So I haven't been writing as much lately, as I've been running for my life. Well, walking really rather fast.
We finally bit the bullet and bought a treadmill a couple of weeks back, as I try exploring that foreign concept called "exercise." Walking is generally my favorite way to ease the stress a bit, but between early working hours, minding the boy after school and now, winter and darkness by 5pm, it's hard to fit it in, and not at the sustained pace I need to lose some weight. Now we can go for a walk whenever we want, in the scenic environs of our humble garage.
And once you get used to the treadmill, it's not bad at all. You have to keep up with it, in a way that forces you to sweat, but you can also lose yourself in your thoughts or some music for a spell. I've been going for a fast walk on it mostly -- gingerly building up speed. I've been having a bit of a sore back because I'm not quite stretching enough, but for brief (very brief) stints I've been managing a wee spastic jog as well.
Truth is, I'll be hitting 40, dear god in heaven, in a little over a year, and things don't bounce back like they once did. For my first 30 years or so I didn't have to do much of anything to maintain myself, and I was in pretty decent health. But then I had an emergency appendectomy in 1999, and boy, I tell you it's been all downhill since then. I'm fortunate I'm still in relatively good shape considering my near-total lack of exercise in recent years, but I could still stand to lose a good 10-20 pounds. Time to do something about it before it's more than that.
...Sorry, not a real post, but a few of you might find this other blog post interesting as it talks a bit about what I'm doing in my day job, as a visiting US journalism professor interviewed me and visited my workplace: A visit to New Zealand’s biggest sub-hub
Sometimes, when it comes to superheroes, it's all in the name and the look. Everyone made up their own goofy superheroes when they were kids, combining two words or more to make up awesome-sounding good guys and bad guys -- Robotron! Mister Amazing! Super Ant! Whatever it is, a good name can help make a hero cooler. And so it is with today's Superhero That I Love, Doctor Fate.
Who: Dr. Fate, a sorcerer of immense power who first appeared in More Fun Comics in 1940, and who's been bopping about in DC Comics in one form or another ever since, mostly as a member of the Justice Society of America.
What: An archaeologist's son, Kent Nelson discovers a mystical helmet possessed by the spirit of an ancient Egyptian wizard, and becomes all magical and stuff.
Catchphrase: Who summons Fate?
Why I dig: This one's simple, really -- it's the name and awesome costume. I think the visual of Fate's gleaming golden helmet, streamlined blue and gold costume and cape are just Superhero Classic 101 -- it sticks in your head. Fate's typically been played as one of the big guns in DC comics, right about up there with Superman in terms of power. He shows up, speaks in mystical epigrams, and battles forces of dark and mysterious power. I think maybe it was this sense of mystery that attracted me to Dr. Fate -- and the more routine his adventures become, the less appealing he is. He's had quite a variety of solo series in the 70 years since his creation, but few lasted too long and he's never quite been "A-list". Frankly I think the character works best in tandem with other superheroes.
There have been a few good runs, including his longest lasting solo series, the 41-issue "Dr. Fate" series in the late 1980s that at least at first managed to combine Fate with a fair bit of humour and still respect the character's mystery. Theres also a nice Walt Simonson run and a Keith Giffen miniseries that had some great abstract art. But honestly, since the 1990s Fate's had a rough run of it, being replaced about 10 times (today's Doctor Fate is apparently the original's great-nephew -- really?) The character's nadir was an utterly infamous mid-1990s run where Fate was reinvented as a big hairy guy with a knife. I don't know if the character's full potential has ever been met. Dr. Fate has never quite gotten the "ultimate" story such a good-looking gent deserves. But sometimes it's just enough to stand around looking cool, I suppose.
Most Top 40 pop music these days tends to make my teeth itch, and I've never made it through more than 30 seconds of watching "American Idol." But I have to admit, I do kinda dig Lady Gaga.
I'm not like gonna follow her around and stalk her or anything, but I do admit to owning her debut album The Fame Monster and paying far more attention to her than I have to the Katy Perrys and Rhiannas of the world. Gaga has managed that trick of combining a sex-soaked image with bouncy hummable tunes without looking like a flailing lost child. Just google Gaga wardrobe and you'll see a kaleidoscope of bizarrely brazen outfits that make her look like a Martian visitor, a post-millennial love child of David Bowie and Freddie Mercury.
It doesn't hurt that Gaga does put out some decent tunes amid all the spectacle. "Bad Romance," with its rollicking hook and thumping insistence, is as good a single as I've heard in a while, with a video that manages to channel none other than Marilyn Manson in the service of a pop jingle. "Telephone" is another cheekily overwrought club anthem, with Beyonce pitching in for a song far more memorable than anything I've ever heard her do solo. "Paparazzi" manages to take a narrator from the world's most annoying profession and make them a wee bit sympathetic.
The former Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (imagine that on an album cover!) has got a hint of David Bowie about her (although her music is light-years behind Bowie's innovations, of course), in that you're never entirely sure who's the character and who's the performer. Her increasingly elaborate, over-the-top videos show her trying to lay claim to that elusive King of Pop trophy (a nine-minute saga for the "La Isla Bonita"-lite piffle "Alejandro"? Egad!)
Gaga's main flaw is that her music lacks any real emotional weight -- when Bowie sang "Five Years" or "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide," you believed him, but when Gaga sings about what a bummer it is her cell phone doesn't work in the club, well, yeah, I suppose it might speak to the young folk but it doesn't really move you, does it? But it's pop. I suppose "Thriller" was a pretty darn stupid song when you just read the lyrics, too.
Gaga has embraced the inherent artifice, the fakery, of being a modern pop star, rather than trying to pretend she's "keeping it real." That in and of itself seems a bit like a breath of fresh air in the age of Auto-tuned insincere "Idol" aspirations. Whether she can sustain it for the long haul isn't certain; she's just 24, after all, and it's a fine line between being a star and being overexposed. Pop does eat itself.
Britney, for instance, immediately became uninteresting when her personal life mattered more than her music. I've enjoyed a Britney tune or two (especially "Toxic," a great James Bond theme song wanna-be) but she's such a tabloidy mess that I'd never classify myself as a "fan."
If Lady Gaga can come up with music that truly matches her knack for spectacle, it could be something. But if Gaga is smart, she'll also stay behind the masks for as long as she can. We don't want to know about her secret travails. We just want to dance, dance, dance.
Ah, it's Queen's Birthday weekend. Yes, that's right, I'm officially a subject of Her Majesty (a factoid which never fails to amaze this proud American) and this is the time we pay honour to her 502 years on the throne. In tribute to HRH, let's talk about the finer things in life...
• Winter may be irksome, but y'know, we don't get 8 feet of snow in our yard like we did in Northern California.
• That four+ years after buying this MacBook I finally got around to setting up a wi-fi connection. Freedom!
• The boy doing a dead-on Iggy Pop impersonation, without clothes on just before bedtime. When he's a teenager the video goes up on YouTube. Or whatever tube we have then.
• Nick Tosches' biography of Dean Martin,"Dino: Living High In the Dirty Business of Dreams" -- Martin's an entertainer I've never really cared about, but Tosches' apocalyptic Lester Bangs-meets-Cormac McCarthy prose really puts a jolt into this tale of fame and folly.
• Re-reading Brian Bendis's "Alias" series and being reminded that he really can be a pretty fine writer when he abandons his tropes and quirks.
• Woody Harrelson in "Zombieland." Redneck awesomeness.
• It's a little "Cathy," but warm cats purring on your chest.
• LCD Soundsystem's burbly, brooding new album 'This Is Happening.'
• Matt Smith as the new volatile Dr. Who, and even more so, chirpy redhead Amy Pond the companion.
• Hot coffee and waffles on a rainy Sunday morning.
• Winter, which is like all of two days old already.
• New comic books shooting up from US$2.99 to US$3.99 in price. Yeah, that'll help a struggling industry. Already paring back my monthly reads list to about as low as it's been since the mid 1990s "Dark Ages" of gimmicky comics.
• That despite trying to more or less stay off the Internet for several days I didn't entirely avoid a spoiler about the "Lost" finale in the week between when it aired in the US and when it aired downunder.
• People who go on about the idiotic "celebrities die in threes rule" every time a couple famous people die. People famous and not die every single day and it's a sad thing, but you can find whatever pattern you want in it. Celebs die in sixes? Three people born in 1980 died this year, it's a curse? Sure, why not.
• That MGM has managed to screw up its finances so badly that both the next James Bond and the "Hobbit" movies (set to be filmed in New Zealand) are being delayed.
• How I didn't try to grow really really long hair back when I had a full head of hair.
• "Special edition" CDs that come out like 6 months after you first bought the CD and make you annoyed you didn't wait longer for the extra tracks. (Yes, I still buy CDs, as I am a living fossil.)
• Spoken word tracks on albums. They really don't work unless you're Bob Dylan.
• News organizations that continue to write about the Internet in a vaguely condescending, elitist tone, when that ship has sailed long ago and it might be good to get with the program rather than fight change.
• How ridiculously expensive and small in quantities over-the-counter medicine such as Tylenol is in NZ compared to the US.
•"Reboots" for movie franchises.For every solid move like "Casino Royale" you get a bunch of needless "Nightmare on Elm Street" remakes. Why does "Spider-Man" need a reboot, set for 2012, just 10 years after the first Sam Raimi movie? Ugh.
One of the things that's fascinating about living in New Zealand to me is that for most of the millions of years of its existence, it was a land of birds, and birds alone. Until the first Polynesians arrived about 800 years ago, isolated NZ was a feathered place with no native mammals. Unfortunately, between the Maori and later European colonisation, many of this land's most unique and dazzling birds were soon extinct.
Most people know about the moa, the largest bird ever to live. If you've ever seen a skeleton of one of these, it's pretty amazing to imagine a bird as tall as a giraffe. They were wiped out not long after the Maori arrived and were gone by the time Europeans came. At their biggest, they stood 12 feet tall.
But there were tons of other amazing long-gone feathered things -- the Haast's eagle -- the world's largest eagle; the beautiful black and yellow huia (right); the moa-lite adzebill; the whekau or laughing owl... I've a long list of things I'd do if I ever got my mitts on a time machine, but I think one of the things I'd love to do is see what New Zealand looked like, pre-colonization -- before the original bush was mostly wiped out, when the only thing you'd hear was a million different bird calls and imagined herds of moa roaming the land. It's just a tremendous shame to know that thanks to man's greed or man-introduced predators like rats and cats, we'll never know what a wonder a country of birds would've been.
Not all the unique birds of New Zealand are extinct, of course. Everyone knows about kiwi - which are fascinating creatures, but I tell you, there hasn't been a bird less prepared for foreign invaders since the dodo. Flightless, nocturnal, timid and nearly defenseless, the poor kiwi doesn't make it easy on itself. Another gorgeous yet terribly hapless critter is the flightless kakapo, the rarest, fattest parrot in the world -- dozens of people work long hours in the bush trying to force this exceedingly stubborn animal to mate. Living on the ground and not flying makes it hard to be a bird in the modern age.
Another native bird I discovered just a month or two ago is the beautiful kokako (right), which is a sleek grey with dazzling blue wattles and the cutest dark little cry you ever heard -- it sounds exactly like a person saying "ko-ka-ko," hence the bird's name. There's not a lot of them left, either, but we saw one at a bird sanctuary near Wellington and they're just awesome.
But hey, not all birds here are evolutionary dead-ends. My favorite New Zealand bird is the pukeko, (right) which is like a punk-rock chicken. They're gorgeous, gawky things, a sleek and sparkling blue with an orange helmet, about the size of a chicken but with huge oversized feet. They're awkward and amusing little fellows and they're as common as pigeons in many New Zealand parks. I like to think they're a reminder of what it was like in a country of birds.
Thirty years ago today, May 21, 1980, was a pivotal day in the life of every young fella born in the '70s -- the day Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back hit theatres. It's fair to say most boys (and lots of girls) of my age would never be the same. Wampas! AT-ATs! Yodas! Bobas! Landos! These were the things that buzzed around our brains for weeks and months afterwards.
Sadly, though, I can't quite remember my 9-year-old self's experience of actually SEEING "Empire" in theatres. I know I did, but for some reason, it's all tangled up in the kazillions of times I've seen "Empire Strikes Back" since then. I don't know for sure, but I suspect I've seen it more than any other movie. It's my favorite "Star Wars" movie, of course. Isn't it everybody's?
Thirty years on, "Empire" works because it's the best pure movie of the entire six-film epic. I'll always love the original "Star Wars" despite its hokier bits, and even the rather daft Ewoks don't sour me on "Return of the Jedi" (which I vividly do remember seeing in a packed cinema in 1983). And as for the "new" trilogy -- it's not as bad as all that, but it's a lot more soulless and plastic, I think.
But "Empire" -- well, many an armchair critic have already pointed out its merits. There's a scruffier side to "Empire" that the glossier other five movies lack -- it's there in Han Solo's snarky bantering with Leia, with the rogue Lando Calrissian, with sinister bounty hunter cameos, with Darth Vader's seemingly wholesale slaughter of unworthy henchmen. And "Empire" had the guts to end on an unashamed downer of a cliffhanger, with no promise things would be set right. (They would.) "Empire" had all the boy's own adventure fun of the original "Star Wars," but just coloured in with a little more intensity, a little more reality. Why that's lacking in George Lucas' later movies, I don't know.
Perhaps it was his script collaborators like Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett, or "Empire's" director Irvin Kershner. "Empire Strikes Back," from its glacial Hoth vistas to its soggy Dagobah gloom to its oh-so-'80s Cloud City disco skyline, is rich and full. It's so full that an entire generation of us kids saw a heck of a lot more to it than Lucas ever intended; we'd create worlds around it, guzzle down comics and action figures and nostalgia items for another 30 years to fill it out more. You'd see a lizard-man Bossk get about 1.4 seconds of screen time, buy the action figure and make up an entire cosmology around him. That's interactive entertainment in the pre-iPad age.
Nothing is ever quite as cool as it is when you're 9 years old, so maybe that's why nothing quite measures up to "Empire" for me. Without "Empire Strikes Back," it's hard to imagine growing up in the 1980s. So for that, George, Irvin, and everyone else, thanks for the awesomeness. (As Han Solo would say, "I know.")
I'm a tall fellow, but I was a late bloomer -- I was like 5-foot-2 through my freshman year of high school and then, it seemed, over the course of about a week I shot up over 6 foot. But sometimes I guess I still feel small if you get what I mean. Maybe that's why I dig The Atom, comics' smallest superhero. Or maybe it's seeing "The Incredible Shrinking Man" at a very impressionable age. Either way, I've always had a soft spot for this '60s superhero, a DC Universe mainstay.
Who: Ray Palmer, the Atom, who first appeared in 1961's Showcase #34 (technically the second hero to bear that name, but the first one with shrinking powers).
What: A scientist who discovers how to shrink himself using "white dwarf star matter." Don't question it. Has tons of cool adventures fighting full-size bad guys, discovering hidden subatomic worlds, exploring the awesome "Time Pool" and being drawn by that master of the art form, Gil Kane.
Catchphrase: "The World's Smallest Super Hero!"
Why I dig: I love the idea of a hero who isn't formed by great tragedy, but who instead is the outgrowth of a highly curious, scientific mind. Palmer's Atom has always been scientist first, superhero second, which gives him a nifty kind of Jules Verne/Sherlock Holmes allure. And while super-shrinking isn't perhaps the number one superpower one would think of having, there's something about the kitschy old Atom stories that make appealing the idea of visiting subatomic worlds, of seeing chairs become like mountains and spiders become elephant-size.
The Atom has always been a bit of a "second-tier" superhero, not quite at Batman/Superman levels of popularity, and frankly, the best comics featuring him were mostly the original '60s lot. In the decades since he's bounced all over the place, with the latest inevitable trend to "darken" him with various personal tragedies and traumas. But while he may be small, he's always been a fun character to me. (And of course had perhaps his finest hour in the Grant Morrison-written JLA #14, where he used his powers in a fascinating way and killed the biggest bad guy in the entire universe, Darkseid. Let's see Batman do that!)
I'm a big Nicolas Cage fan, which is incredibly uncool to admit.
At one point, circa 1995 or so, Cage was very cool indeed. But in the years since, he has signed his name to an awful lot of movies (Wikipedia lists a staggering 18 Cage-starring flicks since 2000), and an awful lot of those movies were, technically, not that good. But y'know what? Even in a bad movie, I like to watch Nic Cage do his thing. I am fascinated by him as an actor.
Cage at his best few will dispute -- Raising Arizona, Leaving Las Vegas, Face/Off, Adaptation -- but even in pulpy trash like Snake Eyes or Next, I find enough Cage to amuse me. His face is not conventionally Hollywood handsome -- he's all bug-eyes, sharp angles and soft edges blurring together in a kind of intense, lean flame. Cage's very passion often gets him accused of overacting.
Somewhere around the silly good fun family action flick National Treasure-- which attempts to marry The Da Vinci Code with Raiders of the Lost Ark -- Cage went from hip to hambone in the eyes of many. Is it because he has a knack for picking rather bad scripts? (But then again, so do a lot of other actors.) Some people seem to take Cage's prolific acting personally, as if his every movie should be a Leaving Las Vegas rather than a Ghost Rider.
But frankly, I just think Cage a rare animal among actors -- he's not afraid to embarrass himself. I know that sounds a strange quality but it's a rare one among big Hollywood actors -- the willingness to look a fool. (See "Wicker Man" clip below.) Cage is often teeth-gnashingly, manically over the top -- and hey, I'm entertained by that. I'd rather watch someone interesting like a Cage, a Sam Rockwell or a William H. Macy over a stiff and self-pleased Tom Cruise or WIll Smith sort any day.
The recent movie Knowing is not exactly a great film -- it's a tangled sort of horror story/alien abduction movie, which veers from bizarre to outright outrageous to strangely affecting. Yet, in its kitschy fashion, it's genuinely interesting, and as a professor and father who gradually becomes an apocalyptic conspiracy theorist, Cage is never less than sincere.
Last weekend I watched the hideously titled but quite good recent Werner Herzog film Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans. As an unspeakably corrupt, drug-addicted cop, Cage is sweating, hunchbacked and jittery, an ugly portrait of an ugly character -- and he's mesmerizing. Or take his fine turn in Kick Ass, as Big Daddy, where he combines bits of "Taxi Driver" DeNiro with Adam West's "Batman" to create some kind of twisted vigilante genius.
Is over-the-top automatically a flaw when considering an actor? I wouldn't mind if Cage did pick better scripts -- "Adaptation" and "Bad Lieutanant" stand up as far better films than most of his recent work -- but heck, I'll still watch him in in just about anything.
I leave with this gem of a montage from "The Wicker Man" 2006 remake -- not one of Cage's best by any standard, but as neat a concise summary of the bizarro Cage appeal as any clipfest. How can you not find the "Bees! Bees!" line entertaining? Thirty years from now when Cage gets that Lifetime Achievement Academy Award, I hope to God they play this as he walks to the stage.
So I haven't been writing as much lately, as I've been running for my life. Well, walking really rather fast. 
