1) How to properly tune a bike’s drivetrain, including knowing how to adjust the rear derailleur when I swap wheels.
2) All of Bach’s first cello suite, not just the prelude.
3) How to stop feeling so beat down every time the day ends with a screaming kid.
4) How to make a good pico de gallo. Every time I make it, it’s always missing something, a low note that commercial versions have.
5) How to get to bed on time. I used to know how to do that. Now it’s midnight, and I’m still up. What the hell?
6) Spanish. ‘Cause why not?
7) The proper form for squats and dead lifts. Also, a way to work out at home that doesn’t interfere with Nurturing Time (I have the feeling this will probably turn into finding a gym that has child care that doesn’t freak me out).
8) More rhyming and clapping songs, because even I’m sick of hearing “The Wheels On The Bus.”
9) How to write a third draft that kicks so much ass it leaves bruises.
10) How to ignore Newt Gingrich.
And now, I’m going to bed. Good night.
Fifty bucks.
Some guy in Norway just got himself one hell of a deal. I’m sure he’s laughing his ass off. Me? I got all that stuff out of my house, and I made the donations in Frank Miller’s name (except for IRUSA, which didn’t allow it on the form, which is a bummer; I’ll forward the acknowledgement letter on to him at Dark Horse Comics later on).
$25 to Children of the Night:
$25 to Islamic Relief USA:
$25 to Girls Inc. of Orange County:
Now that all that crap is done, I can get back to work.
I was never a comic book kid. I grew up with Star Wars and cartoons, and the ones that really stuck were Battle of the Planets, Transformers, and the 1967 Spiderman (thanks to the theme song). (Robotech would come later, but it was on another plane of existence.) I knew about superheroes because of the Christopher Reeve movie and the Adam West Batman and, of course, lunch boxes. Comics existed, but they weren’t my bread and butter. They seemed kind of childish and incomprehensible, an attitude that got reinforced when I got a stack of mid-80s Marvel books to help tide over our first family trip to New Zealand. There were some Transformers books, GI Joe, and an X-Men that was too weird for twelve-year-old me to handle (New York is encased in a magical force field, and everyone reverts to a pseudo-feudalistic version of themselves). Even the arrival of the Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles trade paperbacks didn’t help.
That all changed my sophomore year of college when my roommate took a class whose required reading included Alan Moore (Watchmen), Neil Gaiman (Sandman: Season of Mists), and Frank Miller (The Dark Knight Returns). After I had consumed them and tried to patch my blown mind back together, one of the guys down the hall let me attack his collection, which included Miller’s epic Daredevil story Born Again. If Watchmen is the deconstruction of superheroics, Born Again is the distillation of them: Matt Murdock’s life is torn apart by his archenemy, and he spends most of the book out of his tights and trying to keep from going insane. David Mazzucchelli’s art is clean and realistic, and Miller’s writing is economic and sharp. It is a fabulous book, and it was the reason that I dove into everything Miller wrote or drew, including Give Me Liberty and Sin City.
Which brings me to today, and the eighteen pounds of Frank Miller books that I’m putting up on eBay.
This whole thing started after Frank Miller posted his anti-Occupy screed on his website (Google it; I’d rather not give him the traffic). I read it, and couldn’t believe it came from the man whose heroes were solidly in the 99% (minus Batman, of course, who might defend the 99% but isn’t about to give up his 0.00001% trappings). Matt Murdock was the son of a prizefighter (and mafia enforcer) who worked his way out of pre-gentrification Hell’s Kitchen to become a lawyer who worked pro-bono for poor clients (and a superhero who fights the Kingpin, who’s as 1% as they get). Martha Washington from Give Me Liberty was born in the Cabrini Green housing projects, worked her way up through the ranks of the army and saved the world at least three times, including putting down a coup led by the rich traitor who assassinated a President. Marv, Dwight, and the other schlubs in Sin City are down in the gutter, scraping up a living, and always battling the wealthy and powerful.
According to Frank Miller, the people camping in Zuccotti Park were “nothing but a pack of louts, thieves, and rapists, an unruly mob, fed by Woodstock-era nostalgia and putrid false righteousness. These clowns can do nothing but harm America.” The same people who were regularly fucked over by the real-life analogues of the Kingpin, the Roarks, and Lieutenant Morretti were doing harm to America? Really? The Iraqistan vets who couldn’t get a job, the senior citizens whose retirement funds had been looted, the students in debt up to their eyeballs with no job prospects? These were the people who were hurting America?
The OWS rant was the kicker in the one-two punch that started with the publication of Holy Terror, Miller’s comic about a Batman stand-in who beats up al-Qaeda. I haven’t read it, and I don’t want to read it, because the sample pages look ugly and disjointed (and that’s just the art), and the reviews don’t make it sound like things improve with reading. The more reviews I read, the more Holy Terror sounded sad and pathetic, the cries of a scared, rich man who feels the walls he’s built around him closing in.
And I helped make him rich.
Well, the movie of Sin City probably did that, but I helped lay in the foundation by buying his comics. I was one of those slobbering Miller fanboys who convinced the Hollywood money that Miller’s work would sell. Even though a part of my brain kept saying they weren’t that great (“Look at the art! Look at the way he plays with light and shadow!” “What about the one-dimensional tough guys and the Ninja Fetish Whore Assassin Swastika Girls?” “ART, DAMMIT!”) I kept buying the damn things, until The Dark Knight Strikes Again came out, and I couldn’t even defend the art any more. Frank Miller was now a rich creator of shitty comics.
Which brings me to the eighteen-pound pile in the dining room.
For the past two years, I’ve been home with our daughter. I think way too much about gender stereotypes, about princesses and Pepto-Bismol pink, about bikes and tools and what kind of life I’d like her to have. I want her to be smart and strong and kind. I want her to stand up to bullies and stick up for outcasts. I want her to be a hero, to make the world a better place.
So I take tiny steps. I make sure she’s gentle with the other kids at the playground, that she understands hitting is not allowed, that she sees both Mommy and Daddy use tools to fix things. She sees Anne gear up for a bike ride with her friends, and she sees me cook and sew and fold laundry (and, sweet mother of God, is there a lot of laundry). And I make sure the books she reads have all kinds of people doing all kinds of things, and that the occasional princess that gets into the house is the kind who defeats the dragon and tells the clueless prince she just rescued to get stuffed when he tells her she isn’t pretty. And I look at the hardcover of Sin City that’s on the bookshelf, and I think about what that says about me, and I wonder what she’ll think when she’s old enough to pull it down and look at it.
Is she going to wonder why all of the women are naked at some point in the book?
Is she going to wonder why there’s all this violence toward women in the book?
Is she going to wonder her father thinks it’s okay to have a book where the women are all sex objects?
And is she doing to wonder why there are so many more books like it in the milk crates in the garage? Is she going to start analyzing them the way I have and realize: holy crap, women don’t come out well in these books at all? Even in my beloved Born Again, the whole story is kicked off because Matt Murdock’s old girlfriend has become a porn star with a heroin habit who sells out Murdock’s secret identity for a fix. It’s all WHORES WHORES WHORES, and that isn’t the kind of stuff I want my kid to read or to think that I think it’s all okay. Because it isn’t. Not by a long shot.
I don’t want her to think that protesting corruption is wrong. I don’t want her to judge people based on their faith (or lack thereof). And I sure as hell don’t want my daughter to be anyone’s victim or to think it’s okay for men to treat her like trash.
I don’t want to throw away these books in disgust. I don’t want to burn them, or trash them, or give them away. I don’t want to lock them in a box and bury them in the garage. I want to take Frank Miller’s xenophobia, his misogyny, his I’ve-Got-Mine-Fuck-You-If-You-Want-Yours attitude, and I want to do something positive with them. I’m going to pack up these books, and I’m going to put them on eBay, and I’m going to send the proceeds to charity. Half will go to Islamic Relief USA, and the other to Children of the Night. I figure if Miller wants to put down Muslims and glorify prostitution, I should make the money help Muslims and aid people trying to get out of prostitution. In addition, I’m going to donate money of my own to Girls Inc. of Orange County, where my mom volunteers.
I don’t think I’m going to get much for these books; the Miller stuff on eBay isn’t moving at all right now. But who knows?
In the meantime, I’m turning off comments and the contact form for my site for a bit. I doubt this post and the auction will kick up any dust, but, if the comments on Miller’s site are any indication, the possible response isn’t going to be pretty, and I don’t have the time to moderate or respond.
Bye, bye, Born Again. So long, Sin City. Good luck, Martha Washington. I hope to replace you with better works by better people.
EDITED TO ADD: And, thanks to griphus’s excellent suggestion on Metafilter, all the donations will be in Frank Miller’s honor.
EDITED TO ADD: Richard Pace really said this much better than I could. And in comic form, too.
He’s in this box.
I’ve owned five Apple computers: an Apple IIe (it was really my parents’, but I used it more), a Powerbook Duo, a Pismo PowerBook, and two MacBook Pros. I also have an old Mac that is now an aquarium; Ben used it in college, and Ken gutted it and built a lexan tank. I haven’t brought it out of storage, and won’t until Grace is old enough not to, y’know, toddler the fish, but it’ll return to the living room one day. It’s a friendly-looking device, even if you removed the elephant ears that Ben velcroed on back at Mudd.
The Pismo was my favorite, because it felt so solid and comfortable and had, I think, the best keyboard action of any Mac. I bought it for $600 off Craigslist, back when I needed something to get into TicketMaster’s systems to work. And, yes, I felt very chipper and nerdsexy carting that beast around on the bus, taking it out of its case for meetings, and all that. I really didn’t write a lot on it, though. At least, I don’t think I did. It’s sitting in the closet, waiting for the day when I haul it to a shop to resurrect it.
I’m pretty sure it was the last laptop Apple made before Steve Jobs returned (I’m too tired and lazy to look it up, but I’m sure some Mac pedant will come along in the comments to correct me if I’m wrong), and that got me thinking a lot today about how the machines have changed since Jobs returned. I can remember opening up the IIe to look at its guts, and, even as a kid, I could appreciate how pretty it looked inside. It doesn’t surprise me the Jobs rode the IIe team to make it look as good inside as it did out.
While I couldn’t get into the Duo, I could pop out the batteries and the drive bays and all that stuff. The Pismo had levers, and I thought that was awesome. Done with this battery? Just pull the lever and pop a fresh one in, then maybe hotswap a drive, just because you can (or not. Can’t remember if that was possible. Shut up, Apple Pedants!)
Then I bought Jason’s used MacBook Pro, and when things went wrong (like the DVD drive crapping out), I could still attempt to take it apart. It was a royal pain in the ass, and it required all sorts of tiny screwdrivers and Torx heads and a roll of Scotch tape just so you didn’t lose track of the screws, but, dammit, you could still get into the damn thing. Screw the warranty, screw the Genius Bar; I have a Radio Shack electronics screwdriver set, and I’m bloody well using it myself!
The DVD drive I bought off eBay didn’t work, by the way. I mean, the machine knows it’s there, it’s just indifferent to the drive’s presence.
When that machine’s trackpad started to go, I hemmed and hawed about getting it fixed by a pro versus hauling out the Torx, and caved. I bought a new MacBook Pro, and it’s sealed. Everything’s locked in. If the battery croaks, there’s no friendly switches to pull. It’s all tucked inside the case behind ten screws that are just daring me to undo them.
And I can’t help but wonder how much of Job’s obsession with industrial design and Apple’s obsession with control freakery (and how both bled into each other; Apple is Jobs is industrial design is we’ll tell you how to get your contacts onto your iPhone and you’ll bloody well like it) were driven by Job’s pancreatic cancer. Here’s a man who could make entertainment companies bend to his will, who reshaped the face of personal technology time after time, who could probably reduce Ph.D’s to tears with a single shake of his head, and he couldn’t keep his own body from rebelling and killing him. We’ve all read or seen his excellent commencement address to Stanford, and it sounded like a man who had looked Death in the face and told it he would go when he was good and ready…
And yet, here’s this case. Here are these ten screws. Here is someone saying, “I’m going to put all this good stuff in here, and you have to trust me and not try and take it out.”
I wonder if some of that good stuff was a bit of himself. Steve is in there, in all our machines, among the memory subroutines and bits to monitor the processor temperature, making sure the Good Stuff stays in there.
In a few months, my iPhone will get its updates over the air. Steve will be out there, now. Fifty-six is too fucking young.
I’m Adam Rakunas, and I’m running to be the At-Large member on the USA Cycling Cyclocross Sport Committee.
My platform is simple: cross is awesome, and USAC needs to do everything to maintain that awesomeness, even if it means doing as little as possible. I want to make sure that cross grows in a way that makes it easy for promoters to put on more races and fun for racers who like to get dirty. How do we do that?
1) Keep cross fast. And I’m not talking about just the speed of the course (which should, I think, be as red-line breathless as possible), but speeding things up before you hit the race site. If you pre-register online, all you should have to do at number pickup is show your photo ID, get your number and a bunch of safety pins. No more signing waivers, no more digging out a race license, nothing that will slow you down. I’ll make sure USAC works with online registrars so all of the license verification is done behind-the-scenes. The only paperwork you should have to fumble with on race day is your number.
2) Keep cross fair. If you’re a cat 4 cross racer, you should be going against people of the same ability. That means the OBRA class A who’s visiting should be lining up with the cat 1s, not the 4s, but we know that won’t happen because of USAC’s refusal to reciprocate with independent race sanctioning organizations. This needs to change. If we want to field world-class cyclocross racers for Europe and (one day, I hope) the Olympics, we need to have as many people racing each other in as many races as possible, and that means recognizing that USAC has failed the member organizations of FIAC and must make things right. Reciprocity is the starting point to reconciliation.
3) Keep cross fun. That means we don’t stop with the heckling, the dollar bills in the beer cans, and the loud awesomeness of cross. USAC should do nothing to interfere with all of this stuff, unless it’s to protect rider safety. And if you’re sucking wind at the back of the pack and some guy in a tutu and a Lone Ranger mask is offering you buck, there’s nothing unsafe going on. Hell, that’s motivation to finish what you started.
Making it fun also means making it easier for race promoters. USAC needs to begin serious outreach with local governments and parks departments to show these groups that how beneficial hosting a cyclocross race is to a community (and, thereby, speed up permitting). USAC also needs to figure out how best to ameliorate expenses that keep race promoters from making a livable profit. The more profitable cross racing is, the more races there will be, the more people will race, and the better the chances of an American bringing the World Cup home.
You like the sound of this? Then vote for me, and encourage your friends to do the same. Thank you.
(I know, I know. Everyone and his mother is going to use that as the title for their review, including the marketing department of Del Rey when they come out with the ninth printing, but I’m tired because I was up all night finishing the damn book, so this is the best you’re going to get.)
I joke a lot about my massive reach on the internet, even though I know it’s mostly my friends, my mom, and disappointed South Korean who think they’re going to a billpay site but wind up here instead. It’s a small circle, but I’m a big believer in using the internet to spread ideas. Yesterday, Jamie showed me a video of a dubbed dog, and I thought it was so damn funny that I sent it to Anne and my mom, who will quite likely share it their friends, and on and on until everyone has seen this video. You’ll see it, too, because you’ll want to see the deal is. You’ll become another vector.
I want you to become vectors for Daryl Gregory’s Raising Stony Mayhall, because it is so goddamned good. It is keep-me-awake-to-see-what-happens-next good. It is I-want-to-eat-Daryl’s-brains-just-so-I-can-gain-his-writing-skills good (though that bit is just between you and me. I’m going to see Daryl in a few weeks, and I don’t want him to get wise to me and show up wearing a helmet). It is a zombie novel told from the zombies’ point of view, and it will break your heart and make you laugh and do all the great things that Daryl’s writing does.
I remember talking with him about this in Montreal, when he was busy trying to talk himself out of writing Stony. The Zombie Glut was approaching maximum saturation, and Daryl was convinced that his book would be lost in a wave of po-mo zombie stories that took the genre apart and sewed it back together. I am so glad Daryl kept at it, because I think he’s scored another winner.
Go buy this book. Buy two copies so you can lend one to your friends, and watch it spread. Give in to the Big Bite. Be the vector.
Something weird happened today: I got trolled on Twitter.
This isn’t weird in the grand scheme of things: any time you’ve got an appliance with a network connection on one end and a keyboard on the other, you’re going to get a stream of data from jerks. It’s all part of John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, and I shouldn’t be weirded out by it. But I am, simply because I am one tiny, tiny person in vast ocean of information, and whenever someone pinpoints me to tell me off, it feels weird.