I’m currently enthralled by “Boxer,” the new LP by The National. Think post-goth, new-wave-inflected indie rock. I’m reminded somewhat of Bauhaus, if Bauhaus were a serious band and not a brilliant joke. This from a recent convert to Peter Murphy and company. The music is slow, building with emotional intensity, but it’s subtle — it’s not in your face. It grows on you. Fans of Interpol, The Stills, Stellastar, etc. should like them.

I saw them open for Arcade Fire a few weeks back and in some ways they were more exciting than the headlining band. They were definitely a nice surprise. And yes, Emusic has all their records available to subscribers, so they’re practically free. Download now.

So Monica Goodling, the young right-wing hack formerly installed at the Department of Justice, took the stand today to defend her partisan screening of “liberals” from career civil service jobs at DOJ. She is a proud graduate of Regent University, the institution run by Pat Robertson that grants what it alleges to be “legal degrees” to its “students.” One only has to watch a few seconds of Goodling’s feeble defense of her actions at DOJ to understand the quality people that place is churning out.

Of course, she was offered immunity for the Dems to compel her to testify, so it’s unlikely she’ll ever sit behind bars like her beloved hero, Martha Stewart.

So, the Democrats caved on Iraq. They gave Bush just what he wanted — a blank check to continue business as usual.

Apparently this was a “compromise” — note to Reid and Pelosi, a compromise occurs when both sides give up something. As far as I can tell, Bush gave up NOTHING.

This is just shameful. The public wants out of Iraq — America voted the Democrats into office to get change. And yet after a couple of weeks of empty political theatre, we get nothing.

As usual, the swaggering, incompetent chimpanzee of a president gets exactly what he wants. And once again, the American people get buggered.

I’m really sick of politics. And to top it all off, my brand new iPod just broke. What a wonderful day.

As a longtime fan of the original two TERMINATOR films, I really liked the idea of an ongoing TERMINATOR television series. However, THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES, due midseason on Fox, looks pretty dreadful.

Have a look here.

Now, 3 minutes of video footage does not necessarily give you a sense of the final product, but I must say that I’m very disappointed. The “touching” scene between John and Sarah came off as stilted, and let me go on record by saying that I am VERY unimpressed with the tool they hired to play the show’s first Terminator.

Next, please.

It occurs to me now that I’m a parent and acquainted with the insanely popular, though largely invisble genre of “children’s music,” that 90’s indiepop was nothing more than children’s music packaged for adults.

Take, for example, the work of one Mr. Justin Roberts. View here.

$500 says that this song would have been huge at the NYC Popfest back in 1996.

Well, I finally got around to stopping by Big Monkey comics, yesterday, to pick up the trade of Marvel’s CIVIL WAR mini series. I haven’t read a super hero comic in a long, long time — in fact, it’s been awhile since I’ve read a comic, period. Being back in a comic shop was a bit strange — I gave up my regular comics habit when my girls were born two years ago. Despite having read comics for over 20 years, I can’t help but feel like an outsider.

Comics shops are weird places. Cool, but weird. There’s a culture there, a community that senses whether or not you’re a member. I felt like just another ex-comics fan who had come to the shop to belatedly check out that big “event” everyone was talking about six months ago. In many ways, I felt embarassed.

But I bought the book, anyway.

Flash back: I first began my obsession with comics when I was 11 years old back in 1986. My parents had taken me camping with my grandmother on Chincoteague Island in Virginia, and I was bored. There was a little mom and pop store on the island filled with comics — and my grandmother kindly bought several for me. These included Uncanny X-Men, Iron Man and West Coast Avengers. I remember reading them on a picnic bench, surrounded by trees and buzzing flies. I read them again and again. When I got back home, I had to seek more out — and thus began a nearly lifelong fandom.

Of all the books I read, Iron Man was my favorite. This was the David Micheline/Mark Bright era, and I was blown away by the high-tech coolness of the character. Tony Stark took on illegal arms dealers, evil corporations and his own alcoholism. I liked that he was a flawed guy, that he wasn’t perfect. And I especially liked that he could blow things up spectacularly with his powered armor.

It’s from this angle that I approached CIVIL WAR, which I found to be a shallow exploitation of characters I’d cherished as a kid. Mark Millar, who so spectacularly re-invented the super hero comic with his run on the Authority clearly has no respect for these characters. This was clear when he was working on ULTIMATE X-MEN and THE ULTIMATES, where he repeatedly humiliated them. However, since these were alternate takes on classic characters, Millar had the freedom to do what he wanted — you could accept Captain America as a right-wing fascist, since he wasn’t the real Captain America, anyway. But CIVIL WAR takes place in the real Marvel Universe (TM), with fifty years of continuity. What happens there, for all intents and purposes, happens for real.

In a nutshell, the story centers around an incident where the town of Stamford, Connecticut is destroyed as the result of a group of reality-show superheroes taking on villains far outside their league. In response, the country demands the government do something about reigning in super heroes — licensing them, making them both “official” and “accountable.” Captain America disagrees with this, and takes a wide assortment of characters “underground.” Tony Stark agrees with it, and takes a wider assortment of characters on a hunting expedition to apprehend the “rogue heroes.” Eventually a minor hero gets killed and things escalate from there.

In many ways CIVIL WAR is an allegory for George W. Bush’s America and the post-9/11 era, but to achieve that allegory it takes classic beloved characters like Iron Man and Reed Richards and turns them into complete wankers, and others like the X-Men and Spiderman, and makes them out to be pathetic losers. In many ways it reads like bad fan-fiction — there’s a sense that Millar doesn’t care about the history of these characters, and everything that happens is to fuel the books sensational themes of “hero vs. hero,” and not to service the story, itself. Thus, Spiderman agrees to give his identity away on television, Reed Richards develops a superhuman prison in the Negative Zone, and Tony Stark decides to become a complete fascist. And the fact that Stark’s victory over Captain America is depicted as a happy ending, makes me wonder if I live on the same planet as Mark Millar. How authoritarianism can be depicted as a victory is beyond my comprehension.

Look, I understand that franchises can only go on too long before they repeat themselves so many times that their original greatness is lost — STAR TREK is a case in point, as is both the MARVEL and DC comic book universes. I gave up on super hero comics largely because of how sick I was of them and their conventions. But re-inventing them shouldn’t involve disrespecting what’s come before — and it certainly shouldn’t be this ugly.

The adminstration lowers the bar on what qualifies as “success” in Iraq.

From the kind folks at TPM:

My old iPod crapped out about two months ago, and in that time I’ve been pretty much without a regular and reliable source of music. Tina just made bank on a recent project, and kindly bought me a new iPod. All I have to say is that life is so much better with your complete record collection at your fingertips.

I’m currently about halfway through the first chapter of my new collaboration with Jake, “Pax Americana.” I have to say, it’s great to be working on a comic book project that comes from the same place as my literary fiction. The characters are revealing themselves in a way that I haven’t let comic book characters reveal themselves before. “Alberic Heresies” serviced a detailed plot, but “Pax Americana” is strictly about the charcters. It’s a lot looser and feels more natural.

Well, either that, or I’m just getting lazy.

The public beta of Halo 3 releases in a couple of weeks, and I can just feel myself starting to boil over with anticipation. Halo, as you may know from other posts on the subject, is my religion. Master Chief, aka Spartan John 117, is the only messiah I will ever know. There’s only two commercial properties in existance today where I am an inapologetic fan boy — Doctor Who and Halo. I imagine I will be completely unproductive during this three-week period, so I’ve got to get the first chapter of the comic done pronto, or Jake will take me as a slacker.

I doubt any references to Halo as a kind of religious pilgrimage will not be accepted.