PEANUTS
The old neighborhood isn’t what it used to be. Twenty years past their wonder years, the cast of Peanuts are finding out that life ain’t a bed of roses.

Snoopy, the one character who binded them all together, has long since gone. After the book deal never materialized, Snoopy turned to Woodstock’s “bad brown stuff” and went downhill fast. Sally thought that Woodstock’s overdose on his own cooked chaff might have been a wake up call for the beagle; but they found Snoopy a few days later, cold and rigid on his kennel. No note. No regrets.

In the vacuum - no more joyous beagle dancing, noses in the air - people begin to fall apart.

Lucy gave up on Schroeder when he sold out and became a session musician on Jimmy Kimmel. Now, she consolidates her psychiatric practice in the daytime and fucks everything with blond floppy quiffs at night. She self-prescribes Zanax with a chaser of zinfandel to get through the dark times. She still believes the earth is shrinking.

Peppermint Patty and Marcie’s sapphic relationship goes tits up when Patty refuses to call Marcie “sir” during strap-on duty. Marcie runs away, becoming a character in the Doonesbury strip (NOTE: possible future cross-property tie-ins a la Justice League...).

Lucius - fuelled by Pabst Blue Ribbon - spends his daytimes wandering around random mall parking lots, which he declares to be the “pumpkin patch,” waiting for the arrival of the Great Pumpkin, laying down his piss-stained blanket in front of Chevy Tahoes and blocking soccer moms from their predestined need to buy stuff.

Charlie Brown finally guts Lucy, like a trout at a tempura convention, for pulling the ball away that one last time. Sentenced to life in San Quentin, Brown carves the “w” of his pullover onto his chest as a way of intimidating the homeboys (led, coincidentally, by Snoopy’s Mexican cousin Spike); but it doesn’t work and he’s forced into life as a “home bride” for all and sundry, including even the prison sponge (ironically, this is actually better than he’d hoped for, even back when he used to dance with Snoopy and his life was all still to unfold; and marks the redemptive aspect of the reboot).

Pigpen becomes a Republican senator, making a fortune from representing “clean fuel” interests in a local state pork barrel package.

Next: Archie needs to return some Genesis videotapes.

The Daily Mona Lisa Monster Truck:

Alan David Doane lists his 100 greatest graphic novels. I’m not sure I’ve even read 100 (not counting comics collected into trade volumes. I believe that is cheating…). This guy must be independently wealthy, and have a lot of time on his hands…

POPEYE
Popeye was the union of a scurvy sea dog and an opium-smoking slattern in the Asian pirate-hole of Madriporno in the Golden Triangle. As a boy he was beaten so severely by his father - an embittered alcoholic with a leather belt he called “Mr.Wimpy” - that Popeye lost the use of one of his eyes and developed a life-long stutter (“Didst-didst-didst-donsts-beat me any more, pappy!”).

When his mother turned down a threesome with two manta rays, as proposed by the bored local warlord, Bluto, she was hacked to death in front of Popeye with a series of increasingly rusty flensing knives. Bluto’s band of swarthy pirates gang-raped little Popeye in every orifice, leaving him for dead in the hold of a freighter.

Popeye, near-death, dragged himself over a tangle of lobster pots and netting before collapsing into a large supply of spinach. For three long nights the flowering plant sustained the boy - he ate what he could to build up his strength, using the rest of what he couldn’t keep down as a soothing poultice on his violated little man place. In that time, he learned to hate for the first time.

Exactly one year later he moved like a hairy-forearmed wraith through the ranks of Bluto’s men, beating them to death with their own femurs (whilst using their tibias as a tripod so he could record and post their death throes on his Facebook page). Bluto escaped to America.

Now a man, Popeye haunts the crusty seaports of the eastern seaboard looking for his adversary. On his path he meets many evildoers, whom he is happy to dispatch as karmic collateral of his long walk to vengeance and justice. When they beg him for their lives, pleading that they aren’t the warlord who destroyed him, Popeye bends down, glowering through his one good eye, and asks his own scarred asshole - which he has nicknamed “liddle Swee’pea” - whether he should let them live. Whereupon his butt, like a ventriloquist’s doll, replies: “Youse-youske-youske-are-allsk-the-Bluto.”

Next: strike three for Charlie Brown’s team.

The Daily Mona Lisa Monster Truck:

The cosmic unfairness of the Internet proceeds apace. Once, even fat fucks used to have to waddle down to their sports bar to see unfortunates die and/or wipe out in rear-projected montages of rally car crashes, dirt bike catastrophes and bus-jumping follies, while U2 blared in the background. Now, thanks to youtube, you can log on to footage of people who have devoted their lives - athletes goddamnit! - to being anything BUT a couch potato… to training in the wee small hours even as we sleep… to pushing every brain cell and sinew to the breaking point in a quixotic search for excellence… so that when their world goes to shit in a naonosecond due to the incredible targets they set themselves, we can all luxuriate in them screwing it up without even getting up from our Aeron chair with lumbar support.

I’d say it’s tough but fair… except it’s not either of these things. It isn’t.

Lauren A.E. Shuker, writing in the Wall Street Journal, interviews Warner Bros. Pictures Group President, Jeff Robinov, and observes:

Like the recent Batman sequel — which has become the highest-grossing film of the year thus far — Mr. Robinov wants his next pack of superhero movies to be bathed in the same brooding tone as The Dark Knight. Creatively, he sees exploring the evil side to characters as the key to unlocking some of Warner Bros.’ DC properties. “We’re going to try to go dark to the extent that the characters allow it,” he says.

Forgetting for a second that if a My Little Pony flick had made almost $500m to date, we would be saturated two years from now in hypercolored equestrian stories emanating unalloyed happiness from every computer-animated pore, where the greatest threat to anything would be an unlocked paddock; this means that, in the trickle-down factor common when massive success is generated by one amorphous property (er.. Batman K-POW anybody?), many other intellectual holdings are now going to be spitballed into incorporating darker fins and a side portion of angst.

Seeing as DC is doutbless already strip-mining all its characters - giving Kamandi a loincloth utility belt with napalm pockets - I thought I’d throw my own hat into the ring with some national syndicated newspaper strips. From their inception many of these strips, in the early days, started out as a good deal less sanitized than their current counterparts (Little Nemo was extremely violent, Little Orphan Annie given to fascist musings and lynching kidnappers). I’ve decided to rejig some of the less caustic ones for possible franchising with an eye to a darker reboot…

(NOTE TO EXECUTIVES: these are just rough drafts. sirs. I can do much more backstory. Maybe a little recovered memory thang, some entrails in the snow visuals. Darker. Grittier.)

Next: Popeye’s pipe goes SNIKT!

The Daily Mona Lisa Monster Truck:

Veni Vidi Vince, as profiled by Juxtapoz magazine, is a classically trained Royal Academy artist who gave it all up for a life of white trash iconography. Only you can tell if it was worth it…

He was met with a vast echo of applause that grew ever-louder as people realized it was okay to join in. Screenwriting wannabes stood up and whooped as if they were greeting G.I.s walking into their dusty bombed-out European towns.

George Lucas makes whore’s movies!

There is something mythic about Star Wars: in that no myth is complete without tragedy. As metaphors for our own lives, myths are journeys undertaken under the specter of potential failure. The concept of inevitable decline, of goals unfulfilled, has to be woven into the tapestry of a mythic story for it to truly resonate, and Star Wars has this in abundance.

I’m not talking about the tragedy of dead Ewoks, though, or vaporized planets, or even the fate of Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader (a character of true mythic proportions - the absence of which was still enough to sustain the first two limp prequels - that stands as Lucas’s highest achievement). I’m talking about the tragedy of a talented director who risked his sanity to make a film without precedent, and succeeded against the odds when everyone told him it was a fool’s mission; but thereafter this General, victorious, proceeded to tarnish his own magnificent creation by thrashing it like a stormtrooper’s jet bike that ran out of gas, as all the studio clonetroopers fell into line, heads bobbing to give him whatever he wanted. The tragedy of a director who has never made another American Graffiti, and could still do whatever he wants to do, but is seemingly content to oversee an ever growing roster of characters with increasingly ridiculous names, as he runs out of consonants and small bills.

At the end of the saga of Jason and the Golden Fleece, Jason has failed to secure the fleece (forget the Ray Harryhausen film with the happy Hollywood ending), and sits weeping under the beached rotting prow of his once mighty vessel Argo. As he dreams of his past victories and the comrades who died, the stern breaks off and crushes him in his sleep.

The lesson here must be: avoid prequels. Avoid bridging stories. Avoid backstory. Kill your heroes and kill all their children; leave no orphan unslain. Have the dignity to give it all up at some point. There are things far worse than failure.

The Daily Mona Lisa Monster Truck:

Of course, some people weren’t able to create their own stand-alone Joseph Campbell hero journeys; and figured if Star wars was coining it, why not simply rip that off instead? Jess Thompson over at Toplessrobot.com lists the 10 most egregious Star Wars rip-offs…

A fan base that had blithely accepted Lucas’s version of events when he reverse-engineered a nine movie storyline that he’d started with the first part of the middle trilogy (at the very least this shows a lack of respect for one’s own source material; whilst both Homer, in his Odyssey, and Virgil, in his Aeneid, begin their action in media res, in the middle of the plot, it was part of a legitimate self-contained structure that used flashback to tell the story), and preferred to simply pretend that the holiday tv special - rushed out a year later with cute wookies and Art Carney fer crissakes - has never happened.

But with this latest film, the Star wars community has voiced a level of mass dissent to Clone Wars that seems unprecedented. In 1999 they were prepared to cast a blind eye, generally, to the tepid Phantom Menace relaunch; with its appalling dialogue and inert storytelling. Indeed much of the fan commentary at the time tends to start with how it felt to “be back in the theater again, and see those credits scrolling down the screen”; as if the trip to the theater was more a quest for renewal than to see a movie. If fans were disappointed they were prepared to let it ride; maybe because going sixteen years without your favorite thing makes you a bit more receptive and grateful for whatever you can get…

To be concluded…

The Daily Mona Lisa Monster Truck:

Just one more reason why comic book writer/artist Scott McCloud stays ahead of the curve: The Morning Improv.

Harry Knowles can’t enjoy his nephew’s “glee” because Tatooine is simply no country for old men; he can’t sit with his 8-year old buddy, marveling at two suns, forever. His nephew is already skipping away over the sand dunes and Harry can’t keep up any more. Moriarty (aka Drew McWeeny, although I’m not sure why he has a nom de plume, seeing as his real name sounds like someone - a bountyhunter, say, or a Rankor wrangler - from the film), who became a parent a while back, perhaps sees the matte lines behind the Star Wars construct even more clearly now (he’s a professional screenwriter after all; one would think any sense of wonder had been beaten out of him many moons ago…).

When he takes his son to the theater in future years, settles down with the popcorn, and watches the look of unalloyed joy on his kid’s face as he is rocked by the tenth Clones sequel, is it possible Moriarty might see something else too: the invisible strings that Emperor Lucas is silently attaching to his little tyke in the dark, ready to steer him out the theater once the lights come up, and into the Toys R’Us figurine cavern, the Jedi aisle of Target, the Cloneburger stand? Maybe Moriarty will look at his own shoulders and see his scars from when he cut the hooks out…

Investment can be a fragile thing; especially in a phenomenon that wasn’t planned in the first place. Nobody really knows what the shelf life will actually be of a franchise that began as a self-contained film that even its creator felt might be a fiscal and creative disaster (check out Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls), then blossomed into a full blown contemporary religion (fact: more people saw Star Wars around the world than their were Christians in the times of Jesus. Utter fact.). And once doubt blooms…

To be continued…

The Daily Mona Lisa Monster Truck:

The last video game I played was Batman Returns in approximately 1993. I got to the last level (on the train) but after three hours of failure to smosh the Penguin I gave up; that seemed more than long enough to complete a simply motor task… and so I got on with my real life: learning eight languages, the Heimlich Manoeuvre, curing cancer and marrying five supermodels in a row. Maybe I would have been more tempted to stay the course if I had the opportunity to have an avatar Batman like the one shown on Destructoid.com who wanders around Arkham Asylum with what looks like even his belly button lint delineated...

On Aintitcoolnews, the web site where we have all grown older over the years, there is a distinct sense of mid-life crisis. Founder Harry Knowles opines: I hated that I left a theater hating the movie so much that I couldn’t take my nephew’s glee of Star Wars and share it with him. Arch Star Wars fan Moriarty has become so disappointed with Lucas’s attempts to stage-manage fan reaction via controlling possibly unfavorable advance reviews that he has decided: I am done writing about STAR WARS. No more. No reviews. No retrospectives. No news. No coverage at all.

For these guys the sense of disgust seems to lie with something even bigger than the aesthetic failings of what (by all accounts, I haven’t seen it) is a cut-price product that infuriates traditional fans with poor animation, sloppy storytelling, paper-thin ‘characters’ introduced mainly to sell more merch to 8 year olds; it lies with a sense of bemused betrayal, something common to the aging process that they maybe thought they were going to escape? Unlike the rest of us, who also littered our school books with stickies of Jawas and Wamp Rats and wore out the record needle with Meco’s disco Star Wars theme, but moved on, the Star Wars fanatic tends to view the Lucas canon as some kind of benign corporate Dorian Grey portrait in their collective attic; that if they continued to invest in it, clicked their ruby-red slippers together three times fast, and flew around the room like Peter Pan, they could live forever in some state of suspended wonder and grace.

To be continued…

The Daily Mona Lisa Monster Truck:

You may think you have deleted your old “John Kerry Get Out the Vote” local ward spreadsheets, or those pictures of your ripped t-shirt phase, but this stuff can still turn around and bite you in the ass. Peter Warren in The Guardian writes about Why deletion fails to protect your private data.

The latest iteration of the cultural phenomenon that has done so very very much to effect a state of eternal retardation in huge swathes of the American male population (I believe statistics will bear out that, in this age of no military draft, there are more stormtroopers of the Empire variety than volunteers for the real Army Reserves. Which must be a comfort at least to the fanatical insurgents of Afghanistan. I imagine them sat in their caves at night giving thanks to Han Solo and a walking carpet that they can live to fight another day.) is the cartoon Star Wars: The Clone Wars. This weekend it was released to a less than stellar box office of $15.5m.

This marks a distinct difference to the hysteria generated by the previous films. Lines of fans do not reach around the block, this time. Media crews don’t set up shop outside Mann’s Chinese, interviewing the spooky stalwarts who been camping out since June to see the first screening. The waters of Los Angeles docks have not been displaced two feet higher up the sea walls by convoys of Taiwanese freighters unloading Count Dooku lunchboxes, dead Tauntaun sleeping bags, Yoda-flavored peanut butter and Obi Wan Kenobi toilet roll holders.

To be continued…

The Daily Mona Lisa Monster Truck:

Imagine public sculpture that is better than public art, and you are also allowed to play on it! For those of you have always wanted to absail down an Anish Kapoor or a Richard Serra but were deterred by bourgeois principle, it’s nice to know that there is genuinely weird shit out there that is clamber-friendly. Darkroastedblend.com has a series of photographs of nightmare playgrounds that appeals to the clown-dressing child-slaying monster in all of us.

“The future of the Los Angeles Times, in print and online, rests on our ability to meet the needs of our readers and deliver news and information that is unique.”

Kinda sounds like one of those resumé headers doesn’t it? The newspaper equivalent of those essentially meaningless character sketches cobbled together by job applicants to display a bit of extra-value plumage beyond that basic facility with Microsoft Office and a bit of Photoshop: Spanish as a second language, ability to work within both group and individual contexts, a clean driving license, passions for hiking and racquetball.

Please hire me. Please buy copies of me.

The key to fully comprehending the servile tone of the LA Times’ spit-balled, work-shopped, committee-formulated, re-launch manifesto is to note that it is marked by a sense of desperation that pervades the entire industry. For a fully-rounded survey of the ills befalling all newspapers - catastrophic loss in revenue from circulation and print ads, The New York Times Company’s stock decline of 54% since 2004, the loss of a quarter of newspaper jobs in the US since 1990 - check out Eric Alterman’s superb article Out of Print in The New Yorker (it’s so good you can appear really intelligent at parties if you remember enough of it to parrot…).

The writing has been on the wall for some time, then, for print media; but that doesn’t make the intricacies of tone and prevarication any less interesting, as we begin to see the death struggles of an aging beast locked in a titanic battle with some strange new upstart bugger that has emerged - pissing html and shitting blogs - from the protean mass-media ooze.

Appeasement is only part of the issue (and what else are the newspaper editors supposed to do? Shut up shop?); more importantly, what does this mean for what we now expect as consumers? The LA Times wants to “meet the needs” of readers, but it also promises to do so by delivering “news and information that is unique.”

But isn’t news and information supposed to be, well… you know… like totally “real” in the first place? As in: “non-unique?” Like it’s the same thing whether it’s on Defamer, USA Today, or Al Jazeera?

“Unique” refers to the manner in which the same information that you can now indeed easily get elsewhere will now be re-framed and re-presented by the LA Times. Revelations such as: Putin is playing America like a broken zither over Georgia, mainly because the Russians know that Americans - with the exception of Jack Kennedy stumbling into a nuclear gunfight that he bluffed by sheer dumb luck - are totally pussy and have backed down always, like fat cowards at their own B-B-Q with their phone on 911-hold as they’re faced down by a fundamentalist brandishing a broken bottle; young Hollywood celebs are hot for casual sex like rats love taco stands; local communities can do amazing things without elected officials.

Except that the LA Times now has to pretend that news items are more like sushi portions. It promises its consumers that it can dress all these nuggets up to look a little different, a little more “unique” (with a little wasabi/lettuce conflab) than all that fishy shit you can more quickly gobble up with your digital chopsticks on the websites.

Personally, as a bloke of 45 years of age with an ingrained trace memory of having The Guardian’s (an English leftist national newspaper often affectionately called The Graudniad because of its propensity for typos) ink rub off on my fingers as it flapped in the bitter northern winds of England as I devoured news in the early ‘80s of Thatcherite social crimes, I shall miss the presence of newspapers almost as much as my own passing (maybe just a bit less. In fact, I really hope I’m still alive by the time they’ve gone…).

I have always vaguely admired the way that newspapers have, for all their individual faults and gaffes, tried to tell it like it is to their own constituencies; the hoops that they have had to jump through to present what happens in the world to their readers as affirmation of certain values and a repudiation of others. I fear (like all middle-aged people faced with change) that the current Internet version of news seems to be devolving, and that we have entered the era of phenomenonology: of news simply reporting on the reporting of news.

News, like pop, shall eat itself.

I’d just like the print media to go out with whatever dignity it can muster. When the Calendar Section - always the litmus test of change because so much of this cultural shit is subjective - of the LA Times re-launch presents a sheepish series of meditations on the collapse between high and low culture subtitled “Highbrow. Lowbrow. No brow. Now what?” I find I’m not taking as much punk pleasure as I thought I would in such a bourgeoise collapse of values.

Mainly because I suspect it’s not the values - the binary difference necessary to the struggle between high and low culture - that have essentially changed. It’s just that we don’t know the difference any more. I feel like a senile Asian doing tai chi in the park oblivious to the muggers. A country singer at the DNC. A dipstick in Rodeo drive caught between handbag paradigms.

And I absolutely reserve the right to feel sad about that.

NOTE: due to pernicious change as partially evinced above, this blog will change format next week. Stay tuned. Make it so. And let’s be careful out there. By the power of Greyskull.

So: if newspapers are relatives, they wouldn’t be Grandpa - already resigned to being nearer to the end than the beginning, and thereby not worthy of our attention at all - they’re gonna be more like Mom or Pop, with a lot more to lose: feeling for lumps in the shower while the Miley Cyrus party music thrums through the bathroom walls; breaking out in a light cold sweat that sticks like Velcro and the shower water can’t quite wash away.

Basically, if you’re a parent who has started that weirdly subtle process of beginning to maybe consider forming an exploration committee to select a task force to balance your options in the realization that the whole life thang might just be throwing you more curveballs more quickly than you’d anticipated at this point in the scheme of things…

… then you’re the newspaper of relatives.

The Sunday July 27 2008 issue of the Los Angeles Times is another relaunch for a failing organ going through a mid-life crisis. This is not a new phenomenon for the print media - launched from city and town papers from Atlanta to Zion Heights - that has seen the spurting ubiquity of the Internet redefine some basic ground rules. For the last four years or so, as media-consumption patterns have become increasingly habituated in favor of electronic mediation as the norm, the Internet has been flashing its skirts at traditional print media even as it sprints away gaily laughing, leaving the old duffer panting in the gutter, ashamed at playing such a public display of catch-up.

Only back in 2005 the LA Times danced a significant sidestep shuffle, a spastic polka that even Lawrence Welk would have had trouble composing the backbeat for: in which it made its Calendar section re-accessible (having removed it at one point from the purview of the casual newspaper purchaser) to those who hadn’t paid a (short-lived and soon aborted) additional online subscription fee.

The identification of a so-called online community prepared to pay extra monies for exclusive access to what they had previously received for free was only the latest mirage in a series of subscriber-reduced hallucinations. The already (now in retrospect) quaint “gosh golly” hubris of an idea in which Internet surfers would want to pay for anything at all was foreshadowed in the relaunch claim that the “new” LA Times would soon rival Craigslist in its mix of user-generated content, original material and classifieds. Well…

Three years later, and on a bright Sunday morning (as I recover from the tribulations of fallen arches from my endless Comic-Con wanderings) my wife sets up coffee and croissants on our balcony, and the hummingbirds buzz around my ears like frantic interior designers already measuring up the drapes for Michelle Obama, as I stagger under the weight of the Sunday edition and let it land with a dull thunk on the table.

Ellen and I then begin to sift through the latest re-launch of the Los Angeles Times like we’re CSI detectives (I am the good cop, wanting the re-launch to actually work, possessed of the belief that my adopted city has displayed a considerable commitment to journalistic verities over the last hundred years or so. You may invest in the Machiavellian intricacies of the water-stealing plot of Chinatown, but you should at least know that the real scheme was actually busted wide open; and not by Jack Nicholson but assiduous local reporting that stirred up a critical mass of local revulsion. Ellen, on the other hand, is the bad cop who wants to beat the LA Times with a rubber sap for daring to continually reduce the book review section over recent years like it’s a French consommé stuck on high heat. As a longtime LA-inhabitant she loathes almost everything about the city I’ve forced her to live in, and is just waiting for the scales to fall away from my eyes and stump up for the New York Times.).

Regardless of our personal prejudices, we do at least agree, without coming to blows, that this relaunch marks the latest manifestation of a downsizing sensibility disguised under some vague peripatetic bullshit rubric of consumer-responsivity. A newspaper is, lest we forget, a daily manifesto for a corporation, and announcements of “downsizing” or “streamlining” are simply the ways that corporations normally polish a turd; even one that you can wrap tomorrow’s fish and chips in.

Beyond the hype and the shiny platitudes, the model for the current corporate response to recession, confusion and turmoil is actually quite traditional: you simply lay off a shitload of people, reduce the overhead, scare the bejeezus out of the rest whom you haven’t laid off yet (America is SO COOL for this in terms of the whole health care dynamic), and then offer to let them continue in their jobs if they take on the responsibilities of the recently departed. In the meantime, as a corporate head, you cross your toes, swing a dead cat around your head, and wait for some phenomenon so bright and shiny to come along and save your business that bloggers like me will have run out of snide labels for it long before you finish the last sautéed banana on your tsunami-monitored Maldives beach.

But: forgetting corporate parsimony, the naked fear of executive people who might lose their season tickets to everything, and the crushed hopes of all those wives of all those journalists who thought they could both make it as long as she kept teaching in the inner-cities and he kept writing about conceptual art in a gay new way; forgetting all that passion and perspective, what does a re-launch that very specifically announces itself as “In Defense Of Shameless Pleasures” actually mean for us as a society (even if only for us on this side of the country, and ignored by all those fucking book-readers in Manhattan)?

PART TWO: the relative that is the LA Times darts back into the party, grabs you by the arm and pulls you into the hallway, barking “we need to talk” in your ear whilst trying out the most stoical of semi-smiles.