A Simpsons tattoo didn’t seem devotional enough for my level of fandom, so I opted for this instead.
Seth Madej
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Here, without a reason or elaboration and in no particular order, are 10 of my favorite movie villains.1 What are some of yours?
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Heath Ledger as The Joker
in The Dark Knight
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Margaret Hamilton as The Wicked Witch of the West
in The Wizard of Oz
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Klaus Maria Brandauer as Maximilian Largo
in Never Say Never Again
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Wes Studi as Magua
in The Last of the Mohicans
- Not necessarily my top 10. [↩]
Categories: Writing | Tags: animation, movies, Stuff I LikeClick here to comment
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Letters to Sherlock Holmes by Richard Lancelyn Green
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
If you think you’d be interested in a collection of actual letters sent to Sherlock Holmes, then you certainly won’t regret the hour or two it takes to read this one. After all it contains the only known letter to a fictional character requesting his help acquiring an autograph from the lead singer of Soft Cell. If you’re unsure if you’d be interested in a collection of actual letters sent to Sherlock Holmes, your time would be better spent resetting your Internet passwords or relearning the quadratic formula.
Categories: Writing | Tags: 007, books, sci fi, Sherlock HolmesClick here to comment
Today the news broke that the 13 episodes of Futurama airing on Comedy Central this summer will likely be the show’s last, because the network opted not to renew it. This isn’t much of a surprise — it’s more surprising that the announcement didn’t come months ago — but that makes it no less depressing. Futurama is one of my very favorite shows. I remember watching the 1999 premiere thinking, “There’s no way I’ll enjoy this as much as The Simpsons.” I did. And as Futurama went on, it’s best episodes proved to be as good as the best episodes of The Simpsons, which is the highest praise I can give anything that I can’t have sex with.
The one time in my career that I was lucky enough to develop a pilot1 the network demanded we bring in a more experienced writer to help. The first name on my list was Futurama’s Ken Keeler. To my utter amazement he actually wanted to come onboard.2 Eventually TV biz hoohah prevented it, but I still covet the photocopied script of Ken’s first draft of the classic Futurama episode “Godfellas” sent by his agent as an entirely unnecessary sample. I even dragged it across country with me when I moved to LA five years later, despite the fact that all I brought was what could be squeezed into my creaking Volvo.
----It’s National Poetry Month, so I might as well post a poem. Here’s one I wrote 12 years ago called “Naked Jesus Women.”
“Naked Jesus Women”
Public money, our money, should not be given to a museum so that they can display photographs of naked women portraying Jesus. No!
Instead, naked Jesus women should fall from the sky, on parachutes knitted from our tax dollars, the actual bills. Clasping Metrocards between their thighs, the naked Jesus women should land on roofs and in trees and on the FDR. Their Naired legs should clog the chimneys at Gracie Mansion.
Naked Jesus women should touch down into Madison Square Park and entwine their limbs around the statue of William Seward. Their bodies should fill the shallow swimming lanes of the Asser Levy pool and stain the water with cocoa-butter.
The Jesus women should set up booths on the promenade and write Haiku for a dollar. They should swipe racks of clothing in the garment district and ride them through Chelsea, fragrant and whooping and popping wheelies.
Of course, we don’t get much of that out here in Brooklyn. See, this is a family town.
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While you’re here, you might as well read my Taco Bell haiku.
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More of my series of self-portraits can be found here.
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The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This exceptionally disturbing book has some beautiful writing, but its slow pace and intentional lack of narrative left me plodding through it. But I’ll always remember the title Handmaid’s description of the act of sex, which is so unlike any I’ve ever read and I imagine is as alien to all men as it was to me:
…the stub of himself, his extra, sensitive thumb, his tentacle, his delicate, stalked slug’s eye, which extrudes, expands, winces, and shrivels back into himself when touched wrongly, grows big again, bulging a little at the tip, traveling forward as if along a leaf, into them, avid for vision. To achieve vision in this way, this journey into a darkness that is composed of women, a woman, who can see in the darkness while he himself strains blindly forward.
She watches him from within.
While digging through my storage space over the holiday weekend, I yanked some particularly Goodwillable sweaters out of an old trunk and underneath found a stained manila folder. Inside was something I thought I’d lost — the only known extant copy of my music newsletter from many, many years ago, “The Bird Stump.”
Typewritten mailers like “The Bird Stump” were the ancestors of fanzines, and seeing mine again brought back sweet memories of the hours I spent researching, writing, and crafting it every day. I have a particular fondness for this issue, which is probably why I saved a photocopy. It contains the final interview with Donora, Pennsylvania’s greatest Partridge Family tribute band, In a Pear Tree. I’ve scanned in all four pages, below.
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If you read my post from last week pointing out that there are probably 345 billion intelligent civilizations in the Universe, you might have asked yourself or your local alderman, “How come none them trillions of ETs ever swing by Earth to say ”sup’?”
You wouldn’t have been the first. Legendary particle physicist and Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi wondered that, so much and so often that it led to his achieving the all-American dream of having a paradox named after him. The Fermi Paradox, as Rico himself summarized it, is “Where is everybody?” If all evidence points to our galaxy and Universe throbbing with hot hot life, why have we never encountered it?
Well it just so happens that today the sci fi blog i09 laid out about a dozen of the more eccentric proposed solutions to the Fermi Paradox, and man are they a gas and a half. From the theory of the Cosmic Zoo, to the Whack-a-Mole hypothesis, to the Big Meat Problem, it’s all essential lunch-break reading for anyone who enjoyed playing around with the Drake Equation app or would like a reason to say the word “panspermia.”
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Disney announced today a series of 19 new Mickey Mouse cartoons coming to Disney Channel this summer. The big deal about this to animation fans is that the shorts return Mickey to 2D and wackizany pre-war storytelling. Disney has released the entire first one, “Croissant de Triomphe,” online, and it hits the tiny sweet spot of feeling both retro and progressive, with a distinct ’20s-’30s vibe emanating from a modern sleekness and fast pace. Showrunner Paul Rudish and his crew have made something beautiful, fun, and funny. Take 3:30 seconds to watch it straight through, and your day will thank you for it.
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