Read Some Allie Brosh! No Excuses . . .

When I tell people to read some Allie Brosh-- a young lady who writes primitively illustrated memoirs that are so funny even Bill Gates laughs-- I get a lot of:

"I can't read things with pictures because I get confused and don't know when to look at the words and when to look at the pictures and I tried to read Watchmen and it was good but just too much stimulation"

and-- quite frankly-- I want to smack these people . . . I just finished her second book, Solutions and Other Problems, and it's funny and dark and weird and profound and full of Brosh's neuroses and her dogs and her existentially overly-energetic brain. . . you can read the words and/or look at the pictures or any combination of those two . . . but who doesn't like funny pictures?

Retro Saturday of Stuff to Appreciate

An old school Saturday that reminds me why we bought a house in Highland Park, had kids, and rescued a dog . . . successful soccer practice in the AM at Bartle gym-- two blocks away-- followed by some successful tennis training with Ian at Donaldson Park-- five hundred feet away-- then the boys got on their skateboards and rode to the comic book store (and purchased some retro-ish comics: Invincible and some new series related to Watchmen) and ate pizza, they returned with the pizza crust, which our dog ate-- a good sign, because he's lost his appetite lately-- and then Cat and I walked for some coffee with the dog and he made it all the way to Main Street and back, the longest walk he's taken since his illness . . . and now both boys are upstairs reading, and they'll be fast asleep soon enough-- at least In will be, he reads three pages and falls asleep every Saturday afternoon-- and there's a snowstorm on the way (and indoor tennis tonight for the boys) so I'm declaring today a celebration of mundanity, small town life, kids, dogs, sports, marriage and all that normal regular stuff that I often forget to appreciate . . . and I keep extending this sentence because I don't feel like going on the Mid New Jersey Soccer Portal and fucking with spring registration stuff for the travel team, because that is some small town banality I could do without.

Rorschach is a Rorschach Test (or perhaps a Litmus Test)

Last year my son Ian was the star of Halloween, when he went viral as Eleven from Stranger Things, but this year props go to Alex, whose costume is literally a pop cultural Rorschach test . . . because he is dressed as Rorschach, the anti-hero from the greatest graphic novel ever written (Watchmen) and while his costume is a bit obscure, people who recognize him feel hip and in-the-know and have all kinds of good associations and perceptions, while those who don't will have their own unfounded and weird reactions to his inkblot mask . . . so maybe it's more of a litmus test for pop cultural literacy, not a Rorschach test . . . but my apologies for the imprecision, I'm writing this sentence quickly and under duress because it's Friday afternoon and my kids are going to a sleepover to binge on Stranger Things and my wife is encouraging me to mention the fact that Alex's mask changes shapes when he breathes and that she is responsible for not only this special mask but also the rest of the ensemble.

No Fun No Fun No Fun

I heard P.J. O'Rourke on NPR plugging his new book, which is about the "baby boom" generation, and he explained that his generation really did "use up" all the fun in the '70's -- sex before STDs, drugs before "just say no" and America before complete fragmentation . . . and it if you want a visual example of this, read Mimi Pond's fictionalized autobiographical graphic novel Over Easy . . . the narrator's adventures as a waitress at the hippest diner in Oakland is gender-bending, drug-fueled artsy hippie punk fun . . . and the art is easy on the eyes, and the book is a breeze to read-- it's not dense like reading Watchmen . . . but no disco, please.

The Avengers Are Not As Super As My Wife

The Avengers is certainly action-packed, but the heroes are too super for me . . . when the characters are invincible, there's not much on the line (plus they stole the ending from the movie version of The Watchmen) but my wife, on the other hand (who is a mere mortal) did perform a super-heroic feat while we were watching The Avengers and she did it with everything on the line . . . my son Ian said, "My tummy hurts, I think I'm going to throw up," and in a split second, with her super-human reflexes, my wife whipped out the giant bag of potato chips that she had smuggled into the theater, got it perfectly positioned in front of Ian's face as he yakked-- in the dark! the the fucking dark!-- and then calmly took Ian and the bag of potato chips/vomit to the bathroom, tossed the latter, cleaned up the former . . . and brought him back so he could enjoy the rest of the movie . . . I'd like to see Natalia Romanova pull that off.

Alan Moore: Predictable and Amusing (Just Like Me)

DC Comics is planning to release a seven comic book mini-series prequel to the unparalleled comic masterpiece Watchmen, and (according to The New York Times) creator Alan Moore is-- you guessed it!-- outraged and calls the new venture "completely shameless" and the article reports on Moore's typical pompous grouchiness, and explains that he has "completely disassociated himself from DC comics and the industry at large," and this sounds like a lot of fun-- to completely disassociate oneself from something, so here are a few things that I am now involved in that I plan to completely and indignantly disassociate myself from in the future:

1)  doing the dishes
2)  picking up dog poop
3)  tying my children's shoes
4)  wearing underwear
5)  flossing
6)  blogging
7)  canker sores
8)  Boardwalk Empire
9)  driving
10) Canada.

Dave's 105 Books to Read Before You Die (Which Will be Sooner Than You Think)

Everyone seems to have a top hundred list of something, and so here are my top hundred books (plus five bonus books in case you finish the top hundred too quickly) and each author is only represented once, so while Shakespeare and Italo Calvino may actually deserve more than one slot, for the sake of variety there are no repeats; also, there is fiction, non-fiction, and everything else on this list . . . and I should point out that once you finish reading all the books on this list, then you will be much smarter than me, because though I've read them all, I'm not sure I remember anything from them:

1.   Moby Dick by Herman Melville
2.   Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky
3.   War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
4.   The Lives of the Cell by Lewis Thomas
5.   Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
6.   If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino
7.   Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne
8.   Freaky Deaky by Elmore Leonard
9.   Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
10. V by Thomas Pynchon
11. The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
12. 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
13.  Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
14.  Into the Wild by John Krakauer
15.  Music of Chance by Paul Auster
16.  The Dog of the South by Charles Portis
17.  Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
18. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
19. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
20. The Bible
21. Henry IV (part 1) by William Shakespeare
22. The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard
23. The Stories of John Cheever
24. Will You Please Be Quiet Please by Raymond Carver
25. The Image by Daniel Boorstin
26. Clockers by Richard Price
27. Nixonland by Rick Perlstein
28. American Tabloid by James Ellroy
29. A Peoples History of the United States by Howard Zinn
30. Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan
31. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
32. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch  by Philip K. Dick
33.  Chaos by James Gleick
34.  The Society of the Mind by Marvin Minsky
35.  Watchmen by Alan Moore/ Dave Gibbons
36.  The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson
37.  The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
38.  Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa-Puffs by Chuck Klosterman
39.  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
40.  Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
41.  Foucalt's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
42.  Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
43.  War With The Newts by Karel Kapek
44.  The Miracle Game by Josef Skvorecky
45.  The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams
46.  Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving
47.  White Noise by Don Delillo
48.  The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
49.  Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
50.  Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
51.  Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
52.  Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins
53.  Bully For Brontosaurus by Stephen J. Gould
54.  The Drifters by James A. Michener
55.  Geek Love by Catherine Dunne
56.  The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker
57.  Human Universals by Donald Brown
58.  Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan and Anne Druyan
59.  The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
60.  The Diversity of Life by E.O. Wilson
61.  The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins
62.  Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
63.  American Splendor by Harvey Pekar/ Robert Crumb
64.  The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz by Hector Berlioz
65.  A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
66.  The Castle by Franz Kafka
67.  Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz
68.  Naked by David Sedaris
69.  Godel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
70.  The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L. Heilbroner
71.  The Big Short by Michael Lewis
72.  Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt
73.  Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer
74.  Monster of God by David Quammen
75.  Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
76.  Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Sacco
77.  Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
78.  Hyperspace by Michio Kaku
79.  Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
80. The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor
81.  Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Richard Wright
82.  The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
83.  Manchester United Ruined My Life by Colin Shindler
84.  Soccer in Sun and Shadow by Eduardo Galeano
85. From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple
86. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
87. The End of the Road by John Barth
88. Neuromancer by William Gibson
89. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
90. A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
91. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
92. Some Buried Caesar by Rex Stout
93. The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
94. The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson
95. We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates
96. The Bushwhacked Piano by Thomas McGuane
97. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
98. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
99. 1493 by Charles C. Mann
100.  Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azerrad
101.  A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
102.  The Life and Death of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch
103.  Methland by Nick Reding
104. A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin
105. Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

V For Paranoia

When I read Alan Moore's Watchmen, I thought to myself: I should write the script for a graphic novel, it would be awesome if someone turned my words into really cool pictures . . . but then I got a look at the actual script for Watchmen and thought better of this idea (here is the link to the script and though you have to download a PDF to see it, it is worth it to see the nearly insane attention to detail Moore takes for each frame of the graphic novel . . . you'd think someone with this kind of visual acuity would want to see the film version) and if you want more of Moore's insanity, read V for Vendetta, which isn't as dense as Watchmen, but has a clearer story-line, and if you want to get a feel for the tone of the book, read the introductions: the first is by David Lloyd, the illustrator, and he recounts an anecdote in a pub . . . he is sitting, drinking his pint, and the TV is blaring one insipid "cheeky and cheery" sit-com after another, and then a sports quiz program, but when the news comes on, the bartender shuts the TV off, and Lloyd finishes ominously: "V for Vendetta is for people who don't switch off the news," and then comes Moore's introduction, in which he predicts that Margaret Thatcher will create concentration camps for AIDS victims (it is 1988) and he describes vans with cameras on top, and police and their horses wearing black visors, and he says that England has turned "cold and mean-spirited," and he's getting his seven year old daughter out of there (although according to the internet, he's still living in Northern England, twenty three years later) and while I think the two of them are paranoid nut-bags, I also think you need people like this, predicting the worst, to remind us of what Arthur Koestler called the darkness at noon, so while I prefer to live blithely and unaware, someday Moore will be able to say: I told you so.

Banksy and Alan Moore Should Hang Out

Banksy, the acclaimed and aggressively anonymous street artist, was invited to the Oscars for his debut film Exit Through The Gift Shop but the Academy Awards denied his request to show up in disguise, and so Banksy says he will not be attending, which is more in character for him since he "does not agree with the concept of award ceremonies," though he is "prepared to make an exception" for awards which he is nominated . . . and my suggestion is that instead of trying to crash the ceremony in some covertly overt way, instead Banksy should hang out with Alan Moore on Oscar night and not watch the Oscars and not watch Watchmen and not watch anything at all, but instead have a serious discussion on the gullibility and naivete of the sort of people who like to look at things, like art and movies and award ceremonies, and how instead of looking at things, these people should make things that other people like to look at, like stencils and comic books, unless these people are Thierry Guerra, who maybe shouldn't be making art at all-- because Guerra makes terribly, derivative and kitschy crap-- unless Guerra is a creation of Bansky, and then his art is doubly ironic, and therefore significant.

Zombies Vs. Men In Tights

Last weekend, I consumed 11 volumes of Walking Dead comic books (but now I am back on track with the new translation of War and Peace) and I am completely addicted . . .the plots are inventive, surprising, and very, very dark . . . and I was pleasantly surprised as to how appealing a zombie apocalypse is to think about: it's not like the typical superhero scenarios of good versus evil-- where you contemplate what sort of hero the world needs and what sort of actions that hero needs to implement; The Walking Dead  forces you to ruminate on survival scenarios, about how far you would go to continue living and to protect your wife and kids-- it reminds me of Cormac McCarthy's The Road in that sense, but the series is much more fun to read because of the pictures-- unlike Watchmen, they are easy to digest . . . sometimes my eyes would race through an entire page and then I would go back and read the text to see exactly what happened-- and each volume has a serialized pulp feel and ends with a cliffhanger or major event, without ever being especially campy or cheesy: ten lurkers out of ten.

I Am Calling Out Alan Moore (Despite His Scary Beard)

I have mentioned that I can't really understand why fans of the graphic novel Watchmen despise Zach Snyder's movie version . . . I think it's a good rendition of that universe, and after seeing Snyder's previous movie, 300, which is an adaptation of the eponymous Frank Miller graphic novel about the Battle of Thermopylae, I find the film Watchmen even more impressive . . . because 300 is one of the cheesiest movies ever made (despite some cool battle gore and monstrous humanoid warriors) but I guess some people will never be happy with the film version of anything, such as the counter-cultural icon Alan Moore himself, who wrote Watchmen; Moore claims he has never watched any of the Hollywood film adaptations of his creations . . . this includes V for Vendetta and From Hell and Constantine and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but I am calling bullshit on this . . . I think he has seen them and he's not admitting it . . . a man of his intellectual stature and creative powers would be overcome with curiosity about how his art withstood the transformation into film, and despite his hatred for Hollywood blockbusters and all the vapidness they represent, he must have seen a bit of at least one of these films . . . at least a trailer or a YouTube clip or something . . . so Alan Moore, confess, you were curious and you checked out one or more of these movies . . . it's okay, your fans will forgive you.

Despite My Disappointment, Zack Snyder Probably Made a Good Decision (But What Do I Know?)

My wife and I watched Zack Snyder's epic treatment of the graphic novel Watchmen, and I assumed that my wife would need my help with the plot-- because she didn't read the graphic novel-- but, oddly, she was able to follow the film without my insight, which leads me to believe that Zach Snyder did a good job for the lay person, and I also think he did a good job for people familiar with the graphic novel-- but don't say this to Watchmen fanatics . . . for some reason they hate the movie, but I can't figure out why-- as in my humble opinion, the movie looks like a comic book and feels like the world of the Watchmen and Malin Akerman, the chick who plays Laurie Jupiter, is about as super-heroic looking as it gets (she's a hotter version of Linda Carter) and Dr. Manhattan, glowing radioactively and sporting a swinging blue tally-wacker, blends naturally into the scenes, which are more like sequences of loosely connected tableaux, but they do the trick and get across the plot . . . and though I was disappointed that the ending varied from the graphic novel, the movie ending is probably more elegant and requires less explanation and back-story, and so, in retrospect, after my initial disappointment of not getting to see a giant octopoid faux-alien transported into downtown Manhattan, I agree that the new ending makes more sense . . . and I give the movie nine blood covered smiley faces out of a possible ten.

Watchmen Makes You Earn It

I finally finished Watchmen, the heralded graphic novel that treats super-heroes as realistically as a Henry James novel treats consciousness, and it was an engrossing read-- it requires total commitment to get through a page-- the level of detail in the frames is astounding, the shifting genres are always perfect in tone, and the plot is dense and complex . . . and if you suffer through the cold, dark, corrupt world-- including the comic book within the Watchmen universe, the tale of the Black Freighter-- then there is a reward at the end: some traditional comic book fun . . . I can't wait to see how they did it in the film version.