I don’t know (or really care) what triggered the latest round of the recurring “Superman is boring/Superman is cool” debate, but it has made for some interesting reading. Superman has never been one of my favorite characters, though I’ve read and enjoyed many comics starring or featuring the Man of Steel in my 35+ years [...]

Sometime back in the summer of 1985, I came home from a D&D all-nighter to find my little brother hovering over a massive pile of funnybooks stacked in the middle of our bedroom’s orange shag carpet. The bewildering haul was a gift from my uncle, who’d discovered Jesus and/or the realities of married life and [...]

Sometime during the spring of 2006, I got into my head to return to writing as a hobby after a long hiatus. My chosen platform was a daily blog where I wove together tracks from my extensive music library with panels lifted from old funnybooks and recursive political/historical/autobiographical discussions. I expected — based on a [...]

I used to keep a set of index cards on the windowsill next to my bed. Scribbled on them in pencil were lists of my holy grails — movie titles gleaned from various cult or “psychotronic” film guides and band/album names pulled from the Trouser Press or Guinness “New Wave” directories. Very few of the [...]

(“Explosion” by George Grosz, 1917) How have things been out your way?

When my mother was a teenager, she dug up some of the small blue wildflowers which grew on Bucky’s Hill and transplanted them in her parents’ backyard. The plants thrived and multiplied over the years, each spring heralding a bigger and more vibrant carpet of little azure blossoms. When I moved into the House on [...]

I’ve just completed my quarterly status report. Much of the data still needs to be tabulated, but I am confident of one conclusion. Ollie the Rock Stupid Puppy continues to be a huge fucking dork.

Sneak Previews — locally broadcast on WBGH on weekend afternoons — was a staple of my TV-damaged childhood. The clips were the main draw. They were a means, like lurid newspaper ads and MAD Magazine parodies, for a kid to catch a fragmentary glimpse into the alluringly forbidden world of “grown-up” entertainment. And so I’d [...]

I was a child soldier in the Great Apple War. That’s neither a boast nor a confession, just a simple statement of fact. The conflict erupted, as so many conflicts have, out of the summer vacation boredom experienced by a contentious bunch of eleven year olds during a time when “adult supervision” meant and a [...]

Surrender isn’t my favorite album by The Chemical Brothers. It doesn’t even rank in my top three releases by the Manchester big beat duo. Its inclusion as an Album That Meant Something stems from how I acquired my copy of the CD, which was purchased upon its June 1999 release from an up-an-coming online retailer [...]