Making Manchester United Again

#sorrynotsorry

I wanted to write this post a week or so ago, when Manchester United put us all out of our collective misery and fired Jose Mourinho, but now that we've seen how United's done under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer as interim manager, I have a little more information to work with. And after watching them demolish Bournemouth this morning, it's fair to say that the change in management has perked the team up significantly.

I've long been ambivalent about Mourinho. He obviously led Chelsea to their greatest period of success back in the last decade, and before that, at Porto, claimed the last Champions League title for a team outside the Big Four countries in 2004. But his teams are frequently boring, and he's long had a knack for making great players look ordinary. Add to that his tendency to flame out in his third season at any club, and he looks more like an expensive gamble than a real option for a club to regain its former glory.

And maybe it's only that I've paid a lot more attention to him the past few years, because I've been playing Fantasy Premier League during that time, but he's also seemed worse this time around. His first season at United doesn't bring up any particular memories, but last season he kicked up his feuds with his own players, such that it was surprising to see how well Paul Pogba played in winning the World Cup this summer. And the start of this season saw him kick that feuding into high gear, even stripping Pogba of the captaincy and benching him completely for the last couple of games before he got the sack.

But then he was gone. The most mystifying thing for me was how much I cared - Manchester United has been one of the teams I've most loved to hate since about 1999, when they knocked Juventus out of the Champions League and then snatched it dramatically in the last five minutes of the final against Bayern Munich. Yet, oddly, seeing Mourinho go filled me with a weird excitement, a need to see what happened next and whether it meant United would finally challenge for the title again.

(Although there was also a perverse desire to see just how bad things could get - at some point would even United get relegated?)

That excitement rose when they announced that they'd be hiring Solskjaer as their interim manager for the rest of the season. Solskjaer obviously is the guy who scored the winning goal in that 1999 Champions League final, and despite not being associated with the club in the same way as David Beckham, Gary Neville, Ryan Giggs or Paul Scholes, is legitimately a club legend. He's even 45, the exact same age as Alex Ferguson when he took over in 1986, though I'll admit that's stretching analogies a bit too far - Ferguson had already had a certain amount of success as a manager in Scotland before getting the United job, whereas Solskjaer's previous managerial experience in the Premier League was an ill-starred stint where he took Cardiff City down to relegation.

And yet, as of today he's now overseen three successive wins in his first three games, something only Matt Busby and Jose Mourinho himself achieved. The other number people have been throwing around is the five goals his United team scored against Cardiff in his first game in charge - since that was the first time United had scored five in one match since Ferguson's last game in charge in 2013.

Generally it's not good to draw too many conclusions from this run, since these three matches have all been against decidedly weaker teams, two of whom were promoted in the last two years, and all of whom are in decidedly poor runs of form at the moment. In addition, Man United line up next against Newcastle United, who are also in their own difficulties at the moment, so Solskjaer's skills won't be properly tested against a top 6 side (Spurs) until 13 January.

But I come once again to the game I was watching this morning. United looked fluid, free-flowing, deadly - stringing together passes and rushing into danger areas where they were well placed to score against Bournemouth. Pogba was particularly deadly, pulling back the first two goals and creating another later on. Whatever Solskjaer's skills as a coach or the hands-on-ness of his approach, the evidence is right there in performances against opposition that the Mourinho team would have struggled against. It's also hard not to assume that he's trying to stamp on this United team the style of football he learned under Ferguson.

The other question is what happens at the end of the season. If Solskjaer continues like this, he'll surely be in the running for the job on a permanent basis, with Spurs manager Mauricio Pochettino the other likely candidate (unless he gets lured away to Real Madrid, who are also looking for a permanent coach but haven't made as charmed an appointment). It'd be interesting to see, if Solskjaer does get the job, what he'll be able to make of it, and whether this really does herald a change in fortunes for the team, rather than a dead-cat bounce.

This all brings us back to the question of why I care so much. As I mentioned, United has long been the team I loved to hate. They almost always got the players that helped put them head and shoulders above the competition, including a very young Cristiano Ronaldo, and they had the swagger and arrogance that came with dominating the game throughout the 1990s.

But I suspect my current nostalgia for the 90s is what's behind my excitement - Solskjaer is part of the team that I learned about when I first got into football, which is also when the UK in general, and Manchester in particular, was the cultural epicenter of everything I was into. Seeing them come back into that kind of form would be a nice throwback to days that were, if not happier, then not as marked by darkness (as evidenced by the title I came up with for this post).

When United was winning everything in sight, we were still years off from invasions of Iraq, wars on terror and rising xenophobia. Not to mention that the UK didn't seem likely to ditch the EU anytime soon, even if they did complain about it a whole lot.

In any case, it'll be fun to watch how United develops under Solskjaer. In particular, it'll be interesting to see whether Pogba's run of form continues, given the promise that attached itself to him with his £89 million price tag when United bought him from Juventus (and, um, when he won the fucking World Cup). United may not have the best team, but in Pogba it may have the best player, Mohamed Salah notwithstanding.

So for the first time in twenty years, and with shame in my heart, I think I may find myself rooting for Manchester United soon...

2018: Another Year I'll be Glad to See Gone

On the one hand, life is a series of cosmic ironies: I once expressed confusion at someone saying that a particular year had been a bad one, and they were happy to see it go.

On the other hand, the screaming void continues to claim our sanity: I wrote posts in 2016 and 2017 saying how crappy the year had been, and now I'm doing a third.

In fairness, it's been slightly less crappy in some ways than the previous two years. I started out by going to London for three months, earning some extra cash and seeing friends and family. In a way it was a perfect vacation back into my old life between 2006 and 2013, right up to and including the fact that I was living next door to a friend's old place.

(I even ran into his old flatmate, and was thinking about that guy again recently. What struck me was how mature, even serene, the guy seemed now - he has a wife and lives in a nice house that he owns, in a neighborhood that's improved immeasurably since 2006. I'd like to be like that one day...)

And I've ended the year in an interesting new job, that's really stretching my creative boundaries in a lot of ways. The main negative for me is that I'm not writing as part of the job description, apart from a brief or slide deck here and there, but it takes some important strands from my previous full-time employment and lets me examine those more: stuff like working with startups and finding out about tech sectors that aren't gaining a lot of investment.

But to be honest, the stuff in between was pretty heavy-going at times. I managed some freelance work during the summer, but between those jobs found myself spinning in circles a bit - when you're not on a schedule, what's to stop you from playing web Solitaire all day? Turns out, it's my own willpower, which... well, wasn't always up to the task.

Jokes aside, I felt even more trapped in the house than before, when I'd been employed but working from home. When you don't have anywhere to go or anything to do, there's not much point in even leaving the house, and I could feel how that was spiraling into progressively less awesome things. So yeah, the new job came just at the right moment.

Personally, it was again a fairly blah year. A couple of friendships came to abrupt (or abrupt-ish) ends, and the dating was hamstrung by being both poor and resident at no fixed address. It doesn't help that I literally had one of the worst dating experiences of my life, which I'll be happy to tell you about IRL. And yeah, the looming 4-0 didn't help with looking at my dating life, or with feeling any less behind my friends.

There were other positives, though. The time in London, as I mentioned, allowed me to revisit parts of the UK I hadn't been to in a while, to see friends I hadn't seen for ages. And it was easy to bolt on my yearly trip to Italy, which despite having shitty weather was much more pleasurable than I'd expected it to be (in addition to giving me the idea for a new short story).

I also managed a couple of fun road trips, at opposite ends of California. Back in July my dad and I went on a road trip to southern Oregon, where I got to experience Ashland, Crater Lake and various other natural wonders (along with an impressive load of junk food). I even got to experience the pleasure of introducing my dad to an area of natural beauty that he hadn't seen before, the Avenue of the Giants.

Meanwhile in October I had my Joshua Tree trip, which as I said was a fun experience in pushing my own boundaries. And all the driving put a nice big dent in my podcast backlog, which is also nice, I guess.

Writing-wise, I don't know how much "progress" I made, but I was pleased to meet my goals and come up with new stories. I also started working with a freelance editor on some pieces, which helped me tighten things up, but also gave me heart that I'm on the right track with them.

I also went looking for help with the dating and fitness stuff, finding some awesome ladies to coach me at both. On the dating side I get some cheerleading and suggestions for places to try and meet more ladies, while on the fitness side I've learned how to properly stretch key muscle groups, and I'm pretty much able to touch my toes again (!).

So... despite the title, and how I started this blog post, I actually feel a bit hopeful for the year to come. It might evaporate on January 2nd, or it might turn into an unending parade of awesome, but it feels like the important thing is to take some action and ask for help (which was my big lesson of 2017, after all). I'll see how that goes next year, and what these actions turn into, if anything - but at any rate, I'll be sure to report back in twelve months.

Punisher War Zone: Frank Castle as He's Meant to Be

The universe has been conspiring to have me watch this movie lately: after discovering that it existed, I found out that a filmmaker I follow on Twitter, Lexi Alexander, directed it, and then someone on a private, comics-focused group I'm part of on Facebook started talking about it. I went and found the episode of the "How Did This Get Made" podcast that has Alexander talking about the making of the movie. So, inspired by this I went to my Amazon Fire TV last night intending to rent it.

Result? It turns out it's been on Netflix the entire time.

So I watched it, and I can say that it's probably the best adaptation of the Punisher that's out there, including Netflix's own collaboration with Marvel, starring Jon Bernthal.

Of course, let's get one thing out of the way straight off: this isn't exactly Citizen Kane. Or even Raiders of the Lost Ark. It feels like it wouldn't be out of place buried on the SyFy channel's lineup of direct-to-video movies, even though it has a pretty good cast (including Dominic West, the Wire's own Jimmy McNulty, as the main villain Jigsaw).

But, its charm comes from a certain unhinged, go-for-broke willingness to plumb the depths of the source material's absurdity. Not content to set up a trio of parkour-loving criminals to get killed by the Punisher, it dispatches one of them, mid-flip, with a rocket-propelled grenade.

When the Punisher blows a gangster's head off in front of the FBI agent who's been chasing him all movie, the agent's reaction is less horror as annoyance.

And in the climactic battle, where the Punisher faces off against most of New York's street gangs, one bad guy's last words are, "Oh, for fuck's sake." To put it another way, this movie has Garth Ennis's fingerprints all over it, and to be honest, that's exactly how it should be.

In case you don't know, Garth Ennis is the Northern Irish writer of comics like Preacher, Hitman, the Demon and the Marvel Max Nick Fury mini-series that apparently put off George Clooney because of how ridiculously violent it was. He also had a couple of defining runs on the Punisher, beginning with a 12-issue limited series in 2000 and going through a regular series on the mature-readers Marvel Max imprint.

I caught the 2000 series when it came out, but didn't read any of the Max series until a couple of years ago, when a friend lent me the "Kitchen Irish" storyline. You could say that Ennis and the Punisher were made for each other - if you take the premise of a guy killing every violent criminal he sees at face value, it'd get boring, so you need to add something extra, a little colorful, maybe a little grotesque. And this is exactly what Ennis specializes in.

War Zone dispenses with the Punisher's origin story almost completely. It mentions it from time to time in order to give viewers just as much information as they need, but otherwise the Punisher is a known presence in New York, with both the cops and the mob well aware of him. It does give Jigsaw's origin story, by having the Punisher throw him into a glass-grinding machine.

Even when story elements don't come from Garth Ennis, they feel like they could: one of Jigsaw's henchmen is his brother Loony Bin Jim (played by Doug Hutchison), who in his first scene eats the insane asylum orderly who's been torturing him for years. Once free he smashes every mirror he sees for the rest of the movie, out of respect to Jigsaw and (presumably) because he really likes smashing things.

In case it's not obvious, this movie is kind of like a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon, but with all the gore and violence retained. People are dispatched with guns, knives, spiked railings, baseball bats and a chair leg, among other things. The Punisher himself, played here by Ray Stephenson, is kind of a cypher, stoically wading through hundreds of bad guys and not uttering a line until about 20 minutes into the movie. His Terminator-like crusade positions him as the straight man against the incompetent and morally compromised cops and FBI agents who first are assigned to catch him but end up teaming with him.

Put another way, this is a spiritual precursor to Deadpool, though more grounded in reality because the Punisher doesn't have superpowers. And if it looks a little cheaper, at least it all looks and feels appropriate - and anyway, it's clear the filmmakers blew all their budget on the gore effects.

So, silly and absurd and violent as it is, I can't do anything other than recommend you check it out ASAP, while it's still on Netflix. Forget the po-faced discussions of PTSD and gun control that dominate the Jon Bernthal show: this is the Punisher as it's meant to be.

An Afternoon of Warhol at Stanford's Cantor Arts Center

As I usually do when I have a free Sunday afternoon, I headed out to the Cantor Gallery on Stanford campus today. Not because there was anything I particularly wanted to see, but because it's free and offers nice opportunities to get some walking done, and enjoy the fresh air. It also has a new central exhibition every few months, and I discovered today that they were hosting an exhibition of photography by Andy Warhol.

I don't feel I know that much about Warhol, despite a profile about him in Paradox Press's Big Book of Weirdoes from the 90s, so I gamely went to check it out. It's a review of the different themes and subject matter he took photos of throughout the last decade of his life, from the celebrity work he's known for to people in the gay community and the Studio 54 crowd, among others.

The Cantor Gallery actually acquired the contact sheets and negatives from the Warhol Foundation, so this is the first time a lot of these pictures are being displayed, which made it more interesting.

In any case, I was struck by a thought as I looked at the celebrity photos he took and that were in his interview magazine. Among the shots of Liza Minnelli, Nancy Reagan and Grace Jones, there was a photo of Michael Jackson as a rather young man, on which Warhol had traced lines following the contours of his face.

Looking at it, and the pictures around it, it struck me that it was similar to the famous Campbell's Soup painting, in that these celebrities are also brands and iconography that the public recognizes and responds to in specific ways. The silkscreen prints of Mao Zedong or Marilyn Monroe, or indeed this traced-on photo of Michael Jackson, seemed to me a way to try and distill that essence of who these people are, which made it even more interesting to try and locate the same meaning in the other pictures.

I don't know if these thoughts are ground-breaking (probably not) or so basic as to elicit snorts of derision (probably more likely), but if accurate, gives me a new way to appreciate his work and that of others in the Pop Art movement. It also gives me an insight into what he was interested in, which helps explain why he made the art that he made. Every artist has their preoccupations and pet themes, which show up again and again in their work, and for me, being able to identify these themes makes me like the work more.

It's on my mind quite a bit also because I recently spent a few idle minutes reading up on some of Neil Gaiman's work on Wikipedia, which listed certain themes he's played with since his early comics work. It also made me think of what the themes are that I'm most interested in for my own stories - future generations of literary critics will have to parse this out themselves, I suppose, but based on some of the stories I've been writing lately consciousness and artificial intelligence are fairly big, at least in some of my stuff.

On the other hand, a writer (or any other artist) probably shouldn't spend too much time teasing the themes out of his own work, right? Maybe it's all Freudian and I'm trying to express something related to shagging. Who knows?

That notwithstanding, if you're in the Bay Area, you should have a look at the exhibition. The page warns, somewhat euphemistically, that some images "may not be appropriate for young viewers", so I'll spell it out: there are some female and male nudes, which are generally quite tasteful and artistic, and then there are some photos of gay sex, including ejaculation. The more explicit contacts remain fairly small, but it's pretty clear what's going on, so if that sort of thing bothers you, feel free to skim that corner of the gallery and focus on the others.

And please do check it out! As I say, there are a lot of interesting themes covered, and if nothing else the pictures of celebrities, storefronts and Warhol's acquaintances in the drag community are fascinating artifacts of 1970s and 1980s New York, subject matter that I've always liked.

Roam Like Home: What I learned from three months of using my phone abroad

I've talked a little about my three or so months in London this past winter, where I was working on a contract to make some money after having lost my job back in December. From a money, and cultural, and social standpoint it was an interesting experiment - getting acquainted with a new company, new parts of London and new people, alongside all the things I already knew well about the place.

But there was another aspect that struck me about it recently. In the months I was away, although I bought a little pay-as-you-go burner phone, because my contract required me to have a local number, I continued to use my US smartphone as my primary means of communication. Not only that, I didn't make a phone call on it once - my bills from T-Mobile during that period remained resolutely the same as always.

The key is that my mobile operator here in the US is T-Mobile, which alone of the four big carriers offers free roaming for texts and data, albeit super-slow data, although as it turns out that wasn't such a problem. Voice calls are charged extra if you're abroad, whether making or receiving, but at 20 cents per minute (now raised to 25), even that wasn't excessively high.

Back when smartphones were newish, a number of reporters and analysts that I followed on Twitter were running experiments to see how they coped with using a smartphone as their primary or only computer. The conclusion seemed to be that they were actually pretty good as computers, and that if you needed to downsize you could do so without too many problems.

The result of my experiment feels a little more radical, somehow - in three and a half months of using a smartphone for messaging, surfing, texting and the like I didn't make a single phone call.

(OK, that's not strictly true, because I used my burner once or twice, but even in those circumstances I could have gotten around it - the burner was, as I said, more for my job and for signing up for stuff there in London, like a gym near my flat).

I guess we're still conditioned to think of our smartphones as phones first, but we've come to a point, with WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, social media and so on, to say nothing of texting, where the old voice calling capabilities are probably not as important as they were even as recently as the 3G years. There are so many ways of communicating with each other that voice isn't as necessary as it used to be, and even when real-time communications are necessary you can now just video call on FaceTime or WhatsApp and use your data rather than your minutes (though this proved a little tough when I was away from Wi-Fi, because as I said, my data was SSSSLLLLLOOOWWWW).

As 4G was rolling out in Europe and North America, one of the big ideas was Voice Over LTE, or VoLTE, similar to VoIP technology that apps like Skype use. This would have allowed users to make voice calls over the LTE networks that their phones connected to, rather than having to switch between the 2G or 3G radio and the 4G radio to call. But it seems we've bypassed that a little bit, by using video calling or just plain old VoIP through Skype and WhatsApp, and by having data allowances that are large enough to cope, if not actually unlimited.

One aspect of this unintended experiment that I didn't get to test was how long it would have lasted. T-Mobile's fine print says something about not roaming long-term, but doesn't really give a set amount of time after which they cut you off. I kept waiting for some kind of notice that they needed me to come back, but every month I just got another "Welcome to the United Kingdom" text explaining the terms of my roaming.

The reason this is important is that I do spend a lot of time overseas, and to be quite honest, I'd like to spend even more time overseas. But I don't want to have to cut off all my services when I do go, or fiddle about with things like prepaid phones (which get disconnected after three months of non-use), or any of that.

So I have to welcome the fact that some services just continue to work regardless of what country you're in. In fact, during those months not only did I use my US smartphone much as I always have, I also used my Netflix subscription as normal, with the exception of watching certain things that are only available overseas (like Star Trek Discovery). In a world where almost every aspect of living across multiple countries is a pain in the balls, frequently by design, it's nice to see that some companies don't hassle you too much about it.

I've mentioned T-Mobile US here, but a couple of European operators do it too, and with the abolition of roaming in the EU, this stuff is going to get even easier. And I can't help but welcome it.

RIP Stan Lee

Like the rest of the world, I heard today that Stan Lee died.

Since then, I've been seeing memes and memorials all over social media - references to the characters he helped create, or to the ones who came about because of what he was doing at Marvel in the early 60s. I've also seen eulogies and tributes from comics creators (and other notables) praising him for his impact on the culture.

I haven't seen a lot on the fallings-out he had with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, who helped him create that universe, but to be honest, I don't know if that matters. As I read in one of the obituaries today, Stan himself didn't get all the ownership that would have been due him if he'd been working in another medium - that doesn't make it right, but it widens the picture a bit.

I never met Stan myself, or to my knowledge was ever in the same room as him. But he was comics' cool Grandpa, at least by the time I got into comics. The fact that his name was all over the books ("Stan Lee presents"), and in later years that he had all those cameos in the movies and on shows like the Big Bang Theory, made him an icon to more than just us comics nerds.

Still, I think even if someone's a public figure you've never met, you can have a favorite memory of them, and this is mine: the second time he went on the Nerdist Podcast, probably in 2013, he was talking to Chris Hardwick about his childhood. He was lively as ever, chatty and full of jokes, but casting his mind back he started to recite the jingle to a commercial he'd heard on the radio as a boy. And, in awestruck wonder, he mused to Chris what a wonderful thing that was that after all those decades he could still remember that. It melted my heart to hear it then, and I'm close to tears writing it down now.

My entry into superhero comics came about because of the X-Men, though a version far removed from the original book he came up with. From there I spread out into almost all of the Marvel universe, and then on to other books, mostly DC for the last couple of years. But even as a DC fan, you had to love Stan "the Man" Lee.

I'll be remembering him, tonight and for a long time, by reading the comics that he helped usher in, watching the TV shows drawn from his characters, and enjoying the movies he appeared in, possibly as the same character across each one.

We'll miss you, Stan - Excelsior.

Where Ideas Come From

I've been thinking about ideas lately, and how they turn into stories. This is because I keep marveling at the fact that in the last year and a half or so I've written four new short stories (five if you count the one that had its genesis as a movie with a friend), after not having written any short stories since 2011  or so.

The question writers dread is the one about where ideas come from, but while it is broadly unknowable, it can be answered. The problem is that the answer is never the same.

I believe it's Warren Ellis who likened the creative process to the birth of DC's Swamp Thing. A bunch of things, all collected or stolen from other places, fester in the subconscious until they're ready to emerge, remixed into something resembling but not totally like the components. It's a metaphor that's stuck with me for years (almost twenty of 'em), and I still agree with it 100%.

What's interesting about my five short stories of 2017-18 is that some have bubbled away for a long time, but others snapped into focus fairly quickly. To give you a sense, the one based on a movie idea was on my mind for years, since my friend and I put that treatment and script together; another one, which I wrote in May of this year, was inspired by a conversation I had in April.

It's worth remembering that ideas, as the conventional wisdom goes, are worth nothing on their own, which is what I think lay at the heart of that Swamp Thing analogy. Ellis, or whoever came up with it,  rightly points out how a story idea comes from all the disparate things you've read or watched or listened to over the years.

This is also why Ellis, among other writers, recommends reading outside your genre (and here I'm on firmer ground, because I explicitly remember this from his old column, Come In Alone). One of the stories from last year, which I wrote out by hand in Tokyo, came from an old issue of Neil Gaiman's Sandman (the one with Hob Gadlen) as well as the history of World War I. It may not have been obvious at the time, but I'm sure the decision to focus on that comes from the renewed focus on the Great War that's been present in the US and UK since 2014, when we marked the centenary of its start.

(And it's probably no coincidence that I'm writing this column, with this subject matter, on the centenary of that war's end)

As far as I can tell, the process for ideas to turn into stories, then, is to act as a receiver for interesting stuff, and then let it all accrete and build until it's time for it to come out. This means that you've been thinking about the story for a while before you start writing it, and so you probably have a good idea how it'll end. That ending may or may not materialize as you expect, because once you put pen to paper things take on a life of their own, but it's important to have that general road map.

If I had to give tips, then, they would be as follows:

• Keep an idea journal, and mark stuff into it whenever you get an idea for something that might be neat in a story.
• Read a set number of top-flight authors each year, and diverse authors in your genre, and just about anything else you can get your hands on (for our purposes here books can also be movies, TV shows, whatever).
• Think through your idea whenever you have some free time, and develop it a little. Put those developments into your idea journal.
• Write the damn thing when it's ready to come out.

The other interesting thing I've found about my own brain is its bias toward whatever medium I'm working in at the moment. Currently my ideas all seem to settle into short story form, but a year or two before that I was thinking in terms of movie scripts and treatments, because that's what I was mostly working on. Before that it was novels.

Yet that bias toward one format can work in your favor, as an idea that you developed as a movie can be repurposed as a short story or novel, and vice versa. In fact, now that I've taken the movie idea and turned it into a fairly different short story, I'm considering re-adapting that for a movie script. And so it'll go.

This is all meant to demystify the process a bit, and codify a little how I approach it. Yours may be different, but I'm sure it'd be interesting to compare, as everyone works differently. Feel free to comment with how you do it...

Catching up with the Legion of Superheroes

In my ongoing reread of all my old comics, I've just finished up my run of the Keith Giffen-Tom & Mary Bierbaum run on Legion of Superheroes, from the late 80s. I always associate it mentally with the Justice League run, which partly overlapped, forming a time when Giffen was basically the editorial director for all of DC's characters, except the Big 3 and the Vertigo universe.

Two things struck me on this reread, the first I've done since I bought these comics back in the 90s. One is that the story moved much slower than I remembered, and the second is the sense I got of the LSH fandom being somewhat apart from the rest of DC fandom.

Regarding the first point, there were just two major storylines in the 40 issues that Giffen co-wrote and drew or laid out: the first concerned the reformation of the Legion 5 years after the previous storyline (which is why this epoch is called the Five Year Gap), and the second was about the liberation of Earth from the Dominators. There were a couple of other minor stories in there, but the first storyline is just as much about telling readers what's happened to all the characters as it is about telling new stories.

This means we're left with a lot of ideas introduced early on by Giffen and the Bierbaums, but which never came to fruition. This isn't a huge criticism because what we did get was entertaining and well-written, but it's interesting to think that some of the characters that came out of this era of the Legion were positioned (because of various DC Universe retcons) as having always been part of the team, but we never learned that much about them.

For the second point, one of the things that attracted me to the Legion then was the sense of a huge history (the team first appeared in 1958). Some reading and research back in the 90s turned up back issues and fanzines talking about the Legion's history, confirming this impression. But the amount of letters from disgruntled (or happy) fans who'd been reading the book for decades, and who had strong ideas about favorite characters, was intriguing.

A lot of names kept popping up in the letters, and the Bierbaums themselves, who started as fans before turning pro, confirmed this in how they ran the letter column. They had their own language and in-jokes and references, much more so than the Justice League fans over in those books.

Back in the day, DC's books were a lot more diverse and not always explicitly connected, so although LSH started as a toss-off Superboy story, it quickly grew into its own little corner of the DC Universe, connected but largely unconcerned with what was going on in other books. But in terms of a fully realized universe, you could say LSH is up there with Jack Kirby's Fourth World books or the Vertigo books. The fact that the characters had personalities and histories also makes a difference - Superman and the Flash and Batman were basically all interchangeable in terms of personalities, whereas a lot of Legionnaires dated each other at various points in those initial 30 years of publication. And most notably, Legionnaires who died stayed dead.

The other striking thing is how mature the book is, despite not having the mature readers tag on it. In fact, I just checked and none of that series had the Comics Code Approval stamp, which is pretty innovative for a book that started out being about teenage superheroes in bright costumes in the future.

To start with, just a shitload of characters dies, especially in the first few issues. One issue features, on its cover, the villain of the storyline standing among the body parts of a former Legionnaire whom he kills in that issue. Other mature themes are non-explicit nudity, drugs, domestic abuse, same-sex relationships (as hinted in Lightning Lass and Shrinking Violet's relationship), and even transgender storylines, when it's revealed that Shvaughn Erin, a female supporting character with a long-standing crush on Element Lad, was originally a man who took a sex-change drug to get closer to him.

Most interesting was the revelation in the issue that addresses this story that Element Lad himself wouldn't have been bothered to date a guy. Pretty heady stuff for a book published 30 years ago, especially when you consider that trans rights are the current battleground in American politics, the way homosexuality was a few years ago.

What's sad for me is taking the book as a whole, from the first issue to the final one I own, in which that whole continuity is erased and rebooted to be in line with DC's Zero Hour crossover. I kept on with the book for a year or two after the reboot, but eventually lost interest and at some point got rid of those issues, even though I remember the first storyline being okay.

But how successful was this Giffen-Bierbaum relaunch? Probably not very, at least not to the same level as the Giffen-DeMatteis Justice League, which is still regarded fondly (and collected in trade paperbacks). The Legion went through another reboot after Zero Hour, creating yet another version of their origin, before being de-booted to something that reflected the book's continuity as of 1989 - but basically all of the stuff in the Five Year Gap isn't considered canon anymore.

And the reason that's too bad is that this was really something different - the Legionnaires were all grown up now, some dead, some different to what readers expected. The universe itself was also different: a grimy "used future" rather than the shiny, optimistic one that first appeared in the 50s and 60s, with Earth now under brutal alien control. There wasn't really anywhere to take the Legion after this, and anyway DC probably wanted it to conform closer to the rest of the continuity.

So while not the most successful book, Legion of Superheroes Volume 4 remains one of my favorites, and yet another indicator of why the 80s was the best decade for comics.

Guest Post: Thoughts on the Tree of Life Synagogue Massacre

Another guest post this week. My friend Ari posted the thoughts below on Saturday, 27 October 2018, in the wake of yet another mass shooting, this one an anti-Semitic attack on a synagogue during services. He allowed me to share it here, as I was moved by his response, his unwillingness to give in to this darkness. It's presented here in full:

The anti-Semitic attack today doesn't take place in a vacuum. Days ago, a white supremacist, unable to complete an attack on a black church, killed two black people before being arrested in Kentucky. Obviously, the echoes of the Charleston attack ring loud -- Dylann Roof, like the Tree of Life shooter, was obsessed with stopping this fictional "white genocide". Killing people at their most vulnerable -- at a house of worship -- is a pattern of depravity the white supremacist shows fully.

It can't be stressed enough that the shooter chose Tree of Life synagogue not just because the shooter hated Jews but because the congregation was active in refugee resettlement, and he was particularly afraid of Muslims coming into the country. Anti-Islam and anti-Semitism go hand in hand.

Just a week ago, we heard news that the Trump administration was ready to redefine gender to essentially erase more than 1 million transgendered Americans. This is shocking not just because of the robbery of rights that would take place immediately, but because it echoed so clearly how the Nazi Holocaust unfolded, as the attack on sexual minorities was one of the party's first shows of force. Once the cleansing of "deviants" was accepted, everything else followed.

At the same time, the president is dispatching troops to the border with Mexico to face off a "caravan" of migrants -- men, women and children. The one-sided standoff has the potential to be catastrophic, the latest horror in American immigration policy just after the crisis of migrant family separations.

I think a lot of Jews get frustrated when they don't think that anti-Semitism is not appreciated or taken as seriously by the left as other forms of bigotry. What I think is becoming evident is all of these acts of terrorism -- whether by the state or by individuals -- are united in hatred of us who are not "normal" or "mainstream", whether we are sexual minorities, immigrants, racial minorities, religious minorities or political dissidents.

Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti-blackness, anti-LGBTIA, and so on, are all different heads of the same beast. This is not to lessen the urgency of any of these struggles, but to identify a common enemy, and to underscore that our fight must be united -- we remain fragmented at our own risk. In a sense, the old labor saying becomes all the more real: an injury to one is an injury to all.

Ecclesiastes 3:8 says there is a "time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace". I disagree. We will at once love and support each other as we face and unite against fascism. Our families will live in peace, we will laugh, rejoice, have children, drink and be merry. But we will not be passive when our existence is questioned. We've beaten fascism before. And we will again.

Good night, comrades. And good luck.

Joshua Tree: Francis Goes Camping

Funny thing, memory - I was so caught up in writing last week's post that I didn't realize I had something else to write about, until I was halfway through my post. I finished the goth one, and promised myself that I'd talk about the other idea, my recent trip to Joshua Tree, this week. So here we are:

My spot, with my car parked conveniently nearby

This trip has been a long time coming. A friend of mine organizes it every year, and he's been inviting me every year, but I've always had conflicts - usually I'm out of town for work, or there's just something else going on that I can't miss, or something like that.

And, to be honest, I'm not really a camping person. Which isn't to say that it didn't appeal - it was different, and a little scary (because I'm not a camping person), and I actually thought that it sounded like a neat idea. But I never managed to have time to go.

This year was different, for the reasons I've been enumerating on this blog since last December. Not being employed by my old company meant I didn't have any events to go to, and so no conflicts. But more importantly, I thought it would be good to make time for it. So when the invitation came, sometime in July or August, I accepted and promptly started to panic about the preparations.

As I say, not really a camping person. The last time I slept in a tent was probably when I was in high school if not middle school. Or to put it another way, I hadn't gone camping since the Twentieth Century. This was the result of a highly successful campaign of terrorizing my parents whenever they took me camping as a child - I'd start with getting carsick on the interminable drives to Yosemite or wherever we'd go, and then bitch about the bugs or food or toilets or lack of TV or whatever until it was time to go home, at which point I'd get carsick again (just to underline how ill-suited I was to this whole business).

So what changed between then and now?

Part of it is that I've come to appreciate a bunch of the outdoorsy stuff my parents were into back then (my dad especially, as he used to go climbing all the time). And I think the reason for that is that I moved to Britain, where people go camping, but I never really came to appreciate the wild outdoors like we have here.

The dreaded cholla cactus, which I just wanted to touch. Would have been a terrible idea.

The first inkling that camping might be a thing people did for fun, without being dragged by their parents, came all the way back in 2002 or 2003, when a friend said he was spending the weekend camping with his girlfriend (now wife). At the same time I was reading Paul Theroux's and Bill Bryson's books, which all featured some amount of camping, or talk thereof. For some reason it sounded a little more appealing, but space and cost remained limiting factors, and so I didn't try to do it.

Of course, this camping gear of my dad's came in handy for my own trip. I've always known we had outdoor gear in the garage, because it was the crap I had to move out of the way to get to our skis or to my boxes of comics that live down there. But once I'd signed up to actually go camping myself, I had to do an inventory, and realized that I was actually fairly well-equipped.

We had a tent, which I think I vaguely remember having slept in. I didn't bring it this time, because it was huge, ostensibly for five people, and consisted of a rolled-up bag containing the tent and a box of stakes, poles and other stuff to make the damn thing stand up. I ended up borrowing a smaller tent from my boss.

There was also a sleeping bag, which I definitely remember from my childhood, and a pair of air mattresses that are probably more recent. I also found a number of odds and ends, like lanterns and camp chairs and so forth, which proved useful. All I ended up buying was a headlamp and some other bits and bobs, mainly for food preservation. In that final week before leaving I must have spent about $200 on food, beer and last-minute equipment. Bill Bryson's Walk in the Woods, where he camps along the Appalachian Trail, and is left quietly aghast at the cost and complexity of camping gear, loomed large in my memory during these trips to REI.

In any case, it turned out well. I think I was amply well-provisioned for shelter, and food (there was some stuff provided, which also helped). I was also in good company, and able to go off and do my own thing whenever my introvert tendencies came up.

I managed a few hikes and scenic drives, and some night-time bouldering, aided by my trusty headlamp and some Costco-brand bourbon that was surprisingly good. And I got the immense pleasure of a few road trips, allowing me to draw down my large backlog of podcasts as I crossed pretty much half of California to get there and back. One of these was the Amateur Traveler, in an episode where he talked to a former Joshua Tree National Park ranger, published fortuitously the week before I left.

An actual Joshua Tree

As far as what there is to see, well, loads of open space, for one thing. I didn't venture on any of the longer hikes, because I didn't fancy walking in that much sunlight for so long and because with cell reception nonexistent in the park, I thought it best to be near well-trafficked areas in case something happened. But there were still some impressive spots to walk around in, or drive through, and mainly I found myself marveling at it all as I drove or hiked from one spot to another.

And of course, there was also the night sky to admire. It's easy to forget, with all our light pollution, just how spectacular the night sky can get. At our house in the country in Italy, we used to get better skies at night during the summer, but development in our area has washed out a lot of it. Not here in Joshua Tree, though: I think this was the first time I properly saw the Milky Way in ages.

Every night, whenever I'd be trudging to the bathroom from the communal fire pit or from my tent, I'd take a moment to switch off my headlamp and look up, drinking it all in. And the final night we got a thunderstorm, luckily quite far off, but still spectacular, especially when seen from up on top of an escarpment of rock.

Not my tent

It was fairly nice to get back to civilization, especially because I broke that trip up with a stop at my mom's house in Orange County, where I took advantage of the shower and comfy guest bed to rest up for a night before driving home. But I found myself sad to be leaving Southern California for the second time this year, and absurdly proud of myself for having managed camping for three nights without my dad to do everything for me.

I'm even considering doing it again! Not just in Joshua Tree, but perhaps in other parts of California, preferably with more trees and more access to shower facilities (although I'm aware that campsites with more water also have more mosquitoes and bears, so I'm thinking this one through). And with the idea of doing it again comes the idea of getting better gear - more comfortable sleeping pads, for one thing, cooking gear, and so on.

It might be a pipe dream, or not, but at the very least it feels nice to have done something completely out of my comfort zone. And having seen how the rubber hits the road, it's no longer inconceivable that I should do it again.

Goth Synesthesia: Dancing Among the Tombstones

Because it's October and I'm a sucker for long-term challenges, I've set myself the task of learning about gothic rock this month. I've been listening to a different band's back catalogue each day, guided in part by this Wikipedia article and by Pitchfork's list from last year of 33 notable goth songs. Some of it's been stuff that I knew a bit, like the Cure's gothic trilogy of Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography. Other things were new to me, like the Birthday Party, Nick Cave's band before he started the Bad Seeds.

It's stretched my understanding of "goth" in new directions, which is a nice way of saying that I thought there'd be more talk of vampires and gravestones. Of course, it's still early in the month, and I've mostly been hearing bands from the early part of the movement.

But it's also true that the most satisfying listen so far has been Bauhaus's back catalogue. For one thing, nothing expresses the idea better than their epic song, "Bela Lugosi's Dead", the bassline of which has quietly been twanging at the back of my mind more or less continuously for the last 20-odd years. And while the rest of their work doesn't necessarily hold up to that moment (for me), it does fit in with the imagery that "Bela Lugosi's Dead" brings into my head.



It may sound weird, but I respond to music that creates certain associations and images in my mind. That can be reminders of times or places or movies, or it can be imagery, almost a physical environment that I think about when I hear the music.

When I think about some of my favorite bands, I imagine a landscape. It can be an urban landscape, like when I listen to the Smiths or Joy Division, or it can be related images, like when I hear the Magnetic Fields (particularly 69 Love Songs). When I hear Bauhaus, I'm imagining graveyards at night. Not all the bands I like have this effect, and seeing it written out like that feels a little reductive, but it's probably close enough to how I respond to most music I like.

Sometimes, a band's music reminds me of other art that I like. Simon and Garfunkel, for instance, are associated indelibly in my mind with 1960s New York City, which carries with it associations of Spider-Man (who, like them, is also from Queens). Listening to Bauhaus this month has reminded me of Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

The look of Morpheus is apparently based on Bauhaus's Peter Murphy, so the connection's not as random as it seems at first. And so much of that comic drew on goth imagery, while also in its turn influencing the goths I knew in high school.

This connection to the Sandman brings this discussion around to my other big preoccupation of the last couple of years, namely re-examining all the things I liked back in high school and college. I've mentioned already how I'm rereading my old comics - well, checking out old music I liked back then, and supplementing that by exploring similar acts I didn't know about, falls squarely into that trend.

I'm not really sure why I'm dredging all that stuff up, other than the fact that I'm getting older and yet I still feel (or would like to feel) a connection to who I was back then. At the same time I'm re-evaluating music, movies, comics, books, whatever through the lens of the experiences I've had since high school.

Looking back has always been a key component of goth culture, and while it is, charitably, a stretch to call myself a "goth", I can see the appeal, especially these days. And more than that, it's exciting to be delving into a new sub-genre, which has always escaped me but has been just around the corner from what I usually listen to.

The Aristocrats

I think I was going to post some other cutesy idea this week but this Brett Kavanaugh stuff is occupying too much space in my brain and I wanted to get some thoughts out, so I'm not turning it over in my head all the time.

The fact is, despite all the hot takes on Twitter, or the Saturday Night Live jokes, or the collections of photos of Judge Kavanaugh yelling while women behind him look unhappy, I don't see our side winning this one. The Republicans are trying to ram their guy through, and would really wish all this scrutiny would just go away so they can go back to dismantling the rule of law and criminalizing everyone who isn't a rich, white, male patrician Southerner or East Coaster.

I watched Christine Blasey Ford's testimony unfold on Twitter, following on as people who were watching it posted quotes and thoughts. I did the same in the afternoon when Kavanaugh took the stand, and was left with a sense of a man insulted that his right to this position is being questioned. I saw the photos of him yelling, read the quotes where he denounced "the left", and have to agree that this is not the impartial judge the country needs.

That sense of entitlement bothered me, as an inchoate thing I couldn't define, until I saw a thread on Twitter by Matt Stoller, where he linked what we're seeing to the moral system of aristocracy - the idea that only the elite has rights and that we're meant to put up with it. That's going to be the defining sense of this era of American politics, assuming there are any eras of American politics to follow.

We've seen it with all the people this "president" has selected for his cabinet, from movie producers in charge of the treasury to billionaire heiresses in charge of education. There's no sense of selecting the right people for the job, just rewarding cronies for their financial support, and doing it so brazenly and openly that those of us who choose to protest can be laughed off - because after all, this is America and we don't have aristocracies here.

Stoller rightly points out that the Democrats are complicit in this atmosphere of elites, given their epic tone-deafness in losing the very bedrock of their support in 2016, without even noticing. The only difference, and this is subtle, is that for all her "my turn" approach to campaigning, Hillary Clinton never threw a tantrum like a baby in front of the Senate judiciary committee.

But let's not deny that for the moment the greater threat is the Republicans, and their likely voters. The first thing Stoller notes is how Kavanaugh's show of emotion is taken as "authenticity" by many on the right; I go a step further by noting that a lot of these folks are content to let anybody into office, as long as they're committed to the GOP's goals of dismantling the very concept of administrative government.

What they don't see is that each of these actions builds on the ones before it to undermine the independence of our institutions, as well as the public's faith in them. They probably don't care, and they probably think that doing this just entrenches them further into power. They're probably right.

The simple fact is that even though the accusations against him are credible, and there's no statute of limitations for such crimes in Maryland, Kavanaugh's not going to go to criminal trial for his assaults, and even if he did it'd be hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt what he did. That's not great, but if the norms of civilized behavior were being followed, the GOP would go to the next page of their grimoire of potential candidates until they found a loathsome entity without any behavior that can be attributed to him.

Unfortunately, we can't even clear that low a bar, and so the Republicans are going to fight to get this specific guy onto the Supreme Court, no matter what accusations have been leveled against him. And many on the right are going to bleat that what a man does at 17 shouldn't disqualify him for office later in life, because he agrees with them about how those blacks/gays/women/whatever have too much power for their own good.

So I expect the FBI investigation to be a formality, for Kavanaugh to be approved with a simple minority in the Senate (a friend predicted that Mike Pence would cast the deciding vote, but I don't believe that), and he's going to infest our lives for the next thirty years or so. And in the years to come, it won't matter, because presidents after this one, if there are to be any, will continue to do whatever they want with ever less regard for norms and laws, until they can just hand the office to their sons.

Not that I'm pessimistic or anything.

Traveling with Tony

I wasn't a huge fan of Anthony Bourdain's initially. My parents watched Parts Unknown religiously on CNN, and I checked a few things out on Netflix when I moved back here in 2014, but I think I had trouble binge-watching them - though I really loved some of the episodes he did in Asia, particularly Thailand and Japan.

But that changed when he died. Just as I was shocked by the suddenness of it, I was also shocked by the outpouring of grief, from friends, family and other entertainers. That whole long weekend, which began with me arriving at San Jose Airport only to learn that Bourdain had killed himself, I read and listened to people talk about him and try to make sense of his death.

The feeling of things gone mad wasn't helped by the fact that the summit with North Korea, as brokered by Dennis Rodman, also occurred that weekend.

Naturally, then, I went back to rewatch the eight seasons of Parts Unknown that were on Netflix. I've been watching them since then, with added urgency now that they're set to disappear on 1 October, and I think I've reappraised why people like Bourdain's shows. I won't go over the stuff that other people have said, like how he used food to get to know places and people, or how he shined a much-needed spotlight on places that Americans know nothing about (both inside and outside the US).

But I'm struck by the breadth of people he spoke to during these shows. It's strangely satisfying to see one of my favorite authors, Paul Theroux, pop up in the episode on Hawaii, for example - for most viewers, I'm sure that Theroux was just some dude that Bourdain talked to briefly, but because I've been reading his books for fifteen years I know why Theroux's there to tell Bourdain about what Hawaii represents, because I know how he himself ended up living there. At least, insofar as anyone who read The Happy Isles of Oceania can know that.

What I've also found myself enjoying is that even if I'm uninterested in a place before watching an episode, I watch it anyway because by now I trust Bourdain enough to know that he'll pull something interesting out of it.

Mostly, though, what I keep coming back to in almost every episode is his death. In a lot of episodes he talks offhandedly about death or suicide, like he's joking. In others he talks about the future, about where he'll be in five years or ten years or twenty, or about being a father to his daughter. And I can never hold back from yelling at the TV that he's broken those promises, that he won't be there to see how a troubled situation develops, or to see how his daughter grows up.

Abstractly, as well, I wince a little whenever I see friends of his who popped up. There's Eric Ripert, obviously, who found Bourdain's body and so becomes difficult to watch in the few episodes where he and his friend are clowning around, like in Sichuan (which I watched just today). But I also think of Dinh Hoang Linh, Bourdain's friend in Vietnam going back to 2001 or so - in both of the Vietnam episodes I've seen, they talk about the length of that friendship and I feel bad for Dinh, imagining how he must have heard the news of Bourdain's death.

Another common thread of the reports on his suicide was how difficult the life must have been. Bourdain was on the road a lot, spending his time in hotels and airports and train stations, or on location, and far from his family and friends. And even having friends was difficult, the articles said - he'd blow into your life for a few days, create some intense experiences somewhere, and then vanish, not to be seen again until the next time. Until there wouldn't be a next time.

That's why I find it difficult to laud the lifestyle he led. Traveling to places, eating delicious food in unfamiliar surroundings, spending the days solving the tasks of getting around and finding stuff to do,  are all things I love, but I've realized in the past couple of years that I don't think I could cope with doing that all the time. Sad as I was to leave Tokyo last October, I know that at some point I'd have felt the need to get back home to my bed, my friends and my routine.

I thought about that strain a lot, in the context of other travelers I admire, from Paul Theroux to Rick Steves, and I note that each of them has had divorces and other unpleasantnesses, possibly or explicitly related to all their traveling. Theroux himself admits that during the writing of The Great Railway Bazaar, his first travel book and the one that effectively launched his career, he was miserable at being away from home and his kids - and that his marriage hit a terrible patch as a result.

Speculating on someone's suicide strikes me as tacky and gross, so I won't do so. But in the end I do keep coming back to the question of why, and what he was thinking as he prepared to do it. I think of all the lives he encountered shooting his show, and I wonder how they must have taken the news, from chefs and artists he dined with to the Filipino family who welcomed him for Christmas dinner in his Manila episode. Knowing Bourdain's fate made that sequence heartbreaking for me to watch, as he reads his hostess a letter from his former colleague, who was raised by her, and as she sings a rendition of Edelweiss that leaves him speechless.

Those moments are what, for me, make his end so sad. If they hadn't been captured on camera and shared with millions, they'd be gone irrevocably, just like all the moments and memories that disappear whenever anyone dies. I feel privileged to watch those moments where he connects with people he'd never otherwise encounter, and sorry that these moments of connection weren't enough to save him.

How to get help: In the US, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. The International Association for Suicide Prevention and Befrienders Worldwide also can provide contact information for crisis centers around the world.