Tuesday, February 22, 2005

OC CAN YOU SAY

Ten episodes into The OC’s first season, I have 17 episodes left, which is… comforting, kind of. Given that I have a lot of reading material in my In stack, too, and more supposedly on the way, at some point, from Amazon.com, well… life is good right now.

The OC kind of reminds me of Wolfman & Perez’s New Teen Titans. Those of you who know my tastes in comics will think I must utterly loathe The OC when I say that, but, well, no. The OC is good fiction, and reasonably entertaining fiction, and in that manner, it in no way reminds me of The New Teen Titans, or nearly anything Marv Wolfman has ever written, with the possible exception of occasional isolated issues of Tomb of Dracula, which could actually suck, because I only remember them from when I was reading them at the age of 12, and I used to think Speed Racer cartoons were totally cool, too.

But, see, when Len Wein, Dave Cockrum, and Chris Claremont more or less incoherently and unintentionally stumbled into the teen team supreme super-formula that was going to end up revolutionizing comics (generally for the worse) from around 1977 onward, nobody had any idea at the time that within 20 years, there were going to be more angst-driven, sexual tension laden teams of generally young-ish, broody, rather good looking (except for the inevitable bitter and rage-driven monster) superheroes with ‘tude, baby, ‘tude, than there were corn flakes in the average Kellogg’s box.

In fact, at that time, most people would have been hard up to derive a formula out of the All New, All Different X-Men. Many seemed to feel that it was just the X-Men’s time, come round at last. Others seemed to attribute it to the tasty Cockrum artwork; he’d made the Legion of Superheroes – never the most popular of concepts – into a major fan favorite at DC, and now, the Marvel Universe was diggin’ his chops.

It wasn’t until Marv Wolfman came along and successfully cloned the essence of the All New, All Different X-Men into a book that had absolutely no mutants, that wasn’t about one time adolescent outsiders hated and feared by a world they were sworn to protect, that had no feral raging berserker types in it, and that wasn’t drawn by Dave Cockrum or John Byrne, that people realized, hey, there WAS a formula there, and if you were analytical enough, you could discern it, and Xerox it, with remarkable success.

Or, at least, as far as I know, the New Teen Titans has never been off the stands since.

That’s how The OC reminds me of Wolfman’s Titans. On the surface, you’re hard pressed to put your finger on the specific formula that Josh Schwartz is exploiting so well with this show. Yet if you’re at all analytical, it becomes fairly easy to see that The OC is indeed an alloy of many different types of characterizations and conflicts that have worked well in other successful teenage high school soap operas in the past, with influences from past series as diverse as Beverly Hills 90210 and Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

Any originality a viewer may think they see in this show is an illusion. The OC is a characterization collage with pieces drawn from many different sources. We have the Brooding Bad Boy With The Heart of Gold. We have the Little Rich Girl Who Has Lost Her Way. We have the Little Rich Girl’s Spoiled and Slutty Friend Who Needs Redemption. We have the Humorous Sidekick, the Concerned, Wise, But Ultimately Helpless Parent Figures, the Bitch Next Door, the Villainous Jock Alpha Male and Big Man On Campus who hates the Brooding Bad Boy With The Heart of Gold, and, well, a whole lot of other cliches that have worked well in other shows.

It goes without saying that every character is fun to look at, but, well, I don’t mind that at all; nobody watches TV to look at ugly people, and I’m no exception.

Now, having said that The OC doesn’t have the remotest sliver of originality to it, let me go on to say that, well, as I noted briefly above, it’s good fiction and it’s entertaining fiction. The OC may have stolen much of its setting and a few characters from Beverly Hills 90210, but that piece o’ Aaron Spelling schlock never had dialogue anywhere near this good, or actors anywhere near this talented. The character dynamic between Seth and Summer may have been directly lifted (I swear to God, even the dialogue and repartee is nearly identical, with only the topical references changed) from what was going on between Xander and Cordie in the first three seasons of Buffy, but, well, you won’t catch me bitching because someone pulled something that worked from one of my favorite TV shows ever (and at least, The OC doesn’t have any vampires who declare resoundingly that they don’t breathe, while lighting up cigarettes). And however jarring it may be for me to see Peter Gallagher playing a genuinely nice parental sort (my first and overwhelming impression of Gallagher will always be as the utterly sleazy husband in Sex, Lives & Videotape), still, I have to admit, he does a deft job with the role… as do all The OC’s cast members. Benjamin McKenzie and Mischa Barton may well be just the latest stock 20s something TV hunks playing star crossed lovers from different worlds… but here’s a flash – they can both act… in fact, either of them can act rings around those block-of-wood models taking up space playing similarly (and literally) star crossed lovers over in Smallville.

What impresses me most about The OC so far, though, as been the character of Luke. He’s big, he’s beefy, he’s got those chiseled good looks we’ve been trained to associate with Evil, Pure And Simple on these teen soaps, and in the pilot, that’s all he seemed to be… a swaggering, preening bully, taking pleasure in humiliating Our Heroes both verbally and violently.

But there’s more to Luke than meets the eye, seemingly. Where any 90210 villain would have run off and left an unconscious Brandon or Dylan to burn to death in the fire his own machinations had inadvertently started (leaving Brenda and Kelly to breeze pluckily into the flames and somehow drag their respective men friends to safety), Luke actually goes back and pulls Ryan out himself. And there have been other indications, tossed out here and there in the first ten episodes, that Luke might actually have hidden depths lurking underneath that ice sculpture exterior.

Oh, there’s a lot of ridiculous stuff in this show. When the Wise Parental Figures end up on opposite sides of a major lawsuit (they’re both lawyers, you see, but He’s a tree hugging liberal trying to save some endangeredwetlands, while She works for her rich daddy’s construction firm and they want to put up condos and damn the swamp rose to hell) and of course it causes strain in the household, but Their Marriage Is So Good And Right That Ultimately It Is Only Strengthened By This Trial, well, you know you’re about as far afield from actual reality as any resident of Sunnydale ever was. And there’s other really silly stuff as well, like every single contrivance that the writers can think of to toss into the path of Bad Boy Ryan and Little Lost Rich Girl Marissa’s otherwise inevitable romance.

However, none of that bothers me. The two key elements to interesting fiction are characterization and conflict, and The OC has plenty of both. Like most soap operas, nearly all the conflict does, in fact, arise from the characterizations, but some of it is built into the setting (our hero Ryan is a street wise tough kid from Chino, suddenly transplanted to the wealthy upper strata of California’s Orange County). It may be formula, but it’s a formula that works… or it wouldn’t have made the cut.

Interesting serial fiction, whether in comics or the movies, is also fueled by one vital concept – make your audience want something, and then don’t give it to them, or, at most, give it to them in small doses, then take it away again. For the first several seasons of ER, the writers did this with Doug and Carol (and once those two finally got together, they were both written off the show within another two seasons).

On The OC, the central ‘make them want it, but don’t give it to them’ relationship is between Ryan and Marissa, although there is also some built in frustration with Seth and Summer, and of course, both those relationships are actually triangles, with Anna interested in Seth, while Luke is constantly trying to get in between Ryan and Marissa.

The problem with that dynamic, of course, is that eventually the audience DEMANDS that the continually frustrated couples be allowed to get together, and generally, when that happens, the show gets boring and shortly thereafter, ends up canceled. But I believe The OC is currently in its third season, and here I am barely a third of the way into its first. So I don’t have to worry about that for a while.

It’s trash, but it’s tasty trash, and I like it. But there are still 17 first season episodes to go. I may change my mind by the time I’m done.

GENERALITY

I think I mentioned, a few entries back, that a good friend of mine has declared February 2005 to be Spoil Darren Month. It’s a bit dizzying, because I’ve lived 43 years without having anyone prior to this feel any urge to spoil me at all… well, I guess that’s not completely true. My Great Aunt Helen used to spoil me pretty rotten when I was a kid and visiting her and her sister, my Great Aunt Hazel, for various summer vacations. And my third girlfriend, Rebecca, used to like to spend a lot of money on me, during the five weeks we were dating. However, with Rebecca, it turned out to mostly be motivated by guilt; she was still seeing her ‘ex’ boyfriend behind my back the entire time we were involved, and wound up going back to him after she ditched me… in point of fact, the entire relationship seems to have been little more than a method to make him jealous and more attentive.

So it’s odd, for me, to find myself a focus of this much thoughtfulness and consideration. Pleasant… euphoric, even… but honestly, I’m not used to being the person who gets stuff from friends. All my life, I’ve been the person who gives stuff to friends, or acquaintances, or, on occasion, to strangers in need. I’ll give away anything I have extra that someone else might want… books, Magic cards, HeroClix, food, clothes, whatever. I recently got an extra copy of one of Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula books, and promptly gave it away to a guy at work who had read it long ago and didn’t own a copy. And I’ve never dated a woman I didn’t constantly shower gifts on, major and minor. I enjoy giving stuff to people. I’m just like that. And I’ve never really known anyone else who was like me that way… well… Mike Norton has been remarkably generous to me over the years, at random intervals when he wasn’t in full psychic retreat from a world he often hates and fears, and my buddy Nate has been remarkably kind on occasion, too. But still… it’s not something I’m used to. For the most part, when people are passing out gifts to each other, I am generally a’hint the door.

But, this month is Spoil Darren Month and today I got another package from my friend. These packages usually contain a lot of junk food, so I won’t go into that, other than to say that frozen Ding-Dongs are the BEST, and while there is something truly decadent about already cooked bacon in a box, well, decadence is not something I have much objection to. And once more, of course, I have chocolate, which is never a bad thing.

However, the real wonderment to be found in this package is in the reading material. Omaha the Cat Dancer #s0 – 10… a long lost, much missed facet of my long lost much missed former comics collection I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to rebuild. (The ones I was sent don’t include issue #1, but maybe I can find that one on my own.) Along with these, two Marvel Treasury Editions from the 1970s… the Fantastic Four, featuring monster sized reprints of 4 Lee-Kirby era issues, and a Superhero Holiday Grab Bag, featuring a then-new Roger Stern scripted framing sequence surrounding four classic old Silver Age stories featuring Spider-Man and the Thing, the Avengers, the Hulk, the Silver Surfer, and Daredevil.

Best of all, Marvel Masterworks featuring the Fantastic Four Volume 7… collecting Fantastic Four #s 61 – 71, and Fantastic Four Annual #5. An especially heavy and impressive volume, since these Masterworks generally only collect 10 issues, the 1st through the 10th in a sequence of 10 (like, #1 – 10, or #31 – 40).

Oh, and I also got Aqualung by Jethro Tull on CD, as well as something by someone named Steve Earle, who is supposed to be very good.

Good music. Good readin’. Good eatin’. Good LORD, man! As the animated Gambit was wont to say, Life don’ ged much bedda dan dis.

On other fronts, I woke up this morning and made my dim, sleep be-fogged way out to my living room (everyone’s favorite Brown Eyed Handsome Man is not a quick waker-upper, to say the least) and noticed, gradually, while sitting in my recliner trying to muzzily decide between watching more OC and reading more Blood of Amber, or just, you know, making vague gestures in the general direction of some sort of brunch preparation (this sentence is totally out of control, but I’m just gonna roll with it, baby) that there was an unusual amount of heavy traffic noise coming from right outside the Satellite of Love. So I got up and discovered an unusual amount of vehicular activity just outside, an entire stream of mid morning traffic turning off Rte. 54 (the main drag through the rotten little town I am currently forced to inhabit) onto my generally lightly traveled side street, and heading down to 6th Avenue, and turning to continue in the direction that this traffic would normally be going on Rte. 54, if it all had not, for some peculiar reason, detoured down my side street instead.

Mary Mother of God I write torturous sentences sometimes.

So I wandered through the parking lot of the bar across the alley and up one building from me to Rte. 54, and saw, down at the intersection of that thoroughfare and 12th Avenue, a gigantic flat-bed tow truck in the process of chain-dragging an obviously completely trashed vehicle of some sort up onto its rear rack, all of said activity which was closing off the intersection.

From a distance (there is harmony) the wrecked vehicle bore a resemblance to the piece of shit my brother Paul’s highly objectionable and thoroughly unpleasant girlfriend Dawn drives, and since the two of them were supposed to be going to an ob-gyn appointment together today, well, it fretted me. I grant you, I can barely tell one vehicle from another, not being an internal combustion sorta guy, so there was probably no point in being worried, but still, I repaired back home, called my cousin’s wife, got Dawn’s cell phone number (my brother Paul stopped paying his phone bill as soon as I moved out and got the line turned off, so that cell is the only way to contact him now) and called it… just to make sure that they were both still alive, or, at least, that my younger brother was.

And woke them up.

At 11 a.m.

Now, I don’t mean to sound snotty about that. Call me on any of my days off at 11 a.m. and you will usually wake me up, too, unless I’m going through one of my phases (which I have been recently) where I can’t sleep for more than six hours at a time (which is why I was up around 10 a.m. this morning). Actually, you generally won’t wake me up, because I turn my answering machine way down and the ringers on my phones off before I go to bed every night, since I have managed to live a life where nothing… no personal relationship, no family tie, and certainly no job… has ever had any kind of impact I would weigh as being more important than me being able to sleep if and when I want to.

(I’m just sullen and pettish that way.)

Yeah. I don’t mean to sound snotty about waking my brother Paul and his girlfriend Dawn up at 11 a.m. on a day that Paul took off from work so they could go to the doctor’s together. I don’t mean to. I have no call to. I sleep late a lot too.

Still… I say good business is where you find it.

Oh, and, yeah, clearly they were okay. So that’s all right.

My good pal Nate made a hefty deposit to my PayPal account yesterday, so I’ll be sending him a large box o’ clix in the mail… in a week or so, I think. In order to complete the package, I need some extra maps and object tokens and stuff like that, so I’ve ordered a few things from Gathering Ground to toss into the package, which already has a substantial volume of extra clix in it. And while on that subject, I will note that I recently slightly modified the Green Lantern Corps Team Ability description in my HeroClix House Rules. Since taxiing really isn’t all that effective under my House Rules any more, and since Green Lanterns are supposed to be cool, I wanted to add something. So in my version of the game, GLs can now not only taxi up to 8 friendly figures if they want to, but they can also give the powers Energy Shield/Deflection or Combat Reflexes to any friendly figure that they have clear line of sight to and that is no more than 10 squares away, as a completely free action. (This means that, basically, if you have a GL on your team and you’re not far away and that Green Lantern can see you clearly, it can surround you with a protective aura, giving you a +2 against either ranged or close combat attacks.)

I have to hope Nate enjoys the box when he gets it, and proves as susceptible to the insidious irresistible charms of these little plastic suckers as everyone else I know has upon exposure to actual clix, because otherwise, everything I write on the subject of HeroClix from now on will be largely wasted. Or so it seems, at this juncture, anyway.

Of course, a persuasive argument could be made that everything I write on any subject is largely wasted, and I’m sure there are people setting forth that thesis at length in various places on the web I’m not aware of right this moment, too. But, to use what is rapidly becoming one of my favorite verbal coinages ever, scroo’m.

I’m back to work at The Office Which Must Not Be Named tomorrow, but, before that, there’s a new NYPD Blue on tonight, and I have a plethora of stuff to read and watch on DVD, and chocolate. Need I repeat the animated Gambit’s eternal catch phrase? I… think not, sir.

Wednesday Addendum:

Feeling a little queasy, and very tired, so I came home from work early tonight. I may or may not watch another episode of The OC before hitting the sack and hopefully getting a decent night's sleep. Whether I do or not, though, I wanted to take a few minutes to mention that... well... remember that guy I don't like at work, who promised me a Vet Shadowcat and never delivered? And how happy I was that he hadn't, because it gave me an objective excuse to support the very subjective (and possibly quite childish) dislike I feel for him?

Well, I went into work today and found a Veteran Steel sitting on my desk. From him.

He also stopped by to make sure I'd gotten it, and knew it was from him, and to say he'd felt bad because he'd forgotten about the Shadowcat, and generally make me feel like crap.

I don't know. I'm half tempted to think he reads my blog, except if he did, I suspect he'd be being really really pissy to me instead of really really nice.

(In all honesty, I really have to assume that if anyone at work were reading my blog, I wouldn't be working there any more.)

I don't know. Perhaps I have wronged him.

Still don't like him much, though.

He told me that I should have reminded him about it. I told him the following anecdote as an illustration of why I don't do stuff like that:

Back in college, my closest friend gave me a very nice drawing he'd done of my original character Scorpio for my birthday one year (it was the same year his future wife, Ann, gave me a teddy bear that I still have, so I'm thinking it must have been my 20th birthday). This friend of mine told me that he'd wanted to get the drawing put on a t-shirt for me, but he hadn't had time, and he insisted that from that point onward, I remind him regularly that he owed me a t-shirt with that drawing on it, because he really really meant to give it to me.

I am trusting and gullible, especially with my friends, so I reminded him frequently over the next several months that he owed me a t-shirt.

Twenty years later, he published a lot of calculatedly toxic mistruths about me on an ASTRO CITY board, and, well, if you go to Google and do a search on my name, you can fairly easily find several websites where total strangers who have never met me (and probably have never met Kurt) still refer to me as "Kurt Busiek's psycho stalker" and heap a lot of personal abuse on me on a regular basis.

So, as I explained to this guy at work, I no longer remind people that they owe me something.

The Japanese, as a culture, prize honor very highly, and they make paying a debt an enormous priority. And under the Japanese code of honor, it is the debtor's obligation to remember a debt. If the person who is owed a debt has to remind the debtor of it, the debtor is shamed and disgraced.

I didn't explain that to this guy at work, but, in all honesty, that is also how I feel. If I owe someone something, I don't feel it's on them to remind me and keep after me about it.

Similarly, if someone tells me they are going to do something for me, it is their responsibility to honor that commitment. It's not on me to make it easier for them to do so.

Anyway, that's just how I feel about that.

Now, looking back on it, I have never actually been certain that that gift on the part of my friend was entirely well intentioned. We knew a guy back then named Steve who was kind of a PTA poster boy for why parents shouldn't let their kids read comics or play roleplaying games. I mean, he was like some living avatar of The Annoying Geek. And he constantly wore t-shirts with a picture of one of his original roleplaying game characters on it.

So I've always kind of wondered if, by planning to give me a t-shirt with a picture of Scorpio on it, Kurt wasn't kind of, very subtly, meaning to insult me.

He's a very subtle guy.

So I've never been sure of that. But I am sure of this: I no longer remind people of obligations to me, at least, not trivial obligations, like "you said you'd give me a Veteran Shadowcat, now where is it?" That just strikes me as childish, and, anyway, it hasn't worked out well for me in the past.

But, still. Either this guy at work is better than I gave him credit for... or he's a pretty subtle guy, too. But I do appreciate the Veteran Steel, even if I'm unlikely to ever use it for anything.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, "Wow, I didn't recognize you in men's clothing". According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I'm reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I'd take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here's The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people's blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin's Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron's blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don't really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren't related to me by marriage, I'd most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I've learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don't care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I'd get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don't Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.