Superman has a day job and a bogus byline to boot. In his current iteration, he’s a stringer for the Daily Planet and thus a shoe-in to be the patron saint of journalists. Well, perhaps not all journalists – maybe just the ones in comics and those, like me, whose columns are quarantined to the funny pages to sidestep libel suits. This is fine with me, given my “truth vs. fact” credo, which has long leaned me in the direction of being a writer rather than a journalist despite the fact that most of my professional paychecks have come from newspapers.
When my yen to be pseudo-scholarly is at full rev, one might even say I’m into “fiction vs. fictionalism,” that latter of which, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy will have you know, is “the view that claims made within that discourse are not best seen as aiming at literal truth but are better regarded as a sort of ‘fiction.’” These are conversational conveniences, cultural assumptions like the fact we all know a pair of eyeglasses is sufficient to disguise one’s identity as a superhero.
It stands for reason then that my reporter-hero would not be a Woodward or Bernstein, say, but a 75-year-old figment of fiction. Sure, Watergate was a great story but the saga of a space alien with a Christ-complex and red underwear invented by a couple of outsider Jewish kids in Cleveland? You had me at Christ-complex. [click here to continue…]
Summer movie season is upon us. Well, it’s technically been here since May because, like climate change, Hollywood can adjust the seasons seemingly at will. At your local cinemas, iron-clad playboys flex computer-enhanced muscles whilst spaceships go where no man has gone before – again. It’s a dizzying display of predictable imagineering, so pixel-perfect that it’s hard to remember that cinema used to be a simpler affair.
To provide context for how relatively new movie making is, relative to the other arts, and how far it’s come, consider that there are turtles in the Galapagos older than the entire history of cinema. It’s difficult to imagine that movies were once little more than a point-and-shoot deal. According to two innovators in the medium, the basic requirements once were as follows:
A) “All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman, and a pretty girl.” – Charlie Chaplin
B) “All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.” – Jean-Luc Goddard [click here to continue…]
Jenny Hendrix writes in today’s Los Angeles Times that the present National Security Administration surveillance scandal has led to an appreciable uptick in sales of George Orwell’s 1984 on Amazon. By appreciable, we’re talking a 5,771% surge as of this morning. At the time Hendrix filed, the totalitarian tome was appearing at No. 4 on Amazon’s list of “Movers and Shakers.” Presently, it’s at No. 18, which isn’t bad for a dystopian tale originally published in 1949 and under the pen-name of Eric Arthur Blair. It’s a good thing Orwell let his own name eventually crest the title, since the lit-crit term “Orwellian” has such a better ring to it than “Blairian,” which sounds like a hair product.
The novel celebrated its 64th anniversary on June 8 just in time for 29-year-old Edward Snowden, a NASA contractor to leak info about the NSA’s “massive collection of data from the phone and Internet records of Americans have given rise to concerns over loss of privacy…” write’s Hendrix. Now, Snowden the target of an international manhunt.
Now, I wouldn’t trust a Millennial-aged contractor with the company kitchen’s microwave let alone give him access to NSA secrets but the dude at least deserves a hat-tip for busting the administration’s merry trodding over your Fourth Amendment right to privacy. Here’s a refresher: [click here to continue…]
Whodathunk that a space alien with a Christ-complex and leotard cooked up by a couple of Jewish kids in Cleveland would become a billion dollar business? They apparently didn’t – hence the $130 fee from Detective Comics (now Warner Bros.-owned behemoth DC Comics). 75 years later, Superman has become so emblematic of “Truth, Justice and the American Way” it’s difficult to comprehend how anyone could own him at all. He’s woven into the fabric of our culture like his public domain brethren Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and yet, like the “Happy Birthday” song, he remains subject to copyright (thanks to his expiration date being a moving target, just like Mickey Mouse’s). What’s fueling his longevity? Check out the figures in the info graphic below… [click here to continue…]
Superman has a day job and a bogus byline to boot. In his current iteration, he’s a stringer for the Daily Planet and thus a shoe-in to be the patron saint of journalists. Well, perhaps not all journalists – maybe just the ones in comics and those, like me, whose columns are quarantined to the funny pages to sidestep libel suits. This is fine with me, given my “truth vs. fact” credo, which has long leaned me in the direction of being a writer rather than a journalist despite the fact that most of my professional paychecks have come from newspapers.
