Violent Love and the Greatest Comic Book That Never Was

I remember sitting in Court Street Diner about two or three weeks into my Freshman year (being a Freshman, this was before I realized it was cooler to go to Union Street Diner) and eavesdropping on two Sophomore girls in the booth across from me.

In-between the menial bullshit that Sophomore college girls tend to talk about (trust me: I basically am one) a little kernel of knowledge slipped through to my eavesdropping ear.

"Sophomore year in Scripps is absolutely brutal!" Girl A said.

"Jeez...that's why I am in " Girl B responded.

While sipping my absolutely delightful potato and cheese soup, I made a mental note not to ever forget that fact when my Sophomore year in Scripps rolled around.

Now as I sit here in my Film 201 class, sensations of that delightful soup long passed, I realized that I indeed forgot that fact.

Sophomore year is rather brutal.

News Writing is simple enough...until I actually have to do work. Film is fun...until I feel the uncontrollable urge to nap once the lights dim for a screening. Introduction to Creative Non-Fiction is right up my alley...until I get B's on all my papers. And Islam....well Islam just straight-up sucks all around.

This has not been the easiest quarter for me and as punishment for my boredom, Internet, you are now subject to more of my pop culture-related ramblings while I neglect Citizen Kane (too much culture, not enough pop for me)

- I thought I was done prattling on about AFI's new album, Crash Love, I really did. But something occurred to me as I was listening to its lyrics on my way to class today. Crash Love combines two concepts that go so well together they should be more synonymous with unity than PB&J: violence and infatuation. The word's Crash and Love suggest two seemingly conflicting ideas that are brought together through the magic of....ART!

Just listen to some of the violence and car-crash imagery on the record:

"If we run this light, take a little life, no one will care at all."

"With the light out and the night inside, the broken radio was playing suicide."

"Bleeding from pure love."

It's now come to my attention that I am in love with the dual concepts of love and violence as they pertain to one another. Just take a gander at the cover of one of my favorite albums of all time:

That is the cover of Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge by My Chemical Romance. The painting is called "Demolition Lovers" and was created by singer Gerard Way. "Demolition Lovers", eh? Sounds like it conforms to my fun little notion of violence and love intersecting. The blood on the two lovers faces seem splattered in the blood from their impact.

But you don't have to stick to the emo and hardcore arenas...

"And baby when it's love if it's not rough, it isn't fun." - Lady Gaga, bitches.

- I feel like I've fought destiny for a long time.

Destiny clearly wanted me to be a comic book nerd. And truthfully, I was an everything-else-nerd. Pokemon? Check. Star Wars? Check. Harry Potter? Check. Lord of the Rings? Check. Magic Cards? Check. Online RPGs? Check. Tabletop wargames? Check. But for some reason comics just felt like too big a leap for me, like heroin to a cocaine user.

But two summers ago I took that leap and read Watchmen. I loved it (doesn't everyone?). Then I tackled some Batman series. Then I read The Umbrella Academy. And now I'm on the prowl for more.

When I read these series, however, I detected that I had experienced it all before? Why is that?

Of course, comic book DNA is spread across all areas of pop culture (hehehe ew.), but it went even deeper than that. I've read these types of stories before.

Remember Animorphs? And don't lie, I KNOW you do. Everybody read Animorphs. Well K.A Applegate also wrote one of my favorite series of books ever after Animorphs called "Remnants."

Remnants was a 14-book series about a group of survivors' trials and tribulations in space in a post-Earth existence. It sounds cheesy and bad because it was cheesy and bad. But it only didn't work dramatically or commercially because it was written in the wrong medium. Remnants was a comic book series in the form of a novel. Remnants was graphic, pulpy, fast-moving, unrealistic, fun, all with a dash of deeper meaning - everything that a good comic book should be.

So your homework today, Internet, is to research Remnants (or read the whole series, which is available upon request to yours truly), contact K.A Applegate or Scholastic for the rights and then create the single greatest comic book series the world has ever seen.

Please do this...for me.

"The Lucy Westenra Search Party" Would Be an Awesome Band Name

So why the fuck do we amass and consume endless amounts of television, film, literature, theater and other visual media?

I know it seems like there should be a sentence before that but there isn't. I don't want to bury the lead on this one. I was walking through West Green on my way to News Writing and the thought popped into my head. Actually, that wasn't my thought at all. But I backtracked my initial thought (to be revealed shortly) to the essential question of what I was thinking. So really that opening sentence could have been a lot more jarring...

Why do I spend my days wondering if Lost will reveal the meaning of life? Why do you read The Little Prince for the eighth time? Why do we watch The Bear Jew turn Hitler's brains into pudding? (I swear my Inglourious Basterds/Pulp Fiction is coming one day)

Well there are plenty of reasons we plug into our visual culture or, say it with me: the collective unconscious. But I thought of one reason today why I (and by "I", I am just vainly assuming "we") consume culture like Mike & Ikes.

We consume culture because we want to be in culture. I have a family, I have friends, I have peers. I have co-workers. It is a very real existence that I live with very real people. But in each and every case I always try to compare these in-groups to in-groups that I have seen in the media. And in almost every case, they don't compare favorably.

I recently posted a picture on Facebook of The Umbrella Academy (a comic book superhero team) with me and all my friends tagged as our corresponding characters. It was fun to concur that Alex was definitely The Seance and Dan was definitely The Kraken...but why did they have to be? Why can't Alex just be Alex and Dan just be Dan (this is that original thought that I had, by the way)?

Culture exists, in part, so that we can imagine ourselves in it.

This is an intriguing notion for a multitude of reasons. But I am too lazy to write about them and I have a Film Midterm breathing down my neck. Instead I'll leave you with a list of the fake-groups I would most like to be a part of. And mind you, these are groups that I have seen and enjoyed. I have not seen much of old-timey entertainment such as Cheers so don't expect me to want to hang at the bar where everyone knows your name.

- The Bluth Family (Arrested Development)

- Sacred Heart Hospital (Scrubs)

- Gryffindor, Class of '98 (Harry Potter)

- Serenity crew-mate (Firefly)

- The Basterds (Inglourious Basterds)

- The Barksdale Family/Baltimore Police Department (The Wire)

- The Gang (It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia)

- Bon Temps Citizen (True Blood)

- The Lucy Westenra Search Party (Dracula)

If I could drop everything in my entire life, including even possibly my identity, and join into another reality with a different friend-base, those are a select few I would choose.

You, Internet?

"Put the Top Down, Use Your Knees to Drive"

Hello again there, Internets!

It's been a while since my last post. I apologize for the delay. I've been working on my Backdrop story for this Fall's Issue for the past two weeks. Thanks to my dear old friend procrastination, I had to churn out interviews, research, transcribing and three drafts in a miniscule timeframe. This of course meant many all-nighters, coffee, tears, more coffee, and neglect of my recently reanimated blog. But my story is finally complete and I think it compares more than favorably to my last two efforts. This one gets a little deeper, goes a little darker and hopefully is a little better. Pick yourself up a copy October 22!

Enough of me being a company man though, let me walk you through some of the collective(ly) unconscious I have been enjoying since my last post.

- I've been wanting to write about the show Glee since it premiered. Of course I wouldn't really know what to say about it other than "I like it and it makes me smile." Sometimes it is nice just to be brought into the welcoming embrace of a big, loud and clever network show and forget any issues you may be having (encroaching deadlines, perhaps?) for an hour once a week. Thankfully, my friend and colleague Adam Wagner is more eloquent on the subject of Glee anyway so I concede the floor to him.

- While writing draft after draft of my Fall story until 5 in the morning (this seems to be a recurring theme), I happened across AFI's Myspace where they were streaming their full new album "Crash Love." I have an interesting relationship with AFI. Here is my opinion of all their albums:

1. Answer that and Stay Fashionable - Dogshit

2. Very Proud of Ya - Dogshit

3. Shut Your Mouth and Open Your Eyes - Dogshit

4. Black Sails in the Sunset - Dogshit (minus "God Called in Sick Today" which is absolutely beautiful)

5. The Art of Drowning - Mostly dogshit with some signs of life

6. Sing the Sorrow - The pinnacle of hardcore music and perhaps the greatest thing to happen to the Gothic subculture since Bram Stoker wrote Dracula. One of my favorite albums ever released.

7. Decemberunderground - Dogshit

So is Crash Love dogshit or the pinnacle of Western Civilization?Well the album itself skews far closer to pinnacle of Western Civilization than a pile of dogshit. And this song right here might be the best thing to carress my eardrums in a long time.

- Last night I got reacquainted with my dear old friend Charlie Kaufman. Who is Charlie Kaufman you ask? Charlie Kaufman is the man who completely redefined the role of a screenwriter in the film industry and is probably the most talented and influential writer in the most popular commercial medium in the world. And you've probably never heard of him. He's the dude responsible for movies such as Being John Malkovich (awesome movie), Adaptation (one of my faves), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (one of my faves) and Synecdoche, New York (I still don't know what to make of this one). He also wrote Human Nature and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind but I've never seen Human Nature and he disowned Confessions because he was unhappy with the direction George Clooney took it in.

Anyway, I watched Eternal Sunshine for the first time in a long time and it hit me harder than I can ever remember a Kaufman movie hitting me on any of my many viewings. So I am giving you fair warning that I may be rambling about him a lot more as I re-watch his other flicks. For now I thought I would just bring up an interesting fact about his writings. Each Kaufman movie seems to be, at its core, a distillation of two veeeery deep, veeeeery abstract and often veeeeery contradictory ideas.

Being John Malkovich = Existence + Celebrity

Adaptation = Writing + Passion

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind = Love + Memory

Synecdoche, New York = Art + Reality

Is Charlie Kaufman the only one whose art can be analyzed as such? If not, give me more fun examples in the comments section.

Well that's all I have for now. I've been meaning to write a massive essay comparing Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds and how they are not only two of the better films of my lifetime but reflect the pop cultural landscape of our era better than anything else ever made buuuuuuuuuuut...I've just been to busy to tackle it.

Here's hoping that I can get that done some time this week!

30 Men on Mad Rock

The Emmys have come and gone and you can tell that I have grown a lot as a person because I didn't try to predict the winners this year.

Let me rephrase that...I didn't go public with my Emmy predictions. Instead of wowing the blogosphere with my wildly inaccurate predictions, I wowed the small group of folks I watched the Emmys with my surprisingly accurate predictions.

To be fair, the Emmys were not that hard to predict. 95% of America could have told you that 30 Rock would win Best Comedy and Mad Men would win Best Drama. The predictions were so obvious that for once in my life I decided not to reflect on how awesome I am, but instead ask why they were so obvious.

You follow?

What I am asking is: why did the wins of 30 Rock and Mad Men seem so inevitable and pre-ordained? What is it about American society at the end of the decade that makes these shows synonymous with excellence in comedic and dramatic material?

I am assuming that it goes beyond the fact that both are excellent tv shows. I am a regular viewer of 30 Rock and believe it to be one of the funniest shows of the decade. I have never seen an episode of Mad Men but have been lead to believe that it is brilliant. Still, there are plenty of other hilarious and dramatically affecting shows out there. Why will these two go down in history as the definitive programs of 2009's America?

Looking at the concept of each show, it seems clear that there is one factor that each share: all the characters work. Obviously, there are plenty of other shows out there in which the characters have jobs (homelessness is not a very exciting or funny concept for television), and there are even some shows that take place in work environments exclusively. But 30 Rock and Mad Men don't just have characters that work and don't just take place in a professional environment...the two shows are all about work.

30 Rock is short for 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where all of its characters work on a sketch comedy program. Mad Men cleverly refers to the fact that the characters work in the advertising industry, and al their lives revolve around the office and what happens in it. 

In these shows, work is everything: laughter, frustration, drama, excitement, family and presumably money. In a year in which the highest number people are unemployed since the Great Depression, it only makes sense that we want to honor two shows that honor and uphold the concept of work and how integral to our lives it can be.

Shit, that's why they invented television, to show us what we want and sometimes what we fear.

Now if you'd excuse me, I am going to watch the season premiere of House...don't psychoanalyze that decision like I just did with 30 Rock and Mad Men.

You're In My Dreams Now

I should totally not be writing this right now.

My Editor at Backdrop decided to take a stand against my procrastinating bullshit and is demanding the first draft of my Fall Quarter story by 3 tomorrow....the same first draft that was due last week.

So I have some work to do. But before I fully engage in "writing mode" I need a quick scrimmage to get myself back into game shape. And should said-editor be reading this right now, I'd just like to say "Don't worry, Shane, I can knock this bitch out of the park."

Anyway, let's talk about two things that I never thought would meet up: emo and rap. 

It seems more fundamentally awkward than oil and water or Joe Wilson and common sense. Emo is essentially a raging treatise against life and all its excesses. Rap is traditionally wrapped (pardon the pun) in life itself. It speaks of every little bit that makes it all worth living: hos, money, hos, ice, guns, hos, urban-respect, hos, homies and of course, hos.

But a fly homie from the 'Land seems to have pulled it off.

Scott Mescudi a.k.a Kid Cudi is not the most talented musician or rapper I have ever heard (as a matter of fact, many of his rhymes are downright mediocre) but he has made one of the more interesting musical concoctions I have heard in a while. Man on the Moon: The End of Day is ambitious, exciting, depressing, uplifting and bizarre....but most important: it is fun as hell to listen to.

Some will find the dividing of the album into five parts (I The End of Day, II Rise of the Night Terror, III Taking a Trip, IV Stuck, V A New Beginning) to be pretentious, but I am a total sucker for grand artistic flourishes like that. Plus, it totally works. Each chapter has it's own little flavor, running from reality to dreams to drugs to panic all the way back to reality again. It is an absurdly fun trip and compulsively listenable. I even look forward to Common's spoken statements at the end of each chapter telling me what I'm about to experience...even though I've heard him say the same thing about 712 times since I bought the album on Tuesday.

The mere fact that Kid Cudi had a hand in the best break-up album of the decade in 808's and Heartbreak, speaks to his legitimacy as well. First 808s, then underground cred, now mainstream success. I can only hope that this Northeast Ohioan sticks around for awhile. He definitely has my ears...and more importantly my wallet.

Anyway, prepare for my Facebook and Twitter accounts to be awash with lyrics from the album for the next month or so (I got 99 problems/and they all bitches). 

Now I really have some writing to do.

As you were, Internet.

I'm Really Happy for You and I'm Going to Let You Finish But...

Certain events are sure to blow up my Facebook news feed so much that I am sure the very walls of reality are about to tumble down. One is a celebrity death, the second is Kanye West's annual tradition of "saying/doing stupid shit" and the third is the coming of the end of days (why do I get the feeling that these three are not unrelated?).

Yesterday then was a very bad day for my Facebook news feed. First Kanye fulfilled his role as Gayfish and then Patrick Swayze succumbed to cancer. I'm bummed that Swayze had to go, as I never want to see any seemingly half-decent human being die from cancer. But aside from that, his death does not effect me on any pop-culture level (which really is the only level I operate on anyway). Homeboy was before my time and I never saw Dirty Dancing so God bless, Swayzes everywhere but I want to talk some Kanye.

I love the man. I really do. He is an extremely talented artist but more importantly than that, he is one of the most adept experts on pop culture that Western Culture has right now. I trust his taste in music (listening to the new Cudi album right now) and I respect his proclamations of other artists' greatness. If I'm a musical artist right now, I am dying for a Kanye shout out in a song or the press. 

Having said that....taking a microphone from a 19-year-old girl during her moment of thanks and appreciation to make your own sweeping proclamation on the state of American music is a fundamentally Douche move. It figures that Kanye waits to do this until right after I give up my "Biggest Douche in the Universe" blog. Kanye, there is a time and place for everything. If you truly believed that Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time (and I concur with this), you should have written a short essay after the show (AND NOT THE ALL-CAPS RANTS THAT YOU USUALLY WRITE ON YOUR BLOG) calmly explaining your position. Time and place, dude, time and place.

But hey, maybe our little 'Ye is finally growing up. Back in olden times, Mr. West would storm the stage to say he deserved to win, now he storms the stage to say someone else should have won. Classy? No. Mature? No. Kind of sweet in a perverse way? I guess if you throw all those extra adjectives in there then yeah...

Thanks be to Beyonce for revealing herself to be one of the classiest babes in the 'biz. Thanks be to Kanye West for what must become the greatest meme in Internet history. And thanks be to that Kid named Cudi for this insanely catchy song.

Take Two or How The Collective(ly) Unconscious Got Her Groove Back

Hello there, Internet.

It's been a while. Do you remember me? I'm that one dude who combined clever witticisms and self-deprecating humor to analyze the news and entertainment media and our connection to it. Then I got distracted by the shiny object that is baseball. Then I got a little Douchey. And finally,  I just got lazy. 

So what happened? How does one turn into a well-oiled blogging machine one day and into a lazy bastard the next? There are plenty of answers to this question I am sure, but ironically I am still too lazy to figure them out. 

Suffice it to say, I realized that there is only so much one can write about while one is not actually "living." Like any other introspective and narcissistic asshole "artist" I had to take a sabbatical to get to know myself and my surroundings a little better. My writing had gotten to the point where I would just look around my sparsely decorated dorm room and write about whatever I saw (Do you really love the lamp, Alec? Or are you just saying that?). Boring living is not conducive to good writing...so I changed it. It took a while and it was as hard as hell. The fact that my last blog entry was more than three months ago can attest to this. It seems to have worked, however because I no longer seem compelled to write blog entries such as this one.

But enough about me and my numerous probably mental issues, let's talk about us, Internet and what this all means to you.

In short....The Collective(ly) Unconscious is back. And to the best of my knowledge it won't go away for the next three years. It has gotten to the point where I just have too many things to say and not enough friends willing to listen to me describe why "Jarhead" is the most underrated film of the 00s for the 51st time. I need a medium to communicate my many ideas and theories regarding media and culture  they be brilliant or bizarre or both. 

The goals of The Collective(ly) Unconscious remain as exactly the same as they were one year ago when I started this thing. As a matter of fact, I think I am adopting this phrase from "Seven Years Ago" as The C.U's new official mission statement:

The goal of this blog is not to rave and it is not to rant. The goal of this blog is to add one more voice (albeit a quiet one) to the world's collective unconscious: the mass media. Carl Jung once theorized that we all draw from a pool of universal symbols and ideas deep in the dark corners of our minds that allows every human being on planet Earth to share in the same experiences. Now psychologically, philosophically and biologically speaking I am sure this idea is as wildly wrong as it is interesting and intriguing. But I believe technology and the journalistic spirit to share information and offer analysis has connected us in a way that would shock even Mr. Jung, himself.

That is still the Collective(ly) Unconscious and it is not going to change. 

I cannot say that I haven't changed, however. In strolling down the Word Document that constitutes as my diary from this summer, I came across something that could serve as my new official mission statement. This was written under the possible influence of hallucinogens and Chuck Klosterman:

8/17/09 - I want to dedicate my life to understanding the DNA of pop culture.

Well, Alec-of-24-days-ago, let's get started.