Janeane Garofalo, Henry Rollins, and Marc Maron doing non-standup at The Silent Movie Theatre (?).

I would go see this if a) it weren’t tech week for that one-act festival you’re invited to, and  b) I weren’t then out of town at the state Democratic convention.

Life in comics may be hard for comic-book characters such as Captain America and Thor (both currently “dead,” both sure to return at some point). But as evidenced by the good health of Cap co-creator Joe Simon, 93 years old and still going very very strong, and the long lives of many other Golden Age greats, doing funnybooks keeps you going.

Pirate con in New Orleans.

For one thing, it seems that the city has already been raped and pillaged.

Thank God we won’t have to wait for another election!

Newsweak (cq) has a web-only interview with Gore Vidal, one of the last remaining great American writers of that generation.

How fitting that the only other survivor is his arch nemesis, Norman Mailer. (Philip Roth, who is still doing astonishing work and having a remarkable late-career revival, was born in the following decade.)

I know that Vidal would like to be remembered as a great writer. But he isn’t one. An entertaining figure? Certainly. An entertaining writer? Sure. It’s hard to remember why I read so many of his novels, once upon a time, except they were so much fun. But “great”? I don’t think so.

“Creation” is the novel he says he wants to be remembered by, and that is the one I intend to reread. I remember it as being epic, and although I don’t trust Vidal’s opinions (as when he came down on Aaron Burr’s side) I’d like to relive his origin of so much of our philosophy. Even if I don’t agree with the characterizations.

This seven-minute clip seems to be from a documentary I haven’t seen (yet).

Vonnegut’s mordant humor is well-served by his wry reading voice.

I really miss this guy.

Yes, TODAY is the deadline for early registration for the San Diego Comic Con. (After this, the prices keep going up.)

And if you haven’t already booked a hotel room — fuggedaboutit.

I’m producing this festival, put on by the graduate writing program I teach for at USC, and featuring four very very good new plays by playwrights in the program.

It’s at 8PM on May 1st and 2nd at East West Players’ David Henry Hwang Theatre in the beautiful Little Tokyo district downtown, and admission is free. And you’re invited to join us. (And if you’re a reader of this blog, please come up and say hi. When I don’t look like I’m frantically producing. And if you’re not a reader of this blog, how are you reading this?)

Click here for information on the plays.

Click here to make a reservation.

Hope to see you there for a great night of free theatre.

One person I never thought would be the new Imus is this guy: sauve singer Bryan Ferry. I have been a Ferry (and Roxy Music) fan for almost 30 years, since picking up cassettes of both his solo album “The Bride Stripped Bare” and a Roxy Music compilation album from a discount bin at Woolworth’s. I listened to them endlessly and without further investigation — it was a couple of years before I discovered that the same man was behind both.

Ferry is in hot water for praising the “beauty” of Nazi imagery. I understand what he meant — he wasn’t praising evil, but recognizing the potential attraction of its fashion — but it does come off like admiring the sleek flowing lines in a KKK robe. Ferry sounds abjectly mortified. Here’s the story, and his apology. Thanks to Paul Crist for sending this link.

For years I have joked to friends that I’ve been trying to get my plays protested — if only angry villagers would show up and condemn me, then I could hit it big. Lately I’m not so sure.

Several people today have emailed me with links to the plays of Cho Seung Hui, the student behind the Virginia Tech massacre. Click here if you’d like to read them yourself.

They don’t tell us much beyond this: Mr. Cho was a very bad playwright. Really bad. The dialogue is forced and expositional, the staging doesn’t work, and characters such as the stepfather are set up as paper tigers for other characters to express their viewpoints. In fact, the only thing I like is the stepfather character’s name, Richard McBeef, but then only for a play in the style of Alfred Jarry.

Here’s the statement that these plays do not — repeat, do not — make: that because these are dark, troubled plays, Cho was clearly a dark, troubled person, someone who was going to be a murderer. No. These are dark, troubled plays that happen to be by someone who turned out to be a dark, troubled person who happened to turn out to be a murderer.

It always troubles me when people confuse the unattractive character in a play with its creator. Just because you’ve written racists, pederasts, murderers, and even Republicans into your play doesn’t mean you are one. It means that you are writing about them. Ian Fleming was in no way James Bond, Edgar Rice Burroughs was not raised by apes, and Harriet Beecher Stowe did not have an uncle named Tom.

These things may seem obvious to most of us reading this. Yet all across the net tonight people are reading the plays of Cho Seung Hui and deciding that someone “should have known.” If Cho gave other signs of mental distress, that’s one thing. But the writing in these plays tells us only that he had no future as a playwright.

Except — and here’s an irony — I guarantee that some enterprising director or producer somewhere is right now printing out those plays and getting ready to produce them. Remember, you read it here first.