Over at Newsweak, a rabbi discourses on the demise of Captain America and gets it almost entirely wrong:

Captain America was created by Joe Simon in 1941 as a fictional ally in the war against Hitler and Nazi fascism. In the most recent issue, Cap was gunned down in New York City after 65 years of fighting for freedom and the American way of life. Pop culture mavens said that Cap’s death symbolized the death of the American passion for freedom and of the kind of heroes who give their lives in its defense.

This particular maven said something different: that Cap’s demise ipso facto symbolized the demise of the American symbol of freedom, one it wasn’t clear we deserved any more.

Rabbi Marc Gellman continues:

It’s obvious to me that movies and comic books can make this case better than any subtle novel and more authentically than any spin-tested political speech. Comic books, and the graphic novels that evolved from them, are about the struggle of good against evil. Other art forms can make the claim that everything is gray, nothing is true, and nothing eternal. Of course these latter claims may be right, but if they are, then the age of heroes is over and both Cap and Leonides are really dead.

It may be “obvious” to him that comic books reflect a dualistic morality, but as someone who has actually read a comic book at some point since 1941 (including just last night), I can say he’s wrong. (Which is not an uncommon reaction from me when religious leaders say something is “obvious.”) As we discussed here just recently, comic books post-Watergate have indeed become more and more gray. The conflicting necessities of doing right in a world without good choices — precisely contra the Manichaeian belief system Gellman thinks pervades comic books — was the entire subtext of the Civil War storyline.

Finally, Gellman opines:

Embracing the need to spiritually justify the fight for world freedom carries its own perils. Chief among these dangers is what we now see in the world of Islamic fascism: the use of religion to extol death and tyranny. The biblical name for this is idolatry, and the seductions of idolatry are hard for some to resist. In the end, though, the spiritual truth of freedom’s cause is eventually clear to all.

Although he’s right that we “now” see the danger in Islamic fascism, when it comes to the misuse of religions that seek to create utopia (here or hereafter), I suggest the rabbi dig into some 20th century history. Or Medieval history. Or the history of the Crusades. Or of the Holy Roman Empire. Because this “use of religion to extol death and tyranny” is not precisely a new thing. The Founders of this nation were right that people yearn for freedom (even though they were unable at the founding to grant it to all). They were also right to recognize that when left unchecked man is a morally bankrupt creature and that the freest form of religious practice is for the state to have no attachment to religion.

Where could one find some of the themes I’m talking about? Throughout comic books post-9/11. I just wish that media critics, either religious or not, who choose to write knowingly about comic books would show some evidence that they had actually read any.

Captain America is dead, but his legacy lives on.

Yesterday, the LA Times ran a front-page obit headlined “Milton Wexler: 1908-2000.” I thought, “Why is the Times profiling people who died seven years ago? What’s the news angle?” The lead channeled the quintesssenial New Yorker-type lead, i.e., you had no idea where you were or what the story was (it was an anecdote about the dead man’s wife, 40 years ago). The kicker on the jump page (A14) read, again, “Milton Wexler: 1908-2000.” Finally, in graf 5, I learned that Mr. Wexler had died on Friday.

Shout out to the LA Times: Guys, it’s 2007.

I understand that, well, this is a typo. But it’s on your front page. And if Mr. Wexler was indeed “a towering figure in disease research,” as you say, a man whose death warrants a front-page story, then I would assume that someone had read this story and at least the on-screen mockups before sending it to print. I also doubt this was a last-minute drop-in, given that the great man had perished almost a full week before.

And before I go on, let me state again: I love newspapers. This is why this is so distressing and why it seems I keep kicking the cripple.

This sad affair reminded me of the time that Allen Ginsberg died and the Times, on its front-page obit, misspelled his name. Rule number one of journalism: Get people’s names right.

In today’s Times the sad saga continues in a different way. The paper’s editor and its publisher killed a much-ballyhooed guest-edited opinion section scheduled to run this Sunday because they now decided that a perceived conflict of interest might exist; the would-have-been guest editor, film producer Brian Grazer, is represented by the publicity firm headed by the girlfriend of the Times’ heretofore opinion editor. Here’s the story, which covers the resignation of that editor, Andres Martinez, in response.

I’m not interested in the romantic lives of newspaper editors (various 1940’s screwball comedies be damned), but I am greatly interested in the health of newspapers, especially with regard to conflict of interest. The (Los Angeles) Daily News has what I call a “roll your own” section in which people online “report” their own “events,” with many of them selected for a special print edition delivered with the paper. (Which we also get.) I don’t want people reporting on themselves in what I can only imagine would be a relentlessly positive light. Even at this stage of the decline of newspapers I hold some hope that a true reporter would at least try to report objectively. (As part of full disclosure, the Daily News section editor called me no fewer than six times last year asking me to write pieces related to my own local political activity for the paper. I demurred. Would our political club have benefited from the coverage? Sure. But I was part of forming the club because I was distressed by the ethical breaches of various government officials; to me that precludes my involving the club itself in ethical breaches. Others may disagree and plan their own route; I stuck to my preferred path.)

With regard to the LA Times opinion-section story, I’m with the editor and the publisher on this one. The Times can’t afford even the perception of conflict of interest with the business community. It took the paper years to recover from the Staples “advertising section scandal,” in which advertorial was presented as editorial in a special section devoted utterly to the arena, in a deal that included profit sharing between a newspaper and a major advertiser (!). And actually, some of us would argue that the paper has never recovered.

Last September in Fast Company, a columnist extolled the virtues of newspapers and forecast a robust future, albeit in a different delivery format. (And I think that’s probably right, at least short-term.) In the current issue (no link available yet), someone lays out an entirely different prescription: public non-profit status.

Whatever is going to happen with newspapers, they aren’t going to much resemble what’s currently landing on my doorstep. Given the recent error-prone Los Angeles Times, that may be a good thing. Or it may just be far, far worse.

Every day it becomes more clear that I should not have sold that Apple stock a couple of years ago. If anything, I should have sold it now so I could buy the new Apple products I want.

I don’t think of myself as a true gizmo hound (although I did have a home computer in 1980, and was on the Internet very early, and was an early adopter of first the Handspring Visor, then the Visorphone, then the Treo). No, it’s that I like useful gizmos that help me with information exchange (communication), because that underlies every single bit of what I do, professionally and personally. I am scheduled to the max, and my Treo helps me handle that. My wireless card (and/or Treo) allow me to get email most places I need to. Synching to .Mac allows me, potentially, to access backups from anywhere in the world. Could I have survived without these things even 10 years ago, let alone in Chaucer’s time? Sure. But now I don’t have to.
As I shared here previously, I greatly covet the iPhone. The Treo was state of the art; now, by comparison, the iPhone is a Lamborghini and the Treo is a Chevy Aveo. But the Treo does get the job done, at least for the moment. So maybe what I really want first is:

The iTV (or Apple TV). Why? Because I am indeed one of those guys with a bigscreen TV who finds himself all too often huddled over a 15″ laptop screen watching video. Sometimes it’s downloaded from iTunes, sometimes it’s streamed (as from CBS.com, where for some inexplicable reason I continue to watch “Jericho”), sometimes it’s made and edited by me myself with my Canon digital camcorder. Wouldn’t it be better to just beam it via the iTV to the large flatscreen, for the enjoyment of all in the household? (Especially when it’s a movie of my short play, or a movie of a speech or presentation I just gave? What could be more entertaining on the large screen?)

I’m not the only one pondering the calculation of iPhone or Apple TV (assuming one is not going to buy both, which this one is not, at least not right away). Over on Macworld, they’re wondering which will go over bigger. (And just 10 years ago, this was not the question on analysts’ minds; the question was when would Apple be going out of business.)

I get frustrated with people who say things like “There’s no good music any more,” as though some previous time (usually their own adolescence and young adulthood) held the key to all good things. Actually, there’s lots of great new music of all sorts — it just has a hard time finding a place on airwaves dominated by “classic rock,” which caters to the selfish stinginess of the 60’s and early 70’s. I say this as a fan and follower of the Beach Boys, the Who, Pink Floyd and many other great bands who wind up on those classic rock stations — I just wish the format would open up to include new artists.

Luckily we have the internet (including iTunes), satellite radio, and Indie 103.1. Between those three venues, some terrific new music gets out.

Three albums in particular I want to plug (and put into the ears of those who think “good music” ended decades ago, whether they agree with me or not):

1. “The Good, the Bad, and the Queen” by, um, an unnamed band that insists its name is not the same name as its album. (Officially, the band has no name.) The band includes Damon Albarn (Gorillaz, Blur), Paul Simonon of the Clash, the guitarist of the Verve, and Fela Kuti’s old drummer. That’s a diverse bunch. The producer is Danger Mouse (of Gnarls Barkley, another recent fave of mine, as well as The Gray Album), and the atmosphere is a decided mix of drug-induced-experimental Beach Boys, early Pink Floyd just before Syd Barrett fried his brain, the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, and, um, a seedy carnival in town for one night. You haven’t heard new anything that sounded like this in more than 30 years. I’m sure Van Dyke Parks owns multiple copies. I love this album, and if you’re like most people you’ll absolutely hate it — so you’re forewarned.

“Return to Cookie Mountain” by TV on the Radio. If “The Good, the Bad, the Queen” is a creepy clown acid trip, this album is the soundtrack to that post-apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy novel I keep talking up. I’m so taken with “Wolf Like Me,” which I had heard all of twice, that I had a dream in which I was listening to it; I guess it made an impression. I saw this band two years ago when they opened for Franz Ferdinand at the Greek, and at the time I thought this was quite possibly the worst band I’d ever seen (a distinction soon achieved by The Polyphonic Spree, who opened for Brian Wilson and who were loudly and justly hooted and laughed at by whole sections of the Hollywood Bowl). I couldn’t imagine the raves they’d earned from people like David Bowie, whose opinion always counts. Even while I thought TV on the Radio was bad, very bad, I also could see that they had probably alienated some very key people at the Greek, i.e., the people working lights and sound, because they were mostly unlit and had a sound mix so bad I felt we were listening to a band playing underwater and on a distant planet. Listening to this record proves once again that Mr. Bowie is wise in all things.

While Pere Ubu is in no way a new band, “Why I Hate Women” is a new album by a band that continues to change. At times I find myself wondering if this may not be the best album in their 30-year history. They actually pull off what amounts to a blues song with “Blue Velvet,” featuring a haunting harmonica turn by Robert Kidney (The Numbers Band, the Golden Palominos). That song is bracketed by the atmospheric small-town ghost story of “Babylonian Warehouses” and the teenage raveup “Caroleen”; together these become a mini-suite probably never equaled in the history of the band. The rest of the album, especially “Love Song,” is just a strong. Vocalist David Thomas assays the neurotic subconscious of lost people on empty roads, but it is Robert Wheeler, playing theremin and synthesizers, whose sonic architectures evoke alien landscapes rarely explored.

Not to your tastes? I understand. But now more than ever there is a breadth of new music of all sorts, utterly available if you can get past the urgent determination of the mainstream radio dial.

They probably use traditional math, as expressed here by Ma and Pa Kettle.

I haven’t written about it here before, but given that I’m sure it’s going to start creeping in, it’s time to come clean:

Yes, I am a registered Democrat.

I know — you had your suspicions. Maybe it’s the way I walk, or talk, or something. But there it is.

Sometimes when people listen to me on various issues they momentarily think I’m a Libertarian, or a Republican, but no — I just happen to hold whatever common-sense provisions are so common-sense that even parties that have chased out all reason (that would be the GOP) hold them. Like: I think the government shouldn’t waste money. We may disagree on what “waste” is, but the concept is shared. I think the government shouldn’t be snooping into people’s medicine chests or bedrooms or mailboxes or email in-bins; that doesn’t make me a Libertarian, that makes me an American. Conceptually.

In January I was elected as a delegate to the California State Democratic Party, one of 12 elected delegates representing the registered Democrats in Assembly District 43. So: If you are a Democrat in Burbank, Glendale, Silver Lake, Los Feliz, Atwater Village, Valley Glen, or North Hollywood, I hope to do you proud. I ran on a “Progressive” slate that ran against another “Progressive” slate; that’s progress for you. Some members of our slate vigorously want things like redistricting, an end of term limits, and clean money campaigns — in other words, those things that help guarantee Constitutional free and fair elections, and true representation. That we have to define this as “progressive” is somewhat embarrassing; you would think these are core values.

As a delegate, I will be attending the California State Democratic Party Convention the last weekend of April in — you saw this coming, right? — San Diego. (No, I haven’t already booked my hotel room — and I bet I’ll be sorry.) Today was our orientation, and also my first introduction into people wanting my vote for resolutions to the party platform. I signed one to help it on its way (this particular one seeks to de-credential elected Democrats who endorse non-Democrats, such as Greens in particular), and I offered to take another one to the Burbank Democratic Club for endorsement (this one seeks to bring Clean Money elections to California).

If you’re wondering why I would put so much time into this (and into the Burbank Democratic Club, where only just this month I stepped down as president), you haven’t been reading the newspaper. Or this blog. And my tiny role in last November’s election results felt very rewarded indeed.

One more thing. Here’s just one indication of how much the Democratic party, which was founded in 1792 by slave owners with some otherwise rather attractive values, has changed: Today one of the resolutions introduced asked the Party as a whole to recognize the importance of white voters, who make up 72% of the Democratic vote. I’m a white guy, but it never occurred to me that one day I’d be in a room in the United States where someone was reminding us of the importance of the white people.

Who says nothing ever changes?

That’s how quickly the rooms for Comic-Con sell out every year.

When last we reported on hotel reservations for the 2007 San Diego Comic-Con, trusty friend Paul had secured us a suite. Since then, he’s been dutifully trying to get us a suite at the Embassy Suites because, well, we want to be even closer to the all-hours spectacle of funnybook debauchery and bad costumes (imagine jumbo-sized people stuffed into Ant-Girl-sized tights; lots of lycra, lots of yellow taffeta and powder-blue eyeliner and glitter). Here, from Sequential Tart, is why Alberto Gonzales has a better chance of remaining Attorney General than we do of getting a different room:

According to Comic Con International’s website 114,000 attendees, plus 9000 exhibitor staff (making a total of 123,000 people) attended 2006’s Comic Con International: San Diego.

In her February 2006 article, Why you didn’t get a hotel room in San Diego, Heidi MacDonald observed that while over 100,000 people attended 2005’s Comic-Con International: San Diego, less than 7,000 hotel rooms were available through the convention’s hotel website. (As an aside, MacDonald dug up not one, but two articles on how the San Diego Convention Center has outstripped the supply of hotel rooms.)

The situation for 2007 has not improved much. While the San Diego Convention Center Corporation (SDCCC) web site proudly boasts that there are over 10,000 hotel rooms within one mile of the convention center, page 10 of the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau’s 2007 San Diego Tourism Outlook reveals that only 269 hotel rooms were added in 2006, and that, “[s]ome projects expected to open in 2006 are now anticipated in 2007, when an estimated 2,300 rooms will be added, a 4.2% increase to the County’s total inventory.”

Just how many rooms are available in San Diego County? According to page 11 of the same report, the 2006 total is 51,882 (54,037 if counting Bed and Breakfasts, Spa Resorts, and Casino Resorts). Downtown, with its roughly 10,000 rooms, accounts for 27% of the county’s total.

A traditional economist — one versed in supply and demand — would say that either more rooms will become available (more hotels being built; some people quitting the Con is disgust with trying to get a room) while in the short-term at least the prices of rooms will rise. If all this is true, given the shortage of rooms — at any rate — I think my friend Alan in San Diego could rent out his sleeper sofa for $295 a night.

After more than 30 hours straight of writing, punctuated only by a few hours of passing out here in my office, I think I need to walk around the block or something.

The good news is, I’ve made strong progress on my book (about playwriting).

The other good news is that I finished a new one-act play in time for submission to a festival I was contacted about.

The not-so-good news is that I just caught myself sending emails like this one, to a friend of long standing (and sometimes sitting, and other times lying down):

Appropos of nothing, I thought I’d send you my new play, “Next Time,” written in time for submission to a one-act festival this September. (No idea if I’ll get in, but it’s run by a former grad student of mine — not sure if that helps or hurts.)

One brief moment in this play may seem familiar. About 15 years ago you wrote — and I mean HANDWROTE — a brief play in which versions upon versions of people stepped away from each other to show the layers and depths of a person. I swiped that, but because I’m lazy and it’s a short play, I’m showing only one layer, and they’re playing Monopoly. And the entire play is about layers of meaning and identity and reality, it’s completely removed from your own notion, as you see, but I wanted to acknowledge even the hint of a swipe where there might be one. So thanks for that, kind of, if, sorta.

Yes, I think it’s time for a break.

I’m not a believer in “rules” for writers. Where rules exist, good playwrights know them – and break them.

We break the rules of grammar to create dialogue that sounds like normal speech.

We break the rules of spelling to hint at character and dialect. Having a character say “tuff” instead of “tough” provides an indicator for the actor.

We break the rules of punctuation by placing commas not necessarily where they go but where we need them: to serve as brief musical rests for actors speaking our lines aloud.

And most importantly, we break the unwritten and unspoken but all too obvious rules of conformity and convention when we have our characters say, do, and be things that aren’t popular or nice. Society is that construct that ostensibly helps people get along by burying what’s uncomfortable; playwriting is a mechanism by which writers unearth the unpleasant for art and entertainment.

As opposed to rules, I believe in what I call “craft techniques” – theatrical givens passed down to us about how to help dramatic writing play better. Actors, directors, writers, all have these techniques, and they’ve kept them because they work. A few examples:

• Put the punchline at the end of a joke because otherwise other words step on the joke and kill the laugh.
• Don’t have an actor cross upstage on someone else’s important line because it steals focus.
• If you have an actor play against the expressed intention of the line, you can often get a stronger reading by revealing subtext.

These aren’t “rules,” which inhibit us; these are techniques that help us succeed, and they’re generally related to the production.

When it comes to the writing, rather than keeping in mind rules, there are three notions that I hang onto, all of them starting with “F.”

Playwriting should be – needs to be – freeing. The act of writing a play frees playwrights, through their characters, to explore issues and ideas however they see fit: to see where they take us, to look at things in a new light, to find out what we think and to learn what we don’t know. This is a gift we pass on to the audience. Being free in your writing is a prerequisite to writing.

At the same it, playwriting should be frightening. If you never ever stop and wonder if you’re going too far, then you assuredly aren’t. You need to go further. If you want an audience to worry about your characters, you’d better put them in situations that make you uncomfortable while you’re writing it. This doesn’t mean putting them in oncoming traffic; it usually means they’ve said too much, too unkindly, behaved too rashly and too wrongly, been too good and are now paying for it, or are just flat-out unlucky in a truly catastrophic fashion. If everyone is safe, the play is safe – and no one wants to see a play that plays it safe. Playing within the rules of good behavior is safe.

And playwriting should be fun. This is the other reason that rules are to be understood but rejected: They usually stand in the way of the creative impulse, of the fun. If you’re having no fun writing your play, imagine how little fun actors are going to have acting in it and audiences are going to have seeing it. By “fun,” I don’t mean comic (although if you’re writing a comedy, it’s generally a good thing if at least you think it’s funny). I mean: exciting. You get up in the morning eager to work on it and go to bed feeling the same way. You think about it in odd moments. It colors your perceptions, as when you see someone in a supermarket berating a child and you realize that’s the way your protagonist would act. You feel truly alive when you’re writing the play and somewhat asleep when you aren’t. Fun is motivational. If everyone had more fun – if everyone were able to have more fun – the world would be a funner place.

Rules constrict people. In larger society, that’s often a good thing. In playwriting, not. To write plays, you don’t need rules. You need freedom, fright, and fun.