"Kick Ass" kicks the comic books and superhero movies standards you know where

Warning: No big spoilers here - safe to read

By Dr. sipmac

¿Jan Luc Picard or James Tiberius Kirk? ¿Star Wars or Star Trek? ¿Law and Order or CSI? ¿DC or Marvel? Dr. sipmac's heart still belongs to the DC Universe, and he remembers how when he was a child he used to think of the Marvel superheroes as second-rate Super Friends wannabes. While Superman had a succesful major motion picture, Captain America had a lame movie to offer (a little research tells Dr. sipmac that it had to be one of the two 1979 TV Movies starred by Reb Brown or both). It was sometimes utterly painful to watch Peter Parker being regularly abused by J. Jonah Jameson, even if it was a cartoon. Hey, you can tell anything you want about Clark Kent, but he never took abuse from anybody just the way Parker did. And, ¿have you ever seen the dreadful Marvel cartoons of the WWII era?

But nowadays Dr. sipmac recognizes that Marvel has done a superior job since the begining, and always had the ambition to aim always for something different and edgier than its competitor, even within the boundaries of the Comics Code Authority. And it has handsomely paid off: The X Men movies, the Hulk movies, the Fantastic Four Movies, the Iron Man movies... and on the other side, a lame attempt to revive the Superman franchise and (fortunately) the Dark Knight.
Maybe Dr. sipmac oversimplyfies in his analysis, but you may think he's getting the overall picture right. Marvel connects a lot better with the readers than DC does and sets the trend where competitors parasitically thrive. The trendsetting example this time is, as the title already revealed, "Kick Ass". There is a lot of reviews for this movie, sip is not going to try to top, but he feels the need to share still a few more thoughts.

As in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, literature, even in the form of the "despicable" comic books is approaching reality and slowly reshapingly it. In the Golden Age of Comic books it took an extra-terrestrial or a multi-millionaire to fight crime; in the Silver Age the lead was taken by a geek that gained radioactive superpowers, and the modern age artists like to praise the exploits of superheroes with no powers, even no special training. Just like Kick Ass. Well, and that modern age Batman, the awesome and lethal Hit Girl.

For sip, it was hauntingly attractive to write a story about a superhero-without-powers for years. Well, you can say it's too late, it is already been done. But you didn't knew that the first requirement for that implausibly plausible character was his insanity. Yes, for Dr. sipmac it was clear from the beginning that the protagonist had to be a complete nutcase, with his madness barely concealed. Sip imagined an insignificant hard working clerk, a worthless peon tired with his mindless job, that decides to "fight evil" after working hours. He would dress as... a giant bird. He would drive an old clunker across the city until he could find something he could fight for.

And now you may think, sip, it's really too late. You are talking about Big Daddy, the father of Hit-Girl. No, sip is surely talking, er... retelling Don Quixote. Just think about it: take the superpowers or the special skills away from a costumed hero and tell me what you get? Don't be shy... yes, a ridiculous, insane and senseless person. A Don Quixote.

It surely can be found ideology traces in the comic book-movie tandem, but you (maybe) never thought you could find even deeper meaning in this externally harsh and coarse presentation. We need more Don Quixotes in this world.

What are you waiting for? Go and watch the movie!

Jorge Luis Borges, Patron Saint of the Internet? Well, Yes and No.

If there is anybody of whom I can assuredly identify myself as an admirer, without bothering too much by recognizing it, without being ashamed by blushing, that’s Jorge Luis Borges. An Argentinean man of letters, poet, a writer of short stories, reviews, essays and literary critiques; he was born in 1899, died in 1986. Married twice. These are very schematic details of a very interesting life. What happens in between will be discussed here, in the accustomed way of Paul: eclectically, disorganized and incoherently.

Every writer/creator admitted to the Pantheon of the Greatest (immortal, universal literature classic- you know-) normally leaves to the posterity a very powerful image to be remembered for eons: Cervantes had Don Quixote and Sancho, Shakespeare had Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, García Márquez had Colonel Aureliano Buendía. Others leave as a powerful image, not a character but a place: Thomas Moro left his Utopia, the same García Márquez has Macondo; Borges belongs in this second category. We vaguely could remember the affront suffered by Emma Zunz, or the affront perpetrated by Kilpatrick, but we always better remember Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and the Library of Babel both as two of the most marvelous and at the same time monstrous visions of universal literature.

Talking about the extraordinary capacity that Borges had for playing (and toying, why not?) with ideas might be redundant, but one has to do it. To describe a world, in which Berkelian idealism molds every knowledge, perception, civilization and language (Bite on that bullet, Chomsky!), and in the meanwhile materialism is not a heresy, but the mother of all heresies, that is more than scholar’s trickery: it takes years to metabolize the whole short story and grasp all the ramifications coming out of it. I’m still thinking of Tlön (and Uqbar, and Orbis Tertius, for that matter), and I know I’ll never go too far.

Why? Because we’re not Jorge Luis Borges. Most of us weren’t born in a bilingual family at the crossroads of XIX and XX centuries, nor we didn’t spend our early childhood and adolescence in a big family library, nor we weren’t taken from Buenos Aires to Switzerland and then to Spain; i.e., we didn’t have our whole lives to prepare an erudition comparable to that belonging to the Universal Argentinean himself. Some people is going to elaborate about Infinite Monkey Theorem ad nauseam, but is remarkable indeed, that humanity had to wait some 1950 or 1400 (consider the source) years from the destruction of the Alexandria Library, for someone bold enough to conceive the Total Library: The Library of Babel, in which all the knowledge that was, is and will be exists, and the one that isn’t, too.That is Borges.

By the way, could you imagine the power of the Librarian that could grasp the order of such a library? Well, it would be bigger than a poultry inspector for the Buenos Aires municipal market, for sure. That ‘promotion’, from the post of head librarian, was an indignity our writer had to suffer, a courtesy of the newly arrived peronista regime, as a reminder of what totalitarian regimes, dictatorships and chieftains really mean to literature. But why bother, Borges himself said:

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.

I insist in things like these, because thanks to them, the Nobel Prize of Literature awards more ideological affinity than real talent. Borges, being basically a conservative, it is said he lost every chance of winning by committing the mortal sin of accepting an award in Pinochet’s Chile (he would regret that later). Besides, what about Kafka? Too much of an offbeat writer, or too much of a posthumous writer? And Joyce? And Proust? It is said that the greatest cable channel that never existed could be made with all the series Fox cancelled. Well, you could easily create quite an anthology with all the Nobel rejects.

Not all is bitterness: Borges could have make mistakes, but his achievements and regrets are securing the place he rightfully deserves in our time. For instance, being named by Wikipedia as his precursor, is a vindication. According to its Spanish article on him, the way the artistic and scientific works were published in Tlön, resembles a lot of that of the Wikipedia (with the same ideological bias uniformity, I might add).

Without fake modesty, I’ve been thinking of this for years, the question was if Borges preconfigured or preconceived the Internet. Nowadays anybody could say yes, being Internet a combination of the encyclopedic project Orbis Tertius, inserted in a Library of Babel (you know, the Labyrinths are kind of a Borges' specialty). What makes me doubt is thinking that the Internet era could not give birth to Jorge Luis Borges. Being born in these times, his energies would have been channeled into developing software, videogames or virtual reality environments. Our real and historic Borges deals a lot better  being considered as custodian and/or Saint Patron of the pre-Internet culture. It was the traditional culture, with its information-flow limitations, and the language barrier partially dissembled by someone who only realized after years that a part of his family spoke English and the other one spoke Spanish. That was the culture that allowed him to visualize in the virtual reality of the human imagination, the virtual reality of the computers.

I strongly recommend the reading of Jorge Luis Borges. FULL DISCLOSURE: I’m not even halfway to read his complete works yet.

Told ya, you were running out of luck!

Charlie Sheen was awarded an a-hole of the year prize last year by Dr. sipmac. He was in a very delicate position then, to put it mildly. Now, he went to rehab, shutting down the "Two and a Half Men" effectively. The careless, happy-go-lucky, drunken whoremonger bachelor attitude works only in fiction, it seems. At this moment, nobody knows what is going to happen to the sitcom (and Mr. Sheen, for that case). Anyway, Dr. sipmac wishes both of them luck (and the entire cast, why not).

BTW, it is a policy of sipmacrants! to follow up the published newsitems.

Dr. sipmac is a TAAHM fan but does not support irresponsible behavior.

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Beatles Catalog (Finally) Remastered – A satiric Beatles-wordplay-and-puns-free assessment

On September 9th, 2009, the entire Beatles original catalog was released to an always avid target: three loyal generations of Beatlemaniacs and unsuspecting buyers we could qualify as collateral damage. As we saw with the 2006 released Love, we could appreciate in the documentary how difficult it was to the producers to come up with decent mashups, even with the entire same catalog at disposition (Yeah, sure. Just look out for Beatles’ mashups in Youtube. Start with Paperback Believer). With this in mind we can infer how difficult it was the remastering of every single song released in the 13 official albums with the singles and EP original material without botching it.

Because it doesn’t matter how many times the marketing team ends up not with a bang but with a wimp: the original songs remained the same. Until now. With such a task, the EMI engineering team, supervised by none others than Paul, Yoko, Olivia and Ringo, worked 4 years straight… until they could not hear a Beatle song anymore. First they searched for similar experiences around the world. Finally, in Colombia they bought the 1998-produced 30 Grandes Exitos – Diomedes Díaz and the original albums. After carefully (and for most of them, painfully) listening, they knew then what to do exactly with the Beatles catalog:

* First, suppress all chat and greetings to zero. Otherwise the recordings get too mundane instead of classy. Since Let It Be… Naked was released in November 2003, people would know already what to expect. Oh! Sorry What Goes On Website, your work is not needed anymore.

* Get rid of embarrassing out-of-tune performances! That means you, Hold Me Tight! Ole Paul was literally forced to re-record the With the Beatles’ track entirely with the early technology and sing correctly this time. When he protested, George Martin said: “You saw this coming from 46 years ago!” Mr. Moonlight? Out with the annoying Hammond solo! And another slap in the wrist for Macca!

* As in "30 Grandes Exitos", where the guacharaca was suppressed and replaced for *stylish, refined* cymbals, the entire drums and percussion of the tracks were removed and replaced with a drum box! In an upcoming Rolling Stone interview, Ringo will talk about how he is finally fed up with being the butt of jokes and harsh and unfair criticism for his drumming job in the band, so he gave up all his work for a bigger share in the Beatles’ business. Finally a point for Macca (fair or unfair his drum parts weren’t removed)!

* Revolution 9 was supposed to be enhanced with disparaging remarks of Michael Jackson made by Paul, Yoko, Olivia and Ringo, but self-styled King of Pop’s death recent death made them quit the project.

* As a special gesture, Strawberry Field Forever was intended to be reworked since the late John was never satisfied with the final result, the originally 1967-released version. But it was not possible to contact him, in spite of all the attempts made.

* In the most controversial move, all non-Harrisongs lead and rhythm guitar work was scrapped and replaced for all new Macca and Eric Clapton’s work. In his final days, close to achieve another happier and peaceful plane of existence, George Harrison couldn’t care less about the request and gave his permission to this. If this was the way for Macca to “finally set things straight”…

Well, speaking seriously now I wish the entire work can be heard as I heard Let It Be… Naked for the first time. Thank you, lads!

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After the Highway Scene, It Was Downhill All The Way From There

Image via Wikipedia

I found this fascinating quote today:

9. Matrix 2/3: Sometimes, when a good movie is made, recognized as being good, and the filmmakers are given the money and creative freedom to expand their vision, you get greatness.  Not this time.  Where the first Matrix movie had been a lean, mind-twisting tale with groundbreaking special effects, the second and third were muddled, self-indulgent philosophical drivel with gaping plot holes.  Alas for what could have been.10 Geeky Movies That Should Have Been Great, but Weren't, Aug 2008

You should read the whole article.

In Cold Blood - A Political Prism?

Last Sunday I was reading the papers and I found an interesting piece about a well-known left-wing columnist commenting In Cold Blood – both the movie and the book. Until now, I have not seen the movie yet – so I won't discuss that part. But it seems the columnist and I read two different books - That's Art with a capital A, folks! You only need the rosy-red glasses to read a different work and you can sympathize with Perry Smith!

For me it was comprehension. You could see what a miserable life it was for the two murderers and their so-called adventures before and after their infamous massacre. But you could see that before there was a little ordinary life they could have continued.

You can go on and on about the Depression years, how difficult it was for the Smiths, but despite what the author says, they still had a chance – witness Bobo. The current TV-Law-and-Order version is that criminals have little chance of redemption. The Capote pals never found real remorse – according to the book. Maybe they found it, but then the author and the critic may have found it lessening the literary quality of the novel.

Anyway, sympathizing with the murderers feels like desecrating the Clutters' memory. That's the point. No piece victimizing the perpetrators will undo that.

Dr. sipmac has ranted.

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