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The following are character descriptions from the T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents website. The comic book series, developed by old EC hand Wally Wood, ran in the mid-60s under the obscure Tower comics imprint. A strange synthesis of the DC and Marvel styles with the pervasive acronymania of period espionage stories (U.N.C.L.E., S.H.I.E.L.D., et al) the strip was perhaps too thoughtful and melancholic to survive long. The writing below--Stan Lee meets Hemingway by way of Thurber minus the humor--gives a good sense of the dilemmas of morality and mortality Wood & Co. posed. Here's the setup: "A United Nations team counterattacks the assault on Professor Jennings' lab. Although the enemy is driven off, the man with the greatest mind in the world is found dead. In the wreckage of the famous scientists' lab, however, are several one-of-a-kind inventions," which are worn by the series characters, turning them into flawed superheroes:
THE BELT
What was it about that belt? It was truly amazing. It had powers. It would make the wearer incredibly dense, the density of hardened steel. Muscle power far greater than ten of the strongest men on the planet rolled into one. But only on a temporary basis. And at a cost. The life force of the wearer would be strained. The strongest man could only wear it for thirty minutes before complete exhaustion. Len Brown was the agent of T.H.U.N.D.E.R. who got that belt. Every evil organization wanted that belt...or wanted the one wearing it destroyed.
THE CLOAK
A cloak that imparted complete invisibility with a turn of a switch. But it was more than just the cloak. It was what the cloak hid underneath. To give legs to his aging body, NoMan was actually an android with the brain signature of Professor Dunn. But not just one android. Many expensive androids were made, and the mind of Professor Dunn could transfer into any one of those android bodies in a moment's notice - but only one android at a time. NoMan was human.
NoMan was machine. Torn between the two, perhaps forever.
Androids are machines first, and capable of failure. If NoMan, the combination of man and machine, were to fail without Professor Dunn transferring his mind out, his mind would be lost forever.
THE SUIT
Guy Gilbert makes that suit work. Its mechanism, triggered by the dial on his chest, speeds up everything for Guy. Lightning in a bottle. His top speed is really unknown. While the suit multiplies his speed, it also has a deadly drawback: It also multiplies his metabolism. Every time Guy uses the suit and becomes Lightning, the suit ages every cell in his body. Some people shorten their lifespan by smoking tobacco. Guy has shortened his by wearing the suit. The fastest man on Earth. Running away from his own demise. The faster he runs, the faster his doom chases him.
THE HELMET
The helmet created Menthor. T.H.U.N.D.E.R. was riddled with a variety of enemy agents. John Janus was one of them. Putting on the helmet was a major triumph of espionage, and it was just as great a failure of that same spying. Besides the apparent incredible telekinetic and telepathic powers of the helmet, there were the changes to the wearer to consider. As the helmet is used, the wearer's personality is affected. At first, it only happened when the helmet is worn. But the effects eventually lasted longer. Janus had planned to do great damage to T.H.U.N.D.E.R.; he was an agent for S.P.I.D.E.R., an evil organization. But for some reason, while wearing the helmet, his evil side was suppressed. Good. Bad. How deep inside a man's brain lies the human soul? The helmet can transmit the powers of the mind into action. The helmet seems to also transmute the human soul as well. The wearer can be converted from evil to good. And that has to be the strongest power of all.
Goff alludes to the Twilight Years of the Gasoline Economy we're currently living through (how long will it take Gaia recover after we've burned all the fuel?), and James Howard Kunstler eloquently indicts the unbalanced cities we've built for ourselves in such an economy. A constant theme of his Architectural Eyesore of the Month (page back through all of them--it's worth it) is how the automobile dominates planning priorities, giving us ugly homes, parks, and workplaces. I lived in the Washington DC 'burbs for a few years and it got to be heartbreaking watching developers tear out yet another chunk of forest to make room for some crap-ass subdivision, with big fuel-guzzling houses accessible only by fuel-guzzling autos. I flew over Atlanta recently and felt like crying for the same reason. Our slash-and-burn lifestyle is just nuts.
Nothwithstanding the above (and apropos of the bloodsucking theme in the upper left corner), the most potent issue in the coming campaign should be so-called outsourcing of jobs. Here's an article about CPA firms sending tax-preparation work to India. One might argue that the trend makes sense economically if it weren't for the record salaries upper managers are paying themselves. Keep pushing it, guys, you're really gonna enjoy the view from the lampposts you'll be swinging from in a few years.
Announcing the "Young Methuselah" Award for Longest Documented Period of Emergence by an Artist (This isn't a cynical category, but a hopeful one; because of the art world's perennial boneheadedness, you can still be a "new artist" for a very, very long time.)
And the winner is:
Scott Grodesky, who was the subject of an "Openings" column in Artforum in 1992 (which "introduced the work of artists at the beginning of their careers"), and is included this month (Jan. 2004) in "First Take: 12 New Artists" in the same magazine. "First Take" selector Carroll Dunham tries to account for this absurdity by explaining that Grodesky's work has "evolved" over the past 12 years, so he needs to be reevaluated as a new artist. Go figure.
Runner-up: Judith Eisler, whose first one-person show in NY was in the Luhring Augustine viewing room in 1995. She is also included in "First Take: 12 New Artists" in the January 2004 Artforum. I'm afraid to even look at the resumes of the other 10.
And as long as we're handing out awards, the Sixth Day Award for the Shortest Documented Period of Emergence by an Artist goes (somewhat belatedly) to Jennifer Pastor, the subject of an 1996 "Openings" column in Artforum. She was included in the Whitney Biennial (for many artists a career milestone) exactly one year later. Just keep working, people, none of this makes any sense.
UPDATE: A second runner-up for the Young Methuselah Award, Gareth James, has been named. Please see the comments to this post for a real laugh.
UPDATE 2: A friend of Gareth's says he's still emerging so I guess it's not so funny. The intimidating-sounding blurb for the architecture course he teaches at Cooper Union fooled me into thinking he was already there.
Between Christmas and New Year's Jim Bassett went to LA and environs and kept everyone visually informed on his photolog. All the pictures were taken with one of those cell phone/camera/internet browser combos, and even better, Jim worked out a way to resize and upload them directly to the website from the camera. The picture above is super lush and proves (along with many others) that this method is completely "there" as a photographic medium. Nice work, Jim! The California trip pictures start roughly halfway down this page. Click "older posts" at the bottom of that page to view more. |
At Belvedere Castle we had an excellent vantage point for the fireworks that blew off when '03 changed to '04. The police helicopters keeping us all safe from terror had an even better view of the show. After the Castle several of us rode down the newly-completed bike path that runs along the Hudson, and watched the moon set over New Jersey. Great night. Happy New Year to all.
UPDATE: An animated .GIF with pics of the event, by Kristin Lucas, is in the comments to this post.
| I recently added an archive for my 2003 artwork, which includes some of the .gif animations I've been doing lately. The one below is enlarged from its actual 157 X 175 pixel size, and I'm happy to report it looks OK in Safari internet browsers. UPDATE: I moved the animations (including the one below) out of my Artwork 2003 archive and into a new page called Animation Log).
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John Gregory Dunne, novelist, journalist, husband of Joan Didion, died yesterday. I highly recommend his book Monster: Living Off the Big Screen. Lucidly written, incredibly dry, it describes the process by which he and Didion adapted the story of TV anchor Jessica Savitch, which eventually became the dumb movie Up Close and Personal. If you want to know exactly why Hollywood offerings, and especially those produced by Scott Rudin and/or starring Robert Redford, are bland and suck, read this book. In real life Savitch's Svengali husband (played by Redford) was a wifebeater with a sick psychological hold over Savitch; barely a glimmer of this survives in the movie. Chapter by chapter, Dunne takes you through the process whereby reality, and a script, is transformed into uplifting, conventional treacle.
During the on and off writing of the Savitch screenplay, Dunne and Didion tackle a science fiction script, for a Simpson/Bruckheimer blockbuster (never filmed) called Dharma Blue. The plot concerns UFO-related goings-on at a mysterious research facility called Rhyolite. Written into a corner, they decide they need a lesson in current physics to move the story forward. Science go-to guy Michael Crichton's suggested dialogue about string theory cracked me up:
[Doctor, novelist, filmmaker] Michael Crichton has for years been our authority about matters medical and scientific. [I called him and said] Michael, tell me about string theory. "For a piece, book, or movie?" Michael asked. "Movie," we said. "You want to know what it is," he asked, "or do you need dialogue?" "Dialogue," we said, "and we need to keep it simple." "John," he said patiently, "It's a movie." We explained the circumstances. "I'll check some people and get back to you," Michael said.Dunne and Didion also start an action movie script, and feel considerable pressure to come up with "whammies"--an industry term for "special effects that kill a lot of people, usually bad people, but occasionally, for motivational impact, a good person, the star's girlfriend, say, or that old standby, the star's partner, a detective with a week left before retirement." After they submit a story outline filled with what they think is the requisite mayhem, director Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2) rejects it, and describes his ideal scenario: "'First act, better whammies,' he said. 'Second act, whammies mount up. Third act, all whammies.'"A few days before our meeting with Simpson and Bruckheimer, Michael called back with the requisite information, and helped us put it in dialogue form:
A. Most people think of the universe as having four dimensions. Height, length, depth, and time. String theorists have constructed a theoretical model of the universe with 26 orthogonal dimensions.B. Orthogonal?
A. At right angles...
B. But what does it mean that they're doing string theory at Rhyolite?
A. I think it means they're not doing theory any more.
(a beat) It means that...whatever they're out there to study...may appear to exist in more than four dimensions.
(another beat) It means they could be out there to see what 26 orthogonal dimensions looks like when it hits the real world.
Shinshi and Ohta at Narita Airport (with a few unscheduled takeoffs). From Patlabor: The Mobile Police. This file is at 109K [UPDATE: I corrected some of of the wobbliness in the framing]. In the comments to this post is a cleaner (330K) version of the file, which is truer to the source DVD. There is probably some easier way to convert DVD clips to animated .GIFs than the frame by frame reconstruction and compression I did. Let's just say I learned a lot about this 1 and 1/20 second of video.