Happy what’s left of Bastille Day, and apologies for the long absence. I’ve been meaning to post, but my energy’s been at a low ebb recently. Could be the heat. Could be a mood thing. Could have something to do with my health overall. I honestly don’t know.

It’s been a strange couple of weeks.

Much of that time has been spent banging my head against the wall, trying to solve certain story and character problems for the new DC project. The cranial abuse was unnecessary, of course. The answers finally came to me in the shower, when I wasn’t thinking about the work at all. But the agonizing seems to have been worth it. Editor Joey Cavalieri was pleased with the material, Dan DiDio has given it the necessary nod, and I now have the go-ahead to start writing scripts.

One aspect of the project proved especially challenging. It involves a character who, at the most basic conceptual level, is completely at odds with my own beliefs about the origin of the universe and who’s been at the controls ever since. This part of the project was more in the nature of an assignment, something Joey came up with, not something I proposed myself. When he suggested it, I hesitated for about two seconds, then agreed to take it on, precisely *because* of the vexation factor.

Here’s a creative principle I believe in strongly: Every writer, at some point, should require himself or herself to write a sympathetic character whose worldview is diametrically opposed to the writer’s own. And when I say “sympathetic,” I don’t just mean “likeable.” I mean, not a caricature, not a vehicle for ironic comment, not a misguided soul whom the hero sets straight. I mean a three-dimensional character whose actions are guided by deeply-felt principles and with whom readers — and, more importantly, the writer — can identify, in spite of the fact that they may wildly disagree.

It’s a difficult exercise, but also a lot of fun. The first time I attempted it was in a Spider-Man annual back in the ’80s. The character was a refugee from the Castro regime who came to the U.S. in 1980 in the Mariel Boatlift. Like the majority of Cuban-Americans, her politics leaned to the right. She was staunchly anti-Communist and, though her party affiliation was never specified in the story, unapologetically Republican. *And* she was a superheroine.

Anyway…

I still can’t tell you what the new project is, but it can’t remain a secret much longer. We’re shooting for an early ’07 publication date.

It’s been a strange time on a personal level, also, but I’ll save that for the next post.

I know I promised that my next post would be non-political, but then my friend Dave Kraft sent me the following, from the Wayne Masden Report:

June 28, 2006 — WMR has reported on the explosive information from two Iraqi War Army counter-intelligence veterans that they uncovered materials and documents proving that some of Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons were provided in 1988 by The Carlyle Group, through Spanish and French intermediaries. WMR has learned that pre-cursor and recombinant chemicals used in Iraqi WMDs were provided by a Texas petrochemical company and a chemical/biological toxin firm in which George H. W. Bush held and continues to hold a financial stake.

I gather this site is the lefty equivalent of Drudge, so it’s probably advisable to take its reportage with a grain of salt, or perhaps the entire Bonneville Salt Flats. But if any of this very long article is even *remotely* true, it’s — well, not dynamite, exactly — something a little more destructive and massier. (Colbert disease. Sorry.)

There’s also a very funny item about the alleged W/Condi tryst, which the Globe tabloid now seems to be hawking on a regular basis. I don’t take this very seriously, but — who knows? It was the tabloids that broke the Gennifer Flowers story, too.

On a completely unrelated note, I saw “Superman Returns” Friday. It’s not bad. If you’re favorably inclined toward the character and the Donner/Reeve interpretation thereof, chances are you’ll enjoy it. (The film is not without its nits — most glaringly the total waste of Parker Posey as a Miss-Tessmacher-except-without-a-personality character — but I’ll leave the picking to others for now.)

From the L.A. *Times*: “Spike Goes to the Mat to Get Guys”.

Since the days of the Reagan administration, conservatives and corporate types have been engaged in an intense and wide-ranging media campaign to convince men that it’s cool to be stupid (nuance is for pussies); cool to possess the attention span of a gerbil; cool to be concerned solely with one’s own immediate gratification, whether that means sacrificing everything for a cold brewski *now* or marching off to a feelgood war chanting “USA! USA!”.

Because they want a nation that can be easily led, America’s rulers — the partisan and corporate interests who are the architects of our consumption-obsessed, escapist culture — want a docile, easily-distracted, intellectually neutered, aggressively apolitical male population.

They’re getting what they want. 200,000 more women than men earned college degrees in 2005. Which raises an interesting question: Are educated women really going to like stupid men? Maybe so, for the same reason the politicians and corporate interests do. Maybe so, for the same reason men supposedly liked the archetypal dumb blonde: the willfully moronic male can be used, dismissed, and discarded without guilt or remorse.

It’s in the stores, I’ve heard.

So — what did you think?

Can someone please tell me if I hallucinated this?

I could swear that sometime in the late ’60s, a folk-rock group or solo artist recorded a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” with electric (maybe twelve-string) guitar, prominent bassline, drums — everything you’d expect would pulverize such a delicate melody and lyric…except, it didn’t. Somehow, it actually worked.

Does anyone else remember this record? Can anyone tell me the name of the singer or group?

Or am I remembering a record that never existed?

I received the following mass-email from MoveOn.org this afternoon:

Everyone expected House Republicans to give up efforts to kill NPR and PBS after a massive public outcry stopped them last year. But they’ve just voted to eliminate funding for NPR and PBS — ­unbelievably, starting with programs like “Sesame Street.”

Public broadcasting would lose nearly a quarter of its federal funding this year. Even worse, all funding would be eliminated in two years–threatening one of the last remaining sources of watchdog journalism.

Sign the petition telling Congress to save NPR and PBS again this year.

Last year, millions of us took action to save NPR and PBS, and Congress listened. We can do it again if enough of us sign the petition in time.

This would be the most severe cut in the history of public broadcasting. The Boston *Globe* reports the cuts “could force the elimination of some popular PBS and NPR programs.” NPR’s president expects rural public radio stations may be forced to shut down.

The House and Senate are deciding if public broadcasting will survive, and they need to hear from viewers like you. Sign the petition at:

http://civic.moveon.org/publicbroadcasting/

Thanks!

Okay, so the tone is a bit too alarmist. Even the *Globe* article says the proposed cuts will never make it past the Senate.

Like the Senate’s own debates on gay marriage and flag burning, the House’s passage of this bill is mostly an act of theatre, another attempt to shore up the Republican base by pandering to the Christian right. (It’s been a pattern that when small NPR stations fail, Christian broadcasters immediately swoop in and apply to license the vacated frequency. How charitable.) So maybe there’s not much to worry about.

Still, this little stunt comes on the heels of Ann Coulter’s appalling “I Spit on Your 9/11 Grave” moment, one more reminder that *nothing* is beneath these people.

Go sign the petition. What can it hurt?

FactCheck.org on those “Competitive Enterprise Institute” (i.e., oil companies) TV spots intended to counter Al Gore’s new film and book.

Just a short piece from the *Huffington Post* about a subject that’s been nagging at me lately — not the stamps, particularly, but the larger issue of business worming its way into the public sphere and, almost unnoticed, planting and cultivating a corporate value system among individuals.

A somewhat unconventional view of the process and the profession in this era of corporatized creativity.

From Steven Grant’s Permanent Damage column this week:

HARD TIME #2-5 by Steve Gerber, Mary Skrenes & Brian Hurtt, 32 pg color comics ($2.50@)

I still can’t quite warm up to Hurtt’s art, but it has grown more expressive, and the real show here is Gerber & Skrenes’ brutal prison drama/social drama. Teenage co-conspirator in a Columbine-like incident ends up doing 50 years in maximum security, and incessantly finds himself the prey of older, tougher cons while his mother and lawyer try to line up do-gooders to secure his release. The hero’s life is simplified slightly by sympathetic if reticent fellow cons and an ancient, invisible energy being that lives in the hero’s body. In this second series – unfortunately, it’s currently walking its last mile – Gerber & Skrenes shift the battleground a little, moving slowly from questions of mundane evil to cosmic evil, as a serial killer enters the prison population. If anything published by a major company qualifies as a writer’s tour-de-force, this does. Buy it while you still can.

Full disclosure: Grant is a fellow Las Vegan and a friend, but this review was unsolicited and unexpected. Thanks.

(We disagree, though, about Brian Hurtt’s artwork. I think Brian’s moody, yet straightforward approach to the material suited *Hard Time* perfectly.)