I was digging into my copy of Comics for Ukraine — and so already keenly aware
of the compartmentalization we practice daily to appreciate art in the midst of tragedy or, more generally, simply live our lives even as they or the lives of others are under imminent threat — when reports came in from Israel of the horrifying assaults there
on Saturday.
The book, just recently arrived, was crowdfunded in June of last year through Zoop
to benefit the work done by Operation USA. Its subtitle is Sunflower Seeds after the curse directed at Russian soldiers by a bold Ukranian woman who told them to put seeds in their pockets so that when they die sunflowers will grow in their place on the land they attempted to occupy.
Bryan Walsh contributed a good piece on Hurricane Sandy to last week’s issue of Time.
He details Sandy’s effects but also suggests how to prepare as storms like Sandy — a hurricane turned post-tropical cyclone after merging with the Arctic jet stream to form a hybrid nor’easter that some dubbed “Frankenstorm” — become a fact of life in what (most rational minds now agree) is an era of consequential climate change.
I’ve felt a bit of survivor’s guilt over Sandy, to be honest.
You think you’re done with “Call Me Maybe”? You cringe when your car radio lands on it for even a moment? You swear that no cover, mashup, or parody could ever get you to listen to that song again?
I’m here to sympathize but also to tell you that you must hear it one more time, at least if you haven’t yet seen the Night of Too Many Stars duet between Harvey Keitel and Carly Rae Jepsen. Keitel pulls a William Shatner by doing his part as a spoken-word performance exactly as you’d imagine Harvey Keitel would.
Night of Too Many Stars is the biennial variety-show founded by Robert Smigel and hosted by Jon Stewart to benefit autism programs. This year’s edition aired last Sunday on Comedy Central as a live telethon with clips from a show held the previous Sunday at New York City’s Beacon Theatre. Other standout moments included Katy Perry singing “Firework” with 11-year-old Jodi DiPiazza and Louis CK auctioning off a holiday-card photo with Al Pacino.
[Update: My links have unfortunately all gone bad, although if you find and enjoy the material elsewhere online you can hopefully likewise find a way to donate.]
Related: Gift Rap • Muppet Monday • Crazy Talk
Digital version of newsstand cover to Static #1 © 1993 Milestone Media.
Pencils: Denys Cowan. Inks: Jimmy Palmiotti. Colors: Noelle Giddings.
This post is currently down for maintenance.
I’ve been meaning to write about comics veteran Tom Ziuko since the news broke
last year that he was ill.
Ziuko was a longtime colorist for DC. I vividly recall being struck by his muted yet vibrant work on the cover to 1986’s Legends #1, which I’m pretty sure was also one of the earliest covers to carry a colorist signature along with that of the pencil and ink artist(s) — in this case, John Byrne.
Cover to Legends #1 © 1986 and characters TM/® DC. Pencils, Inks: John
Byrne. Letters: Gaspar Saladino. Colors: Tom Ziuko. Editing: Mike Gold.
The Grand Comics Database lists over 1,500 credits for Ziuko spanning nearly 30
years of covers and interiors, from Superman to Hellblazer to Animaniacs, including color reconstruction on reprint projects for both Marvel and DC.
My family is full of special kids — funny, smart, good-looking. I’d expect nothing less from the Saner gene pool, really, but a small part of me figured that statistically there’d have to be one dud in the bunch, if only by comparison to the rest. So far, though, from the youngest up through the eldest, born my senior year in college and now a sophomore herself, the next generation is pretty universally awesome.
Ravi, however, is special in a particularly special way. That’s in part due to his being on the autism spectrum, yes, but also because — to take the aphorism from Job out of context and turn it on its head — while the Lord taketh away, the Lord also giveth.
A year ago at a family dinner, I had a chat with Ravi to figure out a good book to get him for his impending 6th birthday, asking if he preferred history or fantasy (or liked both).
Ravi: “I prefer history and non-fiction to fiction.”
Me: “Do you have a favorite period of history?”
Ravi: “About 4.6 billion years ago is the limit of my interest in history.”
Me: “...”
Ravi: “That’s approximately when Earth and the solar system were created.”
Of course I remember September 11th, 2001. Not a soul who was of age to
remember it will ever forget. And no matter what that day was going to be for them, when it started, it ended up different.
I was supposed to move that morning, only the truck broke down. We got a call quite early — at my mother’s house, where I’d been staying between apartments — that the hauling of stuff would have to wait a day. Sure, I could have gone over to the new place and spent the night there anyway; the events that soon unfolded, though, called for family. I sat and watched Peter Jennings cover the unfathomable news just as I had 25 years earlier, home from school with the flu on the day the Challenger was lost.
That’s all you’ll hear me say directly about the grim scenes whose 10th anniversary we mark today because, really, there are no words.
What to do, then? How to do… something?
May 1st is celebrated in various places as May Day with events greeting the season
of spring. The date has nothing to do with the international distress call “mayday” but seemed as good a time as any to offer some links for disaster relief.
I don’t write much about real-world stuff here on the blog, with the exception of family anecdotes. For a while now, though, I’ve been feeling like I should address the tragedies wrought in recent months by natural disasters.
We’ve had a notable string of such events going for the past several years, in fact, perhaps due in part to climate change but according to many geologists and meteorologists largely due to the fluke of earthquakes affecting more populated areas than usual — even if the number of such earthquakes (and resultant tsunamis) isn’t significantly greater than normal on a global average.
I nearly posted something after the 6.3 earthquake that struck New Zealand earlier
this year. Ditto the massive 9.0 earthquake that hit Japan, not only wiping out large areas with astounding floods but of course wreaking havoc on those nuclear reactors. Then a series of devastating tornados struck here in the United States of America.
Over two years into the experiment that is Blam’s Blog, I have yet to put up a “tip
jar” button. I’d rather you take whatever enjoyment you get out of my online offerings guilt-free — until I start whittling down my stash of books and magazines, anyway, or there’s a new book to hawk, which you are then perfectly welcome to feel obligated to buy. However, I would be thrilled for you to express your regard for my writing by taking the scratch you might normally be moved to drop in my virtual hat and donate
it to a worthy cause.
