Last night I red-eyed from Hollywoodland to Providence. Thanks to the time-zone bangup, I’ve no idea how long it took. This is for the best. A brutal 5am layover later and I’m home. Huzzah! Needless to say, travel doesn’t leave one in the best of mental states for the high impact sport of blogging, so I’ll use this post to throw out some miscellany.

#1. A few days ago I woke up and went into my kitchen and out of the corner of mine eye, I espied this lovely fellow:

Despite being situated in a relatively suburban/low-industrial area of Los Angeles, my apartment is overrun with wild life. Spiders (supposedly black widows, though I’ve yet to see one), ants, slugs, and the occasional roach. Once a tiny mouse. To say nothing of the genuinely unpleasant little dog that lives in the front of my building, nor the tomcat living under it. But a giant lizard? Amazing. Here’s a close-up after I caught this guy with my broom and a plastic bag:



#2. Anyone interested in Victorian ephemera, Jack the Ripper, hangings, or how I waste my life is directed here to a dissertation just published on Casebook.org. A small piece about a small discovery.

Still, it’s a hobby.

Digging through a pile of unread books, I uncovered a copy of Charles R. Cross’s Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Curt Kobain (2001). I bought this because a review in The New Yorker made it seem like there was a lot of depth. There isn’t. Sometimes a dead rockstar is just a dead rockstar.

However! Heavier Than Heaven is marked by the best/worst first paragraph I’ve ever read. And I’ve read (the first page) of John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance.

Here we go:

“The first time he saw heaven came exactly six hours and fifty-seven minutes after the very moment an entire generation fell in love with him. It was, remarkably, his first death, and only the earliest of many little deaths that would follow. For the generation smitten with him, it was an impassioned, powerful,and blinding devotion–the kind of love that even as it begins you know is preordained to break your heart and end like a Greek tragedy.”

Wow!

A bunch of stuff that’s too insubstantial for posts of their own.

#1. Everyone’s favorite hysteric, Andrew Sullivan, posts an English WWII propaganda poster that’s been making the rounds, including a mention on the dread Boing-Boing. I hadn’t seen it before, but… if we were living in a totalitarian city-state and I were your tyrant tyrant, this poster would be on every wall and in every home and building. People, listen up! By these words should your lives be lived!

#2. Speaking of propaganda, I found this story on Newsarama. It’s a by-the-numbers ain’t-they-great puff piece on Marvel’s forthcoming & so-called Indie Anthology, which has been drawing many second and first tier artists like moths to a flame. The sound of backs being slapped all around except for this remarkable quote:

“‘Another great thing about it is that it’ll be a perennial seller, since it’s not in continuity,’ said Sitterson.”

Uh, what? Is that an accidental admission that continuity, lately Marvel’s bread-and-butter (Cap’n America dead! Skrulls! Spider-Man angry!) doesn’t sell over the long term? Or an admission that continuity based stories are a niche-based market incapable of developing a broader audience? Or is it just Marvel, finally, thankfully just admitting its published product is purely boutique?

What a wonderful business model! Especially considering that the characters are now in hock to the bank.

#3. A commenter on my earlier rambling on the occult history of Mormonism writes in to say,

“Let’s remember that Christianity is also qite goofy: The belief that a cosmic Jewish zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so that he can remove from your soul an evil force that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree …”

Well, yeah. My post was not intended to defend Mormonism on the basis of it being Serious, but rather as Equally Ridiculous as any other religion. In the end, this is the same thing as being Equally Serious (it’s a collapse of the either/or binary) and not a valid criticism of either faith. As I mentioned, religions ask their adherents to believe weird, often crazy stuff. This is the mystery of faith and either you got it or you don’t.

In the eyes of latter day Atheists, who strike me as mostly anti-Christian with a bit of post-9/11 anti-Islam, this weird, crazy stuff is evidence of awful, earth-shattering superstition. Opiate of the masses, etc., etc. Which can be true, but it’s a little like being upset at rocks because someone’s taken out your eye with a sling. What isn’t a weapon in the wrong hands?

This argument also ignores the possibility that people know how strange their beliefs are and keep on believing. It’s not just the magical realism in Christianity that’s counter-intuitive (love thy enemy? turn the other cheek? give alms to the poor?). Do atheists really believe that any intelligent member of a religion hasn’t had this dialogue with themselves? C’mon kids, the whole point is believing bizarre things!

Like most arguments against religion and faith, it also seems a little sorry– the best example of a weak Atheist argument is that old favorite Why Does God Allow Evil, which really means Why Does God Let Bad Things to Happen to Good People, which really means, Why Did God Let Bad Things Happen To *ME*? Memo to Christopher Hitchens: somehow I don’t think the best argument against the existence of God is your girlfriend breaking up with you sophomore year. (Or whatever its English public school equivalent. O-levels? A-Levels? Who cares?)

But there I go again; atheists always turn me into a religious apologist.

‘Nuff said.

Yesterday I came the closest to dying that I’ve ever come in my life. My previous closest-to-death experience was when I caught myself falling off some cliffs near but not the Cliffs of Moher. There’s a chance I could have survived that, as I would have crashed into the water and was probably only about 100-125 feet up.

This totally beats that. Probably two inches, at most, from dead.

Really, really, really, really, really, really super dead.

The upside is eternal recurrence, right?

A miscellany:

#1. Okay, I give up. I’ve had my conversion. I adore Achewood and I don’t care who knows.

#2. Given the amount of dudes now dressing up like Captain Jack Sparrow outside of the Chinese Theatre, I propose the institution of a new Hollywood game: Pirate or Homeless?

#3. This interview fascinates not because the President is grilled by a journalist outside the clubby atmosphere of the mainstream media/White House press corps, but because of the unbelievable condescension with with Bush responds. Considering his general reputation as something less than a leading intellectual light, I’ve long found it interesting how much of Bush’s articulation involves speaking down to his listener, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen him manifest it like an Andover old boy. At first I thought it might be because the interviewer is a woman, and chicks need to be spoken to like they’re idiots, but then I realized: Oh my god, no, it’s because she’s Irish. Bush is talking down to her because she’s Irish, and when you’re at Andover or Yale in the 60s, who better to take a few lumps than Paddy?

Is that a new kind of transformer?

From: Harriet Mcghee <rauha.daniell@oom.at>
To: jarett@kobek.com
Subject: Saddam Hussein is alive!
Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2007 04:14:30 -0800
Message-ID: <01c7d972$9dddb3c0$fd3cffdc@rauha.daniell>
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1807

Good afternoon, dear! Sensation! Saddam Hussein is alive! Exclusive photos -
here! Thanks.

Holy! My blog got quoted in the September 7, 2007 print edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education. I’m not sure how long the google cache will last, but let’s hope forever!

Incidentally, this is the post that was quoted on the topic of Mitt Romney, the occult history of Mormonism, and the American double standard when it comes to faiths founded in the New World.

Best of the week (my week):

You learn something new every day.

Theoretically.

Here are some random pictures of weird witchy Salem stuff:

The lowest form of blogging– with YouTube links running a close second– must be a blogger writing on the topic of her or his own blog. Having admitted the crime, I now commit it and point out that this site has undergone a revision of design.

The original look was a relic of 2004, when I had fancied myself a political blogger & ran, for roughly three minutes, a politics themed blog. That whimsy died when I adopted a highly unfashionable apathy to World Affairs, or suffered my only period of prolonged depression– your choice, gentle reader!

When I established our present monster, I used a slight modification of the design that I had crafted for the old blog. This was sheer lazyness. Mea culpa. It also seems likely that I hardly believed this thing would last long enough to warrant any work beyond the writing. But look upon my works, ye mighty, for like a tough blonde dame out of David Goodis, BLOG.KOBEK.COM: Live & Direct From the Pleasure Dome has itself a swell set of gams and one nice pair of long legs.

Given the amount of content generated over the months, the old design became embarrassing in its thick-lined clutter and inadequate for any purposeful navigation. Thus, I’ve cleaned the thing up & thrown some navigatory aids in the sidebar– a list of what I consider (and search results indicate) to be the best moments in this blog’s short history, and also, further down, a handy catalog of catagories. Both the categories and the monthly archives now run in descending chronological order– a far more palatable state of affairs than reading everything backward. The main index continues to display the most recent posts first.

That’s about it. We now return to the regular state of barely updating.