Will Hines Dot Net

The warm weather caught me off guard, and I still wore my thick winter coat yesterday and today. I felt like a tank wheeling down Hudson St. with all these lighthearted people strutting by in their short sleeve shirts holding skateboards.

I’m also carrying around two bent up and dented license plates from the car I gave away a month ago. It’s such a hassle to get down to the Brooklyn DMV, located in (begin sarcasm)convenient(end sarcasm) Coney Island, that I’ve had them with me this whole time. But I’m determined to get them in the mail today. At any rate, while ambling down the street in my enormous coat, I pulled them out of my bag to inspect them. To anyone walking by, I’m sure I looked like a homeless person, hiding license plates in his coat to protect them from spying government eyes.

Separate topic: I am enjoying the latest Strokes album. They don’t make great stuff, but they don’t make bad stuff. Thank you Strokes. Animal Collective was boring my soul right out of my bones.

It goes something like “Just to get BY, just to get BY, just to get BY” or maybe it’s “just to get HIGH, just to get HIGH, just to get HIGH.” It rocks. It’s not some slower mid-tempo thing. I’ve heard it on Sirius here at work but have never done the necessary leg work (i.e. walking across the room) to get a song title and artist info. I would sing it for you, but this is just a writing blog and I have the vocal range of a rock.

Part of Eliza’s and my trip upstate last weekend was me discovering the October 17, 2005 issue of The New Yorker. I subscribe to that magazine but never read it because I’m inefficient that way. So this was my first viewing of it. To my DISMAY, it had an article on the state of comics books called “Words and Pictures”, subtitled “Graphic Novels Come Of Age.”

Ugh! Journalists of the world, know this: there is NO reason to tell people that “comics aren’t for kids anymore” or that “comics are serious literature” or as this article said “Graphic novels — pumped up comics — are to many in their teens and twenties what poetry once was.”

I’ve read this same story in dozens of magazine since at LEAST 1981 when Frank Miller first started writing Daredevil. And again when Art Speigelman released Maus. And again when Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons released Watchmen. And again for Ghost World. And it probably happened back in the late 1970s when Will Eisner released “A Contract With God” and earlier than that when Zap #0 showcased Robert Crumb.

Every article on comics in the mainstream press is an apology for it, a pre-emptive defense and a redundant vague list of whatever comics the snobs are reading.

Comics will have made it when no one feels the need to tell you that they’ve made it.

Here’s my redundant vague list, because I can’t activate the geek portion of my brain without making a list and I’m a hypocrite:

1. Caricature, by Dan Clowes. Forget Ghost World and David Boring! This story shows his ability to make characters who are familiar but not cliche. In this one, the manipulative precocious girl who both charms and needs the loser caricaturist.

2. Heartbreak Soup – Gilbert Hernandez. Passion and humor and action — a heightened soap opera in which no character experiences emotions on any level less than 100%.

3. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 1 — Alan Moore/Kevin O’Neill. Great fun when a survivor of Dracula, Mr. Hyde, the Invisible Man, Allan Quartermain and Captain Nemo team up to save London! Get on it!

4. Batman: Year One. Beautiful art with a bold simple story. Don’t be an ass! Get this one!

5. I Never Liked You — Chester Brown. Saddest story ever, in simple and slight drawings, framed by oceans of blackness. This is the type of comic you picture when you think of the sad mopey nightmare that is “Independent Comics” but this one is good.

And 30 others.

My standards for when it is proper to recycle are completely arbitrary. I resent bundling up cans and bottles at home because NYC recycling procedures are so Byzantine that I feel like I’m figuring out my taxes once a week. So a lot of times I’ll throw a few bottles in the regular trash if it means putting off dealing with the mandatory light blue bags.

However, I stubbornly refuse to get new paper cups at work. I reuse the same one for weeks. It makes my desk look about 30% more disgusting and contributes exactly .00000000001% to the further preservation of our planet. It’s filled with water but flakes of leftover coffee stain it brown, as if I scraped my drink from a pothole. I don’t mind the mild coffee taste and even like to pretend that I’m living in a post-apocolyptic world where there isn’t much water and I’m grateful for the filthy liquid handed out by the Feeding Robots that run on garbage. Really, I should just bring in a mug and wash it.

Your Friend,
Andy Rooney

It seems over the last 3 or 4 months that when walking around New York City I am perpetually trapped immediately behind a slow person of the fat variety. He or she will step in front of me as I depart the subway and bob in front of me like sagging inner tube blocking my path out of the pool. And I’ll race up out of my seat, already late to my next appointment, only to be stuck behind them as they widen their bodies by sheer force of will — looking up and around like a mentally retarded duck, forcing me to BE SLOW. They have strollers, they are eating sandwiches, they are eighty-five years old and don’t trust their brittle knees to be quick, they are four or five people abreast.

I know that to be a person who is always in a hurry, rushing around, walking hurriedly with my head down is to be living life INCORRECTLY. Stop and smell the roses, people say. Eat more slowly. I diplomatically say to this school of thought: NO. I didn’t move to New York City to dawdle and observe. I moved her to GET TO WHERE I AM GOING. Karma be damned.

Maybe the universe has sent them to me to force me to change my perspective.

Maybe I’m just overextended so I’m always late.

Maybe I’m not so important and there’s just a certain number of slow people and when you walk quicker than 90% of the people around you you’re soon going to be behind someone slower and it doesn’t mean anything more than that and I should shut up and maybe wake up a bit earlier.

Saw V for Vendetta Thursday night with Eliza, Kevin and Cat. My proclomation: it was….. okay! A bit better than Batman Begins, and I wasn’t overwhelmed with that. But Brian loved Batman Begins and Kevin loved V — as did Eliza and Cat — so I feel like I must be suffering from pre-conceived notions from having loved the comic first.

Qualifiers of my own credibility aside, I thought it was gutsy in a lot of ways, but ultimately felt like someone trying to simply do a good job of being faithful to some list of requirements rather than telling a story. It felt like a list of ideas being stated, rather than a story being told. “What I believe is X, because I stand for Y” sort of thing. That stood out the most when Evey is talking to Gordon, the comedy show host who’s hiding his homosexuality from the fascist regime.

That’s the challenge with Alan Moore stories, I think. There’s his storytelling — which is genius and without fault — and there’s the messages he chooses to tell, which are often bat-shit crazy! I point to Promethea as an example. I can’t put the book down — it’s a page-turner because Moore knows how to DO that somehow, and yet it’s also Alan Moore’s tutorial in the philosophy in magic and how the world may be ending in 2010 because the way certain symbols of a Tarot Card deck add up. But if you want that beautiful storytelling — the master of plot and idea — then you have to read about Jack the Ripper conspiracy theories, futurustic superheros trying to destroy New York City and a man in a Guy Fawkes mask killing corrupt policemen.

V for Vendetta as a story isn’t THAT crazy — though it is pretty harsh. A violent anarchist is rebelling against a fascist, Big Brother-esque government by blowing up buildings and murdering high party members. Harsh. The movie did a lot less softening of this than I expected. Once V gets going, I think he’s a figure of genuine terror and murderous rage — which is a big part of the book.

But when I read the comic book, the characters — no matter how crazy their actions — feel like REAL PEOPLE. That’s what’s amazing about them. And in this movie, they all felt like walking “character sheets” — with their dialogue simply spouting their points of view in ways that real people rarely articulate. I think they did a good job of simplfying the book. And the I even liked the new ending, although it fundamentally changes the point of view of the book. And the mask was scary. There was too much talking in the first half, but the second half had a lot of great visual sequences that maybe needed the talkiness to pay off.

Anyway, I’m thrilled that Alan Moore’s book is on the big screen. Even if he had his name taken off.

Doing an improv show tomorrow night with Primal Bias, 5 Dudes and special guest Chantico Warfare. Silly names, all! Basically three good improv groups, $8 — and, no shit — 40 oz. beers handed to the first buncha people there. Maybe everyone, depending on how many we buy before the show. Probably everyone. Come and be late 90s gangstaz Saturday night.

10:30, $8
UNDER St. Marks
94 St. Marks Place, between 1st Ave. & Avenue A
Basement space, no wheelchair access
(st. marks place = 8th street)

PRIMAL BIAS: kevin cragg, kevin hines, will hines, dave lombard, silvija ozols, gavin speiller, erik tanouye
FIVE DUDES: eugene cordero, chris gethard, bobby moynihan, charlie sanders, zach woods,
CHANTICO WARFARE: cory cavin, emily felt, kristin firth, bill grandberg, josh lay, marcos sanchez

Rock!

Catching up. Might expand on some topics later.

• Eliza and I spent last weekend in the Catskills. That makes us sound like Henny Youngman. Or 80. Even moreso if you count Eliza’s time knitting in a for-real rocking chair, and my desire to hide inside and read. It’s off-season, which meant cheaper room rates for us and a hilariously high percentage of businesses closed. Our cabin was great: I cringe at the thought B&B’s — but Eliza found one that was low on fluffiness and high on spaciousness and having-its-own-kitchen. Very nice. And wi-fi!
• Top 50 Comics Publications of 2005, according to Tom Spurgeon:
  http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/briefings/commentary/4505/

  Seeing the entries on Batman: Year One and Watchmen warmed my increasingly robotic heart.

• I made this site for my job: Are You A Dime?
• I shaved off almost all my hair. I was at a barber shop in the Catskills (“Mark Of Excellence Barber Shop”) and was at least one month overdue for a cut. My sideburns, as previously blogged, were thick like lumber hanging from my ears. When the barber shaved them off, I felt an almost sexual relief. Then I said “Keep going.” He said “What?” I said “Just shave my whole head. Who am I fooling?” And he did. Now I look like a 1950s science teacher but I feel somehow more honest. Pictures later.
• Eliza and I saw Dave Chappelle’s Block Party last night. Great time! It made me want to both 1) make sure that every creative effort I make is somehow rooted personally in a deep belief and 2) become the drummer for The Roots.
• After the movie I bought CDs by Erykah Badu, Jill Scott and also Morrisey’s You Are The Quarry — forever destroying Virgin Records heretofore consistent profile of my record tastes.
• Forbes lists the 20 Most Important Tools:
  http://www.forbes.com/2006/03/14/technology-tools-history_cx_de_06toolsland.html

My sideburns have never been thicker. I look like a lost son of Martin Van Buren, cast 150 years into the future. I’d put a picture up, but that’s for unemployed punks who have time for such shennanigans.

I’m currently creating a web site (in what is apparently a popular trend out there) to let women upload pictures of their ass in an attempt to be voted a “booty of the week.”