Batman, and also Shakespeare and scumbags

[NatGertler]

• What happened with the All-Star Batmans was that some but not all of them were shipped. Diamond doesn't ship all of their shipments on the same day. Instead, they ship them all to arrive on Wednesday (except for certain locations that get them Tuesday), which means that locations furthest from the shipping centers (in terms of UPS delivery times) get shipped first, then the closer ones. The ASB&R pull order came after the process had already begun. So some got shipped (mostly east coast, I believe), some didn't. None were supposed to be returned; DC just requested (not demanded, requested) that they be destroyed. Since they asked for them to be destroyed, they don't have a good system for treating non-compliance; it's hard to have proof that you destroyed something. (There's also the legal question of whether they have the right to punish someone for selling something that was ordered and shipped as a commercial product.) They could do some growling at retailers who stated publicly that they were selling them, or put them on eBay under the store name or whatever. But they were quite legit to want them destroyed, not as a comic that is more dangerous with those words in it, but with one that was not as intended... just as it would've been had pages been out of order.
• There is one segment of the creative community where doing new takes rather than more purely original work is held up as particularly respectable: acting. The Shakespearean actor is considered a more serious beast than those interpreting hitherto unseen plays.
• Wall Street "fell into the hands of conscienceless, avaricious scumbags"? Who do you think ran Wall Street before? Who do you think it was built for? They are at times very useful folks, but don't think that Wall Street was built on delivering flowers, honey, and homilies to the downtrodden man.
• The basic policy driving the mortgage collapse is the many years of promoting home ownership as an investment not in a nest, but in a nest egg. It has constantly been sold to the American people by the government as a sound financial investment almost certain to go up in real value. Of course, that holds true only so long as demand can be maintained at ever-increasing real prices; as the prices skyrocketed, the government had to encourage ways to allow people to "afford" those prices. There are a lot of good reasons to be a homeowner, and I hope to be one myself fairly soon (whether that makes me a villain exploiting the weakened market or a hero who will help save the economy is up to the observer). But we were looking a couple years ago, and the amounts that they were not only willing to let us borrow but actively pressing us to take were silly huge, and not a good idea even with fiscally responsible people like my wife and myself. But, since the system had rolled in such a way that the lending institution wasn't actually involved with that specific debt in the long term, no reason they should care, right?

[Buzz Dixon]

Don't invest in anything you can't enjoy personally.

This includes comic book companies, liquor stores, tobacco shops, coffee houses, and bordellos.

[bartl]

The basic policy driving the mortgage collapse is the many years of promoting home ownership as an investment not in a nest, but in a nest egg. It has constantly been sold to the American people by the government as a sound financial investment almost certain to go up in real value. Of course, that holds true only so long as demand can be maintained at ever-increasing real prices; as the prices skyrocketed, the government had to encourage ways to allow people to "afford" those prices.

The place you live is an expense, not an investment (although if it includes one or more rental apartments, it becomes partially an investment). And Social Security is an insurance plan, not a retirement plan.

[Steven Grant]

[*]There is one segment of the creative community where doing new takes rather than more purely original work is held up as particularly respectable: acting. The Shakespearean actor is considered a more serious beast than those interpreting hitherto unseen plays.

It's interesting you should say that, because it occurred to me in the shower the other day that HAMLET was probably originally performed as a comedy. Looking at it structurally, it's a phenomenally good comedy. I'd like to present it that way - without changing any of the dialogue.

- Grant

[NatGertler]

I confess to being not as knowledgable about Shakespeare as I ought be, but even I've found there is certainly comedy to be mined from the Bard where folks dont expect it. Plenty of places where replacnig a traditional dour reading with an enthusiastic one paints different and humorous character.

[mattx110]

It's interesting you should say that, because it occurred to me in the shower the other day that HAMLET was probably originally performed as a comedy. Looking at it structurally, it's a phenomenally good comedy. I'd like to present it that way - without changing any of the dialogue.

- Grant

Killing people off as resolution in a comedy wasn't done. (Definition of comedy also different from modern sense). By the time of Dickens, he just killed whoever he wanted and it didn't hurt the humor. The language used was as important to what's a comedy as the plot, which is definitely a comedy structure, but with all this weird death and poverty involved (I'm thinking David Copperfield, when I say this). But for Shakespeare, he threatened to kill characters in a comedy, and I'm not sure, but he may have killed a few in traditonal comedies, but I'd need to check more thoroughly. He did break conventions a bit, but the widescale destruction of everyone in Hamlet is different from Benedick throwing his life on the line for the love of a woman. It'll be harder to get past scholars in pushing that to the comedy section.

Also, being a "Shakespearean" actor just means your trained in that way, which often makes you a very good actor (Keanu Reeves practices monologues to this day as an excercise, no comment on whether it's improved his acting skills). RSC and National Theatre ties also help. Patrick Stewart is still a Shaekspearean actor when he's playing a bio-chemist fighting red-tape or a starship captain fight umm... can't find a good cognate for red-tape, so let's say navigating moral quandries with a near-omnipotent being known only by his collective's name, which is translated into basic as Q.

The Tempest is a comedy, and has some disturbing non-comedic stuff, so I wouldn't doubt that Shakespeare could throw humor into every play, and Othello I know definitely has parts dedicated to just being funny ("This is my right hand... and this is my left"). Drunken characters, court jesters (like in Lear), and the repeated use of the phrase "I am an ass" throughout his works, give us a Shakespeare that was as much Pantomime as serious writer and actor. He had catchphrases.

Also, I don't doubt that the audiences noticed that all the women were young boys in makeup (that contained lead, and poisoned a few into madness), and were capable of finding the humor in that.

[Buzz Dixon]

Didn't Thurber write a story called "The MacBeth Murder Mystery" about a woman who was an Agatha Christie fan who, in a moment of desperation for any sort of reading material, read MacBeth and tried to figure out whodunnit?

[Steven Grant]

Didn't Thurber write a story called "The MacBeth Murder Mystery" about a woman who was an Agatha Christie fan who, in a moment of desperation for any sort of reading material, read MacBeth and tried to figure out whodunnit?

Who dun what? Isn't MacBETH rather transparent in that regard?

Now THE BIG SLEEP, that's a different kettle of suspects...

To Matt: I've had to read HAMLET very carefully a few different times, for various reasons (like producing a Classics Illustrated adaptation), and it became very clear that many of the things Shakespeare scholars take deathly seriously about the play were almost certainly meant for laughs, which is one reason Shakespeare lets the audience almost always stay one step ahead of the characters. I wouldn't hesitate to call it the first great black comedy of Anglo civilization. That Shakespeare did something that simply wasn't done doesn't strike me as far from the realm of possibility. It may not have been performed that way, but with each re-reading I have less and less doubt it was written that way.

- Grant

[mattx110]

Who dun what? Isn't MacBETH rather transparent in that regard?

Now THE BIG SLEEP, that's a different kettle of suspects...

To Matt: I've had to read HAMLET very carefully a few different times, for various reasons (like producing a Classics Illustrated adaptation), and it became very clear that many of the things Shakespeare scholars take deathly seriously about the play were almost certainly meant for laughs, which is one reason Shakespeare lets the audience almost always stay one step ahead of the characters. I wouldn't hesitate to call it the first great black comedy of Anglo civilization. That Shakespeare did something that simply wasn't done doesn't strike me as far from the realm of possibility. It may not have been performed that way, but with each re-reading I have less and less doubt it was written that way.

- Grant

I find myself laughing at Shakespeare a lot more post-high school (back when Shakespeare was a god, and we were just english students), and after seeing a few more productions that took liberties. Scholars have been wrong before (well, the accepted interpretation found by scholars, a few rogue professors get it right sometimes). Also the first time a professor went "this wasn't how people spoke at the time" to me (and other students) instead of trying to explain the ornate language as of the time (maybe it was a colloquial rhyming slang for the Stratford lads), and that's why it seemed complicated. He made up words to fit rhyme schemes. I know, rebelling against high school english curriculum might seem ridiculous and not very brazen, but it's annoyingly condescending that they're allowed to be wrong. (If you're looking for direct points on your post, I'm just responding, not arguing, so there aren't any, just to clarify. Sometimes it's hard to actually talk on the forum, when reply is assumed to be counter-point).

Also, I love those classics illustrated books. Don't have the Hamlet one (sorry).

[Steven Grant]

I find myself laughing at Shakespeare a lot more post-high school (back when Shakespeare was a god, and we were just english students), and after seeing a few more productions that took liberties. Scholars have been wrong before (well, the accepted interpretation found by scholars, a few rogue professors get it right sometimes). Also the first time a professor went "this wasn't how people spoke at the time" to me (and other students) instead of trying to explain the ornate language as of the time (maybe it was a colloquial rhyming slang for the Stratford lads), and that's why it seemed complicated. He made up words to fit rhyme schemes. I know, rebelling against high school english curriculum might seem ridiculous and not very brazen, but it's annoyingly condescending that they're allowed to be wrong. (If you're looking for direct points on your post, I'm just responding, not arguing, so there aren't any, just to clarify. Sometimes it's hard to actually talk on the forum, when reply is assumed to be counter-point).

Also, I love those classics illustrated books. Don't have the Hamlet one (sorry).

No, no, you don't have to cite points.

What I realized when doing the CI Hamlet (and it's okay that you don't have that one, First went out of business before they got around to paying royalties on it anyway) was that the famed "To be or not to be" soliloquy, almost always played as excruciatingly serious - the pinnacle of Shakespearean philosophical thought - is a con game. Hamlet knows Polonius is there, though he thinks it's Claudius (mistaken identity being a mainstay of comedy, and especially of Bill's comedies), and he's saying the craziest and vilest things he can think of - because he's trying to put over that he's crazy, so that when he murders 'the king' he can escape punishment because he's out of his mind. To convince Those Listening that his sanity is gone, he speaks to Ophelia as he does. She's a prop in the little play he's putting on.

I somehow imagine Hamlet giving his soliloquy to audiences at the time in a very, very exaggerated manner, and can easily see them laughing through much of it, since it's so over the top. A lot of the play reads like that - over the top dialogue, comedic reversals, totally inappropriate material. The final scene, where everyone's getting stabbed and poisoned and falling over, plays like a Monty Python scene, climaxing with Fortinbras storming in to find a room full of corpses. Shakespeare's quickly fell out of favor after his death, and wasn't rediscovered for a couple of centuries. Perhaps, if his plays really spit on the mores of the day, as a "comedic" Hamlet would seem to, they explain why...

- Grant

[Buzz Dixon]

Years ago I saw a small theater group do a musical pastiche called OH, HAMLET which was quite faithful and yet quite funny. Just as the lead actor wound up to begin "To be or not to be" the stage manager yelled "INTERMISSION!" and when we came back the play began immediately after the soliliquy ended.

[Lord Destiny]

• The basic policy driving the mortgage collapse is the many years of promoting home ownership as an investment not in a nest, but in a nest egg. It has constantly been sold to the American people by the government as a sound financial investment almost certain to go up in real value. Of course, that holds true only so long as demand can be maintained at ever-increasing real prices; as the prices skyrocketed, the government had to encourage ways to allow people to "afford" those prices.

Most folks don't buy "houses." They buy HOMES. Places to live, raise kids, and live out their lives.

For all their talk about family values, the GOP has been pushing nothing more than speculative future profits. A lot of families are devastated right now because they were encouraged to buy more than they could afford. Being homeless is no family value.

I guess I just don't "get it" the way our arch-capitalists do. I don't buy a car because it has future resale value. Why? Because I wear them completely out. The last two I owned were given away, because there was almost nothing left to resell. THAT is how you get your money's worth.

And that's how I'm approaching buying a house (I'm about a year away from taking that plunge). I'm looking for a place I will live out my years and raise kids. I'm not looking for a long-term profit venture. My biggest concern is how it will aid my quality of life while I'm living there, not just how much cash I'll get for it later on.

We're seeing the price we have to pay for being a country that virtually WORSHIPS money. All other values have been secondary.

[Steven Grant]

I guess I just don't "get it" the way our arch-capitalists do. I don't buy a car because it has future resale value. Why? Because I wear them completely out. The last two I owned were given away, because there was almost nothing left to resell. THAT is how you get your money's worth.

See, the core economic principle of "the Reagan Revolution" is that true value is cash value, and that cash "locked up" is money wasted. A standard savings account? A home that isn't borrowing on its equity? Money set aside for a rainy day? Complete wastes of time, and, worse, you're cheating yourself and our whole economic system of the value of working capital, which can be invested and reinvested and multiplied so that not only you but a raft of others can use it to build wealth. You want to be rich, don't you? So squeeze that cash out of everything you've got, invest it in mutual funds, or more real estate, or high risk/high profit futures trading, etc. because otherwise you're a goddamn money-hating, America-hating stupid doodyhead who doesn't understand how money works.

By the way, if you lost all your money, that's tough. Why do you think they call it high risk? If you couldn't be bothered to spend your whole life paying minute attention to every peregrination of your market, you shouldn't have gotten into high risk/high reward investments in the first place.

But good news: if you can scrape together a dollar, all you have to do is pick six correct numbers out of forty and you can win a million or more.

Cocaine economics.

- Grant

[NatGertler]

If the Reaganite logic were applied to spouses rather than finances, we'd all be being told to be playas rather than husbands.

(And in general, the conservative pushes are for everyone to be more of an expert in everything - able to pick the best health plan, the best stock, the best everything. But so often the folks pushing this seem rather inexpert in such things themselves...)

[Michael P]

If the Reaganite logic were applied to spouses rather than finances, we'd all be being told to be playas rather than husbands.

You mean we're not?