Internet More Dangerous than School Violence, Sexually Transmitted Diseases for Children

Internet More Dangerous than School Violence, Sexually Transmitted Diseases for Children: survey

I found this little bit of paranoia interesting. Reminded me of the excellent book "The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things" that I read a few years back.

BE ALERT

I didn't know Charlie Stockley, but he was a friend of a friend and he died on Christmas Eve at the age of 38 - SF Chronicle. He had cystic fibrosis and desperately needed a lung transplant that tragically didn't arrive in time. Hearing about children's deaths always gets to me, but there something even more cutting hearing about a peers death, a stronger reminder of my own mortality. His site, that my friend Kyra, made to update people on Charlie's condition now reads:

It is with profound sadness that we announce the passing of Charlie Stockley on the night of December 24th. As we search for meaning in this terrible loss, we fervently believe that Charlie's courageous battle with Cystic Fibrosis has inspired countless people to register as the organ donors that someday might save the lives of others in his situation. Although Charlie didn't receive the lungs he so desperately needed, we know he would be happy if only one person was helped by his struggle. Charlie's family wishes to express their most sincere gratitude for the love, prayers and support that sustained them during this difficult ordeal and demonstrated how many lives were touched by this remarkable man. If you are thinking of sending commemorative flowers for the family, instead please honor Charlie's memory either by registering as an organ donor or making a contribution to any chapter of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. We welcome and appreciate any words/thoughts you have in our guest book below, too.

I had already registered as an organ donor, but this is another reminder that gifting our organs can save real lives and the whole thing is a reminder how tenuous all our lives our. So please, if you haven't done so yet, consider registering as an organ donor.

At lunch this week, I got a fortune that read "Opportunity only comes along once. Be alert". There's a lot of truth in that and really there no time for clinging to the sadness we collect in our lives. And obviously I'm referring to other stuff that is going on in my life, but at the same time we need to have patience for things to take the time it does and not push our experiences away. The dialectical tension between sucking the marrow out of life and finding the patience for life's tiny changes is one I'm quite familiar with and no closer to any definitive answers. Ah, the process of constantly finding the balance as life swings around us...

Blogzy? Blazy?

OK, I know I haven't been writing much lately. Partly because I've been doing more off-line journal writing, partly because I've been busy-busy at work lately, and partly just because I've been blog lazy recently. It's not that I haven't been doing lots of blog worthy stuff recently, but finding the time and energy to write about them has been hard.

For example, I hosted a lovely Santa Lucia party on Wednesday with a fiend crowd of good friends in attendance. Sadly I neglected to take any photos, but ah well.

Monday I went and saw Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng speak about their new book, What is the What, as part of the City Arts series. I was sleepy-tired but enjoyed the chance to see them chat, though I would have liked to hear more about their writing process and how it was to write someone else's autobiography as fiction and what is was like to have someone else write about their life in a first person narrative.

And part of the reason I was tired was from going to the most excellent Bootie party on Sat. Took some pics there, but still have yet to upload them.

Ah, back to the laziness again. Oh week, all thing wax and wane as I stressed in a talk I gave last week on why I am a Buddhist. It was quite interesting to think about and a subject I'd like to write more on. Soon.

The Walking Dead vs. Lost

I'm a late convert to the TV series LOST, and just watching the 12th episode last night where Claire is taken by Ethan and Charlie nearly dies. It was excellent TV and expertly written. Then this morning I was thinking of Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof's introduction to the latest collection of Robert Kirkman's comic book series Invincible.

"LOST is a comic book... Or like one... Here's two things I learned from reading a gazillion comic books:

Thing One: I like lots and lots and lots of characters. I get bored easily, so the Justice League is infinitely more compelling then just Superman alone. The X-Men rock harder then Wolverine's solo albums...and even the Midnighter can't hold my interest for too long if you strip away The Authority.

Thing Two: I like my stories complicated and sprawling. I want surprises. I want to be rewarded for being a loyal reader... like I'm part of a secret society. I don't want to be spoon-fed. I want to think. I want to be part of a universe where anything can happen... and often does. And I like RISK.

Robert Kirkman has mastered Thing One and Thing Two."

Damon's absolutely right, but the series that actually illustrates this the best is his other creator owned series The Walking Dead. While LOST chickens out and lets Charlie live, The Walking Dead regularly kills off major members of it's sprawling cast. Kirkman has written that no one is safe in this series, not even the main protagonist, Rick. And I believe it. Rick just recently lost a hand to a sadistic survivalist-warlord. I don't feel the same sense of danger for LOST's Jack. In TV, star actors are usually hired for entire seasons and are rarely let go mid-season. But for comics, any character can be written out at any time, all of them just lines on paper. And that's big part of why comics can take bigger risks. Of course, in mainstream super-hero comics like Superman and Spiderman, no one can stay dead for long, but outside of the icons, character can die and stay dead. And in creator-owned project anything goes. No matter, how big a TV show runner is, they don't have that kind of freedom. So while LOST is very well done and I'm may be surprised by latter episodes, it seams clear that The Walking Dead "rocks harder" to use Damon's parlance, just because it takes a lot more risks and really ANYTHING can happen. The structure of TV just doesn't offer those possibilities, no matter how quirky and off-beat a series is.

UPDATE:

Okay, I'm wrong. Lost does take some major risks and will kill off main characters. The writers are doing it right, and writing along the lines of some of the best comics.

Alan Moore' Lost Girls

This week the Onion's A.V. Club has an excellent interview with the incomparable Alan Moore in anticipation of the long awaited "Lost Girls". I remember hearing about this project back in the early nineties, when it was first started, but after sometime it took on a semi-mythic status as the Alan Moore pornography project that would never get published. So a few months ago, I was a bit surprised to hear rumblings that it was actually going to see print. I have to admit I had some hesitations about ordering the massive thing, but ultimately decided I needed to see it myself to see what I thought.

I'm definitely intrigued after reading this interview and seeing him write so intelligently and passionately about the book and the status of pornography and sex in Anglo-American culture. I think if it doesn't challenge my own sensibilities a bit, I may be disappointed.

Roadside Show & Tell!

My book club buddy Alison is currently crossing the country as part of her Roadside Show & Tell. She's an amazing artist and her travel log is almost as amazing. It makes me hungry to take my own road trip across America, something I've never done. It really is a strange and fantastic country that I'd like to see more of eventually, but foreign shores tempt as well.

Pollan Attack!

Went and heard Michael Pollan speak at the City Arts & Lectures last night. What an amazing passionate and humorous speaker! He spoke primarily about his new book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma in which he goes explores four different modes by which food is produced in this country, industrial factory farming, industrial organic, "grass" farming or pasture based agriculture, and hunting and gathering food, and then has four different meals from the food each of these systems produces. The first part of the lecture was pretty depressing with lots on the marriage between capitalism and corn (particularly for animal feed), and the only consolation I had was my participation in the worst parts of factory farming is pretty minimal just by virtue of being a vegetarian. Though even with that, it was a good wake-up call to my own complicity in my food choices. Michael Pollan a much more forceful speaker then I expected, and far more radically anti-capitalist. He mentioned that Omnivore’s Dilemma was recently referred to as the Das Kapital of food.

Can't wait to read the book. Maybe we can choose it for our next book club book. In closing he suggested two sites www.eatwell.com and www.eatwild.com for further information and steps.

More pigeon photos

I got a better view of the pigeon chick this morning. It's quite odd looking, especially the beak. It looks way to big for a bird that size. Maybe it'll grow into it. The yellow feather are also strange. I'd never have thought of pigeon chicks as yellow.

I remember we had this book Fly High, Fly Low in my 3rd grade classroom. It's all about a a couple of pigeon living in Union Square. Even at that point I thought it a bit odd to have a book about pigeons, but was fascinated by the idea of what real pigeon chicks looked like.

Lunar Power

My new book club has been reading Jared Diamond's latest Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. One of the things we've talking a lot about, obviously, is whether the our current globalized, capitalistic system is headed toward collapse, environmentally, economically or otherwise. I tend to think that human species can live in some pretty miserable screwed up living conditions, so we're likely to survive in some form or fashion. I can't help though but have some hope for ideas like Moonbeams to Power Earth

It's Superman

I just finished Tom De Haven's novel It's Superman last night. A very wonderful book that re-tells the story of Superman in a more realistic 1930's America full of race problems, union battles and changing roles for women. This Clark Kent is a young, naive farmboy and who constantly spells things wrong and gets his facts muddled. But he's also earnest and compassionate and quickly learning to become something closer to the Superman most of us know.

I had heard of Tom De Haven before and knew he had written about comics in his Dugan series, but hadn't ever read any of his work before. Then I heard the CGS crew interview
him and was intrigued enough to pick his Superman book up. Now I'd really like to go back and read some of his other books.

PulpHope: The Art Of Paul Pope

I listened to this excellent Podcast interview with Paul Pope today on CGS. He talked a bit about his Batman: Year 100 that I've blogged about before here and here, and he also talked a lot about his back ground in fine arts and art history. He also talked a bit about the relationship between art, ethics, and the responsibilities of doing work for hire. Interesting stuff, and well worth a listen. It reminded me to pre-order a copy of his forth-coming art book
PulpHope: The Art Of Paul Pope. I'm looking forward to getting this hopefully sometime in June.

Granddad

Like an aged film
The moment comes
It's okay
I've seen this one before
“I've got some bad news” = death
Who? What? When?
We talk on
Following yesterday's script
Rewind
I FEEL!
Control slips
I sit in my box
Can't digitize my emotions
For satellite transmission
Memories cloud my air
With pixilated tears
The act goes on
I say my lines
Curtain called
Goodbye, goodbye Granddad

I was in India when my Grandfather died. He died alone in his apartment in Santa Cruz and wasn't found till many days later when his body began to rot. But I was far from the stench, far from family, on my solitary aimless travels, alone in my hotel room in Kerala. I was waiting for more friends to show up and in the meantime just hanging out in town, going to the book stores and drinking too much coffee. So I thought it would be a good time to ring up the family. I called my dad and he dropped the news. He had just found out himself the day before yesterday and he and my uncle were heading down to Santa Cruz the next day to wrap things up. Even though I was thousands of miles away, I was one of the first to know. My brother and sister were still in the dark, and the emotional weight of Granddad’s death hit me hard.

Fuck it hit me hard! The tears of the intervening oceans captured my eyes. Shut up in my cheap Trivandrum room, I ragged with sadness and loss and wrote out my pain. He was part of the chain that made me who I was and got me to India in the first place. Granddad had been in India some twenty years previous and I had had been looking forward to finally having something to talk about that might interest us both. He’d gone to Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges, and for the rest of his life wore the Hindi sacred saffron orange. I wanted to see the things he had seen and more, be able to make some more real connection with him. I really wanted to hear his stories beyond the bullshit that he was usually spouting off about. Out of everyone in the family, I was the most sympathetic to his selfish, self-centered ways, but I accepted him in spite of them. But despite that I never expected to be so torn up by his death. Maybe it was because my early childhood memories had been in such sharp focus.

I remember when I was maybe four or five, he had this huge argument with my mom and she kicked him out said he could never come back. I have no idea what the argument was about, but it was loud, confusing and frightening. And then for years he was gone from my life, just this vague presence only rarely referenced. Then after my parents divorced, our dad would take us sometimes to Café Flore to see him. He always had these little plastic pouches that he'd pull out and give us each a sticker. I'd drink my Calistoga and we'd sit with him while his friends (or as I later learned, his acid customers) came by to pay their respects. And as I grew up, that was pretty much the only place I saw him. Once hanging out with a friend in the Castro, I joked that he was always at Café Flore and sure enough, we stopped by and there he was. Even now, if I go there, his presence there is strong for me and I half expect him to be sitting at his table, pulling things out of his bag and going on about the Goddess in his soft sing-song voice.

For much of my life, he was this clownish, pitiful, charlatan character that was largely irrelevant. What I knew about him was inferred from snatches of conversation and wrapped in his myth making. I knew he was adopted, the supposedly illegitimate son of his "uncle". The guess was that his mother was probably Native America or at least half, but the people who would have known were long gone. He fought in Europe in WWII and had a medal. Going through his effects years later, there was only a photo of war buddies and a hand of cards that must have meant something. Maybe a big payoff? , He never really wanted to talk about his war experiences though, as long as I had known him. But for the rest of his life he carried a "lucky" cricket-clicker like those used on D-Day. But I did hear the story once that after the war, he swore off meat, shaved his head and moved to San Francisco. And to me that sounds like a man that had miraculous escaped some horrific circumstances and was both traumatized and transformed. In the fifties he had a job delivering Coca-Cola, and fell into the Beat culture, or the at least it’s outer fringes. He wrote poetry and got a few published, I think, in various, obscure, small-circulation beat magazines of the day. Somewhere in this time period, he knocked some girl up and the baby, my aunt, was "adopted" by his mom. I think it was soon after this that he met my grandmother through his mom. His mom lived in the same small Central Valley town as my grandmother and thought to introduce them. My grandmother moved up to San Francisco and I think she started nursing school with her sister, but it wasn’t for her. She was hooked into my grandfather though and they'd go drunken sailing with her sister and her brother-in-law. Soon enough they were married and she was pregnant with my dad, maybe even in that order. They lived in some little cottage in Bernal Heights and lived the high life, drinking, smoking and partying it up. As my aunt got older, she'd come up to San Francisco to visit her "uncle" who was gradually revealed to be her dad. Of course, my grandmother was not very happy about the whole situation and I imagine there were some big, drag-out, alcohol infused fights. My uncle was born, and soon after, granddad got a writing residency in Mexico City. So the whole family moved down there for a momentous year, and he wrote as the illusion of a family life eroded around them.

When they moved back to San Francisco, the marriage sputtered on, but I think it was already largely in tatters. Eventually, he was ready in Timothy Leary's terms to "drop put". My dad had already left home at 14-15 and was finding his way into proto-hippy circles. My grandfather began flirting with new-age religions, and that was the final straw for my grandmother. She took my uncle, first moving to someplace in the Tenderloin and eventually to Georgia, with her new husband. I think it was around this time that my granddad went back to Mexico, following the hippie trail to Yelapa.

Yelapa is about an hour's boat ride from Puerto Vallarta and was a virtual island with no streets, no electricity and no phones. However, it did become an important hideout for the hippie elite, such as Dylan, Fonda, Nicholson, Hopper, Crosby, Stills & Nash and Xaviera Hollander. And there he made his home, organized the first full-moon parties and lived the soft life. At some point, he had acquired two names and two social security numbers (perhaps in the war?) and was able to collect government checks in both, so he had more then enough to live quite well in Yelapa. Then he began to swim in the same water as John C. Lily, reputed to be the best LSD brew-master, and began to quietly deal on his trips up to San Francisco. But while he was never much of a grandfather to me, he did become a grandfather figure in the village of Yelapa.

He still carried his tin cricket-clicker and developed a little ritual to satisfy the curiosity of the local children. Once a day, and only once a day, he would hold the clicker towards a child and click it twice, saying "Que tenga buena suerye/May you have good luck". The mystery of who he would click at and when pleased the children immensely, and they began to call him "Chicharra" for the sound of the clicker. He acquired yet another name and the role as the village clown/trickster, loved by generations.

Then when he was in San Francisco, he tried to play the role us grandchildren and give us each a reflective prism sticker. But it didn’t work nearly as well on us. We were sophisticated City kids, not easily impressed, and always picking up the uncomfortable prickliness between him and our dad.

Of course, it was also in the guise of Chicharra that he attempted to seduce whatever young hippie girls where in town with his spiels on the Goddess, the spiritual power of Tantric sex, or whatever new idea he had. He had this photo that he’s always hand out, of himself standing on a rock in front of the Yelapa waterfall with his arms out-stretched as some benevolent god. And he always had some slick plan on how his self-published newspaper "Hola Amigos" or his vast archive of San Francisco '60s alternative magazines was going to make him rich. He was always going through the motions of self-promotion, able to charm the stranger, but never always at some distance with the people that knew him well.

And with his death, all those chances to make some real connections were lost forever.

PULSE | KRAMER'S KEEN ON DRAWING THE JSA

There was a nice interview with Don Kramer on the Pulse today. He's definitely doing some great work on JSA right now and I'm hoping he'll be on the book for a long time to come.

Burning Man 2005 The Comic Book

Burning Man 2005 The Comic Book

Very, very cool Flash comic book review of this years Burning Man!

Kickball Komics!

Corey Lewis: Pages from my new comic about kickball

Loved his book Sharknife and now his next book is about kickball. How could you go wrong?

Geoff Johns | Brian Vaughan

Geoff Johns | Brian Vaughan

It's good to see comic book writers get some semi-mainstream press coverage, well The Onion at least. These guys are two of my favorite writers right now. Brian's doing amazing work with "Y: The Last Man" & "Ex Machina" and Geoff is kicking butt all over DC, though my soft spot is for his JSA work.

Geoff Johns Interview

Brian Vaughan Interview

Kupek a.k.a. The Amazing Bryan Lee O'Malley

I've been listening to Warren Ellis' Superburst mixtapes since he started doing them and the one track I kept finding myself craving was by this artist Kupek, but I really had no idea what the group was. Imagine my surprise when Kupek turned out to be the band name of Bryan Lee O'Malley, the comic book guy responsible for Scott Pilgram. Still haven't read his comic book work, but if it's half as good as his music, it must totally rock. The other nice thing he's doing is making his music available via bit torrent. Very cool. Thanks Brian!
RADIOMARU.com

Now in Auckland

Yesterday was my first full day in New Zealand. Sunday was a bit of a haze, sorting out rental cars, getting settled in with my couching surfing friend, seeing a bit of West Auckland and going out to the beach. Where I'm staying is in the foothills of excellent hills. We drove up there and even the nearby park land is gorgeous. Saw my first weta in a little science museum they had there. Weta's are an insect species native to NZ. Their quite unique looking, with large legs, long antennae and a long stinger looking thing in the rear.

But back to yesterday, I made my down to the city center and wandered down to the wharf. There out in front of the maritime Museum they had KZ-1, the boat that challenged in the America's Cup back in 1988. Quite a site to see up on blocks where you could really see it's groundbreaking keel design. Then I went looking for a book store to get some Kiwi history to read. It looked like that was a common interest at least in the tourist zone cause they had plenty to choose from. I found the backpacker area but it was bit strange to see it have such a prominent place downtown, but it must be big business.

Next I went over to the Auckland Museum which was huge and quite good. It reminded me a bit of the Hong Kong museum, but with lots of war memorial stuff. I had no idea the kiwis fought in the Malaysia "emergency" and they had a special Gilipoli exhibit with lots of school children going through.

The plan now is to head out of Auckland and make down to where my friend Andy lives out side of Gisborne.