In everything that you do, always strive to be exactly this awesome.
Ecce Homo
I will teach you the superman.
I Am the Night (Light)
Let's talk stories.
So when Batman's mind was under attack by The Black Hand, did Batman give up?
No. No, he did not.
He sought the ritual of Thögal, a dress rehearsal for death itself. He created a sort of backup mind, a Batman without Bruce Wayne. A man who would do what it takes.
He dressed himself in bright colors. Even his imaginary Bat-Mite thought him mad, yet there was a nonlinear logic in his insanity.
So when you see this thing that I made for my daughter:
You will be tempted to say it is a "Batgirl night light".
And I say you can shove your gender-normative bullshit up your peehole.
Because, though Barbara Gordon is a complete and total badass who got shot in the spine by the Joker and was wheelchair bound and yet fought through all of that to become effective enough to be worthy of the Justice League and saved superheroes' lives with computers, she is not yet on my daughter's radar.
Yet. A three-year-old can't appreciate a story like this.
So when my daughter says "I want a pink Batman night wight", then that is what that is. It will be Batgirl when she's old enough to learn Barbara's story, maybe, but for now it's...
(God bless you, Grant Morrison.)
God Damn
I remember the first time I heard a recording of a young B.B. King wailing and growling his way through a I-IV-V shuffle about some woman what done broke his heart. Something went twang in my chest, then there was a mild adrenaline rush, and I was hooked. As absurd as it sounds, my skinny white suburban middle class self would be inextricably hooked on blues music for the rest of my life. Because I needed that feeling every day.
Hasn’t been often I’ve had that feeling of a tectonic shift when discovering a musician. Clapton. Hendrix. John Lee Hooker. Muddy. Stevie Ray. Public Enemy. Tom Waits, after he chased me around a few times. A few others, not many for 37 years. They only come around once every few seasons for me. My wife and I had just started dating when the last one came around.
Another one just happened today, about ten minutes before I wrote this sentence. I found this MetaFilter post (via dooce, no idea how I missed it when it first went up) about an up-and-coming band called The Alabama Shakes. I watched the first video linked there.
I said god damn.
That thing went twang again, first time in about a decade. Maybe it was partly Levon Helm’s recent passing, maybe it was how long it had been since the last time–shit, maybe it was the Wellbutrin–but I even got a little choked up by the end.
I don’t want to oversell it. I got the album, and it’s damn good. Sources tell me it’s nothing compared to watching them live. My guess is you’ll be hearing a lot from them pretty soon. Because seriously, god damn.