Everyday Heroes (Update #2)

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Entomo, courtesy of the Signal Light Foundation (click for more info)Things continue to pop on the real-life superhero front.

A few days ago, I posted an update to an earlier post about real-life people who don costumes, fight crime, have secret identities and sometimes superpowers, and so on. In that first post, from January, I featured (among other crusaders) one Entomo, a “Crime-fighting/Environmentalist/Detective” who “patrols the streets of Naples and promotes environmental awareness.”

So anyhow, earlier this week I got a comment to that January post, beginning, “This is Entomo. Please do not make fun of me.” Its author asserted that he takes very seriously the business of patrolling the streets, etc., is very sexy, and appeals to “the ladies… despite my bug size man proportions.” The comment ended with Entomo’s signature phrase: I inject justice.

Well, who was I to doubt? Accordingly, that comment was the focus of the news-update post from earlier this week. (You’re keeping the chain of events straight, right?)

Now I am in receipt of yet another comment… to the update! This one says:

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Everyday Heroes (UPDATE)

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You may remember my post from a couple months ago, about the real-life superheroes who have identified themselves via a site called the World Superhero Registry. I’ve recently heard from one of the superheroes featured in that post (or at least, from someone claiming to be that superhero): Entomo, the “Crime-fighting/Environmentalist/Detective” who “patrols the streets of Naples and promotes environmental awareness.”

(That’s Entomo’s logo over there at the right. According to a page at the Entomo Resource Center, this is “‘Broken Time’,” that is, “A stylized capital sigma resembling an hourglass.” Earlier, we knew only that he had chosen the sigma because (a) “I sum up all the powerful, silent and venomous small creatures inhabiting this world,” and (b) “I’m a synthesis, the human-like swansong of millions of races.”)

I knew something was up when my blog stats started to zoom over the last couple days — only on the “Everyday Heroes” page, and nearly all of them Google Image searches for entomo… and from various places around Europe, but nowhere else.

Still, I was surprised to hear from the man himself. Here’s what he said (which appears as a comment on that earlier post):

This is Entomo-
Please do not make fun of me. I am a Superhero. I have no time for child games. I patrol the dark streets of Naples, even though all my pictures are of me in my living room. I also have a partner. Pay no attention to the fact there is not a picture of the both of us together. So… do not make any comments. I am a very sexy Superhero and the ladies love me, despite my bug size man proportions.
I inject Justice

Update (2009-03-21): Curioser and curioser… For more about the above passage, see this comment, below, and my post of today.

I want to reassure Entomo and any other superheroes — as well as their everyday alter egos — that I was not “making fun.” (Regular readers here know that I rarely make fun of anyone, really, but myself.) As Entomo himself says in his writeup about the reasons why people adopt a superhero persona:

…you’re providing people with a real symbol, and yourself with somewhat of a “self-avatar”, one million of times stronger than your former “civilian-self”.

Inspiration plays a major role in this, of course. You can inspire people to believe in a symbol. You can inspire people to believe they can create themselves a symbol and embody it… and it’s not a lie. It’s all true. It’s the projection of an internal truth.

Everyone can lead his/her own destiny. We’re pawns of ourselves on the great, universal chessboard. It’s up to us to establish if the great game of reality must end in good or evil.

So no, I was not amused. On the other hand, I was (both originally, and now) what you might call bemused. Which is to say: confused; bewildered; perplexed.

In short, remember yesterday’s post, which concluded with the head-tilting dog? I think I just feel like that dog.

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Being Here (Today)

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Pogo: Churchy's paraskavedekatriaphobia (click for full strip)

From whiskey river (first 3+ lines not included there):

from The Ninth Duino Elegy

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)–: why then
have to be human–and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate?. . .

Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.
Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which
would exist in the laurel too. . . . .

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some
strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, c. 1922 [source])

…and:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then one of them looks over at the other and says, “What the hell is water?”

(David Foster Wallace, 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College [source])

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Pay No Attention to the People in Front of the Curtain

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Dear Turner Classic Movies (TCM):

I fell in love with you years ago. Who wouldn’t love a cable channel that broadcasts (and re-broadcasts (and, all right, re-re-broadcasts)) timeless movies, often in black-and-white, that otherwise would have faded into obscurity years ago?

True, I had moments of doubt (they happen in the best of relationships).

Mostly, you didn’t seem to care that I had to change the channel. Not because I didn’t want to see the feature (I did! I did!), no. Rather, I had to change the channel because I couldn’t hear what anyone was saying, or could hear only sporadically. I could often read lips in the closeups but eventually I’d tire. I’m no spring chicken anymore, you know. So I’d sigh melodramatically — you never noticed, did you? — and switch over to something ghastly like SPIKE or SciFi or even the Hallmark Channel… at least until they, too, turned a cold shoulder to me.

But you kept winning me back. More and more films would be close-captioned — even the oldest ones from early in the sound era. And I know, I know — the studios and distributors probably paid for the captioning. So maybe it was out of your hands, not your decision anyway.

Still, I think maybe you were just toying with my affections.

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Department of Barely Restrained Comment
(Jane Austen Desk)

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From Variety (courtesy of The New Yorker‘s “The Book Bench” blog):

Rocket launches ‘Predator’
Clark to direct aliens vs. Jane Austen pic
By MICHAEL FLEMING

Elton John’s Rocket Pictures hopes to make the first Jane Austen adaptation to which men will drag their girlfriends.

Will Clark is set to direct “Pride and Predator,” which veers from the traditional period costume drama when an alien crash lands and begins to butcher the mannered protags, who suddenly have more than marriage and inheritance to worry about.

[…]

“It felt like a fresh and funny way to blow apart the done-to-death Jane Austen genre by literally dropping this alien into the middle of a costume drama, where he stalks and slashes to horrific effect,” [Rocket Pictures’ David] Furnish said.

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What’s in a Song: I Get Along Without You Very Well
(Part 2)

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Excerpt from Hoagy Carmichael's 1st draft of 'I Get Along Without You Very Well'[This is another in an occasional series on popular songs with long histories. Part 1 — on the song itself as finally recorded by numerous artists — appeared on Tuesday.]

Hoagy Carmichael published “I Get Along Without You Very Well” in 1938. (The copyright date was November 18.) But the song’s history stretched back over 15 years earlier, and the sheet music as published bore two signs of this past:

  1. The full title of the song included, at the end, “(Except Sometimes)” — a phrase which appears nowhere in the lyrics.
  2. Following Carmichael’s name as the songwriter appeared the note, “Words inspired by a poem by J.B. (?)”

Why “Except Sometimes”? Who was J.B.? And why that trailing question mark?

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Everyday Heroes

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Like nearly everyone seems to be, I’m caught up in what might be called Onauguration Fever.

And — coincidence? you be the judge! — Warner Brothers and Fox recently settled their legal tussling over the upcoming Watchmen film, allowing its release as scheduled on March 6.

Under the circumstances, the time seems right to celebrate the existence of real everyday heroes, nay, superheroes.

I do not speak of policemen, firemen, teachers, even soldiers. I speak — of course! — of those officially designated as such, at least by themselves, in the World Superhero Registry (slogan: “Coming Out of the Phone Booth”).

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The Tiny Heart of Darkness

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[I’m working on a seasonal offering with my co-blogger. But, as you can perhaps imagine, complications abound in working on anything with a gargoyle. Communication problems, for one — we’re still getting used to each other’s language. And no computer “hard”ware known is meant for handling by someone with fingers of stone and eyes incapable of focusing on anything but the vague middle distance. So in the meantime, there will probably be a couple of brief posts here — like the one below — just to keep the site at a low simmer.]

Among the many dramatic narratives playing across the pop-culture landscape of recent years, one of the most dramatic — from a certain perspective — has been the South Park saga. Not that there’s really a continuing story line (each episode stands more or less on its own), no; the “dramatic arc” such as it is comes from the tension between what the show is and does, and what the broader culture implicitly says it may say and do.

(The popular saying “pushing the envelope” seems a little lame to describe South Park. The envelope in question isn’t just being “pushed” from inside; it’s actually bulging, rippling, threatening at every moment to tear itself from the addressee’s hands.)

The chief source of this tension, as in many works of, umm, art and literature, is the antagonist. The villain. The… resident evil.

Eric Theodore Cartman.

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Mr. and Mrs. WS Go for a Walk

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Yesterday would have been William Shakespeare’s and Anne Hathaway’s 426th anniversary. Whew.

Per yesterday’s Today in Literature newsletter, which I’ve just got around to reading, we have this excerpt from Chapter 3 of Mrs. Shakespeare: The Complete Works, “Richard Nye’s fictional send-up of their marriage”:

When Mr William Shakespeare asked me that idle question as to whether I desired him to compare me to a summer’s day, and I said thank you no, we were standing together on the bank by London Bridge. I say together because together is worth remark in a marriage like ours was.

Himself had been picking his nose for at least five minutes, dreaming. As for me, I was counting the heads of the traitors up there on the poles. It was cold, I might tell you….

“Winter,” my husband said suddenly.

He swept off his hat with a flourish, as if he had just discovered some important new truth. I thought he’d read my mind about the day not knowing what season it belonged to. Then, from the green spark in his eyes, I knew there was worse to come.

“Winter what?” I demanded.

“Winter you,” Mr Shakespeare said. “Anne Hathawinterway with her,” he went on, grinning. “You’re more like a day in December,” my husband concluded.

I hit him.

Well, what would you have done?

What a great exercise: inventing dialogue — a whole life — for a famous person whose biography is documented poorly, or not at all.

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