The blank page is an intimidating thing, especially for a writer who only manages to spew out a couple thousand words per month. Trying to write a significant eight-hundred-word piece every month seems harder than doing an essay two or three times a week, as most columnists do. The formula (take a bit of news, maybe make a few calls on the topic, then tell everyone what to think about it) doesn’t work so well when the news may be thirty days old by the time the column is read. At best, this will be eleven days old before the magazine hits the streets—and even older by the time readers make time for it.
So, how do you remain fresh in the era of the Internet, when your “Use by:” date is already expired by the time you hit the streets? You don’t write about Alberto Gonzales or Anna Nicole Smith (OK, I wouldn’t write about Anna Nicole at any time), and you sure don’t discuss the weather. I’ve pored over the pages of random notes I took this month with the hope that something would pop out at me as worthy of a column, but the notes that did were clearly the scribblings of someone who was slogging toward the end of a long Minnesota winter.
For example: “Only when the economic benefits become apparent will we do what we should have done all along”; or, “Paradise will not come to Minneapolis because of technological advances like Shot Spotter”; and, “A belief in rationality gives us hope when the reality of our savagery makes it unlikely a rational approach will work”; and finally, “Wash your car.”
Clearly, I need a little more time under the full-spectrum lamp. And soon.
But it will be spring before this writing hits the streets. And there are other notes in the little black book I carry around that aren’t so dreary.
I was in New York a few weeks ago, and in addition to the Armory Show [see this story], I also took in another art event worth mentioning: Comic-Con, the national convention for comic books and all things related. The Javits Center was bursting with all sorts of comics-related booths, from the displays of classic comics dating to my youth, to new video games, to the work of contemporary artists and writers, many of whom were autographing and selling their original art.
The sights were both amusing and poignant to someone like me who grew up learning to read from Superman and Batman comics. I saw familiar comics that I used to own, before my mother bundled them up with my baseball cards and tossed them the day after I left for college. The smiles those brought were exceeded only by those engendered as I watched people my age sort through the stacks—although the current motives were different. In place of the revelry of youth, there was the determination of the collector. “I’m looking for issue 222. I can’t find it anywhere,” moaned one searcher. “Is that the ‘Juggernaut’ issue?” another commiserated. “That’s a tough one.”
Alongside these moneyed acquisitors were the young people who looked how you’d expect people to look after spending too much time in dusky basements playing Dungeons and Dragons. Comic-Con was their paradise, for not only were they surrounded with their obsessions—the games—but the gaming companies had hired people to demo the games. And these people were young women. And by young women, I mean pretty young women with gothic tattoos, medieval piercings, and T-shirts with cleavage approximating that displayed on the black-light posters that line the bedroom walls of such boys.
There was also anime. For those of you who have missed the latest development in graphic novels, anime is the Japanese version that combines sex and swordplay into one heady fantasy for the American adolescent. You may have seen the iconic saucer-eyed schoolgirls as you flash by the cartoon channel on cable. At Comic-Con, the young men were attracted by live saucer-eyed anime dolls, who were dressed like Brooklyn Catholic school eighth graders, except for the fact that their Peter Pan-collared blouses were open to a point that would have made Sister Mary Catherine fatally apoplectic.
At the Grimm Fairy Tales booth, there were a similarly sexy Alice in Wonderland and Little Miss Muffet. And, just down the aisle from them sat Tiffany Taylor, Playboy’s Miss November of 1998. Miss November has nothing to do with comics, but everything to do with fantasy. You could buy a personalized, autographed nude photo of her for twenty dollars, or just stand next to her for a photo with your own camera for five dollars.
I might have gone for it if she had looked just a little bit more like Lois Lane.
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