from here.

Don: Is it a problem that I now root for Don Draper the same way I do for Jason Stackhouse? I’m like, “Attaboy, Draper! For an encore, do your neighbor!” Probably. I don’t know if television has ever given us one character, let alone two, who deal with this kind of “pussy overflow” on such a regular basis. Old Don would be hopelessly drawn to to the self-assured marketing analyst, because just like Rachel Mencken, girls who say no turn him on. New Don… well, we’ll see how much he’s really changed. He’s single now, so women are viewing him as a potential partner instead of just a fling now, and he’s having trouble getting used to it.

Peggy: Her talk with Freddy was a little “on the nose,” as they say, but we get the picture. Peggy knows this dork isn’t marriage material, so she’ll fuck him for now, knowing this will hasten his exit. While we’ve certainly gotten hints of feminist angst from her before, I think this episode was the closest she’s come to outright voicing them. I liked the half-grimace she, Joan and the marketing chick all seemed to share when White Pants were brought up in the meeting.

Roger: I think SCDP will not end the season with Lucky Strike as a client.

Betty: Fuck Betty.

Glen: Him too. Creep. The world, August Bravo aside, was not asking for more Glen.

——-

But what’s really on my mind tonight/this morning is the new Arcade Fire album: The Suburbs.

As soon as I read about the title of this LP, I had a feeling I’d like it. I’ve always had a complex connection with suburbia, and it sounds like Win Butler does too. I’m only on my second listen-through, but I can tell that this is an album that’s going to keep growing on me.

It’s a sort of choppy, stream of consciousness series of vignettes on the love/hate relationships between the suburbs and the city. The sprawl is an inescapable malaise of crushed dreams, but go downtown and maybe those shallow hipsters aren’t your kind either. Two years into an economic catastrophe and a lot of those downtown bohemia promises can start to sound like so much happy bullshit. Something fascinating about the line, “Now that San Francisco’s gone, I guess I’ll just pack it in.” There’s a theme of weary resignation here. But in The Suburbs, resignation feels a lot like growing up, and who says that’s a good thing, even if it’s unavoidable.

Most of the kids in my generation — if they could afford to, if they didn’t get shackled with a burdensome spouse or child, or military service — they moved to the city as soon as they could get away. Me, I moved back to the suburbs. I guess I’ve always felt there was something important going on here. Something that, if I came to understand it, would understand everything about modern American life. I don’t think I do yet, but I’m getting closer.

I’m confident that one day I will, and then I’ll leave.

When you were a kid, because it was the simplest of all possible answers, they told you that God was up in the sky.

As you got older, when you wanted more complex answers, they told you that God was somewhere within.

As a kid my mother always told me that she knew I’d grow up to be smart. She just knew, she’d assure me. That’s nice to hear, for a boy from his mother, but you have to press on and ask why? Without quantification, that kind of praise can be dangerous. So I pressed on. Why, why, why?

The answer, she told me, was because as a kid I understood about the moon and the sun and space. “Huh?” I’d ask. And she told me that she was always amazed that even before kindergarten I understood that the moon orbited the Earth, the Earth orbited the sun, and the Sol solar system orbited around the giant black hole at the middle of the milky way galaxy, and the galaxy was just a string of other galaxies, probably in a snowflake shape, rotating around something else. “You even knew the name of the sun!” she’d tell me, her eyes beaming with motherly pride.

Of course, when I was a kid my mother explained to me what black holes were, as best as she could, as best as I could understand it then, and that’s probably had more effect on me than the memetic concept of God.

The moon, too.

There’s just something beautiful about the our gray satellite up there, isn’t there? “Magnificent desolation,” Buzz Aldrin called it. And he’s right. It looks so much to me like the physical manifestation of an actual human soul: bleak, sad, barren, empty, but with beautiful patterns within the dust and craters if you want to see them.

When I was a kid, we constantly would hear things like, “Tonight the sky will be clear and the planets will be aligned enough that you’ll be able to see Pluto!” Of course, this is back when Pluto was still a planet, because it was neutered by classifications. But I kept looking up in the sky and not seeing it.

Same with comets. Supposedly we could certain comets up in the night sky. I never saw them. And I kept looking. I kept wanting to see them. I was like Fox Mulder and John Locke. I wanted to believe. That there was something up there in the sky, that maybe there was something resembling a God-like thing in our universe, and, worst of all and most devastating of all, you know what? I wanted to believe I was special and somehow seeing these things up there would confirm that for me.

But I never saw them.

But there was the moon. You could see the moon. You knew mankind had gone there and come up and could, theoretically, go back again whenever we felt like it. It’s up there, whenever we want to visit it, that first step on a greater journey. No matter how bad life is Earthside, there’s something up there for us. There’s tangible proof just within grasp that we can escape Earthly troubles and change our whole view of the universe, for good or for worse.

A few days ago my mother was telling me about the day of the actual moon landing, when she was a little girl. She had been playing in a friend’s yard when both her and the friend’s mother came out and told them they had to come inside and watch something. “What is it?” they ask. “Something important,” they were told. “The future.” So inside they went and watched as man set foot on the moon.

My mother described the friend’s mother’s grave reaction to the event, her still face as she watched the grainy television images with cold eyes. “God is dead,” the woman kept whispering. Mind you, this is two years before The New York Times announced it.

My mother is somebody who still firmly believes in the idea of a God, if not a specific religion, not out of a firm belief, a strong faith, but a strong hope. She tells me that’s all there is. “All human beliefs, at their core,” she tells me, “have that hope at their center. When you fall in love, you hope it’s with the right person, and you hope they won’t be a shithead or damage your heart or your sense of the world.”

It’s from my mother that I get a lot of my sense of the world, those beliefs and hopes that you get before you actually enter the world and see how bad/wonderful things are for yourself. She’s also the first person to walk me out into our garden at night as a kid and point up at the sky and say, “Look at that thing.” She’s also the person who first put on Star Wars for me as a kid and said, “You’re going to love this.” And I’ll never forget her walking in during the scene and saying along with Obi Wan Kenobi, “That’s no moon. It’s a space station.”

But I said this is would be the end of me howling at the moon. So as I get to the end of this, I’ll say this one last thing about my mother, besides the fact that I love her, that she read Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon to me as a child…

The moon isn’t a real thing to us. Just a symbol. It stands for something different – probably several different somethings – for everyone. Even in the art it inspires. But we don’t really think of it as a real place we can go to. Just somewhere we dream about going.

So this is about me. About childhood, and about symbols. So here’s something that’s not a shock, something I’m pretty sure I’ve said before: Batman is my favorite “super hero.” My favorite comic book character, if you will. My obsession with him starts where a lot of comic book fancies start: he’s just cool, right?  But to me, he was always cool because he was real. That could be you under the cape and cowl, fighting crime and fighting a hopeless battle to make the world a better place. That could be me.

How sad that I don’t believe in God, at least not God the way others do, but I do believe in Batman?

But Batman is dead now. At least the Bruce Wayne version of him. I believe I linked to it before, but I talked a little about the passing of the Dark Knight in a post at This Recording a week or two ago.

Whenever it came up to write that piece, the editor at TR, Alex, who’s a really nice guy, suggested something about comics. Not a tough subject for me since I’m a bit of a dork, but I’d also say a bit of an amateur expert in the field. And there’s a billion things that I could’ve written about then, but the biggest, most current thing at the time and the thing most prevalent comics-wise in my thoughts: Batman was dead.

Shortly after that piece was written, a story by Neil Gaiman came out, entitled “Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader?” It was written to be in the similar vein as Alan Moore’s classic “Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow?” and seen as the last Batman story.

The gist of the story is simple: Batman, recently deceased, is watching his own funeral from the cusp of the afterlife. The attendees of the funeral are all his friends, loved ones, and the criminals he spent his entire life fighting. And everyone has a eulogy, telling a story of how Batman died, all of them starring a different iteration of the caped crusader and depicting a different death.

But when the stories run out and it’s time to move on, Batman is ushered into the sweet hereafter by his mother. He’s fought the good fight, she tells him, and he’s to be rewarded. And the reward for being the Batman? To continue being the Batman.

And we learn that young Bruce Wayne’s mother read Goodnight Moon to him as a child and it was his favorite book growing up.

And as he fades away, in the style of the book, he says goodnight to the things that mattered. His friends. The Batcave. The Bat signal.

And then he’s reborn.

And the story continues anew.

The same here, mostly. No more talking about the moon, I promise. Unless something really, really, really interesting comes up. The story up there has been done for a while, but at some point we’re going back. At some point, everything starts over again.

Keep looking up at the sky and wondering, okay?

See you out there, space cowboys and cowgirls.

We choose the moon!

“No Sense” from Moon Pix.

“It’s a marvelous night for a moondance.”

“Dancing in the moonlight.”

“Walking on the moon.”

“…from the cold sunlight that’s reflected off the moon…”

“The moon gazed on my midnight Eggan, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places.”

-Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.

“The Moon aged 9 days,” taken by Joseph Turner with the Great Melbourne Telescope on Sept. 1, 1873. via here and here.

No more talking about the moon after tomorrow, I promise. Tomorrow’s the big/not so big finish.

Take a seat. Get comfortable. It’s a new week, and as always, we have things for you.

My second favorite line from this song: “Mars aint’t the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact, it’s cold as hell.”

My last bit on the moon will be on Wednesday. Thanks for hanging in there so far.

Hark! whence that rushing sound?
’t is like the wondrous strain
That round a lonely ruin swells,
Which, wandering on the echoing shore,
The enthusiast hears at evening;
’t is softer than the west wind’s sigh;
’t is wilder than the unmeasured notes
Of that strange lyre whose strings
The genii of the breezes sweep;
Those lines of rainbow light
Are like the moonbeams when they fall
Through some cathedral window, but the tints
Are such as may not find
Comparison on earth.

Behold the chariot of the Fairy Queen!
Celestial coursers paw the unyielding air;
Their filmy pennons at her word they furl,
And stop obedient to the reins of light;
These the Queen of Spells drew in;
She spread a charm around the spot,
And, leaning graceful from the ethereal car,
Long did she gaze, and silently,
Upon the slumbering maid.

Miranda Richardson as Queen Mab, from that miniseries about Merlin starring Sam Neill.

Oh! not the visioned poet in his dreams,
When silvery clouds float through the wildered brain,
When every sight of lovely, wild and grand
Astonishes, enraptures, elevates,
When fancy at a glance combines
The wondrous and the beautiful,-
So bright, so fair, so wild a shape
Hath ever yet beheld,
As that which reined the coursers of the air
And poured the magic of her gaze
Upon the maiden’s sleep.

from here.

The broad and yellow moon
Shone dimly through her form –
That form of faultless symmetry;
The pearly and pellucid car
Moved not the moonlight’s line.
’t was not an earthly pageant.
Those, who had looked upon the sight
Passing all human glory,
Saw not the yellow moon,
Saw not the mortal scene,
Heard not the night-wind’s rush,
Heard not an earthly sound,
Saw but the fairy pageant,
Heard but the heavenly strains
That filled the lonely dwelling.

-from Queen Mab; A Philosophical Poem; With Notes, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, somewhat based on the character of Queen Mab from Mercutio’s speech in Romeo And Juliet by Shakespeare. You can find the full text of the poem here.

Queen Mab In The Ruins, from here.

The moon is very slowly waning away…

At least here at Counterforce.

The Great Moon Hoax!

From Wikipedia: The “Great Moon Hoax” was a series of six articles that were published in the New York Sun beginning on August 25, 1835, about the supposed discovery of life on the Moon. The discoveries were falsely attributed to Sir John Herschel, perhaps the best-known astronomer of his time.

And this is…

The lithograph that accompanied the Great Moon Hoax on August 28, 1835.

You can find the “Great Moon Hoax” in six parts: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six., which I discovered via the awesome site, Comets, Stars, and Moons.

Speaking of comics…

Moon Knight? Ehhh. I never could get behind Moon Knight (who is illustrated by comics legend Alex Ross up above). I mean, I get the gist of his character, but what a half assed rip off of Batman, right?

Speaking of comics, by now, I’ve outed myself as a huge old school comic book dork, right? Try this on for size then, geeks:

I’ll say more about comics probably… in Tuesday’s Counterforce post? Yeah, probably, but the above issue, Uncanny X-Men #137, the end of “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” is probably the last great comic book story I’ve read. And I’ve read a lot of really, truly great ones since then, but the above issue/storyline could very well have been the end of comics, and of Scott/Jean, or Cyclops/Marvel Girl for some of you, and I would’ve been fine with it.

The gist of the issue: The X-Men are on the blue side of the moon (and observed by the mysterious Watcher). Their teammate, Jean Grey, has recently had the nearly omnipotent alien lifeforce subdued within herself (it’d be possessing her and going on a violent, destructive rampage for some time now) and even though she currently has it under control, the Imperial Guard of the Shi’ar race wants to kill her, so not to risk the Phoenix ever hurting another soul. But the X-Men aren’t going to have any of that, so a deal is struck: The X-Men vs. the Imperial Guard for the life of Jean. The battle  is intense, but the Imperial Guard is just too strong and one by one the X-Men fall in the name of their friend. But the image towards the end of the lovers, Scott and Jean, holding hands as they run through the ruins of a former moon civilization, fighting off the Shi’ar, is one of the most beautiful, epic, tragic, wonderful things I’ve ever seen in comics.

First crush in four colors.

Here’s a little bit of my childhood, kids:

And then…

Colonization of the moon.

Werewolves and the moon.

The moon in art and literature, including:

Credence Clearwater Revival, of course. There’s a bathroom on the right! And:

The work of Chairface Chippendale, from The Tick, and other famous defacings of the moon, and:

The Man Who Sold The Moon by Robert Heinlein, and of course:

That wily bastard, Nick Drake. Of course. And:

The terror of the Mooninites! And:

Paul and Linda McCartney, naturally. From here. And:

Superman IV: The Quest For Motherfuckin’ Peace. And…

Well, and I could go on forever, but I won’t. This whole thing of me talking about the moon was supposed to be about that big sexy lunar satellite up in orbit and about art and human history and… well, sometimes it’s just suffered from poor planning on my part. But it’s ending very soon, and I think maybe perhaps ending not so badly. Thanks for reading so far.

And not just any eclipse, people.

The longest solar eclipse of the century.

The moon passed in front of the sun, an event lasting something like 6 minutes and 39 seconds, which…

…from our perspective down here on Earth, is just fucking amazing.

The people watching the eclipse in Varanasi from the banks of the Ganges is fascinating to me. Bathing yourself there, by the way, is supposed to burn away your soul so that when you die, you’re free from the loop of karma and reincarnation. That’s just a little life after death pro tip for you kids there.

All of these awesome pictures come from here and here and here and here and here.

A brief aside: Yesterday also saw another post at This Recording from me, this time a pretty basic primer on shows like Doctor Who and Torchwood. Painfully basic, actually. Thanks again to Alex & co. for putting up with me.

Also, I’ll finish up howling at the moon on probably Sunday.

And tomorrow on Counterforce: “The guy behind the guy behind the guy.”