So I guess Superman's Just A Murderer, Then. (12 People Superman Has Killed In The Comics)

This is sort of a feature I'm thinking of calling "pop investigates," or something. It's basically a continuation of what I used to call Minibests, a series of posts loosely grouped together but written over time.  The 365 Poems is one of these, as it The 8 Hottest Moms.  There will probably be others, and there have been others.  But this is this one.

A few weeks ago I finished up an essay so long that it literally looped time in around itself, which is probably why so few people have read it so far.  (Actually, the post has been viewed 63 times since I posted it June 30, which is as of today, July 16, not bad for something so long. Then again it's not good for something that mentions Superman.)

In that essay, which was what I thought about the movie "The Man Of Steel," I said "Superman does not kill people."  I even said it in bold, I was so sure I was right.  And nobody since then has challenged me with any specifics.  People have challenged me, people like The Boy, who said "How do you know that?", but not with specifics, and so I just had to respond that I had "looked it up," which I sorta had, by which I mean I had read some stuff about Superman on Wikipedia and I had also thought about it for a while and so I was pretty sure that I was pretty sure that Superman had never killed anybody.

BUT there is ONE PERSON out there smart enough to prove me wrong, and that person is ME.  I have confounded myself (and logic) by once again being the only person who is smarter than himself, and I have therefore taken it upon myself to correct myself by pointing out that my (earlier) self was wrong and my (currently existing) self is right, in that Superman does kill people.

Or person, at any rate.  Let me tell you first how I found out I was wrong: I looked it up on Wikipedia the other morning.

This picture doesn't relate to the post at all,
but it came up on an image search and
FOR SOME REASON I wanted to include it.

Wikipedia doesn't usually prove me wrong, let alone inadvertently, and in this case I wasn't even trying to prove myself wrong.  Nor was I trying to prove anything, really, I was just trying to read about superheroes because I had in mind to start doing a series of posts like this one only this series was going to be about crazy origins of superheroes, which I always find fun to read when they are condensed onto websites and I don't have to go buy 330 back issues of Alpha Flight to get the whole version of how Red Tornado is actually an elemental demon or whatever.

(Which I know I'm muddling up heroes there, but let me just say that I'm about 84% sure that currently Red Tornado is an elemental demon, and also I'm 85% sure that most superheroes in the DC pantheon are demons or angels or elementals or something else of an overpowering spiritual/demigoddish nature, because everytime I read an origin of a hero, that's the latest turn. That probably says something about society, which is something that I like to do: say things about society, which is why I was going to do that series of posts about origins, to see what they said about where our society has gone to, in that an ordinary (!?) robot masquerading as a human being (!?) with the powers to create tornadoes (!!) isn't enough for us anymore (?&) and that ordinary robot human being now has to also be an elemental demon of the wind, or something close, but ultimately I... am I still in a parentheses? Better get out of that)

ultimately I didn't go with that series of posts because I couldn't find a good quick list of superheroes, they were all subdivided into women heroes and heroes from Iceland and heroes with dyslexia or something, and then I thought "maybe something about villains, then," since it's been a while since I did something about villains, and that's how I stumbled on "The Ultra-Humanite,"

and I paused because (A) I have that comic! which made me want to read the article the same way if you once met a minor celebrity in person you'll probably watch that person on The Tonight Show, and you'll say to your wife "Hey, I once met that person!" which, trust me, makes a bigger (better) impact on her than "Hey, I have that comic!" because that latter line is always followed by an explanation of

1. What comic?
2. Why is he a monkey?
3. With a big skull?
4. What are you doing reading Wikipedia entries about giant monkeys with skulls, aren't you EVER going into the office?
5. How much Cap'n Crunch can you fit into a bowl?

And so I paused and read the entry because (B) I was thinking about doing something about supervillains, and I read about how the "Ultra-Humanite,"

is the first supervillain faced by Superman, and among the first supervillains of the Golden Age of Comics. He was designed to be the polar opposite of Superman; while Superman is a hero with superhuman strength, Ultra-Humanite is a criminal mastermind who has a crippled body but a highly advanced intellect.

And how he was first discovered by Superman when Superman was breaking up a cab strike,

Superman sets out to smash the so-called Cab Protective League, an underworld organization, headed by a racketeer named Jackie Reynolds, which is attempting to seize control of the city's lucrative taxi trade by launching a reign of terror against the independent cab companies, murdering their drivers and demolishing their taxicabs in an effort to coerce the independents into joining the League.[3] Reynolds organizes unscrupulous cab drivers into a union, the Cab Protective League (CPL). Reynolds' union, financed by the Ultra-Humanite, intimidates other cab drivers through violence and threats against passengers. In the summer of 1939, a cab carrying Clark Kent (alias Superman) is assaulted by a CPL driver.

Which sounds THRILLING, I know, but ultimately that leads Superman to discover that the Ultra-Humanite exists and is a supervillain and also leads Superman to be knocked unconscious by electricity, "enough to kill five hundred men," which actually I think would work.

I mean, nerve impulses are electrical, right? So couldn't you simply electrocute Superman, if not with regular doses of electricity, then with a lot, enough to burn out his nerves so he couldn't move and his autonomous nervous system would no longer cause his heart to beat? Maybe. I know they can block nerves with drugs and stuff, so they could probably burn out the synapses with electricity, and Superman may not need to be able to breathe (if he doesn't then how would Krypton's atmosphere affect him, but if he does how does he fly in space?) but he probably needs his blood to circulate or he'll die.

Anyway: the electricity works but the buzz saw with which the Ultra-Humanite tries to kill Superman while he's unconscious breaks, and Superman interrupts the Ultra-Humanite's fleeing in a plane by smashing into the plane itself, breaking it to pieces and crashing it.

Which alone is enough, I think, to set up this series, as Superman has since 1939ish not been above smashing into planes to destroy villains whose only fault was trying to take over the cab monopoly/electrocuting him (which the latter was only brought about by Superman trying to stop his evil scheme, and "stopping an evil scheme" is what Florida calls "Stand Your Ground", at least when white guys do it, so can you blame the Ultra-Humanite? Not if you serve on a Florida jury and want a book deal, you can't. My recommendation to anyone charged with a crime? Make it high profile. The higher profile the better, because publishers don't want book deals with jurors who convict.)

But Superman couldn't find the body after the plane crash, so the Ultra-Humanite was still alive, and that led to round two when

After scores of subway riders have been injured in the collapse of a subway tunnel and an inspector is nearly killed by a train when he is knocked out on train tracks, Superman discovers that Star, Inc., the firm that built the tunnel, defrauded the city by charging the city for expensive materials and then using substandard materials on the actual project. Superman pursues some of the criminals who lead him to the Ultra-Humanite. 

Ultra-Humanite is more than just a bad contractor, though. He appears to know a thing or two about Superman:

As Superman barges headlong into the shed, the villain freezes him inside a block of crystal. "BEHOLD!" gloats the Ultra-Humanite. "My mortal foe imprisoned in crystal.... so that I can look upon him and laugh until eternity!"

Or maybe not. Superman escaped by punching his way out.  Ultra-Humanite uses his intellect to try to extort a cruiseline, to cause a plague of purple blotches, and to try to hypnotize Superman with a helmet, but Superman fakes being controlled, and after a ray gun fails to stop Superman,

Superman then returns to Ultra's strongholds where the villain tries to blast him, but Superman places the Ultra-Humanite in front of the gun, killing him.

(All these quotes are from Wikipedia.)

Just like that.  Not even "Oh my God I had to do it to save some people who'd have been partially burned by Zod," just "Hey, Ultra-Humanite, eat hot lead from your own henchman," bang zoom it's over, and Superman killed him.

Just flat-out killed him -- succeeding on his second try, apparently, remember the plane-smashing?

(That wasn't the end of the Ultra-Humanite; he was revived by adrenaline, so if you're keeping track so far then:

-- M. Night Shymalan and Stan Lee stole from the Ultra-Humanite, who is a crippled bald man in a wheelchair whose only power is his supreme intellect and

"Mr Lee? A call from our copyright lawyers."

"Tell them I said we're going with it, nobody
read those comics in the 30s anyway!"

-- Pulp Fiction stole from The Ultra-Humanite, not to mention The Man Of Steel, because the Ultra-Humanite's plague is designed to kill people so that the Ultra-Humanite can get around to making his own race.

Anyway: the Ultra-Humanite's body wasn't going to last long, so he had it transplanted into a series of bodies, first a young woman and ultimately an albino gorilla and Johnny Thunder.)

It was when I read all that that I realized that (A) I was wrong about whether or not Superman kills but (B) I was apparently the only person who knew/cared about that.  But on the offchance that I'm wrong about the latter, and because whether or not you care about it, I care about it, so this is just the first in this series of posts.

I don't know if there'll actually be 12 people Superman has killed in the comics; I picked that number randomly and went with it.  But it doesn't really matter, does it, how many people he's killed? The fact is that he has killed and, more importantly, he's GOTTEN AWAY WITH IT, so successfully that we (I) now think that Superman is this whole boy scout dogooder that stands above it all and represents the next wave of humanity, when in reality, he's just going around throwing villains in front of bullets.

Also, I suppose it does matter how many people he's killed.

Nobody's seen that woman since.

 ____________________________________________________________________________

I did do a whole series of posts on what makes a villain the best, and chose The Best Villain, in this series beginning here.

Here are some other things that I've investigated over time:

"30 Things "The Scream" is screaming."

The Seven Best Underrated Instruments

The 20 Best Pop Culture Workouts, 2:

I really actually think this might be the next workout craze, so I'd better slap "TM" and "Copyright 2012" and "I'm a lawyer and possibly the most litigious person you've ever dreamed of meeting" all over this now so that I can secure my future royalties by creating spinoff after spinoff of THE POP CULTURE WORKOUT(TM)(C:2012)(Ialaptmlpyedof) which I will now make even more popular by presenting Workout Number Two:  Cat Head Walking.

Or, this:

That's from the book One fish two fish red fish blue fish, by Ernest Hemingway.  (He ghost-wrote it for Dr. Seuss, is what I heard.).  That book, which I read with Mr Bunches twice on Sunday because he's super-into Dr. Seuss right now, is sort of an exercise manual all on its own.  There are the yellow running people who like to run... for fun in the hot, hot sun, the kids who ride a bike with their Mike sitting up in the back ("Mike does all the work when the hills get high") and Gox Boxing:

Which is properly done in yellow Gox box socks.

Here's something I've started to think about Dr. Seuss and I'm not trying to be ironical or hipster in saying this because I know the big Internet thing is to make a lot of fun over innocent things like comic strips or Back To The Future novelizations, because things that were cool when we were a kid like Choose Your Own Adventures books now seem hopelessly lame, and all, but this is not that.  This is for real:

Dr. Seuss books are kind of creepy.

Here is an example.  The example is Clark:

That is a weird-looking monster that's already pretty big but who is going to grow and grow and I'm kind of thinking that's a mixed message there.  The kids seem... seem happy with Clark, but they admit that Mom may not be so crazy about this animal that while it seems to live in the water can clearly breathe air and is going to grow and grow and Clark himself seems pretty malevolent looking.

One fish etc is filled with things like that, from the 11-fingered man who is held up as a role model to the guy who can magically conjure up fish, on a plate, every time, but who for some reason doesn't share with the Nook, who is doomed to wander the world, a cookbook hanging in front of his head on a hook... but he can't read.

THAT is worthy of a Greek tragedy, isn't it?  And then the God cast down Nook, and bade him eat only what he might learn to cook from the tome he had stolen from them.  The Book Of The Gods' Cooking hung in front of Nook, wherever he went, tormenting him with visions of foods he desired, but never could he learn to read the recipes and so his hunger went unsated.

I mean, that's not what Dr. Seuss says but that's what I got.

Also: Cat Head Walking seems impractical, but if I opened a gym that promised it as a workout I bet I would make about a zillion dollars.

Also-er: Maybe I should start a website making fun of Choose Your Own Adventure books? Maybe.  I mean, even with the zillions I'll make from Cat Head Workout Gym and THE POP CULTURE WORKOUT(TM)(C:2012)(Ialaptmlpyedof), why should I miss out on that sweet ironic hipster money?

Previously:

1.  Yoda Jogging.

This post is about Lana Parilla. (The 8 Hottest Moms (Currently) On TV Shows. (MiniBest!))

Does being a stepmother count as being a mom?  Because I really want to include her:

On this list.

That is "Queen Regina," or the Evil Queen or whoever, on the show, "Once Upon A Time."

I don't watch Once Upon A Time, but I think I might have to start because it sounds awesome, and I've only read about three paragraphs about the show itself.

I went looking this morning not for Queen Regina but for that one girl who played Claire on Lost,

because she was going to hold spot number 4 on this list.  Not for her role as Claire, because this list includes only those people who are currently playing moms on TV, and Lost isn't on TV, as people (like me) who are up on pop culture know.

(People, like me, who are up on pop culture are completely unfazed by the inability of people, like me, to remember the real names of people, like Claire on Lost.)

Anyway, I always thought Claire on Lost was hot, but I didn't start this list until well after Lost was off the air, and so I couldn't put Claire on here because I haven't actually invented time travel, but then I heard that Claire is in Once Upon A Time so I went to look at a website for that show but before I could find Claire I saw Regina, who, remember, is who this post is about:

Her.

Not her:

Her:

Who doesn't love a strong, confident woman?

Having gotten distracted by the existence of the Evil Queen (everyone loves a bad girl) I read about her to see if she was a mom, getting all the backstory, which is a couple of paragraphs long, but which boils down to this: everyone falls in love with the Evil Queen, even the Genie, and she ends up killing them all because once Snow White got tricked into revealing something about a secret marriage.

Oh, and Snow White is her stepdaughter, so technically she's a mom, right?

Here's the thing: While reading about that I saw that Jiminy Cricket is a character, and the Genie is a character, and there are probably other characters but like I said I read only the first three paragraphs of the introduction to one character so I am a little bit "in the dark" as people say about the details, but honestly I can't believe how this story has escaped my notice -- especially given how tuned in to pop culture I am, what with knowing some people's names and having seen a movie recently and all -- up to now.

The Evil Queen is played by Lana Parilla, who as it turns out also was in Lost, in the episode titled "Through The Looking Glass."  She played [SPOILER ALERT! BUT LOST ENDED LIKE A DECADE AGO OR SOMETHING SO REALLY THIS IS NO MORE SPOILER-Y THAN SAYING THAT BRUCE WILLIS WAS DEAD THE WHOLE TIME] Greta, who while she was dying from getting shot by Mikhail revealed that the password to "the Looking Glass" station was the tune to "Good Vibrations."

I don't remember her at all.  But I do remember that episode because as it turns out, that set up was spoiled for me.  I was behind on watching episodes of Lost, while Sweetie and Middle Daughter were ahead of me.  We were talking about the show and how I had to catch up, and I said that Charlie was one of my favorite characters, which (A) was because he was and (B) was because I couldn't say she

was one of my favorite characters because Sweetie gets jealous.

Anyway, then Sweetie and Middle looked at each other and Middle said "Um..." and then they just told me that Charlie was going to die.

[OH, UM, ALSO: SPOILER ALERT? HEY IF IT GETS WRECKED FOR ME, WHY SHOULD YOU BE ANY BETTER OFF?]

So when I was watching the episode where Charlie is underwater turning things off, I suddenly realized this is where he dies, which is what it must feel like, in an extremely minor way, to be Paul Atreides, and that is the story of how Lost was kind of spoiled for me early on, but I (bravely) persevered to watch the entire series and one of the crowning achievements of my life is that I was able to watch the finale nearly a year after it aired without having had it spoiled, a herculean effort that involved avoiding references to the show for twelve whole months.


The moral of the story is that I now plan on watching Once Upon A Time, and so do not tell me what happens.  Also, the Evil Queen again:

Because this post is about her.


Previously, On The Eight Hottest Moms (Currently) On TV Shows:

1. Allana Harkin

2. Sophia Vergara

3.  January Jones.

The 20 Best Pop Culture Workouts, 1:

So over on Thinking The Lions, in between the usual pointless drivel about toast and grasshopper fables, I've been doing something I call "Project CXC," which is Project 190 for those of you who are Roman Numeral Impaired and therefore never know what Super Bowl we are on, and Project CXC is about how I'm trying to lose 63 pounds and get down to 190.

It's been going fitfully, at best.

But while I was swimming this morning, I got tired and needed to keep pushing myself and for no reason whatsoever other than the fact that I have twin almost-6-year-olds and so 99.7% of my life revolves around "Toys R Us" stores and Pixar movies, Dory from Finding Nemo popped into my head and I found myself thinking Just keep swimming just keep swimming over and over until I went insane.

That is, until I finished my swim.

Which, of course, got me thinking, as I swam, too, about other people (?) in pop culture and entertainment who might serve as suitable inspirations for those of us who find the "real" (?) world a bit uninspiring, what with all the sports heroes either pleading no contest to doping charges or being all smirky and unlikeable for other reasons, and so I decided to try another Minibest -- no, don't ask me to clearly delineate the categories on this blog, even I can't keep track of them anymore-- and this one will be a listing of Pop Culture Workouts -- those fictional exercises from movies, books, songs, whatever else pop culture is made up of (Youtube cat videos and Instagram photos of rich kids, I think) that could both keep me, and maybe you, working out and getting in shape -- or serve as a model for a brand new exercise workout and ohmygodthat'swhatIshould'vedone: I should've put this together as a book, THE POP CULTURE WORKOUT, and gotten rich.

Anyway, here's number one: they're not in any particular order, they're just in the order I thought of them and then listed them, so here's the first Best Pop Culture Workout, which you'd have to guess would come from Star Wars:

Yoda Jogging.

In the movies, Yoda rides on Luke's back as Luke swings and jogs through the swamps of Dagobah, exhorting Luke to jog while also telling him that a Jedi's strength "flows from The Force", which makes it seem kind of dumb to do push-ups and hand-stands if all you have to do is use The Force to shape your muscles. 

I'm sure it wouldn't hurt a Jedi to be in shape, and most of them seemed to be doing pretty well in that department, from what I remember of the movies, except that as Yoda points out, he's pretty small, and so it doesn't seem to especially help a Jedi to be in shape, or large, either. 

Maybe it's got something to do with training the mind? Physical fitness equals mental fitness?  In any event, Yoda's training methods are far superior to, say, Obi Wan's.  You never saw Ewan MacGregor climb onto Anakin's back, and that's probably why he became Darth Vader.

30 Things "The Scream" is Screaming, 17 (Is This Art?)

It's as if they read my mind... or my blog.  Or both: given that we live in an era where people can tell from an MRI whether you are suffering from a mental disorder, is it so hard to imagine that technology being used to scan people's minds as they walk into a Wal-Mart store, determining if they're happy or sad or thinking they need a new grill set.  (Hint, Wal-Mart: I never need a new grill set. I don't even have a grill-set.)

(Confidential to society: I'm sorry that I just openly suggested Wal-Mart bombard you with magnetic rays as you walk through their door just so they could get you to buy more pillows, but really, do you think they hadn't thought of that already?)

Anyway, the people reading my mind/blog who aren't Wal-Mart (I'm thinking... peanut brittle? really?)(Actually that seems about right) are the folks over at NPR and NYU, with the former reporting on a study the latter did in which an NYU professor found that "the more expensive the painting, the less the return on investment," that result coming as a surprise to people who don't, you know, know about stuff.

Of course the more expensive something is the less there's a potential for return on your investment.  If you buy something for $1, all you have to do is find someone who's willing to pay you $1.10 for that thing, as I did to this kid who bought the rest of my peanut brittle yesterday at Wal-Mart, and you've got yourself a 10% return on your investment.  And lots of people have a dollar, so your market is huge.  To use Drake's Equation in a novel way, if 10% of all the people in the world have $1, and 10% of those people are looking to buy something and 10% of those people looking to buy something are interested in your thing, you've got 6,580,657 potential customers.  (There being 6, 580,657, 003 people in the world as I type this.)

But if you spend $119,900,000 on something and want to make just one percent on your investment, you've got to find someone to spend $121,099,000 on that painting.

There are only 56 people in the United States worth over $100,000,000, so your market is decidedly more limited.

On the other hand, there are fifty-six people in the United States alone worth over $100,000,000, a number that seems kind of staggering to me.  In the US, the most expensive place to live is New York City, where the median income is just over $63,000.  There are 8,175,133 people in New York City, and that means that 4,000,000+ people in New York city make less than $63,000.

Just for fun (?) let's think about something.  What if you were a $100,000,000-aire, like, say, you had selfishly bought a painting for $119,900,000 because you have no soul, but you decided to do something nice and bring those 4,000,000 people up to the median income line in New York? Could you do it? And for how long?  Remember, you've got to leave something for yourself, so let's leave you, Selfishy McSelfishson from Selfishville, $1,000,000 per year so you can still go clubbing, and let's assume you're 25.

To live 75 more years -- you've got medical insurance, you'll make it -- you need $75,000,000.  (I'm assuming you've only invested in art and so get no return on your money, Mr. McSelfishson).  That leaves you with only (?) $25,000,000 left to dole out, really not so much when you think about it.

What can you do with that $25,000,000?  Giving it away just in dollops, like that millionaire who literally throws money out the window because people have forgotten what happened in the French Revolution, gets all those 4,000,000 people just $6.25. 

If, though, you invested it in safe, long-term investments in a trust and directed the trustee to pay out the income each year to the 4,000,000 people we're theoretically saying have nothing, you would be able to give away about $500,000 every three months. (T-Bills, a safe investment that would make you a patriotic person, Mr. McSelfishson, pay about 2.04% every 90 days.)  Or $2,000,000 per year without ever cutting into the principal.

So what if you were to take that whole $100,000,000 and put it into T-Bills and live off 1/2 the return?  Why, then,  you could give away a million dollars a year and still have $1,000,000 per year to live on and all that money you have would never even be touched, so your son, Selfishy McSelfishson, Jr., would inherit it completely unscathed.

That million per year wouldn't, again, help directly, not everybody -- but that million per year could provide grants for kids to go to college, or matching funds to open small businesses, or perhaps rent assistance, or funding legal services, or buying text books for a school.  That million per year in found money would do a lot of good, Mr. McSelfishson.

Or, you know, you could blow it on a painting you have to keep in a vault and never ever let anybody see plus the painting's ugly anyway.

(PS:  "Eleven of the 20 highest prices ever paid at auction have occurred since 2008, when the global economy all but collapsed," says this article, which goes on to note that many art buyers aren't buying the art for an investment.  They're just getting it because they like it.  In the worst economic conditions anyone alive can remember, people have money to throw away on pretty pictures.)

Wait, wait! What 

happened in the French 

Revolution? Was it bad? 

Tell me!

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30 Things "The Scream" is screaming, 16 (Is This Art?)

The other day, Jeremy Bates, author/commenter, mentioned that Dali might be someone worthy of reinterpreting The Scream, as opposed to Andy Warhol, who commenter/author/dad/teacher Andrew Leon felt contributed to art solely by painting soup cans, while author/superhero author PT Dilloway felt Warhol's Elvis painting was the most notable thing about pop art like that.

Which brings me to dadaism.

My previous exposure to dadaism was through the group dada and their song Diz Knee Land,

which I used to rollerblade to when I was an undergraduate at UW-Milwaukee.  I also listened to Ned's Atomic Dustbin:

but that latter one has no real connection to dadaism, so don't worry too much about it.

Anyway, I went a-lookin' for a Dali interpretation of The Scream and before I could search much I ran into a math website that talked about artists, which seems like a weird way to teach math but then, teaching math is a weird way to teach math, as we should focus more on surveys of math, teaching kids mathematical concepts and thinking rather than rote memorization.  Schools should be a whole lot different, and would be if (when) I was in charge.  There'd be no history, for one thing.  And more science.  And everyone would take shop class.  And art.  And football teams wouldn't be a big deal.

I digress.  Dadaism according to the math site was an art form that said art had no meaning and would therefore take everyday objects and alter them slightly and call them art.  Wikipedia actually says a lot more,  including that the movement was meant to point out the absurdity of modern life, not art, which is kind of confusing: The idea that art has no meaning would be directly contrary to the idea that your art can point out that art has no meaning. 

But that seems the kind of thing dadaists would enjoy.

Most of the dadaists quoted on Wikipedia talk about destroying art and commenting, in doing so, on the horrific images and aftereffects of World War I, which was credited with helping spawn the movement. 

Here in America, the movement took on stronger anti-art themes, with Marcel Duchamp's famous Fountain:

Which the moment I saw it I thought was obviously the birthplace of every single hack art student work ever, right up to and including putting crucifixes in urine.

The idea that art could be shocking and demoralizing was new and revolutionary (and shocking and demoralizing) back in the early part of the 20th century.  But can any art shock or demoralize anymore? 

And by shock and demoralize I don't mean "make right-wingers mad."  That's not hard to do, at all.  I mean really get the world up in arms, one way or the other.

I'm sitting here, on this fine Monday morning and trying to think of a painting or poster or play or musical or art form of one kind or another that shocked the world or took it by storm.  And you know what I come up with?

The Matrix.

Not that it shocked the world, not the way dadaism seems to have.  But it changed the world, in that before it came out, movies looked one way and after it came out, movies looked another way. 

The Matrix wasn't anything new, really: computer games, 'what if this is all a dream?' -- it was simply freshman-dorm-room philosophy.  What it did was present that old idea (going back to pre-Plato times, the idea that none of what we are experiencing is real but is instead a construct we make, an idea Plato actually rejected, postulating instead that we had two potential kinds of existence, the imperfect one of our senses and the perfect one of being) in an entirely new way, and in doing so, completely re-ordered the way movies are made.

Which is to say, The Matrix tore down old movies and built up new ones.  It's impossible to say whether that big-deal, 360-degree scene of The Avengers assembling would have been made if not for the fact that The Matrix nearly 15 years ago gave us 360-degree freeze-frames, just as it's impossible to say if pop art like Warhol's would have existed if dadaism hadn't shocked and demoralized the world by tearing art down.  Maybe eventually we would have naturally progressed to the point of making new art, or making movies look new, but dadaism and The Matrix jump-started the process.

I think maybe that's why I'm so underwhelmed by The Scream.  It sold for $119,900,000.  Why?  Is it ground-breaking?  No.  Is it especially proficient?  No.  Does it represent the best, the newest, the weirdest, the most-thought-provoking, the -est of any category?

No. Not other than "Most expensivest," which maybe is the newest form of art at all.

Today's caption:

Plus, I'm not even very pretty to look at!

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30 Things "The Scream" Is Screaming, 15 (Is This Art?)

What I was wondering was whether there had ever been a live-action, or real-life, re-enactment of The Scream.  You know, like when they all dressed up as paintings on Arrested Development, or when they all dressed up as paintings on Modern Family, or probably when they did that on every TV show ever.  I figured they must have done The Scream because virtually every other painting appears to have had a 3D recreation. (There's a whole bunch of them here, but no The Scream.)

The practice of posing like a painting is called tableau.  Or, more sophisticatedly, a tableau vivant.  A tableau vivant of The Scream would seem simple, but for those colors. 

I found links to what appeared to be two such depictions, only to find that each link led me to the same article about a bride freaking out about her wedding and apparently tableau vivanting the painting, which just irritated me because I don't get why people freak out about their weddings.  To me, there is an inverse relationship between the amount of stress one feels about how perfect a wedding is and how valuable that person is to society, and topping off generic ruminations about wedding anxiety with a generic recreation of The Scream just makes me remember my Rachel-in-the-OC rage. 

I did find this, though:

That's Andy Warhol's version of The Scream, and it sold for 300,000 pounds at Sotheby's not long before The Scream sold to a sucker for $119,900,0900.

That's $191,367 in real money.

Question: How much do you think a recreation of Andy Warhol's reinterpretation of The Scream would sell for?

Extra Credit:  What, exactly, was Andy Warhol's contribution to the art world, as opposed to the world of commerce?

Today's Caption:

 But at least I've never

been on a cereal box!

Yet, Mr The Scream.  You mean yet.

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30 things "The Scream" is screaming, 13 (Is This Art?)

This is incredible.  All the hype over The Scream, and I didn't know any of this.  Watch this video:

So this article on HuffPo notes that the non-public version of The Scream

is kept locked in a vault so secure, I lost count of the number of elevators, electronically-coded doors and retinal scans that we passed through in order to arrive in the climate-controlled tomb where lies what may be the most iconic painting on earth, crated in a glass box.

And talks about the Munch Stones, a name I just coined, 200 or so white lithographic stones that Munch carved his designs into and then made prints from; Munch couldn't afford to keep the stones, and they've never been publicly displayed.


And it mentions that Munch created "over 40,000 works."


Over 40,000.


David Bowie once refused to play any of his hit songs for a concert tour.  I remember kind of sympathizing with him while also thinking he was a bit ungrateful -- people loved those songs, not his new stuff.  I imagine that U2, and Paul McCartney, and everyone else who's ever had a hit kind of felt the same way:  I'm sick of playing Jumpin' Jack Flash, they probably all think in one form or another.


Gilligan likely didn't want to be typecast as Gilligan.


So consider, today, the kind of success that leads you to be pigeonholed into the same thing over and over and over for all eternity, Grishaming your way through a grim existence in which you only sing the same song night after night, or only write the same book day after day.


Edvard Munch made 40,000 paintings and people know only one of them.  


Oh, and he died without getting paid any of the $119,900,000 The Scream sold for.  Although he seemed to live a pretty comfortable life after his early poverty, so I probably shouldn't make too much of that.


Today's caption:

Gilligan, little buddy!

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30 Things "The Scream" is screaming, 12 (Is This Art?)

There's a website called The New Verse News.  They print previously unpublished progressive poetry (alliteration! brought to you by Literary Devices, Inc., TM) about current events.  Back on May 6, they put up this little gem:

TO THE BUYER OF THE SCREAM


Why not something restful, like
a still life by Morandi
you could contemplate and find
a sense of order in? Why not a landscape
by Constable to bring back trees
long since cut down? Why not
a Nolde watercolour
bright enough to burn your eyes?
You must have known
your walls will shudder as long
as they contain your new acquisition;
you must have bargained with
the sleepless nights spent listening
to a cry never stopping for breath.
How’s the demand for grief today?
There’s enough to go around:
it runs out of the faucets
when we turn them and a river’s last
drops trickle into our sinks;
it stands at the intersection with
a cardboard sign asking for a dollar;
it comes home from a war in
bandages. And every time you go
into the secret room you keep it in
to stare down the throat of every
person who can’t stand
the world they’re in, that the price
is always rising.

Today's caption:

 I wish I had thought of a 

cool line like 'how's the demand

for grief today'!

________________________________________________________________________

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30 Things "The Scream" is screaming, 11 (Is This Art?)

PT Dilloway knows his superheroes, but not his artists' media; his aghast (I assume) comment about whether artists were allowed to create things using crayon on cardboard and still call it "art" and get some rich idiot to pay $119,900,000 for it ignores such famous artists as Christian Faur, who not only once was predicted to handily beat the Yankees in the World Series but who also works in the "crayon" medium, devising a color alphabet to make poem-pictures that do something about semiotics.

I don't know what semiotics is, so let's move on to what Faur does in his "Crayon Series."  From his site:

For this body of work I have assembled more than 100,000 hand cast crayons of varying colors and shades to produce a body of work that, to the best of my knowledge, is unlike anything done before in art. 

These individual "pixels" of wax are precisely stacked into specific locations inside of wooden frames to produce a new art form that uniquely balances the qualities of both photography and sculpture. Further, I have developed a mapping system that translates the English alphabet into 26 discrete colors and I use these crayon "fonts" to add words and language to each of the pieces in the show. 

The product is a series of photorealistic landscapes and figurative images that are formed at the surface of the thousands of tightly packed crayon tips. The imagery that makes up this new body tends to focus on isolated elements represented as children, barns, water towers, etc. within indeterminate landscapes, which are intended to reference the individual crayon whose solitary existence, like that of the individual element, is rendered obsolete in the amalgamate. 

The direct representation of language in each piece further imbues the works with meaning and brings an aspect of color into each composition reminiscent of DNA coding. The alphabetic key at the lower left of each panel allows the viewer to interpret the individual words written throughout the various panels.

I believe that means that Christian Faur created life via a set of Crayolas.  He probably had that cool 128-crayon pack with the sharpener.  My mom would never get that one for us, although once she got me a 64-pack that opened its top like a mouth and so I drew robot arms and a face on it and used to have conversations with it in my mind:

Me:  Hi, Robot! How's your day?

Robot:  Apparently not as pathetic as yours.  You're talking to a cardboard box.

Me:  I need friends.

Good times.  Good times.    Here's something from Christian Faur:

That's called Umbilical Sky.  The rest of his stuff is really worth checking out at his site.

Here's today's caption, because, remember, some dumb guy paid $119,900,000 to buy a poorly-drawn cardboard box.

Where did I lose my hairpiece?

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30 things "The Scream" is screaming, 10 (Is This Art?)

Could The Scream someday be worth as much as $59,950,000,000? Maybe -- if the same multiplier occurs as happened to this guy:

That's Zachary Bodish, of Columbus, Ohio, and he's holding a Picasso print that he found in an Ohio thrift store and bought for $14. Turns out the print is number 6 in a series that Picasso made, making it kind of an original (?) that Zachary Bodish, whose friends probably ought to call him Z-Bod, sold for $7000.

And he got that money even though nobody actually authenticated it as a real Picasso. So to recap: guy buys an old poster in a Goodwill, sells it for seven large.

I say it's kind of an original because the poster itself is a print from a linocut -- Picasso carved the print-mold and then posters were printed, with the first 100 or so in such a series generally being considered originals in that they were probably printed by the artist him- or herself, while later copies were made by others or were copies of copies, which are worthless, maybe.  Who knows? People who will pay $7000 for an unauthenticated copy of a Picasso poster might pay anything for anything.

(Other stories say there was some authentication of the origin of the poster done.)

Artists creating multiple copies of their works isn't limited to Picasso (who did the poster for the exhibition).  Edvard Munch made more than one The Scream, even, creating four copies total:

 And you know what they say:  It's really worth nothing unless you have the whole set.

Here's today's caption:

Hummala bebhuhla zeebuhla 

boobuhla hummala bebhuhla zeebuhla bop!

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30 things "The Scream" is screaming, 8 (Is This Art?)

In response to Andrew's question yesterday, yes, The Scream is the most-stolen painting in the world. 

Or not.

I got that stat from CNN, which called it "the world's most stolen work of art," putting that in quotes, so someone else must have said it.  But after Andrew questioned my blind repetition of CNN's claim, I decided to look into just how many times The Scream has been stolen.

Two sites agree that the number of times The Scream was stolen was...

(Drum roll, please)

Wow! I like that sound.  I would like that to precede everything I have to say.  Like:

Sweetie:  What do you want for dinner?



Me:  

Pizza!

Sweetie: [Sigh.] *mentally counts how many days until actuary charts expect me to kick off, brightens up*.  "Okay."  *reviews actuary charts in her mind again* "Extra cheese, right?"

Neat!

Anyway, the actual number of times that The Scream has been stolen, according to two different websites one of which is poorly worded is... two.

God dang it, Art World.  Don't make me sic Big Retail on you.

So I looked into other works of art that might have been stolen, and I found this picture:

Which looks a lot like a guy who was a junior in high school when I was a sophomore and who used to smoke over by his Camaro in the parking lot, but who is actually "Jacob III de Cheyn," and that painting is by Rembrandt, who would go on to invent a short-lived toothpaste that ground your teeth into chalk, but who before that painted Jacob III, which this site says was stolen four times since 1960.

Interestingly, each time the painting has been recovered, it's been abandoned: it was found (again according to that site) on a luggage rack in a train station, under a bench in a graveyard, and on the back of a bicycle.  (Presumably, the thief was not on the front of that bike as nobody has ever been charged with stealing old Jacob III).

But the Mail Online, which usually is devoted to stories of teachers having sex with their students, reports that Picasso is the artist whose work is most frequently stolen.

So The Scream isn't the most stolen painting, and it's also not the world's most valuable painting, as it turns out. The real most valuable painting is one that's missing completely:

That's The Concert by Johannes Vermeer, and this site says it's valued at $200,000,000, which means that if you want a truly valuable painting, have it stolen. (And, my idea for a thriller about the five people who could own The Scream gets a little better...)

Today's caption:

Everything reported about me is a lie!

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30 things "The Scream" is screaming, 2 (Is This Art?)

The Scream sold recently for $119,900,000. 

The average salary in the United States for a full time worker is  $41,673.83.

So in just 12 minutes, someone spent the equivalent of 2,877 years worth of the average person's salary.

On a picture.

To celebrate this demonstration that society doesn't work, I'm spending 30 days captioning The Scream:

"So Bruce Willis was dead the whole time?"

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30 Things "The Scream" is screaming, 1. (Is This Art?)(MiniBest)

Edvard Munch's The Scream, or one of them, anyway, just became the highest-priced piece of art in history, selling for $119,900,000.  The previous-record holder was a Picasso, but who cares about previous record holders?

To celebrate this milestone in wastefulness, I am going to, for the next 30 days, post a caption for The Scream.

"But where will Mitt hang me?"

Pop Culture, I don't trust you: (The 8 Hottest Moms (Currently) On TV Shows. (MiniBest!))

I know it's been six months since I mentioned this topic, but that's only because I'm don't pay any more attention to what I say here than you do. And also I'd have gotten back to this Minibest sooner except I try as hard as I can to avoid ever hearing anything about Mad Men whatsoever -- not because Jon Hamm's a liar but because when a television show (or anything) is superpopular it can only mean that it sucks.

Don't bother trying to correct me. In our modern era (post 2005), the more popular something is, the more terrible it is. It used to be that something being really popular meant it was good, but somewhere between Titanic and the last Harry Potter book, that ended. Now, as a general rule, with the exception of McDonald's cheeseburgers, superpopular generally means supersuckage.

I believe it's because it's no longer possible to distinguish genuine popularity from fake popularity. Popularity is, after all, determined by only a few factors: how much money something made and how highly it is rated and how much people are talking about it.

But money stopped being a measure when I (and you and we all) stopped being able to factor in inflation. Every movie is a record-setter; Shrek 2 made more money than E.T. So The Hunger Games made a jintillion dollars over the weekend; so what? Movie theater box office receipts are simply a Hollywood version of the Weimar Republic.

Then there's ratings -- which are so easily manipulated that Oprah could ask her viewers to rate her show higher.

Finally, there's how much people are talking about it. That used to be a reliable measure -- it's what got me to see Titanic and it's what two years ago proposed as a true measure of greatness. It seemed to me that was a good way to check things out, but I hadn't yet at that time worked out the logistics of the echo chamber that is the Internet and modern media -- where one paparazzi photo can show up on 50 celebrity blogs, where the Huffington Post will headline a story from another site which copied it from the New York Times, where, in essence, there are 33,000,000 Google results for even the most obscure topic.

For example: I just googled "robot who played checkers" and found nearly 6,000,000 sites.

So if it seems a lot of people are talking about something like Mad Men or The Hunger Games or that one show that George R.R. Martin made by taking all the boring parts of Lord Of The Rings and altering them to include more dwarves, it's as likely to be just the reverberations of a single original voice or a small contingent of voices as it is to really be a crowd at the water cooler, and that's fueled my natural suspicion of anything popular, a suspicion that was originally created by high school (where I was unpopular, as you've guessed/been told over and over.)

Which, in turn, is why it took me so long to realize that January Jones plays a mom on Mad Men,



but once I did learn that, I wasted no time in making her number three on this list.

Previously, On The Eight Hottest Moms (Currently) On TV Shows:

1. Allana Harkin

2. Sophia Vergara

28 Days Of Christmas, 28.. Make That 23... of the Best Christmas Songs, 9, 10 and 11... plus The 10 Best Santas and Some Stuff... (MiniBest!)

I never quite hit the mark on these, do I? Here's the 2012 Christmas posts, 23 of the Best Xmas songs with some thoughts on Santas, Santa-Like People, and other stuff:

23. Go Tell It On The Mountain, Jim Nabors, Bo The White House Dog.

22. Kung Fu Christmas/ John McClain.

19-21: Another Rock & Roll Christmas, You Are My Joy, Santa Stole My Girlfriend, plus The Santa Clause Claus, Cousin Eddie who I kept calling Cousin Randy, and Yukon Cornelius.

17, 18: Nella Fantasia, Angels We Have Heard On High, and Larry Stewart.

16. You'll Never Find My Christmas, Bishop Allen, and Gizmo the Mogwai

15. The Twelve Days of Christmas, by Bob & Doug McKenzie, plus Bad Santa.

14. When the River Meets The Sea, by John Denver, plus "Doc Bullfrog."

13. All I Want For Christmas, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and The Santa who helped Superman fight Toyman.

12. We Need A Little Christmas, Glee version, and The Holiday Armadillo.

11, 10, 9: The Little Drummer Boy, Johnny Cash; What Christmas Means To Me, Stevie Wonder; What's This, by Julia Nunes and Ian Axel, and "The Santa From A Nightmare Before Christmas".

8. Taste The Coast, by Admiral Fallow

7. Dringo Bell, Mediaeval Babes

6. Born Is The King (It's Christmas) by Hillside

5: Tijuana Christmas by The Border Brass

4. Christmas Griping, REM

3. A Christmas Waltz, She & Him

2. Don't Shoot Me, Santa, The Killers

1. Snoopy's Christmas, The Royal Guardsmen

The 8 Hottest Moms (Currently) On TV Shows... (MiniBest)

...and it only took me 1 1/2 months to get around to posting number two:


I'm on the record as saying it's not just looks that make you attractive. Yes, Gloria from Modern Family is hot in an obvious way*

*obvious beauty is the worst, as Friends pointed out.

... but that's not what makes someone hot. Just like with Allana Harkin (who was elevated to the number one position by being funny, because funny +pretty > pretty only*),

*that's math, and math doesn't lie except when it pretends that dark energy exists

Gloria, as Sofia Vergara is primarily known for playing, has plenty of other attributes, like

1. She can shoot a gun. Which, I am opposed to guns, but let's face it, that's hot.
2. She's sneaky.





3. And, well, that's it.
4. Well, those things, plus this:




I mean, it's not all about personality.

Previously, On The Eight Hottest Moms (Currently) On TV Shows:

1. Allana Harkin





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