EPISODE 312: CLARK KENT IS MY SPIRIT EMOJI
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Prince is back from the dead with a new song, American TV critics are back with more strangely-hostile reviews of Westworld -- we get it, it's not perfect, but it "denies our humanity, one pitiless puzzle at a time"? Go easy, New Yorker. Maybe take a ride on New York's newest ride, the flooding subway.
Meanwhile Matt Lauer, Garrison Keillor, Mario Batali and Charlie Rose all want to come back, Jim Comey never really left and may never go away, and the Rapture has been pushed back to the second half of the year. Plan accordingly.
Welcome back. The world may be crazy, but we're still holding on.
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HEY, WHAT IS IN THIS THING THAT I AM NOW READING?
Superman turns 1000 and He Still Has Better Skin Than Me.
Superman's Low Hanging Fruit. (Now, Behave.)
People Take our Favorite Things and Show We Didn't Even Know What They Are.
Today's Version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is Three Degrees of White Supremacy, Fun!
How to Have a Satisfying Newsletter Conversation about Omelettes.
Rabbits, Subways, Schoolhouse Rock and Michael Chabon.
LET'S DO THIS.
This week DC Comics released the 1000th issue of Action Comics, the 1938 comic book which introduced Superman via this iconic “Superman holds a car” cover.
It’s actually a very weird shot, that cover. Why is Superman trashing someone’s car? There’s no apparent bad guy around, no evil plot being foiled. Look at those bystanders – this is not a “Truth, Justice and the American Way” moment. The guy in the left corner is losing his entire freaking mind.
(Also, where are they, the Mojave? It's been a while since I visited Metropolis, but nowhere I've been looked like that.)
The actual story is pretty wild, too. Superman breaks into the governor’s mansion to try and get the governor to stop the execution of a woman on death row; he’s got evidence they’ve got the wrong lady. (For some reason the Governor’s bedroom door is also reinforced steel. Is that a thing, Tom Brennan?)
The next day at work Clark gets called on to cover an ongoing domestic assault (think about that for a second, it's a strange place to send a reporter...) And here's Superman’s response to the husband:
That sequence is followed by Clark and Lois out dancing, and some awful guy tries to horn in. “You’ll dance with me and like it,” he says, the charmer.
After she slaps the guy and walks off (Lois is perfect no matter what era she's being written in), the guy and his pals accost her in the parking lot, throw her into his car and drive off. (Again, think about that for a second...if Superman didn't show up, where was that story headed? And no one in the car even seems to think twice about it.)
The shot on the cover is actually from this moment, after Superman rescues Lois.
Point being, the introduction of the character of Superman was not about super villains, aliens or even world wars (though there is a reference to that at the end of the issue); it’s about him standing up for and with women against nightmare men.
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Action #1000 is your classic big name writers/artists anthology jam, and it has some great little gems, like Metropolis having a celebration for Superman, but he doesn’t want to show up because he doesn’t do what he does to get credit (easy, Clark). But he ends up being touched hearing the stories of ordinary people whose lives he changed.
Or there’s another of Superman saying a final goodbye at his parents’ graves in the year like five billion, just before Earth falls into the sun. It’s sad and also really beautiful.
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Superman’s been around so long, it’s hard to find anything new to say about him. It’s all been done already, you know? But even so, I've got my wishlist of stories I'd love to see.
1) Clark Kent, Super Reporter
Writer Grant Morrison once said there’s one main difference between Batman and Superman: Batman hides his actual human identity behind the form of a strange creature of the night. But for Superman it’s Clark Kent that is the disguise.
You think of all the goofy awkwardness of Christopher Reeve’s Clark Kent and it’s just so true. Part of what makes his take on the character such a joy to watch is that his clumsiness is such a put on. As he trips and spills his coffee and pushes up his eyeglasses and Lois ridicules him, we’re in on the joke with him.
*sigh*
But unlike young Peter Parker, who seems interested in photography only insofar as it yields cash for web fluid, being a journalist doesn't seem to be just a convenient disguise for Clark Kent. He really seems to see it as a way of doing good.
So why not show that from time to time?
2) Lois Lane, Batman
People like to say Superman is this great symbol of hope, of what we can all be if we believe in ourselves and one another. But you know, that's pretty much straight up nonsense. He's an alien, yo. He got laser eyes.
It's Lois that's the human being really putting herself out there day in day out to take down forces way bigger than you or me like multinational conglomerates, corrupt tiny-fisted political leaders or our lizard overlords. "Truth and Justice," that's her gig. In a world where there was no Superman, we would still need to have Action Comics or something like it to tell the stories of Lois Lane.
More please.
3) Perry White Knows a Secret
In the entire history of comics, the most unforgivably overlooked supporting character has got to be Clark and Lois' boss Perry White. He walks into rooms, chomps cigars, shouts for/yells at Kent or Lane...and that’s it. He’s like J. Jonah Jamieson, but without any of the things that makes him (or anyone) interesting. He might as well be drawn as a stick figure; he has no specificity at all.
White's One Defining Characteristic:
He Likes to Say This One Weird Phrase which isn't Even a Thing.
The thing is, Perry White runs basically the New York Times of the DC Universe. Are you telling me he doesn't know that Clark is Superman? COME ON.
What are the implications of that? What it’s like to be a phenomenal journalist watching the greatest story of all time and be unable to ever report it? Or even able to share it ever with anyone? What sort of sacrifices has he made for Clark?
Jimmy Olson is traditionally known as “Superman’s Pal”, but maybe it’s Perry White that’s been his best friend over the years. And Clark doesn't even know.
4) How does Superman Sleep over all the Screaming?
If you lived in Metropolis and got in trouble, the first thing you'd do is cry out for Superman, right? Why not? The man hears literally everything.
Imagine that from his point of view: all day, all night he hears people crying out for him. Some might be college goofballs just trying to get him to come to Bill Murray their kegger, but most might have real need. People being assaulted; kids at the funerals of their parents; people in the hospital, dying.
How do you ever rest when that’s the case? How do you go to sleep not feeling like a failure?
Batman is the DC hero portrayed with all the teammates and big plans to stop villainy, but given how much Superman is hearing and seeing all the time, maybe he should be the one trying to figure out a way to save everyone.
5) Take it to the Sci-Fi
In my opinion the greatest take on Superman is a comic called All-Star Superman, which is basically Superman with Crazy Sci-Fi, like living suns and alternate universes and super suits and thousands of years of time passing.
It's insane stuff, not at all the normal stuff you see in Superman comics, but it works because Superman himself is inherently a big idea science fiction concept.
It also has some of the greatest art.
So no to more bulked-up monsters and yes to big and crazy ideas.
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When you’re playing with characters or properties that have been around a while, you’re always looking for the “hot take” – some new insight or point of view.
So for instance I was reading an article this week in Real Life Magazine about the enormous problems of the fantasy of leaving our world behind.
And it had this takedown of Close Encounters unlike anything I’ve ever heard:
When, a few years ago, nearly a quarter million people eagerly volunteered to die on Mars, they perhaps had this in mind, a frontier fantasy muddled with martyrdom and the dream of a nobler death than eco-suicide. They made video applications, similar to the ones you’d submit to get on Survivor, and submitted them to Mars One, a nonprofit hoping to orchestrate the first human colony off Earth. Perhaps all the applicants had seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a 1977 film about child abduction and post-traumatic stress that ends with its deeply damaged protagonist defying martial law to board an alien craft and leave a variety of failed utopias — America, his family — behind him once and for all. The audience is invited to envy his enchanted leap into the unknown, his regression to child-like wonder as he makes an essentially suicidal decision. Elon Musk, who aspires to found a Martian colony, declared that candidates for Mars must be prepared to die, but that “it would be an incredible adventure. I think it would be the most inspiring thing that I can possibly imagine.”
It is sad to imagine an imagination so limited. It is as if Musk believes our planet is so devoid of the possibility of good, that all the opportunities for improving the lot of beings on Earth are so boring or so disappointing, that it is more inspiring to hold a death lottery and launch his similarly nihilistic counterparts into the void.
Yeah, Richard Dreyfuss, stop trying to convince us your characters are dreamers rather than broken lunatics.
YOU'RE MAKING A TOWER OUT OF MASHED POTATOES.
IT ISN'T ADORABLE. GET HELP.
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Or how about this description of a high school theater production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
Admittedly I don’t normally like modern Shakespeare adaptations but once I went to see my cousin in a Midsummer Night’s Dream and it opened with a high schooler saying “I don’t wanna read this play” so he sits down and eats an entire Chipotle burrito on stage and then immediately falls asleep and the play begins but instead of the forest the faeries all hang out in a Rainforest Cafe and at one point in the middle of a scene the guy from the beginning just slowly drifts across the back of the stage on a skateboard, staring at all the characters as the events of the play transpire in the form of some sort of Chipotle-induced coma lucid dream.
There’s even video footage.
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Preaching actually has a similar challenge. The Scripture stories are so familiar to people, it’s almost impossible not to zone them out. I’m always trying to find the thing or the way in that makes the familiar strange. Like last week we had this Gospel where the resurrected Jesus invites people once again to touch the holes in his hands to prove that he’s actually really there in flesh and blood.
Which is all by itself a pretty crazy idea that you can mine for miles and miles. Like, how do you stick your finger in the hole in someone’s hand (or their SIDE) and not run away screaming and have nightmares of squishy flesh holes forever? What is going on here?
But this particular reading doesn’t end there. No, Jesus goes on to ask for a piece of fish, and then eats it in front of them. Which is absolutely hilarious; we’ve gone just like that from body horror to like, a magician doing a crazy trick at a children’s birthday party. He might as well end with a big “Ta-Da!”
And I want to say that Jesus intends that, that his resurrection isn’t meant to be some solemn moment but an event that inspires laughter and spontaneous delight. What the heck is going on here? I don’t know, but I love it. Easter is about joy; death is not the end. Take that, life.
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Speaking of hot new takes...did you know that Netflix just rebooted Lost in Space? If the answer is no, don’t feel bad. Netflix is like the 70s East River sewage of TV networks, constantly dumping out new material (except usually way better than 70s East River garbage).
I guess I watched Lost in Space as a kid in reruns, but it never really did much for me. The only thing I remember is that the Robot somehow seemed like Will Robinson’s nanny. Not a show that screams reboot.
Except it turns out the idea of Lost in Space is interesting in all kinds of ways that the TV show was not. It’s a family drama, with all the heart and fun that entails, but in this unique context of sci-fi and wilderness adventure.
The pilot can be tough to watch. You could re-title it Nightmarish Child Endangerment in Space. But since then it's really grown on me. The kids (there are three now) are fantastic. Doctor Smith is now played by indy icon Parker Posey. (You start thinking What is Parker Posey doing in a science fiction family drama? But pretty quickly you're wondering Oh God, can someone please stop Parker Posey from destroying that poor family? She is really evil.)
And the Robot is... pretty different, too.
Enjoy those claws in all your upcoming nightmares.
I’m not sure I know a scifi show that offers such a great family-friendly story. Once again, Netflix nails it.
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On a totally different topic, some great stuff floating around last week about recommendation engines – the algorithms in things like Google or social media sites that direct you to things they think you’ll like based on what you already like or follow.
Fun fact, it turns out these algorithms have a tendency to direct users to more and more extremist content. Yeah!
For instance this article shows how YouTube moves you from mainstream news to insanity within just three links. A guy on a TED Talk page gets suggested CNN; when he goes to CNN, he gets suggested FOX; when he goes to FOX, he gets suggested right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
It’s the same with YouTube and music videos; you watch a music video, one of the things you’ll get recommended is a remix of the video or a mashup of music videos. Click on that, and you’ll get options for far right wing speakers and videos.
There’s an even crazier report about Pinterest.
When I log into the site, I get served up a slate of relevant recommendations—pins featuring colorful images of baby clothes alongside pins of hearty Instant Pot recipes. With each click, the recommendations get more specific. Click on one chicken soup recipe, and other varieties appear. Click on a pin of rubber duck cake pops, and duck cupcakes and a duck-shaped cheese plate quickly populate beneath the header “More like this.”
These are welcome, innocuous suggestions. And they keep me clicking.
But when a recent disinformation research project led me to a Pinterest board of anti-Islamic memes, one night of clicking through those pins—created by fake personas affiliated with the Internet Research Agency—turned my feed upside down. My babies-and-recipes experience morphed into a strange mish-mash of videos of Dinesh D’Souza, a controversial right-wing commentator, and Russian-language craft projects.
One of the things I found most striking about this piece is that for a lot of algorithms not about what you like but what you look at. A page or image view is enough for the algorithm to think, oh he definitely is into alien conspiracy theories.
(And I totally am.
Fun fact: if you watch any Tina Fey-written show you will definitely hear people talk about how the world is being run by lizard people.
She knows what’s up. And so do 12 million other people.)
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I did a story for America about a week ago about the growing problems around the use of algorithms for everything from job search results to sentencing of felons. I got to interview Dr. Paul Twomey, who is basically the grand-daddy of the internet; he was one of the founders of the organization that oversees the development and maintaining of internet addresses. The original title of my article was going to be “The Father of The Internet Has Seen What is Going on with Your Algorithms, and He is Not Having It.”
I know, very Buzzfeed. I’m sorry.
The article was being released at the same time M.Zuck OS 7 was preparing to put on his human face skin and front Congress.
Definitive Evidence of the Lizard Infestation
So of course the social media folks at America wanted to mention Facebook, so that the piece would pop higher in Google’s search algorithm. Their title was something like “How the Church can Fight the Tyranny of the Facebook Algorithm”.
Here’s the thing: the article had nothing to do with Facebook. I don’t think it even mentions Facebook, in fact.
So basically we had a situation of an article that was about how algorithms are misleading people whose title was itself misleading people on account of the requirements of algorithms.
I seriously love that. Welcome to the world.
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If you're interested, here's the final piece (with fixed title).
And if the tech ethics realm interests you, you might check out Casey Newton's The Interface newsletter. The articles I mentioned at the beginning came from her.
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Last week, Kieron Gillen offered maybe the best recipe for making an omelette I’ve ever seen.
A few days later I was reading Warren Ellis’ newsletter, which had come out a few days before Gillen’s, and I found this (and if you have trouble with foul language, warning, there is some foul language):
The omelette is an ancient French dish, one of that wonderful people's greatest gifts to the world. It's a three minute job at most, and less than two of those are in the pan. It is simple and should be pure. Don't put milk in it. You don't need butter. Don't fucking flip it like it's eggs over easy. It's a fucking omelette. He does these things to destroy the omelette because he is evil. Eeeeee villllll. He only uses butter and milk so he can destroy more things while making breakfast.
Get a small non-stick pan on the hob, at three-quarters heat. Crack two eggs into a bowl and dash them with a fork for thirty seconds. You don't need to whisk them. An omelette should not be a homogenous mass. You want ribbons of yolk and white tangled together.
When a tiny drop of water in the pan sizzles when it hits, pour the eggs in.
Leave alone for thirty seconds. Just let it sit and work.
Take the pan and shake it, like you're doing figure-eights with your wrist. Most of the work here is with the pan handle. If you're really good, you won't need a spatula at all. But this isn't a test. Lift the edges of the forming omelette with the spatula. After a minute, the whole thing will become free of the pan and slide around. Keep shaking it. You want the top to look like scrambled eggs, shiny and almost-set.
This is why you don't fiip it. An omelette is an exercise in textures. Firm to the bite on one side, soft and airy on the other.
If you want a filling, it goes in now, just for fifteen/twenty seconds to warm it up.
Then you flip the right hand side of the omelette into the middle. You will see that the underside has become firm and golden.
Slide the whole thing on to your plate so the left hand side folds underneath.
Now you season. I'm currently using black sea salt and smoked paprika.
I had some left over aromatic duck from a Chinese meal last night,so I just shredded a little bit of that. Experiment. You can wilt baby spinach right on top of it for twenty seconds. Some people grate cheese in. Sometimes I chop up some red bell pepper and toss that in.
Perfect is the enemy of good. As you will see below, today's is a little ragged and a touch too gold in places. But you're not making food for a photo book. You're making something that tastes good and surrounds the intent of the object. It's just eggs, comrade.
If you're counting: without the filling, this omelette is around 150 calories and around 25g of protein. It's not classical, because it doesn't use butter, but in the days of good non-stick pans, I don't personally think it's vital. Your mileage may vary. People will tell you to use water (for the steam effect, to aerate the omelette) or milk (for reasons beyond my understanding). (Actually, no: I suspect milk in particular is a chef's tool for banging out a reliable omelette for two hundred covers at breakfast.) I always prefer to experience the thing in itself, for itself. Don't be Wilson Fisk.
In the words of Madame Poularde: "I break some good eggs into a bowl, I beat them well, I put in a good piece of butter in the pan. I throw the eggs into it and I shake it constantly. I am happy, monsieur, if this recipe pleases you."
The recipe was accompanied by these photos of the omelette he had made.
Suffice to say I laughed so loud it sounded like I was shouting. And in a public place which is happy for me never to be there again.
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Did you know Spain literally translates as the Land of Many Rabbits? That Botswana means Those who Went Away? Or Venezuela means Little Venice?
This map gives you a translation of the name of every country. It’s probably a total fiction -- Land of Many Rabbits? What? -- but I love it.
Do you ever wonder about who exactly are the people that write and edit the Wikipedia pages? The New York Times discovered that the NYC subway pages are run by two teenagers.
Both teenagers described their motivation to edit Wikipedia as a mix of personal enjoyment and a desire for public service. Mr. Ng said that editing at times felt like a video game, except that instead of getting a high score, the reward was creating a page that left the reader more enlightened.
Schoolhouse Rock, circa 2018.
And one last great hot take, by Michael Chabon on dreams in TV versus dreams in reality:
I’m the guy who fast-forwards through dream sequences in movies and skips to the end of dream paragraphs in books. The truth of a dream is not in its dreamlike quality: the truth of a dream is a tree bleeding ants, a night truth oozing through into the waking world, unseen not because of our vanity or self-delusion or fear but because we spend so much of our waking lives sleepwalking, eyes open but blind to the weirdness of the waking world, preserved by the saving hand of repression from anything that might come along and give us a dangerous shake. We call the people who try to jolt us out of our somnambulism artists, and in general we don’t treat them a whole lot better than we do our prophets.
For the past forty years, David Lynch has been shaking us with his art, aiming our gazes to the night truths of the world, to the truth of our dreams, violent and dark and beautiful as that truth may be.
Thanks for reading. It's good to be with you.
Who knows what the week may bring. No matter. We're in it together.
Here we go.