Guys,
Not to beat this topic into the ground, but here goes. One of the things I like about New York is that for every well-funded advertising campaign that blankets the city, it seems like there’s an equally concerted ad-busting countercampaign. I don’t want to get all Tyler Durden here, but to some extent vandalism–especially the pointed, critical kind, the kind that looks at ads and says, “Are you fucking kidding me?”–seems like a sensible response to life in Manhattan, where public space is commodified to the point that it’s virtually impossible to find a flat surface without a commercial message on it.
Sure, the idea of dissenting against the entertainment-state’s pervasion of daily life (or some other Tom Frank-with-a-semiautomatic-Sharpie thesis) probably didn’t cross the mind of the Beavisesque wag who added the word “Me” to every Blow poster in every station along the F line. (This actually happened.)
But remember the MTV campaign we were discussing? Apparently a few New Yorkers found it offensive enough to merit some sticker-bombing critiques–somebody has defaced a bunch of the “CAN I GET MTV FROM KISSING?” ads with Wheat-pasted fliers modeled on the cigarette pack warning label. They say “PEOPLE’S GENERAL WARNING: Television may cause confusion of mindless entertainment with a deadly disease.”
Re the black Bond, I’d buy a ticket, although I don’t think Cuba’s the right man for the golden gun. But I like the prospect of a black, female, or Tennessean Bond–if there wasn’t a British guy in that tux, all of a sudden we’d have an investigation of the nature of Bondness on our hands. What makes Bond Bond? Forget nationality–give some cocky screenwriter a license to strip away the Bond props we’ve become accustomed to, at least temporarily. Would there be any essence left if you took away his ride, stripped Q off the speed dial, slipped him a stirred martini? Austin Powers and the end of the Cold War made Bond into the spy who got kicked to the curb; some Elliott-Gould-is-Philip-Marlowe!-style stunt-casting could save him.
They wouldn’t have the guts, of course. When it comes to playing around with mythic characters, comic books tend to wipe the floor with movies–and, counterintuitively, it usually just strengthens the myth. Anything Grant Morrison writes falls into this category. Alex Ross and Jim Krueger’s intense, psychologically gnarled “Earth-X” and “Universe-X” books suggest that superheroism, trying to save the world, is essentially megalomaniacal because what actually drives characters like Reed Richards and Professor X is a desire to ensure the persistence of their vision of the world. It’s Umberto Eco’s Myth of Superman, plus fight scenes!
Some of these issues come up in this Washington Post profile of Phil Jimenez, the gay man who writes D.C.’s “Wonder Woman.” A guy who admits that the Lynda Carter “twirl” from the old Wonder Woman TV show was a formative moment in his sexual life is now in charge of the myth of the Amazon Princess. It’s kinda cool.
AP
