Prague Zombie

I’ve been writing a weekly column for the Washington Square News this semester. It’s been met with, shall we say, mixed reviews. Be that as it may, I have to say that I’m pretty fond of the one that ran yesterday. So, enjoy below the full, red-blooded uncut version of the article (but do, of course, head on over to WSN and see the published version for yourself):

NYU Prague director Jiri Pehe is kind of a political rock star. He’s worked closely with literary dreamboat and premier Czech president Vaclav Havel, lent his knowing hand to Radio Free Europe, and had the gall, the sheer, explosive libertine chutzpah to flee communist Czechoslovakia in 1981 and settle in the United States. His mug is all over Google, and for those particularly tickled by the democratic ins and outs of this former Soviet annex, Mr. Pehe is probably a household name. Scope his nearly 300-word list of accomplishments on NYU Prague’s staff bios page and you’ll see for yourself that he’s, well, a pretty important sort of fellow.

Recently, he scribed an email in response to a grave mystery that with each passing day bubbles ever closer to its boiling point, and it starts with a line that would perhaps bring a tear to those few, proud Czech dissidents who signed Charter 77 years ago to oppose communist “normalization.”

“It has been brought to my attention again,” writes Mr. Pehe, “that food items are being stolen from rooms, kitchens and refrigerators in the Machova dorm.”

Surely, this numbers high among the darkest hours Jiri Pehe would face in this, the country he fought for and loved.

The letter goes on. Machova RAs are asked to be more “vigilant” and increase their night patrols. Red notices have been plastered all over our hallways, saying things to the effect of, “lock yourself in your room or you will – you WILL – have your granola stolen, and then you will die.” And the kicker, the rotting cherry on top, is that the NYU Prague administration has actually found this to be such a tremendous problem (no doubt because of what I’m sure are innumerable complaints) that the Czech police have actually been made aware of this problem. Should the thief be caught, they will be put in front of a tribunal and then, ultimately, to death. (Also, they face immediate expulsion from NYU Prague and will get their rumps bruised further back in New York.)

Yeah, this is pretty cringe-worthy.

The saga of Machova’s missing food items has lumbered on since the final days of September. It’s attained near mythic levels in these halls, and to my knowledge, no suspect has been detained. With mere days left in the semester, I can only conclude that the bandit will remain at large, possibly to return to the United States to continue his or her reign of produce-pilfering terror. Maybe there was something to the concept of secret police, after all.

Who could it be? An assortment of faceless stoned, drunk partygoers returning from a night out with a serious case of the munchies who just happen to open the fridge and think, “hey, dude, MILK,” helping themselves while the victim sleeps peacefully unaware mere doors down, only to awake hours later in a cold sweat, realizing, crap, that they hadn’t initialed their foodstuffs in Sharpie? That’s, you know, possible. I might feel a bit of sympathy for the stunk-ass narfer who gets caught redhanded, icy doggy-bagged goulash dripping from their quivering lips, should this be the case.

Otherwise, guys, I’m mostly just embarrassed. We aren’t worthy, Mr. Pehe. We just aren’t.

A note: according to a Machova RA, the fall 09 batch of NYU students is the most destructive of the past seven years. Yahoo! High five, guys.

Aaaand fuck yes:

DC. February.

Frank Quitely: I yearn to bloat with your writhing manspawn.

Looks like Brucey’s going for a little dip in a Lazarus Pit? But isn’t Batman disembodied and on some sort of cosmic not-death trip after Darkseid blasted him with the Omega Sanction? (Prediction: might this “revived” corpse be nothing but a shambling aberration while the essence of the Dark Knight is still elsewhere, lost in time and space?)

… I love comic books.

Another fuck yes: I’m on the Prague Monitor today. Links here, to an oddly Czech-ified and trimmed version of the original article, but still.

2:14 Beans

Nothing like Heinz canned beans for breakfast lunch at 2:14 in the afternoon. Such protein.

DID YOU KNOW:

Beans are a food you can use with anything. Fancy a big breakfast? Beans on toast? With sausage, egg, bacon and fried mushrooms? Yum.

Lunch time? Need something to eat? Beans with your pie? There’s not a better combination.Even for tea, you can have fish and chips and beans! There is nothing you can eat that you can’t have beans with. Also, spread brown sauce on them, and mix it all together, and its even better. You can’t beat Heinz beans!

Are you concerned about weight? Eat Heinz beans!! Per serving (a half can) it’s only 149 calories, add your two slices of toast and thats a meal in just 350 calories. That half can also contains just 0.4g of fat of which only trace saturates.That half can also contains 26.8g of Carbs, of which 9.9g sugars, giving a mix of both long slow energy, and an immediate hit.

The high protein content in Heinz’s beans will help you grow and maintain cells. The fibre content will make sure the rhyme comes true (come on, you know the one!)The only down side to heinz’s beans, is the salt content. 1.8g per half can is a hell of a lot of salt for one meal. This high salt can cause heart problems such as high blood pressure. However, if you can avoid other salty foods, heinz beans are a great treat for your day!

Thank you, Stig11686, via Ciao.co.uk.

Combined with the amount of Queensryche that’s happening right now (a lot), I feel even nearer to my NYU brethren, who once adorned their shower with open cans of black beans, spoons adrift in the steam-blasted remnants, ever pointed towards heaven.

Edit: Christ, it is 8:06 now and I am on my bed, eating dinner (beans), listening to Queensryche. I really need to find something new to do in this town.

Comic Books: Going Digital, Going Under

Despite the fact that I’m a journalism major and declarations of print-implosion are in vogue, I try not to overextend myself to take part in any sort of debate as to whether or not CNN’s Twitter is a harbinger of the industry’s doom, or that The New York Times’ iPod application is, like, totally the worst thing. I know that journalism is going to exist in one form or another, barring some global takeover by a totalitarian alien force, and my ability to get a news brief on my phone doesn’t necessarily mean that I won’t also want long, thick, juicy (mm) investigative pieces like Michael Moss’ recent expose on the meat industry. These things have ups and downs, and it’s just not productive to speculate. The wheels are turning anyway!

But. Those pro-digital fuckers just got to my comic books. And we have a problem now.

New Music

Oh yeah.

Learning to Love Mastodon

College students identify with any number of silly things: Bret Easton Ellis novels, “The Hills,” NYU’s gender and sexuality major. All of us, however, identify with music, and we like to broadcast our sonic character through venues aplenty (last.fm, shared iTunes libraries, blogs such as this, our speakers in the wee hours of the morning). And you know, I get flack because I happen to identify with metal (sludge, stoner, doom, drone – it’s all good). I get flack while everyone else creams, just creams over Asher Roth, Girl Talk, and, what, the fucking Beatles?

Man, fuck The Beatles. That was so forty years ago.

Here is something about Prague:

All of the toilets have big bowls, but low water levels, so when you have a dorm packed full of college students slammin’ back the goulash and Pilsner, there is almost always some poop conspicuously slapped about the porcelain, hanging like prehistoric tar or maybe some chocolate taffy, because there are like two toilets for every ten people. The toilet seat in my bathroom happens to be broken, so sometimes you sit on it and it snaps off and you wind up plunging into wild bowel oblivion, never to return; not, at least, as you once were.

I’m in Prague

Enjoying the nightlife, see?

Damon, the stern clubber.

So, I’m going to be writing a weekly column for the freshly revamped Washington Square News about my stay in the Czech Republic (look for it on Tuesdays), getting legally drunk at most hours of the day, and, you know, stuff like that, and as such I would not expect regular updates, per se, but I realize that bloggers have this huge responsibility to put something out more than once every two months, and, well, I’ll try to be better.

Anyway, I do have that column so I don’t want to gab too much about Prague here, but it’s pretty rockin’. You should probably visit it! You can drink beer everywhere. And what better reason is there to visit a foreign country than that?

I do admit that I’d like to acquaint myself with the actual culture a bit more. It’s hard, not just because of the language barrier, but because people here are generally incredibly reserved. They range from genuinely mean-spirited to, well, just quiet, I suppose. I’m enrolled in an international reporting class here, though (surprise surprise), so I’m going to have to start throwing myself out there on assignments in the near future, which I’m excited about. It’s a little easy to get stuck with the NYU crowd. It’s the sort of program that, by its very nature, isolates you a bit in terms of the people you are exposed to. When my brother did a study abroad program in South Africa, it was with a foreign university and he didn’t know anyone; he says this is the way to go. Maybe, maybe not. I’m making a lot of friends (American friends, sure) and having a lot of fun. A success in either case, I’d say.

Alright. We’ll try for more updates in the near future! Stay tuned.

Damn you, Brakhage!

I might as well be a YouTube blogger that deals exclusively in Brakhage-inspired “experimental” film reels of my plucked bum hairs: ain’t no one readin this no more.

Ain’t no one really writing on this no more, either!

Part of me wants to say, “Oh yeah well I am writing for the New York Daily News now there just isn’t time for A Plog of Blunders,” but oh how there IS.

Part of me, having just mentioned Stan Brakhage, wants to go on a digression about why I dropped my Cinema Studies major, to explain how repulsed I was when we were expected to cream ourselves over fucking Mothlight and the Odessa steps sequence in Battleship Potempkin, but I realize how uninteresting and self-indulgent (oh, to be a blogger!) that is, so.

One of my best friends was recently like, “your blog used to be funny, now you just talk about comic books, bring back cheese fridge,” and maybe he’s right, maybe he’s just nostalgic for the putrid appliances we had when we lived together, but one thing is probably pretty much true: I don’t really know who’s reading this anymore, and I only got like three hits a few days ago (and ELEVEN today oh man), and I don’t know, mostly it probably exists to give potential employers pause, and so I am formally announcing the closure of A Plog of Blunders.

Batman: Reborn and Fixing DC Comics (UPDATED 07/02)

Batman comics are just about all I buy anymore. Marvel forfeited my business – completely, irrevocably - after the plodding mediocrity of Secret Invasion and unimpressive early entries to Dark Avengers (“pick up Invincible Iron Man,” they coo, vainly). DC, unable to unify its disparate brands after the brilliant psychedelia of Final Crisis (ultimately insignificant, save for DC’s predictable “Final Crisis Aftermath” schlock and Batman, but more on that later), pretty much has me in the bag for this summer’s “blockbuster event” Blackest Night, but has me less and less interested in some of my previously favorite books like Justice Society of America, Action Comics, Green Arrow/Black Canary, and The Outsiders; they’re just too all over the place. Will I pick them up on occasion? Sure. But can I really find it within myself to actually care about the supposed importance of, say, Deathstroke’s most recent dip into the bleeding rumps of the Teen Titans? Not really. Because half the time, these stories aren’t even fun anymore, and they almost never have any impact whatsoever on the rest of the “DC Universe,” which now seems a collection of galaxies with light year upon light year between them.

It’s cynical, but it’s also mostly true. DC understands how to provide excellent standalone stories, based on the preview material for Wednesday Comics – which looks stunning – and their major events like Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis (mentioned above) and Geoff Johns’ Sinestro Corps War (which, despite spanning several issues across a number of series, is collected in two very digestible trade paperbacks), yet its monthlies exist in some sort of horrible limbo between those and the admirable cohesion of the Marvel Universe. The monthlies share characters, vague references to “big ideas” (Martian Manhunter and Batman getting incinerated are about the only two things that DC’s writers seem to be getting out of Morrison’s sprawling opus), but generally fail miserably in attaining any sort of dramatic weight. The Spectre can suffer and rampage all he wants in the Revelations mini-series, but then a seemingly different character altogether is featured a few months later in Justice Society under the same name, which makes both exercises seem pretty insignificant. Similarly, Mary Marvel, forced to change her look and become an insane force of lust and violence after being possessed by an evil God in Final Crisis, should, presumably, be back to sorts after Darkseid is crushed and good prevails, but she’s strangely present in her S&M form in Johns’ recent JSA arc; is this supposed to take place during Final Crisis, when all of these characters were united against a force beyond all reckoning and the skies were raining fucking blood, or is it set afterwords in a DCU that is seemingly – bewilderingly - unaffected by the cataclysm, save for Mary Marvel’s ass-hideous haircut and exposed Shazam-boobies? Readers can’t enjoy these stories on their own, as they would be able to with the aforementioned events or Wednesday Comics, because the editors insist on pushing the concept that these threads are all connected when they just aren’t.

It’s difficult territory to navigate, I’m sure. Marvel’s Universe feels like a cohesive whole, but that can make it kind of boring and one-note from time to time. And we wouldn’t want DC to forget continuity completely, because then the comics would feel less essential and the science fiction tapestry would collapse altogether. So what should they do?

If the last month of Batman is any indication: reboot.