Mike Gold: Cold Ennui
Here’s a sucky way to spend one’s birthday: voiceless with a serious summer head cold. Bitch, bitch; moan, moan. Okay, I had a great day-before-my-birthday in Manhattan lunching with Danny Fingeroth and dinnering with fellow ComicMixer Martha Thomases. Nine hours of fantastic conversation in the best thing in life with your clothes on.
Sadly, as the overly-breaded but otherwise tasty General Tzu’s was being presented to me at our Greenwich Village dungeon of culinary delight, I was starting to sound like a frog in a blender. By the time I was on the subway back to Grand Central Terminal, I was grateful somebody bothered to invent texting. The gifted Miss Adriane picked me up and dragged me home. That was birthday-eve.
On birthday day, we first had to ransom my car back from the shop – I can’t complain; 100,000 miles on one battery is pretty damn good and I guess you really do need functioning breaks. After a quick stop at Walgreens to clean them out of toxic chemicals and chocolate Twizzlers, we returned home. As Miss Adriane procured the prerequisite chicken soup, I retired to celebrate the anniversary of my mother’s major inconvenience in a time-honored way: I picked up my stack of comic books (e-comics; I’m nothing if not hip and trendy in my dotage) and commenced to read.
As luck would have it, there wasn’t a winner in the bunch. Only one or two sucked; the rest were poignantly mediocre. This is not to say that I hadn’t read some worthy stuff while on the train to Manhattan – I consumed all the good stuff as a matter of fate and ill-planning. But you’d think that out of a dozen or so hand-picked titles, there’d be at least one that reaffirmed my fannish enthusiasm. Let us remember: I was under the weather, and my cockles needed to be warmed.
There were three New 52 titles in the electronic pile. All 12th issues. None motivated me to pick up the 13th, two months hence. There are a number of New 52ers I really enjoy: Batgirl, Batwoman, All-Star Western, and everything with the words “written by James Robinson” on the credits page. These weren’t them. The most enjoyable of the DC books was, oddly, the only Before Watchman mini I’m reading: Night Owl, and that’s because I’d read prescription warning labels if Joe Kubert drew them. Reading Kubert, for me, is a lot like drinking chicken soup. You might have to be Ashkenazi to fully grok that.
The Marvel titles were okay; slightly better in that none chased me away. But, damn, why is it that each and every good Marvel “event” series has four times as many issues as necessary? Okay, we know the answer to that one. Still, the Avengers Vs. X-Men series was established to put Marvel on a somewhat different course for a while and it’s doing its job. It’s not a reboot, it’s just your standard dramatic shuffling of the Marvel deck. But it should have been over by now.
The so-called indies were all over the map as they are supposed to be, so my luck of the draw was simply a bad hand. No, not bad. Just mediocre. Too many unnecessary middle-issues in overly long story arcs. I regret the day publishers decided to put six solid pages of story in each 24-page issue, and I look forward to our next GrimJack series to once again prove you can actually put 28 pages of story into a 24-page issue… without being Stan Freberg, and, yes, that was just to see if Mark Evanier’s paying attention.
Okay, all that sucked. On the other side of the scale, I got more than 200 emails and Facebook shout-outs from friends old and new. That’s great anytime, but after a speechless day of aches and not-breathing and a dozen mediocre comics, all that made be feel on top of the world. And not in the Cody Jarrett sense, either. To one and all, my deepest thanks.
Daughter Adriane and I finished the day watching Paul, a genuinely funny and essentially heartwarming movie written by and starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. I’m a sucker for anything with Jane Lynch that doesn’t involve high schoolers spontaneously combusting into song, and Pegg and Frost have never disappointed me.
Moral of the story: when you’re feeling low, reach for something positive and funny. Tomorrow is… another day.
Thursday: Dennis O’Neil… Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing?
See? You should have read The Samurnauts: Curse of the Dreadnuts. 36 pages of story, with about 32 of content. That’s beating Marvel and DC… :)
Sorry to hear (er… see) your voice got Pekar’ed. Hopefully not for long. A solid matzoh ball is the sucrets of the Jews.
Last matzoh ball I ate was in 1985. I’ll let you know when I’ve finally passed it. But that’s a great pun.
Samurnauts… no, that’s not ringing a bell.
Last matzoh ball I ate was in 1985. I’ll let you know when I’ve finally passed it. But that’s a great pun.
Samurnauts… no, that’s not ringing a bell.
Ahh, well, it’s cause I didn’t send it to you. The Samurnauts, not the matzoh balls.
And which barbecue sauce do you recommend with each?
Mike, I’m curious about the title of this post. Are you familiar with a Michael Nesmith song, Grand Ennui?
Grand Ennui came down between the Monkees and Elephant Parts. I love “One Ton Tomato.” Actually, I love all of Elephant Parts / Television Parts. Funny you should mention. It was announced just yesterday that Mike Nesmith has taken the vacant spot on the upcoming Monkees tour. And if I get my voice back (it’s now at 65%) I’ve got a slightly obscure Monkees song, Goin’ Down, programmed for this Sunday’s Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind, on The Point.
But no, that’s not where the title came from. It evolved into Cold Ennui from “Cold Wind Blowing,” which evolved out of Walter Horton’s “West Winds Are Blowing,” which is a great Sun Records blues tune from back when.
Of course it’s possible I was channelling the First National Band — I used to play ’em on Chicago air back in those hallowed Marconi days!
Wow! I’m impressed. I’ve got about 7 Mike Nesmith albums. Love “Tantamount to Treason” and the song Highway 99 with Melange, “Without a transmission, you ‘caintengo’.” I’ve got Elephant Parts on tape and DVD. I also have all the Monkees albums too and there was a time I could not admit that.
I’ve come full circle. When I was a teenager, the Monkees were on teevee and it was cool to be a fan… if you were a teenager. When I got on the air in the early 70s, some people thought it was very cool to play them and many others thought they were lame rip-offs. Still a third group thought that playing the Monkees was an insult to the Beatles. These people belonged to a cult called “idiots.”
When Baby Boomers started bitching about their lost childhood — this was about 35 years ago — the Monkees became cool again.
Now, I’m thinking it might be fun to go to their NYC gig. Depending on the venue, I wouldn’t be surprised if it sells out.
I hadn’t heard there was gonna be another tour.
As to the New 52: I find “Batwoman” pretty much unreadable, and i think that ditching Stephanie Brown and making Babs Gordon Batgirl again was a bad idea on more than one front.
Gail really makes it work. She got me interested in how Barbara healed, and where she’s yet to heal. Nice human interest. And I gather (but I really don’t understand) that the New 52 means never having to say your old stories are silly, so Stephanie wasn’t ditched, she was retroed out of existence. Maybe. I think. I guess. Perhaps. Don’t mean she won’t be back. Or that I’ll care. Marc Fishman has a nice column about how Marvel Now seems to be handling things as opposed to the New 52 coming up this Saturday; check it out.
Batwoman, on the other hand, seems to have continued pretty much as is from its pre-52 run in Detective. I guess. Maybe. Anyway, it’s a bit of effort to catch up and stay on top of it, but it’s worth it for me.
The only problem with Batgirl has been the lame duck villains.
The nugget that grabbed me was the line, “I look forward to our next GrimJack series…” Is this a thing? Did I miss an announcement, or was that some type of analogy/metaphor?
You haven’t missed an announcement, Neil. We’re in talks…
Great fun lunching with you, Mike. I thought you were referencing Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You”:My story is much to sad to be told
But practically everything leaves me totally cold
The only exception I know is the case
When I’m out on a quiet spree, fighting vainly the old ennui
Then I suddenly turn and see
Your fabulous face
Chorus:
I get no kick from champagne
Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all
So tell me why should it be true
That I get a kick out of you
Actually, Porter had to make a number of revisions to that now classic tune. As reported truthfully in Blazing Saddles, the “champagne” verse originally went:
Some get a kick from cocaine
I’m sure that if
I took even one sniff
That would bore me terrifically, too
Yet, I get a kick out of you
And prior to the Lindbergh kidnapping, the final verse originally went:
I get no kick in a plane
I shouldn’t care for those nights in the air
That the fair Mrs. Lindbergh goes through
But I get a kick out of you.
Cole didn’t mention which “Mrs.” Lindbergh to which he was referring. America’s best-known bigot kept a separate family going in Germany. Three children from that one. Six from his American wife.