LUDIC LOG

TWELVE CONTROVERSIAL OPINIONS (DAMMIT, SOMEONE'S GOT TO TAKE A STAND)

1. Mark Waid is one of the best comics writers around. This speaks less of Waid's talent than it does the current state of mainstream comics, but it cannot be denied. Waid has skills that everyone's uncomfortable about recognizing because it means admitting the medium is in the crapper at the moment.

2. Albert Belle was one of the greatest players of the modern era. He probably had the best half-season the White Sox will ever get out of anyone, and all told he had a jaw-droppingly good career. He'll be kept out of the Hall of Fame, despite far surpassing "good guys" like Kirby Puckett, simply because odious blowhards like Rick Reilly and Bob 'Pompositron' Costas don't like him. Any guilt they feel about cheating him out of the Hall will be alleviated when they vote Barry Bonds in.

3. The mania for war with Iraq has far less to do with oil than the left seems to think. Much like the last war with Iraq, this has more to do with maintaining political hegemony and spelling out a sort of imperialist regle de jou than it does economic concerns. It's also useful to provide a locus of attention for a country that's floundering domestically. Oil comes in maybe a distant third. The 'blood for oil' thing is little more than a catchy slogan.

4. There's really not much of a difference in hard liquors. With very few exceptions, you're just as well off buying cheap drugstore off-brand gins, vodkas, and rums as you are the fancy name-brand stuff. People who pay sixty bucks for a bottle of vodka are suckers.

5. 'I Love Lucy' was a crap show. It had crap stories, crap jokes and crap acting. Its reputation as one of the funniest comedies in TV history is belied by the fact that it's not in the least bit funny. It's coasting entirely on reputation. Ditto the Three Stooges. The Three Stooges fucking blow.

6. Jazz musicians who play endless variations of old standards are somehow conferred the magic of genius, but there's really nothing better about a bunch of jazz sessionmen playing "Stormy Weather" for the thousandth time than there is about a bar band playing "Louie Louie" for the thousandth time.

7. Stephen King is one of the most important novelists of the 20th century and should be studied as such. He's boring, long-winded, self-important, and returns to the same shopworn themes over and over again, but he's better than probably any popular novelist of the last 30 years. The critics and the cult-stud crowd all hate him, and often justifiably so, but he's a hell of a good storyteller and a master of proairetic sequencing. He's eminently readable. His crappy books on literature and writing shouldn't diminish his importance any more than William Burroughs' bad paintings diminished his. I'd rather read King's worst than Kerouac's best. Sure, he's a hack. But he's the best hack since Dickens.

8. Speaking of critics, one of the most profound truths ever put on paper was by Paul Fussell, who said that criticism should be the first and foremost duty of every intelligent person. The yammering of creative types that critics are just bad artists who failed is not only false (plenty of good critics were good artists, and vice versa), but it also tends to be heard the loudest from those whose lousy art just got ripped in the press. And consumers who say they don't need a critic "telling them what to do" obviously misunderstand the whole point of criticism. While admitting that all opinions are equally arbitrary and that no one's is "right", intelligent criticsm is an undervalued activity, as important -- and as creative -- as any other artistic medium.

9. The main reason that certain parties rail so fiercely against postmodernism isn't because they're afraid of some sort of massive ethical breakdown; ethics is just a code word for regulations these days. It's not because they fear moral relativism; most people, postmodernism's fiercest critics included, are well-practiced at situational ethics by this point in history. It's not because they don't understand it or because they think it's gibberish or because they fear the degradation of the canon. It's because they fear a generation of epistemologists. Reactionaries live in fear of those with a finely tuned bullshit detector.

10. Detractors of pro wrestling, of which there are many, like to scornfully point out that it's all fake, and that only a moron would believe it was real. That's exactly true, which is why almost no pro wrestling fans do believe it's real. Of course it's fake. No one thinks it's real, because its truthfulness isn't the point. Saying "pro wrestling is fake" is just a shorthand way of making yourself feel intellectually superior on the basis of a false premise. Disliking pro wrestling because it's not real wrestling is like disliking pro football because the Denver Broncos aren't real horses.

11. The following things are terribly underrated: 'til tuesday; Starship Troopers; SCTV; country music; pork; mail order; masturbation; Mexico. The following things are terribly overrated: Leonard Cohen; Oliver Stone; Saturday Night Live; blues music; air travel; live sporting events; vitamins; Heaven.

12. A log entry consisting of nothing more than a list of totally unrelated topics is just as valid and worthwhile as any other kind.