braingarden
Efforts continue to free myself from the self-inflicted / half-a-lifetime prison of timers and timeblocks, relics of a former perceived need and identity piñata of inflexibility, and allow myself to work / write / make much as my wife toils in her garden for all hours of the summer day: by default. Make it, working / writing / making, like breath in meditation: it's what I do first thing, what I return to, my inhales, my exhales, one through ten, etc etc (note: I quit meditating long ago and have found that, since I started this process of time-freeing and making doing my work the default activity for the day, I no longer have a little voice telling me to consider meditating again).
Happiest when I spend my time doing things that are actually in my control because, as I've slowly learned, precious little is.
A long ways to go to parole myself from the mental constraints that will, undoubtedly endeavor to fuck me up but, on the best days, the days of assigning guilt for a failure to attain a set number of hours are over, what I do being nothing special – only what I do.
UZUMAKI anime clip
Ito’s mad world brought to stunning life. Can’t wait. (via)
Superman Day at the World’s Fair, 03 july 1940
Ray Middleton makes his debut as the first live action Superman (yes, yes, I know, see my notes below) on 03 July, 1940, appearing at +/- 1:20 in the video below. You can also spot DC owner Harry Donenfeld riding an elephant at 1:04 and Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel with DC co-founder Jack Liebowitz at 2:25.
As I seem to be in a “comment on an ages-old mystery” mood today, I’ll wade into the 83-year-old “was it Middleton or someone else in the suit” controversy and, while I have no conclusive evidence, I’m going with it being Middleton in the Super-suit: especially in the video, the facial structure /length looks similar to the picture of Middleton (Middleton is on the right in the second photo (source) below, taken the same day) and the nose bears a striking resemblance in both photographs below. And, while Superman’s hair is parted on the opposite side as Middleton’s, shifting the part from one side to the other could (again, I’ve no conclusive evidence, only a practical knowledge of how stage actors work) part of a performative effort to obfuscate Superman’s “secret identity,” given that Middleton doesn’t wear glasses and organizers would, indeed, want to give the kids a great show.
Nevermind that no one, to my knowledge, has come forward in the 83 years since that day to claim that it was them in the super-suit, something that seems far more of a stretch than an actor puffing up his chest and parting his hair in a different direction for a one-day-only performance.
That being said, I’m happy to be proven wrong and one day learn the real identity of the unknown and uncredited Superman, but we’ll consider these to be my two “it’s Middleton” cents thrown into the pot. Either way, what wonderful footage.
HOW TO FIND ZODIAC (Kobek, 2022)
As with Kobek's series as a whole (the first of the duology, MOTOR SPIRIT, is quite excellent – and I do recognize that I might have done a disservice by reading them so far apart from one another), there are two books in HOW TO FIND ZODIAC: one, an utterly compelling examination and portrait of not only the pre-internet internet of fandoms and fanzine culture but of the collision of that culture with right-wing, anti-government ideology and Cold War paranoia; the other, half a portrait of a deeply disturbed man, Doerr, one whom I could readily believe would commit a reign of terror to prove his own unappreciated genius to the world – I do agree, wholeheartedly, with Kobek's portrayal of the killings as the late 60s, pre-internet equivalent of today's mass shootings (if Zodiac were active now, he'd be livestreaming) – but still only half a portrait: I wanted to know more about Doerr, beyond the screeds and personal ads, the married father with a secret double (or, perhaps, triple) life. Maybe that was intentional, maybe not, but I was, nonetheless left wanting more, hoping that, eventually, we'd get to it. We didn't: the final page left me with the impression that I had read half of a book, a deeply-drawn and exceedingly well-researched portrait of half of a person - but then again, maybe I didn’t take the title of the book literally enough.
That being said, while Kobek's theory is, by far, the most compelling one put forth, I never had that oh shit / eureka / evidentiary moment that fully convinced me that Doerr was Zodiac (though the sketch, devoid of glasses with added mustache, came pretty damn close). Perhaps I missed something – or perhaps the other half of the book, the missing half, would finish the job?
