...given that I don't watch a single one of these shows. But the picture accompanying the headline I must ask about. The girl on the left whose bare back we see: is she dying or something? I mean, I could count her vertebrae.

I rarely watch broadcast TV(and never major network TV), but--is that the kind of "thin" that some diseased souls call sexy now? If so, when did necrophilia go mainstream?

A minor one: I meant the one on the right. Duh.

He should be only the start.

But not a bad start.

...no more.

>>Southerners have been brainwashed to fear the word "union"

Though I assume, like most, you probably mean that Southerners associate the older meaning(for them anyway) with all uses of the word: No. That's silly and glib.

But in a more exact sense: yes. I grew up in the South from Nixon through Reagan, mostly in the Charleston, SC area--which most would call about as "Southern" culturally as it gets. At the time--I don't know how it is now, as I left in 1987 and haven't even visited Charleston since 1995--it was a place with a huge military presence, if living about 15 miles from a major naval weapons station counts, but that wasn't all. The military college the Citadel, which my dad graduated from, is there, and the military's presence was apparent everywhere. So deep that when the invasion of Grenada happened or Libya was bombed, it was announced victoriously over the PA system in my school--to nearly universal cheering. (And if you'd called any of them "red" back then you was in for a whuppin', boy) Big part of its economy; in my HS a military aptitude test was one of the required standardized tests we took every year.

I spelled out various broadcast call letters with mine and then moved on to diagrams made of many #2 pencil-filled bubbles. My dad had been pretty much ruined by the Citadel & Vietnam and I would have shot myself in the face rather than join the military. I think my guidance counselor later said that was frivolous.

But boy, did you get encouragement. Partly because there weren't a lot of other jobs waiting for you when you graduated. Maybe the naval shipyards(though after Clinton, no longer), but in Charlestion, unless you were born into a certain class, went to the right school(the one I've mentioned was one), like that, you were only going to ever make so much in your life. Rich Southerners like being really rich, and like knowing others aren't.

I briefly worked in South Carolina, at a music instrument warehouse, following my first stay in Chicago. And I saw the effects of no union presence on the work environment. Pathetic pay that can be cut anytime. A pension plan removed, retroactively, with no notice. Being forced to work overtime every single day, and being paid the very same wages, and no recourse to get the overtime one's been cheated out of. Because as workers have no rights, there's nobody to defend them.

Psychologically, it felt like slavery; that was the effect on the workers, who'd already been raised from birth with the idea that they had no rights and someone giving them a job was doing them a favor. Which is the situation that suits the wealthy Southerner well--you can do as you like and nobody dares complain.

It's a funny place. It claims American culture as its own and that somehow everyone else's is "alien." They are heavily a part of our armed forces. And yet within the South, they don't like to think of themselves as "America" in the same way others do elsewhere. Or put another way: When the white Southerners seceded(direct ancestors of mine having been ruling class and directly involved), it wasn't that they were LEAVING America. That's the misperception of the North. It was that they were redefining themselves as the true America, and rejecting the rest as NOT America. And that's the view I grew up around. The South is an easy place, or was then, to forget about the rest of the country, something they only saw on TV.

Seriously. I mean, who looks down on pie?

...Miller knew Eisner, and Eisner was a truly positive influence on his comics work from the very beginning. It's sad he couldn't do this most cinematic of comic strips justice. But I really don;t see how you can make the Spirit a movie without losing a lot of what it is. First thing, they were usually little self-contained 8-pagers. (It came as a separate comic section by itself in the Sunday paper) But you have to try to pack many together to make a feature. You have to pack too much in too small a space and can't let it breathe the way Eisner did. The Spirit was not designed as something in long doses.

Thing is, if a contemporary director back then had directed a movie of the strip, it wouldn't be any of Miller's noir heroes. It would be Frank Capra, maybe Howard Hawks. The Spirit walked this delicate line between warm and eerie, dark and friendly. But overall, it was never really very dark, certainly not seedy. And always humorous even in the darkest moments, just by virtue of the timbre of Eisner's style. His characters, too, coming out of his experiences in Yiddish theatre, really acted; he really detailed their movement and expression. And that's what a noir take misses. It's really supposed to be more screwball than noir.(and "noir" is such a cliche now.) An ideal Spirit would be someone like George Clooney, or a young James Garner.

Alan Moore and Rick Veitch actually showed a better understanding of the Spirit with their pastische GREYSHIRT, which is the Spirit in all but name(with a bit of Plastic Man thrown in).

An interview with Frank. Does he sound drunk?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98741609