Tagged: Elayne Riggs

All in Good Fun, by Elayne Riggs

  • News
  • October 22, 2008

jibjab-characters-blog-1-1727751“Palling around with terrorists!” the Republican VP candidate chirped of her running-mate’s opponent to a hungry mob armed with the modern-day equivalent of torches and pitchforks, which would be ignorant shouts of “Kill him!” and signs reading “Obama bin Lyin’”. (Oh, they excel at the disgusting comparative pun, do members of this base. Who could forget the knee-slapping “Hitlery”? Epithets like “McSame” and “Caribou Barbie” pale next to such jocularity.)

On the tried and true adage that Republicans scream loudest about stuff that they themselves are doing, I was tempted to inquire as to whether secessionists could be considered terrorists, but that’s a column for a different day. This week I want to further explore the themes I first articulated in my “birds of a feather” column.

Guilt by association is nothing new. It goes back to the Salem witch hunts, probably even earlier. And it’s soooo not the issue here, at least in terms of accusing one’s opponent of hanging out with people you deem unsavory. No, the real danger is to the American citizenry (as usual), and it comes from all these people palling around with each other.

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On False Equivalency, by Elayne Riggs

  • News
  • October 15, 2008

goddamn-batman-2-7699744I was but a wee babe in the ‘60s, and I don’t really remember JFK’s assassination, or his brother’s, or King’s. I don’t think we had separate drinking fountains for black and white kids in New Jersey. But I remember racism. Anti-Semitism affected me directly (we were the only Jewish family in a heavily Catholic neighborhood) but, as our suburb became integrated and I was best buddies with a black boy, the jeers of racists were never far behind. Prejudice is kinda hard to forget, too, since it never went away.

Granted, everyone may be a little bit racist or sexist or homophobic. But there’s a difference, to my mind, between folks who need to work a bit more on their white or male or hetero privilege and people who wallow in it, who wear their ignorance proudly like a badge of honor. It’s like the difference between what superhero comics fans used to understand as the good guys and the bad guys. We read how the bad guys could fool some of the sheeple some of the time, but at heart they were just plain rotten because they had no moral core. And it was understood that they were not to be emulated nor aspired to and that there was a clear delineation between them and the “do-gooders.” This was in the days before do-gooders apparently became boring and passé.

I think the McCain campaign is counting on the American public to forget that he and his boring, passé do-gooder opponent are vying for a position that will affect millions of real lives very deeply, and pretend instead that they’re voting for the American Idol who will best kick ass and take names (especially yours, which reminds the government that they’d like to thank our fine troops so much for all their wonderful phone sex conversations!). Perhaps they reason that, since the whole Wild West schtick worked so well for the caricature currently occupying the White House, the same script can be retooled for the “James Garner He’s Not” Maverick and Sancho Bimbo — no wait, that’s Bible Spice — no sorry, I meant to say Caribou Barbie. Frontierswoman with a gun! And a helicopter! And golly gee, she knows how ta use ‘em, winkety wink!

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The Big D, by Elayne Riggs

  • News
  • October 8, 2008

diabetes-2266515Back in the spring during my job hunt, I took care of my annual checkup. I’d gotten fed up with my New Rochelle physician who’d kept up a steady drumbeat of “you need to lose weight” as the answer for everything from my heart scare to high blood pressure to allergies (the allergy advice seemed to always be supplemented by free samples of Flonase, from which she was doubtless getting a kickback), and heck if I wanted to schlep into New Rochelle again anyway. So I went to a local doctor who was listed as a fat-friendly health professional. But while this local doc was certainly friendly, she turned out not to be terribly fat-accepting, especially considering the results of my first workup.

Her office called me when the test numbers arrived, asking me to return, which I did, shortly before I was offered my current position. Nobody said why I had to come in again, but I was misled to believe it was because they needed to retake the blood test since I hadn’t fasted prior to the first test (not that they’d reminded me I should have). Well, as it turns out, I was greeted with the kind of news that pretty much rocked my life in a dramatically deeper way than did my atrial fibrillation scare of Aught-5. That was the overnight hospital stay which gave me a wake-up call at age 48 that I could no longer eat anything I wanted and not suffer the consequences. So I commenced with a salt-restricted lifestyle, missed potato chips and pickles for awhile, but could more or less deal with it just fine.

This one was different. The diagnosis was diabetes.

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When Sums Don’t Add Up, by Elayne Riggs

  • News
  • September 24, 2008

rmcalc-1-2485759So I read via Colleen Doran’s blog that the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider, has gone bust, at least temporarily. Apparently it, like the Internet router Monday morning at the Riggs Residence, suffered some sort of electrical malfunction. Our router’s fine as of the typing of this column, but the LHC will take a bit more time to get going again on its way to possibly wiping out all known life. Which is pretty much okay by me; I have at least four months’ worth of DC comics still unread!

Now, for anyone unclear on what the heck the LHC is supposed to be doing, some wacky and geeky scientist types have put together this handy-dandy hip-hop ditty:

But fairly heavy rotation in our Science and Discovery channel viewing meant Robin and I were more or less up on the basics of dark matter and so forth, and had already mocked them mercilessly. See, here’s what we tend to think of these scientists. We can’t fault them their enthusiasm to find the binding tie that will create a grand unifying Theory of Life, The Universe and Everything (42, by the way). But for scientists, whose chosen profession demands that they question everything and rely primarily on the empirical evidence of their senses, this arrogant certainty doesn’t sit well with me. It’s as if, as Robin observes, the theoretical quantum physicists sat around saying, “Hmm, what can we postulate to make our sums add up?”

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Fashionably Late, by Elayne Riggs

  • News
  • September 17, 2008

earamid2-1-6850803Whoever thought that lipstick would make major Silly Season news in the 21st century? Although I have to admit I’d rather hear about it being applied to pit bulls and pigs than human beings, but I’ve never had the best relationship with makeup, accessories and other fribbles, as this past week has reminded me.

Every September sees the re-emergence of Fashion Week here in New York City. In keeping with the acknowledgement that this Silly Season is in many ways sillier than most, this year Mercedes-Benz, the chief sponsor, has even decided to go with an election theme on the event’s home page. Maybe they want to emphasize how uselessly trivial it all is. Or, to be fair, how much “fun” people have ooh’ing and aah’ing at emaciated creatures who rarely resemble real people strutting the catwalks wearing creations that rarely resemble real clothing. And there are all sorts of tie-ins, one “big deal” this year being Target’s special “Bullseye Bodega” outlets in strategic areas of the city, only open this past Friday through Monday, which purported to sell high fashions at low (i.e., Target-level) prices.

Fool that I was, I ventured into one around noon on Friday, just out of curiosity, and found it to be the single most pretentious experience I’d ever witnessed. A cramped place with absolutely nothing of any practical value to me, but filled to the brim with a sea of people desperate for couture at closure level. I saw only one piece that would have fit me, a XXL man’s thermal top for around $35, but I’m afraid I just wasn’t in the market for one, and even if I were I could have gotten the same thing (sans designer label) for far less money by shopping at Amazon. That’s the kinda gal I am. But other gals seemed to like it just fine, so obviously one’s mileage may vary.

Even comic geeks have been able to get into the spirit of fashion this year.  My ComicMix colleague Martha Thomases has reported on the “Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy” exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Rick Marshall covered the Marvel Fashion Show at the San Diego Comic-Con. There does appear to be a fun element to the idea of heroic costumes being more frivolous than practical, especially when worn by women. But even the guys are taken to task, and taken down a peg, by wry observations about their chosen uniforms. The word “capes” alone elicits either giggle-fits when watching Brad Bird skewer that fashion-don’t in The Incredibles, or sneers in comic pages wherein non-powered citizens dismiss the antics and lifestyles of the heroic and famous.

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Getting Catty, by Elayne Riggs

  • News
  • September 3, 2008

attackofthepumas-8308565Humans have been fascinated by felines both big and small since the beginnings of recorded history. At times we’ve both worshipped them (as did the ancient Egyptians) and reviled them (as did medieval Europeans, thus opening themselves up to the spread of the Black Plague when the witchcraft-associated kitties weren’t around in sufficient numbers to keep the rats at bay). And they’ve probably always been a big part of our mythology and folklore, including making multiple appearances in comics, from superheroes like Catman and Kitten to adult stuff like Fritz the Cat to funny animal and anthropomorphic fare.

But lately two big-cat names have infiltrated our culture to the extent that we’re all probably sick of them by now. I’m secretly hoping for Matt Groening to include them in his Forbidden Words list for 2009 so we never have to deal with them again, because they — like a number of other catty terms (such as, um, “catty”) — are used to impart negative attitudes towards women. And being one of those women-types, I tend not to like negative things directed at me simply because of my internal plumbing.

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Truthiness in Advertising, by Elayne Riggs

  • News
  • August 27, 2008

The 2008 Democratic convention is currently well underway. It being the Age of Reality Shows That Aren’t Real, every bit of spontaneity is of course tightly scripted to allow for maximum media control, not unlike all those Beijing Olympics stories that practically write themselves. What you see is pretty much what they tell you you’ll get.

As a society, we seem to have inured ourselves to accepting style over substance as the norm. We judge books by their covers all the time — even more so when we look at comics. First impressions are the lasting ones. We expect what’s on the cover to reflect what’s inside, often because we’ve been assured that it will. When the cover artist’s style doesn’t jibe with the interior art, the result can be a bit jarring. When the cover art misrepresents the story within, we can feel cheated or used.

And that’s all well and good when it comes to consumer entertainment. We’re used to being lied to, it’s all part of the advertising fake-out. If a certain type of cover art moves product, the actual interior content is irrelevant from the seller’s point of view. We accept (some more grudgingly than others) that we’re going to be subjected to this little dance every time we buy, and buy into, our culture of mass-produced entertainment.

The problem arises, as it usually does, when this mentality shifts from the fictional to the real, and we find ourselves judging people by their “covers.” (more…)

Har-Asses, by Elayne Riggs

  • News
  • August 20, 2008

I must confess, I didn’t read a lot of San Diego con reports this year. My SDCC attending days are probably well behind me; in addition to Robin just not being as into comic conventions as my first husband Steve was (maybe it’s because, for many pros, conventions are part of their job, whereas for the rest of us they’re part of a hobby), between hotel and airfare costs the darn thing has just gotten ridiculously expensive, and that’s if you can get a room or a flight or even admittance at all.

Plus, there’s the mobility thing, which has started becoming less of an issue now that my new job has increased my physical activity to a level it hasn’t seen in a number of years and my 50-year-old body is responding accordingly, much to my surprise. Of course, this year’s excuse has also been the job thing; after being out of work over half the year, I wasn’t about to make plans to travel anywhere further than New Jersey during the first few months of my new employment!

But, aside from the always-enjoyable pictorials that many folks uploaded to their blogs, the two posts that piqued my interest the most this year had to do with harassment. Yes, we’re still talking about harassment in this day and age. But, as has been pointed out recently in response to hypocritical and sanctimonious politicians presuming to lecture Russia from their own lack of moral high ground with admonitions like “this doesn’t happen in the 21st century” — well yes, yes it does. Anything that’s happening now is by definition happening in the 21st century. One can certainly argue that we as a civilization ought to have moved beyond sexual harassment by now, but one can argue we should have moved beyond various forms of discrimination and intimidation hundreds of years ago as well. It’s still happening even today, and it still needs to be addressed.

Fortunately in the 21st century we have an amazing communications tool that, to our collective knowledge, has never existed before in the entirety of human history. This electronic paper trail certainly has its flaws, but it also helps hold people accountable when there’s no other recourse. So when Rachel Edidin writes an open letter decrying the behavior of someone at San Diego who sought hugs from unwilling strangers, it gets discussed in an open forum where all sorts of interesting observations are made. One commenter noted it wasn’t "necessarily a male privilege thing," while Rachel herself added "I was generally hella impressed with the general respect for personal space at SDCC. In crowds packed shoulder-to-shoulder, I encountered only a very little bit of pushing, and aside from Creepy Hug Guy, I didn’t have a single encounter that made me uncomfortable." Someone else pointed out that "In Canada pestering a stranger for physical contact is a form of criminal assault even if it’s not intended sexually." (more…)

Unscripted, by Elayne Riggs

  • News
  • August 13, 2008

Last weekend, New York City had its annual Del Close marathon. I’m sure our esteemed editor Mike Gold and my fellow columnist John Ostrander were somewhere about, if only in spirit. I was home doing housework, lounging about and occasionally glancing at the Olympics. Which can be tough, by the way, if you’ve got a female gaze. I do wish the men’s and women’s sports getups bore a bit more resemblance to each other, kinda like the outfits most of the countries wore during the Parade of Nations.

But instead we have women’s volleyball team uniforms, for both the indoor and beach variety, that consist of either porn-movie short-shorts or bikini bottoms, while the guys get to wear nice loose regulation exercise-type shorts. I cry unfair! Butt shot after butt shot, and the only time my prurient interest is slightly catered to is when it rains and the boys’ clothes start to lovingly cling to them… er. Ahem. Where was I? Oh yeah, and what’s with the creepy male coaches for all the women’s teams? In this day and age that’s as unseemly as me drooling over young nubile volleyball-playing boys… Uh. Well.

So, I’ve been sitting here improv’ing on my computer keyboard. I do that a lot. Maybe it’s the writer’s version of riffing on a jazz tune. Or was that reefering? I’m so not hep. Robin says our marriage sometimes feels like a never-ending improv routine. I think the best marriages ought to be like that, with two well-matched partners constantly playing off each other. Of course, as accident-prone as I am, I could wish my particular situation involved more wit and less slapstick, but there you are. (more…)

Always a Workaround, by Elayne Riggs

  • News
  • August 6, 2008

Last Friday I took my first PTO (paid time off) day since starting my new job, as I’d slightly injured myself the previous Wednesday evening (thank goodness I’d already been to the comics shop by that point). As the injury involved my leg, and as I knew I’d be doing a lot of driving on Saturday, I planned to schlep to and from the office rather painfully on Thursday to take care of needed business, then treat myself to a non-commute day on Friday, which I’d devote to blogging on my home computer.

I don’t blog as fervently as I used to. My priorities have changed a bit in the last year. This past year when I’d devoted myself largely to finding a new job, a number of friends advised me to get back into the fiction writing I’d abandoned as my former job had sucked up my creative soul, observing “You may never have this chance again!” But I was too anxious over income, and the practical side of me won out. I know I’ll write until I no longer have the capacity for independent thought, even if that writing only takes place in my head. However, my desire to live the rest of my life in the style to which I’ve become accustomed (paying rent and bills, having a well-stocked fridge, etc.) overruled my second favorite hobby — like many writers, my favorite hobby is reading, not writing — and I fell into different patterns.

At the moment my newfound routine is still being worked out. For a number of reasons both in and out of my control, I do not blog at the office, and I haven’t been writing all that much in the evenings and weekends. But I feel that’s going to start to change (the latter, that is), and not just because the Yankees and Mets really ought to be doing better at this point in the season and thus I often turn off the TV before the game’s even official. I’m starting to feel the drive again. I’m finally happy and comfortable both in my work life and my home surroundings, a confluence that hasn’t existed as such in over a decade. And on Friday, despite the injury, I was jazzed to write. By gosh, I was going to tackle all those unread posts from my friends’ and acquaintances’ blogs and then Get To It! Heck, I might even post all those photos I took of the All-Star parade up 6th Avenue a few weeks ago!

So I went onto the edit window for Pen-Elayne on the Web, and that’s when the trouble started. (more…)

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