firehose

 
This song, believe it or not, is actually a collaboration between Burt Ward, better known as “Robin” on the 60s Batman TV series, and Frank Zappa. Long circulated on variously titled bootlegs, “The Boy Wonder Sessions” were recorded in 1966 with Mothers of Invention (and Velvet Underground) producer Tom Wilson at the mixing desk. Mothers Jimmy Carl Black, Elliot Ingber and Roy Estrada are present, however Zappa doesn’t actually play on these sessions, although he arranged and wrote most of the material recorded. Note the bit that sounds like Zappa’s later “Duke of Prunes” composition near the end.

From Burt Ward’s autobiography, Boy Wonder, My Life In Tights:

I should have had the wisdom I now have when I signed a recording contract with MGM Records- I wouldn’t have signed it. MGM staffer Tom Scott [I think he means WIlson] was assigned as my producer. He brought in one of the visually wildest groups imaginable as my backup band, the Mothers of Invention. What a sight! Neanderthal. They had incredibly long, scraggly hair, and clothes that appeared not to have been washed in this century if ever. These were musicians who became famous for tearing up furniture, their speakers, their microphones and even their expensive guitars onstage. They were maniacs!

Of all the people in the world to team with this wild and crazy bunch, I can’t believe I was the one. The image of the Boy Wonder is all American and apple pie, while the image of the Mothers of Invention was so revolutionary that they made the Hell’s Angels look like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Even I had to laugh seeing a photo of myself with those animals.

Their fearless leader and king of grubbiness was the late Frank Zappa. (The full name of the band was Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.) After recording with me, Frank became an internationally recognized cult superstar, which was understandable; after working with me, the only place Frank could go was up.

Although he looked like the others, Frank had an intelligence and education that elevated him beyond brilliance to sheer genius. I spent a considerable amount of time talking with him, and his rough, abrupt exterior concealed an intellectual, creative and sensitive interior.

For my records, the plan was to record four sides and then release two singles prior to producing an album. After listening to me sing, Frank got a wild idea to make use of my hideous voice to do a hilarious recording with a song that had some of the Batman feel to it. He picked “Orange Colored Sky.”

I can’t bear to think of this song. The memories are too embarrassing. Though the intent was to create comedy by putting my lousy singing to good use, the actual result was so disastrous that the studio thought the tape had been left out in the sun and warped. They insisted on re-recording.

But first, MGM took a radical step as an insurance policy that my next session would sound better. They sent me to an expensive vocal coach—and no doubt hoped for divine intervention. Back in 1966 they were shelling out about $1,000 a week for those lessons. That was a lot of money, more than three times what I was bringing home after working twelve hours per day in my monkey suit for an entire week. With the coach raking in that much, even I am surprised that after two weeks of training, the lady politely asked me not to come back. I’m not sure if she felt that having me as a student was damaging to her career or if listening to me sing was destroying her eardrums, or both.

In an attempt at self-preservation, the record company had me just talk on the second two sides I recorded. That I could do very well! The material for the song was a group of fan letters that had been sent to me. Frank and I edited them together to make one letter, which became the lyrics for the recording. Frank wrote a melody and an arrangement, and we titled the song, “Boy Wonder, I Love You!”

Among the lyrics was an invitation for me to come and visit an adoring pubescent fan and stay with her for the entire summer. She wrote, “I will even fix you breakfast in bed. I love you so much that I want you to stay the whole summer with me!” The lyrics ended with “I hope you know that this is a girl writing.”

Lots more information can be found here.
 

This is not a joke. The next version of Android will be called "KitKat." The above picture is not a photoshop, it's an actual picture shared by Sundar Pichai, the head of Android, on Google+. Google has also launched a website for KitKat at android.com/kitkat/. Right now the site only features a small history of Android and the following announcement:

Android is the operating system that powers over one billion smartphones and tablets. Since these devices make our lives so sweet, each Android version is named after a dessert: Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, and Jelly Bean. As everybody finds it difficult to stay away from chocolate, we decided to name the next version of Android after one of our favorite chocolate treats, Kitkat®!

Yes, this is an actual cross-branding initiative with Nestle's KitKat. The Android site links back to kitkat.com, and KitKat is celebrating the renaming with a new Facebook Profile picture. Nestle will be releasing a limited edition Android KitKat bar, with Willy Wonka-style winning tickets for a new Nexus 7 or Google Play credits.

For almost a year, the community believed the next version of Android would be called "Key Lime Pie," but apparently Google just loves to keep its fanbase guessing.

As expected, former camera-making company Kodak has climbed out of the Chapter 11 bankruptcy it entered in January of 2012. In a press release, the company says it finished its restructuring today, canceling its old stock and giving creditors a new set of shares. It's the culmination of nearly two years of planning, as Kodak steadily sold off assets and pared down its workforce to emerge as a tightly focused business that had lost its best-known segment: the consumer camera business that it started phasing out early last year. Kodak's website appears to still be in transition, showing the image above.

Having spun off or shut down its various consumer divisions, including digital camera and printing segments, Kodak will focus instead on commercial printing for packaging and other large-scale projects. To fund this transition, it sold off a roughly half-billion dollar patent portfolio and received $844 million in financing; its billions of dollars of debt were also reduced by issuing stock at a drastically reduced dollar amount for creditors. The company has roughly stuck to its restructuring timeline — it initially planned to emerge from bankruptcy in mid-2013 — and it crossed the last major hurdle in late August, when a court approved its bankruptcy plan and expressed hopes that a formerly iconic brand would recover some of its past glory.

I hold Marvel’s gay characters in special affection. I love them because they’re Marvel characters — flawed, freaky, forever young. I love them because they’re gay characters; they live and love and fear and lust like I do. That’s an aspect of fiction that I never got to enjoy when I was a kid.

But, reader; I worry. These characters are currently enjoying a moment in the spotlight, but what if it’s only a passing beat? What if these characters — and their lesbian and bisexual cohort — only exist as a temporary corrective to the medium’s, the genre’s and the publisher’s past shortcomings? What if the desire to make that correction passes, and the gay characters fade away?

What if it’s just a phase?

It sounds alarmist, but when it comes to positive representation, LGBT audiences are used to expecting the worst only to learn that we were being optimistic.

As recently as 2006 it was Marvel reported policy to put an “explicit content” label on the cover of a book if it starred a gay character. The policy wasn’t especially well observed, and when it was publicly challenged the then editor-in-chief Joe Quesada was quick to offer a course correction. He stated that the policy was no longer in effect, and he pointed to Freedom Ring, the star of Marvel Team Up, as evidence of the company’s commitment to gay characters.

Weeks later, Freedom Ring was literally penetrated to death in a story designed to prove that not everyone has what it takes to be a superhero. Unusually for a Marvel hero, he remains dead seven years later.

I’ve brought all of this up before, but I believe it’s worth bringing up again; it paints a very clear picture of the landscape that LGBT comics fans are used to. For a long time, LGBT characters were scarce, disposable, or non-existent.

The landscape has changed, in part because publishers now know that the conservative groups that once had them running scared are toothless, and in part because of a wider social shift towards better representation of minorities in the media.

Marvel has done excellent work expanding its stable of gay and bisexual characters and giving them a share of attention. It can’t currently match DC in claiming an LGBT character with their own ongoing title (Batwoman), but it can boast a greater number of recurring lesbian, gay and bisexual superheroes, especially in supporting roles, especially in its X-Men family of titles. (Neither company has much to crow about when it comes to transgender heroes.)

Yet I still worry that these characters are too disposable. There are three male “power” couples in Marvel right now, and all three appear to be under threat.

Northstar and Kyle Jinadu received a great deal of media attention when they enjoyed the first same-sex super-wedding in the pages of Astonishing X-Men #51, by Marjorie Liu and Mike Perkins. (Some readers give that accolade to Apollo and Midnighter, but theirs was a civil union.) The couple have been a focus of the book since Liu took over writing early last year, but the book is cancelled with October’s issue #68.

Northstar has a new home over in Jason Aaron and Ed McGuinness’s Amazing X-Men, but Aaron has stated that the roster on his book is fluid; it can be “anyone who’s a teacher at the Jean Grey School”. Even with seven X-Men team titles on the shelves, Northstar may no longer have a permanent place. The character spent much of the two decades prior to Astonishing X-Men either dead or in the wilderness. He could easily slip back there.

With Rictor and Shatterstar, Marvel “turned” the characters gay and bisexual respectively. The hints were there in their histories, but Peter David brought it to the fore and established them as a couple.

Their book, X-Factor, ends with issue #262 in September. We know that series writer Peter David has another series lined up, and X-Men line editor Nick Lowe said at San Diego that other writers are keen to get their hands on the characters orphaned by that title’s closure — but there’s no word yet on where we might see this couple again, or if they’ll survive as a couple, or if they’ll survive at all. A huge question mark hangs over their future.

The third power couple are the only established LGBT characters in any current Avengers team: Wiccan and Hulkling. The current arc of Young Avengers, by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, sees the characters going through a rough patch. That will probably pass.

My greater concern is that Gillen has only ever talked about a “first season” on the book. There’s no word on what comes after that. Hopefully the title will continue into a second season with these characters in place. Of all three couples, Wiccan and Hulkling have the most plausible future. Yet Young Avengers is a title that’s been plagued by erratic scheduling. There’s no reason to be confident that we’ll still be reading about these characters next year.

There is only one lesbian couple that I can think of currently appearing in a Marvel title, and that’s Valkyrie and Anabelle Riggs in Fearless Defenders. They’re much less well-established than the other couples, and series writer Cullen Bunn recently introduced a complication to their relationship that prevents it being a typical love affair. They’re also in a book that sells less than Astonishing X-Men and about the same as X-Factor, so their future is far from secure.

There were other major lesbian couples in the Marvel universe. Runaways characters Karolina Dean and Xavin suffer from being Runaways characters, and not ones “lucky” enough to be Hunger Gamed in Avengers Arena. Like the title that introduced them, they’re semi-permanently consigned to limbo. Cosmic heroes Phyla-Vell and Moondragon were frozen out of the new Guardians of the Galaxy title, and there’s no sign of them factoring in to the current Infinity epic. (Phyla-Vell is technically dead right now, if that’s worth mentioning.)

There are no other LGBT characters that I know of in any surviving title’s core cast. Karma is also made homeless by the loss of Astonishing X-Men. Julie Power and Striker disappeared with the cancellation of Avengers Academy. X-Treme X-Men‘s James Howlett is no more. Hercules, alluded to be bisexual in a joke at his funeral and in one ambiguous scene in his own title, remains buried.

Living Lightning, outed as a joke eight years ago, has barely been seen since. Technically he was the first male Avenger to be established as gay, which ought to earn him some sort of marquee status, but he remains an obscure punchline. There’s a small handful of LGBT characters kicking around in the supporting casts of other Marvel books. Anole. Bling. Cullen Bloodstone. One presumes that Graymalkin is still out there somewhere.

Few of these heroes occupy positions of importance in the Marvel Universe. They remain highly disposable. Like Northstar before Astonshing X-Men, like Hulkling and Wiccan in the hiatuses between Young Avengers series, LGBT characters don’t often crop up in other books when they don’t have books of their own. If Wolverine or Captain America disappear or die, it’s an event. If Northstar disappears or dies, it’s a panel.

Lesbian, gay and bisexual characters aren’t vulnerable or disposable because they’re LGBT. They’re vulnerable and disposable because they’re relatively new and relatively unimportant to the grand narrative. They’re in the same class as all the other B-list characters, and like those characters their presence in a story is generally tied to an individual author’s affection for them. When that author moves on, the characters get dropped back in the toy chest to wait for someone else to come along and pick them up.

It’s the fact that all LGBT characters belong to this class of disposable characters that’s problematic. That quality of being disposable has also historically been a problem for most non-white characters, most female characters, but there have been exceptions like Black Panther, Storm and Sue Storm, and writers made concerted efforts to raise the profile of characters like Luke Cage and Captain Marvel and integrate them more fully into the grand narrative.

LGBT characters need that sort of support and endorsement to keep them in the spotlight. Right now we’re on a bubble where Rictor, Shatterstar, Northstar, Karma, Wiccan, Hulkling and Valkyrie could conceivably all disappear from our comics within the space of a few months, following Karolina and Xavin and Phylla and Moondragon into obscurity.

There aren’t enough LGBT characters around to guarantee their presence in the Marvel universe. There aren’t any high profile LGBT characters that play a role in the publisher’s big events, like AvX and Infinity. Given how Avengers-led the Marvel Universe has been for the past ten years, a few adult lesbian, gay and bisexual Avengers would go some way towards fixing that problem. Just one adult transgender superhero who isn’t a shapeshifter would be a step forward.

Compared to how things looked a few years ago, we’re living in a golden age of LGBT representation in superhero comics, and Marvel can be proud of the part it played in making that a reality. But with any luck this is not the golden age; with a sustained commitment to diversity, Marvel’s roster of LGBT characters can get a lot better.

Or it can get worse. The bubble can burst and those characters can fade away for twenty years, like Northstar. That power rests with Marvel, and the creators that write and draw for them.

I’m fearful of the worst. But I’m hopeful for the best.

Few music artists have as much tech cred as Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor. When he offers his opinions on topics like streaming music, the impacts of social networks on the music biz and whether music labels have a place in the digital era, it's worth a listen. A wide-ranging interview with Reznor appears in this month's Spin magazine. About Twitter, Reznor says he enjoyed it at first, but now calls his Twitter interactions a mistake. "Oversharing feels vulgar to me now," Reznor told the magazine. "We've been fooled into thinking it's okay to show dick pics and that the Kardashians' behavior is normal, but it's not. I've tuned out in the last couple years."

Reznor was one of the first top artists to test the internet as a marketing and distribution tool. In 2007, Reznor left his record label at about the same time do-it-yourself music was catching on. Reznor rolled up his sleeves and began experimenting with different business models, including a pay-what-you-want offer that was similar to Radiohead's famous In Rainbows campaign. This year, much was made about Reznor's decision to partner again with a major label. Columbia Records, which helped Nine Inch Nails' release the album Hesitation Marks. The singer-songwriter suggested that musicians are better served thinking more about music than the business of music. "Market research is not a sexy thing to think about," Reznor said. "More than that, when you're self-releasing, you have this walled garden of people that are interested in what you do, and to everyone else you're invisible." He also noted his deal with Columbia is not long term.

"You have this walled garden of people that are interested in what you do, and to everyone else you're invisible." Because of that hands-on experience, it was no surprise that Beats by Dre, the headphone maker, teamed with Reznor on its upcoming subscription music service. Reznor said this about Beats' competitor to Spotify: "The fact that our music may or may not be in the air now and people seem eager for it, and that I'm working on something with Beats that's a marriage of humanity and technology, which is sort of what my music has always been about, and I'm doing this after years of working on my own trying to figure out how best to get music to the people who want to hear it — you can't plan for those things. It's just the way the world works."

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