Essay

Blockbuster Crossroads, Summer ’23

| Steve

Barbie or Oppenheimer: which wolf will you feed? The death drive or joie de vivre?

I can’t fairly judge Oppenheimer because I haven’t seen it, but I’ve made my singular choice for the summer blockbuster season. Barbie look squarely at the finality of death (no joke!) in order to affirm life, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it considers death more intimately than ‘Oppenheimer.’

Both titular figures am become death. Oppenheimer irrevocably expanded the human species’ capacity for mass murder by orders of magnitude. Barbie chooses to be human and defer, here and now, to mortality’s own hidden schedule. In so doing, her movie celebrates and multiplies the joys of our world. It is an improbable outpouring of grace on a global scale. It comes at the cost of the millions of tons of plastic garbage it also serves to create, but if it’s a choice between the two, I’d prefer Barbie’s fallout to nuclear winter.

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Letter to Thomas, in memoriam of our main homies and Elack and that one old lady Pilot

| Steve

I arrived at Night Drawer drawing club three or so weeks ago—five minutes after Olive broke up with me on the phone and a few days into my prostate gone tender and painful and making my feet tingle and terrifying, yet another forced search for new housing heavy on my mind—to find the prompt that evening was “Smiling through it all.”

I was not in shock, or else something was alive and engaged and warm and plainly not traumatized inside of it, undiminished. The early passage of equanimity was no less honest than the stabbing heart-and-crotch pain a couple mornings after and the quieter lovelorn-and-perineal malaise two weeks hence.

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Courage Under Cuteness: “irena: Book One: Wartime Ghetto”

| Steve

“Irena” is a graphic novel series dramatizing events in the life of Irena Sendlerowa, a Polish social worker who saved 2,500 children from the Nazi-occupied Warsaw ghetto. The story is distinctly moving as a graphic novel, and I want to share a few things I appreciated about Morvan, Evard, Trefouel, and Walter’s articulation of it in the comics medium.

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Mobius Dong: The Ben Kunesh Story

| Steve

I went to a racetrack in Centralia on business recently and read part of Moby Dick during the proceedings. I take no pride in keeping my nose down toward something other than a phone in the bleachers, and harbor some shame for being wary of all the people in attendance at something that is definitely not my sort of thing (except for the demolition derby at the end. I love demolition derbies. They are not worth their cost in fossil fuels, but they are otherwise broad and dumb and hilarious in the right ways).

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