A Commonplace Book

After an unfortunate wash-out last year, Tompkins Scare Park was set to happen on the 27th of October this year regardless of the weather. It did end up raining again this year, but that didn’t stop the Action Arts League from working with a number of other groups to put on a great day-long series of events and performances in the center of the East Village.

Even more heartening was the number of kids and families who came out even in the early morning drizzle to check everything out and get themselves involved in a bit of participatory Halloween activity. Kostume Kult spent the morning giving out costumes to any kids or adults who stopped by, and I think a few undead participants from last week’s Zombiecon even showed up to compete in this year’s Zombie Olympics:

(Picture Credit to joujoubee)

The organizers of the 17th annual Tompkins Square Park Halloween Dog Parade, Friends of First Run, decided not to brave the inclement weather and instead took their event to Sunday. Once the parade began the dogs were mostly corralled inside the dog run and out of picture range, but I snapped a few pictures of costumed pups before the event began:

(Full set of pictures can be found here.)

Two days ago Saturday the nervous prophecies of an undead gathering came true: a few hundred of New York’s finest undead took to the streets of the Upper East Side, bringing with them blood, carnage, and a desire for conspicuous consumption.

The day couldn’t have been any more beautiful as we started at 59th and 3rd Avenue, walking east towards Bloomingdale’s. As was pointed out by The Zombie Queen, Bloomingdale’s security and employees seems to be increasingly nonchalant about the presence of the undead in their store every year. The shoppers, however, were universally confused and bemused.

Highlight Number 1:
As we lurched across 5th Avenue to the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel, a breakdancing crew was just starting a routine for some tourists. Not only were the dancers cool about several hundred bloodied 20 and 30 somethings crashing their act, but one of them put Thriller on the sound system and kicked off an impromptu zombie dance party.

Highlight Number 2:
Zombie group photo at the Army recruiting station in Times Square. Below is a picture from the group’s perspective, but you can still see Zombie King’s ominous head in the dead center of the shot.

Highlight Number 3:
The outfits. Its amazing the effort and creativity some people put into their costumes. Personal favorites of mine include

Zombie Pete Doherty and Zombie Amy Winehouse,

Amish Zombie (not visible are a garden tool and basket on his back),

And of course, Zombie Marcel Marceau/Zombie Mime. An opera hat with a flower in it is more difficult to find than you’d imagine.

I wish I’d been able to take pictures myself, but I was a bit busying with the zombie wrangling, which is about as easy as cat wrangling only the cats are easily distracted by tourists and expensive clothing and you’re trying to herd them down 5th Avenue. So instead thanks for the photos I’ve used here must go to Grant Berger and IsaacWayton.

And finally, lavish mountains of praise must be heaped upon Irene Kaoru for providing overall organization, as well as Ricky’s, Carriage House, O’Lunney’s, and M1-5 for giving us shelter as we lurched, shuffled and shambled from 5th Avenue to Chinatown. The day wouldn’t have been possible without all of their help.

Boing Boing, fine purveyors of Wonderful Things, recently ran a few paragraphs from Dan Shahin at Hijinx Comics in a post which can be found here. The main thrust of the post/press release was that Dan also operates an online comics retailer, ComicBookShelf.com, which has dedicated 10% of all future sales to charity. Half will go to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and half to the Hero Initiative. That 10% has also been doubled for the entirety of October. (Supporting the Hero Initiative sounds like a great idea to me, although that might simply be due to my having finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay not more than two weeks ago.)

And while the site’s charitable donations are laudable, it was the last paragraph of Dan’s note that really caught my eye:

We carry a wide array of books and our open source bookstore recommendation algorithms let you rate books and get recommendations. Kind of like Netflix does, but for graphic novels.

This is, in a word, awesome.

For movies, books, and other entertainment I usually like the idea of putting your faith in one or two cultural critics who haven’t let you down very much. I’m currently leeching ideas from the superb staff at The AV Club, and if it weren’t for a ringing endorsement from one of their staff writers, I never would have sat down for Friday Night Lights, which ended up as one of my favorite TV shows of the past season.

Despite this, I also like the social-networking or algorithm-based suggestion system. I can think of at least one or two movies which liked and had watched based solely on a Netflix recommendation, so the idea of a comic book recommendation system based on amalgamating other users’ opinions could be awesome. The only catch? There have to be other users.

I’m not sure how long Comicbookshelf.com has had their system up and running, but even most of the more popular comics, or rather the ones I immediately ran to look at, had 2-3 votes at the most. Obviously the market size for comic books is smaller than that of major motion pictures, but I’m hoping that more people will begin to go through the site on an occasional basis and mark up how they feel about each comic book. I’ve been burned once or twice before on comic books that I heard would be good, that looked good, but didn’t end up being good. $14.99 gone like that.

So while I can’t drive any legitimate traffic towards ComicBookShelf.com myself, I can at least add an extra drop in the Google algorithm bucket and include as many key words as possible in this post to drive some comic book fans in that general direction.