"Yeah, I'll be evil, I'll be the Bond villain." I had totally forgotten about Martin Shkreli! Do you remember Martin Shkreli? Something like... he bought the rights to an AIDS drug and immediately made it five hundred times more expensive? I know next to nothing about American Healthcare, but Allie Conti's interview with him for Vice back in January 2016 is a beautiful character study regardless of topic.
The useless hover board, the mismatched wine glasses, the "Sicilian Defense", the globe on the floor. That Wu Tang Clan album. This is what performative villainy looked like before Putin invaded the Ukraine. Before Covid. Before Brexit. Before Trump. Almost before Elon Musk.
I was only reminded of it when watching RedLetterMedia discuss Ben & Arthuras part of their "Best of the Worst" series: an awkward cri de coeur shot in a cheaply furnished flat. Something about that film's combination of bareness and clutter suddenly reminded me of Shkreli, so I looked him up, and it turns out he'd just got out of prison.
I've no idea if the rob-the-rich-to-give-to-Research-and-Development defense he gives in this interview holds any water at all. I just know he's pawned his "prison watch" and is now threatening on instagram to go and bed all our "thot mums". I miss wondering what someone like him will do next, rather than fearing it. I hope he never catches up.
Some people find Superman boring because he's invulnerable, but
he's not, of course. He cares, which makes him extremely vulnerable. Elliot S. (later S!) Maggin's "Superman, Last Son of Krypton" – originally published in 1977 to accompany the release of the Motion Picture – was happily brought to my attention by Colin Smith here (with surprise input from S! himself in the comments below: "Of course Alan Moore read my book"). Reading nothing like a novelization – more like a very early Kurt Vonnegut – the book is careful and witty and full of aliens. One of my favourite paragraphs is the opening of Chapter 6 "The Penthouse", a beautiful and unfamiliar introduction to an archetypal megalomaniac:
"Yesterday Luthor was dressed in skin-tight pyjamas and crossed ammunition belts. The outfit was the only affectation he had for a purpose, and therefore the only one he recognized as an affectation. The penthouse hideaway four hundred feet over the city, the medieval tapestries hanging over the faces of the computers and wall consoles, the Egyptian sarcophagus whose mummy was replaced by a mattress covered with Snoopy sheets and pillowcases, paintings on the walls by Leyendecker, Peake, Frazetta and Adams, those weren't affectations. Those were matters of taste. Luthor was flying in the terrace window with his jet boots for the seventeenth time and he was running out of videotape."
