May 3, 2008
The skyline might look atomized from our front stoop today, but the forecast for Sunday's birthday bash/springtime bbq is taking a turn for the better. Weather.com predicts only cloudy skies by the afternoon, with the odds of precipitation shrinking to 20% by our kickoff time of 3 pm. Temperatures should be in the low 60s.

Nothing can dampen our enthusiasm, however, for wishing Thomas Pynchon a happy 71st while chowing on food regurgitated by some of his most memorable characters. Technically his birthday is a few days later, but who is counting? While clips of a rare documentary about the writer run in the front of the store, food and beverage will be served up in our backyard. A station for writing out a personal greeting will be nearby and we will commence with the faxing at 5 pm. Party favors will be available to early arrivals.

At Freebird we take a particular interest in the 1950s, a decade that spawned some of the great paranoid trends of our times. Scratch the surface and you'd see communist infiltration, CIA assassination plots, massive organized crime, nuclear proliferation, alien abductions, and a myriad of secret societies. Our propensity to see cabals everywhere begins at this point (it's practically a national trait now) and Thomas Pynchon has mined that unease to amazing effect ever since.

One of our favorite streams from this conspiracy reservoir is the hysteria over juvenile delinquency. David Hajdu will speak on Thursday, May 8, about his new book The Ten-Cent Plague and the comic book scare of the fifties that mortified American parents. If you think the debate over violent video games is lively, the backlash against comics fifty years ago was downright maniacal. David will discuss the lengths to which the government battled comic book publishers and worried the medium was corrupting our youth. If the counterculture first stirred with the sound of Elvis, it did so with a rolled up comic book in its back pocket. To illustrate the point, David will be showing a rare clip from a "Reefer Madness"-like film that warned of the dangers of reading comics.

Janet Maslin just called The Ten-Cent Plague: "An amazing story, with thrills and chills more extreme than the workings of a comic book's imagination." Check out this recent debate about the subject between David Hajdu and Douglas Wolk in The New Republic.