If You're Against Elitists, Why Then Do You....

talk like a poncing grad school cult stud liberal elitist?

Deppey's rhetoric of evanescent childhood wonder and the necessity to put aside the search for it, to "move on," might possess some substance if he or like-minded elitists could demonstrate that comics-fans were in some way unique in this regard, as against other patrons of modern entertainment-media.

Here, let me rewrite that for you in English rather than elitese, shall I?

Dirk Deppey insulted my friends by calling them little whining babymen. But everybody is a babyman, so it doesn't matter. Our society and all its entertainment are great, so comics must be great too! And I can't be a stupid snuffler of nostalgic babycrap, because...I use big words! And I don't like elitists anyway, so there!

I may have more about this later...but it really frosts me when people pretend that cultural studies is somehow a movement for the people. Putting yourself above the fray on some lofty academic perch and presuming to speak for the people: that's the very definition of elitist, my friend. Because you know what? Most everyday, regular people who haven't undergone academic lobotomies — they think the stuff they like is good, and that the stuff other people like isn't. And the only people who think that the people can do no wrong are ivory tower intellectuals cavorting about in proleface.

Update: I was so irritated I forgot the link; it's been added now.

Update 2: Just trying to read through the whole series of posts...and, yeah, I have to agree with most commenters here that the game isn't really worth the candle. He's sufficiently confused that further argument seems pointless.

Update 3: Phillips responds here.

Some nice panels from art comics

One from Fantagraphics, one from Top Shelf, another from Fantagraphics.

First, Interiorae #3 by Gabriella Giandelli.

Hieronymus B. by Ulf K. of Germany.

And Reflections by Marco Corona. Like Giandelli, he's Italian.

With a slice

The mug with the slice of lemon is in front of Officer Crowley. So the one actual working man at the "beer summit" either drinks beer with lemon or ordered  ice tea. How do you like that? (Update, James Fallows says Crowley drank Blue Moon Wheat Beer, which Fallows calls "Faux microbrew." Update 2, The NYT says that's orange, not lemon, in Crowley's mug, and that Biden had a lime slice in his; Biden's mug is the one in the left foreground. Bottom line: no actual lemon around, so I changed the title of the post.)

The photo series shows Vice President Biden present but not talking. (Update, It says here Biden is a teetotaler and drank nonalcoholic beer. Imagine if he did drink.)

Prof. Gates's statement contains the following:

Sergeant Crowley and I, through an accident of time and place, have been cast together, inextricably, as characters – as metaphors, really – in a thousand narratives about race over which he and I have absolutely no control.

 

Yeah, inextricably as metaphors. I guess that's Harvard for you.

The quote from Officer Crowley in the AP story is pretty vapid: 

"I think what you had today was two gentlemen agreeing to disagree on a particular issue. I don't think that we spent too much time dwelling on the past. We spent a lot of time discussing the future."

What particular issue? I guess Crowley said it was okay for him to arrest someone because he doesn't like the guy's conversation, and Gates said he wasn't so sure. Then, looking to the future, they discussed getting a time-share in Nantucket. (Update, Crowley told reporters he and Gates are going to meet again on their own. His video clip is at the bottom of the linked-to post.)

Prof. Harvard, to go back to his comments, was generous in his hopes for the outcome of the "national conversation" (yikes) about his arrest:

There’s reason to hope that many people have emerged with greater sympathy for the daily perils of policing, on the one hand, and for the genuine fears about racial profiling, on the other hand.

I say generous because the policing peril in this particular case was being mouthed off to by a professor.

I'm always polite to police officers. On the other hand, they're always polite to me, and from what I've seen the good ones stay polite in some fairly difficult situations. (My neighborhood fills up late at night with drunken clubgoers of all races, and there have been a couple of shootings over the years.) They're called peace professionals for a reason. They keep the peace and they're professional about it. They don't go dragging you off to booking just because they lost an argument.

Crowley gets to go to the White House because he screwed up his job, and now he wants to "agree to disagree" about his behavior. Life is hell for the beleaguered white man in Obama's America. 

(update, I edited this post a bit to make it read better. After posting it first, I mean.)

Female Creators Roundtable: Ariel Schrag, Like Who?

Both longtime blog readers are probably aware that I'm a big fan of Ariel Schrag's work in general and of her most recent book, Likewise in particular. One of the things I find most interesting about Schrag is how different her work is from male comics creators like Jeff Brown or David Heatley. Specifically, for folks like Brown and Heatley, autobio comics are generally a way to say "me me me me me me me" for thirty to a hundred pages or whatever; the narrative tends to be obsessively focused on their own past, their own psychology, their own ambitions (sexual and professional.) Other characters drift through to one extent or another, but they tend to be there mostly as props, important only insofar as they have something to give to the main character or something to deny him.

As I said, Schrag's work is very different; she's obsessed with relationships. There are a lot of characters in her books, but they all have weight and personality. Schrag's girlfriend, Sally, for example, comes across as both incredibly cruel and entirely justified in her occasional interest and frequently brutal disinterest in Ariel. Sally is often mean, but on the other hand, Schrag gives you enough of her perspective and enough of her actual words that you can see where she's coming from in her ambivalence about the narrator. With male autobio writing, in other words, you inevitably get a Bildungsroman, where everything relates to the the main characters' self-actualization. In Schrag, you get romance, where everything relates to relationships between people.

What's interesting about Likewise is that it seems, in part, like it's Schrag's attempt to do what the male creators are doing — to have her own psyche fill up more and more space; to gain control of her painful relationship with Sally by walling herself off in her own pscyhe the way that male autobio creators do as a matter of course. Schrag mentioned in several interviews that her main inspirations for Likewise were James Joyce and Joe Matt — two men, obviously. When I interviewed her and asked her what was attractive about those writers, she said "I guess I related to the obsessive thinking about women that they both had, and maybe related to their work more than I would to a straight woman writer."

Obsessive thinking like that is often seen as out of control, of course — but I think in a literary context, it can also be a way to turn another person into a figment; it's a move for control and dominance. You're turning the other person not into themselves, but into a puppet who performs actions for you over and over again. One of the key literary characteristics of sadism, most theorists seem to agree, is repetition.

Likewise does start out in this obsessive, typically male literary mode. The first part of the book is told in Joycean stream-of-consciousness. The artwork actually represents this, literally, as having a depersonalizing effect on others; many characters around Schrag are drawn featureless, as if she's so wrapped up in her own head that she can't see them — or as if they're part of her dream, and only become clear when she focuses on them.

But while Schrag begins (sort of) in male, she isn't able to sustain it. In our interview, Schrag described the narrative shift like this:

And then Part 2 starts and you begin with the stream of consciousness, and then it cuts into this tape-recorded version, and it basically goes and then it will cut into a journal written version, and as the stories continue in Part 2, you get stream of consciousness switching with present day styles.

Towards the end of Part 2 the tape recording and handwriting take over the present day reality…and soon the only time you see Ariel in present day reality is when she’s thinking about writing the new book…you get the sense of how much the new book has taken over her mind.

In Part 3 the present day steam of consciousness has totally gone, and you start getting even things that you wouldn’t want to record. Like blank spaces on the tape, or blank pages in the journal…sort of the downside of a story being told only through what’s recorded, you get this warped and biased view


And that continues through Part 3 and then it’s not until the very end, and she’s finally done with it, that the very last page returns to the stream of consciousness reality.

In our discussion, Schrag saw this change as being about art hijacking life: her book taking over the rest of her existence. To me, though, it seems like it can also be read as being about an inability to escape from the outside world, and from her relationships. Stream of consciousness is in her head, but the tape recording and the journal and the writing are outside; they're objective rather than subjective. Instead of being in control or primary, Ariel goes back to being one voice among others.

The one scene where this seemed most clear to me was in a sequence where Ariel and her boy friend (and sometime boyfriend) Zally go to a strip club. Zally has been to the club before; he got a lap dance and came, as guys do. Ariel is hoping to achieve a similar climax, but it's not to be. Instead, she ends up being fascinated by the surface of one of the dancer's faces (literally — the woman has a skin condition), and then by how the women feel about the men (they are not especially enthusiastic about the men, Ariel learns while she's in the bathroom with them) and finally during the dance itself about what parts go where and what she's supposed to be doing exactly and on and on and on. The upshot is that Ariel doesn't get it done in the dance, and has to go beat off companionably with Zally in the bathroom. The whole scene is actually transcribed (I presume verbatim) from the tape-recorded after-analysis which Ariel and Zally recorded on their way home together, and so it comes off as an anecdote; something that is being shared and understood between friends as part of a mutual experience. Zally's reactions (amused concern that Ariel's hopes are going to be dashed; icky sexual request to watch Ariel's lapdance; an general ambivalent investment throughout) are important parts of the story. In fact, in some ways, you could see the whole episode as about Ariel's relationship with Zally — her competitor, sometimes fuck-buddy, and sometime collaborator — and about how her loyalties and interest are divided between him and the (possibly gay?) stripper who dances for her. This is, in other words, a long, long way from James Joyce's confessions about his own pursuit of sexworkers in "Portrait of an Artist," where the prostitutes are little more than scented shadows occupying some guilty corner of the narrator's skull. For Schrag, getting off isn't about getting off, but about how she feels about others and how others feel about her.

Schrag is often tormented throughout the book by her inability to shake her butchness, and by the fact that people keep mistaking her for a boy. At the same time, at moments like those in the strip club, she seems to be trying to process experiences like a boy, only to be foiled by a female way of looking at the world. The struggle between the different narrative techniques seems to also be a struggle to find a way to have it both ways — to have the sense of internal privacy and self importance, that male writers often take for granted, while at the same time continuing to respect her relationships with others. Schrag's struggling with and against autobiography, and as a result Likewise doesn't read like anything else I can think of, either in that genre or outside it.

Control V, Control C

I have a review up at the Chicago Reader of a great collage show curated by Ryan Christian here in Chicago called Control v, Control c.

It's a Marvel, Man! Surridge does Gaiman

My friend Matthew Surridge just interviewed Neil Gaiman! It was for an article Matthew's doing about Anticipation, the 2009 World Science Fiction Convention. Gaiman's going to be the guest of honor, and the convention's right here in Montreal (Aug. 6 thru 10).

Go here for what Gaiman told Matthew about the Marvel purchase of Marvelman. Short version: Gaiman's "delighted" and he may write the title again, but no promises -- "I hope so. I don't know. It would be very, very good."

Spam and Comments Policy

So we're getting slightly more spam than in the past. I've been deleting it fairly quickly so far. But I was wondering if I should try to set up one of those things where you have to jump through a hoop (typing a word or series of numbers or whatever) in order to comment. Anyone have an opinion? Which is more annoying -- occasional spam or having to go through an extra step to comment?

She should be vice president, or possibly just stay home

Republicans have wildly different ambitions for the ex-Gov. Fox News did a poll and found that 27% of GOP respondents doggedly insist that Palin really ought to be vice president now that she's had enough of her governorship. But the next most popular choice, at 18%, was "homemaker."

A commenter at the Washington Post site, where I found this, points out that it's a bit odd for a poll to list "homemaker" as a career option for ex-governors. I don't know if the survey gave respondents a list of choices or just ranked what the respondents threw back at them. Probably the first, though.

My choice was "college professor," which didn't do too well: 7% among Republicans, 12% among Democrats. I guess the Democrats come out so far ahead because Republicans figure nobody should be a college professor. Either that or Democrats just have more of a sense of humor.

update, How about president? A Wall Street Journal/NBC poll finds 21% of the country says yes, meaning they want her to be president someday. The "no, never" response is 67%.

Gaffe

I was talking about Joe Biden and how he commits classic-style gaffes, ones where the dumbness lies in saying something that's true but the saying of which will get you in trouble. 

It just occurred to me that Obama's "stupidly" comment about the Gates affair is such a gaffe. Possibly also his remarks last year about people in the rural U.S. "clinging to guns and religion," but that's a matter of interpretation. The Gates business is open and shut: the charges were dropped around when the cop car reached the station house. 

Gluey Tart on Women in Comics

This is part of a roundtable on women creators. Please read the previous entries, if you haven't already – there's lots of good stuff, as always.

****

This is a roundtable on women creators in general, but I originally thought it was just about women creators in comics – which seemed like an odd topic. Don't you think? And indeed that wasn't quite the topic, but this is a blog that is kind of sort of about comics, so what the hell. And you do see this sort of thing, not infrequently. You know what I mean: "Huh. Women comics creators. Let us discuss their relevance!" It made me realize that I live in a bubble. Because I find it bizarre that people would focus on comics by women as a specific subgenre, as people do in the West. I read comics – shojo and yaoi manga – all the time, lots and lots of them, almost all by women. It's unusual for me to read comics by men. So the situation with American mainstream comics strikes me as a weird aberration.

There certainly aren't a lot of women working on mainstream American titles, though, and I have to wonder why. It isn't that women can't do it (proof below), or even that women are inherently disinterested in mainstream comics; something's keeping them out. There have been lively discussions about that topic on this very blog – here is a recent one, and here is more of a classic.

When I thought about women creators in comics (in the West), the first name that came to mind was Jill Thompson. Apparently I was right on the money with that, since her Web site says she is "the most well-known female comic book artist working in the comics industry today." She has done art for a lot of mainstream titles, including some of my favorites, Sandman and The Invisibles. These are girl-friendly mainstream titles, of course, especially Sandman. She's also illustrated even more mainstream ones (more tights and capes, fewer girls) – Batman and Spiderman and Wonder Woman. (Do I know which series? No. I find the myriad divisions of Batman and Spiderman and Wonder Woman and the like incredibly confusing, and frankly, I can barely get out of bed and get to work every morning, much less keep track of superheroes. Ignore 'em all and let God sort 'em out, I say.) (I do know who's DC and who's Marvel, if that makes anyone feel any better. Although I frequently say Superman when I mean Spiderman, much to the irritation of my son and husband. I do know the difference, I just apparently don't – care.) (And the names Superman and Spiderman are treated differently, now that I think of it. Like Kmart and Wal-Mart. One has a hyphen and a capital letter in the middle, and one doesn't. I know this because I am an editor and people get it wrong all the time. Or people used to, when people were writing about Kmart. My easy way of remembering it is that Kmart has nothing and Wal-Mart has everything.) (I don't actually have any other pointless interjections at this point; I just wanted to throw in another parenthetical comment to show I could do it.) I've seen a certain amount of Thompson's work on those titles, and I don't especially like any of it. It fits in with the rest of mainstream comics artwork, which is what it's supposed to do.



Look at this panel, which I chose at random from The Invisibles because I had it at hand. And, huh. What the hell is going on here? This is not exactly the stuff, artistically. Which is pretty much what I always think when I look at mainstream American comics. (This is personal, but I don't mind sharing it with you: I don't understand why superhero comics readers are content with art that isn't that great. The art is at least fifty percent of what's going on. It should be really good, or why not just read words?)

The thing is, I actually come not to bury Jill Thompson but to praise her. I'm not crazy about her mainstream comic art, but I don't really like any mainstream American comic art. She's done some wonderful work, though. Her Scary Godmother books are some of my favorites. They're actually children's books and not technically comics. Well, they sort of hang out at the intersection between comics and picture books. The art is wonderful, stylish, and fun. (The storytelling is also very good.) You get the feeling Thompson got to do what she wanted to do here, like she finally got to slip her leash and run.



I wouldn't know the first panel was drawn by a woman. I'd assume it was done by a man because most of those kinds of comics are. I would definitely assume the second panel was drawn by a woman. That's because the first one conforms to the expected mainstream American comics look, and the second one is a cute Goth for girls thing. I am a fan of some, but not all, cute Goth for girls things (as in most areas of human endeavor, some are well done and some are lacking). I am also aware that this genre lives in a ghetto, segregated from the other titles in the comics store.



Scary Godmother is a series of four hard-bound books, published in the late '90s, plus a couple of comic book series and a one-shot or two. It has a distinctive style and is done in watercolors, which is clearly the way for Thompson to go. I say that because her next two projects, Death: At Death's Door and Dead Boy Detectives, are drawn in a manga-cized version of her Scary Godmother style, but in black and white, and they don't do much for me.

Those books were followed by Beasts of Burden, which you can read online right here. This title was written by Evan Dorkin and illustrated by Thompson, in a return to watercolors. The art is nice, and (separately, in my opinion), she won an Eisner award for it. (She won one for Scary Godmother, too.) Thompson also has a new series of children's books about a character called Magic Trixie, and it's very much in line with Scary Godmother, thematically and artistically. Also painted. The art is lovely.

So, there are a couple of points here. Point the first: Jill Thompson has done some really good stuff, and you might want to hook yourself up with it. Point the second: There aren't many women creators in mainstream American comics, and the best-known one – who is capable of great things – hasn't done anything close to her best work in this field. One is tempted to draw conclusions. It suggests, I think, that mainstream comics, with its emphasis on continuity of the visual style rather than on the artistic strengths of the individual creators, doesn't attract female artists because it doesn't play to their strengths. Or any artist's strengths, from the looks of it. I can see why an outsider might shy away from joining this club.

Tanya Tucker's New Album

...is not very good Or so I claim in a review at the Metropulse.

Erection joke

You stand up for yourself, David Vitter!

Braindrip

I was on the phone with Fantagraphics an hour or so back and realized I sounded like I'd been released from an institution. Whoever answered the phone had to give me a couple of "All riiiiight"'s or the equivalent. I mean the sort of thing you say when the other person in the conversation just won't track.

I've been up for a while trying to finish a TCJ column and just sent it off. The thing went thru drafts and got bigger and smaller, just heaved around in different directions. I always do this, and most of the time I wind up the way I am now, feeling like I've been run over. What a lousy approach. How can I go thru the rest of my life thrashing about whenever I try to write an article? Also, it feels a bit shabby to keep people guessing about lengths and when you're going to deliver.

A bright spot is that I just cut 1,400 words. I sent what I thought was the final draft on Monday, and then Michael Dean said space was tight and he gave me a couple of days to cut the article back from 5,000. For me that was like getting an extension, because the "final draft" needed a lot of focusing. Now it's down to 3,600 and the points I really want to make have been spelled out more. 

The article is about the Watchmen movie and how it's not so different from what I see as the dumber aspects of Alan Moore's own post-'89 comics career.

Favorite phrase that I dropped:

He was just catching a ride on the collective unconscious’ public transit system of shared tropes and icons. 

That's me being snotty about Moore's use of Alice, Wendy and Dorothy in Lost Girls.

Shatner does Palin

The truth is it's just okay. Shatner is much funnier when he thinks he's being serious, which is most of the time. [update, Of course, these days he doesn't normally think he's serious; Noah mentions Iron Chef down in Comments.] Here he knows he's doing a joke and he has the typical overemphasis of a celebrity being a sport. Also, the bongos and upright bass aren't the killing comedy touches they might have been in 1983. The Beatniks have taken a lot of licks by now.

And the extract is the nature stuff only, no "So, how 'bout in honor of the American soldier, ya quit makin' things up." When I first heard about the skit, I thought for sure they'd do "teeny tiny delicate starlets" and "perpetuating some pessimism and suggesting American apologetics" and other cases of assonance and consonance leading the ex-Gov along like a mad horse dragging a 10-year-old.

 

But anyway, the clip is here.

Female Creators Roundtable: Jenji Kohan and Weeds

Cerusee and Noah posted, now me.

I've been watching Weeds in dvd and just finished season 3. If you don't know, it's a comedy/soap opera/crime show about a young widow in a rich suburb who decides to support her kids by selling pot. For the most part I like it. The cast is good and the stories move along, and I like seeing what's up with suburban life now that people my age have teenagers.

But I'm talking about the series here because of a discussion we had last year about the Bechdel Test, which is this: Think of a movie that shows two women talking to each other about anything that isn't a man. The point of the test, as I see it, is this: there aren't a whole lot of such movies. The test acquaints us with a movies ground rule we may not have noticed.

My reflex explanation for the the missing scenes of two-women-just-being-women is that movies get made by men, so it's chiefly men's view of things that gets shown. Weeds is a tv show whose writer/executive producer, meaning the person who gets to decide what kind of show it's going to be, is a woman. And there are a lot of scenes between women talking about all sorts of things. It's not remarkable at all. So I guess the ground rules have been jerked around a little.

If I had to do a ratio of male to female screentime, I'd guess it was 47/53. The difference is pretty narrow. But the key characters are women and they are more or less in charge of the people around them. The heroine, Nancy (Mary-Louise Parker), bosses her family and drug operation. Her best friend/enemy, Celia (Elizabeth Perkins), is a monstrous bitch and tyrant who gets ousted by husband and daughter. (Perkins does an amazing job. It's the greatest bitch performance since Bette Davis in All About Eve; better, really, because it's a lot more varied and detailed.) Nancy's chief business connection is Heylia (Tonye Patano), who runs a drug operation from her kitchen.

The white guys do a lot of frisking about. There's an aging frat boy, a Peter Pan, a nebbish, and Nancy's whiney lameass son. The attitude toward the frat boy (Kevin Nealon) and the Peter Pan (Justin Kirk) is a bit like laddism in Britain, or at least my impression of it. The idea is that men always act like kids, and that is their charm but also why women get to win all the arguments. There's a black male lead (Romany Malco) who becomes Nancy's lover, and he's intelligent, responsible, and competent, but he's usually getting batted around by circumstances and on the defensive with Nancy or Heylia.  

But Weeds doesn't go so far as putting a woman in charge of the action. What's being in charge: minimum, you don't look like an idiot; even better if you get to make the key smart decisions, tell people what to do, use violence successfully. Nancy gets scenes like that, but they don't set the tone for her, or at least so far. Nancy is in over her head trying to be a pot dealer; the implication is that she is learning, and is on her way to becoming a rather cold, tough character, but for now she's usually on the ropes. 

So, without white males on top, it looks like Weeds' race-sex-ethnicity pecking order is a bit  disheveled. No character has a lock, no group does. The whites dominate the show's suburban side, the blacks dominate the show's drug-business side. Heylia gives Nancy a lot of the ignorant-white-girl stuff, the kind of thing you get in a lot of black-white TV scenes, but here with a lot more such scenes. Also, the black characters talk to each other; their side of things gets told. (I don't know if the version presented of "their side" is authentic or not; it's mainly about white people.)

At the bottom of the status heap is a skinny Asian man (Maulik Pancholy) who's there to be a boob and butt and then to get feminized. The black man has sex with Nancy; if the skinny Asian guy looks at her, it's considered a joke -- he's a pencilneck with a crush. Then it turns out he's gay. He's allowed one dignified moment, his statement of his gayness, and then he becomes the latest slender Asian guy on a tv comedy show to be treated like a simpy imitation girl. (It's quite a pattern: the slender assistant in 30 Rock, the slender assistant in Entourage, and now this guy.)  

When I talk about the show being decentered, having a disheveled pecking order, I want to acknowledge that this side of things may strike me especially hard just because my group, white guys, is not in charge. Anyway, what hits me about the show is just how everyone is scrambling not to sink down the ranks. Nobody has secure footing. There are alliances, shifting rankings, etc. groups get represented by strings of different characters with varying statuses, and individual statuses also bob back and forth over time. (And one of the groups represented is white guys. All of a sudden the white guys in a show are not just individuals, they're representatives of a group and you look at them to see how white guys come off. For me that's a switch.)

It's like watching people's heads bobbing up and down in a tank. You see who gets pulled down, who gets to keep her mouth in the air. The new race line-up: whites and blacks on top together, the whites' position more secure but the blacks getting some plums; other races are locked out. supporting players at best, otherwise walk-ons and butts. And women get to talk to each other about business and friendship and all the rest of it. 

more boys vs. girls at san diego comic-con

So I'm no good at doing peppy little wrap-up posts, but I've gotta record for posterity my favourite overheard moment of last weekend.

It was in the women's bathrooms by the Small Press area, and I was leaving out the door so I have no idea what the women looked like or anything. All I heard was, "I told that costumed guy to 'beat it, nerd!'"

Let Venus Wear Her Girdle, Damn It (OOCWVG)

In my post about Greg Rucka's Wonder Woman yesterday, I realized I forgot to sneer adequately at one of the things that most annoyed me in his scripting for WW 196-200. Namely, the gods.

I don't mind that Rucka turns all his gods into irritating American suburbanites and/or hipsters (Aphrodite as bored housewife; Cupid as stoned California drop-out, etc.) That's fine; whatever. Some of the dialogue is kind of funny, I guess. I sort of laughed when Ares told Cupid to stop hitting on his great aunt and Cupid says "like that ever stopped anyone in this family from getting game." I don't know. I don't expect a ton from Rucka at this point; I guess I appreciate any indication that he's trying at all to entertain me rather than educate me or encourage me to fawn over his Amazon paragon.

So, right; updated gods -- not especially clever, but par for the course. What really irritates me, though, is the theology. At one point, Ares explains at length to WW that he (Ares) is now more powerful than Zeus, because nobody is scared of the sky but everybody loves war. Putting aside the question of whether Zeus couldn't somehow piggyback on climate change fears, I just want to say — I am so, so, so sick of the whole "it isn't the worshippers who get power from the Gods — it's the Gods who get power from their worshippers" wheeze. It was tired when George Perez dragged it out for his WW series, and after Neil Gaiman picked it up, dusted it off, and then (in his elegantly canny British way) jumped up and down on it for years...well, there wasn't a whole lot left.

And yet, here's Rucka, trundling along years later, spouting this crap like it's actually insightful or meaningful or anything but the tedious ploy of a nonbeliever who wants to have a deity for verisimilitude while pissing on him (or her) too. The logic is patently ridiculous...and as a result it makes the Amazons look like idiots. If they know that their prayers and belief give the Gods power, then, you know, why not think about something else for a while? Why worship a figment of your imagination? Doing so isn't profound, and it's certainly not an alternative to man's world, where everybody is always already worshipping their own immaculate feces. (And, yes, Alan Moore's worship of his own imagination also irritates me, though at least, unlike Rucka, he actually does have an imagination.)

It seems to me like if you're going to use gods in a super-hero comic, you can do one of two things. First, you can just treat them as super-heroes, which is more or less what Lee/Kirby did with Thor (at least in all the Thor I've read; maybe somewhere they try to build a theology/philosophy to explain the gods, but I mercifully missed that.) Nothing wrong with gods as superheroes; it's entertaining and goofy and involves people hitting each other with unusual weapons andl/or force blasts, which is what comics are all about.

Or, second, you can actually, you know, have some kind of concept of transcendence and use the gods to explore that. That's what Marston did in the first WW series. His Aphrodite and Ares are archetypes connected to his ideas about femininity and masculinity and love and war. Aphrodite especially is definitively transcendent; she's wiser and more powerful than any other character. It makes sense that the Amazons worship her, because she actually seems to know things they don't.

Of course, the things she "knows" about submission and love and gender roles are things you could disagree with -- but Marston believes in them. What's most irritating about the "gods are there because we believe in them" meme is that it true to some extent -- but the truth is vitiated by putting it so clumsily. Yes, fictions do have power, and the power has something to do with belief. But that belief is at least in large part the artist's belief in his or her own work, and it is created not just through saying, "hey, I believe in that," but through genius and craftsmanship. Marston's Aphrodite means something because Marston took the time to make her mean something; she's transcendent because Marston thought there was transcendence, and thought about how to express that in his work. Rucka's Ares, on the other hand, just says, "conflict is important," as if anybody couldn't have figured that out for themselves. And then he says he's powerful because people think conflict is important. Just give it up, already. Don't lecture me on the meaning of existence when you can't even figure out how to tell a decent comic book story.

Tom Spurgeon says happy birthday....

to Miriam.

Republican senator makes fun of how Southerners talk

Thank you, George Voinovich of Ohio. The party's on hard times, you want to analyze why, so what do you do? Make fun of how some population group talks:

"They get on TV and go 'errrr, errrrr,'" he said. "People hear them and say, 'These people, they're southerners. The party's being taken over by southerners. What they hell they got to do with Ohio?'"

Yeah, well, maybe what they're saying isn't too good either. Consider that as a source of your problems.

Making fun of how people talk is a great pleasure in life, but it should not be a default reflex. Somebody who makes it into one is probably a jerk.

(Via Benen, original article here.)

Finding examples of bullshit

Because it was my love. She couldn't decide that. It was my love.

That's how I remember a key line from Adaptation, the movie by Charlie Kaufman. The movie's second half is a point-by-point parody of a typical modern-day Hollywood popcorn film, with beats and pivots and so on. There's the fake plot breakthru (the villainess says she'd like to have dinner with Jesus or John Lennon, so now the heroes know she's a big liar and that she's up to something), the race against time, the quiet heartfelt moment before the big action climax. During the quiet heartfelt moment, the dopey brother tells the smart brother (the arc is about two brothers who must be reconciled) that in high school, sure, he had a crush on that hot girl even though she made fun of him, that he kept loving her even after he caught her and her friends laughing about him and what an idiot he was. Why? And then the line given above, a really fine pastiche of a dopey Hollywood pseudo-profound gnomic utterance. 

I would have thought that was a perfect example of bullshit, as the word is used in H. G. Frankfurt's "On Bullshit." I mean a supposed statement that actually says nothing. This kind of bullshit is to statement what a slug (by which I mean a round, blank disc, not a garden slug) is to a coin. The slug does nothing that a coin is supposed to do except feel like a coin. Someone who isn't paying attention will put it in his pocket and believe he has a coin there. But it's all a fraud. The same with a sentence of bullshit: You hear it, and it feels just like something has been said. A lie, on the other hand, does say something, but something untrue.

I've been looking for examples of bullshit, finding them, and then having them squirt away from me. When you go down a few layers, there's always some specific lie hidden away. It's just that the lies have to do with heady matters that don't get looked at directly most of the time.

For example, "Because it was my love. She couldn't decide that. It was my love." Compare that with the following:

So, this momentary ego approval was not as great as the feeling of loving her! As long as I was loving her, I felt so happy. But when she loved me, there were only moments of happiness when she gave me approval. ... Her loving me was a momentary pleasure that needed constant showing and proving on her part, while my loving her was a constant happiness, as long as I was loving her

I concluded that my happiness equated to my loving! If I could increase my loving, then I could increase my happiness!  *

The speaker is a man discussing the great change in outlook he underwent during his 40s. I think a lot of people would agree with what he said. I haven't read the book in question, just glanced at a couple of pages, but I gather that the speaker goes on to draw many sweeping, straight-line conclusions from this discovery. They may be right or wrong, I have no idea. But his starting point would strike many people as correct: not just that it's better to love than to be loved, better as in morally desirable, but that you get more out of loving than being loved. There's more return.

With that point established, the Charlie Kaufman line looks a bit different. All of a sudden I can see how it might actually mean something -- something highly debatable, not to say false (that the benefits accrued from loving have nothing to do with the person being loved, with whether they return the love or treat you decently, and so on), but something that can be turned into a statement.

Thinking about it, there's another heady claim that the line could be based on: the idea that everything about you is somehow your property and that the key thing is to make sure no one else ever has a say in its disposition. That sounds a bit Ayn Rand-ish, but Hollywood goes in for a debased form of self-actualization that could also give rise to a claim like that, at least if a screenwriter was desperate enough.  

* From Happiness Is Free and It's Easier than You Think by Hale Dwoskin and Lester Levenson. Achmed, a cafe rat I know, pressed the book on me, he said sheepishly.

Good example

Lawrence, a very well-read cafe rat I sometimes bump into, was pouring scorn on the way Republicans pretend that Joe Biden's run-off-at-the-mouth tendencies are proof that Sarah Palin isn't stupid. Lawrence said Biden could talk for an hour on any given political/policy topic and make sense, whereas Palin would fall apart 10 seconds after her sound bites ran out. Good point!

The problem with Biden isn't that he's ignorant or muddleheaded, it's that his mouth goes way too fast. Occasionally he'll get some matters of fact garbled, like someone committing a spoonerism even though he knows where the syllables are supposed to go. More often he says something that's simply impolitic. Michael Kinsley likes to say most "gaffes" are statements that are true but politically inconvenient. If someone asks you what magazines you read and you reply, in effect, "Uh, all of them?" that is not a gaffe. But if someone asks you what you, as vice president of the United States, think of the situation with Russia and you say:

The reality is the Russians are where they are. They have a shrinking population base, they have a withering economy, they have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years, they're in a situation where the world is changing before them and they're clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable.

... that would be a gaffe. But as a lucid, straight-from-the-shoulder overview of an economic-political situation it's not bad. At least he knows about population bases and banking structures and stuff. I like that in a political leader.

(Via Sullivan, with Biden interview here.)

Wonder McDonnell (OOCWVG)

So; Wonder Woman #196-200, Greg Rucka's first few issues on the title, I think, with art by Drew Johnson and Ray Snyder.

Wonder Woman publishes a book filled with wisdom. We don't get to hear much of that wisdom in detail, but apparently she thinks peace is good, eating meat is bad for the environment, and you should support your local U.N. The comics, in other words, are kind of like listening to World View, except with all the actual information about world events replaced with platitudes and remarkably poorly rendered, unstylish art. It can also be distinguished from World View because it has less action. Wonder Woman wanders around to signings and readings while a shadowy, nefarious organization attempts to...ruin her reputation! Like in Legends! Remember Legends! Except, this time, instead of Darkseid, we've got some blandly blond executive type and Dr. Psycho. Not the Marston version with ectoplasm and kinky hypnotism. No, this is a tedious, latter-day version who does nothing for five issues and finally is unleashed at the end to...start a mild riot, which the police break up by themselves without even Wonder Woman's help. That's because Wonder Woman is engaged in a by-the-numbers slugfest with Silver Swan. Who apparently is the tortured, mind-twisted Vanessa Kapetelis, the teen Mary Sue from George Perez's run on the title. I presume the obligatory desecration of Vanessa isn't Rucka's fault. Still, it does suck that every minor character, no matter how innocent, has to eventually show up as a super-villain. It sort of makes you think that the people writing this stuff don't actually have more than two ideas to rub together.

Who the fuck wants to read this crap? Whose idea of a hero is a NPR commentator in a swimsuit? Rucka just seems endlessly fascinated by how busy WW is; how she's racing from one do-gooding enterprise to another. The supporting characters are mostly her staff, because, damn it, social secretaries are fascinating. The series often feels like a journalistic puff piece from a fashion magazine or something; it's like WW is Angelina Jolie. And I know that lots of folks like to read about Angelina Jolie and her doings, sure. But Jolie exists; why do you want to invent her? I can understand the appeal of Twilight; I can understand the appeal of Superman; I can understand the appeal of the Marston Wonder Woman, who was fun because she had amazing adventures and exciting powers. But Wonder Woman as ersatz, earnest celebrity? For God's sake, why?

In fact, to see how wrong-minded this approach is, you don't have to go any farther than the back-up features in WW #200, an annual sized volume. A short story by Robert Rodi with art by Rick Burchett called "Golden Age" essentially retells Rucka's story in the style of Marston/Peter. And — despite the fact that artist Rick Burchett disgraces himself in trying to imitate Peter, and despite the fact that Rodi is unwilling to fully embrace Marston's bondage fetish — the result is delightful. We ditch the leaden plot, and instead rush blithely from enjoyably ridiculous complication to enjoyably ridiculous action feat. WW refuses to endorse Veronica Callow's perfume, so Callow builds a super-robot which imitates WW and performs numerous evil deeds (painting a moustache on the statue of liberty! kissing Steve Trevor!) WW despairs as her friends turn against her...but then, with the help of Etta Candy, she uncovers the dastardly deeds...and convinces the robot to turn to the good! And at the end the goddess Aphrodite appears and turns the robot into a real girl. WW sum up by noting that she defeated the robot with "my powers of persuasion! That's all any girl needs to be a Wonder Woman!" By this point, anyone willing to satirize Rucka is okay in my book...and, as a bonus, we also get to see one of the Amazon kangaroos, lost for many years in the seas of continuity.


This is one of the only bondage scenes in the story (the villain is tied up at the end. Artist Rick Burchett gets Peter's stiff poses, more or less, but Peter's fluid linework not so much. The motion lines for the spanking for example, are uniform weight, simple boring strokes, clumsily positioned. No way would Peter draw them that way.

Again, this doesn't actually read like it's by somebody who really understand, or likes, or even read the Marston/Peter run that closely. Having WW's friends turn on her and the anxiety about kissing Steve -- that's way, way Silver Age. Marston's WW would never cut and run back to Paradise Island...and no way would Marston's Steve reject a kiss from WW. But that's neither here nor there; the point is that this is silly, action-filled fun, with the central messages (persuade, don't fight! women power, yay!) presented with tongue-in-cheek, perhaps, but still with less pomposity and greater clarity than in Rucka. If they published a WW comic like this now, I'd probably have to buy it, even if the art did suck this badly.

(There's also a moderately entertaining silver age story called "Amazon Women on the Moon" which is about what is says (by Nunzio Defilippis and Chistina Weir with actually competent art by Ty Templeton). And then there's an adequate retelling of the Perseus legend by Greg Rucka. And hopefully that's the last Greg Rucka I'll read for quite some time.)

_______________

For those who want more Rucka-bashing, I made fun of the Hiketeia here.

Female Creators Roundtable: Jane Austen and yes, eventually, some damned zombies.

I've been on a big Timothy Hutton kick lately, so naturally I had to go watch Ordinary People, the famous 1980 film for which a young Hutton won an Oscar. Hutton, Mary Tyler Moore, Donald Sutherland, Judd Hirsch, etc; they're all fantastic. Actually, Hirsch doesn't really rock my world--I think I've seen better psychiatrists on screen before--but the rest of them are such deeply felt performances that I couldn't even bring myself to scoff at the emotional tribulations and petty problems of wealthy American suburbanites. You're rich! You have no material wants! And okay, you're in a life-destroying emotional hell caused by severe trauma. That actually is a real problem.

If I'd read the original novel by Judith Guest, instead of watching the film version directed by Robert Redford, I could have stopped there for my contribution to the women creators roundtable, but I didn't, so I have to go another direction. What's sort of been on my mind is the extraordinary subtlety of Ordinary People: it's brimming with delicate, minute observations of the interactions of people, the better to show how fragile they are, how broken the Jarrett family is. In the middle of the film, there's a perfectly awful conversation between Moore and Hutton's characters, a scene in which the mother and son, who have practically no relationship at all, try to reminisce; in just a few seconds, it goes horribly sour and becomes apparent that these people, who have lived in the same house for years, do not have emotionally compatible memories of the past. They can't connect.

The delicacy of the filmmaking reminded me of the experience of reading Jane Austen novels. In popular culture, at least, Austen's works are mainly considered in terms of their romantic appeal--and I will say now that as I love subtle, understated passion in fiction, I think Pride and Prejudice is among the most totally awesome romances I've ever read--but there is also the manners part of her comedies of manners.

Once, when I was enthusing about the Regency Romance queen Georgette Heyer to a fellow bookseller, I said that she was all the fun of Jane Austen, but purely fluffy. He, an aspiring horror writer, replied that he thought Jane Austen was fluffy. If you're oriented towards Kafka-esque horror, I guess that makes sense, but if you read Austen in the right mood, she can make your skin crawl without needing any addition of fucking zombies. (I've been predicting for years that the next natural step after the publishing boom of sexy vampire romance porn and werewolf romance porn was zombie romance porn, but this wasn't quite was I was expecting.)

Actually, one of the biggest differences between Heyer and Austen, aside from the fact that the former was a twentieth century writer who ruled the romance genre spawned by the nineteenth century novels written by the latter, is that Heyer likes everybody. Her books feature plenty of dumb, petty characters who screw up life for her heroes, but she treats them gently. Heyer's work is happy, and in her romances, which are deeply pleasurable fantasies, she chuckles at human foibles and leaves it at that. Austen is more cutting, less forgiving of fault, and the constraints of social expectations bind her characters more tightly. Her novels are not narratives of rebellion, nor anthropological studies, but observations of the way people live and feel within the existing frameworks of a society. Possibly I'm just reinventing the English Lit 101 wheel here, but man, that's huge; that's why we still read Austen. Somewhere between the psychological freakout of The Yellow Wallpaper and the extraterrestrial thrashing ooze of Lovecraft, there is the horror of going down to have breakfast with family members who think more about flossing their teeth than about your inner emotional life. (Parts of Ordinary People remind me of parts of Persuasion. You may get out alive; you may even get out sane, but you cannot get out of these scenarios without personal damage.) In terms of their literary worth, creeping insanity and New England towns that worship tentacled alien gods certainly have their merits, but most people probably deal more with the minor and major horrors of human dealings than with those first two things.

Austen doesn't just reflect social mores in her books; she offers harsh judgement on people and behaviors, albeit discreetly voiced. It requires relatively close reading to get all that, as her prose is both precise in meaning and complex in structure. That's part of the modern-day fun in reading these books, of course. Elizabeth and Darcy wouldn't be half so romantic if they communicated in simpler language; it's all about the delicacy and the intricacy of their conversations and abbreviated meetings, right up until their restrained-but-heartfelt mutual agreement of affection in the finale. I haven't read all of Austen's novels, but the same restraint ruled in Persuasion and Sense and Sensibility, so I think it is kind of her thing. Encounters with nineteenth-century gothic romance have made it clear to me that the emotional restraint is definitely an Austen-specific thing, too, not a period feature.


...

My sister makes fun of the Keira Knightley movie version of Pride and Prejudice for being so emotionally naked; personally, I liked it because it had big, smelly-looking pigs running around in the yard and there was a lot of mud. What it lacked in mannered restraint, it made up for with literal earthiness; I thought that was kind of neat. There have already been like five billion screen adaptations of that book, most of which didn't have goddamned Colin Firth; at least the Knightley version had some sort of unique concept in that it substituted minutely observed detail of the physical reality of middle-class country life in Regency England for the novel's minutely observed detail of the social interactions of the middle class in Regency England, which played to the strengths of the adapting medium and still left a lot of space for unsaid feeing. It's a film; can you blame them for wanting to make it atmospheric? And I suddenly realize I've come round full circle and am again talking about a movie with Donald Sutherland in it.

Speaking of questionable adaptations, though, anybody see that hideous recent Marvel comics version of Pride and Prejudice? I wish they'd beaten Grahame-Smith to the zombie pastiche thing, at least, since putting zombies into everything is I think Marvel's main sales strategy these days.

something is rotten in the garden patch

A terrible, terrible metaphor I ran across in a story on tomatoes at the NPR site:

I could never stand to see tomatoes treated that way. Just thinking about it makes me hungry. And it's almost lunchtime. Out in the vegetable patch, the Brandywines are as red as raw steak. The Juliets are as ripe as their Shakespearean namesake, and the Arkansas Travelers are blushing pink.

The Juliet of the famous play, age 13, was not even ripe by the standards of the day, much less now. I have by now seen a couple of excellent Juliets, which was enough to bring me around on the romantic power of the play and the character, but calling the tween Juliet ripe has ickily Lolita-esque implications. Bad metaphor! Bad!

Female Yakuza Tale

Matthew Brady promised me that Female Yakuza Tale would be good, and he was pretty much right. The sequel to Sex and Fury it's got a different director, Teruo Ishii, who largely ignores telling a coherent story in favor of extravagantly gratuitous violence and sex. High points include a prostitute hawking and blowing a wad of snot down the throat of a guy trying to sneak a surreptitious peek; the moment when female swordswoman Ocho is about to cut off the fingers of gambler Big Tiger, and Tiger's wife begs Ocho to spare his middle finger as a favor between women (the wife waggles her own middle finger suggestively); a character named Yoshimi of Christ who declares "When I pray, I kill"; and a final battle scene involving gaggles of women fighting nude — especially the moment where a bunch of them beat their former rapist to death, and then piss on his corpse. It's all done with cheerful insouciance — there's never a moment where you feel like the filmmaker actually thinks he's imparting a moral or elevating lesson (as there is throughout Lady Snowblood: Lovesong of Vengeance for example. (There is one moving scene where, in flashback, a 17-year-old Ocho is caught cheating at cards; she is about to have her finger cut off, but a big crime boss intercedes, and offers to allow his own finger to be chopped in return. Then he tells Ocho to go forth and sin no more...but, and this is kind of the best part, in some sense, she does actually spend the rest of her life as a professional gambler. So much for life lessons.)

Where was I? Oh, right, no moral center. Also, it doesn't have the grim rape-revenge intensity of Scorpion/ It's almost parodic in its offensiveness — the mood almost seems within hailing distance of something like Toxic Avenger, though this is infinitely cleverer and better made. I enjoyed it pretty thoroughly. I may well have to try to find more movies by Teruo Ishii. Any recommendations as to what I might look for next?

Super Edward (Female Creators Roundtable)

This is the first post in a roundtable on female creators here at HU. Tom, Miriam, and Cerusee will have posts up on this topic as the week goes on.
___________________________

As threatened, I did in fact see the Twilight movie this weekend. It was actually a good bit better than I thought it would be. I Admittedly, all the actual suspense and vampire stuff is incredibly clichéd – the good vampires vs. the bad vampires; the oh-so-painful need to keep from sucking human blood…the darkness! The tragedy! It’s Buffy light, which is saying something. Even the effects are mediocre and half-assed for the most part. Still, there were good parts. I’m not especially in to the pale slight goth-looking thing myself, but I have it on good authority that if you are, Kristin Stewart is something special. Moreover, her acting was quite good — she manages to come across as both painfully awkward and definitively intelligent, which is not all that easy to pull off. Indeed, the cast as a whole is a lot less cringe-inducing than you might expect. Partially I think it’s the director, Catherine Hardwicke (who also did the very decent Tank Girl movie) who seems to have a real talent for awkward high school interactions. The moment where one of Bella’s friends is asking her to the prom, and she’s so fixated on staring at Edward that she doesn’t even hear him is pretty priceless. Meeting the families was quite funny too…the vampire clan is both cute and freakish, and Edward’s exasperation with them is about exactly what you’d expect from a regular 17 year old dealing with a regularly weird family. I wished more than once that Stephanie Meyer had just written a teen high school drama without all the fantasy crap.

Though, of course, it probably wouldn’t have been popular enough to get made into a movie in that case. The movie seems almost scientifically designed to appeal to the tween-girl hindbrain. Several commenters over at this Robot 6 roundtable noted that the relationship dynamic between Edward and Bella is extremely creepy – and, yep, that’s the case. He’s a complete romanticized stalker, breaking into her house every day for weeks to stare at her sleeping, constantly talking about how his love for her compels him to hurt her. When he first sees her, he stares and stares and stares and is utterly creepy.

So right; encouraging teen girls to romanticize their stalkers — bad. Except that…the whole point of the story, what’s exciting about it, is that Edward will never hurt her. In fact, he won’t even have sex with her. He’ll barely kiss her. There’s a scene where he shows up in her bedroom, and he makes her hold still so he can kiss her…and things start to get hot and heavy, and he leaps away from her, bashing into the wall of her room. Then they spend the night talking, until she falls asleep in his arms. Her mom asks her “are you being safe?” at one point and the irony is that she isn’t, of course — Edward’s anything but safe! But the bigger irony is that she’s being super, ultra, duper safe. No condoms needed here. You might as well say that the story is fetishizing virginity as that they’re fetishizing stalking. Indeed, the whole point seems to be that they’re fetishizing both. The appeal is that you have all the darkness and danger and sex and lust you want, all the magic irresistible power of female sexuality – and its all utterly defanged. You can be dangerous and cool and sexy and stay completely safe and untouched.

What’s funny about the Twilight/San Diego Con flap, in fact, is that, if Twilight belongs anywhere, it’s at a comic convention. It’s the perfect female power dream complement to the male power dream inaugurated by Siegel and Shuster, and still running Superman is a fantasy for boys about having secret power and being invulnerable. Twilight is a dream for girls about having a secret lover who will keep you invulnerable. They’re both utterly transparent and infantile and clueless; Superman wears his underwear on the outside and that’s supposed to be tough and glamorous? Edward drives a Volvo and plays baseball and that’s supposed to be dark and cool? But that cluelessness is also a kind of innocence, and a charm. I don’t necessarily want to read the Twilight books, and lord knows I don’t ever need to read another Superman comic. You could argue that either vision is damaging or dangerous, as you could argue that any fantasy is unhealthy and unrealistic, I guess. But I don’t know. I was a kid, and, for that matter, a tween. I can see the appeal.

Update: Cerusee posts on Ordinary People, Jane Austen, and Zombies.

Do people still care about decades?

When I was younger, newsmagazines and regular people spent a lot of time on deciding what mood the world was in during a given decade. The practice goes back a while (the Mauve Decade, the Gay '90s, others), but it mainstreamed hard during the '60s, and then the '70s were a reaction to the '60s so they needed an assessment too, and then the '80s were a reaction to the '70s, and the '90s were a reaction to the '80s, so the chain kept going for a while.

The assessments had something to do with big-league events in the world, such as assassinations and wars, but their heart always seemed to be this: for the past few years "we" have been behaving and thinking differently than we were a few years before that, and these changes in thought and behavior amount to a whole new climate for life. How shall the climate change next?  

The official sequence of decades went like this:  '60s (idealism! upheaval! violence! challenges to established norms! liberated lifestyles!), '70s (cynicism! self-absorption! stagnation! liberated lifestyles!), '80s (money! traditional norms! consumption!), '90s (austerity! youthful ennui! spirituali -- wait, the economy's back up -- dotcom!).

I make that sound pretty stupid, but the changes in behavior and attitude that happened just before, during, and just after the 1960s really were a sea change. If you want to refer to them all, "the '60s" is the neatest way to do it. During the 1970s and '80s, people really were working out what to make of the changes, how far to take them and how far to retreat from them. The silly aspect of the decades business, never a small thing, got larger as the post-'60s consensus worked itself out.

By the '90s we had a new generational shift, so chances looked good for a new, highly distinct zeitgeist unit. But Gen X didn't really have much of a new set of attitudes. People thought they were pretty mopey, but that turned around when they started finding jobs. Therefore, the newsmagazine aspect of the '90s changed almost in mid-year. One month you were hearing about how "the '90s" were a time of hardship, disaffection, creepy enthusiasm for serial killers, and so on. Then, all of a sudden, "the '90s" was a period of crazy amounts of money and consumption -- "excess," as journalists like to put it. 

With its raison d'etre running out, the decades business also encountered two important technical obstacles. First, there was a new millennium. That looked like a fat invitation for more zeitgeist assigning, but guessing at a spirit for a whole millennium makes one feel pretty stupid. At the same time, figuring out a decade looks too trivial to bother with. Second, it's tough to talk about a period of time when there's no number to go with it. What do you call a decade whose years are marked out by 0, as in '01, '02, etc? Somebody in Slate suggested "the Oughts," which was enough to show the decades business was in trouble.

Finally, 9-11 happened, and then the Iraq invasion, and then Barack Obama's election. I'm tempted to think that these events have provided us with such immense milestones that the this-decade-vs.-that-decade parlor game has slipped people's minds. On the other hand, the 1960s and 1970s had their own jumbo events, and what happened was that people assigned the events to serve as markers for the start and end of the decade-as-zeitgeist units -- I mean the assertion one used to hear that "the '60s began in 1963 and ended in 1974," which is keyed to the Kennedy assassination and the end of the Watergate scandal.

With the 1980s we had a pair of big, zeitgeist-defining events to get the decade started: Lennon shot, Reagan elected, and (as newsmagazines reminded us at the time) the '80s are underway. 

But no one talks about how our current decade really began on Sept. 11, 2001, or how it ended on Nov. 5, 2008. Back when the market crashed in '87, Newsweek got out in front with a cover story saying, in so many words, "The '80s Are Over." Nothing like that now.

Maybe people are getting smarter, though that's never a good bet. My own theory is that all this goes back to the baby boomers. The '60s-'70s-'80s chain of zeitgeist assessments was a means of arguing about where those crazy kids would take the culture. The two choices being discussed always seemed to be idealism/libertinism vs. traditional values/greed. Conservatives would say the choice was between libertinism and traditional values, liberals would say it was idealism versus greed. What it came down to was arguing about whether the country would continue to change in line with the changes kicked off during the 1960s or whether it would swing back to the pre-'60s status quo.

Now the baby boomers are all going to have urinary problems and then die, and it looks like nobody else is planning any big departures from present modes of operation. Which probably means that steam is gathering for a direction that's so new nobody will figure it out until we're 10 years into it. At which point we'll hear about "the Teens" or "the Age of Palin" or some damn thing. 

Tough guy dialogue

Yeah? I'm going to lay it on the line. Smoke this down, pal. Smoke it cool.

Overheard at Troublemakers Studio during a story conference that involved Brian Michael Bendis. (Not really.)

She's a big jerk

 "It violated all common decency, all protocol," says Ramras. "It just showed such disrespect."

That's Jay Ramras, a member of Alaska's House of Representatives, talking about Palin's tongue-lashing of an aide to the House speaker. The aide had told Palin it wasn't the done thing for governors to leave the state when the legislative session still had a few days to go. Apparently Palin overreacted.

Mr. Ramras also has this thought, on Palin's misfired nomination of a loudmouthed attorney general:

"He was voted down, and she blamed all of us," says Ramras. "She's perfected victim psychology."

The quotes are from a piece in the New Republic by Suzy Khimm about Palin's activities as governor since '08. These activities appear to have been few but frenzied:

... upon returning to Juneau last fall, "she managed to alienate most of the 60 members of [the Alaska] House and Senate," says Larry Persily, an aide to state Republican Representative Mike Hawker. "It wasn't a matter of burning bridges--she blew them up." 

Mr. Persily "spent two years working in the Alaska governor's Washington office," the article says. I guess that mean he was working for Sarah Palin, though the wording's bit unclear; if he was, he must have come back to Alaska at the start of '09. At any rate, he's Republican and so is every politician and aide mentioned in this post. Judging by Ms. Khimm's article, I'd say Republicans who take part in the Alaskan legislative process really enjoy talking about Sarah Palin. 

More from Mr. Persily: 

"We couldn't get any decisions out of the governor," says Persily ... "It had nothing to do with critics harping at her--it was a lack of attention to governing."

Rather than hash things out with lawmakers, Palin repeatedly rebuffed their engagement efforts, most notably canceling a key April meeting with legislators. When she changed her mind at the last minute, the frustrated legislators declined to meet with her. Palin issued a press release blaming them for the meeting's failure, prompting both the Senate president and the Republican House speaker to denounce her claims as completely false. "You don't see that often--the Senate president calling the governor a liar," says Persily. 

You don't! Palin coped with the situation, as mentioned above, by chewing out the speaker's aide. She showed up at the aide's office to do so, which may have been the only time the speaker and his team ever got sight of her. All right, that's hyperbole. But:   

When it came to legislative matters of any substance, "we got very little information from the state," says Republican House Speaker Mike Chenault. "All I wanted was to know what her response was.... There were many times we couldn't get a clear answer." 

One complaint about the article. Like the lousy Purdum article in Vanity Fair, it goes light on Palin's attorney general fiasco. We're told she nominated the guy to please the NRA and national Republicans nationwide, and that she left him out to dry when the going got tough -- I believe that's more than Purdum offered. But we're given only a gesture of an explanation as to why Alaska found it so tough to swallow an attorney general who says mean things about gays. Maybe I just need someone to underline for me that the situation regarding gay respect/tolerance in Alaska is not what I imagine it to be.

 

Salad Church Exercise

I was in a Salad/Church/Exercise themed art show recently curated by Bert Stabler. Photos from the show are here.

Understanding modern America

Being racist against blacks is such a bad thing that actually it can never exist. Nobody could really be that bad. My hatred for white racism is shown by my resolute understanding that it never occurs.

[ Notes for the dumb: Yes, the above is irony. ]

White evangelicals, you disappoint me

The Washington Post reports on its new poll. You know who "she" is:

While she is still widely popular among those in her party, she has lost ground among Republicans generally and among the white evangelicals who are so critical in the early presidential primaries.

...

Among white evangelicals, Huckabee outpaces Palin and the others by better than 2 to 1.

Actually I like Huck, so I shouldn't say I'm disappointed. He's a weathervane, and on various key issues of modern life I think he's a nutter. But he's smart and he ran a full-size state for quite a while in a way that is generally accounted competent. Also, he's got charm and he really can come out with a good speech, whereas Palin gets graded on an outrageous curve. God, I hate her voice!

On the other hand, as a product of secular America I'm used to thinking of evangelicals as people who will believe anything. It turns out some of them have their limits. Maybe I knew that intellectually, but factoring in actual evidence still makes my ideas twitch. 

57 percent of Americans say she does not understand complex issues, while 37 percent think she does, a nine-percentage-point drop from a poll conducted in September just before her debate with now-Vice President Biden.

I wonder what the figure was for right after the debate? Biden certainly did well in the "who won" results, but people were talking about how much better Palin did than anyone had expected (since expectations had been set by her Gibson/Couric interviews).

Like most people, I think, I believe that her relatively good reviews for the debate were all about her demeanor -- viewers were relieved and surprised when she got thru complete sentences and didn't try to hide under the podium. But a post-debate "understands complex issues" number would be helpful for verifying that impression. 

GOP women are more apt than GOP men to see Palin as a strong leader 

Yeah, those GOP men. How do you make it possible for them to see thru an ignorant, posturing jackass? Give the jackass breasts instead of a penis.

Most innocuous sentence in an account of a tell-all celebrity book

James also revealed he and his teammates smoked marijuana one night after getting access to a hotel room in Akron.

I guess if we ever do scandal books about senior class trips, LeBron James will have paved the way. (Also -- "access to a hotel room"? That's weird phrasing.) 

Tiny Titans

Tiny Titans #17
Baltazar/Franco

Tiny Titans is analogous in a lot of ways to Mini-marvels. Big-headed child versions of your favorite heroes involved in comedic adventures, with continuity references sprinkled about in just the right amount to entertain hard-core geeks without alienating everyone else. It's such a winning formula you wonder why Marvel and DC haven't remade their entire line over in its image. (I'd sure like to see it applied to 100 Bullets, for example.)

Given the similarities in concept and execution, though, it's impressive how different the books actually are in practice. In the art, for example, Chris Giarrusso on Mini-Marvels is relatively sick — it looks like it's influenced by newspaper strips, maybe. The drawings are imaginative (the tiny hands on venom are a favorite bit, for example) but not especially stylish or distinctive.

Art Baltazar's drawings for Tiny Titans, on the other hand, are really kindergardeny (ahem); theyr'e messier with thicker lines and less background detail -- more expressive. I think I prefer them more to look at; in this sequence, for instance, I like the way Mxyzptlk resolves from out of the squiggles; it's sort of like you're watching him being drawn.





For the story, though, I definitely prefer Mini-Marvels. It's probably partially because it seems pitched at slightly older kids...but it's also because the writers seem to feel able to do more. There's lots of nutty verbal humor and weird gross out gags (Wolverine cuts up a piece of French bread with his claws and everyone's horrified because he just used the claws to hack up zombies); and the continuity jokes are bizarre and hilarious (Galactus being the giant at the top of Jack's beanstalk, for example.) The things just chock full of side gags and glancing nonsense and silly unexpected patter. The gag below, for example, is a damn fine Peanuts riff:



(uck; apologies for the colors on both of these. My scanning technology is limited.)

Tiny Titans on the other hand is much more sedate...and dare I say, boring. No gross out humor, no verbal sparring; just one mildly silly situation per story. Battle for the Cow, in which the cow has Batman's cowl, is entertaining, and the cow is cute...and it's fun reading the "Mooo! Crash! Mooo!" as the cow beats up Beast Boy. But that all takes four pages...and the denoument is totally squandered (starfire just wanders in and rescues the cowl...I guess because she's a girl? It's definitely got that sitcom trope where the girls are more competent.)

Again, it's probably aimed at a younger demographic...but Mo Willems does great verbal rhythms and well-timed slapstick and even some absurdist nonsense, and he's aimed at even younger kids. I think the writing is just mediocre, is the conclusion. I mean, don't get me wrong, it get be loads worse, and I'd rather read this than the Berenstein Bears, or Thomas the Tank Engine books...or than loads of stuff. But I wouldn't seek it out on my own...whereas, if another Mini-Marvels collection is published, I want it.

Mom Eat Poop

My son wrote that out yesterday -- his first complete sentence.

And yes, it has a familiar ring to it.

I blame the parents.

Ginuwine Still Going, For What That's Worth

My review of the mediocre new Ginuwine album is online at the Knoxville Metropulse.

Twilight: Con and Con

I've become embroiled in a bit of a to-do over at Brigid's Robot 6 roundtable on Twilight and the San Diego Con. I thought I'd move my response over here, partly to give readers here a chance to watch me burble, but mostly to avoid hijacking poor Brigid's thread anymore than I already have.

All right...so for those who haven't been following the brou-ha-ha... At the con, there's going to be a showing of the new Twilight movie. That means there will be a lot of tween girls at the con. Some fanboys are concerned that these tweens will ruin things for the "normal" fans. Several female comics bloggers replied hey, screw you fanboy. And who can blame them, really?

Anyway, Brigid, as I said, had a roundtable amongst her cobloggers at Good Comics for Kids to talk about why the fanboys need to buck the fuck up (I don't think she'd put it that way, but tha'ts the gist). And, as I've indicated, I'm with Brigid and co -- buck the fuck up fanboys! But I was a bit taken aback to discover that one of the fanboys singled out for chastising was...our own Tom Crippen. As you may or may not remember, Tom expressed reservations about manga and geez, the fangirls do not forgive or forget. Kate Dacey called him on the carpet:(in the original post, and with slightly more detail when pressed in comments) for calling shojo manga "girl's stuff" and for saying it had a "kindergarden feel".) In comments, Melinda Beasi added that such language "insulted and belittled" the women who read shojo.

So that's the state of things. I'm going to go off on a bit of a tangent now, but I'll get back to poor Tom and his belittling, never fear.

One of the more interesting points raised in comments on the roundtable thread is that virtually nobody actually thinks Twilight is all that good. I haven't read it myself (though I'm hoping to see the movie this week.) But most commenters agreed that it was not especially well written and that the central relationship was creepily abusive and dumb...not necessarily the sort of thing you'd be eager for tween girls to read.

So how do you defend the fans of a crappy piece of art? Several possibilities were floated. Brigid suggested that fans of Twilight don't necessarily agree with or fall for the book's message:

But just because people read something doesn’t mean they buy it wholesale or take it as a model for their own relationships. Part of my daughter’s reaction to Twilight was her distaste for the relationships portrayed in the books. They gave her a chance to think about different types of relationships and articulate her own feelings, which I think was a valuable thing.

This is pretty much the cultural studies argument; pop culture is empowering because marginalized groups creatively take what they want from it and leave the rest. I have to say, I find this argument pretty hard to accept. I don't doubt that some girls do read the novels critically and dislike bits of them. But I don't think the books and movies have become bestsellers because the fans think they're dumb. They've become bestsellers because fans like them, and their questionable relationship advice too. Or, to put it another way, pin up art wasn't popular with guys because they liked to deconstruct the male gaze.

Robin B. says "We need to trust in the people that read the books, whatever messages the stories may send, to be smart about what they take away from them and apply to their lives" — but why do we need to do that? People (not excluding me) are often stupid and make horrible choices on a fairly regular basis. People (again, not excluding me) are often quite untrustworthy. I'm willing to accept that young girls aren't dumber than anyone else...but everyone else is plenty dumb. If, for the sake of argument, we say that these books tend to encourage abusive relationships, why should we assume that the girls who read them are not going to learn some unfortunate lessons from that? Because, you know, and not to blame the Twilight books specifically, but...tween girls in this culture, do, on occasion, find themselves in abusive relationships for real. And sometimes they think those relationships are okay, or their fault. And one could argue that there are media images and cultural products that contribute to that mindset. Which isn't to say "ban the Twilight books!" But it is to say, if you think they contribute to those images, maybe you don't need to necessarily make excuses for them either.

In any case, Robin B. goes on to explain a more straightforward method of separating fans and work:

It’s a question of dismissing people, here, not the works themselves, and I think that’s the real problem for me. I can hate Dan Brown’s books (and I do) but I would never dismiss a Dan Brown fan just because they like Dan Brown.

Which sounds reasonable enough; just hate the consumable, not the consumer. Except...well, let's go back to Tom.

Remember, Tom was accused of calling shojo manga "girl stuff" and of referring to the art as having a "kindergarden feel."

Put aside for the moment that shojo is, in fact, by definition, girl stuff. And further put aside the fact that it is deliberately and extravagantly cutesy — big eyes, flowers, often weird fetishization of infantilized characters (a lot of shojo has extremely weird issues around childhood.) Put aside all of that. The point here is that Tom was doing with manga exactly what everybody says should be done with Twilight fans. He didn't call anyone a kindergardener; he said the art had a "kindergarden feel." Further, went out of his way to make it clear that he was expressing his own personal distaste for the material without insulting the readers of it (on the contrary, he was actually saying that he had missed important things, and asking for recommendations.) Tom never once says anything, positive or negative, about manga fans; he confines himself entirely to to talking about the comics. And yet, he's still being held up as an example of evil intolerant fanboy pilloried for being "unwillingness to try and understand why manga—or, for that matter, Twilight—appeals to girls". This even though Tom repeatedly throughout the roundtable *asks for manga recommendations* — and even expresses interest in and appreciation for, some shojo art.

So a couple of points here. First, I think this shows fairly clearly that, no matter who you are, there's a strong urge to circle the wagons when your fandom is assaulted...or even mildly poked. This can play out in various ways, depending on power dynamics, history, and the relative personal vicissitudes of those involved. You can get borderline racism (as with that disco record burning thing in the late 70s). Or you can get unpleasant connotations of misogyny, as with the male fans whining about women at their con. Or you can just have fairly innocuous internet bickering. I don't think for a moment that these reactions are morally equivalent...but I do think they spring from similar impulses. And it makes me kind of wonder how all those teen girls would respond if you went up to them and said, "You know, Twilight is really sexist and bad...but yeah, you go girl!" Would they really be entirely pleased?

I just want to touch on one other thing before finishing up. Kate Dacy quoted one thing that really irritated her from a male commenter on Valerie D'Orazio's blog:

"And now, you want to talk about the TWILIGHT fans. Hell, Val they aren’t even fans of the story. They just want the actors. If it was just author Stephanie Meyer there, and no movie, no actors, the turn out would be just about nil."

Dacy said in response "What bothers me most is the underlying assumption that girls (and women) don’t know how to be proper fans, that they’re only there for the hot guys and couldn’t care less about the books or the creator."

On the one hand, I absolutely agree with Dacy: the comment is insulting, and also just wrong -- I'm sure the fans would be incredibly psyched to meet Meyer. After all, without any doubt, some significant percentage of those fans are *writing Twilight fan fiction themselves.* Quite possibly explicit Twilight fan fiction.

Because you don't need the hot actors to have a prurient interest in your fandom. There are other erotic levers that can connect you to your obsession. Indeed, I think it's worth wondering whether there are anything *but* erotic levers. Vampires. Romance. Vampire romance. Hot guys, hot girls. Where exactly is the non-prurient bit? Or, alternately, if you will — manly men in skintight costumes engaged in intense, sweaty mano-a-mano combat. With the occasional preposterously clad, pneumatic heroine thrown in for good measure.

In a consumer society, consumption is a fetish. The fetish is an object you invest with power and worship -- but that power is *your* power. It's not you, but at the same time its the most important part of you. Arguments about fandom get so hot and heavy because they aren't just about what you like or don't like; they're about power, love, gender, self, identity. Respecting people even as you disrespect their consumer choices is a laudable goal in some sense. But people aren't so easy to locate. They're not just taking up space at the con. They're in the books or comics they read, the horrible relationship advice that causes them to swoon, the cheesecake they lasciviously drool over. They're in their ideas. And some of those ideas (tween girls aren't normal; abusive relationships are cool) deserve to be mocked.

Update: Over on the other thread, Brigid had an interesting take on the kindergarden thing:

Are we talking about apples and oranges here? Hello Kitty has a kindergarten feel. Fruits Basket, not so much. In fact, I think most shoujo manga is not so much cutesy as hopelessly sentimental. Vampire Knight made me feel like I was back in high school again, so much so that I stopped reading it because I’m done with high school emotions and had no desire to relive them.

If anything, the guy manga has more of a kindergarten feel because a lot of it features girls who look very childish—as I write this, I’m looking at Amefurashi, a shonen manga, which features a girl who looks like she is about 10, holding a whip. I don’t see much of that sort of character design in girls’ manga. The page layouts are often quite complex in shoujo manga, and the characters look and talk like teens/adults.

I should add that I"m grateful for the discussion Brigid and her co-bloggers put together, It gave me a bunch of things to think about, and I enjoyed the chance to kibbitz in comments and here. I'd urge folks to check out their blog, Good Comics For Kids.


Update 2: I talk more about Twilight here/