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/

300: what it means

The Daily Show did a segment about 300 and various jokey parallels with U.S. politics, and then the Daily Dish gathered up links to the clip and to several blog discussions of the film's (not very strong) sense of history. 

I saw 300 a few months ago and didn't have much of a reaction except this: its Sparta-Persia matchup seems like a dream image of how the Taliban might see the world. There's the scrappy band of underdogs who live the hard but good life and who will fight and die before they accept comfortable submission to a debauched empire. And then there's the debauched empire, where women don't wear a lot of clothes and men put their tongues in each others' ears. The empire has money and numbers on its side. The underdogs have nothing but courage and morality.

Where the parallel falls down is that the Persians are dark and from the east, the Spartans white and from the west. Apparently those factors beat anything else involved.

Check Out That Form

I've been looking at Jack Cole's pin-up art as collected in Alex Chun's excellent (and aptly named) "The Classic Pin-Up Art of Jack Cole." If you have any affection for pin-up art at all, it's pretty great. Cole's impossibly fluid lines are perfect for limning impossible proportions, and the grey washes he uses adds weight in all the right places:

I posted yesterday about Dan DeCarlo's pin-up work. One of the things about DeCarlo is that, when you look at his pin-ups, you instantly tend to say "My God! I'd always wanted to see Veronica do that!" Or not as the case may be...the point is, it looks like Veronica. Cole is very famous for his non-racy work as well, but you don't get the same effect. You can occasionally look at a Cole drawing and say, yeah, it makes sense that this guy drew Plastic Man. Butt you never look at a cartoon and say, "Hey! That's Woozy Winks looking at that girl's unmentionables!!"



The reason for this, at least in some sense, I think, is that Cole's a better artist than DeCarlo -- or maybe not better exactly, but more versatile. DeCarlo's style is a wonderful style, but it is only one style. Whether he's drawing innocent comics for teens or racy illustrations for grown ups, his pictures look like they take place in the same world, with cartoony, expressive faces, stylized, slightly stiff movements, clear lines, and so forth.

Cole has a style too...but the style is defined by his facility more than by any particular look or character. Plastic Man, the pin-up work, and his late Betsy and Me strip are all recognizable as the work of the same artist, but they're all also really different — not just in terms of how the strips look, but in what they try to do. In the intro to the pin-up book, Chun says that Cole had to relearn how to tell gags when he left comic books for magazines. That's a pretty interesting claim, inasmuch as Plastic Man was, like, all gags wasn't it? And gags which were a lot funnier than those you get in these pin-up bits.

But Cole was doing magazine work, and so he was doing magazine work; he didn't seem to want, or need, to try to carry over his interests from one project to another. Sure there are a couple of moments that recall Plastic Man level nuttiness:





But for the most part he's happy to stick with boring one-liners that rely very little on the kind of frenetic visual hijinks he used in his comic books. (Again as opposed to DeCarlo, for whom the clunky humor of the pin-up gags wasn't all that far removed from the clunky humor of Archie.)

Looking at Cole's seemingly effortless transformations from one medium to the other, you sort of wonder if Plastic Man really was his most personal work, just because Plastic Man the character is so resolutely impersonal. The whole point of Plastic Man, after all, is that he can fit himself to any form, just like his creator. It's a weird, ultra-professionalized version of auteurishness; his signature style is no style, or every style. And it's probably why, while he's much admired, he doesn't exactly have any acolytes. DeCarlo has the Hernandez Brothers, Winsor McCay has Chris Ware...but you can't easily, or perhaps at all, imitate a style the main hallmark of which is the ability to do everything. Cole's art is a triumph of form over content. It's impossible not to admire, but it's very hard to feel a sense of personal connection with it. And indeed, when you look at Decarlo's women, you get the sense that they're people, with something going on behind their mobile features. Cole's women, on the other hand, often have narrowed eyes and impassive expressions. Who needs soul when you can shape the surface however you'd like? His polymorphous is perverse not because it hides a twisted psyche, but because it refuses to refer to the psyche at all.

Milton, you're a genius!

I've mentioned my cafe buddy Milton a couple of times. He's not dumb, but he's usually a couple beats behind in a conversation. Worse, he doesn't take his lag into account. He jumps in with irrelevant questions, he sums up what you're saying and gets it wrong -- things like that.

The other day we were talking about the girls who work in the cafes where we hang out; that's a favorite topic, of course. I told him about Emily, who was greatly loved and admired before she went home to Vancouver. She worked the early morning shift, so Milton had never met her. 

Emily had a fabulous, sunny personality and greeted everyone walking thru the door like they were an old friend. The old Quebecois gents -- retirees or fellows headed to work at 7 in the morning -- would all call out "Abientot, Emily, au revoir" as they left, and she would give them a big wave and smile. Very sweet.

She was also very good looking, in a blond, broad-shouldered, farm-girl way. A lot of times people say "big boned" when they mean fat. Emily actually was big boned. 

I made the above points to Milton. "... when they mean fat, but she actually was big boned," I said, winding up.

Milton:  "Oh, I know who you mean. Pam."

Pam was a big favorite of ours, but she didn't work the early morning shift or call out to customers as they walked in the door. Also, she was noticeably fat, not big boned. "Well, no," I said to Milton. "Because Pam, you know, she actually was pretty overweight."

Milton:  "Yeah. When you said 'big boned,' I just thought that was what you meant."

Milton, you're a genius!

Nonexistent political cliche

I can't believe no one ever thought of this:

Like a shoe store in an earthquake.

The idea: take "Waiting for the other shoe to drop," normally used when a damaging bit of news has been released and another damaging bit is expected, and apply it to a politician who is suffering a whole series of damaging revelations. It's typical for big scandals to go thru a phase like that, when the hits just keep on coming, headline after headline, and reporters love the shoe-drop figure of speech. But nothing about shoe stores in earthquakes; I even checked Google.

Victory

On line at the Cafe Depot today, the woman ahead of me was talking on her cell phone so hard she couldn't follow what was going on. When she was fumbling around for her money, and still talking, I got mad and reached over to touch her shoulder. Me: (level but stern):  "You're taking my time. Stop talking."

The woman was perfectly polite about it. She got her money out, and noted that she had been reaching for it, then paid and took her coffee before she started talking on the phone again.

I always feel silly after I get angry, so it touched me when Lynn, the young monarch of the Cafe Depot counter people, thanked me for saying something. The cell phone people drive the Depot staff crazy, she said, and there's nothing they can do about it. Then, over by the milk and cream pitchers, a young fellow on staff appeared at my elbow and thanked me too. I had no idea I'd been doing the right thing! I thought I'd just got mad and lost my cool.

Bust Interview With Miriam

Long interview with Miriam in Bust. Mary Sues, soldier fetishes, geopolitics, and more! Check it out.

The Pin-Up Art of Dan DeCarlo

This is a review of Alex Chun's "Pin Up Art of Dan DeCarlo." I think it may have run on the Bridge Magazine website at some point in a rather different form...but that website's gone, and nobody read it anyway, so that's okay.
_________________________________________



It’s hard to believe that one book could be so thoroughly dated in so many different ways. The cover sums it up -- a man who looks disturbingly like Riverdale’s Mr. Lodge gazes lasciviously at a lingerie-clad young woman who looks disturbingly like a (very) bosomy Veronica. That is just so wrong.

Nonetheless, Dan DeCarlo’s later, more famous work on Archie Comics is only a small part of why these illustrations, drawn for men’s magazines in the ‘50s, are hopelessly time-bound. Today, according to all the polls, the hipless, androgynous Angelina Jolie is the sexiest woman in the world. Beyonce and J. Lo are considered full-figured because you can find their rear-ends with military-issue radar.

Be assured that no such technology is needed in studying DeCarlo’s women. Breasts swell and sag with the weight of flesh, not silicone; thighs press firmly and meatily together, hips and butts strain against fabric, threatening plentiful wardrobe malfunctions. And the wardrobes! Today, many of these women would be considered fat, and would dress accordingly, in loose clothes, solid colors -- anything to make them look thinner. DeCarlo on the other hand, lovingly shoehorns his women into skin tight dresses, and then -- to show that more really is *more*-- adds horizontal patterns to emphasize the curves. The overall effect is -- well, I can’t describe the overall effect. Let’s just say that in trying to take it all in I may have stretched my eyes permanently out of shape.



DeCarlo’s men don’t meet the standards of present-day smut either. In these days, when herds of free-range pretty boys roam unchecked through reality television, even porn actors aren’t allowed to be repulsive. Or at least, they aren’t allowed to be as repulsive as DeCarlo’s males, who are, in general, old, bald, pear-shaped, or all of the above. DeCarlo does occasionally draw young studs, but there’s no effort to eroticize them. The perfunctory washboard abs of one Archie Andrews look-alike, for example, are more than offset by a pose which suggests that a snapping turtle has crawled into his gratuitously unflattering swim trunks.

Even DeCarlo’s sexual situations are passé. Of course, the hoary gags -- mostly based on the idea that people having sex is ipso facto funny -- aren’t that far removed from current sit-com fare. And sure, feminine professions -- secretaries, nurses, artist models, strippers, and so forth -- continue to be fetishized. But can you imagine a book of smut produced today that made no reference to those twin pillars of modern advertising: lesbianism and oral sex? Or one which made no reference to prostitution (as opposed to more respectable gold-digging)? For DeCarlo, deviance begins and ends with light spanking -- a practice so tame that it has pretty much completely disappeared from erotic iconography.

Finally, though, DeCarlo’s book seems out of place in today’s marketplace simply because kinky illustration has lost its footing in the mainstream American marketplace. FHM, Maxim, and the other lad-mags use celebrity pics, not cartoons. Playboy did still have drawings, the last time I checked, but they seemed merely one more sign of that magazine’s chronic irrelevance. It’s possible that the growing popularity of manga may change all this in the near future, but, for now, cartoon sex still seems like some other cultures’ hang-up. If you want to make it yours, however, this volume is a great place to start.



Update: More on pin up art, by both DeCarlo and Jack Cole.

Fan Girls vs. Fan Boys

There's an interesting roundtable organized by Brigid Alverson on fanboy sneering at fangirls in relation to the expectation that Twilight fans will be showing up at Con. Tom (who will never live down his admission that he doesn't like manga) is ribbed, and I get his back and natter on in comments, as I am wont to do.

Update: Much more on Twilight and fanboys and fangirls here.

Sequential Samurai Attack

I've been looking through a Dover collection of Utagawa Kuniyoshi's samurai prints. Kuniyoshi was one of the last great classic Japanese printmakers; he worked during the1800s. This book, 101 Great Samurai Prints, includes two series. The first, "Heroic Biographies from the 'Tale of Grand Pacification'" depicts samurai involved in the battles for the unification of Japan in the 1500s. It's a very pulpy series -- a lot of the pleasure comes from "holy shit!" moments of preposterous battles, grotesque toughness, and so forth.

Here for example, is a samurai hiding among corpses to surprise his enemies:




And here a samurai fights a wild boar:



This samurai is squeezing the life out of three opponents:



And this one is my favorite I think; it's an underwater battle (notice the fish.)




The second series included in the book is "The Faithful Samurai," which is a very famous revenge narrative. It's very different in tone from the other series. Stylistically, it's much less aggressive; the situations are less outlandish, and even the clothing is less elaborately patterned and individualized; all of the samurai here pretty much wear some variation on a black and white robe (though there's still plenty of patterns besides the robe; it's really only less elaborate in comparison to the first series.)

In addition, while the Pacification series above goes for jaw-dropping set pieces, this series is more focused on, of all things, humor. Most of the climactic fight scene takes place inside a residence, and Kuniyoshi appears to have just thought this was hysterical. Many of the scenes show samurai struggling to defeat common household objects, like kindling wood:



Alternately, we see samurai hiding behind kimonos:



or chatting with the household dog:



Even the outdoor scenes are mined for slapstick. Here's a samurai being assaulted by a pine tree:



These series were executed about the same time (in the 1840s), so the issue here isn't a change in taste. And obviously they're similar in content. Kuniyoshi just decided to treat them differently...which suggests that each of these series was expected to be seen as a whole, with individual themes and ideas.

It also struck me looking through these that the relationship between narrative and image here is a little odd. These series both work off of well known legends. A more familiar western way to handle a retelling would be to have someone write out a version of the story, and then have the illustrations come out of the text, illustrating the story. Here, though, at least as far as I understand it, the text here isn't a retelling of the story. Rather, the words tell about particular incidents, or give background on the individual samurais. The illustrations can be of particular incidents, but they don't necessarily have to be, and even when they are, they're not necessarily in context (the fight with the pine branch, for example, didn't happen during the famous raid; it was an incident from the history of the samurai, or an anecdote he liked to tell.) Each series then doesn't so much help tell or illustrate a story as it creates a particular take on a legend; narrative gilds the picture, rather than vice versa. It's historical painting...except, since it's a series, there is some sense of sequence, or at least of multiple views of the same incident. It's not comics, but it does integrate stories and multiple images in a way that maybe points to something that you could see turning into comics. It's clear enough, anyway, why comics found such a receptive audience in Japan; there have obviously been popular, aesthetically validated picture narratives over there for some time.

Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance

I just saw this 1974 film. It's a sequel to the first Lady Snowblood film, which I haven't seen, and it's very different from the comic book version. The comic, as I noted, has Lady Snowblood willing to do anything to anybody to further her vengeance -- and there was a nationalist subtext as well, with a loathing of degeneracy and western decadence which felt really fascist.

This, though, has a much more comfortable and familiar morality. Anarchist heroes joining together with the poor to fight the power -- it doesn't get more bourgeois than that. Even the exploitation here is sedate; the one sex scene is between a married couple, for goodness sake. Lady Snowblood splits her time between regretting her past acts of violence and perpetrating carnage on behalf of the downtrodden.

There are certainly some good scenes — Snowblood's method of fighting is to just sort of walk slowly forward, as dozens of guards launch themselves at her and are dispatched one by one, and that's entertaining to watch. But overall, and though I hate to say it, the fascist, gratuitous, morally despicable comic is probably better than this right-minded movie. Sometimes the devil does have better tunes.

I do hope to see the original Lady Snowblood movie at some point...though I think netflix doesn't have it, so it may take a while.

Update: No, scratch that. They do have Lady Snowblood. Why'd I see this one first rather than the original? Got me....

Doonesbury green shoots

I have to admit, I find Roland Hedley Burton's tweets very funny. Favorite:

I refuse to apologize for making time for my kid's ballgames. So I usually end up not going. 

Let's see if this works. Click here.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #12

We took a bit of a hiatus from the Marston/WW blogging there. My apologies; hopefully we'll get back on track with out once a week posting, and push on through until the end of the run (which is #28...so 3 more months if I keep to the once a week schedule.)

Anyway, one of the things I tried to do with my time off was read Marston's academic treatise, The Emotions of Normal People, from 1928. I have to admit I only got a handful of pages in. Marston is an entertaining writer, and you can see it even when he's trying to be boring and academic...but, well, overall, it's still kind of boring and academic. I thought this anecdote was nicely revealing though:

I can still remember vividly the fear I once experienced as a child, when threatened, on my way to school, by a half-witted boy with an air-gun. I had been taught by my father never to fight; so I ran home in an agony of fear. My mother told me, "Go straight by F____. Don't attack him unless he shoots at you, but if he does, then go after him." I was an obedient child and followed orders explicitly. I marched up to F_____ and his gun with my face set and my stomach sick with dread. F_____ did not shoot. I have known, ever since that well-remembered occasion, that fear does not give strength in times of stress. Part of the strength with which I faced F_____'s air-gun came from my own underlying dominance, newly released from artificial control. But most of it belonged to my mother, and she was able to use it in my behalf because I submitted to her. Dominance and submissions are the "normal", strength-giving emotions, not "rage" and "fear".

It's all so Freudian you just can't stand it. Though on the surface this may be a conflict between Marston and the “half-witted boy”, you don’t have to go too far into the subtext to see it as a conflict between paternal authority (it’s his father who forbade him to fight) and maternal dominance. It’s also telling, in terms of Marston’s general view of the world, that violence here is definitely gendered, but that gendering doesn’t break down quite the way you would expect. On the one hand, the half-wit boy has the gun (very phallic) and it’s the father who lays down the arbitrary law, which is universally applicable and not to be altered no matter the circumstances. Still, it is the Dad who is the pacifist, and the Mom who is willing to continence violence…albeit tailored to individual circumstances, and administered with love. And, of course, the whole point here is that fear and (typically male-identified) rage are less effective and powerful than submission to love. The phallic gun is no match for the mother’s will.

It’s fun, too, that Marston has apparently written a whole book here to demonstate, scientifically, once and for all, that everyone else is wrong, and his kink is normal, normal, normal. Speicfically, it’s a “normal emotion,” which is how he gets to call his book “Emotions of Everyday People,” rather than, say, “The Pleasures of Dominance and Submission: A Field Guide.”

Marston is, as always, easy to make fun – but there are also some interesting ideas here, I think. Dominance and submission maybe are a lot more common and important as motivating forces than we generally think about. People are certainly influenced by hierarchies and affection more or less constantly. Freud relates those to subconscious motivators, but it would be possible to think of them too as more natural, or above-board emotions. You can see too why Marston was occasionally accused of fascism by the advisors/censors in the editorial offices; strength through giving up your will to a higher authority must have sounded ominously familiar in the 1940s (though, of course, Hitler wasn’t a mother, which was probably an important distinction for Marston.)

(As a parenthetical aside to the parenthetical, I was just skimming some writing by medieval theologian Meister Eckhart (why? Never mind why.) Anyway, he was arguing that obedience was virtue; more important than love or humility or charity or anything else. The argument was basically that obedience brings you closest to God, since through obedience to a superior you most thoroughly abnegate self, and when self goes, God comes in. The best use of free will is to destroy your own will.

I can’t say I find that especially convincing – it seems to be deliberately abrogating moral choice in a way that seems pretty problematic from most moral standpoints, including Christ’s as far as I understand it. I actually have more sympathy for Marston’s position, which at least argues that obedience has to involve love and presumably some level of trust. Obedience in and of itself, to any random hierarchy, just doesn’t seem like a virtue, much less the virtue. But I’m a liberal secularist steeped in modernity, so I guess that’s what I would say.)

Anyway, on to WW #12, where we’ve got WW, not for the first time, seizing control of a suggestively shaped missile:




I believe this is the first WW issue written after the end of the war. Marston’s not quite ready to dispense with the military plots, though; this story is all about the evil European munitions manufacturers and their glamorous women spies who are plotting to cause yet another war for fun and profit.



I kind of feel bad for the European arms manufacturers, actually. I mean, they just helped win WW II; if they were ever going to enjoy any popularity, you’d think this would be the moment. But no, as soon as the wars done, Marston is blaming them for everything. Still, I guess I should be glad that Marston hasn’t gone right back to blaming the Jews.

In any case, as it turns out, the European munitions manufacturers are little more effective than that half-wit boy with the gun. Even Diana Prince can take them out:



So inevitably they’re defeated and taken for treatment…not to Paradise Island, but to another matriarchal, peace –and-dominance loving society (Marston’s got a million of them.) This one’s on Venus. You can tell the Venusians from the Amazons because the Venusians have wings, which Harry Peter seems more or less born to draw.



As you see at the end there, the Queen of Venus is promising to transform the evil munitions men and their glamorous girlfriends into good, loving law-abiding citizens. And though there are a couple of blips (as you see in the last panel) she does have some success, primarily because of the power of magnetic gold, which makes you happy to be captive.




Any similarities to the golden magical lasso are presumably intentional; I think Marston believed that the color yellow encouraged feelings of submission. Anyway, this is also where we first have the Venus Girdle, the belt made of magnetic gold which makes people happy with their captivity:



Marston’s paradises are so Edwardian and upper-class.


The thing here is that the men are all perfectly happy with their captivity; they all want to wear Venus Girdles all the time. It’s only Velma, one of the glamorous girlfriends, who has the gumption to figure out a way to break the spell, following the letter of the law (a patriarchal move, incidentally) in order to break free.




Later Velma, in pursuit of a nefarious plan, actually places the girdle on herself, and then summons the willpower to break free despite the post-coital spell.



Velma has to hold the men at gunpoint in order to get them to rid themselves of their girdles.

I’ve probably said this before, but I think this shows why it was that Marston so often resorted to female villains. Men in his world just don’t have that much gumption. It’s really hard to imagine any male in Marston’s world, from Steve to Ares, throwing off the matriarchal power of the girdle. Men, like young Marston, want to submit their will to a more powerful feminine control. Only another woman like Velma can resist Venus – and offer men the opportunity to be controlled by her will.

Of course, Velma is eventually captured and renounces her evil ways…which seems kind of too bad, since she was pretty fun to root for. But no fear; I’m sure they’ll be an evil villainess to root for in an upcoming issue.

Nothing much else to say about this issue…except that Harry Peter just keeps getting better and better, damn it The effects with the ray that transport everyone to Venus are thoroughly weird and lovely, for example:



as is this visit from the ghostly Queen of Venus:



Peter is also experimenting very effectively with some more complicated page layouts. I think this is the first time I've seen him use the kind of narrow tiny panel he does in the middle here:



and I know I've never seen him use that odd jagged panel before:



And then there’s this weird, sensuous ghost whispering sweet nothing in WW’s ear:




I think my favorite panel, though, is this one:



The perspective is so scattershot that it actually looks like Paula is floating in mid-air; like it’s some magician’s trick that Velma is demonstrating, with WW standing there thinking, “How on earth did she manage that!” The shadow adds to the effect too; it’s weird and doofy, and completely works with Marston’s themes of control and magic. I really wish there were still mainstream artists like this around. Darwyn Cooke is cool and all, but this is the shit.

Partially Congealed Pundit: Why We Can't Do Lots of Things

This short short story is from 2001, 2002 or thereabouts. Bonus points to anyone who can figure out where I stole the good professor from (using google doesn't count.)
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Why We Can’t Do Lots of Things at Once

Professor Challenger lives in the future. Because of all the time machines there are dinosaurs everywhere. Luckily most people are robots and when they are stomped they just drink oil from the kitchen faucets which make oil and then they get full size again after they drink enough like bicycle tires. Being stepped on is bad though because robots are very clean and dinosaurs are dirty. Professor Challenger has a solution! Small trained supersmart octopuses in your shoes. They just stay there until you are dirty and then they come out and clean you off with brushes. But the robots say the octopuses are illogical and they won’t put them in their shoes. They would rather use vacuum cleaners. Professor Challenger swears revenge! He kidnaps robots and sends them to the past where there are no vacuum cleaners. The octopuses in the past offer to help, but of course the robots don’t trust them. Instead they marry monkeys. If they’d only married octopuses we would have lots of arms and would be able to do lots of things at once!

Trig and his awful mother

Reactions to Sarah Palin’s decision to resign the governorship of Alaska have been a reminder of her unmatched ability to elicit strong emotions from friend and foe alike. We know some of the reasons why. It’s her evangelical Christianity and her folksy manner. It’s her small-town roots and her “new feminism.”

Yeah, if you don't like Palin it's because you're a bigot. It's not that you think being mayor of Wassilla isn't enough to prepare someone to run the country. You just hate small towns. Come to think of it, a lot of Palin haters liked Bill Clinton just fine, and he was awfully folksy. But Palin is also ignorant and intellectually feeble, and she tries to fake her way thru difficult situations by desperately bullshitting whoever's in range. And for her a difficult situation is a question, such as "How about that economy?" or "So why did you quit being governor?" She says nasty, untrue things about political opponents ("read terrorists their rights") and whines whenever anybody hits back. So, of course, yeah, what we dislike about her is her "new feminism."

Obviously, I just got triggered by a Christian Right op-ed piece. It's by Gary Bauer, a longtime CR panjandrum, and Daniel Allott, a fellow he employs to help with the words. It got such a rise out of me because it says I despise a one-year-old kid who has Down syndrome: 

Palin gave birth to her youngest son, Trig, who has Down syndrome. Since then, mother and son have become objects of the left’s unrelenting scorn and the right’s unflinching fidelity.

Well, fuck you, Gary Bauer. You have three pieces of evidence for your claim: a reader's diary entry at Talking Points Memo, a post at an antifundamentalist humor site (the post's writer just quit), and a quote by a libertarian nutball at a place called the Center for the Advancement of Capitalism. The first two items weren't directed at Trig, just at the idea that Down syndrome might be something the world needs more of (because of Palin's comment "The world needs more Trigs"). The third item is just a libertarian being crazy: "it is crucial to reaffirm the morality of aborting a fetus diagnosed with the Down syndrome." If you don't like what the guy said, talk to him at the next CPAC. But leave "the left" out of it.

Trig is a reminder of our fierce ambivalence over disability. Every mention of his name is a pinprick to our conscience. Every photo of mother and son is a reminder of concepts — vulnerability, dependency and suffering — our culture no longer tolerates, as well as virtues, such as humility, dignity and self-sacrifice, it no longer extols.

The left doesn't believe in "vulnerability, dependency and suffering." Well, that's a new one. Furthermore, Sarah Palin embodies "humility, dignity and self-sacrifice." Sure. All you have to do is redefine every word involved and the idea works perfectly.

You can see that Gary Bauer is after some big game here. He thinks the medical profession and society as a whole are pressuring people to abort genetically handicapped children. I think he's got matters the wrong way around. Raising an afflicted child is an admirable choice, but it's not one I would force on anybody. And you'd have to force people because being born with a severe handicap -- being retarded, being born without a spine -- is an onerous condition, one that imposes suffering on the child and requires great sacrifice from everyone in the child's family. Given a choice, most parents won't have such a child.

Gary Bauer figures that's the result of some far-reaching propaganda campaign. No, it's just people being allowed to do what they want. Bauer doesn't see it that way, but he sees none too clearly. Just ask him what he thinks about Sarah Palin.

Barstool embarrassments

Milton, one of my cafe buddies, claims he heard the following at the Bifteck, our local bar. A fellow was trying to pick up a girl. He told her about how he was an actor, mainly, but he did some work as a shoe salesman too.

Girl:   "Isn't that frustrating? I mean, you being an actor but having to sell shoes."

Guy:   "No, no, not really. There are a lot of parallels, kind of a strong connection really. Because when you're selling, you're performing. I mean, from my perspective, it's essentially retail theater." 

Milton claims that the man, at this point, lifted both hands to make the air quotes gesture. That sounds too perfect, but Milton swears by it. The man went on to use the "retail theater" phrase four or five times before the girl excused herself to visit the ladies room and then disappear.

Kids Comics Roundtable: it's all good

Kids’ comics were a giant part of my childhood, and I don’t mean respectable European ones like Moomin or Asterix or Tintin. No, it was pure American corporate-owned, tie-in-toy, sugar-cereal shilling garbage like Mad Balls, Ewoks, Masters of the Universe, Planet Terry, Top Dog, Care Bears, Strawberry Shortcake, (there were three of us girls, but my brother was the oldest, so it was mostly non-girly stuff. Of course, gender norming even then wasn’t as defensively aggressive as it is now, so there were girly bits to most of the boy comics; I totally imprinted on the girl ewok (Kneesa?) with the pretty pink hood, and somewhat less so on She-Ra and her gang) god I don’t know what else, ALF comics for awhile (did you even know there were ALF comics?). Along with some older standards like Archie and Katy Keene.

What it was was, my parents were hippies, relative to our community, and the biggest gulf between us Libickis and our peers was our lack of television. My father had been somewhat into comics in his youth (I know he owned at least some sixties Spider-Man and Fantastic Four, besides the hidden stash of Crumb comix), and they both wanted to encourage us to read and apparently figured that the comic-book equivalents of those 80s Saturday morning cartoons had enough benefits in with the consumerist brain-rot. So I could still share in the advertising jingles sung by kids in my class, even though I only knew the words and not the tunes (and if that isn’t a metaphor for the introvert nerd’s life….).

I dunno exactly what my point is. Maybe that my siblings and I did basically learn to read on comics (we had picture books read to us, and chapter books read to us, but never comics that I recall), and the comics we learned to read on were pure extruded Comic Product, and they did exactly what my parents hoped they would: made all of us lifelong readers, writers, and draw-ers (everybody got over the latter except for me, but everybody drew for pleasure longer than most of our peers). So worry not, parents and librarians. Sometimes crap can do the job just as well as art.

There are even some elements from the comics, whose writers and artists I’ll probably never know by name, that still stay with me: Top Dog taught me about inflation (in one issue, the bad guy’s evil plan is to drop helicoptersful of money onto a city, thus wrecking its economy) and Planet Terry was your generic ‘80s orphan searching the galaxy for his lost-to-memory parents, except his twist was he didn’t have their picture, just their glass picture frame, empty and inscribed to him. I still find that both clever and poignant.

My most treasured learning-to-read memory is out of Planet Terry. I had the hang of phonics down, but I didn’t yet understand a lot of the conventions of English writing. Planet Terry was a pretty overwrought kid, being an orphan and all, and he was having a particularly bad time of it one issue when he is forced to accept that his arch-nemesis is his father, and goes live with him and have a proper filial relationship.

He tries, but when the cognitive dissonance becomes too great, he cries, “B-but, D-dad!” I hadn’t yet come across the rule about how dashes between letters indicate stuttering, so I read this as, “bee butt, dee dad!”

That was my and my best friend’s favourite joke for the next five years. Kids, they’re easy to please.

Super Wonder Frontier (OOCWVG)

This is the latest in a series of posts about post-Marston iterations of Wonder Woman. For those of you waiting for me to continue my blogging through the original Wonder Woman series; my apologies for the delay. I promise I will get back to it next week.
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I dumped on Darwyn Cooke's mediocre New Frontier yesterday, and I'll stand by that. I do like his art, though; nice color palette, and he combines the cartoony TV show style with a tactile realism that's really charming. I like the way Superman and Flash's costumes are a little baggy, for example.

I also quite like his Wonder Woman drawings. He very cleverly finds lots of excuses to get her out of the swimsuit, and he also draws her in a zaftig cheesecake pin-up style that's hard to resist. This panel is positively luscious.




Cooke's obviously quite plugged into Marston's lesbian fantasy dreaming there, with tongue all the way in cheek (if that is the metaphor I want.) His characterization of WW is fairly enjoyable too; there's one sequence where he has her free a bunch of Vietnamese women from their captors, allows them to butcher the villains, and then leads them in celebration. It's true that this is a rather tasteless effort to gin up meaningfulness by piggybacking on Important World Tragedy --but if you can get past that, you have to admit that it's a pretty entertaining twist on Marston's bondage fetish. I also enjoyed seeing WW all bloodthirsty and cheerful about it, rather than earnest and dour as she is so often portrayed. Instead, it's Superman who has to be all boring; he's the stuffed shirt appalled at the butchery, while WW gets to be the loose canon ("I'm over here winning the hearts and minds of the disenfranchised," she tells him confidentially).

There is a problem, though. WW does get to be the wise free spirit, a la Wolverine. But she gets to be so only in relation to that stuffed-shirt, Superman. WW hardly has a scene in the whole comic that doesn't also feature Superman, and her function is essentially to serve as a muse for his conflict/self-actualization. Yes, she is supposed to have come to some sort of understanding about American policy herself, I guess...but Cooke cuts her off, literally in mid-sentence, before she can articulate it. But that's okay, because her own thinking isn't really all that important. She's beautiful and smart and thoughtful and adventurous and daring...and all of that is in the service of getting Superman to realize that he's the symbolic icon of wonderfulness who must lead America to greatness. That scene in south asia is thematically staged for Superman's benefit. So, I think, is the lesbian daydream in the image above. We see WW and her Amazon sisters frolicking...and then one of them gasps "It's a man!" and we see Superman fly in, and Diana tells him "Come fly with me, Kal," and if that isn't enough of a come on, she then goes on to tell him how wonderful his values are. Yay! Later she gives him a kiss and that inspires him to assume the leadership role that he's fated for because he's...Superman!

This is hardly the first time this has happened, of course. In these massive crossover alternate universe things, WW is always getting relegated to the helpmate/soulmate/lead you to your destiny role in support of Superman and/or Batman. It happens in DKII, and seems to more or less be a theme in Kingdom Come as well (I've only skimmed that.) Darwyn Cooke uses it himself in other stories. League of One is kind of the exception which proves the rule; there, WW takes up all the oxygen, and everyone else (especially Superman) is just a nonentity revolving around her psychodrama. Basically, it just seems very hard for people to figure out a way to have Supes and WW exist in the same space without treating one of them as an appendage.

Which makes sense, since, basically, they're the same character. I mean, of course, all superheroes are based on Superman to some degree, but Wonder Woman was deliberately designed not just to riff on the superhero idea, but to actually function, narratively and psychologically the way Superman does. Marston said this himself; he was basically creating a female Superman. Now, making Superman female meant a number of very specific things to Marston (more bondage for example), and WW is different than Superman in a lot of ways. But she's the same in that her point is really to be a paragon; the quintessence of heroism. She's not like the Flash who's just superfast, or Batman who's just smart and resourceful, or even Green Lantern, who has a defined power. She's everything to everybody. She's superfast, she's got superstrength, she's superwise, and she's just the best at everything she does. That's the character; that's what her stories are about.

So when you put her in a story with Superman...well, one of them has to lose focus. If it was Marston, of course, that one would be Superman, and it would be all about how men, even superman, have to submit to women, and love their submission, and so forth. But, alas, Marston's dead, and what we get instead is the much more conventional idea that women (even wonder women) are mostly there to serve as supportive figures in male psychodrama.

It's too bad, too, because, as I said, I think Cooke likes the character, and has some good ideas for her, and overall could probably write a decent story about her if he wasn't so desperate to use her to shore up Superman's ego (or Batman's, I guess.) I shudder to read Trinity, though. I can see that being quite, quite bad.

Update: Richard points out in comments that Darwyn Cooke did not, in fact, have anything to do with the Trinity series. So maybe I should check it out after all. Or, then again, probably not.

Tales Designed To

My review of Michael Kupperman's Tales Designed to Thrizzle collection is up at the Chicago Reader:

The lurch from comic-book supervillain cliche to boob-tube homage nicely encapsulates Kupperman's methods and influences. While alt-comics creators try to cadge some credibility by putting on literary airs and their mainstream peers pray for a movie deal, Kupperman has other burgers to flip. On the one hand, he's steeped in the conventions of comics past—barmy sales pitches ("Men! Is your penis a urine-leaking, chronically unreliable threat to your mental well-being?"), breathless pulp-adventure titles (I Bothered a Big Fish!), and doofy superheroes (e.g., Underpants-on-His-Head Man). But his essential rhythms seem to be borrowed from another medium entirely. The way he turns narratives into advertisements, ends stories with some wacko randomly barging through a window, and abruptly drops gags only to pick them up and drop them again suggests that Kupperman takes his cues from the surreality of the small screen—especially Monty Python's Flying Circus and its animated heirs on the Cartoon Network.

If that's just not quite enough of my prose, the Reader has also HTMLified some of my older essays (earlier available only as PDFs). There's one about James Loewen's Sundown Towns and one about Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains now available.

Kids Comics Roundtable: The British invasion

The formative literature of my early years was a stack of cheaply printed comics with newsprint covers and goofy names that are puzzling to most Americans, myself included:  The Beano, The Dandy, The Topper, The Beezer, Whizzer and Chips, Buster, Cor! Back in the 1960s and 1970s, these comics were churned out by the barrelful by the British publishers D.C. Thomson, Fleetway, and IPC. Most are gone now, but The Beano and The Dandy are still around, and some of the original characters endure as well.

I was happy about writing about these little-known comics until I read this. Apparently this particular genre of comics haven’t changed much since 1967.  No cell phones! No video games! Hippie jokes! Way to rain on my nostalgia, dude! And the coup de grace:

Without a strong creator allowed to take charge and update the property with a new, modern vision, The Beano follows the same basic model as Archie Comics in the U.S.: the characters are just familiar four-color chess pieces to be moved around in the service of familiar jokes that lead to groans instead of laughs.

Feh! What’s wrong with that? Kids’ comics don’t have to be great literature. Sometimes they can be something dumb and funny that you read while sprawled across your bed eating candy.

Most of the characters in British comics were defined by a single trait carried to an extreme. Keyhole Kate spied on people through keyholes. Billy Whizz was really fast. Greedy Pigg was a gluttonous teacher who would go to extreme lengths to get something to eat. Chalky drew chalk objects that became real. Desperate Dan was an overgrown cowboy, a hilarious caricature of the British notion of Americans; he wore a vestigial gun, which he never drew, dined on cow pies (an enormous pie with a cow’s tail dangling out the side), and broke everything he touched because he didn’t know his own strength. It seems like all the creativity in these comics went into dreaming up the characters; once that was done, they went through their paces every week.

That didn't bother me. Most of the stories were only a page or two long, and reading them was more like a short visit with a wacky friend than a trip through an actual storyline. I don’t remember individual stories, but I remember the characters very vividly. They are dancing around in my head as I am writing this. 

British comics of that era were much edgier than their American counterparts, more Garbage Can Kids than Little Dot. The art was exaggerated, and the kids were horrible brats. Bully Beef and Chips was about a sadistic big kid who beat up a nerdy littler kid every week, and every week, the nerdy little kid got some clever revenge. Roger the Dodger, Minnie the Minx, and Beryl the Peril were bratty kids who tortured their parents and usually ended up on the wrong end of a slipper in the last panel. The Bash Street Kids contributed the useful and expressive phrase “pungent pong” (horrible smell) to my family’s lexicon. No one experienced deep thoughts or learned lifelong lessons in these comics, and that's how we liked it.

Later on, I would get bored and move on to stories with more complexity, including the British girls’ comics Bunty and Judy and Mandy and Diana. But when I was six, a copy of The Beano, a bag of chocolates, and the absence of nagging adults was the recipe for pure bliss.

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Update by Noah: For those who are wondering, Brigid has very kindly agreed to participate in our kids comics roundtable this week. She is too polite to mention all her other internet writing, so I will do it for her. She writes a column called Unbound at Robot 6; a fabulous manga link blog called (appropriately) Mangablog a kids comics linkblog at School Library Journal and goodness knows what else. So go read her other missives, and make her feel at home while she's here, all right?

Kids Comics Roundtable: Ask Not What You Can Do For Your Inner-Brat

John F. Kennedy was an irresponsible warmongering douchebag, who proved objectively that he was more immature and reckless than Khruschev, which is saying something. Fuck him, and fuck the relentless nostalgia for his thoroughly pedestrian cold-war intellect and administration.

And, hey, while we’re at it, fuck Darwyn Cooke’s overrated, tedious cold-war nostalgia exercise, “New Frontier.” I own this because a friend went to a comics store, and she was looking for a comic for her five-year old. And Darwyn Cooke’s art is pretty and cartoony, right, so she said, um, maybe this? And the comic store owner said, “Hey, this would be great! Gratuitous death, lots and lots of characters most of whom aren’t even properly introduced, incomprehensible plot largely composed of fan scruff, apocalyptic imagery at the end — your kid’ll love it!” So,anyway, my friend looked at it a bit more closely when she got home and cursed the comics store owner and gave it to me.

And I read it because I’m the core demographic, right? I even know who the Challengers of the Unknown are, and I sort of know who the Losers are because they got killed off right at the beginning of Crisis on Infinite Earths just like they get killed off right at the beginning of this. And I know that super-heroes were black-listed in the 50s because it happened in Watchman and in Wild Cards and in Dark Knight, except that wasn’t in the 50s I guess, and also in Golden Age which was an Elseworlds series I never read, but some critic said that New Frontier is like a total revamp of the Elseworlds concept, like you’ll never look at Elseworlds the same again. This time you’ll look at it with the new, fresh, innocent eyes of an Alzheimer afflicted vulture hungrily eying its own decaying scrotum. Oh, wait, that is in fact how you looked at it before. But, no, this is different, see because there’s a timeline, so that Darwyn Cooke introduces each character exactly when they appeared in real life. So, like, the Flash first appeared in 1956, so that’s when he shows up in the comic! And the Martian Manhunter first appeared in…well, whenever he first appeared…and that’s when he shows up too! It’s like going back into the past and pretending that the kids who read the comics back then were as mature and smart as the aging, paunchy, con-goers of today!

I also liked that Cooke chose to make the central character Hal Jordan, who is a young, strapping fighter pilot with daddy issues. Even though he joined the army he doesn’t like to kill, but that doesn’t make him a pacifist, no, no, no…it just means he knows the Korean War is wrong, though he never explains why, exactly, because that doesn’t matter…what matters is that he totally proves his bravery and comes of age and fills his daddy’s shoes and does it while being only slightly more bland than Tom Cruise. And, hey, there’s Batman being all hyper-competent and grim and the Flash running and thinking about Iris just like in Crisis on Infinite Earths and Superman giving a noble speech and J’ohnn J’ohnnz discovering the innate goodness of humanity buried deep in the psyche of some random special-ops asshole, who has a heart of gold, causing you to say, hey look! There's gold in that there asshole! I guess you've just got to keep digging. And there's also gold in some asshole called Flagg, who gets killed along with his requisite attendant supportive female. And there are a billion cameo appearances by a billion unexplained DC walk-ons, because the best part of fan-fic isn’t exploring relationships or putting your own twist on a character, but just making a checklist so that you can say, ayup, I mentioned every single one of those characters, by gosh. Oh yeah, and there’s a villain called the Center, who is an eldritch evil disguised as a community youth building. So, hey, what more do you want? The doofy, unpretentious heroes of your grandpappy’s youth have been transmuted into the doofy, pretentious heroes of your own middle-age. Sing hosannas and whip out the Eisners; everything young is senescent again.

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You can see the rest of this roundtable on kids comics here.

Update: And more on New Frontier here.

Kids Comics Roundtable: Jules Feiffer's Clifford

You'll find four of the strips below. Clifford was Feiffer's first strip, and he did it for Will Eisner's studio; the series ran on the back page of the Spirit section. Wikipedia says Feiffer was born in 1929, and I vaguely recall Clifford as running from 1949 to 1950, so Feiffer was the age of a college student when he did the strip. Fantagraphics collected the whole run as the first volume of its Collected Feiffer.

The previous Kids Comics Roundtable installment (Noah on telling kids what to like) was here, and you can see a roundup of my previous Golden Age scans here.

If you want to see these a bit larger, click on them and then click in the new screen where it says "Full Size." It's good enough to read them by. 

Jan. 22, 1950         

Feb. 5, 1950

Feb. 19, 1950

March 5, 1950

Kids Comics Roundtable: You Do So Like Green Eggs and Ham

Cerucee just posted about her difficulty figuring out what books kids will like. She notes:

as a selfish adult reader, what I'm constantly looking for is glimmers of adulthood in those books--complex plotting, elegant art, darkness, sophistication--and I get excited when I see them, so excited that I sometimes forget that what makes a book a good grown-up book isn't necessarily right in a kids' book. The first service of children's comics is not adult readers like me, but to children.

That's a reasonable enough stance, certainly...but it's not one I share. I mean, I'm happy enough to tell other adults what they should read and why; I don't know why it should be different for children. I don't always agree with my son about what's worthwhile, but I don't always agree with my wife, either. (Steve Earle...blech.)

The truth is, I think a lot of the things Cerusee points to: complex plotting, elegant art, darkness, sophistication -- can easily be things that kids like too — especially if you're talking young adults. Many of the great young adult series, in fact, are extremely dark and complicated. Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, Ursula K. Le Guin, Madeleine L'Engle...and for that matter Dokebi Bride, which I was just rereading. They're all aimed at tweens, or even younger, I'm pretty sure. The Harry Potter books, for that matter, are quite complicated and plenty dark.

Obviously, when you're dealing with 5 year olds (as I am) you don't want anything too scary. But still, I think there's often quite a bit of overlap in taste...and I guess, moreover, I don't see why I shouldn't have an opinion. The point of children's literature isn't solely to entertain children. I have to read the stuff, after all; that makes me part of the intended audience, surely. The best products for children often keep in mind that there's an adult audience as well -- not too many kdis are going to get Alistair Cookie, but it's thrown in on Sesame Street because they know that there are a lot of folks out there who *will* get it. And lord knows, if you're home with the kid all day, it's not selfish -- or, at least, it's very reasonably selfish -- to want to be able to interact with the entertainment without being hideously bored or irritated.

Besides, it's not like all adults hate all kids books. I like a lot of what my son does — Sesame Street is great, obviously (though he's a little beyond that now.) So were the Teletubbies, actually -- pretty visuals, tripped out plots, what's not to like? And of course there's Peanuts, which is probably about the best comic ever, for kids or adults. And there's Dr. Seuss and Pee Wee's Playhouse, and on and on.

Cerusee says she tends to like adult books for their adult qualities. There are definitely things that kids aren't going to like that much — explicit sex, explicit gore, complicated dialogue that references stuff they don't know about. But the things that are fun in children's literature are often things adults can and often do like too...imaginative goofiness, slapstick, fart jokes, cute animals, pretty art, entertaining wordplay. In short, I don't think there is or has to be an aesthetic barrier between children's comics and adult comics. Let there be commerce between them, as some adult said.

Kids Comics Roundtable: Hazardous Travel

Back when I was a bookseller, and for the last two or three library positions I've worked at, I've had to recommend comics titles for kids--in two cases, I was not working anywhere near public services or collection development, but I was asked for recommendations as soon as I mentioned that I read comics, as comics are hot in libraries, but comics-reading librarians are still in short supply. Embarrassingly, though, youth titles are my weakest area; I just don't read that many of them, and when I do, I'm not reading them in mind of their suitability for youth.

One of my sisters has a Master's in Children's Literature, and secondhand exposure to her education has led to a lot of overthinking on my part when I'm trying to recommend kids comics. So I always feel a little under-equipped dealing with them, because as a selfish adult reader, what I'm constantly looking for is glimmers of adulthood in those books--complex plotting, elegant art, darkness, sophistication--and I get excited when I see them, so excited that I sometimes forget that what makes a book a good grown-up book isn't necessarily right in a kids' book. The first service of children's comics is not adult readers like me, but to children.

As obvious as that is, people miss it a lot. Children's TV shows like Barney and Teletubbies frequently draw mockery for their simplicity and their innocence--qualities that are perfectly appropriate in material created for toddlers. Works that mix the more innocuous elements of adult appeal in with appeal to children can pull double duty--Calvin and Hobbes was pretty successful at mixing the childlike imagination with adult observations, creating a comic that could be sincerely enjoyed on several levels--but I do wonder whether that actually makes them any better as works for children. (I'd guess that a great portion of C&H's enduring popularity with my generation is due to the fact that the adult perspective mixed into the child's adventure gives nostalgic adult re-readers something to enjoy beyond the nostalgia itself.)

One of my favorite recommendations as a core YA manga title is Hikaru no Go, but I must confess that I like it as much as I do because it's so solidly crafted, not because it taps into my latent childish imagination. And honestly, craft and skill weren't all that high on my list of priorities when I looked for books as a kid--I certainly reacted to, say, the lively, funny, expressive quality of Berkeley Breathed's cartooning in Bloom County, but I didn't register the level of skill required to produce it until much, much later. It impresses me now on an intellectual level I just didn't have when my brain was still a work in progress. I've had some good luck suggesting gorgeously made children's comics to children and their parents, but I've also had some serious failures--the universal rejection of Jeff Smith's Bone by the YA graphic novel club I used to co-host springs to mind--and I have had to learn to swallow it, and not push my adult aesthetic sensibilities on child readers.

(Incidentally, I love Bone, with all its whimsy and frolicking fun, but I wouldn't love it as much if not for the way that the unsettling nightmares and the darkness permeate the thing. However, though the interplay of light humor and of horror in Bone is one of the highlights for me now, I think I would have been less enthusiastic as a child; I had a much lower appreciation for the sense of creeping terror when I was ten years old. Other ten-year-olds might certainly feel otherwise.)

In the vein of adult sensibilities, I really enjoyed these Thought Balloonist essays on a set of TOON books--Charles Hatfield's essay here, and Craig Fischer's response--not least for Fischer's comment that despite his and Hatfield's lack of ardor for them, "I suspect....that kids might be more enthusiastic about these books than us crabby old adults are." But the key bit I am thinking of is in one of Hatfield's observations on Silly Lilly, which had been praised for its deceptive simplicity: "Not to be curmudgeonly, but the flatness of the approach seems to me to invite a rather adult construction of childhood 'simplicity.'"

I gather that's not an uncommon pitfall in writing for children--that is, talking down to children when trying to invoke a child's point of view. I had a similar thought while reading Guibert and Sfar's very precious Sardine in Outer Space--there seemed to be too much winking and nodding about the formula of a child's adventure story for the book to sincerely be a child's adventure story. But, as my sister pointed out to me, affected childishness doesn't necessarily stop children from enjoying a book. She cited Peter Pan to me as a classic example: it's a condescending meta-commentary about children's imaginations, winking at adult readers, but simultaneously it's a very successful children's story with demonstrable staying power and a significant hold on our cultural imagination.

Ultimately, when it comes to actually trying to match up kids to kids' comics, I try to take my cue from what other children appear to actually enjoy, as we modern librarian-types do. I don't trust my natural judgment in this area--at the end of the day, I like adult comics, and I like them for their adult qualities--but I'm not interested enough to cultivate the real critical perspective on the field that would better equip me to navigate children's publishing. Blah.

From Palin's bathroom mirror to the Weekly Standard's cover

The problem wasn't so much Palin as it was Alaska. She had become too big for her home state.

That's one way of putting it. Put in the right pronouns and you can imagine Palin speaking to her bathroom mirror: "It's not my fault! It's ... Alaska's. They're all jealous." But the quote is from Matthew Continetti's piece in the Weekly Standard giving the troops the rundown on why their hero fled. The article is a case of third-person narcissism: the writer's engaging in borderline personality disorder on behalf of another party.

The reasons given for Palin's quitting are 1) nobody would govern with her, 2) people say mean things about her, and 3) she's already done everything any governor could hope to do in office. Point 1 is blamed on the national Democratic Party, which supposedly bosses around the legislators in individual states (wish it could get Congress in line). For point 2 it's treated as a given that every charge against Palin has been refuted. Point 3 is voiced by Palin herself: "I know that we've accomplished more in our two years in office than most governors could hope to accomplish in two terms. And that's because I hired the right people."  So it's okay for her to quit because she's just way, way better than any ordinary governor. And you know it's true because she says so.

Of course she also said once that she was a pitbull. Continetti sidles gently up to the sad fact that this claim was a charade:

The accusations affected Palin emotionally. A rare and necessary talent for a great politician is the capacity to ignore or laugh off the critics' most vicious assaults. FDR had it. So did Reagan. When Palin spoke at the 2008 Republican convention, it seemed as though she had it, too. Her commanding performance gave the impression that the previous week's falsehoods, exaggerations, myths, insults, and smears did not matter to her. Not one bit.

This doesn't seem to be the case anymore, however. Over time, the attacks on Palin--on her character, intellect, appearance, femininity, and family--clearly got to her. 

But he can't let go of the idea that, somehow, she really is tough. Palin "knows how to win a political knife-fight," he says after paragraphs spent lamenting that the poor lady had to deal with mean legislators and harsh words. In fact the whole "knife-fight" passage is interesting for its incoherence:

... she is a newcomer to the national arena. The bulk of her career has been at the local and state level, where the stakes and the tempers are low compared with the rock 'em, sock 'em dramas that play out inside the Beltway and on the cable channels and blogs. "Everyone else in '08 had been in the game for decades," John Coale said. "They all had been there. This was somebody playing for the first time." For Palin, the hostility directed at her was novel and shocking. Because she prides herself on her unconventionality, and because she knows how to win a political knife-fight, she decided to fight back.

 So, for one thing, it turns out that Palin really was too inexperienced for the big time, even though the Standard and its buddies had been saying the opposite all along. For another, we're told that Alaska is quite a tranquil place politically, although the rest of the piece says the state has become ungovernable because of the nasty vendettas against the governor.

A last point: in the fall we were told about Palin's vital executive experience. Now we find out it really doesn't matter who commands the Alaska National Guard. The point of a governor turns out to be entirely legislative: if the governor has passed, or claims to have passed, all the laws she had in mind, then there's nothing left for her to do but twiddle her thumbs. It's not like there are any floods for her to deal with or a state administration that needs to be run properly.

In America, we elect our executives to fixed terms on the understanding that they have day-to-day duties to fulfill and that these duties remain no matter what the legislature is up to. That would especially be the case in Alaska, where the legislature meets for a few weeks but the governor is on duty all year round. Unless she finds something better to do.

"The job had become demanding and unpleasant," Continetti writes. Is there any other politician anywhere who would get a sympathetic hearing for that argument? Not that she could get such a hearing from just anybody. Alaska may not understand Sarah Palin, but the Weekly Standard does.

Kids Comics Roundtable: Get Away, Fuzzy

A year and a half ago, I wrote a review of a Get Fuzzy anthology for the Comics Journal. Somehow, though, it got lost in the ether that is email, and so it never got published. Thus rejected, it has come here to the blog to find a home.

______________________________________
I’m Ready For My Movie Contract
Darby Conley
Andrews McMeel Publishing
128 pages/B&W
$10.95/softcover
978-0-7407-6922-1

Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy is, as the strip itself mentions several times, an almost indecently faithful Garfield clone. As in Garfield, there’s a mean, domineering cat (Bucky); a dumb, sweet dog (Satchel); and a nerdy, vaguely artsy owner (Rob.) And also as in Garfield, the animals are sentient, but not quite adult — sort of a cross between pets and small children. Rob even carries Bucky around in a Baby Bjorn.

There are a couple of differences from Jim Davis' franchise. First, Bucky’s a Siamese, which (for a Siamese owner such as myself) is automatic bonus points. And, perhaps more importantly, Conley has dispensed with most of the ossified Garfield gags. Bucky isn’t fat, he doesn’t care about Mondays, and he doesn’t eat lasagna. Instead, he yearns to consume monkeys, engages in credit card fraud, and is terrified of beavers. Or, as he puts it, “They curse all that is good! They curse all that is wholesome! I tell you, beavers are evil!”

The double entendre makes that a good bit funnier than it’s meant to be, of course. Similarly, the high point of the book is a misprinted sequence in which Satchel mouths an empty speech bubble, Rob says, “On the same monkey,” and then we get a close up of some sort of bizarre test pattern with an Indian chief’s head in the middle. The nicest thing about these bloopers is that they’re really not all that far removed from the spirit of the strip as a whole. Conley must have done a lot of weed at some point; Satchel and Bucky’s confused almost-clever-but-then-totally-boneheaded patter is quintessential stoner humor. “Rob: T. rexes don’t even exist anymore!” “Bucky: Exactly. Therefore, a beaver is a million-billion times more dangerous than a T-rex.” Satchel: “You just blew my mind.” I mean, that could almost be lifted from A Scanner Darkly.

Conley’s art is pretty decent for the comics page — he has serious troubles with perspective, and I find his grayscale effects irritating, but his character designs are cute and winning rather than Dilbert or Pearls Before Swine-ugly. He’s helped somewhat by the fact that he rarely attempts physical or slapstick humor — instead, the jokes are mostly bad puns and zoned-out verbal goofiness. In his heart, I think Conley really is more fourth-rate Peanuts than second-rate Garfield. And yes, that’s a compliment.
________________________________

So as I said, this was written at the end of 2007 or thereabouts. Since then, my son went through a very intense Get Fuzzy phase. This involved reading our three Get Fuzzy collections over and over (and over) again. At the same time, he was obsessed with Garfield, which we read over and over. We also got to hear the strips repeated back to us without any context or description (so you get a strip which sounds something like: "I'm going to steal Jon's chicken. Hey where did that vine come from! Isn't that funny!")

So a couple of points here. First, after this intense exposure, I think that I was right that Get Fuzzy is not really a knock-off of Garfield -- and maybe wrong that it is a knock-off of Peanuts. In its running gags and its rhythms, its really maybe closer to Bloom County in a lot of ways. (Which is fine with me; I like Bloom County. But it's important to make these distinctions.)

Second, reading these strips aloud (and other comics) has really, really made me appreciate story books. Not that I have anything against comic strips qua comic strips...or, okay, maybe I do, but that's not the point I'm making here. The point I am making here is that reading comics aloud kind of sucks. When I read a regular story book, I'm often able to pretty much zone out; I can just read along without paying much attention to what I'm doing because...well, it's a narrative, it only goes one direction, you don't really have to think about it that hard. Getting downtime like this is really crucial when you're a parent, and I greatly appreciate it.

With comics, it's a lot harder to do that. You have to pay more attention to where the text goes in the first place, and in the second you have to make sure the small child is following along, since he's got to be able to figure out who says what. Admittedly, after the millionth repetition, he pretty much knows who's saying what...but after the millionth repetition you're ready to go insane anyway, so the benefit is not as great as it might seem.

On the plus side, though, comics seem to be really good for teaching reading. The constant interplay between text and pictures, and the aforementioned need to follow which text goes where, has really helped my kid parse a lot of words. The first word that he read out of context without any prompting from me, in fact, was "Garfield" (we were in the car and he said, "That sign says Garfield!" I said, what? and started looking around for an advertising poster — but he was actually reading the street sign for Gafield Boulevard, which we were driving on.) He also taught himself to read sound effects like "Crash!" and "Zip!" because he sees them so often on the page.

So...less restful, but better reading comprehension. A few minutes of peace vs. a lifetime of learning. Yep, I'd make the same decision; a few minutes of peace, every time. But if I have to be irritated, I guess it's good that he's learning to read. Because then he can go off with a book by himself eventually and leave me alone.

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And here's the first post in the roundtable.

Cerusee's follow-up post is here.

This just in: Nicole Wallace is a jerk

The "pals around with terrorists" line came straight from the McCain high command, according to reporters Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson. Marc Ambinder summarizes:

an e-mail from campaign adviser Nicolle Wallace [was] sent to Palin on the morning of October 4rd, with an attached New York Times article about Obama's relationship with Ayers.

Turns out that the McCain campaign was a week away from running an ad linking Obama to Ayers. The e-mail from Wallace, according to Balz and Johnson, reads as follows: "Governor and Team: rick [Davis], Steve [Schmidt] and I suggest the following attack from the new york times. If you are comfortable, please deliver the attack as written. Please do not make any changes to the below without approval from steve or myself because precision is crucial in our ability to introduce this." 

McCain HQ had suggested the following line: "This is not a man who sees American as you and I do -- as the greatest force for good in the world. This is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country."

When complaining about what a diva Palin was, McCain's people would cite the very line the campaign had given her. They claimed she had "gone rogue" and delivered the line all on her own. Well no, looks like that wasn't the case. (Assuming the email is genuine. Ambinder's post doesn't say where the fellows got ahold of it.)

Does this mean that Palin isn't a diva and whack job? I doubt it. She has a trail of bitter ex-allies from Wasilla to Juneau to wherever Republican high command is now bunkered. My guess is that the McCain people 1) wanted to keep their distance from an especially nasty attack, and 2) wanted another stone to throw at the Gal.

The "pals" revelation brings up the same lesson taught by the great post-"pitbull" letdown: never trust a story sourced to Republican political operatives.

Yeah, lipstick, and also pit bulls are kind of tough

The first time I heard the lipstick-pitbull line? Well, I remember reading this a couple of days before Sarah Palin's big convention speech. William Kristol wrote it, of course:

McCain aides whose judgment I trust are impressed by Sarah Palin. One was particularly amused by this exchange: A nervous young McCain staffer took it upon himself to explain to Palin the facts of life in a national campaign, the intense scrutiny she'd be under from the media, the viciousness of the assault that she'd be facing, etc.:

Palin: "Thanks for the warning. By the way, do you know what they say the difference is between a hockey mom and a Pit Bull?"

McCain aide: "No, Governor."

Palin: "A hockey mom wears lipstick."

Oh, that nervous young staffer. I like Palin's amused, unruffled air in deflecting him. I also like the idea that anyone would trust William Kristol's assessment of who is trustworthy. And the idea that we would think Palin came up with the lipstick line. And the idea that this conversation ever took place.

We all know how the line went over. Now, from the big Times article on why the governor decided to quit:

Late last week, as her sport utility vehicle made its way through the town of McGrath, Ms. Palin said in an interview that the seeds of her resignation had been planted the morning Mr. McCain named her as his vice-presidential choice.

“It began when we started really looking at the conditions that had so drastically changed on Aug. 29,” she said. “The hordes of opposition researchers came up here digging for dirt for political reasons, making crap up.”

Well gee, Princess! You should have listened to that nervous young aide! Though, admittedly, his probable nonexistence could have gotten in the way. But, all right then, listen to Janet Kincaid of Palmer, Alaska. I don't know if she's involved in politics, but she seems to have glommed onto a fact of political life that everyone in the country knows except Sarah Palin:

“In politics, you’ve got to just let it roll or it will eat you alive.”

Good point. By the way, I don't concede that anyone has made up anything derogatory about Gov. Palin. All the inventing seems to have been intended to build her up. For an example, see the start of this post.

The press loves cliches and taglines and obvious irony, so I'm kind of surprised that we don't hear about the pit bull line now that Palin has turned tail. Even the liberal bloggers haven't harped on it much, from what I've seen. So I'll say this: some fucking pit bull.

She wasn't much of a governor either. I don't mean just that her policies were bad or that she proved inept. I mean that she progressively forgot that she was supposed to be governing:

Amid all the turmoil, Ms. Palin’s enthusiasm for the job itself seemed to be waning, her office appointment books from January 2007 through this May indicate. Since her return from the national campaign her days have typically started later and ended earlier, and the number of meetings with local legislators and mayors has declined.

That 70% percent of Republicans say they'd be likely to vote for Palin in a presidential race shows that the GOP has become a system for generating and then swallowing bullshit. It's bad enough that the schmucks think that being tough beats or encompasses all other virtues, like intelligence and competence. But they insist on thinking Palin is tough when she has demonstrated that she isn't. She has broken before the very test that, way back at the beginning of her national career,  was supposed to prove what superior iron she was made of. 

Come to think of it, her downfall wasn't even pressure at the national level. The ethics complaints that she says drove her from office were all filed by locals. Forget the big time -- Palin can't hack politics in Alaska, a state with fewer people than Barack Obama's old state Senate district.

What a fucking loser. Sarah Palin is a pair of breasts, a pair of cheekbones, a pair of glasses, and a winsome mouth that delivered a speech somebody had handed her. Republicans have given up on political life and switched to a fantasy life, and for those purposes she works just fine. She never was a pit bull, just a party doll.

Kids Comics Roundtable: Mini-Marvels

Everyone knows that what kids these days crave is a heaping helping of continuity in-jokes. Obscure, off-hand references to Bendis-birthed secret societies, Gwen Stacy's death, or multi-hued Hulks — lord knows, five year olds love that kind of stuff, right?

The answer, oddly enough is — yeah, they do, at least in this case. Chris Giarrusso's Mini-Marvels volumes prove that an inventive artist can make even the worst ideas work. Where most other Marvel all ages titles (the Marvel Adventures books or Franklin Richards) studiously avoid the continuity quagmire, Giarrusso and his collaborators happily frolic in the quaggiest bits. Uatu pops up for a gratuitous single-panel gag ("Wha? Me change a diaper? Dude I don't even want to watch!" See, that's funny because Uatu is called the watcher, and he spends all his time watching so...oh, never mind.) A whole short story is devoted to the fact that Thor was replaced with a clone (which is funny I think because there was a Thor-clone in the Civil Wars mini-series?) And so forth. Mini-Marvels is, in a lot of ways, the great grandnephew of Fred Hembeck. It's affectionate, insider parody, delighting in meta-geek mockery of geekishness. It's a kid-friendly version of Marvel Zombies — just another example of the self-cannibalizing decadence that has consumed the super-hero genre.

Except, as it turns out, when you make your decadence kid-friendly, it kind of stops looking like decadence. Super-hero zombies are a mannered affectation for the jaded palate. Super-heroes as big-headed, manga-looking kids though — that makes the characters more accessible, not less. I mean, awww, look, little Venom has a single square tooth sticking out of his mouth! That's just adorable.

I think mini-Venom is probably my son's favorite character in the book, as it happens, and he really highlights Giarrusso's talent for finding the Marvel heroes and villains core appeal, cutting out the icky bits, and serving up an all ages version that is superior to the original in almost every way. Giarrusso's Venom isn't a slavering, violent, scary monster for teens and up. Rather, he's a slavering, largely harmless monster who keeps repeating "I want to eat your brains!" Over and over. And let me tell you, my son loved it. Half a day and all he said was "I want to eat your brains!"

But despite its bad influence, I still like Mini-Marvels. I like the way Giarrusso and his collaborators are able to take a single goofy fan-scruff notion ("Why doesn't Iron Man make suits of armor for all the Avengers?) and spin them out into absurdly escalating nonsense (Spider-Man's armor doesn't have jet boots, because, Iron Man explains, spiders can't fly. But, Spider-Man points out, in some irritation, people can't fly either. "They do when they're wearing one of my suits of armor!" Iron Man replies.) I like how the books mix in simple, intuitive plots (Wolverine goes to buy a box of cereal) with the multi-part Civil War parody/tributes. I like that Reed Richards' hair is still greying even though he's, like 10, and I like the fact that there's an extra-bonus Avenger named Elephant Steve and that Peter Parker wears his costume all the time, even at breakfast in his house, but that Aunt May still doesn't realize that he's Spider-Man. And most of all I like that though all of this stuff is based on what is presumably a life-long obsession with Marvel continuity, you don't actually have to know anything about the continuity itself to find it funny. Hawkeye climbing a magic beanstalk and finding Galactus at the top of it is amusing whether or not you know who Galactus is; Elephant Steve is funny even if you don't know he's not really supposed to be an Avenger. Giarrusso has done the seemingly impossible; he's created an alternate world where initiates and newcomers alike can appreciate the Byzantine monstrosity that is the Marvel Universe. In fact, if you didn't know better, reading these books might even convince you that super-heroes were created for kids in the first place.

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This is the first post in a roundtable on kids comics, which will be running throughout this week. second post here.

Don't Let the Pigeon Shrink the Panels

We're going to have a roundtable next week on kids comics (featuring a special guest post by the multi-talented Brigid Alverson if all goes well.) To get you in the mood I thought I'd reprint this effort from Culture 11. So here goes.
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For lots of small children, “funny” equals slapstick — and by that standard, the funnies just aren’t all that funny anymore. Kinetic pratfalls, fisticuffs, explosions, characters bouncing about like demented sugared-up toddlers — to draw those things you space which just doesn’t exist anymore on the funnies page. The full-page nuttiness of strips like the Katzenjammer Kids or Popeye are, of course, long, long, gone. But even the four-panel efforts of my youth have shrunk and dwindled. If you get three tiny panels on a daily, you’re pretty darn lucky — and that means that physicality has been mostly replaced by verbal humor and the occasional static silly drawing. Strips like Dilbert (or even the online Achewood) are almost completely paralyzed; clip-art friezes whose inert perfection is unsullied by motion line or sound effect.

Not to despair, though. Non-sedentary funnies still exist. They’ve just hopped, scurried, and rolled off newsprint, and into the children’s section of your local bookstore. Little, little ones can find cartoon hippos and penguins and moose cavorting with the requisite flurry through any number of Sandra Boynton books — most especially the appropriately named Hippos Go Berserk! And for slightly older kids, there’s Mo Willems, whose Elephant &Piggie series is one of our households all-time favorites…possibly edged out by Willems’ series of Pigeon books.

Part of what makes Willems’ books so enjoyable is that his background is not in the funnies, but in television — he wrote for Sesame Street, and was involved in a number of Nickelodeon animated series. Obviously, animation and comic strips have a long history together, but over the years they’ve largely gone their separate ways. Animation has retained its commitment to wacky physical hijinks and the funnies pages — well, as we said, not so much.

This isn’t to say that Willems’ stories are violent. On the contrary, even by children’s publishing standards, these are extraordinarily gentle books. The plots involve straightforward, resolutely unfrightening conflicts; in “There Is a Bird on Your Head!” Elephant Gerald must deal with a bird building a nest on his head; in “I Am Invited to a Party!” Piggie gets a party invitation, and she must figure out (with Gerald’s help) what she should wear. Even something like Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, the title of which at least suggests the possibility of car chases and crashes, in the event involves nothing more hair-raising than a small bird throwing a tantrum.

It is quite a tantrum, though. The pigeon really, really wants to drive the bus. After begging and pleading with the reader to give him a chance (“My cousin Herb drives a bus almost every day!” “How ‘bout I give you five bucks?”) the insistent bird has a full-page fit, hopping up and down, shouting to the sky, and flipping over onto its back in an explosion of motion lines that culminates with it’s head turned around three-hundred sixty degrees, it’s eye inflamed and bulging red, and it’s wings flapping in a multiplied blur, shedding feathers like drops of sweat.

Though Willems simple character outlines and neutral backgrounds are obviously derived from animation, the grainy quality of his chalky lines, their feeling of dashed-off imperfection, gives the drawings a tactile oomph. That sense of contained movement on a static surface, of personality within the line, is one of the great joys of comic-strip cartooning, and Willems’ mastery of it is, I think, part of the reason his books have been so popular with both kids and parents. For instance, in the Elephant & Piggie book, Today I Will Fly!, Piggie is determined to get herself airborne. Willems illustrates her hapless hopping with energetic thick dotted lines, which trace her tergiversations from right to left across the layout, then back from left to right on the next page — and ultimately, through a short hop and uuuuuuup in a flying leap onto poor Gerald’s much-colonized head. Those dashes are, literally, a physical delight: my son likes nothing more than to trace every single one of them with his finger. If I forget and turn the page before he gets a chance to do so, I’ve got something very like a pigeon tantrum on my hands.

Willems makes use of his luxurious space not only in terms of elbow-room on the page, but also in terms of story length. These narratives may not be especially extended, but compared to a daily comic strip, they might as well be novels. With that extra room, Willems reinjects visual cartooning with some of the rhythms of animation. His narratives have the spiraling escalating silliness of good vaudeville. In I Am Invited to a Party! Gerard and Piggie decide first that the party must be fancy dress…then that it must be a pool party…then that it must be a costume party…until at the end Piggie is wearing an evening dress with flippers and a snorkel and a giant cowboy hat. Each costume change is preceded by the same schtick, as Gerald proclaims, “We must be ready! I know parties!” (To which Piggie responds, “He knows parties!” ) The repetition and variation is like a sublime schematic of how humor works. It also makes it easy to anticipate and then memorize the dialogue, which is exactly what four and five-year-olds want from their reading experience.

Ultimately, though, perhaps the greatest advantage Willems has over his newsprint peers is not space, but time. Between Elephant &Piggie, the Pigeon series, and other projects, Willems seems to be churning out somewhere between four and five books a year. That’s quite a pace — but it’s nothing compared to the brutal grind of a daily strip. The truth is, given all the constrictions placed on them, it’s no wonder that the funnies have had to abandon many of the medium’s traditional resources. Perhaps, as newspapers complete their death spiral and content is forced online, the funnies will rediscover some of the possibilities they’ve lost — though goodness knows strips like PvP certainly don’t give one much hope. In the meantime, if I start hankering for more cartoony goodness, I won’t have to look too far. Writing this article has alerted me to the fact that Willems has yet another Elephant & Piggie book out: Are You Ready to Play Outside? As Gerald might say, “We must have it!”
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As a kind of update, we did get "Are You Ready to Play Outside?", which is maybe the best of the series. It certainly has one of the stand out lines: "I am not a happy pig!" It's amazing the number of situations for which that quote is the ideal. -- indeed, perhaps the only -- appropriate response.

That Other Yazawa Title

My column over at Comixology is about romance and Ai Yazawa's pre-Nana series, Paradise Kiss. Here's a quote:

The romance genre, is not, in other words, a fantasy of female disempowerment, but of female empowerment. Which isn't to say that it's necessarily empowering. In fact, the insistence that women can save men from themselves is, overall, fairly depressing. Why on earth would you want to save Richard Gere in the first place? I mean, fuck him…and no, adamantly not literally.

And yet, the romance genre can't get enough of him and his ilk. From Jane Eyre and the moody, violent Rochester to Maggie Gyllenhaal and the utterly emotionally inaccessible James Spader in the film Secretary, the excitement of romance is all wrapped up in the magical power of masochism. Yes, this guy is an abusive shithead…but that very abuse makes the relationship all the more rewarding when I tame him through the power of my redeeming love! No pain, no gain…or, to paraphrase another fairytale, no magic kiss without the frog.

Gluey Tart: Lovers and Souls

Lovers and Souls
Kano Miyamoto, Deux Press, 2008

This is one of those mangas. I read it just last week – late last week, even – and I felt all happy and a little swoony about it, especially the main story (out of five; the other four are pretty short). Pretty art, complex emotional whatsit, ambiguous sexuality, casual prostitution, and a good amount of"explicit content," as promised on the cover. Yes! Houston, we have a winner! And a week later, I still love the main story. I might still love the secondary stories as well, but I can't remember them.

This is an interesting phenomenon (interesting to me, anyway). I read a lot of yaoi. A lot, a lot. And my memory is not – well, it's really not very good, that's true, but I do manage to stumble along and get to work and back and pay the bills on time. Usually. What I'm trying to establish here is that I'm not significantly impaired. The only reason this matters, as far as this column goes, is that I don't have the slightest idea what's in the stories between pages 113 and 238. And if I do not suffer from significant mental impairment, this might mean that there's not much there there. Lord knows it happens.

We'll table that logical leap for a moment and discuss the main story, the part between pages 1 and 112 that I do in fact recall. It's a melancholy little thing with a surprising and, I thought, absurdly melodramatic ending, even for melodrama. Now, I know melodrama is supposed to be a dirty word, but I'm a fan. I'm not dismissing anything because it contains a hefty dose of melodrama, or even an excess, necessarily. I'm just saying. It's really a stubbornly emo ending. I thought it was maybe a bit much, but it worked in context, and there was a point to the out of nowhere-ness, so I can live with it.

"What the hell happens?" I hear you asking. I'm not going to say, because the element of surprise is really important. I don't mind spilling about the rest of the plot, though. Shinomiya is hot and aimless and earning money for college by posing nude for Matsuoka, a photographer. Matsuoka wants Shinomiya, who says he's straight, but – maybe not so much, since all it takes is some extra cash. After he tries it once, Shinomiya gets pretty comfortable with both gay sex and Matsuoka, eventually working in a gay sex club. (As one does.) The story is about their relationship and how it develops.



This isn't the kind of story where flowers explode all over the page. It's quiet and subdued and sort of grim. The character development is believable, if kind of strange. The photographer, Matsuoka, seems like a complete dick at first, apologizing to the obviously offended Shinomiya about "that incident" and asking what it'll take to get him in bed. He stuffs $100 down Matsuoka's pants and forces a kiss on him, offering him money for more and telling Matsuoka to think about it before he has to force him. Nice. The next time we see them together, Shinomiya is taking pictures of Matsuoka and seems much nicer. He does offer Matsuoka money for sex, but he seems a lot less predatory about it, and Shinomiya accepts, saying he's kind of interested in Matsuoka. Earlier, Shinomiya had been musing to himself that he isn't especially interested in other people, and he doesn't much care what happens with his body. Over the course of the story, the disinterested part changes. It doesn't happen smoothly, and neither party exactly understands it, but Shinomiya starts to fall for Matsuoka. And Matsuoka shows a surprising amount of gentleness and insight, given his opening scenes.



Well, it ends badly. I feel OK saying that much, since the back cover announces that this is "a tragic tale of love found and lost." The story is a little sordid, a little vague, and, dare I say, bittersweet. I wouldn't say it feels realistic, but it has a ring of truth about it that I responded to. It had enough presence to keep me thinking about it, days later.

So, let's go back to the other stories, the ones I apparently stopped thinking about instantaneously. If I ever thought about them in the first place. Let us look over them, you and I, and retrace what happened.

Story two, "Vanity," is about Shinomiya's response to the unfortunate events wot I do not explain. It's good – in some ways, maybe better than the main story. Shinomiya is depressed and confused and desperate, and his reactions are believable and even sexy, which is a deft trick. This story really illustrates how complicated and fragile and coincidental and harrowing relationships with other people can be. OK; I hadn't forgotten his one. I just thought it was part of the first story.

Next: "Sleeping Beauty." This one is the backstory for a something fleetingly mentioned in "Lovers and Souls," that Matsuoka had taken a picture of Shinomiya and entered it in a contest, all without Shinomiya's knowledge, much less permission. That detail, tossed out at the very beginning of the manga, had made me wonder about Matsuoka. That and the non-con and the $100 kiss. These points, taken together, made him look, well, kind of sleazy. You know, just a little. But he turns out to be very different. This little story gives us just a bit of insight into this blessedly complicated character, and, oh yeah, the ending is super-sweet. I forgot it because it almost isn't there – only eleven pages. But, in retrospect, they're a nice eleven pages.

Story four: "Eternal Moon." It's a nice little story, too, sparse and real. Long enough to develop the characters of two friends who fall in love. It doesn't play as trite as it sounds. I would have enjoyed this more the first time I read it (and thus possibly remembered having read it) if I hadn't spent a certain amount of my limited mental abilities wondering if Kai was the character from the first two stories, who I remembered only as bi-guy (and this is where I admit, to my shame, that certain Japanese names just slide off my brain as if it were coated with Teflon). What the hell was that guy's name? Oh, Hikaru. Well, he isn't. May you all learn from my stupidity. (Also, a bonus: Toward the end, Kai – not Hikaru at all – wears his hair in that half-updo thing I'm so excited about. Woo hoo!)

Story the last: "Tomorrow's Sky." This one is about the characters in "Eternal Moon." (Hey, there's a theme there! Eternal moon, tomorrow's sky – yup, definitely a theme. You can't fool me.) It's told from the point of view of Nozaki, the other half of the couple. Public affection is offered and fidgeted about, a fight is fought, insecurities are aired, and understanding is fumbled toward. It's short and not necessarily substantial, this story, but it is quietly gentle, the kind of story that leaves you with a smile. Which you should savor, since in about thirty minutes, you'll have no memory of this moment. If you're like me, anyway.



I love Kano Miyamoto's art, the pacing of her stories, and her over-arching lack of desire to create plot. She is able to convey wonderful subtleties of expression and nuances of emotion without a lot of movement. And that may have something to do with my lapse of memory, too. The more plot you have, the easier it is to remember the details. But those aren't the kind of details this manga is concerned with. I was left with an understanding of the characters, a feeling for them, and the ways they experienced love. (Which did include explicit sex scenes, by the way, involving invisible penises – well, you can't have everything.) So, good enough. I'll put this one on the keeper stack and probably read it again, one day. The whole thing will no doubt be brand new to me, by then. And I'll enjoy it just as much the second time. (Cue "Feels Like the First Time as background/fadeout music.)

God and Mammon

This essay first ran in Culture 11.
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The title of Michelle Williams' forthcoming R&B album is Unexpected— though judging from the first video, there isn't actually all that much to be surprised about. As an entirely rote processed beat bangs away, Williams repeats the title "We Break the Dawn" over and over while wearing a short, tight dress and slinking around with a posse of yummy and shirtless male dancers. Oh, and there are lots of jump cuts. I guess that would have been novel thirty years ago.

So the title's just a case of the usual marketing hype? Well, not exactly. "Unexpected," refers, not to content, but to career trajectory. Williams became famous when she joined Destiny's Child in 2000. As a member of the hugely popular R&B act, she wore preposterous dresses and sang about bumping, grinding, sex, and dissing those men while throngs of cheering fans stared at Beyoncé's cleavage. Then Williams turned around and released her solo debut "Heart to Yours" in 2002 — a very fine contemporary gospel album, complete with guest appearances by Shirley Caesar and Mary Mary. After another solo gospel outing, and one more Destiny's Child release, "Unexpected" is, finally, her solo R&B debut.

Country singers do this sort of thing all the time, of course. Throughout his career, Johnny Cash would pray to Jesus in one track and murder his woman in the next, and hardly anyone batted an eye. But in the world of black music, shuttling between sacred and secular as Williams has done is a lot less common and a lot more fraught. For African-American audiences living in a segregated America, the gospel/pop line was about more than just faith. It was about loyalty to your people — about whether you were going to stay true to your oppressed community, or kowtow to the ofays who were, often quite literally, trying to kill you.

Changing your musical style wasn't just an unfortunate marketing decision; it was an exercise in betrayal, sin, and damnation. As such, black audiences and artists took it very seriously indeed. In the early 50s, the gospel star Sister Rosetta Tharpe lost much of her fan base when she started performing in secular clubs — even though she was still singing Christian music. Then there's Sam Cooke, who started his career as the gospel superstar lead singer for the Soul Stirrers. In the late 50s, he moved to secular music and never looked back — though "A Change Is Gonna Come" had gospel tinges, Cooke's pop music rarely, if ever, touched on his faith.

Contemporary R&B follows in his footsteps. Virtually every R&B artist shouts out to God first thing in his or her liner notes, but that spirituality is kept tightly under wraps on the albums themselves. Even performers that do express their faith more explicitly do so with a certain care. At the conclusion of her 2005 album "My Story," for example, Na'sha thanks her God while defensively dismissing those who told her it would be bad for her career to do so. Similarly, on their breakthrough "The Writings on the Wall," Destiny's Child sings "Amazing Grace" — but only at the very end of the album. Faith is fine, apparently, as long as you save it for the last track.

This nervous tension between private faith and public salaciousness can have unfortunate repercussions. Several African-American stars have been so torn by the perceived conflict between their faith and their music that they abandoned the latter. At the height of his popularity in 1957, for example, Little Richard turned to God and renounced rock and roll, tragically scuppering his career. In less extreme cases, the intensity of the sacred/secular binary can result in a painfully intense refusal to notice what one is doing — a kind of aphasiac hypocrisy. Item A here is Destiny's Child single "Nasty Girl" in which the super-group famous for its plunging necklines, ascending hemlines, and borderline-hooker-wear upbraided their peers for dressing like sluts. "Nasty put some clothes on," they harmonized, "You make it hard...for girls like myself who respect themselves/And have dignity...." Translation: I'm out here in my underwear, but it's classier underwear than yours.

So the firewall between God and mammon has undeniably wreaked a certain amount of personal and aesthetic damage. But overall, it's effect has been predominantly positive. White musical forms have had much looser definitions of selling-out, but that hasn't allowed them to dispense with authenticity. On the contrary, the fact that nobody really knows who is real, or why, has resulted in music which is compulsively, and often rather idiotically, conservative. Country music gets slicker and slicker as it fetishizes an eternal rural past,; rock gets older and older as it fetishizes an eternal Baby Boomer moment of youthful rebellion.

There are certainly black musicians who are mired in nostalgia (and yes, I'm talking about you, Wynton.) Overall, though, African-American music is relentlessly forward-looking. Jazz, rock and roll, funk, disco, hip hop...the zeitgeist moves and you stay with it. Keeping it real, when it's an issue, tends to be about being cool, or tough, or funky, not about being true to the past.

And a big part of the reason for that is, precisely, that for these artists, there is no past. You don't explore your roots — you rip them off for gimmicks, and jack them for beats. Little Richard used gospel vocal techniques he learned from the amazing Marion Williams, but he couldn't be Marion Williams, or even really reference her without some dire consequences. For him to look backwards was not to be validated, but to be turned into a pillar of salt.

If Richard had been able to look behind him, it's doubtful he could have transformed music the way that he did. Similarly, if Destiny's Child were more invested in their Christianity, they probably couldn't have embraced the hip hop delivery and serious bitchiness which allowed them to create some of the most ravishing and influential pop music sounds of the last decade. Beyoncé brings the gospel fire on tracks like "Say My Name," but — like Ray Charles, Aretha, and many others before her — it's the way she ruthlessly subverts her religion for secular ends which paid dividends, both literal and aesthetic.

To be rootless is to have no fallback position; it's a dangerous, exciting, and potentially very creative place to be. That's not to say that every crass commercial move is going to be great art — Michelle Williams' new album, alas, looks very much like a dud. But it is to suggest that, as has long been the case, if you want to bet on the future, you should place your money with the sell-outs.

No, that's not why she left

 

At Greg Sargent's Plum Line we learn that Palin's departure, despite what she tells us, won't free up any money for teachers or roads. Alaska doesn't hire lawyers per job; it has them on staff and they get their salaries no matter what assignment is in front of them. Defending Palin against all those ethics complaints may be a waste of their time, but the state won't be spending any less on its legal department if the complaints go away .

Sargent says Palin's office arrives at a figure of $1.9 million spent to defend against the complaints. That's from dividing the lawyers' annual pay by the money they received during hours spent on the complaints.

TPM says only 3 ethics complaints are still pending, one-sixth of the original total. The others all got wrapped up quick enough, possibly because 9 of them went before the state's personnel board, whose members can be fired by whoever's governor.

update, Here's a good point. Palin says she passed an ethics reform law and that this is the law that makes it possible to file ethics complaints against her. Steve Benen suggests that, under Palin's own account of things, she passed an incompetently designed law. After all, from what Palin says it can be abused to drive a governor to resign for no good reason. 

Russian Black Metal, Now With Biblical Quotations

My review of the new album from Ithdabquth Qliphoth is now over at the Metropulse. The album is titled Holy, Holy and Holy Trans-formation. So there.

No Uighurs, but ...

... Andrew Sullivan has been busy.

update, Has anybody ever heard a joke about Trig? I haven't. Some people somewhere must have made such jokes, but only in the sense that some people somewhere must have shoved eggbeaters up their butts and then rushed to the emergency room.

Yet there Palin was talking about "mean adults" or the like taking shots at the little guy. Like who, where, when?

update 2, entitled "She's Delicate, I Guess." Palin's lawyer said she had to call it quits because she had been "on duty now for two and a half years solid." And, admittedly, two and a half years are quite a chunk out of a four-year term.

Whither Uighur?

I"m a regular reader of Andrew Sullivan's blog. His coverage of the Iranian protests was great, I thought, and he preened a fair bit (and deservedly) about how he was doing much better than the MSM.

Okay. But now you go over there and... -- lots on Palin, lots on second stimulus, lots on this and that, but not a blessed word about the conflagration in China, or, for that matter, about the coup in Honduras (which he did cover a few days ago.)

Which is fine, I guess. Iran is pretty clearly more geopolitically important than either of these other messes. And maybe he's just more interested in it. But it is a little distressing that, when the mainstream media completely folds next year, I'll only get to hear about the bloody internal conflicts that strike Sullivan's particular fancy.

The Indian Cinderella

A version of this piece first ran on Culture 11.
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When I first stumbled on a reference to the Indian Cinderella, I thought the phrase must be referring to a South Asian legend. When I realized the title was meant to refer to a Native American tale, I was...well, dubious. The whole Jungian universal-mythological-archetype thing makes my teeth hurt, and it sounded to me like this was some sort of post-facto effort to mutilate somebody else's folk-tale-foot in order to fit it into a European shoe. I mean, how exactly would the Cinderella legend have gotten to pre-Columbian America? Did Thor Heyerdahl paddle over with it or what?

To those who caught the logical fallacy in the paragraph above, congratulations: you are smarter than me, and quite possibly less racist as well. The trick, of course, is in my knee-jerk assumption that an Indian legend would have to be pre-Columbian. I knew quite well that native life changed immensely in the years, decades, and centuries after the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Marie touched shore. Some cultures, like the Taino people of Hispaniola were wiped out more or less completely by a combination of European diseases and European policies of slavery, mutilation, and mass-murder. Other cultures sprang up, like the Florida Seminole, composed of members of the Creek nation and escaped black slaves — or, more famously, like the Plains Indians, who based their entire way of life on that European import, the horse. I even knew that Squanto, the Patuxet Indian who famously aided the Pilgrims in Massachusetts, was not, as he is often portrayed, some kind of innocent, friendly savage. On the contrary, he had been kidnapped repeatedly by Europeans, had lived in both Spain and England, and had served as a guide and interpreter on multiple British expeditions. He was probably more well-traveled and more cosmopolitan in outlook than the English people he assisted.

As I said, I knew all this before I saw that reference to the Indian Cinderella. And yet, still, when I think of Indian folklore, I tend to think of old, immemorial, stories, unblemished by European contact — stories about Raven, stories about Coyote, trickster tales. Somehow, despite half a millennium of contact, and despite the fact that I'm certainly over-educated enough to know better, in my head, Indians have their stories, we have ours, and never the twain shall meet.

The fact that I tend to say or think "we" when referring to European colonizers is part of what I'm talking about. The truth is that, geneologically, I don't have anything more to do with William Bradford than I do with Squanto. While those two broke bread in Massachusetts, my Semitic ancestors were half way around the globe, being casually persecuted in Eastern Europe. It's true that my son probably has some British in him. But then, he's also got some "black Dutch" — a euphemism my wife's grandmother used to obscure the fact that she was a quarter Cherokee.

Of course, I suppose you could argue that my culture is Western European even if my blood isn't exactly. I speak English, after all; I live in a democracy based on an essentially British model; my whole liberal/atheist/scientific belief structure comes out of a Western latitudinarian tradition.

And yet, if it's easy to downplay the European influence in Indian cultures, it's even easier to forget or erase the native contribution to contemporary European — and especially American —life and thought. Perhaps most obviously at this time of year, much of what we eat was first raised by Indians — potatoes, sweet potatoes, squash, and, of course, turkey. Thanksgiving itself, for that matter, is based on native harvest festivals. And, of course, the American English that I speak is dotted with native words, expressions, and place names — like the Susquehanna River, which flooded my house the year I was born.

It isn't just food and names, though. Native cultures and traditions have worked their way pervasively into American history and thought. The first American pulp hero, James Fennimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo, was an Indianized white man. In Cooper's five Leatherstocking novels, published through the early 19th century, Bumppo was portrayed as a half-savage, comfortable in the wilderness, and ambivalent towards the white culture he saves. Certainly this view of Indians is romanticized to the point of insult...but its power shows the extent to which the Indians have shaped American identity. Bumpo's distinctively native manliness has bequeathed a furtive Indian heritage to practically every American loner hero you can think of, from Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name, to Han Solo, to Marvel Comics' Wolverine.

As this suggests, many of our most distinctively American ideas and ideals are distinctive precisely because they have Native American aspects. In North America for the most part, native political structures were much more egalitarian, much more free, and indeed, much more conservative (in terms of limited government, at least) than anything on offer in the monarchies of the Old World. Benjamin Franklin noted admiringly of the Iroquois government, "There is no force, there are no prisons, no officers to compel obedience or inflict punishment." Centuries later, Lucretia Mott and other feminists were shocked and inspired by the equal status of Iroquois women. Whether Indian government had a direct influence on the U.S. Constitution is still the subject of contentious scholarly debate (not to mention intense whining about multiculturalism by D'nesh D'souza.) But I think it strains credulity to suggest that our Founding Fathers (and/or mothers) built a nation on the principles of freedom and equality, and failed to notice how these virtues functioned in the societies of their closest neighbors.

So...what about the Indian Cinderella then? The story was apparently originally told in the mid-1800s by a member of the Catholicized Mik'maq tribe in Nova Scotia. It was written down by Silas T. Rand, a Baptist missionary, and published in 1884 by a scholar named Charles Leland. It is clearly influenced by Perrault's "Cinderella," which the Mik'maq teller had certainly heard. But it is ominous and melancholy in a way Perrault never was.

The tale is called The Invisible One. The title refers to a being of great power, who no one can see. He lives in a lodge by a lake with his sister, and it is said that if any girl can see him, she will marry him. Many try, but they all fail. Finally, a girl named Oochigeaska decides to make the attempt. She lives with her sisters, who treat her horribly -- they even pushed her into a fire at one point, so that her face is covered with scars. Nonetheless, she gathers together some rags and goes off to try to see the Invisible One...and as she goes all the people of the village laugh and mock at her. Finally she reaches the lodge, and she does indeed see the Invisible One — who rides through the air on a sled tied with the rainbow, a symbol of death. Having seen him, Oochigeaska's burns are washed away, and she prepares to marry the being — though no one ever seems exactly happy at the upcoming nuptials. Indeed, it seems possible that we are to take the Invisible One as death; Oochigeaska may have escaped her tormentors simply by going to the grave.

Paula Giese, a native author argues that this tale is a bleak satire.) Certainly Perrault's assumption that blood-kin do not perpetrate injustice; his appeal to fine apparel as salvation; his reliance on the ultimate goodness of the nobility; all are here systematically and bitterly upended. Family cannot be trusted, money and its trappings are useless, hierarchies mean nothing. What matters instead are vision and faith — which lead to awe, to knowledge, to death...and perhaps to joy, or renewal.

This tale, made out of European materials, but decidedly un-European, is — obviously — a Mik'maq tale. But it is also an American one — or at least, set as it is in Canada, a North American one. The story is about a promise; a turning away from a decrepit civilization and looking, in hope and dread, for a new and unseen truth. That's always been the promise of the New World. It's what the Indian's gave, not to the Europeans, or to the whites, or to "us," but to the America of which they are a part. And it's why, when America is most itself, it is — not alone, but in part —Indian.

Does she know what she did?

Palin twitters a feisty defence:

Critics are spinning, so hang in there as they feed false info on the right decision made as I enter last yr in office to not run again

But she gets the decision wrong. Her feisty defense leaves out the decision that is under attack, namely her resignation -- the decision she announced on Friday, the one that had media types scrambling back to the studio. Because, for a politician holding a public trust, just up and quitting your job is much stranger and more newsworthy than letting people know that you won't be on the ballot again. And now she's forgotten the damn decision.

She never stops being odd, she never starts being coherent.

update, From her Facebook announcement:

And though it's honorable for countless others to leave their positions for a higher calling and without finishing a term, of course we know by now, for some reason a different standard applies for the decisions I make. But every American understands what it takes to make a decision because it's right for all, including your family.

One thing Americans understand is the difference between moving up and flaking out. A governor can quit to become president or even commerce secretary. A governor doesn't quit to do the ineffable. And certainly not this fast -- after 2 and a 1/2 years and on a weekend when her press secty is across the continent. Something very odd just happened. Maybe not lurid or amazing or dramatic, because we don't know. But at least flakey.  

"... right for all, including your family." If she doesn't want her family in the public eye, she'll have to give up being famous. Quitting as governor won't do it; she'll have to quit being a celebrity. Any bets on her doing that?

update, Bomp-ba domp-bomp. Fred Barnes voices grim words: "Palin is no Reagan." (Bonus! Barnes accidentally says Tom Dewey had charisma. And Bob Dole for that matter. And Richard Nixon. One piece of sloppy phrasing can have some far-reaching effects.) 

Where Am I?

I am back home...but I still need to catch up on things, so there won't be much new blogging this week. Next week, though, I promise to be back in the saddle...with reviews of mini-marvels, space pirates, maybe the New Frontier, and, of course, Wonder Woman.

My apologies for the dawdling. Sometimes life gets you....

Lady Wack-a-doo flies south

update, Huck is deadly on the Great Bird:

 

Huckabee, looking at his own time as a governor, asked that "If that had been the case for me, I would have quit about the first month? Been there, done that.? One of the things you have to do is decide, 'Look, they're not going to chase me out.'" 

If she's smart, she won't be looking to win office ever again. She might do well in a few Republican presidential primaries; so did Pat Buchanan. But that's the limit. Even if she moves to Montana and runs for a House seat ... well, maybe.  

**********

My latest guess: the David Letterman flap went to Palin's head and now she wants to do media flaps full time.  The guy behind the new career direction is John Ziegler; he's got her ear. She's going to be picking fights over news coverage and leading boycotts because of "anti-faith" and "pro-gay" programming content. Seems like a good way to raise money. Maybe she'll have a show on Fox or CBN, as part of her operation. She'll be like a televangelist but working the political side. Instead of interceding with God for the viewer, she'll be interfering in society on God's behalf, and mainly that will take the form of 1) loudly disrespecting big-name media personalities and institutions (Dan Rather, Letterman, the NYT, whoever else), and 2) staging video ambushes and embarrassing office sit-ins so as to target executives of the companies with ads on the wrong programs. (On second thought, maybe you don't pull ambushes/sit-ins on people with access to corporate lawyers. Well, whatever Michael Moore used to do.) Her show's basic fodder will be outrage over cable programming, especially snotty comedy shows; some of these will then make a point of baiting her to get exposure on her show, and the two sides will develop a degree of mutual reliance.

Along with the show she's running boycott campaigns and letter campaigns, for which she will raise money thru personal appearances at civic theaters and skating rinks across the country. All in all what promises to be a lucrative organization, since the small-town right feels like politics has proven to be a bust.

Of course it will all turn to shit before any of the above gets too far, reason being that Palin is crazy and so is Ziegler. 

Seduction of the Corrupt — Jeff Parker's Comics for Kids

This originally ran in Culture 11 a while back.
________________________________________

Kids love super-hero comics, but super-hero comics don't always love them back. At first, of course, and for a long time, super-heroes were aimed exclusively at the under-12s. The initial Siegel-Shuster Superman tales from the 30s were G-rated, and — thanks in part to the industry's self-censoring Comics Code instituted in 1954 — even the supposedly "mature" Stan Lee Marvel titles from the 60s are amazingly inoffensive. The swinging Mary Jane Watson, for instance, is a lot more bubbly than sultry, and never have so many evil masterminds propounded so many evil schemes with so little loss of life...or even loss of blood. I read that stuff to my four-year-old.

In the last twenty-five years or so, though, the Code's influence has waned sharply, and super-hero comics have marched from G, past PG, to at least PG-13 — and some particularly unpleasant PG-13 at that. In DC's 1988 Killing Joke, Batgirl — Batgirl, mind you — is shot in the stomach, turning her into a paraplegic, and then the Joker strips her and takes nudie pictures to show to her father. (When Alan Moore, the writer who has since disavowed the title, spoke to editor Len Wein to ask if this plot point was okay, Wein reportedly responded, "Yeah, okay, cripple the bitch.") In 2004's Identity Crisis, Sue Dibny, the wife of the Elongated Man — of the Elongated Man, mind you — was raped. And then she was murdered. Oh, yeah, and she was pregnant at the time. Meanwhile, over at Marvel, one of their most successful projects has been Marvel Zombies, a group of mini-series and one-shots set on an alternate world where all the super-heroes are turned into undead monsters who eat every civilian on earth. While we were in a comic-shop, my son saw one of these uplifting tales on the shelf and asked, with mild concern, "Daddy, why do all the super-heroes look scary on that cover?" "Oh," I said. "That. We're leaving now."

Obviously this stuff isn't for kids. And it's not meant to be. The average reader of super-hero comics these days is a guy in his thirties, and guys in their thirties want to see blood and tits, or, preferably, as the above narratives suggest, both at once. Still, that leaves something of a vacuum. As you'll notice if you go out this Halloween, little boys still want to consume Spider-Man merchandise and paraphernalia. But the baseline commodity which started the media juggernaut is aimed at their dads, not at them. You can get collections of back issues, of course. But given the huge demand, wouldn't these companies want to invest in creating some new product for a younger audience?

The answer is yes, sort of. Both DC and Marvel have all-ages super-hero titles, though they mostly float under the radar in terms of promotion and company attention. One of the best writers working in this marketing backwater is Jeff Parker. I recently bought two of his all-ages books to read to my son, Marvel Adventures The Avengers Vol. 1: Heroes Assembled from 2006, and Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four: Silver Rage from 2007.

Both titles are a delight. Parker has a lovely, kid-friendly sense of humor. For sex and realistic bloodshed, he substitutes slapstick and some gross out goofiness. My son almost hurt himself laughing at the scene in Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four where the Human Torch wakes up, turns over in bed, realizes that, while he slept, his prankster pal the Thing has placed said bed on the roof, and then falls off the building (he's not hurt because, of course, he can fly.) Another high point features the Impossible Man, a shape-shifting green and purple alien nuisance who gets zapped into vapor early in the story while in close proximity to Spider-Man. Spidey, who breathes in some of the vapor, spends the rest of the story feeling queasy — and at the end the Impossible Man unexpectedly reappears when Spidey abruptly vomits him up in a green and purple impossible puddle.

What really separates these stories from adult comics, though, is the pacing. As super-hero comics have skewed older, they've gotten more and more frenzied — even strident. Read Grant Morrison's run on Justice League from 1997, for example, and in every issue you've got four cosmic threats, three alternate realities, dozens of dead bodies, and lots of over-heated prose about how amazingly awesome this super-hero team is and how we're going to save the earth better than it's ever been saved!

Jeff Parker has a fair bit of action in his comics too, but it's all somehow ...leisurely. It reminds me a little of the Oz books, or of Peter Pan, which are chock full of adventure and preposterous happenings, but which nonetheless seem to proceed at a gentle trot. In Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, the main baddy spends most of the series behind an impenetrable force field, amicably chatting with the heroes as he calmly goes about his plans to take over the world. In Marvel Adventures: Avengers, the evil robot Ultron wants to kill the captured Avengers immediately, but his super-villain insist instead on talking about their master plan...and then they start to squabble among themselves...and then there is a big battle for about two pages, but the final clash between the two most powerful adversaries actually takes place off-stage, while the rest of the heroes wait companionably for the impending victory.

This sort of world-being-threatened-surprisingly-slowly is quite true to the spirit of super comics past, where the heroes always seemed to have unlimited time to natter with the villains or escape from the death trap. We're used to thinking of kids as being the ones with the short attention spans, but the truth is that children's narratives can actually be a lot less cluttered and frantic, because the audience doesn't need to be constantly reminded of how important or worthwhile the proceedings are. Kids are happy to just stroll along with narrative — the story's there for the story. It doesn't need to be justified.

And that's really the kind of faith you need if super-heroes are going to make any sense at all. Don't get me wrong — there are some great super-hero comics for adults, like Alan Moore's Watchmen or Grant Morrison's Animal Man, which, in different ways, consciously and imaginatively attempt to reconcile juvenile material with a senescent audience. As a long term aesthetic strategy for the genre, though, crippling your super-heroes, raping them, turning them into monsters, or having them race around while bloviating self-importantly like over-caffeinated CEOs in tights — it all starts to look rather desperate and sad. The basic point of super-heroes is that somebody gets amazing powers, and then uses them to do good. It's simple, and as kids are well aware, the simplicity is the charm, and even the wisdom. Complicating it just makes it dumber.

Ding dong

"This is not a retreat. It's an advance in another direction." Oh boy. 

First part here, second part here. For your collection.

This announcement was thrown together awful fast. She's talking about investigations and packing her bags in a hurry, so maybe she'll wind up in Brazil. Even if not, at least now she can't ever be president. You can't see it happening even if you're a paranoid liberal pothead with a science fiction bent. She is now a quitter and a flake. That will be the view of anyone who's not a wingnut and of some who are. Two and 1/2 years as gov.

My guess is she wants to make money as a celebrity, especially since she needs money for legal fees (because of the ethics complaints). [update, I also find it tempting to think that she thinks she can make pres by the celebrity route, that she believes her personal wonderfulness is only being hampered and obscured by office and its headaches, that she thinks now she can blaze her way to the top by being glorious full-time in the media.]

[second update, Marc Ambinder wrote this: "Palin, in Alaska, is a sitting duck for the people and forces she believes are ruining the country. She can't fight back -- she can't protect her family, her values, her worldview -- while she's governor." I think that's meant to be her view, not his. Even so, I don't get it. How does being governor make her a sitting duck? People don't make fun of her for what she does as governor, not unless they are actually in Alaska. The rest of us don't know enough to say. We make fun of her for her ignorance and sleazy behavior. Ambinder goes on to argue that the real deal here is that she hasn't done well as governor and is fed up with being chivvied and hassled by the other Alaska politicians. He implies that going national full time looks a lot better to her because that line of approach is all about showing off and making speeches, not delivering governmental results. Sounds very plausible to me; I do gravitate toward the "bright lights, big city" explanation for her flakeout. Still leaves us wondering why she had to throw her announcement together so precipitately.]  

[third update, Says her ex-friend and ex-campaign manager:

 When she comes to Alaska, everyone calls her "Sarah." Out there she’s governor--almost president-elect. She’s not Sarah. They introduce her with pomp and circumstance. Build her ego up, do that whole thing. Here, she comes back, she runs into a buch of Alaskans. It's humbling. It's nothing big to us. They don’t mind calling you on the carpet. It's nothing special. She's just one of us. But she decided she wasn’t going to be one of us…

Sarah's uppity!]

I just heard about the resignation this afternoon, since I'm staying off the Internet (kind of). Griffy Flatts, my building's excitable janitor, gave me the news. He watches CNN a lot and is obsessed by US politics. He gave me an earful about the resignation and the relevant clip, which he said showed her emotional and incoherent -- "babbling." Hah, no. Her voice shook here and there, but she delivered a good performance and pursued a more-or-less consistent rhetorical thread in her remarks. They were confusing only because she was talking thru her hat. No emotional free associating, just really extreme fancy dancing: human-growth psychobabble to reframe her decision to quit, murky references to political operatives targeting her after she got on the McCain ticket. passing the ball when the other side has you in its sights (doesn't say who the other side is).

Says now the state won't have to pay for pursuing all the ethics complaints against her? for the time she spends on payroll defending against the complaints? Kind of missed that bit, but she's saving Alaska money by stepping down while all these ethics complaints are pending against her, and she's saving the state more money by quitting instead of just serving out her term as a lameduck. Lameducks go on junkets a lot, and she doesn't want to let herself do that.   

What was that she said about one complaint being about her holding a fish? From what seed of truth has she spun this mutant?

Prog Weirdness from Japan

Metropulse has my review of crazed Japanese prog band Koenjihyakkei's third album, Nivraym up now. This is about the most fun I've had writing a music review, I think. Also, there are slavering elves. And Alban Berg.

Partially Congealed Pundit:Christopher Columbus

Since it's the 4th, I thought I'd do an American themed poem. Sort of. This is from 2003 or so, I think.


___________________

Christopher Columbus

If I was Christopher Columbus I wouldn’t be so boring. Because that is the name of a parrot and he just sits there on the island he is on. Maybe he was stranded there when he pooped on Bluebeard’s beard and that is why it is blue. Also he flew into things by accident. Like eyeballs so they had to get eyepatches. Trees and things were afraid and they ran off the island and even his poop was afraid of his later poop. So he sleeps a lot. My Dad would say he needs ambition and maybe some money.

Alice Hoffman flips out; internet scoffs

It's been pretty dead at my house. I haven't read anything interesting in a while, except for lots of Rex Stout, who's pretty fab, but who doesn't exactly keep me up at night pondering the deep questions.

This story caught my eye the other day, though. I particularly love the blase reaction of Roberta Silman, who went on vacation in time to totally miss Alice Hoffman's embarrassing public flip-out over nothing (in her review of Hoffman's latest novel, Silman described the book in question as lacking the spark off Hoffman's earlier work, which she says she liked), followed by Hoffman's asinine defense of herself ("Girls are taught to be gracious and keep their mouths shut. We don't have to," said Hoffman, trying to write off her blatantly immature act of malice against another female publishing professional as for god's sake, feminism), and Hoffman's subsequent deletion of her Twitter account. It would be dull to sit through it all first hand, but how lovely for her to get back from a weekend in the Berkshires and be presented with this brief snack of schadenfreude.

It's amazing that anyone could even wonder whether disseminating someone's contact information and instructing your fans to harass that person over a minor professional slight might just perhaps be going too far, almost as amazing as Hoffman's implication that only in the age of electronic mass media and microblogging have authors finally been given the power to respond to book reviewers. No one who'd ever read the letter column of The Nation could read that with a straight face.

This is beautiful

Okay, Todd Purdum and Vanity Fair, this is how it's done. Let us now thank Scott Conroy and Shushannah Walshe for bringing to light the Steve Schmidt/Sarah Palin correspondence of October 15, 2008. It includes one of the most beautiful emails ever written by a busy professional to a lying, narcissistic idiot. The email is also a chance to see a Republican political operative going into reverse mode. Instead of scrambling facts, he's spelling them out; hey, he's good at that too.

Background: Sarah Palin's husband, Todd, belonged for 7 years to the Alaska Independence Party, which wants Alaska to secede from the United States. During the campaign, Palin complained to Steve Schmidt and others in the top command that not enough was being done to push back against criticism of Todd for his secessionist ties. The back-and-forth over this matter was all by email.

Schmidt told her no, they weren't going to touch the AIP issue. Palin harangued him again, this time claiming that the AIP's platform doesn't mention pulling out of the U.S. Schmidt lost it and wrote the following:

Secession. It is their entire reason for existence. A cursory examination of the website shows that the party exists for the purpose of seceding from the union. That is the stated goal on the front page of the web site. Our records indicate that todd was a member for seven years. If this is incorrect then we need to understand the discrepancy. The statement you are suggesting be released would be innaccurate. The innaccuracy would bring greater media attention to this matter and be a distraction. According to your staff there have been no media inquiries into this and you received no questions about it during your interviews. If you are asked about it you should smile and say many alaskans who love their country join the party because it speeks to a tradition of political independence. Todd loves his country

We will not put out a statement and inflame this and create a situation where john has to adress this 

Isn't that great? It moves me.

Palin had also claimed that Todd registered with the AIP by accident, that Alaska voter registration forms list the party only as "Alaska Independent" and Todd had meant to register as an independent. But no. Alaska forms list the party by its full name.

Lying to her own side. Lying about points of fact available to anyone who might want to look. In-fucking-unbelievable. But Andrew Sullivan has already covered this ground. 

So all can one say is that Steve Schmidt lived the dream. He got to write Sarah Palin an email spelling out how full of shit she is.

update, Yeah, another thing. "I'm afraid he finds our country so flawed he pals around with terrorists." And meanwhile she's married to a guy who finds our country so flawed he wants his state to secede.

Marie's doing okay

I blogged here about Marie, who was waiting for biopsy results the last time I saw her. Good news: no cancer. I kind of guessed as much because I heard her voice halfway across Cafe Depot. Nothing subdued or weighed down about her; she's like normal.

I ran up and asked for news, and she gave me the lowdown. The lump, whatever it is, has to be removed, but there's no big threat. I congratulated her and she thanked me, but she's had the good news for a while now and really wanted to show me a framed print she had bought of a vase and flowers

"On Bullshit" discussed

My thanks to commenter Billjac for bringing up H. G. Frankfurt's On Bullshit. I found an excerpt (right here; warning, it cuts off in midsentence) and someday I may read the whole book. The excerpt, at least, is very good and taught me a lot.

First thing, I'd said that Frankfurt, in giving his concept the name "bullshit," simply  "slapped on" the term. No! "Bullshit" is most often used to mean something very broad, namely wildly and obviously false statements, but it is also used often enough to mean exactly the concept that Frankfurt has in mind. As far as I can tell, no other word is used for that one idea, so what can you do? Out of stubbornness, I'll refer to the Frankfurt-identified style of bullshit as "b.s.," but no, he was not at all arbitrary in saying "bullshit."

More later, I guess, but I've got to run.

Bad job on Palin

That Vanity Fair article on the Gal was pretty lame. (Mentioned it here.) It was notable mainly for two giant holes: nothing about the $150,000 shopping spree, nothing about "Africa is a country/who's in Nafta?" and the other imbecilities Palin was supposed to have committed during her debate prep. Those were major stories: if a really plugged-in behind-the-scenes tell-all piece about Palin comes out, I want to hear anything I can about whether those allegations are true.

All right, the piece mentions the shopping spree, a one-time passing mention, and refers to it as if spree and pricetag were established facts. But no details and no presentation of evidence. At the time of the original stories, some paper or web site reported that one of the stores in question said it had no record of the purchase allegedly made there. One hopes a big-deal piece like the Vanity Fair article would help us wade into questions like that. But the best we get is the forlorn hope that the spree story must be true because the article acts as if it were. Ah well.

(update, The corollary of that last point: the "Africa is a country/who's in Nafta?" stories are probably not true. If the article could have used them it would have, especially since it makes so much noise about the problems between Palin and McCain's staff during the runup to the debate. Now I get to play told-you-so because I warned friends when the stories came out. Never believe a story sourced to a Republican political operative, especially when he/she is anonymous. It's a measure of GOP flacks' moral standing that they are more dishonest than Palin is stupid.)

Another big gap: the fiasco over her nominee for Alaska attorney general. The guy got voted down -- "the first time in Alaska history that a cabinet nominee was rejected." Sounds major! But why did the guy get voted down? The article mentions that he has said dumb things about gays and that he is against "subsistence hunting preferences for Native Americans." That's it? That's enough to get you voted down in Alaska? Well, okay, I guess it's possible, but sounds like there's something missing.

Another: Palin's communications shop. The article says it's lousy, but everyone has heard that already. How about some examples, or something about the background and style of the shop's allegedly incompetent director? How about a concise summary of the back-and-forth over whether Palin would speak at the Senate-House fundraiser? That was a damn mess, a great chance to watch her staff's incompetence in action. Nothing.

The article is just all the usual stuff everyone knows, most of it mentioned headline fashion (did you know Levi Johnston did some tv interviews?), plus a few bits of new material as garnish. The Palin-as-God email, a couple of poignant blind quotes by McCain advisers about what a jerk Palin is, nothing else.

Fuck, what a disappointment. 

update, Now this looks promising. A CBS.com story headlined "Palin E-Mails Show Infighting with Staff." Something to check out.