This week at HU was devoted to Komikusu, a roundtable on selling awesome manga. Contributors included Erica Friedman, Kate Dacey, Brigid Alverson, Ryan Sands, Ed Chavez, Shaenon Garrity, Deb Aoki, and Peggy Burns. Also lots of insightful comments from folks like Xavier Guilbert, Melinda Beasi, Sean Michael Robinson, and more. Thanks so much to all those who posted, commented and read. I learned a bunch.
Utilitarians Everywhere
Over at Madeloud I provide an introduction to doom metal.
Dooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom. It sounds threatening and, well, doom-like, but in fact doom metal is a giant furry mammoth that just wants to cuddle and roll all over you…inadvertently crushing you into a gelatinous blot of assorted fluids.
Maybe we should start over.
Other Links
When people think NSFW, they think of things like this.
Starting tomorrow, HU is going to host a roundtable on the marketing of art manga. We're going to have a whole host of guest contributors...so click back through the week.
On HU
HU suffered a major outage and was down for 9 days. For a moment we thought we were going to lose about half our comments...but the folks at tcj, and especially blog admin Tom came through and managed to restore almost all the damage. More details here and here.
In less apocalyptic news; since the last link roundup, we completed our Asterios Polyp roundtable with posts by Caro, Robert Stanley Martin, me, and Matthias Wivel. Please note that all comments have not been restored to Caro and Robert's posts; we're hoping to fix that soon, but at the moment the threads may be a little disjointed.
Suat published a long two part discussion of The Times of Botchan. Part 1; Part 2.
As it turns out, I was reminded of an observation by G.K. Chesterton. In a 1911 essay, he said (in his cheerful, racist turn-of-the-20-century British way) that he felt Japan had imitated many Western things — the worst Western things. “I feel as if I had looked in a mirror and seen a monkey,” he wrote. And, reading “Rewriting Gender and Sexuality in English-Language Yaoi Fanfiction,” I had a similar experience. I love yaoi. I love Weiss Kruez fanfiction. And, to be overly dramatic about it, this essay ground my longtime passion and obsession into dust and ashes. I looked in the mirror and saw a demographic slice, vaguely exotic, in a Dances with Manporn sort of way, and ready to be dispassionately observed.
This book really helped me come to terms with my past, my regrets, my desires. Speaking as a straight white cisgendered male, I occasionally regret my transgressive decision to drop out of grad school to explore the fluid, abject jouissance of the non-(i)voried and nontowered. But then I encounter a text like this, and in its quivering, jellylike prose I remember why, though riven by radical difference, still numerous numinous heterogenous communities speak with a single pleasurable speech-act when they utter: “academics fucking suck.”
Kuan-yin's calm here may be in contrast to these unenlightened viewers, who squat like monkeys or strut like cranes, curious but oblivious. Or, perhaps, the joke isn't that the audience is unworthy of enlightenment; but rather that they are already enlightened. Because they are as undignified as the monkey or the crane, those who contemplate the picture have their own plain, contingent place within it, like cranes or monkeys who happen to be nearby when the bodhisattva comes.
One of the more noticeable results of this transformation was that r&b semi-fused with rap, and the resulting homunculus took over the world. Less spectacularly, the change wreaked havoc with typical pop career arcs. In the normal course of things, you expect a pop act to release a few good albums, and then get progressively crappier until they finally attain a plateau of unlistenable awfulness and fade into oblivion. But after r&b as a genre exploded aesthetically, singers like Brandy and Mariah Carey found themselves doing their best work in their second decade rather than their first.
All of which leads me to conclude that, if given the choice, I’d rather hear Christina Aguilera perform black metal than listen to Blake Judd try his hand at pop R&B. Some musicians should stick to their roots; others can only get better the more thoroughly they betray themselves.
Many black metal musicians have been inspired by Satanism or alternately by traditional cultures or nationalism. Is that where you’re coming from at all? Or are there other beliefs and convictions you have which influence your music?
ARCHAON: For us this is about the art. But when that is said, it’s an artform coming from a background that had a great focus on such beliefs/convictions, and to a certain extent we are all believers of the individual being it’s own master - that’s where we would meet. Obviously, we are four individuals that would give you four different answers to this subject, but none of us are worshipers as such. And 1349 has never been a religious or a political band, and (most probably?) never will. Even though we’re all quite philosophical...I cannot see any of us going down that path, mate.
Also at Madeloud, I have reviews of two short albums by pop R&B group Allure, a review of 1349's latest album Demonoir and a review of a new album by the dubstep duo Vex'd.
Starring: Robert Downey, Jr., Don Cheadle, Gwyneth Paltrow, Scarlett Johansson, Mickey Rourke, Samuel L. Jackson, Sam Rockwell
After watching the first Iron Man movie, I was curious as to how the franchise would deal with Iron Man’s lack of memorable villains. I suppose the Mandarin is relatively well-known, but Yellow Peril stereotypes don’t play well in Asian markets. And most of Iron Man’s remaining opponents are just guys in battle-suits, and at least half of them are Cold War commies. So they’re both interchangeable and out-dated.
The filmmakers behind Iron Man 2 addressed this problem by avoiding it as much as possible. Much of Iron Man 2 has nothing to do with Iron Man fighting Whiplash. Instead, the movie spends time on Tony Stark’s conflict with the U.S. government, or a subplot about Tony’s father issues, or a subplot about Tony’s impending death from palladium poisoning (due to the device in his chest), or a subplot about Jim “Rhodey” Rhodes becoming War Machine, or a subplot about Pepper Potts assuming control of Stark Industries, or a subplot about a rival weapons developer who wants to publicly upstage Tony, or a romantic subplot with Pepper Potts, or the introduction of Black Widow, or a couple of scenes that set-up the upcoming Thor movie, and a few scenes with Nick Fury that set-up the inevitable Avengers movie.
The avoidance strategy actually works well for most of the film. Easily the most enjoyable part of Iron Man is not the action but Robert Downey Jr.’s performance as Tony Stark. Downey-as-Stark can invent a new technology, outwit his business rival, and score a threesome with Swedish supermodels at the same time. In other words, he’s an unapologetic male empowerment fantasy, but without the trite moralizing of characters like Superman. And the best scenes in Iron Man 2 are when Robert Downey, Jr. hams it up as a self-aggrandizing (but lovable) jackass. Whether he’s mocking a congressional committee, or getting drunk while wearing the Iron Man suit, or flirting with Pepper Potts, Tony Stark is an entertaining character even without the superheroics. Unfortunately, Tony doesn’t get to have as much fun this time around. The Rules of Hollywood Trilogies demand that the second movie be darker than the first, so Tony has to spend a sizable portion of the film fretting over his mortality, which gets tiresome very quickly (spoiler: he doesn’t die).
And the film eventually has to get around to the external conflict. This is a summer blockbuster after all, so explosions are mandatory. And to be fair, there are a lot of explosions in the climax, and Mickey Rourke tries his hardest to make Whiplash seem like an intimidating character. But at the end of the day, Iron Man is still slumming it with a villain that shouldn’t keep him occupied for more than 15 minutes. As a comparison, imagine a Batman film where the only villain was KGBeast.
As for whether Iron Man 2 is worth your hard-earned money, it depends on your taste for big, dumb action movies. Iron Man 2 isn’t as good as its predecessor and it lacks a strong villain, but it does everything an action movie is expected to do, and in just over two hours.
Most of the week was devoted to the ongoing Asterios Polyp roundtable. Derik Badman, Craig Fischer, Vom Marlowe, Richard Cook, and me have all had our turns; Caroline Small, Robert Stanley Martin, and Matthias Wivel are still to come.
So, okay, it’s true—this is a big, dumb, Hollywood action-adventure vehicle with nothing in its head except things blowing up, sword fights and pretty actors staring soulfully into each others eyes for a moment before more things blow up.
If you want to know whether girls have become more or less promiscuous, you don’t look at what they’re reading or listening to, or even at what big sex scandal occurred in which random college or prep school. You look at teen pregnancy rates. You can find out in less than 120 seconds that teen pregnancy rates fell in virtually every state between 1988 and 2005. After 1995, teen pregnancy rates nationwide declined every year for a decade, hitting their lowest point in 30 years in 2005, smack dab in the middle of Flanagan’s hook up decade. It’s true that the next year, in 2006, rates rose by three percent, and preliminary findings suggest they may have risen again in 2006. Even so, rates remain historically low; in 2006 teen pregnancies were only 71.5 per 1000, as compared to, 83.6 per 1000 in 2000, 99.6 per 1000 in 1995, and 116.9 per 1000 in 1990. To suggest, as Flanagan does, that teens were especially promiscuous in the past decade and a half is simply wrong. On the contrary, teen pregnancy has apparently declined for more than a generation, the growth of the Internet notwithstanding.
