On HU
Featured Archive Post: Monika Bartyzel on Bella, Buffy, and Katniss.
Me on Jack Hill’s Switchblade Sisters and the feminist revolution.
Voices from the Archive: I express some skepticism about the excellence of Eddie Campbell’s prose.
Jacob Canfield reviews a bunch of student-run college comics publications.
Brian Cremins on the end of the Comics Buyer’s Guide and Matt Levin’s Walking Man comics.
I talk about gender in comics by Lilli Carré and Derik Badman.
Jog on why he writes the comics criticism he writes.
Bert Stabler asked folks to help him out with recommendations of comics for his high school art class.
Vom Marlowe reviews Lunch Lady and the League of Librarians.
Our weekly shared music post features Wax Audio’s amazing mashup “Stayin’ Alive in the Wall.”
Utilitarians Everywhere
At the Atlantic I wrote about Azzarello’s violent, man-pandering Wonder Woman.
Also at the Atlantic I talk about noir and misogyny and Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects.
At Splice Today I explain that Matthew Houk is not as cool as Johnny Cash, and that he should really shut up.
Also at Splice I write about the ambience of pop and the pop of ambience.
Other Links
Alyssa Rosenberg talks about video games and the violent fantasies of the gun lobby.
Carly Lewis suggests that men stop writing celebrity profiles of women.
Helen Rittelmeyer on less sex and more God at Yale.
Russ Smith speculates on personnel changes at TNR.
A short piece on the state of video games.
Jadehawk on whether there will be sex work in the feminist utopia.
C.T. May sneers at House of Cards.
This Week’s Reading
Finished Carol Ann Harris’ Fleetwood Mac tell-all memoir; read Franklin Einspruch’s Comics as Poetry anthology; read the Azzarello/Chiang second volume of Wonder Woman; just started Anne Bronte’s Agnes Grey.
I finished The Savage Detectives! / Started Bolano’s Woes of the True Policeman, but the entire first chapter is lifted with minor changes from The Savage Detectives, so I might just consider myself as having read Bolano’s definite work and move on. Great great book.
I also read The Silver Linings Playbook in B&N the other day. Since the movie is a romantic comedy I was expecting something more humorous, but it’s one of those childish unreliable narrator stories (like The Dog in the Night-Time) with a lot of teachable moments. Also a very questionable “my only black friend” Magical Negro character who just happens to rescue the narrator from his mugging in North Philadelphia because everyone knows that when you go to North Philadelphia you get mugged, etc. Anyway, the movie is better than the book, but the book does have a very realistic take on the way some people use sports as a channel for their emotions.
No more reading until I finish the writing I have to do!
I’m gonna disagree with your essay about pop music being associated with sunny vacuity and banal self-actualization. Maybe sometimes, but I think most pop music right now is club music, and it’s as dedicated to exploring the sadness of hedonism as anything sunny. Really popular pop musicians increasingly live in a disconnected bubble… of course when they try to break out of it and write something other people can relate to, it’s gonna sound vacuous and banal. Most of the time, though, they’re not trying to do that.
Maybe we just listen to different radio stations.
Ah…you mean the pop ambient one. It’s definitely white retro pop I’m talking about I think; the Beach Boys and their offspring, rather than Michael Jackson and his.
Ah ok then – carry on!
Recently I read Moorcock’s Behold The Man and it was really good. It is about a neurotic guy with lots of serious issues trying to find refuge in religion and he eventually goes back in time to witness Jesus and all the events that culminate in the crucifixion; he finds things slightly different from the way he wanted them to be and he needs to shift events towards what christians believe happened.
Moorcock is not religious but he does a good job of really caring about the things a christian might care about while also putting in oppositional elements and things that would be seen as blasphemous by many. Some really good explanations for the way people might have seen the world back then and why they might have thought they witnessed miracles.
Even though I’m not religious at all, it was eerie how the book was critiquing a lot of flaws I have, even though I wouldnt call it preachy, I felt like I was getting a telling off that I deserved!
I’m halfway through Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived In The Castle. I had reservations at the start about the amount of descriptions of commonplace details but it eventually makes sense why she does this so much. Another screwed up main character who is worryingly like myself, but also with sweet and girly qualities I wish I had.
I just received the 3 volume edition of the complete Clark Ashton Smith poems. It has some newly discovered poems in this new paperback edition. It includes a lot of his translations of french and spanish poets like Baudelaire.
For some reason it doesnt include the prose poems (which I own in a different book called Nostalgia Of The Unknown). It annoys me when complete poetry collections dont collect the prose poems.
I also screwed up a drawing I had been working on for a few weeks but still liked it enough to post it on my site.
I finished reading Lance Henricksen’s biography*, “Not Bad for a Human” ( http://www.amazon.com/Not-Human-Lance-James-Henriksen/dp/0983432503 ), filled with fascinating, delightful, sometimes hilarious accounts of his remarkable experiences…
———————-
[When playing Abraham Lincoln]
We stayed at the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond, Virginia. And when I walked into the lobby of the hotel [looking like Lincoln], there was a southern woman way across the lobby who stopped and said, “Oh my gawwwd!” Later, she said, “He had the gall to walk right up Main Street! That Lincoln had the gall….” Like it all just happened yesterday….
I also remember we were shooting at a historical house in an area of town that’s now a black ghetto. Inside, the house looks exactly the way it was in Lincoln’s day, and there’s a big steel fence around it so that nobody can get in. The production crew parked the trailers like two blocks away. When they called me to the set, I was in full [Lincoln] regalia. I started walking to the set, and this black kid comes toward me on a bicycle and he went, “God damn!” He circled me and he said, “Emancipation Proclamation – I love that shit!” And then he split. What a moment that was.
———————
…And am almost done with the excellent “Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America,” by “Washington Post” columnist Eugene Robinson. ( http://www.amazon.com/Disintegration-Splintering-America-Eugene-Robinson/dp/0767929969 ).
*Though it’s described as an autobiography, unlike the usual case with those, most is not “first-person narrated” by Henricksen; only sections (though there are many), such as the one above, are.
Read a bit but didn’t finish anything. Watched several movies, though:
re-watched the first two episodes of The Decade of Destruction (Adrian Cowell’s excellent 1990 Frontline documentary about environmentalism, development, indigenous rights, and land-conflicts in Brazil during the 80s).
Also re-watched some Disney movies of varying quality (Fantasia, Snow White, The AristoCats).
And… Time Regained (Ruiz), Annie Get Your Gun, Exotica (Atom Egoyan), Tristram Shandy (Winterbottom), Swordsman III: The East Is Red, Bedlam and Isle of the Dead (from the Val Lewton horror collection), Unstoppable (Tony Scott), The Insect Woman (Imamura – didn’t think this was anything special).
I finished reading Mockingjay, which was a decent enough end to the Hunger Games trilogy, but I’ll be surprised if they don’t change the ending for the movies; it’s pretty dark and kind of anticlimactic, and will probably leave a lot of moviegoers pissed off. I do appreciate the way it really emphasizes the damage that war does to both participants and civilians, even when the cause is just. And while I found Katniss to be incredibly frustrating at times, that’s mostly because she’s a teenager. Overall, a pretty good series, but it’s a case of me realizing why I’m growing increasingly tired of YA stuff. That is, it’s definitely good for its audience, but I feel like I’m getting too old for this shit.
I’m now reading Joe Hill’s Heart Shaped Box for a book club, and in a nice case of timing, I also read the second volume of Azzarello and company’s Wonder Woman. It’s pretty nice-looking, and the umpteenth reinvention of the Greek pantheon is interesting, but I agree with Noah that it’s all a bunch of violence and general grossness, the kind of thing that has ruined the character for at least the last 20 years, but actually ever since Marston. The real revolutionary thing to do would be to attempt to go back to those wacky adventures, or at least make something more girl-friendly rather than the latest violent, masculine update of the consummate female superhero. That seems like it’s never going to happen though, unless some really, really major shakeups happen at DC comics.
I think the only movie I watched this week was Brave, which I liked quite a bit. Gorgeous animation, and a nice mother-daughter relationship. Too scary for my daughter though, no matter how much she wants to see it.
Is Joe Hill worth reading?
And I kind of enjoyed Azzarello’s WW (sorry, Noah … no I’m not). It’s better than the original, at least.
I read David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Subdee brought him up in the Django roundtable, after which I (re-)discovered that Graeber was one of the participants in a flareup with Zizek over violence and anarchism that occurred a few years ago regarding the latter’s review of Critchley’s Infinitely Demanding (a book I recommend flinging across the room after you’ve read it). I share some sympathies with anarchists, and find the discussion endlessly fascinating, but when it comes to positive statements about their utopias (as opposed to negative takes on capitalism), anarchy comes across as pure fantasy land … and Graeber’s book is no exception. Still, he offers a lot of interesting analyses of counter-hegemonic enclaves that have existed in the world. I look forward to his book Debt.
Joe Hill is terrific, in both senses of the word.
He is, of course, the son of Stephen King, and I understand why he chose a nom de plume: doesn’t want to be seen as “daddy’s boy”, which is admirable.
But I also think he didn’t want to put up with the endlessly stale ‘You must be Joe King’ gag.
(‘You must be JOKING’…geddit? Snarf, snarf!)
I think this is the first Joe Hill I’ve read (although I hear Locke & Key is good, so I might check that out given the chance), and its okay so far. I’m still pretty early on in the book, but there have been some decent creepy bits. We’ll see how it goes.
I wouldn’t say I dislike Azzarello’s WW, in that it isn’t badly written or drawn, but there’s just nothing there that I really find worth reading, aside from a semi-interesting reinvention of the Greek gods, which isn’t exactly anything that’s going to set the world on fire. I suppose I might have found the “shocking” revelation regarding the Amazons being rapist-murderers worthy of attention if I hadn’t read it discussed so much on various comics websites six months ago (and even then, I didn’t really care one way or the other, since I don’t base my existence around the actions of fictional characters). At this stage in my comics-reading life, I don’t feel like I need to waste much time on the exploits of costumed goofballs punching each other out, and whenever I dabble in them (even in ones that are a bit off the beaten path, like this version of WW), that feeling is just confirmed.