Utilitarian Review 7/13/13

Curtis Le May …said that he had wanted to burn down North Korea’s big cities at the inception of the war, but the Pentagon refused—“it’s too horrible.” So over a period of three years, he went on, “We burned down every [sic] town in North Korea and South Korea too, …Now, over a period of three years this is palatable, but to kill a few people to stop this from happening—a lot of people can’t stomach it.”

General Ridgeway, who at times deplored the free-fire zones he saw, nonetheless wanted bigger and better napalm bombs…in early 1951, thus to “wipe out all life in tactical locality and save the lives of our soldiers.”

The Pujon river dam was designed to hold 670 million cubic meters of water, and had a pressure gradient of 999 meters…According to the official U.S.Air Force history, when fifty-nine F-84 Thunderjets breached the high containing wall of Toksan on May 13 1953, the onrushing flood destroyed six miles of railway, five bridges, two miles of highway, and five square miles of rice paddies…After the war, it took 200,000 man-days of labor to reconstruct the reservoir.

One day Pfc. James Ransome, Jr.’s unit suffered a “friendly” hit of this wonder weapon: his men rolled in the snow in agony and begged him to shoot them, as their skin burned to a crisp and peeled back “like fried potato chips.”

…Operation Hudson Harbor…part of a large project involving “overt exploitation in Korea by the Department of Defense and covert exploitation by the Central Intelligence Agency of the possible use of novel weapons.” This project sought to establish the capability to use atomic weapons on the battlefield…lone B-29 bombers were lifted from Okinawa…and sent over North Korea on simulated atomic bombing runs, dropping “dummy” A-bombs or heavy TNT bombs.

After his release from North Korean custody Gen. William F. Dean wrote that “the town of Huichon amazed me. The city I’d seen before-two storied buildings, a prominent main street-wasn’t there any more.” He encountered the “unoccupied shells” of town after town, and villages where rubble or or “snowy open space” were all that remained.

Meray had arrived in August 1951 and witnessed “a complete devastation between the Yalu River and the capital,” Pyongyang. There were simply “no more cities in North Korea.”…A British reporter found communities where nothing was left but “a low, wide mound of violet ashes.”

…at least 50 percent of eighteen out of the North’s twenty-two major cities were obliterated.

…the pilots came back to their ships stinking of vomit twisted from their vitals by the shock of what they had to do.

Utsubora: The Erotic Exigencies of Authorship

Posted on July 12, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

“Utsu…means “depression” or “melancholy.” Tsubo…mean “urn.” …in addition to connotations of a hinter emptiness, the title strongly echoes nouns with a contrary impression of crude vitality… Utsubora is baffling yet familiar; negative yet animate; empty yet organic.” — the editor, Utsubora.

The word online is that Asumiko Nakamura’s Utsubora has had dismal pre-orders. First published in 2008-9 in the pages of Manga Erotics F, it has been released to a patter of enthusiastic notices (see reviews listed below) but little else. While eroticism might sound like a sure seller, this is less the case when it is sold under the guise of “literary” seriousness (the English language edition is by Vertical which does a lot of well-designed Tezuka). And there is certainly a vague kind of high-mindedness trying to crawl out of Nakamura’s manga which is ambiguously subtitled “The Story of a Novelist.”

In the opening pages, a pallid statuesque beauty jumps head first from a tall building leaving an unrecognizable mess on the pavement below. A famous novelist, Shun Mizorogi, is called in by the investigators to identify the body (thought to be that of Aki Fujino) a clearly impossible task since only her lower limbs are well preserved. As it happens, he is one of only two names on her phone contact list and hence a suspect. At the morgue, he meets the victim’s twin sister, a sphinx-like creature going by the name of Sakura Miki, a cipher who leaves a list of false contacts for the police but somehow clings to him in a symbiotic or perhaps parasitical relationship. He has been plagiarizing her sister’s (a budding authoress) manuscripts and becomes dependent on Miki for the remainder of his serialized novel which is also titled, Utsubora. The rest is a metaphorical ramble around questions of authorship and creation, played out in the mystery surrounding the lives of Aki and Miki.

One could be forgiven for assuming that the novelist of the subtitle (an editorial addition or in the original?) is the male protagonist whose fate structures the story, but Nakamura’s ambiguity is purposeful—that appellation refers not only to Mizorogi (the male author) but also the plagiarized suicidal authoress (Aki Fujino), and Nakamura herself. Aki and Miki are not so much characters but personifications of author and story. The “true” author of Utsubora is the woman (Aki) seen flinging herself head first to the sidewalk, a shadowy figure who is seemingly plain and unadorned but then transformed by means of surgery to the physical likeness of her friend and self-professed sister, Miki (the female protagonist of the tale).

This plastic surgery has less to do with soap opera conceits than the way an authoress’ appearance and personality is transformed ( in the imagination of her readers; and personally and insidiously) into something else—a physical likeness of similar, angelic temperament; mysteriously distant yet welcomingly sexual; a hidden, mythic, and unaging figure. A vision of how personal experience when turned to fiction can lead to the molding of the writer herself. We can detect a plot of similar temperament in Roman Polanski’s The Tenant where the actor-director becomes the object and victim of his fears in a movie of his own conception. In the structure and premonitions of Utsubora, we can see an echo of the fatalism of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now—Donald Sutherland’s almost authorial paranoia in that film being the impetus of the plot and entire movie. It is this mixture of grief, writerly fixation, and eroticism which creates that tinge of horror in Nakamura’s manga.

Miki is the personification of Aki’s (and Nakamura’s) story. In deference to this, she is frequently seen conveying handwritten manuscripts to either Shun Mizorogi or his editor. At other times she is depicted against scattered sheets of drafts. The moment Utsubora is released in its final form by Mizorogi is also the moment she disappears from the manga as a character—turning at once into a caricature of the typical cheerful manga heroine—her job and reason for existing finally brought to a close. That segment of the manga where Mizorogi’s editor debates the primacy of the story over authorial credit seems a moment of metatextual self-realization, one might even say a kind of sentience on the part of the manga. It is easy to see a trace of personal experience in that conflict between the physical availability of a story and the act of plagiarism.

As for the eroticism, the authoress seems to take a singular delight in finger fucks but appears more abashed by actual coitus. Scenes involving the latter are broken up and defused through her panel work and other forms of obfuscation. The blow jobs depicted are undeniably squalid and damp; it is an act which is depicted with contempt and disgust.

One might see in this a decidedly feminine approach, the use of lengthy fingers being more readily available or even more attractive than the male sex organ (I have yet to read any of Nakamura’s Boy’s Love manga to confirm this). The reiteration of this device in comics will undoubtedly suggest the work of Guido Crepax to a Western audience—that arch student and adapter of all forms of literary smut. That penchant for gnarled, stringy hands inserted into orifices, as well as a boundless attraction to the sopping juices of a tight cunt are all hallmarks of that Italian cartoonist.

Nakamura’s delicate minimalism and elongated figures suggest the work of Aubrey Beardsley and the smattering of reviews I’ve read offer up an amalgamation of this Western eroticism and that found in Ukiyo-e in explanation of the final product (though examples from the latter seem considerably more frank).

Crepax’s vision suggests violence and control while Nakamura’s allows for desirability and fulfillment; an almost feminine coyness about the penis which is quite the reverse in Crepax where the male organ is an erect weapon.

Despite all this, there are immense difficulties for the would be reader before we get to that final moment of legerdemain. There are about 50 pages of scattered plot here fluffed out to 450 pages of mind numbing repetition of figuration and expression, as well as pointless nudity and pin-ups. All to often this is a suspense novel without any suspense, an exercise in eroticism without sensuality, a depiction of authorial obsession with nary any artistry—a torrent of metaphors with almost no consequence or real depth. It’s as if you bought a comic and all you got was paper and ink. The high page count and, one suspects, the pace of publishing has resulted in far too many pages of quite insipid mood, depiction of place, and composition. Only at the end does some form of concentrated artistry rear its head.

The flurry of barely developed plot devices is oppressive and infuriating. For instance, the incessant cradle snatching and the reassertion of the “natural” attraction of young girls for boring wrinkly, old farts (especially when they spend all day cooking for them)—all this clipped from the celebrated annals of incest in Japanese Adult Videos. Yes, even female mangakas can be idiots (or maybe ironic, it’s hard to tell). Tired tropes abound, it is almost as if dutiful eroticism had anesthetized creativity. And thus we have Aki as an assertive succubus, entrapping the author with her wiles and literature, her form transformed not by smothering the devil’s bottom with adulation but by heeding the surgeon’s knife.

The tear jerking moment when Nakamura lifts a plot point from episode Z of your favorite police procedural crap—the cop who gets overly involved because the victim reminds him of his sister (or was that wife, mother, or child)—is certainly incitement to book burning.

A trying experience then but one alleviated by a lengthy and well inscribed denouement—the solitary reason one might pause in the act of casting a copy into the outer darkness to mention this work at all.

_____

Other reactions

There aren’t many to choose from as yet but there’s a review by Sean Gaffney, another at Otaku Champloo, and finally one by Connie C..

I Am Tonto

Posted on July 10, 2013 by Chris Gavaler

If you’re wondering why Johnny Depp has a dead bird on his head in the new Lone Ranger, look at Kirby Sattler’s “I Am Crow.” The painting is to Tonto as Keith Richards is to Captain Jack Sparrow. It also has as much to do with Native America as the Rolling Stones have with the 1700s Caribbean.

According to Sattler’s website, his “paintings are interpretations based upon the nomadic tribes of the 19th century American Plains.”If you think that means the model for or at least the subject matter of “I Am Crow” is a Crow Indian, think again. “I,” explains Sattler, “purposely do not denote a specific tribal affiliation to my paintings, allowing the personal sensibilities and knowledge of the viewer to create their own stories.”(Mr. Depp’s personal sensibilities, for instance, tell him the dead bird on his head likes peanuts.) Sattler’s website also notes that the sixty-three-year-old painter is of “non-native blood” and that he’s neither a “historian” or “ethnologist.” And yet his “distinctive style of realism” avoids being “presumptuous” by giving his work “an authentic appearance” but “without the constraints of having to adhere to historical accuracy.”

That makes Sattler a perfect source for Johnny Depp’s equally imperfect Indian fantasy. The actor may have a Cherokee or possibly Creek grandmother (how else to explain those cheek bones?), and he told Rolling Stone that hopes his portrayal of Tonto will “maybe give some hope to kids on the reservations.” His first Indian character was named “Nobody” in Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 Dead Man (a film I really really tried to like), which prompted Depp to direct himself in The Brave two years later. The film wasn’t released in the U.S., not even on video, so I’ll have to trust the IMBd summary:

“An unemployed alcoholic Native American Indian lives on a trailer park with his wife and two children. Convinced that he has nothing to offer this world, he agrees to be tortured to death by a gang of rednecks in return for $50,000.”

If you replace “gang of rednecks” with “American pop culture,” that’s a decent allegory for Tonto.

Depp’s performance is also based on Jay Silverheels, who played Tonto in the 50s TV show. He was born Harold Smith on a Canadian Mohawk reservation, but for some reason went with “Silverheels” when he moved to Hollywood. His performance in turn was based on John Todd, who voiced Tonto in the 30s radio show. Todd was 77 and the last original cast member when the show went off the air in 1954. He was also Irish, but was happy enough to play dress-up for publicity shots. The network replaced him for public appearances, and briefly on air too, but, the story goes, the college-educated Native actor refused to read Tonto’s ungrammatical lines, so Todd got the job back.

Tonto was originally Potawatomi, so he and his Michigan tribe (the program aired from Detroit) were a bit lost in the Southwest. Someone changed it to Apache, but Camp Camp Kee Mo Sah Bee, the summer camp the director visited as a kid, is a better designation. Tonto means “stupid” or “silly” in Spanish, but that might be coincidence. The writer just needed someone for the Long Ranger to talk to.

The same creative team gave the Green Hornet a chauffeur for the same reason. The Lone Ranger may look like someone grabbed a superhero, slapped a cowboy hat on his head, and dropped him in a Western, but the lines of influence run the other direction. The Lone Ranger premiered in 1933, five years before Superman hit newsstands. It was a hit, so when the radio station demanded another show like it, they just updated the formula. The 1936 Green Hornet is an urban Lone Ranger. His horse “Silver” morphed into the limo “Black Beauty.” His Indian sidekick transformed into an oriental sidekick (Kato’s ethnic designations make less sense than Tonto’s). The Hornet’s even a blood relative. His alter ego, Britt Reid, is the Lone Ranger’s great nephew. Britt’s father, the Ranger’s nephew, is Dan. John Todd voiced him too. The Shakespearean actor dropped Tonto’s broken English to record the elderly Mr. Reid into the same microphone.

But now the superhero influence really is reversed. Seth Rogen’s Green Hornet beat Armie Hammer’s Lone Ranger to theaters by two years, both fueled by the killing Marvel and Warner Brothers are making on their assorted Avengers and Justice Leaguers. Even Kirby Sattler’s interest in “the Indian” has more to do more with pop culture than “Indigenous Peoples of the Earth.” The crow Johnny plopped on his head is, according to Sattler, a source of power:

“Any object- a stone, a plait of sweet grass, a part of an animal, the wing of a bird- could contain the essence of the metaphysical qualities identified to the objects and desired by the Native American. This acquisition of ‘Medicine’, or spiritual power, . . . provided the conduit to the unseen forces of the universe which predominated their lives. . . when combined with the proper ritual or prayer there would be a transference of identity. . . .More than just aesthetic adornment, it was an outward manifestation of their identity.”

And that, Kirby, is what we folks of non-native blood call a superhero:

Any object—a lantern, a ring, a bat, even an initial—contains the symbolic essence of the superpowers identified with the object and desired by the alter ego. Once acquired, unseen forces of the multiverse predominate the lives of the wearer. When combined with the proper ritual or prayer (“Shazam!”), there is a transference of identity (“Hulk smash!”). More than adornment, the superhero’s costume is an outward manifestation of his identity.

I could quote some juicy bits from Michael Chabon’s “Secret Skin: an essay in unitard theory,” but you get the idea.

None of this is to say The Lone Ranger is a stupid movie. It’s more entertainingly silly than the black and white reruns I watched as a kid. I also attended “Indian Guides,” in which fathers and sons of my Pittsburgh suburb assembled plastic tomahawks and heard legends of “Falling Rock,” the mysterious brave whom yellow road signs warned drivers to beware. So my “personal sensibilities and knowledge” of things Indian is right up there with Sattler and Depp. (My novel School for Tricksters is about two fakes pretending to be Indians too, but we’re talking Lone Ranger right now.)

I do give director Gore Verbinski credit for framing the tale as a 1933 Wild West exhibit, a style of realism even less constrained than Mr. Sattler’s. Tonto, “A Noble Savage in His Natural Habitat,” is a magically talking mannequin. That almost but not quite makes up for the self-annihilating Comanche (Tonto’s latest tribe) who aid Manifest Destiny by declaring themselves ghosts and charging into the spray of Gatling guns. (Can you feel the hope surging through those reservation kids?) Tonto at least gets an upgrade from racially laconic sidekick to racially madcap mentor. He and Grasshopper Ranger romp across a cinematic West that owes less to John Ford than Wile E. Coyote. You’ll be amazed by how many CGI-ed train stunts Verbinski can cram into two and a half hours (longer if your theater’s projector overheats as ours did).

Verbinski also includes several werewolf-esque bunny rabbits, so there’s far far more whimsy in Lone Ranger than in the masked mayhem Warner Brothers or even Marvel Entertainment have been putting out. Superheroes are naturally Goofy Creatures best exhibited in a Habitat of Whimsy, so I applaud the Verbinki bunnies (they have fangs!). I would just tweak the latest Tonto by revealing him for what he’s always been. A deranged white guy pretending to be an Indian. Surely Gore and Johnny could mine some comic silver from that premise.

Crotch Dance

Posted on July 7, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder:Voice starts with a beauty pageant — specifically, the Llaverac Clan Conformation Competition, as the text box/announcer tells us. The announcer goes on to explain that the girls are being judged to see if they fit the physical specifications of the Llaverac clan. The candidate being inspected (Jin St. John, we’re told) gets up close to the judges, thrusting her crotch in the face of one elderly woman, which is apparently in accord with contest traditions. Then, suddenly, a bulge appears in her panties. The elderly female judge recoils, and the announcer snickers, “I guess that’s why they call them ball gowns.”

Obviously, Jin has a penis — or, you know, maybe not quite so obviously. I read the first volume of Finder a while back, and so had at least a vague memory that Llavarec gender isn’t always quite what it looks like, but still, I have to admit that I was not at first exactly sure what I was looking at in those images above. McNeil does provide some additional clues in the next pages for the slow of mind…which, as one of the slow of mind who sort of but maybe not quite got the dick joke, I appreciated.

Again, my confusion around the dick is a sign that I’m a little dense. But it’s also, I think, thematized by the comic. The Finder series is broadly cyberpunk, and one of the characteristics of cyberpunk is disorientation — a far future setting where social realities, and even physical characteristics, are so different from ours that it’s difficult to get your bearings. McNeil provides some notes at the back which help a bit…but even those end up often emphasizing the extent to which the world on view here is a mystery. “Can’t remember for the life of me which clan the dude in the suite represents,” is a not atypical author’s note — suggesting that even McNeil herself is not the master of, but rather a bemused tourist within, the world she has created.

In Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick argues that realist fiction is built around the manipulation of knowledge and lack of knowledge to create a kind of unspoken blackmail. The writer writes as if she knows everything in the world she has created, and the reader then pretends that she follows along, and knows everything as well. The reward for acquiescing to the author’s mastery is a sense of mastery for oneself — to acknowledge knowledge is to be the knower. There’s a complicity; a doubled pretense of knowingness.Sedgwick links this to the lines of force and knowledge around the closet, where what you know (i.e., who is gay) and what you don’t know (i.e., who is gay) become a matter of threat, mastery, power, and self-definition.

McNeil’s diffident stance towards her own work in her notes (emphasized again in a recent Facebook comment where she says ” I really had no idea what I was doing as a writer when I first began [Finder]”) seems like a rejection of Sedgwick’s formulation — a refusal of the pact of knowingness between writer and reader. And I think it is a rejection to some degree…though maybe, also, an investigation, or elaboration. Finder:Voice, in this reading, is deliberately about knowledge, about narrative, about the closet, and about the way people negotiate all those things, or try to.

The book’s protagonist, Rachel, is a Llaverac (and how do you pronounce that, anyway?) entered in the beauty pageant/conformation contest. Despite the fact that her father is not a Llaverac, she seems to be doing well, and seems like she has a chance to win, or at least make the cut to be accepted into Llaverac clan, with resulting honor, wealth, power, and the opportunity to share those things with her family. Before the final competition, though, she is robbed, and loses her hereditary clan ring — which means she’ll be disqualified unless she can get it back. The bulk of the story is devoted to her search for Jaegar, Rachel’s mother’s boyfriend, on whom Rachel has a longstanding crush, and who is an expert at finding lost items.

In his essay about Finder:Voice, Richard Cook points out that Jaeger functions in the Finder series in general as a hyperbolic lodestone of masculine competence and cool. The search for him, then, is in part a search for the penis or phallus. Rachel wants him in no small part because she wants to be him. She sees herself as incompetent; or as she puts it “I am weak, there is something basically unable in me.” Jaegar represents for Rachel not only her knight in shining armor, but her wish to become that knight. Part of her wants the ball gown — but part of wanting the ball gown is the hope that wearing it will mean she gets balls.

Wanting the phallus seems, at least, fairly uncomplicated — who doesn’t want power? And yet, the bulk of Voice is dedicated to demonstrating that balls are elusive, and that even when you find them it’s not always exactly clear what you have, or how to use it. In fact, you could almost see the book as a series of more or less false or confusing revelations about genitals. There’s Jin’s suddenly visible penis at the book’s beginning, of course. Then Rachel’s mom Emma tells her that her non-Llaverac dad is not her real dad; instead she’s the daughter of a Llaverac, Lord Rodzhina.

Rachel tries to get help from Rodzhina, but he refuses her because he thinks she’s incompetent (no balls.) Then, Rachel tries to get her sister Lynn to help her find the lost ring; when Lynne refuses, Rachel tells everyone who will listen that Lynn has a penis — only to have them laugh at her, because, yeah, they already knew that.

Finally at the end of the book, Rachel is allowed into the competition after she blackmails Rodzhina by threatening to reveal that he is not a man at all (which means, tangentially, that he is not her father.) He’s often helped get girls through the competition by claiming they were his illegitimate children — but he hasn’t actually fathered any children since he’s a woman, and having this made public would therefore cause him embarrassment and difficulties.

Rachel repeatedly fails, then, when she tries to manipulate knowledge about the penis. She only succeeds when she has knowledge about where the penis isn’t. This is mirrored in her search for the-penis-that-is-Jaegar; it’s only when she gives up on finding him that she manages to make progress.

Said progress involves stumbling into a drunken orgy with a bunch of Ascians (a marginalized ethnic group, to which Jaegar belongs) and having them hand over an alternate ring — not hers, but someone else’s. She succeeds, then, by basically losing all knowledge of everything, even (especially?) her body — she blacks out, and doesn’t even seem to be entirely sure whether she had sex or not (at the end of the comic she’s wondering worriedly what she’ll do if she misses her next period.)

So…I don’t think Rachel’s choices are exactly supposed to be normative. This isn’t necessarily a celebration of zen and the art of being fucked senseless (and/or dickless). Rather, it seems like it’s a meditation on the way that gender and knowledge wrap around each other — and on the way that following those wrappings around is a big part of what it means to grow up, or to survive growing up. Rachel succeeds in the beauty pageant — succeeds at becoming a woman — by using tactics traditionally associated with women. These include (as Richard Cook says), gossip, and (as Richard doesn’t quite say) trading on her body in order to gain allies and power and knowledge. (At the end of the book she says, ‘all my life i wanted to be able to do things, fix things, make things happen, without feeling like a conniving whore” — but of course her victory at the end, which gives her power and the ability to do things and fix things, arguably comes about because she’s been a very accomplished conniving whore.) Yet Rachel also succeeds, again, by recognizing where the penis isn’t — and by figuring out that the people who claim to have power over her are as phallusless as she is. And, in turn, understanding that maybe means she’s not so phallusless; she gets to put her finger through that ring, after all.

Lord Rod (which is an interesting name) gives Rachel a speech about fake books, and about how a truly accurate, undetectable fake can be more valuable than the real thing. Judith Butler, in her discussions of gender, says something similar — there is no original of gender, she contends, so copies of gender which show their copiedness, like drag, are more valuable, or truer than the “real” thing.

Rod is himself in doubled drag — a woman who looks like a woman disguised as a man who looks like a woman. And what about Rachel? Is she a woman pretending to be a woman? Is she faking having a phallus or faking not having one? And is she more valuable as a fake or as the real thing? If there’s an answer here, it seems like it’s neither that the phallus is truth nor that the phallus is false nor that there is no phallus, but some indeterminate, situational amalgam of all those things. Do we know Rod has no penis? Do we know Rachel has none? Only because McNeil tells us so. Drawings are what we say they are; their gender is made of knowledge, not bodies. Like ours, maybe, though it’s hard to know for sure. Once the story starts and the future turns to past, how can you tell the dancer from the dance?

Peter Sattler on Clowes Agonistes

Posted on July 7, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

Peter Sattler wrote a great comment about Dan Clowes’ Wilson and the oppressive weight of comics. So I thought I’d reprint it below.

I had never thought much about linking gender and comics per se in Clowes’ work, but you make a strong case, especially for Velvet Glove.

Over the years, I have only presented a few papers that touch on Clowes, usually in the context of broader claims. But I tend to agree with you that his work goes out of its way to thematize the artist’s and/or the story’s struggle against comics themselves – against a form that, as Clowes presents it, seems unable to encompass interior states, unable to escape its own theatricality and artificiality, unable to circumvent its own closed system of beginnings and endings, set-ups and punch-lines. Clowes dramatizes his contest with these limits, transforming that contest into the content of his graphic novels.

Take Wilson, for example. The sense of connection, of understanding, of interiority, of history that the Clowes’ characters – mainly, Wilson – repeatedly say that they want are always thwarted by the protagonist’s unwillingness to stop talking, by his demand that other people – especially women – shut up. It would be easy to see this as a feature of Clowes’ misanthropic creation: a man too horrifically self-involved to see his own villainy. But on the page itself, this solipsism is most visibly as a series of qualities endemic to comics: the obscuring and endless series of word balloons; the need to keep talking, running an externalized and insuperable inner monologue; the infantilizing and ironizing iconography; the truncated and isolating nature of the comics page itself (and few long-form cartoonists seems as wedded to the idea of comics as a collection of discrete pages as Clowes).

Indeed, it is the rigid nature of the page – imposing its own unavoidable sense of beginnings and endings – that most circumscribes Wilson’s exploration of human connection and meaning. At least in this volume, no matter what one says or sees, the ultimate reality is that any particular page must come to an end, must toss the reader back outside the work, and must, to some extent, deflate anything that might count as narrative. No matter what one encounters in the middle of the strip, it must always end when the page and its panels run out. For Wilson, this means ending with a joke. But in Clowes’ world, the deflationary punch-line and the structure of the Sunday funnies are just shorthand for the fragmented, one-page-at-a-time and one-damn-page-after-another nature of comics overall.

In Wilson, it is comics that keeps you talking, and it is comics – at least as Clowes represents them – that shuts you up. The form of comics lends its stamp to the structures of your thought (“Insert ass-rape joke here”) and to, it seems, how Clowes can represent — or not represent — thinking. (At last year’s conference at the University of Chicago, Clowes told the audience that he now tends to experience his own life in one-page segments.) I’m not trying to say that Clowes hates comics, of course; he clearly loves them. But as much as anything, he seems to be infatuated with the conflict that he has with the medium – with its history (or you argue, Noah) and with its historically inflected structure.

The most common last-panel punch-lines in Wilson involve excrement, and three different times those joke involves shit that is boxed and mailed. Perhaps that is the ultimately stand in for what comics can give you. That final delivery always comes, promising a special message. But it always comes out as dog poop.

Debaser

Posted on July 6, 2013 by Albert Stabler

My dear friend Chris, who loves the Pixies, mentioned their new song “Bagboy” to me. The song is a cryptic quiet-loud hiss-shout anthem in their classic style, but the video overwhelms it somewhat for me, as it features a young white boy trashing a house with colorful items (Froot Loops, balloons, liquids, sundry mists and sprays)– a house that, at the very end, is revealed to (presumably) belong to an African-American woman who is tied up in the bedroom (foreshadowed by a photo early in the video). Perhaps a potent metaphor for post-multicultural something. Perhaps an unproblematized depiction of a hate crime. Perhaps a strange reference to the mad Negress of Jane Eyre– who knows?

Anyhow, here’s a digest of my conversation with Chris, but I’m paraphrasing his devil’s advocate parts, as he felt a tad reticent.

So, for openers, I feel irritated by the video’s attempt at being controversial. I mean, Family Guy annoys me, but I still watch it. The Seth MacFarlane edginess is usually part of some narrative. When a character pukes on a copy of The Feminine Mystique, it seems like a somewhat harmless boneheaded provocation that might get kids to read Betty Friedan. When he makes a joke about how quiet restaurants were during Jim Crow, it’s really not offensive to me, even if it might irritate someone older who lived through Jim Crow.

But in Chicago, where I live, there’s a long history of police torturing black people– we live in a country with lots of black people in jail. There’s also a long history of housing discrimination against blacks. You could use that to make an edgy joke, like Chris Ware did when he advertised prisons as “Large Negro Storage Boxes.” But the video did it in a way that was basically “Birth of a Nation” with a soundtrack; my vibe was that “terrorism against middle-class black people is awesome!” I disagree.

On the other hand, I’m told that one member of the video production team is black, and it could certainly be read as an indictment of white entitlement and hatred, or just an Obama-era version of A Clockwork Orange. Or the white kid could be read as a trailer-trash shithead a la Gummo (which then raises the specter of class war). Maybe, in the class war frame of mind, it doesn’t matter that she’s black, but only that she’s a homeowner. Maybe he’s just an evil kid.

Well fine… I would read it differently if it was a black band, or a band with one black member, or a band with any significant black fan base. But the Pixies are predominantly white people (excepting Filipino-American guitarist Joey Santiago) predominantly addressing white people, and their message (in general) is about how mutilation is fun and how blaming “redneckers for getting pissed at stupid stuff” is stupid. Drop out of college and tell women about how you fear losing your penis to a diseased whore. Which is cool- they’re a great rock band with decent angry-white-male anti-intellectual intellectual lyrics.

But to me there’s no question that the kid was the protagonist, and he was victorious. It takes some serious rationalizing to make him a villain (even though that may have been the intention). And, just to touch on the lyrics– they would seem fairly opaque without the video as context, but now I can’t help but read “She had some manners and beauty but you look like a bug,” accompanied by the sneering insistence to “polish your speech” and “cover your teeth” as patrician advice on proper racial assimilation that not even Bill Cosby would utter.

After reading a draft of the above, Noah pointed out quite astutely that the departure from the band of bassist Kim Deal, known for having a strong woman-positive voice in her other musical projects, does coincide neatly with a video that is not only depicting violence against blacks, but violence against women. It seems doubtful that a country act, a rapper, or a metal band would get a pass for making their misogyny visually explicit, but the fact that an “alternative” act apparently can should certainly provide food for thought.

So yes, “racist” and “sexist” does account for perhaps a majority of, well, all recorded music. Non-recorded as well maybe. There is an entire musical subgenre known as “murder ballads,” this subgenre forming one element of the blues, noted target of wholesale white appropriation, etc. It just might be fun for at least a moment to consider the ways in which the quasi-elite pop culture pantheon, seemingly a sparkling realm of gender- and race-blind self-made genius, have some connection, however tenuous and refracted, to the ongoing worldwide disenfranchisement and exploitation of a teeming underclass.

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Update (by Noah): One of the video’s creators replies in comments; please scroll down to see his response.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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