Best Music of the Year…So Far

Posted on October 4, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

I asked what folks were listening to way back towards the beginning of the year. We’re 6 or 7 months further on…so what do you all think are the best albums of the year?

Here’s a couple of my picks:

I’m really into this awesome twisted space death metal by Artificial Brains.

SZA’s alt R&B floaty psych soul is great:

I’m just now falling in love with this Open Mike Eagle track:

Jason Eady is the best country album I’ve heard this year:

And I really do love the new Sunny Day in Glasgow album, Sea When Absent

So what about you all? What’s your best album of the year so far?

Fabrice Neaud’s Journal and Autobiographical Comics

Posted on October 3, 2014 by Michael A. Johnson

The following post is a barely updated version of a paper I presented at the International Bande Dessinée Society in London in 2007, entitled “Fabrice Neaud’s Face Work.” What drove the paper was two combined hunches, that 1) comics are generally concerned with, and comics are the newest instantiation of, masks as a social phenomenon (presentation of self, social roles, etc.) and 2) Fabrice Neaud’s unique focus on his face, and the faces of others in his autobiographical comics, is essentially a kind of “face work” an artistic effort to portray his “self” through a work on his “face.” I’m not sure how successful my argument was, and it may seem out of date at this point, but I have been thinking about autobiographical comics in more depth lately and I continue to believe that “face work,” while not unique to the comics art form (Proust, for example, was a master of face work while a certain number of comics artists, of course, avoid the face as a focal point), is nonetheless intimately bound to comics as an art form. If this essay seems out of date or irrelevant, I hope, at the very least, that it will encourage readers to become intimate with Fabrice Neaud’s Journal and, eventually, that editors will consider publishing an English translation. It is, from my point of view, one of the greatest works of autobiographical comics that has been published to date, certainly up there with David B’s masterpiece, L’Ascension du Haut-Mal (1996-2003).
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Fabrice Neaud’s autobiographical project, Journal, spans 765 pages total, covering the period of Neaud’s life from February 1992 to July of 1996 with a fifth volume that Neaud finally decided not to publish. What distinguishes this project from other autobiocomix is the fact that Neaud conceives of it as a journal. There is no preconceived unity to the project, no preconceived end. Unique to French BD at the time, Neaud is uncompromising in representing his sexuality. Also, there is a very persistent meta-bd level of discourse throughout the Journal, a constant interrogation of the conditions of representation, which makes Neaud’s work interesting for any scholar interested in the question of autobiocomix.

The title of this conference, The Innovative Form, inspires all manner of questions about the novelty of the medium. To begin with, “what’s new in BD?” that is to say, what new kinds of things are happening in the medium, but also “what’s new about BD?” that is to say, what is the potential of this form? But of course these two questions are dialectically related: we need innovations in the form before the potential of the medium itself can be fully realized. And I think Fabrice Neaud has some interesting points to make on the question posed by the title of this conference. His own discourse about BD both asserts optimistically the potential of the form and maintains a cautious provisionality as he works to reveal the potential of BD to do new things. In the fourth volume of his Journal he writes the following:

Dans le meilleur des cas, ils [les post-modernists] nous feraient même croire que la bande dessinée est le dernier refuge du dessin académique. Je ne me sens pas pour l’heure capable de démontrer le contraire. Mais j’ai bien l’intuition qu’il s’y passe autre chose, une autre façon de percevoir le réel. Une nouvelle manière de hiérarchiser les souvenirs. (Tome IV)

[In the best case scenario, they (post-modernist academics) would have us believe that comics are the last refuge of academic drawing. For the moment, I am not in a position to prove the contrary. But I sense that something else is happening here (in comics, as an art-form), another way of perceiving the real. A new way of classifying and prioritizing memories. (Volume 4).]

Neaud asserts that the potential of the form lies in its capacity to give a new and singular mode of access to the real. In the case of his own Journal, the question of perception of the real is directly connected to the enterprise of autobiographical self-representation, to the “real” of Neaud’s own life. For Neaud the mode of representation must always remain in a kind of dialectic with the “real” of the “represented,” in this case, his life. Or to put it otherwise, the work he does with the constraints and potentialities of this mode of representation is also part and parcel of a certain work on the self. He explains this process in an interview with Jérome Lepeytre:

Ainsi le journal est-il, en plus d’etre un simple témoignage ou compte-rendu d’un vécu, d’une experience, d’anectotes, un travail formel qui interroge les moyens qu’il se donne et le medium qu’il utilise: la bande dessinée: C’est un laboratoire: laboratoire sur le “moi”, laboratoire sur la vie et laboratoire formel allant jusqu’a utiliser des contraintes “oubapiennes” quand j’en ressens la nécessité.”

[Thus my journal, beyond simply being the account of a life lived, or of a personal experience, or of anecdotes, is a formal work that interrogates its own means of representation and its own medium. Comics are a kind of laboratory, a laboratory of the “self,” a laboratory of life, and a formal laboratory that will go to the extreme of using “oubabien” constraints when I feel the need to do so.]

The Journal is subject to a certain kind of work. More to the point, Neaud conceives of the journal as a laboratory. This is a very strategic choice of words here. A laboratory is a place where work and experience (and I’m thinking of the double meaning of the word expérience in French) come together to produce new perceptions of the real. I also want to underline Neaud’s use of the word travail, because this is where my reading of his Journal begins. For Neaud, it is only through the painful process of work, through an intense engagement with representation, that BD will be able to reveal its novelty, its potential to provide any kind of new access to the real. In the same interview, when trying to describe the singularity of his project, (the open-ended nature of a journal as opposed to an autobiography) he uses the English expression, “enfin, c’est un work in progress … les outils qui servent à l’élaboration du projet sont élaborés au fur et à mesure des besoins de ce projet.” He insists on underlining the contingent and improvisational nature of the project, using a language that makes one imagine Neaud’s work on the journal more along the lines of manual labor. Further on, Neaud describes the way in which the project of the journal has altered his way of “taking notes” sur le vif. Whereas he began by drawing from a written journal, supplemented by photos and a sketchbook (“carnet de croquis”), the work of the Journal has brought him to begin “thinking” within the representational constraints of the form. This is how he describes the process:

C’est-à-dire que nous n’y avons plus simplement des croquis accompagnés de notes écrites, mais bien un prédécoupage direct en sequences, quitte à ce que celui-ci soit extremement sommaire et ne se charge que de légender des cases parfois vides. Ce travail de notes me permet au moins de penser en bande dessinée. Il me parait important de souligner ici ce qui est à l’oeuvre: le travail de la bande dessinée.

[In other words, we are no longer dealing with sketches accompanied with written notes, but rather a direct pre-breakdown into sequences, even if it is true that such a pre-breakdown is cursory and is concerned with not much more than the labeling of often empty panels. This work of note-taking allows me, at the very least, to think in comics. It seems important to me to underline what is at stake here: the work of comics.]

For Neaud the work proper to BD, “le travail de la bande dessinée,” is a way of thinking in the form “penser en bande dessinée,” and it is a working towards the realization of the medium’s potential to reveal a different perception of the real. His description of his work method makes it clear: Neaud’s own perception of reality is filtered through the medium – his initial representations of recent memory are already distributed into panels. As he works on the journal, it works on him.

This “work” then happens in the journal across a broad range of representational fields: rhythm, place, word-image relation, register, symbol.

What I would like examine here is Neaud’s work on the face. There is a marked, idiosyncratic, kind of work being done on both the autobiographical face and the face of the love object (called “image” when it is the face of the other) in his Journal. [We might even say that this is the signature of Neaud’s work, this attention given to the face]. It is a kind of work that takes place both on a verbal and visual register. And it is a work that is engaged with the possibility of representing the real of Fabrice Neaud’s life. The face asks, it interrogates, the question of the real. Thierry Groensteen in his preface to vol. I of the Journal refers to Neaud as a face, as “ce visage qui nous interroge” [“this face that questions us”]. What kind of access to the real of the life of Fabrice Neaud does the face of Fabrice Neaud give us? While his more or less realistic (as the French would say, “classique”) style of drawing would seem to promise a relatively straightforward autobiographical representation, the particular attention he gives to his own face, suggests he is concerned with the way the autobiographical face might authenticate self-representation (like a signature), and thus complicates the presumed simplicity of self-representation.

We have from the very first pages of volume I of the Journal a complex discourse on the face. When he writes about his nocturnal sexual encounters in the jardins publiques, he criticizes the safe hypocritical anonymity of the kinds of sexual encounters that take place there, encounters that happens without face. Neaud claims to refuse the anonymity of faces, “je refuse l’anonymat des visages” [“I refuse the anonymity of faces”]. And a few panels later, “je tiens à assumer jusqu’au bout: circuler à visage découvert sans être obligé aux clichés que ceux qui viennent … se sont imposés à eux-même” [“I am committed to claiming my identity to the extreme, to circulating with an exposed face, without being forced to acquiesce to the faces that those who come [to the cruising park] have imposed on themselves”]. Neaud’s discourse on the face is haunted by a metaphorics of masks. As he explains it, while he claims to show his “true” face, in other words to fully assume his homosexuality, he nonetheless also refuses to “wear the mask” of gay clichés. But this is hard to do when faced with an insistent deontologizing heterosexual gaze, a gaze that itself imposes masks on its other. Confronted daily with a heterosexual gaze, he steadfastly refuses to present a legible face – refuses to provide a comfortable or digestible face for the other to have a (faux) ethical encounter with.

The legibility of the homosexual face is presented as a question in the opening pages of the Journal. A sort of “flash back,” the scene takes place in a park, 1975, where the young Fabrice is chased and violently forced to pull his pants down to “show that he’s not a girl.” [And here already at the beginning he is very deliberate in his representation of the face]. This primal scene of the journal returns to haunt another scene that takes place, significantly, also in a park. Discussing his nocturnal wanderings, describing the various types of men who frequent the park in an anthropological (or almost more zoological) manner, Neaud describes a certain type of married man who frequents the park. A set of four panels show a faceless, anonymous man, presumably a married man seeking easy sexual gratification in the safety of his car. When Neaud refuses him, the man insults him, calling him “pédé” [“faggot”]. The insult, is both an interpretation, that is, a reading of the face, and an interpellation, that is, a giving of face. Here he compares these faceless men to his childhood bullies:

Ce sont eux. Ce sont les mêmes qui me traitaient de “tapette” alors qu’ils ne savaient même pas ce que ça voulait dire … tout simplement parce que je n’aimais pas leurs jeux … Ce sont les mêmes qui m’ont fait tant douter quand “tapette” je suis devenu, et que j’ai cru qu’à m’insulter de la sorte … ils l’avaient lu sur mon front.

[“Those are the ones, the same ones who called me a queer even though they didn’t even know what that meant… just because I didn’t like their games… the same who made me doubt myself when I did become queer and who, in insulting me thus, convinced me that they had read it on my forehead”]

[Neaud is haunted by the thought, this childhood conclusion, that his homosexuality is “written on the face.” And here we have a rewriting of the primal scene in which he gets up from of his abject (fetal) position and faces his interpellators returning the insult… But although he able to rewrite the scene and “face” them, his face here is scratched out, de-faced. Why does he do this here? At least one way to read this is as part of a general project to render his face illegible in the face of this interpellation of the heterosexual gaze – here the gaze and the insult are one and the same, by the way]

And this is a general condition of Neaud’s life, both in private and in public, he finds himself fighting constantly against the deontologizing tendencies of the straight people in his milieu. Even his “liberal,” non-homophobic friends expect Neaud’s work to “reveal” a certain truth about homosexuality (the word dévoiler (reveal, unveil) is used a lot in relationship to the word pudeur (prudishness) as though only Neaud, the only gay person in the association, must bear the sole burden of confronting societal taboos). His friend and collaborator Loïc Néhou, now the general editor Ego Comme X, suggests that Neaud might tell the story of his “petites ballades nocturnes” [“little nighttime excursions”]. In a rather funny scene that takes place in Journal IV, Neaud depicts a radio interview in which the radio announcer claims that the subject of his journal is “homosexuality.” Neaud responds violently.

“Sinon, faut dire quand meme que ton sujet principal, c’est l’homosexualité. T’as un message à faire passer? // Je n’ai aucun message à faire passer sur l’homosexualité!! Il n’y a plus grand’chose à dire sur l’homosexualité!! Est-ce que Roméo et Juliette a pour sujet principal l’hétérosexualité? NON! … Je parle de mon quotidien … // […] Et mon sujet principal, c’est plutôt … le portrait de mon modele: “Stephane”!

“In any case, your main subject is homosexuality. Do you want to convey a message [to my listeners]?” / “I don’t have any message to convey about homosexuality. There’s nothing left to say about homosexuality!! Is heterosexuality the main subject of Romeo and Juliette? NO!!! I just write about my daily existence… and my primary subject is more precisely that of my model, Stephane.”

So I would suggest that Neaud’s work on the face resists presenting any kind of intelligibly gay subject, and in resisting the imposed “masks” succeeds in presenting a new perception of the real. In effect, all of Neaud’s most intense face work appears in the chapters of his Journal most explicitly concerned with the question of gay identity. His resistance to and cynicism towards the autobiographical signature is finally impossible to separate from his refusal to produce the effect of an intelligible gay identity in his autobiographical Journal.

On a visual level, the face-work occurs in a number of different modalities. I will describe four of those modalities, although there would be many more, and these could and should be further nuanced:

1) The photographic punctum, the “snap” photo effect. Neaud does not hide the fact that he works off of photographs to draw himself and those in his entourage. In fact, in all four volumes of the journal he shows himself photographing those around him. Also at various moments we see him sorting through his archive of slides and printed photographs. In one very memorable panel, he shows himself projecting a slide of his love object. He stands inside of the projection so that his face is distorted, almost monstrously, by the image of his love object’s face projected onto and overlapping with his own. But it is not just through the narrative that we learn about his use of photographs. We can also see it very clearly in his drawing of the face, from his choice of photographs to draw from… Neaud uses a lot of bad, “snap” photography, in which eyes are closed, the face is caught awkwardly in the moment, or made to appear monstrous through unflattering angles, bad lighting, flash, etc.

But why incorporate the photographic into his face work when photography would seem to only reflect the deontologizing gaze of the other? In other words, all of the photos Neaud uses to draw of his own face were taken, that is framed, by others. If Neaud is working to resist the heterosexual gaze, making his face illegible, as I’m claiming here, why use photography? I think the answer lies in the way he uses photography – using it in such a way as to refuse to suture the inhuman eye of the lens. So more than using photography, he marks this use in interesting and even radical ways. By choosing bad, unflattering, snap photos, the autobiographical face is made ugly, not through a process of distortion but on the contrary through the photographic process of representing too faithfully. Making reference to the inhuman eye of the camera lens is one way of resisting the appropriative gaze of the other, because it reveals the extent to which that gaze is subjectivized. It’s like he’s saying “yes, you ultimately frame me, but I can also continue to remind you that you are doing this, that this is not a “natural” process but rather an imposition”. The bad snap shot also highlights the dramatic fleetingness of the moment (rather than “capturing” the moment, the bad snap photograph marks the moment as “past” “dead” already lost… etc. therefore there is no “face” that could be said to transcend time, etc.).

2) Defacement: At various moments throughout the journal, Neaud defaces himself, erasing parts of his face (his mouth or eyes or both), rubbing out his facial features so the face is smudged, scratching it out, or leaving it blank. This is a more “obvious” way of rendering the face illegible and I interpret this particular mode of face work in the vein of a refusal. By defacing the autobiographical face, Neaud is simply saying “no” every time the reader might need or want the attenuation of a face.

3) Displacement, metonymy: Another modality of face-work could be called the displacement of the face. There are a number of scenes in which the rhythm of the panels creates the expectation of a face when we have, appearing in its place, something else, another body part, a concrete object, a blank panel, sometimes enacting a complete shift of representational orders (like going from faces to mathematical formulas, which occurs in a few panels)… The use of other parts of the body – such as the back of the head or of a hand, or in one case a stomach –where his face is expected.

4) Mask, prosopopeia: the trope of the mask (highly specific to the form and history of comics) in Neaud’s Journal includes his use of caricature, borrowings of representational modes (such as that of Francis Bacon), and his self-consciously recycled repertoire of facial gestures. As much as he claims to “circuler à visage découvert” [“circulate with an exposed face”] he also reminds the reader that there is a process of “masking” that happens in the writing of the journal (a kind of medieval idea, masking in order to unmask, in order to show the true self … this could be said in a way to be the most important aspect to his process of self-representation … and also points to something specific about bande dessinée, that if there were a master trope of bd, it might be said to be prosopopeia, the trope of the mask, the talking mask.)

Rather than concluding, I’d like to gesture towards a more critical reading of Neaud [more critical of Neaud, I mean] that would have to do with a different kind of face-work — his work on the faces of others, and more specifically the faces of his love objects (namely Stéphane and Doumé). Recall the radio interview, when Neaud angrily denies that the subject of his journal is homosexuality, he suggests instead that the true subject is more likely his love-object, or as he puts it “Et mon sujet principal, c’est plutôt … le portrait de mon modèle: “Stephane”! [this is in reference to volume one]. I think his use of the word “portrait” (which implies the representation of a face) is significant here. I suspect that his work on face of the other ultimately comes to obscure his work on the autobiographical face. On a purely visual level, his work on the face of the love object (esp. in vols 1 and 3) is most elaborate. He works more on the face of the other. Both on the visual and verbal levels. He deflects the deontologizing gaze of the other by intensifying (and justifying) his own.
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I’m sorry to recycle old work but I also hope that there might be some useful nuggets for those interested in autobiographical comics who might not have access to the franco-belgian tradition.

Lois Lane’s Rooftop Riunite

Posted on October 2, 2014 by Kailyn Kent

Wine is not part of the American visual vocabulary of virtue, in the way that breakfast cereals, completely undeservingly, are.

Look there in the bottom left hand corner of the frame. While more a function of product placement than set-design, the Kent family’s box of Cheerios implies happy childhoods and growing children, a story unbrokenly told by generations of marketers through summery television commercials. If a director alternatively placed a Cheerios box amongst domestic strife, it would read like it automatically belonged there. Perhaps it should, complicit as it is in the destruction of small family agriculture in America. Yet marketing triumphs, while the Kents innocently harbor the agent of their coming obsolescence. In a way, the Cheerios box stands alongside Mrs. Kent, also looking out onto the grown Clark, knowing it has raised him well, understanding that he will soon be heading out for the adult world of coffee and hotel breakfast buffets.

I digress. Of course wines are not depicted as a nostalgic childhood artifacts– at least not for protestant, white, American families following WWII. Things are slowly changing, and filmmakers and sitcom directors increasingly picture it on dinner tables, and as a relatable half-vice for full-time mothers– just not often in sight when the kids are around. Light substance abuse is a hallmark of dysfunctional family comedies, and wine’s refined enough to seem a little less scary. Wine can be a part of family, with reservations. Yet when does wine become a part of childhood fantasy and play acting? If there ever was a Champagne or Martini Barbie, its assuredly retired, but that doesn’t prevent young girls from imaginatively filling in the blanks, and the tiny pink play glasses. Wine, consistently portrayed as a feminine and aristocratic drink in America, plays a trickier role in fantasies about masculinity. Bruce Wayne might drink it as part of his alias– but would Batman? Would Professor X from the X-Men, because he’s sophisticated and European? Catwoman, because she’s a femme fatale? These seem the most likely– the image becomes incongruous with the Punisher, Deadpool or Spiderman. Oenophiliac villains would be another conversation, as would romantic interests. Which brings us to the other brand-name consumer good not-so-prominently placed in the 1978 film Superman: A bottle of sparkling white wine with an obscured, and perhaps defaced label, pounded by Lois Lane while anxiously awaiting an ‘interview session’ with Superman.
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Through most of the scenes, the filmmakers turn the label away from the camera, exposing a prominent bar code and a back label likely filled with marketing copy. Lois might live in a penthouse with a landscaped roof deck, but she drinks a reliable, commercial brand. More mysteriously, she’s brought out Champagne flutes, but the bottle doesn’t look like a sparkling wine. Champagne bottles and their imitators typically have long neck foils, and a horizontal label. With the exception of the collar label, it somewhat looks like a bottle of Riunite from the advertisement below, also from 1978.

For those unfamiliar with the slogan “Riunite on Ice, That’s Nice,” Riunite was like the brand-specific prosecco of its day– cheap, fizzy and from northern Italy. Riunite is a prominent brand of Lambrusco, a type of sparkling red wine from Emilia-Romagna, which is northeast of Tuscany. Sparkling red wine is a bit of an anomaly, and while there are a handful produced around the world (particularly in Australia,) Lambrusco might be the most traditional– less a fun experiment, and more of a regional speciality. Different provinces make different variations, which differ in terms of dryness and sweetness, and what kinds of grape varietals are used. Riunite is an example of the sweetest and darkest type of Lambrusco, Lambrusco Reggiano, which is made with a higher percentage of Ancellotta grapes:

This is the wine that took America by storm in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the Cantine Riunite of Reggio nell’Emilia, a consortium of co-operatives, succeeded in exporting up to 3 million cases per year to the United States. So successful has Lambrusco been on export markets that special white, pink, and light versions have perversely been created, the colour and alcohol often being deliberately removed.

-Daniel Thomases and David Gleave, The Oxford Companion to Wine

Riunite combated this with the claim that Riunite white “is natural,” a good reminder to natural wine producers everywhere that the term is easily pirated by industrial producers. If Lois is in fact drinking white Riunite, it shows her to be rather tasteless– a charming, bizarre twist on the luxurious tableau she presents to Superman. Her choice is fashionable, but uneducated. It doesn’t look like Lois grew up around wine, or has taught herself wine. Does Lois make enough at the Daily Planet to afford her designer wardrobe and penthouse? Or did she inherit it? Superhero stories are all about origin narratives, but despite Lois’s status as “the archetypal ‘comic book love interest,'” her biography isn’t part of the cultural consciousness (or even immediately discoverable on Wikipedia.) Lois is a well-dressed, spunky career woman living in a beautifully appointed home, partaking of the best known brands of 1978– not unlike a Barbie doll with corporate tie-ins. But where did she come from?

Still, its possible she is not drinking Riunite. The logo isn’t very visible on Lois’ bottle, nor is there a screwcap wrapper. A motivated set crew could have blotted out and removed labels and foils so as to deny Riunite accidental sponsorship, or incorporation into the Superman brand. Its possible they needed a bottle of wine, ran to the nearest liquor store, and picked out a bottle from a prominent case display. It’s hard to know how clued in these guys were to detail, considering that two different sets of wine glasses appear on the table over the course of the interview.

Besides giving Lois a little liquid courage, the wine gives Superman the opportunity to look good abstaining, to make a half-joke, (“I never drink when I fly.”) When she writes up the piece, Lois assumes that Superman doesn’t drink at all, which makes Eve Teschmacher, Lex Luthor’s girl friend, coo with desire. After a bout of disarmingly cute sex banter, supposedly a hard-news interview, Lois and Superman fly over Manhattan and into the night sky, where Lois free-styles a rhyming poem. Utterly smitten after the visit, she monikers him, (“What a super… man.”) The winning performances and odd-ball quality of these moments easily make them the best part of the movie not involving Gene Hackman. After dropping Lois back off at the apartment, Superman swings around as his alter-ego Clark Kent, reminding a dazzled and distracted Lois that they have a date. This affords Superman a chance to make one more joke about the wine, this time at Lois’ expense. “You haven’t been–hmm?” He asks, miming her drinking with his pinky extended, lips puckered, and eyelids semi-closed.

Of course she was drinking. You were there, jerk. And of course you know the real reason she’s swooning. Lois Lane is savvy, but she’s comedic relief. And despite the overblown comparisons of Superman to Jesus, (only exacerbated in the 2013 Man of Steel,) Superman isn’t a saint. He’s duplicitous enough to schedule two dates with Lois as two different people, just for voyeuristic kicks. He seems charmed by her imperfections, but not in awe of her abilities, (although he appreciates her wit.) Superman isn’t a farm boy innocent, falling head over heels in love. He’s effortlessly in control, and he’s amused by her inability to see his true identity, and only passingly guilt-ridden. Superman acts less ‘salt of the earth,’ than like a cheeky business-school brat. Lois is the love interest not because she is ‘super’ herself, but because she’s a normal girl who was there at the right place, at the right time. She makes adorable, and sometimes deadly, mistakes– she publishes Superman’s weakness in the public paper, and can’t think fast enough to escape a broadening fault line. She drinks cheap, trendy plonk while dressed like a timeless Egyptian princess. Lois Lane could be anyone, so why do audiences need to know anything about her? She’s ultimately helpless– a remarkably feminine ‘Common Man’ that Superman dedicates his life to love and save. And drop thousands of feet above the ground. And get mugged at gunpoint. No hard feelings.

And what’s happened to Riunite since 1978? It didn’t age well, but sales are still holding strong in states with more labyrinthine liquor laws, like Pennsylvania and Ohio. Riunite, once advertised as the wine of happening twenty-somethings, is now a proudly-unfashionable staple of the heartland. Riunite’s producers understand that, releasing a highly publicized TAPS campaign for veterans, an RV tour, and a smart line of ads riffing on the datedness of their jingle from 1985. One could imagine that they’d love to be the favorite of Superman’s girlfriend—the Cheerios or Malboros of wine.

This is part of a series called What Were They Drinking? co-posted at my wine and social criticism blog, The Nightly Glass.

Also recommended– the archive of old advertisements on the Riunite website. The theme-song might get stuck in your head, but they’re pretty amazing cultural artifacts.

Red Dawn, 2012: Imperialists, Insurgents, and Role Reversal

Posted on October 1, 2014 by Kristian Williams

I expected the 2012 Red Dawn remake to push jingoistic hyper-patriotic borderline-racist propaganda. And it does.

I did not expect it to carry a subtext urging a re-evaluation of the War on Terror. But it does that, too.

The original (1984) version of Red Dawn was a Cold War fantasy of Communist aggression and brave American teenagers heading to the mountains of Colorado as resistance fighters against a Russian/Cuban/Nicaraguan invasion. The kids call themselves the “Wolverines,” after their high school mascot. The remake keeps that same basic plot, except the leader of the guerrilla band is a marine home on leave after a tour in Iraq, the action has been relocated to Washington state, and the invading enemy is North Korea.

“North Korea?” one of the young partisans says, incredulously. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Well, there’s a bigger picture here,” his older brother replies, vaguely.

They’re both right. It doesn’t make any sense, but there is a larger bigger picture. That bigger picture might be called the real world.

In the real world of 2012, the United States was not being invaded — not in danger of being invaded — by North Korea or anyone else. We were, however, winding up occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, two countries where we had faced ruthless, bloody insurgencies. What Red Dawn asks of its audience is that we imagine ourselves in the place of the insurgents.

“When I was overseas,” the Marine lectures, “we were the good guys. We enforced order. Here, we are the bad guys, and we create chaos.” The irony is cutting. For in the story the movie tells, it is obvious that these American kids, fighting for freedom, defending their homes, are the good guys; and what does that suggest about Iraq?

He also says:

“I don’t want to sell it to you, it’s too ugly for that. It’s ugly and it’s hard. But when you’re fighting in your own back yard, when you’re fighting for your family, it all hurts a little less and it makes a little more sense. For them, this is just some place, but for us this is our home.”

It’s the moment in the film when the subtext is most explicit, and it is so important that, with variations, the speech is repeated at the end of the movie. But there are numerous other points when the War on Terror makes its uncomfortable appearance. The Korean authorities, for instance, continuously refer to the rebels as “insurgents” and “terrorists.” They create an internment camp for suspect elements, dressing them in orange jump suits and using shipping containers for cells — like the Americans did at Bagram Air Base. Their propaganda and their oratory have an kitschy, cliched, Cold War aesthetic, but beneath the red veneer, there’s a standard hearts-and-minds kind of appeal. In their speeches, the occupying army insists that “We are not your enemies,” but liberators — bringing freedom, delivering security, and rebuilding the country. “Helping You Back On Your Feet,” one propaganda poster advertizes. “Repairing Your Economy,” promises another. What they ask in return is for “your cooperation in bringing these cowardly Wolverine terrorists to justice.” The rhetoric sounds hollow, but no more hollow coming from a Korean commissar than it did from Paul Bremer. The familiarity, as well as the falsity, seems to be part of the point.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. Maybe the anti-imperialist role reversal was there in the original. Back in 1984, Andrew Kopkind wrote in The Nation:

“If you swivel the politics about 45 degrees to the left, Red Dawn begins to look more like a celebration of people’s war than a horror movie about the evil empire. . . . [Director John] Milius has produced the most convincing story about popular resistance to imperial oppression since the inimitable Battle of Algiers.”

Kopkind goes on to compare the Commies’ summary execution of unreliable elements to the CIA’s Phoenix Program, targeting Viet Cong supporters. He then suggests that we should “read Red Dawn as a parable of American intervention in Central America.”

Apparently the US Military didn’t get the memo. The 2003 mission to capture Saddam Hussein was codenamed, “Operation Red Dawn,” and the two sites the Army searched were dubbed “Wolverine 1” and “Wolverine 2.”

The point I’m trying to make has nothing to do with the dangers of a Communist invasion. It’s about propaganda and interpretation. Politics are sometimes a struggle over meaning, and such meanings are never really fixed or settled. But this observation raises more questions than it answers: Given that there is always the possibility for subversive subtexts and resistant readings, how does one produce or evaluate political propaganda? Is Red Dawn a right-wing movie, undermined and co-opted by left-wing critics? Or is it a left-wing movie cheered by conservatives too dumb to understand what they’re watching? Neither? Both?

And to what degree is the meaning created in the social practices surrounding the text, as opposed to residing in the movie itself? Do Blake’s “Jerusalem” and Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” become patriotic anthems because large groups of people treat them that way — “dark, satanic mills” and “the shadow of the penitentiary” notwithstanding?
Was Bradley’s more explicit 2012 Red Dawn a reclamation, a recompense for the US military’s tone-deaf and nuance-free embrace of the first film? Or are both films just object lessons concerning what happens when action movies try to be too clever — or when critics do?

Works Cited

William Blake, “Jerusalem [from Milton],” William Blake: Selected Poems. ed. Ian Hamilton (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1994) 114.

Andrew Kopkind, “Red Dawn,” The Nation, September 15, 1984.

Red Dawn, dir. Dan Bradley (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 2012).

Red Dawn, dir. John Milius (United Artists, 1984).

Bruce Springsteen, “Born in the USA,” Born in the USA (Columbia Records, 1984).

Bio
Kristian Williams is the author of American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination, Hurt: Notes of Torture in a Modern Democracy, and an editor of Life During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency.

The Fall of Superheroes

Posted on September 30, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

Remember when the end of summer meant the end of superheroes? If you could get past August you were free of the masked and superpowered until spring. Six months. That’s the minimum period of regenerative hibernation required before the next explosive, power-punching, evil-thwarting onslaught of hyperbolic do-goodery. This past year Captain America: The Winter Soldier opened in April,

followed by Amazing Spider-Man 2 in May,

before X-Men: Days of Future Past spilled into June.

July offered only the semi-superheroic duo Lucy and Hercules, but August made up with Guardians of the Galaxy.

I admit to seeing all but one of them, but something changed for me this year. Maybe it was the death of Gwen Stacy. It felt like Hollywood’s way of punishing an uppity girlfriend. How dare Gwen figure out how to defeat Electro when Peter couldn’t—and imagine if he had actually followed her to England. Superhero as trailing spouse? Obviously the woman had to die. The seventh installment of the X-Men franchise restored me a bit, with its mildly complex characters making occasionally unexpected choices. Sure, the cast members from the original 2000 film are looking a bit gnarled these days, but we can’t all have anti-aging mutant powers. And, hey, who didn’t have an absolute ball at Guardians? Funniest superhero movie yet. A week later I could barely recall a scene, but that’s normal. It was August. My superhero processing systems were cycling down already. Time to tuck the capes and cowls away for a well-deserved cryogenic nap.

Except, wait, why do I still hear the thumping of a bombastic soundtrack? Superheroes aren’t hibernating this year. They just shrunk down a bit. September has already brought the TV premiere of Gotham

and season two of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

October promises Flash

and season three of Arrow.

Add Constantine, Agent Carter, Supergirl, Teen Titans, and the four Marvel shows in production at Netflix, and the power nap is over. We’ve seen plenty of superheroes on primetime before—Batman, Wonder Woman, Hulk, and Greatest American Hero all boasted multi-year runs in the 70s and 80s—but never so many simultaneously. I can’t resist them any more than I resisted their summer siblings, but I do worry how long the onslaught is going to last.

I actually requested a show like Gotham two years ago. The Fox production isn’t exactly what I described, but I won’t quibble. And I named every supervillain-in-his-youth cameo for my son and wife as we watched. Though was it really necessary to film the Wayne murder scene yet again? Imagine arriving at the crime scene with Gordon and glimpsing little Bruce for the first time. Cut three minutes from the script and that opening could have been dynamic just through a POV change. Instead we get a repeat, something closer to Nolan’s Batman Begins than Burton’s Batman. The WB has managed to throw in some bare-chested goofiness into Green Arrow’s character, but DC is keeping its dark and dire palette for the bigger network.

S.H.I.E.L.D. had a firmer grip. Last year’s series premiere was flawed but hopeful—and then the follow-up episodes were some of the worst TV I’ve ever sat through. I don’t know how they made it to mid-season, but I’m glad they did, because the final season arc was one of the best long-term plotting coups a series ever pulled off. This year opened at a sprint, with the expanded cast and juggled originals introduced with gloriously little exposition—a huge trick given the upheavals in status quo the last Captain America film forced on the show. Though my favorite moment was a narrative sleight-of-hand employed for the new characterization of an old but radically altered returning character—one of those look back and reevaluate a half dozen scenes when you realize brain-damaged Fitz is only hallucinating Simmons. Oh, and bad Ward grew a beard and lives in the basement now—just like the dragon in the first season of the BBC’s Smallville-inspired Merlin.

So, yes, I guess I can’t complain about the superhero’s autumnal shift to the small screen. I’m their audience. But what happens next spring? Will we have recovered enough for The Avengers 2: Age of Ulton in May? Or Ant-Man in July? Or Fantastic Four in August? Or the following year when have to go see X-Men Origins: Deadpool and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Captain America 3 and X-Men: Apocalypse and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 and Doctor Strange and Shazam! and Sinister Six? All that after having just watched Daredevil, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, and Iron Fist combine forces on Netflix’s The Defenders? Plus the other seven planned superhero shows airing fall and winter?

It’s not quite genre domination–there are still more cops and doctors and lawyers on TV than I can list–but have two publishing companies ever generated so many simultaneous franchises? Marvel and DC are spreading their genes faster than the zombie plague. The superhero apocalypse is here. Will we survive it?

What We Don’t Plan For

Posted on September 29, 2014 by Kate Polak

This post was supposed to be about Brian K. Vaughn and Niko Henrichon’s Pride of Baghdad, the fictional graphic novel based on the true story of the pride of lions that escaped from the Baghdad Zoo after the initial bombing campaign in Iraq in 2003. Although that work has become freakishly and horrifyingly topical again, given the recent decision by the Obama administration to wage such a campaign against ISIS, my mind is elsewhere this week.

Last week, my students finished Jeremy Love’s brilliant Bayou Volume I, the story of African-American Lee Wagstaff and white Lily Westmoreland, two young friends negotiating the racial politics of 1933 Mississippi. The class was oddly silent for much of the second day, and when one of my (few) African-American students brought up a recent news item in our region, I knew I would be ashamed of myself if I didn’t discuss it.

Our class takes place on the idyllic Wittenberg University campus in Springfield, Ohio. Just a little ways down the road, in Beavercreek, John Crawford III was shot to death by the police inside of a Wal-Mart. He was holding a toy pellet gun. Another customer had apparently called the police, claiming that a man was waving a gun around in the store in a threatening manner. After weeks of refusing to release the video for fear of tainting the grand jury, Attorney General Mike DeWine allowed the security footage to be released tonight, only hours after the grand jury declined to indict the officers. The video is horrific. Appalling. “Cold-blooded murder” is the most obvious phrase that pops to mind.

Of course, it was also precisely what I expected.

Last week, we didn’t have the grand jury decision, nor did we have the video. What we did have was one volume of a bizarre little comic that riffs off of Alice in Wonderland. By way of summary, the work opens with Lee by the bayou, preparing to jump in to tie a rope so as to haul up the lynched body of Billy Glass (a character meant to stand in for Emmett Till). Glass had been lynched for supposedly whistling at a white woman, his body left in the water.

While she is in the bayou, Lee sees a vision of Billy’s soul, and as we turn the pages, we realize that what we have seen is her memory of the incident, which she is recounting to Lily.

Lily expresses curiosity about the appearance of the dead body (as opposed to Lee’s genuine fear) and even goes so far as to parrot her mother’s racist diatribe about Billy “deserving what he got.” Qiana Whitted’s close reading of this scene is exquisite, telling us that

What we hear, then, in Love’s visual rendering of Lily’s whistle interests me greatly, for those tiny eighth notes generate a tremendous sound. We hear echoes of anti-miscegenation panic, a fear that reverberates unease even as the conversation hastily resumes. We hear the sense of white privilege that attends Lily’s ability to whistle freely, carelessly one could argue, in spite of her naïveté as a child repeating her mother’s words. But I believe that what Love also wants us to hear in this sequence is the “wolf whistle” of a murdered black child, along with the memory of just how much that sound costs. Perhaps what resonates most deeply in the white girl’s whistle are the sounds that Billy (and Emmett) are no longer able to make, were never free to make at all.

Furthermore, the iconic rendering of their faces invites identification, but that identification remains ambivalent. They are both iconic, so neither is closed off. While the racism Lily spews certainly inclines the reader to retract any sympathetic engagement, she is also a child copying her mother’s words. We should all know better, but, the implication is that sometimes we don’t.

Later, Lily loses her locket in the bayou, and blames the loss on Lee, prompting Mrs. Westmoreland to demand Lee work to pay back the value of the locket, a demand to which Calvin, Lee’s father, promptly accedes because he doesn’t want to see his child “hurt over some white girl’s locket.”

While Lily would seem to be a bumbling villain at this point, she tries to go down to the bayou to find the locket and fix her relationship with Lee. She is eaten whole/kidnapped by a Cotton-Eyed Joe, a giant white man, while Lee watches, shaking in fear. As Lee runs away from the bayou in terror, a vision of lynched black bodies in the trees materializes, and she frantically runs through their feet.

Lee’s father is accused of the crime, although there is no evidence, and in a scuffle with the deputies, she is summarily knocked out by a white adult.

She journeys to the prison to see her father, who has been beaten mercilessly, where he tells her that her aunt will take care of her now, assuming that he will be lynched shortly. She decides to enter the bayou to find Lily and clear her father’s name. In this “through-the-looking-glass” moment, she enters a world in which racist caricatures are both personified and aggressive, and her only help is found in Bayou, a slave grown monstrous in his bondage, although he remains kind and fearful of the master.

She falls into one of Cotton-Eyed Joe’s traps immediately after reaching the land on the other side of the bayou, and while Bayou the character stitches her up, the spirit of Billy Glass tells her that she has very little time.

When I approach Bayou, the complexity of Love’s rendering of the racial landscape echoes not only America’s complicated and genocidal past, but also a present in which blacks are put in the unconscionable position of apologizing for history even while demanding justice. When we step through the bayou/looking-glass, we are stepping into America’s hysterical relationship to race, in which we must frequently repeat that it doesn’t matter now even when we encounter the most obvious evidence that it does.

Part of Bayou’s charm is feisty, spunky Lee, who insists that Bayou the character be courageous about his own life. We root for her, even though she is effectively a dead girl walking by the end of volume one. On the other hand, Love makes it clear again and again that Lee does not understand the limitations placed on her in the social structure, and she is hurt because of it. She is our heroine, but she is also before her time. While she may prevail in her quest to exonerate her father and to free Lily, we’ve already been told she won’t survive. Furthermore, we’ve seen her undergo obscene abuse at the hands of white adults, and her dreams or hallucinations indicate to a close reader that she is already—at minimum—a victim of psychological trauma as well.

As we discussed the circumstances of the work, my students tended to stress the historical context. “What it was like back then” was a phrase used frequently during the week we spent on the volume. Still, I stretched. “Why would Love write this in the 2000s?” “It was published in 2009. What was happening during this period that might make this relevant?” There were only 20 minutes left in class when someone bit. She brought up Ferguson, and referenced Beavercreek as well. The room was suddenly evacuated of sound, except for my “very good,” turning to scratch out another tick in the “Contemporary Contexts” on the board. I turned back to the classroom, and I could feel the white students receding. Not all, but many. There was shifting. There was uncomfortable fidgeting. And worst of all, eyes glazed.

They didn’t want this to be another lesson in how whitey was bad, but it was exactly the kinds of reactions I was seeing that I was hoping to critique. I drew attention to my own whiteness by way of tacitly acknowledging the discomfort. I asked—rhetorically—what it meant to have such conversations about race in the contemporary age.

Students of color and a few white students were energized, and we gabbed on about how Bayou could enrich our reactions to these current discussions for 10 minutes. The remainder of the class was lively, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of that moment of out-of-hand rejection of a text that was trying to teach us more productive ways to respond to discussions of race in contemporary America, and by the end of class, I felt deflated.

Perhaps I was more deflated more than usual after a rough class, because I’m currently working on a presentation for MLA on the science of memory, recent neuroscientific findings, and Bayou. I was invested in the text, and contexts, in ways I could only gloss in class. Tentatively entitled “My Children Will Remember All of the Things I Tried to Forget,” I ask us to imagine a mouse alone in a cage whose feet are exposed to electric shocks. Alongside of the shocks, the scent of cherry blossoms is piped into the cage. This is repeated until the mouse demonstrates an aversion to the aroma, and then the mouse has children. The pinkies are isolated from the parents and are never exposed to similar conditions, but nonetheless show a similar antipathy; the scent of cherry blossoms inspires only terror. I recount a study published recently in Nature Neuroscience, in which researchers found that mice do indeed transmit aversion between generations without actual social contact. Somehow, traumatic experience is genetically encoded, etched into the make-up of these animals. I ask if it is not too far of a stretch to believe that, perhaps, humans function in the same way.

Such a finding has fascinating repercussions for the study of intergenerational trauma, long the province of literature scholars, dwelling on the outskirts of “proper” psychological and neuroscientific literature. The finding suggest in part that slavery is not over, and that the subsequent abuses have been writ small on our genetic codes. There are ample studies (some ongoing) demonstrating lingering prejudice in even the most devoted progressives, yet popular thought still turns away.

I spent the weekend trying to shake off the lingering feeling of profound failure, as well as worrying about the grand jury convening on Monday in Xenia, just up the road from my home. What had I said? What had I failed to say? On Monday, I drove into campus a bit before 6am, hoping to plan myself into a less agitated state. And I arrived to find the illustration below on a poster I made at the beginning of the semester, with a cartoon of myself asking “What are you most worried about? What are you most excited about?”

Clearly, someone was listening. Or at least, they were hearing between the lines.

Race, Class, and Iggy Azalea

Posted on September 28, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Splice Today.

From Elvis to Miley Cyrus, it sometimes seems like the only way white people can interact with black music is through appropriation. The latest example of this tiresome American tradition is Iggy Azalea, a white woman who has broken chart records for Beatles. “Iggy is..an heiress to white supremacy, the mix of unearned racial privilege and racial fetish that has historically made black music without black people big business,” Travis L. Gosa writes at The Root, while Britney Cooper points with disgust at Azalea’s adoption of a Southern black accent. “I maintain that there is no triumph and no celebration when we embrace a white girl who deliberately attempts to sound like a Black girl, in a culture where Black girls can’t get no love.”

Gosa and Cooper aren’t wrong — but it’s worth pointing out that Azalea has to some degree anticipated their criticisms. Or, at least, the debut single and video from her album The New Classic, seems to deliberately reject racial appropriation as a reading of her music. Instead, the video suggests that her connection to hip hop is based, not on race, but on class.

Class is right there in the title of the song: “Work.” The track starts with Azalea talking directly about working crap jobs.

Two feet in a red dirt, school skirt
Sugar cane, back lane
3 jobs took years to save
But I got a ticket on that plane
People got a lot to say
But don’t know shit bout where I was made
Or how many floors that I had to scrub
Just to make it past where I am from

The video is in some ways even more directed; Azalea walks through a desert setting, passing by a woman taking in laundry, a spitting, grizzled guy in a trucker’s cap, trucks, and a trailer park. It’s not clear whether this is supposed to take place in Azalea’s native Australia or in Florida, where she moved when she came to the U.S. (“No money, no family. 16 in the middle of Miami.”) Probably it’s supposed to be the latter, and to show the continuity between the two — being poor and white in Australia is not all that dissimilar to being poor and white in Florida.

Poverty isn’t just figured as a white phenomenon though. Instead, work is something that Azalea sees as uniting black and white women both. Early in the video a black dancer twerks in front of a truck; later Azalea twerks (more convincingly than Miley at least) in a strip club for a skuzzy patron while rapping.

“Valley girls giving
Blow jobs for Louis Vuitton
What you call that?
Head over heels?”

She then steals his keys and races out of the joint with a couple of black women, taking the guy’s car.

When I interviewed sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom recently about hick hop, a genre blending country and rap, she argued that “we don’t have any class stuff happening in popular culture, period.” She added, “Hip hop, country, and hick hop—the merging of the two—are all part of the larger cultural domain, which has become a place where we just don’t have class.” Hick hop, or country rap crossovers, are increasingly popular, as Cottom has written, but they tend to be built around black and white men partying. The shared interracial experience is lust, rather than class per se (as an example, check out this Florida Georgia Line/Nelly video.)

Azaela’s track doesn’t completely reverse that: the video certainly provides black and white gyrating female bodies for the pleasure of a male audience. But black and white women are not just the object of the gaze for Azalea; they’re also objects of class exploitation. Black and white women work cleaning floors; black and white women work as strippers — a job that doesn’t look like much fun given the guy Azalea has to cozy up to. And black and white women work in this video, stripping and twerking, almost as if the entertainment industry and the sex industry aren’t all that different. Florida Georgia Line and Nelly bond on the basis of their gender in a milieu which deliberately elides class. Azalea, on the other hand, presents herself as having a common experience with black women that is based both in gender and in class. “Pledge allegiance to the struggle,” isn’t quite a line out of the Communist Manifesto, but Marx would still appreciate the sentiment.

The class statement here still has lots of problems. While the track is in part about work as exploitation, it also presents work as path-to-success; the poor kid worked, and now she’s rich, like Horatio Alger. Moreover, appropriation remains a real issue; Azalea’s twerking while stripping seems like a way to define black women in terms of sex work, then associate herself with both the sexiness and the struggle to make herself look edgy and real. When a white woman declares solidarity with black women in this context, who is really benefiting?

Still, for all its limitations, there’s no way around the fact that “Work” is about work. Criticizing Azalea for racial appropriation is fair. But doing so can’t help but erase, or discard, her argument — which is that hip hop speaks, or can speak, not just to race, but to an experience of poverty and labor which is meaningful to people, and especially to women, of different races and nationalities. Azalea may not be entirely convincing, but still, there’s something to her claim that hip hop is hers because she worked for it.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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