10 Books That Really Stuck With Me

Posted on September 21, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Peter Sattler tagged me in this facebook meme asking me to list 10 books that really stuck with me, from all times of my life. I usually avoid these social media gauntlets, but I did this one, because I don’t know why. I tried not to think about it too hard and probably failed. I’ve linked to essays I’ve written about the writers/books (unless I haven’t written about them.)

1. Carol Clover, “Men, Women, and Chainsaws”
2. James Baldwin, “The Price of the Ticket”
3. Richard Wright, “Black Boy”
4. Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons, “Watchmen”
5. Jack L. Chalker, Soul Rider series
6. Marston/Peter, Wonder Woman
7. Sharon Marcus, “Between Women”
8. Jane Austen, “Pride and Prejudice”
9. H.P. Lovecraft, “Shadow Over Innsmouth”
10. Ariel Schrag, “Likewise”
11. Wallace Stevens, “Palm At the End of the Mind”
12. Ian McEwan, “Atonement”
13. George Eliot, “Middlemarch
14. C.S. Lewis, “Til We Have Faces”
15. Stephenie Meyer, Twilight Series
16. Foucault, “History of Sexuality”
17. Philip K. Dick, “The Man in the High Castle”
18. Ursula K. Le Guin, Earthsea Series
19. Cecilia Grant, “A Gentleman Undone”
20. Julia Serano, “Whipping Girl”
21. Gerard Manley Hopkins, collected poems
22. Octavia Butler, “Xenogenesis”
23. Julia Cameron, “The Artist’s Way”
24. Ai Yazawa, “Nana”
25. James Loewen, “Lies Across America”
26. Samuel Delany, “Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand”
27. Grace Llewellyn, “The Teenage Liberation Handbook”
28. George Bernard Shaw, “A Book of Prefaces”
29. Eve Sedgwick, “Between Men”
30. Tabico, “Adaptation”

Obviously, not thinking about it too hard meant in part not being able to count. I think the earliest one of these I read was probably Black Boy, which I believe is from fifth grade or thereabouts. The Earthsea books might be from around then too, and the Jack L. Chalker was early on — probably middle school. Oh, and the H.P. Lovecraft would have been from around then too. I don’t think there’s anything on here that I was actually assigned in college, which is a little weird, but I read “The Man in the High Castle” at that time. (I thought about including Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, but I can’t say it’s the book that’s stuck with me as much as a couple of the ideas; thought about Elshtain’s Women and War, too.) The most recent things here are the Cecelia Grant and the Ian McEwan. Most are books I love…and probably not coincidentally many are books that made me cry (Yazawa, Grant, Loewen, McEwan, Lewis). There are a couple that I don’t think are very good though; that would be Chalker, Meyer…and Cameron’s on the list because that’s the worst book I’ve ever read. The Delany was on my headboard in high school for years and years without me reading it; I dragged it all the way out to Chicago with me, I think, and finally got through it…and didn’t exactly like it. I still think about it, though, in a way I don’t with lots of books I’ve enjoyed more. I should reread it someday. (I haven’t managed to find any other Delany I like at all. I thought the essays might work, but I started a volume of those recently and was bored and irritated.)

Though I’ve only read Delany once, I’ve read many of these numerous times; probably read Baldwin and Austen most, and maybe Loewen and Shaw and Cameron (the last of whom I read multiple times for work reasons.)

The list definitely tilts towards the cis het white guys, but it could be worse in that regard, I guess. 17 guys, 13 women; only 5 non-white folks. 9 LGBT writers (Baldwin, Marcus, Schrag, Hopkins, Foucault, Delany, Serano, Tabico and Butler…who I hadn’t been sure was lesbian, but the web seems to agree she was. Sedgwick might fit too…her identification was complicated.) So that’d be 10 cis het white guys altogether (if you count Moore/Gibbons and Marston/Peter as one each). Only about a third, but the single most represented group, it looks like. I’m all about my demographic. (Though I think Schrag is the only Jew on there? Oh, and Eve Sedgwick. Might be another one or two; we assimilate and are hard to find.)

12 nonfiction, 2 books of poetry, 16 fiction, 3 comics. Sci-fi is I think the most represented genre with 4 titles (Delany, Butler, Chalker, Tabico — Dick might count too as alternate history, depending on how you look at it, and I guess Lovecraft might too depending on if you think evil creatures from outside of time are sf or fantasy). Romance is in there and personal essay and academic books and horror and superheroes and lit fic and some classics and YA and porn and autobio and even self-help (Cameron and Llewellyn), but no mysteries (unless you count Watchmen, I suppose). That’s about right; mystery isn’t a genre that I’ve ever had much of a relationship with. I thought about including Agatha Christie’s “Murder of Roger Ackroyd”, which I read when I was a kid; not sure I can honestly say I care about it too much any more, though. Also no plays; I thought about Pygmalion but picked Shaw’s essays instead. I’m sure I could pick some Shakespeare too…

All right, that’s enough babbling. If you want to put a list in comments, please do (you can copy and paste if you already did it on facebook). I’m curious to see what other folks would pick (whether 10 or more.)

How Do You Say “Superman” in French?

Posted on September 20, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

March 1939 was a good month for Superman. Less than a year after his debut, Action Comics No. 11 was flying off newsstands, his daily comic strip was starting its third month of syndication, and Superman No. 1, his first solo comic book, was in production.

March is also the year the Man of Steel landed in Europe. Clark’s French pronunciation wasn’t very good though, so the Belgian weekly periodical Spirou must have thought he said his name was “Marc.” Spirou had already introduced Dick Tracy to their readers, and on March 2, they added Superman’s daily newspaper strips in batches of six under the side banner “Marc Hercule Moderne”:

Their translators also switched Kent to Costa, Lois to Jenny, and the Daily Star to the Evening News. The comic book center in Angouleme has this 3-strip installment from the January 2, 1941 issue:

Spirou stopped running the feature later that year. The cancellation isn’t surprising, considering Germany invaded Belgium in May 1940. The occupation ended in 1945, the year Superman returned to Spirou. Belgium deported him again in 1947, due, I presume, to anti-American censorship sweeping French-language comics in the late 40s.

But back in March 1939, France was happy to stamp Superman’s passport. Five days after Marc the Modern Hercules landed in Belgium, those same daily strips premiered in the French weekly tabloid Aventures:

That editor misheard his name too:

Spirou sometimes called him the Man of Steel (le Homme de Acier) or the Superman, within panels, but Aventures was owned by an anti-fascist Italian who had fled Mussolini’s dictatorship; he wasn’t about to print a name associated with Nietzsche’s ubermensch. Plus he thought the exotic-sounding “Yordi” better suited a guy from another planet.

Aventures didn’t like Superman’s American newspaper strip’s layout either. Joe Shuster was drawing four, doggedly square panels a day:

Aventures preferred five. So, back in the Angouleme stacks, you can see the No. 30 issue from July 25, 1939 collects six of the dailies published in the U.S. from May and June, but with the panels rearranged and shrunk to accommodate a five-panel width:

The layout team kept it up. No. 51, from Dec 19, 1939, rearranges six dailies from November and December:

According to at least one account they removed the “S” on Yordi’s chest too, though another source states otherwise. My own eyeball analysis is inconclusive. I’m not sure if I’m looking at a lightly erased chest emblem, or just time-faded newspaper ink:

Either way, Yordi’s fans found better things to worry about when the series halted after the German invasion.

The occupation didn’t end the Man of Steel’s residency in France though. Starting on October 27, 1940, the fifth issue of Les Grandes Aventures introduced “Le Homme de Acier” on their color back page:

Les Grandes Aventures was also running a doctored version of Batman, “Le Justicier,” loosely redrawn from Bob Kane’s Detective Comics art, but their Man of Steel is something different. The art and stories aren’t Shuster and Siegel’s:

Based on my mastery of Google Translate and my daughter’s high school French III, that opening panel reads something like:

“A very ancient legend tells us that once there was an extraordinary man gifted with superhuman strength, and that this man must reappear in hundreds and hundreds of centuries and become the defender of the weak, the administrator of justice . . . and here it is: The man reappears in a large city of Europe in the year 2000. He is called the Man of Steel.”

Although he is invulnerable to fire (“au feu”) and begins his career by catching his Lois Lane (“the girl that is named Marise”) after villains toss her from a skyscraper window, this Homme de Acier sports a red tie and green vest, a far cry from the cape and leotard of his American brother.

Things get even stranger over at Hurrah! in 1941. The Blue Beetle was appearing as the red-costumed “Le Fantome d’Acier” (The Phantom of Steel):

The Beetle’s altered look and name was due in part to the popularity of Lee Falk’s Phantom strip. The French periodical Robinson had probably swapped the purple costume for a red one because the ink was cheaper:

But back at Hurrah!, “Le Fantome d’Acier” transforms into “L’Homme d’Acier” on November 5, 1941 (No. 311):

The Beetle-derived costume is the same at first, but then L’Homme d’Acier starts sporting the cape and briefs of the actual Man of Steel, minus his “S” emblem:

Things are stranger still at Editions Mondailes with the arrival of “Francois L’Imbattable” (the Unbeatable):

This Francois episode is redrawn from three of Superman’s May 1940 daily strips, but with each panel reversed:

Superman, or “Surhomme,” also appeared in the doctored form of Bill Everett’s Amazing-Man.

France doesn’t receive a completely unaltered Superman until well after the war, when the new tabloid L’Astucieux begins reprinting Wayne Boring’s Sunday newspaper pages from November 1944:

L’Astucieux launched itself and baby Superman from Krypton with an introductory four-page issue numbered “00” on May 14, 1947. Angouleme’s copy is badly faded:

No. 1 is eight pages and in slightly better shape:

No. 1 also includes Batman (renamed red wings, “les ailes rouges), but that’s another story. This “Crafty” (how Google translates “austuciex”) Superman, like his twin “Marc” who was running simultaneously in Spirou again, didn’t last long in the post-war wave of comic book censorship.

When the Man of Steel returned in the 70s, he was published by Sagedition, formerly known as Sage, the publisher of the long defunct Aventures. This time they didn’t change his name to Yordi. The Angouleme collection includes one of Superman’s final, 1986 adventures, published months before Sagedition went under:

But don’t worry, Francophiles. France is still receiving heavy doses of Homme d’Acier. Only no one bothers to translate his name into French anymore:

Kate Bush and the Sensual World

Posted on September 19, 2014 by Sean Michael Robinson

Three weeks ago, one of the world’s greatest living songwriters returned to live performance after thirty five years of silence. Kate Bush is in the midst of a run of shows at the Hammersmith Odeon, the very venue where she last performed at the conclusion of her one and only tour, way back in 1979.

When Bush initially made a splash, at age nineteen, much of the media attention focused on her precociousness, her wide-ranging and sometimes shrill voice, and her elaborate, passionate dancing and sometimes wacky choreography. But in the decades since her debut, long after her peers have ceased to be relevant, after her beauty and even her fiery voice have weakened, it is her songwriting that remains her most remarkable trait, among many remarkable traits.

Like Emily Bronte before her, young Kate Bush was a fantasist. While her first three albums have thrilling moments, the truly remarkable aspects are her performances, and her work as a vocal and musical arranger. Her songs, on the other hand, are notable chiefly for how good they are for having been written by someone so young, with presumably so little life experience. They are best when they stay in the realm of the fantastic (“Violin,”), when they are overtly theatrical and over the top (“James and the Cold Gun,”), or coyly smart (“Them Heavy People,”) or lyrically vague enough to not draw attention away from the soaring, swooping melodies or the complex arrangements (“Wuthering Heights,” her first and biggest hit.)

When the songs move into the realm of the observation, such as “L’Amour Looks Something Like You,” the effect is something akin to a precocious teenager playing dress-up. No matter how compelling the melody and the arrangement, the scene is somehow distanced from reality, without the pleasure of the overtly fantastic.

I’m hanging on the Old Goose Moon
You look like an angel
Sleeping it off at a station
Were you only passing through?
I’m dying for you just to touch me
And feel all the energy rushing right up-a-me
L’amour looks something like you

But, really, this is comparing Kate Bush to herself. What teenager penned better songs? Who, exactly, were her peers as a songwriter?

In my estimation, Kate Bush’s fourth, fifth, and sixth albums, The Dreaming, Hounds of Love, and The Sensual World, stand as some of the greatest achievements in songwriting in the last half century. Unlike performers who step on the performance treadmill and run for as long as they are able, Kate Bush said goodbye to the stage in 1979, and said hello to self-production, self-direction, her own recording studio, her own goals, on her own time.

And presumably, the time off from performing and the increasing time between recordings meant time to live and to grow as a person.

“Mother Stands for Comfort” is a bit of an oddity on 1986’s Hounds of Love, sandwiched in between songs of greater length and complexity. But the streamlined lyric makes a useful comparison to the poetry-class noodlings of “L’Amour.” To the accompaniment of programmed drums, samples of breaking glass, grand piano, and a throbbing, alien fretless bass, Kate whispers and shakes her way through the oblique narrative.

She knows that I’ve been doing something wrong,

But she won’t say anything.

She thinks that I was with my friends yesterday,

But she won’t mind me lying,

Because

Mother stands for comfort.

Mother will hide the murderer.

The exact scenario isn’t clear from the lyrics. Is there a literal murder? An abortion? The narrative might not be forthcoming, but both the feelings and the dressings are explicit and real. The song is at once mournful and warning, cold and comforting.

It’s an oddity amongst the pulsing grandeur of the rest of the album, a breath between plunge and ascent, but for that it is no less great. Kate Bush takes this intimacy further on her follow-up album, 1989’s The Sensual World, an album full of songs that ramp up the fantastic and the mystical with the mundane details of a real life in the real world. In “Heads We’re Dancing,” it’s not just any charming manipulator she finds herself dancing with at a party– it’s Hitler. In “Rocket’s Tail,” two lovers walk along a bridge at night… I want to describe the story of the song, but the words do it so well themselves, conversational and clear and fitted to stunning unaccompanied singing by Kate and the Trio Bulgarka.

That November night, looking up into the sky,
You said,

“Hey, wish that was me up there–
It’s the biggest rocket I could find,
And it’s holding the night in its arms
If only for a moment.
I can’t see the look in its eyes,
But I’m sure it must be laughing.”

But it seemed to me
the saddest thing I’d ever seen,
And I thought you were crazy,
wishing such a thing.

I saw only a stick on fire,
Alone on its journey
Home to the quickening ground,
With no one there to catch it.

I put on my pointed hat
And my black and silver suit,
And I check my gunpowder pack
And I strap the stick on my back.
And, dressed as a rocket on Waterloo Bridge–
Nobody seems to see me.
Then, with the fuse in my hand,
And now shooting into the night

And then, silence.

After 1993’s disappointing The Red Shoes, it seemed as though Kate Bush’s recorded output might have met the same fate as her live performance, abandoned due to stress or personal needs or even disinterest. But after twelve years of silence came 2005’s Aerial.

It’s a difficult album to evaluate on its own merits, a sprawling mess of songs that go on too long and others that should have been cut completely. But amongst it all are some of the most ambitious songs I’ve ever heard.

The highlight of the album is the stunning “Mrs. Bartolozzi.” Dread and grief and remembered intimacies, all at a distance, as the couple’s clothes tumble in the spin cycle. Like “Mother Stands for Comfort,” the central fact of the song, the tragedy at the heart, is off-stage, this time never mentioned in the song itself.

I watched them go ’round and ’round
my blouse wrapping itself around your trousers
and oh the waves are going out
my skirt floating up around my waist
as I wade out into the surf
oh and the waves are coming in
oh and the waves are going out
oh and you’re standing right behind me
little fish swim between my legs

“Mrs. Bartolozzi” reaches a peak that few songs ever even aspire to, beautiful and ugly, both soothing and thrilling, explicit and mysterious. It’s a song that took Kate Bush a lifetime to write, even if the basic skills required were with her almost from the very beginning.

I don’t know who exactly reads these things, what your motivation might be for making it this far. If you’ve heard these songs and really listened you probably don’t need convincing. If you haven’t heard these songs, I don’t think it’s very likely you clicked through in the first place.

But sometimes, when you see something spectacular, you need to tell someone else, if only to affirm to yourself, yes, I saw that spectacular thing. I saw it and it burned up as it shot across the sky and we were there to see it then, weren’t we?

Thanks Kate for the lifetime of music, and thanks to all of you for making it this far.

Kate Bush discography

The Kick Inside 1978
Lionheart 1978
Never for Ever 1980
The Dreaming 1982
Hounds of Love 1985
The Sensual World 1989
The Red Shoes 1993
Aerial 2005
50 Words for Snow 2011

This post is part of a series called Panoptisongs, focusing on multi-dimensional analysis of songs and song craft.

Was Spider-Woman Harmed in the Making of this Cover?

Posted on September 18, 2014 by Roy T. Cook

So everyone is no doubt aware of the Milo Manara Spider-Woman variant cover art controversy that occurred a couple of weeks ago. Marvel’s commission of the cover, and its subsequent reaction to the backlash, was sadly typical of a mainstream comics industry that seems to want to embrace its large and growing female readership yet seems utterly incompetent when it comes to actually doing so.

Now, I don’t want to talk about Manara’s Spider-Woman cover art for any of the standard and by now familiar reasons. I don’t mean to suggest that the issues relating to the depiction of females in comics raised by the incident are not worth attending to – quite the contrary. But one public comment regarding the incident got me thinking about a different issue.

On September 2, Kelly Sue DeConnick – the current writer of Captain Marvel – made the following statement in an interview when asked about her take on the cover:

“The thing I think to bear in mind is Jess is not a real person – her feelings are not hurt by that cover.” (full video interview here)

Now, this is certainly true.

But we shouldn’t forget certain claims are objectively (even if only fictionally) true of a fictional character (e.g. Jessica is a superhero) and other claims are objectively (again, even if only fictionally) false of fictional characters (e.g. Jessica lives on the moon), regardless of the fact that the character is question doesn’t actually exist. In particular, the production and publication of Manara’s cover now makes it fictionally the case that Jessica (at least once) poised herself atop a building, in a body-paint version of her costume, ‘presenting’ herself (in the biological sense of the term) to anyone in the city who might want a look. Regardless of how we might want to re-construe or reinterpret the art, this is what it in fact depicts.

Of course, as DeConnick notes, Jessica’s feelings aren’t hurt by this – not even fictionally. She isn’t fictionally aware that an artist decided that she would expose herself this way. On the other hand, she now just is the sort of (fictional) character that – perhaps in a single moment of questionable judgment – is willing to engage in some rather extreme exhibitionistic behavior. In short, the incident depicted on the cover is now part of how we understand what sort of person Jessica is.

Given this, we can meaningfully ask: Did the Manara cover (fictionally) harm Spider-Woman? And I think the answer here is uncontroversially “yes”. Whatever Jessica’s motivations for engaging in the behavior depicted in Manara’s art, this contribution to Spider-Woman’s narrative seems to be a negative contribution to her character – a representation of vice, not virtue.

The more important question to ask, however, is perhaps this: Independently of the other kinds of harm undeniably caused by the cover (and well-covered elsewhere), should Manara feel bad for producing this image because it (fictionally) harms Spider-Woman (or should Marvel feel bad for commissioning the image, or should we feel bad for consuming it)? Have we (i.e. Marvel, or Manara, or readers, or some combination of the three) done something morally wrong by adding this incident to the story of Jessica’s life? In short, should we care that we have done something objectively (albeit fictionally) harmful to a fictional character? Is there any sense in which we have moral responsibilities to fictional characters at all?

Of course, characters are harmed via depicting them doing non-virtuous things (making them non-virtuous characters) all the time – we call them villains or antagonists, and we need them for at least some sorts of story. But here the fictional harm done to Spider-Woman was not done in the service of any identifiable narrative needs. It was done for no reason at all, except presumably titillation. So unlike the case of villains, there is no story-related reason to alter Spider-Woman’s character in this negative manner.

So, was Spider-Woman harmed in the making of this cover?

Note: I have simplified a number of issues in the above in order to facilitate my main question:

The narrative content of cover art does not always straightforwardly depict events that we are meant to take to have actually occurred in the narrative contained within the comic – cover art can play all sorts of other commercial or aesthetic roles in addition to straightforward storytelling (see my previous post here).
I have assumed that unsolicited exhibitionism is, all else being equal, morally bad (since, for example, it might harm those exposed to it against their wishes).

If one is unwilling to grant me the simplification in 1, or refuses to grant 2 for the sake of argument (since the questions I am trying to raise is a larger one about the moral properties of fiction), then feel free to imagine a relevantly similar depiction of a until-now (mostly) heroic fictional character engaging in morally unacceptable sexual behavior for no reason other than, perhaps, the sexual gratification of the reader, and where that incident is depicted in the main body of the narrative.

Revelations of a (Ghost)writer

Posted on September 17, 2014 by Stacey Donovan

My life is full of ghosts – those of my grandfather, father, and uncle, all of whom wanted to be writers. My grandfather sailed from Ireland and became a Boston shoe salesman instead. My father was a stockbroker in New York City. My uncle, however, was a copyright lawyer who became a well-known writer of young adult and children’s books. John Donovan also became the Children’s Book Council president, “a non-profit trade organization dedicated to encouraging the literacy and the use and enjoyment of children’s books.”

Throughout my childhood, John would send books. I breathed them in like air – adventure stories, science, nature books, biographies. I would smell the books, rest my head on them, open their pages with awe, escape the real world into theirs.

When my father was dying, I stole the manuscript of the only novel he’d ever written. It was belly-up rotten. Huh? He had three Ivy League degrees. Didn’t matter; he had no talent. What he did have, and what shocked me, was a barely veiled starry-eyed love for a Malaysian woman he’d met while selling car tires there before he met and married my mother.

To understand why that was so surprising, it must be understood that my father was the type of Bostonian who begged its cliché: conservative, unemotional, inexpressive. In short, uptight.

My uncle, on the other hand, loved books, theater, dance, film, writing. Once he told me that he had fallen in love only fifty times. In short, he thrived.

While my father expressed no emotion, my uncle emoted often. Was there a tie between expression and talent? The biggest complaint my father had about me was that I was too emotional.

Was I? In third grade, I read the dictionary for fun. I wrote my first book – of jokes – in fourth grade. Throughout childhood and high school I wrote and directed plays, bribing siblings and pals to perform them at the grown-up cocktail parties. I started writing picturebooks when I was in my teens. I received triple A+’s on my English assignments, which praised my imagination but implored me not to write “this way” in college, to instead follow the rules.

Off to college I went, led by my emotions. I wrote as much as I could, exactly the way I wanted to. By graduation, I had become a big fish in a little pond. I had published poetry. I learned how little that mattered the instant I arrived in the big pond known as Manhattan. Flapping around like a fish far from water, I finally landed work in a small advertising agency. Then a bigger one. I wrote copy. And copy. And copy.

During that time, my father fell ill and died. My sister was diagnosed with a fatal illness. After her young life ended, I quit the copywriting job that paid my bills while it bankrupted my spirit. I left Manhattan for Montauk, the far end of Long Island, and dove into the artist’s life.

Er…the starving artist’s life. It was winter, I knew nobody, there was no work to be found. After a year writing it, and the next year trying to sell it, I sold my first young adult book. It didn’t make me rich, but I got legs out of it – (mostly) positive criticism, attention in Publishers Weekly and The New York Times, workshop gigs at writing conferences, public readings.

I joined a local writing class. I couldn’t help it, my pen would lift as if possessed, and I would edit people’s stuff. When fellow scribblers began offering to pay me for that, I started an editing business.

While I wrote my second novel, I became a ghostwriter. I worked with doctors, lawyers, Indian Chiefs. That’s a fib – about the Indian Chiefs, but it’s true to say that psychoanalysts, teachers, furniture makers, all wanted to be writers. So did ophthalmologists, dentists, bankers. Let’s not forget the entomologists, painters, and mechanics.

Finishing my third novel, I started a writing workshop. Writing is lonely; I longed to be around other scribes who were grappling with issues that can inhibit the creative process: Is this book any good? Should I go to law school? Are 26 rejections too many? The calls started coming in – some the kind I was used to, but increasingly, developing into something else.

As it turned out, a lot of contractors on Long Island’s East End wanted to be writers. They wanted to tell their tales of leaving places like Manhattan for places like Montauk, working at the homes of the doctors and lawyers and Indian Chiefs who had left places like New York City and bought houses on the East End so that they had somewhere to write their books.

The contractors wanted to write stories about the same clients who were now calling me with woeful tales about how their contractors were simply not returning their calls inquiring when that kitchen redesign, living room expansion, or guest house addition would finally be finished. Who could say? The contractors were busy talking to me.

My father’s words rose up like ghosts: Are we all really writers, or are we all just too emotional?

______
Stacey Donovan’s website is donovanedits.com

Rock Is Dead

Posted on September 16, 2014 by Tracy Q. Loxley

I hate to be the one to burst Noah Berlatsky’s bubble but Gene Simmons is right: rock is dead. But it’s not dead for the reasons Simmons thinks it is. In the original Esquire interview, Simmons bemoans the changes in the record industry and scolds the entitled fans who ruined the support system that used to exist for rock bands. What he overlooks is the record industry greed that got us there.

In the late 1990s-early 2000s, the record industry was taken to court for price-fixing and to jack up the price of compact discs. They lost. To a lot of music fans, that was 2-3 hours of their burger flipping that went to pay for corporate’s hookers and blow, rather than to the musicians they loved and thought they were supporting. Artists like the Goo Goo Dolls had to embark on endless tours to pay back their record companies “support system.” Or they could take the TLC route and just file bankruptcy. Add to this, record companies themselves are no longer record companies: buyouts and mergers have turned record companies into just another arm of a corporate revenue stream. What little attempt these companies ever made at producing any semblance of “authentic art” ended long ago.

The most obvious sign of this lack of authenticity is the obsession with signing adorable morons before they’ve finished high school. It makes for more malleable performers. Thanks to Autotune, it doesn’t even matter that they can carry a tune. In this musical climate, nothing interesting is going to happen in the mainstream. Also, a singer or singing group singing to pre-recorded music is cheaper for a venue to book than a full band of people that like eating, and have to take time to set up and break down their gear. That cost consciousness has also led to the rise of the DJ. Not only is paying one or two people less expensive than a band, but it’s also easier to book them for several appearances at a venue. If anything has killed rock music (people playing instruments in bands), then it’s because EDM and dumb pop music are simply more cost effective to make and sell.
This isn’t the first time music has seen such a transition. After World War II, bop quartets started to push out full swing bands consisting of around a dozen people because smaller clubs couldn’t afford the bigger acts. More intimately minded artists like Miles Davis flourished in that atmosphere, while the bigger bands either pared down, like Benny Goodman, or ceased touring for a while, like Duke Ellington.

But what of the proverbial bedroom artists? People who still write songs and play an instrument? Do they even exist anymore? As Berlatsky points out, YouTube tells us they do. I suppose the best of them can hopefully sign to a genuinely independent label and flourish that way. But I suspect that many of these artists will mostly exist in a vacuum. It’s hard to say, because we’re in such a new place with this type of self-promotion.

What I do wonder, though, is how good these people can ever hope to get. I have two reasons for asking this: the first is that a generation of kids who have been given more anti-psychotic drugs than music lessons. The impetus to be interesting has been drugged and counseled out of them. If Bob Dylan was a kid now, he’d probably be given Ritalin instead of a guitar. It seems impossible to demand that this generation give us authentic musicians when it’s normal to deny them the privilege of being their authentic selves.

This line of questioning extends to the audience too. How can a generation who have been drugged into submission ever learn to appreciate an artist who calls out the bullshit in the world? Because that is the spirit of not just rock ‘n roll, but of great art. I mean, it’s not the only thing, but it can be a substantially more interesting starting point being another sparkly, dancing kid on Nickelodeon. And this is probably what scares me more than anything about the death of rock ‘n roll: that we’ve reached a point, culturally, where there’s no room for honesty or rebellion. So much of what we consume, not just in music, but in movies and television, has little room for anything that hasn’t been already designed and pre-approved by a committee.

Rock ‘n roll has had a good 50 year run or so, and by the time Gene Simmons’ kids are grandparents, it will be like jazz is to our generation. It will still exist in some pockets of the music world, among serious music fans taking themselves very seriously, but it will continue to move farther and farther out of the mainstream. And hip-hop will be on the chopping block very soon.

Captain America: Half-Truths

Posted on September 15, 2014 by Ng Suat Tong

I was looking forward to reading Truth: Red, White, and Black following the smattering of positive notices the comic has received on HU of late. Noah’s recent article certainly gave me the impression that this was a comic which would transcend its roots in the superhero genre. The words “difficult”, “bitter”, and “depressing” are certainly words to embrace when encountering a Captain America comic.

I’ll not stint in my praise of the parts which do work. I like the naturalness of Robert Morales’ period dialogue and the shorthand used to delineate 3-4 characters in the space of a sparse 22 pages in the first issue. I like that Faith Bradley takes to wearing a burqa just to make a point. The idea that the first Black Captain America should be sent to prison the moment he steps foot on American soil is not only sound (linking it with the events of the Red Summer of 1919 mentioned earlier in the book) but resonates with reality.

I like that Baker has a way with faces and makes the characters distinct even if they are almost all dispensed with in the course of 4 issues. His devotion to caricature (he is a humorist at heart), on the other hand, lends little weight to proceedings which are deadly serious—the violence is anaemic, the action flat, the misery imperceptible, and the double page splash homage to Simon and Kirby’s original Cap utterly out of place (or at the very least executed with little irony). I like the idea that when Isaiah tries to save some white women about to be sent to the gas chambers, they react to him with a fury as if asked to couple with a dog. It’s a troublesome passage of course since it implicates Holocaust victims in their own brand of racism.

One big problem for me, however, was that the comic wasn’t depressing enough. If the super soldier experiments are meant as a distant reflection of the Tuskegee syphilis study, then the comic doesn’t quite grapple with the true nature of tertiary syphilis and, in particular, the effects of neurosyphilis. The latter condition is described quite bluntly in Alphonse Daudet’s autobiographical In the Land of Pain and the effects are nothing short of a total breakdown of the human body, oftentimes a frightening dementia. Not the blood spattered walls which we see in one instance when a soldier is given an overdose of the super soldier serum but years of irredeemable and unsuspecting torture.

A nod to this lies in one of the test subject’s post-treatment skull deformation as well as Isaiah Bradley’s ultimate fate, but it barely registers in the context of a form wedded to the Hulk and the Leader. Yet even these moments are quickly discarded in favor of action and adventure—there is simply no time for the horror to deepen. The great lie underlying this tenuous reference to human experimentation is that no one has ever become stronger due to a syphilis infection—which is exactly what happens to a handful of test subjects. Not only is the condition potentially lethal in the long term but it has destructive medical and psychological consequences for the families of the afflicted as well as the community at large. To lessen the moral depravity of this historical touchstone in favor of saccharine hope seems almost an abnegation of responsibility.

The reasons for the strange disconnect between purpose and final product are perhaps easy to understand. No doubt editorial dictates and the limits of the Captain America brand came swiftly into play. But there remains the secondary motive of this enterprise. Reviewers have naturally focused on the “worthy” parts of Truth but in so doing they fail to highlight that it is in no small part an attempt to insert the African American experience into the lily white world of Simon and Kirby; an updating of entrenched myths and propaganda resulting in a nostalgic reinterpretation of familiar tropes (confrontation with Hitler anyone?). As such it partakes deeply of the black and white morality of the original comics— its easy virtue and comfortable dispensation of guilt.

It’s telling that Merrit (drug dealer, arsonist, murderer, and kidnapper), one of the most egregious villains and racists in the entire piece, is also a Nazi sympathizer. The other unrepentant racist of the comic (Colonel Walker Price) is a murderous eugenicists with his hands on the very strings of racial and genetic purity. Is racism only for villains? Why not rather the very foundations of American society; an edifice so large as to be almost irresistible. There are small hints of this throughout the text of course, but the desire for closure and the sweet apportioning of justice overwhelms a more meaningful and truthful thesis. While there is every reason to believe that racism against African Americans has improved haltingly over the decades, I would be more guarded in my optimism if our attentions are turned to people living in the Middle East and Latin America. In the real world, Captain America wouldn’t be one of the enlightened heroes of the tale, but one of the torturers and perpetrators. Even Steve Darnall and Alex Ross had the temerity to recast Uncle Sam (the superhero) as a paranoid schizophrenic in their own comic recounting America’s woes.

And what of the final fate of these villains? Well, we all know what happend to Hitler and Goebbels. That leaves Merrit who sits scowling in jail presumably imprisoned for life and Price who is threatened with exposure at a stockholder’s meeting by Captain America. And what of real life eugenicists such as Harry H. Laughlin, Charles Davenport, and Harry J. Haiselden—death by natural causes one and all, certainly not the judicially satisfying conclusion of public disgrace. The organizations which funded their work still abound in good health; their followers retiring to the safe havens of rebranding and renaming.

In the final analysis, Truth is still meant to be an uplifting story of tainted patriotism. As social history and activism by the backdoor Truth is commendable but it’s almost as if the authors were afraid to make too much of a fuss. Steve McQueen’s Twelve Years A Slave has no such qualms and is an orgy of violence, despair, and depression—a film which I have no intention of ever watching again. I have no intention of ever reading Robert Morales and Kyle Baker’s Truth again but, in this instance, for all the wrong reasons.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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