Category Archives: Series

The Groove That Ended

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This first appeared in The Chicago Reader.
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Today fabulous divas and thuggy rappers use the same producers. They sing about the same things—mainly clubbin’ and sex. They date each other. And they appear not just on the same radio stations but on the same tracks. For all practical purposes, hip-hop and R&B have merged into a single commercial juggernaut.

Ashanti, who’s been out of circulation for four years, has already proven herself a diva, but her big comeback, The Declaration, is also her attempt to fully and finally embrace radio reality. It’s the album where she shakes off the influence of label owner Irv Gotti and hooks up with a bunch of megaproducers to prove she can rock the dance floors of the late aughts even harder than she rocked the bedrooms of 12-year-old girls in 2002.

That was the plan, anyway. But The Declaration is completely anonymous. It feels like it could’ve been put together by any second- or third-rate R&B diva—Christina Milian, say, or Lumidee. It’s not terrible, and there are some nice moments—the piano loop on the lead single, “The Way That I Love You,” works well, and “In These Streets” gets lodged in your head in that pleasurable/painful way certain pop songs do—but the moments of inspiration are fleeting. Even Rodney Jerkins, who’s been on fire these past couple of years, seems to be sleepwalking; his production job on “So Over You” sounds like he unearthed a duff Brandy track from ten years ago and remixed it while doing his taxes. “Girlfriend” is a dreary knock-off of Ciara’s “Promises.” And Akon’s contribution to “Body on Me” is just like every other one of his wack misogynist whines—the man is a one-trick blight.

Even more distressing, though, is the slide in Ashanti’s singing. She’s largely abandoned the slightly nasal burr that put a poignant catch in everything she did. Gone too are the smarts, which made her one of the most underrated pop singers in the business despite her thin voice. Nothing here matches the aching pause in “I’m so… happy, baby” (from “Happy,” on her self-titled debut), the clipped, funky stutter in “Focus,” or the jazzy phrasing that swings her sublimely off the beat in “Don’t Let Them” (both from 2004’s Concrete Rose).

On The Declaration Ashanti runs through a smorgasbord of vocal styles. On “You Gonna Miss” she vacillates between a hard-edged pseudo-Beyonce and a processed pseudo-Ciara. On “Things You Make Me Do” she seems to be imitating the sensual purr of her old rival Tweet. It’s like she desperately wants to be somebody else, or anybody other than herself. On the execrable faux show tune “Shine,” Ashanti insists that “They can’t shut out your light/ No matter how hard they try.” But this record is proof that, if you give them just a little help, they can in fact smother your inner beauty under a big, fat bushel of blandness.

Of course, negative reviews of Ashanti albums are par for the course. Except for the millions of tween girls who bought her CDs in the early aughts, pretty much everyone despises Ashanti’s music. Even contrarians who laud the virtues of disposable plastic pop tend to prefer Beyonce or Kelis or Mariah Carey. Ashanti, who was briefly as big as any of them, rarely merits a mention.

Ashanti’s problems—now and then—mostly stem from being on the wrong side of the zeitgeist. Specifically, she has a very uncomfortable relationship with hip-hop. Her 2002 debut included some of the most embarrassing faux-street skits ever committed to disc, with the pitiful Gotti incongruously bellowing profanities like some sort of Tourette’s-afflicted ungulate (“I’m feeling the shit out of you, you’re feeling the shit out of me”). A remix of her big single “Foolish” featured a sexually explicit rap by the deceased Biggie Smalls, with Ashanti cooing encouragement. Instead of buying her some cred, it just made her seem cluelessly ghoulish.

The trouble is that Ashanti came on the scene just as R&B and hip-hop were fusing. In the 90s hip-hop was certainly an important influence on R&B, but there was still some distance between them. When Aaliyah sings “One in a Million,” for example, it’s emphatically R&B—the music is groove based, and the lyrics are a straightforward tribute to perfect love. Timbaland’s beats function as an insistent but separate voice, so that the track becomes almost a duet, a love song from R&B to hip-hop with Aaliyah and the breakbeats trading endearments and vows.

The two genres consummated their relationship at the end of the decade. Acts like Destiny’s Child (with producer Kevin Briggs) and Kelis (with the Neptunes) moved away from grooves and toward more complex song structures, integrating beats and multilayered vocals. Lyrics also began to adopt a much more in-your-face hip-hop attitude—instead of agonizing over the men who done them wrong, Beyonce and Kelis come across as tough and angry, chewing out stalkers, cheaters, and parasites with gleeful disdain. On songs like “Bootylicious,” Destiny’s Child even slipped seamlessly from singing to quasi-rapping while boasting about their sexual charms.

Ashanti is a different story. The music on her debut was the last, gorgeous gasp of 90s R&B. Taking his cue from Butterfly-era Mariah Carey, producer 7aurelius didn’t so much write songs as pour glittery, translucent glop over beats and vocals. The result was a syrupy, trudging, pulsing drone—doom metal by Care Bears. Ashanti and her infinitely multitracked doubles often sound buried alive, desperately emoting from inside an echoey pink plastic prison, repeating and repeating R&B signifiers (“Baby baby baby baby baby”) until all meaning is squeezed out of them and they start to register as pure sound. It’s overwhelmingly, swooningly, gooily romantic, miles away from the invulnerable iron-bitch strut of Beyonce or the true-pain confessions of neosoul artists like Keyshia Cole. In other words, it’s neither tough nor real. There’s nothing hip-hop about it.

Ashanti’s next two albums kept the same format—lousy skits, ravishingly ethereal music—but fell off progressively from the massive commercial success of the first. Gotti’s legal troubles certainly helped sabotage 2004’s Concrete Rose, but in any case the space in R&B for artists with so little real affinity for hip-hop was shrinking. On 2005’s The Emancipation of Mimi, Mariah Carey proved she was flexible enough to adapt and still make good music, but Ashanti… well, not so much. On The Declaration, in order to fit in with the current state of R&B, she’s systematically erased all traces of her musical personality.

I’m not trying to say that everything was better back in the day. Though 90s R&B had its moments, overall I think the genre has benefited enormously from hip-hop’s influence. Still, there’s a price; pop is a zero-sum game, and when one style wins, another loses. That’s why today Ashanti’s early albums sound like a transmission from another world, a place where R&B never took that left turn but instead went straight on, stuck in one endless, shimmering groove.

It’s Nobody, Bitch

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This first appeared on Splice Today.
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Of all the pre-processed, artificial, talentless pop blow-up dolls, Britney Spears is quite possibly the most processed, the most artificial, and the most talentless. Beyoncé can actually sing. Lady Gaga has performance art attitude. K$sha has rock and roll attitude. Rihanna has an accent. Even the relatively anonymous Ciara can dance.

In comparison, Britney is a cipher. Over the years, she’s mimicked a range of pop styles, from the faux-Beatles psychedelia of 1999’s “The Beat Goes On,” to the 2001 faux-Prince funk of “Boys.” But you never get the sense that those styles exactly influenced her, or that she even knows who Prince or the Beatles are. Without Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake’s whole performance schtick would dissolve. Without Prince or the Beatles or even Madonna, Britney’s producers would just feed her something else. This is ludicrously illustrated in 2007’s Blackout, where whoever’s in charge decides to turn Britney into a confessional artist. On “Piece of Me” she coos and growls about her public meltdown and her kid and how unfair everyone is to her, and she sounds as engaged as if she’s reading someone else’s tax forms. When Christina Aguilera whines about her critics, she seems sincerely self-obsessed. For Britney, though, talking about her life is just another pose she can fail to carry off convincingly.

Which is absolutely not a bad thing. On the contrary, Britney’s utter lack of emotional investment in her own music has served her well throughout her career. The contrast with Xtina is instructive. Aguilera has 10 times the voice Britney does. But she also has at least that much more ambition, without any more discernible intelligence. Her increasingly desperate efforts to turn herself into something more respectable than a dumb pop singer—a classic diva! Lady Gaga! Anything! Help!—have resulted in one of the most embarrassing public careers in recent memory. For Xtina followers, her mangling of the national anthem wasn’t so much a horrible misstep as a logical culmination of her evolution as a singer. And I’m speaking as someone who liked Aguilera’s last album!

Britney’s had her own public disasters, of course. But they never seemed to touch her actual music, in large part because nothing touches her music. A Britney song has the perfect purity of an unwrapped Twinkie; it exists outside authenticity and time and art in an inviolable envelope of plastic. This has only become truer as her career as advanced. Way back on Baby, One More Time, Britney sounded almost human—on the first moans of that album she even came within a mortar shot of soul. No fear of that on the recently released Femme Fatale. Autotune was made for Britney and Britney for autotune. Her non-personality is systematically erased; she’s more herself than ever, which is to say she’s more no one.

Just because Femme Fatale is arguably Britney’s most characteristic album doesn’t necessarily mean it’s her best. The song selection overall certainly isn’t as strong as In the Zone, and I think Femme Fatale is a step down from her last effort, 2008’s Circus, as well. Still, there’s plenty to like. From the insanely catchy whistled hook of “I Wanna Go,” to the catchy and burpy low end on “Big Fat Bass,” producers Dr. Luke, Martin, Billboard and others pack the disc with enough gimmicks for an ABBA album or three. The sing-song girl-meets-bloop “How I Roll” does Robyn better than Robyn does. “I wanna go downtown where my posse’s at / got nine lives like a kitty cat,” turns streetwise posturing into music-box girl-group nonsense, an apotheosis of rapturously treacly yearning. But the highlight of studio fuckery may come on “(Drop Dead) Beautiful.” In the middle of casually objectifying some hot guy, Britney lets out a lascivious laugh which is almost instantly processed into a computerized squeal. It’s like the producers heard a flicker of sincere emotion and panicked. Drown it out! Drown it out! Where’s the confounded FX knob?

The totality of the self-effacement on Britney’s albums is definitely funny, arguably disturbing—and also, I think, kind of moving. For instance, at the beginning of “Inside Out,” Britney sings “gotta look my best if we’re gonna breakup.” It’s a wry, rather sad line, and it seems true as well—you want to impress the boyfriend more when he’s on the way out, though logically you should want to less. The lyric touches on a sense of being out of control, of trying to remake yourself to no good purpose.

I don’t think this is a glimpse of the real Britney. Someone else wrote it, and her delivery certainly doesn’t suggest she thought about it too hard. Rather, the lyric resonates with the fact that there is no real Britney. And that in turn points to a sometimes-neglected truth. Pop and love and life—they’re not just about swagger and personality. They’re also about disappearing into everyone and no one; about ominous, bitter, and sometimes sweet nothings. Britney is not the pop star as genius. But there is a kind of genius in the way she incarnates the pop star as nonentity.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman Chronicles volume 1

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I just finished DC’s Wonder Woman Chronicles volume 1, which collects Wonder Woman’s appearances in chronological order. This first volume collects Wonder Woman’s first appearance in All-Star Comics 8 (December 1941-January 1942) through Sensation Comics no. 9 in September 1942, and also includes Wonder Woman number 1.

I’ve already talked about several of these comics in the Bound to Blog series (for example, I talk about Wonder Woman #1 here, and Sensation Comics #1 here.) But there are a couple of things that struck me while reading the collection as a whole.

No Intro

There’s absolutely no introductory material at all, unless you count a small note in the table of contents that says, “The comics reprinted in this volume were produced in a time when racism played a larger role in society and popular culture, both consciously and unconsciously.” That is undeniably true

but still, it seems like there might be more to say. Who wrote these comics? Who drew them? How popular were they? What did people think of them? Why are we reprinting them?

Of course, the answer to the last question is basically, “because they are there,” and also, “Wonder Woman still has a fanbase, so if you stick her face on a cover, you can sell some copies, even if no one really thinks this material is particularly worthwhile — or, for that matter, thinks anything about it at all.”

Not that this is just about Wonder Woman. I’m sure DC’s other chronicles editions don’t have intros…the point is to make them as cheap as possible, I’m sure, in the hopes of selling to a not-especially-well-defined audience of WW fans, kids, and the curious or confused. But even the DC Wonder Woman Archive Edition (hard backed, more expensive, slightly more material) has an intro (by folk singer Judy Collins) that is more along the lines of an extended blurb than an actual effort to provide some context.

I’m sure some might say this is for the best — why have some professor get between the kids and their pop culture ephemera? The problem is that pop cultural ephemera is ephemera; if that’s what it is, why reprint it? And, indeed, DC’s various archival projects have tended to founder from lack of interest, being released at glacial speeds before instantly going out of print. Those boring professors, it turns out, are part of minimal cultural validation — and without that minimal validation, old pop cultural ephemera is largely irrelevant.

Steve Trevor, He-Man Convalescent

Steve Trevor appears on the very first page of Wonder Woman’s first story in All Star comics. In that debut appearance, he’s unconscious.

He then stays unconsious throughout the entire tale. He gets some moments of lucidity in flashback, but by the end of the story, he’s still conked out. It’s only in the 2nd WW tale (in Sensation Comics #1) that he comes to his senses. After that he’s in the hospital convalescing. He sneaks out when he learns of deadly danger to the country…but by the end of the comic, he’s back in bed again, with WW as Diana Prince (who changed places with his nurse…don’t ask) caring for him. Next issue he’s up and around, but by the end:

It’s only in Sensation Comics 3, the fourth WW story, that Steve Trevor escapes from the hospital, forcing Diana Prince to get a job not as his secretary, but as his boss’ secretary.

In other words, the ur-Steve Trevor, as Marston conceived of him, is not a fighter nor a love, but a hospital patient. The true Steve Trevor is the wounded — or, perhaps more accurately, infantilized — Steve Trevor.

In Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power, and Reistance, Gill Plain argues that:

War creates a situation in which the gender debate is subsumed by a meta-narrative of power. It represents a conflict that divorces and prioritises the division between activity and passivity from the founding binary opposition masculine/feminine. War almost represents itself as a constructive reinscription, or even a rejection of the age-old formulations of gender…. In the course of purusing the division between a non-gender-specific activity and passivity, woman is ‘decentered’… The woman has once again become invisible.

For Plain, then, war destabilizes gender by divorcing activity/passivity from gender — but in so doing, it erases women’s difference, and so erases women.

I think, though, Marston, radical feminist and dirty old coot, has found a way around this dilemma. He uses the destabilizing effect of war to create an emasculated hero — the wounded soldier, whose incapacity is the sign of his boldness and strength. But for Marston, the fact that passivity is disconnected from women does not result in ungendering. On the contrary, it becomes a masochistic fetish. Steve regresses, authority is upended…and patriarchy becomes matriarchy. Woman isn’t erased; she’s explicitly elevated as caregiver and (maternal) hero. Which is (in Marston) what men want:

That’s an awesomely, fluidly flaccid twisted leg Peter has drawn there — and Steve is, of course, explicitly getting off on his own castration. War for Marston isn’t a disaster so much as an opportunity for men to embrace their weakness…and let women take over.

Myself for a Rival

A number of the stories in this volume end with a panel like this

What’s interesting about this is that…that’s it. The trope is stated…and then dropped, over and over again. The love triangle is pointed at, but never really becomes central to the plot (the way it is with the Clark/Lois/Superman triangle, even in the early years to some extent.)

It seems like, for Marston, there’s a pleasure in the masquerade of changing identities, and a frisson in the unrequited melodrama…but very little interest in actually presenting either Diana or Wonder Woman as angst-ridden or, for that matter, weak. There’s almost a condescension about it, like she’s pretending she’s worried to make Stevie feel important, the little darling. As I’ve mentioned before, double identities in Wonder Woman feel more like play than agonized bifurcation, a polymorphous feminine role-play rather than an agonized Oedipal bifurcation. After Marston died, of course, Diana’s love vicissitudes move from marginal tease to major plot points. With Marston’s feminism removed, everybody seemed more comfortable with a passive object of desire, rather than with the all-powerful Mommy, stooping to love.

The Flaw in Watchmen

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In his post last week, James Romberger argued that the “offensive flaw” of Watchmen is its suggestion that a woman could forgive, and even love, her rapist.

Sally kissing the photo of the late Blake amplifies the flat note in what is otherwise one of the most carefully and sensitively composed comics ever done. In a medium predominantly directed to males, an often overtly misogynistic form oblivious to the consequences of sexual violence, this rare realistic depiction of rape in comics comes to represent a offense a woman could forgive, that she even might even come to love her rapist.

James is certainly correct that the trope of woman-falling-for-her-rapist — the conversion rape — is a standard of misogyny. As I’ve noted before, the ur-conversion rape is probably the notorious scene in Goldfinger where James Bond overpowers Pussy Galore and fucks her. Afterwards, Pussy Galore abandons her lesbianism and betrays her boss, risking her life and the lives of her whole lesbian posse for the love of Bond’s magic penis.

what’s especially offensive about this whole scenario is the extent to which Ms. Galore is so completely beside the point. The rape and transformation is never about her; in fact, we don’t ever get a sense of her as a character except that she’s tough and independent, and then, suddenly, not so much. She falls for Bond because he’s just so darn overwhelmingly attractive, and she abandons her (never quite stated) lesbianism as if she were doffing a hat. There’s no actual psychological progression attempted; it’s just, insert phallus, hello enlightenment. The whole point of the encounter is, in fact, to annihilate her as a character; in entering her, Bond replaces her will with his own, and she becomes simply his catspaw. It’s the crudest kind of male power fantasy, and one which is more than a little pitiable, suggesting as it does a desire to fuck a mannequin, rather than a real person.

The Bond/Pussy Galore conversion rape is undoubtedly misogynist — but it’s also really, really different from the rape in Watchmen. In the first place, there’s nothing romantic or pleasurable about the sexual violence that Sally experiences. On the contrary, Blake’s assault is bloody and miserable. He himself is anything but cool; Gibbons portrays him pathetically pulling his pants up afterward, and then getting beaten to a pulp by the Hooded Justice.

Moreover, Sally is not converted by the rape. On the contrary, she never forgives Blake.

She hasn’t forgotten, she hasn’t decided what he did was okay. He’s a monster, she knows it, and she’s never going to let him have anything to do with her daughter.

Of course, the part that gets James, and that he feels is misogynist, is that Laurie is Blake’s daughter too. Sally did not forgive him, but she did love him.

James feels that that is problematic. In part, he seems to feel that it is problematic because it is unrealistic (“this rare realistic depiction of rape in comics comes to represent a offense a woman could forgive, that she even might even come to love her rapist.”)

But is Sally’s reaction unrealistic? Women do often love, or are intimately attached, to the people who abuse them, whether husbands or boyfriends. This is an uncomfortable truth, especially for a feminist vision that puts a premium on empowerment and autonomy. Sally Jupiter is certainly not perfectly self-actualized; there’s no question about that. But because she’s not perfectly self-actualized, does that mean she and her choices are necessarily wrong or misogynist?

In James’ reading, Sally’s love becomes the misogynist smoking-gun; the love is wrong. I don’t accept that. It’s not Sally who’s wrong. It’s Blake. It’s not the love that’s at fault; it’s the violence.

James says that:

Even more offensively, Snyder in his film made the fact of Laurie’s very existence through Sally’s forgiveness be the salvation of the world. This concept unfortunately lurks in the book…

I’m relieved to discover that I’ve almost completely forgotten Snyder’s crappy film. In the book, though, Laurie’s existence is indeed seen as a miracle (though not necessarily as the salvation of the world, as my brother points out). As Dr. Manhattan puts it:

So yes, Sally’s love (though not, as I said, her forgiveness) is seen as transformative, and even beautiful. And it is seen as transformative and beautiful in large part because it produced Laurie, who Sally loves, and who Jon loves.

I think James in part sees Sally’s love as a flaw because he sees it as mitigating, or validating the rape. But I don’t think that’s the case. Just because something good comes from evil doesn’t make evil good. Paul Celan’s poetry is wonderful, but it doesn’t validate or recuperate the Holocaust. Or, as C.S. Lewis says in Voyage to Venus, talking about the fall from Eden:

“Of course good came of it. Is Maleldil a beast that we can stop his path, or a leaf that we can twist His shape? Whatever you do, He will make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed Him. That is lost for ever. The first King and first Mother of our world did the forbidden thing; and He brought good of it in the end. But what they did was not good; and what they lost we have not seen. And there were some to whom no good came nor ever will come.” He turned to the body of Weston. “You,” he said, “tell her all. What good came to you? Do you rejoice that Maleldil became a man? Tell her of your joys, and of what profit you had when you made Maleldil and death acquainted”…

The body that had been Weston’s threw up its head and opened its mouth and gave a long melancholy howl like a dog….”

That could be Blake at the end giving that howl, almost. Certainly, he dies ignominiously and alone, having lost even the comfort of his amorality. Laurie, as a living manifestation of her mother’s love, is a standing rebuke to Blake and his life. If Laurie is a miracle, then the Comedian’s cynicism and nihilism truly mean nothing. This is not to say that Moore and Gibbons, or even Laurie herself, entirely reject the Comedian’s evil or his violence. But it is to say that, to the extent that Watchmen does reject it, it’s because of, not despite, Sally and her choices.

I don’t mean to say that those choices are ideal. Sally herself doesn’t think her choices are ideal. But just because a woman fails to make ideal choices, and just because she does not respond to violence with hate (or at least not only with hate), doesn’t make her a failure. If feminism requires perfect women, there won’t be any feminism. Sally may be a flaw, but humans aren’t gems. Flaws don’t make them less precious.

Utilitarian Review 2/4/12

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On HU

The week started out with Charles Reece and I in an epic Buffy vs. Twilight showdown.

I talked about noir and violence in the Steven Grant/Mike Zeck Punisher.

Richard Cook discussed the found footage horror genre.

I talked about comics and Fredric Jameson’s theories of the postmodern.

Andrei Molotiu discusses the cracked allure of Frank Miller’s Holy Terror.

I talked about the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman and replicating postmodern pleasures.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere
At the Atlantic I reviewed the surprisingly enjoyable new found footage superhero film Chronicle.
 
Other Links
Robert Stanley Martin reviews Lilli Carré’s Nine Ways to Disappear.

Chris Mautner on the Before Watchmen idiocy.
 

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #27

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In theory, this is the penultimate issue of Wonder Woman written by William Marston. in fact, as I’ve mentioned several times already, it seems very possible that many of the stories were being ghosted by this point. As with the last few issues, this is simply not that great.

So rather than belaboring that fact, I thought I’d mention a couple of things here that interested me in light of my recent post about comics and postmodernism. As I noted in that post, comics is built around reproduction of imagery and the reinscription of inaccessible deep time (memory, history, past) as a manipulable surface. I think you could argue that that is the case even in comics like this one from the 40s, suggesting a kind of precocious postmodernism.

As an example, in the first story in this comic, Diana Prince has been asked to present a medal to Wonder Woman. So WW has to figure out a way for her and Diana, her alter ego, to appear together in the same place. The solution is a technological process involving the extraction of Amazonian clay from a volcano, followed by the molding of a Diana robot/dummy, and the copious deployment of technological gadgetry. In other words, the Amazons use labor, craft, genius, and ingenuity to create a complete, coherent masterpiece — which seems like an essentially modernist solution. The Diana Prince dummy is the pulp narrative equivalent of Van Gogh’s boots).

The nature of the comic, however, pushes against a modernist achievement. The Diana doll not only replicates the real Diana Prince; it replicates itself. The doll is an image, of course, but the image of that image is repeated panel after panel. In the upper right hand panel above, Wonder Woman makes the doll speak “Hola! I’m very happy to be alive!” The doll isn’t alive, it’s only an image of life — but, of course, Wonder Woman isn’t alive either; the speech bubble coming out of her mouth is just as ventriloquized (by Marston, or whoever is speaking as Marston) as the speech bubble coming out of “Diana’s.” The final panel, as Wonder Woman hugs her doppelganger, may in part be the euphoria of a work completed. But it also seems to be the libidinal excitement of the mirror stage, when the child sees and (mentally) embraces its own (false) image. Hippolyta, WW’s mother, of course, looks on proudly as her daughter coos at her own reflection. The celebration is of the self magically and infinitely reproduced, the image reified as product and sent forth into the world to multiply, flowing within and across borders in a delirium of multiplying jouissance.

The third story in the volume has an even odder take on creativity and replication. Wonder Woman is flying the Holiday girls to Paradise Island when she is suddenly sucked out of her invisible plane. The girls land the plane, but are understandably concerned. Hippolyta, however, tells them she knows all about WW’s disappearance:

I think Marston must have written this — who else is going to spend panel after panel explicating garbled Platonism? And on he goes:

So, according to Marston, idea-forms send out cosmic rays to sensitive minds, reproducing themselves on the brain like film on a screen (Peter’s silhouettes in the bottom right as Hippolyta and the Holiday girls turn to look at the mirror/screen seems suggestive here.)

Plato said we could only see the flickering shadows of reality on the cave wall; Marston has reality beamed into our heads. Idea-forms aren’t the real tragically out of reach; they’re a fecund technology disseminated to all. Wonder Woman herself — a loving woman stronger than men — becomes a kind of viral idea, propagating itself across time and space. More than 70 years after Marston’s death, Alan Moore would create Promethea, an idea of a goddess which inhabits different women at different times. Moore thought Promethea was his own version of Wonder Woman. Based on this story, though it seems like Promethea wasn’t a version of Wonder Woman, but the idea-concept itself. The pomo version of Wonder Woman is simply Wonder Woman.

Post-modernism, which turns everything into a fetishized surface, obviously works well with Marston’s own proclivity to fetishize…well, everything. But I also wonder if his early-adoption of post-modernism might have something to do with his queerness — and perhaps his femininity. Certainly, the criticism of post-modernism as surface without depth, as merely decorative, echoes criticisms of female aesthetic endeavors, and indeed of women themselves. When you look at Harry Peter’s art (as in the image from Wonder Woman #13 below), you see pages stuffed with repetitive images of women holding, clasping, and touching each other, a consumable cornucopia of iterated catharsis.

If that also describes our post-modern landscape of bricolage, mash-up and meme, perhaps Luce Irigary should have substituted “postmodernism” for “woman”, and written:

So postmodernism does not have a sex organ? She has at least two of them, but they are not identifiable as ones. Indeed, she has many more. Her sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is plural….postmodernism has sex organs more or less everywhere.

Utilitarian Review 1/28/12

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On HU

In our Featured Archive Post, the mysterious cough syrup celebrates the work of Jason Overby.

I sneer at the saccharine atrocity that is the new muppet movie.

Tom Gill on a classic Tsuge manga.

Tom follows up with a discussion of Tsuge and the zen concept of evaporation.

I argue that sci-fi and fantasy takes on race need to be more aware of history.

Qiana Whitted discusses African-American literature and African-American classics the comic.

Joy DeLyria on good and evil in Buffy, Battlestar Galactica, and sci-fi/fantasy.

I put up a black and white gospel download mix.

Ng Suat Tong on Olivier Schrauwen’s The Man Who Grew His Beard.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I review Tim Wise’s new book Dear White People and disagree with him about Ron Paul.

At his blog Bert Stabler and I chat about academic Marxists.

At Splice again I argue that Newt Gingrich is good for no one.
 
Other Links

Elias Hiebert has a nice reply to my discussion of Crumb and blackface.

Jason Thompson has a massive essay at io9 about the collapsing manga industry.

Qiana has a post at her new blog about blackness in EC monster comics.

Rand Paul on the idiocy of airport security.

Matthias Wievel at tcj.com on the new Fanta Carl Barks collection.

Best Music Writing is now taking nominations for its 2012 anthology.