Dyspeptic Ouroboros: Daphne Carr on Music And Criticism

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Dyspeptic Ouroboros is a new occasional series here on HU in which artists, critics, and other folks talk about the relationship between art and criticism.

To kick things off, I’m publishing an interview I conducted with Daphne Carr. Carr is the series editor for the Best Music Writing series. She blogs at funboring.com, and her book in the 33 1/3 series on Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine will be out in September. We talked by email in February. A shortened version of this interview appeared on Madeloud.com.

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Noah Berlatsky: The Best Music Writing series is somewhat unique in the sense that there hasn’t been a successful “Best Book Review” or “Best Film Writing” series (I guess there was a “Best Film Writing” book or two, but it seems to have gone belly up after a year or so.) Do you think writing about music occupies a different cultural place than writing about other kinds of pop culture? And if you do, do you think that’s because of an intrinsic difference in the way people respond to music versus other art forms, or is it because of the historical development of music criticism, or some other factor?

Daphne Carr: Music occupies a different cultural space than do other forms of fine art (for sure) and mass-distributed art because it is ubiquitous in contemporary life, it permeates nearly every moment of our public lives (with or without permission) and is part of much of our private lives. Along with that music is also a form of communication that privileges the poetics and emotional content as much or more than denotative meaning, which makes it a rich “text.” Of course there is also music as a culture, music as a social context or as an element that heightens the meaning of social gatherings for many people, which makes it important when writing about how we live our lives and make sense of the world. So there are a lot of ways that music is different than any form of art fixed in material or any work that exists in restricted spaces. I could go on and on…

One of the things I love most about BMW [the Best Music Writing anthology] is that many of my favorite pieces come from writers who do not consider music to be their primary object. There is a sense that anyone who has cultivated a writing style and who has passion and time can write a great piece about music, whereas I think some of the other fields of art like literature, film, and fine art have more canonical theoretical approaches one is supposed to have mastered before beginning to criticize. While some lament the lack of a body of theory for the analysis of popular music, I think the sort of wild mixture of approaches—from lyrical analysis to memoir—is its strength. It also makes my job really hard because people are writing from all over the place.

Just a note of clarification by the way, I track down and read work about any kind of music, not just “popular” music. I don’t have a bias against art music in any way.

What do you think the role of writing about music is? Is music writing to help people make consumer choices? To help them understand music better? Is it entertainment? Is it art in its own right?

Of course music writing can also be entertainment, and can also be art. It’s a huge field with so many different kinds of writers in it, from poets to content writers.

As far as music criticism goes, one of the primary skills of a critic is to be a filter. It’s the “we suffer so you don’t have to” model, a division of labor where critics give attention to things that the less active, less obsessive listeners would or could not. The filtering result of a review used to be that readers wouldn’t have to suffer by wasting money on wretched LPs or CDs, and now maybe it’s just that listeners won’t waste as much time. Or, if the reviewer favored something that was unusual, it might get bumped up in sales and appreciation. That said, the circulation model of music and music criticism has changed so dramatically with online distribution/publishing that I think it is not easy to compare it with the print-media and physical copy era.

I know you read a ton of music criticsm for the Best of series every year — and that the final books reflect the individual editors, rather than your personal taste necessarily. So I’m curious if there’s a type or kind of criticism that you especially despise, or that you feel is not doing what criticism should do. (I noticed on your blog you were dreading the onslaught of Michael Jackson tributes this year — is that, for example, a dislike for that kind of article in general, or just a weariness that there’s going to be so many of them?) Is there an example you could give maybe of a critic or a piece you especially dislike?

A note about the question – I consider music criticism just one small sub-field of “music writing.”

Well, there is one thing I won’t tolerate when I read music writing for the book, and that is work that is obviously, unquestionably racist, sexist, or homophobic. Of course there is a big difference between reporting on artists or scenes in which these attitudes exist, which I consider to be an important and underdeveloped part of music writing, and the writer him or herself advocating hate.

The only other thing in criticism I despise is writing that recreates either press releases or preexisting reviews. If I see the same sets of adjectives used in multiple reviews, I start searching to see what the first source was and how much more of the content and style is similar. Its astounding how often writers do this. It’s lazy, immoral, and embarrassing to and for the whole writers’ community.

Also I was not dreading the onslaught of MJ pieces, only the fact that we can’t publish all the good ones. If a publisher wants to do it, contact me and I will either give you all the pieces or I can help you put the book together myself. Seriously, that book should happen.

In contrast, is there a kind of criticism you’re especially interested in, or feel are particularly what criticism should be doing?

The thing about BMW is that it is not a collection of original essays. I literally take what comes. The pieces that always thrill me are the ones that present artists, musical works, scenes, or philosophical questions about music in fresh ways, often with novel structures, solid craft (however manic in style), firm opinions backed up by clear arguments, works written with passion and that have been clearly edited, fact-checked, and spell checked (although there are exceptions, usually blogs that read like some post-midnight inspiration). I like to read work that seems engaged with other parts of the world beyond music, be it other forms of culture, history, politics, or literature (that said, I like a well-written bit of inside baseball too). Given that music writing is often a commercial art, I like writing that fills up the space given to it in the most original way, and work that, like popular music itself, calls attention to and critiques its commercial origins and constrained formats. That’s why I loved Mike McGuirk’s Rhapsody capsule reviews and Paul Ford’s Six Word Reviews although the latter was more of a critique of concept of critical listening in the digital age or at the mega-festival. Greil [Marcus, editor of Best Music Writing 2009] called it “dada provocaton art.” We should have ran the whole damn thing.

Criticism, as a sub-field of music writing, should be engaging in the sound and culture of the musical object in question, and should engage and provoke the reader to listen and/or think more, more clearly, or differently about music, language, or the world. The best pieces create discussion for a long time afterward, change a reader’s mind, and even change their lives. I was definitely changed by reading Katy St. Clair’s piece A Very Special Concert. It gave me a new contextfor understand both the mentally retarded people and the people who work in supporting them (not to mention, it made me respect Huey Lewis). A similar thing happened with the John Jeremiah Sullivan piece “Unknown Bards” from last year’s book. In the piece Sullivan recounts a fact-checking call with John Fahey that is equal parts funny, sad, and startling. The whole piece is an argument for stubborn devotion to listening, to questioning and re-questioning one’s ears, and to cultivating an exhausive and critical mental archive. John Fahey was one of the people who did this, and his death is a great loss to scholars as well as the listening world. This piece got me set to march out the door once again. I don’t want to be all “salvage” about it, but there is a lot of work music writers can do just by knocking on a door, being kind enough to get invited in, and sitting down to listen. With a recording device on, of course.

I am witnessing this first hand because a dear friend of mine, Keith Jones, is putting together a . documentary on the punk scenes of Africa. He is focused primarily on South Africa, and in his work he has been doing exactly that—knocking on doors of total strangers—and finding that many of these brave musicians (many of whom played in multi-racial bands under Apartheid) haven’t talked about their experiences since they happened. I’m prodding him to take the huge archive of interviews, photos, and flyers that can’t possibly make it into the film and and to do a book with them, because this is not just important for music history, but the history of South Africa.

There are so many more books like this to be written. When you start doing a book like that, you also realize how desperately important first hand accounts of concerts, band practices, and recording sessions are, as are reviews that give a historian some insight into the way people listened at the time. The best criticism is both completely of its time and evergreen in this way, and it is a joy to find. I suggest Ellen Willis’s report on Woodstock if you need an example. Read it even if you don’t.

I know you are working on a PhD., and that many of your own essays are focused on the intersection between art and broader social and intellectual movements. Is that the sort of thing you generally like to see criticism doing, or are there other models? Is there a book or essay you could give as an example?

Again this question is more about music writing than criticism, I will work from that angle.

My own personal career in writing about music and studying music culture has given me the opportunity to participate in many different writing contexts and to read so many different styles of music writing. Of course it has also shaped my opinions about all three of the words in the book’s title: “Best” (cultivation of skilled value judgments) “Music” (notice no qualifier “popular”) and “Writing” (crafting language).

I started off as a zine writer and moved to criticism in college. My own preference was always more for features, and a big part of going to grad school was my desire to expand my research methods and hone my critical reasoning skills. My reading of feminist theory, anthropology, and philosophy of science has made it basically impossible to accept the premise that there is a universal position from which to make “absolute” value judgments. Still, it’s possible for me to love writers who stick by this approach. It’s like a cookie fortune, but instead of adding “…in bed,” I mentally add, “…or so (s)he thinks.” That is a really long way of saying, yeah I can read, evaluate, and enjoy things that I would never personally write, of course.

I guess I keep ignoring your request to give examples, and maybe that’s because I don’t want to play favorites in a field where writers’ styles can change dramatically from piece to piece, and when even the most average writer can happen upon a story so good they merely have to keep the facts straight. Also, when I was first starting to write about music I would read interviews with music editors and they would talk about who the greatest writers of the next generation were and I would feel really defeated. I never want to make a writer feel that way, because we do this thing out of passion, and we have potential to get better if we keep working, get good feedback, and pay attention to the world, and never stop listening to new music.

There are some 3,500 email addresses in my database for BMW, and I am sure that I am missing a lot of people besides those. There are people doing great work all over the world—folks like Anwyn Crawford in Australia—and every year I have the good luck and pleasure of finding more and more of them. I do my best to find new voices for the book, and welcome anyone to submit their own work or the work of other people to me. Yeah, there are some “usual suspects” in each book, but at least half of the writers are coming from solicited and unsolicited works from the world, from my stacks of magazine subscriptions, my RSS feeds, and my trolling of blogs. Oh yeah, and Twitter.

And, if pinned down I might say “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” by Gay Talese is the piece of music writing I wished I’d written, and that the whole archives of Ann Powers, Simon Reynolds, and Greg Tate are not to be missed by lovers of music and writing. Of course, I am biased towards Ann, who is guest editing this year and is one of my writing heroes. Ellen Willis is another hero and she will finally get the anthology of music criticism she deserves, Out of the Vinyl Deeps, this September. The full disclosure is that I co-wrote the afterward with Evie Nagy. I’m really proud of that book, and happy that Ellen’s daughter Nona put it together while working on her Girl Drive project.

I was listening to a joint discussion you had with Douglas Wolk on Soundcheck a year or so back. You both seemed pretty down on snark. You in particular seemed to be arguing that critics should try to understand and analyze, if not exactly go beyond, their scorn for, say, Vampire Weekend. I guess, as someone who writes and enjoys the odd bit of snark, I wondered if you felt that just dumping on a record was never a valid move? And is that coming from a popism perspective in some ways (I’m thinking of Carl Wilson’s Celine Dion book especially here, I guess.)

I feel like snark is a tool best used to undermine power, not to reassert it. Snark is a portmanteau of snide remark, and as such serves as a kind of sly witticism meant to serve its object of derision. When it’s done well, it’s a swift comeuppance to some over-esteemed icon. But when someone is being snide from a position of power and the object of the remark has done nothing to deserve it—really, just provides the set up for some joke—I feel like that’s a form of malice, a kind of abuse of power.

My metric for evaluating snark doesn’t really come from poptimism, it is my own personal ethics. I do share a lot of the poptimist philosophy towards musical listening and writing style, especially as qualified by Jody Rosen some years back.

You and Douglas also seemed to be objecting to, or wanting to see fewer, short reviews and blurbs. Do you think that music criticism has gotten shorter? Or has the internet actually allowed for longer projects than in the past? And do you think the change you see (for shorter or longer) is a good thing or a bad thing?

What I meant in that rant was that as the digital archive of music writing gets deeper, there will certainly be a lot of redundancies if everyone is writing short, mostly factual pieces that have a tiny bit of critical engagement, which is what most blurbs are.

The trend seems to be that print writing is now shorter and that professional online music publishing is finding some consensus or standards on average lengths for writing types. There’s always room for the 10,000 word essay on hauntology, and that I welcome. Long live chaos! I certainly wish that there were new funding models for all of this great chaos.

To get back to the Best Music Writing series for a minute — it seems like some of the most interesting music writing is often being done now in formats that don’t easily lend themselves to anthologizing. How do you deal with that? Are there pieces that you want to include but just can’t because they’re based around youtube clips or visuals or are just too long or fragmented?

I do think that there are an increasing number of pieces that are hybrid to the point of being multimedia in their creator’s conception not just in their subsequent editorial design. I see these things as their own form of new media art. Some of it, like podcasts, are really new media broadcast. There are other media that do music criticism well, for instance, a lot of experimental music is meta-musical critique, and videos like the “literal videos” and “….Shreds” series are forms of music criticism as well. There’s so much great stuff!

At the end of the day, I have to draw a line. For now it is English-language writing about music published in some kind of periodical. I’ve daydreamed about doing a visual and/or online component to the book, but my job is big enough just dealing with periodical texts. In an ideal world, I’d have a whole BMW office that could have a multimedia editor, and we’d keep all the publications, links, and videos as an archive that could serve as research for current and future generations of music scholars.

Finally…I wondered if you could talk a little about your PhD. thesis and your upcoming 33 1/3 book on Nine Inch Nails.

The Nine Inch Nails book, Pretty Hate Machine, will be out on Continuum in September 2010 and I am planning a launch event that will be in the spirit of both the old and new Nine Inch Nails. Stay tuned. I will also be doing readings on the East Coast through the fall, especially in September. If any group of 15 or more NIN or music writing fans gets together in a place where I can travel by public transportation (subway, bus, commuter rail, train) and plans a public event I will come do a reading. Email me musicwriting@gmail.com

As for the dissertation, ask me in May 2012.

Original Art: A Short Note on Hal Foster

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Of late, I’ve been revisiting a number of Hal Foster originals. In so doing, I’ve occasionally noted a certain resemblance between Foster’s work on Tarzan and the pencil sketches he did for John Cullen Murphy as he was handing over the reigns of Prince Valiant to his chosen successor. These sketches were never meant for public consumption but have since reached the collector’s market. Foster’s pencil drawings are like notes to an essay, a more relaxed and open conversation with his collaborator and now, with the passage of time, his readers. In some ways, a Foster Tarzan Sunday might be said to be a few steps closer to the raw ideas of the artist.

[Detail from a Hal Foster Pencil Prelim]

Continue reading →

Katrinasploitation

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Nola
Publisher: Boom! Studios
Creator: Chris Gorak
Writer: Pierluigi Cothran
Artist: Damian Couceiro

Hurricane Katrina was one of the worst natural disasters in American history, killing over1,800 people and flooding the city of New Orleans. But despite the scope of the disaster, there are surprisingly few comics about Katrina or its aftermath. Perhaps comic writers, who tend to be white, northern, and middle class, are simply indifferent to a disaster that mostly affected people who are black, southern, and poor. Or if I were to be more charitable, perhaps comic writers are trying to be respectful, given that Katrina is still a very recent tragedy from the survivors’ perspective. But if I’ve learned anything from my years of consuming pop culture, it’s that somebody will eventually find a way to turn even the worst disaster into a frivolous pulp thriller.

Which brings me to Nola, a 4 part mini-series created by Chris Gorak (an art designer for several big films) and written by Pierluigi Cothran (writer of several Heroes graphic novels). The story is about the oh-so-cleverly named Nola Thomas, an attractive African American woman who falls for a married man. Who’s rich, white, and named Chevis, so obviously he’s an asshole. In fact, he’s an asshole of Kennedyian proportions, because when he drunkenly flips his car off the road with Nola inside, he sets the car on fire and flees rather than get caught having an affair with a black woman. Of course, Nola survives but she’s badly burned.

Hurricane Katrina finally factors into the story while Nola is in the hospital. Abandoned by the medical staff, Nola wakes up in a flooded room, bandaged like a mummy in the tradition of horribly scarred noir heroes. After she discovers that her mother died in the hurricane, Nola decides it’s time to set the plot in motion and get her revenge. So she travels around the ruins of New Orleans, killing the doctor who left her to die, killing a few cops (it’s okay, they were jerks), and eventually hunting down Chevis. Along the way she also uncovers a rather convoluted murder mystery involving her long-lost father and another evil, rich white guy.

Ignoring the presence of Katrina, Nola is just an old-fashioned pulp crime story. It does occasionally touch upon race, but only in a shallow manner that helps advance the plot. And the colorful setting of New Orleans (pre-Katrina) is never used to its full potential. None of this is to say that Nola is awful, so much as it isn’t notably ambitious or original. Damien Couciero’s artwork, best described as generic, reinforces my impression of Nola as a by-the-numbers crime comic.

But the use of Katrina can’t be casually set aside. The plot hinges on the disaster in a number of ways: Nola is abandoned in the hospital because of the hurricane, her mother dies during the flooding, and she’s able to sneak around the city and get away with murder because law enforcement is already overwhelmed. The flooded landscape of New Orleans also give Nola a few memorable scenes, even if Couciero’s art is rather boring.

Most importantly, Katrina is a massive tragedy, and real-life tragedies can impart the illusion of relevance on otherwise irrelevant stories. Is it crass and shameless to use a real disaster to elevate low brow entertainment product? Yup, but Gorak and Cothran would probably insist that the personal tragedy of Nola is deeply interwoven with the larger tragedy that befell New Orleans. Because you see, Nola is scarred, just like New Orleans, and … um … Nola will never be the same again (after all the murdering and what not) and the city will never be the same again! It all makes sense, as long as you don’t think about it.

But if you do make the mistake of thinking about it, you’re left feeling dirty. It’s bad enough that so many people died while the government dithered, but Nola adds insult to injury by treating that catastrophe as a plot device for a trite revenge story.

Cuckoo for Copyright Comment Roundup

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To finish up our roundtable on copyright I thought I’d highlight some of the more interesting comments.

First, Nina Paley very kindly stopped by. Her comments start here. In one of the most pointed she said:

My focus is not on changing the laws – that is extremely unlikely. Copyright will become increasingly draconian, because of of our rather corrupt congress and campaign finance system.

Interestingly, I mentioned in the interview that back in the day, when women criticized misogyny in certain underground comics, they were accused of “trying to censor.” As I demonstrate viable alternatives to copy restrictions, people argue back as if I’m somehow trying to “remove copyright entirely.” I can’t remove copyright, and even if I could, I don’t support dictatorial, unilateral legislative changes that don’t reflect the will of the public – that’s how we got the copyright mess we’re in now.

What I am trying to do is increase public awareness of what copyright is (an artificial monopoly), how it works (through censorship), and what we can do in the midst of a broken system. Many wonderful opportunities exist for artists right now, but no one needs to take them. I win either way: if more works are freed, I live in a freer society, and if more works are locked up, my free works enjoy a competitive advantage.

Over at his blog, animator Mark Mayerson touches on some issues particular to film.

I agree that Paley has something of the “zealousness of the convert.” Because a copyleft approach worked for her, she assumes that it is the right way to go and will work for everyone else. I think the Newman interview in the roundtable makes some very good points in refuting Paley.

There are so many issues wrapped up with this. First is the length of the copyright term. What’s the right length to benefit the creator and his/her heirs while still allowing for a vibrant public domain? Right now, it’s an open question as to whether anything will ever again be added to the public domain except by accident.

Then there’s the issue artists and corporations. Newman, as a composer, is creating complete works without the aid of others. It’s natural for him to hold the copyright. Even though Paley made Sita by herself, she included other works on the soundtrack. Paley is a rare case in that the majority of films are created by more than one person. In that case, who should hold copyright or how should it be split? What rights do financiers have relative to creators?

I think we can all agree that artists should have more ownership of their work (as opposed to corporations owning it), but should corporations vanish, we’re still left with some difficult questions.

There’s a fairly lengthy comment thread over at Sequenza21 inspired by Jonathan’s post. One interesting comments from composer John Mackey.

I’m also of the belief that your potential performer, like any person, has a mindset that you get what you pay for. If you don’t believe enough in your music to feel you should be compensated for it, how good is your potential performer going to think it is when they happen upon it online? If you, literally, can’t even GIVE it away, why would somebody think it was going to be good enough to take the time to even listen to the MP3 or look at the free score? It goes to something Eric Whitacre said once, and I’m going to get the quote wrong, but it was essentially, “nobody wants a free futon from Craigslist, but a whole lot of people would pay $50 for that same futon on Craigslist.” (I think his quote was actually more along the lines of “nobody will pay $10 for a futon, but everybody will pay $100 for a futon,” but the point is the same.) Charge something for it — and that’s a right that copyright law provides — and suddenly it’s “worth” something. A free futon is just gross.

And another from Chris Becker.

I do know from friends who have or currently write music for television (and I’ve done this as well…) that big corporate media entities have made every effort to cut down on the amount of money they are willing to shell out to composers because of the availability of license free music. Their attitude is: “Look, we can get this music for free OR my kid can spit it out using a loop CD, so YOU punk ass composer should be grateful we’re even considering funding a day of recording sessions…”

Back on HU, commenter plok, a singer-songwriter and supporter of freer copyright, had a whole slew of entertaining comments, which you can scroll back and forth for. I’ll point particularly this one.

I wish you would stop saying “stealing”, though — we’re talking about copyright infringement, not theft, and it’s an important difference. What the record company’s doing to me isn’t the same thing as what downloaders are doing to it — it’s a lot worse. In the grocery store of my music, the downloader’s taken a grape and popped it in his mouth; the record company’s taken cash from the till.

Also, a very important thing I would like to communicate to you is that the downloaders are mailing me a cheque — in fact they’re mailing me several different cheques, just by doing what they do. The people who download are avid music fans, they attend concerts and purchase records and T-shirts and sometimes even beer for the musicians, but more importantly than any of that they make new fans…and every time they do, they pay a Blank Media Levy designed to compensate artists for copying activity that can’t be monitored or controlled. Although I don’t know how much I’d be getting from it, because I can’t bring myself to take that money as long as individual downloaders are not just paying it, but also being prosecuted for what we all know they’re paying it for. And especially not if it’s my music they’re downloading, because nothing says they have to download my music instead of somebody else’s!

I mean, I’m grateful they like it enough to want to own, and even share, a copy of it! Make no mistake, that is support, and if the RIAA was interested in monetizing the Internet as a promotional resource instead of as a retail outlet, that support would translate to a couple different kinds of new income for me…but the word “stealing” stands in my way, stands between me and that new revenue.

Short form: I see downloaders as radio listeners, not shoplifters. Which is why every time someone expresses outrage that those people are getting away with murder, I always make a point of saying “well, why not join ‘em?” Radio listeners successfully send money my way even though they don’t pay user fees; I don’t see why Internet listeners should have to pay anything more than that. If you don’t want to buy the CD or go to the show, I can’t make you do it by shaming or threatening you out of listening to the music…and I don’t want to do any of that anyway.

Eric B. addressed the question of whether those who download illegally are petulant infants

As for the “petulant infants” on the internet–I think it’s a bit trickier than that. I mean, if I see a dollar bill floating along the street, I’m likely to pick it up and put it in my pocket, if the rightful owner is nowhere in sight (This actually happened to me the other day). I’m not going to undertake a worldwide search to return the dollar bill…nor am I going to leave it floating around. While the internet downloading thing isn’t really equivalent, it does have that feel. There’s so much crap floating around out there, that it’s kind of like picking it up in the street. I have yet to download for free music that in my former life as avid CD purchaser, I would have purchased. That is…I try to ask myself, “would I be buying this” under other circumstances, and if the answer is yes, I’ll probably buy it (on iTunes or in physical form, or whatever)…But if it’s a matter of trying something new–or obtaining something that I otherwise probably wouldn’t have bought–well, I’ll let your imagination wander. Sometimes this kind of sampling leads to purchases (concert tix, other CD’s, songs by the artists I especially like) and sometimes it doesn’t. My income is very limited (or has been over the last 5 years or so)–but my appetite for music isn’t really, so I try to resolve those things. I buy a lot of blank media, so I guess some of my money finds its way back to those who profit, or whatever…Maybe this makes me a “petulant child” –but I’m guessing I’m not an atypical one. I don’t think I should be able to get anything I want for free…and I do support my artistic favorites…but I do think that it’s unwise to take a pie-in-the-sky view of this kind of thing. Just because it may be ethically “wrong” to download without paying, it will continue to happen regardless of changes in copyright law unless there is a way to stop it. Currently, there isn’t really.

And artist and critic Bert Stabler summarizes my discomfort with the Paley’s movie Sita Sings the Blues:

The word you all are looking for is “patronizing.” Whenever NPR profiles the latest Ry Cooder musical fusion crossover between Mongolian throatsinging and Cherokee nose fluting, with an electronic cumbia bassline, the reason your stomach should churn with shame as an educated privileged cultural consumer is because, ever so quietly, guilt is being atoned for with tokenism. There are worse things than trying to atone for sins, but hardly a more irritating way of going about it.

Caro has an impassioned defense of Sita in that thread too (she gets to compare me to Hindi fundamentalists.) And there’s lots more from Caro and me and lots of other folks if you click about.

Thanks to all of those who commented and to our guest posters, Pallas, Jonathan Newman, and Alan Benard. And thanks especially to Caro for inspiring the whole thing with her interview of Nina Paley — and to Paley herself. You can find the whole roundtable here.

Sunday Funnies

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To wrap up the roundtable, some Nina Paley cartoons. The full run of Fluff and a selection of more Nina’s Adventures, along with other cartoons, interviews, and miscellaneous materials related to Sita Sings the Blues, are available at the Internet Archive.

Click through the thumbnails below to read.

“Art vs. Commerce” from Nina’s Adventures

“Sheep Reincarnation” from Nina’s Adventures

“Urbana, Illinois vs Santa Cruz” from Nina’s Adventures

“That Little Weasel!” from Nina’s Adventures

Empire of the Godzillas from the Daily Illini (c. 1983, University of Illinois Student Newspaper)

Godzilla PDF

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Update: You can read the whole roundtable on copyright here. Despite Caro’s promise that this is it, we’ll actually have one more post on the topic tomorrow….

Utilitarian Review 3/13/10

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On HU

This week was devoted to our (still ongoing) roundtable on copyright.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Comixology I talked about Steven Grant’s Punisher series, Circle of Blood and the connection between super-heroes and noir.

From the neck up, though, the Punisher isn’t hyper-competent at all. Instead, he’s more like the classic noir dupe. Though he has a certain tactical animal cunning, his inner monologue is obsessively repetitive in a way that suggests borderline idiocy — where Batman’s traumatic backstory has, supposedly, made him smarter, the Punisher’s has left him, in Grant’s writing, a monomaniacal mental and emotional basket-case. The Punisher is, like most noir men, childishly easy to fool. He stumbles into traps, is bamboozled by a shady conglomerate called the Trust, and, inevitably, betrayed by a woman. His solve-it-by-shooting-it approach to every problem results in heaps of dead bodies, including that of one child. Said child’s death sends our hero into a self-pitying funk, complete with flashbacks and profound utterances (“It’s got to stop. The poor children.”) which, at least from my perspective, makes him appear more damaged, dangerous, unsympathetic, and unheroic than ever.

On tcj.com I reviewed Fumi Yoshinaga’s All My Darling Daughters.

At Madeloud I interviewed Best Music Writing series editor Daphne Carr: Part 1; Part 2.

Also at Madeloud I reviewed Priestess’ prog metal opus, Prior to the Fire.

Other Links
Dirk kicks ass.

Jason Thompson on incest in manga.

Tucker argues that illegal downloading is bad because it betrays the can-do rapacious imperialism of our forefathers.

And Tucker also pointed me to this article about why contemporary poets should just go ahead and die already.

And here’s a long, academic, and pretty fascinating article about yaoi and homophobia.

Copyright for Middle Brow Snobs (Or, Worst. Mashup. Ever.)

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I’ve been a little obsessed with mashups recently, so I thought in honor of our free culture roundtable, I’d try making one of my own. Of course:

— I can’t beat match,

—my only software is Garage Band

—which I don’t know how to use,

— I’m a Paid Music Critic

— which means I have the musical eptitude of a lightly lobotomized bag of hammers.

These factors might deter others…but hell, Nina Paley’s got me all gung ho on niche markets, so I figure somewhere out there there’s a vital fanbase that wants to hear Beyonce incompetently combined with Australian female doom metal. No doubt there are LiveJournal groups and message boards and lord knows what else, right?

Right?

In any case, without further ado, here is Single Plague, in which Beyonce battles Murkrat, with a brief cameo by the Carter Family. Download it and weep.

For a discussion of real mashups and a list of some of the best, try this list and discussion by Alan Benard.