Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Wilhelm and Claudio

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A couple of Beethoven sonatas and random other things. I am excessively into the Alan Parsons Project and Priestess. I love prog.

1. Wilhelm Kempff — Beethoven Sonata #27 in E Minor, Op. 90 (Late Piano Sonatas)
2. Siriporn Umpaipong — Lakorn Chewit (Jumbo Hit)
3. Sade — Be That Easy (Soldier of Love)
4. Lady Gaga — Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I can Say) (The Fame Monster)
5. Martyn (featuring the Spaceape) — Is This Insanity? (Great Lengths)
6. Alan Parsons Project — The Voice (I Robot)
7. Priestess — The Firebird (Prior to the Fire)
8. Necro Deathmort — I Fought the Law and the Law Won Because Fighting Is Against the Law (The Beat Is Necrotronic)
9. The Skaden — A Peaceful Moment (You’ll Hope I Died)
10. Liz Carroll and John Doyle — The Island of Woods
11. 1349 — To Rottendom (In Play)
12. Claudio Arrau — Piano Sonata No 32 in C. Minor, Op. 111

Download Wilhelm and Claudio.

Manwha 100

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Manhwa 100: A New Era for Korean Comics
KOCCA
252 pages/color
softcover/$19.99
978-1-60009-951-9

At least two of my favorite comics of the last few years have been Korean — Jung-Hyun Uhm’s gentle, low-key romance Forest of Gray City and Sooyeon Won’s brutal, melodramatic yaoi Let Dai. So I was curious to learn more about the manhwa (Korean comics) scene.

Unfortunately, this little volume is not quite what I was hoping for. Manhwa 100 is only a book in the loosest sense that it’s got a binding and a price tag. In its soul, it’s a glorified catalog put together by the Korean Culture and Content Agency (KOCCA) to promote Korean culture. To that end, a couple of short introductory essays are provided. In one, Korean comics creator (or manhwaga) Lee Hyun-se says he doesn’t think manhwa should be discussed in terms of manga, then proceeds to compare the two anyway while balancing a chip on his shoulder that looks to be roughly the size of a particularly glutinous giant panda who has just been force-fed every volume of Ranma 1/2. In another short essay, Kim Hyun-joo, a Tokyopop editor, talks about how great manhwa is, and then encourages Korean creators to dumb down their work for an international market by dumping the untranslatable wordplay and shortening the stories, since audiences are driven away by series which “drag on and on” (like Naruto?)

The bulk of the book, though, is made up of two page profiles of 100 different manhwa titles. Two or three illustrations are provided for each, and many look intriguing — the image provided for Marley’s Dokebi Bride for example, uses a striking combination of solid colors over subtle patterns to render a traditional folk dress in a style more evocative of (first rate) children’s book illustration than of your typical shojo.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to get a real sense of the various series’ strengths and weaknesses from the provided text. In part, that’s because the capsules are puff pieces, not reviews. In part, though, it’s because the English is…well, better than my Korean, but still a little shaky. For example, in the review of Chonchu, we are earnestly informed that: “Its characters are also very expressive. They are portrayed effectly to show whether they represent the good or the evil. Whichever side they are, they all boast well-built bodies and formidable costumes.” I do not think that word means what you think it means….

As a promotional tool, the book could work well enough; I went right over to Amazon and purchased the first volume of Dokebi Bride, and I suspect I’ll find other reasons to open my wallet as I continue to browse around. I’m certainly happy to have received it free as a review copy. But I find it difficult to believe that anyone is going to want to spend $20 on what is essentially an extended advertisement, no matter how thoroughly unanticipated the prose has been making itself.
________________
This review first appeared in The Comics Journal.

Dream of the Red Chamber: An Introduction to the manhua adaptation

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The growing affluence of the mainland Chinese has led to a steady growth in both the quantity and quality of reprints of classic Chinese comics. These comics have been available sporadically over the years but mostly in abridged and unlicensed versions. Even up to 10 years ago, the quality of these reprints were poor with images possibly 2-3 generations removed from the originals.

It is only in recent years that more expensive “collector’s editions” preserving the original format of the comics (i.e. a single image per page in rectangular booklets) have emerged.

The 2005 collector’s edition of Dream of the Red Chamber from the Shanghai Fine Arts Publishing House (SFAPH) is a case in point. The comics  (lianhuanhua) from the SFAPH represent the high point of the adaptors art in China.  Originating from the middle of the twentieth century their influence on all future adaptations of the four great novels of classical Chinese literature is inestimable.

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I don’t think antibiotics are going to help

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Parasyte (vol. 1)
By Hitoshi Iwaaki

Slowly but surely, I’m moving my way up the ranks from manga-noob to manga-novice. For this week, I decided to read Parasyte, a title that is well-regarded by many a manga critic. But you can’t trust the judgment of critics (unless they’re Utilitarians), so I approached this title ready to nit and pick.

It had a simple premise: alien parasites invade Earth and infect the brains of an unknown number of people. But teenager Shinichi Izumi manages to trap a parasite in his right arm before it can enter his head. Now, I’d read enough manga and seen enough anime to know that Shinichi was going to use the parasite in his arm to fight other parasites. The set-up seemed so predictable, and I was considering whether to try out a different book. But then …

On most pages, the art isn’t particularly noteworthy, though it manages to convey the story in a clear manner. But when the parasites reveal themselves, realism gets thrown out the window and the character designs become wonderfully surreal and grotesque. Heads and arms morph into impossible shapes, inflicting gory deaths on a few unlucky humans.

A story about murderous parasites that infect human brains naturally lends itself to horror, but Hitoshi Iwaaki has a gruesome sense of humor. Parasyte gleefully shifts from horror to comedy to action and back to horror in every chapter. The one constant factor is freaky visuals.

At the core of this weird story is the complex relationship between Shinichi and his parasite, Migi (meaning “right”). The textbook definition of a parasite is an organism that benefits at the expense of its host. But in Shinichi’s case, the relationship between host and parasite is almost symbiotic. Migi can’t survive without Shinichi as a host, and so Migi defends Shinichi from all threats, ranging from bullies to other parasites trying to kill him. But co-dependency doesn’t equal friendship. Migi is completely amoral and will do whatever it takes to survive, and Shinichi is not exactly pleased to have a shape-changing parasite in his right hand.

Over time, their symbiosis changes both of them. Migi starts to exhibit human characteristics, and may even care about Shinichi for reasons besides self-preservation. On the other hand, Shinichi begins to wallow in homicidal thoughts.

While I was correct in assuming that the chapters would mostly be about Shinichi and Migi fighting other parasites, the tension between the characters and the ambiguous nature of their relationship keeps the fights from becoming repetitive. Migi defends Shinichi and kills other parasites only because it’s in Migi’s own interest to do so, and it’s quite willing to use innocent people as human shields. Yet when given the choice to abandon Shinichi for a better body, Migi refuses. Shinichi is far more altruistic than Migi, as he doesn’t want innocent people to get hurt. But he also fantasizes about becoming a hero by killing the other parasites.

Overall, a very compelling first volume. Of course, it’s possible that this manga will go completely off the rails in the next volume, but I’ll take my chances.

Gender and Cartooning in Chicago

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Despite Alison Bechdel, despite Marjane Satrapi, despite manga, women are still in many ways marginalized in American comics. And if you are a marginalized group, there are generally two ways to go about advancing your lot. You can work towards integration. Or you can work towards establishing your own institutions. Martin or Malcolm, Betty Friedan or Shulamith Firestone, the questions remain the same. Do you want to be given access to the institutions? Or do you want to change them? These two positions aren’t always or necessarily opposed, of course — some people may have voted for Barack Obama both because it marked an important moment in integration, some may have voted for him because they hoped he would change the country, and a lot of people probably voted for him for both reasons. Still the goals don’t always dovetail so nicely; often you have to pick which to prioritize, and how.

These issues were the subtext of much of the discussion at a panel on “Gender and Cartooning in Chicago,” which I attended in April. The panel was organized by Anne Elizabeth Moore (former editor of The Comics Journal and Punk Planet) and featured cartoonists Nicole Hollander (Sylvia) and Dewayne Slightweight (The Kinship Structure of Ferns, I Want to Know the Habits of Other Girls.) Each of them had thought about the problems of being a women in a male dominated field, and each had come to somewhat different conclusions about how to best advance their careers and their art.

Dewayne Slightweight (who is an acquaintance of mine) is not widely known, but he’s a remarkable young artist. Though he’s female, he identifies as genderqueer, and prefers to be referred to by the male pronoun. As this suggests, Slightweight’s thought a good bit about identity; his work is very consciously focused on exploring and building, as he put it, “feminist or queer or anti-capitalist community.” His comic The Kinship Structure of Ferns attempts “to make an art that communicates a new form of kinship” built around “love, hope, desire, and friendship.” Slightweight argued that “hierarchical capitalist culture privileges sight,” by, for example, saying, “I know what a woman looks like,” or “I know what a terrorist looks like.” So in his work, Slightweight tries to complicate looking by turning his comics into performances; he will project them on a screen and dance and sing in front of them, contrasting his body with drawn bodies and with music. He includes a CD of musical accompaniment with each comic as well, the effect of which is pleasantly disorienting. As you read and listen along, words and phrases pop out and repeat in odd, out of sync ways, breaking linear progress up into effervescent bubbles of sound and meaning.

Slightweight’s focus on separate communities and non-hierarchical experience is mirrored in his career. All of his work is self-published; most of it is not sold, but traded with friends in the underground rock and queer arts communities of which he is a part. When asked about his take on current cartooning or mass culture, Slightweight said that he had not bought a book or comic or record in something like three years. Partially this is because he makes virtually no money; he said he walks during the winter rather than taking the bus in order to save up the funds to put out his comics, and he mentioned that one of his main sources of support is food stamps. In addition, though Slightweight noted that he isn’t part of the comics scene, mainstream or alternative, because he doesn’t want to be. “I don’t need to pay attention to what dude is the up and rising star,” he pointed out. Nor does he need to worry about sexism or discrimination, since the underground community of which he is a part has lots of women, and lots of queers, and lots of feminist men. “A grouping of women and queers is not a ghetto — it’s a wonderful thing,” he said.

Slightweight, then, is committed to a separatist rather than an integrationist model of feminist culture; when asked if he would be more interested in the mainstream if it included more interesting, feminist-friendly work, his answer was essentially, “no.” For Slightweight, the very existence of the mainstream is the problem; he argued that the point of feminism was to decentralize power. “You have as much right to talk back to culture as culture has to talk to you,” he said. The point, then, for Slightweight, is not for marginalized groups to step into positions of power, but for them to speak from where they are, and so break down a hierarchy which insists on privileging certain creators or certain voices.

Nicole Hollander, the creator of the strip Sylvia, began her career as a comics professional when women were even more underrepresented in the industry than they are now. She is also a newspaper political and strip cartoonist, segments of comicdom that are perhaps the least gender-integrated. (Anne Elizabeth Moore pointed out that there had been only one female editorial cartoonist in the United States — before she was fired in the recent economic bloodletting.) It is no surprise, then, that Hollander spent a good part of her discussion talking about the barriers she had faced as a woman to mainstream success.

Hollander began her career illustrating articles for The Spokeswoman, a feminist, political magazine. After receiving some interest from book publishers, and inspired in part by Doonesbury, she tried to syndicate Sylvia — at which point she ran up against something that looked rather like sexism. One syndicate executive told her that her strip was “deep, but narrow” — narrow, presumably, because it didn’t have any men in it.

Faced with mainstream disinterest, Hollander turned to DIY. She worked to syndicate herself, phoning up newspapers on her own behalf. Though she made some sales, being a woman was a disadvantage here too — newspaper editors would often tell her, as she put it, “We have Cathy already. One woman is quite enough, thank you.” Nonetheless, she managed to land the strip at one paper and another, and to cobble together book deals, performance opportunities, and a certain amount of fame, if not exactly a fortune.

Hollander discussed not only the lack of opportunities for, but also the lack of representation of, women on the comics page. “Men want to write about men,” she noted, and pointed out that there would only be more strips for women when there were more women creators with access to the comics page. As it stands now, Hollander said, girls don’t generally think of becoming cartoonists. She herself, she said, had not been interested in comics as a girl; as a child she had liked the Phantom and Broom Hilda, but as an adolescent, comics had offered her nothing.

All of this might suggest that Hollander sounded bitter…but that wasn’t the case at all. On the contrary, she pointed out that in her experience it was her male colleagues who often complained about low pay or that they could not make a living at cartooning. As for herself, she noted, “I wish I had more money…but I feel very happy in my career. I’ve been able to say everything I wanted to say. I was able to say “vibrator” in one strip. I was able to say “orgasm”” At another point she added, “I could be Sylvia. I could be tough.” Thus, though Hollander would have liked more mainstream success, she also has appreciated the freedom which came with being on the margins.

In contrast to both Slightweight and Hollander, Anne Elizabeth Moore is somebody who follows the comics industry closely. She is in the process of conducting a series of interviews with female comics professionals, and she seems to know just about everybody there is to know. She said that for her it was very important to try to accrue mainstream power in order to promote people like Slightweight and Hollander, “whose work should be everywhere!” as she said. At the same time, she noted, when you participate in the mainstream, you end up “subverting rather than changing.”

Though Moore seemed to be at least provisionally interested in working with the mainstream, she also argued for a need for more female institutions. In response to a question from the audience about the lack of female representation in Kramer’s Ergot, and Sammy Harkham’s reportedly snotty defense of same, Moore suggested that there was a need for more (or even one) female comics anthology.

The final statement of the evening came from a Korean-born woman in the audience. She noted that growing up in Korea, she had constantly read comics by women, for women. She very rarely read any comics by men, because they were overly violent, because they focused on male characters, and because, with so many comics written by women, she didn’t have to, so why would she? In Korea, in other words, comics for women are their own separate genre and have their own audience — but that separate institutional framework is so large and so strong that it is, in fact, effectively of the mainstream. The women added that when she got to America, it was a shock to realize that women here weren’t drawing, writing, or reading comics in large numbers. “It made me really sad,” she said.

________
This essay first appeared in The Comics Journal. Since it appeared, Sylvia has been cancelled in the Chicago Tribune, it’s home paper. The Chicago Reader has the story, as well as info about what you can do if you would like to try to get the decision changed.

Update Jan 2014: Dewayne Slightweight now goes by the name Lee Relvas.

Changing the World One Apocalypse At a Time

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R. Fiore has an essay up on tcj.com about the Watchmen book and comic. He argues, in part that the movie’s weaknesses are those of the book.

the entire movie depends on an idea that became obsolete within a few years after the book came out, which is that nuclear war was such an imminent absolute threat that the only decent course was non-resistance to totalitarianism. What this in turn depends on is a failure to understand the difference between nuclear war and every other kind of war, which is regardless of who was left hobbling, the respective high commands could not hope to personally escape the consequences. Even if they were sheltered during the blast, all the comforts and riches of their capitols would be blasted away. But what really makes the whole idea empty is the belief that conflicts between peoples aren’t genuine, and that they could all be swept away by an imaginary bogeyman. This is an idea as juvenile as any that ever appeared in a comic book.

So first, I don’t think Watchmen is pro-totalitarianism (V is another story). Ozymandias and his final solution are undercut and questioned repeatedly, both by other characters and by the narrative itself. Rorscach and Dr. Manhattan both suggest, for different reasons, that destroying New York may not have been worth the candle, and the final page of the book indicates that the fate of the world hangs, not on Ozymandias, but on some moron with ketchup on his shirt. (If you want to see me natter on about this topic at greater length, you can read this and also this).

I have problems with several of Fiore’s other points as well. For example, if I understand his argument aright, he seems to be under the impression that, because nuclear war would kill everybody, the people in charge of the nuclear buttons would never actually press them. The whole cold-war paranoia thing was just a big dumb mistake; nobody was ever in any danger, since mutually assured destruction was absolutely fool-proof. The lesson of the end of the Cold War was that we never had to worry about the Cold War to begin with.

Fiore’s correct in some sense — if our leaders were rational, we needn’t have worried about nuclear war. The problem, of course, is that they weren’t particularly. I’ve read a bunch of accounts of the Cuban Missile Crisis (most recently one by Garry Wills) and I’m pretty convinced that John F. Kennedy was enough of a preening prima donna that he would have sooner destroyed the world than lose the news cycle. Thus, avoiding nuclear holocaust depended on…Khruschev. As it turned out, Khruschev was more level-headed than even a glass-half-full, turning-dog-turds-into-lemonade, off-to-join-the-Peace-Corps-and-frolic-with-the-happy-natives kind of optimist had any right to expect. But just because things worked out doesn’t mean that people weren’t right to be a little nervous.

I also disagree with Fiore’s contention that Watchmen misunderstands history and people. I mean, yes, obviously, the fake-space-alien-uniting-the-world is not especially probable. Among other things, the plot in the comic relies on the existence of psychic powers broadly distributed among the populace. And a guy who can catch bullets. And the existence of teleportation technology. Watchmen is many things, but a realistic narrative it is not.

But Fiore, obviously, is talking about more than that. He’s arguing that it’s ridiculous and childish to believe that conflicts between people can be swept aside by “an imaginary bogeyman.” He’s saying that miracles not only can’t happen, but wouldn’t work anyway because people are too set in their ways. Ultimately, Fiore seems to be skeptical not just of miracles, but of change.

Like Fiore, I don’t really believe in miracles, and I have my doubts about change. But I’ve been reading Terry Eagleton, who, as a Marxist, has a certain commitment to miraculous social transformation, and he does make you think. In his memoir The Gatekeeper, he discusses at length a Carmelite nunnery where he served as altar boy as a child.

What was most subversive about [the nuns], however, was their implacable otherworldliness. There are tough-minded types who believe that this world is the best we can muster, some of whom are known as materialists and the rest as conservatives. Whatever they call themselves, the hard-nosed realists who claim that there is no need for another world have clearly not been reading the newspapers…For [the nuns], the flaw of the world ran so deep that it cried out for some thoroughgoing transformation, known in their jargon as redemption. Short of this, things were likely to get a lot worse.

Fiore is one of those realists; he thinks the world is what it is. Moore, on the other hand, is suggesting that transformation is possible through a kind of apocalypse. Not Marxist revolution or Christian salvation, but something analogous; a global scale cataclysmic event, killing millions and shifting earth’s concept of its own place in the galaxy.

Contra Fiore, I think that such a massive event would actually really shake people up. 9/11 wasn’t as transformative as some like to claim, but it did succeed in concentrating a lot of minds. And the even Moore suggests would be much bigger — many more dead, and the sudden revelation of a hostile alien race. The only comparison would be the first European encounter with the Americas, which had massive psychological, spiritual, economic, and political consequences, to say the least. If you don’t think a bogeyman on the scale Moore propounds would be enough to change the world, it’s hard to say what would. Certainly, if you’re that assured of stability, it’s hard to see why you would think (as Fiore seems to) that George Bush could have made much of a difference one way or the other.

Moore does suggest that his particular miracle would require gallons and gallons of blood. His willingness to look at that unflichingly and unsympathetically is why Watchmen doesn’t end up endorsing violence or fascism. The revolution may really not be worth it; utopia isn’t necessarily grace.

The funniest thing about both sides of this argument, maybe, is that we know now that both Fiore and Moore are too pessimistic. Fiore argues that the cold war conflict was intractable; Moore argues that it could only be worked out by piling bodies like cordwood. And what happened instead (as Fiore at least should know)? The Cold War ended very rapidly and with (as these things go) little loss of life. Of course, the world isn’t all hunky-dory (and Moore didn’t say it would be.) But things do change, and not always for the worse.

Watchmen is, among other things, about the possibilities and perils of radical political change. It’s not a political treatise; it doesn’t present solutions to the problems it raises. But I don’t think it’s wrong in arguing that those problems could, perhaps, require transformative change, and in further suggesting that, for better or worse, such changes do occur. Fiore says that the plot of Watchmen is hard to believe, but, as Terry Eagleton notes the story of humanity is itself “grossly improbable.” The cynical view that tomorrow will be like today is in fact the most hopeless naivete — more naive, even, than trusting in our leaders not to kill us, or in believing that the fears of our parents were unreal because they no longer happen to be ours. Things do change, in large ways and small. The future is like the past only in being different from the present. Moore got that, which is why, even though its yesterday and tomorrow aren’t ours, Watchmen still seems up to date.

Utilitarian Review 2/6/10

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On HU
We started out the week with Adam Stephanides returning to xxxholic. He read the whole thing and eh. Could have been worse.

In memory of Howard Zinn’s passing, I sneered at the graphic adaptation of his book.

I mocked the prevaricating title of The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga.

And doing her part to convince Suat that people really do write mean things about manga, Kinukitty dumped on the yaoi Madness.

Vom Marlowe does her part as well by not much liking Book of Friends.

And finally this week’s download features women in extreme metal.

Utilitarians Elsewhere
On Splice Today I join the long line of those who have sneered at Pauline Kael.

In other words, Kael uses “we” because there is no “we”; the point for her is always self-referential; her thesis is always, “I am right.” And that solipsism is, in turn, a function, not of rampant egotism, but of the categories she uses. As “Trash, Art, and the Movies” suggests, Kael is obsessed with what is art and what isn’t art and with the evil “businessmen” who muck up everything and make it “almost impossibly difficult for the artists to try anything new.” To read Pauline Kael, therefore, is to be confronted with a capitalism whose worst sin is making mediocre movies; with a bourgeois society the worst sin of which is enjoying those same mediocre films. Smack dab at the end of the 60s, Kael has nothing to say about Vietnam, or Lyndon Johnson, or civil rights, or any of the cataclysmic upheavals of her day. She manages to write a review of Godard’s La Chinoise in which she explicates Godard’s feelings about revolutionary youth but doesn’t tell us anything about her own position except, “Yep, I think Godard is really clever!”

On Madeloud I look back at the Rolling Stone Record Guide from 1993.

Still, if the Album Guide isn’t exactly useful as reference anymore, it retains sentimental and historical interest. Consider, in 1993:

– Nirvana was a decent band peddling a more pop-laden version of the “metal-edged punk” that typified Soundgarden and Soul Asylum. “At their best,” J.D. Considine says, Nirvana’s songs “typify the low-key passion of post-MTV youth.” Bleach (three-and-a-half stars) is faulted for relying on “metal riffage” as much as on “melodic invention,” while the poppier Nevermind gets four stars. Since Nirvana has not yet been named rock royalty, no one needs to trace its bloodline, and bands such as the Melvins and the Vaselines don’t exist.

On Splice Today I have a review of the latest in dubstep meets doom metal by Necro Deathmort.

On Madeloud I review the quite-good-but-unfortunately-named Scandinavian thrash band Rimfrost.

Also on Madeloud I review the latest slab of endless doom from Holland’s Bunkur.

Other Links

Tom Crippen has been writing some great super-hero pieces on TCJ.com this week, including this sad song for MODOK. Also, a great discussion of Ebony White.

Jessica Hopper’s takedown of Vampire Weekend is nicely done.