Richard Linklater’s “A Scanner Darkly” is easily the most straightforwardly faithful Phillip K. Dick adaptation to reach the screen. It adheres closely to the novel’s words, and is suffused with a sense of reverence.

Unfortunately, that’s kind of a problem. Dick’s books were remarkably unfaithful, even to themselves. A typical Dick novel reads as if he’s thinking only about one paragraph ahead of the reader. Narratives dead-end, expectations are ruthlessly ignored, profound insights turn into pratfalls and vice versa. For a writer so enamored of aesthetic messes, a spirited desecration like “Blade Runner” is more in the spirit than Linklater’s sincere homage.

When Linklater does change the material, he consistently dumbs it down. At one point in the novel, Arctor is coldly dissed by his girlfriend Donna Hawthorne; in Linklater’s version, this scene turned into a tender, romantic moment. Even worse is the treatment of the rehab center New Path. Linklater tells us right from the beginning that New Path is evil; Dick saves the information till the end, so that it appears to come almost as an afterthought. And, of course, Linklater adds gratuitous scenes condemning police brutality, complete with some dude in a bullhorn praising freedom. Subtle, Rick.

All of the movies faults are further accentuated in the comic. The movie’s animation was created using computer software to animate over live-action footage; it doesn’t look good onscreen, but the stills used as comic art are absolutely hideous. Nor has anyone made any effort to translate the movie’s effects and rhythm into comic form. The main special effect — a scramble suit which causes the wearer to look like one person after another in quick succession — doesn’t work at all in a static image which lets you see only one set of features. Comic timing is relentlessly ignored; still images seem to have been selected almost at random by a machine. The one concession to comics form — additional narrative text blocks written by Harvey Pekar. are woefully clumsy. A typical one informs us that, as a car speeds out of control, “…high speed chaos reigns….”

In other words, this graphic novel is a pale shadow of a pale shadow. Do yourself a favor — skip the comic adaptation, skip the movie, and just go read (or reread) the novel. Philip K. Dick was fascinated by imposters and facsimiles, but he himself was inimitable.

This review was first published in The Comics Journal a while back.

Sorry the posting has been so light recently; I’m working on an essay about horror movies (The Thing and Shivers, among others) and it’s turned into kind of a monstrosity. It’ll be part of the Gay Utopia symposium I’m putting together, about which there will be more info sometime soonish.

In the meantime, here’s an essay written by me and Bert Stabler for the Chicago Reader a while back.

Fade to Black Already

The soundtrack to the documentary “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster” has the brutal honesty of an encounter group and the heart-on-the-sleeve sincerity of a celebrity product endorsement. James Hetfield bellows like Eddie Vedder impersonating a water-buffalo: “I’m madly in anger with you,” — or is that, “the killer in me is the killer in you”? Anyway, the point is, this music is edgy and raw and designed to pump you up for righteous tasks like washing your SUV or invading sovereign nations. In one of the movie’s many, many scenes, drummer Lars Ulrich lays down a rare vocal track, screaming “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!” until he topples over in exhaustion. That, right there, is metal’s glorious essence: a primal scream of glandular rage uttered by a tormented soul.

Or then again, maybe not. Fact is, metal has never encouraged artless emoting. That’s blues or country or grunge. Metal’s roots are in classical music and the over-arranged, ponderous song-suites of fusion. Early metal bands like Black Sabbath and Uriah Heap don’t sound like the New York Dolls — they sound like Yes. Musically, metal features hyper-competent performers running through intricate arrangements. Lyrically, it tends towards impersonal tales of apocalypse. It’s intensity is formal, not confessional; if punk says music is for everyone, metal says music is for whoever’s able to strangle it and drag it on board the Viking warship.

In the early and mid-eighties, that was Metallica. Their first three albums were landmarks in metal — hugely popular and lightning fast, each song a baroque, cancerous show tune. But while the frilly writing recalled Rush, the delivery was inspired by Motorhead. The production was garagy but precise; the vocals were mixed down, and each drum beat roared like a pistol shot at the bottom of a well. Hetfield’s lyrics ranged from the half-baked supernatural menace of “Leper Messiah” to the more specific electric-chair mini-tragedy of “Ride the Lightning.” The overall impression was one of fierce, even fearsome control in the face of creeping terror, both existential and — in the anti-military “Back to the Front” — political. Like bluegrass, this was music about sin, salvation, and the dignity of art in the face of both. That’s why Metallica’s songs revel in their craftsmanship, and why they’ve held up so well in comparison to those of thrash contemporaries like Megadeth, Anthrax, and Slayer. Beside the compositional care of a Metallica number like “Master of Puppets,” most latter-day ensemble rock sounds like a kiddie recital or a jam band.

In 1986, Metallica’s bassist Cliff Burton was killed when the group’s tour bus went off the road. From the documentary, it’s hard to tell that Burton was anything more than just a really good bassist — he’s mentioned only a couple times in passing. In fact, though, Burton was the most musically omnivorous and adventurous of the Metallica foursome. Hetfield and Ulrich were primarily fans of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) — Burton, though, was into everything, from Thin Lizzy to the Velvet Underground, the Misfits to Simon and Garfunkel. After his death, the band hired a new bassist and recorded one more classic release, 1987s Garage Days Re-Revisited EP. Devoted entirely to covers the band listened to and/or played with Burton, it’s hard not to read it as a tribute to the bassist. Possessed by his spirit, the band made songs by Diamond Head, Killing Joke, and the Misfits sound as wise, as elemental, and as funny as old country blues. It was a transcendent achievement — for our money, one of the great moments in American popular music.

In a perfect world, that would be the end of the story. But, alas, it wasn’t. More albums were released, each one worse than the last. Lars Ulrich, who had started his career performing live, uncredited covers of obscure NWOBHM tracks, became a leader in the anti-Napster crusade, excoriating fans for downloading his increasingly shitty music. The demonic horns were cut off the “M” and the “A” of the once-great Metallica logo, giving it an air of bland corporate neutrality. And now, finally, comes this documentary, an award-winning, boneheadedly cynical combination of the Osbornes and Behind The Music, agreed to by a bunch of has-beens desperate to promote a plastic turd of an album.

If you hate metal, or just don’t care about it much, “Some Kind of Monster” is a very funny movie — a real life equivalent of “This is Spinal Tap,” as many critics have pointed out (though, sadly, the music isn’t as good.) The central premise, as you’ve probably heard, is metal-meets-group-counseling. After bassist Jason Newstead quits, the rest of the band hires a therapist named Phil to help them overcome their mutual hatred and general soullessness. The goal, of course, is to hold things together through one more album which will, if it only gets made, earn each of them as much as the GNP of a mid-sized-Third-World nation. Along the way there are hi-jinks and inarticulate posturing aplenty. Lars screams “I don’t want to be a fucking parody!” Mousy guitarist and beta-male Kirk Hammett declares that he is trying to become “egoless” as part of his “personal philosophy,” and, secondarily, as an example to his bandmates. James Hetfield explains that driving his shiny little race car on the freeway is a sign of his rebelliousness; in the next scene we see him nodding deferentially and thanking the police officer who has pulled him over for speeding. Guitarist Dave Mustaine of Megadeath, who was forced out of Metallica in the early eighties, asks Lars, “What happened to my little Danish friend? What happened to the eighteen-year-old-kid who used to want to smoke pot out of the ground?”

But to anyone who ever cared about Metallica, the film isn’t quite so funny. Instead, its an opportunity to watch, in agonizing detail, as one’s heroes betray themselves, their fans, and their art. Perhaps most painful is, as Mustaine suggests, what has happened to Lars. Back in the day, Ulrich was a monster-drummer, responsible for the air-tight tempo shifts and elegant patterns underpinning every one of the band’s killer riffs. But more than that, he was the leader, writing the music and arrangements; the others contributed, but it was his singular vision that made Metallica great. Through counseling, however, Metallica has apparently learned that noodling together like a Phish cover band and creating songs by committee is the true path to emotional harmony and commercial domination. Or maybe Lars is just too bored to be bothered anymore. In one scene, he doodles absently while the rest of the group discusses quality control. When asked for his opinion he looks up blankly — “It all sounds good,” he says.

With Lars out to lunch, the focus of the band has increasingly drifted towards James Hetfield. Over time, his vocals have been mixed higher and higher in the bands releases, the lyrics have become more audible, and he has tried to emote. This is not good. Hetfield simply doesn’t have the voice or the intelligence of a decent singer, much less a great one, and, as revealed through innumerable up-close and personal interview scenes, his pedestrian inner-life doesn’t bear close observation. Lars mentions at one point that Hetfield’s writing has become more honest, which helps explain why it is so much worse. Every scene of him singing his newly sincere lyrics is preposterous — like some horrible sitcom where the uptight, clueless father-figure is forced to recite his daughter’s journal out-loud in front of the entire school. “My lifestyle determines my deathstyle,” Hetfield insists. “TICK TICK TICK TICK TICK TICK TICK TICK,” and finally, inevitably, “TOCK!”

Seeing the new Hetfield-dominated Metallica working together to bring the kids the sounds they love is an education in the aesthetics of the lowest common denominator. During one session, for example, Lars decides to break up the drum part a little bit, and throws in a little bit of off-kilter syncopation. There’s the briefest moment of relief–maybe his chops haven’t completely gone to hell– and then James stops the song. “Could you just play it normal?” he asks Lars. Lars informs James, accurately and in no uncertain terms, that his guitar patterns are “stock,” and he just wants to give the music some life. James starts whining about what a bad mood he’s in and accuses Lars of deliberately trying to annoy him. That session ends with a group emotional exchange, and James stomps out of the room and, shortly, off to rehab, where he can, presumably, burble about his troubles ad nauseum without being distracted by vaguely interesting beats. Even worse than that travesty is the scene in which Metallica meets with the A&R guys to focus-group the title for their new album. Lars suggests “Frantic,” a bad song, but a name thoroughly imbued with the thrash ethos. He is drowned out by Hetfield and a bunch of brainless record-industry sycophants with designer shades to match their designer tattoos and designer bleached goatees, all of whom agree instead on the unconscionable “St. Anger.” Out-voted, Lars comes around, musing that the band has finally proved that you can make aggressive music without negative energy. Sorry Lars, Stryper did it first — and their album titles were cooler.

What really hurts, though, is the extent to which Metallica no longer seems to care about music. What are they listening to? What inspires them? The answer seems to be “nothing.” The soundtrack has only Metallica tunes, as far as I can tell — perhaps that’s a licensing issue, but it would have been hard to film the old Metallica, I think, without getting an earful of some great bands, obscure and otherwise. Jason Newstead specifically says that he left Metallica because he wanted to explore other musical directions. The rest of the band treat this with incomprehension and surprising bitterness. When they are offered a spot on MTVs icons, they laugh gleefully at the thought that their former friend has stopped being an “icon” because he abandoned Metallica. But Jason was sick of being an icon. He wanted to be a musician.

There are two other people in the film besides Jason who seem inspired by music. One is Newstead’s replacement, a kick-ass bass player formerly with Suicidal Tendencies who clearly has a lot more love and respect for Metallica than his new bandmates do. The other is Lars’ father, whose long white beard, walking staff, and Nordic accent mark him as an ideal patriarchal icon of rock wizardry. As Lars and his father walk around a piece of property Lars has recently acquired, Papa Ulrich mentions that Lars should think of himself in a tradition with Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, an idea that seems to make Lars uncomfortable. Later, the two are listening to some new digitally stitched-together tracks and watching the flashing levels on the computer monitor. Papa Ulrich disapproves, cryptically asking his son, “Am I in an echo chamber?” Afterwards, as the two are driving away in the car together, Lars brushes at his face. Is he crying? Have we been granted an image of the true, tormented soul of Lars Ulrich at long last? Who gives a shit? Let’s leave the narratives of self-discovery and personal fulfillment to the singer-songwriters, please. Metallica had more to offer once. If they had a shred of decency left they wouldn’t cry about it. They’d just break up.

For aeon upon aeon, it seems, the primeval battle has raged. On this side, the economists: smug, fanatical, genuflecting before the awesome power of the free-market before riding forth to sow evil and death. And on the other side, the sociologists: earnest, shapeless, gorging upon the most intractable social problems and then belching them out again in a vague and amorphous slime. Meanwhile, the rest of us stand on the sidelines, shaking our heads and fervently wishing the combatants would just be mystically transformed into unemployment statistics, already.

The latest tiresome blow in this tiresome conflict is Linda J. Miller’s new book, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption, which focuses on the struggle between chains and independents which has dominated the book business over the last 30 or 40 years. Miller is a card-carrying sociologist, and so, inevitably, favors the independents. It’s ironic, then, that her major achievement is one of marketing rather than content: she’s proved decisively that, no matter how boring, a book about bookstores is going to get some buzz. The copy I picked up was prominently displayed on the front-table of one of Chicago’s most venerable independents, 57th Street Books.

It’s not that Miller’s tome is completely worthless; in fact, the volume’s monochrome gloom is flecked throughout with glimmers of interesting books that might have been. Miller could, for example, have put together an engaging, nuts-and-bolts history of contemporary bookselling, from elite, downtown bookstores, to department store booksellers like Macy’s, to the mall chains like Waldens and B. Dalton, to the freestanding superstores, to Internet shops like Amazon. Miller provides a strictly bare-bones account of this process, but the detail she does provide is fascinating, as trivia often is. I had no idea, for example, that there are no Borders stores in Canada, or that most titles in a chain superstore sell only one or two copies *per year*.

Alternately, Miller could have written a fuck-the-chains polemic, denouncing evil corporate behemoths with the kind of impassioned, brainy broadsides that have worked so well for Tom Frank. Of course, not everyone can write well enough to pull this sort of thing off, but there are a few indications that Miller could if she would. Despite herself, she does manage a couple of zingers. My favorite is when she notes sardonically that chain customers “savor the victory of a book discount equivalent to the price of the mocha latte they purchase in the store café.”

Alas for the reader, Miller is neither a vacuous pop-historian nor a pundit with a grudge. Instead, she’s an academic, which means that her book is devoted to mouthing bland circumlocutions and undermining capitalism, more or less in that order. Thus, her final call to arms claims, “…as consumers, we try to reconcile the act of acquiring commodities for the self with a need to make meaning, which sometimes includes a commitment to bettering the human condition. The ironies are endless, but they do not need to stop us.” Hardly “Workers of the world unite!” but more likely to get you tenure, I guess.

The obfuscatory quote above may not make this quite clear, but Miller does have a couple of points to make. Her central one is simply that consumption is a political act. What and where you purchase your goods affects other people. Miller then goes on to argue that, because people have a special reverence for books, the plight of the independent bookstores has raised people’s consciousness of their roles as “citizen consumers.” Those who own and shop at independent bookstores place community, diversity, and love of books above bargain-hunting and conscienceless consumption. Such individual changes of heart and emphasis may well — with due caveats and qualifications, of course — have some sort of effect on capitalism as we know it. Hallelujah.

Miller seems to be under the confused impression that the consumer-as-citizen is an outré idea; which “many find peculiar or even offensive.” No doubt that’s true in some sense; the U.S. is a big place, and “many” people can be found who think almost anything. Nonetheless, shopping-as-morality is almost a liberal shibboleth at this point. From vegetarians to Critical Mass participants, Working Assets subscribers to Wal-Mart haters, it sometimes seems like being a radical is as much about lifestyle accoutrement as it is about voting record. Nor are leftists alone; the religious right semi-regularly boycotts uncongenial media, whether its Disney or the Last Temptation of Christ.

In fact, under capitalist ideology, consumption has always had a moral and political dimension. In his own day, Adam Smith was as well known for his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments as he was for The Wealth of Nations. Moreover, 18th-century notions of political and moral relationships were central to the way Smith thought about political economy. For Smith, the economy was both atomized and integrated; individuals, by attempting to better themselves, were tied into a web of economic relationships. Guided by an “invisible hand”, what was good for one became, almost mystically, good for all. Freedom of economic action was a moral right; restricting it resulted in unhappiness, poverty, and unfairness. This is still the case ; The Economist, for example, insists in almost every issue that the only way to save the developing world is to place fewer restrictions on trade. Before capitalism, morality was spiritual — it was about a relationship with God, primarily, and was discussed in terms of sin and death. But under capitalism (or communism for that matter), morality is, essentially, material; it’s about one’s relationship to stuff, and is discussed in terms of who has what, and whether that’s fair or just.

In a recent essay in Slate.com, Tyler Cowan, an economist who (predictably) dislikes Miller’s book, claims that people who shop at independent bookstores do so in order to project a certain kind of image — it is, he claims, an “affectation.” No doubt it is, but more to the point, it’s a capitalist affectation. Linking one’s identity or sense of self-worth to what one buys — whether books, SUVs, or what have you — isn’t a rejection of capitalism; it’s an affirmation of it.

Not that resistance is futile or anything. If market forces are against you, there’s lots of steps you can take, and Miller discusses some of them; forming a union, as some chain bookstore workers have done is a good possibility; lobbying to keep a chain out of your neighborhood is another. But the suggestion that you can transform the world just by altering where you shop is about as ridiculous as arguing that the leadership of the country is hanging on whether or not you happen to vote come November. If you want a change, organize; if you want a revolution, you might think about obtaining some guns. If you want to shop, please, just shop.

A shortened version of this essay appeared in TimeOut Chicago.

Over on the TCJ message board, there’s a conversation about manga, which takes the expected depressing course. Here’s R. Fiore, making some of the usual arguments:

I don’t see what you’re supposed to get or not get about manga. You like that kind of thing or your don’t. Obviously they turn out too much too quickly. The question you ask yourself is how many manga readers will develop a broader interest in comics in general. I think there may be reason to think they’d be even less likely to broaden their interest than the superhero audience, but if only a small percentage did the audience for comics would expand significantly.

It sounds like it makes sense…and then you think about it, and realize that it means nothing at all.

“You like that kind of thing or you don’t.” Parasyte and Nana, to name two of my favorite titles, are pretty darn different from each other; I can see not liking one, or not liking the other, or not liking both, but it wouldn’t make sense to dislike both for the same reasons, because stylistically, thematically, even artwise, they don’t have all that much in common (except that the storytelling and art are good, I guess.)

“Obviously they turn out too much too quickly.” The level of craftsmanship in manga is very high, from what I can tell — they don’t look nearly as shoddy as mainstream American comics…or as alternative American comics, for that matter. Not every title’s a gem, obviously, but that seems more like the luck of the draw than some sort of chronic case of over-production. There’s a lot of manga because a lot of people (both artists and consumers) are really into it.

“The question you ask yourself is how many manga readers will develop a broader interest in comics in general.” Again, what the hell? Manga’s an enormous category; the bulk of what’s available hasn’t even been translated. It’s also much more interested in serving a wide demographic (agewise, genderwise) than American comics is. You could spend the rest of your life just reading manga, I’m sure, and the quality of the product would probably be at least as high in general as what you’d find in American comics. Why, then, is moving outside of manga supposed to mean that your interest is “broader”?

I think Fiore’s right about one thing, though — an interest in manga is not necessarily going to translate into an interest in super-hero titles or alternative titles, especially when the people who create those books show little interest in making comics for the groups of people manga primarily serves. It’s like saying, “oh, if people like Ciara, maybe that’s a good way to get them hooked on Otis Redding.” No, it’s not. And nor should it be, because Ciara’s fucking great — and despite the endless whining of thirtysomething guys — the teen girls who are into her have nothing to be embarrassed about.

Dirk at Journalista linked to this comment, where a semi-anonymous user bitches about TCJ writers:

“People who write for the comics journal dismiss the far side with a snarky wave of the hand yet write 30 page articles on the ‘postmodern genius’ of fucking nancy”- “afsfadsgs”

It is rather postmodern to attempt intercourse with a cartoon character. But anyway, I actually love the Far Side. Gary Larson is obviously somewhat limited as an artist, but I think he manages to work really well with what he’s got — all those bloated farm animals, lumpy people, and bizarre squashed rectilinear compositions. It’s distinctive and charmingly without being half-assed, like, say Dilbert. His humor isn’t exactly original, but he’s very good at it, and, like his art, the writing has a doddering quality which really does it for me.. I still think regularly about that one cartoon where the guy in the alley whispers, “Hey, buddy! You want an ungulate!”, and concealed in the alley with him are a bunch of hoofed mammals. Monty Python would stretch this out into a manic skit, but, fo course, with Larson, this is it — a single, perfect surreal pratfall with no build up, no explanation, and no elaboration. They’re like little schlubby koans.

On the other hand, I’ve never really gotten the appeal of Nancy. After some effort, I can sort of see why folks are so into it. It’s very clean and very clear, and the readability of the visuals is impressive — the art is, in some objective sense, more competent than Larson’s. But the sameness and simplicity gets incredibly tiresome— like eating bowl after bowl of shredded wheat without milk. I mean, it has no pretentions, so it’s hard to get really mad at it, but that doesn’t mean I want to read it.

So there; yet another hurtful stereotype directed at Comics Journal contributors debunked. Maybe in our next episode we’ll explain why Bloom County is better than Krazy Kat.

——–
It just occurred to me that this post kind of syncs up with this massive discussion about low art vs. high art over on the Comicon board. They originally started off talking about me, but quickly got bored with that and have been meandering far and wide. I think, for me, some of the problems they’re talking about can be resolved by thinking of high-art as simply a different kind of genre — that is, Joyce isn’t necessarily any more individual or writerly than Stan Lee; he’s just writing in a different tradition with different genre conventions and for a different (smaller) audience. The Lee/Joyce division is actually an interesting one, because both were very original, and so could be said to have been creating a new audience, stitched together from portions of older traditions. And my appreciation for both is probably about the same; I admire and enjoy many things about their writing, but neither are really my favorites, for reasons which have a lot to do with their investment in the tiresome tropes of male self-pity.

I also have a lot of trouble with the idea of talking about low-art or comics as myth. I think it’s an overused idea, and maybe takes myth too seriously or not seriously enough. To the extent that myths actually have religious content, I think that content is really important, and probably not to be lightly tossed aside however much we like to make secular analogies. To the extent that myths are just stories in an oral tradition — well, then they’re just stories, which can be told better or worse in various context. It’s not clear to me how they validate or elevate something like the Elongated Man or the Matrix, which are also just stories. (In other words, the part of myth which is supposed to give low-art its power is the religious part, which is, I think, exactly the bit which, in a secular work of art, is not relevant.)

Why we like a work of art is tied up with lots of stuff — who the intended audience is, what the work seems to be saying to that audience, whether it manipulates its various genre tropes and ideas in a way that is meaningful to us, etc. So I guess I’m saying that whether something is low-art or high-art definitely goes into determining whether I like it, but it’s not a one to one correlation — I don’t like something because it’s low art, but I might like it because there is something about the way it uses or is low-art that I like, and the same with high-art.

So, yeah, Kafka and Philip K. Dick better than Joyce or Stan Lee better than Clowes or John Grisham. Now you know.

The first Gabrielle Bell story I read was a delightful piece in Kramer’s Ergot #5 called “Cecil and Jordan in New York.”. It begins as a slice-of-life narrative, but halfway through turns Kafkaesque. Instead of metamorphosing into a loathsome and despised bug, though, Jordan turns into an ignored but useful chair. The change makes her not less, but more mundane than she was before, and the comic ends with no particular fuss — a lovely and quietly bizarre little fable.

Unfortunately, while Bell’s new collection from Drawn and Quarterly is quiet enough, it isn’t bizarre. Nor is it especially lovely. Instead, Lucky is tediously predictable — yet another autobio journal by yet another hipster/artist doing hipster-artist things in New York. Bell looks for an apartment. She goes to see performance art. She hangs out with semi-famous friends. She drifts in and out of crappy slacker jobs. She tells long, pointless anecdotes that were really funny if you were there, really. She experiences a passing Zen insight/lack of insight (“I thought, if I sit still long enough, I will gain some kind of deeper understanding…. But…all I felt was my heart beating, and an emptiness, just like any other creature.”) Her boyfriend looks for an apartment. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Not that Lucky couldn’t be worse. Bell’s drawings are solidly mediocre, and her layouts are a standard, unimaginative grid. But her figures are cute in a bland, non-threatening way, and, you can tell one character from another — which puts her quantum strides ahead of some of her MOME-ready competitors. In the later pages of *Lucky*, she starts using solid blacks, her figure-drawing takes on more natural weight, and she allows the images to carry more of the story. I’m not sure that I, overall, prefer the later panels to the earlier ones , but if you have to read through the whole honking thing at once, stylistic variation at least provides a nice change of pace. Similarly, while Bell’s humor in these pages is low-key to the point of paralysis; it is there, and generates at least a couple of smiles. For instance, Bell explains that she hates art-school modeling so much that after she’s done, anything else becomes pleasant: “This line isn’t moving! Argh! I hate this!…Wait a minute, I’m not modeling. Hey, this is kind of fun!”) Even better is the sequence at the conclusion of Lucky #3 where the narrative spins off into a fantasy daydream involving kissing lessons from Gerard Depardieu and smooching farm animals.

It’s not an accident that Bell’s best work occurs when she detaches herself from the details of her own existence. In fact, reading this book, it’s hard to believe that she ever decided to saddle herself with the autobio milieu. Generally speaking, the best memoir-writing is done by people who want to talk about themselves. You don’t necessarily have to be a brutally honest chronicler of your inner life (like, say, Augustine or Ariel Schrag.) But you do have to have some aspect of yourself that you want to reveal, whether it be your political philosophy (like Malcolm X or George Orwell), or your success (like Ben Franklin or Jenna Jameson), or your wit and humor (like Mark Twain ). Innately private people have written autobiographies, of course but they tend to suck — and if you don’t believe me, just try reading Duke Ellington’s somnolent Music is My Mistress all the way through. I double dare you.

Even if you do manage to finish Ellington’s memoir, you’ll end up knowing remarkably little about him — just as, when you finish Lucky, you’ll know very little about Bell. Though she often mentions her emotions at a particular moment, there’s little sense of how those come together to form a complete picture: while we may know how Bell feels, we never get a sense of what it feels like to be Bell. Despite glancing references to her parents, and a good bit of face time for her boyfriend, the mechanics of her most important relationships are largely opaque. So are her intellectual and aesthetic passions — when another character asks Bell what comic artists she likes, she can’t (or refuses to?) come up with a single one (when pressed, she admits an enthusiasm for Art Spiegelman.) Even the drawing style contributes to this sense of distance; Bell virtually never draws close-ups. Instead, her figures are all seen in the middle-distance, at a safe remove from the reader’s prying eyes.

I don’t have any problem with chilly, impersonal art— Wallace Stevens never wrote about the heartache of adjusting insurance, and that’s fine with me. But Bell’s insistence on writing about herself when she appears to have little interest in doing so sucks all the life out of her work, in every sense. This is made emphatically clear by the last strip in the book. Titled “The Hole,” it isn’t one of the original Lucky journal pieces, but it starts off as if it were. Bell has a hole in her bathroom; Tom, her boyfriend wants her to fix it; she dawdles. Then, suddenly, Tom disappears into the hole. Eventually, after some discussion with unsympathetic friends, Bell follows him: “With surprising ease, I slid inside, to go and be with the one I love.” As with all the best creepy parables, from Hawthorne on up, the metaphor is ostentatious, yet never precisely explicated. The hole in the wall is described as being organic and diseased, like a wound — but since it is so closely linked to Tom and Gabrielle’s relationship, it also seems to have sexual connotations. Is the hole a sign that Tom and Gabrielle are pulling apart? That they are coming together? Or both? Despite, or because of, these questions the tie between Tom and Bell is much more complicated, sympathetic, and real in this three-page fictional piece than in all hundred previous pages of straight autobiography. It’s when Bell disappears, into the hole, and into her fiction, that she is most distinctive. Hopefully in her future projects, then, we’ll see less of her, and more.

This review first ran in The Comics Journal.

A version of this ran in the Chicago Reader several years ago. It’s sort of a companion piece to this essay on Merle Haggard, if you’re keeping track….

Born in the Ryman Auditorium

Gretchen Wilson’s chart-topping debut CD “Here for the Party” is one of the most exciting, innovative albums to come out of Nashville in recent memory — which is faint praise indeed. Country music has, sadly, been a stagnant backwater for at least a generation, and Wilson’s efforts to stir things up serve only to distribute the stink. On “Chariot,” for example, Wilson delivers a rap that’s equal parts Blondie and Charlie Daniels. Not a bad idea, and her delivery’s more convincing than Kid Rock’s. But the musical backing is pedestrian blooze riffing, and one can’t help but note that, as one of mainstream country’s first real responses to hip hop, the song is both twenty years too late and kind of half-assed. The rest of the album is even less impressive. Lots of reviewers have praised Wilson for being more rootsy than Shania Twain or Faith Hill. Maybe so, but to me her power-chord bubblegum hooks and cheesy, pseudo-rebellious choruses (“Hell, yeah!”) don’t really recall Loretta Lynn or even Tanya Tucker. Instead, they hark back to the bottom-drawer hair metal that was all over MTV in Wilson’s youth — her hit single, “Redneck Woman,” is almost but not quite as cheeky as Motley Crüe’s “Smokin in the Boy’s Room.”

Much of contemporary country harks back to a simpler, more honest time when classic rock riffs were still rebellious enough for beer commercials, so Wilson’s connection to schlock rock shouldn’t raise any eyebrows. Yet, such is Nashville’s insularity that any semi-explicit acknowledgement of the rest of the radio dial, no matter how unthreatening, is considered newsworthy. Thus, in interviews, Wilson can sound eclectic by name-dropping AC/DC and Lynyrd Skynyrd, two decent bands that, thirty years ago, were at the forefront of nothing in particular. Wilson’s also established her bona-fides by associating herself with the Muzik Mafia, a loose affiliation of Nashville artists dedicated (in the words of its de facto leaders Big and Rich) to making country “the most inclusive format of music in America.” That sounds inspirational; maybe, with Wilson’s help they’ll drag CMT out of the past and into the brave, new future of 1982.

Country’s been retro so long that it almost seems churlish to expect musical innovation from the genre. Rap, rock, and even pop may be interested in hunting out the cool new sounds, but country doesn’t even pretend. Yet, it wasn’t always that way. When it first began to coalesce in the 1920s, country was every bit as diverse as its chief rivals, blues, jazz, and pop. Jimmie Rodgers, often referred to as the Father of Country Music, may have been the single most omnivorous performer of his day. During one remarkable stretch in 1930-31, Rodgers recorded several sides with Hawaiian guitarist Lani McIntire, several more with a Hispanic band from San Antonio featuring Charles Kama’s steel guitar, a couple with hillbilly traditionalists the Carter Family, one with St. Louis bluesman Clifford Gibson, and one with trumpet giant Louis Armstrong. Nor was Rodgers’ broad church approach limited to one period of his career. He recorded with jazz backing regularly, if not frequently, and the blues were always a foundation of his performance style. Indeed, Rodgers is as much a part of blues tradition as he is of country; many important artists, from Furry Lewis to Howling Wolf, have either covered his songs or cited him as an influence.

Rodgers’ approach seems bizarre now, but it wasn’t unusual for country music of the ‘30s, ‘40s, and even ‘50s. Certainly, some stars like Roy Acuff or Kitty Wells played up their traditional ties to a hillbilly past. But many others listened to, and were inspired by, the musical styles of their own day. Bill Monroe, for example, created bluegrass by wedding a hillbilly repertoire and instrumentation to the soloing and speed of hot jazz. Bob Dunn, one of the earliest electric steel guitar players, consciously imitated the style of contemporary jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden. Western swing bands, exemplified by Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys, played everything from fiddle tunes to hokum blues to Duke Ellington’s sophisticated swing compositions. When the big bands gave way to vocalists, country performers like Ernest Tubb and Tennessee Ernie Ford frequently recorded with pop singers like the Andrews Sisters and Kay Starr (try to imagine Tracy Lawrence cutting a single with J. Lo.) As the 40s closed out, Moon Mullican, Billy Jack Wills, the Maddox Bros. and many others all made music indebted to the jump blues popular on the R & B charts.

Then there was rock n’ roll. Elvis Presley is often presented as the first white man to be influenced by black music, neatly erasing country music’s entire history, from Jimmie Rodgers to Bill Haley. In fact, Elvis was at the end of a long tradition of borrowings by country music, from multiple sources (nobody ever mentions Elvis’ Patti Page cover….) It was his phenomenal crossover success, not his eclecticism, which was distinctive.

That success, though, had consequences — almost all bad, from country music’s perspective. After Elvis, musically inventive white kids — from Bob Dylan to Kurt Cobain — gravitated overwhelmingly to rock. Country was left largely to traditionalists like Merle Haggard, and to the odd aesthetic disaster like New Grass. Johnny Cash, Waylon, Willie, and a few other aging innovators who had started their careers before or shortly after rockabilly managed to hang on for quite a while, however. Largely because of their influence, country managed intelligent responses to the folk revival in the 60s and classic rock in the 70s.

By the 80s, though, country was largely down to artists who loved older styles (i.e., Lyle Lovett) and artists who loved how they looked on video (i.e., Garth Brooks.) And that’s pretty much where things have stayed ever since. Whether it’s the faithful country blues of Bloodshot’s Devil in the Woodpile, the Zeppelin clichés of the recent Loretta Lynn/White Stripes collaboration, the hippy singer/songwriter vibe of Iris Dement, or the tired AOR-ready sheen of the Dixie Chicks, the whole genre, from hitmakers to hipsters, seems as mired in nostalgia as an oldies station. Country has become the rallying point for anyone unhappy with any musical development of the last forty years — a moribund husk stitched together from the corpses of dead genres.

One exception is Bobby Bare Jr. The son of Bobby Bare — a thoughtful country-folk performer in the Johnny Cash mode — Bare Jr. is as obsessed with the past as the next child-of-famous-parents. But the history he cares about is varied and unpredictable enough that it has opened options for him rather than closing them down.

Bare’s first two albums were forgettable by-the-numbers alt. rock, bone-headed and, not coincidentally, whisky-soaked: when my wife saw him in Nashville ten years ago he was about as drunk as one human being could be (and this was at a show where his dad was in the audience!) For his third effort, though, he turned down the amplifiers, ratcheted back the alcohol consumption, and switched to Bloodshot. The last, along with his parentage, is the reason he gets shelved in the country bin, but the album he came up with fits nowhere easily. Certainly it isn’t comfortable next to anodyne No Depression groups like Whiskeytown or Uncle Tupelo, which dealt with their multiple rock and country influences by reducing everything to an indistinguishable sludge.

Young Criminals’ Starvation League, on the other hand, is like sleight-of-hand with a cuisinart; everything Bare ever listened to in the last thirty years seems to be chopped up in there somewhere, but it all appears and disappears so quickly that it’s hard to tell where one source ends and the next begins. Are the lovely vocals on “I’ll Be Around” inspired by Tyrannosaurus Rex or the Everly Brothers? Are the album’s dreamy, soulful horn lines more reminiscent of the MGs or of Love’s Forever Changes? Even on a cover of the Smiths “What Difference Does It Make,” Bare’s easy, shoulder-shrugging rendition seems as much Willie Nelson as Morrissey (though neither of those artists ever relied so much on steel guitar.) On “Dig Down,” Bare name-checks everyone from Chuck Berry to Jimi Hendrix to Pete Townsend to Black Francis, complaining that they’ve stolen all the best ideas, leaving up-and-coming rockers with table scraps. “My Fender is just a painted board,” he wails, “And if I light it on fire I become such a fucking bore.” The song ends with a brief rendition of the “woo-hoo” chorus from “Sympathy for the Devil,” a tired rock shibboleth if there ever was one. The joke, though, is that Bare’s version is better than the original — his sparse, choreographed sloppiness is simultaneously more heartfelt, more fun, and more ironically knowing than the overblown Jagger/Richards multi-tracked dinosaur. After mentioning the Pixies on a country release and making the Rolling Stones seem worthwhile again, there wasn’t much left for Bare to do except walk on water.

His next full-length, this summer’s “From the End of Your Leash” isn’t quite miraculous. Instead, it’s more of the same, which is fine with me. As on the last album, there’s a lovely cover of a tune by Shel Silverstein, one of his dad’s favorite writers. There’s also a hidden track, and a reprise, part way through the album, of one of the early themes.

But while Bare seems to be running out of ideas in terms of structuring his albums, in other respects his muse seems as fertile as ever. In part, this is due to his intelligent choice of musicians, and his willingness to treat them as collaborators rather than sidemen. The results are extraordinary. On the album’s opener, for example, Andrew Bird comes out of nowhere to screech his way through a remarkable Hendrixoid solo on violin. Cory Younts provides the perfect touch of wistfulness to the piano hook on “Don’t Follow Me (I’m Lost).” In “Your Favorite Hat,” Carolyn Kotsionis’ child-like vocals chase Bare’s accented phrases around and around, like Shonen Knife trying to harmonize with Steve Earle. And Doni Schroader’s percussion is marvelous throughout.

It’s Bare though, who really makes the album something special; if anything, his writing style on this record is even more intricate than on the last. Just as one example, the super-catchy “Valentine” starts with a churning guitar riff before Bare and Will Oldham enter, singing harmony. Then a keyboard drifts in, followed by a Beatlesesque bass-line. At the bridge, trumpets enter playing a marching-band flourish. Then the whole thing stops for a bar, before a steel-guitar solo that’s grafted onto a syncopated backing. Then the vocals return, this time accompanied, in addition to the other instruments, by a baritone sax. There’s another pause, which seems to last for a fraction less than a measure, then the steel guitar comes back, this time accompanied by electric grunge (probably courtesy of Duane Denison of Jesus Lizard fame). There’s a false ending, a brief pause, and then a coda by the trumpets. Brian Wilson, eat your heart out.

Fussy arrangements were hugely successful for the Beach Boys, but they’re not a very lucrative choice for a roots rocker. Too much fey intellectualism and the fans start to suspect that you’re not down with the proles. Bare must know that he’s in a marketing limbo, but he doesn’t let it bother him. Instead, he uses his debt to, and distance from, both rock and country to mock both. Anyone expecting “Let’s Rock and Roll” to be a party anthem are in for a disappointment. The song opens with gently swaying music, and then Bare announces “I live on the floor of a minivan/driven by drunks across this land.” By the time he tells us that “there is vomit running down the walls/that vomit don’t care where it falls/and that vomit came out of someone/and that vomit should be cleaned up by someone,” rock decadence seems a lot less like good fun or tragic excess, and a lot more like an excuse to get someone else to clean up your shit. Admittedly, the tune features periodic loud, dissonant guitars, but they’re the wrong loud, dissonant guitars — Sonic Youth braininess rather than fist-shaking Kiss. In any case, given the lyrics and the otherwise dreamy pace of the song, it’s hard not to see the “rockin” section as a total put-on — okay, kids, time to raise your lighters.

The skewering of country on “Visit Me in Music City” is even funnier. Against a musical background which recalls some of Nashville’s excesses — including a full organ sound, singalong chorus, over-miked drums — Bare describes a fairyland where rural authenticity and marketing merge into a single, seamless whole. “The hills are filled with naked hee-haw honeys/ who all sing along in perfect harmony,” “guitar strings grow on shrubs and maple trees,” and “record deals fly in and out like happy bumble bees.” Bare even dares to suggest that country may not be quite as patriotic as Toby Keith likes to think; after all, “in pick up bars the country stars play Japanese guitars.” The coup-de-grace is Bare’s voice — he deliberately adopts ‘70s country phrasing, and ends up sounding a lot like his dad.

When Alan Jackson wrote about Nashville in his lugubrious “Murder on Music Row,” he was peddling straight-up nostalgia — things have gone to hell since ol’Hank’s day. In the first line of “Visit Me in Music City,” Bare claims that he was “born at the Ryman Auditorium during the Martha White portion of the Grand Ole Opry.” Martha White is a bakery products company, and was an Opry sponsor. Bare knows that country’s always been commercial and more than a bit hypocritical. That’s why it’s important not to take it — or any genre — too seriously. Bare uses history, but he doesn’t wallow in it. As such, he’s much truer to country’s past and present than almost all of his more reverent contemporaries.