Tag Archives: Hooded Utilitarian

Utilitarian Review 5/22/10

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On HU

Kinukitty started her monthly column by pointing at KISS lyrics and laughing.

I interviewed critic Tom Spurgeon about comics and criticism. In comments, he tells me what he really thinks of me. It’s fairly unpleasant.

Richard Cook contemplates the Ant-Man, She-Hulk, and Cable films on the way in 2013.

Art critic Bert Stabler does a guest post in which he discusses bodies, essentialism, and feminist performance art.

I review Michael Kupperman’s Tales Designed to Thrizzle.

And I talk about racism in my favorite terrifying Tintin dream sequence.

Also, we’re going to be using captcha words for comments from now on in order to try to cut down on the crazed deluge of spam. You can avoid having to type in random characters when you comment by signing up in the upper right corner of the sight.

Oh; and I’ve uploaded a classic Scandinavian black metal mix.

Utilitarians Everywhere

I talk to Bert Stabler about Kant and God and other stuff over at his blog.

Bert: A God that pursues us, that moves in and out of us, is not an abstract principle of wisdom, nor a form of primal electromagnetism, but something else that contains elements of both of those things. Our wanting and changing and experiencing and relating are the things that are most relevant to God and to faith. I’m not totally satisfied with the way Kant addresses this, but he certainly tries, and for faith after the death of God, that’s an important start.

I review a passel of reissues of Johnny Cash’s 70s albums over at Madeloud.

Still, the real standout here is the title track. Built around an irresistible banjo hook, swirling swings, and a cheesy but somehow still aching horn riff, the lyrics neatly invert the standard gotta-ramble-baby trope, as Cash laments the fact that his woman won’t stay with him. “I know she needs me about as much as I need someone else. Which I don’t,/ And I swear some day I’ll up and leave myself. Which I won’t,” he sings, with plainspoken helplessness. Cash has always had an admirable willingness to look like a fool, and here the overblown, foofy production seems to emphasize his emasculation. “I know the only reason that she ever has to leave me is she wants to.” The song is, like unequal love, both ridiculous and heartbreaking.

Other Links

This is one of my favorite of Tom Crippen’s reviews so far.

Robert Boyd has some interesting speculations about the impace of criticism on theater productions embedded in an (also interesting) discussion of Jules Feiffer.

Utilitarian Review 5/15/10

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On HU

We started the week off with Matthias Wivel’s new column titled DWYCK (in honor of Guru; Matthias has a lovely obit here.) This month’s column on HU focuses on the relationship between cartooning and classical art.

I sneered at the title of Ben Schwartz’s Best American Comics Criticism. (Prompting Matthias to call me “asinine” in comics — welcome aboard Matthias!)

Suat reviews Dan Clowes’ Wilson.

Richard Cook reviewed Peter Milligan and James Romberger’s Bronx Kill. (James himself weighs in in comments.)

Old HU hand Tom Crippen returned for a guest post about writing criticism.

Vom Marlowe discussed comic character perfumes and the virtues of fandom.

And I digitized one of my old zines, titled “Superheroes I Have Known.

Utilitarians Elsewhere

At comixology I have an essay about pregnancy and homosexuality in Junji Ito’s Uzumaki.

Ito seems to be suggesting that all men secretly want to — that the only thing preventing constant man-on-snail coupling are a few thin taboos which will warp and dissolve like cardboard before the smallest liquid spray of desire. This is, of course, the fever-dream behind the most alarmist kinds of homophobia; the terror, not so much that gays are recruiting, as that, with just a little prompting, men will embrace any excuse to abandon heterosexuality, and with it humanity. From a Freudian standpoint, you can see it as the combined fascination with and horror of the father; a desire for the power of the phallus which must be carefully regulated through totem and taboo if we are not to all slide into cannibalism and anarchy.

I review Pam Grier’s new memoir over at Splice Today.

Foxy: My Life in Three Acts certainly is affecting in parts. As the father of a six-year-old, I found Grier’s account of being raped at that age actually nauseating. Less somberly, Grier’s discussion of one of her visit’s to the gynecologist has to be one of the top gossip anecdotes of the year so far. In her account, Grier explains that the doctor discovered “cocaine residue around the cervix and in the vagina” and asked Grier if her lover was putting cocaine on his penis. “ Grier responds, “That’s a possibility … You know, I am dating Richard Pryor.”

Then she admits to the doctor that during oral sex her lips and tongue go numb because, apparently, Pryor did so much coke that it made his semen an opiate.

Other Links

Tom Crippen sneers wearily (and effectively) at John Constantine.

Utilitarian Review 5/8/10

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On HU

This week on HU, Erica Friedman wrote her first column, in which she discussed whether or not feminine and lesbian perspectives in comics exist.

I highlighted some comments from the Fiore/Berlatsky grudge match.

Suat explained why the Unwritten doesn’t deserve an Eisner.

I discussed time and change in volume 3 of Ooku.

I reprinted a review of Lilli Carre’s The Lagoon.

Vom Marlowe looked at Bran Doll

Caro talked about how Anke Feuchtenberger writes the body.

And Suat provided an appendix of Feuchtenberger drawings.

Tomorrow we’ll have the first of Matthias Wivel’s columns — so be sure to click back!

Utilitarians Everywhere

Speaking of Matthias, he’s got a discussion of the Fumetto festival online at tcj.com.

Anyway, good art tends to thrive on the fringes, and Fumetto is as great as any showcase of the best contemporary comics have to offer. Amongst the highlights was an inventively curated exhibition of the work of Nadia Raviscioni, with focus on her new, autobiographically inflected fantasy, Vent frais, vent du matin, ten years on the making. Beautiful, funny and inventive work synthesizing big-nose cartooning and textural illustration in pages that alternate naturally between gag mode and oneiric suggestion, this promises to be a major book.

Also on tcj.com, I reviewed a really bad coffee table book about Wonder Woman.

Instead, we get a hodgepodge, mishmash Wonder Woman; a Wonder Woman thrashing about helplessly, but alas, not fetchingly, in the piss-golden strands of indifferent storytelling, sub-par artwork, nonchalant exploitation, and endless, grinding, remorseless continuity. Author Robert Greenberger [Update: with art Director Chris McDonnell] is a wonder himself, choosing illustrations by blindfolding himself and stumbling around DC’s offices after closing hours, while all the while cheerily and randomly retailing the intimate minutiae of idiotic, best-forgotten subplots.

At Splice Today I compare Shelby Lynne to of all things, death metal.

I’ve been obsessed with death metal recently. Decapitated, Disincarnate, Dismember, Deicide, Demilich and, of course Death; the best fucking band names in the world of music, and these are just the ones that start with “D.” I love that listening to death metal on an iPod is like collecting every word in the dictionary that could possibly be considered morbid and gross and putting them together almost at random. And yes, I’m sure there’s a band named “Morbid Gross” out there somewhere, and their singer sounds like he’s gargling knives and the music is like being bashed upside the head with a decaying goat tied to a spinning helicopter motor because that’s what death metal is, damn it. Just ask Carcass or Cancer or Cannibal Corpse or Kreator.

And at Madeloud I review the latest by nu-doom metallers Apostle of Solitude.

Other Links

Bert Stabler muses on faith, capitalism, and my recent fracas with R. Fiore.

Also in re said fracas, Charles Reece pointed me to this great essay about cultural and psychological darwinism.

And coffeeandink has a quietly but bracingly negative review of Natsume Ono’s Not Simple.

Everyone Gets Into the Fight

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The Fiore vs. Berlatsky kerfuffle was so much fun other folks threw some punches as well. I thought I’d do a brief roundup of some of the more entertaining/enlightening blows.

Mike Hunter, in a comment over at the mainpage, did an extensive fisking of R. Fiore’s fisking of me. Here’s the first bit:

R. Fiore:
The reasonableness of the West is demonstrated by its relative freedom from religious warfare. It is a case where a problem that bedeviled mankind for centuries was solved by human agency. It is one of the greatest achievements of human history.
——————
Indeed a great achievement! But what we need here are more qualifiers, such as “The reasonableness of the West in this area“; for, does the West not indeed support the most corrupt and exploitative dictatorships for the most cynical of reasons?
That there are plenty of tyrants trampling their people without our aid hardly excuses our keeping others in power.
——————
R. Fiore:
The Danish Jyllands-Posten, lulled into a false sense of security by a period of reason and good fellowship in Europe dating all the way back to 1945, published their suite of cartoons featuring Muhammad on the assumption that no one was crazy enough to sacrifice their lives and liberty or commit horrible crimes over a drawing.
—————–
(?????!!!!) The Jyllands-Posten is a right-wing publication which wanted to show what a bunch of berserk nutsos all Muslims were by doing a deliberately provocative action which it knew perfectly well Fundamentalist members of the faith world predictably go apeshit over.

Caro, to no one’s surprise, had a really insightful take.

It seems to me the most telling sentence in the second piece is this: “The reasonableness of the West is demonstrated by its relative freedom from religious warfare. It is a case where a problem that bedeviled mankind for centuries was solved by human agency.”

This idea that social problems are ever “solved” is, at the risk of melodrama, dangerous. They go dormant, conditions obtain at a given period of time when the are less of a problem, but that doesn’t mean they are solved, like some utopian science fiction novel.

This is precisely where Fiore’s “cultural materialism” is insufficient: you might be able to explain the past in cultural materialist terms, but you will not be able to imagine how the past might “return” to inform the future, because by denying the dialectic you leave yourself no mechanism for examining how that past is immanent in the present.

Maybe the errors of fact arise from this too: how would the families of the victims of Srebrenica feel about the notion that the West has solved the problem of religious violence, or even that Europe and “the Muslim world” have diverged in the first place? (His use of the word “Europe” to mean “Western Europe” is really irritating.) Or the European religious philosophers of the 17th century feel about secular pluralism as the cause for the advancements of Western civilization, since it ignores the religious pluralism on which secular pluralism is based? (I want to include the statement “Radical…Islam is not a remedy” here but I can’t figure out what he’s saying it’s not a remedy for…)

Fiore thinks in terms of cause and effect rather than in terms of “conditions of possibility” and I think that’s why Fiore’s essay feels so wrong to us: he treats history as something completed, a riddle to be explained, rather than as a powerful immanent presence that we have to engage with. His inability to perceive religion as anything other than an adaptation is probably why he can’t perceive History in this way: immanence was originally a religious concept, and if you take a strict materialist approach to religion it’s hard to exhibit the forms of mind necessary for imagining things that are temporally infinite. Fiore, imagining history as as series of finite cause and effects rather than an ongoing process that he is part of, sets himself outside history. I guess that’s the binary that I see informing this piece the most.

And in what I think is the closest thing we’ve gotten to a defense of Fiore, Andrei Molotiu chastised me for my second response to Fiore.

Noah, whatever one might think of Fiore, this is not a response, it’s a trolling post. It makes you sound like JF Ronan in his prime. It’s the kind of post that makes me not want to check HU as often anymore.

I think Fiore may well be sick of the back and forth, so this may be the end of the brouhaha. Thanks to all those who read and commented…and to R. Fiore himself, for engaging as long as he did. I hope we’ll get a chance to fight again soon.

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Packing a Grip

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Mash ups, R &B, some Thai pop….

1. DJ Lobsterdust — Alone Wit Chu (Air vs. Queens of the Stone Age)
2. Aggro1 — Banquet vs. Don’t Cha (Bloc Party vs. Pussycat Dolls)
3. Go Home Productions — Pink Wedding (Billy Idol vs. Pink)
4. Christina Aguilera — Get Mine Get Yours (Stripped)
5. Golden Echoes — Packing a Grip (Good God! Born Again Funk)
6. Victory Travelers — I know I’ve Been Changed (Good God! Born Again Funk)
7. Jody Watley — Friends (Larger than Life)
8. Toni Braxton — You’re Makin’ Me High (Secrets)
9. Monica — Sideline Ho (The Makings of Me)
10. Monica — If You Were My Man (Still Standing)
11. Allure — Favorite Things (Patiently Waiting)
12. Allure — Treat Him Rite (Patiently Waiting)
13. Jonas & Kristy — Mark see da sao taw tarng lum (Jonas & Kristy)
14. Kat Rattikarn — Yaa Geed Nuk (R-Siam : Ruam Pleng Mun Marathon)
15. ?????????? — Mayura Fahsithong
16. Sao Bang Pao — Mayura Fahsithong

Download Packing a Grip.

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.

Utilitarian Review 3/6/10

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On HU

We started the week off with my six-year-old son commenting on Peanuts.

Suat offered an appreciation of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.l I still didn’t like it.

Richard surveyed current horror comics.

I explained why I hate Chip Kidd’s Peanuts book.

Vom Marlowe reviewed the manga A Wise Man Sleeps.

And this weeks download features mashups and more.

Utiltarians Everywhere

On Splice Today I review Johnny Cash’s last album.

At the Reader I survey my neighborhood’s bookstores.

And on tcj.com I review The Cartoon History of Economics.

Other Links

Tucker’s been on fire recently.

Shaenon has a highly entertaining take on the idiot copying panels from Bleach controversy.

Comics Comics brutally pwns TCJ.com again (and the rest of the comics blogosphere too) by doing the so-obvious-it’s-brilliant, and asking Jog to do his weekly previews on their site.

Alyssa Rosenberg is so so wrong to prefer Solange to Beyonce.