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The Non-Dreary Goth of Jane Jensen

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This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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My argument is that music can be industrial/sort of goth and not suck. By which I mean, it doesn’t have to be monotonous and dreary and “transgressive” (God help us). It can be playful and sexy. Seriously. It can sound like something you might want to listen to now. Sort of like disco.

Which – right. Never mind.

You’ve never heard of Jane Jensen (this one, not this one), but she’s charming, funny, and sexy. Really sexy. In a charming and funny way. She started out making industrial music that wasn’t dark and plodding (she wasn’t the only one, but there’s a reason it isn’t remembered as a lively genre) – Nine Inch Nails-y, but her voice is high and clear, and her lyrics are not about wanting to fuck you like an animal or hurting herself today or whatever. This is a different and, I suggest, more engaging experience. (I love NIN, by the way. It would be disingenuous to suggest otherwise.)

Jane Jensen has had a varied career. She was in Chicago theater and New York movies (she was Juliet in Tromeo & Juliet!), and she worked with Die Warzau on a side project called Oxygiene 23, which sounds like a Michael Manning title, but I probably wouldn’t be into it because I never liked Die Warzau. Aaaaannndddd she has a link to comic books, which just seemed kind of thematically pat, Hooded Utilitarian considered. She was friends with Alex Ross, Wikipedia informs me, and she was a model for some of his characters. (Remember this; it comes up again in the next sentence.) This is the joke, or at least part of the joke, behind the title and cover of Comic Book Whore, the album Jensen released in 1997. And as if that weren’t enough steaming topicality for one post, Wikipedia also tells me that Gene Ha “represented” Comic Book Whore in an issue of DC comic’s Top 10. I’m not sure if that means he included an image of it or if he held it forth as a good example, but whatever.
 

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Jensen has recorded with a few groups and under different names, but I’m only going to discuss the stuff you could actually find and listen to. First up: Comic Book Whore.

Just to address the elephant in the room, that cover is not ideal, in my candid opinion. I have always assumed she drew the left side, and if she’s still good with it, then that’s fine. I am very much for self-expression. And, you know, it’s a pretty nice eye.

Eyes are hard.
 

“More than I Can” is the first Jane Jensen song I ever heard, and it’s still one of my, say, favorite 200 songs (that is not a dig; my Top 200 is a tightly edited list). It has it all – driving but drugged-sounding beats, cynical but potent sexuality, and a beautifully, believably world-weary tone – everyone gets obsessed with me, maybe I was obsessed with you too, but, you know, I’m tired, go away. Her voice teases as she sings “You fail with words and try again/And bring the words into your hands/Onto my skin and there it lands/You want the light inside my body/Makes you nervous/Makes you naughty.”
 

 
“Luv Song” is hot. I think. It’s a rollicking, sexy (I keep saying that, but what can you do?) ode to a friend’s awesome, awesome boyfriend. Who among us has not been there? Some of his choice qualities: “Never gets sleepy, he goes down all night …He’s not co-dependent or anything weird like that …Not really much into entomology.” And Jensen’s chatter at the end always makes me smile: “Do you have a bottle opener? Baby, this one’s not cold. Go get me another one.”
 

 
“Highway 90” is a little bit of proto-geek girl drama, and the source of the record title (“I dream about a day at a comic book store/I didn’t wanna be a groupie/But I guess I am a comic book whore”), with a nice, cutting guitar line. My favorite couplet is “I wanna be Donna Summer/But I bet she wouldn’t wanna be me.”

This record covers a certain amount of ground, stylistically. I was streaming it online and the little bar on the side kept recommending Filter’s “Hey Man Nice Shot,” which is basically Nine Inch Nails by a different name, so I agree with that. “Listen” is another take on that sound, but more of a Jesus and Mary Chain thing. Several songs rock a style I think of as “alternative performer playing with the four-track.” And there’s “Be Just Sound,” which has a heavy metal guitar hook that quickly turns psychedelic.
 
Comic Book Whore was put out by Flip, which was a subsidiary of Interscope, which was king of industrial music, back when people were actively listening to that sort of thing. This is of pretty much no interest except that I saw an interview in which Jensen was asked, “What was Flip records like? Especially when Fred Durst took it over.” And she said, “Fred wanted to produce my follow-up CD to Comic Book Whore. I couldn’t imagine how that would work so I declined. I had no idea how deeply he could hold a nasty grudge. We had the same management team – same label – it was difficult for me at that time.” (Burner, Jensen’s follow-up record, was self-produced and independently released.) This whole paragraph is basically just an excuse to point out that Fred Durst (of Limp His Kit fame) is a doorknocker.
 
Burner is Jensen’s second widely available recording, and it’s the best. It has several “fuck it” rock songs that we take for granted from the boys but seldom get from the girls (I said “fuck it,” not “shake it off”). This album has better sound than Comic Book Whore, and the songs sound more gelled. In fact, there isn’t a bad song on it, with the possible exception of “Angel” – the stadium ballad doesn’t work for her, either. (Although, to clarify, we aren’t talking “I Want to Know What Love Is.” You can hum “Angel” for days after it gets stuck in your head and not want to kill yourself.)

There’s more fuzz and reverb and shit on this one, which makes the sound fuller than the very-indie-sounding Comic Book Whore, and I prefer that, although it does obscure the lyrics somewhat. She has pretty good lyrics, and her delivery is sexy (I’m just going on record here as not really liking any of the synonyms for sexy). At any rate, the overall kick-ass demeanor does come through, although this record is less industrial and more – I don’t know. Varied. “Alternative.” I suspect this has been a problem for Jensen throughout her career, since people frequently want to know what they’re getting.
 

 
Looking at individual songs, there’s a cover of “Miss You” that’s credible, I guess. I like her original stuff better. “Rock That” – is funky. “Sick of Losing You” is brilliant for conveying the sheer frustration and annoyance of trying to hang onto a relationship you no longer even like.
 

 
“Burner” is a very dirty song – musically, I mean. Well, not just musically. “I’ve got your heart in my hand/I’ve got your tongue in my mouth/I’ve got your thoughts in my head/I’ve got your dreams on the burner.” That right there is a lovely portrait of a certain kind of relationship, romantic and wry. (Would that be a good title for a romance novel?) (Right – no. I guess it wouldn’t.)

Jensen ultimately settled into rockabilly (it’s a logical progression; see the Cramps) and released My Rockabye in 2007. The songs aren’t as strong as the songs on Burner; they remind me more of Comic Book Whore, but a mutated, grown up version. The sound is similar – simple, open, containing a high-hat interlude that sounds like Steely Dan’s “Bodhisattva.” (Fine, there is no high hat interlude on Comic Book Whore that sounds like “Bodhisattva.”)
 
“Jim Jones” is a surprisingly cute (both surprising and cute) little song about unexpectedly finding a friend. “Who are you? He said, Jim Jones. Follow me and I’ll take you home.” Aww. The halting, almost stuttering beat of “Lovers” reminds me of David Bowie’s “Heroes.” It swaggers, but, er, gently? This song is frank, a moment with a full-grown woman, as it were. “Sweet Child” is a power ballad. (See above.) And “Bedtime Baby” is adorable. I don’t throw that word around much because, contrary to common perception, I do have some dignity. But it is what it is, and that is adorable. This is a fairly traditionally put together rockabilly song about persuading the baby to go the fuck to sleep, as the recently popular book put it, so the parents can get it on. And it is successful. I admire Jane Jensen for this song.

In a way, Jane Jensen does remind me of Steely Dan. (Beyond that slightly unexpected drum thing on “My Rockabye”.) I don’t mean she has unparalleled sound work or insanely tight orchestration or jaw-dropping musicality; I’m talking about the way she skims over a number of styles but doesn’t fully embrace any of them, and mostly makes it work. (Also, this rock critic-type thing is rough – I almost caught myself using the word “uncompromising.”) Whatever genre she’s rocking, she’s a gem.

In and Out

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ran059

Art from Weiss Kreutz

 
This is part of the Gay Utopia project, originally published in 2007 . A map of the Gay Utopia is here.
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I didn’t get the point of slash, initially. Why the hell would anybody want to spend their creative energy writing explicit sex scenes with someone else’s characters, and why would anybody want to read it?

So I was surprised to find out that huge quantities of the stuff were available on the internet for almost any anime, manga, TV show or movie you could think of. A friend told me about it — her fandom was “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” — and despite my misgivings, I trusted her taste. She is smart and highly literate and wouldn’t recommend anything that completely sucked (as it were), no matter how much she was into the porn. So the possibility rolled around in the back of my head for years before I finally took her suggestion and Googled “fan fiction.”

My kink is beautiful young men having hot, explicit sex in the context of some kind of emotional relationship. Something meaningful — love, angst, hatred, ideally all three at once. I like porn, but what I wanted wasn’t really available in the mainstream. You can find heterosexual porn with plot, but I didn’t want heterosexual porn. And you can find gay porn with beautiful young men, but I didn’t necessarily want that much sex. (Anyone see “Butt Boys From Outer Space: Blasting Out From Uranus”?)

I had grave misgivings about quality but got lucky and found Scribblemoose right off. The porn sealed the deal, but she is a good writer: well-developed characterizations, compelling plots, and so on. I wasn’t familiar with any of the anime or manga characters she wrote about, but I’d heard of Weiss Kreuz, so I chose one of her WK stories at random, and nothing’s ever been the same.

I picked Weiss Kreuz because it sounded angsty, but also completely ridiculous. The premise of this ’80s anime — which is plagued with some of the worst animation ever perpetrated, along with one-dimensional characters and plot-holes that will occasionally make you throw an axle — is that four beautiful (if peculiarly styled) young men, who have all been scarred by some absolute tragedy, have become avenging assassins with kitty-cat code names who work under cover by day in a flower shop called (get ready for it) “Where the kitten sleeps.”

It seemed like a good place to start.

The first story I read was called “Moving On” (co-written, actually, by Scribblemoose and Gwendolyn Flight). It opens with an espionage scene, and I do love espionage. Two men, Yohji and Aya, are trying to get illicit information out of a computer. Yohji muses crankily about this not being his thing and then spits, “Damnit. It wants a password.” Aya says, “Eggplant.” “What?” “Eggplant. The password’s eggplant,” Aya says, muttering, “Did you actually read the mission pack?” “Of course I fucking did,” Yohji answers.

Soon after, Aya makes a mistake (at the end we find out that a trainee had left different pages out of each man’s information packs), leading to the pair being pursued and hiding in, of course, a crowded gay club. And to blend in, they are obviously forced to dance in extremely tight proximity and kiss in a wonderfully heated fashion. There are passages like: “…Yohji could glimpse shifting muscle and smooth flesh. Tantalizing. He tasted the word on his tongue, rolled it about and smiled on a sudden curling heat.” The men thus discover their hither-to unexplored passion for each other, stagger home and have hot kitchen-counter sex, followed by a complication, then hot bed-sex, and a relationship ensues. It’s funny and sexy and absurd, but there’s an internal logic that holds everything together. (There’s a picture, too, by the lovely and talented P.L. Nunn.)

Years later, Weiss Kreuz is still about the only slash I read, but even in this tiny universe, I’ve come across many talented writers just having a lot of fun with what they do. So many, in fact, I’ve occasionally regretted my inability to become obsessed with other fan fiction universes. I’d enjoy reading them even without the sex.

But, oh, the sex. I’ve had the same basic kink since I was first conscious of sexuality, and for most of my life, there was almost no way to express it. It is inextricably tied up with the other major facet of my sexuality, which is that I’m bi. Both things were equally painful when I was growing up. My family was poor-ish and lived in a fairly small, firmly blue-collar town, and everything I was, sexually, was so wrong it couldn’t even be admitted to exist. For years I had a nebulous, awkward and, most important, closeted relationship with a young woman of similar background. We couldn’t even admit to each other what we were doing. My social life was extremely restricted because nobody could be allowed to find out I was gay — or something, I didn’t exactly know — and nobody around me was out, so I had no idea how to go about finding a more suitable partner or even friends I could trust with my secret.

I spent a lot of time prowling a decrepit and usually completely deserted used bookstore (but wonderful, in its way, and miraculous that it was there at all). And one thrilling day when I was thirteen, I ran across Faggots by Larry Kramer and discovered the broader concept of homosexuality. People like me did exist — somewhere else, obviously, than in my home town, but still. In retrospect, it amuses me that this nasty little book would have been what gave me hope. It’s very far from the kind of porn I seek out, and it didn’t really work for me as porn at the time, but, holy shit! There was a whole world out there, and even if my life felt like a too-tight shoe at the time, there were gay people, and when I grew up I could set forth and find them.

And I did grow up, more or less, and I did find people who were gay, lesbian, bi and trans-gendered, and it was a huge fucking relief. But there was still the other part. I still couldn’t find the kind of porn I needed, or any community where those interests were openly acknowledged, so in a way I still felt like I was in the closet. I broached the subject with some gay men and was considered a fag hag (a phrase I’ve always detested). I was afraid to even mention it to my lesbian friends, who often seemed deeply suspicious of my bisexual orientation (and who did in fact drop me when I started dating a man). It was sort of like high school all over again — there were certainly people out there who shared my porn inclinations, but where the hell were they? So discovering slash, and the slash communities on the internet, felt a bit like discovering the gay utopia. I could finally be out in every way.

There are problems, obviously. It is a virtual community where people interact virtually, using pseudonyms and keeping many details of their real lives private, in part to avoid intruding overly on the fantasy, probably, but mostly to keep themselves safe, since the real world still isn’t open to bi (or straight) women who fantasize about gay men. There is finally yaoi manga to be found at Borders, but this remains a preference you probably don’t want your coworkers to know about.

The virtual community of which I speak lives on LiveJournal, although there are many on LJ and other sites. I often think my life would have been different if this stuff had been around when I was a teenager (in the wee, early ‘80s) or a young adult. To have something so fundamental about myself validated by a community of people who felt similarly — what would that have been like? I have no idea, but I wish every manporn-obsessed teenager in the world could find out.

That opinion would seem to put me in the minority. There’s been so much wailing and gnashing of teeth and crying of “The children! The children!” that it’s almost impossible to say teenagers should perhaps have access to porn. Yes, I am aware that sexual predators make use of the internet. And no, I am not in favor of child abuse. At the same time, I think there is some middle ground on which to perch.

Teenagers are sexual. If someone is thinking about sex, saying “No, you’re not” isn’t going to stuff the genie back into the lamp. This concept of innocence that must be maintained until the age of eighteen, and damn the civil rights torpedoes, is not a universal truth. An awful lot of teenagers have sex. It was even the norm in the US not so long ago. My grandmother — admittedly poor and rural — was married at fourteen, and that was not unusual.

LiveJournal is currently trying to convince its users to save the children by self-censoring. Users are never, ever to post anything that might possibly contain any remotely sexual content involving anyone younger than eighteen — because if you ever posted anything like that, you’d obviously be a disgusting pedophile, and also, the terrorists would win. And the newest innovation is inviting users to flag all adult content in a way that precludes younger users (those who registered their accounts with a birth date indicating they are not yet eighteen years old) from being able to access the material. Other people can flag your content, too. Because the only way to keep teens from being sexually assaulted by pervy old creeps is to deny them access to any kind of sexual content whatsoever.

From the outside, I guess the closet looks like a safe place to store kids. It didn’t feel that way when I was in it, though.

Gluey Tart: Kicking and Dreaming

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Kicking & Dreaming: A Story of Heart, Soul, and Rock & Roll, Ann Wilson, Nancy Wilson, and Charles R. Cross (It Books, September 2012)

As I work my way through the biographies of all my seventies and eighties rock heroes, I realize there’s no point in fighting my demographic destiny. I did expect this book to be dreadful, at least. Dreadful and tedious. Dreadful and tedious and full of repetitive boredom. Dreadful and tedious and full of repetitive boredom and clichés.  And of course it is not entirely free of dreadful, tedious, repetitive, boring clichés, but mostly it is “surprisingly readable,” title aside.

I have always wondered how Ann and Nancy Wilson managed to become kick-ass stadium rock stars in the age of Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones and Aerosmith and all those other very, very male bands. I always wanted to know how much of the early guitar sound was Nancy and how much of it was Roger Fisher.  And I always wanted to know how eighties and nineties Ann felt about being piled with huge hair and big, dark costumes, and shot mostly from the chin up in their videos in a viciously stupid attempt to keep us from noticing she had gained weight. (Answers: because they kicked ass; more Roger, in the songs I like best, but the acoustic stuff is Nancy; and humiliated and irritated, as one might expect.)

The book is told in snippets of narrative by Ann, by Nancy, by other members of Heart, by associates, friends, their mom, and Chris Cornell. This is a half-assed way to put a book together, but it does give Ann and Nancy their own voices. And they are charming. As fluttery, breathlessly dancing in a sun-dappled springtime meadow as you’d expect of anyone who wrote “Dreamboat Annie” and “Dog and Butterfly” and so on, but also as driving and relentless as you’d expect of someone who wrote “Crazy on You” and “Barracuda.”

That’s the dichotomy that made Heart brilliant, and frustrating. I can’t listen to any of their albums all the way through, and individual songs are often divided against themselves, the wild, hard-driving fervor never blending seamlessly with the frothy, acoustic effervescence. (I should point out that I speak of Dreamboat Annie through Bebe Le Strange; I don’t entirely acknowledge the existence of any of their other works.) But they have written some of my all-time favorite songs. I wonder if the hit and miss situation with so many Heart songs is because they were feeling out something that nobody had done yet.

A couple of million critics have written about this dichotomy as a balance of masculine and feminine, but that misses the point. It’s all feminine, and what gets called masculine is instead a side of femininity we don’t usually acknowledge. It was thrilling, back in the seventies, and it still is, more than thirty years later, even though we’ve gotten used to seeing women on a stadium stage. (“Straight On,” for instance, or “Magic Man” – these are pretty much perfect rock songs.) Which brings me back to wondering how they did it, when they did it. Or any time – but especially in the mid-seventies.

And they explain pretty well, considering that it’s really just one of those things. They start out by meticulously recounting their early lives, and in fact their entire family history. I found this touching, in part because I’m a huge fan of putting things in chronological order, but also because they love their family, and each other. I’m into that. They were a military family and moved all over the world during the girls’ childhood, making Ann and Nancy a solid, close unit. They were also musical from a young age. And they found the Beatles. Ann and Nancy see that as the crucial pinch of magic dust that launched them – or Ann, specifically – toward stardom. I’m less convinced; while all their friends were playing at being Beatle girlfriends, Ann and Nancy were pretending to be the Beatles, with guitars and everything. They already had whatever it was.

Next up: Who wrote what. I want to know who slept with whom or what as much as the next person, but I also want to know who wrote what, and under what circumstances. And the book has a lot about the music and about dealing with the music industry, which is always fascinating, in a degrading, evil kind of way. I’m curious about what inspired the songs, too, but that’s usually sort of discouraging. Magic Man, for instance, was a straight-up homage to Ann’s first and overwhelming love, Michael Fisher (brother of guitarist Roger Fisher and, for a few years, their manager). I’m somewhat uncomfortable with that overboard, overwrought song being about a specific man. That’s what happens when you listen in on someone’s creative process, though.

The book is also very much about Ann’s struggle with her weight – or, more accurately, the music industry’s struggle with Ann’s weight. She started gaining in the eighties and, eventually, she was fat. It doesn’t seem like such a horrible thing, but it just wasn’t allowed, in society or, especially, in the music industry. The shit everyone gave her over it destroyed her self-confidence, that blistering individualism that allowed her to get on the stage in the first place. (Well, that, and the music industry in general, and coke.) Have you seen any of those videos from the eighties and nineties? They have Ann’s hair so big she can barely stand beneath it, and her jackets and dark and broad of shoulder, excessive of lapel. She is shown in shadow, cloaked in smoke, or only in close-up, where the big hair and startling blush situation are supposed to fool the eye into thinking she’s smaller than she is. Or, perhaps, just short circuit the viewer’s thought process from an overload of confusion and perplexity. Either way, it’s pathetic. This is a beautiful and shockingly talented woman, and all the music industry could think to do with her was turn her into some kind of clown. That, and focus on Nancy.

This was more or less their approach to the music, as well. Most of Heart’s hits came after Bebe LeStrange, the 1980 album I consider their last acceptable one (although I haven’t checked in recently – I guess their albums from the last two years, Red Velvet Car and Fanatic, could be great – but I wouldn’t bet on it). Ann and Nancy tell the story of how the music industry repackaged them in the eighties, choosing hits they didn’t like and clothes they found ridiculous. I was pleased to find this out, because some of that shit is very, very bad, and knowing they realize this, at least to some extent, makes me feel much better about things. All the dirt about the music industry and its hangers on, by the way, is good stuff. It becomes very clear how bands go from brilliant to embarrassing in the space of one album. (Hint: Letting the music industry tell them what they need to do if they want to make it really big. Also, coke.)

I’d read a couple of popular feminist books recently, and I was surprised to find that the Heart biography was one, too. I don’t know why it surprised me, given their beginnings – perhaps because of songs like “All I Want to Do Is Make Love to You” (which it turns out Ann never liked, thank god; that song is the kind of shit you can’t wait to wipe off your shoe, and even then, you keep smelling it anyway). Ann feels strongly that she was judged by different standards than male rockers were judged by, and she suffered for it, and she resents the hell out of it. That isn’t tricky, as feminist arguments go, but sometimes simple is good. (I was glancing through the Amazon reviews, by the way, and noticed that Ron, an Indiana Republican who can’t spell, is unhappy about the book’s liberal leanings. Life must be frustrating for Ron.)

I got involved with this book, and not just because I spent at least a week reading it (its not exactly tight, and when you’re reading it in spurts of fifteen or twenty minutes a day, it seems endless). Also, I feel that now the Wilsons and I are so close, it’s cold of them to obviously leave out so much of the dirt – because the absence of certain things is palpable. (For instance, despite a decent number of generalized statements about drug use, there are surprisingly few actual anecdotes, making me suspicious. And in the later years, we learn about Nancy’s marriage to Cameron Crowe — and the demise thereof — but there’s almost nothing about what Ann was doing in her personal life over the last twenty years. What up, Ann?)  So, it was a bit of a slog, and a vague slog, at times, but that was all right. Ann and Nancy are likeable, and interesting, and they kick ass.

And I just saw that Rod Stewart has a biography out. God damn it.

Voices From the Archive: Kinukitty on Improving This Blog By 17.6%

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During out Wire roundtable way back when, Kinukitty had some depressing thoughts on the use of statistical methods in government. Thought I’d reprint it since we’re doing our democracy thing today.

I was delighted when the Wire opened with that CompStat meeting. I don’t know if many people understand the tyranny of the stat programs. Many governments and government agencies wrestle with some kind of performance measurement system, and they tend to work pretty much as you described – there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Performance measurement isn’t hopeless, exactly. There are some (probably not a lot) of governments using it right and getting good results. It takes someone special, though, to turn an organization around and create true accountability (which does not include firing people because you don’t like their stats). Especially in an enormous bureaucracy like a government. And then there are the elected officials. But as long as some organizations are doing something good with stats, it seems best not to throw out the baby with the bath water.

Because I don’t know if there are a lot of alternatives. I don’t see NGOs as helping very much. Too many obstacles, including the fact that stats can be altered just by the choices of what is measured, and how. And news coverage? I don’t think the problem there is that news outlets are only interested in sensationalizing stories to sell copies, advertising, etc. Well, it’s not the only problem. A lot of reporters and editors just don’t understand what they’re publishing, and the more sophisticated or complicated the issue is, the less likely they are to really get it. The current hysteria about state and local government pensions is a good example. Yes, they have an incentive to report that the sky is falling, since people are more likely to be interested in that than the sky not falling, but they also don’t understand the issue well enough to challenge any lies, misrepresentations, or mistakes their sources feed them. I’m not actually completely down on journalism — I more or less believe in the fourth estate thing. We’d be screwed without it. But there are problems.

Which leaves me in a Wire frame of mind, too. I appreciate it, though. I think it’s kind of important to make people understand that the problems are complicated.

 

Gluey Tart: Takes on Maus

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I hate Maus. Let me count the reasons why. I’m not allowed to hate it, for one thing; I always find that annoying. I’m not crazy about portraying Jews as mice and Poles as pigs and so on (I won’t go into why – better critics than I have already beaten that horse). (OK, I can’t help it – Nazis were humans who killed Jews, who were also human – people killing other people, not one species killing another species, not cats hunting mice, for heaven’s sake.) (Also, pigs? It doesn’t really matter to me whether he meant that insult or not; that’s the kind of thing that happens when you start getting cute about genocide.) I’m full on offended by “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” and Spiegelman’s tossing the word “murder” around. (That story is about his mother committing suicide, and he says, “You murdered me, Mommy, and left me here to take the rap!” He also calls his father a murderer for burning his mother’s journals without letting Art see them.) I could write essays about each of these topics, but I’m going to stay focused (well, focused for me) on my main problem with Maus, which is that I believe it’s morally wrong to batten on the pain of your people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. Postmodernism. I’m aware of it. And narratives help us understand atrocities like the Holocaust. And the children of Holocaust survivors experienced their parents’ memories in a unique way. And how is it wrong for a writer to work out his demons by telling a story? Plus, mice are cute! Everyone loves mice. I don’t actually disagree with any of that, except maybe postmodernism, but there isn’t much I can do about postmodernism.

My objection is to Spiegelman grabbing his parents’ painful past and carrying it in a fireman’s hold through an obstacle course of writerly tropes to emerge, triumphant, a Pulitzer prize clutched in one hand and an Eisner award in the other, proud and satisfied about making the graphic novel serious and literary and worthy of a couple million graduate theses. He is excessively eager to define himself by his relationship to his parents – that is, my fucked up parents fucked me up, damn it. And who can argue? It’s the Holocaust! You can’t argue with the Holocaust. Of all the writers who have ever written about how their lives are ruined by their damned crazy parents, anyone laying claim to the Holocaust hits the mother lode. It renders anyone’s personal trauma unassailable and worthy of interest.

I am going to assume Spiegelman undertook this project as a way to come to terms with his own pain – an understandable motive, although the subsequent publication of more Maus and the egregious In the Shadow of No Towers might make one wonder, if one were mean and lacking in tact, about the relationship between Spiegelman’s career and his willingness to schmaltz up whatever major tragedy lands at his doorstep. Maybe it’s a chicken and the egg thing – he could be attracted to these themes because of the way his psyche was constructed (by his damned crazy parents). Either way, he thought it was OK to publish this story about mice Jews and cat Nazis, but he almost certainly didn’t expect everyone in the world to decide it was a brilliant masterpiece.

That probably means I shouldn’t hold it against him, but… But. (“Everyone I know has a big but,” sayeth the sage Pee Wee Herman; “What’s yours?”) This sort of thing reminds me of people who write true crime books. Beyond the “Look at me! Look at me! Be impressed by my pain!” thing (and isn’t that why God invented psychiatrists?), I can’t help thinking that putting murder out there for profit and some measure of fame (because we don’t publish things unless we hope people will read them) is wrong. Is it more or less wrong to exploit your own tragedy than someone else’s?  On the one hand, you have more of a motive than simply latching onto a story that might sell (although that is part of your motive; otherwise, you’d keep a diary or something). You’re working through something that is, in some sense, yours. On the other hand, your own family becomes grist for the mill, and even if they acquiesce, you’re still using them.

I already hear the collective grumble of irritation saying it isn’t exploitation if it’s art. Art transmutes exploitation into something else, something with a higher purpose. And I believe that, too – to a point. What rises to the level of art? This isn’t the time or place to throw down on what art is or isn’t, thank god, but I don’t subscribe to the “50 Million Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong” theory. You know, “everyone else thinks it’s the best comic ever, so if you don’t think so, you can’t call yourself a sentient being and you also suck donkey balls.” Well, you say “sweeping metaphor,” I say “somebody get me some damned insurance so I can see a psychiatrist and tell them how my parents fucked up my life.”

Not that I’ve actually read the thing, mind you. I don’t want to, I don’t need to, and you can’t make me. Does this mean I’m not allowed to have an opinion? It does not. I have picked Maus up countless times, willing the book to do anything but annoy me. If you are an educated and intelligent reader and accidentally let it out that you sometimes read comics, everyone assumes you love Maus. They start talking about it as if it had performed three perfect miracles. And because: 1) I hate to disappoint (oh, please – Kinukitty is the most gracious of creatures); and 2) I hate to miss out on things, I pick it up, I read a few pages, I put it back. (I actually have a similar relationship with Gravity’s Rainbow, which I used to keep with my horror books – except  I think Gravity’s Rainbow really is art.) I have done this countless times and have probably read about half of the book, over the last 20 years. I have also read a certain number of essays and blog posts, and listened to a certain number of conversations, and rolled my eyes at a certain number of over-carbonated bookstore recommendations.

The brilliance of Maus would not coalesce for me if I could but force myself to read those missing pages. The Poles would still be characterized as pigs, the Holocaust would still be ugly, and the book would still stink of entitled self-pity.
 
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Gluey Tart: Porn Cozies for Everyone!

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So, I was reading an article the other day (yes, I sometimes read things that aren’t yaoi manga or fan fiction) (OK, it was Marie Claire, but bear with me; there are larger truths afoot), and it turns out that – get ready for it – women are reading porn on their Kindles! (And Nooks and whatever. You’re always a Kindle to me.)

Said article immediately dove for feminist cred by talking about our foremamas reading Jane Eyre under a cover because women aren’t supposed to have active fantasy lives and so on, and then it surfaced with the obligatory statement that the important thing about the Fifty Shades of Grey-porn-for-female-lady-person-led renaissance is that this porn is safe because it’s by women, for women. Like knitted craft projects.

I’m not entirely cynical about this, mind you. Many of us realized immediately that, like the Internet, the Kindle was made for porn. On the bus, if we so desire. Well, porn and romance. There are multiple points of intersection, as it were, between the two, and Fifty Shades of Grey is obviously not the first by-women-for-women piece of romantic porn to grace the screens of our nation’s e-readers. As soon as the Kindle floodgates were opened, a new industry was born – adapting romantic fan fiction (sometimes literally, sometime figuratively) into novellas to sell for sometimes as little as 99 cents on Kindle. And apparently this anonymous experience has cranked up demand and normalized the genre to the point that those bitches on the view are chatting about it on morning television. To which the proper response is “Huzzah!”

I am a huge fan of porn. It eases the discomfort of modern life, taking its place with naptime as another of nature’s soft nurses. Or something. And with apologies to Shakespeare, of course. The thing about porn is that it has to be broken down into much smaller cross sections than most genre lit. I like mysteries, for instance, and there are certain kinds of mysteries I like better than others, but if Christopher Bookmyre or Ian Rankin aren’t available, I can also amuse myself with James Patterson or Dean Koontz or even something starring a cat. If I’m into, say, gay romantic shape-shifting dominance and submission cowboys (which I’m not, by the way – that was just an example. Shape-shifting isn’t my cup of wereleopard), I’m not going to be able to make due with, say, het water sports. And vice versa, surely.

Fortunately, the Kindle romantic porn industry ensures I’ll never have to face such a dilemma, because whatever your kink, they’ve got you covered. There are scores of novels that never would have gotten printed because their appeal isn’t broad enough; offering digital versions, though, is apparently cost effective. Fan fiction writers such as E.L. James (who initially wrote Fifty Shades of Gray as Twilight fan fiction) can shift from writing for free on sometimes-obscure websites, change the names of the characters, and sell short stories, novellas, and full-length books online. (This was happening before e-books, with websites like Loose Id selling PDFs, but that was still not exactly mainstream.) I unapologetically love fan fiction, and I am excited for E.L. James; turning fan fiction into legit publishing can only be a good thing.

You say America’s housewives don’t have access to the filthy perversion of their choice? Let them read e-books!

Now, I haven’t read Fifty Shades of Grey, and I’m not going to – but not because it probably sucks. It just isn’t my kind of porn. I don’t care if it’s reasonably well-written or if the prose is so tedious as to suck out your very soul through one of those tiny little straws you use to stir your coffee. Because my mother, who is as likely to embrace porn as she is to come out as a MTF transsexual alien Siamese cat, bought Fifty Shades of Grey at Wal-Mart. She hasn’t had time to read it yet because she’s not done with that heart-warming series by Jan Karon about the small-town priest, so in the meantime, she lent it to my aunt, who did read it, despite being a church-going Southern Baptist and, as such, even less porn-adjacent than my mother. (My aunt’s critique was pretty damning, though: “It wasn’t that dirty.”)

But never mind that. This is a giant step forward for all mankind! Let us all download porn onto our Kindles and celebrate.

Gluey Tart: Better Living Through Celebrity News

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If you read celebrity blogs (and fully 23.7% of Kinukitty’s brain is occupied thus; dlisted is one of my favorite things in the world, right up there with Twix, Fresca, and peace, love and understanding), you might have recently become aware of Stephen Ira Beatty. I think the Daily Mail started it, and it spread to the National Enquirer, and so on, and so on. Stephen has popped up in this context before, but this video seems to have spread further than anything else.

This could be a coincidence, or it could also be totally wrong; I did some half-assed research but did not employ science or anything. Assuming it’s not wrong and there is a reason (because, really, why not?), I can’t help thinking it’s because Stephen Ira Beatty is tremendously appealing. Also thoughtful, intelligent, educated, and well spoken – and sure, all those things are fine, but really, the adorability helps. And, in my mind, it’s exciting that habitual readers of the Daily Mail, the National Enquirer, TMZ, etc. are watching a video of a trans man chatting about being trans.
 

 
He got all the publicity because he’s the son of Warren Beatty and Annette Benning, of course, not because people want to better understand transsexuals or because he has interesting things to say, and that does suck. What also sucks is the circus sideshow tone of some of these posts – child of famous attractive heterosexual people is transsexual! Can you believe it?!!? All noted. (Here’s Stephen’s take on that.) But still – that’s an awful lot of people who probably never think about this stuff taking a moment to acknowledge it and, possibly, having a wow, that guy is pretty cool moment.

Said video, which made the rounds in mid-July, is of Stephen chatting about being transgendered and stuff. He started transitioning at age 14, and he’s 20 now, which I find mind-bogglingly splendid, and also really very encouraging. His parents are rich, and apparently at least somewhat open minded, which obviously put him in a better position to address his gender dysphoria than most people are in. (For instance, if you follow Dispatches from Tanganyika (which is damned hard to spell), you’ll read about how Billy Martin – formerly Poppy Z Brite – has had to sell off possessions to pay for his testosterone, and he still had to stop taking it for a time.) That doesn’t make Stephen any less impressive; it’s just worth nothing. Looking back at my own 14-year-old experience, which was muddled and unpleasant and thoroughly lacking in resources for fixing anything, I can only say damn, Stephen, you kick ass.

And Stephen’s blog, Super-Mattachine, is charming and interesting and well written. His most recent post is a review of queer porn movie Speakeasy (available here, along with a lot of other great stuff, including the marvelously titled “The Genderfellator.”) There’s some interesting introspection and discussion of the movie (Speakeasy, I mean; there’s a trailer here if you’d like to take a dip), including an acknowledgment of the cerebral nature of the review, which he clarifies by saying “A++, would fap again.”

The name of the blog, by the way, refers to the Mattachine Society, a pre-Stonewall gay rights group (founded in 1950) and its newsletter, The Mattachine Review. According to group founder Henry Hay, via Jonathan Katz, Gay American History (Crowell Publishers, 1974), via Wikipedia, the name references a French medieval and renaissance masque group called the Société Mattachine. These societies (again according to Wikipedia) were “lifelong secret fraternities of unmarried townsmen who never performed in public unmasked, dedicated to going out into the countryside and conducting dances and rituals during the Feast of Fools, at the Vernal Equinox. Sometimes these dance rituals, or masques, were peasant protests against oppression – with the maskers, in the people’s name, receiving the brunt of a given lord’s vicious retaliation. So,” Hay said, “we took the name Mattachine because we felt that we 1950s Gays were also a masked people, unknown and anonymous, who might become engaged in morale building and helping ourselves and others, through struggle, to move toward total redress and change.” Which is interesting, dontcha think? Also interesting (and also from Wikipedia), the Mattachine Society’s goals were “to unify homosexuals isolated from their own kind; educate homosexuals and heterosexuals toward an ethical homosexual culture paralleling the cultures of the Negro, Mexican and Jewish peoples; lead the more socially conscious homosexual to provide leadership to the whole mass of social variants; and assist gays who are victimized daily as a result of oppression.”

I had heard of Stephen before I saw the afore-mentioned video on dlisted, etc., but I didn’t start Googling him frantically. And, not to get all earnest and shit, I appreciate having another opportunity to find out more about him. He dislikes the celebrity media, which has outed and hounded him, so I suspect he might not find my enthusiasm in this particular case worth the candle. He would have a point there, obviously. He seems like a tolerant guy, though, so maybe he’d see a silver lining here, too.

(Also, I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty upset about Kristen Stewart cheating on Rob Pattison – why, Kristen, why? Apparently she can’t act – I don’t know because I only saw her in the first Twilight movie, and I thought she banged “glum teenager with not ideal decision-making skills” dead on – as it were. I don’t care about that, though. I just like to look at pictures of her in Us and shiver at the pointy perfection of her nose.)

(And by the way, am I the only one who thinks the Orbit tower at the London Olympics site looks like it was built by Phineas and Ferb? That’s not an insult, by the way.)