Tag Archives: Noah

I’m Going to Lie Here for the Rest of the Day

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I think this is the first Charlie Brown/Lucy football strip. Later it becomes about Lucy’s cruelty and Charlie Brown’s sad sack hopefulness, but this one is just about the little kid misunderstanding. it’s Lucy who’s trying her best and failing — though, of course, Charlie Brown’s still the one who ends up flat on his back.

We’re taking the day off today. Not sure what posting will be like through the weekend, though probably there will be something or other up. Enjoy the day off if you’ve got it, and don’t let the five year old hold your football.
 

The Cruellest Batman of Them All

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My family is happily watching our way through the newly released Batman TV 60s TV show DVDs; I think we’re up to 14 out of 120 episodes now.

For the most part the Batman TV show is remembered as goofy fun — and goofy fun it is. But the first two episodes (with Frank Gorshin’s Riddler as the villain) are unexpectedly…not dark exactly, and not grim, but cruel in a way that’s all the more shocking for being casually off-hand.

A couple of times in the show, Bruce Wayne, with little prompting, segues into a discussion of his murdered parents. It’s presented as pro-forma and, with Adam West’s tongue-in-cheek delivery, as fairly ridiculous. The show essentially sneers at murder and childhood trauma; they’re presented as ridiculous.

Even more egregious is the fate of the Riddler’s girlfriend, Molly (Jill St. John). Molly dresses up as Robin (insert disquisition on camp here) and tricks Batman into letting her into the Batcave. She then runs up to the atomic pile that powers the cave. Batman begs her to come down, but she mutters vaguely about being scared, and, overacting all the while, spins, staggers, and falls into the reactor even though Batman is standing like a foot away from her holding out his hand. Batman mutters something regretful about how he wishes he could have saved her (“Poor deluded child!”), and the show barrels on cheerfully. Molly’s death, like the Wayne’s, is viewed as a joke. Batman’s traumatic backstory and the tragic death of the villainness are both portrayed as glib narrative heart tuggers — cynical melodramatic boilerplate.
 

BatTV-SC-S1E02-Molly-68

 
The rest of the shows I’ve seen so far don’t engage in this kind of sneering; it seems like an early tonal blip. It’s interesting just how jarring that blip is, though. Grim and gritty in genre is usually seen as brutal, or tough — blood on the Batglove is a sign of unflinching viciousness, as is shooting Batgirl in the stomach. But I think in a lot of ways the Adam West Batman is actually meaner than Frank Miller or Alan Moore. Those guys took violence seriously, they treated bloodshed with reverence, at least in the sense that bloodshed was important to them and meaningful in their writing. But for the 60s Batman, violent, hideous death is just a punch line. Or maybe after all the 60s Batman just shows that violence in Batman is never anything but a punch line; in its cynicism, it reveals the callow cynicism of all that grim and gritty violence that. How many times can you shoot Bruce Wayne’s parents before you start to feel like Bat-trauma is just another disposable Bat-product?

Utilitarian Review 11/22/14

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On HU

On Thai pop singer Pamela Bowden and why the world’s too big for best of lists.

I concluded our roundtable on the Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of with a discussion of why some music (and some roundtables) aren’t popular.

I argued that the secrets in Jill Lepore’s Wonder Woman history aren’t actually secrets.

Chris Gavaler on the history of transsexual supervillainy.

Jared Hill on Arthur C. Clarke, prognosticator.

Roy T. Cook wonders if a Batman comic in color is a different comic from the same(?) Batman comic in black and white

Kailyn Kent on how absurdity becomes conservatism in the film Snowpiercer.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic:

—I reported on We Charge Genocide how Chicago’s human rights violations were presented to the UN.

—I said that the new Peanuts film looks like cheery, ugly crap.

— I interviewed Martin Paul Eve about open access to academic work in the humanities.

At Comic Book Resources I argued that diveristy is a superhero tradition.

At the LA Review of Books I wrote about Sergei Lukyanenko’s The Genome and how the fault is in our genre, not our genome.

I got interviewed on the Irish pop culture show the Green Room about spoilers. (I’m towards the beginning of the hour.

At Splice Today

— I interviewed the wonderful psychedelic soul musician Jordannah Elizabeth.

— I point out that Hillary Clinton is really popular and is almost certainly going to win the Democratic nomination.

— I make fun of Paul Krugman’s pop culture writing.
 
Other Links

Laura Hudson with a fantastic piece on Twine and diversity in video games.

Greg Hunter takes down Fukitor at tcj; nice exercise in biting the hand.

Imran Siddiquee on how teen dystopias imagine everything getting worse except racism and sexism.

Emily Witt on Laura Kipnis’ bad book about men behaving badly.
 

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Not The Secret History of Wonder Woman

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lepore_wonder_woman_coverI reviewed Jill Lepore’s book The Secret History of Wonder Woman over at the Atlantic a little bit back. I had one serious issue with it which seemed like it was probably not of much interest for a mainstream venue. But I thought I’d point it out here.

That issue is…the title, and in many ways the thesis of the book, are misleading. Lepore presents the Marston family history of polyamory, and therefore the connection between Wonder Woman creator William Marston and his lover Olive Byrne’s aunt Margaret Sanger, as unknown. If this was the first book you’d ever read about Marston and Wonder Woman, I think you’d come away with the impression that Lepore is the first one to reveal that Marston and his wife Elizabeth lived in a polyamorous relationship with another woman (Olive Byrne).

This is most obvious at the very end of the book. Lepore says, “The veil of secrecy kept by the family over Wonder Woman’s past proved impossible to lift.” She then cites writers in 1972 and 1974 who apparently didn’t know about the polyamory (Joanne Edgar and Karen Walowit.) She writes “The secrecy had consequences” and argues that there was a distortion because of this in the understanding of feminism. Margaret Sanger in the 1910s through Wonder Woman in the 1940s through WW fan Gloria Steinem in the 1970s were all connected. Because people didn’t know about the Marston/Sanger connection, they saw feminism as waves rather than as a continuous whole.

The problem with that thesis is that people have in fact known about the Marston/Sanger connection for around 15 years (or at least, that was the best guess of folks on the Comix-Scholars list serve, where these matters were recently discussed.) Marston’s polyamory was written about as early as the late 90s, and it was certainly widely known after Les Daniels wrote about it in the Complete Wonder Woman at the beginning of the 2000s. Lepore could easily have said that; Les Daniels is mentioned in her notes, and this would be the place in her narrative to acknowledge him and earlier researchers. But she doesn’t. As a result, readers are likely to believe that they’re the first ones who are learning about these “secrets.”

This isn’t to say that Lepore discovered nothing. She had access to tons of archives no one else has seen, and she has numerous jaw-dropping revelations — that the Marston polyamorous relationship appears to have included another woman (Marjorie Huntley), that Marston, Elizabeth,and Olive participated in New Age feminist sex parties, that Olive and Elizabeth were bisexual (a point that seemed fairly obvious, but has been disputed.) The book is important for anyone who cares about the early Wonder Woman, and Lepore’s work is in many regards ground-breaking. Which makes it all the more frustrating that the book’s thesis seems to rest on the revelation of the one secret Lepore didn’t discover.

As a result of this confusion, the book ends up being unnecessarily ungenerous to the numerous scholars who’ve written about the Marston Wonder Woman over the last 15 to 20 years. But more than that, I don’t think it’s ideal to frame the story of Marston and his family in terms of secrets. The closet is among other things a relationship with, or lever for, power. By urging the reader to adopt the position of the knower or the revealer, Lepore makes the story of Wonder Woman about the reader’s and the author’s rush of discovery — about the revelation of truths that the Marston family wanted to hide. The point of the story becomes not what Marston and Elizabeth and Olive made of their lives and politics and sexualities, but what secrets the book can uncover. Lepore doesn’t really contextualize that in terms of the history of gay identities or marginalized sexual identities, or of the closet; she doesn’t present the secrets as part of a history of practices that have both protected and trapped queer people, nor does she discuss Marston’s work as itself engaged with, or part of a tradition of, queer theory. I think that ends up positioning the Marstons as objectified others for the book’s readers, which again sits uneasily with the history of the closet and of the marginalization of queer people and alternative sexualities, whether lesbian or polyamorous.

Not that that’s the only takeaway from the book, certainly. And I do think Lepore is right that the history she uncovers, even if it isn’t a secret exactly, demonstrates that feminist history is more varied than people tend to think. Most obviously, the Marstons show that sex-positive and queer feminisms were around long before the third wave. Hopefully Lepore’s book will make that fact better known, and the next folks to write about Marston and his meaning can take it as more common knowledge, rather than as a revelation.

Update: Peter Sattler has a great follow-up to this post here. Jeet Heer also has a bunch of thoughtful comments below; so scroll down and then click over to Peter’s post if you want to continue the conversation (I’ve closed comments here to keep the conversation easier to follow over there.)
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If you’re interested in reading me babble on more about Wonder Woman, I have a book coming out shortly. Lots of info and links about that here.

The Best Roundtable No One Has Ever Heard Of

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Irreplaceable

 
One of the things you discover when running a roundtable on unpopular music is that the music tends to be unpopular. While we certainly had some readers and some discussion as we talked about obscure old blues, obscure punk, obscure world music, and obscure Jpop, in general this has not been a high water mark for traffic on the site. We probably would have done better to do a roundtable on Beyoncé or even the Rolling Stones. It’s the artists with lots of fans, it turns out, who have a lot of fans. There are some people, maybe, who want to discover new things, or are intrigued by a random band name (Virgin Black! Wilmer Broadnax!) But for the most part people want to hear about something they’ve already heard about. I’m not usually one to see the critic as parasite, but it’s pretty clearly true that attention to criticism is dependent on the extent and success of the subject of the criticism’s marketing campaign.

So it’s clear why no read the roundtable. But why aren’t these bands popular to begin with? In some cases, the answer seems like it’s probably just bad luck. If you live in New Zealand, the likelihood of massive success in the States (or worldwide) is going to be substantially reduced. If you never managed to put out an album because of mismanagement or happenstance, the chances of longterm notoriety are much reduced.

At the same time, though, it’s often the case that “bad luck” can be read as “wrong genre.” In his piece on The Music Machine, Sean Michael Robinson points out that 60s psychedlia was a time of album worship. In some times and some eras (early rock, for example), putting out singles might not have marked you as marginal, but not when the Music Machine was playing. Along the same lines, Paige McGinley explained that the blues nostalgist enthusiasm for the male guitar performers is a big part of the reason why Esther Mae Scott, who blues woman in the Ma Rainey tent show tradition, has no recorded music online. Rahawa Haile argues that Eritrean music is marginalized because of an intra-African history of colonialism, where Eritrea is seen by as a kind of embarrassing footnote to the much better known tradition of Ethiopian music. Ben Saunders explains that the Cardiacs were too prog for punk and (presumably) too punk for prog; the incompatible mix of genres left them without a logical fanbase or audience.

Other performers here are simply from genres that don’t garner tons of mainstream attention: Wilmer Broadnax in quartet gospel; Jane Jensen in goth; Windahm Hell in extreme metal. And some, like Natural Snow Buildings or Sleepy John Estes seem to have deliberately oriented themselves towards a smaller audience, either by eschewing traditional marketing or by situating themselves deliberately as local rather than national or international performers. Sometimes genre consigns you to obscurity and sometimes, some artists choose (relative) obscurity as a genre.

Either way, though, I think the roundtable shows pretty conclusively that what lasts, or what is famous, or what’s in the canon, has only a tangential relationship to what is “best” — in part because issues of genre comes before what’s considered best, rather than after. When Rolling Stone makes a list of the greatest bands of all time, performers in Eritrea and New Zealand and Thailand aren’t on the radar. When people talk about the greatest blues performers, it’s men they’re thinking of often, not women. When they talk about greatest singers, gospel isn’t considered. When they talk about greatest albums, you don’t list acts that don’t have an album. Music that’s unheard is generally unheard not because it’s somehow worse than music that is heard, but because somewhere along the way, it was in that set of things that got filtered out.

The genre of things that got filtered out is never going to break blog traffic records. But, like any genre, its fans will testify to its virtues. Thanks to Ben Saunders for coming up with the idea for this and helping to organize it, and to all the contributors, readers, and commenters for joining us. It’s been a great roundtable, even if (or partially because) not many have listened to it.

Utilitarian Review 11/15/14

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Wonder Woman Conquers the World!

I’m starting to get some reviews in on my Wonder Woman book. I’ll list them in Utilitarian Review weekly as they come in. For a complete list of reviews/interviews/events/articles and more related to my book, go here.

And the first full review of the book is from Publisher’s Weekly.
 
On HU

Featured Archive Post: Bill Randall answers the question What is Manga?

We finished our last full week of the Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of roundtable. Entries included:

A thread on the Best Artist No One Has Ever Heard Of (I voted for my friend Bert Stabler, because no one appreciates him enough.)

Chris R. Morgan on the punk pain of Thoughts of Ionesco.

Otrebor on classical music and metal in Windham Hell and Virgin Black.

Dana Schechter on the mysterious psych folk duo Natural Snow Buildings.

A.Y. Daring on EGOIST, the band behind the anime “Psycho-Pass”.

Quinn Miller on Norma Tanega’s “Walking My Cat Named Dog.”
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I wrote about:

— the glorious salvation of Beyonce fan fiction.

— Nicki Minaj, superheroes, and fascism. (I also woke up very early and stuttered my way through an interview with the CBC on the same topic.)

For Pacific Standard I wrote about Jeffrey Zacks’ Flicker and how our brains can’t tell film from reality.

At Reason I wrote about how the UK copyright system is even worse than ours.

For the U of C Magazine I wrote about Wonder Woman and Bella and why the greatest superpower is love.

At CBR I explained why Adam West Batman is the only real Batman.

At the LA Review of Books I explained why spoilers are good, and all your art shoudl be spoiled.

I discovered that this transcript of my interview on CNN about Emma Watson, men, and misogyny is online.

At Splice Today I complain about the tragedy of Noah. Get your own damn name, stupid kids.
 
Other Links

Janell Hobson on Nicki Minaj and the performance of white supremacy.

Mary McCarthy, on why she feels it’s important to acknowledge that her sister’s death was a suicide.
 

Adam+West+Batman+Bomb

The World’s Too Big For Best

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This first appeared way back in 2009 in the Chicago Reader. It seemed like a good fit for our roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of.
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It’s December, which means it’s time for me, as a dutiful blogger, critic, and self-appointed cultural arbiter, to put together my best-of lists. I need to listen to that Raekwon album again to confirm that I really do think exactly the same thing everyone else thinks. I need to check back in with that Mariah Carey album to make sure I really do think exactly the opposite of what everyone else thinks. I need to compare Of the Cathmawr Yards by the Horse’s Ha with Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest and Antony & the Johnsons’ The Crying Light to figure out which romantic, indie-folk-tinged work of idiosyncratic genius is the most geniuslike. I need to decide if I have to download the new Lightning Bolt album (legally, of course) and form an opinion on it, or whether it’d be safe to simply put it on my list on the assumption that it sounds like all the other Lightning Bolt albums.

At least that’s what I should be doing. Unfortunately . . . well, I’ve gotten kind of sidetracked. Some weeks ago, I was googling an artist from the Sublime Frequencies anthology Thai Pop Spectacular when I stumbled on an utterly bizarre video for a Thai song called “Sao Esan Raw Ruk” by a woman named Pamela Bowden.
 


[Pamela Bowden] – Sao Isan Raw Ruk by yinyinren

 
In the video the apparently Caucasian Bowden wiggles carefully to the beat, alternately as a blonde in a green tube top with green star-spangled pants and as a brunette in a black strapless dress. A large freestanding cylinder, like a hybrid of a gazebo and a generator, serves as a backdrop for erratically synchronized choreography featuring a handful of other dancers, all dressed in tight, cheerfully sexy red-and-black outfits. From time to time a boxy tunnel of green gridwork floats behind them, apparently on loan from Tron.

I enjoyed the campy staging, but what really hooked me was the hook. “Sao Esan Raw Ruk” weds overdriven techno-pop to what from my uneducated perspective sounded like traditional Thai rhythms and instrumentation. The result is a little like American pop’s Bollywood fusions—e.g., Amerie’s “Heard ‘Em All”—though the Bowden song has a stiffer beat and less sinuous, more percussive Eastern interpolations. The whole package feels like some sort of robotic exotica, with all the resolutely corny unhipness that implies—except that Bowden’s pure, light phrasing occasionally detaches itself and goes wandering free, a little throb of lyricism amid the frantic thumping. The song is funny, surprising, impossibly catchy, and unexpectedly affecting. If it had come out this year—the video I saw was posted in 2007, which ruled that out—I would’ve put it on my best-of list without blinking.

Finding more of Bowden’s videos wasn’t difficult. And I did manage to obtain a collection of six of her albums, sold as MP3s on a single disc called Pamela Bowden—Jumbo Hit, from the online store eThaiCD. For a non-Thai speaker like me, though, figuring out when those albums and videos were released—or indeed learning much of anything about Bowden—proved a lot trickier. But after a few weeks of moderately obsessive effort, I did manage to piece together some tentative biographical information (and, thanks to the Internet and the staff of Noodles Etc. in Hyde Park, some even more tentative English translations of titles).

Like many Thai pop stars, Bowden is mixed race; from the tidbits I’ve found scattered online, my best guess is that she’s partly Australian. (Though she’s a natural brunette, she sometimes plays up her Westernness by going blonde.) I’m reasonably sure that her first album was 1995’s Pretty P. The hit from that record is a by-the-numbers new-wavish pop-punk tune called “Sorry.” Its video features lots of neon colors and various nerdy guys who are all hyperbolically intimidated by Bowden’s tight DayGlo clothes and general hotness. The beat is overdriven and irritating, the guitar is formulaic, and Bowden sounds thin and strained trying to make herself heard over both.

Pretty P was a commercial success, if not an aesthetic one, and Bowden went on to make at least four more albums in the same vein. Then in the early aughts she switched genres to luk thung. Luk thung is often described as Thai country music, mostly because of its content. The lone blogger at Lukthung & Morlam (loogthung.blogspot.com), who asked to be referred to only as Chris, told me that the songs tend to be about “the poor country dweller who comes to the cruel city, or the hard life of a farmer.”

Traditionally luk thung has emphasized relatively slow songs, with expressive singing and lots of throbbing vibrato. Bowden did at least one album in this vein: Kaew Ta Duang Jai (“Waterfall in the Heart”). Videos for the album show Bowden in formal but still tight-fitting attire, singing midtempo luk thung standards to tasteful accompaniment.

To American ears the style is more like cabaret or torch song than country, with tinges of Memphis soul in some of the horn arrangements. Bowden is front and center in a way she tends not to be in her poppier efforts, and she sounds fantastic; her pure voice gently sways rather than swings along to the beat, and there’s just a hint of the keening bite that gives character to much Thai singing. The best track may be “Ao Kwam Kom Kuen Pai Ting Mae Kong” (“The Sadness of Leaving Mekong”), where she switches between short, careful phrases and extended quasi-yodels, the precision of the first accentuating the heartbreak in the second.
 

But albums like Kaew Ta Duang Jai are retro exercises. Luk thung has changed drastically in the past ten years, cross-breeding with pop and another rural style called morlam. According to Chris, “You can listen to 5 ‘lukthung’ songs and hear 5 totally different styles of music!”

Bowden’s other records from this decade bear that out. “Wud Jai Kun” (“Test One Another”) from 2002’s Bow Daeng Saraeng Jai (“Red Bow”) opens with what sounds like a saxophone strangling a duck and then goes into an off-kilter Latin beat interrupted by occasional big-band horns. Another song from that album, “Ruk Tai Luey” (“Love With All Your Heart”), dips into cheesy disco funk, with Bowden rhythmically talk-singing like an early rapper. “Noo Mai Dai Len” (“I Can’t Play) from 2003’s Pah Ched Nah La Jai (“Goodbye Heart”) is a three-way grudge match between a house DJ, a hopped-up brass band, and a classic-rock guitarist, with a funk bassist doing laps around the carnage. And then there’s E Nang Dance and E Nang Dance 2, which feature the remarkable blend of Thai pop and techno that was my first exposure to Bowden.
 

 
Perhaps, as Chris says, this all coalesces logically into a single genre if you can understand the lyrics. But when I watch the video for “Sao Esan Raw Ruk,” with the gazebo tube and the floating Tron bits and the spangled dancing girls, I find it hard to believe that what Bowden’s singing has anything to do with rural poverty. The title translates roughly to “Looking for Young Love,” which isn’t all that helpful.

For half a moment, I thought I was going to be able to clear this up, as well as fill in all the other gaps in my Pamela Bowden knowledge. After I’d been trying to track her down for several weeks, Chris pointed me to her Facebook page, and when I got in touch she cheerfully agreed to answer a list of questions. But . . . well, presumably catering to an American reviewer is a low priority when your music is basically unavailable stateside. The only information I was able to get from her by press time—she was charmingly apologetic but, she said, very busy—is that she plans to release a new album, Pamela Krajiewbarn, in mid-December.

Which means that, even though “Sao Esan Raw Ruk” turned out to be from 2004, I could still put Bowden on my best-of list for 2009!

Except, of course, that by the time I get a copy of Pamela Krajiewbarn shipped from eThaiCD it’ll probably be mid-January.

But that’s OK. After all, there are probably a bunch of great Thai albums from this year that I haven’t heard—not to mention Laotian albums, Indian albums, and, for that matter, American albums. As amazing a tool as the Internet can be, national boundaries, language barriers, and simple time constraints are still, as it turns out, a really big deal.

Certainly it’s fun to categorize and put things in order and make definitive pronouncements. (Ina Unt Ina’s “Teacher” is the best song of the year, dammit!) But it’s nice too to remember that it really isn’t possible to judge the totality of the world’s music, or even anything close to it. As C.S. Lewis put it, “Be comforted, small one, in your smallness.” Whether or not I download that Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, the world is still going to be bigger than my list. Which is a reassuring thought.

Addendum: Thanks to the power of the internet, I was contacted by an interested Thai speaker, who told me what the deal is with Sao Esan Raw Ruk. The name means “Esan Girl Looking for Love” and does (much to my surprise) tell the story of a simple country girl searching for love in the big city. It’s a traditional song, and Bowden apparently sings many of the lyrics with more than a touch of ironic sass; she deliberately plays up a country Esan accent as she explains that she is a simple country girl with dark skin and little knowledge of love — even though, obviously, she’s a light-skinned half-European wearing tight clothes and shaking about on the dance floor.

Not sure anyone else cares all that much, but learning this pretty much made my week.