Art at Roots and Culture

I have a showing of my artwork at Roots and Culture Gallery this Saturday, 7-10PM. Details are below. You can see the images I’ll be displaying here

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“Malleable Sky”: work by Lisa Rybovich Cralle and Maria Perkovic
Curated by Elizabeth Chodos

featuring work by Noah Berlatsky in the project room

Opening December 1, 2007 7pm- 10pm
at Roots & Culture
1034 n Milwaukee Ave. Chicago, IL 60622

Through Dec. 22nd

How do we remember the places we’ve been? How does our memory play
into the way we imagine the future, and dream of new places? How does
a location, real or imaginary, become a specific place with its own
qualities, abnormalities and idiosyncrasies? Malleable Sky is an
exhibition of work by Lisa Rybovich Cralle and Maria Perkovic that
explores where the boundaries between our internal and external lives
blur and looks at how these two realms can be indistinguishable and
mutually influential.

Cralle’s work explores the problems of recreating a specific place,
her home-state Florida, using various media including collage,
painting and drawing. Her work uses general source material like
pictures of beaches, men in bathing suits, boats and hurricane-sized
clouds, to create a vivid portrait of where she grew up. Cralle’s
collages manage to emphasize a particular place while
de-contextualizing it, showing how memory can be both specific and
placeless, blurring reality and fantasy.

Perkovic’s work de-emphasizes the specific and the real. She builds
and photographs environments made from paper that resemble the modern
city, with its towering buildings designed for speed and efficiency.
While these images are not of any real location they indicate a
particular logic that is specific to a place and time. Unlike Cralle’s
collages with their abundant use of color, Perkovic’s photographs are
various shades of gray. The lack of color in these photographs empties
them from a connection to the real world, and insists on placing them
in an imaginary, desolate, and at times comical, modern utopia.

Using various techniques, these artists show how chance imagery,
fantasy, theory, and memory all influence our understanding and
apprehension of the world. Their work shows how relative experience
can be, and how something as seemingly specific and real as sky is
malleable in our imagination and memory.

The works displayed by Noah Berlatsky were created in response to the
Flaming Fire Illustrated Bible, an online collaborative project
dedicated to illustrating every single verse in the Bible. To this
ambitious effort, Noah has brought a deep lack of religious faith and
an utter inability to create representational drawings. The result is
a series of black and white abstractions which comment, more or less
obscurely, on more or less randomly selected verses. The series is
about mystery, distance, effort and community — trying to respond in
a meaningful way, with limited resources, to a text which is and is
not my own.

Beer made possible by Grolsch.

Programming development at Roots & Culture is partially funded by a
City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs
Community Arts Assistance Program Grant.


Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center
1034 n Milwaukee Ave.
Chicago, IL 60622
773-235-8874
www.rootsandculturecac.org
hours: Thurs. & Fri 4:30p-7p, Sat 12p-6p

Weird Foot-Man

So my 4-year old son is absolutely, completely, ridiculously obsessed with Spider-Man. I feel this is probably some sort of punishment for my sins as a comics critic. In any case, it has its ups and downs. Specifically, the downs are when he throws himself at my legs every, oh, 15 seconds, shouting, “I’m Spider-Man!” causing me to lurch chinward towards whatever piece of furniture is placed nearby. The ups are when he explains as he’s sitting on the toilet that Spider-Man doesn’t poop real poop; he poops webs.

But actually, the real worst part is the children’s books. Has anyone ever seen these things? There are several series of them. One’s published by DK Readers, and is written and I guess drawn by someone named Catherine Saunders. I’m sure she’s just the front name for a whole committee apparatus, but I must focus my ire somewhere, so I will hate her on general principles. Christ these things are horrible. The art is just ridiculous; the anatomy is so completely fucked up that even my son makes fun of it (one picture where Spider-Man’s leg ends in what appears to be a traumatized zucchini always causes him to look up at me hopefully and ask, “That’s a foot, right Daddy?”) And furthermore — and this is the kicker — there’s no story. None. I guess they just couldn’t be bothered with little things like plot, so instead it’s set up as a kind of Thrilling Encyclopedia of Boredom . “Spider-Man usually works alone, but sometimes even he needs help from his Super-Hero friends.” Now try reading that. A. Hundred. Times.

There’s another series based on the third Spider Man movie put out by HarperCollins which does in fact have a moderate effort at creating a story, and that’s a little better though, really, not much. My son does love them…but why do they have to be so, so bad? He likes Spider-Man videos too, and those are perfectly watchable; decent animation, entertaining action, etc. etc. Why do the books have to be such pieces of crap? I’ve actually been reading some of the old Lee/Ditko comics to him; he loves those too, and reading them doesn’t make me want to scrape out my eyes. If Marvel wants to get parents on board…or, for that matter, kids on board for the long haul…maybe they might consider putting a little imagination, or at least thought, into their customers first contact with their product. I mean, if they can’t find any artists, why not use some of Ditko’s original drawings? Please?

Million Man Talk: Review of Deconstructing Tyrone

A version of this essay appeared in the Chicago Reader a while back.

The image of black men tends to provoke strong reactions in the media, whether pro or con. At the beginning of “Deconstructing Tyrone,” their study of black masculinity, Natalie Hopkinson and Natalie Moore pledge not to get caught up in the antagonistic hype. “The positive-negative thing? We are *so* over that,” they insist.

Even-handedness can certainly be a virtue when approaching a complex topic. But it can easily tip over into a bland refusal to stake out difficult positions — or any positions. The latter seems, unfortunately, to be what’s happening here. The authors are journalists, and they have essentially stitched together a book out of moderately insightful feature articles. There’s one chapter on Kwame Kirkpatrick, the young, black and (allegedly) swinging mayor of Detroit; one on being black and gay; one on females strippers and their dads; one on Buppies raising boys, and so forth. The style is chatty, informed, and ultimately positive, mining the common ground between NPR and Oprah. There are, inevitably, a few forays into more literary territory — in describing video performer Melyssa Ford, for example, the authors inform us that “Her long ponytail sways gently like spring leaves on a maple tree.” Luckily, these moments are few and perfunctory.

Though the book isn’t exactly thoughtful, it does contain a lot of suggestive tidbits. It’s interesting to hear, for example, that gay male style is much more straightforwardly masculine, and much less flaming, than it was a generation ago. It’s interesting to be introduced to Earl Thomas, a professional basketball player who has also made a reputation for himself as an activist poet. It’s interesting to learn that Jay-Z tells white people in his audiences not to chant along to “Nigga What, Nigga Who.” It’s interesting to learn that black men with a high income are less likely to marry than those in the middle-class. And, of course, the interviews with strippers and video chicks are interesting— or, at least, even in the authors’ studiously unexploitative prose, they make sensational copy.

In fact, what’s most frustrating about the book is that it raises so many issues and then leaves them dangling, not only without analysis, but without any sense that analysis is even necessary. The authors spend a certain amount of time discussing media representations of the “down low”; a term for closeted gay black men. But there is no discussion of homophobia in the black community, nor of how important the closet has been , in one way and another to black cultural expression (gospel music wouldn’t be the same without it, as just one example.) Similarly, the book takes several offhand jabs at feminism — but there’s no effort to explore the ways in which feminism has (or hasn’t) failed blacks, and vice versa. A chapter is devoted to interviewing female strippers about their dads — but , beyond a few lame references to a Chris Rock skit, the authors never explain what, if anything, this has to do with race. Certainly, the strippers are black, but their stories of abuse, impoverishment, and the lure of easy money don’t sound much different than those of white sex-workers, from Jenna Jameson on down. The black sex industry may well uniquely reflect black masculinity, but you’d never know it from reading this.

Theory — or at least some kind of point — is important because it gives a book direction; it helps to determine which details are important and need to be developed, and which ones are useless and should be chucked. More than that, though, it gives a work coherence and resonance. Hopkinson and Moore do seem to have a dim sense that they’re adrift, and they’ve tried to rectify the problem by ostentatiously claiming to be using deconstructionism. According to them, deconstruction as a philosophy is meant to “to take apart fake constructions to reach a greater understanding.” In other words, Derrida —an abstruse aesthete who spent his life generating impenetrable prose about unknowability — is here rejiggered as some sort of muckraking newspaperman, battling falsehood in the interest of the uplift. What next? Foucault as advocate of safe sex?

Since they clearly don’t have the slightest idea what deconstruction is, it’s no surprise that, despite the title, Hopkinson and Moore don’t actually use it. Nor do they replace it with any other critical lens. They do occasionally express opinions — they dislike sexist rap videos, for example, they think that “black male-female relationships have become crippled.” (page 103) and they really liked the 1994 Black Male exhibit at the Whitney. But without any intellectual framework, each contention boils down to little more than arbitrary personal preference. For example, the clearest reason the authors can provide for liking the Whitney exhibit is that it was among the first shows to place film stills and news photographs on a museum wall. Whoo hoo. Even when Hopkinson tells the story of a family friend who was convicted, probably wrongly, of murder, she can’t get any moral traction. Instead, the narrative drifts off into the familiar evidentiary minutia of true-crime drama — efficient, entertaining, but not particularly passionate.

In the not too distant past, any book which treated black men as human could have claimed to have a righteous, even subversive, agenda. But that is no longer the case. American institutions — schools, housing, prisons — remain racist and discriminatory. Yet the rise of a fairly stable black middle-class has meant that African-Americans are, at one and the same time, an oppressed minority and just another demographic marketing niche. Race sells, at least to a limited audience. It’s a product as well as a problem.

Hopkinson and Moore probably wouldn’t explain the transformation of racial discourse in quite this way. But they do recognize it and are, in fact, as enthusiastic about it as they are about anything. Thus, they earnestly praise the “Million Man March” because it was a media circus rather than an actual political movement. The march, they say, “launched a new front in black politics in which battles are waged in the realm of perception.” [page 38] This is a comforting thought, surely; changing the world doesn’t require thought, or sacrifice, or discomfort. With apologies to the Beatles, all you need is a PR campaign. Or a 200-page sound bite, as the case may be.

Perception and/or the media were important to the Civil Rights movement too, of course. King and his cohorts were brilliant at manipulating both black and white images, and then beaming them across the world via television. Civil Rights protestors weren’t focused on the images themselves, however, but on what they could get from them — on how they could leverage the perceptions they created into concrete political gains. This is very difficult to do, and especially in the north, it wasn’t always successful. Still, you can’t get anything if you aren’t willing to figure out what you want and develop some sort of strategy, however flawed, for getting there. Hopkinson and Moore seem to think that it they just say something, or anything, then they’re a force for good. Perhaps they’re preaching will entertain the choir. But it’s unlikely to do much more than that.

A Scanner Darkly: The Comic

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.

Fade To Black Already (w/Bert Stabler)

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.

I Buy, Therefore I Am

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.

That Kind of Thing

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.