Send Back Sendak! Boost the Seuss!

I find Donald Phelps’ writing style maddening; circumlocution is piled on parapraxis until all you can really see is the giant, rather desperate sign waving back and forth: “Kiss me! I’m erudite!”

Nonetheless, his new column in TCJ is tackling interesting subjects. Last time out he talked about the classic pulp occult novels of Manley Wade Wellman, which look pretty fabulous. In TCJ 294, he compares Maurice Sendak and Dr. Seuss, which is a fun topic to think about, even if, (to no one’s astonishment) I disagree with everything he says.

Phelps’ basic point is that Sendak is better than Seuss because Sendak is more of a formalist. In the selection below, he’s talking particularly about a 1934 comic strip by Seuss which is fairly chaotic and ignores panel borders.

An object lesson, I might suggest, in the liabilities of kindergarten chaos as practiced ad infinitum by Giesel. It involves the jettison of form, embodied, in the example just cited, in those ubiquitous panel boundaries: expandable (as Hal Foster and Billy DeBeck variously demonstrated) but very, very seldom, if ever, dispensable or, challengeable, at least, as obtusely as Seuss challenged them. Form: that which delimits, that which demarks, that which identifies, in children’s art especially — like that of Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak. Form entails a sense of the imagination’s geography and its component laws.

Such a geographic sense, along with the commitment it would appear to involve, has never been evident for me in the fantastical outpourings of Theodore Giesel. One recalls once more — somewhat querying — the little homilies embodied in some of the later books: How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Horton Hears a Who, Horton Hatches the Egg. Aren’t such sermonettes the occasional warning or symptom that the author, albeit with whatever benign and public-spirited sentiments — recognizes (make that: re-recognizes) the work of his hands as a Marketable Commodity. And one might observe: a symptom of the deficiency of form, one might say, the integrity of the artist’s work, as manifested in laws, not homilies.

Phelps then goes on to laud Sendak for being more restrained and controlled:

The stories of Sendak unfold themselves in gravely exact segments of action, by soberly defined anatomies, enacting the fables in compact but soberly graphic pantomime. The pictures as a rule are not enclosed save by the pages’ white margins, the concentrated imagery suggesting a dream’s flickering vignettes. Yet, I can not sufficiently mark the tone of earthy, almost prosaic reality that Sendak bestows on his visions.

So to sum up, Seuss is uncontrolled, overly commercial, and kind of gauche. Sendak is controlled, brimming with artistic integrity, and classy.

The difference between Seuss and Sendak, in other words, isn’t only, or primarily, that Sendak is more interested in form. Phelps can natter on all he wants about the link between homilies and formlessness,capitalizing “Marketable Commodity” just to make it look more official, but that doesn’t change the fact that the central claim is complete bullshit. An interest in neat moral packages doesn’t have jack to do with how much of a formalist you are. Hogarth and Grunewald have pretty solid formal virtues I’d argue; so does Art Young. And for that matter, as far as language goes, Seuss, with his strict doggerel rhythms and rhymes, is much more interested in form than Sendak, who works in much looser verse or in prose, and who includes frequent asides and narrative wavering. Phelps is merely the victim of a common modernist critical confusion; the assumption that if an artist is willing to put meaning in his work, then that work must be formally bankrupt. This is a pernicious doctrine, and it should be hooted.

No, what Phelps is really getting at, undercover of his muddled cry of “form!”, is that Sendak is — definitively, self-consciously — high-brow. Sendak references Winsor McCay. He fetishizes volk culture (folk tales, nursery rhymes, his own ethnic roots.) He likes tweaking the bourgeoisie with a little bit of nudity here, some impish rebellion there. His books thrive on an improvisatory cleverness akin to that now thoroughly high-brow music, jazz (as in, say, “Hector Protector”, where the nursery rhyme “As I went over the water”, where the most memorable image is of a sea-monster mentioned nowhere in the text.)

Seuss, on the other hand, is a big, fat, middle-brow. He doesn’t tweak the bourgeoisie; he embraces them, with long screeds about how great democracy is and what a wonderful thing it is to celebrate Christmas. The volk he loves aren’t ethnic; they’re the deracinated Americana, with their lovely rituals of high-school graduation and self-help rhetoric. He doesn’t bother with old, fusty nursery rhymes…why should he, when he can make up twelve of his own just as easily?

In other words, I think that, in choosing Sendak over Seuss, Phelps is just proving that which should come as a shock to no one who has read his prose; namely, that he prefers the pose of an aesthete to the pose of an entertainer. That’s certainly not always the wrong choice, but I think it is in this instance. Sendak has done a lot of great books, and is a wonderful artist, but for me, at least, his pretentions can start to grate — he certainly *is* clever, but I wish occasionally he’d spend less time pointing it out, and more time telling a story that my son actually wanted to pay attention to. Seuss, on the other hand, may reek a bit of greasepaint and the uplift, but he sets off so many verbal and visual fireworks that I find it impossible to take offense.

Plus, Fox in Socks is, hands down, not-even-worth-discussing, my favorite book to read aloud ever…with the possible exception of Seuss’ very entertaining tongue-twister follow up, Oh Say Can You Say.

Was George Herriman a Pothead?

I’m posting the same question on the Comics Journal message board. Maybe a passer-by here will also have some info.

Anyway … Krazy Kat sure reads like it was marijuana inspired. Of course it’s tedious to assume that pot lies behind anything strange and original; I wouldn’t say Dr. Seuss or Thurber were stoned. But Krazy Kat has that air, don’t ask me why.

Googling turned up nothing but this mention by, I think, Skip Williamson (scroll down a good ways or do a word search). And the Library of Congress lists a book on Herriman that I may track down someday.

Resources aside, what’s the comics-world conventional wisdom on the question of Herriman as pothead?

Amerie: Because I Like It

I’ve finally gotten rid of my ten-year-old-plus imac and purchased a Macbook, which means that blogger is much, much easier to deal with. To celebrate, I figured I’d start posting highlights from the back catalog (or I like to think of them as highlights, anyway.) To start I’ll be reprinting some of the music reviews I wrote for Bitch magazine in 2007.)

Amerie
Because I Like It
Columbia Records

This is Amerie’s first album without producer Rich Harrison, and she takes the opportunity to demonstrate that the signature style they perfected together was more her than him. “Forecast”, “Hate to Love You,” and “Gotta Work” are brutal, unrelenting funk, built around percussive horn samples and beats so jagged that you expect James Brown to jump out of his grave to say “Huh!” Amerie has writing and arranging credit on most of the numbers, and she certainly sings as if she owns the material. On the retro-hip “Make Me Believe,” she gets within testifying distance of Ann Peebles; on “Take Control” she declares “I love the way you kiss my neck in public” wth a sexy-tough exhalation that’ll have you fanning yourself. The cover art may be fashion-shoot girly, but R&B doesn’t get much more cockily virile than this — in comparison, both Justin Timberlake and R. Kelly sound like 11-year olds who haven’t quite figured out which end of the toy is up.

That’s the first part of the disc, anyway. The second degenerates into a bland, ballad-heavy mush, relieved only by “Paint Me Over”, a break-up song with a decent tune and a bit of actual pathos. Some day, I sincerely believe, Amerie will figure out how to deal with slow tempos and the result will be an absolute masterpiece. Till then, half a perfect record will do nicely, thanks.

Svengali?: We don’t need no stinking Svengali.
Columbia Records: Needs a good talking to: as of mid-September this record had not been released in the U.S. Luckily, it has been available by import — and, of course, by download.

Updated fun fact: This album never did get a U.S. release. Stupid Columbia records….

Omega the Unknown’s Lesson for All of Us

I read the Lathem Omega the Unknown revamp and liked it. Not much to say on the subject until the day comes that I’ve read the original. For now I’d like to underscore a valuable insight presented by the new Omega. At one point the poor schmuck high-school kid who gets pushed around by the bullies confesses that he’s not really the class brain because he’s not actually smart, he’s just a dumpy fellow who wears glasses and is no good at gym and therefore must consider himself smart because otherwise he’s got nothing else. There are a lot of guys and girls like that, and they’re not represented much by popular lore; or, if they are, it’s with the omission of their defining factor, which is that they lack brains. I know that if you work in reference publishing or for a trade newspaper you’ll run into them, lots of them. Maybe they’re in other walks of life too. It sure is fun listening to them talk about movies!

Unifinished Comics: The Eternals by Neil Gaiman and J. Romita Jr.

I couldn’t get thru this thing. The Eternals is a snooze. It is to boredom what a head-on auto collision is to fear and pain: a cataclysm that can be outlived but never analyzed. So don’t ask me why this comic is so bad; just chip in to my hospital fund.

John Romita Jr.’s stuff is fine; he’s not the problem here. Neil Gaiman is, and he baffles me. A few years ago I did a piece about him for The Comics Journal, one that featured a lush aria detailing all the ways a Gaiman script can run aground. As far as I can tell, none of those ways are present here. The Eternals features straightahead, streamlined storytelling with the occasional imaginative touch that … Christ, it’s still boring.

Years ago I worked for a bright, energetic fellow who screwed up everything he touched. He had incompetence in its purest form; no other factors assisted him in his production of disaster. Gaiman has a similar isolated gift for producing boredom. He didn’t use to: about 40% of his Sandman run counts as the most entertaining bunch of comics I’ve read. Then the rot crept it and then it spread and then I had finished The Kindly Ones and never got around to The Wake.

Some people you just can’t appreciate, but I sure used to appreciate him and it’s not like his new stuff is so different from what came before. In fact it’s too much the same old but with the removal of key elements that I’m pretty sure include fresh dialogue, unexpected ideas, and interesting balloon-caption-picture interplay. So maybe there’s the problem. But why did those elements go missing? He isn’t even 50 yet; Wodehouse kept churning out his formula for half a century and it stayed fresh.

An additional mystery: I have never met anyone who said they liked Gaiman’s post-’93 comics, but figures indicate that people buy the stuff in great quantities. 1602 was top seller for its year, I believe, and won some sort of award.

His books aren’t so bad, those that I’ve read. They rehash his old ideas, but I can get thru them. Coraline underwhelmed me, but American Gods was all right; a friend found the reverse. Whatever. They’re still a long way down the slope from the Sandman issues that I liked. Maybe I’m just older; then again I really liked “A Study in Emerald,” so I think I can still respond to what he’s got when he bothers to bring it along. He just doesn’t bother, and why not?

Anyway, I took The Eternals out from the library, so no money was lost. That fucking thing … I couldn’t get thru it.

Zen and the Art of Self-Satisfaction

This review of The Artist’s Way was published first in the Baffler, then on my old group blog Eaten By Ducks, and is here again for those missed it the first couple of times. (I think this is, by the by, the first piece of criticism for which I was ever paid.)

Though The Artist’s Way claims “to tap into the higher power that connects human creativity with the creative energies of the universe,” what it really taps into is the same old shit. More specifically, The Artist’s Way sounds, at times, exactly like contemporary poetry; at other times like economic theory; and at still other times like a combination of management consultant jargon, NPR commentary, and friendly academic feminist anthropology. There are, in fact, several bleak moments in which The Artist’s Way sounds like all of these, and like everything else as well. Yet despite the motherload of verbal detritus which spills from its pages, the book never once compromises its truly awesome vacuity. It seems determined to make as little as possible from as much as possible: an ambition which, while amusing at first, quickly becomes seriously disorienting. The unwary reader may begin to feel that all that he has ever read or thought has been designed with the nefarious purpose of leading him to The Artist’s Way , and there abandoning him. One finds oneself clutching the edges of the book a bit too hard, as if to prevent oneself from pitching forward into the page and falling forever into a bottomless and eerily familiar abyss.
It is an abyss which has already swallowed a large number of people. Originally published in 1992, The Artist’s Way was marketed as “a spiritual path to higher creativity” — a workbook for anyone who wanted to learn to become an artist. Since then, it has sold over a million copies, inspired numerous sequels, and been praised by many artists, including singer Kathy Mattea, who credits it with giving her a “new direction.” It’s basic thesis — that everyone, deep down, is an artist — has proved enormously popular: almost as popular as such better-known theses as “everyone, deep down, is equal,” and “everyone, deep down, is free.” These slogans are noteworthy not because they are inspirational, beautiful, or true, but because they are self-fulfilling. To say, with our founding fathers, that everyone, deep down, is equal is to ignore all those people who, up here, on the surface, clearly aren’t. To say with The Artist’s Way that everyone is an artist is, therefore, to be guilty of more than stupidity; it is to be guilty of willful blindness, and manifest bad faith. Indeed, The Artist’s Way genuflects to the zeitgeist with such cunning efficiency that it attains a grandeur usually associated only with epoch-making documents like The Constitution of the United States and The Valley of the Dolls.
The Artist’s Way is written — to the extent that such a book can be said to be written — by Julia Cameron, with the help of Mark Bryan. Mark Bryan is Cameron’s former husband and an expert in “business creativity,” which is all, I think, that needs to be said about him. Julia Cameron — or “Little Julie” as she sometimes calls herself — has an even more improbable past; she is a recovering alcoholic, Martin Scorcese’s ex-wife, and a one-time writer for Rolling Stone, in approximately that order. That neither Cameron nor Bryan is an artist in the conventional sense may explain their utter disrespect for art in all its forms. Indeed, they seem to hate art, with a shallow, condescending hatred reminiscent of those grammar school teachers who loathe the unfortunate pupils they so mercilessly praise.
Duplicitous philistinism is, of course, a typically American vice, and notwithstanding its Mt. Fuji cover, The Artist’s Way is a very American book. Like most self-help gurus, Julia Cameron has an American belief in the efficacy of individual action coupled with an even more American contempt for the individual: everyone, she argues, can learn to be successful, because everyone is a failure to begin with. “[W]e are all creative,” she tells us in one breath, and then in the next, “all of us are [blocked] to some extent.” We are all, in other words, failing to live up to our full potential as artists, much as welfare mothers fail to live up to their potential as entrepreneurs. This, naturally, is where Cameron’s book comes in — job training, as it were, for the aesthetically underprivileged.
Like job training, too, The Artist’s Way, teaches no actual skills. Cameron avoids making even the most basic suggestions about the mechanisms of art — nowhere does she indicate, for instance, that painters should learn how to mix paint, or that violinists need to practice regularly, or that poets should, at least occasionally, read poetry. This is because Cameron doesn’t think of art as a craft, or even as a hobby — she thinks of it, instead, as a health issue. If you are not an artist, you are unwell; to become an artist therefore requires not practice, but convalescence and “recovery.” Cameron does not want to teach — she wants to “daub and soothe and cool,” and, in accordance with this desire, she has crafted a program based loosely on her own experience with Alcoholics Anonymous. Through twelve easy steps, blocked artists recovers a sense of “safety,” “power,” “abundance” — a sense, in other words, that they have a rightful place at the center of the universe. This centrality is literal, not figurative: God himself is an artist, Cameron maintains, and “artists like other artists.” With friends in such high places, one might think that artists were a pretty hardy group, but this is not the case: Cameron’s book takes it for granted that the artist is barely held together by “self-nurturing” and self-pity. Spend quality time alone with your own “inner artist-child,” Cameron says, or the little fella will curl up and die. Buy yourself “luxuries” like expensive perfume and “gold stick-’em stars” or your creativity will wither. Do what you want because “Artists cannot be held to anybody else’s standards!” A good first act of self-assertion, Cameron suggests, might be dyeing your hair. (Cameron does not suggest getting a tattoo — presumably this would be too far out, even for artists.)
Given their frailty, it should come as no surprise that criticism is very dangerous to most artists. Some criticism, Cameron reluctantly admits, can be useful, but most is “artistic child abuse,” and “all that can be done with abusive criticism is to heal from it.” As damaging as criticism from others is, however, self-criticism is worse. Artists need to think with their “artist brain,” not with their “logic brain.” The “Censor” — the part of the mind which criticizes artistic output — needs to be outwitted, and the way to do this is through the “morning pages”: three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing to be done every morning for the rest of your life. To write morning pages, you put down on paper whatever comes into your head, without going back over it. In other words, the morning pages are freewriting, a staple of high school English courses, and a well-established way for writers to generate ideas. For Cameron, though “morning pages” are not the beginning of the writing process; they are, rather, a metaphor for all artistic endeavor. Art comes out of people naturally and unreflectively, like urine. The artist should not think about his work; he should, as minor filmmaker Martin Ritt says, “just do it.” Cameron quotes Ritt several times in her book; she also quotes just about everyone else, from Oscar Wilde to Albert Einstein to Duke Ellington. She does not, however, quote Jonathan Swift, nor James Baldwin, nor Public Enemy, nor, for that matter, any other satirists or social critics. The reason is clear enough: for people like James Baldwin art is a form of thought, a way of engaging society by criticizing it, arguing with it, and challenging it. For Julia Cameron, on the other hand, art takes place outside of thought, outside of society, in a pseudo-Zen emptiness which would chill its inhabitants’ blood if any of them could feel.
Cameron, of course, believes that she feels. To what has she sacrificed thought, history, and insight, if not to feeling? “Use your anxiety,” she urges, “use your anger….gain in compassion by reparenting your wounded artist-child.” Cameron believes that the artist should luxuriate in feeling, licking his dry lips in anticipation of each original emotional quiver. Unfortunately, such quivers are rarely either original or emotional — save in the cramped, desperate way in which masturbation is emotional. Nothing exists in a vacuum, and feelings are no exception. One cannot disconnect art from society and expect it to be rewarding, emotionally or otherwise. Compare Kate Chopin, for example, with somebody like Jack Kerouac. Kerouac is arguably the better writer — he has, at least, a better ear for language than Chopin does. But Chopin’s stories are grounded in American society: in the ways in which Americans of different classes, races, and genders relate to one another. Kerouac, on the other hand, has nothing to talk about but his own peeved rebelliousness — against what it is never clear — and his vague desire to get away from everyone else so he can nurse his injuries in private. As a result, Chopin’s writing is exhilarating, thought-provoking, funny, and occasionally moving, while the only emotion Kerouac inspires is a sort of lukewarm distrust — a vague wish that he had taken the whole “on the road” thing a bit more seriously and had gone far, far away, preferably to a land without typewriters.
Today, alas, Chopin is largely ignored while Kerouac is a cultural icon whose banality and glibness seem in large part responsible for his popularity. Certainly Cameron’s banality and glibness have stood her in good stead: The Artist’s Way has made her a millionaire. American artists, it seems, desperately want to believe that they are outside society — that they are, on the one hand, persecuted by their culture and, on the other, that they are connected to a secret, special source of power which makes them superior to their crass, misguided peers. Like Jesus or John Wayne, the artist wants to be both the persecuted outsider and the savior, both despised and worshipped. You must acknowledge and heal the injuries inflicted by those around you, Cameron tells her eager audience, so that you can become better than all of them.
Yet, though Cameron’s artists are free of all social connections, they are also rather helplessly bourgeois. Art does not pay very well, and its practitioners, therefore, tend to be people who can afford to be frivolous. Among those who have successfully used The Artist’s Way, according to Cameron are “Edwin, a miserable millionaire…Timothy, a …curmudgeon millionaire,” and “Phyllis, a leggy, racehorse socialite.” A large part of the purpose of The Artist’s Way, then, is to reassure Edwin, Timothy and Phyllis that, despite their vast wealth, they are really very nice; indeed, they are enormously talented and wonderful. The reason that they feel worthless is not because they have built their lives on treachery, deceit, and callousness, but because they were unjustly “wounded” by parents, teachers, and friends who told them that they could not have absolutely everything they wanted. The reason that things come easily to them is not because they are rich, but because the universe is organized to benefit artistic people like themselves. “…God is unlimited in supply and everyone has equal access… we deprive no one with our abundance,” says Cameron. Through bitter experience, the people of the world have come to learn that such slogans are not a promise but a threat. They know that when we say that they are our equals, what we really mean is that we will take from them whatever we desire, and that we will not be sorry.
Some might argue that all of this is beside the point. The Artist’s Way is, after all, a self-help book, not a philosophical treatise. It does not claim to offer political insight: what it claims is that it will make us more creative, and that it will make us happy. Most people who pick up The Artist’s Way don’t want to know if the book is good or bad; they want to know if it will help them — that is, if it works. Many of us tend to forget that the list of things which work is long and not particularly glorious. Capitalism works. So does western medicine, fascism, advertising, and polling. So does slavery. Anything, in fact, will work, as long as you believe in it. But few Americans accept this. Instead we have allowed economists and therapists to convince us that the only way to judge everything from ideology to art to detergent is on the basis of whether it works and whether it makes us happy.
Let me say in its defense, then, that The Artist’s Way works, and that it will make you happy. Some day, I feel certain, it will work so well that, across the country, men and women everywhere will rise, write their morning pages, and spend the rest of the day brimming with creative energy. On that day, painters, writers, performance artists and filmmakers will blissfully explore their childhood traumas and arrive at public healing strategies. Policemen will be filled with joy as they inventively and playfully beat a black man who has wandered into a gated community. Photographers will take rich, zesty pictures of anorexics, and publishers will think up exciting ways to convince female readers that they should look like those models. Lawyers heady with God-flow will brainstorm ways to legally drop people from the rolls of HMOs. But more than that, I see a day when the black man who is beaten doesn’t mind, and the women who starves herself doesn’t mind, and the cancerous child without health insurance doesn’t mind either. For they, too, will be cultivating their own creativity. The man will aesthetically modulate his screams and be happy. The women will stick her fingers down her throat, vomit in an attractive pattern, and be happy. And the child’s brain will be slowly, inevitably, and painlessly eaten away, as across his face spreads a comforting and meaningless smile.

Edra Soto and Arriver

Last week I reviewed a show by Edra Soto at Rowland Contemporary for the Chicago Reader. Here’s the full review:

Identity art tends to be repetitively earnest–my ethnicity is spiritual! my people have suffered!–but Edra Soto realizes that putting your tongue in your cheek can stimulate your brain. Though her new show at Rowland Contemporary–“The Chacon-Soto Show: Featuring ‘The Greatest Companions'”–ostensibly focuses on Iris Chacon, an iconic Puerto Rican TV star, Chacon is almost never glimpsed. A bunch of apelike action figures with painted masks perch on a filing cabinet in one corner of the space, while giant, labial paper flowers squat before the gallery attendant’s table. The paintings on the wall mostly feature anonymous simians and the occasional fluffy dog, all flamboyantly dressed and gyrating on nightclub stages that vanish into garish abstractions. Everything drips tackiness–except, surprisingly, the faces of the apes in the paintings, which are sharply and evocatively rendered. Here a she-ape kicks up her hindquarters with a look of exquisite delight, there an apparently adolescent missing link furrows his brow in what looks like constipation. Elsewhere two females bend over provocatively, their faces obscured, while in the background lurks a blurred, masked figure. What would we see if they turned toward us? Are they human or not? In the context of the room, their identity becomes not a celebration or even a statement but a question–funny, sexy, mysterious, and more than a little uncomfortable.

Lot’s of great images from the show at Edra’s blog here

I also reviewed the fabulous Chicago metal outfit Arriver (coincidentally, the band of Dan Sullivan, Edra’s husband.) Here’s a slightly longer version of the review that ran in the Reader.

Getting older means significant others, kids, jobs, and not a ton of time to spend writing preposterously intricate metal songs and practicing them till you’re so tight it hurts. Don’t tell that to the guys in Arriver though; guitarists Dan Sullivan, and Dan MacAdam, bassist Rob Sullivan, and new-to-this-band drummer Joe Kaplan (Viza Noir) have been playing together in various combinations and under various names for more than a decade, now, and they have no intention of stopping. Their second album, scheduled hopefully for sometime next year, will include not one but two rock operettas: the first about the Russo-Japanese war and the second about Simon Mann, a British officer who engineered a failed coup in Equatorial Guinea. Whatever the topic, though, their music is a smorgasbord of heavy, touching on doom, thrash, and prog, with just enough classic rock heroism thrown in to give it a “fuck-you” swagger. A thunderous new song titled “Simon Mann” keeps trying to lock into a stolid trudge and then lurching into jerky rhythms and weird dissonances, like a death metal band suffering a series of painful seizures. It just goes to show that middle-age doesn’t have to turn you into an embarrassing dinosaur. Instead you can get smarter, more accomplished, and more disciplined as you march towards the perfect metal apocalypse.