Gluey Tart: Does the Stupidity in My Book Bother You?

Posted on June 30, 2011 by kinukitty

Look, the last thing I want to do is harsh on Steven Tyler. I love Steven Tyler. I probably wouldn’t want him spending the weekend at my house because, face it, he seems pretty high maintenance. But in a more abstract way, I love him.

And I pretty much loved his book, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? It was very entertaining, and many of the things you want in a rock biography. The relative sizes of Aerosmith’s respective dicks, for instance. See? You want to know, right? I was also charmed by the pains Tyler seemed to be taking to be as kind as possible. His claws certainly came out a time or two, especially when he started talking about drug and band issues (one in the same, pretty much) from the mid- ’80s on, but overall I give him points for trying.

I didn’t read this book because I love Aerosmith, although I do (well, I love about five years of Aerosmith’s career, from 1972-1977, and am indulgent about another few years shortly thereafter, especially Joe Perry’s solo albums). The specific reason was that I read Cyrinda Foxe’s biography, “Dream On: Livin’ on the Edge with Steven Tyler and Aerosmith” (a euphonious title if ever one I did see). Cyrinda Foxe’s book was pretty damned interesting. She was associated with Andy Warhol’s crowd and married David Johansen of the New York Dolls before marrying (and then divorcing) Steven Tyler, so as you might imagine, she had Things to Say.

Now, it’s stupid to assume that you’ll like someone just because you like his music. People often become rock stars because they’re narcissistic assholes, and cocaine doesn’t make that situation any better. But “Dream On” made Steven Tyler sound like a monster. A minor monster, I guess, but the kind of guy who lies and cheats and doesn’t give a damn about anyone other than himself, including his wife or his daughter. Cyrinda wrote about a man who was completely out of control, cruel and miserly and interested in nothing besides his drugs and his band. (She was an innocent in all of this, of course.) And I can see that, to a point, but she protested too much.

And most of her protests involved a perceived lack of fabulosity re. their living conditions, which makes me wonder. Instead of taking her to an amazing New York apartment after their marriage, she said, Tyler took her to a disgusting, filth-crusted hovel in the wilds of New Hampshire, which you’d think was located in Darkest Peru or something, from her description. And then he expected her to do things like clean up after herself and cook food. And he didn’t buy her things. She left her exciting life in boho New York (where she lived in a hovel with David Johansen) to be with this big rock star, and he didn’t pay out properly Well, I don’t know. She didn’t marry Tyler the moment she met him – in fact, she was around for awhile before leaving her husband for him. Where he lived never came up? Not once? I can also kind of see how someone who’d suddenly become a big rock star and had been touring nonstop for a year or more might want to go someplace that was comparatively safe and quiet. Cyrinda Foxe was many things, but rational doesn’t seem to have been one of them. (Same goes for Steven Tyler, of course. Two irrational, high strung, drug-addled showboats does not a solid union make, apparently. Who knew?)

Foxe also claimed that Tyler later dumped her and their daughter Mia in another hovel in New Hampshire while he toured and lived the high life. (Ha! Get it? The high life!) She was on her own, alone, and he didn’t give them any money at all, and she had no way of getting back to civilization. She also claimed there wasn’t a problem with her own drug abuse, and all of that seems unlikely. (How hard can it be to get out of New Hampshire?) Tyler was on the road constantly, and he certainly did cheat and do a staggering amount of drugs, but their relationship was obviously a train wreck, and train wrecks are a two-way street. Or something like that.

There were good times, of course, mostly involving partying and expensive jewelry. Foxe described a touching moment on the road with Aerosmith where she expressed admiration for an insanely expensive bracelet she saw at a jewelery store. That evening, Tyler pulled back the covers and displayed said insanely expensive bracelet adorning his dick. As she squealed in delight, he told her to dive for it. Oh, darling!

So, fascinating and lascivious and stuff, but leading to a number of questions. So, I was eager to read Tyler’s side, thinking I could maybe merge the two together and divide by two and come up with something , you know, truthish. It worked, to a degree – although I might also have to read “Creating Myself,” Mia Tyler’s 2008 biography (Mia is Steven and Cyrinda’s daughter). (She is a lovely woman, but I have serious doubts about her literary abilities.) I’ve already read “Walk this Way,” the 1997 “biography” of Aerosmith by Stephen Davis (who wrote “Hammer of the Gods” about Led Zeppelin), and I partially reread it after finishing “Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?” (answer: no, but your title does). Because, you know, I do shit like that. Anyway, I have finally come to some (obviously dubious) conclusions about this man I don’t know at all.

He is not the most self-aware pencil in the sea, Steven Tyler. I can hear your collective gasp of outrage and shock now. Steven Tyler? Not completely on top of his shit? Well, yes. That’s my main takeaway. It only bears mentioning because he seems to feel that he’s done enough rehab and soul searching and so on that he understands things now and can present his story objectively, and get preachy about my Xanax. He tells me that it is a crutch and he knows what I’m really doing because he’s been there. (His error is that I take Xanax as prescribed for an actual problem – a concept he has apparently never considered – while he snorted pounds of Xanax to get high.) (Snorted.) (Anyway.) He is angry and resentful and feels the band has done him wrong, especially guitarist Joe Perry, and he will not forgive them for telling him his drug problem was completely fucking out of hand. (It was.) His main justification for this resentment is that the rest of the band was fucked up too, especially Joe Perry. And while that is no doubt the case, it just makes the extent of Tyler’s drug use even more impressive, rather than diminishing its scope in any way.

This is as good a time as any top point out that a lot of Tyler’s book is about drugs. A lot, a lot. I was expecting that, though, because it’s a story about Aerosmith, and Aerosmith was about drugs. That’s what they did. They toured and made music (and Tyler does also include a lot of delightful anecdotes about how certain songs, lyrics, and sounds came to be – I found out, for instance, that he says “‘cept for my big ten inch” in “Big Ten Inch Record,” on Toys in the Attic, not “suck on my big ten inch – a bit of a disappointment, really, partly because on of my favorite childhood memories is of my aunt walking by my cousin’s bedroom when that song was playing, stopping for a moment to listen, and saying, “That braggart!”), and they took drugs. Those things were on equal footing. And taking massive amounts of drugs narrows a person’s world so much that a man like Steven Tyler can look back on a time when he had the world at his feet, and what he can tell us about it is where he hid his tuinals and how he managed to snort cocaine during the shows.

Tyler also makes many of the expected excuses for generally being an asshole – although the behavior he is excusing is in many cases not what anyone might expect. Taking legal custody of a fifteen-year-old girl so he could have sex with her, for instance. He explains this by saying he loved her. (Oh. Well, then. Who can argue with that?) I’m largely unflappable, as far as getting exercised about sexual mores, but I admit that I do look at this episode askance. (Tyler talks more about this in “Walk the Way,” by the way, saying the girl had several abortions and was badly burned in a fire in their apartment while he was on the road – he said she was too young to be left alone, but he couldn’t take her with him, so…) Anyway, he has his reasons. Everyone does. For the most part, the excuse-making isn’t excessive and he’s willing to make himself look pretty bad. I respect that.

This balance holds until roughly the second half of the book, when he starts to lose his grip. I have a theory about why Tyler can be more or less reasonable about the events that happened before the first time he went to rehab, but not anything since. That reason is that he was so high, all the time, that he can’t really remember what happened before he went to rehab. (That would also explain some of the factual discrepancies between “The Noise in My Head” and “Walk this Way.”) Since going to rehab, and going to rehab, and going to rehab, he’s had some moments of sobriety and thus actually remembers some of the things that have happened in the last twenty years. I find that things are more annoying when you remember them.

And that’s enough, really, about Steven Tyler’s book. I just remembered that Aerosmith drummer Joey Kramer wrote a biography a few years ago, so I’m off to download that sucker to my Kindle (unless I have to buy the printed edition so I can look at the pictures). If it’s any good, I’ll let you know.

Best Comics, Bleak Vision

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

Today is the ABSOLUTELY LAST CHANCE TO CONTRIBUTE TO OUR BEST COMICS POLL. THIS IS IT! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR! CLICK THAT LINK AND SEND US YOUR LIST! IT’S THE CHANCE OF A LIFETIME! FREE BUNNIES IN SUPERSUITS WITH EVERY SUBMISSION! DO IT! DO IT NOW!

Ahem. Sorry. Excitement got the better of me.

Anyway, to get you in the selecting-best-of-things mood, I thought I’d reprint this short essay from Craig Fischer’s zine project to benefit Team Cul de Sac and Parkinson’s disease research. The zine includes lots of your favorite comics writers ( Jeet Heer! Robert Stanley Martin! Shaenon Garrity! Caroline Small!) writing about their favorite comics. I picked Bob Haney and Jim Aparo’s Brave and Bold #104 featuring Batman and Deadman. Here’s what I said.
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Everybody loves Batman the avenging demon of the twilight, kicking Kryptonian superballs with spiked kryptonite Bat Boots while simultaneously grinding Liam Neeson’s Ras Al’Nose against the inflated manliness of Styrofoam pecs. Me though, I prefer Batman the incompetent patsy and bumbling stooge circa Brave and Bold #104. Written by Bob Haney and drawn by Jim Aparo, this is a stylish noir where Batman is framed at dramatic, improbable angles failing to infiltrate a bridge club and/or successfully allowing everyone around him to be murdered. Deadman’s thrown into the mix so that the great Bat can cluelessly betray him and ruin his — well, not life exactly, but you know what I mean. This is superheroes the way they were meant to be; as woozy police hacks fucking up everything they touch, wandering off panel after the “happy ending” with a concerned glance at their underwear and a cloud of flies rising from the corpses in their wake. Plus, there’s a cameo by God who comes off about as cynically incompetent as Batman himself., randomly tricking Deadman into shooting his lover for no explicable reason. The universe makes no sense, and the guy with the bat ears fighting crime is exactly as ridiculous as he looks, a danger to himself and others. Bob Haney: he had a bleak vision.
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Luck of the Assholes

Posted on June 29, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

Both Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and True Romance (1993) end in flamboyant, modern deus ex machinas. By “modern” I mean that there’s no god cranked down on a wince. Instead, salvation is attained through the entirely materialist force of dumb luck, also known as the scriptwriters finger on the scales. In Lock, Stock, director Guy Ritchie’s four bumbling lads stumble into wealth when about a billion other tougher, badder, smarter armed factions all happen to conveniently shoot each other, leaving our heroes as the only ones standing. In True Romance, director Tony Scott and writer Quentin Tarantino’s bumbling couple stumble into wealth when about a billion other tougher, badder, smarter armed factions all happen to conveniently shoot each other, leaving our heroes as the only ones standing.

In both films, the unlikely denoument is intended to be a tour de force; you’re supposed to admire the intricate mechanism of the plot just as, perhaps, the ancient Greeks admired that intricate mechanism which dropped the God onto the proscenium. And by that measure, at least, both films succeed; their narratives are energetically and pleasingly tangled. A plethora of bit characters — Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper in True Romance, Vinnie Jones and Lenny McLean in Lock, Stock — roll about amidst the strands like profane kittens ingratiatingly farting. It’s maybe a little too cute, but overall not a bad way to kill a couple of hours.

In both films, though, one thing rankled. I was meant to like these people. As a viewer, I’m supposed to be rooting that Guy Ritchie’s four bozos don’t have their fingers chopped off, and that Sting (playing a sympathetically tough working-class dad to one of said four bozos) doesn’t lose his sympathetically tough working-class bar. I’m supposed to cheer because Christian Slater’s movie-star-tough-guy dreams all more or less come true rather than ending in a hail of bullets and a pool of his own blood. Plus he gets to bang Patricia Arquette for all eternity, or thereabouts. Yay!

Unfortunately, there’s been a slight miscalculation — that being that there’s nothing remotely likable about any of these characters. Guy Ritchie tries rather desperately to distinguish his four young boneheads one from the other or, indeed, from anyone, by giving hiply incongruous voice over tidbits about each one. It’s nice to see him try, but the main effect is not to make you like the characters, but rather to make you wonder why the so enthusiastically declaimed personality quirks don’t actually figure into the film anywhere else. For example, Eddie (is his name Eddie? oh, who the fuck cares) is supposed to be incredibly good at reading people — but he never reads anyone that I can tell. He just pals around with his pals and fucks up and gets into trouble and then gets out by screwing other people over and then gets really drunk, which is supposed to be endearing. He’s not even an irritating loser; he’s a hollow trope posing as an irritating loser.

Christian Slater (is his name Vince in the film? again, I refuse to care) is a bit more complicated. He’s a comic store clerk and an exploitation film freak — he tries to pick up a girl by asking her to a Sonny Chiba marathon; on his first date with Arquette (Alabama; I remember her name) he reads to her from some Spider-Man comics. He’s a nerd and a geek; eccentric and kind of sweet.

Supposedly. I think it may have worked in Tarantino’s original script. However, thanks to the direction by Tony Scott and a flat, unmotivated performance by Slater, the geek eccentricity never coheres. Instead, Slater quickly moves from loving fictional violent heroics to engaging in successful violent heroics himself — shooting pimps, stealing cocaine, screwing a movie star, and generally behaving like a movie star himself. Tarantino’s writing undercuts the heroism — Slater leaves his driver’s license at the scene where he killed the pimp, and his stupidity causes the death of his own father. But Scott and Slater are too dense to hear what Tarantino’s telling them; neither Slater nor the film ever realize that what’s interesting about Vince (or whoever) is not that he’s the star of the film, but that he isn’t.

For Tarantino, I think, Slater’s a fuck-up trying to be the hero he’s seen on film and failing. That’s a sympathetic and interesting character…and you’d have cared when he died, as he did in Tarantino’s original script. But the Slater we get instead is just another tough guy whose mistakes are never brought home to him, both in the sense that he doesn’t ever get to integrate them into his character and in the sense that he doesn’t suffer from them. Patricia Arquette is a more charismatic actor by far, and she is able to capture more of the vulnerability in Tarantino’s script even as she beats a mafia boss to death. But the happy ending, and the general drift of the direction, undoes her as well — her individuality is crafted in the teeth of the rest of the film, and the storybook happy ending cheerfully undoes her efforts, turning her into the beneficiary/victim of yet another Hollywood romance.

The protagonists in both these films, then, are heroes not because of anything they do or anything they are, but just because they’re there. They’re the young white guys on the marquee; God (or the director) loves them, and the world is organized for their benefit. There’s a depressing verity to that; the world really is in many ways organized for the benefit of young, stupid, boring white guys, especially if they’re attractive movie stars. But having that driven home in as gratuitous a fashion as possible is not quite the happy ending that the directors seem to think it should be.
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I was thinking about these films in relation to the new Green Lantern movie — which I blissfully haven’t seen, though I’ve read Jog’s review, which is undoubtedly more entertaining as well as more informative. Anyway…I was thinking that a superhero’s real power isn’t super strength or super speed or a magic wishing ring, but unearned luck courtesy of some overinvested creator. In Lock, Stock and True Romance, the luck is backloaded; it comes in at the end after lots of plot manipulation. In superhero stories, it’s frontloaded — being bitten by a radioactive spider gives you amazing strength rather than cancer; having a shelf-full of chemicals fall on you gives you superspeed rather than chemical burns; you’re chosen out of everyone on earth because you’re a showboating dipshit, etc. etc. But backloaded or frontloaded, the power of luck works the same — providing both the mechanism for victory and the supposed justification of it. Hal Jordan is the hero because he’s chosen to have the ring, and he’s chosen to have the ring because he’s the hero. The logic is, appropriately, perfectly circular.

Superheroes are generally seen as power fantasies…and obviously, they are that. But Lock, Stock and True Romance suggest another possibility too…which is that the power fantasies are closer to real life than might be altogether comfortable. Those (mostly) Western (mostly) white (mostly) guys who generally get to be superheroes…in real life, they really can wave their hands and destroy large portions of Afghanistan, just like Iron Man. They really can display some mystic green and bury themselves in ephemeral glowing toys. The fantasy isn’t the power so much as the adulation — the assurance that the luck is earned and that the whole world loves to be grist for the remorseless grinding of someone else’s plot.

Better Than a Textbook

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

The Cartoon Introduction to Economics, Volume 1: Microeconomics
Grady Klein and Yoram Bauman; Hill and Wang; ,224 pp., $17.95; B&W, Softcover; ISBN:978-0809094813

“…nobody, except under threat of torture, can read a school book,” George Bernard Shaw commented. “The reason is that a school book is not a work of art.”

Comics were for many years not considered art either … but in general because they were too easy to read, not too hard. Historically, comics have been sneered at for their excessive accessibility — a trait which makes it difficult (though as recent art-comix trends show, not impossible) for them to attain the rarefied level of obfuscation required for highbrow modernist cred.

The same qualities which doomed them to generations of academic disdain, however, make comics perfect for conveying basic information without sending long-suffering students into a stupor. Scott McCloud figured this out years ago, with the result that, despite their pedestrian insights and hideous design, his books have become staples in introductory college courses nationwide.

Artist Grady Klein and economist Yoram Bauman have taken McCloud’s insights, applied them to material that is not (unlike McCloud’s) actively idiotic, and come up with a thoroughly readable book that explains microeconomics clearly, and even charmingly. Bauman (who has spent time teaching in high schools as well as colleges) and Klein do an excellent job of using analogies to explain the abstract concepts of economics, whether demonstrating Pareto efficiencies by dividing cake, or illustrating elasticities with the use of a torture rack.

The creators are also, in the best traditions of comics, willing to throw in the odd gratuitous joke for pure amusement value:

And, again as per comics tradition, they even engage in some gentle satire. For example, in a series of running gags, the creators cheerfully suggest that a fair bit of economics is simply coating the obvious with a patina of scientific pretension.

But though the book is enjoyable to page through, it’s not exactly a delight to look at. Klein is a better illustrator than Scott McCloud, but that doesn’t mean his drawing is attractive. His characters have a thick, generic, formless quality that suggests clip art, and his layout and design skills are solidly so-so. It’s easy enough to figure out where your eyes are supposed to go on the page, but that’s the most you can say for the layout. His occasional full-page splashes are notable mainly for their lameness; this, for example, is an impressively ineffective use of white space:

Bauman too, has his limitations. While he’s willing to poke fun at economists on occasion, his skepticism has definite limits. There’s no sense in his work of the contested historical or cultural place of economics as a discipline. Thus, the Nobel Prize is mentioned, but not the fact that there is, in fact, no Nobel Prize in economics — the “extra” faux Nobel was added by bankers, because bankers really like economics. Similarly, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara pop up as stereotypical figures of fun, but communism, with it’s generalized assault on the ideological place of economics, is never mentioned.

An economics textbook, of course, is meant to teach you economics; it’s not intended question its own premises. But, whether that’s a failure of Bauman or of the textbook genre, the result is a chirpy platitudinous boosterism, with the last pages of the book assuring the reader that economics can offer “creative and powerful solutions” to problems like climate change.

So is this book a work of art? I would say that it is — though not a great one. Whatever its weaknesses, it was clearly created by particular people to be read by particular other people, rather than, as is the case with most textbooks, created by committee to be read by no one. As a longtime professional educator (God help me), I’d certainly recommend it for high school or first-year college classes, where even mediocre art would be a vast improvement over the general bill of fare.
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This review first ran online at The Comics Journal.

Elfquest Re-Read: Issues #8 and 9. Partings

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Stephanie Folse

Authorial self-inserts, fear and worship, and intriguing hints of other elves ahead! As always, you can read along at http://elfquest.com/.

Elfquest #8 – Hands of the Symbol Maker

Issue #8 opens with the title placed over a paneled grid of human hands holding a stone paint-pot and using a crude brush made from a stick with a frayed end along with fingers to create a simple silhouette image — a figure with pointed ears and a spear riding on a large bird.

In the Sun Village, Ember is ~~Impressing~~ meeting the cub who will be her first wolf-friend. Leetah misses Cutter, but Moonshade castigates her for not leaving her children – for a chief’s children belong to the whole tribe and they will all parent them – and following Cutter, as lifemates should remain together, which is the Way. Nightfall and Leetah talk alone, and Leetah confesses that pride and fear kept her home, pride in her healing skills that keep the tribefolk alive, and fear of things she cannot control.

Elsewhere, Cutter and Skywise use their troll-made fetters as bolas, and capture a couple of ponies to carry them. The wolves are exhausted and tender-footed from traveling, unable to bear the elves’ weight, and Nightrunner is growing old. They travel for months without finding more forest or more elves until one day they see trees arising in the distance, a swampy wood, and release the ponies.

Cutter, giddy with delight at seeing woods again, tries to rescue a small drowning squirrel, which promptly bites him, and then he falls into the fetid water of the swamp. As they travel over the next couple of days, they start feeling faint psychic traces of elves from long ago. Wary of pockets of old magic like that which created Madcoil (issue #4), they take to the forest canopy for travel over the next few days. Cutter sickens from infection of his bite wound, and Skywise leaves him to search for plants that the former Wolfrider healer, Rain, used to treat such things.

Alone that night, Cutter sees a vision of his parents on their wolves and follows it, falling into a clearing in which a human woman tends a fire. She picks him up and is attacked by Nightrunner. A human male scares Nightrunner off by hitting his face with a flaming brand. The woman, Nonna, takes Cutter into a cave where he wakes up and tries to escape, but he is too weak and Adar, the human man, takes him back in. Strangely, instead of killing him, the humans tend Cutter, which confuses him.

Elsewhere, Nightrunner finds Skywise, who’s just gotten the plants he needs. He rides to the human dwelling and bursts in, attempting to kill the humans. Cutter, sick as he is, stops him. Skywise gives Cutter the plants, which he eats. Cutter goes outside to purge while Skywise, untrustful of the humans, guards them and remembers the atrocities committed on his tribe by humans, including the capture of his mother, taken and never seen again, when he was very young.

Nonna calls the elves “bird spirits” and honors, almost worships, them, but Adar tells Nonna, in their language, that he will attack them if he has to. Cutter returns, having seen Nightrunner’s injury, and asks the humans in their language if they did it. Adar explains that Nightrunner was attacking to kill, and Cutter accepts that. Behind the humans, Cutter sees a back room of the cave with symbols painted on the walls, walls that look as if they were altered by rock-shaping magic long ago. Nonna gives them a tour of her painted gallery, showing them a picture and asking if they recognize their mountain, which she has painted surrounded by pointy-eared bird-spirits riding on giant birds. She worries that Cutter and Skywise have come to take her back to the mountain, without Adar. Cutter reassures her, saying they’ve been away for so long they hardly remember what their folk are like, and Nonna explains that they are taller. Cutter determines to go to this mountain to meet the elves that are there.

Interspersed with these panels, we see panels of Savah, back in Sorrow’s End, psychically searching and jerking upright, her eyes wide open.

The next scene is in Sorrow’s End, where it is discovered that Savah “went out” today, but is trapped somewhere, and her spirit can’t return. Her handmaiden Ahdri says that just before Savah went out, she mentioned touching something evil that Cutter must not find, and she was returning to find out what it was. Suntop psychically touches Savah, but the information he returns with is jumbled, and he can only communicate it to Cutter mind-to-mind, and begs to be taken to him.

Elfquest #9 – The Lodestone

#9 opens with the Wolfriders preparing to travel, trying on their new leather traveling clothes made by Moonshade. The villagers are terrified of their healer and their new protectors leaving, but Dart, son of Strongbow and Moonshade, declares he will stay behind and teach them how to defend themselves. Strongbow gives grudging permission, saying he doesn’t approve but it’s Dart’s decision. Rainsong, who is staying behind with her family, tells Leetah that she senses that the powers of her healer father, Rain, flow in the child she is bearing so that the village will not be without a healer for long. The Wolfriders and Leetah leave the village, in a bittersweet moment.

Back in the forest, Nonna tells Cutter that she and Adar are exiles from their tribes. Adar confronts Skywise, demanding to know if he worships the bird spirits, will they arrange matters so that they can return to their tribe, as Nonna is lonely with other people. Later on, Cutter says he and Skywise should help them, because the humans know things that can be useful for their quest. Skywise muses that Cutter is different from the past Wolfrider chieftains – he has the ability to imagine a different future and a new way of life, when they didn’t.

Elsewhere, the Wolfriders and Leetah follow Suntop’s directions through the desert with their wolves and zwoots.

Cutter and Skywise lead Nonna and Adar through the forest with the help of Skywise’s lodestone. Adar happily says that the Bone Woman, his tribe’s shaman, should now see that they’re under the protection of the bird spirits and let them back. She had convinced Olbar, the chief, that Adar had brought bad magic into the village when he married Nonna, and convinced him to exile them.

Eventually, they reach the human village. Nonna and Adar enter it without the Wolfriders, and the Bone Woman demand they be killed. Olbar agrees to hear out Nonna and Adar, but is about to command they be executed when Cutter and Skywise enter from the forest, riding their wolves, with a deer carcass trussed to a carrying-pole. Cutter speaks to the humans in their language, saying that Nonna and Adar have the spirits’ favor, and that if the village accepts them, it will have good fortune and if not, the spirits will take revenge, giving them the deer as a gesture of good faith. The Bone Woman does not believe them, but Olbar agrees to their demand and asks they stay for a feast the next day. Cutter agrees, much to Skywise’s chagrin.

In the desert, the travelers have come to the wall of cliffs that separate the desert from the Wolfriders’ former home, a different part than where the Tunnel of Golden Light is. Ember finds a small cave that contains elven bones. Suntop announces that the rocks were moved by magic, and Leetah realizes that Rayek could move rocks by magic, and grieves for her former friend and lover. The troupe finds a break in the cliffs that leads to the land of humans.

Cutter and Skywise occupy seats of honor at the feast. Watching the humans, they realize that when interacting with each other, humans are much the same as elves – smiling, laughing, loving. Olbar is fascinated by the elves, which the Bone Woman interprets as being under their spell. She tells an associate named Thief that the stone around Skywise’s neck is magic, and that she could work wonders with it, offering to restore his warrior name if he brings it to her. She gives him a potion that will eradicate his odor as he follows the elves and their wolves.

As the elves leave, Thief sneaks up and reaches for the lodestone. Skywise catches a glimpse of movement, and slashes with his sword, cutting off Thief’s thumb. Olbar curses Thief — who was once his brother — and Cutter warns him not to trust the Bone Woman, who is lurking nearby, eavesdropping.

Nonna and Adar see the elves off at the river, giving them vine ropes and pointing the way. The Bone Woman feeds Thief a narcotic root, commanding him to kill the elves. He agrees, if she will make him chief in Olbar’s place.

Cutter, Skywise, and the wolves reach a waterfall, the cliff beside which they plan to descend with the help of the vine ropes.. Cutter tells Nightrunner to take the long way around and meet them at the foot, but Nightrunner snaps at him, and Cutter realizes that his wolf is old and will no longer follow them. He takes some time to say farewell to Nightrunner, scratching him and breathing in his familiar scent. Nightrunner leaves, followed by Starjumper, Skywise’s wolf, who will take care of him until the end. The elves accept events with sadness but aplomb, as this is The Way, the natural order of events.

Thief lurks in the shadows, seeing the elves now unguarded, and prepares to attack.

Elsewhere, in a grassy valley, the Wolfriders and Leetah pause to rest. They see a large bird circling in the sky far above them and, hungry, decide it will make a good dinner. Suntop cries out that they cannot kill that bird.

Thief releases a stone from his sling at Skywise, standing on the cliff’s edge, as Strongbow releases his arrow in the valley. Cutter attacks Thief over Skywise’s unconscious body, stabbing him. Thief loses his balance and goes over the edge of the cliff, with a desperate grab at the lodestone around Skywise’s neck. He drags Skywise over with him. They fall, and Thief plunges into the river below as Skywise grabs a root sticking out from the cliff with one hand. He’s broken his other arm, so cannot climb up. Cutter uses the vine rope to descend to him, but is astonished to discover someone is pulling them both up.

Olbar pulls them up, having disobeyed and followed them. He asks a favor in return for saving them – some time back his daughter fled the village with her lover, into a place called The Forbidden Grove. When he and his warriors pursued, they were repelled by small, winged spirits. He wants to know what became of her, and points the way to the grove.

The elves howl a final farewell to Nightrunner and Starjumper, then continue. Some distance away, in the valley where the travelers paused to rest, there is a scene of devastation – wolves sniffing around sadly, a dead zwoot, dropped weapons and items of clothing. No elves are evident.

DISCUSSION

I think this might be the only place in the story arc where Cutter’s decision about trusting or not trusting someone is correct – so far he’s trusted the trolls to keep their word and guide them to a new Holt, ending in disaster, and not trusted the Sun Villagers to give them aid, which could have ended disastrously but luckily didn’t. We shall see what Cutter’s future decisions produce.

These two issues tend to feel like place-fillers to me. They’re mostly full of the characters collecting plot coupons and giving them reasons to go one way or another so they’ll all end up back together again before the next segment of the plotline begins. I also tend to find the humans of the World of Two Moons pretty simplistic. We see humans here who don’t automatically fear and hate elves, but they still consider them special, otherworldly beings instead of fellow sentient creatures. (Okay, maybe that’s a bit of foreshadowing, as if the four fingers in a world of five-fingered creatures haven’t got you knowing that already. Well, that and the entire prologue to issue #1.) At any rate, I’ve got a background in anthropology and it bugs me when Neolithic-level humans are depicted as simple – we’ve got enough evidence to realize their social lives and culture were just about as complex as any other culture out there, even if their level of technology was simpler. So the “fear them or worship them” theme is fairly annoying.

These issues introduce hints of former elven occupation in the whiffs of magic around the forest and the hints about the Forbidden Grove. We also see that Nonna’s tribe worship tall elves who ride birds and who live in a great mountain, but a hint that all may not be well as the Wolfriders and Leetah vanish after killing a large bird.

I do tend to feel that Rainsong’s forthcoming child bearing healing powers is a bit of an authorial cop-out as regards the Sun Village, but I can see why they did that – the story lies elsewhere, not in the Sun Village, and leaving them in the lurch without their accustomed healer would mean that to tie the story’s loose ends up by the end, the Sun Village’s response to that situation would have to be considered, and the majority of the story lies elsewhere.

With Nonna and her husband Adar we get our authorial self-inserts. The character designs are based on Wendy and Richard Pini, although the don’t fall into the Mary Sue trap of having them be perfect – Adar is brusque and hotheaded, while Nonna can’t see that her “bird spirits” might be anything other than good.

I really enjoy the illustration of life cycles involved with Cutter’s farewell to Nightrunner. It shows that elves are longer-lived than their wolf companions, but that they the Wolfriders see death as part of the natural order of things. Cutter is beginning to wake up to a new possibility, that death perhaps isn’t part of the natural order for elves. He may be the first Wolfrider in a long, long time to see that, as Skywise muses. Cutter has somehow gained the ability to envision the world in a different way from the Way, as symbolized best by Strongbow and Moonshade. Those two are the most wolfy of the Wolfriders, unafraid to challenge their chief or others in the tribe when they think it necessary, but willing to accept what the chief says they must do for the good of the tribe. This tension between tradition and change is one of the ongoing themes of Elfquest.

I’ll also point out that in issue #9, there’s a page that Wendy Pini draws in classic time-slowing-down style, using the panel grid to slow the action down, such that events that occur within a couple of seconds – Thief reaching for the lodestone, and Skywise seeing the movement and slicing off Thief’s thumb – take a full page.

It’s also a great example of violence without goriness – we can feel the shock and pain that Thief does when the sword hits his hand, but it’s not drawn out in detail. Frankly, a shot of a thumb flying through the air as it’s parted from the hand would be ludicrous. Also, later on, the action has dire consequences – Skywise is badly hurt and almost dies because of Thief’s desire for revenge.

There’s also a bit of a theme of partings and endings running through these two issues. Cutter says farewell to Nightrunner, Leetah mourns Rayek, the travelers leave the Sun Village, Savah is trapped beyond recall. This is reversed in the next issues, as we have reunions and meetings between various groups.

Next time: reunions and meetings. And if I manage to get it read in time, the next Elfquest novel, The Quest Begins.

The Truth Is Out There

Posted on June 27, 2011 by Noah Berlatsky

Considering they’re both serial TV dramas, Twin Peaks and the Wire couldn’t have much less in common. Twin Peaks explores the quirky surrealism of a small town; the Wire looks at the intricate realism of a city. Creator David Lynch uses the improvisational rhythm of dreams; creator David Simon relies on the layered narrative of investigative reporting. And where the Wire is one of the most multi-racial shows ever to appear on television, Twin Peaks is, insistently, not.

Yet, on closer inspection, the two shows had in common. In particular, both Twin Peaks and the Wire are obsessed with the real.

In part, this obsession is a function of genre. For all their differences, both shows are at heart police shows, and both are built around investigations and the ferreting out of secrets. In both, the techniques and expertise of the protagonists are leant to the viewer, who is enabled to approach nearer and nearer to a provocatively concealed heart of corruption. The famous scene in the Wire, where McNulty and Bunk deduce how a murder was committed while communicating solely by using the word “fuck” is analogous, in its flamboyant hermeticism, to the scene in Twin Peaks where Dale Cooper identifies likely suspects by referencing Tibet and throwing stones at bottles.

Whether through a triumph of earthy procedure or through semi-mystical intuition, the results are the same — the knowing expert shines light into the heart of darkness.

“Heart of darkness” has racial connotations of course — and that’s apropos for both shows. The connection between race and reality is most obvious in the Wire, a show immersed in the vibrancy, and despair of Baltimore’s African-American community. Omar’s transcendent cool, Kima’s understated integrity, D’angelo’s tragedy, and Snoop’s brutality are all manifestations of intertwined authenticity and blackness. The white characters, too, draw their grit in large part from the show’s integration. Thus Entertainment Weekly praises McNulty for his funk, which it links to his “easy rapport with his African-American work partners.”

Race at first appears to be almost entirely absent from Twin Peaks…but the absence speaks loudly. The show is set in the perfect American small town, with people who are all friendly, all decent, all blessed with movie star good looks, and, oh yes, (with the exception of a stereotypically untrustworthy Asian woman and a stereotypically spiritual Native American) virtually all white.

That whiteness — the trusting small town, the blonde homecoming queen cheerleader — is part and parcel of the perfection. And as the town’s secrets are revealed, it is not just the perfection, but the whiteness, which is shown to be a facade above a swirling pit of jealousy, greed, and deformation. Laura Palmer, that blonde homecoming queen, is addicted to cocaine just like all those black junkies on the Wire. Her father, Leland, is, in the depths of his twisted soul, not white at all, but rather the demonic spirit BOB played by Native American actor Frank Silva.

Moreover, the whiteness in Twin Peaks is undercut and doubled by its own queerness. The show is an extended meditation on the campiness of whiteness; the perfect exterior concealing melodrama and lust. When Laura’s best friend Donna wears her friend’s sunglasses, she turns into a teen femme fatale, exterior transforming interior. More pointedly, after Laura’s death, her murderer/rapist father, Leland, begins to compulsively dance to show tunes, his dark sexual secret finding expression through his response to stereotypically gay cultural responsiveness.

The truth in Twin Peaks is ultimately Freudian; the revelation of the ogre father and the primal scene. In the prequel, Fire Walk With Me, we learn that Leland has been raping her daughter since she was 12; in the series itself, another father almost sleeps with his daughter. In The Wire, on the other hand, the revelations are less psychological and more pragmatic, focusing on the overwhelming, crushing, and corrupting power of institutions.

There are many other cop shows built around investigation, of course. But where something like Bones or the Mentalist lets the knowing detective tie up the truth in a pretty bow at the end of (at least most) episodes, the Wire and Twin Peaks treat truth as an overwhelming excess, which expertise can provisionally master but not contain. The resulting tragedy is is in many ways the guarantor of the reality. The real does not have a happy ending. The Wire concludes by establishing that life in Baltimore will go on as before; while some individual characters may escape to provisionally bright futures, the city as a whole is no closer to escaping its pathologies than it was at the beginning of the series. Twin Peaks effectively ends with the death of Leland and the escape of BOB. The culprit is dead, but his spirit lives on…and to the extent that the series abandoned that grim insight in its later part, it became virtually unwatchable (or, at least, I couldn’t watch it.)

I love both Twin Peaks and The Wire. I think they both deserve their reputations as the greatest television show ever. I do wonder though how much that reputation is about their mutual obsessions with the real. Television has often been seen as uniquely irrelevant bone-headed escapism. The Wire and Twin Peaks both, in quite different ways, present themselves as windows onto unpleasant truths. They’re serious because they show us what is, and provide no escape. Laura’s ascent to heaven in Fire Walk With Me seems more a dream to emphasize the tragedy than an actual cause for optimism, while McNulty’s final attainment of peace seems like an instance of accepting what he can’t change rather than a broader assertion of hope. Evil is fixed; experts know but can’t save us, or even themselves. It’s a grim vision so critically embraced that one starts to wonder if it could be, at times, self-fulfilling.
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Coincidentally, I just watched Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, which has a very different take on the real. Stalker is ostensibly a science fiction tale set in the Zone, a mysterious, dangerous realm where your deepest wish may be granted. Tarkovsky, though, makes no use of special effects of any kind, and so the Zone appears as simply any other piece of countryside. The three men wandering through it, casting nervous glances this way and that, seem like children playing a not-very-convincing game of make-believe — a sensation only emphasized by Tarkovsky’s long takes and excruciatingly slow pacing. The camera frames a long shot of a field, the men in the distance move across it…and still move across it…and still move across it…giving your attention a chance to wander to the trees, and the sky, and then back and yep, the men are still crossing the field…and you’ve got plenty of time to think about how silly the actors must have felt, and wonder whether they were thinking about their motivation, or how silly the script is, or just about whether they were ever going to get to stop walking across the field and go to the bathroom, for the love of God.

Eventually the guide (Stalker) leads his two followers (Writer and Professor) to the wish-granting center of the Zone, called the Room. But at the last minute both of the followers, perhaps fed up with the transparently ersatz nature of the whole endeavor, refuse to participate in the silliness anymore and balk at going in. One of the film’s last scenes shows Stalker back in his beautifully grungy hovel, lying down into his bed as if reclining in an Old Master painting, bewailing the intelligentia’s lack of faith. “Can people like that believe in anything!” he moans. “And nobody believes! Not just those two. Nobody!” After comforting him, his long-suffering wife breaks the fourth wall and directly addresses the camera, insisting that despite all her troubles, she has never regretted her life with the Stalker. “It’s better to have a bitter happiness” she says, “than a gray, dull life.”

On the one hand, Stalker is like the Wire; it fetishizes grit. The first part of the film, before the protagonists make it into The Zone, is set in an urban landscape which is run down even by the standards of the Wire’s Baltimore. On the other hand, Stalker shares characteristics with Twin Peaks. Both fetishize a secret, dangerous realm just out of sight.

But where the Wire and Twin Peaks figure the physical and spiritual as truths for genre to reveal, in Stalker both function more as consciously framed tropes. The Stalker’s hovel is so ravishingly shot and carefully composed that it becomes a quotation about grit rather than a direct apprehension of it. The intimations of otherworldliness in the Zone are so stubbornly unrealized that they become quotations about surrealism rather than an actual apprehension of subterranean dangers.

Stalker loves these genre references, but not because they show reality. Rather, it loves them as genre — as the imaginary. And if there’s a real in Stalker, it’s not in these pulp gestures, but in the process of film itself; the shots of grassland or a wall or a face held so long that narrative drains away, and you’re left looking at grassland or a wall or a face. The real is not the end result of a process of meaning, but the beginning of a process in which meaning must be added. The wall can be poverty; the grassland can be an ominous psychological truth; but the viewer must make it so. Art does not strip away to an essence, but adds to a blank. The Wire is worthwhile not because it is true to Simon’s Baltimore experience, but because of the energy of its narrative entanglements; the energetic metaphoricity of D’Angelo at the chess board or the profaner-than-life dreamed-of universal signification of “fuck”. Twin Peaks is profound not because it shows the real corruption of small town America, but because of its hollow flamboyance, haunted by specters of irony and dread. The shows are great not because they’re real, but because they’re imagined.

The very last scene of Tarkovsky’s film shows the Stalker’s crippled child sitting at a table, staring at glasses, and apparently moving them (slowwwwly) with her mind. After she stops, we hear a train pass, and the glasses shake. The telekinesis is, of course, just a special effect…and it emphasizes the fact that the train shaking the house is probably a special effect too. Tarkovsky seems to be almost taunting us, daring us to accept the shaking but not the telekinesis — or rather, to accept both. For Stalker, film is not about gaining expertise and seeking truth. It’s a way to practice faith.