Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Hillbilly Highway

Shoulder-shrugging country mix. Download Hillbilly Highway here.

1. Guitar Town — Emmylou Harris
2. Hillbilly Highway — Steve Earle
3. Midnight Rider — Waylong Jennings
4. Shotgun Willie — Willie Nelson
5. Black Rose — Billy Joe Shaver
6. Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight — Rodney Crowell
7. Smoke Along the Track — Dwight Yoakum
8. I’m a One Woman Man — Steve Young
9. Long Haired Country Boy — Charlie Daniels
10. That’s How I Got to Memphis — Rosanne Cash
11. If I Needed You — Townes Van Zandt
12. Please Be With Me — Cowboys
13. Amie — Pure Prairie League
14. Love’s Been a Little Bid Hard on Me — Juice Newton
15. Falling in Love — Juice Newton
16. Tumbling Dice — Linda Ronstadt
17. Do It Again — Steely Dan

Women and Children First … To Die!

Netflix streaming allows for an eclectic diet of movies. You can view not just Hollywood crap, but crap from all over the world. Recently, I’ve been watching Italian gialli films from the 1970s. Giallo (meaning “yellow,” a reference to the genre’s origins in a series of paperbacks with yellow covers) is a sub-genre of the crime thriller notable for its exceptional levels of violence. A giallo plot is typically a murder mystery with a few red herrings, gratuitous sex, and a chase sequence or two. In other words, hardly different than the pulp crime novels familiar to most Americans. But the lasting impressions of these films has less to do with the “whodunnit” plot mechanics than with the gore. Murder sequences are often long, bloody, and elaborate.

Of the four gialli that I watched, Profundo Rosso (Deep Red) was far and away the best. I’ll discuss it in my next post, but for now I’ll focus on three other films: The Black Belly of the Tarantula, Don’t Torture a Duckling, and Who Saw Her Die? Normally I’d give a spoiler warning, but these films are from the 70s, so deal with it.

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The Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971)
Directed by Paolo Cavara
Starring Giancarlo Giannini, Ezio Marano, Barbara Bouchet, and Barbara Bach

 

Genre entertainment can be roughly grouped into three categories: works that fail to satisfy the bare minimum expectations of the genre, works that transcend the genre, and works that embody the genre so precisely that the details become blurry, and instead you’re left talking about tropes. As you’ve probably already guessed, The Black Belly of the Tarantula falls into the third category. It has a murder mystery – someone is murdering impossibly attractive women (including a Bond Girl). It has a detective (Giancarlo Giannini). It is extremely violent. And it is utterly sleazy and misogynistic.

Giallo, and the crime genre more broadly, is not known for its feminism. Women are objects, women are tramps, and women are targets. In the case of the first victim, she’s all three. The character (played by the gorgeous Barbara Bouchet) is on screen for little more than 20 minutes and half of that time is spent stark naked. The other half of the time is spent teasing her blind masseur, cheating on her husband, and then being terrorized and murdered. And I don’t mean anything as prosaic as being shot. The name of the film refers to a wasp that paralyzes tarantulas with its stinger and then plants its eggs in the tarantula’s abdomen. The killer uses a needle to inject the wasp’s venom into his victims’ spine and paralyzes them. He then rips off their clothes and slowly cuts them open with a knife while they’re still alive.

The filmmakers engage in the pretense that everyone is horrified by this brutality. But brutality, directed at women, is the whole point. The murder sequences are lengthy, gory, and devoted to the display of female flesh as it is slowly penetrated by the killer’s blade. While undeniably loathsome, the intense misogyny gives the murder scenes a demented energy that’s absent in the rest of the film. The tedious domestic scenes of detective and wife and the film’s convoluted plot are poor attempts to legitimize exploitation.

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Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972)
Directed by Lucio Fulci
Starring Tomas Milian, Barbara Bouchet, Florinda Bolkan, and Marc Porel


Sometimes killing women just isn’t exploitative enough. Thank God for children.

Don’t Torture a Duckling is about a murderer who targets young boys in a small Sicilian village. There are suspects and red herrings everywhere. The killer could be the town idiot, the local witch, the overly-protective priest, or the big city harlot (Barbara Bouchet again). The police are worse than useless, and most of the detective work is done by a reporter, Martelli (Tomas Milian).

While Don’t Torture a Duckling has superficial similarities to The Black Belly of the Tarantula, the latter is nothing more than competent genre hackery with a dose of sexism. The former is a film with an actual point to make, namely that religion and superstition are terrible things. For example, one of the suspects is a gypsy witch (Florinda Bolkan) who confesses to the murder. But when the police ask her how she did it, she admits that she merely “cursed” the boys with voodoo dolls and has no idea how they actually died. The witch is not a killer but a pitiful joke, but that doesn’t save her from the superstitious townsfolk. In a scene reminiscent of medieval witch hunts, the fathers of the slain boys corner the witch and beat her to death in a gruesome sequence.

In contrast, the thoroughly modern reporter and the big city girl, Patrizia, are far more sympathetic. The treatment of Patrizia is notable in how it contrasts to treatment of women in The Black Belly of the Tarantula. Initially, Patrizia seems to be another giallo sexpot, teasing the young boys with her beauty. The film even hints that she might be the killer. But it turns out that Patrizia is neither a seductress nor a murderer – she’s just a harmless pothead who was banished to the country because of a drug arrest. The modern girl actually turns out to be a hero of sorts, and she even helps Martelli solve the mystery.

The murderer turns out to be the village priest, Don Alberto (Marc Porel), who was killing the boys to “protect” them from sexuality and ensure that they would go to heaven with stainless souls. While attempting to kill another child (his own sister!) by throwing her off a cliff, Alberto is instead pushed off by Martelli. This leads to an overdone death sequence where Alberto (actually a dummy that looks nothing like Marc Porel) slowly falls to his death as jagged rocks tear his face off, all the while flashbacks reveal his nonsensical motives.

 

Duckling Finale

Up with modernity, down with superstition! But the film’s point of view doesn’t survive scrutiny. Catholic priests have committed horrible acts throughout history, not least of which is the multinational child abuse scandal, but I can’t find any examples of a priest who actually murdered several children to help them avoid sin. Dying young to escape sin is simply not a Catholic obsession. Sin is unavoidable perhaps, but the penitent can always obtain forgiveness. So the filmmakers essentially invent a flaw in Catholicism that they can then throw off a mountain. One last point: the assertion that modern society is less violent than traditional society is ridiculous, especially in the country that invented Fascism (cheap shot, I know).

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Who Saw Her Die? (1972)
Directed by Aldo Lado
Starring George Lazenby, Anita Strindberg, Adolfo Celi, Nicoletta Elmi, and Alessandro Haber

 

More kid killing!

Who Saw Her Die Opening

Who Saw Her Die? is yet another story about a psycho killer who targets children (this time little girls instead of little boys). Franco Serpieri (George Lazenby) is an artist in Venice living apart from his daughter, Roberta (Nicoletta Elmi), and estranged wife (Anita Strindberg). When Roberta comes to visit, she is immediately targeted by a mysterious killer wearing a black dress and veil. Poor Roberta gets offed fairly early in the film, and Franco becomes an amateur detective to find out who murdered his daughter (because the police are, as usual, useless).

In most respects, Who Saw Her Die? is superior to the above two films. Venice proves to be an excellent locale for film noir. Aldo Lado turns the city of canals into a city of dark passages and winding alleys. The characters are a bit more developed than in the other gialli, and Lazenby puts in a decent performance as the grieving father. There are also a couple of wonderfully off-beat moments, as when Franco interrogates a man while playing a game of table tennis. And the score by Ennio Morricone (who also composed the score for The Black Belly of the Tarantula) is a trippy, addictive mix of rock and children’s choir. Unfortunately, the filmmakers never quite get a handle on how to incorporate the score into the film, and certain riffs such as the killer’s theme are overused.

The early scenes are kinda brilliant in a manipulative and evil way. Every time Franco leaves Roberta alone outside, the killer shows up and begins to close in.  But just as the killer is about to grab Roberta, Franco returns in the nick of time, completely oblivious to the fact that he just saved his daughter. But then Franco leaves Roberta alone to play outside just a little too long, and the killer gets her. First message to parents: your child is being targeted by a serial killer at all times! Second message to parents: do not leave your child outside while you get a blowjob from your mistress. You’ll just suffer dramatic guilt afterward when your child’s corpse is fished out of the water. On the plus side, your guilt will move the plot forward.

As in Don’t Torture a Duckling, there are multiple suspects and red herrings. Suspects include an evil businessman, a child molesting lawyer, a priest … I won’t waste your time, of course it’s the priest. But it gets better! He’s not just a priest but a cross-dressing priest. According to the Psycho Rule, that multiplies the evil by a factor of four. The film chickens out at the end though, when it is revealed that the killer was only impersonating a priest. The filmmakers were likely worried about offending Catholics. Though I suspect they were not so worried about implying that priests are murderers (Don’t Torture a Duckling was released in the same year) and more worried about implying that priests are cross-dressers. Some insinuations are beyond the pale.

Perhaps if cross-dressers had their own country and a global institution with millions of adherents, filmmakers might think twice about portraying them as degenerate child-killers.

Too True

My reviews for Madeloud are largely buried and unsearchable, it looks like, so I thought I’d start reprinting some of them here, starting with this one.
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I like contemporary pop. I like classic country. I should be able to reconcile myself to contemporary country pop. Right? I am trying. I’ve recently renewed my affection for George Strait, and belatedly discovered the charms of Leann Womack and Sara Evans. All those folks, though, have at least a cowboy boot and a half in the tradition; they’re neo, not new. Even their slickness ends up being charmingly corny and old-fashioned. Leann Womack looks about as dowdy as a major star can look on the cover of her first album; seated and leaning forward awkwardly on a big Sears-worthy comfy chair, big dangly cross earrings vying for attention with the big buttons on her aggressively modest black jacket.

Miranda Lambert doesn’t wear big buttons. Nor does she mess around with neo cred. She may be on the country dial, but she’s pop from her perfect toes to her exquisite collarbone — the latter of which is featured prominently on the cover of Revolution. I’ve got no objection to that — pop stars are supposed to be pretty, after all. It’s part of their appeal. And it’s not like Lambert doesn’t have anything else going for her. On the contrary, like Christina Aguilera and Beyonce, when Lambert won the genetic lottery, she didn’t do it by halves — her voice is almost as much of a marvel as her physique. Her twang is lodged in her every phrase like a burr, adding swagger to the uptempo stompers and sultry insinuation to the ballads. I’d be happy to sit back and listen to her sing the phone book, as the saying goes.

Unfortunately, she isn’t singing the phone book here. Instead, she’s singing the sort of songs you’d expect to hear on country radio — and try as I might, I just can’t hack it. “Dead Flowers,” for example, could be an affecting, vividly imagined ode to lost love — if somebody would just for God’s sake shoot the drummer, who thumps along like he’s wearing hip boots on his arms. “Heart Like Mine,” has a couple good one liners (“I heard Jesus he drank wine/ and I bet we’d get along just fine,”) more or less obscured by the music’s all-too-earnest efforts to be sweeping and inspirational in a “get your lighter out” mode. It’s almost like listening to Boston’s “More Than a Feeling,” if you tried to substitute denuded country filigree for any musical ideas or actual personality.

Such is the whole album. It’s not reverent and backward-looking, like the neo-traditionalists, but it’s not gimmicky and bizarre like the best pop from Abba to Ciara. Instead, the Revolution exists in this weird aphasiac past, where retailing indifferently performed rock clichés from the seventies, eighties, and nineties is somehow supposed to be arresting or entertaining. Not everything’s a disaster — the opening song, “White Liar,” for example, is a perfectly pleasant Waylon Jennings knock-off by way of Steve Earle. “Virginia Bluebell” is a decent trudgy ballad. But country radio needs to sell out a lot more thoroughly than this if it’s ever going to win me over.

Troll On- God, Natural Disasters, and the Powers of the Internets

A version of this article appeared on Splice Today in March.

She recorded and posted the video quickly and impulsively—from concept to upload, the process took less than 20 minutes. Her eyes are gleaming and her face beams happiness and smug satisfaction. “God is such an amazing God,” she tells us, peering through the screen and into our eyes, so close to the lens that her face distorts. “On Wednesday, at the start of Lent, believers all over the world came together, and we have been praying specifically for God to open the eyes of atheists all over the world.” And, she tells us with excitement and pride, “Just a few days later, God shook the country of Japan. He literally grabbed the country by the shoulders and said, ‘Look! I’m here!’” TamTamPamela is overjoyed by the quick and emphatic response of her deity to her prayers, and encourages her audience to redouble their efforts. “Just imagine what will happen at the end of the 40 days!” she says with a beatific smile.

The video went live the morning of March 14, and began spreading almost immediately, thanks initially to a link on Ignorant and Online, a Tumblr account dedicated to “exposing the worst […] online comments, Facebook posts and internet posts. What was once anonymous is now revealed.” Started only two days before, Ignorant and Online had so far almost exclusively displayed screen caps of status updates of Facebook users linking the Japanese disaster to Pearl Harbor, or other off-color remarks related to the crisis. Perhaps it was her invocation of God, or the nature of video itself, but for whatever reason, this clip carried more weight. Within hours it was everywhere, and atheists and Christians alike seemed none too happy with the contents of the video.

That night I watched her YouTube channel with amusement, and then alarm, as thousands of comments flowed in, ranging from cries of “troll,” to threats of death, rape and pizza delivery. The alarm came when addresses, full names and phone numbers began appearing as well, first for a woman in Florida and then for another name in California. A sample of the comments:

b17ches like you makes me literally wanna start a crusade. mark my words that you’ll die a horrible horrible death.. — buyungwidhi

how about I fuck-start your face you stupid cunt.— heavysweater

Lady, if I held your head under the water for 17 minutes, I would quickly show that he either: A – Hates you B – Doesn’t exist— Notjustbonez

can anybody tell me who this girl is? name or location can help cause i can just look her up. Ill give her a religious wake up call myself and shoot this bitch.. private messg me any info on her. first person to do it ill give 1K. thanks— vietnameseJKT

you need to get raped — abaebae1

Yout such a dumbshit. fuck you get a fuckming life. i pray u fucking die u dumb bitch. i beleive that oh my god i cant begin how to think how much pain people will cause for u. your so fucking dumb. do understand anything? go die u fucking cunt. id llove to see u die. go to hell. do you not understand people are dieing. LETS ALL PRAY THAT YOU DIE! be encourage that god will crush you. Ill be overjoyed when you die — djmattzz1

Japan will come get u for this. — nova123

And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. TamTamPamela posted one last brief video, “Coming Clean,” in which she stated that she’s been “making troll videos for a while,” but that at this point she’s “kind of tired of pizza,” and so she’s calling it quits. Her account, along with all of her videos, disappeared shortly after.

Although deleting the account put out most of the fires, death threats and links to both somewhat correct and completely incorrect personal information continued to promulgate for days after the video. Surveying the wreckage, at the virulence of the reaction to her video, I tracked down the real person behind the character of TamTamPamela to find out, in her own words, what it’s like to be hated by a million people. What are the consequences of having your address and phone number, the names of your family members, even photos of your house linked to on dozens of web sites containing death threats on your life?

“Nothing,” she said over the phone, five days after having posted the most disliked video in YouTube history.

Really? Nothing?

“Nothing in real life,” she said, except that, “Tuesday morning a pizza was delivered to my house.”

Has anyone recognized her?

“If they did, they didn’t come up to me and say anything.”

A college student named Tam is the real-life person behind TamTamPamela, her self-described “character” that she played for more than a year on YouTube and on various religious message boards, both real and satirical. She was surprised by the reaction to her video, given that up until that point her videos had hovered around 10,000 views only. She ultimately outed herself, she says, because of the inaccurate private information being spread about the woman in Florida. “It wasn’t until late Monday night that my boyfriend told me that people were posting another woman’s information all over the Internet, saying the other woman was me,” she said. “And that was when I got worried. I started thinking that people were going to take this way too far.” Once she had outed herself, she said, there would be no point to maintaining the videos—the satire would be ineffective—and so she closed the channel.

I watched the year’s worth of videos before their deletion, and seeing them chronologically, one can see the rapid development of the craft of satire. The early videos are rambling, meandering, rarely getting to their central topics right from the start but instead approaching the arguments as part of a larger fabric of personal history. As they progress Tam warms to her character, and the videos have a lot more direction, arriving at the theme early and spending the bulk of the time developing the concept. One video discusses the season of Lent, and how it is the will of the Holy Spirit for TamTamPamela and her dog, Rambo, to fast together for the entirety of the 40-day period. In another video TamTamPamela has been visited by an angel who told her that she “must pass on this message to the sinful people of Massachusetts. If you don’t vote for Scott Brown today, God will be very angry. The wrath he poured out on Haiti, the wrath he has poured out over the world in small doses—let those be an example to you. Don’t give God a reason to be angry. Vote for Scott Brown.” In a more vulnerable moment, TamTamPamela reaches out to her YouTube audience and asks them for advice about how to resolve her impasse—the Bible instructs her to obey her husband in all things, but her fiancé doesn’t want her posting any more videos. She knows the Holy Spirit has instructed her to continue her evangelization. What’s a good Christian girl to do?

But something was different about the Japan video. Part of the reaction was undoubtedly due to its proximity to the crisis itself, but some of the extremity could come from the craft and the delivery of the satire. Almost all of the previous videos have slight tells to clue their audience into the intent. “I always had the same people watching and the same people commenting,” Tam said. “There were two groups—the one group that would watch it and argue amongst themselves whether I was being serious, and there was the other group who knew my intention was to bring attention to the subject of the video.” The difficulty of determining the authenticity of statements of a religious fundamentalist nature is a well-observed phenomenon—called Poe’s Law, named after and coined by Nathan Poe: “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.”

In fact, if there is a “tell” in TamTamPamela’s penultimate video, it’s that most fundamentalists aren’t as direct in general conversation about these kind of feelings, and certainly not on video. That doesn’t mean that those thoughts still aren’t there or expressed. The earthquake connection readily brings to mind Pat Robertson. In 2010, shortly after the devastating earthquake in Port Au Prince, Haiti, Robertson had this to say on his show, 700 Club:

… something happened a long time ago in Haiti—people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, you know, Napoleon III or whatever, and they got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you free us from the Prince.’ True story! And the Devil said, ‘Okay, It’s a deal.’ And they kicked the French out, the Haitians. But ever since that they’ve been cursed by one thing after another. They’ve been desperately poor…. They need to have and we need to pray for them a great turning to God, and out of this tragedy I’m optimistic that something good may come.

It’s a spectacular bit of reasoning, tying the woes of a stricken nation to the perceived Godliness of its people. And, for a Bible literalist, it’s a perfectly reasonable position as well. If one believes that God has agency in the world, that He in fact has opinions about the conduct of the human beings he has created and rewards them and punishes them in turn, it’s natural to assume that such a devastating event is in fact the will of that deity. This assumption is made explicit throughout the Bible, as God selectively destroys individuals, cities, kingdoms, and at least once, the entire world. In fact, the Bible instructs those faithful to God to carry out the work of eliminating unbelievers for him:

If you shall hear say in one of your cities, which the LORD your God has given you to dwell there, saying, Certain men, the children of Belial, are gone out from among you, and have withdrawn the inhabitants of their city, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which you have not known; Then shall you inquire, and make search, and ask diligently; and, behold, if it be truth, and the thing certain, that such abomination is worked among you; You shall surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein, and the cattle thereof, with the edge of the sword. And you shall gather all the spoil of it into the middle of the street thereof, and shall burn with fire the city, and all the spoil thereof every whit, for the LORD your God: and it shall be an heap for ever; it shall not be built again.

— Deuteronomy 13:12-16, American King James version

Did Tam approach her videos from an atheistic perspective? Like much good satire, it’s hard to pin the perspective down completely, but Tam sees herself as religious. Yet, “I really don’t like calling myself a Christian, because these people who are the face of Christianity have painted Christianity in such a terrible light.” From her perspective, the satire is directed at “the Christians who really don’t care what’s going on around them, and the kind of people who are representing them. Most Christians would never blame these natural disasters on God. But these same Christians let these crazy wackos lead them and let them be the face of Christianity. I kept posting the videos because I wanted to bring to light that if we actually followed these leaders, this is what we would be saying.”

Her faith did not seem to change the digital wrath directed at her, wrath similar in tone to the wrath God has instructed his people to visit upon the unbelievers. Reading the words directed at her, it’s hard not to see the reaction as the wrath of the righteous. And yet, in this world of screens and distance, of pulsing light and little physical proximity, what does the righteous indignation of a million people mean? Thousands of threats of death and rape. Your name and address and phone number. A single pizza, turned away at the door.

Tam is guilty of poor taste—she is guilty of indiscretion, and of tremendously bad timing. But mostly, she’s guilty of not winking at the camera often enough, and not couching her character’s speech in the language of diplomacy.

Professional provocateurs, meanwhile, have the line down perfectly, and know how to use indignation and outrage to gain audience and advantage. The same day that TamTamPamela’s love letter to God spread across the Internet, Glenn Beck shared his thoughts about the crisis with his radio audience of millions.

I’m not saying God is, you know, causing earthquakes … Well, I’m not not saying that either. [Laughing.] What God does is God’s business. I have no idea. But I’ll tell you this—whether you call it Gaia or you call it Jesus, there’s a? message being sent. And that is, ‘Hey you know that stuff we’re doing? Not really working out real well. Maybe we should stop doing some of it. [More laughing.]

Negative reaction to Beck’s calculated raving was mostly of the “what type of God would kill thousands of innocent people to punish them?” variety of indignation. Well, if you are a Christian or Jew who believes in the literal truth of even a fraction of your religion’s holy scriptures, then the answer is simple—your God kills people innocent of all but not loving him. He instructs his followers to do the same. Much worse than that, he’s set up a system of eternal torment to punish the slain unbelievers and sinners of all other stripes. That kind of petulance makes Beck, or even TamTamPamela, look like the very model of grace and understanding.

Not actually existing has advantages: TamTamPamela will suffer no eternal torment. But though she’s passed, her creator lives on. “I’m still definitely going to keep doing what I’m doing. I’m not going to stop,” Tam said. “It’s in my nature to troll people, to get a reaction out of people, to say, ‘Look, you see what’s going on, why don’t you do something about it?’ ”

Isn’t she worried about reprisal? What about applying for jobs in the future—isn’t she worried that searches using her full name might turn up all of this material? She reminds me that her state of residence has a law forbidding hiring discrimination based on religious affiliation. So she might be in the position of defending her character’s viewpoints in order to get a job? She laughs. Seriously, I tell her, the stuff I’ve written has been seen by such a small fraction of the people that have seen your videos, and yet I have constant anxiety about someone out there calling me out for the asshole I am, hating me for what I’ve written. Do you just get used to the hate? Are you and I just built differently?

“Everyone always says that it’s part of my natural personality to have that ‘I really don’t care about anything’ [attitude],” she said, her normally fast cadence of speech slowing down slightly. “But I know what people are like in real life versus the way they are on the Internet.” She paused, and then spoke again, a smile in her voice. “And I think I’m the perfect example of that.”

Ed McMahon vs. The Man

A while back, editor Ryan Standfest asked me to contribute to his black humor comics anthology Black Eye. I wrote a piece for him, but it turned out not to be what he was looking for, and he decided not to print it. The rejection did spark an interesting back and forth about black humor, faith, and other issues.

Black Eye has since been released, and Ryan kindly sent me a copy. The below is less a review than a way of continuing our conversation.
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“It is our duty to give our readership whatever they wish to choke down, hoping it gets lodged in their throats….Sometimes you just have to go for broke,” Ryan Standfest writes in his preface to his anthology Black Eye. In doing so, he neatly encapsulates the dilemma facing the dangerous avant-garde. That difficulty being that the dangerous avant garde has been around, now, for more than a century. Artaud, arguably, was scary. Crumb, maybe was shocking. But if you’re preparing the same recipe Artaud did, are you really creating something your readers can’t digest? If you’re walking in Crumb’s footsteps, are you really going for broke? Or to put it another way, how can you shock the bourgeoisie when shocking the bourgeoisie is by now so thoroughly bourgeoise?

Black Eye has a lot of lovely work, and managed to freak out Canadian customs officials. But it never really manages to figure out how to get around the central dilemma of the unoutrageousness of third-hand outrageousness. The more it rages against the machine, the more overdetermined and reverent it seems.

For example, Michael Kupperman’s advertisement for All-Purpose Animal Groinologues, which will allow you to correctly reference various vertebrates’ reproductive organs for important business presentations, is up to his usual standards of hysterically goofy humor — but it fits comfortably into a genre of comics advertising satire that long since passed through pointed and on into nostalgia. Similarly, Danny Hellman’s two-page spread showcases his usual strikingly clear and accomplished graphic style…but the image of a nude woman dead in a graveyard, tits visible and nether bits carefully covered, seems less like a brutal fist in the face of hypocritical contentment, and more like the sort of casual misogynyist imagery underground-influenced comics artists draw because that’s the sort of casual misogynist imagery comics artists draw. Similarly, Onsmith’s one-panel gags are little more than reiterations of frat-boy gross-outs without the inventiveness of Harold Ramis or the Farrelly Brothers, much less Crumb. Shooting dogs is funny, peeing on homeless people is funny, chopping up women is funny, necrophilia is funny all just in and of themselves because, damn it, being a black humorist means rotely following the tropes of your forbearers without ever having to add an iota of your own imagination. More successful is Gnot Gueddin’s surreal tale of butt-faced fisherman, demonstrating that you can water down Kafka a lot and still get something fairly entertaining. And then there’s Roland Topor’s “100 Good Reasons to Kill Myself Right Now” which is mainly amusing because it reminds you that, oh yeah, those goofy French! They are so cute with their berets and their wine and their nihilism! Oh, by the nose of Gerard Depardieu, that is dark!

Detail from Danny Hellman’s Black Eye centerfold

But Black Eye’s difficulties are perhaps most clearly summarized by its essays. All written by prominent comics scholars, the pieces are careful, well-written and, inevitably, devoid of the bite that they claim to champion. Ken Parille defends Ditko from the moral animadversions attendant upon his objectivist philosophy by summoning up Crumb and Lenny Bruce and declaring that like them “Ditko attacks the status quo, ridicules government and religion, exposes hypocrisy, and, most importantly, sees irony and humor wherever he looks.” Jeet Heer, in similar vein, insists that S. Clay Wilson is not a misogynist or a narrow moralist but that his comics, which occasionally depict homosexual sex, are, therefore, “A Visual Stonewall,” which, like the gay rights movement “speaks to…the new spirit of freedom.” Whether or not you agree with the aesthetic assessments, the intention is clearly hagiographic; you’re supposed to reverence Wilson and Ditko for their brave irreverence. All the idols have already been toppled, and there’s nothing for the nascent black humorist to do but idolize those who did the toppling.


Panel from S. Clay Wilson’s “Star Eyed Stella from Zap Comix No.4, 1969, reprinted from the original art in Black Eye in conjunction with Jeet Heer’s essay

It’s instructive to turn to perhaps the most aesthetically successful contemporary comics black humorist, Johnny Ryan. Ryan’s Angry Youth Comix #12, reprinted in his latest anthology Take a Joke is devoted to “Boob Pooter’s Jokepocalypse.” Pooter, for those unfamiliar with Ryan’s work, is a world-famous comedian dressed in a cheap suit who specializes in hyperbolic offensiveness. In the Jokepocalypse, for example, he sprays people with Holocaust juice, turning them into lampshades; cuts off a soldier’s hand and sticks it in the soldier’s ass; launches a fleet of horribly destructive pity-fuck missiles; frees the breast cancer odd couple from the “cancer bags” of the President’s wife; goes back in time to kill Abraham Lincoln before he can sign the Emancipation Proclamation, resulting in slavery never being abolished; and kills a KKK member in order to cut him open and fly around in his corpse.

Pooter is, in other words, an anarchic black humorist, spitting in the eye of the proper and ejaculating blood upon the PC. Moreover, Pooter is not merely treated to hagiography, but is in fact deified. Pooter isn’t just some comedian; he’s a comedian with godlike powers. For one of his jokes in AYC #13, Pooter shoots himself in the head, comes back as a ghost, enters a woman’s body and masturbates until ghost sperm comes out of her mouth. In AYC #14 a (now-living) Boots elaborately ruins a man’s life, and when the man enacts revenge by killing him, Boots survives through a dizzyingly improbable series of disguises and substitutions, in which it starts to seem like Pooter is everyone and everyone is Pooter. He becomes a kind of immortal, unkillable demon, murdering and torturing in the name of cheap laffs and shallow boredom.

In some ways, Ryan’s use of Pooter is similar to Chris Ware’s use of God in some of his early Acme Novelty Library Work. For Ware, God (in tried and true black humor fashon) is revealed to be a megalomaniacal pissed-off superhero spreading brutality indiscriminately throughout the world. The difference, though, is that God for Ware acts out of sadism and cruelty — not out of a desire to make people laugh. Pooter’s a comedian, which means that he is, fairly directly, a stand-in for Ryan himself. Ware’s “God” satirically reveals the cruelty of the world; it’s a bleak joke on the ogre father. Ryan’s Boobs Pooter satirically reveals the cruelty of Ryan, who doesn’t so much want to upend the ogre-father as he wants to become him. Thus, while cruelty may be fun, it’s not exactly liberating. Pooter, isn’t a revolutionary; he’s a fusty stand-up man, beloved by even the President of the United States — sort of a mean-spirited Ed McMahon. Black humor, for Ryan, isn’t sticking it to the man in the interest of freedom. It’s sticking it to the man in the interest of taking his place — with the understanding that the man is all the more the ogre-father because he’s really just a bored dick.

If you gave Boobs Pooter Black Eye — with its lushly printed Onsmith/Paul Nudd cover, its witty Momma /Medea mash-up by R. Sikoryak, its lyrical surreal comic by Lilli Carré, and, yes, its thoughtful and enlightening essays by Heer and Parille and Bob Levin—if you gave Pooter this anthology, he would vomit Holocaust juice on it. That’s not Black Eye’s fault; Pooter’s a soulless cretin. As such, he defecates, not just on the staid squares, but on the anarchic rebels, until they’re both so slick with feces that you can’t tell the difference between them. Contemplating the mess, it’s hard to see black humor as a romance with daring heroes who courageously upend all values. Instead, it starts to smell a lot like just another stupid laff.

Country Race

This piece first appeared on Splice Today.
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Much of the best American music is the offspring of miscegenation. Whether it’s African-Americans in New Orleans repurposing white band instruments; or Elvis combining country and R&B just as his hillbilly forbearers did for generations; or mash-up artists deliriously merging together white and black; segregation has traditionally, and gloriously ended at the borders of the recording studio.

SoulJazz’s two-disc compilation Delta Swamp Rock: Sounds of the South, At the Crossroads of Rock, Country and Soul provides another satisfying instance of musical cross-breeding. Expected country rockers are represented—Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers show up on several tracks. But the comp spreads its net wider, too, focusing especially on the scene around the famous session players at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, but also reaching out to Memphis and Nashville, with some surprising results. Cher, of all people, delivers a soul-soaked, down and dirty vocal for “Walk on Gilded Splinters,” recorded in Muscle Shoals. Area Code 615, a group of Nashville session musicians, provides “Stone Fox Chase,” a bluegrass-meets-blues-funk rave-up that was later sampled by Kool G. Rap and others. Dan Penn, known for writing hits for James Carr and Aretha Franklin, here sings his own Stax-ready, Memphis-recorded “If Love Was Money.” Linda Ronstadt on “I Won’t Be Hangin’ Round” is encouraged by a chorus that seems to have strolled out of a black church; Waylon Jennings’ “Big D” sidles up to funk, and the whole album is soaked in blue-eyed soul.

SoulJazz’s eclectic, thoughtful choices throughout the two discs emphasize the oft-ignored fact that the South, at least as much as the north, has been a locus of racial integration and racial borrowing. This comp makes sense of the fact that the couple who won the case for racial intermarriage in the Supreme Court, the Lovings, came, not from New York or LA, but from rural Virginia. It’s a reminder that some of the first integrated sessions ever were Jimmie Rodgers recordings.

And yet. While SoulJazz has provided a testament to the South’s proud and little-known history of color-blindness, it’s also highlighted the South’s much better known, and sadder, history of segregation. In its extensive liner notes, SoulJazz mentions several times that the Muscle Shoals scene, steeped as it was in soul music, nevertheless represented a step back in terms of race. The Memphis-based Stax, where so many soul hits were recorded, had as its house band Booker T. and the MGs, an integrated band. Muscle Shoals was inspired by Stax’s example… but its musicians were all white.

The Allman Brothers band did have a black drummer, Jai Johanny Johanson. But the other pillar of the Southern rock movement, Lynyrd Skynrd, was not only all white, but flirted with segregationist rhetoric, unfurling a Confederate flag during their live performances and giving a bump to George Wallace on their hit “Sweet Home Alabama” (not included on the comp.) The fact that African-American Merry Clayton sang back-up on that track intensifies the cognitive dissonance, but doesn’t exactly excuse it. As SoulJazz says, “Walking the line between southern working-class pride and simply reinforcing southern stereotypical bigotry could be a tricky business.”

The sad part about Delta Swamp Rock is that it chronicles a moment when maybe the South could have figured out how to separate bigotry and working-class pride once and for all. There is no doubt that the musicians represented on this comp, and the scene they were part of, loved black music… and indeed, no doubt that they saw it, not as black music, but as Southern music, an integrated tradition that was simply theirs, without the painful fetishization and authenticity-mongering that has so often marred work by non-Southern musicians, from Janis Joplin to the Rolling Stones. Bobbie Gentry’s rough vocals drip, not with black accents, but with Southern accents. She sounds like a black singer, at times, not because she needs black vocal tics to validate her, but because she comes from the same part of the world.

But then there’s the question—if you come from the same part of the world, if this is your tradition, and if that tradition is color-blind, why are the people you surround yourselves with so overwhelmingly pale? The tradition SoulJazz chronicles here was eager to integrate music, but its willingness to integrate musicians was much more nervous. A drummer here, a back-up singer there, but overall blue-eyed soul remained separate from just-plain soul. American R&B attained its current, not insubstantial level of integration through the urban bricolage of hip-hop, rather than through the rural byways of country. White Southern identity remains, to this day, white—defined by a sideways avowal of a rebel segregationist past, rather than by an embrace of its rich and honorable integrated culture. Delta Swamp Rock makes the case that things could have been different, and points to some of the painful reasons why they weren’t.

Avatar the Last Airbender: a very fun American anime! (kind of)

So a couple of weeks ago, I came down with a bad cold.  When this happens, I try to be strong, but usually I end up congested, cranky, and bored. Surrounded by books, mugs of half-drunk tea, boxes of kleenex, and my aging but fierce dog weighing down my feet lest I try to do anything shifty like get up and wander around, I laid in bed, grumbling quietly and bemoaning my fate.

Then I decided to poke halfheartedly through my streaming Netflix queue.

Lo and behold, it suggested Avatar, which several of my friends had been trying to get me to watch.  I stared at the first episode with bleary eyes, and thought to myself, You know, this isn’t half-bad.

Several hours later, I’d downed half the first season.

There’s a lot to like about this series.  It’s written for kids and aired on Nikelodean, but don’t let that fool you.  In this universe, actions have consequences.  Some characters fight, become injured, and later die.  Bad things happen. But, unlike a lot of action-packed stories, there’s depth and humor, great characterization, the chance for mistakes and then redemption.

All that said, what the heck is it about?

Katara, a teen girl, is from the Water Tribe.  She and her brother, Sokka, live at the pole and go out fishing among the icebergs.  Katara is a waterbender, which means that she has an ability to manipulate the element water if she makes certain movements, but she doesn’t know how, because her tribe has been devastated by war.  There are four people–Earth, Air, Water, and Fire, and everyone lived together peacefully until the Fire Nation got a wild hair and attacked everyone.

So, Katara’s tribe has only old folks, kids, and her and her brother left.  Katara and Sokka go out fishing, and while they’re hunting, they find the lost Avatar.

The Avatar was supposed to keep the peace, because he can use all of the elements.  But 100 years ago, the Avatar vanished, and war swept the world.

Katara and Sokka find the lost Avatar, Aang, who ended up trapped in a big iceberg.  They decide to travel with Aang to help him master the elements and restore peace to the land.

But really, that’s kind of a cool, but standard plot.  The characters are what make it great, though.   Each of the characters who personify their elements show that element.  Katara is kind and brave, and she sees the best in people .  She’s water, so she reveals wisdom.  Aang, the Avatar, has mastered Air and shows air qualities like humor but also flightiness.  The Fire Nation character, Prince Zuko, is impulsive, but also passionate.  Each of them has qualities that can be advantages of disadvantages.

The world building is thoughtful and cool. Each of the different elements is controlled by a different martial art.  Water is controlled by Tai chi, for instance, whereas Fire is controlled by Northen Shaolin kung fu.  Watching the different elements battle against each other is quite beautiful.  The different elements live in different dwellings, so you eventually find varying kinds of benders in different climates.

I won’t spoil the story, which I still haven’t finished myself, except to note that you might want to check for plot points in advance if you want to avoid sad or depressing stories (if you’re showing it to a kid, for example).

But OK.  I’m just going to be honest for a moment.

The real reason I love Avatar is that it has the coolest creatures of any show ever.

Flying bison! Bat eared flying lemurs!  Badger moles! Saber-toothed moose!  I often find myself asking, if I could only have one cool awesome animal from Avatar, which would it be?  This has entertained me for hours.  Should I get a dragon, or a ostrich-horse?  Would I enjoy a flying koi or one of those swamp alligators?

Also?  There are fox spirit librarians who scour the world for books and scrolls and knowledge and stories and take it to a hidden library deep within the earth, which is run by an owl.  How is that not awesome?