Monthly Archives: November 2011

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Corazón Duro

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A merengue download mix. Download Corazón Duro here.

1. Cierra Tu Puño — Johnny Ventura
2. Ay Cuca — Felix del Rosario y Sus Magos
3. Ya Me Canse — Olga Tañón
4. Desde Que La Vi — Los Hermanos Rosario
5. Cabecita Loca — Gisselle
6. El Jarro Pichao — Wilfrido Vargas
7. Un Dia En New York — Los Hermanos Rosario
8. Dime — Ashley
9. Corazón Duro — Alex Bueno
10. Soy Un Hombre Felix — Fernando Villalona
11. Mi Amor Campesino — Milly Y Los Vecinos
12. Yo Se Lo Que Quiere El Negro — Belkis y Las Chican
13. Cojelo Ahi — Anthony Santos

Lyonel Feininger At the Edge of the World

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Amidst the chaos of New York Comic Con weekend, Desert Island held a kids-oriented, indie comics event at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The children of New York’s young well-to-do families perused colorful booklets and questioned the authors about their work, while collecting pages of a screen-printed (and laboriously produced) ‘coloring-book.’ Occasional bursts of doodled sex or vomit made it through the content filter and into a child’s hands, restoring an earnestly subversive-ness to the art experience.


Courtesy of John Meijas

The event tied into the last day of a remarkable retrospective of the work of Lyonel Feininger, subtitled “At the Edge of the World.” Feininger is celebrated in Germany, where he spent most of his artistic career. However, he was born, died, and identified himself as an American—and juggled both an American and German national identities during both world wars. He is best known for a crucial misinterpretation of cubism, developing a romantic, conservative style while the art-world grew more abstract, nihilistic and fragmented. Feininger was successful—he was embraced by the Expressionists, and taught at the Bauhaus. I expect that every major museum of modern art has a Feininger in its collection, but his ‘Prismism’ proved more curious than influential. The Whitney’s resurrection of Feininger didn’t so much revoke previous dismissals as shift the focus away from Prismism to other facets of his work.

In addition to his paintings, “At the Edge of the World” showcased Feininger’s cartoons, photographs, prints, music and wooden carvings. Yet its obvious that Feininger didn’t consider these works as seriously. In a bid to restore Feininger as a relevant artist, the Whitney told a story that Feininger wouldn’t have told about himself. I’m also not sure it’s a story the art-world would have told until recently. The Whitney uses his cartoons and carvings to validate the rosy nostalgism of Feininger’s painting, yet the paintings justify the presence of the cartoons and carvings in the museum. The event is structured like a biographical wunderkammer—a cabinet of curiosities, a history museum. And comics, long eschewed and appropriated by fine-art, are represented on world-class gallery walls and showcased through a series of tie-in events, like talks featuring Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter and Chris Ware, and “Zine Festival.”

The day I visited, the show was packed with the families from “Zine Festival” downstairs. Young volunteers guided kids through a comics-making workshop in the retrospective’s chain of galleries, re-contextualizing the entire show, for a single day, in terms of Feininger’s cartooning. Feininger is celebrated in the comics world for his brief but mesmerizing turn with the Chicago Sunday Tribune at the turn of the century. The playful, eerie power of “Wee Willie Winkie’s World” and “The Kin-der-Kids” carries over into the best of his canvasses. His early paintings greatly resemble his comics, and later Disney concept art to boot.


“Carnival in Arcueil”, Courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago

Yet Feininger never returned to making comics after less than a year with the Tribune, (the grueling work-load partly to blame,) and after discovering cubism, grew disinterested with cartooning and weeded its influence from his work. The best of his late-career cityscapes capture the anthropomorphic zaniness of his beginnings, but are drained of their dark charm.


“The Green Bridge

It’s not revolutionary to order a retrospective through a chronological chain of galleries. What was strange was to feature his earliest work in by far the largest and most dramatic room, and run his mature paintings through narrower, middle galleries. Feininger’s career also didn’t come full-circle, but the last gallery spills back into the first like a bout of wishful thinking, allowing attendees to begin and end the retrospective with Feininger’s village paintings. Only the comics gallery is located outside of this artistic trajectory, in the architectural equivalent of a backstory— after passing the first few examples of his provincial scenes, visitors ‘step back’ from the room to learn what Feininger did before painting, and then continue on. This sidelining was necessary to protect the newsprint from light exposure, but downplays the importance of cartooning in his artistic development. His comics were presented more like a period of proto-artistry than the origin of his career.

From a fine-art perspective, this made sense—comics brings its own historic and media-specific baggage that the show wasn’t equipped to address. The Whitney limited the tangent of their inclusion through the size of the room, and limited the think-work of curating them by simply ‘rehanging’ the selections from the “Masters of American Comics,” show and catalogue, a wonder of outside-comics PR that ensured the pages’ inclusion at all. The showcasing of the broadsheets demonstrated their cultural relevance, sophistication, and artistic qualities— yet not suitable as the ‘first’ room of the show, and first period of his career.

While they are not showcased as his first true ‘artwork,’ Feininger’s comics were central to the curator’s strategy to salvage Feininger as a relevant artist. The inclusion of his Sunday pages and wooden toys, long considered low-brow and craft media, shifted the focus of his repertoire from his half-cubist ‘Prismist’ paintings to the brilliance of his caricatures, and his complicated understanding of nostalgia.

The brightly painted, provincial wooden village dubbed “The City at the Edge of the World” was set up in a large, illuminated case halfway through the show, which attendees circumnambulated in a dark room. Unlike the comics room, it was unavoidable when walking from one side of the show to the other. The attendee behavior became a spectacle in its own right, people gasping and pressing their faces and hands up against the glass—a little like kids at a toyshop window. It would have been nice to have seen similar dramatic touches applied to the dim comics gallery, and might have inspired visitors to have viewed it with the same wonder. It would have been strange if they had used a sibling comic-shop model to have played on the nostalgism of the carvings and Feininger’s work—or even placed them in the same ‘fun’ room. I don’t mean to say that the gushes of attention ‘The City’ received were unmerited. It’s unfair to say that the carvings stole the show, as they provided its title in the first place, and were literally its centerpiece.


Courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago

“The City at the Edge of the World” is a lovely and touching work, complete with a humble back-story. Feininger carved it with few pretensions for his children. Feininger’s nostalgic and reactionary longings in his paintings sometimes feel a little inappropriate, like an oblivious friend at a delicate social gathering. Compared with the war-time anxieties his Expressionist or Cubist contemporaries expressed through their work, Feininger’s concerns feel a little rude, or beside the point. Feininger refused to depict his times, painting mid-nineteenth century villagers, light-showered gothic cathedrals and seascapes. Just as a funeral is a social venue for certain behaviors and meditations, painting was (is?) a social venue for aesthetic and philosophical confrontation, which Bauhaus and Die Brucke membership aside, Feininger only halfway participated in. (He actively participated in ‘painting as a decorative or nostalgic activity.’ This tradition of painting is alive and well today.)


“Church of the Minorities II’


“Sunset at Deep”

Toy-making has never been a venue for the kind of anxious explorations that Feininger refused to paint. Personal and cultural understandings of ‘toy’ also sync nicely with Feininger’s nostalgic and reactionary focus. ‘The City’ feels spontaneous but conceptually well-developed. When displayed in a museum as culturally relevant, artistically sophisticated works, his toys articulate a self-aware kind of nostalagizing and provincial romanticism. Feininger was whittling away during the rise of industrial and commercial toy production, when the tradition of carving risked being pushed off ‘the Edge of the World.’ While Feininger never intended the carvings to be showcased in a major art museum, they poignantly ask the viewer to simultaneously fantasize about childhood and eras past, and think about how these nostalgias are inextricably linked. It reminds me of another, wildly successful and honest assessment of the impulse to nostalagize.

And in a fatigued art world, obsessed with the auctioning off and display of increasingly obscure works by name-brand hero-artists, I think this ‘honesty about nostalgia’ is incredibly refreshing. The art-world is giving in to nostalgia as well. Without a seductive history behind a work of art, people are innately drawn to the figurative and the narrative, just as babies intuitively like to look at faces. If no one knows the direction to go from post-modernism, why not go the route of romanticism and human connection? It’s strongly connected to what people are fundamentally, universally interested in.

Feininger is an exceptionally good figure drawer and rampant anthropomorphizer. More than that, he is a brilliant cartoonist–his nostalgia feels more sinister than secure. He captures the eerie feeling of twilight, the bigness of a small town — feelings lost growing up, and misremembered with a rosy lens. The key to Feininger’s vision is found in his ‘Wee Willie Winkie’s World’ pages. Feininger has an startling memory for the specific breed of unassignable, atmospheric darkness that accompanied childhood.

Right now, Feininger is an apt candidate for resurrection. The figurative focus of his early, village paintings compliments the art world’s nostalgic longings and interest in characters, but in a way that complicates them. The carvings make his subject matter honest, while the comics showcase what is exceptional about his brand of nostalagizing. And the retrospective format is already a character based show: a historic museum, a biography, and often a little kitschy. Finally, the comics room was underdeveloped, but is a testament that the value of Art, cynically expressed as an auction value, depends more on the stories of success and rarity and mystery that surround an object, rather than what kind of object it is. Comics and toys make a lot of money at the block too.

From the comics perspective, his Sunday Pages came off really well, even given the necessarily dim and appendixical room . Attendees discussed them in small groups, and spent a significant amount of time reading through them.

There’s a curatorial urban legend that states that people only spend around seven seconds observing a piece—the number increases or decreases based on how easy the piece is to analyze and look at. Additionally, a wall can be an uninviting space for comics browsing (I’m thinking of the tediously unimaginative R. Crumb’s Genesis show.) However, comics have an advantage in that people know how to read them. Visitors spent a minute or two on each one, and once presented with the ‘punch’ of its ending, stepped back, thought, and “hmphed” at it. Or laughed. Or discussed it with their friend.

Isolated in their side-gallery, the comics raised questions that the show wasn’t willing to answer—they were truthfully a respectfully included, unexpanded footnote. Viewers might have wondered if most comics were this large and beautiful in 1906. Or, how long have comics existed? If visitors didn’t trace the dates on the labels, it would have been hard to figure out when he had drawn these pages, and what their relationship to his painting was. While I was standing over a group of kids drawing comics underneath one painting, a woman walked over to address the volunteer. “Excuse me,” she said, “I was looking at the comics over there, and was interested in knowing when the speech bubble was invented.” Without missing a beat, the volunteer replied, “I think it was invented by Marvel Comics.”

Gay Ghetto Comics 2: Robert Kirby

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Sina Evil is a comics artist, best known for his self-published autobiographical comics series BoyCrazyBoy. He is also completing aPhD on the history of queer comics. He is a huge fan of the Golden Age Wonder Woman. His website is www.boycrazyboy.com.

This is the second of two posts on Gay Ghetto Comics. The first is here. Portions of this post were delivered as a talk at “Materiality & Virtuality: A Conference on Comics” at Leeds Art Gallery on Friday 18th November 2011.
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Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s various queer people felt alienated from the “official” gay and lesbian community and culture – but nevertheless desired some sort of gay community/culture. Among them were cartoonists who felt that their work did not “fit in” with the glossy, mainstream gay magazines. Inspired by the burgeoning zine culture’s “do-it-yourself” ideals, these new LGBT cartoonists began to produce and distribute their work through self-published comics or small independent presses. These cartoonists were critical of homophobia, but far less interested in affirming a sense of shared gay identity and community. Instead they tended to focus on their personal lives and identities, critiqued mainstream gay culture as conformist and commercialized, and created alternative visions of gay life and culture.

Robert Kirby was one of the pioneers of this new queer cartooning when he published the queer alternative comics anthology Strange Looking Exile in 1990, which ran for 5 issues, and was followed by another anthology, Boy Trouble, in 1994.

I will now discuss Kirby’s story “Private Club”. The story was adapted to comics form by Kirby from a short autobiographical prose story by Orland Outland. Although not written by Kirby himself, “Private Club” nevertheless typifies many of Kirby’s own concerns as a writer, and his representation of community and “belonging” in his comics.

The story is narrated by Orland himself – a middle-aged gay man, a former punk, he reminisces about going to gay baths with his teenage friends in the early 1980s in Reno, Nevada. These teenage queers, too young to get into gay bars, would go to the baths not for sex but “for the music.” Orland describes how a DJ in the baths at San Francisco was making tapes of “the best music in the world” which he would send to the club baths in Reno. The young protagonists of “Private Club” are portrayed as awkward and unsure of themselves, afraid of the highly sexually charged gay subculture, but also more focused on having fun with their friends and enjoying music.


 

 

Throughout the strip the narrator’s alienation from “mainstream” gay scenes is highlighted. He and his friends are rejected by the majority of the gay men who frequented the baths in his hometown in Reno, Nevada: “No one at the baths would sleep with us – they were clones, they were men.”

The young punks themselves reject this rejection, emphasizing their difference from the other gay men, turning their difference into a badge of honour: “We were faggots, and proud of it, long before anybody invented queers.” In one panel Kirby depicts Orland and his friends dancing and singing along gleefully to “T.V.O.D.” by synth-punk act The Normal, while a muscular, mustachioed gay man peers from behind a wall in the baths, bemused and annoyed at being interrupted while cruising and having sex.

The teenage faggots’ behaviour is an example of what Michel de Certeau describes as “tactics” in his book The Practice of Everyday Life. De Certeau aims to outline the way individuals unconsciously navigate the everyday and distinguishes between what he calls “strategies” and “tactics”. Strategies are employed by institutions and structures of power who are the “producers” of culture, and seek to control ordinary people; on the other hand, Certeau sees individuals as “consumers” who use “tactics” to negotiate some sense of agency in environments defined by the producers’ strategies. A classic example of “tactics”, described by de Certeau, is the secretary who “poaches” time and materials from her boring office job to write a love letter – on company time and using the institution’s resources. This illustrates Certeau’s argument that everyday life works by a process of poaching on the territory of others, using the rules and products that already exist in culture in a way that is influenced, but never wholly determined, by those rules and products.

Like Certeau’s “tactical” secretary, the young faggots of Outland and Kirby’s strip use the space of the gay baths for something the institution does not intend the space to be used for, transforming parts of it into their own “private club” – as the story’s title implies, a private space (albeit in semi-public) where these teenage punks have the freedom to be themselves, listen to their favourite punk/synth-rock music, “smoke cigarettes, and shriek like the 18-year-old missies we were.” By appropriating space in this way the young faggots create for themselves a different kind of “community”, an alternative reality.

This alternative reality is one that contrasts with the young punks’ repressive, heteronormative surroundings in Reno – in one panel Orland and his friends are depicted standing on a street corner, delighting in singing offensive punk lyrics loudly in an effort to frighten heterosexual passersby – another example of Certeauian “poaching.”

However the young faggots also seem to enjoy interfering and disrupting the “normal,” everyday rules of the game at the gay baths, “poaching” on the territory staked out by the sexually confident community of “clones” that are the club’s primary clientele.

This disruption is manifested through their sloppy, “punk” appearance and their decidedly unsculpted bodies, which contrast with the more groomed and “worked-out” looks favoured on the mainstream gay scene, defying mainstream gay culture’s normalizing disciplinary regimes.

A further disruption of the bath’s status quo is the young faggots’ ebullient enjoyment of “unusual,” punk music, and their playfully effeminate “camping,” which contrasts with the more “serious,” “tough” and “masculine” postures adopted by the majority of the bath’s visitors.

The strip’s protagonist, Orland, describes the baths as “our secret world” of “punk fags in the middle of nowhere,” and distinguishes his friends from the “gay clones.” The story closes in the present day, with Orland visiting Club Uranus, a gay punk rock club in San Francisco; Orland notes that although in theory he should have loved this club, in fact he experiences it as a sanitized, commercialized version of the more amorphous, less official space he had “poached” and shared with his friends.

Kirby portrays Club Uranus as populated by handsome athletic gay men sporting fashionable tight T-shirts, spiky haircuts and trendy piercings, discussing their accessories (“Love the earrings”/”Thanks – got ‘em on sale”) – the narrative caption reiterates that in contrast to the “private club” of Orland’s youth, commercial “punk” clubs are “about being pretty more than about being punk” – San Franciscan queer punks are represented simply as another kind of gay “clone”, another commodified, conformist gay identity.

In my interview with Kirby he described himself as, at one time, feeling like “a square peg surrounded by many round holes” (interview, Minneapolis, Minnesota August 18th 2008) – and this is how he represents Orland, the protagonist of “Private Club” – alienated not only from the gay mainstream “clones” but also from the gay punk scene which in theory he “should” feel a part of; the story, then, like many of Kirby’s comics, emphasizes the tensions and conflicts inherent in the notion of community.

At the same time, “Private Club” suggests that a kind of postmodern experience of community is possible and indeed valuable – the strip emphasizes the importance of Orland’s teenage bonds with his punk faggot friends, and in some ways – and for a necessarily brief time – this friendship group, Orland’s “private club”, does operate as an ideal(ized) community where the young punks’ difference from their heteronormative small town and from the norms of gay culture can be celebrated and enjoyed.

Many familiar elements of gay alternative cartoonists’ representation of mainstream gay culture are present in “Private Club”: “Mainstream” gay men (whether in repressive small towns or metropolitan gay ghettoes) are represented as vacuous, body fascist, and conformist, and are visually represented (on the whole) as slim, athletic, and fashionable in a commercial, “mainstream” way. They are akin to the types of gay characters prominent in comics like Troy, Joe Boy, Kyle’s Bed & Breakfast and Chelsea Boys, but in “Private Bath” they are background characters and figures of mockery, in contrast with the punky young faggots who are the story’s protagonists. The young protagonists’ “punk” gay identities are also posited as an alternative to mainstream gay identity – this is a kind of queer identity built around references to “alternative” fashion, music and taste. Characters like the young punks of “Private Bath” (re)appear as protagonists throughout Kirby’s oeuvre, and can also be found in the work of many of the other gay alternative cartoonists who began publishing their comics independently from the 1990s to the present day.

Life on Earth; Life on Bjork

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I’m reprinting two related reviews; the first appeared on Madeloud; the second on Splice Today.
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Edward Williams – Life on Earth: Music From the 1979 BBC TV Series

I actually cried when I missed an episode of the David Attenborough BBC mini-series Life on Earth.. I was in middle school at the time, and my family watched the show religiously every week, but I had a swim meet, and we’d just forgotten. Worse, it was the reptile episode. I loved reptiles.

It’s hard to believe I remember all that now, three decades later. I remember, too, that much as I loved the show, the end of each segment was thoroughly disturbing; you’d watch these wonderful, strange animals for an hour, learn about their habits and their lives, and then, at the end, David Attenborough would explain in his matter-of-fact, British voice, how man’s relentless expansion was inevitably going to kill them all.

And yeah, I remember the soundtrack too. Not the melodies or anything, but the broad outlines of the music; quiet, translucent, and fey; chamber music to contemplate extinction by. It’s bizarre how clearly the show comes back to me while listening to this newly released reissue of music from the series. The plangent woodwinds, the splashes of strings, the dischords that never resolve but just drift away — I can see the water dropping into the pond, or the butterfly coming out of its cocoon, or the hummingbird wings slowed down so that Attenborough could count the beats.

Obviously, I’m older at this point, and while the music seemed sui generis back then, it now fits into a recognizable context— which is to say, composer Edward Williams loves, loves, loves him some Debussy. But even so, there’s a strangeness and a humor here that’s hard to resist. The wonderfully named track “The Sex Life of Ferns” starts with a light percussive patter, as if all those spores are nervously shuffling their bits in anticipation; then, towards the end, there’s a lazily triumphant woodwind, and you can imagine various leafy greens rustling in a satisfied manner as the sun sinks low in the distance. “Big Mammals” has a slow, swaying lope with just a touch of Tarzan jungle drum, so you can almost see those big trunks swaying. And then there are the lovely albeit somewhat unfortunate Orientalisms on “Japanese Macaques.” It’s all so melancholically precious, or so preciously melancholy. I don’t know if Donovan ever saw Life on Earth, but if he did, he would have understood.

Perhaps my favorite track is the final one, taken from the last episode in the series, “Man.” I pretty much hated “Man” at the time; I wanted to see reptiles biting things and frogs jumping, and elephants trundling, so a bunch of people walking through cities was just not what I was parked on the couch for. Yet, despite my disinterest, Attenborough’s final words have remained with me for most of my life, and it was a jolt to hear his narration excerpted here. “The fact remains that man has an unprecedented control over the world and everything in it. And so, whether he likes it or not, what happens next is largely up to him.” The music for the finale is an odd duel between a inspiring fanfare and a mournful little solo violin theme. Eventually the fanfare seems to win out…but in the last second or two it trails off weirdly, as if embarrassed. It’s an appropriately uncanny moment. In this mini-series and album, life doesn’t so much dominate the planet as haunt it, passing across the surface of the earth like a shadow, or an oddly vivid memory.

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Bjork: Biophilia

Bjork is Bjork. Over the years she’s become one of those artists who is a genre unto herself. Though she’s got connections to the fey new folk movement and links to the fey end of New Age electronica and an affinity for other fey Icelandic post-rock romantics like Sigur Ros, the truth is that when you listen to any of them and Bjork, she becomes the meme and they become the iteration. Or, to put it another way, they all sound like Bjork more than Bjork sounds like them. You can compare her to whoever till your hair turns pixie polycolors, but Bjork is not post-rock folk electronica. She’s Bjork.

Which is why her latest effort, Biophilia, gave me a start. Not that it’s different from her past releases—if you’ve heard Vespertine(2001), or Medulla (2004), or Volta (2007), you’ve got a good idea what to expect from Biophilia. It’s just that all of a sudden, the Bjork sound didn’t sound like Bjork. It sounded like Edward Williams’ music for the David Attenborough mini-series Life on Earth.

What made me think of Williams’ quiet, Debussy-like score are no doubt Biophilia’s lyrics. You can get the gist from the song titles: “Moon,” “Crystalline” and “Solstice.” The album is post-rock folk electronica for the natural world. You listen to its plangent blips and murmurs and visualize plants opening or birds’ wings beating in motion so slow you can see each feather shudder. Nature, in Bjork and Williams, is figured as a series of disturbingly vivid tableau arranged for uncanny contemplation. At the beginning of “Hollow,” the echoey, arthymic keyboard sounds patter forward, then pause, then patter forward, then pause, like a small furry creature scuttling across the ground towards food. “Moon”‘s plucked lilt could be the background for a butterfly slowly coming out of its cocoon. “Thunderbolt” is even more explicit: “Staring at water’s edge/Cold frost on my twig/My mind in whirls/Wandering around desire/…Craving miracles.” Then at the end of the song, the electronics start burping like a series of frog calls. Suddenly Bjork isn’t Bjork. She’s library music for a nature special. How did that happen?

“Virus” seems like an attempt to explain the process. “Like a mushroom on a tree trunk/as the protein transmutates/as I knock on your skin/and I am in,” Bjork sings in her usual hoarse, soaring precious diva style as the music drips and clinks, water falling on chimes. Nature is both a smooth vision on the eye and an ominous visitor moving under the skin. Nothing is really itself. “My sweet adversary,” Bjork calls her lover/disease, as the distanced music and its surface prettiness turn her into an aestheticized transient shadow. If you watch nature, and nature is you, then you are both inside and outside, a ghost infection haunting yourself. At that point, you can hardly be surprised when you become something else, even if that something else is a 30-year-old BBC miniseries.

Or, for that matter, an up-to-the-minute pomo marketing endeavor. Biophilia is as detached from its identity as Bjork is from hers. It isn’t really an album so much as a nexus for related products, including a series of apps for every song and a range of multimedia live shows some of which, apparently, include National Geographic imagery. Still, as I lack the funds, the technology, and the interest to pursue the album through its metastasizing iterations, I’m happy that my brain has instead decided to attach the soundtrack to my own hazy memories of creepily perfect nature specials past. I hate to admit it, but Bjork as Bjork was beginning to get a little boring. Bjork as mushroom with David Attenborough narration, though, is a thought to cheer every phylum.

Utilitarian Review 11/19/11

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On HU

In our Featured Archive post this week, James Romberger discusses the critique of Christianity in the work of artist David Wojnarowicz.”

I talk about decadent viewers and decadent villains in 13 Assassins.

Sina Evil on Gay Ghetto comics.

I reviewed Marston/Peter Wonder Woman #25.

Robert Stanley Martin on Julian Barnes’ Sense of an Ending.

Nadim Damluji interviews Craig Thompson about Habibi and Orientalism.

I compare Kyrli Bonfiglioli’s All the Tea in China to Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang.

I talk about Bella, Katniss and (fear of?) femininity. (Caroline Small makes a special guest appearance.)

I explain why Obama is no Khruschev.
 
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic, I had a post about Twilight and the Hunger Games.

At Splice Today I argue that Herman Cain’s campaign does not mean that ideology has trumped racism.

Also at Splice I talk about frame stories and narrative in How To Train Your Dragon. (Also why it’s better than Harry Potter.)
 
 
Other Links

Shanenon Garrity asks various folks (including me) what comics adaptations they would and would not like to see.

Ty Templeton’s blog is really entertaining.

Rod Dreher on empathy and justice in light of the Penn State scandal.

Tucker Stone with a long interview with Mark Waid.

Obama Is No Khrushchev

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Prosecuting former administrations for crimes divides us from our friends, encourages our enemies, and distracts us from the pressing and difficult business of governance. As one high-ranking government official said of a liberal reformer bent on raking up the crimes of the past, “He’s just handing the sword to others, helping the tigers harm us.”

As the poetic idiom suggests, the high-ranking government official was not Dick Cheney — it was Chairman Mao. And the liberal reformer in question was not Glenn Greenwald; it was Khrushchev.

I recently read William Taubman’s massive biography Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, and the book was on my mind as I paged through Glenn Greenwald’s new volume With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. The parallels are fairly obvious. Greenwald argues that American elites have effectively and deliberately placed themselves above the law. Illegal activity by the wealthy or powerful — Nixon Watergate crimes; Reagan Iran-contra crimes; Bush-era illegal wiretapping and torture; Wall Street malfeasance which led to the financial collapse — is not so much ignored as deliberately sanctified. Democrats, Republicans, and the press corps all agree that prosecuting the powerful would be divisive and hurt America. Therefore, as Obama has often said, “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”

Mao, obviously, felt the same way about Stalin. So, for that matter, did many in the Soviet hierarchy. These people weren’t idiots; they had good reason not to want to expose the extent of Stalin’s crimes. Communism had many enemies, both internal and external. For those enemies open discussion of the hideous mass killings of the Stalin era would be a propaganda coup. Moreover, Stalin’s heirs were all implicated in his atrocities. Mao in China was, of course, wading through shoals of decaying bodies, and was using Stalin’s personality cult as a blueprint for his own. The Russian elite was more directly involved; all had, at Stalin’s behest, consigned innocent people to death; all had failed to speak out to protect the innocent. Khrushchev, who succeeded Stalin, had certainly signed death lists.

Yet, despite his own culpability, Khrushchev denounced his predecessor. Taubman in his biography calls this denunciation, delivered in a four hour speech, “the bravest and most reckless thing [Khrushchev] ever did.” It was certainly a braver thing, by many orders of magnitude, than any public act committed by Barack Obama, or by George W. Bush, or, for that matter by Clinton or even the sainted Reagan. We tend to think of Soviet rulers as absolute dictators who can govern with impunity, but the truth is that Khrushchev’s position at the top of the hierarchy was by no means entirely secure, and his decision to out Stalin’s crimes was a major political gamble. Taubman describes the reaction to Khrushchev’s speech, delivered in secret to the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956.

Many in the audience were unreconstructed Stalinists; those who had denounced former colleagues and clambered over their corpses suddenly feared for their own heads. Others, who had secretly hated Stalin, couldn’t believe his successor was joining their ranks. As the KGB chief-to-be Vladimir Semichastny remembered it, the speech was at first met with “a deathly silence; you could hear a bug fly by.” When the noise started, it was a tense, muffled hum. Zakhar Glukhov, Khrushchev’s successor in Petrovo-Marinksky near Donetsk, felt “anxious and joyous at the same time” and marveled at how Khrushchev “could have brought himself to say such things before such an audience. ” Dimitri Goriunov, the chief editor of Komsomolskaya Pravda, took five nitroglycerin pills for a weak heart. “We didn’t look each other in the eye as we came down from the balcony,” recalled Aleksandr Yakovlev, then a minor functionary for the Central Committee Propaganda Department and later Gorbachev’s partner in perestroika, “whether from shame or shock or from the simple unexpectedness of it, I don’t know.” As the delegates left the hall, all Yakovlev heard them uttering was “Da-a, da-a, da-a” as if compressing all the intense, conflicting emotions they felt in the single, safe word, “yes.”

Of course, George W. Bush is not Stalin. Stalin caused the death of millions, and ordered I don’t know how many innocents tortured to death (thousands? tens of thousands?). Bush’s aggressive (and therefore, by international law, illegal) war in Iraq killed only in the low hundreds of thousands according to most estimates. Greenwald says the torture Bush authorized probably resulted in the deaths of at most 100 people. Similarly, the Obama administration and its Democratic allies have much less to lose by exposing their predecessors than did Stalin’s followers. As Greenwald points out, Democratic muckety-mucks like Nancy Pelosi and Jay Rockefeller were informed of Bush torture tactics and illegal wiretapping, which makes them complicit under the law. But they weren’t murderers like Khrushchev, and they haven’t just lived through a political bloodletting like the purges. If worse came to worse, they would only get jail time, not execution following a quick show trial.

These comparisons, though, do not necessarily redound to the credit of our political class. Khrushchev exposed Stalin-era crimes even though he had much more to lose by doing so than Obama has to lose in exposing Bush’s. Even in terms of national security, Khrushchev was in a significantly more precarious position. The U.S. has al-Qaeda to worry about; the Soviet Union had the U.S.— and, many, many other enemies, all much more credible as existential threats than Osama bin Laden could ever hope to be even in his most megalomaniacal wet dreams.

In fact, Khrushchev’s deStalinization damaged the Soviet Union in the short term, and arguably destroyed it in the long. The secret speech, which was at Khrushchev’s insistence duly publicized, sent shock waves through Soviet colonies in Eastern Europe. The Hungarian Revolution — which Khrushchev ruthlessly and bloodily crushed — was inspired in large part by the revelations of the true horror of Stalin’s reign. Khrushchev’s speech also alienated Mao, separating the USSR from one of its most important allies. Khrushchev’s anti-Stalinist rhetoric was used against him when he was forced from power in 1964, with one colleague declaring, “Instead of the Stalin cult, we have the cult of Khrushchev.” Even after Khrushchev himself was gone, his reforms continued to undermine the government and philosophy to which he had devoted his life. In the late 1980s, Khrushchev’s deStalinization became the blueprint for Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost, which ultimately caused the Soviet system itself to buckle.

So Obama and Mao aren’t wrong. Looking backwards can turn you into a pillar of salt. Exposing the crimes of the powerful really can delegitimize a government, and holding past rulers accountable really can have devastating consequences. To have faith in the rule of law, as Greenwald does and (vacillatingly, but nonetheless) as Khrushchev did, is to have faith in the system. It is to believe that democracy (or in Khrushchev’s case, socialism) is strong enough and vital enough to withstand the light of truth.

As it turned out, Soviet Communism wasn’t strong enough to withstand that light. Maybe our government isn’t either — in which case, the sooner we find that out, the better. Khrushchev’s deStalinization resulted in much misery for both himself and the country. But I don’t think anyone doubts it was the right thing to do.

Not that Khrushchev was a saint. On the contrary, he was a boorish, overbearing, often cruel man, with blood on his hands up to his elbows. But if we’re going to toss out the rule of law and model ourselves on tyrants, better him, by far, than Mao or Stalin.
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This first ran on Splice Today.

Tween Horror

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I had an article on the Atlantic a couple of days ago in which I talked about the Hunger Games and Twilight, comparing Bella and Katniss. I argue that Bella is in many ways stereotypically feminine (passive, focused on romance and motherhood) while Katniss is in many ways stereotypically masculine (competent, deadly, not focused on romance).

People have not been pleased with me. Specifically, Alyssa Rosenberg and Amber Taylor take me to task. Alyssa started out by calling me condescending and went on to say:

First, there’s something really profoundly weird and limited about this definition of femininity — and condescending in the piece’s sense that a totalizing devotion to motherhood, to relationships, to sex, to girliness is the only, or most worthy, definition of femininity. The second-wave feminists who produced Our Bodies, Ourselves may not have done the research into a groundbreaking medical text that changed the relationship between women and the medical establishment while wearing pretty dresses*, but that doesn’t mean that their work wasn’t deeply attuned to the feminine. Creating space for women’s voices in hip-hop, and suggesting that women have something specific to offer the form, may not be explicitly attuned to the state of romantic and sexual relationships, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an exploration and assertion of the feminine. Choosing to have a baby even if it means you have to be on bed rest or endanger your life might mean you’re devoted to motherhood, but it doesn’t actually make you more of a woman than casting off your cloak to duel the holy hell out of Bellatrix Lestrange or climbing into an exo-suit and doing battle for a little girl’s life — and by extension, the continued existence of the human race.

As is usually the case, Caroline Small is more eloquent than I am, so I’ll let her respond. This is a comment she left on the Atlantic site before Alyssa’s post went up, but I think it resonates.

The comments to this article are really pretty interesting. But pretty disheartening, really, too. A lot of popular feminism, which seems to be where some of the commenters are coming from, isn’t very attentive to the history of cultural gendering, where certain traits were indeed gendered “female” and certain “male”, and where the male traits were generally considered better and more worthwhile. Those preferences haven’t really gone away — the sets of traits and behaviors are still valued differently. They’re just more available to individual people of both genders now.

I’ve been seeing these “I’m glad I grew up with Buffy and not Bella” things too, so it’s not just Katniss. I sympathize; Bella doesn’t particularly appeal to me either. But it doesn’t take much insight to recognize that she aligns more closely with “traditional femininity” than Buffy and Katniss do.

Fortunately, there are lots of women today whose self-perception aligns with the masculine values, to the point that those women would never describe those traits as “masculine”. I think these comments reflect that. But being able to see them as non-gendered, or differently gendered, is something we have the luxury of doing because we were fortunate enough to have come up after feminism fought those hard battles, in an era where other people and society overall enforce those gendered norms on our individual bodies much, much less.

A lot of people seem to think that the point of feminism is making “masculine” behavior acceptable for women — or making no behavior unacceptable for women, that is, separating the behavior from the bodies of the people who perform the behavior and not judging women who prefer those historically masculine traits. And I agree that is one goal of feminism.

But feminism used to also be about recognizing the value and beauty of the way women historically did things, of women’s ways of knowing, of women’s unique experiences — of “femininity” as a counterweight to the excesses of “masculine” strength and authority and aggression. It used to be about valuing “femininity” as a place from which we could criticize and challenge the bad things in our world. A lot of the distaste for Bella is genuine distaste for the historically “feminine” categories and behaviors and values and aesthetics, but it’s generally expressed without even the slightest recognition of how problematic and limiting — and historically patriarchal — that attitude is.

So I’m hesitant that it’s a good thing to derogate traditional femininity, either in favor of traditional masculinity or even in favor of an individual woman’s right to behave however she pleases. A feminism that rejects the very notion that culture is gendered (in ways that have nothing to do with biology) is a feminism that’s amputated its best critique of power. It’s essentially co-opted by historically masculine cultural biases and preferences — including the ones for violence and strength. That’s tragic, if that’s where we are.

Part of the appeal of characters like Katniss is that they challenge conventional gender without completely eradicating it. Part of the appeal of characters like Bella is that they subvert conventional gender without really challenging it at all. I don’t much like either of them at a personal “do I want to hang out with these people” level — I’m with the person who prefers Hermione, although HP is almost as badly written as Twilight. But it strikes me that not being able — or willing — to think the difference is a problem.

Girl power is great — except when it moves beyond allowing people with female bodies to behave any way they like and becomes a new set of restrictive, normative, angry, prejudiced norms that bully people with female bodies into behaving a certain way. The widespread and almost-always knee-jerk “feminist” contempt for Bella, both in itself and in comparison with “tough” female characters like Katniss and Buffy, is a tremendous intellectual and social failure in that respect.

So I think it’s worth asking the defenders of Katniss — is there actually a feminist critique of the power structure that gets Katniss into the book’s defining life or death challenge, the kind of systematic feminist critique you get from, say, Joanna Russ or Erica Jong? I can be talked out of this position, but it doesn’t seem to me that there is. The same question could be asked of Buffy, and of any other girl power heroine. Twilight may actually have the edge on that one — there is a definite critique of the Volturi from Bella’s perspective that aligns nicely, yes, with Christian ideals, but also with traditionally feminine ones. (Although Bella is certainly no Alyx.)

Ignoring the seductiveness of those “masculine” characteristics, pretending their relationship to authority and strength and power and violence is transformed just because a woman engages in them — — that’s not feminist at all. And neither is perpetuating biases and prejudices against the historically gendered-feminine traits. A feminism that can’t make room for Bella is a feminism that’s going to have a lot of trouble getting purchase with women who like Bella, and that seems like a tremendous mistake to me.

To me it seems like Caroline has Alyssa pretty much dead to rights. Alyssa is basically insisting that the feminine be defined as, “anything that women do.” And that has been one goal of feminism. But another goal has been to champion those things traditionally associated with women. And you can’t champion those things if you feel it’s condescending to even suggest that they exist.

The difficulty with championing them if you refuse to admit they exist is perhaps best epitomized by another commenter on the Atlantic. This is Genevieve du Lac. Her comment has garnered 16 likes, so I don’t think she’s just speaking for herself here.

I’m really disgusted with these definitions of femininity and feminism. Why can’t a woman be competent and feminine at the same time? Femininity is not weak. And Bella is just retarded. The two neurons she’s got floating around in her cerebellum are drunk off too much estrogen… like most 16 year olds. So she’s got some feminine qualities – like following her feelings, etc. That does not make her the epitome of femininity.

I’d like to think a woman can be feminine and still be competent. I can wear my makeup and heels and take care of my hair just as well as I sky dive, shoot an arrow, shoot a pistol, finish my MBA, and have a career. Sheesh.

Like Alyssa, Genevieve wants the feminine to mean everything women do. But to get there, she has to call Bella “retarded” and sneer at her “estrogen.” Which, to me, seems like a problem.

Alyssa doesn’t lambast Bella in such offensive terms, of course, which I appreciate. But she is coming from at least a vaguely similar line of country.

And while those values are worth examining further, Twilight‘s also eminently critiqueable on narrative grounds, something Noah gives very little credence. Complexity is the stuff of genuinely compelling decision-making, as well as compelling storytelling. What’s troubling about Twilight is less the idea that Bella picks Edward and more the inevitability of their eventual union. Once Edward walks into Bella’s science class, she never really considers anything else, never gets presented with any other truly compelling options, she treats the humans in her life who are graduating and going off to their own adventures with dismissiveness and disinterest. Tough choices are fascinating. Defending the world’s kindest fate is rather dull.

And just as I’m bored by Bella’s certainty and dismissive attitudes towards people who set other priorities and take other paths, I don’t appreciate the idea that I don’t live up to Noah Berlatsky’s very particular standards of femininity, I’m doing it wrong. There may be effective arguments for a Christian focus on love rather than strength. But a strident and myopic lecture to women with a variety of priorities isn’t likely to be one of them.

Alyssa is arguing for narrative complexity — complexity involving action, politics, and suspense. She goes on to argue that the Hunger Games is interesting in part because it’s about how politics destroys families; how the public trumps the private and why that’s evil.

But…that’s not unique to the Hunger Games. It’s just how adventure stories work. You’re fighting for home and family; that’s the motivation, but it’s not the story. That’s why Amber Taylor is misleading when she says that Katniss’ actions are all about her family. Diagetically they are…but that isn’t what the books focus on. We hardly know Katniss’ sister, or her relationship to her; Pru really just exists as a kind of pure idol of goodness and innocence, a reason to keep fighting, like any number of pure-women-left-at-home in any number of adventure books. What Alyssa wants, and what adventure narratives want, isn’t the exploration of love and relationships…so they push those over to the side. And instead, you get violence and things blowing up.

I don’t have any problem with things blowing up in my entertainment. I don’t know that I seek that kind of thing out quite as much as my wife does, but I’m perfectly happy to go along for the ride. Enjoyable as those things-blowing-up are, though, I like other kinds of stories too. Such as, occasionally, romance. Which is what Twilight is.

As in most romances, narrative complexity, in terms of events and suspense, is not the point. You know Bella is going to get her guy, just like you know that Jane Austen’s heroines are going to end up happily married. That’s how romance works. People — often people known as “women” — read those books not because they’re idiots who don’t like complexity, but because they are interested in a different kind of complexity. Specifically, they’re interested in the ins and outs of love; not just whether people love each other, but how they do so; not who will live and who will die, but what will they say and how will they say it and how will their relationship develop?

For instance, there’s that scene in the Twilight series where Edward’s family is voting on whether to turn Bella into a vampire. Edward’s father votes yes, and his reason is that Edward has vowed to kill himself when Bella dies. For Edward’s father, his love for his son therefore means that Bella has to also live forever.

As a father, as a husband, as someone who has been thinking a lot recently about in-laws and what they mean for marriage and for love — I found, and find that scene really moving. And that’s where the suspense and surprise in Twilight comes from; from the explanation and exploration of love and intimacy, not just between Bella and Edward, but between Bella and Jacob, and Jacob and Edward, and Edward’s family — the entire cast of characters, in other words. It’s different than watching the nifty new way Katniss kills somebody, I’ll grant you. But it’s not worse. For me, anyway, I find it more compelling. Or, as Laura Blackwood says in a lovely recent essay, “The Twilight series challenges what I would call the “Buffy Summers Maxim”: that teen heroines be physically empowered, oftentimes at the expense of emotional clarity.”

None of which means that Katniss, or Alyssa, is “doing it wrong.” Even if the Hunger Games is (like Twilight) dreadfully written, I still like Katniss. I like watching her figure out how to kill people; I like her tomboyish competence; I like her butchness, I like her delight in dressing up, even if the series won’t really allow her to own it. I like the way she finds true love and family at the end. She’s not my favorite heroine in the world, and her whining (like Bella’s) gets pretty tedious, but overall, I enjoyed spending time with her. That’s why I went out of my way to say at the end of my essay at the Atlantic that Katniss and Bella aren’t opposed. As another writer notes here, it’s not an either/or choice. Lots of girls admire both characters. I think it’s possible to imagine that Twilight’s heroine and the Hunger Games’ heroine would find something in each other to love and admire as well.

Amber Taylor disagrees with me there, though:

The idea that there would be a fight is absurd, but the reason for peace is not that Bella and Katniss “might understand each other’s desires and each other’s strength” and walk away in mutual respect. Katniss wouldn’t fight Bella because Bella is not an autocratic totalitarian dictator. Bella threatens exactly nothing that Katniss values, and thus Katniss, a user of violence who is not inherently violent, would probably shrug. Katniss’s political consciousness and promotion of self-rule does not threaten Bella’s tiny microverse of loved ones and would likewise be a non-issue to Bella.

For Taylor, Katniss wouldn’t respect Bella. She’d just ignore her, because Bella is no threat. But I have to ask…if Bella “threatens exactly nothing” that Katniss or Taylor or Alyssa values, why then are so many writers so eager to attack her? If she’s not a danger, why call her a “retard” or deride her as dull or passive or sneer at her “tiny microverse of loved ones” — that thing that some of us of insufficient political consciousness refer to as our “family”? What, in other words, is so scary about Bella and the girls who love her? And could it, maybe, have something to do with our culture’s ambivalence about femininity?

I’ll let Sarah Blackwood have the last word.

Bella holds up a cracked mirror and shows us some things we don’t want to see. But she also reminds us that the imagination resists checklists of appropriate behavior. Teen girls resist checklists. The really interesting conversations start to happen when we stop circling the wagons against “bad examples” and “passivity” and start exploring not only what we want our heroines to be like, but why.