Utilitarian Review 12/31/11

On HU

For our Featured Archive post, Richard Cook provides a gallery of comic book santas.

Richard Cook on Tron Legacy and our beneficent economic overlords.

Me on Grant Morrison’s Batmen and the endless iteration of our pop crap souls.

Me on Wonder Woman #25 and Habibi.

Eddie Campbell (from comments) on Persepolis and Habibi.

A download of music from women singers around the world.

Tom Crippen with a gallery of work by cartoonist and illustrator Robert Binks.
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Utilitarians Everywhere

On Splice Today I review a rereleased album by the Nigerian Lijadu Sisters.

Also on Splice, I argue that Ron Paul’s racism doesn’t necessarily lose him my vote since his opponents are either actual or wannabe war criminals and torturers.
 
Other Links

Monika Bartyzel on the sexualization of Lisbeth in Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Dan Kois on Broadcast News.

Ethan Heitner with a comic interview with a Palestinian artist and activist.

Laura Hudson with a great review of Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder.
 
 

Robert Binks: More Works by an Unassuming Master ( part 4 )

Hello! We come to the end of our second round of posts devoted to Robert Binks, illustrator and artist extraordinaire. Illustrations will be our focus this week, with a sampling of Mr. Binks’ freelance, private and on-staff work (for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.).

As always, work done for the CBC is © CBC/Bob Binks, and Mr. Binks’ private works are © Bob Binks. Our previous posts can be found here, and scans of his illustrations for a book of  Ogden Nash’s poetry are here.

First, an illustration done for the Toronto Star newspaper during the 1970s:

 

 

The picture grabs the eye, as a newspaper cartoon has to, but it does the job in a way that’s quite unusual. The drawing is built around two sets of steps — the products rising up from the TV, and the animals making up the audience — that zigzag up from the lower right to the higher left. How often do you see that? And the shapes making up each group tend to get bulkier as the group rises.

More dogs, this time in a card Mr. Binks made for a friend who had lost a pet:

 

A pair of subtle, unorthodox touches: the tiny drop of the composition’s central line from left to right, and the spare but warm placement of color among the picture’s gentle grays. The red motto and polka dots are presented front and center, then left on their own until color reappears at the far right of the drawing, just where the gently dropping central line comes to rest.

Now for six drawings taken from a group of nineteen. As we have seen before (that is, here, here and, if you scroll down, here), Mr. Binks finds something provocative about cows, and especially cows  juxtaposed with such unexpected settings as the typical modern metropolis. Or, as he puts it less pretentiously, “Recently I felt I just had to write and illustrate a cow story for my grandchildren. Again, the theme is about a cow and the big city.”

Below is a selection of illustrations from his privately made book and its story of one cow’s heroic odyssey:

 


 

A triumphant sequence! Which brings us to our clean-up pair of pictures. First, from the Toronto Star, a drawing that Mr. Binks has also used for cards congratulating friends on their birthday:

And a studio graphic that the CBC show Take Thirty used for station breaks:

That’s good advice, as we hope to present another Binks sequence a little down the road. In the meantime, enjoy a healthy and prosperous 2012.

Music for Middle-Brow Snobs: International Diva

A mix of women singers form around the world. Download International Diva here.

1. Haenim (Korea) — Kim Jung Mi
2. Virus (Iceland) — Bjork
3. Gham Hai Ya Khushi (India) — Alka Yagnik
4. Yah Luem Kon Klai (Thailand) — Duangjan Suwannee
5. Amores Extranos (Puerto Rico) — Olga Tanon
6. I Love Paul (Germany) — Nina Hagen
7. Life’s Gone Down Low (Nigeria) — Lijadu Sisters
8. Ix-Xieh U Ix-Xieha (Malta) — Rosina Xiberres
9. Na Gamhna Geala (Ireland) — Triona
10. Byyatt Turk (Iran) — Dowleh Helen
11. La Molina (The Mill Song) (Peru) — Yma Sumac
12. The Predatory Herd (Australia) — Murkrat
13. Negrume Da Noite (Paulinho Do Reco) (Brazil) — Virginia Rodriguez

Eddie Campbell on Persepolis and Habibi

Eddie Campbell had a long comment in which he talked about Persepolis, Habibi, the relationship between art and writing, and other matters. It seemed a shame to leave it at the end of the comment thread, so I thought I’d highlight it here. (I’ve tweaked formatting on a couple of links, but otherwise it’s unedited.)

(in response to Mike)

Matthias wrote, in his opening paragraph : “one is perhaps fooled into believing that the form is finally receiving its due, that we have moved beyond the facile.. “story vs. drawing” discussions of yesteryear.”

And then you entered into a “story vs drawing discussion”.

Such a discussion belongs to the arena of comic books where the convention is that different tasks are assigned to different practitioners (you show that you still dwell in this arena when you refer to Ditko and Kirby). And even if they are not so assigned, this consideration of separateness is now ingrained. An aficionado of the comic books follows his favourite artist from one job to the next, hoping that he will occasionally be teamed with a partner worthy of him.

An essential demand of the newer kind of comics under discussion, in which a unified whole is presumed, is that we find a more apt way of talking about them. Satrapi’s Persepolis, when it opens, is the first person narrative of a ten year old girl. The drawing is perfectly right for the story; it expresses the world view of a ten year old girl living anywhere. Characters are simplified in a way that is charmingly naive and perspective is nearly non-existent. Whether Satrapi is capable of a different kind of drawing is not relevant to a discussion of the book. The artist is not a musician being hired by a symphony orchestra that expects her to be able to play the whole classical repertoire. She is giving us a record of her personal experience. She has a natural grasp of what is important in telling a story, which unfolds with simplicity. By the end of the first book we are surprised by how much information we have taken in, as we weren’t aware of taking it in. We thought we were listening to a child talking.

The authentic voice of the original can be appreciated by comparing it with the more professionally knowing treatment of the material in the animated movie parts of which are
excruciatingly embarrassing.

The professionals who worked on it will go onto their next gig and we may hope they will be teamed with material more suited to their outlook.

As to Habibi, Matthias shows that there is nothing in Thompson’s art that is not in the overall meaning of the book. To praise the art separately is the reflex of the critic who has unconsciously recognized the ‘generosity of intent’ that is all over the work and doesn’t want to end on a rude rebuke. That intent is as much the CONtent as anything in the book that appears to be about the Arabian world. Looking at it again two months after I first opened the work, what I see is a cartoon romantic fantasy. I’m incredulous that it has inspired so much argument, or that in a medium that produces a mountain of crap over and over every year anybody could think this is among the “worst” that comics has to offer in 2011.

As always, the criticism against Thompson is that he didn’t make the book that thinking folk wanted him to make. I recall that the title of the TCj review of Blankets in 2003 (2004?-Tcj is never timely) consisted of those words more or less (‘Why Blankets isn’t the book… ?) Here it’s that Habibi is not a complex poem about modern life as reflected in the travails of the middle east, and also he didn’t draw it more in the manner of Blutch.

I remain however dubious about the remark that there is an implicit assertion that the book is more than broad melodrama. I thought that Nadim’s observation that there was more of Disney’s Nights than Burton’s was apt. And the ecological message isn’t more profound than ‘we need to look after the world because it’s where we live’.

While the lavish attention to tangential information raised hope of profundity, some critics have had trouble with him breaking up the linearity of the story unnecessarily. But I see that as just a Tarantino thing. A normal person nowadays takes in so many pre-digested stories (still on holiday, I think I inadvertently watched four movies yesterday) that rearranging the normal running order of events becomes a way of pumping some fizz into the flat drink. There can’t be anybody who doesn’t know how stories go. Sometimes I come into a movie ten minutes late just to make it more interesting. I tried it with Inception yesterday and it still didn’t work. We are a society that is weary with it all. We get more complete stories daily than ever before in history. We shuffle the pack to stave off boredom. Lists. the Months of the calendar of pregnancy, the names of the rooms in the palace, the planets, the nights of Sheherezade, the walk-ons of the Cheshire cat, the ninjas of Frank Miller, the Goddess Bahuchara Mata. Witty juxtapostions: the prophet at the farthest limit of human understanding plays out over the slave putting a spanner in the works in the Rube-Goldbergian plumbing inside the heart of Wanatolia. it’s a play-bauble being turned around and viewed from every possible angle. It’s not the ink line that is the virtuoso show, but the cartoon invention, the prodigious flow of ideas. The ink line serves the demands of clarity, of the ‘control’ that has been discussed above, and it speeds in comparison to Blutch’s because that also is demanded of it. It is liquid, and the ideas run as though out of a tap that has been left on, spilling out the supply of water necessary to quench the thirst of a careening dash through this Arabian fantasy.

And as with Satrapi, that is why Thompson’s drawing is inseparable form everything else in the book. There is certainly much that I find odd in it, including a coy Middle American sense of humour, as in the farting little man in the palace. Isn’t farting viewed differently in Arabia? And the convoluted treatment of sex in Thompson’s work will certainly one day attract a separate study.

The entire roundtable on Habibi and Orientalism is here.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #26

As I’ve mentioned, the last few issues of the Marston/Peter run have been tough going. Marston was, at this point in the series, very unfortunately dead, and it seems likely that at least some of the scripts were being ghosted. In any case, quality fell off something fierce.

I’m pleased to say that things have picked up somewhat with #26, though. The stories are not especially ambitious, but they do seem to be written by Marston, in all his loopy, kinky glory. Giant women enslaving their menfolk?
 

Check. Insane tiger-lady using pressure points to control men’s wills?
 

Yes. Evil treacherous green men attacking virtuous intergalactic golden policewomen?
 

Yay!
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So since Marston’s in his bonds and all is right with the world, I thought I might try using issue #26 to see if I couldn’t address some of the questions Matthias raises in this post about Craig Thompson’s Habibi. Specifically, Matthias argued that critics need to address not only ideological issues, but also aesthetic ones — or, perhaps more accurately, that critics should address ideological issues through aesthetic ones.

Matthias approaches both issues of aesthetics and ideology in Thompson’s work through a metaphor of control. For Matthias, Thompson’s art is unsurprising, slick, and overly pat:

the line is rather mechanical, incapable of surprising us – every stroke is in its place, and we know where it is headed.

Matthias adds:

Everything is the same graceful brushstroke, as if that were the main point. The effect is strangely antiseptic in a work that concerns itself so intently with filth and pollution — its mountains of garbage seem designed to wow us more than anything else.

So above is Thompson’s mound of garbage. Let’s look, in contrast, at an image of Harry Peter’s from Wonder Woman #26.

To start with maybe the most obvious differences, Thompson’s mound of garbage is (as Matthias notes) much more carefully, and even classically composed than Peter’s scene of quasi-classically dressed women. Thompson makes careful use of negative space; the area in front of the garbage dump is blank, setting off the brick-a-brack. The grouping of man, woman, and boat is placed up to one side, isolating it dramatically. The arrangement comes across as painterly, or perhaps as dramatically awe-inspiring in the manner of Doré. The image seems frozen or posed; a dramatic landscape to be placed on a wall and (as Matthias says) admired.

Peter’s illustration is also stiff and still — the guards stand straight off to the side; Wonder Woman stands straight in the center, and the two giants also seem oddly rigid. However, the stiffness here isn’t painterly or dramatic; it’s awkward. The figures aren’t grouped to take advantage of negative space; instead, their just dropped against the disturbing pale green background. They end up looking like paper dolls; you almost want to get a scissors and cut them out. Where Thompson’s drawing seems elaborately finished, sufficient unto itself, Peter’s beckons you to take part — not least by presenting Wonder Woman herself as a puppet, literally manipulated by a cord attached to her neck.

These differences carry over to the use of line. As Matthias says, Thompson’s inking is so sure as to be almost diagrammatic, most noticeably in his calligraphy.

The image above is for the most part bilaterally symmetrical, and the repetition of shapes is careful and more than a little cold. This is miles away from the tradition of Japanese calligraphy, where imperfection — the sign of the writer’s hand — is such a central part of the aesthetic.

Zen Circle by Tanchu Tarayama

 
Peter is certainly capable of graceful lines (check out the eyebrows.)
 

But, as with the composition, he’s not afraid of awkwardness either. The clunky wire connecting the box to Wonder Woman’s neck manages to look so stiff and odd in part because Peter doesn’t keep the two lines forming it an even distance from each other; they bulge out and come together to make an organic metalness. Peter also uses inky blots and daubs almost at random. The patterns on the chief giant’s winged boots, for example, are so joyously messy that they almost fail to parse as feathers. Similarly, the motion lines by the ax are thick and juicy enough that the giant seems ready to grab them. If Thompson’s line is precise, creating a definite, calibrated world, Peter’s line is has a bulbous, erratic grace, which constantly threatening to pull his figures down into their constituent globs.
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I (still!) haven’t read Habibi, so I’m tentative about making wide statements about how the linework might relate to Thompson’s narrative themes and vice versa. So I’ll piggy back on Matthias’ insights, and point out some possible connections that he doesn’t quite tease out. For example, this from Matthias is suggestive:

In Habibi, this unease is primarily located in the treatment of sexual anxiety and transgression, which borders on the obsessive and even the sadistic. It is almost as if Thompson enjoys torturing his characters, especially through sexual humiliation, in a way that suggests meaning beyond the narrative itself.

Matthias seems to see the obsessive sexual transgression as outside of, or opposed to the neatness of the surface…but in fact, I wonder if they’re not all of a piece. As anyone knows who has tried to read de Sade, sadism is really boring. It’s repetitive and obsessive and overly organized; counting whip strokes with the same kind of regular blandness with which Thompson makes pen strokes. Moreover, the very composedness of the junk pile, recalls Laura Mulvey’s comments about the pictorial autonomy of Hollywood cinema:

But the mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic phantasy.

If Orientalism is a voyeuristic phantasy, Thompson’s self-sufficient style might be seen as a means to control and regiment that fantasy — a way to keep everything in its place.

Harry Peter’s art, on the other hand, is much less successful at creating an illusion of containment. Wonder Woman’s look over her shoulder seems deliberately to break the plane of the image just as the figures seem cut loose, floating in front of their own background. Power and hierarchy break apart into knowing glances and wiggling blobs; are these lines pretending to be women, or women pretending to be Peter’s? It all seems staged, not as an image for singular consumption, but as a dress up play in which each viewer and each line is invited to assist in limning each role. In its stiff, awkward way, Peter’s style embraces polymorphous perversion. His line encourages not (or not just) scopophilia, but a plethora of interrupted, indeterminate, pleasures of position and pretense. Aesthetically or ideologically, the line draws you in not as master, but as subject.
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Update: The entire roundtable on Habibi and Orientalism is here.

Our Batmen, Ourselves

This first ran over at Comixology.
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“Morrison’s reclaimed the gaudy, unsettling craziness of Silver Age Batman comics,” Douglas Wolk gushes. Wolk’s a smart guy; he’s not just gibbering enthusiastically here, but is actually ironically referencing the gibbering enthusiasm of Silver Age letter columns. The twist is that by building his abject shilling on the abject shilling of old, Wolk’s manages to posit his views as more considered, and therefore as actually even more naïve and nonsensical, than those of his forbears. His silver affectation is silver-er than real silver, in exactly the way the Batcave was foreshadowed by, and is therefore more real than, Plato’s cave.

As Wolk notes, the awesomest thing about Grant Morrison’s Batman and Robin is that Grant Morrison takes all the Batman mythology there’s ever been — Lazarus Pits, Red Hoods, — and turns it into somnolent cyberpunk hash for drooling continuity porn addicts. If you get a thrill down your spine when you hear Dick Grayson tell Damian Wayne never to underestimate Jason Todd, then your spine will rise right out of your esophagus and do an Adam-West-style bat-dance when resurrected clone-zombie-Batman burps out “Old Chum!” while shambling around Wayne Manor. What Morrison understands, through a Jungian intuitiveness born of years of intensively soldering corporate slogans onto the sacred flesh of his unnameables, is that crazy throw-off moments from the past gain weight and profundity by being repeatedly embalmed and disinterred. Every time Bob Haney hawked up a loogie, Grant Morrison was there, mouth open like a baby bird, ready to ingest, digest, and re-emit it for the sole purpose of waddling his sublimely stained Bat underoos over to the nearest university English Department for professional sterilization and veneration.

The second awesomest thing about Morrison’s Batman and Robin is the faux-Batmen. Morrison is obsessed with Batman and Robin replicants — an evil vigilante Batman and Robin; a British Batman and Robin, Batwoman and whoever her sidekick is, etc. etc. This obsession is actually even more mirrored because it imitates Morrison’s run on Batman, which also had lots of different Bat guys running around, from Man-Bats to the Club of Heroes to lots of clones created by Darkseid.

Or so I’ve been told. I didn’t read the Darkseid arc…which I think is actually the perfect critical stance. All these imitation Batmen deserve an imitation reader, a false fanboy imperfectly refracting and reinscribing the imperfect fanfic. My failure to do due diligence is actually an ironic metacomment on the failure of Morrison to write. a. goddamn. story. Instead, both he and I together are involved in a reproducible narrative meme; thematic material about people wearing masks and having their faces ripped off float off into the marketing ether, where its post-modern non-reference affixes itself to the non-identities of the nonentities who, through reading these comics, actually cancel their own (non) existences.

This sense that Morrison is deliberately talking into a void — or creating a void through his incessant talking — is only intensified by the brilliant decision to instruct the artists to derail the flow of action. For instance:

She “thinks” she can hurt him in twelfth-generation Frank-Miller-retread noir-thought-captions — and the utter exhaustion of the tired “trope” is given a humorous fillip by the fact that the confusing “arty” “angles” exist mainly to “distract” from the “main point”, which is that her “clever” “inner-plan” involves, “like,” “hitting” “him”. Robin’s “Gnnr!” subtly parodies artist Philip Tan’s use of an incompetent delivery system to contain stupid content; it is, in fact, the reader’s “Gnnr!”, a reflexive stimulous-response of simulated approbation as the Pavlovian Bat-joy-schtick is manipulated with crass incompetence to show that we are all just “little boys” abusing ourselves without even token help from our “evil doubles” to whom we have shelled out our $2.99.

Or how about:

Through clever positioning, sparkling dialogue, and the indeterminacy of whatever that is on the floor, artist Andy Clarke makes it unclear for just a moment whether Robin has just hit Batman with a sword, or whether Batman is falling through the floor in the nick of time to escape Robin hitting him with the sword.

It’s true that these are small touches — but it’s this kind of careful attention to detail that most clearly reveals Morrison’s subliminal hermeneutics. Batman comics, like the Batmen themselves, proliferate and subdivide, with no purpose or meaning other than their own infinite iteration. Mainstream super-hero comics are, in this vision, the most perfect of all popular art forms, severed as they are from populace, art, and even form. Like a virus, these comics exist only to perpetuate themselves. Reading them is to hear nanogears grinding pointlessly in the cracks of the universe. Aren’t we all, really, lame, doddering, toothless parodies of corporate properties, wandering brainless through some clichéd post-everything landscape before sinking into our own unmourned and ludicrous tombs? Morrison’s Batman and Robin is a savage satire not only of mainstream comics per se, and not only of Morrison’s own previous work, but of human dignity itself. We wait, not for Godot, because we must existentially hope, but rather for Batman, because we are fucking stupid.

Tech Messiah

Tron Legacy
Directed by Joseph Kosinski
Starring…
Jeff Bridges
Garrett Hedlund
Olivia Wilde

I have a confession to make. I’ve never watched the original Tron from beginning to end. Sure, like everyone else I’ve seen bits and pieces on TV. I saw the part with the frisbee and the light cycles. And I remember it had David Warner, one of those great British actors who always appear in the shittiest movies. But I could never sit through the entire thing. It was boring, the special effects looked dated, and I just don’t care that much about the “infinite possibilities” of cyberspace. So why did I watch Tron Legacy? Because it was on Netflix streaming and I had nothing better to do. Spoilers below…

Tron was about a programmer named Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) who accidentally transported himself into a computer-generated universe. Once there, he was forced to compete in gladiatorial games for the amusement of a race of sentient programs (a.k.a. humans in silly costumes). He eventually teamed up with the local Spartacus, the titular Tron, and together they overthrew the despotic government.

Tron Legacy picks things up just a few years later. Flynn’s divides his time between raising his son, Sam, and building a better world in his computer. To help him manage the latter task, Flynn creates a virtual doppelganger of himself named Clu (Jeff Bridges with digitally younger face). Everything seems to be going well until the digital universe spontaneously creates a new race of sentient programs, the isomorphic algorithms (ISOs). Flynn sees them as a miracle, but Clu considers them an aberration that will ruin his utopia. So Clu seizes control of the digital universe, kills nearly all the ISOs, and leaves Flynn stranded as a fugitive unable to return to his son.

 

Jeff Bridges as Clu

Flashforward several years. Sam (Garrett Hedlund) is a computer genius like his father, but he’s spoiled and directionless. While he inherited ownership of his father’s company, Encom, Sam would rather ride his cool Ducati than run a business. So he leaves it’s management to boring suits who rip off consumers with overpriced products. Of course Sam has major daddy issues, which leads him to investigate what happened to his father. One thing leads to another, and Sam is transported to the digital universe where he’s quickly arrested and forced to compete in the gladiatorial games (with updated special effects!). Sam is eventually rescued by Quorra (Olivia Wilde), the last surviving ISO who was raised by Flynn. Father and son are reunited again, there is much awkward bonding, and they team up to defeat Clu and escape the virtual universe.

Along the way, Flynn essentially gives Quorra to his son because she has some techno-fairy magical nonsense that will revolutionize everything and Sam has to bring her into the real world. Quorra is presumably content with being a tool that the Flynn boys will use to save mankind. I say “presumably” because the filmmakers care little about her motivations (beyond trite shit like wanting to see a sunrise). When Sam returns to the real world, he takes over management of Encom and vows to change the company. So were left with the warm feeling that Sam will use his billions of dollars and techno-magical girlfriend to fix our planet.

 

As popcorn entertainment, Tron Legacy is about average. The special effects are mostly well done, the soundtrack by Daft Punk is great, and attractive women in skin-tight outfits is never a bad thing. On the other hand, the film treats women as mere appendages to men, most of the characters are dull, the plot drags in the middle, and the visual design is lazy. Apparently the inside of a computer looks just like a modern city, but with superfluous running lights everywhere.

To the extent that Tron Legacy moves beyond popcorn and deals with actual ideas, it embraces one core idea above all others: social progress through technological progress. And no other character embodies this idea better than Quorra. She isn’t important as a person. She’s the embodiment for every technological innovation that will usher in the next golden age. She’s a personal computer, a smartphone, the Internet, an iPad, and a cappuccino machine all wrapped up in the body of Olivia Wilde. She will usher in a revolution! But what kind of revolution will it be?

It’s clearly not a Marxist or anarchist revolution. Hardly surprising, given that Disney isn’t in the habit of producing films that advocate the dissolution of mega-corporations like Disney. It isn’t a populist revolution, as the common folk hardly factor into the film. The closest thing to Joe Schmoe is the race of sentient programs in the digital universe, and they’re a decadent, slavish lot. It isn’t a New Agey, “back-to-nature” revolution either. Sam doesn’t give away his fortune or move to a commune. He starts and ends the movie as a billionaire.

But he’s the good kind of billionaire. Good billionaires don’t care about silly things like profitability or market share. They use their wealth (which they undoubtedly earned through hard work and intellect) to fix our world’s problems. And they occasionally beat up criminals too.

So the revolution that Quorra brings is not a revolution of wealth distribution or weath creation, but a “revolution” of wealth investment. The problem with the rich people at the beginning of the film isn’t that they’re rich, but that they only care about becoming slightly richer. Rich people should care about saving the world, preferably by inventing some new technology that fixes all our problems (including the problems created by the last new technology). The rest of us can just sit back and enjoy our gadgets, comfortable in the knowledge that our benevolent overlords and their techno-magic girlfriends have everything well in hand.