Utilitarian Review 1/26/13

Posted on January 26, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Nadim Damluji on the tiny number of Chinese comics creators.

I talk about Kill Bill and Quentin Tarantino, Humanist.

Voices from the Archive: Trina Robbins on Marvel’s hapless efforts to sell Barbie comics.

I talk about the Johnny Cash’s work with Rick Rubin.

My nine-year-old explained the appeal of Lee/Ditko Dr. Strange. (with fan art!)

Subdee on the economics of Django Unchained. (This, incidentally, completed our Django Unchained roundtable.

Kailyn Kent on the ironies of Jason Lutes’ Berlin.

Michael Arthur provides a NSFW explanation of the furry subculture.

Ng Suat Tong with the case against Moto Hagio’s Heart of Thomas.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I argue that the fake geek girl meme means maybe we need to get rid of geeks.

At the Atlantic I argue that the 50 Shades of Grey Movie will be better than the film (though still bad.)

At the Atlantic I make the feminist argument against women in combat.

At Splice Today I write about the mixed blessing of discovering the Republicans are not completely insane.

Other Links

Melinda Beasi and Michelle Smith on Heart of Thomas.

Erica Friedman on manga’s bumpy move towards digital.

Brian Cremins on comics and nostalgia.

Calista Brill on when it might be time for hopeful comics creators to give up.

The American Conservative on how even Texas is sick of testing.

The Literary canon based on academic articles.

The Atlantic on sex and sexual assault at military academies.

Mary Elizabeth Williams on why you can think fetuses are alive and still be pro-choice.

This Week’s Reading

Still reading Fellowship of the Ring to my son. I reread E.M. Forster’s Room With a View; rereading Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Also read Alex Woolfson and Winona Nelson’s Artifice for a possible review.

Heart of Thomas, Heart of Tedium

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Ng Suat Tong

[Those looking for background details and a synopsis of The Heart of Thomas can do no better than to read Jason Thompson’s review.]

In the opening pages of The Heart of Thomas, the eponymous object of desire and remembrance, Thomas Werner, leaps from a railway bridge to his death.

But who is he? This intangible ghost of doomed naivete crushed by the morass of faithlessness and abandon which has inundated the boarding school which he attends. Perhaps, a metaphor for innocence lost, reborn in the form of his more resilient lookalike, Erich Fruhling—a boy who soon becomes an indelible memory of that life carelessly thrown away; a soul on the path of transmigration in an alien and barbaric Christian world of torment.

Of course, Thomas’ body isn’t subjected to any tragic or tangible mangling despite the suggestion that “his face was crushed.” Death in Hagio’s world is as chaste as the heated embraces and kisses which reach a crescendo towards the closing chapters of the manga. Even Goethe’s Werther (no first name, similar last name) had the presence of mind to die slowly and painfully 12 hours after shooting himself in the head. Mortality is nothing more than a stylized leap into an endless stream of romantic possibilities in Hagio’s manga. Thomas’ suicide is performed out of love for a senior student by the name of Juli, a distant and correct individual who like all suffering, misunderstood heroes, conceals hidden depths of anguish. The appearance of Thomas’ lookalike, Erich, quite early in the tale—strolling past Thomas’ grave as it were—presents Juli and his classmates with a second chance. He is nothing less than an angelic being. Even the school master seems enraptured by this unspoilt youth—like Hadrian lusting after Antinous. One might almost call it a process of deification. And as with his historical counterpart, Erich is subject to both adoration and recriminations. As Hagio asserts at the start of her story:

“They say a person dies twice. First comes the death of the self. Then, later, comes the death of being forgotten by friends. If that is so, I shall never know that second death. (Even if he should die, he will never forget me.) In this way, I shall always be alive in his eyes.”

These lines define the authoress’ purpose. The Heart of Thomas rests on a physical manifestation of this remembrance, as florid as a grief stricken emperor’s commerorations of his lover—as if memory had the power to evoke a second incarnation or avatar. Still others might see everything which follows Thomas’suicide as the fantasy of a collapsed mind, the tangled memories and imaginings of a dying brain hoping for a happy corrective to a tragically short life. Certainly, that Germany of the mid-twentieth century imagined by Hagio has no anchor in on our reality. It is an alien planet both to the Japanese and European reader alike—a dream which has no interest in the tradition of Mann, Grass, and Boll but rather adheres to the hysterical breathing, coincidence, and fainting spells of wish fulfillment and hallucination. If these young male students had breasts, they would be ripping their bodices from their angular bodies

In one early episode, Juli suffers one of his recurrent fainting spells, a neurotic turn resulting from an earlier psychological trauma. It is perhaps the only time you will see an individual getting mouth to mouth resuscitation while he is having a “fit”. The fraudulence of this medical act suggest it’s placement—if it isn’t clear already—for erotic effect. The penis is verboten but a number of alternatives are grasped with both hands. A teacher’s attempt to stroke Erich with his cane is nothing less than a metaphor for the sexual tensions within the school. When the reigning queens of that exclusive institution arrange to converse with and touch Erich at a tawdry but chaste tea session, he barely manages to fend off their ministrations. This high tea of the mildly depraved is a kind of half-baked, elementary school version of the Hellfire Club where “Do what thou wilt” shall be the whole of the law.

There is the pesudo-coitus—between Juli and Erich—of grasping with sharp objects: first in the fencing room and then, somewhat less subtly, in the bedroom with a pair of scissors. Later, Erich recounts a tale where he indulges in the predominantly male practice of autoerotic asphyxiation. These recurrent acts of strangulation are brought on by the sight of his mother kissing her lover—his mental torment (and patent mommy issues) relieved only by the death of his mother and a profession of fatherly love by his mother’s lover.

This incessant intermingling of pain, death, and love is Hagio’s idée fixe; and the purity of male love the panacea for all depicted ailments. The only exception to this gloss on idealized homosexuality (a fanciful and hopeful template for a paradigmatic relationship between the sexes) is Juli’s physical and likely sexual abuse at the hands of another student named, Siegfried—that swaggering, heroic betrayer of Wagner’s Ring cycle here seen as lascivious, preening monster with an appetite for sadism and young boys.

Erich’s allusion to a meeting between Beethoven and Goethe suggests the essence of the relationship at the center of Hagio’s manga. Here is an excerpt from a Gramophone article concerning Goethe’s feelings after that fateful meeting:

“Shortly afterwards Goethe penned a more qualified verdict to his musical guru Carl Zelter: ‘His [Beethoven’s] talent astounded me; nevertheless, he unfortunately has an utterly untamed personality, not completely wrong in thinking the world detestable, but hardly making it more pleasant for himself or others by his attitude.’”

Erich is of course Beethoven in our boarding school equation. Juli’s rejection of his “untamed” sensuality—forged and broken through terror by Siegfried—is the root of all his troubles. When Juli tells Erich, “I am going to kill you,” it is not merely a prediction based upon his earlier role in the death of Thomas Werner but a sign of Juli’s repressed sexuality—a disease which manifests itself in the weird science of mild attacks of “anemia” which have no basis in medicine.

The reader’s mileage with respect to Hagio’s subtle eroticism will vary depending on his/her passion for the artist’s figure work and for characters with brittle foreheads in need of warm towels. Not that these aspects aren’t apparent to Hagio. There is, for example, that moment of epiphany when one of the characters complains that his fellow students feel that he has “a girl’s face;” an otherwise unremarkable statement except for the fact that just about everyone in that boarding school looks like a pre-pubescent (i.e. breast-less) girl. To be sure, readers of The Heart of Thomas should always assume that every woman in Hagio’s work is actually a man until proven otherwise. This isn’t a problem so much as a feature of the genre, the attractiveness of slightly feminine men (or in this case feminized yet adequately virile men) being the entire point. To imagine the alternative—consider going to an action movie in which nobody dies and no violence is performed. It just wouldn’t do.

Noah in his article at The Atlantic offers little in the comics’ defense except for the standard, “Well, it’s meant to be crap and succeeds admirably at it.” Not his actual words of course, but here they are for those so inclined:

“In a lot of ways, The Heart of Thomas is an Orientalist harem fantasy in reverse. Instead of a Westerner thinking about veiled maidens on cushions in some distant palace, the Japanese Hagio fantasizes about beautiful boys in an exotic Europe.

The genre of boys’ love, in other words, allows Hagio and her readers to place themselves in a position of power and aggrandizement that is rare for women—as the distanced, masterful position, letting his (or her) eyes roam across variegated objects of desire….Thus, the prurient fan-service which is usually doled out only to men is here explicitly taken up by women, who get to watch more exotic male bodies than you can shake a spectacle at.”

And on Juli’s emotional (and likely physical) rape:

“Instead, Juli’s rape emphasizes the universality of what is often presented as a particularly female experience. Similarly, Juli’s shame, his self-loathing, and his tortured effort to allow himself to love and be loved, are all character traits or struggles which are often stereotyped as feminine. The fact that Juli is male seems, then, not an aspect of otherness, but rather a way to underline his similarity to Hagio and her audience. If readers can with Siegfried experience distance as mastery, with Juli they experience an empathic collapse of distance so powerful it erases gender altogether…The boys’ love genre, then, freed Hagio and her audience to cross and recross boundaries of identity, sexuality, and gender.”

As Noah periodically ejaculates on this blog, this is a case where the criticism is of far more interest than the text; a situation where purpose is more interesting than result, intention far better than the delivery, and (presumed) effect more fascinating than the actual reading experience. And if, as Noah claims, Hagio is an “aesthete”, this does little to explain the inadequate metaphors, and the banal structure and prose which litters the narrative. The romance here is as invigorating as ice on genitals. Certainly, nothing works so well to preserve mood than a comic chorus commenting on every loving decision and every act of forbearance. At every turn, the manga engenders not so much an “empathic collapse” but a complete nullification of empathy.

The tacked on and thoroughly mangled Christian metaphors (angels without wings; Judas and Christ; a cursory mention of justification) serve only to highlight Hagio’s poor grasp of European culture and religion in general. Even worse is the “shocking” revelation (of abuse) which is anything but. I let out a mental gasp of incredulity when the a plot twist near the close of the comic had Juli threatening to retire to a seminary; a time honored old chestnut seen in both modern and period Asian dramas since time immemorial where women have retired to nunneries for one reason or another. The immense superficiality and unadorned derivativeness of The Heart of Thomas suggests that whatever dividends one might gain from it are largely skin deep. It is nothing less than a time capsule of high camp.

Apart for the tangy taste of forbidden fruit, is the love of one man for another any different than the much more familiar sight of a man and a woman pining for each other? As both the novel and film adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man suggests, the mere unfamiliarity of that object of affection is no hindrance to empathy. But just as truly great heterosexual romances remain in short supply in the medium (I’d be hard pressed to name more than a handful in manga and anime), so too does this rule apply to gay love in comics. Yet, to demand these standards of The Heart of Thomas is almost certainly a mistake for the comic in question was originally created for the enjoyment of women and has as much to do with the day to day issues of romance and gay love as the women in traditional harem manga have to do with flesh and blood females. Any resemblance to the gay liberation movement of the late twentieth century is simply good fortune if not purely coincidental. Some will say that the manga deserves praise because of its daring sexuality for its time—it is nothing less a seminal work in the boy’s love genre—but such a statement would be a demeaning admission that the comic is merely of historical interest.

The main inspiration for the manga at hand was apparently the film adaptation of Roger Peyrefitte’s Les amitiés particulières (novel published 1943, and film adaptation,1964). The similarities between the film and the manga are certainly striking.

There is the setting and sexual orientation of the protagonists as well as their relative ages. The lovers at the center of the film also struggle with ideas of purity and impurity (“It wasn’t his purity I loved.”) to the extent of expunging their sins of romantic (homosexual) love at confession. As with the final note left by Thomas, the letters between the young lovers act as erotic talismans. In the film, the letters are linked to the legend of St. Tarcisius—a young boy who defended the Blessed Sacrament with his life. These pieces of paper become nothing less than the body and blood of Christ to the lovers (they are certainly held in higher regard). Then there is the younger lover’s (Alexandre) suicide by jumping from a railway bridge (in this case, while traveling on a train) and the confusion of accident and suicide made more pressing in the film than in the comic because of the intransigent Catholicism which hangs heavy over the events.

While the love affair depicted in the film is not entirely convincing, it is certainly far more effective than anything found in Hagio’s comic. Peyrefitte’s work is restrained and classical in approach, and altogether more serious and real, especially in the interaction of the boys and a liberal minded priest named, Trennes. The priestly test commanded by Father Lauzon of the older lover (Georges; Juli’s counterpart) is nothing less than an act of temptation on the part of Satan. Hagio, of course, takes an alternative route. One might call it a disavowal of authenticity in setting, conversation, religion, and, perhaps, even sexuality—all of these becoming as putty and playthings in the authoress’ hand. A perfectly acceptable approach except for the decisive failure in delivery and communion.

The Heart of Thomas is in certain ways a sequel to the film, a fitful re-imagining of everything that could have been, but the final page of this book presents itself as a consummate evocation of my state of mind as I flipped through its pages.

The work was not clever enough, not brazen enough, not idiotic enough, and simply insufficiently well wrought to provide me with even a moment’s pleasure. It was, in short, interminable.

Yiff in Hell, Hipster (the author gets over furrself)

Posted on January 24, 2013 by mouse

“He had typed stories for comic books for the past seven years… every genre but funny animals. Sammy drew the line at funny animals. The success in the trade of these dot-eyed, three-fingered imports from the world of animated cartoons, with their sawdusty gags and childish antics, was one of the thousand little things to have broken Sammy Clay’s heart.” – from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

I was asked to be a guest on a podcast recently. I was asked to explain furry culture to the curious and open-minded hosts and (judging by the response) their equally magnanimous audience. In the interval between publication and this writing, I’ve cringed at my inadequacy at each turn at stammering out bullet-pointed shorthand that doesn’t really explain anything about us fuzzy folk in any great depth or detail. My caveat was that no one had elected me as furry ambassador. Listening to myself, there might be good reason for that. Was I being honest and candid or feeding on self-validating horseshit? A: probably both.

I have opined in the past on the social gulf between Furry and Alternative Comix Culture in 2013 as if it is not a figment of my middle class, status-obsessed imagination. Boutique mini-comic presses, comics as art objects, zine-swaps, these are “cool.” I allow myself to feel validated by my association with them. Fursuiting/kigurumi, plushies, the free and open exchange of cartoon animal people pornography are all “uncool.” I allow myself to feel validated by earnestly enjoying things that run against the grain of internet derision. See what I’m doing here? Better not let the NYT Style section catch wind of this!

Lisa Hanawalt, not a furry, but she draws them

There is no furry monoculture. There is room in the polymorphous furpile for everyone’s social baggage. If you think of yourself as a geek, then furry outsider-dom will reflect prismatically off of you. Kink-centric people, pull up a chair. You are home. Naturally the icons of my own middle-class “alternative” youth, (DIY, subversive comics) are a particular draw to me. So I read the new Girl Mountain comic (NSFW) where Mogg the talking cat gives a rimjob to Megg the witch, and it’s a darkly hilarious criss-crossing of wires that our brains can call anthropomorphism; animals doing people stuff, but sometimes in an animal way. There is no gulf between my “alt comix” reading and the “furry” one. They’re one and the same goddamned thing.

So I talk a big game about furry being cool and inherently dignified while dog-whistling my pleas for validation from some vague imagined “indie scene” because I’m an insecure baby. It’s unfair to furry to cage it in this rhetorically purgatory underdog status where it’s constantly being compared to other fandoms or scenes. Furry is furry, and furry comics is comics. Why stick my neck under the boot of good taste when something like Crumb’s Fritz the Cat can acquire respectability anyway in a few decades’ time?

Furry Black Flag girls by Birds at Midwest Furfest 2011 | photo by Tommy Bruce

Here’s one difference. As vaudville theaters disappeared into the dust, the minstrel shows re-emerged onto the silver screen and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (along with another more famous cartoon mouse than me) took their place. The roots of funny animals as we know them are more disgraceful than even Chris Ware can masterfully repackage. I use funny animal books as my internet handle partly out of the self-lacerating irony that is so popular among cartoonists, we who love the books designed to be thrown into the trash. The truth is, there’s very little interest to be found in what are properly called funny animal comics save maybe the naïve sexuality of dusty old Fox and Crow covers.

Furry is not necessarily a fandom for these comics though, despite how nice and alliterative that sounds. As funny animal comics eventually became too embarrassing to be publishable and began to slough off of communal consciousness, artists began collecting their own stories in self-published fanzines. Fan groups that budded out panels, meetups and parties at sci-fi conventions cleaved away in the 80s to form the basis of its own community. An exhaustive history of the emergent furry scene, first published in the fanzine Yarf! can be found here. I genuinely miss the rough hewn amateur art (link NSFW) that circulated in early furry fanzines and on sites like the Vixen Controlled Library. The internet was definitive in making furry a “thing” but it also may have brought about a homogenized, Disney-inspired “furry house style.” Really, a LOT has changed since 1996.

Because comics and illustration are less expensive and labor-intensive than say, film, they became the centerpiece of the emerging furry scene and the basis for its valuing individual creativity over devotion to established properties. Furry lexicon is always changing. I haven’t seen the word “yiff” used earnestly since the 90s, and “furfag” has been adopted from internet harassers as a playful calling card. A wolf is a walf, and walf is a way of life.

Since I’ve been involved in furry (over ten years, yikes!) BBS boards, forums and MUCKS are toast, Deviantart style social art sites like furaffinity are on their way out and new social media like twitter and tumblr are becoming the center of furry expression and communication. I see less and less comics and fanzines, but every furr seems to have a small stable of original characters they draw in disconnected scenes. Costuming, fursuiting or just “suiting” is becoming increasingly central, with dance emerging as the dominant style of performance. I don’t have the words to describe just how uncomfortable these suits are, how disoriented the limited vision can be, how HOT they become in a matter of minutes. Groans of agony, maybe. So to see how folks can make these lumpy, unblinking mascots move with such grace and style and uncanny verisimilitude, it’s not just cool, it’s *magical.*

Magical. Zeke Hyena by Firestormsix, worn by SkyRyd3r, photo by Abrahm

Over the years, a kind of micro-economy has emerged as furry events became more frequent and their boundaries defined. There are furry apparel companies, full-time fursuit makers, music labels, news aggregates, book presses and distros, fetish gear makers, a company that makes luxury sex toys shaped like dragon cocks. We are famously open about sexuality and happily produce wave after wave of imaginative, mesmerizing pornography (that link is SO not SFW). Sometimes our radical inclusivity is our finest feature, other times it is a disaster. Some corners of furry are a literal snuggle-fest (my AC suite mid-handle of Bulliet), others are nests of malicious bullying and harassment, so drama-phobic we can allow negativity to carry on unconfronted and unaddressed. The youth culture is sometimes oppressive, though maybe I say that because in less than five years I’ll be 30 (a greymuzzle!) and out of the loop.

Van-Weasel (nsfw)

The new trend in pop journalism from Buzzfeed, Kotaku etc. has been sympathetic, if detatched fly-on-the-wall style coverage of furry conventions. Furries are now valid because we are cute and know how to party and aren’t as bad as every writer asumes we are going to be. This is better than the boring bourgeois sensationalism that came before it. It’s hard to beat the Rumpus’ interview with Kilcodo (full disclosure, a friend of mine) who is honest and candid and dignified in a way I can only look up to from my crib. To know furry is to be one. In my experience, it has been more creatively fulfilling, mind-expanding, fun and joyful than I ever could have imagined when I first snuck that notorious issue of Vanity Fair, the one with Julianne Moore on the cover, off of my mom’s nightstand. In the internet age, where there can be no underground, it is my refuge from respectability, my own polymorphously perverse tribe, and the filter through which I read anthro in comics: Krazy Kat, Fritz the Cat, Omaha the Cat Dancer, the Great Catsby… Gunsmith Cats?

Q&A+General Learnin’ TIME

Yes, a lot of us (including me!) wear animal costumes. No, not as many of us fuck in them as people think. Remember what I said about the dancing?

Furries are a global phenomenon thanks to the internet, though we are mostly concentrated in North America, Western Europe and Japan. The largest furry convention in the world is Anthrocon in Pittsburgh, PA, with over 4000 attendees.

Yes, a huge percentage of furries are gay men, and gay male sexuality and imagery is a dominant force in furry visual culture. No, I don’t have the faintest clue why this is.

We’re not called plushies. Furries who are intimate with stuffed animals are called plushophiles. I’ve been seeing less and less art catering to this interest since the early 2000s.

You should google Chakats.

We are sick and tired of talking about CSI and Tyra and My Strange Addiction. When approached by media types, your modern furry might be inclined to just make shit up. We are over it.

Reptiles and birds and dolphins get to be furries too.

A furry can be a person who identifies that way and engages with furry fandom or subculture to any extent of their choosing. Furry is also a shorthand for any anthropomorphized animal character in historical or contemporary work. A character in a furry fanzine comic and Bugs Bunny can both be referred to as furries, though the latter was developed of prior to and outside of any association with internet weirdos.

Yiff is a very silly word. No one uses it like, ever anymore. But I’m fond of it.

Werewolves are hot.

My costume is a coyote, though I identify as a cartoon mouse.

Yes, it is like a thousand degrees in that thing. I already told you. It’s still awesome.

It’s important to know exactly what kind of room party you’re about to visit at a convention.

Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore in Minneapolis, MN has an entire spinner rack of Omaha the Cat Dancer comics and I regret every day I didn’t just walk in there and buy the whole thing.

In furry cartoon porn, some artists prefer to present their characters with human-style genitalia while others defer to the natural look of the represented species. I like human-style.

I watched a lot of David Attenborough docs growing up. Actually anything to do with animals was my shit.

Furry conventions are really fun. You should go.

Cartoon animals rule and it is OK to like them.

City of Irony: Jason Lute’s Berlin Book One

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Kailyn Kent

Jason Lutes’ Berlin: City of Stones is illustrated within an inch of its life. Painstakingly researched and precisely drawn, its pictures work overtime to breathe life into history and the fictional persons of its sprawling, yet relatively schematic narrative. The story opens with the arrival of Marthe Muller, an upper class, unmarried woman, who plans to take art classes in Berlin and escape the spectre of an arranged marriage. On the train, she encounters Kurt Severing, a jaded journalist who is struck by her innocence and her self-taught drawing skill, (and presumably how these inform each other.) The book orbits around their transforming relationship, while hopping through the private lives, memories and dreams of disparate citizens scattered throughout the city. Sometimes these characters are revisited, sometimes not. Some lives intertwine in mundane coincidences, others in large fateful clashes, like the violently suppressed Communist march on May Day 1929.

City of Stones attempts a faithful visual portrayal of post WWI Berlin in all its tumult, but misses the mark in spirit. Lutes rewards his characters for their impartiality, ignorance and doubt, and punishes those who embrace the frenzy of ideologies that was its zeitgeist. Marthe drops out of art school, declaring, “there’s a lot for me to learn, but I don’t want to know any of it… I can’t reconcile these things with what I see…. more what I feel. But for me [seeing and feeling] are not so far apart,” and this is treated like a heroic act. Her unfamiliarity with the figures of Trotsky and Stalin, while fascists and communists battle around her, is treated by Kurt as both revelatory and charming. But rather than remain two perspectives among many, Marthe and Kurt’s diaries become the book’s most authoritative voices, giving City of Stones its title and articulating its major themes. The only major character seduced by the communists, a weary and sensitive mother, is shot to death during the march that closes the book, while her husband is progressively vilified as a Nazi. Oftentimes, Lutes’ breathtaking mastery of expression and body language is of more interest than the stock protagonists themselves.

More powerful than the characters is Lutes’ recreation of the city in ink. When people walk, they pass through the city, individual block by individual block. Figures are rarely shown apart from their environment, which is rendered with startling specificity and care. Lutes makes good on his characters’ claims that the city envelops them; he often drafts the foreground and background with equal line-weight, which feels like a deliberate philosophical decision.

On one hand, Lutes’ treatment of Berlin celebrates a crucial freedom the comic medium affords its creators; aside from time and training, everything is as equally ‘expensive’ to draw. Lutes is able to realize visuals that would have required a mammoth budget and manpower in any other medium. City of Stones is also less ‘comic-y’ than many books, as it doesn’t immediately participate in the ‘genre’ of comics or its concerns. (However, the romantic union of a drawer and a writer, and their self-exile from art-school and the rest of Berlin, suggests that City of Stones could secretly be about comics after all.) Lutes doesn’t push the envelope on what comics can do, although he achieves some great effects, often in pursuit of cinematic pacing. It begs the question whether Lutes draws comics in order make something similar to film, while retaining ultimate control. This also leaves him with the responsibility to know and accurately represent the story world he has chosen, which in the case of Berlin, exists outside of Lutes. This ‘auterism’ is far from a bad thing: imagine the variety and ambition of comics produced, if more creators made comics for this reason. Its fair to assume many already do.

Yet Lutes’ choice neglects, or even rejects, another freedom of comics– the ability to select what is represented. While a camera necessarily records all it can within range, a cartoonist can obliviate a background, stylize its objects, and can render objects into icons or types. Comics resembles memory, where only the essential elements are remembered, or rendered. The act of rendering itself makes what is drawn relevant to the ‘telling.’ For example, in Paul Hornschmeier’s book Mother Come Home, a child builds a snowfort out of flat, immaculate snowbricks.

Hornschemeier doesn’t describe the snowbricks, (crumbling, melting or made in various sizes,) and he barely describes the fort or the activity of building it, in favor of simply depicting the concept of ‘making a snowfort.’ Compared to speed lines, sweat bubbles, and the hundreds of symbols that have been developed in diverse comics traditions, this is a very minor shorthand– Hornschemeier is telling the reader that the child is making a snowfort, without going into detail of what that experience is like. This is left up to the reader, should he or she choose to dwell on it.

Alternatively, this freedom of selection resembles prose writing, where the descriptions add to the fabric, effect and significance of the story, and where a gratuity of description is not appreciated. City of Stones avoids seeming overindulgent because the drawings don’t have to be actively read. They can be visually absorbed (or passed over, unnoticed). At these times, the comic acts more like a film than like a novel. Lutes commits himself to draw like a camera. There’s a tragic nobility here; as a ‘rememberer’ of his narrative, it’s as if Lutes is trying to restore or break through to the world outside of the plot, while working in a medium where this is impossible. By choosing a historical period, Lutes appears to reach for a place independent of his imagination, or the reader’s. Yet the more he reaches and renders, the less room he leaves for his reader to imagine a world outside of Lutes– or late 20s Berlin via Lutes. The act of reading switches over from an active reading to a passive reading, where his audience is not responsible for assembling a sense of the world themselves. This is facilitated by Lute’s tight reign over the pacing.

This core irony is joined by two others. While City of Stones frequently criticizes the cult of “New Objectivity” which beset post-WWI Germany, Lutes works to draw as objectively and as similarly to a camera as possible. Lutes draws with anatomical and perspectival precision, yet he heroicizes a character who refuses to learn to draw this way. Judging only from the first volume, it’s up in the air as to whether Lutes crafted Berlin so as to criticize this visual oppression, to showcase its inescapability, or to capitilize on it.

This review was written without reference to Lute’s interviews or other writing about Lutes, and without reading the following issues or second compilation of Berlin, which the New York Public Library has so far not made readily available. Its possible that the story’s development will make some of these critiques pointless– perhaps Marthe will get a massive comeuppance for her solipsism. More likely she will lose her innocence. The most tantalizing thread is whether Kurt’s noble political non-commitment will spill over into an ambivalence about Marthe, something City of Stones confronts with subtlety and bite. If only more of the narrative threads carried this sense of mystery. The reader watches so many characters think and do so many private things, in such specific streets and houses, yet the book never achieves real, raw intimacy. Perhaps Lutes tries to show too much for a book that is ironic at its core. Which would be a sad conclusion, because his quest to truly, earnestly represent Berlin is the book’s most remarkable quality.

Django: Back to Basics

Posted on January 22, 2013 by subdee

Coming in at the tail end of the Django Unchained roundtable, it transpires that I’ve already shared a lot of my thoughts about Django in comments. In this post, then, I’ll mainly be expanding on those ideas + quoting excessively from David Graeber’s doorstop work of economic anthropology, Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

First, I want bring up some ideas about slavery, morality, and legal systems that Graeber talks about and that I think Tarantino illustrates in Django in a smart way. In Debt, Graeber starts by looking at what he calls “human economies” – that is, economies where people are the main unit of account, and money is only used to smooth over social relationships. In these societies, “social currency” was used for weddings and funerals, to settle disputes, and to acquire wives. However, even in societies that recognized slavery and brideprice, this money was not actually used to buy people. And certainly, the same money that was part and parcel of deals between people was not also used to buy things. Graeber argues that two factors enable chattel slavery, a system in which people are equated with things: one, the removal of the slave-to-be from “the web of mutual obligations” that defines him as a human being. And two, violence.

Already, this is looking like a promising lens for the analysis of a Tarantino movie!

In Graeber’s account of traditional societies, slaves are people who have been removed from their context, so that they no longer have mothers, fathers, siblings, and so on to protect them. Only after this removal has been accomplished can they be bought, sold, or killed, because this is when “the only relation they had was to their owners”.

Looking at things this way, the logic of Samuel Jackson’s character Stephen becomes clear. As Noah pointed out, he really doesn’t have anyone else besides Candi. While Noah saw this de-contextualization as a weakness of the character – what real person doesn’t have relatives? – I think it’s an important point. Stephen is an edge case that shows the way the system works more clearly.

It’s pretty clear in Django that slavery is a dehumanizing institution that actively seeks to prevent slaves from forming connections to each other. Think about the extraordinary force used to separate Django and his wife Hilde: when it’s discovered that they have run away together, they are beaten and sold separately. Hilde is then additionally punished by being branded, which forces her out of the role of the house slave and into the role of comfort girl, a prostitute for every low-level foreman and fighting slave on the estate. Forget about marriage: for the sin of calling herself a married woman, Hilde is to be denied even the right to choose her own sexual partners.

Schultz’ actions in the movie take on even more meaning against this background of depersonalization. As the new owner of Django, Schultz is lenient and tolerant, allowing Django to choose his own dress, to exact his own revenge, and to carry a gun. However, all these are acts of charity as long as Schultz owns Django in the eyes of the law. The movie completely understands this point, because what does Schultz do as soon as he frees Django? He offers him a deal: Django’s help over the winter in exchange for Schultz’ help rescuing Hilde. This offer is symbolically important because as long as Django is a slave, he has no power to agree to deals. That’s because only people can make deals, and Django, as a slave, is not a person. By offering Django a deal, Schultz is acknowledging that he is a person and not a thing; in some sense he is acknowledging that the two of them, as fellow human beings, are in some way equals before God.

So that’s kinship networks and personhood. What about violence? Graeber observes that most of us don’t like to think about violence. Tarantino, clearly, is an exception: his work is largely an exploration of the charisma of violence, of individuals with personal charisma (who are almost invariably violent), and of the power of filmic violence to evoke a visceral response in the audience. Think about that however you like; but if Tarantino is going to work through the power and appeal of violence, one of the best “good” uses for his skills as a filmmaker is in an exploration of a society in which violence plays a crucial, obvious role.

To remove people from their networks of mutual obligation requires enormous force. They have to be taken as prisoners of war, or forcibly abducted, or sentenced to punishment for a crime, or sold by someone who has the “right” to be so under what are frequently desperate circumstances. After sale, they have to be transported somewhere else. According to Graeber, a common theme of the laws (Islamic and Roman) of the period is that people become slaves in situations in which they otherwise would have died. They are, in some sense, living dead.

Furthermore, once African people have been forcibly ripped from their contexts and transported to the New World, a system of enormous violence is required to keep them as slaves. This is the violence Tarantino shows directed against black slaves as a matter of course in Django – the brutal beatings given to runaways, the sadistic punishments by foremen, the laws prohibiting black men from riding horses, and the mobs that form to uphold those laws – in contrast to the more cathartic or cartoon violence he shows directed against the people upholding the slave system.

Schultz’ introduction to the audience takes on another meaning when examined in this way. It establishes a kind of moral rightness to the character that would not have been present if he had simply bought Django at the market. Of course, Schultz could have done this: he could have followed the slave-trader brothers until they arrived at their destination and then purchased Django in front of witnesses. He could even have killed them afterward. But wouldn’t we have resented him if he did it that way? He would have been involved in the whole dirty business of buying and selling slaves. Instead, Schultz goes back to first principles and takes a war captive. We can understand the logic of a man of honor who saves someone who otherwise would have died (if only from his own gun).

Concepts of honor and violence are, of course, entwined. On the one hand, violent men are invariably obsessed with honor. On the other hand, honor is “something that exists in the eyes of others. To be able to recover it… a slave must necessarily adopt the rules and standards of the society that surrounds him, and this means that, in practice at least, he cannot absolutely reject the institutions that deprived him of his honor in the first place” (emphasis mine). Graeber is speaking about The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Oladudah Equiano: or, Gustavas Vassa, the African, here, by the way – probably the inspiration for MT Anderson’s great YA novel series The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing.

Tarantino, while perhaps not obsessed with ideas of patriarchal honor having to do with control over women, is obsessed with “cool” – with the personal honor codes of violent people. He’s put in a tricky situation in this movie, where he needs his protagonists to be cool and honorable, but is shooting an historical movie at a time when they could not, in practice, both reject the system and remain honorably within it. “In practice” becomes the key phrase, here. Because Quentin Tarantino is filming a movie and not directing an historical event, he has other value systems besides the society his characters operate in at his disposal.

Django and Schultz don’t need society’s approval because they have their own audience. Sometimes their audience exists within the movie: when Schultz frees the slaves in the woods, he has an audience of surprised and shocked black men; when Django turns the tables on the slavers bringing him to the mines, he has an audience of black men in the transport wagon; at the final shootout at the mansion, all the house slaves are on hand. Just as important as the on-screen audience is, however, of course, the audience in the movie theater.

This is a crucial point. It’s important in a Tarantino movie for the audience to side with the “heroes” on screen, however questionable, and to cheer at the end. He uses filmmaker’s tricks to achieve that end – makes the heroes competent and the villains incompetent or crazy, uses close-up reaction shots, slowly escalates the violence. They are tricks, but they are fairly transparent tricks. There’s very little in the way of misdirection: it’s not as if the audience does not realize that they are being led to think a certain way.

And anyway, is this identification automatic, even for an audience in the 21st century confronted with a major star like Jamie Foxx in an obviously heroic role – as both a Western and a Blaxploitation hero? I don’t think this hurdle is at all easy for some members of the audience. I remember having trouble with Kevin Boyle’s historical novel Arc of Justice, about racial violence in Detroit, an obsessively footnoted work of historical fiction that is not even fictional. The moment of realization – oh, if I just identify with the clear victims in this situation, I can forget about trying to justify the unjustifiable – was a huge relief, and I remember it vividly. While hopefully everyone has either had, or never had to have, that moment, I can’t fault Tarantino for taking so much care to keep his entire audience on board.

Anyway, is it a sin for a movie to be a movie? I know this is a sticking point for lots of people – the unsettling collision between historic violence and genre tropes – but personally I find it to be a strength. Or, quoting myself again: “In Django, it’s not just violence per se that’s the subject, but depictions of violence, or filmic violence. Filmic violence can be funnier than real violence, but because it’s funny, it can also be more affecting – you remember the unpleasant things along with the funny things instead of throwing the whole movie out of your brain the second it’s over (because, no matter how much you want to be a Good and Serious person, it’s too upsetting to keep thinking about).”

But getting back to honor: the ability to strip others of their dignity becomes, for the master, the foundation of his honor. Those with “surplus dignity” surround themselves with slaves not out of any kind of economic necessity, but for reasons of status. DiCaprio’s Southern gentlemen is exactly one such man of honor. I think his character is a great subversion of previous portrayals of “Southern gentlemen” like Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind. It’s not that some bad apples ruined the system for the respectable plantation owners, Tarantino is saying. Rather, it’s that those who are the most entrenched within the system, and the most active in upholding its abuses, are, by the logic of the system, the most respectable. In other words, Candi is what a respectable southern gentlemen looks like: a sadist surrounded by “things” (people) over which he has ultimate power, who stages displays of that power for his own glorification; but who is however unnaturally obsessed with the virtue of his (full-blood white) relation.

It’s exactly Candi’s status as one of these “surplus dignity” owners which requires Schultz and Django’s elaborate deception (in addition to other, character based explanations). Calvin Candi is rich and masterful. He doesn’t need the extra $300 for Hilde.

So far all of this might seem a little basic, or simplistic, even. Everything I have discussed has been theoretical, with little in the way of nuanced psychology or a complex moral worldview. This is not to say that there is no complexity in Django. For me, personally though, the strength of the movie lies in the way that these conceptual points about what it means to be enslaved – about what a slave society must be like – are presented without explicit comment, in the way the characters relate to each other and in the events shown on screen – in wordless reaction shots, rather than in speeches.

One final theoretical note, then, to close out the post. Graber discusses how “freedom” as a concept developed alongside slavery; as well as how personal (Roman) property law developed in response to people-as-things. The concept of freedom, the ability to do whatever you want with yourself (except for the things you can’t do), follows on from the concept of slavery, the ability to do whatever you like with your human property. Here’s the quote:

“Freedom is the natural faculty to do whatever one wishes that is not prevented by force or law. Slavery is an institution according to the law of nations whereby one person becomes the absolute private property of another, contrary to nature.”

Contrary to nature! You gotta love details like this. Theories of phrenology espoused by Calvin Candi, the whole (once)science of racial inferiority, clearly must have developed to fix this otherwise beautiful theoretical framing.

It does point toward an important question, though. If the main distinguishing feature of freedom is that one is not a slave, what does it mean to “own” yourself and to “own” your freedom? How can the same person be both the master, and the slave?

According to Graeber, it’s this question that necessitates the division of the self into two selves: a mind which “owns” the body, over which it has absolute power. It’s a division Tarantino supports in his movie, to an extent. Put simply, it’s a big problem for Tarantino that he only has one hero in his movie. What is he saying about all the other black bodies – that lacking Django’s luck and skill with a gun, they simply accepted their fate?

Here, again, the reaction shots are important. The reaction of Schultz, the bartender, the saloon mistress, to two black brothers made to fight to the death is hate and disgust (and queasiness, in Schultz’ case). The reaction of Candi’s other slaves to Django, a free black slaver, is hate and disgust (and confusion, on the part of the head maid). The reaction of Stephen, on the other hand, to the sight of a free black man on a horse, is hate… and resentment.

It’s been mentioned before that Stephen is the movie’s final villain because he is Django’s doppelganger. They contrast each other in nearly every way: Django fights for his connection with his wife, while Stephen’s only connection is with his master; Django is young and fit, while Stephen is old and has a bad leg; Foxx plays Django with restrained dignity while Jackson plays Stephen as loud comic relief. At the same time, though, they are bound together: first as the two largest black roles, played by the two biggest black stars. But secondly, because they are both given these closeups where they show the “wrong” reaction, even if Foxx’s Django is playing a role at the time.

It’s that moment of doubt, as well as all the other indignities up until that point, that forces the movie’s explosive conclusion. Of course, Django has to strike against the entire system, because the entire system is responsible for what he and every other enslaved person has suffered. But also, this is a scene of putting right: the better ending than the one where he pretended, even for a moment, that he liked or was indifferent to what he’d seen.

We can’t always act, the movie says. But we can always wish, fantasize, about the way we would like to act. When we are able to counteract the violence and indifference of the unjust society we live in, and bring about a reality that accords with our wishes, we are heroes. But even when we are not able to change anything about our external reality, the simple act of wishing and fantasizing itself has power.

Dr. Strange! Explained by a Nine-Year-Old

Posted on January 21, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

My son has been really into the Lee/Ditko Dr. Strange recently. So I thought I’d ask him what he liked about it. Here’s what he said.

I like the art because it’s really colorful and I like how he gets different cloaks through the series. I like the plot too. I like how Dr. Strange runs around and does things and goes into different dimensions a bunch. I like how everybody talks to themselves a lot because it’s funny when they’re just saying things to themselves. I like the way they talk about the writers. For example, “written at twilight by Stan Lee.”

That’s kind of all I have to say.

And here’s a drawing of Dr. Strange he did.

Packaged In Black

Posted on January 21, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

I don’t know if it was so much [Johnny Cash’s] music per se that drew me to him; it was more his overall persona….

—Rick Rubin, Interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air, February 2004

Unearthed, the five-CD collection of outtakes and unreleased material from Johnny Cash’s last 10 years with American Recordings, comes in a box as black and stark as Cash’s tormented soul. The sleeves are made of CD-scratching cardboard, as rough and uncompromising as Cash’s famously raised middle finger. The shrink wrap is tough and tenacious, as tough and tenacious as….

Well, you get the idea. Cash is a serious artist and it takes a virile, forward-looking, serious company like American to provide his music with the extremes of over-packaging it deserves. Old, stodgy labels like Columbia and Mercury hadn’t known what to do with a complex iconoclast like Cash — it took Rick Rubin, American’s founder, to see the greatness in Cash and act on it. The liner notes to Unearthed gleefully quote Nick Tosches, who claimed that “Johnny Cash at 61 was history, an ageing, evanescent country music archetype gathering dust in a forgotten basement corner of the cultural dime museum.” It wasn’t until Cash’s first 1994 album on American that the singer was granted “the imprimatur of ageless cool.”

Or so the story goes. Johnny Cash’s career was indeed in a slump in the eighties and early ‘90s — enough of a slump that he thought he might cease recording altogether. But he was hardly as irrelevant as Tosches and Rubin make him out to be. In fact, in 1993, the year before his first American release, Cash made a much promoted and discussed appearance on the final track of U2’s Zooropa. Rubin didn’t have to be a genius to figure out that there was an audience for Johnny Cash’s work — all he had to do was read the papers.

Nonetheless, American has spilled a lot of ink insisting that Cash’s career would have been over without Rick Rubin. The point of this strategy seems to be to make Cash and American go together like ham and eggs, or music-industry and slimeball. Usually a label promotes the artist, but with Cash and American, something like the opposite has occurred. Cash’s first album with the company was actually named American Recordings (as Cash quipped on one of his final tours, “the album American Recordings on the American Recordings label, recorded right here in America”). His other albums also give the American name unusual prominence and, continuing the trend, the back of Unearthed features the labels’ upside-down flag symbol alone on a black background. Little wonder, then, that Unearthed’s liner notes exclaim that Cash’s first album with American was “as stark, dark, and elemental as the stunning cover photo,” as if it’s some sort of compliment to Cash to have his work compared to a publicity shoot. Still, there’s a certain logic here: if the label is as important as the artist, then it makes sense that the packaging is as important as the music.

For this particular promotional strategy, the blame must rest with Rubin himself, who not only signed Cash, but also produced each of his albums. Rubin was already quite well-known before his work with Cash, in large part because he had worked on a number of landmark rap and metal albums: most notably the classic early records of L. L. Cool J, the Beastie Boys, and Slayer. But Rubin’s notoriety was also a function of assiduous self-promotion. With the Beastie Boys, in particular, Rubin pushed himself forward with unusual enthusiasm, touring with the group, appearing in videos, and adopting the rap moniker DJ Double R. According to The Vibe History of Hip Hop, Rubin considered himself a member of the band. If he believed his own hype, however, the Beastie Boys did not, and when they left his then-label Def Jam, they left Rubin behind as well.

As far as I know, Rubin has never appeared on stage with Cash, but he hasn’t exactly retired into the background either. Unearthed is presented as a collaboration between the two men, who are portrayed as something very close to equal artists. “This is the story of what happened when the man with the beard [Rubin] met the Man in Black,” the liner notes intone. Their encounter is then described in the portentous language of trashy romance novels — Cash’s former manager is quoted as telling Rubin ‘You could see the sparks flying between you two. There was such an immediate, powerful connection,” to which Rubin adds “It felt like we connected on some level other than talk.” Cash’s recollection is a bit more tongue-in-cheek. “You know, I’d dealt with the long-haired element before, and it didn’t bother me at all. I find great beauty in men with perfectly trained beards and groomed faces — or grooved faces, or whatever it is.”

Cash was intimately involved in the production of the box set before his death last September, and he’s clearly both grateful to Rubin and willing to share the spotlight with him. And there is no doubt that Rubin did revitalize Cash’s career, basically by marketing Cash the way he had marketed rap and metal acts — that is, by making Cash a dangerous outsider, a loner, an outlaw. Gone was the Johnny Cash whose biggest hits had been jokey novelty records like “A Boy Named Sue” and “One Piece at a Time”. In his place was, as the notes put it, “a dark troubadour with a troubled past who had sinned and been redeemed.” The first song on the first American release, “Delia’s Gone,” was a particularly vicious murder ballad — the video featured Cash killing model Kate Moss. Ten years before, “the dark troubadour” had appeared in a video for his song “Chicken in Black” wearing a blue-and-yellow mock-superman suit.

Obviously, Rubin didn’t invent the “dangerous loner” image for Cash, who had been singing about shooting people since the ‘50s. The American publicity merely emphasized this aspect of his persona with stark, moody, black-and-white album art and stripped-down production — especially on the first release, which featured Cash alone and unaccompanied for the first time in his career. Whatever the publicity material said, of course, Cash continued to record goofy stuff alongside the doom-and-gloom numbers. “The Man Who Couldn’t Cry” from American Recordings, “Mean-Eyed Cat” from Unchained, and, Cash’s heavenly duet with Merle Haggard on Solitary Man’s “I’m Leavin’ Now” are all glorious examples of Cash’s lighter side — wise, witty, and very funny. None of these cuts is represented on Unearthed’s fifth disc, a “Best of American” compilation which is tilted heavily towards his more solemn numbers — “Delia’s Gone,” “Hurt,” “I Hung My Head,” and the really annoying “Bird on a Wire” (Leonard Cohen’s clumsy ramblings do not benefit from Cash’s gravitas: the set also includes a fully orchestrated and even more lugubrious version.) Still, the other Unearthed discs contain a fair share of lighter material, including a jovial discussion of substance abuse in “Chattanooga Sugar Babe” and the unaccompanied “Two-Timin’ Mama,” perhaps the one American cut that most clearly evokes Cash’s Sun sides.

So all well and good: Cash is doing what Cash does, and Rubin has realized that young hipsters think it’s cooler to kill people than to laugh — or, perhaps more charitably to everyone, Rubin simply had the vision to give Cash a marketing budget, something the singer had been denied for years. Rubin, however, has not been satisfied with merely contributing to Cash’s commercial Renaissance. Instead, Unearthed’s liner notes insist that Cash’s resurgence has been aesthetic as well as critical. In explaining why he approached Cash, for example, Rubin says “I’d been thinking about who was really great but not making really great records…and Johnny was the first and the greatest who came to mind…Someone…who didn’t seem inspired to be doing his best work right now.” Rubin also says that his biggest challenge with Cash was getting the singer to see each recording date as special, rather than as just another album. The implication of all this, of course, is that the material on Mercury which Cash recorded in the early ‘90s was a series of prefabricated knock-offs.

Au contraire. The Mercury material is great — not every cut, of course, but the hit-to-miss ration isn’t significantly worse than on the American albums. At Mercury, Cash mostly worked with producer Jack Clement— a longtime friend — and he sounds relaxed and inventive. Indeed, his best material on Mercury is as good as anything he’s ever done. The duet-heavy Water From the Wells of Home from 1988 is perhaps the stand-out, featuring the lovely “Where Did We Go Right” with his wife, June Carter Cash; and the tough, vindictive “This Old Wheel” with Hank Williams Jr. Best of all, though, is the utterly bizarre “Beans for Breakfast” from 1991’s Mystery of Life, in which Cash explains that “the house burned down from the fire that I built in my closet by mistake after taking all those pills, but I got out safe in my Duckhead overalls.” Significantly, Cash never said that his work with Mercury was slick studio product: he only said, with great frustration, that the label wouldn’t promote it.

In this context, the most impressive thing about Unearthed is not how distinctive the American recordings are, but rather how much of a piece they seem with the rest of Cash’s oeuvre. For the truth is that each of the much-ballyhooed strengths of the American years — the surprising song selection, the challenging duet partners, the varied settings, and even the reinvention of Cash’s image — have all been typical of Cash’s career throughout. This is a man, after all, who started out as a rockabilly performer in the Elvis/Carl Perkins mode, appeared at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964, was associated with the Outlaw country movement in the ‘70s, showed up on Emmylou Harris’ seminal Roses in the Snow album in 1980, and had his last hit record with the Highwaymen supergroup in 1985. Along the way, he recorded songs by everyone from Ray Charles to Bob Dylan to Kris Kristofferson to Bruce Springsteen to the Rolling Stones, hosted an eclectic television show, and released protest songs, concept albums, and a novel.

Cash, in other words, was always experimenting, and it is this aspect of his work that Unearthed puts center stage. It’s an odds and sods collection, so not everything works — a couple of tracks with a mediocre blues band are a mess; Joe Strummer sounds badly outclassed when he sings with Cash on Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song”; the version of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” with organ is cluttered rather than sweeping; and I’m forced to admit that Cash’s austere renditions of hymns on disk four grow wearisome on repeated listening. That leaves, however, quite a lot of impressive music. The first disc in particular shows what a great idea it was for Cash to record alone and unaccompanied — an idea the singer had had some time ago but had been unable to sell until Rubin came along. All the interpretations are lovely: Billy Joe Shaver’s wistfully hopeful “Old Chunk of Coal,” and Cash’s own love letter to his wife, “Flesh and Blood,” are particularly fine. On the rest of the set, the duet with June is, as always, a high point; Cash’s baroque cover of his friend Neil Young’s “Pocahontas” (with mellotron) is also pretty great. Introducing Cash to Nick Cave was an obvious move, but it works wonderfully; Cave adds a touch of out-of-place gothic glee to “Get Along Home Cindy” which almost upstages the master. My absolute favorite track, though, is Cash’s short, sweet version of “You Are My Sunshine.” The song is a fusty piece of schmaltz which I’ve never liked very much, but Cash’s bleak quaver turns it from a greeting card into an agony of grief and loss.

Certainly Cash knew about grief and loss. This is the aspect of his work which — with his long illness, the death of his wife last May, and the success of the single and especially the video for “Hurt” — has been most in the news for the past couple of years. To me, though, the fact that Cash was able to change, to learn, and to take risks with his life and art for more than forty years is far from sad. One of those risks was to record with Rick Rubin, who led him to new songs, new people, new audiences, and new approaches to recording. Rubin, Cash himself, and the public all benefited from their collaboration. But I have no doubt that if Cash had not had the opportunity to take that particular chance, he would have taken another one. Even had the Man in Black never met the man with the beard, Cash’s story would still be one of the happiest in American music.

_________

A version of this essay ran at the Chicago Reader way back when.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Monthly Archives: January 2013