Utilitarian Review 5/31/14

News

You can preorder my Wonder Woman book for 20% off! Bondage, cross-dressing, pink ectoplasmic goo…what are you waiting for?

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Subdee on Saint Young Men, hipster Jeuss and hipster Buddha.

Joy Putney on the Wicked Witch of the West as superhero.

Tyler Wenger on Superman and Christ.

R.M. Rhodes on Vasari, Kandinsky, narrative art and comics.

Isaac Butler on Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” and 9/11.

Robert Stanley Martin has an exhaustive history of Steve Gerber’s struggles with Marvel over legal control of Howard the Duck. You can find documents relating to the post here.

Qiana Whitted on Joel Christian Gill’s Strange Fruit and the representation of racist speech in comics.

Chris Gavaler on poet Tim Seibles, Blade, and race.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I had a post about the Elliot Rodger shootings and building masculinity on misogyny.

I was interviewed about the essay on HuffPost Live and also on Take Two.

Also at the Atlantic I wrote about the Great Greene Heist and how we need more diverse mediocre children’s books as well as more diverse great ones.

At Salon I have a list to prove that 2000s R&B was the greatest music ever.

At Splice Today I wrote about:

— how the Orange is the New Black TV show jettisons the memoir’s political commitment for cheap thrills.

the cover of the Great Green Heist and seeing and not seeing race.

At the Chicago Reader

— I preview the CAKE Chicago Comics Expo, which is happening right now as you read this.

— I have a brief review of orchestral indie folksters Mother Falcon.
 
Other Links

Mary McCarthy on living out her stripper fantasies, very briefly.

Amanda Hess on how misogyny is bad for everyone.

Eloise James on the stigma against romance novels.

Jonathan Bernstein on why ideological political parties are a bad thing.
 

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Superman Will Seduce You to The Good

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Sex and violence go together. Working fist in caress, they can help boost a film from PG to PG-13 and on up into R. They’re both adult, both corrupting, both potentially dangerous. That’s why it made sense when bell hooks looked at a Time cover with Beyoncé in her underwear and declared, “I see a part of Beyoncé that is, in fact, anti-feminist—that is, a terrorist—especially in terms of the impact on young girls.” Beyoncé’s sexuality is violent and damaging; it hurts people, especially young people. Sex is a weapon.
 

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So sex and violence, in media, are commonly seen as continuous. But should they be? A little bit back I was talking with a class at Lakeland College about superheroes and violence. The teacher (and sometime HU writer) Peter Sattler, showed some clips from The Man of Steel, and asked the students to talk about the treatment of violence in the film. But the first reaction when the lights came up had a different focus. Taylor Levitt, one of the women in the class, pointed out that Henry Cavill was something special. “Wow,” Julie Bender, agreed, “I didn’t know Superman was so fine!”

Henry Cavill’s fineness is widely agreed on (students weren’t even shown jaw-dropping image of him wandering about with his shirt off.) But what’s interesting in this context is the extent to which that hotness is superfluous to, or off to one side of, the film’s violence.

The genre pleasures of Man of Steel largely involve the usual action film devastation — things blowing up, cities being leveled, good guys hitting bad guys and vice versa. There is also, though, a line through the film about Superman restraining himself; gallantly refusing to use his powers, or refusing to fight back. And a lot of the energy, or investment in those scenes seems to come from Henry Cavill’s hotness; the pleasure of watching this perfect physique in spandex rendered all restrained and submissive. Superman even allows the authorities to put handcuffs on him, supposedly to reassure them, but perhaps actually for the pleasure of a clearly enjoyably flustered Lois Lane, acting as audience surrogate. You may go to the movie to see Superman commit hyperbolic acts of violence in the name of good. But you can also go, it seems like, to see Henry Cavill be sexily passive — to witness an erotic spectacle that is about seductive vulnerability, rather than destructive terror.
 

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William Marston, the psychologist and feminist who created Wonder Woman, deliberately tried to exploit (in various senses) this tension between sex and violence. The original Wonder Woman comics are filled with images of Wonder Woman tied up elaborately with magic lassoes, gimp mask, and sometimes pink ectoplasmic goo. The point of all this, as Marston explained in a letter to his publisher, was to teach violent people the erotic benefits of submission

“This, my dear friend, is the one truly great contribution of my Wonder Woman strip to moral education of the young. The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound … Only when the control of self by others is more pleasant than the unbound assertion of self in human relationships can we hope for a stable, peaceful human society … Giving to others, being controlled by them, submitting to other people cannot possibly be enjoyable without a strong erotic element.”

 

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Marston believed women were better at erotic submission than men, and that therefore women needed to rule so that men could learn from them how to submit. In his psychological writings, Marston referred to the women who would erotically lead the world as “love leaders.” Love leaders would use their sexuality to seduce the world to goodness and peace — just as the soulful-eyed, bound Henry Cavill guides viewer’s thoughts away from the super-battle plot and towards gentler pastimes.

Of course, Marston was kind of a crank, and, in any event, it’s quite clear from Man of Steel that you can have eroticized submission and uber-violence both; you don’t have to choose one or the other. Still, you can choose one over the other if you want; it is possible, to use the erotic to undermine a narrative of violence. This is what happens in Twilight, for example — and it’s part of the reason that many people find the series’ ending so frustrating.

Stephenie Meyer wrote about super-powered vampires, and builds her series towards a climactic, brutal, all out battle. But the focus of Twilight is on the romantic relationship between Bella and Edward; on love, passion, and sex. As a result, Meyer doesn’t feel she needs to follow through on the genre promise of violence — the big all out battle never happens. The series has other interests, which makes a non-violent outcome possible. It’s not a coincident that Bella’s vampire power is literally to neutralize other violent powers, just as Marston hoped erotics could neutralize force. In Twilight, romance and conflict are set against each other, and romance wins. Sex trumps violence.
 

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It’s tempting to conclude hyperbolically by calling Beyoncé a love leader whose command of the erotic will bring about world peace. But that’s no more convincing than calling her a terrorist. Sex isn’t going to save us anymore than it’s likely to doom us. Still, eroticism remains a powerful thing. It seems worth thinking about it not just as a danger, but as a resource — a way, at least, to imagine a world in which heroes don’t always end up hitting each other.
 

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You can keep your hammer, Thor.
 

Son of Blade

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Tim Seibles cuts straight to the heart. When I met him at his hotel to walk him over to my wife’s poetry class, conversation leapt from “nice weather” to “parents with Alzheimer’s” in a single bound. He was giving a reading that night and—because his most recent book, Fast Animal, includes five poems about Blade the Vampire-Hunter—visiting my Superheroes class the next morning.

Seibles was in high school when Marvel launched the character in 1973. He’s not the first black superhero—Black Panther debuted in Fantastic Four in 1966 , the Falcon in Captain America in 1969, and Luke Cage in his own title in 1972—but he beat Brother Voodoo to newsstands by two months. The comic book market was slumping, so Marvel was desperately mixing its superhero formula with blaxploitation and horror. Shaft hit theaters in 1971, Super Fly and Blacula in 1972. Hammer Films had been pounding out low budget Dracula and Frankenstein flicks for over a decade, but the Comics Code prohibited “walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism” until 1971, unless the horror was “handled in the classic tradition such as Frankenstein, Dracula, and other high caliber literary works.”

Marvel pounced with Werewolf by NightTomb of DraculaThe Monster of Frankenstein, and a half dozen other horror-tinged titles. He sounds like a pseudonym, but flesh-and-blood writer Marv Wolfman moved to Marvel at the same moment, and soon he and artist Gene Colan were adding a black “vampire killer” to their Dracula cast.  I’ll let Seibles introduce him:

Years ago, a pregnant woman was bitten by a vampire and turned. Her son was born with the thirst but, being half-human, he could walk in sunlight unharmed. Though vampires quietly dominate the world, he fights them—in part to prove his allegiance to humanity, in part to avenge his long isolation, being neither human, nor vampire. Because of his deadly expertise and weapon of choice, they call him: BLADE, THE DAYWALKER”

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It’s hard not to read the character as a racial metaphor. Barack Obama turned thirteen when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade that year, and though President Nixon made no public comment, White House tapes reveal his opposition to abortion, except when “necessary,” as “when you have a black and a white. Or a rape.” I read all vampires as rapists, so it follows the horror of our cultural logic that the first black half-vampire would have to take a vow of blood celibacy. Note all those unconscious blonde women draped in Dracula’s arms too. Blade’s skin makes explicit more than one coded fear.

Seibles told my class that he saw the character as an “emblem of alienation,” a metaphor for what it feels like to be black in the U.S., to feel “both American and not.” The night before they heard him read his poem “Allison Wolff,” set in 1972 when “Race was the elephant / sitting on everybody.” Seibles was born in 1955, the year Emmett Till was lynched, and that horror haunts the teenaged Tim the first time he kisses a white girl.

Fast Animal includes a high school photo of Seibles, “circa 1971,” long before he met Blade. The half-vampire lurked around Marvel’s black and white magazines for a few years, vanished for a decade or so, then reawakened in the 90s.  I showed my class the 1998 film, which opens with Blade’s vampire-assaulted mother bleeding out on delivery room table. David S. Goyer penned the screenplay, which also explains Goyer’s rise to dominance in the DC film universe since both his Batman Begins and Man of Steel screenplays open with the bloody deaths of their heroes’ mothers. Seibles said the two sequels weren’t as good, and both the Spike TV and anime series were news to him.

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Apparently Wesley Snipes spent 2010-2013 in prison for tax evasion. He last played Blade in 2004, about when Seibles started using the character in his poetry. Seibles said it was George Bush who turned him, that feeling of “a deep trouble taking over the country,” or, as his Blade explains: “it’s almost like I can’t / wake up, like I’m living // in a movie, a kind of dream: / action-packed thriller.” Political essayist Jonathan Schell drew the same conclusion in 2004. Since 9/11 and the War on Terror, it seemed to Schell “history was being authored by a third-rate writer” compelled “to follow the plot of a bad comic book,” with the President turning “himself into a sort of real life action figure.”

The vampires in Fast Animal do have a Wolfowitz-neocon vibe: “the ones / who look in the mirror / and find nothing // but innocence   though they stand / in blood up to their knees.” But Seibles-Blade address a much larger audience, everyone watching “the war on TV” while not wanting “to see / what’s // really happening,” all of us living “in / the blood,” fighting for “The right to live / without memory,” to ignore “So many / centuries, so much / death.” Slavery, Seibles reminded my class, is a kind of vampirism too, one of many ways America has exploited the world. Of course Blade longs for “this country / before it was bitten,” even as he mourns: “I don’t know how // to save anybody from this.”

Seibles called Blade his “mask,” a perfect term for my Superhero class. He used Blade to channel his rage, he said, likening the character’s name to a pencil: “Some days // I think, with the singing / of my blade, I can fix / everything.” That’s a poet’s superpower, to reveal through language, since “evil thrives best in the dark.” He even gave us his mission statement: to fight “inattentive dumbassery.”

Seibles also has a pair of poems in the new anthology Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books (where my wife, Lesley Wheeler, and I do too). Swapping his vampire superhero mask for Natasha and Boris of the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, Seibles playfully critiques American capitalism, a theme one of my students asked him to expand on. Another asked how, if our leaders are as stupid as Seibles suggests, were they smart enough to come to power? But my favorite question came at the end of class: What would Blade do if there weren’t any more vampires to fight?

Superhero missions, like Batman’s quixotic “war on criminals,” guarantee never-ending battles. You never run out of bad guys. You never get to walk away. But instead of talking vampires, Seibles talked about his father. The idea of sitting in a room of white people and discussing race, his father couldn’t imagine such a thing. His father can’t believe there are white people who aren’t racists. Sure, at an intellectual level, of course he can, but the idea is meaningless at any emotional level.

I don’t know what year he was born, but let’s say circa 1930—a moment my class understands well in terms of American eugenics. We read excerpts of a standard high school biology textbook that explained the hierarchy of white supremacy and advocated the extermination of unfit gene pools. That’s not something you walk away from. That’s not a world that ever runs out of bad guys. Seibles described Blade’s life as a psychological and spiritual war—one his parents’ generation can never stop fighting.

The only hope, he said, is for Blade’s children.

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Wonder Woman, Bondage, Feminism: All for 20% Off!

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As many folks know, my book on feminism and bondage (and so much more) in the original Marston/Peter comics is coming out in early 2015 from Rutgers University Press. And this is your chance to get a discount on your preorder! Just call the number below and give them the code thingee down there. Or you can hop over to the website.

Still unsure? Wondering, is this for me, this Wonder Woman and bondage and feminism and cross-dressing villains and space kangaroos? Well, why not check out my multi-year effort to blog through every single issue of Wonder Woman. See eruptions of ectoplasmic bondage tentacles! See Seal Men and Mole Men saved by the love of a good woman! Revel in every variety of sorority spanking rituals! Wonder Woman will be implanted on your brain, and all of you (of every gender) will be more womanly and better for it.

So buy the book, damn it. Aphrodite commands you.

Oh, and if you do buy it, leave a comment and let me know if you feel like it. I remain uncertain that anyone will want to read the thing, so counter-evidence would be appreciated.
 

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How Do Comics Visualize Racist Speech?

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My copy of Joel Christian Gill’s new graphic novel arrived in the mail last week shortly after I read Frank Bramlett’s post on the way editorial comics depict Michael Sam, the openly gay, black football player who was recently drafted by the NFL’s St. Louis Rams. Of particular interest to Frank was how few of the comics he found rely on metaphor to convey meaning and instead invoke more literal representations of Sam to comment upon the significance (or insignificance) of his social identity. As the post makes clear, scrutinizing the visual and verbal shorthand that comics use to illustrate abstract ideas like race or sexual orientation can reveal a great deal about how society negotiates changing attitudes, institutions, and avenues of power.

Gill’s collection, Strange Fruit: Uncelebrated Narrative from Black History, provides us with another opportunity to raise questions about the figurative modes of expression that today’s comics creators use to represent race and racism. Readers of the short stories in Strange Fruit quickly learn to appreciate the playful succinctness of Gill’s iconographic language. He knows when to use humor and sight gags to advance the story. (On the experience of enslavement, Henry “Box” Brown remarks: “This stinks.”) But Gill knows when more serious cultural cues are needed too, as in the two-page spread where Brown’s body, shown curled inside a wooden box, silently tumbles from slavery to freedom.
 

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Yet in the graphic novel’s accounts of lesser known African American figures and infamous historical events, Gill’s depiction of race hatred also caught my attention. When angry whites confront African Americans in these stories, their speech is represented as orange or red word balloons that contain no printed text. It isn’t difficult to imagine what is being said in these exchanges. But perhaps that is the point.
 

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In other instances, the verbal threats and insults of whites are condensed into a single image of a black caricatured face with wide saucer eyes and swollen lips. The panel below is from a stunning story called “The Shame” about the denigration and forcible eviction of the black residents from Malaga Island off the coast of Maine in 1912. In the exchange, a former Malaga resident is attempting to “pass” and conceal his black identity.
 

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Exactly what is being said here? Can the sentiments expressed in the top panel alone ever fully be translated into printed text? Gill’s arrangement of the well-known visual racial caricature seems to go beyond words to convey a culturally and historically situated discursive practice. The pictographic balloon draws our attention to the constructedness of an image meant to articulate a host of ideas about black inferiority. (The accused responds with a fiction of his own by attributing his physical features to an Italian lineage.) I also think it’s fitting that this exchange appears in a story that takes place during the early 20th century when caricatures dominated visual representations of blacks and other ethnic groups. In his efforts to retrieve the neglected history of African Americans, Gill arguably makes those early cartoonists complicit in his critique of racism as well.

Strange Fruit goes a step further in completely depersonalizing white supremacist ideology by representing angry white people literally as (jim) crows. In stories like “The Noyes Academy” about the destruction of the nation’s first integrated school or “The Black Cyclone” about one of the fastest black cyclists in the world, outraged whites are transformed into belligerent red-eyed birds that chase and poke their wings into black faces. They speak only in blank word balloons, pictograms, and the occasional “caw!”
 

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Relying on these kinds of visual metaphors is not without risk, but I believe that Gill’s comic succeeds in redirecting the reader’s attention to the voices that matter most to him, that of Henry “Box” Brown, Harry “Bucky” Lew, Richard Potter, Theophilus Thompson, Alexander Crummell, Marshall “Major” Taylor, Spottswood Rice, and Bass Reeves — men who despite their different circumstances, encountered racism’s vitriolic squawk in comparable ways. Black resistance and agency remain key elements in every incident chronicled in Strange Fruit, even for the stories that end in tragedy (these are the uncelebrated, after all). Let’s hope we’ll see more narratives of uncelebrated black women in volume two.

Last month, World War Z writer Max Brooks and artist Caanan White published, The Harlem Hellfighters, a graphic novel about an all-black infantry unit during World War I. It shares with Strange Fruit an interest in recovering details about African American life and culture that have been overlooked (and both are helpfully endorsed by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.). But in contrast to the more conventional heroic narrative and mimetic style of The Harlem Hellfighters, I think that Gill’s experimental choices result in stories that are not just aesthetically richer, but that also illustrate a wider range of interpretive possibilities for remembering the past.

The way in which Gill represents racist speech in Strange Fruit is just one example of these artistic choices. What do you think about his strategy? I’d be interested to hear if you’ve seen similar approaches in other comics too.

Here Come The Planes

(NOTE: This was first published a few years ago in the now-defunct web journal “The Fiddleback.” Noah was kind enough to let me repost it here.)
 

 
At first, it’s just Laurie Anderson’s voice, looped on an Eventide sampler. A pulmonic agressive ha repeats, calling out from 1981, exhaling middle-C. The ha continues through the duration of the song. Seven hundred one times at a pace of eighty-four beats per minute. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s a little bit over eight minutes. And yet this song, with its curious title, “O Superman,” and cold, borderline-cheesy lyrics and seemingly endless repetitions was, briefly, a monster hit. Up to #2 in the UK. One very bad recording of it on YouTube boasts that “this is what we all used to dance to back in the day.”

There are few other sonic elements introduced over the song’s eight-minute-plus length. There’s a handful of synthesized string lines and some organ. The faint sound of birds once or twice. And there’s Anderson’s vocals, a robot chorus announcing a new age.

Anderson’s work as a performance artist and musician relies heavily on distortions of her alto voice. She pitch-shifts it down two octaves, becoming a male “Voice of Authority,” or adds reverb and delay effects to punch home emotional beats. In both United States I-IV—the four hour stage show where “O Superman” debuted—and Big Science—the commercial album it appears on—Anderson sings through the vocoder, a kind of synthesizer that attaches your voice to notes you play through an instrument. You’ve heard it used by Peter Frampton on his biggest hits, or by Afrikaa Bombaata. The British also used it during World War II to send coded messages, breaking the sound up into multiple channels for spies to assemble later.

 

The opening lyrics of “O Superman” (“O Superman, O Judge, O Mom and Dad”) are a play on Le Cid’s aria “O Souverain, O Juge, O Pere.” In the opera, these words are uttered as a prayer of resignation, the hero putting his fate in God’s hands. In the Laurie Anderson song, the three O’s change meaning. First, she prays to Superman (Truth! Justice! The American Way!) but by the end she longs for Mom and Dad, and gives this longing voice in a series of vocoded ah’s: “Ah Ha Ha-Ah Ah-Ah-Ha.”

Despite Anderson dedicating the song to Le Cid’s composer, the two biggest influences it draws from are The Normal’s “Warm Leatherette” and the Philip Glass/Robert Wilson opera Einstein on the Beach. Indeed, “O Superman” can in some ways be read as a marriage of the two, of the uniting of brows both high and low, the repetition of minimalist opera lensed through the repetition of the dance floor.

Anderson is open about the debt she owes Einstein on the Beach. In interviews from the time, she cites the show as opening up possibilities for what a stage show could be, a process that lead to United States I-IV. O Superman’s repetitive “ha” references the sung counting during Einstein’s opening, and the keyboard lines not only sound Glassian, but the actual specific organ tone is one fans of the Philip Glass Ensemble will recognize.

The relationship between “Warm Leatherette” and “O Superman” is more tenuous. Certainly “O Superman” would not have garnered Anderson chart success and a seven-album deal with Warner Brothers without The Normal’s game-changing single from three years prior. Several sawtooth waves—chords, a siren gliss and a thwap-thwap rhythm—make up the entirety of Warm Leatherette’s music, while Daniel Miller, The Normal’s sole member, delivers ominous couplets about sex and car crashes. The song is essentially a musical setting of the JG Ballard novel, Crash, in which a car crash awakens the novel’s narrator to the sexual possibilities inherent in the automobile and its destruction.

It’s through “Warm Leatherette” that “O Superman” accesses JG Ballard’s apocalyptic vision of techno emptiness and Cold War nuclear anxiety. “Warm Leatherette” echoes Crash’s alienated space in which everything becomes simultaneously mechanized and eroticized. “O Superman,” meanwhile, creates a space of mechanization and alienation that also contains our human responses to this alienation: paranoia, loneliness, and a kind of heartbroken yearning. No character in a Ballard novel would ever beg to be held by Mommy, as Anderson does by the end of the song.

 

Coming as they do out of a theatrical tradition, Anderson’s songs, even at their most abstract, tell stories. “O Superman” is no different. Here, more or less, is its story:

You sit in your apartment in New York City at night. You are alone. Perhaps this apartment is on Canal Street, nearby the Holland Tunnel. It is 1981.

You sit in your apartment in a chair rescued off the street. The day you found it, you felt grateful that no one needed this chair anymore. This is the economy of New York furniture. People lug their unused belongings to the curb: The televisions and air conditioners with yellow paper taped to them, the word WORKS written in sharpie; the chairs that look fine, but might contain bedbugs; the couches that get waterlogged while you try to round up friends to lug them up the four flights of stairs to your apartment.

Concrete Island lies open on your lap, off to your right on a stack of milk crates rests a glass of cheap wine. Your violin leans against a nearby bookshelf, desiring your fingers and the bow.

Your phone rings. You decide that you will let the answering machine get it. People own analog answering machines, with real tapes that run and run and run out in the middle of their friends’ loquacious messages.

You hear your own voice first. “Hi. I’m not home right now. But if you want to leave a message, just start talking at the sound of the tone.”

A beep. And then. “Hello? This is your mother. Are you there? Are you coming home?” You hear need in her voice, along with a drop of reproach. Perhaps she didn’t approve of your moving to a hellhole like TriBeCa to be an artist. You do not pick up the phone. You do not tell her when you are coming home.

Another beep and then a voice you do not recognize. A man’s voice. “Hello? Is anyone home?” You do not answer it; you are not in the habit of speaking to strange men on the phone in the middle of the night. Instead of hanging up, however, he speaks more. “Well you don’t know me. But I know you. And I have a message to give to you.” Uh oh. Is this a crank caller? A stalker?

He speaks again. “Here come the planes. So you better get ready. Ready to go. You can come as you are. But pay as you go.”

You’ve had it with this man’s warnings and rhymes. You pick up the phone and say into it, “Okay, but who is this really?”

When the voice replies, what he says is terrifying. “This is the hand, the hand that takes.” He repeats it. He won’t stop saying it. You imagine just a mouth, the rest of the face shrouded in shadow, rendered in grayscale, like in an old movie.

And then he says: “Here come the planes. They’re American planes. Made in America. Smoking, or non-smoking?” He babbles on about the post office, about love, justice and force. And mom.

You hang up the phone. Confronted with this warning, with this mysterious stranger, the hand that takes, perhaps America itself, what can you do? You think about the first message. Your mother. She called you. She wants you to come home.

Sitting in your apartment, stranded in the night in New York, which despite the popultion density can feel like an island bereft of human company, you want your mother.

So hold me mom, you think to yourself, in your long arms.

You are so shaken from the phone call that the vision of your mother holding you gradually changes, becoming perverse and terrifying, but as it does so, you find yourself even more comforted.

 

*          *          *

Here come the planes. They’re American planes. Made in America.

In 1981—the year of O Superman’s commercial release—Ronald Reagan broke the air-traffic controllers’ strike and expanded the US military by the equivalent of $419,397,226.33 (adjusted for inflation).

In 2010, we’ve lost great amounts of our manufacturing sector, but one area remains triumphantly intact. We still make machines of war here in America. Boeing and Lockheed Martin are still based in the United States, the former in Chicago, the latter right outside Washington, D.C. Their plants also remain in this country, in places like Witchita, Kansas, Troy, Alabama and Columbine, Colorado. The Martin F-35 Lightening II—of which the United States intends to buy 2,443 for a price tag of over three hundred billion dollars—performed its first test run in Fort Worth, Texas.

In 2001, Mohammed Atta flew a Boeing 767—manufactured in Everett Washington— into the North Tower of the World Trade Center Building.

 

*          *          *

If you haven’t guessed by now, I might as well come clean: I was obsessed with Laurie Anderson in college. I tracked down out of print monographs of her work. I attempted to sneak her into just about every paper I wrote. Laurie Anderson thus joins a long line of serial obsessions on my part. She sits right between Eddie Izzard and Charles Mee if you’re ordering it chronolgoically.

I only knew one other person who loved Laurie Anderson. He discovered her via a twenty-six CD series titled New Wave Hits Of The Eighties that he bought off of late night television when he was in high school.

Despite all of this, four months after graduating from college, on the actual day when the American Planes Made In America finally showed up, I did not think about “O Superman.” On the actual day, U2’s borderline easy-listening track “Beautiful Day” took up unshakeable residence in my skull. It’s been said often enough to become a cliché, but the eleventh of September, 2001 really was gorgeous. The sky blue and cloudless, the temperature perfect for a walk from my then-girlfriend’s office on 56th and the West Side Highway to deep into the East Teens.

The blue sky loomed ominous, the way nights dark and stormy foreshadow murder in a potboiler. If we couldn’t trust the weather to tell us how to feel, or what would happen next, what could we trust? As we walked, desperate to put our backs to Times Square or any famous piece of Manhattan real estate, occasional planes flew overhead. When this happened, our faces blanched and our clutch on each other’s hands tightened as we ducked into the shadows of a skyscraper to watch the planes streak the blue dome above us.

And in my head, Bono wailed all the while. “It’s a beautiful day, don’t let it” Go away? Go to waste?

I discovered that I did not actually know the words to the song. As we stopped at a McDonald’s for food, bought water off a street vendor, and entered the East side, I became fixated on figuring them out, worrying the words like a loose tooth. Solving this annoyance seemed more important—or at least more manageable—than the attack itself, the questions about my DC-dwelling parents’ safety or where our nation was headed.

 

Unlike most Americans, I did not see what had happened to my city until many hours after the second tower fell. By then, our epic walk concluded, we sat on our friend Alison’s couch and watched the BBC. Again and again the plane flew into tower two, again and again the orange flower bloomed, again and again the towers collapsed and we jump cut to a POV shot of someone running from a wall of dust.

One of us said what became a constant refrain. It looks just like a movie. And indeed it did.

During the weeks to follow, we heard this idea everywhere. Just like a Bruckheimer film or I thought they were showing a disaster movie, until I realized it was on all the channels, or Just like Independence Day.

What we did not ask then is why. Why, at the height of our powers, had we imagined our own destruction so often that we had a ready-made database of images to compare this moment to?

Instead, we clicked our tongues in disapproval. This showed, we believed, the shallowness and alienation of our psyches. Now the time had come to end irony once and for all. We chose this interpretation instead of acknowledging how in tune with our deepest fears mass entertainment really was.

Through the nineties, when everything seemed so good that a blow job consumed media attention for years, it turned out that we both knew and feared that the clock would run out on our exceptional good fortune. The multiplex transformed into the only place to explore these premonitions of what was to come. The movies responded by doing what they do best. They thrilled us again and again, so we didn’t have to feel bad or, really, think much, about any of this.

We did not ask these kinds of questions in the aftermath because we did not have the leisure or distance or time to ask them. Instead, we asked other questions. Questions like, Who did this? And, Whose ass do we get to kick now? And—in certain circles of the left—Is it right that we kick their ass?

The first two questions we immediately answered with a nebulous body known as “the Arabs,” later refined to “Al Qaeda.” First thing we should’ve done, someone said to me at Thanksgiving dinner that year, is turn the Middle East into a parking lot. Even on that day, when we had no idea who had done this or why, we knew it must be “the Arabs.”

On her couch—which she invited us to stay on for as long as we want—Alison launched into a monologue about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She did not know that my girlfriend hailed from a Muslim country and I, although a Jew, am not a Zionist. The story culminated with her running into a Hasid on the street two hours after the second tower fell. “Hey man,” she recalls herself saying, “I’m with you and Israel all the way.”

She wanted to hug him, she said, but knowing the prohibitions against touching women, did not.

In that moment my mind wandered back to my girlfriend copping to a desire to bump up against Hasidic men on the subway and then claim to be menstruating. I did not mention this. Sitting next me, my girlfriend was silent. After crying until her pale skin turned a shade of red I did not think occurred in nature, she stared at the television, unblinking.

 

*          *          *

 

“O Superman” contains three moments of wordplay. The first comes right after Anderson mentions the planes, when she then asks, “Smoking or non-smoking?” Since we are not riding in these planes but are instead being warned about them from a mysterious voice, the phrase takes on a double meaning, becoming about corpses.

The second is when Anderson recites the Postal Creed: “Neither snow nor rain/Nor dead of night/Will stop these couriers/From the swift completion/Of their intended rounds”

Because if (once again) we are talking of airplanes, and talking of the death they bring, then the couriers become something different, and the package they are delivering is one you certainly don’t want. Nothing will stop them. A motto of American can-do becomes a motto of uncheckable military aggression.

Or, listening to the song today, dread of the unstoppable terrorist other.

Over the 2010 holidays, as the privacy (and genitals) of white people unaccustomed to legally sanctioned harassment were violated, America seemed to wake up to the absurdity of trying to stop terrorists with the pat down and the extra large zip-loc bag. If they can’t get on a plane, they’ll blow up a subway car. They are nothing if not tenacious. Neither scanner, nor banning of liquids, nor cavity search will stop them from the swift destruction of their intended targets.

The third moment of wordplay comes at the end as Anderson calls out to her mother. Like the question about smoking, the yearning for mommy’s arms gives way to a pun, of all things. “Arms,” of course, contains two meanings, one of which is enshrined in our Second Amendment.

And so, with a mournful, churchlike basso organ sound, Anderson’s mother turns from human into weapon. Her arms progress from “long” to “automatic” to “electronic” to “petrochemical” to “military” and back to “electronic.”

When Anderson sings “petrochemical,” if you turn the volume up very high and listen very closely, you will hear birds chirping.

In college, the merging of mom and machine struck me as a silly bit of early-80s “we are the robots” kitsch. I realize now how I wrong I was. I know now that the comfort found in waging war. I know that hurting others can feel like a familial embrace.

Did our desire for this comfort—the comfort of anger, the comfort of righteousness, the comfort of inflicting, rather than receiving pain—lead us so swiftly to retribution?

And what of other kinds of comfort?

I am at atheist. On 9/11, the only working phone I could find was in a Christian bookstore. I made two phone calls while the employees praise-Jesused behind me. The first was to my girlfriend to tell her I would walk to wherever she was, the second was to my mother. My father works for Congress, and was in who-knows-what federal office building that morning.

In the week that followed, everyone I knew in New York wanted to be held in some way, to be comforted. A friend called me to tell me she had been to church that morning. I laughed into the phone, finding it—and her—absurd. Like me, she was both a Jew and an Atheist. What possible business did she have in a church?

“I was walking down the street and I saw this woman outside a church, and, she just, she just looked at me, and I knew that that was where I needed to be.”

 

*          *          *

From the fall of 2001 until the Spring of 2010, I didn’t listen to “O Superman” or really anything by Laurie Anderson. It wasn’t until I left New York to drive across the country with my now-wife that I played it again. We were all gone to look for America. We were all sorts of cliches. We didn’t care.

As the curving asphalt ribbon of the Pacific Coast Highway unspooled before us, I click-wheeled over to the song. The instant I pressed play it started to rain and we sat in silence and listened to it. And it wasn’t until I got lost in the ha that I realized how long it had been since I had heard it. How did that happen? How did a totem that I carried with me, loved so hard, like it was a person, like it belonged to me, like I made it, how did I abandon this thing for so long?

Right before Anderson’s two-minute litany of different kinds of arms, I looked over at the driver’s seat, seeking approval. Now-wife displayed the face of a champion poker player. On the stereo, Anderson paraphrases the Tao Te Ching, singing, “‘Cause when love is gone, there’s always justice, and when justice is gone, there’s always force, and when force is gone, there’s always mom.” And then her voice breaks a little, and in a rare moment of humanity Anderson says, “Hi, mom.”

It felt like letting her read my diary from before we met. I wanted to be known better by this woman I would soon marry and move from New York with. I wanted to let her see the embarrassing parts that resist verbalization and need the true falsehoods of art. Part of me felt, in this moment, like all young men who like imposing their tastes on their loved ones—that somehow my self-worth was caught up in this moment in this purple Honda listening to this song.

Why had I stopped listening to O Superman? The answer seemed obvious now. After that sunny September day, her work became unbearable to me. The song contained too much of what I tried not to feel and not to recognize about the world and myself and the country in whose name horrible things were being done.

Instead, the song went into a cardboard box in a dusty attic closed off from my soul. Also in that box: a book of plays that lay, spine cracked on my windowsill collecting mysterious black and grey and green dust from September 12th through 15th. It sits on my bookshelf now, spine facing the wall, unopened, a guardian against destruction.

 

*          *          *

At the end of the song, Anderson repeats a vocodered melodic line from the beginning: “Ah Ha Ha-Ah Ah-Ah-Ha.” This time, however, she interrupts herself with a synthesized string line that once again feels like it could come out of the Philip Glass playbook.

This string figure references the vocoder melody off of the song “From The Air,” the track right before “O Superman” on Big Science.

“From the Air” is a song about a plane crashing into New York City.

 

Via crossfade, an honest-to-god tenor saxophone replaces the synth strings. The only instrument to appear in the song without some kind of treatment on it, it makes its realness known by being slightly out of key.

And then, at the very end, everything cuts out, giving way once again to the ever-present, omnipotent “Ha,” repeating itself solo for seventeen seconds.

If you turn the volume up very high and listen very closely, you will hear sirens in the background.

 

*          *          *

 

As the song ended, we feared for our lives. The storm transformed the Pacific Coast Highway into something treacherous, slick, unknowable. The next pulloff onto more trafficked streets lay tens of miles ahead of us. Did we have enough gas to make it? Would our stomachs give out amidst the twists and turns? And—most importantly—did my now-wife like the song?

“Huh. Wow.”

“It’s kinda brilliant, right?” I asked.

“Yeah. It’s also kinda unlistenable at the same time.”

Kinda brilliant, kinda unlistenable is about as close to a judgement of the aesthetic quality of “O, Superman” as I can offer.

 

An odd component of post-9/11 American life has been the failure of art to address the event itself. Many—including some of our greatest living artists—have tried.

Instead, we’ve had to turn back to before the smoking day to find art that resonates. Some claim that Radiohead’s Kid A is the best album ever made about 9/11, despite coming out years before. Immediately after the event, the pundits on television wanted so badly to believe in our President that they told us to reach back to Shakespeare’s Henry V to understand how a drunken spoiled brat could become a Good Christian King.

Why not, then, appropriate “O Superman”? Laurie Anderson herself remains unclear as to the inspiration of the song. She claimed in one interview that she wrote it in response to the Iran-Contra scandal, which broke over five years after the song’s improbable chart climb. Like JG Ballard claiming to have seen the flash over Hiroshima from Hong Kong, this memory is impossible, invented but right nonetheless.

Our claming of these artifacts as being “about 9/11” shows that—rather than changing everything—that day recapitulated and unleashed what lurked, buried underneath us like one of Lovecraft’s ancient Gods. As much as we said this was the day we’d never forget, it revealed how much we’d already forgotten.

 

Other Narrative-Sequential Art Forms

In the heart of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence is the Salone dei Cinquecento (Hall of the 500), which, as the name implies, was designed to seat the 500 members of the Grand Council. In the 1560s, Giorgio Vasari was commissioned to create a series of frescoes on the walls and oil paintings on the ceiling of this hall.

 

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West Frescoes in Salone dei Cinquecento by Vasari 

(Photo by Ron Roznick)

The frescoes depict battles and military victories by Florence over Pisa and Siena (in chronological order, no less). These are massive pieces of art that are designed to impress visitors to the Hall, which functioned as the court of the Medicis. It is interesting that they are presented side by side with what look like extremely ornate panel borders. They are too large for the arrangement to be accidental, which means that Vasari (or his patrons) wanted these pieces to be close enough to create an effect larger than the sum of the parts.

It would be possible for a viewer to spend hours examining every detail in each fresco, but it is clear that the intended effect of the presentation is to impress visitors to the hall with both the military prowess and wealth of the city with the visual immediacy of how it has been successful in the past (and, by implication, could be in the future). It may only be because I read comics that this presentation reads as a three panel strip where the middle panel is less important than the two on the ends.

 

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A portion of the ceiling of the Salone dei Cinquecento by Vasari 

(Photo by Ron Roznick)

 

The 39 oil paintings on the ceiling of the same hall represent great episodes from the life of Cosimo I and scenes from the history of Florence. The presentation of these paintings in a massive, ornate grid reminds this modern viewer (and reader of comics) of the carefully arranged panel grids of a comics page – especially since each of the paintings has its own descriptive caption. And there is even an implied order that these are meant to be viewed in; the circular painting in the center, for example, is The Apotheosis of Cosimo I de’ Medici which depicts his coronation by the personification of Florence.

Again, the intended effect is to produce awe at a government that had enough disposable income to commission such a piece. Keeping in mind that thirty feet of open space separates the ceiling and the viewer, the narrative aspect of the arrangement is less obvious on an initial viewing and only becomes evident with time to study the detail. But it is there.

(Better views of these pieces can be found at this site.)

These artworks take advantage of the basic artistic process that enables comics – the implied narrative- sequential connection that comes from placing two pieces of artwork near each other, regardless of whether those pieces are related or not.

The Salone dei Cinquecento is a good example of a narrative-sequential artwork outside of the comics tradition because it contains two distinct examples with very different approaches from the same creative team. It is easy to avoid referring to either work as “comics” because “comics” was not part of the artistic idiom at the time of creation. There are other examples, of course – narrative-sequential artwork is everywhere if you have a broad enough perspective.

And, to be honest, finding examples of narrative-sequential art from before the advent of comics-as-comics is almost too easy. What I find especially interesting are the 20th Century examples of non-comics narrative-sequential art, mostly because they arise outside of an explicitly comic-making tradition but are still contemporaneous with what we think of as modern comics.

thirty by kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky, “Thirty” (1937)

Kandinsky was living in Paris when he made Thirty, which means that he would have been aware of bandes desinees (BD) as a general cultural phenomenon. It is possible that he might have encountered it earlier in his travels around Europe, but it would have been impossible to miss it in Paris in the 30s. If he had wanted to make comics, there was ample opportunity for him to do so. He didn’t, but this was as close as he got.

Despite the fact that it is an explicitly abstract piece, Thirty still takes advantage of the implied relational connection that comes with arranging discrete pieces so close together. It is an extremely successful grid and provides an overt narrative framework for the viewer to build an interpretation around. If anything, this grid is closer to the effect generated by the ceiling of the Salone in Florence. It emphasizes the overall effect first and rewards subsequent scrutiny.

Wild Pilgrimage

Lynd Ward Wild Pilgrimage (1932)

There is little evidence that Ward was thinking in terms of comics when he produced his woodcut novels like Wild Pilgrimage. Comics were certainly around at the time, but they were largely regulated to the newspapers and comic books were still in their infancy.

Each page of Ward’s novel only has a single image and there are no captions, so these are comics-like at best. But these absolutely take advantage of the fact that images presented in sequence can be used to tell a story. As allegorical tales, Ward’s novels were tied to the worker’s movements of the times – a very different audience and purpose than American comics of the period.

Milan Duomo 2Milan Duomo 1

Doors of the Milan Duomo (mid 20th Century)

Because I have taken Frank Santoro’s composition course, these doors remind me of the fixed grids that he teaches in his class. It absolutely makes sense that an artist attempting to produce a narrative in bronze would divide the available space into rectangles of equal size. It is a natural impulse and an obvious design solution. I have no idea who designed these doors or whether that person had a comics background. I’m happy to get more information if someone has it.

Une Semaine

Max Ernst, “Une Semaine de Bonte” (1934)

Like Kandinsky, Ernst was living in Paris when he worked on Une Semaine de Bonte, although he actually completed it in Milan. Like Kandinsky, Ernst would have been aware of the BD culture of the time – even if it was only a cursory cognizance.

Like Ward, Ernst’s novel takes advantage of the narrative aspects of art presented in sequential order to tell a story. Like Ward’s work, each page contains a single image and, unlike Ward’s work, these pages have captions more often than not. Despite the fact that they are contemporaries, there are very few other similarities between Ward and Ernst beyond the fact that they both arrived at the same solution (images in sequence) for the same purpose (to tell a story) from very different (non-comics) directions.

It’s tempting to categorize these kinds of explicitly narrative-sequential art as comics that don’t know that they’re comics. I think it’s safer to say that the idea of presenting artwork in sequence for narrative purpose is such an easy conceptual leap that it should not surprise anyone that it shows up so often in so many disparate places; diptychs, triptychs and other polyptychs have been acknowledged art formats in multiple cultures for centuries, if not longer.

Comics, specifically, are a refinement of the concept for a very specific purpose and medium. Rather than trying to shoehorn everything into the comics tradition because that’s the most obvious context for modern viewers, it would make more sense to think of it the other way around – comics are no more and no less than a distinct subset of the larger grouping of narrative art in sequence.

Having said that, it would not be a bad idea for contemporary comics creators to pay attention to these other examples of how past artists have used this technique to good effect. This is no different from telling creators to study how other artists have used color theory, figure drawing or one point perspective.