I’ve got a couple of things published this week.

Two pieces in the new Comics Journal, one about the gay-love cooking manga “Antique Bakery” and a short blurb about Dirk Tiede’s manga-like horror/cop-drama Paradigm Shift.

And a rant/poem/whatever up on Poor Mojo’s almanac called A Pundit In Every Pot-Head

While you’re over at Poor Mojo’s, incidentally, you should check out the Giant Squid’s advice column. It can’t really be effectually described, but check out this one from a couple of weeks ago about ninjas, pirates, President Lincoln, Nikola Tesla, and Thomas Hobbes among other things.

This is from one of the first comics I remember reading (and I think I actually read it in England, where it was reproduced in black and white….)

I’d always assumed it was drawn by John Byrne, but apparently its a different Kirby acolyte named Dave Cockrum.

Anyway, here’s my abstract version of the same page.

The edges got a little snipped, but I figure no one minds but me, and I didn’t really want to scan twelve times to get it right…..

The text reads, “When I solve a puzzle, I am smart and you are confused.” Said by my son, of course.

I had originally hoped to do this blog with my friend, mentor, and sometime collaborator Bert Stabler. Alas, he doesn’t have the time at the moment. Nonetheless, he’s agreed to let me post some of his reviews if I don’t trouble him about it too much. So here’s an article which ran last week (in somewhat altered form) in the Chicago Reader. If you’re in Chicago, the exhibit is still up, so you should be able to check it out for a brief while at least.

PEDAGOGICAL FACTORY: EXPLORING STRATEGIES FOR AN EDUCATED CITY HYDE PARK ART CENTER

By Bert Stabler

Schools, like prisons and hospitals, are mysterious social institutions, dedicated to lofty but ill-defined goals regarding the benighted populations that sluice through their corridors. And, as with prisons and hospitals, the result is often messy. I should know, I’ve been working with Chicago Public Schools students for ten years. “Pedagogical Factory,” a new project at the Hyde Park Art Center spearheaded by Jim Duignan of the Chicago-based Stockyard Institute, attempts to provide concrete examples for improving education. The series of events and workshops Duignan has put together with Daniel Tucker of AREA magazine has nothing to do with technocratic arguments over assessments and accountability, and looks past the notion of school as a defined, programmed place. Their events bring together a variety of people who approach socially progressive.learning through collaboration, participation, research, and lived experience.

Given my dewy-eyed expectations, I must admit to being slightly taken aback when I saw how much the space resembled a school. A giant chalkboard 15 or 20 feet tall listed all the upcoming events. It felt a bit like the authoritarian instructions of a giant absent teacher, evoking the power dynamics that make school so unpleasant for so many. A number of publications, DIY in form and content, are on racks in a spacious but spartan area of reading tables constructed by Material Exchange from salvaged materials. An little trailer in the corner houses a low-power radio station, SPOKE, used primarily to play recordings of teenagers from the Austin neighborhood participating in the Stockyard Institute’s educational radio project. But initially its drab appearance evoked FEMA refugees, or a claustrophobic “time-out” space. The haphazard postings include some sloppy coloring-book-style contributions to AREA magazine’s People’s Atlas project, in which participants invent their own maps, and informative posters from the Celebrate People’s History project. In the audiovisual area is a project of the Experimental Sound Studio, the Found Chicago Sounds listening station, which features an annotated listing of ambient sounds recorded around Chicago (WBEZ has also been broadcasting these everyday soundscapes). In the end, the space didn’t remind me of an art show. It seemed, well, educational.

As I found out, the central aspect of the show is dialogue, not visuals. Besides, the look of the gallery continues to evolve. For example, some color was added by graffiti artists involved in the first event I attended. Led by instructor Jonathan St. Claire, this event, “How We Move,” was a class that broke down breakdancing into simple movement patterns, and offered useful techniques for breathing and improvising. “How We Grow,” the event I went to August 15, featured Baltimore artists Scott Berzofsky, Dane Nester, and Nicholas Wisniewski, who presented a slide show about their successful new vacant-lot farming project. It isn’t a top-down “improvement” initiative. They never asked for official permission or help with cultivating their chosen plot. Rather, they invited participation from neighborhood residents, and learned informally, from advice, research, and trial and error. Their presentation initiated a conversation on many issues, both practical and philosophical. An urban farmer from Brooklyn, Austin Schull, spiced up the gallery by gracing it with his pickup truck, which features a verdant portable greenhouse in the back.

St. Claire’s organization, the University of Hip-Hop, was founded by gifted Chicago artist and schoolteacher Lavie Raven, also in attendance on August 4. Raven was interviewed in William “Upski” Wimsatt’s 1994 book of essays, Bomb the Suburbs. In the tradition of progressive education exemplified by John Dewey and Paulo Freire, Raven stated that his goal was to be “a student, a learner, rather than an overrated teacher.” One way to blur the line between the education world and the outside world is to make a gallery look like a classroom. But it’s far better to transform traditional educational spaces with the energy and freedom of people working in the outside world, doing things like dancing and farming.

AREA is organizing a number of impressive events on Wednesdays and Sundays, featuring artists, writers, artisans, and teachers from Chicago and beyond. These lectures, discussions, and workshops are being done in conjunction with the magazine’s upcoming “How We Learn” issue. The opening panel discussion, which can be heard on wbez.org, featured local activist educational groups such as Mess Hall, Platypus, Free Geek, Chicagoland/Calumet Underground Railroad Efforts, Bronzeville Historical Society, Chicago Women’s Health Center, and the Odyssey Project. Upcoming topics include grassroots fund-raising (“How We Fund”), do-it-yourself food production (“How We Brew/Bake/Mead/Etc.”), architecture and the built environment (“How We Build”), and reconstructing the art textbook (“How We Make a Pedagogical Sketchbook”). Though the patronizing “How We X” titles remind me of an unreconstructed textbook, the programs will be exciting and relevant for those doing community cultural work. People are also invited to propose their own events or discussions. A detailed schedule is posted on stockyardinstitute.org and hydeparkart.org, and raw audio of the events is available on blip.tv.

The community focus of much Chicago art gives the city a distinctive profile in the global contemporary art context. Examples include the installations and redistribution efforts of Dan Peterman, the booklets and projects of Temporary Services, and the scrappy information sharing and flashy interventions of the Version festival. Other efforts are described in the free publication Trashing the Neoliberal City: Autonomous Cultural Practices in Chicago From 2000-2006, available at “Pedagogical Factory.” The many free performances and services, DIY workshops, and self-publishing initiatives going on in the city, though they operate at a small scale, are viable and powerful models. The real pedagogical factory–Chicago public education, with its bloated administration and constant restructuring–needs to be rethought from the inside out by considering other possibilities (like the art world), not extended further into other areas (like the art world). In the end, this show offers inspiring alternatives for improving the city with education.

WHEN Through 9/22: Mon-Thu 9am-8pm, Fri-Sat 9am-5pm, Sun noon-5pm
WHERE Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell
PRICE Free
INFO 773-324-5520

T. Hodler takes me to task in this post for various things. Most of them stem from a lack of clarity on my part, I think, and on Hodler’s assuming that I’m saying the same thing as several other folks he disagrees with.

Hodler asks, for example:

“Where are all these boring, serious art comics overreacting to superheroes? Is it really that hard to find alternative comics that aren’t memoir? Or that aren’t obsessed with distancing themselves from superheroes? Aside from a few members of the older guard, I find it hard to apply this criterion to nearly anyone.”

However, my point isn’t that the content of the comics themselves necessarily revolves around super-heroes. Instead, my argument (such as it is) is that the dominance of super-heroes, and their low critical standing, has helped to determine the current obssessions of art comics — basically, memoir and literary fiction (to the extent that the two are separable.) It’s a desire for literariness and respectability which is the trouble with comics — a desire I see as being linked to the pulp past.

Hodler also notes that Chris Ware and Dan Clowes don’t write autobio comics. Indeed they don’t. They write contemporary literary fiction, a genre which is at least somewhat distinct, but which has many of the same problems (tedium, pretension, self-absorption.) (And, of course, TCJ isn’t an example of autobio either; it’s just the foremost critical voice arguing for the literarification of comics.)

Hodler’s right when he argues:

“It is true, I suppose, that when Ware and Clowes reference superhero comics, they usually do so through parody or satire, though I think it is far too simple to categorize their approach to the genre as simply contempt or as an attempt at distancing themselves. Clowes’s Death Ray is one of the best superhero comics I’ve ever read, and while his Dan Pussey stories are fairly devastating in their treatment of superhero comics, they don’t exactly treat the “art comics” world with kid gloves, either. I would also argue that Ware’s references to Superman and Supergirl in his Jimmy Corrigan and Rusty Brown stories are just as much elegiac as critical.”

There is a good deal of elegy and nostalgia in the approach of alt cartoonists towards super-hero comics — and towards older strip cartoons as well. Unfortunately, nostalgia is just about the worst of all possible modes for art, in my opinion. Nostalgia has throttled jazz, kicked the shit out of contemporary poetry, and what it’s done to white mainstream rock is none too pretty, either. In comics, I believe it’s also a way to reconcile the genre’s pulp roots with a modern literary sensibility. Chabon’s Kavalier and Klay (which I must admit I was forced to put down in disgust after about a chapter) is maybe the best example of this — oh those darling pulp creators! They were so alive, so vital, so, so…ethnic! Let us appreciate them by penning pompous boring hymns to our own superior taste! Hallelujah!

Also, and in addition, I’ve read way more Dan Clowes than I wanted to, damn it, because everyone loves him and I’m supposed to have an opinion. But when I read it all I ever think is, who would have thought you could make surrealism so boring? It’s like Ira Glass borifying a David Lynch movie. Life is too short for that crap.

Hodler also says,

“I have nothing against manga, the best of which seems to me to be just as artistically valid as anything created in North America, and the inclusion of more female voices would be an obviously healthy development, but I will never understand so many comics readers’ apparent desire for “hugely popular” comics, and the implied belief that that popularity goes hand in hand with being “aesthetically vital”.”

Again, this is me failing to make myself clear. I hope that in the future comics will be popular because I like manga, and manga’s a popular genre. I don’t like manga because it’s popular, though. (Did that make sense? What I’m trying to say is, popularity would be part of comics if comics turned into manga, but the popularity isn’t what makes the manga good.) The point is that manga is an incredibly vital and diverse art form, with standards of craft and storytelling that leave most American comics whimpering in pitiful little puddles of incompetence.

I also think that contemporary visual art (hardly hugely popular) is quite exciting. And some popular art forms (mainstream country) are horrible.

Still, (and maybe in slight contradiction to what I just said) it’s not quite true to say that popularity has nothing to do with aesthetics. The cultural space within which a work is produced, and the way it is received, has a lot to do with a medium’s health, I think. It can just work in a lot of different ways. Mainstream comics’ very limited audience has been quite bad for its aesthetics. The even more limited audience for metaphysical poetry in the 17th century probably had good effects, overall. It just depends.

Update: Hodel responds to my response…and I think we’ll probably leave it at that.

And furthermore: I hope that those of you who came to see the fight will stay to look around a bit. I’d encourage you to check out discussions of Dame Darcy, H.P. Lovecraft and Re-Animator, contemporary R&B, art and education, plus an enormous interview with cartoonist Johnny Ryan. Also, and finally, you can see me imitate someone rather like John Byrne.

This ran in TCJ a while back. Darcy’s one of my favorite comics creators; I should try to write more about her at some point.

Illustrated Classics

The folks at Penguin books have been thinking up some interesting ways in which to take advantage of comics’ increased literary credibility. First there were the Penguin Graphic Classics, a series featuring famous novels with cover designs by Chris Ware, Seth, and other iconic artists. And now, under its Viking imprint, Penguin is bankrolling an even more ambitious project — an Illustrated Classics series, in which each volume includes a full complement of spot illustrations and color plates by a particular comics artist.

For the first entries in this series, Viking has rolled out two Gothic warhorses, *Dracula* and *Jane Eyre* — a canny decision given the success of goth comics. Viking’s also moved a bit afield from the strictly high-brow Raw mafia. For Dracula, they’ve chosen Jae Lee, a mainstream artist with wicked skills. His compositions are lovely, and the slick, airbrushed finish of his color plates work well in this setting — Dracula’s basically a Victorian exploitation flick, after all. But though the pictures are pretty, they’re marred by a curious tentativeness. Where’s the blood? The fangs? Why are the vampire wives just standing there like clothes-horses? Lee doesn’t even bother to draw the most startling image in the book: the moment when Dracula crawls head-first down the side of his castle. Restraint can be fine and all, but, it’s not what Dracula is about. Thus, though the project isn’t a disaster, it doesn’t really stand up to the great film visuals of the legend. Even Coppola’s 1992 film seems more fully realized, to say nothing of Nosferatu.

Dame Darcy, on the other hand, was born to illustrate Jane Eyre. Her stylized, twisted bodies perfectly capture the novel’s air of choked and stifled passion. The book is filled with great drawings, but I think my favorite is an illustration in which Jane kneels before Rochester, who is cross-dressing as a gypsy. His hand is inches from her face, her giant almond eyes seem frozen, as does the fire behind her. A mermaid tschotskes sits almost mockingly on the mantel above her head. The whole image throbs with mystery, unhealthy dominance, and repressed sex. It’s as masterful as one of Berni Wrightson’s classic drawings for Frankenstein — and I can’t think of higher praise. In an online interview, Darcy said she’d like to try *Wuthering Heights* next. Hopefully Viking will continue to demonstrate its good taste by paying her to do so.

As both of my regular readers have probably noticed, I’m occasionally using this blog to write about things other than comics. Since consistency is the soul of marketing, this is probably not a great idea.

Unfortunately, the idea of writing about comics and comics only makes me a little queasy. In part this is just because I’m twitchy. But in part its because I have serious reservations about where comics is as a genre and where it’s going.

In art and in life, it’s somewhat of a truism to say, “there’s good and bad in everything”. Sure there may be bad art comics…but there’s also good art comics. There may be bad super-hero comics, but there are good super-hero comics too. And so forth.

Obviously, it’s always possible for someone to take a given form and do something interesting with it. I’m sure that if I listened to the entire output of mainstream Nashville radio over the last 20 years, there’d be something that was at least mediocre. But the fact is, genres can be healthy, and they can be the reverse. Sometimes a medium or a part of a medium is at a point where artists working within it are encouraged to do exciting work. Elizabethan drama was just a lot more interesting than mid-18th century drama, for example. Victorian literary novels as a whole are better than literary fiction at the moment. R&B in the oughts is a lot more interesting than R&B was in the 90s (see here for an explanation of why). And so forth.

All of which is a prelude to saying that I think American comics have some serious problems. Most of these have to do with insularity. The direct market super-hero titles (as Dirk Deppey often points out in his blog Journalista) are aimed at an extremely narrow demographic — thirtysomething white guys who have been reading comics for twenty years, basically. They exist (like, say, neo-bop) mostly as nostalgia fetish objects rather than as art, or even entertainment. As a result, the point is not so much quality as knee-jerk formula. The craftsmanship in most is laughable — the fact that hideously ugly computer coloring is standard throughout the industry tells you all you need to know about professional standards and aesthetics.

Alternative comics don’t have those problems — and yet, at the same time, they kind of do. There is certainly a wider imagined audience for non-super-hero titles. But super-heroes still hang over the art comics like giant, four-color, cadavers. Alt comics seem to be constantly looking up nervously at these suspended, bloated monstrosities, feebly protesting, “What that…oh, no, *that* doesn’t have anything to do with me. We just came in together accidentally.” Or to put it another way, alt comics have a huge chip on their shoulders, and they have responded by rejecting everything super-hero in favor of Serious Art — which, alas, often means seriously boring art. Why on earth is autobio and memoir the standard for art comics? Is there an imaginable genre which makes less use of comics’ inherent strengths — the ability to represent fantastic, magical situations with charm and ease? The answer’s pretty clear: it’s the very boringness which appeals. Alt cartoonists are desperate not to be associated with super-heroes, and the best way to do that is by becoming literary fiction. God help us.

Which isn’t to say that comics are (like contemporary poetry) unredeemable or absolutely doomed. Fort Thunder, which looks to visual art rather than to literary fiction, is great. And there’s a whole generation of potential cartoonists growing up who see manga, not super-heroes, as the standard. In moments of hope, I think that in twenty years Chris Ware and Dan Clowes and the Comics Journal will all be seen as a quaint detour in the history of the medium, and comics will be a hugely popular, aesthetically vital medium mostly created by women in a manga style. That’s not because I hate Chris Ware or the Comics Journal ( I don’t). It’s just because I think, overall, it would be a better direction to go.

So, anyway, if you read this blog and conclude that I hate comics, its only because I kind of do.

This article about contemporary R&B first appeared in a slightly altered form in the Chicago Reader. At the end I’ve included a somewhat snarkier take on the same material, which didn’t quite make it to the final draft.

Underrated Overground

LeToya’s self-titled debut is packed with distorted beats, oceanic harmonies, production values that make it feel as if the music is being broadcast from the precise center of your skull, and miraculous songwriting. “Tear Da Club Up” nicks a perfect Outkast sample, combines it with skittering Aphex-Twin-worthy beats and and adds a stuttered opening that’s both propulsive and sexy; “All Eyez on Me” features a titanic pseudo-Bollywood loop that pretty much defines “fat”. Even the tossaway bits — like a gorgeous, easy-going duet with a Yolanda Adams recording on the Outro — are spectacular. In other words, this album struts. To say it’s pefect pop is a disservice — it’s one of the most accomplished and creative recordings I’ve ever heard, in any genre.

Alas, this is a minority opinion. LeToya’s album has been certified platinum, but the critical response has been, um, tepid. Most outlets haven’t even bothered to review it. Those that did, like RollingStone.com, had little to say, and even less that was laudatory.

Not that this is a big surprise. Few musical genres are as critically despised as contemporary R & B. Read a review of any random urban diva and you’ll learn that her street-posturing is laughable, her lyrics monotonous, and her voice an embarrassment. Even positive assessments have a defensive air — a write-up of “Kelis Was Here” on PopMatters provides the singer’s fans with talking points so they can fight back against their friends’ inevitable skepticism. And last week in the Reader, Jessica Hopper praised Ciara’s latest . . . because it wasn’t quite as bad as Gwen Stefani’s.

Different strokes for different folks, of course — but many of the criticisms leveled against contemporary R&B are confused enough to be actively misleading. Take one of the most common contentions — the argument that the performers’ voices are lousy. I’ve seen this said of Ashanti, Ciara, Kelis, Teairra Mari — even, bizarrely enough, of Mariah Carey. And it’s undeniably true that few of those performing R &B can belt out a tune like Aretha. The thing is, they’re not supposed to. Contemporary R &B has very little to do with classic 60s Southern Soul. Instead, it’s rooted in the high-gloss production and intensive harmonies of Motown and Gamble and Huff. There are a couple of exceptions: Shareefa’s debut deftly combines old school grit with new school gloss, and Faith Evans unbelievable“Mesmerized” sounds like Stax on steroids. In general, though, a big voice and giant production add up to a faux- Broadway disaster (hello, Christina.) Contemporary R&B just works better with less dramatic singers. Tweet and Monica, for example, both use smooth, creamy deliveries that swirl languidly into the backing tracks. And then there’s Cassie, whose vocals might be kindly described as wispy. That doesn’t hurt her a bit, though; on her debut, her voice is so processed and multi-tracked that the singer becomes just one more electronic blip among many — part of a robotic, flawless glucose-delivery system that makes Pizzicato Five sound clumsily robust.

Even if every singer in the genre could holler like Marion Williams, though, I doubt that it would matter. Critics want scrappy; they want subversive —or at least not ingratiating. As Jim DeRogatis puts it in his chronicle of 90s music, “Rock’n’roll is a spontaneous explosion of personality and it is an attitude.” That just doesn’t describe R &B at all. In the first place, the female-dominated world of contemporary R&B doesn’t really do misogyny —still the easiest way for rock, hip hop, punk and country artists to demonstrate their edginess. And besides, it’s impossible to pretend that a pre-packaged product of reality-TV like Danity Kane is in any way scrappy. Thus, though divas do occasionally talk about keeping it real, the ambivalence about success and selling-out that is the signal of authenticity in hip hop and alternative barely exists in R&B. On the contrary, performers tend to cultivate a girly, XXXOOOO relationship with their fans. That’s why Beyonce can cheerfully shill for her latest Hollywood movie, Dreamgirls, on B’day and present it as an extraspecial bonus moment for her listeners.. And it’s why she and her rivals all shorten their names into diminutive, corporate one-word brands.

I must admit that, personally, I find this straightforward willingness to embrace all things commercial rather refreshing. Even if you’re wedded to the dubious concept of mass entertainment as subversion, though, contemporary R&B does have something to offer. In the first place, it’s largely performed by lower-class, teen-aged women of color. Indeed, its perhaps the only way these women have to reach a large audience . Sure, sometimes what they have to say isn’t any more thoughtful than “the junk in my trunk’ll put a bump in your pants,” as Brooke Valentine quips. But you don’t have to listen to too many tracks before you’ll find songs that tackle more demanding material.

In fact, the common thread running throughout contemporary R&B is neither drippy sentiment nor mindless partying. Instead, the performers insist on self-worth, independence and strength, even as they acknowledge the importance of close relationships. Like classic country (or classic R &B for that matter ) the music is about love, joy, loss and — most of all — about dignity.. Thus, in “No Daddy,” Teairra Mari expresses sympathy for and solidarity with sex workers without lapsing into moralism or pity; no mean feat. (No I don’t strip in the club/ Don’t trick in the club/ But I got friends that do/ So my girls that’s getting the dough/ The best way that they know/ No hate girl, I got you). Mya’s “Late” is a hilarious account of an accidental pregnancy — with some useful tips on proper condom care thrown in. Cherish’s “Oooh” is about teen abstinence. Kelis’ “Ghetto Children” with its heart-breaking refrain, “no matter what teacher say to you/ ghetto children are beautiful” is about the best two-line condemnation of our educational system you’re likely to get.

The best thing about contemporary R&B isn’t the lyrics, though. It’s the music. Sometime in the late 90s, R&B moved away from the groove-based vibe of TLC and Timbaland’s early work and towards extremely complex song-writing. At the same time, production capabilities, already phenomenal, went into the stratosphere. The result is music of painstaking craft; layers of sound morphing and twisting through bridges and intricate arrangements, while a multi-tracked vocalist sings rings around herself. Often it’s impossible to even tell what instruments are playing, if any, just as it’s difficult to know who’s responsible for the final product — most songs seem to have three to five writers, not to mention the producers and executive producers. It’s a bit like the shoegazing pop of the nineties and a little like the most polished Philly Soul, though in many ways its more intense than either. Certainly, it can tip over into bombast or undifferentiated mush. At its best though it’s unearthly. LeToya and her peers are pushing against the boundaries of how music can be made and what it can sound like even as they remain firmly in a popular idiom. In this, they’re not unlike the first great swing or rap performers. And like those models, it may take a decade or two before critics start to fetishize them. In the meantime, everybody else has the opportunity to listen to some of the best American music ever made, right there on the top-40 station of your choice.
——————

The following was originally intended as the beginning of the article, but didn’t quite make it for one reason and the other….

In his much-lauded book Lipstick Traces, rock critic Greil Marcus celebrated the revolutionary power of pop music — with some notable caveats. Elvis, the Beatles, and the Sex Pistols, Marcus gushed “raise[d] the possibility of living in a new way” because they “”assaulted or subverted social barriers.” Michael Jackson’s album Thriller, on the other hand, “crossed over [social barriers] like kudzu.” Marcus then goes on to sneer at Jackson because his audience was largely composed of white people. Marcus does not state, but I suppose we are meant to presume, that Johnny Rotten was some sort of hero to black youth.

Marcus’ comments dredge up some ugly truths. Like America itself, American music is, (A) segregated, and (B) in deep denial. For at least 30 years now, top 40 has been dominated by black-derived dance-pop, and (especially recently) black artists. Yet white rock critics (that is to say, almost all rock critics) have never really accepted this. Instead, as the complexion of pop music has changed, critics have grumpily declared mainstream to be crap, and gone out desperately looking for some “alternative.”. But when you take into consideration everything from the hysteria of anti-disco record burnings to the fervent hallelujahs which greeted the release of “Elephant”, the much-touted alternative to mainstream fare looks suspiciously like a desperate search for a great white hope.

To be clear, I am not saying that it is racist to like rock music or to dislike black music, or any combination of the two. Aesthetic preferences aren’t political positions, and I’d personally rather listen to Led Zeppelin than Muddy Waters, for what that’s worth. But Marcus and his sort go beyond a simple statement of aesthetic appreciation. For them, some middle-class white dude strumming a guitar he doesn’t even know how to play is a revolution on disc, upsetting the very fabric of our social order. And, conversely, a working-class black guy singing his heart out over a computer-generated rhythm track is a sell-out, demonstrating the — ahem — pale monotony of our popular landscape. Liking a genre is one thing. Claiming transcendent moral superiority because you like a genre is another.

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