Monthly Archives: August 2009

The Fae Will Take You On

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This review first appeared in the Comics Journal.
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Meatcake #17
Dame Darcy
Fantagraphics
24 pp (?)/ $3.95
B&W/softcover
ISBN: 9781560977957

Even when she’s not especially inspired, Dame Darcy creates superior goth comics: cheerfully mean-spirited, idiosyncratically stylish, and oozing with surreal ichor. Thus in this issue’s “Rockstar Romance,” we get to see rockstar Trixxie put paid to her stinking boyfriend Tex — the gross-out high point being a half-page panel in which Tex appears as a bulbous, weeping worm strangling itself with its own belt. “Spider-Silk Tropics” features Darcy regulars Effluvia (a mermaid) and Stega-Pez (a girl who speaks by spewing bloody, inscribed tablets from her throat) as they use their amorous wiles to bamboozle a spider-loving Duke. In both stories, Darcy indulges her goth tropes and her feminism: men are tormented, sisterhood is affirmed, and light-hearted squick is relished by all. And, as always, Darcy’s eccentric drawing is a joy, with perspective, proportion, and visual logic all flattened out to fit into geometrically obscure but oddly elegant patterns.

Again, I do have an effervescent attraction for these narratives. But I pledge my true and more hopeless passion to Darcy’s less tongue-in-cheek efforts. “We Are the Fae and There is No Death” forswears quirky hipster humor and jokey man-bashing alike. Instead, it simply tells a fairy tale; Oriana and her younger sister Hyacinth live in a castle ruled by their harsh father, a king whom we never see. Hyacinth wants to leave the castle and marry the forest ruler…but Oriana doesn’t believe there is any such person, and tries to stop her. As is the case in fairy tales, the plot takes numerous twists and turns, but has an eerie inevitability, pregnant with pain, love, death, and magic. The sisters do escape from the tyrant king, who is both abusive father, and, perhaps, life itself. But where do they end up?

Oriana answers in a remarkable poetic denouement, where she speaks for the first time directly to the reader — as if she has become unmoored from the story. Against a design of stars and flowers, she’s drawn with her hair down and in a transparent shift. “Am I alive or am I dead?” she asks. “It doesn’t matter in this place. Time does not run in a linear line as pronounced by man, but instead runs in an eternal spiral like the rings of a tree. My sister is in eternal holy union with a God.” A full page illustration shows two skeletons embracing; in the lower right of the panel, stylized but lovingly-patterned flowers contrast with the white bones. In the last panel, we see Hyacinth bathing in an idyllic pool, while Oriana sits beside it, head on her knees, butterfly wings sprouting from her back. Her expression is difficult to read; her face may be slightly smiling, or wistful, or perhaps just blank. “Now we are the fae,” the caption says, “and there is no death.”

This isn’t the retro-smirk of Jhonen Vasquez, or even, for that matter, of Edward Gorey. Instead, Darcy’s conclusion is reminiscent of the chillingly beautiful take on immortality at the end of Peter Pan…or of Lovecraft’s “Shadow Over Innsmouth.” “We Are the Fae …”, is in other words, not goth, but true gothic, in which queer doublings suggest a relationship between the human and the uncanny — or in which , indeed, the relationships are the uncanny. In Darcy’s other stories in this book, sisterly love triumphs, and evil men are destroyed. Here, in contrast, all love — between sisters, between parents and children, between men and women — seems to run together like dark water, where the self sinks and dissolves until all that’s left is a smiling, empty mask. All three of these stories end, more or less, with a “happily ever after,” but only in this one does it sound so resolutely inhuman.

Elisha Cook Jr., Earl Grant Titsworth, others; or, The Star Trek Wiki tour continues

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“Galileo VII.” 


…  There is a 1964 movie called Great Gettin’ Up Mornin’. … The black ensign guest-starred on Roddenberry’s first series, The Lieutenant. Nichelle Nichols also did a Lieutenant guest spot, and something tells me it was the same episode. The two definitely co-starred in Great Gettin’. Later he was a reg on Land of the Giants. … Celia Lovsky and Mark Lenard, who both played Vulcan elders on Star Trek, also appeared in The Greatest Story Ever Told. … The woman who played the yeoman in “Galileo VII” now “sells recreational vehicle lots in Palms Spring, California.” … One of the episode’s extras, a 35-ish blueshirt, died in a motorcycle accident two years later. His real name was Earl Grant Titsworth, but for credits he used “Grant Woods” and “Grant Lockwood.”


“Court Martial.”

… The base commander is the “first black actor to play a flag officer on Star Trek,” per Mem Channel. Afro-Portuguese, born in Montreal, the St.-Henri district. The actor, Percy Rodriguez, was a Peyton Place reg for the show’s last season: “A Doctor’s Role for Negro Actor,” the LA Times said in a headline. He narrated the trailer for Jaws, and when he was 89 he came out of retirement to narrate the trailer for a documentary about Jaws-the-phenomenon, The Shark Is Still Workin’. (Wiki says he was interviewed for the film and the interview was his last appearance.) … 

… Cogley the lawyer was Elisha Cook Jr., of course — Wilmer from The Maltese Falcon. To tell the truth, I didn’t think his Cogley was that good; he really did not sell the “Books, Captain! Books!” speech. But he does have a nice moment as the charges are being read out and he frowns down at his elbow in an impatient, manly way. (Here‘s Mem Alpha.)

From Wiki:  “He lived in Bishop, California, typically summering on Lake Sabrina in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.” Wiki quotes John Huston: “[Cook] lived alone up in the High Sierra, tied flies and caught golden trout between films. When he was wanted in Hollywood, they sent word up to his mountain cabin by courier. He would come down, do a picture, and then withdraw again to his retreat.” …

… Joan Marshall played the prosecutor/Kirk old flame. She did a lot of TV work from 1958 to the late ’60s, then married Hal Ashby. Her last film was Shampoo (1975), which Ashby directed, but her part doesn’t make the Wiki cast list. (Mem Channel here.)

Star Trek actors in wiki: married to David Ogden Stiers

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“Miri.” … The girl in the title was supposed to be 12 or 13, but the actress was 19. A few years later she played the girl in True Grit, who was supposed to be 14. She got married five times. “After she starred in True Grit, film critics predicted that she was at the beginning of a long career as a great actress. In fact, she has made almost no films of note since.”  Still, she was John Cusack’s mom in Better Off Dead (1985); David Ogden Stiers played her husband. … Michael J. Pollard played the teen who was stirring up trouble among the kids. But he was 27. I give his name because I never saw True Grit but I did see Bonnie and Clyde, where he played the second second banana, right after Gene Hackman. He got a Supporting Actor nom for that, not bad. One of his later films was Melvin and Howard (1980).


With a face like Pollard’s, a real pulped masterpiece of boyish oddity, you’d think he would have been all over the place, in any goofy-guy role that came up, and it appears that he did at least work. … One of the little kids, a kid with an army helmet that has a net on it, is the son of Greg Morris, who was a Mission: Impossible regular. This same kid grew up and played Jackie Chiles on Seinfeld. … There’s a movie called Homeboys in Space. … One of Roddenberry’s daughters has a former schoolmate named the Rev. Peggy Pearl-Kirkby.


“Conscience of the King.”  The villain, Alto Karidian, is played by a guy who did Shakespeare from the 1930s to the late ’50s, then started doing Hollywood. His son helped start Sesame Street. … The character’s daughter, or the actress playing her, was voted Miss Memphis in high school and went on to do okay as a cool-blond type on tv. For instance, she played the police-woman sidekick on Ironsides, a crime-drama vehicle that ran for years (Raymond Burr’s in a wheelchair and he solves crimes). In the 1980s and ’90s “she worked frequently as a costume designer for a number of B movies.” Her first season of Ironsides, she had won an Emmy for best supporting actress. …

There was an episode of Mission: Impossible called “Cocaine” and it guest-starred William Shatner.  … Great movie title: Twenty-Three Paces to Baker Street. … The guy playing one of the ensigns is a Canadian doo-wop singer and “co-wrote the theme song for the hit TV series The Fall Guy.” 

Special notice: Bruce Hyde, a long-faced, distinctive guy in his 20s who was charming as the goofy Irish ensign, Lt. Riley. He showed up here and in “Naked Time” (he was the guy driving Kirk nuts by singing). Wiki just says he wound up teaching at St. Cloud State in Minnesota. Memory Alpha fills in this: Hyde did 9 tv guest shots in 13 months, then played Hair in San Francisco and was converted by his role into being an actual hippie. “I was going to get a Volkswagen bus and a big bag of brown rice and go find God. And that’s what I did.” Then he got his doctorate and now he’s chairman of Theater, Film Studies and Dance at St. Cloud. To me that’s not a bad way for things to work out.

… as Kevin Riley

Stepdown

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So I’m back from my summer gig as a teacher to feral high school students and I’m stepping down from blogging here at the Hooded Utilitarian.

No juicy gossip behind it, unfortunately.

I’m just joyously busy with business and life, requiting this & that, and setting aside most of my critical work. Instead I’ll pull some creative projects out from their dust clothes. Also, I’ve learned some very nice swears in Arabic (unrelated).

I have some articles & reviews coming from TCJ, as well as my desultory blog at my own site. I will change its focus from reviews into a freer, more personal notebook. Which had already happened, actually.

As to the Utilitarian, it’s been quite a pleasure to spend a while here in the company of these writers. Noah’s great to work with, and everyone else is a joy to read and spar with in the comments. I always enjoyed that I never had any idea what the next post would be about, or what angle it might take. Some ways of reading, like those informed by gender, don’t come naturally to me, so I’ve profited from them. And I never found my own critical perspective flattered. Which is why I’ll still be reading. And why I’m sad I to go.

I want to leave on this note:

In the Summer 2009 issue of Bidoun, a magazine of arts & culture from the Middle East, there’s an interview with the four cartoonists behind Samandal, a trilingual comics anthology published out of Lebanon. (You can download the first three issues of the young, so far middling anthology– I liked Sandra Ghosn’s entry in #3, anyway.)

A lot of the interview’s childhood nostalgia between Fdz and Hatem Imam. Some standard fare about comics’ junk status meaning political freedom, about censorship. This and that.

And there’s this:

NA: Who’s your youngest contributor?

FDZ: Hashem Raslan. He’s in high school. He sent us a comic about killing his teachers. I think he’s the youngest. Then there are the girls in Tripoli– they’re maybe nineteen.

NA: Who are the girls in Tripoli?

OMAR: They contacted us with a submission. They are very shy and quiet– three veiled girls who are influenced most by yaoi manga, which are Japanese comics about beautiful boys that fall in love with each other. It’s a genre. I found it very peculiar.

NA: Do they know Japanese?

OMAR: No, they were reading online fan translations, which have horrendous English. …The girls submitted tales of unrequited love!

How dumb is the Second Amendment?

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I’d say anyone who really, really wants to exercise his right to carry a loaded weapon outside a presidential appearance is probably 1) angry, and 2) not blessed with good judgment. This reassures me!

Of all rights, the right to bear arms is the fucking stupidest. Arizona’s “open carry” law sounds like a delicious refinement on this stupidity. 

Of course, whoever’s head finally pops may not take a shot at Obama, he may just spray the crowd. Or maybe nothing will happen — guessing is part of the fun. 

update, At least he’s smiling. Note: This is the fellow that Allahpundit and Confederate Yankee thought might be pro-Obama because he was strolling with his loaded automatic weapon near people who had pro-health reform signs. What does the fellow himself say? “Taxation is theft.” So there goes the “both sides are packing” meme.

On a brighter note, he tells us, “We will forcefully resist people imposing their will on us through the strength of the majority with a vote.” If you lose an election, start shooting. (Via Talking Points Memo.)




AssaultrifleObama_ac556.jpg

 [ added 8’20: The third photo and an accompanying thought: Did the guy change from a white shirt to a blue shirt during the rally? And for a lunatic he is one good-looking man. ]

update, So Uland calls me out in Comments with his views on gun control. He raises good points, so now I’ve expanded my thoughts. They’re presented here as responses to various bits taken from his comments, starting with:

“Is this post for me? Thank you.”

No! I’m just pissed and feeling vocal. But I can see how you might think it was a jab at you, so I apologize for that.  


“First off, the right to carry that exists in some states is not a second amendment right . Related, of course, but those are distinct sets of policy in which special license is required.”

I know that! From my post: “Of all rights, the right to bear arms is the fucking stupidest. Arizona’s ‘open carry’ law sounds like a delicious refinement on this stupidity.” So I get the distinction.

“I don’t think they ‘want to’ carry guns around the president.”

Then they must be sleepwalking or under mind control. What you call symbolic is still a real action, and it’s an action that I very much dislike and resent. I don’t want my country’s political system at such immediate risk of destabilization thru violence.

“Since conceal/carry laws have been passed in many states, the crimes-with-firearms rates have not moved one way or the other.”

What about accidental shootings? And here I’m actually curious, not trying to pose a stumper.


My feeling: guns are fine in the right context, like a firing range or a hunting trip, or if they’re being handled by a security officer who’s been trained decently, but otherwise I don’t want them around. Especially if the person who’s the lynchpin of my country’s government is anywhere nearby. Doesn’t mean I want to ban guns; does mean I think it’s stupid to treat them as a right. If the 2nd Amendment ever gets offed, put me down for any regulations that would prevent spectacles like the one in Arizona.

A final point, an important one. Uland says of the gun fellow’s comment:

he’s saying that a majority cannot vote away the rights of a minority; that’s the premise of inalienable rights/Constitutional system.


First, because I haven’t heard the rest of the fellow’s comments, it’s possible that he was talking specifically about rights. But the quote in question does not specify the minority’s rights as being at stake. And, at any rate, the fellow believes that taxation is robbery, so what he considers a right may well be very different from what people of normal mental constitution might consider a right. So I stand by my summary of his position: When you lose an election, start shooting.

Second, he is definitely not saying only “that a majority cannot vote away the rights of a minority.” He is advocating the resolution of such situations thru force.

And, you know, we have a court system. That’s what it’s for. The guy seems to care about the Constitution as long as it puts a gun in his hands, and after that the law can go out the window. Maybe he’s an Eagle Scout, but he scares me and I don’t like what he’s saying.

Traces of greatness among old Wiki actors

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Who am I kidding? Nobody’s going to link to this shit. But yeah, the last batch was here.

“What Are Little Girls Made Of.” Sherry Jackson. Wiki says Jackson “is probably best remembered today for her role as Terry Williams on The Danny Thomas Show (AKA Make Room for Daddy) from 1953–58.” According to Star Trek associate producer Robert Justman, the sight of Jackson in costume caused William Shatner to sweat and become crosseyed (though I don’t have the book at hand, so maybe memory exaggerates). 


“Dagger of the Mind.” The mad scientist was played by James Gregory, the guy who played Inspector Luger in Barney Miller! (And also the dopey McCarthyite/Communist pawn Sen. Johnny Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate!) He was an excellent comic actor, so good he made you glad the tv was on, but in “Dagger” he played a straight villain and anyway the episode is a real snooze.



… Marianna Hill. She’s credited in Godfather II as “Deanna Dunn-Corleone,” which I think would make her the shiksa (or whatever the term would be for a shiksa equivalent in the Italian frame of reference) who married Fredo and then got too friendly with Troy Donahue. If so, she delivered a great little comic performance. (“Never marry an Italian! They treat their women like shit!”)