This is part of a roundtable on Fandom Confessions, in which embarrassing things we liked back when are transmuted into embarrassing blog posts. Like alchemy, but funnier.

I didn’t have to stop for a moment to think about what I should write about; it was so, so obvious. Joe Perry. God, how I loved Joe Perry. I got started on my guitar god hero worship in the late ’70s, so Joe Perry was not an embarrassing choice, in and of itself. I still contend that ’70s Joe Perry was a thing of beauty and a joy forever. The degree and depth of my adulation, though, are – awkward.

To say I admired Joe Perry is a laughable understatement, akin to saying I had some issues with George W. Bush’s policies or that I have been known to occasionally look at manporn. I spent hours listening to Aerosmith through enormous Pioneer headphones, or on the floor with my head stuck between my enormous Pioneer speakers, teasing out every nuance of the guitar parts, figuring out what was Joe and what was Brad Whitford, listening for key changes, waiting for Joe to sing on the chorus. My room was covered with pictures and posters of Joe, and when that wasn’t enough, I drew a life-sized, full-body portrait. I studied every nuance of his sneer. I learned to play guitar because of him. I tried drugs and casual sex because of him. On some level, I cursed being a girl because it kept me from identifying more completely with him.

Joe Perry was the major component of my belief system. I ran my choices through the WWJPD filter – what would Joe Perry do? What Joe Perry actually did was take a stupendous amount of drugs, crash cars, and generally not look like he was having a hell of a lot of fun with any of it. And as you might expect, WWJPD was really a very poor decision-making mechanism. No one will be surprised to learn that it led me to do a lot of stupid things.

Jean Claude, for instance. That wasn’t his real name. His real name was Joe, but I didn’t feel like he lived up to it, so I called him Jean Claude. Jean Claude was irritable and sneering, unpredictable and antisocial, all of which I liked. We were once banned from a pizza place because he pissed on the salad bar. He was annoyed after having been asked to leave because he’d carved a picture of a spread-eagle naked woman into the wall with a fork. It was pretty good, too. Jean Claude broke into cars to steal cassette tapes so he could record over them. Unfortunately, I have chosen this example at random. This is the company I kept.

Eventually I grew the fuck up, sort of, and got over it – mostly. Although I do still automatically pick up scarves I could see Joe Perry wearing. ’70s Joe Perry. I never exactly forgot, but the disappointments added up, and even I had to stop listening to Aerosmith. Joe became less of a mental presence. When his solo album came out a few years ago, I bought it for old times sake, knowing I would hate it. Which I did. Listening to it not quite once, I became curious about where Joe Perry was, now. Who he was, now that he’d gone from “Draw the Line” to the theme song from “Spiderman.”

Google is not always your friend. Sometimes a moment’s curiosity turns into years of angst. Because I was so much happier, not knowing about Joe Perry’s Rock Your World Mango Peach Tango sauce. According to the marketing copy, “Joe Perry has been creating bone rattling licks with Aerosmith for 30 + years. Now his Mango Peach Tango sauce will rattle your palette with its high voltage flavor and taste. Keep your taste buds a rockin’ & a rollin’ all night long.” (I just checked the site for the URL and, oh dear God, there’s also mac’n’cheese.) I just – don’t have words. Every time I think about Joe Perry’s Rock Your World barbecue sauce, I die a little.

I gave him a pass on the whole performing with Britney Spears at the Super Bowl thing. She was a hot mess, and what’s more Aerosmith than that? But then, the sauce. The TV appearance with Rachael Ray. Rachael fucking Ray, people. Last year, he said he was a life-long Republican and endorsed John McCain for president. I’m still reeling from that one. I mean, nobody could live up to the image I’d built up for Joe Perry, but holy shit. Mango barbecue sauce? John McCain? I could forgive him for the God-damned sauce – well, no, I couldn’t, but I could resolutely pretend I didn’t know – because, you know, he’s pushing 60, and presumably he needs to retire at some point. But a lifelong Republican?

Sigh. The anti-hero of my youth is truly gone. Good bye and good luck, Joe Perry. I hope you sell a lot of sauce.

Kyle Baker
Nat Turner
Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
207 pages, $12.95
B&W, softcover
9780810972278

I have a great respect for Kyle Baker, and I’m very interested in the history of slavery. So I really wanted to like this biography of slave revolutionary Nat Turner.

Unfortunately, I can’t say that I did. A lot of this has to do with Baker’s decision to rely mostly on images rather than text. There are long stretches of wordlessness; what exposition there is consists almost entirely of long quotes from Nat Turner’s pre-execution confession. There’s no real dialogue as such. Baker’s black and white art is meant to be expressionistically grim and evocative, but while it’s certainly competent, it’s not really distinctive or powerful enough to carry as much of the narrative weight as he places on it. For a mainstream comics artist, he’s very good, but to do what he’s trying for he needs to be Bill Sienkiewicz, and he just isn’t quite there.

Dispensing with any explanatory text is intended, I think, to focus on the dramatic and mythic qualities of the story. But it also makes it difficult for Baker to elaborate the story’s specifics. Sometimes when he tries, the result is just confusing — I’m still not entirely sure, for example, whether the protagonist of the beginning chapter is or is not supposed to be Turner’s mother. In other places, the lack of historical context leads straight to cliché. The book ends, for example, with a slave sneaking off with a copy of Nat Turner’s confessions, by which we are supposed to understand that the inspiration lives on. Okay as far as it goes — but this obscures the fact that one of the main effects of Turner’s quixotic rebellion was to confirm Southern white fears and significantly harden resistance to change. If you want to make the case that Turner’s good outweighed the bad, I’m ready to listen, but to be effective you need to engage the other side, not merely ignore it. And just as Baker’s sentiment often seems unearned, so too does his gore have a second-hand, horror comic inevitability. Babies are tossed to sharks, a drummer gets his hands chopped off, there are multiple whippings. And, in the inevitable denoument, we get to see a hulking, axe-wielding, superhuman, almost slavering black murderer, stomping right out of America’s collective unconscious to take his place as Turner’s right-hand man.

If that last image sounds like borderline racist caricature — well, yeah. Baker avoids most of the real questions raised by Turner’s story — is hopeless rebellion heroic or immoral? Is murder of one’s oppressors justified? — and as a result he’s at the mercy of his own genre conventions. Those conventions dictate blood, revenge, inspiration, and exoticized others. Worthy pulp tropes, perhaps, but I don’t think they’re the best lens through which to view a complicated and controversial figure like Nat Turner.
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This review first appeared in the Comics Journal.

Two negative music reviews, one of veteran indie rockers Sonic Youth’s disc The Eternal and one of R&B newcomer Chisette MIchele’s Epiphany.

Hideo Azuma
Disappearance Diary
Fanfare
softcover/$22.99
B&W/194 pages
9788496427426

The Lady and the Tramp

I probably tend to idealize manga a bit — Japanese comics often seem to me to be less insular, less exclusively male-oriented, and overall better than their American counterparts. Hideo Azuma’s Disappearance Diary is, in this context, a nice corrective, for it is as monotonous, as self-absorbed, and as relentlessly guy-fixated as the work of any interchangeable American autobio wunderkind who ever snapped his arm in half while trying to simultaneously lay out a grid and pat himself on the back.

Admittedly, Azuma’s style is more polished and expressive, and his boxy layouts more inventive, than you’d find in the work of most of his American peers. His cartooning chops are impeccable, and many of the small moments are great: he learns how to tie his boots like a laborer in a flurry of expressive motion lines, for example, and his dts summon up a host of adorably blobby hallucinatory critters. Alas, these bright spots are methodically buried under the steady drip-drip of the tiny panels and the mundanity of their content. I’m willing to look at one drawing of Azuma vomiting; three or four seems a bit excessive; twelve and I’m wondering why in hell I offered to review this book.

If the art is repetitive, it’s got nothing on the writing. Reading Disappearance Diary is like being locked in a room with that boring guy (you know the one) who can’t tell the difference between an interesting detail and his own belly-button lint, and who is constantly telling the punch line in the middle and then going back to it three or four times to explain why it’s funny. The pages drag on and on — Azuma gets up, Azuma does random uninteresting thing, Azuma does other random uninteresting thing, Azuma goes back to tell you about the uninteresting thing he did yesterday, Azuma goes to sleep, Azuma wakes up…..

What’s most frustrating is that it seems like there really is a worthwhile plot buried here somewhere under the soporific storytelling skills. The narrative focuses on a decade long period of crisis in Azuma’s life during which the successful manga-ka quit his job to become homeless, returned to work and quit again to become a gas pipe-layer, returned again and then descended into alcoholism. Obviously, something worth hearing about was going on in his head — and just as obviously, he doesn’t want to discuss it. Azuma avoids introspection with an intensity and vigor that is positively incriminating. Instead, of explaining himself, he focuses on the details of daily life, apparently under the assumption that there is something intrinsically funny or interesting about the life of a homeless man, or that of a pipe-layer, or that of a hospitalized alcoholic. In other words, the lumpen proletariat is supposed to have innate anthropological interest, a theory which is both offensive and, as it turns out, false. It’s no more revealing to see Azuma search for cigarette butts every day than it is to watch him dig a hole every day than it is to watch him trying to meet his deadline as a manga artist every day. Whether you’re a big-game hunter, an international spy, or a garbage man, without emotional context the routines of daily life are just routines.

So what is the emotional context or background? What would give this drab plod some meaning? There’s not a ton to go on, but it seems to me that the big, unanswered question in the manga is about Azuma’s relationship with his wife. We hear very little about her. In the opening sequence, when he talks about quitting it all and running away to live in the woods, he mentions his editors and friends, but never his wife. Over the course of the whole book, though, a few details come out. We learn that she puts out a missing persons report on him both times he disappears. We learn that she acts as his assistant on his comics, and that she makes some effort to get him to handle his assignments in a responsible fashion. In the last chapter, we see her committing him to an institution for alcoholism. While he’s there, he mentions briefly that he is afraid she will divorce him, though she apparently never does.

In a couple of bonus interviews, we find out a bit more. Azuma’s wife apparently thought he was dead at one point during his first disappearance, and during his second she remodeled the house, eliminating his studio. Also he has kids, and they didn’t recognize him when he came back the second time. Oh, and his wife was apparently kind of pissed at the way she was so thoroughly excised from the manga.

The most telling moment though, comes in the comic itself, towards the end of his second stint away from home, when he’s working as a pipe-layer. The police pick him up for having a stolen bicycle, and discover his identity. Azuma relates:

“After that they took my fingerprints, gave me a stern talking to, and my wife came to get me and took me home (abbreviated because none of this was funny.)”

Of course, if Azuma was going to cut everything unfunny, he’d be in big trouble. Virtually nothing in the book elicits a laugh; on the contrary, it’s all deadly dull. The suspicion, then, is that he cut the discussion about his wife not because it was serious, but because it might have been interesting. Indeed, once he and his wife are reunited, he continues working his blue-collar job, commuting from home. Surely there would have been some revealing conversations there. They might even, one would think, have had comic potential.

Azuma’s reticence here also casts light on the first words of the comic: “This manga has a positive outlook on life, and so it has been made with as much realism removed as possible.” In this context, “realism” would seem to indicate grit, misery, and so forth. But, in fact, Azuma is perfectly willing, and even eager to retail the sordid facts of his existence — scrounging through garbage cans, vomiting all day every day, etc. What he isn’t willing to talk about in the manga is his wife, or his kids, or, for that matter, any of the important relationships in his life. Instead, we see him interacting with a series of men for whom he expresses insistent disdain. As a pipe-layer, for example, he works with a guy named Yanai. Yanai is bossy and disgusting and most of his partners drop him after only a week. Azuma, though, sticks around much longer. He attributes this to the fact that “whatever nasty things [Yanai[] said to me, I had my own pride.” That’s one interpretation, I guess.

As it happens, Azuma is best known, not for autobiography, but as one of the creators of Lolicon, a manga genre which depicts young girls in sexualized situations. The fascination with unavailable girls, the apparent preference for relationships with emotionally stunted men, and the refusal to discuss his own marriage — all these form a rather suggestive triangle. No doubt it’s impolite to psychoanalyze… but then, it’s also bad manners to relate endless strings of wearisome anecdotes. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who wades all the way through this deliberately tedious volume is owed a little payback.

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This piece first ran in The Comics Journal.