Monthly Archives: October 2011

Utilitarian Review 10/15/11

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On HU

We continued our roundtable on Habibi and Orientalism with discussions by Ng Suat Tong, Corey Creekmur, Caroline Small, and a short one by me. Lots of comments as well.

Robert Stanley Martin with a lengthy post on Eddie Campbell’s’ Alec: The Years Have Pants.

I talk about manliness and The James Bond comic strip.

Vom Marlowe on the horrible Birds of Prey TV show.

Bert Stabler on the awesome poster artist Keith Herzik.

And I talk about Kate Beaton and the Web.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I talk about men, women, and the remake of John Carpenter’s Thing.

Other Links

Eddie Campbell replies to Nadim Damluji’s post about Habibi.

And Campbell replies to Suat’s post. In comments Milo George credits me with stunting comics criticism for a generation.

Over at Grantland they have what seems like the definitive takedown of the DC reboot. (Thanks to Eric Berlatsky, aka “my brother” for sending me the link.)

Along those lines, this cracked me up.

Bert Stabler has a great essay about two Paul Nudd curated shows at the Hyde Park Arts Center.

And it’s good to see someone arguing with the neuroscientists.

Hark, The Internet

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This piece first ran on Splice Today.
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Kate Beaton is the rock star of web cartoonists. Hark a Vagrant may not be the most popular strip online—I doubt it’s overtaken Randall Munroe’s xkcd or Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins’ Penny Arcade. But, especially with Achewood on hiatus, Hark a Vagrant is probably the hippest web strip around, combining popularity with almost universal critical acclaim. If you’re not familiar with webcomics, there’s a good chance that Kate Beaton will be one of the two or three examples of the genre that you’re familiar with.

Beaton came out with a collected book of her strips last week published by Drawn and Quarterly. The most striking thing about seeing the strips on the page is, perhaps, how un-striking it is to see the strips on the page. In the dim, pre-historic Internet dawn of 2000, Scott McCloud in Reinventing Comics proposed that the Internet would allow comics to spread and morph into fabulous shapes. Creators could take advantage of what McCloud called an “infinite canvas” to produce sprawling images that scrolled across multiple screens.

Some creators have picked up on the hint—McCloud himself has made some comics in this vein—but for the most part, webcomics look a lot like newspaper comics. Beaton’s certainly do; almost all of her strips are three or four panels, like a daily, or else two tiers of three-or-four-panels, like a Sunday. Occasionally she’ll have a slightly different format: for instance, a strip about Vikings collecting souvenir-illuminated manuscripts from sacked monasteries is eight panels arranged as two pages of four-panel blocks. But that’s about as adventurous as the layout gets. Artists like Bill Watterson and Winsor McCay were eager to use every inch of space they had for lush landscapes across which action rolled and sprawled in lavish, kinetic detail. In theory Beaton has a lot more room than Calvin and Hobbes, and even more than Little Nemo, but she’s not interested. Instead, like most web cartoonists, she seems comfortable in the small cramped boxes, which she fills mostly with people standing around with their speech bubbles.

It’s not that the web form has no effect on Beaton; it’s just that you need to squint a little to see them. Most significantly, perhaps, is that you don’t actually need to squint. Comics in the paper have gotten smaller and smaller, encouraging the proliferation of strips like Dilbert—hideously ugly, but readable at even microscopic size.

Many webcomics, like Achewood or xkcd, also feature rudimentary art, but Beaton’s work is much more accomplished. In a strip showing the battle between a giant squid and the Nautilus, the bigger-than-newspaper-size panels give Beaton a chance to play with scale. In one panel, a giant tentacle wraps around one of the men; in another the squid sidles up to the sub. Similarly, in a Sunday-shaped-strip about Queen Elizabeth, Beaton draws the first tier of panels in increasing close-up, allowing us to enjoy the tightly-drawn pattern on Elizabeth’s headdress. Then in the second tier, we pull back, as Bess declares she has the wingspan of an albatross, and goes swooping up, up and over the landscape, until she’s just a butterfly-like squiggle in the sky. It’s not a flashy effect, but it’s nicely done, and it would be difficult-to-impossible to pull off in the space constraints imposed by newspapers.

But Beaton is mostly a creature of the web not so much in her drawings as in the topics she chooses and the way she approaches them. Traditionally, most strips have featured recurring characters (like Peanuts). Some web strips work that way too, but there are others which are more conceptual…. or more gimmicky, depending on how charitable you’re feeling. Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics, for example, re-uses the same clip art dinosaur art in the same six panels every day, altering the text to create different gags. Dan Walsh’s amazing Garfield Without Garfield alters a Jim Davis strip every day, removing the eponymous cat in order to focus on Jon Arbuckle’s life of emptiness and absurd despair.

Beaton’s approach isn’t as formulaic, but it’s still (for the most part) a formula. Rather than inventing her own story lines, she takes characters from literature and history and writes jokes around them. So in “Dude Watchin’ With the Brontës,” Emily and Charlotte enthuse about brooding, violent men (“So passionate.” “So mysterious.”) while Anne points out that these brooding, violent men, are as she says, “alcoholic dick bags.” In another memorable strip, a badass Wonder Woman gets a cat out of a tree by viciously lassoing it and nearly terrifying it to death; in another Marie Curie goofs around by putting little chunks of radium over her eyes.

The joy of Beaton’s work is seeing familiar figures given a half twist and recontexualized—Dracula’s wives discussing women’s rights, or Moses losing the respect of his people because he’s dressed in sandals and socks. As such, her comic fits right in on the web, which has an insatiable love for creating the new out of the bits and bytes of the old. Beaton’s cartoons are like mash-ups or fan-fiction. They’re perfect for an environment in which large communities of people who love, say, Nancy Drew, are primed to send each other links to the new cartoon where Nancy dons a KKK mask, or those who love superheroes are ready to tweet about the strips featuring sexy Batman. Beaton cartoons all feel like Internet memes waiting to happen.

When Internet memes are great, it’s because of their unassuming absurdity; the brilliant ease with which, for example, Beaton makes Charlie the reluctant winner of a trip to a turnip factory, or the quick, biting snark with which she portrays the perfect Dickens heroine as a bland nonentity who looks like her brains have been scooped out with a melon-baller.

When Internet memes are not so great, it’s because of that same swiftness and effortlessness—they can come off as glib. That’s the case for Beaton’s work too, especially over the course of an entire book. One historical figure talking like a valley girl is very funny; when it’s the patois of Elizabethan peasants and Nordic adventurers alike, though, it can start to seem like a tic. Similarly, Beaton’s “isn’t history/literature funny, huh?” schtick gets tiresome after awhile—like those emails from your friend who just can’t help sending you every single “hilarious” link that the Web happened to spit out that day. When Beaton’s good, she reminds you of Gary Larson; when she’s not so good, it feels like Gary Larson domesticated for NPR.

Still, if every hilarious link you ever got was as funny as Beaton’s cartoons generally are, the world would be a happier place. If the Hark a Vagrant collection is, like the Internet, occasionally disappointing, it is also, like the Internet, often delightful, and ultimately worth paying for.

Caroline Small on Habibi, Said, and Heart of Darkness

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Caro posted this in comments earlier today. I hope she’ll forgive me for turning it into a post.
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The classic examples I think of when I think about “good” exoticism are things like World’s Fair pavilions and ’60s musical exotica — all trafficking in stereotypes and generalizations and even caricatures, but also, importantly, drawing on indigenous voices and crafting exotic representations that are, overall, positive, rather than dehumanizing ones. They can create interest in the outside world that’s a valuable counter to jingoistic tendencies.

So without intending any criticism of Nadim’s use of Said’s argument, I think that digging a little deeper into Said might be worthwhile, as it seems like we’re moving toward entrenched positions that really are more axiomatic than anything Said himself said. I take Eric’s point (and I don’t know for sure whether Franklin has read Orientalism or not) but it seems like he might find it more palatable than most French theory — Orientalism is from 1978, and it’s much closer to a traditional textual and historical treatise than the canonical works of poststructuralism or psychoanalytic feminism (and Said’s later work.) There’s a copy of the book online, and even skimming the introduction is valuable.

It’s also interesting to note that by the 1990s, in books like Culture and Imperialism (which were much more overtly theoretical than the earlier work from the late ’70s), Said was putting forth defenses of books like Heart of Darkness specifically on the grounds that Conrad was self-aware, that is, even though he couldn’t really think outside of the discourse of Orientalism, he perceived the places where it was insufficient, and that perception comes across in his writing. Said says:

What makes Conrad different from the other colonial writers who were his contemporaries is that, for reasons having partly to do with the colonialism that turned him, a Polish expatriate, into an employee of the imperial system, he was so self-conscious about what he did. Like most of his other tales, therefore, Heart of Darkness cannot just be a straightforward recital of Marlow’s adventures: it is also a dramatization of Marlow himself, the former wanderer in colonial regions, telling his story to a group of British listeners at a particular time and in a specific place. That this group of people is drawn largely from the business world is Conrad’s way of emphasizing the fact that during the 1890S the business of empire, once an adventurous and often individualistic enterprise, had become the empire of business. […] Although the almost oppressive force of Marlow’s narrative leaves us with a quite accurate sense that there is no way out of the sovereign historical force of imperialism, and that it has the power of a system representing as well as speaking for everything within its dominion, Conrad shows us that what Marlow does is contingent, acted out for a set of like-minded British hearers, and limited to that situation.

[…] Heart of Darkness works so effectively because its politics and aesthetics are, so to speak, imperialist, which in the closing years of the nineteenth century seemed to be at the same time an aesthetic, politics, and even epistemology inevitable and unavoidable. For if we cannot truly understand someone else’s experience and if we must therefore depend upon the assertive authority of the sort of power that Kurtz wields as a white man in the jungle or that Marlow, another white man, wields as narrator, there is no use looking for other, non-imperialist alternatives; the system has simply eliminated them and made them unthinkable. The circularity, the perfect closure of the whole thing is not only aestherica1ly but also mentally unassailable.

Conrad is so self-conscious about situating Marlow’s tale in a narrative moment that he allows us simultaneously to realize after all that imperialism, far from swallowing up its own history, was taking place in and was circumscribed by a larger history, one just outside the tightly inclusive circle of Europeans on the deck of the Nellie. As yet, however, no one seemed to inhabit that region, and so Conrad left it empty.

I think the important next question, therefore, is not whether Thompson’s Habibi traffics in orientalist stereotypes, since Thompson has acknowledged that and Nadim does a good job of highlighting them, but whether it does anything interesting structurally with those stereotypes, whether and how it deepens our understanding of them. His right to use them is rather besides the point, IMO. Of course he can use anything he wants, but is what he does with them smart?

I haven’t seen any arguments that he does anything particularly smart with these tropes, in the sense of the type of insight that Said identifies in Conrad. It seems to me, on the surface, that a “cowboys and indians” perspective isn’t all that likely to get to those types of profound dissections of the sociodynamics of Western prejudice. But that doesn’t mean he won’t surprise me! An argument that he accomplishes something that smart is what I’d like to see, from Thompson and people who appreciate the book, and it’s what I’ll be looking for when I read it.

Keith Herzik Rocks

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The first time I saw work by the Providence upstarts then known only by the name of their communal live/art space, Fort Thunder—guys like Ben Jones and Leif Goldberg, who ended up as founding members of Forcefield. Paper Rad, etc. – it was at a huge rock poster show put on at Chicago’s Butcher Shop in 1999.  Their posters were expressionistic, but exquisitely detailed and highly crafted; they were known for having far more color separations in their silkscreen prints than anyone else in the show. They were more pretty than weird then. The crest of acclaim that buoyed that gang in the ‘oughts followed the arc of many frisky artists brought to heel by MFA degrees and attention from the Whitney Biennial— visionary anarchism whittled down to a few key motifs (diamonds, peace signs, weird dog heads, Gumby) and a trademark style (day-glo colors, seizure-strobe animations).

And I also saw Keith Herzik’s art for the first time in that Butcher Shop show.  Keith’s work, on the other hand, had the mind-blowing audacity of the apparently feeble-minded; the trembling outlines of one little piece featured a toilet sitting on the lap of a large naked person, with a cutaway view to a pack of cigarettes rotting in their stomach.  And yet, other artists treated Keith as the unsung celebrity of an incredibly comprehensive and star-studded survey exhibit.  His posters were, compared to most of the art in that show, not especially offensive, clever, ornate, or vivid.  Rather, like the musical output of Syd Barrett, they were gentle koans of incomparably absurd perfection.

Keith and the Providence dudes have had an ongoing artistic relationship, so the comparison isn’t shocking.  Among other things, he contributed work to their stellar comics periodical Paper Rodeo back in the gay ‘90s.  Since that time, the dudes have made the compromises necessary to become collectible cultural content, somewhat to their detriment, and Keith, well, he just hasn’t.  Drawings that look like something David Crosby would have drawn with a pen in his mouth during a sentimental bout of flashback-induced somnambulism melt and wobble next to hysterically mundane sound bites, the same today as they did a decade ago.  But his production values have advanced tremendously. The ecstatic drawings are scattered and stacked in delicate arrangements of ink separations that don’t belie the spontaneity of the epileptic doodling, but make it leap off the page in a joyful storm.  His posters, once merely loopy, hilarious, and bizarre, have become retina-tingling tableaux of feverish shapes, harmonious chromatic energy, and enigmatic cultural bloopers.  Herzik learned everything there was to learn from alterna-comics oracle Gary Panter, except how to try to age gracefully via obnoxious literary pretentions.

The sense of fragmentation is unavoidable in Herzik’s work, as images drift in and out of discernibility.  In the small fully-screenprinted booklets he’s been making of late, under the aegis of “Alamo Igloo,” the format implies a narrative.  Words appear now and then, there are a few recognizable and repeated images (dogs, astronauts with guns, sexy girls, etc.), but mostly the images dissolve into musical shapes and patterns, recalling the synesthetic synthesis of the arts that was one of Modernism’s nobler aims.  In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinsky comments that “a first encounter with any new phenomenon exercises immediately an impression on the soul.”  The effect is similarly immediate in Keith’s art, no hesitation in his eternally newborn overflow of sensations.  Working tirelessly, never neglecting his handicraft, Herzik attempts to recreate the assault on the nervous system of a universe too strange to reproduce with detachment.

Keith is not a romantic narcissist—the impression from seeing the work is classically sublime, one of being overwhelmed and absorbed by reality, “to the point where one no longer sees forms or even matters,” (quoting Deleuze commentator Daniel W. Smith) “but only forces, densities, intensities; the forces of folding in a mountain, the forces of germination in an apple, the thermal and magnetic forces of a landscape.“  Vitalistic and demented, elegant and incoherent, immersive and marginal, these are pieces at which you stare like blinding headlights, and then stumble away from, forgetting everything but the floating spots briefly burned into your imaginations.

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Note by Noah: Bert first wrote the piece above for Paul Nudd’s dvd-r zine “R.U.B. Vol 2:  Keith Herzik – Inside the Alamo Igloo,” which featured a 30-min documentary on Keith Herzik.  This piece is also being used in the catalog for the Keith Herzik retrospective currently at the Hyde Park Arts Center, curated by Paul Nudd. If you are anywhere near Chicago, you need to see it.

A Brief Conversation with Corey Creekmur on Habibi

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Corey Creekmur is an associate professor of English, Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa. He’s also a sometimes commenter, mostly over on our Facebook page. He had a bunch of interesting things to say about Habibi over there…and when he pressed he politely (if a little reluctantly) agreed to let me post them here as part of our Slow-Rolling Orientalism roundtable.
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Corey Creekmur: Frankly, I think this [that is, Suat’s negative assessment of Habibi] is a response Thompson was anticipating.

Noah: What do you mean Corey? Because he mentioned his use of Orientalist tropes?

Corey: Yes, I think his risky gambit was to create a consciously Orientalist work in a post 9/11 context. The criticisms are valid, but they also presume that something “authentic” was possible, and I’m sure Thompson knew that that wasn’t really an option either. It is striking that, so far, praise for the book (in general) concentrates on the art and condemnation emphasizes the narrative, as if we haven’t learned how those intertwine.

Noah: Corey, surely it’s also possible that the art is good and the narrative not so much? Suat points out some works that he thinks succeeded better; would you disagree that that’s the case? I don’t really think Suat and Nadim are asking for more authentic so much as less racist?

Creekmur: People should read this in relation to the earlier essay you folks posted on Orientalism in SANDMAN as well. The large question seems to be what sort of Middle Eastern fantasies are now possible or tolerable in the context of the West’s increased awareness of Middle East realities. I disagree with points in these essays but they are sharp, important criticism. Thanks.

Sure, form and content don’t always mesh, but it seems striking that the positive criticism praises the art and downplays the story, and the negative criticism works in the reverse way. And isn’t a plea for less racism almost necessarily a plea for more authenticity, or realism? Again, I think Thompson risks the use of stereotypes (almost intrinsic to the history of comics) and perhaps fails in that, and does so with a certain awareness rather than ignorance. We may object to what he is doing, but my sense is that he knows what he is doing in regard to the history of stereotypes. (A friend of mine thought what he got most wrong was pregnancy and childbirth, by the way …)

Noah: Corey, would you mind if I posted our back and forth here as part of our ongoing discussion?

Corey: Um, I guess so, though these aren’t the thought-out comments the text, I think, deserves. I work on the history and function of stereotypes, but my comments here are, well, FB comments. I will note I’m bothered that people here have proudly decided not to read it at all based on the criticism. I’d rather people read it and then go after it as hard as they wish than assume that actual reading is unnecessary.

What the hell did I just watch: Birds of Pretty I mean Birds of Prey

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I knew I’d seen the actress who played Oracle (and who I blame for sucking me into watching this damn travesty of a television show, curse it) before, so I checked Wikipedia, because that slightly off nose and those cheekbones were familiar.  Ayup.  Bats.  (Look, I went with a friend who adored cheesy horror and it had Lou Diamond Phillips–don’t judge, OK?  Also, it wasn’t that bad.  Now you can judge.)  Also, the Mentalist, where she was killed off.

So, as astute readers might know, I’ve got a bad leg, so I’m not the spry, handstand performing Vom of ages past (and yes, actually, my usual workouts did involve handstands, no joke).  Nowadays, I walk with a limp and sometimes use a cane, so a superhero who is stuck in a wheelchair appealed to me, especially if she was brilliant, lead a double-life, had a Greek inspired name, and kicked butt.  We all have our ids.

Now, I’d heard this show was pretty bad.  But lots of people hate comics TV on general principal and it garnered a lot of viewers before being inexplicably wiped off the air.  So I thought maybe it was just the usual insular bitching and moaning about continuity or whatever.

Ahahahaha.  No.

This show is truly, deeply, wretchedly bad. Which is a shame, because it had so much potential.

I’ll admit upfront that I only made it through the pilot.  Maybe things get drastically better, but I doubt it.

So, we begin with Alfred narrating a tale of Gotham and talking about Batman and Joker, which kind of annoyed me, because I am not watching this show to find out about Batman.  But anyway.  So Alfred says that Le Bat put away the Joker, but first, the Joker took his revenge by cruelly killing or maiming the ones Batman loved.  We watch Catwoman get stabbed while her daughter watches on (secret lovechild of the Bat and the Cat!) and then Batgirl get shot after a weirdly gratuitous shower scene (I don’t know, because this show was supposed to be for women, I thought) and then we see that a little blonde girl gets visions of all of this.

And OK, none of that sounds bad, actually.  It sounds like a comic made into TV, sure, but not bad.  It gets bad when we watch the young girl, now a teenager, meet a guy on the bus as she goes to Gotham city to make her fortune.  That’s when the cliches start–because he asks her if she’s running from or to and she ends up taking his number and I just rolled my eyes.  I don’t know who the hell writes this shit, but every girl I know is wary of strange guys on buses who sit down next to them and start chatting, cute or not.  I mean, lol whut.  It’s eventually revealed that the guy isn’t so nice afterall.  What a surprise.  I never saw that coming.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  So, the girl on the bus is the teenaged Dinah, and she’s looking for two women she’s seen in her mind but never met.

Meanwhile, we get to see Helena, Huntress, swank around in the most absurd outfit for crime fighting I have ever seen.  It’s like a bizarre combination of floaty fairy-wing and dominatrix, and it just does not work for me.  There’s a weird wide-neck nearly-disco collar but the fabric is gossamer and there’s pleather or something and just….

Huntress is beautiful and cranky and athletic and she’s kicking and fighting and beating up bad guys in dark alleys and yet somehow instead of being enthralled, I’m thinking, gosh, I bet that’s really uncomfortable to workout in.  I hope she’s wearing proper support.

….This is probably not the emotion that the producers were hoping for.

I know it’s cool and all, but my goodness, that would get jabby into uncomfortable places and how could she bend properly to do roundhouses? I kind of want to hand her a Title9 catalog and recommend she look into something made from breathable fabrics and maybe some better cushioned shoes.  Nikes, perhaps, or with all that leaping, maybe some Rykas.

If you think I’m overthinking things in an action show, it’s probably because the editing in this fiasco sucks.  There are long pauses between words.  There’s time for people to strike ridiculous poses and then just….stand there.  It’s kind of weird and sad and I wanted it to stop, because at the heart, there’s some interesting possibilities for storytelling.

The three women eventually come together in a loft with nifty gadgetry (although the head scanner looked a lot like a McGuyver’d cuisinart container, which made me giggle).  Anyway.  Three women, all from rough pasts, making a little family and happiness and fighting crime.

Which would be awesome, except there were all these plot holes.  The docks at Gotham city have been bought up and haven’t been used.  No one’s been there for years.  Dun dun dun.  Really?  No one’s been at the docks in a river-based city?  Really?

Huntress goes to visit a businessman wearing her dominatrix “work” getup.  She looks like a very weird, expensive hooker, but this is what she wears when fighting crime, I guess.  They’ve got goggles that mockup vision miles away but nobody’s thought of undercover business casual, I guess.

It’s just very puzzling.

The villain in the pilot is painfully obvious, and the way the three women battle him is just as obvious.  There’s a moment that should be touching and emotional, when in her mind, Batgirl/Oracle has legs in the villainous dreamworld and then gets crushed down to her new body with no working legs, but it just came off as flat and kind of embarrassing.

And in the bat-leather costume, Batgirl just looked kind of weird.  Not confident and awesome, but, dare I say it, silly.

Which is really the whole problem with this show.  In Star Trek, costume silliness is everywhere.  It’s as if 100% lycra was the perfectly normal and valid lifestyle choice of the future. Only a few people get into funny looking threads and those few are aliens.  The bland Star Trek sets are kind of like community theater.  You’re not supposed to notice them.

In Birds of Prey, the whole set-up is backwards.  Most people, extras and Dinah and Oracle at her dayjob, are all picture-perfect and real as real.  The ones who aren’t real are Huntress, Batgirl, and any villain we’re supposed to take seriously, like the Joker.  And I’m sorry, but it just doesn’t work.  Joker doesn’t look scary.  He looks like my neighbor kid got into the cheap Halloween greasepaint again.  It’s comical, and not in the echoes the fine world of graphic novels sort of way.

Much like any TV, good storytelling would have carried the show through bad costume, silly sets, and ridiculous special effects.  I’m sorry to say that it’s just not here.  So much potential, so many cool characters, and….we get cliches and some heavy-handed acting.

Eastern Trip

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This was first published on Splice Today. It seemed like a good sidenote to our ongoing roundtable on Orientalism.
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Psych Funk Sa-Re-Ga!: Seminar: Aesthetic Expressions of Psychedelic Funk Music in India: 1970-1983 is not an unwieldy academic tome. Instead, it’s a compilation of Bollywood psych funk—all sitars, organ grind, wah-wah guitar and trippy effects—put together by World Psychedelic Funk Classics.

The title, then, is something of a gag, though of the half-serious kind. The impressive booklet included with the CD includes subheads like “Course description” and “Learning outcomes” and suggests that “While not required,” those taking the course would benefit from “a working knowledge of Indian history from the Mughal Empire in the 16th century to the British colonial period—the end of which, of course, coincided with the birth of many of the Indian Psych Funk pioneers included on this compilation.”

So far, so cute. A little too cute, in fact. The booklet is self-consciously tongue-in-cheek in its anthropological pretentions, but that doesn’t make the pretensions any less pretentious or any less anthropological. They may joke about their scholarly approach, but the approach remains scholarly, complete with biographies of important figures, careful annotations of each track putting it into historical and musical context, and a ton of artwork from the period that must have been quite a job to track down.

None of which is wrong, obviously. And yet there’s something about the careful hipness and hip carefulness that I find a little off-putting. Many of the tracks here are by mammothly enormous stars—R. D. Burman, Asha Bhosle—from the most densely inhabited segment of the globe. This is popular music with a capital pop. It’s like putting together a compilation of tracks by Taylor Swift and Ke$ha and Lady Gaga and then saying, hey, this is a wacky seminar! It’s fun…and it’s good for you! But such is the Columbus-like experience of world music crate diving, in which you compulsively pat yourself on the back for discovering that obscure fruit off which some significant proportion of the world’s population was already living.

And yet the fact remains, even though a lot of people already know about it, it’s still new to someone. In this case, me. I certainly knew who Asha Bhosle was, and I knew some 70s Bollywood, but even so I hadn’t heard most of the music on this comp. And it’s great!

More than that, it’s great in part because of the obsessive annotation. It’s embarrassing to admit, perhaps, but I didn’t catch Bappi Lahari’s flagrant and hysterical lift from “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” until the liner notes pointed it out to me—and you can’t truly appreciate “Everybody Dance With Me” until you realize that Lahari is performing Iron Butterfly as if they were the Kingsmen. Similarly, I’d heard Asha Bhosle sing “Dum Maro Dum” a time or two, but somehow never realized that it was about smoking dope—a factoid that definitely adds a certain something. As, for that matter, does the information that she was soon to be married to R.D. Burman, who joins her on the track.

So it goes throughout the album. Would I have noticed the Vegas-meets-free-jazz-while-being-cheered-on-by-spasticly-burping-keyboards in Burman’s insane “Freak Out Music” if the liner notes hadn’t singled the track out for me? Would I have been as thrilled by the heavy garagey lounge groove of German saxophonist Klaus Doldinger’s “Sitar Beat” if I hadn’t been told that the sitar player was also responsible for the Vampyros Lesbos soundtrack? Would I have tuned in to Usha Khanna’s contemplative, droning “Hotel Music”—complete with swinging trumpet outro—if I hadn’t learned that she was one of the few female composers in Bollywood?

Maybe. I’ve certainly got lots of compilations that don’t provide a ton of information. I don’t need to have things spelled out for me in order to enjoy an unfamiliar genre. But it doesn’t hurt to be given a little bit of orientation either. I wish the information could be provided without suggesting that it was particularly esoteric. But then, don’t I think I’m kind of cool for being interested in Bollywood, even despite the fact that scads of my hipster peers have been there before me? I’m in the room, I’m taking the course. It’s not clear what practical difference it makes whether I’m smug about that or smug about knowing that it’s kind of icky to be smug about that.