Monthly Archives: March 2012

Utilitarian Review 3/10/12

Posted on by

On HU

For our Featured Archive Post, Vom Marlowe looked at Billy and Blaze.

Erica Friedman discussed the Defenders and other comics she likes despite themselves.

I talked about empowerment and dicks in Almodovar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

Ng Suat Tong on the not so transgendered world of Tezuka’s Princess Knight.

Domingos Isabelinho on Tim Gaze and abstract comics.

Kinukitty on angst and cat reaction shots in the yaoi manga I Give to You.

I did a series of reviews through the week on Pop R&B. Beyonce, Ashanti, Mariah, Britney, and more.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I review Gail Carson Levine’s children’s book of William Carlos Williams adaptations and talk about how contemporary poetry has isolated itself. Plus! A poem by me!

At Splice Today I talk about Andrew Breitbart and new media navel gazing.

Also at Splice I review the crappy new Springsteen album.

 
Other Links

Art theory map.

A nice essay on Habibi and Orientalism.

A comics anthology supporting marriage equality is running a kickstarter campaign.

Qiana Whitted on how where you shelve comics affects how you read them.
 

Radio Pop That Didn’t

Posted on by

These reviews originally ran on Madeloud.
________

Brooke Valentine
Physical Education Mix Tape

Houston native Brooke Valentine’s debut, Chain Letter, was one of the greatest R&B albums of the oughts…or of all time, for that matter. From the loping, burping strut of “Pass Us By,” to the tongue-in-cheek goth-funk of “I Want You Dead” to the aching, breathy heartbreak of “Laugh Til I Cry,” Chain Letter was all over the place stylistically, but tied together with humor, smarts, and audacity. Valentine and mad genius producer Deja were convinced down to the giant flying bat on Brooke’s half-shirt that female-helmed R&B could be every bit as bizarre and crazy as rap by the likes of Outkast and Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and they were damned well going to prove it.

Musically they succeeded, and then some. Commercially…well, that’s a different story. Chain Letter had only one bona-fide hit, the funny but relatively unadventurous Lil’ Jon produced “Girlfight.” Singles released to promote her follow-up went nowhere, and after months of hemming and hawing by her distributor, Virgin, the album was shelved and she limped back to Deja’s Subliminal label.

Earlier this year, Physical Education, the album that never was, was finally released by Subliminal as a mixtape. It’s definitely a retrenchment. The flashes of bizarre wit and eclecticism are gone; there aren’t even any ballads here, much less profanity-laced tirades against valley girls. Instead, what we’ve got is track after track of deep, throbbing, ominous Houston crunk.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Valentine and Deja may be working to keep the smarts on the down-low, but try as they will, they can’t quite make a duff track. Valentine is not by any means a great singer, but throughout the album her throaty whispers and moans drip sex and insouciance. The production (I presume by Deja, though there were rumors that Valentine did some of it herself) is also stellar. Pimped Out is built around a weird synth motif that sounds almost like an electronic duck has been drafted to quack rhythmically while Chamillionaire raps along. “Make It Drop” has some of the funniest rear-obsessed lyrics this side of Sir Mixalot: “I can make that ass pop/like hydraulics on drop; I can make that ass stop/like you runnin’ from the cops.” “Gold Diggin’” starts with a wash of demi-classical synth strings and then opens out into a heavy, hesitating thump which also somehow manages to swing hard enough to lift Valentine and the uncredited guest rapper up off the backing like they’re jazz performers. “Thug Passion,” too has an impossibly hooky stuttery beat which keeps you off-balance no matter how many times it repeats.

The only thing I miss here is the 2006 “D-Girl” single, with its surging keyboards and that sample from N.W.A. pattering through the tough production like a whispered, half-forgotten threat. Even with that track left off, though, this is still hands down my favorite R&B release of 2009 to date. So if you’re going to download it, be sure to pay for it, would you? I don’t want Valentine and Deja to completely run out of money before they release their next full length.
___________

Allure
Patiently Waiting; Time’s Up (4 stars)

Like everyone else, the vocal group Allure was pulled along in the wake of Destiny’s Child in the early 2000s, abandoning the smooth jams of the 90s for a tighter, funkier, more hip-hop friendly sound. But where Beyoncé has moved on, Allure got stuck. Their new ep (Patiently Waiting) and album (Time’s Up) both sound like they’ve dropped through a wormhole from 2001.

Which is kind of great. Nothing against today’s radio, but there was really something special about that moment a decade or so ago when R&B songwriting and production suddenly caught on fire — a mixture of newbie fumbling and professional calculation as hip hop realized that this, this right here was the way it was going to take over the world. No doubt there’ll be an uncomfortable retro-early-oughts movement any time now, but this isn’t that. Instead, Allure clearly just never got the memo that itchy/cheesy Kevin Briggs beats aren’t where the market is at.

Patiently Waiting takes that obliviousness and runs with it. From the sweeping, harmonized tough-girl-threats-with-horn-sample of “What Goes Around;” to the materialist tinny looped steel-drum reworking of “Favorite Things;” to “Treat Him Rite” with overdriven eighties video game bleeps that somehow slide right into a sexy, laid-back groove — it’s 20 perfect minutes of gloriously out-of-date pop. Hell, even the obligatory skit is great, featuring some of the most piercing shrieks I’ve ever heard outside of a Diamanda Galas album.

Twice as long, Time’s Up has a bit more filler, but it’s still plenty good. “The Other Side” is awesome faux early Timbaland, with layers of beats and squeaky vocal hiccups bounding around each other while the singers volley “you’re a no good cheater” lines back and forth between the soloist and the harmony backup. “With Out U” is a great mid-tempo disco roll — Andy Gibb for the hip hop generation. “Walk in My Shoes” is something of a rote ballad with too, too gospel vocals — but even so, the low-key guitar playing and the harmonizing makes it listenable.

It’s those harmonies that are maybe the most refreshing thing about the album. Not to take anything away from the amazing sucrose delivery system that is Danity Kane, but there’s also really something to be said for a group whose vocal arrangements are tight enough to add hooks to the song, rather than just keeping up with the production.

Even Beyonce herself has given up on the vocal group aspects of her legacy these days, so it’s up to groups like Allure and the similarly-backward-looking Cherish to keep the faith. Not a good career move, exactly — harking back a decade is no way to get radio play. In fact, both Patiently Waiting and Time’s Up are CD-Rs, burned on demand, which suggests the singers themselves don’t expect to move a ton of copies. But whether or not anyone buys it, this is still some of my favorite music of the year — even if it is the wrong one.
 

Gluey Tart: I Give to You

Posted on by


Ebishi Maki, 2011, June

“The world is rejecting me.” Our main character mutters this to himself in the opening panel. When we meet him, he is recently dumped, homeless, and trudging through a pounding rainstorm. Brilliant. He winds up at an old-fashioned tea house, tended by a slouchy, chain-smoking hottie with a cat in his lap. That is, obviously, a fine scenario.

Initially, the dialogue suffers from some obvious translation problems. I assume it’s because Japanese can have a formal quality that doesn’t really exist in English, and the translator was trying to retain all the original references to “give” – creators sometimes like to bang us over the head repeatedly with their rhetorical hammer. Once we get past the iron-fisted enforcement of the leitmotif, we can concentrate on how cool and sort of mysterious the tea guy is and how much of a candy-assed, over-emoting weirdo the homeless, wet guy is.

The wet guy was dumped by his boyfriend, who left him with a mountain of debt and nowhere to go – thus the wandering around in a typhoon thing. He immediately falls for tea guy, after a certain amount of clinically insane emoting, and tea guy seems amused and, of course, provisionally interested, because that’s how these things go. There are lots of cat reaction shots along the way to make it worth your while.

Wet guy is one of those characters whose innocent, inherently sunny disposition is supposed to be sweet and refreshing, and of course his idiocy leads him to deep human understandings. It doesn’t take much to please him, he’s loyal as a dog, and so on and so on. I find all this consistently annoying, but perhaps that’s because I’m uneasy with mindless optimism. Perhaps it’s a personal failing on my part.

(OK, spoilers ahead, if that sort of thing bothers you.)

Tea guy is much more interesting. He’s from a yakuza family, and his retainer, Ritsu – a big, biker-looking guy who can get away with wearing sunglasses during the day, indoors – is several kinds of hot.

I would have much preferred putting Ritsu and tea guy together, but that was obviously not to be. Because wet guy has to crack the rock-hard edifice of tea guy’s pain and guilt with his simple, honest, healing idiocy. I know the drill. I never much took to wet guy, but tea guy has depth, and when we start getting his back story in the second half of the book, things get more interesting, emotionally.  There’s also a smattering of incidental kink at the end that I enjoyed. (It isn’t supposed to be incidental – it’s the whole reason tea guy is the way he is – but there’s only a couple of pages devoted to it, and it’s resolved cleanly and almost painlessly, so it feels incidental.)

The end is too pat in general, but that’s hard to get away from. You have a man who’s hiding from unscrupulous debt collectors and another man who disbanded a Yakuza organization, for heaven’s sake. You don’t just have individual meeting with gangster thugs, thanking them for their services and sending them home with a month’s salary. Yet, suddenly, all is well, and our main characters are setting off on a grand adventure, playful and in love. I want a happy ending as much as the next gal, but when a creator manages to capture some actual angst, you can’t help wishing they’d stick with it and ride it out.

That’s the thing with Yakuza stories, I guess. The have to be brutal or batshit crazy, and anything in-between is dangerous territory. Not that this book is a failure. There’s a flashback scene where a young tea guy is blowing bubbles. Another character asks if he isn’t too old for this, and tea guy says, “I like watching them. They ride the wind and fly to freedom.” That’s kind of how I feel about this book, if freedom can be interpreted as oblivion (meaning that I will have forgotten all about it by this time next week). A momentary pleasure is pleasure none the less.

No Longer Destiny’s Child

Posted on by

These reviews first ran on Splice Today here and here.

Beyonce, 4

“I Was Here” off Beyonce’s latest album, 4, is one of those songs that makes you re-evaluate an artist’s entire oeuvre in light of the capacious bucket of liquid feces that has just been upended on your noggin.

Not that Beyonce hasn’t spawned crap before… and crap of similar provenance. She’s always had a weak spot for surly self-vaunting, reaching perhaps its apex in 2001’s “Survivor,” a song devoted largely to taunting the two women she’d forced out of her band. Still, crass as it was, “Survivor” at least had a hook. “I Was Here,” on the other hand, brings all the self-absorption and none of the pop smarts. Beyonce takes a deep breath and belches out barrels of Broadway glop, enthusing over her own career success with unembarrassed egotism and Hallmark card triteness. (“I want to leave my footprints on the sands of time…want to leave something to remember so they won’t forget.”) Moving into her second decade of mega-success, Beyonce is proud to let us know that she’s got absolutely nothing to talk about except how cool it is to be mega-successful. She makes her mirror look deep.

In fairness, this has always been a big part of Beyonce’s appeal. Male rock and rap stars are notorious narcissistic assholes, but female performers, from Madonna on down, tended to seduce their listeners with at least as much vulnerability as swagger. Beyonce, though, was all about the girl power put-down; from “Bills, Bills, Bills” through “Irreplaceable” through “Single Ladies,” Ms. Knowles never pleads when she can sneer instead. Her message isn’t so much “I Will Survive” as it is “Fuck. You.”

As rock and rap have shown, “fuck you” is a pretty popular slogan, and Beyonce has certainly opened the way for women in pop R&B to be bigger jerks. It’s hard to imagine how we would have gotten from Ashanti and early Mariah Carey to Ke$ha and Lady Gaga without Beyonce in the middle.

But while Knowles may have broadened the range of attitudes available for female pop singers, her own emotional reach has always been limited. She can be triumphant, she can be hectoring… or, yeah, she can be triumphant. It’s pretty clear at this point that she’ll never manage a song like her former bandmate Kelly Rowland’s “Still in Love With My Ex,” a rapturously heartbreaking track about betraying yourself and everyone you care about. To sing that song, Rowland had to admit to weakness, and Beyonce isn’t going to do that any more than Robert Plant or Snoop Dogg would. When Knowles talks about being hopelessly in love on “Rather Die Young,” it’s all about burning out before you get old; James Dean and gasoline and leaving a beautiful corpse. Similarly, “Start Over,” about a love she can’t leave behind, ends up as a surging future-hope anthem. Rowland’s adult despair and self-loathing—or, say, Patsy Cline’s—might as well be in another language. Beyonce’s a rock star, and rock stars kick life in the ass; life does not kick them.

Rock stars also look really stupid when they get old enough to know better… and there’s some indication that Beyonce may run into that problem as well. Her longevity has been astonishing in a genre where careers are often measured in months rather than year, but, however belatedly, her shtick is starting to fray.

“Best Thing I Never Had” is Beyonce once again kissing off some dumb dude with a mid-tempo lyricism that is much less engaging than “Irreplaceable”; “Run The World (Girls)” is a percussive girl power jam without the humor or novelty of “Single Ladies.” “Love on Top” tries to re-energize the flailing diva by reaching even further back, all the way to Destiny’s Child‘s first album and the summery, girl-group vibe of “No, No, No.” Beyonce responds with a strident, hog-calling vocal that dutifully beats the song’s would-be flirtatiousness to death and dances on its corpse.

There are a couple of bright spots on the album. “Countdown” is a bizarre, lurching mini-masterpiece; with horns, steel drums, keyboard bleeps, and a bizarrely out of sync Boyz II Men sample all bouncing around each other as Beyonce declaims and soars and even woofs like a dawg. It’s weird and sexy and hip—more like an Amerie or Robyn track than most of Beyonce’s solo work. She’s still got some fire in her, so maybe 4 is just an unfortunate detour, and she’ll figure out a way to make decent albums again. I won’t hold my breath though. Once rock stars start to suck, there’s generally no going back.
 
Kelly Rowland, Here I Am
The cover of Destiny’s Child’s 1999 mega-smash Writing’s on the Wall shows three blindingly hot women swathed in clingy white diaphanous nothings—and, Kelly Rowland. Beyonce, LaTavia, and LeToya look like they’re ready, waiting, and eager for superstardom; like they’ve spent their whole lives preparing for the moment when they could bare their shoulders and be showered with adulation and cash. Rowland, on the other hand, has a deer-in-the-headlights stare. You can almost see the cartoon thought bubble above her head, “Are we done yet? Can I put on some clothes now?”

It’s not that Rowland is particularly unattractive for a civilian. But standing next to Beyoncé Knowles, one of the more heart-stoppingly beautiful women on the planet, she does end up looking a little horse-faced—like the sit-com best-friend, carefully chosen not to upstage the star. Rowland, who lived with the Knowles’ from the time she was 14, solidified her stand-by-your-BFF cred when she remained with Beyoncé during LeToya and LaTavia’s acrimonious split from the band. On subsequent albums, Rowland did her usual thing, flanking Beyoncé and new bandmate Michelle Williams, looking hot but not too hot. A notable exception is DC’s 2001 Christian album, where the trio all wear something approaching street clothes and Rowland actually seems… comfortable.

Destiny’s Child is long gone, and Rowland has invested in breast implants—but whether she’s an A or a B-cup, in a band or out, she’s still a second stringer. Her only big hit without Beyoncé, 2002’s “Dilemma,” wasn’t a solo success, but a collaboration with Nelly. Her post-DC solo album, Ms. Kelly, didn’t do squat in terms of sales, though it was surprisingly strong musically. Its first track, “Like This,” featured Rowland’s thick Houston accent wrapping itself around a sparse head-nodding hook. The song had character and made you remember why you always liked that best friend on the sitcom better than the boring lead.

The same cannot be said for Rowland’s latest album. In some ways, this is the logical culmination of her career—a work devoid of ambition or vision, designed to underwhelm on every level. The title, Here I Am, seems to have been chosen specifically for purposes of self-refutation. The opening song, “I’m Dat Chick,” is resolutely anonymous. Rowland’s accent is obliterated in an onslaught of autotune, and Tricky Stewart provides a bland anthemic backing.

That’s how it goes throughout. Ke$ha uses autotune to give her castrating party girl persona a snotty adenoidal edge; Britney uses autotune to turn herself into a robot. Rowland, though, just uses it to rub off the edges of her personality, like she’s afraid you’ll notice that she’s singing without a real frontwoman. The obligatory guest appearances by various rappers just drive the point home more painfully. Rowland’s pro forma cooing on “Motivation” sounds lame on its own… but when you put it next to Lil Wayne’s languidly, goofily lascivious rap (“I put her on the plate/and then I do the dishes”), the putative star’s lack of star power becomes actively embarrassing.

It’s a well-known truth that pop success is far more about marketing than musical talent or genius. Lady Gaga isn’t an especially gifted musician, and she doesn’t even look like the typical pop star sex bomb—but despite all that she has charisma out the meat dress. Rowland, on the other hand, has neither sex appeal nor marketing smarts. She poses topless on Vibe, and the media reacts as if a bra fell in the forest and there was no one around to hear.

The sad thing about this is that with Destiny’s Child and even on her own, Rowland has been involved in making a fair amount of great music. Ms. Kelly is arguably better than any of Beyonce’s solo albums, and the harmonies of Beyonce and Kelly together with their bandmates are some of the most heavenly musical sounds of the early 2000s. On Here I Am, though, Rowland is swallowed by her own lack of wattage, trying so hard to be a diva with charisma that she sounds like any random diva, minus the charisma. It’s a reminder, maybe, of the many ways in which pop stars find themselves constrained. Everyone knows that you only get an audience if you make a certain kind of music and have a certain kind of image. But Rowland’s career suggests, too, that failing to sell your image can in certain circumstances, not only reduce your audience, but can also end up gutting your music.

Monthly Stumblings # 14: Tim Gaze

Posted on by

100 Scenes, a graphic novel by Tim Gaze

With Tim’s permission: to Antoni Tàpies in memoriam…

Comics writer and historian Alfredo Castelli said that, even if, for the best of his knowledge, the first newspaper Sunday Comic Section in the U.S.A. to regularly adopt  the title “Comics” in short was published by the St Louis Globe Democrat in 1902, the word “comics” was well established to refer to the art form by the 1910s only. I don’t know who, at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century (I suppose) first applied the already existing word “comics” to fulfil this new function…

On the other hand German art historian Wilhelm Worringer used the already existing word “abstraction” to apply it to the visual arts in the title of his book Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy), published in 1908. The concept predated the actual invention of abstract high art by some Russian painter (probably Wassily Kandinsky, but Mikhail Larionov is also a possibility – and how about Kasimir Malevich and Czech painter František Kupka?).

I’m saying the above because I joined the two concepts and coined the expression “abstract comics” (I wouldn’t be surprised if someone in the below comments proves me wrong though…). Andrei Molotiu reminisces:

I first began thinking of abstract comics as a concrete possibility during a discussion with Domingos Isabelinho on the TCJ board in the summer of 2002, on a thread with the rather awkward title, “Is there a Hemingway or Faulkner of comics?”– or something of the kind.

I don’t remember any of this to tell you the truth. In fact, I didn’t pay any attention to my “discovery” (so much so that I saved a few TCJ‘s messboard threads, but not this one). Abstract art was, to me, such a natural thing that I mentioned abstract comics without giving it a second thought. Here’s the only thing that I remember (or misremember, but I hope not…): at some point in the thread the two possible readings of a comics page came about. It’s possible that I mentioned French comics scholar Pierre-Fresnault Deruelle and “his” theory of the linear (a vectorial succession of panels – what I call “a reading”) and the tabular (the page as a random visual whole – what I call “roaming”). (I didn’t know it at the time, but said analysis is not by Deruelle who published it in 1976. Said theory’s author is Gérard Genette who published it in 1972 – he called the former a “successive or diachronic reading” and the latter a “global and synchronic look[.]”) to illustrate these two readings I posted the image below by Lettrist writer, filmmaker and draftsman, Isidore Isou:

Isidore Isou, 1964.

I said at the time that the page could be read/viewed in two ways: (1) as a drawing (the global look), (2) as an abstract comic (the successive reading). (I don’t remember my exact words back then, but I don’t want to imply now that the former isn’t part of a comics reading proper.) Anyway, this took too much space already and, in the doubtful chance that you, dear readers, are still interested, too much of your patience and time. Sorry for the self-indulgence!…

Contrariwise to what happened with Wilhelm Worringer the expression “abstract comics” didn’t predate abstract comics. Looking back we may found many examples in other fields. The one below is by Portuguese visual poet Abílio:

“Humor” by Abílio, 1972.

My favorite example comes from the comics field though. I mean the following example from Cuba:

The Amorphous and Disheartening of Vacuous Dialog by Chago Armada, 1968.

One of the roots of abstract art is Symbolism, the Gauguin inspired Nabis especially as we can see below:

The Talisman, the Aven River at the Bois d’Amour by Paul Sérusier, 1888.

It was fellow Sérusier Nabi painter Maurice Denis who said:

Remember that a painting, before being a battle horse, a nude woman or any anecdote, is essentially a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.

Kandinsky’s abstract art was born in an atmosphere similar to the Pont Aven one, in Munich this time. I mean the Blaue Reiter (the blue rider) lyrical Expressionist group, of course. Around 1912, when his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art was published, Kandinsky was interested in Theosophy and Symbolism (he admired Belgian poet Maurice Maeterlinck). In fact, when he seemed to be occupied mainly by formal problems he stressed the importance of his work’s content (1925):

I would really like the spectators to go beyond the fact that I chose triangles and circles. I would like them to see what’s behind my paintings because that’s the only thing that interests me. I always viewed the problems of form as secondary… I know that the future belongs to abstract art and I’m dismayed when other abstract painters don’t go any further than form…

First Abstract Watercolor by Wassily Kandinsky, 1910.

 Other wings of abstract art starting with Malevich and the Constructivists will be more formalist, but we’ll have to jump a few years in order to arrive at Tim Gaze’s book 100 Scenes, a graphic novel. Before leaving Kandinsky, for now, I want to stress what’s in common between the two: they both had/have an interest in music (in Tim’s case it’s Dubstep). Following Lithuanian painter and musician Mikalojus Ciurlionis Kandinsky believed in a synesthetic relation between colors and sounds (1912):

Yellow is disquieting to the spectator, pricking him, revealing the nature of the power expressed in this color, which has an effect on our sensibilities at once impudent and importunate. This property of yellow affects us like the shrill sound of a trumpet played louder and louder, or the sound of a high pitched fanfare. Black has an inner sound of an eternal silence without future, without hope. Black is externally the most toneless color, against which all other colors sound stronger and more precise.

It’s easy to know where Tim Gaze is coming from because he tells us so in his Notes. He cites three main references: Andrei Molotiu’s abstract comics and “ground-breaking volume Abstract Comics: The Anthology (2009)[;]” Surrealist art and techniques (collage books and decalcomania paintings by Max Ernst); Henri Michaux’s Tachiste (Pierre Guéguen, 1954) sequential work. One may say that, briefly, Surrealists and Tachists (Informal Art, Art Autre – Art of Another Kind -, as Michel Tapié put it in 1951, 52) advocated a spontaneous, irrational, kind of art. Both groups were fascinated by drug use, magic, popular art and, sorry for using an expression that I don’t like much, outsider art (Jean Dubuffet’s Art Brut)… Informal artists are the European equivalent of the Abstract Expressionists in the U.S.A..

100 Scenes, A graphic Novel by Tim Gaze, 2010. 

Tim Gaze says that his graphic novel “touches upon two emerging areas: abstract comics […]  and asemic writing.” I’m with Kandinsky when he said that “[t]here is no form, there is nothing in the world which says nothing.” Writing may be asemic as writing, but a sign is a visual entity signifying with visual means (as Tim put it: “[t]hese areas transcend languages, and offer the possibility of inter-cultural communication without words.” (Just like music, right?…) As Tim puts it, polysemy is high in his book:

This is an open novel, for you to project your mind into.

Every page is a stimulating field for your imagination.

So, there’s no predetermined meaning here, entropy is at its fullest, we have achieved maximum energy.

We may start with the cover of 100 Scenes above. I asked Tim if the book had anything to do with Katshushika Hokusai’s One hundred views of Mt. Fuji. He answered me that “only the title has any connotation of Hokusai.” So, false clue there, I would say… First of all: is this a novel as the cover claims? How can it be if there are no characters or plot? Isn’t the concept of “graphic novel” stretched to the breaking point? I would answer yes to the first question and no to the last one. We don’t even need to go further than the cover to understand these answers. There are at least two reasons to explain them:

(1) The cover of a book is what Kandinsky called, the basic plan. Without the title (without the words) the basic plan would be a square (as we can see above). So, it’s the book’s format that limits the basic plans’ choice.

(2) A drawing on a gallery wall (or a comics original panel) has a materiality (white pentimenti, irregular intensities of black, the paper texture, etc…) lacking here. What we have above is an image of an image of an image (a copy of a monoprint): i. e.: in McLuhan’s terms the hot drawing cooled down creating a distance that, in Benjaminian terms, provoked the loss of its aura. Hence: there’s a movement from the visual arts to literature: the graphic novel…

Having established that we may now answer the second question: the comics people co-opted the word “novel,” but graphic novels have their own specificity being nothing like novels.

The drawings in 100 Scenes result from various tensions, then (to use another Kandinskyan word): human made / machine reproduced; line / texture; black / white; positive space / negative space; centered / decentered; stillness (the basic plane) / movement (the drawings); chaos / order; regular rhythms / irregular shapes; etc… From page to page we witness a restless, lively world. It’s like a godless theogony (another tension?) in which trial and error coexist. I’m on the verge of denying the abstract nature of this graphic novel, so, I’ll stop now…

Page from 100 Scenes: the regular rhythm, the irregular shapes, in ascension.

I’ll finish with part of Henri Michaux’s postface to Movements, 1951:

Whoever, having perused my signs, is led by my example to create signs himself according to his being and his needs will, unless I am very much mistaken, discover a source of exhilaration, a release such as he has never known, a disencrustation, a new life open to him, a writing unhoped for, affording relief, in which he will be able at last to express himself far from words, words, the words of others.

Page from Movements by Henri Michaux, 1951.

The Not So Transgendered World of Osamu Tezuka’s Princess Knight

Posted on by

[Images read from right to left. Wikipedia synopsis of Osamu Tezuka’s Princess Knight (1953) here. It’s a fairy tale romance for kids folks!]

 

*               *               *

In the cloud strewn halls of heaven, the sexual fate of a  group of cherubic “souls” are decided through a lottery of colored hearts. The consumption of a blue heart produces a boy child while the consumption of a red heart produces a girl. When the nascent Princess Sapphire is accidentally fed hearts of two different colors, her sexual fate is thrown into doubt (the covers to the Vertical edition of Princess Knight cleverly highlight this dichotomy). In order to rectify this disastrous turn of events, the supreme deity dictates that her blue heart must be extracted if she is in fact born a girl.

To be sure, this game of hearts has little to do with any real determinacy when it comes to sexual orientation or desire. Rather it is a foreboding of the future course of Sapphire’s life, a premonition of years of chaste crossdressing. The heavenly mix-up is not a recipe for hermaphroditism but for an individual fully at ease in the world of masculine (sword fighting, horse riding, wall climbing) and feminine (pretty dresses, fixations on princes, cat fights) activities.

When Sapphire is born a girl, she remains comfortable with and desirous of her femininity. It is her political circumstances which dictate her need to adopt masculine ways and this she does with a degree of reluctance but with utmost decorum. Her sexual orientation is never in question. As with much children’s literature, this is a world where secondary sexual characteristics like breasts are clearly on display but genitalia never spoken of. Sapphire’s enemies are unable to discover her true sex because she doesn’t have a vagina (nor do Tezuka’s men have penises for that matter) — this constraint undoubtedly due to the age of Tezuka’s readership but also accidentally suggesting that sexual divisions are a cultural product and not predicated on sex organs (hormones not withstanding).

Sapphire is forced to be a prince in public due to the careless birth announcement of a lisping doctor. The swift rectification of this mistake is impossible due to an arcane law which, like most fairy tale legislation, doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny.

When we first see Sapphire as a young girl, we are swiftly apprised that she likes frilly things. Her transformation into a “prince” is a terrible inconvenience which she has come to accept over the years; an act of subterfuge which has caused such youthful bewilderment that she sometimes forgets to discard her heels in favor of more princely boots.

She is otherwise the consummate professional. Her mastery of disguise beggars that of Clark Kent and Diana Prince with their obfuscating spectacles and boring business suits. Her prince charming is blind to the wiles of his “flaxen” beauty the moment she discards her blonde wig and billowy ball gown. It’s either that or the magic of make-up, you never can tell.

Early on in the story, Sapphire reacts violently to a series of entrapments by a deceitful courtier who attempts to expose her femininity through a woman’s “natural” passions for sewing and cuddly animals.

Yet it is the feminine calling of a beautiful gown that she secretly yearns for.

In many ways, Tezuka is less interested in gender identity (as a crossdressing protagonist would seem to imply) than in a kind of old school female empowerment. Unlike other fairy tale princesses, Sapphire drops a knife and not glass slippers. She is always “correctly” and heterosexually attracted to her prince charming and the aforementioned lavish dresses, yet fully capable of defeating her opponents in single combat — an antediluvian Lara Croft without the pneumatic breasts. The 6th century Ballad of Mu Lan had similar concerns but less reservations about the strength of women.

It is only in the second volume of this new translation that Tezuka begins let his guard down. When Sapphire’s female heart is extracted by the nefarious Madame Hell, she struts around in male fashion and rejects the advances of her prince lover.  A more conservative approach is adopted when her angel guardian reverses this magical surgery and replaces her male heart with a female one — she becomes a wilting flower…

….a stance Tezuka swiftly dispenses with in light of his mildly feminist agenda. What’s an adventuring heroine to do if she can’t wield a sword? Even the emancipated ladies of the court use brooms to engage some invading soldiers.

 

Despite its long standing tradition of being the castrato of the comics world, North American comics have had an endless fascination with the transgendered lifestyle. Many of these are almost monkishly respectful while others posit rape as the first instinct of a male-female body swap (see Skin Tight Orbit; an erotic fantasy written by Elaine Lee). The latter device is a common trope in transgendered pornographic fiction.

The transgendered stories surrounding Superman are perhaps the most entertaining from a historical perspective, but the canonical text in the genre must be Al Feldstein and Wally Wood’s “Transformation Completed” (Weird Science #10, 1951).

Here the unwitting fiancé of the female protagonist (androgynously named Terry) is transformed into a woman by her jealous father. Two constraints are at work here. Firstly, the bugbear of the homosexual lifestyle which can never be in a children’s comic and, secondly, the EC line’s own penchant for the “shock” ending. Both of these factors ensure that mere lesbianism will never be an option as far as the couple’s fortunes are concerned. On the final page of the story, Terry injects herself with her father’s gender change drug and becomes the groom to her newly female bride.

This kind of slow, forced feminization and simple gender reversal is a mainstay of transgendered literature (pornographic or otherwise), and satisfies both male-to-female and female-to-male desires and fantasies. We can see something similar at work in the operative female perfection achieved in Almodovar’s forced feminization horror-fantasy film, The Skin I Live In. Here the possibility of a lesbian romance is held up as the final shred of hope after years of sexual abuse at the hands of Antonio Banderas’ surgeon-torturer.

Needless to say, Tezuka will have no truck with any of this. The manga is question is for kids afterall. The taboo of abandoning the straight and narrow of the female lifestyle is suggested by no less than a minion of Satan (Madame Hell) and is rejected outright. [Sidenote: the female reincarnation of Tristan in Barr and Bolland’s Camelot 3000 is offered a similar bargain by Morgan le Fay but finally opts for lesbian love with her Isolde]

Readers prone to detect the lesbian frisson in the performances of the Takarazuka revue (said to be an influence on Princess Knight) will be left bereft by the heterosexual mores and desires of the protagonists in the manga. Sapphire’s potential bride (as seen in the penultimate chapter of the series) is left weeping at the altar once she is apprised of her groom’s substantial bosom; a Shakespearian moment further emphasized by the translator’s choice of priestly complaint (“Oh, this is sacrilegious, so much ado for nothing.”)

Considering its worthy progenitors in the field of literary transvestism, one might say that the most surprising aspect of Princess Knight is not its crossdressing heroine but the author’s need to contrive a celestial accident for a woman to be skilled at athletic and martial activities. What little “feminism” we see on the page soon gives way to escapades not dissimilar to what you might find in the adventures of Zorro, The Prisoner of Zenda, or a movie starring Douglas Fairbanks. One assumes that this presents an advance over the usual position of women in comics during the 50s and is to be commended.

Nevertheless, this is a manga to be read more out of a sense of duty than anything else. Its historical importance as far as manga directed at girls is concerned is indisputable, but the romantic dilemmas on show are uninvolving. The tiresome and largely unimaginative plots will prove a chore for most. It is undoubtedly virtuous in intention but also averse to do away with childish things even if only for a moment — a product of its time with all the limitations that implies. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the death of Sapphire’s father which is not so much a terrible moment (see Bambi or Charlotte’s Web) but a simple plot development and an exercise in frantic cartooning.

There can be little doubt that Princess Knight remains a perfect example of that safe, asexual entertainment people have come to expect from comics.

Pop Ephemera

Posted on by

These reviews all ran on Knoxville Metropulse
_______________

Mariah Carey, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel

Nineteen years into her career, Mariah Carey remains almost uncannily consistent. Though she’s had her ups and downs, certainly, she is, at this stage, neither a bloated self-parody nor a longtimer settling into a comfortable groove of second-tier irrelevance. Instead, she’s what she always was — an immensely talented singer and songwriter who is also the apotheosis of MOR. So thoroughly does she embody easy-listening that she transforms everything she touches. A shout out to ODB? A handful of dancehall oh-oh-ohs? Even, believe it or not, marching band arrangements? All of it turns seamlessly to sugary smooth radio gold — “Candy Bling” as one particularly appropriate song title puts it.

Some may sneer at the plastic artificiality of it all; Jim Derogatis, for example, whined his indie-rock whine about how Mariah’s too corporate because she has Elle ads in her CD. And, yeah, it’s true — she’s not torn up over her success like Kurt was. But perhaps in part for that reason, she was able to stick around, and so we have songs like “h.a.t.e.u,” a languid break-up ballad begging for a change that never comes. “I can’t wait to hate you,” she sings in harmony with herself, hitting her inevitable whistle register notes like overdetermined cries of pain. The familiarity is comfort and ache both at once — the sadness and joy of still, still, still being yourself. Mariah really does make more sense the longer she stays at it, laying down the same surface over and over with painstaking craft, until even our shallowest dreams and hurts seem to echo with depth.
 
AmerieIn Love & War
If funk could walk, the first twelve minutes of In Love & War would be Jesse Owens. Producer Rich Harrison may be gone, but Amerie can still slam the dance floor harder than anyone since Prince — and at moments you have to wonder if even the unpronounceable glyph himself wouldn’t have to jump back and beg for mercy at the virile swagger packed into Amerie’s every devastating “ooo!” The jagged, repetitive drums and percussive horns of “Tell Me You Love Me” are (gloriously) reminiscent of Amerie’s own “1 Thing”; “Heard ‘Em All is based around a sinuous pseudo-Bollywood loop that gets worked so hard it transmutes into rasta declamation. “Dangerous” and “Higher” combine classic rock and funk into a seamless, explosive package that makes even successful fusions like P.E. or Funkadelic seem a little naïve and klutzy.

There are nine more songs here, but…well, really the less said about them the better. Amerie’s clipped, declamatory phrasing, so perfect on the funk, sounds blandly uninvolved when she slows down the tempo, and even her best ballads come nowhere near the passion or invention of Mariah Carey…or even Britney, for that matter. Someday, maybe, Amerie will recognize her strengths and make an album that kicks from start to finish — and when she does, that album will be one of the greatest funk documents of all time. In the meantime, if four perfect tracks are all I get, I’ll take them and say “thank you.”
 
Alice Keys,Element of Freedom

“I just want you to feel a sense of freedom, I want you to feel out-of-the-box, feel inspired,” Alicia Keys said about her new album on BET. And, yep, Element of Freedom sounds exactly like she wants you to feel that. There’s lots of breathing in earnestly to tell you that she’s, like; earnest; lots of inspirational lyrics about how she wants to know how it feels to fly and how she’ll be waiting through distance and time. And lots of songs which start soft and then swell up as she emotes. Earnestly.

Amidst all the classy blandness and kind-of-funky-but-oh-not-too-much hooks, the Beyonce collaboration struts in like a red hot diva determined to set someone’s dreary ass on fire. Suddenly we’re talking about texting over a beat that isn’t embarrassed to be a fucking beat, and you’ve got a vocalist singing nonsense lyrics not like she’s earnest, but like she’s going to throw you down on the ground and grind your NAACP Image Award so hard that it breaks in half.

As for the rest of the album…well, Keys’ piano-driven “Empire State of Mind” probably isn’t significantly more clichéd and/or unendurable than Billy Joel’s piano-driven “New York State Of Mind.” Faint praise, yeah, but it’s all I’ve got.