The Most Popular Movie Column in the Entire World #3 – Scenes from the Life of an Accidental Progressive

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Jog

Six miles away from my office is a theater that plays Bollywood movies simultaneously with their Indian release. This is one of them.

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Special 26
Directed by Neeraj Pandey, 2013

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*SPOILERS THROUGHOUT*

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WHAT CAN WE GUESS THE FILM IS ABOUT FROM THE UNSUBTITLED TRAILER?

One initially expects the picture is about a revolution in chroma key backdrops overtaking India’s newsreaders, but this is quickly proven superficial. Some variation on “TRUE INCIDENTS” awaits, dear children, with the authoritative voice of Akshay Kumar barking “raid dalni” while clacking fonts assure us that shit will imminently get at least as real as Zero Dark Thirty. At least. Look at Anupam Kher slap that guy. I swear to god, I walk out of every Bollywood movie wanting to slap as many people as conceivably possible; no other world cinema tradition has so *totally sold* the virile crack of flesh on cheek. Mmm! Anyway, it looks like the Central Bureau of Investigation is raiding the hell out of major dudes, except REAL IS FAKE and vice versa, leading to at least one broadly satirical(?) speech on the value of patriotism delivered by a top-ish Hindi movie star in a crisp professional shirt. Action! And a little dancing!

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WHAT IS THE HISTORY BEHIND THIS PICTURE?

Once upon a time, there was a boy from Punjab who grew up in the markets of Chandni Chowk and went to school in Delhi and Bombay, and then, apropos of apparently nothing beyond personal desire, relocated in his late teens to Bangkok to study martial arts, at which time he supported himself as a waiter and a chef. Upon returning to India as a martial arts instructor, he unexpectedly broke into modeling, and then, by chance, the cinema. “I’ve been linked with every heroine I’ve acted with,” he would later say, but this was only fitting: a gadabout reputation for a Bollywood outsider, a strapping naïf who would take what he wanted, when he wanted it, and saunter away whistling to the next big thing.

Most Bollywood heroes have legends, and this is the legend of Akshay Kumar, born Rajiv Hari Om Bhatia, active since 1991, and limited only — so the stereotype went — by his own whimsical ambitions. He would score lead roles, sometimes, and big hits, sometimes, but in the ’90s he was mainly associated with the B-grade arena of action pictures just a little ways past the vogue for those. He even had his own signature series of films: Khiladi, or “Player,” which did not hew strictly to action or suspense over the course of its eight feature-length installments, but that was where it always returned. Where Kumar, who did a little of everything, always returned. He was a ‘classic’ Bollywood workhorse, at one point appearing in a dozen feature films in one year, which by that time was very much not the behavior of a ‘major’ star.

Still, there are occasional benefits to prolificacy. In 2007, sixteen years into his career — having spent much of the decade oscillating between dubious action and romantic comedy with dips into outright drama — Kumar unexpectedly saw each and every one of his four releases hit hard, with three of them grossing over Rs 100 crore.

Suddenly, he could no longer be ignored as a periphery leading man, and gradually — be it through artistic desire or a sense that he could branch out into different areas of potential income — his risks became higher-profile.

In 2008, Kumar and his wife founded Hari Om Entertainment, a production company. Their first project, Singh is Kinng, betrayed a global outlook, with footage mostly shot in Australia, a plot remade from an ’80s Jackie Chan vehicle, and a closing credits cameo appearance by American rapper Snoop Dog. It was a financial success. The next year, Kumar seemed to double down with Chandni Chowk to China, an ambitious India/U.S. co-production with an autobiographical slant to its script. You’ve probably not heard of it, despite Warner Brothers ensuring distribution in North America; like all Bollywood/Hollywood team-ups, it seemed fated as marginalia on both sides of the globe. Interestingly, despite the seemingly personal nature of the project, Kumar managed to keep Hari Om out of the mess, though his brand nonetheless suffered; by the end of 2009 he had also co-starred in Blue, the most expensive film in Bollywood history (as of then), which also under-performed.

This prompted a particular type of conversation about Kumar, one which continues to this day: is he really a movie star? He *is* to some degree, of course — he’s the lead actor in an awful lot of movies — but his reliability as a ‘draw’ is more comparable to a Matt Damon or a George Clooney (the reduced ‘stars’ of high-concept, branding-mad America) than the Hero is Everything ethos still in strong effect in Hindi pop cinema.

The temptation, then, is to hypothesize Kumar as the potential herald of a less star-focused Bollywood, though a connoisseur might simply dub him a minor presence in the constellations. My own first encounter with his work came similarly troubled, through 2010’s wretched Action Replayy, an utterly risible fusion of Back to the Future and The Taming of the Shrew that nonetheless startled me by how completely fucking serious Kumar seemed to be taking the Crispin Glover role of a nerdy, put-upon dad, waves of shame and resentment all but jumping from his face for the first two reels of the picture. “What the hell is this guy doing?” I thought. “He’s not a terrific actor or anything, but he’s taking this dumb shit so… seriously.”

By the end of that year, my feelings had evolved in a typically perverse manner. Ask anyone — anyone — what they made of Kumar’s Christmas 2010 co-production, the notorious Tees Maar Khan, and they will instantly claim a career low for its leading man, and potentially the whole of 21st century Hindi film. It was moronic, it was insulting, it was ugly, and, worst of all, it was quite lucrative, due to intense hype, incessant advertising and a massively front-loaded opening weekend, nimbly avoiding the word of mouth that would eventually win the film a 2.5 rating on the IMDB, one of the lowest from Bollywood-acclimated users.

I rather like Tees Maar Khan. It’s the bitterest movie in the entire world, and damn fascinating as a moment capture. Directed by Farah Khan — an acclaimed dance choreographer, media personality and probably the only woman in India who could realistically call herself a superstar filmmaker — and written & edited by her husband, industry gadfly Shirish Kunder, the film is uniquely positioned as a peek into a private world of politics, resentments, and general beefs.

Adapted from Vittorio De Sica’s 1966 Peter Sellers outing After the Fox, the plot finds Kumar as a legendary con man, who, cognizant of the bottomless hunger Indian cinema types have for Western approval, poses as M. Night Shyamalan’s lighter-skinned brother and hooks up with a pretentious film hero driven Oscar-crazy in the wake of Slumdog Millionaire. An absolutely vicious parody of megastar social crusader and ‘quality’ Bollywood icon Aamir Khan (with more than a dollop of Shah Rukh Khan plopped on top), the delusional actor is more than willing to participate in BIG-TIME HOLLYWOOD PROJECT — amusingly pitched as a paean to Indian suffering, i.e. the only way to get Americans to acknowledge anybody outside of the first world — which is actually just an excuse for ‘director’ Kumar to rob a train right under the noses of ignorant, starry-eyed village folk.

The true objective, of course, is to broadcast Khan’s & Kunder’s unflagging sneer at everything in show business that irritates them, including but not limited to Hollywood influence, cultural tourism, bucolic ‘patriotism’ and the current crop of heroines — poor Katrina Kaif seems to have been cast as the female lead specifically so Khan can make fun of her; despite being a romantic interest, Kumar never shows her the slightest affection outside of the obligatory song sequences, which is a bit of parody all its own — not to mention critics, audiences, and indeed, the very notion of cinema ‘art.’ To Khan, through her onscreen avatar, film direction is revealed as a con game, useful primarily for facilitating a properly modern Indian lifestyle — rightly separated from the laughable grotesquery of dirt-eating village life but proudly self-reliant and anti-American in its urbanity — with the happy accident of people sometimes finding themselves entertained in the process of being used, the stupid fuckers.

Taken in this way, Tees Maar Khan is a genuinely radical (if gigantically obnoxious) work of thematics, totally unafraid of seeming shrill or hysterical or any of the other gendered insults you can throw at a woman behind the camera. Employing an ultra-high camp mise-en-scène recalling late ’90s Old Navy commercials, its soundtrack prone to screeching “TEEES MAAR KHAAAN” at every instance of on-camera mugging, the film all but dares you to hate it, to get up and walk away from its brazen irritations; such provocation is a very rare thing in eager-to-please Bollywood, especially coming from as otherwise easygoing and cosmopolitan a guy as Akshay Kumar, who must have felt weird as hell seeing the results. He nonetheless teamed with Khan & Kunder again for a 2012 directorial project by the latter, an eccentric children’s film titled Joker that proved so unpleasant a process Kumar abandoned promotions for his own co-production and left it to die a dog’s death in theaters.

Yet given the latitude of perspective, it’s easy to see why Kumar would click with the surface attributes of such filmmaking. His style of delivery hews toward the very broad and loud, to the point where anything resembling a subdued performance inspires a Jim Carrey-like overcompensating toast to fresh-blazed subtleties. He is also that special kind of macho male whose classical masculinity is so little in doubt he’s become fond and unafraid of strutting around in pink and incorporating effeminate, almost coquettish overtures into his presentation.

You can see why a Farah Khan would find him camp as fuck, though Kumar’s tiny resistance to heteronormative standards may betray a deeper sympathy; while Tees Maar Khan adopted the I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry approach of cracking gay jokes as a means of normalizing homosexual relationships, one of the songs in Kumar’s 2011 Canada-set co-production Thank You matter-of-factly depicts one man slinging his arm over another, flowers in hand, while the star producer gazes on in approval. Similarly, the skin color jokes of Tees Maar Khan are refracted in Kumar’s 2012 neo-masala romp Khiladi 786, which posits Kumar’s hero cop and a brown(er)-face doppelganger brother as scions of a wildly mixed-race family, the earthy harmony of which is stereotypically but earnestly emphasized.

Perhaps most startlingly, Kumar has recently set up a second production house, Grazing Goat Pictures, for the purposes of exploring ‘quality’ films. Its virgin feature effort was 2012’s OMG – Oh My God!, an adaptation of a popular stage play Kumar credited with inspiring a profound change in his religious practice. A riff of sorts on the 1977 George Burns starrer Oh, God!, the film maintains the pose of a light comedy, but also directly tackles the industry of diverse religion in India in an unusually thorough manner. More than anything else, it’s been the critical and popular success of this film that has threatened to completely revise Kumar’s reputation – suddenly, he is “mass” and “class” alike, and uniquely equipped to push Hindi pop movies into less-comfortable places. Or so is the wish.

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WHAT HAPPENS BEFORE THE INTERVAL?

Immediately, we are confronted with a most patriotic illusion, as a serious young woman delivers a speech detailing the idealistic motive behind her applying for a job with India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (“CBI”). Visible on the margins are her interviewers — Akshay Kumar and veteran character actor Anupam Kher — who, if you have done any research whatsoever prior to seeing the film, are evidently not real CBI officers, though they maintain classically straight faces throughout the process. Soon, we are seeing footage of an authentic 1980s Republic Day parade; this is both to establish the time period of the film, as well as writer/director Neeraj Pandey’s satiric theme. Unique from India’s Independence Day (which celebrates liberation from British rule), Republic Day commemorates the adoption of India’s first Constitution, thus placing its focus on the stability of a federal apparatus that still employs the CBI as its primary criminal investigation body.

Naturally, it’s all bullshit. Particularly since the 1970s — a great era of social entertainments pitting angry young men like Amitabh Bachchan up against an uncaring society toxic with corrupt administration, self-serving capitalism and ruined idealism — ‘adult’-oriented Bollywood films have been massively skeptical of the efficacy of business and law enforcement powers; rare is the public works official not hungry for kickbacks, or the titan of industry not sleeping on black money, or the policeman not toadying for regional dictators. If there’s elections that aren’t rigged, I haven’t seen ’em. Even the brazenly reactionary neo-masala wave, escapist as it is, typically frames its swaggering, mustached hero cops as aberrations: forces that defy the will of the majority and the laughable ruse that is the ‘rule of law’ to bring immediate, popular justice to the displaced and needy.

Pandey is working loosely from a true story in Special 26 — a 1987 incident in which fake CBI officers robbed a Bombay jeweler under the auspices of an official raid — but his deployment of a ‘period’ setting also (inexactly) evokes an older era of Hindi film for its gloss of righteous criticism. Indeed, for the first fifteen or so minutes of his film, Pandey strings the less studied viewer along by presenting Kumar & Kher and their gang of loveable cronies as *actual* CBI officers, prepping for and carrying out a tax raid on a local politician. Basically — in movie terms! — that means CBI officials get to burst in on somebody’s home or place of business on suspicion of tax evasion, literally tearing apart the walls searching for money the suspect has inevitably stashed in huge clumps somewhere on their property. “You will be cursed!” shouts a woman as the men move a religious icon from its place of rest, complacent as everything else in a shit society.

It’s all quite exciting; Pandey hails from the world of television commercials and documentary film, having only made his theatrical feature debut in 2008 with A Wednesday!, a Hollywood-sleek hour-and-forty-minute tour of a day in the life of a police commissioner (Kher again) who must negotiate a mysterious terrorist threat. Special 26 is his sophomore feature, likewise effective at caffinating legal procedure – witness Akshay Kumar, clad in a crisp, Rick Santorum-worthy sweater vest ensemble, wriggling his ‘stache while knocking on walls, cracking the dirty politician’s private property like it’s a bank safe! And what a slap Anupam Kher delivers when the suspect hazards a bribe!

Perhaps the seasoned viewer can’t possibly believe such upstanding civil servants could really exist; when Kher delivers a snappy catch phrase to a goggle-eyed young policeman about the importance of Heart, it’s a self-evidently filmi moment, dreamed up on the fly by a man who has doubtlessly crafted his con man persona from long hours in the theater, all the better to fool higher-paying rubes. Perhaps this charade of idealism is merely Pandey’s shaggy dog way of setting up a joke, the punchline arriving when Akshay Kumar — handsome here like a old American matinee idol — tears off his facial hair as the team makes its getaway.

But Special 26 is also cognizant of audience expectations on a less confrontational level. At two hours and twenty-three minutes, this is a far longer film than A Wednesday!, and Pandey spends much of the first half detailing the circumstances that have led Kumar & Kher into their situation. The latter is not a stern authority figure at all, but a comical neurotic — such an ability to convincingly switch between ‘funny’ and ‘serious’ personae has made Kher one of the very few Bollywood lifers to occasionally pop up in English-language films, such as David O. Russell’s The Silver Linings Playbook — who needs a lot of extra money to support his gigantic family, while Kumar is just a roguish romantic who hopes to earn enough scratch to spirit his girlfriend away from her unhappily looming arranged marriage.

As we eventually discover, Kumar was once a CBI prospect who was rejected for service due to his lack of skill with English (a neutral, ‘universal’ language); as a result, his obsessive knowledge of federal procedure empowers him to throw India’s would-be national outlook back in its rotten, corrupt face… anyone prominent can be targeted for a fake raid, after all, because everyone is corrupt. If director Pandey notices that such all-devouring cynicism is just as much a movie device as goody platitudes, he doesn’t let on, perhaps embracing this cooler brand of artifice in the same manner a masala director might crank out the fights and dances.

There are dances in here, though. Ha ha.

You’ll notice I didn’t identify the girlfriend just above. Sadly, that’s because actress Kajal Aggarwal (mostly of Telugu and Tamil ‘south’ film) is saddled with one of the most thankless, do-nothing roles in recent memory, stranded amidst a romantic subplot that eats up an extraordinary amount of screen time without accomplishing anything beyond the most banal platitudes. Obviously, such problems are not unique to Bollywood. Were this a Hollywood film, I’d theorize that some studio executive had delivered a note reading “MAKE AKSHAY SYMPATHETIC, XOXO” but it seems likely here that the romance takes up so much space to facilitate adequate song tie-in monies for somebody’s corporate partner somewhere. I don’t mind when a Hindi action movie breaks into song and dance — you just buy into that possibility coming in — but the music of Special 23, set to ‘missing you‘ montages and the like, works at direct cross-purposes with the suspenseful, relentless, immersive pace Pandey obviously seeks to build. A ‘traditional’ Bollywood movie is so often a work of vignettes – a modular evening of courses. This is like eating a piece of a steak, and then waiting a while for the second piece to be brought out, and then the next, and the next.

But then, that is the balance when you seek to go big. Akshay Kumar may be a modest progressive, but knowing that he *can* pull off such things carries with it the burden of popular expectations that facilitate that very freedom, particularly when he’s not in control of the production. The public expects a sympathetic, heroic figure, and Special 26 is altogether eager to play up Kumar’s movie star reputation as much as his offbeat tendencies. The result is really a hybrid film, but not something that benefits from hybridization: so eager to provide a slick, straightforward work of suspense and critique, Pandey winds up seeming less sure with the songs or the romance than any of the ’70s and ’80s social picture forebears he plays at emulating. Like Kumar, he is man slightly astride his transitional age.

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WHAT HAPPENS AFTER THE INTERVAL?

The second half of the film primarily concerns the climatic jewelry heist, as well as a cat-and-mouse game played between Kumar/Kher and and actual CBI investigator played by the always-excellent Manoj Bajpai, whom nobody will call a traditional movie star, though he embodies a more intense tradition than Akshay Kumar.

A television actor who made his film debut in 1994 via future (and temporary) Oscar semi-darling Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen, Bajpai rose to prominence in 1998’s Satya, one of the landmark works of contemporary alternative Hindi pop cinema – not exactly the ‘parallel cinema’ of art film, but a distinctly vérité, rough-hewed, criminally-focused brand of urban fiction. The director of the film was Ram Gopal Varma, a prickly, erratic, sometimes rather goofy figure deserving of more attention than I can afford right now, though it’s sufficient for these purposes to note that he’s often sought new and potentially unpleasant ways to produce ostensibly popular films, including recent forays into (unwatchable) microbudget filming and (slightly underrated) consumer-grade digital photography, recently given way to large-format tragic docudrama.

Even more pertinent, though, is the co-writer of Satya, one Anurag Kashyap – more than anyone else, Kashyap embodies the present counter-mainstream in Bollywood, perhaps because his films often strike an explicitly critical stance against the Hindi film norm. His 2007 feature directorial debut, Black Friday, despite its stance as (another) tragic docudrama, was both a sensitive investigation of the heroic/villainous police dichotomy and an avowed cinematographic influence on Slumdog Millionare, while his 2009 Dev.D mined intriguing veins of misogyny and self-abuse from the beloved, oft-filmed Bengali novel Devdas.

Bajpai reunited with Kashyap for his most recent directorial pursuit, 2012’s weird, beguiling, tiring, indulgent, and undeniably 5 1/2 hour-long Gangs of Wasseypur. Eventually split into two films for ease of release, the project was a shoot-for-the-moon attempt at a century-spanning, multi-generational crime saga comparable to The Godfather and its sequels; while the results frankly suggest less of a novelistic immersion than a filmmaker simply unwilling to edit much of anything, Gangs of Wasseypur nonetheless boasts a commanding, impulsive performance by Bajpai (and an equally good Nawazuddin Siddiqui), and an all-time high for the agony of influence active in Kashyap’s cinema, climaxing in an agonizingly long, unbroken shot of a wounded man crawling through a house in flight from assassins, the soundtrack humming his very favorite cheesy Bollywood romance song to give him strength, to fortify his misguided character, to affirm his misspent life.

Where Kashyap is agonized, Pandey is content. He establishes Bajpai a bit prior to the interval, in an extended chase scene that serves mainly to give him something ‘active’ to do in a screenplay that might otherwise leave the audience unstimulated for a millisecond. Egged on by the aforementioned goggle-eyed (now seemingly humiliated) young policeman from the prior raid, Bajpai muscles his way into the jewelry plot, which centers around Kumar & Kher recruiting a cadre of underemployed dumbass civilians to serve as an unwitting backing army in the raid. They are not quite the “Special 26” of the title, however, as Kumar & Kher are (of course!) playing a long con, and (of course!) the goggle-eyed cop was a deep-cover plant, in on the scheme the whole while, and (of course!) our anti-heroes have prepared for every eventually, ultimately using the real CBI as an inadvertent decoy while the real raid goes down with triumphant slow motion punctuation at a different locale.

Yet where does this leave us? One might assume that Pandey is making a point about capitalism — there’s a classically cheesy humanizing moment near the end where Kumar mails Bajpai back some money he snatched from him earlier, ’cause he don’t steal shit from honest working men — but the only real success his heroes enjoy is their entry into a more relaxed social strata. Indeed, they mostly take advantage of their fellow proles in the process, without a lot of regret, if never exactly to their material detriment. Maybe Kumar hasn’t wandered so far from Tees Maar Khan after all. Maybe this is all nothing more than a writer/director applying all sorts of domestic mainstream gloss to his foreign mainstream influences, and happily cashing in – Special 26 is already the second-highest grosser of 2013, standing at about Rs. 65 crore, having done enormously well for an ‘small’ film.

Still, there is a weird ambiguity at the end of the picture, as the frustrated Bajpai suddenly receives a new lead on the whereabouts of the thieves, just before the end credits. Did censorship concerns prompt a crime (sorta) doesn’t pay (maybe) denouement? Or did Pandey mean to suggest that, having become rich in place where rich equals corrupt, his heroes will inevitably become corrupt as well, and require toppling? Endless conflicts like that can power endless, profitable, probably banal fictions, though the success of this one again inspires hope for another small line of credit extended to Akshay Kumar, another possibility for another small step for this Bollywood outsider, wormed goodly inward and now slowly navigating his way out.

Yun Kouga: Loveless 10

Posted on March 14, 2013 by vommarlowe

I’ve been reading Loveless for years. It’s a semi-fantasy series about cat boys/cat girls. In the Loveless world, everyone has cat ears and tails until they lose their virginity. We’re up to ten volumes, so it’s going to be hard to summarize. The main story is about a troubled young boy, Ritsuka, who has lost all his memories. He lives with his very abusive mother; in the past, Ritsuka’s beloved older brother Seimei would protect him, but Seimei died in a fiery pile of flames and ashes.

The main external plot is about the mystery of Seimei’s death, the school Seimei attended, and the secret magic system of fighters and sacrifices (it’s a special way to have a magical duel–each couple has one fighter and one sacrifice).

The main internal (character) plot is about the variously broken individuals coming together to become less broken via friendship and affection.

Spoilers follow

When Ritsuka moves to a new school, a college student named Soubi meets him outside the grounds. Soubi says he is a gift from Seimei. Soubi wears bandages around his neck, and eventually asks Ritsuka to pierce his ear with an earring. It’s all very mysterious and kind of weird.

I will say upfront that when I got into this manga, I thought Ritsuka was in high school, but he’s actually a sixth grader. I am terrible at reading ages in manga, and while adults are sometimes pictured taller, it can be hard (for me at least) to tell who is what age. There are a whole bunch of schools and students and teachers and administrators and graduates and so on. It’s a long, complicated manga. Apologies in advance if I get character age details wrong.

In volumes 1 through 7, the story covers Ritsuka’s background (troubled childhood, love of Seimei, Seimei’s good side), Seimei’s death, and Ristuka’s arrival at a new school. Ritsuka is obsessed with philosophy and also believes he is a parasite in his own body, because he has lost his early memories. The ‘real’ Ritsuka is the one in the past, the one who had Seimei, the one his mother cared about. That old Ritsuka liked different food and behaved differently. Ritsuka is waiting for that old Ritsuka to return. It’s both touching and sad.

Fortunately, he meets a girl named Yuiko, who isn’t very smart, but is very kind. She befriends him, and as they spend time together, Ritsuka defends her just as she defends him. Ritsuka’s young teacher (who still has her ears) also does her best for Ritsuka, despite disapproval from other teachers who think she shouldn’t bother to get involved or who think Ritsuka is creepy.

Soubi also befriends Ritsuka, in his own weird way.

However, as soon as Soubi enters Ritsuka’s life, these weird duels begin. Random couples challenge Ritsuka/Soubi to battle. It’s all quite odd and mysterious, but eventually you find out that the fighting pairs are all taught at a special school. Several different teachers at the school have different methods of preparing fighters. Soubi’s teacher abused him horribly to teach him to tolerate pain and be the best fighter. Another teacher invents/creates a couple who are called ‘zeros’. The zeros feel no pain, so they can accidentally hurt themselves. One of the zeros poked his own eye out. Seimei has left Ritsuka some information about this stuff on a locked special file on his computer, but it’s all very vague. There’s a video game and a big challenge and sometimes people trade over fighters or sacrifices, and each pair has a name (Bloodless, Loveless, etc). In this world, words have incredible power.

Which brings us to volume 8. In volume 8, Seimei invades the special fighting school. He removes the eyes of the abusive-to-Soubi teacher and leaves a message scrawled in blood. “Ritsuka I’m Back.”

Classy!

Ritsuka, Soubi, and Soubi’s friend Kio all go to the weird school to find things out. Unfortunately, not only is Seimei back, he also appears to be evil (what with the poking out people’s eyes and all). Ritsuka, who still loves Seimei, isn’t so sure about the evil part.

Seimei and his new fighter kidnap Kio and basically cause a big ole ruckus.

And this is the point where the manga went on hiatus, Tokyopop succumbed to bankruptcy, and the entirety of Loveless fandom screamed in combined frustration.

Fortunately for us all, the artist did eventually return, Viz took over the licensing, and my world was righted. Huzzah!

I greedily read volume 9, which is, in many ways, the culmination of several emotional storylines. I won’t recount the various pitched battles, but in short, all of the teachers give Ritsuka advice for battles. Ritsuka has always been suspicious of words, but here, he finally comes to understand that the advice and words are an attempt to give him strength. The art in that passage is particularly poignant. Soubi and Ritsuka do engage in battle, and they triumph–not against Seimei, but against his allies. Volume 9 ends with a breath of relief–Ritsuka and Soubi trade Seimei’s fighter (who they took prisoner) for Kio, and they release Kio from his prison.

Overall, the art of Volume 9 is beautiful. Moving, strong, with rich backgrounds at some points and expressive minimalist ink-line-only panels in others. It does have some confusing passages, but I’m not sure whether that’s the fault of the manga or Viz’s choppy translation. For a manga that cares so much about words, a good translation is essential.

Which brings us to the most recent volume.

10 is much quieter, the aftermath of the battle, the picking up of the pieces.

The passages in Vol 10 are mostly quiet, thoughtful, beautiful. Here, Ritsuka deals with his past:

The irritating, puzzling, unable-to-feel-pain Zeros decide to come stay with Soubi so that they can protect Ritsuka. Soubi worries that this is a plot by the Zeros’s teacher, but it turns out that they have decided to do this on their own–they like Ritsuka and they’re worried about him. It’s a surprise to everyone, since their teacher basically created them. Don’t they look like major trouble-makers?

Naturally, when they show up in Ritsuka’s class, they cause exactly as much trouble as one would expect–taunting people, bullying others, hugging Ritsuka until his ears stick out. But Ritsuka handles them.

This volume is full of such small moments.

Here is another beautiful, painful passage:

Aren’t the faceless figures great? I love Ritsuka’s body language as he sits there, trying to figure out a world that is difficult and confusing.

I especially enjoyed the way that Ritsuka, who had until recently been ambivalent about Soubi, decides to make dinner for Soubi. (In previous volumes, Soubi cooks for Ritsuka.)

I love how Ritsuka’s tail puffs out just like an angry cat’s. Heh.

Overall, this is a great volume. Towards the end, another pair shows up to move the external plot along, so the pacing is quite good. My one complaint is that the opening of this volume details a completely random section about Kio. Until now, Kio has been like Yuiko–a normal person, a foil for all the nutty magic stuff. Kio is an art student who befriends Soubi because he feels sorry for him. Kio wears lots of earrings, likes candy, jokes around, is kind. In the very end of the last volume, Kio sees someone who looks just like him, except female.

In the start of this volume, Kio goes off on an adventure of his own. Unfortunately, I felt nothing but bafflement and frustration. Kio shows up at a great house where he says he was raised, and he meets a young girl in loli dress who is, apparently, his daughter (?!?). A daughter who was born without his awareness or consent, and who, as soon as she was born, meant he was kicked out of his ancestral home, because only women can live there. It was like being dropped in Angel Sanctuary–who are these people? Is that Sir Not Appearing In This Manga? Help, I’m lost.

His mother is crazy, there’s a maid with a ruffled cap, it’s all just–I don’t know, man. I was enjoying Kio for who he already is. I hate to say it, but not everyone needs a secret identity.

It’s possible I’m just getting cranky in my old age, or maybe the manga will take this development in an interesting direction. It’s not enough to stop my overall enjoyment of the story.

For those who are interested, Viz is rereleasing the earlier episodes of Loveless in 2-in-1 volumes for a nice price.

Anne Bronte Also Likes Assholes

Posted on March 13, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

I think the above cartoon by Kate Beaton is the first piece of Anne Bronte criticism I ever saw. At the time, I hadn’t read any of Anne’s novels, but the cartoon certainly made me think I should.

Well, I finally have…and as it turns out, I’m not sure I entirely agree with Beaton. The cartoon is obviously focused on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which is centered around the abusive marriage of Helen and Arthur Huntingdon.

Certainly, in comparison to the brutish protagonists of Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, Arthur is much less romanticized — or really not romanticized at all. He is not brooding or exciting, but (as Anne says in the cartoon) an asshole dickbag, whose good looks and charm conceal wells of selfishness and cruelty. He’s a drunkard, a cad, and an adulterer, who treats his wife with indifference and contempt (leaving her alone for months at a time so he can carouse in London) and then terrorizing her when she protests. He deliberately tries to get his young child to drink and curse to amuse himself and his friends. His low point comes when he discovers that Helen is planning to leave him and support herself by painting; he storms into her room, takes all her money, and destroys her painting materials.

Much of the novel, then, is a harrowing description of a domestic tyrant, and an unflinching portrait of the powerlessness of married women at the time. Helen has no rights to divorce her husband, even though he is basically parading his mistresses in front of her; she can’t take the child away from him, though he is deliberately, and basically out of spite, attempting to corrupt him. Moreover, her early attempts to reform her husband founder precisely on the disproportion of their power; she has no means under law or custom to influence him; she can’t even make him stay in the same house with her, or make decent efforts to conceal his adultery. The romantic notion that a good woman can save a bad man (very much in play in Jane Eyre, for example) is shown to be not so much spiritually as logistically impossible given the status of women at the time.

So far as Arthur Huntingdon is concerned, then, so good. But, unfortunately, the book feels compelled to present us with another suitor for Helen. And so we get Gilbert Markham, the epistolary narrator of much of the novel. Markham is a gentleman farmer, and the most eligible young bachelor in the neighborhood into which Helen moves after escaping from her husband. She and Gilbert quickly strike up a relationship, which eventually ends in married bliss after Huntingdon obligingly drinks himself to death.

And again, this is unfortunate because, contra Beaton, Gilbert is kind of an asshole. Oh, he’s vastly superior to Huntingdon; he’s not a drunkard or a monster. But that’s a pretty low bar. Without Huntingdon for comparison…well, he doesn’t come off so well. He’s conceited, petulant, and selfish; he toys with the affection of a neighboring clergyman’s daughter, and then tosses her aside when he decides that Helen is more interesting — and when said clergyman’s daughter is upset and resentful, he blames it on the failings in her character and essentially accuses her of being a shallow designing flirt.

Nor is his treatment of Helen much better. He sneaks onto her property and oversees her embracing another man, Frederick Lawrence. Rather than asking her to explain the situation, he rushes off and refuses to speak to her. He also loses his temper and a few days later assaults Lawrence, seriously injuring him and confining him to his bed for several days.

So, to sum up, Gilbert is a jilt, a sneak, and a thug, petulant, cruel, and thoughtless. And yet, he’s supposed to be the good guy!

Of course, Gilbert’s courtship of an sympathy with Helen, and his discovery that Lawrence is Helen’s brother and that in assaulting him he behaved like a total poltroon — all those things are supposed to make him a better, less impulsive, more caring person, and a fit husband for Helen. But that’s not a contradiction to the assholes-are-cool-so-marry-one narrative. Rather, it’s the same narrative over again. You’ve got your infantile ass with anger management issues, and instead of saying, you know, I don’t really want to marry an infantile ass with anger management issues, you end up saying, hey! It’s a fixer upper! Awesome!

There’s at least one other fixer uppers in the book too — one of Huntingdon’s carousing buddies ends up being transformed into a doting husband through the power of his wife’s love (with a little nudge from Helen.) One might be an accident, but two starts to look like carelessness. It’s great that there are some levels of brutality and drunkenness that Anne is willing to be repulsed by…but I think Beaton goes a little too far when she ask rhetorically:

Anne why are you writing books about how alcoholic losers ruin people’s lives? Don’t you see that romanticizing douchey behavior is the proper literary convention in this family! Honestly.

Anne’s perfectly capable of romanticizing douchey behavior. She’s perhaps tweaking the family literary convention, but she’s not rejecting them. If you want a guy who treats women with respect, you need to read Jane Austen or E.M. Forster or maybe watch Say Anything. With the Bronte’s, the best you can hope for is a slightly smaller asshole.

Foxx Luv (interview with the artist Corinne Halbert)

Posted on March 12, 2013 by mouse

Corinne Halbert – Foxx Luv

The Mission – 1431 Chicago Ave // Chicago, IL

July 13, 2012

The other morning, I was reading old Wonder Woman comics online, taking my time with the perverse ritual scene where young Amazons dressed as fauns are imaginatively eaten by their sisters. Like you do. Bill Marston’s imagination carried more depth and breadth than contemporary folk are often comfortable assigning to a funny book writer from the 40s. Even so, in his wildest dreams, could he have imagined that a half-century and change after he set that spirited account to paper, young people from all over the world would meet in airport hotels and convention centers, dress up as animals and pretend to devour one another? That the only barely obscured erotic charge of the Amazon ritual would take on a meaning to a community totally independent from any reading of the comics themselves?

I thought about this, too, the last time I visited Chicago in July of 2012. My former roommates Jon and Jeremy shepherded me to a friend’s installation in Ukrainian Village. They promised I would love it. On the sidewalk outside of The Mission on Chicago Ave, sharing a joint with five or six fellows all in our mid-20s crisis formal attire, I was kind of freaking out, I loved it so much. Right next door was the wake for a very young man, his friends standing in the distinct colors of a much-televised Chicago gang, smoking and kind of looking at us. There’s no meaning I can really wring out of those two very different groups of people; these are things that happen in very large cities. But in the basement…

Corinne Halbert had sewn a felt manequine of a bug-eyed anthropomorphic fox with an enormous erection. Seated on an obscene green vinyl couch, he was the first thing we saw when we softly padded down the treacherous flight of stairs to the Mission’s concrete-floored basement. All around the room were scrawled portraits of the fox, daggers and blades made of felt bulging out of open suitcases, a frantic love letter and images of the Fox’s obsession, Red Hot Riding Hood from the Tex Avery cartoons in various stages of undress. The whole scene was dim, tacky, cartoonishly horny, delightful, hilarious, repulsive, charming… It reminded me immediately of my favorite creatively deviant artists in the furry fandom, Swatcher, Van Weasel and Mamabliss. After introducing myself, I asked to pick the brain of this captivating artist about felt foxes and red hot vixens.

Hello There

MICHAEL ARTHUR: Walk me through your inspiration behind Foxx Luv. Why did you choose the Tex Avery Wolf and Lady cartoons as your subject?

CORINNE HALBERT: The Foxx character originally started as band art for my good friend Jason Smallwood’s New York based noise rock group, “Bbigpigg.” They had a song called “Foxx the Fox” about a psychotic murderous Foxx man. Jason and I corresponded online via email and I described to him a cartoon I remembered from childhood that left a huge impression on me. I told Jason this character reminded me of Foxx the Fox and I described him as a zoot suit wearing, horny, outrageous wolf man who was obsessed with a lounge singer. Jason nailed it and sent me a youtube link to Tex Avery’s 1943 classic, “Red Hot Riding Hood.” I fell in love with the cartoon all over again and began making my first images of the Foxx man. I wanted to transform Tex’s wolf into Bbigpigg’s Foxx, I kept Red’s character pretty much intact. After completing the illustrations for Jason I found myself completely obsessed with the Foxx man. I drew him constantly, everyday and in as many places as I could find.When I was a little girl I had a bunch of different characters I would draw. One set of characters was a momma dog and her baby doggy. I would draw them over and over again, every day in different situations. There is something very centering and relaxing about knowing a series of lines that you can rely on. So drawing Foxx made me feel like that little kid again. Except now that I am an adult I don’t only find drawing him soothing and satisfying, I can tap into the deviant parts of myself by using his character as a vehicle.I began making larger scale works with these characters using at first puffy paint and fabric and eventually I would begin to use felt and faux fur. Basically at the beginning of this journey I was obsessed with the Foxx. After learning that I would be exhibiting my solo at the Sub-Mission my attention and direction shifted towards Foxx’s obsession with Red. I decided that instead of creating a space about my obsession with Foxx I should create the Foxx man’s living room and really pile drive over the edge his obsession with Red. I wanted people to step inside a cartoon and realize how strong and bursting Foxx’s lust and obsession for Red really is.

Red

MA: The exhibition of the piece took place in a basement. Was the specific location of the installation important to the reception of the piece? Did you specifically request that space when negotiating with the gallery?

CH: It was absolutely key that this show be in a basement, I just knew that in my gut the first time I saw a show in the Sub-Mission. I felt like this was the perfect space to create my Foxx Luv world. The Sub-Mission is a wonderful and unique project space run by Sebastian Campos, Natalia Ferreyra and Sarah Syman who operate Chicago’s Mission gallery. They have a passionate objective to not only show mid to late career American, South American and international artists upstairs but to reserve room in the Sub-Mission space for young, local and up and coming artists. They send out an open call for artists every year to propose a site specific installation in the basement space. I was lucky enough to be one of the four artists accepted to the program this year. I believe they will be choosing seven artists next year.I can’t stress enough though that my vision made a dramatic shift when I learned I had actually landed the show. I started to think about what kinds of things this wonderfully deviant Foxx man would have in his living room. I began work on the pin up series and various other pieces and then I realized I would have to build an actual life sized Foxx man. I felt that the show would fall short without him in his own living room. I was definitely daunted by this fact and knew it would be no easy task but I knew it was something I had to do.

The Foxx’s letter to Red

MA: There is an obvious sexual current running through those cartoons, and it is writ large in Foxx Luv. Is your choice to highlight this element satirical? personal? intellectual?

CH: It’s funny, I never intended it to be satirical at all. Even though I revel in the humorous moments that I hope the audience finds too, I actually take Foxx Luv quite seriously. Of the three words you used in this question I think personally rings the most true. There is also an intellectual current running throughout Foxx Luv. This show like all my work is open for interpretation but it is actually deeply rooted in gender roles, sexual roles and the roles we all find ourselves playing to fit into society as functioning members.The Foxx embodies men’s roles, specifically heterosexual men. But it’s not that simple because the Foxx is also me. I think it is interesting that every single person on this planet past a certain age, save maybe a few have a very private, rich world of imagined stimuli that we call a fantasy life. Yet so many of us keep these thoughts secret, it would be too embarrassing if everyone knew what we were really thinking about. That is the heart and soul of Foxx Luv, throwing that idea that my fantasies are taboo out the window and just put it all out there for people to enjoy.R ed is the embodiment of femininity. While it may appear to be a chauvinistic environment it is not intended to be. I hope that by giving Red a strong enough character she is not read as some poor helpless thing that needs to flaunt her sexuality to survive. In my mind it is quite the opposite, she has full possession of her own body and uses her powerful sexuality to dominate men’s fantasies and make a living. To me that is a powerful woman. Feeling completely comfortable in her own skin, unashamed of her choices. It is kind of beyond her control that Foxx became absolutely obsessed with her.

MA: The character from the Tex Avery cartoon is a wolf, but the centerpiece of your exhibition is clearly a very red fox. You describe transformation as a significant theme in Foxx Luv. Can you talk about this in detail? Why is this?

CH:Transformation is integral to this body of work. I explained in the first question as to why I transformed Tex’s Wolf into a Foxx so I would like to discuss how I transformed myself into a Foxx. It’s funny to me because I think a lot of women, at least heterosexual women, would if asked which character they identified with more, my mere speculative guess would be Red. I myself identify much more strongly with the Foxx man. I have had an overactive imagination since I was a kid. I am not putting this out there to be sensational or shocking but I have an extremely deviant and perverted imagination. Join the club, I know right. But it is interesting that our culture embraces so whole-heartedly the fantasies of heterosexual males while often down-right shunning the rest of us. Clearly a lot of progress has been made and our culture does foster the fantasies of gay men, bisexuals and lesbians as well as heterosexual women and people who are transgendered to some extent. Throw any amount of kink in there and just forget about it unless you’re reading “Fifty Shades of Gray.” I haven’t read it but it makes me smile that it is so wildly popular, it just proves that people don’t even realize how kinky they could be if they just let go of our overly institutionalized way of doing everything.

Anyhow, I feel like I can see things through the Foxx’s eyes. I have a tendency to become completely obsessed, enamored and engrossed with people, subject matters, pop culture gems, films, bands so on and so forth. If I discover something new that really does it for me I want to throw myself into it completely. Learn everything I can about it, study it, absorb it, experience it. I do orient myself as majoritively hetero; however it’s not quite that simple because I am extremely attracted to women. I have had sexual experiences with women and enjoyed them immensely. I think my attraction is directly centered around beauty and femininity. I hope this makes it more clear why I identify with the Foxx, because I have been that perv with my tongue hanging out of my mouth, salivating and my eyeballs popping out of my head while ogling beautiful women countless times.

MA:Many themes in Foxx Luv, anthropomorphism, transgressive sexuality, transformation, are defining features of a contemporary subculture called “furry.” Were you aware of this subculture during the conceptual phase of Foxx Luv, and if yes, to what degree did your awareness of the subculture influence the work?

CH: I was fully aware of the Furries before making this work, however I did not realize the connection until after meeting you and after the opening had passed. It kind of dawned on me that, holy shit there is absolutely a connection to Furry culture. I mean the luv letter, the way I phrased it it’s like a steamy little furry fantasy. And the Foxx man, I mean he is kind of like a Furry sex doll, or at least he could be. It’s really funny because I am not a Furry but coming away from this show I am beginning the process of a new body of work and I asked myself what was I most stimulated by when I made this show? And my answer to myself was line, color, fur, the Foxx man and sculpture. I love the sensual nature of fur, it’s both aesthetically appealing and gives me tactile pleasure when I feel it. So I absolutely plan to make more fur pieces.

If you look at my past work I have created a lot of characters that are animal human hybrids. I created a series while in grad school called the “Dogma of Dogmen.” These characters had men’s bodies and dog heads. Before grad school I did a series called “Businessmen in Bunnyland.” The main characters were these evil business men and various races of bunny/human hybrids. I have also made paintings of myself as both a bear girl and the sad bunny girl. For my graduate lecture at SAIC I actually dressed up as the sad bunny girl and handed out bags of carrots and eggs with Minnie (Mouse) paintings inside to the audience. So I am not surprised there is this connection. I have a lot of similar interests as an artist to the Furries.

Attempting to Answer the Questions Darkest America Doesn’t

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Betsy Phillips

Bert Williams in blackface.

Let me say up front that I really liked Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop by Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen. It does one very important things you don’t often find in books about American minstrelsy (I’m looking at you, Love & Theft)—it describes what a minstrel show was like in clear and engaging language that conveys some of the charm of the art form without making you feel like you’re drowning in boring overly-academic prose. For that alone, it’s worth reading.

There’s also this really, really nice moment where Taylor and Austen describe Flournoy Miller and Johnny Lee, both black comedians, doing a blackface comedy routine in the movie Stormy Weather. Then they give a whole paragraph to the history of the routine, which Miller had been doing since at least the Twenties. And then the paragraph ends in this: “By the estimation of black comedy historian Mel Watkins, it was as familiar to black audiences as Abbot and Costello’s ‘Who’s on First?’ was to white audiences.” (p. 292) This bit of contextualizing is so amazing—you get the bit (or a bit of the bit), the bit’s history, and then a sense of the bit’s reach.

But I don’t think that Taylor and Austen ever quite satisfactorily address why blackface minstrelsy was so popular among black people—both performers and audiences. They brush up against it in the chapter on the Zulu parade in New Orleans, when they say, “Zulu history has been largely whitewashed, scrubbed clean of its origins in caricature, parody, and stereotype. Instead, blacks paint their faces out of respect for a tradition that, like the rest of the black minstrel tradition, has always been focused on entertaining its audience. For the Zulus, as for many black and white minstrels in the nineteenth century and earlier, blackface simply stands for a very good time.” (p. 106-107).

Tradition and pleasure are strong motivating factors and I wish Taylor and Austen had wrestled more with the implications of this insight. We like a lot of things because they’re familiar and because we find their familiarity pleasurable. I kept waiting for them to make this explicit—black people didn’t/don’t enjoy black blackface minstrelsy or its popular culture descendants because (or only because) they recognize some truth of who they are on stage; it’s pleasurable because they recognize the performance.

Or let’s look at it it from a slightly different angle. In 1993, Alan Jackson took “Mercury Blues” to Number 2 on Billboard’s country chart. It’s a cover of K. C. Douglas’s 1949 song, which is sometimes called “Mercury Blues” and sometimes called “Mercury Boogie.” “Mercury Blues” contains a line, which, in Alan Jackson’s version goes, “gal I love, stole her from a friend, he got lucky stole her back again” and in Douglas’s version goes, “girl I love I stole from a friend, the fool got lucky stole her back again.” But the line also lives in other songs. In Robert Johnson’s “Come on in My Kitchen” (1936) it goes, “the woman I love, took from my best friend, some joker got lucky, stole her back again.” Back in ’31, Skip James, in “Devil Got My Woman,” sings “The woman I love took off for my best friend, but he got lucky, stole her back again.” But it goes back further to at least Ida Cox’s “Worried Mama Blues” back in 1923—“I stole my man from my best friend, I stole my man from my best friend. But she got lucky and stole him back again.”

There’s a real power in recognition. When I learned about this repeated verse, I felt as if some great secret history of America had been revealed to me in a lightning flash, as if I had learned a way pop culture connects through time. It pleases me to recognize those same words in all those very different songs and I trust that at least some of you will be delighted to recognize them too. And it’s not because all of us have experience passing a loved one back and forth with our best friend. We take pleasure in recognizing the familiar bits. Of course, this kind of recognition of familiar bits can also be disturbing. When you know Walt Disney took inspiration from The Jazz Singer when he made “Steamboat Willie,” how do you ever look at Mickey Mouse’s white gloves the same way again?

So, when J.J. Walker makes his entrance, or later, Flavor Flav, isn’t there a delight in recognition—not of that type in the community, but of that type in entertainment?

Which brings me to the thing that I think Taylor and Austen fundamentally misunderstand. It’s up there in the Zulu quote, but they also state it explicitly on the third page of the book, “The minstrel tradition, as practice by whites in blackface, was a fundamentally racist undertaking, neutering a race’s identity by limiting it to a demeaning stereotype. But what Chappelle and other contemporary performers draw upon is the more complicated history of black minstrelsy.”All this is true. But, it misses an important and complicating component of white minstrelsy—a lot of white minstrel performers thought they loved black culture (I say “thought they” because any kind of black culture white men could have observed in the 1800s would have been carefully performed by those black men, because of the incredible danger the black men would have been in had it been misinterpreted).

In Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, Eric Lott says that, for these white minstrels, “To wear or even enjoy blackface was literally, for a time, to become black, to inherit the cool, virility, humility, abandon or gaité de coeur that were the prime components of white ideologies of black manhood.” (p. 52) (I don’t want to get sidetracked from my point, but I also feel like it’s important to state explicitly how terrible this belief of white men—that they could know black men through mimicking them—was for black men. It is at the heart of why white men could justify all the terrible things they did to black men. White men believed they knew the secret motivations of black men, because some of the white men, white men believed, had literally been black men briefly through imitation.) And this is the hard thing to accept, but the only thing that makes sense of minstrelsy, both black and white: it is racist and demeaning AND it is about a deep fantasy of how awesome it is to be black. Those things are both true, and, in fact, in a racist society like ours, you rarely have an admission of the latter without the former firmly in play.

Once you get that, the power and attraction of blackface minstrelsy—not just the components of the minstrels show, but the actual wearing of blackface makeup—for black people is obvious. If every single thing in the broader popular culture is either explicitly racist or does not mention black people at all (and is therefore implicitly racist), of course the racist art form premised on white people finding so much value in black culture (even if the value they find is not what black people would have called valuable themselves) is going to be incredibly popular with black people. And is it so hard to imagine the appeal of standing on a stage dressed as the object of desire of people who systemically hate you?

But as easy as it is to see the appeal, it’s also then easy to understand why the most egregiously racist components of black minstrelsy fell out of favor as black people gained control of their own representations in popular culture. After all, it is racist and relies on demeaning stereotypes. Of course, when other, less problematic, representations of black people became available, people preferred them.

Still, for a time, it was incredibly popular, both because the bits were funny, the songs beloved, and the insult of blackface muted by the twisted confession of envy that it represented. Yes, it was racist, but what popular culture wasn’t? Blackface was demeaning, but in the hands of black artists, it was also more than that. Black performers in blackface recognized that the culture portrayed by performers in blackface was black culture (or a fantasy of it)—which meant that culture had value, was something worth looking at, even to the very white people who, when they weren’t sitting in the audience, were denying that black people had any worth.

It’s little wonder, then, that its remnants linger on. Blackface minstrelsy was the popular culture for most people for at least half our country’s existence —where our comedy came from, where we heard and learned our favorite songs, and where a type of fundamental “American” sound in music was codified (including banjos and later the Blues)—and there’s still a lot of cultural resonance. And it’s little wonder that those remnants continue to be a source of controversy and pain—because it was racist and demeaning. That’s the legacy of blackface minstrelsy—a source of great pleasure that still resonates in our time AND a source of great pain, which we are still grappling with.

Imperialism and Pop Culture — Peter Suderman Interviews Me

Posted on March 10, 2013 by Noah Berlatsky

I recently had an article in the print edition of Reason on Justin Hart’s Empire of Idea, a book about America’s efforts to influence world opinion. Peter Suderman interview me for a profile to run beside the article…but of course, I was over verbose, so most of my responses got cut. Peter, though, has kindly gave me permission to run the whole thing here instead.

Peter Suderman: What makes America so susceptible to foreign policy blunders?

NB: I think America’s tendency to stumble into foreign policy quagmires probably has a lot to do with the fact that we’re just everywhere. We’ve got a finger in every pie (and/or a foot on every neck, if you want to be more confrontational about it.) I think there’s just a
very strong ideological commitment to leading the world/solving all the world’s problems, which is partially expressed through spending tons and tons and tons of money on weapons — and once you’ve got all those weapons, there’s a huge incentive to use them, which reinforces the ideology, and you buy more weapons, and on and on and on.

PS: Do you think there’s a disconnect between U.S. policy/government elites and less-well-connected citizens when it comes to foreign policy? Or are they basically in sync?

NB: There are obviously a lot of Americans, of all walks of life, who enjoy the image of the United States as a superpower, and who identify with the US projection of power. On the other hand, there’s also a substantial number of folks who want us to be doing less. Obama won the Democratic primary basically as the less-imperialism candidate. But then, of course, in office, he’s projected force as enthusiastically, if thank God less incompetently, than his predecessor. So…I’d say that elites are more unified in their support for imperial adventures. Those adventures draw at least occasional substantial opposition from the public, but that opposition seems difficult to translate into elite action (except in cases of transparent policy failure, like Iraq).

PS: You’ve written an awful lot about pop-culture. Does pop-culture contribute in important ways to how America sees itself in the world? Are there particularly relevant, insightful pop culture portrayals of America’s foreign policy outlook?

NB: I think pop culture both reflects and can contribute to how America sees itself, or what America does. I guess the most obvious recent example of that is 24, which became a touchstone for pro-torture arguments.

I think Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ comic Watchmen is an extremely insightful look at America’s foreign policy. It was written in the 80s, obviously, but it’s still really relevant, I think. It’s about the allure of power and of saving others, about the utilitarian calculus of sacrifice that goes along with it, and about the way that that utilitarian calculus ultimately founders on the fact that no power is ever enough power, and that, however many bombs you have, the future really isn’t under your control. Ozymadnias’ piles and piles of dead bodies are meant to be a sacrifice on the altar of the new future — but the book strongly suggests that they are, really, just piles and piles of dead bodies. The fact that it’s the liberal one-worlder who turns out to be the mass murderer while the right-wing fascist nutball is repulsed by the violence is a nice reminder that imperialism can be centrist as well as extremist .

PS: What do you think America could have done to avoid being linked with
European colonialism? Or was that linkage inevitable?

NB: America has long had an isolationist strain; it seems at least possible that that could have had more of an influence than it did. Counterfactuals are hard to figure, though.

Reason ran a photo of me with the article as well…but looking at it again, I don’t think I can bear to reprint it. It’s just hard to avoid looking willfully smug in author photos, I guess. So if you want to see my shame, you’ll just have to pick up that issue of Reason.

Black Bolt Speaks

Posted on March 9, 2013 by Chris Gavaler

How long can you go without talking?

It doesn’t sound like much of a superpower, but Black Bolt holds the record in comic books. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created him back in 1965 (Fantastic Four #45), and aside from a few mountain-splitting whispers, the guy has barely parted his lips.

For Supreme Court Justices, the verbal self-restraint prize goes to Clearance Thomas.

“One of the abiding mysteries at the Supreme Court,” writes Adam Liptak for The New York Times, “is why Justice Clarence Thomas has failed to say a word in almost seven years of arguments.” Theories include self-consciousness (Thomas was teased about his Georgia accent growing up), intimidation (he didn’t speak in his Yale law school classes either), and courtesy (to his fellow Justices whose noise level he likens to Family Feud).

Black Bolt is less of a mystery. My wife gave me Men and Cartoons for Christmas, so I’ll invite Jonathan Lethem to the lectern:

Black Bolt wasn’t a villain or a hero. Black Bolt was part of an outcast band of mutant characters known as the Inhumans, the noblest among them. He was their leader, but he never spoke. His only demonstrated power was flight, but the whole point of Black Bolt was the power he restrained himself from using: speech. The sound of his voice was cataclysmic, an unusual weapon, like an atomic bomb. If Black Bolt ever uttered a syllable the world would crack in two.

Black Bolt grew up in a sound-proof chamber, not rural Georgia, but he is also a member of the Illuminati, the closest thing in the Marvel universe to the Supreme Court. Thomas shares his bench with eight Justices; Black Bolt only five (Reed Richards, Dr. Strange, Professor X, Tony Stark, and Namor), but both supergroups are the endpoint of an ultimate check-and-balance system.

They always get the last word.

Black Bolt even passes judgment on U.S. legislation. He rejected the Superhuman Registration Act (AKA the Patriot Act) in 2006 (also the year Thomas last spoke in court) and refused to get involved in the ensuing “Civil War,” monitoring it from afar instead. As Lethem explains, “Black Bolt was leader in absentia much of the time—he had a tendency to exile himself from the scene, to wander distant mountain tops contemplating . . . What? His curse? The things he would say if he could safely speak?”

Aside from a few whispered remarks audible only to Breyer and Scalia seated beside him, Thomas has gone seven years without a single word. Until this winter. During a discussion of the qualifications of a Harvard-trained defense attorney, the Black Bolt of the Supreme Court leaned forward and said into his microphone:

“Well — he did not — .”

The earth did not split in two.

But opinion did. Some witnesses say he was making a joke, a reference to whether a degree from Harvard could be considered proof of incompetence. Or was he referring to his own alma mater, Yale? Either way, court transcripts indicate laughter followed. Seven years of silence and then a one-liner. But if it was just a joke, why did the lawyer at the lectern try to refute his point? Whatever that point may have been? And since the broader issue was the minimum qualifications for a death penalty defense lawyer, who exactly was laughing?

When Black Bolt breaks his vow of silence, the results are usually much louder. Remember when he used his voice to free the Inhuman’s city of Attilan from the Negative Zone? Or stunned Spider-Man’s alien Venom costume after it merged with Thor, allowing Black Cat to kill it in revenge for Peter Parker’s death? (Though, okay, that’s from What If?, so technically it never happened.)

We never know exactly what Black Bolt says in his super-speeches. Maybe he just likes to crack jokes. If so, no microphone can record them. But the last time Thomas deployed his nation-splitting voice, every network in the country televised it.

Remember how he pronounced the L-bomb, declaring his 1991 confirmation hearing a “high-tech lynching,” and categorically denied Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment? Remember the joke he cracked to her about the pubic hair on his Coke can? Now THAT was funny.

Of course the Senate confirmed him, so technically that didn’t happen either.

So let’s hear it for judicious self-restraint.Like Black Bolt, the Justice understands his own destructive vocal power and so has learned to hold his super-tongue. If he stays on schedule, we won’t hear another joke till 2020.

‘Nuff said.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Monthly Archives: March 2013