On Service in The Grand Budapest Hotel

Posted on March 19, 2014 by Kailyn Kent

Forgive me for thinking that all of Wes Anderson’s movies are about aristocrats. His characters seem rather taken care of, living in manicured homes, and setting forth on boyish adventures that each new film believes in a little bit more than the last. Yet his stories don’t really talk about class, or the tension between classes. It’s a diagetic abandon I’ve loved, perhaps indulgently. No one scurries about trying to hang the mirror just right, before the lord of the house enters. His heroes are inventive and not a little cultured, implying that they may have decorated the house themselves- or maybe that they are really just a extensions of the interior design.

Anderson’s most recent film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, is the first that permits the alternative, and chances a glimpse of a world outside the parlor rooms. More remarkably, it centers on the exploits of two characters responsible for the upkeep of a luxury hotel in Eastern Europe, threatened by a sort of World War II. Which means that the film is partly about service, and the workers who construct the clean, rosy fetishes that have become synonymous with Wes Anderson, but have remained backgrounded or backstage in his previous films.

The Grand Budapest is an explicitly contemporary fantasy, commenting more about our nostalgizing of pre-War (and wartime) Europe than those periods themselves. It stars an impetuous hotel concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) and “his lobby boy,” Zero, (Tony Revolori) who resist the tides of modernization through the enforcement of an almost chivalric code of service and taste, and fundamentally, nostalgia too. Their reluctant admission– that the Anderson dream is a façade, is played for nostalgia but comes off as restive, a sensation only compounded by the film’s enervating slew of deaths and dismemberments. Still, M. Gustave and Zero nobly go down with their ship, and Anderson’s vision of human decency in tow. Yet while Grand Budapest romanticizes service, the film is subliminally contemptuous of the reality of service– and service workers– in America today. Sure, the film is set in a make-believe country, bordering other make-believe countries, threatened by make-believe Nazis. On paper, it has no responsibility to representing contemporary maids, bakers, valets and servers. But then where does M. Gustav’s bilious, racist slandering of immigrant workers come from? Why is it excused? Why does it serve as an opportunity for him and Zero, a supposed immigrant, to connect? And why does the silhouette of Mexico float around the movie screen, imprinted as a birthmark on the heroine’s face?

Many will find connecting these two things far fetched, and I do not mean to reduce Grand Budapest to a reading about labor relations. Neither is this an attack on Wes Anderson: this is coming from the girl who spent the last term of high school dressing up as Margo Tenenbaum (at least, as much as I could manage, only having one off-brand polo dress.) Grand Budapest progressively casts a non-white protagonist, and lightly subverts the conventions of white-hero and colored-sidekick in a humorous way. Zero comes up with the majority of the plans. He drives the sled and motorcycle, while M. Gustave babbles on behind him. It’s a little like Wooster and Jeeves if they were both butlers. Or perhaps more awkwardly, Crusoe and Friday. Grand Budapest hotel is a grown-up boy’s adventure story after all, and both Friday and Zero are named for the circumstances of their arrival in ‘society,’ whether rescued on a Friday or coming with zero experiences, money and connections. Both Friday and Zero also escape death in their native communities, cannibalism and a firing squad respectively. It’s worth noting that the terms of their escape are both sensational, rather stereotyped threats from their communities. Friday is an indigenous American, so of course he risks being eaten by other Indians. Zero is Middle Eastern, so according to adventure story logic, its no shocker that his entire family was killed in a war.

Still, this information is revealed as a twist, rather than initial background. For the first half the movie, Zero is addressed as “a bloody immigrant.” The exchange that reveals Zero’s true history is greatly disappointing, and beneath a director whose humanity locked step with dead-pan humor and whimsy throughout his entire career. After Zero assists M. Gustave break out of prison, they reunite, but Zero has forgotten to bring M. Gustave’s signature eau de toilette. As it appears in the script:

M GUSTAVE

(escalating)

“Precisely. I suppose this is to be expected back in Aq Salim al-Jabat where one’s prized possessions are a stack of filthy carpets and a starving goat, and one sleeps behind a tent-flap and survives on wild dates and scarabs – but it’s not how I trained you. What on God’s earth possessed you to leave the homeland where you very obviously belong and travel unspeakable distances to become a penniless immigrant in a refined, highly cultivated society that, quite frankly, could’ve gotten along very well without you?”

ZERO

(shrugs)

The war.

M GUSTAVE

(pause)

Say again?

Zero speaks softly and struggles deliberately to hold back his emotions as he says, staring at the ground:

ZERO

Well, you see, my father was murdered, and the rest of my family were executed by firing squad. Our village was burned to the ground. Those who managed to survive were forced to flee. I left—because of the war.

M GUSTAVE

(back peddling)

Ah, I see. So you’re actually really more of a refugee, in that sense.

ZERO

(reserved)

Truly.

M GUSTAVE

(ashamed)

Well, I suppose I’d better take back everything I just said. What a bloody idiot I am. Pathetic fool. Goddamn selfish bastard. This is disgraceful – and it’s beneath the standards of the Grand Budapest.

While M Gustave tearfully apologizes for wrongly categorizing Zero, his vitriol against immigrant workers is left unaddressed. It is an ugly statement, yet decked out in the same fanciful loquaciousness as about every other piece of dialogue. Neither does Zero rebut it. The script elsewhere makes plain that M Gustave and Zero share the same values and allegiance to the Grand Budapest, and that their status as service workers is synonymous with their understanding of basic human decency. After this exchange, Zero declares them brothers, which does little to slow the swirling currents of family, class and citizenship going on in this conversation. M Gustave, the rogueish, valiant dandy and Zero’s hero, despises Middle Eastern people for their poverty, indulging in a slew of anciently racist imagery. He wrongly believes that a society of decadence can exist without foreign laborers. As long as Zero conforms to the current-day cliche, that the Middle East is a viper’s nest of ethnic violence, he is excused, because it is M. Gustave and Europe’s responsibility to watch over and deliver him. Anderson explicitly and unreflectively reveals a post-9/11 id, and perhaps demonstrates that his imperialistic leanings go a little deeper than the Scalamandre brand wallpaper.

One could reply that Grand Budapest is about as political as little boys playing ‘Cowboys and Indians’—then again, that’s exactly the point. The mission to keep up The Grand Budapest Hotel is cast as quixotic. The backdrops, speeding trains and establishing shots are deliciously faked. The actors speak in stilted, deadpan stage-talk, in their native, incongruous accents. Zero is played by an actor of Guatemalan descent, and grows up into F. Murray Abraham. Little effort was made to match the two, and while Abraham is actually of Syrian/Italian descent, it sort of looks like Zero transforms into a Jewish grandfather by 1965.

Even the film is nested in time—the story is framed as a contemporary girl reading a book written in the eighties by an author who interviewed Zero in the sixties about events that happened in the thirties. The film is an American fantasy of Europe, and America’s own fixation of Europe ‘having been lost forever’ in World War II. So, treading back to M. Gustave’s speech above, it’s not unfair to read contemporary immigrant workers into the meaning of the story. A contemporary film, speaking through the limitations of an anachronistic character, ventures to say something quite disgusting and untrue about immigrants. Whether this outburst is being used to ‘deepen’ or ‘complicate’ M. Gustave, or actually expresses a frustration with real immigrants, the film doesn’t do much to criticize M. Gustave’s opinions. He seems tasteful if snobbish, broad-minded if eccentric, in about every other circumstance. It’s as if the film casts his perfume-dependence as a greater weakness than his prejudice against other human beings, including Zero.

This only becomes more problematic, as plenty of critics have noticed that M. Gustave is a transparent stand-in for Wes Anderson himself, taking “extra special care of every little-bit” of his story worlds. I am not accusing Wes Anderson of racism, only this strange and forgivable slip. The issue is that the slip opens up a new line of inquiry. Why are almost all the hotel staff male and white? Why are there so few maids to be seen? Why is the one maid untrustworthy, (played by my favorite, Lea Seydoux?) Was light chauvinism part of the nostalgia? The humor? Grand Budapest is a peculiar fantasy of the authority of service. M. Gustave knows everyone and everything about the hotel. He’s a connoisseur of wine, food, perfume, art, partly for his own amusement, mostly because he can better assist his guests. Once the caper begins, M Gustave can pull favors from about anyone, in places high and low, because of the impression he left as an impeccable helper. He befriended a lonely little boy that grows up into an influential police chief. In prison, he wheels around a gruel cart with a wink and a smile, he wins access into an escape plan. He and Zero are rescued by a league of extraordinary concierges (all white men, except for ‘Dino,’ an Indian man in an orange turban.) His Bernie-esque companionship to an aged women (one of many he carries on with,) gains him a huge fortune, a masterpiece, and the hotel itself. When he is killed by a ‘Nazi’ firing squad off camera, Zero inherits the hotel in his stead. M. Gustave willed all of his possesions to Zero in exchange for his steadfast service to him.

Service is a tangled conundrum. The people who come to know our things best are often those who do not own them. The people at Tri-Valley Cobbler understand my shoes better than I do, and when I worked in a wine store, we knew more about the expensive bottles than most people who bought them. A maid perceives the corners of a house that its inhabitants are blind to, and a cook fathoms the interlocking steps and ingredients of a recipe. A complex economic chain separates authority from possession and enjoyment. M. Gustave instructs Zero “A lobby boy is completely invisible, yet always in sight.” Hospitality is sometimes a performance of equal parts competence, flair and subordination, but many times it is simply inconspicuous. Luxury hotels have greater disposal to hide its staff—maids and waiters ride separate elevators, and their uniforms look more like costumes. They are disguised so as not to suggest their independence of the hotel, and its setting.

Grand Budapest solves the issue of inheritance—both M. Gustave and Zero inherit the hotel, uniting authority, possession and recognition in two fell swoops, the rightful kings restored. Much later, Communism threatens to nationalize the hotel, and Zero trades his fortune for it. Then the hotel goes bust and he presumably dies. So rather than grant the worker a life separate from the institution, M. Gustave and Zero meld themselves into it. For M. Gustave, he merges out of love of a lost era. For Zero, he holds on out of love for his deceased wife Agatha (Saoirse Ronan).

Which returns us to the giant Mexican birthmark. The birth-mark is specifically a ‘port-wine stain,’ a large, irregular mark on the face whose name Wes Anderson would love. Agatha is a kind, quiet and hardworking “pastry-girl.” She exists as sophisticated eye candy, biking with a heavy load of pastry boxes in slow motion, smiling wisely at her fiancé and M. Gustave’s banter. She also speaks with a cute Irish brogue, but she’s barely given anything to say. Agatha falls short of about every other female character in Wes Anderson’s films, but shines compared to the other women here: a trio of insipid fat villainesses, a beleaguered peasant, the treacherous lady’s maid and the numerous elderly ladies M. Gustave companions as part of his impeccable service. Zero always narrates over her scenes. Unlike Margo or Mrs. Fox, she can’t see through the boyish adventuring. She just gazes adoringly at Zero, at M. Gustave, at the camera, while the men joke-fight about flirting with her. (It’s like Wes Anderson forgot how to see through himself.) The most characteristic thing about Agatha is her Mexican shaped birthmark.

The birthmark makes sense on a comic, absurd level. Mexico is an easily identifiable and perfectly random country to appear on her face. Its gentle curve is aesthetic as well, drawing attention to her rosy cheeks and lips. Other countries would have looked like a random blotch—but why a country in the first place? Especially since all the other countries are imaginary. It resonates strongly inside a film about war and lost statehood, whether Lutz, Zebrowka, or the Grand Budapest itself, even when the nations are imaginary, and the fascist forces oh so vague. And why a birthmark? My guess is that birthmarks are simply nostalgic, being pre-laser removal and all, but they do dredge up associations. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Birthmark, the hero Alymer kills his wife in an attempt to remove her birthmark, convinced it is infernally possessed, and in cahoots with her hidden, feminine darkness. According to folklore, birthmarks are caused by the unsatisfied wishes of a pregnant mother, or past-life traumas. They are the inherited psychic turmoil of generations past, suppressed before and now spilling forth like a stain, or a brand. In this case, in the shape of Mexico —in a film by an obscurely Texan director.

When you glance onscreen and see Zero, do you see a Central American or a Middle Eastern man? Hero or sidekick? Immigrant or refuge, with all the modern connotations of those terms? The answer always seems to be an intermixture. In a film about service, Anderson obscures service’s troubling anonymity and its powerlessness with, well, le air de panache. He repaints it as a thing that young white boys do, a sort of elaborate game and secret society, and then ignores and kicks dirt on the people who work service jobs because they need to. Not all fantasies require this. Fairy tales do rather well with balancing vulnerable protagonists with valiant quests. But fairy tales are about girls, and this is a boy’s adventure story, where our hero must swagger from the start, and his challenge is more mischievous than difficult. Anderson lets us see the man behind the curtain, M. Gustave, master of the dream world. Do not worry—its not like there’s some underclass or anything, pasting up the wallpaper, building the submarine, and making all of those perfect animal costumes. M. Gustave and his crew of youths handle it themselves.

And this is the fantasy behind the class and luxury of Wes Anderson’s world, which refuses to connect with stories about class and luxury in our own. It’s usually not a problem. A movie shouldn’t be anything it isn’t. The difference is that here, the ghost of what Anderson doesn’t mention insists on itself, and starts beating like a heart under the floorboards, a part of his creation. Anderson ignores it, muffles it, then shrieks at it, and finally, it materializes upon the face of the film.

Sympathy for “Sympathy for the Devil”

Posted on March 18, 2014 by Osvaldo Oyola

Baudelaire may have said that “The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist,” but I think it is just the opposite. The finest trick humanity ever played was persuading itself that the devil was real.

Back in January, Noah Berlatsky posted a list of 18 songs about the devil over on Salon.com. After looking through the list I thought there were some overlooked gems. The most egregious was perhaps obvious, but as far as I’m concerned also the most worthy of inclusion: The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.” I immediately tweeted at Noah (and I probably wasn’t the only one) about his oversight and we had the following exchange:

Now I can’t speak to why the allusion to the Kennedy killings is so objectionable to Noah (though I am sure he will come by the comments here and enlighten us—at least, I hope he will), but it did make me spend some time thinking about the song some more and what makes it so great.

It is probably deserves mentioning—as I did in my first tweet—I am no huge fan of the Stones. Generally speaking, I can take them or leave them. They have some great songs, no doubt, but I am not enamored of their white-boy blues-man pose, and find Keith Richards to be about as obnoxious a figure in rock n’ roll as there is (his comments on hip hop being particularly irksome). In the old Beatles or Stones binary, I am a Beatles guy. Despite this, I do have something of an obsession with “Sympathy for the Devil” and make it a point of collecting various covers of it. I love the live version by Jane’s Addiction (it takes Perry a while to warm up, but when he does his screech is haunting) and I even own Laibach’s Sympathy for the Devil EP on vinyl, which is nothing but really bizarre covers of the song. Heck, one of my first bands back in college, The Milk Lizards, used to do the song at our shows, so I’ve even sung it a bunch.

From the first lyric, the song does a great job operating in this tension between the personified and the historical. He personifies evil through his voicing of Lucifer, but as the examples of his evil deeds accumulate it becomes clear that every single one of his examples are evils for which human beings, not fallen angels, are responsible. Jesus Christ’s “moment of doubt and pain,” whether it is a reference to Gethsemane or his cry on cross, is his most human. The backing “whooo-whoo” gives the song the feel of a ritualistic chant while questioning the assertions of the singer. Who? Who? Who really is responsible for the events he lists? Who is the devil and what purpose does the idea of a devil even serve? Isn’t he just a convenient excuse for humanity’s corruption, short-sightedness, greed, selfishness and capricious penchant for violence? Doesn’t belief in the devil and his evil implicitly legitimize a network of institutions that put God at their head in opposition to this evil, but actually perpetuate the wars, massacres and murders being enumerated in the song’s lyrics—“kings and queens who fought for 10 decades for the gods they made”?

The idea of making gods is actually quite important to the theme of the song, because while the song claims the name we should be guessing is “Lucifer,” its speaker doesn’t say “I am Lucifer” or “My name is Lucifer,” but rather “Call me Lucifer.” In other words, the name we guess should be our own, but we made up Lucifer instead. Isn’t that the puzzle mentioned in song’s refrain? The inability to turn our gaze upon ourselves, our own institutions for the pain and evil in the world?

Sure, that “our” might be problematic. What do I have to do with “the Blitzkrieg rage” or the overturning of Czars (a thing that I’d argue needed to happen, but nevertheless led to decades more corruption and suffering)? But at the same time, the “I” in the song is metaphorical. It is any “I” informed by ideology or bound by duty to do things like driving a tank into France or going into the Ambassador Hotel to put a few bullets in Bobby Kennedy’s head and back.

Which brings me back to Noah’s objection, which still strikes me as too literal-minded. Our discussion about that one line—“I shouted out, ‘Who Killed the Kennedys?” When after all, it was you and me”—made me think of Ladybird Johnson’s journal entry on the assassination of JFK, and her report on Jackie Kennedy’s response when asked if she wanted to change out of her “dress…stained with blood. One leg was almost entirely covered with it and her right glove was caked, it was caked with blood – her husband’s blood.” Jackie replied “with almost an element of fierceness – if a person that gentle, that dignified, can be said to have such a quality – she said, ‘I want them to see what they have done to Jack.’” Who was this “them” she referring to? Based on the timeline of the day of the assassination this was after Oswald had already been captured, so the use of the plural is weird. I am not trying to plead a case for Kennedy assassination conspiracies, because as fishy as everything surrounding it may be, the ability for 50 years to pass without even one conspirator coming forth or someone in the know providing evidence makes it increasingly likely that Oswald did act alone—no secret can be kept that well for that long. No, I just mean that her accusation resonates with the Stones’ lyric, even if the anguish of the recently widowed undermines the ability to interpret the specificity of her statement in any kind of definitive manner.

Regardless what she might have meant or not meant, I think of Jackie’s exclamation as referring to everyone. You and me. The fact that Jackie probably bought the whole Cold War ideological narrative just reinforces this notion, since she probably felt she lost her husband due to his efforts to protect the little people from the big bad Russians, Cubans and Communists. In other words, “they” were the American people. Who else would feel guilty? Not his actual assassins. Why would they care? Why wouldn’t they feel glee to see Kennedy’s blood on her dress?

I am not making the claim that Jagger and Richards were making a reference to this in their song, but rather the notion that there are broader implication for political assassinations already present in terms of the systems of belief that support those kinds of actions and their global consequences. The whole “Camelot” pretension is bullshit. Americans were outraged at their leader being killed as their leaders worked to kill others. “We” put them there to do that. Evil is what men do. If Malcolm X was right that Kennedy’s killing was “chickens coming home to roost,” then “Sympathy for the Devil” with its Afro-Latin sounds was an attempt to sacrifice one of those chickens and cast some protective blessing or ritualistic warning through pop music.

And sonically, the song delivers just that. It’s fantastic. It feels kind of raw and loose. Not only the ragged “Who-Who” chant, but the halting jagged pecking guitar solo and Jagger’s many affected exclamations of “yeah” introduced with their uncertain “um.” Along with his grunts and cries, it gives the song an uneasiness. The song is frenetic. It builds to a desperate feel without actually getting any faster, cohering around the piano chord changes and the bubbling bass. And yes, the choice of the conga drums, shakers, and the samba rhythm give it that kind of worrisome “voo-doo” feel. I think it was meant to sound primitive and dark to white ears in 1968, but I give it a conditional pass because it works. Jagger sings with a fantastic coaxing menace that matches, if not surpasses, any other performance of the role of the devil—barely contained, but somehow civilized, in way that tanks and kings are signs of civilization. “Sympathy for the Devil” gives us the realest and most affecting devil in pop music, but giving us something to really be scared of—ourselves.

And thus, that’s why if you meet the devil you should “have some courtesy, some sympathy and some taste some taste / Use all your well-learned politesse” because you are meeting the devil every day, and a little sympathy, compassion and politeness can go a long way avoiding the kind of denial of humanity, lack of empathy, that perpetuates evil and makes us all potential devils.

The Athenaeum of David B.

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Ng Suat Tong

A Review of Incidents in the Night Volume 1 by David B.
Comic translated by Brian and Sarah Evenson

“Like all the men of the Library, in my younger days I traveled; I have journeyed in quest of a book, perhaps the catalog of catalogs.”

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”

David B.’s Incidents in the Night begins with a record of a dream he had on April 11th, 1993.

In that dream, B. finds himself scouring a book shop where he finds the second, third and then 112th volume of Émile Travers’ Incidents in the Night. When B. awakes, he sets off in search of the physical manifestations of those spectral books, soon finding himself in the capacious literary establishment of a certain Mr. Lhôm. B. is in search of the barely glimpsed record of his nocturnal adventures, a magazine transcribing not only his personal unconscious but the collective unconscious—a MacGuffin; the key to his reveries; his very own “catalog of catalogs.”

In his afterword to the comic, Brian Evenson, evokes the labyrinthine depths of Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel when he considers the existence (or lack thereof) of the many books B. has drawn and enumerated. Lhôm’s library would seem to be yet another repository of all possible books, but it also remains distinct from its illustrious predecessor.

Where Borges’ Library of Babel “is a sphere whose exact center is any hexagon and whose circumference is unattainable,” Lhôm’s cache of illusory knowledge doesn’t have a particularly edifying shape or any semblance of symmetry. It is a place dank and dark with the decaying leaves of thousands of books, enlivened periodically by phantoms. The cavernous space B. traverses is filled with mountains of miscellanea to be conquered. Any discoveries are pleasantly shared among fellow explorers met incidentally among the piles of musty tomes.

At times, the owner-librarian dons the costume of a mythical beast and sets his “wild” dogs on his patrons—the better to excite them. This is a guileless depiction of the romance of reading; each adventurer bound to an elevated conception of Romanticism as epitomized by Casper David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog; each hiding a reality much more mundane and disappointing.

B.’s library is no longer “the handiwork of a god” (Borges) but the invention and province of humans. The comic itself is buttressed by tangents sustained by the slightest suggestion.

Right at the start, there is the hint of common interest between B. and the keeper of this literary mountain range—the latter’s favorite work is Rene Grousset’s The Empire of the Steppes, a book detailing the histories of the Huns, Turks, and Mongols. With a guide at his side, B. begins a slow trek through the codices of Arabia and hence to South Asia; a purely literary tourist with all the unreliable, second hand knowledge this entails. Among the books unearthed from the “geologic strata” of this region is one bearing a Swastika (sometimes taken as a representation of eternity), the limbs of this symbol prefiguring the four forms the author finds himself split into later in the comic—human, shadow, paper, and skeletal.

These forms are conjoined to a Dharmacakra, an eight-spoked dharmic wheel representing the eightfold path to enlightenment. What the four forms represent is anyone’s guess but they easily play into a number of fourfold concepts in Buddhism: the 4 noble truths; the 4 right exertions; the 4 stages of enlightenment; the division of life into human, heavenly, animal, and demonic forms.

Thus, in the course of a few pages and with the barest of intimations, we have migrated from France to the steppes of Asia and hence to the mountainous regions of the Himalayas; there encountering a legendary creature in its foothills before assimilating an ancient religion of the land. All this without leaving the confines of the author’s apartment, the second hand book shop and France. B. is confined in time and space even as he negotiates the threads of history and geography.

This rendering of the superfluous nature of travel is also found and parodied in the person of a misguided poet by the name of Carlos Argentino Daneri in Borges’ story, “The Aleph.” In that story, the narrator (perhaps Borges) meets the strangely deluded Daneri who haplessly recites his vision of “modern man”, “surrounded by telephones, telegraphs, phonographs….motion picture and magic-lantern equipment, and glossaries and calendars and timetables and bulletins…”; all this rendering the act of traveling “superogatory.” In the same way, the protagonist of B.’s comic, while periodically enunciating his concerns with death, seems perturbed only in so far as physical annihilation would put a damper on his ability to read more books.

The rabbi from whom B. seeks advice is also confined to his room, negotiating every evening with the Angel of Death; as is the sociopathic instigator of B.’s adventures, the editor of Incidents in the Night (Émile Travers) who escapes death by a Kabbalistic “fusion with the letter” N.

That letter is of course a reference to the Aleph, the first letter in the Kabbalistic alphabet. This, when rotated, takes on the form of that aforementioned symbol of eternity, the Swastika….

…a theme which B. returns to throughout this first volume of Incidents of the Night.

From his drawing board and bed, B. surveys the entirety of time and space—from the Babylonian flood myths to the futile dreams of a Bonapartist (Travers). A similar theme might be found in Borges’ Aleph—

“…the place where, without admixture or confusion, all the places of the world, seen from every angle coexist.”

In explanation of this, Borges opens his story, with a quote from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, (an excerpt from the philosopher’s exposure of false doctrine):

“For the meaning of eternity, they will not have it to be an endless succession of time; for then they should not be able to render a reason how God’s will and pre-ordaining of things to come should not be before His prescience of the same, as the efficient cause before the effect, or agent before the action; nor of many other their bold opinions concerning the incomprehensible nature of God. But they will teach us that eternity is the standing still of the present time, a nunc-stans [the eternal Now], as the Schools call it; which neither they nor any else understand, no more than they would a hic-stans for an infinite greatness of place.”

For B., Émile Travers’ multi-volume Incidents in the Night (a symbol for B.’s dream life) is the Aleph. This might be taken for a simple metaphor but Brian Evenson (in his afterword) ladles on an existential (almost mystical) compact between readers and their books:

“David B. understands that subconsciously we search books for magics that will help us avoid being confronted by our own mortality, and he has made this the conscious subject of Incidents in the Night…We will not find these magics—rationally we know this. But we might still find the promise of them, even as we see within them the reflection of our own future corpse.”

Yet the sideways connection with Borges’ Aleph also suggests something altogether more mundane—a study of influence. If “The Aleph” is in part a tribute to (or parody of) the works of Dante then we might see in David B.’s journey an endless search for influence and precursors. As Borges writes in “Kafka and his Precursors“:

“In the critic’s vocabulary, the word “precursor” is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”

It is a theme which B. applies to the oldest recorded “genocide”—the universal flood destroying all on earth save for the family and animals of Outanapishtim—and also the human wrought extinction of “nearly thirty-five species of mammals belonging to the megafauna” from Paleothic times. In so doing, B. uses a term coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944 to modify our perception of historical events.

In “The Aleph”, Borges echoes Dante in his acknowledgement of the limitations of words and their (in)ability to convey the transcendent:

“I come now to the ineffable center of my tale…How can one transmit to others the infinite Aleph, which my timorous memory can scarcely contain?”

If we find David B.’s comic at once familiar and slippery, it might be the result of a preoccupation he shares with those authors—the interrogation of the inexpressible; in this instance, the basis of creativity. The author and his guide (like Dante and Virgil) wade through an avalanche of books (and afflatus) as they would a sea of corpses; a library of infinite letters and words in the form of a series of hand drawn images—an incomplete transcription of the limits of human language.

_____

Further Reading

See Daniel Kalder’s review of Incidents in the Night for a detailed synopsis of the comic.

The second volume of Incidents in the Night in French.

Best Music So Far This Year

Posted on March 16, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

We’re almost three months into the new year…so what have folks been listening to from 2014?

Just heard this; Tinariwen,drony groove from Mali

I wrote about Akkord on Splice Today; electronica for sun death.

Also really like Be Forest; Italian fey folk.

And the Domains; Spanish death metal the way death metal should be.

Hubba Bubba, where the Thee Oh Sees’ frontman does slowed-down cough-syrup doped electropop:

Katy B, empty-headed shallow British dance pop.

Here’s left field-R&B performer Kelela. I wasn’t that into her album from last year, but this track is pretty great.

There’s this EP by Zikomo which is really nice zoned-out trippy fractured easy-listening hip hop.

Free download available here

Marissa Nadler, folksy shoegaze in a Mazzy Star meets Civil Wars vein.

And finally Don Williams new album; just started listening to it but it’s pretty great. He’s definitely an artist who makes more sense the older he gets.

So what about you all? What should I be listening to from 2014?

Utilitarian Review 3/15/14

Posted on March 15, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

News

We’re thinking of doing a J.M. DeMatteis roundtable, probably sometime in summer. Let me know if you want to participate, either in comments or by emailing me.

There’s also been some discussion of doing a Spielberg roundtable…people still interested in that?

EDIT: Actually, now that I think about it, since we’re doing DeMatteis in the summer, and just did Bloom County, maybe it would be a good thing to do a roundtable that’s not quite so darn white and male.

So…anyone have any ideas? I’d be interested in doing an Octavia Butler roundtable; I’ve been toying with the idea of reading more of her. A romance roundtable might be fun, though perhaps would need to narrow that down. Black cinema? Or comics and fashion was something I’d been thinking about too. Maybe we could do some brainstorming in comments?
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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Shaenon Garrity with an illustration of Wallace Stevens’ Emperor of Ice Cream.

Eric Berlatsky on Alan Moore/Kevin O’Neill’s Black Dossier, feminism, and utopia (part of our Gay Utopia reprint project.)

We had a long thread about underrated and overrated SF. (I said Asimov was overrated, Gwyneth Jones and John Christopher underrated.)

Kristian Williams on Daredevil: Love and War, Sin City, and Frank Miller as accidental feminist.

Samantha Meier on the pioneering women’s underground sex comic Tits & Clits.

Chris Gavaler on Oliver Cromwell as Superman.

Qiana Whitted thinks about non-fiction comics that use fantasy elements (for PPP).

I wrote about Young Avengers, and how laudably diverse doesn’t necessarily mean good.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I talked about:

— breast-feeding, drinking while pregnant, and how folks should just leave mothers alone already.

— Desktop Dungeons and how making non-sexist/non-racist art is hard work.

— the word “bossy,”feminism, and abusive assholes in power.

At Salon I had a list of songs that are almost Beatles covers.

At Splice Today:

— I argue that conservatism is a fandom. (Prompting this response from Jonathan Bernstein, one of my favorite bloggers.)

— I talk about the awesome gender-swapping manga Ranma 1/2, out in a new edition from Viz.

— I review the gallery show Teen Paranormal Romance, and talk about appropriating lesser humans.

Other Links

Melissa Gira Grant’s book Playing the Whore, about sex work and work, is now available. Y’all should buy it.

Sarah Boxer on Peter Bagge’s comic about Margaret Sanger.

Shaenon Garrity on Irish cow-battle web comics (yes, there are more than one.)

Amanda Hess on how Ezra Klein looks like the old boss.

Stoya on pseudonyms in porn and online.

In and Out

Posted on March 15, 2014 by kinukitty

Art from Weiss Kreutz

This is part of the Gay Utopia project, originally published in 2007 . A map of the Gay Utopia is here.
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I didn’t get the point of slash, initially. Why the hell would anybody want to spend their creative energy writing explicit sex scenes with someone else’s characters, and why would anybody want to read it?

So I was surprised to find out that huge quantities of the stuff were available on the internet for almost any anime, manga, TV show or movie you could think of. A friend told me about it — her fandom was “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” — and despite my misgivings, I trusted her taste. She is smart and highly literate and wouldn’t recommend anything that completely sucked (as it were), no matter how much she was into the porn. So the possibility rolled around in the back of my head for years before I finally took her suggestion and Googled “fan fiction.”

My kink is beautiful young men having hot, explicit sex in the context of some kind of emotional relationship. Something meaningful — love, angst, hatred, ideally all three at once. I like porn, but what I wanted wasn’t really available in the mainstream. You can find heterosexual porn with plot, but I didn’t want heterosexual porn. And you can find gay porn with beautiful young men, but I didn’t necessarily want that much sex. (Anyone see “Butt Boys From Outer Space: Blasting Out From Uranus”?)

I had grave misgivings about quality but got lucky and found Scribblemoose right off. The porn sealed the deal, but she is a good writer: well-developed characterizations, compelling plots, and so on. I wasn’t familiar with any of the anime or manga characters she wrote about, but I’d heard of Weiss Kreuz, so I chose one of her WK stories at random, and nothing’s ever been the same.

I picked Weiss Kreuz because it sounded angsty, but also completely ridiculous. The premise of this ’80s anime — which is plagued with some of the worst animation ever perpetrated, along with one-dimensional characters and plot-holes that will occasionally make you throw an axle — is that four beautiful (if peculiarly styled) young men, who have all been scarred by some absolute tragedy, have become avenging assassins with kitty-cat code names who work under cover by day in a flower shop called (get ready for it) “Where the kitten sleeps.”

It seemed like a good place to start.

The first story I read was called “Moving On” (co-written, actually, by Scribblemoose and Gwendolyn Flight). It opens with an espionage scene, and I do love espionage. Two men, Yohji and Aya, are trying to get illicit information out of a computer. Yohji muses crankily about this not being his thing and then spits, “Damnit. It wants a password.” Aya says, “Eggplant.” “What?” “Eggplant. The password’s eggplant,” Aya says, muttering, “Did you actually read the mission pack?” “Of course I fucking did,” Yohji answers.

Soon after, Aya makes a mistake (at the end we find out that a trainee had left different pages out of each man’s information packs), leading to the pair being pursued and hiding in, of course, a crowded gay club. And to blend in, they are obviously forced to dance in extremely tight proximity and kiss in a wonderfully heated fashion. There are passages like: “…Yohji could glimpse shifting muscle and smooth flesh. Tantalizing. He tasted the word on his tongue, rolled it about and smiled on a sudden curling heat.” The men thus discover their hither-to unexplored passion for each other, stagger home and have hot kitchen-counter sex, followed by a complication, then hot bed-sex, and a relationship ensues. It’s funny and sexy and absurd, but there’s an internal logic that holds everything together. (There’s a picture, too, by the lovely and talented P.L. Nunn.)

Years later, Weiss Kreuz is still about the only slash I read, but even in this tiny universe, I’ve come across many talented writers just having a lot of fun with what they do. So many, in fact, I’ve occasionally regretted my inability to become obsessed with other fan fiction universes. I’d enjoy reading them even without the sex.

But, oh, the sex. I’ve had the same basic kink since I was first conscious of sexuality, and for most of my life, there was almost no way to express it. It is inextricably tied up with the other major facet of my sexuality, which is that I’m bi. Both things were equally painful when I was growing up. My family was poor-ish and lived in a fairly small, firmly blue-collar town, and everything I was, sexually, was so wrong it couldn’t even be admitted to exist. For years I had a nebulous, awkward and, most important, closeted relationship with a young woman of similar background. We couldn’t even admit to each other what we were doing. My social life was extremely restricted because nobody could be allowed to find out I was gay — or something, I didn’t exactly know — and nobody around me was out, so I had no idea how to go about finding a more suitable partner or even friends I could trust with my secret.

I spent a lot of time prowling a decrepit and usually completely deserted used bookstore (but wonderful, in its way, and miraculous that it was there at all). And one thrilling day when I was thirteen, I ran across Faggots by Larry Kramer and discovered the broader concept of homosexuality. People like me did exist — somewhere else, obviously, than in my home town, but still. In retrospect, it amuses me that this nasty little book would have been what gave me hope. It’s very far from the kind of porn I seek out, and it didn’t really work for me as porn at the time, but, holy shit! There was a whole world out there, and even if my life felt like a too-tight shoe at the time, there were gay people, and when I grew up I could set forth and find them.

And I did grow up, more or less, and I did find people who were gay, lesbian, bi and trans-gendered, and it was a huge fucking relief. But there was still the other part. I still couldn’t find the kind of porn I needed, or any community where those interests were openly acknowledged, so in a way I still felt like I was in the closet. I broached the subject with some gay men and was considered a fag hag (a phrase I’ve always detested). I was afraid to even mention it to my lesbian friends, who often seemed deeply suspicious of my bisexual orientation (and who did in fact drop me when I started dating a man). It was sort of like high school all over again — there were certainly people out there who shared my porn inclinations, but where the hell were they? So discovering slash, and the slash communities on the internet, felt a bit like discovering the gay utopia. I could finally be out in every way.

There are problems, obviously. It is a virtual community where people interact virtually, using pseudonyms and keeping many details of their real lives private, in part to avoid intruding overly on the fantasy, probably, but mostly to keep themselves safe, since the real world still isn’t open to bi (or straight) women who fantasize about gay men. There is finally yaoi manga to be found at Borders, but this remains a preference you probably don’t want your coworkers to know about.

The virtual community of which I speak lives on LiveJournal, although there are many on LJ and other sites. I often think my life would have been different if this stuff had been around when I was a teenager (in the wee, early ‘80s) or a young adult. To have something so fundamental about myself validated by a community of people who felt similarly — what would that have been like? I have no idea, but I wish every manporn-obsessed teenager in the world could find out.

That opinion would seem to put me in the minority. There’s been so much wailing and gnashing of teeth and crying of “The children! The children!” that it’s almost impossible to say teenagers should perhaps have access to porn. Yes, I am aware that sexual predators make use of the internet. And no, I am not in favor of child abuse. At the same time, I think there is some middle ground on which to perch.

Teenagers are sexual. If someone is thinking about sex, saying “No, you’re not” isn’t going to stuff the genie back into the lamp. This concept of innocence that must be maintained until the age of eighteen, and damn the civil rights torpedoes, is not a universal truth. An awful lot of teenagers have sex. It was even the norm in the US not so long ago. My grandmother — admittedly poor and rural — was married at fourteen, and that was not unusual.

LiveJournal is currently trying to convince its users to save the children by self-censoring. Users are never, ever to post anything that might possibly contain any remotely sexual content involving anyone younger than eighteen — because if you ever posted anything like that, you’d obviously be a disgusting pedophile, and also, the terrorists would win. And the newest innovation is inviting users to flag all adult content in a way that precludes younger users (those who registered their accounts with a birth date indicating they are not yet eighteen years old) from being able to access the material. Other people can flag your content, too. Because the only way to keep teens from being sexually assaulted by pervy old creeps is to deny them access to any kind of sexual content whatsoever.

From the outside, I guess the closet looks like a safe place to store kids. It didn’t feel that way when I was in it, though.

The Kids Are Mediocre, Albeit Not Utterly Without Charm

Posted on March 14, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Earlier this week I wrote a post at the Atlantic where I talked about the game Desktop Dungeons and how its creators had discovered that, in order not to be sexist, they had to work really hard at it. The intention to be non-racist/non-sexist isn’t enough, because the default tropes used to imagine fantasy game settings and characters are racist and sexist. It takes imagination and effort to overcome that.

So Kieron Gillen and James McKelvie definitely deserve credit for the extent to which Young Avengers pushes back against decades of accumulated superhero whiteness and sexism. The team includes a gay couple (Wiccan and Hulkling), and a Hispanic child of a lesbian couple (Miss America),along with two other white guys (Marvel Boy and Kid Loki) and a white Hawkeye).

Perhaps more importantly than their numbers, the marginal characters aren’t treated as marginal or other or weird…and the decision not to treat them as marginal or other or weird is nicely linked to the supehero milieu. Hulkling is a green-skinned shapeshifter from another planet; Miss. America is a brown-skinned superhuman from another dimension. Hawkeye is sleeping with the alien Kree Marvel Boy, Wiccan is sleeping with the alien Skrull Hulkling. Amidst all the intricate incoherence of the Marvel multiverse (which Gillen and McKelvie gleefully toss about without much explanation for novices), a non-White superhero as the strongest member of the group or a gay romance as part of the proceedings hardly seems worth mentioning (except, in the later case, as a vehicle for the requisite quotient of intra-team melodrama.)

So Gillen and McKevie set the worthy goal of not being sexist, racist assholes, and they followed through with intelligence and some subtlety. Thus, the comic is good. QED.

Alas, would that it were so. Not being racist and sexist is hard work, but there are other bits of making a worthwhile piece of art too, and as regards them Young Avengers is less successful. In particular, the artist Jamie McKelvie is, even in the context of crappy mainstream super-hero art, not really any good. His figure drawing is clumsy and haphazard; his poses are stiff when they’re not default; his faces are not particularly distinguishable. But where he is really abysmal is in his layouts, which are consistently confusing and cluttered. Especially in his fight sequences, it’s often almost impossible to figure out what’s happening — and there’s no visual panache (as in say Bill Sienkiewitz) to justify the incoherence. A Chris Ware inspired page is almost laughably incompetent, with tiny figures boucning around in an ugly floorplan that manages to be at one and the same time bulbous, blocky, and boring, the whole thing ringed by uninspired mainstream action sequences, the color scheme of which contrasts garishly with the wannabe-Ware floorplan pastels. Descriptions of the action are set off in a kind of map legend and keyed to numbers because diagrams are what the latest hip comics artists are doing and McKelvie would like to be up to date and hip with all his heart. It’s sort of sweet, if you cover your eyes and don’t look.

Gillen is more competent than that; his dialogue is fun and snappy and pop-culture-aware in a way that seems, if not precisely true to teens, at least true to the sorts of things teens might read. When Kid Loki asks Ms. America why her former super-team broke up and she says, “Musical differences,” I snickered. Same when Hawkeye comments that she knew there was some world threatening catastrophe because Wiccan wasn’t answering his texts every 30 seconds. It’s not genius or anything, but it’s cute. If I can appreciate Taylor Swift, there’s no reason I can’t appreciate this too.

There’s some perhaps interesting thematic material as well, if you squint. We first meet Hulking when he’s shape-shifting in imitation of Spider-Man, hunting down bad-guys as Marvel’s most popular superhero. Later, Wiccan summons Hulking’s dead mother from another dimension…only it turns out to be a shape-shifting soul-eating demon. The other Young Avengers’ parents also end up coming back from the dead as evil glop. You could see the comic then, perhaps, as being about children turning themselves into their parents — or about the way that it’s not just parents who make their kids, but kids who make their parents. The evil parents and the clueless parents (adults can’t see the evil demon mommies) could be a version of the hippie “parents just don’t understand/anyone over 30 can’t be trusted” meme. But you could also see the bad/clueless parents as constructs or dreams — as make-believe parent kids want to/need to create in order to make their own lives. That’s underlined by the fact that the evil parents are the reason for the team coming and staying together; the threat is what makes the book diegetically possible.

Gillen doesn’t ultimately do all that much with this material though. There isn’t, for example, any real anxiety around the evil parents per se — dead moms and dads come back from the dead, but their kids don’t seem much traumatized, or even disturbed. They just trundle on through the by-the-numbers superhero battles, the only real emotional tension being the frustration caused by the fact that, based on McKelvie’s drawings, you can’t actually follow those superhero battles at all.

To some degree that’s fine; it’s a competent empty-headed superhero adventure with crappy art, and it doesn’t make much pretense to being anything else. But, inevitably, the mediocrity of the execution has implications for the treatment of gender/sexuality/race as well. McKelvie, for example, tends to draw the usual slim/hot female characters — he certainly doesn’t feel anything like Desktop Dungeons’ commitment to imagining women who don’t look they walked out of Cosmo. The full-length, blank-faced, hip-cocked, wait-let-me-stuff-this-cleavage-in-somehow Scarlet Witch is an especial low-point.

In a similar vein, Gillen’s insistently shallow writing makes it hard for him to do much with his diverse cast other than have them there. As I said, part of the joy of the comic is that difference is simply treated as normal, so that green skin isn’t much different from brown skin. But while that’s refreshing, it also can feel like a cop out. Is Miss. America really even a Hispanic character, for example, when she’s an advanced human from another dimension who has never experienced prejudice? G. Willow Wilson’s Ms. Marvel deliberately explores what it would mean for a Muslim girl to gain superpowers in terms of her perception of herself and others perceptions of her. Such subtlety is utterly beyond Young Avengers.

So, basically, making art that isn’t mired in stereotypes is hard. And making art that’s good is hard. And those two things put together are even harder, not least because, to some not insignificant degree, you can’t do one without the other.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Monthly Archives: March 2014