Utility and Art, Satan and Paradise: Depeche Mode and Gustave Doré

Posted on May 13, 2014 by Sean Michael Robinson

Promises me I’m as safe as houses
As long as I remember who’s wearing the trousers
I hope he never lets me down again
Never let me down

Twenty five years ago this month, Depeche Mode was one of the biggest groups on the planet. Three men and one prop. Martin Gore, the pretty face and the songwriting talent, the man with the melodies and the ideas and the sometimes daft lyrics. Dave Gahan, the thug, the angel, the unbelievable voice, cold and controlled and icy, somehow vulnerable even in his strength. Alan Wilder, the musician, the arranger. Taking Gore’s chords and melodies and transforming them into a synthetic dance onslaught. Textures layered and melding together, the artificial alongside the organic, hook upon hook weaving through, implying and extending Gore’s harmonic structures. Fourth member Andy Fletcher? A non-musician mime that mutely stands on stage, ventrilloquizes, manages the band.

Nine years into their careers Depeche Mode embarked on a grueling 101-show international tour, in support of their album Music For the Masses. The tour culminated in a staggering show at the Rose Bowl, attended by more than 60,000 people.

The show was filmed by director D.A. Pennebaker for a documentary on the band and its fans, eventually released, along with an album of the performance, as Depeche Mode 101. (Pennebaker is probably best known for his Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back, but it’s his David Bowie concert film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars that Depeche Mode 101 most resembles)

Prior to the concert footage, the documentary gives insight into some of the on-stage strangeness of the band, and of the group’s internal politics. Off-stage, singer Gahan comes across as loutish and arrogant. Songwriter Martin Gore disappears, even when he’s on screen. Fourth wheel and non-musician Fletcher briefly makes himself useful by describing the band. “Martin’s the songwriter, Alan’s the good musician, Dave’s the vocalist, and I bum around.” And musician/arranger Alan Wilder proves him right, with little fanfare, in a sequence shot from behind a bank of keyboards, as he casually describes how different sounds are split across the instruments, and how the live arrangements are split between himself, songwriter Martin Gore, and a tape machine.

On-stage, Gahan at least is transformed, his pre-gig bluster changing into some kind of strange, thrusting energy. Unrestrained by any instrument, he stalks the stage, he shouts between singing, his voice hoarse and unrestrained. And at other moments he seems lost and weak, until the hook rolls back around and he rises to and assaults the crowd again.

At the end of their set they and their tape machine launch into “Never Let Me Down Again.” They are to a man sweaty and weary looking. Between phrases you can see Gahan’s mouth working in closeup,his face tightening, spastic, body rebelling even while his voice is restrained. “I’m taking a ride with my best friend.” The music ominous, the melody almost literally monotonous, droning. “I hope he never lets me down again.” The lyrics are stupid, real “moon in June” stuff, but they’re set in such a strange context, and the delivery is so intense, that it begs consideration.

Like many of Depeche Mode’s most affecting songs, there’s a distance, and a loneliness and despairing of communication, of being heard, of hearing. This sung by a man throwing himself about the stage in a desperate attempt to reach the audience in front of him, while the man who wrote it sings harmonies from behind his keyboard.

Gahan stops, breaths, staggers, thrusts out his hips, yells wordlessly, an octave higher than the sung range of the song.

“Let me hear you,” he screams. “Let me hear you!”

Finally he steps out onto the thrust of the stage and starts gesturing to the audience, waving his hands from side to side. And the lights come up and for the first time the camera sees Gahan and the audience together, the towering mass of waving arms rising above him, in front of him, all around him.

I get chills every time. It’s not just his confidence, the strutting and yelping, or the pulsing, looping chords. It’s an aesthetic reaction to him, to the whole scene, the beautiful lone figure thrust out over and surrounded by the massed crowds. It evokes the grand religious visions of Gustave Doré, particularly in his illustrations of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Of Satan, before the assembled cohort of angels, or looking out over Paradise.

Doré himself had a career not dissimilar to Depeche Mode. He was a prolific and tireless craftsman who was energetic and inventive, who relied on his collaborators, the engravers whose labors caused his pencil and wash drawings to take form in wood, to bring his work to its final form. (Like a band name represents a group of individuals, so we might think of “Gustave Doré” more accurately as a group of men, a kind of syndicate of illustrators and engravers, that shared their collective name with that of their founding member and progenitor.)

And like Depeche Mode, Doré was one of the most popular artists of his era; but critical acclaim eluded him. He was a good draftsman, critics sniffed. But. But. Was he just too well-known to be well-respected too? Or too well loved?

Not to mention the “illustrator” issue…

You see, the past two hundred years of aesthetic criticism have not been kind to function.

It’s why “craft” is a pejorative. It’s why design forms its own sub-category of visual art, related, somehow, to the field, like a second cousin once removed. It’s why soap operas and romance novels and video games and quilts and pottery and wood carvings and, hell, flower arrangement have been kept at an arm’s length from Art, an asterisk at best. Function implies craft. Function precludes intelligence, the demands of function displacing the desires of author.

Utility is at the heart of the critical attitude towards dance music.

Like pornography, you can evaluate dance music by the bluntest measures possible – it’s efficacy. Did you dance? Did other people dance? How many other people? How vigorously? The crassness of this measure tends to ward off deeper examination.

And that could be why Depeche Mode will likely remain a band well loved, but largely un-examined. Why some of the most interesting music made in the past four decades could be relegated to roller skate rinks and cut-out bins.

And when I squinted the world seemed rose-tinted
And angels appeared to descend
To my surprise with half closed eyes
Things looked even better than when they were opened

Ms. Marvel: Deliciously Halal?

Posted on May 12, 2014 by Ng Suat Tong

Would you give G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona’s Ms. Marvel to your daughter or young nephew to read?

I think the answer in most instances would be a loud and affirmative, “Yes!” It is after all quite inoffensive and mainly concerns the travails of school and family life; if complicated in this instance by the fact that the main protagonist is a Pakistani-American Girl. The comic is friendly, instructive, educational, and has a placid attitude towards the dangers of everyday existence. It would seem to be, in a word, “safe.”

And what exactly are the dangers Kamala Khan faces in her first three issues? She is tricked into taking alcohol by insensitive classmates, breaks her curfew and is grounded, is sent to detention for accidentally destroying school property, helps a pair of accident prone lovers, is involved in a friendly hold-up at a corner store, and is injured during the accidental discharge of a firearm.

In many ways Ms Marvel is a return to the more gentle pleasures of the comics of yore; dialing back the myth of a violent America propagated by TV shows like CSI, Criminal Minds, NCIS et al.—where murderous psychopaths reside on every corner and corpses are to be found on every other doorstep and school dormitory. Can a superhero comic subsists on stories culled from ordinary high school life? Well, the sales figures on future issues of the comic should tell the tale in due course.

The central issues at stake in Ms. Marvel are conformity and difference, subjects which are balanced precariously at this historical moment in America (and Europe) where the simple act of wearing a hijab might be cause for derision.

Perhaps the comics’ greatest achievement is to make the life of a Muslim girl in America perfectly ordinary. Part of the success of Jaime Hernandez’s Locas lies in just this effect—the way it shapes our understanding of an unfamiliar culture, revealing its core of basic humanity. Something similar occurs in Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation where the setting (environmental, legal) and motivations may seem strange but the reactions completely “human.” With that moment of recognition, Iranians stop becoming headline material or screaming terrorists (a la Ben Affleck’s Argo) but individuals in all their complexity.

I don’t think Wilson’s work is quite at that level in Ms. Marvel but there is a trace of gentle subversion about it; much of it related in humorous vignettes. A visit to the neighborhood mosque for a halaqah (religious study circle) is not an occasion for harsh harangues of deeply conservative mullahs but some questions concerning Islamic theology and issues surrounding the place of women within the mosque and society. The first page of issue one has Kamala sniffing a “greasy BLT” which is described as “delicious, delicious infidel meat”. This is followed by the suggestion that she try fakon instead (“it’s not that terrible”). Buddhists face similar philosophical “problems” when encountering vegetised meat dishes; a culinary art form in itself.

Wilson’s subversiveness doesn’t lie simply in these small challenges to authority but in more subtle mouldings of this thoroughly “white”, Christian-Jewish form of expression—the American superhero comic.

Present day Islam is not especially enamored of figurative works of art, but the image of Kamala confronting the Avengers in the form of Iron Man, Captain Marvel and Captain America is clearly an instance of borrowed iconography. Lamps are not rubbed in the course of issue one of Ms. Marvel but the Terrigen Mists and the appearance of the Avengers suddenly within its folds do suggest the appearance of Jinn bearing gifts, and we all know how badly that usually turns out. The soundtrack to their arrival is a qawwali song by Amir Khusrow (“Sakal ban phool rahi sarson”), sufi devotional music which some might find intoxicating.

That’s Captain America as an Islamic mystical being straight from the pages of the Qur’an (as angels are from the Bible). But more than that, the image is clearly a syncretisation of well known religious forms—it is a Transfiguration with Moses and Elijah on both sides of a female Jesus. Iron Man has his left hand raised in a gesture which either suggests the Trinity or the giving of a benediction. Captain Marvel herself is posed in a manner which immediately brings to mind images of the Assumption of the Virgin—right down to her flowing waist ribbon. The birds surrounding her are presumably modern day versions of the cherubs we see in Renaissance paintings. To borrow a phrase from Ms. Kamala Khan, it’s all “delicious, delicious infidel meat.” One assumes that Kamala—aged sixteen and forbidden to mix with boys at alcohol fueled parties—is a virgin herself. One also assumes that Wilson and Alphona are not entirely convinced of the merit of the iconoclastic claims of hadith literature.

AND LO! The angels said: “O Mary! Behold, God has elected thee and made thee pure, and raised thee above all the women of the world. Surah 3. Al-i’Imran, Ayah 42

Christopher ZF writing at The Stake is eager to let readers knows that:

“In this instance Kamala’s gods are not God, but another trinity that inspires her: Captain America, Iron Man, and the central religious figure of Kamala’s imagination: Captain Marvel….The manner in which Wilson and artist Adrian Alphona handle what could be a potentially fraught subject is instead refreshing in its candor…this scene is not a ham-handed, irreligious, or silly affair….”

The caution is understandable though obviously not my cup of tea.

This appropriation of imagery is clearly tied up with Kamala’s own conflicted sense of identity and her cultural influences (both knowing and unknowing)—a desire to fit equally into “normal” white American society and the traditions of her parents, with these parts seemingly irreconcilable. She’s a dark haired Alice in Wonderland, taking the bottle labeled “Drink Me” to become small or the cake with “Eat Me” written on it to become a leggy white blonde—all of this done in the interest of assimilation. The creators obviously thought long and hard (or maybe not) when they decided to make her a “human with Inhuman” lineage. Kamala’s vision is no more than a reflection of the mishmash which constitutes her subconscious desires. As “Iron Man” says to her, “You are seeing what you need to see.” If only Captain America was more halal.

Noah writing at The Atlantic doesn’t quite see it that way though. Concerning Kamala’s shape shifting powers he writes:

“You could see this power as a kind of metaphorical curse, reflecting Kamala’s uncertainty; she doesn’t know who she is, so she’s anyone or anything. I don’t think that’s quite what it signifies, though. Changing shape doesn’t mean that Kamala erases her ethnicity…Rather, in Ms. Marvel, shape-changing seems to suggest that flexibility is a strength. Kamala is a superhero because she’s both Muslim and American at once. Her power is to be many things, and to change without losing herself.”

And that is undoubtedly the final destination of Wilson’s story. The first three issues are in all likelihood a journey to that point of realization.

Perhaps the greatest subversion of all is that Ms. Marvel might be the most religious comic book published by Marvel in decades. Not anywhere as overt as the Spire Archie Christian comics but arguably in the same tradition. Islam both informs Kamala’s action and the conflicts she faces at school and at home.The centrality of Islam in Ms. Marvel was probably considered uncontroversial by Wilson’s editors (save Sana Amanat who is Pakistani-American) because of the ethnicity of the main protagonist—in America, race and Islam seem almost indivisible and therefore “excusable.” At the risk of stating the obvious, this rigidity in terms of race and religion is part of Wilson’s challenge to her readership in a country where the word “Muslim” often conjures up images of “brown” or black individuals. The fact that a blonde, white woman is taking moral action on the basis of the Qur’an is an essential part of Ms. Marvel’s narrative.

In Culture and the Death of God, Terry Eagleton writes that:

“Societies become secular not when they dispense with religion altogether, but when they are no longer especially agitated by it….as the wit remarked, it is when religion starts to interfere with your everyday life that it is time to give it up….Another index of secularization is when religious faith ceases to be vitally at stake in the political sphere…this does not mean that religion becomes formally privatized, uncoupled from the political state; but even when it is not, it is effectively taken out of public ownership and dwindles to a kind of personal pastime, like breeding gerbils or collecting porcelain…”

American society is “agitated” by Islam but Muslims have almost no voice in the political sphere. Kamala Khan may be the central figure of Ms. Marvel but she is an “other”—not us, someone strange, someone else—with seemingly little to say about how Americans should lead their lives; she has no religious or moral prescriptions which could affect white America. She is someone else’s porcelain collection. This makes the comic “tolerable” in the eyes of Marvel’s paymasters even while Disney enforces a policy of not taking the Lord’s name in vain in song.

The commentators at Deseret News have an even more innocuous explanation for this new venture:

“Comics are a “survey of the pop culture medium,” Hunter said, adding that the religions brought up in modern comics reflect modern society.

He said mainstream culture is talking about Muslims. According to the Pew Research Center, the Muslim population in the United States is projected to rise from 2.6 million in 2010 to 6.2 million in 2030, which shows Muslims are a growing market and topic in the U.S….Ms. Marvel’s Muslim heritage was chosen as a reflection of what the mainstream culture is interested in…Publishers are not just appealing to certain religious markets, however. They’re also using religious comics as a way to tap into the market of unbelievers, too, Lewis said.”

How wonderfully bland it would be if this was the comic’s sole raison d’être. This gentle and most politically correct of comic book stories is sometimes more clever than it seems.

____

Further Reading

(1) G Willow Wilson on Kamala’s powers. Lots of background information in this interview:

“Her power set was actually the toughest thing, I think, to narrow down in the character creation process,” Wilson said. “I really did not want her to have the classically girly power sets – I didn’t want her to float. I didn’t want her to sparkle. I didn’t want her to be able to read people’s minds. I think a lot of these sort of passive abilities are often given to female characters – becoming invisible, using force fields. I wanted her to have something visually exciting, something kinetic…. The idea of making her a shape-shifter nicely paralleled her personal journey.”

(2) Mariam Asad, Zainab Akhtar, and Muaz Zekeria discuss “What the new Ms. Marvel means for Muslims in Comics.”

Kids Vs. School

Posted on May 11, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran on Splice Today.
_________

I send my son to a private Waldorf school. This makes me one of the bad parents Allison Benedikt singled out in a controversial post at Slate recently, in which she excoriated (and/or trolled, as Mary McCarthy said) parents of private school kids. According to Benedikt, “[I]f every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve.” Therefore, folks like me are morally evil for sending our kids to a private school and beggaring our neighbors. Benedikt thinks that my kid would probably get a worse education at a public school. However, she tells me:

You want the best for your child, but your child doesn’t need it. If you can afford private school (even if affording means scrimping and saving, or taking out loans), chances are that your spawn will be perfectly fine at a crappy public school. She will have support at home (that’s you!) and all the advantages that go along with being a person whose family can pay for and cares about superior education—the exact kind of family that can help your crappy public school become less crappy. She may not learn as much or be as challenged, but take a deep breath and live with that.

The worst that will happen to my child, Benedikt insists, is that he won’t know poetry or the dates of the Civil War. He’ll just have fun drinking before football games rather than having fun learning about komodo dragons or drawing.

And maybe all of that’s true. Maybe I’m hurting the public schools by not sending my son there, and maybe it’s all for nothing, since he’d be just as happy filling in test bubbles as he is knitting. But I couldn’t help thinking of Benedikt’s proscriptions when I read Emily Yoffe’s most recent advice column. Yoffe’s interlocutor is a member of a religious minority living in the Deep South. The community, and therefore the public school, is deeply Christian, and the separation of Church and State appears to be honored entirely in the breach. There are school-sponsored Bible studies; the choir concert includes little but Christmas songs. And — the one that really matters — the woman’s middle-school aged daughter is frequently told by peers that she is going to hell.

Yoffe’s response was long on sympathy and short on actual practical advice.

Being in middle school is for many kids a kind of torture at best, and being told you’re going to hell must only add to the fun. But unless your daughter finds her treatment intolerable, you have to help give her some tools to deal with this: “Thanks for thinking about my soul. But my family is happy to be Jewish/Muslim/Hindu.

Which rather begs the question — what if her daughter does in fact find the treatment intolerable? What do you do then?

Benedikt would probably say that the mother should confront the school, and insist that they stop with the Bible studies and that they prevent the harassment. This is, in fact, Benedikt’s central argument; active parents, she feels, need to direct their energy, not towards building up some happy Waldorf community, but rather towards improving their local public schools. They should be, as Kim Brooks wrote at Salon, “super-parents who, through tireless volunteering and organizing and advocacy, turned our neighborhood school around.” By this reasoning, the questioner here needs to march up to the overly evangelical administration and start doing some transforming.

Brooks, who sends her kids to private school, admitted, with much guilt, that super-parenting wasn’t something she could face. For her part, Yost is savvy enough to realize that, for the non-Christian mother, super-parenting could make matters worse, not better. “[B]ringing a complaint,” she acknowledges, “might not do much except make school more unpleasant for your kids.” And, indeed, schools are often quite bad at dealing with bullying, especially when the bullying is directed at folks who are seen as outsiders by the adults as well as the children. Among the kids profiled in the film “Bully,” for example, is one girl named Kelby, who is a lesbian. For a while she stays in school because she wants to try to change people’s attitudes towards gay people. Eventually, though, her parents, who are afraid for her safety and her mental health, pull her out. By Benedikt’s reasoning, that makes them bad people. After all, if your kid isn’t in public school, you’re part of the problem.

I’m sure Benedikt does not intend to morally condemn the parents of bullied queer youth for trying to prevent their children from killing themselves. And, of course, the young girl whose peers keep telling her she’s going to hell may well not be in as dangerous a situation as Kelby. And my son almost certainly wouldn’t be in as bad a situation as either if he went to our local public school here in Chicago.

Still, the point is that if you place your moral duty to society over your moral duty to the person in front of you, you can end up with some fairly monstrous conclusions. Benedikt had an okay time in public school. So did I, despite some unpleasant brushes with bullying. For that matter, I have friends who did better in public school than in private. But still, some kids who go to public school don’t have okay experiences. And if that kid is your kid, are you really supposed to tell them that they need to stay in school for the good of the school system as a whole? Do they just have to take it until it becomes “intolerable” — at which point we can give them no advice and no options?

It’s true, and tragic, that many people don’t have options. But in some cases, at least, the problem is as much a lack of knowledge as a lack of funds. I wish Yoffe had told that family that there are a lot of affordable distance-learning options these days. They might not have wanted to pull their daughter out of school, and she might not have wanted to go. But just knowing that there’s an escape hatch if things do become impossible can sometimes make the day-to-day grind a lot more bearable.

Public schools need more money and more resources. But I don’t see how we get them those resources if we don’t care about kids. If what happens in school doesn’t matter, if learning doesn’t matter, if we’ve convinced ourselves that kids are going to be all right no matter what, then where’s the incentive to improve things? And if we’ve decided that the child must stay in that building for the good of society, then what difference is there, finally, between school and prison?

Schuyler Avenue in Kingston, PA, my public elementary school

Utilitarian Review 5/10/14

Posted on May 10, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

News

Rutgers put up a prepub page for my book! You can see the cover and everything (or just look up above there)!

Check it out!

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Robert Stanley Martin on Brassai’s photography.

I wrote about why I like Piss Christ.

A brief thread on overrated and underratd photography, strongly suggesting that nobody cares about photography much.

Kailyn Kent on wine labels for male insecurity.

Chris Gavaler argues the world is ready for superheroines kicking butt on the big screen.

Me on Ms. Marvel, female superheroes, and aggression (or the lack thereof.)

Adrielle Mitchell on Luke Pearson’s Everything We Miss, time, space, and loss.

Erotic artist Michael Manning on Beardsley and the gay utopia.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I wrote about why I still like Star Wars. (It’s the dirty robots.)

At Salon:

— you say rockist, I say poptimist, let’s call the whole thing off

— I wrote about The Bechdel Test and shaming women’s genre works.

At Splice Today I wrote about:

— how having the U.S. pay attention to Nigeria isn’t necessarily in the best interest of Nigeria.

— Myra Greene’s book My White Friends and the invisibility of whiteness.

At the Center for Digital Ethics I wrote about the Ethics of Ride Sharing, of all things.

Other Links

Michael Carson on taking the war out of war literature.

Zeynep Tufecki on Nigeria and the politics of attention.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on how racism was deployed against Bill Clinton (and Lincoln, for that matter).

Kathleen Geier on conservative family trees and the cult of victimhood.

Nobody watches Game of Thrones.

Tracy Q. Loxley on underreporting sexual harassment.

What the experts say about Spider-Man 2

Posted on May 10, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

Once again Hollywood has kindly released a superhero movie during my spring term Superheroes course at Washington & Lee University. So my students abandoned our classroom and strolled downtown to our smallville big screen. Here’s their (SPOILER ALERT!) verdict.

Tyler Wenger: “The Amazing Spider-Man 2 found the perfect balance between comedy and tragedy. What Parker lacks in raw power, compared to his villains, he makes up for in his wit. Andrew Garfield portrays this comical side of the Web-head perfectly, a drastic change from the original Toby McGuire trilogy (sorry, old sport). He uses his comedy as a weapon—taunting Electro by calling him “sparky” and brazenly provoking the Rhino, causing both to attack rashly—and as a shield, protecting him and allowing him to bounce back from his many losses.”

Ali Towne: “The Amazing Spiderman 2, although in most ways a classic example of the superhero archetype, does break away from superhero norms. In one of its greatest divergences, Gwen Stacy, the love interest, is killed during a battle with the super villain Electro; Spiderman is not capable of saving her. This is entirely different from the normal superhero trope in which the superhero saves the “damsel in distress”. By breaking this norm, the writers gave both Spiderman and Gwen a sense of fallibility, mortality and, therefore, humanity that is often lacking in many superhero narratives.”

Joy Putney: “The Amazing Spider-Man 2 shows that heroes and villains are two sides of the same coin, and that their differing motivations determine whether they use their powers for good or evil. Electro wanted to be noticed, and he felt the only way he could achieve that was to remove Spider-Man from the spotlight. Harry Osborn wanted a cure for his disease, and when Spider-Man would not give it, he tried to destroy Spider-Man too. Both villains were driven by selfish desires. Only Spider-Man was selfless; that made him a hero.”

John Carrick: “The Amazing Spiderman 2 was an exciting film that had plenty of action packed scenes and just the right amount of added romance between Gwen and Peter. I enjoyed how the plot allowed Gwen to actually help Peter in his role as Spiderman. She was able to help him figure out that magnetizing his web shooters would allow them to hold a charge. She also helps save him from Electro and helps Peter figure out that they must kill Electro by overloading his charge capacity. Although, at the end of the movie, I was very disappointed that they actually let Gwen die.”

Sam Bramlett: “The Amazing Spiderman 2 is an interesting film in that it follows many traditional superhero tropes to the letter yet twisting the outcomes of these tropes to create greater emotional impact. For example, both main villains (Green Goblin and Electro) are classic examples of friend turned enemy, the Green Goblin being an old schoolmate of Peter Parker and Electro at one point being virtually obsessed with Spiderman. Another example, it is clear that while Gwen Stacy helps Spiderman save the day, she is indeed a damsel in distress. However, the movie has greater emotional impact due to her failed rescue. Allowing them to set up the next few movies with a new motive and plenty of new villains to choose from.”

Chase Weber: “What makes Spider-Man so endearing to many fans is his humanity. The audience members can relate to the triumphs and failures of Spider-Man. This is plainly evident in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Spider-Man does not always win. As seen in the film, Spider-Man failed to save his love, Gwen Stacy, who Spider-man promises to her Dad he would protect. Spider-Man must deal with this guilt the rest of his life. This is much more relatable to real life. With audience members more devoted to Spider-Man, this makes his victories all the more satisfying. “

Flora Yu: “The role of women portrayed in the film interests me. Through his relationship with Gwen Stacy, Peter Parker learns that there are things one must abandon to persist in another; also, life is so fragile that sometimes even super power fails to it from mortality. Devastated by Gwen’s death, Peter eventually finds motivation for his next debut from two female characters—Aunt May and Gwen—both very important to him. He realizes he must bury grievous memories at the bottom of his heart and retrieve his other side—the side of hope and Spiderman.”

Faith Clary: “It’s interesting to me how death is such an integral part of who Peter is as a person. Death is present in all stages of his development – childhood with his parents, teenage years with his uncle, and now adulthood with his girlfriend and, metaphorically-speaking, his childhood friend. With Spider-Man’s disappearance from the city in the aftermath of Gwen’s death, this movie drives home even more than its predecessor that a superhero’s life isn’t just about soaring around skyscrapers and posing for the paper. When you put on that mask, it’s not just yourself who gets thrown into the fray.”

George Nurisso: “After Uncle Ben’s death, Peter Parker’s realization that ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ has been his motivating force. In addition to battling super-villains, Peter has inspired others with his bravery and kindness. When Spider-Man rescued a kid named Jorge from some bullies and gave him some encouragement, he changed the boy’s life. Jorge later became brave enough to stand down the ultimate bully, the Rhino. After Gwen Stacy’s death, Peter Parker learned that being a hero isn’t easy, but in the end the world is a better place because of it.” ?

Sara King: “What seemed distinct about this Spiderman movie compared to all the other superheroes we have read so far is the fact that Peter Parker’s secret identity is known by more than one person, thus causing him many problems. His girlfriend, Gwen, is ultimately killed because she knows and his arch nemesis, Harry Osborne or the Green Goblin, takes advantage of the fact. Is it possibly a problem that Peter Parker identifies more with his non-super identity than his super-identity, causing the movie to take a more eugenic turn?”

Chris Myers: “Although “Electrode” undergoes a startlingly abrupt transition from Spider-man fanatic to his worst enemy, I thoroughly enjoyed the development of Electrode’s powers. Traveling as a current and departing from his human form, manipulating metal with magnetic forces, and shooting currents of electricity make sense for an electrical super-villain, although his ability to create dubstep music does not. His motivation to stay within the confines of New York made sense (defeating Spider-man), and by the end of the movie, he seemed to have realized the extent of his powers.”

Abdur Khan: “Electro’s motives for becoming a supervillain match perfectly with the usual tropes involved in villainous origins. Max Dillon is a shy, miserable man who’s constantly pushed around, and once he’s given the means to assert himself, he does so in a powerful and violent way. His motivation comes from his need to be recognized, to no longer be “invisible”, as one Oscorp employee calls him. His anger when Spiderman doesn’t remember him or when Times Square erases his face is arguably ridiculous, but in his mind he is completely justified.”

Joe Reilly: “After experiencing The Amazing Spiderman 2, my heart ached for the tragic injustice towards the villains. Where most movies can only sustain a single antagonist to challenge the hero, the indecisive Spiderman swings from one foe to another beating each antagonist before they have time to know what hit them. Forced to fight tooth and nail with one another for screen time, the injuries towards the rogues’ gallery lengthen with poorly contrived motives and cliché origins. Spiderman faces an obsessive and accident prone Electro, a Green Goblin whose butchered comic origins as Norman Osborn are scratched and dropped for no reason into the lap of his spoiled brat son, and added to the confusion a random guy in a ludicrous rhino suit who arrives far too late toobare any actually meaning or impact on the plot. With flimsy origins, repeated defeats to Spiderman, and pitted against one another, the only true victims I felt in the latest Spiderman movie were the villains.”

Mina Shnoudah: “The movie tells the story of Spider-Man’s parents, the origin of the Green Goblin, Electro, and Rhino. The common superhero tropes such as dead parents, revenge, damsel in distress, and friend turned enemy were ever-present throughout the film. Harry is the friend turned enemy by his psychological obsession to not turn out like the monster his father is. Furthermore, the parallels between Peter and Harry in their origin stories are another common superhero trope: they are both motivated to avenge the deaths of their loved ones.”

Under The Venusberg: Tannhäuser, Beardsley and I

Posted on May 9, 2014 by Michael Manning

This is part of the Gay Utopia project, originally published in 2007 . A map of the Gay Utopia is here.
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As an artist who does erotic artwork for a living, there are certain questions that I inevitably get asked, whether it’s in the context of an online interview, a first-time studio visit or just hanging out at a party. One that I can pretty much count on every time – along with “Have your parents/family seen your books?” (answer: yes) and “Have you tried any of the things you draw in real life?” (answer: yes again) – is “What inspires you to draw this kind of artwork?”

The first things that come to mind are the usual suspects: life, death, sex, the work of other artists. One influence that isn’t always so obvious is music. I listen to a lot of it, usually while I’m working. I like seeing live music too. A good live show can provide weeks worth of inspiration. For all the styles and sub-genres of music that I like though, I’m aware that there are many many more that I know very little about. Opera, for example. I own a grand total of one disc (excerpts from Puccini’s La Boheme) and am more familiar with the story lines courtesy of P. Craig Russell’s comix adaptations and viewings of Amadeus and Immortal Beloved than I am with the actual music. None of my music collector friends are opera fans. Also, I’ve always had the impression (misguided or not) that opera, like free jazz or death metal, is something best experienced live and the astronomical ticket prices can be very intimidating.

Last year, two things tipped the balance toward my first opera experience. One was a generous anniversary gift from Lyn’s father that we decided to reserve for something that we couldn’t ordinarily afford to do. The other was a locally-produced version of Wagner’s Tannhäuser — a classic operatic meditation on the struggle between the sacred and profane — which supposedly featured nudity and an big orgy scene. And so one March evening, we found ourselves in the vertigo-inducing cheap seats in the fourth tier of the cavernous Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles. Sure enough, the beginning of act one did consist of a twenty minute long sex party with many lovely toned mostly-nude bodies engaging in various acts of simulated copulation, writhing away on two rotating stage sets, all bathed in the crimson glow of Venus’ underworld. Most of our favorite positions and permutations were featured in a variety of gender combinations with special attention paid to trios, doggy-style fucking, pussy/ass/foot worship and even a bit of flogging. It was all good NC-17 rated fun, but the whole time, I couldn’t help thinking that it wasn’t nearly as naughty as illustrator Aubrey Beardsley’s prose version of Venus and Tannhäuser aka. Under The Hill from 1904.

From Beardsley’s frontispiece to Earl Lavender by John Davidson

Now as an artist who does erotic artwork — especially predominantly black & white gender-freaky erotic artwork — it’s difficult to remain ignorant of Beardsley, much less avoid having your work measured against his, even in this day and age when black & white artwork makes most people think of manga or Frank Miller. The o.g. (19th century England, baby) black & white gender-freaky erotic artist, Beardsley was never very well known for his prose yet over one hundred years after its first publication Under The Hill remains one of the dirtiest stories ever told. According to my copy of “Aubrey Beardsley: A Slave To Love”, the text was never completed during Beardley’s life time due to a combination of his ill-health, legal/censorship problems and the scandal resulting from Oscar Wilde’s trial, but hotter heads eventually prevailed, the incomplete manuscript finally saw print and has remained in circulation ever since.

In Wagner’s version of “Tannhäuser”, the first act has barely gotten under way before the titular hero, bored to tears with all this endless carnal pleasure and pining for just one more glimpse of Germany’s apparently unmatchable fields and streams, chooses to spurn the Goddess and gets himself ejected into the outside world. Predictably, he grows to regret his stupid decision and spends two and a half more acts trying to convince the puritanical aristocrats of his aptly named hometown Wartburg that the noblest form of love is the physical (spoiler: he fails miserably). Thankfully, Beardsley’s version chooses to focus on the good stuff; that is, everything that goes down prior to the opera: Tannhäuser’s wooing of the Goddess and Meretrix and their erotic adventures, all told in the most ornate gorgeously overblown prose imaginable.

From the Chapter I – How The Chevalier Tannhäuser Entered Into The Hill of Venus:

It was taper-time; when the tired earth puts on its cloak of mists and shadows, when the enchanted woods are stirred with light footfalls and slender voices of the fairies, when all the air is full of delicate influences, and even the beaux, seated at their dressing-tables, dream a little.

A delicious moment, thought Tannhäuser, to slip into exile.

The place where he stood waved drowsily with strange flowers, heavy with perfume, dripping with odours. Gloomy and nameless weeds not to be found in Mentzelius. Huge moths, so richly winged they must have banqueted upon tapestries and royal stuffs, slept on the pillars that flanked either side of the gateway, and the eyes of all the moths remained open and were burning and bursting with a mesh of veins. The pillars were fashioned in some pale stone and rose up like hymns in the praise of pleasure, for from cap to base, each one was carved with loving sculptures, showing such a cunning invention and such a curious knowledge, that Tannhäuser lingered not a little in reviewing them. They surpassed all that Japan has ever pictured from her maisons vertes, all that was ever painted in the cool bathrooms of Cardinal La Motte, and even outdid the astonishing illustrations to Jones’s Nursery Numbers.

The full version can be read here.

With it’s lavishly decked-out gender-ambiguous aristocrats gamboling in scented baths full of serving boys, bands of satyrs “consummating frantically with women’s bosoms” and unforgettable highlights such as Venus masturbating her well-hung pet unicorn for the enjoyment of her human lover, Under The Hill achieves an unmatched level of camp eroticism and barely-veiled perversity. I wish I could say that it’s playfully unapologetic ultra-baroque polysexuality had some influence on the creation of my Spider Garden books but unfortunately, I wasn’t aware of it’s existence until after I had completed the second Metal Web book.

My first reading of Under The Hill was yet another curve-ball from an artist with whom I’d had an uncertain relationship in the past. Beardsley was one of the few classical artists whose erotic work could be found on library shelves (my post-pubescent pre-internet source for both art and erotica) but like other eventual favorites of mine such as H.R. Giger and Richard Corben, I initially found the air of grotesque decadence in his work to be somewhat sinister and very intimidating.

As a teenager, I had discovered the work of 19th century artists such as Edward Burne-Jones, Alphonse Mucha and Beardsley himself by way of comic book artists like Barry Windsor-Smith, Jeff Jones and the afore-mentioned P. Craig Russell. Among the Romantics and Symbolists, Beardsley was the joker in the deck. Laboring under the shadow of his Pre-Raphaelite contemporaries, his interpretation of L’Morte De Arthur had all the trappings of their chaste and higher-minded romantic fantasies but with dark-side twists that always left me both fascinated and vaguely uneasy. In Beardsley’s Arthurian tableau, the sexually-neutral androgyny that characterized Burne-Jones’ work was pushed to the level of parody. Lancelot, Guinevere, Tristram and Isolde were transformed into incestuous hermaphrodites, confronting one another in scenes suffused with a deadly languor or a decidedly unchaste almost vampiric urgency. The starkly ornamental scenes, their borders entangled in coils of spiky flowers, seemed strangely claustrophobic; voyeuristic views of chambers draped with barely-parted curtains and shadowy twilight landscapes filled with gleaming mirror/pools, trees that resemble ornamental tapers and candles that look like sex toys.

Two of Beardsley’s illustrations for L’Morte De Arthur.

Beardsley’s Salome and the Rape of the Lock were equally daunting; lush studies in pale diaphanous textures and shimmering patterns, peopled by leering hunchbacks, gamboling fetuses and beautiful figures of indeterminate gender, their patrician faces transfixing the viewer with a cool gaze, daring them to look away from the opulent decorations and strangely distorted anatomy.

Beardley illustration from Salome

Much of the sexuality in Beardsley’s work is more implied than stated (another source of frustration for my teen-self who was usually looking for the harder stuff) but even his infamously explicit Lysistrata illustrations with their corpulent female bodies and gigantic shunga-inspired penises seemed more grotesque to me than erotic. Yet somehow, I couldn’t look away. Beneath the freakish sinister atmosphere, there was a sense of playfulness and something genuinely sexy — something I would need more life experience to truly appreciate.

Two of Beardsley’s illustrations for Lysistrata.

A significant event that brought home the true beauty of Beardsley’s work and essentially “humanized” him in my eyes was a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Fogg Museum in the mid-80’s. It was the first time I had ever seen his illustrations in their original form and I was surprised to find that the black areas which on book pages looked like the essence of pure black night were full of texture and brush strokes. In other places, the drawings had been trimmed, pasted over and whited-out. In essence, they looked like modern comic book pages. For most, this would be a minor detail but for me, Beardsley suddenly didn’t seem quite so unapproachable. He wasn’t a sinister satyr with “a face like a silver hatchet” living in a castle surrounded by grotesques; he had been a man like me, an artist/craftsman drawing illustrations to pay the rent — and if the sexuality portrayed in his work still seemed a bit ambiguous — well, I could relate to that too.

If my work and Beardsley’s can be said to have any similarities beyond the purely technical, it would probably be on the theme of the hermetic environment. Beardsley saw Tannhäuser’s subterranean Venusberg as a jumping off point for the creation of an inner world of total sexual license — an elaborate stage on which deliciously decadent fantasies, repressed by the society of his day, could be played out without regard to social order or gender, safe within the womb of the Goddess.

Shaalis the Sacred Androgyne is my Venus, “S/He who delights in that part common to both Hir men and Hir women”, the Goddess incarnate with both cock and cunt who accepts the intimate worship of Hir slaves (beautiful men and women made equal by gender transformation) while dispensing Hir sacrament through blood ritual and sodomy. I took narcissism and the mirror, two other recurrent themes in Beardsley’s work, to an incestuous extreme with Shaalis’ former lover, Squamata Serpentine. She and her sister Lichurna are the ultimate fantasy/cautionary tale of falling in love with your own image.

serpentine_sisters II

Theirs is a truly hermetic existence, a divided soul locked in a self-devouring embrace while their sex-starved Tengu slave Gion is reduced to sucking himself off for their pleasure. I wasn’t fully conscious of it at the time I first started drawing them (there are versions of Shaalis and Squamata that date back to my high school days) but now when I look at the Sister’s snaky locks and contortions and Shaalis’ regal perversity, I can’t help but see echoes of Beardsley’s Athenian bacchantes from Lysistrata and L’Morte De Arthur‘s witchy androgynes.

I realize that the way I’m describing my own work here may sound as off-putting to some as Beardsley’s work initially was to me. One person’s utopia, especially one founded on exploring the limits of carnal desire, can easily seem like another’s person’s dystopia, misinterpretation being one of the many risks we run when we choose to share our dreams with others. Just as the Garden itself is a mirror for the inner workings of the mind of it’s multi-gendered ruler, I suppose the series as a whole could be thought of as a reflection of my own imperfect yearning for a polysexual utopia that real-life sex parties and BD/SM play can tantalizingly approximate but never quite fully achieve. Whether the Spider Garden and the Venusberg can be an ideal to anyone other than myself, Aubrey Beardsley and the characters that live there is ultimately another matter of personal choice. For some, they may just be rest-stops on the way to worlds that none of us has even imagined yet.

Is Luke Pearson’s Everything we Miss a Requiem for Lost Time? (Part 3 of a 3-part series)

Posted on May 8, 2014 by Adrielle Mitchell

This is the third and final installment of my series of loose musings on time in comics. The February 13, 2014 post looked at graphic representations of different types of time and highlighted Sebastien Conard and Tom Lambeens’s critical piece, “Duration in Comics.” This was followed by some meditation on March 27, 2014 on the depiction of contemplative time via the figure of the flâneur as manifested in Jiro Taniguchi’s The Walking Man. This week, I’ll explore lost time in Luke Pearson’s 38-page graphic novella, Everything we Miss (2011). Pearson is a British comic artist in his 20s (here is Paul Gravett’s fine short review of Pearson’s growing body of work). Pearson is currently making some North American rounds with a stop at NYC’s Strand Bookstore this week, followed by an appearance at TCAF this weekend (May 10-11, 2014), and is best known for his Hilda series for children,

but I am most fond of his comic for adults, Everything We Miss, a gently elegiac exploration of our many blind spots, i.e. all the things we fail to see, fail to enact, fail to imagine, fail to love.

In many ways, Everything we Miss addresses a question other than the one I am exploring here: as the title of this novella suggests, Pearson’s emphasis is on “missing” things – missing an erstwhile lover, narrowly averting catastrophe, missing the unseen creatures that might inhabit our worlds alongside us, such as the “omniscient anurids– the great observers of human kind.” (n.p.)

Pearson wants to remind us to look around, to be attentive, to get our heads out of our butts every once in a while, but he also recognizes that there is a temporal issue here: every moment that you fail to see something, fail to recognize its value, influences the next moment and the next, and slowly your lived experience of hours, days, months and years (in short, your lived experience of time) whittles down, reduces, grows impoverished as you let all sorts of things slip away.

By not grasping these moments when you can, you miss the chance to lay down a memory. All those lost memories stay lost: what you didn’t see at 22 becomes what you do not remember at 43 or 89. Over and over, you lose for having lost:

By narrowing his color palette to shades of gray and black, apricot and white, Pearson allows his panels to self-illuminate in interesting ways: orangey apricot functions to startle us gently, but also to illuminate things nocturnally, as a campfire reduces and concentrates the few elements in its reach and as sunset adds an ethereal quality to atmosphere.

Shades of gray and black work to represent space and background, but also convey psychic trouble, memory and fantasy.

Subjective and objective experience intermingle in Everything we Miss, and so, too, do subjective and objective time. Do you know of other comics that treat lost time and missed experience/absence with similar sensitivity?

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Monthly Archives: May 2014