Utilitarian Review 7/27/12

So my first reaction to this was fairly intense visceral dislike. The goal seems to be to deconstruct icon and narrative to reveal a subtext of explosive violence, gender dynamics, image making and, most of all, manipulability. The stuttering spin and spin again as Diana Prince turns into Wonder Woman and then turns and turns into Wonder Woman, or runs over the same segment of forest and then reruns over it, makes us see both the narrative and the heroine as constructed and artificial. Like much appropriation art, it’s using camp to destabilize the normal and the normative, so that, for example, when Wonder Woman breaks out of her mirror prison, the rhythm comes not as climax, but as anti-climax — culminating in her stale banter with the inevitable man she saves.

The problem is, this camp undermining of Wonder Woman is significantly less camp than the source material. The intimations of dominance and power from manipulating the tape, for example, or from the connection of WW’s transformation with explosions, are far more muted, and far less sexualized, than the compulsive bondage games in Marston/Peter. The replicated Wonder Womans in the mirrors are less daring, less loopy, and again less sexualized than Marston/Peter’s precocious dabblings in pomo themes of replication and artificiality. The disco double-entendres at the end, rhyming “under” and “wonder”, again seem positively tame compared to Marston’s spiraling fantasies of women dressed as deer eating each other, or giant vulva-flowers consuming men and women alike. Christopher Reed in his book “Art and Homosexuality” argues that the avant-garde always lags behind pulp sources in its use of homosexual and controversial content, and this seems like a painful case in point. Marston and Peter created an incredibly sexually daring, homoerotic, and feminist comic book, and some three decades later the art world comes along and preens itself on “discovering,” in much less confrontational form, all the themes that were there to begin with.

So, like I said, that was my initial reaction. On second thought, though, I probably don’t need to be that harsh. In the first place, the Wonder Woman television show was not the Wonder Woman comic by a long shot. With that in mind, Birnbaum can be seen in part as re-excavating the invention and the sexual charge that the TV writers largely removed. In particular, Birnbaum has rightly figured out that the only part of Wonder Woman the TV show that is really worth keeping is the transformation scene. That explosive (orgasmic?) moment spills out of its original context, as if Marston and Peter’s original erotic vision has shattered the dull genre narrative built to contain it.

Beyond that, it’s probably worth noting that Birnbaum isn’t really part of the avant-garde, at least as Reed discusses it. Feminist art and pop art were both still very much outside the institutional art world in 1978. From that perspective, Birnbaum might be seen not as (or not just as) appropriating Wonder Woman and television, but as identifying with them. Diana Prince’s explosive, exciting transformation into Wonder Woman is also Birnbaum’s accession to the wonderful, gleeful joys of control. Wonder Woman stutters back and forth and spins around and around and runs over the same ground not to subvert her, but because the power over those images, and the power of those images, is just so darned fun. Birnbaum’s video, then, might not be so different, in concept or execution, from those Yourtube compilations of every Lynda Carter transformation ever:

In other words, I like it more as a fan video than I do as avant-garde art — which isn’t necessarily a dis, since part of what it’s doing (especially in retrospect) is anticipating, or forecasting, or helping to bring about the (ongoing) collapse of the walls between fandom and art. I still wouldn’t say it’s great, and it’s still very simple-minded, ideologically reticent, and formally underwhelming compared to Marston/Peter. But I can see its historical importance and appreciate its energy. It’s certainly one of the most inventive uses of the character since Marston died — which may be damning with faint praise, but is praise nonetheless.

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Brown and Beige Are My Favourite Colours

Posted on July 24, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

Twee faery folk pop download: Brown and Beige Are My Favourite Colours.

1. Sunshine on My Shoulders — John Denver
2. Bring Me A Song — Lavender Diamond
3. April Come She Will — Simon and Garfunkel
4. On Susan’t Floor — Gordon Lightfoot
5. Place to Be — Nick Drake
6. Thicker Than a Smokey — Gary Higgins
7. Winter Is Blues — Vashti Bunyan
8. Sandy Toes — Linda Perhacs
9. Epistle to Derroll — Donovan
10. Banquet on the Water — The Sallyangie
11. Plumb — The Horse’s Ha
12. Fall — Devandra Banhardt
13. Eastern Spell —Tyrannosaurus Rex
14. The Traveling Tradition — Tyrannosaurus Rex
15. Brown and Beige Are My Favourite Colours — Acid House Kings
16. Winter Sprint Summer Fall — The Postmarks
17. The Rollercoaster Ride — Belle and Sebastian
18. You Told a Lie — Camera Obscura

Nick Black’s Super-Awesome Urine-Recycling Alien

Posted on July 22, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

Artist Nick Black had an awesome kinetic sculpture up at Happy Dog gallery here in Chicago. It’s a giant floating bulbous faced alien with a raygun peeing pink pee into a giant vat. The pee is constantly recycled, so there is never an end to the urinating.

Katie Fizdale took some pictures and kindly shared them with me.

And click here to see the recycling urine in action.

I think this piece fits in nicely with our recent discussion of modernism and post-modernism and comics and fine art. It’s using underground comics references pretty obviously, I think (the alien could be a Johnny Ryan drawing.) At the same time, it’s turning a mechanistic system which might well be modernist and turning it into a representation of itself; parodic/pastiche divorced from utilitarian function and turned into a sign of itself as pornographic pulp. There’s still the nostalgia from the comics, maybe, but the 3-D giant action figureness of it kind of deliberately cheapens the nostalgia…or inflates it, depending on your viewpoint. (The piece was priced, very much tongue in cheek, at over $5 million.)

52 Equals Zero

Posted on July 21, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

A version of this first appeared in The Chicago Reader
______________
Eight months ago DC launched the New 52, restarting all of its titles from #1 and transforming the pop culture universe as we know it. From Salon to Rolling Stone to the Atlantic to the Chicago Reader itself, the excitement among columnists, bloggers, and alternative news sources has been almost uncontainable. It’s like Game of Thrones…except 52 times!

Or, you know, possibly not. The truth of the matter is, back in September some mainstream outlets were mildly interested and/or just couldn’t resist the opportunity to put “Pow! Boom!” in a headline. Shortly thereafter, a few people kind of sort of notice that a bunch of the DC titles were sexist crap even by the admittedly low standards of stupid pop culture detritus. And after that, basically, nothing. Comics blogs still follow this stuff, but in the real world, nobody cares.

And if you want to know why nobody cares…well all you have to do is pick up some of those new titles. You would think that the purpose of a massive relaunch would be to create an easy-in for new readers — why reset to #1 if you’re not going to start at the beginning? But when I picked up a handful of titles this week, I found myself right back in the same Comic Nerds Only space I remembered so well from the days when I used to occasionally read this crap. In Animal Man, our hero is discovering that Everything He Ever Knew About Himself Was Wrong, just like Swamp Thing did back in the famous Alan Moore run from the 1980s — and, indeed, writer Jeff Lemire is actually literally cobbling together his new (New!) Animal Man from random plot elements Moore used thirty years ago. In Wonder Woman, our heroine is discovering that Everything She Ever Knew About Herself Was Wrong, and that she’s actually the daughter of Zeuss which allows lots of Gods to wander in and out saying profound things like they were in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic from, oh, 30 years ago (the early Sandman issues, specifically, when Gaiman was still trying to write horror like Alan Moore.) In Batman, our hero is discovering that Everything He Ever Knew About Himself Was Wrong (are you detecting a pattern?) though, to give him his due, writer Scott Snyder’s drooling, insane, drugged out and victimized Batman is pretty entertaining, especially if you’re as sick of the character as I am. And then there’s Red Hood and the Outlaws, which has accomplished the impressive feat of taking only seven issues to create an intricate backstory which feels tedious enough to have been going on for decades.

The point here isn’t that these comics are formulaic pulp crap. They are formulaic pulp crap, but goodness knows I’m willing enough to consume formulaic pulp crap if it’ll meet me half way. I really liked the superhero found footage exercise Chronicle, for example. I even had a place in my heart for the recent The Thing remake. I’m not proud.

And yet, even by those low standards, the DC relaunch is just surprisingly unpleasurable. And while I would like to blame the creative teams, I don’t think it’s entirely their fault. Red Hood is truly embarrassing shit, but the writers and artists on Animal Man, Wonder Woman, and Batman are all competent enough pulp creators as these things go. It isn’t their fault that they have to use 50 to 70 year old characters to tell utterly irrelevant stories to an audience of ever-more-insular fanboys (and yes, it is almost entirely boys.) Serialized television pulp, a genre which was once almost as scorned as comics, has rejuventated itself by scampering shamelessly after controversy and high concept. 24, with its countdown and its terrorism and its torture is maybe the most egregious example, but Mad Men qualifies with its period feel gimmick, and so does Breaking Bad with its “Meth! The drug of the moment!” schtick.

That’s the way pulp’s supposed to work; it’s supposed to be crass and time-bound and desperate for the next new shiny thing. Not superhero comics, though; they don’t even bother trying — presumably because their audience doesn’t want them to. My friendly local comics retailer, James Nurss at First Aid Comics in Hyde Park, told me that in his store DC has had a significant boost in sales since the reboot. Marc-Oliver Frisch, a journalist who covers comics sales figures for news site The Beat, confirmed that this was the case industry-wide. Both, however, suggested that the boost in sales is not from new readers. Instead, the bump is from what Frisch referred to in an email as “lapsed” readers (his quotes) — people who, Nurss suggested, moved to Marvel titles, or people who’d stopped buying DC some years back. It’s buyers from within the subculture, in other words, not anyone from outside it. Or, as Frisch concluded, “I think it’s fair to say that, thanks to the ‘New 52,’ DC is making more money selling more comic books to more of the same direct-market customers; no more, no less.”

The other part of DC’s reboot was a move to start releasing digital comics on the same day as print. Nurss, whose store carries a good amount of alternative and children’s comics as well as mainstream titles, feels that the change to digital may transform the comics industry, making it possible for new kinds of comics — and new kinds of audiences — to get a foothold. Maybe so, but after slogging through this pile of uninspired and unambitious dreck, it’s difficult to get too excited about comics future.

And just in case you think it’s only a problem for DC — I also bought a couple of Marvel’s Avengers vs. X-Men comics in honor of the new Avengers film. Apparently the Phoenix force is endangering us all, just like it did 30 years ago when Chris Claremont and John Byrne wrote X-men stories that were at least marginally creative, even if they were using other people’s characters. These days, though, the best you can hope for is that one of the same old heroes will discover that everything he (or possibly she) knew about himself was wrong. At which point he (or less likely she) will slog bravely forward through the torpid drifts of continuity while the rest of the world get its schlocky pulp fun from television or YA novels and its superheroes, if it must have them, from the big screen.

Utilitarian Review 7/21/12

Posted on July 21, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

I talk about Quentin Blake’s beautiful “The Story of the Dancing Frog.”

In our Featured Archive Post, Alex Buchet discusses Herge’s struggles with race.

Ng Suat Tong on Joe Sacco’s Journalism.

Alex Buchet on his experiments with spoiler technology.

Robert Stanley Martin on Godard’s Alphaville.

Isaac Butler stages a brutal gritty cage match between The Wire and Johnie To’s Election films.

I stage a cage match between Al Columbia and the electronica of Taragana Pyjarama; the winner receives the postmodern sublime.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At The Atlantic I review the documentary Queen of Versailles.

At Esquire I look at some lesser known Bat villains.

At Splice Today I compare the Bain Scandal to the Jeremiah Wright Scandal.

Also at Splice I review Tommy Flander’s forgotten sixties hippie folk masterpiece The Moonstone.

Other Links

Ben Winters (that’s my cousin!) talks about his new apocalyptic detective novel.

The Guardian on a possible Chicago teacher’s strike.

Alex Pareene takes down Aaron Sorkin.

CBR with a really nice piece on Wonder Woman’s lasso.

James Fallows on Americans and guns.

Surface Pleasures

Posted on July 20, 2012 by Noah Berlatsky

In her recent post on the postmodern sublime in comics, Marguerite Van Cook paraphrases Frederic Jameson on our crazed cultural landscape.

Jameson points out that the sublime of postmodern is not the dark and brooding place of the high romantics; it is not the depressed world of brooding heroes. Somewhere along the line, all of that angst and personal introspection has been replaced by another world of bright shiny surfaces, replicas and fragmented visions in a world now experiencing another kind of psychic onslaught. Jameson talks about the postmodern sublime as a type of container for all this madness, which he describes as a type of schizophrenia.

Marguerite goes on to look at various comic-book chroniclers of the post-modern sublime, concluding with Al Columbia.

Al Columbia’s Pim and Francie perhaps sums it all up. They run not walk to the sanatorium. Columbia’s characters are no longer in revolt, they are beyond that cognitive choice. Rather they live in a world that does not differentiate morality and feelings. Columbia draws snatches from various artists styles. They hover ghostlike, pulled back from our collective memory as they sit on pages that are torn, fragmented and abused in a confrontation of what it means to be a new product. Jameson suggest that nothing is left to shock us, but I’d suggest that Al Columbia does just that. In this final image the boy takes a straight razor to Bambi. He eschews the choice of Mickey and assaults us in the soft spot. Bambi, the sacred lamb, the sacred cow, the holy sanctified symbol of innocence, is offered to the madness of the postpostmodern. Bambi’s limbs lie dismembered in the grass and we are oh so close by, to see them.

Jameson, Marguerite, and Columbia are all presenting us with a postmodernism as hell; a shiny, emotionless strobing of patterns whose only meaning is an ersatz copy of meaninglessness. The real has vanished utterly, and all that’s left are images of images, a cardboard graveyard of stale tropes through which wander wayward consumers, robbed of even the dignity of despair.

That is certainly one face of postmodernism…but I wonder if it’s really the most insidious one. To me, anyway, the focus on the postmodern schizophrenic apocalypse can obscure maybe the most obvious thing about our current cultural moment — which is that postmodernism is really pleasurable. Gliding out on those ever-shifting shallows, with the real and its hierarchy of earnestness vanishing like the afterimage of that web page you just left, while every song in the world is simultaneously uploaded to your cortex — who can resist such blithely excessive dreams?

Comics is so rooted in nostalgia that it maybe makes sense that it sees the post-post-everything as an impetus mostly to gnash and mourn and re-reject decades old funny animals and the now irrelevant sentiments they inspired. Other cultural forms, though, have embraced the zeitgeist with more eagerness.

Electronica is perhaps a too-obvious example. Listening to the recent release Tipped Bowls by Taragana Pyjarama, you aren’t dumped into a schizophrenic void. On the contrary, the first track, “Four Legged,” orchestrates the future-synth automatons of our overdetermined dreams into a rising symphonic rush of exaltation, panning and swooping over digitized fijords like tiny joyful digitized tourists. “Growing Forehead” takes that most human of sounds, an inhaled breath, and cuts and reiterates it until it’s just another computerized meme afloat in ecstatic programmable melody; transcendence as binary conversion. “Pinned (Part 1),” is a staggering agglomeration of beats and bloops, like a video game caught in a spin cycle, while “Pinned (Part 2) is a funkier but still inner-ear-disturbed strut, stochastic patter resolving and threatening to dissipate, resolving and threatening to dissipate, all with a catchy tunefulness, as if we’ve wandered into a world where even the busted appliances spit out pop.

That world is our world, of course; high culture and low culture and random furniture and passing cats (especially passing cats!) all sliding across one endless screen. It’s nauseating and soul-destroying, certainly. But it’s also vertiginous and, in a song like “Ballibat,” such a lovely, smoothed-out mash-up of timeless futurism that you wonder if, in this post-present, you even need a soul.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

Author Archives: Noah Berlatsky