Category Archives: Roundtables

Monthly Stumblings # 10: Alan Dunn

Posted on by

East of Fifth by Alan Dunn

Fredrik Strömberg wrote Black Images in the Comics (Fantagraphics Books, 2003). In the foreword of said book Charles Johnson stated:

[…] while the cartoonist and comics scholar in me coolly and objectively appreciated the impressive archeology of images assembled in Black Images in the Comics, as a black American reader my visceral reaction to this barrage of racist drawings from the 1840s to the 1940s was revulsion and a profound sadness.

Jumping to page 86 we can find the inevitable Ebony White (the family name has to be a joke) accompanied by Will Eisner’s (the character’s creator) comment:

I realize that Ebony was a stereotype because I drew him in caricature – but how else could I have treated a black boy in that era, at that time?

Well… Eisner could have asked East of Fifth ‘s author Alan Dunn

Title page of East of Fifth.

 “Will Eisner’s Almanack of the Year” [December 26, 1948] as published in DC Comics’ Will Eisner’s Spirit Archives Vol. 17 (July 4 to December 26 1948), 2005.

As you can see above both “Will Eisner’s Almanack of the Year” and East of Fifth were published in 1948. Sacred cow defenders usually utter the same excuse that Will Eisner used above. Basically: he’s not to blame, he lived in less enlightened times, etc… On the other hand the Eisner (or McCay or Barks, etc…) critics say something like: that’s true, nevertheless other creators didn’t fall into the trap of racist imagery. The latter’s problem is that they never give any example… Until now: clearly belonging to the second group I believe that great art gives us a complex view of the world, hence: it has no place whatsoever for the simplistic and offensive imagery of racists. See below how Alan Dunn portrayed black people in East of Fifth and compare the depiction with Will Eisner’s pickaninny.

 East of Fifth, page 95.

 As we can see above, it’s not that difficult. Alan Dunn just needed to caricature black people in the same way as he caricatured everybody else. What he couldn’t change was black people’s role in society. In this image, as housemaids in a party. Even so, he didn’t resort to job stereotyping either. In the second image below the fourth character in the background row (counting from the left) is a middle class black person (a poet) attending a white people’s party. In this sequence racism is clearly viewed as embedded in 1940s society (also: on page 92 an employee says: “Cab for Mrs. Eelpuss – white driver”). (Even if they appear here together the two images are 30 pages apart. Braiding is the formal device that links East of Fifth the most with comics. The book is also an example of what I call a locus .)

East of Fifth, page 59.

East of Fifth, page 89.

 Some cartoonists praise stereotypes because, according to them, it’s an immediate way of conveying ideas. Looking at the image above I can see why: not that it really matters, of course, but without the usual short cuts (and forgetting page 59) it’s not immediately obvious that the gentleman depicted is indeed black. My question is: is this offensive immediacy really worth it? I don’t believe that Will Eisner was a racist. As Robert Crumb famously put it on the backcover of his comic book Despair (1970): “It’s just lines on paper, folks!” (before that Crumb depicted a character named Nutsboy tearing apart a woman and saying “it’s only a comic book, so I can do anything I want” – see below).

Robert Crumb, “Nutsboy”, Bogeyman # 2, 1969, as published in The Complete Crumb Comics # 5, Fantagraphics Books, July 1990.

I’m not denying Robert Crumb or any other artist, for that matter, the right to draw “anything [s/he/they] want,” but drawings have consequences as we have seen at the beginning of this post. In the story “Angelfood McSpade” (see below) Robert Crumb shows his camp tendencies exploiting a racist imagery that, I suppose, Crumb sees as his cultural trash heritage. As I see it Angelfood is marijuana (the character is an allegory), but that’s irrelevant for this post. The point is that kitsch or no kitsch, camp or no camp, it’s a racist depiction and I can’t decide who to blame more: Will Eisner who uncritically swallowed his times’ imagery or Robert Crumb who reveled in it.

“Angelfood McSpade”, Zap # 2, June 1968, as published in The Complete Crumb Comics # 5, Fantagraphics Books, July 1990.

John Crosby (1912 – 1991) was a media critic. In one of those happy circumstances that happen once in a blue moon one of his columns “Radio in Review” fell in my hands. It was published in the New York Herald Tribune (July, 1948) and it’s about East of Fifth. Sharp as a knife Crosby understood (with Göethe, looking at Töpffer’s drawings, many years before) that this book had an unnamed form: the graphic novel. Here’s what he said in his column “Radio in Review: East of Fifth, West of Superman” (New York Herald Tribune, July, 1948):

[…] “East of Fifth,” by Alan Dunn, a cartoonist who is also a subtle and polished writer, is the story of twenty-four hours in the life of a large, fashionable Manhattan apartment house and, of course, of its occupants, told in cartoons with an accompanying text.

I bring it up here because Mr. Dunn’s book may well be a brand new art form, a sort of sophisticated, literate extension of the comic books, rather horrifying in its implications to writers unable to draw. This isn’t the first book in which cartoons and text tell a complete story but, to my knowledge, it’s the first time anyone has attempted serious literature in this field. In this unreading age, when all the arts and much of journalism tend towards pictures, Mr. Dunn’s comic book for adults is certainly significant, just a little distressing and thoroughly captivating.

Alan Dunn juggled with three forms: literature, comics, but above all, cartoons (he was a New Yorker cartoonist). While printed words carry the load of the narrative cartoons are lively comments on the little events that occur in the building (see below).

Alan Dunn was an architecture cartoonist. He was as interested in the machinery of the building and the personnel running things as in bourgeois life inside it. The tone is a bit too breezy (it reminds Ben Katchor’s cool and detached, if poetical, remarks, sometimes).  A suicide occurs, in a masterful ellipse, nevertheless. It barely disrupts the hustle and bustle of city life though… and, maybe, that’s the whole point: the book ends with a drawing and a phrase alluding to “the cold metropolis of the north.”

East of Fifth, page 38.

Going back to Will Eisner it seems to me that, at least in the 1970s, he was influenced by Alan Dunn’s work. It’s a shame that, by then, it was too late to avoid Ebony…

East of Fifth, page 5.

Will Eisner, The Building, Kitchen Sink, 1987, as published in The Will Eisner Companion by N. C. Christopher Crouch and Stephen Weiner, DC Comics, 2004. 

I end this post with page 134 of East of Fifth. It’s now the wee hours and someone complained about the noise of a character’s typewriter. He then switches to handwriting in a great visual device that will be used, years later, by Charles Schulz.

East of Fifth, page 134.

__________
Update by Noah: This post inspired a roundtable on R. Crumb and race, all of which can be read here.

Robert Stanley Martin on Paying For It

Posted on by

Robert Stanley Martin wrote about the harshest piece I think I’ve seen on Chester Brown’s Paying For It in our comments. It seemed wrong to let it languish there, so I have given it it’s own post.

It’s three parts, actually. Here’s the first.

This book really makes me embarrassed for the comics world. If Chester Brown wants to make a creepy, crackpotted spectacle of himself, I suppose that’s his business. But did everybody have to go whole-hog to identify themselves, and by extension, the field with this thing? Judging from the comics-media sites, it’s the book of the year so far. It’s Chester Brown week over at TCJ, for pity’s sake.

Anja Flower then asked Robert what was so embarrassing about prostitution, anyway. Robert responded:

I don’t consider the discussion of prostitution and its prospective decriminalization embarrassing. I don’t think it’s particularly worthwhile, except as an intellectual exercise. The reason is that with, for lack of a better term, morals laws, I don’t believe they get changed unless people feel that one is or could be unfairly deprived of something. Obscenity laws began being undermined by people not feeling it was appropriate to legally deny them the opportunity to read writers like Joyce, Lawrence, and Henry Miller. Laws barring gay marriage in the U.S. are now taking a beating that I expect will end in their repeal. Homosexuality is increasingly acceptable in our society, people are more likely to have social relationships with people who are openly gay, and people are seeing that gay partnerships are in practice identical to heterosexual marriage. They increasingly don’t think its appropriate for gay couples not to have the legal prerogatives of straight ones.

I don’t think that’s going to happen with prostitution because I don’t see the stigma of being on either end of the transaction going away. I think lax enforcement of the laws is probably the most that can be hoped for.

What I find embarrassing relates to North American comics and their community of artists and readers.

North American comics are invariably unconscious allegories of male potency anxiety that stink up the field like a miasma. (The comic-book efforts that have broken through to success in bookstores–where the customers for memoir and fiction material are overwhelmingly female–either eschew this altogether or interrogate it with such sophistication that people are able to get past the ick factor.) What Chester Brown has produced is an intellectually pretentious acting-out of his fantasies of himself as a porno stud.

Brown has demonstrated exhibitionist tendencies in his work almost from the beginning. A minor example was an autobiographical piece that featured an extended sequence of him picking his nose and eating the half-dried mucus. The major one is The Playboy, a memoir of his experience with pornography that featured several bluntly explicit scenes of him masturbating. Brown obviously has a compulsion to publicly show himself engaging in activities that most people would just as soon stay private. Paying for It is his latest venture with this tendency.

What the comics community has never been able to get through its head is how repellent mpa material largely is to people in the outside world, who at best just consider it adolescent. Show Paying for It to a halfway reasonable person outside the comics world, and they’re going to see a rather pathetic crank flaunting his emotional shortcomings and grody personal behavior, which he then tries to portray as virtues. Any other field would marginalize this, such as the literary community did with Mailer’s misogyny. But not the comics field. The message of “Hey, everybody! Isn’t being a socially stunted dweeb who’s into hookers and wants everyone to share the joy fun and cool!” blares like a civil-defense alarm from tcj.com and other comics-press mainstays. The field has had more (much, much more) than its share of embarrassing spectacles, but the reception accorded this book just takes the cake.

And finally this.

Let me add that in general I hold Chester Brown in very high regard as an artist.

Ed the Happy Clown, which I read during its initial serialization, was my entry into alternative comics. It set a standard for cartoon surrealism that all subsequent works in that mode must be measured against, and none have yet to meet. I Never Liked You is an outstanding memoir of adolescence. I’m putting together a list of my top-ten all-time favorite/best/most worthwhile comics for another project, and one or both will likely make the final ten.

As for his other major efforts, what I’ve seen of Underwater shows it to be an interesting and admirable misfire. I have yet to read Louis Riel, but by all accounts it’s a strong piece of historical fiction, and I look forward to reading it. And his Gospel adaptations show just how tepid Crumb’s Genesis effort is by comparison.

I want to add that I think he’s a nice person. I encountered him once at a Barnes & Noble signing with Seth and Adrian Tomine in New York a few years back. He’s a friendly–if very reserved–fellow face-to-face.

However, we all have our unfortunate sides, and Paying for It is the worst aspects of Chester Brown’s work writ large.

_______________________
Other posts in what’s turning into a slowly evolving roundtable on Paying for It here.

Love Among the Androids

Posted on by

A much-shortened version of this review ran last week in the Chicago Reader. I also had an essay here a little bit ago about some other reactions to the book.
_____________________________

It’s because I do see sex as sacred and potentially spiritual that I believe in commercializing it and making this potentially holy experience more easily available to all.

That’s Chester Brown , writing in the lengthy appendices to Paying For It, his graphic memoir about his experiences as a john. The quote is odd not so much for what it says as for what it doesn’t. Specifically, throughout the book Brown sets himself firmly against the ideas of romantic love and marriage, and touts sex-as-commercial-experience not just as a reasonable arrangement for him, but as the best arrangement for everybody. What, then, exactly, is the sacred nature of sex for Brown? Or, to put it another way, if the sacredness of sex isn’t about love, what’s it about?

In some ways, you could see Brown’s entire book as an answer to this question. The narrative starts as he and his girlfriend, Sook-Yin, go through an amicable break-up, and he realizes he doesn’t want to have a romantic relationship ever again. In fact, he decides that romantic relationships are actively bad. “…being in a romantic relationship brings up all [Sook-yin’s] insecurities,” he notes. “It does that for everyone — me too.”

Convinced of the evils of romance, yet not willing to give up on having sex, Brown eventually decides to get some the old fashioned way — by paying for it. As he learns the ins and outs of being a john (how to find an escort, when to tip, where to look for reviews online) he also becomes a more and more adamant proponent of legalization. The graphic novel alternates between Brown’s encounters with different “whores” (as he sometimes calls them) and his arguments with friends, family, and the prostitutes themselves about the morality of prostitution.

These arguments, continued in the appendices and notes, are by and large quite convincing. Admittedly, I’m biased — I thought criminalizing sex-work was a bad idea before I started reading the book. Even so, Brown pushed hard against my already-very-liberal opinions. He argues forcefully that prostitution should be not only legalized, but completely unregulated. In the appendix, for example, he points out that legal prostitutes in Nevada often aren’t allowed to leave the brothel without permission, and are sometimes forced to buy condoms and even food from the brothel-owner at exorbitant prices. These women, then, are much more exploited than they would be if they weren’t regulated, or even than they would be if they were just working illegally. Brown is also compelling when he insists that prostitutes should not be subject to mandatory health testing. “Medical treatment,” he says to his friend, the cartoonist Seth, “should always be voluntary. It should never be forced on anyone.”

But while Brown’s words make a strong case for the dignity and necessity of legalized prostitution, his comic itself is, seemingly unintentionally, more ambivalent. This is most noticeable in the portrayal of the prostitutes themselves. Brown, of course, uses fake names for all of them. He also, as he notes in the foreword, deliberately removes any reference to their real lives — boyfriends, children, childhoods, families. “I wish I had the freedom to include that material…,” Brown says, “it would have brought the women to life a full human beings and made this a better book.”

That’s no doubt true. But one could argue that, despite his protests to the contrary, Brown actually goes out of his way to dehumanize the women he sleeps with. Specifically, he never shows their faces. Presumably, this is meant to protect their anonymity — but he’s drawing them. He could change their faces, just as he made them all brunettes. By showing us only the backs of their heads, he turns them all into expressionless ciphers. His trysts with them seem like ritualized encounters with dolls. This is even more the case since Brown rarely varies layout or style; his comics are series of small squares, often with minimal backgrounds. His representations of sex, similarly, have a regimented similarity; he and the woman are placed against a black background, fucking with the joyless, repetitive deliberation of wind-up dolls.

Brown’s depiction of himself is even more disturbing. A thin man, he draws himself as a death’s head, his glasses staring blank and pupilless. And then words start to robotically issue from that cadaverous skull, reasoned arguments grinding forth like the granite lid scraping across a tomb. “Romantic….love…is…evil…*click* marriage…is…evil…*click* there…is…only…money…and…desire…click*”

Brown has, in short, turned himself into an uncanny libertarian caricature. And it is this libertarianism — along with its forefather, enlightenment utilitarianism — which forms the basis for his dislike of romantic love. Romantic love, he argues, “causes more misery than happiness.” It is wrong because its calculus is wrong; instead of maximizing joy, it interferes with the cheerful autonomous operation of the individual. Brown touts his own long-term, monogamous relationship with a prostitute named Denise precisely because it is entirely based on his own desire, rather than on potentially traumatizing reciprocity. “I’m having sex with Denise because I want to, not because I made a marriage vow to her or because she’d get jealous because I saw someone else.”

And this, I think, is why Brown sees sex as sacred. It’s because sex, especially paid sex, is divorced utterly from commitment or community. As a libertarian, he worships the individual, and sex is the ultimate expression of the individual autonomously pursuing pleasure. Brown even argues that prostitution, once legalized, should not be taxed. The government and, indeed, society has no place in the bedroom. Sex is sacred because it is private.

The irony here is that Brown thinks that he’s somehow challenging the basis of romantic love. The truth, though, is that he is merely carrying that logic of romance through to its conclusion.

In the 1978 essay, Sex and Politics: Bertrand Russell and ‘Human Sexuality,’ theologian Stanley Hauerwas notes that

marriage can be sustained only so long as it is clear what purposes it serves in the community which created it in the first place. With the loss of such a community sanction, we are left with the bare assumption that marriage is a voluntary instituion motivated by the need for interpersonal intimacy.

Romantic love, as Hauerwas says, is already an ideology of autonomous atomization. It assumes that you marry for love, and that love is an ideal because it is personally fulfilling. Brown does not dispute the liberal, capitalist goal of personal fulfillment; he just argues that liberal, capitalist fulfillment is ideally maximized by the market.

That’s a logical position, obviously. Indeed, its so logical it starts to verge on madness. If everyone is an entirely independent desiring subject in theory, then in practice everyone is an object, reduced, like Brown’s prostitutes, to blank toys manipulated for everyone else’s mechanical satisfaction. That’s true whether we’re trying to maximize our individuality through romantic love or through the sacred orgasms of capital. If we want a less soul-crushing sexual ethic, we may need to consider the possibility that sex is about other people, and possibly about God. In the meantime, I guess, like Chester Brown, we can look forward to life as happy, fulfilled, free-spending skulls.
______________________

Addendum: I didn’t have space for this in the initial review, but I did want to highlight what I think is one of the most interesting interchanges in the book. Brown is talking post-coitally to a prostitute named Edith. Brown explains to her that he no longer believes in romantic love, which is why he visits prostitutes. He outlines the arguments I’ve already discussed, emphasizing especially that people change over time, and that it’s not fair to either partner to be tied down to a romantic relationship when both will eventually change.

The end of the conversation is as follows:

Edith:Yes, but you can try to continue to understand your partner. And if you love him or her you’d be willing to make that effort.

Brown: Yeah, effort. Romantic love is work. Call me lazy, but I don’t want to do the work.

Edith: If I met the right guy, I’d be happy to do the work. It takes work to get anything worthwhile in life.

What’s interesting here is that Edith gets the last word, her dialogue floating above Brown’s inevitably expressionless stare. Brown never makes any attempt to refute her — not in the narrative, not in the notes (which don’t mention this exchange at all.)

I suspect the back and forth with Seth will get more attention for various reasons (it’s longer, it’s Seth.) But this is the moment in the book where Brown comes closest to letting someone get the better of him. Edith’s argument — that relationships are about work, and that that is in fact what makes them worthwhile — is a fine thumbnail paraphrase of Hauerwas’ position, and Brown, apparently, has no response to it.

There’s a nice irony, too, in the fact that Edith, who is extolling the virtue of work, is in fact working as she speaks. The sequence get at the class divide between Brown (artsy middle-class hipster with disposable income) and the women he’s seeing, and raises the question — largely unexamined in the book — of privilege.

I don’t think that Brown is actually endorsing Edith’s position. The rest of the book makes it quite clear that yes, he really does think prostitution is the ideal way to conduct sexual relations. Even when he admits that he is in love with Denise, he does so by arguing that paid sex is the ideal expression of, and venue for, that love. Still, he’s to be commended for giving someone else a chance to put forward a contrary view; that you get, not what you pay for, but what you work for.
______________
Update: Naomi Fry’s review at tcj.com posted today touches on some of the same issues discussed here.

Dyspeptic Oroborous: Reacting To It

Posted on by

I recently finished reading an advance copy of Chester Brown’s new book Paying For It. I’m writing a review for someone who is (appropriately) hopefully going to pay me for it, so I’m not going to talk about the book specifically right at the moment. But…I was interested in talking about Tom Spurgeon’s review of the book, and some reaction to it.

Tom’s review is striking because he so strongly insists that he doesn’t want to talk about the book’s content.

I felt myself at a disadvantage throughout the entire process of reading Paying For It, Chester Brown’s long-awaited graphic novel about his becoming a John and how that part of his life developed over a lengthy period of time. I have no interest in prostitutes, less interest than that in the issue of prostitution and sex work, and can muster only the tiniest bit of prurient intrigue for watching how a cartoonist of whom I’m a fan orients himself to the aforementioned. That’s going to sound like a protestation, but I genuinely mean that I lack a fundamental interest in that specific subject matter.

Consistently enough, Tom then goes on to say that his favorite part of the book was a moment having nothing to do with prostitution.

The most fascinating sequence in Paying For It for me didn’t involve a single naked woman or the sensible peculiarities revealed by the veteran comic book maker as he unfurls the operational workings of such enterprises from the consumer’s end. What I enjoyed most was a few panels where Brown tries to orient himself to the fact he’ll soon move from the home of one-time lover and longtime friend Sook-Yin Lee. Buffeted by very understandable waves of grief, Brown gathers himself, pounces on a brief, inexplicable flash of happiness and pins it to the white board of his consciousness like an amateur entomologist. I’ve read that section four times now. It feels much more intimate than any time the cartoonist depicts himself in the sexual act, more revealing, even, than when Brown suggests we take a second look at his actions throughout this work for the implications of a surprising, final-act twist. The greatest strength of Paying For It comes in its facilitation of these tiny, off-hand moments, less its ability to bring us the world in which Brown moves than the manner in which he processes what he sees once he gets there. (m emphasis added)

In the remainder of the review, Tom continues this back and forth, expressing discomfort and indifference to Brown’s major themes while concluding that the book is still great. “Whatever the comics equivalent of saying you’d watch a certain actor read a phone book might be,” Tom says, “that’s Chester Brown.”

Over at tcj.com in comments, Jeet Heer expressed some doubts as to whether this was a useful approach to Brown’s book.

I also want to know what Tom thinks about sex work. Which is another way of saying that, like Joe Sacco’s various books on contemporary wars and Crumb’s Genesis, Brown’s book is one where the content requires the reviewer to give more than just an aesthetic judgement and also weigh in on the content and issues raised. Given the nature of the work, I think its important to be upfront about one’s response to Brown’s arguments/opinions, although of course it’s possible to like the book and think that the legal and cultural changes he’s advocating are completely out to lunch.

Tom responded sharply.

I couldn’t disagree more that any kind of response is required of anyone writing about a work, either in this case or generally, although I realize that some folks may think less of any piece that doesn’t engage a work on those levels. Those kinds of strictures don’t seem logical to me — or fruitful, even. Heck, I think you can make a stronger argument that any response to Paying For It needs to be in comics form before it needs to engage X, Y, Z issues in A, B, C ways. And as the former’s obviously silly I think the latter’s silly, too.

I’ll catch you guys up next time (first time) we meet as to my deep and personal opinions on the sex work stuff. It’s faaascinating. (No it’s not.)

And Jeet then backed and filled a bit.

Just to clarify: I thought Tom’s review was really smart and incisive. So if he doesn’t want to tackle the politics of the book head on, that’s fine. But someone (not Tom, if he doesn’t want to) should take “Paying For It” seriously not just as a comic by a major cartoonist but also a book with a radical political message — that message is worth trying to evaluate (along with, of course, the sort of formalist evaluation of the book that Tom did so well).

What’s interesting to me is that this is, I think, a debate that comes up a lot in comics criticism. That debate being…what place does content have in a discussion of a comic? Does it matter that Crumb’s Genesis (for example) has nothing particular to add to the discussion of Genesis? Do we need to think about Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s attitudes towards sex when reading Lost Girls? Is it important to think about Ditko’s objectivism when evaluating Ditko? Or are the contributions of cartoonists tied into their art — so much so that responding to what they’re saying, as what they’re saying, can be beside the point?

In that regard, I think it’s interesting that when challenged, Tom went immediately to the idea that it makes more sense for reviews to be done in comics form than for reviews to have to engage with ideas. Again, he said:

Heck, I think you can make a stronger argument that any response to Paying For It needs to be in comics form before it needs to engage X, Y, Z issues in A, B, C ways.

He then adds that either requirement (review in comics form or review responding to polemic) is silly — but he seems to believe that the first is (at least marginally) less silly than the second.

Like Tom and Jeet (in his second comment) I’m somewhat reluctant to say, “reviewers must react to a work in this way.” On the other hand…I do agree with Jeet’s first comment, that works of art, especially polemical works of art like, say, James Baldwin’s essays, really seem to be demanding an engagement with their ideas. If you refuse to grant them that engagement — if you insist, I will not talk about racism, I will only talk about Baldwin’s prose style and the moments of personal revelation of universal human insights — you are in fact missing the point in a fairly profound manner.

What’s interesting to me, too, is that I don’t think Tom does miss the point in that way. He disavows a polemical stance, but there’s ample evidence in the essay that he is not so much indifferent to Brown’s opinions as uncomfortable with them — especially when they’re expressed in the prose appendices rather than in cartoon form.

This is a far cry from what comes through in the essays: that Brown’s orientations might somehow be the basis for policy and cultural change, that all stigma is correlative, that the removal of cultural discrimination afforded paid sex is the difference between the world we live now and a world that functions a bit more like Chester Brown. When the cartoonist moves away from his own experiences and into broader proclamations about the nature of romantic love and assertions that more frequent monetary remuneration in sexual relationships will somehow ease relationships between men and women, it’s hard to engage with what he’s saying beyond being certain he means it. To put it more directly, even for someone not invested in the general subject matter, many of the broader arguments fail to convince.

That paragraph to me doesn’t sound like someone who is not invested in the subject matter. It sounds like someone who disagrees with Brown — but who values his cartooning so much that he’s ambivalent about saying so.

The thing is, to me Tom is being in many ways more generous to Brown when he agrees to think through and reject his ideas than he is when he suggests that you can put those ideas aside, and that the main thing to go to Brown for are the cartooning choices irrespective, almost, of the issues they engage.

For example, you can say Jimmy Stewart would be great if he read the phone book…and, in fact, I wouldn’t mind hearing Jimmy Stewart read the phone book as an exercise in dada. Still, the fact remains that Jimmy Stewart was at his very best when he was directed by Hitchcock and John Ford and Capra in movies that did not suck. Acknowledging that he is not so great when in movies that weren’t so great (like the mediocre The Mortal Storm) is not an insult to him. Rather, it’s a compliment to his real greatness; he’s an actor that deserves great movies — and indeed, his greatest performances are not separable from his best movies.

Similarly, I think we owe cartoonists an evaluation not just of their formal talents, or of their small choices, but of what they do with those talents, and what those small choices add up to. To withhold that is not a mark of respect for comics or for individual cartoonists. Quite the contrary.

________________

It’s worth noting that both Sean Collins and Chris Mautner have reviews in which they engage fairly directly with the polemical aspects of Brown’s book.

The Wire Roundtable: Not Anti-Cop

Posted on by

It takes a complex and nuanced piece of storytelling to firstly provoke, and then sustain thoughtful, prolonged consideration of its themes, its characters, its flaws and failings, its ambitions and their execution. The Wire, repays such close attention. Even its imperfections are interesting, as demonstrated in the honest and robust assessment of its absent women or the analysis of the story arc of Prez.

When TV drama claims to represent reality it offers itself up for close scrutiny. Over at Freakonomics the real “thugz” have been roundtabling The Wire. Here at The Hooded Utilitarian, I’d like to share some thoughts on The Wire from the point of view of an ex-cop and current crime writer.

From where I stand, The Wire got some very important things about cops right – but left one very important thing out.

Firstly to what worked.

Although I was in The Job on the other side of the planet, I recognised these cops. A discussion with a family member, who’d found Landsman’s foul language and porn mags a bit of a stereotype, reminded me just how real they were. Landsman could have been one of any number of sergeants I’d worked with –their filthy mouths, filthy minds and “stick” books stuffed in their bottom drawers.

But it’s McNulty who struck me as the genuine article. The discussion of McNulty as hero – or anti-hero – of the American Monomyth touched on some of the ways that McNulty subverted the role.

Dramatically McNulty is the protagonist. He gives us many of the inciting incidents that propel the narrative arcs of The Wire. In drama, most heroic characters are motivated by external factors; their quests are the pursuit of justice, the righting of wrongs, the defence of the powerless. But McNulty is motivated by internal factors; he knew he was smarter than Avon Barksdale and his crew and he knew how to manipulate a judge to get a chance to prove it.
McNulty was no hero, but he was a lot like a lot of cops I knew. They see The Job as a cross between a game and a business, and they play to win. They believe they are the smartest person in the room, and they’ll bend and break a lot of rules to guarantee they come out on top.
As well as being a proud bastard, McNulty was one hell of a shit stirrer. He was not, could not, be naïve about the consequences of getting a judge to put a rocket up police management – for McNulty causing Rawls and the hierarchy grief was the cream on top.

It’s hard to see any noble motives in all those hours of work on charts and tides that McNulty puts in to prove those bodies were in the jurisdiction of his old nemesis Rawls. Even riding the boat, McNulty was still a murder police. He seized the chance to show he was smart enough to use the very position he had been sent to as punishment in order to outwit Rawls. McNulty is like the smartest kid in class, easily bored, happiest when causing trouble and not much bothered by the fact that he (not for the last time) royally screws his old pals Bunk and Lester in the process.

There’s never any real sense that McNulty feels too deeply about any of the dead victims in the container case, which is again unlike the standard response of most heroic TV cops. In fact his behaviour when he goes “undercover” in the brothel in S2, and is found deshabille when it is raided, rather adds to his unheroic but realistic status.

When Rawls refuses to allow McNulty in on the container case, the bored troublemaker’s attention shifts to the “suicide” of D’Angelo Barksdale. Yet, even his interest in D’s death becomes just another twist in the long game. He sees it as a way to Stringer Bell, straight through Brianna Barksdale’s grief.

More likely candidates for hero-cop in The Wire are Carver and Freamon. Carver’s journey from street rip narco cop to wise street cop who knows his young offenders by name and offers them one break, who goes out of his way to try and “save” Namond from Juvenile Hall, who tries and fails to save Randy, goes to emotional places McNulty does not seem to possess.

Beadie Russell’s tears as Frank Sobotka is pulled from the water; Freamon’s obsessive desire to “follow the money” which seems to stem from an understated yet driving sense of justice, are all characters and behaviours that echo our expectations of what “good” cops ought to be.

For McNulty, though, a wire is a way to do good police work, to show he’s good police, to keep him occupied and interested, and give him the space to shine.

It’s worth considering McNulty’s reaction after Omar’s “heroic” speech to Levy, where the criminal tells the truth and exposes the permeability of the barrier between good and bad, legal and illegal. As the cop who has orchestrated this perjury, McNulty’s delight in it is summed up in the moment outside the courtroom where he alerts everyone to watch out for the “eyefuck” as Omar and Bird exchange looks.

Yet again, McNulty shows that he knows exactly how to play the game to get the result he wants. He’s smarter than the Barksdales, he’s smarter than the system. It’s a foreshadowing of his final and epic play of the game in S5.

So, McNulty is no hero, but damn, he plays like a real cop. In him I hear the echoes of so many of the cops I’ve worked with along the way, smart, selfish and in thrall to their own egos.

So many things in most TV cop shows drive anyone with a passing acquaintance with real life policing batshit crazy. For me, the standard scene where the hard working, dedicated cop takes home the brief, all the files, the photos, and spreads them out across his/her Spartan apartment, then after staring and re-reading and drinking alone through the night there’s the Eureka moment. The truth was there all along! Everyone else had just missed it!

Never seen it happen.

Ever.

Cops get breakthroughs by talking to people. Not nice people, because nice people don’t know very much about drugs, and dealers, and guns, and murder. Cops need to get close to crooks. Crooks tell you things about other crooks, and for all sorts of reasons, usually to screw up the competition or to save their own skins. They tell you things when they’re arrested and have no other options. They tell you things like Bubbles, as a career, being a professional gig, or like Omar, in order to extract revenge, or like Stringer Bell, as a strategic move in a long game, but often the very best things are told to you by people who don’t know you’re listening.

The Wire got this exactly right. Wordplay, not gunplay, and paperwork, lots and lots of paperwork, and many, many, many mostly boring hours watching, listening, waiting for something to happen, is how most real policing happens.

But, there was one area of real policing where The Wire’s normally unflinching gaze pulled back.
Yup, I’m talking about corruption. Police corruption.

Not the juking of stats corruption but the real down and dirty on the street, ripping off and robbing dealers, offering protection to criminals, taking bribes, putting money and drugs in the pocket, type of corruption.

It is alluded to in the case of Daniels.

His “past” was a constant shadow, lurking, just waiting to pounce and puncture his career – which it eventually did. The specifics of it were never delineated, though it is strongly suggested that his nice house and the fine lifestyle he enjoyed with his wife is the result of corruption.
But it is also very much implied that what had happened was in the past. And that it was localised, in the unseen “The Eastern District.”

When Herc and Carver discuss pocketing a stash of cash, just a small portion of one day’s takings, during the Barksdale operation in S1, I thought, “Ah ha! So, now we’re going to get down to it.”

Only, we didn’t.

Carver, talks Herc out of it, pretty much because he believes that the wire might discuss figures, so they’d be caught. It’s a fairly ambiguous moral decision, based on the risk factors rather than moral ones, though it is justified by what happens next. Part of the money goes missing (innocently lost) and it’s Daniels who concludes they have stolen it. His reaction implies that in his experience that that is exactly what usually happens and that he – nowadays – disapproves of it.

Anyone who has spent anytime involved in working drugs will tell you, the volume of money, hard cash, that can turn up, unexpectedly, in the course of a search warrant, an arrest, a car stop – is mind-boggling.

This is shown graphically during the simultaneous raids ordered in response to Griggs’ shooting: money, drugs and guns fall out of fridges, chairs, and bedding. This time Herc and Carver seize the moment and the cash. No discussion. Their eyes meet and they stuff a bundle into their vests, confirmation perhaps that Carver’s previous caution was risk-based, rather than morality-based.

It’s shown as a spontaneous action. Understandable even, in their anger over a colleague’s shooting, over the police management’s decision to waste all their hard work by demanding “drugs on the table” in time for the evening news, in the face of the obscene wealth of those they have been fruitlessly chasing.

The amount of cash lying around waiting to be found and pocketed by an opportunistic cop is shown to be considerable. But in reality, that is loose change, compared to the amounts of cash that can be made by a cop actively looking for it, a cop who is prepared to do business.

The Wire’s thesis that the prohibition on drugs has been a pernicious failure that causes infinitely more damage than it averts, did not fully explore the corrosive effect it has in corrupting the police, and not just the institution of police but the individual street police.

That little glimpse of Herc and Carver is, in reality, exactly what a lot of police do, every day. Most times there isn’t a wire. There’s no one looking, there’s just a couple of cops, a stash of money and a crook happy to get a pass. No biggie. They can make the cash back again, easy.

The Wire is, in so many respects, courageous and admirable in examining the fallout of the war on drugs that it comes as a surprise when they avert their gaze from the pervasive and poisonous affect of drug money in generating and sustaining systemic police corruption.

The Wire is prepared to throw a lot of punches. It certainly doesn’t miss the Law, as represented by Levy, or the political classes, both are shown as irredeemably corrupt. It is shown, explicitly, when Levy pays off a Grand Jury Prosecutor in order to secure court documents. Ill gotten cash swirls around the characters of Levy and Clay Davis, it is handed over, intercepted, referred to as “donations”, but the links between the illegal drug economy and politics and the law is shown unflinchingly.

Yet the police corruption that is emphasised is “juking the stats”, not ripping off dealers for their money, drugs and guns, or in the reselling of those drugs and guns, not in taking bribes to lose cases, or, like the Grand Jury Prosector leak court briefs, or information.

McNulty’s capers in encouraging a witness to perjure himself (Omar), or creating a serial killer, are examples of the so-called “noble cause” corruption, where the rules are bent for the greater good. (Though as I’ve suggested in these cases the greater good is Jimmy McNulty’s ego).

Interestingly, McNulty is seen taking a bribe, at the beginning of S2, when he accepts some cash from the party boat. Again, this was an “Ah hah!” moment for me as a viewer. It fit. Were the writers indicating that McNulty was used to taking bribes as a detective and merely carrying on when the opportunity presented itself in his new lowly job? Or was this going to be how losing his status as a detective leads him down a path of corruption?

Neither apparently.

Rather like Rawls in a gay bar, and Herc and Carver’s quick handful of bills, the moment passes and is never really followed up. These incidents of personal corruption stand as opportunistic, spontaneous events, rather than as part of something larger and systemic.

In fact, there is no further reference to corrupt behaviour again until S4 and the evil Officer Walker appears. However, he’s presented more as a bully than a seriously corrupt policeman, stealing as he does from kids, breaking the fingers of Donut when he causes him paperwork.

Most of the police we see have, for the most part, no contact with corruption. We don’t see them resisting it; they just have no contact with it.

It’s not as if there were no police corruption scandals happening in Baltimore during the making of The Wire.

Two Baltimore cops, William King and Antonio Murray, were arrested in 2005, for stealing and re-selling heroin from street dealers. This is not the petty theft and casual sadism of Officer Walker. These guys were doing business.

Police corruption is no secret. The famous Knapp Commission in New York in the 1970s inspired the Serpico movie, and led to a permanent body being set up in 1995, The Commission to Combat Police Corruption. Look at most police forces in western democracies and corruption scandals and commissions litter the landscape: in Australia there have been The Wood Royal Commission in NSW and The Fitzgerald Inquiry in Queensland.

The presence of Ed Norris in The Wire, a controversial figure, convicted of corruption, flags that the issue was not unknown to the writers but that they, perhaps, rather like an embedded reporter, had chosen not gaze too intently at it.

David Simon proudly calls The Wire an anti-cop show, and in so very many fine ways it is – but in choosing not to fully follow through the consequences of the corrupting influence of the war on drugs on the police, The Wire is clearly not anti-cop.

The Wire Roundtable: Cherchez la femme

Posted on by

The Wire may or may not be the Greatest TV Show Of All Time, Now And Forever, In Any Language And Genre, In The Whole World, And Throughout The Whole Extent Of Spacetime — but one thing’s for sure. It’s definitely The Most Praised Show Of All etc. Time, Entertainment Weekly and the Guardian have all labelled it the greatest, as have lots of other folks with and without column space. Metacritic.com assigned the fourth season an aggregate score of 98%, which is higher than the rating for God Himself; more strikingly, it’s even four points higher than the score for Kanye West’s most recent album.

The Wire‘s legion of enthusiasts regularly point to a couple of features that merit especial praise: the show’s realism; its panorama of an entire society at every level; its giving voice to the marginalised and disempowered. Realism: swearing! Panorama: Drugs! Unions! Politicians! Schoolkids! Settling old grudges Journalists! The marginalised: Black people! Gay people! Gay black people!

In interviews during and after the show, creator David Simon consistently claimed the highest ambition for the show and its themes. In particular, the show would

with each season, slice off another piece of the American city, so that by the end of the run, a simulated Baltimore would stand in for urban America, and the fundamental problems of urbanity would be fully addressed.

First season: the dysfunction of the drug war and the general continuing theme of self-sustaining postmodern institutions devouring the individuals they are supposed to serve or who serve them. Second season: the death of work and the destruction of the American working class in the postindustrial era, for which we added the port of Baltimore. Third season: the political process and the possibility of reform, for which we added the City Hall component. Fourth season: equal opportunity, for which we added the public-education system. The fifth and final season will be about the media and our capacity to recognize and address our own realities, for which we will add the city’s daily newspaper and television components.

Throughout the whole show, however, there’s one group of marginalised and disempowered that is not given proper representation; one type of individual that gets eaten by institutions but is not explored; one group which has historically faced, and continues to face, massive inequalities of opportunity.

That’s right: I’m talking about the ladies.

Simon identifies The Wire‘s great theme as “institutions devouring the individuals they are supposed to serve or who serve them”. And throughout all five seasons, the show develops this theme in detail, in a variety of institutional contexts and with a variety of individual players. Institutions fuck over McNulty, Daniels, Bubs, Wallace, D’Angelo, the Sobotkas, Bunny, Randy, Bodie and plenty more besides.

But, from Snot Boogie’s sad demise at the very start to the much-exploited homeless guy at the end, The Wire is singularly unconcerned with how women fare in these institutions, the fates they face, the options open to them.

Consider: by my count, over the course of five seasons, thirty-seven cast names appear in the opening credits. Of these, four are women. These are the actors playing Beadie, Kima, Pearlman, and (!) Alma Gutierrez. Beadie is in the credits only for season 2, despite playing a sizable role in the final season too. Shardene and Snoop never make the credits. By contrast, Burrell, Rawls, Sydnor, Clay Davis, Clarence Royce, Maurice Levy and Chris Partlow do.

Chris Partlow makes the cut and Snoop doesn’t.

(This gender imbalance is presumably, totally unrelated, in any way whatsoever, to the fact that ten out of the eleven writing credits throughout the show are men)

Or consider: of those thirty-seven cast members, the relationship status of three of the women are plot points. Pearlman fucks McNulty and then Daniels; Beadie fucks McNulty; Kima struggles with her (de facto) wife and child. Alma gets nothing, but that’s only because she has no internal life to speak of or, really, any kind of life to speak of, beyond learning at the feet of the great David Simon Gus Haynes.

Sure, much is made of who the guys are fucking, too — McNulty and Omar in particular. (And, of course, if Pearlman is fucking Daniels, then Daniels is fucking Pearlman too). But, for a lot of the male characters, it’s simply not an issue. They may be married or have a girlfriend, but it doesn’t matter much to their character. Prez has a wife onscreen for all of one scene, as I recall; Bodie, Herc and Carv take dates to the movies and that’s about it; Marlo and Avon are mostly asexual; Rawls’ sexuality is a throw-away gag (well, two gags, if you include the graffiti in the homicide toilets); and who the hell knows about Royce, Davis, Burrell, Levy, Sydnor et al. The point isn’t that the show isn’t interested in who the guys are fucking; it’s that the show is much more interested in who the women are fucking.

And once you get beyond the “main” cast — even if you include a couple of extra characters not in the opening credits, such as Shardene, Snoop, Prop Joe, Jay Landsman and the like — it gets even worse. Most of the tertiary female characters are WAGs, would-be WAGs, one-night stands, or mothers. Going down the cast list, if we skip the few women who actually do appear in the opening credits, we get: Snoop; Marla Daniels, who’s fucking Daniels at first and then she’s not; Cheryl (you know, the one with her coupons); Theresa D’Agostino, who fucks McNulty and then tries to fuck Carcetti; Grace Sampson, who used to fuck Cutty; Donette, who fucked D’Angelo and then Stringer; Elena McNulty — look, it’s too depressing to go on.

The biggest missed opportunities comes in season four, with the introduction of the school. Here you have an environment with a lot of women and a lot of girls, the powerful and powerless. Maybe they couldn’t fit in a new major character as a teacher, given that they already had Prez undergoing his learning journey and growing into his new role. Maybe there wasn’t any need. But surely — surely — they could have made one of the four kids that we track a girl?

For the point of season four is, in part, to show the options available to black children in marginal environments. Randy, the budding entrepreneur who ends up traumatised by his glancing contact with crime. Michael, the child of abuse, who’s recruited to crime by way of protecting his family. Namond, who’s too weak for the streets and lucks into a way out. And Dukie, poor Dukie whose fate seems sealed from the moment we see him.

We see what the boys can do, what can become of them, what few roles are offered by the system — the systems — that surround them. But what are the fates for girls? Do they become dealers, junkies, citizens? What specific options do they have that the boys don’t have? Questions not answered by the show; worse, they’re not even asked.

The show isn’t altogether clueless on gender. There’s a nice bit in season four when all the neighbourhood mothers converge on Cutty, as one of the few eligible bachelors going. Or the bit in season one when D’Angelo lets his casual misogyny slip to Shardene. And the instigating incident of season two — the dead sex slaves — suggests a show not entirely uninterested in how women are used by power. But is that enough for a show that aims to reveal an entire society, and how that society grinds down its members? Is that enough for the Greatest TV Show Of All Time?

Or, to quote the great Bunk Moreland: Happy now, bitch?
_________________

The entire Wire roundtable is here.

The Wire Roundtable: Conclusion

Posted on by

I thought for a moment there we were going to have another contribution or two to our Wire roundtable, but it looks as if they didn’t pan out alas. So I thought I’d finish up by highlighting a couple of the more interesting comments.

First, Jason Michelitch has a long discussion of Pryzbylewski.

Pryzbylewski: not about temper, not about mentoring. Anger plays into it, but not in the heat-of-the-moment uncontrollable way. It’s a deeper anger, an anger of resentment and insecurity. Prez in his early days is not acting out of raw temper, or assuming a learned mode of behavior; he is lashing out from a volatile mixture of fragile ego and stark fear. In short, Prez is Ziggy.

If Ziggy’s family connection had been to police rather than stevedores, he’d have shot up his patrol car, put a slug in the wall of his unit’s office, and he damn sure would have clocked a project kid in the eye with the butt of his gun. But Ziggy wasn’t a creature of temper. Ziggy was desperate for respect in the only milieu he knew to look for it. Ziggy was terrified of being proved a failure, a fuckup, a geek, and so he formed a thick layer of humor, bravado, and rage.

A cop acquaintance of mine once said this to me about his profession, and I take it to be true. He said, “About a third of the guys out here, they’re like me. They just want to help people. All the rest of them are the kid that got picked on at school and now he’s got a gun.” When Prez takes that kid’s eye out in the projects in Season One, he’s not doing it because the kid pissed him off. He’s doing it out of anger at the world, and to prove to the world and to himself that HE’S in control now.

It’s only later, after Lester has shown him how he can be competent and respected through the wiretap, that Prez is then confronted by the kid he hurt, and he realizes that he was not in control at all.

And that isn’t the end of his journey, because while Prez finds a new well of confidence and self-respect in his work with Lester, he’s still a cop, and he still carries a gun, and he has not recognized his own flaws sufficiently to make him safe with that responsibility. And so his renewed confidence leads to overconfidence, and in the chase with McNulty, some part of him (subconscious, surely) sees an opportunity to finally achieve that original goal of respect through “manly” police work. That it goes so horribly wrong is Prez’s second wake-up call, the one that finishes the job that the kid with the eyepatch started of shocking Prez into self-awareness. At that point, Prez knows he shouldn’t have been a police, with the power of life and death.

Prez is driven to teaching primarily out of his guilt over the kid from the first season (though there is also an element of him needing to have a career that feeds his ego’s need to be in control. Cops and teachers both wield big swinging dicks, even, or maybe especially, the good ones. And Prez, like all the major characters on the show, is complex. Nothing he does has only ONE motivation).

The Prez that shows up in that classroom, though, has had two huge blows to his sense of self that have resulted in him making an absolute resolution to himself to never let something like the blinding of the kid or the shooting of the cop happen again. Prez’s arc as a teacher is not a wimp learning to be a disciplinarian. It’s someone who has seen what can happen when he lashes out getting over his fear of ever doing so again and learning how to instead exert force (either verbally or physically) in a safe, mature manner. When he disciplines the snatchpops kid in the last episode, it’s through a controlled hand on the shoulder and a stern and unwavering voice of authority.

All of the preceding is why Pryzbylewski’s character arc is my absolute favorite from the show, and why I could not let stand the dismissal of his intense personal growth as mere plothammer.

Jones, One of the Jones Boys on Wallace:

The beating of Johnny Weeks, and Wallace’s role in it, is different from Brandon’s death, and his role in that, in several ways. (1) Johnny is “merely” beaten. Brandon is tortured, mutilated and murdered. (2) Wallace’s participation in the beating occurs in the heat of the moment. His decision to rat on Brandon is dispassionate and calculated. (3) Wallace doesn’t really see the long-term effects of Johnny’s beating. Brandon’s body is displayed in Wallace’s backyard. (4) Punishing cheating junkies is presumably a relatively routine event for Wallace. Participating in a murder is novel, and thus more salient. (5) Wallace’s role in the beating is not crucial; even if he didn’t participate, Johnny would still be beaten by Bodie et al. His role in Brandon’s murder *is* crucial; if Wallace didn’t make that phone call, Brandon wouldn’t be murdered–at least, not at that time. (6) The beating happens in the company of Wallace’s peers. The murder involves him with his superiors, who are adults, and serious–and scary–criminals. (7) Johnny is just a junkie, a figure of contempt. Brandon, although a homo and dope-snatcher, is at least higher in the street hierarchy. (8) Brandon seems closer in age to Wallace. Johnny is indisputably an adult; when Wallace spots Brandon, he is playing pinball at a local hangout. (9) Wallace beats on Johnny. He (kind of) snitches on Brandon. Snitching is worse than beating (exhibit A: Randy Wagstaff). (10) Finally, doesn’t DeAngelo express some qualms about Brandon’s vicious treatment? Boadie couldn’t give a shit, but Wallace takes his moral cues from DeAngelo, to some extent.

Given all these differences, Wallace’s different reactions seem not at all inconsistent. Could the show have made these differences, or Wallace’s thinking about them, more explicit? Sure. But if the show made everything explicit, each season would have been one thousand episodes long.

And Jog on Zach Snyder’s translations of Alan Moore’s epic poetry.

Ugh, the hell with Zach Snyder… not only does he constantly favor flowery look-at-me phrasing at the expense of the text, his Moore translation seemed flatly ignorant the critical aspect of DIALOGUE with the oral tradition Noah mentions. Specifically, Moore’s liberal, detailed quotations from Steve Ditko are so bowdlerized as to render them mere surface decoration, despite being utterly fucking central to the work, down to seemingly tiny sections — Dr. Manhattan’s disastrous encounter with the scribes — referring directly to crucial verses from Ditko’s Captain Atom. And yes yes, the Kalermites will tell you that attribution is difficult in antiquity — where would our classics departments be without “Bob Kane”? — but Ditko, remember, commonly operated with an intent of conversion, to deliberately replace earlier, pagan narratives with substitutes derived from that unfashionable monotheistic bedrock, Mr. A, himself (of course!) parodied in the form of Rorschach, despite the protestations of “Sunday Catholics” with no appreciation of tradition, duly aided and abetted by Mr. Snyder… you see why I’m pissed??

Although, I’ll even read Snyder’s shitty-looking novel this weekend before I sit through one more second of Ayn Rand, the enduring (if limited) popularity of whom can only properly be analogized to the embrace of Tommy Wiseau among particular Victorians… contrary to one million posts online, I found it a relief when she just plopped that dude in front of the camera and had him talk, because she cannot frame a shot to save her life…!

__________________________

This has been a kind of amazing week here, as Joy Delyria and Sean Michael Robinson turned into a meme, linked by everyone from boingboing on down. My statcounter says we had 70,000 hits plus over the course of Thursday and Friday, which is the amount of traffic we usually get in two months. Things have calmed down a little (we only got as much traffic as we usually get in a week and a half yesterday) and our bandwidth has dropped to levels that allow the blog to function again.

So, I wanted to give a big thank you again to Derik Badman, who’s been fighting to keep the blog working and available to readers. Thanks also to Bill Randall and Caroline Small for helping out on the technical level. And thanks to all our contributors, commenters, and readers. It’s been a blast.