Utilitarians Here

The big news this week is that sometime in the next couple of months HU is going to be moving over to TCJ.com. You can find more details at the link…but the short version is that the content will stay the same; only the URL will change.

This week started out with the third part of my discussion of comics, gender, and gayness.

Vom Marlowe expressed her surprised but enthusiastic affection for Marvel Adventures Spider-Man.

I had a more mixed reaction to the Giffen/Hamner revamp of Blue Beetle (check out comments for a dissent from popular and talented artist Gene Ha.

Richard sneered at Strange Tales and Wednesday Comics alike.

I claimed that Andy Helfer’s Malcolm X is better than Crumb’s Kafka.

Kinukitty praised Waning Moon despite the squicky boy in cat ears.

Vom Marlowe explained how librarians have made it easier to find graphic novels.

And finally this week’s music download featuring everyone from Bobby Gentry to Frost Like Ashes is up. If you missed last weeks shoegaze extravaganza, it’s still available here.

We’re getting started a smidge late this week, but tomorrow we’ll begin a roundtable on race in comics, featuring discussions of Marston’s Wonder Woman (of course), Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four, American Born Chinese, and more. The estimable Steven Grant will be guest-blogging as part of the roundtable…so check back throughout the week!

Utilitarians Everywhere

I have an article on Reason about the new movie, Men Who Stare At Goats.

It’s no secret that New Age mumbo-jumbo is the driving force behind every third Hollywood movie, from Field of Dreams to Fight Club to Star Wars. The Men Who Stare At Goats may begin by mocking this impulse, but it’s careful to leave itself an out: In the end, it never firmly declares that Lyn’s powers are bullshit. Indeed, if the movie begins with skepticism enlivened by a cutesy hedge of belief, it ends with full-on gullibility, gilded with an occasional patina of irony. Thus, in the climactic scene, army soldiers inadvertently tripping on LSD wander around harmlessly while guru Bill Django frees captured Iraqis from their torture chambers. As he flings open the door, he triumphantly declares “in the name of the New Earth Army and loving people everywhere, I’m liberating you!”

Again, if the analogy were to work, the freed Iraqis should instantly be shot—possibly by some of those tripping soldiers carrying guns.

My review of the 1950s Bill Monroe boxet from JSP is at Metropulse.

And my review of a 70s kraut novelty record, Dracula’s Music Cabaret is over at Madeloud.

Other Links
In response to my Comics in the Closet series, Gene Phillips makes an entertaining case for the gayness of Captain America.

Steven Grant has a nice discussion of the Comics Journal’s heydey in light of the recent announcement that it is going to a bi-annual format.

Andrew Sullivan has a really lovely piece on race in the U.S. from his British perspective.

On HU

This week started off with my two part discussion of comics, gender, masculinity, and the closet: Part One,and Part Two.

Richard reviewed the DVD Superman/Batman: Public Enemies which was very bad.

I reviewed Concrete: Strange Armor and Concrete: Human Dilemma which weren’t that bad, but weren’t good, either.

Kinukitty reviewed Foreign Love Affair. which she appreciated despite the fundoshi.

And Suat finished up the week wondering why on earth the critics like The Imposter’s Daughter.

And this week’s download with lots of shoegaze. You can also get last week’s if you missed it.

Off HU

I didn’t publish anything this week, alas, but I did get involved in a couple of comments threads which might be entertaining if you like that sort of thing.

Brief flame war here (keep scrolling)

This is a fun conversation about Quentin Tarantino, contemporary literature, Hemingway, C.S. Lewis, and other stuff.

Other Links

Tucker reviews comics as if he were French writer Michel Houllebec. I wish I’d thought of that.

Sean Collins is wrong, wrong, wrong about the abstract comics anthology. I really liked his review, though.

I haven’t read The Big Khan, but I suspect reading Chris Mautner’s snarky review is more fun anyway.

Robert Alter provides what is probably the definitive commentary on Crumb’s Genesis. Thanks to Suat for the link.

Matt Yglesias compares racism in Europe and the U.S

In the Hood

This week we added longtime commenter Richard Cook to our blogging roster. Richard started off the week by sneering efficiently at the new Spider Woman motion comic.

I followed that up by sneering at all editorial cartoonists and particularly Jules Feiffer.

Vom Marlowe, not to be outdone, sneered at Supergirl.

Kinukitty — a beacon of sunshine and light — broke the streak by speaking with affection and kindness of the manga yaoi Prince Charming.

Perhaps inspired by such cheeriness, Vom Marlowe came back to post about her love of manga how-to books, and of ink.

And finally Suat finished up the week with the second part of his essay on Benoît Peeters’ and François Schuiten’s Philosophical Cities series. The first part was on The Great Wall of Samaris, if you missed it. The second part focuses on Fever in Urbicand.

This week’s music download with folk and bluegrass and German vampire music and Thai pop and whatnot is here

And if you missed it, last week’s music download filled with cheesy contemporary country and other songs of heartbreak is here. Get it before Mediafire decides to randomly delete it.

Over the River and Through the Hood

At Splice Today, I have a long review of Carl Wilson’s “Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste,” his book for 33 1/3 about trying to love Celine Dion.

Wilson’s book, then, turns out to not really be a polemic in the rockist/popist internecine war. Instead, it’s a statement of faith—though of faith in what isn’t entirely clear. Democracy, perhaps? Art? Celine herself? Terry Eagleton comments in Reason, Faith, and Revolution that “certain of our commitments are constitutive of who we are, we cannot alter them without what Christianity traditionally calls a conversion, which involves a lot more than just swapping one opinion for another.” Wilson seems to be almost inverting this, proposing, or hoping, that if we can but treat our opinions as constitutive of whom we are, we can experience a conversion merely by changing them.

At the Chicago Reader I review Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book Bright-Sided.

The left is in love with false consciousness. Ever since Karl Marx called religion an opiate, progressives have been pulling on their muckraking boots, breaking out the bullhorns, and shouting “Wake up!” at the supposedly somnolent masses. While the paranoid right tends to see its enemies as corrupt conspirators, the left prefers to assume its opponents are merely dim bulbs, just one well-argued monograph away from enlightenment.

I review the Numero Group’s great 70s-80s collection of male singer-songwriter folk, Wayfaring Strangers: Lonesome Heroes over at Metropulse.

Beyond the Valley of the Hood

Some random, not necessarily timely links from around the comics blogosphere:

Mark Andrew on the Haney/Aparo Brave and Bold run.

Jones, one of the Jones boys on continuity ( and more here.)

Robert Stanley Martin makes the case that Julius Schwartz was the one really responsible for Alan Moore’s Superman story, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow.

I’m still holding out for Tucker to actually smear feces on Kramer’s Ergot 7, but till then, this is quite entertaining.

And hey, here’s something random: a Thai pop video!

Update: Not that anyone actually cares but me, but the singer in this video is Pamela Bowden. She seems to have gotten her start in the 90s doing dance-pop, and then moved into a more ballady style called loog thung, I think. I think this song is off her album E-nang Dance volume 1, maybe? There are a bunch of youtube videos of her performing, but hardly any information in English that I could track down anyway. I found a website which seemed to be selling her music and ordered some…we’ll see if it ever arrives.

I love this song though.

Update 2: She’s native Thai, apparently, but of Australian descent, according to one YouTube commenter.

Hoods Here

This week was devoted for the most part to our bande desinee roundtable. Special thanks to Derik Badman for his special guest contribution. Please check out his own blog, won’t you?

Despite my ongoing struggles with mediafire, I did post a mix last week, including Sonic Youth, experimental chinese music, Michio Kurihara, the inevitable Chopin, and other dreamy drony things. Download it now before mediafire makes it disappear in their mysterious way.

Hoods There

Bunch of stuff this week. First, I have an article about why Bob Wills is country and not jazz over at Splice Today.

The point here isn’t that Wills was ripping off Count Basie like Elvis ripped off Jackie Wilson. Rather, that “ripping off” doesn’t really do justice to the pervasive way in which race and marketing have affected American music. Because the fact is that Bob Wills is different from Count Basie. He used different instruments, he played different songs, he didn’t use the same musicians. (Segregation meant he couldn’t have, even if he wanted to.) Those differences could have been less important than the similarities, but, because of history and marketing and race, they weren’t. Similarly, Elvis is different from Jackie Wilson, and contemporary R&B is different from contemporary country. How music gets labeled affects who listens to it, who loves it, who uses it, and, thus, what it is.

My interview with Andee at the amazing San Francisco record store Aquarius Records is online at Madeloud. Here’s an excerpt, including a little bit that didn’t make the published version:

Me: Looking at these lists online, you sort of get the feeling that the store itself must be gigantic. How big is the store? How many records do you have in stock at one time?

Andee: That’s funny. It really does. And I sometimes feel bad when someone finally gets to visit, having come all the way from Japan or the UK, I feel like we should apologize for how small the store is, but almost always, people dig it. It’s small-ISH, but there’s tons of records, cds, plants in the windows, posters and flyers, and crap all over the walls, doors and posts and windows have been painted by artists, there are video games (a Tron, a Rastan and a Joust, and we usually have a Ghosts And Goblins, but that one’s broken), there’s good music playing, it’s just really comfortable and worn and home-y, the way a record store should be. I love places like Amoeba and Virgin and Tower, but that’s a whole different vibe, places like aQuarius are more inviting to just hang out, browse, shoot the shit with whoever is working, play some Joust. I like it like that. As for how many records we have in the store, only a fraction of what’s on the website. we’re usually full to capacity, but the cool thing about visiting is, there’s always plenty of stuff that is NOT on the site, maybe stuff we haven’t reviewed yet, stuff that we were only able to get a few copies, not enough to post on the site, some stuff that just won’t make it on the site, for whatever reason, not to mention TONS of awesome used stuff, and new arrivals and more…..

Also Splice Today has reprinted my review of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, which ran some years back in the Baffler. (I think it was my first published essay, actually.) And I have a review of a Tommy Cash reissue at Metropulse.

Hoods Everywh…Oh, Wait, Those Aren’t Hoods

A note on this website points out that the deevolutionizer in this issue of Wonder Woman apparently inspired Devo. Who knew?

Diana Kingston-Gabai explains that crossovers still suck.

This is a great fucking essay by Terry Eagleton about what atheists are stupid and god is great, even if he isn’t real.

And so the very act of attempting to close history down has sprung it open again. Both at home and globally, economic liberalism rides roughshod over peoples and communities, and in the process triggers just the kind of violent social and cultural backlash that liberalism is least capable of handling. In this sense, too, terrorism highlights certain contradictions endemic to liberal capitalism. We have seen already that pluralistic liberal societies do not so much hold beliefs as believe that people should be allowed freely to hold beliefs. The summum bonum is to leave believers to get on with it unmolested. Such a purely formal or procedural approach to belief necessitates keeping entrenched faiths or identities at a certain ironic arm’s length.

Yet this value—liberal society’s long, unruly, eternally inconclusive argument—also brings vulnerability. A tight national consensus, desirable in the face of external attack, is hard to pull off in liberal democracies, and not least when they turn multicultural. Lukewarmness about belief is likely to prove a handicap when one is confronted with a full-bloodedly metaphysical enemy. The very pluralism you view as an index of your spiritual strength may have a debilitating effect on your political authority, especially against zealots who regard pluralism as a form of intellectual cowardice. The idea, touted in particular by some Americans, that Islamic radicals are envious of Western freedoms is about as convincing as the suggestion that they are secretly hankering to sit in cafés smoking dope and reading Gilles Deleuze.

This is actually the last chapter of Eagleton’s latest book, “Reason, Faith and Revolution,” which is amazing. Best purchase on Amazon I’ve made in a good long while. If you want to check it out, it’s here.

On the Hooded Utilitarian

The week started off with my review of Wonder Woman #18 of the Marston/Peter run, which I compared to John Carpenter’s Christine.

Vom Marlowe continued her perusal of Batwoman.

I sneered at The Long Halloween.

KInukitty explored her tortured love affair with Kazuna Uchida’s I Shall Never Return.

And I reviewed the collected black and white Zot.

And you can see the tracklist and download my Thrash by Thrash mix here.

Next week, by the by, we are doing a bande desinee roundtable, with special guest blogger Derik Badman.

Utilitarians Everywhere

Over at Comixology I compare comics sales figures to those of other entertainment products.

Also to my surprise, big-event books appear to actually outsell big-event CDs and DVDs. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sold more than 8 million copies on its first day on sale in the U.S., which makes Lil’ Wayne’s 2.8 million albums over a year look pretty puny. And, of course, 8 million copies is just about the total bookstore sales for all graphic novels in all of 2008, according to Brian Hibbs’ figures. Obviously, Harry Potter is exceptional…but Dan Brown’s most recent book was also selling in the hundreds of thousands on its first couple of days. Breaking Dawn, the last Twilight book, sold 1.3 million copies on the first day.

I talk about some of my favorite less successful contemporary R&B albums from the last ten years or so at Madeloud. Among them, Brandy’s Afrodisiac:

The commercial failure of this album is altogether a mystery. Brandy and Timbaland — how could that go wrong? The problem isn’t the music, anyway; this is indisputably Brandy’s best album…and it may be Timbaland’s as well. Brandy’s rich, resonant, slightly burred vocals fit perfectly with the washes of sound in Timbaland’s mature style. Far from being overpowered, Brandy instead becomes the most potent effect in Timbaland’s arsenal. On “Who Is She 2 U,” Timbaland opens with some patented funky/goofy stuttering and then Brandy slides in with her patented heart-stopping vocals, one of the sexiest sounds in R & B. The whole album’s like that; idiosyncratic genius and funky wit fused with absolutely unironic heartbreak and desire. Maybe Brandy’s fans just weren’t ready for her to go avant-garde and Timbaland’s weren’t ready to see him embrace the sincerity of the slow jam. Which is said fan’s loss; this is one of the great syntheses of black music in the last twenty years at least.

I review The Anthology of Experimental Chinese Music at Madeloud as well.

And I have an enthusiastic review of the great new Mariah Carey album up at Metropulse.

Other Links

I’ve been reading a bit of rock critic Carl Wilson. Some highlights are his article on why only hipsters make fun of hipsters, and also on why for indie rock class is more important than race.

Shannon Garrity is doing an epic series of posts on yaoi; this one about why yaoi is popular is a balanced and thoughtful look at the subject.

On the Hooded Utilitarian

This week started out with me posting on Marston/Peter Wonder Woman #17, the Sailor Moon manga and what parents talk about in the park when they talk about comics.

Vom Marlowe did the first in a series of posts about Batwoman.

Suat wondered why on earth people like to collect racist comic art.

And finally Kinukitty wrote about the yaoi manga Future Lovers.

Utilitarians Everywhere

I’ve got a long review of Jennifer’s Body up at the Chicago Reader. Here’s a quote:

Jennifer’s Body is different. The film centers not on Jennifer and her male oppressors/victims but on Jennifer and her BFF, Anita, or “Needy.” Jennifer and Needy have remained friends since nursery school, even though Jennifer has blossomed into Fox, one of the sexiest women in the world, and Needy is played by the merely gorgeous Amanda Seyfried—a geek by Hollywood standards. Jennifer is shallow, dominant, and demanding; she drags Needy away from her boyfriend and out to bars, verbally shoots down guys, and runs around after indie rockers best left alone. Needy is sensitive, smart, and cautious, always careful not to upstage her friend, and . . . well, you know the drill. Over the course of the movie, Needy realizes that she and Jennifer have grown apart, and that the friend she once loved is now a jealous bitch, not to mention a demon from the pits of hell who wants to eat Chip (Johnny Simmons), Needy’s sweet, long-suffering boyfriend.

Also, I’ll be speaking at Randolph-Macon college on Wonder Woman at the end of October. I’ll probably announce it again closer to the date so you can all leap on planes to attend.

Other Links

I found a really entertaining comics blog by one Michael Buntag called NonSensical Words. Among the articles I enjoyed: a takedown of the recent Wonder Woman arc and an essay about the mistreatment of Captain Marvel.

Jog’s lovely review of the upcoming Johnny Ryan battle comic.

I like this Wonder Woman drawing.

Haven’t read all of this, but it looks like a great Alan Moore interview.

And finally an awesome retro 80s video by Toya. B-boys in space!

Goodbye

As folks have seen, the biggest and saddest news on the Hooded Utilitarian this week is the departure of Tom Crippen. Tom came onto the blog almost exactly a year ago, though it feels like he’s been here forever. He’s been a tireless blogger, about everything from comics to politics to Star Trek. While he’s been here, his lovely, thoughtful, and often mean-spirited (and I mean that in the best way) prose has really defined the Hooded Utilitarian.

If you haven’t read much of Tom’s work, I’d urge you to look back through the archives; there’s just tons of wonderful material. Some of my favorites:

-his description of an imaginary Sandman collaboration between Neil Gaiman and Jack Kirby.

-his paean to his days as a Marvel Comics collector

— his contributions to the Helter Skelter roundtable, both in his own posts and in comments.

—his attempts to understand Oliphant

-and maybe the gem of gems, his description of Michael Corleone as a Mary Sue. It’s one of the pieces of writing that made me feel like starting the blog was worth it.

Almost all of Tom’s posts, with the exception of a few at the beginning, can be found here. You can also read him semi-regularly in the Comics Journal, where he writes a stellar column called “The Post-Post-Human Review about super-hero comics. I believe he’s got a long essay on Alan Moore and Watchmen coming up there, which I’m eager to see.

I hope we’ll see Tom occasionally in comments still, and I really hope he finds more outlets for his writing, either online or in print. In any case, I feel very lucky to have had him here for as long as we did, both as a co-blogger and a friend.

On the Hooded Utilitarian

This week was devoted to our roundtable on Sandman. Some of us were disappointed, others still loved it, and lots of folks weighed in in comments.

There was also a long post on the inkdestroyedmybrush site in response which is worth checking out.

Utilitarians Everywhere

Vom Marlowe reviews Killer Unicorns over on her LiveJournal page.

Kristy Valenti catches me in an embarrassing error over at comixology. It’s like the Dave Johnson thing all over again…except this time, I really do kind of care.

I have a short review of Jennifer’s Body at the Chicago Reader.

An essay at Splice Today in praise of lousy art.

On the contrary, if any contemporary figure attains to Bataille’s ideal of pure sacrifice it is one particular kind of artist—that is, the failed artist. Note that by “failed” here, I do not mean the artist who has missed commercial success, but has underground cred or aesthetic bonafides, or who is discovered and lionized after his death. On the contrary. When I say, “failed” I mean “failed.” I mean an artist who profligately, copiously, obsessively works on creating objects that are, literally—by everyone and forever—unwanted. Creators of tuneless songs who never achieve dissonance; of ugly canvases too self-conscious to be outsider art; of doggerel verse too banal for even the high school literary magazine-in them, the excess of the universe is annihilated. Genius, love, life—they are exchanged for neither lucre, nor cred, nor beauty, but are instead simply thrown away. Failed art is permanently wasted, and it is therefore sacred.

I have a review of Observatory’s Dark Folke. It got kind of chopped down for space, so I thought I’d reprint the full version here:

The Observatory
Dark Folke
Self-released

Though this Singapore band may have placed the word “folk” on their album, that doesn’t really capture their sound. Certainly, there are elements of freak folk here; “A Shuffler in the Mud” has sparse lovely harmonies and a gentle acoustic sway that wouldn’t be out of place on a Devandra Banhardt album. Other tracks, like “Lowdown,” though, trip merrily etherwards, heading for the brainy, drony psychedlia of Ghost. For that matter, “Decarn” is almost heavy enough at points to qualify as metal, locking into a head-thrashing trudge while keyboards burble overhead and somebody shrieks from the pits of Hades for a couple of bars before handing it over again to the gentle-voiced harmonizers.

The album feels like a delicate arrangement of shifting textures drawn upon and then erased from a black canvas. Omicron, for example, starts with an acoustic guitar strum that is allowed to fade almost completely; then there’s a second strum, also followed by silence, and then a percussive keyboard figure takes over, building with other instruments and vocals, until again it fades almost to silence…and we go back to acoustic guitar. The track is built around changes in direction, but it’s not the busy post-modern bricolage of the Boredoms. Rather, it’s modernist, fetishizing space and silence. If The Observatory doesn’t adore Webern, I will cease staring at the hardbound liner notes, graced by Jason Bartlett’s Pus-head meets Virginia Lee Burton line-drawings, and eat the whole package instead.

Other Links

Alan David Doane reviews the abstract comics anthology and searches for Sentinels in my contribution. His son finds them.

Comics creator Dewayne Slightweight performs an amazing rendition of Were You There When They Crucified My Lord.