If Aggression Is the New Pink, Does That Mean We All Have to Hit Things?

Posted on May 7, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Yesterday, Chris Gavaler wrote about female superheroes, arguing that they’ve been around for a while, that people of all genders love them, and that it’s about time we got to see a film dedicated to watching female superheroes hit things. Chris cited a study by Kaysee Baker and Arthur Raney that showed that, in superhero cartoons, women and men behaved just about the same — they hit things, they saved people, and so forth. Baker and Raney found this a little disturbing; they were worried that heroes of either gender had to be more masculine and aggressive to be heroic. To which Chris responds, well, who says that aggression has to be masculine? “Because if aggression is now gender-neutral, how can being aggressive also be “more masculine”?”

Chris has a point — and that point is a neat summation of empowerment feminism, which is the feminist perspective which says that women should be able to do everything men do, especially if that “everything men do” includes holding and wielding power. The lean in movement is empowerment feminism, and so (as Chris shows) is the enthusiasm for female superhero movies and the desire to see Hawkgirl bash in some baddie with her mace. America is really into power (we’re a superpower, after all) and so it’s not a surprise that empowerment feminism is generally speaking the most popular manifestation of feminism.

It’s so popular, in fact, that it can be easy to forget that it doesn’t necessarily appeal to everyone all the time. But here, at least, is one dissenting voice.

[Wonder Woman’s] creator had…seen straight into my heart and understood the secret fears of violence hidden there. No longer did I have to pretend to like the “Pow!” and “Crunch!” style of Captain Marvel or the Green Hornet. No longer did I have nightmares after reading ghoulish comics filled with torture and mayhem, comics made all the more horrifying by their real-life setting in World War II…. Here was a heroic person who might conquer with force, but only a force that was tempered by love and justice.

That’s Gloria Steinem, describing her relief at discovering the original Marston/Peter Wonder Woman comics, in which, as she intimates, there weren’t a ton of fisticuffs and violence. Instead, Wonder Woman tied the bad guys up with her rope of love — and was tied up by them. Loving submission and bondage games, yes; bashing people’s heads in with maces, not so much.

Chris rightly points out that there isn’t anything essentially masculine about violence; there are plenty of women throughout history who have enjoyed hurting other folks. And yet, at the same time, you don’t just get out from under millenia of culture by having Scarlet Johansson kick somebody. Violence and aggression and war have traditionally been encoded male. Lots of feminists, from Steinem to Virginia Woolf to William Marston, have pointed out that masculinity is wrapped up in an ethos of force and violence — that being a man means, in many respects, being violent. And while one reaction to that can be, with empowerment feminism, to point out that women can be violent too, another approach is to say that the non-violence which has traditionally been associated with women is not an aberration or a failing, but a resource. Women do not have to be embarrassed or ashamed that they don’t like Captain Marvel hitting people; rather, they can point out that hitting people is possibly not such a great way to solve problems, and that equating goodness manliness and heroism with hitting people is, perhaps, a failure of imagination which can, under the right circumstances, get people needlessly killed.

Along those lines, one of the things that I most enjoy about the new Ms. Marvel series by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona is how uninterested it is in uber-violence. Three issues in, and our teen protagonist, Kamala Khan, has encountered exactly zero supervillains. After she gains her shape-shifting powers, the first thing she does is to turn her hand giant (embiggen!) and fish a damsel in distress out of a lake. The damsell in question fell in the lake after her boyfriend knocked her in — not in the process of a sexual assault, as you’d think if you’d read too many superhero comics, but simply out of stupidity and drunken horsing around. This is a world in which heroes exist and heroism matters, but it’s not a world in which that heroism is necessarily linked to violence.

In issue #3, Kamala does have her first fight. She sees her friend/sweetie-in-waiting Bruno getting held up at the convenience store where she works, and (after trying to call for help and discovering her cell phone is out of batteries) she transforms into Ms. Marvel and starts swinging with her giant embiggened fist.

Sort of. The robber is Bruno’s brother, and he’d already given up on the theft before Kamala barged in. She easily defeats him, crushing him in with that fist (“you’re squeezing really hard!”)…but not before she does far more property damage than he ever could have managed by himself. And then, after she lets him go (he’s promised to apologize and never come back) he accidentally shoots her. The last image of the comic is of Ms. Marvel sitting on the ground, her giant hand extended out in front of her, looking shocked and confused, an iconic hero reduced to a confused adolescent girl, as the guy she was saving freaks out and the “villain” sits off to the side looking at the gun in his hand in horror.

My suspicion is that Ms. Marvel is going to discover that her rubbery hide is effectively bullet proof, and hopefully all will end more or less well. But it’s rather nice to have a superhero story where violence ends up being, not a solution, but a complication.

Ms. Marvel, in other words, critiques super-hero violence — and the reason it’s able to do that is absolutely in part because the series is not just a superhero story, but a girl YA coming of age story. The narrative is interested in Kamala having adventures, definitely, but it’s also interested in her figuring out who she is, which means (among other things) working out her relationship with her (shape shifting, sometimes adult Caucasian va-va-voom superhero, sometimes adolescent Muslim girl) body and discovering that her annoying good geeky friend is in love with her. Lee and Ditko couldn’t figure out how to make Spider-Man a man except through violence and trauma and more violence. G. Willow Wilson, though, is drawing on a narrative tradition quite different from boys’ adventure, which means that for her, growing up doesn’t need to mean watching your dad die and beating up his killer.

Ms. Marvel has been exceedingly popular (it keeps selling out at my local comics store) — but, given the low sales of even really popular comics, it seems unlikely that it will be turned into a superhero movie any time soon. Still,it’s worth noting, perhaps, that other superhero stories about women on the big screen — the Hunger Games, say, or Twilight (where Bella gets to be a superhero by the end) are significantly more ambivalent about violence, its effects, and its efficacy than the standard Marvel/DC superhero/supervillain thump-fests tend to be. Maybe that’s because they’re working to appeal to women (and for that matter men) like Gloria Steinem, for whom narratives of violence are alienating rather than empowering.

Aggression is the New Pink

Posted on May 6, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

If nothing else, at least the Captain America sequel solidified the call for a Black Widow movie. According to Justin Craig at Fox News, Scarlett Johansson “is quickly becoming the smartest, toughest female action star. . . . Forget Captain America 3 or The Avengers 2, it’s time ScarJo gets her very own Marvel franchise.” Slate’s Dana Stevens even thinks Johansson’s “dryly funny Natasha at times comes perilously close to being … a well-developed female character?” That’s high praise in a genre bereft of leading women.

Why are Batman and Superman onto their third film incarnations, while Wonder Wonder still wallows in 70s TV? Presumably Warner Brothers’ hiring of actress Gal Gadot for the Man of Steel sequel will change that, but the company is making no promises for a stand-alone venture. When asked about her own movie prospects, Johansson had to writhe her way around Marvel’s non-commitment: “Sure, we talk about it all the time. You know, I think it’s something that, um, again I think Marvel is is certainly, um, listening, and if, you know, working with them for several years now, you kind of see how, ah, they respond to the audience, um, demand I think for something like that.”

You’d think Marvel and Warner never heard of Jennifer Lawrence or the profits Lionsgate is earning from Hunger Games. Not that Lawrence is the leader of a new trend. Her cartoon counterparts changed gender barriers a decade ago. I’m looking at a 2007 study by Kaysee Baker and Arthur Raney, “Equally Super?: Gender-Role Stereotyping of Superheroes in Children’s Animated Programs.” Even though they’d read one 2004 study that found “no significant differences in aggression between male and female characters,” they still predicted that “Male and female character will be portrayed in significantly different and gender-role stereotypical ways.” They were wrong. Yes, men outnumbered women almost two-to-one, but those men were no longer portrayed as more intelligent, brave, dominant, technical, or task-oriented. And those women were no longer portrayed as more dependent, jealous, romantic, affectionate, sensitive, domestic, damsel-prone, follower-minded, or likely to cry. And both groups “were portrayed as virtually equal in terms of physical aggression.”

If you don’t remember what cartoon superheroes were romping around TV in 2007, I do. My son and daughter had recently grown out of Teen Titans and Justice League, but Cartoon Network was keeping both teams alive in reruns. So, yes, I remember Hawkgirl clubbing the shit out of Martian spacecraft with that mace of hers, and Raven could have dropped the Titan Tower on Robin’s head any time she liked. “One way to interpret these findings,” write Baker and Raney, “would be to proclaim that female superheroes are finally breaking down the gender-based stereotypes that have permeated children’s cartoons for decades.” Instead, the authors spin their findings in the opposite direction: “Adding the masculine trait of aggression to a character who is already portrayed as having traditional feminine traits such as being beautiful, emotional, slim, and attractive, while also losing other more prominent feminine stereotypes (i.e., domesticity, passivity), might suggest that to be heroic, one has to be more masculine, regardless of gender.” Although the authors use the term “masculine” (meaning socially determined) rather than “male” (biologically), I still sense a hint of essentialist nostalgia for those good ole days when men were men and women were, you know, not men. Because if aggression is now gender-neutral, how can being aggressive also be “more masculine”?

However Baker and Raney interpret their data, news of their findings hasn’t revolutionized the culture. There’s a hell of lot more than a hint of essentialist nostalgia in the comments section for a Walking Dead review at the movie blog. When Darren Mooney criticized Tony Kirkman for presenting old school gender attitudes as “unquestioned near-universal truth,” a reader responded: “Seems fairly natural that the group would default to the standard lineup, where men protect the women. In case you haven’t noticed, men are far more aggressive and stronger by nature.”

Don’t tell Gal Gadot. Sure, she looks like a skinny little thing, but after winning Miss Israel in 2004 the next Wonder Woman served two years in the Israel Defense Forces. Israel is one of the few countries that requires military service for both genders—and since a 2000 amendment to the law, that’s meant women having an equal right “to serve in any role in the IDF,” including in combat. The new gender norm has made it across the West Bank border too. The Presidential Guards, the most elite Palestinian military force, currently includes 22 female commandos-in-training. They even look like superheroines since their combat fatigues come with headscarves.

The toy industry is catching on too. The New York Times reported in March: “Toy makers have begun marketing a more aggressive line of playthings and weaponry for girls–inspired by a succession of female warrior heroes like Katniss, the Black Widow of The Avengers, Merida of Brave and now Tris of the book and new movie Divergent–even as the industry clings to every shade of pink.” Actually, the Nerf Rebelle Heartbreaker Exclusive Golden Edge Bow looks purple to me, but it still gets child psychologist Sharon Lamb’s approval: “I don’t see this as making girls more aggressive, but instead as letting girls know that their aggressive impulses are acceptable and they should be able to play them out.”

Meanwhile DC and Marvel, those vanguards of radical feminism, continue to dither over the box office viability of any superhero movie starring a woman. Because, you know, women are, uh, not naturally, um, like that.

On Lions and Tigers And Bears And Wine

Posted on May 5, 2014 by Kailyn Kent

Panel from Sean K’s ‘My First Panic Attack,’ 2011

For obvious reasons, American children are not introduced to a ‘canon’ of great wines in school. Instead, we grow up sifting through culture for cues and shorthands to help us decide what to drink. Some men tend to drink red exclusively, fearing that white is feminine. People stay away from Merlot in part because it was disparaged in the movie Sideways, (despite the fact that the protagonist’s most prized possession is a bottle of a Merlot based wine.) Buyers stick to famous place-names like Bordeaux, Chianti and Napa, while avoiding lesser known regions. At the same time, they’ll call just about any sparkling wine ‘Champagne,’ even if it wasn’t grown and made there. In the end, people prefer to buy by varietal, like ‘Cabernet Sauvignon’ or ‘Pinot Noir,’ rather than the growing region. Most people wouldn’t be able to point to Bordeaux on a map, and if they haven’t been there, they don’t care about it. But they’ve had a ‘Cab’ before, and know they liked it, and hear good things about it, so what the heck.

What does a winery do when they are not from a famous region? Or making wines from lesser known varietals? How do consumers differentiate one Cab from another? The people who have the most money and time to figure out these questions are large, multi-million dollar wine companies. Additionally, they ask, how can a large mass-producer disguise the fact that there is nothing special about their wine? The answer: to market it kind of like a book– or a gimmick at Spencer’s Gifts. Slap a cool sounding name on it, and an appealing image, and send it to market. People will want to buy it, because the name is a hoot, and its stacked in a pyramid, so it must be a big deal. To be honest, most people don’t have a specific reason for getting a Bordeaux, so why not get the one with the crazy label instead?

In 2000, the bulk-bottled Australian import Yellowtail arrived on American store shelves. It was cheap, and had a stylized Kangaroo on the label. Half cartoon, half Aboriginal sketch, the kangaroo was sophisticated enough for a dinner-party, but ridiculous enough to call attention to itself. Yellowtail did not start the ‘critter label’ fad, but it does exemplify it. Little Penguin, Smoking Loon, Dancing Bull and Gato Negro come to mind, as does Tussock Jumper, where every varietal in the line is symbolized by a different animal wearing a red sweater. Some of the best-known luxury wineries, like Screaming Eagle and Duckhorn and Frogs Leap, preceded this trend, yet profit from and increasingly engage in it.

Critter labels soon drew the ire and exasperation of wine critics, disgusted that so much attention could be drummed up for such mass-produced plonk. The marketing strategy seemed infantile and manipulative: people like animals, and like to purchase things with animals on them. Critter labels are so stupid they’re savvy– they play into our earliest associations with the countries that supply bulk wine, like Australia, South Africa, Spain and Argentina. We may not know much about these countries, but we’ve been watched Bugs Bunny bull-fight from birth, and grew up identifying Australia with kangaroos. France and Italy don’t have signature animals, but they don’t need them either; we associate France with wine, not with roosters. (Yet Le Vielle Ferme displays a prominent rooster on the label, in any case.)

For all that’s been said against critter labels, and for their weird colonial baggage, (Australia= exotic animals!) at least they sort-of, sometimes hint at the provenance of a wine, and insist that this is important information for the consumer. In most industries, this is a laughable anachronism. Who cares where one’s toothpaste or phone come from? Yet with fine wines, the place of origin is the reason it will taste a certain way, and when you smell it, remind you of certain things, and highlight different kinds of memories. The place determines how the wine will be meaningful to you, in and of itself. With bulk wines, not so much. Too many grapes from too many places went into it, and the wine has been stripped of its unique characteristics, so as to ensure shelf life and uniformity. These wines can be good, and are dependable, but not particularly meaningful. Like toothpaste. So its no surprise that the industry has developed another method, where the origin and varietals are incidental, and the brand and concept becomes the only thing that matters. In order for this to work, the brand has to be alluring, a little shocking, and “share-worthy.”

The shamelessly trendy marketing strategy is now the creepy label.

creepylabel_1

The Prisoner might be the king of creepy labels. It was originally created by Orin Swift, who has a whole line of disturbing labels, featuring knives and dismembered mannequins and jarring Dadaist collages. At Weilands in Columbus, OH, I was pleased to find The Prisoner posed against JC Cellar’s The Impostor– had the store actually sorted them this way? Then I looked around me:

What is this, Halloween? Even labels I wouldn’t have found creepy beforehand begin to seem a little nocturnal, and frightening. Slo Down’s Sexual Chocolate suddenly looks like it had been scrawled by a demented person. Sans Liege’s Groundwork appeared to be straight out of a Brothers Quay animation. Below them sat 19 Crimes, (opportunistically displaying another prisoner on the label,) and the ubiquitous Apothic Red at the bottom of the shelf. Copolla’s Zoetrope recalled a Kara Walker silhouette. Even critter labels like the Coniglio bunny, and Dashe’s monkey, appeared insidious. And look at all those black capsules, lined up together like a row of fascist uniforms.

It’s hard not to see parallels in pop culture at large– like the rise in vampire and zombie properties. There’s the Golden Age of Television, which often can be reduced to the Golden Age of Gritty Shows About Conflicted Sociopaths. Turn on the TV, and you’re as likely to find a show about a witch coven or serial killer as a sitcom. ‘Witch house‘ is arguably a musical genre, (or at least a style,) and artists like Future Islands and Tyler, the Creator physically menace their audiences. “Epic battle” style orchestrations straight out of Lord of the Rings grind alongside the hours of run-up footage to the Superbowl, and the entirety of the Olympics. Dimly lit, heavily paneled Speakeasy bars are popping up like daisies. Since the mid to late 2000s, everything must have gravitas, roiling drama, tainted love.

Why not wine too? Its not a far leap of the imagination. In movies, wine is most often drunk by cruel, corrupted villains. More positively, a glass of wine denotes sophistication and mastery– which narratively belong to the bad-guy, not the girl or boy-next-door. Creepy labels play into this understanding.

They also make wine fun. Creepy labels are rebellious, because they are not quite classy. Yet more than anything, they are nostalgic. They are just as accessible as critter labels. What is this flood of dark, gritty imagery, if not an appeal to take the things we loved (and feared) as children seriously? No one ever needs to grow up, because ghost stories and Batman and Harry Potter are for adults. And children’s pajamas. At the same time.

Creepy labels are also a way of making wine a little more guy-friendly. Women drink wine alongside villains. For instance, The Drinks Business recently reported “Men Fear Ridicule Over Ordering Wine” as a headline. Meanwhile, darkness and femininity have been equated for eons. Edgy male characters can appropriate shadowy, ‘feminine’ characteristics while retaining their masculinity. Just like femme fatales, they can seduce, dress well, drink wine, and modulate their voices to be sweet one moment, biting the next, and still remaine masculine. These behaviors are also vaguely aristocratic. While the gap between the rich and poor widens, this is a seductive visage to adopt, even if it is considered less than virtuous.

The safest way for a man to do feminine things is to be diabolical while doing them. Paradoxically, this becomes the most powerful way for a woman to be feminine– to be a woman playing a man playing at being a woman. Rates of wine drinking are rising rapidly amongst young men and women, who in turn re-negotiate what drinking wine ‘means.’ At least with red-blends, the fastest growing category, this re-negotiation confirms Hollywood’s typecasting, while weakening people’s connection to what wine actually is– an expression of a varietal, from a place. How convenient for industrial size producers, who will cloak their wine refineries and tanker trucks with a sexy vampire shroud.

Meanwhile, men and women can be united at last in their choice of blood-red blends with titillating names, leaning aloofly over vintage bars, and decorating the kitchen table with mysterious black bottles. Whoever brings the most sinister wine to the party wins.

———

This piece is an amalgamation of two posts that went up on The Nightly Glass, a wine in culture blog. I’m hoping to make it like The Hooded Utiltiarian equivalent for wine, beer and spirits criticism, and would appreciate it if you check it out!

Photography, Overrated/Underrated

Posted on May 4, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

We haven’t done one of these in a bit, but I’ve had so many people tell me that they’re wrong and/or evil that I felt we should revive them. So…since Michael A. Johnson posted about war photography this week, I thought we could bounce off of that. What photographers do you think are overrated, or underrated if such a thing is possible?

I guess I’d go for Walker Evans as someone who is understandably but still inexcusably lionized for his poverty porn. Underrated…I don’t know if Andres Serrano quite fits since he’s obviously very successful, but as I said yesterday I feel like he’s broadly loathed by both right-wingers and high-art skeptics (including comics folks) who don’t seem to have actually looked at or thought about his work much.

Bert Stabler’s written about why all art photography is overrated, and Thomas O’Shea responded here with a defense of the genre, if you’re looking for more photography discussion.

Utilitarian Review 5/3/14

Posted on May 3, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Andrea Tang on Iron Man 3, Olympus Has Fallen, and the new yellow peril.

Paul Nudd with Love-Chutney drawings for the Gay Utopia.

Alexander Hamilton was an authoritarian thug.

Ng Suat Tong with a lengthy consideration of Nijigahara Holograph.

Chris Gavaler on Phillip Pullman and Spring-heeled Jack.

I talk about Octavia Butler’s Fledglin, Lacan, and amnesia.

Michael A. Johnson talks about the ethical implications of covering war via photograph and comic (from PPP.)

Sean Michael Robinson on Rhinestone Cowboys, Deacon Blues, and small dreams.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Salon I

— Lised the 10 most overrated albums of the 1990s.

—wrote about how there are basically no women in the original Star Wars.

At the Dissolve I reviewed the documentary Documented about Jose Antonio Vargas’ experience as an undocumented immigrant.

At Splice Today I wrote about

— Esme Patterson asking Elvis Costello what the hell is wrong with him.

— how Batman, Sarah Palin and everybody else loves torture.

Other Links

Amazon is deleting the wish lists of sex workers because Amazon is run by arbitrary puritanical assholes.

Relatedly, Spike on trying to publish porn comics.

Also relatedly, the DOJ is closing porn star’s bank accounts because our government is run by arbitrary puritanical assholes.

Dana Schwartz on gender in Star Wars.

Isaac Butler on why your Star Wars books still count.

Mary McCarthy on jeans drama.

Snark Is Thicker Than Urine

Posted on May 3, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

This first ran at Comixology.
________
Comics has something of a chip on its shoulder about visual art — a kind of forthright working-nerd philistinism. The snooty, pasty theory-spouting degenerate sticks a flag in a cow turd and gets the grant and the girl while the hard-working illustrator who’s got pen technique like Durer gets a condescending pat on the head and relegation to a cultural backwater. Not only does the emperor have no clothes, but he is actually getting paid to paint his ugly genitals purple.

One of the more infamous art frauds of the last twenty years or so is Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” Like most people, probably, I heard about “Piss Christ” before I saw it. From news accounts, I thought it was a plastic crucifix stuck in a jar of the artist’s urine. Jesse Helms hated it, and I had to admit that it seemed like he might have a point. It was easy to assume that Serrano was a trouble-making, glory-seeking hack, whose work was defensible only on the most extreme free-speech grounds. He seemed like a charlatan, substituting a gimmick, pretension, and contempt for genius.

I did actually see the piece in person many years later —a definite moment of “doh!” “Piss Christ” isn’t actually a plastic crucifix in urine, but a photograph of a plastic crucifix in urine. And the photograph is beautiful — the blurry cross shines with yellows, oranges and reds as mysterious bubbling currents swirl around it. Looking at the image without any background information, there’s no question that it is religious; an evocation of the mystery of Christ, who seems to be falling through space, cast aside and yet radiant. If you didn’t have the title, you wouldn’t even know the liquid was urine.

But, of course, viewers do have the title, as well as the background information, all of which rather changes things. Placing Christ in a jar of your own urine is an act of deliberate sacrilege. Serrano is pissing on God; humiliating him and mocking his humiliation. If you’re a Christian, it’s literally Satanic; Serrano might as well just affix the crown of thorns himself while sneeringly declaring “Hail, King of the Jews!”

The thing is that, as the crown of thorns itself suggests, mocking Christ is itself scriptural. The Passion is about degradation and defilement. Christ is mocked, brutalized, humiliated — and then redeemed. The sacred can’t exist without the profane; you need the leaking bodily fluids and the rotting husk if you are to have the transubstantiation. Christ must be reduced to the lowest of the low, to an abject thing, to a place where the body is everything, before the body can become nothing at all. If urine squicks you out, it’s worth remembering that Christ embraced the lepers. And as for Jesse Helms…given his stance on AIDS, he would have been much less likely to hug a leper than to piss on one.

Not to be too hard on Helms who is, after all, not the only sinner in the room. If Christianity urges its followers to sympathize with the tortured, it is also quite aware that most people are a good bit more comfortable identifying with the torturer. “Piss Christ” may be sneering at Christ, but it is also, and certainly, sneering at those who profess to follow him. Helms accused Serrano of “taunting the American people,” which is about right. He was, specifically, taunting them for being crassly commercial, spiritual hypocrites — for being sinners. And as long as there are sinners, Christ will be defiled.

Nobody wants to be called a Christ-killer, and it’s little wonder that Serrano’s work has…er… pissed people off. An outraged Helms declared that Serrano “is not an artist. He is a jerk.” While I appreciate the charming forthrightness, I think the sentiment is maybe a little limiting. Why can’t you be an artist and a jerk?

Indeed, there are a lot of artists who make their living by being jerks. They’re called political cartoonists. Like Serrano, they use a combination of words, images and instantly recognizable symbols to make moral points, and like Serrano, they do it in a way designed to irritate as many people as possible. From “Piss Christ” to the Danish Mohammad cartoons just isn’t that big a step (as I am not the first to note: for instance, the ever-helpful Wikipedia even provides a link from the first to the second.)

“Piss Christ” is different in some ways from most editorial cartoons, of course. For one thing, the way it juxtaposes image and text is a lot more thoughtful than you’re likely to see sitting above the op-eds. Most editorial cartoons are visual one-liners with notes — that’s the Democratic Party; this is the Republican party; they don’t like each other! Ha ha. Serrano, on the other hand, uses words to change the way you see the image, and to alter what it’s saying to you. The distance between religious and sacrilegious turns around the title — and it’s not just one turn either. As in any good editorial cartoon, the message is definitely “fuck you,” but who is being fucked with and why is both ambivalent and mysterious. Even the aesthetics of the piece are translated back into a legible text; “Piss Christ” is actually about its own beauty, and about the way that beauty is ironicized by, or transcends, the title.

The point here isn’t “Editorial cartoons should be more like ‘Piss Christ!” For one thing, Jesse Helms is safely dead, and I don’t particularly want him rising from his grave to wreak vengeance. But it does seem to me that dismissing large swaths of the visual arts tradition as irrelevant fakery is an unfortunate and impoverishing road to take. If comics creators are interested in the interaction between words and images, then Andres Serrano surely has something to say to them.

Dreaming Small — “Rhinestone Cowboy”/”Deacon Blues”

Posted on May 2, 2014 by Sean Michael Robinson

Last week 78-year old singer Glen Campbell appeared in the news for the first time in a long while, for reasons personal rather than musical. Since then, I’ve had Campbell’s much-maligned “Rhinestone Cowboy” in constant rotation on my cranial radio. I thought it would be a good time to revisit the song and try to figure out why it is exactly I love it so much, and see if I can bring a little bit of the pathos of the subversive song back to its surface.

Campbell himself was hardly a subversive figure. Although he’d started his career as a side-man and in-demand studio musician, by the close of the 60’s he’d successfully transitioned to the life of a popular country crooner, scoring hit after hit with the songs of other writers. His first major hit was a cash-in cover of Buffy Saint Marie’s pacifist anthem “Universal Soldier,” a song whose message the singer didn’t seem to exactly align himself with. “The people who are advocating burning draft cards should be hung,” Campbell told an Albuquerque newspaper in an interview about the song. “If you don’t have enough guts to fight for your country, you’re not a man.” A few years later his hit-hunting would pay greater artistic dividends when he recorded a series of songs penned by songwriter and former music transcriber Jimmy Webb, including the semi-mystical, harmonically complex “Witchita Lineman.”

Several years and several albums later, Campbell first heard “Rhinestone Cowboy,” as performed by its author, singer Larry Weiss. It would prove to be the song that would define Campbell’s career.

Larry Weiss’ rough and tumble delivery gives the downbeat lyrics a rugged authenticity. “I’ve been walking these streets so long,” he intones with his intense baritone voice while acoustic guitars and a harpsichord chime away in the background.

Where hustle’s the name of the game
and nice guys get washed away
like the snow and the rain

And suddenly the melody rises yet again, Weiss’ voice intense and clipped.

There’s been a load of compromising
on the road to my horizon
and I’m gonna be where the lights are shining on me
Like a rhinestone cowboy!

Throughout the verse the chords have wandered away from the tonic, only to triumphantly return at the chorus, Weiss shouting the lyrics as the melody rises to the top of his range. He’s joined by a soaring unison string section that had only teasingly entered before, now intertwining with the vocal, playing with full intensity.

And what exactly are the compromises that have led him to dream of the life of a rodeo star? What kind of hustles exactly are we talking about here? There are few answers, and only a handful of clues, the chief of which is the intensity of Weiss’s delivery, and the painfully shallow dreams evident in the chorus. What is the great triumph, the wonderful victory on the horizon for the narrator?

Like a rhinestone cowboy
Ridin’ out on a horse in a star-spangled rodeo
Like a rhinestone cowboy
getting cards and letters from people I don’t even know
and offers comin’ over the phone

The horse and the rodeo is incidental, the details sketchy. The important part? People contacting him, caring about him, even people he doesn’t know. It’s a vision of a man who’s at the bottom, who’s highest aspirations are a glitter of the lowest kind.

In Campbell’s version the grit and drama is replaced with Campbell’s expertly employed voice, complete with almost operatic vibrato. The key has been raised a whole step to accommodate Campbell’s vocal range, and the string part squared off. Campbell’s version brings the song even closer to it’s second cousin, the 1966 Walker Brother’s hit “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore,” a song with which it shares a general rhythmical thrust and melodic arc. (Walker’s own operatic vocalizations, however, are almost painfully intense, elevating the lyrical nonsense to obsessive ode through his delivery alone).

So, is it possible that the “hustle” presented in “Rhinestone Cowboy” is that of an urban prostitute? The image itself was certainly in the air, thanks in part to 1969’s Academy-Award winning Midnight Cowboy. Even if the specifics aren’t divulged, the narrow dreams of the narrator make the likely options rather grim. The soaring chorus isn’t cheery; it’s the desperate dreamings of a man at the end of his options.

The narrative strategies at work in “Rhinestone Cowboy” appears again in a rather unlikely place, on the 1977 Steely Dan song “Deacon Blues,” written by Donald Fagan and Walter Becker.

At first glance the songs seem to have nothing in common, at least musically. “Deacon Blues” leads off with a series of shifting extended chords that finally settle into a recognizable but constantly modulating verse, the harmonization throughout almost mockingly complex, while the arrangement and instrumentation is as polished and ornate as the design of a bottle of scotch.

The lyrics of the verse, narrated in the first person, describe with slurred detail the ego-maniacal imaginings of a drunken man. Ejected from his regular nightclub, he staggers through the streets dreaming of his ultimate revenge, which arrives at the catchy, eminently singable chorus–

learn to work the saxophone
I’ll play just what I feel
Drink Scotch whiskey all night long
and die behind the wheel
They got a name for the winners in the world
and I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blues

It’s surely one of the weirdest songs ever to be a success, novelty-level strangeness masquerading as smooth, pseudo-intellectual jazz. The great triumph of the narrator is the imagined life and fame of a saxophone player, a skill that the singer is so unfamiliar with that he can’t even find the right words for the job.

And once he’s learned to “work” his instrument of choice, it’s drinking and dying spectacularly that he dreams about, and the attendant attention and recognition that would surely follow. He’s undoubtedly a loser, and in his imaginings of what it’s like to be a winner, he’s exactly the same, but everyone loves him. His dream is the re-imagining of his own failures and vices as virtues instead.

The genius of the song is in the precise way that it inhabits its alcoholic narrator, and imagines him as he imagines himself, an “expanding man” whose greatness can only be greater once it is extinguished by death. The only missing components in this dream? A saxophone and a grandiose nickname.

An audience at a play or a film understands that every actor isn’t playing a role that reflects themselves. We sometimes extend this courtesy to novelists, and occasionally cartoonists as well; but when it comes to pop singers, audiences are often painfully literal. It’s why every singer dead before their time has their lyrics strip-mined for meaning and premonition, regardless of who authored the songs in question; it’s why every banal utterance is analyzed for autobiographical content.

Let us therefore embrace the brave; those willing to give voice to the little dreamers, those willing to be misunderstood.
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This is the first in a series of posts called Panoptisongs, focusing on pop songs.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon