Utilitarian Review 1/2/10

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HU Elsewhere

HU took last week off, but I still had a few pieces up elsewhere around the webs.

I snuck in to the tail end of Tom Spurgeon’s holiday interview series over at the Comics Reporter with a discussion of the Elephant and Piggie children’s book series. (Update: Tom informs me that there’s another week of interview left, apparently — I am in the middle, not at the end at all.)

I don’t think it’s an issue of seeing it in the context of comics; Willems’ work is comics. He uses cartoony simplified animal characters and makes extensive use of comic tropes like motion lines and speech bubbles. The narrative is entirely advanced through sequential action; the movement and words of the characters directly tell the story; it’s absolutely not text with illustrations. Some of the chicken books even use panels. The only reason you wouldn’t call it a comic is because it’s not sold through the direct market, basically.

The second half of my survey of Thai Luk Thung videos is up on madeloud.

Still, there are other approaches. For example, there’s Por Parichart’s “Krai Sak Kon Bon Tarng Fun,” or “Someone on a Path to My Dreams.” It basically follows the usual luk thung formula — with a slight conceptual twist. Luk thung is often referred to as “Thai country music” because its audience and lyrical themes are both mostly rural. However, “Krai Sak Kon Bon Tarng Fun” is unusual in that it actually sounds like American country music. The band hits a Nashville groove like they’ve been listening to Hanks and Merles all their lives, while Por, the singer, imitates Dolly Parton down to the breathy yodeling quaver. And as for the video — well, the set designers appears to have seen Hee Haw.

Also on Madeloud, I have a review of a reissue by shoegaze legends Teenage Filmstars.

And at Metropulse I review the blaxploitation comp “Can You Dig It?” and the gospel comp “Fire In My Bones.”

Other Links

There are a couple of amazing essays by former Utilitarians up on tcj.com. First, Tom Crippen has a spectacular essay about Alan Moore and geekism. And then Bill Randall has an equally spectacular essay about the odd progression of manga in America. You really need to go read both of them; they’ve both kind of outdone themselves.

Also on tcj.com, Steven Grant has a brief, acerbic, and hysterical take on the Spirit pop up book.

Then Shaenon Garrity has an even briefer, even more acerbic, and even more hysterical take on Acme Novelty Library #19.

I enjoyed Chris Mautner’s discussion of Scott Pilgrim, a comic I’ve never read but am now thinking I should.

The one-woman comics-news dervish that is Brigid Alverson has a thorough round-up of this year’s manga news over at Robot 6.

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Luk Thung Apocalypse 2

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1. Surapol Sombatjaroen — Doht Rom [Parachute] (Poo Pae Ruk)
2. Thongmark Leacha — Now She Loves Every Man Except Me (Molam: Thai Country Music v.2)
3. Aungkana Kunchai — Finishing My Business in Burma (Molam: Thai Country Music v. 2)
4. Job & Joy — Sao Nar Soan Nong [Teach the Farm Girl] (Sabud Yun)
5. Pamela Bowden — Wud Jai Kun (Bow Daeng Saerang Jai)
6. Bussara Sriroongrueng — Juk Ka Jee (Dao roong Loog Thung pop)
7. Duangjan Suwannee — Rong Kao Fun (Show Ber Mai Show Jai)
8. Aump Nuntiya & Boonta Muangmai —Worn Pee Mee Ruk Deaw (Wong Kalimae)
9. Kratae (with Peter Fodify) — Yaa Wai Jai Tarng yaa Warng Jai Krai [Trust No One] (Rud Mon Non-Stop)
10. Kratae —Perd Jai Sao Tae [Open Your Heart, Girl] (Rud Mon Non-Stop)
11. Poifai Malaiporn — Muk Laew Krub [Likely To] (Muk Laew Krub)
12. Cathaleeya Marasri — Proong Nee Ja Lerk Kid Tueng (Ruam Hit Pleng Dunk)
13. Cathaleeya Marasri — Nong Kai (Ruam Hit Pleng Dunk)
14. Tai Orrathai — Tung Jai Luem (Morlum Dok Ya)
15. Siriporn Umpaipong — Tum Barb Bor Long (Mor Lum Baan Don Vol. 3)
16. Wipoj Petchsupan — Baa Yor [Fond of Flattery] (Huang Look)

Download Luk Thung Apocalypse 2

Week Off

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We’re going to take a week off here at HU. Thanks all for reading along with us through our change of address, and we’ll be back bright-tailed and bushy-eyed (or something like that) for the start of the new year. Hope to see you then!

Utilitarian Review 12/26/09

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A little quiet this week, what with the major holiday and all. Still, we blogged away…

On HU

We started out the week with a return to my halcyon days of writing scatological prose-poems.

Kinukitty posted about the joys of reading yaoi novels on the Kindle.

Vom Marlowe reviewed How to Draw Manga: Ultimate Manga Lessons Vol. 5: Basics of Portraying Action.

I sneered vigorously at Chris Ware’s Halloween New Yorker cover. If the comments to the post aren’t sufficient, there’s also a thread on the TCJ message board devoted to the topic.

Richard discussed his reaction to the first volume of Lone Wolf and Cub.

And finally this week’s download included no Christmas music at all.

Utilitarians Everywhere

Over on tcj.com, Suat reviews Suat on Carol Tyler’s “You’ll Never Know”

Written in 1994, Carol Tyler’s “The Hannah Story” was a tribute to her mother, Hannah, and her strength in dealing with her in-laws as well as the death of her daughter, Ann. Despite the intervening years, Tyler’s sensitive “voice” remains easily recognizable in her latest book, You’ll Never Know.

At madeloud I have up the first of a two part series on Thai luk thung music videos.

Even more flamboyant is “Arom Sia” by actress and singer Apaporn Nakornsawan. The title means “Sick of It All,” and indeed the performer appears to have become so disgusted at her romantic troubles that she has turned to super-villainy, luring the Justice League into some sort of catastrophic defeat at the hands of a gay pride parade.

At Splice Today I talk about the overcarbonated new dolphin show at Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium.

The most heart-tugging moments in the show, though, involve not the cute penguins, nor the noble hawk, but rather the trainers. Demoted from educators to props, they are ruthlessly dressed up in penguin suits or decked out like British hawkers or hoisted up on pulleys and dropped from a height into the water. Yes, they seem cheerful enough about it in general but good lord-it all seems like a rather cruel punishment for the comparatively minor sin of being a zoologist.

Over at Bert Stabler’s blog we continue our conversation about the book of Job, and discuss Stanley Milgram’s experiments, among other things. The quote below is from Bert.

Basically, if you lose everything for no moral or practical reason, whether it’s because God decides to destroy your life arbitrarily or because he can’t stop bad things from happening or because it’s part of some grand scheme for the betterment of the universe, we cannot ultimately hold God to account. He’s God, he’s not a limited being with petty motives. God is like a petty dictator, but he’s also not. He’s not a transparent, contingent demiurge– he’s a remote yet ubuquitous source of energy.

And at metropulse I contributed to a pretty entertaining best of music list.

Other Links

Tom Spurgeon’s been doing a bunch of interviews with critics about some of the best or most influential books of the decade. I think my favorite so far is his discussion with Kristy Valenti about Little Nemo.

Shaenon Garrity has an interesting discussion of manga translation issues on tcj.com.

And finally, I’ve mentioned a couple of times that I often disagree with Jeet Heer on most everything. I have to say, though, that this essay about representations of homosexuality in classic comics is pretty great from start to finish. The essay carries a lot of learning very lightly, and includes a number of zingers, most notably: “Like most professional moralists, Bozell has no real sense of history: he’s a traditionalist with no grounding in the past.” Andrew Sullivan linked to it, and deservedly so.

Music For Middle Brow Snobs: Sex Life of the Fern

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A completely not-Christmas-themed music download for Christmas:

1. Edward Williams — The Sex Life of the Fern (Life on Earth Soundtrack)
2. Animal Collective — Graze (Fall Be Kind)
3. Suzuki Junzo — Ameria (Pieces for Hidden Circles)
4. Michio Kurihara — The Old Man and the Evening Star (Sunset Notes)
5. Isaiah Owens — You Without Sin Cast the First Stone (Fire in My Bones)
6. Amazing Farmer Singers — I Got a Telephone in My Bosom (Fire in My Bones)
7. Alice Keys w/Beyonce — Put It In a Love Song (The Element of Freedom)
8. Mariah Carey — Candy Bling (Memoir of an Imperfect Angel)
9. Ina Unt Ina — These Eyes (All Sides of Ina)
10. Antony and the Johnsons — Another World (The Crying Light)
11. Ulrich Schnauss — As If You’ve Never Been Away (Far Away Trains Passing)
12. Daylight Dies — Dismantling Devotion (Dismantling Devotion)

Download Sex Life of the Fern.

Happy holidays!

Xmas Samurai

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Lone Wolf and Cub: The Assassin’s Road (Vol. 1)

Writer: Kazuo Koike

Artist: Goseki Kojima

I never read any manga as a kid. The closest I came to it was watching manga-based anime like Akira, so my impression of manga was that it was mainly about teenagers screaming at each other as they fought to the death (depending on the series, these battles might involve giant robots and/or cat-girls). And the manga digests were alien and weird, these thick, little books with black-and-white artwork.

Now I’m older and a little bit wiser, so I’ve decided to let go of my prejudices and see what all the fuss is about. But the sheer size of the manga industry, along with my total unfamiliarity with the major titles, has made it difficult to find a clear point of entry. And while I try to keep an open mind, I’m not quite ready to jump into yaoi. I’m sticking close to my comfort zone, which just so happens to include samurai.

Lone Wolf and Cub proved to be a great starting point. Set during the Tokugawa era, it depicts the adventures of the assassin Ogami Itto and his infant son Daigoro. The chapters in the first volume are episodic. Other than Itto and Daigoro, characters do not carry over from story to story. Also, each chapter tends to follow a simple formula: Itto arrives in some town or village pushing his son around in a cart, he toys with his target for a while, his target ineffectually tries to get rid of him, and Itto then kills his target and everyone who gets in his way. And occasionally, hot women remove their clothes.

Of course, there’s a downside to the episodic approach. Even having just read the volume, it’s hard to remember the specific details of any one story, and all the chapters feel vaguely indistinguishable. Like every procedural on television, enjoying Lone Wolf and Cub is contingent upon enjoying the repetition of particular themes and events. As someone who enjoys reading about samurai, I found the stories entertaining, but it’s easy to imagine someone with different tastes finding it to be a repetitive bore.

The art is actually the bigger selling point. Goseki Kojima’s style is heavily influenced by traditional Japanese artwork, and it’s absolutely perfect for the subject matter. He’s also a capable storyteller. Panels are attractive and uncluttered, spatial relationships are clear, and the panel layout ensures that the narrative is easy to follow. His talents are particularly evident during the fight scenes. Many Western comic artists have trouble creating the illusion of motion in a medium comprised of static images. Kojima is one of the few artists I’ve seen who can plot a fight scene so that  actions that occur between panels are just as obvious as those depicted in the panels.

As these pages make clear, Itto is a sneaky bastard.

The various chapters touch upon themes that will be instantly familiar to fans of samurai stories (honor, self-sacrifice, bravery, etc.). But the most prominent theme throughout the entire volume is the devotion between father and son that survives even as Ogami Itto follows the “assassin’s road.” Itto clearly loves Daigoro, but at the same time Itto is an essentially violent man, and he chooses to work as an assassin as he plots his revenge on the men who disgraced him. His love for Daigoro is conditional on Daigoro being worthy to follow in his footsteps. In practice, this means that Itto frequently risks Daigoro’s life just as he risks his own life. The potential conflict between Itto’s profession and his love for his son never arises, however, because it’s clear from early on that Daigoro truly is his father’s son.

But for all its high-minded pretentions about honor and family devotion, Lone Wolf and Cub is overflowing with violence and sex. At first glance, the book seems to be an uneven combination of high-brow Eastern philosophy and low-brow exploitation. This is partially deliberate. Kazuo Koike no doubt intended to explore the contradiction between bushido ideals and the harsh reality of feudal Japan. But the book is also clearly nostalgic for an era when men were men. Ogami Itto is Koike’s ideal man: strong, relentless, sexually virile, and honorable in his own way (and ignoring all the times he risks his son’s life, he’s a loving father too). In Koike’s vision of feudal Japan, there is a natural coexistence of philosophy, ideals, violence, and sex because only in this era could men achieve both physical and spiritual perfection.

So Lone Wolf and Cub is retrogressive and occasionally quite sleazy. But I couldn’t help but enjoy it. I may be a bleeding heart, but I appreciate action stories with great art and clever plotting. Here’s my favorite panel of the entire volume:

A part of me is offended by how Itto is so unconcerned about Daigoro’s safety. But a much bigger part of me admires the badassery of killing 10 men while giving his son a piggyback ride.

The New Yorker Hearts Luddites

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I found myself reading this essay by Gorjus about Chris Ware’s Halloween New Yorker cover recently. In case you missed it, this is the cover:

And here’s what Gorjus has to say about it:

The children are literally masked, yet still engaging the world—going forth into that terrible night, mashing down on the button at the house they don’t know, mumbling and punching each other to you go first. They are open to the world; the masks are meaningless, the toys of children, soon to be ripped off to suck in the sweet Halloween night…..

The parents of the children wear a different mask; while there is nothing physical upon their faces, the reflection of their email and RSS feeds and status updates smear across their features, shutting them off from the world more than any Wolverine® latex ever could. It is, in one still image, a surpassing and comprehensive look at American society in the 21st century: we send our children out with masks to play-act traditions that were shaky and hoary when we were young, forcing them to play outside and make friends with the neighbor girls, while shutting down ourselves via 3G and electrons and Cymblata and whiskey more then even our own parents could manage.

That Mr. Ware has evoked this without showing us a single costume, or a single face, or truly, anything other than basic shapes coupled with a flat-matte color palette, again validates the dozens of honors that litter his career.

I’ve been reading a lot of comics criticism recently, as it happens, and one thing I’ve noticed is that writing about super-hero comics is almost invariably better than writing about art comics. That’s because writing about art comics tends to be really unendurably sententious. I mean, “going forth into that terrible night”; “traditions that were shaky and hoary when we were young”; “Mr. Ware”; “again validates the dozens of honors that litter his career”…I mean, come on. It’s like we’ve stumbled into the back cover blurb of a volume of contemporary poetry. The stink of reverence is suffocating.

Again, I don’t blame Gorjus personally. This just seems to be how folks write when they write about art comics. It’s particularly unfortunate in this case, though, because…jeez is that cover a drearily cliched piece of crap. I mean, Chris Ware sure goes way out on a limb there, using the pages of the New Yorker to sneer at contemporary technology and those who use it! Boy, I bet that was a hard sell to Francoise Mouly, huh? Imagine…the stodgy old New Yorker being old and stodgy! Really shifts your paradigm, huh?

Obviously, Chris Ware is a talented designer…but I have to say that personally my patience for his antiseptic blocky buildings and antiseptic toy-like people is pretty much exhausted. And, just out of curiosity, where exactly are the Halloween decorations here? Oh, right…if you included those, the picture wouldn’t be quite bland enough. Yes, yes I know that he’s showing the antiseptic emptiness of contemporary life…to which I say “feh,” and also, “yawn.” The bourgeoise literary tradition where you excoriate the bourgeoisie for their empty, lifeless culture by creating empty, lifeless culture — it’s been going on for generations, and I presume it’ll continue as long as two bourgeoisie are alive so that one can sneer at the other, but I don’t see why we (bourgeoise or otherwise) need to pretend that it provides some deep and humane insight.

Because it doesn’t — it’s just glib. Which is what this cover is; overwhelmingly glib, with the self-satisfied glibness that is the inevitable adornment of a real New Yorker cartoon. You could get the same level of insight from the crank at your local bar. “Damn it, cell phones…they’re ruining the world! People just don’t talk anymore like they used to!”

You want to know the technology that actually affects the Halloween ritual? As somebody who went trick-or-treating in the quite affluent neighborhood of Hyde Park, I can tell you that the mechanical device at the end of everyone’s fingers was not the cell phone, but the digital camera — except for the moments when people were using their cell phones as cameras, I guess. Because everyone was taking pictures of their kids in their cute costumes, for even in this soulless, technology-ridden age in which we sadly toil, taking pictures of kids in costumes is still the sort of thing that parents do more or less constantly.

Gorjus finishes his essay by saying, in reference to both the cover and Ware’s interior story, “It’s bleak, this world; it’s rife with cynicism and misanthropy, as can be said of much of Mr. Ware’s work.” But this image, at least, isn’t bleak or cynical. It’s nostalgic and suffused with easy sentiment and easier moralism. It’s a big slab of maudlin hooey concealed under a thin veneer of urbanity. And it, and its critical enablers, deserve to be hooted.