Whence Came the Doom?

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I’ve been listening to Hasil Adkins, a crazed, low-fi rockabilly performer; sort of sounds like Elvis crossed with a rusty robot bullfrog and dropped down a deep well. At the same time, I’ve been listening to the Swans — crazed, low-fi, goth performers, sort of sounds like teams of robots sloooowly bashing their brains out against infernal machinery at the bottom of a deep well.

As the description suggests, the two acts are coming from similar places. Goth in general is pretty obsessed with rockabilly, and I find it hard to believe that the Swans weren’t active fans of primitive rockabilly like Adkins and Link Wray. By the same token, I think it’s pretty clear that trudging seminal doom outfits like the Melvins are indebted to the Swans. Which means that Khanate’s 35-minute sludge opuses with some maniac shrieking “Trying….is not…enough!” have a pretty direct link to 2 minute Elvis tracks about blue moons and milkcows.

All of which is to say, screw Faith Hill and Travis Tritt; I want to hear a doom metal Elvis tribute album. I know Harvey Milk would do a bang-up cover of Mystery Train, damn it.

Rush To Critique

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Tom’s been talking a bit about the flap over falp over Rush Limbaugh as head of the Republican party. As a liberal Dem, I’ve been following the story too, with mingled joy (hey, look, the Republican party is eating itself!) and horror (well, ugh…shouldn’t that be done behind closed doors?) (If you want to participate in the repulsion/attraction, try listening to this exchange between AM conservative personality Mark Levin and broad-party conservative advocate David Frum.)

Anyway, one of the things that is interesting to me about the kerfuffle is the extent to which it centers around aesthetics. This is more or less unacknowledged; supposedly, the fight is all about politics. But Limbaugh isn’t a politician; he’s an entertainer, which is to say, an artist (of some sort, and with no qualitative assessment implied.) People listen to his show for the same reason they watch “Lost” or read a comic-book; they’re passing leisure time.

That’s not to diminish Limbaugh’s influence; on the contrary, as you’ll discover if you sneer at Art Spiegelman in public, people take their aesthetic choices very, very seriously. What you like, listen to, watch, read, is central to how you perceive and define yourself — often moreso than what you do for a living (this causes Marxists endless frustration.) Limbaugh’s fans are fans, and they react to attacks on him much the way that other fans react to attacks on their aesthetic taste — that is, they take it personally, and they get really angry.

But if that’s the case for Limbaugh, isn’t is also the case for all politics? How is the identification as “Democrat” different from the identification as “comics geek” or “Buffy fan” or whatever? The answer is, I don’t think it is all that different. Politics and aesthetics are really closely linked, not because given pieces of art have particular political stances, but because politics is itself a branch of aesthetics. Politics is basically a leisure activity which people follow like they follow a favorite TV show or piece of serial fiction. And like aesthetics, politics works through communication and symbols; it’s about manipulating perceptions, creating narratives, or poetry, or emotional reactions. And it has its own genre rules and measures of success. The big problem with Limbaugh, form the perspective of the Republican party, is that, while he’s an extremely good radio show host, he’s a lousy politician. The same skills that serve him well in the one arena (vituperation, for example) don’t work at all in the other. It’s like watching an academic poet try to write a popular TV show without changing his style.

One criticism often leveled at critics is that they’re essentially talking about nothing; or nothing that matters, anyway. Why bother saying that Watchmen the movie is bad? You like it or you don’t like it — why spoil it for other people? For me, anyway,the “why” is at least partly that aesthetics are actually important. They’re part of the way the culture runs itself. Political loyalties and cultural loyalties are aesthetic loyalties, which is part of what makes talking about aesthetic interesting.

So this post is all about strident self-justification, basically. I like to think Rush would appreciate that.

Wedge Issues

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Like “high concept,” the term gets thrown around a lot. Used precisely, “wedge issue” refers to an issue that opens a wedge between a given party and loosely committed or uncommitted voters. The bill to create a homeland security department (this is going back a ways) contains a provision that’s unfair to unionized employees. If you’re a Democrat, it’s awfully tough to be against the unions. So the Democrat votes against the bill. He’s been wedged!

If you’re a Republican, it’s awfully tough to be against Rush Limbaugh. If you’re not a Republican, it’s awfully tough to tolerate Rush Limbaugh. Fill in the rest.
Limbaugh could recognize how he’s being used and minimize the damage to what is supposedly his own side. Obviously, he doesn’t want to. He’s selfish. But this is the man so many Republicans have admired for so long.
UPDATE:  Ross Douthat spends a few paragraphs explaining how it might not always be a bad thing that a conservative voices anti-Rush thoughts. To a non-conservative, two points jump out:  1)  Rush picks a lot of fights with other conservatives, and 2)  he doesn’t try to start ideas, he tries to stop them. He’s the orthodoxy police. Douthat is reduced to sounding like a Soviet reformer: oh, for “some space in which to experiment a little.” 
From reading the Douthat post and about Frum’s dust-up, it sounds like Rush slaps but no one is allowed to slap back. He can say you’re wrong; if you say he’s wrong, you’re a traitor. How did a movement ever wind up like this? Seeing the conservatives put up with Rush is like watching a grown man pick his nose. It’s disgusting and surprising and you wonder how he can think it’s normal. 

New Favorite Phrase

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Via Sullivan. Some Brit columnist is gumming up a fuss because the Obamas didn’t show PM Gordon Brown and his wife a good time. Michelle gave the Brown kids toy models of Marine One, which is the helicopter the president flies around in. The choice makes the columnist angry:

It’s not as though anyone needs reminding that Barack Obama is President or that he has his own helicopter. Short of giving the boys Action Man models of her own husband smiting the evil forces of neoconservatism, Mrs Obama’s gesture could not have been more solipsistic or more inherently dismissive of Mrs Brown.

We must not be inherently dismissive of Mrs. Brown.

wonder woman aftershocks

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So, I guess to commemorate Noah’s recent posts, a new Wonder Woman animated straight-to-dvd movie came out. Also, Kate Beaton drew Wonder Woman. I like the seated figure best, both for her speech balloon and her tree-trunk legs.

I’ve gushed about Kate Beaton’s art before, but I’m still amazed how, with such fast-spare lines and zero tones or line-weight variation, she creates the impression that WW’s breasts have weight, and that her swimsuit is supporting that weight. Which very few superhero artists can do (the fact that very few superhero artists have breasts, is, I’m sure, completely unrelated).

How Come That Guy Looks LIke Everybody Else

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A few weeks back I posted about the first handful of issues of Brian K. Vaughn’s Y: The Last Man. I’ve now read the whole thing (basically; I missed an issue in the middle, I think.)

There are spoilers here, so be warned if that’s a concern.

I don’t think my assessment of it really altered that much. I still found Pia Guerra’s art really bland and boring. Someone who could have delivered on the cheesecake that the book was obviously pretty eager to provide (supposed-to-be-sexy pirates, supposed-to-be-sexy ninjas, supposed-to-be-sexy quasi nuns, etc., etc.) would have added a lot to the story.

Still, if I read the whole thing, I obviously found something to enjoy. There are a lot of nice touches along the way; I liked Ampersand (the capuchin monkey) escaping the ninja by peeing in her face, for example. I liked the way that the escape from the cannibals in New Guinea was completely elided; you see one scene from it and then you cut away and only ever hear about it again in casual back-references. More importantly, Agent 355, the secret society ass-kicker who shepherds Yorick across the world and back, is a pretty great character. I’m not sol overall on Vaughn’s efforts at confronting gender, but 355 is certainly his best effort in that regard — she’s totally butch and tough, but every so often we get these femme accoutrements, like her knitting, or (right at the end) trading her gun away for a dress…or the fact that she has a long term unrequited crush on Yorick (the titular last man). The way she and Yorick grow closer over the five years they’re together is really nicely done; Agent 355 picks up on Yorick’s escape techniques; Yorick learns about fighting from her; both of them gain a shared past and an appreciation for each other’s tics and habits (for instance, Yorick knows that 355 sews when she’s feeling horny — a tidbit of information that takes on additional meaning when we learn that what she’s sewing is his going away present. And 355’s ambivalent relationship to her own violence — she starts out by being reticent, moves through being willing to shoot a young child (though Vaughn cheats here by having her gun misfire) and ends with her seeming to, at least potentially, try to renounce killing.

But though it has its moments, overall the series feels shallow and deeply untrustworthy. Mostly its the plot; the constant, gratuitous cliff-hangers, and the revved up action-drama just never end. At one point Alison Mann (a scientist who travels with Yorick and 355) curses about the fact that someone seems to be pointing at her every hour or so. It’s funny because it’s true; the action throughout the run all seems gratuitous, unmotivated, and ultimately tiresome. Vaughn wants to dish up action and danger every issue, but he doesn’t have the pulp smarts to tie them together in a compelling overarching narrative, nor to come up with really interesting opponents or situations. So you’re stuck with a lot of women pointing guns at each other for no particular reason and endless semi-ironic coincidences. There’s a moment where two astronauts attack each other for a couple of panels and then decide that, oh, yeah, they’re not really mad at each other at all. A lot of the comic feels like that; just action for action’s sake.

You can really see Vaughn’s pulp limitations in his villains, incidentally. They are all boring and cliched as fuck. We’ve got evil scientist, we’ve got crazed man-hating feminists, we’ve got nutso John Birch government hating psychos — who cares?

When he does try for depth or explanation, the results are often even worse. In explaining why all the men died, for example, we get an explanation based on pseudomystical Jungian gobbledygook tied to a series of soap opera revelations (with Dr. Mann playing the Luke Skywalker “oh, no, it’s my father!” role.) Character after character gets a very-special-backstory issue (you know the ones; kaleidoscope of images from their pasts show you the Key to Their Souls). The absolute worst of these — and it is very bad indeed — is that of Yorick himself. Some secret agent ties him up and offers him kinky S&M sex, then almost drowns him. But it’s all an intervention, you see, to help him overcome his death wish. Because he’s just that important that a secret society needs stage his elaborate sexual fantasies for him.

He is that important, of course. He’s the last man on earth! Vaughn talked in his recent TCJ interview about how Y started off as a kind of Penthouse fantasy — the story of the last guy on earth wandering around screwing willing, horny wenches. Vaughn was, of course, saying he had moved away from that, in particular by having Yorick be faithful (for the most part) to Beth, his girlfriend who he’s running across the world to find.

The thing is, though, that male continence in the face of plenty isn’t the opposite of a sexual fantasy. It’s a sexual fantasy, period. Having lots of opportunities to sleep with beautiful women and refusing is a fantasy of sexual and moral potency. The book, moreover, is Yorick’s story; all the men on earth are dead, but we’ve still got to hear about the quest for manhood of one self-absorbed guy. It’s like all the competition was killed just so that SNAG Yorick could get some “manly scars” and have the strength to not fall apart when his girlfriend dumps him. You can almost see the whole thing as Yorick’s apocalyptic rejection fantasy; Beth dumps him over the phone, and so he imagine a world where all the other men are dead (that’ll show her!) and he gets a long submerged romance with a super secret agent…who is tragically killed just before their relationships is consummated. 355’s murder at the hands of Alter, a really stupid Israeli villain, moments after she tells Yorick her real name, perfectly mirrors the manipulative moment at the beginning of the series when the apocalypse occurs right after Yorick asks his girlfriend to marry him. Yorick’s supposed to have grown up over the five years, but the series itself is in the same familiar masculine place, where it’s better to destroy the world than pledge your love.

Luckily for Yorick, the cards are stacked in his favor. He doesn’t have to do emotional intimacy. Instead, he can grow old as the wise, tragic figure, father of the world (via actual fatherhood, and through cloning) who never knew true love himself, dispensing crotchety knowledge to his younger selves. The last issue, which shows Yorick’s sad future and effectively mythologizes him, is a towering pile of monkey shit. The last page, with the word “Alas” scrawled over it, seems to sum up the series; it’s all about “poor Yorick,” a long rationale for a final sentimental male self-pity party.

Having said that…I certainly wish that mainstream comics looked more like this in general. I mean, for all its faults, this is competent genre literature, which reaches out effectively to a broad science-fiction/adventure audience. It’s weaknesses (sit-com repetition, easy sentimentality, cliched cliffhangers) feel more like those of television, say, than the insular clusterfuckery of super-hero comics. The art isn’t as good, but overall I liked this more than All Star Superman. If I’m going to read about the noblest man on earth, I’m happy to have it be somebody other than Clark Kent.