When Are Two Comics the Same Comic (Part V)

Posted on November 20, 2014 by Roy T. Cook

Recently, DC Comics has produced a series of re-issues of Batman stories – the unwrapped editions – that present the artwork in pencils-only form. The question I want to explore here is whether these works are instances of the same comic – that is, the same work of art – as the original inked and colored edition. I’ll use the unwrapped edition of Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Batman: The Court of Owls as my example, although the questions raised could apply to any comics in this series.

It is worth getting one potential misunderstanding out of the way from the outset. The unwrapped comics appear, to be reproductions of the original art produced by Capullo. Now, it is tempting to think at first glance that this somehow gives us special access to the art – after all, when we go to comics-as-art exhibits at museums, it is usually the original art (often just pencils, although often pencil-and-inks as well), and not inexpensive floppies, that are hung on the wall for our viewing pleasure. Thus, it might seem like the unwrapped version of The Court of Owls is not only an instance of the same comic as the earlier, inked and printed version of the comic, but that it gives us particularly privileged access to this artwork in virtue of providing us with particularly privileged access to (accurate reproductions of) the original pencil art.

This, however, would be a mistake, I think. When we view original art at a comics exhibit, it is not obvious that we are even experiencing the relevant comic in the first place. Now, I am not denying that the original art pages are artworks, but only suggesting that they are not the same artwork as the comic that we experience when purchasing a floppy at our favorite comics dealer. The reason is simple: individual pieces of original comic art are singly-instanced artworks, while comics themselves are mass-produced, multiply instanced artworks. To mistake one for the other would be to ignore Nelson Goodman’s distinction, formulated in The Languages of Art, between autographic and allographic artworks. Of course, looking at the unwrapped version of The Court of Owls, or looking at the original art pages, might give us additional information relevant to interpreting the multiply-instanced inked-and-colored artwork that we experience when reading the comic. But that doesn’t meant that experiencing either the unwrapped comic, or looking at the original art pages, is a case of experiencing the comic itself. After all, facts about Snyder’s life and personality might be relevant to understanding The Court of Owls as well, but that doesn’t mean that learning about his life amounts to experiencing the comic, or that his biography is somehow a part of the work.

There is another argument for the claim that the unwrapped edition of The Court of Owls is an instance of the same comics: we might point out that the original inked-and-colored version, and the unwrapped version, tell the same story. I don’t think this strategy works any better, however. In his essay “Making Comics into Film” (in The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach, Aaron Mesking and Roy Cook (eds.), Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) Henry Pratt investigates the criteria by which we might justifiably claim that a comic and a cinematic adaptation of that comic (or vice versa) might be said to tell the same story, despite minor changes in plot and the rather more major differences between formal properties and storytelling conventions in the two media. For this project to even make sense, it must be at least possible that a comic and a film can tell the same story. But if that is the case, then sameness of story told is not sufficient for being instances of the same artwork, since the comic and the film are obviously distinct artworks.

This is not to say that I believe that the unwrapped version of The Court of Owls is not an instance of the same comic as the inked-and-colored version. But I do think the question is a difficult one, and that the obvious quick strategies for defending an affirmative answer are flawed. In addition, we do have very different aesthetic experiences when reading the two different versions of the story, suggesting a negative answer isn’t completely out of the question. So, is the unwrapped version of The Court of Owls an instance of the same comic as the inked-and-colored version?

Arthur C. Clarke: Predictions of a Sci-Fi Psychic

Posted on November 19, 2014 by Jared Hill

Arthur C. Clarke (1917 – 2008) was one of the most prolific science-fiction authors of the 20th century. His body of work includes more than a dozen novels, more than 100 short stories and even a few non-fiction books. His magnum opus was perhaps the screenplay for the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, written jointly by Clarke and director Stanley Kubrick as an adaptation of one of Arthur’s short stories. 2001 has been viewed by millions and has become an iconic cultural touchstone.

Now that several decades have passed from the time Clarke started writing, it has become clear that he was not just an imaginative and talented author, but also a prescient prognosticator of the future. Many of the technologies that Clarke envisioned have become commonplace realities. This may be a case of life imitating art because many young scientists and engineers were avid fans of his, so his writings themselves may have influenced the development of the modern technological landscape.

In 1945, Clarke wrote a paper entitled “Extra-Terrestrial Relays – Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage,” describing satellites using geosynchronous equatorial orbits to facilitate worldwide communications. Clarke’s article initiated an interest in the subject – in the 1960’s, together with Howard Hughes, NASA began work on the Telstar project (which would ultimately culminate in satellite television broadcasts and the HughesNet data satellite networks as they exist today). The first satellite using the principles outlined by Clarke was launched in 1964, and they are now extensively employed in meteorology, mobile phone communications and radio and television broadcasting. His contributions to the field are reflected in the fact that these geosynchronous orbits are also called “Clarke orbits.”

Even more striking are Clarke’s frequent pronouncements on devices that ordinary people would use in their homes. In a 1964 documentary broadcast by the BBC, he noted that “trying to predict the future is a discouraging, hazardous occupation,” but he nevertheless continued on to give his predictions for the coming decades. Clarke foresaw what he called a “replicator” to reproduce physical items along the same lines that documents and photographs can be copied. 3D printers are now turning this vision into reality. In the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, astronauts aboard a spaceship used “newspads,” which bear a remarkable similarity to today’s tablet computers, to watch a TV interview. In 1974, Clarke stated that people in the future would have small computers in their own homes in contrast to the bulky, business-oriented machines then in use.

Rather than just imagining the physical devices that would be built, Clarke focused on the changes they would bring to human society. He believed that people would be able to get in touch with their friends all around the world easily as well as look up their bank records and theater reservations right from their computers. He thought that these small, household computers would become ubiquitous and would enable people to work far away from their offices. He even predicted the rise of telemedicine, and the future of robotic surgeries. All of these seemingly farfetched shifts in lifestyle have become largely true, at least in many wealthier countries.

Of course, not all of Arthur’s conjectures turned out to be accurate. His idea of people using monkeys as personal servants still seems as unlikely today as it did when he pronounced it. Likewise his suggestion that people would dwell inside giant domed communities on the north and south polar ice caps. Nevertheless, wild guesses of what’s to come in future years are typically left to psychics and dreamers – whose predictions aren’t often accurate. Arthur C. Clarke’s unique genius enabled him not only to see into the future, but nudge his futuristic visions towards reality.

Transsexual Supervillainy

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

So John Simms is now Michelle Gomez. Presumably Time Lords have always had the regenerative ability to change sex, but it took a half century of Doctor Who adventures before anyone dared to notice. The villain’s new body also gives the former Master the ability to stick her tongue into Peter Capaldi’s mouth. The Guardian’s Mathilda Gregory wasn’t shocked: “Discovering the Master had kissed the Doctor and called him her boyfriend didn’t seem odd, because there has always been sexual tension between the two, but seeing Missy being able to express it made it clear how heteronormative TV can be.” Matt Hill at ScienceFiction.com was more irked: “If this is the way the Master felt like treating the Doctor, why is it the only time we see a kiss [is] when the two participants for all intents and purposes fit a heterosexual norm?”

I agree, but I’m intrigued by a larger pattern of villainy. Why do evil homicidal men keep turning into evil homicidal women?

I’ve been catching up on old episodes of Syfy’s Haven with my wife and son, and 2012’s season three features a serial killer dubbed the Bolt Gun Killer (a possible homage to and/or knock-off of the cattle gun-wielding Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men). He not only murders women, but he slices off his favorite parts to stitch into a new body. The Killer is clearly male—the blurry surveillance image proved it even before detective Tommy Bowen is unmasked—but that Frankenstein body he’s making isn’t his bride. It’s himself. Like Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, he’s sewing a new skin so he can become a woman. Except the Haven writers (I seriously doubt Stephen King had any influence on this plot arc) gender flip the gender flip by revealing that the skinwalking killer was originally a woman who now slides in and out of birthday suits, male or female, while busy assembling one that looks like her old self.

She wants to impress her returning husband (he spent a few decades in a magic barn and/or alternate dimension), and her plan more-or-less works. But no one comments about the Bolt Gun Killer’s gender and sexuality ambiguity. When “she” slips on a man is “she” still a woman? Or is she a man with a female gender identity? Since the Killer’s spousal devotion is constant, does that mean she changes sexual preference when she changes genitalia? In the Troubled universe of Haven, are gay men and straight women the same under the skin?

Chris Carter belly-flopped into similarly murky waters in the 2008 The X-Files: I Want to Believe. A pair of gay villains, Janke and Franz, abduct women to extract and sell their organs on the black market. Except sometimes Franz needs a whole body for himself—everything but the head (which Janke buries in a field for the FBI to find with the help of a psychic pedophile priest who molested Janke and Franz as altar boys). Franz’s first and presumably male body may be in that ditch too, though it’s unclear how long his team of assistants has been removing his head and reattaching it to new bodies. Women’s bodies. Are women just easier for Janke to abduct? Or does Franz have a female gender identity? And if so, how does Janke, a gay man, feel about his husband’s new vagina? In the outed truth of Carter’s Catholic universe, are gay men just straight women attached to male heads?

Again, Carter and his co-writer, like the Haven writers, don’t comment on the implications—they don’t even seem aware that their fantastical sex change operations sew up anything but plot holes. There are other examples—the female H. G. Wells from another Syfy show, Warehouse 13; Tim Curry’s Dr. Frank N. Furter, that “sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania” landing on Earth via The Rocky Horror Picture Show—but I prefer the original transsexual supervillain/ess because s/he is also the original comic book supervillain.

When Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Ultra-Humanite debuted in Action Comics No. 13, he was a bald guy in a lab coat and wheelchair. All those seemingly unrelated adventures during Superman’s first year—a crooked football coach, a war-profiteering munitions manufacturer, a circus-foreclosing loan shark—were all part of the retconned Ultra’s improbable plot for world domination. Superman thwarts him four more times in 1939, ending with the villain’s explosive death in No. 19. He’d mysteriously vanished from plane wreckage in No. 13, but this time Shuster draws the corpse. “Dead!” declares Superman.

Action Comics No. 20 introduces Dolores Winters, a Hollywood actress who lavishes Clark with thanks then cold shoulders him the next day. “It doesn’t make sense!” he exclaims. “Females are a puzzle—movies queens in particular!” After the “vixen” kidnaps a yacht of millionaires and threatens to murder them, Shuster draws the first wordless panel in Superman history.

“Those evil blazing eyes,” declares Superman, “there’s only one person on this earth who could possess them . . .! ULTRA!”

The “person” confirms: “My assistants, finding my body, revived me via adrenalin. However, it was clear that my recovery could be only temporary. And so, following my instructions, they kidnapped Dolores Winters yesterday and placed my mighty brain in her young vital body!”

Although Shuster draws that young vital body with his standard vixen proportions, Superman can’t drop the male pronouns. “He must have as many lives as a cat!” he says after Ultra’s inevitable escape, wondering “will he continue his evil career?” But when Ultra returns in the next issue, the captioned narration accepts her sex change, mentioning “her last encounter” and “her hideaway.” Even Superman adjusts, calling her a “madwoman.”

Ultra expressed no sexual desires before his operation—so 1939 readers, like 2014 Doctor Who viewers, would have assumed he was straight. But given all the young vital bodies available for transplantation, why did he instruct his minions to stick his brain inside a gorgeous woman’s skull? Next thing he’s using his new pussy (a cat trapped in a fence) to seduce a male scientist—but that’s just to get the scientist’s atomic-disintegrator, right?

Ultra pulls on a pair of pants before leaping into a giant vagina–I mean, volcano–at the end of No. 21, but the next issue begins the two-parter that introduces Lex Luthor to the Superman universe. Ultra never returns. “It all seems to be a terrible nightmare!” declares the pussy-freeing scientist. Superman doesn’t want to talk about it: “Well, leave it go at that.”

I’m thinking Siegel’s cisgendered editors wanted to leave it go too and told him to flip villains. 1939 wasn’t ready for transsexuality. 2014 may be past it.

Ultra, Franz, and the Bolt Gun Killer have one thing in common: a brain. The rest of their body parts are detachable, but their skull-housed sexualities and gender identities seem constant. Franz is a straight male brain. Bolt Gun and Ultra are straight female brains. None of them actually change. The Master is different. I’m not sure exactly what happens inside a Time Lord’s cranium during regeneration, but the brain–the physical organ–must transform with the rest of the body. Only the mind remains. Which means a Time Lord’s identity transcends anatomy: the Master is neither female nor male, neither gay nor straight. Time Lords have no baseline sex or sexuality. The Doctor Who thought experiment posits a universe in which cisgendered-heteronormality isn’t even a possibility.

The Master is also the first sex-changing villain whose sex change isn’t a manifestation of his villainy. Franz, Ultra, and Bolt Gun are variations on Buffalo Bill–a character so two-dimensionally vile, audiences root for Hannibal Lecter instead. Bill is subhuman, and his homicidal attempts to become a woman are his only defining feature. Except possibly his thigh-tucked penis:

The Mistress stands apart from Bill, Franz, Ultra and Bolt because she didn’t abduct and murder actress Michelle Gomez to get her body. Missy is still a homicidal psychopath, but her sex change isn’t monstrous. The character may be evil, but not the transsexual transformation. That’s a first in pop culture supervillainy.

Not The Secret History of Wonder Woman

Posted on November 17, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

I reviewed Jill Lepore’s book The Secret History of Wonder Woman over at the Atlantic a little bit back. I had one serious issue with it which seemed like it was probably not of much interest for a mainstream venue. But I thought I’d point it out here.

That issue is…the title, and in many ways the thesis of the book, are misleading. Lepore presents the Marston family history of polyamory, and therefore the connection between Wonder Woman creator William Marston and his lover Olive Byrne’s aunt Margaret Sanger, as unknown. If this was the first book you’d ever read about Marston and Wonder Woman, I think you’d come away with the impression that Lepore is the first one to reveal that Marston and his wife Elizabeth lived in a polyamorous relationship with another woman (Olive Byrne).

This is most obvious at the very end of the book. Lepore says, “The veil of secrecy kept by the family over Wonder Woman’s past proved impossible to lift.” She then cites writers in 1972 and 1974 who apparently didn’t know about the polyamory (Joanne Edgar and Karen Walowit.) She writes “The secrecy had consequences” and argues that there was a distortion because of this in the understanding of feminism. Margaret Sanger in the 1910s through Wonder Woman in the 1940s through WW fan Gloria Steinem in the 1970s were all connected. Because people didn’t know about the Marston/Sanger connection, they saw feminism as waves rather than as a continuous whole.

The problem with that thesis is that people have in fact known about the Marston/Sanger connection for around 15 years (or at least, that was the best guess of folks on the Comix-Scholars list serve, where these matters were recently discussed.) Marston’s polyamory was written about as early as the late 90s, and it was certainly widely known after Les Daniels wrote about it in the Complete Wonder Woman at the beginning of the 2000s. Lepore could easily have said that; Les Daniels is mentioned in her notes, and this would be the place in her narrative to acknowledge him and earlier researchers. But she doesn’t. As a result, readers are likely to believe that they’re the first ones who are learning about these “secrets.”

This isn’t to say that Lepore discovered nothing. She had access to tons of archives no one else has seen, and she has numerous jaw-dropping revelations — that the Marston polyamorous relationship appears to have included another woman (Marjorie Huntley), that Marston, Elizabeth,and Olive participated in New Age feminist sex parties, that Olive and Elizabeth were bisexual (a point that seemed fairly obvious, but has been disputed.) The book is important for anyone who cares about the early Wonder Woman, and Lepore’s work is in many regards ground-breaking. Which makes it all the more frustrating that the book’s thesis seems to rest on the revelation of the one secret Lepore didn’t discover.

As a result of this confusion, the book ends up being unnecessarily ungenerous to the numerous scholars who’ve written about the Marston Wonder Woman over the last 15 to 20 years. But more than that, I don’t think it’s ideal to frame the story of Marston and his family in terms of secrets. The closet is among other things a relationship with, or lever for, power. By urging the reader to adopt the position of the knower or the revealer, Lepore makes the story of Wonder Woman about the reader’s and the author’s rush of discovery — about the revelation of truths that the Marston family wanted to hide. The point of the story becomes not what Marston and Elizabeth and Olive made of their lives and politics and sexualities, but what secrets the book can uncover. Lepore doesn’t really contextualize that in terms of the history of gay identities or marginalized sexual identities, or of the closet; she doesn’t present the secrets as part of a history of practices that have both protected and trapped queer people, nor does she discuss Marston’s work as itself engaged with, or part of a tradition of, queer theory. I think that ends up positioning the Marstons as objectified others for the book’s readers, which again sits uneasily with the history of the closet and of the marginalization of queer people and alternative sexualities, whether lesbian or polyamorous.

Not that that’s the only takeaway from the book, certainly. And I do think Lepore is right that the history she uncovers, even if it isn’t a secret exactly, demonstrates that feminist history is more varied than people tend to think. Most obviously, the Marstons show that sex-positive and queer feminisms were around long before the third wave. Hopefully Lepore’s book will make that fact better known, and the next folks to write about Marston and his meaning can take it as more common knowledge, rather than as a revelation.

Update: Peter Sattler has a great follow-up to this post here. Jeet Heer also has a bunch of thoughtful comments below; so scroll down and then click over to Peter’s post if you want to continue the conversation (I’ve closed comments here to keep the conversation easier to follow over there.)
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If you’re interested in reading me babble on more about Wonder Woman, I have a book coming out shortly. Lots of info and links about that here.

The Best Roundtable No One Has Ever Heard Of

Posted on November 16, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

One of the things you discover when running a roundtable on unpopular music is that the music tends to be unpopular. While we certainly had some readers and some discussion as we talked about obscure old blues, obscure punk, obscure world music, and obscure Jpop, in general this has not been a high water mark for traffic on the site. We probably would have done better to do a roundtable on Beyoncé or even the Rolling Stones. It’s the artists with lots of fans, it turns out, who have a lot of fans. There are some people, maybe, who want to discover new things, or are intrigued by a random band name (Virgin Black! Wilmer Broadnax!) But for the most part people want to hear about something they’ve already heard about. I’m not usually one to see the critic as parasite, but it’s pretty clearly true that attention to criticism is dependent on the extent and success of the subject of the criticism’s marketing campaign.

So it’s clear why no read the roundtable. But why aren’t these bands popular to begin with? In some cases, the answer seems like it’s probably just bad luck. If you live in New Zealand, the likelihood of massive success in the States (or worldwide) is going to be substantially reduced. If you never managed to put out an album because of mismanagement or happenstance, the chances of longterm notoriety are much reduced.

At the same time, though, it’s often the case that “bad luck” can be read as “wrong genre.” In his piece on The Music Machine, Sean Michael Robinson points out that 60s psychedlia was a time of album worship. In some times and some eras (early rock, for example), putting out singles might not have marked you as marginal, but not when the Music Machine was playing. Along the same lines, Paige McGinley explained that the blues nostalgist enthusiasm for the male guitar performers is a big part of the reason why Esther Mae Scott, who blues woman in the Ma Rainey tent show tradition, has no recorded music online. Rahawa Haile argues that Eritrean music is marginalized because of an intra-African history of colonialism, where Eritrea is seen by as a kind of embarrassing footnote to the much better known tradition of Ethiopian music. Ben Saunders explains that the Cardiacs were too prog for punk and (presumably) too punk for prog; the incompatible mix of genres left them without a logical fanbase or audience.

Other performers here are simply from genres that don’t garner tons of mainstream attention: Wilmer Broadnax in quartet gospel; Jane Jensen in goth; Windahm Hell in extreme metal. And some, like Natural Snow Buildings or Sleepy John Estes seem to have deliberately oriented themselves towards a smaller audience, either by eschewing traditional marketing or by situating themselves deliberately as local rather than national or international performers. Sometimes genre consigns you to obscurity and sometimes, some artists choose (relative) obscurity as a genre.

Either way, though, I think the roundtable shows pretty conclusively that what lasts, or what is famous, or what’s in the canon, has only a tangential relationship to what is “best” — in part because issues of genre comes before what’s considered best, rather than after. When Rolling Stone makes a list of the greatest bands of all time, performers in Eritrea and New Zealand and Thailand aren’t on the radar. When people talk about the greatest blues performers, it’s men they’re thinking of often, not women. When they talk about greatest singers, gospel isn’t considered. When they talk about greatest albums, you don’t list acts that don’t have an album. Music that’s unheard is generally unheard not because it’s somehow worse than music that is heard, but because somewhere along the way, it was in that set of things that got filtered out.

The genre of things that got filtered out is never going to break blog traffic records. But, like any genre, its fans will testify to its virtues. Thanks to Ben Saunders for coming up with the idea for this and helping to organize it, and to all the contributors, readers, and commenters for joining us. It’s been a great roundtable, even if (or partially because) not many have listened to it.

Utilitarian Review 11/15/14

Posted on November 15, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Wonder Woman Conquers the World!

I’m starting to get some reviews in on my Wonder Woman book. I’ll list them in Utilitarian Review weekly as they come in. For a complete list of reviews/interviews/events/articles and more related to my book, go here.

And the first full review of the book is from Publisher’s Weekly.

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Bill Randall answers the question What is Manga?

We finished our last full week of the Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of roundtable. Entries included:

A thread on the Best Artist No One Has Ever Heard Of (I voted for my friend Bert Stabler, because no one appreciates him enough.)

Chris R. Morgan on the punk pain of Thoughts of Ionesco.

Otrebor on classical music and metal in Windham Hell and Virgin Black.

Dana Schechter on the mysterious psych folk duo Natural Snow Buildings.

A.Y. Daring on EGOIST, the band behind the anime “Psycho-Pass”.

Quinn Miller on Norma Tanega’s “Walking My Cat Named Dog.”

Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I wrote about:

— the glorious salvation of Beyonce fan fiction.

— Nicki Minaj, superheroes, and fascism. (I also woke up very early and stuttered my way through an interview with the CBC on the same topic.)

For Pacific Standard I wrote about Jeffrey Zacks’ Flicker and how our brains can’t tell film from reality.

At Reason I wrote about how the UK copyright system is even worse than ours.

For the U of C Magazine I wrote about Wonder Woman and Bella and why the greatest superpower is love.

At CBR I explained why Adam West Batman is the only real Batman.

At the LA Review of Books I explained why spoilers are good, and all your art shoudl be spoiled.

I discovered that this transcript of my interview on CNN about Emma Watson, men, and misogyny is online.

At Splice Today I complain about the tragedy of Noah. Get your own damn name, stupid kids.

Other Links

Janell Hobson on Nicki Minaj and the performance of white supremacy.

Mary McCarthy, on why she feels it’s important to acknowledge that her sister’s death was a suicide.

The World’s Too Big For Best

Posted on November 15, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

This first appeared way back in 2009 in the Chicago Reader. It seemed like a good fit for our roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of.
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It’s December, which means it’s time for me, as a dutiful blogger, critic, and self-appointed cultural arbiter, to put together my best-of lists. I need to listen to that Raekwon album again to confirm that I really do think exactly the same thing everyone else thinks. I need to check back in with that Mariah Carey album to make sure I really do think exactly the opposite of what everyone else thinks. I need to compare Of the Cathmawr Yards by the Horse’s Ha with Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest and Antony & the Johnsons’ The Crying Light to figure out which romantic, indie-folk-tinged work of idiosyncratic genius is the most geniuslike. I need to decide if I have to download the new Lightning Bolt album (legally, of course) and form an opinion on it, or whether it’d be safe to simply put it on my list on the assumption that it sounds like all the other Lightning Bolt albums.

At least that’s what I should be doing. Unfortunately . . . well, I’ve gotten kind of sidetracked. Some weeks ago, I was googling an artist from the Sublime Frequencies anthology Thai Pop Spectacular when I stumbled on an utterly bizarre video for a Thai song called “Sao Esan Raw Ruk” by a woman named Pamela Bowden.

[Pamela Bowden] – Sao Isan Raw Ruk by yinyinren

In the video the apparently Caucasian Bowden wiggles carefully to the beat, alternately as a blonde in a green tube top with green star-spangled pants and as a brunette in a black strapless dress. A large freestanding cylinder, like a hybrid of a gazebo and a generator, serves as a backdrop for erratically synchronized choreography featuring a handful of other dancers, all dressed in tight, cheerfully sexy red-and-black outfits. From time to time a boxy tunnel of green gridwork floats behind them, apparently on loan from Tron.

I enjoyed the campy staging, but what really hooked me was the hook. “Sao Esan Raw Ruk” weds overdriven techno-pop to what from my uneducated perspective sounded like traditional Thai rhythms and instrumentation. The result is a little like American pop’s Bollywood fusions—e.g., Amerie’s “Heard ‘Em All”—though the Bowden song has a stiffer beat and less sinuous, more percussive Eastern interpolations. The whole package feels like some sort of robotic exotica, with all the resolutely corny unhipness that implies—except that Bowden’s pure, light phrasing occasionally detaches itself and goes wandering free, a little throb of lyricism amid the frantic thumping. The song is funny, surprising, impossibly catchy, and unexpectedly affecting. If it had come out this year—the video I saw was posted in 2007, which ruled that out—I would’ve put it on my best-of list without blinking.

Finding more of Bowden’s videos wasn’t difficult. And I did manage to obtain a collection of six of her albums, sold as MP3s on a single disc called Pamela Bowden—Jumbo Hit, from the online store eThaiCD. For a non-Thai speaker like me, though, figuring out when those albums and videos were released—or indeed learning much of anything about Bowden—proved a lot trickier. But after a few weeks of moderately obsessive effort, I did manage to piece together some tentative biographical information (and, thanks to the Internet and the staff of Noodles Etc. in Hyde Park, some even more tentative English translations of titles).

Like many Thai pop stars, Bowden is mixed race; from the tidbits I’ve found scattered online, my best guess is that she’s partly Australian. (Though she’s a natural brunette, she sometimes plays up her Westernness by going blonde.) I’m reasonably sure that her first album was 1995’s Pretty P. The hit from that record is a by-the-numbers new-wavish pop-punk tune called “Sorry.” Its video features lots of neon colors and various nerdy guys who are all hyperbolically intimidated by Bowden’s tight DayGlo clothes and general hotness. The beat is overdriven and irritating, the guitar is formulaic, and Bowden sounds thin and strained trying to make herself heard over both.

Pretty P was a commercial success, if not an aesthetic one, and Bowden went on to make at least four more albums in the same vein. Then in the early aughts she switched genres to luk thung. Luk thung is often described as Thai country music, mostly because of its content. The lone blogger at Lukthung & Morlam (loogthung.blogspot.com), who asked to be referred to only as Chris, told me that the songs tend to be about “the poor country dweller who comes to the cruel city, or the hard life of a farmer.”

Traditionally luk thung has emphasized relatively slow songs, with expressive singing and lots of throbbing vibrato. Bowden did at least one album in this vein: Kaew Ta Duang Jai (“Waterfall in the Heart”). Videos for the album show Bowden in formal but still tight-fitting attire, singing midtempo luk thung standards to tasteful accompaniment.

To American ears the style is more like cabaret or torch song than country, with tinges of Memphis soul in some of the horn arrangements. Bowden is front and center in a way she tends not to be in her poppier efforts, and she sounds fantastic; her pure voice gently sways rather than swings along to the beat, and there’s just a hint of the keening bite that gives character to much Thai singing. The best track may be “Ao Kwam Kom Kuen Pai Ting Mae Kong” (“The Sadness of Leaving Mekong”), where she switches between short, careful phrases and extended quasi-yodels, the precision of the first accentuating the heartbreak in the second.

But albums like Kaew Ta Duang Jai are retro exercises. Luk thung has changed drastically in the past ten years, cross-breeding with pop and another rural style called morlam. According to Chris, “You can listen to 5 ‘lukthung’ songs and hear 5 totally different styles of music!”

Bowden’s other records from this decade bear that out. “Wud Jai Kun” (“Test One Another”) from 2002’s Bow Daeng Saraeng Jai (“Red Bow”) opens with what sounds like a saxophone strangling a duck and then goes into an off-kilter Latin beat interrupted by occasional big-band horns. Another song from that album, “Ruk Tai Luey” (“Love With All Your Heart”), dips into cheesy disco funk, with Bowden rhythmically talk-singing like an early rapper. “Noo Mai Dai Len” (“I Can’t Play) from 2003’s Pah Ched Nah La Jai (“Goodbye Heart”) is a three-way grudge match between a house DJ, a hopped-up brass band, and a classic-rock guitarist, with a funk bassist doing laps around the carnage. And then there’s E Nang Dance and E Nang Dance 2, which feature the remarkable blend of Thai pop and techno that was my first exposure to Bowden.

Perhaps, as Chris says, this all coalesces logically into a single genre if you can understand the lyrics. But when I watch the video for “Sao Esan Raw Ruk,” with the gazebo tube and the floating Tron bits and the spangled dancing girls, I find it hard to believe that what Bowden’s singing has anything to do with rural poverty. The title translates roughly to “Looking for Young Love,” which isn’t all that helpful.

For half a moment, I thought I was going to be able to clear this up, as well as fill in all the other gaps in my Pamela Bowden knowledge. After I’d been trying to track her down for several weeks, Chris pointed me to her Facebook page, and when I got in touch she cheerfully agreed to answer a list of questions. But . . . well, presumably catering to an American reviewer is a low priority when your music is basically unavailable stateside. The only information I was able to get from her by press time—she was charmingly apologetic but, she said, very busy—is that she plans to release a new album, Pamela Krajiewbarn, in mid-December.

Which means that, even though “Sao Esan Raw Ruk” turned out to be from 2004, I could still put Bowden on my best-of list for 2009!

Except, of course, that by the time I get a copy of Pamela Krajiewbarn shipped from eThaiCD it’ll probably be mid-January.

But that’s OK. After all, there are probably a bunch of great Thai albums from this year that I haven’t heard—not to mention Laotian albums, Indian albums, and, for that matter, American albums. As amazing a tool as the Internet can be, national boundaries, language barriers, and simple time constraints are still, as it turns out, a really big deal.

Certainly it’s fun to categorize and put things in order and make definitive pronouncements. (Ina Unt Ina’s “Teacher” is the best song of the year, dammit!) But it’s nice too to remember that it really isn’t possible to judge the totality of the world’s music, or even anything close to it. As C.S. Lewis put it, “Be comforted, small one, in your smallness.” Whether or not I download that Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, the world is still going to be bigger than my list. Which is a reassuring thought.

Addendum: Thanks to the power of the internet, I was contacted by an interested Thai speaker, who told me what the deal is with Sao Esan Raw Ruk. The name means “Esan Girl Looking for Love” and does (much to my surprise) tell the story of a simple country girl searching for love in the big city. It’s a traditional song, and Bowden apparently sings many of the lyrics with more than a touch of ironic sass; she deliberately plays up a country Esan accent as she explains that she is a simple country girl with dark skin and little knowledge of love — even though, obviously, she’s a light-skinned half-European wearing tight clothes and shaking about on the dance floor.

Not sure anyone else cares all that much, but learning this pretty much made my week.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon