Tag Archives: Noah

This American Shithead

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This article originally appeared on Splice Today.
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“We’ve been travelin’ over rocky ground,” the chorus declares on Springsteen’s latest, Wrecking Ball. And who can deny it? The recession has kicked America in its stained blue jeans; it’s wrestled us to the factory floor and stepped all over our soaring dreams of a good day’s work for a good day’s pay. But the Boss is here to tell you that we will overcome. A sample of gospel here, a neo-soul quasi-rap there, and, of course, that big, bad beat, performed by Bruce Springsteen himself, repeatedly and emphatically smashing his earnest face into the drum. Whump! Whump! Whump! Yeeeeeeeeeeeeyuuuuuuh! This recording matters! Preach it!

Springsteen has arguably been capable of nuance in the past — Nebraska is, at least, a quiet album. But the recession is big and, obviously, it calls for a big response. An anthemic response. A response that causes hogs in the next county to prick up their ears and fart for freedom. We need drums that smash and guitars that soar, and maybe some horns that also soar. We need people to scramble up onto the roofs of their underwater homes and light candles to show that even though we collectively made atrocious financial decisions in the past, we are not so defeated that we can’t continue to appreciate atrocious music in the present.

With an almost simian acumen, Spingsteen limns the troubles of our time, speaking for the working man and working woman inside of rock stars everywhere. “I’ve been down but never this down/I’ve been lost but never this lost/This is my confession/I need your heart/in this depression,” he sings on “This Depression.” You see what he did there? It’s, like, a play on words, because “depression” means both an economic depression and being really sad. So he’s saying he’s really sad, which is what you say in a pop song, plus he’s talking about how the country is having trouble economically. Fucking A, that’s deep.

The whole album maintains that high level of wordplay and perspicuity. “We Take Care of Our Own” is about how we don’t really take care of our own anymore. “Where’s the promise/from sea to shining sea?” he asks, because you can never have enough songs mourning the passing of America’s constantly regenerating hymen. Springsteen’s innocence, too, seems charmingly unbreakable. All the way back on “Born in the USA” he was triumphantly shouting tired patriotic tripe over fist-pumping music only to undermine said patriotic tripe with fairly obvious caveats when he got away from the chorus. The result being huge mega-hits because everyone loves triumphant patriotic bellowing, and the few people who don’t love it can love the caveats instead. The only downside being that it’s utterly ineffectual as protest. But a couple decades in, Springsteen hasn’t figured that out, no doubt because of the purity of his heart, or possibly, because he’s been distracted by raking in the gobs and gobs of cash.

But what the hell, I don’t begrudge him his wealth. I just wish that he could support himself in the style to which he is accustomed in some other profession — maybe as one of those robber barons he (of course) anthemically decries in “Death to My Hometown”? I hate Wall Street as much as the next Occupy sympathizer, but at least for the most part the salivating financiers and malevolent hedge fund vampires who rule over us are willing — eager even — to suck our life-blood quietly. Springsteen, on the other hand, insists on taking the musics of oppressed peoples — African-American gospel, traditional Irish, blues — and rolling it all together with the proportional subtlety of a herd of bilious ungulates.

I appreciate Springsteen’s concern for my bottom line, and, it is in the spirit of helping him help me that I offer the following earnest, heartfelt advice. Boss, if you want to lift my oppression and my standard of living simultaneously, then please, at long last, shut up.
 

Utilitarian Review 5/12/12

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On HU

In our Featured Archive Post, Richard Cook provides a history of Wonder Woman in covers.

Our roundtable on the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman continued. with criticism by Sharon Marcus, Ben Saunders, and Richard Cook. Plus William Marston on sorority hazing rituals. And also, a fan comic by Vom Marlowe featuring space crocodiles, matriarchal otters, and a guest appearance by Etta Candy.

Erica Friedman wrote about Maurice Sendak and learning to care — and not to.

And in our new voices from the archive feature, Gail Simone discusses Wonder Woman and Mary Sues.

Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I wrote about Naomi Schaefer Riley’s concern trolling about teacher activism.

Other Links

Chris Mautner on why he’s not seeing the Avengers.

An original page from Wonder Woman #28.

It looks like the Sun-Times is going to buy the Chicago Reader.
 

Voices from the Archive: Gail Simone on Wonder Woman and Mary Sue

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As I’ve mentioned, we have moved our archive from our blogspot address to here. I thought I’d make use of that to start a series highlighting some of the comments from back in the day. Voices from the Archive will be an occasional series; maybe once a week? We’ll see.

Anyway. Since we’re in the middle of a giant Wonder Woman roundtable, I thought I’d start out with some comments by Gail Simone in response to a post of mine in which I suggested that her version of Wonder Woman was a Mary Sue. Gail was extremely patient and forgiving, given the post in question. She left several comments.

Here’s most of her first.

This is a fun read. let me get that out first. I enjoyed it, in non-ironic fashion, honestly. But good lord, your premise is absolute and complete nonsense. I don’t like Mary Sues, I don’t believe in them, and I sure as hell don’t WRITE them. I find them intrusive, amateurish and insulting to the audience. The ‘evidence’ seems to be that:

a) I like the character, and

b) I like to show her in a positive light.

Well, dang, you caught me. She’s OBVIOUSLY a Mary Sue. Along with, oh, virtually every lead character ever written by anyone in a superhero comic. ;)

If I had a Mary Sue character, trust me on this, it wouldn’t be Wonder Woman, or Superman, or any of the other icons. I have absolutely no such connection.

Additionally, I found you REAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLY stretching to make your point in this article, which is a little funny, given the smugness that it embraces. I always say, wrong is okay, smug is okay, wrong AND smug is a little weird. ;)

I’m glad you liked some of the book, but of course sorry if you were disappointed overall. Wonder Woman is very subjective, and your piece here reminds me a lot of what I read on message boards, wherein there’s some resentment that the book’s author doesn’t write the Wonder Woman that the poster holds in his or her own imagination. It’s understandable, I’ve been there myself many times.

And here’s a bit from a later comment.

As for Mary Sues, hmm. Well, while I can see your definition, I’m not certain that it is actually the prevailing one. And there’s no question that blatant Mary Sue-ism is mostly pretty hideous stuff to actually read, even when it ISN’T amateurish fan-fic.

But simply declaring a character to be a Mary Sue doesn’t make it so, as I’m sure you’ll agree. Whether or not you believe a Mary Sue is a bad thing (and I think your article betrays you here, because in it, you certainly imply uncharitable things about the practice), the evidence is far too scant to make the case. In this particular case, I find the basic argument to be fallacious on its own merits simply because the charge could be applied literally to almost every recent lead portrayal in a superhero comic. If the definition is that open-ended, so much so that it defies sub-categorization, then I’m sure you’ll agree that it loses all potency. And meaning, for that matter. If any such portrayal can qualify, then using the term at all has little meaning….

I do find it interesting that you seem to dismiss the Circle as mostly pure pulp, as I think that story has quite a lot of interesting subtext about maternity and womanhood, in an kind of blemished manner that the book normally doesn’t embrace. I hope you pick up the next volume, as it fits more with some of your complaints about this book, and I admit it was more of a personal “I love this kind of shit” story than The Circle was, all about d-list forgotten barbarians and the like.

I completely admit that I wrote it because I do love that shit, and your charge of ‘continuity porn,’ which really doesn’t apply to the Circle (most of the elements in that book are new characters with little reference to DC obscurities) apply in godawful force in volume II, The Ends of The Earth. I admit it, and if you had written this article about that volume, I’d have to sheepishly take the heat. :)

It was worth it. Diana and DC’s Beowulf make a surprisingly strong dynamic, and it was good fun all the way through to write. Hope this volume hasn’t turned you off to that one.

You can read more of Gail’s thoughts, my responses, and the original post here.

Terry Dodson and Rachel Dodson The Circle

Ben Saunders on William Marston and Sex

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Ben Saunders had a great comment which I wanted to highlight in a post for Marston’s birthday. So here ’tis.

Thanks for your comment, Mike. To elaborate on Noah’s response: part of the difficulty, I think, is that Marston was an extraordinary sexual optimist who believed in the liberatory potential of desire. Although it is Freud who is usually associated with the logic of repression (“your neurozis iz a funktion of your represt longink for your muzzer!”), he was in fact far less optimistic about the idea that facing and overcoming repressions might lead to “health” than Marston. There’s a dark side, an almost cthonic element, to Freudian libido. Marston, on the other hand, seems much more cheery; “free yourself from your repressions, give in to your (real) desire to be dominated, and you will be happy.” It’s really a kind of sex-faith – to the point that the possibility of acknowledging a sexual element in all the non-sexual scenarios you suggest (child-parent, student-teacher, good citizen before the law) would not be seen by Marston as a distortion or corruption of those scenarios. Marston would probably say that the very need to insist that those scenes are non-sexual is itself a sign of our tendency to view sexual energy (falsely) as inevitably corrupting.

Of course, that’s exactly how a puritan culture DOES see sex – as dangerous, forbidden, shameful, corrupt, and having NO PLACE in any of the social interactions you have described. In some ways, it’s that puritanism that Marston is responding to – but he really doesn’t think he’s being subversive by insisting that sexual energy does play a role in all those interactions, because sexual energy is an unqualified good, in his vision.

I don’t actually agree with that, and would be hard put to point to one place in his writings where he flat out says it – it’s more an implication of the larger theories. But I think it’s a fair characterization of his thought, and it helps to explain why his comics seem weirdly sexy and sexless at the same time (to our perhaps jaded, puritan-in-reverse, pornotopic culture). His vision of sex is simply too sunny for us. To that extent, the observation that Marston was less cynical than us is probably right on – although I wouldn’t attribute a lack of cynicism to his culture at large, for all that their standards for sexual display were very different from our own.

The entire roundtable on Marston/Peter’s Wonder Woman is here.

Utilitarian Review 5/5/12

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News

We have transferred our archive from our blogspot address. There are still a few kinks in the system, but hopefully all will be worked out by the end of next week. So take a look around if you get a chance — and we’ll be featuring some older posts in various ways going forward.
 
On HU

Alex Buchet reviewed the new Avengers film, and discussed the creator’s rights issues it raised.

Most of this week was devoted to our roundtable on Wonder Woman #28. The roundtable index is here. Check it out for posts by Trina Robbins, me, my eight-year-old son, Jones One of the Jones Boys, Kelly Thompson, Sina, and Vom Marlowe.

Incidentally, you can read all of my reviews of the entire run of Marston/Peter Wonder Woman comics here.

In our Featured Archive Post, Sean Michael Robinson and Joy Delyria report on Emily Bronte’s relationship with her publisher and the unicorn in Wuthering Heights.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Splice Today I review the banal slog that is Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem.

Other Links

Really funny letter by Adam Yauch. RIP.

Jason Michelitch with a great review of the sex and violence and nationalism in the Captain America movie.

Monika Bartyzel on the depressing sexism in the superhero genre. Also on how Marston/Peter were great.

A new James Romberger comics.

Shocking new data shows that schools do better if you give them more money.
 

Vom Marlowe on Wonder Woman, Bondage, and Princess Leia

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Vom Marlowe had a short, thoughtful comment on Trina’s post, which I thought I’d highlight here.
 

I think that plenty of women notice the bondage–I certainly did. I think it’s part of the Marston/Peters charm. But it’s not the bondage itself that is the charm, it’s the way the kink is handled that made early WW so successful.

For a more modern version, I always loved the scene in Return of the Jedi when Leia strangles Jabba The Hut with the literal chains of the patriarchy. There she is, in the absurd bikini, and instead of just being this pretty cheesecake, she uses her bonds to save the day and get herself the biggest of the big guns. If she was just stuck there and then got rescued, well, I’d have hated it.

Same thing with WW. Old school WW is always getting tied up and then freeing herself, and tying up other people, and it’s all good clean kink. I’m sure some women (and men) don’t notice the bondage or ignore it in favor of other aspects of the character–such as her love of peace, or her invisible plane or whatever.

But WW is awesome in part because being female is awesome; I mean, to me that’s what Marston/Peters is all about. Being female saves the day–there aren’t many stories like that whatever the format. I think modern writers often write WW as being female as something that has to be overcome or is weird, like green hair–to me, that’s the trouble with all the reboots. The writers can’t figure out a way to tell a story that makes her successful because of her femininity (and I suspect that maybe they don’t even try, as in A/C’s version).

The index for the roundtable on Wonder Woman #28 is here.

There’s Something Besides Fire To Contend With Here!

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So as I mentioned earlier in this roundtable, my son has been really into the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman. So I asked him if there was a panel he’d like to draw from Wonder Woman #28. He picked this one.
 

 
And here’s his version of it.
 

 
I figured I’d draw it as well. Here’s mine:
 

 
My son looked at it and said, “that’s a mess.” My wife looked at it and said, “her chin seems a bit prominent, doesn’t it?”

Everybody’s a critic.