Tag Archives: Noah

Schlock Blues

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This first ran at Splice Today.
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Bonnie Raitt’s always had a bit of pop in her roots. Her 1971 self-titled debut included appearances by stone blues royalty A.C. Reed and Junior Wells covering contemporary pop tunes like Stephen Stills’ “Bluebird” and the Marvelettes “Danger Heartbreak Dead Ahead.” Two decades later, she was still at it. The title track of Nick of Time put Raitt’s earthy/sexy blues-pop voice over eighties drum machine and keyboards. With Don Was producing, the result is an authentic schlock charge that tore up AM radio. Blues becomes sentimental pap, sentimental pap becomes blues, and both of them are deployed in the interest of lyrics about getting older, watching your parents age, and listening to your friends tell you about their marriage falling apart. It’s middle-of-the-road music for boring middle-aged people — and as a precociously boring and precociously middle-aged twentysomething, I found it irresistible.
 

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Raitt’s next album 1991’s Luck of the Draw was even more successful with the same formula — some blues licks, that smooth, real voice, smarmy easy listening tunes delivered like they were roots truth and roots truth delivered like it was smarmy easy listening. “Something To Talk About,” opens with a ridiculous giant crappy thudding drum and a background chorus that sounds like its had its collective brains scooped out with a mellon-baller, all juxtaposed with Raitt’s growling guitar and that drawled “darlin'” which never fails to make me need to sit down and fan myself. It’s both gee whiz corny and smolderingly sexy — a come hither anthem for middle America.

In short, Raitt’s appeal lies not in being “real,” and not in being gratuitously ersatz, like Madonna or Bowie or even the Carpenters. Rather, when she’s on, she’s on because she’s a little bit authentic, a little bit pop— solidly middle-of-the-road. At her best, she sounds both tough and clueless; both knowing and approachable, as on the aching schmaltz heartbreak of Luck of the Draw’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me.”

Alas, the roots/pop balancing act is inherently unstable; step wrong one way and you’re recording pallid blues; step wrong the other way and you’re putting out unlistenable pap. Raitt’s done both of those things. Her second album, Give It Up, is much lauded as a triumph of authentic blues rock, but can also be seen as an exercise in irrelevance. If I wanted to listen to a tasteful, competent album, I’d go for Billie Holiday or Van Morrison or someone else with talent, you know?

Slipstream, Raitt’s latest release, tips over in the other direction. There’s still the blooze, of course, but even that seems pro-forma at this point in her career — just another hollow gimmick like the keyboards and the drums and the vocal chorus. The reggae-lite of “Right Down the Line” is one of those vapid, peppy tunes that makes you leap for the radio off-switch — a could-have-been earthier “Shiny Happy People,” if Raitt had the hitmaking power of yore. “Marriage Made in Hollywood,” figures Raitt as bland scold, mildly deriding our celebrity culture with all the satiric bite of a toothless, shapeless crooning bivalve. Whoever decided that Raitt would make a good social commenter needs a swift kick in the reality programming.

Still, there are moments of adequacy. Raitt’s voice sounds a little older, a little more strained, but her phrasing can still hold your attention. When she sings “I would be crazy if I took you back,” on “Standing in the Doorway Crying,” you can feel the desire and the resignation. The opening lines of “God Only Knows” (“Darkness settles on the ground/leaves the day stumbling blind,”) deliver a bleak, charge…before the tune degenerates into Billy Joel-esque earnest piano confessional.

But so it goes. Raitt was never a great artist, or even, arguably, a very good one. Still, she managed to parley her aesthetic incoherence, her bad taste, and that marvelous voice into some of my favorite pop ever. I doubt she’ll ever make another bearable album. I’m just grateful, and a little surprised, that she ever made any.

Utilitarian Review 7/27/13

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Alyssa Herlocher
Scrotal Mountains
gouache on paper

 
On HU

Featured Archive Post: Matthias Wivel on the sacred in Chester Brown’s Paying For It.

Voices from the Archive: Kurt Busiek on copyright extension and comics.

Me on trying to choose whether to vote for racists or imperialists.

Patrick Carland on Aku No Hana and the politics of decadence.

Jog on cultural tourism and Only God Forgives.

Andrea Tang on the Yellow Peril in recent cinema.

Vom Marlowe on the weirdness of Black Butler.

Me on meaning and no meaning in John Porcellino’s Raindrops.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Wired I argue that we don’t need no stinking Wonder Woman movie.

At the Reader I wrote about a great show at Woman Made gallery focusing on the aesthetics of porn.

At the Atlantic I wrote about censorship and porn on the Kindle.

At Splice I write about:

—Obamacare for traditionalist.

—Venus Santiago’s lactation stories and porn for women who work.

 
Other Links

Jes on engaging with music made by abusive men.

What Do You Mean, Raindrops?

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I like the cat. It’s barely there; just a single line dividing inside and outside. And then it’s bound by the bottom of the panel, so the something inside and the nothing outside seem equally arbitrary. The tail is a separate thing; it could be a raindrop sliding down the surface of the panel. The cat’s eyes and nose could be raindrops too. The lit lit lit is the sound of the cat tail raindrop hitting the panel, and the sound of the eye and nose raindrop hitting the cat. One lit for each, the sound of rain dripping.

The window in the corner could just as easily be a painting, or a drawing. In fact, it is a drawing. Is that the delusion? Or the bare substance? The raindrops in the window, or the picture, are not raindrops. But they aren’t empty either. Ideas, not clinging, but falling…at least in theory.

I think the comics almost makes more sense if you rearrange the panels, or drop some of the panels. The monk’s questions and answers don’t really seem to add anything; it’s less a socratic dialogue than a monologue with more or less distracting interjections. The fact that there’s a pretense of communication almost makes the thing more hermetic. If Ching-Ch’ing doesn’t have an interlocutor, then some of the contradictory statements seem less like things you have to parse, more like he’s vacillating inside his own head. Instead of setting his own conduct up in opposition to that of ordinary people, you could read him, without the monk, as saying that he, too, is an ordinary person, on the brink of falling into delusion about himself. In fact, treating the rain as a metaphor could be seen as a step into delusion. The rain is not people upside down falling into delusion about themselves. The rain is the rain. But the bare substance is hard to express. It turns into deluded people, or into the word “lit” (like “literature”?) or into the picture of a picture of rain. To express the bare substance, all you’ve got is representation.

The title design, with the little raindrops on either side, is pretty clearly twee. Maybe it’s the title Ching Ch’ing is referring to when he says that ordinary people pursue outside objects; the title is outside the comic, labeling it, and providing the one real drawing of rain (if you don’t count the cat’s tale as a raindrop, and count the window as a picture.) The unnecessary fillip of design, and of such an unassumingly finicky design. The little “lits”, the cat, the bald-headed monk tilting his head just so, and the world in which equal line weight and lack of shading means that bodies and backgrounds fail to become each other only through the delicacy of reader and creator’s mutual forbearance — all of these seem to try to find profundity through ostentatious smallness. You wonder if the bare truth of Zen is a tea cosy.

In the first panel, the sound outside is the sound outside might be seen, not as the sound outside the room (wherever that is) but rather as the sound outside the speech bubble itself. But the speech bubble has a sound inside itself too — or at least as much of one as the sound outside. If Ching Ch’ing is seen as a shape, then the sounds — his speech, the lit lit — are all outside him. Pursuing outside objects could be the words running outside the self, chasing those lit lits.

Or perhaps what’s outside is us, looking down, upside down over the page, falling into delusions, or on the brink of doing so, by trying to avoid falling into delusion by reading about avoiding falling into delusion.

In the little additional text at the bottom, Porecellino says you and I discuss how people cling to words and ideas when the Old Monk drops by. That makes the monk the rain, falling from outside to inside. But which monk is this? Is it Ching Ch’ing? Or is it the monk talking to Ching Ching? I think it’s probably supposed to be the first, but I kind of like the idea of the straight man monk showing up, maybe with the cat, and all of us standing around confused together. No rain.

Racists vs. Imperialists

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This first appeared on Splice Today. The time references are a little old, but I think the overall issues are still relevant.
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“Barack Obama is the food-stamp president,” Newt Gingrich declared last week on his way to the South Carolina primary. Some have called this a racial dog-whistle. Others might argue that, given its quintessential Newt subtlety, it is more of a racial slime-trail. Either way, you still apparently can’t go wrong in South Carolina by equating black people with big government. John Calhoun is no doubt chuckling with senile glee on his traitor’s dung heap in hell.

Andrew Sullivan made the argument recently that libertarianism is not inherently racist. He argues that he would not legislate against private expressions of racism…but that is not because he supports racism, but because he believes that such legislation would backfire, resulting in less freedom for all.

The social power of homophobia and hetero-sexism in a free culture is crushing. I oppose it; and recognize it. I have spent a great deal of my life pushing back culturally and intellectually and morally against it. But I do not want to compel it into submission. I want to persuade it into toleration. And that is the core difference between power exerted by the state and power exerted by non-state actors: the former is ultimately backed by physical force deployed by the government; the latter by public opinion, economic and social power, and the willingness of minorities to buy into the ideology of their oppressors or haters.

Sullivan’s certainly right on the philosophical point; there’s nothing structurally or logically that says that a desire for small government has to coincide with racism. Indeed, you can imagine societies — say, apartheid-era South Africa, or Nazi Germany — where opposition to government control and opposition to racism would be entirely congruent.

The problem is that those societies are not the society in which we live, and that history matters. Tim Wise makes this painfully clear in his brisk new book Dear White America. Addressing his fellow white people (like me!), Wise not so gently informs us that most of our presumptions and self-congratulatory musings on race are bunk. Barack Obama’s election has not ended racism (he lost among almost all white demographics except the young.) Asian Americans are not a model minority (they’re relatively high income is because they are concentrated in high-income cities; adjusted for location, their poverty rates are double those for whites.) And in America, where “state’s rights” was used as a rallying cry for slavers, fighting against the central government does in fact have something to do with racism. Which is why when Ron Paul says, “South Carolina is known for its respect for liberty,” it’s hard not to think that he’s speaking not for all people, but for white people in particular.
 

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Along these lines, Wise points out that Tea Party activists who oppose high taxes and big government are not actually interested in going back to a time when government was really small — to the nineteenth century, for example, when there were no regulations preventing children from working in industry (even the pro-child-labor Gingrich isn’t agitating for us to start chucking ten-year-olds back into coal mines — at least not white ten-year-olds.)

Instead, when Conservatives say they want to roll government back, they generally mean back to a time before the 1960s. Of course, as Wise says, tax rates in the 1950s were exponentially higher than they are today — the highest was ninety-one percent. But there was something different in the 1950s. There were big government hand-outs…but they were restricted to whites. White folks, Wise says, supported the Homestead Act of 1862, which gave Indian and Mexican land to white people. White folks supported the New Deal programs of the 1930s. They supported the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration Home loans which were largely responsible for creating the affluent American middle class. “In other words,” Wise says

government had always been big for people like us, and we were fine with that. But beginning in the 1960s, as people of color began to gain access to the benefits for which we had always been eligible, suddenly we discovered our inner libertarian and decided that government intervention was bad, perhaps even the cause of social decay and irresponsible behavior on the part of those who reaped its largesse. [….]
Doesn’t it seem convenient that growing opposition to government intervention in the economy, the housing market, the job market and other aspects of American life parallels almost directly the racialization of social policy, and the increasing association in the white mind between such efforts and handouts to the undeserving “other”?

I can’t deny any of that. Which makes my own flirtations with libertarianism (including reading Andrew Sullivan and kind of liking Ron Paul) somewhat embarrassing. Wise turns the screws further in a recent blog post on Ron Paul in which he points out that racist shithead David Duke opposes imperialism abroad and the government security state at home, just like Paul. He adds:

And yes, I realize that Ron Paul — this election season’s physical embodiment of the broken clock — is not, literally, as bad as David Duke. Yes, he supports all those incredibly ass-backwards policies rattled off above (about welfare, immigration, abortion, taxes and education), but he is not, like Duke, a Nazi. He is supported by Nazis, like Stormfront — the nation’s largest white nationalist outfit, which is led by Don Black, who’s one of Duke’s best friends, and is married to Duke’s ex-wife, and is Duke’s daughters’ step-dad — but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. Surely it’s not because Paul wants to repeal the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act, and allow companies to discriminate in the name of “free association.” And it couldn’t have anything to do with those newsletters that went out under his name, with all kinds of blatantly bigoted commentary about black people being IQ-deficient predators, at a time when he was promoting those very newsletters (and so, presumably, reading them), and not objecting in the least.

Ouch.

And yet, while I am chastened, I’m not necessarily convinced. Yes, it’s true that libertarianism, freedom, and self-determination in this country have all been soaked in racism. You can’t use those terms in reference to the United States without taking part in the history and ideology of white supremacy. Wise is right about that.

But…the problem is that the alternatives to libertarianism, freedom, and self-determination aren’t exactly pure either. As mentioned above, Wise himself points out that most big government interventions, from the Homestead Act to the FHA housing subsidies, were explicitly white supremacist in intention and in effect. Slavery was enabled by large-scale government intervention. So were our many, many big government, racially inflected imperial adventures — from Columbus’ extermination of the Arawaks which kicked off white folks’ control of this continent to our current bloody slog in Afghanistan. So, for that matter, is the drug war.

There certainly have been anti-racist big government interventions. The Civil War was one. Civil Rights legislation was another. But, by the same token, there have been anti-racist anti-government movements as well — such as the Civil Rights movement. But the Civil War doesn’t excuse our adventure in Iraq from its racist imperial tradition any more than the Civil Rights movement excuses the Tea Party from its racist libertarian tradition.

The difficulty in America (and not just in America, but America is where we live) is that there is no ideological path you can take that isn’t tied to the history of racism, because racism is our history. This country was built on the genocidal elimination of Native Americans and on the enslavement of Africans. It wasn’t built on only those things, but still, those things were pretty important. And when a President — even a black President — sends drones halfway across the world to intentionally kill terrorists and happens to kill other people who don’t look like us, that history is implicated, and implicates us.

The point here isn’t that Paul and Obama are equally racist, or that their supporters are equally hypocrites. Rather, the point is that it behooves every white person, whoever they support, to think about their ideologies not just as abstract systems, but as living histories, with all the bloodshed and compromise that that implies. Wise is doing God’s work when he vilifies the racism of Conservative libertarianism, but I wish he’d found it in his heart to spend a bit more time vilifying the racism of bi-partisan big-government as well. I guess white people, to no one’s surprise, find it easier to see the beam in the other person’s eye. That’s why whites need to follow Wise’s example and check each other.

Utilitarian Review 7/20/13

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Miriam Libicki on Terri Moore and Jaime Hernandez.

Ng Suat Tong on the Korean War, Kurtzman/Toth, and propaganda.

Jog on late Ditko.

Betsy Phillips argues Superman isn’t Jesus, but Moses.

Isaac Butler on the Walking Dead video game and narrative.

Ng Suat Tong on Krazy Kat, Jack Chick, comics and kitsch.

Chris Gavaler on supervillains, the Silver Age, and the Boston Marathon bombing.

Me on Kim Thompson, negative criticism, and loving comics.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Atlantic I write about:

why psychologists are too much like superheroes.

Realism and banality in the Conjuring.

At Splice Today I talk about

The Trayvon Martin case and misandry.

how a client screwed me out of thousands of dollars.
 
Other Links

Domingos Isabelinho asks whether comics criticism ever existed.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on racial profiling.
 

KK-Sunday

Another Ambivalently Elitist Editorial

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In a 1980 essay titled Another Relentlessly Elitist Editorial, Kim Thompson made the argument, on behalf of the old Comics Journal in general, and curmudgeon Gary Groth in particular, that negative comics criticism is worthwhile and necessary.

And to those who, fists tightly clutched around the latest issue of Micronauts or Warlord, indignantly shriek, “Comics—love ’em or leave ’em!” we can only respond: We do love them. But we refuse to become apologists for the mediocre and the worthless in the process. To wallow in that which is artless and dishonest is an act not of love but of betrayal. The Comics Journal’s sights are pointed obstinately at the stars. Perhaps reading it is depressing at times; but I think the disappearance of the magazine, or of the basic philosophy that makes it what it is, would be more depressing by far. We haven’t given up hope for comics yet. We’re still waiting for the medium to flower.

Thompson’s response to the purveyors of anti-negativity negativity is, then, that only through (selected) negativity can you express true love. Folks who refuse to admit that Micronauts is a piece of crap denigrate the medium they claim to reverence. If you value comics, then you must have standards. If you promote any old piece of dreck, then you’re treating comics as any old piece of dreck. You are, as he puts it, a gluttinous gourmand, lacking respect for your pallet and yourself, rather than a discriminating gourmet.

The issue, therefore, is framed specifically, and competitively, in terms of love. Thompson is responding, he says, to a question that many people at the time asked of the Journal: “Why, if you have such contempt for the medium, do you publish a magazine about comics?” Kim’s response is a turnabout: it is not we who point out flaws who have contempt. It’s you, who refuse to hold comics to the highest standards, who are spitting on the medium. If Gary calls most mainstream comics “bland, useless garbage,” it’s because that bland, useless garbage is smearing filth upon the face that he reveres.

Kim’s points seem reasonable enough. I might question whether Roy Thomas or Steve Gerber have actually “achieved superior works in the medium,” or whether the O’Neil/Adams Green Lantern/Green Arrow proves the worth of comics rather than the opposite — but those are quibbles. Different folks have different canons, and in terms of worthwhile comics, there were even slimmer pickings in 1980 than there are today. The general point that respect for the good in art sometimes involves contempt for the bad stands, even if one doesn’t quite agree on the merits of a given work.
 

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If I agree with Kim up to a point, though, I’m also a little leery of the way he frames the issue…and perhaps of the conversation in which it occurs. Reading Kim’s editorial, it’s hard not to be struck by the extent to which TCJ, and its editors, were embedded not just in the medium, but in the industry they were critiquing. Kim isn’t jousting with internet trolls; the folks who are telling him he’s too negative are editors and writers at DC and Marvel. One guy basically sounds like he’s threatening the Journal that he won’t help with news or cover reproductions if the reviews aren’t more positive.

Given those kinds of incentives (and/or that kind of frank thuggery) it’s a credit to Gary and Kim’s integrity that the Journal didn’t back down, and did continue to call out crap when confronted with steaming piles of it. At the same time, though, it seems like being embedded in that world would have to affect your worldview — or, to look at it another way, to have wanted to be in that world, and to have worked to be in that world, means that your worldview would have to sync up to some degree with that of the folks you’re criticizing. Kim may not agree about what it means to love comics — but he does agree that loving comics is a reasonable criterion by which to judge comics critics. And that love should, in this view, extend to comics as a whole — very definitely including super-hero comics. he takes care to show that he has the right and the standing to sneer at the most recent X-book, by declaring that he has no prejudice against the genre as a whole. Recognizing Steve Englehart as a glorious treasure is part and parcel of recognizing the lousiness of the Micronauts.

This is not really where I’m coming from. I would never say that I loved comics, nor would I necessarily say with Kim that it’s “a great and wonderful medium.” Certainly, there are some great comics — and then there are lots and lots and lots of terrible comics (some of which Kim signals out for praise.) Certainly, comics isn’t any greater a medium than music, or art, or literature, or film…or possibly video games, which I know almost nothing about. Comics perhaps can do some unique things — but doing unique things isn’t unique. Every medium has its own history and its own formal potential. Why praise one in particular? Why love one in particular? And why should loving one in particular be a condition for criticizing that one? Or to put it another way, why do I need to be a fan to point out that Green Lantern/Green Arrow is clumsy, overblown agitprop, in which the vivid, dramatic visuals mostly serve to emphasize the self-parody?

One reason to be a fan, perhaps, is that fandom — to some extent in 1980, and even more now — is the way that our cultural interests are organized. Kim’s love of comics (and TCJ’s love of comics) was an essential part of what the magazine was and how it became so important; that love was the reason it could be so connected, however ambivalently, to the institutions and communities that Kim is, in this essay, both defending himself from and insisting on his own place within. It was the love that powered his long, long list of achievements as publisher, translator, critic, advocate, and editor.

Criticism without a basis in a fan culture of love, on the other hand, isn’t likely to produce such achievements. The common community, the common audience, and the common institutions, which spring out of commitment to a particular medium are vital to organizing and perpetuating communities, audiences and institutions. Placing yourself outside of community puts you outside of community; you end up, by definition, not talking to a whole lot of people.

Still, I like to think that there’s some worth in comics criticism, or any criticism, even by folks like me who don’t necessarily have a special fondness for comics in particular. Different perspectives can, perhaps, pick out different gems, as well as different warts. And different loves, or different kinds of loves, can maybe create different communities, or different connections between existing ones. Kim and TCJ and Fantagraphics are a longstanding and impressive demonstration of what those committed to comics can do for comics, and for art. But I think too that one measure of comics’ worth is, or will be, that they can speak not just to fans, but even to those who don’t have a stake in loving them.
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As most folks reading this probably know, Kim Thompson passed away last month. The last time I communicated with him was when he, graciously as always, declined an invitation to participate in our anniversary of hate.

…and I just went back through my too-few emails from Kim and found one where he was talking about how much he loved translating that just about made me cry.

Utilitarian Review 7/13/13

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On Hu
Featured Archive Post: Richard Cooke on Finder: Voice and gender.

Bert Stabler on the new Pixies video and race.

Peter Sattler on Dan Clowes’ agonized relationship with comics.

Me on Finder:Voice, power, knowledge, and penises.

Michael Arthur on furries, nostalgia, and the mainstream media.

Chris Gavaler says “I Am Tonto.

Jacob Canfield on how late Ditko is worse than Jack Chick.

Ng Suat Tong on Utsubora and the dangers of artsy erotica.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere
 
Other Links

At the Good Men Project I talk about how misogyny hurts men.

At the Atlantic I talk about racism, sexism, and the Pixies new video.

At Splice I write about:

Joy Stecher and Kate Brislin’s great version of Our Town.

How work for hire is not spiritual debasement.
 
Other Links
Jog writes about late Ditko.

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