All Hail the Comics Heroes

Chris Ware made several promotional posters for the "Comics, Philosophy, and Practice" at UChicago earlier this year.

Dear reader -- This thing was "in the can" in May, but went unpublished and grew dusty. Here it is now, five months later, but hopefully illustrative of something of the accelerating tide of comics' move to the mainstream. I know, I know--we've known that comics are "serious" for a long time....but there's a new urgency around the academy's acceptance of the form. This incredible meeting of comics minds was a testament to what's happening now.

Art Spiegelman’s electronic cigarette glowed neon blue as he puffed in the darkness offstage. The scene looked almost like a series of panels from the beginning of a superhero comic book: a stranger’s silhouette hangs in the shadows of an anonymous city, his face illuminated only by the tip of a Marlboro Red. As he exhales, he grumbles, “Forty years ago, we never guessed that this %@&*! would happen.”

In this particular context, “this %@&*!” was an academic conference on “Comics, Philosophy, and Practice” at the University of Chicago’s brand-new $114 million Logan Center for the Arts. Ten miles south of the NATO circus [this was the same weekend as the city-paralyzing show up at the McCormick Center--feels like a long time ago --ed.], the weekend’s symposium brought together its own group of summit-level characters—Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel, Ivan Brunetti, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Phoebe Gloeckner, Justin Green, Françoise Mouly, Joe Sacco, and Carol Tyler, among others—and put them in conversation with scholars. When R. Crumb received his invitation from English professor and conference organizer Hillary Chute, he worried about boring the audience. “I try to be entertaining and not too serious or intellectual,” he wrote in a postcard (he doesn’t use email).

“This is, after all, about comic books.”

Of course, it seems like a long time since “comic books” earned recognition as a serious and intellectual medium—one that has established a following of serious and intellectual readers. Despite origin stories about underground presses in East Village lofts and homemade magazines with miniscule circulations, graphic narrative has found a safe home in university literature departments. More broadly, it seems an accepted truth that graphic novels and nonfiction represent some of our best contemporary literature, and that they deserve our closest readerly attention.

That comics count as high-art, and that everyone knows it, was driven home to me when I taught a freshman class on Bechdel’s memoir Fun Home. I asked whether anyone was surprised that we were reading something that looked very much like a comic book in a college classroom.

A comic book!

In college!

No one raised a hand, and I stood there in my tweed jacket like a balding, Hamlet-quoting square.

One can still marvel at (or lament) the speed with which comics have attained the academy’s gold star of legitimacy. But it seems more useful to try and figure out what the appropriation of comics by the university actually means for young authors, readers, and Hamlet-quoting squares. For Spiegelman, who joked about the “Faustian bargain” that admission to the ivory tower implies, it still sounds like a strange development. Justin Green, patron saint of autobiographical comics, was slightly less ambivalent. In his hypnotically soothing voice, he wondered what kind of occasion could bring together such a heavy-hitting group of comics authors.

It could be a funeral, he suggested—but then again it might be a wedding.

After all, would the academy really kill comics? Would it slice them up? Couldn’t one as easily argue that comics have already been drained of their subversive oomph by retrospectives at fancy museums and in edited anthologies?

And is Art Spiegelman really smoking e-cigarettes now?

Instagram scattered thoughts

The simple way to think about Instagram is that it's a play on nostalgia--that it looks to recreate the sense of a previous era's photographic aesthetic for the purposes only of making pictures seem vintage.

The problem with this view is not only that it ignores an important reason why people actually seem to use the app. That is, it seems to foreclose a discussion of the emotions that we are trying to evoke with the app's various filters, focus options, captions, etc. Rather, it also seems to paper over the question of how the form of the app is changing what we think constitutes photography.

How does Instagram change our understanding of the snapshot? What are users trying to tap into other than nostalgia?

A framing thought: the photo filters *don't* really aim to recapture any lost sense of how photos creates meaning or induced emotion. When these filters weren't filters (that is, when it was just the way analog technology worked), the style would have seemed eminently modern. So at the very least Instagram actually warps the sensations created by the filters in the very act of trying to reproduce them.

I dunno. I'm on a bus. Thoughts instagrammers?

So Long Zuccotti

Tough to support this claim, guys.

Last night's collective shower was inevitable. Occupation in the absence of meaningful negotiations with (or even a few demands of) those who hold political power is as empty as violence in the absence of meaningful negotiations. In this, as a chapter of OWS comes to a close, it seems an obvious opportunity to talk about why it has failed so far:


Occupation is a Political Tactic, not a Strategy:
 
As pictures of sanitation workers cleaning up the newly-cleared Zuccotti park have been hitting the Interwesbs all day, I'm struck by the orderliness and swiftness with which evidence of the presence of OWS protesters has been eradicated. This of course reveals something essential to the "movement" itself: its presence is physical, embodied, and built on only one half of the required tactics to achieve political ends. Occupation has always been a stalling tactic--something that brings negotiators to the table; an opening up of space somewhere else for dialogue. Not so for OWS.

Violence against protesters by the police in the streets is a horrible thing. But in a case where negotiators are working with those in power, it can at least be a bargaining chip. Violence against protesters who have no one speaking for them is a total waste.

The Call to Arms by the Newer-New-Left has been Unhelpful (their reading of the financial collapse is incomplete, and their call for abstract change is counterproductive)

Sweaty, bedraggled, and seemingly trying to hold back a smile during a fiery speech in the early weeks of OWS, Slavoj Zizek lay down the hammer:

Here there is already socialism for the rich. They say we don't respect private property. But in the 2008 financial crash down, more hard-earned private property was destroyed than if all of us here were to be destroying it night and day for weeks. They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think that things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are the awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself.

The first part of this paragraph, which emphasizes the weird cult-like aural landscape induced by the "human-megaphone"--seems right enough, except for the fact that it wasn't as much private property that was destroyed as financial capital. The difference is not unimportant. The intangibility of the crisis itself has resulted in an incoherent (or, at best inchoate) set of demands from protesters.

This might be why the materialist critical response to the financial collapse has been so unsatisfying: it's difficult for thinkers in the Marxist tradition to talk about things like credit. This is especially so when it seems that people are less interested in overthrowing the system of private property and more interested in getting jobs. For the most part, even the most unreasonable sounding protesters at OWS wanted jobs and health insurance--not the overthrow of capitalism.

Or,

• It's not the eradication of banking: it's the privileging of a certain kind of bank (credit unions)
• It's not the eradication of corporations: it's the eradication of an ineffective corporate tax structure masked as rhetoric that wants the end of corporations
• It's not the elimination of globalization: it's the perceived democratization of the means of global interchange (side note here, this is why Twitter and Facebook were so much more effectively used in Arab Spring revolts, where these methods of communication were perceived as unsuppressable...they were used in defiance of political powers. Here, it was frequently observed that corporations would never shut down wireless systems to prevent people from Tweeting pics of their drum circles from Zuccotti).

 The failure to articulate a concrete set of demands is, in other words, not just the fault of the protesters. It's the fault of the intellectuals and politicians who exacerbated the problem by fanning the flames of--not really extremist: if you notice, there's nothing that extreme or really new about what Zizek says--totally impractical rhetoric.

If You're Planning on Repopulating Zuccotti, Bring a Warm Blanket--and Also, Read About the Tea Party

There are 62 members of the Tea Party Caucus right now in Congress. There will be ZERO Occupy Wall Street representatives in Congress as of next fall if nothing changes. Elizabeth Warren can't be the only reasoned voice in the room. Period.
 

 

On Memory and Moving On

Try to Praise the Mutilated World, Adam Zagajewski, September 2001

 Try to praise the mutilated world. 
Remember June's long days, 
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew. 
The nettles that methodically overgrow 
the abandoned homesteads of exiles. 
You must praise the mutilated world. 
You watched the stylish yachts and ships; 
one of them had a long trip ahead of it, 
while salty oblivion awaited others. 
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere, 
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully. 
You should praise the mutilated world. 
Remember the moments when we were together 
in a white room and the curtain fluttered. 
Return in thought to the concert where music flared. 
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn 
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars. 
Praise the mutilated world 
and the grey feather a thrush lost, 
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes 
and returns.

Times Finally Reports on Nineties Nostalgia

NYTimes did a piece on Nineties Nostalgia (the existence of which, somehow, surprised them). What struck me is how smart Nick is in their redeployment of Doug and others. They're not only responding to pressures from social media outlets, but now also responding to audience participation on social networking sites to determine their schedules.

The other thing, as I've continually been thinking about nostalgia these past few months: we're nostalgic for forms of media engagement. As those forms change more rapidly, the thing we can be nostalgic for gets more and more recent. After school cable television was the primary form of entertainment. But check out these social networking stats (passed on me by Tyler, of course....). Notice the crazy-weird spike of internet usage by the youngest demographic. Also note that 11% of Facebook users are 13-17 years old. ELEVEN PERCENT! This is more than 75 million kids.

Forget about watching stuff like Nick. KIDS are online poking each other *cough* ever earlier.

These kids will be nostalgic for the old Facebook messaging interface, like, next week.

(Just kidding, they'll be nostalgic for Google+).

Errol Morris's Favorite Commercial

I've written about Errol Morris's directorial work on the High Life campaign here and (I think it should show up this afternoon) on Splitsider. But props to NPR for spotting and boosting Morris's tweet from year calling out this commercial as his own personal favorite.

Take that, High Life Man.

Critical Engagement with "Tree of Life"

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie. (Jonathan Franzen, Liking is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts," NYTimes 5/28)

In a sharp and often moving criticism of social networks, Jonathan Franzen sets "liking" against "loving." Whereas to like something sets us apart from the liked (or disliked) object, love demands the opening of one's life to another. Love is about cohabitation, and not just in the sense of splitting the rent. It's about a metaphoric (and sometimes not metaphoric) sharing of the same bodily, mental, and emotional space. To put it in the words of the only *actually* moving wedding homily I've ever heard, it helps us salve the loneliness inherent in the human condition. And it does this by attempting to come as close as possible to shared consciousness with another person--regardless of whether one believes this idea is nutty (at best) or impossible (at worst).

But the kind of criticism that has emerged in the wake of Terrence Malick's Tree of Life has exposed a complication of Franzen's argument. Simply to like or dislike a film embodies the laziest sort of critical response available to a writer. I was taught this in high school. An English teacher instructed me never to write "I like this book" in an essay. He told me that merely liking something is uninteresting, and that asking what I think something means would always constitute a more worthwhile form of engagement. But critiques about Tree of Life often ignore the lesson of this observation about good writing, and instead go to the extreme to defend or attack the movie, along with Malick, contemporary filmmaking, and, in some cases God.

That is, we don't need to like or dislike the film. But neither do we need to address what it means.

We need to love it or hate it.

Grasping For One Another: Artist Nathan Vernau

“Let me go grab even more stuff,” Nathan said to me. I was sitting at his coffee table trying not to let my mouth sag onto the pile of his work. Nathan Vernau moved to Chicago after finishing his MFA at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He participated in a widely lauded group show at Robert Bills Contemporary, curated by gallery director Emma Stein, and will appear in the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival later this summer. Last year, he appeared on the cover of New American Paintings. News about his upcoming shows and festival appearances can be found at his website.

But look. I’m burnt. I’ve tried to write this piece five times, and endured total accidental deletion of 1500 words that I thought were finally adequate to the task of describing what Nathan’s work “is.” I haven’t written anything but a piece on Ren and Stimpy in two weeks as a result. And once again, I find myself not saying what I want to say about the piles of pictures that lay in front of me on Nathan’s coffee table.  So I’ll just say it: Nathan’s work is vital, urgent, unnerving, and deeply felt.

And there’s a lot of it.

Torture and the State of Exception

Politico recently reported that, according to Bush Administration speech writer Marc Theissen, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed mocked his captors at Guantánamo while being waterboarded. "KSM figured out waterboarding," Theissen said at the American Enterprise Institute last week. "He figured out the limits," and allegedly counted off seconds until his interrogators were required to pull back.

Theissen's comments seem to suggest that the problem with the Bush Administration's waterboarding policy was that it did not allow agents of the government to go far enough. For me, reading from selections of the Torture Memos provides enough evidence that this assessment is misguided at best--and insane or inhuman at worst. Yet somehow the debate about the merits of waterboarding persists.  I have been struck in the past few weeks by the quiet resumption of what I thought was a closed matter: that waterboarding yielded little in the way of useful information at Guantánamo Bay.

The High Life Man, Part II: What Women Want

In Part One of my discussion of the High Life Man, I suggested that an aesthetic transition has taken place in the portrayal of men over the course of the last decade.  Using the new Old Spice Man as my point of comparison, I suggested that the masculinity embodied by the be-toweled Isaiah Mustafa "doesn't derive from an internal code, but from the female gaze."  This ostensibly stands apart from Errol Morris's High Life Man, whose code of manly behavior comes from within: from adherence to an internal ethos of manhood.  To understand what this transition could mean, it seems appropriate to analyze what the High Life Man actually says about female desire (and women in general) and compare that to a reading of the Old Spice spot.

Oskar's Mom: Searching and Loss in "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"

Words Words Words

I'm not big on announcing "SPOILER ALERT!" but be that as it may, don't read this brief piece on Jonathan Safran Foer's 2005 novel unless you're okay with knowing some things that happen in the end of the book.  Or, in other words: Spoiler Alert.

Oskar Schell never considers himself a detective in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  He's not looking for the solution to a mystery, and instead characterizes his travels around New York City as "my search," telling people he meets that he's merely "looking for a lock."  Of course, what we learn throughout the novel is that the search itself gives Oskar a means of carrying on a day-to-day life in the absence of his father.  It gives him a means of ordering and calming his otherwise inchoate body of symptoms (self-bruises, tics, obsessions about 9/11 and clothing and death, etc).  Oskar fears that the conclusion of his search ostensibly forecloses the possibility of proximity (ie: his extreme closeness) to his father.  Once Oskar finds the lock he worries aloud to his grandfather: "I found it and now I can't look for it [...] Looking for it let me stay close to him for a little while longer" (304).  Finding the lock could never have been as important as engaging in the process of endless searching.

Ordinary Politics: Pictures from Michael Mergen

Precinct 7-1, Centerville, TN, 2010

Ordinary Engagement with the Political

Michael Mergen's photography hung at the ArtChicago fair this month as part of an exhibition featuring the work of 19 top MFA candidates from around the country.  Pictures from Vote, a series that reveals the often unexpected contexts in which Americans cast ballots, stood out for their documentary presentation of scenes in which everyday life becomes a stage for political participation.  A Philadelphia native, Mergen began his career as a photojournalist, and is currently a graduate student at the Rhode Island School of Design.  His growing portfolio of work, which has been featured in Mother Jones and elsewhere, represents an expanding inquiry into the modes of political participation in America at the level of everyday ritual and routine--not just when we feel like we are performing civic duties.  Mergen's pictures stand as an important commentary on the over-saturation of daily life by the political, exposing ways in which citizens are constantly exposed to civic imperatives in scenes of ordinary life.

"United 93" and OBL

 

There are a lot of reasons to think about Paul Greengrass's 2006 United 93--not least of which is the film's complicated portrayal of Islam.  Here's my best effort when it comes to relating the movie to last week's events.

Since Osama bin Laden’s death last week, a part of the national conversation has been dedicated to determining how “we” are supposed to feel.  It’s a dilemma.  What emotions are appropriate this kind of event?  Ambivalence?  Relief?  Joy?  Satisfaction?  Perhaps more interestingly, the question of how to feel has often been framed as an accusation.  That is, it’s seemed quite common to hear people asking: “What emotions are inappropriate for this kind of event?” in an effort to disavow certain sets of reactions. I wonder why accusations of emotional immaturity and wrongheaded patriotism have been heaped with such vehemence upon crowds of White House and Times Square “OBL” revelers.  And I want to suggest that the narrative function of United 93 is in part to give us fictional space to experience these emotions without having to avow them.

Derrick Rose and Fan Highlight Reels

Derrick Rose became the youngest player ever to win the NBA's Most Valuable Player award today.  By this point, even if you don't live in Chicago, you might know why.  If not, Sports Illustrated's version of Derrick Rose Central essentially provides all the numbers necessary to make a convincing case that he was the most dominant player in the league.  I'm not going to try to express in too many words the thrill of watching Rose play (though it's something akin to watching a man run downhill and jump off cliffs over and over again for 48 minutes).  Rather, it's a good opportunity to think about the phenomenon of fan-generated highlight films--and how they are changing the nature of sports fandom.

The Built Environment and Photography

The above composite of photographs taken by Hilla and Bernd Becher appeared in the 1975 exhibition The New Topographics: Photographs from a Man-Altered Landscape at the George Eastman House in Upstate New York.  Like many of the pictures in this exhibition, the black and white documentary stare of the camera presents what seems an objective perspective on scenes of industrial production.  The majority of the pictures at the Eastman House were taken in black and white, and were starkly depopulated.  They present stark landscapes created by "man," but devoid of his presence.  Now,  a new show (that I am absolutely flipping out about since my girlfriend told me about it [I might have to go alone, I'll be so annoying])  at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Photography called Public Works demonstrates the multiple directions that artists have taken the lessons of New Topographics. 

The 9/11 Commission Report as Memorial

The 9/11 Commission Report stands as the government’s official take on “what happened” almost ten years ago on that infamously beautiful day on the Eastern Seaboard.  Perhaps surprisingly, it also stands as one of the most engaging narratives about the history of Al Qaeda and America’s counter-terrorism efforts.  It’s really well written—a fact that surprised many critics when it was first published.

In light of last night’s events—a kind of strange kickoff of the nation’s Tenth Anniversary of 9/11 pensiveness—I have been thinking about other ways to think of the report.  Perhaps we can think of the report, less as a government document, or even as a work of literature.  It’s an instruction manual on what, why, and how we should respect the authority of the state.  In effect, the report acts as a kind of memorial to September 11.  Memorials establish the rules for what constitutes citizenship, and confirm our participation in a fantasy of national belonging.  When thought of as a memorial, it seems possible to suggest a broader importance for this government document.

An Evening of Gentlemanly Pursuits, Part IIIa

What follows is a setting of a scene--something that contributes to the understanding of the grand sweep and narrative context that found me walking up Fulton Market Street on an almost impossibly warm day in early May 2010, on my way to an interview with Paul Kahan at Publican.  Of course, not everyone agrees about the importance of historical flows and contingencies, and so this is an interlude, a prelude to that interview itself.  Skippable, sure.  After all, there are those that refuse to acknowledge that we are all bound up in contexts and stories and narratives.  That we are more than the mere technologies that record these contexts and stories and narratives.  That we contain each other.  That the remediation of loneliness and apartness comes, in part, from reminders of this togetherness across time.  Remember this Mr. Achatz, if you think that you are some kind of context-less newcomer with your fancy cocktails and your seasonal menu.  Remember your history. Remember as you sell tickets to the opening of your latest concern.  Because we may seem like our own most important moment, but even as we hurtle toward whatever we perceive as the future, the tentacles of our collective pasts tug at our tendons, our tissues and weave themselves into something that we might call, in our more contemplative or hopeful or fearful moments, a soul.

A Brief but Important History of the Blommer Chocolate Company and the West Loop, Vitally Necessary to an Understanding of what One Might Think About on the Way to an Interview with Paul Kahan, Restaurateur

The Blommer Chocolate Company was founded in 1939 in Chicago.  The Blommer family--Henry Blommer and his two sons Al and Ben--built a handsome modern headquarters and factory in the Near West Side at the intersection of Kinzie and Desplaines, a few steps from the western bank of the putrid stench of the Chicago River.  The city still had no solution for the dumping of industrial waste into the River, and its flow had long before been reversed to reduce pollution of the city's blue jewel, Lake Michigan.  The factory was close to the cheap and desperate muscle of a Depression-ravaged immigrant populations, and yet within shouting distance of the Loop--long the city's commercial aorta.

The High Life Man: Masculinity in America

Overture: The High Life Man's Credo
I went up to the Block Cinema at Northwestern University last week to see Errol Morris's latest documentary Tabloid.  I'm a longtime fan of Morris's extensive series (more than 100 ads in all) of advertisements for Miller High Life.  According to Morris's website, so is he.  The director of documentaries like The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War considers the High Life commercials "his most impressive achievement."  Their sheer volume aside, Morris's meticulous attention to consistency of tone, humor, and warmth throughout the campaign is pretty amazing.  Because they ran for so long (almost eight years), and seem to establish a consistent aesthetic for a certain kind of ideal American man, Morris's commercials raise a lot of issues related to the supposed crisis of confidence plaguing American masculinity.

Newspapers in "Falling Man"

Trying to combine the last two posts together a bit.  Don DeLillo's 9/11 novel Falling Man thinks a lot about the relationship between the individual and the historical, but in a way that is much different from Junot Diaz and Jennifer Egan.  Here the concern is about the relationship between individuals and an exemplary/spectacular/singular event.  How does an individual's relationship to a historical event like 9/11 differ from that individual's relationship to the ongoing narrative of a continuous history?  I think the novel helps us address some of these questions, while at the same time providing some insight on how newspapers mediate the transition from post-trauma to ordinary life.  Or something.  I'm really tired.

Don DeLillo's Falling Man presents characters with different relationships to visual, literary, and performance art.  The novel meditates on the ability of different genres and forms of art to mediate trauma--to help characters work through the aftermath of the terrorist attacks.  Meanwhile, the novel itself attempts to work in different genres.  The staccato, stilted dialogue of the characters often seems more like terse poetry than realistic portrayals of conversations; and (as we discussed in class), the tightly stylized form of the book resembles a self-contained still life.  In other words, Falling Man engages with questions about the usefulness (uselessness) of artistic forms as means of smoothing the transition from trauma "back to" ordinary life.

Wondrous Goons

I've been swooning over Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad for a while now.  It's no longer my private recommendation--my "sleeper" candidate for best book of 2010 (and, to be fair, it was everyone else's sleeper candidate in that category well before it was mine.  That is, well before I got around to Goon Squad, the secret that the book was a secret success had very much gotten out).  By now, everyone knows it's a book that deserves to be torn apart, read multiple times in multiple directions: one whose parts can seem momentarily greater than the whole, but only momentarily.  And this is great news for a lot of reasons that involve a lot of things--particularly the opening up of the novel as a form, and the generation of dialogue about the future of fiction making.  But I wasn't so much thinking about the future as the past.