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Pittsburgh's Small Press Festival 2010

Published

on August 21, 2010

. 0 Comments

PGH SPF 2010

I'm probably beating a damn dead horse at this point, and for that I apologize. But I realized that I don't have anything written about this year's show... and I SHOULD considering that I'm helping organize the festivities!

Here's the official schpeel:

The SPF Expo will be held on September 25th and 26th, from 12pm to 5pm, at AIR: Artists Image Resource! Registration costs only $25, and in return your press, book, magazine, or organization receives a table, two passes, and signage for both days! We have lots of big things coming in September, and we hope you'll be there to experience it!

Basically, SPF is all about Pittsburgh's small press scene -- whether it's comics, mini comics, zines, small press lit, or whatever. And registration is open now. So go sign up if you want to exhibit.

Culturology #74 - On Reading Walden (2)

Published

pete

on July 30, 2010

in Books and Culturology

. 1 Comment

Remember last week, when I had that little note at the bottom of the post about what was going to come up this week? And I said "Thoreau's Walden (and I fucking mean it!)"? Well, I didn't really mean it. I try to keep my personal life out of these articles as much as possible (except for the occasional weird ominous poster from where I live), but, my failure to finish Walden has me scrambling for excuses, so I'll let it slip: I'm moving out of the apartment where I live (the one with the EVIL), then leaving the country for several months, so I've been, like, busy. But I really did start to read Walden. I got about 12,000 words into it (which I think represents maybe 44 pages or so), so, like, that's more than just picking it up and then putting it down again. But not really impressive.

So what can we take from all this? Well, so far, two quotes in particular caught my eye:

"All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant."

This obviously appeals to the serious artist in me, as a major strain not only in my own work, but in conversations with my colleagues, is about concentration, and the value of concentration. And whether it is appropriate, in an ADD-raddled age, to still expect one's viewers/listeners/readers to, like, actually pay attention to what you've produced. This ties in to the question I was asking last week, where I was concerned that I read graphic novels too fast--that there's something there that I'm not taking the proper time to savor (I try to appreciate the art, and notice great layout and pacing when I see it, but in more standard fare, I'm often at a loss for what I should be noticing).

There's an interesting tension that arises in a lot of creative works, around repetition. I suppose especially in music and poetry, where there are refrains or formal patterns that repeat themselves. But it comes up a lot in comedy as well, via catch phrases, running gags, call-backs, etc. And even in comic books as certain frames or set-ups are repeated in certain ways to provide continuity through and across multiple books (I know that as I work on writing Time Log, I'm always looking for spots where I can set up a situation that directly mirrors another one that has already happened in the story (and maybe that really only makes sense in time travel writing, or maybe I'm just an amateurish hack (or all of these things)). But then, even once we've admitted repetition as a central element in cultural creation, some number of artists will immediately want to claim that there really is no such thing as repetition, since, as Thoreau states, change is always happening, so at best repetition is a kind of recycling uncanniness. And all of our lives are just hauntings.

"To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust."

And see there, isn't that nice? It sure is. But you can see that even reading just the first ten-thousand words of Walden allows me too much chance to indulge my artistic self, which is totally inappropriate for the usual wielding of the awesome cudgel of cultural criticism that I flail around with here.

But... I'm going to keep reading Walden, and dammit, I'm going to finish it eventually. I can see now how ridiculous it was to try and read this in 11th grade, on the time table of a high school English class. There's no reason to motor through this stuff! I mean, the fact that I've come around to deciding to read it myself certainly clues in the fact that I'm looking to be inspired by it (I'm trying to think of what, if anything, I was inspired by in 11th grade... maybe... you know, I don't really remember what I was reading in 11th grade, outside of stuff required for class. But I've always self-identified as a reader, so I must have been reading something...), so will probably continue to find quotes that I like.

And I think part of the problem is that I've been trying to read it as an e-book, rather than as a paperback, and that definitely isn't helping. In fact, I'll probably wind up taking the time here one of these days to go ahead and find an actual copy of the thing, 'cause then it'll be way easier to read.

Luckily I've got just the scheme to buy myself a couple more weeks to finally read it... original short fiction, written by my brother Nate, will be appearing for the next two weeks. It's a story which also serves as a great epilogue to Nick and my awesome Tournament Movie Tournament from back in the Spring. So stay tuned next week for Part I of... SUPER FOOT TO HEAD!

Culturology #73 - Monkey Fist

Published

pete

on July 23, 2010

in Books and Culturology

. 6 Comments

There's some kind of trend involving, I sense, a growing appreciation for Young Adult and children's literature amongst the generally-literate folks that I tend to interact with or am aware of. This, I presume, has to do with the fact that people our age are getting slightly older and, like, having kids, or something, so therefore children's things--which are often simultaneously marketed to parents--are attempting to appeal to people who are similar to me (except that they have children). Or, slightly less cynically, creative people that came up in the same zeitgeist as me are now finding success in the culture industry, and making things that are of a similar sensibility to my own.

Which isn't to say that I do all that much consuming of youth culture. In fact, I don't really partake of any of it. Except for stuff that Nick turns me on to. Things like Avatar: The Last Airbender. Would I have been aware of the fact that Nickelodeon had made a cartoon show that was pretty good? Probably. Would I have watched it? Probably not. But, luckily, Nick had the foresight to get me to actually watch the show, and I quite enjoyed it. Not enough to read up or argue about its mythology, or to go to any comic-cons dressed up as a character or anything, but was happily watched all three seasons (and happily skipped the movie when it came out). Which brings us to this week's entry in the I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Booklove Bookclub: Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese.

There is some embossed gold foil circle stamped onto the front cover of my paperback copy of this graphic novel, so I knew, even before opening it, that it must be good (it won a Young Adult Literature Prize from the ALA). Which is also nice to know ahead of time, when you've gotten a recommendation from Nick--that other people also think it's good, and it's not just another Irish Jam (not to use the same example as last week, but I've honestly blanked on any of Nick's dud recommendations (and in fact, am mostly now thinking of him giving me Casanova, which I think I might even like more than he does, so I'll let this runner die out (and start picking on Molly instead))).

And ABC is quite good. A little bit of it was kind of off-putting to me (more on that in a minute), but it does exemplify what I think must be the appeal of much YA literature, as read by actual adults (people, you know, like me, in their late twenties):

--a semi-complicated structure which then resolves itself quickly and neatly

The back-cover copy already let's us know: this book has three main characters, how are they ever going to be related? The reader will have the pleasure of finding out. And of course, the reader does find out, and rather swiftly at that (though, I have to note here, I think maybe I'm not a great reader of graphic novels; how long is it supposed to take to read a page of a comic like this? To read a whole section?). Though, in terms of these characters resolving into each other, I was a bit curious as to where the base-line reality lies in this thing. As I was talking about with The City & The City, it's often the case in fantastic tales, that it doesn't really matter how crazy the world it takes place in is, so long as that world is self-consistent. In the case of ABC, is Jin's world the same as Danny's? That is, in Danny's world, is he actually still just Jin, seeing himself as a white American kid, or did the transformation actually happen?

And, as a point of comparison, Audioshocker 2009 You-Don't-Suck-Award nominee, Dan Chaon's Await Your Reply probably stands as an example of a book with a similar structure which is resolved in a less YA-y way. The main distinction being that, though there are multiple characters that turn out to be transformed or disguised versions of themselves in other plotlines in ABC, the tale itself is told in more-or-less linear fashion, whereas in AYR, not only is there some character-crossing (some identity theft), but the tale is much more chopped up, and less obvious in its time-line (until the reader finally figures out what's going on (who is who and when they are).

--rather directly stated meanings/morals

I don't think there's anything wrong with being obvious. That's probably what makes YA literature enjoyable for grown-ups too; we don't always want to do the work of figuring out what a book is really about. The "transforming" idea, how emigration and life as a minority is always an act of transforming oneself, whether those codes come from within your community or from without, finds a happy home in the literal/actual acts of transformation undergone by these characters. So when that old lady at the herbalist early on in the story warns a young Jin about the loss of his soul and transforming, we understand it as a metaphorical turn about where one's identity comes from. And then when he actually transforms into Danny, it's given a fine fantastical resonance (as opposed to, say, the more alienating metamorphosis of poor Gregor Samsa into a giant beetle).

--a wrap it all up ending

Just for the record, it's my guess that the happy, fully concluding manner of ending literature for young people is probably a newer trend. Seems like once upon a time, authors were willing to traumatize their readers a bit more (mostly, as I look back on my own childhood (which is already too soon to get at what I'm trying to imply), I'm thinking of dead dogs here). I just wasn't thrilled with the "your best friend was my son, a monkey, and he hates humans now, so go win him back over" ending.

So, as for what I didn't like as much about this: (and this probably just reveals my usual biases) what's up with Tze-Yo-Tzuh? Or, more specifically, sending the monk and the monkey to go give gifts to Baby Jesus broke past the barriers set up by of my weak agnostic notions. Just a little much. I mean, I suppose it stands as a fine archetype of East-meeting-West, but the notion that we can get through globalized culture-mashing modern existence by recognizing that we all have the same Creator just seems... ugh, I dunno, just a little much. Given the amount of in-fighting between sects of the Abrahamaic religions alone, I don't know, I suppose I would have preferred something more secular to bring it all home with, that's all. I realize that it's a work of fantasy, but grounding it in a bit more reality at the end might also be useful to the kids that have the most to gain from reading it.

NEXT WEEK: Thoreau's Walden (and I fucking mean it!)

IN AUGUST: We'll get the month of my birth off on the right foot (to head) with some original fiction, then go from there.

Culturology #72 - There's Books in Them Thar Hills

Published

pete

on July 16, 2010

in Books and Culturology

. 6 Comments

Culturology's I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Booklove Bookclub rolls forward, with me back up on my book-reading shit and having completed the book that I claimed I (we?) was going to read for this week: B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. For those of you that are interested, there's apparently some amount of interest in Traven's personal history, insofar as, apparently, it was just a nom de plume, but know one ever knew--or, whoever did know never squealed--who the author actually was. Which I think is pretty rare, since for the most part we know what fake-author-name's real names were (George Eliot = What's her face, Mark Twain = What's his face, Molly = Nick, etc.). But I'm not really in a mode where I'm tempted to get swept up in such a thing. A fine book though, this one, whoever wrote it.

Perhaps some of you--presuming that you're more-or-less my age (late 20s)--have had a similar experience to this: because of watching cartoons, as I grow older and catch up with all the culture that's happened in the past, as I see, hear, or read iconic works for the first time, I realize that I was first introduced to the trope via a reference in a cartoon from my childhood. For instance, watching the "Goodfeathers" sequences on Animaniacs, and then finally, years later, actually seeing Goodfellas, and thinking "Wow, that was a violent, vulgar (you shut your mother-father mouth!) movie, I can't believe they based a kid's show around it." Or, like, every frame from Citizen Kane, which has shown up in one place or another.

In reading Sierra Madre, I encountered the source for yet another chain of references. My personal narrative of the trope goes like this:

1) In Weird Al Yankovic's movie UHF, the pet-store guy, at some point, yells "Badgers! We don't need no stinking badgers!" Then, I believe, he throws something (some pet) out a window. This was funny.

2) In Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles, the sheriff is deputizing some folks, and a bandit-esque kind of character declares "Badges! We don't need no stinking badges!" And my teenage self, smart as he was, realized that UHF was referencing Blazing Saddles.

3) This line comes from B. Traven's book! I read it with my own sub-section-of-brain-pieces-responsible-for-reading-and-comprehension!

4) I then realized that, given the first two things being movies, they were almost certainly referencing the movie adaptation of the book (starring one of those famous '40s actors), where the "Badges, we don't need no stinking badges." line must have been uttered. It comes full circle.

So that was exciting. I don't think anything else in the book matches that moment. So, if you haven't already surmised, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is Western pulp, taking place in Mexico back during the end of the oil boom and during the perhaps long-running gold if-not-boom-than-like-some-people-consistently-out-there-looking-for-gold. I haven't read a whole lot of pulp fiction in my life, and most of what I have falls into either the hard-boiled/noir genres or sci-fi, so I'm not too familiar with Western or cowboy novels. So I don't know if this one was really better than any other or not. Part of me wasn't thrilled with the prose style, mostly because it's in an omniscient third-person narration that shifts freely between characters, and also tends to be a bit pedantic.

The pedantry isn't a huge deal, since it still does tend to be pinned to one character or another, as we follow a down-and-out American as he wanders about Mexico for a while then goes mining for gold with two other Americans (one of them being an old-timer that knows the ropes). So then they're mining for gold. There's some dialogue, some gold dust, a few hi-jinks, a little bit of danger. Then they stop mining for gold. Then someone's head gets chopped off with a machete, which is a little bit jarring, since there's no other violence to match it in the book. As if the author was thinking either "Fuck it," or "Boo-yah!" I'm gonna have this guy have his head chopped off. Felt more boo-yah-ish to me than anything.

I can't tell if that just means I've been well-trained by the contemporary-literature machine to unconsciously desire Raymond Carver-esque first person narration, or if not that then the kind of distanced third person of a lot of postmodern prose, or just a modern style thing generally, but I can't think of too many books that I've read that sit in such a place narratologically. I mean, plenty of other novels do it, but not in such a sudden and free-flowing manner as the Traven. So I tried pretty hard to keep myself for judging it on such grounds, but after a while it was still hard for me to--it's not quite suspension of disbelief, but there's a kind of realism involved in any given novel, where you have to, as a reader, by it or not, as a tale being told. But since this one's a kind of morality tale, I don't know, it just seemed a bit overwrought to me. But, it being pulp, none of this matters too much, since it all moves very briskly and is delightfully easy to read.

As another note, since I'm still not finished reading Walden, one of the blurbs on the back cover (from who knows how long ago) notes that perhaps The Treasure of the Sierra Madre would take the place of Walden as the book from which the young people might take advice. Though I still feel like it's still much more likely that I go live in a shack in the woods than go mining for gold anywhere.

Coming up on the I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Booklove Bookclub:

July 23rd: Gene Yuen Lang's American Born Chinese

July 30th: Henry David Thoreau's Walden (this time I mean it!)

Culturology #71 - On Reading Walden

Published

pete

on July 9, 2010

in Books and Culturology

. 7 Comments

As if posting a (if I do say so myself) rather substantial first entry to this summer's book club, by the end of it I suddenly found myself irrationally confident in my ability to read books and then write commentary about them. I should have remembered that, as of late, I've barely been able to maintain a bi-weekly schedule of posting (which is supposed to, of course, be a weekly schedule) about any old thing, let alone make consistent, specific, content-driven posts about actual things. So, I didn't read Walden this week, like I claimed I was going to do last week. I did read the first several dozen paragraphs, though, and I still intend to read the thing by the end of the month.

I would like to also note, though, that it isn't Walden's unreadability that kept me from reading it. Or, to restate, it's me that's the problem, not Walden. The timing just wasn't right for things to work out. Walden, we've still got a chance to make things work, I just need some more time first. My suspicion is that, in fact, I'll wind up writing about Walden's continued or renewed relevance for young people nowadays, and about how ridiculous it is to have been made to read it in 11th grade, when I was totally incapable of doing so (as I recall, I read some of the key passages, but definitely didn't read the whole thing, or if I did read it cover-to-cover, more just looked at the words, rather than actually parsing them, or I read the Cliff Notes, or the Cliff Notes were so boring that I couldn't even get through them). But I've gotta save all that writing for when I actually read the thing.

The main other cultural-digestive thing that distracted me from Thoreau was the release (and subsequent purchase (breaking a pretty consistent string of not buying media that I had going there for a while)) of a second By Brakhage anthology DVD set from the Criterion Collection. There is the part of the post where it becomes ever more painful what a nerd I am for art, but Brakhage was an amazing film-maker, and additional was an incredibly great aesthetic thinker and a brilliant reader of poetry. Combine all of that and he's been a huge influence on my own thinking about art, and especially lyric art, especially lyric poetry (which I tend not to write about for Culturology, since it's, like, rarified and probably snooty, and mostly, I imagine, uninteresting to almost everyone on the planet (and here I distinguish between poetry, which I think everyone on the planet can potentially enjoy and get a lot out of, and poetics (the theory of poetry) which is more for the poets than for the readers, in the end (even though poets, of course, are also readers))).

Brakhage is most known for his painted-on films, which are almost always silent, and which find as their inspiration closed-eye vision. Brakhage, on the various special features of the DVDs, talks about how he was really trying to make "music for the eyes." And I think, even from a popular-cultural perspective, in a lot of ways we can all see how all the arts aspire to be music. Or we have that experience, in listening to music, of finding it to be a direct line to emotional and visceral experiences in a way that happens more often and more consistently than with writing or visual art. But, before I diverge too far into talking about such things, maybe I should stop...

Brakhage is also well known because he was, for a long time, a professor of film and the University of Colorado, in Boulder. His most famous students are Trey Parker and Matt Stone, who made the original South Park short while students of Brakhage's. He also, awesomely, has a cameo role in their first movie, Cannibal: The Musical (which I haven't watched in many years, but I recall being at least entertaining, if not as laugh-packed as, say, Orgasmo). So even though Brakhage didn't really have any use for narrative sound-film, and especially not for Hollywood movies, he still managed to play a role in a couple of his students' spring break project. Which is pretty rad. I like to imagine Parker and Stone approaching him about it, and Brakhage just chuckling and amicably agreeing.

So in that way, Brakhage as a further influence on me. Even though he was a total visionary and an incredible lyric artist (and thereby, is perhaps not as immediately approachable as some artists--at least from the aesthetic conversation perspective; I think his films are very understandable), and could probably be seen as being a bit of a snoot thereby (in one of his interviews he says something awesome to the extent of "I've never seen a Hollywood movie which required more than 15 minutes at a coffee shop afterwards to discuss" (that's a massive paraphrase, and I hope I'm not misrepresenting there)), he still managed to be a cool professor and show up in a random, goofy movie. Right on.

Coming up on the I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Booklove Bookclub:

July 16th: B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (this will be read by then; I'm already halfway through)

July 23rd: Gene Yuen Lang's American Born Chinese

Culturology #70 - I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer

Published

pete

on July 2, 2010

in Books and Culturology

. 8 Comments

Welcome to Culturology's second summer of bookloving bookclub action! (And you know who knows what we bookclubbed last summer? The Onion A.V. Club, who're wasting their time with A Scanner Darkly right now, which we all know is soooooooo 2009.)

China Miéville's The City & The City

We're starting things off with a pretty awesome book this summer, I think. The City & The City came to me as a recommendation from a fiction-writing friend of mine, as a book which is blurbed as if it's a mash-up of Raymond Chandler and Franz Kafka, and actually manages to do so. And that's really what it does! I found it to be a very engrossing read (perhaps more like Chandler in this way than Kafka), the sort of novel which just thrives within its genre--a detective story--to keep the plot moving, but then contains such interesting scenery. I reckon that Neal will agree about this too, since it seems like it took him all of two days to read this one. There's, I think, a fairly large number of things to discuss out of this book, so I think I'm, as a start, going to just focus on one aspect for now, and see what comes up from there: genre.

Though this book is definitely a police story at heart, it straddles this fascinating line between fantasy and sci-fi as well. Put as simply as I can, the story takes place in a city, or rather, two cities which overlap each other, Besźel and Ul Qoma, which is/are somewhere past the Balkans. Although the two cities are separate city-states, they occupy the same geographic location, they are "grosstopically" right on top of each other. Some districts are all one city or the other, but many areas "crosshatch," where the two cities co-exist, their citizens being well-trained from childhood to ignore ("unsee") the other city. The origin of this is referred to as "the Cleaving," an excellent usage of language by Miéville, as "to cleave," awesomely, means both to split, and from a separate origin, to come together (this polysemy was also beautifully utilized by the poet Li-Young Lee in his amazing poem "The Cleaving"). Monitoring transgressions by either set of citizens across these invisible borders is the mysterious force of Breach.

Breach is the more obviously sci-fi element of the story, as they wield powers which are above and beyond those held by either individual city. They're revealed to be human, in many ways, by the end of the story, but even then their technologies and observation abilities are one of the points that stretches C & C beyond just being rather realistic fantasy. The other main source for fantasy-esque elements is the possible third city of Orciny, which according to legend, exists in the cracks between the two cities, and the never-satisfyingly-explained archaeological dig in Ul Qoma that produces a mish-mash of artifacts reminiscent of an ancient culture right out of H.P. Lovecraft (though the Lovecraftian elements fizzle away very satisfyingly before any real horror elements enter the novel).

There's been a recent spate, in the last couple of years, of authors mashing genres up with detective stories, to rather satisfying results (e.g. The Big Lebowski, The Yiddish Policemen's Union (not surprisingly also, apparently, in development as a movie by the Coen brothers), Inherent Vice). I think why it works so well, and this is certainly true of The City & The City, is that the detective novel allows for both a brisk, exciting, pulpy plot but also extensive world building. The cop, Inspector Borlú, needs a city to move around in, and since he observes with such a careful eye, the reader gets a very acute observation of the alternative reality he lives in. Here I see where both this book and a lot of these genre-benders owe a lot to the rise of respect within literary circles for comics and graphic novels in the last 20-30 years.

Certainly, world-building as a concept has been around since the novel came to being (Eliot's Middlemarch, for instance, is an amazing microcosmic work), but in (traditional) novels, the impetus has been one of realism, where the world represented is supposed to match the actual world within which it is written (Middlemarch, seems to me, is pretty much exactly what life must have been like for people like that in a time and place like that). But the kind of world/universe building in comics, which seeks to create self-consistent alternate realities that don't necessarily need to have anything to do with the actual world (this is why I think The Dark Knight was such a step backwards for comic book movies, its whole Gotham-is-Chicago method takes a massive step backwards in terms of world-building, since it hinges on actualism instead of self-consistent realism (though perhaps it needed to, since Schumacher took Gotham to such campy places in his movies)).

But The City & The City succeeds so well as a novel, that although at various points I did find myself thinking that it could be really well done as either a movie or a graphic novel, I think, in the end, that it's better off without any visual representation. This way, it's up to the reader to build and interpret the wild cross-hatching streets and the two city's different architectures, fashions, and mores. There would definitely be fun ways to show and hide the two cities depending on where Borlú is, but the book itself keeps you from seeing too much, which is part of what makes the book so engrossing. The first 60 or so pages were just fun reading to me, as the police procedural took its time getting out of the gates in order to slowly sneak in exposition of the circumstances of these two cities.

And once the book really gets going, though it never loses track of its police story roots, Miéville keeps enough turns coming that it never gets stale, so that even as plot points are revealed and mysteries both pertinent to the case and cultural-historical, it still feels like there's something at stake for Borlú up through the end. Though part of me was let down by there not being a bit more Lovecraft in there, overall I came away very impressed with both the concept and execution of this one. And we're off to the races!

I Know What You Bookclubbed Last Summer Schedule:

July 9th: Henry David Thoreau's Walden

July 16th: TBD

July 23rd: Gene Yuen Lang's American Born Chinese

Figment.com Private Beta - Signup Now!

Published

neal

on June 7, 2010

in Books and Misc

. 0 Comments

Yallz may or may not know, but for the past several months I have been interning at Figment.com. We are getting ready to launch our private beta soon and I want to invite you all to sign up.

But wait, I haven't told you what Figment is yet! Well Ok, here is the deal: Figment is an online reading and writing community focusing on young-adult literature. Short stories, poetry, novels, maybe even essays and graphic fiction in the future -- the possibilities are endless. More specifically though, we want to engage mobile users and break away from coffee shop laptop curse. Why not read a novel on your phone or write a haiku on the bus home from school? We want you to be able to participate wherever you are and with whatever you have. Figment is about high availability, a wide selection, and user participation. Figment was inspired by Japan's cell-phone novel culture, and an article published in the New Yorker by our co-founder Dana Goodyear.

We see this as a great way to connect teens to each other and their favorite authors. I really hope you will all sign up and write yourselves in.

Culturology 040 - Back at the Movies!

Published

pete

on August 31, 2009

in Books and Culturology

. 0 Comments

So I finally, finally go out last week to see a couple of movies, so have plenty of topical things to write about, and even get to the internet in time to post this column at about the earliest time it's been posted at for a long time, and what do I see on the internet when I get here? News that seems to make a couple oh-hey-I-guess-Pete-saw-a-movie paragraphs seem downright unimportant: that's right, folks, you heard it here first: Disney is buying Marvel. Nothing like another massive cultural-industrial trust, huh? What's fascinating to me about it is comparing Disney/Marvel to Warner/DC, since the DC/Warner thing was rooted in publishing, and for a long while there DC was seen as being in better shape in general, since it had a powerhouse publisher backing it (until Marvel started to rake it in with their we-can-make-that-movie attitude), but the Disney buy is almost certainly rooted in the movie side of the business (Disney obviously does its fair share of publishing (and TV animation), but most of that is in support of characters designed for (or first for) the movies they star in.

Comic books remain comic books, though. That's for more-or-less sure.

So what movie was it that finally broke my cinemaless streak? Maybe you saw this coming, but it was Taratino's Inglourious Basterds. I wouldn't necessarily claim to celebrate the man's entire catalogue (it's been yearsandyears since I saw Reservoir Dogs, for instance (I'm generally satisfied in that regard by occasionally saying "You're okay. You're gonna be okay." in a Harvey Keital voice and watching the little homage scene in Swingers, where the characters walk to their cars like the Misters (Color) do in RD)), but I do tend to like his movies. One generally knows what one is going to get: a loose exercise in genre, more interested in a superficial grazing blow at the genre in question, mostly focused on a talk-heavy plot and unanticipated turns away from genre-wallowing (back towards more dialogue).

Certainly the case with Inglourious Basterds, since it's much less of a warsploitation movie than it might've been--especially compared with the way it was marketed. Which is a relief, really, since several of the non-genre-y scenes were pretty fantastic. Also, so that way one doesn't have to think any more about the broader implications of the movie being about jewish people getting blood revenge on the Nazis, given the fact that is a permanently open wound in the Western World's past, present, and future which no piece of culture--no film, no book, no documentary, no History Channel special, no imaginary scene of Hitler being riddled with machine-gun bullets--can salve. I'm honestly not even sure what I think, in that regard, and though I do try to think about it, prefer, at least for now to focus on the structural aspects of the movie underneath the setting, costumes, languages, which were quite satisfying. Though I'm glad it was Nazis because Christoph Waltz was incredible as Colonel Handa (in a different setting, his character was essential the evil assistant principal or bad lieutenant), stole his scenes, best acting in the movie, hands down (though no one else gets as much face time, I don't think, and I've never thought that Brad Pitt was much other than mediocre in everything he does ('cept for maybe Snatch, where I can't help but like Mickey)).

One complaint I had with IG, which is similar to the one that I had with Taratino's half of Grindhouse, is that he doesn't seem to be able to keep himself interested with the genre-relative stylistic touches on these movies; that is, "Death Proof" didn't play around with the meta stuff nearly as effectively as Rodriguez's "Planet Terror," especially by the time the big car chase starts. Like QT gets distracted by having his characters say things, and forgets that the thorough-going genre thing, once started, is generally noticed as disappearing when it does, and such a disappearance is jarring. Like the kind of intro that the ex-Wehrmacht guy gets relatively early on in the film but is never matched again, and sound-tracking choices (yes, I know, when in doubt, with any movie (unless it's a Clint Mansell score for an Aronofsky film), assume that I'm going to gripe about the soundtrack). I don't even know that I'm arguing on behalf of the meta-film kind of stylistic touches, so much as wishing instead that they were just left out entirely, rather than half-assed.

And, speaking of heavily armed jews...

at long last, the return of...

The Summer of Booklove Bookclub: Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road

This being (last time I checked, anyway) Chabon's latest book. A slim little adventure novel which fully embraces its genre very satisfactorily (complete with cool drawings by the guy that does Prince Valiant). Chabon says, in the back-matter of GotR that he first conceived of this story as being about "jews with swords," pulling this book right in line with his other two recent ventures, The Yiddish Policemen's Union (Audioshocker's pick for 2008 paperback of the year), and The Final Solution--a Sherlock Holmes story involving a Jewish child who has escaped the holocaust, his parrot, and an aging Holmes (another genre exercise (mighty trendy these days)). Good job, Chabon.

I'm not particularly steeped in Jewish history, so to me, reading this book, it mostly just seemed like an action/adventure novel; I didn't really notice anything until in hindsight after reading Chabon's above-quoted comment in the back matter. Not that that matters either. It doesn't really. What does matter is that Chabon really nailed the genre on this one (way better then he did with Final Solution, and more convincingly than his attempts to cop a Raymond Chandleresque prose style in Detective's Union; a completely excited, quick read. Did any one else read it? You should, really.

Culturology 035 - Demographic Disposition and Bland Comedy

Published

pete

on June 22, 2009

in Books and Culturology

. 6 Comments

Having received several quasi-favorable reviews--not high praise exactly, but admissions of funniness--from a couple of reliable sources, I went ahead over the weekend and went out to see The Hangover, to see what all the fuss was about. Given that the movie's already been in theaters for three weeks, there's not a whole lot I can say here that hasn't already been said, but it was kind of funny. But it was also clear why the thing has been so popular, since it's not not-funny either.

Maybe it's an age thing, once again. I'm in the closing months of my mid-20s, soon to be embarking on my late-20s, and more and more I find this to be an awkward age. I probably sit at about the median age of my social circles, but that means that a fair number of people that I see socially on a regular basis are already in their 30s (mostly in their early-30s, but a few are in their mid-30s). I bring this up because of a certain logic that seems to exist in comedy movies, that movies about high school are written for a pre-teen audience (though the raunchy subset of high school movies finds a broader audience, I suppose), movies about college for a high school audience, movies about twentysomethings capering about (Saving Silverman, maybe?) for college students, and movies about thirtysomethings written for twentysomethings. So, by only several minutes into The Hangover, I found myself thinking "wow! I can't wait 'til I'm in my mid-to-late thirties!".

If this age-based thing seems too general, or off base, it's also further complicated by The Hangover's simultaneous existence as a caper comedy and as a Vegas movie at the same time. It may well, in fact, just be the fact that it takes place in Las Vegas that this movie is successful at all (how could a combination of Dude, Where's My Car? and Very Bad Things succeed otherwise?). Given that some many of its jokes seem so familiar, the thing won't age well, but then again, that's not really the point, I suppose. Comedy-for-the-ages is a different beast than comedies-that-make-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars (or even of less immoderate success). Take, for instance, Something About Mary and Kingpin, from all the way back in the '90s: Mary seemed like the ground-breaking movie at the time, as the culmination of the '90s gross-out movement, and made more money (I'd imagine), but Kingpin was the movie built to last--Bill Murray's comb-over alone will maintain this movie for centuries to come (not to mention possibly the best groin-hit (between Harrelson and the two baddies) of all time). I could rattle off a massive list of classic comedies but there's no real point to it; I'm fairly confidant that the trends would point to aspects of quality rather than quantity of viewers.

Crank 2 was way funnier than The Hangover. Very different types of movies, admittedly, but the comparison can be made since The Hangover definitely went for the still-new "this is awesome" model of movie-making. Except that very little of its concepts were particularly awesome, and the thing was quite slackly-paced. The pacing issue probably has to do with it being a Vegas movie, where the director, one assumes, is compelled to lovingly film all those beautiful hotel rooms and hallways and scenic vistas blah blah blah. As usual, with popular things like this, part of me hopes that it leads some minority of its viewers towards actually good things, but that probably isn't the case with this. Giggle! "So many crazy things happen in Las Vegas OMG!"

The only other point I want to bring up, dealing again with this movie's placement in the canon of all comedies ever, has to do with Zach Galifinakis's role. Dude's been doing the awkward-comic thing for a while now, to decent effect (anyone else remember his turn in Out Cold? I sure do). Owes something to Andy Kaufmann, I'd assume. And he does pretty well steal most of the scenes he's in--though, that's not much of a feat when you're competing against Ed Helms and some other douchebag. But awkward comedy is easy, especially for a mainstream audience, since it would seem much newer to them. Why? Because comedy is all about timing (for the best-timed joke in the history of movies, see the "It's Enrico Pallazzo!" gag from the first Naked Gun movie), and awkward comedy is based in disrupting that timing. I can't think of many things that I appreciate more than a well-timed joke (there were a couple decently timed gags in The Hangover but not many), and this can also appreciate blatant disregard for anti-timing, but in a movie where things more or less just move forward and jokes come and go, the awkward thing gets really boring.

And I guess that's why I tried to warn myself off of writing about this movie, since it was doomed to boil down to "popular movies are boring," which, while true, also leads to the similar aphorism that "elitists are annoying."

Pete Can't Believe He Hasn't Read This By Now #4: William Faulkner's Sartoris

I'm not sure by what this book should be hailed. It's Faulkner's third novel, and the first dealing with Yoknapatawpha County and its residents, but not first "major" novel overstates the case. The thing definitely shows signs of Faulkner having not quite his stride as a serious writer. But, given that it's the first of the whole spate of amazing novels that defined and developed Faulkner's primary literary universe, it's an important work. I don't know why I hadn't read it by now; I guess because it isn't as good as the sequence of amazing novels that followed it. In that regard, I tended to think of it as his first novel as I read it. Similar to reading Kundera's The Joke last week, I've found it quite rewarding to go back and read the earliest novel of a writer whose later works I enjoy quite a bit.

Pretty much every summer, going back to my sophomore year of college, I've gotten this urge to read Faulkner. Something about the humidity maybe, draws me towards his descriptions of Mississippi. So it was only a matter of time before I got around to reading Sartoris. Reading one or two Faulkner novels a summer for eight summers in a row gets you there eventually. The plotting (really, the lack of plotting) in Sartoris once again matched the pace of my summer to this point, moving slowly, with not all that much happening. Given the amount of story that followed this book, though, its not surprising that its 300 pages take such a broad view and move so slowly, since Faulkner, here, is already trying to build so much of his imaginary world.

It's interesting to me as well that, reading it after so many of the other Yoknapatawpha novels, this book didn't feel like a "prequel" at all--that has something to do with the timelessness of Faulkner's story-telling, and the sort of shifts in time that take place in those other works. Given that, what makes it seem earlier is really in the craft.

Particularly disconcerting is Faulkner's treatment of African-American characters, often resorting unnecessarily to broad-strokes and racist stereotypes (an issue that he had corrected (at least to some extent) in his later works). I think most of us white middle-class readers are taught how to deal with this sort of stereotype-laden writing in Junior High, when we read Mark Twain, and are taught to ignore the "n-word" and consider it part of the social tapestry or whatever. But that's not really satisfactory. Produces a lot of white liberal awkwardness, if nothing else. What's strange here is that many of the black characters are well-developed, embark upon sub-plots and are treated fairly and humanely. Faulkner resorts to stereotype mostly in the background; in sentences that were either never written or edited out of later novels, or at the very least presented more complicatedly. Writing the novels about the South, especially during a timespan between the Civil War and The Great Depression, from the perspective that he had, Faulkner's racism--or the racism in his characters--is generally present in all his works, but complicatedly so; in Sartoris its not complicated at all, but at least the reader can take to heart that it eventually will be (if never completely satisfyingly so).

For July 6th: Toby Barlow's Sharp Teeth

Culturology 035 - Chairman of the Bored

Published

pete

on June 15, 2009

in Books and Culturology

. 3 Comments

As the summer solstice approaches, these longer days seem to be luring me towards posting these columns later and later in the day on Mondays; I'll do what I can once the days begin to shorten again to have them up earlier in the work day, but for now, please accept my apologies, Tuesday's content, for my late-Mondayness nearly infringing upon your solidarity.

As a brief update to last week's discussion of Conan O'Brien's new gig on The Tonight Show: my final night of TV watching (until I get around to purchasing a digital converter and I guess probably an antenna too) I went ahead and spent watching Conan O'Brien again, though my sense (and I've confirmed this with the few friends of mine that have also watched it) is that he's definitely watered down his shtick for the earlier time slot---which is a shame since its still late at night. But, on said last night of watching TV (though the next night I did go over to a friend's house to watch Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals on TV--a great game, with my hometown team coming out improbably victorious (enthusiasts and followers of this column will have already known that the biggest crack in the walls of my cultural-elitist firmament is my unabashed love of Pittsburgh sports)), Conan's first guest was Norm MacDonald (here is the whole show on hulu, Norm's the first guest), and it was the first genuinely funny thing on his show up to this point. Though, I'm a sucker for Norm MacDonald (many people are; he's hilarious). I'm sure you'll agree.

Really though, the funnier interview is a classic from Late Night with Conan O'Brien:

Also, further evidence of Norm MacDonald's hilariousness include Screwed, Dirty Work, and his cameo appearances in The Animal (as a concerned member of the mob chasing Rob Schneider) and Deuce Bigalow, European Gigolo (as a Scottish gigolo). Also, his shtick on Comedy Central's roast of Bob Sagat is totally classic.

Clearly, then, I'm not just suddenly jumping on the Norm MacDonald bandwagon. Sometime, way back in the '90s, I saw one of his stand-up specials, and it was the funniest stand-up I'd seen until Dave Chappelle's "Killing 'Em Softly" special. The only other contemporary stand-up to generate as many laughs from me would be Mitch Hedberg.

I give further props to Conan, since it seems like, since Norm doesn't really have anything going on, that he brought him on the show only because Norm is really funny. Way to go, Conan.

Pete Can't Believe He Hasn't Read This Before! #4: Milan Kundera's The Joke

This is Kundera's first book. Interesting because of its history of translation and retranslation (as documented in the "definitive version" which I just recently read). Interesting because Kundera is mostly an interesting writer. Why I never got around to reading it until now? I'm not sure.

To me, Kundera is one of those writers that I can't help but like, even if it's only because certain aspects of his books are so good that they overcome consistent annoying aspects. Which I suppose is why it was rewarding to go back and read his first book, to see where all this started from. One of his newer books, and probably my least favorite of the Kundera novels I've read, Identity, I didn't like because it felt like the characters, rather than occupying any kind of "real" world--or straddling a line between a textual world and a real world (the way both Immortality, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being are successful)--they just felt like Kundera characters living in a Kundera world. Which is still okay, and I'm sure that Kundera enthusiasts may even like that more, since such a book plays into the cult of the author.

The Joke, then, though carrying certain Kundera-signifiers (its being in seven parts, the broad scope of cultural references contained therein, a certain focus on music, its unabashed political stance, etc), was still a bit simpler, and just worried about telling the story its telling; that is, it has no meta-fictional aspect, which becomes such an important part of Kundera's later books. A pretty intense book, with a mostly despicable protagonist that the reader still feels impelled, if not to feel sorry for, than to forgive, since he's seen as being a product of oppression; that he fails in his revenge is the crux of his presumed coming of age--if we take The Joke as a Bildungsroman for an oppressed humanity that has a forcibly extended adolescence.

The comparison, which is probably wildly off-base, that I always like to make is between Kundera and Tom Robbins. Partially to do with the way they interject their own knowledge into the fabric of their novels, and for the generally grand scope of their plots and the way that scope is balanced by an intense focus at the same time on small interpersonal relationships. I don't know though; I don't get too many chances to test out the analogy (which is odd to me, since it seems like if these authors are similar, its like that people that've read the one have read the other, but that's not often the case--which maybe means that I'm wrong in comparing them (oh well)). Also, both authors are the type to kind of be read in phases; I haven't read all of either of their complete works, but tend to pick up a book now and then at a used paperback store, enjoy it (more or less), then think to read more of it, but not for another year or whatever.

Summer of Booklove Bookclub Reminder: Next up is Toby Barlow's Sharp Teeth for July 6th.