Popular Frontiers!

Moving On Up, Or At Least Over

2005-04-05T15:25:00.000-05:00

Faithful readers, both of you: The long-winded post below will be my last for Popular Frontiers for the foreseeable future. Frequent PF commenter, legal bald eagle, and cartoonist Gorjus has invited me to be a part of his new blog, Pretty Fakes, and I'm taking him up on the offer. So you can read my natterings about comics, my family, music, and what-not there now (where I'll be known as Professor Fury). See you at the new PF!

Darnielle on the Edge of Town

2005-04-05T12:43:00.000-05:00

The Mountain Goats and Bruce Springsteen will both release records on April 26. Guess which one these lyrics are found on:

I broke free on a Saturday morning
I put the pedal to the floor
Headed north on Mills Avenue
And listened to the engine roar

My broken house behind me and good things ahead
A girl named Cathy wants a little of my time
Six cylinders underneath the hood crashing and kicking
Uh-huh, listen to the engine whine

A-ha! You think. That's clearly Springsteen--it sounds just like an outtake from 1978's Darkness on the Edge of Town. But these verses come from "This Year," one of many standout tracks written by head Mountain Goat John Darnielle for The Sunset Tree, which I was able to hear an advance copy of thanks to the kind folks at The Compact Disc Store (clever name there, guys). A lot of these songs recall vintage Springsteen in terms of lyrics and in terms of production; the album often sounds like Darkness-era songs re-conceived for the later stops of the Tom Joad tour, when Bruce added some occasional and understated drums and strings to what had been a one-man show, producing revelatory new interpretations of his back catalog--all weary and contemplative, empty space punctuated by sparse instrumentation that sounded lush anyway. Had Springsteen had spent his mid-to-late-twenties reading Sophocles and Virgil and smoking a flippin' joint or two instead of watching John Ford movies, reading Steinbeck and heroically abstaining for his art, Darkness might have sounded a little like The Sunset Tree. Both albums chronicle the conflicts between intense poet-rockers in the making and emotionally wrecked, physically shattered father-figures, and both albums hold out the power and promise of rock n' roll as salvation from the desperation and brutality of life.

(If Darnielle spent most of his til-now career writing songs about people who were absolutely not him--the Alpha Couple, Grendel's mother--and gradually turned towards autbiography with this album and its immediate predecessor, Springsteen has been walking the other direction on that road, gradually paring the autobiographical songs from his albums in favor of third-person narratives about very non-Springsteenly people--Mexican immigrants and meth-makers. It'd be interesting to see how The Ghost of Tom Joad and We Shall All Be Healed overlap and inform each other--one set of songs about illegal immigrants ruining their lives running drugs and cooking meth and another set about speed-freaks ruining their lives taking meth and running from the damage they've caused).

But I've probably tortured that comparison long enough; there are no doubt some of you who would not see comparisons to Springsteen as a compliment. I see you there: you're easily identifiable by your stooped posture, the consequence of a lifetime shouldering the back-bending burden of your impeccable indie cred. Regardless, The Sunset Tree is a great album, if sometimes hard to take. These are some of the best songs Darnielle has written, but they're at times so brutal, so raw, that they often make for uncomfortable listening. It's hard to imagine a sloshed concert-goer shouting out requests for a narrative of abuse like "Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod?"--and not just because it's really hard to say with beer-tongue.

And speaking of saying: one of the most effective weapons in The Mountain Goats' arsenal is Darnielle's voice; there's not a performer this side of late-era Dylan who uses his voice's limitations more effectively than Darnielle, and this record indicates that he's still honing that particular blade. It would be easy for him to rely on the soul-in-tatters yelp that lends such force to such past fan-faves as "Home Again Garden Grove" or "Family Happiness"--and it does claw its way free here, at the end of "Dilaudid" and most effectively on "Up the Wolves" and "The Magpie"--but elsewhere he sings in a haunting, whispery falsetto. It makes sense. Too many cold-eyed rave-ups would have seemed weirdly out of place on an album that is in large part about a protagonist struggling with the desire to be invisible, about wanting to act but fearing the terror and pain that are sure to follow.

In lesser hands, this album could have been a disaster--a song-cycle about a teenager's bad relationship with his abusive stepfather, one that name-checks Kurt Cobain. But then again, it also name-checks pianist Dinu Lipatti, reggae legend Dennis Brown, and the she-wolf who nursed the legendary founders of Rome in their infancy and abandonment, so that Cobain reference is well earned. It's that sense of perspective and context that helps these songs transcend the limitations of autobiographical, confessional, heart-sleeve tedium. In fact, I think it's a mark of the album's success that I went back and forth on the question of whether it did indeed achieve that transcendence until the final track, "Pale Green Things," which throws a strange and bright new light on everything that comes before it. Not only one of the best songs in the Mountain Goats' catalog on its own, it also rearranged the rest of the album into a whole that's more complicated, more rewarding, and ultimately more satisfying than the one I might have been expecting.

UPDATE: Comments on this post would best be left at its incarnation at Pretty Fakes, my new blogging home. Thanks!

Comi-Comi-Comi-Comi-Comichameleon

2005-03-29T07:59:00.000-06:00

After slipping of the schedule a couple or three times, New Avengers #4 finally hits the stands (not that there are any stands for comics anymore). It was well worth the wait. Bendis continues to surprise and entertain with this new group of Avengers, and he does an especially nice job with Spider-Man. It's not just that he gets Spidey's sense of humor (something sadly missing from the movies so far) or his half-serious chronic pessimism. Where Bendis' use of the character really shines is in recognizing his unlikely centrality to the Marvel Universe. By dint of his being so ridiculously overexposed for the last 15 years and of his long-running starring role in Marvel Team-Up, Spider-Man has met virtually everyone in the MU and been just about everywhere. There's no reason, given the basic concept of the character, for Spider-Man to know anything about, say, the Savage Land, but in fact he's a bit of an expert on the subject compared to some of his new teammates, most of whom were spared the burden of having to guest-star in the first issue of every new comic Marvel launched in the 1990s. It's that sense of the deeper history--dare I say continuity?--of the MU that Bendis brings to this title that makes it so much more than just the hodge-podge assortment of kewl and high-grossing action figures I feared it would be.

As I was reading a stack of Marvel Two-in-Ones that the ever-erudite Dr. Catpants was kind enough to donate to my collection while he was purging his, it occured to me that The Thing has played a similarly Kevin Bacon-esque role in the MU--he's guest-starred with a wide array of heroes who have nothing to do with the Fantastic Four and gone to places where you wouldn't normally take a guy whose whole shtick is being orange and strong and dropping his "g"s; future FF writers should maybe take his history into account as a way of finding new stories to tell about those guys.

JLA Classified #5. This issue nicely compensates for some of the problems I had with the previous ish; Giffen/DeMatteis are still writing Booster as ludicrously incompetent, but they make real strides towards humanizing Guy Gardner and Blue Beetle; the humor in this issue is less forced and more character-driven than character-assasinating. The exchange between Beetle and Power Girl makes me want to track down the issues of Birds of Prey that deal with their relationship; plus, I have a sinking feeling that Blue Beetle sightings are about to get pretty scarce in the DCU.

The Manhattan Guardian #1. There are pirates riding the New York subways. There are golems. There is a villain named All-Beard. This issue was a pure delight--the best entry so far in Grant Morrison's massive Seven Soldiers project. If the mainstream DCU seems to be returning to the grim-n-joyless eighties, Morrison is singlehandedly making the world safe for the Silver Age.

Who’s on first? (And by “first,” I mean “crack.”)

2005-03-28T18:13:00.000-06:00

So, our trip to my parents’ house this weekend was surprisingly pleasant and low-key. We did, however, witness this exchange between my mother and my brother, who was home from rehab for the day.

Brother: What time are you leaving for church?

Mom: 10:30. [short pause] Why?

Brother: What?

Mom: Why?

Brother: What?

Mom: Why?

Brother: What?

Mom: Why do you ask?

Brother: Ask what?

Mother: [sighs heavily; long pause]

Brother: Oh! About when you’re going to church?

Mother: Yes!

Brother: [Goes back to eating his bagel, half of which he will leave on the kitchen table, where it will stay until my mother walks by hours later, after church. I do not handle his food.]

Still, that li’l scene doesn’t even begin to crack the top five awkward, strange, and offensive conversations we’ve been witness to/participants in over the course of the past few years. Take this gem from a Christmas visit with my sister and her husband. They’re both nice people and they’ve been through some real tragedy, but, well…

(In order to make this exchange less offensive to read, and also to screw with Andy Griffith fans, I’ve replaced a particular racial slur with the name “Jim Nabors.”)

Brother-in-law: …and do you know what I been seeing a lot of in Madison?

Me [confident the answer is “deer”]: No, what?

B.I.L [righteously indignant]: White girls dating Jim Nabors!

Me [caught off-guard by absence of references to venison in his reply]: Um…

B.I.L: I mean pretty white girls! With Jim Nabors!

Me: Oh…

B.I.L: They need to learn what’s right and wrong!

Me [tentatively]: Well, you know, I don’t really see anything wrong with that.

Sister: Me either!

Me [relieved]: Yeah, see—

Sister [with air of enlightenment]: What I can’t stand are those lesbians!

Us [demoralized by having our small hope pulled out from under us]: Gursh…

Sister: And those Mexicans! Walking around Canton the way they do!

Us: [weeping softly]

Some Comics, and What I Thought of Them

2005-03-22T12:37:00.000-06:00

Fantastic Four #523. Well, Waid dropped the ball. He dropped it and it landed on my toes and now my toes hurt, especially when I jump up and down in frustration about how Waid dropped the ball. It's a vicious cycle. No wait, not vicious, the other thing. Pathetic. Anyway, the first three parts of Waid's "Rising Storm" storyline, while problematic, set up an interesting concept for longtime Marvelites: Galactus as human. Think of the possibilities! What might might this mean for the Marvel Universe?

Yeah, I sure would've enjoyed a story about the long-term ramfications of Galactus becoming human. But instead, we've got a story in which Galactus Learns an Important Lesson About How Amazing Humanity Is. You've seen this a dozen times on Star Trek, and even once on Space: 1999. The opening scenes with the Thing are fun, but after that it's one long condescending snooze-fest about Cezanne and homelessness. There's something perverse about the way that human-Galactus spends the whole issue munching on snacks while the starving homeless are relegated to the role of object lesson about the Indomitable Human Will.

Ultimates 2 #4. One of the things that's bugged me about this series is the relationship between Captain America and the Wasp; it just never seemed to make any sense. Here, Millar lets us know that it really isn't supposed to. Their relationship is part of the media machine that keeps public attention focused on their "celebrity" side instead of on their "persons of mass destruction" side. Sure, they're really dating, but the Wasp's enthusiasm is increasingly reserved for the cameras as she begins to realize what it really means to date a guy from the 1940s. Plus, more development of Thor's backstory--though it's always a bad idea to trust any brother of Thor's, right?

Captain America #4. I'm really pleased with the way that Brubaker makes use of some complicated Captain America continuity here--the "replacement Caps" of the 40s, William Naslund and Jeff Mace. One of the first comics I can remember reading was Captain America #285, in which Cap struggles to defeat the Porcupine in time to pay his last respects to Mace, aka the Patriot. I'm a little more worried about the fate of former Cap sidekick Jack Monroe, aka Evil Bucky of the 50s, aka Nomad II, aka Scourge II; he was shot at the end of last issue, and I just assumed he wasn't dead, but now I'm not so sure. He's had a tortured history, sure, but he's important to the Cap mythos, and I hope he survives.

In other--dire--comic news: speculation at Newsarama and elsewhere seems to be that the dead (?) body Batman is holding on the cover of Countdown #1, the intro issue to DC's big summer crossover event, is a DCU character much beloved of PF's readership. Preview images from the book seem to confirm that speculation, but it could easily be a red herring. I'd threaten to stop buying non-Vertigo, non-Grant-Morrison DCU books altogether, but I kind of already have.

There Will Be Feasting and Dancing in Jerusalem Next Year

2005-03-22T09:23:00.000-06:00

Mountain Goats fans: run don't walk to www.4ad.com, where you can download the Dilaudid EP, a preview for the forthcoming The Sunset Tree! Complete with print-outable artwork! It'll set you back a measly three British pounds, and it's worth every tuppence and farthing.

(A hat tip to queennell at Slowly Circling the Drain for the heads-up.)

One more update: Amazon asked John Darnielle to write a list of the 20 albums he's listening to now; you can find a link to the list here.

Warnke

2005-03-21T09:50:00.000-06:00

This very fine post at Slacktivist got me thinking about Mike Warnke. For those of you not privileged to grow up in that unique atmosphere of simultaneous material comfort and moral paranoia that hung over the childhood of many a 1980s evangelical Southern kid, Mike Warnke may not be a familiar name. He was a highly popular "Christian comedian" who played to packed houses all over the country. In the first half of his routine, he would woo the masses with a safe, tame routine on the little humors of home life and what-not. In fairness, I remember some of this stuff as pretty funny, at least to early-adolescent me at the time. Warnke isn't a handsome man (click here for a picture of Warnke with Amy Grant, the once blessed saint of pop Christianity driven out of the kingdom as a harlot when she left her hubby for Vince Gill. Actually, that's a good call there, modern Christianity. Vince Gill is so lame), and he made jokes about it with a winning, self-deprecating sort of charm.

In the second half of the show, he'd talk about the sex slaves. And the virgin sacrifices. See, the other part of Mike's "testimony" was that he had been a Satanist high priest before he was born again--you know, abusing kids, holding black masses, offering tributes to the Illuminati, and all that. It's all chronicled in his best-selling book The Satan Seller, which I read cover to cover more than once, even though I had to spend a lot of time explaining to scandalized classmates that it was about how Satan was bad, not good—though of course the real pleasure was in reading the lurid descriptions of Satanism's badness; once the orgies were over, the narrative lost some of its punch.

I'm not sure I can really capture the experience of going to a Mike Warnke show or listening to one of his tapes. Everyone would laugh uproariously for 30 minutes or so at stories about how he and his wife sometimes disagree and then nod soberly for another 30 minutes at stories about mutilated babies. For years, when I thought about Mike Warnke, I thought of how bizarre that combination seemed—how fluidly Warnke and the audience were able to switch modes. But now I realize that they weren't switching modes at all—both halves of his routine appealed to the same emotion, the same instinct. Combining stories about home-ish foibles and about the horrors of Satanism perfectly conforms to the idea that once you venture out of safe, traditional, white, middle-class, nuclear family suburbia, you've immediately entered the realm of curved daggers and bloody flagons. Smugness is the defining quality of contemporary evangelical Christianity, and Warnke was just an early example of the same impulse that drives the LaHaye-n-Jenkins Left Behind series: the desire to sanctify conservative middle-class values that have nothing to do, really, with, you know, Jesus, and to demonize the entire rest of the world.

You can read a thorough and entertaining debunking of Warnke's story here. Why this fellow hasn't inspired a TV movie or Sundance-featured documentary I don't know. And speaking of LaHaye and Jenkins, here's a haiku I entered in a haiku contest a while back. Which, ahem, I won, but not with this particular haiku:

LaHaye and Jenkins
Dance the Apocalypse Twist
Together, Naked

Short Review: New Thunderbolts #6

2005-03-16T08:55:00.000-06:00

JLI 11
Originally uploaded by PopularFrontiersman.

So, last go-round I compared Fabian Nicieza's New Thunderbolts to John Ostrander's 1980s series Suicide Squad. But if the cover to this month's issue is any indication, Fabes is also trying to channel another 80s DC classic--the beloved Giffen/Maguire Justice League. Here's a picture of Justice League International #11; and click here for a picture of this months T-bolts cover. Not a coincidence, I think.

It's another solid, fun issue from Nicieza--widescreen silver-age superhero action with nary a hint of decompression anywhere around. This comic really succeeds when it uses the spectacle and chaos of the Hydra attack on Manhattan as a backdrop for some interesting character moments. It's a mark of Nicieza's skill as a writer that I really, really care about what happens to Speed Demon and the Blizzard, two of Marvel's lamer super-villains (but the jury's still out on Joystick. I mean, Joystick?). The villain-turned-reluctant-hero arc is happening a bit fast for me, but, then again, I'm not sure how many more times we need to see that transition happen in this title.

One of the most appealing aspects of this book is the spit-and-bailing wire nature of the T-bolts' operation: Blizzard can't freeze a nuclear bomb because he runs out of freon for his super-suit. (Speed Demon: "I am not dying because you didn't go to Home Depot!" Blizzard: "I wanted to! You made me go to a strip club!")

And it's good that this comic succeeds in small moments like this, because, unfortunately, the big picture isn't really coming together yet. Strucker's big evil plan turns out to be...committing evil for elaborate but obscure reasons that probably have something to do with what's going on over in Wolverine. And a character returns from the maybe-dead with a strangely chosen new name that's just going to make the Avengers' roster even more confusing than it is.

But those concerns aside, it's still a fine title, and well worth your time. Now: back to grading!

Children by the Millions

2005-03-11T10:42:00.000-06:00

The Paul Westerberg show in New Orleans last night was an ear-ringing, mind-addling delight. After hearing it performed live, I hereby declare "Alex Chilton" to be simultaneously the greatest pop song of all time and the most poorly recorded and produced, and I prophesy that Jim Dickinson will be made to answer for this particular sin at the seat of judgment when he shuffles off his Memphis coil. Jim likely believes that he can coast through the pearly gates on the strength of having played the piano bit on "Wild Horses." Jim is wrong.

Things I learned last night: Alex Chilton is not dead.

Reconsidering: (Smog), Supper

2005-03-06T22:39:00.000-06:00

I have a love-indifference relationship with Bill Callahan's musical alter ego, Smog (now (Smog), I guess) centered primarily around the album Knock Knock, a record that I can go for months without even thinking about and then abruptly need to hear right away.

But because that album never got its hooks into me in any kind of permanent way, I never felt the urge to explore the Smog catalog in much depth. I bought a copy of Supper a few years ago, gave it a listen, and have been considering trading it in ever since then.

For whatever reason, I listened to it again tonight, and now I'm glad I never that trip to the trade-in counter. Maybe the problem was that I bought it in the summer and tried to listen to it driving around with the windows down, when, apparently, it's more of an early-Spring-sitting-home-alone-grading-papers kind of album. What really caught me off guard this listen was the production--Supper is just a great-sounding album. It's so easy to focus on Callahan's deadpan delivery--he rarely troubles with things like inflection or "singing"--that it's easy to miss how beautiful the playing is. His voice prepares you to expect simplicity, if not outright incompetence, from the band, prepares you for a rhythm section characterized mainly for its superfluity, a vehicle to get the tear-and-blood-stained lyrics out into the world. But if its possible to be both understated and lush simultaneously, then that's what Callahan's cohorts sound like. Not so much propelled as cajoled by some occasionally intricate drumwork from Jim White, the band finds a bizarre little place somwhere between the gentle swing and pedal steel of 70s Nashville and riffy guitar-rock. "Our Anniversary" sounds like "Melissa"-era Allman Brothers quietly jamming on Queensryche's "Silent Lucidity." It also sounds great.

That song, the seventh of nine, is the highlight of the album (with "Truth Serum" right behind), mostly because, unexpectedly and affectingly, at about the 3:45 mark, Callahan does something that sounds a lot like singing; it's not that he suddenly discovers a vocal melody or anything so complex; he just sings in a slightly higher pitch for a line or two. He only does it for a second and then goes right back to his normal film noir voiceover approach, but it's a revelatory, head-tingling moment--so simple I almost hate to fall for it, but too compelling to resist.

Gladys Get Your Gun

2005-03-05T00:09:00.000-06:00

File under: long-winded autobiographical anecdotes.

This weekend my parents are off on what has been an annual excursion as long as I can remember—their trip to the Memphis Gin Show. Sadly, “gin” in this case refers to cotton gins, not the drink. My childhood would have been way more screwed up, or screwed up in a vastly different way, if my parents were booze-swilling glitterati, pendulating between blossom-nosed rage and slurred, stumbling affection, rather than being standard-issue repressed middle-class Protestants.

My brother and I rarely went along on this trip, though we went on most business-type vacations. Instead, we typically stayed with a variety of aunts, older sisters, and baby-sitters, and, one time, they left us in the care of our live-in grandfather’s new live-in hospice, Gladys.

Gladys entered our life in my 8th-grade year, a year in which my parents indulged their predilection for inviting people to live with us who were clearly insane—clearly to everyone but my parents, of course. My folks’ threshold for tolerating erratic behavior is set somewhere around “fugitive Nazi crypto-geneticist,” which, in retrospect, is really a shame given my lifelong desire to keep an abomination before God as a pet. That year we had already acquired Benjamin, a 7th-grade foster kid who I shouldn't really call crazy. His tough life had led to legitimate psychological problems that needed real attention. These problems went far, far beyond my parents’ ability to handle, and, by “handle” I mean “acknowledge.” I recall that on his very first weekend visit, before he even came to live with us full-time, he stole my brand-new survival knife.

(Why did I need a survival knife, you ask? Well, in addition to a built-in compartment with a compass, fishing line, and waterproof matches, this knife had a finely honed serrated blade, so that, if I were ever lost in the woods, I could slit my wrists in the hopes that I would bleed to death before the ants ate me.)

Anyway, my mom insisted it must have been a misunderstanding, much like the later “misunderstanding” when Benjamin stole the family truck as well as my dad’s .22 rifle and took potshots at our cattle. Due to my parents’ patient, forgiving nature, he lived with us until he assaulted a referee during a church-league basketball game, at which point he was promptly sent packing. That actually gives you a pretty good sense of my family’s value system: you can steal our weapons and shoot our cows, but you do not fuck with organized sports. They build character and are a good substitute for learning things about your kids! On the other hand, had it not been for Benjamin, I probably wouldn’t have spent so much time hiding in my room, and Wishsong of Shannara wasn’t going to read itself, after all.

In fairness to my folks, Gladys’ depravity may have been more immediately apparent to me because I’d just finished reading Stephen King’s Misery (one of the many novels I read in my teen years instead of kissing girls, drinking beer, or playing in a mediocre band; Dean Koontz’s Night Chills was another), and so when we hired an overbearing, overweight white woman with an insatiable Harlequin romance jones, my hackles went up straightaway. It was a classic horror-movie nanny situation; in front of the whole family, she was desperately likable—she even briefly took over the cooking until my mom began to fear she was being replaced. But around my brother or me, her darker side emerged—a kind of half-assed casual cruelty. For instance, she used to drive my ailing grandfather around in the afternoon until she found me out training for long-distance running events, at which point she would heckle me. Uncreatively. “That ain’t running!” was at the upper end of her wit spectrum; “Hey, boy!” was at the lower.

Still, none of that adequately prepared me for the time Gladys held a gun on me. My parents had set off on their annual pilgrimage to Memphis, and the weekend had been pretty uneventful. But on Saturday night, I was startled awake by the sound of Gladys calling my name in a harsh whisper. When I turned on the light and blinked my eyes, I saw her there, shadowed in the doorway of my room, waving a double-barreled shotgun at my bed.

(Gentle readers: some of you may be concerned that perhaps my family has too many unsecured guns lying about. Not a problem anymore! My brother has since pawned them all for drug money! So now my parents’ house is a gun-free zone; it has also been, over the years, a lawnmower-free zone, a television-free zone, a chainsaw-free zone, an all-the-checkbooks-except-the-ones-in-my-parents’-wallets-free zone, and, most egregiously, a my-CD-player-with-the-middle-disc-of-a-three-disc-Springsteen-box-set-in-it-free zone).

As I say, Misery was much on my mind, so I was pretty sure I was a goner. I can’t remember if my life flashed before my eyes, but if it did, most of the running time was probably occupied by an incident from sixth grade that I was still trying to live down involving an in-class speech, loose-fitting sweatpants, and some ill-timed and involuntary hormonal activity.

Thankfully, though, her wrath, unlike her gun, wasn’t aimed at me.

Gladys [hissing]: “There’s someone in the carport! There’s someone in the carport!”

Me: “Um…”

Gladys: “You’ve got to take the gun down there and scare ‘em off! I’ll call the police!”

Me: “I would like to put on some pants now.” (8th-grade was a briefs phase for me).

So the police came and confirmed that there were no rapists, escaped mental patients, or dungeon masters in our carport. And when my parents came home, they were duly concerned about the intruder (or extruder?), though not quite concerned enough, as it turned out, to buy a security system from Gladys’ son, who, would you believe it, sells and installs security systems for a living, and he could have given them a great deal! What luck!

It’s a testament to my parents’ charitable spirits (and a sad predictor of woes to come) that any attempts to point out a possible connection along such lines by their increasingly cynical 13-year-old was dismissed with wide-eyed wonder.

Oh--and we finally fired Gladys after we found out that she'd been doping up my grandfather during the day so she wouldn't actually have to take care of him. My dad still gave her a recommendation, though.

Vocabulary and Memory

2005-03-04T10:29:00.000-06:00

I'm a bit overwhelmed here with midterms to grade, job candidates to meet, and a dissertation defense to attend, so I only made it to the comics store last night (for the first time in two weeks).

But some random thoughts: there are words that are, for me, indelibly marked with the memory of the first time I read them, and that first time is almost always in the pages of a comic book. No matter where I run across them--high-falutin' scholarly journal or pulp novel--I always get a distinct flash of the page and panel where the word appeared.

"Dapper" comes from Flash #323 (and man is that a great cover); Barry Allen is tightening his bow tie in preparation for his second wedding and notes that he makes a dapper groom, which is, in retrospect, pretty narcissistic. He also refers to himself as "Barrence." I got this comic in a Stuckey's three-pack, so "dapper" is for me also rather counter-intuitively connected with "Texas Fly-Swatters," pecan logs, and long trips by van with my family to Florida.

"Halcyon"comes from an issue of Suicide Squad (I think this one); the Enchantress is reminiscing about the battles she and Rick Flagg used to have when they were members of the Forgotten Villains and Forgotten Heroes, respectively.

And "Maw" I remember most distinctly from Strange Tales #2--just a bit of stock exposition about Cloak's "ravenous maw" or somesuch. I vividly remember reading this comic covertly in my 6th grade classroom--covertly because we were ruled by the iron fist of Mrs. Minson, whom I remember chiefly for two reasons: 1) she wore these wide-knit sweaters so we could always see here stark-white old-lady bra right through the weave; and 2) she used to talk about how everyone in her family knew that the day of the Rose Parade was the one day of the year she got to watch what she wanted to watch on TV, an uncharacterstically emotional and heartfelt little speech that gave me some insight, even at age 11, to the emptiness and tedium in her life that must have made her hate 6th graders so much. Then again, 6th graders are pretty easy to hate. Anyway, that word calls up a whole host of sense-memories for me--chalkdust smells, buzzing fluorescent lights, uncomfortable red sweatpants, and a whole lotta awkward.

Anyway: I was just curious if other folks had similar experiences with words of comic-bookish or other origin.

Other thoughts: Marc Singer at I Am NOT the Beastmaster offers a pretty thorough takedown of the latest issue of Y: The Last Man. It's hard to argue with his critique of the particular issue, though I'm not sure I think the hamfistedness he sees here really extends to the rest of the series, which I've been reading and enjoying for a while now. I dig Bryan K. Vaughan's work in general, and I was tickled pink with the first issue of the second volume of his Runaways series, largely because of the clear affection Vaughan has for the odder corners of the Marvel Universe; though he does poke some fun at Marvel's retired teen heroes, it's pretty gentle fun. It's nice to see a creator taking characters and storylines that are widely (and perhaps justly) regarded as mistakes and treating them with a measure of respect--who woulda thought we'd ever see a member of the Slingers again, except maybe as cannon fodder in some big crossover event? Sprawling shared universes like Marvel's and DC's have generated all kinds of mysterious nooks and malodorous crannies packed full of raw material for fascinating stories. That's some of what Vaughan seems to be going for here, and, on a larger scale, what Grant Morrison is doing in his Seven Soldiers event (just got the first ish and am eagerly looking forward to reading it). Love for the sheer weirdness of comic book history is one of the reasons that Ambush Bug #3 will always be a favorite comic of mine.

Addendum: Superheroes and the South

2005-03-02T16:49:00.000-06:00

Those of you interested in reading further ruminations on superheroes and the South should check out swell fellow W. Scott Poole's newest Catfish Row column over at PopMatters, entitled "Captain Confederacy: The South in Living Color." We make some similar points, but Prof. Poole has some especially insightful things to say about the connection between comics' depiction of the South and their depiction of African Americans.

New Frontiersy content coming soon...

Program Note

2005-02-24T12:48:00.000-06:00

I've changed the comment settings to allow for anonymous comments. I assume that there are thousands and thousands of lurkers without Blogger accounts who want to weigh in on these already weighty matters, so now you can.

Man, those crickets are loud.

Also: those of you who've memorized the "links" section of the sidebar will note that I've added a link to law-talkin'-dude and frequent PF commenter Polly's blog, Polly and the Mooch! Read it.

The Blue and The Gold

2005-02-24T12:33:00.000-06:00

Hasty thoughts on JLA: Classified #4:

I cut my teeth on the 1980s Giffen/Dematteis/Maguire Justice League, and by "cut my teeth on" I mean "was totally obsessed by." It was the comic that took me from shopping haphazardly at the Super Stop or the Eckerd's or whatever to frequenting specialty stores (and none too soon, since there wouldn't be comics at convenience stores for much longer anyway). In fact, in my office at home right now I have, under glass in a custom-made frame, the "Class of 1987" poster DC released to commemorate/promote the book's change from JL to Justice League International. If you think that framing such a poster and continuing to display it well into your almost-30s is excessive, well, then, this may not be the blog for you.

Like a lot of people, I loved the humor, and I liked that it featured the Blue Beetle, who I'd become fascinated with when I first encountered him in the Legends mini-series that led into the formation of the new JL. Best of all, it was always clear that that creators really cared about the characters; freed from the constraints of having to find interesting things to say about characters who already starred in multiple titles of their own, Giffen and friends could take the time to develop relationships among this roster of (mostly) b-listers.

The familiar criticism of the series is that, after the first year or two, the creators quit taking the characters seriously; the jokes became more important than the characters, and so readers stopped caring. I think that's probably not entirely accurate; sure, the series got jokier as it went along—G'Nort, Club JLI—but there were plenty of "serious" stories pretty deep into the run: Blue Beetle getting brainwashed, the Despero storyline (unfortunately marred by the worst deus ex machina ending ever. The funeral for Mr. Miracle was actually pretty moving, though, even if readers of Mr. Miracle—all three of us—knew it was really a robot who got killed). The series didn't really go off the tracks for me until around issue 50 or so, when General Glory came aboard and the whole thing did finally devolve into slapstick and broad parody.

Looking back on the series now, one of the things I like the most is the friendship between Blue Beetle and Booster Gold. Most "friendships" in comics are pretty underdeveloped, based on nothing so much as respect. Much as with Reed and Sue Richards, we're told that characters like, say, the Flash and Green Lantern are friends, but we don't much see it—they get together, fight crime, call each other "partner" or "pal," and then that's about it. Wonder Man and the Beast are probably one of the good (if woefully underused) exceptions to this rule, and Beetle and Booster were the other—united by a common sense of humor and a shared feeling of being not-quite-ready-for-prime-time.

So it's disappointing to me to see that this issue—originally intended to be a standalone follow-up to the Formerly Known as the Justice League miniseries—seems to embrace the criticisms of the 80s league as virtues. The truth that Giffen and co tried to hammer home in the old series was that, while these characters might spend a lot of time screwing around, they were still competent, they were still heroes. This series (and it's early yet) has forgotten that, or, at least, has decided that it doesn't apply to everyone. Booster Gold, in particular, has devolved into a sex-crazed, gold-digging, dim-bulb laughingstock. I know Booster's never been a big success as a character, and, by all means, have him be dim, horny, and worried about money, but geez, give us some reason to care about him. Even though Giffen tries to bring back the Beetle/Booster friendship, it just doesn't work because only one of the characters is actually a character—the other is just an amalgamation of allegedly humorous flaws.

Still, I'm not giving up on this series; the last page bodes well, and it's nice to read about a non-murdered Sue Dibny.

2005-02-23T13:10:00.000-06:00

The Mountain Goats are coming to Baton Rouge! According to Decorporated.com, they'll be here on April 8th. Hoo-freaking-ray! Can't get here fast enough. (This image is from 4ad.com)

Superheroes and the South

2005-02-21T12:39:00.000-06:00

I'm not by nature a Daredevil fanatic. In the right hands—Miller, Bendis—he's a compelling character, but he's not one that I feel personally invested in in the same way that I do, say, Captain America or even the Blue Beetle.

So, a peripheral mini-series like Daredevil: Redemption normally wouldn't make my pull list. But I began picking it up because I was interested to see how the series—penned by British writer David Hine and drawn by Daredevil regular Michael Gaydos—dealt with the South.

Comics don't go South very often. In Marvel comics especially, if a hero isn't in Manhattan, he's probably in Asgard or outer space or the Microverse. The Fantastic Four have journeyed to the otherdimensional Negative Zone dozens of times; I doubt they've ever visited Mississippi. The X-Men spend a good deal of time in a tropical jungle land under Antarctica, but I don't think they've ever sweated in the tropics of south Louisiana. The handful of characters who are from the South—Gambit, Rogue, Cannonball, Captain Marvel II/Photon—rarely seem to have any real roots there and rarely display any sense of how their region of origin has shaped their identities. Sure, Gambit has his thieves' guild and what-not, but he might as well be from the Mojoverse for all that actual New Orleans is ever actually referenced. Similarly, Avengers scribe Roger Stern would remind us every few issues that CM2/Photon was from New Orleans by having her mention gumbo, but that's about as far as it went. Rogue calls people "sugah."

The one notable exception to this rule that springs to mind--and it's not a positive one--is that of John Walker, the USAgent and temporary Captain America, who was a native of Custer's Grove, Georgia. His tenure as Cap was marked by irrational, depraved violence and a strong streak of jingoistic nationalism—a dark, "Southern" reflection of the morally upright and fair-minded original Captain America, who is, of course, from Brooklyn.

In fact, the only writer I can think of who has really attended to the complexity, the complications and contradictions, of the South is British master Alan Moore during his Swamp Thing run—an achievement made all the more impressive by the fact that he was writing gothic horror and could easily have taken cover behind the constraints of genre.

I'm sad to say that (and we're admittedly only two issues in to a six-parter) it doesn't look like David Hine is going to join his countrymate in greatness. Gaydos' cover for issue two says it all. It features all the elements of the white trash gothic: the obese matron, her idiot son, a damaged preacher, a crucifix, an overgrown forest—and presiding over it all, pulling this whole scene together, is Matt Murdock, drawn in tighter lines than his companions, dressed in a sharp gray business suit, clearly the emblem or normalcy in a diseased, depraved South.

Now, true, there is a giant Daredevil head in the background—but it's colored a pale white and you can see right through it. Its transparency is emblematic of the way in which the fundamentally depraved and irrational nature of putting on a skin-tight devil outfit and beating people up with sticks is glossed right over in this book, treated, in fact, as downright ordinary (even when it doesn't make sense in the plot—why would a character so protective of his secret identity these days go to Alabama and put on his super-suit?).

The motif of Daredevil as a figure whose competency and sanity are thrown into sharp relief by the Christ-haunted chaos around him is confirmed over and over again in this issue. Murdock and company ride into town in a van vandalized with apocalyptic graffiti. A southern deputy—chewing a toothpick, of course—and his companions jeer at the New York lawyer, prompting him to reflect, "Well, the southern wit lives up to its reputation, even if the hospitality falls a little short." Only Murdock, not the native lawyers, realizes that one of the young men he's been sent to defend has been coached into giving an untrue confession, et cetera.

Let me be clear: I don't object to stories about the overheated, gothic, grotesque South. I love Flannery O'Connor and Barry Hannah and Cormac McCarthy and Lewis Nordan, and there's plenty of much weirder stuff in their works than in this mini-series (so far). It's a viable literary tradition. But those writers demonstrate some kind of empathy and love for even the most misshapen and sinister of their freaks, inspiring us to consider whether or not we, perhaps, belong in the sideshow right along with them. Hine, by contrast, invites us to buy a ticket and keep a safe distance--even though we experience the story through the "eyes" of a character who would not at all be out of place among the grotesques he looks askance at.

Admittedly, it's early in this mini-series, and I probably shouldn't be judging so much so soon. Hine's depiction of the teenagers accused of murder—the story is based loosely on the West Memphis Three—is compelling. (But: how do we know they're probably innocent? Well, they don't talk in a recognizable Southern idiom, of course, and they speak rationally and without the merest hint of religion, unlike, say, the religious fanatic a few pages later who beats his wife with a telephone book.)

Anyway, my fervent hope is that I'm jumping the gun with my criticism of Hine's myopia regarding Daredevil's own freakishness. I've read novels before—Nordan's The Sharpshooter Blues springs to mind—which seem to start off skimming along the surface of every bad Southern stereotype ever written and then suddenly yank the rug out from under the reader, forcing us to reckon with the grief and pain of these characters who we just a minute before felt so comfortable laughing at. And Daredevil's damaged, tortured psyche has always been a part of his character moreso than any other super-hero besides maybe Batman. So Hine has a chance to pull this thing off. I hope he does. More from me as the series develops. I know you can't wait.

Here's a link to an interview with Hine about this series at Newsarama.

2005-02-18T08:30:00.000-06:00

Sadie with Pancake.

Comics Lists

2005-02-17T09:09:00.000-06:00

Thanks to bulb for pointing this out to me: apparently there's a "100 Things You Love about Comics" meme going around comics blogs, started by Marvel Age stalwart Fred Hembeck, who, apparently, is still alive. Here's one from Lacunae (via bulb), and a pair from the Comic Treadmill.

Now look. I'm as big a comics nerd as ever there was, but there's no way I've got time to sit here and come up with a 100-item list. I mean, it seems like this task is designed to conform to every bad comic-reader stereotype: "Hey, you at home in your mother's basement with no job or girlfriend--here's something to pass the time until Farscape comes on!" On the other hand, I can't really resist. So I'm just going to throw a couple out here off the top of my head.

1. "Everyone who can fly--grab someone who can't!"
2. Mr. Miracle's flying discs
3. Mike Zeck's Captain America
4. Fantastic Four Roast

Readers: feel free to add your own in the comments section.

Long Time Coming

2005-02-16T17:09:00.000-06:00

Whee! As everyone's probably heard already (possibly because you got a giddy e-mail from me), Bruce Springsteen is realeasing a new album in April. Click here for the AP story via whatevs.org.

I'm excited to see a couple of songs I know and love from bootlegs--"Long Time Coming" and especially "The Hitter." And I'm encouraged to hear that this is going to be a quieter, stripped-downer, more Nebraska/Tom Joad affair. I'm less encouraged that Brendan O'Brien is producing it again, since I didn't think he added much to The Rising, which, I finally have to admit, just isn't that great an album. There's just too much there; pick the 10 best songs off that record and bring them in under 45 minutes and it would be a masterpiece, but songs like "Skin to Skin" drag everything around them down into the muck. Go listen to that song. You know what it sounds like? Color Me Badd.

Anyway--can't wait for the tour, especially since the word is that he'll be doing solo shows in smaller venues at first; hope somewhere in Louisiana makes the list.

2005-02-16T08:22:00.000-06:00

At the Spanish Town parade on Mardi Gras Weekend. Crowd condition: frantic amiability. Our host's speakers: soaked in mimosas. Her windows: broken by hard-flung beads. My spleen: not yet ripped open.

Splenetic Comic Reviews

2005-02-15T08:55:00.000-06:00

Details about our first Mardi Gras in Louisiana and the subsequent bleeding of my spleen to come soon; I'm getting a picture or two ready to post. In the meantime, though...

A Tale of Two Caps: Last week saw the release of Brubaker and Epting's Captain America #3 and Priest's Captain America and the Falcon #12. It's a shame these books aren't both sticking around--CAF has two more issues before the axe falls--but reading them side by side helps me understand Marvel's decision to ditch one title (though not their initial decision to roll out a new Cap title while Priest was just getting going). Though both writers clearly have their own very distinct takes on Cap, they're both very interested in exploring the intrigue and espionage aspects of the character's mythos, and, although Priest's take has been a lot more fun of late, what with MODOK and now the Hulk, it's easy to understand why the suits at Marvel might think two titles covering what looks like similar territory with a character who's never been able to sustain more than one title (and barely that one at times) would be a bad idea.

This is probably the weakest issue of Brubaker's run so far; it suffers from a bad case of the part-three-of-five-itis that's been circulating around the Marvel offices and mutating into ever more drug-resistant strains since Bendis got hired. We don't come much closer to finding out who's behind the Red Skull's murder, but we do get several nice character moments, including a convincing scene in which Cap explains why he hates French-bashing. Mother Night pops up here, too, and I was pleased by that--my fear was that in adopting a more "realistic" take on Cap, Brubaker would drop some of Cap's more colorful rogues, but with Mother Night this ish and Crossbones earlier in the series, I'm glad to see that's not the case. (Neither of those characters are, technically speaking, colorful, since they both wear black, but you get the idea). Instead, as in his Sleeper series (just read the first trade, liked it), Brubaker is interested in playing with the intersection of four-color super-hero action and the grimmer, grimier world of international intrigue. All that, plus Nick Fury's flying ferrari!

Priest ends his five-part Brothers and Keepers story arc with CAF #12. This had the possibility to be one of the very best issues of this series so far, but the fill-in art by Greg Tocchini just doesn't pack the same visceral wallop that now-exclusive-to-DC-Joe Bennett's did. (This brings up the question: what other kind of wallop is there, really?). Damocles Riva, trapped in Modok's body, seeks out the one creature he thinks can kill him and end his misery--the Hulk--but if he dies, then he'll release a plague that will kill millions, so Cap's caught in the middle. It's a good issue with some well staged fight scenes, and, had the series continued, this would clearly have been its major turning point--the much more pragmatic Falcon takes charge of their partnership while Cap engages in some of his trademark moral dithering. Anyway, here's hoping Priest goes out with a bang.

Fabian Nicieza haters, and I know there are some, should go out, buy a copy of New Thunderbolts #5, and then write Fabes a letter of apology. One of the main problems with the old T-bolts series was that, until Hawkeye came along and then again after he left, it often wasn't much fun; everyone spent a lot of time angsting about their criminal pasts and romantic failures or angling for more power in the group. It was pretty clear that Nicieza had cut his teeth on the X-titles. But, surprisingly, this issue is probably the most fun comic Marvel will publish this month. Nicieza perfectly captures not just the tension but also the comedy in trying to get a bunch of self-absorbed individuals to all get on the same page, or at least in the same library, and stay there for more than a few seconds. The sequences with Speed Demon, Joystick, and Blizzard in the strip club are a highlight of the book, as is Radioactive Man's attempt to hail a cab to get to the fight scene. All this and the return of Abe's Beetle armor, which I hope he keeps.

JLA #111. I was excited to hear that Busiek was doing a run on JLA, but I'm afraid it's a bit of a flop. The conflict between the League and the Crime Syndicate is fine, but it's weighted down by what I can only assume is Busiek's attempt to do Grant Morrison--an almost unreadable b-plot about the weaponeers of Qward. I don't know about you, but I don't really need a long exploration of the social and political traditions of Qwardians, or at least not this one. I want them to show up in all their goofy henchman glory, throwing thunderbolts and arming Sinestro.

The Incredible Hulk #78. This issue is the second of Peter David's allegedly triumphant return to the title he shepherded so successfully for over a decade. I've got reservations: sure, David wrote some of the best Hulk stories ever written--I love most of his run--but near the end of his tenure on the title his writing declined sharply. It may not all be his fault--he was never partnered with another penciller as skilled as Dale Keown or Gary Frank, and he unfortunately got caught up in some complicated crossover fallout from the Heroes Reborn thing, and his final issue was, admittedly, pretty great--but it's hard to shake the sense that maybe he's said all he has to say about the character. The jury's still out, I think. There's too much flashback to Bruce's tortured adolescence here for my taste; this ground has been worn pretty smooth. On the other hand, Lee Weeks's art satisfies, and the mystery David has set up intrigues, so I guess I'll stick around.

Ultimates 2 #3. It's a testament to Millar and Hitch's storytelling skills that even though I know Fury is lying to Bruce when he comes to see him, I really, really want him to be telling the truth. Bitchy Jarvis bugs me. Otherwise, good issue as ever.

Coming soon: Mardi Gras details, and the story of The Time a Woman Held a Shotgun on Me in My Own Bedroom When I Was in Eighth Grade

More So: Comics

2005-02-01T09:03:00.000-06:00

Other purchases last week...

Planetary #22. In UFF, Warren Ellis writes a young, hopeful Fantastic Four; in Planetary, an older, more brutal, and more vicious version of that team serves as the main antagonist for Elijah Snow's Planetary crew. This issue gives us the backstory of William Leather, the young hothead of the evil Four, and I'm pleased to see that Ellis has ditched any attempt to do a version of Johnny Storm or Jim Hammond's history in favor of connecting Leather to a surprising but interesting pair of pulp heroes from the past. Between Ellis' writing and John Cassady's art, this comic is so routinely excellent that one runs out of superlatives after a while. There's nothing in here to match the sublimity of the two-issue Mystery in Space arc from last year, in which recording angels took a ship powered by information to investigate a civilization of people who've evolved out of the gigantic corpse of a dead alien, but it's still pretty great. My only qualm with this issue is the rather gratuitous and squirm-inducing, albeit brief, torture scene near the end. I know we're meant to be worrying about Snow a bit more and rooting for him a bit less, but still.

Daredevil #69. I don't even care that this arc is moving at a glacial pace and could easily have been over two issues ago. This is clearly the title where Bendis is putting his energy nowadays, and it shows. This issue suspends the main plot for a while to focus on the White Tiger (old and new), and it's really a joy to read. Alex Maleev's art has never looked better, and I'm really digging the bright-colors-and-benday effect he's using for the flashback sequences. What's really interesting about this issue is that Daredevil is taking on a pupil, someone to train; this isn't the sort of relationship we've ever seen him in, to my knowledge, especially with a woman (Wolverine calls him a "himbo" in the most recent issue of his title), and I'm intrigued to see where Bendis goes with it.

By contrast, Powers (#8), while still a good read, is slipping a little bit. I think the problem here is scope: after two big epic storylines--the death of Supershock and the more epic than expected origin of Christian Walker--it's probably a good idea to get back to street level with these characters and regroup a bit. But with those Big Stories hanging around in the background, it's a little bit harder to care about the new status quo in the precinct and the rise of a small-time crime boss. Still, with this title, there's really no telling where the story is going, and there's still the mystery of Deena's new powers to be explored, so okay. I like the framing device for this story, too--the message board posts from superhero fanboys.

And: I bought a copy of the most recent Wolverine. And several issues prior. This is a shift for me, because I really don't care too much about Wolverine. There's nothing wrong with him as a character, but, like a lot of folks, I imagine, I just had my fill of him in the '90s. I liked him in Morrson's X-Men, but I haven't read his solo title since John Byrne was at the helm. I actually picked this issue up because I was intrigued by his appearance in New Thunderbolts--which must mark the first time in history that Screaming Mimi has boosted Wolverine's sales. I've been reading good things in the fan press about the Millar/Romita jr take on the character, and I'm a sucker for anything with Hyrdra and SHIELD. And you know, it's really, really good--Wolverine has been killed and resurrected by the Hand, who've teamed up with Hydra, and sent to create various kinds of havoc. Really, it's The Bourne Supremacy with claws and spandex, but it works well, and Millar shows a defter touch with the rest of the Marvel Universe--the FF, Cap and the Falcon, Daredevil--than I was expecting from him.

Also read and enjoyed: Invincible #19, Y: The Last Man #30, Madrox #5, We3 #3

So: Comics

2005-01-31T09:29:00.000-06:00

Ultimate Fantastic Four #15. This issue made me realize that the element of this series I'm liking most is the ultimized relationship between Reed and Sue. It's true that, in their mainstream MU incarnations, they have one of the only happy marriages in comics, but it's always seemed like a marriage characterized by Sue's tolerance of Reed's (sometimes literal) eggheadedness. I know Sue allegedly "grounds" Reed, or whatever, but I never know why he was attracted to her particular form of grounding over another, or what attraction Reed held for Sue after she got over her starry-eyed infatuation with him as her TA (surely the most credibility-straining element of the FF's origin. Cosmic rays, hijacked shuttles, the Red Ghost and his Super-Apes--fine. TA infatuation? Not likely). The one really unbearable element of John Byrne's otherwise stellar FF run was the way in which Reed and Sue were always referring to each other as "my darling" or somesuch. It seems clear to me now that that stylistic tic was a way of compensating for the difficulty of trying to demonstrate that these characters love each other when they have nothing in common. Byrne couldn't show us, so he had to tell us, over and over again.

But with Warren Ellis's UFF, Sue and Reed are partners in geekery. Rather than Sue cocking an eyebrow along with the rest of the team at Reed's obsession with some nanomicrobic technowhoozits, Sue clearly gets just as enthralled as he does, bringing her own expertise to bear and seeing things that he doesn't. As a result, their relationship seems more real and more warm than it ever has in the 616 MU. I'm also digging Ellis' take on the Thing: still gruff and lovable, this version of Ben Grimm adds a layer of shrewdness and cynicism that complements Reed's big-picture naivete nicely. The plot this ish continues the FF's trip to the Negative Zone, which Ellis has very smartly tied into their origin. I'm not a big fan of Kubert, but his depiction of the decaying space station at the edge of the universe is really impressive and creepy, and the brief glimpse we get of its inhabitant--a Negative Zone mainstay--made my skin crawl a little bit; impressive, since I've come to think of him as pretty silly in his original incarnation.

I picked up the primary Fantastic Four title this week, too (#522), mainly because I can't resist a Galactus story. The Waid/Wieringo FF has earned a lot of praise from fans, but I quickly abandoned it after their early issues. My main quibble was with Waid's handling of Johnny Storm, who seemed to have been de-aged about a decade an de-matured about twice that long. His womanizing and love of fast living are of course an integral part of his character, but Waid was writing him as a totally irresponsible boob.

In retrospect, I can't really fault Waid that much for his decision. Johnny is heir to some of the most screwed-up history in modern comics, mostly thanks to Tom DeFalco (right, DeFalco? Or was it Howard Mackie? I'm going with DeFalco right now). Some of you may recall that during the long period in which the Thing was adventuring off-world, Johnny fell in love with the Thing's blind sculptress girlfriend, Alicia Masters, and they got married. This made for some eminently milk-able tension between Ben and Johnny and was a nice way to explore the ramifications of growing up for a character who had previously been defined by his adolescence. Anyway, when DeFalco came aboard, he decided that he really hated the idea of Alicia with Johnny--that Alicia was Ben's girl, and that's the way it should be.

Now, DeFalco is entitled to his opinion on this matter, certainly, and choosing to reunite Alicia and Ben was totally his right as the FF writer. On the other hand, deciding that the best way to accomplish this goal was to reveal that the Alicia Johnny married wasn't Alicia at all, but in fact a Skrull shapeshifter sent to infiltrate the FF! And Alicia's been held prisoner by the Skrulls in outer space! And the female Skrull, against all rules of biology, has gotten pregnant by Johnny--and laid an egg! No. That's hacktackular.

So my only dissatisfaction with this issue of FF, which is otherwise a pretty interesting Galactus story, is that the "character" part of the story is all about how Johnny is finally growing up and learning to take some responsibility for himself, take a leadership role, and so on. The problem is, I've seen him grow up a bunch of times already over the past 20+ years of comics reading, and, if I wanted to read a young, hotheaded Human Torch, I could do so in the pages of Ultimate FF. Which I do. The Human Torch in FF has nothing to do with the character I've followed for years and feel a certain investment in, and that really undercuts my enjoyment of what is otherwise a pretty good title.

More comics ramblings later; I have to prep for class and order my tickets for Paul Westerberg in New Orleans.

Something I Heard at a Party Last Night

2005-01-28T16:01:00.000-06:00

I love my new colleagues. To wit: I heard this sentence last night, by way of explaining a piece of art:

"I had a hermaphrodite godfather who went up the Amazon."

New comics reviews coming one of these days soon. In the meantime, everyone should check out The Comics Curmudgeon (formerly known as I Read the Comics So You Don't Have To), in which a guy named Josh plays the victim to the daily comics page's abusive spouse. It keeps kicking him in the teeth, but he keeps coming back for more--is it affection or addiction?

Also, the Mountain Goat-inclined among you should check out last night's episode of Phoning It In, in which John Darnielle performs songs over the phone. Link via LHB.

Demons and Painkillers

2005-01-19T11:49:00.000-06:00

Has anyone seen this interview in Salon with M. Scott Peck? The headline piqued my interest since he's written a new book on self-help and on demon possession--the two subjects that dominate my parents' library, such as it is. My mother was very worried about our immortal souls when my brother and I were kids, so we had a lot of books on the evils of Christian rock, the occult, and Disney (a similar book we had but that I can't find online: "Pounce on the Mouse.") Given my love of fantasy novels, my mom was especially concerned that I might fall prey to the evils of Dungeons & Dragons, but, since I couldn't find anyone with whom to play D&D in the first place, those fears turned out to be unfounded. Well, I did swallow a twenty-sided die one time, but that's a whole 'nother issue. Anyway, our whole church went through a big Revelation phase during my formative years, so the whole pre-millenial dispensationalist view of the endtimes that you see in the Left Behind books is seared pretty deeply into my mind. If you didn't see A Thief in the Night at a youth group lock-in in the 8th grade, well, then, clearly you didn't grow up middle-class and evangelical in 1980s Mississippi. Of course, I still remember the Cold War version of this ideology, when everything associated with Satan stood for Russia. It's a good thing the UN is still around to pave the way for the antichrist's one-world government or there'd be some serious revision going on. Obviously, I don't buy it anymore, but I honestly think it's the only way to understand Bush's bizarre foreign policy--or at least, I think it's the way in which Bush understands his foreign policy, and the neo-cons are glad to let him have it. BTW, Slacktivist has been reading the LB novels so you don't have to.

Anyway, that's what surprised me about the M. Scott Peck interview--I associate belief in demon possession and endtimes prophecy with straight-laced support for our heroic Christian President, but Peck seems convinced that the Supreme Court justices who decided Bush v. Gore were possessed by demons--just like Hitler's henchmen! I'm just not quite sure how to process this contradiction, and I'm curious to see how his book is received in Christian circles, if it gets sold at Christian bookstores, and so on.

New! Quick Comic Reviews

2005-01-19T10:09:00.000-06:00

Just a couple of quick thoughts on some of last week's comics:

Ultimates 2 #2: As comic fanboys well know, Thor can't fly. What he does is, he throws his hammer really hard, then catches on to the strap at the end and hangs on for the ride. Readers not in on this bit of trivia could easily be forgiven for thinking Thor flies because nearly every artist who draws him draws him flying, except holding a hammer. Bryan Hitch just went up a notch in my book (why am I notching my books, you may ask? Time will tell, children) for his depiction of Thor taking off in Times Square, a depiction that looks like a big guy holding onto a flying hammer, not Superman with blond hair and a weird hat. It's one of two great images in this book, the other being Captain America jumping out of a helicopter into Times Square against the backdrop of a neon Coca-Cola sign. Hitch's faces always seem a little static to me, a little too close to the celebrities he's clearly based his conceptions of the characters on--Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury is a good example. But man, he brings the goods otherwise.

Oh, and the story was good, too. Looks like the Hulk is coming back. Etc.

New Thunderbolts #4. If Fabian Nicizea has a fatal weakness, it's his inability to differentiate interesting Marvel history from really boring Marvel history. A more charitable assumption would be to say that he believes there are no bad characters, just bad execution, but then we'd have to say that he has been the author of some really poor execution over the years, and that doesn't seem especially charitable, so I'll just go with my original criticism. His first T-bolts run started off strong but then got cluttered and tedious, as we had to sit through a crossover with the heroes of Counter-Earth--you know, the ones left behind at the end of Marvel's failed Heroes Reborn experiment, ones like the Liefeld-created female Bucky! And some dude who wears Iron Man aromor and a cowboy hat and carries six-shooters! And then the big surprise character in one arc was a character who'd been created in some fan contest decades ago but had never received the promised publication, and now here he is!

But New T-Bolts has been working for me, and this issue is probably my favorite so far, even though it's a crossover with Wolverine, who I don't care about, and even though it just keeps piling on the plotlines, threatening to spill over the line that separates "dense" from "cluttered." Still, I'm intrigued by the mystery of the new Swordsman's identity, and I'm liking the tension between the new members of the T-bolts. One of my all-time favorite comics is the Ostrander/McDonnell Suicide Squad from the 80s, a comic to which T-bolts has always been somewhat indebted, and these early issues have really captured the tense, chaotic, and ragtag feel of that series.

I don't know if I think the new Swordsman is the Moon Knight anymore. We know it's a pre-existing character, since Wolverine recognizes him (by scent, presumably), and it's someone, according to the Purple Man, who wasn't a hero, exactly, and someone whose upbringing combines swashbuckling and barbarism. Paladin? Ka-Zar? Iron Fist?

Oh, and I bought the second issue of the Brubaker/Epting Captain America a couple of weeks ago. Still great, and I was glad to see Crossbones--I was afraid that a whole decade of Gruenwald continuity would continue to be ignored in favor of the more "realistic" Cap, so some of my fears are allayed. Still, though, Brubaker's Cap isn't nearly as much fun as the Priest/Bennett Captain America and the Falcon, which is apparently ending with issue 14, unfortunately; it's really been hitting its stride with this Modok storyline, and this month's cliffhanger promises some good fun next week, especially given how skillfully Priest has handled next month's guest star in the past.

Some Comics Recently Bought by Me

2005-01-12T11:25:00.000-06:00

Some highlights from last week's haul, as I get ready for this week's:

New Avengers #2. The first few issues of Bendis' run on Avengers last year consisted mostly of things blowing up and people acting confused; that was fine with me then, since I had faith Bendis knew where he was going--faith that was not rewarded. So I'm a little wary that New Avengers is starting off much the same way, as this issue is a chaotic (by design, not by any failure of art or writing) prison riot fight scene. But this time Bendis has done a much better job of indicating that there is a mystery to be solved, rather than just a surprise to be sprung; plus, he's writing characters whom he actually seems to care a little bit about, and, aside from some uncharacteristic let's-move-the-plot-along headlong rushing from Spider-Man, Bendis manages to do some nice work, especially with ostensible B-listers like Luke Cage and Spider-Woman. In fact, this issue's cliffhanger--Cage's confrontation with a certain mind-controlling villain--has made me wonder if these past years Bendis has essentially been using the widescreen majesty of the Marvel Universe as a backdrop to tell a small but compelling story about the relationship between Luke and Jessica Jones. I've still got reservations about bringing the Sentry back into continuity, and gorjus will be happy to know that yet another hero gets tortured this issue, but overall it's working okay for me right now.

Legion of Super Heroes #1. I like Waid and Kitson just fine, but I was under the impression that this was a re-launch, not a re-boot. My mistake. There's something inherently epic and gosh-wow about the Legion that makes me want to be a fan, but the only version of the team I've ever really sunk my teeth into has been the dystopian Giffen Legion. Anyway, Waid has some nice ideas here, and Kitson turns in some nice--if unusually scratcy--pencils, but I know pretty soon this team is going to have to meet the all-new, all-different Fearsome Five or Lightning Lord or what have you all over again for the very first time, and I just don't care.

Amazing Spider-Man #515. And that's it for me with this title. I dug it during the early part of Straczynski's run, and, unlike many fans, enjoyed the fish-out-of-water stories featuring Spidey fumbling around in the world of Marvel's magic users, but he clearly has nothing left to say about the character at this point. What got lost in all the hoopla about Straczynski defaming Gwen Stacy's character in the last arc was the fact that the fanboy indignation it inspired was the only interesting thing about it; it was really a tedious story. I stuck with it, but the first issue of this new arc looks just as unappealing.

By contrast, Straczynski's Supreme Power (issue 14 came out last week) still entertains. Straczynksi's best Spidey stories were the ones in which he examined and expanded the Spider-Man mythos and explored neglected corners of the Marvel Universe. I suspect that he's a much better world-builder than he is a compelling plotter (maybe Fabian Nicieza is his opposite number in this respect?), and SP really plays to his strengths--creating new characters (well, new-ish) and figuring out the rules they have to play by, the history they are heirs to, the social and political structures that complicate their lives.

Also bought and enjoyed: Firestorm #9, Ultimate Fantastic Four #14, Invincible #18

This week's shopping list:
JLA #110
Captain America and the Falcon #11 (woo-hoo!)
Marvel Team-Up #4
New Thunderbolts #4
The Pulse #7
Ultimates 2 #2

So: The Life Aquatic

2005-01-05T10:57:00.000-06:00

Most of Wes Anderson's movies combine tender, sympathetic character development with the exploration of his idiosyncratic, detailed, and pleasantly fussy nigh-twee world. At their best, they do both simultaneously and seamlessly: the rapid-fire series of scenes cataloging Max's extracurricular activities in Rushmore showcases of the scope Anderson's imagination and tells you everything you need to know about Max.

Now, imagine that each of those eye-twinkle scenes is 10-15 minutes long. And that Max Fischer is totally absent from them. That's what The Life Aquatic is like--a gorgeous, sumptuous, painstakingly crafted world with no reason to give a damn about any of it, no characters or story to make our passage through the movie seem like anything more than a guided tour of a studio backlot.

Bill Murray, to his credit, nearly makes it work; as the previews indicate, his Steve Zissou has lost his best friend on an expedition, and when, near the end of the film, Zissou's face suddenly bunches and contorts with the sorrow he's been repressing all movie long, I was really moved. But then I realized that I wasn't moved because I cared about Steve Zissou; I was moved because it reminded me so strongly of that scene in Rushmore when Murray's Herman Blume is standing outside Max's dad's barber shop, looking as dejected as I've ever seen anyone look. The memory of that scene was way more powerful than anything I saw in The Life Aquatic.

I liked it more than this post makes it sound like I did, but my main feeling was disappointment--this was the move I'd most looked forward to throughout 2004, and it just didn't do it for me. Maybe next time.

The Old Order Changeth

2004-12-16T09:30:00.000-06:00

So, Identity Crisis and Avengers Disassembled were the big comic book events of the year, and they've both finally drawn to a close. Thoughts:

If I'd had to pick which one I thought would be worthwhile a few months ago, I would have picked Disassembled, hands down. Avengers-philes have to face the fact that Kurt Busiek's long, magnificent, silver-agey run was an aberration in modern Avengers history. Before him was years and years of subpar writing and muddy, boring art ("The Crossing," "Bloodties," etc--when the next most recent high point in Avengers history is Jarvis the butler taking down a demon-possessed VW in an "Inferno" crossover, you know you've got problems), and after him came a disappointing stint by Geoff Johns and a downright disastrous run by Chuck Austen (see Paul O'Brien's takedown of a typical Austen X-Men plot here, and just apply that same sense of befuddled horror to the Avengers.) So I didn't really mind the idea of bringing in Brian Bendis, whose work I love, to shake things up, shift the roster around, and tell some new stories--knowing that, given comics' inevitable pull back towards the status quo, we'll eventually go back to having Hank Pym and Hercules and Hawkeye fighting Kang and the Supreme Intelligence, or somesuch similar thing. (And lest I be misunderstood, I would approve of such a return, eventually).

But: I hadn't anticipated how much Disassembled would suck.

But then again, once I was fully caught up in the suckiness of Disassembled, I didn't anticipate how good Bendis' New Avengers #1 would be; clearly, this is the story he wanted to tell, and he put a lot more energy into telling it than he did in creating an environment where he would be able to tell it. Bendis mainly seems motivated by the chance to tell Avengers stories with the characters he loves to write--Daredevil (who Bendis continues to get exactly right in his solo title; and I might as well say it now: better than Frank Miller), Luke Cage, Spider-Man, Spider-Woman--plus some Avengers mainstays like Cap and Iron Man, plus, for some reason, Wolverine. It's not clear why these stories need to be Avengers stories, exactly, when Bendis is doing similar work in his excellent Secret War miniseries, but I'm willing to give him some rope, anyway, even if this line-up bears a suspiciously straight-faced resemblance to Walt Simonson and Art Adams' goofy "all-new, all-marketable" Fantastic Four storyline from the 90s, in which the classic FF gets replaced by Marvel's biggest-selling characters of the day: Spider-Man, the Hulk, Wolverine, and Ghost Rider (that's right, Ghost Rider).

In the meantime, I'm filling in my classic Avengers void with the TPB of the Korvac saga, which includes, to my surprise, one of my favorite stories ever--Hawkeye v. the Collector in Avengers #174, which I picked up for a quarter at Mallette's comics in Ridgeland back in the 80s. Here's hoping someone gets around to resurrecting Hawkeye real soon, preferably in the pages of Thunderbolts.

And then there's Identity Crisis, which ended this week. And I can't figure out why it works for me. It really, really shouldn't. I wasn't even going to keep reading it after the first issue: why kill a minor character like Sue Dibny and break up one of the only happy marriages in comics? (The other one, interestingly, also involving a man with rubbery body parts). But I kept coming back, even though I began to suspect that the big reveal would be a bit of a letdown, as it was--a letdown sporting some highly questionable gender politics, to boot. But what I've enjoyed has been Meltzer's exploration of the landscape of the DCU from a non-cosmic perspective; usually in a big DC Crossover, you get Darkseid and, I dunno, the Spectre shooting energy beams at each other and proclaiming things in purple prose, but in IC we get long sections devoted to street-level villains like Captain Boomerang and Deadshot, and we get to see some of the character development that has been sacrificed in mainstream books like JLA in favor of the so-called "widescreen" approach to storytelling. So, a surprised thumbs-up.

Year of the Goat

2004-12-10T09:15:00.000-06:00

I got a stern e-mail from Blogger today informing me that, as a dork, I was contractually obligated to produce a year-end best-of music list, so here it is. But a disclaimer: this was a weird year for music-buying for me. I had to finish writing my dissertation, go on a couple of campus interviews in medium-flung places around the country, defend my dissertation, take a new job, move to a new town, then buy a house and move again, start a new semester teaching new classes, meet a bunch of new colleagues, etc. So I haven't had the kind of time I used to to haunt the halls of record stores to find out about new music or even to buy music I know I'll probably like. Plus, the one indie record store here ain't that great. All that to say that there will be some notable omissions from this list—I haven't heard the new Interpol, Arcade Fire, Joanna Newsome, Neko Case, Loretta Lynn, Iron and Wine, any of that. I hope to soon. And I'd welcome your recommendations.

So: here's what I thought about the better things I bought:

Drag it Up, Old 97's. First let me say that I think not liking the Old 97's is a moral wrong, a fundamental character flaw that FBI profilers should use as an indicator that a suspect might be a sociopath or at least a bit of a prick. That said…I was disappointed with this album. I mean, "Won't Be Home" is a good enough classic-sounding Old 97's rave-up, even if it sounds like Ken Bethea is strangling his guitar in an attempt to keep it from playing the solo from "Timebomb." And some of the slower tracks are really compelling--"Adelaide," "Valium Waltz" are both winners. There are choice lines and licks strewn about all over the album, but ultimately it's all kind of forgettable; it sounds like, with nothing else to prove—no major labels to wow, no pop chops to show off—the band has decided to make a comfortable, fun album. Nothing wrong with that, but nothing blisteringly good about it, either.

The Slow Wonder, AC Newman. This album, chock full of hooks so sweet they'll hurt your teeth, easily holds it own against either of the New Pornographers albums. No surprises here, but plenty of satisfaction.

A Ghost is Born, Wilco. I'm an overeducated white guy age 25-40. Do I have a choice but to love Wilco?

Half-Smiles of the Decomposed, Guided By Voices. The first essential GBV album since Isolation Drills, and the most consistent (at least by GBV's inconsistent standards), with a devastating first half that sees Pollard and his crew swerving drunkenly from new wave to arena rock to warped 60s pop. Don't think of Robert Pollard as a singer/songwriter—think of him as a found artist inhabiting a junkyard world of his own creation. He doesn't record songs and release albums; he creates whole (better) alternate realities out of the debris littering the landscape of rock history. He sweeps it into his pan, takes it home, and puts it together again in new, bizarre, exhilarating forms. If "Huffman Prairie Flying Field" isn't the best song ever to close an album, I don't know what is.

Tell it to the Dust, Anders Parker. Already wrote about this one here.

We Shall All Be Healed, The Mountain Goats. As the title of this post suggests, this year I gave in to my Mountain Goats obsession. To a meager collection that included only Bitter Melon Farm and Tallahassee, I added Ghana, Protein Source of the Future…Now!, All Hail West Texas, The Coroner's Gambit, Sweden, Full Force Galesburg, and the Extra Glenns' Martial Arts Weekend. Now that I think about it, I may know another reason why I didn't have a chance to explore a lot of new music this year. Listening to WSABH—the only song-cycle about desperate junkies I'm likely to buy for some time—is like watching a pirated NC-17 cut of The Outsiders—the one guy who made it out looks back with relief, regret, and a sense of awe at the miracle of his own survival. Although this album got a lot of attention for the way it diverged from other MG releases (its overtly autobiographical subject matter, its full-band production) it succeeds because Darnielle keeps doing what he does best: telling the stories of broken, betrayed, exhausted people with humor, joy, and compassion. After a thousand listens, "Quito" still makes my neck hair stand up--and I have a lot of neck hair.

So that's my pathetically underdeveloped list. What should I definitely pick up to round out the year?

Happy Birthday to Her

2004-12-08T11:40:00.000-06:00

Happy Birthday to Gina, my truly wonderful wife, who turned 30 yesterday. A great deal of what you need to know about the mystery and majesty of Gina--horse lover and hot librarian--is contained in the two birthday gifts she got from me: a spa gift certificate and a gas-powered leaf blower.

I think her surprise party went off pretty well, though it wasn't much of a surprise by the time it happened, partly due to her natural suspicion and partly because of my inept duplicity. Memo to future surprisers: "We're going to go help Sue change a light fixture" is not a convincing cover story.

Christmas

2004-12-06T18:28:00.000-06:00

File this one under Stories Likely to Disappear if My Family Ever Finds Out About this Blog.

On our recent trip to see my folks over Thanksgiving, Gina and I salvaged a carload of junk that had been buried in one of the dozens of crammed-full closets at my parents' house--things we'd left there years ago when we got ready for one move or another, things of mine in high school that I wanted to hang on to, old comics and trading cards and what not. One item that I sort of hoped we'd come across but am relieved we didn't is a sweatshirt that my mom made me for Christmas 1990.

My mom is a crafty lady. Not crafty in the sense of shrewd or sneaky or cunning; raising the daughter my brother had with his crack-addict ex-girlfriend really takes all the energy that she might otherwise use for subterfuge. (True story: my brother met his girlfriend during one of his stints in rehab, where, at the time, he was serving a term as president of his rehab class. I guess power really is the greatest aphrodisiac.) No, mom is crafty is that way that only upper-middle-class Southern ladies can be: handy with a glue gun, quick with a paint pen, ready to fling diamond-sharp rhinestones like porcupine quills at any tastefully unadorned surface. For years before she entered her second motherhood, Mom would adopt and excel at--she's really quite talented--whatever crafty thing they were pushing at Fads n' Frames. Cross-stitching was big when I was a kid, of course, and one year, maybe the best year, she made close to a hundred teddy bears to give away; another year she gilded denim jackets with lace and multi-hued buttons.

But the year I'm thinking of was the Year of the Decorated Sweatshirt. Using puffy paint and other such tools of the trade, Mom would draw lambs and Rebels (our school mascot, like every other white-flight private school in Mississippi) and cartoon characters, write slogans and bible verses and what-not. Naturally, my brother and I were not exempt from her handiwork, and for Christmas that year I received a puffy-painted sweatshirt masterpiece, a combination of word and text that produced a sublime reaction combining elements of terror, nausea, grief, and a horrible, horrible fear of how disappointed your mom would look if you didn't put it on right then and there.

It was a picture of a tortilla chip. With a face. Wearing a sombrero.

And there was a caption. It read: "Nacho Ordinary Guy!"

And it was true. I was not an ordinary guy. I was an ordinary guy with an actually really swell mother who, for reasons I'll get into elsewhere, wanted to dress her eldest son like a middle-aged woman from the rural South. It should say something about how mortified I was by this shirt that I was intensely, passionately jealous of my brother's more masculine shirt, which depicted an angry bull stamping his foot, with the caption, "Go Ahead--Make My Hay!" It seemed like a football jersey in comparison, a flak jacket, something made from the skin of a bear that he'd wrestled to death. My brother, who lacks the neurotic compulsion to please my parents that has been my cross to bear on the path I tread, a path that leads from bad outfit to mediocre sports career to an unimpressive stint in the church youth choir (I screwed up a verse of "Do Lord" during my one and only solo), refused to wear his.

I got the Nacho shirt on Christmas Day, when we all went to my grandparents' swelteringly hot house, and I wore it. To counteract its nerdifying effects, I wore my letter jacket over it, but it didn't really help, since people kept asking me what I got for Christmas in earshot of Mom.

Larry Brown

2004-11-29T09:00:00.000-06:00

All my underwear's dirty, I can't find my insurance policy.
--Larry Brown, "The Apprentice"

If there's a better, more understated description of abject misery in contemporary American fiction, I haven't read it. Confusion and helplessness characterizes much of Larry Brown's fiction, the sense that you've come to a pass where there are really no good decisions, just different grades of mistake. Near the cold-shock conclusion of one story, his narrator realizes that he's gotten everything wrong about everyone, and he thinks, "I hope I didn't ruin their lives." But if the notion that lives are fragile and more apt to be ruined than not runs through all of his work, in his best work--Dirty Work, Big Bad Love, most of Facing the Music, some of Joe--his characters realize that it's worth risking ruination to have the chance to make a friend, to overcome your aching lonesomeness, to help someone else along--even if, as in "Samaritans," even a kid knows you're a "dumb sumbitch" to take that risk, even if, as in Dirty Work, all you can help anyone do is die.

When at Thanksgiving dinner this week my parents told me that some writer from Oxford had died, I just assumed it must be Barry Hannah, who's been struggling with cancer for a while. I didn't even know Larry Brown had been in bad health. The too perfunctory write-up in the Clarion-Ledger was much less than he deserved, but the steadily dwindling stack of his books by the register at Lemuria was probably tribute enough.

Trials and Errors

2004-11-22T13:34:00.000-06:00

Much rejoicing: Secretly Canadian records has released the track listing and promotional blurb for Trials & Errors, the forthcoming live album from Magnolia Electric Co. (formerly Songs: Ohia). I was fortunate enough to catch them on their swing through Knoxville earlier this year, and it was a great (if brief) show. I was a little disappointed to see that this recording is taken from early in the tour, when the MEC was still a four-piece; by the time I saw them, they'd acquired a keyboardist and, most importantly, Jennie Bedford as a backing vocalist (and lead vocalist on her own composition, which is not on this album but I understand will be included on the next studio release). On the other hand, I'm glad to see that this album is being released as an entity all to itself, with only three previously released songs, instead of the more usual greatest-hits rehash. One of the most impressive things about seeing them live was how thoroughly they managed to capture the crowd despite playing a setlist almost totally devoid of fan favorites. The only downside is that the CD version of T&E won't be released until January.

If you haven't heard the last album--either a Songs: Ohia release entitled Magnolia Electric Co. or a self-titled album by a band called Magnolia Electric Co., depending on how you want to look at it--you should. You can hear the album's teeth-rattlingly good leadoff track "Farewell Transmission" on Secretly Canadian's MP3 page--one of the best songs recorded in 2003, a song that, should you need to outrun an apocalypse, would provide a perfect soundtrack (if on the other hand you should decide to make the best of life in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, the album's closer, "Hold On, Magnolia," would perform a similar function). The first few thousand copies of that album came with a disc of acoustic demos, a skeletal double that, in places, outdoes the full-band arrangements on the official record. Since the bonus disc is out of print, the songs are available for download at the MEC audio archive. Don't miss "The Big Game is Every Night," in which Molina brings charter members of the Old Weird America--Luke the Drifter, Mark Twain, Johnny Cash--together with Walter Payton and Johnny Unitas for a pickup game of softball and manages to make the connection between such seemingly disparate elements of American mythology seem perfectly natural and even inevitable.

Tell it to the Dust

2004-11-20T17:22:00.000-06:00

Songs in a Northern Key, the 2001 album by Anders Parker's band Varnaline, is one of my all-time favorites. It's a stunning record, careening breathlessly from whisper-folk to space-Americana to furniture-breaking rockers, threatening to fall apart at any moment but managing, somehow, to hold together.

Tell it to the Dust, though released under his own name instead of the Varnaline moniker, is Parker's followup to that should-be classic, and it's well worth the wait. True, it lacks the epic feel of the previous release. There are no interstitial instrumentals binding the tracks together, no preachers' voices ranting almost indiscernably under thick static fuzz, no music boxes snapping shut; it's a less experimental-sounding record all around. But then again, wouldn't some of that noise seem redundant after Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (an album released after Northern Key, I would note) mainstreamed it so successfully? In fact, the more relaxed atmosphere works for this album: it sounds wintry and melancholy without spiraling into excesses of gloom. Tell it to the Dust opens with a powerful trio of songs--the title track, "Goodbye Friend," and "So it Goes." The first and last of the three are probably the strongest songs on the album; "Tell it to the Dust" starts with driving, upbeat verses, catches its breath with a slow-down chorus (normally a transition I hate, but it works here), then charges ahead again, eventually smashing up against a wall of electric guitar. "So it Goes" is maybe the catchiest song on the record and the clear single in that more just alternate universe that music nerds are always talking about, all infectious drumming and rueful moving-on; if the title track encourages us to talk to the dust, this song tells us not even to bother to shake it from our feet when we hit the road out of town. Resignation never sounded so buoyant.

The only downside to such a strong opening is that the rest of the album, as great as it is, never quite lives up to it. Nothing has the loose, elastic bounce of "Tell it to the Dust" or the sheer electric charge of "So it Goes." The remaining rockers tend to stay locked tightly into a groove, sometimes driving ("Come on Now"), sometimes droning ("Into the Sun"). The piano-driven tracks make up the best of the rest of the album, invoking at once The Band and 70s FM pop (with the exception of the too precious "Innocents," which reminds me uncomfortably of "Desperado"). "Go Alone" is a highlight, and "Don't Worry Honey, Everything's Going to Be Alright" is a delight and comes closest to matching the heights reached at the beginning of the record. "Keep Me Hanging On" finds Parker dueting with guest vocalist Kendall Meade to successfully wistful effect, and the album closes with "Doornail," a satisfyingly apocalyptic Crazy Horse-ian stomp.

Tell it to the Dust is one of the best albums I've heard this year. It's available label-direct from the nice people at Baryon Records, who also offer a stream of three songs from the album so you can hear for yourself.

Captain America

2004-11-20T09:04:00.000-06:00

So, yesterday I picked up the much ballyhooed new Captain America #1, written by Ed Brubaker with art by Steve Epting. I don't know much about Brubaker besides that he has a loyal fan following because of his DC work on Catwoman and Gotham Central, but it's easy to see why people like his work: this is a top-notch comic. I was initially wary when I heard he was going to do something with the Cosmic Cube--an overused plot device whose main power is to generate lazy writing--and even warier when I heard it was going to be a Red-Skull-and-the-Cube storyline, which Mark Waid had done twice during his relatively recent run on Cap (once successfully, once not). But Brubaker makes it work with a suspenseful plot and a nice switcheroo twist ending that I didn't see coming. Steve Epting brings a nice superhero-meets-noir sensibility to the art, and, overall, I have high hopes for this comic.

But I've got mixed feelings nonetheless. The high-profile launch of this series means that big and unplanned-for changes are in store for Christopher Priest's Captain America and the Falcon--changes that include taking Cap out of the series, more or less. This book is just now hitting its stride after some disastrously bad art on the opening "Two Americas" arc. Priest is my favorite comic book writer, mostly because of his great 60-issue run on Black Panther and the unfortunately short-lived The Crew, and CAF has been vintage Priest--complicated, twisty, dense, action-packed, and funny, with a real sense of what makes his title characters tick. I don't think anyone else could pull off bringing back MODOK and making him/it a credible, even horrifying, threat. I don't think anyone else could make the Falcon as interesting as Priest has. Plus, Priest is putting his own spin on a classic Cap ur-story--Cap v. a darker version of himself--a story that tends to rear its head every decade or so, with good and bad results: Dan Jurgens with Protocide (shudder), Mark Gruenwald with the Super-Patriot (who becomes a nationalistic 1980s Rambo-ized version of Captain America for a while), Frank Miller with Nuke (in the pages of Daredevil), and, most famously, Steve Englehart's 1970s tale of the 1950s Cap--a man who idolized Captain America and took up his mantle when Cap disappeared during World War II, but who, made mentally unstable by the process that gave him Cap-like abilities, became a paranoid, Red-baiting racist.

I think writers are drawn to this story because of the implicit difficulties of writing Captain America; there are so many contradictory and conflicting currents in America that it's not clear what "America" he's supposed to be representing. It's the same problem Springsteen had in the 1980s with "Born in the USA"; Reagan attempted to appropriate the song because it sounded upbeat and it mentioned America, so it must be a patriotic song, right? And by patriotic, don't we mean Republican? When patriotism has come to mean an uncritical acceptance of a particular political party's ideology (a strategy honed by Reagan and perfected by the current administration), how do you make it clear that wearing a flag doesn't mean you buy into all the things that the people who want to appropriate the flag believe? A good slugfest against a corrupt version of yourself if always a good way to do it. Priest's Anti-Cap is in some ways the most sympathetic of these dark Caps: an idealistic, gung-ho young kid who lost parents in the Oklahoma bombing and volunteered for an experimental procedure not unlike the one that turned Steve Rogers into the original Captain America. But he's a cynical Cap, a black ops Cap, a Cap who believes that America can only be defended by doing things that the real Captain America would find fundamentally un-American. As ever, Priest is spinning a great comic book yarn and getting at some sticky and uncomfortable political issues while doing it; I hope that Marvel's plans for the title will let him see his story all the way through.

Teaching Strategies

2004-11-19T14:02:00.000-06:00

Hey literature teachers! Wondering how to get your students to read the last text of the semester when they've already picked out their research topics and they don't really have any reason to? Here's a tip: be sure you pick a novel in which someone loses a testicle in the first ten pages. I recommend Harry Crews's A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. For maximum effect, be sure you hint about the imminent detesticulizing. If male, squint and wince slightly to really sell it.

Static

2004-11-19T10:51:00.000-06:00

"I am the hard to find stations on the AM band"
--The Mountain Goats, "Jaipur" (The Coroner's Gambit)

A combination of factors--Darren's recent confessions about his audiophilia (still not a crime in Tennessee, but I've got some pictures of him at a by-the-hour hotel with a Sansui receiver that will come in handy if he runs for political office), getting ready to teach White Noise to my undergrads, and listening obsessively to The Mountain Goats--has gotten me thinking about static. Unlike Darren, I'm not an audiophile; I'm entirely ignorant about stereo or recording equipment. I don't know one type of receiver or speaker from another. That Sansui reference above? A total bluff. I have an Aiwa 3-disc changer shelf system from Best Buy and that pretty much takes care of all my listening needs, thank you very much. But for some reason I'm fascinated by studio equipment, recording gizmos, broadcasting whirlygigs. It's all very mysterious and magical and evocative--the tools of musical freemasonry. I love that the Nuggets box set refers to the songs as "artyfacts." I covet the Harry Smith Anthology of Folk Music. I strain my ears to hear the rocking chair squeak on Nebraska. That scene in I Am Trying to Break Your Heart where the camera follows the electrical cords across the room while the band plays "I'm Always in Love"? That's sublime. So, as part of that fascination with musical equipment, it was an adolescent fantasy of mine to have my own low-wattage radio station--a fantasy created and maintained despite the fact that, I swear on my copy of Born To Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story, I never once saw the movie Pump Up the Volume.

Not an uncommon dream, I guess. Some of that desire was just plain narcissism, of course. After all, I've got a blog, so I've got to be just a little self-involved. Some of it was probably a reaction to the absolute and utter lameness of commercial radio in the Jackson, Mississippi broadcast area in the 80s and early 90s. During my junior high years (roughly) we had 94TYX, the local Top 40 station, and that was okay for early-adolescent me. I am not a bit ashamed to tell you that I once biked furiously home from school after football practice so that I could request Richard Marx's "Endless Summer Nights," though perhaps that reveals more about my near-sociopathic lack of shame than anything else. But then 94TYX went away. I suspect it had something to do with Patrick Swayze. When pre-production for the film Mississippi Burning was in process, a rumor started circulating that Patrick Swayze, fresh from the epic battle of wit and wills with Jerry Orbach that was Dirty Dancing, was going to be that star, and that, OMG, he was staying at the Ramada Renaissance on County Line Road RIGHT NOW. So, the disc jockeys at TYX decided that it would be a coup if they could get him to call in or come by the station, and that a good way to get his attention would be to play his hit single "She's Like the Wind." For 12 hours straight. Really. They played it and played it and played it and played it. Even when it was time to do the nightly Top 3 Requests, they just played "She's Like the Wind" in all three spots. It was like a cult was trying to break down the resolve of Jackson-area teens who were still resisting their brainwashing. What would we do in this cult? Feather our hair and stand at the airport distributing Betamax copies of Tiger Warsaw? We'll never know, since that insidious propagater of propaganda was shut down shortly thereafter. It's worth noting, though, that, at the video store where I worked throughout high school and college, Roadhouse was always a top renter. Coincidence or inevitable result of subliminal malfeasery? Then again, our very topmost rental for several years was Hider in the House, starring Tom Berenger, who does not, to my knowledge, play an instrument or sing, though he is still a more compelling guitarist than Eric Clapton.

But I digress. So: the radio station. I mentioned this dream to someone recently, who suggested that I get involved with podcasting. It's a good idea. But I've been trying to figure out why I'm so much less interested in that than having a radio station. I think the answer is about static. Podcasting is all binary. Signal and not-signal. Music and not-music. Nothing in between; no ambiguity, no mystery--no static. Static is possibility; it's the world that exists between being tuned in and being tuned out. The Wood Between the Worlds in The Magician's Nephew. Unlike podcasting, there's always the chance that something can emerge out of the static depending on where you are and what the weather is like; signals can float and wheel and settle into valleys before taking off again with the morning sun. If we're thinking in terms of travel metaphors, podcasting is like teleportation. Here, then there. Nothing in the middle, no journey, nothing to see along the way--just the destination. The radio is like taking a walk through a city or across a country. Static is the place where there isn't much--abandoned buildings, fog, cotton fields forever--but the absence has a presence. There's sound in the silence, like the wheel grind and tape hiss in a Mountain Goats song. You might stumble across something mysterious or horrifying or unknowable along the way: a murder, a circus, a stabbin' hobo, a funeral, a church service, a demagogue: something that has the possibility of taking you out of yourself and making you experience the world in a new way rather than something that simply validates and affirms the perspective you already have. There is no danger that you'd ever have a confrontation with something as weird and alien as The Conet Project in a podcast.

So, I guess I'm lining up with the same folks in the 1980s who said the Sony Walkman was a chilling signal of growing personal isolation and the end of community and civic-spiritedness. Geez. How about I just start advocating a return to an agrarian lifestyle as a defense against the soul-killing conformity of the industrial North?

Why the name?

2004-11-05T12:41:00.000-06:00

"Popular Frontiers" evokes the two main interests that I anticipate driving this blog: politics (broadly defined) and popular culture. The particular "Popular Front" I have in mind is that of the 1930s in America: a broadly leftist political coalition that emphasized ensuring the participation and enfranchisement of marginalized groups in democratic culture. During this time literary artists produced work that was politically engaged and aesthetically complex in ways that we are still learning to appreciate fully; the works of Richard Wright, John Dos Passos, Meridel LeSueur, Erskine Caldwell, and Gwendolyn Brooks spring quickly to mind. Though not all these writers might have identified themselves with any organized political movement, their writing reflects the energy and the urgency of those struggling to articulate the contradictions and complications of American life in the 1930s. As I hope "frontiers" will suggest, I'm interested in looking at the ways in which writers and artists in contemporary American society are grappling with the same issues.

I hope that was suitably high-falutin because I also mean "popular" in the broadest sense; many (maybe most) of the posts here will have to do with my fascination with comic books, music, and television.