tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28028136728060620092024-03-29T06:02:11.605-05:00the shallow brigadeUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger86125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-6141335104695139892022-12-06T14:11:00.002-06:002022-12-06T14:18:36.868-06:00Twitterpocalypse Now: Beings of Earth<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfIebUON8vdBBg02ou-M5rPcb19ZGs_nHceTedLt9aPR6R2osr0I_c4Es9DqcAaoygCFuZzHXkZ00m91kvb9Ie-ujdrCS32Ou7bwR6jfnNepHPMaEmxuIgWPA_qow3PWG4rUwG-ERuL0NChVoOHDGm6Hdyu7I-Z-VuPOQNO3hP0I3MD-Ipkrz_HdCZ/s470/twitterpocalypse-now2-470x264-2.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="264" data-original-width="470" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfIebUON8vdBBg02ou-M5rPcb19ZGs_nHceTedLt9aPR6R2osr0I_c4Es9DqcAaoygCFuZzHXkZ00m91kvb9Ie-ujdrCS32Ou7bwR6jfnNepHPMaEmxuIgWPA_qow3PWG4rUwG-ERuL0NChVoOHDGm6Hdyu7I-Z-VuPOQNO3hP0I3MD-Ipkrz_HdCZ/s320/twitterpocalypse-now2-470x264-2.png" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p>Welcome to the latest installment of <i>Twitterpolcalypse Now</i>, an ongoing conversation where Nick Hanover and Kim O’Connor theorize the impending collapse of America’s least favorite website. For the archival records of the slow and steady decline of our </span><a href="https://twitter.com/chrisfralic/status/1599183953659072514?s=20&t=-BrA8Ko55RfTzisZOCWOTw" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: #954f72; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">biological neural nets</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, you can read </span><a href="https://loser-city.com/news/twitterpocalypse-now" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: #954f72; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Part 1</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> at Loser City, </span><a href="https://amazingcavalieri.blogspot.com/2022/11/twitterpocalypse-now-wheels-are-falling.html" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: #954f72; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Part 2 here</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and </span><span style="color: #954f72; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://loser-city.com/news/twitterpocalypse-now-episode-3" target="_blank">Part 3</a></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://loser-city.com/news/twitterpocalypse-now-episode-3" target="_blank"> </a>at Loser City. </span><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Kim: Nick, we seem to have entered a new stage of the Twitterpocalypse, and we’re here today to try to make sense of it. It feels like there’s a way in which it was always coming to this: the day that Kanye West hailed Hitler on a livestream with Alex Jones and got suspended by Elon for tweeting a swastika [or </span><a href="https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/did-elon-musk-really-suspend-kanye-west-posting-picture-ghislaine-maxwell" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">posting that Ghislaine Maxwell pic</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">?]. There’s the inevitability of it all, where Ye himself has become the zeitgeist incarnate. Bigotry, nationalism, gross spectacle, conspiracy theories, celebrity dysfunction—basically every bad vibe we’ve endured as a culture over the last decade has accumulated in this man, and now he’s </span><a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10156529892588478" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">spewing it back onto us</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></div><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: 700; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: 700; white-space: pre-wrap;">But at the same time, there’s a way in which this all feels disorienting. It’s in the same vein of how I felt when Trump won the election, that dialectic of “I can’t believe this fucking guy is the president” and “of course he was always going to be president.” Even though I understand and agree with the popular notion that Kanye’s been spouting extremist views for years, it felt like today was the point at which he finally became his own inverse. I’m old enough to remember when Kanye told the world that George Bush doesn’t care about Black people, which I saw live and may have been the single most shocking thing that I’ve ever seen happen on TV, including 9/11. So these two pop culture spectacles are very weird bookends on the last 17 years of American history. </span></div><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: 700; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUfdgERyWYqs3BDgufSpZdOFAszOkCklQ6imWT1vKutLlw6SFUCVQxzudL4NCdQxVN9pCqCq1bnfPEf4wknfEIMFpXpcf15vr6MYbd28NGpuiPXfa8j-Rm6arZbdOVzz4MYjXjUH4wJWTWYRZE-hWbxn3194xUBoieeh77hVbLZB26rrwVnx3dy0OE/s560/kanye.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="477" data-original-width="560" height="273" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUfdgERyWYqs3BDgufSpZdOFAszOkCklQ6imWT1vKutLlw6SFUCVQxzudL4NCdQxVN9pCqCq1bnfPEf4wknfEIMFpXpcf15vr6MYbd28NGpuiPXfa8j-Rm6arZbdOVzz4MYjXjUH4wJWTWYRZE-hWbxn3194xUBoieeh77hVbLZB26rrwVnx3dy0OE/s320/kanye.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: 700; white-space: pre-wrap;">Kanye’s antisemitism is vile and dangerous, and he’s obviously responsible for it, but I think the consensus that we should draw a hard line between his ideology and what appear to be catastrophic mental health problems is wrong. It’s maybe more useful to think of him as a walking Pepe meme: a really ugly, empty vessel that has been appropriated by people with ill intent. </span><div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As usual with the Twitterpocalypse, none of this has any meaning, yet all of it is meaningful. There’s a fundamental incoherence that makes talking about it difficult, but I want to ask you about how you see the broad political implications of what’s been going on. Lately I’ve been around relatives who watch MSNBC and the sentiment in the mainstream seems to be that we’ve reached a point where Trump’s actions have finally caught up with him and that his dinner with Kanye and Nick Fuentes was a “</span><a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/story-trumps-explosive-dinner-ye-nick-fuentes-rcna59010" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: #954f72; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">political nightmare</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.” I…do not agree, nor do I agree that he’s being used by the far right as a ploy to make their key players seem more moderate by comparison. But I’m very interested to know how you’re reading the mood and the meaning of this particular moment in time. What do you see? </span><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nick Hanover:</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> As weird as this might sound I think Kanye has once again forced a do or die conversation in national politics, albeit in the polar opposite way he did with the Bush moment you mentioned. I don’t think either of us want to get into a discussion about his mental state at all other than to say whatever he is experiencing right now has amplified his historic lack of a filter and that the GOP players who clearly sought to exploit that are realizing too late that they couldn’t control him and he made explicit what they probably intended to just be (louder than usual) dogwhistling. I agree with you that the GOP did not intend for this to be a situation that made them look more moderate, I firmly believe they wanted Kanye to be aggressive and controversial they just didn’t expect him to go full “Hitler is cool, actually” and now it’s causing a lot of groups that are anywhere left of alt-right to not only unify behind shutting down Kanye but also finally recognizing that maybe Twitter does need some kind of governing body.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Right as we began this conversation today, President Biden himself used the platform of Twitter to unequivocally call out everyone who shares Kanye’s Holocaust denying beliefs, and he also seemed to suggest he felt that the platforms that enabled this misinformation were a major problem that may require government intervention. I could be reading too much into Biden’s statement, only time will tell, but even if the government does not step in directly with Twitter, Biden sent a very clear message that he and the party he leads consider the ongoing rise in antisemitism to be a major concern. More cynically, I can’t help but feel that Biden and his team are probably relieved that Kanye and Musk would fuck up so badly right now as the Democrats are facing blowback to their response to the railroad workers’ demands for better treatment.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">One of the biggest obstacles for the progressive movement in America has always been the unwillingness of most people to “take a side” or involve themselves in conflict. You see this throughout our history, whether it’s WW2 or the Civil Rights Movement; we just generally avoid getting involved until the situation is either right on our front steps or too disturbing to look away from any longer. And I think in his typical chaotic way, Kanye just forced a lot of Americans to acknowledge that Nazis are definitely back, they are definitely not kidding and they really do believe Hitler had the right idea. And worse than that, the world’s richest man is directly aiding these Nazis and wants Twitter to be their greatest propaganda weapon. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">You said you don’t feel that Trump’s actions have caught up with him, so my question back to you is do you mean that in the sense of within the GOP or the culture at large? Do you think this situation with Kanye going full Hitler is going to help or hurt Trump in the long run?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Kim: It’s too early to tell. My own sense of things is that Trump is currently in a better spot than most people seem to think he’s in. He has in some ways reset the outsider/underdog status that served him so well in 2016. Historically, people have underestimated Trump and especially underestimated the degree to which his most racist and horrifying actions and words stir up his rabid base. Key Republicans are obviously starting to distance themselves, and DeSantis has emerged as a plausible rival. But does DeSantis have </span><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/apr/25/kanye-west-donald-trump-dragon-energy" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: #954f72; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">dragon energy</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">? No. No, I don’t think he does. That is supposedly his advantage! But I’m not so sure. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: 700; white-space: pre-wrap;">Outrage remains a very powerful political currency and it doesn’t always unfold in straightforward and predictable ways. So we have this situation where Trump and Twitter and Kanye are on the national news every night. We’re hearing “condemnation from all sides.” But is what we’re seeing the American public finally rejecting fascism once and for all? Or the launch of the most unhinged presidential campaign of our lifetimes? What have Republicans even got without the sheer force of Trump’s terrible personality? Deeply unpopular ideas and beliefs?? </span></p><p><b style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></b></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="border: none; display: inline-block; height: 291px; overflow: hidden; width: 234px;"><img height="291" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/rwT-osa2Jm31sSeggkugrz8bY051hS08LZ3aa4H-5OHSiM9c4TmLTj0zN9qzkxCXVR-on1-dGOr_7RQme511WlFNPlGHdYuDVXGCYbykL_gc07dq3uWjaHpafbBMvj15MNyu8z-1lvfo3CgHgAT-VAN8G6sFyvjg-D1oV_cp9QTxdebIjpUa2eH0AEXC_Q" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="234" /><span style="font-size: 12pt; text-align: left;">So I don’t know, we’re obviously a long way out, but I think Trump’s still in play. At the end of the day, if Republicans feel that he’s their path to power, they will line up behind him like they always have. If their path to power is some guy who’s not Trump, they’ll do that, too—but that seems harder. </span></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Going back to your point about progressive Americans being conflict averse, the obvious corollary is that regressive Americans are not. As we watch </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/technology/twitter-hate-speech.html" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: #954f72; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">what’s happening with hate speech</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> on Twitter, my question is how much more purchase are these people going to find now that the subtext has been made text?</span></div><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><b style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></b></p><div style="text-align: left;"><b style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Nick:</b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Literally right after you responded, Trump announced that he was using Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi’s questionable “Twitter Files” stunt as yet another pretext for demanding a 2020 recount/redo. It doesn’t seem to matter to a not-inconsiderable portion of the American population that the “Twitter Files” unveiled nothing that would be considered election fraud, nor does it seem to matter that everything Taibbi “revealed” happened before Biden was president not during his presidency, these people are running with it as reason enough to go to war. </span></div><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m sure you are just as tired of bringing everything back to Hitler as I am but it’s hard not to feel like history is repeating here and we’re heading towards a similar situation as the decline of Hindenburg after his final re-election that paved the way for Hitler to seize control. Over and over and over again the Democrat leadership has been generally unwilling to take this nu-fascist party seriously but they have specifically failed at fighting back against Trump’s continued distortion of reality. Even the way Biden condemned the rising antisemitism shows this– rather than directly name Musk or Kanye or even Trump as fueling this hate movement, he vaguely stated what the facts are and even more vaguely suggested someone should probably do something about it. As great as it is to see him condemn antisemitic rhetoric and identify it as a major problem, this response is still the definition of too little too late and I truly believe we’re heading towards a new version of the Reichstag Fire where the Democrats help the GOP pin the blame on the Democrats themselves.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">There is no way out of this mess without shutting down or seizing control of the propaganda vehicles these nu-fascists are using, and that includes Twitter. But how do you even do that now without playing right into the “deep state” conspiracy these terrorists continuously yell about? Similarly, sending Trump to prison now rather than right after January 6th is only going to embolden that movement. Our “lesser evil” party has failed in every possible sense.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m also extremely concerned about how quickly and loudly Musk is using Twitter as a means to get around the donation and advertising restrictions that are in place for elections. On his Substack, Matt Taibbi revealed just how much involvement Musk had in shaping that story, making it abundantly clear that Taibbi is a full blown political operative now instead of anything resembling a journalist. Taibbi has already promised more “episodes” of the “Twitter Files,” but with Musk gloating about how he views his acquisition of Twitter as a license to dredge up whatever private correspondence serves as ammunition for his political aims, we are undoubtedly going to see the most chaotic and disruptive political contest of our lifetimes and possibly of the entire American lifetime. What do you predict will be next? Who else do you think is going to reveal themselves to be a Musk crony? How long before Matty Y gets his own “Twitter Files”?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Kim: I mean, I’m pretty worried! Trump is never, ever going to jail; I’ve always been sure of that much. The Democrats are as impotent as you say. Maybe worse, they’re overconfident because they didn’t fail as badly as expected at the midterms. Post-Obama, scraping by or just not losing egregiously is what they count as a mandate. And the superior smug shrill tone of the pundits on MSNBC throughout this latest series of episodes with Trump suggests that the center thinks this has been some sort of turning point. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Which is what they always think.</span></div><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="border: none; display: inline-block; height: 164px; overflow: hidden; width: 356px;"><img height="164" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/c7HG1m132a4hmYyArhB2eFHbTnuhVVODlzFdTDHejDntlPrBjU4hByWaPa3xU6sWuYf5xnuPxgIVLgwL5clIxxqk0pzKrQKV1AO-dKQK-aqgsc7Zwpy9TwU0iUg_SL1S-wiClp4BL-5aTF4aQteA64eX_Foq9xm2t-fDiMSoMgnE3LfwW6hkhq3TPI29lg" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="356" /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I agree with you that what Musk is doing with the Twitter Report(s) is scary and so far it seems that almost everyone is underestimating the significance of that, too. Just because we don’t care about Hunter Biden’s laptop, “lock[ing] her up,” etc. doesn’t mean it’s no big deal. It literally doesn’t matter that there’s nothing there of substance. <a href="https://loser-city.com/news/twitterpocalypse-now" target="_blank">As we’ve talked about, content matters, but meaning is vestigial</a>. “Hunter’s laptop” is like a fight song at a sporting event. Matt Taibbi’s credibility doesn’t matter because he’s singing their song. His background at outlets like Rolling Stone is an asset in the same way that Glenn Greenwald’s background is an asset when he goes on Tucker Carlson. So far as I can tell, there is no one who seems more credible to the other side than a media personality who has defected from their party. That’s true on both sides, actually. That’s half the anchors on MSNBC. So those are the types that seem like the obvious candidates for joining Taibbi at Musk News. We already know he approached </span><a href="https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1599163391511494656?s=20&t=dt0YqAi2DtTI3t6HOZb9Qw" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bari Weiss</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Alex Berenson? Any of these anti-establishment types who pander to the right. Probably not Greenwald, but he’s a spiritual advisor. The script writes itself.</span></div><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I agree that shutting down the propaganda is the lever here. I don’t know if there’s a way to go about that on the federal side, just in terms of their practical tools. The government has stayed way behind on regulating Big Tech, so the idea that they could find a timely way to deal with these new developments is pretty far-fetched. I know some people think that Musk is going to be in deep trouble with the Federal Trade Commission for not complying with its consent order, but that </span><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/09/12/mudge-twitter-ftc-consent-decrees/" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">seems real shaky</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to me. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> <br /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So that brings us full circle, back to our original questions about where we even are with the Twitterpocalypse. Namely, when is Twitter gonna die? And how? The existential threat seems to have been all but forgotten on the timeline, but the company is plainly still in <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-elon-musk-could-use-tesla-money-prop-up-twitter-2022-12" target="_blank">serious financial distress</a>. The service is spotty, but working better than I expected. And as of Saturday night (when I’m writing this response) (…because I’m cool), </span><a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1599205091294052352?s=20&t=dt0YqAi2DtTI3t6HOZb9Qw" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Musk claims that advertisers are coming back</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. While his posturing may contain a seed of truth, </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/technology/twitter-advertising-targets-missed.html" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">reports say that Twitter’s revenue is nowhere near normal</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. So what do you think, is the Twitterpocalpyse still on track? Or do we need to reconsider?</span></div><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><br /></b></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Nick: </b></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think the Twitterpocalypse is definitely still on track because the platform continues to </span><a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2022/11/08/mit-report-twitter-elon-musk-users-lost/8300611001/" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">hemorrhage active users</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and is boosting the activity of other platforms in the process, even massively uncool platforms </span><a href="https://fortune.com/2022/11/29/linkedin-twitter-upheaval-recession-digital-town-square/" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">like LinkedIn</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. On top of that, there are the </span><a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/29/tech/yoel-roth-twitter-elon-musk/index.html" style="text-decoration: none;" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; text-decoration-skip: none; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ongoing security and public safety concerns</span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, which are now amplified since Musk publicly admitted to sifting through private correspondence for ammunition. If 2024 doesn’t go the way Trump and Musk want, I think Musk has placed a giant crosshair on himself, too, and if Twitter isn’t a rotting corpse by then he will almost certainly carve it up as much as he can to save himself. I don’t exactly trust his claims about the return of advertisers, either; even if Apple has come back the odds that they are still putting as much money into the platform as before are next to nil. If Twitter was actually doing well and entities like Apple were not as much of a concern, I don’t think Musk would be spending as much time as he has been promising everything is just fine.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnEJ6FrDup2tCZmz9rzAmvTwUFzR5i0SvuPMf_iL85IcJTu8nQ2nkT6RPgL_2HFg4goacvT-EepMsbfYAX3QWomhJtm3ZBHik8EL24LbeQ-Mz5PPpIQ5GALe8jewAUBcR42owtmNR7A5_k_SHbhDP3l1BHPmr9xBzL9HaHVSnBEbkCAEd7fdhyd7Q-/s598/Screen%20Shot%202022-12-06%20at%202.47.57%20PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="491" data-original-width="598" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnEJ6FrDup2tCZmz9rzAmvTwUFzR5i0SvuPMf_iL85IcJTu8nQ2nkT6RPgL_2HFg4goacvT-EepMsbfYAX3QWomhJtm3ZBHik8EL24LbeQ-Mz5PPpIQ5GALe8jewAUBcR42owtmNR7A5_k_SHbhDP3l1BHPmr9xBzL9HaHVSnBEbkCAEd7fdhyd7Q-/s320/Screen%20Shot%202022-12-06%20at%202.47.57%20PM.png" width="320" /></a></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>At this point, what I’m most curious about is who else Musk is going to suck into the vortex with him. The Kanye reinstatement experiment flamed out even quicker than expected so I suspect Musk is desperately trying to find a more malleable toxic celebrity to enlist because he seems to rightly assume Twitter’s best asset right now is its status as Must See (Trash) TV. What could be next? A New Year’s Eve Twitter Circle Extravaganza featuring Louis CK, R Kelly and Bill Cosby and exploding Teslas in place of fireworks? The sky’s the limit!</span><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><br /></b></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><b>Kim: </b></span></span><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Maybe Dave Chapelle will do a special! Men’s rights terf comedy is probably Twitter’s most viable path to solvency at this point.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><b> </b></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><b>Well, I think that about sums up where we are in the Twitterpocalypse. To quote Ye, “It ain’t funny anymore.” Thanks for reading, and if you haven’t left Twitter yet, you can follow Nick Hanover <a href="https://twitter.com/Nick_Hanover" target="_blank">@nick_hanover</a> and Kim O’Connor at <a href="https://twitter.com/shallowbrigade" target="_blank">@shallowbrigade</a>.</b><o:p></o:p></span></p></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-64173095160305164422022-11-15T15:39:00.072-06:002022-11-15T16:21:55.292-06:00Twitterpocalypse Now: The Wheels Are Falling Off<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGKXXmPxdMbPZib_xoFBeiDww692kRgPJ2AHnzgM4pKKyfUpzYRBmf68dGzIr7L01aHm1Gq17ky3K3zMQcfxvQ3Jp2lV-J8IJ4dFH0Uuv5EGWiv24oqzD0GnS5cNkEHw3G2YKhP8bOxTupD51uW21KdlDtMKqrE4OkUfqlmqbPrqP1u8_Jifc1yzPQ/s470/twitterpocalypse-now2-470x264.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="264" data-original-width="470" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGKXXmPxdMbPZib_xoFBeiDww692kRgPJ2AHnzgM4pKKyfUpzYRBmf68dGzIr7L01aHm1Gq17ky3K3zMQcfxvQ3Jp2lV-J8IJ4dFH0Uuv5EGWiv24oqzD0GnS5cNkEHw3G2YKhP8bOxTupD51uW21KdlDtMKqrE4OkUfqlmqbPrqP1u8_Jifc1yzPQ/s320/twitterpocalypse-now2-470x264.png" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><b><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Kim O’Connor: Nick, since we published <a href="https://loser-city.com/features/twitterpocalypse-now" target="_blank">our last conversation about Twitter </a>around 36 hours ago, some 4,500 contractors have been fired. Elon Musk <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1591813228119855104?s=20&t=9IuvOnuxi7OLhWiGRJpHBg">provoked a U.S. Senator,</a> made <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1591853644944932865?s=20&t=ciqtH1WNyKPR2V69P6Llug">bizarre false claims </a>about Twitter and its <a href="https://www.livemint.com/news/world/embarrassingly-wrong-elon-musk-s-twitter-theory-rubbished-by-exemployee-11668355353176.html">reach</a>, and accused his <a href="https://twitter.com/shallowbrigade/status/1591091787216875520?s=20&t=8bQxRVpQaYBQibIkaWT2Yg">ghosts</a><a href="https://twitter.com/shallowbrigade/status/1591091787216875520?s=20&t=8bQxRVpQaYBQibIkaWT2Yg"> </a>of <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1591935035367723008?s=20&t=8bQxRVpQaYBQibIkaWT2Yg">stealing food</a>. Oh, and reports broke that a rogue Tesla Model Y <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-says-it-will-assist-police-probe-into-fatal-crash-china-2022-11-13/">maimed or murdered five people</a> in China?<br /><br />All to say we’ve had a relatively quiet Twitterpocalypse news cycle, and I want to take advantage of the lull to pose a somewhat philosophical question. <br /><br />I’ve been thinking through the idea of “influence” and how it’s adjacent to, but ultimately really different from, power and money. Historically, it seems that influence, much like Twitter itself, has been hard to monetize. The people we talk about as social media “influencers” are mostly grifters or guerilla marketers. The influencers who actually shape the world we live in—trendsetters, artists, intellectuals, “the Russians,” etc.—are a lot more important. But they don’t necessarily get paid.<br /><br />There are people who talks about Musk’s designs for Twitter as <a href="https://twitter.com/broderick/status/1592191222168555520?s=20&t=ciqtH1WNyKPR2V69P6Llug">colonialist</a> or fascist. It seems to me that his agenda (insofar as there is one?) is a lot more selfish and idiosyncratic and poisoned with Chad memes than that. Yet I can’t ignore that he talks constantly about making Twitter an “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/technology/elon-musk-x.html">everything app</a>.” For a lot of reasons, that ambition seems absurd on its face. But it’s also my belief that when the richest man in the universe talks about making an everything app, he shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. The tech world is still very much moved by unhinged gambles and cults of personality, despite the constant stream of press on Silicon Valley snake oil conspiracies.</span></b><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="224" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/uo_FVQep91UDGC8xkkeIdm5LmMuQHFfPObynQjrXoZfMq3AXyEtWp7xaXuYfPfKL4695v0Jpf4AUcbA_gJhAQ6CIzWjiXQsOzuIoFcQXui1GRC06Q7zE9UwVPJqzXcBXsBsA3Lw8NuypYpExYtZVvyZ2bUETNntKudHGjMHTpaJm4rS-Ql-Hhq0FyjKLlg=w400-h224" width="400" /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>All Elon on Elon quotes from <a href="https://twitter.com/bestofdyingtwit/status/1592570593274384384?s=20&t=ciqtH1WNyKPR2V69P6Llug">@bestofdyingtwitter</a></i></div><br /><b><span style="font-family: helvetica;">So let’s just set aside for the moment the very real possibility that Twitter will stop existing sometime soon. Is it even possible that a platform that’s influential in the real sense of shaping the world (not just selling pink sauce) can be well and truly monetized? Can Twitter’s influence be harnessed, or is it inherently unruly? Or has its influence been grossly overestimated, just in general?</span></b><br /><br /><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>Nick Hanover: </b>I’m glad you brought this up because Alex De Campi had <a href="https://twitter.com/alexdecampi/status/1591094945313685504?s=20&t=LpIB63MNJw3DQxnm4Tz2cA">a thread about this the other day</a> that I felt hit the nail right on the head. Alex argues that Twitter’s real problem, as far as profitability, is how broken its approach to ads is, specifically in terms of metrics. As Alex mentions in that thread, brands and publications and influencers all still cling to Meta because of how robust its metrics system is and how easily it allows you to effectively market to users. But everybody in those worlds also hates Meta because of how often and how brazenly it lies about those analytics– the biggest, most catastrophic example of this would be the <a href="https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/09/well-this-puts-a-nail-in-the-news-video-on-facebook-coffin/">pivot-to-video push</a> Meta was behind that ended up being a lot of (ultimately fatal) smoke and mirrors. Every client I work with on this sort of thing, be it a musician or a food service company or a publication, is desperate for pretty much anybody to offer an alternative to Meta. But because of incompetence or misaligned priorities or whatever, Twitter has continuously shit the bed on this front.<br /><br />Musk’s takeover has, perhaps more than anything, illuminated how poorly the tech world at large understands what Twitter is, what it could be and how it can be profitable. No one wants Twitter to be an “everything app” any more than anyone wants Facebook or Instagram to be an “everything app,” they just want to hang out in these spaces and have a reasonably civil experience. The best way I can think to frame these platforms is that they are basically digital bars– Twitter is the neighborhood dive bar where you catch up on gossip and debate news with friends and select coworkers, Facebook is the somewhat sterile family friendly bar where you’re more likely to run into family members and former classmates and Instagram and TikTok are the nightclubs where you don’t go to be able to have conversation but to see glamour and style and maybe a few drunken fights/embarrassing situations. Where these platforms fall apart is in attempting to ape one another and integrate things that really only work on the other platforms– no one goes to the neighborhood dive bar to scope out the latest fashion trends and no one goes to the nightclub with their family in an attempt to talk out their differences. Likewise, you aren’t going to have a profitable experience if you get rid of all of the cheap beer at the dive bar and try to get everyone to sip on overpriced syrupy cocktails instead.</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/UEM37eCDA5j-s10cHUDCRkOOO5vzUkgw7G-EbvF5n8-_5G-olFNu2VMZck3X2q9Gi07qHN7LMvFMfsmP7mh3SnOPelsolpRPr2gmzH34FhTg3rFTs1uxeoma6cazfq5yqQ5Kpr7irdYrpOXcXmIDYxWpuYyVI57hL50S91Wbif4JavTWtTuEVFVOZXrfyg=w400-h225" /></div><br /><span style="font-family: helvetica;">So if you want these things to be profitable, you have to moderate and control the experience properly for the environment you have. Musk, however, seems to want to force Twitter to fit the experience he and his cronies want to have and in the process of doing that he is making an environment that is too toxic for advertisers and too chaotic for a normal ass person. I don’t think “fascist” is the right framing for his approach, it’s more like the “It’s a Good Life” episode of The Twilight Zone, where a petulant child has incomprehensible power but pretty much only uses it to bully and break people. As the <a href="https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1591813699840495616?s=20&t=LpIB63MNJw3DQxnm4Tz2cA">texts from the lawsuit show</a>, Musk and his partners have wanted to buy Twitter for a while just to punish its users. There is no plan here other than “I want to be able to direct my horde of unhinged followers towards whoever I don’t like at the moment but I also don’t want anyone to be able to criticize me” and that is the sort of plan that will never make money no matter how many resources you throw at it.<br /><br />It’s especially bad here, though, because Twitter is in a way a sentient organism itself and it is actively resisting efforts to shape it into anything it isn’t, and this isn’t new to Musk (this is also why I don’t think its influence is overestimated, if anything any platform that is this autonomous and resistant to forced change under the hostile ownership of the world’s richest man has probably been underestimated). There is clearly a societal need to gossip and talk shit and Twitter remains the best platform for that so if you want to make money off Twitter, embrace that! Stop putting more money behind bloat, stop laying off the engineers keeping the quality of life stable, stop encouraging what are basically drunken hooligans to storm the dive bar. Put the energy and money instead into fixing your metrics systems and into better moderation because that is what advertisers and users both want– they want the app to work, they want to be able to be seen easily, they don’t want to deal with paywalls or “shadowbanning” or whatever other nonsense Musk thinks is a road to success.</span><br /><br /><b><span style="font-family: helvetica;">Kim: It’s such an interesting question, what level of user experience Twitter needs to maintain to keep its users (and attract new ones). One way to interpret these crazy rounds of layoffs is that Musk has been Benjamin Buttoning the platform. He’s taken a mature, functional service and is stripping it down to the studs, moving backward toward a minimum viable product. It’s like a reverse startup? Which is an enormously risky approach, even if it weren’t being executed in such a haphazard and unprofessional way, under unfathomable financial duress. <br /><br />I mean, we could talk all day about the very plain deficiencies in Musk’s understanding of how anything works. There’s his total lack of insight into the advertising and social media businesses, as you mentioned. There’s also his outrageous plan (perhaps former plan…?) to throttle engagement for users who won’t pay for a subscription. That would repel droves of people on, like, the level of neurochemistry. It’s bonkers! <br /><br />It seems worth noting that Facebook made a lot of money not because of Mark Zuckerberg, but because of Sheryl Sandberg (who has, notably, abandoned ship in the transition to Meta). There does not seem to be anyone in Musk’s life to play that role. His lieutenants are a rogue’s gallery of Robert Greene wannabes, plus that one lady who sleeps in the Twitter conference room. Musk should be surrounding himself with normie pragmatists, not people who describe themselves as alphas who found “spirituality” at Burning Man. The idea that those are the people you want on your team to realize One App to Rule Them All is so funny. </span></b><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="242" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/QxIuwVlR7pLd45I1cRbsNfFpQe8ONb-7Np0sHiKJ2PYOO8eYTWOFd7tHyRMwsZRIbAzJwW6EKq_szV2FODBipQTUqRYcsKGCaW1FKdCDCXO3NFwptKtLeRk9GI3cl_XdR2fSJdl8XS1TNRNkDWnzXY5gRqwLd3kAyjK_S20TQ0NXjBpdC-G3USByxThzgg=w400-h242" width="400" /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>A good leader must listen, reflect</i></div><br /><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>But…Silicon Valley is still chasing unicorns, which is why Musk is who he is. His belief that Twitter has a lot of bloat – that it should be focusing on a lean payroll and minimum viable product rather than integrity or network effect – is on some level rational. Historically, Musk is a person who has been enormously successful with this notion of minimum viable product. Look at Tesla! Year after year, on a material level, it has jerked and burned its way toward massive profitability. (I am wandering well outside my expertise here, but it seems like to me that bringing MVP to the luxury car space…is the most American innovation in history?) Musk’s main lines of business have been in manufacturing more than tech. But he has shown this huge capacity for successfully translating tech startup principles to the material world, which is experience that seems relevant. <br /><br />Again, setting aside the real possibility that Twitter will simply break in the near future – is there a world in which Musk could succeed without a Sandberg-like figure at Twitter? Or, put another way, how much does reality matter? lol</b></span><br /><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><br /><b>Nick:</b> With Tesla, and SpaceX, the main difference is that Musk is selling a philosophy/status more than an actual product. People buy from Tesla because they want to be seen in a Tesla and/or they have bought into this idea of Musk as the “savior of humanity” and thus buy his products to support his quest. Tesla and SpaceX neither aspire to nor want the average person to be able to consume their products. That approach is of course antithetical to a social media business, because social media only really works when it is embraced by a large number of people as well as by celebrities who need the adoration of the masses. So no, I don’t think there is a world in which Musk can succeed at any social media platform that he himself is in charge of unless he goes through some kind of process that puts his ego in check.</span><br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="220" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/RGbAX-DCqvXS0MzTKYqkTL2wcxnXTDugPNwVgAXoZ02QatuOnqjLs9vDrv0GAF17NyRoGxZmYCfJSyx9vIUy777XUhUj-vh8CNLvh9ire4tKWVok6c6NiU1NomSIKq8nS28IG7yt3Ft2Lx1yms4EhKlWSepr72wjIxRGkhNpG-keyuvQJurrGjjGCK3jvQ=w400-h220" width="400" /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Employees are for betas </i></div><br /><span style="font-family: helvetica;">This is also why every attempt to make a more closed off form of Twitter– be it the various libertarian hell holes or on the other end of the spectrum, federated platforms like Mastodon– never really goes anywhere. This is also why I think that Musk’s emphasis on “going lean” is so catastrophic, because a giant ecosystem like Twitter can only really function if there are a lot of people involved in checking its engineering systems and keeping it stable, as well as doing the thankless work of moderation. Even Meta and Google understand this to a degree, and that’s why Facebook and YouTube sustain entire content moderation industries, like sharks carrying remoras. <br /><br />To me, all of this has become less of a question of “will Musk kill Twitter?” and more of a question of “will Twitter kill Musk?” What has surprised me the most since Musk took over Twitter is how much it is resisting him and also how much it is wreaking havoc on his finances, the stability of his businesses (and honestly the entire market) and the very notion of him as a genius. Maybe I’m reaching here but it legitimately feels like this Twitter takeover is helping destabilize Silicon Valley in general, because we are now seeing simultaneous breakdowns at Meta and Amazon and in the latter case we even have Bezos trying to figure out <a href="https://gizmodo.com/jeff-bezos-amazon-big-tech-layoffs-amazon-prime-1849780290">an exit strategy for himself</a>. Yes, these companies and this industry were having issues before this but I think the Twitter situation, and the intense scrutiny Musk has inadvertently brought down on his fellow billionaires in the process, has rapidly escalated a fierce public turnaround on these figures and the parasitic businesses they front. Bezos in particular seems to now grasp that even the billionaires can’t stop the return of a labor movement in America and that the “eat the rich” shouting that has intensified over the past few years might become a very real threat soon.<br /><br />So I guess my question back to you is even if Musk were to find this mythical Sandberg-esque figure, do you think he or anyone can stop the avalanche or is this going to take down this entire god forsaken industry or am I perhaps crazy for thinking it might?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>Kim: I think grift culture is fundamental to American business, finance, religion, everything, and it genuinely cannot be overestimated. Trumpism, the self-help industry, Silicon Valley, evangelicals, etc.—these are powerful and intertwined forces in society. The nature of their grifts keep getting more complicated and abstract, as we have seen with the “Soylent Green is people” business model of social media platforms and the cyber Ponzi schemes of crypto. And many of the grifters themselves seem to have been growing emboldened to share their message of white male supremacy.<br /></b></span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><img height="189" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/Lzj7YJZkd2hlYs873eG8RTT6ZyyuCmpUJExNJewcWhkwdhA753dd-wPeugOeF8X0b25N1sIz_nj5OEzqGmyIdEHl6pu4wLf2Yq4at0jHAQsAM6w1_JSj1H-LVtY5F025k4x9__iwHHGySH5EhZCD_cSVI7NVKdXdDM5oJs3HVhSvyrdteB3yKfQLU5jIzA=w400-h189" width="400" /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Approaching the singularity </i></div><br /><span style="font-family: helvetica;"><b>So I really don’t know. I think you’re more optimistic than I am. The layoff announcements at Amazon belie the reality that the company is still growing, just not fast enough by the standard of modern greed. Still, I take your point. I agree wholeheartedly that Musk has been showing his ass in a truly spectacular fashion. I agree this could effectively be the end of him. And I agree that there’s a growing sense of hope, in the way that people talk about labor in general and the outcome of the U.S. midterms, that eyes are opening to the fact that the emperors have no clothes. <br /><br />It’s such a potent metaphor that so many of these guys are pouring their resources into space and AI and virtual reality. They really do operate outside reality a lot of the time. They often seem to transcend its laws. But let’s look at some facts without spin: Bezos donned his cowboy hat and spent about 10 minutes from launch to landing, only approaching the edge of what most people consider space. His fortune sent him there. But the laws of gravity brought him back.<br /><br />And with that, we'll conclude the second installment of Twitterpolcalypse Now, a series where Nick and I dust off our defunct blogs to discuss the delightful and unsettling implosion of twitter dot com. You can read the<a href="https://loser-city.com/features/twitterpocalypse-now"> first installment </a>over in Nick's part of town, aka Loser City. As of this writing, you can still find Kim tweeting about Todd McFarlane <a href="https://twitter.com/shallowbrigade">@shallowbrigade</a>, and Nick Hanover at <a href="https://twitter.com/Nick_Hanover" target="_blank">@nick_hanover</a>.</b></span><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-56124525364526147172021-06-13T14:45:00.005-05:002021-06-13T14:56:59.643-05:00 Who should have access to the Philip Roth Fuck List? <p><span style="font-family: inherit;">I guess anyone reading this will be familiar with the scandal surrounding Philip Roth and Blake Bailey, the biographer Roth handpicked to secure his legacy. Since that book’s publication, Bailey has been accused of </span><a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22398138/blake-bailey-philip-roth-biography-rape-sexual-assault-accusations-allegations-grooming" style="color: #954f72; font-family: inherit;">multiple rapes</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">, </span><a href="https://slate.com/culture/2021/04/blake-bailey-lusher-journals-teacher.html" style="color: #954f72; font-family: inherit;">child grooming</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">, and </span><a href="https://www.pilotonline.com/news/vp-nw-bailey-odu-20210610-cuzrop4ibrh55daovoqk43rluy-htmlstory.html" style="color: #954f72; font-family: inherit;">serial sexual harassment</a><span style="font-family: inherit;">. There’s no way to know if Roth knew about any of that; perhaps he just vibed with it. What is certain is that Roth didn’t anticipate this type of public scandal would sully the book, and by extension his own reputation. This is widely understood to be a shame, both for Roth and a world full of people who wish to understand him.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> But I wonder if it was providence.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There’s a whole Internet full of takes out there about what the Roth/Bailey relationship means or implies about literature, and publishing, and academia, and criticism, and the fraught art of biography. (In summary: nothing good.) But there’s also the idea, a consensus even, among <a href="https://www.philiprothsociety.org/single-post/statement-on-the-possible-destruction-of-essential-materials-pertaining-to-philip-roth" style="color: #954f72;">scholars</a> and <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/162475/philip-roth-blake-bailey-documents-biography" style="color: #954f72;">critics</a> that Roth’s reputation and legacy don</span>’<span style="font-family: inherit;">t deserve to be closely tied to Blake Bailey for all eternity. There are many ways I could describe this view, but above all, it’s ahistorical. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Was Roth a misogynist?<span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="color: #954f72; vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">[1] </span></span></span>This question, which has long been on the table, is shallow and misguided. It’s more illuminating to consider the ways in which some of Roth’s actions were misogynistic. To that end, in a NYT article wondering “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/books/philip-roth-biography-blake-bailey.html" style="color: #954f72;">What Happens to Philip Roth’s Legacy Now</a>?” a suggestive little sentence caught my eye:<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Roth also gave Bailey copies of two unpublished manuscripts, “Notes for My Biographer,” a 295-page rebuttal of his ex-wife Claire Bloom’s 1996 memoir, and “Notes on a Slander-Monger,” a response to the notes and interviews Miller had compiled.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">These two items are among the texts that the Philip Roth estate is actively suppressing from the public (and might eventually destroy, per Roth’s wishes). They’re now at the center of a second scandal tied to the Roth estate. I suppose it’s actually a third scandal, if you count the “censorship” of Bailey’s book by Norton. As ever, discussions about “censorship” and intellectual freedom tend to co-opt narratives that are, at heart, about sexual criminality. This is not an accident.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">While I think the bald facts in that sentence quoted above really speak for themselves, let’s consider the materials under discussion more closely for just a moment. First, we have an unpublished novel-length manuscript—not a</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> memoir, but a “rebuttal” to his ex-wife’s memoir—that was not meant for public access. Roth did not choose to share this particular story in his own voice, though apparently the manuscript was originally slated for publication (and only pulled on the advice of Roth’s friends). Beyond those minimal details, we can only speculate about why. I can certainly see the appeal of putting out his side of the story posthumously, through a proxy, in an official biography. It has a patina of objectivity and the imprimatur of canon. Roth’s ex-wife’s memoir, on the other hand, was </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/17/books/claire-bloom-looks-back-in-anger-at-philip-roth.html" style="color: #954f72; font-family: inherit;">characterized in its time</a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">as bitter, exploitative, and dubious, even if her portrait of Roth as a misogynist hit a nerve with readers (Roth himself most of all). </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Second, “Notes on a Slander-Monger,” a collection of Roth’s “unpublished essays on such subjects as money, marriage and illness, and a list of his relationships with women, with commentary,” is owned (but not fully controlled) by Princeton University. These materials are currently locked down and inaccessible to researchers or anyone else, at the behest of the Roth estate.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">“A list of his relationships with women, with commentary.” This phrase has the ring of euphemism, does it not? Can we really characterize such a thing as an “essay”? Because what that sounds like to me is that Philip Roth wrote a fuck list.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I don’t know, maybe that’s going too far. I hope at least we can agree that both unpublished manuscripts sound like nasty pieces of work. The words “rebuttal” and “slander” suggest a certain spiteful tone. The fact that they were more or less written for Blake Bailey’s eyes only is also suggestive. Most suggestive of all is the fact that the Roth estate is leaning on Princeton to suppress “Notes on a Slander-Monger,” a move that is by every indication aggressive and unusual.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Is it fair that the estate has restricted access to (and might go so far as to destroy) these texts? Scholars and writers would have you believe that these documents are hugely important to literary history, and that to destroy them would be a crime against humanity and, worse, Philip Roth himself. “It’s fundamental material relating to a major American writer,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/books/philip-roth-biography-blake-bailey.html" style="color: #954f72;">said Ira Nadel</a>, whose unauthorized biography on Roth will be released next year.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I mean…is it, though? <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">More specifically, the question I’d like to raise is this: Is there something inherently misogynistic about characterizing these texts as having immeasurable scholarly value? <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What does it mean that, in the future, I might have to be granted a special pass from Princeton University to access an annotated list of every woman with whom Philip Roth ever slept? Should Roth’s unpublished screed against his ex-wife be assigned reading in American literature classes? Are these really the kinds of items that deserve to be preserved and lionized for posterity and, if so, what does that say about the kinds of information and sources that we value? And those that we do not? <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The fact that the estate considers the fate of the Philip Roth Fuck List to require a decision at all indicates that they intend to honor the spirit, rather than the letter, of Roth’s wishes, which were to destroy the materials after Bailey’s biography was published. Plainly, the estate’s mandate is to protect Roth’s legacy, and they have latitude to do that in whatever way they see fit. While the estate hasn’t announced a timetable or any criteria for their deliberation, it seems fair to assume that it will remain on hold until the Bailey scandal has settled and some sense of Roth’s legacy as a person has cohered. (Roth’s legacy as an Important Artist is of course firmly settled, at least for now.) What else could they be waiting for?<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Whenever it’s made, the estate’s decision will itself be an important source of information. These people have already demonstrated a keen aversion to values like open access and crowdsourcing. (Roth did too, as his efforts with the Bailey biography show.) If the estate chooses to release the materials, it will be because they think it will exonerate or at least improve the author’s reputation to some degree. If they destroy the materials, it will be because they believe they would damage his reputation further. That will be the calculus.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In my uneducated opinion, the latter option seems much more likely. When the decision to destroy the materials is announced (if it is announced?), the estate will emphasize how important it is to honor Roth’s dying wish. When the time comes, remember: demonstrably, that is not the estate’s priority. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In any case, the “debate” is moot. The fate of these papers is out of our hands, meaning it’s naturally the angle the commentariat has trained its focus on. A hallmark of public conversation in the wake of #MeToo is the Othering of its villains. There’s plenty to say along these lines about Blake Bailey and Philip Roth, as the Take Economy has shown. It’s much more delicate and unflattering work to examine what these news stories imply about our own values and institutions. All this handwringing over the future of the Philip Roth Fuck List is an indictment, not of Roth, but of a culture that refuses to reflect on its past or build a more equitable future. It is a culture that places absurd worth on preserving some people’s literal garbage at the expense of a very long list of people, some of whom are still alive, who never signed up for all this. It is a culture whose treasured objects have quite a lot to say about the eye of the beholder, but all that gets shrouded in institutional norms and high-minded arguments about cultural preservation and intellectual freedom.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I just don’t see the inherent value of these materials, at least with regard to Roth’s romantic life, that others seem to take as a given. I don’t see why these texts should be objects of study, or why a raft of scholars imagine they’re entitled to see them. I don’t think it’s some neutral, pro-intellectual, principled stance to assume that Roth’s private notes to an alleged rapist are valuable public property. That kind of thinking is itself the dumb vestige of patriarchy. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I think if it were up to me, I’d let the papers “burn,” not least of all because that’s what Roth wanted. Inevitably, people would worry about what might get destroyed next. We’re in a historical moment in which the canon has been destabilized, if not displaced, and what people envision on the blazing Farenheit-451 fires in their dim imaginations is much more than </span>some<span style="font-family: inherit;"> genius</span>’<span style="font-family: inherit;">s Fuck List, or even the Classics. It’s a certain sense of self. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">LOL. Let them sweat. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></p><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br clear="all" /></span><hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div id="ftn1"><p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="font-size: 10pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference" style="vertical-align: super;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">[1]</span></span></span>Yes.</span><span face="Calibri, sans-serif"><o:p></o:p></span></p></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-16471407914303920042020-08-17T16:05:00.006-05:002021-06-13T14:28:13.558-05:00myth and magic in the age of mechanical reproduction<div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ricky Jay’s most pristine miracles were not intended for strangers to see. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />These were events that were never captured on film. Jay preferred to deal his best magic in bright impossible bursts—ephemeral shows for audiences as small as one that will pass from living memory within decades. <br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>Arguably, Jay’s most powerful performance was staged for an audience of just one woman, in 1995. <br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>I find this to be such an interesting choice for a performer in the age of mass media, especially given Jay’s deep connections in show business. He appeared in dozens of films, consulted on others, and was a fixture on late-night television from the 1970s. On the prestige drama <i>Deadwood</i>, Jay played some version of himself, a card sharp from another era, and before that, he had an enormously popular show off-Broadway, directed by David Mamet and taped for HBO. <br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>Despite these many appearances on stage and screen, the fact remains that Jay’s most brilliant performances unfolded in front of a select few. Like most things in Jay’s carefully controlled life, this was surely by design.<br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>He was an enthusiastic and careful historian. So it seems meaningful that Jay’s most profound acts of magic appear on the historical record only as described by the handful of people who were lucky enough to witness them. Like the great acts of his beloved forebears—magicians and other oddball performers who lived in a time before video—the most deeply compelling magic of Ricky Jay will persist only in arcane territory, somewhere between history and myth. To reconstruct these transient works of art, we’re confronted with the wonders and limitations of imagination.<br /><o:p> <br /></o:p><i>Authenticity is not reproducible.<br /></i><o:p> <br /></o:p>Jay’s most elaborate tricks required intricate setups that were informed by a lifetime of experience and made possible by months of site-specific preparation. These were artful illusions that hinged on opportunities that might have never presented themselves. (I wonder most about the magic that Ricky Jay never had the chance to perform.) It’s thrilling to read about a <a href="https://twitter.com/shallowbrigade/status/1295128852797194241?s=20" target="_blank">diabolical card trick</a> he performed at a party, late at night. Or an <a href="https://twitter.com/shallowbrigade/status/1295129527325261825?s=20" target="_blank">uncanny display of mentalism</a> at a bar. This past Saturday, I had a complicated feeling watching a scene in a documentary where a man described the time Jay manufactured a two-dollar bill out of thin air—not on the stage, but in the shower after a workout. This interlocutor was a skeptic who had hoped to catch him off guard. But Ricky Jay was always ready.<br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>Each of these perfectly executed moments in time was a polished piece of technical theater seamlessly woven into the events of everyday life, to the wonder and delight of whoever was watching. In the 2012 documentary <i>Deceptive Practice</i>, Jay described this genre as “impromptu magic,” which he regarded as the highest form of art. <br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>One of the magicians Jay most admired and studied was Max Malini (1873-1942), a world-famous practitioner of impromptu magic. Malini was known for his splendid spur-of-the-moment performances. He often staged them in rich people’s homes in a bid to capture their interest (and their dollars). These were acts composed not of scripted stunts, but minor miracles. Or so it seemed.<br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>Jay’s innovation in the practice of impromptu magic, from what I gather, was in catching people completely off guard, and his near total lack of agenda. This kind of magic was very personal and enormously special. Jay loved to surprise people in mundane places and offhand moments—in a diner, say, or at a hotel bar. The banality of the setting must’ve made the magic that much more real. <br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>“For it truly to be magic…a magical moment, it has to be spontaneous,” Jay explained in the documentary. “It has to be something that just happens. Not in a stage show that’s carefully plotted from beginning to end but, rather, in a moment.” <br /><o:p> <br /></o:p><i>That which withers in the age of mechanical production is the aura of a work of art.<br /></i><o:p> <br /></o:p>In the film, Jay describes how Malini was known for a dinner-party trick in which he produced a large block of ice from the seemingly empty space beneath a hat lying on the table. Jay recreated this magnificent show and arguably did it better, if only because the person he performed it for never saw it coming. (For Malini, it was a signature piece.) But Jay’s performance did not appear in the documentary; it was only described by the woman who saw it. The actual event had transpired in a diner some 15 years before.<br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>The context is very important: in 1995, Jay was being filmed for a BBC special. He had been clashing with a producer who wanted him to perform Malini’s ice trick as a set piece for the show.<br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>Jay had zero interest in doing this. But privately, he planned a surprise: instead of performing for the camera, he chose to conjure the huge block of ice for one person, a journalist named Suzie Mackenzie who had been hanging around the set. At the time, they were having lunch in a busy diner. I think she was profiling him for a story.<br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>As she described the ice trick in <i>Deceptive Practice</i>, Mackenzie visibly struggled to find words to express how much it moved her. It was like religious awe: not for Ricky Jay, but the for the experience that he had given her.<br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>The BBC didn’t get the footage, because there was none. At the diner, between Jay and Mackenzie, the ice began to melt on the table—a potent symbol for a fleeting moment. It was a very hot day.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></div><div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Artistic production begins with ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult. One may assume that what mattered was their existence, not their being on view. <br /></i><o:p> <br /></o:p>At a memorial service for Jay in 2019, Mark Singer (who wrote the definitive <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/04/05/secrets-of-the-magus" target="_blank">profile</a> of Jay and worked as a producer on <i>Deceptive Practice</i>) <a href="https://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/singer_su19.html" target="_blank">added this remarkable coda</a> to Mackenzie’s story:<br /><o:p> <br /></o:p><blockquote>It was the only time Ricky performed this [trick]. For anyone, ever. … When it happened, Suzie Mackenzie burst into tears. In the film, she says, “It’s a moment I’ll never have again. I’ll never forget it. It was a kind of supreme piece of artistry that I witnessed, that was done for me.”<br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>What she doesn’t say is what Ricky told me, years ago, about her reaction. After she had regained her composure, he asked her what she felt. <br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>“Love,” she said. </blockquote><o:p><br /></o:p>Jay often spoke about the difference between magicians and con men. I don’t think he’d put it this way—he seemed to think about the distinction in terms of honesty—but my understanding is: one gives where the other takes. <br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>“He’s unbelievably generous,” David Mamet <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/04/05/secrets-of-the-magus" target="_blank">said</a> of his friend. “One of the world’s great people.” <br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>Jay reportedly worked very hard. Before a performance, Michael Chabon once <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/02/12/ricky-jay-the-magician-with-an-edge/" target="_blank">said</a> to him, “You must get tired of it sometimes, night after night, show after show.”<br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>“Yes, Michael, sometimes I do,” Jay said. “But once I get out there, I guarantee you, not you or them or anybody is ever going to know.” <br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>As a performer, Jay kept a lot of secrets, which people sometimes regarded as elitist or stingy. “Ricky won’t perform for magicians at magic shows, because they’re interested in doing things,” <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/04/05/secrets-of-the-magus" target="_blank">said</a> Michael Weber, the magician who was Jay’s business partner. “They don’t get it. They won’t watch him and be inspired to make magic of their own.”<br /><o:p> <br /></o:p><i>The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.<br /></i><o:p> <br /></o:p>It seems to me that Jay’s professional secrets were in the spirit of giving people something (an experience, a <i>feeling</i>) rather than a selfish wish to withhold. Jay had his reasons for performing his most amazing magic for so few people. It certainly wasn’t a problem with resources; he had access to all the right people, plenty of money, and a surplus of tools. <br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>“Today, audiences are just as curious, just as willing to be amazed” as audiences from the distant past, Jay <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/04/05/secrets-of-the-magus" target="_blank">remarked</a>. “But look at everything we’re barraged with—it just doesn’t lodge in the imagination in the same way.”<br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>Everything we’re barraged with.<br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>As a magician and a historian, Jay had a special understanding of perspective and constraints. Talking about the HBO special of his off-Broadway show in an interview, he <a href="https://www.avclub.com/ricky-jay-1798207934" target="_blank">said</a>: <br /><o:p> <br /></o:p><blockquote>The show is different live. Particularly something that deals with magic: The very essence of it is the spontaneity; that’s the moment you’re looking for. The very idea that you have a TV camera there, even though we went through great lengths not to cut away and not to use camera trickery… [Mamet] even came out and directed himself, which was nice. But it’s still different. It’s a live show, and it’s meant to be seen live.</blockquote><o:p> <br /></o:p>Reading the interview, I came to an understanding of why Jay saved his best stuff for off-camera; it would have been a degradation to film it. Impromptu magic cannot occur on film, by definition; it’s an experience that only occurs if and when the right moment presents itself. <br /><i> <br /></i><i>Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be</i>. <br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>Jay wasn’t interested at all in showing people how his tricks were done. (Why would it matter?) But he did impart a kind of understanding of what it might have felt like to experience them. The experience was the art. His process was only a method.<br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>In the age of Google and Wikipedia, it is perhaps notable that the obituaries for Jay in mainstream outlets differed on the point of whether he had died at the age of 70 or 72. Like so many of the magicians who came before him, the details of his life are fuzzy. Most of us don’t know so much about him as an individual who existed in the world. We watched the parts he wanted us to see, and the rest is stories.<br /><o:p> <br /></o:p><i>The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.<br /></i><o:p> <br /></o:p>I’ve always had a fondness for people who do amazing pointless things. I don’t have that kind of talent, but it’s an impulse I understand. It resonates with me now more than ever, in this sad time of accelerated media consolidation. It hums faintly somewhere deep within my chest as I try to live through this period of US collapse. <br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>“Behind every transcendent, unforgettable performance is a deeply ordinary chore,” Jay’s former assistant <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/11/30/671637852/ricky-jay-remembered-from-the-wings-a-personal-assistants-thoughts-on-the-late-s">wrote</a>. I can’t decide if that’s some rarified philosophy, or just one way to describe a life. <br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>I read a story about a time Jay performed a stunning miracle for yet another audience of one: Steve Freeman, a fellow magician who stopped by Jay’s apartment to return a shirt. <br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>“It was nice to be fooled,” Freeman <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1993/04/05/secrets-of-the-magus" target="_blank">said</a> of the experience. “That’s not a feeling we get to have very often anymore.” <br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>A mystery doesn’t always yield an answer, but may yet offer some reward.<br /><o:p> <br /></o:p>I don’t know much about magic. Nevertheless, it exists. <br /></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "times new roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;"><o:p></o:p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-70655862088424105162020-04-18T23:53:00.003-05:002020-04-19T00:06:51.818-05:00faux food insecurityAn interesting thing about the whole self-quarantine experience is how much of my anxiety and horror about what's happening in the world get poured into the grocery shopping, an activity I used to really enjoy. Except for maybe a two- to three-day respite following a given shop, I work on the grocery list constantly, with weird intense pathological desperation. That list is by far the most cursed thing in my home (or on my phone, I guess). Hundreds of years from now, if an anthropologist finds one of my pandemic-era grocery lists, its horrible dark energy will probably kill them instantly. They won't even have time to wonder why I have so many different kinds of fake milk while also using real cream in the coffee.<br />
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Like a lot of my anxieties relating to the pandemic, this new unhinged relationship to food feels... unearned. Whatever I'm feeling isn't food insecurity, a real actual problem that a lot of people have, especially now. The extremely disordered way in which I sterilize and put away the groceries (which is somehow both completely inadequate and wholly over the top?) may make me <i>feel</i> like Meredith Baxter Birney in a Lifetime movie, but I don't in fact have obsessive-compulsive disorder. So it's this very circular stupid psychodrama of having weird fears and fake problems, and then feeling guilty and even ashamed about the fears and problems, because honestly it seems reasonable that those of us who aren't sick or grieving or working for Bezos (yet) should buck up and not complain. Part of the problem is that I know my brain is equipped to scan the landscape for predators and instead it has been reduced to checking the same five websites for my preferred brand of paper towels. For the first few weeks I think my body was flooded with stress hormones, like I woke up every morning and ate several handfuls of stimulants, but that seems to have died down, at least. Finally, my nervous system (if not my brain) seems to have grasped that the stakes of human survival in this household are - for now - having enough cans of the good tomatoes.<br />
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Anyway part of this whole melodrama is the new (fake, but deeply felt) stakes of cooking, another formerly pleasant activity which now feels very fraught. There was a viral reddit post (also fake, imo) about someone's girlfriend burying cans of beans in the woods "for when things get bad" and that is like 100% the mentality I have to fight to cook a dinner. That reddit post is either a parable for whatever my problem is, or an actual story about my future, and I'm not sure which. Anyway I'm now (probably appropriately...) worried about food waste and using the gross stems of vegetables, etc. So a type of quarantine content I have really appreciated is chefs who are committed to helping people figure out how to cook stuff. I mean, I can cook, more or less, but it's been hard to take any pleasure in it. Or, worse than that, where cooking used to feel pleasurable, I find it sort of upsetting now. So I'm just intensely grateful for any podcast or show or anything else hosted by people who make me feel better about food: buying it, cooking it, eating it, experimenting with it. There's a lot of this content right now (I'm sure I haven't even scratched the surface), but my very favorite is a TV show with Jamie Oliver called Keep Cooking and Carry On. It's not available in the US, but some kind soul links up all the episodes on deep reddit.<br />
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Jamie Oliver is probably my favorite celebrity chef? In a profession that is so often about machismo and misery (which whatever, I'm into some of that too), he stands out. He just seems like a good person, plus I really like his recipes. One time someone gave Chris Morocco a Jamie Oliver recipe on Reverse Engineering. It was just the saddest burger in the world, and CM spent the entire show making fun of whatever chef had devised this terrible recipe. But then! After the reveal, when Chris Morocco he found out this burger he had insulted for half an hour was made by Jamie Oliver, he immediately backtracked and talked about how much he loved and respected Jamie. I'm not sure if that's a meaningful anecdote to anyone else, but to me it had the same kind of magic as when someone's difficult pet decides that you're all right. The Chris Morocco blessing.<br />
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The incredible thing about the new Jamie Oliver show is that it was sort of thrown together, but still quite well produced for about a week before he started literally filming it on a phone in his garage. After a handful of episodes it went from this:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOWctyw85RZNFX_EyXUuUCY_U5XOZroIO_5qg7O1fAP7YH1HFB0iK9fbPrXNPzkaxGNc9cxzz18IhkPX5WSsCGgJn47LIMMW9Cav1IGfuIJeD0761MwsbZPFj_6seGKf3Tde_yPGSeQnA/s1600/jamie-oliver-keep-cooking-and-carry-on-t.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1200" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOWctyw85RZNFX_EyXUuUCY_U5XOZroIO_5qg7O1fAP7YH1HFB0iK9fbPrXNPzkaxGNc9cxzz18IhkPX5WSsCGgJn47LIMMW9Cav1IGfuIJeD0761MwsbZPFj_6seGKf3Tde_yPGSeQnA/s320/jamie-oliver-keep-cooking-and-carry-on-t.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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To this:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikXFzb6mstD9Rd0cpMWlQd8ju4f4CvQdWbhyZdHcUE6Es99Dr7-_FLlI7C3HyKO82Zfu4Rf2ntmnnOJej5DTKilOMMuRFLv1rodIIw9tJ9KtkSVnD4JOK9o-B0VexCtdL2ooAPdGRn_ic/s1600/EU4hNSBXQAAMsiG.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="647" data-original-width="1199" height="172" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikXFzb6mstD9Rd0cpMWlQd8ju4f4CvQdWbhyZdHcUE6Es99Dr7-_FLlI7C3HyKO82Zfu4Rf2ntmnnOJej5DTKilOMMuRFLv1rodIIw9tJ9KtkSVnD4JOK9o-B0VexCtdL2ooAPdGRn_ic/s320/EU4hNSBXQAAMsiG.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Dirty t-shirt. Uncombed hair. I think the first thing he made was quesadillas. It was straight up dorm-kitchen cooking, albeit in the cake pan storage area(?) of his literal estate, and I love it so much.<br />
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You know...working through it.<br />
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<b><u>Good things:</u></b><br />
My favorite Jamie <a href="https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1012805-creamy-pasta-with-smoked-bacon-and-peas" target="_blank">recipe</a><br />
My <a href="https://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/vegetables-recipes/veggie-chilli/" target="_blank">other favorite</a><br />
Highly <a href="https://twitter.com/shallowbrigade/status/1247778733211017218?s=20" target="_blank">entertained</a> by these coronavirus update videos from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K7z_IABMRw" target="_blank">Spiegelman</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XV9RWuCsxA4" target="_blank">Seth</a><br />
The Longform podcast<a href="https://longform.org/posts/longform-podcast-386-ed-yong" target="_blank"> interviewed</a> Ed Yong, my fave science writer <br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-55450336668179639872020-03-31T14:04:00.000-05:002020-03-31T14:43:30.381-05:00meditations in an emergency<i>Am I to become profligate as if I were blonde? Or <span id="goog_2144632961"></span>religious as if I were French<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/26538/meditations-in-an-emergency" target="_blank">?</a> </i>The two coronavirus pastimes are baking bread, or hating people that bake bread, and unfortunately I can't get into it. In a perfect world, I would've gotten around to my vague aspiration to "get into meditation" before this pandemic cranked into high gear (premium <a href="https://www.davidlynchfoundation.org/catching-the-big-fish-meditation-consciousness-and-creativity.html" target="_blank">David Lynch</a> brand, not that cubicle-poster shit). You know... that ship has sailed. So my personal journey seems to be transforming from a vaguely anxious person into a state of pure consciousness I fondly imagine as a raccoon trapped in a trash can.<br />
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Any complaint I could possibly make would have to be offset by 10 years of gratitude journaling, a fate almost worse than death. So this is just an observation: My concentration is bad. Very bad. Every day is just a row of car alarms going off in the middle of a tornado siren. Everything takes longer than it should. Sometimes I stare at the screen, or forget what I'm doing. I rewrite things until they start to sound like me? And it still sounds like someone else. But apart from a sort of blankness, and the bizarre experience of the gears grinding so slow I can almost feel a thought laboring its way through my brain, the worry feels physical. It jangles its way through my nervous system. I worry about the risks in my family. My oldest friend works at a poorly supplied hospital in a hot zone. The required reading is about to get worse (much worse, I think...). My old job is taking a lot longer, and now I have this second job trying to piece together some idea of how any of this works. At the same time, even in a vacuum of leadership and the most basic facts, I feel alienated by a lot of the conversation about uncertainty. I feel the question mark of it all on a personal level for sure, but what really overwhelms me is a stunningly clear notion of what this first stretch will look like, if not what comes after that. And then this intense state of emergency gets some very complex notes and shades from the new uncanniness of everyday life. I'm just constantly fascinated and deeply unsettled by how the most banal, pleasant tasks from before - walking around, buying groceries - have these new overtones of anxiety and dread. I really miss walking around in a regular way. The little moments that make a day.<br />
<br />
So anyway I wish I'd gotten into meditation. It might have come in handy. But it always seemed like homework, and maybe also meta spiritual thinkpiece hell. Sometimes the people who teach meditation describe learning it as a process of embracing failure, because it's so difficult to clear the mind. The experience of frustration and failure is perversely what trains your brain to meditate better. And I guess maybe now that I'm typing it out, that's what it's like to learn anything? idk, I don't have the patience.<br />
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What I do have is a little low-effort trick - a relaxation hack, if you will! - that doesn't feel like anything reading bad Bechdel comics. Just as backstory, I began using it a few years back, when I started getting headaches. Getting a lot of headaches seems sort of like having a small child, in that your are constantly trying to appease something that is irrational, all-consuming, and only partially under your control. (I guess anxiety is like that too, come to think of it.) I ended up trying a lot of stuff, but the activity that helped most over the long term was acupuncture, I think because it helps with tension? But the caveat is that acupuncture can make your body feel weird in all sorts of wild and mysterious and unsettling ways, including rousing the fight-or-flight instinct. This can happen even if you're not squeamish about acupuncture at all. You start to sweat. Your heart races and you feel faint and ill, and all of this is because your lizard brain perceives a threat on some level of consciousness you don't even have access to.<br />
<br />
The trick I learned to offset this was to focus on a positive memory to center myself and relax.<br />
<br />
This could obviously mean a million different things. But just to give you an idea of how it works for me, the memory needs to be a very specific, with a very high level of zoom. I choose experiences (always from travels, seems like?) where I felt either really content or full of awe and wonder. The first memory, my go-to, is from a boat ride with friends on a beautiful day. I don't really think about people during these fake meditations, because that somehow feels too charged (even before all this). So I think about the moments where we were standing quietly looking out across the water. I think about how the sunlight glinted off the surface, and how the water made the nicest sound as we moved toward an even more scenic view, and how blue and stunning the sky was that day. I think about the cool wind on my face as the boat moved through the water, and how glad I was to be there.<br />
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My other go-to, which is considerably more sociopathic but extremely effective, is from the time I went to a museum where the exhibits were just these massive halls filled with enormous Viking ships.<br />
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It was a calm and awesome and intensely metal place. The floor plan of the building itself formed a cross. Minimalist presentation. Walking through those halls made me feel a deep sense of wonder that I was looking at things people made and used a thousand years ago. At least two of them were burial ships, if I remember correctly. I liked approaching each ship slowly, just full-on gawking. And I especially liked going to these raised platforms that let you look down into the decks. You could gaze down into these beautifully made objects and indulge a gentle kind of curiosity. Who were the unhinged murderers who made these incredible things? I went to public school! Who knows!<br />
<br />
I've been trying to build up a better stash of these small, quiet moments. One I'm working on is from a time I was in a place where it had been gray and misty for days, when a patch of clear sky opened up to reveal the distant mountains. It looked like a portal into another world, and was maybe the most magnificent thing I've ever seen. I like to think about sitting on a bench that was almost too warm from the sunshine in a botanical park. Or the occasion, so many years ago it feels like it was someone else's life, when I was in the mountains floating down a really quiet river edged by the fullest, tallest trees.<br />
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That's it. That's my advice. Close your eyes. Work up a nice memory by really fixating on the sensory details. Remember the easy feeling you had in your chest. Take deeper breaths. Think about the possibility of going somewhere else.<br />
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<u>Good things</u><br />
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/UKTVLAND/comments/fnxtlj/jamie_keep_cooking_and_carry_on_s01e01/" target="_blank">Jamie Oliver's quarantine cooking show</a> - The raw mania emanating off Jamie in episode 02 is truly something to behold. Would die for this man.<br />
<a href="https://homecooking.show/episodes/1" target="_blank">Samin Nosrat's quarantine cooking podcast</a> - good vibes, solid advice<br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BmgHZAuNR4" target="_blank">Bon Appetit test kitchen home kitchen vids</a> - I have a lot of opinions on this<br />
<a href="https://www.shatnerchatner.com/p/reactions-i-have-had-while-watching" target="_blank">Daniel Lavery talks about the Americans</a> - a topical television program about tension<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-7013013460710673542020-03-21T12:09:00.001-05:002020-03-21T14:44:09.268-05:00notes on another personI'm not big on offering advice. I would never presume, just for instance, to share my thoughts on how to work from home, though I have done so for most of my adult life. I have zero boundaries and multiple levels of catastrophic sleep disease, and while I prefer my own coffee and the lack of commute there are times when I feel like I'm coming up short on every side of the equation--at work, at life, etc.<br />
<br />
There are an awful lot of articles right now on how to do this thing, huh? Judging from appearances all my work-from-home brethren have been living right! They have <i>routines</i>. But all that advice...whatever listicles there are for these poor souls who have suddenly found themselves running an old-fashioned schoolhouse for their kids out of two-bedroom apartments, plus all this new required public health reading, the interviews with epidemiologists, all this shit we've got to read to feel we're on top of all the different ways in which we're about to die...the answers these words on our screens purport to offer feel more inadequate than usual. As disorienting as the moment may feel, I believe the world is weirdly simple right now: a stunning series of object lessons about obvious issues that too many people have tried very hard to ignore.<br />
<br />
I mean, don't get me wrong. I've fully subscribed to the empty American dream of using this time to organize the closets and heal my gut. There's just the horrible unease of being forced to nest when you're feeling crazy that feels like it's going unacknowledged. It's the elephant in the room that's never mentioned in each day's packet of explainers, right? The strain of it.<br />
<br />
The question that people are asking isn't <i>how do I work from home</i>. It's <i>when will life go back to normal</i>. And it's in thinking about that subject that I realized I actually do have a piece of advice to offer: It won't. And that's okay.<br />
<br />
People are still asking if this is going to change the world, when it seems very plain that it already has.<br />
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There is a <a href="https://amazingcavalieri.blogspot.com/2017/04/other-peoples-stories.html" target="_blank">thinness to things</a> I've always felt, a sort of tenuousness or transience. I assume it comes from the experience of having been a kid who saw my parents in crisis. A difficult fact of life is that some of the most basic things you take for granted are secretly subject to sudden, violent revision. That reality is a contract that is easily broken. I learned about how events beyond your control can change the person you thought you were into another person who feels unfamiliar. Then 9/11 happened! I was living in another country at the time, and had been laid off from my first grown-up job. I came home and I started someone else's life again, and at some point it became mine.<br />
<br />
I don't mean to sound flip. Last night I heard the mayor of Chicago is looking at empty schools and convents to house thousands of sick people, which is somehow the most sobering fact I've heard to date. But the bigger picture according to my reading packet suggests this won't be an extinction event. What I know is that when the world changes, you become another person.<br />
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This is the New Productivity: becoming whoever we need to be next. It's day nine of quarantine. Yesterday I ordered a cookbook with the dumb fantasy of preparing simple, nourishing Japanese food in a methodical way, like a character in a Murakami story. I want to meet whatever intensely weird thing the world throws out next with instant acceptance and unflappable patience. I did not expect to find myself in a reality in which unknown forces are trying to murder me. Whatever. I'm going to heal my fucking gut.<br />
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I'm posting through it, y'all. Please be well.<br />
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<br />
<u>Some good things</u>:<br />
Just listened to my <a href="https://play.acast.com/s/offmenu/e6ce5685-ba3c-43b4-8d25-77c30725c528" target="_blank">favorite episode</a> of my favorite podcast<br />
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51208651-vegan-japaneasy" target="_blank">That cookbook</a><br />
<a href="https://www.gresham.ac.uk/series/the-great-plagues-epidemics-in-history-from-the-middle-ages-to-the-present-day/" target="_blank">Series of lectures</a> that explains pandemics as a product of history, not an outside attacking force<br />
New hobby: <a href="https://www.shatnerchatner.com/p/where-to-go-for-vibes" target="_blank">pretending your living room is various Witcher taverns</a><br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-25041792658608991702019-11-14T21:41:00.000-06:002019-11-14T22:04:54.531-06:00thanks, tom<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
Today I’ve been thinking about Tom Spurgeon. To many industry folks he was a dear friend, but to even more of us he was the closest thing that comics had to a local weatherman – a small but familiar daily presence who provided context, predictions, and perspective. He was a guy whose opinion you always wanted to know, even if there were days when you knew in your bones that history would prove him to be incorrect. <o:p></o:p></div>
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I think that Tom was the only person in comics who I’ve butted heads with who I’d count as a helpful acquaintance. (I’ve been fascinated to see so many people say something similar.) He was a valuable resource to me when I was working on an investigative piece that I never quite saw my way to publishing. I admired the way he conducted CXC, the annual comics festival he directed. It was plainly apparent, though I never attended the event, that he handled unpleasant incidents quietly, competently, and with great care. It says it all that Olivia Jaimes – a cartoonist who receives a lot of unwanted attention from a very dark and creepy corner of the internet – made her first and only public appearance there. (And from the way that panel was handled on the day, it was plain that Tom and other people at the festival put Jaimes’s safety and well being above all else.) Another time, after a cartoonist who was harassed at CXC wrote about her experience for the Comics Journal, I told Tom how well I thought he’d handled it and what an impact I thought that would have as an industry model. He told me how grateful he was that the cartoonist who had been harassed had written the piece. (How many organizers would have felt the same in his shoes?) He also mentioned, just in passing, that a zero-tolerance policy for harassers had been among the conditions of his employment – a quiet but remarkable act of allyship.</div>
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There were a few times over the years that I noticed stuff like this, and over the last 24 hours I’ve heard about similar things I never knew about. My impression is that Tom wasn’t one to take credit for the things he did well, though he was quick to own his failures. More than once he publicly apologized for never following through on the comics journalism project he promised in his Patreon. I remember thinking that most of his patrons were probably funding the work he was already doing, as well as the work he had done. He went about that work in such a principled way. And he never engaged in provocation for provocation’s sake, something that I think set him apart from many of his peers. <o:p></o:p></div>
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As many others have mentioned, I was struck by Tom’s frequent directive to thank people for work that you admire. It’s advice I’ve tried to follow, if not as often as I should. I know that it’s advice he lived by, as I received one of those emails. Other times he absorbed my criticism with the manners of a bygone age. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: When you’re young, there’s this bright dividing line between the grayness of history and the vibrant present. A distressing part of growing up is watching the color drain from the world as pieces of it recede across that line into the dusty past. I don’t know that we’ll ever have another weatherman here in comics. I’m very sorry to see him go. <o:p></o:p></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-783101303081995112019-04-21T14:19:00.000-05:002019-04-21T14:48:38.385-05:00select writings on chris ware My Twitter reading group for Marc Singer's <i>Breaking the Frames</i> convenes tomorrow night (April 22, 7p central) to discuss Chapter 4. It's about Chris Ware, so I have some opinions! I've written about Ware quite a lot over the years, so I collected a few things that seem most relevant to the discussion.<br />
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For your consideration, a few points:<br />
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<b>1. Chris Ware has a lot of trouble writing about himself.</b><br />
Much of Singer's chapter is about Ware's cheerleading for autobio (in his capacity as an editor for McSweeney's and Best American Comics) and his commitment to narrative realism in his own comics. In discussing Ware's relationship to his protagonists in Jimmy Corrigan and Building Stories, as well as Ware's "cameos" in comics like Rusty Brown, Singer gestures to Ware's complicated relationship with autobio. But I don't think Singer quite conveys how tortured that relationship is...how palpably uncomfortable Ware is in writing about himself and even discussing himself in public. I talk about Ware's fraught relationship with self-expression in my review of his quasi-memoir, Monograph (2017), a short section in a much longer article about the State of Comics. Here's an excerpt:<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 11.5pt;">Some critics have characterised Ware’s aesthetic as emotionally cold. But </span><i><span style="border: 1pt none; font-size: 11.5pt; padding: 0in;">Monograph</span></i><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 11.5pt;">, with its preponderance of mechanical drawings and photographs of painstakingly handmade wooden automata, makes for a revealing psychological portrait. There is clearly something about these objects with which Ware identifies; there’s something moving, too, in the concept of an autobiography told mostly in picture captions. The way in which Ware narrates his life story is often more revealing than the writing itself.</span> </span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-size: 11.5pt;">One of the best features of the book is its pasted-in booklets, many of which replicate Ware’s original mini-comics. The most interesting of these, which is not much larger than a postage stamp, describes the last few months in the life of the artist’s grandmother. Ware’s caption admits that although the booklet, which bears no resemblance to his distinctive style, is “of no aesthetic value,” it “allowed for something to come out on the page which [he] otherwise would not have permitted.”</span></blockquote>
(Read <a href="https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/the-new-age-of-comics" target="_blank">"The New Age of Comics" at Prospect magazine</a>.)<br />
<br />
One of my central opinions on Chris Ware is that his comics would be a lot better if he either committed to writing about himself or committed to writing truly fictional characters.<br />
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<br />
<b>2. Chris Ware expresses some stunningly sexist attitudes in his work and his comments.</b><br />
Singer discusses Ware's sexist attitudes in his capacity as an editor (an argument that was first laid out by Bart Beaty in <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Comics_Versus_Art.html?id=xuotcKAeM5YC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank"><i>Comics Versus Art</i></a>). But this attitude isn't just limited to Ware's work on two anthologies (which I think Singer places way too much weight on anyway); it's also a frequent theme in Ware's own work and his interviews. I think a lot of it comes down to Ware's inability to write about himself, coupled with his tendency to impose his own point of view on other people instead of truly empathizing with them. I wrote about a truly incredible video where Ware talks about his ambivalence on writing female characters:<br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 11.5pt;">Ware’s fundamentally incapable of imagining a convincing character or even </span><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; text-decoration: none;">another actual human</span><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 11.5pt;"> who isn’t, on some level, Chris Ware. That isn’t because he’s white, or because he’s a man, but because he mistakes all human experience as </span><span style="font-size: 11.5pt; text-decoration: none;">interchangeable</span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 11.5pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> in a way that would only ever occur to white men. In his hands, exploring difference is the project of locating other people’s inner Chris Ware.</span><span style="color: #666666; font-family: "times new roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></blockquote>
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You can read the full post right <a href="https://amazingcavalieri.blogspot.com/2017/08/an-extremely-funny-chris-ware-video.html" target="_blank">here on the blog</a>.<br />
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<b>Related:</b><br />
<a href="https://twitter.com/shallowbrigade/status/969258859167670272" target="_blank">Ware's #MeToo cover for the New Yorker</a><br />
<a href="https://twitter.com/shallowbrigade/status/874350925724438528" target="_blank">A misogynistic comic he did for the New Yorker</a><br />
<a href="https://twitter.com/shallowbrigade/status/798640780936101892" target="_blank">Another one </a><br />
<a href="https://twitter.com/shallowbrigade/status/672158141371420672" target="_blank">Ware on makeup</a><br />
<a href="https://twitter.com/shallowbrigade/status/1119717042075197441" target="_blank">Ware on his wife</a><br />
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<b>3. The whiteness of Ware World</b><br />
Given that Singer delves into Ware's sexist attitudes, I'm VERY surprised he doesn't go down a similar line with race. (I'd just about bet those anthologies that Singer talks about are as white as they are male.) A few years ago Ware wrote a real humdinger of an essay on George Herriman, whose work Ware has edited for Fantagraphics' infinite Krazy Kat series. I thought it had some problems:<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 11.5pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Pegged to a new biography on kartoonist George Herriman (1880-1944), a black man who passed as white, Ware writes about the merits of the comic and how they deepen and multiply when considered through the lens of black identity. He has a Maya Angelou epigraph and everything. Which is all fine and good till, inevitably, Ware comes around to the universality of Herriman's (really rather particular) predicament. You know, because "fiction...in its finest form" isn't just about articulating black identity--it's about transcending it.</span></span></blockquote>
You can read my full post on Ware's Herriman essay <a href="https://amazingcavalieri.blogspot.com/2017/02/black-history-month-profile-in-courage.html?showComment=1548121063662" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
<br />
<b>Related:</b><br />
<a href="https://twitter.com/shallowbrigade/status/957727931924697093" target="_blank">Ware and Spiegelman get real racist in conversation</a><br />
<a href="https://twitter.com/soashworth/status/957801495491211264" target="_blank">Ware's unfortunate blurb (on the Tisserand book)</a><br />
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<b>4. Why are people so reluctant to criticize Ware?</b><br />
People seriously get SO MAD when you criticize Chris Ware. It's a whole thing, and I took it to be the subtext of this chapter given that, as someone who has written about Chris Ware on the Internet, Singer has surely experienced this phenomenon firsthand. Behind people's anger there's a real reluctance to criticize Ware in his capacity as an artist, an editor, or a historian. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Ware's absolutely terrible work as a cover artist for the New Yorker. (My complaint on this was actually the first post on this blog.) While I think the New Yorker covers are probably outside of Singer's scope, they represent the true convergence of all Ware's bad takes on sex and race, which I consider central to his "real" work: <br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 11.5pt;">Chris Ware’s comics are about white misery, which people (including him, including me) tend to talk about in terms of universality. I don’t even mean this as a judgment of his work. The comics of his that I know at least--Jimmy Corrigan, Building Stories--are about miserable white protagonists who live in miserable, mostly white, worlds. That’s not my opinion; that’s the text. (And isn’t it also the text of Rusty Brown? I’m not a completest, but I’m pretty sure this is Ware’s thing?) You can say Ware’s comics are about human misery, and that’s not </span><i><span style="font-size: 11.5pt;">wrong</span></i><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 11.5pt;"> exactly, but it’s not the whole truth. To tell the whole truth, you’d have to acknowledge that the worlds Ware builds, and particularly Ware’s Chicago, are pretty dang white.</span></span></blockquote>
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You can read the full text <a href="https://amazingcavalieri.blogspot.com/2016/09/obstacles-to-critiquing-chris-wares.html" target="_blank">here</a>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com55tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-61672451803475447732018-12-31T15:25:00.000-06:002019-01-02T01:59:45.051-06:00my favorite comic of 2018<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaz_-YROuMaI2kXp-SG6X-vXtFsnuiL6YaFHhUSvOUumusXh8SYPvMXN79J6GUEUKE27EfXO37sz0AdUeRRktIyOTQH42PWy3xZ5mQUGH26yrKL33D1p0czHCj8N8nF2ZGakQyxMj6doI/s1600/9781770463219_cover_0.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1400" data-original-width="1400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaz_-YROuMaI2kXp-SG6X-vXtFsnuiL6YaFHhUSvOUumusXh8SYPvMXN79J6GUEUKE27EfXO37sz0AdUeRRktIyOTQH42PWy3xZ5mQUGH26yrKL33D1p0czHCj8N8nF2ZGakQyxMj6doI/s320/9781770463219_cover_0.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Someone new comes to town. Someone goes away. There are only two plots in all of literature, a late mentor once told me, and it’s only now I realize he was paraphrasing another dead novelist. I think in comics there’s undue focus on innovation—on who came first, and what comes next—when most of the time it doesn’t matter. If there are only so many ideas, what’s important is the articulation. It isn't about who has an idea so much as who conveys it in a manner, in a time, in a place, so that the idea feels like it's speaking to <i>you</i>.</div>
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My favorite comic this year is an eloquent exploration of not one, but both, of the classic storylines in just 14 pages and a few hundred words. Four months after her daughter was born, the cartoonist Geneviève Castrée was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She was dead before the girl turned two. In between, Castrée made <i>A Bubble</i>, a children’s board book about their time together that was published posthumously. It is a story that could’ve easily been weighed down by sentimentality, conveyed with a lightness of touch as effervescent as the book’s central metaphor. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The artist’s conceit of suspending herself in a soap bubble was of course a reference to the isolating nature of Castrée’s illness, which had its own demands. (“That’s what the bubble book was about,” her husband <a href="https://pitchfork.com/features/profile/10034-death-is-real-mount-eeries-phil-elverum-copes-with-unspeakable-tragedy/" style="color: #954f72;" target="_blank">told</a> Pitchfork. “She knew that she was shut off from us and the people that she loved.”) And yet it seems to me the bubble also conveys a certain intimacy, a nod to the almost otherworldly relationship between mother and child in those first years of life. A bubble’s surface is semipermeable, and Castrée’s daughter appears inside and outside its barrier, or sometimes both. </div>
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Every page, with the marked exception of the book’s only spread, is a portrait of mother and daughter on an unadorned background, as though they live in a world where nothing else exists. The story takes place during that liminal time when a child begins to grasp the concept of the autonomous self, and a mother learns how to let go. To build a bridge, Castrée wrote the book from her child’s point of view, and drew herself into places where she never was, and never will be. <i>A Bubble </i>is, on one level anyway, a mother’s lament. Many readers will relate to Castrée’s ambivalence about working too hard, I think. <o:p></o:p></div>
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But as much as this is a folk tale, it is also one woman’s story. It must have been a strange and heavy task for Castrée to compose what she surely knew to be her final work of art, and stranger still to balance the personal, painful nature of the story with its public consumption (which she planned). What we are privy to, as this late woman’s readership, is her effort to preserve a time that her small daughter will not likely remember. This is heirloom-quality drawing, down to the lovingly rendered textiles that comprised the Elverum family’s real clothes. The book’s most magical imagery, from the single spread I mentioned before, reminds me of the work of Frida Kahlo, with fauna and wildlife serving as emblems of the family’s home in the Pacific Northwest. Like Castrée, Kahlo knew pain and suffering, and there’s a powerful melancholy magic in how both women imagined life beyond the confines of their beds and bodies. </div>
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<i style="color: #954f72;"><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=ahw-BQAAQBAJ&pg=PT205&lpg=PT205&dq=Eternity+no+longer+appears+as+such,+but+only+as+refracted+through+the+most+ephemeral+of+things.&source=bl&ots=Gxy5rDkjSs&sig=RKLODF_-SMduXf8KaxDA9Eu1NPY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjQ5" style="color: #954f72;" target="_blank">Eternity no longer appears as such, but only as refracted through the most ephemeral of things.</a> </i><span class="MsoHyperlink" style="color: #0563c1; text-decoration: underline;"><i></i></span>I think Castrée’s strength as a cartoonist was in her ability to locate truth in contradiction. The great irony of <i>A Bubble </i>is that the artist died before she ever drew a single bubble on the page, leaving the work incomplete. I suppose there’s some technical reason that she saved the bubble for last (a task that was ultimately carried out by her friend Anders Nilsen, per his <a href="https://www.tcj.com/fuck-you-death-thoughts-on-finishing-my-friends-last-book/" style="color: #954f72;" target="_blank">remarkable essay</a> for The Comics Journal), but I find myself wondering about the significance of that membrane—and its absence—in this story about life and death. It is there, and it also isn’t there, a marvel in all its porousness and integrity. In art, in memory, in progeny, there is a sense in which we persist when we’re gone. On the back cover of the book, the artist walks off the page. She doesn’t saunter into the abyss, to the right, but exits left, as if she’s returning to the story inside. Castrée’s daughter trails behind, blowing bubbles. </div>
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A dumb quirk of human existence is how our most fundamental experiences, birth and death, transcend understanding. Too often mistaken for child’s play, the purpose and privilege of imagination is to answer these failures of intellect. Our stories are simple, but rarely easy. Someone comes to town, he told me. Someone goes away. </div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-40441052990461957872018-07-08T14:39:00.000-05:002018-07-08T14:58:47.119-05:00"celebrating" steve ditkoI don't know much about Steve Ditko, but I've always found him relatable. To feel compelled to participate in comics, yet want to keep its culture at arm's length...well, I guess you're either the kind of person who finds that incomprehensible, or someone who thinks that sounds relatively normal and sane.<br />
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There's always been an unsettling degree of fan entitlement surrounding Ditko, but I didn't understand its extent until the last few days. Since his death was announced on Friday there's been an outpouring of intensely sociopathic stories from the <strike>people</strike> men who stalked him, pestered him, or asked him for favors, presented as though they're some sort of celebration of his life and work. It's incredible to me how often Ditko is the person in these stories who's regarded as cranky or crazy or rude. A common misconception these guys seem to have is that they were offering Ditko some sort of favor. What I see anyway is that they wanted something from him, and felt aggrieved when they didn't get it. Maybe they wanted to talk to him, like the time my nemesis <a href="https://amazingcavalieri.blogspot.com/2016/11/here-are-some-comics-links.html" target="_blank">harassed Ditko</a> under the auspices of a mainstream magazine. Maybe they wanted to offer their work up for Ditko's consideration. (What a treat, for him!) Maybe they wanted to offer Ditko the exciting opportunity to collaborate with a stranger, or to pay their respects by turning up at his workplace to stare at him like he was an animal in the zoo.<br />
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I was astonished to read <a href="https://twitter.com/earinc/status/1015459290188926976" target="_blank">this account</a> from Eric Reynolds, associate publisher of Fantagraphics, about the time he and Gary Groth visited Ditko's studio:<br />
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"Soon after the first Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie came out in 2002, Gary Groth and I were on business in NYC one day and had a few hours to kill. Gary said, "Wanna meet Steve Ditko?" It sounded good to me. We showed up at Ditko's 5th Ave. studio and knocked on the door. Ditko answered in a dirty white t-shirt and pants that looked like they also needed a good wash. <b>[<i>Cool detail, Eric!]</i> </b>Although he knew Gary and didn't seem unhappy to see him, we were not exactly greeted hospitably <b>[<i>What is the correct amount of hospitality with which to greet two people--one of whom is a stranger</i>--<i>who turn up unannounced?</i>]</b></blockquote>
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Ditko somewhat carefully slid through the door without opening it widely, into the hallway, conspicuously not inviting us in. <b>[<i>Perhaps this was a hint?</i>]</b> I did my best to peek through the door and get a sense of his working space but couldn't see much. <b>[<i>This is gawking, and most people consider it rude.</i>]</b></blockquote>
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That said, Ditko was actually relatively friendly and despite not inviting us in, he proceeded to talk to us in the hallway for 90 minutes or more. <b>[<i>hmmmm</i>]</b> At some point, conversation turned to the Spider-Man film, which was raking in money at that time. Ditko seemed disinterested in the money - he was much more concerned with receiving credit for his (co-)creation, and clearly resented the victory laps that Stan Lee was taking in the media at the time. If I had one takeaway from the conversation, it's that he palpably hated Stan Lee. Much more than he liked money, despite clearly living very modestly.</blockquote>
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I remember Gary pressing Ditko on the nuances of his philosophy about this (insisting that Ditko should be making money off the film and not be content with a simple credit in the film.) <b>[<i>Is there perhaps a distinction to be made between a "philosophy" to be argued and a personal choice?</i>] </b>Groth and Ditko went back and forth about this for awhile, and at times Ditko seemed to genuinely enjoy having someone to spar with on an intellectual level, but eventually he became a bit agitated and asked us to leave as semi-politely as he could. <b><i>[...after 90 minutes of what sort of sounds like a condescending lecture to a 74-year-old man about his choices.</i>] </b></blockquote>
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It was a great conversation that I wish had been recorded, despite being one that I mostly tried to stay out of the way of and just soak in. Sadly, 16 years later, it's already fading from memory. RIP, Steve Ditko! You deserved to outlive Stan Lee."</blockquote>
For Eric Reynolds, this encounter was a once-in-a-lifetime meeting that he imagines should have been recorded for posterity. For Ditko, by every indication, it was an annoyance that happened all the time<i>. </i>Here's the thing: there's a fundamental difference between having respect for someone's work and being respectful towards them as a person. I don't want to single out Reynolds in that he's one of many, many people who seems incapable of making this distinction. They aren't necessarily bad people, but fandom is a form of blindness. It inspires a form of pathological self-involvement that can be dehumanizing to the people we wish to honor most. Take Brian Michael Bendis, who seems to think that Ditko should have found his own exploitation touching. Seriously, this is crazed:<br />
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A more enjoyable genre of Ditko anecdote (for me, anyway) is the people sharing their "<a href="https://twitter.com/fredvanlente/status/1015608631902048258" target="_blank">hate mail</a>"--i.e., feedback they requested and received. (I would pay 50 US dollars for a coffee table book of these letters.) This one from Fred Van Lente isn't a pure example, since the hate mail was actually solicited by <a href="https://amazingcavalieri.blogspot.com/2017/07/in-contd-appreciation-of-chester.html" target="_blank">Dave Sim </a>for some reason (lol), but anyway Van Lente <a href="https://twitter.com/fredvanlente/status/1015608631902048258" target="_blank">offered</a> it as an example of Ditko's "legendary prickliness." To wit:<br />
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"Sim had written me to say he enjoyed me and Ryan Dunlavey's Comic Book History of Comics. He had been corresponding with Ditko on an unrelated matter and somewhat puckishly said he had forwarded the Marvel origin issue on to him to see what he thought. Sim (and I) were both surprised when Ditko wrote him back write away, and Sim forwarded the reply along to me. This is it."</blockquote>
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"The assertion that it was a "personal fantasy" was a little puzzling since the part of the story was comprised of entirely of cited quotations by him in his later writings and anti-Marvel/Lee political cartoons. I mean, if it was a "personal fantasy," *he* was the person, you know what I'm saying?"</blockquote>
Yeah, actually, I know exactly what Van Lente is saying. He's saying that his appropriation of Ditko's words, used for his own purposes, somehow made more sense than Ditko's understanding of his own life, presented on his own terms. I guess I disagree.<br />
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<a href="https://twitter.com/chris_ryall/status/1015645145595695109" target="_blank">Here's</a> Chris Ryall with another "perplexing response" from Ditko that is in fact stunning in its simplicity:<br />
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Chris, allow me to translate this gnomic text: Ditko thought your comic fucking sucked. You know, he could have been nicer about it. But when you consider how much time Ditko put into reading and responding to piles of comics he ~inspired~, it seems more than fair. I don't find it outrageous that Ditko took no satisfaction in having inadvertently spawned a stack of comics he didn't care for. I have a harder time understanding the pride with which so many people have been sharing stories like this. My own feeling is that anyone who truly respected Ditko would have left him alone or, at the very least, shown some humility when he didn't respond to their overture.<br />
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I don't mean to glorify Ditko's personality (which I find, in turns, sad and endearing), his reclusive ways, or his Randian beliefs. But I do want to float an idea I've been thinking about with regard to a different comics story: <b>The "comics community" as it's championed in the broadest sense has never really been about the people. It celebrates the work</b>. All too often it celebrates the work at the artist's expense. Ditko was exploited by Stan Lee and Marvel Comics, and as a reward he got to spend the rest of his life vetting thousands of tiny (often well meaning) acts of exploitation from the people who admired him. I don't wish to present this as a tragedy. Understand it was a failing.<br />
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Given the way that Ditko was treated by Marvel and, later, other industry players, it seems to me an extraordinary act of generosity that he continued to make comics at all, much less until the end of his long life. It's a shame that it was never widely regarded as enough. The salient question is: <i>What would have been?</i>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-92117717929810881162018-06-15T22:47:00.000-05:002018-06-15T22:47:03.875-05:00unpopular opinionsOccasionally on social media there will be a thing where people confess their "unpopular opinions." A true coward's meme, the UOs is where people unload takes that they've privately long believed to be clever, but are too boring for normal people to talk about. As it happens I have one of the last opinions on earth that is truly out of step with every corner of society: I hate Mr. Rogers.<br />
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I hate Mr. Rogers now, I hated him when he was alive, and I hated him most of all when I was an actual child. Fucking haaaaate. Not just him, but also his hateful slippers, his nightmare cast of puppets (especially that ruddy faced one, not to be too unhinged but that puppet was seriously a <i>cunt</i>), hate his slow way of talking, his whole condescending way of being.<br />
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I always secretly took this to be one of the most fundamental things about my personality, and possibly the key to everything that's wrong with me, but recently my mom revealed that it was a simple case of modeling. "Oh, I think you got that from me," she said. "That simpering tone of his, I honestly couldn't stand it." My childhood role model was the Cookie Monster, which was maybe a more pure antecedent. I'm still living his values to this day.<br />
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I've been waiting my entire life to confess this unpopular opinion, but after this year, which seems to be the Mr. Rogers centennial or something (?), I figured I'd have to take it to the grave. Well anyway I guess tonight's my night because I'm deeply, unreasonably, characteristically irritated by the take that Rob Rogers being fired from the Pittsburgh <i>Whatever</i> is some grave affront to democracy. Oh, you're talking about the guy who drew this?<br />
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I honestly can't believe I have to say this: <i>This is a terrible cartoon. </i>TERRIBLE. Terrible on every conceivable level on which a piece of "art" can be bad. Terrible even for the (almost uniformly) shitty genre of political cartooning, which is itself inconceivably terrible. I'm not even cherrypicking! Literally every spiked cartoon of this guy's I've seen is this degree of bad. Of course they're running them all at the Nib, lol. Let freedom ring.<br />
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It's honestly amazing to me that people care about this? Rob Rogers and Ted Rall? American heroes, the first line of the First Amendment in the good old U.S.A.?<br />
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*<i>holds up that one cunt-faced puppet</i>* These people are idiots, and they are actively making us all dumber. *<i>flaps her horrifying toothless mouth for emphasis*</i> GET A GRIPUnknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-516651210522123332018-06-09T00:59:00.000-05:002018-06-09T01:15:51.980-05:00tonight I'm thinking about anthony bourdainHeavy week's going out heavy. I don't know if you read <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/us/children-immigration-borders-family-separation.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fus&action=click&contentCollection=us&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=7&pgtype=sectionfront" target="_blank">this</a>. My nephew's fourth birthday is next week, so a year younger than the boy in the story. I've been making him this little book about his life. Going through pictures. Kids are unhinged narcissists like everyone else but they don't have to hide it yet, so I know he's going to love it. His father's been out of town these last two weeks; just knowing the magnitude of this (very real) anxiety and sadness his father's absence for a *business trip* has introduced into his life gives me some perspective on what that article is talking about. My brother-in-law has sent him a postcard every day he's been gone. My sister put the first one in his carseat for him to find, texted me about how solemn he became when she told him what it was. "It looks very special," he said, and clutched it to his fucking chest. He's not quite as maudlin as me yet but he's getting there. I have full faith I'll have him listening to one of those Whole Foods muzak kids' version of the Cure's oeuvre by age five at the absolute latest. Anyway reading the NYT thing I feel connected to the little boy in the story in this distant muted distinctly American way. Reading it I feel things that are bigger than me, things I can't understand but sort of make me want to die, and there are times I don't know where to put it or a constructive outlet to channel it into or know what number to call and <i>ask for the manager</i> because that's how my kind handle these things.<br />
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I was reading Ronan Farrow's new book these last few days, about the death of diplomacy in American government. I guess I knew a lot of it already but he's a writer, like a writer-writer, and seeing it all laid out in this way that was so stark was also something. I recommend it. At the center of it were these two old-school diplomats, including a woman I'd never heard of who was the last American with a human heart in Pakistan. She was prosecuted by the government for espionage for stuff like having dinner with Pakistanis, because we're in a time and place and point in the War on Terror where there's no longer a framework to recognize that as a thing that someone who works for the Foreign Service might wish to do. Richard Holbrooke worked so hard to get Obama's administration to turn away from literal warlords committing unspeakable atrocities in the name of fighting the Taliban to maybe get some money to some fucking farmers that his actual heart burst in his chest. That's how hard he cared about Afghanistan. You know, he died and that was that.<br />
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So anyway that's been the week in my brain leading up to today, to Bourdain. One of our last Great Diplomats. I say that with absolutely no exaggeration. Bourdain was also someone who meant something to me on more of a personal level, not because I knew him but because I could see myself in him. He was someone else who lived more than one life and it's wild when you see someone else who got away with it, who's walking around and talking about it all in the right way, a piece of your story expressed through this person who has--who <i>had</i>--a much, much better personality. Bourdain didn't have that repulsive self-glorifying tendency of every writer I ever admired growing up. I always thought that was because before he was ever a Writer, he had an actual job. He had this attitude of humility (not as a celebrity, but as a person in the world) that I found relatable. I hope I have it too.<br />
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In my twenties I was in New York for a month; it rained the whole fucking time but a highlight was a visit from my friend Kevin and the night we went to Les Halles. I think Bourdain had already moved on by that point, but it was just this emotionally charged thing of visiting this place that had been so important in the life of someone we both idolized. Kevin and I grew up in this dumb town, both people who were super interested in humor and food in a place where there wasn't a lot of interest in those things. Bourdain was an international phenomenon from the beginning I guess, but these were still the early days of internet, where you felt like you were really finding something, like it was yours.<br />
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By total fluke I came across an incredible story about Bourdain yesterday, not even 24 hours before he died. This is Ben Rhodes, the big Obama guy who has a new memoir that I was skimming for work.<br />
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I feel just as self-conscious as everyone else who's been talking about this today...but I'm grateful to have come across it. I have a feeling, knowing Bourdain got to hear that. It's a lesson too, that you can mean something like that in someone else's life and not even know it. I'm adding it to my list of things to think about when I feel these things that are bigger than me. Pulling down his books from my shelves and maybe cook myself a steak. It's a hard world, and Bourdain's gift was never letting us lose sight of that, even as he offered it all up like a jewel.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-53918620735472341372018-04-12T17:04:00.000-05:002018-04-12T17:46:41.781-05:00disgruntled comics linksWho doesn't love some serious ass after-school special comics links? Literally everyone, including me, you say? <i>Sounds like we're in my wheelhouse</i>. Let's jump right in.<br />
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<b><u>1. Brandon Graham has been accused of misconduct</u></b><br />
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If you're reading this, I have to imagine you're aware that cartoonist/critic Carta Monir recently <a href="https://twitter.com/CartaMonir/status/983395037357723650" target="_blank">tweeted a warning</a> to women, and especially trans women, about her fellow comics maker Brandon Graham. I'm going to (try to) set aside my own take in the service of some more general observations and questions. <i>Is that the right choice?</i> is one question, and though I've thought on it the answer remains an immutable <i>I don't know</i>.<br />
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I think people tend to stop at <i>I don't know</i>, when maybe that's the place you have to begin.</div>
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An indisputable fact is that Carta's tweet made some information that had been in a whisper network more explicit. In this the truth or falsity of the whispers' content is beside the point; this is only to say the content existed. (I know because I heard it from people who aren't Carta long before this ever happened.) In this, Brandon Graham is not especially unusual; I've heard whispers about plenty of other people, too, and obviously the ones I've heard represent only a small fraction of all the whispers there are. It's just this thick undercurrent of shit that most people, most of the time, prefer to imagine isn't there. I think a lesson the Aziz Ansari scandal imparted was that, to some degree, a lot of people regard sexual misconduct that's not straight-up nightmare rape as distasteful--a matter that polite society has no place discussing. Like it's something that should be worked out behind closed doors. If Me Too is a reckoning, it's only the tip of the iceberg in that most of these discussions remain underground. Personally? I feel nothing but gratitude any time some piece of information makes its way to me, even if I'm unlikely to need it, but it comes with a heaviness - a sense of responsibility that is neither logical nor actionable, beyond a point. So there's both horror and relief in understanding I'll never hear most of it.<br />
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What does it mean, just in general, to make a whisper network public (or at least less private)? That's a whole fraught thing, as the <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/moira-donegan-i-started-the-media-men-list.html" target="_blank">Media Men List</a> made clear. We have imperfect tools in this imperfect world, and there are drawbacks. (Did you see the Comics Men List? It was...not good.) Again, zooming out from the specific content of Carta's tweet, and any consideration of its veracity - that tweet was objectively more responsible than an accusation couched in an anonymous list. It was, explicitly, a warning, even if it was a vague one. Now, you can also choose to view the content of her tweet as some sort of Brandon Graham takedown, but there is a larger sense in which publicizing a whisper network (to whatever degree that's even possible) takes the onus off women to keep each other safe by transfering these difficult and clandestine and sometimes personal conversations that usually happen amongst ourselves as opportunity allows into a more public forum. It is a sad and futile thing, a whisper network--a patch that attempts to address a problem that's on our minds, but largely out of our hands. Going public with a piece of information helps normalize discussions about violated boundaries, about harassment, assault. Rape. These things are happening <i>all the time</i>, yet are very hard to talk about<i> </i>under the best of circumstances. It's that much more difficult when they brush up against your livelihood.<br />
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Comics as a "community" is never even going to <i>begin</i> talking about accountability for predators if we can't find some way to broach these conversations. "What is okay, and what is not okay?" is (at least at this point) a more useful question than "What, exactly, did Brandon Graham do?" Comics outlets that gleefully opined on 2dcloud's issues earlier this year aren't going to touch this story with a 10-ft pole, dismissing it as gossip or in-fighting, but of course that's not quite what whisper networks are. At what point would a comics site deign to acknowledge that this semi-public whisper exists, much less take a side? Probably only if Brandon ends up thoroughly disgraced, and maybe not even then. But listen: it shouldn't wait. These conversations are difficult and uncertain and risky, and women have been shouldering all of that, forever. For any man who's been accused, specific consequences--whether they're taken by an employer, a conference, a publisher, a website, whatever--are one thing, but I'm not sure that we'll ever get around to talking about the circumstances under which those consequences are even on the table if we can't first find a space, however uncertain, where we stop regarding this as holding a referendum on one man and start making room for women (for anyone, actually) to air grievances without being treated like pariahs. Discussing consequences doesn't always have to be the end goal, because frankly that's not always appropriate. And even when it is, it is in some ways secondary. Punitive measures can only go so far as a deterrent; a much more effective deterrent, to my mind, is to create a cultural climate in which it's more difficult for predators to quietly do their thing. It's like putting a bell on a cat.<br />
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Meanwhile, people will whisper, whether it's about Brandon or someone else, because that's what they've got. Also, they will watch. Carta's tweet is a canary in the coal mine for whisperers of all stripes. Whisperers are watching Brandon Graham, who at one point said he would invite more specific accusations. That's certainly possible, though it might be easier said than done; he has <a href="https://amazingcavalieri.blogspot.com/2017/03/comics-links-are-back.html" target="_blank">reacted with some hostility</a> to light criticism of his work in the past, which was a far less personal matter. The whisperers are watching Brandon's circle--the people he knows and the fans who are speaking up for him--who, thus far, have been more outspoken and defensive and, in some cases, aggressive than he himself has been. (That's how comics works, as a rule; cf. Chris Sims.) And maybe most of all they're watching Carta, who (so far as I can tell) has received way more blowback and harassment with regard to this than Brandon has, or will. These are real individuals in a specific situation, and I don't want to minimize that - but they are also emblematic. You could sub in other actors for Brandon or for Carta and I think events would unfold in a similar (if not precisely the same) manner.<br />
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All to say that I'll wager that, in watching all this, the whisperers are feeling somewhat discouraged. Reader...consider the possibility they're watching <i>you</i>.<br />
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<b><u>2. A digression</u></b><br />
This isn't a link, but indulge me for a minute:<br />
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It was my birthday last week, one of the weird ones. One of my oldest friends had their own weird bday exactly one week prior, so we decided to go somewhere to commiserate. Much of our time involved sitting or floating in warm water and not looking at phones, which was predictably good. (This level of activity is about all I'm capable of now, as an Old.) There was a pool, I guess it had a lot of salt in it or something, so it gave you this uncanny buoyancy. I honestly can't think of anything I'd rather do than float around like a corpse all day. That's the sort of mood I've been in this year.<br />
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Anyway my friend and I would corpse-float for these long periods of time, and when we'd reconvene, they'd always been thinking these really deep thoughts about the future, reflecting on this milestone, whereas I was just like...I really thought that by this age I'd be better at putting on eyeshadow. Frankly I just pictured myself as being better at makeup by now; that had seemed to me a thing that would come with time. I have a natural shallowness that I try not to worry about too much, or maybe I just don't always care about the same things that other people tend to care about. I don't know. But anyway what with the world being the way it is lately, this shitty birthday, and just a difficult year, personally, <i>even I</i> have had to give some level of thought to the limited time we have in this life, and whether or not the things I'm doing make me happy. Which is a very roundabout way of saying that I'm increasingly unsure that comics is one of those things. This isn't my 'fuck it, I quit' moment. Just like...I don't feel too good about it lately.<br />
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Part of that's discussing things like in item #1 (bit of a downer), but some of it's more personal. I like reading about comics, I like talking about comics, writing about comics, all of it. But a part I don't enjoy so much is some of the baggage that comes with it, some of the people we keep around, and how bad we are at sticking up for each other. Sometimes I hesitate to talk about small things anywhere near a conversation about bigger things because that's not a shift in gears that people seem to understand, but to me these problems have always felt to some degree related. I think some folks have trouble trusting that anyone has a sense of proportionality, and so they conclude we can't discuss anything or anyone without sending them to comics jail or throwing books on the comics bonfire. They worry these discussions can't have nuance, which might be because they themselves are incapable of nuance. This is a working theory.<br />
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Anyway I don't have some explosive story, or any one anecdote that encapsulates this feeling. Just a vague wish that I could put whatever I'm going to put out into the world without getting back something weird and upsetting, such as (for ex) a long public "debate" on my t<strike>houghts on Crumb</strike> fuckability run by an industry professional who looks like this:<br />
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Whatever. I got a lot of shit for implying that Jeffrey Dahmer was ugly <a href="https://amazingcavalieri.blogspot.com/2018/02/lets-fix-your-promotional-photos.html" target="_blank">that one time</a> so I should really shut my cruel bitch bullying mouth. But I don't need to solicit anyone else's feedback to conclude from this man's facial hair alone that he's a loser, a nitwit, and a probable virgin who at some point in his life has studied the art of magic. I guess my rule is sort of like that thing they say about jobs, relationships, and apartments in New York--pick two, but you're not getting three. I ain't even counting that shirt.<br />
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I'm trying out a new policy: if you see something, say something. I'm done with these pieces of shit. If an industry person treats you in this manner, however petty it may be, I urge you to call them out on it, meanly. And if you can't - I'm your Huckleberry.<br />
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<u><b><a href="http://www.tcj.com/on-hating-cathy/" target="_blank">3. Juliet Kahn on Cathy comics </a></b></u><br />
I'm behind on my comics reading lately, but someone linked to Juliet's piece at the Comics Journal(!) and it's awfully good. Juliet's so sharp. While I was reading I kept thinking about this quote from Lynda Barry, who is not a fan of Cathy comics:<br />
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Sort of a throwaway comment but there's a lot going on. So many levels of "bad feminism" (on both sides, Lynda and Cathy), plus some stuff about sincerity and autobio and how we relate to comics, as readers. You know, does real-Cathy have the right to draw zaftig-Cathy is a boring topic. But there's something that rang true to me about Lynda implying that comic is hollow and even opportunistic.<br />
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I don't remember having any strong feelings about Cathy growing up. To me it didn't feel relatable at all, just sort of more what the world was selling? Even as a child I understood that Cathy wasn't a person you wanted to be, and that wasn't just what the world was telling me; it was what Cathy was telling me. I feel like the argument that people hate Cathy because sexism speaks to me more than, like, the idea that Cathy is somehow a feminist comic. But here's a thing I know: nothing ever seems sadder and more repulsive than a brand of feminism that isn't close enough to your own. So...it probably is a feminist comic? Ack!<br />
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<b><u>4. The NYT has hired some comics critics </u></b><br />
Some personal news: the New York Times doesn't seem to be hiring people who write "suck my dick" in their comic book reviews, so I didn't make the cut for America's Top Comics Critic. I just assume I was being considered? Odds are at least one of the 20 people who read my hobby blog was part of the Gray Lady's hiring team, but of course you never know. In any case <a href="http://www.comicsbeat.com/ny-times-book-review-adds-graphic-novel-column-by-hillary-chute-and-ed-park/" target="_blank">the people who've been hired</a> are Hillary Chute, who is mostly an academic, and Ed Park, whose work I don't know at all.<br />
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Is Hillary Chute a critic? I don't know. She's a first-class academic--truly interesting and innovative. My knowledge of her work for lay people is mostly her interviews with cartoonists (a different skill) and a couple pages of that new book of hers (which honestly looked sort of bad to me). I think whether or not she'll be good at this kind of writing could go either way, and I sort of don't care. I'm not really the person that kind of review is written for. What I *do* care about is how much say that Chute has in what's becoming comics canon. This is a thing I talked to her about, oh, maybe five years ago when I interviewed her about her work for a mainstream outlet. (She dodged the question, if you're wondering.) I think...I think no one should have that much say in the comics that people are reading now, and also 100 years from now. I think that's a responsibility she doesn't take very seriously, or at least didn't when I talked to her about it. I think her tastes are too narrow - but that is to some degree an academic thing more than a Hillary Chute thing.<br />
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Ed Park...from his bio he sounds to me like more of an actual critic. I know he's been associated with The Believer, so I assume (perhaps incorrectly) (...but I really don't think so) that his sensibility will be very similar to Hillary's. I saw someone praising the NYT for hiring a woman and a person of color, and you know, that's swell, but diversity of perspectives isn't only about the identity of the people who have them. I think it's also about what they're looking at.<br />
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<b><u>5. COPRA Round 5 is here</u></b><br />
Ending on a high: COPRA Round 5. I <a href="https://twitter.com/shallowbrigade/status/984180787854630914" target="_blank">spent some time yesterday</a> flipping through the collections just to appreciate some of the things that comic does best, an activity I'd recommend. I've fallen down on the job for my Chris Ware roundtables, which I organized and then promptly got too busy to actually run. (If you were one of the participants, please know how sorry I am about this!) I think at this point I'll just do the Ware posts myself, but maybe a COPRA roundtable someday? Dare to dream.<br />
<span style="background-color: #bd081c; background-position: 3px 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; background-size: 14px 14px; border-bottom-left-radius: 2px; border-bottom-right-radius: 2px; border-top-left-radius: 2px; border-top-right-radius: 2px; border: none; color: white; cursor: pointer; display: none; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; left: 240px; line-height: 20px; opacity: 1; padding: 0px 4px 0px 0px; position: absolute; text-align: center; text-indent: 20px; top: 553px; width: auto; z-index: 8675309;">Save</span><span style="background-color: #bd081c; background-position: 3px 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; background-size: 14px 14px; border-bottom-left-radius: 2px; border-bottom-right-radius: 2px; border-top-left-radius: 2px; border-top-right-radius: 2px; border: none; color: white; cursor: pointer; display: none; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; left: 240px; line-height: 20px; opacity: 1; padding: 0px 4px 0px 0px; position: absolute; text-align: center; text-indent: 20px; top: 553px; width: auto; z-index: 8675309;">Save</span><span style="background-color: #bd081c; background-position: 3px 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; background-size: 14px 14px; border-bottom-left-radius: 2px; border-bottom-right-radius: 2px; border-top-left-radius: 2px; border-top-right-radius: 2px; border: none; color: white; cursor: pointer; display: none; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20px; opacity: 1; padding: 0px 4px 0px 0px; position: absolute; text-align: center; text-indent: 20px; width: auto; z-index: 8675309;">Save</span><span style="background-color: #bd081c; background-position: 3px 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; background-size: 14px 14px; border-bottom-left-radius: 2px; border-bottom-right-radius: 2px; border-top-left-radius: 2px; border-top-right-radius: 2px; border: none; color: white; cursor: pointer; display: none; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20px; opacity: 1; padding: 0px 4px 0px 0px; position: absolute; text-align: center; text-indent: 20px; width: auto; z-index: 8675309;">Save</span><span style="background-color: #bd081c; background-position: 3px 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; background-size: 14px 14px; border-bottom-left-radius: 2px; border-bottom-right-radius: 2px; border-top-left-radius: 2px; border-top-right-radius: 2px; border: none; color: white; cursor: pointer; display: none; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20px; opacity: 1; padding: 0px 4px 0px 0px; position: absolute; text-align: center; text-indent: 20px; width: auto; z-index: 8675309;">Save</span><span style="background-color: #bd081c; background-position: 3px 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; background-size: 14px 14px; border-bottom-left-radius: 2px; border-bottom-right-radius: 2px; border-top-left-radius: 2px; border-top-right-radius: 2px; border: none; color: white; cursor: pointer; display: none; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20px; opacity: 1; padding: 0px 4px 0px 0px; position: absolute; text-align: center; text-indent: 20px; width: auto; z-index: 8675309;">Save</span><span style="background-color: #bd081c; background-position: 3px 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; background-size: 14px 14px; border-bottom-left-radius: 2px; border-bottom-right-radius: 2px; border-top-left-radius: 2px; border-top-right-radius: 2px; border: none; color: white; cursor: pointer; display: none; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20px; opacity: 1; padding: 0px 4px 0px 0px; position: absolute; text-align: center; text-indent: 20px; width: auto; z-index: 8675309;">Save</span><span style="background-color: #bd081c; background-position: 3px 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; background-size: 14px 14px; border-bottom-left-radius: 2px; border-bottom-right-radius: 2px; border-top-left-radius: 2px; border-top-right-radius: 2px; border: none; color: white; cursor: pointer; display: none; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20px; opacity: 1; padding: 0px 4px 0px 0px; position: absolute; text-align: center; text-indent: 20px; width: auto; z-index: 8675309;">Save</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #bd081c; background-position: 3px 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; background-size: 14px 14px; border-bottom-left-radius: 2px; border-bottom-right-radius: 2px; border-top-left-radius: 2px; border-top-right-radius: 2px; border: none; color: white; cursor: pointer; display: none; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; left: 240px; line-height: 20px; opacity: 1; padding: 0px 4px 0px 0px; position: absolute; text-align: center; text-indent: 20px; top: 2180px; width: auto; z-index: 8675309;">Save</span><span style="background-color: #bd081c; background-position: 3px 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; background-size: 14px 14px; border-bottom-left-radius: 2px; border-bottom-right-radius: 2px; border-top-left-radius: 2px; border-top-right-radius: 2px; border: none; color: white; cursor: pointer; display: none; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; left: 240px; line-height: 20px; opacity: 1; padding: 0px 4px 0px 0px; position: absolute; text-align: center; text-indent: 20px; top: 2180px; width: auto; z-index: 8675309;">Save</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-75858432477788790372018-03-15T14:35:00.000-05:002018-03-15T19:48:15.481-05:00slasher, a comic by charles forsman<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">Last weekend I gave myself over to an unwholesome taste I rarely indulge and can’t quite
recommend: I read a comic I thought I’d hate because I knew I’d take pleasure
in trashing it. I guess some gals—well, at least the protagonist of Charles
Forsman’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Slasher</i>—are pedophiliac
serial killers who get their rocks off at the sight of “knife play,” while girls like me are content to sit on a couch and quietly explore the depths of
their contempt. One difference to note is that I was born this way, whereas <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Slasher</i>’s Christine Sobotka, in her
latex suit and gimp mask, is the product of one man’s imagination. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW6JPIBhL5Ro1BBBkP_bxmpHzzvdzb2dfSvToSa_C-WlzMqmObXI0XaDtmFnUf7o2BrG-Nvjq2NeBCd2KJRitJBG4NMrOIF8Xfh70nXtCvdoYGVO3mNIqY6rIg1Q0GIz67nPrivBnHOsA/s1600/Slasher5.cvr_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1035" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW6JPIBhL5Ro1BBBkP_bxmpHzzvdzb2dfSvToSa_C-WlzMqmObXI0XaDtmFnUf7o2BrG-Nvjq2NeBCd2KJRitJBG4NMrOIF8Xfh70nXtCvdoYGVO3mNIqY6rIg1Q0GIz67nPrivBnHOsA/s320/Slasher5.cvr_.jpg" width="206" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">“Jesus,
why?” is one question that might be asked of a comic book that consists of a
25-year-old woman masturbating her way through a murder spree. Over at the
Comics Journal, Leonard Pierce</span><span lang="EN"><a href="http://www.tcj.com/reviews/slasher/"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%; text-decoration: none;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.tcj.com/reviews/slasher/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">entertained it</span></a></span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;"> with less than half a heart. “She [<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Slasher</i>’s protagonist] can only get off sexually at the sight of
blood,” he writes. “Why? It’s not really important.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">Oh,
okay! He continues:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">“The quest for an irreducible meaning behind mass violence
is, in life, largely futile and easily confused effort, and in art, almost
never more than a narrative crutch. Forsman wisely doesn’t spend more than a
token line or two on the origin of her mania, instead plunging us directly into
its expanding consequences.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">Pierce imbues the cartoonist’s dubious narrative choices with the sort of
sweeping philosophical import one might find in the work of Cormac
McCarthy; failing to find fault with the idea of a woman who takes sexual pleasure in her own
evisceration, Pierce concludes that here’s a comic that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">really makes u think</i>. Mmm, does it, though? Because when I ask <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">why</i> this young woman finds sexual
satisfaction in a 14-year-old boy drawing a knife across his concave chest,
say, or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">why</i> she doesn’t mind when
some other pervert saws off her hand, my spirit isn’t quite so equivocal. In fact, I
can say with some confidence that the answer to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Why is Charles Forsman’s protagonist turned on by these unspeakable
things? </i>is: because the cartoonist decided to make her that way. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">To
catfish is to pretend to be something you’re not to lure people in - a lie told
to another person in service of your own satisfaction. Catfishing is central to
the plot of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Slasher</i>, but it is also,
if you think about it, part of the packaging of Post-Dumb comics, the genre to
which this comic book belongs. The Post-Dumbs,</span><span lang="EN"><a href="https://amazingcavalieri.blogspot.com/2017/03/all-time-comics-crime-destroyer-1.html"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%; text-decoration: none;"> </span></a><a href="https://amazingcavalieri.blogspot.com/2017/03/all-time-comics-crime-destroyer-1.html" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">you may recall</span></a></span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">, are artists like Johnny Ryan and
Benjamin Marra whose shtick is to take loaded, politically incorrect imagery
and empty it of meaning. These artists play with plausible deniability, mostly
through the haphazard deployment of irony, a recognizable aesthetic, and a modern
point of view, but at the end of the day they’re trafficking in old
stereotypes. Scratch beneath the surface and you’ll find there’s nothing there.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">Forsman
is a millennial who has been to comics college, so <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Slasher</i> is the Post-Dumb genre with a socially aware twist: he
casts the gender of his serial killer against expectation.</span><span lang="EN"><a href="https://thenib.com/the-sponsor-12e183e43ef0"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%; text-decoration: none;"> </span></a><a href="https://thenib.com/the-sponsor-12e183e43ef0" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">James Sturm</span></a></span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;"> is proud, I’m sure, but much like “The Sponsor,” the
problem here is that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Slasher</i>’s gender
commentary can’t quite obscure its misogynistic attitude. The feminist swell I’m
meant to feel when Forsman shows me Christine’s sleazy boss hitting on her
isn’t enough to make me overlook the cartoonist’s stereotypical representations
of (just for instance) mothers as overbearing and mentally unstable. Some
images, like an unhinged woman giving herself an empowering haircut in a
bathroom mirror, will be familiar to readers from the language of cinema.
Others, like a lady in a gimp mask chowing down on a fistful of raw ground beef
in the supermarket, are newer, if somehow more tired. The effect, either way,
is the same.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">Roughly
a thousand years ago I read a book of writing advice by Stephen King. One of
the exercises he recommended (at least as I remember it) was to write a short
story about a cat burglar who was...wait for it...a woman. Wild and crazy
stuff. That’s basically the plot of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Slasher</i>,
except with violent perverts. Christine Sobotka is a seemingly
mild-mannered data entry clerk who’s secretly in love with Chester Brown’s
grandchild, who she met <s>via fax</s> on the Internet. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUkeFA0tvZKOX0OgU6EG_h1p7aXK1mPOmbra5hbkrYcmAqZrQU22qlMm-srpmuIUNrc7gJxWJXP6YxiY8wvy9TIauSR7BnFv5V1PQbhimbm1ScRFIwqIgOvcKE42HEk4c4ils5awWeqnE/s1600/digital-image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1288" data-original-width="1600" height="321" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUkeFA0tvZKOX0OgU6EG_h1p7aXK1mPOmbra5hbkrYcmAqZrQU22qlMm-srpmuIUNrc7gJxWJXP6YxiY8wvy9TIauSR7BnFv5V1PQbhimbm1ScRFIwqIgOvcKE42HEk4c4ils5awWeqnE/s400/digital-image.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">Her
father dies, so she decides to start doing sex murder? Then a road trip to
see Chester Brown Jr. Jr. doesn’t quite go as planned. Gosh, I really don’t want
to spoil things for you, but hopefully you’re getting the sense that this is
not so much a story that hangs together as an undercooked thought experiment. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">As
with all Dumbs and Post-Dumbs, Forsman exhibits a certain level of craft and
competence. He can draw a hell of a cover.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf3CpWKN8PO5QnGEfUWsdNa4D55mBRuwNU7y57yl2Jeulrid-qMs3wKf7C5V7vB5iMragdmA8MEJ-1kEH_8I5lM45JU8EYcHrHMcXg3FGtQrWxmT2lHxg1LJxy3of4aHEQFvwEeBQD4mM/s1600/Slasher4-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1556" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjf3CpWKN8PO5QnGEfUWsdNa4D55mBRuwNU7y57yl2Jeulrid-qMs3wKf7C5V7vB5iMragdmA8MEJ-1kEH_8I5lM45JU8EYcHrHMcXg3FGtQrWxmT2lHxg1LJxy3of4aHEQFvwEeBQD4mM/s320/Slasher4-2.jpg" width="205" /></a></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">He’s
more or less proficient at the level of the sentence, of the panel, of the
page. Where he struggles in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Slasher</i>
is in fleshing out the idea of a nightmare person necrophilia comic beyond a
shallow elevator pitch. (Hey, does Bret Easton Ellis meets Juno sound good to
you? I guess it sounded good to Netflix.) There is often something quite
commercial about “edgy” work, is there not? I believe the line between <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">offensive</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">appealing</i> is more porous than these men care to admit. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">Post-Dumb
comics are part of the legacy of Robert Crumb (the ur-Dumb, if you will), who’s
celebrated for his use of politically incorrect imagery. The key difference
between Dumb and Post-Dumb is that with Crumb, that imagery meant <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">something</i>, even if it meant different
things to different eyes. Now we have post-race racism instead of regular racism, post-gender sexism instead of plain misogyny, so on/so forth. I was pondering this lineage a few nights ago as I
was writing</span><span lang="EN"><a href="https://twitter.com/shallowbrigade/status/971934866848796673"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%; text-decoration: none;"> </span></a><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;"><a href="https://twitter.com/shallowbrigade/status/971934866848796673" target="_blank">a thread venting about old Crumb</a></span></span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">,
when I noticed something interesting: One of the authors of an old AV Club</span><span lang="EN"><a href="https://www.avclub.com/drawing-board-confessional-22-unflattering-moments-fro-1798215720"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%; text-decoration: none;"> </span></a><a href="https://www.avclub.com/drawing-board-confessional-22-unflattering-moments-fro-1798215720" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">piece</span></a></span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;"> that named a panel in which Crumb raped a woman as its #1 “unflattering moment from autobiographical comics” was Leonard Pierce, the same critic who gave <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Slasher</i> that glowing review.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">Which
comics artists do we - the “comics community” - interrogate, and which ones get
a pass? I found myself thinking about Pierce’s praise for how <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Slasher</i> challenges its audience to “look
at a lot of our assumptions about the nature of violence in both life and art”
(lol), and also Tucker Stone’s more compelling, if somewhat antagonistic,</span><span lang="EN"><a href="http://www.tcj.com/i-watch-for-patterns-an-interview-with-ales-kot/"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%; text-decoration: none;"> </span></a><a href="http://www.tcj.com/i-watch-for-patterns-an-interview-with-ales-kot/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">interview with Aleš Kot</span></a></span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">,
which hit on many of the same topics in a different register. I don’t wish to
say those pieces fail to attend to the issues at hand so much as that,
taken together, they express a larger cultural force, a skewed perspective we
might endeavor to correct. The ur-Dumb set a double standard in which a
provocative indie comic, no matter how incoherent or appalling an expression of
the id, is presumed to have worth and intellectual integrity, whereas anything with mass
market spit-and-shine is automatically an object of suspicion. Too often there's something fundamentally dishonest about the way in which violence against women in indie comics is drawn and discussed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">But here I’ll admit to one of my own limitations: sometimes it’s hard to tell the
difference between finally seeing into the matrix and viewing everything
through the lens of my own irritation. It was the possibility that I was
mistaken about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Slasher </i>- maybe even more so
than the prospect of a delicious hate read - that convinced me to give it a
shot. After all, Forsman’s Revenger series is published by Bergen Street Comics
Press, home to Michel Fiffe’s Copra trade paperbacks, one of this world’s few
perfect things. Plus, of course, Forsman recently became a mainstream success,
with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The End of the Fucking World</i>
having broken the salon barrier (meaning the woman who cuts my hair enthusiastically recommended
it). I was curious.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">Alas,
there was no need to look past my assumptions, which were met and exceeded; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Slasher</i> is just another exercise in
empty titillation from a bad boy with a brand (albeit a brand that’s
more capacious and flexible than most). Like its Post-Dumb brethren, Forsman’s
comic falls somewhere between aimless, listless satire and absolutely
thoughtless entertainment, a combination doomed to fail. If we’re digging for
meaning—that pesky <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">why</i>—the Post-Dumb
genre is like a joke that’s not a joke in that it expresses something true
without the courage of conviction. I find it lazy, despicable, and bloodless.
Writing this post, I’m reminded of the time I taught a writing class, where
sometimes I wondered if I spent more time commenting on papers than the
students had spent writing the papers themselves. In my fantasy, in lieu of
this review, I’m handing Charles Forsman a copy of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Slasher </i>with a single comment scrawled in red pen: Suck my dick.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 13.5pt; line-height: 115%;">No
offense, gentle reader. “No offense.” </span><span lang="EN"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-84065666500630196552018-03-08T17:15:00.000-06:002018-03-08T17:16:21.891-06:00now trending: rapscallions' sad fantasiesHere's a thing I truly believe: it's not cool to make fun of other people's sex stuff. Like... of all the losers on the internet, is there any sadder demographic than would-be Chapo middle school alphas whose bon mots are<i> </i>always<i> </i>about how Arthur Chu isn't doing it correctly, or enough? This type of teasing is transparently insecure and deeply unattractive. We're all just out here trying to live.<br />
<br />
That being said, Tim Kreider writing a New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/style/modern-love-valentines-day-acted-like-strangers.html" target="_blank">column on roleplaying</a> after being in a romantic relationship for three weeks has got to be the saddest shit I've ever seen:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9xuhrnHe25fksK6da4F09_wsGNluuzuzbEgCs5JkhhBFlt4kUv7kCjKCWXKnKy7EytbswqRrxOvFbyk9GELRn37fMdUi-VyLHwTU9R7hDx9nl7sPuAGZ7CYXZaLG14X1JxikeV9eftvE/s1600/Screen+Shot+2018-03-08+at+10.46.57+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="388" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9xuhrnHe25fksK6da4F09_wsGNluuzuzbEgCs5JkhhBFlt4kUv7kCjKCWXKnKy7EytbswqRrxOvFbyk9GELRn37fMdUi-VyLHwTU9R7hDx9nl7sPuAGZ7CYXZaLG14X1JxikeV9eftvE/s320/Screen+Shot+2018-03-08+at+10.46.57+AM.png" width="248" /></a></div>
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My, how quickly things can change. For example, in the space of just two paragraphs, I found that nigh on a decade's worth of creepy stranger crushing on Tim Kreider had transformed into a sort of uncomfortable pity. (He's devastated, I'm sure.) Immediately, it got worse: <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHOO_hBetyJNKFmTwFhFTj022iweWmjyWKPpS-6IFFHJaQuZg5H7ozvomwDtYYBbP07Y-lCpV6II9bavrQ_yLA4e8ejIzxxDi7Cw9vv-6q9OgcCc3kL4MlzkQs9NT_x48PAO6eCV7EqZw/s1600/Screen+Shot+2018-03-08+at+11.00.48+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="365" data-original-width="672" height="217" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjHOO_hBetyJNKFmTwFhFTj022iweWmjyWKPpS-6IFFHJaQuZg5H7ozvomwDtYYBbP07Y-lCpV6II9bavrQ_yLA4e8ejIzxxDi7Cw9vv-6q9OgcCc3kL4MlzkQs9NT_x48PAO6eCV7EqZw/s400/Screen+Shot+2018-03-08+at+11.00.48+AM.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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Oh no. Somehow Tim Kreider's role-playing scenario involving Nabokov is more horrifying than every sad horny detail that preceded it. But, hey, I don't want to leave you hanging. I know what you're wondering. Did Kreider fuck?<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihWT3wBeI8cXrdb-SjILMYSWlxsrProtdty-3bK5ziu3UE83WSQd82YHalF4v-FX_7EGKrkdPwik6AoAODR4pB6tOmJBxQl3OMPJHzTfxT25Iht6F69AEbx6Bw_1Dq0T2NXxoMBGc6do0/s1600/Screen+Shot+2018-03-08+at+11.06.53+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="119" data-original-width="525" height="91" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihWT3wBeI8cXrdb-SjILMYSWlxsrProtdty-3bK5ziu3UE83WSQd82YHalF4v-FX_7EGKrkdPwik6AoAODR4pB6tOmJBxQl3OMPJHzTfxT25Iht6F69AEbx6Bw_1Dq0T2NXxoMBGc6do0/s400/Screen+Shot+2018-03-08+at+11.06.53+AM.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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<i>Sigh</i>. Do you know how hard it is to find a male writer even marginally attractive in your imagination these days? This piece came out almost simultaneously with Kreider's new book, which I pre-ordered, but now I'm holding onto it till I'm in a better frame of mind. Anyway I was reminded of all this upon seeing this headline at Slate, which suggests to me a trend:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk3GDXXPjZDzY0VeRkYjBLaINaESM1FvPQlSDLPZhN8VPXtY1bBys0E2Ypb5V5hUpUeVdF2iNursCf12VSqF2ufnTiyuYaY0i9uA_gioTef4BKlo2I3iDcKVvEx4F2b1fDhPgOTHIV9ZQ/s1600/Screen+Shot+2018-03-08+at+11.20.21+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="271" data-original-width="771" height="141" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjk3GDXXPjZDzY0VeRkYjBLaINaESM1FvPQlSDLPZhN8VPXtY1bBys0E2Ypb5V5hUpUeVdF2iNursCf12VSqF2ufnTiyuYaY0i9uA_gioTef4BKlo2I3iDcKVvEx4F2b1fDhPgOTHIV9ZQ/s400/Screen+Shot+2018-03-08+at+11.20.21+AM.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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Nothing against Ted Scheinman, I guess, but his new book (of which this is an excerpt) is so clearly "Urban Outfitters novelty book about Jane Austen, about a decade too late, and by a <i>man</i>" that it sort of grates in the first place. And in the second place, there's how<a href="https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/03/older-couples-keep-marriage-spicy-at-jane-austen-camp.html" target="_blank"> the piece begins</a>:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMo4w1aLFJUX-Pavu13tKLP9MSZPHTRt0pJcJOR9K8G3Tod2NVODSSnMhkEGuckMXThGa-R1_RWPlYVGvO2tK2esxwcFG1ZuCBO2Vrseshx6w8K2DKSqb6HSCAZyZZOkLlpKPu-vG9XXg/s1600/Screen+Shot+2018-03-08+at+11.47.43+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="284" data-original-width="690" height="166" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMo4w1aLFJUX-Pavu13tKLP9MSZPHTRt0pJcJOR9K8G3Tod2NVODSSnMhkEGuckMXThGa-R1_RWPlYVGvO2tK2esxwcFG1ZuCBO2Vrseshx6w8K2DKSqb6HSCAZyZZOkLlpKPu-vG9XXg/s400/Screen+Shot+2018-03-08+at+11.47.43+AM.png" width="400" /></a></div>
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You see, this intrepid reporter has discovered that people at cosplay conventions have sex with each other. But also they read? Worlds colliding!! Old people have sex! Wow. adorable<i>.</i><br />
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Ugh, this piece has so many levels of condescension I can't even keep track. I guess to me the joke of it isn't old people's sex lives, but the writer's attitude towards the subject as though it's even remotely interesting or scandalous. Humorists often take the central question of essay writing to be <i>Am I punching up or down?</i> when sometimes the question is more <i>Why am I sitting here, punching myself in the face? </i>You know, what do you think is funny, who do you imagine to be the object of your joke, and is that the same as the actual joke to your readers? I found myself thinking about this as I encountered a weird degree of antipathy towards that <a href="https://amazingcavalieri.blogspot.com/2018/02/lets-fix-your-promotional-photos.html" target="_blank">post I wrote</a> on promotional headshots - like, lots of people who felt compelled to say, out loud, some version of "oh, you think this is a good use of your time?" (as though that even ranks among all the many ways in which I waste time, haha, <i>please</i>), plus a number of comments about "bullying," including someone who berated me for not being as good of a person as Simon Hanselmann? Sometimes comics really makes u think. Like, what if it's time to recalibrate my moral compass and STOP bullying Jeffrey Dahmer and that warlock from Game of Thrones and START finding a way to commodify trickle-down gossip and/or using all my sacred comics hobby time to write plot summaries of new episodes of Jessica Jones? Mmm, I'll pray on it.</div>
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Two pieces of writing advice. Try to be kind - but when you're not, try to mean it. Also your writing is always going to be bad when you're trying to be cool, and that's especially true if your jokey piece about sex has any whiff of a boast. Take it to the bank. </div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-44461206271572461272018-02-12T14:01:00.000-06:002018-02-12T14:01:15.414-06:00icymi<b>An Airing of Grievances:</b> Last week I had a <a href="http://slate.com/culture/2018/02/the-new-yorkers-anniversary-cover-featured-a-black-woman-but-it-wasnt-drawn-by-one.html" target="_blank">piece at Slate</a> talking about tokenism and Fran<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">ç</span>oise Mouly's hiring practices at the New Yorker, which I've been complaining about now for, oh let's see, two years? Three? Feels like forever. Now you know.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-86450176992889573002018-02-06T14:18:00.001-06:002018-02-06T14:18:16.707-06:00let's fix your promotional photos: a special guide for men in comics<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 110%; tab-stops: .25in .5in .75in 1.0in 1.25in 1.5in 2.0in 2.5in 3.0in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;">Yes, I know you could care less about self-promotion. You are an artist! An artist, and moreover a man (a white man) (a straight white man) who imagines that not caring about your
appearance is a virtue rather than the inevitable product of the way in which
you were socialized. You bristle at the very notion that anyone expects you to put any effort or thought whatsoever into selling this thing that you spent an absolutely obscene amount of your time putting together. W</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 16px;">hen no one buys into your new project, why point fingers at your "promotions" (one broken link in a tweet and an instagram stacked with actual pictures of someone's puke) when you could blame</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;"> "the system," like a real artist. Like a </span><i style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;">man</i><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;">. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;">Probably the idea of taking more than one terrible selfie in the
deadening glare of your computer’s camera for the profile that website will be
running next week strikes you as absurd. Insulting, even. (Let me guess: you're fundamentally opposed to the very idea of selfies anyway.) You're incapable of comprehending why anyone wouldn't just repurpose some random photo of himself at a con, seated behind a table, staring like a glassy-eyed criminal awaiting his
sentence in a courtroom, as his promotional photograph. </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;">Well, I'm not here to change your mind. Nor am I here to teach you photography. I'm just here to tell you how bad you look, and give you a few tips on looking better.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;">First I suggest you take a look around. Have you ever noticed how the women of comics look incredible in their promotional
photos? Their most tossed-off selfies on twitter are old skool mall-grade glamour
shots, and you would do well to study them. (Every time I see Katie
Skelly’s perfectly manicured nails I wonder where it all went wrong for me.) Honestly, most of the time, you can do whatever you want with your twitter—but when you’re promoting a new comic,
doing a Kickstarter, inviting the public to visit your table or your panel at a show, or
sending an author photo to a website, you really owe it to yourself and to your work to put in a little bit of effort.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 110%;">OK. So generally speaking</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;">, the men of comics favor promotional photos that fall into five or six main
categories. Your first task is to assess your type, which should be very easy. </span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;">Type</span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;"> 1: The Serial Killer</span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;">There’s
a real epidemic of men in comics whose photos give the distinct impression
that, if the opportunity arose, they would choose to eat human flesh. I assume you guys are just trying too hard to look serious? But I can’t discount the
possibility that at least some of you are actual murderers. Either way, it
would behoove you to try to look more normal. Here are some things you can try:</span></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">•<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;">Smize</span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;">. To <i>smize</i> is to smile with your eyes, and you're probably going to have to practice. Look, </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 110%; text-indent: -25pt;">I'm not sure exactly what's wrong with you, but I do know your regular eyes are cold and dead and weird. </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: -25pt;">One strategy you might try is to talk to
whoever’s taking the photo so you appear a little more animated. Think about
something exciting (e.g., cookies). Look alive, son.</span></div>
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</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;">Do not
gaze into the middle distance. </span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;">Unfocused staring is not
attractive, and it definitely doesn’t make you look smart. It is creepy or, perhaps worse, ridiculous. Try
looking into the camera, or just a little bit off to the side. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;">Ask at
least two human women who care about you to vet your photo</span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;">. This
is good advice for everyone, but it is particularly important if you choose not
to smile.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;">Type</span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;"> 2: The Cool Dude</span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL3VCTBktFFxG0CULTaXMgVvWBIsFis1xZTsKssGJ22iZKNnI17jbqh6z0xLtEr6xXN8nEUE2dIhx7hD_EQEVY_p8iBO6cI32lxE6Z_jwDuVSwy2_vDA_xZn_X-1rLalaU_mbzxDX-H9k/s1600/9e488611dfbfd246957d1b18a4e3f3dc.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="168" data-original-width="290" height="231" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL3VCTBktFFxG0CULTaXMgVvWBIsFis1xZTsKssGJ22iZKNnI17jbqh6z0xLtEr6xXN8nEUE2dIhx7hD_EQEVY_p8iBO6cI32lxE6Z_jwDuVSwy2_vDA_xZn_X-1rLalaU_mbzxDX-H9k/s400/9e488611dfbfd246957d1b18a4e3f3dc.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;">When my
nephew was a baby, he didn’t know the word for sunglasses. To compensate,
whenever he wanted to wear them, he said he “want[ed] to be a cool
dude.” It was so stinking cute! But the thing you have to understand is that he was under two years old. You’re a
grown-ass man so it should go without saying: You are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not </i>a cool dude. Take your sunglasses off. You look fucking stupid.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;">Pretending
not to care is not a personality.</span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;"> You do care about this thing
you’re promoting, right? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;">Are you
making a little joke?</span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;"> OK, we can work with this, but you are probably
overconfident. Tread carefully. Workshop this photo.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 110%;"><b>Do not
stand in front of some dumb building or sign. </b>You look like an amateur. In a wedding photo. On a road trip. From a 10-year-old Facebook post.</span></span></div>
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</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;">Try
harder</span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;">. I can see that you’re already trying very hard! You’re just
doing it wrong. Redirect that energy into making an actual effort.</span><br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Type</span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> 3: The Comics Bro</span></b></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwZLLMtytxWriRo-CJFza58o1vUYjsuw72obpB5jQeYM6bM2-IC9O6EuggG7uCq0J4CzVImRPH1T7VYTw7buasktSL1dS-7qD0zI19L2ZYpi4pThiZ8GSYBEuU5EvACJ1eGS7UCGA9BI0/s1600/guy.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="523" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwZLLMtytxWriRo-CJFza58o1vUYjsuw72obpB5jQeYM6bM2-IC9O6EuggG7uCq0J4CzVImRPH1T7VYTw7buasktSL1dS-7qD0zI19L2ZYpi4pThiZ8GSYBEuU5EvACJ1eGS7UCGA9BI0/s320/guy.png" width="306" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">A Comics Bro is a sentient energy drink with a hair situation who insists on some variation on jazz hands or double guns in all photos. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWS2viCQij-5hF4jmuYQlaAF73TB8AskswFobgxTP5eOuSagWm-2BSbD6m2825QLEAyvt3TGv3iB7GyNBy5lcP9efs1CapyG1C_3hLyYqfrkn6NkgQeJ2DY4qk6yH9Otme-PY-9IFPB1Y/s1600/08b09304db90fe1d6f45a02ecf446b741314569d.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="600" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWS2viCQij-5hF4jmuYQlaAF73TB8AskswFobgxTP5eOuSagWm-2BSbD6m2825QLEAyvt3TGv3iB7GyNBy5lcP9efs1CapyG1C_3hLyYqfrkn6NkgQeJ2DY4qk6yH9Otme-PY-9IFPB1Y/s320/08b09304db90fe1d6f45a02ecf446b741314569d.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">These people cannot be helped. I’m very sorry.</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Type 4</span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">: Mr. Tough Guy</span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;">This
is complicated, because Tough Guys are really a subtype, and they can skew Serial Killer, Cool Dude, or even
Comics Bro. </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;">Serial
killer-type tough guys, let me reiterate that no one’s saying you have to
smile.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><b style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;">But you really must try not to glower, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">even if you’re doing the irony</i>. </b><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;">Literally the only person in
comics who can pull off glowering in his promotional materials is Alan Moore.
You are not Alan Moore.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj60KSOtnaS9q6IaluB-RQRAS7XZdhVl4RF_zwWD2Wn4ZPbmYbd9O8-k-XUPU1TpA-BpVzZf0lJswbAVXKL3vFOAERQzJOmU_iOkYIvzuKJB5_GWuKttsNyYvFea2OzHVziMOHFw-y29dY/s1600/d87249bc18eb38eb044b89aefb242725--piano-sheet-music-rob-zombie.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="628" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj60KSOtnaS9q6IaluB-RQRAS7XZdhVl4RF_zwWD2Wn4ZPbmYbd9O8-k-XUPU1TpA-BpVzZf0lJswbAVXKL3vFOAERQzJOmU_iOkYIvzuKJB5_GWuKttsNyYvFea2OzHVziMOHFw-y29dY/s320/d87249bc18eb38eb044b89aefb242725--piano-sheet-music-rob-zombie.jpg" width="254" /></a></div>
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<i>Fake Alan Moore</i></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Let
me put it another way. An old friend of mine from high school had this amazing
family portrait where his mom, dad, and sister were all smiling and happy and
wholesome and he was wearing a metal tee and the most profound scowl
you’ve ever seen in your life. It is possibly the best picture I’ve ever seen,
and it perfectly captures the exact flavor of ridiculousness that is roughly
30-40% of men’s promotional photographs at Fantagraphics. The main difference is that my friend was like 15.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">A
more difficult subset to address is the Cool Dude type tough guy. (These are basically all the other guys at Fantagraphics.) To be clear, these are not
actually tough guys. These are men who wear hoodies and have read Fight Club
four times. They insist upon black and white photographs, and they’ve been working on a comic about William Burroughs and/or sex murder for a minimum
of six years. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxYsN3VNik6ngt2flW75JGKVin892V8-lEvO6GF8qi2gMmkvean2dlbxbKSSKWFzMwizhI1D8B0usxl4H3VUAk_o3gxLoRs6sGZ5-f84rfCHm0ZxJiewlz2_JpuWqu_FHCZXhKZN8Zen8/s1600/fb5c9e20a1ccf5ae647899c456aa06bf.jpg.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="588" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxYsN3VNik6ngt2flW75JGKVin892V8-lEvO6GF8qi2gMmkvean2dlbxbKSSKWFzMwizhI1D8B0usxl4H3VUAk_o3gxLoRs6sGZ5-f84rfCHm0ZxJiewlz2_JpuWqu_FHCZXhKZN8Zen8/s320/fb5c9e20a1ccf5ae647899c456aa06bf.jpg.png" width="273" /></a></div>
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Here's a few things you can try:</div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">•<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Ask yourself if your photo could be mistaken for a mug shot.</b> Be really, really honest with yourself. If the answer is yes, start over.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">•<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Try flexing that face you're pulling into an actual smile.</b> You don't have to smile in the photo itself. But hopefully this will help relax your facial muscles into a more becoming expression.<o:p></o:p></div>
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</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">You're probably dressing about 10 years too young.</b> I'm not asking you to wear a costume. Simple adjustments can be effective. Launder your t-shirt, for instance.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;">Type</span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;"> 5: Literally a Bunch of Paint Splatters</span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxgU2fYdF374sKRaJTAp8T920VzbVsSJi9fF55RrJAg-6jgdmAUCF7IKZKm4LDBeteT-hasni20MIJgJbdM5BT46SY2gUJ3aR37XJ09MkiOfGkaG9OKswHl0t_LTWBpb62IpI9NmRiCgE/s1600/Adobe+Spark-4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxgU2fYdF374sKRaJTAp8T920VzbVsSJi9fF55RrJAg-6jgdmAUCF7IKZKm4LDBeteT-hasni20MIJgJbdM5BT46SY2gUJ3aR37XJ09MkiOfGkaG9OKswHl0t_LTWBpb62IpI9NmRiCgE/s320/Adobe+Spark-4.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;">Does your promotional photo vaguely resemble a screensaver? Unfortunately, I
can only draw one conclusion, and that is that you are catastrophically ugly.
Here’s the good news: there's no way you look as bad as I'm thinking. Quit being so
hard on yourself! There’s a decent chance you’re “comics hot.” Suck it up and
do the photo. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</span></span></span><!--[endif]--><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;">Or…consider
using a portrait</span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;">. It’s perfectly acceptable for you to draw
yourself, or even use someone else’s drawing of you (though in certain
situations the latter might be awkward or misleading). The portrait doesn’t have to be
realistic, but it should be human-ish and recognizably you.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;"><br /></span>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2V3uL38rFUz3U94Q3q9774g5PY_1CWpPTs7GelY72d03IoQdlOzKpKgHyzYbaTj7Lrv9fe2NH_rlOUTPwMovvhxfJ7ghT16vSbKA-6BfmXIwYu1vzZlJwgM5IVGZYRoP5bGtOIRqNlUs/s1600/brunetti-chute.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="771" data-original-width="1200" height="206" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2V3uL38rFUz3U94Q3q9774g5PY_1CWpPTs7GelY72d03IoQdlOzKpKgHyzYbaTj7Lrv9fe2NH_rlOUTPwMovvhxfJ7ghT16vSbKA-6BfmXIwYu1vzZlJwgM5IVGZYRoP5bGtOIRqNlUs/s320/brunetti-chute.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i>Ivan Brunetti drew Hillary Chute's "author photo" for </i>Outside the Box.</div>
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<ul>
<li><b style="text-indent: -25pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;">Create
a distraction</span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 110%; text-indent: -25pt;">. Do you have a puppy, or a shirt with a crazy
pattern? Are your surroundings super interesting? You might feel more comfortable if you
feel like you’re sharing the attention with (but not completely shifting the focus to)
something else. Please note, however, that your photograph should not feature any other people.</span></li>
<li><span style="text-indent: -25pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 110%;"><b>People
are not shallow for wanting to put a face with a name. </b>Unless you feel that it compromises your safety or something like that, </span></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 110%; text-indent: -25pt;">it’s just best practice to honor this basic facet of human nature. Show your face, particularly if the photo is for a festival type situation. </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 17.600000381469727px; text-indent: -25pt;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span></span><b style="font-size: 12pt; text-indent: -25pt;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 17.600000381469727px;">Know that your art, however awesome it looks in real life, will look like dentist office art as a thumbnail.</span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 17.600000381469727px; text-indent: -25pt;"> If you want to use something you've made, again, consider a self-portrait. Or, bare minimum, something with a face.</span></li>
</ul>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;">Special</span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;"> Challenges: You Are Bald</span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigrU71EgdS3xYm55yephTOHu0Bd8Wsj4udZAQHEzu2OJX2yu3HavLgpwSNXQ3K2jFISt9rBkoZIHG1MS-75W18I_Pb3dWI1lPXnQOLFJIkDUuv9tXS0inghSwpSyVKYisCSXQvA21dPhI/s1600/Adobe+Spark-2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigrU71EgdS3xYm55yephTOHu0Bd8Wsj4udZAQHEzu2OJX2yu3HavLgpwSNXQ3K2jFISt9rBkoZIHG1MS-75W18I_Pb3dWI1lPXnQOLFJIkDUuv9tXS0inghSwpSyVKYisCSXQvA21dPhI/s320/Adobe+Spark-2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 110%;">Are you
a bald guy? Cool, nothing wrong with that. It’s just that sometimes bald guys - and
especially pale 50+ bald guys - need to take special care to avoid looking
terminally ill in their promotional photographs. You have one job, and that’s
to convince people that you’re not a warlock.</span><br />
<ul>
<li><b style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;">Pay
special attention to lighting.</b><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;"> This is good advice for everyone, but it’s
especially important for you. Consider going outside, maybe near some plants.
Good vibes! Warm tones. That’s what we’re going for. </span><i style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;">Avoid black and white at all costs.</i></li>
<li><b style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;">Do
not indulge in the temptation to wear a hat</b><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;">, particularly any sort of period
hat. Please take my word on this.</span></li>
<li><b style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;">Try
to look 20% more put together than usual.</b><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;"> You know who always looks nice?
Daniel Clowes. His shirts look pressed; he has interesting glasses. His
pants fit. We aren’t talking about his </span><i style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;">style</i><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;">, which is sort of nondescript</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;">.
We’re talking about a </span><i style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;">feeling</i><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12pt;">: Daniel
Clowes is ready. He's just a really sharp version of his somewhat boring personal style. Whatever your thing is, up your game by 20%.</span></li>
</ul>
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<i>Clowes can get it</i></div>
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<ul>
<li><b>Engage with the camera.</b> Bald people need to be extra careful about gazing into the distance, for nerd reasons. Work the camera. Patrick Stewart is the absolute master of this. (Just look at that smize, my god.) Compare and contrast:</li>
</ul>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmvKFHgkoXX1VRg7WxEQrqB6m-1__EWpoS0TE6GrICSxqJBdmsX2XUCrLKKIfVccioF1EjBvNxKtQt4_OAfpai-srgsVwpudW9lLzhYaUuLGTGVVlUU7DaR2qyM9Ctl8FQYLx1JqD_0m4/s1600/Adobe+Spark-3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmvKFHgkoXX1VRg7WxEQrqB6m-1__EWpoS0TE6GrICSxqJBdmsX2XUCrLKKIfVccioF1EjBvNxKtQt4_OAfpai-srgsVwpudW9lLzhYaUuLGTGVVlUU7DaR2qyM9Ctl8FQYLx1JqD_0m4/s320/Adobe+Spark-3.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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In conclusion, staging a decent promotional photo is not rocket science. Your photo doesn't even have to be that good, is the thing. It just shouldn't be off-putting.<br />
<span style="background-color: #bd081c; background-position: 3px 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; background-size: 14px 14px; border-bottom-left-radius: 2px; border-bottom-right-radius: 2px; border-top-left-radius: 2px; border-top-right-radius: 2px; border: none; color: white; cursor: pointer; display: none; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; left: 193px; line-height: 20px; opacity: 1; padding: 0px 4px 0px 0px; position: absolute; text-align: center; text-indent: 20px; top: 5596px; width: auto; z-index: 8675309;">Save</span><span style="background-color: #bd081c; background-position: 3px 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; background-size: 14px 14px; border-bottom-left-radius: 2px; border-bottom-right-radius: 2px; border-top-left-radius: 2px; border-top-right-radius: 2px; border: none; color: white; cursor: pointer; display: none; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; left: 193px; line-height: 20px; opacity: 1; padding: 0px 4px 0px 0px; position: absolute; text-align: center; text-indent: 20px; top: 5596px; width: auto; z-index: 8675309;">Save</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-90838948280609188632018-01-25T14:54:00.000-06:002018-01-26T23:46:07.611-06:00ware week<a href="https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/arts-and-books/the-new-age-of-comics" target="_blank">I wrote about Monograph</a>, Chris Ware's strange and fascinating new memoir, for a UK magazine, Prospect. It was a weird commission in that I was asked to more or less triangulate it with two other recent titles, Dave Gibbons' latest how-to book (dumb, but still a little cool) and The Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel (for clowns, by clowns - mostly). The editor originally wanted something about the whole comics vs. graphic novels terminology debate, but very kindly let me steer the argument in a different direction because I literally can't even imagine caring about that. Even if you find that debate fascinating (??), Ware and Gibbons aren't figures who readily map onto it for reasons that I think you must already understand given that you've read this far. You beautiful fucking genius, you.<br />
<br />
Due to the nature of that piece I didn't really get to talk about Monograph or Ware as much as I would've liked. Some stuff was abbreviated, some was cut, and some stuff I never got around to in the first place because it didn't fit the contours of my argument, which is about identity and authority and various parties' weird proprietary comics ~feelings~. To make up for it, and to just generally cheer myself up, I've decided I'm doing a Ware Week here on the blog. Nothing fancy: just a week of talking about Chris Ware (who I love to make fun of - and whose work I really enjoy, if you can even believe it) in what I imagine will be posts of wildly varying length and quality. Unless they are uniformly short and terrible, which is also a real possibility.<br />
<br />
If you like talking about Ware and you're interested in joining in for a dialogue or roundtable or something like that, let me know and maybe we can work something out. (I haven't really seen that much out there around Monograph, which seems odd?) On one hand, I feel like a whole week of me spouting my personal Ware takes might be a bit much? But on the other I reckon most people love themselves enough that sitting around and talking into the void about Chris Ware isn't their idea of "fun," so I'm prepared to do it on my own. In any case below is a list of some of the topics I'm likely to touch on at some point. For most of them you probably need to have at least read part of Monograph? A couple maybe not. Whatever, I don't actually care. This is an open call, though I reserve the right to flake out. Hit me up if there's anything here that catches your eye:<br />
<ul>
<li>Chris Ware's Charlie Brown Misery Persona (and the weird way in which he controls his public image)</li>
<li>Ware's riffs on autobio</li>
<li>The many ways in which Ware plays with scale</li>
<li>Ware as a historian (of himself, and of comics more generally)</li>
<li>How bad was that intro by Art Spiegelman?</li>
<li>The Chris Ware ~Conversation~ (how he gets talked about in different circles)</li>
<li>Did no one care about Monograph? What's that about?</li>
<li>Does Ware need an editor (yes or yes)</li>
<li>Fussy formal qualities and sheer volume of ephemera/variation in the Ware archives: charming? overrated? insane??</li>
<li>The Worst Chris Ware New Yorker Cover of All Time </li>
</ul>
<div>
Other suggestions are also welcome. Ware week will be in two weeks, depending on how this goes. Three weeks? Seven hundred weeks. In my lifetime, hopefully. Start practicing your frowny face.<br />
<br />
<b>Amended to add that I forgot to include an email for anyone who doesn't know where to find me: ware.week@gmail.com. </b></div>
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<span style="background-color: #bd081c; background-position: 3px 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; background-size: 14px 14px; border-bottom-left-radius: 2px; border-bottom-right-radius: 2px; border-top-left-radius: 2px; border-top-right-radius: 2px; border: none; color: white; cursor: pointer; display: none; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; left: 42px; line-height: 20px; opacity: 1; padding: 0px 4px 0px 0px; position: absolute; text-align: center; text-indent: 20px; top: 806px; width: auto; z-index: 8675309;">Save</span><span style="background-color: #bd081c; background-position: 3px 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; background-size: 14px 14px; border-bottom-left-radius: 2px; border-bottom-right-radius: 2px; border-top-left-radius: 2px; border-top-right-radius: 2px; border: none; color: white; cursor: pointer; display: none; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; left: 42px; line-height: 20px; opacity: 1; padding: 0px 4px 0px 0px; position: absolute; text-align: center; text-indent: 20px; top: 806px; width: auto; z-index: 8675309;">Save</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: #bd081c; background-position: 3px 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; background-size: 14px 14px; border-bottom-left-radius: 2px; border-bottom-right-radius: 2px; border-top-left-radius: 2px; border-top-right-radius: 2px; border: none; color: white; cursor: pointer; display: none; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20px; opacity: 1; padding: 0px 4px 0px 0px; position: absolute; text-align: center; text-indent: 20px; width: auto; z-index: 8675309;">Save</span><span style="background-color: #bd081c; background-position: 3px 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; background-size: 14px 14px; border-bottom-left-radius: 2px; border-bottom-right-radius: 2px; border-top-left-radius: 2px; border-top-right-radius: 2px; border: none; color: white; cursor: pointer; display: none; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20px; opacity: 1; padding: 0px 4px 0px 0px; position: absolute; text-align: center; text-indent: 20px; width: auto; z-index: 8675309;">Save</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #bd081c; background-position: 3px 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; background-size: 14px 14px; border-bottom-left-radius: 2px; border-bottom-right-radius: 2px; border-top-left-radius: 2px; border-top-right-radius: 2px; border: none; color: white; cursor: pointer; display: none; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20px; opacity: 1; padding: 0px 4px 0px 0px; position: absolute; text-align: center; text-indent: 20px; width: auto; z-index: 8675309;">Save</span><span style="background-color: #bd081c; background-position: 3px 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; background-size: 14px 14px; border-bottom-left-radius: 2px; border-bottom-right-radius: 2px; border-top-left-radius: 2px; border-top-right-radius: 2px; border: none; color: white; cursor: pointer; display: none; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20px; opacity: 1; padding: 0px 4px 0px 0px; position: absolute; text-align: center; text-indent: 20px; width: auto; z-index: 8675309;">Save</span><span style="background-color: #bd081c; background-position: 3px 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; background-size: 14px 14px; border-bottom-left-radius: 2px; border-bottom-right-radius: 2px; border-top-left-radius: 2px; border-top-right-radius: 2px; border: none; color: white; cursor: pointer; display: none; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20px; opacity: 1; padding: 0px 4px 0px 0px; position: absolute; text-align: center; text-indent: 20px; width: auto; z-index: 8675309;">Save</span><span style="background-color: #bd081c; background-position: 3px 50%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; background-size: 14px 14px; border-bottom-left-radius: 2px; border-bottom-right-radius: 2px; border-top-left-radius: 2px; border-top-right-radius: 2px; border: none; color: white; cursor: pointer; display: none; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 11px; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20px; opacity: 1; padding: 0px 4px 0px 0px; position: absolute; text-align: center; text-indent: 20px; width: auto; z-index: 8675309;">Save</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-75074870410966758892018-01-24T00:10:00.000-06:002018-01-24T00:15:46.411-06:00three good thingsUrsula K. Le Guin has died. (Not one of the three good things, to be clear.) Famous people dying always makes me ponderous and annoying like a teenager who's smoked too much pot, but for the last few years I've had this slow-building realization that what has felt like an epidemic--these titans of culture dropping like flies--is in fact just me getting older. When you're younger there's this bright line between dusty gray history and the realness of the vibrant present, and aging is in some ways watching the color drain from the world around you as pieces of it recede into the past.<br />
<br />
For a while there I was doing a "one good thing" series, where I just talked about one good thing that had happened, but I deleted it back when someone gave me the creeps. (Comics, man!) But I thought I'd try again, make it less personal, and up the ante. So now there's three. The first good thing is Paddington 2, which I saw on Sunday. I'd heard it's good, of course, but I had no intention of seeing it because...I don't know. I thought the way they'd drawn the bear was sort of ugly. But a friend wanted to see it, and I got a MoviePass, so why not. And it was perfect? Hugh Grant is Tim Curry-level bananas and it looks like Wes Anderson without all the...Wes Anderson baggage. I love Wes Anderson, but you know what I mean. Seriously, go see Paddington 2.<br />
<br />
The second thing is <a href="https://twitter.com/shallowbrigade/status/955945220335722496" target="_blank">this little story</a> about Celine Dion taking Elliott Smith under her wing before his performance at the 1998 Oscars. You know those little children's books about unlikely animal friends? I want a book like that about Celine Dion and Elliott Smith.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGOJHXos-fdPjo-8mi1oJiddbUB6VMMvQmCy86Za3QOXtJ_mqVYUqpEg_XlHkTAPUhZ3LJQ7fmFL3d_MZmIUVB_owxcBrXo6kxYUJ6wQJNQDPBsxJK4XaoVXAFiUTQ9UCYE7HT0FjfjlA/s1600/Owen_and_Mzee.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="268" data-original-width="371" height="288" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGOJHXos-fdPjo-8mi1oJiddbUB6VMMvQmCy86Za3QOXtJ_mqVYUqpEg_XlHkTAPUhZ3LJQ7fmFL3d_MZmIUVB_owxcBrXo6kxYUJ6wQJNQDPBsxJK4XaoVXAFiUTQ9UCYE7HT0FjfjlA/s400/Owen_and_Mzee.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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I'm old enough to have seen that performance in real time, and it's something I'll never forget. That suit, oh my god. Comparisons have been flying fast and furious between Smith and Sufjan Stevens (who's up for Best Song this year), and that is just so fundamentally incorrect. I mean, I get it, sonically. But Elliott Smith came up from punk, and he was one of the rawest performers I've ever seen, for both better and worse. Sufjan has a similar awkwardness I guess, but he's a very polished performer who does very stylized shows. Very, very different. Anyway I guess I could link to that Oscar performance, but I don't think watching it now begins to convey how surreal it was at the time. It was just...really something.<br />
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The third thing is this recipe for garlic rice, which is my new favorite thing.<br />
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The recipe is from Melissa Clark's new cookbook (which is for Instant Pots, in case that's not obvious), but you could adapt it to regular rice cooking pretty easily. The trick is drape a clean dishtowel over the top of the pot after you fluff the rice, replace the lid loosely, and wait for 10 mins before you eat it. That cookbook has some nice tricks.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-40930066143695206452018-01-08T01:28:00.001-06:002018-01-08T01:28:41.983-06:002018 can already fuck itselfI welcomed the new year with a roaring case of norovirus. Whether that unholy purge was meant to be some symbol of 2017, of the year yet to come, or just my body's instinctive urge to self-destruct in the most unpleasant way possible remains, as of this writing, unclear. Probably all three.<br />
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Uncharacteristically, I have a planned week of #content coming up (more on this soon), but in the meantime I wanted to link to a few posts from 2017. Why? I do not know. I did one of those Twitter threads where I linked to some of this stuff and it just really deeply amused me, the idea of all the journalists I follow being like 'here's all my thoughtful investigative reporting about poverty and some thinkpieces on sexual assault' and me being like 'here's multiple links to Whore Feud." It's 2018 and I'm still laughing about Whore Feud, seriously. I wonder what those wacky guys are going to get up to this year.<br />
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Anyway, here are some of my favorite posts from last year:<br />
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<a href="https://amazingcavalieri.blogspot.com/2017/02/black-history-month-profile-in-courage.html" target="_blank">Black History Month Profile in Courage: Chris Ware</a><br />
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<a href="https://amazingcavalieri.blogspot.com/2017/03/all-time-comics-crime-destroyer-1.html" target="_blank">All Time Comics: Crime Destroyer #1</a> - a review<br />
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<a href="https://amazingcavalieri.blogspot.com/2017/03/in-appreciation-of-chester-browndave.html" target="_blank">In Appreciation of the Chester Brown/Dave Sim Whore Feud </a><br />
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<a href="https://amazingcavalieri.blogspot.com/2017/07/in-contd-appreciation-of-chester.html" target="_blank">In Continued Appreciation of the Chester Brown/Dave Sim Whore Feud </a><br />
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<a href="https://amazingcavalieri.blogspot.com/2017/04/other-peoples-stories.html" target="_blank">Other People's Stories</a> - a personal essay<br />
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<a href="https://amazingcavalieri.blogspot.com/2017/07/another-fake-conversation.html" target="_blank">Another Fake Conversation</a> - on upsetting comics<br />
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<a href="https://amazingcavalieri.blogspot.com/2017/08/an-extremely-funny-chris-ware-video.html" target="_blank">An Extremely Funny Chris Ware video</a> - Chris Ware locates other people's inner Chris Wares<br />
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<a href="https://amazingcavalieri.blogspot.com/2017/09/portrait-comic-by-simon-hanselmann.html" target="_blank">Portrait, a comic by Simon Hanselmann</a> - a review<br />
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I also wrote about <a href="https://amazingcavalieri.blogspot.com/2017/05/a-primer-on-nick-spencers-shitty.html" target="_blank">Nick Spencer</a> and <a href="https://amazingcavalieri.blogspot.com/2017/01/r-crumb-is-sexual-predator.html" target="_blank">R. Crumb</a>. Not my faves but without a doubt the ones that seemed to resonate with people.<br />
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Happy new year? "Happy new year." Happy new year.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-91410070215546518822017-12-12T05:19:00.002-06:002017-12-12T05:35:35.162-06:00gawker crowdfunding cabalWhat's the deal with this doomed <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2136064924/save-gawkercom?ref=396657&token=377c3395" target="_blank">Gawker kickstarter</a>, a story in three parts:<br />
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OK, let me make sure I have this straight. A tiny number of former Gawker employees and "friends" have formed a crowdfunding cabal to raise $500k to either:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>buy Gawker (for less than 0.4% of what the Gawker family of sites sold for in 2016)</li>
<li>reanimate Gawker (impossible, but whatever)</li>
<li>create some sort of...Gawker wayback machine...?</li>
<li>start a Gawker-inspired website? maybe?</li>
<li>or some combination thereof?</li>
</ul>
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Also, despite the fact this Zombie Gawker cabal has been toiling behind the scene for months (lol), no one thought to give a heads up to (much less invite the participation of) Puja Patel, the EIC of Spin Magazine? Or the alum who's the Style editor of the New York Times...the two staff writers at the New Yorker...that one reporter for the Intercept...a senior writer at WIRED...deputy editor at the Hairpin...features writer at GQ...a senior editor at New York Magazine, and like seriously this list goes on and on forever? Seems like a small oversight, there.<br />
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An insane nightmare cabal just bought LA Weekly, and it makes perfect sense those people would try to be anonymous. What they're doing is nefarious. Peter Thiel bankrupted Gawker in the first place by funding an entirely different nightmare cabal, and that made sense because he's an actual villain. Why does Gawker need a cabal? Why does their Kickstarter have zero details about who they are and what they're doing? And how come no one associated with Gawker in the history of ever, except for literally one guy and Elizabeth Spiers, want to touch this thing with a 10-foot pole?<br />
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The smart money says the answers to those questions aren't very interesting. It's probably a ragtag crew that has no idea what they're doing, though I'd be happy to be proven wrong. It's all just sort of sad. Like the complete lack of media savvy on display here doesn't lend any faith to the idea that these people have put any thought into this plan whatsoever, were it to work. Which it won't. And even if they'd gone about it properly, kickstarting the purchase of Gawker seems sort of farfetched. I guess if Gofundme is basically funding the American health care system at this point, maybe anything's possible? Dare to dream? Maybe Zombie Gawker will "hire" some "interns," haha. Ha. :(Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-14794801766921785162017-12-11T01:04:00.000-06:002017-12-11T01:04:39.206-06:00in a future where all the crabs are deadThe insomnia's back, fuck my life. My clock runs late on a good day (always has), but every few years I cycle through a few months or more where I have extra terrible trouble getting to sleep. Sometimes I wonder: what is this alien frequency I've tuned into, and what else is happening on this channel? Sometimes it's boring old depression, I guess, but other times I can't really attribute it to anything. The last time must've been around 2013 because I remember the constant dejection of trying to fall asleep to the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield tweeting about whatever he'd already overachieved at the International Space Station in what was, for him, late morning in outer space. Like for each of these insomnia jags there's always some marker that lets me know when I've crossed over from being up horribly late to being up egregiously, painfully late, and at that time it was these astronaut tweets. Prior to 2013 the point of no return would've been some TV-related thing, but at some point I started working on "sleep hygiene." Now instead of watching TV, which I love with my whole heart, I stare at my phone and feel unhappy. Yes, I know better, but also there was a period in my life where I read the Economist to put myself to sleep and that was maybe worse. It worked, but it just wasn't worth it.<br />
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So anyway I'd still be trying to get to sleep and Commander Chris Hadfield would've orbited Jupiter twice, performed his strenuous exercises for the day, eaten several pouches of healthful space gruel, etc., and I'd just be lying in bed staring at my phone, every cell exuding the literal opposite of whatever that is. Extremely dark, tired energy. I'm not sure why I'm even thinking about this so much except that recently I had to read an astronaut's memoir for work that was largely about some guy (not Chris Hadfield, mercifully) who lived at the International Space Station for a year, and it was wild how much of his life there was hideously banal. Like literally 75 percent of this book was just him watching CNN while he fixes the space toilet. I just have to wonder how little you respect life's mysteries, to write a book like that.<br />
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A few nights ago I was going through my pre-dawn ritual of staring at my phone for 4.5 hours before going to sleep I encountered the most incredible thing I've seen in a while. It's <a href="https://www.avclub.com/heres-what-we-think-death-stranding-is-actually-about-1821117113" target="_blank">two guys at AV Club</a> talking about Hideo Kojima's <i>Death Stranding</i>, which is, if I understand them correctly, a series of 15-minute art films...released over a period of years as...trailers?...for a video game?...starring Hannibal and Daryl from Walking Dead? It's sort of unclear. Despite my affection for both Daryl and this utterly unhinged synopsis, I don't want to learn anything more about this project, ever, much less watch the actual trailers, if that's what they even are. I just don't see how they could live up to (much less surpass) this synopsis, which I have already read at least half a dozen times:<br />
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If I had to pick my favorite part, I guess I'd go with "in a future where all the crabs are dead" OR the baby metaphorically lodging itself in someone's throat OR Daryl's metaphorical C-section (<i>what is going on with these metaphors??</i>) OR the Guillermo del Toro cameo, which was just unexpected. Tough call.<br />
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Another curious thing the last few days has been watching people argue about "<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-person" target="_blank">Cat Person</a>." Like, oh right, this is the sort of thing we used to argue about on the Internet before 2016 happened. A viral short story. How quaint! A day or so ago the Cat Person "backlash" began, or so I hear. (Everyone on my twitter loves it, anyway.) One thing I legitimately don't understand: since when is not liking a short story a "backlash?" Usually that's how it works: some people like a thing, and then some people don't. But maybe we don't have that anymore.<br />
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It's a queasy little piece of work. Sort of artless, in my opinion, though that isn't what makes it bad. Like...the achievement of this short story so far as I can tell is in making something totally plausible have the artificial sheen of a short story. The symmetry with the characters' fantasy lives--where her fantasies are about him being secretly vulnerable and better than he seems, and his fantasies about her are all weird and crazy and jealous--all of that, and the banality with which she considers getting murdered, the sort of fluctuating between feeling afraid and ridiculous, the way that even pathetic men can have a certain menace, and then the ending--emotionally, it rings true. The characters are really believable, I'll give it that. But as a piece of writing, it largely just seems like bad craft. I feel very aware of it as a story that has been constructed. In fact I've maybe never read anything that seems so naturalistic and so fake at the same time, particularly with the fantasy stuff and with the ending. The ending is just beyond hacky even though I find it totally believable? So that's weird, but I think it comes down to on a technical level there is a real clumsiness in the story's construction. Even the detail about the cats felt like artifice, very In the Writer's Workshop 101.<br />
<br />
I've seen a lot of really defensive reactions around Cat Person, a lot of "if you don't like this story, you've clearly never been on a bad date"-type takes. I don't get that at all, this idea that identifying with someone in a story means you have to love it. People are all messed up about art and identity now, but most of the time this gets discussed in really unintelligent ways. I totally understand that people love stories because they identify with characters or plots--and whatever, that's valid. You can love something for any reason you want. Me, I guess I need something more than that. Some sort of insight, some beautiful prose, an interesting question, an entertaining story. Maybe at least one of those things? "People are hard to know, and sex can be bad"--I don't know, I guess that strikes me as the literary equivalent of living in space and writing about watching CNN and fixing the toilet.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-5493422074051214572017-11-13T02:44:00.002-06:002017-11-13T02:47:44.105-06:00berganza takes: a half-hearted roundupBe careful out there, kids: the <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/dc-comics-editor-eddie-berganza-sexual-harassment?utm_term=.ptAzbBwRKz#.djEVLENq8V" target="_blank">hammer finally dropped</a> on Eddie Berganza, and it's motherfucking takes season. (What, you thought comics would stop being comics?) I mean, most people just seem glad, and if that's you, congratulations: your take is correct. But there's been a whole lot of "this is old news" type takes, and also "finally, real journalism, not another Trial by Twitter" type takes, and...look, I'm not even getting into it. Too dumb. That said, if every Comics Thing generates one exceptionally stupid take, I reckon we have a winner:<br />
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Alternatively, you could quit comics! lol<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Definitely quit comics.</i><br />
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My favorite take, if you're curious, is <a href="https://www.facebook.com/mark.waid/posts/10155967529765799" target="_blank">Mark Waid's</a>, who straight up wants to open a can of whoop-ass on that one goblin who made the "witch hunt" comment in the Buzzfeed piece. One of these days Mark Waid is going to die on the toilet, and with all due respect to his family, I am going to laugh and laugh. But before that happens I really hope he punches that witch-hunt guy in the face.<br />
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The Buzzfeed piece was extremely well done, in my opinion. There was a depth of understanding in the dynamics involved thanks to Jay Eddin. (Respect.) The anonymous DC male goblin quotes were quite artfully incorporated. The only note that rang false to me was Heidi MacDonald being made into the sort of hero of the piece. You know, Heidi's always got some heartfelt commentary on women in comics...and, well, women in comics have some equally heartfelt commentary on her, if you're paying attention.<br />
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Today the Twitter had a lot of "what of comics journalism" takes, and those weren't bad. They were fine, in fact. All the threads these screenshots were taken from are probably worth reading, if comics journalism is relevant to your interests.<br />
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I'm not going to say this on twitter because I can only invite so much unhappiness into my life, but part of the problem with "comics journalism" is fandom. Here I'm referring to both the fandom of the "journalists" and of their readers. The tweets above are talking about money, legal backing, retaliation from the Big Two, lack of training--and all those barriers are real. But what everyone seems to be forgetting is that we have at least one full-time comics journalist at a major U.S. magazine. Unfortunately he's very busy using bringing those resources to bear on literally <a href="https://amazingcavalieri.blogspot.com/2016/11/here-are-some-comics-links.html" target="_blank">stalking an 89yo cartoonist</a>. And you ("you") pretty much universally linked to that piece and thought it was great...? That's my read, anyway.<br />
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Fandom--the way I think of that word--isn't about loving something, exactly; it's a form of entitlement. It's utterly ridiculous, but at the same time it's weird how consistently it's disrespected by the people whose bread is buttered by fans. Like...both of those things are deeply, fundamentally uncool. Maybe I dwell on it too much - maybe me blaring this horn is just a(nother) personal problem. (If it is? whatever. I make no apologies.) All that said, it's honestly insane to me that Comics Twitter is having a conversation about comics journalism and ignoring that entire situation.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2802813672806062009.post-55153319185240176032017-11-06T00:03:00.000-06:002017-11-06T00:03:01.506-06:00on my mind this week<b><u>1. Bladerunner 2049/Arrival</u></b><br />
I saw these almost back to back. Not on purpose or anything, because I'm dumb about movies. Just a happy coincidence. I wonder if it would've been as obvious, had I watched Arrival when it came out instead, how similar the two are? Maybe. I strongly preferred Arrival. In fact I'm not sure I've liked a big huge movie that much since World War Z. (Or maybe since John Wick? When was that, even?) It could've been so much better, though, which I suppose is my general feeling on movies. My totally uninformed, completely made up take on Villeneuve is that Big Hollywood ruins his stuff a little. These two movies at least seemed subtle with a sporadically very heavy hand, and I'm just assuming that's someone else's fault. It just felt like the kind of thing that maybe someone else fucked up. Those overwrought M. Night Shyamalan endings, the superfluous action, the corny flourishes, etc. strike me as the result of <i>meetings</i>. But who knows. I'm too lazy to actually google this and figure it out.<br />
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Arrival was the better script, but it also benefitted from having a much more talented supporting cast. How do you surround an actor like Ryan Gosling with the likes of Jared Leto and Harrison Ford and expect that to come out OK? Though honestly the Ford Problem was both inevitable and handled about as well as it could've been, all things considered.<br />
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My favorite Gosling movie is Drive. Is that everyone's favorite? I like how different those two Gosling characters are even though neither of them say much.<br />
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<b><u>2. How bad should I feel for going to the rapey movie theater?</u></b><br />
On Halloween I saw Hellraiser 3 at that sexual pervert theater chain's Brooklyn outpost. On one hand, I didn't feel so great about going to the rapey movie theater, but OTOH that was the place that was showing Hellraiser 3 on Halloween. Turns out it's literally the nicest theater I've ever been to, holy shit. I would maybe go there every day if I were local. It has table service for every seat?? That wasn't that intrusive?? In the minus column it also contained what was possibly the dumbest bar I've ever been to in my life. I think it was supposed to look like the Mutter Museum but it reminded me of the time my sister and I got lost in New York and we got so hungry that we ended up eating sliders at one of those Jekyll and Hyde chains. Also the movie theater had advertised free fake blood and we couldn't find any fake blood, much less free. One of my friend's friends made this totally excellent bloody pumpkinhead costume, pictured below. (Fortunately he brought his own fake blood from home.) I thought he was supposed to be the Headless Horseman, but apparently not? In any case it was a great costume.<br />
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Also hung out with some guy who said, in total seriousness, Bush did 9/11. New York is such a parody of itself, but maybe that's every city.<br />
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<b><u>3. Eventually it's <i>your</i> pervert. </u></b><br />
Everyone's mad at perverts right now (including me, but that's part of my whole thing), and inevitably Twitter (re-)dredged up some passages from Matt Taibbi's dumb book he wrote with Mark Ames when they were in some Russian frat together. I think the person who dredged it up this time around was Laura Hudson, Brave Defender of feminism and, uh, Chris Sims. Hahaaa. I mean, number one, I'm very sorry, but if you're friends with Chris Sims, I am judging you - not for moral reasons, but for coolness reasons, because that guy strikes me as a giant loser. But number two, being friends with Chris Sims doesn't mean you have to defend Chris Sims when he does something super gross? Not that hard.<br />
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<i>Or is it.</i> Because my first thought back whenever I heard about Taibbi being a pervert the first time around (approx. two "Matt Taibbi's a terrible misogynist" cycles ago) was: <i>oh brother.</i> I have some patience for the things people wrote when they were really young; that's part of it. I feel like you can read those passages and see very plainly how desperately those guys wanted to be Hunter S. Thompson. (Hot gonzo journalism tip: when writer types write a whole lot about getting blown all the time, that usually means they're not getting blown, ever.) But the other thing is that Taibbi is one of these writers who has a whole complex with machismo, which I take to be a totally separate, if vaguely adjacent, thing with regard to misogyny. It's a little pathetic but ultimately sort of harmless and secondary to what a great writer he is, and I feel that way about many writers. Maybe most, even, though more so in prose than comics. I found Taibbi's second <a href="https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10155412615564652&id=602324651&ref=content_filter" target="_blank">apology</a> compelling, and in alignment with everything I had sort of assumed anyway. His mistake, in my opinion, was in not apologizing sooner. People are so stingy with apologies. I think about Gabe Delahaye's<a href="https://www.stereogum.com/1748480/dear-comedy-just-so-you-know-you-are-allowed-to-apologize/vg-loc/videogum/" target="_blank"> piece</a> about apologizing all the time. It's one of the most entirely correct things I've ever read.<br />
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I was thinking about all this again lately, but this time it wasn't quite so easy or automatic. Maybe because everyone's talking about perverts more than usual. Maybe because I had been writing that thing about Eddie Berganza. Maybe because Taibbi actually acknowledged the controversy this time around, maybe all of that. There's a certain convenience to thinking that some writer who I like is #actually fine and more or less good, and finding someone like Robert Crumb, who I find morally, physically, and artistically repulsive, to be a total fucking degenerate. Any time I comment on the "bad" guys, I've at least tried to interrogate my own assumptions because I think that's the right thing to do. This is the first time in recent memory I've done that for a "good" guy. Anyway I think it's a thorny and imperfect, but healthy, process to interrogate your assumptions and biases most particularly when whatever alleged pervert holds a special place in your heart is under the microscope. Still feeling pretty good about Taibbi and look forward to reading his new book on Eric Garner.<br />
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<b><u>4. Winter self-care plan</u></b><br />
Where I live really takes my depressive personality to the next level during daylight savings time. For at least six months of the year this place is a cold sunless hell and unfortunately I believe in neither God nor <i>hygge. </i>This year I'm making a special effort that includes going to the previously unthinkable lengths of digging my Happy Lamp out of the storage closet and <i>actually using it. </i>I think it works but it requires waking up at sunrise (at least according to some sleep quiz I took), which goes against my beliefs. I'm going to try to use it while reading in bed (instead of at my desk, like I've done in the past) because I feel like that seems like a better way to start the day than not answering my email while staring into a very bright light.<br />
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Other things that have historically worked for me are vitamin D supplements and Sleepytime Extra tea, which doesn't taste good but works better than anything else I've tried. I've tried a lot.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0