ware week

I wrote about Monograph, 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.

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.

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:

• Chris Ware's Charlie Brown Misery Persona (and the weird way in which he controls his public image)
• Ware's riffs on autobio
• The many ways in which Ware plays with scale
• Ware as a historian (of himself, and of comics more generally)
• How bad was that intro by Art Spiegelman?
• The Chris Ware ~Conversation~ (how he gets talked about in different circles)
• Did no one care about Monograph? What's that about?
• Does Ware need an editor (yes or yes)
• Fussy formal qualities and sheer volume of ephemera/variation in the Ware archives: charming? overrated? insane??
• The Worst Chris Ware New Yorker Cover of All Time 

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.

Amended to add that I forgot to include an email for anyone who doesn't know where to find me: ware.week@gmail.com. 

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three good things

Ursula 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.

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.

The second thing is this little story 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.

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.

The third thing is this recipe for garlic rice, which is my new favorite thing.

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.

2018 can already fuck itself

I 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.

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.

Anyway, here are some of my favorite posts from last year:

Black History Month Profile in Courage: Chris Ware

All Time Comics: Crime Destroyer #1 - a review

In Appreciation of the Chester Brown/Dave Sim Whore Feud 

In Continued Appreciation of the Chester Brown/Dave Sim Whore Feud 

Other People's Stories - a personal essay

Another Fake Conversation - on upsetting comics

An Extremely Funny Chris Ware video - Chris Ware locates other people's inner Chris Wares

Portrait, a comic by Simon Hanselmann - a review

I also wrote about Nick Spencer and R. Crumb. Not my faves but without a doubt the ones that seemed to resonate with people.

Happy new year? "Happy new year." Happy new year.

gawker crowdfunding cabal

What's the deal with this doomed Gawker kickstarter, a story in three parts:

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:

• buy Gawker (for less than 0.4% of what the Gawker family of sites sold for in 2016)
• reanimate Gawker (impossible, but whatever)
• create some sort of...Gawker wayback machine...?
• start a Gawker-inspired website? maybe?
• or some combination thereof?

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.

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?

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. :(

in a future where all the crabs are dead

The 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.

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.

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 two guys at AV Club talking about Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding, 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:

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 (what is going on with these metaphors??) OR the Guillermo del Toro cameo, which was just unexpected. Tough call.

Another curious thing the last few days has been watching people argue about "Cat Person." 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.

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.

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.

berganza takes: a half-hearted roundup

Be careful out there, kids: the hammer finally dropped 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:

Alternatively, you could quit comics! lol

Definitely quit comics.

My favorite take, if you're curious, is Mark Waid's, 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.

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.

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.

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 stalking an 89yo cartoonist. And you ("you") pretty much universally linked to that piece and thought it was great...? That's my read, anyway.

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.

on my mind this week

1. Bladerunner 2049/Arrival
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 meetings. But who knows. I'm too lazy to actually google this and figure it out.

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.

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.

2. How bad should I feel for going to the rapey movie theater?
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.

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.

3. Eventually it's your pervert. 
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.

Or is it. 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: oh brother. 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 apology 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 piece about apologizing all the time. It's one of the most entirely correct things I've ever read.

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.

4. Winter self-care plan
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 hygge. 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 actually using it. 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.

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.