Live & Direct from the external hard drive, that arcane & eldritch repository of years past: a letter to my landlords of 2003, writ in Anger. There’s many stylistic things that I’d change if this was being written today, but I like how much it holds up– and how raving mad I sound.

Common Good? Their ward? Wrong doing and apathy?

It would seem that in my lunacy I had confused my landlord with Batman.

–

Jarett Kobek
10 Barnes St, Apt #5
Providence, RI 02906

[Landlord Name & Address Redacted]

August 11, 2003

RE: Parking at 10-12 Barnes St.

Dear Sir or Madam,

Per our many conversations, you are by now no doubt aware that for some time there has been a series of ongoing and flagrant violations of stated building rules regarding the number of cars that may be parked per unit. As we have discussed on several occasions, and as was assured during the process of lease signing, there is a space available for one car per unit and one car only.

I have no desire to police this situation, nor am I unreasonable enough to believe this rule should not be subject to a certain amount of flexibility. Certainly there are occasions and one-time situations which may take place without any real trespass, but when violations occur with a repeated and daily frequency, it’s hard to miss the emerging pattern of abuse, and even harder to deny the progression of circumstance from merely annoying to utterly intolerable. You’ll recall that my complaints have come not in relation to certain and very specific units parking two vehicles each and every night.

I now find that this situation has further escalated. On the night of August 9th, 2003, the tenants of 10 Barnes Apt #3 have parked not only the car (a tan Saturn with Canada Registration # [REDACTED]) and truck (a grey Toyota with New York State Registration # [REDACTED]) with which they routinely flout the rules regarding parking, but also a third card (silver Honda Civic, New York Registration # [REDACTED].)

Allowing this behavior to continue would constitute sheer madness.

Surely, as Landlord of this residence, you have a familiarity with the limited number of available parking spaces and are able to easily imagine the basic antisocial nature of this transgression. When the number of cars being parked by any single unit is three, the situation becomes not merely the breaking of a soft rule, but a brutal attack on the Common Good. I would like to believe that your organization recognizes its inherent responsibility and duty towards the protection of that Common Good, and understands that all of its tenants should not suffer needlessly because of wrong-doing and apathy. Your actions, however, have only reflected your apparent disinterest in the protection of that which is your ward, and it seems as though you would rather let the well-being of All be trampled and destroyed by the Few who have no sense of human decency, nor no natural regard for others, let alone any respect for stated regulations.

Clearly, as several apartments within the building remain vacant, the impact of these violations is minimized. Equally clear is the reality that the building is near two colleges, and that school soon will be in session. When these empty units are occupied, these matters will enter a state of crisis.

I write to you now not with the desire to shame any person, nor merely to complain, but with the hopes that you will recognize this letter for exactly what it is: a chance to correct a bad situation before it becomes considerably worse. Our conversation in June left me believing that assigned parking was an impending reality. Instead, it has proven to be a fanciful possibility that might some day come to fruition. While I am sympathetic and understand that certain elements are no doubt working in such a way as to avoid daytime detection, surely as protector of the Common Good, you can recognize the multiple ways in which this situation may be redressed without resorting to nighttime surveillance.

I am enclosing an informal letter delivered to the tenants in Apt #3, 10 Barnes.

I look forward to your immediate and efficacious response. I am,

Sincerely yours,

Jarett Kobek

cc: tenants 10 Barnes #3

enclosure

–

What a dick!

The Book Gods have interrupted my jaunty 19th Century kick– forcing a repeat engagement with the Odyssey of Homer. This is the fourth or fifth reading and the only time that I’ve liked it. I suspect that this has something to do with translation. The last two go-rounds were with Fagles and Chapman. Both men did fabulous work on the Iliad (only about 400 years apart), but their Odysseys left me cold. This time I wanted Lattimore but ended up with Fitzgerald, who turns out to be up my alley, stuffy midcentury-isms and all.

I presumed that when the Book Gods demanded my return to the Odyssey, this was with a reason in mind. I have yet to find it, not even mustering an association of my own distance with the wanderings of the eponymous Hero. I will say, though, that it’s extremely interesting to read the poem after nearly seven years of contemporary continual military action– one notices how much of the poem is concerned with the cost of war. None of Iliam’s conquerors get away clean. They take the war home. Another random thought: if the Odyssey is about learning to deal with women, does the Iliad then tell us that men create war to avoid the fairer sex?

I’ve developed a fascination with the incident in which Odysseus and his men land on the island with the cattle of Helios, the sun god; this comes after Odysseus and his men have traveled to the underworld and been warned by Teiresias to stay away from the cows, and after Circe has repeated the warning. The significance of this event in the narrative can not be underestimated: of all the adventures and wanderings of Odyssey, it is the only one to be mentioned specifically in the epic’s introductory lines:

The man, O Muse, inform, that many a way
Wound with his wisdom to his wished stay;
That wandered wondrous far, when he the town
Of sacred Troy had sack’d and shivered down;
The cities of a world of nations,
With all their manners, minds, and fashions,
He saw and knew; at sea felt many woes,
Much care sustained, to save from overthrows
Himself and friends in their retreat for home;
But so their fates he could not overcome,
Though much he thirsted it. O men unwise,
They perish’d by their own impieties,
That in their hunger’s rapine would not shun
The oxen of the lofty-going Sun,
Who therefore from their eyes the day bereft
Of safe return. These acts, in some part left,
Tell us, as others, deified Seed of Jove.

(taken from Chapman’s translation. Italics mine.)

When Odysseus and his men land on the isle of Helios’ cattle (or Chapman’s oxen), it’s Eurylochus, second in command, who takes advantage of Odysseus’ hideously inopportune slumber to convince the other men to slaughter the cattle, giving the following speech:

‘Hear what I shall say,
Though words will staunch no hunger, every death
To us poor wretches that draw temporal breath
You know is hateful; but, all know, to die
The death of Famine is a misery
Past all death loathsome. Let us, therefore, take
The chief of this fair herd, and offerings make
To all the Deathless that in broad heaven live,
And in particular vow, if we arrive
In natural Ithaca, to straight erect
A temple to the Haughty in aspect,
Rich and magnificent, and all within
Deck it with relics many and divine.
If yet he stands incens’d, since we have slain
His high-brow’d herd, and, therefore, will sustain
Desire to wrack our ship, he is but one,
And all the other Gods that we atone
With our divine rites will their suffrage give
To our design’d return, and let us live.
If not, and all take part, I rather crave
To serve with one sole death the yawning wave,
Than in a desert island lie and sterve,
And with one pin’d life many deaths observe.’

(again taken from Chapman)

The reader or listener knows that this is a funeral oration. All the men serving under Odysseus die; only Odysseus lives. But he doesn’t escape vengeance. Right after, he gets stuck for seven years– the vast majority of his voyage home– with the nymph Calypso.

If you’re willing to accept the idea that both the Iliad and the Odyssey are didactic works intended to instruct their contemporary audiences in ways and customs, then one can’t help but wondering about this episode’s underlying meaning. Its paramount placement in the poem’s opening lines, plus the fact that Odyssey has been explicitly warned twice (once by a dead man, once by a witch) against this action only deepens the mystery. As I see it, the most likely interpretation is thus: there are some things and some Gods with whom one does not fuck, and Helios, who lights the whole of the human world, tops the list. Homer specifically notes the joy that Helios takes, each day, in seeing his cattle. Eurylochus and the other men could, conceivably, be screwing with the natural order of things and, thus, the whole of civilization. And the Odyssey is, if nothing else, about one’s duty to civilization.

But here’s the rub: Eurylochus accompanied Odyssey to the underworld. There are a finite number of mortal men in the Odyssey who know the whole truth of death, and Eurylochus is one. Even without this knowledge, his reasoning would be sound enough: in theory, all the men are going to die. Better to be struck down instantly than wither away with starvation. It’s entirely reasonable. The knowledge of Eurylochus makes this even more potent; he’s arguing three possibilities. Death by starvation, death by the Gods or the remote possibility of survival. But he knows to whence he goes. He’s Napoleon in rags– he’s seen too much and ain’t got nothing to lose. I wonder if there isn’t a reading here of a very Platonic idea: having the hoi polloi know how things work creates individuals independent of their duty to the state.

Tone and feel– for lack of better words– are key distinguishers between the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Odyssey feels as though it could’ve been written yesterday– meanwhile the Iliad is like a thing stolen from the dawn of time, a wild poem where the baneful wrath of Achilleos (Chapman) transforms a mortal to a beast and then a god. Both epics reflect customs and belief of their time. This is, I suspect, the final meaning of the herd of Helios. It’s not just that Odysseus’ men offended the gods or that Odysseus himself did not– it’s the Ancient sense of the total irrational unfairness of things, of a natural order over which man has no grasp and of which the gods themselves are barely in control. And some people have the right friends and listen. Others eat the oxen.

–

Here’s an hilarious youtube reenactment of the above mentioned incident:

Found: pictures taken as a high school student. These are of Thayer Street in Providence, RI, and its attendant environs. Based on certain visual cues and simple math, I’m dating these to Spring of 1994, probably April. In those days, Providence was a strange place– still reeling from the Bush I recession & packed with freaks and anarchists as far as the eye could spy. I’m not sure exactly when the city started changing– somewhere towards the end of the decade– but I remember returning from Distant Locales in the Summer of 2001 and being completely and utterly flabbergasted. It was so clean. I moved back in 2003 & it was good times, mostly, but it’s no surprise that it didn’t take. Like the cliché says: you can’t really ever go home again.

Unlike many of the photographs proffered on this very website, these have a certain historical resonance; a combination of awful 90s clothing (was any decade ever so horrid?) and buildings and views of Thayer Street that have disappeared forever. I question the idea of photography as an art, but there’s no denying that every photo becomes interesting after ten years. The archival, representative nature predominates.

This flier came last December. Earlier today, it fell out of my rarely used backpack on to the floor of one elly. I was happy to see it and thus she scanned it. Marz Bar is an important place in the personal cosmology. In celebration of this rediscovery, I have also uploaded a third and final video of an hilarious time ending poorly. It is entitled, “Too Drunk to Drink Anymore.” Thus the vortex of the Marz Bar consumes us all.

Last summer, when I attended the San Diego Comic Con, I was struck by its blankness– there was literally nothing that required photography and nothing, after the cease of the spectacle, that was worth remembering. My sum total of purchases was $3 for a grotty bottle of Vitamin Water.

This year gave me hardcore deja-vu, but I was prepared by the previous engagement– I managed about twenty photographs and achieved the holy grail of commodity fetishism: the acquisition of a relatively unique object in unrepeatable circumstances. Along with my toilet photograph, this triumph indicates, I believe, that I had a good experience– two Unique Moments in what is, after all, an event dedicated to specific conformity of product.

It’s been many moons since I last read Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and my memory of it is terrible– but I believe that much of its central conceit revolves around the idea of the mass media providing a perverted mirror of actual human relations which then cheapens and destroys the human relations that it mirrors, thus making its own reflection increasingly perverted.

It’s hard to attend an event dedicated to the replacement of personalities with corporate products and not feel a little bit like a freaked-out Left Bank intellectual. The best way to think about the culture of comics fandom, or any fandom, really– and establishing a way of weeding out enemy from friend– is this: are people reacting to the product as a thing crafted and created by individuals and engaging with the communication implicit within that creation, or is the consumer’s interest in the surface aspects like “plot”, “characters” and “story”?

This is what makes the hoopla-hoo about the recent-released The Dark Knight completely repellent; Heath Ledger’s performance requires that the audience care (or pretend to care) about the Joker, a one-dimensional construct with no implicit or explicit meaning beyond its reflection of pulp tropes from the 1940s and an ability to sell related merchandise for the parent owner, Time Warner.

Ledger’s turn is an empty thing– imagine Popeye learning how to method act and channeling Marlon Brando from One-Eyed Jacks– but it could never be anything else. The Joker, in every incarnation, is what the lowest brow entertainment of its origin period had to tell us about criminality and madness: barely anything at all.

We live in the first society in which media narratives are an embedded industry: sheer statistics demand and enforce a hierarchy of consumption. Just as there will always be a certain number of cars sold each season, so too will there always be certain kinds of films achieving varying levels of success. Some will be blockbusters, some will be sleepers. Others will bomb.

The products themselves, being delivery mechanisms for the intake and release of capital, contain surface level narratives that are essentially meaningless and variations on tired themes: this is why the same people who watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer are now watching Battlestar Galactica. The analogue with the auto industry again becomes useful: just as young people buy “edgy” cars and mature individuals buy “solid” cars, reasonably above-average nerds watch “smart” television, but avoid “dumb” shows like Enterprise. It’s an interface of marketing and demographics, and, in the case of Dark Knight, Time Warner’s exceptional good luck that its actor sacrificed himself upon Mammon’s Altar of High Marketing.

The lead-in for 2007’s installment– Transformers– was nostalgia for enormous fucking robots that turned into cars; this year it was the actor who went too far into the Darkness of the Joker and Never Came Back. But, really, let’s be honest: there’s about as much depth and darkness in the Joker as there is in the infinitely repeating cliche of the Hollywood OD. These same empty cultural tropes have been recycled forever; and if you don’t believe me, ask Lupe Velez.

The real purpose of Ledger’s performance appears to be a granting of permission for a certain kind of man to smear his face with makeup. You know these people: they had a real hey-hey-hey-day after 1994’s The Crow, another comics property with a lead actor bearing an oddly similar resemblance to Ledger in Dark Knight, who also died tragically before his film’s release. (Memo to Hollywood males: properly apply your eye and lip liners.)

These people, the cosplayers and the costumed, are the blank ciphers on which the spectacle is writ.

And that brings us right back to the San Diego Comic Con, 2008, ground zero of the masquerade, where the most common costume was the Joker. Cosplay and costuming are pretty abstractly interesting– if you think about them hard enough, you start wondering about the basic nature of free will. Each cosplayer makes a specific choice to dress up as a media property, but what if that’s an inversion of the actuality? What if the media property itself– the platonic form of the commodity– is making that choice on a spectral plane of existence? What if some people are genuinely so blank and empty that their souls and their bodies are nothing more than a canvas on which the idea of the Green Lantern is writing itself? And if that’s the case, then what, really, is the Green Lantern trying to tell those of us that see it?

The masquerade is like everything else at the Comic Con– a practical reassurance for all parties, those in costume and those not, that the Hobbies and Interests of the attendees are safe, unchallenging things. There’s a faux-surprise with each outrageous costume; can you believe that chick is half-naked? Can you believe that the fat dude is dressed as Kazaar? But these are rhetorical questions and the shock is faked, another false emotion amidst five days of lucre hiding behind camaraderie. The freak parade is a giant advertisement disguised as a hug.

This year, I attended the Con with elly, my old chum and romantic interest, and weeks before, she had asked me about cosplay; somewhere in our discussion, I suggested that we attend dressed as characters from Art Spiegelman’s Maus. I’d go as one of the death camp mice and she’d go as a Nazi guard. After all, by the logic of the costumed, Maus is a pretty good property: well-drawn anthropomorphic animals. But for certain reasons– taste and laziness– this plan was abandoned. Instead we hit the floor and were awash in seventy years worth of filth and debris.

The only reprieve from the sea of flesh was our attendance of a panel in celebration of Blake Bell’s recently released book on Steve Ditko. Around these quarters, Ditko is a long-term idee fixe– the only comic artist whose work I actively collect. I have my thoughts on the man, some of which are poorly expressed here.

I have a lot of trouble with panels– they conflict with my inability to sit still for more than thirty minutes and my complete unwillingness to shut up– but I always attend at least one of the more obscure. These sequestered, fluorescently lit cells are clusters of ultra-hardcore interests; the panelists and attendees are professionals and specialists in the totally arcane, and generally far removed from creeping product. Last year, I attended one on Disney strike-busting that bored my companion to tears; I was fascinated not only by the topic but by the audience. How was it possible to be in a room of thirty people who cared about attempts to unionize animators in the 1940s? But there it was.

Later, I discovered that the line-up of the Ditko panel as originally announced was Bell, the phenomenal Kim Deitch, Gary Groth, Jim Starlin, Carl Potts and Dean Mullaney. Mullaney– who had published Ditko under the Eclipse Comics banner– did not attend; his replacement was a younger woman Liana K., a Canadian who appears to be “known” for talking to a sock puppet and attending conventions half-naked, but, in the moment, we possessed zero knowledge of her background, nor of Mullaney’s absence, and assumed, in light of the seasoning of the other panelists, that she had been included as a misguided representation of the Female Perspective.

The panel had highlights. Bell projected a nice selection of Ditko art, and Kim Deitch discussed at some length the interest of his brother and collaborator Simon in Ditko; he also dissed on poor John Romita Sr. Sera sera, sez I. But, as all discussions of Ditko must do, the whole thing broke into contention around the topic of the Randian-influenced Objectivist comics, and in particular, Mr. A. (Viewers of the Jonathan Ross documentary might recall Mr. A as the point where Neil Gaiman, a man possessing no small experience with 20th Century American belief systems, started talking about “American barking madness.”)

It was Liana K. who brought the pain– discussing her discomfort with Mr. A and taking, I think, exception to the political didacticism in the work. These concerns fell into a well-honed tradition: most comics cognoscenti lean Left, and Leftism’s enduring problem is its condescension to those of opposing viewpoints. In short, while folks on the Right think that people on the Left are deranged, hell-bound sodomities, folks on the Left appear to believe that people on the Right are stupid.

It seems almost impossible to discuss Ditko’s Mr. A work without giving up a lament that the work “suffered” due to Ditko’s loading it with his politics. The person discussing the work will most often find these politics repellent and thus, indirectly, discuss Ditko as though he were stupid or somehow mistaken. (Not everyone, though: Jim Starlin was just fine.) But what this line of commentary really drives at is the same problem encountered in Ditko’s Hawk and Dove: the rigidity of the superhero genre as a storytelling device, and the limitations of a readership raised on genre expectations.

Ditko’s Mr. A stories only seem like “bad comics” if one expects genre exercises– if, however, one assumes that the works appear as their creator intended, they exist much more comfortably. They’re only “bad” if one’s definition of comics is limited to one genre & its one story, and if one assumes that there is only one potential audience being addressed.

Namely oneself.

(The strange thing about people constantly trying to wedge the Mr. A comics into the superhero genre is that both Dr. Strange and Spider-Man under Ditko were quite far from the genre; Peter Parker was the perpetually unfulfilled female lead of a Romance Comic, and Dr. Strange touristed through a successive series of monster/horror comics.)

Which is a long-winded way of suggesting that the worst possible place in the world to be raising the most obvious and hackneyed objections to Ditko’s Objectivist work has got to be a panel at the San Diego Comic Con. For the record, I also don’t recommend quoting scripture and verse to Christians.

It was not soon after Liana K. had called Mr. A something like “bad comics,” that a man in the audience called out with the most difficult possible question: “What would you have done differently?”

At the time, what stood out was the unfortunate undertone of (perhaps not so) latent sexism; who was this girl on a panel amongst industry veterans, and why was she prattling on about Ditko in such an ill-informed manner? Clearly, such assertions could not go unchallenged! About five to ten minutes of argument and floundering occurred– all of it painful and disagreeable to the eyewitness.

I was of two minds: I had a partial sympathy, knowing how incredibly awful it must be as a woman amongst nerds, but even without my later acquired knowledge, I couldn’t help wondering why anyone with such a surface level understanding of Ditko would sit on a panel of individuals that had published the man, or had hung out in his studio, or had edited him, or, you know, had written a book on the man’s life and art. We each have our interests, but interest alone does not make us an expert.

Coming home and discovering that the individual in question’s major credentials appear to be squeezing into a Batgirl costume and conversing with a sock puppet only made me wonder what in god’s name panel organizer Blake Bell was thinking; why would you ever invite this person? Isn’t it bad enough that the Comic Con is one enormous headsqueeze– must I witness parochial sexism against the ill-informed and often half-clothed?

With the distance of a few days, I have begun to see this moment as emblematic of the entire Comic Con; a collision between the cosplaying media personality, an almost living avatar of the convention’s current direction, and the ultra-nerd contingent, the kind of obsessive old school freak that was once its heart-and-soul.

Much as my basic sympathies fall with the latter camp, it’s also clear that these people are dinosaurs– the comics industry has become raw meat for the grinder of film & television, and there’s an awful day of reckoning not far from now, when the vast majority of youngish comic book fans have come up reading their funnybooks from right to left. Even the outcasts and the arty will be pushing books based on conventions and ideas that have no connection whatsoever– none at all– to that great mass of readers. And then, kids, it’s done.