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We’ve been rocking Janelle Monáe’s Metropolis Suite I of IV ever since her show last May at the Key Club. Being deeply opposed, as our pal Jason Tallon would say, both in principle and in practice to attending live music performances– and also being way, way, way out of the West Hollywood loop– we didn’t even know that such a thing was happening until too late; but whisper campaigns brought news of Monáe’s music. And there was, as the old folks used to say, much rejoicing.

Monáe’s had a long Summer of being hyped by Diddy– many command performances hither and yon, a re-release of the aforementioned Metropolis Suite and now a new video for “Many Moons.”

The video is reasonably good but comes off a little sub-Kanye Glow in the Dark. Its major, tragic flaw is the one sin that Jesus called unforgivable: the use of quick-cuts and poor framing on an amazing dancer. There was, once, a Golden Age of dance on the silver screen, when cinematographers and DPs knew how to frame action. In those days, if by chance someone could dance then, by God, you would really see them dance.

Which is why amateur Youtube fixed-camera video of Monáe’s live performances is so infinitely preferable. Not to be missed, and wait till about the three minute mark:

Long series of digital photographs aborted by my own profound camera incompetence. Too bad. Only six survivors:

Courtesy our pal, Arafat Kazi:

–

A rough English translation is:

I will poot, I will poot
Once I poot, you will be destroyed
You will cook from beyond the grave

When I see a beautiful girl, my chest cries out with a Poot
My soul is taken over my an insane addictive daemon

I will poot, I will poot
Once I poot, you will be destroyed
I will reverse the hourglass of your life

I have eaten mangoes, berries, jackfruit, and lichees,
Every time I see a fruit I salivate

I will poot, I will poot
I will poot, I will poot.

I avoid looking at this blog’s access logs– they alternate between the frighteningly active and the depressingly desolate and are too filled with obvious hits– but my occasional observations have noted a definite contingent of NYC peeps. Some I know, most I do not. Either way, tri-state stalkers and stans, now’s yer chance for public confrontation in a small space, apparently with a certain amount of nudity:

Storytelling thru Stripping
featuring: Ariana Reines, Jarett Kobek, Jason Tallon, Fritz Donnelly, and Christina Ewald
Thurs 9/18 @ 9pm
hiChristina
154 Orchard St between Rivington n Stanton
hiChristina.com

Ain’t it fun?

 

Text quoted from Volume 1, Number Four of the Cthulhu Prayer Society Newsletter:

By 1725, only 18 documented burials had occurred in the [North Burial Ground of Providence], clear sign that home burial was still preferred. The burial ground land was used for a town animal pound. A whipping post and stocks were set up there, too. The Rhode Islanders may have been rebels against the Puritans, but they were still Englishman, fond of dispensing corporal punishment for such offenses as reveling on the Sabbath.

Gravestone carving became a Providence profession with the arrival of John Anthony Angel, who came from Portsmouth, RI in 1747. Other gravestone carvers were George Allen, Seth Luther, and Stephen
Hartshorn.

Finally, the idea of a civic burial ground caught on. As the population expanded and land grew scarcer and more valuable, it became plain that having Grandpa in the backyard was an impediment to business and real estate. The burial ground underwent expansion, with some houses along its edge vacated, the owners often settling for an exchange of land. The burial ground underwent successive expansions in 1747, 1764, 1776 and 1867.

The creation of Benefit Street, cutting across many vertical plots of land running up College Hill, also resulted in the relocation of a number of family plots to the North Burial Ground, with the endorsement and encouragement of the city fathers. Providence’s Quakers also acquired a designated part of the burial ground for themselves, moving their graves from Olive Street. Many other historic grave plots wound up in Swan Point Cemetery, which explains how a garden cemetery opened in 1846 has stones from the 18th century!

Taken by me some time later:

–

More Sarah Helen Whitman: HOURS OF LIFE and POE’S HELEN.

(PDFs via kobek.com. Ya heard?)

There is no way to put a gloss on the complete and utter failure of Rudy Giuliani’s Presidential run. It ranks as the single worst campaign in modern political history, a statement born out by the numbers: $50 million dollars spent versus one (1) delegate won. This startling incongruence– combined with Rudy’s neutered and anemic performance as a candidate– seemed like the end of a great beast. America’s Mayor was sent back to New York, tail tucked between his legs, finding solace only in the plastic of his mannequin bride and left to wonder, like all living objects of universal disgust, why no one liked him. It couldn’t have happened to a worse guy.

Giuliani reminds me of Dracula in the late-period Universal horror films, the ones where Frankenstein’s Monster fights the Wolfman and Dracula and Abbott and Costello. These films are formulaic in the extreme. Each ends with Dracula dying, and each begins with the corpse falling from the coffin. The stake is dislodged from the heart. The old dessicated skeleton returns to life, growing sinew and muscle on bone and flesh on sinew.

The vampire king emerges from death for one more hissing bloodfeast.

From the first lisping giggle, I knew that Rudy’s keynote speech was his return to form. The dark lord had finished with the daylight, had cast off the veneer of respectability and aristocratic manners, and returned to his roots as a cheap thug in a bad suit, his oversized shoulder pads disguising the feminity of his frame, and was ready to sink his fangs into the first available neck.

Prepped by McCain’s handlers, Rudy was without armor or sword. His one rhetorical device stripped away for the first time in almost seven years, America’s Mayor had to pretend that it was a 9/10 world; he had to tap into to his previous self, the earlier incarnation. Presented with a unique challenge– “Don’t Mention September 11th”– Rudy drew from his Inner Well of Hidden Strength and discovered anew that it was as it had been: a cesspool, a rotting festering sinkhole buried deep and clogged with a lifetime of malice and hatred.

I’m not sure at what point– maybe when America’s Mayor openly laughed at the idea of public service, or maybe when he characterized Obama’s life-story, pejoratively, as something that could happen Only in America– but somewhere in that despicable rant, I understood. I realized. I got it.

As a serious candidate for National Office, Rudy had burned himself out, yes, but now he has a new niche. He has become the mean-spirited little monster that the Republicans will bring out every two-to-four years. Whenever a nasty speech needs making, whenever an enemy requires besmirching. He will be there, snorting and laughing at his own jokes. He is a hack and a hatchet-man, the one who will do what the others will not. He is the in-house vandal, a dog that attacks on command and then returns, its mouth covered in blood, to lap at its master’s hand, longing only for approval.

But don’t fool yourself: his masters still hate him. Everyone hates him. Other than a brief blip in which American society went crazy enough that it finally– at last– was operating on Rudy’s wavelength of constant paranoia and aggression, this has been the defining factor of his career. He was voted into office not for likability or personal charm. He was elected as Mayor for a simple reason: he had promised to brutalize criminals. He knows that he is on the fringe of the party– that he is a creature viewed with suspicion, that old women from Nebraska cross themselves and hide cloves of garlic under their skirts whenever he enters a room– but he has no other options. No one else will accept him. This knowledge makes him dangerous, more eager to perform, to make sure that the knife unerringly passes under the ribs.

The small man will never get his balcony, but he is allowed to borrow podiums, and it is from these that he demonstrates his vacuity. There was a time, and I remember it, when Rudy seemed as if he might be a political figure with Ideas. You could disagree with those Ideas and you could be disturbed by the ancillary damage that accompanied them, but you never felt that you were watching a charade or a put-on.

There was a time, however distant, when he seemed his own man. His brief ascendancy has changed him. He got a taste of the real, pure stuff and wanted more. Painfully aware of his personal limitations, the only way Rudy could imagine himself scoring the mainline was to become yet another unsuccessful political void. Mitt Romney without the charm. Huckabee without the brains. John McCain without the competence. A sucking pull of desperation, doing whatever is necessary to Win. There is no value or long-held position that he will not reverse. Nothing is beyond compromise. Guns, God, abortion, gays, Jews, whatever. Even New York itself will be betrayed on command. If we woke up tomorrow & the nation had placed a value on lawlessness rather than order, Rudy would be first in line to refute his time as the Ball Buster. Reduction in crime rates would be blamed on subordinates, on underlings– America’s Mayor would recast himself as the man who had favored chaos but was held back by career politicians and the bureaucrats.

Yet there is a solace: the week is over. It is time for Republicans to stake the heart and hide the body. America’s Mayor will pass to his undying death, waiting in stasis for the next call of his masters. He will return, as he always returns, with his cheeks purpled by makeup and tufts of grey hair framing a face that he stole from Max Schreck. Watch his tongue, see how he licks his lips.

It is not a question of if, but of when.

Some monsters never die.

U.S. Republican presidential candidate John McCain kisses Trig Palin who is held by his sister Willow Palin (obscured) after arriving to attend the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota September 3, 2008.

U.S. Republican vice-presidential candidate Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK) (L-R) meets U.S. first lady Laura Bush and Cindy McCain, wife of U.S. Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain (R-AZ), in Minneapolis, Minnesota September 2, 2008.

Riding dirty and running with the devil.

(Buy.)

(this post by request.)

Look: I like dumb vampire movies and I like dumb stylistic candy and I like dumb genre exercises, so it’s a sucker’s bet thinking that I wouldn’t be all about Joel Schumaker’s The Lost Boys (1987).

From the trailers and online commentary, it was obvious that Lost Boys 2: The Tribe (2008), a direct-to-video sequel, never had a chance of being anything but a travesty. This is not a review. Why bother, what can possibly be said?

But.

Watching the sequel is an exercise in contrast-and-compare fascination. Between rounds of MY EYES MY EYES and GOD HOW COULD THEY DO THIS and MY CHILDHOOD IS BUTCHERED, one catches glimpses of significant differences in the two films’ levels of ethical complexity. The original Lost Boys presents the viewer with an essentially Manichean world of Good Humans and Bad Vampires. Even in its shock twist, what is notable is the lack of grey: Max goes from good to bad in a half-second reveal and there’s never any doubt about which side is Right. While the screenplay makes overtures towards presenting the World of the Vampires as a seductive one, these efforts are weak, at best half-hearted, and, at worst, insincere. After all, this is a narrative in which vampirism involves living in a filthy cave, having terrible breath, hanging out with Kiefer Sutherland and taking orders from a Harry Anderson impersontor. This may be someone’s idea of a good time, but that someone is probably the BTK Killer.

The original film’s loose thematic resonance resides with the idea of Family. The mother and her two children live with Hippie Grandpa in a nasty old house; this is juxtaposed with the rag-tag collection of misfit metal vampires, the Hot Chick and a little kid, all of whom are under the secret sway of the Business Man. Both families are make-do and stripped from the nuclear ideal, but their fundamental difference comes in the glue that binds. In the Mom and Gramps camp, the binding elements are Love and Concern. On the other side, the Vampiric Rogues are tied together by cruelty and mutual need. And, being a motion picture extravaganza based in the Received Wisdoms of Vaudevillian Hollywood, obviously Love Conquers All.

Lost Boys 2 presents a decidedly different outlook. The narrative setup is much the same as the original films: two kids go and live with a distant relation in a town rife with Vampirism. The second film riffs off the much beloved Grandpa of the first, substituting in an Aunt who appears– at first– as another lovable eccentric but, in a shocking divergence, is a cruel and mean-spirited woman. She even charges rent! Rent!

The sequel makes a better effort towards demonstrating the awesomeness of the world of the vampires: they’ve, like, got an X-Box 360, a big ol’ house where they throw shitty parties and generally can do whatever they want. This depiction strikes me as truer to the original concept of J.M. Barrie’s lost boys– if anything can be noted of the Vampires in the first film, it’s that they were a dour mid-80s bunch incapable of fun. Not exactly the path to winning converts.

As the narrative of the sequel plays out, both newly arrived humans are forced to make The Hard Choice: join the vampires, live forever, rock-and-roll all night and party every day, or remain human and experience, uh, whatever it is that humans do. Paying rent, apparently. The complex aspect of Lost Boys 2 is that by its own internal logic, there’s almost no reason as to why the kids shouldn’t become vampires. Unlike the first film, wherein vampirism represented a loss of inherent values, the sequel presents a world in which the protagonists are about as selfish, idiotic, pleasure-driven and thrill-seeking as the vampires. Their aunt’s crazy, they’ve got no money and they have been disappointed by all human agency. Why not join the bite club?

The world of the vampires has its own complexities: the head vampire appears to be from a different film. He’s a surf-rocker with awful hair and a soulful, other-wordly demeanor. His minions, on the other hand, are a Hollywood screenwriter’s idea of ANNOYING YOUNG MEN, even down to one of the vampires consistently videotaping (no doubt for Youtube!) hilarious acts of violence and mayhem. It’s never reconciled why a surf-rocker with his zen vampirism would chill with extras from Jackass 2. But let us not hope against hope! Incoherent garbage will never explicate itself! Rather, let’s have the underlings bring us to the crux of the matter: the slow creep of nouveau cynicism into youth films.

The Lost Boys remains well loved because it effectively straddles several genres, allowing it to exist in several places at the same time. One of these is the 80s Teenager/Youth Dramedy. These films, which are loved and loved and loved by my peers and which I mostly loathe and loathe and loathe, were, in retrospect, comparatively three-dimensional in their depiction of the young. Somewhere in the 90s, probably due to that horrendous right wing snoozefest of KIDS (1995), youth films lost any attempts at an honest, or at least human, characters. Everyone under a certain age– 25?– has been conflated into whatever cynical Youth Trends happen to be dominating the late night news in greater Los Angeles County.

So, if you’re a hack screenwriter churning out a direct-to-video sequel about sexy teenage vampires, you just make everyone– and I mean everyone– incredibly stupid. There’s probably a Wikipedia category created just for this purpose. “Sociopathic Trends Amongst Teenagers.” “Youth Oriented Idiocy.” Take your pick.

Let’s be honest: the original Lost Boys isn’t even a good movie, but it’s watchable, well constructed and makes sense. The sequel is an enormous, stupid piece of shit. And yet, for all of its directorial and authorial incompetence, for all of its reliance on tropes that were cliche over ten years ago, it presents the viewer with far greater, and less resolvable, ethical complexities than the original.

This brings us to an interesting observation, and the point: sometimes you can break something badly enough that, in your destruction, you create something almost interesting. Some things, and I guess some people, are so ugly that they achieve a new kind of beauty, or at least a transfixing hideousness. Even Medusa had her admirers.

(this post by request.)

Winter 2005.

Worst year of my life. Arafat Kazi and the girl who worked at the Fluevog store in Boston.

For someone with an interest in the work of writer and artist Steve Ditko, the last year has been a bonanza of material, culminating in Blake Bell’s Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko and a new publication released by the Ditko/Snyder team. Initially, I wasn’t  interested in Bell’s book– career retrospectives tend to be good introductions for the general reader and frustrating for the conversant– but having attended Bell’s panel at the San Diego Comic Con, I came away with the feeling that, whatever else, the art in Strange and Stranger had been selected with enormous care and taste, and this alone made the book worth acquiring.

To my surprise, the text, admirably, never transgresses into the tawdry. Speculation about Ditko’s life has been a staple of the comics industry for almost forty years, so Bell should be applauded for keeping out as much as possible. I wouldn’t presume for a moment to know whether or not Ditko himself approves of Bell’s approach, and, really, why should I? Why should anyone presume, before having any direct evidence, that they know or understand what another individual is thinking?

And yet assumptions of this nature abound through nearly all critical writing about Ditko, and, sad to say, when Bell reaches the Randian-influenced period, there is a bit of the same. This is particularly galling when one considers the direct and unabashedly didactic nature of Ditko’s creator-owned work; one of the obvious themes of this material is an insistence by the creator that the work not be read biographically, or as part of a continuum, but rather as individual statements of the same ideas. A = A requires no a priori knowledge. If the reader is incapable of reading the work in a vacuum, after it has become clear that the vacuum itself is part of the work, then I would argue that this is a failure of the reader and not of the artist. For decades, Ditko has been demanding that his work be read ahistorically; isn’t it time to start considering this insistence at face value?

The last chapter of Bell’s book, in particular, left me deeply unhappy. With its dismissals of Ditko’s later Randian-influenced work and questions about the methods employed– the reduction of characters to outlines, the amount of text, the seeming adherence to the superhero story– I was reminded of a passage in Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, in which the narrator-artist Gully Jimson, now in his elder years, forges a drawing from his earlier period. In the novel, Jimson has entered a phase not unfamiliar to many, if not most, artists with long careers: his latter work has become something entirely different than the earlier work, and the earlier work is judged superior. The passage in question:

Thank God it wasn’t Sunday. And before four o’clock the next afternoon I had the prettiest early Jimson you ever saw. Sketch for the Bath. Or rather, from the Bath, but bearing on its face all those indubitable marks which as the crickets say, testify to that early freshness of vision and bravura of execution which can never be imitated by a hand which in acquiring a mature decision of purpose, has lost, nevertheless, that je ne sais quoi, without which perhaps no work of art is entitled to the name of genius.

The Horse’s Mouth is copyright 1944. Let’s compare and contrast with the final paragraph of Bell’s book:

Ditko failed to acknowledge that while many of his fans may not have appreciated being force-fed right from wrong, almost all of them recognized the decline his increasingly didactic material had wrought on his storytelling and art. Had Ditko been able to maintain the same approach to graphic narrative that informs his best work, his status as a true visionary in the art of visual storytelling would be afforded its due, confirming his place alongside the medium’s serious practitioners who are leading the charge into the new millennium.

(Let me note: I am not likening Ditko to Jimson. Merely pointing out an echo.)

The frustration elicited by Bell’s final chapter is a familiar one. I’ve been feeling it from the first days of my interest in Ditko’s work, dating back to about 1999. I have become royally tired of hearing the Randian-influenced work dismissed and I am royally tired of hearing Ditko discussed as though he were an idiot savant who had a few good years and then disappeared in a fog of reactionary thinking. Thus I am now going to science and knowledge out my thoughts on this matter and be done with it.

The Truth:
No One has ever been Ripped Off
as badly by the Comics Industry as Steve Ditko

Not Siegel and Shuster. Not Jack Kirby. No one.

How badly has the comics industry ripped off Steve Ditko? Last year, Spider-Man 3, a property which Ditko co-created and on which he was promised a royalty share that never materialized, grossed about $900M globally. This year, Iron Man, featuring a visual look based on Ditko’s redesign of the character, has grossed about $560M. Next year, Watchmen is on track to earn at least $300M domestically. (This is a deeply conservative estimate.) The trailer of the film has been well received enough that DC has printed about a million copies of the graphic novel, a work so indebted to Ditko that he might as well have been listed as a co-creator. (This is not to take away anything from either Alan Moore or, especially, Dave Gibbons or John Higgins. But I was looking at Ditko’s issues of Blue Beetle and it hit me. They are Watchmen. Beyond inspiration. It’s all there.)

After 2009, there will have been three solid years of major, headline grabbing films that are by-products of Ditko’s creative work. As much as Kirby was the King of Komics, it’s been Ditko’s aesthetic, primarily, that has translated outside of the medium. This makes a certain amount of sense: although at the center of the Silver Age, Ditko was somehow on its periphery. The easy translation of his aesthetic to a billion dollar industry– and the relative failure of Kirby’s (c.f. Fantastic Four films)– is perfectly logical if you consider that the received wisdom of what makes “good” superhero art is utterly disconnected from the visual values of the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, Ditko’s reward has been scraps from the tables of companies that he personally enriched and forty years of incessant second-guessing by his so-called fans, by other professionals, by his editors and by his critics. How could he leave Spider-man? Why are these new comics so preachy? Why doesn’t he sell his original artwork? Why doesn’t he want to meet his public?

And that last question contains a barb of its own: no comics professional in the 1950s could have envisioned that the industry would spawn a knock-off showbiz stuffed with quasi-celebrity. Creators from later eras who’ve been cagey on the point of their own weak fame should be considered, at best, disingenuous. No one who entered the industry after, say, 1980 can reasonably or honestly say that they didn’t expect what they got. But with Ditko’s generation, and generations previous, this sentiment is completely true. Most of these men viewed themselves, I’m sure, as artists or at least artisans, but none signed a Faustian bargain with the American fame machine.

We should be ashamed that it is considered, amongst some, legitimate to criticize Ditko’s reluctance to engage with his quote-fans-unquote. In an era where celebrity has become a coin as common as pennies, only a depraved jackal would want to see Ditko transformed into another drooling mummy wrapped in wisps of pseudo-celebrity and wheeled out beneath the fluorescent lighting of the Jarvis Center.

The comics industry has always acted as a mortar-and-pestle towards creators who deviate from its central value of lucre acquired regardless of spiritual or intellectual cost. Nothing confuses most mainstream comics creators, or their fans, more than one of the Brethren opting out of easy money. Thus, there is something right and fitting about the current round of disrespect over Alan Moore’s handling of the Watchmen adaptation. You wanted to play with Ditko’s toys, Mister Big Hairy Magician Man, well, watch out, you’ve now become indistinguishable from Mr. A, only another uncompromising creator suffering Ditko’s fate, and washed over by the rage and disgust of sports fans towards a player who refuses the rules of the game.

What I would have liked very much to see in Bell’s book is an analysis of how the comics industry itself may have played a heavy role in shaping Ditko’s beliefs about both business and money. I’ve read enough of Rand’s writing to have a sense of the Objectivist worldview, and while it is one for which I have a certain amount of abstract sympathy, I find that in many ways it engages in a series of self-supporting rhetorical fallacies with little connection to my day-to-day existence. There’s a very distinct reason for this: I haven’t spent my entire life being screwed over by the people for whom I’ve worked.

The comics industy of the 1940s, 50s and 60s– and to a certain extent, as demonstrated by Moore’s endless issues with DC, continuing into the present day– must be one of the very few places in which Randian principles are demonstrably, and consistently, present. Comics were, and are, ground zero for unethical and unconscionable business practices designed to strip Producers of their rewards. Superman’s acquisition by National may have been the industry’s original sin, but it was, and remains, the working template for the intake of intellectual properties.

As the most talented creator of the Silver Age, Ditko suffered its worst indignities. I can only imagine– and this may be wrong– that seeing his work harvested amidst endless broken promises, did to the man what life does to us all: left him in search of an ethical system of thought that could explain his experiences. It’s inconceivable that any individual with a working knowledge of the last seventy years of broken promises, lies and outright theft should then blanch at a creator rejecting the cores values of the companies that produced these abuses.

The recycled canard offered in defense of the Big Two is thus: the creators signed the contracts. This has been demolished a million times over, but I think it’s unnecessary in the case of Ditko, who did what the Apologists are always suggesting was an alternative: he walked away. And was promptly second-guessed for the next four decades.

One of the strengths of Strange and Stranger is in documenting Ditko’s mistreatment not only at the hands of the Big Boys, but also the fan press and some of the smaller companies. This is, unfortunately, off-set by too much hand-wringing about Missed Opportunities in the later years. I understand the impulse to bemoan choices that appear Questionable, but in light of Ditko’s consistent mistreatment by everyone other than Charlton, it isn’t clear that anyone should sit in judgment on which subsequent choices were or were not appropriate.

Bell’s final chapter proceeds from the assumption that because Ditko’s techniques no longer adhere to the standards of the mainstream comics industry, they are somehow lesser or less-skilled than the previous decades of work. This is true only if one presumes that Ditko in any way cares about the collective assumptions about what does and does not make a “good” comic. This presumption is an historical bias based on Ditko’s earlier work and the audience’s unwillingness to allow an artist’s development off established paths. With any creative mind, some of these paths will be terrible and some will be good, but most will be ignored by the Afficinado, who craves nostalgic reminders of Earlier Days like a three-toothed junky longs for her junk. My guess would be that if Ditko’s creator-owned work were being judged independent of What Came Before, it wouldn’t be spoken of as a Decline, but rather in the same way that we have begun to discuss an outsider artist like Rory Hayes. (Note: not likening Ditko’s work to that of Hayes.)

Sometimes it feels like I’m the only person alive of whom this is true, but I enjoy, genuinely, the didactic Randian-influenced work. I’ve own copies of nearly all the Snyder/Ditko publications, and I plan to acquire the new one. I like their look, and I like the direction in which Ditko has gone. I don’t agree with their philosophical underpinnings, but that’s okay. I’m not interested in being reassured of my own rightness, nor am I affronted by the expression of a political and ethical system that is not my own. I’m an adult.

–
UPDATE, LATER: Steven Grant attacks this piece.

As we are wont to do, me and Andy Harrison got together and opted to journey towards one of the increasingly rare instances of Weird Garbage in Rhode Island which neither of us had previously visited; this turned out to be Hanton City in Smithfield. Directions from the Internet were awful and seemingly authored by drunken half-wits and cut-rate Englishmen, but we managed a sense of our intended destination.

The above map shows our point of entry: Lydia Ann Road off Douglas Pike, Route 7, in Smithfield. The thick red transparent line denotes the main route traveling through the woods; it quickly turns dirt. According to Topographical Maps and Internet Gossip, at some point it becomes Hanton City Trail. This is not to be mistaken with the other Hanton City Trail, an actual paved road that leads to nothing except Historical Cemetery 62 and ugly houses; there has been some confusion between Cemetery 62 and Cemetery 8, which I’ve put on the map. They’re different places. Same family name, though.

As of this writing, the satellite image on Google Maps is older than that of Live Maps. Thus, it lacks any trace of the dominant feature of my helpful illustration: the enormous new road and construction that has been driven straight through the woods. It is quite possible that this has eliminated much of Hanton City. The construction is visible here, sort of, but what we found was far more advanced and complete.

Our first mistake was in ever being born. Our second was in visiting the area on the hottest day of Summer. We’re talking about 99 to 101 degrees and me and Harrison wandering around in the woods, looking for a Spook City that may not even exist; it’s unclear if we found anything. There were a few walls and apparent foundations, but they were so covered in debris and tree branches that it’s difficult to ascertain if they represented the real Hanton City, or were just old stone fences left over from Halcyon Dayes of Yore. The low point of this sweating exhaustathon was, as may be inferred from my illustration, when I got the car stuck; we’re talking full on stuck, with me revving the engine and Harrison pushing the stupid thing and the wheels not getting traction on the gravel. There was a snow shovel in the trunk, so we managed to dig our way out of the predicament; again, this was in 100 degree heat. Madness set in and we wandered around for another two or so hours, finding little but trash.

The function of this post is twofold: to provide a better reference for people seeking out Spook City, and to reflect on how incredibly strange Rhode Island remains, even after decades of being in its thrall. It’s hard to imagine a place outside of early 80s computer RPGs where a person can hunt for a ruined city hidden in the woods while being three minutes away from relatively populated civilization and about ten from the state capital. Though some unsatisfactory attempts have been made, the remains an amazing book to be written (by someone other than me) that is a Weird New Jersey-esque tour up and down the Ocean State’s weird places and marvels. So. Get popping, someone.

“Welcome to my book collection.”

Horace McCoy is my favorite writer of the early 20th Century; his first book, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is the single best novel of the Depression– a bleak, short dose of hell centered on a Dance-a-thon– and his last proper novel, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is equally remarkable, though less compact, and achieves the kind of dense Freudian tapestry that (our hero) Dashiell Hammett aimed for in The Glass Key. The other books are variable, but I’m particularly fond of I Should Have Stayed Home, a slight, pre-Day of the Locusts look at life as a Hollywood loser; if nothing else, it has the most applicable title of any book ever written about this here city of Los Angalayze.

I’ve never been comfortable with McCoy’s classification as “hard boiled”; he certainly wrote for the same pulps as the originators and best known practitioners of the style, but I’m partial to the idea that “hard boiled” has connotations as an off-shoot of the mystery genre. Throughout all of McCoy’s work, the only mystery is this: “Why are people so awful?”

In my mind, his work fits more clearly into a tradition of near-hallucinatory, vaguely inchoate narratives of indirect, brutish emotion being kept at bay through force of will and repression.

It is a sub-literature, adapting the developments of genre and modernism to describe the basic inability of the lower class American male to express his desires, and more truly, his pain. When bored, I often taunt women by accusing them– facetiously– of never being able to understand the “awful pain of being a man.” Novels within this school are quite serious about the idea; the shame and the misery of frustrated masculinity are their building-blocks.

The staccato rhythm of the 1920s and 1930s is employed as a distancing mechanism– a way of keeping the male narrator from revealing himself; this mirrors the sexual inadequacy of the protagonist, which is, of course, the source of his many shames. The only question is climax; and when it comes, the novel ends, usual in bloodshed and tears.

Fun fact: of this tradition, one of the most interesting books is You Play The Black and The Red Comes Up, by Eric Knight, the man who went on to create Lassie.

McCoy is an interesting case; clearly his genre designation only came with time, after the failure of his work to catch fire within the mainstream. Below is a collection of varying cover art– arranged by novel and vaguely chronologically– where one can see the passage from novelist to crime writer.

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THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY? (1935)

NO POCKETS IN A SHROUD (1937)

I SHOULD HAVE STAYED HOME (1938)

KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE (1948)

SCALPEL (1952)

CORRUPTION CITY (1959)

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.

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.

freaktard chooo-choo-chooses you, pikachu!

Jason Tallon. Apparently offsprung from the chance union of a Riverboat Confidence Man and a methfreak from Warhol’s Factory.