Breeding Lileks Out Of The Dead Land
Like hell’s mouth torn asunder, like a sudden thaw in the mountains of madness, the smoking hole left by the terrorists of September 11th, 2001, has unleashed all manner of horrors upon the world — the USA-PATRIOT Act, the Iraq War, and the literary career of Charlie Daniels. But perhaps no nightmare that flits on bat wings from that ruined waste has caused more misery than that which crawled into the ear of James Lileks and convinced him to say everything he was thinking.
Above: “Oh, yes, you will aid me in beating up all the hippies! So says…THE LEADER!”
As an inveterate Lileks-watcher, the thing that’s fascinating to me isn’t his post-9/11 ascendant conservativism. The liberal-bashing, the knee-jerk opposition to anyone who suggests the war isn’t going that well, the hopping around in a blind panic like Bill Paxton in Aliens every time an Arab does something in public — that’s all great, but you can get it better in other places, often with a free fifth of drugstore tequila. No, the thing that’s fascinating to me is that his governor has been completely removed since the second those planes hit the towers, and while he once felt content to allow his ultra-reactionary cultural tastes to come out when discussing that horrible crazy rap music or how baseball players made too much money, now he has a built-in audience of ideologically-driven dingalings who will pretty much listen to anything he has to say about anything. Freed from the necessity to be funny, clever, or even well-informed, he now feels free to give voice to his every little complaint about our culture, and permit full expression to that big chunk of his brain that lives in a world that started to go to hell when the first teenager mouthed off after V-J Day, was in in a rapid state of disrepair when Maynard G. Krebs first appeared on television, and ever since the appearance of the first hippie, has pretty much been a write-off, slowly circling the drain and waiting for al-Q’aeda to finally finish it by pouring the Drano of nuclear terrorism all over Seattle.
You can never predict what’s going to set Jimbo off on one of his darn-kids-get-off-my-lawn moments. Insolent stockboy at Target? Inoperative skee-ball machine at Chuck E. Cheese? A reminder that the 1970s happened? This time around, it’s spotting a piece of trash art at a poker store in a shopping mall. Now, a lot of people don’t really expect much from the kind of art you would buy at a poker store in a shopping mall. Even fewer people would be inspired to go on a pointless, clueless jeremiad about our cultural degradation by the kind of art you would buy at a poker store in a shopping mall. But there’s only one James Lileks. And he knows what must be done.
Reminds me of a picture I saw in a poker store at the Mall: one of those Iconic Film Star mash-ups. The most famous, I suppose, has Elvis and Marilyn and James Dean at Hopper’s “Nighthawks” diner. This one had all of the above, in a room around a pool table, with Bogart. Ack. Movie Bogie would have slapped James Dean around until he gave up the whereabouts of the Fat Man.
For you see, Bogart, he was a real tough guy, a creature of that nobler time before James Lileks was born when everything was better. James Dean, he was a rebel, a counterculture icon, the sort of greasy character that appeals to…teenagers. (As opposed to Bogey, who just married teenagers.) James Lileks, as we have seen proven over and over again, knows three things, and one of them is that anything that teenagers like is awful and will be the ruin of us all
We think they all belong together because they’re dead and they’re cool. But cool has a hierarchy. James Dean is cool because he was twitchy and TROUBLED, MAN, then dead.
Whenever Lileks uses the all-caps followed by the word “man”, he is mocking the values of anyone to the left of Father Coughlin, because hippies and punks and snotty teenage rebels like James Dean are all just sad that they found out Santa isn’t real. Lest you think I exaggerate for humorous effect, I direct you to this classic column.
Bogart is cool because he sent Mary Astor up the river and did what he did because that’s what you’re supposed to do when your partner gets killed, and he married Bacall and drove fast and smoked himself into a grave. He knew who he was and he had a good laugh and he had a good ride. James Dean shoots a Nazi in a movie, he can sit at the same table. But he’s more relevant to our time than Bogart. James Dean would be a star in a movie about Iraq war atrocities. I’d say Bogart would have turned the role down, but the idea of making that movie in the middle of the Duration – well, different times. Different culture. Different people.
Now, let’s leave aside the whole Iraq-is-just-like-WWII thing (I’d love to have that conversation with Jimbo, and ask him what he thinks about what America had accomplished in Europe and Asia by 1947 compared to what we’ve accomplished in Iraq by 2007, but that’s another entry). And let’s leave aside the I-said-it-so-it-must-be-true jibe about how Americans today are weak spineless traitors who make movies about how we shouldn’t be allowed to torture people instead of buying war bonds like they did back in the Greatest Generation. Let’s instead focus on how completely fucking ignorant pop-culture expert James Lileks is of the subject which he chose to introduce.
We could talk about his bizarre appropriation of Humphrey Bogart as some kind of iconic patriotic figure who spent the entire 1940s killing Japs and Ratzis onscreen; that would be fun. We might thus discover that Jimbo appears to have confused Bogie with John Wayne, and that he does not seem to have noticed that in Bogart’s two biggest WWII-era roles, in Casablanca and The African Queen, he plays a guy who basically goes out of his way to avoid the Nazis altogether, even collaborating with them at times, until his private morality forces him to make a dangerous decision. We could talk about how, far from playing lily-white two-fisted tough guys, Bogart in fact specialized in playing somewhat sinister figures who were morally shady, frequently compromised, straitjacketed even by their own codes, men like the deeply cynical, cop-hating Philip Marlowe and the coldly mercenary, impenetrable Sam Spade, who does the right thing in the end for all the wrong reasons. We could even talk about how Bogie was a political liberal, a man who organized a group of open resistance to the McCarthy hearings at a time when it was highly dangerous to do so, a self-described “Democrat in politics, Episcopalian by upbringing, dissenter by disposition”.
But instead, let’s talk about that dirty filthy homo fleabag proto-hippie, James Dean. When he shoots a Nazi in a movie, THEN he can sit at the same table as Bogart! But not until then!
Unfortunately, Dean died when he was 24. It is remotely possible that, had his film career lasted 36 years like Bogart’s instead of four, he just might possibly have starred in a movie where he shot Nazis. Lileks would no doubt object; probably he would have starred in movies where he joined the Communist party, smoked reefer, and sass-mouthed his mother. Oddly enough, though, James Dean actually DID appear in a few movies other than the three in which he starred, as well as some TV shows, and guess what? His very first film, Fixed Bayonets, featured him playing a G.I. in the Korean War, who, if he didn’t actually shoot godless Reds, at least presumably wanted to. He also appeared in an episode of CBS Television Workshop and an astonishing two episodes of Kraft Television Theatre as a G.I. in the Second World War who shoots Nazis, but that doesn’t count because it was on television. So the point remains: James Dean was a harbinger of our modern era’s dirty filthy treacherous hatred of manly patriotism, not an actor, and if he had lived, he would never, ever have shot a Nazi in a movie. James Lileks knows this to be true just as he knows that beloved country singer Johnny Horton is a virulent racist. If first impressions weren’t always right, you wouldn’t have them, would you?
James Dean would have hated Target, just as virulently as I hate being in the Sadly, No! free speech zone.
The other two things that Lileks knows, by the way, is that hippies spoiled everything, and that some day terrorists will nuke Seattle.
Wait until he finds out they’ve published Kerouac’s original ‘scroll’ of ‘On the Road’ as a 50th anniversary tribute. There’ll be blood in the streets, brother…. blood in the motherfuckin’ streets…
23 skidoo, kids!
1 The African Queen is about WWI. No Nazis.
2. Bogart made lots of WWII movies, many with an obvious populist, liberal bent — All through the Night, Sahara, and Action in the North Atlantic spring to mind.
3. Lileks is still an idiot.
How about we discuss Indiana Jones, who shot Nazis all the time, BUT was a college (Ivy League?) professor, and spent a lot of time in a-rayb countries, and had Arabic friends. Yeah, he found the Holy Grail, but he also slept around with women, both parties were un-married (Republicans are against that still, right? Or is just the wanton gay sex?).
You know else had a hard-on for shooting Nazis? Stalin. Where’s he land on that Macho Americana scale?
What the hell is a poker store?
But…Bogart MUST be conservative! He wears a tie and a fedora and his movies are in black and white! Everyone knows liberals are grungy hippies and pointy-headed academics who are always filmed in Technicolor! And they love Nazis. Thats why they won’t shoot them.
What the hell is a poker store?
particularly one in a mall?
What the hell is a poker store?
If it ain’t dogs sittin’ around the table then it ain’t art.
Your descriptions of the archetypal Bogie charaters are spot on (and I was waiting for someone to remind Jimmy of the anti-blacklist group that Bogart helped to organize during the height of the HUAC hearings) with two minor exceptions:
The African Queen is set during World War I, with the misfits played by Katherine Hepburn and Bogart taking on the Kaiser’s, rather than Hitler’s, kriegsmarine. And I don’t think Marlowe can be legitimately described as “cop-hating.” He chose to live by his own moral code, a luxury that the police don’t enjoy, but as far as I can recall, Chandler’s iconic P.I. only ever expressed distate for crooked cops, the thuggish sort who staffed the Bay City force, and would take a payoff to look the other way. Spade, on the other hand, displayed a consistent, and fairly naked contempt for the police.
Otherwise, you’re exactly right. It’s amazing that someone as steeped in the pop culture of the first half of the 20th century as Lileks is can’t seem to grasp that Bogart, like Dean, was the quintessential outsider of his generation. From Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest to Spade and Rick, Harry Morgan, and Charlie Allnut, Bogart excelled when essaying faintly disreputable characters who chose to live by their wits on the fringe of society. Bogart was, in many ways, the guy Dean’s characters could easily have grown up to be — wounded men whose cynical exteriors couldn’t quite disguise the idealism within. What’s he’s not, and never would be, is a guy who would take a Macanudo out onto the lawn so his wife won’t complain about the smell, and stand there readingThe Weekly Standard by the glow of the porchlight.
When was Gnat born? 1999? 2000? At some point, Lileks must face the unwelcome fact that the apple of his eye and the fruit of his loins is destined to become a Midwestern teenager—which leads to only one thing.
Starting in 2012, there should be a Twin-Cities initiative to distribute goo-bags (FEMA tarp, duct tape, and squeegee) to all residents, just in case they’re caught near ground zero when the fivehead goes critical.
I always understood that Bogart’s character in Casablanca was playing it apolitically, but was actually very left-leaning and had a history of involvement in the Spanish Civil War fighting the Fascists. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen it, but that’s how I remember it.
Thank you, objectivelypro. Never heard the phrase before.
Umm, I’ve been reading Lileks’s “Bleat” column off and on for several years. It’s always been fluff, and I’ve never really taken it seriously. By his own statements, even Lileks doesn’t take it all that seriously.
Are you maybe taking it too seriously?
Lileks has a talent, but it’s constantly threatened by his pseudo-cultural political babbling, which instantly turns him into an 80 year old woman nattering on about baggy pants and how much that Sikh grocery store makes her think about 9/11.
I actually don’t mind the guy who gently mocks old newspaper and radio ads, but damn does he have to remind us what a prissy, scared Babbitt he can be while he reviews movies from a genre famous for its world-weary cynicism and apolitical scheming?
Most film noir protagonists would kick his ass over his chest-beating about Nazis and terrorists.
DU
Ach, that Lileks character. Tremendously saddening it was- I’d actually enjoyed his retrophilia,- and he opens up about how dirty gay hippies ruined everything.
Not long ago, he described going to an exclusiive right-wing dinner at a golf club, ate filet mignon, and they all stood to sing “God Bless America”. Fine. But he described it as if he were some persecuted minority, fleeing oppression. I’m not sure what storm troopers he was expecting..
And of course he loathes James Dean: unnatractive, uncharismatic men often resent attractive, charismatic men, and sometimes go to lengths to pathetically disparage them.
After all, it’s not like James Dean can respond, right? Even better for a wimpy jerk.
Lileks is such a bourgeouis poodle, in terror at his loss of masculinity. Clinical.
From “fluff” to arch-reactionary propaganda about non-existent happier times the way things used to be is a slope that Lileks is fastly slipping down. He’s a chunderloaf, this should be clear.
I assumed Lileks was just bitter that Garrison Keillor beat him to the “wry retro-referencing Minnosotan humorist” slot… it can’t be easy when one’s best material is greeted with “Not bad, but of course it ain’t no ‘News from Lake Woebegone’.” Then he got overinvested in his daughter, which after 9/11 morphed into his current paranoia about anybody not eligible for membership in the AARP, or the DAR.
Fifty years from now, he’s going to be the exemplar of the kind of “Gosh, what well-intentioned, self-satisfied dorks populated our grandparents’ world!” japery that he’s tried to claim as his personal bailiwick. Not to mention serving as an entry in the lengthy case against American self-involvement as a mild form of insanity…
Wow. Long time reader. First time comment. Like Ace, I’m a little drunk tonight, but had to comment.
You powned Lileks tonight. No doubt. I probably spelled that wrong.
But as a Minneapolis resident, and Star Tribune reader and fan, I gotta say…this guy is an absolute nobody up here. In fact, in the face of all the layoffs and buyouts at the Strib, (not to mention the firings/fallout at our only anti-establishment weekly City Pages) the fact that this guy still has a high paying job is a crime.
Hopefully your response to his latest inanity will be part of the tidal wave that splashes him out of work. What a waste.
The crucial question here remains unanswered; what the hell is a poker store?
To which I’ll non sequituriorily add; what the hell was so great about taking almost a decade to realize the Nazis were bad and should be stopped?
It gets even better today. Seems that a bunch of big ol’ meanies took him to task for yesterday’s Bleat by interrupting the 9/11 Scaredycat-fest he initiated over on the Strib blog.
Then he goes on to say how misunderstood he is, or something. It’s hard to tell what point he’s trying to make, because he obscures it with so many strawmen.
James Dean is cool because he was twitchy and TROUBLED, MAN, then dead.
What, Bogart was never twitchy? Cap’t. Queeg, as the easiest example. Unless by “twitchy” Ol’ Dimple-Chin is making some sort of snide reference like, “Well, he was one of those sissy fellers.”
Movie Bogie would have slapped James Dean around.
That’s right Jimmy-boy. “Movie Bogie.” There’re all fucking movies, w/ actors in them, who are reciting (or reading from cue cards) lines written by writers, and who are told how to recite & move & act by directors. And what you think you know about their personal lives has been orchestrated by publicists & willing to go along celebrity journalists.
So give it the fuck up already.
Steve EVFuture: I have vague inklings of that very same Spanish Civil War side to the Casablanca character (could I have been more incoherent? Hmmm, let’s try).
Vetiver: you mean someone actually named their child, their very own flesh and blood, after an insect? That’s a little strange.
Is he going to name the next sprog after shellfish? Something with an exoskeleton, perhaps? Or something even lower down the evolutionary ladder? Trilobite would be a good name for a girl. Or Protozoa.
How about Slime Mould?
Is it just me or do the wingnuts have that diabolical criminally insane look?
I believe Gnat is a nickname. Which is fair enough. Does the kid really have to grow up with the whole world knowing who her dad is?
Movie Bogie would have slapped James Dean around
Unless we’re talking his Fred Dobbs role, who would have stopped twitching just long enough to shoot James Dean in the back.
I know there’s been a general call to move on from McAddled-mania, but I can’t let this particular one go…..
That book by Jon Chait? The one that on Monday she claimed she hadn’t read?
On Tuesday she wrote a review of it.
I am a fast reader. One summer when I was fourteen and totally bored because I lived in the middle of nowhere and I didn’t have anything worth reading in the house, I grabbed one of my mom’s Stephen King novels (yeah, yeah, I know – they suck. I was fourteen and bored). I made my way through the seventeen hundred pages in a single day of reading.
Despite that, I don’t think I could read an entire wonkfest on taxation policy AND write a review of it in the small hours between the end of September 10 and the start of September 11.
She must be some kind of wunderkind.
Huh??? So the old and tried John Wayne – Marlon Brando juxtapose is not good enough anymore and we have make up something out of thin air about Bogie/Dean?
Since I brought it up, as far as visionary/prophetic movie icons go Brando is simply unsurpassable, so relevent today… Take a look at this for example:
“Everybody ought not to turn his back on the phenomenon of hatred in whatever form it takes. We have to find out what the anatomy of hatred is before we can understand it. We have to make some attempt to put it into some understandable form. Any kind of group hatred is extremely dangerous and much more volatile than individual hatred. Heinous crimes are committed by groups and it’s all done, of course, in the name of right, justice. It’s John Wayne. It’s the way he thinks. All the crimes committed against Indians are not considered crimes by John Wayne.”
Also, remember that interview in 1992 with Larry King, he was talking about global warming years before it became the “thing”…
“Movie Bogie would have slapped James Dean around.”
And real life James “The Human Ashtray” Dean mighta enjoyed it.
Fans of his culture-bashing might note he used the term “mash-up” which I suppose is more timely than, say, “bricolage.” Maybe he’s trying to get ahead of the game by transferring all expressions of cultural angst from the professoriate to Gregg Gillis. Next: Lileks on how IP law protected and promoted the development of nifty vintage toasters
Now I can’t stop thinking of James Lileks as Elisha Cook Jr. in “The Maltese Falcon.” He’s a little lamb full of threats and thuggery and tough-guy posturing, but he always looks like he’s about to cry, and he folds like a cheap suit when the going gets tough.
Blogwhore:
Our secular freedoms under attack from medivalist fundimentalists!
Far as Lileks goes, it seems he’s funny when he’s not being a paranoid tittie-baby. But with the group he’s hanging out with these days, paranoia is Special of The Day every day on their menu.
You guys and Roy Edroso. Every once in a while, y’all just have to empty your silos at chowder-rangers like Lileks. You’re always hilarious when you do it, and frankly, I enjoy it, but even more frankly, it’s beneath you.
It’s like The Mighty Thor is out hurtling around the Manhattan skyline and he sees The Leap-Frog robbing a jewelry store and WHOOSH!!! ZIP!!! HERE COMES MJOLNIR MOTHERFUCKER!!! Sure, it probably happened at least once at some point during the Silver Age (it would sure explain why we never saw the Leap Frog much after around 1970 or thereabouts) but you can’t imagine Jack Kirby or Gene Colan or John Buscema ever wasting panel space on it. It would be, like, “Gimme the jewels, >sproing sproingKLAAA-BWAAMMO!bad.”
So you know, what I’m sayin’ is, absolutely, Lileks deserves it, but honestly, he’s a rodent and he’s kinda beneath you guys.
Dude, Gene Colan created Leap-Frog.
Dept. of Unfortunate OT Crap I Didn’t Know:
From Megan McArdle’s bio at TPMCafe:
Now apparently all the Atlantic bloggers get this title, but somehow it adds insult to injury.
Difficult for wingnuts: making consistent arguments.
Easy for wingnuts: lumping every single concept you disagree with into a single category (‘the left’) so that it seems like your own arguments are consistent, and not the lumped together half-thoughts of an idiot.
(Not to get all Joe Morgany with all the consistent talk.)
The fact is, it is the liberals who can make no consistent arguments, theirs are only selfinterested appeals to be morally permissive and biased against freedom.
Jillian – even if she hadn’t told us the day before that she didn’t even own a copy of the book yet, it would be obvious that it was a bullshit review of a book she hadn’t read.
Four paragraphs of an anecdote about Larry Summers, one vague paragraph accusing Chait of being too “partisan” and throwing out all contrary evidence, and about nine paragraphs about what she thinks about tax cuts. I had to scan through a few times to find any reference to the book all, and there is not a single mention of a specific claim that she couldn’t deduce from the title.
Someone was passed along through college, eh?
Mr. Lileks exudes a certain musky masculinity that is completely lacking in your average leftist Islamomexicans who populate certain “progressive” blogs. The fact of the matter is that Mr. Lileks has firm biceps and manly thighs, thereby making him the perfect representative for patriotic, totally heterosexual Americans who enjoy nothing more than spending extended periods of time … *squirt*
Uh, whoops.
The crucial question here remains unanswered; what the hell is a poker store?
I found this . 5 locations in MN. If you poke around you’ll see the page with the picture Lilek’s bleating on about.
Ah, who could forget Lileks and the “manhole of glory”, TSRWG?
Okay, FakeGary gets style points. That was hilarious. I demand a reposting of the MC Escher Lego pic just as tribute to that.
Seriously? A store that sells poker stuff? We have those here, too. They’re called, you know, game stores. They have other shit too. Puzzles and boardgames and dice sets and Warhammer miniatures or whatever.
How much poker do you people play in Minnesota?
Shouldn’t portraying Capt. Queeg while troops were in Korea be considered an act of treason? I lost all my respect for the military after seeing his portrayl of ” Ole’ Yellow Tail”.
Way to make the T.S. Eliot reference!
I guess it’s like a baccarat store except it has poker stuff.
Perhaps you prefer to call it chemin de fer?
Pardon me while I adjust my footwear. The razor in my shoe seems to be irritating my heel.
Now I can’t stop thinking of James Lileks as Elisha Cook Jr. in “The Maltese Falcon.”
I don’t know, Lileks doesn’t come off as being a gunsel – young, twitchy, armed and queerer than a nine dollar bill with three threes for change. I mean Lileks is certainly gay, but not in the good way.
What I can’t figure out is why Lileks over there links an old piece of signage from a 40s noir film to a font that plainly says it was created in 1991.
It’s like The Mighty Thor is out hurtling around the Manhattan skyline and he sees The Leap-Frog robbing a jewelry store and WHOOSH!!! ZIP!!! HERE COMES MJOLNIR MOTHERFUCKER!!! Sure, it probably happened at least once at some point during the Silver Age (it would sure explain why we never saw the Leap Frog much after around 1970 or thereabouts) but you can’t imagine Jack Kirby or Gene Colan or John Buscema ever wasting panel space on it. It would be, like, “Gimme the jewels, >sproing sproingKLAAA-BWAAMMO!bad.”
Fuck, I’d buy that issue.
Oh, POKER store! And here I was thinking it was a store that sold fireplace implements.
Thor isn’t so tough.
Without that hammer, he’s lame.
That burst of gamma radiation made me a thousand time smarter than I was before. My current intellect makes me look down on normal humans as normal humans look down on Jonah Goldberg.
“I grabbed one of my mom’s Stephen King novels (yeah, yeah, I know – they suck. I was fourteen and bored)”
Not all of them and not by a long shot. It’s fashionable to disdain an author so popular I know (though it never seems to count against Dickens and Twain who also had the misfortune of being popular in their own times), especially so for a “genre writer”. I’ll grant that a handful of the early-80s Cokehead Steve rent-payers are pretty awful and I’ll even cede that his ear for dialogue is lacking. But generally speaking, the guy sits down with a story to tell and gets busy telling it. Rarely is there a clause typed that doesn’t either advance plot or reveal character and in my book such economy is far from a liability.
Lay off the threadbare trope and stop apologizing for having sullied your hands with such dreck. It ain’t high art but that doesn’t mean it ain’t art (or artful).
Smelly hippie James Dean-type!
Poker stores stock paraphernalia for people who play poker: Chips, decks of cards, books on how to play “Texas Hold ‘Em,” Vegas t-shirts, and so forth. Sort of like the Scotch Tape Store in that old SNL skit, or Ned Flanders’s ill-fated Left-Hand Store. I wonder why Mr. Lileks is acquainted with such emporia, but I bet that’s where he found the picture over his mantelpiece, with those dogs sitting around the poker table but the dog heads have been replaced with the heads of Bogie, and John Wayne and Ronnie Ray-gun.
James Dean also starred in “Giant,” with Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson, and he struck oil on his own little patch of ground and was able to rise above his humble origins and challenge Big Oil (i.e., Rock Hudson) at a big super-duper banquet. I wonder why Mr. Pop Culture doesn’t mention that? Huh? Huh?
Favorite lines from “Giant”: Jett (JD) and Leslie (ET), just before his gusher finally comes in:
Leslie: Well really, Jett, money isn’t everything.
Jett: No m’am, not when you got it.
“Seriously? A store that sells poker stuff? We have those here, too. They’re called, you know, game stores. They have other shit too. Puzzles and boardgames and dice sets and Warhammer miniatures or whatever.
How much poker do you people play in Minnesota?”
It’s not just Minnesota. Malls are dying, rents are dropping, vacancies abounding. Fad stores are as inevitable as they are transient. The same space may very well have been home to a Pog store some time in the dim past.
I have to admit I laughed at this.
Yeah, Bogart was so conservative that he flew to Washington with Katherine Hepburn to protest HUAC at the height of the red scare.
Possibly the fact that the guy who wrote the script for Casablanca and the guy who wrote the Maltese Falcon were blacklisted had something to do with that.
Moskowitz–
You remain as lovable as ever, but I believe it was “Old Yellow Stain.” The ref is to a dye marker Queeg has the crew leave in a patch of ocean to mark where the Caine…did something (I forget), and then gave up and moved on. Hence the subsequent song, “(I Got Those) Yellow Stain Blues.”
But first: Humphrey BOGART? You mean the self-indulgent playboy twit from Sabrina? He’s going to do what, exactly, to the James Dean of Giant?
Torpedoing Lileks may be like shooting fish in a barrel. But, as I said somewhere else (I forget), SOMEBODY has to shoot them. Well shot, Mr. Pierce.
““I grabbed one of my mom’s Stephen King novels…”
Wow, what a great setup for my own Stephen King story –
My older brother was a grad student at U.Maine/Orono back in the 70’s (English major, Ph.D. U.Missouri, dissertation on James Joyce/Ulysses, but I digress). One of his U.Maine seminars was on fiction writing. There were 5 or 6 people in the class.
The seminar meetings were for reading and commentary. Anyway, one kid was always absent from the seminar. Just never showed up.
Except for the last meeting, when the always-absent kid showed up and tossed a manuscript on the table that he had been working on that semester.
The title of the manuscript was “Carrie,” and the kid’s name was Stephen King.
King flunked my brother’s seminar, but, hey – he owns a freaking minor league baseball team.
Plug it UP!
Lileks:
Maltese Falcon:
So Lileks gets the words mostly, sorta right, but the meaning seems to escape him.
In Casablanca, a couple of the other characters do refer to Rick having fought Fascists in Spain. Still one of my favorite movies and the scene where they sing the French anthem to drown out the German’s own anthem always gets me. Gives me hope that we can win out against the power-mad jackasses one day… sigh… I’m an idealist at heart.
Everyone has said all kinds of clever and well-informed things about why Lileks loves Bogey and hates James Dean. Everyone has also been much smarter than I could be in pointing out why Lileks is just wrong to interpret Bogey as he does and assimilate Dean to the “dirty fucking hippie” brigade.
Here’s another answer though for why wingnuts would love Bogey and hate Dean, even though the cultural evidence about the movies and the personal evidence about HB’s politics would all suggest he’s a bad role-model for wingnuts:
Lileks thinks Bogey is a real man and hates Dean because Dean is prettier. No more, no less. Bogey physically fits in better with the wingnut cult of masculinity that Glenn Greenwald and others are talking about.
Dean is too pretty to be a real man for the wingnuts. Add to that his presence in that iconic movie of Dirty-Fucking-Hippiedom, “Rebel Without a Cause”..and Dean will always be the wingnuts version of a gender traitor.
To expand on Lame Man’s excellent point:
Lileks writes as though Spade’s actions are personal and based on feeling. “when your partner gets killed” = he’s your pal, your wife, your friend.
The actual quote shows Spade citing professionalism and business, literally. “It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him.” (Wasn’t Spade having an affair with Archer’s wife?)
Thus, Lileks doesn’t even remember what team he’s playing for. He takes the side of liberal pussiness: feelings, empathy, relationships.
Spade, meanwhile, is a businessman. (Although he also shows a kind of class consciousness in looking out for detectives everywhere.)
The self-indulgent playboy twit was William Holden.
When Lileks talks about the poker store at “the mall” means of course the poker store at the Mall of America. When anyone here says “the Mall” that’s what they mean. I could get a pic of it if you really wanted. I think it’s next to the store that sells only hot sauce (and related) and is down a bit from the store that sells Nagel prints. Yes, you heard that right, suburban Bloomington is a cultural wasteland of the first order.
The “Lake Wobegone” store does better business I believe. We loves us some Garrison Keilor up here. Apparently, failed New Yorker wannabes who drone on incessantly about a fantasy town in Minnesota is big stuff. “Lake Wobegone’s” real life claim to fame is that we have a street named for us in NY City because the prostitutes around there are mostly from rural Minn. And who can blame them?
“You remain as lovable as ever, but I believe it was “Old Yellow Stain.”
Always Wonderful & very correct. Thanks. Now if you could only help me with my missing strawberries.
Sure, lets talk about Captain Queeg: A military man who just wanted to serve his country. And the military uses him and sends him into battle. And does it again, And does it again. And does it again. And ignores the warning signs that Queeg might be losing it. And sends him into battle again. And again.
Until finally Queeg does lose it. Because sending a man into battle too many times, especially when it isn’t clear that he’ll EVER get out drives him crazy.
Now, what does that sound like today?
Oh, and another cool thing about Bogart: He was an expert chess player. Used to bring the set to the,uh set and take on all comers. No one could touch him.
James Dean was a harbinger of our modern era’s dirty filthy treacherous hatred of manly patriotism
brilliant!
Steve T., Doc Nebula, I know what you mean. But 2 things make me think this creep should be checked out. One is that he is a touchstone for a lot of the other wingnuts, who take his fatherly persona to heart. This means he has an effect, which leads us to the second thing — the wretchedness of his message.
It was Sadly No that made me realize this in their expose of one of his other more awful moments — his “you don’t get to” hang around children if you look “disheveled” (Don’t know how to make links — http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/6579.html). Nevermind the fact that most child-molesters look a lot more like Lileks — it was the plain, outspokenly uncharitable (unChristian, really, not that I am preaching that religion) aspect of his message.
It would be an interesting exercise to speculate which famous roles of the sixties, and, perhaps, the early seventies, that James Dean would have performed had he lived so long.
Spartacus?
Felix Unger?
Butch Cassidy?
Dirty Harry?
The Godfather?
Bogart came from a wealthy Manhattan family, engaged in leftist politics, and married a model half his age. Just the type that Lileks really admires, all right.
That’s not funny, man. You can compare him to a blond version of the guy who fucks his student and winds up working in a grocery store in Election, but not to Elisha Cook Jr. No.
Aren’t the sort of righties who appropriate Hollywood figures to their tough-guy iconographies the same sort of people who, in high school, looked on all male “theater geeks” as show-tune-singing sissies?
Furthermore, what does such rampant appropriation unto iconography say about righties’ love for veneers, edifices, and false fronts?
Julia
“Yikes” doesn’t begin to describe my chagrin. How right you are. Bogie was the serious, responsible older brother. My terrible.
However, Bogart did play a youthful tennis-playing nitwit on Broadway, in what I think was his first role, or leading role, or something. I’ll go quietly now.
Furthermore, what does such rampant appropriation unto iconography say about righties’ love for veneers, edifices, and false fronts?
It says that they’re religious. A myth is a myth is a myth. It’s a short step from governing the way you think Bogie would to fearing eclipses.
“It would be an interesting exercise to speculate which famous roles of the sixties, and, perhaps, the early seventies, that James Dean would have performed had he lived so long.”
And then, inevitably, “Falcon Crest” and “Twin Peaks”
If I slap Jimbo’s huge, stupid forehead and no one is around to hear it, does it make a noise?
Leonard
Dude, Gene Colan created Leap-Frog.
Of course he did; it’s impossible to imagine a character more Gene Colanie than Leap Frog, other than maybe the Stilt-Man. Nonetheless, if Stan Lee had sat down with Gene for a plot meeting and suggested that maybe this issue Thor could fight that guy with the springs on his feet from DAREDEVIL, I can only imagine Gene “the Dean” Colan staring at Stan in appalled horror and saying something like “Are you fucking HIGH? Thor could turn Leap Frog inside out and wear him as an ascot!”
Of course, then Stan would say something like “Well, maybe Loki secretly does a spell to vastly increase Leap-Frog’s power, like he did with the Cobra and Mr. Hyde.” But hopefully Gene would end up pencilling something entirely different (like, Thor battling aliens with pyramid shaped spaceships in Central America, or something) and Stan, who was ‘writing’ about seventeen monthly titles at the time, would never even know.
Pere Ubu,
Fuck, I’d buy that issue.
Nearly anybody would. But in the Silver Age, comics weren’t quite that sadistic yet, so as a general rule, guys who dressed like lily pad denizens whose only super power was a set of sofa springs attached to each foot did not go mano a mano with the likes of Thor. Thor fought entire living planets. Leap Frog would get smacked around by a blind guy with a trick cane.
Mind you, the idea of some big Jack Kirby full page spread showing Leap-Frog frantically sproinging down a crowded city street, bouncing off the sides of buildings and mailboxes and lampposts and the occasional retired postal worker, screaming “HELP ME!!! HELP ME!!! HELP ME!!!! AAAAAAAHHHHHH!” while Thor is chasing him, hammer raised, bellowing something like “And now there shall fly to pieces — A VILLAIN!” is pretty solid. I’d buy the original art to something like that.
Le Chiffre,
Thor isn’t so tough.
Without that hammer, he’s lame.
Ah ha ha ho ha ho ha hee! Yes, he is. Well, the Silver Age Thor was, anyway. I think nowadays Thor has some entirely different secret identity I couldn’t care less about because it’s stupid. But your point is well taken as regards the REAL Thor, who, without his hammer, reverted to the form of a whiney little spaz named Don Blake, whom, it turned out many issues later, was just a false persona Odin created to punish Thor with. (Nowadays, Odin would punish Thor by making him a Republican politician who hangs out in airport men’s rooms, but back then comics were more innocent.)
Wasn’t Bogey available to make those movies because he was 4F?
I think nowadays Thor has some entirely different secret identity I couldn’t care less about because it’s stupid.
I believe Thor’s current AKA is “dead guy”. If you don’t count the Thorbot clone Reed Richards made that blasted Goliath to kingdom come during the Civil War.
Although there is a guy named “D. Blake” who showed up soon after…
Good god I’m a fucking geek.
tata ~ a lot of actors got deferments because they were helping the war effort by making movies & helping. Also, Bogart was born in 1899 and served in the USN starting in 1918.
oops, helping raise bonds.
Lileks:
Contrast Elvis and Marilyn. All they did was play Nazi killers; they couldn’t get any other work.
I don’t “get” the comics thing. Never have and never will. The only one that I remember reading when I was young was a comic version of “The Time Machine”. Other than that they all make a nice whoosh! sound as they pass by. They don’t even translate into good movies except maybe the first “Spiderman”. The rest have all been crap.
I’d much rather read something like “American Splendor” or “Ghost World” or “Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth” than about some underwear pervert. Even soft core porn like “Heavy Metal” would be better.
noen said,
I don’t “get” the comics thing.
No.
No, you don’t.
Never have and never will. The only one that I remember reading when I was young was a comic version of “The Time Machine”. Other than that they all make a nice whoosh! sound as they pass by. They don’t even translate into good movies except maybe the first “Spiderman”. The rest have all been crap.
I’d much rather read something like “American Splendor” or “Ghost World” or “Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth” than about some underwear pervert. Even soft core porn like “Heavy Metal” would be better.
For soft core porn in comics form, I always refer people to the late 70s Warren line, especially SF tittiepalooza title 1984, which, as soon as 1980 rolled around, was promptly rechristened 1994. Some of the finest jack off material my adolescent eyes had ever beheld in comic strip form.
For myself, I only prefer porn of any sort to any other good reading material when that specific mood is upon me, and I can only imagine preferring pretentious bullshit like GHOST WORLD or AMERICAN SPLENDOR to anything else at all if I had a pretty severe concussion, but, hey, that’s why they make chocolate and vanilla.
Me, myself, and I would probably hesitate to call anyone else’s beloved childhood imaginary pals ‘underwear perverts’ in the same paragraph as one indicates a fondness for the kind of Ugly People Jerking Off crap you seem to like, but I try to be more self aware than most people, and perhaps that’s a character flaw.
I don’t “get” the comics thing.
If you like reading Greek myths superhero comics should be no different, except that the comics are much more of a waste of time. I love them, despite things like this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this and this.
They do not compare with Clowes and Muir, although I can do without Pekar complaining about being stuck behind an old lady at the store.
“James Dean was a harbinger of our modern era’s dirty filthy treacherous hatred of manly patriotism.”
I wonder. We watched rebel without a cause the other night — wanted to introduce it to my adam sandler loving twelve year old son. He was suitably impressed by James Dean.
But the whole Jim Baccus in an apron thing. What was that about?
“I believe Thor’s current AKA is “dead guy”.”
Nay nay. By Odin’s eye socket! Thor is alive and relaunched and he rode in on a week-long Oklahoma City tornado.
I’m on!
Me, myself, and I would probably hesitate to call anyone else’s beloved childhood imaginary pals ‘underwear perverts’ in the same paragraph as one indicates a fondness for the kind of Ugly People Jerking Off crap you seem to like, but I try to be more self aware than most people, and perhaps that’s a character flaw.
That’s a little harsh. The “underwear perverts” bit comes from here in which the companies that own your childhood heros attempt to own your language as well.
Perhaps Mr. Lileks might rouse himself from his narcissistic stupor to watch one of the movies Bogart himself produced—the ones he cared most about—and inparticular one in which he starred. “In a Lonely Place,” opposite Gloria Graham and directed by Nicholas Ray. Among other things, the films say: the movie Bogart is crap, as are all movie personas; here’s what a real humamn is like. A real human is full of nameless anger that can make him a misery to others (here’s looking at you, Lileks). A real human can be so fucked up by the violence he experiences in war that he causes more violence (hmm?). In real life people fall in love because the soul of their beloved compels them, so a beautiful young woman (Graham) finds herself in love with a cranky, worn-down geezer (Bogart). In real life, when someone pretends to be Bogart and beats up a kid he thinks is like James Dean, the horror and shame of causing such suffering makes him face himself (this happens in this film). And in real life, unlike in the fantasy land or conservatives, there is little redemption and none at all when we continue to behave in exactly tthe way from which we must be redeemed. That behavior is exactly what Lileks does when he whinges on & on for years now about the world not going according to his plan for his own greatness and comfort.
Cool, a comics debate! Gilbert Hernandez is Lord.
Personally I gave up on superheroes (TM, apparently) during Chris Claremont’s tenure on X-Men, during which he killed and then immediately resurrected pretty much the entire cast twice during a 12-month period. I began to feel the creators were a little more committed to cheap emotional button-pushing and splashy “EVERYBODY DIES!!!” covers than they were to continuity and high-quality story-telling.
Gracious, no, MrWonderful, not on my account – it’s one of my daughter’s favorite movies, so I saw it last week.
Personally I gave up on superheroes (TM, apparently) during Chris Claremont’s tenure on X-Men, during which he killed and then immediately resurrected pretty much the entire cast twice during a 12-month period. I began to feel the creators were a little more committed to cheap emotional button-pushing and splashy “EVERYBODY DIES!!!” covers than they were to continuity and high-quality story-telling.
The story-telling was low quality before then as well. It just hits you right because that’s the way myths work.
When someone says “I don’t like comics!” it makes about as much sense as someone saying “I don’t like paintings!” or “I don’t like movies!” It’s a medium for Eris’ sake. Granted, few media are as dominated by one genre as American comics, but super heroes are not the only game in town.
What I do when one of my friends starts going on about how he/she “hates comics OMG” is I give them volume 1 of Preacher. Twelve hours later, at 4 am, when they’re finishing off volume eight, they have a new perspective.
Not to say I ain’t a nerd, of course. I can tell ya that Thor is back to his Donald Blake alter-ego but is spending his time as Thor rebuilding Asgard in the middle of Kansas, and I get excited as a little boy when the new World War Hulk comes out. In the end, though, I’d still rather sit down with a new Stray Bullets or anything by Alan Moore. Promethea ended too soon… too soon. Anyone here read Lost Girls? My town has a lame comic store that doesn’t carry that sort of thing so I’ll have to resort to Ebay I think.
“The story-telling was low quality before then as well. It just hits you right because that’s the way myths work.”
Of course; I wasn’t trying to imply that superhero comics suddenly started to suck at this point; rather, I suddenly started for some reason to start noticing that they sucked.
Having said that, Grant Morrison’s Animal Man is quite fun (quote: “We’re told that comics are more ‘adult’ now because they contain more cursing and violence; God help us if that’s what ‘adult’ means”), as is Marshall Law, but that’s more of a satire on superheroes (and particularly the psychosexual, “underwear pervert” aspect of their behavior).
Lost Girls, I’m sorry to say, had some butt-ugly artwork. For that title I think they needed an artist who was better at drawing, y’know, girls.
What would movie Bogie have done to the simpering, prize-melon-headed, virtually shoulderless Lileks had he caught him skulking around a poker store?
When someone says “I don’t like comics!” it makes about as much sense as someone saying “I don’t like paintings!” or “I don’t like movies!”
Noen clarified that she does like comics, just a certain kind, which is fair enough I think.
The superhero thing is a lot like rock and roll: get a few elements together and a great song is a great song even if it’s the millionth one about partying and girls. It leaves room for a fantastic amount of garbage, which I also seem to love. Oh well.
A comics debate? Watchmen FTW.
“pretentious bullshit like GHOST WORLD or AMERICAN SPLENDOR ”
Hey, Doc Nebula (great underwear pervert superhero name, btw), did you ever actually read American Splendor? Harvey Pekar may be a lot of things, but pretentious he’s not.
I cried when they shot “Old Yellow Stain.” I’m not ashamed to admit it.
Well, to be honest I just wanted to give Preacher a plug. Seriously yo, it’s awesome.
I don’t really ‘get’ comics either. Actually my favorite version of Thor is from “The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul” by the late great Douglas Adams. If you’ve never read it you’re definitely missing out on a great take on Odin, Valhalla etc. and man’s relationship with the gods.
But the whole Jim Baccus in an apron thing. What was that about?
It was those Hollywood liberal hippie types and their political correctness. They knew putting Mr. Magoo in an apron would embolden the Vietnamese. Remember the Ho Chi Minh tape where he specifically belittled that scene and went on and on about Betty Friedan?
Mr Lilicks looks like one of the stupider sit-com dads.
Mr Lileks is, like many unfortunate men (such as Huey Lewis), the owner of an ass-chin.
He is, however, the first I’ve seen to also be the owner of an ass-forehead. What’s up with that? Did he walk into a door?
In a morning from a Bogart movie
In a country where they turned back time
You skulk through the poker store just like James Lileks
contemplating a war crime.
Oh dear, a comic book discussion. I propose we move the discussion to the finer points of the infield fly rule.
Well, to be honest I just wanted to give Preacher a plug. Seriously yo, it’s awesome.
It’s on the list. My own can-do-no-wrong guy is Chris Ware, which I amusingly typed as Muir above. Fuck you Sadlies for putting that in my brain!
It might also be worth plugging Persepolis considering bombing Iran is on the horizon and all.
i don’t *get* comics either, or *graphic novles*, but I really enjoy the company of those who do. Imaginative and humorious, they don’t make me feel like a gred drone, either. I’ve enjoyed reading this thread, too. My 9 year old daughter loves Inuyasha, and reads the books back-to-front quite happily. Now she wants to study Japanese, so I’m looking for an instructor.
‘poker store’ aka ‘games store’ where you can buy board games and chess paraphernalia …poker is very profitable for selling clay chips and cases and felt mats; and the same companies that produce the cheap stuff also produce ‘pieces of art’ with the same wood and glass manufacture.
Depending on the owner/buyer you’ll find various amounts of drek in the store, sometimes lots of cardboard cutouts from movies, suits of armor are traditional, swords and knives and those ugly lamps and statuettes with half naked women with badly positions and proportioned chests on them.
Uhh… I used to work in on. Not that we had any half naked statuettes. But the store in the mall did…
Even stranger is the paragraph right before the one quoted:
Jayne Mansfield. I always preferred her to Monroe, because frankly Marilyn seemed a rather dim bulb. Mansfield had more forthright sunny cheer; she seemed to enjoy herself, and life, much more than MM. Which made her suspect in the eyes of tortured English Lit grad students, I suppose. Too American.
Aside from the fact that a lot of people who knew Marilyn Monroe well have always maintained that she was actually pretty smart – what in god’s name is he blathering about? What tortured English Lit grad students? Is he somehow trying to say that the librul elite is responsible for Marilyn being more popular than Jayne Mansfield? I mean, in all honesty, I fear for his sanity. I agree that Mansfield is under-rated, but beyond that, does this paragraph make the slightest bit of sense to anyone?
are we all being a little bit fucking prolix about a sadly no! lileks post? over 100 comments in a morning?
calm down. important parody-necessary shit is happening, like the entire reichosphere’s reaction to petraus.
what, you say? get my own blog?
eh, kids today.
Picking out one particular comment in this ongoing ‘comics debate’ I seem to have started, as, hopefully, somewhat representative, and making some interesting points to sproing back off of:
Jrod said,
When someone says “I don’t like comics!” it makes about as much sense as someone saying “I don’t like paintings!” or “I don’t like movies!” It’s a medium for Eris’ sake. Granted, few media are as dominated by one genre as American comics, but super heroes are not the only game in town.
It’s true enough, and seems to be shaping this debate into a classic “those who love superhero comics vs. those who refer to superheroes and their fans as ‘underwear perverts’ ” type Battle Royale. I should stay out of it; nobody ever convinces anyone at the end of these things of anything they didn’t already believe at the beginning.
Having said that, I am not merely a superhero comics fan, but a Silver Age superhero comics fan. I dislike a great deal of the post-Silver Age, and tend to lump it all together as ‘the Modern Age’, which I mostly say with great disdain. There are a few Modern Age writers whose work I enjoy, and certainly, the oft mentioned Alan Moore is one of them (having said that, I am one of the few who finds WATCHMEN to be a deeply flawed work, much preferring Moore when he is working with characters of his own creation and not simply sodomizing material others may have some emotional attachment to, apparently for nothing more than the sheer joy of imagining the look on the face of a classic Blue Beetle fan when they witness a mob of katied up knot tops beating an elderly version of BB to death with his own civics trophy).
Now, the disdain that most of the ‘underwear perverts’ crowd feels for superhero comics generally originates in the Silver Age, which was admittedly more childish and innocent and thus, less ‘realistic’ (‘realistic’ presumably meaning, nobody got raped by Dr. Light). The lack of realism varied in degree; DC was putting out Silver Age material for 9 year olds, while Marvel tended to target a more mature audience of adolescents (and it’s important to remember than in the 60s and early to mid 70s, nobody assumed that adolescents had to be emotionally retarded and/or possess microscopic attention spans; superhero comics written around those prerequisites really didn’t start to hit their stride until the late 70s/early 80s… right around the time Claremont’s X-MEN and their various doppelgangers really started to have an impact on the genre as a whole).
What I do when one of my friends starts going on about how he/she “hates comics OMG” is I give them volume 1 of Preacher. Twelve hours later, at 4 am, when they’re finishing off volume eight, they have a new perspective.
PREACHER is a wonderful example of the kind of Modern Age comic I hate the most, and the things I hate about it are generally exactly the same ‘qualities’ that commend it to the average Modern Age ‘superhero’ comics fan. Everything that the Modern Age fan who hates the Silver Age loves about the Modern Age is embodied in this comic.
Me, when I run into somebody who hates comics, or who loves comics as a medium but can’t stand those horrible superhero things, I try to give them a GOOD superhero comic, like some Cary Bates SUPERMAN stuff from the 70s, or Englehart’s first run on DETECTIVE, or Steve Gerber’s DEFENDERS or GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, or even some of Alan Moore’s America’s Best Comics stuff, especially TOP 10. If I’m trying to convince them that the medium itself is a valid one, I always pitch some of Gaiman’s SANDMAN at them.
But I’d have to have a really good reason (read that as “she’s a babe” if you like, I won’t try to duck it) to try any of that on anyone making such a declaration, since to me, someone saying “I hate comics OMG” or “I hate superhero comics why aren’t you reading GHOST WORLD you cretin” is on about the same mental level as somebody who confesses to being the biggest FLAVA OF LOVE fan in the world. I just don’t have time for anyone who is that big an idiot, sorry.
Not to say I ain’t a nerd, of course. I can tell ya that Thor is back to his Donald Blake alter-ego but is spending his time as Thor rebuilding Asgard in the middle of Kansas,
Somebody blew up Asgard? Was it terrorists?
and I get excited as a little boy when the new World War Hulk comes out. In the end, though, I’d still rather sit down with a new Stray Bullets or anything by Alan Moore. Promethea ended too soon…
I enjoyed PROMETHEA greatly, but I have to admit, I enjoyed the early issues that actually had something remotely resembling coherent plots more than the later “let’s take an illustrated comic strip tour of the entire history of metaphysics” stuff. And much as I enjoyed PROMETHEA, I enjoyed TOP 10 even more. But much as I enjoyed both of those, the Moore comic I like the most is FROM HELL.
too soon. Anyone here read Lost Girls? My town has a lame comic store that doesn’t carry that sort of thing so I’ll have to resort to Ebay I think.
I haven’t read LOST GIRLS. Mostly because I’m really not sure I want to go to Alan Moore for my monkey spanking material, especially when there’s a new HOUSEWIVES AT PLAY out next month.
In the end, the ‘superheroes vs everything else’ debate strikes me as pointless. It’s much the same thing you can hear in any medium at any time — art film fans loathe the Star Wars stuff, fans of great literature won’t read Stephen King (and drip contempt for those who do). All I can tell you is, yeah, I’ve read AMERICAN SPLENDOR and yes, I really do find it pretentious, in its “oh look at me I’m so goddam ultrarealistic and grim n gritty and I would never sully my fabulous art with anything remotely like a plot or any slight element of imagination that’s for CHILDREN god someone kill me now” sensibility.
I read for fun. Silver Age superhero comics, however stupid and childish many of them may have been (and many others were nothing of the sort, check out Englehart’s DR. STRANGE or Gerber’s MAN-THING if you don’t believe me), were always fun. Precious little in the Modern Age of superhero comics can say that, and if there’s a single word in the English language that could never be applied to AMERICAN SPLENDOR or GHOST WORLD, well, ‘fun’ would be the one.
From good ol’ Wikipedia:
Humphrey Bogart plays Rick Blaine, a bitter and cynical American expatriate in Casablanca, who owns “Rick’s Café Américain”. Although Rick professes to be neutral in all matters, it is later revealed that he had run guns to Ethiopia to combat the 1935 Italian invasion, and fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War against Francisco Franco’s fascists.
See! He was a Republican!
As for Stephen King, he writes two kinds of books: those where the victims are mainly men (“Misery”, “The Stand”, “Shawshank Redmeption”) which are horror masterpieces, and those where the victims are mainly women, which I can not stand.
I was hoping that “See! He was a Republican!” would come across as more sarcastic than it did.
Doc, in your screed you have neglected to mention what makes your favourite superhero comics worth paying attention to above better material like “Ghost World” (and by better what I mean is better) while acknowledging that they’re written for kids.
Chris Ware is a genius. Since we’re pluging stuff now:
Adolph by Osamu Tezuka is one of my favorites, but it’s hard to find. If you live near a good library they might have it. A tale of three men named Adolph during World War II.
Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse. Another one that’s probably out of print. It’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a novel in comic form. A young man struggles with his homosexuality while getting involved in the civil rights stuggle of the early sixties. I only paid a dime for my copy, and it’s the best ten cents I ever spent.
Jinx by Brian Micheal Bendis, before he was bought by Marvel. Actually all of his stuff from his indy days is excellent. Alias is his best Marvel book, and not just because Luke Cage is a character. Though that helps.
Fables by Bill Willingham and various great artists. Bigby is my hero.
Four suggestions for those who don’t get comics.
A Chris Ware page from The New Yorker.
Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse.
I remember reading some press about this. Thanks for the reminder. He’s got a lot of material about it on his site.
Lots of fun digressions.
Stephen King- One of his sons was a classmate of mine in undergrad. Looked and behaved like a poorly shaved ape. Unfortunately I ended up taking a number of classes with him in the classics dept. He had a tendency to repeat what the prof just said back at him. And he peeped on my long term gf at the time in the shower. Apparently he did that frequently. Hairy bastard.
I was huge on comics as a kid, from the age of 6 or 7 right up until the sex, drugs, and rock n roll kicks in at about 14, tho there was a year or two of overlap. Last thing I bought back in the day was the end of the Age of Apocalypse X-Men series. Wasn’t that I came to dislike comics so much as I needed that money to buy pot to smoke with the preppie girls at my boarding school who thought it was sooooooo strange, and therefore desirable, that I liked neither phish nor dave matthews.
I did buy the civil war trade paperback, n it was interesting. Also a reprint of the death of captain america, who’s really obviously not dead but in a coma of some sort.
And while I was too young to read much american splendor, the flick of it has to be credited as the greatest homage to geek love I’ve ever seen. Geek love is strong, n I miss it.
Wasn’t that I came to dislike comics so much as I needed that money to buy pot
Comics are free these days although maybe not as comfortable to lie around with.
And while I was too young to read much american splendor, the flick of it has to be credited as the greatest homage to geek love I’ve ever seen.
I thought American Splendor was tedious and unremarkable and I didn’t think Harvey Pekar had anything striking to say. The film, however, is really terrific.
I’ve noticed conservatives, or recent conservative converts, often seem ignorant about films, or maybe it’s the basic comprehension thing that trips them up. One of my favorite bits was when the Fox News crew expressed concern that one of John Roberts’ favorite films was Doctor Zhivago, because it was “a litle bit commie,” which is sorta like, I dunno, saying Roots is “a little bit pro-slavery.” But hey, you can’t trust them Ruskies…
apparently for nothing more than the sheer joy of imagining the look on the face of a classic Blue Beetle fan when they witness a mob of katied up knot tops beating an elderly version of BB to death with his own civics trophy.
I’m a little dubious that this was Moore’s only motivation for The Watchmen. Did he tell you this?
Why would Moore be so obsessed with honking off all those classic Blue Beetle fans?
The many classic Blue Beetle fans I know are very nice, and I can see no reason why Moore would pick on them as a group. Is he really such an ogre? I had no idea.
Yeah, superheroes suck. That’s why that “Heroes” show bombed, and that “Batman Returns” movie was a flop.
Okay why hasn’t anybody said “Underware Perverts” is a good name for a band.?
I think Ragnarok happened, or something. I dunno, I only read the new Thors cuz my friend had them. Thor came back to life because his myth was too strong for him to stay dead. Or something.
I liked the murderous clone Thor better. Though my favorite comic Thor is the one from Savage Dragon.
That dood with teh foto on top likes ’em some oldies cuz they way too dead to be laughin at teh massive foreheads.
Aren’t the sort of righties who appropriate Hollywood figures to their tough-guy iconographies the same sort of people who, in high school, looked on all male “theater geeks” as show-tune-singing sissies?
No, the Lileks and Goldbergs are the kids who were relegated to “Props” because they were too stupid or lazy to memorize lines and they couldn’t carry a tune in handbasket. (Yes, they were ugly too, but at most high schools there are so few male students willing to be involved with the show-tunes crowd that any Y-chromosome carrier can be a “star”, unless they just can’t or won’t do the friggin’ job.) That’s one of the early warning signs of Rethuglicanism… they’re the kids who are fascinated by the glamour and social status of performing, but totally unwilling to do the work involved in actually putting together an act anybody would want to watch. When they fail to get awarded some kind of Big Role which would involve nothing more challenging than showing up half an hour before curtain & standing under the spots repeating what they remember of the rilly kuul lines from last night’s Adam Sandler movie, they “retaliate” by announcing that all the successful male theatre geeks are sissys, and all the female TGs are “putting out” for the faculty director. I believe this is where Karl Rove discovered his vocation, in fact…
As for Comic Books, most of us love the style we discovered at some vulnerable point in our aesthetic development. I’ll always have a weakness for Gene Colan because he was doing strong women characters when I was stuck in an all-girl parochial high school. And for Sheldon Mayer, because of Sugar. I know Alan Moore and Harvey Pekar are technically better artists/storytellers, but I have so many other things to do with my time these days that I just can’t commit to appreciating their ouevres, y’know?
I liked the murderous clone Thor better.
It’d be fun to have a “no punches pulled” Thor, so guys rob a bank or something, Thor throws his hammer and their skulls are pulped.
Brian Micheal Bendis
I have to say I loved Powers, and I vastly prefer the Ultimate Marvel universe because there’s not (yet) sixty years of godawful backstory.
Fables by Bill Willingham and various great artists. Bigby is my hero.
Eh, Bigby. I like Boy Blue and Jack, myself. But Bigby’s not bad.
One thing I’d like to plug is DMZ, written by Brian Wood. Good stuff.
You didn’t have to write any text for this piece at all, you know. “Breeding Lileks out of the dead land” is simply the most brilliant headline pun I have seen yet on Sadly, No!. Kudos to you, gentlemen.
apparently for nothing more than the sheer joy of imagining the look on the face of a classic Blue Beetle fan when they witness a mob of katied up knot tops beating an elderly version of BB to death with his own civics trophy.
I’m a little dubious that this was Moore’s only motivation for The Watchmen. Did he tell you this?
I’m pretty sure Doc was using a little hyperbole here. But what do I know?
I’ll tell you what I know: The best reason for appreciating superhero comic books is that they almost always, at one point or another, involve a boot
to
the
face.
I’ve actually followed this thread all day. Interesting. A lot of passion in some rather obscure areas. I have absolutely nothing to offer.
The last movies I saw were “A history of violence” and “Master and Commander”. No, waitaminute, a couple weeks ago I kinda paid attention to “Three Kings” on cable. It was not at all what I expected, and I think it might be pretty profound. I’ll get the DVD one of these days.
The last comic book I read was in 1970. I never liked superheroes, because I always knew that with enough firepower I could kill anything. That, I had to figure, included dudes in capes.
The only thing I know about Lileks is he did a series on the painter that painted women with their panties around their ankles and celery in their possesion. I think I got clued into that during the great sammich war.
I’m not sure what the proprietors are up to, though. In the last five or so days, since HTML’s last, there’s been about a dozen from Gavin, one from Bradrocket and one from mister pierce. Is this the summer hiatus?
mikey
I never liked superheroes, because I always knew that with enough firepower I could kill anything. That, I had to figure, included dudes in capes.
Pfft. You’d miss. Unless it was really a clone, a robot, or a naive friend fooling around with the kooky threads that were hidden in the closet.
“Transmetropolitan.”
If everyone read “Transmetropolitan,” it would be a better world.
If we made our reporters read “Transmetropolitan,” Bush would be lucky to last five minutes before he was impeached and/or bowel-disrupted.
I really don’t care about lightbulb head. I’m just seeing if I can post comments here (I can’t seem to do it at World O’Crap)
Did I miss any references to Art Spiegelman’s Maus in this comic/graphic novel discussion?
I’ll look again but, if not, well I just made one.
The link is to a page within a larger site dealing with the Holocaust, and providing access to a ton of material (essays, media, etc.). Google is amazing – I just want to say that.
I was never really into comics as a kid. I don’t know why, but I just never gravitated to them. But when I first heard that there was a comic book/graphic novel treatment of a Holocaust survivor’s story, I just had to get my hands on it.
Spiegelman has also done some stuff for the New Yorker, including the very moving two-tone black cover for the issue immediately following September 11th in 2001.
Other than these two tidbits, I got nothing. Interesting reading through this thread, though.
(Oh, I also read Persopolis a while back. I’m gonna dig it up again tonight when I get home).
Alan Moore writing about a previous Spiegelman project, Arcade.
I loved Arcade. I still buy big collections of different comics every now and then just to get the thrill of having that much weird stuff in one volume.
Bogart as WWII hero? How about The Caine Mutiny? Our “hero” takes cowardly action under fire while in the grip of paranoia.
Lileks is never one to let facts get in the way of a pet narrative.
“rebuilding Asgard in the middle of Kansas”
Oklahoma, actually. Kansas is Oklahoma without all the excitement.
If I remember correctly, John Dos Passos inserted a strikingly similar anti-James Dean rant in the novel Midcentury, written in the early sixties after the once-great Dos Passos had degenerated into a reactionary jerk-off. Like Lileks, Dos Passos saw Dean as a sign that the world was being overrun with lily-livered wussoids and made a point of contrasting him with a two-fisted manly-man (a Korean War general in this earlier version, rather than Humphrey Bogart). Down through the ages, James Dean seems to have some enduring quality that really gets wingnuts’ panties in a wad.
As for comic books, I’ve never had much passion for super-heroes. Still, I like weirdness and I’ve got to admire the twentieth century for coming up with the extremely strange mythology of ordinary citizens with secret identities who put on bizarre costumes and fly through the air fighting evil.
Personally, I’m more of an old Zap Comix DFH kind of a guy. Maybe I should send Lileks a copy. I’m sure he’d enjoy Ruby the Dyke Meets Weedman.
(And yes, Spiegelman is great.)
“The African Queen is set during World War I, with the misfits played by Katherine Hepburn and Bogart taking on the Kaiser’s, rather than Hitler’s, kriegsmarine.”
To get really technical here, the Kaiser did not have a Kriegsmarine — he had the Imperial German Navy. Kriegsmarine was purely the Nazi navy.
Say what you will about Stephen King, and I will say that he’s written (and more the crime, published) some horrible dreck. But he is also responsible for the novels Misery, The Stand, and The Shining, as well as the beautiful novellas Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and The Body from the collection Different Seasons. And also The Green Mile, a serialized novel that kept me on the edge of my seat waiting for the next installment.
Why am I not drinking with everybody here?
Comics may be free now, but I was too big a comics geek to ever accept such a format. I need the first edition most fanboy cool cover version to win. Ahh, to be young and stupid and overindulged. At this point my transformers are worth more than most of my comics.
Hmm. Parsing Bubba.
Why am I (not drinking) with everyone here?
Or.
Why am I not drinking (with everyone here)?
Or perhaps.
Why am I drinking (but) not with everyone here?
It is a question of drinking or not drinking, either alone or with preferred participants..
I’ll be drinking within the hour, in order to prepare to endure the giants game…
mikey
Comics may be free now, but I was too big a comics geek to ever accept such a format.
I have no laptop so stealing ’em makes for inconvenient reading, but there’s an advantage to a monitor in that the colours glow. Also the older I get the more I curse teensy lettering, like the kind that Chris Ware bastard does.
Why am I not drinking with everybody here?
Off to the depanneur to buy the 1 litre can of Molson Export. I’ll be back at oh-twohundred (Stuttgart time) ready to propose a toast.
All this crapping on Lileks’ misreading of Bogie’s screen persona and only one person has mentioned Fred C. Dobbs? Philistines, the lot of you.
Actually, I find GHOST WORLD and AMERICAN SPLENDOR fun.
Then again, I find BLACK HOLE fun.
Guess I’m a sick puppy.
And how come nobody’s mentioning Gaiman’s SANDMAN? Or BONE? Or, for that matter, CEREBUS, which might be the only truly wingnutty comic of any merit (though I’ve never really managed to get into it).
I’ll be back at oh-twohundred (Stuttgart time) ready to propose a toast.
Alas, I have to go drink with the five-year-old. I can usually outlast her.
1. For those who have not seen it and are interested: Spiegelman’s Harper’s piece on the Danish cartoons (August 2006).
2. …to propose a toast.
To Bruce!
The best line I ever read in a movie review about Bogart was something about how his genius was that he “could show fear.” That really is it. Even when he’s smartmouthing cops, there’s something in his eyes and mouth that shows you he’s thinking about all the ways the situation could go very seriously wrong for him. My point is, Schwarzenegger he wasn’t.
Also, if you haven’t seen In a Lonely Place with Bogart and Gloria Grahame, do yourself a favor and see it.
Best individual “underground” comic ever: Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary, by Justin Green. Nah gonna Google™ it, dunno know if it’s been reprinted, but it’s great! Speaking of Google™, by way of World O’ Crap™, it’s K. J. Lopez, putting the “doy” in doyenne @ NRO.
“The last movies I saw were “A history of violence” and “Master and Commander””
Funny enough, “A history of violence” was based on a graphic novel. Getting comics taken seriously in popular culture is full of catch-22s – if a serious adaptation is made of a serious comic, those involved don’t make much mention of the source because then it wouldn’t be taken seriously.
This sort of thing happens a lot with media perceived as being “for kids”, like comics, animation, video games. “X is for kids.” “No, see, here’s an example that is clearly intended for adults.” “GAH! How dare you sickos put adult content in something intended for kids!”
You and me both.
Someone once said Charles Burns’ stuff “doesn’t look like it was drawn by a human being.” Here’s one of his self-portraits.
For the record, I highly recommend In A Lonely Place as well. The first time I saw it was on the big screen at a revival house and I thought it was about the best movie ever. I was so stoned …
I love the part where Bogart is trying to justify his blind rage: Did you hear what he called me!?!?!?
And Gloria Grahame says: Blind, knuckle-headed squirrel. That’s real bad.
And Gloria Grahame says: Blind, knuckle-headed squirrel. That’s real bad.
I love the way she melded all her B-movie gun moll/village floozy roles into her one really great role in that picture. When you brought that scene up, they all came back to me.
Dan Someone said,
apparently for nothing more than the sheer joy of imagining the look on the face of a classic Blue Beetle fan when they witness a mob of katied up knot tops beating an elderly version of BB to death with his own civics trophy.
I’m a little dubious that this was Moore’s only motivation for The Watchmen. Did he tell you this?
I’m pretty sure Doc was using a little hyperbole here. But what do I know?
Tone is hard to do in pure text, but, yeah, I was being mildly ironic. While I do think AM gets at least a mild thrill out of raining shit down on the heads of sacred cows in capes and cowls, I suspect he mostly does his deconstruction thing because there is an enormous amount of melodramatic power in taking apart the myths of childhood/adolescence.
Still, I think deconstruction is generally a cheap thrill, and much prefer it with at least a twist of honest creativity to it, not to mention, I like it way better when it’s happening to characters I have no emotional investment in.
Just for one example, the Silver Age JLA Are All Child Molesters story that Moore did in the last two issues of TOP 10 would have utterly enraged me if it had actually been done with the JLA, even if it were only an ‘Imaginary Story’. I would have found it unbelievably disrespectful and been mortally offended by it. But Moore makes up some lame and completely obvious Silver Age JLA stand ins and I can stand back and appreciate the story completely.
And, to answer someone else, I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned Gaiman’s SANDMAN, if no one else has.
I’ll add a vote for In a Lonely Place. And linus, I think that quality in Bogart is the “twitchiness” that Lileks doesn’t perceive in him but is all over in James Dean. Like Lileks isn’t a twitch of the first order anyway.
that quality in Bogart is the “twitchiness” that Lileks doesn’t perceive in him but is all over in James Dean.
Very true. Does anybody remember that scene in Chinatown where Jack Nicholson as the tough private eye is doing a Bogart number on the cops and in response they kick his ass? Truly, time reveals everything.
“Still, I think deconstruction is generally a cheap thrill, and much prefer it with at least a twist of honest creativity to it”
What, no love for the Tales of the Black Freighter intercut allegory/Greek chorus?
Some folks’ll only see what they wanna see.
Mind you, the idea of some big Jack Kirby full page spread showing Leap-Frog frantically sproinging down a crowded city street, bouncing off the sides of buildings and mailboxes and lampposts and the occasional retired postal worker, screaming “HELP ME!!! HELP ME!!! HELP ME!!!! AAAAAAAHHHHHH!” while Thor is chasing him, hammer raised, bellowing something like “And now there shall fly to pieces — A VILLAIN!” is pretty solid. I’d buy the original art to something like that.
Wow. Fuck, yeah.
Somebody get me an Ouija board, or at least someone who can draw like Kirby.
(Oh, never mind – it’d end up being done by some punk-ass Liefeld-type kid who heard about something called “proportion” in art class at one point but that was the day after that righteous party, dude. And there’d be nekkid chicks and zombies and zombie nekkid chicks to assure plenty of sales.
Y’know, sometimes, as much as I love comics, I really HATE comics, if y’know what I mean.)
Oh, n as far as Lileks hating teens and James Dean, don’t those represent the threats of his daughter developing an independent and sexual identity?
I’m surprised he hasn’t gone off on unicorns. Maybe he has.
Doc, I’m still highly dubious about your interpretation of The Watchmen. I just don’t see Moore being obsessed with some sort of “deconstructionist” approach to characters that are very loosely based on characters with such a small fan following as the Charlton characters the Watchmen are based on, just to evoke some kind of shock from those fans.
“Take that, you Charlton fans! I’ve turned the Question into a dirty, practically homeless paranoid redhead! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
I’m also highly suspicious of your analogy between the child sex ring JLA in Top Ten and the dystopian Charlton characters in Watchmen. You seem to be saying the latter didn’t work because they were too close to the original characters and you just couldn’t stand seeing Nightshade have an affair with Blue Beetle, Captain Atom killing the Question, whoever the hell Comedian is supposed to be thrown out a window and whoever the hell Ozymandias is supposed to be as some sort of Machiavellian Ubermensch who kills a bunch of people to make Captain Atom leave Earth and save the world.
Huh?
I can get that The Watchmen didn’t do a whole lot for you, but your critique sounds really forced, as if you can’t just accept that people saw something you didn’t, so you have to find something, ANYTHING to say as criticism, whether it makes any sense or not.
I work with a lady who doesn’t like the Impressionists and Modern painting, she doesn’t like poetry, and she just can’t accept that its nothing more than a personal taste issue. She all too frequently bags on what an awful painter Picasso is, or goes off on how stupid poetry is. It’s quite tiresome. And she just basically looks kinda foolish in the office, and she has no idea she looks so foolish. (She also thinks the Narnia books and Alice in Wonderland were written by the same person.)
I can accept that she doesn’t like Picasso, but she doesn’t stop there. She bags on people like Picasso and Kandinsky and Klee and says it’s not art.
By the way, Top Ten is great. I read Top Ten and Watchmen over and over again. I also love Tomorrow Stories, especially Cobweb.
And Doc’s not the only one who can quibble over tone.
J— and Rub DMC: “Maus” is on the syllabus for a postmodern narrative seminar I’m taking this semester. I’ve bookmarked your links — thanks.
mikey: “Three Kings” is one of my favorite contemporary movies. Vastly underrated, and prescient, and one of the first (I think) to use that weirdo visual effect of bullets entering the body, etc. I must also have the DVD of it someday.
I’m drinking White Russians tonight in honor of having seen, for about the 10th time, “The Big Lebowski” on cable the other night.
Again, I must urge anyone who hasn’t seen James Dean, et al. in “Giant” to do so. Another underrated and very rich movie that holds up quite well for its age.
The last comic books I read had Archie and Betty and Veronica in ’em. Oh, except for the “Mr. Natural” ones back when I was a real hippie rather than the current simulacrum. Yes, it’s all postmodern, all the time now for the world’s oldest grad student!
That’s all I got. Now if you’ll excuse me, there are children on my lawn who need to be yelled at.
I was hoping this thread would turn into “favorite amoral characters in teh movies,” but somehow it’s all about comix. So I’m just going to drop a reference to Gabriel Byrne’s character in Miller’s Crossing, then run along.
And it’s Yuengling for me this evening.
1) James Dean never did a vampire like Bogart did in “The Return of Doctor X”. 2) So far, no one’s mentoned “The Harder They Fall” with Bogart as the Intellectual Hero, and how natural he seemed. 3) Leapfrog was killed by Daredevil, in an arc that highlighted the ‘lameness’ of the Leapfrog’s criminal career, tragically leaving an orphan. 4) Graphic novels are one step closer to a finished screenplay, which is why the creatively-bereft film industry likes them so much. 5) I still like Too Much Coffee Man.
re: Doc Nebula
It’s ok, really. I didn’t mean no harm and you must have missed the body language that told you it was gentle ribbing among friends. I’m not the greatest writer so I can forget to put those cues in the text.
Sorry about the “underwear perverts” thing and yeah I got that from BoingBoing. I guess that I do sort of like comics it’s just that I like a different genre than the Marvel, DC or whatever stuff. I like comics if the art work engages me or impresses me and I was sort of pointing in the general direction of what I liked. I love R. Crumb, I mean, who doesn’t? So I guess I misspoke, I do like comics, just not all kinds.
I like stories. I don’t care that much for adventure and still less for horror. I don’t like “hard” SciFi. I like fiction that tells a story or gets deeply into the characters. I don’t care much for car chase footage that pretends to be a movie. Another thing that I don’t really “get” that much is music. I mean I like it but… for some people music is their life or a big chunk of it. Not me.
All that said I’m not hard core about it. Balance in everything, nothing is black or white.
If you ask me, Bogart’s best movie was The Crime of the Ancient Mariner, where he played the amoral private detective Coleridge. Some people reckon that the movie was ruined for them by Peter Lorre’s over-acting as Porlock, Coleridge’s demented sidekick — but to my mind,
Sorry. The akvavit is just starting to kick in.
a different brad said,
Oh, n as far as Lileks hating teens and James Dean, don’t those represent the threats of his daughter developing an independent and sexual identity?
I’m surprised he hasn’t gone off on unicorns. Maybe he has.
The internets deliver:
No, I haven’t a clue what he is blabbering on about but later in the post he mentions a fondness for Skyy Melon Vodka and puts up a painting of Saddam next to the twin towers that proves he was connected to 9-11. The man is a f*king idiot.
My favourite Lileks – the one where he announced that he couldn’t enjoy zombie-shocker 28 Days Later because he was so annoyed by England’s strict firearms laws.
If only they’d had guns, it would’ve been fine! That’s how it always turns out in American zombie flicks, after all.
Don’t get me started about Zombie Bogart. Something tells me that I won’t make any sense.
Hoosier X said,
Doc, I’m still highly dubious about your interpretation of The Watchmen. I just don’t see Moore being obsessed with some sort of “deconstructionist” approach to characters that are very loosely based on characters with such a small fan following as the Charlton characters the Watchmen are based on, just to evoke some kind of shock from those fans.
“Take that, you Charlton fans! I’ve turned the Question into a dirty, practically homeless paranoid redhead! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
Couple of things here. ‘Deconstruction’ refers to much more than simply ‘humanizing’ a larger than life hero. It is the process of taking a particular mythology, as a whole, and breaking it down into pieces, and then examining those pieces, turning them to different angles, and, generally, rebuilding the myth in an entirely different context.
Moore has pretty much pioneered the technique in superhero comics; his MARVEL/MIRACLEMAN was the text book case of ‘deconstruction’ as applied to these grand fantasies that often had little or nothing to do with actual mundane day to day existence.
Now, my reference to Moore’s motivations in writing WATCHMEN as being little more than a sadistic urge to aggravate fans of the original Charlton heroes was meant to be an amusing aside. I think there’s some element of truth to it — I think Moore gets a very real joy from knocking the pedestals out from under his childhood heroes, and what that says about him is for someone more qualified to go into — but I also think that Moore’s main motive in his deconstructions is often positive, as he’s trying to salvage characters and story elements that he may have loved as a child, and that will no longer work to his adult sensibilities. I believe that’s what he was doing in stories like MARVELMAN, and in “Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow”, among others.
But it’s important to understand that, as regards WATCHMEN, Moore wrote his precis specifically for those Charlton characters, once DC got the rights to them. DC loved the idea, but didn’t want to so finally dispose of the properties they’d gone to so much trouble to acquire, so they asked Moore to transform the characters somewhat. This is what led to Blue Beetle becoming Nite Owl, Captain Atom becoming Dr. Manhattan, the Question becoming Rorschach, Peacemaker turning into the Comedian, Nightshade becoming Silk Spectre, and Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt, transforming into Ozymandias. Moore doesn’t always ‘deconstruct’ with an eye towards eventually rebuilding. Sometimes, as with WATCHMEN, or as with the JLA stand ins in TOP 10, or as especially with his never produced TWILIGHT prospectus, he is simply indulging in a childish desire to tear something down.
My conclusions as to WATCHMEN being a profoundly flawed work do not arise from any attachment to the original Charlton characters (although it’s important to note that these characters were childhood favorite’s of AM’s himself, and he doubtless got a pretty big personal thrill out of knocking them all into the dirt, much the same as Rick Veitch did smearing slime all over the Teen Titans in BRAT PACK). They mostly come from the fact that in a few crucial places, the central story arcs make no sense. Most importantly, by 1977, there are only three independent superheroes still publicly active in the WATCHMEN world — Rorschach, Nite Owl II, and the semi retired Silk Spectre II — it is simply ludicrous to think that the police would go on a nationwide strike because of these three costumed vigilantes, none of whom even have superpowers. Without the national police strikes and the subsequent national uprisings against superheroes, there would be no Federal Keene Act outlawing superheroes, and without the Keene Act, WATCHMEN has no central conflict.
Beyond that, WATCHMEN’s underlying Ozymandias plotline is lifted wholesale from an obscure SF novel named PROJECT: WILD CARD. But never mind that, Moore steals a lot of his material from other places. He generally improves on the source, so I’ve learned to let that go.
I’m also highly suspicious of your analogy between the child sex ring JLA in Top Ten and the dystopian Charlton characters in Watchmen. You seem to be saying the latter didn’t work because they were too close to the original characters and you just couldn’t stand seeing Nightshade have an affair with Blue Beetle, Captain Atom killing the Question, whoever the hell Comedian is supposed to be thrown out a window and whoever the hell Ozymandias is supposed to be as some sort of Machiavellian Ubermensch who kills a bunch of people to make Captain Atom leave Earth and save the world.
No. Again, that was simply an aside. I couldn’t care less about the original Charlton characters. My point was, Moore cared about them a great deal, and he gets a significant kick out of ‘re-imagining’ characters he enjoyed in his youth. Sometimes he does this in a positive way, other times he’s just wrecking shit for the fun of wrecking shit.
I can get that The Watchmen didn’t do a whole lot for you, but your critique sounds really forced, as if you can’t just accept that people saw something you didn’t, so you have to find something, ANYTHING to say as criticism, whether it makes any sense or not.
WATCHMEN is an extremely significant work in the superhero comics genre, and much of it is brilliantly written. That I am capable of seeing its flaws as well as its qualities doesn’t make me wrong or foolish, although, certainly, it seems to make me unique among WATCHMEN readers and Alan Moore fans. However, for the record, I own WATCHMEN and enjoy reading it very much. It’s just nothing even remotely like the sacred perfect immaculate holy writing that the remainder of its fans insist on viewing it as.
I work with a lady who doesn’t like the Impressionists and Modern painting, she doesn’t like poetry, and she just can’t accept that its nothing more than a personal taste issue. She all too frequently bags on what an awful painter Picasso is, or goes off on how stupid poetry is. It’s quite tiresome. And she just basically looks kinda foolish in the office, and she has no idea she looks so foolish. (She also thinks the Narnia books and Alice in Wonderland were written by the same person.)
You seem to be drawing parallels between this person and myself. If so, I would like to quietly suggest these comparisons are unfounded.
Down through the ages, James Dean seems to have some enduring quality that really gets wingnuts’ panties in a wad.
That’s probably because he was (a) a vulnerable, and (b) purty. Combine the two and you’ve got a guaranteed wingnut enemy. Think about it: Dean was the sort of guy who got women’s panties, well, not exactly in a wad. That hurtin’ bad boy that made every woman want to cuddle him and make it right (along with a bit of screaming sex).
And I think that makes so many wingnuts mad because you can’t do that vulnerable thing unless you’re purty: if you’re butt ugly, it just makes you a complete nerd who gets his head flushed down the toilet every day.
That’s why they idolise manly men: you can be ugly as a hatful of arseholes and still be a tough guy, and therefore still be sexy (to anyone who fancies a man with no brain). They’re not cute and they’re not funny, so pretending that they’re tough, imagining women swooning and clinging to their biceps (the wingnut’s biceps, not the women’s) is their only chance of engendering uncontrollable lust.
Well, that and teh ghey.
Comic coda: Sandman totally rocks. Other than that, I fancy Japanese anime: there’s a great series called Saiyuki that’s based on a manga (comic) that’s a version of the Journey To The West (the Monkey saga). The original manga is written and drawn by a great artist who’s also a woman (and not just in her spare time), which means there’s a lot of interesting byplay between the characters. Which in its turn means that it provides a fertile field for yaoi stuff.
I’m sorry, I think my brain just ran out of my ears. Fulsome apologies. I’ll return as soon as the problem has been rectified.
Just wait until Jimbo writes about Leonardo and River. Yes, River died in 1993, but he is still a dirty fag who spoiled our culture.
Seriously, if River were alive today, we’d be seeing an amazing career. Joaquin wouldn’t have a job and Leonardo would have some serious competition.
I wonder what James makes of Bogie in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I think it is a pretty good interpretation of modern conservatism. Oh, except Fred C. Dobbs wasn’t a closet homosexual.
Couple of things here. ‘Deconstruction’ refers to much more than simply ‘humanizing’ a larger than life hero. It is the process of taking a particular mythology, as a whole, and breaking it down into pieces, and then examining those pieces, turning them to different angles, and, generally, rebuilding the myth in an entirely different context.
This is not what deconstruction is.
Whoopsies.
If Lileks still needs a job, he should rent out ad space on that Jumbotron forehead.
Flying rodent: As this is probably the geekiest thread this site has ever seen, I feel I must insert some pointless pedantry. 28 Days Later isn’t technically a zombie shocker, it’s a “virus shocker” in the vein (boom-tish) of David Cronenberg’s Rabid or Shivers. The nasties in these films aren’t dead (or undead), they’re merely infected with a disease that makes them attack the uninfected (or, in the case of Shivers, sort of paw at them and pull their clothes off a bit).
If only they’d had guns, it would’ve been fine! That’s how it always turns out in American zombie flicks, after all.
Guns. Psshhh.
What they needed was Alice! [Swoons, mops forehead, goes outside for air]
mikey
Perhaps Lileks’ impression of Dean has been coloured by Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon portraying boy genius as The Human Ashtray fond of being touched in many unfathomable ways. That would cover both the “slapped” and the “TROUBLED”
Some more geekage:
There’s not a novel called PROJECT: WILD CARD, it’s a shard-universe anthology series, Wild Cards: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Cards
I think Moore and Campbell’s FROM HELL is Moore’s best so far, a real masterpiece (with more footnotes than INFINITE JEST).
It’s nice to see so many shoutouts for IN A DARK PLACE. But though there’s a powerful moral ambiguity in it, it’s still somewhat Hollywoodized, as the Bogart character would really be a murderer, if they had followed the source novel more closely.
Gah… Lileks is boring, even when he’s talking about Jello molds. Harvey Pekar’s stories only seem interesting when Crumb draws them, otherwise it’s this clunky bunch of panels of Pekar thinking things like, “Gee, I guess other people really do have feelin’s and stuff.” Alan Moore’s mutant power is taking trite and played-out stories and, without changing anything that’s already been written, adding aspects that make them thrilling and new.
Also, Hammett himself was the kind of commie that Lileks would have rushed to denounce. And Chandler was a one-time Bloomsbury poet who sometimes had to be drunk to write. (Mind you, they’re close to the top of my personal hit parade. Chandler was the Debussy of the pulps, Hammett was the Ravel.)
Somewhere in the 60s, there is a back-up feature in Superboy comics where Krypto (on two or three occasions) runs into a sort of legion of super canines, whose exact group name I seem to have forgotten. They walk on their hind legs (two legs better!) and have names like Hot Dog, Tusky Husky, and Paw Pooch. Talk about having to be drunk to write! In one blazingly memorable panel, a dog who can show the future in his giant crystal ball head is showing Krypto that Superboy is pinned under a glowing green meteor, one of billions of chunks of Krypton that follow the last son of Krypton wherever he goes. “Yip! Yip!” says Krypto, perceptively, “My master is in danger!”
I finally realize why that photo of Lileks looks so familiar. It reminds me of the dog with the giant crystal ball head. Yip! Yip!
So, let’s take stock:
Lilleks uses as his conservative archetype a man who was personally a liberal, and who has, as his two most recognizable characters, an anti-Fascist/anti-Nazi activist (who was getting the hell out of Paris because the Nazis had him on a list of targets when the whole thing with Ilsa and his bad, rainy day at the train station happened) and a private detective created by a guy who was dragged in front of the HUAC and roundly denounced by Jimmy’s intellectual ancestors, such as they were.
Yeah, that’s quite a typical start for another spellbinging trip to his Daliesque interior world.
Hey, did James Dean hate frozen pizza, too?
Lileks probably once read Heinlein’s Friday, whose title character says “My records (or one set) show that I was ‘born’ in Seattle, a destroyed city being a swell place for missing records.” Being Lileks, he couldn’t tell the difference between science fiction and reality.
Dennis Savage said,
Some more geekage:
There’s not a novel called PROJECT: WILD CARD, it’s a shard-universe anthology series, Wild Cards: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Cards
No, there is a novel called PROJECT: WILD CARD, or OPERATION: WILD CARD, or just WILD CARD. I can never remember the name of the two authors, and it never shows up on most Google searches without those names. Making it even worse, I actually own a copy of it… somewhere… but my personal library is very extensive, and if I can’t remember the names of authors, it doesn’t help me track something down. ::banging head against table::
Anyway — the novel itself is set in a future where the United States is being torn apart by different violent ethnic and extremist factions, so the President initiates a top secret project to fake an alien invasion “to unite the nation”. He tells all the scientists involved that he only wants the ‘aliens’ to use a biological weapon that will make people sick for a while, but then has one particular scientist make the weapon lethal, for maximum psychological impact. Once the project is finished, he puts everyone involved on board a plane and then has the plane shot down over the Gulf of Mexico. The book ends with a minor government functionary about to decide between opening a message that will tell him everything about Wild Card… or throwing it out unopened.
So, yes, there is a shared universe edited by George R.R. Martin called WILD CARD, but that’s not the WILD CARD I’m talking about.
Wait, goddamit, I found the fucker. It’s just WILD CARD, by Raymond Hawkey and Roger Bingham, published in hardcover by Stein and Day, New York, 1974. Library of Congress catalog card no. 73-91858.
There, goddamit.
Kip W said,
Somewhere in the 60s, there is a back-up feature in Superboy comics where Krypto (on two or three occasions) runs into a sort of legion of super canines, whose exact group name I seem to have forgotten. They walk on their hind legs (two legs better!) and have names like Hot Dog, Tusky Husky, and Paw Pooch. Talk about having to be drunk to write! In one blazingly memorable panel, a dog who can show the future in his giant crystal ball head is showing Krypto that Superboy is pinned under a glowing green meteor, one of billions of chunks of Krypton that follow the last son of Krypton wherever he goes. “Yip! Yip!” says Krypto, perceptively, “My master is in danger!”
I actually own a beat up reader’s copy of one of those issues — Superboy #131. The story is “The Dog from S.P.C.A” — S.P.C.A. standing for “Space Canine Patrol Agents”, a group of super powered dogs consisting of worthies like Tusky Husky, Chameleon Collie, Paw Pooch, Tail Terrier, Hot Dog, and Bull Dog. Also Massive Mutt, but he died at the start of the story. Alas, no crystal ball headed dog, but he must have showed up in some later S.P.C.A. back up story (it boggles my mind that a concept like Space Canine Patrol Agents proved popular enough for sequelization, but the Silver Age was a different time than this).
Jesus fucking Christ, I am either too geeky to live, or I am some sort of obscure but powerful geek deity. Worship me!!!!
re the Johny Horton virulent racist thing- mebbe some of the confusion stems from the fact that Horton recorded a song ( a hit, I think) called “Johhny Reb”. That might explain the conflation given the confusing nature of the internets and The Great Gazoogle.
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