Burzyum

I wrote something over at the comics blog about Magneto and the Holocaust via the unfortunate Testament mini-series, and the great issues 150 and 161 of X-Men.

In case you missed it, here’s a link to the first post, on the Avengers’ first four issues and the limitations of the movie.

May 21

One trick Cabin in the Woods trots out during its offensive on horror fans is baiting their encyclopedic sense of canon before chiding them for getting kicks out of recognition, exposing the mechanics behind a trope as a method of deflating its importance. It functions much like a critique of a comedy would if the entire critique were a methodical explanation of a joke’s construction and our alleged complicity in laughing at it. One point of reference Cabin uses is the Pandora’s box from Hellraiser and the way it speaks to Horror’s logic that the victims reap what they sew, almost entirely for our amusement.

A particularly egregious thing that gnawed at me during (the admittedly entertaining) Cabin was its lack of empathy, especially with the audience. Horror is really good at tapping into dread, not just that demons (et al) are real but that they confirm something we might suspect about the world. That we are not here to make a mark on it, but for it to make a mark on us, as semi-conscious organisms in an evolutionary pattern whose mistakes are merely stepping stones for future iterations. Cabin thinks it is accomplishing this, but misses the point that horror audiences can gather as much without being told that that’s what they are experiencing.

I had never seen Hellraiser so I watched it last week and, lo and behold, the function of its abuse has less to do with sating bloodlust by punishment than with commentary on dubious transcendence in the face of life’s diminishing returns. I can’t tell if this is because my sense of wonder is continually fading, but the way in which the world has lost its spark for its characters is apparent in Hellraiser’s mise-en-scene before most of the damage even begins. Pinhead mainly exacerbates the rotting core of these characters’ existence.

Nearly the entire film takes place in a dilapidated house, with blasphemously scattered religious iconography that needs plugs for momentary spark in decayed interiors that are barely serviced by any such attempt. Quite a bit of the action takes place under daylight, which offers no comfort and instead roughs up the film grain and exposes this further. The only thing that injects life into the house is blood, spawning a self-sustaining accident that drags its surroundings into its failure. Perhaps it’s Barker’s English sensibility critiquing some of the delusions that fuel American ingenuity, but he has an American propel the plot by setting to refurbish a house beyond redemption.

At first I noticed dialogue and acting that seemed beyond redemption, but what one gets from lines stepped over by people whose careers will be outlived by one of their products is that the naivety with which they force those line deliveries is informed by the potential of a go-nowhere future. They are directly negotiating with it, and in some ways failing, but also rendering the product they put the effort into less disposable. Even though Hellraiser is built on its abstract, celluloid iconography, this humanizing aspect places the action in a tangible realm. It adds stake to the worldviews being broken.

There’s the tantric sadomasochist whose boredom with earthly limits, including ravaging his brother’s wife, is met with infernal obliteration. Second is the said wife, whose extra-marital affair requires more bloodletting than she bargained for in order to perpetuate its existence. Third is the spurned husband who, while putting his missing brother’s house back in order, is literally torn apart in the process. Fourth is the aggrieved daughter who gets dragged into her idiotic uncle’s punishment and witnesses the fall of everything that defined her reality.

It’s really 4 that puts the first 3 in perspective. Her attempt to make it on her own, avoid her stepmother, and still be a part of her father’s life seems like a cruel joke when her entrance into the plot is preceded by the shabby construct of her father’s abode and the knowledge that things will get worse, especially if these mostly shitty adults and the increasingly awful things they do are any indication. Much of what happens registers as a post-collegiate nightmare, starting with a less than savory job at a pet store where she interacts with a deranged homeless man who eats bugs with his hand. He functions, on the surface, as an omen, but he also represents those discarded by life’s upward trajectory. He’s not just a sign of the hellish things to come, but the idea that a job at a pet store isn’t much towards securing a future.*

One can choose to see this as bitter nihilism but an important function of the horror film is to expose the discrepancy between our ideal self-projection and its potential for destruction, thus allowing for an interaction with our worst fears that we’d rather cast from the subconscious. Whether a film succeeds at resolving the tension between these two is almost besides the point as exposing the destruction also necessarily undermines the impractical sanctity of the ideal. I’m not sure what there is to learn from pointing this out as something worthy of guilt when its value was already accepted on terms of psychic projection.

*In this context one could see all the puzzle solving in the climax as a GRE of sorts, but grad school’s a nightmare too so SEQUEL…

May 20

Set something up to deal with my gap in comics knowledge. I have a torrential chunk of my hard drive (and some mail orders) devoted to filling it up. Over at Underwater Spaceships, I’ll be putting words to the process. This may be a trainwreck, but those are fun to watch too, right? (I apologize in advance)

My first post is a follow-up to the one I did on the Avengers franchise. I have now seen it. I have also read an almost negligible amount of it. But, since one panel is a world unto itself, there is still much to be said. Almost 3,000 words, actually! (I apologize in advance, again)

I would like to thank Sean (of few to no gaps) at No Chorus for suggesting it, and hope you will find something of interest in it. (if not, there is an ask box, but have mercy and remember my advance apologies)

May 13

In 2010 Fabo of D4L released GiK Tales, a singular statement only hinted at by Down 4 Life’s “Scotty.” On that track Fabo was given free reign, and transcending the perfectly fine boundaries of the album’s snap template, established himself as the group’s Budahas. Except, prior to coming back charred and shaken he actually managed to make first contact, where he was embedded with alien technology far surpassing his stolen plane. Gik Tales, basically, is Scotty: The Album.

What was once just a spaceships sighting Fabo made in Bankhead is now the aftermath of an invasion that quite possibly only Fabo, like a Mulder that was abducted instead of his sister, holds the key to. Bankhead here is in a parallel universe (or one underneath the present one) that is tangible and lived-in, both blessed and cursed by the ATLiens that either lord over its inhabitants or secretly commune with them in back alleys. Though the fiend’s lament in Danny Brown’s “Scrap or Die” is still a milestone in user’s POV storytelling, Fabo’s entire focus is the fiend, or the J. “Give it up for Da J’s,” appropriately, is like Fabo’s A Scanner Darkly, recounting various working-class characters, like a truck driving family man that needs to stay up longer for the drive, having their straightforward universe shattered by alien drugs.

As a mixtape, it foregoes studio-refined production, but the bombed-out, sonically unstable brittle of its beats actually end up being a plus, giving it an on the fritz, lo-fi template for Fabo to fill out with his electric, booming rasp. Rightly struck, a minimal synth flourish can paint the walls of a chamber with the beat’s brains, and on torn-up, universe-weary laments like “So What,” “U Don’t Feel Like Me” or “My Brutha,” Fabo brings an earthquake to the scrapyard, and forces it to implode. His rapping style is much like his dancing, both on point and go-for-broke, which limb it will pop, and which leg it will shake unknown until the movement’s already passed.

One moment he’s come “back in 3d, surfing on a tsunami” (#FaboPlissken), another his body speaks in genre, “dance moves science fiction, i’m on a mission” or being on his toes with “the Robocop.” It’s hard to pick a line, really, almost an injustice to separate his lightyear-a-bar momentum, i.e. “Lights out, fuck ‘em all! I’M BACK/Say hello to the Gik, Good god GONE BAAAD/It’s the Enterprise, GOT ‘EM ALL HIGH…” and so on as if Tony Montana’s pile of cocaine turned into Mount Selaya, but only in the heads of the Starship Enterprise crew, as manipulated by the trickster god Fabo.*

Whether he’s talking about drugs or music is playfully unclear, “Houdini in my snackpack, the candyman here…when i put the gik in it, i come up with a new dance…i’m so low down, you know what i did, i mixed some james brown, with some temptations shit” His moods are similarly unpredictable, literally snapping mid-croon into paranoid self-laceration. “I live in a world where I can stop time, devil keep on chasing me, fuckin’ with my mind, I keep asking for help but scotty don’t talk…” Fabo is constantly vacillating between trans-dimensional euphoria and infernal dementia.

Fabo’s crap shooting, stimulant-informed, interdimensional, snap-philosophizing kind of makes this his Valis. Gik Tales, in this light, is best understood as heartfelt, pulpy sci-fi, and its genre trappings allow it to interact with pre-existing entries into the canon, especially if you swap out a few of the variables with one of the classics. For instance, let’s say Fabo is actually LeFabian Quade, a construction worker/struggling rapper with visions of being greater, possibly already accomplished in a past or side life of sorts.

One day, he encounters a shady organization known as GiKaLL that allows him to implant the memory of a triumphant and meaningful contribution to life. The scenario LeFabian chooses involves being an entertainer by day, secret agent by night on Mars, where an encounter with alien technology renders him the center of a psychedelic conflict. He soon finds that his legs, his arms, “they take over like Saddam, and my body is the country where the war is going on.” Before long he becomes a resistance fighter that meshes both his day job and that of his night:

What’s real and what’s not is indistinguishable. Who they are is inscrutable. The alien technology is both liberating and crippling. Is it astral ancestry to which he is rightful heir or are the streets being torn by sinister forces?

The album, much like Total Recall itself, flirts with this dual reality right through its last two tracks. “It Feels So Good” presents a up from nothing, to hell and back trajectory, where two dead uncles and a dead baby mother have “buried the fiend,” he “went from stone cold junkie to the American Dream” and the world outside has exposed Fabo to an understanding of potential beyond the structural limitations of his ubringing. He didn’t want to “be a black joke” and now that he’s seen “the ocean…don’t make me a river//I was born in Bankhead so they made me a nigger” but he’s “in the sky now/this is how the aliens do it.”

Yet, Immediately after, “Haters” comes on and the sunny resolution of the previous track is dispensed for the album’s darker narrative last glimpsed on the fiery, gravelly brimstone of “It Got Me.” The country where the war is going on is beyond his body and relative safety is an illusion. It’s a masterstroke that, while it may be chalked up to the choppy excesses of mixtapes, is nonetheless effective in the self-mythologizing, loose-narrative that Fabo sets up for himself. The underlying, thematic cohesion goes towards containing the 18-tracks, makes them an endlessly exciting, loop-able breeze. Though obviously my perspective on it is tainted by personal bias, how its become a kind of fading footnote in rap history is beyond my understanding.

On release, the album was met with some fanfare before being marginalized. Brandon shouted it out both on No-Trivia 1.0 and, appropriately, Comics for Serious (1.0), commenting on its copious references to aliens and spaceships, its beyond-snap resonance with soul, and its beyond-standard levels of inebriation. On the other hand, Sam Hockley-Smith at The Fader lamented the middling beats and missed opportunity that a forever delayed album’s production budget might have given it but acknowledged that it doesn’t really matter since Fabo has 100 ideas a song.

Those ideas seem to have resonated at least somewhat beyond sell-by date, but seem relegated to Atlanta. The wall-moving, room-shaking habits Fabo describes contributed to a shorthand that sneaks up every on some recent area records. On Rich Kidz generally effusive Everybody Eat Bread, unbridled fronting is humorously undercut by massive drug intake with the line “wanna fuck these streets up, but I’m too gik’d up so I feel like Fabo, ho.” On Future’s Pluto, the space-conscious, drug-addled, interplanetary escapism momentarily slips into a Fabo-ism when, on “I’m Trippin” Future raps “I’m blankin’ out on track, don’t know where I’m at, talk to Scotty and he talk right back.” Future’s template of space navigation as a mythical barrier to life’s losses here affectingly uses D4L’s standout track to re-orient itself after momentary slippage.**

As such, there seems to be something unfortunate about the timing of Gik Tales, as if it arrived too early, especially given the current climate for mixtape distribution and artist buzz. Perhaps with proper album art and the right co-signs, maybe if curated by Nick Catchdubs instead of Swamp Izzo or adorned with a slickly designed Fool’s Gold push, it could have made some kind of splash. It seems especially lamentable in light of stuff like Schoolboy Q, with his attention-baiting Fader interview that quietly showed off his bottle of syrup and his XXX-lite mixtape Habits & Contradictions.

Habits takes the eccentric, schizoid genius of XXX, boils it down into a recyclable template and dilutes its potency by removing the incendiary Detroit politics, gender-bucking aesthetic and out of this world ferocity. Instead you get the cornholio version of crazy as signified by Adam Sandler ABBAY DOOBAY vocal tics and a beat-you-over-the-head textbook cover that spells out its binaristic themes in pseudo-scientific terms. It grounds Brown’s Adderall Admiral, and bars the cosmic echo of Brown’s nearly-extraterrestial yap. XXX’s violent vacillation between stimulant-addled, hedonistic highs and serotonin-depleted, poverty-and-violence-stricken lows were a fully-realized universe with compellingly idiosyncratic narration, but with some inter-dimensional flight that universe could find kinship with the broken down space meth laboratory that Fabo was practically a tour guide for.

In 2010 it wasn’t exactly operating in foreign territory, as it came out two months prior to Sufjan Stevens’ Age of Adz, where he used tinny beats and stripped orchestration to explore the apocalyptic, alien invasion artistry of schizophrenic Royal Robertson. It was also in the center of Shabazz Palaces’ 2009 EP’s and 2011 LP Black Up, an album it has quite a bit in common with. I had initially written off Black Up as its Sub Pop packaging, indie embrace and reputation for giving current rap trends a “much needed” kaleidoscopic corrective suggested we’d gone back to caring primarily about Anticon. I had ignored Ishmael Butler’s legacy and the way that Palaces seem to have found what Digable Planets were Reachin’ for and, having successfully refuted space and time, were beaming adaptive, hologram projectiles of their former selves onto the current landscape, crash landing their refracted sounds.

When I recently went back to it, it reminded me of the work of another Ishmael, Reed, in Mumbo Jumbo. The embrace of cultural mysticism as post-modern, multi-faceted resistance to the white, western master narrative was there, with comic-book pop mythology baiting condescending critical taxonomy (“robots program racist sequences, don’t compare my beat with his”), but so was playful and reverential interaction with rap as something rooted in dance music that, despite anti-trend sentiments and broken beats acknowledges the traditional incorporation of clipped phrases and repetitive movements (unless I misheard some parts on “free press and curl”) that East Coast vs. Snap warfare missed.

Still, it is poetically and structurally mystifying in a way that can be rewarding—such as when an old jazz sample pushes through the synth-heavy, wire mesh of Youlogy and it’s like old Digable short fusing through a digitally archived version of themselves—but also diffuse in effect, bathed in disorientation. Fabo’s Gik Tales hits a lot of these same beats without sacrificing THE BEAT or the accessibility, which doesn’t make one better than the other, but fleshes out Shabazz’s anti-cohesion with a complementary, equally out-there variation on the theme. Not sure when his next mixtape will drop, or if the studio album will happen, but that liminal delay should at least give Gik Tales some time to be rediscovered. Get it here.

May 12

May 09

How to experience The Avengers without giving money to Marvel while simultaneously taking in quality cinema!

As Sean T. Collins pointed out on twitter earlier, Joss Whedon’s “generous” thank you note doesn’t bother to thank Avengers co-mastermind and aesthetic creator Jack Kirby (RIP). Instead, there’s a lot of “creative writing” with jokes about an Air Bud dream project and a fake self-interview that reeks of early P4K lampoons. Ironically, this is not satire of but an actual thing written by the artist. There’s a moment where he jokes about what he’s able to buy with his money, and that it turns out to be “a fine meal” is supposed to be some kind of whimsical expression of “i’m still me, folks!” humility while ignoring the narrow allotment of those proceeds, which is like insult to injury and leaves a real sour taste on the spoils won.

By who those spoils were won is also dubious, as the note suggests a trajectory of filmic legitimacy for Whedon made possible by his fans, not the multi-million dollar media campaigns, plus the 2-billion-dollar-amassing sextuplet of predecessors that essentially functioned as a decade long advertisement for last weekend or, most importantly, the legacy built by the comics (and attendant creators) themselves. Even if The Avengers turned out to be a mediocre hack-job (like most of its predecessors except for the two Iron Mans were) it would have still exploded at the box office.

I’ve had mixed feelings about seeing it, and obviously its massive success doesn’t hinge on my indulgence, but there’s something discomfiting about Hollywood’s fixation on origin stories and streamlined narratives that The Avengers in particular seems to illustrate (and the Dark Knight trilogy does, too, which Whedon shouts out, asserting the comic-to-film-industry’s “community” that functions more like collusion). Given that I’m someone that hasn’t regularly purchased comics and is thus not authentically part of comics culture you may want to take the following with a grain of salt, but the massive conglomeration of celluloid conversions is, to me, a form of hegemonic revisionism that operates as a master narrative at the expense of the diverse narratives it is wedging itself onto.

Not that one should not be able to enjoy a story in a medium other than that which birthed it, but Whedon’s reduction of artistic achievement of a comic book film to the relationship between the film director and the consumer measures the legitimacy of the product by its profit in a way that ignores the content’s hard-won history. He mentions being acknowledged at Comic-con but since when were filmmakers working on big budget comic book adaptations not given the deluxe THIS IS WHAT’S IMPORTANT YOU COMICS GUYS treatment at those conventions? Those things are practically railroaded by effects reels and teaser footage from studios looking to ensure ticket sales by actively catering to a narrowcasted demographic, and it’s not always even comic book movies. Remember Tron 2?

This is a success for Marvel’s profits (and for Disney’s) as well as for Whedon’s, but is not necessarily a success for the rights of those creating these kinds of film-potential-rich narratives, or the comics themselves. Though I should fear overlapping Godwin’s Law on some unfortunate technicality, it’s reminiscent of how Spielberg’s artistic achievement in Schindler’s List overshadowed the work paved by the author of the book, the historical figures it was about, and the aesthetic history of the subject’s filmic portrayal, which Spielberg no doubt reconfigures in piecemeal fashion.

Matt Seneca, in writing about Thor, gave a backhanded complement to the “miracle” of the coherent universe the Avengers franchise was creating, though he defined the coherence as a bland “sense of uniformity” in aesthetic and general mediocrity, not the vibrant, colorful, action-filled panels they were translating. I’d add that there’s a Baudrillardian sense of history being hollowed out and replaced by an artificial shell that simulates the removed contents.* Filmic origin stories, which the Avengers series is essentially a collection of, aren’t attempting slavish reverence to the source material but are actively vying for the source material’s legitimacy as primary in status. They also bar the balls-out, go-anywhere potential that “what if” or just straight up side stories and one-offs have in exploring icons through recontextualized, alternative lenses. They’re beholden to a new, false continuity and the base demands of the bottom-line demographic they’re catering to (i.e. the ones that troll critics with death threats over bad reviews).

I’m not opposed to filmic interpretations—I think the two Iron Mans are some of the more sophisticated commentaries on the military-industrial complex, the war on terror, and rich, white, male privilege—but just because they can lend themselves to that kind of socio-political analysis (and i’m sure there’s already pieces on how Whedon fits his trademark ass-kicking (if still body-normative) feminism into the Avengers) that doesn’t mean the conditions they were birthed under aren’t totally fucked. Boycotting, as a cessation of funds, doesn’t necessarily redirect them, and given the first weekend box office doesn’t seem to matter either way. Also, like the Iron Man films, the Avengers does have the potential to be more than the sum of its parts, and Whedon isn’t the total asshat his letter suggests, even though Avengers has a similar capacity to be insulting to its genre/history as Cabin in the Woods did.

Still, there’s The Hero Initiative, which collects funds (legal, medical, otherwise) for comic artists/writers/creators in financial positions similar to Kirby’s. There’s also the Jack Kirby Museum & Research Center, a website looking to become a physical place. Some people are matching the money they paid for tickets by donating to one or the other. While not entirely remediating, it seemed like a more productive coda to an “THIS IS FUCKED PIECE” than, say, my Amendment One reaction last night.