Poor China

The Olympic torch has been snuffed out five times today because of protests in France (here).

Poor China. It's always shocking when people don't appreciate your attempts to civilize them, isn't it?

Press Clippings V

Kyle Wade
The Post-it Project
Here.

As you may remember, I won an essay competition put on by the magazine The Nation. They had only excerpted it before, but now it is up in total, here. They've also posted the four finalists. If you have the time, I'd check them out. Here's a couple of great lines. William Organek writes in his essay "A Neo-Deal":

[T]he world has simultaneously become more complicated and integrated, once more wresting control of our lives out of our hands and subjecting us to the whims of global economic and political forces.

Grant Resick in "The Change We Wish to See" writes:

Sadly, for many people in the United States, citizenship has become a passive term. All too often the idea of being an American is an allegiance without passion, a coincidence of birth that is bereft of any significance deeper than geographic location. If we as a nation are to have any hope of successfully confronting the challenges we face, it is essential that our definition of what it means to be an American be expanded and enriched.

The Month in Review

Photo by Tori Wenig
From here, via Warren Ellis here.

Scandelous, I know. Also, I've already written this post once, but fucking Safari closed unexpectedly and I lost the post. Yes, I am pissed. So, if I seem somewhat brusque, it's because I finished this fucking post and had to re-write. Okay, without any further ado:

March Booklist
-Jason Aaron (Guera, illust.), Scalped, issues one through fifteen.

-Brian Azzarello (Risso, illust.), 100 bullets, issues one through thirty.

-Mike Carey (Jock, illust.), Faker, issues one through six.

-Michael Chabon, The Final Solution: a Story of Detection.

-Billy Collins, Nine Horses.

-Dave Eggers, How We Are Hungry: "another", "what it means when a crowd in a faraway nation takes a soldier representing your own nation, shoots him, drags him from his vehicle and then mutilates him in the dust", "the only meaning of the oil-wet water", "on wanting to have three walls up before she gets home", "climbing to the window, pretending to dance", and "she waits, seething, blooming".

-David Lapham (Lapham, illust.), Young Liars, issue one.

-Grant Morrison (various, illust.), Doom Patrol, issues thirty-six through forty-five.

-Haruki Murakami, After the Quake.

-Annie Prroulx, Bad Dirt: "The Hellhole".

-Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

-Brian Vaughan (Guerra, illust.), Y: the Last Man, issues fifty-five through sixty.
-Brian Vaughan (Harris, illust.), Ex Machina, issues one through ten.

-Brian Wood, (Burchielli, illust.), DMZ, issue twenty-nine.
-Brian Wood, (Gianfelice, illust.), Northlanders, issue four.
-Brian Wood, (Kelly, illust.), Local, issues one, two, four, and six through ten.

There are a few things I'd like to highlight from this list.

First, I've been thinking about Carey's Faker some more. It isn't just the pacing of the first few issues that bothered me, it was the early dialouge. It often felt contrived. Here's an example:

Marky: "You're a sight for sore eyeballs, Sackie!"
Sackie: "Great. Likewise. And speaking of balls, can we please get inside before mine freeze off?"

Unless I've been saying that idiom wrong my whole life--"you're a sight for sore eyes"--this really is as forced as I think it is. But I hold that "I’d hold the last pages of Faker on the level of comics’ canonic works--The Invisables, Transmet, Watchmen." Carey makes good in the back three issues. I swear.

I've started reading Murikami's Kafka on the Shore, and, once again, I'm struck by just how good he is. I'd really recommend checking the man out. If you need something short, get one of his collections, The Elephant Vanishes or After the Quake. If you want something more substantial, try The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Props to Nora for getting me hooked.

I'd also like to highlight Vaughan's Y: The Last Man. I'm with my friend and writer Marc, who thinks its ending is one of the best in any media--inasmuch as its happy without being ex machina (ha ha). Thematically, it isn't that dense, but there's something, I don't know, mesmerizing about it. I'm going to try to re-read in total this month, and give myself a little more time with it. On the subject of Y. It seems that there with be a movie version directed by D.J. Caruso (Disturbia) and starring Shia LaBeouf (Disturbia, Transformers, and Indiana Jones 4). I'm going to suspend judgement. But, please God, let this be good; we really don't need any more bad comics remakes (think: Daredevil). Vaughan is also writing a screenplay adaptation of his Ex Machina. He jokes: "I'm a big sellout now." Ha ha. Just don't fuck these movies up and all is forgiven.

Next up, politics. A couple of sites I've stumbled on in the last month deserve mentioning. First there's The G Spot. She's smart and funny to boot (and, yes, I found her from digby's Hullabaloo, another great site). Here's one of the many gems you can find over there, writing about the problems of using GDP as a measure of economic health:

It's kind of like the joke where you and your friend are the only people sitting at a bar. Then Bill Gates walks in, and your friend states (correctly) that "The average person in this bar is a billionaire!"

If you're in the mood for bile and Democratic idiocy, check out Hillary is 44. This, my reader(s), is what happens when people continue to use an empirically unfit narrative. If you think that Obama is a racist and angry black militant manchurian candidate, then this site is the one for you.

While on the subject of stupid narratives, I just never get tired of the old "Democrats are effeminate" meme. Here's a cute clip from Scarborough, and its worth watching--even just the first couple minutes.

For those of you who are to lazy or at work, here's the transcript, via Hullabaloo, here

SCARBOROUGH: You know, Willie, the thing is, Americans want their president, if it's a man, to be a real man. They -- 1984, I remember Ronald Reagan goes to South Boston. He holds up that beer mug --

BRZEZINSKI: Yeah.

SCARBOROUGH: -- in that South Boston pub, and everybody's like, "He's a real man," and I guess Barack Obama's trying to do the same thing, too.

BRZEZINSKI: Stop it. Oh, come on.

SCARBOROUGH: Awful. Good Lord.

GEIST: He's going to have to try a little harder than he did in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on Saturday night --

SCARBOROUGH: Oh my God --

BRZEZINSKI: Really?

SCARBOROUGH: Oh, this is awful.

GEIST: -- at the Pleasant Valley Rec Center. He went bowling, and let's just take a quick look at it here. I guess I'll just give you the final numbers. Started out nicely, got the Velcro shoes.

BRZEZINSKI: Looking good, looking good.

GEIST: But then he started bowling. The score you're really after in bowling is 300; that's a perfect score.

BRZEZINSKI: Oh, OK.

SCARBOROUGH: That's perfect score.

BRZEZINSKI: Good, good, good.

SCARBOROUGH: But, you know, if you get 200, you're a good bowler.

GEIST: Sure. You know what?

BRZEZINSKI: Yeah. Two-fifty --

SCARBOROUGH: You get 150, you're a man --

BRZEZINSKI: OK.

SCARBOROUGH: -- or a good woman.

BRZEZINSKI: Stop it.

GEIST: Out of my president, I want a 150, at least. Barack Obama bowled -- well, you can see his form here --

[video clip of Obama bowling]

SCARBOROUGH: Hee!

BRZEZINSKI: Yeah.

GEIST: A 37.

BRZEZINSKI: Oh.

GEIST: That's a three, next to a seven.

SCARBOROUGH: Baby, if you go to Altoona, Pennsylvania, on a Saturday night and you're going to try to bowl --

[video clip of Obama bowling]

SCARBOROUGH: Oh, that's so dainty. Ugh.

I love the serious, hard-hitting political reporting we get from our mainstream media. And if that wasn't enough, here's Chris Matthews adding a racial je ne sais quoi to the mix:

MATTHEWS: You know, Michelle -- and this gets very ethnic, but the fact that he's good at basketball doesn't surprise anybody, but the fact that he's that terrible at bowling does make you wonder --

FINEMAN: That doesn't surprise anybody either.

BERNARD: Well, it certainly doesn't surprise anybody black, I can tell you that.

MATTHEWS: Is black a bowling --

It's gonna be a long primary season.

Lastly, I know this says something about my generation; also, it's funny--from here via The Lede:

t seemed like an honorable goal: Draft an honor code for University of Texas at San Antonio students to follow, exhorting them not to cheat or plagiarize.

But when students threw a draft of the new honor code onto the Internet for feedback, some noticed a problem: Parts of the code appeared to have been lifted word for word from another school’s honor code, without attribution. Even the definition of plagiarism was, well, plagiarized.

Funny? Sad? I report, you decide.

Oh, and I should mention this from Brian Wood:

The inspiration for DMZ’s “Friendly Fire” came partly from the Haditha killings, where Marines shot up a few houses filled with Iraqi families back in 2005 (it was also partly inspired by a 60 Minutes interview with some of the soldiers involved (Sgt. Frank Wuterich) and the disgusting way Scott Pelley conducted both the interview and himself).

Were DMZ done poorly, it wouldn't matter, but, the fact remains that DMZ is probably the most politically relevant comic I've ever read, and certainly one of the most politically relevant pieces of fiction around today. I'm not going to stop plugging this thing. It's that good.

Art Show

Savannah Mirisola-Sullivan
Here.

So, do you remember when I wrote about the high quality of art being produced here at Oberlin? Well, now is your chance to see some of it in action: art show this Thursday (April 3) at 8:30 at 16 1/2 Main Street (the second floor). Savannah Mirisola-Sullivan's instillation will be up along with many others. It's being put on by the people who edit So What, the art crit mag here at Oberlin.

Comic Review

Meena Hasan
Silk painting
From The Headquarters, here.

Reading Mark Carey’s Faker is like trying to hold an eel; just when you think you have it, it slips away. It’s odd animal, its six issues are at once not enough and too many. And that is too bad. If it weren’t for Carey’s poor pacing, his ideas—brilliant and strange—would mean much more.

Faker had a six-issue run, and Carey spent the first two issues laying out the background, and it seemed like some sort of strange but mundane examination of a group of somewhat despicable collage-age characters. The next two issues build a pseudo-science fiction existential story, and in the last two issues, it felt like a smart, almost introspective, philosophy-leaden action yarn. The fact is, each two issues felt rushed, and, while Jock’s artwork ameliorated some of the rushed feeling—he/she has an ability to effortlessly do in one panel what other artists might do in four or five—Faker feels awkward in its own skin.

In a certain sense, this discomfort fits, as Faker is, in many ways, a meditation on the internal dis-ease of this generation. Nevertheless, it loses something, crammed into its form.

But, thematically, it is riveting and provocative. It gives voice to the silent struggles faced by so many—sexual abuse, addiction, depression—and places it in Gen Pomo’s unique and detached context. It would have been easy—too easy—for Carey to give us a cheap ending, but he didn’t. I’d hold the last pages of Faker on the level of comics’ canonic works--The Invisables, Transmet, Watchmen. Here’s a particularly pertinent passage—both to the way Carey ends Faker and to the way it captures the essence of our cultural paradigm:

Love is like everything else. It’s there if you say it is. Which I guess, if you follow the logic, means that a happy ending is as easy to fake as an orgasm.

If you ever have an opportunity to read it, I’d encourage you to do so. Hell, you can borrow my copy anytime (those of you who know me personally). Otherwise, try to grab it when it comes out in trade. It’s a Vertigo comic.

Later on Oberliner: The Month In Review, as promised; a discussion of paradigmatic media bias and the “Obama is a racist” meme; and why Glenn Greenwald is one of the sanest voices in today’s political punditry.

More will be revealed.

Recital

Soprano Courtney Merrell

I will be playing a piece with Soprano Courtney Merrell in her upcoming senior recital. So if you happen to be in Oberlin, gentle reader(s), you might consider stopping by. Scarlatti, Faure, Wolf, Ginastera, and Heggie are all on the program. It's in Kulas Recital Hall in the Conservatory, Saturday, April 5, at 4:30.

God in the Machine

Susan Homer
In the Darkness
Metaphor Contemporary Art, here.

I'd like to do a brief review of Brian Vaughan's Ex Machina (Vaughan, you may or may not remember, is the man behind Y: The Last Man). Ex Machina follows Mitchell Hundred's rise from engineer to ill-conceived superhero (The Great Machine) to Mayor of New York City. It re-imagines life in NYC after 9-11, if a semi-superhero had been able to save one of the towers then ran for--and became--mayor.

It's a strange kind of comic book, part cape and cowl, part political drama. In the first arc, we get to see the city government's response to controversial artwork at the MoMA--not exactly the usual superhero fare. But, at the same time, we get to see the guilt and ambivalence of a more human superhero. This, of course, is nothing new, but it's the pairing of this post-human superheroism and mundane, political superheroism that makes for such an interesting read.

The first for trades are out, and it's still running. I'd recommend heading down to Infinite Monkey, or your local comic shop, and picking this up.

On a personal note, let me just tell you that this quarter will be a bit more work. I have a rather large paper due on Intelligent Design and scientific demarcation; I have a long-lead article for The Wilder Voice, In Search of a Value-Neutral Media; I have my editing and layout duties for both The Wilder Voice and The Grape, I have work at the writing center, and I have--that's it, thank God, I think.

The point is, things may be coming slower now. Tomorrow? The Month in Review

New Yorker

Susan Homer
Butterfly-Flowers
At Metaphor Contemporary Art, here

Well, first of all, if you like today's featured painting, I strongly suggest that you who read this and live in New York go see this show. It's at Metaphor Contemporary Art in Brooklyn, and you can get the address and hours here. Homer's show is called The Traveler's Return. I love--and agreew with--this quote from her write-up:

The multiple sessions of work that go into their making leave behind layers of information and traces of brushwork that become part of the topology of the paintings imbuing them with a tactile generative energy and a deep sense of time.

In this New York-centric vein, I'm going to offer up a review of Mannes College of Music's most recent recital of Arnold Schoenburg's Lieder, opus 2 (1899)and Pierrot Lunaire (1912).

First, though, a little background. Schoenburg is probably know best for his role in the creation of (big M) Modern music. But, as demonstrated by soprano Katharine Dain, his early, hyper-Romantic work can be inspiring and bold, as well. Her Lieder was sexy and stunning. I'd watch out for this one. She's got voice, musicality, and can emote better than William Shatner in a fight scene.

The Pierrot--one of the (many) iconic and now-canonic works by Schoenburg--demonstrated, once again, Dane's powerful musicality and ability to connect with her audience (even in Sprechstimme, even in Sprechstimme...), and the ensemble, as a whole, pulled of their difficult parts with remarkable ease.

Back in Oberlin tomorrow.

Press Clippings IV & Going to New York

Stanley Downwood
here
He does art for Radiohead

Well, I'm really not that sorry about my lack of updates these last few days. I've been taking some time off, visiting friends and family in Minneapolis and New York. But, I'm back now.

Also, more press for me and Oberliner. I entered an essay competition for the magazine, The Nation a while back, and, dispite the fact that I have yet to hear directly from The Nation itself, it looks like I've won. Here's what they excerpted:

A NEW DEAL (RE)GENERATION? To commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the New Deal, and to remind the next generation of progressive leaders of their movement's historical roots, The Roosevelt Institution and The Nation sponsored a student essay contest, asking young writers to reflect on the importance of the New Deal to current political thought. The winner, John West of Oberlin College, composed a spirited defense of the New Deal's collective civic consciousness. His essay, "When and How?" is excerpted below. To read it and the four finalists' entries in their entirety, go to www.thenation.com/student.

"The ethos of the New Deal is gone today. 'The era of big government is over,' President Clinton proclaimed, and, with a stroke of his pen, stripped welfare from its moral underpinnings. Social Security, one of the last tangible policies of the New Deal era, has been divorced from the spirit of Roosevelt's vision.... If we reject this conservative framework, we can replace it with our own. If we argue that government has a responsibility to the most vulnerable, we can make the debate about the methods government will use to fight injustice, rather than about how small government should become. If we take this stand, not only will we fulfill the moral imperative of the New Deal, but we can, once again, build a progressive electoral majority."

Next up, new comics and books and sketches of upcoming reviews.

I'll start by talking about Jason Aaron's Scalped put out by Vertigo--the HBO of the comics world (I'm not sure who said that, I think Brian Vaughan). It's a gritty, pulpy crime story set on a Lakota indian reservation. The lead character, Dashiell "Dash" Bad Horse--I can only assume it's a reference to The Maltese Falcon--is, rather perfectly an FBI agent, "undercover as himself".

In many ways it like Northlanders, just with a tighter thematic foucus on the conflict between one's cultural identity and one's personal agendas. Obviously, Northlanders has Vikings and there's more poignancy with its sweet, sad, crushing inevitability. Scalped is anger--raw and unremorseful.

I'm reading Egger's short stories again--How We Are Hungry. They're well-crafted and well-written and, often, quite beautiful. Eggers does, however, have the unfortunate habit of being obnoxiously cute. Lines like "The horses had no symbolic value" and "This story is not about Pilar and Hand falling in love" can be somewhat frustrating when stuck in the middle of otherwise ernest and subtle stories. Its like he can't help himself; he needs to let the reader know that he isn't that self-serious.

The Proulx isn't bad. And Chabon's novel The Final Solution was excellent, aside from the occasional the overly long and complicated sentences. It's fun to see a good writer expariment with themes and modes. It's Sherlock Holmes, but, thematically new and fun. Here's the epigraph:

The distinction's always fine
between detection and invention.
-Mary Jo Salter

All right. I'm going to bed. More to come.

100 Posts

The Onion News

I didn't know The Onion did fake TV segments, but they do. If this isn't one of the better commentaries on today's talking-head media, I don't know what is. Enjoy.

I'm heading first to NYC then to home to Murderopolis, so my blogging may be sporadic. But fear not, gentle reader(s). I shall return, rested, read, and ready to write!

Also, as of this post, Oberliner has posted its 100th entry! [Applause] Oooo... Ahhh...

Lastly, I had the opportunity to check out the winning Joycelyn Eby's bassoon recital last night in Kulas. It was terrific.

She opened with three selections from Francisco Mignone's (1897-1986) Sixteen Waltzes for Solo Bassoon, and, in Eby's words:

I think we [bassoon players] get excited that someone actually wrote sixteen waltzes just for the bassoon.

And they should get excited. The pieces ranged from the technical to the somewhat other-worldly, and Eby, standing with her bassoon, seemed to waltz right along with them.

This is an exhortation to all you who go to and live in Oberlin. Take the time and hit some of the recitals at the Con. Once you leave this place, you won't get to see free concerts of this caliber.

More will be revealed.