The opening to Nas’s “Proclamation (Nigger Hatred)” is killer. It’s what sold me on his (aight to good) untitled album back when it was still called Nigger. The Malcolm X quote, the Paul Mooney joke (“White folks made up ‘nigger’ and don’t want me to say it” is endlessly funny to me for some reason), and Nas’s quiet, subdued flow… it’s haunting. It’s Nas at his best, kicking something conscious but jiggy. There’s no complicated wordplay here, either. It’s just straight spitting. Honestly, “Proclamation” has the perfect sound for sad black music in the 2000s, doesn’t it? I dunno. It’s spare and sorta menacing because of it, but melancholy, too.

The video for “Be A Nigger Too” starts out with “Proclamation” and it’s the perfect lead-in to the video. “Be A Nigger Too” is a montage of… it’s just people, really. Military cats, families, fights, slave times, robberies, awards, everything. There’s a lot of actor cameos in there, too. It’s a snapshot of real life. It’s a solid video, but there’s one part that gave me goosebumps back when I first watched it.

At about 3:50 in, the video slams to a bassy pulse and the slave times are juxtaposed with scenes and faces in the modern day. It’s drawing a direct line from one to the other. That’s pretty powerful, but then it flashes back to black and white and it gets really crazy.

This kid, a teenager I guess, wakes up out of bed and grabs his uzi off the dresser, and runs up on a white man outside. The kid is mirroring Nas’s rhymes–“Wake up in the mornin’, shake my third leg in the toilet/ Uzi on the nightstand, I’m the man you go to war with/ Not the man you go to war against/ patience, I’ll get you / if that means I can’t sleep a whole year, I’ma get you”–but what got me was when he flipped that classic Malcolm X pose, with the M1 by the window. The posture is different. Malcolm is alert and watchful. The kid is waiting, but hiding. There’s a reason for that, I think.

The thing about the Malcolm photo is that it’s iconic. It’s burned into the psyche of so many people. It’s a symbol of black power, black masculinity, love, and a lot of things. It’s a man making a conscious decision to protect his family from those who would do them harm. It’s the idea that meeting violence with violence is not something to be ashamed of. It’s something to avoid, but when your back is against the wall, you need to be ready to put someone down. It’s an acknowledgement of the danger of speaking your mind, but an affirmation that you must speak your mind, no matter the consequences. It’s huge. I can’t even begin to really wrap my mind around it.

This kid with the gun is the opposite. It doesn’t mean any of the things that the Malcolm photo does. Instead, it’s a failure. It’s born not out of power, but out of fear. The kid isn’t there to protect anyone. He’s a predator. He wants revenge, not freedom. Or maybe he wants freedom, and the only way he knows how to get it is via revenge. Offensive action.

There’s something about kids with guns. I have a mild obsession with child soldiers. I’ve probably spent entirely too much time reading about the Lord’s Resistance Army. Limbaugh defending the LRA to score points against Obama actually made me wish that Limbaugh was dead. I don’t–that’s not the type of emotion/response/political discourse that I like, but that was my gut reaction. “How can you defend these people?”

(digression)

I’ve read stories of heroic kids fighting at Stalingrad or wherever and dozens more besides. All of them gross me out. I feel like when you hit the point where a kid has to pick up a gun, or is forced or coerced to do it, there’s been a complete and total collapse of everything that adults are supposed to do. Children are supposed to be protected from that sort of thing.

So this kid picking up the gun, briefly emulating one of my most favorite photographs, and then inverting it… that grabbed me. It grabbed me by the throat and threw me off a roof or something. It’s intense, and it really heightened how I feel about the song.

The video’s a bit overlong (a third song? credits? really? wrap it up, cousin, i got places to be), but the first four-five minutes are nuts. It’s a perfect marriage of imagery and lyrical content. It’s not just someone performing a song very well (as in the video for the stellar “Bridging the Gap” with Nas’s father), or a sorta concept-y thing (“Hip-Hop Is Dead” goes hard), or flossing as hard as they can (“Nasty”, which had me as soon as Nas said “I come from the Wheel of Ezekiel to pop thousand dollar bottles of Scotch, smoke pot, and heal the people” and I was REALLY into it when he said “Bet a hundred stacks, niggas’ll run it back/ Just havin fun, I ain’t even begun to black/ Light another blunt in fact, haha…”). I like all those videos a whole lot, and to be honest there’s not a lot of difference between a concept joint like “Hip-Hop Is Dead” and “Be A Nigger Too.” I feel like the difference is that the marriage between audio and visual is much stronger in “Be A Nigger Too.” “Hip-Hop Is Dead” will exist, and knock, forever, without the video. The video’s well done, but not essential. The video is essential for “Be A Nigger Too.”

Heidi MacDonald found a report in the Guardian about Tintin in the Congo. I guess there was a move to ban it due to racist content, but a judicial advisor has rejected the idea that the book is racist. Here’s a few quick thoughts/jokes on the subject.

1. I liked this reasoning on the part of the advisor because it’s full of crap:

De Theux de Meylandt said in the document seen by Reuters that Tintin author Georges Remi (better known as Hergé) did not intend to incite racial hatred when he depicted his cartoon hero on an adventure in the former Belgian colony in a 1931 work that was updated in 1946.

“The representations (of African people) by Herge are a reflection of his time,” De Theux de Meylandt wrote.

Intention is a key criteria in substantiating a charge of racism. The court is expected to deliver a judgement rejecting or accepting Mondondo’s argument that the book’s depiction of Africans is racist.

“We see in particular that Tintin in the Congo does not put Tintin in a situation where there is competition or confrontation between the young reporter and any black or group of blacks, but pits Tintin against a group of gangsters … who are white,” De Theux de Meylandt also wrote in the statement.

2. It’s kind of interesting how the law (I assume) approaches racism as a conscious act–“intend to incite racial hatred”–rather than something that just happens. Intent, near as I can tell, has basically zip to do with racism. Inciting racial hatred is a racist act, but it is not the sum total of racism. Racism can be clutching your purse when someone hops onto an elevator or looking at a certain type of woman as a sex object first. Racism can be dragging a man behind a truck until he dies in agony. Racism can be denying home loans to black families, shooting a grandmother in the face because you got the wrong house, underestimating a stranger, overpraising a child, and more. Racism is a lot of things. It’s a system. It’s an opinion. It’s an act. It’s an emotion. It’s whatever. Intent? Not really relevant. If I didn’t mean to step on your toe, you’re still sitting there with a flat toe, right?

3. I love love love “The representations (of African people) by Herge are a reflection of his time.” Man oh man do I love it. It’s the ultimate Get Out Of Jail Free card. “Oh, it was just the time! Weren’t they so quaint back then with their casual racism? Land sakes, mint juleps, landed gentry, southern belles, I do declare!” That got away from me a little. The point is, the racism in this drawings is okay because it was okay at the time. It’s quaint, like, I dunno, cocaine in Coca-cola or those enormous dresses women used to wear in the 1800s that doubled as circus tents.

I don’t believe in a sliding scale of morality and neither should you. If lynching somebody until their eyes bug out is a dick move in 2011, it was a dick move in 1911. If drawing an entire race like they were darkie nigger savages is a racist act in 2011, guess what bruh, it’s a racist act at every other point in time, as well. It’s dehumanizing. If you argue it isn’t, you’re objectively wrong. That’s the entire point of that type of art.

4. Think about the context, too. Depicting blacks as subhuman is a tried and true tactic. Churches used to teach that blacks were the descendants of Ham, son of Noah, and used the curse of Ham as a justification for slavery. (You know I heard somebody tell me that in church as a kid? That really made me mad, because I was young enough to know that story was full of crap, but they were old enough to have probably heard it from actual slaves.) Black men and women were depicted as hypersexual because they were closer to savagery than whites, which had the bonus of making it a-okay to sleep with them whenever you felt like it, and then to deny it to the heavens should you get caught (shout-out to the Thomas Jefferson clan). They’re violent. They’re dangerous. They’re stupid. Take your pick.

The savages in Tintin in the Congo are particularly disgusting because of the time period the book came out in. Congo was a Belgian colony at the time, and the book portrayed the people as stupid “Me Too Stupid To Know How Talk Right” savages. It is explicit propaganda. It posits a world where the Congolese are too stupid to be civilized on their own. It’s Deepest Darkest Africa, The Dark Continent garbage all over again. And man, I wonder what the point of depicting the citizens of a colony of your country as subhuman? Could it be to shore up the idea that you’re supposed to be there? That being there is right? Golly.

So, no, “it was the times!” is a crap excuse. Will Eisner and Hergé both drew unbelievably, cartoonishly racist depictions of black people. A lot of other people did, too. Racism! It exists. Don’t pretend it didn’t because you like how somebody put lines on paper. Plenty of great (and bad and normal) people do scumbag things here and there. Just accept it!

5. Tintin in the Congo: it’s objectively racist. It’s stupid to try and ban it, though. Even racist speech is free speech.

I watch a lot of music videos. I usually stream Google or Amazon music at work or whatever, but sometimes I think of a classic (note: lie) that I just have to hear and see at the same time. So off to Youtube I go, typing in phrases like “Ruff Ryders Drag-On” and “Made You Look official” and “Adina Howard” and “Trina Baddest Bitch” and “Curtis Mayfield live.” I’m not sure what my favorite is. Maybe Jay’s “Blue Magic” because the beat is so hard, it’s the last time Jay-Z was actually dope enough to get away with calling himself Hova, and my secret crush is off in there with an ill adidas jacket at (1:48, 1:57, more). NERD’s “Everyone Nose,” both remix and original. I like the original mainly cause Lindsay Lohan is in it and it’s the hardest coke anthem since… ever. Everyone else raps about selling it, not using it. Redman’s “I’ll Bee Dat” is up there. I dunno.

One of my favorite thing about music videos is how they heighten the song when done right. All those early Wu-Tang videos were perfect, “Shadowboxin’/4th Chamber” especially (“I judge wisely” and Method Man’s first verse, hmmmm!). Jay-Z’s “Hard Knock Life” is legendary. Tupac doesn’t have many great videos, surprisingly, but “California Love” is fire. A good video melds into the song and hooks you. It pulls you deeper. I like looking at what people try to use as hooks. Sometimes it’s with a bunch of stupid looking cats dancing in garbage bag suits. Sometimes it’s a chick hitting the back of a taxi in slow motion. Sometimes it’s just flossing in front of as many nearly naked, blurred out, glistening butts as you can. Sometimes it’s stupid. Sometimes it’s cool.

ASAP Rocky “Purple Swag” from Jason Ano on Vimeo.

I watched this A$ap Rocky video a while back. Somebody linked it somewhere or said I should or something, I dunno. It was for his song “Purple Swag.” The song’s aight. The beat is actually pretty tight, to be honest. It sounds like something screwed but not chopped, which I’m very down with. It probably sounds incredible when you’re overhigh, I dunno. It sounds like the type of song that would. And that part where the Akira bells come in is nuts. I’m pretty sure they’re the ones from “Tetsuo”.

Rocky ain’t much of a rapper though. If I wanted to hear that flow, I could just bump old Three-6 or 8Ball&MJG or UGK. In fact, that first verse has a whole lotta Pimp C in it. You can practically hear “Smokin’ out, throwin’ up/Keep a liter in my cup” in his first eight or so bars. Which I guess makes sense, cause of the beat, but whatever whatever.

(Drake was on that Texas steez for a minute, too, and the result was “November 18th,” the hardest song he ever did.)

The video isn’t much to write home about either. Real low budget, 2011 unsigned hype ish. Dudes chilling and lifting weights or drinking or lurking, the occasional girl in the background or somewhere, and some shots outside on a skateboard or bike or stoop or something. Mild house party swag, like an old Ruff Ryders video turned down to 1.

But I really do like one part of this video. Mixed into the chorus is footage of this All-American looking white chick. Pretty eyes, thick makeup, blonde hair, and big ol’ dangly earrings. And before you have a chance to go “aight, cool” the song kicks up and she’s not only rocking gold fronts. She’s lip-syncing the whole joint. Maybe this is internalized racism or something (“I’m a victim, brother. I’m a victim of 400 years of conditioning. My conditioning has been conditioned.”), but the juxtaposition between her appearance, the dragged out and slowed down song, and the chorus she syncs being screwed is crazy.

It’s a better image than the song deserves, I think. It’s not like white girls don’t like screw music (they do) or wear grills (they do that, too). But something about this one here really, really works. It’s like when Method Man showed up with the gross contacts and licked his lips like a lizard or Mary J is singing in the hallway in that “All I Need” video (3:10 and 2:53). I’ve never forgotten those images. And the Purple Swag chick has got so much attitude and energy, like this video is her one chance to get on and she’s not gonna waste it. Her mannerisms are perfect rap sass swag, and she bows out of the video with a nod and a smile like “Yeah, I kilt that.”

And she did.

(I got more thoughts on music videos and strong images, but I wrote this in twenty minutes [more, now that I’ve edited it for links and watched like ten youtubes] to get it out of my head. More later.)

Here’s the solicit for X-Men #20, on sale digitally and in finer comic shops nationwide:

Guest starring Iron Man 2.0! The fallout of Schism pushes the X-Men and War Machine at each other in Eastern Europe asSsentinels are being traded on the black market.

Here’s me earlier this year (it feels like forever ago) in an interview with Tom Spurgeon:

And look at Marvel’s upcoming Iron Man 2.0. The cover artist, title, and logo are all intended to make it look like it’s part of Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca’s successful run on Iron Man. The twist? It stars James Rhodes as War Machine. The same James Rhodes who was just in a series a year ago that bit the dust with issue #12. How is that anything but a vote of no-confidence for black characters in comics? Congrats, Rhodey! You’re a major co-star in a big Hollywood blockbuster and Marvel knows that the current comics audience won’t even look at you without someone else’s logo on the cover.

Related, but maybe not: Bleeding Cool is saying that Iron Man 2.0 is canceled as of #12.

I read a few issues of Iron Man 2.0. It was a Nick Spencer/Ariel Olivetti book at the beginning, but Kano and Carmine Di Giadomenico (who I like a whole lot) pinch hit a bit. I was unimpressed. I was actually sort of annoyed when Rhodey slipped further and further into the background. I hit one issue where Rhodey wasn’t in it at all, or on one page or something ridiculous like that. And then Fear Itself hit and the book turned into Cast-Off Iron Fist Characters Monthly (sometimes featuring War Machine). Chris Eckert did a pretty good job of breaking down why that sucks over here.

I’m not one of those comics hardliners, either. People who are like “It took Stan and Steve six pages to do Spider-Man’s origin and yet Miles Morales isn’t even in costume yet in issue three!” are morons. Fights don’t have to happen for an issue to be good. “Nothing happened” is a crap complaint. You take a story on its own merits, not by the standards of some time before any of us were born. You could probably build a very good story with the hero/titular character flitting around the outskirts of the book. I think Brian Azzarello and Marcelo Frusin did that pretty well on their last arc of Hellblazer. You can build dread.

The problem with Iron Man 2.0 is that there was no narrative momentum. I never bought the premise of the story. Spencer didn’t stick the landing when he was setting it up. As a result, rather than building a mystery, an entire issue about some dude I don’t care about or some rip from Chinese mythology was an intrusion, rather than an infiltration. Does that make sense?

If the story is good, you can do whatever you want. Even pirate comics and lengthy essays.

But that’s all a sidebar for what I really want to get at, which is referring to Rhodey as “Iron Man 2.0” in solicit text. Yeah, they call him War Machine later, but he’s introduced as Iron Man 2.0. He’s branded as Iron Man 2.0.

And I don’t think anything speaks to the state of colored folks and comics as well as that. Marvel has been astonishingly good at keeping their black characters around. They’re miles ahead of their nearest competition. Barring a couple breaks of maybe 18-24 months combined, we’ve had an ongoing Black Panther comic since like 1998 or whenever Priest started. Bendis turned Luke Cage into a superstar (but still no solo series). Misty Knight has starred in three separate Heroes for Hire/Daughters of the Dragon series in the past what, six years? And she’s getting relaunched again this week? Marvel clearly wants this to work. They’ve thrown everything at the wall and nothing appears to be sticking.

Their new tactic is stripping a character of his own identity and hitching his cart to another character. Iron Man 2.0‘s entire outward appearance is meant to emulate Iron Man and confuse consumers into thinking it stars a white dude or something, I dunno. Rhodey has been around for decades. He has a fanbase. But it isn’t enough. So Marvel is pretending like Rhodey is a subset of Iron Man rather than letting him stand on his own two.

And that sucks. Readers (hopefully) aren’t that stupid, and it’s so limiting in scope. Rhodey spent the ’90s (and several other brief periods of time) attempting to escape Tony Stark’s shadow. I’m far from a superfan, or even an average fan, and I know that. To pull him back under that shadow in the name of goosing sales and then to make him a sideliner in his own comic… I dunno. Maybe there just shouldn’t be War Machine comics. Or maybe I misread and Iron Man 2.0 is about Tony Stark’s world and not War Machine at all.

I’ve been trying to think my way through how you could spin turning Rhodey subordinate as a positive. I don’t think you can. There will always be a connection between him and Stark. That’s unavoidable and totally an avenue worth exploring. But at one point, in the text and without, he was his own distinct person. Sacrificing that, in any way, on the altar of hoping to goose sales… I dunno. It seems like such a waste.

Black Panther has a touch of this, having stepped into Daredevil’s shoes in terms of title and gimmick. I dislike it for different reasons, though. Black Panther has always been at the forefront of that comic. I think the book is dreadfully average right now, with the occasional dip into stupid (but the art tends toward fire), but that’s beside the point. Becoming the Man Without Fear and running a Denny’s feels like a step all the way out of the Black Panther’s gimmick (king of a technologically advanced isolationist nation who is also smart enough to supply Reed Richards with gadgets), but at the same time, Francesco Francavilla was born to draw him. I mean, can you imagine a hard espionage tale featuring the Panther with art like this?

“The Most Dangerous Man Alive.”

It’s so strange to think of two decades-old characters who have to step into a white man’s shoes in order to boost sales. I called Iron Man 2.0 a vote of no-confidence for black characters, and I think that holds true. If they were genuinely viable in and of themselves, they’d star in series of their own, not ones that are strapped to someone else’s back. Neither story feels like a particularly organic transition (though Rhodey’s status quo over the past however many years has been wildly uneven to begin with). Honestly, I don’t buy that either of them are good fits, either. But I can see what Marvel’s attempting to do, and in a way, I get it. In another way, it grosses me out.

It seems like you can pull off great portrayals of black characters in team books. Thunderbolts is a treat, and New Mutants, last I checked, was majority non-white. But once you get down into Soloville, you start hitting road bumps. Depressing.

Let them dudes have their own names and identities. Or let them die.

As a kid, maybe somewhere between 8-10, I found my grandmother’s stash of Erma Bombeck books. I think it was out in our barn, in a chest, or something like that, and I found it after a day of toiling in the yard. I’d already run through my uncle’s collection of sci-fi, espionage, and fantasy at this point (they were later wrecked thanks to an untimely leak during a rainstorm while I was out of town and the books were looking bloated and sick by the time I found them again), and these books were slim, so I figured why not. The one title I always remembered was If Live Is A Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing In The Pits?. I never really ate cherries, so I didn’t get the pun in the title until someone explained it to me. Honestly, they probably had to explain a lot of it to me–who still says “the pits?” The other book was Just Wait Till You Have Children of Your Own!, which I liked because it had pictures by the Family Circus guy and the title was all in lowercase. (It also had “from the author of The Grass Is Always Greener Over The Septic Tank” under her name, and we had a septic tank, so I could relate.)

These books were written five and twelve years before I was born by a lady who was fifty-five before I was one. In terms of target audiences, I was about as far out of it as you could get. The jokes were ancient, the references even more so, but I still managed to hook onto it. The family dynamics were really funny, and pretty unlike my family, but the jokes still hit. The mean little asides, the idea of nagging parents and lazy children who just want to borrow the car (“one day I’ll be old enough to do that!”), and the summer vacation stuff were all pretty great. I think I sorta vaguely remember some thinly veiled sex jokes (“maritals”), but maybe that’s just wishful thinking. If they were in there, though, they were funny.

I think I liked Bombeck because she was so sarcastic, but in a loving way. You could tell that she really liked her family, but wasn’t afraid to slap them when she needed to. Her jokes tended toward really simple aphorisms, stuff like, “One thing they never tell you about child raising is that for the rest of your life, at the drop of a hat, you are expected to know your child’s name and how old he or she is.” But go to a big family gathering and watch how many names you get called before your relatives settle on the right one. My grandmom has five kids and something like 14 or 15 grandkids. I’ve been called everyone’s name, up to and including people who are fifteen years younger than I am. It happens. “It’s funny, because it’s true.”

But yeah, ever since, I’ve liked this sort of humor. There’s something comforting, but still a little edgy, about it, like a milder version of “hurt the ones you love.”

Imagine my surprise when I found a random link to Mindy Kaling’s new book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) and it turned out to be a Bombeck-style advice/memoir/aphorism book. Here’s a preview:
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me by Mindy Kaling – Excerpt

Now, here’s the thing. I like The Office. Liked, maybe, I haven’t checked out the new season to be sure just yet. I thought it was at its best a couple seasons ago, and feel like Jim & Pam have been dragging the show down ever since. The Office isn’t necessarily a good vehicle for real drama. But when it’s actively trying to be funny, it’s deadly. The highlights of the past few seasons have been Ellie Kemper as the new and slow receptionist, BJ Novak as Ryan, and Mindy Kaling as Kelly. Something about those three never fails to slay me. I like how Kelly’s infatuation with Ryan fluctuates between outright delusion and genuine, iron-grip control of the situation. Every time Ryan gets a chance to look at the camera in disbelief or anger, I’m laughing. All three of them have great comic timing, and Novak and Kaling both write for the show, too. I still like a lot of the cast–Craig Robinson is fantastic–but these three kill.

Kaling’s book was a surprise, but yeah, you know what? After reading the excerpt? I was hooked. Bombeck was the first name I went to (because of sexism, I guess), and I feel like it’s an apt comparison. They both mine a similar vein of humor, I think, with really personal and relatable observations punctuated with biting humor. It’s my thing. And I knew I would enjoy the book when I hit this bit from the introduction, as part of a list of rejected titles for the book:

When Your Boyfriend Fits into Your Jeans and Other Atrocities

and for some reason, that just tickled my funny bone something fierce. It was the word “atrocities,” I think, that tipped me over into open laughter. The outrageous exaggeration (maybe it isn’t!) got me good. The book’s full of stuff like that, like when she explains how she somehow found herself in the habit of saying thank you to boys who were being mean to her or what it was like to fall into a pond from a high diving board against her will.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

It’s funny stuff. I remember being a kid and wanting to be a comedian. I found an old photo album that had a spot where you could put down your Dream Job, and what I actually wrote was “comedian/astronaut,” which is either a hybrid job or I really wanted to have two jobs in kindergarten. I feel like these are the sort of jokes I’d have wanted (or still want) to be able tell. Maybe that explains my dumb sense of humor, because I’m entertained best by terrible puns/wordplay and excessive violence. (If only someone could merge the two…)

But yeah, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, judging from the few chapters I’ve read thus far, is the business. Real funny stuff.

-Let’s talk about all things scary!
-Books, comics, movies, dates…
-Emily Carroll’s His Face All Red
-Colson Whitehead’s Zone One: A Novel
-Stephen King’s Desperation and The Regulators.
-Daniel H Wilson’s Robopocalypse: A Novel.
–The Bad Seed:

–The Good Son:

–Junji Ito,
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental for the theme music.
-Here comes a new challenger!
-See you, space cowboy!

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I hate a lot of things about comics journalism, man. Maybe I just hate how Marvel & DC market their books. Is that weird? Ironic? Maybe I just hate how complicit the press is in enabling these companies to push worthless information out there, and I absolutely include myself in that condemnation. It’s generally Marvel and DC jockeying for position and Google rank. It sucks.

I’m not sure what I hate most. Unlettered previews are pretty bad, and I didn’t really realize how bad until I did a few myself. It’s sort of a “Hey, pimp this incomplete product for us that was chosen at random from an upcoming issue that we need to goose the numbers on” thing. I’ve never seen an unlettered preview that was chosen specifically for its artistic content. They’re always either from the first four (or so) pages or random pages throughout the book that don’t have “spoilers.”

I hate those stupid blanked out covers. Oh, you have a new team? And you can’t show it to me? Cool, hit me up when you have something to say. No, no, I understand. If you have a cover with say, six blacked out characters, then you get to have one post with the blank cover, one for each of the six characters, and then, if you’re lucky, another post for the completed cover. And that’s seven, maybe eight posts on the front page of a website that DC doesn’t have, and doesn’t that feel good? Great, go feel good over there and away from me.

You know what I heard through the grapevine about DC’s New 52? One of the edicts of the press campaign was “no story info.” You could describe the basic status quo, but nothing more than what’s in the solicits. And if you go back and look at the vast majority of those interviews from May or whatever til August, what do you see? A bunch of writers spinning their wheels, trying to describe their book in vague, unappealing high concepts, and the occasional artist dropping a cool piece about design. iFanboy had a good take on these. They got broke away from the standard rigmarole by getting creators to do goofy interviews that were informative in terms of approach and perhaps scope, but not necessarily on details. They made water into wine with that.

Oh! I hate playing the firsts game. Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley created more continuous issues of any comic ever as a team, as long as you define any comic as “Fantastic Four” and team as “everyone but the inker, colorist, letterer, and editor.” Batwoman is something like “the first lesbian superhero to star in an eponymous solo title from DC Comics That Isn’t The Holly Robinson Catwoman.” There’s so many caveats that it doesn’t even matter, does it? Batwing is the first Black Batman (except for the devil-worshipping black Batman who went on to be Azrael the other year). Instead of trying to grasp cheap glory, why not just make some good stories and be like “This is the first good Cloak & Dagger comic ever!” (hasn’t happened yet) or “This story will make you like Donna Troy!” (ditto).

While I’m being negative, what else do I dislike… posting press releases with no commentary is one, I figure, but that one’s obviously stupid. Announcing comics with no creative team. If you don’t have a creative team, back down until you do. I don’t care if you’re giving Hypno Hustler a 100-issue maxiseries that forms one huge story that maps to the rise of rap worldwide. Who’s writing it? Who’s drawing it? I’m not reading no comics by scrubs, fellas. Put your best foot forward by putting your best asset forward: the creators.

Yeah, basically? I got a lot of issues with comics internet. I’m guilty of a few, and I’ve spent the last however many weeks trying to course-correct and obsessing over it. Gotta do better to be better, right?

With all of that out of the way, I really dug the marketing for Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s Fatale, an Image comic that drops in 2012. Check the rhime:

The interview with Kiel at CBR is pretty good, too. It’s full of information. Fatale has its roots in a Wildstorm pitch. It’s a genre mash. It’s a Brubaker/Phillips joint, which means that at worst it will be “pretty good.” It’s Brubaker attacking his relatively poor (but generally well-written, nonetheless) usage of women as undeconstructed (™ 2011, Brothers Before Others, Inc.) femmes fatales or trophies. It’s got monsters. It’s got guns. It’s twelve-issues long, but may run longer. It hits the ’30s, ’50s, and the ’70s, which are some of my favorite decades to read about. It’s gonna be sorta weird to read Brubaker/Phillips without Val Staples, but Dave Stewart is a monster. Basically, Brubaker gave an interview that made me want to read their book. It’s enormously effective.

But the truth is, it was too late. I wanted to read the book after I saw the images. They’re a movie trailer fitted to a nine-panel grid. It fits in praise for the team a couple places. It gives you a taste of the story by teasing a few scenes. There’s even a bit of narrative in the preview, thanks to the scenes that bookend it. The preview really tells you everything you need to know (how it looks, how it reads, where to find it, what it’s called) in a few short pages. Very deft work.

More like Fatale, please, and fewer blacked out X-Men or Avengers teasers. Cater to me, internet.

The Damon Albarn Appreciation Society is an ongoing series of observations, conversations, and thoughts about music. This is the eleventh, and has been converted from a quick email to a friend into a post that is considerably longer. I listen to a lot of music, and this is just a snapshot of where I’m at right now.

Minutes from previous meetings of the Society: The Beatles – “Eleanor Rigby”, Tupac – Makaveli, Blur – 13 (with Graeme McMillan), Blur – Think Tank (with Graeme McMillan), Black Thought x Rakim: “Hip-Hop, you the love of my life”, Wu-Tang Clan – Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), On why I buy vinyl sometimes, on songs about places, Mellowhype’s Blackendwhite, a general post on punk

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Graeme McMillan, bka “One Of My Favorite People On Or Off The Internet,” sent me a link to “Allez” from French artist Camille’s latest CD, Ilo Veyou. I was talking about how much I liked Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Terrible Angels EP, particularly this song:

I’ve liked Gainsbourg since someone (Sean Witzke, probably) introduced me to IRM last year. I think he recommended it after I heard and enjoyed the Scott Pilgrim soundtrack? I dunno, it’s irrelevant I guess. “I like her, here are some boring words on how I found her.”

What I like about “Terrible Angels” is that it evokes a very specific mental image for me. The throbbing sound of the melody (is that the word? the electronic throb and buzz) and the snap of the snare play off each other, and it all ends up sounding like a dance single that’s just slightly out of pitch. The lyrics run counter to the snare, too–“I want release from absolution” is delivered as something between a moan and exhortation. “Terrible Angels” sounds like this:

It sounds like the soundtrack to the dance party at the end of the world, as conceived by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely.

I really like pretty much any song that has an “Oh-I” or “Oh-why” or “Oh-anything” part, really, like TLC’s “Creep” or Blur’s “Tender”. “Oh my baby… oh my bayabeh… oh why… oh my…”

I like “Allez” a lot, too, and it’s pretty easy to like, isn’t it? I’ve been really fond of rounds (typoed that as “found of rounds” at first, hey hey hey) since I was a kid, and I like how this one builds in on itself. It’s weird, too–she’s putting on a voice, right? She sounds younger, but also more growly than she usually does. Maybe it’s the backmasking that shows up later in the song. It definitely makes me want to check out her full-length record Ilo Veyou, which drops physically on Tuesday and hopefully digitally, too. But probably not? Amazon has them listed as Imports, which is a new one by me.

I liked Camille’s Le Fil and Le Sac Des Filles, but I’m not sure which I like more. Maybe Le Sac, because the first two tracks (“1, 2, 3” and “Paris”) are really strong. I’ll have to listen to both again to figure it out for sure, but Camille was a really good recommendation on Graeme’s part.

I like her voice a lot, though it’s a little tough to put my finger on why. She has that throaty lounge singer sound, a little bit, and the fact that it’s in French gives it a whole nother level of appeal, like a classy diva sort of thing.

Have you heard Soko? Another French singer:

I first heard Soko on a remix of this song that Cee-Lo did for a mixtape. I like her voice more than the music, I’m pretty sure. Cee-Lo’s version is sort of in the same vein as “Fuck You,” but I like it a lot more, actually. It’s more fun to sing and listen to. “Fuck You” has that edgy feeling or whatever, but this feels a lot more solid, despite being a hodge-podge. In fact, his Stray Bullets mixtape? Better than the album Fuck You was on. Whatever it was called.

I also love dueling love songs like that, too, with both the boy and the girl on the same track. It changes the tone without breaking the tone, if that makes sense. It adds texture.

I’ve been listening to The Kinks off and on. I don’t have a lot to say yet, but I’ve listened to Village Green, Low Budget, and Something Else. Something Else didn’t make much of an impression after a couple spins, but Low Budget was instantly great. It’s sorta melancholy, but still poppy, if those aren’t mutually exclusive. You can bop to it while Ray Davies sings about how much it sucks to not have any money.

Maybe it’s really corny, but the two superhero songs on Low Budget (“Catch Me Now I’m Falling” and “Superman”) are both really good songs and well considered metaphors. And relevant to today, I’d say, but I feel like songs about economic unhappiness are pretty evergreen. There’s something about “Catch Me Now I’m Falling” in particular. It doesn’t feel like it’s about America so much as Captain America–a single person. It’s one man asking for help. And to get a little comic book-y about it, Captain America has theoretically always represented not America, but the American Dream. He’s an ideal. He’s the kind, possibly fictional, side of the empire, and now he needs help, but he’s gotta beg for it. I dunno, there’s half of something there. There’s also a connection in Aesop Rock’s “Commencement at the Obedience Academy”: “Point: I guess I could spare a splash for a couple of heads/Counterpoint: During my famine I never got broke your bread.”

Low Budget is much more my speed, as far as The Kinks goes, I think. It doesn’t feel as Faux Beatles as Village Green feels. Which isn’t necessarily a criticism, because I do like Village Green quite a bit. But the two albums sound very different, and I like Low Budget a lot more.

David Bowie: I’m still learning. I like The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars a lot, though. I’ve heard Aladdin Sane once through thus far and it’s… okay? Not as good as Ziggy. Luckily, a friend sent me a Bowie manual, so I expect that to change soon as I explore more of his catalog. Bowie feels like one of those people I should like. I’ve got a fistful of friends who swear by him.

Esperanza Spalding’s Chamber Music Society is really good. Esperanza Spaulding won the best new artist or best new album Grammy over Bieber this year, which caused a flood of Twitter hate. The anti-hype got my attention, I checked out the album when Amazon dropped it down to five bucks. It puts me in mind of Kassin+2 and some of the more Brazilian-influenced jazz/samba on the Lupin the Third soundtracks by Yuji Ohno.

I like jazz, but I’m far from an expert. I know the greatest hits, right? Past that is a smoky haze of trumpets and unknown singers. I do really, seriously enjoy the Lupin the Third soundtracks by Yuji Ohno, though. I mean, sure, it’s the soundtrack to a cartoon, whatever, but they’re really well put together and feature diverse influences and sounds. Like “Lupin III Samba Temperado”. The arrangement is just fantastic, and it feels like a complete song by the time you hit two minutes in, but then it just keeps building.

Ohno makes great music to write to, too. I bought a fistful of his CDs from a game store in like 05, maybe ’03, and I kept them on my computers ever since. I’ve probably written hundreds of thousands of words to this guy’s sound. He’s got such a diverse catalog, though I guess all of it can be called “jazzy,” that I never get bored queuing up that playlist.

The Brazilian influence on his work is really obvious. He’s got a bunch of bossa nova numbers, several more songs that feature Portuguese titles or lyrics, and a lot of samba-ready tunes. He’s probably responsible for opening my ears to that diverse Brazilian sound. I like pretty much all of it, unsurprisingly. There’s crooning, there’s hard drums, there’s booty shake dutty wine beats, and more. Fantastic stuff.

Keeping it in Brazil, I really dig The +2’s. It’s a cool concept for a group, where one person takes the lead and the title per project. I own and regularly spin Kassin+2’s Futurismo, and I need to go ahead and buy Sincerely Hot and Music Typewriter considering how much I like them. I’ve been putting it off for whatever reason–my own wackness, probably.

I discovered The+2’s via the cartoon Michiko e Hatchin, a Japanese joint that is custom built for me (girls, Brazil, and crime) but still hasn’t managed to get a stateside release. Kassin did the soundtrack for that one by himself, and it’s a doozy. Like this joint, from the strip club episode:

It’s “Papo Cafajeste,” and it goes so hard. Tight flow, great thump, and it’s comfortably situated in a long line of songs that use gun sounds to great effect. Bone and Pac’s “Thug Luv” is still king, though. The soundtrack is full of bangers. It’s another good one to write to, very headnod-inducing.

I didn’t intend this when I started writing, but I guess I’m in an international phase. A lot of France, a lot of Brazil, some Brazil/Japan fusion, and a bit of the UK. It just sort of happened, I figure. I have some vinyl coming tomorrow, Blu’s Jesus. It’s this noodly, experimental, strangely mixed rap album that’s still straight out of Los Angeles. I’ve been meaning to write about Blu for weeks now, ever since his NoYork! officially leaked (my drafts say I started writing about it on 09/26), and I figure getting jesus on vinyl will kickstart another Blu phase. Matter of fact, I just saw that Blu & Exile’s Below the Heavens, one of my favorite joints, is hitting vinyl later this year. So that’s a definite.

I like “My Sunshine” off NoYork!:

My Sunshine | Blu feat Nia Andrews from aaronisnotcool on Vimeo.

This is more or less how I listen to music, though. I spin from trend to trend and back again.

-We’re talking comics!
-Not comic books. Joke comics. Ha ha ha.
-This is the second half of the conversation.
-Here’s Kristen Schaal’s Sexy Book of Sexy Sex.
-6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental for the theme music.
-Here comes a new challenger!
-See you, space cowboy!

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Like everybody else, I’ve been thinking about Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive since I saw it a while back. But first:

Trailer:

And a good song from the soundtrack:

(The Drive soundtrack’s really very good, by the way. Stretched out John Carpenter synths, real ’80s sort of sound.)

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this movie. I was actually thinking about it before falling asleep last night, and came up with a killer opening paragraph, but then I fell asleep. I had a couple of good email conversations with Morgan Jeske about it the day it came out, too. (Apologies to him if I accidentally steal any of his ideas.)

Drive is a movie that is aware that you watch movies. There’s a certain level of self-consciousness to a lot of modern films, sort of a Family Guy-esque drop in a reference and let you fill in the blank. Daniel Craig’s James Bond I think did this a few times to emphasize the difference between the sexy James Bond and the new thug, Die Hard 4 was better titled John McClane Versus Die Hard’s Bastard Children, Featuring Parkour Guy, Ninja Girl, and The Matrix Guy. It’s a wink at the audience, essentially, rather than any sort of effective storytelling. It’s a pat on the head, a congratulations for having seen a bunch of stupid movies. (Comics fans will know it as “continuity porn.”)

Drive comes off differently. It’s aware of the arc of your average action movie, it gets Michael Mann’s movies about dudes who are good at a thing, and it understands throwback aesthetics. And instead of rewarding the audience for knowing these things with a doggie biscuit and “Good boy!”, Refn and Amini use… I called it “negative space” in my emails to Morgan, and that’s really the best term I can come up for it. They simply don’t fully flesh out certain things, and we’re left with the responsibility of inferring the full shape.

It took me a while to realize that this is what they’re doing. It’s a very quiet movie, dialogue-wise, with an almost distractingly high number of knowing looks, tentative smiles, sidelong glances, and grins. There are precious few times where someone stands up and says, “I feel like this and so I am going to do that.” It works well, in context. It makes what could have been a cliché movie into something a little more ethereal. It’s to Drive‘s credit that it doesn’t quite feel like what it actually is.

The negative space thing is interesting. I had no trouble filling in any of the blanks in the movie, and it occurs to me that this is a sort of audience participation, too. I built part of this movie, maybe some fairly important parts, myself. That just strengthens my suspension of disbelief, since I’m not going to come up with something I can’t believe in, and strengthens the movie, too. It makes it more personal, more mine, than it would be if everything were clearly spelled out. For example, the romance part of the movie feels awkward and almost teenaged in demeanor. No one declares their love, and it isn’t even clear whether or not there’s a sexual aspect to their relationship. You assume so, sure, but was there really?

In Drive, Ryan Gosling’s character is nameless. It abstracts him as a person. He’s “The Driver.” What does he do? He drives. That isn’t the fullest explanation of who he is, but we’re left to interpret that for ourselves. We have to crystalize his abstraction into something we can believe in. For me, Gosling saying that he doesn’t carry a gun tripped something over in my head. He participates in sometimes violent crimes. He’d be held responsible in a court of law, but he divorces himself from the actual violence of the act. He won’t help you stick some place up and he won’t carry a gun. He’ll drive you from A to B, and that’s all you get. Is driving an adrenaline rush for him? It’s clearly something he’s good at, and he’s fairly clever, too. But he doesn’t want to carry a weapon or do the actual job. Does that keep him from overstepping his limits? “I don’t carry a gun” is a limit. It’s a rule, and we have rules because at some point someone did something that required the creation of the rule.

Bryan Cranston’s character mentions that Gosling just walked in off the street one day and asked for a gig. That suggests that he’s transient, and his lack of friends does, too. He’s not on the run from something, exactly, but he is escaping from something. Maybe he made a mistake or maybe he couldn’t do something any more.

So, working backwards: The Driver leaves some place (my first thought is Chicago, actually) and moves to LA. He left because, at some point, he carried a gun and something went sour and somebody died or worse. The Driver got off clean, but still had to vacate. He comes to LA, finds a small job, and falls back into an old habit, but is careful to keep the worst aspects of that habit at a distance. “I don’t carry a gun.” And then, when given sufficient reason, he falls back into those old habits, not with relish, but a sort of… grim determination. Like the end of The Big Fat Kill–“We gotta kill every last rat-bastard one of them. We gotta kill them because we need them dead.”

There isn’t pleasure in the act, not that I can see, so much as a responsibility. He’s good at what he does, whether that is driving or killing. The problem is that that opens up something inside him that’s genuinely ugly and terrible. He understands fear and theatrics, on at least a surface level. That fits with Refn’s idea that Drive is a superhero origin story. But Drive isn’t, not really. It’s the end of a thug’s life.

The Driver’s “sufficient reason” isn’t your traditional action movie love. He becomes attached to a neighbor, Carey Mulligan’s Irene, and her young son Benicio. He takes them on a tour of the LA river, and they have a brightly lit, fun, familial picnic at a beautiful, but polluted, locale. The picnic is shot like Heaven, and the implication is pretty clear. This is a place the Driver thinks is cool, and it is, but it’s also tainted. At the same time, this brief taste of Heaven is enough to show the Driver a way out of his life, something to grasp to pull himself out of his past.

I really don’t think that Irene and the Driver had a physical relationship. The Driver filled a need while her husband was locked up, whether it was security or a strong role model for Benicio. They both filled a need, really. Irene and Benicio represented Heaven for the Driver. There was so much unspoken in their relationship, and they were definitely into each other, but it seems very much like that they were in the budding stages of a relationship up to the point where Irene says “My husband’s coming back” while riding with the Driver somewhere. That line’s dropped in there with murderous finality, and may well be one of the longest sentences she’s uttered up to that point. It certainly felt like the one with the most impact.

There’s a scene late in the movie that directly juxtaposes the Driver’s past and present. He’s in an elevator going down (you don’t go down to Heaven, by the way) to the parking garage with Irene. A man in the elevator is clearly a shooter come to clean both of them up. Driver and Irene kiss in the elevator, completely with a bright, heavenly light, and then the Driver turns, slams the shooter against the elevator, and then kicks his head in. Thanatos and Eros right there, or maybe just Heaven and Hell. Irene steps out of the elevator and the doors close with the Driver in the bloody elevator. The doors literally closed on his future. He was always damned, and getting a taste of Heaven tipped him over just enough to ruin his equilibrium. He was closed off emotionally, and then Irene and Benicio opened him up, and then it was too late. You don’t get to pick and choose your emotions, and that bright red poison inside him came out at its first opportunity.

Later, the Driver tells the story of the scorpion and the frog. It feels really on the nose and eye-rolly, but after I thought about it some… it isn’t. The story doesn’t track. He didn’t ask for help. He was shanghaied into helping someone else. And then, after being betrayed, he set about the business of hurting people until things were put right. The only thing that applies is that scorpions hurt people. That’s their nature.

And that train of thought swung me back around to “I don’t carry a gun” (because if he had his tools, he would hurt people) and Irene and Benicio as escape hatch (because it is definitely both of them, not just Irene. He wants to go somewhere and be a family man) and the way that he stomped that guy out in the elevator. I don’t think that he would have harmed Irene and Benicio, but at some point, he would have hurt someone and fallen once again. The scorpion & frog speech wasn’t about what he was about to do to the people. It was about him. It was a confession. “This is what I do when you make me break my rules.”

It’s a well made movie, is what I’m saying. It encourages conjecture while still managing to be complete in and of itself. The conjecture is integral and superfluous at the same time. It knows you know how these shake out, so it can skip the exposition and backstory. That’s your half of the movie. Refn and Amini’s half informs and overrides yours, but the two halves make for a great whole.

It’s great. Visually, it works really well, too, but that’s another essay. I did want to share this image that Morgan sent over to me. It’s thumbnailed because there’s bare breasts and this is theoretically a worksafe site, but check this:

Look at the focal point of the frame. I like this level of attention paid to small details. The strippers in this scene almost act as the audience, watching with somehow rapt attention and blank faces, simultaneously attracted and repelled by the violence to come… yeah, I like this movie quite a bit. It hit the spot perfectly. I’m flying to Los Angeles today, and I basically just bought the Kindle version of Drive just because. It’s short, you know?

Catch the flick if you can.