The Format of Presentation as Part of the Art

The vehicle which transmits a particular media can itself be part of the artistic expression–secondary, certainly, it isn’t on equal footing with the creator or artist but rather subtly intertwined with the expression itself as an added layer of entertainment. This is not always the case either, because the vehicle of transmission is often totally irrelevant. But when it is part of the entertainment package, the vehicle of transmission enhances the experience of a particular media item wonderfully albeit sometimes imperceptibly.

Two particular things got me thinking about this concept specifically at this time. First, I recently took a beach vacation and before going I stopped by a few local used bookstores to stock up on cheap paperbacks. Now the ideal beach read, at least for me, has to be something that is fast-paced, exciting, and page-turning and not to dense or hyper-literate yet without being dumb, poorly written or overly cliched. Thus a good beach read is by someone like Michael Connelly who detours “literary fiction” without becoming a James Patterson and does so by writing creatively and, well, “good.” Anyway, it had been a long time since I had bought fiction paperbacks; typically the sort of thing I’d want in a fiction paperback is something I’d try to find at the library; I’d resort to buying it if I couldn’t find it there, but any fiction item I purchase typically is something by a favorite author I know I’ll want to re-read and keep or something I’ve read before and know is a classic that I want to hold onto, in which case I want a nice, presentable softcover TPB or Hardcover; if a classic work of literature, I want it in an even nicer format if I can find a deal on it.  Anyway, since I was in the process of moving and thus in between libraries, because I wanted specific authors and books, and because I knew there was a high-probability that what I read on a beach would get sandy and water-logged, my best bet was purchasing these books myself.  So armed with a stack of Lee Child, Michael Connelly, and Graham Joyce paperbacks I made way to the beach. Down by the water each day, I realized that there’s no better companion to a shady beach chair, a cooler of drinks, and a fifteen minute dip in the ocean every hour or two than a great paperback thriller or mystery. Certainly the story itself has to be good–the author has to suck you in, get you flipping the pages, and never drag on to bore you out of the forward momentum. You have to be dying to know what will happen next, otherwise you’ll just throw it down and zone out in the sun. But the paperback format itself adds to this enjoyment tremendously; looking around to see what other beach-goers were reading I spotted the occasional Kindle and I just kept thinking that I would be continually nervous that the water dripping off of me, the waves rolling in, the sun beating down, and the sand everywhere would have me constantly nervous that my electronic device would go kaputz and not only would I be out a hundred or more bucks, I’d be without a read for the day. Armed with a 2 or 3 dollar used paperback, I could fold the pages, toss it in the beach bag, read it while covered in sand and not be overly concerned with its overall condition–it just had to hold up for me to finish reading it. If I fell in love with the book and wanted it for my library, I could hunt it down later in hardback. Even off the beach, the perfect format for a thriller you only need to read once is the used paperback; it’s fun and perfectly sized for reading wherever you want and easily portable. I suppose the Kindle could replicate this experience better than many other reading experiences if and when the price per item is comparable but until that is a reality I’ll hold out.

The other thing that made me think of this format as part of the art argument came from a few Yahoo news story. One story was the rehashed filler they pull out every month or so, the “businesses that are as good as dead”article which names video rental stores, costume stores, etc. Record Stores made the list, with the same old reasoning that people download, and when they do buy CDs they do so cheaply in big box stores. The article said that despite what hipsters, DJs, and collectors want to believe, the indie record shops are largely on the way out except for the ones who’ve managed to adapt and adopt business methods that work in the digital economy. Conversely, there was a story a day or two later that talked about how many record shops that struggled when the bottom fell out of the CD business were gaining enough ground to level off by switching to vinyl for the bulk of their sells. Indie stores in big cities and college towns around the country now devote more of their sales floors to LPs and 45s than to CDs  and the annual “Record Store Day” event in which artists release limited edition vinyl releases directly through independent music retailers was another huge hit this year. Vinyl sales were up more in 2010 than in any year since Soundscan began taking numbers in 1990. New albums by established artists and up and coming indie acts release their albums not only on CD and download, but on at least 500-1000 vinyl pressings; vinyl reissues of albums by The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Who sell very well each and every year. Such stores in areas like Charlottesville VA, Cincinnati, OH and Louisville Ky have begun stocking high quality turntables because they were tired of turning away the teenagers and college kids stumbling into their stores to buy vinyl but needing the system to play it on. Now, vinyl collectors and audiophiles have kept vinyl in business and popular for years (this even made it to film in the classic 1990s comedy “High Fidelity” based on the Nick Hornby book), but the popularity among indie rock fan teenagers and twenty-somethings has helped it boom out more than ever to such a point that artists as mainstream as Taylor Swift make sure to press vinyl editions of their new work. Of course it’s still a niche market and the price of new vinyl coupled with the limitations and requirements it poses to mass consumption will never make its sells a drop in the bucket compared to legal and illegal digital downloads. But it is interesting. The part of this prompting the argument I am making here comes largely from the comment-thread in that last story. Every time there is a “vinyl is booming” new-story, there are dozens of people commenting things like “Huh? Why?” and dozens of audiophiles posting about the superior sound quality of vinyl vis-a-vis digital. These comment threads explode into over-the-top arguments as people seem to find each others arguments completely incomprehensible. Both have their points but both miss a key aspect of this hobby too. Vinyl does offer a warmer, fuller sound when the record is clean and well cared for, the turntable is of good quality, and the amp and speakers are the correct components. The clicks and pops won’t be there on new cared-for LPs (contrary to the arguments of those never having heard a new vinyl) and on older items a few introductory pops are indeed pleasantly nostalgic. The sound on a vinyl copy of, say,  “Abbey Road” compared with every CD pressing before last year’s remastering overhaul was miles ahead–I had no idea there were as many instruments and notes in the background as there were because of digital’s habit of maxing every sound to its top volume and then leveling it flat in a digital sample onto CD. Vinyl has a particular sound, one that jazz, blues, and classic rock built itself to suit for many years so of course a Charlie Parker, Bob Dylan, or BB King record from the 1960s will sound miles ahead of its CD pressing. Yet the digital folks have their point to; properly mastered CDs sound great on the right system, are more portable and sound great cars. MP3s are enervated a bit every time they are opened to a certain extent but aren’t susceptible to human sound warping through scuffs and scratches and are the height of portability thus far. They do limit the sound by compressing it more than any format before (LPs give off sound waves, CDs sample soundwaves, mp3s compress those samples even more), but now high-quality 320 and up kpbs digital tracks are available that in most cases catch the quality of a sound recording the way it was supposed to be; the fact that sometimes that results in a high-gloss sheen that sounds “artificial” to some in comparison to the “warmth” offered by vinyl is due more to aesthetic and nostalgic sensibilities than fact. What both sides of this (admittedly to the outsider rather pointless and arbitrary) argument don’t give priority to nearly enough is the format-as-part-of-the-art fact: it certainly isn’t just sound that draws collectors and hipsters to vinyl. If I just want to hear a new album, a download is the most efficient way to get to do so, often cheap or free; I can carry it around with me and hear it in my car or with headphones. If I want a better sounding copy to carry with me most anyplace that also offers me the intended packaging, there’s CD. For me, I preview and listen and can love albums that I download but once I truly find a great one (or know beforehand it will be a great one), I don’t feel I have it in the proper format until I get it for my turntable. Not just for sound–for presentation, collection, and process. It sounds good on an old fashioned home stereo; it requires my involvement in that I place it on the turntable and put the needle to it. I hear the first and last track of the first side, which especially in vinyl-era releases was the result of a deliberate sequencing decision and then I flip it to side two and repeat the process. It requires my care in that I keep it clean and safe. It gives me a giant cover with full-size artwork and an inner sleeve, often liner notes and extras tucked within. It gives me a collectible to place on the shelf and pull down when I want to. The vinyl hobby itself sends me to new and used and out of the way places in the towns I live in or bargain hunting on line. There’s nothing better than getting a record never pressed on CD or sampled digitally or one you’d never have thought to get and getting it for a few dollars only to find out you love hearing it spin on your turntable.

Great art is great art regardless of how it is presented. Yet the vehicle of transmission can add to the joy of the experience one has when consuming such art. Certain movies look great on the big screen and are a joy to see collectively in a theater and seeing them alone at home on the TV often cannot match that. A visually stunning movie looks excellent on a a Blu-Ray player with a proper screen and sound-system and can be much more fun that trying to squint your eyes at your smartphone to watch it. A classic jazz record sounds best on the turntable; a nineties hip-hop album sounds best on CD in a car with great bass speakers. A great comic-arc reads best in a nice and carefully presented Omnibus but a one-off fun short story comic works best as a single issue. A thriller works best as a cheap paperback, a dense erudite work is best in a hardcover sewn volume. I would argue that a newspaper still reads best via newsprint but those days are almost gone. So sure, this involves primarily matters of opinion and personal taste and I’m sure there’s an entire generation of kids growing up right now who will find no problem digesting every bit of their media with a handheld device. Perhaps by then every bit of media will be created and be tailored for display on such a device and thus be unfit for presentation in any other way. But for now, in the supposed last days of physical media there are still things that work best in the format they were created in and for; and hey, if the digital pulse ever comes knocking out all RF, satellite and wi-fi signals those of us with any digital media at all might be able to use our collectibles as widespread currency ala “The Book of Eli.”

2010 Addendum (Last Recap)

As always, I find myself with odds and ends that did not make it on any of my year-end “best of” lists but warrant a mention anyway, so I have one last catch-all post to highlight those items.

First, I did not manage to catch “The King’s Speech” prior to ranking my favorite films of 2010, but managed to finally view it last week. I’m not sure where it would have made it on my list if I’d seen it sooner–arguably right in the middle, but anywhere on the list would have forced my tenth slot, “The Town,” off of the list and into the “honorable mentions” category. “The King’s Speech” is a truly wonderful film, full of humor and heart. Colin Firth is an excellent actor as always, giving a performance that ranks with or quite possibly is his single best yet as “Bertie,” or Albert, or the man who adopts the title of “King George VI” when his brother deserts the throne to marry Wallis Simpson. The friendship he cultivates with his speech therapist Lionel Logue (played terrifically by Geoffrey Rush) is the core of the movie, but everything about this one clicks from the expertly crafted sets that recreate England in the 1930s to the marital relationship of Albert and his wife (another fine performance from Helena Bonham Carter), the charming look at Princess Elizabeth and Margaret’s childhood, etc. Every performance is out-of-the-park, and writer David Seidler and director Tom Hooper manage to craft suspenseful scenes out of public addresses as Firth gives his heart and soul (as George) into attempting public speaking–who could have thought a battle to overcome a speech impediment could rank with the best of “the big game” style scenes from sports movie classics?

I never do a TV best-of, primarily because I rarely catch a show all the way through as it debuts–my favorite shows from the past few years (The Wire, Six Feet Under, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Breaking Bad) were all viewed way after the fact via Netflix, but I did catch AMC’s “The Walking Dead” from the beginning each Sunday night this year and was thoroughly impressed. I enjoy Robert Kirkman’s Image comic that this is based on, and the entire premise that makes that series work is that it is a detailed, in-depth look at the survivors who have to live in the world at a time after the spot most zombie movies roll the credits–a film adaptation of this simply wouldn’t work, it would miss the point. So this AMC approach is phenomenal, it gets to adapt this story in the format that the comic did. Not only that, by having years of material to draw from, the series can know where each player will end up and thus be more certain of their portrayal early on. This show was harrowing and taut, wonderfully acted and shot uber-creepy. The first episode was arguably the strongest, but each of the six from this first season had plenty to offer whether psychological or visceral, action or drama, focused on the zombies or the internal human threats. I look forward to the second season and hope that the director’s idea to move from a writing round-table to a BBC style freelance script submission will prove to be a good move.

I still heartily recommend Stephen King’s “Full Dark, No Stars,” which I reviewed here. It was his best book in years. I’ve had a blast playing “Red Dead Redemption” on the PS3, I’m sure many gamers have reviewed that one all across the web so I’ll add nothing to that other than say it’s a lot of fun. Also, “Scalped,” “Northlanders” and “The Unwritten” continue to be some of the best ongoing series Vertigo has put out into the comics field in some time and they deserve a shout-out even though their particular runs for this year didn’t make the top 10.

 A few more albums that didn’t get listed on my best of but deserve a listen: Eric Clapton: Clapton, Elton John and Leon Russell: The Union, Vampire Weekend: Contra, Ra Ra Riot: The Orchard, Trent Reznor and Atticus Finch: The Social Network Soundtrack, Danzig: Red Deth Saboth, High on Fire: Snakes for the Divine, Girl Talk: All Day, BoB: No Genre, Hold Steady: Heaven is Whenever, Gil Scott-Heron: I’m New Here

Woe is Me, The Grammys 2010

Dropping the ball, making bad choices, and a few bright spots……

Expecting worse than I got, I remember writing a fairly moderate appraisal of the Grammys last year. I never expect much, so anything good is a plus—but I’m still amazed at the results sometimes.

No offense to Taylor Swift, who seems like a perfectly nice young girl, but “Fearless” is not album-of-the-year material by any respectable measure.  She shows promise, and she has obvious talent and massive appeal for a target audience. Giving her the top honors at the CMAs was too much considering she’s more truly a pop star, but giving her full album of the year is puffing up a young artist far too much, far too soon. She needs to grow a bit, broaden the scope of her diary-penned lyrics and show us what she really has. She’s a good 5 to 10 years away from a best album, but she will get there if she keeps it up; I just think she’s getting too much too soon, which hopefully won’t result in burn-out. The only nominee for best album worth its nomination was “Groo Grux King” (sadly mispronounced by John Legend in the reading of nominees), and it truly deserved the award; at least DMB got to give a good performance.

Best New Artist is always a joke—whoever wins usually disappears, never to be heard from again, so I guess I shouldn’t be too upset that MGMT lost to Zac Brown Band; MGMT was the only artist on the list of nominees with a near-perfect debut album, but I guess they were simply too hip for the middle-of-the-road Grammy’s. Zac Brown cheesed it up for the cameras, unfurling the American flag in a song shouting out to the troops, the veterans, cold beer, a mother’s love and “jeans that fit just right,” in a song penned strictly for middle-American success, but OMIGOD, is that Leon Russell, assisting them straight from brain surgery! A true rock-country icon enhanced their performance and probably went unrecognized by most viewers.

Best Rock Album went to Green Day for “21^st Century Breakdown.” A fine enough album, but maybe they got the award belatedly for their true masterpiece “American Idiot.” Sadly, DMB didn’t get even this for “Groo,” and the amazing “No Line on the Horizon,” U2’s best in almost 20 years, didn’t either.
Best Rap Album, an award we didn’t even see given, apparently went to Eminem’s “Relapse,” an album so atrocious Eminem has even publicly disavowed it, stating that he had still been “getting the drugs out of [his] system.” In years past, yes, he would have deserved this award. But for a rehashed album of serial killing and pop star-baiting, no. At least the true best hip hop album of the year, “The Ecstatic,” by Mos Def, got a nomination.

Taylor Swift won the country award, over real country legend George Strait. Dylan lost the award for Americana album (which is like Jordan losing an award for basketball); other great nominees in that category (Lucinda Williams, Wilco, and Willie Nelson) lost as well. The winner? Levon Helm.

Tragedy of tragedies, the regrouped Spinal Tap lost to…Stephen Colbert (for comedy album).

The Black Eyed Peas gave a god-awful performance. How is this band this huge? It boggles my mind. I blame it all on Fergie—the rest of the group has talent. They added Fergie, dropped the talent and then they began to sell records. Fergie raps and talks about “I’ma be blingin” and I cringe— I get physically embarrassed for her and for her fans in light of her horrendous attempt at hip hop, her flow is horrid. BEP have become the hip hop version of Creed.

What was with Quentin Tarantino? Talking about a blues legend and then announcing the Hip Hop performance, Quentin proved once again that despite being a great filmmaker, he’s a moronic douche sometimes. Was that a faux urban, hip hopish accent he was going for? It reminds me of when he fought with Spike Lee and told Lee that he “knew black people and culture” better than him…hmmm….

Let’s move on, shall we? Bright spots?
Beyonce. I admit it, she’s crazy good. Big, fun, silly pop songs that are insanely catchy and that don’t quickly grow to grate on your nerves are her specialty. She makes fun songs, dances great, looks great and deserved the clean-up she made with her six awards. The performance by Drake, Lil Wayne and Eminem was pretty fantastic—or at least it would have been had it not been bleeped out to protect our sensitive ears resulting in us missing half of each verse. It was nice to see Em back, free of his Rehab fat and really spitting—here’s hoping Rehab 2 is actually good. Lil Wayne can cool off in jail and hopefully learn to write about more than pot and BJs, and Drake can continue his ascent to hip hop superstardom. Elton and Gaga together was entertaining—Jeff Beck on stage was cool. Kings of Leon won Record of the Year, Phoenix won alternative album of the year.

Okay, next year—let the winners give their speech, actually show their acceptance, and hire a more diverse group of voters. Please, Grammy’s?

“The Wire” as a Prelude to the State of Journalism

“The Wire” is not only ridiculously entertaining, amazingly acted, wonderfully produced, beautifully shot and worked through, tied up and completed without a wasted moment or a with a question left unanswered, it is also immensely important. The thing that sets this show over the top as quite possibly one of the top five American pop-culture artifacts of our time and makes it something that will present future generations with authentic information about people and problems is that it, as many critics have hailed, holds a “mirror up to a broken America.”

The final season of the show did it’s best to answer the question of “why is no one paying attention to what is going on?” For after all, the first 4 seasons laid out in gripping detail and without hyperbole the state of the inner city in regards to the drug trade, poverty, the economy, political structures, the police force, schools, harbors, unions, public housing and city hall. No stone was left unturned and the absurdity of what occurs and what is not done to rectify and address the problems is left out in the open. The last season turns it’s scope on the media, and by proxy the average American who ends up being responsible for what the media does in fact cover.

The fact that the writers, producers and sources for “The Wire” have worked extensively as professionals in the media, city government, the police force, the school system and in street gangs gives it that finalizing touch of “realness.” The show did it’s best to wake the country up through entertainment, something that is done at moments few and far between.

Which leads me to stop with the praises for this show, as much as I could continue. I don’t want to ruin it for anyone who hasn’t seen it, just know that if you commit to the first part of the first season and stay with it, it will hook you and after viewing the last episode you will feel as if you’ve been entertained, learned new things and been exposed to authentic voices that aren’t always heard.

What this delves into for me is the state of journalism today. Why should art be more apt at opening a window to a world right outside of our window? Why aren’t the weighty issues and real things in need of coverage not shown to us on the TV news and in our newspapers?

A featurette on the last disc of the last season of “The Wire” focuses on several journalists associated with the show and all of them point to the myriad of problems facing journalism today. The primary problem is that journalism has become a commodity in which focus groups are tested on the reactions they have to styles and presentations of journalism in the same way that movies are tested for market value. So really, journalism today is formed for the people’s taste, preference and expectations. We are given what we want to see, not what we need to see. This is contrary to the entire purpose of news reporting. Journalists should function as a public servants by exposing truth, reporting facts and leading us to reconsider what we think and alert us to things we were in the dark on. This is what it has historically done, despite problems and lapses. Yet over the past ten years this has become less and less true; now we see on TV what we want to see rather than what we need to see, because it’s marketed as a product and for the ratings to stay up we have to see things we agree with, whether they are true or not. Americans expect news to be free, instant and entertaining. We’ve stopped buying papers, so papers force the folks who’ve spent years building contacts, researching and investigating into retirement. Newspapers then are forced to do “less with more,” which leads to an inferior product, which leads to less sales, which leads to more staff trimming until the death of the print news medium occurs. We want news instant, so we have 24 hour news networks that report and compete for ratings, thus producing news that is biased and non-factual (Fox News), openly opinionated (MSNBC) and sensationalistic (CNN). We’ve flooded the internet and turned it into a breeding ground where everyone is a reporter and information is constantly being pushed onto the world without research or fact-checking and people are free to choose what to believe without attention to what is really true.

The days of a shared news source in which we can all gather around is gone. Where people used to watch Primetime news and read the paper gathering the same facts for which they could garnish their own opinions from, conservatives tune to Fox News to rile and support their anger and prejudices, liberals tune to MSNBC to join in the process of laughing at conservatives and opinions are handed out to both groups so that no opinion is left unformed. The one valid source of ethical, unbiased journalism in America today can be found on NPR yet huge portions of Americans find it’s unfiltered coverage dull or liberally biased. I guess we’ve grown so used to having pre-packaged opinions doled out to us that when real, unfiltered news is reported we still accuse it of “bias.”

Geek Diatribe

As always, thanks for visiting “Raging Against the Dying Light,” all dozen of you. ( : I have a lot of loose threads in this one, my main articles for November and December are in formation and so now’s the time to spew out what I refer to as a “Geek Diatribe” to touch on all the incomplete facets of interest I write about on this site. This time it’s all light too, no politics or religion!

First off, the 2009 Baseball season is over. I find it a very depressing of an end at that…I’m not a vehement Yankee hater, I have extreme love for the history of the team and readily admit the talents and watchability of most of the current Yank roster, but I always have a bit of anger over the unrestrained budget the team has to work with and the idea that they can “buy’ the championship…and the fact that A-Rod alone earns a higher salary than several combined teams. So, there’s always the hope that they will be shutdown and it will be proven that money can’t suppress the drive to overcome that thrives in the underdog teams; the Phillies would have been a much more satisfying win. But the whole thing got me thinking about the structure of the current season; it’s November, and Baseball is just now wrapping up. It’s cold, grey over much of the country and well on the way to winter. Now, I never thought I’d specify that the season should be shorter since Baseball is really the only sport for me, but the season should be shorter! It’s a spring and summer game, and the now extended season length drags it into competing too heavily with football broadcasts and ticket sales, and the game just doesn’t seem appropriate this time of year for whatever reasons. I say, start it in early spring as is done now, start the post-season in September and have the World Series the first week of October. Anyway, as many people thrive for the play-off season when things heat up, as fun as that can be I prefer two other key baseball phases—the opening game through the first two weeks of the season and the events of and games leading up to July’s all-star game and home-run derby. A lot of this ties in with many of the teams still having a shot, but just as much at factor is the time of the year and the way it perfectly fits with the game. I imagine football fanatics feel the same way about fall and February.

Item two on the geek docket is the best music of the 2000s. I’ve pretty much got the 50 picked out for albums and almost for songs, I just have to properly rank them which requires listening to them and making the call on order. It’s a compulsive geek trait for any type of list like this, but you can’t just arbitrarily throw them together. There’s a distinctive reason why item A is at 17 and item B is at 16…or at least there should be. As I was working on my list I noticed that “Paste” magazine already has their “50 albums of the 2000s” on their site. I really like “Paste” and they’ve turned me on to a lot of good music over the years, but their list was off (in my mind) on several accounts—for one thing, it’s early November, there’s still 2 months of music yet to be released. Related to that, their “Best of ‘09” list isn’t up yet—it seems fairly backward to sum up a decade before the last year of the decade. As to the selections, there’s the obvious nerd-centric private idols that the publication adores and will rank highly and mention continuously even if no one else does as highly—everyone does this, my lists are guilty of it as well. “Paste” is very noticeable for adoring a core 5 bands that can never do wrong, as is Rolling Stone and AMG and it’s interesting because these core 5 never overlap in the same regard between these publications. That’s a very signifying factor that when it comes to art and pop criticism, there is no great science. There may be general critical consensus that something new and groundbreaking is “excellent” but it often differs from group to group and certain styles and personalities latch on to certain sounds. I won’t ruin the article for you, but the #1 album of the decade for “Paste” sums up their stance and personality as a publication, and that’s not a bad thing. I’m pretty sure my “1 choice does the same thing for me, as will RS and AMG’s. Another observation on “Pastes” selections is that they was heavily eschewed towards music made by bands established in the ‘00s, with a few ‘90s bands new work thrown in but very little attention paid to career artists releasing very notable work in the decade. No mention of critically acclaimed and massively entertaining work by Dylan, Young, Springsteen, U2, etc. Jazz, Hip Hop and Blues were almost completely overlooked as well, and although Indie is a major focus for “Paste,” they’re an eclectic publication so I expected more variety. The 2000s, looking at them as a whole, may very well have produced the bulk of music that will stay with me the longest. I was a junior in High school at the beginning of the decade and as it draws to a close I’m a first year grad student working on a Masters. In between there was college, work, marriage. I’ve moved several times and grown a lot, and the music I’ve heard that’s stuck with me from each phase of this decade is formative and memorable. Granted, most of my all time favorite albums were made long before this time, but there’s something to be said for what was new and vibrant amidst the average, waiting just to be found.

On to the next one; I always cap up the year’s best in graphic art and prose– comics and graphic novels—with a top ten list at the end of each year as well. This year has been phenomenal with trend breaking literate work in Graphic Novels- – “Asterios Polyp” by David Mazuchelli, The illustrated book of Genesis by R. Crumb, pretty much the entire Vertigo monthly catalogue, creator owned and controlled titles by Jeff Smith and Terry Moore (“RASL” and “Echo,” respectively) and notable work from indie publishing houses IDW (“Locke and Keye“), Boom Studios (“The Unknown: The Devil Made Flesh“), etc. As far as mainstream work, generally meaning the “big two” (Marvel and DC), it’s become clear that despite cornering 65 percent of the market and being host to millions of loyal fans who refuse to read books published by anyone else, Marvel is far inferior to almost every other publishing company, especially DC. It just hasn’t been Marvel’s year. They sell out to Disney for a big paycheck. They opt for raising the majority of their titles to a higher price point– an entire dollar more, making most of their mainstream titles 3.99, a price DC reserves for special events and “important” stories. Unlike Marvel, when DC charges 3.99 they provide ten additional pages of story as well as better paper and ink quality. Marvel heads (here’s looking at you, Joe Quesada—by the way, stay retired from penciling, your art is atrocious) originally stated that this was the result of a tighter economy and to combat mounting paper costs but later Quesada admitted in an interview that it was really because “this is a business” and they wanted to see how much profit they could make if the cost of the titles continued to go up and sales didn’t dip accordingly. To make matters worse for Marvel, their output hasn’t been good enough to justify such tactics anyway. The only really smart move they’ve done recently is re-tool “Amazing Spider Man” last year, shedding the excess titles, hiring a great staff of rotating writers and artists for it, releasing it thrice monthly and generally making it the best popcorn, fun-for-everyone-over-13 book as possible. They have even (thus far) kept it price-pointed at 2.99 and the stories from it all year have been great escapist fun. Other than that, they’ve consistently dropped the ball. Big tie-in events and mini-series? DC’s “Blackest Night” is far better than Marvel’s “The List” or whatever they’re calling it now (since it’s an ever continuing fall-out tale from last summers “Secret Invasion” which was far inferior to DC’s “Final Crisis” at that). Thor? An Eisner-winning surprisingly smart book by Stracinzski is now moving on without Stracinzki and staying at 3.99 (without the extra ten pages). Then there’s the it-just-won’t-die slew of “Marvel Zombies” mini’s that get worse with each sequel. Or dumb ideas like “Marvel Apes” or “X-Babies.” There’s the never-reveal-the-ending-to-the-mystery compost-heap “Hulk,” which gets ever more ridiculous and stopped being fun half a year ago. They were building up steam with “Uncanny X Men” each issue after 500 then lost it having each issue be part of an asinine tie in to an asinine concept series. The only other worthwhile Marvel title right now is “Fantastic 4,” while DC has been on a run with their mainstream work as well. Geoff Johns and Gary Frank are producing the best Superman mini in years, “Secret Origin,” and their entire run on “Action Comics” was terrific last year. Since Batman’s death, every tie-in Bat title has been excellent., notably, “Batman and Robin,” with Grant Morrison and initially Frank Quietely but “Detective Comics” as well if only for J.H. Williams III’ impressionistic and unconventional art. “Green Lantern” and every “Blackest Night” tie in has been great sci-fi and “Wednesday Comics” was a truly original and successful idea. Of course, “JSA” has fallen off and “JLA” seems to never work, but the point is that much of their mainstream work is great and most of it is approachable and more affordable than their competitions. Most importantly, where DC has it’s “Vertigo” imprint which puts out a lot of great, intelligent adult-geared work and DC utilizes that imprint heavily, Marvel’s “Icon” imprint which allows creator funded work to be released doesn’t get nearly enough emphasis. “Criminal” by Brubaker and Phillips is back again with another miniseries, and it’s great. “Kick Ass,” is always fun whenever Mark Millar bothers to get it out (he’s late on everything lately), but what else does Icon have? And why no funding from Marvel? Why not more emphasis?

Okay, last up (and briefly) is “The Wire.” Harvard recently announced a college course that will utilize “The Wire” in its curriculum. If any show has ever been worthy of this, it’s this one. The smartest, most important and best produced television show of all time. Five seasons, so check them all out. That’s all for now.

Celebrating Mediocrity

My brother commented on one of my articles recently suggesting I make a list of hit films, books and songs that, although very popular, are not good in the artistic or critical sense; in other words, what’s my top ten hit media items that I feel are really just crap?

Well, this isn’t really that. This isn’t a countdown of what’s the worst popular junk in systematic dissection, this is more an article about the enthusiasm for mediocrity as a whole.

There’s a recent TV commercial for McDonald’s, a company I loathe almost as much as Wal Mart. In the commercial two young guys are in a traditionally “trendy” looking coffee shop. Both are wearing glasses, one is reading a book. Both speak in low, stereotypical “pretentious” voices. One says to the other “did you know McDonald’s sells coffee now?” The other says “well what are we doing here then?” He whips his glasses off saying he doesn’t really need them. He says he’s tired of sitting in coffee shops and talking about “films” and that he really just enjoys “sitting and watching football.” The other agrees but concedes he actually does need his glasses.

So really, this commercial is showing that there is no need to go to a trendy independent coffee shop where poetry readings and acoustic open mic sessions are  held and where people discuss art, film and philosophy. No, now you can go to McDonald’s and get a dollar cappuccino and take it home to sit on your couch and watch football till your brain drips out your ear from the numbness of average, ordinary mediocrity.

I’m not going to get into a criticism of football. I’ve written about baseball often on this site, if you click on “baseball” at the bottom of the page and read back at all of my baseball articles from last year you’ll even see at least two that comment on why I feel baseball is a superior sport to football on various levels. That’s not something to get into yet again here. I don’t loath football, I’m just not a fan. Perhaps it’s somewhat silly for me to equate baseball as a symbol of positive American values and football as a symbol of negative American values, but it’s mainly just for fun in my case. No, I’ve been known to watch a super bowl occasionally (I’ll definitely tune in to the halftime show this year because Bruce Springsteen is my favorite musician of all time). Not everyone who watches football is a symbol of mediocrity, but the idea that there’s nothing better for the average guy than to sit on his couch and watch football all day, possibly eating fast-food, is a bit of mediocrity celebration.

On a smaller scale, much of what is incredibly popular is insanely mediocre. Your typical active rock radio station plays the most uninspiring new rock imaginable (Nickleback anyone?). Hip Hop stations play the same club jam and pop rap hit like “Live Your Live,” “Apple Bottom Jeans” (Re-Remix), or a mash up between Justin Timberlake, Akon and Bow Wow. Country stations wallow in mediocrity. Alt-country, classic country or even slightly edgy country will not be on the radio–instead get ready for Toby Keith, Big & Rich or any number of other brain numbing works. A slew of mediocre books were turned into mediocre films over the past months ( Marley and Me, He’s Just Not That Into You, Confessions of a Shopaholic). I’ve mentioned authors that churn out sub-par work on a regular basis that manage to sell truckloads worth of books (James Patterson post-the first five Cross novels, Nicholas Sparks, many would say “Twilight” ).

The point is, quite often very unintelligent, unoriginal, and utterly crappy material becomes very successful, be it music, movie or book. I can list a lot but there’s really no point. Why do such things appeal to so many people? Many would say that they are safe, middle of the road affairs that appeal to the lowest common denominator so that they can reach the widest group of people. Typically such things don’t require too much thought, too much absorption and concentration or any measure of taste cultivation. Really, the best of any medium quite often requires the reader, listener or viewer to participate in the process a bit by thinking, involving themselves in the field to better understand the author or artist. So what makes this troublesome is not that people like “crap.” People are different, they can like anything they want to. What’s problematic is that the better work is too often buried underneath mediocrity, pushed out of stores to make room for the top selling garbage, and ignored by the radio stations, TV stations and book stores.

DBT, Palin Politics and “Six Feet Under”

Drive By Truckers

This post is going to be a bit scatter-shot, but there are three unrelated topics I’d like to write a little about.

First of all, if you scroll back about ten posts or so, you’ll see a blog in which I encourage anyone reading to check out a few musicians that I feel are making the best modern popular music. I was very excited to find out a few days ago that two of the bands mentioned in that article are now on tour together–The Drive By Truckers and The Hold Steady. It’s actually very suprising for me to hear this, because I would never have imagined these two bands would ever headline together. They both write excellent lyrics, play music that just sounds incredible, are raved about for their live shows and each band released a contender for album of the year this year—DBT with Brighter Than Creation’s Dark back at the beginning of the year, The Hold Steady with Stay Positive about a month or two ago. But stylistically they don’t have a lot in common–DBT makes a mixture of hard southern rock, folk and alt.country, Hold Steady is a mash up of classic rock and eighties post punk–think early Springsteen (The Wild,The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle era) meets late Clash and The Replacements. I’ve been able to see DBT once but never Hold Steady and I could not be more excited. They’re hitting several small to mid venues across the country, and tickets are priced around 20 bucks which is almost unheard of these days, so don’t miss out.

Okay, next up I want to briefly weigh in on the whole Sarah Palin debacle. I know that by this point every journalist, pundit, talk show host, blogger and citizen on the street has voiced a loud opinion but I had to just vent a few points. See, what’s obvious is that McCain was running out of gas campagining with nothing but his POW and military experience to rant about, the fumes were almost out on his supposed “Maverick” reputation (that Rolling Stone cover was almost a decade ago and his “radical Republican politics” were now just “status quo Republican politics). So what did he do? Well, McCain is well known to be an avid fan of playing craps, so he threw the dice and picked a VP candidate that he had met only once. People have been arguing relentlessly whether or not she was qualified to be VP or (in the case of something happening to 72 year old McCain) even President herself–does a term as mayor in a small town followed by the beginning of a Governor term in a sparsely populated rich state match up or surpass Obama’s experience as a Community Organizer, lawyer and senator? I’m not going to debate that at this point, I’m just going to point out a few issues she’s taken that in my opinion prove her “unfit to run” status much better than any lack of experience could. Even if she’d been Governor for 2 terms and senator for 3 I’d feel that her position on these issues are much more damning:

1) The Banned Books case: Palin once tried to user her leadership postion to get dozens of books banned and removed from public libraries in Alaska–that’s right, not school libraries, but public libraries. Palin didn’t feel adults had the right to choose what they should or should not read. Though several magazines and online sites have argued over what all was on that list (and the librarian that was aghast when Palin contacted her about the legalites of such a move has refused to comment), most lists have included classics such as To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, Shakespeare’s Twelve Night, modern novels by Stephen King and Dean Koontz and children’s books like How to Eat Fried Worms and Hey God! It’s Me, Margaret. OKAY, I LEFT THE ABOVE PARAGRAPH AS ORIGINALLY POSTED SO THAT I WOULDN’T BE BACKPEDALING HERE: IT IS INNACURATE; MY LATEST RESEARCH INTO THIS ISSUE REVEALTED THAT NO LIST OF ANY BOOKS SUPPOSEDLY BANNED BY PALIN IS ACCURATE; ON RECORD SHE NEVER BANNED ANY BOOKS FROM ANY PUBLIC LIBRARIES DURING HER TENURE AS MAYOR. SHE DID CONTACT THE LOCAL LIBRARIAN AND ASKED HER HOW ONE WOULD “THEORETICALLY” GO ABOUT REMOVING CERTAIN “OBJECTIONABLE” MATERIALS FROM PUBLIC LIBRARIES. THE LIRBRARIAN WAS AGHAST AND STATED THAT ALL BOOKS IN ALASKA’S PUBLIC LIBRARIES WERE TYPICAL, ACCEPTABLE AND CREDIBLE LIBRARY FARE. THE SPECIFIC BOOKS PALIN “THEORETICALLY” WANTED REMOVED ARE UNKNOWN. THANKS.

2)Palin opposes stem cell research. She also is a staunch abortion foe, and has stated that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose even in cases of incest and rape. When she was recently inundated with questions about her seventeen year old daughter’s pregnancy she has stated that Bristol, her daughter, has made her decision to have the child and to marry the father. Okay, as Jon Stewart tried to hammer home on a recent episode of The Today Show Bristol and her family have been able to make the decision that Palin would deny other women to make for themselves if she had her way. She would take the decision away from the individual and the family and place it in the hands of the government; the government would deny single working women in much worse economic shape than the Palin family the right to make their own decision concerning such a difficult matter.

3) Alaska makes most of it’s money in gas and oil–would a Palin run White House really be concerned with alternative fuels? Also, Palin has stated before that she feels humans have no impact on global warming, so environmental laws would in no safe hands with her and McCain.

4)She’s willing to run with McCain, a man who has voted against equal pay for an equal day’s work for women–Obama voted for it, and Obama has consistently worked for policies that help working class women much more than Palin. What’s better for American women–a female vice president or economic policies that have women’s best interests at heart? If you think the latter, you have to vote Obama.

5)Palin voted for the bridge to nowhere, then said she didn’t.

Okay, I could go on for pages but you get my drift.

Last of all I wanted to briefly discuss the TV show Six Feet Under. I’m going to write a longer piece, “An Appreciation of Six Feet Under,” which you can find at:

http://dmhamby2.wordpress.com/an-appreciation-of-six-feet-under/

I tend to watch most TV shows by DVD from either netflix or the library, and when I moved to a new town I noticed my local library had every disc of Six Feet Under. Now, 4 months later I’ve seen every episode and feel the need to write a piece discussing the show. Although I’ve had several other favorite shows over the years that I like more, I feel that maybe the best in quality and importance very well may be Six Feet Under. Sure, in many ways shows like The Simpsons or Buffy the Vampire Slayer are higher on my personal list for being enjoyable, intelligent and re-watchable, but for sheer acting skills, direction, depth of subject matter and pure emotional investment, Six Feet Under does what no other show has done. You’ll be able to read why I say this soon.

Well, those are my three topics for the day–hopefully my next article will be more contained.