Thought I’d put my essay on Sacco’s Palestine up here, which I think is one of the best things I’ve ever written.
Nonfiction comics, works that are memoirs or portray true events, are often concerned with the question of authenticity in their depictions. The issue of how to faithfully render an event without injecting the author’s personal feelings was at the forefront of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and the impact of that work seems to have made authenticity a pervasive issue in nonfiction comics. Joe Sacco’s comics-travelogue Palestine is unique among the genre in that it engages directly with parallel modes in which the same stories it tells are told. In Palestine, layouts and the mechanism of time on the comics page are used to critique the inherent flaws of traditional journalism and especially mass media’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In doing so, the book foregrounds the importance of narrative style to the disconnect between the stories of the Palestinians in the book and the Western understanding of their struggle.
While Palestine is concerned with faithfulness to the events portrayed, it certainly makes a point of showing how not to cover life in the West Bank. The chapters “Remind Me” and “A Thousand Words” form the most direct critique of the modus operandi of traditional news outlets. The former chapter is formatted with columns and drawings of headshots of famous figures and still-photo style drawings to resemble a newspaper article (fig 1). However, it functions as a parody of newspaper journalism, adopting a directly conversational tone (“Do we need to talk about 1948?”) and narrating the author’s personal experience in the present tense. Completing the statement is Sacco’s injection of comics grammar into the text piece, as he draws a small square, a panel, around the first letter of each paragraph that marks a transition in time or space. Sacco is not limited by constraints of space or style, so he is able to provide a naturalistic picture of his surroundings rather than a detail-oriented article. The handwritten, unfettered by advertising, nine-page illustrated opinion-travelogue which makes up “Remind Me” forms an implicit statement on the shortcomings of newspaper journalism in dealing with an issue on a deeper level than explaining a series of events.
In “A Thousand Words,” a caption box on page 54 reads “I’m ferreting out a talker for the who/what/why of an inverted pyramid lead paragraph,” and a person responds “It started at the Red Cross Office … they’re protesting the expulsion orders.” The focus on turning this scene into a story works together with the formal arrangement of this scene as a simulation of 24-hour news cycle coverage of events like this. To accomplish this effect, Sacco uses several full pages without delineated panels which still have discernible “scenes” which I will call “the incident style.” Without panels, the events all run together and only Sacco’s captions provide a chronological order to the action. Along with the breathless, improvisational rhythm of the broken-up captions, the pages suggest a situation where actions are happening so fast and so frequently that their beginnings and endings cannot be distinguished from one another. Portraying this event in the incident style mimics the impression that handheld footage played on a newscast makes; there is no understanding of the circumstances communicated, just visceral chaos. Even the formatting of the text plays into this, as the caption box containing the explanation for the violence seems like it is being crowded in by the images on the page, and it is oriented on a diagonal from the upper-right of the page to the bottom-left, the reverse of the direction that comics in English are read (fig 2). As “Remind Me” reveals the limitations of a newspaper or newsmagazine article as an effective way of conveying a true understanding of the plight of Palestinians, “A Thousand Words” functions as a commentary on the shallowness of mass media coverage by using the panel-less format to show that it is impossible to truly comprehend an event such as this by reading or watching a news report.
While Palestine criticizes television and print reporting, it doesn’t push comics as a necessarily better alternative. Sacco’s portrayal of his own time in Palestine suggests insecurity about his ability to relay his experiences in a way that seems both true and unfiltered through his own point of view while criticizing the way news organizations cover the same area. A key presentational element throughout the book is that Sacco always establishes his physical position in a scene for which he was actually present from a “camera” looking out at himself, rather than in a first person view. We are always reminded that Sacco occupies a definite space, which reminds the reader that he could not possibly observe and render every moment he experienced perfectly. The majority of the pages in the book feature oblique rectangular panels hung on angles to the page, with borders drawn reasonably straight but clearly without the magisterial influence of using a ruler. Each page done in this manner seems unsure of itself, especially in contrast to the times when Sacco switches to grid-based pages, which I will call “the narrative style,” when relating longer stories told to him by interview subjects.
The first strictly gridded passage in the book is “Moderate Pressure Part 2,” when a Palestinian named Ghassan recounts the story of his imprisonment and torture at the hands of Israeli authorities. In this section, Sacco goes from six panels per page to nine, then twelve, then to sixteen, and finally to twenty, the panels decreasing in size to show the pervasive claustrophobia of Ghassan’s situation as he sits on a backless chair with his hands bound to a pole. Increasing the amount of panels per page also highlights the loss of a sense of time brought on by the experience. Conventionally, using more panels per page lends itself to showing minute detail of a single moment or moving very quickly over a long passage of time, but neither of those things happen here. Ghassan says he was in prison for nineteen days, but the amount of panels grows inversely to the duration of time they show. On the twelve panel page, the amounts of time discussed are small, “one or two hours” and “ten or fifteen minutes,” and they proceed in a logical order (fig 3). When twenty panels are used, the narration begins to discuss time passing in days and explains events without a clear order. The hallucinations that Ghassan began having “after four days” which he had “till about the fifteenth day” are depicted before what happens on “the fifth or sixth” day (fig 4). The story ends with a page on a twelve-panel grid, but Sacco uses the final two tiers for a wide, open shot of a street scene of an Israeli crowd to signify Ghassan’s exit from the confines of prison, but also to highlight that the Israelis were already free as his car drives away from them (fig 5).
In using and parodying conventional forms of news reporting, Palestine points out the weaknesses in their ability to relay the complex human reasons for the Palestinian conflict. The incident style of reporting is contrasted with a narrative style, which brings the emotional content of the lives of the interviewees to the forefront. By relaying the stories of Palestinians in a method that emphasizes the qualities of experience rather than informational aspects like who, what and why, Palestine finds a new way to try to relate their lives to Western readers.
I just “broke up” with a friend who was a girlfriend at one point. She said the title of this post to me, which I thought was really funny. I’m just writing this to kind of take account of what I feel so I can organize it and put it away. This is a good thing that should have happened a long time ago. We could have avoided the years of back and forth almost-love and hate. I can’t say I know what I would have done instead of all that, but that’s impossible anyway. Unfortunately she was also my best friend, when she wanted to be, and I don’t really have anyone else I feel near as close to. But I don’t know that it’s really good to have that, a person you lean on constantly, because then they’re just a support to you. I tend to be really codependent. So that’s also good for me. I can’t help being sad about it. We had a lot of great times together. We had a lot of aggressively terrible ones too, but I tend to romanticize people even when I dislike them. She liked to invite me over and then ignore me, for whatever reason. She could be really childish, always passive aggressive and petty, and always made me feel like everything I did to hurt her was a serious problem, when I always tried to forgive her. She made her friends yell at me instead of doing it herself, because she was too scared to tell me what her problem was. Which is how this finally happened, I called her out on being a jerk to me and she actually stood up and told me what the problem was, so that’s good. So it was ok. I’m not gonna be “the same” again, like how I was before we fucked each other up, but I’m gonna keep moving.
Just finished drawing this, as part of my obsession with injecting basketball into fantasy stories. Obviously trying to imitate Raymond Pettibon a little bit.
Tallahassee by the Mountain Goats is an album I’m sure that eight hundred thousand people have written about already but my goal for 2012 is to forget about the “everyone can do everything now so nothing you do is important” double bind and just write about stuff like I want to again.
This wasn’t one of the Goats albums I liked much until just recently when they played nearly half of it when I saw them. I was driven to revisit it largely by hearing “People say friends don’t destroy one another, what do they know about friends?” in Game Shows Touch Our Lives. The album is about a recently married couple whose marriage completely falls apart as they descend into alcoholism and eventually get divorced, but it doesn’t quite end the way it’s “supposed” to. Pretty much every song on this thing has a line that points to the theme that me writing this is about: the love that two people still have for each other when they can’t love each other. The feeling that, even though you are destroying and being destroyed by this person who you are pretty sure you love, you are all you have, and you can at least share that. When you hear No Children for the first time, it will gut you. When you hear it live for the first time, you will be amazed that the song can undergo such an incredible tonal shift to a triumphant singalong. Both contexts work, because that’s how that feels. I think this is pretty well encapsulated in this song, Old College Try: “I will walk down to the end with you, if you will come all the way down with me.” This whole thing is in shambles, nothing is right, but I guess we’re together in it. The album ends with the protagonists having sex on the floor of their house after they’ve been divorced, so it never gets any better for them. They’re addicted to each other really, in the actual emotional addiction sense.
I had (and probably still have?) a relationship just like this, so i get sent straight back to the time she was drunk for an entire month and when i’d hope she wouldn’t be able to make it to hangouts because i knew i didn’t have the control to stay away. We hated each other so much but we didn’t have anyone else. She’s much better off now with someone who isn’t insane, and I’m still afraid of having that happen again, or worse, finding out it’s just my fault.
Not to end this on a sour note though. Tallahassee’s amazing. Listen to all of it, several times.
I am finally done with the 5000 word essay on Frank Miller’s Daredevil that’s been taking up all of my time since school let out, so here’s this!
When Howard Chaykin was here, he said that at a certain point in his career he’d realized that there was a whole vocabulary of comics he’d known existed but never bothered to learn, and once he learned it his comics were like “the difference between rock and roll and jazz.” As a big fan of music and comics, this got me really excited. David tried to ask him about it afterward but he was busy doing something much more Howard Chaykin-y: 1) Talking 2) to a Jewish 3) woman 4) about musicals. Walking back to the car, David mentioned that I listened to “the punk rocks” which I had hoped would be a good way to get that conversation going again, but Howard disdainfully spat “THE PUNKS! THE PUNK ROCKERS!” so I just let it go. Nonetheless the idea of jazz and rock and roll comics stuck with me and it wasn’t till a few days ago when I finished Scud that I felt like I had a good way to write about it.
Time2 is probably the jazziest comic Chaykin’s ever done, in that it revolves around actual jazz and also because it does what I consider “jazz comics.” If I had to call it this reminds me of later Miles Davis or Ornette Coleman, the high energy avant-garde type stuff. It’s because there are a million things going on in just this one page, and something like Bitches Brew sounds like 6 instruments playing 6 different songs until you focus in on the bass, the only instrument playing a repeating figure (also one of the best bass parts in all of music), and let everything build from it. Look at the background of the page. There’s that jagged white marker scribble at the top, the big white square where the blood falls, and the rest of the page is filled up with a liquid red texture. Even this picks up the meaning of the action, there’s this violent action moment, the bloodstain at the release of the tension, and then that deep red feeling after the murder is over. Bruzenak is throwing captions boxes everywhere in crazy jagged patterns, the Time2 taktaktak is forcing its way into panels. The lettering functions a lot like John McLaughlin’s guitar does in Bitches Brew, odd sounding discordant stabs on seemingly random beats, bouncing around the page in and out of and through panels. Even the idea of panels is pretty loose here. I love how Chaykin handles the decreasing circles too. The big moment, the stab in the forehead is unobscured, which solves the problem of how the circles get smaller as the tension increases. Look at that bit of red in the 3rd to last one too when the mechanic comes. Nice touch right? You really have to take this in as a page as well as on a story basis or you’re not getting the full effect. There’s that adage about Davis, “you have to listen to the notes he’s not playing,” the idea that he circumvented conventional ideas about melodic progression, that works for this page too. Chaykin’s not giving us an establishing shot and then a few full frames of this happening, he’s giving us devices that tell us how it feels while it’s happening.
Jazz has a reputation for being music for musicians. Time2 is a comic by Howard Chaykin for Howard Chaykin. It’s about his favorite things, sex, jazz, and hating his parents and ex-wives, and all done in a way that only he and people who know him can really understand.
Scud on the other hand, is a rock and roll comic, though I don’t mean it in the potentially derogatory sense that Howard might have. I saw a time-lapse video of Schrab drawing a page of Scud, and I learned a few things. Schrab wrote, drew, inked (markered really), and lettered Scud all on his own, and he draws the letters right onto the pages. He makes spelling mistakes sometimes even! Anyway, Scud is all energy and feels really out of control to read. I wouldn’t be surprised if Schrab just sat down with ideas and drew them out rather than ever scripting anything. He’s doing the comics equivalent of a Greg Ginn guitar solo, just thrashing away here: Scud’s speech bubble is also a panel border, Voodoo Ben Franklin’s “orgasms” caption is hilarious, the entire visual design of Jeff, the plug head knee-mouth tentacle monster. There’s so much energy and exaggeration of every page of Scud.
I can’t really put up a page example of this, but Scud’s a rock and roll comic is because it’s about girls and problems and failure. Scud is supposed to self-destruct after he kills Jeff, but in the first issue he figures that out and keeps Jeff on life-support so he can keep living. It’s a pretty brilliant metaphor for the way creativity can hurt you as a person. There’s this horrible chaotic monster that you want to kill, but you have to keep it alive so you stay alive. There’s an entire issue that’s pretty thinly about Schrab getting fucked around by Hollywood. And then there’s the last four issues, which I won’t spoil for you.
Lou Reed might be one of the most famously crotchety bastards in music history. He’s a generally awful live performer if you approach live music with the expectation that it will sound anything like it’s recorded counterpart, and you enjoy songs because of things like melodies and rhythms and the lack of the part where the singer talks for 10 minutes while the band repeats 4 bars.
BUT. This is a fucking fantastic performance of one the many songs in the heap of classics Lou has written. And the video is important too. Lou looks and sounds like a corpse, basically. Candy Says, as I’d hope you know, is a song about Candy Darling, a transwoman who died of leukemia when she was 25. But tell me it doesn’t take on a whole new context coming from our nearly 70 old, intensely bitter hero. The way he basically refuses to sing this song at all, one of his best vocal performances on record, how the crowd is talking through it. It’s so sad, but so good.
You know, they left out the context that this is about how he supported the Iraq war pretty much solely because he hated religion so much that he figured killing religious zealots regardless of whether they were responsible for something was cool. Kinda shitty really.
It just makes perfect sense that the Violent Femmes songs came from a freakishly thin short guy who is not in any way attractive. The absolute best music ever made for weirdos who don’t get much of anything.
I was thinking about Scott Pilgrim (there’s your comics for the post) and Mad Men. Scott Pilgrim, I think, perfectly captures all the attitudes I’d associate with people my age/myself. Lack of motivation, apathy, laziness, obsession with nostalgia because it reminds us of when we didn’t have all this nothing to look forward to. Mad Men takes all the things I hear old-timers say about themselves and puts them in perspective. Built this country, invented music, et cetera.
By season 4 of Mad Men, Don Draper is just like us, in the generational sense. We get most of this from his relationship with Faye, a business psychologist. ”Why does everyone want to talk about themselves?” he asks her. She responds “I don’t know. But whatever it is, when they’re done talking, they feel better.” The trick of this scene is that Don feels better at the end.
That kind of self-obsession isn’t a generation thing, it’s a humanity thing. There’s a key difference here though. There is a man, who I’m ashamed to say is a professor of economics at LSU, who says that Mr. Rogers’ habit of telling kids they were special in every episode is what has made us all such entitled brats. Really, he focus just changed over time. You used to be entitled because you were an American, now you’re just entitled “because.” Everyone grew up that up way.
Our problem is that the proliferation of information around us has made us all considerably more aware of how small and not special we are. With blogs, twitter, and facebook, we’re all trying to grant ourselves the legitimacy that the act of publishing seems to confer. It’s not really about communication, it’s trying to find anything, anything at all that’ll tell us something about what makes us in any way different or interesting.
Apathy is the result of how redundant we are on our own. As a critic, I’m always more excited to write about things I don’t think anyone has taken a shot at yet. But it seems less like I’m the first person to get there, and more like I just haven’t found anyone else’s take on it.
My point is this: You can feel special in a world you perceive as small, but when you know how big it is, it’s hard to feel anything but commonplace.
