Notmike is right: this truly is the best campaign poster ever.
25
Sep
24
Sep
Another week, another edition of my TV column at Torontoist.com.
24
Sep
1944:
In nature, there are creatures that can only live at the expense of hosts, from the life of other creatures: Grape vine and vine louse — without a grape vine, it perishes. A tree and mistletoe — without a tree to support it, no mistletoe. The Jew is the parasite among humans. That is the natural law. He can not do differently. He needs a host people to be able to live himself.
1993:
We began by saying that a cockroach cannot give birth to a butterfly. It is true. A cockroach gives birth to another cockroach […] The history of Rwanda show us clearly that a Tutsi stays always exactly the same that he has never changed. The malice, the evil are just as we knew them in the history of our country. We are not wrong in saying that a cockroach gives birth to another cockroach. Who could tell the difference between the Inyenzi who attacked in October 1990 [Kangura falsely claimed that Tutsi forces had attacked Kigali] and those of the 1960s [who had resisted the Hutu revolution of 1959]. They are all linked … Their evilness is the same. The unspeakable crimes of the Inyenzi today … recall those of their elders: killing, pillaging, raping girls and women, etc.
2007:
The first and most basic element in all hate propaganda is the dehumanization of the target, for if the perceived enemy is considered to be nonhuman, the concept of killing them entirely ceases to be a series of murders and instead becomes simple, necessary extermination.
Be vigilant.
22
Sep
21
Sep
The current issue of Maclean’s features some (cheap) Photoshoppery of Dubya-as-Saddam on the cover, accompanying an article by Patrick Graham about America is now attempting to sign on former Hussein flunkies to smooth into a hopeful era of relatively stable government in Iraq. (Which is not particularly news, but we are on newsmagazine time in this instance, so.)
Unsurprisingly, Michelle Malkin doesn’t like it, and starts right out with this gem:
When your left-wing magazine is in need of some quick buzz and a cheap circulation boost, what do you do?
Oh dear.
Dear Michelle Malkin:
1.) Maclean’s is not left-wing. At most, it’s center-right. Understand that you are talking here about a magazine that runs Mark Steyn as a regular columnist, that published Barbara Amiel for far too many years and whose current most notable columnist is Paul Wells, who’s an intelligent political writer but also the author of Right Side Up: The Fall of Paul Martin and the Rise of Stephen Harper’s New Conservatism, and a regular proponent of good ol’ tax cuts. (This is not to say that Wells is a neoconservative, but he’s definitely got rightish tendencies even if he defines himself personally as an independent.) Over the last decade it has been consistently critical of the Liberal Party – who are actually political centrists, and I understand that this might be confusing, but it’s how we do things up here – and more often than not outright dismissive of the leftist NDP. Its current EIC is Ken Whyte, who is most notable for two things: an exciting design sense and a highly defined sympathy for Alberta-style conservatism. (And really, “center-right” is being generous, considering that when Ken Whyte ran the National Post, it was widely considered to be a house organ for the Reform Party, and he imported most of his Post senior staffers when he took over Maclean’s.)
2.) Maclean’s is also the best-selling political magazine in Canada. Any “circulation boost” it would get from running a picture of George Bush altered to make him look bad would be painfully minimal.
3.) This is because in Canada, George W. Bush’s approval rate hasn’t topped fifteen percent for his entire presidency, and more often than not he’s been hovering at about the five to ten percent mark. Canadians do not like the man and do not like his politics. A picture of Bush made to look like a jackass is not new or novel or even particularly interesting to us, you see. It is like, say, pineapple upside-down cake. We know it’s always there, and we can always get it if we want it, but when we see it, we don’t immediately think “yes I must have that.”
So, Michelle, you’re wrong. I know everybody will be shocked to hear that. Absolutely shocked.
21
Sep
21
Sep
This week: “Incarnate,” a great song by the Watchmen. (No, not those Watchmen, the ones who aren’t the comic book Watchmen.)
20
Sep
I saw Persepolis a few weeks ago at a press screening for the Toronto International Film Festival, and last night I watched Superman/Doomsday. And really, there are no two works as spiritually akin as these two are: Marjane’s struggle against patriarchal fundamentalism is, dare I say it, exactly like Superman’s struggle against a giant killer alien hitting him repeatedly with a tanker truck.
Okay, not so much.
Persepolis is much, much better than the book was. This may seem like hyperbole, but I assure you, it isn’t – the dreadful events depicted in the comic take on much greater immediacy when they’re animated and happening in “real time” as opposed to when they’re static images on a page. The comic was interesting, and even involving, but for me it was never really very gripping. (Your mileage, of course, may vary.) The movie, on the other hand, is gripping – deeply so, both when it’s lightly entertaining (Marjane air-guitaring to Megadeth) and darkly oppressive (the secondhand, surrealistic accounts of the frontlines of the Iran/Iraq war). The same cartoony motif that is omnipresent throughout the film both makes the comedic bits funnier and the dramatic bits more poignant (and yes, I realize that you can say the same about the comic, but in the case of the film it’s even more apparent). And technically, it’s a marvel – simple black-and-white animation rarely manages to pull off the degree of liveliness that this flick does. Hell, most colour-animation films aren’t as lively as Persepolis is.
Early buzz has it that France has selected it as their entry for the Foreign Language Film category in this year’s Academy Awards, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it also get a nod for Best Animated Film in a year where thus far its only serious competition is Ratatouille. In short, it’s very, very good, quite possibly great. See it on the big screen if you can: it really is a beautifully made movie.
Superman/Doomsday is a retelling of the Death of Superman saga, pared down with a lot of the extraneous bits removed. Other than Doomsday and a few brief appearances by Kelex, this is a very pure Superman story: it’s about Superman, Lois Lane and Lex Luthor, and the complicated relationships they have, plus a lot of awesome earthshaking violence. Doomsday’s brutality is barely toned down at all – he brutally murders a lot of innocent human beings (although without much blood, to be sure), and later on in the movie Superman’s heat vision becomes genuinely terrifying as he wields it with the precision of a laser. (Well, it’s actually a crazy clone of Superman. I would have avoided spoiling that, but the moment he shows up it is SO GODDAMNED OBVIOUS HE IS A CLONE that I feel fine about it.)
What’s really wonderful about the movie is that, more than anything, this is Lois’ movie – she’s more the protagonist than Superman is, because Superman has a big-ass fight, dies, then is mostly offscreen for the majority of the rest of the movie until the SECOND big-ass fight. It’s Lois who has to deal with her lover being gone, and Lois who goes around trying to find out what the hell is up with Obviously Fake Replacement Clone Superman, and Lois who invades Lexcorp on a mission to discover the truth. (And, in case I haven’t made it clear yet, this is very much a movie about how Lois and Clark are a team, and I’m glad DC is one hundred percent behind that. Unlike certain other companies I could name, Marvel Comics.)
The voicework is pretty good: Anne Heche does a good Lois, Adam Baldwin is perfectly acceptable as Big Blue and James Marsters comes very, very close to matching the level of perfection Clancy Brown achieved as Lex Luthor in the Superman and Justice League cartoons. Not quite as good, but then again Clancy Brown just owned Lex, lock stock and barrel. The animation is generally good, despite the fact that the attempt to give Superman prominent cheekbones makes him look alternately like he’s severely aged or has weird facial scars.
Obviously, Superman/Doomsday isn’t going to be as general-interest as Persepolis is, but it’s a very well-made ‘toon feature and a decent Superman story, so if you like cartoons and you like Superman, you won’t be disappointed.
19
Sep
After my law school classes today, I went to four separate comic stores downtown looking for a copy of Dr. Thirteen: Architecture and Morality.
Sold out. Everywhere. I even called a couple other stores and they, too, were sold out. One store got ten copies (which, for a trade paperback featuring a… no, not D-list, more like U-list or something character, is a lot) and sold them all.
I am just saying.
19
Sep
18
Sep
I hate International Talk Like A Pirate Day so much it makes my brain want to explode.
No, really. I fucking hate it. ITLAP Day is like the equivalent of day camp for people who no longer attend day camp. You remember day camp, right? And you got there, and found a few people you knew already, and that was fine – you could read, or play soccer, or just hang out and talk about how awesome Transformers were.
But inevitably that never happened. What happened instead is that you and those kids you already knew were trooped into the auditorium/gymnasium of whatever public school was hosting the day camp, and the head counsellor – mentally counting up both his meagre salary and his far more important hours of public service, already dreaming of his future at whatever appropriate university would lead him to future riches – told you about all the fun games you were going to play. Emphasis on going to. You are at daycamp, and you will perform the determined activities.
ITLAP Day is like that, except somehow they have made this tedious “fun” drudgery voluntary. It’s a horrible social exercise, a co-opting of imagination and wonder into groupthink. “Hey,” says the crowd, “do you want to be zany and wild? Be zany and wild in exactly the way we are being zany and wild!” The astute observer will note that this completely removes any chance of being zany and wild, because it co-opts originality into conformity. (See also: zombie walks, flash mobs, memes as punchlines, et cetera.)
It’s also not cool, and that bugs the shit out of me. I am of course talking about original cool here, wherein the most important component thereof is the total lack of fear of appearing ridiculous. (Chow Yun-Fat is cool because he is willing to look like a horse’s ass in an awesome gunfight action sequence every so often; Arnold Schwarzenegger is not because he only ever is the butt of jokes when he’s in a comedy.) If you’re in a crowd of people all acting the same, the opportunity to look ridiculous is greatly lessened, and so thus is the opportunity to be really cool. Cool is a highwire, and it’s something that isn’t necessary to get by in life, of course, but it is a wonderful thing to occasionally be, and the truly sad thing about Pirate Day and the like is that they offer the illusion of cool without offering the substance.
In conclusion: I really fucking hate International Talk Like A Goddamn Pirate Day.
18
Sep
It’s a commercial for a porn channel in New Zealand.
Why would a porn channel need commercials?
17
Sep
This is quite possibly Sadly, No!’s finest hour.
17
Sep
This week’s edition of Televisualist, written by me don’t you know, is available for all and sundry to peruse, so peruse away.
Yes, I will be doing this every week, now that you ask.
17
Sep
I’ve recently seen a few people upset by or about Your Webcomic Is Bad And You Should Feel Bad, and the usual comments about that site have emerged, and as usual they are all wrong. No, the writer is not uncreative or lazy (writing a funny rant – and they are funny rants – is hard), and yes, they’ve almost certainly done professional writing of their own (they claim to in various comments, and given the talent involved I can believe it). No, exerting creative energy does not inherently make you a better person.
The reason I enjoy YWIBAYSFB is because one of the greatest fallacies inherent to the Internet that I see repeated, over and over again, from all sorts of people, is this:
“In real life, people don’t say nasty things about your work like this to you directly.”
And to that I have to go “whuh?” because, unlike most of the people who say this, I have a stack of rejection letters. From Asimov’s and Fantasy and Science Fiction and lots of other non-genre magazines and publishing houses. From script agents, from script competitions, from producers. I started submitting in my teens, under the mistaken assumption that I was the next Gordon Korman. (Go figure, I wasn’t.)
These are professional assessments, and let me assure you, not all of them are nice. Most of them are, because I when I submitted them I was in that category of “very rough, but there’s promise,” and editors tend to be pleasant to that level of talent (if for no other reason, because someday they might need a favour from you). But they aren’t all nice. A sample of a few of the less nice ones:
There is no way I can call this anything other than derivative dogshit.
Step one towards getting me to consider your submission: proper formatting. Step two: not copying the stylistic quirks of [writer] in a manner so blatant it’s frankly embarrassing.
You are, at present, years and years of bad writing away from even being tolerable.
I have one word for you to consider: accountancy.
Fairly rough stuff to get, especially when you’re in your teens. But you know what? They were right. I was writing shit then. I don’t write shit now, and yes, it’s partially because of those rude editors. I know some might want to attribute my improvement entirely to the helpful editors who went through the generic, tedious crap I was churning out then and gave me helpful pointers on establishing my own style and avoiding bad writing tropes, and I won’t debate for a second that they were all very helpful.
However. The rude ones were helpful as well, because they said one thing, over and over again, either directly or indirectly. They said “this form to which you aspire has standards which we expect you to meet.”
Think about that for a second, the concept of standards. The idea that your work is part of something that is larger and more important than you, that what you contribute in expression will help to define the movement, and indeed, in a way, all art with it. It’s something that’s steadily been dropping off the edge of the creative map over the last fifty years – maybe society as a whole has gotten more self-important, maybe it’s a shift in personal philosophy as a whole, I don’t know. But it’s an idea in regression, of that we can be sure; it’s one that merits a comeback.
Going back to Your Webcomic Is Bad again, what I think a lot of people don’t recognize is that it, and sites like it, have arisen in direct response to the internet’s total lack of editorial control. Don’t get me wrong: I think that, by and large, the creative freedom the web has given us is a good thing, allowing those artists who would otherwise get lost in the shuffle to make their voices heard. That’s valuable.
The problem is that said creative freedom is a double-edged sword, because without the channels the editorial system built up over the years, anybody can just put up any piece of shit, and with an essentially infinite audience, they will in turn eventually get a loyal horde of fans slavering devotion on what is, bluntly, horse crap masquerading as a story. The same goes for photography, or drawn art, or music, or what have you – in every creative industry there exists a system to separate the dross from the (relative) gold. Yes, sometimes it means we get Thomas Kinkade or Britney Spears because people use that system for material gain first and foremost, but take any art history class and you swiftly learn there have always been people like that and that the commercial crap fades away.
(An aside: in 1964, when the Beatles were breaking huge in the United States, somebody tried to make a buck off them by getting a girl group together, calling them “the Beatlettes,” and recording “Yes You Can Hold My Hand.” Ninety-nine point a lot percent of you have never heard that song, or indeed of the Beatlettes at all. That’s less than fifty years past and they’re already a footnote. That’s my point right there.)
Most webcomics are shit. Yes, there are webcomics that are not shit, from the philosophical, writer-driven hilarity of a Dinosaur Comics or XKCD to the artistic free-flow of a Wigu or Scary-Go-Round to the pure story-ambition of a Gunnerkrigg Court or the sheer professionalism on all levels of Penny Arcade or Order of the Stick. But these fine works are exceptions, and not the rule.
The reason for this is inherent in the philosophy of most webcomics, where “professionalism” is frequently treated like some sort of bizarre optional extra nobody would ever consciously choose, much like putting herring on a sundae. Create a sporadic updating schedule then don’t stick to it – because come on, you’re doing it for free! (Anthony Trollope wrote for two hours. Every day. Period. He did not publish his first novel until he had been writing for fifteen years.) “Draw” a comic in a lite cartoony style without ever having learned the fundamental rules of anatomy and composition first – hey, that’s just how you roll! (Most of the great early comic strip artists learned basic life drawing skills while in the Army.) Use an unoriginal, boring meme for your “punchline” in some desperate attempt to identify yourself to your readers as one of them – well, all the other comic people are doing it! (Charles Schulz – actually, I could just say “Charles Schulz” as a blanket response to every bit of webcomic hackery ever performed.)
And then, when some actual professional creative person, someone who sweats out work and gets paid for it despite never being certain if what he’s produced is good enough (and if you don’t have that gnawing demon in your stomach saying “it’s crap” every time you commit yourself to work in any artistic form, seriously, look into accountancy, because doubt is what creates all art) – when that person finally snaps at the umpteenth schmuck who pumps out generic, meandering, derivative crap in their spare time – it’s always in their spare time – and has found within themselves that precious nugget of superego and nurtured it into a towering colossus of self-important narcissism because they’re creating something, dammit – it’s always the professional’s fault for not being polite.
When did “polite” become such a positive attribute in art, anyway? Not “considerate,” you understand, that’s never the word used, it’s always “polite” – when did Miss fucking Manners dictate proper behaviour within the artistic community? Go back to your art history books and you’ll see again and again that art thrives when the artistic culture is rude and challenges the living hell out of anyone who would dare practice it for their living. Look at the Baroque and Romantic composers, who worked in a period where being a professional composer meant not only writing the absolute best music possible but also politically burying your rivals whenever possible. Look at the sheer chaos the Expressionists created, not just on canvas but in the salons and gallery halls.
(If Mark Waid ever loses his shit with me, I totally promise to take it with a smile, because it’s not like I wrote one of the best runs of Fantastic Four ever, you know? PS. Dear Mark Waid: I still think Kingdom Come kind of sucks.)
Why shouldn’t established professionals get a bit dismissive when amateurs with no real standing beyond a bunch of people they sort of know saying “I like this” – and you can find 200 people who are willing to say “I like this” about absolutely anything – demand equal standing? Because when a rank amateur says “I’m a writer” or “I’m an artist” or whatever their chosen artistic field is, that’s exactly what they’re doing.
Robert Rodriguez, in his fun book Rebel Without A Crew, mentions that saying “I’m a filmmaker” (and you can of course extend that to other pursuits) is a wonderful ego boost, and a useful tool for motivating yourself to finish a project. And he’s right. But he also says that it’s only the first step, that next you actually have to become a filmmaker. Some people go to film school; others, like Rodriguez, make a shitty movie or two then come up with a business plan to make another movie. (El Mariachi wasn’t his first, and it’s worth remembering that his original plan was to sell it to the Mexican video market and maybe make back two or three times its cost.)
But absolutely nobody worth mentioning says “I’m a filmmaker” and then prints business cards saying “Chuck Sluckerson, Filmmaker,” and kind of half-asses their way through the basic steps of a project they’ll never really make, but it’s something to talk about at dinner parties. “Oh no, I just work at the insurance company to pay my bills. I’m really a filmmaker.” (This is not to say that this does not happen – merely that they are not worthy of mention.)
Worse yet, the ones who go out and buy a digital camcorder and, without understanding anything about shot composition or pacing a scene or anything that makes narrative film watchable, shoot their abominable short movies and now it’s “I’m a filmmaker – you can see my stuff on Youtube!”
And if you’ve got the temerity to point out that they don’t know what they’re doing, they defend their shit as “artistic choice,” because art can’t be wrong, man, it’s all about personal expression, man! And it occurs to me at this point that I’m getting a bit far afield here, but just pretend that I said Robert Rodriguez was a famous webcomics maker instead, if you like, because the parallels are exactly the same.
In summary: Editorial standards are good things, because art is not a one-way street and never has been. Art is a committal to the audience: you are standing up, proclaiming that you have Something To Say And It’s Important. When you do that, it thus falls upon you to do two things: to make sure that what you say is Important (at least to you if no one else), and that you communicate it effectively. The editorial process is all about creating people who are more skilled at said communication, and if a medium arises – such as webcomics – where that process is absent, don’t be surprised when people create it spontaneously and it’s less helpful than some would like.
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