Art & Criticism – Page 22

Missing the point

Published on June 20, 2010

I’ve got a fair bit of sympathy for people who get annoyed when their culture is misrepresented or appropriated by some science fiction or fantasy writer looking for some exotic colour, but I think Kosin Grigor’s critique of China Miéville’s The City and the City misses the point:

Since we’re hardly lacking in places where people really do practice the kind of mental gymnastics that’s exercised in Besźel/Ul Qoma, the learned knowing of “ours” and “theirs” and never transgressing – though of course not as drastically as to literally unsee The Other Place – it strikes me as gutless to spend so much energy on crafting an allegory (and inevitably leaving it full of holes and failures in this desperate effort of making it Distinct; hell, one of the characters even attended a workshop on policing (real) politically divided cities so that once again we could be assured we’re not reading a roman à clef on any of them) instead of going all the way and writing a fantasy Stolac or what have you, and labelling it clearly as such. Sure, it would piss people off something rotten whichever real divided city one chose to write an alternative history and present reality of, but it’s not like the book isn’t already insulting in its carefree ignorance of its building blocks.

Some of the objections it raises may very well be valid, but it misses the point of the novel. The City and the City is not meant to be a standin for anything, or function as a metaphor for some really existing Eastern or Central European countries. The setting is not quite meant to be realist, rather than evoke just enough of a feeling of realism to serve its central conceit, that of two cities geographically sharing the exact same space yet being separated through the inhabitants of each city deliberately unseeing the other one. The book would not work if it was based on a real situation. I’m sure Kosin Grigor is right to say Miéville made a mess of the language and names and it therefore doesn’t work for them, but again, this is a fictional city we’re talking about, not meant to be representive of anything actually existing. That the language therefore is reminiscent of, but doesn’t quite work like real Eastern/Central European languages is a feature, not a bug.

It’s one thing to be annoyed by this, which I can well understand, but that doesn’t mean that Miéville is guilty of culturefail, as Kosin puts it. Miéville’s cities are not some Ruritania, created to indulge in “Balkans” cliches, but rather use Eastern/Central Europe as an inspiration in the same way that his earlier creation of New Crobuzon.was inspired by London, but not meant to be London. Ultimately everything about Besźel and Ul Qoma is in service to the central idea of unseeing; their existence only needs to make enough sense to support this and to criticise it for not being real enough is missing the point; it was never meant to be.

Finally a proper Marxist videogame

Published on May 27, 2010

According to Jonathan McCalmont , Dead Space is The Shock Doctrine Gone Interplanetary:

The French intellectual and artist Jean Cocteau once said that for some, style is a simple way of saying complicated things. EA Redwood Shores’ Dead Space (2008) is a game that proves how much can be said with minute shifts of emphasis for while the game is ostensibly yet another title all about collecting money and killing monsters, Dead Space is a fiercely left wing game whose narrative constitutes a vicious critique of neoliberalism and the monetarist policies of Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys. It is a game about the brutal economic dismemberment of developing economies in the name of Free Trade and how, finally, the world is starting to realise that you do not cure poverty with Shock Therapy as that only makes things worse. Much worse.

[…]

Indeed, the necromorphs are not alien interlopers into a natural process, but products of that process itself. This is an important distinction, as it chimes so well with the way in which Friedman talks about the free market. Indeed, one of the more intriguing tactics used during the rise of neoliberalism as a political doctrine is the idea of the free market being in some way natural, like a default setting. If this is true, then it follows that any intervention by the state in the market is a ‘distortion’ of the market and ‘unnatural’, but this is mere political rhetoric… the market is a human institution and, as such, it has no existence beyond that granted it by humans. Living in a state of bare-knuckle free market capitalism is no more natural than living in a Stalinist planned economy… and even if it was, it would not be clear what kind of moral or political authority ‘natural’ carries. It is not ‘natural’ to have a special room to defecate in, but it does not follow that we should all let it drop out the back like cart horses. Dead Space’s suggestion that the necromorphs’ presence is a result of the planet cracking suggests that the human costs of the market must be taken into account and not merely repressed with force. Indeed, the game’s final act sees Isaac Clarke desperately trying to mend fences with the hive mind by returning the marker to the planet. This also chimes intriguingly with the history of neoliberal thought…

You know, I think Jonathan might hve been slightly tongue in cheek here…

On bad reviews

Published on May 25, 2010

I don’t quite know why I found this review of The Brave and the Bold #33 so annoying, as I neither read the series nor particularly like the creators (J. Michael Straczynski & Cliff Chang) involved. But it might have something to do with this:

Well, to start off with, Wonder Woman makes yellow light explode out a man’s pants, and not in a good way.

First, I couldn’t tell which direction the yellow stream is even supposed to be going. And what’s with the old duffer’s flying trucker cap? Isn’t it enough to be disrobing one person per panel with unfortunately pee-yellow light explosions?

Grand Ballroom, this way to the yellow pants! It’s like a Dr Suess, except not funny.

Below is the page being mocked. Now, apart from the hilarious joke actually not being all that funny, what is annoying about this “criticism” is that this page surely isn’t that difficult to understand? Two establishing shots with some cruise ship, some terrorist leader yakking away on his megaphone, a superhero flying towards him in a streak of yellow light (“Like pee hur hur hur”), slams into him from behind in the next shot, with the bottom three panels showing the bad guy being pushed at speed over the boat, losing his clothing in the process. The action flows from top to bottom, left to right, with the only tricky bit being the transition between panel three and four, when the camera moves from in front of the bad guy to his back. The art is a bit too static for my liking and a more “blurred” effect on the speed lines would’ve been more clear, but is this really such a bad sequence that pee jokes are the best you can say about it? Really?

a page from Brave and the Bold 33

Luckily the post moves on from pee jokes when describing the next problem page which, to be honest, could be a lot better:

a page from Brave and the Bold 33

I stared at this page and tried to figure out what the heck is happening. Finally, I decided that her bike flies between panel 4 and 5, although I don’t know why. Apparently so we can see Wonder Woman hanging onto the middle of the bike? I don’t even know.

The sequence in question, at the bottom of the page, is one that’s been used in hundreds of comics in one form or another: guy drives along, suddenly is driving in the air, looks down and sees Superman e.g. holding up his car. It’s done badly here, both because the background in the first two panels of the sequence is not very clear and because the panels themselves are too small, squashed between the payoff panel at the end and the big panels at the top of the page. Even so, how long does it take you to work out what’s happening, even if you’re not so familiar with (superhero) comics?

Rather than asking what’s happening here when, though confusing, it is relatively easy to work it out, it’s much more interesting to show why this page can be confusing to new readers or manga readers, as is done in a later post. This is where the final page shown here comes from, on which commenter Telophase has marked up the flow in which a typical manga reader would read the page. According to them, a manga reader would figure out the visual flow from the artwork, rather than from the panel layout — looked at the page this way, it is confusing. Now that’s a good piece of criticism.

a page from Brave and the Bold 33

I’m not defending this comic; since I haven’t read it I can’t. Nor do I mind people making fun of a comic. What I object to are unfunny, lazy jokes done on material that doesn’t deserve them and the defensive attitude in the comments when a few people voiced their objections. But perhaps it’s a bit much to expect indepth analysis of such a piece of epheremal storytelling when pee jokes are so much easier…

Mean but accurate

Published on May 18, 2010

Adam Roberts’ parody of Robert Jordan’s writing is mean but accurate:

Why did I fail? Oh, why did I fail to polish off wotviii this week, I thought to myself, creasing my brow and tugging my braids. Since the Age of Legends I have been reading this bu’u’ook, as the ancient bound codices were called. White streaking my beard and hair, I stroked the mindtrap upon my bedside table. I must be careful, I thought. Careful. To take care. Three different skills were in play, the ancient art of readin, the even more ancient and venerable art, of which only a few dozen in the world were true masters, of Turnian Pages, and, most difficult of all preventing the bitter, lethal brain num that inevitably pursued any man who dared to channel the antique magic of this kind of readin. It could be fatal, brain num. Fatal, it could be. I tugged my braid. The old Ar Selbow proverb came back to me: readin should be a chore, not a pleasure. I thought, oh, but I’ve read so much! To give up now would be … but I left the utterance an axe-handle short of completion. Was there room for any more? I tugged my braids. Hardly any hair left, I thought to myself. I wonder if tugging it all the time is responsible for it falling out? I wonder. I wonder.

But the parody quoted in a 1993 David Langford fanzine is more concise and just as funny, if not funnier. Which totally makes Adam’s version the more accurate, as Jordan, for all his virtues, was never adverse to use ten words when one would do, or seven sentences where two would suffice…

Adam is reading and reviewing the entire Wheel of Time series and not enjoying it much, hence the parody. He does so because, while he has read his share of epic fantasy, he’s “too ignorant of the 1990s and much of the noughties” which is why he “decided to give Jordan a whirl”. It’s been interesting to read his critiques, though not surprising that he finds Jordan hardgoing and not very good. Most honest fans of the series able to aprpeciate good writing will readily admit Jordan’s writing is not very good, workmanlike at best; much of the criticism Roberts levels at him was already talked about in rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan in the mid nineties. Where Adam gets it wrong is when he attempts to understand why people despite this keep reading the Wheel of Time books:

I get that for many people the deal is escape. Leave your worries behind; you enter this better world. It’s a world in which you don’t work in the accounts department of a mid-size educational supplies firm; where, instead, you live in a palace and command servants and have magic powers and enjoy exciting sex with beautiful people and are able to vent your repressed aggression in fighty-fight. Jordan’s twist on this venerable textual strategy is, partly, giving his readers much more detail than his market rivals; and partly, more cannily, creating the illusion of psychological depth. Simple wish-fulfilment gets old too soon; so Jordan’s Alexander-the-Great-alike is troubled by the fear he’s going mad. It’s not much, but it’s enough to separate him from the bulk of competitors.

[…]

And this is the part I can’t seem to get my head around: the fans know that it’s terribly written. They know and they don’t care. Why don’t they care? I don’t know why they don’t care.

[…]

What to say to such a review other than: don’t! Please don’t! The libraries of the world are crammed with beautiful, powerful, moving, mindblowing literature! Read some of that instead!

Adam gets two things wrong. Why people read The Wheel of Time when they know it’s not that good and that it’s possible to “trade in” the WoT series for better books and get the same pleasure out of it. It isn’t wish fulfillment that made me read the first book and then kept me reading: it was the story and the way Jordan told it. And I know the writing is workmanlike at best, the plot not all that original and the padding, oy, the padding! But as I said in my own review of The Eye of the World, Jordan had me hooked from that first scene. It’s not something you can really analyse and it has little to do with literay qualities: you get it or you don’t. If you don’t get it, that’s no big deal; the world is full with better books, but you can’t substitute them for the story Jordan told and the world he created.

It’s always difficult to explain why you enjoy something: in the end it all comes down to “I like it because it’s fun”. What I like in epic fantasy in general and Jordan in particular is a bit of escapism, of losing myself in a story, preferably a long story. The writing doesn’t have to be good to do this, as long as it isn’t so bad it becomes noticable. This isn’t at all comparable to the pleasure I also get from a good science fiction novel or something clever and literary; much more visceral, less intellectual perhaps. It’s also the pleasure in worldbuilding I got from Jordan, the way he which took standard fantasy concepts and remade them over the course of the series. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy agrees with me on that, noting the “ingenuity with which standard plot devices, backgrounds and charachters are subjected to constant and sophisticated modification”. That’s a pleasure that for others may not be enough to struggle through the series, or the kind of pleasure somebody like Adam is looking for, which is okay. It’s just that you can’t recreate this pleasure with a different set of books; certainly not with Nabakov…

Frank Frazetta 1928-2010

Published on May 11, 20101 Comment

Frazetta's classic cover for A Princess of Mars

Coming across his work in the 1960s and 1970s, amid those decades’ absolute disconnect from the recent past and outright suspicion of junk culture, was a specific revelation for their being so very little out there like it. Frazetta’s work was one of the few consistent, visually accomplished gateways to somewhere else, a way of escape available to a generation of kids that was psychologically preparing to die when someone set the skies on fire. Frazetta’s were potent images, strange, of obvious skill and stuffed with conflicting messages. There were the soft women and the more dread, powerful ones. Men faced off against monsters but also nature, and in some cases their own savage impulses. There was light like the light we were used to but also strange colors, light like no one had seen but that Frazetta somehow understood. They weren’t inviting fantasies, but formidable ones, foreboding, aspirational rather than something that coddled or flattered you. If you went through the wardrobe into Narnia, events would likely fall into place, and you were pretty sure you could’ve handled that ring, but if you went to one of the worlds Frazetta painted something was going to eat you or stab you or have your soul. These were fantasies you steeled yourself towards rather than fell into. And so it was with Frank Frazetta’s art: it frequently impressed, it almost always inspired.

From The Comics Reporter excellent obituary of Frazetta, I think this paragraph captures the appeal of his art quite well. It was lush, exciting, exotic, but also a bit scary. Frazetta is of course often dismissed as no more than a panderer to the worst kind of adolescent wishfulfilment, but to do so is to miss both his obvious craft chops, as well as yes, his artistic talent.