LUDIC LIVE

The reason boredom deserves such scrutiny is that it represents pure, undiluted time in all its repetitive, redundant, monotonous splendor. Boredom is your window on the properties of time that one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. It is your window on time’s infinity. Once this window opens, don’t try to shut it; on the contrary, throw it wide open. (Joseph Brodsky)

Of what value is boredom in criticism?  Noel Murray wrote recently that it was one of his most hated critical terms, though I think this is more a function of the critic than the creation.  Being bored can mean that a work of art has failed to engage you on an aesthetic level, but it can also mean that you have a short attention span, or that you become easily frustrated with something confusing, unexpected, or unusually paced.  This is particularly true in the age of the blockbuster, when audiences and critics alike start to doze if something or someone is not blown up or penetrated every ten minutes.

Still, as the abolitionist Wendell Phillips observed, boredom is itself a form of criticism, and if your overwhelming response to a work of art is to be bored, the artist must answer for that.  Boredom is certainly the default reaction of most viewers to Chantal Akerman’s provocative, brilliant 1975 film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, so it’s necessary to dig a little deeper and ask:  what does our boredom mean?  At nearly three and a half punishing hours, the story of a single mother’s prison-like routine of housework, tending to her dullard of a son, and occasional work as a prostitute* to keep afloat is intended  to bore us.  Akerman’s motionless camera, recording without flourish the everyday banality of a struggling working-class woman, uses boredom like a truncheon, pounding us into empathy and defying our expectations at every turn.  She means to make us understand what life is like for millions of women just like Jeanne Dielman, and would trap us in this role of exhausted observer forever if she could.

What is shocking, then, is how Jeanne Dielman bores without alienating.  It is a film that bores, but is not boring; though many would find it intolerably tedious, I find it far more compelling than big-money wastes of time that pop constantly on the screen but go nowhere.  The film’s virtues are many:  structurally, it’s absolutely masterful, and for a narrative in which almost nothing happens, every scene is worth paying attention to.  Akerman’s visual constructions take the banal and make them breathtaking; the composition of many of its static shots are the equal of anything one might expect in a Peter Greenaway film.  Credit is due, too, to cinematographer Babette Mangolt and editor Patricia Canino; their work takes Akerman’s structural planning and turns it into the art of the commonplace, transforming low-bourgeois bedrooms and kitchens, welfare offices and cobbler’s shops into slowly moving tapestries of struggle.

Jeanne Dielman, too, might be the most Situationist film ever made, and coming at the moment in time it did, could be seen as the culmination of that movement’s visual argument.  Far more than the didactic aggression of Godard’s political films, or the near-mystical abstraction of the short films of SI godhead Guy Debord himself, Akerman’s masterpiece hones in with merciless exactitude on that most important of qualities, the critique of everyday life.  She forces your attention without quarter on the samey routine of her protagonist, literally never letting us look away.  The restrictions and tiny oppressions of poverty are taken as simple reality, not made into an operatic setpiece; and the stakes are shown to be grotesquely high in the most ordinary and gradual manner imaginable.

And here is where Jeanne Dielman transcends boredom, which it uses to command the viewer’s focus the way a robber might use a knife to the throat, and becomes something magnificent, something that justifies with finality the much-marginalized use of realism in cinema.  I won’t attempt a long discourse on the uses of realism; my friend Tom Block does a pretty definitive job of it here.  There is something to be said about the nature of escapism, which I may get around to one of these days, but for Jeanne there is no escape.  What is so overwhelming about the narrative is not that Jeanne’s disintegration is played as spectacle, the shocking act of a woman gone mad, but as inevitable, the predictable result of a thousand tiny humiliations and defeats.

Akerman shows us — no, makes us see – the power of the seemingly meaningless to destroy those without power. With the eye of someone who has lived it, she shows how the utterly ordinary concatenation of frustrations — dropping a spoon, running out of potatoes, breaking a shoe — can pile up to the point where they seem completely intolerable.  Little frayed ends that would occupy center stage in most ‘psychological dramas’ are here made part of the background, becoming an omnipresent factor that is barely noticed but that spells unavoidable destruction.  Jeanne’s slow decay is not rendered in moments of hysterical drama or arch obviousness, and Delphine Seyrig plays her as the complete philosophical opposite of her character in Last Year at Mareinbad.  Instead, her breakdown is a mechanical one, like a machine tasked to do the same repetitive job one too many times.  She reads a concerned letter from her sister in the voice of a ghost, and the electric flickers on her wall pass her notice, even though they are warnings of imminent catastrophe.  And when the final violent break comes, it’s not inspired by some horrible abuse or degradation — it’s brought on by a minor loss of control, which, to people who control almost nothing about their lives, can be the worst thing of all.

Akerman has always stood out slightly from her peers in European cinema:  Belgian, not French; working-class, not a product of the universities; female, not male; gay, not straight (and yet powerfully resistant to the idea of being categorized and showcased as a ‘gay filmmaker’); Jewish, not Gentile; structural, not formal; and lethally literal where others can be maddeningly metaphorical.  This shows in all of her best work (It’s nearly impossible to track down, but I cannot recommend enough her hypnotic travelogue D’Est), and the slight whiff of disrepute it gave her allowed her that extra few feet of freedom to make a movie as daring as Jeanne Dielman.  Watch it, and you will be bored, but you will hopefully gain the sense of boredom being used on you as a tool, an effect, a weapon, of witnessing realism as a trial by fire and boredom as a craft wielded as skillfully as Hitchcock used suspense.  It is the everyday as art where the game seems numbingly slow, but the stakes are terrifyingly high.

*:  Another exceptional quality of Jeanne Dielman is how, through its rigor and determination, it short-circuits the judgment that is the natural Western reaction to any suggestion of unconventional female sexuality by making it so matter-of-fact that it is almost invisible.  Until it is necessary for Akerman to bring it to the fore, she sublimates it into the ordinary so that it becomes no more worthy of comment than her washing the dishes.

A slave, Marcus Gato said, should be working when he is not sleeping.  It does not matter whether his work is needed or not; he must work, because work in itself is good — for slaves, at least.  This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery.

I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob.  The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think.  A rich man who happens to be intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions, usually says something like this:

“We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness.  But don’t expect us to do anything about it.  We are sorry for you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, but we will fight like devils against any improvement of your condition.  We feel that you are much safer as you are.  The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day.  So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.”

This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one can read the substance of it in a hundred essays.  Very few cultivated people have less than, say, four hundred pounds a year; and naturally they side with the rich because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty.  Foreseeing some dismal Marxian utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are.  Possibly he does not like his fellow rich very much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by them.  It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.

Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear.  It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, but in reality there is no such difference.  The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy-dandy:  which is the justice and which is the thief?

Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well.  But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor.  For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty?  In my copy of Villon’s poems, the editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the line “ne pain ne voient qu’aux fenetres” by a footnote, so remote is even hunger from the educated man’s experience.

From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally.  The educated man pictures a horde of sub-men, wanting only a day’s liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory.  ”Anything,” he thinks, “any injustice sooner than let that mob loose.”   He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose.  The mob is loose now, and — in the shape of rich men — is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom.

Dear Mr. Roseman,

First, I believe introductions are in order.  My name is Eliza Torrance, and I’ll be taking over the editorial position here at Ramsette-Hill vacated by Art Hough, who is retiring after 35 years in the position.  I believe he is moving to Costa Rica, or El Salvador, or one of those Spanish countries with two names.  Anyway, this means — or at least I hope it means — that we will have the opportunity to work together in the near future!

To address the questions on your letter of the 5th:  our reticence to sign you to a publishing contract at Ramsette-Hill has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of your work.  In all frankness, Mr. Roseman, we believe that you are one of the most talented writers we have encountered in the last twenty years.  The fact that you are able to to write with such skill and insight in so many genres makes your work all the more impressive; of the fifteen manuscripts you have sent us, which range from novels to poetry to histories to textbooks, we believe all of them are of substantial quality, and at least half-a-dozen of them have the potential to become best sellers.  We so look forward to receiving new submissions from you that we are willing to indulge your curious habit of composing all your work in Ami Pro; luckily, we found a 1993 tabletop PC in the basement and had an intern do the necessary conversion.

I’m sure you know where you’re going with this, though, Mr. Roseman.  While we respect the authorial tendency to resist making changes to their work — and even believe that they may have an editorial perspective that may turn out to be the right decision in the long run — it is your refusal to allow us to publish your books under anything but the original titles you gave them that is causing the delay in what we believe would otherwise be a financially and artistically rewarding relationship between you and Ramsette-Hall.

Let us take, for example, your first novel.  It’s, in all honesty, a remarkable debut effort — accessible but artistically sophisticated, full of perceptive analysis of the human condition channeled through a handful of simply unforgettable characters.  That’s why we believed then and believe now that Hot Wet Turd Party is a title that might very well prevent it from getting the critical and popular attention it deserves.  Likewise, Blood of Acadia:  A New History of King William’s War, 1688-1697 is an amazing piece of work — moving, thorough, and shining a brilliant new light on its subject.  Unfortunately, it is not in fact a history of King William’s War, but a biography of Bram Stoker.  While it is clear to me from reviewing the 231 pages of correspondence between you and Art Hough that you don’t believe this to be a problem, our marketing department begs to differ.

Your book of spiritual poetry, I confess as a devout Christian, I found extremely moving, and it encouraged me to learn new things about other faiths while manifestly reaffirming my own devotion to the Lord.  I make this personal admission so as to drive home how strong is my belief that If I Eat a Chinaman, Will I Be Hungry An Hour Later? And Other Kooky Cannibal Queries is an absolutely inappropriate title for this, or any other, book.  And while I don’t have much of a grasp of physics, our science editor assures me that your entry-level college text on the subject is illuminating and education, but written in a style that will appeal to even the most casual student, and stands a very good chance of becoming the definitive assigned reading in schools all over the country — all the more astonishing an achievement for someone with no formal scientific training.  And to think that the one thing standing in the way of such a remarkable outcome is your adamant insistence on retaining the original title, a string of over 300 Cyrillic letters that our in-house translators assure me is complete gibberish.

Mr. Roseman, please believe that we honor your artistic integrity, just as much as we value your work and hope to be able to release it to a public that will value it just as much.  But, as I’m sure you heard from at least a few of the three dozen houses you say turned you down before you came to us, publishing is a business.  Wouldn’t it be worth just this one little compromise in order to open up your entire career as a writer?  It’s a small thing, the title of a book, and what good will it do, in the long run, to cling to one as frankly unappealing as Hog-Fucking Saturdays and Other Reminiscences of Growin’ Up Arkansas, balanced against all the good it would do if you released it under a name more a suited for a book on diabetic nutritional health?  Please consider what I’ve said.  In the meantime, I look forward to your new collection of children’s cartoons — remind me again, is it Burning Triangle:  A Statistical Analysis of the Holocaust, or Peachflesh, a Novel of Hebephilia?

yours in hope,

Eliza Torrance

Nineteen Eighty-Four is not often thought of as a useful text for illumination of the art of criticism, but like all great writers, Orwell contained multitudes of meaning in his writing, leaving great lessons barely concealed for application to whatever subject needed them.  At the book’s very beginning, Winston Smith opens his newly acquired diary, and can’t quite begin to write.  For a moment, he cannot even recall why he did something so potentially damning.  But then it makes sense:  he begins to write, and does not stop until his hands start to cramp, because he must do something, anything, to displace the endlessly streaming monologue that has been running through his head for years.  This is what is worth death to him:  the transference of thought to page.

Looking back on all the words I’ve written the last few years, I fear that I’ve come across as impossible to please, forever sounding the death knell of contemporary criticism.  If that’s true, then I’ve made my case very badly (a distinct possibility to be sure).  It is only because the rise of the Internet created so many astounding possibilities for the art of criticism that I have become so disappointed with the sad deflation of that art in the last decade or so; it is only because I find criticism such a vital and necessary activity that I demand so much from it.  Art may be a mirror in which we see ourselves and our world, but criticism is the window that lets in the light, without which the images in the mirror may not be seen.

It’s temptingly easy to blame commercialism for the decay of criticism, but it’s also increasingly inaccurate.  While it’s true that approaching criticism as only a job (not simply as a job, because much great work has been done by critics for pay) reduces it to the level of any other work-for-hire and drains it of the need for a unique perspective.  But if anything, the Internet has been the executioner of commercial criticism.  It has helped demolish print media, and made the job of a staff critic the equivalent of a typewriter repairman; it has replaced the possession of critical insight with aggregations and mathematical models, as if numbers and data fields could tell you anything useful about a work of art; and worst of all, it has given people the idea that having an opinion about something is the same thing as delivering a critical analysis of it.

Even this is too short-sighted and limited, though; the field of criticism, at least outside of academia — where it still thrives, but makes no effort at involving anyone but the elite in the process of becoming involved in their own culture — has been narrowing for decades.  And it’s hard to shake the sensation that this is because we have raised up a generation of critics who don’t believe that they are anything but mere functionaries instead of people actively engaged with art.  They flit into our field of vision, deliver a vague and impressionistic encapsulation of a cultural product not markedly different than what we might get out of a publicist’s press release, and then retreat, pathologically afraid of inserting anything into their work that might resemble a theory or a worldview.

While we expect, and even demand, passion and perspective from our artists, we hold them at arm’s length when our critics feature too much of them — or even openly revile them.  We have made a fundamental and nearly fatal mistake by thinking we have to agree with a critic to count them as worthwhile, when, in fact, very nearly the opposite is true:  we learn virtually nothing from critics we always agree with, while those who provoke us and prod us into an unfamiliar reaction to the familiar, or immerse us completely into the unfamiliar, are the most valuable.  Jonathan Rosenbaum’s ideological inflexibility and resistance to commercial art can be immensely frustrating, but hardly a more brilliant and expressive film critic is alive in this country.  Greil Marcus’ tendency to go off on dreamlike tangents, forsaking the subject at hand for how it can lead him to observations about the culture at large, strikes many as irrelevant and pretentious, but you will learn more from him than you will from a million straightforward essays by lesser critics.  I disagree substantially with virtually everything Harold Bloom has ever had to say about literature; but forcing myself to articulate the nature and substance of those disagreements has taught me more about books than any other critic could accomplish.

What do all of these people, and more like them (for the world of criticism may be in decay, but above it soar dozens of engaging writers, hard to see through the thickening gloom), have in common?  Like great artists, they believe in something.  They expect art to be a certain way, they demand a particular perspective, and if they don’t get it, they say so.  They have a worldview.  What is Peter Travers’ worldview?  What is Harry Knowles’, Michiko Kakutani’s, Sasha Frere-Jones’?  I fear I could read a million reviews by some of our leading critics of music, film, and literature (to say nothing of television, which, with a tiny few exceptions, has generated enormous quantities of critics in the last ten years, but no qualities) and never find out what, exactly, they are looking for in art, or why, beyond the pitiably low hurdle of mere competence.

They also know — and here is where we can blame the Internet, with its insatiable demand for content and its replacement of the deep read with the click-through — that there is a substantial body of work in every artform that is simply not worth paying attention to.  They are conspicuous for what they ignore as well as what they embrace.  Many younger writers feel that they have to have an opinion about everything; equally afeared of being accused of inconsistency, surely the most ridiculous way to attack a critic but depressingly common, they fail to revisit and reread.  They hold their first opinions on a subject as inviolate, ignore what they’ve always ignored, and worst of all, think the worst thing in the world is to be wrong.  Faulkner once wrote that the most cowardly and base of all things for a writer is to be afraid; if I could by fiat drop one idea into the minds of critics, it would be that it’s perfectly fine to be wrong.  Until you conquer the fear of being wrong, you will never hold an opinion worth hearing.

Possessing no especial perspective and afraid to admit the obvious truth that our critical perspectives change by the day as we are exposed to more and more of the culture, contemporary critics engage in what are essentially mathematical games:  playing connect-the-dots from one influence to another, an amusing activity that nonetheless resembles keeping score in a baseball game more than it does assembling a genuine critical perspective; substituting personal anecdotes, funny stories, and cultural reminiscences for genuine ideas, theories and observations; and, worst of all, the creation of endless ratings, rankings, and hierarchies.  This is a poison as addictive as sugar, and it can teach us only what a critic’s personal preferences are at a specific moment in time — which is good to know on the same level as knowing your blood type or what kind of food you’re in the mood for, but can reveal absolutely nothing about art or what it means.  It is exactly why Manny Farber, a great artist in the way that criticism can be an art, felt that evaluation was generally worthless, and that whether or not a critic liked something was of only marginal relevance.  He spoke of such hierarchies and orderings as “the derelict appendages of criticism”.

And so we bog down into critical work that would be laughably absurd if only we could see them for what they are:  reviews of film and television that make no reference to how they look, reviews of literature that make no reference to the quality of the prose, reviews of music that make only the most perfunctory attempt to tell you what it sounds like.  It is this stupefyingly misguided approach that Flann O’Brien identified over 60 years ago in critics of Joyce as “ignorance of the essential”.  Our critics single out plot, a fleeting trivium; they speak glowingly of individual performances with no reference to how they contributed to the meaning or message of a film (a good performance in an ineffectual film is barely worth even speaking about, let alone writing about); they praise special effects, which is the equivalent of eating at a restaurant and praising the waiter because the chair didn’t collapse underneath you.  Speaking of a cultural object’s meaning, or emotional or intellectual import, or departures from form or idiom, or place in a historical moment, is felt not to be absolutely essential, but marginally relevant and possibly elitist.

It is possible, especially now, to overestimate the role of the critic.  It’s particularly difficult to resist such habits if you are one.  But I am convinced of this:  we will not have great art if we do not have great artists, but we will not know great art if we do not have great critics.  We can trust our own critical opinions only if we have been exposed to an environment where they are shaped and nurtured and allowed to form, not if we have let them spring up in a vacuum of meaning and conviction.  If we do not have critics who believe in art as being this or that, we will not have artists who believe it, either, and what use is an artist who doesn’t believe in art?  If a dead ear hears, a dead hand strums the guitar.  If no one cares about the shape of the words, the writer will have no cause to shape them.  If the mind behind the eye doesn’t believe that what it’s seeing is capable of great meaning, great meaning will not be shown to it.  We will instead stumble around in our own culture, from event to event, and it won’t matter if we labor fast or slow to see it, because there’s always more labor after.  We must be like Winston Smith, who did not know what he believed but knew he must believe something, who wrote because he had to make real in the world what was constantly running through his mind.  If we do not, we will have finally reduced culture to commerce, because it will no longer be something through which we can reflect or improve or empathize, but merely a list of activities to be checked off as they are completed.  The greatest critic will not be the one who sees the most in what he is watching, but the one who sees the most overall — a practitioner of cultural Taylorism, a competitive eater of art who can consume the greatest amount in the least time.

Donald Dunn, whose old man named him “Duck” when the both of them were sitting around watching cartoons in their modest house in Memphis, was touring Japan with his old friend the Colonel, backing up Eddie Lee Floyd as they’d done so many times before in the past.  After last night’s show at Tokyo’s Blue note, “Duck” headed back to the hotel, hit the hay, and that was the last we’ll see of ol’ Donald Dunn.

“Duck” was a little fella and even at the towering height of his career, when he was laying down unforgettable, implacable bass lines for some of the greatest songs of the ’60s and ’70s, sometimes seemed like he was a little kid someone had handed a grown man’s guitar.  He offset that impression by being pure salty:  his scraggly red beard and brokedown hippie clothes marked him as something of a disreputable character, and his language was full of piss and vinegar (though he managed to class up even that low mystique with the fancy pipe that often dangled from his lips, as if held in place by sheer groove).  When he was a boy, he palled around with the hulking Steve Cropper, playing football and baseball and clowning around; but their real passion play was music.

Steve (who would become “the Colonel”) and Donald fell in with the Memphis soul crowd, and their instrumentals were, well, instrumental in providing much of the flavor that made up that unforgettable stew.  Dunn tagged along with Cropper in the nightclubs and juke joints just as he had on the ball fields; unable to keep up at first with his friend’s guitar playing, he picked up the bass, and showed the intense, untraceable talent of a pure autodidact.  They played in the Royal Spades, the Mar-Keys, and finally, legendarily, the MGs along such colorful names as Jerry “Smoochy” Smith, Ronnie “Stoots” Angel, Charles “Packy” Axton, and Charlie “Red Man” Freeman.  (Why have rock bands ceded nicknaming to hip-hop?  I miss it.)

Speaking of color, Dunn helped integrate soul music without even trying.  Though later held up as a Great Example, Cropper & Dunn — who strode freely across the borders of pop and soul, blues and country, bringing what they liked from each stopping point into the Stax sound — simply loved the music, and wanted to play what they wanted to hear.  They weren’t out to make a grand statement when they helped bring rough hillbilly dirt into sweet soul grooves; they were just doing what felt right in the only environment that would allow it.  The Mar-Keys got their first record deal through a bit of nepotistic finagling (Packy Axton’s mom owned a record label), but it was raw talent that kept Dunn carrying on.  His granite-hard grooves were a hallmark of the instantly recognizable Stax signature, and his speciality was pure bottom:  filling in the empty moments of a song with a low, belly-shaking, ass-bumping roll that couldn’t be knocked over with a wrecking ball.

Dunn played on practically every Stax single that mattered and plenty that didn’t.  His booming, skipping low-end Fender Precision bass can be heard on the best songs of Wilson Pickett, William Bell, Sam & Dave, Otis Redding, and Albert King, and with the Colonel, Booker T. Jones, and Al Jackson Jr., he put out what are indisputably some of the greatest albums of instrumental rock, funk and soul the genres have ever produced.  He was, of course, a Blues Brother, and our present generation, which seems to have trouble processing any information except through a lens of joking pop-culture references, remembers him primarily, if at all, in that respect.  But Dunn never stopped working, and never let himself become a nostalgia-vending cartoon.  He was up until the day he died what he was for the majority of the time he lived:  a working professional musician, with the emphasis on professional.

Dunn appeared on dozens and dozens of tracks, many of them unexpected even to casual fans:  he lent his legendary low end to the demanding likes of Muddy Waters and Freddie King, put in his time paying bills in a pop idiom with Rod Stewart and Eric Clapton, and served exceptionally well in a long stint with Tom Petty in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  His muscly, stand-aside bass lines were almost as sought-after by hip-hop producers and beat-miners as were Clyde Stubblefield’s drum breaks.  Some of his best latter-day work was with Levon Helm, who left us only a month ago.  Looking at his vast industry credits, it can seem as if there’s almost nobody he didn’t play with:  as a session man, he appeared alongside Jerry Lee Lewis, Mavis Staples, Mitch Ryder, Bill Withers, Herbie Mann, Moms Mabley, Duane Allman, Richie Havens, John Prine, Joan Baez, Diana Ross, Natalie Merchant, Ronnie Hawkins, Stevie Nicks, Bob Dylan, Willie Dixon, Guy Sebastian.  Roy Buchanan, John Fogerty, Ray Charles, Isaac Hayes, and Elvis motherfucking Presley.

And that’s just his studio work.  As a live performer, he played every chance he got, with everyone he admired.  In 1993, Neil Young asked Booker T. & the MGs to serve as his backing band on the Harvest Moon tour; I saw them when they came through Arizona.  Young, who at that point in his career could have asked pretty much anyone to be his backup — and, indeed, would do so later that year with the still shit-hot Pearl Jam — made the right choice; Dunn was in his mid-50s, but he and the rest of the group played as if they were heedless, hyper-energetic kids in their early twenties.  Even with Young following his usual pattern of abandoning anything like a rational setlist to play whatever songs popped into his addled mind, Dunn and his comrades jumped in with both feet first, locked it down, and held it tight as a noose from first note to last.  It remains one of the finest shows I’ve ever seen, not only for the astonishing precision and skill of the band, but how seamlessly they adapted to the material, playing on their very first tour with Young as if they’d been backing him up for decades.

Booker and the Colonel soldier on.  Al Jackson, the human timekeeper, was the victim of a bizarre contract murder plot almost 40 years ago; and now Donald “Duck” Dunn is dead.  What may be the tightest band to come out of the south is now without both its anchors.  ”Duck” left behind a wife, a son, a grandchild, and some of the sweetest music you’ll ever hear, if you have an ear to lend.

What does a man need – really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in – and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That’s all, in the material sense, and we know it. But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention for the sheer idiocy of the charade.

The years thunder by, The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed.  Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?

The evolution — the mere existence – of comic strip collections is a pretty curious phenomenon.  Comic strips are the very definition of disposable pop culture; they are and almost always have been one-shot gag delivery systems designed to be forgotten five seconds after they’re read.  The dramatic narrative strips of the action and soap-opera variety are even less worth collecting, not only because they’re badly written, but because they spend half their time recapping what happened in the last installment for lazy readers.  The very notion of collecting such things seemed pretty ridiculous until a good five decades into the art form’s existence (which is particularly unfortunate, since some of the early strips, which were often quite excellent, were never preserved).  This wasn’t so much a referendum on the validity of the art form as it was an admission that the strip form was just too ephemeral to merit the treatment.

This began to change in the 1950s and 1960s, largely through the popularity of nationally syndicated strips and the subsequent marketing possibilities, another development for which every comics artist should be eternally grateful to Sparky Schulz.  And it was Schulz who was the well-deserved subject of Fantagraphics’ now-legendary line of comprehensive strip collections; their gorgeously designed, lovingly curated collection of his Peanuts strips set the standard that everyone — themselves included — would have to match from then on.  It’s a surprisingly hard decision to go all in with these sorts of collections; their positive qualities cannot be denied, but they’re also almost prohibitively expensive, and even comics fans with the resources to pony up $30 for every volume probably started to get a little leery by the time the material from the late ’70s and ’80s started appearing.

Though a huge fan of the medium’s masters, I’ve had to refrain  from pulling the trigger time and time again due to the expense and investment of time demanded by the Fantagraphics collections, but I knew the time was coming.  The company had been promising for many years that they were only a few months away from releasing the first volume of the collected Pogo, but there were always unending delays.  The lateness of the Pogo book became something of an industry joke, one which is fairly addressed in Pogo by Walt Kelly:  The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips Volume 1 – Through the Wild Blue Wonder.  Editors Kim Thompson and Carolyn Kelly (Walt’s daughter) explain that they simply didn’t want the collection to come out until it was the best it could be, and that meant preparing a huge amount of archival material, much of which had been believed lost until Carolyn unearthed it.

It’s a fair cop.  Through the Wild Blue Wonder is an absolute peach of a collection; it features the typically handsome deluxe binding we’re used to from Fantagraphics and a beautiful cover, and the non-strip material within is more than enough to justify the double-sawbuck price tag.  There’s a summary of the entire contents, describing each story arc from Pogo‘s first two years; a 30-page selection of strips from the New York Star, before it became nationally syndicated; a foreword by Jimmy Breslin with a swell punchline; an exhausting intro by Fantagraphics’ Steve Thompson documenting Kelly’s life and the strip’s history; and pages of annotations by Pogo fanzine maven R.C. Harvey.  (There’s also plentiful photos and caricatures of Kelly himself, who bore an eerie resemblance to fellow comic genius Ernie Kovacs.)

Of course, any such collection lives and dies by the quality, readability and durability of the strips inside, and there’s a good reason why I exercised such patience in waiting for Wild Blue Wonder.  With all due respect to the likes of Charles Schulz, Bill Watterson, Garry Trudeau, George Herriman, and other great strip artists, Pogo has always been my favorite.  Its art — influenced hugely by Kelly’s time as an animator for Walt Disney — is simply breathtaking; the facial expressions and body language in these strips are often deceptively simple, but they offer a master class in how to communicate emotion and expression in cartooning.  Kelly’s brush lines are absolutely breathtaking, and get a well-deserved showcase in beautiful rough-sketch scans that break up the chapters.  His backgrounds are lovely and provide a perfect balance to the detail in the character illustrations (as well as serving as a painful reminder of how much comic strips have lost by their constant shrinkage on the newspaper page).  The medium is a big tent and can support all levels of craft from its artists, but Walt Kelly may have been the comics page’s greatest draftsman until the arrival of Bill Watterson. And Pogo‘s lettering is simply unparalleled; no one before or since has taken such pains, not only to make the text beautiful, but to integrate it into the very nature of the strip, using it to enhance the humor and deepen the characters.

But what puts Pogo way, way over the top in terms of sheer audacious greatness isn’t its art, great as that is.  It’s Kelly’s remarkably eclectic writing and inventive use of language that makes the strip. The greatest writers in every medium were in love with language, drinking in its possibilities and letting it flow back out of them in unexpected and clever ways, and Kelly is no exception. He threw every kind of linguistic expression into Pogo‘s gumbo pot:  poetry, ballads, popular song, newspaper jargon, technical language, advertising argot, and, of course, the perceptive yet absurd mish-mash of Southern dialects spoken by his characters.  Kelly was a Yankee through and through, and the dialect of Pogo and his pals is no more meant to be a true Southern accent than the setting of the strip is a realistic depiction of the north Georgia swamps.  But he had a tremendous ear, and he managed to whip the dialects of Cajun country, the Old Dominion, the New South, and other nooks and crannies of Confederate country into a blend that was entertaining enough on its own, but when combined with the humor of the strips, was absolutely hilarious.

The humor Kelly used was also nearly impossible to describe, but joyous to experience. He found himself too limited by the simplicity of funny-animal gag strips while working at Dell; when he started Pogo, he stuck with the format, which he loved, but expanded the approach to include political satire, character-based humor, cartoonish slapstick, elaborate linguistic puns, and most of all, a jaundiced look at human nature that can only be achieved through the means of placing it in the mouths of animals.  The material collected in Through the Wild Blue Wonder is the earliest Pogo stuff, so it features relatively little of the biting political material that would be a highlight of later strips, but there’s still at least half a dozen varieties of humor on display here.  Kelly never lost sight of his great passion for making kids laugh, so he still manages to pack in plenty of goofy slapstick that will still appeal to the young ‘uns today; but he was also trying to amuse himself, and his sense of humor was decidedly dark when it came to human nature.  These early strips feature plenty of his cynical takes on favorite targets like the justice system, the newspaper trade, the hucksterism of salesmen and advertisers, and possibly tops on his hit list, the idea that technology is improving the human race.

For these strips, he usually employed the character of Howland Owl, the half-baked pseudoscientist of the Okefenokee Swamp — who, in the first volume, is memorably charged with developing atom bomb technology.  Kelly’s characters were no deeper than the water in their native marshes, but he expertly employed them as archetypes:  the misunderstood misanthrope Porky Pine, forever unable to make himself understood (he submits his tragic life story to the local newspaper, which runs it as a comic strip), the overenthusiastic Albert Alligator and his frequent partner, the easily manipulated turtle Churchy LaFemme, and the self-aggrandizing hound dog Beauregard Bugleboy are all perfectly used in showing how people get caught up in their own enthusiasms and are apt to blame everyone but themselves for the vagaries which keep them from getting what the want.  The self-serving fraud of a priest, Deacon Mushrat, appears sparingly here, and isn’t quite the moralizing hypocrite he would become in later years; his role as villain is largely filled by snake-oil salesman Seminole Sam.  But the essential set-ups are all here, ready for Kelly to start making his endlessly repeated observations on the way fools engineer their own downfall — a topic that was of no small relevance in the America of the 1950s.

Kelly wasn’t afraid to experiment, either.  He was constantly breaking the tacit ‘reality’ of the strip; his characters knew they were in a comic decades before the clever self-referential cartoonists of the 1980s.  There’s even a great sequence where the newspaper decides to run a comic strip, and Howland gives Porky a tutorial on the techniques of the medium by pointing out the very elements of the strip they’re in (“The next merriment pops up when you see the copyright notice”).  He also played around with the funny-animal aspect, making some finely pointed points about the irony inherent in making your main characters intelligent animals, while tiptoeing around the delicate subject of what, exactly, they are supposed to eat.  (More than once, a character decides that Pogo himself would make a good meal.)  There are hidden jokes, linguistic puns, and meta-references to spare, at a time when almost no one else was engaging in such humor, and Kelly even engages in some heartbreaking melodrama; read the strips where Albert is accused of having eaten an absurdly adorable puppy dog and try not to choke up.  Kelly was sometimes so teeming with jokes that he absolutely stuffed the strip with them; the word balloons are practically overflowing compared to most of his contemporaries, and he would often toss in two or three punchlines in a single strip.  (One of my favorites involves Seminole Sam trying to sell the natives a bunch of pins, on his claim that they contain hilarious stories engraved on the head by a minuscule insect.  He starts reading one, which clearly consists of a passage from a geometry textbook.  He confesses:  ”Gentlemen, apparently I’ve mixed the pins.  This one seems to bear the Constitution of a small southern republic in a foreign tongue.”  That’d be more than enough for most strips, but Kelly has Albert provide the capper:  ”Go ahead and finish her — she starts out funny.”)

Through the Wild Blue Wonder, which was released late last year, is the first of a dozen books, which will form the entirety of Pogo‘s run, as well as a bunch of bonus material.  There’s tons of great stuff still to come; much of the political stuff is later on, including the incredible Jack Acid Society Handbook promised as an extra; essential characters like Mam’selle Hepzibah, Bun Rab, P.T. Bridgeport, Tammananny Tiger, and Molester Mole MacCarony have yet to make an appearance; and there will be an increased number of color strips as well as plentiful background notes and sketches.  So even at the high price, there’s no chance I won’t be in this one for the long haul.  And, of course, it’s churlish to mention this as a positive, but the sole good thing to come out of Kelly’s early death at age 60 is that he didn’t stick around long enough for Pogo to become an embarrassment.  Collectors — especially those who aren’t as familiar enough with Kelly as he has long deserved — should join me in locking this one down for the duration; and since it is, after all, that ol’ ephemeral art form, comics, casual fans should feel free to snatch it up from the library, read through it on a tear, and join me in the frustration of waiting for the next installment to appear.  Either way, this is simply a must-read collection of comics by one of the greatest creators ever to put his hand to the form.  Thanks to Fantagraphics, Pogo will avoid the fate of the comic created in-strip by Howland and Church, who draw it on planks of wood which are later eaten by Albert (he thinks they’re sandwiches).  ”Oh, the daily hilarity yo’ paper lost when you ate that strip,” laments Howland, leaving Albert to provide the kicker:  ”I will say it tasted funny.  We might of had another Foxey Grampa!”