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.

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.

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!”

When I was young, like many idealists, I still believed that America was exceptional.  I still believe that this country is an exceptional one; there is still no nation that so fiercely enshrines the rights of man in its very foundational document and so vociferously defends them as part of its entire existence.  But age, time, and the hard, hard lesson that good does not always triumph over evil or freedom over oppression have taught me that the American people are no more free of prejudice and bigotry than those of any other country, and in some regards they are substantially worse.  From time to time, this grim fact — and the concomitant truth that democracy can be quite incompatible with freedom — makes itself explicit, and last night in North Carolina was one of them.

It wasn’t the first.  It won’t be the last.

Even today, with my country’s political system more bought and sold than ever, and with intolerance making a bold new bid for the public embrace, I try not to become a cynic.  The worst political ideas ever wrought by nations have been the work of cynics.  It is the irrational fears and ancient prejudices of the stupidly sincere that form the raw materials of votes like the one in North Carolina, but it is the cynicism and calculation of the political class that channels them into the means by which they consolidate their power, using it to choke the life out of the very people who elected them.  But it’s sorely tempting at times like this to despair about how ignorant and backward Americans have revealed themselves to be on the issue of gay rights.

The right of gay men and women to marriage equality is predictably recognized in Canada, and in Europe’s more progressive quarters, but what is more surprising is that it is becoming the law of the land in bastions of Catholicism:  Spain, Argentina, and Belgium have all legalized gay marriage, and Mexico City now allows them as well.  Civil unions are allowed almost everywhere in Europe, and increasingly in conservative South America (there is something especially disgraceful about being behind Colombia on any civil rights issue).  Same-sex marriages are even allowed in South Africa, a country that still enshrined institutional racism under the color of law as recently as the mid-1990s; perhaps it was their history of ugly racial discrimination that made them so quick to tie it to anti-homosexual bigotry.  It is not for nothing that it has been pointed out that the last time North Carolina amended its constitution was to prohibit marriage between races.

Let’s be perfectly clear on this:  those who oppose same-sex equality are on the wrong side of history.  They are being left behind in almost every corner of the globe, and they will eventually lose.  Whatever the origins of their position — the inculcated brainwashing of tradition, the baseless irrationality of religious indoctrination, or the outright bigotry of repulsion and hatred of gays — they represent what Hunter Thompson called “the forces of old and evil”.  Those at the vanguard of this regressive movement come up with all sorts of justifications that make it seem as if they are not simply indulging in the repression of a minority, but none of them hold a thimbleful of rhetorical water.  For all the talk of sacrament and tradition, marriage has always been a social construct, and thus may be defined however we agree to define it without damaging the concept.  Western society has gone through dozens of permutations of toleration of gays as well as dozens of permutations of intolerance against them.  There is simply no credible evidence whatsoever that gay marriage does measurable harm to heterosexual unions, or that the children of homosexuals are doomed to neurotic misery; what evidence there is suggests just the opposite.  And, just as with that other American bugaboo, marijuana, the harm that can be suffered from homosexuality stems almost exclusively from the fact of the bias and social and legal prejudices against it.  If there were no such thing as homophobia, the whole idea of homosexuality would not even be an issue.  Really, all you have to do to judge the moral quality of the anti-gay movement is look at the people who have sought most feverishly to eradicate homosexual behavior:  the statist paranoiacs of the Stalinist era, the indiscriminate torturers of the Catholic Inquisition, the holy terrorists of the fundamentalist Islamist fringe, and the universally reviled Nazi party, who condemned pink triangles to die alongside yellow stars.

But being wrong, being doomed to ultimate failure, does not mean being denied long-term success.  There has been bigotry against homosexuals for as long as the concept has existed ; indeed, as Gore Vidal has argued, the whole conception of homosexual identity — as opposed to the naturally occurring and entirely uncontroversial phenomenon of homosexual behavior — would never have emerged were it not for the prejudice against it.  The notion that women are human beings and deserve to be treated as something other than breeding stock or domestic implements is a relatively recent one, and has failed to catch on in many quarters; it still meets with fierce resistance even here at home.  And America continued its unbearable mistreatment of blacks far longer than any reasonable person might expect, and bears the scars of its badly healed racial wounds even today.  North Carolina has made it clear that the forces of injustice and intolerance will not easily surrender their power.

The comparison with African-American civil rights has become commonplace, but it is not lightly chosen.  There can be no decent defense of racism or homophobia; both are reducing a human being to a category and then denying them their rights based on their occupation of that category.  Both are punishing a person for being who they are.  But both enjoy widespread support that cannot be reasoned out, just as it was never reasoned in.  Both are — with a few glorious exceptions, which are among the few reasons to be hopeful for the future of mankind — so firmly stitched into the corrupted minds of their followers that they are likely to loosen their grip only with the coming of death.  And both are common enough that they are likely to stand forever in the way of a democratic consensus that blacks should have access to the same justice system as whites, and that homosexuals should have access to the same marital rights as heterosexuals.  But that, of course, is why the courts exist, and is as fine an example as anyone could want as to why the federal judiciary must be allowed to operate independent of the popular will.

When LBJ used his mastery of the senate, the political clout he had accumulated from his dealmaking with the G.O.P., and the public sympathy accompanying the death of John F. Kennedy to push the civil rights issue, he knew it would be finally determined by the Supreme Court, and saw it through despite a social climate and political hostility that are nearly unimaginable today.  Today, our Democratic president lacks such mastery, lacks such sympathy, squanders what little clout he possesses, and may not even have the will to make things happen regarding gay marriage.  He also faces an entirely different Supreme Court, one which has been stocked with reliable ideologues in the last 20 years of conservative rule.  But for now, there can be no doubt that the only way the matter of gay marriage can be settled is in the Supreme Court.  The reason that states with significant anti-gay movement have pursued their agendas through amendments to their state constitutions is because they know laws against gay marriage are de jure unconstitutional, insofar as they are universally in opposition to the Equal Protection Clause and create a specific group against which it is permissible to deny civil rights.  They also know that taking their case to the nation’s highest court poses a dangerous risk; even the likes of Scalia and Alito might not be quick to rule against anti-gay legislation, knowing it would make hash out of the Civil Rights Act and dozens of other anti-discriminatory rulings the court has made in the past.  And it is, thankfully, still pretty well unthinkable that an amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning gay marriage would have a chance to pass.  The anti-gay movement has a legitimate reason to fear federal action on the issue, which is the reason for all the tinkering about with state constitutions — ironically, from the very same side of the political spectrum who are forever grousing about activist judges and Obama’s alleged violation of our sacred constitution.

But the death of a thousand cuts will not work here.  The homophobes and bigots need a decisive blow to behead their enemy, and each little wound they inflict only engenders more sympathy in their opponents (and, increasingly, in the younger demographic that doesn’t seem to give a shit about the issue).  One of the modern conservative movement’s founding fathers (and himself no friend of homosexualists) once described the ethos as that of a man “standing athwart history, yelling ‘stop!’.”  This is entirely apt, and while entirely quixotic as an organizational goal, even a bit noble at times.  But today’s conservatives, especially those involved in the anti-gay marriage movement, have scaled it down to a pettier and uglier goal:  they are standing atop civilization, yelling ‘go back!’.  Alexander Hamilton wrote that the rights of man are not to be found in documents or in law, and “can never be erased or obscured by mortal power”; they are written with a sunbeam, he said, and shoot through every fiber of the human soul.  Conservatives have a chance now to stand aside and let that sunbeam through, see how its cleansing brightness illuminates and colors all corners of our society with hope and justice.  Instead, they are reaching for pots of black paint to forever obscure the very notion of equality.

Now that we’re two years removed from its now rather notorious series finale, it seems like a good time to revisit Lost, and to consider the lessons it imparted to its viewers, to its inheritors, and to its medium.  The consensus, if such a thing can even be said to exist in the fractious post-Internet world of television, is that Lost is at best a deeply flawed success and at worst a game-changing failure, a show that tapped into a timely hysteria for serialized enigmas but left little behind but a scrap heap of inferior imitators; this perception is compounded by the fact that, because people are always more prone to remember the last thing you did than the first, its legacy cannot be spoken of without mention of its last episode, which is widely perceived as a clumsy cop-out, the disappointing payoff of a massive investment of time and emotion.

Having re-watched the entire series, I think this view of the show is more than a bit unfair, and highlights the inconsistencies in our selective memories when it comes to television — a medium which, it is true, encourages just that sort of short-sightedness because of its fragmented and ephemeral quality. While Lost is sometimes remembered as a noble failure because of the uneven quality of its later seasons, The Sopranos, which suffered similar loss of focus as it began to gray, is viewed in a much more positive light, and Twin Peaks – whose second-season calamities far outnumbered its first-season miracles — might as well have been filmed on strips of gold.  Of course, the latter shows earned that indulgence by presenting a much higher standard of quality in the first place; Lost at is best was rarely as good as The Sopranos at its worst (though much better than Twin Peaks at its nadir).  But most of the show’s post mortem writers seem to have come to bury and not to praise, and there’s a risk that we might forget what made it so compelling in the first place.

Lost‘s biggest problem, if you credit the conventional one-liner that’s become as much part of its mythology as the Smoke Monster, is that the writers were “making it up as they went along”.  Here’s a little peek inside the creative process, though, for the uninitiated:  all writers make things up as they go along.  That, in fact, is what writing is, especially in a specialized collaborative medium like television, and even more especially in serial fiction.  There are precious few people who could plot out a complex series with a sprawling cast and a ridiculous amount of backloaded information years ahead of time and have it make any sense; no one wants to see a television show as plotted by Harry Stephen Keeler.  One of the only shows to accomplish this, in fact, was the universally acclaimed (and criminally underwatched) HBO series The Wire.  And its ability to pull off this astonishing task — even when, by the fifth season, the levers and pulleys were starting to show — was one of the reasons it was universally acclaimed.  Lost didn’t have that luxury; it was a network show, and a dazzlingly expensive one at that, so it was beholden to all sorts of intangibles that kept it from sticking to any kind of master plan even if one had existed.   And since its creative staff couldn’t admit what every writer knows — that in any kind of long-form fiction, there is a significant amount of deviation and improvisation over time — they had to pretend otherwise.  And since the pretense was so obvious, fans became angry at being told the lie they themselves demanded.

That significant expense (Lost remains the most costly ongoing series in American network TV history) brings up another point:  the show looked then, and looks now, fucking fantastic.  It was one of the first television series to take advantage of hi-definition digital television at its zenith; it was meant to be seen in hi-def.  And though the isolation and indulgence of filming in Hawaii took its toll on the cast and crew, it certainly didn’t hurt the way the show looked; almost every scene on the island is eye-tearingly gorgeous, and I’d be willing to bet that some of the disappointment in later seasons was as much to do with the fact that the plots took them off the island as it did the quality of the writing itself.  The pilot to Lost is the most expensive ever made, but it is also one of the most perfect creations television has ever delivered.   The notion that TV has become more like movies generally refers to the increased level of quality in recent years of small-screen programming, but in Lost, we have a show that looks as good as a movie as well, a fact that is in danger of being lost because our culture is steadily losing its appreciation of the visuals in visual media.

The acting on Lost was inconsistent, but it was rarely terrible.  It’s another factor that often gets overlooked, for a number of reasons; for one, few of its cast have gone on to bigger or better things, and for another, the three main characters were played by the three least interesting actors:  Matthew Fox could deliver moments of emotional power as Jack Shephard, but he was just as likely to give himself over to calf-eyed gurning; Evangeline Lilly was as dull an actress as Kate Austen was a character; and Josh Holloway didn’t often transcend the requirements of his modeling days as Sawyer.  But Lost was an ensemble cast, and regardless of their work since, the actors outside of that quickly abandoned central triangle often brought their A games.  Michelle Rodriguez and Adewale Akinnouoye-Agbaje were hypnotic in their roles as people irreparably damaged by their violent pasts (and were the prime example of the show’s folly in killing off its most interesting characters too soon); Yunjin Kim was a terrific find, and the show made great use of quirky supporting actors like Ken Leung and Jeremy Davies; and two of its most important roles — Terry O’Quinn’s John Locke and Michael Emerson’s Ben Linus — were played masterfully, to the degree that almost every scene one or the other of them is in is a scene that’s worth watching.  Even in the most absurd moments (as with Jeremy Davies’ wacky adventures in time) or the most unrewarding characters (Hiroyuki Sanada’s inexplicable Shaolin monk), no one phoned it in from the big island.

The show’s scripting was its Achilles’ heel.  Its dialogue was capable of coughing up memorable lines, but it was rarely great and often silly.  Its (generally clever) structural format, as well as the need to fill space as the show’s popularity led to one new season after another, often necessitated egregious padding.  Most of the worst of this involved Kate, but there were also unforgettable duds like Hurley’s imaginary friend, the utter miscue that was Nikki and Paulo, and, of course, “Stranger in a Strange Land”.  It’s nothing short of astounding that “Jack’s tattoos” hasn’t become cultural shorthand for a wet shit of an episode from an otherwise excellent show the way “jumping the shark” has come to mean the end of a show’s useful life.  Lost wasn’t good at being clever, and it frequently lost the thread of its own tale, and it failed miserably at making any kind of moral statement.  (I dare you to give a meaningful summary of why Jacob and the Man in Black were at each other’s throats, or what point of view either they or their minons represented.)  It made about as much sense as any show about magnetic anomalies, time travel, and smoke monsters could ever make, which is to say none at all.  It wasn’t even particularly good at plotting.

But what it was good at — what it was supremely, unprecedentedly, and stunningly good at — was storytelling.  From the very first episode until approximately midway through the fifth, there wasn’t a single episode that failed to do an amazing job of stringing action sequences together in order to create in the viewer an almost tangible need to find out what happened next.  This isn’t the most vital function of art; I’d even argue that it’s a largely superfluous one.  But when it’s well done, the effect is as staggering as watching someone catch a bullet with his teeth.  It’s something that soap operas are very good at; it’s the quality with which Stephen King has become this country’s most successful author.  It is nothing more than the art of telling not a meaningful or enlightening or beautiful story, but an effective one, and Lost had it in spades.  Its cliffhangers dangled like a condemned man’s noose; its emotional moments — its revelations and reunions, especially — possessed the power of a prizefighter’s punch to the gut. It was expert at managing what Roland Barthes identified as the proairetic code — the sequences and actions that propelled the reader into the narrative, and the way those sequences and actions helped impart overall meaning to the text.  The most amazing trick of the proairetic code, one capable of being mastered by something as low as wrestling or as high as Shakespeare, is to involve the reader in the creation of the text; its complexity creates conspiracy, and inspires the viewer to create narratives where none may exist.  This was obvious from the very beginning with Lost, as it provided us with enough narrative hooks and background enigmas that we couldn’t help partake in speculation and and theorizing.  Thus did it engender a world even more complex and full of wonder than even the show’s creators were capable of imagining:  Lost had millions of writers instead of dozens, and the fact that the worlds they created weren’t real, or even relevant, doesn’t make the aggregate richness they added to the experience any less wondrous.

The show did other things well (it’s quite tightly directed overall, and it took fine advantage of new media to enhance its watchability), other things poorly (it never talked when it could scream, and it encouraged certain aspects of the now-dominant nerd culture a bit too shamelessly), and other things fair-to-middlin’ (Michael Giacchino’s score was often loopy and obvious, but occasionally brilliant).  But one thing it gets blamed for is the endless secession of imitators, none of which could hold a candle to it, that it inspired.  So high were its ratings and so tightly did it lock in to its cultural moment that no one can let it go; even today, subpar serial tales of mystery pollute the airwaves, giving us goopy drama with a creamy center of slowly doled-out secrets.  But Lost no more bears the blame for the persistence of shows like The River and Alcatraz than Quentin Tarantino deserves to be called a third-rate director just because all the hip, casually violent crime dramedies that came in the wake of Pulp Fiction were third-rate.  If something successful can be imitated, there will be imitations, especially in Hollywood, and Lost deserves credit for its frequently masterful handling of serial storytelling, not blame for the fact that someone paid a lot of money to get us to watch The Event.

It’s the quality of immediacy, of addiction — the desperate need to find out what, if anything, comes next — that made Lost such a runaway success, but I wonder if, in the long run, it’s also what’s worked against it.  The qualities that make it easy to mock and deride — the Jackface, the weird science-fictional flip-flops of the last two seasons, the frayed edges we all spotted once we decided a fast one was being pulled on us (and honestly, no possible ending to Lost would have satisfied its fans), Michael braying for WAAAAALT — are bits and pieces, quick to come to mind and lots of fun to huck tomatoes at.  But the things we loved about it aren’t easy to remember, because they require us to go through the elaborate and time-consuming process of sitting down and watching it again, and remembering the cold hand we felt dragging us from episode to episode, and the maddening but thrilling sensation of the credits appearing at the most frustrating possible moment.  That mastery of storytelling, and that cruel knowledge of just how to pull our strings, is what made Lost such a massive success when it was on — and what made it so easy to forget once it stopped.

Some time ago, a friend of mine was discussing the painful direction criticism has taken in the internet age.  He suggested, in a bit of phrasing that has struck me as extremely perceptive ever since, that part of the problem is that people no longer approach art with any sense of humility.  Although the democratization of culture and the tumbling down of the walls that arbitrarily separated ‘high’ culture from ‘low’ has largely been a good thing, it has also birthed a generation so enamored of their own opinions, and so distrustful of having something pulled over on them, that they seem incapable of experiencing culture as something transcendent, something capable of instilling in them unfamiliar feelings, something that requires them to learn something new or experience something confusing or strange.  A generation raised on the idea that every opinion is worth publicizing and every cultural product is worth reviewing finds this unacceptable; unfamiliarity, discomfort and ambiguity make them feel dumb, so they eschew it, and approach every aesthetic encounter as something to be placed in a box that has already been labeled and slotted into an already-completed hierarchy.  That this is precisely the wrong way to approach art does not seem to trouble them.

Similarly, in a discussion earlier with another friend, he mentioned that he encounters so many people who have completely bought into the notion of themselves as special and unique creative snowflakes that they drag the entire artistic process through the mud, presenting their art as something undignified, a scruffy child they happened to birth that, if it has any function whatsoever, is to reflect glory on their own very specialness.  How can you have any dignity in your art, he asked, when you look at your performance as nothing more than an excuse to publicize your own oh-so-interesting bio, when the number and status of your credits is more important than the quality of the work?  The important thing is that you’ve written a dozen webcomics, not whether the webcomics are any good; the important thing is that you studied under a well-known dance instructor, not whether you learned anything from her; the important thing is that you’ve seen a thousand movies, not whether the majority of them were worth watching, or whether you learned anything from them or had any insightful criticisms to offer after seeing them.

Paul Fussell, in his bitingly insightful book Class, pointed out that one of the characteristics of the modern classless Bohemian — the people who he called “Class X” for their attempt to break out of the unspoken but strangulating economic and social traps that surround us from before we are born — was that they could look at any contemporary work of art and imagine themselves creating something similar.  This is all to the good, and there is nothing wrong with the idea that we take a proprietorial attitude towards art; indeed, it is essential that we read like a writer, that we listen like a musician, that we view like a filmmaker.  All of us should take a creator’s view of art, not a consumer’s view.  But as we often do in American culture, we have overshot the goal.  We have gone beyond viewing art as creators; we have started to view it as jaded rivals, or scornful superiors, or worst of all, patrons.  We have stopped looking at art as something glorious and mysterious, as aspirational, and started looking at it with the eyes of a latter-day Viennese emperor, wondering if a piece of music might not have a few too many notes in it.

From this sin of the art wagging the artist, none of us are exempt.  In the mediated age, we have all come to be convinced of our specialness; we cannot abide the idea that we might lack any given artistic talent, because since we have fully committed to the esteem-building notion that artists are special people, we must be artists, because who will admit to not wanting to be special?  And so it is that we elevate our artistic judgments to the level of artistic achievements — not because our criticism is artful, but because we must always be doing art.  We convince everyone that it is the self-made qualities of our art that makes it special, its ‘original’ plot or its clever structure or its mere status of being better than awful, and our dignity crumbles, because merely creating well-crafted, well-executed art does not make us unique enough.  We don’t create art anymore because it is a raw, pulsating need, a wound that must be cauterized through the creative process; we do it because we all want to be artists, because artists are special.  We are not in bands because we have something to sing about; we are in bands because being in bands is something that you simply have to do.

Another of my friend’s comments struck home with particular harshness to me:  he rightly complained about  comics writers who, having taken distressingly little time to come up with an idea worth writing, or crafting it into a script worth reading, then go on the hunt for artists because they can’t be arsed to learn how to draw themselves — thus showing a gory disrespect by rendering another person’s struggle to refine and perfect their own art into a mere functional component of their own attempt to be special.  That pained me, because I have been that guy.  It took me years to learn what a jackass I was being to the artists of my acquaintance, who were working just as hard to become good artists as I was to become a good writer, but whose efforts I did not respect because I couldn’t personally appreciate them.

For many years, it killed me — killed me – that I had no real musical talent. I can sing passably well, and write decent lyrics; I can even compose music in my head.   But whatever it is that allows your hands to translate what you hear inside to something that can be heard outside, I don’t have it.  And this ate at me.  I felt entitled to make music, because, well, after all!  I knew so much about music, and it brought me so much pleasure, and here I am, a creative person and all — why wouldn’t I be able to make music?  In all my attempts to do so, I showed a shameful lack of dignity and humility to the people I tried to collaborate with.  I viewed them as functionaries in service of my attempts to express my unique snow-flower-itude, instead of people who were on their own (far superior) creative paths who I was pulling away and distracting in service of my own ego.  I count as extraordinarily fortunate the day that I realized that, since there are a million people far better at music than I’ll ever be, and that I am good at other things, the world did not need me to be a musician, and that was okay.  I don’t have to be miserable all the time because I can’t play guitar.

And I, too, was one of those people who bought into the privilege of artistic creation, and that I was missing out if I wasn’t good at everything.  I didn’t have any perspective on my talent, because it was unthinkable to me that I couldn’t do something.  I think I’m a good writer, but I wasted years of my life, and uncountable hours of the time belonging to my friends with artistic talent, arrogantly trying to push my projects onto them.  I was approaching the art of comics with no humility; I had to be the one in charge.  I was trying to convince the world that I was the boss of art, when it was art making a fool of me.  Since then, I’ve learned what a pleasurable but complex thing a real artistic collaboration is, thanks to the patience and good graces of some truly talented partners.  Collaboration — especially collaboration with someone who has a talent you lack — isn’t about being in charge, or issuing orders.  It’s about surrender.  It’s about giving up the sensation of thinking you’re in charge of the creation, and learning to work with your partner in order to make something that is bigger than both your talents.  It’s about learning that artistic expression isn’t a fun way to express your personality; it’s a necessary way to transcend, to escape your personality.

Because technology has given us more access to art than we’ve ever had before, we’ve begun to devalue the great in favor of the new, the difficult in favor of the quick, and the art in favor of the personality of the artist.  We have stripped the process of its dignity and made it a button to be punched on a fast-food menu; we have subjugated our humility before art into a situation where the artist must abase themselves merely for the art to be worthy of our attention.  Until we re-learn this humility before art — until we admit that, while we are all capable of creation, none of us are bigger than the culture we have collectively created — we will keep putting the cart before the horse, and getting nowhere.