Does it get better than this?

Who better than MAD to satirize the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction, aka MAD?

Thanks so much to Doug and Scott of The Mad Cover site and The MAD Store for digging up this old favorite of mine!

FANG!!!

RIP Soupy Sales.

If anyone has the lyrics to “Catch a pickled herring, put it in your pocket…” I’d be most grateful.

Exterminating Angel

Another Bunuel film:  this one about a group of upper class (bourgeois) in Mexico City who come to a dinner party and can’t ever leave.  They can’t leave the room – can’t step over the threshold to the next one where the front door is visible.  Nor can anyone outside come in and get them.  Nobody knows why.

Not all that unlike those discretely charming ones I was watching last week.  They too are immobilized, in time, in the world, in their little world, and undone by dinner parties.  As Bunuel said in the interview printed in the pamphlet that came with the Criterion Collection DVD, “I am a man of obsessions.”

While the guests are “trapped” in the parlor, they slowly descend towards savagery.  The idiotic and not so idiotic pretensions of their upper crust culture fall away and are replaced by despair, hunger, the desire to find a sacrificial victim, and rank disgust with one another.  Not a new theme, not a deep theme, but a good theme!  And treated with humor and biting sarcasm by LB.  Of course, lots of strange, inexplicable images too, like why did that guy tie a blindfold on a sheep that got into the room?

One other thing about the interview that struck me was that the critics often presented rather involved or esoteric interpretations of things in the film, asking for a “Yes, that’s it“, or a”No” from Bunuel.  Most of the time it was a “no.”  We are so eager to explain, or have explained to us the weird or the mysterious.  Especially from artists, whom we assume must know what they mean and have a clear message (even if it’s a clunky Cold War political allegory that seems utterly incredible – one explanation of the bear’s antics in the adjoining room – he represents the USSR threatening the bourgeoisie!)  More often than not, Bunuel said something like, “Well, I just wanted a strange image,” or “it just happened that way, and I really liked how it looked.”

Free and open elections

Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin – He was the author of the great anti-utopian novel, We.  Orwell admired it, and he thought Huxley had been influenced by (copied?) it.  He died in exile, after his letter to Stalin gained him permission to emigrate rather than remain the USSR without the permission to write.  Considering the contents of his 1923 essay, On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters,  it’s a wonder he wasn’t just taken out and shot.

Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.

Where the flaming, seething sphere (in science, religion, social life, art) cools, the fiery magma becomes coated with dogma- a rigid, ossified, motionless crust. Dogmatisation in science, religion, social life, or art is the entropy of thought. What has become dogma no longer burns: it only gives off warmth- it is tepid, it is cool.

The novel, We, is a memoir written by a prominent engineer in the glorious future One State in which human life is totally regulated.  Mathematics has trumped all poetry.  Individuals rejoice in their state as ciphers.  Sex is proscribed to limited “private hours” regulated by the Book of Hours, and access to sex partners is free, and regulated with a system of recorded pink chits.  The book is a little heavy with literary experimentation as it seeks to evoke the mentality of the future man who revels in his routine and lack of spontaneity, but it is prescient of so many things, in culture, in politics, and especially in the entire future of science fiction, that it amazes.  It also has a very sharp and dark humor.

They say that the Ancients conducted elections in some kind of  secrecy, hiding like thieves … Why would all this mystery be necessary?  Even today it is not understood conclusively; the likeliest explanation is that elections were connected to some sort of mystical, superstitious, maybe  even criminal rites.  For us, there is nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of:  we celebrate election day in the daytime, openly and honestly.  I see everyone vote for the Benefactor; everyone sees me vote for the Benefactor – and it couldn’t be any different, since “I” and “everyone” are the unified “WE” …And if you even suggest the impossible, that is, that there could be some dissonance in the usual homophony, then the invisible Guardians are here, among our ranks:  at any momen, they can stop ciphers who are falling into error and save them from their next false step – and save the One State from them.

Need I add that the “hero” is undone by love, by sex, by a femme fatale ?  At their trysts outside the glass wall of the city, in the museum of the Ancient House, she wears a yellow silk dress.  Her teeth are like daggers.  She scorns the One State, respects nothing.  She is irrestible to him, the engineer of the great spaceship Integral, the vessel that will bring the happiness of tyranny to other planets.  She drives him crazy…makes him…human?

MAD about Wolverton

From the collection of Glenn Bray, on display at this Exhibition.

Wolverton wrote for the comics, for MAD Magazine, where most of his fans probably encountered him, and produced an amazing set of illustrations for the Bible published by the California church of which he was a member.  Looking at his images, it’s clear he was a formative influence on many artists in the undergound comix scene, Art Crumb, among them. (See the Snoid  after looking through Wolvertson’s stuff if you don’t believe me.)

The gun is good…

… The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life, and poisons the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth and kill!

So sayeth the god, Zardoz, in the film of the same name.  I had been wanting to see this film for some time to find out just what the heck it was about – I saw a clip of it once with a floating head soaring above a pastoral landscape to the sound of the second movement of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony.  Having seen it now, or the part I could sit through, I ask, “How could the man who made this great movie [Point Blank], make this lump of mush?”

It’s an amalgam of Brave New World, The Time Machine, and a host of other sci-fi movies and novels, wrapped up in an archly British satirical wrapper, but it fails miserably.  It plays on feminism, reverses machismo (i.e., the John Wayne version of Gun=good, Penis=good), toys with ideas of mind control, the enervating consequences of leisure, etc. etc.  If it were paced a lot faster, and if it didn’t take itself so seriously, it could have been rollickingly good.

The opening action piece is the best:  a gigantic floating head lands in the middle of nowhere and is worshipped by brutal horsemen who seem to live for violence and murder.  The head gives its speech about penis-evil and guns.  Sean Connery is one of the brutal ones, an elite one allowed to breed, and he hitches a ride in the head to see who’s in control.  It’s not unlike the Wizard of Oz, from which the god takes his name.

Why do the brutal exterminators run around in red loin cloths while the ones they kill all seemed to be dressed in worn out suits, as if they are refugees from office work?  Funny, sometimes environmentalists talk  like the Head – people as pollution.

Somewhere along the way, Sean Connery wears a wedding dress.  I’ll have to go watch more of it to find out why.

Reactionary Road

I grew up in the suburbs of the San Fernando Valley, and I live in the “inner ring” of older suburbs of New York City now, so I have always had an interest in the history of urban development, suburban style, and I think I have a good feel for the realities of suburban culture.  Or should I say, ‘culture’?  I was curious about the film, Revolutionary Road, but not enough to see it.

After hearing about what a great writer Richard Yates was, however, I decided to read the book since I knew nothing of his work.  The blurb on the paperback edition I have, with Kate and Leonardo on the cover, speaks of him as a forgotten titan, up there with the greatest of 20th century American novelists.  This article speculates on the reasons why all of his books – all got excellent reviews – are out of print. 

The reason is not hard to find – he is a fine writer, a real craftsman, and his prose carries you along so smoothly, you hardly realize how clever he is – but his vision is incredibly limited, at least in this novel.  Everyone is miserable, everyone is pretty stupid.  They are all dishonest with each other and with themselves.  Nobody has the gumption to try and make their lives into anything meaningful for themselves, they just play parts, and whine.

Was this an indictment of a real social situation or the exquisitely written rant of a talented and unhappy man?  Did he never meet anyone in the ‘burbs who was trying to do something “real” with his or her life?  In satire, people are mocked with the idea that there is a higher standard to which they could, but don’t aspire.  What Yates thinks real and “true” life should be is anyone’s guess.

The only interesting question this dismal literary period piece raises for me is not dealt with much at all by Yates, though he hints at it.  What might it have been that led people who grew up in The Depression and lived or fought through WWII that made some of them accept simplistic notions of success and respectibility?  (What makes them do so today?)  Dimly hinted at in this book, there is a great question:  In a society of relative surplus and freedom, just how does one decide what to do with one’s life?

Sparrow for President…

Maybe in 2012?

Kafka redux

Have you ever read a book, closed the covers, then started in on reading it again right away?  I never have until now.  I finished Kafka’s The Trial, and now I am reading it again.  It is a remarkable book!

I cannot by any means see this novel as a parable about contemporary society, politics, bureaucracy, totalitarianism, or other thematic streams discussed by many reviewers.  For me, this book is pure poetry of the most difficult sort.  And a very dark, ominous sort as well.

Key to this book is tone, something I go on about at length when I rhapsodize about Flaubert.  (Is it a surprise that Nabokov, not a generous critic, had tremendous admiration for Kafka?  He too was a master of tone.)  The book manages to tread the line between a precise, believable, concrete description of things and a world that is totally fearsome, inexplicable, and unexpected.  It is not surreal, but its situations certainly have the feel of dreams, but dreams become absolutely concrete! 

The characters in this book speak a farrago of nonsense about everything, but always with great confidence in what they have to relate, and with tremendous precision, as if they are scholars (talmudic, some have commented) of the structures they analyse.  None of it makes any sense from the point of view of our world, but it makes total sense to them.  The beauty of the writing is that it makes us see it from their point of view, against our will!  That’s the terrible frisson it creates.

There is philosophy here, and satire, and satire of philosophy.  There is commentary here on the nature of human beings and their tragic, fallen state.  And there is fatalistic resignation, not much hope, but laughter that, maybe, makes it bearable.  It is not a happy work, but it is uplifting in a way.

Temptation

The Temptation of Doctor Antonio is the Fellini contribution to the four stories told in Boccaccio ‘70, which was released in 1962.  (Story goes, the producers joked it wouldn’t be allowed on-screen until 1970.)  The good doctor is on a crusade against filth and smut in Roman social life but he meets his match when a gargantuan billboard showing Anita Ekberg reclining seductively on a couch is erected in a park directly opposite his window.  It’s an advertisement for milk!

Slowly, the doctor’s sexual frustrations unravel him, and the billboard comes to life as a thirty-foot tall sex goddess who is a bit put out that he cannot just see things her way.  In the image above, she has reappeared as a normal-sized (but not normally endowed) woman so she can have a little fun chasing Dr. A. about.  Then she goes back to super, duper, jumbo size and begins to undress.

This story is so simple, the satire is so uncomplicated and familiar, but the treatment of it is hilarious, sexy, fresh, surprising, and all-out crazy!  Another Fellini triumph.

Dr. Antonio confronts his nemesis, by day and during a “pagan” night ritual.

The goddess full-size, and looking very angry with the good doctor.

The doctor acts out his repressed childhood fantasy of pinching and fondling his aunt’s breasts, but with a giant-sized incarnation of the devil-woman.

Jim Woodring and …

Jim Woodring is the latest comics artist to come to my enthusiastic attention.  Though he no longer does comic strips, he is legendary for his color and black and white stories about Jim – autobiographical I guess – and Frank, a humanoid figure who wordlessly moves through a landscape that exceeds the bounds of  the surreal.  In fact, to use that term, “surreal,” to describe him is to sink to cliche.  His stories of Frank are dreamlike and terrifying, but in a way that lacks the self-conscious arti-ness of so much surrealism, while being no less powerful.  I’d say, his images smack more of what I have experienced in my rare spells of delirium, but his stories all make sense, often moral sense.

The color page below will give you an idea of the eerie weirdness and humor that “Frank” brings to the world.  You can visit this link to see a faithful animation of his Frank character, but I think I like the regular old ink-on-page comics better.

The black and white page is from an issue of his “Jim” comics, and as usual, it is more structured along the lines of a wordy narrative…but of course, there is that giant talking frog!  I love this story for its wit, subtlety, irony, and sly philosophy.  It reminds me a lot of Italo Calvino’s story, “The Aquatic Uncle.”  The mastery of tone in this page, keeping to a steady highminded satire while portraying a sexy “girl-form,” a pompous and sensitive frog…prince? philosopher? demon?…and a tense socratic dialog on fear and human potential is amazing.  BRAVO!

…and gore…

Yes, somewhere there is a graduate student laboring on a Ph.D. dissertation on the comparative treatment of gore in Richard Sala, Tony Millionaire (two other of my favorites) and Woodring.  Consider first, Richard Sala:

His “noir”, Edgar A. Poe-esque adventure stories are filled with hacking, stabbing, decapitation, skull crushing violence.  Still, it evinces a laugh because he works within a genre and its anti-universe, always keeping it at a considerable emotional distance from us.  When I see those knives flashing, or helter-skelter piles of semi-clothed dead maidens…I chuckle or leer.

Tony Millionaire goes for the grand guignol, with a devilishly funny twist.  He’s not trying to scare us out of our seats.  More likely, he’d like to get us up and running to the can to vomit in disgust,

even as we nearly choke for laughing.  When I look at his sliced up bodies (Everything always seems to grow back fine for the next page!) and buckets of throw-up, I grimace with disgust and chortle.

Then there’s Jim Woodring.  His violence is cool, often wordless and soundless.  Sometimes we don’t even know what is devouring or mutilating what.  Sometimes, however, it’s just straight out barbarity, but with no visual change in tone from the other actions.  Consider below:  Manhog observes Frank having a picnic with his dolls and grows distraught at his exclusion from the fun.  He rushes in and upends Frank’s picnic spread and runs off.

Later, Frank walks alone, despondent, but he happens on the debauched Manhog sleeping.  Watch him take revenge!

Is there any more clinical depiction of the savagery of human violence?  It is truly disturbing, distilled to its terrible essence by the magic of the strange, ridiculous incongruity of the cartoon format.

Uncle Joe’s bailout

Stalin is much with us these days.  At left, a crude cartoon published in yesterday’s NYTimes lampooning the proposed bailout that was voted down later that day.  It was paid for by someone in Texas who seems to own a venture capital business.  Today, he ran another one that was a crude parody of the famous Iwo Jima flag raising, with Bush, Berneke, and Paulson raising the flag of communism on American soil.

Also in today’s paper, an article about a fellow in Georgia who makes a tidy living by impersonating Joe himself.

And on my home front, my latest acquisition.  From Regency  political cartoons and satires to deadly serious state propaganda.  A limited edition printing of the report on the first Five Year Plan of the USSR, completed in FOUR years, under the glorious leadership of Uncle Joe.  With a little help from slave labor.

The cover says “Stalin.”

Dedication page – meant to be given to a loyal Party member

The Great Leader

5/4, Five years accomplished in 4!

Worker Soldier

Lenin is still No. 1

When I look through these pages, I feel a tremendous sadness.  The forced collectivization was on.  The mass murder of the kulaks was in full swing.  The Ukrainian famine had wrought its horror.  The Gulag was growing apace.  The Great Purge was but three years off, to be followed by the cataclysm of the Nazi invasion.  All under Stalin’s watch.  No hint of that in these stirring pages…

A colleague of mine is Russian.  She smells the paper and the ink, and is transported back to her grandfather’s library…