Basically, what I learned from Japan is that creativity isn’t solely the domain of individual artists or inventors. Groups can be creative too. It took me a while to realise this, but when I did it made me happy, because it resolved an apparent conflict between two of the things I hold most dear: collectivism and creativity. I think you can say that Japan is capable of producing both the cliches of the manga industry and the originality of someone like Yuichi Yokoyama, whose quirky abstract mangas depend for their impact on twisting the conventions of mainstream manga. It’s not like Yokoyama defies manga, or appears courtesy of divine lightning.
Momus, in this fascinating interview with Marie Calloway at The Rumpus.
I’ve only recently begun noticing the work of Momus, mostly because of the attention to the Marie Calloway thing, but I’ve started becoming more and more intrigued with their work. This particular section from the interview caused me to think about American comics that both encourages collaboration and creativity, particularly in the form of Grant Morrison’s work among others. The recent Batman issue reminds me of the kind thing Momus is talking about here, as well as Casanova. Both of those books challenge the conventions of American comics, while working within the system.
I was in a Barnes and Noble today and noticed this book by Marc Singer titled Grant Morrison: Combing the Worlds of Contemporary Comics. The description:
In Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics, author Marc Singer examines how Morrison uses this fusion of styles to intervene in the major political, aesthetic, and intellectual challenges of our time. His comics blur the boundaries between fantasy and realism, mixing autobiographical representation and cultural critique with heroic adventure. They offer self-reflexive appraisals of their own genres while they experiment with the formal elements of comics. Perhaps most ambitiously, they challenge contemporary theories of language and meaning, seeking to develop new modes of expression grounded in comics’ capacity for visual narrative and the fantasy genres’ ability to make figurative meanings literal.
It’s always difficult seeing books like that when you’re working on something similar. It’s rewarding to see that you’re working along the same creative unconscious, but at the same time it is difficult to not think that you’ve been passed by—the door slammed in your face, saying “Too slow!” When I start thinking this way I return to what Vaughan said, and I settle down knowing that while Singer has come first with a book length piece of cultural commentary that I’m aiming my darts at, I realize that he’s opening the door for more work like mine to come through. The door is only closing if you think it is.
Here is a shitty cell-phone video of Tim and Oakley playing with some dancing puppets last night. Here also for some entertainment value is the Internet Identity entry from Dec. 27, 2011.
Boardwalk Empire is basically a HBO superband. The best actors from The Sopranos, Deadwood and The Wire with a big writer from The Sopranos, like a superband it does nothing special. “He fall into shoe polish?” a line from the second episode.
After reading the Young Manhattanite piece on Marie Calloway involving a discussion between these people regarding the “controversy,” I can’t help but think that it is all really just a bunch of kids trying to seem smarter than each other. It is all just petty gossiping in defense of people broadcasting their lives on the Internet. It’s like reality shows and trying to ascribe deeper meaning to these people, which means absolutely nothing, that meaning is not there. People like Ms. Calloway are just sharing stories that are completely normal. Why the scandal? They would say the scandal perhaps is in the prose, which is straightforward, introspective but not to the point of it being navel-gazing. The real issue is not with Calloway or the piece, it is with the people who are scandalizing it. When people spiral into their bias on the matter, the entire thing blows up into an argument that is usually more interesting than the initial topic because the defenders try to value their meaning in the hot topic to justify their know-it-all attempts at wisdom. The truth of it, however, is in the fact that these defenders (or offenders, depending on how you look at it) are using their identity to put on display their Internet Identity to perpetuate themselves, making it a wholly selfish endeavor. Really it is all just a pedantic argument because someone is wrong on the internet. Absolutely no one is immune to this; I do it too.
So is there a value to this kind of personal-online commentary? It’s hard to say. I’d like to say that it is important, but to do so one must remove one’s thoughts that have a bias; of course this is impossible for humans to do, inevitably things lose focus. In this case, it creates this self-perpetuating discussion and controversy that is really meant to enhance the identity of the people doing the commenting on the topic itself. It’s not actually about the work and usually it comes off as a bunch of hipsters commenting on something that is really actually very normal. For me the kind of fervor that has collected around—this time—Marie Calloway, is more interesting than the initial topic.
