Over the last few years, the big word in NASCAR has been parity: the idea that no one make of car (Ford, Chevy, Pontiac, Dodge) should have any technical advantage over the others, in order to emphasize competition between drivers. When one make is shown to have a significant edge, whether in testing or on the track, the the other manufacturers' teams lobby NASCAR to step in and redress the imbalance. This means that if Chevy spends all winter making their cars more aerodynamically sound, these innovations can be wiped away by NASCAR before even running the first race of the season (the Daytona 500). This had led some teams to complain that it would be easier not to work on making their cars better, and instead just whine about the advantages the other teams' cars have.
The NASCAR governing body appeals to some vague notion of democracy and meritocracy every time it enforces a rule to keep the cars under a performance ceiling: parity is supposed to take away some of the advantages better funded teams have by putting a cap on technical development. However, the actual result is that only teams with a lot of money can afford to optimize their cars according to many of the seemingly arbitrary rules. Junior Johnson and the Woods Brothers, independent operators, who ran small, underfunded teams, and succeeded because they continuously raised the bar of technical innovation, are figures out of NASCAR's past. "Parity" today means cookie-cutter cars (knock-offs of whichever manufacturer did the most homework over the off-season), cookie-cutter tracks (knock-offs of Charlotte's 1.5-mile oval), cookie-cutter drivers (knock-offs of Jeff Gordon). The irony is that for all the gung-ho Americanism used to market NASCAR, the sport itself has degenerated into a bizarre kind of socialism.
(Next, I'll get into the differences between NASCAR and F-1, which, despite its elitist reputation, is much more democratic in practice).
Over at My Stupid Dog, Tim Hulsey responds to my take on the X-Men, and clarifies his original argument. Reasonable stuff, and I'm basically in complete agreement. However, to clarify one of my own points, the civil rights agenda of the original X-Men comic book was hyped by Stan Lee and the Marvel publicity department. My main argument is that this was PR at the time, and it continues to have little basis in the actual comics. In this sense, I agree with Tim, although I seems that I have a rather more positive view on myths, in general.
(If you scroll down, you can also read Tim's post on Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon: it's one of the most thoughtful pieces I've read about every college literature prof's favorite movie.)
Dylan Horrocks, in his comics and his writing about comics, interestingly and productively compares the process of making comics to cartography. His argument is that comics are maps of space and time, and he even expands this theory to suggest that, in a way, all stories function as these special kinds of maps. Comics stories have, by the very nature of how they are made, stayed closer to their map-making nature than the highly praised efforts of contemporary literary fiction, which have systematically attempted to deny that anything exists to be mapped in the first place. Dylan's idea offers a reason why comics were not able to completely throw off the value of craft in determining their aesthetic worth: we can tell whether a map is good or not by how well it allows us to navigate, or understand, the terrain it depicts.
This cartographical quality of comics is readily apparent not only in Dylan's own work (Hicksville and his new continuing series Atlas), but in most of the greatest works of comics art, both from its past--the fantastic georgraphy of Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland, the urban and rural landscapes of Depression America seen through a child's eyes in Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie, the Cold War Grand Tour of Herge's Tintin--and present--the complicated diagrams that collapse entire family histories into the space of a page in Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan, the impressionistic journalism of Eddie Campbell's autobiographical "Alec" stories. Even in the contemporary mini-comics scene, which is characterized, in general by solipistic, craftless work (aptly parodied by Bill Wray and Peter Bagge in a backup feature in the new Sweatshop #1), Kevin Huizenga, whose Supermonster series offers startling examples of visually mapping complex ideas into everyday stories (you can see examples of this technique here and here). Incidentally, I can't think of too many better ways to spend $12.00 than to buy a bunch of Kevin's comics from the USS Catastrophe website. Kevin has justly received praise from within the arts comics world, but his work is heartfelt and appealing, and skillfully rendered with a spare elegance that makes it stand out from the jumble of ineptly drawn efforts that clutter the mini-comics scene.
I've enjoyed reading Tim Hulsey's take on the new X-Men movie, as well as some of the responses it's generated (from Journalista's Dirk Deppey--you have to scroll down--and Seablogger), but I also think that these interpretations continue to misread fundamental aspects of the comics and movies. In his earlier post, Tim wrote that "the comics found an appreciative fan base not among traditional racial minorities, but among Gays, who enjoyed the messages about difference, but really loved sculpted bodies with tights that bulge in all the right places and none of the wrong ones. " True, but I think this is a straightforward case of audience appropriation, and, at least until the latest creative team of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely took over the book, the X-Men was never meant to work as an allegory for gay rights, or even civil rights in general. As I've already argued (my archive's not working, so you'll have to scroll down to "What was Kirby thinking?"), though the X-Men gives lip service to the ideal of tolerating differences, the heart of the comic deals with the crisis of liberalism, the seductiveness of revolutionary extremism, and the slow, painful process of mediated social change that faced an idealistic youth culture suddenly overwhelmed by its potential politcal power. What these other bloggers seem to be missing out on is the ambiguity Magneto's character takes on in this context, rather than the simplistic (and unhistorical) "X-Men is about civil rights" reading. To be fair, I'm not sure how apparent this ambiguity is in the movie to someone who's not already prepared by the comics to look for it, but since these bloggers have been talking about the meaning of the X-Men in general, I think looking at the source material is entirely appropriate.
Magneto is part of the tradition of noble villains that Jack Kirby created during his run at Marvel in the 1960s which reached its most profound expression in the character of Darkseid in the "Fourth World" stories for DC. Earlier examples in the same vein include the first two major foes of the Fantastic Four, the anti-hero Namor (the Sub-Mariner), who wars with the surface world in order to protect the safety and sovereignty of his underwater kingdom, and Doctor Doom, Reed Richards' rival, driven by jealousy and arrogance to prove Richards the lesser man. Namor's love for Sue Storm eventually leads to his redemption. Doctor Doom is never redeemed, but in The Fantastic Four Annual #2, Kirby paints a sympathetic picture of Doom's origins that shows the reasons for his ambitions as well as his hatred for Richards, and, despite the danger Doom represents to the rest of the world (especially to the Fantastic Four's home New York City), we see that he is beloved by the people of the kingdom of Latveria, who have accepted his absolute rule in return for the safety and prosperity he provides.
Kirby's depiction of Magneto expands on this ambiguity. Not only can we understand Magneto's reasons for attacking humankind--as with Namor, they are a threat to his people (and his children)--but his methods of attack are not very different from the ways in which mutants were attacked by humans in the first place. There is an Old Testament justification in Magneto's crusade against humans. This ties the X-Men in with one of the major issues Kirby deals with throughout his work: for civilization's survival, Old Testament morality must be replaced, but, for Kirby, a vetern of WWII, the pacifism suggested by the New Testament was not a suitable alternative in a world that could allow the Second World War (the Galactus Saga in the pages of The Fantastic Four is perhaps Kirby's most visionary treatment of this theme). True peace required warriors whose power in war equaled their mercy--i.e. Professor X's X-Men: a liberally educated paramilitary group, committed not to revolution, but to the protection of the innocent from attack by any group of extremists--innocent humans from Magneto, innocent mutants from government agents.
As I've already written, I think these ideas exist only in an embryonic state in Kirby's X-Men, and it wasn't until his "Fourth World" series that he began to truly expand on them. And, as much as I enjoy Chris Claremont's writing, he was certainly no Kirby (he wasn't even a Stan Lee), and there's no great subtlety or depth to his writing. However, he did continue to suggest the ambiguity inherent in Magneto's character. Claremont emphasizes that Magneto and Professor X had started with the same goals, but Magneto, like so many of the politcal leaders of the 20th Century, had been seduced by the expediencies of violence in fomenting political change. In this light, Magneto should not be seen so much as a black-hearted villain, but as a noble visionary, blinded by his ideology, felled by his own arrogance and self-importance.
While the X-Men may fail as a civil rights allegory, it remains compelling in its suggestions of many of the crises that faced liberalism during the height of the Cold War and beyond.
Dan Clowes' David Boring, serialized in the pages of Eightball, is an example of the kind of comics I'm talking about. Many comics readers defensively tried to bolster the comic's artistic legitimacy by emphasizing its similarities to Don DeLillo's novels. These readers were correct in noting that Clowes shared many of DeLillo's concerns (especially those of White Noise and Mao II), but were mistaken in not pressing the point that Clowes not only beats DeLillo at his own game, but goes much farther. DeLillo obscures the failure of his prose with empty philosophizing, and points to the shallowness of the world to cover up the lack of depth of his own imagination. DeLillo's writing is lazy, but it pushes all the right buttons of the lit-crit establishment. If Clowes failed in a similar way, say, in being unable to consistently draw a character's face or depict recognizable places, no amount of pomo posturing would be able to cover it up: it would be immediately apparent. Likewise, I can't imagine a contemporary literary author or gallery artist dealing with sexuality, and especially the idiosyncracies of sexual attraction, in as direct and compelling a way as Clowes does. Contemporary literary authors who write about a woman's body, or women's bodies (or gallery artists who deal with it as the "subject" of a piece of high art), seem trapped in a number of outdated assumptions that force them away from reality. Clowes, however, is faced with the task of actually having to draw women's bodies: to deal with them as actual, existing, living, conscious, sexual matter. He cannot substitute this depiction with the cant of dogma, without subverting the very essence of his craft and his art.
Well, my predictions for Indy qualifying didn't come true: not only was Dan Wheldon faster than Kenny Brack, neither one of them ended up on the front row. Unfortunately, Helio "Spider-Man" Castroneves' pole-winning run came during the untelevised portion of the time trials. As it was, the best part of the broadcast was watching Robby Gordon's pretend (badly) that he was glad when his teammate, Tony Kanaan, took the provisional pole away from him. Gordon immediately resorted to the favorite adage of everyone who comes up short on pole-day--it doesn't matter where you start, just where you finish--and even drew on his statistical knowledge that very few polesitters have gone on to drink the milk themselves.
The biggest story of the day might be Chevrolet's embarrassingly poor performance, with their most popular driver, Sarah Fisher, turning in the slowest time of the day.
In other racing news, I'm kind of pissed off because the only channel that's showing tomorrow's CART race live is Fox Sports Espanol, and I don't think we get it up here in Vermont. I was looking forward to watching Paul Tracy lose again.
Tomorrow is Pole Day for the Indy 500. Rookie Dan Wheldon has had some impressive speeds so far, but I think Kenny Brack is going to set it up under pressure and win himself the pole. My sentimental favorite is Greg Ray, who's been fast this week, despite being part of an underfunded, last-minute effort. It would be an act of poetic justice if Greg could thrash the lot of CART defectors who've clogged up the Indy Racing League.
At his blog, My Stupid Dog, Tim Hulsey criticizes the politics of the X-Men: the preaching in the movies and the comic books about "liberal tolerance." As I've argued, the X-Men is concerned with the problems of idealistic liberalism, and is hardly a polemic for tolerance. Though Jack Kirby did create the X-Men as a civil rights analogy, I don't think we're meant to link mutants to any single oppressed group. If anything, in Kirby's conception mutants represent the politicized youth of the sixties, who were just becoming aware that they might have the power to change the world. Professor X stands for the view that this change must be mediated and negotiated and will take time. He sees that idealism is up a slippery slope from extremism and terrorism. Magneto, on the other hand, rightly suspicious of the fascistic tendency of populism, seeks to channel that powerful idealism into a violent revolution by the elite.
I don't think Kirby ever really succeeded in dramatizing this during his own run on the comic, but some of the seeds he planted have grown into some of the better work by Chris Claremont, and even the most recent storylines by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely (which feature a number of very ugly mutant heroes). But that's one of the things that I like about the X-Men comics: they're not some kind of perfect black box analogy, the meanings overlap, and different writers and artists bring out different aspects of the subtext.
However, Kirby did explore many of these same issues in greater depth in his "Fourth World" series for DC. The Forever People is Kirby's ultimate take on the youth movements of the sixties and the fading of their dream, and is as poignant in its own way as R. Crumb's "I Remember the Sixties". Likewise, Kirby's most deeply worked out take on the relationship between humans and super-powered beings comes in the story "The Death Wish of Terrible Turpin" from the "Fourth World" series The New Gods. In it, Turpin, a detective on the Metropolis police force, tries to stop a battle between a super-hero and a super-villain that threatens to level all of Metropolis. The point Kirby gets at is that the ostensible good-guy, Orion, is just as dangerous to the human citizens of Metropolis as his enemy, Kalibak.
I was all set to like the new Justin Timberlake album, which got a good notice from one of my favorite critics, but after finally listening to it today, I was pretty disappointed. Justin's just too much of a wimp. I mean, I can see how adolescent girls might get off on the whole unthreatening-bad-boy thing, but he really seems to be trying to hard at being suave and sexy. I hear his new video about Britney is creepy, but I haven't seen it yet: can anyone else fill me in? I generally think it's fascinating when big time pop stars play out their personal troubles in the form of music videos: it's one of the few things that makes the medium entertaining.
Also, if anyone out there can explain to me the appeal of Norah Jones, I'd really like to know.
Free Comic Book Day has come and gone. Though I did go to my local funnybook store to grab some goodies, I have to say that I find the whole promotional gimmick pretty silly. Only the insular comic book world has to stoop to this level of desperate publicity mongering. At the store I went to, they were giving away comics for both adults and kids. However, the "adult" comics I got were a couple of issues of The Incredible Hulk from two years ago (obviously the store was trying to get rid of their overstock). Only the insular comic book world would consider Hulk an "adult" title. The "kid" comic I picked up was pretty good though: James Kochalka's Peanutbutter & Jeremy #4. Kochalka himself was present at the event hawking the rest of his prolific, if uneven, output (you can see his diary strip about it here). I'm not Kochalka's biggest fan. I think he'd be better off if he spent more time learning how to draw and less time engaging in self-promotion (not that there's anything wrong with self-promotion per se), but Peanutbutter & Jeremy--about the relationship between an extremely domesticated cat (he won't go outside in the snow without his hat and mittens) and an addled, but adventurous, crow--is a very likable, modestly funny book, suitable for all ages. I saw a lot of other people, none of whom looked like average comics fans, who had also gotten free comic books, but I have serious doubts that any of them will turn into regular comic book readers/buyers.
On a related note, I had a helluva good time at the new X-Men movie. It's put together better than the first film, and the characters are, in general, better developed. It's probably the best super-hero movie I've seen since Superman II. I just love Sir Ian McKellan's juicy portrayal of Magneto, who has always been one of my favorite Jack Kirby villains (and I'm pretty sure that Magneto could kick Gandalf's ass any day of the week). McKellan's line readings are the epitome of the sophisticated arrogance any true super villain needs in spades: he's the only actor, aside from Terence Stamp, who's gotten it just right.
