Reading

In Praise of a Classic Text: Understanding Comics - Part I

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I debated writing this post, because I tend to assume everyone knows Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics - but then again, it’s not often cited as a classic fan studies text, though it absolutely is, and a key. Not only is it a fantastic theoretical and practical explainer of the art form of comics in general - and so is a crucial text to comics fandom, as well as all kind of fan art - but I think it is useful for fandom broadly because of its description of storytelling technique and, even more specifically, its understanding of identification.

McCloud argues (for example on the page below the cut) that readers identify more strongly with a more roughly-sketched face - in its most basic form, a smiley face - than with a fully-fleshed out, realistic or photorealistic portrait. In other words, we all see ourselves in a smiley face - or, for example - in somebody simply drawn like Charlie Brown - whereas if we see a very specifically drawn person, McCloud says we see the other–another, one who is not-me.

I believe this and I think it has a couple of interesting implications for fandom.

Interesting Implication the First: There is a way in which fan art tends to create a kind of quick, cartoonish iconography for popular fannish characters that can–not rival, it’s not a competition!–but provide a very different kind of fannish pleasure than a very realistically drawn image. To be an old, and draw on an old fannish frames of reference like Stargate Atlantis, there is a way in which John Sheppard is represented by a particular flip of upswept messy black hair that makes him - (hear me out!) - look different from actor Joe Flanagan; similarly, Rodney McKay is characterized by his sandy brown hair, heart shaped <strike>ass</strike> face, and slash of a mouth. See chkc’s wonderful chibi McShep below:

Chibi Mcshep - 2010-05-02 - Uniform (0 words) by chkc
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Rodney McKay/John Sheppard
Characters: John Sheppard, Rodney McKay
Additional Tags: Fanart, Chibi
Summary:
John smooches Rodney while in uniform.

I would argue that a fanartist working in a mode like this makes Sheppard more rather than less real–in a way, the further Sheppard gets from Flanagan, the realer he is, and the closer he is to the John Sheppard who took up a lot of real estate in my mind for a while there. Who is NOT Joe Flanigan, and who can disappear for me if he looks too much LIKE Joe Flanigan. (Similarly: Han Solo is not Harrison Ford! Misha is not Cas! Etc. ) YMMV of course, and certainly there is wonderful realistic art, but I think that fan art serves a lot of different purposes, and there’s something wonderful about more iconographic art…

Next week: Interesting Implication the Second!

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Entry tags:

musicals,
theater

Ghost Quartet (Green-Wood Cemetery, 7/28/25)

Ghost Quartet is a band: Dave Malloy on keyboard, Brent Arnold on cello, Gelsey Bell and Brittain Ashford on various instruments, and everyone providing vocals. Ghost Quartet is a song cycle, a concert album performed semi-staged, a mash-up of "Snow White, Rose Red," The One Thousand and One Nights, the Noh play Matsukaze, "Cruel Sister", "The Fall of the House of Usher", the front page photo of a fatal train accident, and a grab bag of Twilight Zone episodes. The ghost of Thelonious Monk is sometimes invoked, but does not appear; whisky is often invoked, and, if you see the show live, will most certainly appear. "I'm confused/And more than a little frightened," says (one incarnation of) the (more-or-less) protagonist. "It's okay, my dear," her sister/lover/mother/daughter/deuteragonist reassures her, "this is a circular story."

Once upon a time two sisters fell in love with an astronomer who lived in a tree. He seduced Rose, the younger, then stole her work ("for a prestigious astronomy journal"), and then abandoned her for her sister, Pearl. Rose asked a bear to maul the astronomer in revenge, but the bear first demanded a pot of honey, a piece of stardust, a secret baptism, and a photograph of a ghost. (The music is a direct quote of the list of spell ingredients from Into the Woods.) Rose searches for all these ingredients through multiple lifetimes; and that's the plot.

Except it is much less comprehensible than that. The songs are nested in each other like Scheherazade's stories; you can follow from one song to the next, but retracing the connections in memory is impossible; this is less a narrative than a maze. Surreal timelines crash together in atonal cacophany; one moment Dave Malloy, or a nameless astronomer played by Dave Malloy, or Dave Malloy playing Dave Malloy is trying to solve epistemology and another moment the entire house of Usher, or all the actors, are telling you about their favorite whiskies. The climax is a subway accident we have glimpsed before, in aftermath, in full, circling around it, a trauma and a terror that cannot be faced directly; the crash is the fall of a house is the failure to act is the failure to look is the failure to look away.

There are two recordings available. Ghost Quartet, recorded in a studio, has cleaner audio, but Live at the McKitterick includes more of the interstitial scenes and feels more like the performance.

In Greenwood Cemetery, there were three slightly raised stages separated by batches of folding chairs, one for Dave Malloy, one for Brent Arnold, and one for Gelsey Bell and Brittain Ashford, with a flat patch of grass in the center across which they sang to each other, and into which they sometimes moved; you could sit in the chairs, or on cushions in front of the first row, or with cheaper tickets you could sit in the grass on the very low hills above the staging area, among the monuments and gravestones, and, presumably, among more ghosts. The show started a little before sunset; I saw a hawk fly over, and I could hear birds singing along when the humans sang a capella. It was in the middle of Brooklyn, so even after dark I couldn't see stars; but fireflies sparked everywhere.

Entry tags:

reading

current reading (spolsky 1/?)

In almost two months, I've read about 15% of Bernard Spolsky's The Languages of the Jews (slowness is a me-issue). By the 15% point, the book has summarized contemporary usage of Hebrew in Israel, then begun examining historical usage of Hebrew from earliest to more recent. So far, Spolsky tries to assert rather than tuck away his assumptions, which I appreciate. I've read some work by philologists and historical linguists on other language families, and a historical treatment by a sociolinguist who's aware of his strengths is a lovely thing.

( a couple of the book's assumptions and something cool it does with them )

Joy: The Interdisciplinary Edition

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I am always on the lookout for academic works that talk about the kinds of joy that I feel are characteristic of fandom. There are a lot of books about art, literature, music, etc. but their analysis doesn’t often take into account the pleasures of those activities (Barthes notwithstanding.)

One book that I like a lot for the way in which it conceptualizes joy in collectivity is William H. McNeill’s Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History. McNeill says something that, to me, is obviously true but rarely said: that people like to move together! The book is about the emotional bonding that happens when people move, together, in time: McNeill’s two examples are dance and drill (by which he means military drill - so Beyonce gives us a two-fer with Formation! ) Obviously this is a pleasure familiar to anyone who likes dance of any kind, or synchronised swimming, or drum circles, or marching bands, or yoga or tai chi, or participating in church services, or cheerleading, or doing the wave. I used McNeill in my Vidding book–but I also think of fandom’s love of a good power walk on any TV show! (For a great example check out the last few beats of the Clucking Belles’ Vid “A Fannish Taxonomy of Hotness”, below - power walks are the subject of the last section.)

Hot Hot Hot [Fanvid] : Clucking Belles : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Some orienting quotes from the start of the book:

Reflecting on my odd, surprising, and apparently visceral response to close-order drill, and recalling what little I knew about war dances and other rhythmic exercises among hunters and gatherers, I surmised that the emotional response to drill was an inheritance from prehistoric times, when our ancestors had danced around their camp fires before and after faring forth to hunt wild and dangerous animals…. (p.3)

The specifically military manifestations of this human capability are of less importance than the general enhancement of social cohesion that village dancing imparted to the majority of human beings from the time that agriculture began. Two corollaries demand attention. First, through recorded history, moving and singing together made collective tasks far more efficient. Without rhythmical coordination of the muscular effort required to haul and pry heavy stones into place, the pyramids of Egypt and many other famous monuments could nnot have been built. Second, I am convinced that long before written records allowed us to know anything precise about human behavior, keeping together in time became important for human evolution, allowing early human groups to increase their size, enhance their cohesion, and assure survival by improving their success in guarding territory, securing food, and nurturing the young. (p.4)

Our television screens show continuing pervasive manifestations of the human penchant for moving together in time. American football crowds, South African demonstrators, patriotic parades, and religious rituals of every description draw on the emotional effect of rhythmic movements and gestures. So of course do dancing, military drill, and the muscular exercises with which, it is said, workers in Japanese factories begin each day. Yet, so far as I can discover, scientific investigation of what happens to those who engage in such behavior remains scant and unsystematic. (p. 5)

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Rebuilding journal search again

We're having to rebuild the search server again (previously, previously). It will take a few days to reindex all the content.

Meanwhile search services should be running, but probably returning no results or incomplete results for most queries.