Month: July 2012

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Unfinished Writing #23

Here’s something unusual; an unfinished review that was intended for the Savage Critics; it’s been sitting on my laptop for the last few weeks, untouched because I couldn’t find enough time to complete it – I don’t know why I didn’t finish it, it stops midthought, suggesting that something distracted me as I was writing – and, now that the subsequent issue is also a few weeks old, it seemed so untimely that I decided to leave it alone. Instead of just dumping it altogether, though, I thought I’d throw it up here.

It feels as if there’s now some sort of belief, or suspicion, perhaps, amongst comic professionals that in order to get readers and retailers on board with your new series, you essentially have to tell them enough of what the story is that you spoil whatever plot twists may be in the first issue. That’s certainly true of SPIDER-MEN #1, which – in terms of plot – doesn’t get any farther in its first 20 pages that getting Peter Parker and Miles Morales face to face. And yet… that that climactic moment doesn’t have any punch can’t be blamed on spoilers or PR or anything else; the title of the comic, after all, is Spider-Men, the cover features both Peter and Miles swinging together with their masks off (which would happen further on in the story than what’s actually in this first issue), and the recap page at the start introduces both Peter and Miles. The comic itself spoils that final page without breaking a sweat.

And that last page feels like a fudge even beyond that; it’s a full-page splash of Peter and Miles coming face to face, with both figures in the air, Miles quietly saying “No way.” On the one hand, that’s a nice moment – Miles is literally verbalizing what Peter’s inner-monologue had just said twice (But I’ll get back to the problems with repetition later), making the Miles-echoing-Peter-in-choice-of-superhero-identity more explicit – but on the other… Outside of the fact that we as readers and writers have the meta-textual knowledge that this is one Spider-Man meeting another Spider-Man, this shouldn’t actually be a big moment for Peter. After all, he’s met clones before, he’s met fake Spider-Men before… Why would running into someone who’s not even wearing the same costume as he does, who is shorter and has a different body type be anything more than a “Kid, why’re you biting my style?” moment, exactly…? The only way that final page works as a dramatic moment is with the added knowledge of this is the moment you’ve all been waiting for… but that same added knowledge also robs the moment of any power, because this is the moment you’ve all been waiting for, if that makes sense.

Because there’s no “Who’re you?” “I’m Spider-Man!” “No, I’m Spider-Man!” exchange, it means that #2 is forced to carry that scene, which… I don’t know; I find myself feeling as if that we don’t need two issues of a five issue story to get to the “We’re both Spider-Man, oh, I get it” point, you know? If you consider that, thanks to the page count of comics these days, this is going to be a 100 page story (5 issues of 20 pages), then the “first act” of the classic three act structure should be totally done with by page 34 – yet, by page 20, we’ve only really been introduced to Peter Parker and had hints of the two other core characters in the story. That leaves 13 pages or so to (a) introduce Miles Morales, (b) explain that Peter is now in an alternate universe – Something, that, again, shouldn’t phase him that much considering everything else he’s even done, but I suspect will because otherwise how will the readers know that this story is supposed to be important? – and (c ) presumably allow both heroes to put together that Mysterio has something to do with all of this. Somehow, I don’t really see all of that happening, do you…?

The feeling that this first issue is poorly paced isn’t helped by the fact that Bendis’ Peter Parker is so frustrating, offering schtick instead of characterization. Bendis’ monologue for Parker is horrifically written; unsubtle (It’s full of things like “I am including the part where my life seems to be in constant danger by elaborately themed costumed crazies. And the part where, no matter what I do, I’m hated by just about everybody this side of the Verrazano Bridge,” because, I guess, telling is much faster than showing when you only have 20 pages), almost entirely expositionary, and just plain clumsily constructed. Here’s the opening to the issue:

I love this city.

Love it!!

And, really, the best part about being Spider-Man is getting to swing around up here and just… take it all in.

The best part!

Why the dual repetition? You got me; emphasis, I guess? A sneaky shout-out to the “two Spider-Men” concept? I have no idea, but as inner monologue – or, even, narration, which’d make more sense, unless we’re supposed to believe that Peter Parker spends his evenings reintroducing himself to himself and justifying his life choices – it’s extremely awkward and takes Peter from “quippy” to something akin to “over-caffinated preteen with limited attention span trying to explain why they love Justin Beiber so much.” Maybe I’m way too old-fashioned with my Spider-Man, but for me, his inner monologue would be slightly more ordered and less “OMG!!!” than this; it’s not that it just reads poorly, it also “sounds” wrong for the character.

(Also: Am I wrong in my read on the character that Spider-Man’s quips aren’t necessarily the way he thinks, as such, but an attempt to hide nervousness/anxiety/guilt behind what he considers bravado? Bendis’ narration reads as an excitable version of Spider-Man’s personality, whereas the set-up of the character suggests it should be the opposite.)

Oddly enough, there was a really easy fix to so many of these problems: Use the other Spider-Man. Not only would Bendis have a better handle on Miles’ narration – Being the sole writer of Miles to date, there was almost no way that he could get that voice “wrong” – but Miles, being the newer and less explored character, not only needs the space of the lengthy introduction more (Despite the high sales of Ultimate Fallout #4 and Ultimate Spider-Man #1, there’s no way that the character is as well-known as Peter Parker) but works better as a point-of-view character for the series: He hasn’t dealt with Spider-impostors before, he has an emotional connection with (a version of) Peter Parker that Peter doesn’t have with him, and he’s new to all of the super-science that’s necessary to get through a story about parallel universes and crossing over and the like, allowing him to need the exposition that the audience also needs.

More importantly, using Miles as the main character for the first issue would have validated him as Spider-Man. As it is, this first issue does the one thing the character didn’t need: it underscores his position as the “alternative” Spider-Man, the other one. As far as this first issue is concerned, Miles’ character is so unimportant that his part could be filled by Spider-Man 2099, Spider-Man India or even Ben Reilly; he’s literally a non-character who plays more part on the cover (where at least

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366 Songs 184: Full Of It

This one turned out to be a grower; it’s from Netherfriends’ free EP of songs built around Harry Nilsson samples, which meant that I was almost guaranteed to dig it, but for some reason this one left me flat until the other night, when that riff just got stuck in my head, looped around and sounding wonderful. I love that it sounds simultaneously like a Nilsson song from the ’70s and something from this year, as if the distance between the two wasn’t over three decades.

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Random, (Mostly) Unfiltered Thoughts on Hits, Quality and Online Writing

I’ve been thinking recently about online entertainment journalism, and pageviews, and the responsibilities and realities and everything involved. To explain what started this train of thought it something that’d get me more hassle than it’s worth – Suffice to say, it was the discovery that a site I used to work for wasn’t covering a particularly important news story because it was presumed it wouldn’t get hits – but, thinking about the subject over and over again, I find myself depressingly out of step with the way that the Internet works, it feels like.

I mean, I get that it’s all about the hits. I worked for Gawker Media for two years, and that really gets drummed into you there, or at least it did for me: The eyeballs are what matter, the clicks and the important clicks, not just any clicks. It’s a number that constantly gets whittled down: At first, it was hits, then it was “unique visitors,” then it was “new unique visitors” (Eventually, it’ll be “People who’ve never even been online before, but bought a laptop just to read your piece,” and then people will get fired for not inspiring at least one MacBook purchase every week). That’s not just the case at Gawker sites, though; elsewhere, I’ve had series killed because the hits weren’t good enough, pitches approved based solely on how much traffic they would likely bring even if they were weaker ideas than other ones vying for attention, the whole thing. The internet exists to get your attention, after all.

And yet, that all seems curiously, unhealthily, short-term thinking to me. “Content is King” was the mantra of the Internet for awhile, the idea of “If you build it, they will come” made into something resembling a business plan. It was… optimistic, naive, maybe? There was a sense of good work will find an audience because it’s the Internet – which, come to think of it, feels like part of the thinking behind Kickstarter and other crowdsourcing ideas nowadays. Hmm – that was ultimately replaced by “Content is Content,” which translated into something along the lines of “Fuck it, we can get people to write for us for free and who cares whether or not it’s good as long as it drives traffic, right?” The quality of the work became secondary – if even that – to the fact that the work existed. Curation became more along the lines of “Will this get hits?” than “Is this any good?” because everyone had to earn their keep, and so sites became less about an editorial voice or vision, and more interchangeable as a result with everyone chasing after the same exclusives, the same images and videos and interviews and with the same formula to write it all up.

Surely, if you’re looking to make your site stand out, it makes more sense to decide to actually have its own voice and viewpoint? Have a sense of. Okay, this doesn’t get good traffic but it’s something we should be covering, so we’re going to take the hit on it? Comics Alliance feels like a good example of this; consider the way that the site followed Laura’s passions to the point where it became known for doing so, and for having smart, nuanced writing on gender and webcomics and other subjects that weren’t being covered by other comic sites. It’s a return to “If you build it, they will come,” definitely, but – and this is where I find myself out of step with the Internet – what’s so wrong with that? If you wait long enough, they will come.

Weirdly, surprisingly, Gawker may have the best solution to this issue (That’s Gawker.com, not all of Gawker Media); the idea of traffic-whoring to offset more important, more individual and quieter pieces felt like the closest to an elegant solution to the problem that we could get, short of someone having the guts to say “Screw it, let’s just do good work we believe in and hope for the best.” It feels like it’s a way for sites to fulfill hit/financial responsibilities to their owners, while also the responsibility to readers of something worth reading. I wonder how that experiment worked out…?

Ramble ramble ramble. I should come back to this when I know what it’s clearer in my head.

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366 Songs 183: Ode To The Big Sea

Normally, I am not a fan of jazz noodling and music that goes nowhere fast, but there’s something about the Cinematic Orchestra’s “Ode to The Big Sea” that wins me over, every single time. It’s the loneliness and searching of the central riff, which comes and goes throughout the song, I think. It’s something that’s classically “jazzy,” but when happening over that particular perpetually shuffling drumbeat, becomes something weirdly contemporized in my head. The original recorded version might explain what I mean, more, with the obviousness of the samples underscoring the “acid jazz”-ness of the whole thing, with the atonal riff feeling as if they’re as Sun-Ra inspired as anything else; it suddenly seems less trad fusion jazz, and more something that you could imagine coming from Mocean Worker.

It’s that tension between timeframes that fascinates me, I think.

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366 Songs 182: My Mind’s Eye

One of my favorite things about this song is that it was apparently released despite the Small Faces’ wishes; the version that everyone knows was a demo that management put out as a single because they wanted a follow-up to the band’s previous single sooner than the band could come up with. That might explain why it’s really only half a song, with the other half being what’s essentially a rip off of “Ding Dong Merrily On High” with “In my mind’s eye” replacing “Hosannah in excelsis” (This was the band’s 1966 Christmas single, amusingly enough; clearly, someone had a sense of humor) And yet… This is a great little psych pop song, even in unfinished two-minute form, as much because of the energy in the performance and the spectacular organ that the Faces had going on back then. It makes you wonder what other greatness we’ve missed from the band because it never went past the demo stage, doesn’t it?

Strange but true, I first heard the song as a (far inferior) cover from Britpop wannabes, Northern Uproar:

They totally butcher it with their sub-Oasis clodstepping, don’t they? So much so that, when I first heard the Small Faces version later that year, I didn’t even make the connection that they were in fact the same song. Just imagine how much musical greatness we have lost because Oasis were so popular back in the 1990s…

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366 Songs 181: Accelerator

I still love this song from Primal Scream’s “seminal” XTMNTR album from 2000, which does all the MC5 posturing that you’d want but doesn’t forget to try to be awesome in the process.

The guitar solo alone is worth the mental price of admission, but really: the whole thing is pretty spectacular, no matter where or when you slice it. It’s entirely retro, but feels contemporary even twelve years later, purely through force of will and some wonderfully intense performances (There’s something enjoyable about the fact there are actually harmony vocals on the “Come on! Come on!” parts, as if shouty agit-rock needed a Supremes influence in there). The production is suitably grimy – Can you imagine a version of this with a grunge-esque mix or without the feedback, which is a large part of the architecture of the song? – and, really, the only slip-up anywhere is the fade at the end. If ever a song needed to go until it just… broke down, then this is that song. “Into the future! Into the future!” indeed.

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San Diego Syndrome

Have you ever seen Hearts of Darkness, about the filming of Apocalypse Now? In it, one of the actors talks about the experience of filming, and how deeply life-altering it was for all of them. Obviously this is a very extreme and prolonged example of the kind of experience we’re talking about, but back when I saw it, it was the first time that I’d ever heard someone talk about this kind of emotional upheaval outside of a therapeutic context. It opened my eyes to what is possible when people come together and, for a short period of time, agree to live in a reality that is completely saturated with something outside of their daily lives.

– From here.

That comes from a piece about San Diego Comic-Con, which officially opens tonight. It doesn’t directly connect the making of Apocalypse Now with the mindset of SDCC in terms of “the horror… the horror,” but that’s a connection that I admit to tenuously making in the past. Every single SDCC I’ve covered as a journalist has had that kind of weird disassociation with reality at some point along the way – A sense of “I know this isn’t what life is really like, but it’s all I can remember now, and that’s not a good thing” – that, even when you know it’s happening, is astonishingly unsettling. It’s like comic convention as Stockholm Syndrome or something.

When people ask me whether or not I miss going to San Diego, that always comes to mind. I think I do… but is that really me thinking it…?

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War, Huh? What Is It Good For?

Not every staffer is so happy to dive in to the comments, not the least of whom is Gawker editor A.J. Daulerio, who described Gawker comments in April as “a tar pit of hell.” Any journalist writing for a highly trafficked website knows what a miserable time suck that can be. But that’s their job now. Gawker staffers are essentially professional commenters now — or maybe commenters are amateur bloggers. [Gawker boss, Nick] Denton does not even like the word “comments.” Supposedly he imposed a $5 penalty for any employee heard using the word. “These are posts,” Denton told the Observer in June.

(From here.)

That sound you’re hearing might be me screaming in frustration. I feel, sometimes, like my feelings towards comments mirrors comic creators’ feelings towards blogs in general, creating some kind of weird Internet hierarchy by accident, but I can’t help it; while the best comments sections can illuminate and expand the conversations and ideas coming from any particular online piece, all too often – by which I mean, “almost always” – they devolve astonishingly quickly into vitriol and ignorance, namecalling and side-taking. I genuinely wouldn’t lose that much sleep if I could remove the comments from almost every venue I write for*; seeing Denton allegedly fine people for not referring to them as posts is astonishingly depressing to me, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I feel it devalues the actual posts that the comments appear under, by suggesting that they’re the same thing, and secondly, it underscores how much of the Gawker business model is built upon essentially selling the unpaid writing from each site’s fan community, which gives me all kinds of depressed Huffington Post flashbacks.

(* Despite that, I find myself longing for comments on this blog, sometimes; it’s weird, it started as me writing in secret in public, if that makes any sense, but occasionally I find myself wanting to know who reads it.)

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366 Songs 180: Zoom!

This is a spectacularly overblown song that should, by all rights, collapse under its own weight – especially as the choir(s) come in at 3:58, and the whole thing starts sounding like a stoned take on a Bond theme from Bizarro World – but somehow the momentum keeps it going even as things start falling apart (I’d say around 5:11 is where it really starts shedding pieces, and feeling like a rocket that’s trying to achieve orbit). But what this song has always been about for me, is the electric piano. Seriously, by the time you reach 6:24 and there’s just the awesome jamming/collapsing piano solo, I’m gone, man. I love that so, so much. More songs should be ready to give you the full breakfast that this one does.

(Somewhat randomly, but worth pointing out: This is the lead track from Super Furry Animals’ Love Kraft album, and it definitely puts you in the mood to expect something epic. If you are listening to the album for the first time as a result of this song, I have a word of advice for you: Stop after this song. Everything else on the album is a terrible letdown after this.)