A beautiful, sunny spring day -- the perfect time to pay my income tax! After that, I rewarded myself with yet another goddamn book. Quentin Tarantino's Cinema Speculation (Harper, 2022) is the liveliest and most entertaining book of film criticism I've read in years. This is Quentin the movie fanboy, Quentin the analytical critic, and Quentin the filmmaker, with a professional's knowledge of what works in movies and what doesn't, all in one package.

He's writing about the 1970s movies to which he's been making homages since Reservoir Dogs, explaining why they succeed or fail (sometimes both) on their own terms. The filmmaker explains why Peter Yates and Don Siegel are great action movie directors; the fanboy bombards us with fascinating movie history trivia (Frank Sinatra was slated to play Dirty Harry before Clint Eastwood); the critic is very shrewd about, among other things, racial politics ("For many older white Americans, angry black militants scared them more than the Manson "Family," the Zodiac Killer, and the Boston Strangler combined.") There's not a dull page in this book, and even if Quentin's movie love (to borrow a title from Pauline Kael) is the polar opposite of the I-hate-entertainment ethos of a critic likehttps://A.S.Hamrah, it's because Quentin knows that the one thing no filmmaker can ever do is to bore the audience. (Hamrah's The Earth Dies Streaming (2018) is a riveting book, and his observations are marvelous -- "The happy ending in It is that a group of kids beats a clown to death. Today that qualifies as wishful thinking." -- but he and Tarantino are different kinds of intellectuals.)

Llano County, Texas has a three-branch public library system that's come to the nation's attention lately. That's due to a federal District Court judge's order to the library board -- consisting of elected officials strongly opposed to "LGBTQ views," "critical race theory," and "pornographic filth" among the children's books -- giving them 24 hours to return the books they'd tried to ban to circulation.

Among the books that county officials had found particularly upsetting were Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents; Susan Campbell Bartoletti's They Called Themselves the KKK: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group; Jazz Jennings's Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen; Jonathan Evison's Lawn Boy; and Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer. (Those last two titles were only available as e-books, not physical copies; the board terminated access to thousands of e-books in a ham-fisted attempt to ban those two titles alone.) The library board (or Library Advisory Board, as it's been renamed) obviously hadn't bothered to READ any of these books; the point is, they didn't want anyone else in Llano County to read them, either.

Now, it's hard to imagine a scenario in which banning books from a public library system because of their contents -- or because of what you ASSUME their contents to be -- doesn't trample all over the First and Fourteenth Amendments (freedom of the press and freedom of choice, y'all), but those county officials went ahead and did it anyway because they just didn't care. That's a perfect example of overreach -- or shall we call it hubris?

In Judge Pitman's temporary injunction of March 30th (the case is ongoing), he noted that "The First Amendment prohibits the removal of books from libraries based on either viewpoint or content discrimination." Sanity may yet prevail. And I remember a day a decade ago when a woman with a baby stroller walked into the bookstore where I was a manager. Aaron James's philosophical essay Assholes: a Theory was then one of our hottest sellers, and this person demanded that I remove it from our window display because the title was "inappropriate."

"So," I said, "you want me to stop displaying one of my bestselling books because you don't like the title?"

"Yes."

"That isn't going to happen."

"Well, I guess there's no shortage of assholes here," she huffed.

People really are amazing. And the so-called culture wars, such as they are -- the best culture is, what, none to speak of? -- rage on, to no real benefit. (This week's score: Disney 1, DeSantis 0.)

For god's sake, read more, not less.

RAMEN WOLF & CURRY TIGER, vols. 1 & 2, by Emboss (Seven Seas, 2022-23)

This foodie bromance sets the reader a series of puzzles about people and their relationships. What do we make of relationships for which we don't have readymade labels, like that between our two leads? Chubby gourmand Jiro's biggest appetite is for life itself; he's so upbeat he lifts the spirits of everyone around him, including muscular loner Kagetora. Glum, taciturn, and obsessively comparing himself to his physician brother, Kagetora's natural state is sleepy, nearly motionless; his gym-sculpted body rarely moves, except to light a cigarette. Jiro, for all his bulk, is constantly in motion, with a dancer's gracefulness and (when he wants to) a ninja's stealth. Their food dates become a thing when a plate of curry serves as Kagetora's Proustian madeleine, reawakening his soul.

Emboss won't spell out how the supporting cast know each other; getting there is part of the fun. Shiori, Kagetora's ex-girlfriend (?), startles him by walking into his bedroom early in the morning. Hiroo, Jiro's co-worker, knows Kuroda, Kagetora's black panther sidekick, and she really enjoys pulling Kuroda's chain. Harima, Hiroo's junior colleague, is the fourth-wall-breaking observer who gets to address the reader directly; his goal, like ours, is to understand these characters, and if "to know someone is the highest form of love," then this is a love story. The sexy pinup drawings of Jiro and Kagetora don't hurt, either.

https://www.amazon.com/Ramen-Wolf-Curry-Tiger-Vol-ebook/dp/B0B846KBKP/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1678459102&sr=1-1
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BT65KK1X?notRedirectToSDP=1&ref_=dbs_mng_calw_1&storeType=ebooks

First of all, congratulations to Scott "Dilbert" Adams for having talked himself out of his own career, thereby proving that the First Amendment won't protect you from your own stupidity. Fortunately, there are other (and better) comics to read. Here are a few of them:

Because it's fruitless to review works-in-progress, I'll only say that the graphic novel Wilson,  anti_dev Anti-Dev's ongoing magnum opus about different kinds of loneliness (and different kinds of family bonds) is something different in furry comics, too. The suspense lies in whether or not our lonely, damaged lead characters will be in a better place by the story's end, and this minute examination of their emotional lives transcends genre -- it's literary fiction that has less time for the author's sexual fetishes than we're used to.

Autobiographical manga artist Nagata Kabi's Harvey Award-winning debut, My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness (Seven Seas, 2017) is the story of how an unstable, unemployed, thirtysomething virgin borrowed money from her mom to pay for one night with a lesbian sex worker. Since then, Kabi has published four more graphic memoirs about the bottomless well of her own anxieties, addictions, and ongoing struggle with mental illness. In a cool, almost objective voice devoid of self-pity, she opens herself (and her long-suffering mom) to public scrutiny in a continuing epic of self-analysis: this really is art as therapy. It's also a fascinating read, because Kabi isn't so much inventing a comic persona to draw as she's chronicling a deeply flawed character's misadventures in a world where no one notices how profoundly absurd "sane" and "normal" really are. It's like living in a Samuel Beckett novel.

The star of Kousuke Oono's exceptionally well-drawn comedy series The Way of the Househusband (Viz Media, 2019 - ongoing) is a terrifying Yakuza superthug who's left that life behind to transform himself into Martha Stewart -- the ultimate cook and homemaker. Of course he still looks, talks, and thinks like a gangster; that's the point. It's a series that rings endless variations on its one-joke premise, and that's pretty impressive in itself.

Toru's Crossplay Love (Seven Seas, 2022 - ongoing) is a sweet, silly comedy about the awkward romance between two beautiful teenage girls, neither of whom realizes the other is a crossdressing boy. Of course they can't stand each other in their male identities, or we wouldn't have a wacky manga sitcom, would we? (It doesn't hurt that even the thuggish punks are drawn to look pretty.)

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/37736859/
https://www.amazon.com/Lesbian-Experience-Loneliness-Kabi-Nagata-ebook/dp/B071ZR7CZZ/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1677539740&sr=1-2
https://www.amazon.com/Way-Househusband-Vol-1-ebook/dp/B07WT6JQ5L/ref=sr_1_2?crid=27ED5AIPIDU6E&keywords=way+of+the+househusband&qid=1677539789&s=comics-manga&sprefix=way+of+the+hous%2Ccomics-manga%2C88&sr=1-2
https://www.amazon.com/Crossplay-Love-Otaku-Punk-Vol-ebook/dp/B0B83SV8LS/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3TLGXRY2UV7BS&keywords=crossplay+love+otaku+x+punk+manga&qid=1677539825&s=comics-manga&sprefix=crossplay%2Ccomics-manga%2C84&sr=1-1

It's been a somber week for many reasons, but the reason hitting closest to home for many of us was the passing of  jace Brian "Jace" Harp, one of the vanguard of furry artists from the turn of the millennium. I remember how much fun I had drawing his character https://www.furaffinity.net/view/1785718/, but I'm not here to wax nostalgic.

The furry fandom has evolved from what it was 25 years ago. Nowadays "furry" isn't so much about art and stories as it is about fursuiting and genderfluidity -- that is, as an expression of identitarian politics. There's a generation gap in the fandom, as there is in the wider world, as there was between the WW2/Korean War generation and their boomer kids. Millennials and Gen Z-ers tend to be bored and cynical with boomers, just as we graymuzzles were bored and cynical with our elders when we were younger.

People form their opinions from what they access on their phones and devices. Younger people have grown up using them, whereas many boomers were approaching middle age when this technology was invented. These folks still think of traditional media, especially print journalism, as the gold standard of accurate information, and legacy media functions under the supervision of gatekeepers whose ideas of "objectivity" are under attack from all sides.

It's never easy having your beliefs come under fire. The great TV series Mad Men (2007 - 2015) was about that very thing, one generation's shock and disbelief at being pushed aside by the next. Flux and change. Passages.

As much as my life is defined by the fun stuff -- furry porn, straight porn, gay porn -- it suddenly struck me that I don't know what it is that keeps brick-and-mortar bookstores, and for that matter, any book vendors in business. One keeps hearing about the decline of reading (the orgy of book banning in anti-"woke" states ain't helping, hoss) and the disappearance of independent bookshops, but hang on a minute, it's not that straightforward.

Let's concentrate on the brick-and-mortar bookshop. Chain stores and independents, purveyors of new releases or used/antiquarian books have this much in common: they have to sell enough product to pay for rent and utilities, employee salaries, acquiring new product to sell, and still turn a profit (more often than not, a small one). I wanted to know what types of books are selling well enough to keep these stores in business, but that's a complicated question to answer. There's a distinction between print books, ebooks, and audiobooks, not to mention the confusing nomenclature of publishing industry "genres" and Amazon "categories," which are different ways of describing the same thing.

What we can agree on is that fiction bestsellers mostly fall into three columns: romance, crime thrillers, and SF-fantasy/YA. Nonfiction bestsellers are dominated by memoir/biography/autobiography. And then things get murky. There's some overlap between psychology/self-help/personal development books and religious/inspirational books, to the point where it's sometimes difficult to know where to shelve individual titles. Children's books sell surprisingly well, I'm told. Manga and graphic novels are wildly popular -- but they seem to sell better as ebooks than as print books, as do most business/finance titles. Cookbooks, on the other hand, sell almost exclusively as print books (and if chef/authors wanna sell their books, they have to collaborate with food stylists and food photographers).

Popular history and health/fitness/dieting remain reliably profitable, and someone must be buying all those travel guides. What isn't profitable is most of the stuff I read: 19th century literary fiction, poetry, academic philosophy, math and science, critical writing about art, music, literature, film and television. Well, I knew I wasn't adding much to Barnes & Noble's bottom line (or Penguin Random House's bottom line either, despite their best efforts), but it's a little dispiriting to realize how irrelevant my tastes really are to the publishing (and bookselling) business.

December was interesting. Having spent the holidays home from work with a bout of sciatica -- a type of pain I wouldn't wish to inflict on anyone -- I've slowly recovered much of my mobility, though I'm now walking with a cane. It's safe to say that my days of heavy lifting (and sprinting) are officially over.

January has been action-packed: chiropractor appointments, new glasses, my bank account hacked by some dickheads in Massachusetts, and eBay proving once again that buying used books online is always a crapshoot. (It would've been nice to receive the Virginia Woolf and Heinrich von Kleist books I paid for, rather than Goddess Girls: The Rich Medusa.) Still, a month ago the act of picking up a book and reading it was too physically taxing, so it's good to be in the nearly-back-to-normal spot I am now.

Melville House's out-of-print The Art of the Novella series continues to sustain and enthrall me. Katherine Mansfield's At the Bay (1922) chronicles one day in the lives of the men, women, children, and pets of a coastal New Zealand community, where nothing happens and everything is minutely observed. Her psychological insight into her characters is devastating, almost lethal: the large cast includes a young wife and mother who loves her silly, pompous husband but feels nothing for her own children. Her marriage is "like living in a house that couldn't be cured of the habit of catching on fire, or a ship that got wrecked every day."

If you can take Henry James's orotund prose style in stride, The Coxon Fund (1894-95) is a brittle satire about a penniless "genius" and professional houseguest who can't earn a living; he's supported by a small circle of moneyed (and infinitely patient) admirers who feel uplifted by the vague but dazzling pseudophilosophical ramblings he can't even manage to write down, let alone publish. But James, in making his narrator a professional gossip who can't look away from this spectacle, and who inevitably has a personal stake in it, implicates himself and his readers in this farce as well.

Thomas Hardy's The Distracted Preacher (1879) begins with an earnest young minister arriving at his temporary post and, on his first night there, being inveigled by a pretty young widow into raiding a shipment of bootleg liquor stashed in a church tower. Haven't finished this story yet, but I like where it's going.

Cabaret, according to critic Will Friedwald, is "half jazz, half musical theater, and half pop," but there's no use pretending that this is popular music. Intimate, piano-driven, emotionally vulnerable but intellectually uncompromising, it's the music of sophisticates, of the terminally arch and the privileged few. But that doesn't mean I don't like it.

I've been listening to twenty years' worth of albums by British singer Barb Jungr, an extraordinarily soulful interpreter of the rock-era American songbook, above all the music of Bob Dylan. While Every Grain of Sand (2002) wasn't her debut album, it's the album that put her on the map: fifteen stunning reinterpretations of songs by the "American Shakespeare," drawn from four decades' worth of Dylan's catalogue.

Jungr's records are concept albums and then some: Waterloo Sunset (2003) is about clowns, masks, and emotional deception in a sequence of unhappy love songs, while Love Me Tender's (2004) Elvis-meets-the-Twin-Peaks-soundtrack dreamscape tries hard but doesn't do the King any favors. Walking in the Sun (2006) is a cabaret diva's blues album, with a sense of the blues sufficiently catholic to take in everyone from Bo Diddley and Jimmy Reed to Randy Newman and Carole King.

Just Like a Woman (2008) is Jungr's Nina Simone tribute album -- more Dylan, Chip Taylor, Hoagy Carmichael, and "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," written for Simone but better known in an explosive cover version by the Animals. The Men I Love (2009) salutes Paul Simon, Jimmy Webb, David Byrne, Neil Diamond, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Pomus & Shuman, Todd Rundgren, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen, and, inevitably, Dylan, while Man in the Long Black Coat (2011) compiles all of Jungr's post-Every Grain of Sand Dylan recordings, along with four songs new to her Dylan discography.

Stockport to Memphis (2012) features five of Jungr's self-penned, soul- and R&B-influenced songs, along with a range of writers from Sam Cooke and Hank Williams to Neil Young and Tom Waits. Hard Rain (2014) is "all the tougher, philosophical, political songs of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen," including "Masters of War" and "Chimes of Freedom." Shelter From the Storm: Songs of Hope for Troubled Times (2016), recorded in New York with a jazz trio led by Kurt Elling's former musical director, features the usual eclectic mix of top-shelf pop: Leonard Bernstein, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, Peter Gabriel, and a couple of guys named Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Come Together (2016), the first of Jungr's duet albums with singer/pianist John McDaniel, covers Lennon-McCartney and Harrison; Float Like a Butterfly (2018) is even better, devoted to the songs of Gordon M. Sumner, AKA Sting. It shouldn't be surprising that Sting's music works so well as art songs: this, after all, is a pop songwriter who rhymed "apprentice" with "Charybdis." (Listen as McDaniel sings "August Winds" as a gay male torch song, and as he tweaks "Back in the USSR" into a lusty, boy-watchers' rave-up.)

Bob, Brel, and Me (2019) contrasts Bob Dylan and Jacques Brel (a writer of meandering, tuneless chansons, heard here in translation) with Jungr's own autobiographical jazz songs. Barb Jungr Sings Leonard Cohen (2022) is a brand new digital EP, five songs recorded live.

ALL OF THE MARVELS by Douglas Wolk (Penguin Press)
https://www.amazon.com/All-Marvels-Journey-Biggest-Story-ebook/dp/B08V8CVNK9/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1670678908&sr=1-1

All critics love having a thesis to grapple with, and if a critic were to, say, sit down and read all the Marvel superhero comics published from 1961 to the present day (more or less), what conclusions could they draw from that half-million or so pages worth of stories?

First of all, there's the idea that all of these comics add up to a decades-long epic at all, or a series of linked stories dependent on everything that's happened in this fictional universe before. (The reader is invited to join the great story-in-progress at any point.) Marvel Comics was the first superhero publisher to have a universe shared by all of its characters, just as it was the first to expand the straitlaced world of superhero comics by mashing them up with other popular comic book genres: teen humor, romance, and supernatural horror. (DC expended a lot of effort in following Marvel's lead.)

"Each company's [meaning Marvel's and DC's] superhero comics are collective histories of a fictional place that now has so much backstory attached to it that no one person knows it all," wrote critic Douglas Wolk in his 2007 essay collection, READING COMICS; now he's out to chart one of those collective histories in his latest book, ALL OF THE MARVELS (2021). It's both a nostalgia-fest and an attempt to escape from the bonds of nostalgia by trying to appreciate what Marvel Comics means to 21st century readers who aren't invested in memories of what was "great" about comics in the 20th century.

In Wolk's reckoning, the Marvel story is an ongoing serial about power and ethics, in a distorted but "true enough" reflection of the real world. His guide to the Marvel Universe has eight long, critically insightful chapters on the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu, the X-Men, Thor and Loki, the Black Panther, the "Dark Reign" crossover event (in which murderous sociopath Norman Osborne attains political power and uses it to neutralize all his superpowered opposition), and the Jonathan Hickman-penned Avengers/New Avengers epic (2013 - 2015) in which the Marvel Universe is destroyed, and everyone dies. Come to think of it, most of the characters discussed in the book aren't really superheroes at all: the FF are scientist/explorers, Shang-Chi's an action hero who both abhors and relies on violence, the Panther's a head of state, Thor's a role any worthy individual can play, and the X-Men are activists, symbols really, for anyone, anywhere, who's ever been made to feel like an outsider.

How do you follow all of that? With a ninth chapter on "young women, the audience that Marvel mostly forgot about or neglected for decades" (Perhaps what young people fear and hate most is being silenced, ignored, and having their identities erased), and the characters Squirrel Girl and Ms. Marvel, then a tenth chapter in which Wolk nervously invites his ten-year-old son to share his Marvel habit. After all, superhero comics aren't the exclusive property of aging boomers.

So what's the point? Maybe the Marvel saga holds up a pulp fiction mirror to its readers, and reflects this gnawing worry: We can do better. We can be better. It's not especially motivational, but it's better than the cheap, lazy cynicism of "nothing matters." Everyone has the power to change something -- perhaps even your own mind.

Amazing what approaching a more diverse set of critics can do for the venerable Sight and Sound poll of the world's 100 "Greatest Films of All Time." In 2012, only two works by female filmmakers were in the top 100; this decade's list is topped by Chantal Akerman's mesmerizing, three-and-a-half hour art film about the daily routine of a single mom and part-time prostitute, while seventh place is now held by a female-directed reimagining of Billy Budd in the French Foreign Legion. Eleven other films directed or co-directed by women have now made it into the top 100.

The new top ten:

1. Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), Chantal Akerman
2. Vertigo (1958), Alfred Hitchcock
3. Citizen Kane (1941), Orson Welles
4. Tokyo Story (1953), Yasujiro Ozu
5. In the Mood for Love (2000), Wong Kar-wai
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Stanley Kubrick
7. Beau Travail (1999), Claire Denis
8. Mulholland Drive (2001), David Lynch
9. Man with a Movie Camera (1928), Dziga Vertov
10. Singin' in the Rain (1952), Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen

(Man with a Movie Camera, an experimental Ukrainian Soviet art film, is the only one on the list I haven't seen.)

It's easy to forget how big Barry Manilow was in the 1970s -- his deliberately unfashionable brand of melodic pop songcraft had a large and enthusiastic audience, and there was no shortage of little faux-Manilows on TV and the airwaves back then: people like Eric Carmen, Christopher Cross, and -- in his solo albums -- Gerry Rafferty (1947 - 2011).

I was just listening to Rafferty's hit single, "Baker Street" and thinking about an era in which this minor-key ode to alcoholic regret could reach #2 on the Billboard pop chart (April, 1978). Rafferty's an underpowered vocalist, but the song is defined by a bold alto sax riff and a very good guitar break, heavy on the whammy bar -- Steely Dan without the jazz snobbery. The lyrics, written in the second person, form a vignette about a character who's staggered through "another crazy day" and stops at a friend's place, where they talk long into the night about nothing in particular. The friend swears he's gonna "give up booze and settle down in a quiet town," but our POV character knows that's never gonna happen. (I can't imagine either of them sitting there talking all night without a drink in hand.) Worse, he sees himself in his dicey friend, and when he wakes up the next morning our character is determined to go home and get his shit together. Maybe he will, maybe he won't. Maybe his resolution will last until he remembers why he left home in the first place.

It's important to offer the listener at least a glimmer of hope for our character. You may've noticed the bittersweet quality of so much adult pop songwriting of the 1960s and '70s: Barry Manilow, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Jimmy Webb, Laura Nyro, Boz Scaggs, Colin Blunstone, and other writers who got a lot of creative mileage out of busted dreams, betrayal, loneliness, and a sense that the present could never measure up to a vanished past or a vaguely imagined future; a pipe dream, but it was still better than emptiness. So why not set grown-up problems to grown-up melodies steeped in jazz and blues? (Which brings us closer to understanding the idiom Gerry Rafferty was working in, once he emerged from three years of musical silence following the breakup of his old band, Stealers Wheel.)

"Baker Street" is no masterpiece, but does it matter? Hearing it again, I realize it's indelible -- another well-crafted, melancholy pop/soft rock snapshot of its time.

THE WIZE WIZE BEASTS OF THE WIZARDING WIZDOMS by Nagabe (Seven Seas, 2019) https://www.amazon.com/Wize-Beasts-Wizarding-Wizdoms-ebook/dp/B07WBWXRFY/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

How comfortable are you with different kinds of love? Nagabe is a furry manga-ka whose stories, without depicting anything sexually explicit, are often about awkward subjects: age difference, nonconsensual kissing/hugging, emotional manipulation, finding yourself attracted to someone physically dangerous (and don't get me started on the vampire bat boys swapping blood).

Point is, some romance authors like the thorns as well as the roses, and in these eight linked short stories set in a furry quasi-Hogwarts, the bloom of first love among the animal boys enrolled there is often heartwarming and slightly ghastly at the same time. This is what makes Nagabe such a remarkable artist: the heartfelt emotional content of their stories comes with a willingness to go right to the edge of taboo without crossing over into mere exploitation. (One relatively "safe" story, about the cold-blooded/warm-blooded romance between a lizard boy and his red deer roommate, is an idea Nagabe would expand into their graphic novel MONOTONE BLUE (2022).)

Don't let me downplay the artist's virtuoso pen work; Nagabe's cinematic pages are a joy to look at.

In May 2011 conductor Yutaka Sado led the Berlin Philharmonic in a filmed concert that began with Toru Takemitsu's From me flows what you call time, a thirty-five minute exercise for orchestra and five percussion soloists. I'd like to say I have an opinion on the piece, but since I kept waking up at different points, I'll have to add it to a long list of Takemitsu compositions I just don't get. The second half consisted of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, written in response to a public rebuke from music critic Joseph Stalin. I'd forgotten how much I like this piece -- the fearful first movement, the deliberately exaggerated sentimentality of the Allegretto, a slow movement desperately trying to calm itself down and think its way out of the symphony it's trapped in, and a finale that can be heard as a jubilant public celebration, or as an exhausted and terrified crowd forced to go through the motions of a public celebration -- both interpretations are correct. I won't tell you which route this performance takes (you can hear that for yourself), but maestro Sado is visibly exhausted as he exits, sweating, from the stage.

Beethoven wasn't set on destroying the symphony as his great predecessors Haydn and Mozart had understood it; he was out to expand the symphony, to make it bigger, with more room for everything. That meant more emotion, more volume, more complexity, more drama, more raw power when necessary. The "Eroica" (Symphony no. 3) wasn't just, in 1804-06, the longest symphony ever, clocking in at just under an hour; it was the most intellectually ambitious symphony as well, built on an implicit program in which human heroism triumphs, dies, and is transfigured into Promethean godhood. (The final movement alone fuses variation, fugue, march, and slow procession despite the simplicity of its balletic theme.)

Maestro Christian Thielemann conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in a 2009 performance that brings out the darkness and melancholy of the Eroica while still being an uplifting experience for the listener. The blu-ray includes Thielemann's stirring perfromances of the Coriolan and Egmont overtures -- Beethoven's gruff, who's-your-daddy self in concentrated form.

Gustav Mahler's First Symphony opens a window onto subjective memory -- a serene, childlike recasting of the composer's own song "Ging heut' Morgen übers Feld," in a palette of orchestral colors and cuckoo calls, soon plunging into more troubled sounds: nature has its wild, dark, and dangerous places, too. Then, in the aural equivalent of a cinematic jump cut (in 1888!), we hear the mature adult's reflections, filled with longing and regret, on that childhood vision of nature. The second movement is a heavy-footed, rustic waltz, and the slow movement famously transforms the children's song "Frère Jacques" into a funeral march, interrupted by clarinets playing a klezmer tune. (The composer clearly had a very conflicted childhood.)

The finale is, again, the mature adult reflecting on all that has gone before, equal parts nostalgia and bitterness: "This is what shaped me, but this is who I am now." Riccardo Chailly leads the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig in a thrilling 2015 video performance that leaves us drained but satisfied.

TRICK OR TREAT, SCOOBY-DOO! (Audie Harrison, 2022)
Yes, kudos and more kudos on Velma FINALLY coming out, but have you noticed the Scooby franchise has become so self-referential that nearly every gag in this movie is a riff on the series' 55-year history? The animation looks great, and those wildly exaggerated facial expressions prove that REN & STIMPY's seismic innovations are today's animation mainstream. But in the end it's really just another Scooby-Doo movie, and they'll be cranking these things out long after I'm dead.

PLEASURE (Ninja Thyberg, 2021)
Turning yourself into a commodity -- in this case, an exhibitionist sex worker -- has its contrarian perks. "Bella," a young Swedish woman (first time actor Sofia Kappel), comes to LA with the goal of becoming America's #1 porn star, and we viewers get to observe the highs and lows of her single-minded pursuit of a very particular kind of fame. The movie doesn't judge Bella's choices, awful as some of them are -- it simply shows us a strong-willed young woman navigating a career path that would destroy anyone less sure of themselves than her. Sex work therefore comes to seem interchangeable with almost any other profession built on the blood and sweat of striving for success, which is precisely the point.

MERRY CHRISTMAS MR. LAWRENCE (Nagisa Oshima, 1983)
It's a love story in which the penalty of tenderness is death. The setting is a Japanese POW camp in 1942, and the doomed lovers, eccentric British major Celliers (David Bowie) and inflexible camp commandant Yonoi (Ryuichi Sakamoto), are locked in a battle of wills, with much-abused bystander Col. Lawrence (Tom Conti) stepping between them as a helpless referee. Celliers and Yonoi are allowed a quiet, visually arresting liebestod, leaving the story's ending to the supporting characters, inhabitants of the gross, material world, trying to make sense of a transcendent passion. Merry Christmas indeed.

SISTERS (Brian De Palma, 1973)
A low budget American International horror film about twin sisters, one of whom is a homicidal maniac. It's pure pulp fiction that includes a sinister doctor running a private sanitarium/freakshow, a courageous reporter fighting the patriarchy, the mutilated body of a black man concealed in a white sofa, and a Bernard Herrmann score that cost more than anything else in the picture, and was worth the expense. So why did I keep nodding off towards the end, just as the movie was reaching its bloody climax? Why did I just not care about any of these characters, or any of their bullshit?

Great camera work, though.

I can understand why people would shy away from the you-must-change-your-life school of writing. For instance, as interesting as I found author Fumio Sasaki's story of selling off/throwing away most of his possessions and living happily in a nearly empty apartment, his book Goodbye, Things (Norton, 2017), like most testimonies of those who've found the One True Way, is repetitious, tendentious, and prone to rely on pop psychology banalities in place of actual thought. I don't want to beat up on Sasaki too much; sharing his "I used to be a depressed, lonely slob 'til I got rid of all my shit" story shows his heart's in the right place, at least.

But his minimalist manifesto is just a more extreme version of danshari, the decluttering aesthetic popularized a decade ago by lifestyle guru Marie Kondo in her international bestseller, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and Kondo's book is just a debased -- or better yet, simplified -- version of Zen Buddhism's discipline of non-attachment, the lifelong effort to free oneself from the burden of one's urges and desires, and to live a simpler, more authentic life in the "now."

Nothing wrong with that. Twenty years ago I sold off most of my comic book collection and lost the rest in a cross-country move, and I was surprised at how little I missed any of it -- in fact, I didn't miss it at all. Now I've gotta downsize all those paperback books that've taken the comics collection's place; trading in one attachment for another is rather self-defeating, ennit? Maybe Mr. Sasaki has a point.

The more dubious their qualifications for having an opinion on anything, the more strongly opinionated folks are about how young people should be educated. I'll limit myself to observing that in the U.S., unless you were brought up in a religious cult, or worse yet, you failed to avoid being born and raised in what the banks and the county zoning board considered the wrong zip code, there's a good chance that you had access to a reasonably sane, solid high school education that prepared you (in theory) for the next stage in your life. What you went on to do with it after graduation is your business.

What is education for? Some lament that education today prepares students to be economically productive rather than to think critically (as if the two were mutually exclusive!). Some fear that education is a form of thought control, others welcome it as a vehicle for the propagation of the faith -- whatever institution it is you have faith in, and that your elected representatives profess to have faith in. Meanwhile, public school teachers and academic lecturers alike find their freedom to discuss certain topics being curtailed by state and local governments, and/or angry online mobs, frequently working in concert.

"Passionate beliefs," wrote Bertrand Russell a hundred years ago, "produce either progress or disaster, not stability." Personally, I'll take cultured skepticism over passionate certainty any day of the week, but that option clearly isn't for everyone.

One thing I learned at Otakon 2022: gaming and cosplaying rule, but I'm not into either of those. The con was still a blast for the record-breaking 40,000 or so (!) people who attended it last weekend (most of 'em arrived on Saturday, to be met with jaw-droppingly long lines to get in), with a full slate of anime screenings, workshops, panels, concerts, dances, and autograph sessions, plus Artists' Alley and the Manga Library.

But the Dealer's Room was, for the second year in a row, noticeably emptier than it had been in 2019 (the con was suspended in 2020). If shopping's your thing, there was less stuff to buy this year, but as I said, gaming and cosplaying are where the action is. I don't have enough imagination to dress as anyone but myself.

BTW, burgers and beers for two at restaurants near the DC convention center will run you about $80 - $90 bucks now. Damn tasty, though.

What if Jesus came back, opened a women's health clinic, and began providing abortion services? Wouldn't the Christian Right crucify Him all over again?

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The media keeps warning us that we're on the brink of a recession -- but aren't two of the hallmarks of a recession high unemployment and low levels of consumer spending? Right now, we have the exact opposite of that. Maybe it would be more accurate (and less alarmist) to say that our economy is now (permanently?) prone to a series of shocks, and that our latest shock, rampant inflation, was brought about by supply chain disruptions caused by the triple whammy of COVID, climate change, and Russia's war in Ukraine.

The Federal Reserve, of course, can try to curb inflation by raising interest rates on home, auto, and business loans: a useful strategy if interest rate hikes aren't used as a blunt instrument studded with nails, as Fed chairman Paul Volcker used them in 1980, when he lowered inflation by raising interest rates to nearly 20 percent, quashing both inflation and the economy. (Thanks for the double-digit unemployment rate, dude.) So, forty years on, I'm assuming the Fed's pilots know enough to try for a soft landing...

****
I keep coming back to "Half-Price Hardback," a disquieting piece by the late Australian poet, Les Murray. "As the bookshops die/in country towns," it begins, and goes on to describe, in twenty brief lines, our literary reality, one where nothing difficult or unusual can exist, let alone be promoted. "All's preserved slow TV," Murray writes -- in other words, more of the same -- which you can verify by browsing the aisles of your nearest chain bookstore: full of books, and mostly empty.

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES famously opens with Dr. Watson examining a walking stick left behind by a prospective client neither he nor Holmes has seen yet. Encouraged by Holmes, Watson launches into a feat of impromptu inductive reasoning, drawing broad conclusions from the piece of evidence before him. Feeling rather pleased with himself, he's wrong on nearly all counts. Holmes calmly tears Watson's hypothesis to shreds, finishing just as the client -- who exactly matches Holmes's imaginative portrait -- shows up.

It's one of literature's pithiest examples of different people drawing wildly different conclusions from the same set of facts. Watson isn't stupid (unless he's being played onscreen by Nigel Bruce) -- he's an intelligent man who simply doesn't have Holmes's superhuman analytical skills.

Lord knows our world could use more analytically skilled people; that way, there'd be a better chance of a larger number of people making rational, as opposed to emotional, decisions. Take a recent case you may have heard of: it seems obvious that abortion is just one component of obstetrics and gynecology, branches of medicine specifically concerned with pregnancy, childbirth, and reproductive health care. One would think that practicing physicians in this field could best evaluate the needs of their patients without the interference of utterly unqualified amateurs like state legislators and Supreme Court justices, yet here we are, with a clique of judges unilaterally declaring abortion to be not a health care option (not that "health care" is so much as mentioned in this almost offhand decision), but a crime, so OB/GYN doctors now risk criminal penalties for treating their (exclusively female) patients. This is not keen legal reasoning, it's verbal sleight of hand.

To add insult to injury, the old abortion rights movement slogan "My Body, My Choice" has been appropriated and repurposed by vaccine rejectors as a rallying cry for freedom from medical authority and medical expertise, as an exercise in individual conscience. The irony of the anti-abortion stance of many vaccine rejectors notwithstanding, there's parity between pro-abortion and anti-vaccine groups only if you overlook the inconvenient fact that pregnancy is not a communicable disease. The choice to carry a fetus to term is not commensurate with the choice to play fast and loose with public health and safety.

Now as much as I may appeal to a frustrated desire to hear more rational public discourse, I can't deny that I'm not unbiased in this political matter. When I was six years old, I answered an obscene phone call. What's worse, it was from Clarence Thomas.

THE IRISHMAN (2019)
A fictionalized account of Frank "the Irishman" Sheerhan's (Robert De Niro) rise from side-hustling truck driver to made man in the Philadelphia mob, taking place in a world where the Mafia, the Teamsters, City Hall, and the cops are all working more or less together, and where De Niro's hired killer has to act as the voice of reason between capo Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) and Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). It's a doomed effort, of course -- father figure Bufalino calmly informs Frank what has to be done, and the look on Sheerhan's face as his friend Hoffa arrogantly signs his own death warrant is devastating.

At three and a half hours, it's a riveting story...well, up until the final half hour in which Frank outlives everyone except his estranged daughters, but it's exactly the ending this picture needed. An ending that provides no sense of finality or moral reckoning, but only the feeling of a life, none too free to begin with, reduced to its bare minimum, the quiet inevitability of its own extinguishment.

GILDA (1946)
"This isn't what it looks like," the movie insists. "It's not about a young drifter pimping himself out to a rich, queer Nazi only to have their happiness together destroyed because they're in love with the same woman."

Well, yeah it is, but love in this movie is toxic -- it's all about control, manipulation, and cruel payback, and by the time the two leads go off to begin a "normal" life together what we're looking at is more of a sick joke than a plausible outcome. (Ah, but the incandescent Rita Hayworth's "Put the Blame on Mame" nightclub number showed Jessica Rabbit and Red Hot Riding Hood how it's done.)

This week I'm taking advantage of an opportunity to watch a bunch of movies I've been sitting on.

HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY: THE REN & STIMPY STORY (2020)
Two indisputable facts: THE REN & STIMPY SHOW (1991-95) changed the course of animation history, and series creator John Kricfalusi turned out to be his own worst enemy. Watching the slow motion trainwreck of this story should be a cautionary tale, but how could it be when some people would rather drive off a cliff than follow the rational course of action? Careful, though: it's just as true that you don't have to fuck people over to survive. The truly difficult lesson here is that everyone deserves respect, even the undeserving.

KING OF JAZZ (1930)
If you're at all curious about the "sophisticated" pop music of the 1920s, here's a visually beautiful, genially racist, and very weird musical/comedy revue showcasing bandleader and human caricature Paul Whiteman, king of a stately, symphonic "jazz" with no black people (but you do get to see white dancer Jacques Cartier in head-to-toe black body paint and sexy short shorts in the "jungle" prelude to "Rhapsody in Blue"). Young Bing Crosby appears with the Rhythm Boys, a vocal trio of which he was clearly the star, and the movie begins with the very first Technicolor cartoon, animated by Walter Lantz and Bill Nolan, featuring a cameo by Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. The movie sank like a stone at the box office.

PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE (2002)
"So, where do we go, then?"

I'd forgotten how much I like this movie. Novelty toilet plunger salesman Barry's (Adam Sandler) obsessive collection of frequent flyer miles he'll never use is interrupted early one morning by the arrival of a harmonium he can't play and a woman he can't talk to, Lena (Emily Watson); cool and composed, but with issues of her own, she'll become "Gay Boy" Barry's first-ever girlfriend.

This art house romantic comedy seems twisted only because it acknowledges that psychologically, violence goes hand in hand with passion; violence can be liberating as well as the first resort of morons (we get to see both in this movie). Not your typical romantic comedy, but then who's your typical romantic couple?

Go to Amazon, and it won't take long to find a male model posing in a neck gaiter, dark glasses, and ball cap -- the uniform of Patriot Front, a white nationalist hate group whose young leader, along with thirty of his followers, was arrested in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho on June 11th. (Well, Amazon is the Everything Store.)

I don't think of Idaho very often, but memorable things sometimes happen there. This was one of them: a concerned citizen, seeing "a little army" of guys in masks and riot gear loading themselves into a U-Haul, tipped off the cops, who intercepted the group on their way to a Pride event in downtown Coeur d'Alene.

Pride in the Park, going reasonably well despite the presence of Christian protestors and a small group of (armed) men unfurling an anti-LGBTQ+ banner, had been Patriot Front's intended target. The group had planned a surprise assault: throwing a smoke grenade, storming the crowd, capturing it all on precious propaganda video, and then fleeing before the cops showed up -- this little hate group's usualhttps://m.o.(This sort of drive-by rioting clearly has two main objectives: self-promotion to attract new recruits, and to keep their identities hidden, especially from their employers.)

Patriot Front, whose ultimate goal is to establish a white (straight, Christian) ethnostate in the U.S., likes publicity as long as they get to control the messaging. The publicity they got last weekend -- of 31 goons in flex cuffs, kneeling before the cops -- wasn't part of the plan. The men were charged with criminal conspiracy to riot and released on bail, their secret identities blown. (Only one man lived in Idaho; the others had come in from at least twelve other states.)

It's amazing -- guys who went out of their way to hook up with thirty like-minded knuckleheads, slip into their fetishy riot gear, pile into their hate group clown car, and drive downtown just to ruin a Pride celebration. Who DOES that? (And if these guys had been marginally smarter, and hadn't begun staging their little operation in a hotel parking lot, in full view of anyone with a cell phone, how many injured -- or worse -- bystanders in the park would we have been looking at?)

This time, things worked out all right. No one was hurt. The bad guys got busted. And alternate-reality America once again demonstrated that it has no ideas, that it relies on violence as the first resort for its butthurt feelings.

So, lifestyle-and-culture MEL magazine has taken it upon itself to investigate an interesting but not-too-serious question: is Yosemite Sam Jewish?

https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story.....m-jewish-roots

The impetus was then-President Trump's August 2020 signing of the Great American Outdoors Act, during which, typically, he managed to mispronounce "Yosemite" as "Yo, Semites." Not only did this sell a lot of t-shirts for the Park Service, it prompted several online pundits to recall (or to Google) that in 2013, The Looney Tunes Show disclosed that Sam's last name is "Rosenbaum." (Admittedly, that name could just as easily be goyische German as Jewish, but it was still a funny reveal.)

"Yes, Yosemite Sam, the red-mustached, screaming, gun-toting, bipolar, rabbit-hating maniac, is a Jew," reluctantly acknowledged the website Jew or Not Jew, while hedging their bets by labeling Sam a "borderline" Jew. Even taking into account Sam's self-mocking physical resemblance to his creator, animation director Isadore "Friz" Freleng -- a short guy with a hot temper who used to have red hair -- let's not forget that Jewish in-jokes and Borscht Belt shtick ran through Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies for decades, and that Jewish comedians (many with Anglicized names) dominated American radio and movie comedy when the Warner Brothers animation unit was at its most productive.

The Sam controversy, if you can call it that, leads to a question at least as interesting: is Bugs Bunny Jewish? Of course, speaking with a Brooklyn/Flatbush accent doesn't make you Jewish, and nobody's arguing that trickster figure Br'er Rabbit and trickster god Coyote are members of the tribe -- but if Bugs is both a product of his time and timeless, you can't just overlook his influences. Bugs is vast, he contains multitudes (and I've never had any problem imagining Bugs as both queer and Jewish).

The last word should go to Friz Freleng's adult daughter, Hope Freleng Shaw. Her dad once drew Bugs wearing a tillit for his grandson's Bar Mitzvah, and added some dialogue to this family card: "Nobody believes a rabbit can be Jewish, but I'm a Jewish rabbit."

A night scene, illuminated only by a lantern. A man in a white shirt, an imploring expression on his face, his outstretched arms in a Christ-like gesture, faces the raised rifles of a firing squad. At the man's feet is a bloody pile of bullet-riddled corpses and a monk kneeling in prayer. Behind him stretches a line of terrified men, one biting his nails nervously, two with their faces buried in their hands -- they're next. To the right of the man in the white shirt, another victim glares at his executioners, his fist raised in a final gesture of defiance. The firing squad is depicted as a faceless mass, not even human, no more than an efficient killing machine in a slaughterhouse.

Goya's painting "The Third of May, 1808" commemorates the victims of a war atrocity, the viewer helpless to stem the feelings of horror and pity stirred up by the image. That's what art can do.

(There's a companion piece to this painting: "The Second of May," depicting Napoleon's Egyptian mercenaries, who'd been sent in to break up a public demonstration, being slaughtered by the angry mob. The following day, French troops rounded up the demonstrators -- in reality, it was about a hundred random Spanish men unlucky enough to be noticed by the French that day -- and were marched outside Madrid's city walls to be shot. So why is "The Second of May" not nearly as well-known as its companion piece? Because it's not a very good painting: Goya gives us a very busy image with everything happening all over the canvas all at once. There's no focal point for the viewer; everything is given equal importance, meaning Goya failed in his duty to make some hard artistic choices.)

"The Third of May" is one of those images you don't forget once you've seen it. Philistine that I am, I'm wearing it on a t-shirt.

A soldier in Grant Wood's 1927 pencil study for a stained glass veterans' memorial window in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is queer desire incarnate. Okay, maybe not the first thing you think of when the name of the "American Gothic" painter comes up, yet there it is, right out in the open.

The subject is a lanky young artilleryman representing the War of 1812, his bare torso lean and wiry -- you can imagine the grunt work of loading, positioning, and firing the big guns would've sweated the last traces of baby fat off of him. He's wearing only a crotch-hugging pair of bell-bottom trousers and a small hat with a flat brim, and he stands in a flattering contrapposto pose, alert but relaxed. His right hand holds his ramrod erect as it rises out of the frame. There's nothing of exhaustion, fear, desperation, or any other emotion in his expression; his face is neutral, calmly meeting the viewer's gaze with his own.

If that ain't a gay fantasy pinup, I don't know what is. Talk about sexual objectification! There's no proof, but plenty of speculation, that Grant Wood was a closeted gay guy in a sham marriage, but for me this picture's the clincher -- there's no way in hell a straight guy would've chosen to draw a young man in a come-hither pose that blatant, not in Jazz Age America. (I repeat, I'm writing about the pencil study; the figure executed in stained glass stands in a rigid, academic pose devoid of the study's arresting individuality. Even half-naked, the stained glass cannoneer is, like his five fully-clothed comrades representing conflicts from the Revolutionary War to World War I, both impressive and uninteresting to look at.)

Wood's paintings always had more of the magazine cover than the Musée des Beaux Arts about them, and their earnest sentimentality stretches even our postmodern taste for trashiness to the limit. "Death on the Ridge Road" is pure melodrama, "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" is pure kitsch, "Parson Weems's Fable" and "Daughters of Revolution" are grotesquely comic (The latter transforms Macbeth's three witches into tight-lipped American dowagers), and his numerous, rolling Midwestern landscapes are more like backdrops for an Aaron Copland ballet score than commentaries on anything in the material world. "American Gothic" (1930) is Wood's masterpiece, the painting in which his struggle to transform himself from a second-rate Impressionist into an American disciple of the medieval Flemish portraitists had succeeded beyond question. Twelve years later he was dead, from pancreatic cancer, just shy of his 51st birthday.