Do Not Siege Walled Cities - 231
Being fake weird is much worse than being sincerely boring.
JAKARTA
Hello. Hope your week was productive. I’m in a city with a metro area of 34M that nobody seems to feel particularly warmly about.
Before visiting, I looked online for things to do in Jakarta, neighborhoods to check out, etc. And all I came across was “it’s really not very nice.” And that’s not just from visitors. Lifelong residents were equally nonplussed. “There’s many nicer cities in Southeast Asia.”
That’s an interesting space to be, if you think about it. Massive but allowing for no strong feelings. The AVATAR of metropolises.
For what it’s worth, I’ve enjoyed it so far. I find the call to prayer a relaxing thing to experience from a hotel looking out on the city. And I like the cats.
ACTUALLY STRANGE
I have a goal for my time in Jakarta. I’m gonna get through the bulk of Abel Ferrara’s filmography. I’m looking to be inspired and I need something outside what my usual media consumption.
Reading about Ferrara and his collaborators yielded a thing I coulda guessed with even my entry-level knowledge of his work: this guy is comfortable with weirdos.
I used to be. I confess I’ve cooled on difficult oddballs since allowing one into my life blew up in my face. But years later, as I continue to pick the shrapnel out of my soft tissue, I can vaguely remember why I was so keen on fringe people.
Weirdos come with insights. Often wrong and stupid, those insights come fast and from nowhere. Which is a bad thing for them, typically, as they’ll follow a dozen bad paths before accidentally tripping onto a productive one. But it can be a good thing for the rest of us. Most of us can’t see the world any way but what our lens allows, and we’ve got a great many shared lenses.
Weirdos give that other perspective.
I worked for the same guy on-and-off from the time I was 20 to my mid-30s. I consider him a friend and would take work from him now if he called. He’s a Long Island Jew from a nice family who surrounds himself with gangsters, lunatics, and degenerates. And as I was one of a small handful of employees for years, I was also surrounded. I remember one time a dangerous guy he did business with drunkenly asked me “what does he think I actually do for money?” And I replied honestly, “we tend not to ask.” Sometimes people we relied on would go missing and we’d find out they were on a crack binge. A guy we dealt with often told me “I’ve gotta get $20k somehow this weekend.” When I asked what for, I got “In NYC you can go a year without paying rent. But then your landlord can drag you to court. We do this every year. Judge is pissed this time” as my answer. One dude we had business with owned a bunch of gyms. Really sold the whole alpha-male thing years before the Andrew Tates of the world. Always two girls on his arms. Roided out. Spent money on dumb shit. Perfect teeth. Then we hear he’s struggling. Then we find out he’s out of his mind on meth doing 20 man gay orgies and being forced outta his ownership stake in the gyms.
That job never got dull.
Ferrara seems to understand this as a broader concept. Zoë Tamerlis was a committed (I choose that word with purpose) drug addict. Nicholas St. John wrote every type of depravity into his scripts but refused to work on Bad Lieutenant because it offended his sensibilities as a catholic. Christ Zois cannot decide if that’s his real name and cannot practice medicine in New Jersey due to his part in a bank fraud scheme. These are difficult personalities who think differently.
This is who you fall in with when you’re not afraid to take the bad with the good. And it’s why you’ll see me defend the real nutjobs in comics. One might actually hit on something worthwhile, eventually. So when they do proper weirdo meltdown shit and implode, I’m never mad. I do, however, think the corporations have a responsibility to manage those weirdos in a consistent and evenhanded fashion. If lunatic A gets to blow up the world twice a year, then lunatic B shouldn’t be fired for stealing pens.
SOME CONSISTENCY WOULD BE COOL
In my futile, autistic, search for consistency, we’re back on the subject of Israel-Palestine. Or, rather, the way my colleagues are publicly processing a 75-year conflict.
There’s something inherently foul about demanding a statement. It should go without saying that nobody owes that to anyone. And when you see people pull that nonsense online, it’s always an intimidation tactic.
I’m content to keep my counsel on certain topics and I’m happy any time comic pros do the same. Say nothing more often, please.
That said, it’s weird some of you aren’t talking. Not because I wanna hear what you have to say on a complex subject you have no credentials in. But because you have something to say about EVERYTHING else.
Here’s what moments like this reveal: many topics positioned as controversial are not controversial. And many brave stances are not brave.
Do you live in an upper-middle-class neighborhood on one of the coasts? Maybe a college town in the midwest? A resort town in the mountains? Then you’ve seen this lawn decoration-turned-meme.
There’s a number of variations, depending on which Etsy seller you happen to get your tacky bullshit from. Some say ‘diversity is strength’ rather than ‘kindness is everything’ which really makes you wonder about the kindness guy. Does he hate diversity?
That cringe-inducing piece of 2021 ephemera is how some of you look when you’ll lecture strangers online about race, fight trolls about gender all day, and offer your (online) support to humanitarian crisis every time one pops up… but can’t find anything to say about Israel-Palestine. You come off surface-level and cynical.
Because what does repeating “trans women are women” at rednecks online actually risk for you? Your corporate leash-holders won’t cut you off for that. Having a CDC-approved take on Covid won’t put you in the unemployment line. And telling the world you donated to BLM comes with no measurable social cost.
But take a stance on Israel-Palestine? Might have some repercussions.
And as I said last newsletter, the smart ones know this. The real corporate slime out there is well-aware of how THIS particular topic isn’t for play. Take a pro-Israel stance and alienate the 30-something editors who hire you. Take a pro-Palestine position and alienate the 50-something bosses who hire the editors. Your move, online activists.
Again, I don’t actually want any of your opinions. I don’t need declarations and oddly confident assertions from people 7k miles away from the conflict. But the willingness to ignorantly opine on everything else EXCEPT this is an interesting phenomenon. It underlines something.
Even our most lunatic colleagues are still in the center of the Overton Window. They may be selling you revolution, but the reality is anodyne. This is all to ask the question: without stakes, why take any political position at all? Might as well talk about baseball at that point.
This is not me telling Lebron “just play basketball.” I’m happy to see your views manifest in your work (provided the work is any good), but the days of making your name off saying ‘things’ online is over.
Get outside the window of permissible discourse and say something that takes balls, or just shut up.
PRESSED
LEADED GASOLINE got a mention in the New York Times. Time for me to carry an NPR tote and buy Raytheon stock.
Thank you to Mr. Gustines for the coverage. Everything helps.
THIS WEEK’S MEDIA CONSUMPTION
Elevation not required.
So here’s two pieces of well done shit: Abel Ferrara’s Fear City and the Dixon / Zaffino graphic novel PUNISHER: KINGDOM GONE.
Zaffino’s art is en vogue with comic creators the past few years and almost weekly I trip over someone eulogizing the late Argentinian artist. The praise is well-deserved. His work is relentlessly gritty and visceral.
You’ll often see his original inks posted online and I think that’s for good reason. There’s not a thing wrong with the colors in this OGN but there really is no comparison.
Chuck Dixon is playing the hits in this one. The bad guys are bad in that familiar 80s action movie way. The setting is a Latin American island perfect for parachuting onto and hiding in jungle. There’s ballistic knives, that really bizarre fixation of Punisher writers of this era. It’s all there.
And it needs nothing else.
I know I harp on it almost weekly at this point, but there’s greatness in entertainment. This book is what it is. A tight and fun vigilante story. It ends in an unbecoming fashion for a graphic novel, as I believe a splash is the proper note to send readers off. And I’m sure if we put it under a microscope, or even prescription sunglasses, we’d find plenty wrong with the plot. But, it works. Nobody who bought this felt ripped off.
I just wanted to highlight this exchange wherein Dixon trusts Zaffino and his own script.
The way the deposed president works the two feds is great. The knowing face at the end is great. And it requires a real artist to sell it. I might go on a pirate site and read every comic out just this week to see if we get anything like this simple, compact, effective moment.
When people talk about elevated genre work, they’re referring to some indescribable ‘intelligence’ in the thing. It often feels like a post-hoc rationalization for enjoying dumb media. Is Midsommer elevated horror because it doesn’t feature a co-ed being slashed in a locker room? I assure you the film has nothing more to ‘say’ than the hypothetical co-ed slasher movie. Both are just stories, reflecting the aptitude and failings of the writers. Is it because the hypothetical slasher film (we’ll call it College of the Dead) deals in more heavily worn tropes? I guess I could deal with that definition. But what about something like John Wick, that story-wise is not at all smarter than its inspirations or contemporaries? I would argue it actually is elevated, but due to the visual flair rather than the story. So maybe we don’t mean ‘intelligent’ and are instead talking about an element that is simply done exceptionally well.
FEAR CITY is essentially a Cannon Film with just a tiny bit more patience, a tiny bit more ambiance, and a tiny bit better acted. So, is it elevated? It’s better, for sure. But is it really smarter? I wouldn’t say so. It’s just a smidge more self-assured and there’s maybe 20% more flair. Let’s just call it elevated. Or, maybe even better, stop equivocating about the things we enjoy and just say it was a fun movie where a martial artist with no motivation kills strippers until Tom Berenger gets over the trauma of killing a man in the ring and uses his boxing skills to murder the killer.
THAT’S IT FOR ME
I need to work harder on my body. I feel run over and I’m not actually that old. I need to do karate in front of a broken mirror in my warehouse living space, like the stripper stalker from Fear City. Health is wealth.
Alright, I wish you a great week. Either do the thing or don’t. Stop faking. Hope your back feels better than mine. Do for self.