Chasing Skirts

I read books in different genres and formats. I watch three movies. I play a round of Roulette.

Back in early 2021 when I started publishing this newsletter I determined to stick to a dictum an old teacher once issued about good critical writing, that it should be “like a woman’s skirt — long enough to cover the subject but short enough to remain interesting.”

I’ve tried to adhere unfailingly to this constraint while reserving the right to switch up the format, saying little to nothing about a text if that’s all I feel like saying about it or going on at length if something seems to demand scrutiny the explication of which will help me to understand my own views and to practice clearer, better, funner writing. And if something pertinent is happening in my own day-to-day I go so far as to jot down some accompanying personal notes to contextualize my thoughts about my recent reading and viewing habits.

While I don’t intend to stop fashioning lengthier analyses or deploying irregular formats when I feel like it, I feel a need to try giving entries a sturdier, more newslettery structure and parse my points more pithily. If I dig the result it might become something resembling a regular format for One Could Argue, for a while at least. Hopefully this will also mean more frequent updates. (This one will run a bit long but ideally great frequency should also mean greater concision.)

My mainstays are movies, comics and books of prose and art and poetry, and so shall I divide sections along those faults. And because it’s fun and because I like randomizing shit I’ll resuscitate the Roulette feature where I use a random number generator to pluck three entries from the complete list of all books I’ve read since early 2011 and mention something about each of their contents or about where, when and/or why I read them. For no reason I’m also going to randomize the order in which the sections appear in each installment utilizing this more constrained format. So:

Comics Corral

For my daily two pages of classic newspaper comics I moved along from Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip Volume Two to Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip Volume Three. Jansson got better at all aspects of cartooning as she went along and Moomin is my new current favorite old-timey newspaper strip. Jansson has a pleasing line, a yearning, explorative imagination and a quietly unbothered comedic voice that gets increasingly whimsical while managing never to feel twee. And like all great newspaper cartoonists she can draw really well but generally keeps this fact pocketed away and unremarked upon, to the point where the reader gets subsumed in Jansson’s universe and can’t delineate any boundary between the cartoonishly stylized and the convincingly realistic. Now I get why certain cool people in hip neighborhoods wear Moomin tote bags about, though I won’t be doing that myself unless someone gives me one for free.

I read two dense, challenging, outstanding graphic novels, both of which are more to be admired and marvelled at than enjoyed but whose admiration levels are off the chart for me: the new Time Zone J by the legendary Canadian cartoonist Julie Doucet and the recent The Domesticated Afterlife by my friend and colleague Scott Finch. Doucet’s book is a psychedelic memoir where the artist filled what appears to have been one very long sheet of paper in a continuous single-drawing fever dream, preserved in the printed presentation with the use of clever accordion-style book-binding that allows each full-bleed page to flow directly into the one right after, exploring her complicated feelings and recollections of a doomed long-distance love affair. Doucet is great at filling pages like this and is always exploring new formats in which to probe memory and the passage of time; Time Zone J is some of her finest work.

Finch’s book is a lush, ambitious, bizarre, occasionally downright insane examination of high-falutin’ dichotomies like consciousness/instinct, domesticity/ferality, birth/death, past/future and technology/nature, represented metaphorically on every page through a pedal-down visual assault that interweaves contrasts between lush grays and elegant black and white or between meticulous craftsmanship and crude scrawl. I’ve been an admirer of Finch’s work from afar for a long time so it has been very cool to discover that he is both a charming individual and quite a capable utilizer of the graphic novel form. He accomplished something bracingly original with The Domesticated Afterlife and I don’t even really understand it, despite having read every word and studied every page. The book is worth buying even if only for the several points in the middle and at the end where Finch piles spread after astonishing spread atop one another, depicting ships and prisons and religions and factories and thoughts and dialogues and evolution and war and primal screams in increasingly go-for-broke compositions, any one of which would make a great standalone piece of art but which taken together make The Domesticated Afterlife something to wonder at and then gingerly back away from without breaking eye contact. It has a place of honor on my shelf and on my complete reading list.

Wrapping up Comics Corral: I finally read a complete volume, the fourth one, of the well-packaged and diversely-curated comics anthology magazine Rust Belt Review, published and edited by another good friend and comics colleague Sean Knickerbocker. It’s a slick publication with some skilled cartoonists in it, including my friendly acquaintance Sam Grinberg, an artist who has a day job designing characters for The Simpsons. Knickerbocker has a great autobiographical piece in this issue where he pays tribute to the style of the legendary cartoonist Frank King of Gasoline Alley. As myself a former editor and publisher of a comics anthology, I proclaim Rust Belt Review to be the format’s current best on-the-market offering and Knickerbocker to be the most whimsical chap of the season.

Literature Lounge

As mentioned in the previous installment I have been reading and re-reading some earlier works by one of my favorite writers James Ellroy.

I finished his first and second novels Brown’s Requiem and Clandestine, finding the former to be a desperate, swirling, amateurish slurry of all of Ellroy’s personal predelicitions, aesthetic fixations and moral obsessions and the latter to be a less unsophisticated, more ambitious and densely-plotted road map for many of his later projects, superior to Brown’s Requiem and vastly inferior to Ellroy’s sixth novel, the superb and enthralling Killer on the Road, which I also just finished re-reading.

I enjoyed and respected Killer on the Road in 2022 more than the first time I read it probably back around high school. It’s an anomaly in the Ellroy canon — a standalone novel which, unlike almost every other piece of fiction he’s ever written, is not from the point of view of an investigative authority figure like a police detective or P.I. but is rather an empathizing first-person burrow as far into the heart of pure evil as I’ve ever read, an autobiography of a fictitious serial killer who leaves L.A. in the late Seventies and criss-crosses the United States for years growing exceptionally skilled at getting away with mass murder. (Early on there’s a part where the protagonist lives and kills in San Francisco just a few blocks from where I was crashing in a friend’s pad last year when I wrote these entries.)

What’s most remarkable in Killer on the Road is something I’ve always envied in fiction writers who can manage it: utterly convincing verisimilitude. In Killer on the Road, far more than in Brown’s Requiem or Clandestine, one is enveloped by Ellroy’s ability to make little details about chemistry, automotive technology, geography, journalism, guns ‘n ammo, architecture, business, the legal and penal systems and all sorts of other things feel so experiential and authentic as to become realistically and convincingly unremarkable. This, in exquisite concert with Ellroy’s determination to try to understand how someone can be born purely evil and unable to avoid his destiny as a murderer, is what gives this novel its power to compel the reader towards its unnerving conclusion. Serial killers continue to show up in Ellroy’s later novels but as sideshows to bigger issues of institutional corruption and societal upheaval, and certainly not as narrator-protagonists.

Meanwhile Clandestine, which prominently features a serial killer subplot, is certainly one step back and two steps forward from Brown’s Requiem and lays out a healthy structural template for Ellroy’s career-best work in the seven books comprising the L.A. Quartet and the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy. Perhaps his 1987 novel The Black Dahlia, which I will read for the third or fourth time soon, is when he mapped the flare for detail and rich characterization he honed in Killer on the Road onto the ambitious retro-noir scaffolding of Clandestine. This would explain why The Black Dahlia, certainly his best book up until that point, was the breakthrough that ushered him to mainstream success.

The final thing to mention about Clandestine is that I had no idea going into it that Dudley Smith, the lethal, predatory, corrupt Irish-immigrant police detective who stalks the pages of a number of Ellroy’s later books, makes his first appearance as an unpredictable ally/antagonist in Clandestine, as does the Victory Motel, Smith’s favorite location for suborning confessions through torture. Smith and the Victory show up repeatedly in later books, including some of the newest ones that I haven’t yet gotten around to reading (but will). It was fun to learn that the Smith mythos extends as far back as Ellroy’s second book.

Rounding out the Literary Lounge, I read ¡Perros! ¡Perros! Dogs! Dogs! by Ginger Foglesong Guy with pictures by Sharon Glick because I am trying (rather ineptly) to learn Spanish and this is a children’s picture book with the same text in English and Spanish. I should read more of these. Dinosaurs by the Numbers by Steve Jenkins was read because I love dinosaurs and respect well-designed infographics. (Jenkins is skilled at rendering dinosaurs in the trendy Photoshopped illustrative style I’ve seen in a few other recent dinosaur books.) And I made quick work of Tides & Transgressions, the new artist’s monograph from my favorite living fine artist Duke Riley, a New York-based eccentric whose work my sister turned me onto when she would see it around NYC years ago while she was living there. Riley does very large-scale conceptual performance pieces to which I’m mostly indifferent and has a day job running his own tattoo parlor, but the parts of his practice to which I’m drawn are his incredible large-scale pen-and-paper drawings, his mixed-media sculpture/collage pieces and his remarkable and brilliant neo-scrimshaw collection where he renders nautical and maritime-themed slogans, icons and characters on old pieces of indestructible plastic that he salvages from the sea and repurposes as gallery-worthy art. He’s a brilliant, freewheeling creative soul who seems to have a great sense of humor and Tides & Transgressions is a rich assay of his whole career with, unusually for an artist’s monograph, a very readable and digestible amount of nerdy curatorial essay-fluffery. Actually to be fair it probably has less of that kind of writing even than this newsletter.

Picture Place

Curiously, without meaning to, I watched three movies that all involve robberies centered around different modes of transportation.

Pee-wee’s Big Adventure from 1985, directed by Tim Burton, is plotted around the theft of the prized bicycle owned by the constipated, quietly diabolical vaudevillian man-child title character played by Paul Reubens. This is a cult classic that frightened me on visceral and emotional levels when I was a very small child and neither especially bored nor jazzed me as an adult. It’s divertingly offbeat and outré, respectably subversive and finally not particularly entertaining even for a short movie. I like that most of the characters are either insolent, unmannerly children embodied in the personages of grown adults (such as Pee-wee or his wealthy rival Francis) or cartoonish caricatures culled at random from a broad swath of American society (bikers, truckers, rodeo riders, self-absorbed Hollywood people, an escaped convict and so on).

Next was the third film directed by Stanley Kubrick, The Killing from 1956. I love Kubrick when he’s at his best but only saw this particular film once before as a teenaged film nerd in a basement rec room full of same. It’s a bristling, tightly-wound, intelligently-scripted noir ensemble caper about a gang led by a tough and smart character played by the great character actor Sterling Hayden; their plan involves using a rifle to assassinate a horse in the middle of a race while simultaneously starting a violent ruckus inside the track facilities, all of which is cover for a risky and ambitious plan to rob the track.

It’s quite good overall and moves at a brisk cantor with little wasted. It also has a few plot elements and sequences, including a bravura scene that ignites very quickly into a room full of dead bodies, that were clearly an influence on later equally inventive ensemble caper films like Reservoir Dogs and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

Hayden really is an incomparable screen presence in everything I’ve seen him in — commandingly brawny, ruggedly handsome and possessed of a striking baritone that he deploys in a clipped, stomping staccato. His casting in The Killing, besides being ideal for the character, appears to be a partial nod to the fine 1950 John Huston picture The Asphalt Jungle in which Hayden did an equally solid turn.

The most interesting thing about The Killing that I didn’t get before is that the unusual structure, in which the film skips forward and back by minutes and hours in a slightly achronological jangle while a voice-over narrator calls the action like a race announcer, is tied to the film’s central metaphor of horse racing. Hayden’s character and each individual member of the gang he’s assembled for the heist, as well as the hangers-on and rivals who fuck everything up and contribute to that explosion of violence that helps to foil the plan, are like horses racing to outlast one another toward the winning stake at the end of a finish line. In killing the literal horse and causing chaos at the track they unwittingly invite chaos into their own lives and accidentally kill one another. Fittingly, the only one who makes it to end of the race still standing neither gets the money nor eludes justice.

The only thing that holds this otherwise excellent movie back is that a few of the tropes, chunks of dialogue and in particular one central fist-fighting sequence have a cringily low-budget feel that cramps the picture’s plausibility. Kubrick mostly submitted outright masterpieces or the occasional noteworthy misfire; The Killing might be his only picture that is just…pretty darn good.

Finally I watched the Michael Bay movie Ambulance from 2022, easily one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. It involves two foster brothers, one a Marine Corps combat veteran and the other a career criminal, who get embroiled in a shittily-planned bank heist gone wrong and end up trying to escape in a hijacked ambulance with a wounded police officer and desperate EMT in the back as hostages.

This movie is a complete piece of shit in every way. It looks awful, overflows with cringe expository dialogue and thin characterization, makes little narrative sense, feels cheap and has that kind of bizarre look that characterizes the new pandemic-era in cinema where whole city blocks appear mysteriously empty and sequences are written around airily underpopulated locations and interiors. I’ve quite enjoyed some of Bay’s work in the past but this terrible movie finds him descending into self-parody and embarrassing himself by trying to own it with passing references to his prior work (and gestures to the better filmmakers he’s ripping off). Feels like an industry dinosaur thrashing for relevance in the new media landscape and post-pandemic cultural climate. The results are in no way fun to sit through and I wish I hadn’t.

Finally for this installment we play Roulette and present three random drawings from the complete list of all books I’ve read since the beginning of 2011.

Chicken Soup with Rice: A Book of Months by Maurice Sendak, read in 2016. My mother gave me a miniature box set of books by the legendary master of the children’s book form Sendak and I read them all separately while living in a great apartment I had for a while in Noe Valley here in San Francisco. I may have read this on my own or with my learner with whom I’ve worked on an off over the years as a volunteer adult literacy tutor for the San Francisco Public Library.

Factotum by Charles Bukowski, read in 2018. A friend I wrote of two entries back, one of the owners of the house in San Francisco where I lived both right before and right after moving to Seattle for several years and which burned beyond habitability some months ago, got me onto Bukowski when I first lived there by giving me the novel Ham on Rye to read. I became hooked and ended up working my way through all of the other novels in Bukowski’s semiautobiographical “Henry Chinaski” cycle, getting onto Factotum after I’d relocated to Seattle. Factotum is good but probably my least favorite of the Chinaski books. Still head and shoulders above an execrable book of Bukowski poetry I also read in 2018.

My New York Diary by Julie Doucet, read in 2013. It is pure coincidence and the kind of fun that comes up in this Roulette game of mine that I wrote about Doucet a few paragraphs above with no idea that her early masterwork My New York Diary would come up at the very end of this entry. I read this one not too long after moving from Vermont to the Bay Area because I wanted to read more Doucet and wanted a book about the emotional and personal costs of picking up and moving to a distant new city without a plan and for no strong reason. My New York Diary is a visually dense, achingly-rendered autobiographical narrative comic that progresses in a style far more conventional than but equally eye-gouging as Time Zone J, and actually covers a lot of the same themes (ones that, for that matter, show up in Bukowski too) — love, lust, directionlessness, depression, career frustration, creativity, poverty and abuse of drink and drugs. If you want to read one of the best works by Doucet or just want to read well-drawn and inventive comics by anyone, you could do worse than to toss a coin between My New York Diary and Time Zone J.