Crows and Roosters

I read a very short book and start reading a very long one. I read two children's books. I watch a great picture. I play a round of Roulette. Comics-wise I'm in a holding pattern.

Here are the reads I’ve chalked up on the complete reading list since previous entry.

The Gifts of Reading from 2016 by Robert Macfarlane. A succinct essay packaged in the form of a book so small n slim it’s practically more of a pamphlet. Macfarlane comes out with a bold and controversial stance as both pro-gift and pro-reading.

Indeed this volume was in fact a gift from a mysterious package-dispatching benefactor in my life, the same new friend who got me onto The Stuff of Stars by Bauer and Sullivan’s Travels by Sturges. This frienefactor and I are soon to embark upon a buddy-read of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes as translated by Edith Grossman. This was the literary undertaking toward which I alluded at the end of my previous entry. One of us will have to be the knight errant and one the jesterly squire in tilting at the windmills of this legendary novel but we’ll have to read it to figure out which is whom and vice versa. For now I’ve read three preliminaries: Grossman’s “Translator’s Note to the Reader,” an “Introduction: Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra” by Harold Bloom and Cervantes’s own charmingly self-effacing Prologue.

Anyway, my thoughtful care-packager got this Macfarlane book under my purview and it was a quick and pleasant addition to the list. Macfarlane makes mention of Lewis Hyde, an author I saw a give a 2012 talk that was organized by my old art teacher the master cartoonist Jason Lutes at which I bought, had Hyde sign for me and subsequently read Hyde’s 1998 book Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art.

The New Rooster from 2022 by Rilla Alexander. Wonderful children’s book that riffs on the cultural differences in how people articulate animal noises by depicting a rooster who takes a reveille gig in “a new country” and finds that he can’t wake up the other animals because of a language barrier. Illustrated in a lightly distressed faux-screen printing style with a limited palette confined to about eight pleasant colors with spare backgrounds and simple-but-elegant cartoon animal forms. One of the best children’s books of this decade that I’ve read; disregard at your own expense.

The Crow and the Peacock from 2021 by Jo Fernihough. Similarly avian-themed and nearly as good as the above. This one has a rooster in it too! Fernihough opts for more of like a blended watercolor/collage aesthetic. Didn’t dance across my corneas like Alexander’s style but Fernihough is no slouch as an illustrator and I additionally like that both of these books were produced by one-woman writer/illustrator auteurs. The Crow and the Peacock is about a crow cycling through interviews with a roster of other birds — dove, nightingale, rooster, swan and peacock — all of whom he assumes for various reasons must have the secret of happiness figured out in contrast to his own unremarkable appearance and grating caw. One knows the moral before turning the first page but that doesn’t make it any less true: happiness can only be gently permitted into one’s life and simply cannot be chased, captured and/or caged.

Film Selection: A Really Weird and Fun Choice for Something to Watch at Eight O’Clock in the Morning

The Crow, directed by Alex Proyas, 1994. It’s always a delight when you go back to review a movie you used to watch a lot as a kid expecting to find with the hindsight of maturity that it’s not as good as you remembered and discover that in fact the opposite is true. This is some brisk, electrified, confident filmmaking that exemplifies some of the best of Nineties Hollywood’s fixation on the grim n gothic.

The fact that the film’s star Brandon Lee was accidentally killed during production by a poorly-supervised prop gun stunt is deeply saddening but is finally less interesting than the invigorating piece of entertainment for which Lee sacrificed his too-short life. That the story additionally involves a man who was brutally and sadistically murdered while his fiancée was gang-raped to death coming back from the dead with the guidance of a mystical crow to exact vengeance in the name of his lost Lenore makes it all the more unsettling that the actor playing this part died on set. But it in no way makes this fine film less fun or interesting to watch.

I suppose that Lee basically got his chance at action film stardom because his father was a highly influential action film star before him. But he does NOT squander the opportunity: he’s really quite good as this marauding, physically imposing, legitimately scary but also wisecracking and mild-voiced goth-avenger caricature. Sniper-precision casting proceeds down the call sheet: every single role of any size is meticulously well-cast and uniformly well-performed. I cite in particular Michael Wincott as the film’s baroque gangster big bad and that great and versatile working man’s character actor Ernie Hudson as a diligent and honest policeman who was on The Crow’s murder case and becomes his ally after his return to the world of the living.

This movie is really enjoyable on an entirely unintellectual level because it is characterized by a tight structure, an arresting look, charismatic performances and some gratifying and respectably restrained action sequences. But for me the key to really appreciating The Crow on my first adult viewing was to think of it less like a film than like a diaroma. The claustrophobic cast of characters are never arrayed more than two degrees away from one another, the goth aesthetic shows a disaffected adolescent’s obsessive attention to detail and the loping, voyeuristic movements of the camera across the intentionally-artificial-looking sets position the viewer as peering from a crow’s-eye-view into the grimy, sad and sordid lives of the lonely residents of a hypothetical city, overlaid heavily with components from grunge rock and low fantasy literature. Before soon-to-follow noir capers like Seven or The Matrix expanded upon and legitimized its vision, The Crow laid out a functioning model for a great goth/revenge/action picture.

Roulette

Regarding that complete reading list, the one that documents every book I’ve read from 2011 until now: here are three selections therefrom chosen with a random number generator.

You’ll Never Know: Book One: A Good and Decent Man by Carol Tyler, read in 2013. This is the first in a trilogy of beautifully-illustrated graphic novels about Tyler’s attempt to work through her own personal issues dealing with her career challenges, raising her daughter and having her trust abused by the whims of her on/off partner, all set against the backdrop of her efforts to understand her father’s combat experiences in World War II as the factor that kept him separated from her emotionally. The piece is a dance between these two characters who as father and daughter were so close but who spiritually are set painfully apart by incidental differences in their lives and characters, one a taciturn ex-warrior with a talent for manual work and the other an expressive artist and wanderer.

I went on to read all three books in the You’ll Never Know trilogy and they were great. Years later during a brief time when Tyler and I were represented by the same comics publisher we found ourselves signing books at the same table at an event. On the spot I bought a copy of her then-new book Fab 4 Mania: A Beatles Obsession and the Concert of a Lifetime. She signed it for me with a lipstick smooch (seriously; it’s still in there).

The Declaration of Independence and The United States Constitution, edited and with an introduction by Richard Beeman, read in 2017. It’s a good idea to take a look at these documents and read them in their entirety at least once or twice.

I once visited the National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C. and saw the original hand-drafted versions up close but didn’t have time to read ‘em through then and there.

As I noted in a very early entry for this newsletter, one can (and should) read the United States Constitution in comics form.

One Was Johnny: A Counting Book by Maurice Sendak, read in 2016. Speaking of people I like sending me books, one time my mother found for me this box set of four miniaturized Maurice Sendak children’s books. I read them all in quick succession and later read I think at least one with my learner whom I was tutoring in adult literacy. I know this because when I told her my mom had given me the book she was like “Oh, when you were a small boy?” and I was like “Uh, no, actually it was like earlier this year.”

Final note for this entry: having finished FoxTrot: Assembled with Care and not having had anything else queued up for my daily classic newspaper comics intake, I’m reading more FoxTrot in the form of a collection I had as a child entitled FoxTrot: en masse. I don’t want to talk about that more right now. I’m gonna cut FoxTrot with a jigger of Life in Hell; just gotta go collect my library holds.