Culture and Talent
I read comics, nonfiction and a children's book. I make two new cartoonist friends and attend two book-signing events. I watch six pictures.
To begin with, I chalked up on the big board a book of 1930s installments of George Herriman’s legendary comic strip Krazy Kat, the seventh such collection I’ve read.
I always prefer to have a book of old newspaper comics around out of which to read two full pages per day and wanted a change of pace after the Zen weirdness of Herriman. Since I haven’t read a Civil War book in a while I decided to interweave these threads and pulled from the Library stacks The Lines Are Drawn: Political Cartoons of the Civil War, edited by Kristen M. Smith. The cartoons are interesting in their own right but the funniest part is actually from Smith’s introduction. “It is interesting to note that as late as 1863,” she writes, “Southern cartoonists occasionally forgot to draw Lincoln’s beard.” Forgot to draw Lincoln’s beard? It took us four years to beat these guys?
Stewart goes on to state, quite reasonably from what I’ve read of the cartoons themselves, that “cartoonists in the North were masters of their craft, while their Southern counterparts lagged behind.” Well, the Union is still here and the poorly-planned and unsustainably-administered Confederacy isn’t, so by definition they now have none of the top American cartooning talent and we of the Union, east west north and south, have one hundred percent of it. As a Union partisan and Cartoonist American I’m cool with that.
Two other great books of cartoons recently ended up on my shelf through serendipitous alignment of circumstances and the pleasantries of modern internet friendship. A cartoonist and illustrator named Aaron Zonka was in the Fantagraphics Bookstore in Seattle and stumbled upon a sketchbook of experimental art and comics I created which was made into a published facsimile by the Fantagraphics publishing firm. He was intrigued and took the trouble to track me down, which he ended up doing through an old email address associated with a comics and art anthology I co-founded back in 2012 and spent the ensuing three years editing and publishing with two of my closest friends and colleagues in the cartooning community.
Turns out that Zonka is based on the eastern side of the San Francisco Bay. I told him I’ve been living back in San Francisco since last fall and that I really liked what I saw of his work on Instagram. We ended up meeting for drink ‘n draw sessions, shooting the shit about comics and art and life and starting to become buddies, and since he had been nice enough to buy my book I wanted to own one of his as well.
The one I bought is called Mythcreants and it comprises a month’s worth of designs of trippy, fantastical imaginary creatures as prompted by an Instagram challenge called “Creatuanary” that some other artists launched earlier this year. For example on the twentieth of the month Zonka was prompted to draw a “Pigeon Man,” which came out from under his pen as a scruffy anthropomorphic human-sized pigeon guy seated on a park bench and eyeing the viewer warily from beneath the hood of a second-hand coat. It would take me more than a thousand words to do justice to the high level of skill and artistry exhibited in each individual illustration, so I won’t prattle on citing further examples. All thirty-one of these draughtsmanly insights are leveled without any text aside from the list of the prompts and an introduction explaining why Zonka engaged with this challenge and what he learned from it, which incidentally are lessons about constraint, ritualized repetition, self-confidence and open-mindedness that I think anyone practicing any form of creativity should take onboard.
I also made another new cartoonist friend, albeit one I haven’t yet met face to face, in the person of one Scott Finch, author of a completely insane-looking and wondrously creative graphic novel I’ve been eyeing snippets of online called The Domesticated Afterlife. Finch and I are becoming electronically acquainted after my deeply respecting his work from afar for several years; he was generous enough to agree to trade me a copy of his book for some original art and some pages of doodles that might become an experimental collaboration. The Domesticated Afterlife is currently housed on my shelf near Zonka’s book and will be subjected to a close reading and appropriate analysis in due course.
From comics to prose: I read a 1994 book by the author and retired professor Thomas Sowell called Race and Culture: A World View. This was a good Little Free Library find since I have been interested in Sowell’s work for some time though have only read one other book of his. Race and Culture is a thorough and meticulous globe-spanning and history-traversing survey through Sowell’s core theses, arguing that policy should be based around facts and realities rather than ideals or ideologies. More specifically Sowell asserts and deftly illustrates that culture indeed matters for human development, that some cultures quite simply and demonstrably have better ideas and resources (social and/or material) than others and that currents of history like imperialism and war often confoundingly do as much to spread beneficial ideas as they do to result in unpleasant or immoral outcomes. In a fascinating section near the end Sowell gives ample consideration to ways in which “geographical factors are among many other factors which virtually preclude equal economic and technological progress among peoples from the many and varied regions of the world, for the various continents and regions are by no means equally supplied with the factors that make for either economic progress or cultural integration.”
The guy is an intellectual titan and exacting researcher who is not without a certain bemused and even exasperated brand of humor, though overall the didactic dryness of his writing style makes Race and Culture a bit of a slog for someone like me who isn’t nearly as smart and occasionally had to grip pretty tightly to a penetrating paragraph to make sure I was even vaguely following his point. Sowell’s detailed sourcing and encyclopedic breadth of knowledge ought to make his conclusions hard to argue with, at least for people who aren’t equally as well-informed as him, but nearly thirty years later many of the reality-averse ideological positions that Sowell argues against have not only spread but have been institutionalized.
It’s more fun to have read Sowell than to actually sit and read him, though based on the two of his books I’ve read I suspect the trick for someone like me who has a hard time understanding economics and statistics might be to stick to his shorter works. Which doesn’t mean it isn’t still fun to go back and watch old clips of Sowell on Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr., which I occasionally do, or to have an old woman see me reading his work on the library steps and tell me an anecdote about once picking him up from the airport to drive him to a radio station for an interview, which she did.
I had Sowell’s book in my bag when I went to an event to promote the new book by Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross called Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives and Winners Around the World. I sometimes enjoy listening to Cowen’s podcast Conversations with Tyler so I leapt when I saw a free opportunity to see Cowen and his coauthor, the wunderkind VC player Gross, share a public dialogue at a ritzy San Francisco venue.
Cowen like Sowell is an economics professor who is usually viewed as being “conservative” and/or “center-right,” though of course the meanings and interpretations of such terms are very much in flux these days. Anyway there’s no particular connection between Sowell and Cowen for me, other than a desire to listen to and read experts smarter than me with whom I may or may not agree. I went to Cowen and Gross’s event because it was free to register, because I’m intrigued by how Cowen’s mind works and because I was able to switch work shifts at the last minute to free my evening up. The talk was good and afterwards while Cowen and Gross were signing books I was delighted to hang back and indulge in the fine catering and open bar on offer. (A free event is one thing but really good free food and drink are something to truly savor and appreciate.)
Me and my glass of Pinot Noir were minding our own business when a nice, enthusiastic and well-dressed representative from the Mercatus Center, the research think tank out of George Mason University that publishes Cowen’s podcast, came over to strike up a conversation with me which turned out to be the most interesting and engaging talk with a stranger that I’ve had in quite some time. Among other things this young fellow was very patient in answering my questions about just what the Mercatus Center is and does (since I always hear their name and slogan on Conversations with Tyler but have been too lazy to look ‘em up).
We had a fun conversation and next thing I knew I had accidentally talked my way into a free copy of Talent. I am currently sixty-two percent of the way through reading it and finding it well-written, occasionally penetratingly insightful and almost entirely irrelevant to my day-to-day life. (I am not now nor have I ever been a high-powered and influential professor or VC investor looking to recruit top talent and find diamonds in the professional rough. But hey, you never know where you might end up in life.)
To top it off on the walk home from the Cowen/Gross event I found in a box and subsequently read in a room a copy of Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss. If I ever read this book before it was during the days far back in the mists of memory when me and my pop were both at ages when I could safely hop on him, which I would have been more interested in actually doing than in reading a book about. As an adult I can appreciate just how visually and aesthetically sophisticated Hop on Pop is within the beneficial constraints of its enforced simplicity. Don’t be hoodwinked by that marketing bullshit on the cover about it being nothing more than “The SIMPLEST SEUSS for YOUNGEST USE.” Hop on Pop is a great read that rewards scrutiny with enjoyment for anyone who likes fun writing and imaginative illustration.
A few weeks later I went to a similar book-signing event with a different kind of author for a different kind of book, albeit also a non-fiction book I also got into because of a podcast. I’ve been a fan of Conan O’Brien since adolescence and have never missed an episode of his podcast Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend in which his on-mic sidekicks include the show’s producer Matt Gourley and Conan’s own real-life personal assistant Sona Movsesian. To promote her new memoir The World’s Worst Assistant Sona was doing a reading/signing event hosted by a venerable chain of independent San Francisco bookstores called Green Apple Books. I was pleased to see that like the Mercatus Center the Green Apple folks were nice enough to provide free drink of which I similarly availed myself (two beers to answer the two glasses of wine I had at the Cowen/Gross event). I sat in the front row packed in shoulder to shoulder with San Francisco’s other Sona/Conan fans and later found myself hobnobbing with two of them on the bus ride home.
We all got pre-signed copies of Sona’s book as part of the price of admission, so in the line after the talk I forewent a personalized signature and photo opp; instead I simply told Sona how much her work has meant to me and her other fans over the last few difficult few years and handed her twenty copies of a fanzine I made for her in which I proclaimed “The World’s Worst Assistant” to be “Humanity’s Charmingest Human,” a designation she deserves, possibly quite literally. As if to prove my point she was incredibly gracious, generous and receptive in accommodating my sentiment and asked if she could give me a hug, which I said would be my honor. It was pretty obvious from the pace of the line that Sona was giving this kind of heartfelt and sincere attention to every individual attendee.
Sorry, got something in my eye. Anyhow: from Sowell I was tentatively planning to plunge into one of the three Charles Dickens books I’ve culled from Little Frees in recent months but the literary fates clearly had something else in mind. I may squeeze in a quick-and-fun reading of The World’s Worst Assistant after finishing Talent, and then perhaps on to the talented Mr. Dickens.
In rounding up my recent movie-watches, allow me to gore some sacred cows and tell you how much I dislike several beloved movies that are considered classics of Americana. In the next paragraphs I’m praising Top Gun: Maverick but gunning for the original Top Gun, and will get to dismantling Field of Dreams and The Sting presently.
Top Gun: Maverick, directed by Joseph Kosinski, 2022. Not a great movie; merely a perfect one. It doesn’t accomplish much as action picture, military propaganda or hero quest that hasn’t been done before but nevertheless does it all with consummate and unerring professionalism, as if everyone involved was absolutely determined not to make a single mistake with this project. And didn’t.
I’m generally opposed to my generation’s depressingly unimaginative and navel-gazing vogue for exercising our turn in the seat of cultural power by repackaging stuff we loved when we were little kids; I think the zeal for Eighties/Nineties nostalgia that has settled like a pall over the creative landscape amounts to a big shrugging admission that we can’t outdo the franchises and characters we loved as kids and that it would be too labor-intensive or risky to come up with novel perspectives and chart unexplored territory. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still very strong individual products in this Wasn’t-Childhood-Great remake milieu, for example this decades-late sequel that is much superior to the original. A broken clock is right twice a day and Top Gun: Maverick is one of the inevitable occasions on which a nostalgic remake happens also to be an extremely well-done film on its own independent merits. This one has everything the original Top Gun didn’t: good acting, digestible dialogue, a correct structure and beautiful mise en scène, particularly during a sublime opening sequence which manages at once to evince profound serenity and nail-biting suspense.
I never got around to seeing Top Gun until I was an adult and so I don’t have the religious affection for it that a lot of guys my age do. When I finally saw it a few years back I was surprised by how awful it is. Parts of the picture look good but mostly it’s garbage, an aimless and meandering Flashdance for the boys. Even the 1986 Tom Cruise, who through his famous work ethic and also being pope of his own private church has subsequently grown into a very skilled actor, is pretty cringily awful in Top Gun ‘86.
Top Gun: Maverick is better in every way. It even has a better title: “top gun maverick” has a great staccato meter and sounds head-scratchingly cool if you strip it of its context and imagine it as a well-written nonsense phrase. The story is about Maverick, a middle-aged captain in the United States Navy and almost certainly the finest fighter pilot alive, who has stubbornly avoided rising in the ranks and continues to work as a test pilot because he can’t and won’t be grounded behind a desk. After pissing off the brass in the aforementioned opening he is given a chance at redemption by being ordered to design a nearly-impossible fighter wing mission to neutralize an enemy asset and to hand-pick a team of younger “top guns” to staff the mission.
Drama and action ensue. Val Kilmer reprises his role as Maverick’s friend and rival Iceman. Like Kilmer in real life Iceman in the movie has throat cancer and can barely talk, and the filmmakers present the best scene I’ve ever watched in which one character talks aloud and the other types his dialogue out. It’s cleverly-constructed and affectingly well-performed by the adroit actors Cruise and Kilmer, perhaps partly because one gets the distinct feeling that through their characters these two screen icons are processing some real-life issues having to do with friendship, professional rivalry, age and mortality.
This was the first movie in a long time that I took the trouble to see in a theater and it was a lot of fun. I got invited by a good pal who I’ve mentioned in the newsletter before, the one who pointed out my factual errors when writing about It’s a Wonderful Life. We had a good time. I recommend Top Gun: Maverick, particularly if you have never seen the original, which I actually think would make watching this new one even more fun — I wish I could have just imagined the back story instead of knowing how stupid it is.
Field of Dreams, directed by Phil Alden Robinson, 1989. I missed this one as a kid too, so I have no compunction about telling the truth that this is a goofy, uninteresting and over-hyped classic. A well-cast and in-his-prime Kevin Costner plays a family man in his late thirties who is dissatisfied with the condition of his life; he used to be a hippie campus radical in the Sixties and this drove a wedge between him and his now-deceased baseball-loving father, so Costner’s character has chosen the worst of all worlds and become a mediocre farmer and family man, alienating himself both from his heyday memories of the Sixties and from his old man’s athletic legacy.
The plot of the movie involves this protagonist hearing a mysterious voice that tells him to build a baseball field on his farmland; this in turn magically makes Shoeless Joe Jackson and other old-timey ballplayers come back to life from some unexplained spirit realm so they can pointlessly hang out and play halfhearted and aimless practice games. In order to make this happen Costner’s character for some stupid reason has to seek out an old, reclusive and influential writer played by James Earl Jones who becomes his sidekick in the quest to harness the magic of his cornfield.
Jones and Costner do good jobs with their assigned parts, as does Ray Liotta in his limited role as Shoeless Joe. The weak link in the cast is an actor named Amy Madigan who plays Costner’s character’s wife. None of the dialogue in this movie is especially good but Madigan’s role is not so thinly-written that a better actor couldn’t have made something more convincing out of it, and I simply never bought for a moment that the character as played by Madigan believes or takes seriously any of the words coming out of her mouth.
More broadly this movie fails because it’s about an ungainly handful of different things and can’t settle on one or two of them. Most of these concepts and topics would have made good standalone movies if given due focus. Is Field of Dreams about a guy who chose to become a farmer making peace with the memory of his baseball-player father? Is it about resuscitating the historical memory of the complicated figure of Shoeless Joe? Is it about tracking down an influential writer who has become an aging recluse and convincing him that he’s still got something useful to say? Is it about a father’s love for his daughter being expressed by teaching her about baseball? Is it about a small-town community conflict over censorship and free speech in public schooling? Is it about a man possibly having a serious mental break with reality experiencing hallucinations that make him disrupt his life and do crazy things? Like the ghastly The Big Chill, is it about the Sixties generation approaching the age of forty and pining for their glory days with misplaced nostalgia and grating self-absorption?
The answer to all of these questions is yes. Field of Dreams is about every one of these things and possibly several others, and it all deteriorates into a soupy morass of drive-through gee-whiz wonderment. It’s the cultural equivalent of the stick of gum you get from the pack of baseball cards — you chew on it for a while because it’s there but what you really wanted was baseball-related ephemera, itself a sideshow to the much more worthwhile practice of watching and learning about actual real-life baseball games and history. I’m sorry to disagree with apparently everyone else alive but this movie sucks pretty bad.
FuckkkYouuu, 2015, directed by Eddie Alcazar. This is an eight-minute short film that I stumbled upon while perusing the Kanopy streaming platform. Kanopy touts FuckkkYouuu as “an experimental short featuring sound design by hip hop pioneer Flying Lotus.” I don’t know who Flying Lotus is but the sound, like everything about this crunchy black and white film, is indeed very far out and cool. The whole piece is trippy, sexy, unsettling, disturbing. Besides interesting sound it’s also got nifty makeup and special effects. I wish there was more stuff like this out there; maybe I should spend more of the rest of this attention-addled century watching short films, particularly if I can find new or old ones as good as this.
What Killed Michael Brown?, directed by Eli Steele, 2020. Eli Steele is the son of Shelby Steele, who wrote and narrates this film. Like Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele is an African American man who is viewed by some and perhaps himself as being conservative, or at least contrarian, because of his focus on personal responsibility, individual accountability and rejection of ideological narratives.
In this slickly-made, compelling and engaging documentary Eli Steele and Steele père examine the infamous 2014 shooting death of Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer and delve into some, though by no means all, of the cultural, historical and ethnographic considerations and contradictions swirling around that fateful encounter. The Steeles are skeptical of the narratives that have settled around the Brown shooting and other associated events and trends in American life and aim to suggest a less polarized, less resentful and hopefully more productive way to move forward in modern society. Like Sowell’s work Shelby Steele’s ideas and conclusions are sure to rile some, though I found his writing and presentation to be thought-provoking and eloquent and his son’s direction to be competent and professional. If you agree or disagree with this film’s openly and sophisticatedly partisan point of view, or if you’re not particularly interested in these topics, or if you are, this film is worth your time as long as you are prepared to be challenged and stimulated.
Marty, directed by Delbert Mann, 1955. Almost everything except the stupid song that rolls over the end credits is worth liking and respecting in this fine movie which features a perfectly-cast Ernest Borgnine as an unmarried Italian American New Yorker and World War II veteran in his thirties who has faced disappointment in love and work and finally connects with a woman he genuinely likes who happens also to like him back. At heart this movie is really just about how lonely and difficult it can be for a young adult verging on middle age to struggle with being single, getting frustrated and bored doing the same things with the same goofball friends and fumbling through challenging professional and social decisions. (Ahem.)
I have a tremendous amount of respect for the brilliant film writer Paddy Chayefsky who wrote one of my favorite pictures Network as well as an imperfect and interesting Network-prototype The Hospital that I watched last summer, so in the case of Marty it was nice to see that Chayefsky’s first credited screenwriting effort was enlivened by great acting, staid direction and concise running time. It’s full of touching moments of subtle relatability and heartfelt nod-along chuckles that still resonate all these decades later. This is a rare case where the ending of a movie could have been one scene longer instead of one scene shorter, but still a really good movie all around. The efficient writing and Borgnine’s marvelous performance are the most salient points.
The Sting, directed by George Roy Hill, 1973. Like Top Gun (the original) and Field of Dreams, this is a beloved Hollywood classic which is also not a good movie, though this one is far less super-shitty than Top Gun and less schizophrenic than Field of Dreams. The Sting has a focused and coherent storyline but the story on offer of two Depression-era Midwesterner conmen played by Paul Newman and Robert Redford is mildly dull, fairly implausible and ultimately deflated. Also the whole movie looks and feels like it was shot on the relative cheap, like the producers over-confidently thought they could skate by on star wattage, acting talent and period style. They come close, especially when the charismatic and menacing Robert Shaw chomps scenery doing his gangster antagonist schtick, but overall this overrated movie amounts to a broad pantomime. The only time I saw it before this was as a child when my grandfather put on a VHS copy that he’d taped off of the television to keep my attention occupied some weekend morning in the Nineties; I understood it much less and liked it much better back in those days. I guess that’s another way of saying that The Sting isn’t so bad if regarded more as a kids’ movie, so put it on for the ten-year-old in your life and find something more challenging or worthwhile to spend your time on, like Thomas Sowell or Sona Movsesian or Top Gun: Maverick or FuckkkYouuu.