Jews and Cartoonists

A round of Roulette. I watch a short film from 1935. I re-read a novel and a comics collection. I reflect on having met two of my favorite cartoonists.

Roulette

Jew Gangster by Joe Kubert, read in 2012. When I read this I was living in Vermont and taking cartooning instruction from Stephen Bissette, a great artist who famously penciled Swamp Thing while Alan Moore was writing it. I helped him clean out and organize his basement one time. (I got course credit for that, actually.) It was full of thousands of books, comics, zines, posters, toys, original art pieces and a bunch of things that I don’t even know what they were. For my trouble Bissette gave me a copy of the graphic novel version of the Steven Spielberg film 1941. It’s said to be one of Spielberg’s most disastrous failures. Bissette had worked on a comics adaptation of the film with some other artists and had a bunch of copies lying around.

Anyway I mention all that only because legendary old school tough-guy comic book cartoonist Joe Kubert was one of Bissette’s teachers and Kubert put out a graphic novel in 2011 called Jew Gangster about a Jewish kid coming of age in Depression-era New York City who ends up going into organized crime and fucking his boss’s moll. The comics library at the school where Bissette taught and I studied had a copy of Jew Gangster and I was burn burn burning through comic books at the time, racking up dozens of titles for the complete reading list. Including Jew Gangster out of a polite curiosity and sense that it would be a quick read.

It’s banal stuff with a formless story structure, trite dialogue and shallow characterization. Reasonably well-drawn in scratchy, stylish, noirish crow quill black and white, but actually I think my old teacher Bissette is a much better draughtsman, not to mention markedly more sensitive and sophisticaed writer, than his old teacher Kubert.

Three Jewish Plays by David Mamet, read in 2017. I’m not purposefully leaning on the Jewish angle for this entry; this is just the way of Roulette. When I use a random number generator to throw up three titles from my complete reading list it often suggests thematic connections about which I had no intention of musing until I sat down to write. The very first time I played Roulette for this newsletter it famously gave me two children’s books about dinosaurs in a row.

One must concede that being an admirer of David Mamet’s work, which I am, means being floored by certain things he’s done and loving particular writerly techniques, maxims and conceits that he instantiates while acknowledging that when the guy crashes out as a writer he crashes pretty hard. Mamet seems to have only two modes for me. What he writes is EITHER thrilling, inspiring and crackling with razor-edged wit and elegant concision OR it’s some combination of embarrassingly corny, confusing, grating and largely forgettable. Three Jewish Plays, a small book of plays I got from the library, is of the latter kind.

If you want the good shit read Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama, or watch The Verdict, House of Games, Homicide, Ronin, Spartan and Redbelt. You can also do what I did and wait for Liev Schreiber, Alan Alda, Jeffrey Tambor and Gordon Clapp to perform on stage in Glengarry Glen Ross or for Elisabeth Moss, William H. Macy and Raúl Esparza to do Speed-the-Plow, the latter being literally the single best time I’ve ever had taking in live theater. And I don’t fuck around with use of the word “literally.”

Ben’s Trumpet by Rachel Isadora, read in 2017. Some children’s book about jazz trumpet gussied up in period-appropriate Deco. When you see that fucking Caldecott Medal on the cover of a children’s book you can just clasp your fingers, roll your eyes and sigh before you even crack the book open. None of the good new children’s books I read these days ever have one of those medals overselling the book and cluttering up the cover design.

Picture Penetration

Papageno, directed by Lotte Reiniger, 1935. This is an eleven-minute side-scroller silent film rendered in black-and-white animated silhouette cutouts and scored to an aria from the Mozart opera Die Zauberflöte. I was just flipping through Kanopy for something interesting to watch and had never heard of Reiniger and now I’m really thankful that I did because this piece is amazing.

We all know how it feels to be frolicking in a tropical paradise taming birds with your magic flute and bells and then you meet a girl you really want to bang but first you have to fight a huge snake and then the girl escapes on ostrich-back and the birds save you at the last minute but you think you’ve lost the girl forever so you try to hang yourself but the birds save you again and then the girl comes back and then you have like a dozen babies that hatch out of eggs. This film really captures that feeling. Reiniger’s black animated cutouts against painted gray and white backgrounds are whimsical and enchanting fun and it’s difficult to go wrong with setting a short animated film to Mozart’s music.

It’s remarkable what a visionary artist and skilled technician like a Reiniger can get across in a highly constrained medium like silhouette animation; this environment feels richer and more lived-in than a lot of the feature-length technicolor talkies you see nowadays. And the attention to detail is pretty incredible, for example with the evocative moving eye of the snake that really enlivens it from two dimensions into three or the outline of a comely nipple on the female character which heightens the sense of erotic ardor that Papageno feels upon encountering and falling in love with her. This film is eleven minutes of Reiniger’s delirious, giddy creativity with Mozart backin’ her play and I recommend it very highly.

Literature Laceration

Now that I’ve finished re-reading The Black Dahlia by Ellroy I’m going to really commit to finishing re-reading Orlando: A Biography by Woolf. I have about a hundred and ten pages left of Orlando so I’m gonna put myself on a diet of ten pages a day at least. I had some mathematicians run those numbers through a computer and it seems that at that rate I’ll be done with Orlando in about a billion lifetimes.

The Black Dahlia is outstanding, better than I understood when I read it the first time at age fourteen or the second time in my twenties. After recently going through every one of Ellroy’s pre-Dahlia books it’s exciting to have hit his bracing and mature mid-period. The role of the frighteningly brutal, still-unsolved real-life Los Angeles murder case of the Black Dahlia is essential in Ellroy’s formation as an individual and writer: when he was ten years old his mother was murdered in a sex-related crime that remains unsolved and he transposed the mix of lust and loss he felt for his mother onto an obsession with the older, eerily similar but more unsettling and spectacular Dahlia case. Basically his life became one long effort to use his phenomenal natural gifts as a writer to attempt to find justice for his mother and lust for her memory, fashioning himself into a guilt-wracked, woman-obsessed, transgressively-minded, violently imaginative, utterly ingenious and finally very rich and successful author as a means of reshaping and exhuming his complicated feelings about her and impress living women he could have sex with in her stead. The infamous Dahlia case got churned into that process, reformed and fashioned into his breakout novel.

Ellroy spent his author apprenticeship practicing his craft on mostly pretty bad novels before confronting some of his feelings about his mother head-on in a speculative recounting of the Dahlia case as seen through the narration of his fictional protagonist Bucky Bleichert, a boxer who came close to greatness in the ring, gave up athletics for a career as a policeman and partnered up with another boxer-turned-policeman named Lee Blanchard who becomes Bleichert’s surrogate big brother and cautionary exemplar. Bleichert does eventually solve the Dahlia case, and learns some really unpleasant things about Blanchard and himself along the way, but does a lot of illegal and immoral things to get there and finally can never tell anyone the truth of precisely how the pitiable Dahlia stumbled into the moral abattoir of postwar Los Angeles and ended up getting tortured to death and having her corpse horrifyingly desecrated. Bleichert chooses to mete out private justice to some of those responsible and then to let his vengeful hand be stayed when he’s had his worldview and nerves shattered enough to realize that he has to accept his one chance to get out of police work and try to live a contented life. It’s a bold, cruel, deeply moral novel that shows a balance between detail, verisimilitude, narrative momentum and gotta-find-out-what-happens readability in proportions that Ellroy was unsuccessfully remixing and tinkering with before he poured out everything he had into this book and broke through to become a truly great novelist.

Ellroy has been in the news lately because he’s taken to now publicly trashing the excellent 1997 film L.A. Confidential, which is based on the third novel of the loosely-connected four-novel sequence the L.A. Quartet (of which The Black Dahlia is the first book). Ellroy tends to state certain views very loudly, publicly, wryly and bluntly and then chart a course away from them until he later seems to completely disagree with what he said before, in this case reversing his statements about L.A. Confidential from a late-Nineties appearance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien that “I am in the enviable position of being able to go out and endorse the hell out of this thing” because “I did sell my soul but they retrieved it for me when they executed this movie so well.”

I bring this up because unlike the first two times I read The Black Dahlia, the edition I borrowed from the library for this reading includes an afterward that Ellroy wrote in 2006 about how his feelings about his own The Black Dahlia novel have become mixed (unfairly from this reader’s perspective, since the novel is pretty fucking great) but how he CLAIMS to resolutely love and admire the 2006 Brian De Palma-directed film adaptation of The Black Dahlia (even more unfairly, since the The Black Dahlia film is a pretty ghastly misfire which, while it has a few good elements like Mia Kirshner’s interpretation of the Dahlia herself as a character, is finally a laughably goofy, confused, overcooked and sometimes downright silly affair).

L.A. Confidential is a great picture and The Black Dahlia, which cycled through several stages of misdevelopment while the studios stumbled towards producing another slick A-list awards-bait production meant to capitalize on the enduring success of L.A. Confidential, came out as quite a bad picture. Yet here’s Ellroy writing somewhat masturbatorily in 2006, nineteen years after the novel’s publication, that the DePalma adaptation “commands you to savor every scene and revel in your visual entrapment,” that “the essence of my book was forcefully and luminously captured.”

If this accurately describes any of the films based on his work, there is no question that it’s L.A. Confidential and not The Black Dahlia. So with respect to his right to his own opinions and to revise and/or reverse them, Ellroy really can’t issue the brutal L.A. Confidential take-down he’s now slinging from the book festival podium without inviting our derision at what he claimed in 2006 to have thought of the misbegotten later movie. The paper trail of the novel and this 2006 afterward mandates that Ellroy can’t indict the L.A. Confidential adaptation without dinging his own coherence and consistency, or I suppose arguably even his integrity. Like Bucky Bleichert at the end of The Black Dahlia, he can’t blow the case open and set the record straight without implicating himself.

Before I proceed to re-reading The Big Nowhere, the second book in the L.A. Quartet and the one that Ellroy published right after The Black Dahlia and right before L.A. Confidential, I have a couple other observations to air. One is that the phrase “the Big Nowhere” shows up a couple of times in The Black Dahlia, as does (for one scene only) Buzz Meeks, the morally ambiguous security chief and bagman for Howard Hughes who Ellroy repurposed as one of the triumvirate of protagonists in The Big Nowhere. Small clues like these in the pages of The Black Dahlia point to Ellroy getting a real facility for the depth and scope he’s working out, the kind of weight and complexity that takes what must be an unbelievable amount of forethought and concentration to pull off and which he would build out to astonishing scale with the increasingly dense, ambitious and punishing novels that he wrote after The Black Dahlia.

And speaking of Ellroy’s habit of bringing relatively small characters back as major players in later texts, my last thought concerns Harry Sears, a noteworthy supporting player in The Black Dahlia. Sears is the partner and right-hand man of Bleichert’s benefactor, the capable and morally erect Lieutenant out of Central Homicide Russ Millard. Sears is described as “a squat, disheveled man” who struggles with a sympathy-inducing stammer and seems at first to be a bit of a pathetic oddball foil for the Millard character. But when Sears has medicated himself with doses of whiskey he sheds the stammer and wields a “metal-studded sap” in the interrogation chamber, becoming a prowling, bullying, genuinely terrifying Mutt to Millard’s mild-mannered Jeff, responsible for frightening and exhausting suspects to their psychological limit in order to see if a confession can be elicited or suborned. By the end of the book Millard and Sears have established themselves as basically the only honest and reliable allies that Bleichert has in the LAPD (or anywhere else), but Millard like Meeks shows up later in the L.A. Quartet mythos while I can’t recall ever encountering Sears again in any subsequent Ellroy books (we’ll see soon if I’m wrong about that). Sears is a really interesting character and I wonder what might have happened if Ellroy had decided to pluck him from the pages of The Black Dahlia instead of Meeks and place Sears front and center in a later narrative.

Comics Cut

I re-read School Is Hell by Matt Groening. I grew up obsessed with The Simpsons and I still am but there was an interregnum in my childhood when I loved The Simpsons but knew Life In Hell only from seeing the books on the shelves at bookstores, knowing only they were credited to the creator of The Simpsons and that they seemed forebodingly crude, illicit and somehow dangerous. My instincts weren’t too far off because the whole point of Groening’s career is that he created screamingly funny and deeply subversive underground comics in alternative newspapers and then managed to smuggle this sensibility into a prime time animated television show that parents at first didn’t realize was taking direct aim at the contradictions and hypocrisies of institutional and social life in America and so let their children park themselves in front of the program and have their sardonic worldviews and mischievous senses of humor molded by the show just as we were coming of age. Which resulted in a generation of people like me who grew into would-be humorist/cartoonists and can pretty much recite the first eight seasons of the show from memory.

When I got into my teenage years, probably around the time that The Simpsons started to curdle into mediocrity, I wanted to finally see what Life In Hell was all about so I started reading the books. I quickly appraised it as one of the greatest comic strips ever and kept reading and re-reading the collections.

After I had grown up and studied with Bissette and moved to the west coast a publisher flew me from California to New York for that year’s Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival and I met Groening for the first time and he let me hand him some of my work. He politely leafed through it while I told him truthfully that his work literally (see above re “literally”) changed my life. I meant this partly in reference to The Simpsons but I had the presence of mind not to bring the show up at all and only expressed my reverence for Life In Hell. Of the ceremonial offering I’d just shoved into his hands he said “You made this?” with what appeared for all I could tell to be genuine enthusiasm and appreciation, which was especially nice since we were at a packed show full of hundreds of small-press publishers pushing self-created projects and he had a growing bundle of ones he’d already purchased in his arms. I told him yeah and flipped through the book to show off some of my work and he was really cool and nice about the whole scene.

The only interpretation of this encounter that has ever seemed reasonable to me is basically that Matt Groening appears to never have lost touch with his roots as a starving underground cartoonist. He came off genuinely excited that nobodies like me are still doing this kind of thing for the love of it, or more accurately in my case just because of a kind of grim certainty that I don’t have a choice, even if no one, or just one single especially influential, successful and patient man, cares to glance at the work.

Next: longer movies, older comics and hopefully closing in on chalking the Woolf book up on the complete reading list.