WEEKLY DISPATCH #10
6-4-04:
From Dusty Books & Pictures "ART" section:
"9 CHICKWEED LANE
There is nothing more banal, ridiculous, and utterly worthless in the world than this comic strip, drawn by the ultimate pretentious blowhard of our times. His name is Brooke. BROOKE. Anyone who can find anything good about '9 Chickweed Lane' is not only stupid/dull/tasteless but, indeed, beyond help. (Too awful to grade.)"
From Dusty Books & Pictures "COMIX" section:
"9 Chickweed Lane: AAAARGRGRGRGGRRHHHH. Commits all the worst crimes of the above and more. Weird for the sake of weird, stupid for the sake of stupid, and relentlessly, steadfastedly unfunny. Particularly nauseating is its obvious 'artistic' slant. Simply unbearable."
This strip by Brooke McEldowney actually doesn't run in my town and I was introduced to it by a some savvy online individuals during a roundtable discussion about comics. Okay, so I'm no expert about this (BELIEVE IT OR NOT) but I know what sucks when I see it. Still, it seems weird that I would get this bent out of shape over Brooke's strip. I'm not. If it was in the Star-News I'd read it every day. That doesn't really prove anything because I read "B.C." and "Family Circus" every day too.
Okay, my theory is that there are two kinds of hatred provided by pop culture. One is thwarted by the power of irony. You know you would rather watch COOL AS ICE than POTEMKIN, no matter how good the latter is and how irritated you were by "Ice Ice Baby." If you don't remember COOL AS ICE, and I'm actually surprised if you do no matter how old you are, make it FROM JUSTIN TO KELLY. I don't want to say "so bad it's good" because that's a cliché and it takes away the beauty of work that actually does excel. Maybe "so bad it's entertaining" would be a better slogan.
We'll put it like this -- there are things that would disturb me a lot about "9 Chickweed Lane" if I was at all serious about the comic strip form. But I'm a casual alien, like the guy who owns THE MISEDUCATION OF LAURYN HILL and calls himself a follower of black culture. You can read about my ridiculously faint awareness of the medium here, I won't waste space with it.
But this is what I figure. In pop music, entertainment value is almost everything, so whether I think there's anything noble behind a Bangles track or not, if I enjoy hearing it I figure it's good. Even if we were to transfer this idea to some higher-minded craft, film or lit or whatever, I think the verdict would stand. Shamelessly commercial? Fuck you, what isn't? Hate the boy bands and the buxom popsters all you like, but one thing they're not is pretentious. Pretentious is what Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Journey and Rush were -- music that really sucks outside of the realm of "fuck manufactured pop" b.s. because it's so enamored of its own high-minded convictions.
And that's exactly what "9 Chickweed Lane" is. Pretension is not really the problem, it's pretension without any sense of fun or identification. I have to point that out because I wonder if it seems bizarre how obsessed I am with this given my admiration of dadaism and Yoko Ono -- stuff that seems on the surface in the same spirit as this strip. Ono's art is full of life and joy and, especially, humor, and this would stand even if she'd never had the chance to record (if you hate her music, you've either never listened to it or you also hate Bjork, Sonic Youth, the B-52s, Pizzicato Five, Blondie, etc. etc.). And I don't just admire the dadaists because I'm clueless about fine art (though in case you're a dumbass, those reviews of paintings were a joke) -- the idea of finding the secret passion in everything, in ignoring the linear whether out of frustration or sheer nihilism, is undeniably alluring to somebody without any straightforward talent. (HAWHAW.)
I made my point. Now, here's why this comic strip has no redeeming values.
So the comic follows the adventures of a girl with no fun or life who goes to school with a bunch of nuns, like in PROBLEM CHILD. Her family is weird and so is her house. Three generations of women. She has a cat. The illustrations seen variously above are examples I posted in my LiveJournal about a year ago. My first guess was that I'd simply caught the middle of a really odd story. This deduction was influenced by Bill Watterson's surreal attempt in the late '80s to have an extended storyline, free of dialogue, in which Calvin simply kept getting bigger and bigger.
But no, I was wrong. The illustrations here and below are from the last month or so, just to prove that yeah, it's always like this. There are no punchlines, no real jokes, nothing. Sometimes there are stories, kind of. I find this to be an insult to the amount of work others put into their strips; to be fair, "Garfield" is just as insulting, but "Garfield" at least has no arty aspirations. Think about this for a minute. You buy a Yoko Ono record, you know what you're getting; you buy David Byrne's THE FOREST and you can't complain about it being classical because there's a big fuckin' sticker on the cover. You watch UN CHIEN ANDALOU and you know it's not gonna be 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS. Comic strips are something that comes with the newspaper; it's a populist medium. No, that doesn't mean the panels ought to conform to rigid content standards (I like "Boondocks" a lot). It does mean that the cartoonist in question here is not working in the ideal place, which would in fact be a wonderful thing if his work had any imagination and might enlighten somebody. I think Aaron McGruder's strip is honestly witty enough to change my mind about political cartoons (I used to hate all of them and now I like two), so even though I already pretty much shared his politics, there's some brand of conversion anyway.
When does art become blah blah blah. Even if someone admires "Chickweed" out there, confess this much: there are few if any people who buy daily newspapers who are going to find it appealing -- not because it's unorthodox, but because it's unorthodox and inconceivably mundane. All this guy's doing is turning middle America off from acceptance of the unusual, because in this case the unusual is so uninspired.
The United Features Syndicate (publisher of "Garfield" until the mid-'90s and "Peanuts" for its entire existence) website offers this bio of McEldowney, emphasis and comments provided by me.
"'9 Chickweed Lane' by Brooke McEldowney is the popular comic strip about three generations of family - a single mom, her adolescent daughter and gritty grandma. '9 Chickweed Lane' features strong characters, incredible artwork, flights of fancy and McEldowney's intuitive grasp of all kinds of relationships. The strip appears in 60 newspapers worldwide, including the Los Angeles Times, Houston Chronicle, Toronto Sun and Cincinnati Post. A '9 Chickweed Lane' book, Hallmarks of Felinity (Andrews McMeel, 2002), chronicles the prototypically feline adventures of the strip's other star, Solange the cat. McEldowney developed his early artistic technique by obsessively plagiarizing his favorite cartoon, 'Peanuts,' [doesn't win any points from me because that's everybody's favorite cartoon] in the margins of textbooks and spelling tests. He briefly majored in biology, then art, at Allegheny College, and then went to New York City's Juilliard School, where he studied the viola and graduated with a bachelor's and a master's degree in music. He studied and performed at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria. McEldowney labored concurrently as a professional violist, music critic and cartoonist. His music articles and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines, [I couldn't find any, unfortunately] and he was assistant editor of Opus, a classical music magazine [uh-oh]. His cartoons have been published in magazines including Yankee, Opus, Pulse and Punch. In 1993, he created '9 Chickweed Lane,' which quickly developed a strong following. The strip has received [get this] two Genesis Award Commendations for animal rights issues [because we all know that's what's important about comic strips]. McEldowney also creates the color web comic 'Pibgorn' for comics.com. [Another website named this as an example of the "freedom" offered to artists through webcomics. What more freedom does this guy need!?] He lives in Florida with his wife and two daughters."
"Chickweed," as you see here, is linear sometimes. I investigated a reportedly moving story arc about a priest-nun relationship but came away ready to hurl (it ended with the priest saying "I don't know how to say this" then holding her hand, then the nun said -- holy shit -- that he did know how to say it after all!). But what a fucking twat! Brooke transfers the icky self-depriciation model of the Type A Pseudo-Sensitive Clingy Male to a whole new medium by engaging in morbidly idiotic drudgery like the "men/boys" diatribe (gawd, I can totally relate, Lynn, I mean Cathy, I mean Brooke). Oh, then he steals a joke from the film SPICE WORLD. And I had to throw in one of his periodic animal-rights indulgences -- a real knee-slapper, that one. And what percentage of McWhatever's audience wasn't already aware that dog-racing happens and that it is bad? But we will speak in a future Dispatch about nailing yourself to principles and preaching to the others who are bleeding, because the condition is hardly unique to Brooke. It's just that, wow, I can so easily hate everything about his dumb comic strip.
Going back to those two kinds of hatred from earlier, if this is so bad, why do I pay so much attention to it? Why not ignore it? Well, it's there. And it's got real train wreck appeal. Yet in its way it really is worse than "B.C." and "Cathy" and any number of other horrors precisely because it is meant to be Different. It really is the equivalent to art-rock; it's somebody trying to thrust his elitism on people who don't care and a genre that doesn't need it. "Itchy & Scratchy" is funny because it's so unfunny; "9 Chickweed Lane" is upsetting because it's so funny because it's so unfunny and dumb, because its creator is either oblivious to it or just a talentless asshole.
But okay, I will let Brooke McEldowney have his way. I really don't care that much, and I'm sure he's not as bad as I make him sound -- he is very kind to his fans (as well he should be, and yes, they exist) and nobody who likes "Peanuts" can be all bad... wait, doesn't Cathy Guisewhite like "Peanuts"? -- but it's something to complain about and I'm just loser with the webpage anyway etc. Now take a careful look at the strips on this page. I'm not a commie -- I like money too much -- but I'm a big for-the-people type and I think if Brooke is serious about his craft and about the readers for whom he is supposed to create, he should lend us an opportunity. We know goddamn well that every one of us could do a strip as good as "9 Chickweed Lane" or better without too much trouble, at least in terms of the writing (what writing?) -- I won't rag too much on his drawings because they don't look all that bad (I bet there are some guys out there who jerk off to the chick, who herself masturbated in the bathtub in one Sunday strip, but then, there are probably some who do the same for Cathy and Garfield's chick Arlene).
So let's show Brooke a thing or two with the new Dusty Books & Pictures contest. You create a comic strip. Do maybe three or four, as many as you like. Send it to me or put it somewhere and we'll get some people from United Features Syndicate to look (heh heh heh) at the results and see if any of us can get rich writing comic strips like Brooke, who probably still has the can of sardines from the thin-finances week before he scored big with "Chickweed."
My strip, in keeping with my evidently quite precious Beach Boys obsession, will be called "The Nearest Faraway Place." It is in the spirit of Giuliani's proverb -- "If I can do it, it's not art."
Questions or comments?
LINK OF THE WEEK. You're the Man Now Dog
I mean, let's give it up for Sean Connery. When I'm however the fuck old he is I hope women like me that much more than they did whenever I was whatever. (See how apathetic I am? That's why I'm the voice of my generation. Buy my new album, WHO FUCKIN' CARES?)
Brooke McDonald's could take lessons from this sort of insanity. Contemplate for a moment how somebody is paying for this domain name. No, not dusty-books.com, you fool. Max Goldberg of Napa, CA is the owner and operator of yourethemannowdog.com, and what an honorable public service, enough so that fellow webmaster Nathan Christopher Phillips of 2259-P Wrightsville Ave. Wilmington, NC 28403 phone # (910) 251-0049 (public information; goodness, the sacrifices made by our breed) has utilized his connections to bring us OMG a top secret new b-side from popsters Plaastik, the ambitious "On the Telly," a humble tribute to the sort of intarweb art so impossible a mere ten years ago. God bless America.
VOCABULARY WORD OF THE WEEK
parfait (n.) - a flavored custard containing whipped cream and a syrup frozen without stirring
We are going to use this parfait extensively when we fuck later.
I FOUND IT ON THE ROAD.
Yeah, this was posted by the entrance at my store. I guess the punk rawkers who put it there figured that the real anarchists are middle-class supermarket regulars. (I didn't block those phone numbers out; these folks were just really indecisive.) Note the bizarre change of heart involving gender restriction of the desired position. If they ended up hiring a guy I wonder how he felt knowing that they'd really wanted a girl. How traumatic.
FROM THE ARCHIVES.
This is a door behind the deli; there's a gigantic trash can right in front of it, so I hope that "no storage" rule isn't too important. Behind this door there's a lot of wiring and shit and a BLOODTHIRSTY TIGER.
ENEMIES LIST. James Taylor
Walk on down. Walk on down. Walk on down. Walk on down. Walk on down. Walk on down. Walk on down.
I try not to be too obvious in this category by picking out either people who would be amusing to rip or who I have a problem with for reasons that are not widely publicized. Why bother with Donald Rumsfeld or Scott Stapp or John Edwards (the Crossing Over one) or Josh Hartnett when it goes without saying? James Taylor might fit into this category -- Rod Stewart would for sure -- but he's begun to gather some critical momentum in the last ten years and I think we need to reiterate a few things.
Really, he sucks bad. There is a surplus of things to hate about the '70s, but of all the contemptible musical movements of the time, there's nothing worse than the damn singer-songwriters. Cat Stevens, Jim Croce, John Denver, Billy Joel, Elton John, yeah, Carly, you know 'em all. They're the main reason punk had to happen and the infuriating repetition of their stylistic tendencies is eclipsed only by the Mamas and the Papas/Fifth Dimension/Spanky & Our Gang phenomenon five years back. Why do I pick on James Taylor so much then? Besides costing McGovern the election, he's just full of awful shit. "Fire and Rain" is one of the least offensive cuts in his body of work; try "Mexico" -- which makes Kenny Rogers sound like Gram Parsons -- or, as much as I love my home state, "Carolina in My Mind," ludicrous and, as usual, insincere. I don't need to say anything about "Sweet Baby James."
But let me tell you what really sucks -- the guy's urgrgrggrgrhehe covers. I won't come down on him for that unspeakable Carly duet because she sucks too and she has to share the blame. but why would any sane person do what he did to "How Sweet It Is?" What kind of damn rock & roll ideology is this!? Are we gonna start respecting Pat Boone now? And look, the only people who honest to goodness love Carole King's "You've Got a Friend" have probably never heard the eerily similar "New Age," but it's not terrible... unless this asshole sings it.
Mostly he's just boring. That's not a crime, but last time I checked he's in the "rock" section. Find three people for me who are willing to call James Taylor "rock." Yeah, rock is boring sometimes but not in this nauseating fashion. At least grow up like Barbra and admit you're easy-listening, Sweet Baby James.
SPECIAL NOTE:
I offer my profuse apologies for the two-weeks-late status of this Dispatch. I expected a delay because of a trip to Indiana, but a medical emergency blew things apart for a few days. Everything is fine now, thanks for asking, and there shouldn't be any more delays for a while. In other news I am going to discontinue the text-only version of the Dispatches, both due to lack of interest and to the time-consuming nature of preparing two note-perfect versions of these documents. The Journal page will be changed extensively to reflect this and other things shortly.
Forever your girl,
n.
