Review: American Widow by Alissa Torres and Sungyoon Choi

America is no easy place to be a victim. The currency by which we measure tragedy and loss is exactly that — money settlements — and the way we are expected to deal emotionally with the same can be in a public forum provided by the media. The problem is that even though we set our society up to function this way, there is some segment of the population that turns against those who end up on the routes to dealing with the horrible turns their lives have taken. They are painted as greedy, as media hogs. It’s a situation of mob rule and playing to a room full of drunks and so many people become double victims in the process.

“American Widow” is sold as the memoir of a 9-11 widow and it is specifically. Generally, however, it is about much, much more — it is about public grief and societal measures of loss, the appropriate ways in which we communicate these circumstances through a money-driven media and the feelings of isolation that are compounded through turncoat spectators who are acting out their own emotions.

Author Alissa Torres is a 9-11 widow and her graphic novel memoir recounts the first year of shock, depression and mind-numbing officiousness following the death of her husband and the birth of her son. Illustrated by Sungyoon Choi, Torres’ story unfolds in a black-and-white world accentuated through a pall of light blue, shadowing the landscape, the walls of buildings, the faces, inescapable as Torres moves through a normal life that has suddenly become surreal thanks to players on the world stage.

Torres offers an intimate peek inside her life for a year following her husband’s death that shows the lows she hits and the frustrations she faces through a bureaucracy of compassion. The honesty that Torres gives to the narrative — such plainly portraying their relationship in a troubled patch — and her husband’s situation — he was an immigrant attempting to make his way in the country through sometimes menial jobs — gives more relevance to the story, offering something that anyone can latch onto. In an era where we talk about heroes and villains, paint things in black and white, Torres is not afraid to paint her family’s life as complicated, as neither one thing nor the other, but merely as something that deserves respect because it is alive and now is partially dead. Past the political platitudes, the World Trade Center collapsed on real lives and Torres offers her small portion of that dark tapestry.

Profile: Bill Morrison – "Decasia"

Decaying artwork is typically viewed as a bad thing, but one filmmaker has managed to turn it into a source of visual poetry Bill Morrison’s film “Decasia” is a celebration of decomposing film that he created by gathering together damaged footage from numerous film archives.

Films from the silent era were created on the very flammable cellulose nitrate-based film stock — the majority of films from that time have since turned to dust. Others are still in the process of that decline and require special storage to last. These films are still viewable — or transferable to a viewable medium — but the chemical reactions to atmosphere have caused the frames to be flawed in various ways, usually obstruction to the picture in the frame itself. Morrison had been interested in decaying film for some time and he began to look into it during a visit to a symposium on orphaned films — it was here that he found the first images that would eventually pop up in the film.

“It was on the campus of University of South Carolina and I happened to know that it had a large newsreel collection that was nitrate-based, which has long been a passion of mine because its tendency to decompose and create new images within images,” said Morrison. “During that conference, I stole away to the library and started doing searches in its database for things that showed emulsion deterioration and that pulled up thousands of entries. I narrowed that down to severe emulsion deterioration and that got it down to a couple hundred entries.”

At the same time, Morrison had the opportunity to collaborate with Michael Gordon from Bang on a Can on what was to be a multi-media stage piece following a grant that would fund new orchestra music, but which allowed a budget for a visual component. Morrison went to meet with Gordon and present his inspiration

“I described what I wanted to do, make this film from deteriorated footage — and I asked Michael ‘Can you make a decaying symphony?’ and he said ‘Definitely’ and that was something that was very exciting to him, so we put that parameter up,” said Morrison.

Morrison immediately set to work gathering up the shots he needed, but in some places met with resistance

“In some cases, it was surprisingly hard to get access to that stuff. Eastman had originally responded, ‘No, we don’t have any decaying footage, we preserve our footage here,’” said Morrison. “To archivists it’s a cancer that can spread throughout rolls and they’re whole reputation is staked and their funding is staked on eliminating this cancer and having well-preserved rolls of film in 40 degree rooms that are encased by 50 degree rooms. It’s like saying, ‘Show me your dirty laundry’ or ‘Show me your failings.’”

Review: Human Highway – "Moody Motorcycle"

Upping the adorable ante for 2008, Human Highway debuts with “Moody Motorcycle” a set of head bopping, acoustic guitar-driven songs with good natured delivery and a preoccupation with nautical metaphors. Avant popster Nick Thornburn (he’s in the band Islands) teamed with Jim Guthrie, a folk-influenced singer-songwriter to become a modern day Canadian version of the Everly Brothers, but decidedly less precious. Self deprecating in delivery and creatively self aware in production, Human Highway is reverent to the past without being slavish. The two recorded the album in Guthrie’s house in Toronto and the intimate, friendly setting of the sessions comes through.

There’s an Everly Brothers vibe on some songs — “Sleep Talking” and “Ode to Abner” in particular, though the latter also contains a dash of Simon and Garfunkel. Those seeking the sort of traditional pop sound that might have disappeared with the likes Nick Lowe’s ’80s work — or maybe Let’s Active or Marshall Crenshaw — will revel in this. Numbers like “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free” and “Duties of a Lighthouse” are dramatic and infectious slow folk progressions.

The opening song, however, is the ear worm to end all ear worms — “The Sound,” with its catchy acoustic grind that alternates with a sea-chanty break, synth claps and playful falsetto deliveries, celebrates its own ear worm — a mysterious sound that the singers promise to track down. It may just be the best song I’ve heard in years and one that will guarantee a smile on my face for years to come.

Review: The Shadow in the North

British author Phillip Pullman had a high profile screen adaptation last winter with “The Golden Compass,” a film of mixed reviews that drew controversy for its atheism, albeit toned down from the original book. More important, but less covered in the press, was the success — or lack of, depending who you ask — in adapting a terribly complicated young adult science fiction novel. For many fans of the book, the movie took too many liberties in the translation.

Off the beaten path and perhaps more alluring for it, Pullman’s earlier trilogy of Victorian suspense for the YA crowd, the Sally Lockhart Mysteries, have also been adapted. These films — the first being the tight and charming “Ruby in the Smoke” and the second being “The Shadow in the North,” which premieres on PBS’ “Masterpiece Mystery” next Sunday — are BBC productions, intimate and gripping, with no reliance on CGI effects or trendy youth-oriented fantasy posturing. Like the books, they have old fashioned trappings and pride in craft, but with clever, modern twists that prevent clichés — and they aren’t beholden to the high expectations that Pullman’s other work was. The pressure being off gives the productions more space to work out the inherent inadequacies of film adaptation and settle into a middle ground that results in a gripping mystery movie.

In “The Shadow in the North,” Sally Lockhart (Billie Piper) is a sensible girl in a dark, gritty Victorian world filled with secrets and danger who works as a financial adviser with a special interest in helping out women. When one of her clients takes a major loss on an investment and suspects foul play in regard to the chain of events that ruined the company, Lockhart investigates and finds a shadowy industrialist who may well be engineering the company’s demise towards a deadly scheme.

At the same time, Lockhart’s associates — the estranged love of her life, Fred, and amiable young protector Jim — are helping a stage magician escape stalkers who he believes aim to kill him. When the investigators realize that the two cases in interlinked, they pool their resources to solve the cases.

Pullman is not a by-the-numbers novelist and “The Shadow in the North” is much more than a standard Victorian thriller. The story brings in a number of elements, from the psychological shackles of being a female in England in the late 1800s to the grip of spiritualism to the idea that technology could affect war and peace in one stroke, thus capturing both views of a the mechanized world of the future.

The downside is, of course, that the investigation has to be pared down as it is brought from book to screen. In this manner, this bears a great resemblance to Harry Potter movies — extremely well-done and entertaining, but, in reality, only half of the story. That’s the only fault, however, and it leaves a whole new level of enjoyment for that moment you rush out to buy the books after being intrigued by the BBC productions.

Review: Beards of Our Forefathers by David Malki

The Web comic “Wondermark” is the sort of creature that begs mystery — how did it come about? And how can you effectively describe it?
It might sound less than the sum of its parts, but here goes — “Wondermark” is a collection of traditional three or four panel daily style comic strips that, instead of cartooning, uses stock art cut outs manipulated to act out the humor scenario in David Malki’s mind. The humor itself is sometimes coarse, but not in a stupid way, and employs modern attitudes, conversational tones and absolute absurdity in the dialog juxtaposed with the “ye olde” and sometimes stodgy visuals.

I know, that means nothing, but somehow, it all works, it all comes together into something magical.

“Wondermark” is the place to go if you want to quickly bust a gut, or if you wish to wince a little while chuckling. In Malki’s world, boxing bears woo fancy ladies, tradesmen sell fancily-named poo out of wheelbarrows to crotchedy old men, gentlemen complain about the employment of quantum theory in plot lines and men clean kelp from their squid children.

The human condition, in Malki’s world, is just a bunch of stock characters preoccupied by their own warped interactions with each other. Nothing is beyond your own personal panel.

Malki is a social critic extraordinaire, ready to take down the rest of the world as he folds in on his own work. “Ironists wear shirts that they would normally hate, just because they are being ironic,” one of his characters explains. “It is what passes for cleverness with young people.” Malki then explains he is actually selling the t-shirt in question.

Absurdity and irreverence are not enough to make a modern, adult-oriented comic strip, though so many lesser creators — far too many — tromp along with those twin weapons, never learning to use them with any panache. Not David Malki. I think with “Beards of Our Forefathers,” Malki’s first collection of “Wondermark” strips, a superstar might well have been born. Zippy the Pinhead beware.

Review: Stinky by Eleanor Davis

In the never ending struggle against misconceptions about those who are different from us, few people consider what preconceived notions oogly monsters have of humans. Eleanor Davis’ easy reader graphic novel “Stinky” investigates the possibilities through a mix of old-fashioned cartoon good feelings and modern gross humor that sit quite nicely next to each other.

Stinky is a big-headed, stubbily-horned, purple, polka-dotted monster with an obese pet frog named Wartbelly and a penchant for pickled onions. Stinky has a clear vision of what human kids are like, pristine little squeaky clean bores who don’t like yucky things. Enter one kid with a treehouse to undercut Stinky’s expectations.

These are simple lessons about bigotry that reach to harder, more complicated realities, and they are presented in amusing, likable scenarios. If it’s sad that we still have to teach such lessons to children in 2008, it’s at least nice when the necessary preaching comes in the form of stories like “Stinky.” Pickled onion jokes make everything easier to swallow.

Review: Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw

So rampant is the idea of dysfunctionality in our culture that almost any given person will describe their family as such. Each unit contains an air of mystery and each member flaunts an individuality that can make dysfunction seem real, as if being on your own track is the same as being on a separate one. More often the different tracks of family are parallel, more like lanes than entirely separate roads — but that, as with anything familial, is all a matter of perception.

What happens when a dysfunctional situation is deemed normal even expected? What if a family goes through the motions thereby creating a a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Dash Shaw investigates this matter and many more in the mature and surreal graphic novel “Bottomless Belly Button,” in which the Loony kids grapple with the unexpected divorce of their parents after four decades of marriage. The split seems strangely matter of fact as if this were the expected result of their years together, a passionless and lackluster nod to inevitability — it seems as though they are supposed to split up, so they do. The children exhibit their reactions through self-fulfilling personal prophesies that find their own plummeting expectations of life creating the very dysfunction that their parents are forcing along.

Called together for a final reunion at a beach house, gathered to witness the forced family decay together, the Loony offspring are largely too self-absorbed to really pour over the strangeness of the parents’ actions. Frog-faced son Peter continues to plunge into his own awkward, lonely misery until he meets a girl who provides a unique opportunity to blow off his parents altogether. His sister Claire has the exact opposite of her parents — an early divorce that offers her freedom in life that really only enslaves her and sends her wandering in confusion most of the time. Brother Dennis is torn apart by the announcement, obsessed with uncovering the reason behind the absurdity but really reacting to the crumbling of his own safety zone. Meanwhile, granddaughter Jill, an already awkward teen, has now been revealed the futility of the future thanks to her grandparents and the uncomfortability of her own skin seems to be an inevitable and permanent existence.

Shaw works with different kinds of symbolism, from the sand that sprinkles on their skin to the various types of water that can be applied to emotions and family history. It’s no accident that these are the two ingredients used by God to create the hapless, unintentionally wicked Adam, who was surely spiraling towards some kind of legendary self-fulfilling prophecies by eating the apple and being cast from paradise. Such behavior is in our heritage, but that doesn’t make us evil. It just makes us sad.

Shaw’s enormous graphic novel — it’s 720 pages and seems to weigh a few pounds — literally intrudes on the most private moments of the Loony family, a narrative that spirals through their misguided thoughts, as well as their showers, literally stripping them down for rough examination. It’s the level of space and pace that isn’t often directed at mundane family dynamics, but there’s something in there that each of us might recognize and certainly appreciate for the care with which it’s all been dissected.

Review: Frigg – "Economy Class"

Here’s something unexpectedly cute — Frigg. With a name like that, you expect something a little uppity, but this Finnish/ Norwegian string band’s new album “Economy Class” adds a little irony to the name by offering something energetic rather than uppity and altogether lovely while still retaining the quirkiness that the name promises. The core of the group is bass player Antti Jarvela and his two cousins, Alina and Esko Jarvela, who are both violin players, with other players from the Scandanavian folk scene filling in the sound, which is communal and evocative. The all-acoustic combo presents music that surround the listener with a kaleidoscope of possibilities — holidays in Egypt, Louisiana polkas, mating rituals, drinking songs and goblins named Lars Lenkelifot. Stand out tracks include “Jalla Jalla,” “Viinalaulu” and “Northern Lights,” but the whole album will charm you easily.

Profile: Alexis Rockman

Painter Alexis Rockman once imagined the future via science and environmental disaster in his work — but the world has caught up to him and now he only needs to render what he sees in front of him. Rockman captured much attention with his 8 x 24 foot painting “Manifest Destiny,” which depicts the Brooklyn, N.Y., waterfront 3,000 years in the future following the effects of global warming.

His giant work “South” is currently on display at Mass MoCA in the “Badlands” show — a 30-foot long, seven-panel painting of the Antarctic based around specific images from his trip there.

“I just went with a camera,” said Rockman. “I brought watercolors with me, but ended up not doing anything with them because I thought it would be more productive to look out the window than look inward.”

Rockman took a cruise boat across the Drake Passage — 102 passengers with naturalists and geologists serving as guides. The passengers got off the boat everyday to view animals — elephant seals and penguins — as well as take in their surroundings. Rockman busied himself with a challenge that was building during the trip — to reconfigure the luminosity of the landscape rather than merely recreating it in a painting. Ice, after all, conducts light and dispenses it into the landscape — no photo could really capture that.

“I took thousands of photographs,” said Rockman. “The painting is really a group portrait of ice configurations I saw, all based on photographs I took, very specific. That’s the thing about ice, it’s kind of improbable. You couldn’t make that up without having it look like some Yes album cover. Playing it straight was the way to go.”

Review: Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko by Blake Bell

When it comes to legendary comic book artist Steve Ditko, there are two paths of interest in his story. One is obvious — as the co-creator of Spider-Man who wrote and drew the first few years of the character’s existence, his skill as an great innovator in the comic book for is of great importance.

There is another side to Ditko, less known to those who might know of him from his work with Marvel Comics decades ago — his unwavering devotion to the philosophies of Ayn Rand and his compulsion to inject those philosophies into his work. It starts out as a guiding principle, but soon Objectivism overtakes Ditko’s talents, commandeering both the stories he told and the career that never seemed to rise to the level it should have.

In “Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko,” author Blake Bell mixes up a career history and art critique of the legend with a more intricate study of the apparent psychological and social decline of the man. More importantly, Bell provides the link between Ditko’s often outrageous imagery and the mind that conceived of them.

Ditko’s career was as a rather mild-mannered, working cartoonist of obvious brilliance when he hit what, back in the day, was the big time. Ditko became a major player at Marvel Comics, partnering with Stan Lee (antagonistically) and bringing glory to the company through Spider-Man and his other tour de force, Doctor Strange.

A bad experience with the business end of Marvel Comics sent Ditko on his decades-long spiral that had him exhibit extreme paranoia towards associates and fans alike. Equally, his work began to focus more and more on his Randian beliefs so that characters were created and utilized for the sheer purpose of acting out Randian-fused fables. It was a bizarre descent, one that saw uncompromising principles see public form as erratic and self-destructive behavior and turned his work away from the fresh brilliance of Spider-Man and into screeds often resembling a Randian version of the Jack Chick Christian comics — so much wooden lecture that the words almost crowd the pictures out of the frame.

The real focus of the book, though, is the art and that his handsomely covered through reproduction and discussion. Ditko was a great innovator regardless of his eccentricities and his work deserves to be celebrated beyond the comics medium. No one could depict the psychological landscape in physical form better than Ditko — his visuals were quirky and unique.

Ditko’s demise — he is still with us, but hidden away — is sad and perhaps one of the best arguments against the validity of Objectivism as full-proof philosophy of life. His story, though, is fascinating and his art, as with so many others touched with creative greatness, will outlive his peccadilloes, even as they function as the physical form of his own psychological landscape.