This Is My Country - om Amerika och krig

När Amerika får kritik i sånger så handlar det ofta om krig, om USA:s roll i både historiska
och nutida krig, fast de numera ofta benämns 'konflikter' eller 'intressen'...



It's time to stop them in their tracks
It's time to take our country back
Put their ideas in a sack
Recycle for redemption
It's time to show them to the door
They won't be needed anymore
Tell them there will be no more war
Based upon preemption
- Joel Rafael

Redan i de första raderna, "This is my country, we are at war", markerar Joel Rafael modigt sina tankar om det egna landets krigspolitik. Inga omskrivningar, inga dimridåer... Budskapet rakt av i tydlig dager. En riktigt stor låt som säkert retar en del amerikaner till ursinne, men för mig står den för en human och vidsynt männsikosyn.

Här finns texten i sin helhet: This Is My Country

Här en live-version med Graham Nash och David Crosby som gäster:
This Is My Country med David Crosby, Graham Nash och Joel Rafael

Här hemma i Sverige visar SD sitt riktiga och smutsiga tryne... De första sex raderna ovan i Joel Rafaels låt passar så otroligt bra även här!

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 11/10

..will be delayed this week.

I got back from a week-long family vacation in sunny Cal-i-forn-i-a (possibly the subject of its own post, if I get around to it in time) late Sunday night, just in time to see that there are boxes, but not to open them.

So the current hope is that I will update this Monday evening to adequately describe the splendor and wonder that are in those boxes. Let's see if I get to it that quickly -- Monday is also the first day that I try to commute to work in Hoboken post-Sandy, which I expect will evoke a reaction such as the below.

 

Update, 11/18: Well, that took longer than expected, but here's what was waiting for me when I got back from vacation:

First up is a book I got through the auspices of Amazon's "Vine" program for reviewers, which is another attempt by that retail behemoth to take over and control every last aspect of book publishing and distributing that it can. (Not that I seem to mind that much, as far as it affects my actual behavior and not my online complaining.) Julian Barnes's new book is Through the Window, a collection of essays about writers and books, published as a trade paperback original from Vintage on October 30th (during that big storm you may have heard about). Barnes is an excellent, smart novelist -- I particularly liked his puckish A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters and recently reviewed here the short novel The Sense of an Ending -- and possibly an even better writer of nonfiction, with books like the lovely journalism collection Letters from London and the recent Nothing to Be Frightened Of. Sure, he's a "literary" writer, which we grubby genre types are supposed to despise, but he's a great, wonderful writer who has dabbled in non-realistic stuff several times, and I've been reading him with great pleasure for twenty years or so now.

I also have two paperbacks from the fine folks at DAW Books, both publishing in December:

• Elemental Magic is an anthology of new stories set in Mercedes Lackey's "Elemental Masters" series (the retold fairy tales in more-or-less-modern day series, starting with The Serpent's Shadow), edited and with a new story by Lackey. Other contributors include the usual DAW crew: Rosemary Edghill, Diana L. Paxson, Elisabeth Waters, Jody Lynn Nye, Tanya Huff, and almost a dozen more.
• Alien Vs. Alien is the sixth book in Gini Koch's series of contemporary SF novels (they look a lot like urban fantasy -- heroine with massive levels of spunk and a silly name, romantic tension turning into soap operatic series-length plots, long-running conflicts with powerful enemies -- in a SFnal setting), and, in this one, our heroine's husband goes missing and that's the least of her worries.

Everything else I have -- and it's quite a bit -- is from one big shipment from Yen Press, the manga/graphic novel sister of the SFnal imprint Orbit Books. All of 'em seem to be publishing in November. 

The novel Zoo -- by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge, one of those hot-weather thrillers about ridiculous implausibilities causing mass death and devastation (in this case, that pretty much all animals in the world start attacking humans at every opportunity) -- has been turned into a graphic novel by Andy MacDonald. If you like to see lions and gorillas taking bites of out people's heads, this is the book for you.

The rest of the Yen Press box is made up of series books -- most, but not all, of them originally from Japan -- and so I'll organize them my usual way, from lowest volume number to highest, so you can see me getting more and more confused by accumulating backstory.

Mari Yamazaki's Thermae Romae, Vol. 1 is an attractive, large-sized hardcover with a plastic jacket that is both appealing to the eye and severs to cover the naughty bits of the statue on the front cover. Romae has one of those goofy premises that are so wonderful when they work right: harried Roman architect (and bath-house designer) Lucius accidentally gets sucked through the bottom of a bath and somehow finds himself in modern Tokyo, among the only other society in history as bath-obsessed as his own. I think, from poking through this book, that he goes back and forth between the two worlds (presumably through that magic plughole), so that Romae isn't just a fish-out-of-water comedy. Whatever it is, it looks very different, and worth a look.

Also a first volume, but somewhat more conventional, is Misun Kim's Aron's Absurd Armada, a silly, mostly 4-koma (with some longer, conventionally-formatted stories interspersed) series about ne'er-do-well pirates in a very vaguely 18th century Atlantic Ocean kind of world.

Officially a first volume is Umineko: When They Cry: Episode 1: Legend of the Golden Witch (by Ryukishi07 and Kei Natsumi), though it's actually somehow related to the Higurashi: When They Cry series. (Though, after checking the Internet a bit, I suspect the only real connection is that both "Cry" series are based on computer games in the same solve-the-murder genre from the same Japanese developer.) The rich Ushiromya family is gathering for their annual festivities on an isolated island, and an estranged young man, Battler -- Battler?!? -- is rejoining for the first time in several years. And, as Agatha Christie fans would expect, once the island is cut off from the world, the bodies start falling.

Soulless, Vol. 2 continues the adaptation of Gail Carriger's "Parasol Protectorate" series (under the title of the first book in that series), with art by an entity credited as REM. Since the first book adapted the first novel (Soulless) in the series, my assumption -- though we all know what happens we one assumes -- is that this book, more-or-less-adapts book two, Changeless, into comics. See my review of the novel Soulless for more details, if such be necessary.

The third volume of Satoko Kiyuduki's Shoulder-a-Coffin Kuro has finally come around -- I reviewed the first two volumes, back when I was reviewing regularly for ComicMix -- after a delay I have no idea what caused. But this quirky, and quietly dark series is back, and I'm happy to pick it back up -- it's not like anything else I've read.

Now we're getting into the realms of real confusion, with the sixth volume of The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi-chan, a parody spinoff of the main Haruhi Suzumiya comic, which itself is a brand extension of the series of light novels by Nagaru Tanigawa. Supply lines are getting pretty long, and we're deep into otaku territory here. This book is written by Tanigawa, with art by Puyo.

Also this month is the seventh volume of Yumi Unita's Bunny Drop, which was originally about a confirmed bachelor raising a little girl, but turned into a romance story mid-way through, when the time jumped to make that little girl a teenager. As I understand it, there are parallel romances for both the girl and her grumpy, now-middle-aged guardian, but I'll admit that I haven't read the series at all.

Milan Matara's Omamori Himari is a family-of-demon-slayers story (incorporating the standard hot girl who is also a powerful spirit and defends the "regular guy" hero with all of the power and the very few clothes at her disposal) with added fanservice -- as seen by the M-rating on this ninth volume in front of me.

I read the first volume of Atsushi Ohkubo's Soul Eater and enjoyed it -- and enjoyed Soul Eater again when I wandered back in, several volumes later, though I was a bit more confused then -- but I haven't made a habit of reading it. However, my older son is now getting into this zippy, very shonen story of demon-hunters and their sentient, shape-shifting weapons, so I may have to read more of it to have another topic of conversation with him. (How horrible! Having to read comics to communicate with one's own offspring! I do have a nice life.) This month sees the eleventh volume, in which our heroes are attached by someone (or something) called Arachnophobia.

And last for this week is the twelfth volume of Yuhki Kamatani's Nabari No Ou, which I have to admit that I haven't read at all. I'm sure this has fighting in it, but I have no idea who is doing the fighting, or about what. So I'm afraid you'll need to find a more reliable guide if that cover looks intriguing.

Amerika - plus och minus

Amerika har återgått till vardag, valet är klart som en sporthändelse och man ber till högre makter om bättre tider. Jag tycker inte illa om amerikaner, låt mig göra det klart på en gång. Jag har flera vänner 'over there', generösa personer med kloka tankar. Flera av de vettigaste och humanaste människor jag vet är amerikaner: Jackson Browne, Eric Andersen (båda med norska rötter, sträck på er norrmän!), Pete Seeger, John Gorka, Springsteen, listan kunde göras lång...

Ändå är det ofta man hör någon annan amerikan säga något embarmligt korkat och enögt... Landet med 'både och'. Landet som symboliserar girighet och vars livsstil hindrar flera andra länders möjligheter att kunna utvecklas. Vissa tillåts inte ens själva välja sin egen regering. Om det inte passar ledarna i det stora fria landet... där frihet bara kan köpas för pengar. Och dit kan alla nå om de är ambitiösa och flitiga... Dra den om rödluvan!

Men Amerika är stort, det finns mycket vettigt som händer utanför det massmediala flödet. Fortfarande finns det stora grupper som inte gett upp motståndet mot kärnkraften, alla protesterna på Wall Street... Även här finns tron på att förändra även det som inte ens får ifrågasättas... Både och... Kärlek och hat...

Det skrivs fortfarande mycket rebellisk musik i staterna. Det finns artister som riskerar sin karriär för att säga vad de tycker. Morrissey är inte amerikan, men han bor där och att skriva en sån här låt kräver ett väldans stort mod:



Christy Moore och Declan Sinnott tolkar "Ameirica, You Are Not The World" så mästerligt,
så glödande bitskt, men ändå ödmjukt. Stort!

Det här är bara början, det kommer lite fler låtar om det stora landet i väst...

Fyra års katastrof avvisad

Barack Obama sitter kvar fyra år till. Fast egentligen är väl det viktigaste: Mitt Romney sitter inte där över huvud taget!

När Obama tillträdde fanns det förhoppningar och man talade om en ny era. Han har givetvis inte haft en chans att infria allt det som många av oss hoppades på, men han har inte heller misslyckats med allt. Ska man vända på en sån trög koloss som USA, ja, då får man nog gå varligt fram... Nu vet vi i alla fall att det inte blir ett bakåtsträvande och återgång till en ännu mer egoistisk politik.

USA har fem procent av världens befolkning, men utnyttjar en tredjedel av våra resurser och står för en tredjedel av avfallet. Hmmm... Nog finns det ännu en hel del att göra!!



Arlo Guthrie's tänkvärda "In Times Like These" passar otäckt på alla sätt, med både rasande storm och politisk frustration.

"The storm is here, the lightning flashes,
between commercials, they're taking names
singers run to where the cash is,
it's just another link in slavery's chain
...
When leaders profit from deep divisions;
when the tears of friends remain unsung
In times like these, it's good to remember,
these times will go, in times to come"
- Arlo Guthrie

An Avalanche of Books from the Top Shelf

Top Shelf Productions is one of my favorite comics companies -- not least because they have periodic awesome sales like the one I blogged about in early September. And the aftermath of a great comics sale is a big pile of comics, and the aftermath of that is a bunch of books to review.

So let me dive right in....

Gingerbread Girl was originally a free webcomic -- in fact, it's still up, so you can read part or all of it before buying if you like -- by husband-and-wife team Paul Tobin and Colleen Coover. (I knew Coover from her sweetly sexy comic Small Favors, and Tobin has been writing comics for some time as well.)

It's the story of perky young twentysomething Annah Billips -- and that name is so self-indulgent that she just might have chosen it for herself -- who is one of those oh-so-cute girls who can skate along on charm, winsomeness, and a twinkly smile for the first thirty or so years of their lives. (It can be even easier if you're both bisexual, like our Annah, and living in a forgiving, liberal city like Portland.) Her story is told -- directly to the reader, with surprising regularity -- by Annah, by the people she knows and meets, by random passers-by, by pigeons and dogs, and covers the course of one long evening and one (of two potential) dates she had. It also circles the question of Annah herself: she deeply believes she have a twin, created by her scientist father from the Penfield homunculus in her brain, and either this is true or Annah is seriously mentally ill.

Gingerbread Girl will not tell you which is true. But it will circle around an interesting, very quirky character for a hundred pages, with cute art from Coover and some very thoughtfully entertaining words from Tobin.

As long as I'm talking about what things aren't, I should say that Ed Piskor's graphic novel Wizzywig is definitely not the true story of famous hacker Kevin Mitnick. The central character of Wizzywig is Kevin Phenicle, who just happened to do nearly all of the things that Mitnick was famous for, in pretty much the same order and in the same places, for basically the same reasons, and went to jail the same way with a very similar controversy surrounding him.

I have no idea why Piskor decided to fictionalize Mitnick's story, or -- after that decision -- why he then stuck so very close to the real facts for most of the book. Perhaps he felt it necessary to give Mitnick's life a more conventionally novelistic arc -- Phenicle's life in prison is more eventful, and the telling of it more cathartic, than Mitnick's actual life would have been. But, still: Wizzywig is basically Mitnick's story up until Phenicle's arrest, and then diverges.

Piskor tells that story in a complicated round-robin style derived (possibly) from Dan Clowes. (His art, too, is somewhere in the broad region defined by Clowes, Bob Fingerman, and the later Drew Friedman.) There's a Greek chorus of random people who regularly chime in about Phenicle -- or, more often, his mysterious hacker alias "Boingthump" -- plus stories about Phenicle, his childhood best friend and later strongest defender Winston Smith (nudge nudge, wink wink!), and the crusading newsman Ron Shumway, who made Boingthump one of his major bugbears.

It's fun and energetic and thrilling, but it's glossier and more fictional than it needed to be -- Mitnick's real story is at least as interesting as this one, and remains behind the story Piskor does tell like a shadow on every page. Wizzywig is a fine graphic novel, but it could have been better if it had decided to either tell Mitnick's story for real or to tell an entirely fictional story.

The Lovely Horrible Stuff is the newest book from Eddie Campbell, telling another semi-autobiographical tale to follow up the long series of "Alec" stories he's produced for about thirty years. (The bulk of them are included in the recent, and absolutely essential, compendium Alec: "The Years Have Pants", and I point you at my review of that book to explain what's so good about it.) Campbell transmuted the often barely fictional Alec MacGarry into the slightly more factual Eddie Campbell at the end of The Years Have Pants, and Lovely continues in the same vein: the Eddie Campbell character here is Eddie Campbell himself, and the style and tone of the stories continues as before.

This time out, though, Campbell is working in color, as he has in his recent books (The Fate of the Artist, The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard, The Playwright), which gives these stories a subtly different texture than the black-and-white-and-tone work that most of the Alec work had.

Campbell's work is as puckish as ever -- after an abandoned project on the history of humor, Lovely is an examination of the world of money. Campbell, as always, isn't interested in a complete picture, so Lovely covers two things in its two chapters: his own history with money (mostly as a freelancer trying to get money out of the people who hired him), and the story of the Pacific island of Yap, where giant circular stones (quarried on a different island, quite some way away) are the most valuable and important kind of money.

It really doesn't matter what Campbell's ostensible subject is, though: the joy is in seeing him wander around and through it, thinking about this bit and then complaining about that bit and then digressing into a bar full of literary figures all complaining about their unpaid bills. Campbell is an artist in full control of his impressive talents; his pages are smart and funny and interesting and the stories they make up are equally so.

But comics don't need to be serious and thoughtful; comics can also be rip-snorting adventure. And a great example of that is Kevin Cannon's Far Arden, the tale of hard-living, hard-drinking Army Shanks, late of the Royal Canadian Arctic Navy, and his adventures in the far north of Canada.

Shanks gets caught up in the search for the fabled island of Far Arden -- by legend, a tropical paradise in the far north. Along the way, he encounters boys dressed as wolves, semi-friendly bears, creepy circuses, femmes fatales both out of his past and new, clean-cut college students, professors with mysterious plots, scheming local politicians, RCAN sailors both honest and not, secret messages, hidden maps, lecture tours, bar fights, long voyages in open boats -- not precisely "fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles," but a very similar list.

Shanks's world is cold and dangerous, though; Far Arden has many of the characteristics of a romp, but it's not entirely one. But it's a fat book (in a small, fits-neatly-in-the-hand size) with a quirky sensibility and a plot that charges forward in unexpected directions on every page, and the voyage is well worth the price of admission. It's not quite pure adventure, but it's only diluted very slightly with regret and mystery and tragedy, which makes a heady drink.