Robert Crumb, Chris Sanders & The Fine Art Of Genuine Desirability In A Disney Pin-Up

All links SFW, with one noted exception.

Some furor has been raised over Disney's manipulation of Pixar character Merida. The headstrong tomboy in Brave has been given a makeover, rendering her more Disney-feminine. The aesthetic formula at play seems to work something like this: Fancy Strapless Shoulder-Baring Gown (+) Shiny Buckle (–) One or Two Ribs (–) Signature Weaponry (=) Pretty Princess.

My first reaction was surprise at how deftly both Disney and Brenda Chapman, Brave's creator, capitalized on the moment. Brave was a fair-to-middling Pixar product that garnered fair-to-middling box office results (in league with How To Train Your Dragon and Dr. Seuss' The Lorax but nowhere close to Toy Story 3). As the parent of daughters I applauded the attempt at a female lead impelled by passions unrelated to Finding True Love, even if I (and my daughters) finally found the emotional content underwhelming.

But with regards to the controversy of Disney's Body Image Problem, I have to admit — it is a problem. That Disney attends to the aesthetics of sexual attraction* doesn't bother me: if their characters didn't have some sexual appeal, Disney's standard storyline would be entirely without interest. Still, as a hetero dad who's endured a parade of Disney cheesecake, I find it remarkable how aesthetically forgettable most Disney heroines are — forgettable because they're interchangeable. The Little Mermaid, Jasmine, Belle, Tiana — what's the difference, and who cares? If a straight fella (who enjoys a little lewd cartoonery ) ain't piqued by the Disney figurine, I have to conclude the artists are banking on the age-old absurdity of fashioning heroines who are aesthetically attractive to girls.

That Disney apes Vogue in this regard is hardly a surprise: Disney has commodities galore it intends to sell, to as many children and parents as possible. Whether Disney has a larger interest in expanding its aesthetic is finally for the market to determine. The Merida Makeover is their canary in the coalmine.

Anyway, as I mused over the past decade-plus, I realized there is exactly one (1) Disney heroine whose desirability factor stands head-and-shoulders — or hips-thighs-calves-and-feet — above this parade: Lilo & Stitch's Nani Pelekai.

Nani, on right.

Here she stands in contrast to a “Pamela Lee Anderson” figure — another body-type we don't see much of in Disney movies:

I won't say I find the latter body-type unattractive, what with its sweeping hips, the supple shoulders supporting an ample, but not grotesque, decolletage, and of course those arms and the cut of the . . . uh . . .  where was I? Right: let's not replace one culturally predominant unrealistic body “ideal” with another. Perhaps it is best to note Nani's posture and facial expression, which indicate Our Hero is in a supplicant relationship to the curvier (white) woman. (The scene ends badly.)

Still, Nani, as drawn by Chris Sanders, is a figure of considerable power, thanks chiefly to her muscular, almost chunky, base — more than a little reminiscent of Robert Crumb's favoured proportions, on display here . . .

. . . and more explicitly here (NSFW, I suppose — there's none of Crumb's unhinged sexual hi-jinx, but, y'know, she is nude).

I Googled for more Chris Sanders, curious to see where Nani fit in with his overall aesthetic. When it comes to his pin-up art, Sanders does indeed have a fetish for sturdier bases . . .

"Where's Spring Breakers playing, again?"

. . . but after that the distinctives become subtle to the point of disappearing. Bruce Timm, Dean Yeagle and even Darwyn Cooke lean heavily on many of the same tropes: essentially wasp-waisted, pert-nosed, late adolescent girls in varying states of compromised (or soon-to-be-compromised) innocence. I understand the thematic predominance, but if you draw up a giant screen of these guys' pin-ups, the final effect is a blurred uniformity — 21st Century America's india ink version of the Venus of Willendorf.

It may be that Nani's singular appeal relies on her sharp aesthetic contrast to the Disney template. But as bold a departure as her curvature is, the power of her story also contributes — greatly — to her appeal. She is perhaps Disney's most fully-realized female character.

A single young woman who becomes the sole guardian of her little sister after their parents are killed in a car-wreck, Nani finds she cannot manage the physical, never mind the complex emotional needs of the grief-struck child. She gets considerable support from David, with whom she seems to have had something going on, prior to the tragedy. You can see he's crazy about her, and that she cares deeply for him. But theirs is a relationship that has, understandably, been put on hold while Nani seeks to secure physical and emotional shelter for her sister.

Say, he's pretty hot too, isn't he?

Lilo and her “pet” Stitch form the nexus for the movie's action, but the deeper revelations all belong to, and are embodied by, Nani. One of the “lessons” a viewer innately gathers through Nani is how the terrible events that accrue in any life can either drive people into a larger concept of family — or into crippling isolation. This makes Lilo & Stitch Disney's most visceral movie since Dumbo, and it has certainly earned an emotional connection with me. I can't even write about it without choking up.

Weirdly enough, here, too, I'm reminded of Crumb. It ain't just the cross-hatching and stippling that sets his pin-ups and other work apart from the Timms and Yeagles and Sanderses of this world. For those who can stomach it, it's Crumb's candour and never-ending internal conflict being brought into play against hapless Others that make his work work. Self-knowledge is a dangerous thing — and absolutely necessary to the erotic imperative.

So, to Disney or anyone else out there in the business of crafting pin-ups: more of that, please, and I for one will buy it.

*Sexual desire is a motivation Pixar mines, if at all, as a very distant secondary concern — with one exception, which adroitly dodges the issue of body-image aesthetics altogether.

Gatsby vs. The Haters!

We still have a few hours before the unwashed masses gain admittance to Baz Luhrman's adaptation of The Great Gatsby, but already the haters are hatin'. Not the movie, mind you* — the book.

“I find Gatsby aesthetically overrated, psychologically vacant, and morally complacent,” sez — nay, thunders! — Kathryn Schulz. “I think we kid ourselves about the lessons it contains.” You hear that? Lessons! So rev yerself up for some good book-larnin', kiddo, and click on that link.

“The Great Gatsby has often been called 'a novel of yearning,' which for me has always meant a yearning for it to be a better book,” sez — nay, snarks! — The Globe & Mail's new Books editor, Jared Bland. “So why do we keep caring? . . . because for the most part we have it all wrong.” So get it right for once, you numbskull, and click on that link!

Some years back this guy did a “Reader's Manifesto,” which I thoroughly enjoyed (as I did these two pieces). He went one further than Schulz and excised large swaths of writer's prose, which he then excoriated. I giggled along with the man, for the most part, but every once in a while I thought, “Uh — sorry, dude, but this time the author's got me onside.”

Similarly with the passage Bland stabs at:

He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky and frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifting fortuitously about . . . etc.

Sitting on its own like that, the passage does indeed emanate a purple aura (this guy's sentences suffer similarly). But “poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air”? I can dig it.

You get to a certain age and you realize it doesn't matter what your youthful aspirations might have been: your dead ancestors are more present than ever, consuming your dreams and angling for the final word on your life. So by my reading, this metaphor works just fine — for me, and most certainly for Gatsby's larger themes of striving and deficiency (not that you'll ever hear me declare my reading to be The Right Reading. I kinda thought we were beyond all that).

Still, it's a bracing pleasure to catch a little acidity from The Gloat & Wail's Books editor. The previous editor, Martin Levin, was eminently fair-minded and even-tempered — traits that served him and his pages very well during the era of Carol Shields (surely the most fair-minded and even-tempered literary talent this country has laid claim to), but not-so-well in the age of digital decimation. A scrappier temperament might yet inject a little life into those pages — and links. So keep throwing down, Mr. Bland — our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

"Here's mud in yer eye!"

*Although from the outset Luhrman has been dressed down by the usual scolds, a force of habit for some that shows no signs of stopping.

When Is An OS Not An OS?

You know I'm a Linux user. My PC has been a dual-boot for the past seven years — i.e, I use Windows, too, but only to sync up the family iPods. About a week ago I installed the new desktop version of Ubuntu.

And then the problems started.

I'll spare you the details, but suffice it to say they weren't the usual stutter-starts that occur when an OS has been released prematurely. No, this stuff was “Everything is hanging in the balance” serious. I rolled up my sleeves and got to work, keeping my super-talented brother on speed-dial.

At first I assumed the problem was with me — I'm as fluent in coding as I am in German or French. Put me in a roomful of natives (or open a terminal) and I'll eventually get my point across, but it won't be pretty.

As the trials (and days) wore on, I began to wonder if something wasn't seriously messed up with this release. That's happened before, and with Ubuntu's stubborn insistence on a tablet desktop (which is crap on tablets and worse on PCs) it could be that their development eye is so far off the ball they've forgotten how to cover the basics.

But when, after various re-installation attempts for Ubuntu and Windows 7, I was greeted with this screen . . .

. . . my brother began to wonder if the problem didn't originate with “our friends in Redmond.”

Maybe, maybe not. All I know is:

a) right now Windows 7 is the only OS that installs successfully on my PC.

b) Windows 8 is Microsoft's “closed” OS — i.e., Microsoft is now emulating Apple's method (to dubious effect, of which I'll say more later).

c) Windows 8 monkeys with the host BIOS. In other words, if you install Windows 8 on a machine — or get a machine with Windows 8 already on it — Windows basically breaks into the BIOS and changes the locks behind it, so that Windows 8 is the only OS that will run on that machine.

Microsoft isn't the only outfit that can monkey with a BIOS, of course. As my friend, who did time as a BIOS engineer, is fond of saying, “Firmware ain't that firm.” But I'm not a hacker. I doubt I even qualify as a geek. Opening up the BIOS and putting it back together so it does what I tell it to — I'd have an easier time performing that function on my cat.

Besides, “User Error” is still the likeliest cause of my troubles. For now I'm stuck using a functional-if-disagreeable OS, and contemplating Microsoft's larger market strategy. The whole experience has got me wondering.

Why would Microsoft lock up the BIOS? More to the point, why would hardware manufacturers consent to this? Anyone who buys a new PC hoping to install something else on it now faces a hacker's challenge, which the manufacturer's End User Licensing Agreement strongly discourages. I studied Hewlett-Packard's EULA this week, and they aren't threatening patent infringement lawsuits — yet. But as my screen message amply displays, the component manufacturer is keen to let the user know this is certainly a possible scenario.

This antagonism toward the consumer is baffling to me. It's hardly putting the best foot forward with potential customers. For Apple to sell their closed and externally controlled environment they had to have a product that made the consumer swoon. Windows 8 ain't doing that. Sales for their OS aren't just hurting, they're having a negative effect on the hardware that hosts it. Meanwhile, closed systems are losing momentum precisely while “open” systems like Android are taking flight.

But secondly, just consider the ironies of my situation: I only bothered myself with a PC because it could run Linux simultaneously with Windows, which accommodated my household Apple products. If I am now forced to align myself with a closed system, whatever would possess me to take up with the company that pulled the rug out from under my feet?

Anyway, I've already put the money down, so for the foreseeable future a Windows 7 user I shall be — which ain't a bad OS, frankly. Who knows? I might just finally give Halo a spin. New mantra: contentment in confinement.

All I'm saying is, any OS that bears down hard on the dilettante coder cannot be a good thing.

"If I Could Play The Blues Like They're Playing Me" - Wayne Hancock's Wild RIDE

Spring is taking its cussed time, up north of the 44 at least. It's been too cold and rainy to do a proper cleaning of the car, but when that day finally arrives I expect I'll still be listening to this year's Car Wash Soundtrack: Ride by Wayne Hancock.

Hancock is new to me, but it sounds like he's been around forever. Part of this is due to his sound, which hews to an earlier, considerably less processed iteration of country music — honky-tonk, or juke-joint music, really. Hank Williams' grandson, Hank III, claims “Hancock has more Hank Sr. in him than either I or Hank Williams Jr.” an appraisal that is not entirely disingenuous. Hancock's songs of heartbreak have a similar disconcerting candour that leaves you wondering how delivery so muscular can be so unabashedly fragile as well.

That muscularity, force and confidence is the engine of the project, and it's fuelled with high-octane licks from some mighty fine guitarists. A number of songs have three of them trading rockabilly jams. I'm a sucker for the style, and this is the sweetest I've heard it played in many years.

“If I could play the blues like they're playing me,” moans Hancock early in the record. He might not have the upper hand on 'em, but he sure does give 'em a ride. As soon as the weather warms, I'll be rolling down the windows to Wayne for sure.

The album site (Bloodshot Records) is here, and I think the snippet from The Big Takeover review* is spot-on. Hancock's own site is here.

* “It doesn't hurt either that each song is filled with instrumental breaks from three guitarists who let loose and trade off in styles that are at once respectful of the vintage music and as demented as any rock guitar breaks…Despite the fact that there's no drummer on this record** it has the energy of the first Rolling Stones record but taking on rockabilly rather than American blues.”

** Huh. Hadn't really noticed the absence of drummer until it was pointed out to me. Had you asked, I probably would've sworn there was someone smacking the trap behind these fellas. Goes to show ya.

Congrats, RUSH

I was going to let the occasion slip by without comment — if getting inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame was a non-starter for RUSH, I figured it was a non-starter for me, too. But Geddy Lee says it makes his mother happy, and that makes me happy, too. Congratulations, Mrs. W. You must be very proud.

"So now we're, like, famous rockers, eh?"

The CBC and various FM radio hold-outs saw fit to celebrate the day by putting “Tom Sawyer” and “The Spirit Of Radio” on constant rotation. I got a little tired of that, even if I understood the reasoning. Those are the songs that have reached near-universal ear-worm status. Up here, it's common practice to hear their opening bars before the puck gets dropped at NHL games.

Also, those two songs probably signify, more than any other, the “a-ha!” moment for most RUSH fans — that moment when it first occurred to the listener that rock 'n' roll could be so much more, and still rock. And, more to the point, that these three guys had something incredible going on, and were capable of rewarding decades' worth of attention.

Still, singling out two songs from such a massive catalogue strikes me as a shame, especially when Clockwork Angels, their most recent album, is one of their very best. Were I a DJ I'd have played “The Garden” a time or two. It strikes me as a retrospective mission statement, and a loving summary of the forces that sustain us.

Of Indeterminate Legacy

If someone leads a literary profile with, “The Greatest Novelist You Haven't Read” I'm already on the defensive. If said novelist turns out to be someone I have in fact read, defensiveness turns to scorn.

Dear Literary Critics and your Editors -- just . . . please, for one nano-second, consider the day we live in: the task of becoming “well read,” never mind “deeply read,” is by any measure impossible. So if I, a near-anonymous blogger of scant ambition in the hinterlands of Canada, have read James Salter (three books and counting), what accounts then for your prestige press blanket assessment that the 88-year-old Man Of Letters, is “underappreciated” (Alex Heimbach); “revered” but, alas, not “famous” (Nick Paumgarten); “has not been widely embraced as a great writer,” whose “books have never quite caught on” (Katie Roiphe), etc.

"Maybe if I hang with movie stars I'll be appreciated, and widely embraced."

To me it reads as a lazy way of giving the old man a sentimental send-off.

If, in the movie business, it is true that “Nobody knows anything,” the corollary for the publishing business is surely, “Nobody gets what they deserve.” And precisely what accolades and attention Salter's material “deserves” is a matter of more debate than the laurels above might suggest. Just for starters, both Vivian Gornick and Jonathan Dee cautiously express some reservations.

Cautious reservation strikes me as entirely appropriate. It's easy to get a little giddy when reading Salter: The sex! The glamour! The ennui! With Salter the first blush is always the loveliest — best to acknowledge that observation and move along. It is the return — to the memory, and to Salter's prose — that provokes doubts.

Consider just one quote that Heimbach admires: “The great chandeliers hang silent.” Evocative, or absurd? Honestly, I thought “evocative” the first time I read it, then “absurd” when I returned to it. One might argue that Salter was “slumming it” in People magazine, but how about, “They made love like it was a violent crime” (a favourite of Roiphe's)? Best to move on (to Fagen and Becker, perhaps).

Or how about this line, from Salter's memoir, Burning The Days: “The great engines of the world do not run on fidelity”? There are many ways to read a line like that, the most complimentary being, perhaps, as a Salterian mission statement: “What do the 'great engines of the world' run on?” Another might be, “The great engines of the world run on infidelity.” Huh. Okay, now I'm wondering how we should go about defining these “great engines of the world,” whether they're something that invite any sort of definition at all, or if they're just a metaphor, or vague phantom enticing our writer to make bold declarations.

The line could also just be Salter's poncey way of proclaiming “I been a baaaaaaaaad widdow boy!” That's a simpler, perhaps simple-minded, reading. But the fact that Salter proceeds to queue up accounts of screwing around on the wife (sex! glamour! ennui!) does little to discourage this reading.

So this reader never quite shakes the notion that Salter's books finally amount to advertisements for himself: “I'm James Salter — and you're not.” Not that that's a bad thing. He's done a magnificent job of being James Salter — much better than I would have. I just happen to prefer, say, Richard Hell's straightforward astonishment at his capacity for self-indulgence over Salter's ennui and innumerable light metaphors. Somehow Hell just reads more honestly — and sometimes a slim volume of blunt honesty goes further in establishing a legacy than might an entire library of well-turned phrases.

*****

When it comes to literary legacies, I defy anyone to conjure up one weirder than H.P. Lovecraft's. The man's prose is awful: florid, overwritten, wildly off-key. And yet it inspires its own occult orders, blockbuster movies, and cultural memes galore. And now: serious philosophical consideration. The brute power of a well-conceived idea, it seems, can overcome its spectacularly inept expression.

If you haven't yet read any Lovecraft, I strongly urge you to head straight for SelfMadeHero's comic books. Lovecraft anthologies Vol 1 and 2 and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward are terrific adaptations vastly superior to the work that they draw from.

And yet, and yet . . . there is something about a reader conjuring the inconjurable that makes the experience so much more unsettling. Here's an idea: read 'em both, and decide for yourself which is more disturbing.

*****

Roger Ebert is gone, but his legacy is likely to grow, for a bit longer at any rate. His written meditations on movies are likely to be referred to for as long as the applicable movies remain of interest. As for his not-exclusively-devoted-to-the-movies material, it's anybody's guess.

That was the stuff I most enjoyed reading, though. His blog, especially in the years after he lost his voice, was as vigorous and wide-ranging as you'd expect: movies and life-around-the-movies of course, but also childhood memories, ruminations on passing eras, and plenty of thoughts on religion, politics, and anything else that mattered to him. The politics got him a heap of “Stick to the movies, Roger” snark. As if. You didn't have to be a close reader to see that even his movie reviews couldn't “stick to the movies.”

I've sometimes thought he embodied the best of the '60s: he always seemed up for a good “happening.” He sat at the feet of Pauline Kael, played chess with The Duke, gamely followed Lee Marvin around when he was stinking drunk, and later when he sobered up. But he was far too impressively invested in-the-moment to be a '60s artifact. Al Gore might have invented the internet, but Roger Ebert mastered it. His club and the “far flung correspondents” he attracted kept the Happening very much alive.

“Invested in the moment,” though, that's the quality that kept me coming back, even to exuberant reviews of mediocre movies. That guy was alive to possibilities in a way that seemed attainable, and well worth emulating. I can't imagine a day when I won't silently ask, “I wonder what Roger would think?”

“Roger” — now that's a legacy.

If You See It, You Might As Well Admit It: Spring Breakers

1942-2013: Thanks, Roger. God love you.

“The only American movie that matters right now,” sez The Globe & Mail's Sarah Nicole Prickett, of Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers. I'd followed enough of the pre-release hoo-ha to think this claim might actually have some substance to it. So, without reading beyond the headline,* I bid the ladies of the house farewell, then hopped into the car and took off for the nearest multiplex to check it out for myself.

Not that I admitted to anyone what I was about to see. Caution before disclosure seemed a prudent strategy. And, sure enough, about 15 minutes after the lights went down I was mentally scrolling over the list of movies playing around me, considering plausible alternatives to the flick I was actually watching. The important thing to remember, I thought, is that no-one should ever, ever know I have seen this movie.

At that early point in the movie Korine is splashing every possible “Spring Break” fantasy (or nightmare, depending on your POV) across the big screen in super-bright, super-garish pastels. Boobs, bottoms and bongs. Girls drinking hooch by the bucket, girls fellating popsicles, girls doubling down on the glass pipe. So far, so very grade 9 — minus the violent vomiting fits, of course, and those anxious shuddering crying jags that take over once you've crossed seven or eight borders you didn't know were there.

Korine seemed to be re-fetishizing already over-fetishized objects for the YouTube generation — an aesthetic I found rough, prurient and unpleasant. On the ride down I had silently joked with myself that what this movie probably needed was a middle-aged guy in the audience, to complete the creepy vibe. Now I wondered if I'd get so much as a second glance had I worn a trench coat and left my pants at home.

I stayed put, though, because Korine had dropped — like anvils from a balloon — plenty of signifiers that this film was SERIOUS, man. It starts in a college classroom where the prof speaks earnestly of how the Greatest Generation took on the challenge of the American Civil Rights Movement. Next we witness a youth group of Holy Rollers worshipping Jesus, with one of the girls reluctantly participating. She's also the first to bail when things get a little scary — and her name is Faith! Etc., etc.

What finally mesmerized me beyond the images was the dialogue, which from the git-go seemed a little off-sync with what was happening on-screen. Every utterance is earnest, and skirts (like everything else in the movie) dangerously close to camp. The talk about how beautiful it all is, and “How much I love you Mom/Grandmom” and how there are “good changes taking place inside” all seems like it might fit with the action (if the characters are, in fact, as impermeably deranged as they appear to be), but also seems off-puttingly incongruous to it. It's like riding a bicycle with a chain that can't quite find the gear it's supposed to be on, then realizing that's how this bicycle has been built. It makes for a weird, discombobulating ride, lemme tell you.

When the show was over the four young fellas** down the aisle from me loudly declared this, “The lamest movie ever.” But they liked James Franco's character, Alien, and certainly weren't complaining during the titty-shots. They also clapped and hooted when Alien boasted of having Scarface play on constant repeat, 24/7, so I'm guessing they were hoping for a movie more like DePalma's, only with lots and lots of super-hot babes.

The movie's conclusion, though, is the studied antithesis of Scarface, so here's the obligatory SPOILER ALERT: rather than holing up, getting high and waiting for the inevitable siege, the girls goad Alien into taking the action to the drug-lord he's been inconveniencing. When they show up at the lair, Alien takes a bullet in the face before he can fire a single shot, while the babes in bikinis and balaclavas pad about and dispatch one (very large, very black, very well-armed) enforcer after the next, before locating the gangsta in question and shooting him, too — all with a single clip of bullets in their guns. END SPOILER.

It's all framed in a matter-of-fact style, with all the tension of a video game on cheat code. In other words, if you came to this movie hoping your jones for Redemptive-Cathartic Violence might get stroked and put to bed, well . . . dude — you are being mocked. Lest there be any doubt, the girls phone home and, in dreamy tones, talk about how they're “ready to get serious about their studies, now.”

Such a withering excoriation of that particular trope could not come at a better time. And there are so many others Korine and his girls tuck into — and plenty of interpretations as to what it all means. It's all snotty, brash, bright and loud, making Tarantino's late indulgences look like something from Clint Eastwood's declining years. Some viewers might have fun, some might be perplexed, sooner or later most will feel insulted.

As for me, it's been years since I last left a movie and puzzled this much over “why this and not that?” questions. And darned if I'm not thinking Spring Breakers really might be “the only American movie that matters right now.”

*Prickett's essay is very good. Bonus: if you read it, and skip the movie, you'll feel no shame.

**After the preview for the Jackie Robinson biopic was over, I heard, “Ima see that one, yo.” Sincerely said, so far as I could tell. Need I add that these guys were as white as the driven snow?