Bill Randall

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The Cabal of Sea Urchins, in other words. Thanks to my schoolboy French, it took me a few viewings to realize Luc Moullet did mean sea urchins. They infest the maps around Oignies in the north of France, and inspire his hilarious 17-minute film, an unclassifiable jape on tourism, art, and piles of useless rock.

These urchins represent the unnamed mounds that pepper the landscape in what were once coal towns. The mines have closed, but the mounds remain, changing a landscape without so much as a proper hill. They have no names, no doubt due to a conspiracy. As Moullet reminds us, coal mining is underground work, so the heaps insult its discretion. Defiant, he aims to liberate, even elevate them.

To his eyes, the heaps look like his beloved mountains. While he has juggled a dual career as film critic and filmmaker in Paris, he is at heart a country boy and climber. Mountains appear throughout his films, as the backdrop in the anti-Western A Girl Is a Gun and the subject in Up and Down, about an absurd bicycle race in the Alps. In “La Cabale,” they appear almost as a pun. The heaps may have a more perfect form than Fuji, but they’re not exactly stable. Yet he climbs on, skidding down the side.

His deadpan humor– two lovers walking on crumbling mound, a cheeky crew, an argument over the most beautiful of all mounds ending with a monkey wrench– shares the tone of Agnes Varda’s masterpiece, The Gleaners and I. Both have a quotidian quirkiness, with a judge in a field or a hotel on a heap, that gets better with repeat viewings. Moullet might not be the most famous or prolific of the Nouvelle Vague, but he certainly is the funniest. And “La Cabale des oursins” is probably my favorite of his works.  It translates this unique director’s wit into an intricate short, a perfect miniature.

A shame, then, that it’s so hard to see. One DVD exists, a part of the fine French journal Cinéma’s 11th issue, and is French only. At least a box set of most of his features has been released, by Blaq Out in France and Facets in the US. And another hilarious short, “Essai d’ouverture” (”Essay on Opening”), about a bottle of Coke, can be seen online.

Not the idea that, if S is any nonempty partially ordered set in which every chain has an upper bound, then S has a maximal element, but the Hollis Frampton film. Since I don’t live near New York or San Francisco in the 70s, seeing it was almost as hard as understanding S without a mathy companion. But Ubuweb is a kind mistress, making the experimental film ghetto a little more open.

Not to say the film has a clear meaning. I haven’t done the required reading yet, and Zorn is not a gracious host. If such art for the last several decades has relied on a primer, unique to each artist, I’m left in the cold. But that can be an advantage of sorts, a reminder to trust experience.

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Over and over, the artist Joe Brainard painted Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy. Nancy as a transsexual, Nancy as toddler Breton, as the Manhattan skyline. In my favorite, she’s kidney disease. For Brainard, she was a passport.

He wound up in New York City in 1963. But he was born in Arkansas and reared in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That oil town, home of the Golden Driller and Oral Roberts University, had nowhere for a young man in love with art and gay besides. He left for good the same year the Star Trek architecture went up at ORU. I doubt it would have made him feel more at home. Another artist’s photo essay, Larry Clark’s Tulsa, might have reminded him why he left.

In New York, he mixed with artists and poets. First Frank O’Hara, Alex Katz, and Kenneth Koch, later Warhol, Johns, and Ashberry. Yet Brainard maintained a simple persona. And made art about Nancy. As Ann Lauterbach writes, “Nancy could travel with Joe from his humble roots in Tulsa to the bright complexity of New York City… Both the troubled, earnest pathos of the times and the overwhelming grandeur of ‘high art’ might be resisted, or converted, by Nancy’s ubiquitous smile.” The bumpkin takes the city, in other words.

In the 1960s and 70s, he made scores of works on Nancy, most collected now in The Nancy Book from Siglio Press. A glance through shows he’s no bumpkin. These witty, inventive brillo-haired jazz riffs put bland American identity through the wringer. “The Nancy Book,” a 27-page comic book done with poet Ron Padgett, mixes raw sex with mad formal play. Everything is up for grabs, even words: at one point, the word “sky” appears wherever the sky should be. Another work, cover art for the 1968 Art News Annual, views the avant-garde through a Nancy lens. The works always feel personal, as Brainard uses Nancy to explore his complex emotions. Somehow, she is a worthy muse.

No small credit must go to Bushmiller, whose cartooning was kind of brilliant. Nancy has proved a perennial muse for cartoonists, Mark Newgarden and Bill Griffith chief among them. As Lauterbach rightly notes, “the comic strip and the miniature are both economies of distillation,” and Bushmiller made a perfect miniature in each panel. It’s why Five-Card Nancy works, but Five-Card Prince Valiant doesn’t.

Brainard shared the flair for miniatures, and so found a perfect match in Bushmiller’s creation. Navigating the City, he found familiar comfort in Nancy. Much later, when he died of AIDS, he did not share the celebrity that engulfed some of his circle. Reading The Nancy Book, I wonder if he preferred it that way.

(The images come from JoeBrainard.org and are (C) the Estate of Joe Brainard. Top: “If Nancy Was an Ashtray,” 1972; Middle: “Nancy Diptych,” 1974; Bottom: “If Nancy Was a Painting by de Kooning,” 1975.)

Geoff Grogan flays the Gray Lady and makes pop culture collages with her remains. They hang in galleries, where this irony gets appreciated. For his subjects, pastiches of Kirby and Lugosi, he prefers affection to irony. For proof, look no further than his latest comic book, Look Out!! Monsters.

The comic, a tabloid-sized Xeric winner that feels thick with ink, mangles more newspapers. He slathers an issue of the New York Daily News with washes, paint, and shreds of the Times. On them he builds a story of Frankenstein, a collage of body parts. A war’s on; the stiff-legged monster makes quick work of some soldiers before vomiting in front of a cathedral.

Grogan’s thick brushwork creates a monster that seems to wade through the pages. Reading the news beneath is a similar slog: we’re told of three drowned girls, the Taliban, infected birds, even a “battle with Nicole Kidman.” Any given day has the same sour words; when Frankenstein vomits, he splatters torn headlines in a double-splash. The most visible word: “Hell.”

From this point, Grogan unleashes color. A double-splash of red shows a 30s vision of science under the headline “Mad Doctor’s Work.” Kirby-fried energy engulfs the page, giving way to giant-sized Ben-day patterns, evoking both pop-art lithos and four-color printing. Underneath it sits a love story of sorts, with samples of the Thing’s blind girlfriend beneath an embossed rocketship (or nuclear missile).

At first, Grogan seems to lose the story’s handle. These color pages, peppered with lovers kissing and details from possible gallery paintings, lack the violent drive of the comic’s first half. Even the occasional black-and-white panels of Frankenstein seem muddier than his first appearance.

Yet a closer reading shows the earlier conflicts continue, formally. His sources, Universal monster movies and classic comics, pivoted on love as well as war. Frankenstein went up in flames, not for his appearance but his failure to treat beauty with delicacy. It’s a old theme, reprised with Ben Grimm, King Kong, and countless others.

Newsprint has its beauties, too: celebrities and underwear models. Grogan samples them on the cover, with Brittney Spears in the upper left, and fashion’s doppelgangers of real women on the back. Frankenstein couldn’t stomach the monsters in the news, and now he can’t stomach the ads either. His few second-half panels seem to show his fury at rejection, while the models kiss another.

The final image– an embossed bomber, an ad logo, and the Bride of Frankenstein screaming under a colorful layer of giant dots– ties everything together. It’s also an invitation to go back and find new meanings in this riot of color, newprint, and classic monsters. In his artist’s statement, Grogan cites the conflict of ideologies that marks the newspaper. His achievement lies in how he finds an analogue in classic pulps. Both have a home on that low-grade paper, but the pulps increasingly seem tame compared to the news.

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Grogan has other comic works available. One, a work of nostalgic revisionism at ModernTales, left me cold, but Dr. Speck looks promising. A ‘pataphysical superhero tale with doses of Tibetan (Californian?) mysticism, he appears to wield the genre fresh. All Grogan’s work blurs distinctions. Seeing this artist and art professor prove the divisions meaningless yet again in a Xeric-winning comic reminds me of the best works that foundation has funded.

(The images are from Look Out!! Monsters, save for the top collage-painting, whose source I can no longer find. But it turns Jasper Johns’ “Target With Four Faces” into capes-n-tights, so I couldn’t resist the pillage.  And yes, that’s not the Thing’s girlfriend in the art I sampled.  She’s on another page, though.)

When Saul Steinberg passed away, we lost one of the greatest cartoonists, one whose virtuoso line work barely kept pace with his intellect. He played with the language of images in still fresh ways. For his subject, he chose America. Its mishmash of high and low cultures suited his talents, especially with the immigrants flowing into mid-century New York. Nonetheless, he never sampled their rich soup of language. What word balloons there were overflowed with drawings, fake calligraphy, or scrawls, nothing more. This linguistic acrobat remained mostly silent.

Thanks to the posthumous volume Reflections and Shadows, Steinberg has broken this silence with an eloquent book-length autobiography. He never conducted a major interview in English during his life, so this volume fills a major void. While written as a prose autobiography, the book represents a series of conversations between Steinberg and his close friend Aldo Buzzi, an Italian architect, publisher, and writer.

Buzzi guided the book’s construction, editing their talks into chapters for Steinberg to approve. While these conversations occurred in the mid-70s, not until 2001 did the Italian edition of this work appear. That’s a long wait, but the book never seems dated. Steinberg’s works maintained a remarkable consistency throughout his career, and the book largely concerns his early life and impressions of the United States.

While much better with cartoons, Steinberg proves an engaging raconteur. The book consists of keenly observed episodes concerning people from his native Romania to the rural Midwest. As an immigrant, he had a fine eye for the minute differences in cultures; as a satirist, he had a keener eye for human foibles. Of the many drawings included, his sketches of his family grow much richer when compared to his descriptions of these people, like the uncle no-one was allowed to talk about, or their smells, each unique.

Nonetheless, Steinberg draws the best portrait of himself.  His favored themes grow clearer in reading, as well as the history that made his work possible in the first place.  Like many Europeans Jews, his strange path out of Europe fascinates.  His went through Italy and prison.  He had been studying architecture, but shortly after the war broke out he was arrested and sent to a refugee camp.  He describes the journey there as full of wonders: when curious girls see him held by the police, he recalls, “For women a prisoner is a romantic, adventurous character, who has done something unlawful and thus might even do something unlawful to them, or rather for them. …Admired and desired by those girls, I felt perfect.”

Just as perfectly observed are his thoughts on food. It lies at the root of culture; one might even say it is culture.  He sums up his homeland’s history in a dish: “the cooking was Jewish, partly Polish-Russian, partly northern Romanian, Hungarian, Austro-Hungarian: paprika, vegetables.”  He finds similar parallels in American restaurants, which he cannot stand, focused as they are on socialization rather than good food.  To his European palate, “gastronomy in America, the restaurants, the taste of the nation are governed by the tastes of children.”  He never speaks so directly in his cartoons.  Here he seems at times like an English gentleman horrified at the colonies.

In the final analysis, Reflections and Shadows works best alongside Steinberg’s drawings and paintings.  It sharpens our understanding of them.  Steinberg may tell a good story, and he certainly has a fascination with words, but he seems uncomfortable relying on them.  Fortunately, this book points to his others, with a bibliography of books and exhibition catalogues. Unfortunately, none remain in print in his adopted country. For an artist of his stature, working for The New Yorker no less, not to have had a major retrospective published soon after his death remains simply baffling. As fine as this book is, it is no substitute.

Soon after I wrote this article, a few years after Steinberg’s death, I bought a used copy of The Inspector. Like the rest of his books, it had been out of print for years. The bookstore’s owner commented that they were getting harder to find, and going up in price, too.

Recently, however, publishers have tried to make up for lost time, with the art book Saul Steinberg: Illuminations in 2006 and a 2005 edition of another collaboration by Buzzi and Steinberg. In this case, it is a The Perfect Egg, a book of Buzzi’s writings on, of all things, food.

(A version of this article originally appeared in The Comics Journal, #258 February 2004)

Stu called from Toronto last night to make fun of my country’s asinine health care system, so I had to respond by forwarding a bunch of Kate Beaton comics. Take that, Canadian!

I love her work. It is hilarious, full of in-jokes for the historically astute that will make you laugh regardless. She has a marvelous sense of the absurd– Napoleon eating cookies is always funny– and exact timing.

Often enough her comics are about identity, focusing on her origins or a country’s. As a hick, I can relate to her strips about being a from the sticks. Her “Conversations with a Younger Self” also delve into her identity. They show grownup Kate and child Kate, blaming each other for screwing up their life. Her two History Comics series contain her finest work yet, with a gag mixing Dr. Naismith with his creation’s future. The gags are always rooted deeply in fact, so the absurdities don’t seem cheap.

Best of all, she can just plain draw. Her vibrant line that reminds me of Steig, and she slides effortlessly between figuration and doodling, often in the same strip. She draws Georgiana Babbage quite foxily indeed, and Elizabeth I as a furious mound of circles. Her characters’ hands are especially nice, going from squiggles to realistic depending on the comic’s needs.

Most comics I’ve read on the web last in my mind no longer than the light they’re printed on. Beaton’s will have a place on my shelf, should they ever make the leap to print. In the meantime, she could adopt the same model as other web cartoonists. I don’t want to live in a world where she can’t make a living off t-shirts of her first panel of Anges MacPhail. (Should I live in that world, and so fall ill, please Lord let it not be in the US of A.)

Still on the activist documentary, I recall two films on orphans in Uganda. They  number over two million because of AIDS and war, and we all know that cameras love tragedy.

The first film, ABC Africa, began when the International Fund for Agricultural Development invited Abbas Kiarostami to film in Uganda. They hoped to draw attention to UWESO, the Ugandan Women’s Efforts to Save Orphans. Kiarostami, the preeminent Iranian director, went in with video cameras to take some preparatory notes.  He so liked what he shot that he just used it.

He uses the video camera to meet people and play with kids, and so makes a breezy film that somehow grows in the mind after viewing.  It often shows poor streets and natural beauty shot from cars, and billboards for “Lifeguard” condoms.  In a hospital scene, it quietly glances at the dead.  The film’s centerpiece, however, shows nothing.  Six minutes of darkness, broken only by a match and lightning, let Kiarostami remind us that humans can adapt to anything.

Mostly the film sings. As soon as he arrives at the airport, Kiarostami films a man singing. Women and children sing in groups. Kiarostami intersperses reminders, not lectures, about the problem and UWESO’s solutions.  He also reminds us of our privileged viewpoint.  The film ends by following a white Austrian couple from hotel to airport with their adopted Ugandan child.  The complex situation evokes conflicted emotions, as they photograph this child in his homeland before taking him from it.  Kiarostami ends with a shot of clouds, subtly overlaid with children’s faces, as ephemeral as a video image, or a memory.

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The second film, Invisible Children, began when some American wannabe filmmakers invited themselves to Sudan.  A high-school teacher described it to me as “Road Rules in Africa,” with neither irony nor horror.  When the filmmakers arrive in Uganda, they’re surprised that they can’t cross the desert to get to Sudan. Luckily there’s photogenic tragedy at hand. Locals describe the Invisible Children, fleeing the rebels army’s press gangs at night; the film’s money shot slowly reveals hundreds of children sleeping together in a safehouse. It works as spectacle of nameless bodies, a stand-in for the carnage they never got to film in Sudan.

The film is just the beginning.  Having looked with classic American innocence, the filmmaker’s very American solution should not surprise. They established a business.  Free screenings at high schools and colleges lead to events where students sleep out at night, emulating the children. It gives an experience film cannot, and prepares viewers to act, not watch.  They sell trinkets made by the children and actively solicit donations.  Fortunately, they have also established schools and scholarships, hopefully a more sustainable solution with long-term benefits.

One could be forgiven thinking it’s all crass, given the commercials on the DVD. They are an NPO, though, and seem to be doing good in the world.  Most films struggle to get seen, much less build schools. Fault the distribution networks of theaters and television, which Invisible Children bypassed entirely. It succeeds by appealing to its viewers’ naïveté.  It also does nothing to disabuse them of it, just their money.  Hopefully, the film and organization render themselves irrelevant by solving the problem.  ABC Africa lacks a structure to do that, but it is also not the film IFAD envisioned.  It’s Kiarostami’s film, and I can imagine watching it for a host of reasons ten, twenty, even fifty years from now.

The 2008 Whitney Biennial is on now; I may make this one, but for now here is a brief review of a Cameron Jamie video work from the 2006 installment.

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(AKA “The King & the Bird.” Sounds dull translated, but it’s better than the alternate English title “The Curious Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird.”)

Hayao Miyazaki has exquisite taste. He loves Yuri Norstein and Frédéric Back, and most of all, Paul Grimault. This greatest of French animators, fearing neither sentiment nor destruction, left his traces all over The Castle in the Sky. In Grimault’s earlier film Le Roi et l’Oiseau, the castle doesn’t fly, but the Bird does. And the lovers seem to, drawn with such a light touch. As though Bob Clampett had flown to Paris for Jean Cocteau’s poetry, one could say.

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Welcome news, Criterion’s is bringing William Klein’s brilliant Mister Freedom to DVD, along with a couple of his others, for a few ailing dollars. They call it a “delirious fiction.” It offers a gun-toting, corn-spouting superhero fighting Commies in France, all dreamed up by an expat American who found things out fighting in World War II.

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