Joshua Malbin

It’s probably unfair to compare The Impostor’s Daughter by Laurie Sandell to the best piece of graphic writing in the last ten years (and one of the best comics ever), Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. I wouldn’t think it was particularly informative if someone criticized my writing by pointing out that it doesn’t stack up to Joseph Conrad. But the comparison is dominating my thinking about Sandell’s book, probably because both Fun Home and The Impostor’s Daughter are memoirs about fathers and daughters, and largely about how each daughter’s relationship with her highly erudite father influences her understanding of her own sexuality.

Sandell’s father was a con man. He invented a distinguished academic history to get teaching jobs, and then when his resume was revealed as a fake he claimed to his family that he was fired for being a conservative. He told his daughter extravagant war stories about his time in the Argentine army and in the U.S. Army in Vietnam, when in truth he was a deserter from Argentina and never went to Vietnam. He applied for credit cards in his daughters’ and wife’s names and maxed them out. He convinced family friends to make investments with him and made off with the money.

Relatively early in the book, if not relatively early in her life, Sandell realizes her father’s a serial liar and exposes his history in an anonymous article in her unnamed magazine. Her father is devastated, and repeatedly threatens to kill himself. But she hires a private investigator and keeps digging into his past.

Meanwhile she’s in an on-again, off-again long-distance relationship with an aspiring movie director in Los Angeles, and developing her own career as a celebrity interviewer for Glamour . She’s also developing an addiction to Ambien that lands her in rehab for about the last 40 pages of the book. There she learns to let go of her anger toward her father and comes to believe in God. She also breaks up with her long-distance boyfriend and decides to write the book we now hold.

As therapy? That leaves us, the readers, with what? That’s my first major frustration with the book: Sandell promises us answers about this mysterious figure at the center of her existence, and we end up getting a rehab confessional in which she has to let go of her quest for answers. That’s great for her. She’s not addicted to Ambien anymore and she’s found God. But it’s an AA sharing session, not a satisfying memoir.

Here’s where the comparison to Fun Home begins to help me make sense of my dissatisfaction. Every time Sandell’s father appears, we hear all about how he makes her feel, usually bad. Same thing with her boyfriend (who figures so large in the book but is now gone from her life, leaving no specific trace she can mention to justify his oversized presence in the narrative). She is heroine and victim in every scene.

Bechdel’s book circles around and around in time, using literary references—especially to Proust and James Joyce—to depict her father as a tragic figure. Her mother too, to a certain extent. That, ultimately, is where I think Sandell comes up short. It’s not so much that Bechdel, the lifelong comic author, operates on a plane of sophistication several steps above Sandell, the Glamour celebrity interviewer drawing her first major work. It’s that Bechdel works much, much harder to make us sympathize with her father, to understand the limitations he placed on himself. She seems to be writing from a place of greater equanimity, in which she can accept her father’s great intellectual and emotional influence on her. As a result, her father is a recognizably complex human being.

Sandell seems not to have reached that place. Her book is all about trying to fight her father’s influence, and as such he remains a mustache-twirling villain to the end, a domineering, manipulative monster, even as she claims to have kicked free of him through rehab.

Preview here.

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I’ve been watching the video for Miles Fisher’s cover of Talking Heads’ 1983 song This Must Be The Place:

In the video, Fisher plays Patrick Bateman and restages several scenes from American Psycho. (Fisher also does a mean Tom Cruise and appeared as Paul Kinsey’s Princeton classmate and dope dealer in Mad Men.) The prostitute sequence in American Psycho was originally set to Phil Collins’ Sussudio (1985); I don’t think Fisher’s use of American Psycho to hold his song is arbitrary.

Home is where I want to be
Pick me up and turn me round
I feel numb – born with a weak heart
I guess I must be having fun

I saw American Psycho in the theatre in 2000, when it came out. It resonated with me deeply, not so much for the yuppie satire or the narratively suspect rampage of misogynistic violence, but for this seeming truth: this was the story of a man who hates his job. His life, really, but it’s life in an all-encompassing job, a job of a life.

To me, the song, sung from alienation yearning towards warm oblivion, feels exactly like what Bateman’s character seemed to me to feel. Who do I have to murder to get fired around here?

Miles Fisher EP for free download at Amie Street. The other songs are good too.

UPDATE: I should note that I found this via Jim Emerson, who has other connections to make.

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At this point I’m no longer even surprised.

State development officials are drafting a new deal with Bruce Ratner that will give the Atlantic Yards developer a loophole out of the project’s main selling point: thousands of units of affordable housing.

New language quietly inserted into a Sept. 17 lease proposal between the Empire State Development Corporation and the Downtown-based developer now make the construction of the long-promised 2,250 units of below-market-rate housing “subject to governmental authorities making available … affordable housing subsidies.”

None of the prior agreements — including two approved general project plans — made the affordable housing conditional on any state or local support. Ratner was required to build the units whether subsidies were available or not.

And such subsidies are in very short supply.

There was never going to be any affordable housing in the Atlantic Yards project. Ratner only ever promised to build affordable housing somewhere in Brooklyn. Now he’s not even going to promise to do that. In the end, the only part of this thing that will get built is the basketball arena for a team he’s since sold to a Russian billionaire. Unless he feels like it sometime before 2031, which is how long he now has to finish the project.

This is the problem with mega-developments: government officials tie their boats to them and then can’t afford to cut free when they run way off course into the middle of a hurricane.

What do they care? It’s not their money and it’s more than clear that none will ever pay a political price for their cronyism.

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“Food insecurity” for “hunger.”

How bloodless can you be?

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Those of you who show up for the comic book reviews, political pique and local electoral guidance may be surprised to learn that the single biggest driver of websurfers to joshuamalbin.com is the thirst to know vampire dental anatomy. Go ahead, search it and see where you land.

In that spirit, we are proud to present friend of the blog Jake Fleisher — who, as discussed previously, believes the camera favors incisor fangs over canines — in “Intercourse With A Vampire”, produced for atom.com.

Intercourse With A Vampire, Episode 1

Happy Halloween an all that. More Fleisher flicks here.

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Keep in mind that this chat comes at the end of five days in which my internet went down, a repairman failed to either fix the problem or call me back the next day, a scheduled repair on Saturday morning magically turned into a scheduled installation on Monday afternoon, and my year’s worth of service was seemingly lost to AT&T’s system.

(continue reading…)

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I love living in Park Slope and all, but… It used to be that when I saw a potentially hot woman from behind, when I came around front I’d check out her face. Today I caught myself checking to see if she was pregnant.

Not happy about that.

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Tank Girl if it was about a rock band and given snappy dialogue by Joss Whedon. Not bad.

Previously a webcomic, now a one-shot.

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I originally thought I was reviewing a new graphic novel that just appeared in my neighborhood store. Turns out this is just a second printing of a book that first appeared three years ago. Screw it, I wrote the review, I’m still sticking it up.

If the Nineties belonged to cyberpunk, it’s pretty clear that the Naughties have belonged to steampunk. I’m fine with that as long as it keeps bringing us gems like The Five Fists of Science. (William Gibson, incidentally, invented both cyberpunk, with Neuromancer, and steampunk, with The Difference Engine. Top that bitchez.)

It’s New York, 1899. Nikola Tesla has invented a giant war robot, and his friend Mark Twain decides to use it as the decisive force for world armistice, in the face of the Great War everyone senses coming. His idea is to sell one to every major power, so that non dare attack another, a fin-de-siecle version of Mutual Assured Destruction. Unfortunately none of the world’s governments wants to buy one, so Tesla and Twain stage a series of demonstrations: giant energy beasts (projections also dreamed up by Tesla) attack Manhattan, and Tesla’s robot fights them off. While Twain cries, “Showmanship!”

These attacks draw the attention of JP Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and Thomas Edison, who, with the help of blueprints by Guglielmo Marconi, are building a skyscraper to serve as a giant radio link to Hell. Their Mason-like cult plans to raise the Leviathan, and they fear that the appearance of demons (for so they interpret the energy beasts) means someone else has beaten them to it.

For reasons never adequately explained, Edison captures a man-eating yeti and keeps it. It later eats him and Marconi.

Steven Sanders’ art is for the most part lovely, though occasionally murky. I also had a little trouble keeping Edison, Morgan, and Carnegie straight, even though he gave the one no facial hair, the other a mustache, and the third a beard. I did like Tesla’s Tesla coil ray guns.

No previews, sorry.

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The stodgiest magazine in America has declared hip-hop dead. Therefore, it died many years ago. QED.

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