Joshua Malbin

It’s my birthday! And all I want is for you guys to go to Red Lemonade and read Chapter 5 of Soap and Water (and leave a comment). You don’t have to be as thorough as the gentleman who spent two-plus hours leaving me thirty comments on one chapter on Friday. Just one comment is great. Or more if you’re moved to, of course.

Thank you all so much for all the reading and commenting you’ve done so far. I truly appreciate it.

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From now on, all PDFs, ePubs, and MOBIs will live on the Soap and Water page of this blog. After you read a chapter on your Kindle or iPhone or whatever, though, please go comment!

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Li’l Depressed Boy meets Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Manic Pixie Dream Girl pursues LDB. MPDG drags LDB to concerts, bowling, junk food eating, etc.

But then, after drawing LDB out of his shell (as a good MPDG must do), at the very end she reveals she has a boyfriend. WTF!

Sina Grace’s art is good, though.

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Soap and Water chapter 4 is now posted at Red Lemonade. This is the first time I’m trying publishing two chapters in a week, and I notice that the commenting has slowed down. Is it too much? I want to make sure I’m not overwhelming you guys. What matters to me above all is putting it out at a pace that fits people’s ability to read it.

Anyway, thank you all so much for continuing to read and for your kind words. It means a lot to me.

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For those who prefer it, here’s the PDF. Here’s a zip file with it in ePub format, and one with it in .mobi (for Kindle).

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Chapter 3 of Soap and Water is now posted over at Red Lemonade. For those who have been asking for a way to read it on your iPad or whatever, here’s a PDF.* If you do read it that way, though, please still comment at Red Lemonade! Any little comment helps keep the manuscript on the front page.

Based on your responses, I’m going to move to putting up new chapters twice weekly, keeping them short. New chapters will now go up Wednesday and Sunday nights.

As always, thank you to all who are reading. And to those who are reposting, Facebook-liking, Tweeting, or forwarding, I am grateful beyond measure.

* I have e-reader versions for Kindle and ePub formats, but WordPress refuses to let me upload them. If anybody knows a way around that technical problem, please let me know, or just email me (address is on the About Me page if you don’t have it) and I’ll send the requisite version to you.

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I mostly agree with Chuck Klosterman that Breaking Bad stands above the top tier of The Sopranos, Mad Men, and The Wire in its moral starkness. A few caveats:

• Deadwood remains my favorite-ever show, though it was clearly less successful than any of Klosterman’s four.
• That ”the ultimate takeaway from The Wire was more political than philosophical” is a point in its favor, and David Simon’s critique of institutions is one of the most politically complex and philosophically interesting (and entertaining) things to ever appear on television.
• Breaking Bad is fantastic, but also unbearable to watch. I only just brought myself to finish Season 3 last week. If it were a feature, it would have released some tension by now. It never releases tension.
• The holy top tier is very boy, although The Sopranos has vital female characters and Mad Men’s are arguably more central to its purpose than its men. I think there’s a case that Six Feet Under doesn’t make this cut because of sexist bias.

Still, he’s right about the dazzling central feature of Breaking Bad, which is that Walter White is long past the sly gray area that Weedsinhabited for its first three seasons (so, I gather, is Nancy Botwin). Plenty of people have died because of Walter’s actions who didn’t have to; not only has his cost to society vastly outweighed the benefit of providing for his family, he no longer even has those personal stakes: he’s both beat his cancer into remission and racked up enough cash to serve that initial purpose.

But I don’t think Klosterman’s exactly right in his conclusion:

There’s a scene in Breaking Bad‘s first season in which Walter White’s hoodrat lab assistant Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) tells Walter he just can’t “break bad,” and — when you first hear this snippet of dialogue — you assume what Jesse means is that you can’t go from being a law-abiding chemistry teacher to an underground meth cooker. It seems like he’s telling White that he can’t start breaking the law after living a life in which laws were always obeyed, and that a criminal lifestyle is not something you can join like a club. His advice seems pragmatic, and it almost feels like an artless way to shoehorn the show’s title into the script. But this, it turns out, was not Jesse’s point at all. What he was arguing was that someone can’t “decide” to morph from a good person into a bad person, because there’s a firewall within our personalities that makes this impossible. He was arguing that Walter’s nature would stop him from being bad, and that Walter would fail if tried to complete this conversation. But Jesse was wrong. He was wrong, because goodness and badness are simply complicated choices, no different than anything else.

In the world of Breaking Bad, this argument applies more to Jesse than it does to Walter. Jesse is capable of horrible acts, but tortured by them; without Walter’s guidance, he’s a knucklehead, not an evildoer.

But Walter is native here, and to the manner born. Or at least sculpted long ago. Walter has a pulsing vein of barely tamped-down rage that cancer slices open like a box cutter on a vein. His boss at the car wash, the old friend who purportedly cheated him out of millions, his existence — something about the impersonality of cancer brings out something in Walter that is ready for bad and has no need of breaking.

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The remarkable thing about Brooke Gladstone’s The Influencing Machine is that it exists at all. We’ve seen graphic histories, memoirs out the wazoo, travelogues, and biographies, but Gladstone is doing something different: an extended essay in comic-book form. The closest comparison I can think of is Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, a unique case because it almost had to be a comic book to exist.

Gladstone is best known as the host of NPR’s On the Media, a program I like but never listen to. She’s spent a lot of time thinking about and reporting on the practice of journalism, and The Influencing Machine is her manifesto (her word) on the subject. I’m not entirely sure why she chose to make it a comic book. Maybe for the sake of accessibility. I probably would have nodded approvingly at a regular book manifesto from her and never been remotely tempted to read it. As it stands I’ve read it and thought about it.

The book opens with a history of journalism, which contains lots of fascinating tidbits. (For example, a jury-nullification verdict in defiance of the law was the basis for freedom of the press in pre-Revolutionary America.) More deeply, it offers insights into two of Gladstone’s major themes: that journalism has often been deeply flawed and reviled, and that many of the journalistic norms we now take for granted (and fear losing) were the products of technological changes and market forces.

From there she moves to discussions of bias (by which she means no so much political slant as the media’s biases toward novelty, bad news, maintaining the status quo, good narratives, etc.) and objectivity (where she explains with impressive clarity how the bounds of “acceptable” debate shift over time). She examines the coverage of several wars to show how the most troublesome features of bias and circumscribed debate come into play when the media are needed most.

It’s in the last section of the book, though, where Gladstone really makes the argument that sets The Influencing Machine apart from other smart liberal critiques of the media. She describes psychological research into humans’ irrationality and tilt toward prejudice, and then looks forward to the media of the future, even up to the Singularity. Her argument, essentially—made most strongly here at the end but repeated throughout—is that the failings of the media reflect the failings of humanity. Journalism reflects society, and in the future more than ever, as she puts it on her last page, “We get the media we deserve.”

I disagree. Really, I think, we get the media we can pay for.

Gladstone gives example after example of how advances in technology led to the explosive growth of new forms of media. Here’s one:

Objectivity emerges as a selling point in American journalism when the price of a newspaper drops to a penny. When newspapers cost six cents, nearly all of their funding came from deep-pocketed political parties and a few thousand well-heeled subscribers. But in 1833, the New York Sun tries a new business model: slash the price to sell on the street to immigrants and workers — then deliver that readership to eager advertisers, who make the papers profitable. The content changes, too: more local politics, more crime, more drama, more scoops. News is a commodity like bread. Freshness matters. Inaccuracy … doesn’t. As always, technology facilitates the revolution. New rotary presses keep adding capacity, flooding the streets with cheap newsprint. This is when modern journalism begins.

Now, the fact that this new business model was so successful suggests there was a big potential group of consumers for this new product, turned into actual consumers when technology made it possible to serve them at a profit. To say “We get the media we deserve” implies that immigrants and workers didn’t “deserve” media before it became profitable to give it to them.

This is no mere theoretical problem. Today journalism is in the midst of a financial crisis, struggling to figure out what forms of news it can still deliver profitably in the Internet era. Gladstone touches on some of the other promises and challenges of crowd-sourced information technology, but sidesteps this central question. I don’t expect her to come up with a working business model for Internet journalism, of course. I just think it’s important to acknowledge that we don’t get media that reflect human failings and strengths, the media we “deserve,” except insofar as capitalism allows it.

Whether we “deserve” capitalism, I’ll leave that question alone.

Preview here.

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Dave McKean is best known as a cover artist (for Sandman and various CDs), but some time ago he did a couple of big comics that became highly prized collectors’ items. Both (Cages and Pictures That Tick) have been reissued by Dark Horse over the last couple of years, and I guess that’s created enough momentum for him to sell this new book.

Cages, I loved. It retained a fair amount of narrative structure, even as it made some Surrealist gestures. Pictures That Tick, I was more ambivalent about, though because the pieces were shorter I was willing to deal with them as poems I didn’t quite get. It edged a lot farther into straight Surrealism, and there he’s tried to remain in Celluloid: An Erotic Graphic Novel.

There is no text at all in Celluloid. A woman enters a hotel room, carrying a suitcase, and speaks to a man on the phone, maybe a boyfriend. She takes a bath and masturbates. Her body is drawn in lanky pen and ink, and all the pages arrest her in the midst of a motion or an expression. Dave McKean, in case you didn’t know it, is a phenomenal illustrator.

She emerges from the bath and finds a film projector and a strip of pornographic film. She watches and masturbates, and then steps into the frame; we see intercut photo stills from a porno movie and drawings of her fantasy. The film runs out and she steps into the square of white light on the wall, and now drawings of her masturbation alternate with photos of fruit, as she imagines herself having sex with a grape-headed, many-breasted goddess. She falls asleep and is visited by an incubus, and when he ejaculates she’s projected into a dream of Cubist photomontages. The drawings have now all been replaced with photographs, and she is having sex in front of a group of men wearing Eyes Wide Shut devil masks. Finally we see the man from the phone in the first panels enter the hotel room with his own suitcase, I think we’re to assume for a tryst, and discover the film projector instead of our heroine. We see from a reexamination of the film that she’s vanished into the porno movie.

All this reminds me of the animated shorts art students make when they’re learning to manipulate computer effects. It looks cool, and in E.M. Forster’s most basic sense they tell a story—that “tapeworm” of the novel,” as he calls it, made up of a repeated “and then, and then…” But they have no plot, in the sense of building a chain of causation.

Celluloid is beautiful visual art. The photomontages in particular are lovely nudes, and I quite liked the fruit too. But it’s pointless. It attempts to follow the thought structure of fantasy, a classic Surrealist gambit, yet good Surrealism reaches for the associative language of dreams to evoke strong responses—originally to startle bourgeois audiences out of complacency.

And as artists who considered themselves revolutionaries, the original Surrealists were exquisitely aware of social context. I’m not sure Dave McKean is. Why, in a world of unlimited internet porn, is this woman’s fantasy experience centered on an old strip of film on a big projector? Is this a period piece? If so, why does she have a cell phone? Are we supposed to have the sensibilities of a celluloid-era audience? Because you can’t shock today’s audience with garden-variety porn, nor make a comic lurid enough to arouse us. You have to settle for a laid-back, uninvested artistic appreciation of this “erotic” work.

In other words, I can’t beat off to it and it’s not making me uncomfortable. It just sits there being beautiful. Is that what Surrealism is about?

Preview here.

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Bah. I broke down. @joshuamalbin.

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Thanks to all of you who read Chapter 1 of Soap and Water, and special thanks to all of you who Facebook-liked it, reposted the link, Tweeted it, or forwarded the email. Extra-special thanks to those who left a comment—I not only truly appreciate the feedback, comments are how the manuscript stays front-page visible on the site. Every comment, even the simplest word, counts a lot.

Chapter 2 is now posted. If you liked Chapter 1, please help me keep the momentum going: read, repost, Tweet, and comment.

I’ve gotten a couple requests now to do more frequent, shorter chunks, to keep people’s attention without overwhelming them. Give me your thoughts if you have any preference. What would you be more likely to remember to read, short bits a few times a week, or a slightly longer bit once a week?

I’m touched by how many of you have already helped me out with this. Thank you all.

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Once upon a time there was a successful and critically-beloved comic book called Fables that spun off one of its central characters into his own title, Jack of Fables. It took a while for it to find its footing, but when it did it was fun and smart in a way distinct from its parent title. (Sort of the way the best seasons of Angel stood on their own as something distinct from Buffy.)

See, the original Fables had laid claim to all the fictional and mythical characters there have ever been, so for Jack of Fables author Bill Willingham had to find a new angle. Jack of Fables became the story of old, discarded myths, ones from American folklore that no one remembered or cared about anymore. It was the story of those forgotten fables and their conflict with a newly invented race of supernatural beings called the Literals: embodiments of literary concepts like the Pathetic Fallacy, Deus Ex Machina, and various genres.

All this was great fun through issue 35, when in a major crossover with the original Fables Willingham wrapped up the Jack of Fables tale beautifully, bringing everything to a satisfying climax. Jack of Fables finished its funny, engaging side journey there.

Except it didn’t. Jack of Fables kept plugging along for another fifteen issues, coming to an actual end only with the run collected in this final trade paperback The End.

Willingham can be forgiven for trying to extend the title past its epic climax, I suppose. He’d already done it once, successfully, with the mothership Fables itself. That book had its major showdown with its primary villain in issue #75, and Willingham invented a new villain and kept plugging, currently at issue #107 and counting.

But it became clear pretty quickly that Jack of Fables was going nowhere. Willingham even sidelined the namesake Jack completely for issues at a time and tried to tell stories about his heroic son Jack Frost. I don’t think his heart was in it.

So in The End he brings the whole title crashing down, and the way he does it, that I have a harder time forgiving. He engineers a final battle among all these characters he’s invited us to like over the years, and every single one of them dies.

“Those sick bastards went for the Shakespearean ending,” comments narrator-Jack.

But the Shakespearean ending (of Hamlet, say) is set in motion by characters’ inner drives, and when it’s over it feels as inevitable as a geometry proof. The ending of Jack of Fables happens because of really unconvincing meddling by outside forces, and, according to Willingham himself, was deliberately sprung on readers as a surprise they shouldn’t have seen coming.

A messenger robot comes to entreat Jack Frost to fight original-flavor-Jack, who’s been a dragon for several issues. Who sent the messenger? We never learn. A bird spirit visits trickster Raven to draw him into the conflict, along with all the other Jack of Fables fable menagerie.

“Great bird spirit!” Raven cries on the point of death. “Why? Why did you lead us into this death trap?”

“No particular reason,” says the bird spirit. “I thought it’d be funny.”

If it were funny I wouldn’t have so much of a problem with it. Funny covers a lot of flaws. Except it isn’t funny.

Willingham says Jack of Fables wasn’t canceled because of poor sales numbers. He says this is the ending he wanted. But writing “and then everybody died” just seems lazy, and unfair to fans you’ve asked to invest their interest and care inthis world and characters.

This was a series that gave us a deus ex machina as the resolution to its big conflict back in issue #35, and sold the hell out of it. I not only accepted it, I loved it. Jack of Fables, and Willingham, were capable of much better than this.

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