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I’ve wondered what Joe Sacco was doing with himself recently. He hasn’t published a major work since Safe Area Gorazde in 2000, and not even any new minor work since The Fixer in 2003. Well, now I know: for the last eight years he’s been working on Footnotes in Gaza, the most important comic of 2009 or 2010. (Depending on how you count it. It’s listed with a publication date of December 2009, but I’ve only seen it in stores beginning two weeks ago.)

Back in 2002, during the lead-up to the Iraq war and in its earliest days, Joe Sacco was in the southernmost part of Gaza, close to the Egyptian border, interviewing survivors of two events from the war between Israel and Egypt in 1956. One of these, as reported by survivors, was a simple massacre: many of the men in a town and adjoining refugee camp were lined up and shot. The second is more complicated. Israeli soldiers gathered all the men in a second town and refugee camp and selected those they thought were fighting for Egypt to be bussed to a prison. During the course of the day some men were shot for not following orders or beaten to death.

Interwoven with these accounts are Sacco’s observations of life in Gaza as he travels around those refugee camps conducting interviews with old survivors. It’s a sad, cramped place whose residents are not only angry at Israel, for shooting at them and bulldozing their homes, but also at the Palestinian Authority, for selling them out, and often at Hamas and other militants for attracting Israeli guns, tanks, and rockets to their neighborhoods. (2002, remember, was considerably before the Bush administration egged the Palestinian Authority into the armed conflict with Hamas that lost them all control over Gaza.) We see the same neighborhoods in their 1956 incarnations, as fairly new UN refugee camps, and in their much more built-up and crowded 2002 aspects, filled with teenagers who have never lived in a normal place and have nothing to do but follow Sacco around and make trouble.

There is nothing intrinsically important about the two events that have drawn Sacco’s attention. They are two small war crimes in a 50-year war full of crimes on both sides. But consciously or not, by reconstructing events from eyewitness testimony Sacco echoes every Holocaust documentary since and most especially including Shoah. It is jarring to see young Jews, some of them surely child Holocaust survivors or the children of survivors, conducting roundups and lining up men against walls barely ten years after World War II.

There is no way a book like this could avoid being an accusation against the state of Israel, though Sacco does include un-cartooned interviews and documents in appendices to provide Israeli perspectives on the past and current events he depicts. And there is perhaps no way to recommend it as strongly as I would like to without taking part in that accusation. But my own reaction, for what it’s worth, was closest to the perspective of John Sayles’ Men with Guns: it’s true that there are two sides to any conflict, but they aren’t the two sides fighting, they are the men with guns and the people without. All young men grouped and trained to kill are monsters.

Preview here.

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I peered into my iTunes stats, wandered over to my CD shelves in the other room, and put together this list:

Top Tier:

Aimee Mann, Bachelor No. 2 (2000)
The National, Alligator (2005)
Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002)

Next Tier:

Mika, Life In Cartoon Motion (2007)
Brendan Benson, The Alternative To Love (2005)
Regina Spektor, Begin To Hope (2006)
The New Pornographers, Electric Version (2003)
The Weakerthans, Reconstruction Site (2003)
Josh Rouse, 1972 (2003)
Jenny Toomey, Tempting (2002)
Elliot Smith, Figure 8 (2000)

Obviously, this is no attempt at a definitive list. This list comprises soundtracks for love busy being born or busy dying and sounds that inspired me to sit down and figure out the chord changes or write new songs.

I remember the context in which I came to each. I first read about Aimee Mann, Josh Rouse, The New Pornographers, Mika, and The Weakerthans in reviews online. Todd at Sea Level Records (RIP) played Brendan Benson for me in the store, knowing my tastes. The National was urged on me by a friend who co-ran their label. Wilco was in heavy rotation on a portable CD player at the lake house as we recovered from a terrible party. Jenny Toomey, a record club among friends. Regina Spektor, burned to CD by my ex’s friend. Elliot Smith, “Baby Britain” on KCRW — I remember changing from the 110 to the 10, the Convention Center in view, as the quarter-note piano chords came on and picked up drums and bass.

I didn’t own an iPod until 2006, and I tended to load playlists instead of whole albums. Most of these I bought, on disc, in stores, and got into by leaving them in my car CD player. Mika is the only one that I never owned in physical form, and it’s the only work of music that I’ve gotten into as an album since I went (mostly) download.

It seems the case that I fall in love with music less now that it’s weightless and free. (I’ve started paying for downloads again in the form of a subscription to emusic and occasional purchases from Amazon. It works out to about 40 cents a track.  I’ll still torrent big sellers that I can’t find at emusic, and I sample liberally via the hype machine and other music blogs and friends’ mixes.) A physical boundary — one artist on a disc, the disc has to be in the car — helped me form a relationship with an artist. Sorting the wheat from the chaff of a given album helped me know what I loved as compared to just liked. It took more time and covered less ground, but it meant more to me.

I haven’t figured out what music means in my life now, but I’m pretty certain technology has changed it significantly. And while I’m prone to nostalgia, I don’t think it recommends (or will influence) any policy position.

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The field in the battle for a New York Senate seat became a little clearer Tuesday when Mortimer B. Zuckerman announced he would not join the race.

Mr. Zuckerman, chairman and publisher of the Daily News, said personal and professional reasons were behind his decision not to challenge Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand.

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If I run, the likely result would be a brutal and highly negative Democratic primary — a primary where the winner emerges weakened and the Republican strengthened.

I refuse to do anything that would help Republicans win a Senate seat in New York, and give the Senate majority to the Republicans.

It only makes sense, therefore, to pen a bitter op-ed in the nation’s leading newspaper that takes as many shots as possible at the current Democratic officeholder and the state Democratic party. Nothing says “I refuse to do anything that would help Republicans win a Senate seat in New York” better than, oh:

…The party bosses who tried to intimidate me so that I wouldn’t even think about running against Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who had been appointed to the seat by Gov. David A. Paterson, are the same people responsible for putting Democratic control of the Senate at risk… Too few in the Democratic Party are really willing to break with orthodoxy to meet these challenges. …Voting for health care legislation that imposes billions in new taxes on New Yorkers and restricts federal financing for abortions is not good for the people of this state. Voting against critical funds necessary to ensure the survival of the financial services industry — the economic backbone of this state — is not good for the people of New York.

Who could be so delusional as to think that standing up for banks and stopping health care reform is Democrats’ best chance for retaining the Senate in November?

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The cost of pollution and other damage to the natural environment caused by the world’s biggest companies would wipe out more than one-third of their profits if they were held financially accountable, a major unpublished study for the United Nations has found.

The primary reaction is supposed to be shock that these externalities add up to so much, I suppose. And it is shocking. But anyone with a passing knowledge of the current relationships between business and government in America and China, to take two highly important examples, has to have a sinking feeling in his heart.

“It’s going to be a significant proportion of a lot of companies’ profit margins,” Mattison told the Guardian. “Whether they actually have to pay for these costs will be determined by the appetite for policy makers to enforce the ‘polluter pays’ principle.”

For that, taken collectively they have the appetite of a single anorexic sparrow.

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I didn’t think so much of the last Warren Ellis alternate sci-fi history I wrote about, Ministry of Space, so I’m happy to report that the new collected trade paperback of Ignition City is a whole lot better. Where Ministry of Space let its business be telling its alternate sci-fi history, Ignition City leaves that alternate history in the background to tell a character-based story.

This time it’s the mid-1950s, and the people of Earth have had regular flights into space and contact with aliens from Mars and Venus for years. That contact hasn’t gone so well, though, so all the governments of Earth have one by one suspended space flight, leaving only one spaceport operating, a government-free island called Ignition City. There live the inveterate spaceboys and spacegirls who went up in the early days and can’t get anyone to take them back—and there’s where Mary Raven, a young spacegirl herself, has to go to reclaim her just-deceased father’s things. It’s a straightforward, hoary tale of a new sheriff coming to spacetown, but well told.

No previews, but you can see samples of the artwork at the Flickr page.

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I assume that when we were all waiting for it before (around Feb. 8, remember), that probably had to do with this bit:

…just before she was due to return to court to seek a final protective order, the woman got a phone call from the governor, according to her lawyer. She failed to appear for her next hearing on Feb. 8, and as a result her case was dismissed.

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He said that he had hit a wall after working on Up In The Air for five years (this was part of a no-longer-subtle series of digs at writer Sheldon Turner, with whom he’s been forced to share credit and stage time by a WGA arbitration panel). He ran into Judd Apatow at the Santa Barbara Film Festival and asked him for advice.

Apatow said, “Write the ending. Because, then, theoretically, you’re done.”

And that was how Reitman did it (though pace Apatow he wasn’t immediately done.) He figured out the ending, and that let him go back and charge through things like the 20-page wedding scene. He knew where he had to go.

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And it is awesome.

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