Hawkeye #22

Time marches on. Looking back on the last four years of domestic politics what jumps out is the failure of the Obama presidency, coupled with a complete failure on the right to put forward any coherent counter narrative other than the eternal virtue of rapacious greed.

Hence, we are left with a failed political system. There are no heroes in this world. The main players are corrupt and untrustworthy. The good that is being accomplished is being done at the local level. Bigger is not better; small is beautiful. We see this reflected now in comic books with the rise of the anti-hero and the proliferation of female champions. A title that reflected this shift if not paved its way was Hawkeye, by writer Matt Fraction and artist David Aja.

Hawkeye, issues 1-22, featured longtime Avenger and marksman nonpareil Clint Barton as a regular guy who lives in a Brooklyn apartment building that happens to be the target of a hostile acquisition by Slavic thugs in track suits. Barton is a hunky, perpetually bruised and battered slacker who is joined by a female Hawkeye, Kate Bishop, a friend and protege.

Hawkeye meandered over four years moving to its own beat; it followed Bishop out to Los Angeles and became entirely devoted to her exploits there (Annie Wu provided art for the West Coast issues). The whole time Hawkeye emphasized community -- whether with the tenants (black and white, young and old) of Barton's Brooklyn tenement or Bishop's black gay neighbors in California. Real regular people, not Thor wielding his mighty hammer or Captain American tossing his mighty shield. And along the way Fraction even tossed in an Occupy Sandy story arc.

I posted in 2013 on Hawkeye #6 and said about the Zeitgeist-defining Invincible Iron Man, written by Matt Fraction with art by Salvador Larocca, that:

Hopefully when historians study the United States from the 2008 McCain-Obama presidential election campaign to the 2012 Romney-Obama presidential election campaign they will consult the amazing, consistently excellent, four-year Fraction and Larocca run in Invincible Iron Man. A lot would be revealed.

Now historians can study the Fraction-Aja-Hollingsworth Hawkeye to understand what went on from 2012-2015. To move forward we have to go back to the basics. To women and men. To people. The real heroes.

Below are 14 scans from the last issue, #22, of the Fraction-Aja run on Hawkeye. The track suits and a harlequin assassin are bested by the residents of the apartment building working together with the Hawkeyes, Clint and Kate. Community action:

Hippies vs. Punks: Shilpa Ray's Last Year's Savage (2015)

Shilpa Ray's Last Year's Savage, released this year, is filled with one great song after another. Of all of them I believe my favorite is "Moksha."

Shilpa Ray is a Brooklyn chanteuse who plays a harmonium; she is a mid-tempo Punk rocker who absolutely blows her better known Brooklyn peer, Sharon Van Etten, right off the Williamsburg block. Ray's lyrics are super-smart and edgy. I don't usually pay that close attention to words, but it is hard not to when they are in lines like "My dick’s bigger, my breasts are thicker, whatever power means" from the song "Johnny Thunders Fantasy Space Camp" or the following first verse from my favorite, "Moksha":

There’s no entry for the foreigners
I’m your native girl with my
Tail between my bleeding ass
And I’m off to the gates of heaven
I’ve been fakin’ my drunken stupor
And my absence from your real world
I’m just better than prostrating bitches
Who make believe they’re misunderstood

In the end, I'm a sound guy. And what is powerful in "Moksha," and throughout Last Year's Savage, is the droning pump organ, the walloping drums -- like a burlesque strip tease, or a rug on a clothes line being beaten with a kitchen broom -- and Ray's voice.

Yesterday walking home up the hill I tried to remember why I was thinking about the time my ex-wife's mother's live-in boyfriend, Chris was his name, horrified me with a tale about how he had stopped reading. At the time, I was a university undergraduate, probably 20 or 21. 

Chris was a nurse who worked in the same hospital as my mother-in-law. His story of how he had stopped reading went something like this: During college and for the first few years after he got out into the workaday world, he read fulsomely -- history, philosophy, the weighty fiction of the masters. But gradually his passion for the text diminished, and Chris found himself moving away from serious prose to lighter fare like pulp paperbacks. Eventually, as the years sped by, he even stopped reading Michael Crichton and Stephen King, settling for the local small-town evening paper. Finally, at the time of his confession to me in the mid-1980s, he had even stopped reading the evening paper. Capping off his narrative, he said something like, "Now all I can manage is reading a Time article while I am on the toilet."

This hit me like a thunderbolt. I lived to read; reading was my life. I was studying philosophy at the university, reading Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, et al. The idea that there would be a time when I no longer read struck me as a kind of living death, life as a zombie where I would go, like Chris the nurse did, to work every day and then come home and smoke a joint and maybe go out for a run. The thing of it is, what made me panic at the time and seared the moment in my memory to recall this past week 30 years later, is that I knew right then and there that Chris was telling me the truth.

And sure enough, I, basically, like Chris thirty years ago, don't read anymore. Certainly, I try to read the newspaper every day, and a few comic books on Saturday. But the days of sitting down for hours with my snout in The Critique of Pure Reason or Beyond Good and Evil are long gone.

And then I remembered why I remembered Chris' story -- because all that reading of the Western philosophers I did while in college has never left me. I think about it all the time; it informs how I look at the world.

And one of those ideas, gleaned from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, is that we can never completely know the future. The system is always open, must remain open. Any attempt to close the system and declare the end of history or the achievement of perfection is doomed to failure.

What the artist does is nibble at the outer edge of the timeline, the place where the present intersects with the future, where the atmosphere meets the void of space; she brings the future back to us (we, the consumers, the witnesses) and regurgitates it; we then consume it.

This is why it is essential to keep listening to new music. It is how rationality works. Shilpa Ray's Last Year's Savage, like Future's DS2, is pure ambrosia.

The Colt 45 Chronicle #37

Today is the first day of fall. The letter below, number 37 in a collection of letters written my first two years in New York City, chronicles an autumn night 24 years ago when my cousin was mugged in Brooklyn.

My cousin and I were close. We spent a lot of time together growing up, and we were in the same class at the University of California. When my wife and I moved from the West Coast back to New York City, he followed us out in a year. This created friction between me and my wife; she didn't particularly care for my cousin.

I include Rei Momo (1989), David Byrne's first true solo album, below because at the end of the letter I mention having seen him at the Roseland Ballroom. Byrne performed songs off Rei Momo. I didn't enjoy the show. He wore tight pants and did a lot of hip shimmying and ass shaking. I didn't cotton to the whole Brazilian worldbeat vibe. Byrne, as usual, was ahead of his time; as you can hear, it is a good album:

Autumn 1989

It's a Saturday night again and I've shunned social companionship in favor of sitting down here and tapping out a missive to you.  It was either go to the East Village with Ashley and Jessica to see some kind of avant-garde performance at the opening of a new record store or go down to Antony's and smoke some dope and maybe see a movie. I don't get to spend that much time by myself anymore. So whenever I get the chance I take it. It went like this: after I finished telling Antony that I'd have to take a rain check for tonight's festivities I hung up the phone (8:09 PM) and rushed down to the deli and got myself three Coors quarts (I have a quart of malt liquor stashed in the back of the fridge just in case it goes into overtime); came back upstairs; took off my coat (it's cold tonight, low 40s); slapped on some Sonic Youth; cracked the top off of the first bottle, and started my head to thinking.

Ashley has harvested three more of her plants. We've accumulated quite a store and it's all in Tupperware containers in the hall closet. With all the shit around, and with Ashley's new sobriety standards, I've found myself turning more and more to a joint when I'm hankering for a little solace. I'm swearing off the shit though. I don't like the way it makes me feel the next day, just like a stick in the mud.

I guess you know that Colin is now a resident of New York City -- Brooklyn, to be exact. He finally found a place to live last week; it's with a couple of women in their twenties; one's black and beautiful and the other's homely and corn-fed, from Kansas, or so he tells me. I talked to him on the phone today. He said he got mugged last night. He gets off work around 2:00 AM. He has a computer job for Citibank; his shift runs from 6:00 PM to 2:00 AM. He takes the R train into Brooklyn. After the train gets into Brooklyn it stops and an announcement is made to the passengers that that the train will not be going any further due to repair work on the track. Colin gets out of the train and walks up to street level. He's hungry so he finds an all-night diner and has something to eat. By the time he leaves it's 3:00 AM; he figures he'll take a little stroll and unwind a little after his meal. He starts walking up Flatbush Avenue; takes a right here; walks a few blocks; takes a left there; walks a couple of blocks and the next thing he knows he doesn't know where the fuck he is. The whole time he's telling me this over the phone I'm thinking to myself, "He doesn't know what kind of neighborhood he's in -- I know that parts of Flatbush are bad -- it's three o'clock in the fucking morning, and to make matters worse, he looks like a little sweetheart faerie -- what else does he want? Why not just carry a sign around his neck: BEAT ME! ROB ME!" When he realizes that he's lost, he starts hailing cabs. One or two pass, but they've got people in 'em. So he starts walking again. He makes a left; walks a mile or so, and then breaks right. He comes to a lit street corner and decides to wait there. He sees a cab coming from down the road and he steps out into the street to hail it, but it scoots right by him, somebody already in the backseat. He paces back and forth for a while. No cabs come. He decides to start walking again. He turns to walk down the street and sees someone walking towards him from about twenty feet off . He figures the best thing to do is to just lower his head and keep on walking. Right when he's about to pass this guy, the guy grabs him and smashes him up against a car and starts jabbing him in the ribs with something hard and sharp. The guy is Hispanic, Colin's height, and has a cloth wrapped around his face. He demands his wallet; says he's got a knife and he'll cut him if he doesn't give it up.

Colin asks him to go easy, tells him that he's scared and has a big coat on and can't get at the wallet. The guy keeps jabbing and demanding. Colin bargains, says he'll give him his cash but not his cards and billfold. The guy agrees. It's at that point that Colin gets a look at the guy's "blade." -- It's a socket wrench. He wonders if he should make a break for it. But the guy still has a hold of him and nobody's around. So he decides against it; he forks over twenty-two dollars instead. The guy is not satisfied. He rifles through the wallet but can't find anything. Colin has hold of half the billfold; he won't let go. The guy darts into the dark street night with his sharp socket wrench. Colin is left alone under the yellow shade of a street lamp.

Who else but Colin, huh? You've got to tip your cap.

Well shit, I'm doing more drinking than lettering at this point. I've got a good story lined up about a David Byrne show I went to see on Halloween with Ashley and some of her friends. I just don't have the stamina anymore. Pre-sobriety regulations I was as good as gold. I could drink and write with up to four quarts of malt liquor under my belt. Now I down two-and-a-half quarts of Coors and I'm finished.