Citizen Conn

by Michael Chabon

Bless Michael Chabon for using his fiction writing to address historical wrongs in the comic book industry.  His excellent novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay examined the injustices heaped on Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster through the lens of Kavalier and Clay, a pair of Jewish boys who created The Escapist, the world's best-known superhero.  They were cheated out of their rights to the character, just as were Superman's creators. 

Now, in Citizen Conn, a short story published in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago (I've fallen horribly behind in my magazine reading), Chabon turns his gaze on Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

The story is narrated by the female rabbi at Zion Pointe, an assisted living centre for 'independent' seniors.  Resident in the complex, and suffering from incurable bone cancer, is Mort Feather, an elderly artist.  The rabbi doesn't know who Feather is, but her husband, a man who has never abandoned his love for old comics, does.  Feather is the creator of a number of Golden Age characters who he then, with his partner Artie Conn, revived in the Silver Age to great success and acclaim. 

Conn continues to visit Feather, who refuses to see him.  Slowly we learn that after Conn signed away rights to their characters in exchange for a pay-out in the late 60s, the partnership between the two began to fail, with Feather eventually being fired from Nova Publications, and Conn being recognized sole creator of much of their joint work.  Sound familiar?

The story follows Conn's attempts to reconcile with Feather before his disease takes him, and is quite touching.  It's a shame that the person Conn was based on never made the same attempt. 

Chabon is an excellent writer, and I appreciate his work in dramatizing the stories of an industry I dislike as strongly as I appreciate some of the work it has produced.  I would love to know what Stan Lee thought, if he read this.

Wholphin No. 5

Edited by Brent Hoff

I've basically given up on movies, but Wholphin gives me so much hope for the genre of short films and documentaries.  Maybe I'm just losing all vestiges of an attention span for visual media, which makes sense since we're kind of heading that way as a culture, or maybe it's just that the selection process for these DVD magazines are just that good...

Anyway, issue five has some great stuff in it.  'Death to the Tinman' is a fantastic short about a man who keeps losing body parts, to get them replaced by a mad scientist friend.  This plays havoc on his relationship, especially when his soul- and mind-less body gets reattached as a meat puppet, and his girlfriend decides she prefers its company.

The highpoint of the disc is 'House Hunting' a short film based on a Michael Chabon short story, concerning a young couple who are shopping for their first home, and unstable real estate agent that is showing them around (played brilliantly by the guy who played McManus in Oz).

On the documentary side, there is 'One Day With the SLA', showing what life is like among the Sudan Liberation Army in Darfur.  'Drunk Bees' is about just what it sounds like, and 'Piece by Piece' profiles championship Rubik's Cube players.

'American Outrage' and 'Chonto' were on the Best Of disc I've already watched.  This disc also has two creepy videos - 'Madame Tutli-Putli', an animated short, and 'Echos Der Buchrucken', which is a very disturbing science fiction/surrealist short.

The DVD menu videos include a guy throwing a balsa-wood plane off a cliff, a film of a drum set getting shot to hell by two men with guns (I love the sound when you shoot a cymbal), and a video showing the ability of the man who invented the right-click mouse to hang on to the side of a tree using one arm and one leg.

Good stuff, all around.

McSweeney's 36

Edited by Dave Eggers

You have to hand it to McSweeney's and their amazing ability to design unique objects that both titillate and perhaps repulse people.  McSweeney's 36 came in the form of a box, decorated to look like a man's head, and full of small books, pamphlets, postcards, and a long roll of uncut fortune cookie fortunes.

As with any good issue of McSweeneys', there is a lot of to love in this box.  Michael Chabon's Fountain City and Wajahat Ali's marvelous play The Domestic Crusaders have already been discussed on this blog, but there's plenty more to talk about in this box.

The pamphlets, postcards, and fortunes are pleasing filler, but the core of the box lies in the different books, some of which I found more enjoyable than others.

The 'Bicycle Built For Two' screenplay by Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington was pretty nonsensical, which would have been fine had I found it funnier than it was (it's supposed to be a film for Mike Meyers and Dana Carvey about baseball players who ride a tandem bicycle).  Likewise, I found Jack Pendarvis's 'Jungle Geronimo in Gay Paree', a parody of condensed novels which takes on the jungle pulp genre to be kind of silly and unnecessary. 

Where this issue really started to work for me was in the short story book, which included pieces that were quite good.  Ismet Prcic's 'At The National Theatre' was a little obscure, but I loved John Brandon's story 'The Occurrences', which is told by a young boy who lives in a Florida town that appears to be plagued by alien abductions (they often take the whole roof of the house as they suck people up).  It was funny and bizarre, and definitely makes me interested in his novels.  In the same book are the stories 'Dog Bites' by Ricardo Nulla, an interesting look at a boy who has a 'syndrome', and Colm Toibin's 'The Street', a tale of love between illegal Pakistani migrant workers in Barcelona.  Increasingly, one of my favourite things to read in an issue of McSweeney's is the letters section, and this one did not disappoint.

Included in the box is a preview of the recently released newest volume in the Voice of Witness series, which deals with people who have acted in resistance to the Burmese junta.  The story here, told by Ma Su Mon is powerful and frank.

The last item that really caught my attention was the first chapter in Adam Levine's massive novel 'The Instructions'.  It's told by a disturbed boy in a special education program helpfully called 'The Cage', and it is quite funny and perceptive.

In all, another excellent McSweeney's.

Fountain City

by Michael Chabon

Hidden somewhere deep inside me is the seed of a failed author.  I used to think that there were tons of novel or short story ideas growing like mushrooms somewhere hidden within my mind, and with age and very little perseverance, came the realization that I had not the slightest clue how one would go about becoming a writer.

The four chapters of Fountain City, released as part of the latest issue of McSweeney's, help illustrate the difficulties of the novelist's craft, and the lasting frustration it can hold for a writer.  Chabon worked on Fountain City for years before finally abandoning it as unworkable.  In this slim book, he has resurrected the first four chapters, and heavily annotated them with observations and reminiscences of his intent, antecedents, influences, and mistakes.  The work itself definitely had potential, but it quickly becomes clear that Chabon did not know where to take it, or at least, how to effectively get it where he wanted it to go.  The annotations provide valuable insight into his mindspace, and into the craft of writing in general.

I find it interesting that while I read about Harry Klezmer's search for a home, and lust for travel, I was engaged, but when I got to the end, I had no interest in continuing to read the story.  That, more than anything, is proof that Chabon made the right call in giving up on this book.  I am glad, however, that he has, like a terminal patient's physician in a teaching hospital, turned it into a good opportunity for others to learn.