ZAPstract - art that zaps!

All posts by Rey Armenteros

Fake! Copy! Stupid! (1)

27 February 2022 by Rey Armenteros

For us, it was about which ones had killing and which ones didn’t. If it didn’t have killing, it was the type of story we were not interested in.

We were boys, and we were aware of the growing movement against violence on television. It started with the cartoons. Adults were saying how violent kid’s cartoons were. We would laugh, because they were not violent enough. You could have heroes and villains beating up on each other, but there was to be no blood or actual wounding, and absolutely no killing. In cartoons like G.I.Joe, soldiers were firing at each other with all forms of ordinance, never hitting a single person, as if bullets and rockets were only made for vehicles and structures. The word we used for this sort of unrealistic treatment of action stories was “fake.”

If the movie in question were not fake, it was “realistic.”

The A-Team was another fake program we watched. A helicopter was hit with a rocket launcher, and after it slammed down a cliffside in a cascade of fire, the two villains were seen stumbling out, asking, “You okay, Bob?” As if the bad guys mattered anyway! And the funny thing was that no matter how much we hated that program, we were there to watch it every week.

There was nothing else! Our world was limited by the occasional good movie and whatever we could get on regular TV. And we were only interested in things that had killing. This didn’t include slasher movies or things with genocide or any real kind of killing. We just liked action movies of all varieties, and if action included weapons, they had to show some kind of repercussion. It was basic mathematics. If bullets were flying through the air, some people would be there to stop them.

If you asked us back then, killing started with Star Wars, but that was not true. On television a couple years before Star Wars, we had reruns of old TV shows and movies, like the original Star Trek. When Captain Kirk killed a monster, we were happy in knowing that monster would never get up again. If we watched a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western, the shooting of gunslingers on the other side of the fence of right and wrong was appropriate and to be expected.

The first movie I recalled watching in the theater was one of the old Sinbad movies. In time, we would have watched three such Sinbad movies. The formula was similar throughout. At some point in the adventure, after the quest was established, Sinbad’s voyage replete with sea dangers and some form of deceit would take them to a land where they needed to disembark. He usually left most of the crew on the ship, but he would take four of his heroic seamen to accompany him and the interested party that had hired them. They would lose one guy to some colossal monster, and then another guy to something else. Sinbad and the last two would encounter the main monster in the end of the movie, and a third guy would die. His closest friend usually survived alongside Sinbad and the people who had hired him.

The play-by-play results was important because it dictated the same tune in most other stories of the same type. The good guy never died in these things, and he usually had a friend that almost always made it out alive. But the other guys were fodder. To the writers of such stories, the systematic deaths of good guy underlings was certainly to show the danger involved in their endeavors. That is how writers were thinking back then; you have to show that there is an actual stake in the story, or the audience was not going to get emotionally involved. That is not at all how kids look at it. To us, it meant that if there were monsters, you had to have deaths. It almost sounds like these two things mean the same thing, but they don’t. For the storytellers, they need to quantify the deadliness of such adventures by including a scene to show just how dangerous the bad guys were; for boys hungry for logical consequences, such adventures exacted a price, and the underlings were there to complete the sacrifice.

It created a pattern that was hard to shy away from.

We eventually started noticing that Hollywood movies were starting to kill the best friend of the hero more and more often. Again, this was a consideration for script writers to really raise the stakes and have the hero get back at the bastards that had done that to his chum. For us, we would just roll our eyes to another predictable consequence of tumbling with the bad guys. We knew it was coming as soon as the story started to give you more scenes with the best friend, who you were finding out was a really good guy. Naturally!

I realize that I’m speaking for my brother, and if I were to ask him today what thoughts he might have had back then, it would likely be different. But in our conversations, this is what I gleaned from our concerns, and what was uncanny, when I think back on it was that our critical criteria paralleled each other. We were always on the same page, although I would say that at some point, he became more critical about lapses in “reality” than I was. There were times I would let things go because everything else seemed to come together so well, and he would be crucially dismissive of anything that had even an inkling of “fake.”

As far-fetched as the adventure of Star Wars was, it was still possible to have done all those things, or so we reasoned as boys. Star Wars never seemed to delve into the superheroic. The numbers of stormtroopers were manageable. And we loved that movie so much that at that early point as amateur critics, we allowed for any small errors of judgment.

NEXT: Defining the Terms

Leave a comment | Categories: Essay, Memoir, ReyA' | Tags: ,

Essay versus Poem

13 February 2022 by Rey Armenteros

What’s the difference?

Oh, there’s a difference!

You type one and hand write the other one.

One should come out with facility, almost like thought, and the other is to be built like an object of sound structure and appealing form.

If one is your involuntary signature, your handwriting, as they say, the other is your thoughtfully-conceived drawing technique.

One is hit or miss, and the other one is hit when enough time has passed between each episode of shaping and deliberating and searching and toiling.

A successful essay is a thought on a line, unbroken and moving on (and not necessarily forward), and anything else attached to it, such as a clever rhythm or sound structure is nothing more than a bonus.

A successful poem is a thought on a form that may at first seem to be on a line, that takes any shape, disposition, or length within a conceived structure, and which may allow any bonus to be added to it for the benefit of added fascination but at the expense of precluding any possibility of attaining perfection.

Leave a comment | Categories: A Thought, Essay, Fragment, Poetry, ReyA', Writing Process | Tags: , , , ,

Eleven Approaches for a New Art

30 January 2022 by Rey Armenteros

Approach and method are used interchangeably, but I view them differently. To me, approach is how you start a project. It could also mean how you restart a project or some creative task. It is the course you are about to take. It is the way you enter something.

I exclusively use acrylics and brushes in all my work, but I have eleven approaches. I have given each approach a name. Pure Drawing is when I use bone black acrylic, and with brush in hand, I draw in the method of a graphite, charcoal, or ink wash drawing. It is the most elementary approach because it usually involves nothing more than one color on a gray or white ground. When I use a gray ground, I may use white and other grays to give the tones more depth.

Pseudo-Watercolor/Tempera is the general approach I take to painting. It is more like watercolor if I start with a transparent approach, and it is more like tempera if with an opaque one.

If I use carbon black in the spirit of ink drawings or woodblock prints, I call this approach Ink Line Concoctions. I call it this strange name because I start with a white ground, and I do no preliminary drawing under it. In essence, I am inventing things as they come using the black lines to create these improvisations. It is my excuse to satisfy my penchant for seeking out pure black lines on an immaculate white surface. This one is about nostalgia, a look back at my old ink drawing days, and it becomes a sudden urge to work in that way again.

Flat Coloring is when I take opaque colors and draw the forms of what I am trying to depict at the same time that I am coloring with them. When I’ve covered all the ground with one or two dozen of these colors, I wait until they dry and then delineate the forms with carbon black. I then go back to the opaque colors to shape the figures and objects therein, and then I return to the black lines to reinstate contours. I may go back and forth several times before it is finished. I follow this strange approach in the hopes of getting the flat coloring you can get in printing. I like the flat clean look of mass-produced things, and this is my way of attempting something similar.

In Linear Gray Painting, I work with carbon black and titanium white on a gray surface in a specific way. I put down fluid mixtures of the carbon black with a liner brush and then open into these areas with titanium white on a dagger brush, using a spiraling motion. Like this, I create swirling gray forms onto the flat gray ground. The paint may insinuate forms within the forms, and I seal these with black lines. Though the linear component alludes to drawing, I view this as painting.

When I doodle with a ballpoint pen on a scrap sheet of paper, I take one long line and spiral in forms that create figures. This is difficult to do in paint, even when it is fluid because the line usually breaks before you can finish. (Basically, you run out of paint.) I have come up with a way of extending the line. I lay down titanium white on the white ground, and I draw a line of any color on this while it is wet. If I get my amounts of wet white and wet color just right, I can spiral as much as I want on one dip of a liner brush. I finish such drawings with a contour line in carbon black around all pertinent objects in the image. This I call White Wet Drawing, and I have a dry version where I use a fan brush and take up the line with the next prong of hairs without having to recharge my brush with color for at least a couple of minutes. Actually, I have a third version where I use a liner brush with one hand and a large round brush loaded with liquid color with the other, and the larger brush touches the liner where the hair meets the ferule, essentially loading it, allowing me to never lift the liner up until the long doodle is done.

One-Stroke is something I picked up from craft painting books. In One-Stroke, you can give a modeled look that goes from dark to light. The trick is that sometimes it takes dozens of tries until you get that perfect one stroke. This is what I do when I look for a smooth graduated transition on limbs, objects, continuous surfaces, and nondescript things that need tangibility. I also call this wet-wet, as an abbreviation for the popular technique named variously as wet-into-wet, wet-in-wet. and wet-on-wet.

Wash-on-Stroke is my play with wet-into-wet, though the techniques themselves have nothing in common. Actually, this is what they call a resist, so it might be more to the point to call it resist-over-textured stroke. I don’t know, but I first make strokes with heavy body paint or thick gel medium. I let that dry. With color thinned to watercolor consistency, I lay over just the right amount of watery color so that the color gathers in the crevices of the strokes, forming the appearance of lines and textures you had not seen before. This one is like watching a photo appear into existence, but you have to get the right amount of water, or it won’t work. Too much water, and the colors go everywhere. Too little, and there won’t be anything to see. Trial and error is commonly needed for this to really work like magic. After the forms and figures come to life, you almost always have to go back and use other techniques to clarify these forms.

I have a rough, painterly wet-wet approach that I call Lurid Monsters. It is about unchecked brushstrokes and ugly colors, smearing together so that everything looks hairy like a werewolf under spotlights of red and green (or other color combinations).

The last two approaches are the extras, and I use them but rarely. The first one I call Extrusion and Spatula. With one hand, I extrude color or medium from a bottle or eye dropper or such vessel, and with the other, I commandeer a standard kitchen spatula of the silicone variety to cake on these paint applications. This one takes a lot of push and pull, where every layer either gets closer to what you want or farther. It’s like a game of keeping your balance on a bucking bronco, and it is not until you are sitting straight and erect in the saddle for that one instant that you need to recognize that you are finished and stop instantly or suffer more and more consequences.

And Constructed Impasto is my way of getting an unnaturally deep impasto effect with acrylic skins attached to the painting. Acrylic paints can’t give a painter a satisfactory impasto. So, I use dried acrylic paint skins to place together using an acrylic medium. This can create a contorted — almost thorny — texture on which I paint thick amounts of paint that are mixed with a gel medium. The results almost always look abstract, no matter what I do.

Each approach is only the beginning of a drawing or painting. In the middle of an image, I may switch gears and try something different. For example, I may take a painting that I started with Linear Gray and add color glazes on top of it to enliven something that might not be working at the moment.

It may sound eccentric to number and name eleven approaches. I need the variety in my work, but at the same time I have to organize it in my mind so that when I work, I don’t just pull out random occurrences based on whimsy.

Leave a comment | Categories: Art Process, ReyA' | Tags:

Rib Cage (first published in BlazeVOX)

16 January 2022 by Rey Armenteros

The bell, the hawk, and the moon…

Lightning outlined the way for the traveler. The traveler was on the pillow of the floating world. With a brush in one hand and a fan in the same hand, the traveler was going to make something of the tremors that originated at the epicenter of everything. Absorbing the calm of his spinal column, sending his mind to meet this force, but… But he halts. A new resting place is a sojourn in the country, as they say in that almost forgotten place, the land of his birth. But he tarries. Too long, it seems. And soon even this new place becomes his home. Time. A monument of time caught him looking back into the window from that side of his home he now leaves to dust and disuse. At the sound of his voice, a butterfly flutters away, and another catastrophe marks a decision that will be finalized on the horizon. This, as idea prone to reality, forces him to abandon his place to live life again engrossed by a constantly shifting picture plane. On and on, but the traveler stops in front of ancient ruins. What buildings there were turned into the ossified evidence of wooly mammoths. Look. Gossamer spider residue swings from an obliging exit space long ago shaped like an arch, and he goes inside, soon hungry and tarrying once again but for far too long, and then lost to all memory.

Leave a comment | Categories: A Poem, Poetry, ReyA' | Tags: , , ,

Prehistory (first published in BlazeVOX)

09 January 2022 by Rey Armenteros

The drawback behind choosing silence is: no one will ever know. (Silence as it is preceded by blank page or title and nothing more than an ellipse.)

Those that commit suicide have always carried the responsibility. The suicide note is a necessity. The exposition in such notes reveals a reason, identifies it as what it is, as opposed to an accident or murder, and provides testimony for the civil codes in the law. The suicide note shows those on this side what compels the suicide to climb to the edge and decide to release all connections. It is the only proof that bears witness to that line of thought. Potential suicides recognize that it is the proper thing to do. Life has no meaning. We know this. We are the ones that provide the meaning, and it just isn’t fair.

At least we have one way out that is all our own doing. The potential suicide studies this and somehow loses the meaning established by self and sundry.

A new line of thought has been developing. Recently, potential suicides have found meaning in identifying themselves as writers of suicide notes, never graduating into full-fledged suicides. They are notorious for writing the words without doing the deed. We know them well. They have gone by many names. Eventually, after the world forms new layers of ice and then loses them, eradicating all previous civilizations and erasing all past accomplishments, they will come to be known as poets.

Leave a comment | Categories: A Poem, Poetry, ReyA' | Tags: , , ,

Anthony Trollope’s Bittersweet Gem

26 December 2021 by Rey Armenteros

The Warden by Anthony Trollope was on a shelf in a used bookstore, years back when I was living in another country and not expecting to find such a thing. It was the only used bookstore I knew that had a small section for English books. I had been curious about Trollope, but I had all this other stuff to read and decided not to get it then. I might have thought about Trollope from time to time since then; he was one of those authors I felt I was going to read one day.

Then, I got into a shopping binge a few years back. I would go through cycles of themes and purchase everything I could that I felt was related to that theme. It started with art books. My collection of art books at the time was pathetic, and I was trying to remedy that. I did remedy it and went on to other things. I kid you not that every type of literature that could occur to me went through a reassessment, and I found that I had to own some of it, regardless if I had read it before or planned on reading it soon. I found The Warden online and bought it and two other Trollope books and stored them somewhere when the shipment came in. These were books filed away for future use.

I hardly ever thought about Trollope again, you see, because it was like owning something and concluding that you had taken care of that problem, even if you had never interacted with that thing that you were owning. Trollope came up again recently, and I had almost forgotten the original story that had splashed a spot of color on him as an author, giving him the one characteristic that I had happened to know of him.

I think every author of note has a one- or two-sentence biographical summary that places that person in their own light. With Trollope, it was the fact that he followed a daily regimen of writing so punctilious, he was almost a machine about it. He had a full-time job outside of writing and was only writing a set amount of time per day. When the time came to stop so that he could go to his place of employment, he would put down his pen, even if he were in mid-sentence.

Reading him now, after pocketing the first few chapters of The Warden into my realm of experience, I started to quickly conclude that he was indeed a 19th Century author, and I knew that I was expecting this. No surprise really. The story was set up with a thorough introduction in the first chapter of the setting for our little story, followed by a complete introduction of the main character and his relatives, acquaintances, and their relationships. The situation of a certain several hundred-year old will was then explained with some detail, because as we would soon learn, it was going to affect the state of affairs for our main character in his countryside concern.

If we were to look at it with contemporary eyes, this is the sort of opening that would prevent the casual reader from reading any further. But again, I was already expecting something like that. And as I predicted, the story develops in earnest afterward.

By the fifth chapter or so, I was under the impression that certain parts of this book needed some cleaning up, and it reminded me of that one characteristic about Trollope, the writer, that made me wonder if it weren’t for this characteristic that we were getting longer portions of narrative than were necessary. Trollope’s particularities were showing through, as I was observing it. His method of starting his writing at a certain time of the morning and then ceasing the very minute he was to get on with his actual employment seems like that type of quirk that might pique the interest of a public today, but it did nothing of the kind during his time. When his writing process was released to the world, he was criticized as the type of artist that does not work from inspiration. He was viewed as an automaton. How could the author of works feel any love for them if he was going to subject them to such a strict mode of operation?

In the light of his actual job with the postal department, he couldn’t have done it any other way. How could he have ever accomplished the career he had in writing otherwise? If working in the schedule of an automaton were the only way he could get his work done, the so be it. As an employee with a full-time responsibility, he had to do it that way if he was going to accomplish anything in writing!

But I was starting to see that following a tight schedule, and consequently following an impetus in your writing (only ever going forward) might have its drawbacks. If he picked up his pen at five in the morning and put it down in the middle of a progressing thought at 6:30, it tells me that he was writing all previous thoughts on the matter of his book without sudden reflection or change of mind. I have no doubt he edited his work afterward, but if he could have written without so much timed impetus, he might have paused a little more and maybe done away with some of the longer meanderings. I was not standing over his shoulder witnessing any of his scribbling adventures, and yet you can still feel that punctiliousness hanging over the written words that not even a dozen or a score of revisions could reshape.

So far, everything I have accused Trollope of comes from feelings and from knowing one or two things about him. It is another way of saying it comes from prejudice. If the prose in his book seems stiff to a latter-day ear, it is because of the times that he lived in more so than his characteristics as a person. But after I went past the halfway point of the book, I discovered that he was actually shaping his novel into a very precise narrative that had a series of actions that brought us to an inevitable conclusion. In fact, each action was a chapter. One chapter focuses on one thing. Contrary to my initial assumption, there is no added fat here. Regardless of how his narrative voice sounds to a 21st Century ear, each chapter in the book has a purpose. The chapter titles give a hint as to what that purpose is. Even if the writing is a little more verbose than I like it, the form of the book is elegant. When I recognized that, I found myself responding to this elegance as I was reading, and every time I put the book down, I reflected on this quality in his work, taking it in as one would any worthwhile work of art.

The chapters had titles that previewed the event of the chapter. There was no surprise as things were happening, but when the warden resigns, which is delineated as such in a later chapter titled, “The Warden Resigns,” I was reading this chapter wondering if the letter of resignation he wrote was ever going to make it to the bishop to finalize the matter. It was my way of forecasting changes to fate, giving the warden a chance to not resign on the technicality of a letter ever making it to its destination, even if the title gave away the results of actions, all along. And when I finished that chapter, I still thought there was a chance that the warden would keep his position.

That elegance formed ideas in my mind, inviting me to go back to the earlier parts of the book and finding the machinery behind the story, how everything in the plot was set in motion due to the inquiries of a close friend of the warden. Because of these inquiries, John Bold begins an investigation that questions if such a large portion of the monies distributed by the will should be going to fund the warden’s income.

After his inquiry is presented, which involved lawyers on both sides and every character in the book being affected by the machinery started by this, the impetus was unstoppable. Even when John Bold drew back the lawsuit, he couldn’t have erased the nasty newspaper articles written about his friend, the warden. And there was still the question of who was going to pay the fees for all these lawyers.

When the warden wishes to resign because he does not feel comfortable taking the money from the trustees of the will, he is impeded by his closest relations. Finally, the warden takes a trip to London and meets the Attorney General of England, and even the highest-appointed attorney in the land cannot answer his question: does the money that has been coming to warden from the will these past twelve years rightfully belongs to him or not? The attorney general admits that old wills such as the one linked to his hospital cannot make provisions for the changing times, and they were difficult to make progressive. It was telling the warden that there were no easy answers, and it was telling the readers that there were no real bad guys.

Of course, the warden’s son-in-law archdeacon was a type of antagonist to the warden, even if he were looking after the warden’s best interests, but doing so by bullying him into taking the actions the archdeacon felt were proper. But in such real life matters, the archdeacon really couldn’t be blamed. And Bold was only doing what he thought was right, even if it put a severe strain on his friendship with the warden. It was Bold’s initial action that made every action thereafter come to life, and through every step, through every chapter, there were motions to counter this impetus, but they either had no effect or just enough effect to give a contradictory result. And yet the book never reads as an exercise in frustration. It is more of a real look at a particular system of society tinged with a bit of sadness for the warden and the people closest to him, including John Bold himself.

All of my thoughts so far came from an unfinished reading of the book. I was not far from the end when I put them down to express these observations.

And now that I’ve finished it, I can look back at what I have said about it and see where I went wrong. Actually, I was right in thinking that everything came to pass because of that one action that John Bold commits close to the beginning of the book. And yet, I was wrong that the letter of resignation did not exactly amount to the resignation itself. When next we hear about it, the bishop has already accepted the resignation, and the wheels of change (for the life of the former warden) had been kicked into motion.

There is a Christian lesson at the end of it. The twelve men that were supporting the lawsuit against Mr. Harding (the warden) had assumed that since he was leaving, they would be getting a much larger sum in their yearly incomes. The view of the book was that these old men who did not have that many years left to live were getting rid of a friendship for the interest of money. Not only would they not be getting the money that allegedly belonged to them, they were no longer going to receive Mr. Harding’s small weekly allotment he was giving them when he was the warden. And they were now sad knowing that whoever took his place could not possibly be as kind as their former friend.

George Orwell held The Warden as a great achievement by Trollope, but he felt that though the archdeacon (Dr. Grantly) was to be held as the proper antagonist, that Trollope himself perhaps felt better about him than John Bold, who some could look at as a busybody, poking his nose into things that had nothing to do with him, all under the banner of righteousness.

I found that remark by Orwell when I was looking up this novel for something else that had drawn my attention. In one of the middle chapters, we learn of a novelist in the story who champions the poor and makes the well-placed and the rich look like the wicked leeches of society. Trollope takes up about a page or two to lambast this person, and I felt that he was targeting a real person. Immediately, I thought about Charles Dickens, and that is why I had to look it up. And I was right. Trollope’s sketch of Dickens was rendered with a very sharp file, and I thought that this was the conservative answer to someone who was looking for reform. Perhaps to our eyes, Dickens won that war a long time ago, since to the modern mind, we deplore the working conditions that used to be common in the factories and mines of old. I don’t know what Orwell’s opinion was about it (though I guess he sides with Dickens too). The Warden might be a critique of those Dickensian parts, and you can take whatever side you think is right.

But The Warden gave me a small gift as well. It is one of those moments in a book when something happens that you can’t stop thinking about. It is an unforgettable image of the warden performing for an audience of one. This warden, who so loved music and lived his life in the service of music, would sometimes play his cello in his imagination when it was not around to actually play. He would put his hands behind his back or under a table and draw the bow across the strings as if he were really playing while in conversation with someone that had no idea what he was doing. When he meets the all-important Attorney General of England to find out if he were entitled to the will’s money or not, the attorney general explains to him, after admitting that there is no answer to his question for such an old will, that the warden should no longer question the money because it was his to take by law. And he added that if he didn’t take the income, on what could he possibly live? Without the income, the warden would have to fall back on very limited means. And the warden, who had been playing his cello behind his back while he was coming up with his retort to the attorney general, brings it out and plays this imaginary instrument in front of this personage as he is explaining to him that he could no longer take the money and would need to resign, because his conscience could not allow it any other way, no matter how difficult it would make his life thereafter. The attorney general, who had had a long day as is typical for someone in that position, was struck dumb and wondered if the warden were losing his mind. But the warden himself was aware of what he was doing, and he recognized that this was his shining moment, playing his big performance that he was not going to regret no matter what life would have in store because of his decision.

Leave a comment | Categories: Books, Review | Tags: , ,

Arrived at the Bloody Streets of Paris!

12 December 2021 by Rey Armenteros

When I finish the book, the review inevitably becomes a different matter. The ending becomes a bit of a disappointment. We get served the cleanest of resolutions. Everything in the sordid story of Parisians having to deal with the German occupation has a sound reason for being there. What seemed like random events were actually carefully orchestrated links in a perfectly gift-wrapped story. Every strand is conscientiously considered on a web made by a spider called fat convenience.

Another way of saying this is that it was filled with too many perfect coincidences made to provide connections to the array of unrelated occurrences needed. I get the sense that writer of the original novel, Leo Malet, did not have all the details of the crimes ready, and he started the book on interesting impressions that would tickle the reader with curiosity, but when he puts it together in the end, he reaches for some kind of plausible reasons. We don’t learn that coincidence after coincidence is the engine that runs this story throughout the many city blocks we are walking through in our foggy strolls through Lyon and Paris, until the roadmap is produced in the end.

Not only coincidences of the lead detective running into the right people but of him being at the right place at the right time to witness something that would help him later in the mystery. Burma finds the guy with the amnesia who eventually turns out to be someone he knew before the war started. That guy coincidentally bumps into the petty thief when the Germans capture them, and Burma a year and a half later bumps into the petty thief trying to break into his office at just the point in the story when he needed him to walk him through how he found the guy. The house the amnesiac used to live in was still conveniently abandoned. Everything was in its place, including the torture setup that was so important to Burma’s investigation. The petty thief starts to collect American cigarette butts all around that abandoned house, and that becomes an essential clue to the killer’s identity. This goes on and on, coincidences tying the chance meeting with the old colleague of Burma’s at the train station who gets shot before his eyes, when this colleague happens to spout out the same address that the amnesiac gives Burma in the Nazi stalag. 

In a most ridiculous ending, the story even takes us through an Agatha Christie setting of the stage where the detective gathers all the participants we have met along the journey by inviting them to his apartment, and of course, they all show up. He goes through his own rendition of Poirot walking among all the suspects, making them nervous with some piece of incriminating evidence or other, after declaring, “Someone in this room committed the murder.”

When the murderer is found out, a shot rings in the room, but they catch him anyway, and we get the rest of the explanations along with the ludicrous idea behind why the actual murderer would show up to this get-together. Art Spiegelman, in the introduction to this book, mentioned the “trash” novel source from which this adaptation came from, and now I understood what he meant by it. It was hard-boiled, but unlike a Raymond Chandler novel, where the detective is not that superhuman and all the answers are not exposed in the end in a parlor room gathering. Even Chandler usually answers for too much. Mysteries are usually such a pleasure to read — until you get to the ending. I long for a mystery without all that perfect reasoning in the end. One that can’t answer for most things and just stares with longing into some setting wondering how it all went.

Story being a disappointment aside, the book is still a beauty! The original may be a trash novel, but the comics adaptation is such an ensemble of cuisine delights to reread and reread. It remains a travelogue that gives you this wise-cracking detective as a guide around the city of Lyon and then moments of Paris during a surreal time in France’s history. The sequences are well-balanced with interior monologue and moments of silence. And Jacques Tardi does pull this out of whatever stagnant story tropes it evolved from and makes it into something quite different, quite special.

Leave a comment | Categories: Comics, Review | Tags: , ,

Before Reaching the Bloody Streets of Paris

05 December 2021 by Rey Armenteros

The Bloody Streets of Paris is a Jacques Tardi comic book book-length story that has not yet taken place in Paris because I am not done with it yet. I guess that action in the story will end up moving to Paris. The actual title in French is 120 Rue de Gare. It is an adaptation of a hardboiled French novel by a writer named Leo Malet.

It is set during World War II, where our hardboiled detective, Nestor Burma, is a prisoner of war at one of the Nazi stalags. There, he learns of a man that supposedly has amnesia. One of the inmates doesn’t buy it, thinks the guy is faking it in order to get a free pass back to Paris. One night, the guy dies but not before telling our detective about a woman named Helene and 120 Rue de Gare. And so begins this strange mystery that goes beyond its prisoner of war beginnings and ends up in the free city of Lyon, when Burma gets his pass to get out of the stalag. At a train station, he finds an old friend on the platform, and as they wave at each other, his friend yells “120 Rue de Gare,” before being shot several times in the back.

And our Burma is pulled into this circumstance — a mystery that involves a now-dead former colleague with a mysterious address that keeps coming up and a beautiful woman that looks like a famous movie actress who he spots at the scene of his friend’s murder. He is informally working with the police commissioner of Lyon, calling on old friends he knows in the city. He recruits the help of a reporter and a lawyer friend of his dead buddy. These three men of some acquaintance to one another even tear up the night with wine first, and then bottles of booze at a restaurant in a meandering night that feels so European — living the real life, even under these war conditions.

Lyon is an interesting setting because it is in unoccupied France. There are half-blackouts at night against possible bombings. It is a city that tries to retain order amidst the chaos of the Nazi invasion, and the blackouts and the strange mystery in front of Burma are doused in the city’s perpetual fog. As Burma keeps calling it, “this damn city.” We get many views of the city, sometimes in silent panels of a pensive Burma trying to figure out who could have killed his old colleague.

The caricatures Tardi makes of these various characters tells us so much about them. In one panel where the lawyer lights a cigarette and covers his face with it as he is leaning on the table is worth a few of sentences of prose. Later, he is driving Burma somewhere, and a cigarette is dangling from his mouth in such a way that is hard to even put together in words. The pictures, in fact, flow through the details of the story, and a reader needs to slow down to absorb these people and places and objects and interiors with greater care. After a series of pages, I would go back and scour the panels for such rich elaboration. If reading the novel, it would have been like scanning the descriptive paragraphs to get to the good parts and then at the end of a chapter, you go back to read the aspects offered for the settings and really draw yourself in. In other words, it wouldn’t have been very practical in that other medium. It may be the way most of us read comics, and it may very well be the greatest distinction between reading a novel and long-form comics. Most of us read the things that slow us down in prose but are disposed to merely glance at panels with no words in them.

I do make myself slow down, but I also go back to those pages I had already experienced, not so much to corroborate earlier information, but to take it in once more, walk through those lonely, obscure streets with Burma to hike through my own past explorations of other cities. I am reliving every Raymond Chandler novel I have read. And I am reminiscing on the art I used to see in my youth when flipping through kid magazines and watching certain cartoons in Tardi’s images.

A reader is purportedly filled with nostalgia. I don’t know how much I believe that. Yes, Tardi’s art touches on a few sensibilities from some past zeitgeist, but it is far more subtle than just that. His line is that tight clean kind you get with a bowl-tipped pen nib (and I assume this because those were the lines I would get from it when experimenting with various dip pens). He uses a grainy pencil to indicate the foggy parts. He marries his photo references with his signature caricatures in panels that blend with the story. No reader can take that in if they were casually flying through the pages, focusing on mostly the words. No such casual reader would appreciate Tardi’s characteristics if they were purely just there to get to the end of this yarn. Such a work of art needs the reader’s engagement.

Unlike the proverbial page-turner, which according to the public is the way to go for “successful” books, the books that really have something to say or to show may impose a speed on you. Certain works can only be read slowly because the makeup of their sentences dictates a slower, more methodical read if you are even going to understand them. I am now thinking of The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, which showcases sentences that had never existed before.

With comics, the conventional way to slow things down is to inundate panels with captions and thought balloons of verbiage. The reader needs to take the pacing of a string of wordless panels into their circle. Myself, I like to chew on things a little longer, especially when they are this good! It may be that I am reading this book too slowly, but I rue the day I no longer have to look forward to reading Tardi’s rendition of this story. So, I am prolonging it, taking sips of this book a few pages a night, like I swish wine around when it tastes good. Drinking wine is hardly ever about getting a buzz. It is about making the most of that bottle you have opened and cannot unopen. The time is right now, but how I will regret when the last drop, the last page, my final thought on such a stroll through the past has left its mark!

Leave a comment | Categories: Comics, Review | Tags: , ,

Some Crumpled Pieces of Paper (first published in BlazeVOX)

21 November 2021 by Rey Armenteros

That poor hopeless son-of-a-bitch. Who was he anyway? Concentrating. Hard. Delirium. Nothing. Anyone can overcompensate for their false sense of time, space, and self. In step with the spirits, it tastes good until the bottle goes sour.

Now, this poor son-of-a-bitch was talking to an old friend of his that he knew before a prior career change. They had known each other longer than the dry span of progress, that regurgitator of certain lost souls. The son-of-a-bitch was at his favorite hangout spot when his old friend hit him up for some money. “Is it okay?” his friend asked as he pulled the crumpled bills out of the son-of-a-bitch’s shirt pocket. The friend put some in the cigarette machine and offered the son-of-a-bitch a smoke. He was sure his friend was genuine, but when his friend strutted off, the poor son-of-a-bitch thought, “How could this still be happening to me?” 

Leave a comment | Categories: A Poem, Poetry, ReyA' | Tags: , , ,

36 Stories versus 20 Stories

14 November 2021 by Rey Armenteros

Myths make exciting stories. But the Myth of Sisyphus is not one of these. Notwithstanding the useful message, Sisyphus is rather droll, and I guess that’s the point. It has a teaching value. Another myth that is just as boring is the idea that there are only a limited number of stories in the world, and that all the stories come from these few stories. Not just another tiresome idea that has become a cliche, it is menacing the way we think about stories and the value we place in stories. It feels fatalistic, as if the meanings we place on life have always been put on an assembly line. Going up the side of the mountain with this great, big story the size and shape of a boulder only so that it comes down as intended. Do we really believe stories have that type of predictability? If so, wouldn’t they have gone extinct thousands of years ago?

According to certain crowds, the “hero’s journey” by Joseph Campbell properly outlines every story since creation. If everyone believes that the hero’s journey is the only story worth any merit, then anything that falls outside of that model may get lambasted for not following form. This happens all the time when consumers of popular material (movies, TV shows, bestselling novels, and such) admit they can’t understand something and then relegate it as a work that is subpar. Or worse, they group all works that represent the real world as “slice-of-life.”

Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey brought out the notion that many older cultures followed the same model of telling a myth. His theories raise the idea that there are a number of steps the hero takes along his journey before finally making the right decision and saving his society.

I don’t doubt that there are a great many stories that follow this one model. Just look at Hollywood and how it can’t get past whatever sells, and if the ideas of Joseph Campbell are a hot item with the public at large, Hollywood will base every heroic movie they make on his model.

I ask such people that believe in the omnipresence of the Campbell model if they can fit Proust into that model. Where do you fit Chekhov? Does Hemingway so patly follow this formula for making stories?

I won’t deny it is an interesting idea. Back in the days when I was fascinated by such things, I learned from my first creative writing professor that such an idea even existed — that there were only a limited number of stories ever told in the world. In those ideas, it was fashionable to group conflict into one of three categories: man versus man, man versus nature, and man versus himself. There were others I discovered later like man versus society and man versus machine, but if you were of the disposition of simplifying everything into some core, then you would have to admit that the former sounds like a variation on man versus nature, and the latter of man versus man. And the one known as man versus fate might have been nothing more than a different way of looking at man versus himself. But this was about conflict, which was not the same as plot or “type of story.” 

In those creative writing class days, I learned that there was even a writer that had put a book together that catalogued every possible story ever created. He got it down to thirty-something stories.

My initial reaction was to reject this. To my youthful mind, it seemed just so uncreative to follow the same story over and over. But I was curious. I looked up this dusty book in our college library and actually found it! I looked through it, almost checked it out, but I knew I was not going to read it. It was too old, and the writing was thick with a style I couldn’t understand. I let it go.

Years later, I found myself thinking about such things again. I don’t remember what started me on this return to old ideas, but I looked up the thirty-something stories and found the man and his book. I didn’t have to read the book itself since someone had summarized the thirty-six different story plots of Georges Polti on a convenient website.

I don’t think an audience of today would sympathize with Polti’s catalogue of story archetypes. There was a focus on types of stories we just don’t see anymore, such as stories about “erroneous judgment” and “slayer of kin unrecognized.”  There were two different plots for self-sacrifice: “self-sacrifice for kin” and “self-sacrifice for an ideal,” and though the two are clearly different, you would think that a book looking for the fundamental components of a story would recognize that the two were the same general idea. There was “rivalry of kin” and “enmity of kin,” and Polti distinguished what made the two different. There was “crime pursued by vengeance” and “vengeance taken for kin upon kin,” and again I realize the the flavor of two such stories would be quite different from each other, but they seem to belong to the same type of story. There was “adultery” and “murderous adultery.”

Polti had taken many of his ideas from classical literature and some of the French literature of his day. To our ears, it sounds like ideas from another era. And even so, it is a product of its times. Polti was only cataloguing what made sense to him at the dawn of the 20th Century. If there is a great difference between enmity of kin and rivalry of kin, it is because the difference might have been more pronounced in his day.

A more recent writer came up with his story types. Ronald Tobias was writing books and producing documentaries, and he came up with his leaner list of possible stories. To me, his choices have the smell of Hollywood behind them. This is a more practical look with only twenty types. On the surface, it seems like he had a few redundant pairs. We get “metamorphosis” and “transformation,” but the first one is an actual magical metamorphosis whereas the second is when someone merely changes. We get “love” and “forbidden love,” and again, we know they are obviously different, but in the end, every love story has its challenges, and one possibility is when that love is forbidden. I suppose they are quite different because one of them demands a tragic ending.

Tobias gives us “ascension” and “descension,” which he agrees are two sides of the same coin. I can see the argument for having the extra story type because it changes the character of the story if the character is ascending into a better a life or going in the other direction. But if we are really boiling it down to the core elements, I would have stuck to the logic of giving just the elements and conflating the two.

I was thinking how Tobias’s more contemporary take on the different stories would surely sound out-of-date at some point in the future. This led me to reflect on how times change and how people create new ways to look at things. It could be that story theorists in the future would find the way we look at story all wrong. And like certain stories in Polti’s book seem to have fallen out of fashion, new stories might rise, coming from who knows where? This goes well with the young man that I was, believing that the possibilities in stories were virtually endless.

After reading about this and spending long hours contemplating the different possibilities, it wasn’t long before I started formulating my own story types. I came up with 26 different ones and explained them in an article I self-published long ago, and now that I am looking at them after all this time has passed, I see that some of them are redundant to me today. In the article, I prefaced it by saying that there might be only two possible stories: someone goes on a trip or a stranger comes to town (as it was described to me in some random website). But I then added that you can break it down further into one story, which is the one where there is a problem that needs to be fixed.

When you bring it down to just one story type (about the main character presented with a problem that needs taking care of), I ask what is the difference of that and attempting to define the word, story? You can look up the definition of story and then agree that it describes every story that you can think of, but does that really encapsulate all the different types of stories? It is nothing but a terse explanation.

I don’t fault Polti or Tobias for constructing their theories of story types.I think they are both commendable projects, and such work makes you consider parallels between stories. It also raises the idea of structure and is a great tool for instruction. If we recognize repetitions in their story models, it is because there must be overlap between these distinctions. And the overlap can invade certain stories, provoking new stories. The story type of sacrifice or loss could be an essential component in a love story. A revenge story could also be a quest.

On the surface, categorizations like this, if made well, always sound correct. They are put together by words, and words signify things. But words are often used to sway and to convince and to manipulate, and that enigmatic quality in any jumbled line of thought is what most makes them fascinating, as the words help picture impressions when telling a tale of loss and redemption clouded with mysteries that we hope to unravel on a journey through any story. Words are used to argue a point, yes, but they are best made for the things that make less rational sense, such as a story, because when we ask how many stories there have ever been, we fail to see that there have been as many types of stories as there have been stories told.

Leave a comment | Categories: Argument, Essay, ReyA', Writing Process | Tags: , , , , , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →