Making Time by Making Toys

Robert Duffer gave John and I a little love over at The Good Men Project. Click here to read.

Atlas Shrugged. Did you?

I’ve been told by a good friend of mine, a lifelong friend whose opinion I value, that I must, before I die, read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. This is her favorite book, one that she said changed her life the way that, say, Jack London’s The Iron Heel changed mine. Now I’ve heard, as everyone has in these last four years, the constant equating of Tea Party politics with the Objectivism supposedly touted by this book, and of course this added layer of revulsion thrust Atlas Shrugged even further down my abyssal reading list than it already was. I did, however, reactivate my Netflix subscription about halfway through the summer and one of the films in my “when I’m bored enough” queue was the screen adaptation of the first part of Atlas Shrugged.

I typically watch Netflix in three different ways: First, I scour it for good movies that I missed in theaters or On Demand, or that weren’t widely released. Some of my favorite directors, Michael Winterbottom, Darren Aronofsky, David Fincher, Catherine Brilliat, Bernardo Bertolluci, Gus Van Zant, Lars Von Trier, Takashi Miiake etc, often have superb back-catalogs of early films or collaborations that I use Netflix to catch up on. Not all of these are good, mind you, but many are, and some surprisingly so, like Winterbottom’s amazing Code 46 which in my opinion is possibly the finest science fiction film of the past ten years.

The second way is that I catch up on episodes of television shows that I missed or that everyone insists I at least check out, or television shows from the past that I’d like to re-watch to study their form, narrative, and plot. I’ve watched the entire series, sometimes 50+ episodes, of several shows like Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, Battlestar Galactica, My So-Called Life, The Wonder Years, and even some guilty pleasures like Family Guy, Robotech, and the History Channel’s Deadliest Warrior.

The third way, and this is how I encountered Atlas Shrugged: Part 1, is that I cherry-pick titles from Netflix’s huge library for even the smallest whim of interest. I give these films five, maybe ten minutes tops to engage me and then I start fast-forwarding to hunt for any visually interesting moments or unexpected plot twists. My standards of viewing for these is essentially nil. I might, for example, watch American Ninja 3 back-to-back with a low-budget zombie film and a documentary about Mexican drug cartels, all of which would take me less than twenty minutes to skim through, and maybe yield one or two moments worth watching. In this way, I “watch” dozens (or I suppose over the years now, hundreds) of lesser films.

Last night, finally, I decided to check out Atlas Shrugged: Part 1. Like other ill-fated adaptations of controversial books (if you missed the queasily laughable adaptation of the even-queasier novel Battlefield Earth, count yourself among the lucky), I had low expectations. I’d read reviews that roasted the movie for being vacuous, emotionless, and just all-around hilariously awful. I’ve read Ayn Rand’s short sci-fi novel Anthem, which I actually liked quite a bit, and I read—and then listened to as an audiobook because I couldn’t scrape my eyes over it any longer—

The Fountainhead. I only made it about halfway through the audiobook of The Fountainhead, however, which I found insufferably dull and eventually unreadable. So I had mixed feelings, at best, about Rand when I decided that I’d trade ten minutes of my time to see what Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 was all about.

As has only happened a few times with that third Netflix viewing style, however, I ended up watching the entire film, and, unexpectedly, I can report that it’s nowhere near as bad as Battlefield Earth. There are plenty of things to hate about the movie. The dialogue is preachy, stilted, and unnaturally expository (Rand’s fault), the actors’ timing is grim and determined, and what little emotion is shown on screen comes at moments that contrast sharply with them as portraits of actual human beings (director Paul Johansson’s fault), and the film’s pacing and photography are uneven and jarring in the same ways that Joss Wheadon’s films (which I hate) often are.

That said, there’s something intensely relevant about this film, and the message it’s trying to get across. Spending two hours following the machinations of big businesspeople may not sound like a lot of fun, but there may never have been a more relevant time than now to examine the lives of the people who run and influence American industry. Which makes this film’s failure to connect sort of meta-disappointing. The conversation that this film encourages is one that operates on a level that could be enormously helpful for America right now, regardless of any one particular stance for or against it. In a time when widespread class and economic consciousness is as warped and emotionally-driven as it is, a return to idea-driven rationales and objectivity would be a huge change from the reactive, PR- and controversy-obsessed nonsense that passes for discourse in modern public policy. To put it more bluntly, this story demands a level of intelligence and abstract thought that almost guarantees that if you can follow it, even if you don’t agree with it, you can make better and more informed political choices than if your chief exposure to economic theory is Facebook memes and Jersey Shore.

Forgetting for a moment, though, the film’s potential real-world relevance, it’s just really not that terrible of a movie in parts. The actress who plays Dagney Taggert does a passable job of being interesting to watch, and shows a few moments of inflection that feel like she had to wrestle them bodily from Johansson’s stifling, lifeless vision of Atlas Shrugged as dry Objectivist text come-to-life. The costumes and settings look quite good, and there were a few decent editing choices. Showing the construction of a railroad was mildly interesting, as were several sweeping exterior shots of Colorado and California. There were a number of subtle but well-conceived background moments that let the viewer in on the extent to which the America of 2016 is descending into poverty; details that reminded me of the sorts of atmosphere that directors like George Romero are so superb at. And finally, regardless of what you might think of Atlas Shrugged’s message, the film (and the book, I presume, though I haven’t read it) is relatively well plotted.

It suffers, though, it really does, from the lack of familiar faces for the characters. It wants badly for naturalistic dialogue, better pacing, and especially a more humanistic portrayal of the main characters’ lives. How on earth is anyone supposed to connect with Hank Rearden when he never wears anything except tailored suits and does nothing except sit behind a desk, go to lavish parties in exquisitely-detailed settings, and drink alcohol? He’s supposed to be a sympathetic character. Dagney, at least, has a few moments where she walks to work through slums or shows up on a job site to supervise the work. She seems like she’s grounded in a world that actually exists and that a moviegoing audience might be able to understand. The rest of the cast is not. Still, there are moments, like the brilliant and not-quite-coincidental relevance of high-speed rail in a real-world just in the last five years so heavily impacted by fluctuations in the price of oil, that shine in this film, and in the re-imagining of the 1950’s Atlas Shrugged as a modern, near-future sociological science fiction story. Because this is so often the type of story I myself write, I was struck throughout by all of the ways in which it could have been done better—the adaptation and execution both—and it gave me pause to consider why wasn’t it? If the ideas here are so influential (and I can’t argue their timeliness and relevance, if only as one side of a very divisive debate), why wasn’t this film taken more seriously from beginning to end?

A brief perusal of Atlas Shrugged’s Wikipedia page seems to suggest that Rand herself was the primary barrier to this film being made. During her life she evidently insisted on primary creative control of the film adaptation of it, and so much so that she personally derailed several attempts by others to make the film with a bigger budget and better acting talent. Is this, then, to be the legacy of all politically-minded stories, I wonder? Does Atlas Shrugged’s failure in the box office mean that we may never get a film version of Jack London’s magnificent Chicago-set epic of American socialism The Iron Heel? I sure hope not, because that’s the book I tell my best friends they have to read before they die, and it would break my heart to see it done as half-assed as Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 was.

So if you watch this movie (and I’m not sure I recommend you do, but I’d definitely caution you to make up your own mind instead of just listening to critics or taking the dismally-low ranking at Rotten Tomatoes as all the reason you need to avoid it) feel free to groan at the awful montages, the awkward sex scene at the end, and the ham-fisted way in which the narrative handles the passage of time. Laugh and throw popcorn at the screen when Dagney breaks down and cries at the sight of an oil refinery on fire when she’s been a hard, emotionless bitch to every living creature on screen, including her love interest, for the duration of the film. But ask yourself: when was the last time a movie demanded the audience follow a line of macroeconomic theory in order to understand the plot? When was the last time a massive doorstop of a book like this was brought to the screen that didn’t feature middle-school wizards or Hobbits? Even if you think Rand’s flavor of Objectivism is complete horseshit (which I kind of do), isn’t it better to be engaged by forms of entertainment that speak to the kinds of problems that Americans are widely accused of ignoring? Metacritic gives Jersey Shore and Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 aggregate critical scores of 53% and 28% respectively, but at the end of the day, even if Rand’s opus does nothing to sway my political opinion toward her own, I’m confident I know who wasted their time and who didn’t.

Making Time by Making Toys: guest blog on Experiments in Manhood

Thrilled to once again be a guest blogger at Robert Duffer's Experiments in Manhood. This time, the subject is things to do while you're home with your kids for the summer. Since it seemed like suddenly half the guys I know were stay-at-home dads this summer, and with a little bit of friendly one-up-manship happening on Facebook statuses and photo albums, I figured I'd toss my hat in the ring and see if I couldn't come up with something worthy to show off. The result? Custom-made toys.

Click here to read the whole article.

Guest: Laura Szumowski

I'm very pleased to be able to host a stop on the recent blog tour for Ben Tanzer's new book The New York Stories, which was illustrated by another Chicagoan, artist Laura Szumowski. Now you all know about my enduring man-crush on that handsome devil Tanzer, but what about those cool illustrations? I took a few minutes recently to chat with Laura via email about the sorts of things that drive her work.

Mark R. Brand: So let’s just dig right in and talk influences, shall we? If for no other reason than that it will allow me to put all of my fanboy-ishness right out there right up front. I was drawn to your work immediately when Jason showed me some of the proofs of the images before the publication of The New York Stories, and in no small part because I saw in it (or thought I saw in it, I’m more of what you’d call a “not-artist”) the influence of people like Jean Giraud, Marjane Satrapi, Matt Groening, and maybe even a little Ralph Bakshi? I know enough about comics to know that saying you’ve been influenced by Jean Giraud is like saying a musician was influenced by Leo Fender because he or she plays an electric guitar, but there’s a distinctive cleanliness that your work for The New York Stories wears, that brings to mind the vivid primary colors of rotoscoping wrapped around two-dimensional human contours until a printmaking-ish effect is reached. It’s flat and linear until it isn’t, in other words, and it tickles my sense of perspective a bit and reminds me I’m looking at something restrained by the flatness of the medium. Here’s the point where you show the rest of the world exactly how clueless I am and rattle off a dozen influences that I’ve never heard of but will be my favorite new things ever once I write them down and immediately seek them out. Go!

Laura Szumowski: My very first influence, who remains one of my favorite comics artists, is Joe Sacco. I read Safe Area Gorazde in 2004, and it exposed me to a whole new world of possibilities with art, storytelling, and non-fiction approaches to comics. I went on to work as an assistant to Paul Hornschemeier, another big influence who shared his philosophy and opinions on coloring with me. Working with Paul also provided a frame of reference for self-publishing and being a working artist: printing and producing books, filling orders, balancing work with life, being a hermit, etc. Beyond that, I've had a mixture of influences and favorites; Daniel Clowes, Kate Beaton, Marjane Satrapi, Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Linda Medley, Jeffrey Brown. To be honest, I don't read as many comics as I probably should.

Apart from comics influences, my work has been shaped a great deal by a variety of health books. As a child, I loved Peter Mayle's series of children's books about the body, including "Where Did I Come From?" and "What's Happening to Me?" In college, I read The Technology of Orgasm by Rachel P. Maines and A New View of a Woman's Body by the Federation of Feminist Women's Health Centers, both of which inspired me to create a series of women's health guidebooks. I'm also a big fan of Raleigh Briggs' Make Your Place, an awesome illustrated guide to sustainable living.

MRB: Ah, see, I was just about to say Frank Miller and Alan Moore, too, but I figured if I did I'd look like the guy that just pulled out the two biggest names he could think of in graphic novels. Because in case our readers don't know those two have their stylistic fingerprints on everything from comics to TV and feature film the way Jean Giraud, Frank Frazetta, and H.R. Geiger did in the 70's. Just to plug something completely unrelated here that I love, Alan Moore's collaborator on The Watchmen Dave Gibbons drew one of my all-time favorite graphic novels, a book called Rogue Trooper: War Machine. It's obscure and not readily available in most bookstores but if you can get your hands on a copy of it, it's pure sci-fi gold and thoroughly entertaining. And as promised, I'm taking notes here. These sound terrific. What other sorts of media turn you on stylistically? Got any favorite directors or musicians or photographers or other artists that speak to you in specific ways?

LS: The people who know me best would tell you about my fondness for Jurassic Park and Harry Potter, but those are my guilty pleasures. I'm a big fan of street art, artists like Blu, and everyone on the documentary Beautiful Losers-- but it could be any kind of street art, by anyone, old painted billboards or Our Lady of Guadalupe. Typography is another favorite, as well as tattoo art and old sideshow posters.

I don't really keep a list of favorites, it feels too limiting to me. I like seeing what my friends and peers are up to, but I also enjoy time away from art and media. The most recent thing to catch my fancy is the documentary The Rise of the Southern Biscuit.

MRB: Delving a little bit deeper into your catalog, in particular Cycling and Dork-Dance 5,000, I was equally pleased that when my impression of your style veered away from the art for The New York Stories, it veered straight into one of my other favorites: what I’ll call for lack of me having anything resembling an artistic vocabulary the “Life in Hell-like doodle-meets-whimsy-meets-ultra-smartass” genre. Plenty of block lettering and funny little widgets floating in smirking approximations of timelines and graphs and charts that remind us to pay attention because it’s fun, and not to take ourselves or everything we read quite so seriously. Tell me more about where this side of your work comes from.

LS: I definitely try to evoke a sense of fun and ease with my illustrations, particularly in the women's health series. The subject matter can range from intimate to unfamiliar to taboo, so I strive to frame that material in a way that makes it more approachable and friendly. While on one hand I take my work and the information very seriously, on the other I believe there can be a major benefit to keeping things simple and a bit playful. I am often reminded of The Magic School Bus series of books, which I loved as a kid. These books approach teaching in a different manner, a fun and relatable way that makes learning exciting and special.

MRB: I hear only good things about The Technology of Orgasm, and you're the second or third person to mention it to me in the last few months, so I guess I'm going to add that to my reading list. I love the fact that you're bringing some levity (and accessibility) to women's health texts. I've been in healthcare (musculoskeletal mostly, orthopedics and chiropractic) for many years, and when you're educating people about their health, no matter how good the information is, no matter how correct and concise, there's a little gap in understanding that the information has to jump over to make a difference in people's lives. If the best thing available is Ye Olde Stuffy Ponderous Doorstop of yesteryear with vague descriptions and unhelpful diagrams, then the gap widens. There's something to be said, too (and please don't take this as a backhanded compliment, because it's absolutely not), for the readability of a book that doesn't try to harness your ability to think abstractly. One of my favorite medical texts is an anatomy book called The Trail Guide to the Body. It's completely hand-drawn and comprised of cutaway pictures of muscles and bones in various body positions. Eating a hotdog, climbing a ladder, lying on a couch, etc. The book seems on the outside to be a simplistic, almost-too-cavalier answer to the fifteen-hundred page Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body (which, while exhaustive, isn't exactly easy or accessible for most readers). But year after year, and from clinic to clinic, the book I used to the best effect, copying pages from for my patients and using it to explain muscle position and function to people who might not even speak very strong English, has been this ingenious little mildly-whimsical hand-drawn book that looks like a cross between the illustrations from The Joy of Sex and an 80's cartoon coloring book. Somehow it just clicks with people and that gap gets crossed with the absolute minimum of squinting and head-scratching and saying things like "That's either a shoulder joint or the exhaust system of a Buick."

So it's clear to me that this project of writing these books, spanning I'm guessing several years, could be nothing other than a massive labor of love for you. I've written three books and edited a fourth and each of them has taken years off of my life in their own way. Dare I ask what's next? Is there some other project on the horizon that's calling to you when you've finished conquering this niche? I've heard your name pop up everywhere recently, in particular associated with some of the other independent presses and publishing organizations in Chicago that are lucky enough to get you to do some work for them. Care to say a few words about that?

LS: I've been working on the women's health series since 2006, and it's certainly a labor of love in many ways. I'm not sure I could make books about something I didn't feel passionate about. I've just finished updating Tip of the Iceberg: A Book About the Clitoris, the first title in the series. It's now in its third printing, and has been expanded by 16 pages including a historical timeline of the vibrator, which I'm particularly fond of.

I have a few different projects in the works. I'll be adding to the women's health series with a book about fertility awareness. I'm also excited to be working on my first graphic novel, stories from my dad's childhood growing up in Delray, a blue collar neighborhood in Detroit. I'll be doing other freelance illustration work along the way, and I'd love to do more projects like The New York Stories.

MRB: Thanks so much for taking the time to chat today, Laura, and best of luck with your work.

(You can learn more about Laura Szumowski and see her work on the web at http://lauraszumowski.com and http://www.zoo-mouse-key.com)

Breakfast With the Author, Episode 6 is online!

Breakfast With the Author, Episode 6 from Mark Brand on Vimeo.

Breakfast WIth the Author Episode 6: James Tadd Adcox and Rebekah Silverman

5 Indie Chicago Authors and Publishers to Watch Out for

I woke up this morning delighted to find that I'd been included on this list by CBS Chicago. Many thanks to them, and I do highly recommend the work of the others on this list, most of whom I know quite well. Thrilled to be in such good company.

Chicago takes pride in its talented residents, including its literary stars. Get a taste of what the young, talented minds of Chicago are filling the pages with, and check out these great local indie authors and publishers.

Click here to read the entire article.

This Blog Will Change Your Life

Ben Tanzer has some very kind things to say about The Damnation of Memory over at This Blog Will Change Your Life. He is of course spot-on about TDOM: it does owe much to Cormack McCarthy's The Road and John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, and it also takes for its novum many concepts I first encountered in Vandana Shiva's wonderful Monocultures of the Mind, and a structure inspired by Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. I love that Ben mentioned our conversation about Red Ivy here as well because it ties into the subject of influences. I'm not sure if it was the transition to my 30's or the equally important one into fatherhood, but in the last six or seven years I've begun to increasingly see almost all of my writing as a series of love songs and conversations with the things that have enlightened me or spoken to my sensibility at any particular time in my life. I think the older I get, the better and more honest I am with myself about doing this.

The Damnation of Memory on This Blog Will Change Your Life