Maybe the word I’m looking for to describe the spirit that imbues the patrons and the principals of Brown Sugar Kitchen is something more like “mindfulness.” (An East Bay word if there ever was one.) As lovers of Oakland, Tanya and her husband, Phil Surkis, are mindful that the neighborhood where they chose to build their caravansary is the broken heart of Oakland, the place where all those industrious scoundrels who afterward lent their names to streets and civic buildings first conspired to defraud the Peralta family of their land. All the paths of ancestry and migration taken by Oakland’s founding peoples—Indian, Spanish, Mexican, Anglo-, Asian-, and African-American—are densely knotted in West Oakland, with its physical routes and roadways, its boulevards and streets. West Oakland is the great crossroads of the city’s history, the stage and the scene of its starkest crimes and dramas, its most tragic comedies, from the founding land grab to the glory of the Pullman strikes, from the apocalyptic destruction rained down by Federal urban policy in the sixties to the collapse of the Great Beast of Urban Renewal, the Cypress Freeway, during the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. The Black Panthers, the Oakland Oaks, shipbuilders and railway workers, immigrant Jews and Portuguese, Okies and followers of the Great Migration, all came and went along Market and Cypress and West Street, as neighborhoods rose and fell, and Huey P. Newton got murdered, and the industrial demands of two world wars brought a measure of security and comfort, often for the first time, to people whose status had been marginal and precarious. Tanya and Phil were mindful, in choosing the site for their caravansary, that there could be no better place than along the Mandela Parkway, the enchanted road that grew up, gracious and wide and landscaped with greenery, in the gap that had once been the dark underbelly of the Cypress Freeway.
Tanya showed the same mindfulness in conceiving her Kitchen, in formulating her recipes, in committing herself to the cooking of soul food. This was, by her own admission, an unexpected choice. She had come west with plans to open a place that would showcase her La Varenne training; but then she dialed in to the local vibe, to the Sly Stone vision, to that Oakland state of mind. And one day she found herself standing on the 2500 block of the Mandela Parkway, feeling those paths of ancestry, those trails and roads and streets and railheads all coming together in the great soul terminus of West Oakland, and determined to set up shop, there, along the banks of the Mandela, and lay down her own artful and inspired version of the Oakland promise in the form of po’ boys, roux, and waffles.
Consciously or intuitively—mindfully—Tanya made this culinary choice, I believe, because the cuisine we know as soul food—so styled sometime in the 1950s, around the time rhythm and blues was becoming soul music—comes closer than any other product of American art and ingenuity to redeeming the promise of e pluribus unum. Peanuts, rice, okra, and yams from Africa; Central American beans and cassava; European pork, cabbage, molasses, and turnips; Indian corn and hominy, berries and greens: soul food is the caravansary along the road from the African past to the American present, from freedom to slavery to freedom again. Soul food is the little joint at the broken heart of America where all the kitchen inheritances ingather, and get tangled like travelers’ yarns, like the paths of exile and homecoming, like strands of DNA. From the day she opened her little utopia on the Mandela Parkway, Tanya has been making and keeping and redeeming her promise: Come on in, all of you everyday wanderers, and take a seat, and I will feed your soul. Oh—and come hungry. (2014)
Monster Man, Gary Gianni
WE WHO HAVE CREWED ABOARD CAPTAIN NEMO’S NAUTILUS have been left by the experience—in all its antique and tempestuous splendor—with a certain look. We recognize one another, even across great distances and gulfs of years. I remember first encountering the work of my fellow Nautilusard Gary Gianni in the illustrations he did for the marvelous Wandering Star editions of the works of Robert E. Howard. I knew him at once: a sailor of the deeps of popular art and literature; a mapper of submerged, half-forgotten kingdoms with names like Valusia and Atlantis and the Misty Isles. And yet never—or never merely—a diver to the benthos and bathos of nostalgia. Our ship, remember, is state of the art, at once the premier and dernier cri of the modernity that Jules Verne arguably invented. The first gesture of modernity is to explode the past and sweep away its fragments. The second is to use those very fragments to construct new art in the landscape and language of brokenness. I saw in Gianni’s classic pen-and-ink style, in the panache of his cross-hatching, in his mastery of black, in the dynamic flow of his composition and figures, in the evident breadth of Gianni’s familiarity with the history of adventure illustration, a third gesture: the modernity of the Nautilus. We do not seek to rise to the surface of history like a sleeper surfacing from a nightmare. We do not dangle our little lines from cobbled boats, fishing up the bits and pieces. The sea is our home. We swim through it, in the state-of-the-art, electric-powered submarine of our imaginations, drawing freely upon it for everything we need. We are practical modernists. Where others become entangled in vast kelp beds of history, we roll cigars. I was not at all surprised to discover, shortly after that first encounter with Gianni, that he had (studiously, gloriously, and with his customary élan) adapted 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea as a graphic novel.
If that book, and some of the other work that Gary Gianni has done in comics, like the weekly Prince Valiant page, exhibits a certain stateliness, an air of pageantry—if it never quite abandoned the illustrative tradition of which Gianni is a master—Monsterman leaves no doubt: the dude knows how to rock a comic book page. In addition to all his usual swash and shadow, the easy grace of his figures, the depth and dynamism of his layouts, in these pages you will find Gianni putting on a clinic in the art of page layout, showing the degree to which he has pragmatically absorbed the lessons of layout saboteurs like Eisner and Chaykin and Miller—the Captain Nemos, romantic destroyers of the comics page—and married them to the Gianni style, nourished and enriched by the past as the crew of Nautilus by the bounty of the deep. Add to this a reinvention of the figure of the Occult Detective, steeped like everything Gianni does in a grasp of its history from Carnacki to Hellboy, and the result is thrilling, almost disturbing, and it brings us, out of the sea-bottom of the past, as all art must, something new. (2012)
The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, Michael Moorcock
THE SAILOR ON THE SEAS OF FATE, LIKE ALMOST ALL OF MICHAEL Moorcock’s efforts in the subgenre of heroic fantasy, is a complicated work, in the original sense of the term: that is, it folds together, with an insight both sophisticated and intuitive, (1) an apparently simple adventure story told in three episodes that are themselves interleaved in puzzling ways; (2) a sharp critique of adventure stories generally (with their traditional freight of cruelty, wish-fulfillment, sexism, and violence) and of the heroic fantasy mode in particular; and (3) a remarkable working out (independently one feels of the work of Joseph Campbell) of the Transcendentalist premise that, as Emerson wrote, “one person wrote all the books.” Moorcock took this literary universalism, with its implied corollary that one person reads all the books, and in Sailor began his career-long demonstration of the logical conclusion that all the books are one book, and all the heroes one hero (or antihero). From here it is only a short step, which the reader of heroic fantasy is eager to make, to the proposition that all readers and all writers are Odysseus, or Kull, or Elric of Melniboné, sharing through the acts of reading and writing a single essential, eternal heroic nature. This nature links us—all we heroes and Moorcocks—across all eras and lands. One might even attempt to chart these interconnections of story, hero, reader, and writer on a single map: Moorcock is such a cartographer. He called his map of our story-shaped world “the Multiverse.”
It was Moorcock’s insight, and it has been his remarkable artistic accomplishment, not just to complicate all this apparatus and insight and storytelling prowess, packing into one short novel such diverting fare as speculation on ontology and determinism, gory subterranean duels with gia
nt killer baboons, literary criticism (the murmuring soul-vampiric sword Stormbringer offers what is essentially a running commentary on the equivocal nature of heroic swordsmen in fiction), buildings that are really alien beings, and ruminations on the self-similar or endlessly reflective interrelationship of hero, writer, and reader; but to do so with an almost offhanded ease, with a strong, plain, and unaffected English prose style that was nearing its peak in the mid-seventies.
That’s part of what I would have liked to tell to Michael Moorcock when I recently had the good fortune to attend the Nebula Awards ceremony in Austin, Texas, and watch him receive a Grandmaster Award. I would have liked to tell him that when I was fourteen years old I found profound comfort in feeling that I shared in the nature of lost and wandering Elric, isolated but hungering for connection, heroically curious, apparently weak but capable of surprising power, unready and unwilling to sit on the moldering throne of his fathers but having nothing certain to offer in its stead. I would have liked to tell him that his work as a critic, as an editor, and as a writer has made it easier for me and a whole generation of us to roam the “moonbeam roads” of the literary multiverse. But as Mike rose to accept his award all I could do was sit there, next to him—marveling down to the deepest most twisted strands of my literary DNA—and applaud. (2013)
American Flagg!, Howard Chaykin
1.
IN A POPULAR MEDIUM THAT NEEDS TO LABEL EVERYONE A journeyman hack or a flaming genius god—like the world of comic book art—Howard Chaykin is something else: a craftsman, an artisan of pop.
I don’t mean that Chaykin works harder on or takes greater pains with his drawing, though his panels and his layouts bear witness to the pains he takes (like many craftsmen he actually works rather fast). Nor do I mean merely that he brings deeper technical prowess to the comics page (though when it comes to page design, panel arrangement, line control, and the rendering of bodies, faces, clothing, streets, furniture, and interiors, his chops are matchless). Some of the genius gods of comic art, after all, have also been master draftsmen; and one of the best things about popular media is that, within their capital- and calendar-driven confines, sometimes a hack, half by accident, can turn out something haunting, dreamy, or beautiful. What I’m talking about is a kind—the toughest kind—of balancing act. Taking pains, working hard, not flaunting his or her chops so much as relying on them, the pop artisan teeters on a fine fulcrum between the stern, sell-the-product morality of the workhorse and the artist’s urge to discover a pattern in, or derive a meaning from, the random facts of the world. Like those other postwar, East Coast Jewish boys, Barry Levinson and Paul Simon, Chaykin, a man as gifted with a quicksilver intelligence, an irrepressible sense of verbal play, and reservoirs of rage and humor of apparently equal depth, has spent most of his career seeking, and sometimes finding, that difficult equilibrium.
The pop artisan operates within the received formulas—gangster movie, radio-ready A-side, space opera—and then incorporates into the style, manner, and mood of the work bits and pieces derived from all the aesthetic moments he or she has ever fallen in love with, in other movies or songs or novels, whether hackwork or genius (without regard for and sometimes without consciousness of any difference between the two): the bridge in a song by the Moonglows, a James Wong Howe camera angle, a Sabatini cannonade, a Stan Getz solo, the climax of The Demolished Man, a locomotive design by Raymond Loewy, a Shecky Green routine. When it works, what you get is not a collection of references, quotes, allusions, and cribs but a whole, seamless thing, both familiar and new: a record of the consciousness that was busy falling in love with those moments in the first place. It’s that filtering consciousness, coupled with the physical ability (or whatever it is) to flat-out play or sing or write or draw, that transforms the fragments and jetsam and familiar pieces into something fresh and unheard of. If that sounds a lot like what flaming genius gods are supposed to be up to, then here’s a distinction: the pop artisan is always hoping that, in the end, the thing is going to be Huge. He is haunted by a vision of pop perfection: heartbreaking beauty that moves units. The closest that Howard Chaykin has yet come to fulfilling that vision—though he has approached it many times—is probably still American Flagg!
2.
BY 1982, THE WELL-ESTABLISHED SF TROPE OF A DYSTOPIAN FUTURE America (or of a solar or galactic federation closely extrapolated from the American model), dominated by giant conglomerates, plastered with video screens and advertisements, awash in fetishized sex and sexualized commodities, fed and controlled and defined by pharmacology and violence, had been working its way into mainstream comic books for several years, particularly at Marvel. Just as Golden Age comic books had been influenced (and in some cases written) by the hacks and flaming geniuses of the slightly earlier Golden Age of science fiction, many of the creators of early- to mid-seventies comic books showed the influence of sf’s New Wave of the previous decade. The psychotic megalo-cities and paranoid technoscapes pioneered in 1940s sf by Alfred Bester (far ahead of his time and sadly neglected today), and further explored by Phillip K. Dick, William S. Burroughs, Harlan Ellison, J. G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, and John Brunner, were reflected in titles like Rich Buckler’s Deathlok the Demolisher, Jim Starlin’s Warlock, and the work, across many genres and titles, of Steve Gerber. Little by little, comics, along with the rest of us, began to surrender the old World’s Fair–cum–Jetsons vision of the way things were going to be.
3.
BY THE TIME CHAYKIN BROUGHT OUT American Flagg!, IN 1982, therefore, the idea of a science fiction comic book set in a dystopian American future was not a new one; and most of the fundamental elements of the world Chaykin depicts—Earth abandoned by its corporate rulers in favor of off-world colonies, marauding gangs of armed motorcycle freaks, the city as a kind of vast television or information screen that irradiates or medicates its denizens with psychotropic sitcoms—could be traced back to novels by the writers of the New Wave and their successors, to Rollerball and, of course, to Blade Runner (1982, directed by Ridley Scott, another pop artisan, and itself based on a Dick novel), which premiered about a year before American Flagg! But no one had ever before crammed those elements all together in quite the way that Chaykin did here: the post-nuclear, post-global-collapse, post–Cold War, corporate-controlled, media-overloaded, sex-driven, space-traveling, Jean-Paul-Gaultier-by-way-of-Albert-Speer freak-o-rama that was to be life in 2031.
What Chaykin uniquely intuited, perhaps through the process of adapting Bester in the early graphic novel The Stars My Destination (New York: Baronet, 1979), was that with its fundamental liability to fragmentation, juxtaposition, and the layering up of text and images; with its multiple margins into which ever denser images and subtexts and submargins could be crammed; with its ability to hyper-jump a million light-years out to the edge of the galaxy in the space of a quarter-inch gap between panels; with its mongrel vocabulary, its clandestine heritage of sex and violence, its nature as corporate-owned media outlet and mass-produced object; and above all with its accumulated history of stale, outmoded, and rotting bright futures, the comic book was perfectly suited not merely to adapting but in some measure to embodying the hybridized, trashy, garish future of simulacra and ad copy that comics had been hinting at over the past decade. Other comic creators had written or drawn the American dystopia; Howard Chaykin went and built one.
4.
I FEAR I HAVE MADE THE PROSPECT OF READING AMERICAN FLAGG! sound like a grim, possibly even a dreadful task. In fact, from the first panel the strip, almost twenty-five years later, remains completely exhilarating. Part of the reason for this is the virtuoso display Chaykin puts on, with a certain vandalistic Brooklyn-boy glee, of how utterly to scramble the standard deck of page layouts that comic book artists had been shuffling and reshuffling for years. Chaykin played, dazzlingly, with the effect you could get from just a handful of dull square subpanels arranged across a big single-panel page on which, in that one big panel, something violen
t and wild was taking place. All that gorgeous Caniffian line, putting the flutter into a lacy cuff, setting a gleam on the visor of a leather hat, flinging a spray of blood into the air, all that lavish nonchalant beauty plastered over with Jewish gags, neon signs, talking-head nattering, tough-guy commentary, scientific annotation! If Chaykin’s work comes squarely out of the tradition of comics art that likes to stand back and notice how pretty it is—a tradition that includes such greats as Alex Raymond, Mac Raboy, Jim Steranko, Barry Windsor-Smith, and Neal Adams—it is perhaps unique in that it also derives, less obviously, from another grand comics tradition from E. Segar to Al Capp to Kurtzman and the Mad men to Kyle Baker: the tradition of mocking word-play, snide commentary, caricature, and the irrepressible, compulsive, sometimes perilous need to undercut more or less everything but especially comics art that likes to stand back and notice how pretty it is.
The characteristic Chaykin facial expression is the raised eyebrow—of irony, skepticism, puckishness, a satirist’s rage. In his work, on his characters’ faces, the raised eyebrow takes on an iconic power. It’s a combination of punctuation mark, the line that indicates a flexing muscle, and the kind of ripple or wave that cartoonists use to suggest motion, explosion, velocity, shock. I have never seen a published photo of Chaykin in which he fails to sport one himself.
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