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An American’s Guide to Czech Culture: The Joke

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I wrote this a couple weeks ago, when Milan Kundera was still alive. I’m posting it unedited as tribute. Soon I’ll post another tribute to Kundera.

Few names loom as large in Czech literature as Milan Kundera (pronounced MEE-lahn KOON-dair-ah). At the age of 94, Kundera is undoubtedly the foremost living Czech novelist, although given his ban from Czechoslovakia and his long-term residence in France, he prefers to be known as a French author. From his output, including The Joke and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, he provides a consistent yet alienating body of work. His novels, internally separated into seven parts, often navigate between viewpoint chapters of characters in a proto-Song of Ice and Fire way, toe the line between fiction and memoir. At points in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera acknowledges that his characters are fictional. Those two novels tackle the horrors of Soviet rule in Czechoslovakia, and how characters try to numb themselves to those horrors through destructive sexuality and chauvinism. Kundera is not a comforting writer, but he’s a profoundly instructive one.

Kundera ends The Joke, the story of a Czech man who has his life destroyed by the Soviet regime in Czechoslovakia over an off-handed joke to his girlfriend, with the date of the book’s completion: “Completed December 5, 1965.” In those days, Czech art was booming with the Prague Spring, a rejuvenation of their culture. Less than three years later, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. The Joke, like its subject, was banned.

The Joke is a counterintuitively funny book, in that it’s amusing but not in the way its title would have you believe. A reader would see a book titled Žert (Czech for “joke”) on a shelf, pick it up, and encounter a grim story about Soviet labor camps, virulent misogyny, and the decline of Slavic folk culture under Stalinism. The protagonist, a student named Ludvík, makes a joke to his girlfriend about the Czechoslovak Communist Party, which leads to him being branded a Trotskyist, being forced out of the Party and his university, and spending years in a Soviet labor camp. It’s a profoundly upsetting book, if not quite as bleak and hopeless as it sounds. The Joke is funny, like I said — the premise is absurd and depressing in equal measures, and the denouement includes one of the funniest failed suicide attempts I’ve seen in fiction. But it’s very much the story of a man broken by the U.S.S.R., written by a young man in the dying days of the Prague Spring, before the U.S.S.R. totally decimated Czechoslovakia.

One suspects Kundera is wrestling with his own past here. In his days as a student, Kundera was a militant Stalinist who joined the party in the days after the coup, when Soviet-backed forces took over the Czechoslovak government. He may have turned over a dissident to the regime — we’ll never know. And his early poetry reflects a Stalinist worldview. By the time Kundera wrote The Joke, he clearly had a far more grounded view on the Czechoslovak Communist Party.…

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Tombs and Seances and Murders (Book Three, Part 69: Brought to Light)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Moore made savvy use of his artist in Brought to Light, offering a wordy and dense history of the CIA for Sienkiewicz to offer his abstract and often terrifying illustrations to.

You wonder why the children of America are obsessed with death? You wonder why rock groups that look like corpses and zombie comic-book heroes are so goddamn popular here? It’s just the same way your Victorians loved their tombs and seances and murders. The American Empire is dead and does not know it. Like your empire before it, it’s only aware of the truth in its sleep.” – Grant Morrison, The Invisibles

The eagle presents himself as a salesman, and launches into a pitch, though for what exactly is not clear. The content, however, is a history of the CIA, narrated to the reader over twenty-one of the comic’s thirty pages. This is a complicated frame for a story that could have been presented more straightforwardly, but it gives Moore several advantages. The eagle functions as an unreliable narrator—a point that’s made emphatically clear at the outset, when he talks about the CIA’s relationship with Congress in terms of how “My wife, she holds the purse strings, see? I gotta account for every cent. As for laying down the law… hell, she practically drafted a Bill ‘o Rights!… Bitch watches my every move. Still, there’s ways an’ means. What she don’t know ain’t gonna hurt her.” (This stylized dialogue provides the unquestionable highlight of the Gary Lloyd audio adaptation, with Alan Moore voicing the eagle in a style that could be described as “the voice he’d developed for ‘Old Gangsters Never Die’ on several lines of cocaine” but is frankly far better simply sought out and experienced for one’s self.)

This gave Moore three separate ways of revealing information. On the most basic level, he could simply have the eagle convey some historical fact—for instance, that “over in Cuba this friendly dictator named Fulgencio Batista ad been running things along with Santos Trafficante, the Mafia’s man in havana, Cuba’s capital. Batista ignored the drugs, gambling, and prostitution for a cut of the profits… Suddenly, in 1959, this socialist, Fidel Castro, an’ his buddy Ché Guevara overthrew Batista in a so-called popular revolution. Under Castro, Trafficante and the mob hadda leave Cuba.” But he could also lean into the eagle’s status as an unreliable narrator, such as the following sentence, “Say watcha like, the Mafia represent free enterprise, which we, as a company, are sworn to protect.” On top of this, he still has Sienkiewicz’s illustrations, so he can then devote two panels to the eagle lighting a cigar (“Havana cigars—best smoke inna world”) and taking a long drag on it, implicitly commenting on the way in which the CIA and its officers enriched themselves on Cuba.

The unreliable narrator also allows Moore to inject some humor into what is not exactly inherently entertaining subject matter. So, for instance, talking about the use of a Pepsi bottling plant in Laos as a front for a heroin-running operation, Moore has the eagle dryly remark that “later we decided that things went better with Coke.”…

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Pop Could Never Save Us – 06R

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Guess who’s back. It’s your favourite podcast about the UK Top 40 Charts. Pop Could Never Save Us. This week, we’re officially in the 90s; a time where both hosts were actually alive. This is such a barn-stormer of a conversation, it simply could not be limited to a single episode. Enjoy the unique auditary experience this podcast offers. Here’s part one:

https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/5HuFtPEP8tuAGvIdVC4ktw?utm_source=generator

…

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The Cremator (An American’s Guide to Czech Movies)

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CW: the Holocaust

Long before he became a director, Juraj Herz turned ten years old in a concentration camp. The Slovak Jew and his immediate family were among the not-even-3,500 survivors of Ravensbrück. Roughly 60 of Herz’s extended family members never left Hitler’s camps alive.

Herz had just turned four when Germany annexed Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia’s borders, essentially absorbing Czechoslovak industries and military strongholds. When the Nazis marched through the rest of Czechoslovakia, they faced little armed resistance. Certainly the Nazis experienced little pushback from the British at the time, whose Prime Minister gifted Czechoslovakia with a cordial grin.

Nazi infiltration of Czechoslovakia began long before the Wehrmacht marched into Prague. Goebbels had propagandists at work in Prague. Pockets of Nazis surfaced on the streets and in politics. The unstable landlocked Central European country had few means to stem the rise of fascism.

If his movies are any indication, Juraj Herz never forgot the passivity of his countrymen in the face of the coming genocide. His masterpiece The Cremator, an extremely bleak period horror film, follows its titular character as he descends from a Tibetan Buddhism-obsessed husband and father of Jewish people into a serial killer who succumbs to Nazi ideology and kills his family in their name. It’s one of the most fucked things ever filmed, in a way only a Holocaust survivor could truly capture.

The Cremator’s closest American analogue is The Shining. It has a similar sense of quotidian dread to Kubrick’s movie, finding the evils inherent in domestic life. Fascism in both movies stem from the banal evils of the domestic. Jack Torrance and Karel Kopfrkingl both lead ostensibly normal lives — they’re middle-class family men who don’t behave in a way that’s abnormal enough to be noticeable outside their homes. The way they operate behind closed doors is another matter — they’re preening abusive narcissists who can’t have a simple conversation without at least subtly terrorizing their wives and children. Karel is perhaps worse than Jack — he’s closer to Grady, the Overlook Hotel’s original caretaker, who succeeds in killing his family.

And Karel’s everyday life leads directly to his fascism. Karel has the same repetitive justifications for his behavior as every abusive fascist. In his case, he pervasively touts Tibetan Buddhism in claiming his goal is to bring an end to suffering, that cremating people is a way of liberating them. In his mind, this makes sense, even as it’s an obvious lie. When the Nazis come along, they fit perfectly into Karel’s narcissistic worldview. His crematorium is his life — to Karel, the Holocaust is a vastly more efficient way of doing what he already does.

And like all fascists, Karel is selective about who the criteria of his Nazi beliefs apply to. In polite Czech society, he humbly claims to merely have a drop of German blood (a common feature of Czechs, many of whom were ethnically German). When that German blood is useful for him in the face of the Nazi invasion, which is slowly inching forward over the course of the movie, he highlights it more and more.…

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The Films of Jiří Trnka (An American’s Guide to Czech Movies)

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In a sane and just world, Jiří Trnka would be a bigger household name than Walt Disney. Instead, Disney has taken over the world and Trnka is best known for his influence on Rebecca Sugar and other animators. Such is the toll of monopolistic capitalism on media culture.

There’s no such thing as a national filmmaker, or one whose work sums up the culture of their home country. But Jiří Trnka, a Czech stop-motion animator, comes close to being the defining artist of Czech cinema. His body of work, ranging from children’s picture books to class feature and short films, chronicles a vital period in Czechoslovakian history. There are few major Czech texts Trnka didn’t adapt or toy with in some way. He saw Prague in the clutches of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. And he chronicled that history in depth — not as a documentarian, but as an animator.

Trnka originated in Plzeň, a Bohemian city about 50 miles west of Prague. You’ll know Plzeň by its German name of Pilsner, if you’re fond of lager (this first-and-fourth generation American has disappointed her Italian and Czech-descended relatives with her allergy to alcohol, so I can’t indulge in Plzeň’s major export). Trnka’s initial work — and in many ways his only work — was puppetry, a longstanding Czech tradition in which Trnka was coached by his mentor Josef Skupa. Trnka is first and foremost a storyteller for children, one adapting the Brothers Grimm and Czech fairy tales.

Czech fairy tales are dour in a way influenced by the grim state of life in ancient and medieval Bohemia. Nature itself is hostile — water is an alien force in landlocked Česko. Children befall terrible fates. Mothers lose their families. And some incestuous perverts with bad chins control half the continent. It’s delightful. And Trnka is deeply invested in the tradition of Czech folk tales. Kids like a good scary story. Trnka has nothing but nationally conscious scary stories.

Part of this is Trnka’s medium. Stop-motion animation is inherently creepy. The marriage of tangible objects with artificial, coerced movement never quite moves out of the uncanny. When I was a kid, I made my father turn off Jason and the Argonauts because the sight of Talos, a giant statue who turns into a creaking stop-motion statue of horror, was the most frightening thing I’d ever seen. Talos was slower than your grandmother on the wrong dosage, and he was going to absolutely decimate your ass. Even chintzy shmaltz like the Rankin-Bass specials always seemed a bit off, although I watched Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town every year to see Mickey Rooney’s Anarchist Twink Santa overthrowing a fascist regime. Trnka uses stop-motion as an imitation of life that fully embraces the medium’s eeriness. It’s not that all his work is dark or creepy, but Trnka rejects hardline realism in a way that keeps him in the realm of the Eerie.

Let’s take Trnka’s debut feature film, 1950’s Špalíček, or The Czech Year.…

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Languages of Apocalypse (Book Three, Part 68: Bill Sienkiewicz)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Bill Sienkiewicz got his start as a Neal Adams imitator drawing Marvel’s Batman imitator Moon Knight, but eventually moved on to a more prestigious project: New Mutants.

I have heard the languages of apocalypse, and now I shall embrace the silence. – Neil Gaiman, Sandman: Endless Nights

This was one of the books in the X-Men line, written by Chris Claremont, then at the apex of his clout as a major figure in the industry. New Mutants was a book focused on the younger generation of mutant characters. Among these was Dani Moonstar, a Native American mutant. From the earliest issues of New Mutants it became clear that Dani was haunted by a bear spirit—one that had previously killed her parents. A year and a half into the book’s run, as Claremont prepared to pay off this story, he grew frustrated of working with Sal Buscema. As Claremont saw it, “[Buscema] looked like everything else. And I didn’t want that. I wanted this to be very much a kid-centric book. There needed to be a totally different visual sense.” And so he turned to Sienkiewicz.

For his part, Sienkiewicz had been on a kick of reading Hunter S. Thompson, with the memorably grotesque art of Ralph Steadman, and watching David Lynch films, and so when Claremont came to him with a story that took place largely in an abstracted spirit world and a mandate to bring a distinctive visual sense, he cut loose. Reasoning that “the benefit of dealing with dream logic and nightmares is that anything goes,” Sienkiewicz embraced a harsh and abstract line that made characters feel as though they had been clawed into the page, less drawn than scratched. His Demon Bear was a towering monolith of crazed eyes, murderous teeth, savage claws, and the vague yet terrifying implication of a snout. The result was moody, kinetic, and like nothing mainstream superhero comics had seen before. It was not, to be clear, that Sienkiewicz was creating new techniques; ultimately he was simply importing concepts from the fine art world (in which he had trained before seeking a career in comics) that the stodgy comics industry had largely neglected—the same concepts that artists like Dave McKean and Duncan Fegredo would hit on as well. But Sienkiewicz’s run on New Mutants was the first time these techniques had been employed in a mainstream American comic. It was also a massive hit, and Sienkiewicz ended up spending a year on the book instead of the originally planned three issues, introducing the cybernetic alien Warlock, who, in Sienkiewicz’s conception, was an shifting mass of circuitry that got to cyberpunk horror a full five years before the twin 1989 releases of Tetsuo the Iron Man and “Driller Penis: Yes, He Does What You Think He Does.”

Sienkiewicz’s work on New Mutants was aided by the particular dynamic he had with Claremont, who, in 1984, was arguably the single most mainstream writer in superhero comics.…

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Pop Could Never Save Us – 005

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnW4zQbJtLA&list=PLaEPRcUKG4Uv-3elWT4sBxU0b_ld5ESgD&index=9

Available now on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, and any where else you can find good podcasts. This week, we’re in the current charts and discuss Ed Sheeran and the Ed Sheeran-alike lads (Lewis Capaldi, David Kushner), Switch Disco, K-Pop’s highest girl group entry, and more. …

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The Great, Warm, Red-White-and-Blue Beating Heart of This Beleaguered Country (Book Three, Part 67: The Christic Institute)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: The CIA was very bad, and then there was a bombing in La Penca, Nicaragua, that injured a journalist, Tony Avrigan.

In this, the eleventh hour, with the world poised on the brink of Red Armageddon, it is vital that we, as a nation, should rally around those symbols that are closest to the great, warm, red-white-and-blue beating heart of this beleaguered country. They are our hope and our inspiration, the legends that urge our people onward even in times of deepest crisis. -Alan Moore, Watchmen

Subsequent investigation revealed that “Per Anker Hansen’ was in fact a man named Vital Roberto Gaguine, an Argentinian leftist who had traveled to La Penca along with Swedish journalist Peter Torbiörnsson. Tobiörnsson was in fact a Sandinista sympathizer who had worked closely with a Nicaraguan intelligence unit called the Fifth Directorate, run out of the Interior Ministry by Tomás Borge, although he has always maintained that he simply thought Gaguine was a spy and not a bomber, and in his later career worked to expose the details of Sandinista involvement in the bombing. This has not entirely satisfied Honey, however, who, not unreasonably, points out that pinning the blame on the Sandinistas would have benefitted the Reagan administration, who instead stonewalled and obfuscated the investigation, and who points out a number of aspects of the bombing that remain unexplained.

The details of Gaguine’s involvement and Torbiörnsson’s complicity, however, did not begin to emerge until 1993, and Torbiörnsson’s full involvement did not emerge until 2009. Long before all of this, when the bulk of the evidence to be unearthed was still related to the CIA theory, Avirgan and Honey found themselves in touch with the Christic Institute, who felt that the evidence they had collected tied in with their ongoing investigations of the CIA. Ultimately Avirgan and the Christic Institute filed a $24 million lawsuit against a wide spread of people alleged to have been responsible for a conspiracy to commit the La Penca bombing along with drug and arms trafficking, illegal assassination programs, and more. It should be stressed that many of the underlying claims in the lawsuit were ultimately well-documented—the Iran-Contra scandal was, after all, real, and the lawsuit was filed months before it emerged into popular awareness. And, more to the point, the CIA really was responsible for a host of illegal activities including drug smuggling and illegal assassinations.

Despite its prescience, however, Avirgan v. Hull was a deeply ambitious lawsuit, and the Christic Institute had bad luck in drawing James Lawrence King as the judge. King was a Nixon appointee who would have a long career of conservative and pro-government rulings, and on June 23rd 1988 he dismissed the case, declaring that the Christic Institute’s case consisted of “unsubstantiated rumor and speculation from unidentified sources with no first-hand knowledge” and levying one million dollars in fines against the Institute for filing a frivolous suit.

It is undoubtedly the case that King was a particularly hostile judge, and opinion was sharply divided on whether his dismissal and penalties were unduly harsh, but even writers who are sympathetic to the Institute’s aims tend to suggest that the lawsuit was deeply flawed.…

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Daisies (An American’s Guide to Czech Movies)

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Věra Chytilová’s Daisies defies questions like “what the fuck is this?” It is simply unlike anything else in world cinema. I’ve watched films from every continent on the planet and cannot think of a single movie that compares to Daisies. It’s anarchic, ebullient and ruthlessly itself. In an era of petulantly formalist films, its blend of medium-breaking collages, jump-cuts and percussionist staccato soundtrack stands alone as a crowning achievement of drastic bizarreness. 

Yet this hour-and-16-minute chronicle of two women wreaking havoc in Prague is, in its own way, profoundly accessible and grounded. Yes, this is a film that starts with a montage of naval warfare, followed by two girls, Marie I and Marie II, declaring that “if the world is bad, then we are going bad as well.” It’s a cry against the ugliness of war. Yet it’s ultimately about the tumultuous journey of two girls failing to understand adulthood in a world that expects them to achieve it off the bat, a fact bolstered by its lack of professional actors in its lead roles. And like The Firemen’s Ball, it broadly relies on non-professional actors (its leads are played by a schoolgirl and a shop clerk).

More than many Czech New Wave films, Daisies benefits from the viewer knowing a spot of Czech. My Czech is far from proficient, but its simple dialogue, which replicates the speech patterns and worldview of children, was often clear to me even before I read the subtitles. But more importantly, there’s wordplay in the film that’s easily missed in English. In Czech, Ivana Karbanová’s line “I am a virgin” is “já jsem panna”, ending with a noun that can mean “virgin” or “doll.” The duo’s catchphrase, where one says “vadí?”, to which the other replies “nevadí”, meaning “do you care?” And “I don’t care” refers to a Czech children’s game. “Daisies is fundamentally childlike: a film that plays with adult ideas in adolescent terms.

“We are going bad as well” is an adolescent declaration of war against a disorienting world. The world is burning, so let’s burn it more. And the film follows suit: aesthetically, Daisies operates like the play-acting young girls it follows. It plays with the medium of film, mixing analogue effects, strange montages and color grading. When the Maries are home in their apartment, the film adopts color, portraying the girls’ world as vibrant and lively. When the Maries take on false identities to troll lonely older men over dinner, Daisies often switches to sepia or black-and-white, turning into a Buster Keatonesque comedy of manners. Just take the scene where the Maries run with an old man towards a train, hopping on board it, and then trade places with the old man. It feels like something out of The General or Modern Times. And that’s before we get to the Maries deploying a Burroughsian cut-up technique to each other, where they use scissors to cut each other apart, while their animated body parts occupy a different part of the frame, before the film devolves into a flashy montage of percussionist snipping set to bits of the frame clashing against each other.…

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Out Today: 2000 AD #2330

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2000 AD 2330 Cover

I’m absolutely over the moon to be able to announce that today sees the release of my professional comics debut, which you’ll find in this week’s issue of 2000 AD. It’s a Future Shock called “Look At Your Hands” that I’ve done with the stunning Laura Helsby on art, with two-time Eisner nominee Jim Campbell on letters. I am, as you can imagine, absolutely charmed and delighted to be breaking in via this specific route, which I think you’ll agree is by far the absolute funniest way I could possibly do it.

In any case, I hope you’ll check it out, not least because, in my entirely unhumble opinion, it’s really quite good. (I am in fact comfortable saying it’s better than “Killer in the Cab.”) Not only that, but there’s a nice one-shot Judge Dredd in there, new installments of Durham Red and Enemy Earth, and a Rogue Trooper story by Garth Ennis and Patrick Goddard. Yes, you read that right: my comics debut is in the same issue as a friggin’ Garth Ennis story.

You can snag it at your local newsagent or comic shop, or get it online from 2000 AD’s web store. And, since they’ve released it as a preview, I can at least give you the first page, which is enough to see our cool and exciting premise and just how incendiarily good Laura’s art is.

I’ll be posting detailed writers notes to the $25 tier of the Patreon this afternoon, and a big interview with me and Laurz at the 2000 AD website.…

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