Adventures of a Cultural Omnivore: 2015

Each December, I try to put up a post on the best media I encountered throughout the year. This year, my omnivorous appetite for culture concentrated on music more than anything, but I did all right in other categories as well.

 

Books

I didn’t neglect fantasy (George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire) or science fiction (Warhammer 40K), but as usual, the classics made the biggest impression. Joseph Conrad’s portrayal of the British Empire in Heart of Darkness connected in my mind with W.E.B. Du Bois’s comments on colonialism and racism in “The Souls of White Folk,” and I almost got around to a whole series of posts on it (previous post). Honorable mentions would include Franz Kafka’s The Trial, for its absurdist take on the workings of bureaucracy, and Hemingway’s Men Without Women. Every time I read Hemingway, I wonder why, if he had such an impact on English style, more authors don’t write like he did.

 

Comics

I would recommend He-Man and the Masters of the Universe from DC Comics to anyone who enjoys fantasy, and I would highly recommend Neil Gaiman and Mark Buckingham’s run on Miracleman from the Nineties, now being brought to digital format by Marvel. However, nothing could top Ms. Marvel this year.

Kamala Khan is a Pakistani-American high school girl and a Muslim. After a weird gas gives her the ability to stretch her body, she starts fighting Jersey City’s bad guys and, completely without permission, adopts the name Ms. Marvel, which once belonged to her idol Carol Danvers, currently known as Captain Marvel. For her costume, she redesigns a burkini.

 

 

Kamala gained a lot of press as DC’s first Muslim character with her own title, and her cultural and ethnic background is important, but she’s also just a high school girl running the teenage gauntlet and trying to figure out who she wants to be--and it isn’t anybody but herself. She doesn’t have her parents’ roots in Pakistani culture, she isn’t as religious as her brother, and she isn’t like the other kids at her typical American school either. She has squabbles with peers and falls in and out of love and is painfully self-conscious and unsure of herself.

Literature is full of cookie-cutter caricatures along those lines, but writer G. Willow Wilson brings Kamala to life in ways that resonate across cultural and generational divides, and Adrian Alphona’s art is unique, effective, and frequently hilarious. Together, the two serve up everything from typical superhero exploits to tear-jerking drama--and at least one moment among the most powerful I’ve ever read.

Early in Volume 1, Kamala’s powers are fluctuating wildly and she suddenly finds she has transformed to look exactly like her hero Captain Marvel, a classic buxom blond beauty whom Kamala sees as perfect. But a mere 23 pages into the series, I had already come to understand and care about Kamala so strongly that I only wanted her to be who she is--a short, sometimes clumsy brown-skinned girl with unruly black hair. That’s part of her beauty, and watching her turn white felt wrong, wrong, wrong.

 

 

I was so impressed by Kamala Khan, and have been so unimpressed with most of the 2016 presidential candidates, that I even whipped up a couple memes featuring her. Nothing mind-blowing, but feel free to share:

 

I love it when she embiggens her fists:

 

Movies

Early in the year, I continued a stretch of films from director Jean-Luc Godard. Then after my son started leaving the house each day for kindergarten, I was actually able to hit the movie theater every now and then! Spectre and Star Wars: The Force Awakens were both excellent, but it was Mad Max: Fury Road that inspired me most. The result was a series of blog posts examining the movie from the perspectives of feminism, Christian myth, and Marxism:

     Mad Max Feminista

     Jennifer Blood Feminista
     Mad Max: Of Hawks and Doves
     Mad Max: Out of Eden
     Mad Marx: Frederick Road

 

Television

I also found the time--I have no idea how--to watch more TV this year. Penny Dreadful and Outlander were entertaining, while Supergirl was just the fluff I was looking for. The show has problems, but Melissa Benoist isn’t one of them. She’s fairly wonderful, and watching her deal with her life as Kara Danvers is one of the highlights of the series. Meanwhile, Game of Thrones continues to engross and Syfy appears to have a quality space opera in The Expanse. However, Mad Men really was the best show on television, and the question needs to be asked: Has there ever been a better show on television?

 

Video Games

The only video game I played this year, aside from a little Relic Run (Tomb Raider) on my iPhone, was Silent Hill: Downpour. I felt like it was a return to form for home console games in the series, after Homecoming was so bad GameStop salespersons encouraged me not to buy it. I should have listened. Downpour doesn’t try to break or even bend the template for Silent Hill, it just tries to get it right and succeeds.

 

Music

This year, I learned that scores of bands I’ve never heard of are pumping out some incredible metal: Barren Earth, Khemmis, My Dying Bride, Tribulation, Krisiun, Avatarium, Sylosis, Sulphur Aeon. However, the bands that really struck a chord with me this year lay in a completely different direction. One was Siouxsie and the Banshees. I can’t believe I didn’t discover them earlier. They belong in the company of alternative music greats like U2, R.E.M. and The Cure, and you may put “Night Shift” on my list of coolest songs ever:

 

Then one morning I put on some Jefferson Airplane and Grace Slick’s voice in “Somebody to Love” electrified me. Of course I’d heard the song countless times, but this time I really heard it. Now Jefferson Airplane is an obsession. I’m still just wading in, but the water promises to get deep as I explore more of their music and the movement out of San Francisco that they were a part of:

 

And there you have my favorites from 2015. Let me know yours. This cultural omnivore is always looking for something else to eat.

 

Related posts:

Twilight of the Cultural Omnivores
Best in Comics 2014
Best in Music 2014
Best of Books 2014
Best in Movies, Video Games, Comics 2013
Best in Music 2013
Best in Books 2013

My Personal Best of 2013 in All the Rest: Movies, TV, Video Games and Comics

I may have managed to read a fair amount of books (blog) and listen to a lot of music (blog) in 2013, but I had little time for other types of media. Nonetheless, I always make an effort, so here’s my best of 2013 in movies, television, video games and comics.

The only movie I saw in movie theaters this year, and the most enjoyable movie I saw this year, was Star Trek: Into Darkness. J. J. Abrams’s reboot of Star Trek is the best thing to happen to the franchise since Star Trek: The Next Generation. But the rest of my movie viewing tended to be of classics, which I find increasingly reliable for stimulation (blog). After hearing philosopher Slavoj Zizek discuss Possessed (1931) in the following clip from The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, I had to check it out. (Discussion of Possessed starts after the intro and finishes at 3:16 when he starts talking about The Matrix.)

 

In Possessed, a short and fast-paced film, Joan Crawford plays a factory worker who becomes the kept woman of a city gent (Clark Gable). At first, she’s just out for his money, and even tells him so, but she ends up falling in love and desiring marriage even though the ensuing scandal would harm his chances of being elected governor. It doesn’t sound like anything special, but like all great films, it covers a lot of ground, as the back cover of the DVD summarizes so well:

“This pre-Code scorcher…expertly mixes greed, ambition, politics and sex into a frank portrait of a world where men have power and women have a sell-by date stamped on their flesh.”

I fared less well in television this year, falling even further behind with series I love like Game of Thrones and Mad Men. These are on hold until my wife and I can find time to sit down together and watch them--which means the situation is dire. On my own, I did find time to watch both seasons of Rome. The shifting fortunes of soldiers Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus were entertaining, and it was interesting to watch the fall of the Roman Republic as the House of Caesar rose, but I enjoyed most the character of Atia of the Julii. She schemes for her family’s power with such lovable simplicity that the sore price she pays in the end, as her son finally rises to become Emperor Augustus, makes her tragic. Here is Polly Walker in full flurry as Atia the Amoral:

 

In video games, I played through The 3rd Birthday, a sci-fi shooter and spin-off from the Parasite Eve series, on my trusty PSP, and, in a sudden burst of activity, I busted out the old PS2, scraped the crust out of its crevices, and finished off Silent Hill 2--a game I began seven years ago way back in 2006. I got the suicide ending, which apparently means I play on the edge with no regard for danger. I would have expected to get the chickenshit ending, but this is much cooler.

Comics suffered the worst this year since I have yet to find an economical and convenient way to buy them in Japan. However, I did read through the graphic novel of the Spider-Man classic Kraven’s Last Hunt, and it proved to be as engrossing as it was when I was a kid scouring the shelves for single issues at Day & Palin in Farmington, IL. When Kraven the Hunter decides it’s time to kill Spider-Man and take his place, we readers get a deep look into the psyches of the two, their darkness and strength.

 

All in all, as 2013, the Year of Dwindling Free Time, draws to a close, I count myself blessed. I can never read enough or absorb enough music, but increasingly I find that other forms of entertainment like movies, TV and video games can take a backseat to everything else. Much better to spend time with my family, say by talking with my wife over a bottle of Sangria or using Tomica cars to knock down Transformers with my son.