There’s something fascinating about journalists. Something strangely glamorous and maybe just a tad, just a wee bit, delectable. Maybe because we see them so rarely these days. They seem mythic. Like bigfoot only less fuzzy. Like a hydra only much scarier if you’re doing shit you shouldn’t oughtta.
Maybe because the idea, if not the practice, is truth. And maybe that’s just me, I don’t know, but the idea of journalism to me is truth distilled, laser guided and fearless. Truth like you mean it. Truth with a kiss sometimes, sometimes with a bullet. The idea is truth and so the idea is holy.
And maybe it’s just me, but we never see that these days. Journalists have been replaced with fear mongers and hate mongers and various other mongers. (Monger is a fun word) By Glenn Becks and Bill O’Reilys. Sensationalism and exploitation is a lot more profitable than verisimilitude, it seems. And, if you listen to these unbelievable, unbearable fucks, profit is patriotism. Freedom is in the dollar, freedom is in the lie. A real American HATES.
Which is completely fucked but if I dig any further into this trench I may never find my way back to my point.
It is due, in part, to my fascination with the idea of a stone journalist that Transmetropolitan sits atop my list of greatest comics of all time. And I could talk for days, seriously, about Transmet. I even included a reference to it both in my first movie and in my toast at Xoph Daddy’s wedding. And if you ever meet me on the street and ask me what the finest moment in comic book history is, I’ll tell you it’s when Spider Jerusalem put on a shirt. But inside the blacker than pitch tone and cybernetic enhancements of Transmet, it’s the hope that makes it brilliant. It’s the humanity that makes it burn.
Transmet is genius.
But more than hope through gritted teeth these days what i want to see is hope inside open arms. More than the corrupt being taught a lesson with a bowel disruptor I want to see them taught a lesson with a defibrillator. These people have hearts, too. Even Glenn Beck inside the fear and the flab and the lies and the hate and the tears and the bullshit, somewhere in there, I have to believe, is a heart. Maybe he just need a jump-start.
Which brings me to DMZ.
I read the first trade of DMZ a few nights ago and I fell in love, much the way I fell in love with the likes of Y the Last Man and Kabuki. Hard and at first sight.
In DMZ we see a New York through the lens of a young, neophyte journalist. And what we see, for those of us who’ve been lucky enough to get that city, the city, under our feet is at once a New York we’ve never dreamed of and the New York we’ve known all our lives.
Brian Wood’s New York is war-torn and savage, broken and kind, suspicious and receptive, innocent and experienced, feared and all but abandoned by the outside world and still the crossroads of the universe. A New York that refuses to die or even bend under skies raining smartbombs and daisycutters. A New York of communities that care for their denizens as best they know how. A New York that protects its own. A New York that is enigmatic and as much completely separate as it is completely central to a nation.
And that’s the genius of the book. The genius is New York. The genius is the greatest city in the world through the lens of an outsider swaddled by people who just won’t die, who refuse not to flourish. Swaddled by New Yorkers.
At least that’s the genius of the first six issues. I’m told there are more.
Speaking of New York, falling hardcore, head over heals, retarded in love and genius, I think I’ve found the woman I’m going to marry.
Oh, sure, I foresee some complications, like the fact that we’ve never met and she almost surely has no idea who I am, but I’ve chosen to view these things as minor inconveniences. I’ve chosen not to let this define our relationship.
Anyway, her name is Susan Enan and, holy-shit-on-a-pogo-stick is she good.
I know that many if not most of the people who read my stuff prefer that their music sound more like Armageddon than salvation, but I think many of you might make exceptions for beauty on this kind of scale. Artistry like a cannon. Grace like a whisper.
I picked up her record on Amazon a couple of weeks ago and I haven’t stopped spinning it since. Her piano smokes with a soft, caring tone, her words are immaculate, surgical and towering, she has a voice like redemption and when she breathes, more than sings, certain words like “despair” it may be the sexiest sound in the whole of the world.
I fear that if I keep praising her in the manifold ways she deserves I might end up sounding more like a stalker than I’m comfortable with, so I’ll just link you to all kinds of places to hear and purchase her music and hope you find the same kind of deliverance in her voice, the same kind of calming sorrow in her words and the same joy in her instrument as I have.
Get a beverage of your choice and remember that music can still surprise you,
E
cling to what you treasure, and treasure what you hold…
