The Factual Opinion

How To Read Wittgenstein

By Ray Monk
2005
128 pgs
Published By Norton

Ray Monk is a name that anyone interested in Wittgenstein will learn quickly--Monk's claim to fame in the Ludwig world is his throughly researched Duty of Genius, which remains the most important biographical resource for anyone interested in Wittgenstein's actual life.  It's also an immensely readable book, compelling and understandable--a claim that none can honestly make for everything Wittgenstein actually wrote.  The "How To Read" series is a new version of an old publishing maxim--that if it's hard to understand, a book about understanding it is always gonna sell.  In the case of Wittgenstein, an author who only published one book and one critical essay, neither of which are what any mildly educated individual would call an "easy" read, this couldn't be more true.  In Wittgenstein's case, his posthumous publications rival that of Tupac Shakur--from the widely known Philosophical Investigations to his personal religious correspondence, if people have found a page the man wrote on, it's been printed.  None of this has done much to help the widespread comprehension of his ideas; if anything, it's made widespread agreement on what his ideas even were the only main focus among those (college professors and thesis writers) who might be able to explain it to us.  It might not be another hundred years before Wittgenstein is nailed down in a philosophy textbook--as it is now, his chapter is usually prefaced with some indication that "we don't really know what this guy was getting on about, but we think it was probably something like this."  Although How To Read won't bring anyone a final answer on Wittgenstein, it can help fan the winding fires of motivation to figure it out for oneself--after all, Ray Monk should know this cat better than anyone, yet he's kind enough to let the reader in on his secret early on: He's not that sure about Wittgenstein himself.  Considering that, at no point in the pages, does Monk ever let anyone in on his own impressive credentials as a pre-eminent Wittgenstein scholar, that's a pretty attractive achievement.  For anyone who has ever wondered who this Austrian was, and why his name is still coming up as a intellectual heavyweight, How To Read is a book they shouldn't be ashamed to look into.  Unlike Nietzsche, Ludwig wrote the kind of philosophy that maturity won't force anyone to grow out of.

-Tucker Stone, 2007

 

Checkmate # 10

Written by Greg Rucka
Art by Jesus Saiz
Published by DC Comics

For the initiated, the Checkmate series revolves around a rather large spy organization populated by various superheroes (most of whom wear military style uniforms instead of spandex) and normal spies whose responsibility is similar to that of a global peacekeeping force.  The idea behind is it that if the United Nations had the opportunity to use superheroes in their peacekeeping units, it would be something like Checkmate.  The term comes about due to Checkmate's rather unwieldy structure of leadership, built around the various pieces that make up a chess set.  (Although the pawns greatly exceed the required number, there is a Black Queen, a White Knight, etcetera.)  Checkmate was a rather unsuccessful, albeit mildly interesting series from the 80's.  Following it's cancellation, the group and characters occasionally appeared in various DC comic books, but it wasn't until a few years ago that they did anything important.  Following their involvement in Infinite Crisis, the incredibly large and massively irritating crossover DC published last year, Checkmate was restarted as a monthly book, under the stewardship of Greg Rucka.  Rucka, while mostly known in mainstream comics as the guy who wrote Batman for a while when no one was buying it or as the guy who wrote the best DC comic in recent years that no one bought (Gotham Central), has made quite a name for himself with his creator owned works Queen & Country and Whiteout, both of which will be movies in the next few years--and they'll be the type of movies that non-comics readers will be unable to identify as comic related movies.  He's also written some mildly successful prose novels, all of which are currently in print.

Rucka seems to have been wanting to write Checkmate for a while--like Gotham Central, the book is a full read every month, bursting with all the type of international politics that are such a constant theme in Queen & Country.  Whether it's backdoor dealings with China to negotiate the power of their veto or blackmailing low-grade superheroes to commit assassination, more intelligent stuff has occurred in Checkmate in the last ten issues than normally occurs in five years of a mainstream comic.  This is heavy, scary stuff--and not because of the violence, which is rarely the focal point.  It's unsettling because it's dealing with the very nature of what's acceptable when governments that don't like, or trust, each other are in a situation that involves them making decisions based on the greater security.  Rucka does an excellent job of maintaining a constant theme of the attitudes and behavior of the soldiers on the ground versus their ability to follow protocols that, while achieving the ultimate end, are designed to negate all humanity in their practitioners.  Much like a show like The Wire, where the emotional and mental component of doing ugly things wrecks havoc on the characters, Checkmate is full of people whose survival and success becomes predicated by their ability to ignore their inherent compassion and decency.  Unlike 24, where a man like Jack Bauer is able to turn off his human emotion to save the day, the people who form the components of Checkmate are presented as being unable to make this distinction--in doing so, Rucka presents them as far more human than one would expect.

The most recent issue of Checkmate is the continuation of a storyline regarding the organizations attempts to infiltrate a terroristic religious cult--a cult that has stymied all efforts up until now.  The storyline has been an ugly, frightening one, and through an excellent choice, the undercover agent is one invented at the beginning of the story, making it impossible for the reader to be sure how it will all turn out.  (Had Rucka used anyone readers knew, and were possibly attached to, his choices regarding the outcome would have been predicated by the hellishly obsessive DC editorial department.)  Although the issue has it's flaws, not the least of which is the hideous cover pictured above, it's an intelligent, exciting read.  That's a statement that this writer would like to be able to make about DC more often.

-Tucker Stone, 2007

The Complete Dick Tracy: Volume 1

By Chester Gould
Original Publication 1931-1933
Current Collection Published 2006
IDW Publishing

For those whose knowledge of Dick Tracy begins and ends at the Warren Beatty movie (a group that formally included this writer,) IDW's recent publication of Chester Gould's original strips will prove to be an absolute surprise.  As has been the lucky happenstance of the last few years, Mr. Gould's creation has joined the ranks of Krazy Kat, Gasoline Alley, Popeye and (of course) Peanuts in the hardcover reprint circuit.  Like those books, Dick Tracy covers an area sorely ignored by history, that of the classic American newspaper strip.  With the exception of Peanuts and Krazy Kat, recent years have done a considerable amount of damage to the memory of these homegrown icons--although the already sold-out first edition of this Volume 1 doesn't indicate that.  (Don't worry, a second edition has already shipped to stores.)

Dick Tracy isn't anything like one might imagine--it's far removed from the crazed color schemes of Warren Beatty's film, and it's quite unlike the square-jawed strip of recent years--if anything, the closest comparison to current police procedurals is more that of NYPD Blue mixed with a Shield style attitude.  Tracy, as we see in the beginning of the book, becomes a policeman solely to revenge the slaughter of his girlfriends father (and he becomes one a few hours after the body is still cold,) and then proceeds to punch or shoot his way through whatever criminal gets in his way.  Death (albeit a bloodless death) haunts the book: many fall under Tracy's gun, and even more find themselves victims of bludgeoning.  While the book is mired under storylines that stretch a little too long, racist depictions of blacks and mexicans and totally devoid of any halfway reasonable women, Gould's strip is (like Gasoline Alley) far more involving than anything currently souring the funny pages.

It won't be long before the reprint circuit starts delving too deep (God-fearing individuals should start praying that nobody tries this out on Beetle Bailey or Hagar,) but Dick Tracy deserves to get a chance at showing where he came from--especially because so many only know what he's become.

-Tucker Stone, 2007

The Spirit #2

Written by Darwyn Cooke
Art by Darwyn Cooke and J. Bone
Published by DC Comics

Darwyn Cooke is one of those comic creators working today that can pretty much follow his own muse.  For whatever reason, Cooke is currently housed over at the DC building, where he's churning out work-for-hire comics based on characters that he'll never own the rights too.

God bless him for that.  After all, if Cooke was eking out work for Fantagraphics or Drawn & Quarterly, he'd be sure to be getting all the acclaim that means (a lot of love from an even smaller subgroup of the group that's buying the new Gen13 series, which is about the equivalent of people who were watching that TV show E-Ring.)  For now, Cooke seems content to play with corporate toys--his work on Catwoman and, of course, New Frontier, are some of the best things DC has published in the last few years.  (And New Frontier contained what could arguably be the best use of the Hal Jordan Green Lantern in the characters abysmally long career.)

Still, knives have been at the ready for Cooke's re-imagining of Will Eisner's long-running Spirit character--a character that's been referred to for so long as "Will Eisner's The Spirit" that the reader almost expects for the character to be called that in the comic itself.  The comic itself is only three issues in, and so far it's been exactly like what one imagined--Cooke's brand of neo-revivalist art mixed with the bittersweet archetypal characters he's so clearly mastered.  It's an odd beast--his art, as always, is so archaic and whimsical that while it may make one crave the past, the historical fact is that very little cartooning was ever as good as what he's doing.  While he's certainly not going to supplant Will Eisner anytime in the next 10 years (give him 30, than maybe) Cooke's already doing much prettier stuff.  The story here is little more than an updated version of Eisner's classic femme fatale out for revenge, but that's to be expected this early in the series. (Considering that the original Spirit fills over 20 hardcover collections, Cooke has a massive pool to draw tales from if he so wishes.)  While Cooke's skills as a storyteller would clearly be wasted if he spends too long on the Spirit (one hopes he goes out on his own, and soon) as long as he's behind the wheel, the comic is one that will remain a must read.

-Tucker Stone, 2007

No Country For Old Men

By Cormac McCarthy
2005
320 pgs.
Published by Vintage

There's a regular love affair at the offices of the Factual for genre pieces by great artists.  When a filmmaker like Kubrick does horror or science fiction, we like it.  When David Fincher makes a serial killer movie, we buy it.  When Grant Morrison writes super-heroes, we buy you copies.  And when Cormac McCarthy writes a 80's drug-war thriller, we buy it, we read it and we love it.

Make no mistake: McCarthy hasn't left any of the artistry that made his earlier works so important to American literature.  Still, Old Men is a far different book than Blood Meridian or the Border Trilogy--it's a speedy read, and it eschews the larger moral goals of those works.  With a small rudimentary nod to the "how things have changed for the worse" attitude so rampant among red states, Old Men is a book firmly in the grips of characters who solve problems with instincts and bloodshed.  As violent as anything set around 2 million in drug money cash can be, the book follows a loose collection of men on their trek after a massacre: Llewyln Moss, the 36 year old Vietnam veteran in possession of money that he found, the sheriff that hopes to find him and save his life, and Anton Chigurh, a nearly indestructible force of death cut from the cloths of McCarthy's Blood Meridian.  By the books closure, the body count is high and the money is soaked in blood--and it's a tremendously exciting ride to get there.  Due to the shooting in one's own foot that has so entertained Roth, Pynchon and Delillo in the recent 24 months, Mr. McCarthy is the single greatest American writer of fiction working today--but he's clearly got the potential for a successful second career if it interests him.

-Tucker Stone, 2007

The Human Stain

By Philip Roth
2001
384 pgs.
Published by Vintage International
#20 on the NY Times "Best American Works of the Last 25 Years"
Winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award

Although this is one of the better Roth that has made it through the Factual Opinion's screening process, it's still a Roth, and therefore suspect.  On some level, it's impossible to deny or ignore the writer's intelligence: yes, he's a bright dude.  Still, the intense self-worship, the awful egotism and crushing arrogance of his work is something that, when fully immersed in his novels, is suffocating and horrid.  Much like the writer, the Human Stain's protagonist is yet another intensely intelligent man whose acumen is matched, toe to toe, by a total dearth of social ability.  Worshiping at the alter of intelligence and coated in a cloak of absolute self-righteousness, both Roth and his literary counterpart (the poorly named Coleman Silk) stride around tiny liberal towns (as is the case for Roth, always standing in for America) and proclaim themselves master of morality and behavior, begging the reader to recoil in disgust or shock from the choices it's characters make, so that Roth/Silk can point a crone-like finger across the pages and name the prudish conservative in the midst.  As is, irritatingly, standard with all of Roth's work that's come across this desk, entire sections of America are ignored--like the Republican ones, the ones that are gay, the ones that are Muslim, the ones that are Asian, and, up until this tour de force of ego, the ones that are black.

Knowing the uninteresting and trite fact that the Human Stain's main character will, at some point, be revealed to be a light skinned African-American posing as white does nothing to lessen the suspense at the reveal--if anything, it increases the irritation at the cloying and pointless attempts at subterfuge in the early pages.  Like the work of M. Night Shamayln, Roth uses a trick--and an obvious one at that.  While Human Stain contains some brilliant passages, as do all of Roth's work, the book remains firmly in the pantheon of literature that no one who has limited time should spend upon.  One hopes that someday, Harold Bloom and the New York Times be damned, scholarship shall reach the same conclusion.

-Tucker Stone, 2007

The Best Album of 2006

Ghostface Killah
Fishscale

Marty will take care of the serious business.  For now, Tucker's gonna get personal and tell you why Fishscale is a better album than all the rest of this top 25, and another album I'm sick of hearing about.

Why Fishscale is better than...

....T.I. King: Because listening to Ghostface doesn't require an explanation or defense of selling out.
....Girl Talk Night Ripper: About 300 reasons, all of which involve Ghostface not including anything on his album by the band Wings.
....Liars Drum's Not Dead: Because the Liars are white.
....Herbert Scale: Pretty pop/dance/electronic music will never beat anything that is even surreptitiously connected to the Clan.
....Lil Wayne Dedication 2: Album Art.
....Neko Case Fox Confessor Brings The Flood: Maybe because liking Neko Case makes you almost as gay as liking State & Main?
....Comets on Fire Avatar: Uhhh. Vocals?
....Scott Walker The Drift: Yeah, cause of vocals.  And Ghostface never makes you want to kill yourself?  Or at least, not on every track?
....Burial Burial: Cause it's longer.
....Califone Roots & Crowns: Cause it's louder.
....Spankrock Yoyoyoyoyo: Clever sex vocals and loud bass.  Rinse, repeat.
....Voxtrot EPS: Have you heard these? Are they good?
....Tom Waits Orphans: I'm on the fence here.  Go with cause there's one disc length too much.
....Quantic Announcement To Answer: Marty and I have a confession.  This album doesn't actually exist.
....Asobi Seksu Citrus: Brooklyn music shouldn't sound like it came from Japan.
....Hold Steady Boys and Girls in America: Separation Sunday beats Fishscale.  Boys and Girls lost to Quantic.  Moving on.
....Clipse Hell Hath No Fury: crack crack crack crack crack crack crack crack crack crack.  yawn.
....Beirut Gulag Orkestar: Φάτε το γάιδάρο μου. 
....Bruce Springsteen We Shall Overcome: At no point during Fishscale does one experience "yearning."
....Robert Pollard From A Compound Eye: Only because i'm the only person in the world who likes this album enough to remember talking about it.
....Islands Return To The Sea:  The problem with cleverness--it grows to irritate.
....Deftones Saturday Night Wrist: Surprise. This album is better than Fishscale.  Okay, no.
....Decemberists The Crane Wife: I don't know.  Is there anyone on Earth who would push for this to be higher?
....Joanna Newsom Ys: Wait a second. Are you serious?  No, wait, come back.  I'm sorry! I didn't mean it!

-Tucker Stone, 2007

Tucker's sorry he didn't take this so seriously.  Really.  He's really, really sorry. He took a risk that Marty would--and he did, which is why he's our Music Editor-In Chief.

Did you catch Ghostface’s interview in The Onion? He starts out by answering the question, “What can you tell me about the new album?” (meaning Fishscale) with, “What do you want to know about it?” He goes on to compare beats to pussy, admits to picking his Iron Man persona arbitrarily, and refuses to name his favorite soul artists. Dude’s impenetrable. He gives the most insight into himself in the opening moments of the interview, when he describes how he makes an album: “You get the beats, you write to them, you go in the studio and lay it down. Hopefully a song comes out sounding good. If it comes out sounding good, you put it to the side with the rest of the other good ones, and you try to decide which ones you’re gonna use on the album.” 

If Bob Dylan’s Chronicles Vol. 1 proves—as Nick Hornby suggests—that Dylan thinks entirely in metaphors and poetry, so his songs are the natural and obvious outpouring of a mind that sees the world through a singular point of view; then hearing Ghostface talk about making music marks him as a completely different beast altogether. Ghostface’s writing is analogous with Dylan’s in many respects: his elevated language, his storytelling, his concepts for songs. Both Ghostface and Dylan view songwriting pragmatically rather than artistically; their artistic sensibilities just naturally tumble out into their music. But where Dylan approaches his entire life in the same way he approaches his songs, Ghostface shows up in his songs in a way he doesn’t in real life. 

But, maaaaaaan, does he show up all over the place on Fishscale. Ghostface goes to more places in more ways on this album than on any before. It’s his Blonde On Blonde.

“Whip You With A Strap” waxes poetic about the beatings his mother gave him. “Kilo” sounds like Ghostface and Raekwon rolling with the Hard Knock Life orphans on a conveyor belt stacked with mountains of coke. “Big Girl” begins with Ghost hitting on two coked-up hotties and ends with him looking on them like a father figure, telling them, “All I ask in life's for you to be careful/ Stay focused, take care of your health/ Have kids and marry a prince/ Good luck and happiness.” He tops everything off with a far-from-horrible duet with The Notorious B.I.G., a bona fide Wu-Tang joint, and a dream sequence featuring mermaids with Halle Berry haircuts.

Fishscale features at least five songs that have never even been imagined before. Concept for concept, he’s outthinking every other MC in the game. Yet, Fishscale is his most commercial album as well. His duet with Ne-Yo may flip romantic expectations as Ghostface begs the girl he cheated on not to get with one particular guy (“Okay, girl, what I did was whack/ But you don’t get a nigga back like that”), but it’s still, you know, a duet with Ne-Yo. There’s an ode to mothers which tilts Ghost into sheer sentiment, and “Be Easy” is his most straightforward track ever—he rides a horn-driven Pete Rock beat with a catchphrase hook and, voila, the song nets a spot on Entourage. 

Then, there’s the stuff you go to Ghostface for: the high-octane drama of “Shakey Dog;” the murky, RZA-influenced beats (this time provided frequently by MF Doom); Ghost working himself up into an emotional frenzy. Fishscale would be all things to all people, if all people could appreciate violent storytelling dressed up with surreal, stream-of-consciousness imagery; Kanye-baiting, soul-twisting production; and songs that don’t fit into the usual hip-hop tropes of a typical major-label album. As it is, one can only assume that the people who have gravitated toward Ghostface have done so because of his staggering acuteness or the deep mystery of his verses. As much as we can zero in on his turns of phrase, his concepts, the way he picks his beats, there’s still something elusive about Ghost. This is not a guy who should have as many supporters as he does. But he does. He’s the best rapper in the game, but if you asked him, he’d tell you, “I just do this shit because I gotta feed my family.”

-Marty Brown, 2007

Green Arrow #70

Written by Judd Winick
Art by Scott McDaniel and Andy Owens
Published by DC Comics

For whatever reason, there's always a slight bit of embarrassment that comes with bestowing honors upon a Green Arrow comic book.  It's really an unfair response; after all, Green Arrow has, with only a few exceptions, been graced with quality writing and superb art since it's inception at the hands of Kevin Smith and Phil Hester.  Winick has been on the book for a long time now, and although he's had his share of difficulties in the form of a few awful fill-in artists (during the Infinite Crisis cross-over) and a horrendous cross-over with Green Lantern, Winick has done an excellent job of creating a comic that is regularly entertaining.  He's got a skill for the kind of irreverent humor that is normally the domain of Millar and Ellis, and now that he's partnered with Scott McDaniel, an artist who has usually been in charge of books who's seriousness (or attempts at) far exceed his cartoonish style.  McDaniel's career is one that the Factual has kept up with for some time now, and he's been too often shuffled around books that he had no business being on in the first place.  His art is a youthful one, unlike the hyper-steroid art of the mid 90's and too far removed from the photo-realistic style that's currently in vogue.  For whatever reason, he's never been hugely popular, although one doubts that he's not well known among artists. 

The latest issue of Green Arrow is yet another example of why the two creators shouldn't be separated anytime soon--a well-crafted issue detailing the always dork-popular team-up.  As is per DC's usual wont, Batman shows up in Green Arrow's town, reminding everybody that being a billionaire means you can follow one's obsessions through the leisurely use of a private plane.  The current obsession Batman's after is, as the cover depicts, the Red Hood--otherwise known as the long-thought-dead 2nd Robin, Jason Todd.  Winick was the last writer to do anything of importance with the Hood, and thankfully he ignores whatever adventures the kid has been doing since.  (Although it'll never happen, someone at DC should ensure that Winick is always given approval over what Jason Todd is used for--no one else seems to have a good idea.)  It would be a bit too intrusive to copy in all the dialog that pushed this issue to the top spot, it can be safely said that Judd Winick is writing some of the funniest banter short of The Office.

In the end, although everything above can be said to be absolutely true, the simple fact remains that Green Arrow has, and will probably always remain, a B-grade superhero in a world where it's hard to have respect for the A-class.  No kid, excepting a few random archery freaks, will ever want to grow up to become Arrow, and in the end, that's the acid test.

-Tucker Stone, 2007