5 Favorite Books of 2018

hav jan morris

I read a lot of books and I like to think about the books I read. But, I never do enough of either. That will change this year as I plan to engage more with what I read and think about. What better way to start than with a list. Here’s are five of my favorite books from 2018 that had a big impact on me last year. They were not necessarily published in 2018, although one of them was.

Hav by Jan Morris

hav jan morris

It’s no secret that I’m a connoisseur of architectural things. Rooms, buildings, structures, cities; urban areas in general. Hav is a fictional trading city located somewhere in the Mediterranean. It’s old. It has been around for centuries, if not millennia. It’s rumored to be on the site of ancient Greek Troy. It is ostensibly European, but has been conquered by Arabs, Turks, Russians, Venetians, British, and others. Each administration has left an indelible stamp on the city through buildings, urban planning, and population resulting in a labyrinthine conurbation with many distinct parts. It’s also a trading port. It’s most famous export is Hav salt, valued for its aphrodisiac qualities. Like other commercial hubs, it is populated by a varied mix of people that first arrive to do business, but end up staying, settling, and creating enclaves that add to the exotic richness of the place. The Hav Chinese built the most impressive structure, the tower of the Chinese Master, that boasts young Sigmund Freud as a one-time resident. Languidly paced, but hard to put down, Jan Morris’ Hav is a place I wish I could visit again.

atta future kobek

The Future Won’t Be Long by Jarett Kobek

This is a prequel to I hate the Internet, which I loved. Set mostly in 80’s New York, against the backdrop of its waning hedonistic club scene, with short detours to Midwest and California, we get to see the origin and evolution of the friendship between Baby & Adeline. As someone who lived in New York for a few years, it was an easy novel to like. Revisiting old haunts and places I wish were still around was a nostalgic treat.

ATTA by Jarett Kobek

This is a short and incredible book. It’s the fictionalized life of Mohamed Atta, the mastermind of 9/11. I resisted this book for a long time. Having lived in New York during 9/11, it’s hard for me to revisit that moment. It’s probably some kind of generalized PTSD, although I was never near the worst of the action. ATTA is revelatory. His life unfolded like a dark version of my own. I grew up in Poland, he grew up in Egypt, both were outside the western prosperity sphere at the time. We emigrated, and arrived in the west in Hamburg, Germany. We both studied architecture and urban planning. Then our path crossed again in New York, 9/11. A haunting mirror of our world.

1491 charles c mann

1491 by Charles C. Mann

I was aware of 1491 since its release. I read the first 100 pages or so, a couple of years ago at my sister’s wedding. A copy was available at the Airbnb I was staying at. I didn’t want to leaved it, and contemplated stealing the copy. I finally finished it this year when I finally got a copy of my own. This book is incredible on so many levels. From the deep history of the Andean and Mesoamerican societies, through the plagues that wiped out a mind-boggling percentages of Native American populations, to the astonishing ecological impacts of the native populations, this book was filled with incredible history, much of which was completely unknown to me. I say this as someone who’s read fairly extensively on all these topics, and yet 1491 surprised me again and again.

Unamerica by Momus

unAmerica momus

I’m a big fan of Momus; not just Momus the musician, or Momus the writer, or Momus the blogger, or Momus the YouTube lecturer. I’m a fan of ALL of those incarnations of Momus. I’ve listened to his music since the late 90’s, read his Click Opera blog in Oughts, I watch his YouTube channel now, and I read his books when they come out. I devoured and loved The Book of Scotlands and the Book of Jokes.

Parallel World

For some reason it took me a few years to get to Unamerica. Momus can really turn a phrase: The Book of Scotlands’ ‘motto’ is “Every Lie Creates a Parallel World, a world in which it is true.” The back cover of Unamerica announces that, “God doesn’t love America. Quite the reverse.” The book begins with a revelation. God speaks unto Brad, and asks him to go a voyage of discovery, but in reverse. God says: “Brad, Americans have become the opposite of everything I intended humans, especially Christians, to become. If I still could, I’d smash this nation to potsherds, or flood the entire continental basin from sea to shining sea. […] America has to become undiscovered. […] Now it’s the rest of the world that needs to become the shining example, the Tir na nOg, the Shangri-La, the Golden Fleece. You Brad, and your twelve hand-picked companions must learn-and teach the world-how to become as unAmerican as possible.”

Meander

Eventually, Brad embarks on this voyage, but he takes a lot detours and meanderings. Momus is not afraid of language, he frequently makes use of vocabulary that is difficult, and willfully obscure. He relishes it in fact. It’s a slim volume, as are all of Momus’ books, but it’s densely packed with invention, adventure, absurdity, and fun. It feels like a much larger book. It doesn’t play by any narrative rules (that I’m aware of).

Utopia

Above all, Momus’ work revolves around the concept of Utopia. He himself has moved from Britain to France to America to Germany to Japan, and back. It has made him a keen observer of social norms, how they are constructed, and how they differ from place to place. We’re often told of the impossibility of Utopia, or of the impossibility of changing the society we live in for the better. But we only have to step outside of our borders to see that even small changes can produce big results. Humans have been creating different ways of living for millennia, it’s just something we do. It’s nice to have Momus remind us of this ability.

I hope you enjoyed this short list of my five favorite books of 2018. I will have more to say about some of these books in the future. Stay tuned!

UR : Utopia Report : No. 1

Cartoon Utopia #67 By Ron Regé, Jr

Introducing another new semi-regular feature on Trans-Atlantis: UR™ or the Utopia Report. If you’ve read this blog, or my comics before you already know that I’m very interested in the concept of Utopia. In the Utopia Report, I’m going to start cataloging interesting articles, posts, and snippets relating to the general topic of Utopia. As with my posts on the Apocalypse and Utopia in the past, this is to help me organize my thoughts and resources on the subject. It’s mostly going to be undigested links and quotes, though I may occasionally comment on if the mood strikes. Hopefully, someone out there will find this useful or at least interesting. OK, here it goes.


Momus recently alerted me to an interesting book The So-Called Utopia of the Centre Beaubourg — An Interpretation by Luca Frei. From the publisher:

Appearing under the pseudonym Gustave Affeulpin in 1976, and coinciding with the inauguration of the Centre Beaubourg in Paris, Albert Meister’s fictional text imagines a radical libertarian space submerged beneath the newly erected centerpiece of French Culture.


Student Works: Putting Utopia Back To Work is a fantastic and way too short interview with Behrang Behin about his Stack City student project. Behin’s project for a sustainable city is pretty interesting in itself. The conversation veers into some illuminating utopian territory:

abandoning the future as a cultural construct deprives us of a valuable instrument for defining ourselves in the present. You can learn a lot about the ethos of a society by looking at their science fiction. In that sense, the future is a place in our collective imagination, a terrain on which we fight our ideological battles and air out our common neuroses. This is precisely where architecture must play a role. Sustainable architecture shouldn’t just be concerned with the tactical level of engineering efficiency and the preservation of resources, but should also participate in the invention of alternative futures in cultural imagination.


Finally, here’s something I should have linked a while ago. Ron Regé, Jr has been doing some world-building. On his blog, he’s been posting drawings of his Cartoon Utopia. I don’t know if these will be just a series of drawings, or if he will create some kind of utopian comic book, but it’s amazing to watch a whole world come into being before your eyes.


Momus

Momus
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you will already know that I’m a big fan of Momus. As of yesterday he is offering as a free download the first of his six albums recorded for the now defunct Creation label. The first one is The Poison Boyfriend, his second solo effort. Keep checking his blog during December for the the other five.

Momus is a Better Blogger

It looks like my updates have slowed down to the point of erasing all entries from this blogs front page! I guess it’s time to resume posting. Some time ago I went to a Momus and Mai Ueda art performance in Chelsea. It was fantastic. I already blogged about it before. In fact it was my first post. Recently, I started scanning my sketchbook pages again and the image below was the first one to get scanned. It was drawn based on one of the photographs I took at the performance.

Momus and Mai from ‘I’ll Speak You Sing’
Click on the image to make bigger.
Since Momus was one of the major inspirations in getting this blog off the ground, it seems like as good a time as any to celebrate his great, and much more frequently updated blog.

Trans-Alaska Notes

regurgitatation
One of the reasons I started this blog was to make it a sort of digital bibliography for the comic-books I create. This is especially relevant to these three books: Trans-Alaska, Trans-Siberia, and Trans-Atlantis. All of the books are out of print at the moment. I’ve started working on new editions and I wanted to expand the notes section that can be found in the back of each book. I’m planning on a series of entries that hopefully will help me do that.
trans_alaska_micro.jpg
Trans-Alaska is the first book in the series. It was written and drawn over a period of about 2 weeks prior to the 2004 MoCCA Art Festival.
The notes section identified three main concepts that underpin Trans-Alaska. They are: Richard Florida’s Creative Class, Pat Kane’s Play Ethic and Momus’ Metaphysical Masochism of the Capitalist Creative.
trans-alaska-p3.jpg
Pat Kane’s Play Ethic is an attempt to create a new kind of philosophy of work in the 21st century. If the capitalist economic system has always relied on the Work Ethic as it’s engine, then in today’s (and tomorrow’s) post scarcity economies we will need something new: a Play Ethic. “If work doesn’t believe in you, why believe in work?” seems to be the general attitude. Kane is convinced that by embracing our inner homo ludens we can all become more creative, playful (responsibly so – hence the ethic) and happy. I sort of dismissed his ideas in the comic by pointing to the dangers of blurring the boundary between work and play in a capitalist context. At that time I hadn’t read Kane’s book The Play Ethic. I had only read his blog and some articles. The book is a much more nuanced examination of the possibility of a wider shift from work oriented culture to a ludic one. Although Kane suffers a bit from too much technophilia (for my taste) and is perhaps a little more over optimistic about the potential for play in a profit driven environment, nevertheless the book is a chock full of great ideas and concepts. I’m rooting for you Pat!
trans-alaska-p2.jpg
Florida is more of an urbanist and his concept of the Creative Class is deeply connected to cities. He sees the Creative Class (artists, designers, programmers, etc.) as the real economic engine that drives the vitality of cities… and economies. In that he is not that far off from the late and great Jane Jacobs. Florida’s book hinges on his Creative Cities Index. These cities, according to him, are attracting the creative work force necessary for competitiveness in the global creative economy. The book is almost a how-to guide for cities on how to re-create themselves to attract the creatives and by extension the businesses that want to hire them. And business brings all the ‘benefits’ like higher real-estate prices, more tax revenue, etc. This focus on the intersection of money and urbanism is pretty much what turns me off from Florida’s ideas. Momus said it best here. The influx of capital (and consequent rising prices) into creative city centers (often low-rent and marginal neighborhoods) chases those very creatives away. Soho in NY is a good example. San Francisco (number one on Florida’s Creative Cities Index) during the 90’s internet boom is another.
trans-alaska-p4.jpg
Speaking of Momus, he is probably the primary the catalyst for my doing these little theoretical comic tracts. Specifically I was very impressed by his Metaphysical Masochism Of The Capitalist Creative essay. In the essay Momus is taken by the ability of creatives to create metaphysical value out of the capitalist cesspool of money and greed. The equivalent of alchemical transubstantiation of shit into gold. Any designer trying to squeeze a drop of quality out of a clueless client will know exactly what Momus is talking about.
The notes ended with a bunch of Name dropping: Karl Marx, George Orwell, Chip Kidd, Witold Gombrowicz and André Breton. Karl Marx is a pretty obvious choice given the generally critical approach to capitalism in the comic. More will be written on him later.
George Orwell came to mind only briefly in the perhaps over-the-top assertion that the Play Ethic may be in danger of becoming a kind of newspeak version of Work Ethic. Following the 1984 logic of WAR=PEACE I was presenting my own WORK=PLAY. Pat Kane’s book rounded out his theory for me and I don’t think he implies anything of the sort. However the danger for that kind of misinterpretation is still valid think. Orwell will become more significant in Trans-Atlantis where I take a look utopias and dystopias.
I had read Chipp Kidd’s The Cheese Monkeys some time before I made Trans-Alaska. One of the characters, Winter Sorbeck, struck me a perfect Masochistic Capitalist Creative. That’s really the only connection here… though the novel did made it easier for me to think of design and it’s surrounding issues as a valid topic for a comic-book.
Gombrowicz is one of my favorite authors. Right around the time I was starting to work on the comic I was reading his novel Kosmos. The novel is this amazing study of nothing and everything. The main character from the most random occurrences, signs and coincidences, concocts multitudes of paranoid meanings. In some ways I see this novel as kind of template for the comics… a kind of archaeology of contemporary culture… digging up weird books and objects until they all start making some sort of sense.
André Breton. I probably should have said Surrealism. The influence of Surrealism has been with me for a long time. There are some obviously surreal moments in the comic (like the Giorgio de Chirico moment – see image above the Momus entry), but I won’t really get into the surreallity of capital until later books.
Well that’s it for now. More soon.
trans-alaska-p5.jpg

I’ll Speak You Sing

This is about a month old, but I just got around to posting the pictures on flickr. The show was great. I only saw one performance. Everyday was improvised. It was a sort of shamanistic ‘conversation’ between Momus and Mai. Momus would improvise stories based outside input provided by Mai. An Apple iBook served out some spooky ambiance. I also captured some video and audio using my little Canon Elph. I’ll try to post it sometime soon. More about the show here: iMomus.