The biggest Seattle print-media news this month is the debut of Matte, an ambitious square-bound quarterly arts review started by sometime Comics Journal employees Anne Elizabeth Moore and Carrie Whitney. It essentially covers “alternative”/”indie” music, film, comics, and visual art in the Comics Journal writing style–long and leisurely, full of verbatim interviews and philosophical reviews.
The editors and writers spend a lot of space promising what they’ll get around to in future issues and explaining their sociocultural stances. These statements frequently invoke the familiar premise that all of American culture can be nearly divided into The Mainstream and The Alternative, or The Corporate and The Independent. (Music reviewer Tizzy Asher repeatedly invokes “white,” “male,” and “heterosexual” to decry America’s ruling elite, as if everyone who fit one or more of those adjectives was rich and powerful).
Please note: By critiquing the Matte writers, I am not trying to shut them up. I’m asking them to be more challenging; to question their own preconceptions instead of just complaining about those held by others; to explore the more complex realities of how influence and pressure really work in this society. (Remember: Most rich people are white, but most white people aren’t rich.)
Anyhoo, on to the parts of Matte I enjoyed. Robin Laananen contributes a haunting photo essay about people wasting away their evening hours. Greg Lundgren, of Minus 5 Gallery and Artists for a Work-Free America, waxes elequantly on the contradictions of working oneself to death in a culture that idolizes “leisure.” Beautiful, well-told one-page comix stories are supplied by Jesse Reklaw, Laurenn McCubbin, Tatiana Gill, and several others. Jennifer Daydreamer and Phil Yeh debate whether the recession can lead to a DIY renaissance. And, scattered among the back acreage of record and book reviews, are quotations from various “radical” (left and right) manifestos over the years, showing how too often dreams for a “perfect” world would involve the suppression (or worse) of persons significantly different from the particular dreamer.
