POSTHISTORICPRESS

Every weekend, time stands still.

2012-01-29T00:18:00.001-08:00

No Tickee Autopsy: On a foggy night...

2012-01-26T07:02:00.001-08:00

Research time. Following up commentary on ATTACK THE BLOCK, which praised POLTERGEIST as the height of physical FX in film, I rented it. And regretted it, inasmuch as one regrets having a silly flick on in the b/g while painting. Don't think it's aged well. The first reel is okay up to the Killer Tree, at which point scary checks out in favor of Spielberg's, um, subtlety. By reel three it's basically a corny theme park ride.

Returned it Monday, walking my bike through a pea souper of sudden fog. On a lark, looked around for 2 & 3. Three more walls to paint in the living room, after all. But no dice-- Videodrome's shelf space is precious. Started casting around for other 'paranormal' flix, and wound up returning home with two I'd deliberately skipped in the early aughts, THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES & WHITE NOISE.

In terms of story, they're essentially the same: tragic loss of significant other induces slightly flabby, aging hubby to go on round-the-world wackadoo journey of self-discovery with prolonged stopovers in the psychic terrain of mania, self-deception & paranoia... But in terms of effect on the viewer, they couldn't be more different.

MP is built on editing; on sound; on unnerving audiovisual cues that inform the context of what the audience sees; on the sense of a reflection-that-is-not-yours, on the uncanny. I was impressed despite myself. The director understood basic human psychology, the script wasn't written with the blunt end of a dog turd, and there's every indication that the sets, props & fx were crafted by a group of competent artists. The result is something weirder than Hollywood, culminating in a disaster quite unlike anything I've seen in recent memory.

WN is built on weak, repetitive kindling, trying to capture the same lightning-in-a-bottle as THE RING or (to a lesser extent) THE GRUDGE, only instead of trading on foreign hauntings it wants to capitalize on good old-fashioned American amateur parapsychology. It is also rote, impersonal-- both father-son & ex-wife relationships are essentially ciphers devoid of detailed interaction --grindingly boring, and yet somehow nonsensical in the extreme. [cf. second-to-last sentence of the following para.]

MP has ground rules built into the style of the film: the idea that everything we are seeing is meant to convey an aspect of reality; depending on the P.O.V. of the participant or the voyeur, everything from edit to CG FX is aimed at specific textures. Again, artistry. Esp. noteworthy is the interest in symmetry throughout. In contrast, WN is deadly boring, possesses no internal logic aside from rudimentary cause-and-effect (all but abandoned by the end, as the ghosts breakdance Keaton to death for the amusement of their serial-killing disciple, a ringer for Leon in BLADE RUNNER), has all the texture of molded concrete and about as much emotional depth. Tellingly, there is a great deal of chatter on the commentary from WN's director about 'production value'. Also unintentially hilarious is the way Keaton abruptly abandons the commentary during the final act.

Summary:
WHITE NOISE is all about cheap shocks and possesses next-to-no human insight... But I *like* Michael Keaton, so I watched it. No regrets, but never again.

Alhtough I have almost no use for Richard Gere, MOTHMAN PROPHECIES is legitimately unnerving, and chock full of peripheral menace. If I find a used copy I'm all over it.

Weird night indeed. The original Walken PROPHECY next, methinks.

Intermission: Holmes invents the Playstation

2012-01-24T13:38:00.000-08:00

Before I woke, had a compellingly lucid dream in which I watched Downey-Holmes & Law-Watson infiltrate a private club / cult of adults addicted to role-playing... street urchins? The vibe is offputtingly infantile.

While there, Downey-Holmes invents the first game console, a baffling affair with a pair of discus-sized, pneumatic 'paddles' you stand on, leaning in the direction you desire your gaslight avatar to go.

Guess I should return to reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, what?

Blue! Blue! Electric blue!

2012-01-24T12:57:00.001-08:00

No Tickee Autopsy: three picture minimum.

2012-01-20T13:30:00.000-08:00

So:

At first I was

And then I was

But then I decided

KEEPS: the problem of universals.

2012-01-19T08:55:00.000-08:00

One of the things I've had my eye on in re: building KEEPS is nominalism-- the "problem of universals".

Reading up on Kat Acker's 'My Life My Death by Pier Paolo Pasolini', I encountered this interview which just fascinated my ass:

"I was setting up the text so that all the connections were based on nominalism. [....] The book’s structured that way. I think it’s probably unreadable, but.... The idea fascinated me. I’ll never do it again. It’s as far into structure as I’ll ever go. I wanted to fashion a book out of different ways of ordering that weren’t causal."

Acker arranged the characters in 'My Life My Death' against traditional father / son relationships. Like she said, it's all but unreadable unless you're looking for it-- but the notion of creating a network of specific, seemingly illogical, acausal connections between characters resonated with me because writers like Joyce, Delillo, Pynchon & Moore repeatedly trade on similarly synchronous webs. This is, in fact, the way they generate the realities of their fiction.

(Idly I find myself wondering if part of the reason the aforementioned writers lean on this technique so heavily is that it tends to attract, or 'catch', material & solutions as they're weaving...)

The majority of Matthew Barney's 'Cremaster' cycle is organized using nominal connections, the same sort of symbolic reasoning Jodorowsky uses to plot. The philosopher's stone of the alchemists is analogous to the stone the builders rejected in alchemy because they're both the product of a process of refinement. They're not the same thing, mind, but close enough for the openminded artist and/or artisan.

Part of the fun (& a fair share of the torment) involved in scripting KEEPS has been crafting these connections. For the longest time I couldn't figure out why Olgham would take on the role of caretaker for Dade-- until my teenage obsession with Freemasony reared its pimply head and I realized a ring & an oath was as good a motive as any. From there it was a sweet step to Bierce's cynical definition of Masonry:

"An order with secret rites, grotesque ceremonies and fantastic costumes, which, originating in the reign of Charles II, among working artisans of London, has been joined successively by the dead of past centuries in unbroken retrogression until now it embraces all the generations of man on the hither side of Adam and is drumming up distinguished recruits among the pre-Creational inhabitants of Chaos and Formless Void."

Freemasonry being at heart a hedge school, vouchsafing occult 'truths' from one generation to the next, it seemed a reasonable assumption that the varied rites would, when pared down to their pre-rational, cthonic roots, be a simple series of instructions for how to go mad & come out the other side master of that Great Secret the big old beards used to gibber about.

(Although the present build of KEEPS really began with me re-reading Crowley's 'Book of Lies' & imagining the Ritual of the Phoenix-- an official ritual of the A∴A∴, a sub-sect of the Golden Dawn --as the lead-in to an EC-style horror anthology. Four self-contained stories, unrelated but sharing the same core cast...)

Anyway. Ir-rationalizations ahoy! Now back to work.

Kelsey.

2012-01-17T21:48:00.001-08:00

"I would rather die than be forced to spend...

2012-01-17T21:17:00.001-08:00

"--the rest of my days in the place of my birth. I can only visualize myself returning.... utterly destitute, as a cripple, as a man who has given up the ghost.

"With what curiosity I read the early letters of Rimbaud! He has just begun his wanderings.... For all the verve and ebullience he displays, for all his willingness to work, for all that he possesses in the way of talent, ingenuity, doggedness, adaptability, he discovers before very long that there is no really no place for a person like himself anywhere. The world does not want originality; it wants conformity, slaves, more slaves. The place for the genius is the gutter, digging ditches, or in the mines or quarries, somewhere where his talents will not be employed. A genius looking for employment is one of the saddest sights in the world. He fits in nowhere, nobody wants him. He is maladapted, says the world. With that, the doors are rudely slammed in his face. But is there no place at all for him, then? Oh yes, there is always room at the very bottom. Have you never seen him along the waterfront loading sacks of coffee or some other 'necessary' commodity? Have you not observed how well he washes dishes in the kitchen of a filthy restaurant? Have you not seen him lugging bags and valises at the railway station?

"....aside from these discomforts he leads, as every one knows, the life of Reilly. He is lazy, shiftless, unstable, treacherous, a liar, a thief, a vagabond. He causes dissatisfaction wherever he roams. Truly, an impossible person. Who can get along with him? No one, not even himself.

"....the genius never learns. He was born with the dream of Paradise, and no matter how crazy it sounds, he will struggle to make it realizable again and again. He is incorrigible, a recividist in every sense of the word. He understands the past, he embraces the future-- but the present is meaningless to him. Success holds no bait for him. He spurns all rewards, all opportunities. He is a malcontent. Even when you accept his work, he has no use for you. He is already engaged on another work; his orientation has shifted, his enthusiasm is elsewhere. What can you do for him? How can you appease him? You can do nothing. He is beyond reach. He is after the impossible.

"This unlovely image of the man of genius is, I think, a fairly accurate one.... We persist, nonetheless, in believing that this condition need not be so...."
--Henry Miller, TotA again

"If all other methods fail,

2012-01-17T13:31:00.000-08:00

"....as they inevitably do, why not this extreme measure-- of conversion? It is only at the gates of hell that salvation looms. Men have failed, in every direction. Over and over they have had to retrace their steps, resume the heavy burden, begin anew the steep and difficult ascent toward the summit. Why not accept the challenge of the spirit and yield? Why not surrender, and thus enter into a new life? The Ancient One is always waiting. Some call him the Initiator, some call him The Great Sacrifice...."
--'The Time of the Assassins:
a study of Rimbaud' by Henry Miller
"Creation begins with a painful separation from God and the creation of an independent will to the end that this separation may be overcome in a type of unity higher than that with which the process began."
--'The Mystic Will' by H.H. Brinton

Studio setup pretty much finished. As all two of you will have noticed, the Sunday deadline for me posting LONNY AIR whooshed by-- sorry. Got caught up w/ housekeeping. I need to re-scan the batch, as all the copies I have on file are photographs, for some lazy-ass reason. I'll try & have them up this weekend.

"Are they shouting in Atlanta, Ted?"

2012-01-14T17:11:00.000-08:00

"We have never thought of power in terms of good, only in terms of evil. There is nothing mysterious about the energies of the atom; the mystery is in men's hearts. The discovery of atomic energy is synchronous with the discovery that we can never trust one another again. There lies the fatality-- in this hydra-headed fear which no bomb can destroy. The real renegade is the man who has lost faith in his fellowman. Today the loss of faith is universal. Here God himself is powerless. We have put our faith in the bomb, and it is the bomb which will answer our prayers."
--from 'The Time of the Assassins:
a study of Rimbaud' by Henry Miller

Half-done.

2012-01-13T15:21:00.000-08:00

Home of Holy Hip-Hop.

2012-01-11T14:49:00.002-08:00

Splotchy time.

2012-01-10T15:01:00.000-08:00

Sanding the studio.

2012-01-06T14:15:00.000-08:00

KEEPS: nailed final scene of 'The Coffin-Worm'.

2012-01-03T12:27:00.000-08:00

Brother Tarr's
~Lectures in Light~
to Ewe Lambs
works as a mid-century, mock-Masonic manual title, methinks...

Meanwhile:

2011-12-30T12:10:00.001-08:00

eh?

Also:
You should probably read this.

KEEPS: thrifting for props

2011-12-29T09:23:00.000-08:00

Dated '58. Contains loose notes, both type- and handwritten.

"Anyone who is good at something--

2011-12-22T12:53:00.000-08:00

"...whether that something is drawing comics or fixing up cars --knows what it feels like to feel bad at it. The best have to sit and stare at a blank page, or an engine that's making a funny noise for no reason, until they figure out how to approach the problem. It's a slippery goal to hit, and the fact that you're so good at it makes you feel even more acutely like you're so bad at it. If you really were that good, you could solve it instantly. Bang out that hit song in twenty minutes, diagnose the engine knock on your first try, and write your book in fifty thousand word bursts. But no, that's not how creativity works."

David Brothers on Casanova vol. 3, #2

The cat in th' sack with th' power.

2011-12-21T15:06:00.000-08:00

KEEPS: filling in gaps (1)

2011-12-20T16:19:00.000-08:00

KEEPS: hieroglyphica for NoSky Theatre

2011-12-20T10:36:00.000-08:00

Intermission: MEMENTO redux

2011-12-20T08:32:00.001-08:00

Last night dreamt my old mate Josiah showed up. Counter-intuitively, this signified we were in a re-make of MEMENTO? With Jo subbing for the Carrie-Anne Moss role, minus the headfuckery & awkward sex.

[ Hrm. Rhea in KEEPS is modeled off Carrie-Anne Moss, in part. ]

I say counter-intuitively because overall it was nothing like MEM. It was spies & covert ops in S'uthern suburbia, and I'm pretty sure a giant Amazonian plant-mecha hybrid...? The latter during the end credits.

Never had end credits in a dream before. Too many movies in my mind, fo' sho.

That problem again.

2011-12-16T13:42:00.000-08:00

Right hand / forearm has been tingling all day & won't stop. Started after I got up. Yesterday there were floating regions of numbness in my fingers. Am frankly frightened. No insurance, as ever, and can't afford even rudimentary visit to the hospital.

Looking through my journal, note that I was completely symptom-free on the eleventh-- arm was doing great & was able to do variety of exercises w/out pain or difficulty. Haven't been writing or typing that much, and hardly drawing...

Damn everything anyway. Just emptied my bank account on bills & last-minute Christmas crap, now this. And I still have to work tonight & tomorrow.

Breakfast in America.

2011-12-15T08:21:00.000-08:00

Woken by Jehovah's Nemesis after barely three hours in bed. Brain = poo-flavored. Pretty sure I said "I'm sorry, ma'am," before slamming the door in the Witless's face.

Script eating my head. I've been wrasslin' with this thing for seven? eight? months and feel only a third of the way there. Want it done by New Years'-- not for any superstitious or sentimental reasons, but simply so I can have it OUT.

Broke ground on the relationship between Rhea & Vetter, which is something I wasn't exactly champing at the bit to tackle (y'know it's early in the AM if I'm spewing metaphors like a sea cucumber) yet am pleased with what little there is thus far. Desperately trying not to P.T. Anderson the dialogue. Maybe it's the Supertramp for breakfast... Bless Kathy Acker, though. Her work's been a damn fine influence-- as has Anaïs Nin. I just killed 'Collages' last night. Women weave far finer symbolic nets than the majority of male writers; there's something entirely too carefully weighted to the approach of Moore, Morrison & Gaiman. Strange how the Britmale Axis of comicdom logic their way through tales frequently freighting magic, whereas Carla Speed McNeil can get away with purely emotional associations in an ostensibly sci-fi work. Maya Deren would be more enchanted with 'Finder' than 'From Hell', I feel.

Re-watching Twin Peaks from beginning to end. Been forever since I've sat down with it. Trying not to contemplate the fact that it's twenty years old. Beautifully shot. Amazing to me that most of the sets shared a single soundstage. There're are the occasional gaps in logic which, given the improv scripting, aren't terrifically brash; mostly it favors plotting based around character as opposed to some *ahem* mythological battle plan. About the only hiccough I've encountered so far is the Giant's interest in rescuing Audrey. Not that the Giant lacks in human empathy, but Aud wasn't really on the Big Board re: battling BOB, y'know?

Caught FRACTURE last night, thanks to Des. Not a brilliant film, but fun enough. Young Perry Mason gets taken down a notch. Gosling's nuanced as always, though his accent seems to come & go depending on emotional pitch; Hopkins' accent, on the other hand, goes from (I guess) rural California to fuckin' Irish. Enjoyed the ending most, I think. No pyrotechnics, no scenery chewing, simply a pair of cautious minds attempting to outflank one another. I swear to god, it all but ends with a bow. A weirdly respectful finale. Cinema could use more of those.

KEEPS: countdown to full script, t-minus fffffffffffffuggit

2011-12-07T21:14:00.000-08:00

"Let's have this in theatres by Halloween."

2011-12-03T14:35:00.000-08:00

Me: Huh! New Ridley Scott film-that's-not-a-prequel-to-ALIEN, PROMETHEUS, to star Guy Pearce, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba... Somebody's star is on the rise.

D-rock: Idris was about the best part of THOR...

Me: Like remark 'Dris made: "Imagine a film such as Inception with an entire cast of black people.... Would people watch it?" (Context: he was busting on Tyler Perry at the time, but still.)

D-rock: There is a lack of quality black actors in American film these days. Him & Chewie would've killed it in INCEPTION.

Me: America needs a Yaphet Kotto / Chewitel Edjifor / Idris Elba triple threat.

D-rock: Yes! More like INCEPTION, or OCEAN'S 11?

Me: More like TOUCH OF EVIL on Deep Space 9.

D-rock: Love it. I'm in. You write it, I'll pitch it.

KEEPS: her urn

2011-12-03T11:55:00.001-08:00

Big Numbers, little breakfast.

2011-12-01T11:22:00.000-08:00

Birthday looming. Trying not to collapse under the weight of my own neuroses. 'Nuff said there, I trust. Drink'll sink you, and I've been teetotal most of my thirties... Most.

Scriptwerk going okay. Have large number of gaps to fill in, but have taken majority of birthday week off so as not to have to deal with anything but. The arc of KEEPS is finally visible. I know where everything goes, which is a big improvement over the last six months. Dialogue keeps me pleased, though certain transitions remain hinky. Happiest moments of late involve a six-page narrative digression to '68. Still unsure how to shoehorn enough voudoun into chapter four to keep it from being Brubaker-lite, but getting there.

Alan Moore & Asmoday:

2011-11-27T13:10:00.000-08:00

"In early January of 1994, I.... found myself seemingly in conversation with an entity that at first identified itself as 'One of the Nine Dukes', and then upon closer interrogation as 'Asmoday'. Its 'body', when I asked it to show me what it looked like, consisted of a shifting & shimmering latticework of repeated spider motifs all identical but at different scales....
"I wondered if the 'bodies' of such creatures aren't more in the nature of the 'icons' that people use to represent themselves when surfing the net? Perhaps the perceived forms were more like compound symbols, characters in an unknown language that were meant to impart a kind of non-verbal information to us."

Alan Moore, to Dave Sim in
Correspondence: From Hell, pt. 2

KEEPS: countdown to full script, and more comix.

2011-11-25T13:46:00.000-08:00

Quick jaunt across the city to Oxford Comics to raid their fading backstock of Euro-comix. Scored some more Catalan Communications stuff. More clean linework to go alongside all the Schultheiss I nabbed.

Re-reading the Sim / Moore correspondence reprinted in 'Portait of an Extraordinary Gentleman' c/o Abiogenesis Press. The exchange is verbatim from Cerebus #217-220; only downside to the collection in 'Portrait' is it's prefaced by this needless, backwards-looking intro in which the Holy Sim publicly distances himself from his Pagan Friend... Wotta dick. There's a couple of thoughts from the interview I think I'll cull & put up here later for reference. More meat for the mental stew!

Scripting is either leapfrogging or pure drudgery, but it's taking shape. That's all that counts.

Matthias Schultheiss & Kodansha

2011-11-24T14:23:00.000-08:00

Paul Pope had his nightmare story with the Kodansha folks too. What's that about? Is it simply that Kodansha's one of those corporate entities so large no-one talks directly, or are Kodansha just dicks when they get art they don't like?

KEEPS: photo reference (1)

2011-11-24T13:04:00.000-08:00

KEEPS: countdown to full script, and MELANCHOLIA notes.

2011-11-22T09:48:00.000-08:00

T-minus sixteen days. 25pps. down, 75 to go.

Re-reading 'From Hell' because everyone should, at least once a year. That echoing tunnel in Gull's intro haunts me more every time. What a monster Moore makes...

Caught Von Trier's MELANCHOLIA. I've been following VT's films for a decade now, and while I don't always enjoy his movies, I appreciate them-- as provocations, as thought-bombs, as out-and-out fuck-yous to a film industry & an audience mentality which has mutated and degenerated --yet this one scored a big nought with me.

It starts well enough; the pre-title sequence was up there with DANCER IN THE DARK & ANTICHRIST as an encapsulation of the film's purpose & strengths... but it was also the story in miniature, a move which, while ballsy, makes sitting through the entire film an ordeal on par with watching BARRY LYNDON. You know how the story is going to play out, and by the second half the cast is so limited & fucked it's all but impossible to want to see it thru.

That said, you should watch the first fifteen minutes. They're seeping with the visonary, paralytic horror of Francis Bacon, an influence I don't believe I've really seen namechecked in cinema since JACOB'S LADDER. Lovely, haunting stuff. Only director who does paintings-that-move better is Lynch.

The script as a whole is like a mix of EL ANGEL EXTERMINADOR & LAST YEAR IN MARIANBAD, only less compellingly weird. A big problem, right there: that I'm left with nothing but comparisons to older, more interesting films. I've always enjoyed Von Trier's debt to Tarkovsky, but the stylistic shout-outs in MELANCHOLIA feel pasted on in lieu of legitimate substance. With ANTICHRIST the script gives me good reason to re-visit the story; the shock of the ending, the knowledge that your players aren't playing fair, that one party has an excess of cruelty in reserve & the other's so close to the game he's blind to the obvious hand. MELANCHOLIA, not so much subtext. The dominant emotion is one of fatal inevitability, therefore the characters gave me next to no reason to hang on. The single, illusory pillar who might hold the story up is there in name only, serving purely as a neurotic's prop in the face of, yawn, the end of the world.

(That's the stumpy pillar in the middle.)
Man, Trier writes lousy kids. Much has been made of his so-called misogyny, but I ain't buying. Von Trier doesn't hate women, he hates kids. The women in his films are solid characters, invariably more interesting than the men, and rarely if ever does gender play the defining role in their struggles. It's the kids in his stories who lack soul, mainly playing either ciphers or monsters. Gimme SUPER 8 over sad adults masturbating with hammers anyday.

Back to the story which, dialogue-lite & clunky as the second half is, leaves me with little aside from surrealist film references and an excruciating film-length essay on the paralyzing effects of depression --a condition I'm plenty familiar with, thanks, and one I feel that's essentially impossible to dramatize in a sympathetic fashion, especially given the director's legendary resume of neurotic misanthropy.

Considering what the actors have to work with, however, the acting is pitch-perfect. There are happy cameos from actors I always enjoy-- Rampling, Hurt, Skarsgard --and the big-screen trinity of Dunst, Sutherland, & Gainsbourg play perfectly off one another. But the tale's just not worth it. I neither want nor need another film to round out this particular trilogy. It's become cruelty for cruelty's sake and it's just not interesting anymore.

Anyway, had to go home & wash out my brain with CHINATOWN, twice, and rinse with Tarkovsky's MIRROR. Maybe Kiyoshi Kurosawa's RETRIBUTION next...

KEEPS: scriptwerk & notes, 111911

2011-11-20T00:16:00.000-08:00

Coke-addled bastards.

2011-11-17T07:13:00.000-08:00

Klepto cokeheads: one more reason to love my job.
Anyone who has enough surplus cash to snort shouldn't
be stealing from me. *I* carry a blackjack.

every day is a segue

2011-11-16T11:23:00.000-08:00

Looted:

2011-11-13T11:51:00.000-08:00

The Eddie Campbell interview in The Staros Report,
Cerebus: Church & State I (for #71, 'Hovering Below The Fray')
Brubaker & Philips' Criminal: The Sinners, #s 3-4
and Guido Crepax's Valentina.

A nice day's ride. Now back to writing. Am
giving myself 25 days to write 100pps. 5pps a
day with no time off for good (or odd) behavior.

Nnnnngh....

2011-11-12T13:56:00.000-08:00

"Easy on the music," I tell my co-worker, Scott.
"I'm nursing a bastard behind the eyes."

"Not a problem," says Scott, ducking
the point & turning on the tube. "I was
gonna watch the Auburn game anyway."

Nnnnnngh, fucking football...

Unflattering pattern #51.

2011-11-09T21:31:00.000-08:00

My other kitty...

2011-11-04T12:40:00.000-07:00

--is a museum replica. Fuckin' stone.
Bast sure were a purty gal, but bitch -heavy.-
Slightly crushed little finger moving her in!

KEEPS: ellipsis

2011-11-03T09:55:00.000-07:00

Nigh on seven months in, KEEPS finally has an ending.
Now if only I could get somebody to (a) help me proofread ATROCITY BOY, (b) keep their word when they say they will, and (c) cover me at the Indy tonight so my neck & shoulder can heal from whatever dumbassery I committed while working out. Not gonna happen, though, so only thing to do is grunt on thru to the other side...

In non-weenis news, found this fantastic framed photo of a moon lander! Really brings the living room together.

Paging doctor obsessive...

2011-10-29T16:31:00.000-07:00

New on tap.

2011-10-27T13:53:00.000-07:00

A quick scribble for the boss... Thomas Creek didn't ship us a tap handle so we had to fake one. Wow, is the official art embarrassing or what?

My education.

2011-10-27T11:40:00.000-07:00

And that's just the living room.

Occupy Atlanta & the action at 'Troy Davis Park' - an autopsy in brief.

2011-10-26T12:06:00.001-07:00

As Atlanta police presence crept up and erected barriers around the periphery of Woodruff park, as press interest in an uneventful & unfocused story began to gain momentum-- if only for want of anything else to report on --Occupy Atlanta engaged in yet another fatuous, hand-waving protest at the foot of the GP building in downtown Atlanta. A 'guru' with a bullhorn led the group in a chant intended to levitate the immense rose marble plinth, a la Ginsburg's Pentagon protest during the Vietnam war. The occupants of the GP building stood at the ramparts, looking down on a disorganized cluster of hastily scrawled anti-Koch slogans held by post-hippy neo-yippie neko-chans & asst'd anons, wondering who the hell all these people were.

Well-intentioned, mostly. Occupy Atlanta wanted Woodruff Park to be renamed Troy Davis Park. They wanted people to think about how our society takes its individual members largely for granted, how our rights are being eroded for a cabal of would-be aristocrats & assholes with too much cash, and maybe, just maybe, that civil disobedience isn't dead and could even be fun.

I took a few snaps and made my way home, resolving to do the same again tomorrow. I'd been watching the park for a week now, listening to the non-resolutions emanating daily from Kasim Reed's office... I didn't know what, if anything, would happen. Occupy Atlanta had held Troy Davis Park for nigh-on a month, being more of a tourist spectacle & nuisance than anything else. The worst that happened was they blocked bits of traffic whenever they marched. Never have so many cops looked so bored.

At home, I worked on repainting my jacket & keeping the kitten entertained. From ten 'til after well after midnight there was a constant caterwauling of sirens & 'choppers as cops evacuated the park. I didn't assume the worst. Truth be told, I hardly thought about it at all; I live just off Ponce, where sirens are like birdsong.

Making my rounds today, I discovered the park to be picked clean & barricaded on all sides. The police occupy the park, now, their vans marking the corners.

Emptiest gesture wins, I guess.

KEEPS: Leyla on the shisr (revisited)

2011-10-20T09:17:00.001-07:00

Revisited this a few days back while hacking at story & did some touchup. Happier now, though I still adore the looseness of the original sketch. Can't wait to actually get to down to drawing this beast: coloring's going to be one of the most enjoyable parts, I think.

Ch. 3, The Coffin-Worm, is two-thirds scripted. Basically a matter of collating notes, now. Dialogue's the tightest I've ever written. Finally happy with the introduction of the Arikh Anpin. Enjoyed the simple reversal that forms the nut of the chapter: a 3° initiation which turns into a murder, as opposed to your standard ritual re-enactment. About time that teenage obsession w/ Freemasonry paid off...

Handed ATROCITY BOY to an old friend to read & critique. May well start drawing & serializing that here while I'm finishing up script f/ KEEPS.

Nearly done powering thru Peace's Red Riding Quartet. Merciless work.

On a personal note, got a heads-up from my boss: the parent company that owns The Indy may be in trouble. A ton of firings yesterday, according to Facebook. Obviously that might just be Facebook drama & have nothing to do with our business...

But turning a résumé in downstairs at the Highlander, just to be safe.

Free to odd home.

2011-10-15T13:13:00.000-07:00

Atop my mailslot, this afternoon. Some days I fear my hood.

Admiration: Red Riding Quartet trade dress

2011-10-14T17:05:00.001-07:00

Of obvious interest to me in re: KEEPS-- different years, different stories, interrelated cast, same overall tone / arc. Gregg Kulick's RRQ covers are gorgeously simple: primary colors, bisected cover images. Still struggling to work out my own gimmick...

A decade later.

2011-10-14T14:43:00.000-07:00

A decade earlier.

2011-10-13T07:16:00.001-07:00

A decade later? No wiser.

KEEPS: Vetter & Olgham (sketches)

2011-10-07T14:21:00.000-07:00

Happy w/ basic rough of Vetter, lopsidedness aside. Olgham feels clearer, now that I've given him gray hair... A ways to go with cast designs yet, though.

How to put your devil up for adoption; or, Morton's Fork is for optimists.

2011-10-06T10:43:00.001-07:00

After seven months of headbanging like Wesley Willis at a GWAR show, have finally broken that brick wall at the end of the tunnel.

The light... is taking me to PIECES.
Anyway. If this post is a l'il loopy-bloggity, blame it on a baaaaad diet & a caffeine IV that breaks the blood-brain barrier. Took time away from the sixty-hour work weeks to repair & screen my back porch, and have only just now discovered that my employer awards time-and-a-half for being a masochist. Which is amazing, because it's October & November's rent is already in the bag. That never happens.

The KEEPS outline is all but complete. I need to rough in the epilogue (which I'm striving to keep peripheral to the overall arc of the thing, as that's what 'coda' means to me: act 3.5) but otherwise think I've accrued all the necessary materials. Only took two notebooks to hash it all together! Keeps the filing cabinet tidy.

Now, if I can score a couple of clear swathes of time to script, I should be able to start art chores before Black Friday. That'd be the note to end 2011 on...

The Doctor is Sin.

2011-09-29T10:42:00.001-07:00

A quickly scribbled get-well for Katrina,
who MCs trivia on Wed. nights where I work.
She's six months in & the weight of the pregnancy
cracked her pelvic bone, so she's on enforced bed
rest for the remainder. Three months to go, and
no wine! The lady is pissed...

The Rum Letters.

2011-09-28T11:40:00.000-07:00

March 7th, 1961
To Lieutenant Colonel Frank Campbell:

....A man on the crest of a new wave can hardly afford to retire, so all signs point to my imminent return to the strife and struggle of cold-war reality. At the moment I am engaged in hammering out a novel called 'The Rum Diary'. It will probably hit the stands around September, and even if you've left Tennessee by then I'll make sure a copy seeks out your vapor trail and tracks you down to finish the work I began in the office of the Command Courier...

April 26th, 1961
To William J. Kennedy, c/o San Juan Star:

....Your sun is on the wane, I think, for you will be unbearable if you ever get published. My only hope is to smack out 'The Rum Diary' and steal your thunder to the extent that all but the first thirteen copies of your book (sold to family & friends) will be remaindered. It goes without saying-- in answer to your question --that 'The Rum Diary' is the potential high-water mark of 20th century literature. It is a novel more gripping than 'The Gingerbread Man', more skillfully rendered than 'The Sergeant', more compassionate than 'A Death In The Family', and more important than 'Lie Down In Darkness'. These, as you know, are the only good novels written in the past five years. All the rest is ballast. (I now recall that 'LDID' was done in 1950... strike one.)

'The Rum Diary' is of course set in Puerto Rico and I feel there will be a great shrieking and tearing of hair in the New York office of Fomento when when it comes out. This prospect is one of my main incentives....

July 21st, 1961
To William J. Kennedy, c/o San Juan Star:

....since you ask, ['The Rum Diary'] is more than halfway done. It is a novel that will be about 200 pages long and I have every reason to believe it will put me over the hump. It is set, of course, in Puerto Rico and I imagine you will not find all of it unfamiliar. ....In a twisted way, it will do for San Juan what 'The Sun Also Rises' did for Paris. I expect to finish it around September....

The map of San Juan was a real help, by the way. My bourgeois imagination could never produce anything like Calle O'Leary, Avenida Eduardo Conde, or Calle Dr. Stahl-- nor could my memory hold everything that a map brings back to me; the midnight roar of a scooter on Calle Magdelana, the sweating wait for a bus in front of the University, or the morning sun on that long stretch of Munoz Rivera between Sixto Escobar stadium and El Morro. If my memory were as good as I'd claim it was if anyone asked me, I wouldn't need a map....

August 20th, 1961
To William J. Kennedy:

....I haven't read 'To Kill A Mockingbird'. Is it worth $2 1/2 million? Somehow, the title doesn't move me. I like something like 'The Rum Diary'. Now there's a title, by god. Book-Of-The-Month Club? Hell yes. Movie? No doubt. A book like that could make a man rich.

Well it had better, by christ. I'm not about to wait much longer. If a typewriter won't do it... well, maybe a .44 Magnum will. Big noise, big money, eh? I guess that's the way it goes....

February 15th, 1962
To Candida Donadio:

....Thanks for your letter. Now I can finish 'The Rum Diary' with a bit of a grin-- a mean one, of course --and send it snapping and snarling toward the cubicles. It will not be a 'hard and bitter' book in the end, except to those who expect other people to build their houses for them. It has taken me 24 years to lay even the beginning of a foundation for myself, and when I finish I will not have much time to do anything but run off a few copies of the blueprint for other builders to use as they see fit.

One of your comments puzzles me, however, and since it seems to be your main point I would like to see it more clearly. You say, "The novel is made of hard and bitter characters, and that's all right and workable, providing there is enough distinction in the means of telling the bitter and hard story." Now 'distinction' is the word I can't deal with. I hope you don't mean 'discretion'. That would sadden me, because I appreciated what I thought was the spirit of your letter. Also I hope you don't mean I should fish for future comment like "Mr. Thompson has written a distinguished book." I sent a story to an agent once and she wrote back that she had sent it on to The New Yorker because she thought it was 'absolutely charming'. They bounced it, of course, for it was no less mean and bitter than 'The Rum Diary'. It just goes to... ah... yeah....

August 15th, 1963
To William J. Kennedy:

....Dennis Murphy read my book and came to about the same conclusions as you did, but not quite so final. After a bit of talk and thought I have decided to rewrite it for plot and action, separating the characters and trying to give them some meaning. If it goes slow, I'll quit. If not, and if I enjoy the work, I'll push on through. The title alone will sell 5,000 copies if I can just convince some bastard to publish it....

June 9th, 1965
To Paul Semonin:

....The big apple at the moment seems to be 'The Rum Diary', which I have to rewrite at least in part before any of these bastards will send me a cheque. But it is a wild feeling to have fatbellies actually seeking me out, calling McWilliams at The Nation who has been inundated with swine asking how to get ahold of me. If I had the novel in shape right now I could knock off a $1,500 advance tomorrow. But, sadly, it is not good enough to send out. The next few weeks will be a hell of long hours and steady work. I have to punch while they're digging me....

June 28th, 1965
To Angus Cameron, c/o Alfred E. Knopf:

....As for your ideas on 'Losers and Outsiders'. I see it occurred to you at the end of your letter that we were talking in terms of the Ultimate Book. Non-Fiction won't handle a subject that big. Honest journalism is enough to addle the sanest man, and if I've learned nothing else in five years of writing articles I've learned that. And that's why I want to get ['Hell's Angels'] out of the way and get back on my novel-- or novels, because 'The Rum Diary' is becoming two books. Fiction is a bridge to the truth that journalism can't reach. Facts are lies when they're added up, and the only kind of journalism I can pay much attention to is something like 'Down And Out In Paris And London'. The title story in Tom Wolfe's new book is a hell of a fine thing, I think, and so is the one on Junior Johnson. But in order to write that kind of punch-out stuff you have to add up the facts in your own fuzzy way, and to hell with the hired swine who use adding machines....

October 22nd, 1965
To Sara Blackburn, c/o Pantheon Books:

....For the time being you should do whatever you want with 'The Rum Diary' manuscript. Everybody except my lawyer says Ballentine owns it, so I guess they do. I have now retired on pills and cheap whiskey, not to emerge again until this godrotten Hell's Angels thing is whipped, which might be quite a while....

February 9th, 1966
To Paul Semonin:

....Sorry about the note to Sara [Blackburn], but these bastards won't answer my nice letters so I have to snap now and then. Significantly, I have no idea what sort of action you're referring to about Sara doing 'everything she could'. What happened? What couldn't she prevent? I can only assume that Pantheon was forced to reject 'The Rum Diary'. But what's this about "hardback rights... turning her flank"?

Pantheon is a hardcover house. It's precisely this kind of splintered wisdom that's driving me wild. The last I heard, Pantheon was set to publish.... As far as I know they have both manuscripts. I have none. If the fuckers won't tell me anything I have no choice but to write vicious letters. From this distance there is literally nothing else I can do. Somebody wrote the other day and said they saw an article of mine in some magazine that I've never even heard of. Meanwhile I have to borrow money to pay the rent. It's maddening....

May 24th, 1966
To William J. Kennedy:

....News from here is a fraud. 'The Rum Diary' is sold to Random and Ballentine on the condition that I rewrite it. No suggestions. Dealing with these people is maddening.... The contracts are a horror, but of course I have no choice but to sign them. The last one I signed is for two: 'The Rum Diary' and an un-named, unspecified non-fiction book. At a glance it looks like a $10,000 advance for two books, but what it really amounts to is ill-paid bondage for an indefinite period of time. I am very discouraged with the book business. The money is illusory and the cheap realities are all the more shocking because they are hidden, like rocks in the surf, by decades of paternalistic myth....

January 31st, 1968
To Sue Grafton:

....so much for all that... except your question about the novel 'The Rum Diary'. I wrote it a long time ago, but after it bounced once or twice I put it away. Then, after I'd agreed to write a book on the Angels, I sold the novel to Pantheon almost by accident. But Pantheon is a division of Random House, so RH took the novel, and about that time I decided to completely rewrite it. But I didn't have time until I finished the HA book, and after that I got involved in the contract fight. So it's still un-rewritten. I'm not sure how easy it's going to be to get back to fiction, but I'll know more about it when I get started. Right now I'm not thinking about it....

October 3rd, 1968
To Lawrence Turman, c/o 20th Century Fox:

....Steve Geller suggested that I send you a note about ['The Rum Diary'], which is currently lost in weird limbo.... Weird, in that Random House and Ballentine have already bought it; weird in that two years ago I sold it to Pantheon and had the sale croaked by RH... and weirder still in that I sold the book on the condition that I'd be allowed to rewrite it, and since then I've never even read it. Mainly because neither RH nor Ballentine seems to give a hoot in hell about novels....

....And to hell with all that rambling. I began this letter as a quick note to ask if you might be interested in reading 'The Rum Diary'. I couldn't tell you much about it, except that it's a very inept, very honest tale of very young 'vagrant journalists' converging to work on a new english-language paper in the Caribbean. I wrote it about five years ago, and when I start the rewrite I can't help but change it immensely. The first 100 pages are worthless, the characters lack the essential major/minor sort of focus that a good story needs to stay on its feet... but, every now and then, as the book reels along, there are scenes that I'd match against anything in 'The Graduate', and maybe even against one or two on the best in 'The Pawnbroker'. And there are others that I could never do, on paper, as well as I know they could be on film....

....Why not, indeed? All I meant to ask was whether you'd like to look at the book before, or after, I do the rewrite? Or-- for that matter --if you'd like to see it at all? Because, in good truth, it's a hopelessly naive and half-conceived book-- as it stands now, I know I can make it better, but I might also make it worse-- by killing a lot of valid notes that tend to embarrass me now, in my balding wisdom. My current Random House project is keyed on the death of innocence-- the flat opposite of 'The Rum Diary' --and I'm not sure if I can them both, at the same time, without going mad. So if the novel interests you, in terms of film, I think I'd prefer to do that first-- to deal with the Beginning, without documenting The End. It seems like the right way to do it....

...after seeing 'The Graduate', I can't take plots very seriously and I find myself thinking more in terms of scenes, high points, moments... and those are things I might cut, change or fail to develop in my rewrite of 'The Rum Diary', and it worries me....

....I see it mainly as a salvage job, and they're always tricky-- for lots of reasons, including the market....

Al's was empty, except for Sala sitting alone in the patio. When I walked to the table Sala looked up. "Kemp," he said, "I feel a hundred years old."

"How old are you?" I said. "Thirty? Thirty-one?"

"Thirty," he said quickly. "I was just thirty last month."

"Hell," I replied. "Imagine how old I feel-- I'm almost thirty-two."

He shook his head. "I never thought I'd live to see thirty. I don't know why, but for some reason I just didn't."

I smiled. "I don't know if I did or not-- I never gave it much thought."

"Well," he said, "I hope to God I never make forty-- I wouldn't know what to do with myself."

"You might," I said. "We're over the hump, Robert. The ride gets pretty ugly from here on in."

He leaned back and said nothing. It was almost dawn, but Nelson Otto was still lingering at his piano. The song was 'Laura', and the sad notes floated out to the patio and hung in the trees like birds too tired to fly. It was a hot night, with almost no breeze, but I was feeling cold sweat in my hair. For lack of anything better to do, I studied a cigarette burn in the sleeve of my blue oxford-cloth shirt.

Sala called for more drink and Sweep brought four rums, saying they were on the house. We thanked him and sat for another half hour, saying nothing. Down on the waterfront I could hear the slow clang of the ship's bell as it eased against the pier, and somewhere in the city a motorcycle roared through the narrow streets, sending its echo up the hill to Calle O'Leary. Voices rose and fell in the house next door and the raucous sound of a jukebox came from a bar down the street. Sounds of a San Juan night, drifting across the city through layers of humid air; sounds of life and movement, people getting ready and people giving up, the sound of hope and the sound of hanging on, and behind it all, the quiet, deadly ticking of a thousand hungry clocks, the lonely sound of time passing in the long Caribbean night.

Hunter S. Thompson was 22 in 1959.
'The Rum Diary' finally saw publication in 1998.

The complications of unsexy comix.

2011-09-24T13:03:00.000-07:00

"Like I said, I'm on board with the hot ladies; part of what got me into comics back in the day was being a 12-year-old girl who looked at strong, beautiful characters like Rogue and Jean Grey and Storm and wanted to be like them in large part because they were so sexy and confident and had exciting romances. Those books managed to offer characters that.... always felt like people instead of window dressing. I have long maintained that to bring in more female readers, superhero comics don't even need to specifically target women as much as they need to not actively offend them. This is not an insanely hard to thing to do, and yet here we are.

"The money shot that most people have latched onto in Catwoman, however, is the one where Batman and Catwoman have sex on a rooftop. 'What's wrong with Batman having sex?' you might ask. There's nothing wrong with Batman having sex. Or Catwoman, or Starfire, or any other hero. The problem isn't the plot point. If you're an adult, you've probably seen dozens if not hundreds of movies that included sex scenes. The mere fact that a piece of media depicts a sexual act doesn't tell you very much about how that scene is going to make you feel. You might be titillated, or bored, or grossed out, or any number of things. Your reaction depends not on the facts of what happens, but on the way it's presented."
--Laura Hudson, on the D.O.A., dead-eyed
sexuality of the New, New, New DC.
"I've been.... stopping in this amazing store that's bought out the previous owners (a comics shop) and is selling all the accumulated back stock for a buck a pop. This has given me the chance to check out a bunch of mainstream comics from the last 10 years I never would have read otherwise, including.... Ed Brubaker's Catwoman run. There was sexual material in those comics as well, but those moments were in service of wider thematic points, taking on issues that people actually engage in the real world, such as the complications of sex as a coping technique utilized by the emotionally devastated and the difficulty of negotiating an intense relationship when different levels of emotional involvement are in place. Execution is everything, and those comics may not do it for you, but I think making the attempt to use plot points to actually tell a story has to matter.

"When I read about slutty Starfire or Catwoman humping Batman on some roof somewhere, it just doesn't seem to be about anything but-- at best --the set-up for some potential, facile, soap opera-style payoff down the road. It's boobs in a horror movie, empty comic book calories of a slightly ickier kind but pretty much on the exact same level of an Ed Hannigan or Sal Buscema-drawn sequence where two heroes fight briefly before they team up to defeat some arbitrary super-menace. It's not about anything but itself: a plot point that's divorced from plot but instead denotes X, Y, Z difference in this character or that one."
--Tom Spurgeon, on the hacktacular skills on
display at the New, New, New, New, New DC.

Braingrist.

2011-09-23T14:50:00.001-07:00

Breaking from Acker for five seconds. 'My Mother: Demonology' is mad, like jazz-- it takes a bit to keep up with her. The fervid prose of Anaïs Nin, the stagy perversity of both 'The Story of O' and Daria Nicolodi (she wrote Argento's best, 'Suspiria') and, not least, the seamlessly dreamlike dérives of Wm. S. Burroughs. My brain dances to that, but I'm already dancing fast as I can...

So: breaking for some ugly, desperate reality, and a little of the humane beauty to be discovered in the struggle. Between work at the bar & the race to finish roughing out plot for KEEPS I feel flayed. It's all I can do to get my nose out of 'The Rum Diary'. It's my third read. Finding it more honest than I remembered. Plan to scour Hunter's letters to see what he had to say about writing & revisions on it. When, where & why did he strive to strip the Faulkner out? How long 'til he'd sanded away all the ol' Fitz? Nelson Algren was his ideal for realism, at the time Rum Diary was being written...

Rachel's 'Systems/Layers' arrived today; am eager to punch the clock & put it on. I've been listening to this in abstract, purely digital form ever since I discovered it, and it's fast become my favorite of theirs. Maybe tomorrow 'NYC Ghosts & Flowers' will arrive. These are the musics I find most cathartic, right now: little audio exorcisms. Zorn's 'Masada: first live - 1993' and Mazzy Star's 'So Tonight That I May See' fit the bill here as well-- blowing away the melancholy cobwebs.

KEEPS: scriptwerk & notes, o91911

2011-09-22T12:04:00.000-07:00

Not pretty, but I never said my mind was tidy.

Geography's playing an increasingly bigger part in plotting KEEPS. Unlike previous projects where I always kinda winged staging a set because I was too impatient to plan two panels ahead-- let alone twenty-two pages --KEEPS hinges on my keeping uber-anal tabs on positioning in both time *and* space.

Though divided into four self-contained tales, the larger story (including the prologue & ellipsis) arcs across a decade, with each chapter taking place in a different city in a different state in a different year, with a completely different cast of secondary characters for each tale.

That's a lot of to wrangle, and it's taken me half of 2011 to get this far.

I'm nearly done with this stage & am rallying my energies to attack final script. Thumbnails will be much less trouble, by that point, so hopefully it'll be a hop & a skip from there to finished art. That said, I can't always write this thing with words alone.

In the case of ch. 4, 'In The Saddle', thumbnailing helps me to figure out transitions; given that I need to alternate locations, having a landmark that's visible from both positions is vital, esp. since a carefully & thoroughly established set will assist info-dumping some history and, thusly, prevent the finale from turning into a tumult of talking heads. Perversely, I'm using Cerebus #71, 'Hovering Below The Fray', as a rough model for how to pull it all off.

"Perversely" because #71 is NOTHING but talking heads... and 'In The Saddle' is about chronicling the conditions that lead to an Old Chicago-style riot.

Denzel?

2011-09-21T11:47:00.000-07:00

"When I arrived....

2011-09-20T13:23:00.000-07:00

"--the San Juan Daily News was three years old and Ed Lotterman was on the verge of a breakdown. To hear him talk you would think he'd been sitting at the very cross-corners of the earth, seeing himself as a combination of God, Pulitzer and the Salvation Army. He often swore that if all the people who had worked for the paper in those years could appear at one time before the throne of The Almighty-- if they all stood there and recited their histories and their quirks and their crimes and their deviations --there was no doubt in his mind that God himself would fall down in a swoon and tear his hair.

"Of course Lotterman exaggerated; in his tirade he forgot about the good men and talked only about what he called the 'wineheads'. But there were more than a few of these, and the best that can be said of that staff is that they were a strange and unruly lot. At best they were unreliable, and at worst they were drunk, dirty and no more dependable than goats. But they managed to put out a paper, and when they were not working a good many of them passed the time drinking in Al's Backyard.

"They bitched & groaned when-- in what some of them called a 'fit of greed' --Al jacked the price of beer up a quarter; and they kept on bitching until he tacked up a sign listing beer and drink prices at the Caribe Hilton. It was scrawled in black crayon and hung in plain sight behind the bar.

"Since the newspaper functioned as a clearing-house for every writer, photographer and neo-literate con man who happened to find himself in Puerto Rico, Al got the dubious benefit of this trade too. The drawer beneath the cash register was full of unpaid tabs and letters from all over the world, promising to 'get that bill squared away in the near future'. Vagrant journalists are notorious welshers, and to those who travel in that rootless world, a large unpaid bar tab can be a fashionable burden.

"There was no shortage of people to drink with in those days. They never lasted very long, but they kept coming. I call them vagrant journalists because no other term would be quite as valid. No two were alike. They were professionally deviant, but they had a few things in common. They depended, mostly from habit, on newspapers and magazines for the bulk of their income; their lives were geared to long chances and sudden movement; and they claimed no allegiance to any flag and valued no currency but luck and good contacts.

"Some of them were more journalists than vagrants, and others were more vagrants than journalists-- but with a few exceptions they were part-time, freelance, would-be foreign correspondents who, for one reason or another, lived at several removes from the journalistic establishment. Not the slick strivers and jingo parrots who staffed the mossback papers and news magazines of the Luce empire. Those were a different breed.

"Puerto Rico was a backwater and the Daily News was staffed mainly by ill-tempered wandering rabble. They moved erratically, on the winds of rumor and opportunity, all over Europe, Latin America and the Far East-- wherever there were English-language newspapers, jumping from one to another, looking always for the big break, the crucial assignment, the rich heiress or the fat job at the far end of the next plane ticket.

"In a sense I was one of them-- more competent than some and more stable than others --and in the years that I carried that ragged banner I was seldom unemployed. Sometimes I worked for three newspapers at once. I wrote ad copy for new casinos and bowling alleys. I was a consultant for the cockfighting syndicate, an utterly corrupt high-end restaurant critic, a yachting photographer and a routine victim of police brutality. It was a greedy life and I was good at it. I made some interesting friends, had enough money to get around, and learned a lot about the world that I could never have learned any other way.

"Like most of the others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right. I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top.

"At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles-- a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other --that kept me going."
--from The Rum Diary (1959) by Hunter S. Thompson

"This is not class warfare. It's math."

2011-09-19T13:49:00.000-07:00

"We can have no new taxes ever for wealthy people or we can save Medicare. But not both. No new taxes for wealthy people or save Pell Grants. But not both. What you plug in these slots isn't really the point. The point is trade-offs. Nothing is in isolation. What are your priorities? Either/or."
--Josh Marshall, at TPM

I've been towing the poverty line ever since I first ran away from home, in Feb of '96. I don't believe in money the way most of you do. I'm a scraprat, a salvage hound, a stoned goat who happens to be handy with a screwdriver. Money is what gets me by so I can do what I truly want, which is to build stories. Money isn't real to me, but it's not irreal, either-- not the way it is for the stiffs striding the 20th floor of the Goldman-Sachs building at Atlantic Station, with their streamlined power decor, complete w/ 'original' Warhol print of Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt dominating the lobby.

Three weeks ago I was there in my best dress... Which ain't much. I have a couple of button-downs, but mostly it's tees & punky couture. I was there to cram for ten hours then test so the state of GA. would continue to permit me to prepare food. Accompanying me were my boss, Runa, and our co-worker, Sonya. We were all weirded out by the supervillain's P.O.V. across the city, and the immodest art collection hidden behind tinted windows where few but the monied might ever see it.

Between cramming chapters I was in the hall, staring at Teddy.

I've cooked quail's-egg omelettes for the DuPonts at midnight in the War Museum of the Confederacy. I've eaten the finest caviar, and quaffed hundred & sixty year old crimson vinegar because rich assholes don't care about what they're paying for so much as the Name on the label. My share of the blame for the present set of circumstances-- which is rapidly shuttering my favorite record-, book-, & comic shops, putting many of my peers out of work --my blame owes to the fact that I've accepted my place on the fringes of a world which makes fuck-all practical sense, and possesses even less compassion than taste.

Studying smug, squinting young old Ted, I had to recognize I've never really given two damns, so long as I got tipped.

That attitude, that scaly mask of complacence, is accrued by living in the rut of poverty, day-to-day, wondering how to foot the next insane utility bill. It is an attitude which at least three-quarters of the population is familiar with, whether they choose to recognize it or not. The country I live in today is paralyzed by the same disease that afflicted the British in the seventies: we make almost none of our own goods, we're incomprehensibly in debt & impoverished, divided, and stratified by our one last 'asset', the Democratic two-party system, which has led us to the present impasse in which we are suffering a plague of immensely voracious, irresponsible and offensively Entitled assholes, more concerned with brand names than nurturing consciousness. We are alienated, all of us.

Small wonder, then, that I don't believe in money. Small wonder that I'm in awe of anyone willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for an 'original' print of a dead president.

I am working class. I am poor. I have been homeless & destitute numerous times in the last fifteen years, and know myself to be perfectly capable of surviving-- but I do not know if the same is true of the world in which I scratch out my hand-to-mouth existence. Which is a shame, because before America became my parents' ill-fitting, hand-me-down terrain, this bland, perilous continent was once the golden turf of my ancestors. My ancestors-- funny how the faces get more & more out of focus, the further back you go --were not Americans. They were impoverished immigrants & natives, probable scoundrels and certainly marginal figures stranded by commerce & circumstance, coerced by nature into intermarriage and, eventually, wage slavery. Death and fucking taxes.

My struggle has been at least as alien as theirs, with returns only more diminished. I do not know what the next election bodes. I only know what I want to do with my life. Which is a helluvalot more than the yakkity sacs above the fold at the newsvendors' or on TV, in my opinion. I want to build stories; I don't want to be a story. I don't need an author's photo. I don't crave creamy frozen immortality in marble. I simply want my work in print, if only as temporary proof of the point of pulp. Whether I make money on it or not has never been the issue. That's not what art is about. I'm not relying on my job, or my family, or the state to support me, and I haven't in over fifteen years. I'll see my way through. I'll make do.

Will you?

KEEPS: plotted halfway (pps. 0-49)

2011-09-17T17:03:00.000-07:00

RADIO ZENO: sundry musitxts

2011-09-15T12:11:00.000-07:00

D: Random, vital used: 'Low Symphony', Philip Glass, Eno, Bowie; 'Eat/Kiss', John Cale f/ Warhol's films; & 'Blue', Derek Jarman, various (Coil, Tilda Swinton!)

A: yum... didn't know swinton made music... love coil

D: Swinton was Jarman's best friend. She started in his films, featured in most of them. His muse; he was gay.

A: hm... makes sense. she has a compelling androgyny

D: ['Blue'] miraculous. Throbbing Gristle people, Eno again, Erik Satie, some polish composers, Miranda Sex Garden. About Jarman's descent into AIDS; meditation on death.

D: Intensely intelligent, honest, artful. Great writing. Inspiring.

A: nice

D: Is Eno gay? I've never wondered before... 'Blue' amazing as soundtrack, because Jarman (filmmaker/artist/writer) was slowly going blind. Attenuated his ears...

A: hmm. no idea... hadn't ever thought of him as a person w/ a life, only musician... funny how i wonder abt some but it doesn't occur at all for others

D: Exactly. Listening to Eno's music, considering his arc as an artist, there's zero sexuality / polarity in his work; no inflection either way. Odd how rare that is.

A: true... maybe why, despite how much i appreciate him, he can't seem to hold my interest for long

D: I like him best as a collaborator. Eno/Bowie, Eno/Byrne, Eno/Fripp. Those are times where he shines. Never thought about Eno/Coil, gotta say...

A: i agree... he brings a whole world to the sound, but someone else has to bring the tension....

KEEPS: scriptwerk & notes, o91411

2011-09-15T09:14:00.001-07:00

Kathy Acker continues to inform my thinking re: structure & myth. Working thru obsessions is the big watchword, in terms of what I'm trying to do with KEEPS-- summing up all the self-mythologizing bullshit I did in my teens & twenties, tracking down root causes & impulses and making a sordid sort of Sense of it all. As noted on the page previous to this one:

"The fundamental psycho-immune defense of man is identity. This explains man's obsession with Apocalypse: because chaos signifies the end of all identity."

My identity, the name & nature I stitched together for myself, came from a childhood drowned in pulp. Like every kid, I was highly credulous; when I read the back cover blurb on a Bloom County collection saying there was going to be a movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger cast as Opus, I mean, I believed it. So naturally I skipped from cleaving to fantasy as an infant to outright indulging it as a teenager, in pseudo-religious ritual & self-sanctioned, drug-induced psychosis...

KEEPS is me attempting to unsnarl the mischmasch of madness & plain dumb lies I indulged in over the last decade & change, to take it all apart & see what-if-any Truth existed in it, and to do so in the form of honesttogod fiction, as opposed to cringeworthy autohagiography.

Weird synch: CONTAGION and DRIVE

2011-09-15T08:25:00.001-07:00

And I'm not talking about Bryan Cranston's big-screen chameleon routine.

At the end of CONTAGION, Laurence Fishburne shakes hands with a freshly-inoculated child, explaining the historical significance of the gesture: to show good faith, to provide proof you're unarmed, and to identify yourself as an ally.

At the end of DRIVE, we learn to never, ever, ever shake hands with Albert Brooks.

The mermaid next door.

2011-09-14T14:04:00.000-07:00

The hat came back...

2011-09-10T12:50:00.000-07:00

KEEPS: scripting ch. 2, 'Arclight'

2011-09-08T08:46:00.000-07:00

KEEPS: the big board (& unrelated photos)

2011-08-31T14:48:00.001-07:00

Ackersnips.

2011-08-25T07:51:00.000-07:00

Kathy Acker: When I first started writing, I was influenced by poetry, mainly the Black Mountain school of poetry, so there’s a bit of poetry in that book. I was searching for my own medium. The middle section of the book interested me more than the other sections because I was working in a sex show, and this middle section was based on sex shows, diaries of sex shows. I was very influenced by Burroughs, so I was really writing out of a kind of "third mind," through Burroughs and the sex show diaries. It was during the hippie days when sex was fun, when everybody slept with everyone else. I had another point of view, having seen it from the 42nd Street angle. I became politicized. [cf. New York In 1979]

Ellen G. Friedman You say Burroughs was an influence on you.

KA: Oh, he was my first major influence.

EGF: Can you say what in Burroughs you admire or took?

KA: I came out of a poetry world. My education was Black Mountain school—Charles Olson, Jerry Rothenberg, and David Antin were my teachers. But I didn’t want to write poetry. I wanted to write prose and there weren’t many prose writers around who were using the ways of working of poets I was influenced by. Their concerns certainly weren’t narrative in any way. Any prose writer, even if he doesn’t use narrative the way narrative is traditionally used, is concerned with narrative. I mean the reader has to go from A to Z and it’s going to take a long time and that’s narrative. There’s no way to get around it; that’s the form.

EGF: So Burroughs seemed a natural?

KA: There were Burroughs and Kerouac really.... but Burroughs is the more intellectual. He was considering how language is used and abused within a political context. That’s what interested me. The stuff about his relation to women and all that was really secondary for me to the main work, books like The Third Mind. I was also looking for a way to integrate both sides of my life. I was connected to the St. Mark’s poetry people at the time. On the one hand, there were the poetry people, who were basically upper-middle-class, and on the other, there was the 42nd Street crowd. I wanted to join the two parts of my life, though they seemed very un-joinable. As if I were split. Of course, the links were political.

EGF: There were political links between the two?

KA: A political context was the only way to talk about the link between them. Politics was the cause of the divergence. It was a question of class and also of sexism. The poetry world at that time denied any of this. Sexism wasn’t an issue, class, forget it. Money—- we’re all starving hippies -—ha, ha. That I worked in a sex show for money was not acceptable at all, despite the free love rhetoric....

EGF: What attracted you to 42nd Street? Was it the political aspect you’ve been talking about?

KA: Oh, no. I just needed money. I had gotten out of university and I had nowhere to go.

EGF: Where did you study?

KA: At Brandeis, at UCSD, and a little bit at CCNY and NYU....

EGF: What is the new direction you’ve taken with Empire Of The Senseless?

KA: The search for a myth to live by. The purpose is constructive rather than deconstructive as in Don Quixote. .....it was the structure that really interested me, the three part structure. The first part is an elegy for the world of patriarchy. I wanted to take the patriarchy and kill the father on every level. And I did that partially by finding out what was taboo and rendering it in words. The second part of the book concerns what society would look like if it weren’t defined by oedipal considerations and the taboos were no longer taboo. I went through every taboo, or tried to, to see what society would be like without these taboos. Unfortunately, the CIA intervenes; I couldn’t get there. I wanted to get there but I couldn’t. The last section, "Pirate Night," is about wanting to get to a society that is taboo, but realizing that it’s impossible. The CIA is symbolic.

EGF: The CIA is symbolic of what?

KA: That you can’t isolate yourself from the world. Two examples: Say, the hippie movement in which the goal was that you make things better by isolating yourself from society and going your own way. The same sort of thing with the separatist feminists. You form your own group. In the end you pull things that way a little, but it can’t work successfully. Neither one is in any way a viable model of true separation. It’s impossible. In the same way you try to imagine or construct a society that wasn’t constructed according to the myth of the central phallus. It’s just not possible when you live in this world. That’s what I wanted to do in the second section of Empire, but the CIA kept coming in. That’s what I mean by the CIA being symbolic. It could have been anybody. So I ended up with "Pirate Night," You can’t get to a place, to a society, that isn’t constructed according to the phallus. You’re stuck with a lot of loneliness, so how do you deal with that isolation and loneliness? The third part concerns that issue. Also I’m looking for a myth. I’m looking for it where no one else is looking....

EGF: The myth never surfaces?

KA: The myth to me is pirates.... It’s like the tattoo.... It concerns taking over, doing your own sign-making. In England (I don’t know if it’s so much true here), the tattoo is very much a sign of a certain class and certain people, a part of society that sees itself as outcast, and shows it. For me tattooing is very profound. The meeting of body and, well, the spirit—it’s a real kind of art, it’s on the skin. It’s both material and not material and it’s also a sign of the outcast. So that’s what I’m saying about looking for the myth with people like that—- tattoo artists, sailors, pirates.

....the writer could do the same thing. I’m fascinated with the relationship between language and body. That’s something not many people have started working with, I’m interested in the material aspect of the tattoo. I admire Pierre Guyotat because he’s very much concerned with the body-as-text. This business of “When I write I masturbate.” Erotic texts at their best— I don’t mean pornographic, which is something else —are very close to the body; they’re following desire. That’s not always true of the writer, whereas it’s always true that the tattooist has to follow the body. That’s the medium of the tattoo. If you’re looking for values, it’s where the ground would be for real value. Whereas the ground for the values we have now, such as religion, there’s no reality to it, especially the evangelical movements, other than politics. It’s now something very sick. I have that feeling about the whole spectrum of what’s going on in America, from malls to religion, it’s very sick. It’s not real....

EGF: In [My Death, My Life by Pier Paulo Pasolini] there are letters from Emily to Charlotte. Why the Brontes?

KA: Because they were Catholic.

EGF: Because they were Catholic?

KA: Well, anything Catholic was the point. You see, I was setting up the text so that all the connections were based on nominalism. So about Pasolini’s childhood, the son/sun pun became important, anything that had to do with the son, the son is Catholic, Pasolini was Catholic.

EGF: That’s fascinating. Can you talk a little more about that?

KA: The book’s structured that way. I think it’s probably unreadable, but it fascinated me to write it.

EGF: No, not at all. It’s one of my favorites.

KA: The idea fascinated me. I’ll never do it again. It’s as far into structure as I’ll ever go. I wanted to fashion a book out of different ways of ordering that weren’t causal. Again, I was fighting against oedipal structuring. The first part of the book is about the death and the second about the life of Pasolini. So there were two sections to death and life: In “Death” I was fascinated by his murder and also by the media around his murder. In the media, the idea advanced was “porn maker, homosexual” murdered in gory, homosexual murder. Everything was covered over at the trial. I was fascinated with why the media sensationalized it, what they were getting out of it. I always wanted to write a crummy crime book. It started out that way. I was going to write an Agatha Christie version of Pasolini’s murder....

EGF: It’s far from Agatha Christie, though.

KA: The first books I ever read came from my mother’s collection. My mother had porn books and Agatha Christie, so when I was six years old, I’d hide the porn books between the covers of Agatha Christie. They are my favorite models, the books I read as a kid. That’s why I originally became a writer—to write Agatha Christie-type books, but my mind is fucked up. I was going to write the Agatha Christie version of Pasolini’s death. But it didn’t turn out as planned. I picked three ways of solving the murder, I wanted a non-political way of solving it. So I picked three categories: sex, language, and violence. They had to be three appropriate categories. The way of solving it was by way of nominalism. Once I had the categories, anything went. Once I had the category sex, anything went that was about sex. Language was any language experiment, so I played with language school theory. In the end I wasn’t so much interested in solving his death as I was interested in his life. As I got into solving his murder, I didn’t learn how he died, so much was covered over. What I did learn was how multileveled he was. He was a man whose life was his work. He would always make the material of the body his subject. He never allowed people to ignore the body. He didn’t exploit the body as many thought. As I became more and more involved in his work, the “My Life” section of my novel became more important. The influence of Pasolini’s theories on my work is particularly important. He refused to separate genres-film, poetry, criticism. He refused to separate body and mind.....

KA: The book I’m working on now [In Memoriam To Identity] ....is a life of Rimbaud. I chose Rimbaud because I wanted to remember who influenced me, to explore the history of the imagination, and of dreaming and of art, how art can matter politically in the society. For me, one lineage that I’ve come out of is that of Rimbaud. So to investigate Rimbaud is to go back to the beginning for me. He saw myth as a way out of the mess I was talking about to you before.

--excerpted from the Dalkey Archive

Annual visit to Emory & comix fragment.

2011-08-24T12:40:00.000-07:00

Breaking Bad: the God's-eye view

2011-08-21T14:50:00.001-07:00

"Hank and Marie's situation continues to disintegrate. Hank can no longer even feign tolerance for Marie's presence and Marie is headed for a breakdown. How this relates back to the main characters doesn't seem readily apparent but, if we pull back to the big picture, we can see the consequences of Hank ever discovering Walt's guilt ratcheting [ever-]higher. The dissolution of the Schrader marriage can be added to the ever-growing list of unintended collateral damage brought about by Walt's decisions."

"I've noticed that there is a certain breed of commenter who complains loudly every time Marie is given screen time of any substance. I suspect these are the same 'fans' who used to bitch and moan every time The Sopranos strung together two episodes in a row where nobody got whacked in spectacular fashion.... I think the larger point is in seeing how the consequences of Walt’s actions continue to spread and ripple out in unexpected directions. You can draw a direct line from Walt’s decision to sell meth to Marie stealing a commemorative spoon from a stranger’s living room. It’s this God’s eye view of guilt and morality that makes Breaking Bad the large achievement it is."

--from Michael C.'s Serious Film series on B.B. S4

TCJ #301 & misinformation.

2011-08-18T12:38:00.000-07:00

Neither of my usual haunts (Criminal Records in L5P; Oxford Comics in Buckhead) had heard anything about the most recent issue of The Comics Journal. Both had ceased ordering it altogether over a year back.

One helpful staffer asked, "Is Fantagraphics even still publishing the Journal?" As though I hadn't come to them for information.

No-one seemed to know how to order it. Diamond didn't have an entry for TCJ, in print or online-- or so I was told. Oxford's finest sloughed a sigh, stubbed out her cig, and sat to a laborious online search, only to surface minutes later with the Certain Knowledge that TCJ #301 had yet to print, due to editorial delays & shakeups & suchlike. All the publisher's fault.

Yet:
A day later I'm browsing my favorite used & rare bookstore, and what do I see but... TCJ #301, prominently displayed between the Surrealists & the Situationists.

'Second printing', states the indica, 'June 2011'.

Batfan Inc. stopped in for a drink.

2011-08-12T23:30:00.000-07:00

There were eight capes, and they were all
doing their best Saturday morning Wolverine
impression. Thank the lord for last call.

In lieu of hawt content: NILSEN'S BOOK

2011-08-12T15:44:00.000-07:00

Still can't find that Bam Too submission
on my hard drive. Rediscovered these, though.

Two years later.

2011-08-11T23:53:00.000-07:00

KEEPS: NoSky Theatre & Lou Mac's

2011-08-09T12:45:00.000-07:00

Happening distractions: The Shadow Line

2011-08-06T15:02:00.000-07:00

I loved RED RIDING. Saw it on my tinny, tiny computer, then went right out to see it again at my local theatre: all three parts, back to back to back. I found the harrowing horrible plummet of the first act thoroughly addictive, the ethical abyss that was the second (god, the emotionally unavailable, coarse inevitability of David Peace's private universe-- how he must see his fellow man), and even the sunshine & kittens & vengeance over kiddy rape that constituted the third, too, because the audience deserved SOME kind of happy ending. The BBC was wise to keep it to three parts. That said, I desired more filmworthy TV maliciousness & mindrackingly amoral conspiracy, and here it is.

There aren't any bad performances in THE SHADOW LINE, and with a cast like this, I should fucking coco; the off-notes (and there -are- a few) are largely easy to ignore because everyone's obviously in it to win it & the direction sweeps what sins there are in the writing neatly beneath the rug. When the plot officially kicks in, by episode five, you will have fallen thoroughly in lust with even the worst monster on the show. It's hypnotic crime fiction with a brilliant, frightful, byzantine heart, and it's the business. I will be buying this one. I came for Chewitel & Eccleston (who keeps a tight rein on his stage tics-- almost zero shouting) and wound up addicted to Stephen Rea & Antony Sher, whose Holmes & Moriarity game in episode five is top of the form. The characters' dynamic, their history, is... without any hyperbole, a modern myth.

"Do you have any idea how hard it is to keep a secret?" Glickman asks an old, soon-to-be-dead friend. Follow THE SHADOW LINE and you'll begin to have an inkling.

KEEPS: map

2011-08-05T12:30:00.000-07:00

Happening distractions: The Shadow Line

2011-08-05T11:26:00.000-07:00

Criminally Unsung: JULIO'S DAY - Beto Hernandez

2011-08-04T11:48:00.000-07:00

Prob'ly could get myself in hot water with this 'un, but since I don't have -all- of JULIO'S DAY I'm gonna hedge against the Copyright Cops with the magical chant 'herp derp excerpts'. This is everything I've been able to find at my local comic stores.
JULIO'S DAY ran in L&R vol. 2 from #1 to #19. It has yet to be collected; the last time I heard 'Beto mention it was in this '06 interview:

"My plan was to do it for 100 pages but it didn’t quite make it because I kept pulling pages out because other stories were crowding it out. ....when it’s collected I’m going to put those pages back.... and it’s still going to be a 100-page graphic novel."

To be honest, I hadn't even heard about it until last year, when I started buying back issues of L&R vol. 2. The first installment I read was the last, and the finality of the imagery couldn't have been more primed to lodge in my psyche because I was midway through 'Lord Of The Flies'.

"There was a pause.
"Simon found he was looking into a vast mouth. There was a blackness within, a blackness that spread....
"Simon was inside the mouth. He fell down & lost consciousness."
--Lord of the Flies, by William Golding

"I saw [the dying Kurtz] open his mouth wide-- it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him."
--Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

Criminally Unsung: TO BE ANNOUNCED - Jaime Hernandez

2011-08-04T08:45:00.000-07:00

Minor mystery, here. The following three TBA strips were originally serialized in Jaime's 'Penny Century' in '97-'98. From the adult character of Ray D. I infer these single-page daydreams were childish epiphanies, li'l intuitive glimpses which informed his evolution as an adult &/or artist... yet, based on the back cover of L&R #32 (circa '91) I have to wonder whether these visions weren't originally Jaime's.

On David Foster Wallace:

2011-07-30T14:42:00.001-07:00

[Of whom I've long been curious but never brave enough to tackle.]

"That's just the thing about recognizing our common humanity, our common burden. We're suspended for a moment on this spinning blue pearl, here together and alive right now, conscious, though no one knows why. It is a question of caring. When one of us considers the experiences of another, all the failings and the achievements in someone else's life, we are seeing from this common place, knowing that it's all taking place in doubt and the absolute solitude and terror of being human, and knowing that it's all temporary."
--from Maria Bustillos' sensitive & intelligent exploration of David Foster Wallace & his demons
Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.
--from the first chapter of DFW's The Pale King

spotted en route

2011-07-29T13:47:00.000-07:00

"The ICE is gonna BREAK."

2011-07-28T22:25:00.000-07:00

Folly, or follies? Depends on the angle.

2011-07-27T13:45:00.001-07:00

"Negative saints."

2011-07-27T11:46:00.001-07:00

--p. 346 of Zero History, by William Gibson

In the dark of noon.

2011-07-27T11:05:00.000-07:00

KEEPS: in transit

2011-07-27T09:13:00.001-07:00

Nightshadows (1)

2011-07-21T08:55:00.002-07:00

'Tardcasting.

2011-07-20T15:20:00.000-07:00

Do your stretches everyday. F'serious.

2011-07-17T22:52:00.000-07:00

Back in 404pps.

2011-07-15T14:13:00.000-07:00

Breaking to read Wm. Gibson's 'Zero History'.

"The decorators had kept it down, here, which is to say that they hadn't really gone publicly, ragingly batshit insane. There was a huge, ornately carved desk, with something vaguely pornographic going on amidst mahogany vines and grape clusters, at which sat one or another of the club's employees, young men for the most part, often wearing tortoiseshell spectacles of the sort she suspected of having been carved from actual turtles.

"Behind the desk's agreeably archaic mulch of paperwork twined a symmetrically opposed pair of marble stairways, leading to the floor above; that floor being bisected, as was everything above this foyer, into twin realms of presumed philanthropic mystery and Cabinet. From the Cabinet side, now, down the stairs with the widdershins twist, cascaded the sound of earnest communal drinking, laughter and loud conversation bouncing sharply off unevenly translucent stone, marbled in shades of aged honey, petroleum jelly, and nicotine. The damaged edges of individual steps had been repaired with tidy rectangular inserts of less inspired stuff, pallid and mundane, which she was careful never to step on.

"A tortoise-framed young man, seated at the desk, passed her the room key without being asked."

In lieu of hawt content: Olive & park pix.

2011-07-14T09:08:00.000-07:00

Koren Shadmi's 'The Abaddon'

2011-07-08T14:38:00.000-07:00

I was in my studio this morning, leafing thru 'In The Flesh', wondering what Koren was up to...
--and lo, look what turns up for the afternoon browse: a fresh serial.

KEEPS: logo test (1)

2011-07-06T11:47:00.000-07:00

KEEPS: Rhea (2)

2011-07-04T23:52:00.000-07:00

Criminally Unsung: SMOKE NAVIGATOR - Paul Pope

2011-07-04T11:46:00.001-07:00

"This (is a) flawed but honest attempt at a novel done in comics. Please forgive the blemishes and seek out the good in the work. [....] I offer it only as a 'fragment', a 'ladder', etc."
--Paul Pope, from the liner notes for BUZZ BUZZ COMICS MAGAZINE

SMOKE NAVIGATOR isn't so much unsung as unremembered, now. Online, it's principally documented as a false start to 100%-- Pope began SMOKE NAV in '95, got 40-odd pages done, then dropped it... Only to dig it out again the following year as feature-filler for BUZZ BUZZ COMICS MAGAZINE.

There was only one issue of BUZZ BUZZ, and I didn't get to see a copy 'til '09. All I knew of SMOKE NAV came from a jewelcase-size booklet entitled PULPHOPE 96/7: the 'Suffer' sign, and the line "What genius lies sleeping in your brain?" And I had to come all the way to Atlanta to score that. (I was living in Auburn, AL. at the time.) Considering I had most everything else Pope had self-published, you can imagine how that fragment tantalized & maddened me.

My copy of SMOKE NAV came from behind the counter at A Cappella, my favorite rare & used bookstore. Imagine my surprise when, arriving home, I found 100%-- loosely sketched, in micro, but the same players & sets: John the busboy, a nameless, suicidal prototype of Daisy, and the Catshack neon...

But it wasn't finding out that SMOKE NAV was a rough draft* which nabbed my attention: it was the opening. Those beautifully overblown first five pages. The imagery elicits the storytelling of Nick Cave: that tarry, tarry night at the gas station; the title card, rushing overland at us at a hundred miles an hour; the packet of cloves, leading into the volcanic flume past the overpass; and The Sign.

* --in the sense that 'Stephen Hero' is a sketch of 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'...

This opening doesn't recur in 100%. Nor do these images. I'd like to see them, and that sexy sexy title, repurposed by Pope for one of his future projects. In a perfect universe grown from unicorn ejaculate, I'd love for that project to be as overpoweringly oversize as BUZZ BUZZ. At Sunday Funnies scale & frequently full-bleed, SMOKE NAVIGATOR was widescreen before Ellis & Hitch on AUTHORITY, before Miller & Varley's 300. (Though, Dept. of Credit Due, RONIN was firstest with the loudest.)

SMOKE NAVIGATOR was Big Ink. In an era of diminished print & ever-shrinking screens, we need SMOKE NAVIGATOR more than ever.

KEEPS: Rhea (1)

2011-07-04T11:28:00.000-07:00

And the award for First Mammal To Maim The Artist's Nipples goes to...

"So we're here to celebrate the sources of faith and confidence.

2011-07-01T10:03:00.002-07:00

"I want to give you the secrets of the constant alchemy that we must practice to turn brass into gold, hate into love, destruction into creation-- to change the crass daily news into inspiration, and despair into joy. None need misinterpret this as indifference to the state of the world or the actions by which we can stem the destructiveness of the corrupt system. There is an acknowledgement that, as human beings, we need nourishment to sustain the life of the spirit, so that we can act in the world, but I don't mean turn away. I mean we must gain our strength and our values from self-growth and self-discovery. Against all odds, against all handicaps, against the chamber of horrors we call history, man has continued to dream and to depict its opposite. That is what we have to do. We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art-- we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.

"The woman of the future, who is really being born today, will be a woman completely free of guilt for creating and for her self-development. She will be a woman in harmony with her own strength, not necessarily called masculine, or eccentric, or something unnatural. I imagine she will be very tranquil about her strength and her serenity, a woman who will know how to talk to children and to the men who sometimes fear her. Man has been uneasy about this self-evolution of a woman, but he need not be-- because, instead of having a dependant, he will have a partner. He will have someone who will not make him feel that every day he has to go into battle against the world to support a wife and child, or childlike wife. The woman of the future will never try to live vicariously through the man, and urge and push him to despair, to fulfill something that she should really be doing herself. So that is my first image-- she is not aggressive, she is serene, she is sure, she is confident, she is able to develop her skills, she is able to ask for space for herself.

"I want this quality of the sense of the person, the sense of direct contact with human beings to be preserved by woman, not as something bad, but as something that could make a totally different world where intellectual capacity would be fused with intuition and a sense of the personal.

"Now, when I wrote the diary and when I wrote fiction, I was trying to say that we need both intimacy and a deep knowledge of a few human beings. We also need mythology and fiction which is a little furthur away, and art is always a little furthur away from the entirely personal world of the woman. But I want to tell you the story of Colette. When her name was suggested for the L'Académie français, which considered the highest honor given to writers, there was much discussion because she hadn't written about war, she hadn't written about any large event, she had only written about love. They admired her as a writer, as a stylist-- she was one of our best stylists --but somehow the personal world of Colette was not supposed to be very important. And I think it is extremely important, because we have lost that intimacy and that person-to-person sense, which she developed because she had been more constricted and less active in the world. So the family was very important, the neighbor was very important, and the friend was very important.

"It would be nice if men could share that too, of course. And they will, on the day they recognize the femininity in themselves, which is what Jung has been trying to tell us. I was asked once how I felt about men who cried, and I said I loved men who cried, because it showed they had feeling. The day that woman admits what we call her masculine qualities, and man admits his so-called feminine qualities, will mean that we admit we are androgynous, that we have many personalities, many sides to fulfill. A woman can be courageous, can be adventurous, she can be all these things. And this new woman who is coming up is very inspiring, very wonderful. And I love her."
--from The New Woman, by Anaïs Nin

RADIo ZENo: misc. film thoughts

2011-06-29T11:54:00.000-07:00

o62411, 12:o8am -
Rewatching MAGNOLIA after a thirteen-hour workday. Why did I remove this from my collection?

o2:13am -
Y'know that moment where they all break into song? That's just it: they don't break into song, it's not a 'musical' moment, it's a moment when the characters Need Music.

o62811, o6:o7pm -
Re-watching all of P.T.A. now. Did MAGNOLIA 4 times. PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE last night, then read script... THERE WILL BE BLOOD this afternoon. Unsure of what exactly I'm looking for, but finding plenty.

1o:47pm -
Doing THERE WILL BE BLOOD again. Reading script...

1o:53pm -
Hitting all of these so close together, watching the refinement of his style, really has ginned my interest in THE MASTER. I'm with Anonymous: I want to see him take on L. Ron Hubbard. This movie promises to be my favorite celebrity cage-match ever.

o62911, o9:48am -
One of the interesting things about TWBB, to me, is how streamlined the narrative threads are. Blood is family, blood is water, blood is oil. Every character who speaks confirms this...

--which is why all rivers lead back to the plight of Daniel Plainview (& his adopted son's plight, & to some lesser extent Henry the grifter's, too). Plainview begins & ends in isolation, murdering both the men who claimed to be his brothers... When Plainview's leafing through his true brother's journal, he comes across a picture of a child & sheds the sole tear we see from him.

(When I emphasize blood = water, Plainview says it 3x: establishing the wells in Little Boston, requesting the baptism from Eli, & when he says "I drink your water. I drink the blood of lamb...")

I guess when I'm saying 'streamlined', what I mean is, the streams converge. Blood = water = family. The desperation for each resource is equivalent; all are necessary for survival, psychic and otherwise. Plainview, the man, is extinct long before film's end. It's a bit of a horror story, at its heart; surviving multiple brushes with the forces of nature, Plainview is forced to become one himself.

And there's the deliciously tarry visuals: men & children covered in, marked by, the black blood of Bandy's tract. It's on Bandy's land, we are given to suspect, where Henry was buried. Was he simply a broken man who flubbed a con, or had he killed the real Henry Plainview? What were his intentions?

Note how Henry was buried in stony soil where the ground water was high... note also that it's old man Bandy who forgives Daniel, both knowing full well the sin. Why does Daniel respect Bandy's religious tendency where he disregards a great many others? I don't believe 'twas solely for expedience's sake... Though it probably was. Plainview said "There's a pipeline," after his baptismal humiliation was finished, after all.