Author: Gil

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Library of America: Fuck Yeah!

Library of America was having a 20% off sale a few weeks ago. Also, they discount the books on their site AND they’re a non-profit doing the Lord’s work, so I kinda splurged.

Bellowing

If necessary, I can explain myself:

  • Thoreau – Walden – I never read it, and there’s a seminar on it this May at St. John’s College.
  • Dos Passos – USA trilogy – I never read it and who knows?
  • Saul Bellow – They were selling all 4 collections of Saul Bellow’s novels as a group for $115 (before the 20% discount), and I figured I need to add more heft to my 20th century Jewish writers shelf, alongside Philip Roth, Bruce Jay Friedman, Bernard Malamud, Joseph Heller and James Salter (nee Horowitz).
  • Susan Sontag – Essays of the 1960s & 70s – I never read her, and really have to correct that.
  • Philip Roth – Nemeses (novels 2006-2010) – I own these books separately, but I have the rest of the Roth L.O.A. collections, and I’m a completist.
  • Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology – it was only $9.95, and I’m now interested in LA after a my trips there this year.

Why don’t you come by and check out the library sometime? And go buy some books from the Library of America!

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Podcast – The Guest List 2014

Virtual Memories Show:
The Guest List 2014

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Two years in a row? That makes The Guest List a Virtual Memories Show tradition! I reached out to 2014’s podcast guests and asked them about the favorite book(s) they read in the past year. More than 30 of them responded with a fantastic array of books. So, just in time for Hanukkah and Christmas, the Virtual Memories Show provides you with a huge list of of books that you’re going to want to read! Get ready to update your wish lists!

liberryThis episode features selections from nearly 3 dozen of our recent guests! So go give it a listen, and then visit the Guest List cheat sheet where you can find links to the books and the guests who responded.

(And check out the 2013 edition of The Guest List, too!)

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About our Guests

The guests who contributed their favorite book from the past year — and that’s “favorite book I read in 2014,” not “favorite book that came out in 2014” — are Maria Alexander, Ashton Applewhite, David Baerwald, Nina Bunjevac, Roz Chast, Sarah Deming, Michael Dirda, Jules Feiffer, Mary Fleener, Nathan Fox, Josh Alan Friedman, Richard Gehr, Paul Gravett, Sam Gross, Rachel Hadas, Kaz, Daniel Levine, Sara Lippmann, Merrill Markoe, Brett Martin, Mimi Pond, George Prochnik, Emily Raboteau, Jonathan Rose, Ron Rosenbaum, Dmitry Samarov, Seth, Katie Skelly, Ron Slate, Maya Stein, Rupert Thomson, and Frank Wilson. Check out their episodes at our archives!

Credits: This episode’s music is The Book I Read by Talking Heads. Most of the episode was recorded at Virtual Memories Manor on a Blue Yeti USB Microphone. A few segments were recorded by the guests and e-mailed in (which is to say: don’t blame me!). Processing was done in Audacity and Garage Band.

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Podcast – Creativity on Demand

Virtual Memories Show:
Kaz –
Creativity on Demand

“When I started Underworld, there were a lot of comics coming out that were autobiographical and depressing; anything but funny. I decided I was gonna be a little different. I was gonna be the Ernie Bushmiller of underground comics.”

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Kaz joins The Virtual Memories Show

From Rahway to Hollywood, by way of Underworld! Kaz joins the show to talk about his career(s) as a cartoonist, animator and artist. We talk about how he fell in love with the collaborative aspect of animation (and how the SpongeBob Squarepants sausage gets made), how the world caught up to the outrageous depravity of his Underworld comic strip, how Art Spiegelman taught him to be an artistic magpie, how he may have made Mark Beyer cry, how it felt to show his parents his work in an issue of Al Goldstein’s Screw, how he learned to make a story turn funny, and what it’s like to supply creativity on demand, and more! Give it a listen!

“I didn’t make any distinction between getting published in Swank and getting published in The New Yorker.”

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Kaz joins The Virtual Memories Show

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! Related conversations:

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About our Guest

Kaz was born in Hoboken, New Jersey and started drawing comics for Art Spiegelman’s Raw Magazine while still in art school. As an illustrator and cartoonist he’s contributed to many magazines over the years (from Entertainment Weekly to The New Yorker) and started his weekly comic strip, Underworld, in The New York Press. There have been 5 published Underworld collections and editions published around the world. In 2001 Kaz joined the crew of SpongeBob SquarePants as a writer and storyboard director. That lead to his work on Cartoon Network’s Camp Lazlo, where he won an Emmy for writing, and Disney’s Phineas and Ferb where he was nominated this year for an Emmy. Kaz is currently working in Disney TV development and in January will rejoin the crew of Nickelodeon’s SpongeBob Squarepants as a staff writer. The end of 2015 will see Fantagraphics publish a hardcover collection of Underworld comics titled The Book Of Underworld.

Credits: This episode’s music is Her Eyes Are a Blue Million Miles by Captain Beefheart. The conversation was recorded in Kaz’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom H5 digital recorder. The intro and outro were recorded on a Blue Yeti USB Microphone. Processing was done in Audacity and Garage Band. Photos of Kaz by me.

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Mission Statement

Someone asked me yesterday why I make the Virtual Memories Show, and I gave my pat answer, “To get me out of the house.”

I thought about it a bit, and if there’s any guiding principle, it comes from Italo Calvino’s novel, Invisible Cities, a book given to me by That Really Important High School English Teacher.

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

But also, to get me out of the house.

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The Quotable Wayne White

Ready to record

When I make a post for a new podcast, I usually include a quote or two from the guest. In Wayne White’s case, there were a whole lot of good quotes. I didn’t want to put them all in that post, so here’s a bunch of ’em:

  • “Success really messes with your ego.”
  • “I think most really famous people — politicians and movie stars — are sorta insane.”
  • “Art has to show a level of confidence, or no one will want to look at it.”
  • “The movie has given me the opportunity to do bigger and better things, but as far as a psychological concept that I can use in my art, I’m still trying to figure out a way to make work that expresses what I’ve been through. It was quite a unique experience, being in the spotlight. I’d like to do some work that shares that story.”
  • “Getting on stage and performing is just another art project to me. It’s a way of manipulating people; that’s what art does. It was just another way of getting over an emotion, or a laugh, or an idea, just like a drawing or a painting does.”
  • “Sometimes it looks like I’m going for the laughs, but I’m going for connection, for the emotion. All artists are. What else is there, when you’re looking at a piece of art?”
  • “There’s something in the air out here in LA, with the big words in the landscape, the big open plain with the big monumental something sticking out of it.”
  • “I gloss over my art and say, ‘I just go for the laughs and I’m just a plain old guy, and I like to entertain people,’ because it’s funny and I don’t like to get too serious about it. But there are a lot of thorny issues with it and a lot of subtleties. It looks like I’m just defacing a painting and being funny, but I’m not. There are a million subtle things going on and that’s what makes it art.”
  • “I’ve always loved cartoonists, like Mad magazine. Cartooning informs my work, big time.”
  • “Cartooning is the hardest craft I ever did, because it’s no-shit-everything-has-to-work. With a painting, you can fudge things. Everything in a cartoon has to work, like a car, or it won’t run. I learned a lot about craft and discipline from cartooning, way more than painting.”
  • “I’ve been very lucky. I’ve had three separate careers: freelance illustrator, then set designer, puppetteer and animator, and now fine artist. I just bluffed my way into every one of ’em!”
  • “Like Red Grooms, I travel to a city, I hire local young artists and we build cool stuff.”
  • “Like my work, Jeff Koons is a similar kind of notion: Can I just hit it on the head and still make it art? Can it just be a complete, dumb, big idea that someone can get in a second and still be art?”
  • “To me, I like the hand-made, the feeling that the artist made it himself. That’s where the human smell comes in. . . . Some people would say, ‘soul’ or ‘spirit,’ but I like to use the word ‘smell’.”
  • “I’m a frustrated writer; that’s why I do the word-paintings. Of course I write poems that I don’t show anybody. I’ve written lyrics that I’ve pitched to my musician friends, but they’re not interested.”
  • “To live in New York, you have to love the street. The street is your front yard. That’s where you live most of the time. I got tired of that street energy.”
  • “My favorite thing to do is just to draw. That’s where it all comes from, and that’s what gave me the confidence to bluff my way into things, because I could draw. It’s the default position for me, my core.”

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Podcast – Success is Embarrassing

Virtual Memories Show:
Wayne White and Mimi Pond –
Success is Embarrassing

“I’ve been very lucky. I’ve had three separate careers: freelance illustrator, then set designer, puppetteer and animator, and now fine artist. I just bluffed my way into every one of ’em.'” –Wayne White

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Wayne & LBJ

Artist Wayne White joins the show to talk about how his life and art have changed since he starred in the documentary Beauty is Embarrassing (which, if you haven’t seen it, go do so now now NOW!). We talk about the allure and absurdity of hubris, how much of the movie-Wayne maps onto the real version, how LA influenced his word-paintings, how he balances art and commerce, what happens to the giant puppets that he makes for installations, what he thinks of Jeff Koons, why he’s moving toward art-as-public-spectacle, what art form he’s dying to get back to, what his next big project is, when he’s gonna get rid of that beard, and more! Give it a listen!

“Cartooning is the hardest craft I ever did, because it’s no-shit-everything-has-to-work. With a painting, you can fudge things. Everything in a cartoon has to work, like a car, or it won’t run. I learned a lot about craft and discipline from cartooning, way more than painting.” –Wayne White

But first, we have an interview with Wayne’s wife, Mimi Pond! I interviewed Mimi last May (go listen to it!) at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, shortly after the release of her graphic memoir, Over Easy. This time around, we talk about the success of the book, the surprises of the book tour, how the sequel’s progressing, how it felt to win a PEN Center USA Literary Award, and more! (There are also some overlapping questions, and I thought you guys might dig hearing their different perspectives on topics like LA vs. NYC, and becoming empty-nesters.)

“In LA, it’s the law that you must be engaged in writing a screenplay with your hairdresser, pool boy, personal trainer, life coach, dog walker, or yoga instructor.” –Mimi Pond

Mimi also at the drawing table

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Enjoy the conversations! Check out more pix from my visit to their home! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! Related conversations:

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About our Guests

Wayne White is an American artist, art director, illustrator, puppeteer, and much, much more. Born and raised in Chattanooga, Wayne has used his memories of the South to create inspired works for film, television, and the fine art world. After graduating from Middle Tennessee State University, Wayne traveled to New York City where he worked as an illustrator for the East Village Eye, New York Times, Raw Magazine, and the Village Voice. In 1986, Wayne became a designer for the hit television show Pee-wee’s Playhouse, and his work was awarded with three Emmys. After traveling to Los Angeles with his wife, Mimi Pond, Wayne continued to work in television and designed sets and characters for shows such as Shining Time Station, Beakman’s World, Riders In The Sky, and Bill & Willis. He also worked in the music video industry, winning Billboard and MTV Music Video Awards as an art director for seminal music videos including The Smashing Pumpkins’ Tonight, Tonight and Peter Gabriel’s Big Time.

More recently, Wayne has had great success as a fine artist and has created paintings and public works that have been shown all over the world. His most successful works have been the world paintings featuring oversized, three-dimensional text painstakingly integrated into vintage landscape reproductions. The message of the paintings is often thought-provoking and almost always humorous, with Wayne pointing a finger at vanity, ego, and his memories of the South. Wayne has also received great praise for several public works he has created, including a successful show at Rice University where he built the world’s largest George Jones puppet head for a piece called ‘Big Lectric Fan To Keep Me Cool While I Sleep.’ He was the subject of Neil Berkeley’s 2012 documentary, Beauty is Embarrassing.

Mimi Pond is a cartoonist, illustrator and writer. She’s created comics for the LA Times, Seventeen Magazine, National Lampoon, and many other publications. Her TV credits include the first full-length episode of The Simpsons, and episodes for the shows Designing Women and Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. She lives in LA with her husband, the artist Wayne White. She is currently working on the sequel to her 2014 graphic memoir, Over Easy.

Credits: This episode’s music is I’m Ragged but I’m Right by George Jones. The conversation was recorded in Wayne and Mimi’s dining nook on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom H5 digital recorder. The intro and outro were recorded on a Blue Yeti USB Microphone. Processing was done in Audacity and Garage Band. Photos of Mr. White and Ms. Pond by me.

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Podcast – Our Lady of Organized Vituperation

Virtual Memories Show:
Mary Fleener –
Our Lady of Organized Vituperation

“I was so excited to get an issue of Weirdo in the mail. I ran up my driveway and saw my neighbor and said, ‘Look! I got a letter from Robert Crumb!’ And he said, ‘Who’s that?’ And I thought, ‘Here’s my introduction to the mainstream appreciation of underground comics.'”

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lotpViva Cubismo! Mary Fleener joins the show to talk about her career in cartooning, her love/hate relationship with LA (mostly hate now, but there was a little love in the early days), the Zora Neale Hurston story that made a cartoonist out of her, the story of how Matt Groening accidentally derailed her career, her past-life regression while attending the King Tut exhibition in 1978, the roots of her Cubismo comics style, the joys of simplifying her life, the new book she’s working on, the horrors of The Comics Journal‘s message board, and more! Give it a listen!

“When I was going to college, you’d pass the guys selling ‘Muhammad Speaks,’ then you’d run into the Hare Krishnas, then there’d be the La Raza guys, then the Jesus freaks. Everything was in flux. Everybody was getting in cults. Everyone was either asking you for money or trying to convert you.”

FLEENER!

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Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! Related conversations:

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About our Guest

Mary Fleener was born in Los Angeles when smog was at an all time high, Hollywood was still glamorous, and every woman’s ambition was to own a mink coat. Inherited good art genes from her mother and never wanted to do anything else. A collection of her comics was published in 1994 by Fantagraphics as Life of the Party. Her Illustration work has appeared in The SD Reader, OC Weekly, The Village Voice, SPIN, Guitar Player, Musician, and Entertainment Weekly, as well as projects like The Guitar Cookbook, Weird Tales of the Ramones (CD box set), Star Time (the James Brown CD box set), Carlsbad Museum of Making Music – “Hands on the Future” exhibit, and CD covers for The Insect Surfers and Buddy Blue. Her paintings have been exhibited at La Luz de Jesus Gallery, Track 16, David Zapt Gallery, Laguna Beach Art Museum Annex, LACE (Los Angeles), COCA (Seattle), Southwestern College, Patricia Correia Gallery, Sushi Gallery and Ducky Waddle’s Emporium. She also enjoys making hand-built ceramics and wheel thrown functional pieces that she glazes and fires in her own kiln. She enjoys painting on velvet, that which we all consider the King of Kitsch, but which also makes her color and “cubismo” style of drawing even more dramatic and mysterious on the plush background of black velvet. She lives is in Encinitas, CA, with her husband, a dog, a cat, and lots of stringed instruments. They have a band called The Wigbillies.

Credits: This episode’s music is Boomcubism by Brian Eno. The conversation was recorded at Ms. Fleener’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom H5 digital recorder. The intro and outro were recorded on a Blue Yeti USB Microphone. Processing was done in Audacity and Garage Band. Photos of Ms. Fleener by me.

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Podcast – The Way of Pen and Sword

Virtual Memories Show:
Maria Alexander –
The Way of Pen and Sword

“The samurai believed that to be a complete person, you had to study the sword, but you also had to study the pen. They called it Bun Bu Ryo Do, the way of pen and sword. You were complete if you were a writer and a warrior, and I’ve really embraced that in my life.”

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Maria AlexanderMrWickerCoverWeb joins the Virtual Memories Show to talk about her debut novel, Mr. Wicker, her intern/protege relationships with Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman, and the art of shinkendo swordplay and what George R.R. Martin gets wrong about swords. Also, we learn what happens when Lovecraftian pastiche goes wrong, how Maria realized that even geniuses have to write drafts, how her parents took syncretism to new heights, how Mr. Wicker made its way from short story to screenplay to first novel, how she deals with severe carpal tunnel syndrome, and what her love of swords has taught her about editing her work! Give it a listen!

“My mother believed everything she saw on ‘In Search Of . . .’, so our household was very imaginative.”

Ms. Wicker!

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About our Guest

Maria Alexander writes pretty much every damned thing and gets paid to do it. She’s a produced screenwriter and playwright, published games writer, virtual world designer, award-winning copywriter, interactive theatre designer, prolific fiction writer, snarkiologist and poet. Her stories have appeared in publications such as Chiaroscuro Magazine, Gothic.net and Paradox, as well as in acclaimed anthologies alongside legends such as David Morrell and Heather Graham. Her second poetry collection – At Louche Ends: Poetry for the Decadent, the Damned and the Absinthe-Minded – was nominated for the 2011 Bram Stoker Award. And she was a winner of the 2004 AOL Time-Warner “Time to Rhyme” poetry contest. When she’s not wielding a katana at her local shinkendo dojo, she’s being outrageously spooky or writing Doctor Who filk. She lives in Los Angeles with two ungrateful cats, a pervasive sense of doom, and a purse called Trog. Her new novel is Mr. Wicker (Raw Dog Screaming Press).

Credits: This episode’s music is Ironside (Excerpt), Battle Without Honor or Humanity, The Chase, and Woo Hoo from the Kill Bill soundtrack. The conversation was recorded at Ms. Alexander’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom H5 digital recorder. The intro and outro were recorded on a Blue Yeti USB Microphone. Processing was done in Audacity and Garage Band. Photo of Ms. Alexander by me.

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Podcast – I Was A Teenage Structuralist!

Virtual Memories Show:
Richard Gehr – I Was A Teenage Structuralist!

“I’ve read enough Roland Barthes and Foucault to know it’s all fiction, man.”

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cartoonscoverRichard Gehr’s new book, I Only Read It for the Cartoons: The New Yorker’s Most Brilliantly Twisted Artists (Amazon/New Harvest), profiles a dozen New Yorker cartoonists. We talk about the genesis of that project, lament the dearth of cartooning in print and online, bond over Abe Vigoda, and ponder why it is that so many New Yorker cartoonists had teachers or educators for parents. We also get into Richard’s history in the arts-journalism racket, the joys of Robert Walser, his time in the Boy Scouts with Matt Groening, how he built a career out of his oddball enthusiasms, and the most mind-blowing “Which celebrity did you totally melt down around?” story in the history of this podcast. (Seriously.) Give it a listen!

“I love New Yorker cartoons, but they might be the whitest form of art ever conceived.”

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Richard Gehr on The Virtual Memories Show

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! Related conversations:

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About our Guest

Richard Gehr has been writing about music, culture, and travel for quite a while. He has been an editor for the Los Angeles Reader, Spin, and Sonicnet/MTV Interactive. He currently writes for Rolling Stone, Spin, The Village Voice, Relix, AARP: The Magazine, and other publications. He was a senior writer for the book Alt. Culture: An A-To-Z Guide to the ’90S – Underground, Online, and Over-The-Counter and co-authored The Phish Book with the Vermont quartet. His new book is I Only Read It for the Cartoons: The New Yorker’s Most Brilliantly Twisted Artists. He resides in the Brooklyn arrondissement.

Credits: This episode’s music is Homesickness by Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou (because I’m on the road for a week). The conversation was recorded at Mr. Gehr’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom H5 digital recorder. The intro and outro were recorded on the same setup in a hotel room in San Diego, when my voice was shot from a three-day podcast-athon in Los Angeles. Processing was done in Audacity and Garage Band. Photo of Mr. Gehr by me.