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What It Is: 3/1/10
What I’m reading: Alec: The Years Have Pants
What I’m listening to: The soundtracks to Sunshine and Moon, as recommended by Jason Kottke.
What I’m watching: The Conversation, Frost/Nixon, Funny People, Coraline, and the U.S./Canada gold medal hockey game. That was the only event I watched from the entire 2+ weeks of Winter Olympics coverage.
What I’m drinking: Old Raj and/or Hendricks and Q-Tonic.
What Rufus & Otis are up to: Neither of them is too happy about the 20″ of snow we got pasted with last week. Otis managed to eat a mouse that had died from the bait trips we left out for it in the garage. Apparently, my library was on his little mouse bucket list, so he died in the middle of that room, where Otis found him and swallowed him whole. I tried to get Mickey out of his mouse, but by the time I got to him and pried his mouth open, all I could see was the end of the mouse’s tail going down Otis’ gullet. It doesn’t look like there was enough poison in the little guy to affect Otis, happily enough. With his propensity for curling up in a tight ball in the sun, we always joked that Otis is part-cat. Now we know the horrible truth; he’s all cat.
Where I’m going: Nowhere in particular, but I managed to get roped into a round-trip to Philadelphia that literally amounted to 3 minutes of parking before driving back (130+ miles) home. All this to pick up a collection of files that could have easily been packed into a box or two and shipped up to me. I’m peeved about this.
What I’m happy about: It stopped snowing. AFTER FORTY-EIGHT HOURS.
What I’m sad about: That I finally watched a hockey game all the way through, and my country failed. I’ll never watch hockey again. Sob!
What I’m worried about: Flying from Brazil to Paris.
What I’m pondering: What to get my wife for her birthday (it’s Wednesday, btw).
Unrequired Reading: Feb. 26, 2010
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Crumbs
It’s entirely possible that I have brain damage. In the main, I see virtually everything abstract in terms of geometry and/or symbolic logic. Listening to a baseball game on the radio, I’m rarely visualize anything more than a standard scorecard diamond. Any hit to right or left field only travels along the foul line.
Storytelling, I make some pretense at imagination, but I usually over-engineer stories to make them “airtight,” to ensure they fit unobtrusively in the world at large. I spend so much time considering the implausibilities and details that the stories themselves end up lifeless. Maybe that’s why I’ve gained some interest in photography; at least there I’m capturing something that already exists.
(Maybe I’m also still guiding myself through depression and denigrating myself a bit much.)
In my Salinger post two weeks ago, I included a video excerpt from Crumb, the documentary by Terry Zwigoff about Robert Crumb and his brothers. If you haven’t seen it, go check it out, even if you’re not into cartooning. It’s one of my favorite movies, exploring notions of art and sex via unforgettably and entertainingly messed-up characters. (There’s also a cringe-worthy segment with Trina Robbins complaining about Crumb’s cartoons’ meanness toward women, but it was 1994, so hey.)
This recent post by Frank Santoro put me in mind of one of the best scenes in Crumb. Santoro writes about a 1992 NYC in-store appearance by the great French cartoonist Moebius. At first, he was amazed at how perfect and quick Moebius’ sketches were as he illustrated the front pages of fans’ books. But then he noticed some of Moebius’ sketchpad pages:
The loose pages were finished pages for a new Major Grubert story. I knew he drew “automatically†out of his head, with no pencils, but I wasn’t prepared to see how precise and loose his originals were. They were made without ANY discernible hesitation.
There was one page and one panel in particular that really stayed with me. It was a canyon rock wall that curled away in the distance. Floating along in it was a boat with a shadowed figure in the front. I remember it so distinctly because the marks that comprised the boat were like an intricate latticework, like a wicker chair. The sheer number of lines made the boat dark and it stood in relief of the canyon. It didn’t look drawn and shaded, it looked etched into the paper. Did he lightbox those lines? There were no pencil lines at all. Even the handwriting was eyeballed in straight pen. The page was perfect. I was in awe.
Read the rest of it, which includes Santoro’s encounter with that very page when he picked up a Moebius book on a recent trip to France. (Oh, and here’s my pic of Frank from the 2009 Toronto Comic Arts Festival. Hey! You all should come to this year’s TCAF! Amy & I will be wandering through!)
Which brings me back to Crumb. I hesitate to call this segment the centerpiece of the movie, but it is one of the more illuminating examples of what art is, and how it differs from whatever it is I do. In the scene, Crumb looks through the sketchbook of his son Jesse and the two of them compare drawings they’ve made from an old photograph.
Clip copyright 1994 Superior Pictures, “Crumb“, until they make me take it down.
At the end, we get the following exchange:
Jesse: YOU didn’t go to art school and look, you’re rich and famous!
Robert: [laughs] We’re not talking about rich and famous; we’re talking about learning to draw.
Unspoken — or just barely hinted at in Robert’s “heh” preceding that comment — is, “Well, son, I’m a genius and you’re not.”
“Genius” isn’t a shorthand way of describing Crumb’s art is naive or unschooled. He possesses a virtuosity that comes from countless hours of labor (instigated by his brother Charles, shown in that clip I used for the Salinger post), but his genius, as displayed in that clip, comes in knowing what to exaggerate, in knowing how to see.
How does the eye then see inward? How do artists like Crumb and Moebius reach the point where the imagined is evoked so surely and beautifully?
Sometimes, I think they’ll examine my brain after I die and discover that I was missing some important piece, like the way Pete Maravich turned out to be missing a chamber of his heart.
What It Is: 2/22/10
What I’m reading: Consider the Lobster
What I’m listening to: Night and Day
What I’m watching: The Brothers Bloom (meh), The Ricky Gervais Show (I almost peed myself with laughter), The Life of Tim (I wish I was stoned), the end of Tracy McGrady’s first game with the Knicks (David Lee is terrible on defense), and A Serious Man (wow; I’m not quite sure where it’s going to fit in my Coens pantheon).
What I’m drinking: Miller’s & Q-Tonic, and Hendrick’s & Q.
What Rufus & Otis are up to: Attending a Sunday greyhound meet & greet at the Petco in Kinnelon, NJ. Otis was a little overwhelmed by the scene, and really wanted to go after the smaller dogs that customers brought in. Oh, and it was not funny to have a cat adoption event right next to the greyhound group.
Where I’m going: No travel. Gotta buckle down to finish the March issue this week.
What I’m happy about: Dad reached his 72nd birthday yesterday.
What I’m sad about: I’ll never dress anywhere near as well as The Style Guy.
What I’m worried about: My mid-life crisis will be nowhere near as bombastic as Jack Kirby’s.
What I’m pondering: Buying a Bamboo Fun tablet
Unrequired Reading: Feb. 5, 2010
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Unrequired Reading: Jan. 15, 2010
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About Sang
On Monday, my friend Sang was found dead in his apartment. He had suffered a heart attack at some point last weekend, at the age of 43. We were introduced in 1999; my friend Vince Czyz met him and Chuck Bivona at a writer’s group in Montclair, NJ. Sang became the unpaid graphic designer for our micropress, Voyant Publishing.
Less than an hour before I got the news about his death, in an e-mail from Vince, I was looking at the cover he designed for our 2000 release, a collection of letters by Samuel R. Delany
I’ve been failing to write about Sang since then. We hadn’t seen much of each other in recent years, and all I have left are these fragments. The thing is, our conversations were intelligent but low-key. We were casually insightful, and thus the flavor of our friendship lingers, even though I can’t write anything of great importance about him.
If you want to get a better idea than I can muster of who he was, then go check out his blog and make sure to spend some time reading Chuck’s. I lost a good pal, but Chuck lost his best friend.
Here are some of those fragments. I’m sorry that they feel like trivia notes, but somehow they add up to my experience of a man’s life:
- Our happiest shared experience was the end of the final game of the first round of the 2001-02 NBA playoffs, when the Nets beat the Pacers in double-overtime.
- Our saddest shared experience was either 9/11 or the end of regulation of that Nets-Pacers game, when Reggie Miller bombed a 3-pointer at the buzzer to send the game into overtime. Reggie’s dunk at the end of the first OT also ranks.
- Sang, Chuck, Vince and I, along with Samuel R. Delany, became the core members of an occasional get-together I called Smart Guys Salon. We would meet at the WWF restaurant in Times Square, have lunch and shoot the breeze.
- His first cover illustration for The Place In Flowers Where Pollen Rests
was terrible. The second one was perfection.
- Raised in Korea sans dairy, he had no interest in pizza. This forced me to rethink my models of how guys hang out.
- We agreed that No Reply At All had one of the greatest bridges in pop history. His ringtone on my iPhone was the opening bars of Keep It Dark, from the same Genesis record. When I played it for him last month, he giggled.
- He’d started blogging a few months before his death, and did it pretty well. I only read a little of his fiction in 2003, so I don’t know how good that aspect of his writing became. I know that he was focused on getting published and was targeting Asian-American-specific literary magazines.
- I still have his DVD of Black Hawk Down. He still has my DVD of Another Woman (since replaced). I think he still has (had) a few of my comics. He loved Miller’s Crossing almost as much as I did.
- He gave my old girlfriend a copy of Buddha
, by Karen Armstrong, for her birthday back in 2001 (or so). I spoke to her for the first time in 7+ years to tell her that Sang had died. She told me her cat Charlie (b. 1994) is still alive. Sang would’ve been floored by that.
- I gave Sang a copy of George, Being George
last month, because I enjoyed it and because he made an off-hand comment about wanting to get published in The Paris Review. I’m glad I didn’t get him a subscription to the magazine.
- In 2007, I sent him a copy of Michael Bierut’s 79 Short Essays On Design
. I don’t know if he ever read anything I sent him. He was always so busy.
- In 2003, we took Chip Delany up to Readercon, outside of Boston. Chip had a 7:30 panel at the con, but we hit a ton of traffic during the drive. At one point, Chip told us not to worry about missing the panel. I told him, “Uh-uh, Chip. You are going to make that panel.” Sang went into Cannonball Run mode. I joked that we skidded into the hotel parking lot with two tires in the air. We dumped Chip in the lobby 3 minutes before his panel began.
- There’s a photo from that weekend of Sang, me and Paul Di Filippo. He designed the covers for two of Paul Di Filippo’s books: Babylon Sisters
and Little Doors
. That photo’s somewhere in my house, but I can’t find it. I’m hoping Paul still has a copy. (UPDATE: Found! See below!)
- Sang once Photoshopped our faces into a New Jersey Nets game-photo. I’m spotted up behind the three point line. He’s throwing down a one-handed monster-dunk. I can’t find that one, either.
- Nets PF Kenyon Martin had a pectoral tattoo that read, “Badass Yellow Boy.” As you’d expect, this became my nickname for Sang.
- On his Sega DreamCast, he created a Super-Nets team for NBA 2K2. He and I were the starting backcourt. The frontcourt consisted of Dr. J and souped-up versions of Buck Williams and Sam Bowie. We had as much fun playing that game as two guys in their early 30s can have without being stoned.
- When I told him I had a business trip to Paris in 2002, he told me to make sure I check out “the vegetable people” at the Louvre. I now have a set of Arcimboldo drink coasters.
- During summertime, when my Friday office hours were 8am-1pm, I’d sometimes drop in on Sang at his workplace. His partners lived in New Mexico, so he worked solo in those days. We’d shoot the breeze for hours.
- He was a fan of John Byrne’s run of Superman in the mid-1980’s, and a big X-Men geek from Byrne’s earlier run on that comic.
- He got back into role-playing games with a college pal of mine who attended our Smart Guys Salon. They launched a gaming company at one point. He touched that community, too.
- I told him how one of our mutual friends would manage to take his shirt off every single time he was around my old girlfriend. Without fail. Sang didn’t believe this. I’ve never seen a person try so hard to keep from laughing the day it was proved true. Sang literally slid off his leather sofa and onto the floor, clutching his sides and covering his face.
- He was mad that he hadn’t been invited to the party in 2004 where I met Frank Miller. He admitted that he would’ve spent the evening just walking behind Miller and bowing, so it was for the best.
- I helped him write his online dating profile.
- When I assured him I was never going to watch the rest of The Sopranos (after season 1), he revealed a funny joke between Christopher and Adriana. I ordered the complete series
from Amazon set last week; it showed up yesterday.
- The last time we were together, a month before his death, we talked about the merits of “Really?” vs. “Seriously?” I’d recently moved to the former’s camp, but he was sticking with the latter.
- We had a good time that afternoon — even though the occasion of our get-together was to clean up (a small portion of) Chip Delany’s apartment (see picture above, taken by Vince Czyz) — and it makes me even sadder that he’s gone. He was in good spirits, and if you told me that one of the four of us — Vince, Sang, me and Chip — would be dead one month later, my money would’ve been on Chip, then maybe Vince.
- He smoked all the goddamned time.
I’m not sure why we drifted apart. I certainly had less hang-out time once I’d settled down with Amy (we met at the beginning of 2004), but even before that, we’d stopped getting together so often. I think the gaming company consumed a lot of his time, but maybe it was something else. Life has its mysteries, and death tends to leave them unrevealed.
From Readercon 2003: Sang flanked by me and Paul Di Filippo. Photo by Deb Newton.
Man Out of Time: Comics
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There are three major problems I have with writing about comics for this “favorites of the decade” post:
- One of my best pals is a comics critic, and I always feel like I’m coming up short when I try to discuss comics around him.
- I can’t draw worth a damn and always feel like I’m coming up short when describing the visual side of comics.
- I have no idea what constitutes the “of the decade” part of “favorite comics of the decade.”
See, I love Chris Ware’s book, Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth,
Because it really was a hell of a decade for collections of pre-2000 work. There were massive volumes of the Hernandez Brothers’ great Love & Rockets comics, Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo Sunday comics
So I’ve tried to confine this list to comics that were mostly of this decade, but this would’ve been a much easier task at the end of the previous decade. Then I could have just recited the litany of usual suspects — Dan Clowes‘ Eightball, Pete Bagge’s Hate, Beto & Jaime Hernandez, Chester Brown’s Yummy Fur, Ware’s Acme Novelty Library, Seth’s Palookaville, R. Crumb’s Mystic Funnies and Self-Loathing Comics, Woodring, Panter, et al. — and seemed smart enough. Perhaps I’d have tossed in a somewhat obscure short story by David Mazzucchelli (Discovering America), to look even smarter!
But I’ve fallen off in my comics reading in recent years. It seems that the comics I most want to read are also the ones that take the most time to read. With my work and entertainment priorities, I really have to shut everything off to make time for good comics. I don’t think there’s a dearth of good new work; rather, there’s definitely a ton of new, likely worthy comics this decade that I simply haven’t read: Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers
It’s sad, because comics have been part of me since I was a little child; they’re my first language, and I wish I could keep up with their conversation more than I do with novels, music or film. I have dreams occasionally about wandering through unreal malls or shopping plazas, and visiting the comic shops. I don’t recall if I ever find Hicksville-esque Comics That Should Have Been on those dream-walks, but there have been enough good ones for me to offer up another list:
Favorite Comics of the Decade
Wimbledon Green
New Yorker
cartooning style (which he employed very well, but had become too much of an identifier, in my opinion). The fragmented storytelling style presaged his next book . . .
George Sprott: 1894-1975
Ice Haven
The Death Ray (2004) – Daniel Clowes – Another standalone issue of Eightball (#23), this one sorta pays homage to 1970’s comics. It tells a “realistic” but utterly fractured superhero story, laden with Freudian weight and a deeply disturbed “hero.”
Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow
Jaime Hernandez‘s body of work – I have no idea how to relate the ongoing magnificence of Jaime Hernandez’s comics. In this case, the arbitrary decade-mark is silly. He and his brother Beto have continually produced some of the finest comics in history for nearly three decades now. Jaime’s comics from 1998 to 2007 (or so), collected in Locas II
Safe Area Gorazde
Achewood (2001-present) – Chris Onstad – The only online comic I follow, and one of the most bizarre and funniest things I’ve ever read. Shortly after we adopted Rufus, we came home to discover that he’d stolen one of Amy’s bras from the hamper. Thanks to Achewood, we could simultaneously quote Lyle, who said, “I’m lickin’ this bra! Found it at the police station!”
I Killed Adolf Hitler
Kevin Huizenga’s body of work – A while ago, I asked my comics critic pal Tom who the good young comics talents are. I’d looked around at indy comics and had concluded that no one had stepped into the role once held by those usual suspects I mentioned above. Tom pointed me toward Kevin Huizenga and Sammy Harkham, and I have to say that they’re the two best young (under 40) cartoonists I’ve seen this decade. I’m putting Huizenga on the list because I’ve read more of his work, but I don’t have an individual favorite comic by him. Still, he’s good enough that I can recommend you pick up just about anything he’s published, esp. his Glenn Ganges comics.
Essex County Trilogy
All-Star Superman
Asterios Polyp
Louis Riel
Fred The Clown
The Book of Genesis
Honorable Mention
A Drifting Life
Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E.
Exit Wounds
Unstable Molecules
Little Nothings
Delphine – Richard Sala
Omega: The Unknown
Fin Fang 4 – Roger Langridge, Scott Gray
Let Us Be Perfectly Clear
The Muppet Show
The Perry Bible Fellowship – Nicholas Gourewitch
Promethea
Planetary – Warren Ellis, John Cassaday
Kramer’s Ergot #7
Epileptic
Introduction | Music | Movies | Comics | Sports | Books
Man Out Of Time: Introduction
Introduction | Music | Movies | Comics | Sports | Books
I imagine “future generations” will consider the decade to begin with the contested election of 2000 and end with “man, they messed up the country so badly, people were willing to vote a black guy president.” Maybe they’ll take 9/11 as the thematic starting point instead. Whatever. What I’m saying is, I think the decade’s outward/historical manifestation is The Bush Years, but I’m hard put to understand what my inner/hysterical manifestation of it is.
As the decade progressed, I found myself writing less about politics, finance/business and international relations, and more about my own life. There was no changeover moment; it must’ve occurred to me at some point that there are plenty of other blogs to turn to for commentary on those topics. I still care deeply about those fields, and spend a lot of time reading up on them. Maybe it was my time with Montaigne that taught me about the value of looking inside to get a perspective on the outside. As far as I know, no one else is writing about my love, my dogs, my travels, my friends, my photos, my work, etc., except for my wife, and she focuses much more on my eats. So I’m my niche and welcome to it.
(Also, there’s less chance I’ll offend someone with an, um, off-color joke like the one in the first sentence of this post.)
Still, with all the decade-mania going on, I thought it would be interesting if I wrote about movies, books, comics and music for a “decade-retrospective” post. Trying to assemble my own lists for each category — “favorites,” mind you, not “bests” — was more daunting than I expected. I keep a running list of the books in my life, but not those other art forms, so much of this has to be painted from memory.
(I considered adding TV as a category, but realized that the drop-off from The Wire to whatever came in second was too steep.)
Compiling lists — fun though it is — hasn’t helped me reach a deeper understanding about what this decade “meant,” but I’m fine with that. I’ve spent almost seven years writing here and maybe that’s the story in itself: digital distribution has transformed the way we experience/consume all forms of art and how we share our thoughts with others. I’m not going to wax rhapsodic or elegiac about Facebook, Twitter, Kindles or iTunes (okay, a little about iTunes), so much as writing about some artworks that were created or published in the past 10 years and why I like them.
Welcome to my Virtual Memories. On with the show!
Introduction | Music | Movies | Comics | Sports | Books