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.
but, while it was published in 2000, it’s actually a collection of comics published in the ’90’s. Do I include that, or do I only consider books in which most of the work was originally published this decade? Because so many comics are first produced as serials, I’ll have to make an arbitrary ruling on this.
(reprinted at their original size!), the first volumes of the complete 
, Charles Burns’ 
, the three-volume 
, 
, Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s 
, Bill Mauldin’s 
, Jim Woodring’s 
, the 
, 
(the 1950’s reprints), Scott McCloud’s 
, and a million more great collections. Had it come out on time, the collected Alec comics by Eddie Campbell, 
, would have been at the top of my comics list, even though many of the comics in it are pre-2000. (One of my pals says he just found a copy in a comic store, but I’m still waiting for an Amazon delivery of it.) I have no idea if it’s a great time to be a reader of mainstream/superhero comics, but it sure is a blast to be a “literary” comics reader (with a steady job and decent income) in this era.
(my only nod to The Bush Years theme for this series), Nate Powell’s 
, Marjane Satrapi’s 
, Craig Thompson’s 
, Gary Panter’s 
and 
, Al Columbia’s 
, Lynda Barry’s 
, and on and on.
(2005) – Seth – I may’ve missed a step or two in Seth’s progression, but this is the comic where he seemed to get away from autobiographical comics and/or lead characters who bear an astonishing resemblance to Seth. The sketchbook style of the work seems to free him from an over-reliance on a 1940’s
(2009) – Seth – . . . which was flat-out amazing. Expanded from Seth’s series of one-pagers in the NYTimes Magazine’s Funny Pages, this gorgeous book tells the story of lecturer, TV host, Arctic explorer, philanderer, one-time seminarian, Seth intersperses his not-so-omniscient narrator’s descriptions of the man’s life with interview-style passages with the people who knew Sprott. The complexity of the character belies Seth’s cartoony style, drawing the reader (this reader) into the life of a small-city semi-celebrity. I think it’s a remarkable comic; it’s my favorite of the year and may just be #1 among this list, too.
(2001) – Daniel Clowes – Only a few installments of Clowes’ Eightball were published this decade, but man were they good. Ice Haven is a repackaged edition of Eightball #22, and uses a number of different cartooning styles (in short bursts of a page or two) to tell the story of a small town in which a child may’ve been kidnapped in a Leopold & Loeb scenario. Clowes has a new book coming out in 2010, and I’m guessing that, if I’m writing this sorta post 10 years from now, it’ll be high up on my list.
/ 
, a 400+ page volume, show a master storyteller working at the top of his game. Pick up the two Locas collections, and get to marvelin’.
/ 
(2001) – Joe Sacco – Comics reportage from hell on earth. In this case, Sarajevo during the war in the 1990’s. Sacco’s comics journalism is unprecedented and unparalleled, while his eye for caricature marks him as a mutant David Levine.
(2007) – Jason – It’s no Inglourious Basterds, but this 48-page time-travel-with-a-twist tale by Norwegian cartoonist Jason is one of the more delightful comics I’ve read. Several of Jason’s works have an O. Henry twist to them, but they’re a joy to read.
(2009) – Jeff Lemire – Okay, this is one of my quirky ones. I met Lemire in May 2009 at the 
– Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely – The only superhero book on my list. Over the course of 12 issues, Morrison affectionately fuses modern storytelling and styles with some of the wackier elements of Superman comics from the ’50’s and ’60’s, ultimately elevating the character to the archetype of sun god. And it includes a 2-part story featuring my all-time favorite Superman concept: 
(2009) – David Mazzucchelli – I just don’t know what to make of this book. It’s so phenomenally drawn and well-designed that I was floored when I read it, but there’s a sterility/flatness to many of the characters that undercuts Mazzucchelli’s story and the theory that underlies it. In that sense, it reminded me of the worst aspects of a Novel of Ideas. To its credit, it still has plenty life in it. it’s an important comic, just breathtaking in parts, and I’ll definitely give it more readings, so it makes my faves of the decade list.
(2004) – Chester Brown – This story of Canadian politician and resistance fighter Louis Riel is a beautiful, stark change of pace from Brown’s surrealism and his autobiographical tales. Also, it was the first book my wife ever bought me.
(2004) – Roger Langridge – He portrays slapstick better than 
(2009) – R. Crumb – If you don’t get comics, you don’t get comics. If you do get comics, then you know that Crumb drawing an adaptation of the first book of the Bible is All That. After all, he is, to quote 
– Yoshihiro Tatsumi
– Warren Ellis, Stuart Immonen
– Rutu Modan
– James Sturm, Guy Davis
– Lewis Trondheim
– Jonathan Lethem, Farel Dalrymple
– Paul Hornschemeier
– Roger Langridge
– Alan Moore, J.H. Williams III (eh…)
– Everybody
– David B.
last week, and enjoyed the heck out of it. I’m still sifting through my impressions of the book as a time capsule of the end of the ’90’s. It was published in 2001, just a few months before 9/11. While that event’s obviously (to me) the defining moment of our decade, the book is also informed by views of data, privacy, and Invisible Webs that seem antiquated only 8 years later. I think I’m going to re-read this one in the next weeks and try to write a little more about it.
contains a neat discussion about how Montaigne’s Apology for Raymond Sebond connects to the rest of M.’s essays, so I gave that one a read. (For those of you who haven’t been following this blog religiously and for years, the Apology is a 180-page piece in the midst of Montaigne’s generaly much shorter essays, and is so dissimilar in theme and content to the others that I was left completely flummoxed by it. Here are parts 
, a lot.
this week. One of my author-acquaintances asked me, “Why would you read a book about writing by an author whose writing you’ve never read?” I’d heard the memoir section was good and, even if I have no other experience with his prose, I was curious as to what he’d offer about the practice of writing. So it was illuminating, although I don’t know when I’ll get around to reading his fiction.
, which has some good points but is poorly written in a way that the author would likely contend is its strength. He’d be wrong about that; huge swathes of it are just extended columns with overwritten jokes. He once described writing the book out of sequence and eventually figuring out the overall structure for it. After 250 pages, I can see the incoherence but not to emergent order.
, after reading the sample chapter on my Kindle. I know I don’t really travel too much for work, but an awful lot of the narrator’s Airworld observations resonated with me. Apparently, the movie is All That. I’m kinda jarred by how so many of the airport scenes are pre-9/11.
, a Bollywood movie about a poor potato-slicer who gets mistaken as the reincarnation of an ancient Chinese warrior and has to go save a small village. I was aghast when our Netflix DVD showed up and the movie turned out to be 2 hours and 30 minutes long (!). But it’s actually pretty darn entertaining (we split it up into two viewings), even if the Indian lead looked like John Turturro’s handsomer brother. We also watched 
, which I’d never seen before. Loved it, and returned the next day to Ron Rosenbaum’s 
, some NFL, and 
again, because I’m a mark for Paul Rudd and The State guys.
, by Ralph Rosenblum. It’s a book about the art of film editing, with a ton of awesome anecdotes. I also bought a bunch of books off my Amazon wish list last week: 
(Rutu Modan), 
(Lewis Trondheim), 
(Lewis Trondheim), 
, and 
(Roger Ebert).
(The National), 
(TV on the Radio), 
(Delerium), 
(Underworld), 
(Jose Gonzalez) and Bill Simmons’ 
