Huh, willya looka that.
Gettin’ bigger, y-to-the-izzle-all.
8 bit joystick calls the roll. Mr. Sooros brings the photons.
A good time, it seems, is had by all.
But where are the jello shots? Can it be true that there’s no bar in Seattle that sports free wireless? Heavens to murgatroid!
in Izzle Pfaff’s Overview of My Amazon Gold Box, skot muses,
“Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer – [Electronics]
An almost narcoleptically boring proposition. Plus, an “intellimouse” sounds like something Alan Moore might craft a graphic novel around. Which, perversely, I would conceivably buy.”
Regarding which, well, I knew something that he did not.
[Night.
We open on a black frame, subsequent panels enlarging a tiny red dot appearing in the lower left of the initial frame. In voice-over, we read the following.]
Crap.
I thought I’d finally escaped.
Left it all behind, and run off to a life on the streets. But no.
Here, today, as I doze fitfully, dreaming of aged camembert spotted with pools of liquefaction and fungus, I twitch, restless, knowing I’ll never clean the runny cheese from my whiskers again.
I’ve traded a warm, well-lit maze for a cold, wet, dark, smelly one.
At least it’s dark. I like the dark.
[the final frame on the page reveals clearly that the red dot is a shiny red animal eye, although we cannot clearly see the animal’s form.]
CUT TO
[Microsoft campus, executive suite: Steve Ballmer’s office.
A very large, bullet-headed man is standing on a desk in a simian crouch. A ring of cringing lackeys squirms beneath him in chairs facing the desk. The bullet-headed man s arms are raised above his head; he is clearly the alpha monkey, the silver-back gorilla, and the black bar of the hefty holepunch he carries in one long arm is a deliberate echo of the tapir’s jaw in the Kubrick film 2001.
He has enormous, dark pit stains deepening the blue of his shirt to a dense royal blue, the blue of a sapphire’s infinite depths.]
[Ballmer:] OOOOOROOOOROOOOOOOO!
OOOOOAAAAHHH!
DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!
OOOOOOOAH!
WHERE IS THE INTELLIMOUSE! THE DEVELOPERS DEMAND HIM!
ORRROAHOOOOOOAAAR!
—
– an excerpt from a never published script, “Tell a Mouse,” by Alan Moore intended for publication in Slate, summer, 2001. The project was cancelled over concerns that Moore’s penultimate scenes might be percieved as insensitive in the post 9/11 climate. In the scene, Ballmer and the Intellimouse conduct a battle royale throughout the neighborhood at the foot of Seattle’s Capitol Hill, stemming from a chance meeting near the dumpsters of Market House Meats and concluding with the collapse of the Met Park office towers across the street.
Moore responded by spending all of 2002 footnoting every line of dialogue in the script. A copy of the 2500-page Word document was leaked onto the net via Kazaa in spring of 2003. Microsoft responded by implementing a new search engine inteneded to delist any references to the script from MSN-based queries.
I also received official notification from Smilin’ Eric Reynolds, Director of Schmoozing for Fantagraphics, that there’s a warehouse sale in the offing.
It’s Saturday, June 28, noon to five.
Chez Fantagraphics Warehouse
3667 1st Ave So. (100 yards south of S. Spokane Street)
Seattle, WA 98134
(206) 467 4940
Discounts range up to 30% for big orders and damaged books are on the block at half-off, so pray that the forklift guys are drunk.
Scheduled guests include Hate‘s Peter Bagge (2-4p), Scary‘s Ted Jouflas (1-3p) and Rebel Visions‘ Patrick Rosenkranz.
Reports of dancing girls and male strippers could not be independently confirmed. I belive this depends, again, on the level of intoxication among the forklift crew.
Tablet number 70’s Wiretappingleads with my 500-word piece on Fantagraphics’ successful plea for support that hit the web – and email inboxes throughout the comics world – at the end of May.
The news is good, as I’m sure you’ll be happy to hear.
In editing notes, I noted no changes from the story I filed, although I’ve not made a detailed comparison. The title changed from my totally workaday “Fantagraphics Beats Crisis,” or some such, to “Comic Relief.”
In other news, it’s very weird to be working in the same company – even the same location – that I was five years ago. Uncanny, even. I am striving to not bust out the grizzled vet routine, as only three people who work there now worked there when I did, so as far as they are concerned, I’m the new guy.
Thus, it’s weird.
So Buck Woolley, a well-known figure to skee-ball buffs, wanted to know: “What’s up with the, you know, Seattle blogger community?”
The query meant “Who should I start reading and why?” as well as “So are Seattle blog parties as big the bomp-bommity as the fabzizzah BABBzilla of NYC fame?”
Being either a housebound misanthrope or to busy to hit the swingin’ Meetup parties (there’s a gathering tomorrow night at Bauhaus in my freakin’ neighborhood, fer the luvva pete) has meant I can’t truly grant a verdict on implied question number 2.
But question number one, well, I referred to Jimfl, Danelope, Dan S, and Eric Sooros as well as Zannah, Jerry Kindall and MeFi. It seems to me through a good years informal observation that these people are among the longest running of the locals – and that there is some powerful, but mysterious to me, connecting thread running through them to MeFi.
It’s never too early to write History, friends. Get cracking! Why, pray tell, does MeFi feature such a strong rainy city presence? Is it just that it was launched when there were many underemployed web-geeks surfin’ on unemployment? Or is there some further thread?
I of course mentioned other sites as well… but alas, I am on a machine that does not contain the email and laziness is preventing me from even linking in a “link” category post, crazy as it seems (it’s some kind of pomo dealie). I believe I mentioned the yeti, Daymented, Anita Rowland and le petit chou; I’m sure there were others as well.
(UPDATE: I added the links, under Frankenstein’s incessant, pounding critique.)
Idle Words: Macej looks at a suddenly popular blog in the Polish blogosphere, and muses about the popular response to blogs that chronicle the end of life.
As someone who is fascinated with the way that we greive in virtual space, I found his thoughts intriguing.
Wah! Well, I’m all scattered! I have TOO MUCH TO DO!
Suffice to note that I have some sort of new job, doing marketing copy and other things for once and future employer M-2K again – that starts Monday. Also, this past week, I did my first driving-in-traffic since I was 16 or so and it went well.
I also have to finish transcribing the Lasky-Stump interview, build screens for the house, do the dishes, laundry, and cooking, and frankly I forget what else.
The results are in from SIFF with the Golden Space Needle Awards, and guess what? Three of the films I caught were honored, and one I didn’t see but wrote about was too!
Milwaukee, Minnesota, the film noir I enjoyed but with which I was puzzled due to the strange performance choies made by the director and lead actor was honored both for Mr. Troy Garrity’s lead perfomance with a 2nd-place Best Actor award and also as the Winner of the New American Cinema Award.
Jamie Hook’s The Naked Proof won an honorable mention in the latter award as well.
Molly Parker’s performance in Marion Bridge won a 3rd-place runner-up for best actress, and Brock Morse won a 4th-place runner-up for Best Director for Westender, presumably an acknowledgement of the film’s desert sequences.
The big winner, though, was the just-about-in-wide release New Zealand-set film, Whale Rider, carrying Best Director, Best Film, and first runner-up for Best Actress, validating the possibility glimpsed in the trailer.
I was disappointed and puzzed to see that American Splendor was not honored – perhaps the award from Sundance and reception at Cannes made it ineligible for consideration. In my opinion, of the films I saw, it deserved best screeplay, director, and actor for both originality of vsion and execution.
On Thursday, I met alternative comics artists David Lasky and Greg Stump at Caffé Vita, formerly Café Paradiso, near my home on Seattle’s Capitol Hill for an interview which will form the basis of a story featuring them and their Seattle-set comic book, Urban Hipster. We talked about the book for a little over an hour and a half, and I will be transcribing the interview and probably post the transcript here when the feature sees print in tablet.
I also took a few pictures of them both at Vita and in the Comet.
I’ve known David’s work for quite some time, as he sent me a copy of his often-cited mini-comic adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses some time ago, but we’d never met. I don’t think I was highly familiar with Stump’s work except in that he has had a long-running comic in both The Stranger and in the Portland Mercury, “Dwarf Attack.”
Lasky is a classic comics introvert, very soft-spoken, and was wearing extremely long-and-thin rectangular-frame glasses with heavy black frames, a neat goatee, and shoulder-length brown hair pulled back into a pony-tail. Stump is more socially forward, and in his white teeshirt, well-muscled frame, and clean shaven head bore a resemblance to a well-known cleaning product’s anthropomorphic spokesperson.
I explored many aspects of the comic book they work together on, highlighting the relationship of the book to Seattle as a specific locale, and in particular the neighborhoods of Ballard, Capitol Hill, and the University District.
In order not to go into detail about the content of the piece I’m developing, I’ll just hold off on talking more about it today. However, I can note that I very much enjoyed the opportunity to speak with these guys, and think that I can really develop a good feature on the interview and their book.
Coloring Outside the Lines: a punk rock memoir
Aimee Cooper, 132pp, published by Rowdy’s Press
Back in January or February, author Aimee Cooper sent me an email, asking if I’d like to review her self-published book, Coloring Outside the Lines, apparently in response to a dual review of Please Kill Me and American Hardcore I’d posted under the title “I’m so bored with punk history”. I concluded that blog entry with the bon mot, “Next time you see me picking up a copy of ‘Midwest Punk Rock Archaeology Review’, please kill me.” I was understandably reluctant, then, to take a look at Ms. Cooper’s book.
I needn’t have worried. Ms. Cooper’s book is a non-fiction memoir of her days working as the first receptionist for Slash records and as the accidental house-holder for a tribe of punk kids circa 1979-1981 in Los Angeles. These kids were seen onscreen in a fairly fictionalized presentation, Penelope Spheeris’ second film, Suburbia.
Despite the obvious romanticization of the people and lifestyle seen in the film, for many years, Suburbia was the best fictional American film about punks. It may still be, but the film’s flaws grated on me even then, and I have long wondered about both the real kids in the film and the story of how it came to be.
Ms. Cooper’s book provides part of the answer to these questions, as the kids in the film were both played by and based on her peers. The kids referred to themselves as The Connected, or TC, in an early echo of what would come to be the gang-like ethos of certain later LA punk bands and fans. Reflecting the differences in the development of punk in America during the 1980’s, the majority of the kids in TC were teenagers with home and discipline problems.
They tended to be younger and less experienced and educated than the older LA punks, again, a pattern seen in New York and elsewhere. When I was a kid, it was a distinction drawn between the “artpunks” and the “fuzzies,” so named after the first super-short haircut many younger punks would get as they sought entry into the scene.
As an adult, I think it’s also somewhat reflective of class distinctions: the fuzzies, who later became the basis of the hardcore period in American punk, tended to be from both more working-class and more mainstream family backgrounds. Instead of artist or academic parents, their families worked blue-collar jobs, or if their parents were well off, the adults in the family were professionals, doctors and lawyers.
Ms. Cooper reflects the transitional period, in that she was older than her peers in TC, having graduated from UC Santa Cruz before moving to LA. This helped her to convince the Slash people to invent the job she took, but as she recounts, she was to remain an outsider at the record company.
Over time, she found herself becoming friends with a number of younger punk kids, who eventually moved in with her and her roommate, founding a communal living space that is clearly recognizable as the classic “punkhouse,” where all is in common, even the giant resulting mess.
As the unstable living situation produces various escalating misadventures, Cooper’s narrative is focused ever more closely on her relationship with a young woman named Maggie, who appeared in an illustration on the cover of LA Weekly in 1980. That source may have helped to inspire Jaime Hernandez and his character of the same name. I was not able to confirm this, however.
As the story moves along, Maggie and the young Cooper have a falling out that leads Cooper to withdraw, disillusioned, from the whole punk lifestyle and scene. According to her, she was unaware of the next few years’ development of the national punk scene, as she was traveling in Europe, and really only learned about it on beginning the publishing process for the book itself.
I found this book to be very enjoyable and quite well written. A memoir, it’s loosely structured, but the simple narrative thread that underlies it, the hoary device of a coming-of-age-tale, served it well. When the plot focused on the development and loss of the bond between Cooper and her friend, I literally thought to myself, “This would make a great movie.”
Ms. Cooper confirmed to me in an email that the subject’s come up. I had hoped to place this review in a publication more appropriate than the blog, but having heard nothing in response to some queries, I felt I should simply go with it. Ms. Cooper expressed interest in another interview, and I may do that here as well.
This book was the opposite of Blush’s American Hardcore; it has only a minimal interest in scene politics and the name-dropping that unfortunately accompanies any creatively-based cultural endeavor. For me, that made the book intrinsically worthwhile. That’s not to say that Ms. Cooper does not provide anecdotes of some luminaries of the LA punk scene. There are several stories set in the Slash offices featuring Slash honcho Bob Biggs, his wife Penelope Spheeris, X leaders Exene Cervenka and John Doe, and a dinner hosted for the band Black Flag by Ms. Cooper and her roommate.
Johnny Thunders brackets the book, as well. He inspires Cooper’s interest in punk, and she meets him again as his junkie slip had gathered fatal momentum.
However, her attitude to these stories is detached and disillusioned: she kills her idols, indeed. The only thing more punk rock is self-publishing your own book about it, and I’m happy to recommend it to your attention. Any punk or person interested in the history of the subculture should find the book interesting; however, if your interest in punk is primarily and specifically musical, well, fuck off.
Coloring Outside the Lines website
Rowdy’s Press
P.O. Box 847
Elgin, Texas 78621
Here’s a couple more links about it: an interview with the author by No Front Teeth, a UK zine; a review by loserjames.
I saw a couple copies on the shelf at the new Confounded Books location on Pike.
Milwaukee, Minnesota
US, 2002. Dir. Allan Mindel
6/14 9:30p Pacific Place
6/15 1:45p Egyptian
Winter’s white blankets Wisconsin. A twenty-something idiot-savant (Troy Garrity) lives at home with his brow-beating mother, earning large sums as an ice-fishing champion. A grifter thinks she has him on the line, but first one, then another man claims to be the boy’s father in the wake of his mother’s death. Twists drift like snowbanks in this taut film noir.
I giggled with delight and tension throughout the film. It delivered everything I want from a film noir, despite its’ happy ending. The film’s knowledgeable play with the rules of the genre extends even to the final fade – to white, not black.
While Garrity’s Adam Sandler impression mystifies, I readily adapted to it. The film’s well-cast and acted, and the hypersaturated, slightly blown-out look of the film both uses apparent natural light in homage to 1970’s thrillers and presents an artificial, pulpy green and yellow palette, implying age.
—
Garrity, the lead actor, is the son of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden. The best known actors in the film are Randy Quaid, portraying a wonderfully reptilian “traveling salesman” (sporting a rust turtleneck, a splotchy bottle tan, and a wide-lapeled reddish-tan belted car-coat) and Bruce Dern, as an unkempt older copy shop owner.
I loved the production design of the film.
I make reference to Garrity’s Adam Sandler impersonation. He plays the ice-angler, literally, as if Adam Sandler were doing an impression of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man (Jim Flanagan take note). It’s weird, and what mystifies about it is why the actor would chose to adopt such a derivative seeming mode for the performance. I can’t imagine that it wasn’t considered and then accepted as an aspect of the film that would be discussed upon release. Perhaps the filmmakers simply decided it wouldn’t detract from the rest of the film.
If that’s the case, it was a good call from my perspective. While the film doesn’t top Red Rock West for contemporary noir, it’s close, and this is something of an accomplishment when one considers the extent to which Red Rock relied on action sequences to get the adrenaline pumping – Milwaukee, Minnesota eschews action nearly entirely, relying on plot and dialog to work one up into that pleasurable tizzy.
(I find it interesting to note that both this film and – just maybe – Gordon’s King of the Ants employ brain dysfunction as a character element. Memento sure had an impact in funding choices, looks like.)