He's our guy... entity... talking-thing... to do the job

A while back I listened to the audio version of Steve Martin’s biography of his time as a standup comic, Born Standing Up. In it, he talks about getting a whole new kind of reaction from the audience by passing on the stand-up’s standby: the punchline.

So I started kicking this idea around. Could Steve Martin’s idea of humor… that is, basically, of never letting the air out of the balloon, be adapted into comics? Maybe.

I decided to try it. So, allow me to introduce my comic: Eat the Babies. It’s about a walking talking TV. There is no continuity to it, other than the fact that the TV does have friends. The two most frequently recurring friends are Woody Guthrie and John Maynard Keynes. It veers into social and philosophical issues a lot, but mainly its concerned with using the TV’s confusion about humans to create a humor that is elusive.

It means to be elusive.

The idea is you’ll get to wanting to look for it and find it in your own places.

I don’t know if I’m quite getting there, but if the comics don’t make sense yet it is because that is what I am looking to do. To explain my thinking behind strips would be to defeat the purpose, but let me point you to a few favorites so far.

TV gets mugged.

TV talks to Woody Guthrie about songs.

Woody explains adulthood.

TV is a talking head on tv (my personal favorite so far).

If you’ve seen the Charles Schulz tribute site, 3eanuts, that’s the best example I can give of what I want to do so far, though it’s not quite there. Well, it is there. It is awesome at what it is. It’s just not quite what I want Eat the Babies to be. But it’s close!

For the hardcore arts crowd, there are genuinely avant-garde webcomics out there. You should check them out. I don’t think I’ll be going to any conferences with those guys, as much as I might like to. So, if you’re interested in seeing someone try something, that’s the trick I’m trying. Feel free to click any of those links above and, you know… come see.

In her review of the response show, #class, she writes of what she’s looking for in exploring the art world:

I’m a nerd. The reason I participate in the art world is to experience singular moments of great joy when in the presence of great beauty; whether that comes from an idea or the actual physical manifestation of beauty I could care less.

But that doesn’t happen much. So she goes on to say that sometimes the snarkiness she can find in art is enough to sustain her.

Anyway.

The review is a story of art about art and reveals in, I think, a compelling way how a young artist’s thinking about these sorts of things can evolve over time. Readers of this blog seem to appreciate art that comments on the medium itself and questioning the whole notion of where art needs to stop and the gallery or the viewer or the viewer of the viewer needs to begin. That’s why I think what Monnier has to say here is worth a read.

It’s also an interesting commentary on success, what that means and who the winners and losers are when someone in the art world takes off.

Leah Beeferman likes to imagine the internal lives of architecture and buildings. Her show, Orbital Debris, with Brooke Inman, here in Philadelphia, primarily exhibited work from a series she called “Imagining the Universe as seen by a Building used to track Orbital Debris.”

While her work shows a great interest in technology, she does it all by hand. She talks more about what she’s trying to achieve below. If this isn’t enough, you can find more about the inner workings of Ms. Beeferman in the Exterview at This Too Will Pass.

BradyDale: How did the exhibition you just did at SPACE 1026 get started?

Leah Beeferman: After coming down to Richmond for a short visit and seeing our studios, a couple of 1026ers I knew invited Brooke Inman and me to write a proposal and apply for a show. For what it’s worth, what we originally proposed wasn’t quite what we ended up with, but they didn’t seem to mind. We both feel very lucky to have this opportunity!

BD: So how did you and Brooke work out what you were going to do? What was the original gameplan and how did it change? What do you think led to the change?

LB: Well, we’ve both done installation work in the past, and we were thinking of something more directly collaborative. The idea involved a tall ladder on wheels (like in a library or a bookstore) that you would move around the space and climb up and down to look at drawings hung at various heights. I’ve been thinking, for a long time, about accessing different perspectives on things from different heights, and I was excited to create a situation where there were things you could only see from up high, down low, and so on. Anyway, the “Orbital Debris” show actually came together without much specific collaboration. The more we thought about this ladder idea, the less we liked it, and the more we wanted to show the work we had been making in our studios all year. When we started discussing that work together (we were very familiar with each other’s drawings since we were in the same MFA program this past year), we realized that the “Orbital Debris” title and concept was perfect for both of us. It relates very specifically for me, and more metaphorically for Brooke, but we both felt it suited us well and created a really exciting link!

BD: I just went back to your web page to look at the work you had up at your show here in Philadelphia, “Orbital Debris,” and there you have it under the title: ‘Imagining the universe as seen by a building used to track orbital debris.’ Is there a story behind this place that you’ve imagined and that helped you create the maps and design the structures? And is that a rocket waiting there that I see? Why does the Orbital Debris facility need a rocket? I have a feeling you have a pretty good reason for it, so I have to ask.

LB: Yes, there is certainly a story. It started with research I was doing into the space race in general. It became pretty clear early on that the things that interested me weren’t the space stations and the far-traveling rockets, but more what I refer to as “the earth-bound participants in the space race”: specifically, rocket launch towers and the Eglin FPS-85 radar, a building NASA uses to track orbital debris (the Eglin is a real structure in northwestern Florida and it is a “dedicated sensor” responsible for keeping track of the U.S. satellite catalog, which more or less counts as orbital debris). To me, this building epitomizes the perseverance and limitations of human imagination; it forever looks out into the sky, but can only see so far as it never actually leaves the ground. This was the inspiration for all of the larger drawings in this series – my imagining and drawing the universe that this building “sees.”

But you’re right, you do also see a rocket – in two places. The smaller rocketship drawing, “Support structure,” was my thinking about the relationship between the rocket and the launch tower. For the 10′ tall rocket drawing, “Rocket soundings,” I pictured the Eglin “imagining itself” stacked several times on top of itself to form a launching rocket. In this daydream, it actually gets to lift off the ground…

At the “Orbital Debris” show I have a small sheet of paper with some text on both sides. One side of the sheet lists the short, official titles of the drawings. On the other side, there is a sort of poetic elaboration giving a vague explanation of what’s going on. This is something I’m currently experimenting with; I used to do more drawings that included text. Lately, I’ve been leaving them more abstract. It’s interesting – some viewers really like to know the back story and see what the drawings are “representing”. Others want to be left alone to form their own conclusions. I’m investigating different ways of communicating different amounts of information, and trying to figure out how much it matters to me that the full back story be available.

BD: Doing it like this is a pretty good middle-ground. The backstory is out there but they’d have to go ferret it out to find it, which gives them plenty of opportunity to come to their own conclusions before they see your conclusions. I’m of pretty mixed minds about text in art. In a lot of ways, it’s distracting because text can be the easiest part of a visual work to “understand” and when I watch people looking at art with text, that’s what they spend the most time on.

It’s funny that I’m this ambivalent about it because I’m also a huge comic book fan.

Where did you get the idea that a building would dream of being something more? Can you tell us more about the personality that Eglin has in your head? I also just glanced at your del.icio.us page and saw several saved links to articles about the Super-conducting Super-collider. That’s definitely a fascinating structure/dream. Will the Collider become a character in future works (or has it already)?

LB: Yeah, the impulse for “revealing” things is because I work from things that are so super specific – especially in the way that I come to understand them to work from them. It’s tough – I agree that inserting text can be too easy, or too distracting. That’s why I’m exploring some alternative ways of working with it. I’m glad you’re a huge comic book fan. I was too, for a long time, and I still enjoy them although I don’t read them much anymore. The ones I read, though, were primarily Asterix and Tintin… and less the superhero comics, although I was kind of into those too.

I think the idea that a building could be more than what it was grew slowly and surreptitiously out of a class I took in college called “Film Architecture”. We studied the use of architecture and interiors in film, and thus the way that architecture contributed to the story – psychologically, metaphorically, atmospherically. This was where the idea sprouted from that a building could be a character in a story and not just a container for that story. After that solidified, almost all buildings became characters… so it was natural that the Eglin would too.

Specifically, the idea that it could “dream of being something more” was pretty natural. I found it fascinating, hilarious and sad (or frustrating) that this building’s “job” is to spend its entire existence looking out into the sky and tracking what’s up there, but it never gets to actually see it. It seemed pretty obvious to me that the building would dream of getting off the ground some day. I suppose I’d say its personality is a little resigned, but still a tiny bit hopeful.

And yes – the super-conducting super collider (which is totally insane and in my readings about it I’ve been re-learning a little bit about particle physics) – it’s going to be a character for future work.

BD: Do you make up stories/personalities for the buildings you live and/or work in?

LB: Not so much, actually. I’m pretty fascinated by the idea that the shells of buildings or apartments or studios often stay the same, but the character of them totally changes from inhabitant to inhabitant. So in that sense, I think I’m giving it my personality. So it’s imposing myself and my imagination on the structure in a totally different way than I do for my drawings. The sentiment is similar, I guess. I do wonder about a building’s past, its past inhabitants. But I don’t really ever get as involved as I do with the subjects of my artwork.

BD: So what do your buildings think about the people who use them? Do you have ideas about that? In particular, what does the Eglin think, but if you’ve dreamed up strong reactions for other buildings you’ve worked on then it would be great to hear about that, too.

I’m also thinking about the fact that you traveled so far for this show makes me wonder if you ever plan to extend your personality infusion project into vehicles of any kind? You’ve got a rocket in Orbital Debris, already. The Pathetic Fallacy seems like a pretty rich area for artistic inspiration.

LB: I don’t think too much about people in my artwork, actually. That’s been true for a long time. As close as I get, really, is the idea that the human presence is implied by evidence of my hand in the drawing. I deliberately leave people out because I want the focus to be on the structures and the places, not the inhabitants or the users of that place, if that makes sense. It’s not that the presence of humans necessarily “steals the show” away from the setting and the place, but it complicates things in a way that I haven’t really been interested in. So I wouldn’t say that any of the buildings, including the Eglin, really “think” about the people that use them. I’m more interested in the relationships these buildings have with their surrounding landscape and environment.

And regarding vehicles, who knows. I define architecture extremely broadly, so I certainly wouldn’t rule it out. I mean, look at Archigram’s Plug-In City – which I love – it’s a city and a building and a vehicle, so anything is possible, as far as I’m concerned.
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More on Ms. Beeferman in the Exterview at This Too Will Pass.

A few weeks ago, I watched a staged reading of David Strattan White’s play Simulations, at The Walking Fish Theater in Philadelphia. Simulations is a play inspired by the world of the computer game, The Sims. It imagines two people in the real world, two people in The Sims world and one person who might come from either.

David recently left Philadelphia for a teaching job in Indiana, but after we talked for a little bit after the reading we had a more thorough discussion about his work on-line.

Like the previous interview with David Kessler, this interview has a companion exterview (a talk about everything else) over at This Too Will Pass.
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BradyDale: From where I sit, we are only starting to see literature that deals with the new technology that surrounds us. Do you agree? Jonathan Lethem came to Philadelphia’s Free Library a little while back to talk about his latest book. I remember two things about that visit: first, that I didn’t think he’d be that boring and, second, that he said he just adamantly did not write about email or cell phones or the web in his books. It just didn’t feel right for him, and I empathize. Your play, Simulations, is all about a video game, though. Was that something you had to overcome or is it weird that I’d even bring it up as an issue?

DSW: I think that we are only starting to discover our technology – period. I remember eight years ago when I was moving to Philadelphia, my mom insisted that I get my first cell phone. That was eight years ago. Plays take a while to create. They are written, then they’re workshopped, then they’re marketed, then if, they’re chosen for production, there’s often eight to eighteen months between selection and production. I think the current technological lag is partly due to the fact that technology is moving so fast right now. It’s hard for artists to keep up. The difficult thing about writing for the current moment is that the current moment is often gone before you finish your first draft. I think that’s why a lot of writers avoid it. Because it’s hard to judge what will be an enduring sort of thing and what will become silly.

In Simulations I think I was just so fascinated by the idea of Betty creating her own fantasy happiness. And how easy it is for us to sort of surround ourselves in our own fictions. The most daunting task in tackling a video-game play (if that is a thing) was the question, ‘how do I portray a bridge between real world and Sim world.’ But that was never the point, so I just sort of decided that she’d just wish upon a star and be done with it. The video game just comes to life and the audience will deal with it.

I think that the Sims is as much a cultural phenomenon as it is a technological one. Our age is somehow both voyeuristic and escapist. We as a people seem to want technology to transport us away from our problems and on to identical problems. Somehow we relax from our mundane existence by creating an alternate mundane existence. And somehow we find love in our fantasy world, but we hide away from the exact same things we create. It’s a rabbit hole in an Escher painting.

I have read, seen and acted in other plays that deal with the moment in technology. Y2K by Arthur Kopit comes to mind. I participated in a developmental workshop at the Wilma for a play called Agency* by Ken Linn. which was about a pedophile Catholic priest who volunteered to be made into a cyborg assassin for the government in return for curing him of his urges. It was fantastic.

I think technology is something that always will color the landscape of art and literature. Shakespeare wrote about sea travel, Dickens wrote about the Industrial Revolution, Death of the Salesman is greatly influenced by automobiles and telephones, The Fountainhead is an epic story about progress in architecture and journalism. Changes in the world are the most fascinating subjects, and technology is a big fat harbinger of change.

BradyDale: I really liked your response about the bridge between the real world and the world of “The Sims.” Not going into it was a really good choice, though as an audience member I did think about it.

From what you said during the feedback session the other night, it sounds like you plan to revisit the script pretty seriously. How hardcore do you get about rewrites? I saw Chuck Palahniuk speak once and he said that he writes a complete new ending every time he revises a book. Just for fun. It sounded miserable to me because the end of the book is the most stressful part to write. All the stakes are on the end.

Where does the current version fit in your revision process and how much do things change over time with you? Will you put in whole new elements? Do you get re-inspired? Where do the biggest changes happen in the course of writing one of your scripts?

DSW: Personally, at this point in my life, I don’t have a set method. I sort of let the story dictate the process. Maybe I could write more if I did have a set process, but I feel like fitting the process to the story allows each story it’s own kind of form. So I’m always a little off-balance as far as what happens next. I can tell you for Simulations that I’m definitely not happy with the ending yet and that I think the play needs another layer – whatever that means. I’ve been trying to think about what that is, and experimented with some ideas that I’ve more or less thrown out. I think, except for the end, that every scene that is there will be there. And much of the end might be there. So in this circumstance it’s about writing more and finding a way to re-situate the new stuff so that the structure is still harmonious.

BradyDale: You had one scene in particular where you said in your stage directions that maybe the walls would change color for a moment. We were all watching a staged reading, so that didn’t happen. There is also the issue of the hearts floating over the two characters heads when they fall for each other. Do you hope to incorporate new technology on stage? Would you, ideally, like to be a part of the first staging of “Simulations?” If so, what would be your top priority to see happen in a full staging of the play (at least as it’s written now)?

DSW: I think that directors like to find solutions. I know I do when I direct. I think that’s one of the fun things about creating theatre. A lot of times when I write, I’ll come up with an idea and then something in my brain will say, “Yeah. But how are you going to do it on stage?” Then a different voice says, “That would be really fun to figure out.” I really pride myself in not backing down from impossible things. I think that’s one thing that most really great theatre artists have in common.

That being said, I’ve seen lights really change the color of a room in an amazing way. And there could be new technology or really old technology. I see no reason hearts couldn’t simply be suspended from the ceiling. Ultimately, we don’t even have to see the hearts. But I do think it would be cool if we did. Also, why stop with hearts? there could be plusses, minusses, all other things that hover above Sims’ heads.

I will undoubtebly be a part of a staging. I won’t be the director. I like seeing what others bring to my writing way too much to do that. I’ll be the writer. I may be in rehearsals some or not at all. It depends.

As for the top priority, I’m really not sure. That depends on what the actors bring to it. This particular play, for all the talk I’m finding that it inspires, is really mostly a good time. I don’t think it’s ideas will change our lives, although it’s not without thought. I think for this one, success depends on how much fun it is. That simple. Get it? SIM – ple? Okay. That’s bad.

BradyDale: No, no! Don’t regret a pun! I’m tempted to request a pun in every answer! Your answer is just the opposite to one I once heard Kevin Smith give about his movies. He said he knew he was a bad director but just didn’t trust anyone else with his scripts. I thought, “But if you know you’re a bad director…” Some people have strange logic…

When I saw the staged reading of Simulations, there was a sort of talk-back at the end of the session. It seemed like most of the people in the room were involved in theater to some degree. I’m not, but I am a wannabe writer. As I remember, there was a lot of talk about the characterization of the Sims. Moments that confused people a little. The issue of the gobbledygook language the Sims spoke and how much the audience needed to be educated about The Sims in order to “get” your play. Overall, people were really positive and supportive of the play. I mention all this just to provide some context for folks who weren’t there.

What did you take away from the feedback you got? I could see everything people said churning hard through your head. You didn’t write much down but that seemed to be more because you were processing everything so intensely. What did you take away from that feedback? Did the things people said help or did the whole process help you to reveal even bigger questions about the script? I guess the real point of this question is to try and find out what was going on in your head during that discussion.

DSW: I got a lot from the discussion. Most importantly, that people followed it, even though they weren’t educated about The Sims(TM). That was good news. After that, I was kind of seeing the play fall together in a new way, and all of the specifics just sort of swirl into a new image of the play that was happening. When I wrote it, I’d just discovered Sara Ruhl’s plays. I love her simple, magical humor. I think that sort of aesthetic found its way into what ultimately became a farce in my play. I heard Tom Stoppard say that he doesn’t try to write a play until he has two or three ideas for a play, then he writes them all together. So I was thinking about the play being less direct. I almost think it’s too clear what it’s about. The talkback was great. And the reading was very informative. I don’t think I’m a comedic writer, so it was a little scarey wondering if people would be excited about this one. So it was cool to see the actors so attracted to the story.
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Now read the exterview with David.

This will be the first of a team-up I’m creating between This Too Will Pass and implicit art. On this site, I’ll post some interviews with artists about the work that permitted me to discover them. On TTWP, I’ll publish exterviews, that is, discussions about everything but. Kessler’s exterview is here.

This is my first such effort, with David Kessler, a Philadelphia artist who recently did an exhibition of his vlogging project, Shadow World. Shadow World documents what David finds when he takes his video camera out under the elevated light rail tracks in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. Kensington is a huge, largely low-income neighborhood that resists change as much of the city attempts to re-imagine itself. At the exhibition, he supplemented the videos with 9 new paintings, all of which showed at the University of Pennsylvania’s International House from April 4th until May 30th.

For tech junkies, David and I conducted our interview using Google Docs. –BradyDale

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Brady Dale: The first question that I’ve always had about “Under the El” is why just Kensington? For folks who might be reading this from outside of Philadelphia, I’ll try to characterize Kensington, but, David, you should correct me if you think I get it wrong because I’ve only lived here a few years.

Kensington is a low-income area. I’d call it working class but it seems like a lot of people there aren’t working. I associate it more with poor white people than I do with other races, but it’s definitely mixed racially, and your videos capture that well. Kensington is also seeing an influx of development, led by young artists and cool kids moving in ahead of the other builders. If that’s not a fair take on the place, let me know, but, either way, why did you choose the place and why do you keep going back?

David Kessler: It’s a pretty fair representation but I would have to adjust it slightly. Kensington is huge. Shadow World really only scratches the surface of the different neighborhoods in Kensington and even then I only shoot under the El, which leaves a lot out. There are neighborhoods where there are very few white people at all. There are large Puerto Rican communities and some Vietnamese communities. and it’s true that
artists and cool kids are moving in in droves but when you look at the scale of Kensington and really how deep those people are willing to go into the heart of it, I would not say that they make up a very large percentage of the overall character of it.

The areas known as South Kensington and New Kensington are where most of the development seems to be happening and are seeing the fastest changes in ethnicity and culture. There are pockets of places where artists live. I’ve lived inside and outside of those pockets and, however you might feel aboutgentrification, I’ve always managed to find people around me both in the arts community and outside of it that have made me feel welcome in a place that for the most part can be characterized as unwelcoming.

I have to be honest and say that I chose to live there because I was able to find cheap places to live, but you are right about my choice to keep going back. I have periodically taken up residence in South Philly as well but I can’t say that i was ever very excited about South Philly with the exception of the food, an area that North Philly is still largely lacking in (to be polite). It’s really the grittiness, it is diversity and sense of history that makes Kensington more exciting to me. It can get pretty raw but I actually find it
beautiful, startlingly so at times.

But I should add, although all those things (amplified by the power and presence of the El tracks) inspired me to make Shadow World, I don’t feel that Shadow World should be viewed as being about or representing Kensington. That was never my intention. that would be a much different project. The truth is, I leave out as much information
about Kensington as possible and just focus on the individual people that I meet and places that interest me without getting into any of the history or specific sociology of it. I don’t even think of Shadow World as being a documentary, I would not argue that it is not but that is not how I think about it.

Brady Dale: You definitely keep your documentaries limited in terms of their context. It’s definitely about the people (and the occasional alley cat), and now you’ve done a series of paintings based on the videos.

Here’s the most interesting thing to me about the paintings (and I’ll just acknowledge that the following is an unfair prejudice, but here we go): I tend to assume that people who do video (or photography) can’t draw or paint. So, here I am at an exhibition that people have primarily shown up to for the video, and right next to those videos is a bunch of paintings that demonstrate a very high degree of technical skill. Very unusual to see the two things by the same artist side by side, in my experience.

They are very, very small paintings. So small that I did a bad job of photographing them because I’m not used to getting that close to a subject. Is this the scale you typically work in? And why did you decide to supplement the videos with paintings?

David Kessler: To give you some background, I’m a painter that started messing around with video a couple of years ago. My degree is in painting with a minor in film. I started painting “seriously” at around grade 5. When i say that I don’t really consider Shadow World to be documentaries, it’s because my thought process while I make them is more similar to that of when I paint to that of constructing a documentary, which in my mind means more about constructing a story than an impression of one.

Like a lot of painters, I think, I became somewhat apathetic to painting in the mid 90′s and my desire to so something “important” overshadowed my enjoyment of painting because it was fun. This I attribute to Art School and the notion that painting was dead that the Art Schools that I went to did not seem to argue with. I was never one to stick with one medium for very long anyway and when film, video and sculpture took hold I kind of let painting go for many years but I still considered it to be at the root of everything that I did.

The series of 9 paintings in the show now is the first series of paintings that I have made in many years. The small scale allows me to work in a way that feels more intimate and analytical to me, almost scientific, at my desk with sharp tools. they are done using a scratching technique that I have been using for a long time. Part of what makes Shadow World (the videos) interesting to me is the deconstruction of a moment, the ability to go back and focus on a short piece of time, analyze, interpret, arrange, manipulate, retell and distribute. These are things that interest me because they relate to how we digest our own memories and experiences. The paintings are intended to do a couple of things. One is to take that process to the next level by then analyze and interpreting the videos into a different medium, that much more separate from the original moment. To the viewer, my intention is to both clue them into my original thought processes of the videos as well as allow them to come to the paintings with a whole set of memory and experience based on the videos, altering the experience of looking at the paintings.

Brady Dale: If this is your first exhibit of paintings in years, then this show marks a somewhat important moment in your history as an artist. Where do you stand on painting now? Is it important? Is it “dead”? Does it need something else alongside it to justify it? Or have your priorities simply shifted?

David Kessler: I certainly don’t think of painting as dead anymore. These days, I don’t make too much distinction between mediums in my own work anymore. I just use what I think will be most successful. I was excited about showing some paintings again. I’m a pretty good painter and it would be a shame to not do something with a skill that i had been refining for so long. With that said, art still needs to satisfy me on several levels. I need it to speak to me on an intellectual level as well as an aesthetic one. Painting is so much about surface and I am naturally more critical of it than most other art forms so it does happen to be the art form that I am least frequently impressed by. I generally look in the windows of galleries showing painting and walk right by but that is also because painting to me seems like the art form that has become most formulaic. I think any artist can go to PAFA and learn all the tricks to be able to sell work. It’s not hard to impress most people with paintings once you understand technique but that doesn’t make a painting good to me. Interesting subject matter and compelling content in a painting is an incredibly elusive thing. But this is also why when I find a painter that I think is good, I am typically more impressed than I am with most other artists. I can’t say whether or not I will be showing more paintings any time soon. I don’t have any immediate plans to but I don’t rule out the idea.

Brady Dale: I think you are dead on about how easy it is to make a painting look impressive. In drawing, I know, all it takes to make a simple line drawing look “impressive” is to throw some cross-hatching in. Much trickier to get some substance in there. I think a lot of people look at artwork and find it impressive because it “must have been hard,” but what does that matter? I’m sure it’s hard to do taxes for Microsoft, but I don’t want to see the spreadsheets.

It seemed like something was missing in your answer about what you need in art to satisfy you. You said it needs to get you on an intellectual level as well as an aesthetic one. What about emotional? Are you going for an emotional hit in your work? Does it have an emotional hit for you? If so, where? A person could come away from one of your videos feeling anything from pathos to humor to tragedy to out-and-out odd/other-worldiness. Where do they get you?

David Kessler: Oh yeah, certainly emotional as well but as far as Shadow World is concerned the emotional element comes out when it is given to me. I can’t go out shooting with the intention of getting someone to say or do something that will elicit an emotional reaction. The most I can do is edit to put some emphasis on that moment. What i can do is go out with a very clear defined concept and pay as much attention to getting well composed compelling shots. I don’t believe in using emotional devices (like music or fades or slow-mo or any other number of tricks that filmmakers use) to tell the viewer how they should feel about a situation. the emotional element comes from being open to it but
there are times when it doesn’t happen and I have to feel like i have
enough substance there that the work is still strong without it. I think the work is far stronger if people can have different or mixed reactions and if they know that their reaction is their own and not fed to them. The videos may or may not elicit the same emotions as the original moments for me. in most cases, they can’t. I don’t have emotional reactions to my own work. I know when it is there but I am reacting to the moment not the video, which is something that no one else can truly do. I do feel that there is far more humor in the videos than most people seem to be (or admit to) seeing. My sense of humor tends to be pretty dark and dry and i don’t think that humor and tragedy are mutually exclusive but I would never tell someone that they should see something as being funny or tragic if they are only seeing one thing and not the other.

Also, back to the last topic, i look at drawing and painting differently. it may be because drawing tends to be a better record of the artists mind and hand in a given moment than painting but I can much more easily appreciate a drawing for the artist line work and the types of marks that they make despite the drawing’s content than that of a painting that seems to demand much more intent for me. This may have something to do with the factor of the moment of conception often being eliminated through the layers of paint. This might also explain why my paintings look more like drawings than most paintings do.

BradyDale: I have a feeling we agree on the parts that are funny and the parts that aren’t. I find Shadow World funny all the time, but more in that odd, sort of tilt your head and smile kind of funny rather than actually laughing.

My Young Philly Politics friend, Jennifer, says that you used to (or still do) go to Dunkin Donuts in the middle of the night and draw people. Is that true? What’s the story there? It’s an interesting concept in and of itself, but it also seems to echo Shadow World in that it’s another example of you getting out in the city and documenting your impressions.

David Kessler: That was a project that I was working on several years back and it was definitely the predecessor to Shadow World. I was living on Snyder in South Philly at the time. I wanted to make a serialized comic strip in The Philadelphia Independent, Matthew Schwartz’s now defunct newspaper. The strip would essentially be an illustrated documentary of the people who, for lack of a better word, “lived” in Dunkin Donuts on Broad and Snyder. There were a group of regulars, very few I think were actually homeless but you would be able to find most of them at Dunkin Donuts at any given hour, pretty much everyday. Besides the regulars, a bus to Atlantic City stopped directly in front of Dunkin Donuts (probably factoring greatly to its appeal) and there seemed to also be some kind of gambling operation being run out of there, too. For a good couple of years, it was just a fascinating place. I was also interested in the very severe separation between employee and “customer” and the exception to this in one man who seemed to have an honorary position there whom, as far as I could tell, was being paid in do-noughts.

I was using what was essentially a scratchbaord technique on ceramic tiles to draw the panels based on photographs that i was taking as I tried to meet and integrate myself into the population. Unfortunately, i didn’t get too far with the project. I saw how good it could have been, but I suppose I did not have the tolerance to spend that much time in Dunkin Donuts or the confidence to be able to really engage the people there. The strip ran once in issue #3 of the Independent and then I let it go. Over the year or so that followed, I saw Dunkin Donuts gradually get made over, progressively losing all of the seats to discourage people from loitering and I saw what would have become the logical ending of the story as the last of the tables where stripped away.

I guess you can say that Shadow World was partially born out of my regret for not continuing with the Dunkin Donuts project but it was years after Dunkin Donuts when i first picked up a video camera which for me made the idea that much more conceivable to accomplish.
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BradyDale is the editor of ThisTooWillPass. Now, read the exterview with David.

But what he’s making is so beautiful. It’s so hypnotizing. It’s got both literal, visual and metaphorical depth. In an interview on What to Wear to an Orange Alert, Dettmer says he goes looking for heavy, old, reference books. He seals them up on the edges and then starts carving into them, looking for images and words that jump out at him. He doesn’t move anything, but he enables the viewer to see, all at once, words and images that they would have once had to go looking for.

I hate to see a nice book destroyed, but most of these books are “dead,” anyway. That is, as old sources or information, there are newer, more up-to-date, fresher books that people turn to for the same information now. The information in these books may not be useful, except for historical reference.

In a way, Dettmer gives these old books new life by tearing them to pieces. Interestingly, he doesn’t plan ahead. He seals it up and goes digging. It’s an improvisational approach. I’d be curious to see what he came up with if he picked a few images out ahead of time before he got the glue and carving knives out.

I first discovered his books at Centripetal Notion. Centripetal Notion seems to be a popular website with a strong community around it, but this post got 20 times more attention than any of his other recent posts. I think there are a lot of people out there who feel like I do. Books are great! They are still great! Try one! Try one!

Everyone wants you to win their interest at a glance anymore, but if you just glance at a book all you will see is a cover and a spine. So, writers are indebted to Dettmer, for his work in one way. A glance at a book after he’s done with it and you’ll see a little more — there is some exciting stuff in these things. Come see.
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BradyDale is the keeper of This Too Will Pass.

Technorati Tags: sculpture, art, books, excavation, carving, Brian Dettmer, Atlanta, Chicago, BradyDale

Every artist should have a website, or at least a blog. This is a point I’ve been making to a friend of mine who’s trying to make her creative way in New York City. She’s doing this and that, meeting with little successes here and there, but it isn’t quite adding up to something whole yet. If she had a website, I argue, it could help people see her body of work. Plus, it would help her be accountable to herself and other artists. The web helps artists keep going in more ways than mere self-promotion.

That said, a tension will develop between your site and your work, especially if you blog. Copyblogger says that he developed the blog not to become a pro-blogger, but because he saw it as a way to become better known in the circles where he does his real work. I think that’s right. If you’re a good sculptor, you should start a blog so that people are interested in sculpture will find out more about your work, your thoughts and your creative process. The hope being that some of those folks are interested enough to buy and they will.

The trouble is, you still have to keep up the blog.

As I’ve been working on my Earth Day Card, I’ve been spending much less time in front of the computer. This has become a sort of guilt inside me, that I’m not generating some semi-interesting new essay every day for folks to read or find or think about. I’ve started to feel a responsibility to the netizens. Once upon a time, I would go to bed proud and content if I’d gone to the gym and spent two hours at the drawing board after a workday. Now, I feel like something is undone if I don’t write something here. Like I didn’t brush my teeth. Or I didn’t make my bed.

Okay, I never make my bed.

So I thought about this tension, and came up with some mental strategies the artist-who-blogs can use to make sure the blog serves you and you aren’t serving the blog:

• Blog about your artwork. This is the most important rule I’ve got for you. If your best work is your sculpture/writing/video/comix, then that’s what you will write the most interesting posts about. Plus, if you’re writing about your real work then you are thinking about your real work and you’ll get back to it.
• Blog first – but keep it short. You don’t really have to blog every day, but if you’re going to carve out some time to blog, then you should carve it out before starting your real creative work. Let blogging clear out the cobwebs in your head before you start working, but if you don’t finish the post in the time allocated, hit save as draft. Your public can wait a day.
• Your process is interesting, so blog about it. Don’t interpret your work at the end. That’s not a story. The story is how that crazy stuff you do comes together! We all think our creative process is boring. We don’t see why anyone would want to hear about the fact that we take an old racquetball into the backyard and bounce it against a wall in time to the lyrics we’re composing. It is interesting, though. An artist’s bizarre little creative quirks are, perhaps, the most interesting thing he or she has to write about. So write about it.
• Blog about your progress. I need to do this more. Try to read and be read by some other similar artists, so you know that other folks that will understand are reading about it when you write about how far you’re getting. Maybe it’s just me, but I find accountability motivational. I want people to know if I’m trucking along or if I’m on dead center, and knowing that someone is seeing those reports makes it more motivational.

If you’re an artist-who-blogs, it would be great to hear you say whether or not you feel this tension, like I do. Is blogging giving you a more short-term view of creativity? Is there a tension between long projects and punchy posts? How much time does blogging take up for you? Do you have balancing strategies of your own? Do you think mine are wrong-headed?

I’m still working on convincing my friend to start her own blog. Once we’ve got her on-line and she’s feeling comfortable with the Internet, I’ll make sure you all know where to find her. Till then, I took today off so I could finish the inks on page one of my Earth Day Card and get page two drawn. So I’d better get off here and back to work! What are you getting done today?
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BradyDale keeps up ThisTooWillPass.com

Today I did something embarrassing. It was the kind of thing that only an Internet neophyte does. See, I’ve been really focusing in on my blog lately and reading sites that talk a lot about good blog promotion and use of social networking and blah blah blah.

So I finally decided that I should join StumbleUpon and Digg. I’ve been a member of del.icio.us for a while (which can’t be beat for lo-fi simplicity and keeping track of sites you want to spend more time with later – that is, not at work) and Utterz. Of course, there’s a ton of other sites like these out there, too. The basic idea behind all of them is that users will identify things that they like and other users will find them. Then, as people organize themselves about shared interests or tastes, they’ll get better and better at sharing sites they like.

Fine, but I resisted because I burn enough time on-line as it is.

Well, part of the process for joining StumbleUpon.com is checking your address book to see if you have many friends who are on already. It turned out that I only had about 10 friends who were using the site and over 200 contacts that were not. I wanted to add the folks who were on there, but I didn’t really want to add the ones who weren’t.

Wouldn’t you know, like an Internet Neophyte, I hit the wrong button and sent the invite to everyone. Friends who don’t like me anymore, ex’es, co-workers, estranged former bosses and girls I couldn’t get a date with. People who don’t even remember me! Everyone!

I guess it doesn’t hurt much, but it did strike me. Of all the tech savvy people I know, only ten of them were on uber-hip StumbleUpon? How odd? Yet all these sites have thousands of users! Yet only about 5% of my contacts were on there!

I know that this will change over time, but I realized this morning that, for now, as much reach as the big social networking sites have, they all pretty much have the same reach. My guess is that if you did an analysis of the people on those sites, you’d find that they are, by and large, pretty much the same people. Like me, they’ve all just joined as many as they can handle.

Meanwhile, though, I think creative techy types, like the readers of this site, have an opportunity… NAY, A RESPONSIBILITY… to find ways to use these sites not to just promote our creative work but to hijack them and turn them into creative works. Like, by creating mazes of links that pass through multiple ones or games for our readers to play where they solve riddles through our pages or… I don’t know… on-line installations of Tagged, Stumbled and del.icio’ed sites. You decide… but I smell new space here.

Digg it!
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BradyDale

Personally, I was never willing to think of my audience as criminals or to turn the people for whom I create music into criminals, just because the music industry is in a crisis. …
 
I would like to begin with the opening lines of the announcement we attached to the song "Vegas" which was played here earlier:

It does not matter when and how the music and all that is related to it became only a matter of business and commerce. It happened. The love of music became marginal, and in most cases it is not part of the considerations of music products, marketed to the public.

The movie was great, but I wasn’t so hot on the IMAX. This wasn’t my first IMAX experience, but it was the first time I’d seen a traditional movie on one, as opposed to some nature film or whatever.

I’m not really sure the movie was shot on IMAX tape. It definitely, definitely warped at the edges throughout the movie. This distracted me the whole time.

The lower corners noticeably did not fit on the screen. They had it too wide. No one would have objected if they would have pulled it in a few degrees. it still would have been huge.

I also found that during some of the really chaotic scenes where a lot is happening yet the director shoots in close so you can hardly tell what, you really couldn’t tell what with the IMAX. In fact, the screen almost seemed to black out during the really chaotic close stuff. Again, distracting. I will also be interested to see it in a regular theater and see if anyone ever looks blurred. Many parts of the scene often appeared blurred at times. Again, possibly another effect of projecting at a level the original film had not been meant for.

The biggest problem, though, was that there really was hardly a good seat in the house. The seats were far too close to the enormous screen. I was turning my head through the whole thing and I could never see take in the whole screen at once. And my seat was roughly in middle. I feel very badly for anyone further down.

At the start of the movie, they run a little text across the screen and everyone laughed because no one could really read it. It was too big and we were all too close.

In the end, I wish I would have seen it at a normal theater. I feel like I was suckered in to see it on the super-high-tech screen.

Overall, though, it was a great film. Then again, I know I’m a sucker for big heroes and heroics. I like being a sucker for that, though.

We’re a bit grumpy.

Anyway, I’m one of the 30-something members around the states… recently inducted. Go me. We are working on kicking up a few particular storms in coming days, but I thought I’d promote a little something I’ve started doing on the site in South Africa before I really start talking about it in the states too much. I’m going to start running a weekly homily, or public prayer, on the site. These homilies will be humorous commentaries, but they are genuine prayers as well. They are audio files recorded with an old Compaq Ipaq.

Here’s the first.
And the second.

The third will be out next Wednesday. I promise it will make you laugh… though it will also be rather crass. The fourth is already recorded… in it, I’ll actually touch on literature for the first time.

I also highly recommend checking out the ULA’s Monday Report Box and other fine ULA writing.

The ULA’s leader and founder, King Wenclas, has the fine distinction of running the most threatening and hated blog in literature. Check it out! Get scared!

From Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
Brady Russell
Underground Literary Alliance
Rank-and-file

Once upon a time, I could listen to music and write with no problem. In fact, it was better that way. Now I find that I write much better in silence. This makes me feel lame. Is my brain losing its power? Or am I gaining focus?

I feel like this is a question that will primarily concern writers, but maybe not? I’d be interested to hear what other artists say about music and other distractions. How do you feel about them when you are trying to work? Helpful? Harmful? Neutral?

But I am finally getting started. I thought I would review all the comics I read on here, but I think I will just review the ones I like.

“Lightbulb” < - no actual title
by Linda Medley
mini-comic from One Percent Press

This comic is visually charming. It’s an experimental representation of a young artist wrestling with an idea until he is ready to work with it. The pages are dark (literally, not metaphorically), until the artist finally settles on what he wants to do with his idea, then he gets to it. Charming.

“Driving South”
by JP Coovert
One Percent Press

I really enjoyed this comic. It’s very cartoony drawings of normal looking people (stripped down to the simplest lines). It’s the story of a boy who goes home for his grandfather’s funeral. I don’t want to say what happens at the end, but let’s say this: he’s very busy through the whole funeral process.

We buried my grandfather not so long ago, and I saw a lot of truth in this story. It’s elegantly done and the drawing is really solid throughout. It once again demonstrates for me that the best artists leave out more than they put in. Not always true, but there’s a lot to say for economy.

“Onion Jack”
by Joel Priddy
from Ad House Books

This was really just the cover story for Ad House Books’s Free Comic Book Day offering, Issue Zero!!! Superior Showcase. I don’t want to beat a dead horse, here, but for all of Coovert’s economy above, he’s a morass of crosshatching compared to Priddy’s beautiful bio of the inestimable superhero, Onion Head Jack. Priddy reduces heroes and villains down to their most iconic with remarkable effectiveness. Many fools will look at these drawings and say, “anyone could draw that.”

Yeah?

Try it, then. Try to draw a readable story with drawings as simple as this. Hell, try to even come up with one character that looks at all unique using the same economy he uses.

You’ll be surprised. I know some other artists out there that can do it, but simplicity is deceptive. I’ve always said that in almost all things it is much harder to be easy to understand than it is to be mysterious.

Plus, the Onion Head Jack story is a great one – if you love heroes – and ends fantastically, surprisingly and satisfyingly. Find it. Love it. I have to check out more of this guy’s work.

“Monday” part 1
mini-comic by Andy Hartzel

This is the story of Adam and Eve after the first week of creation have ended. Many liberties are taken with the story. Hartzell has a lot of talent and his drawings are pretty. His representation of God is adorable and his Eve has a very cute butt. I hope I see Part 2 at some point.

“Keeping Two” part 1
by Jordan Crane

Jordan Crane is the youngest old-hand out there. I picked this up because Jordan Crane is famous, the cover price was low and the screen printed cover was very pretty. Also because he was standing next to Brian Ralph. This helped Jordan’s sales a lot, I’m sure, as Ralph is the closest thing the comics world has to a pop star (sorry, James K., but I thought of you when I wrote that… you are still a SUPERSTAR!).

At first I thought this story would bore the shit out of me. It’s very much a slice of life story, but it turns out to include high drama. A woman encourages her husband to go on a trip. Because he goes, he misses the birth of their child.

It gets worse. You feel for them.

Crane’s story is told with enough little details to make it feel true and you develop a definite sympathy for the stars of this show in only a few pages.

Another thing I appreciate about Crane is his willingness to show you around the world his characters find themselves in, to take some time with the story and give you the wide view. This is rare in American comics, but Crane does it. It makes the book feel different, in a great way.

Again, I hope I find the second part when it comes out.

“The Intruder”
by Mark Burrier

The art in this story bridges the gap between all the work above and the last one I will write about today, below. The lines in this book are clean, but not quite so clean. He has a lot more edge in his drawings. A lot more motion lines and more more shading. Some very splattery shadowing at parts.

This is all done for a purpose and intentionally. Burrier keeps his lines under control, unless he doesn’t want to. And that’s good. This is a story about completely unnecessary anger and completely unnecessary machismo. It’s about the way men with their women can just be dicks sometimes.

It’s a simple story, about a young boy who finds people making out in the back of his office who don’t work there, aren’t customers and who he’s never seen before. All he asks is that they leave and they won’t. It’s bizarre, but you can see it happening. Some men really would pull that shit with their blood up in the wrong spot/part.

The only crticism I would make of this book is that Burrier probably turns to the panel’less page a little more often than I’d like. Stripping panel borders away from pages can be the right thing to do, but I like it to happen in a way that makes so much sense that I don’t even really notice it. I was very, very conscious of the pages that didn’t have panel borders, and didn’t really see what point there was in leaving them off.

Still, art is about emotion and this one was emotionally evocative in a wonderfully effective way. More importantly, I think Burrier evokes a combination of emotions – uncertain power, anger and righteousness – that we don’t often see in comics. It’s always nice to see an artist try to break into new emotional ground with their work, and I think the field of comics is richer for it. Comic artists tend to rely on a certain limited pallette of emotions too often. Maybe someday when I have more philosophical time I will try to delineate what those are. Anyway, Burrier definitely isn’t in the comic book cliche category with this one, and bravo for it.

“Sea-Man Lamprey”
mini-comic by Mollie Goldstrom

All the rest of the comics I have reviewed so far had nice, clean lines with a strong consciousness of the figure and how it interacts with other figures and objects. Very little shading and unneccessary line work appear in the pages of the comics previously listed (maybe “Monday” is a little busy).

Throw everything I said about how great economy is OUT when you get ready to read Goldstrom’s 4″ x 4″ offering. This one is a mess. A very rich mess. A delicious mess. I like that I have this review in the mix because it shows there is more than one way to do things in the land of art and comics. In fact, Mollie’s work is a lot of fun even though she completely stands in contrast to all the compliments I gave the other artists above.

From the very first page (you really just have to see it), Goldstrom achieves something in drawing what I think must be the most nonsensical sea monster in the history of visual depictions of sea monsters. I mean, if the creature had a larger place in the story, you could entitle the work “Intestines from the Deep.” Go, Mollie!

This is the story of Erasmus Lamprey, mythical seafarer, wanderer. Erasmus has strange friends, strange abilities and strange adventures (all in about 16 pages). Goldstrom’s book definitely falls into the camp of Jennifer Daydreamer in that she tells stories that have the logic of dreams. That is, very little logic at all – but you understand anyway.

Erasmus, as a character, is pretty flat. That doesn’t matter. You’re here to see the world of Goldstrom’s imagination, and you do it by following Erasmus around. The point is Goldstrom’s drawings and trying to figure out how her mind works.

Goldstrom is part of a vein of comics that I think make the comics world one of the richest art scenes you’ll find (if you aren’t a closed minded fuck who dismisses comics out of hand). She has a lot of limitations, technically, as a draughtsman. You can see in reading these pages that she has tested the limits of her limitations and learned to work around them, even with them, creating environments and images that are within her power, technically, and, artistically, up there with any artist of her age and experience out there (and quite a few who’ve been at it longer and ought to be able to accomplish more by now).

I know this sounds like backhanded praise, but I don’t want it to. This is a hard point for me to get across, but let me try to restate it: most art forms put too much stock in technical ability. If art is, in the end, about self-expression, then there might be some people who learn to express themselves extremely well despite the fact that their fundamentals are weak.

Think, for example, of the illiterate storyteller. There have doubtless been countless storytellers and bards over the centuries who couln’t read, spoke only in vernacular and had embarassing grammar. Yet, if they got on a stump and started telling stories you’d be hypnotized. This is the perfect example of the less technically proficient artist performing brilliantly.

I mean, people dismiss punk rock, but it changed music forever and for the better. When punk started, half those guys couldn’t even really play their instruments – yet they changed music forever. I can’t overemphasize this enough. Technical ability is not all that, and I’ve certainly seen some people who draw really well – and everything they draw bores the living hell out of me. Seriously. I’m like: spare me, mofo.

Goldstrom will never be able to, I don’t think, draw a world with both the exquisite realism and cartoony simplicity of, say, a Jason Lutes. It doesn’t matter. Read “Sea Man Lamprey” and you’ll feel like you know something about Goldstrom’s mind, and you’ll want to meet her. Much as a lot of people feel about Lutes’s work.

So there, that’s my point. The comics scene makes more space and opens its arms more widely to the artistically gifted but technically limited among us. I definitely fall into this category, and I appreciate the fact that I feel comfortable making and sending out comics, because I know people into this medium understand that looks aren’t everything.

Lots more comics in my satchel o’ fun. I’ll let you know the next time I read through a stack. In the meantime, be a dear and visit some of these websites and buy some of these comics. Make a young artist’s day!

“Future Me”
by Jesse Moynihan
Mini-comic – $3.00

This mini-comic is beautiful. Fellow Philadelphian, Jesse Moynihan, really has a handle on the whole simple yet beautiful line style thing. You aren’t going to look at thise pages and say, “Wow! What detail!” This is actual art, so you’ll just say “wow.” With no exclamation point. Partly because you aren’t quite sure what’s so captivating.

But it is, baby. It is. One of my favorite elements is his use of patterned materials to fill up spaces. The pages look more intimate than if he had left off that detail, but since it’s a pattern it sort of disappears in a way, like white space does. Making it a sort of alternative-negative-space, that I like to see a good amount of on a page. At least for this sort of meditative story. Meditative it is.

On the other hand, it doesn’t entirely make sense. You’ve got to have the same patience with this book that you bring to a museum when you look at paintings that are really impressive but you don’t quite understand. In fact, Jesse’s work is easier to understand than a lot of really great paintings I’ve seen, but it’s also narrative so you sort of expect to understand everything or nearly-everything. That’s not going to be the case with “Future Me.”

That said, I’ve communicated with Jesse about this and he says that the more of his work you read the more it all makes sense. So that’s promising. “Future Me” definitely made me want to see more.

“_______ Are Always Fun to Draw”
by a lot of people (mostly in New York, I think)

This book is not really a comic. It’s a collection of drawings that a bunch of friends made after compiling a list of a billion things that are “always fun to draw.” They had a master list of like 30 things that EVERYONE had to draw and another much longer list that everyone had to pick ten more things from. The only rule, I think, was to get all of the things onto one page.

So everyone did it and then they printed it up. The result is a great little book with great pictures in wildly diverse drawing styles. Some of them are really inspired.

The list of fun stuff to draw includes earthworms, explosions, ducks, cats, fish, space aliens, etc. It’s pretty wide open. My favorite was, arguably, Isaac Cates’s alphabet (incidentally, he organized the project). A lot of them are really good, though. Karen Sneider uses an interesting device in her page. If she doesn’t think the thing she has to draw is fun, it’s being killed or destroyed in her drawing. She pointed this out to me herself at SPX when I was looking at the book. I was amazed to see that she doesn’t like to draw robots.

Who doesn’t like to draw robots?

I wish I could tell you how to get your hands on it, but I can’t. You might try contacting Karen Sneider directly, because her bio says she’s working on a sequel. Which implies she might know something about the original.

Midnight Creep
by Frederick Noland
Mini-comic, Post-Apocalyptic Funhouse

I think this might be a comic version of a southern fable. Anyway, it’s the story of a poor black working man in the South who’s telling a stranger in a boxcar about murders he committed as a result of his wife’s infidelity. He’s been on the run ever since.

He gets his come-uppance. Boy howdy.

The design and draughtsmanship falls somewhere in between realistic and cartoony – and nicely so. The pages are laid out well and the overall design shows a real eye for the importance of a well planned page.

The sequence that reveals the true identity of the narrator’s companion in the boxcar can be described as controlled, steady cinema.

Check this shit out, brother.

RHYTHM
Anthology by Turk Street Projects

This is a nice anthology that I have no memory of buying, who I got it from or how you can get your hands on it. I can say this: it introduced me to Joe Sayers who has a t-shirt (the gold one) on his website that I am definitely going to have to buy.

This anthology is different stories about rhythm. The stand out is probably the story about murdering Jimi Hendrix is probably the stand out, by Geoff Vasile. The one pagers at the beginning and the end are pretty great, too.

Out of Water
by Matthew Bernier
tinglyelectriceelunderpants@hotmail.com

This is probably the best drawn book, over all, in today’s collection of reviews. Very, very Craig Thompson’ish. In fact, he’s probably technically a little more powerful than Thompson, though we’ll see if he has the emotional range of Thompson. This work is too short to really weight it against Goodbye, Chunky Rice.

He seems to be a little fixated on gonads, I gotta say. And anatomy. Not external anatomy. For some reason he periodially shows cut-aways of his characters so that you can see their guts.

It’s funny, just yesterday I was thinking about how much I love my skeleton and yet I hope never, ever to lay my eyes on even one fraction of one inch of any of my bones. Ever. Funny, that.

Not so sure I want to see the guts of my comic book characters either. It reminds me of the Paul Pope comic where no one is interested in seeing strippers naked anymore… they have machines that allow you to see their guts bobbing around as they dance.

I cannot imagine this ever actually being a turn-on, but I could be wrong.

“Out of Water” is a sweet story about an awkward boy that develops a great friendship with a dolphin. This is, of course, in some ways a dangerous friend to have. Dolphins do not play in an environment that’s wholly convenable to boys, but the environment of boys is not at all hospitable to dolphins. This point is one that Bernier does an excellent job, in ways both overt, subtle and so subtle that you will realize it later, of conveying.

The story, in the end, is about solving the problem of environments. You should definitely email him and order a copy. One of these days I’ll get around to ordering some of his other work.
I also have one other much longer review of a longer book, “Top Secret Summer,” here

If you know me (and if you’re reading this then you probably don’t), you know I am no flag-waving patriot. That said, there is no debate that bores me more than the ongoing one about the cultural supremacy of the USA, like it’s some big freaking crisis that everyone loves our movies.

In the latest sortie by the cultural has-beens of Europe and the also-rans of everywhere else, UNESCO voted just shy of unanimously for an exception to international trade accords (“accord” – n. – def. we freaking agreed to this already!) in order to allow for protection of domestic cultural content against a preponderance of outside (read: U.S.) material. Naturally, the US strenuously objected on the grounds of free trade agreements of various forms the world over.

I am going to mock and deride the UNESCO decision on two fronts: economic and cultural.

First, Economic. Look, the US may be the biggest economy in the world and we may be gigantic slimeballs in a lot of ways, but the simple fact of the matter is that we keep the rest of the world in business. We are net importers of, well, just about everything. Industry planetwide (that is, jobs) gets paid for by the US hunger for… umm… everything. That said, one of the few areas in which we do export more than we import (and we export a lot more) is cultural content. Movies, TV shows, music and even a fair number of books. We make a lot of money around the world on our cultural works. Cut us some slack! We need to be a net exporter of

something

for God’s sake!

Second, cultural. I’m sorry, but any culture that has to protect itself might as well just throw in the towel. It is the nature of history for cultures to rise and fall. For cultures to lead, to matter and for other cultures (that once led) to go gently into that good night, crying a little feebly as they disappear because people once cared – really. Well, they don’t any more. So sorry. Now hush.

Take heart! Someday, the US won’t make the movies everyone wants to see anymore, but, for now, we do. Deal with it. If people in your country like our stuff better than yours, its for a simple reason: our stuff is more interesting. Our artists are better.

And spare me the McCulture garbage, thank you very much. Yes, this is the home of movies with Queen Latifah and Keanu Reeves. But this is also the home of Tim Burton and Marin Scorcese. Yes, we gave you Danielle Steele, but we also gave you James Baldwin, Emerson and John Steinbeck. We may be the home of the Back Street Boys, but we’re also the home of Dylan.

Yeah, that’s right: Dylan. Take that.

We also happen to be the place that came up with great ideas like comic books, blues music, rock-n-roll, cartoons, cinema itself and a little gadget you might have heard of called the World Wide Web. The Moog Synthesizer? Oh yeah, the was us, too. Try to keep up, world. We’re cooking over here.

Look, it doesn’t even matter. The market will out on this even if the WTO doesn’t take UNESCO’s proposal and use it to smack the body like the impertinent little crybaby it is (the US pays for 25% of its budget, b t w ). People like American stuff and, say what you will, snobs of the world, that’s because a lot of it is really good. Some of it is good because it is super fun eye candy. Some of it is good because it is thought provoking and engaging. Either way, it’s good.

Deal.

Post-script: just so long as we’re clear, I mock cultural whiners at home, too. There’s nothing I like more than going to a show put on by a “Preservation Society,” trying to keep people interested in some artform, language or subject that no one has any interest in anymore. I find it really funny when compulsive people waste their time on futile little efforts like that. Hey, long live puppetry, right?

It turns out that PublishAmerica is a print-on-demand company. Print-on-demand [POD] is this new technology that makes it cost effective to make exactly as many books as get ordered. Your “inventory” is blank paper, binding materials and a bunch of computer files, ready to go if anyone wants one printed out. Most POD publishing is vanity or subsidized printing. That is, the author pays to put it out. Not so with PublishAmerica. They promise never to charge you a thing, unless you want to buy a big stack of your own books to sell yourself.

Fine.

I sent two novellas I’ve written in to them. I wanted to publish them as one volume called

Fun With Cults: 2 Novellas

. Sound good? I’d buy it. My books were accepted immediately. I mean, right away. I mean, there was no way they could have read them.

So I get a contract and a pushy Acquisitions guy emailing me about joining up. I talk myself into it and think, “Well, if I’ve got hustle, I can make this happen.” I had basically decided to do it when a friend of a friend who happens to be a published writer contacted me and I asked her what she thought about the Publisher. Her view? Don’t do it. Go for the small press, but not POD. She sent me an article from the

The Washington Post

that reported a lot of unhappy writers (and a few happy ones).

Now, the two big concerns are as follows: 1) prestige. The lit world is all about prestige. If I went POD out of the box, would it follow me? 2) If it’s too good to be true, it probably is. Though, in the company’s defence, one of the less esoteric objections they have raised about PublishAmerica has been corrected. At one time, their books weren’t returnable. This is sort of weird, but if a book doesn’t sell at a book store, publisher’s will refund them for the trouble of putting it out. I don’t really get it, but when everyone else is doing that, it’s hard for a non-returnable book to compete for shelf space. As of last week, though, these POD books are now returnable.

Frankly, it didn’t seem like PublishAmerica was much of a brand. What would the consumer know if they saw the PublishAmerica name on the spine? It seems like there business model is publish as many books as they can, and hope they sell enough to make money. Why not? The only cost is the production work, right? The inventory takes up no real space. In fact, once they have thousands of books on file, they can just sell them forever. Eventually they might not even need to accept new titles. See, the name sort of gives it away: we aren’t about giving you a particular sort of book – we’re about publishing people who want to get published. Publish, publish, publish – see what sticks.

OK, so it sounds like I’ve made my decision. I guess I have. I don’t think I’ll do it. After all, those novellas really aren’t ready to go, though they are fun. But I have one nagging concern.

What if I’m missing the boat? What if this new kind of printing is the way of the future and I’m scared to get in on the ground floor?

I haven’t ever read Welty, but of course I know about her. She’s one of the great Southern writers. She came to my attention because of an essay that I need to read desperately, called “why the novelist is not a crusader,” or something like that. People criticized her because she “portrayed” the south sympathetically, even though she was an outspoken proponent of Civil Rights. Writers have a hard time, since our work is so much easier to ‘get’ than most other art; it’s explicit, so people often conflate a positive ‘portrayal’ of a character as a larger statement about that sort of person or that sort of situation.

Welty famously argued that novelists should write good fiction and leave politics out of it. Moreover (I don’t know if she said this but I will), that people shouldn’t use people’s novels as evidence for political views that the novelist doesn’t necessarily have, and they certainly shouldn’t assume the novelist is trying to make some change in the world based on what they write. Welty didn’t think novelists should use their novels to crusade at all. Crusade on your own time, I say.

I agree with her for two reasons (wow, I’m really on a tangent here). First, I think crusading in fiction diminishes the art. Second, as a professional political guy, I also don’t think it’s good for much in 99% of all cases (yes, yes, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Great. Name a novel that did something for a political effort in the last twenty years? Now name all the billions that tried to. Thank you.).

Anyway, (back to my point – tangent over) I don’t understand why Welty needs to be defended for the shocking revelation that writing, as it happens, turns out to be a way for ugly people to win friends and influence people. No kidding! Have you ever looked at photos of writers? There’s a reason they don’t crossover to movie stardom very often.

Furthermore, who cares? We like their books. Their books are great. If it happens they developed the skill to make up for something else they lacked, then that’s worth knowing. But it isn’t an attack. It certainly isn’t a scandal. Why, that’s why a good number of people get good at art or sports or other means of success that don’t necessarily require looks. A lot of people have become great in one avenue of life because they were insecure about others.

I simply can’t believe there is a flap about this. The scandal is probably more that someone dared to say the truth. Welty was not an attractive woman. It’s true! If she had been a he, people probably would not have been stunned to see this in writing. In fact, it probably wouldn’t even have been observed. We can bemoan the fact that women have more pressure on them to be beautiful than men all we want, but at the end of the day it is what it is. Welty overcame it, at least to some degree, by writing very compelling fiction (and non-fiction). Her fans should celebrate that much rather than denying it.

And they sure as hell shouldn’t pretend like we should be surprised.

Not that I am either an avid blogger or an avid blog reader, but I find it so exhausting when the establishment pooh-poohs knew things.What are folks saying? “You can’t trust the content.” “Blogs are inconsistent.” “There are no standards.”

You know, when something new comes along, the form takes some time to find itself and figure out a way and a culture that will regulate itself. Not that newspapers are exactly bastions of truth these days (everyone heard about the New York Times reporter that was working for The Manhattan Project to put a positive spin on The Bomb, right? He won a Pulitzer), but in their early days they were completely out of control. Editors were there to come up with more compelling news when the truth wasn’t interesting enough.

Anyway, over time, some standards developed and the form evolved and you can have more faith in it now. These things take time. It’s so annoying when the Establishment criticizes upstarts saying, “You should be as good and sophisticated as us right now or you never will be and you suck!”

Step off.

Blogs are going to get very, very interesting over the next decade. Folks are going to find some great ways to organize them and help people find the right one and each other.

From Philadelphia,
BradyDale

So this morning (afternoon for Nat), he asked me if I wanted to be one of his first guest bloggers on here. Is this his first? I read back a little ways until I found him asking for guest bloggers, so maybe I am the first on this one. I thought that it made sense to write about what got him to ask me. See, I live in the states (I met Nat in college) and I just moved to a new city. Philadelphia. Birthplace of the Nation – or whatever.

As a wannabe artist myself, one of the things I’m really hoping to find here is a group I can work with artistically. I’m really jealous of this group of comic book artists out in St. Louis, Missouri called U.S.S. Catastrophe. They have this thing where they get together every Thursday for pizza and then go to Barnes & Nobel to draw together until they get kicked out. Pretty great, in my opinion. I’m ultra jealous and want to find something like that for myself. It’s managed to involve into more than that, too, but just the camaraderie and shared work alone is enough to send me into fits of envy.

The idea got cooked up when I first heard about Fort Thunder in Providence, Rhode Island. I don’t even know where to begin with talking about Fort Thunder, they were so awesome. Basically, this one guy rented a warehouse so he could live in it and use the big, open first floor as a music space, and his art school friends moved into them and they became one of the coolest groups of printers, costume makers, musicians and comix artists in the country (until the city let a developer tear the building they’d been renting down – of course).

So I got this idea in my head to try to figure out a way to get my hands on a building here in Philly and do the same thing. I don’t know how I’ll do it since I’m making snot moneywise here in Philly, but maybe I can figure out some community development angle? Eventually, I should be pretty plugged in politically in this town and I should know it pretty well, too. We’ll see.

I guess the exciting thing is that I recently learned that there already is a space somewhat like that here in Philly, called 1801 Howard. The artists there live together and have studio space and I guess they are looking into some group shows soon, too. Maybe even more of it is going on here? I don’t know yet. We’re at Day 10 in Philadelphia. But it makes me optimistic about the do’ability of it.

Collaboration is pretty damn exciting – that’s all I know. I could go on about other fun things I’ve heard about but I think you get my drift. The hard part is finding other artists are finding other artists who will actually follow through. This has been especially hard for me as non-professional. Any advice from others out there about where to look would be welcome.

And any other great stories about great group collaborations going on now would also be encouraging to hear.