KaneLynch.com

New Comic!

2011-07-12T13:42:00.000-07:00

A New Short Comic! Autobiographical! Fun! Slightly salacious!

http://tinyurl.com/babykane

Chapter 11 of The Relics!

2011-06-07T11:20:00.000-07:00

Chapter 11 of The Relics is now online!

Read it slowly so it makes sense (I think it can!) or just let it wash over you as some weird stuff.

Buffy!

2011-05-05T10:36:00.001-07:00

Last Friday I went to Mari Naomi's marvelous reading at The Escapist--I just finished Mari's book "Kiss & Tell" on my way to work today and definitely recommend it. But this post is about nerd things.

Escapist has a luxurious display of Buffy comic books (Sophie tells me it's a bestseller).

I watched the whole dang show (which I had never seen previously) on Netflix while working on my comic, so I was inexorably drawn over, but then, as always, put off by the tacky faux-superhero art style. I'm sure whoever's drawing the Buffy comic can outdraw me in a dozen ways, but the combination of deadened caricatures and overwhelming crosshatching just so completely fails to capture the cuteness of the show.

The talented Tessa Brunton had a similar experience, so I decided to draw what my version of the Buffy crew would look like.

I don't expect Dark Horse to be giving me a call anytime soon, but I wish the companies putting out these licensed comics would make more of an effort to diversify their art. The show Buffy was doofy as hell, but it was stylistically fluid, going from Broadway musical style one week (Once More With Feeling) to psuedo-verite the next (The Body).

Why do mainstream publishers think everything should look like a Witchblade comic from 1997?

Rando Calrissian

2011-03-19T12:14:00.001-07:00

Howdy folks,

I plan to have Chapter 11 of The Relics finished by the end of the month. And the first weekend of April, issue #4 of the comic book version will debut at Wonder-Con in San Francisco!

In the meantime, I've been doing some fun little comics for my day job (working on educational videos) — they're bonuses for kids who complete their assignments and it's been really awesome going to work and drawing up a storm.

Some people get annoyed when artists they follow post commissions instead of more of the project that the audience is actually interested in, but I always enjoy it. If you do too, head over to my flickr!

Part 10B of The Relics!

2010-11-02T11:34:00.000-07:00

Hey everybody!

The new Relics is finally online!

It's actually the second half of Chapter 10, so you may want to re-read the first half and just experience it as one piece.

I really wish I could've updated sooner, but I've literally never been busier in my life, and I'd rather take longer and have an end product I can be proud of then pump it out to keep the internet paying attention to me.

Thanks again to all of you who've stuck with me, even if that means just subscribing to the blog or staying in the Facebook group!

And since it's never too early to start planning for NEXT Halloween, here's some links to help you go as your favorite Relics character--

Bryan!

Harmony!

Joshua!

Madison (Harmony's roommate)!

(please do not actually buy these things)

Comix Jam at Flax in San Francisco!

2010-10-21T14:15:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be doing a public jam comic with some lovely Bay Area cartoonists this Saturday at the Flax art store!

It's this Saturday at 3, at Flax Art & Design 1699 Market Street, San Francisco, Ca 94103

From the Facebook page:

SIX BAY AREA COMIC ARTISTS! SIX PAGES WITH SIX PANELS! SIX WILDLY UNIQUE STORIES!

We are proud to host our very first Comics Jam event on
Saturday, October 23rd from 3 - 5 PM.
Watch as Bay Area comic creators Jamaica Dyer, Kane Lynch, Nicky Nargesian, Doctor Popular, STORM & Sophie Yanow collaborate on six different comics, rotating pages and panels every 15 minutes!

At the session's conclusion, the resulting comics will be put on display for everyone to enjoy!

Be sure to stop by the Comics Jam merchandise booth, where each artist will have a sampling of their works on sale for the duration of the event!

Don't miss this exciting opportunity to see live comic drawing and pick up
a few great books by some of the Bay Area's best indie creators!

Phil the Axolotl

2010-09-23T19:57:00.000-07:00

After an absolutely insane couple of months, I'm finally back to regular work on The Relics. It feels really good and I hope to have the new update up in the near future.

But I haven't been sitting idly these past few weeks. I've been doing work! For money! And among that work is this animation for the dating site Zoosk, created by me and Sophie.

Click here to check it out!

If you like it, leave a comment on the Youtube so Zoosk doesn't regret hiring us.
If you don't, well...more Relics soon! <3

2010-08-17T00:34:00.000-07:00

In the last two weeks, I got a swanky new video job, got a really cool paid cartooning gig, got my car stolen, and am in the middle of a big fight with our slumlord landlord. Overall, it could be worse, and soon I will be moving into a cool house!

But right now everything is crazy. I'm drawing every day, and I'm especially into this page I'm finishing up now. But I have a few more to do, and my schedule is violently unpredictable.

I value your readership so so much and I wish I could give you a good date to say the new update will be up, but my life is pretty all of the place right now, and all I can say is--soon. In August. Maybe next week? I hope next week!

Sorry I'm being such a wacko. Next post will hopefully be more collected and filled with comics!

Previously in "The Relics!"

2010-06-30T18:44:00.001-07:00

It's been awhile since the last update, so I thought I should include a brief summary to refresh your memory in case you don't want to re-read the last two chapters.

Previously in The Relics—

While working on a janky version of the Loman machine, Harmony and Bryan got trapped in a tachyonic field and ended up kind of bonding.

Joshua thought they were lost for good and kind of flipped out, but his work was not for nought, and soon the two were home.

Harmony was more eager to finish the project than ever, while Joshua was convinced that it had become too dangerous to continue. He reluctantly conceded that the information needed to finish the machine was contained in Loman scrolls in the possession of Roberto Alvarado, a former colleague with whom he was no longer on speaking terms.

That night, Harmony and Bryan talked about their experience in the tachyon void and realized their strengthened attraction to one another. They started to make out, but Bryan balked at going any further in his childhood friend Rachel's bed.

Harmony suggested they instead continue in the void.

The next day, Bryan and Harmony went to Roberto's house on a goofy pretext, and Harmony attempted to coax Roberto into turning over the scrolls.

After telling her a perplexing Loman myth and giving a cryptic warning, he handed over the complete translated set.

And now...

Chapter 10!

Part 10a of The Relics!

2010-06-30T18:37:00.000-07:00

Hey, I'm back! We have a lot to talk about!

Part 10a of The Relics is now online!
Be warned that it contains (spoiler alert) implied sexual activity and brief nudity...like HBO, but free on the internet!

I realize it's been awhile since the last update, so here's a quick summary of Parts 8 and 9 to get you back up to speed.

Now—

"Why 10a?" you ask?

Basically, I realized that Part 10 is going to be incredibly long, so I decided I have to split it in half. I was trying to blaze through the whole thing, but the update's already late enough that I've gotten some perturbed emails/comments, so I figured it was best to give y'all something to check it out. 10b will be up in about a month.

Sure, I could've just added another chapter, but aside from the hassle of redesigning the website, I like the act breaks where they are, and I think in the long run this will make more sense.

Part 8 of The Relics!

2010-03-23T21:05:00.000-07:00

The new chapter of The Relics is now online!

Taking the time to expand the update by two pages turned it from the slowest to (arguably) the most exciting, so I think delaying the update a week was a good choice.

What do you think?

Part 7 of The Relics!

2010-02-10T15:54:00.000-08:00

Part 7 of The Relics is at last online! http://kanelynch.com/therelics/

I think it's different than what people might've been expecting, but I hope you like it! Whether you do or not, I'd love to hear what you think!

If you happen to be in the bay area, you can come see me this weekend in an art show in north Oakland! It's a funraiser for Doctors Without Borders and I think it's going to be really neat! Not sure what I'm going to put in yet, but some Relics material will probably be featured.

For more info, head over to the Fbook page.

Videos!

2010-01-05T15:15:00.000-08:00

Two new ComicVine vids I'm pretty proud of. We're still doing the news and such every week, but we get to do other stuff too and I can get more creative.

The first is an interview with Santa Cruz native cartoonist Jamaica Dyer--

And the second is an "educational film" about the Marvel character Black Cat, featuring music by Angelo and a cameo by my East Bay friend Anna.

I don't have anything to edit today, so I just did a written review of Dash Shaw's new book.

Updates

2009-12-21T11:22:00.001-08:00

Hey everybody!

First, I just wanted to say something about the tardiness of the update.
Basically, two things happened in quick succession--

1) I got a job making videos for ComicVine.com, which is super awesome, but is naturally causing some schedule readjustment. I think long term it actually makes me more productive all around, but it does take some getting used to.

2) I realized this update had to be 20% longer than originally planned. I needed to get the characters to a certain pulse-pounding position by the end of the update, but I didn't want to sacrifice the character moments leading up to it.

Anyway, thanks for reading!
The comic book version of chapters 4-6 will be available in a couple weeks. I'd hoped make it available for the holiday season, but alas, I am too much of a chump.

In the meantime, I have a special offer!
If you post a link to The Relics main page on your website or your favorite forum or social networking site, I will mail you a piece of one-of-a-kind original art.
Make sure to send me a link to your post as well as your address!

Chapter 6 of "The Relics"!

2009-12-19T19:36:00.000-08:00

Deliberating whether or not to announce it elsewhere or wait til Monday (when more people are theoretically internetting), but just for you guys--

Chapter 6 of The Relics is now online!

Crazy stuff is going down in this update, but rather than spilling the beans I'm going to give you this pic of Bryan and Harmony crossing the street--

What happens on the other side?
Does it involve tachyons?
Click on the image and get your pulse-pounded real good!

Tomorrow I plan to do a little more substantial news post, so watch this space!

Part 5 of The Relics and other goodies!

2009-10-08T13:34:00.000-07:00

Hey folks!

The newest rootin' tootin' "Relics" update is galloping onto your internet!

http://kanelynch.com/therelics

I'm pretty happy with this one.

Also new to the website:

Harmony's Documentary:
A short audio project Harmony made for a class about two months before the comic started.
I will add some annotations (she made a couple mistakes) as well as credits soon.

Also:
"Da Vinci Dreams": A short comic originally published in Sophie Yanow's zine "5 More Minutes."

I always want feedback, but I'm especially interested in the newcomers to the comic I've never talked to before.
If you're new, send me an email (kane@mythandmadness.com) or comment on this post! Let me know your thoughts!

Part 4 of The Relics!

2009-09-02T12:44:00.001-07:00

Hey everybody!
The latest brain-bending episode of The Relics is now sliding through cyberspace! I think I need some new alliterations.

Taken on its own, the pacing of this update is a bit strange, but I think it has some interesting stuff in it, and the set up for some craziness to come.

Let me know what you think!

And don't forget about the Relics comic book, if you're the sort of person who would like to not forget that: http://bit.ly/IrAkH

Chapter 3 of "The Relics"!

2009-07-14T13:32:00.000-07:00

I seem to have forgotten to announce Chapter 2 on the blog. Sorry about that.
But now Chapter 3 is here!

If you haven't read the comic yet, this is a good time to start. These first three updates are kind of like a TV pilot, where by the end everybody's in their place for the story to really kick off.

As always, feedback is very welcome.

Coming soon...
A new photocomic!
And...a movie on the horizon? Time will tell, and I will be sure to relay the message.

Thanks for reading!

A new graphic novel begins!

2009-04-25T15:47:00.000-07:00

The first chapter of my new graphic novel is online!

This project means a lot to me and I really want feedback, from initial impressions to specific criticism. It's a lot "riskier" for me than most of my recent stuff, since it doesn't have the jazzy absurdity of Laika or the pulp badassery of the photocomic.

So, please, give it a read, lemme know what you think.

The art gallery I'm showing at is in Alameda, not Livermore, which I would've known if I'd, you know, READ THE WEBSITE. oops. Anyway, the reception is Saturday, May 2nd, at 5 pm at
Frank Bette Center for the Arts, 1601 Paru Street, Alameda, CA.
Hope to see some of you there!

Upcoming Happenings

2009-04-13T12:48:00.000-07:00

THIS WEEKEND, I will have a booth at the Stumptown Comics Fest in Portland, OR, with Sophie Yanow.
http://stumptowncomics.com for more info--We're table 118.

Through the month of May, my art will be featured in the Heroes and Villains show at the Frank Bette Center for the Arts in Livermore, CA.
More info here: http://www.frankbettecenter.org/exhibits-juried-1/heroes-villains.html

New comic premiering soon...

New (ugh) 24 Hour Comic!

2009-02-19T21:20:00.001-08:00

New Laika-23 comic!

2009-02-19T21:18:00.000-08:00

Fancy news!

2009-02-19T21:14:00.000-08:00

The new KaneLynch.com is all set up--

Most everything worth looking at that I've made, now together on one snazzy site.
(much gratitude to ole Chris Guerrero, who's hosting me)

Also--

"The Problem of Laika-23" is screening in the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival’s Central Coast Filmmakers Showcase (say that five times fast!). Wooo!

See you there?

That's why they call me Mr. Fahrenheit!

2006-06-04T03:17:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. I read it in 7th grade, I think, but didn't remember very much.

It's no 1984, but it's pretty good. Parts of its vision of the future hit pretty close to home.

The little misquito-delicate dancing hum in the air, the electrical murmur of a hidden wasp snug in its special pink warm nest. The music was almost loud enough so he could follow the tune...In [his wife's] ears the little seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electric ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind."
(Page 11)

That's not only generally relevant to how much we cling to our ipods, but I felt like it was specifically relevant to me since I started listening to music and audio books as I fall asleep to combat insomnia.
But...
If I'm listening to a book, is that any worse than if I were actually reading it?

And that's where I have a problem with Fahrenheit 451.

As the book's main antagonist, Fire Chief Beatty, explains--

The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that!*
[...]
Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex magazines, of course."
(Page 57)

In a way, he's right, comic books are (in some circles, at least) rising to a role more equivalent to that of literature.
But, why are comics worse than books? Do pictures neccessarily make something stupid? For that matter, does not having pictures make something smart?**
Surely Maus is better than The Da Vinci Code, or even Sin City is better than a Tom Clancy novel.
For that matter, is a movie like Citizen Kane, which could easily be shown on one of Fahrenheit's hated telescreens, worse than either of those books?

At this point, it seems more like he's romanticizing the medium of the book more than any content it might have.
But then, he seems to contradict that later, when he has the washed-up academic Faber say--

"You're a hopeless romantic...It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same thing could be in the [TV shows] today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios and televisors, but are not. No, no, it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books are only one type of receptable where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all."
(Page 82)

...which seems to fundamentally violate the premise of the book. If those things are just as powerful as books, why aren't we seeing them protected by some and burned by others?**

All that said, I wish I had the resources, financial, temporal, and legal, to make a Fahrenhiet 451 movie, because I think if it were done right, it could be really great. If it's presented as a conflict between intellectuals heroically preserving the past while adding nothing of their own and what Faber calls, "the solid unmoving cattle of the majority" (Page 108), it would basically just be a less exciting Equilibrium.

But if you made it a story about how technology alienates people, and how "intellectuals" often prize pretension over contributing to society (I'd want to play up Faber's failure to make any real difference, and the former-scholar bums' lack of originality), I think it could be a really interesting movie. He talks about how the reason art matters is because it needs to have a real impact on people's lifes, and the fact that the intellectual outcast characters don't seem to do much of that is an aspect worth dwelling on.

And the robot hound chase scene would have to be fuckin' badass, naturally.
Kind of like a Paul Verhoeven scifi movie only a little bit slower and smarter.

--
*On a side note, that remark is one of Bradbury's less accurate predictions since, as Ed O'Neill would be happy to tell you, the trend now is more toward so-called narrowcasting to specific sub-groups, since (the success of shows like American Idol aside) people get bored with stuff that's supposed geared toward everybody.

**This seems kind of strange, considering Bradbury's had a long relationship with comics, going back to his stories being adapted by EC Comics (of Tales from the Crypt fame) only a few years after this book was published. He even tried to get them to put out a real graphic novel adapting one of his books (which would have been a benchmark), but they refused.
When cartoonists come along, they read my stories and spot the metaphor I put in there, and that’s what comic strips are about as well. It’s all related – stories, movies, plays, and comics. I can adapt my stories to any form. I’ve had a huge amount of attention come my way, simply because I was a born collector of metaphors.

***I guess that's what happened in both Equilibrium and V for Vendetta and both of those were much dumber, but I still think it's a valid question.

The Rat Activity House. Bum!

2006-05-22T02:48:00.000-07:00

Today Natalie's friend Jake Bradbury, who I'd never met, came over at 10 am today and drove me and Bundo to his house of Mission Street.
He's shooting a movie called Rats, which involves an anthropomorphic rat singing. Most of the time it's a person in a rat suit, but for several shots he wanted a real rat, so Natalie hooked us up.
From what I can tell the story involves someone trying to eat rats but I think they didn't want to tell me that because they were worried I'd get upset.

He somehow gleaned that I like Firefly and spent the drive over asking me about my favorite episodes and then telling me about a series of scifi shorts he and his friends were making.

Then we arrived at his apartment, where I was introduced to two actors, a girl doing sound, and Jake's dad. He didn't actually tell me any of these people's names, but if he had I wouldn't have remembered anyway cause I'm a jerk like that.

Their whole set up was pretty impressive. That had lots of fancy lights and a boom mic and it kind of looked like a real film shoot.

There were a couple times I wasn't convinced they knew exactly what they were doing (like when Jake insisted on having people say their lines during a shot of Bundo that no one else was in and in where no sound was being recorded, and then wanted to redo it when they took too long), but overall, it was probably the most professional shoot I've witnessed/been involved with.

Bundo got really fickle and wouldn't eat the same food for any two takes. The most success was had by coating the piece of cheese the rat character was supposed to be eating in delicious peanut butter.

After they got all the shots they wanted, it was time for me to leave. The guy who was doing Bundo's voice was going to drive me, but ironically, he's allergic to rats, so Jake's dad drove me instead.

He was a pretty cool guy.

He talked about he'd always helped Jake with his movies since high school, and was willing to make the drive up from (I think) Berekely every time he needed help. He was one of the principles in Jake's science fiction "40-minute feature", which I'm now kind of curious about.
He also told me about how his older son is, "a rapper...he does nerd-core. Invented the genre, actually."*
Ok...

He dropped me off at home, where Bundo returned to her busy life of sitting on an old tear shirt and eating.

Jake told me that he'll upload the movie once it's finished, so look for Rats soon on an internet near you.

--
*Wikipedia disagrees, but whatcha gonna do.

2006-05-02T03:30:00.000-07:00

My charcoal thing for art class tomorrow. Photo courtesy of Jake Regal.

2006-04-27T02:37:00.000-07:00

I forgot to mention that the BSN episode I anchored with Ms. Perry Radford is now available for digi-viewing on the internet.

I think it came out pretty rockin'.

2006-03-10T18:04:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Nikki introducing me to YouTube.com*, all my movies are now online and viewable, as long as that site doesn't break.

You can watch them all here.

--
*I think that name is supposed to be like "This isn't the boob tube, it's the you tube", but in my head it's more like, "Watch some fuckin' videos, you tube!"

But you don't have to take my word for it!

2006-02-08T03:43:00.000-08:00

So this weekend, I think on Friday, I was at Bookshop Santa Cruz, as I often am, and found a book I wanted to read.

It's called It's Superman! and is an attempt by a somewhat classy novelist to retell the Superman story in a somewhat classy way, set in the late 30s (when the character debuted) and reflecting that time period (from the dustbowl midwest to gangster-controlled New York*) in a convincing and interesting way.

It also cost $25 which, while about par for the course, is nonetheless more than I can responsibly afford to spend on a book.

I went home and looked online, where I found copies for as low as $6 (they were uncorrected paperback galleys, which if I had to guess were promos sent out to bookstores).
But with shipping that still came out to like $12, which was too much for such a dubious edition.

Two days later, I was wondering around campus by myself. I'd just eaten alone at 9/10 and then vaguely intended to watch a movie for class that I'd missed, but it turned out the only available copy was taken (by the teacher, apparently).

It was then that I realized that the same place that housed the movie also contained a large number of books.
A computer search and a lady handing me a floor plan yielded a dustjacketless copy of It's Superman!

And they let me take it. For free.

I mean, I have to give it back in a couple of weeks, so it's not quite like if I'd bought it over the Internet, but it's still a pretty good deal.

I don't know if your local town or institution of higher learning also has one of these Free Book-Getting Buildings, but I highly recommend them for the next time you want to get a book for free.

--
*New York, not Metropolis. Not sure why.

2006-01-27T15:08:00.000-08:00

Remember when I wrote that letter to the editor of the New Times and posted it here?
Yeah, I barely do either, but it apparently pissed someone off enough to write an angry comment, which you can scroll down and see.

I like to keep things egalitarian and open, but since most of my comments have been spammers and (now) hate mail, there's no reason to keep anonymous comments around. People can say whatever they want, but anonynimity easily breeds childishness, so it should probably be discouraged.

If you'd like to say something, sign up with blogspot for free and comment your ass off.

recipe

2006-01-25T04:41:00.000-08:00

INGREDIENTS
1 container of hummus, plain or spicy 3-pepper (preferred)
2 whole pieces (if that isn't an oxymoron) white pita bread
1 bag of shredded cheese (or you can shred your own, but that kind of goes against the spirit of the recipe)
1 plate (can be substituted for paper towel if you have any, which I certainly don't)

DIRECTIONS
Rip pita pieces in half.
Place halves on plate.
Stuff halves with shredded cheese, the more the better.
Microwave on high for 1 minute and 30 seconds.
Dip into hummus and consume.

Feeds approx. one Kane.

These kids, I tell ya...

2005-12-31T20:15:00.000-08:00

So, there was this really dumb editorial in the New Times (SLO's independent weekly) about how stupid the kids today are.

Here's what she said (sorry, this is long...)--

A nation of morons?
BY JACQUELINE MARCUS
Hellenism, the way of intelligence and conscience, is dead.

According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, 11 million Americans are illiterate. The report concluded that one in 20 American adults lack the literacy skills to perform everyday tasks. In 2003, college proficiency tests revealed that 31 percent of college graduates have a difficult time comprehending classic novels. Even Allan Bloom, author of “The Closing of the American Mind,” would find it hard to believe that the average American college graduate is illiterate.

The illiteracy problem explains why college students are dropping out. In a Reuters article, “More College Students Drop Out Than Graduate,” the Council for Aid to Education (CAE) reported that less than 50 percent of students entering four-year colleges or universities actually graduate. “And that's a conservative estimate,” said Richard Hersh, who co-authored the report on the quality of higher education for the National Governors Association. The report includes high dropouts among Hispanics and blacks.

Cal Poly averages a 67 percent graduation rate. At Cuesta College, according to the latest chancellor's report, only 7 percent, out of the 13,472 total credited students, are “transfer prepared.” These figures are subject to change, and to the faculty's credit, Cuesta held impressive state and national student university transfer records in the past. Currently, enrollment is high at the beginning of each semester, but retention levels are moderately low by mid-semester.

In my introduction to philosophy class at Cuesta, a high percentage of white, middle-class students are illiterate. There is, of course, a difference of academic standing between Cuesta and Cal Poly students. Academic standards are not required at Cuesta. Nevertheless, the latest national statistics illustrate that illiteracy and high college dropout rates are significant at universities.

The object of this assessment is to examine the possible causes or trends associated with illiteracy and the high college dropout rate. Cuesta College's faculty has taken important measures to rectify these problems by offering remedial English courses and excellent tutorial services.

The foremost reason why college students drop out is because they're academically unprepared for college. In high school, they managed to skip through multiple choice tests and CliffsNotes summaries, but they're neither intellectually nor emotionally prepared for rigorous academic demands at college.

There are several explanations for the academic shortcomings and the high college dropout rate:

Students don't read

“There are worse crimes than burning books,” wrote Joseph Brodsky. “One of them is not reading them.”

Students have poor reading and writing skills essentially because they don't read books. Reading and writing are limited to brief Internet and e-mail texts. Studies have shown that without language development skills, children do poorly in analytic and mathematical skills. They also have a difficult time solving problems in imaginative and rational ways. Conversely, studies show that children and teenagers who read books excel at their studies.

Decadence

Teenagers today are raised in a cultural vacuum of distractions. They are subjected to mindless TV shows, violent video games, and degrading music that glorifies promiscuous behavior. Computers have replaced books. U.S. corporations in targeting the youth have succeeded in producing a nation of morons. As a result of these corporate influences, teenagers' emotional and intellectual faculties are severely underdeveloped.

Students don't study

Given their immature attitudes, students have poor study habits and poor attendance records. In a word, American students are lazy, which leads to deficiencies in critical thinking skills. Worse still, they are not motivated or challenged by books or reading assignments. They're neither disciplined nor conscientious. They want to do the least amount of work for a passing grade.

For example, a number of students will take classes without buying the required books because they believe they can pass the course without reading the books. This would all be quite amusing if it were Monty Python's Flying Circus. But it's not. It's the typical reality of American college life. In the past, students wrote letters in correct English. With the advent of computers, correspondence is reduced to illiterate e-code: “will u be their? tnx.” Translation: “Will you be there? Thanks.” Strangely enough, they don't use the computer's spelling and grammar check for term papers. Another common example of laziness is when students believe that they can make up for excessive absences and insufficient work by making a grand appearance for the final exam, which they inevitably fail.

Party life

Late-night drinking, barhopping, and drugs factor into the high dropout rate.

Gloomy future

In addition to being academically unprepared, students are confronting a dark future. They've been told that they'll have to attend college for higher paying jobs. But now, computer engineering, scientific research, and corporate positions are outsourced to India and China. Graduates from China and India excel at math and computer engineering skills. Bill Gates recently discussed his decision for turning to India for several reasons: They're highly motivated, excel at tech skills, and they'll work gratefully for $200 a month. It's a depressing picture for American graduates. If they don't quite understand the “global-corporate economy,” of wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, they feel its weight and believe that a college degree is futile.

Money problems

Under the Bush administration, federal grants and scholarships have been severely cut in order to pay for the invasion of Iraq, which is costing American taxpayers billions of dollars. Without Pell grants and an accommodating job that allows schedule time for classes, it will be financially difficult for students to succeed. As a last resort, they may join the military. When the nation's government invests the people's treasury into weapon industries instead of schools and hospitals, expect a high college dropout rate. The upshot: If students don't have parental support, it's a real struggle to attend college.

There are solutions.

Home schooling

If parents hold degrees and can afford the time, home-schooling may be a wise alternative to the public high school system. The sooner parents introduce the great classic books, in addition to math and science lessons, the better prepared they'll be for meeting university standards. Trust me, your children will not learn about Homer, Plato, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Euclid, the Bill of Rights, or anything closely resembling college prep at public high schools.

Corporate responsibility and vocational schools

Gates prefers to hire grads from India. He's not alone. It's time for that to change. Since corporations contributed to the illiteracy problems, they should be responsible for funding public educational programs and student college grants. True, academia is not for everyone. We need to provide vocational training at the start: K-12. This training should include hands-on experience in nursing-medical programs, auto mechanics and computer engineering, electronics, secretarial and office skills, forestry and conservation programs, and so forth. Why can't we reinvent Roosevelt's New Deal at our high schools?

The biggest obstacle for students is lack of motivation. Teachers can perform Herculean somersaults and it won't do a damned bit of good if they're lazy and apathetic. Motivation encompasses a passion for learning, a sense of wonder and engagement. Why are students so indifferent to learning?

Corporate America promotes the material life at the expense of the educated life. Our children are living in a superficial society that turns them into automatons by the time they're 18. The media is also a corrupting force. The assault on Baghdad was largely a matter of marketing. Politicians are seen as corrupt and greedy. The lesson of today is cheating and lying pays and people in high positions are indeed above the law. T.S. Eliot symbolically coined the predictable fate of a hollow age that lives by commercial jingles and empty social conventions: “The Wasteland.”

Are we really surprised by the high illiteracy problems and college dropout numbers in this country? It certainly paves the way for a military state. ∆

Jacqueline Marcus teaches philosophy at Cuesta College and is the editor of ForPoetry.com. She can be reached at joiemarcus@tcsn.net.

I ranted about something very similar in this space about a year ago, but that was on national television. This is local. Maybe this time I have a chance to be heard. So I sent an email to the ole New Times--

Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2005 20:06:10 -0800 (PST)
From: "Kane Lynch"
Subject: A Nation of Morons
To: letters@newtimesslo.com

I'm a 19 year old San Luis Obispo native in the middle of my second year of college, but even an "automaton" like me can see that Jacqueline Marcus's editorial ("A Nation of Morons," December 29-January 5) is full of poorly-qualified internally inconsistent assertions.

She complains that, "computers have replaced books," but then laments our inferiority to Indian students who, "excel at tech skills." Are we using computers too much or not enough?

Marcus regales us with a vision of teens who've never read a book and waste all their time in the Internet and TV's "cultural vacuum of distractions." Lovely how she doesn't provide a single concrete example.

What she has is sweeping generalizations, perhaps based on her failures with students at Cuesta, perhaps wholly imagined. I don't know.

What I do know is that many people my age (I'd like to think myself included) are clever, articulate, well-read and do what they can to be well-educated. Others aren't, of course, but that's not a disturbing development in "teenagers today"--that has always been true, and probably always will be.

If we'll ever return to a golden age of "Hellenism", it's not going to be through telling 30 million people--an entire generation--that they're all idiots. That is prejudiced, ill-informed, and unproductive, and a supposed philosopher should know better.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some "drinking, barhopping and drugs" to attend to.

Kane Lynch
San Luis Obispo

Bismillah, no.

2005-12-29T21:43:00.000-08:00

A couple days ago I bought "One Way Ticket to Hell...and back", which is the new The Darkness album.

I was kind of ambivalent about spending most of my remaining itunes gift card on it, but one of the reviewers called it "The best Queen album they never released" or some such, so I thought what the hell.

It's not bad exactly, but...
My problem with The Darkness, I think, is that while they sound reasonably good (often), they are not smart or even particularly creative people, and the subject matter of their songs reflect that.

Here's a sample of the very best lyrics (honestly) from "Ticket", in the song "Blind Man"--
Tell me why the blind man cries
Oh, he sheds a tear because he just can't hear
the children singing
How he used to fantasize
Of standing next to some children who are doing singing

The song sounds a lot like Queen's "Barelona", but it's just too blantantly dumb and devoid of substance.

Queen are eclectic, both musically and in subject matter.* It always sounds like something's happening, even when it's not a coherent narrative. That's why their catalogue lent itself so naturally to a musical.

Queen's lyrics aren't terribly deep and meaningful, but they are quirky and evocative. You may not be able to say exactly just what is happening in Bohemian Rhapsody, but something certainly is, and it's something interesting.
And some of their more obscure songs (like my favorite '39 tell somewhat intricate little stories.

And I think that's important. I think it's really cool when people can use songs as an effective storytelling medium and still have them sound good.
It's something that, say, Iron Maiden and The Decembrists have in common, and The Darkness and Queen do not. And it's an important something.

I wouldn't say the album is bad exactly...there's a couple songs I rather like (including, believe it or not "Blind Man"), but there's a reason why Queen's special, and The Darkness simply don't get it.

--
*The rest of this is about the subject matter, but musically it should be noted that while Queen seemingly effortlessly bleneded countless musical genres in various interesting ways (sometimes to great effect, sometimes not), The Darkness range between successfully sounding just like a particular Queen song (or, in one particularly weird instance, a particular The Cure song) and sounding like squeaky shit. I'd say there's maybe three or four songs between the two albums that sound both good and not like a specific copy of someone else.

2005-12-29T21:13:00.000-08:00

You scored as Art. You should be an Art major! How bohemian!

Art

92%

Theater

83%

English

83%

Journalism

83%

Linguistics

75%

Dance

67%

Sociology

67%

Philosophy

67%

Mathematics

67%

Engineering

58%

Anthropology

50%

Psychology

50%

Biology

50%

Chemistry

33%

What is your Perfect Major?
created with QuizFarm.com

Either you are with the Constitution, or you are with the terrorists.

2005-12-19T03:54:00.000-08:00

So, I think Bush authorizing warrantless wire-tapping should be grounds for impeachment.

I'm not particularly angry about this particular incident, and I doubt it'd even make the top ten worst things he's done in office, but it seems particularly contrary to his duties as President.

When you're sworn into office, you say, "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States."

If the President, without the approval of Congress, willfully violates the Constitution (in this case, the Fourth Amendment), he's violating that oath.

The legal grounds for impeachment are extremely vague. The president (or anyone else in the Executive Branch) can only be impeached for committing, "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors." What constitutes a "high crime" is up to Congress to decide on a case-by-case basis.

Bill Clinton was impeached because Congress decided that getting a blow job and then lying about it was a high crime, which seems dubious, but for the sake of argument let's assume that's legitimate.
If lying about having sex is a high crime, isn't lying about upholding the constitution as well?*

I doubt it would happen, but it should. I'm not even saying he should be thrown out of office (though I certainly wouldn't shed any tears if he were), just that if he's going to take an action like that he should be prepared to deal with serious consequences.
It's possible that his actions were justified. But if that's the case, that should be determined by the people (well, Congress) not by him and his buddies.

According to Wikipedia, News of tapping sparked an outcry from many groups, including members of Congress, who feel such actions are a violation of constitutional rights. Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that "there is no doubt this is inappropriate" and "clearly and categorically wrong" and that he would hold hearings into the matter early in 2006.

I'd like to think that those "hearings" would be something on this scale, though it does seem unlikely. Pissed though they may be, it's hard for to imagine that the Republican Party would be sufficiently indignant to throw Bush to the wolves.

But, as we say here in the biz, only time will tell.

--
*No, he didn't lie about what he did. But he said he'd never do it, then did, then obscured that fact.

And lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty, and from that day it was as one dead.

2005-12-14T03:49:00.000-08:00

I'm mostly just writing this now instead of in the morning in the hopes of scooping people, but I just saw King Kong.*
It's really cool and it's kind of encouraging when you think about how in the last 7 years we've stopped seeing movies like Godzilla (1998) and started seeing movies like this.

I love the original King Kong (I just got the DVD on my birthday), and I was more than satisfied with this one, which is exciting, moving, and looks great, from the creepy beasts on the island to the theaters and slums of New York.

But what really struck me about it was how Peter Jackson could be both incredibly obsessed with the original King Kong, and so very critical of that movie's values.
(minor spoilers ahead)
Single shots and lines are taken verbatim from the original, and some of the action sequences (like Kong's fight with the T-Rex, which he kills by forcing open its jaw) are very similar, and it's obvious that Jackson knew the original backwards and forewards.

But a lot of that material is recontextualized in a really weird way--the film revels in the spectacle, but also seems critical of it.

The difference is most evident in the scene of Kong's capture and display.

Carl Denham's line after the capture is the same as before--"We're millionaires, boys. I'll share it with all of you. Why, in a few months, it'll be up in lights on Broadway: Kong, the Eighth Wonder of the World."
But this time we've just seen, from Ann's point of view, the cruel treatment of Kong by the sailors at Denham's behest, as well as the carnage that proceded it.
In the original film, Denham's words were still cavalier, but they were more or a rallying cry--here, he just seems opportunistic and wreckless.

When Kong is revealed to the paying audience, Jackson uses elements from the earlier film in a really bizarre way.
The natives in this movie are creepy and emotionless, unlike the dancing bushmen of the original.
But in Denham's mock-up of Kong's home, we get actors (apparently in blackface!) doing the exact dance from the original movie. The orchestra plays the original's 'native' music. Here, Jackson seems to be commenting on the exploitive nature of the earlier film.

But what's coolest about all this is that by alienating us from Denham and bringing us closer to Kong (he has some wonderful bonding scenes with Anne to the point where his biplane death really feels like a tragedy), the two are made to be equally human, and Denham becomes Kong's dramatic foil.
Denham destroys what he loves, while Kong is destroyed by them.

I think it's really cool that Jackson could take an awe-inspiring but rather stupid movie and turn it into something poignant and thought-provoking. I remember thinking before how fun it'd be to remake King Kong, but I'm really impressed that he could elevate it in the way he has, in a way that would never have occurred to me.** He played perfectly to its strengths while improving on its weaknesses, and while you could argue it's a less monumental achievement than the stop motion spectacle of 1933, it's just as awesome an experience.

Also, it has dinosaurs. DINOSAURS!

--
*My stepbrother Colby has a friend who manages a movie theater in Atascedero, so we got to see it two hours before it opened legit. But since it's over two hours long, it opened while we were still watching. Wah wah.
**NEWSFLASH: PETER JACKSON A BETTER FILMMAKER THAN KANE!

(blowjob)

2005-12-03T18:29:00.000-08:00

My birthday marked the second anniversary of the mysterious appearance of Farabundo de Los Ratos Libres. My other rats barely made it to two years, but Farabundo's at least that old (she was young when we got her, but not a baby) and still going strong.

Bund, then known as Libre or Ninja (because of her mysterious nature and hood), the day after we discovered her under the couch.

The other thing was that I read two of my comics in front of my whole Creative Writing class with other helping me do all the parts.

My TA emailed me over Thanksgiving to tell me that she chose me to read to the class, but apparently I was chosen at random. But it turns out that in addition to that, the professor picked me to read a dopey comic I turned in to the whole class.

On Monday, I came to class and saw "KANE LYNCH" written on the projected powerpoint in huge letters. The teacher called me up and I hastily convinced Jamie to help me read the male parts and Julie to do the girl parts.
It went over wonderfully. Everybody laughed at everything (though especially the word "fag") and when I sat back down I felt pretty awesome.

On Wednesday, I was to read again and decided on doing "The 14th Saying", the short Quamran spin-off story that I wrote and Nikki drew.

Ahoo, another girl from my section, played Mala-Ke, the main character, while Julie played the bitchy girl and Dana-Min (the female cleric) and I played Alken the technician and Ret-Milan (the male cleric).

I thought we did a pretty decent job. Ahoo pronounced all the names fine, and captured the character's bitterness, Julie played both a bitch and a holy women well, and while I stuttered when I first started talking, I actually think it helped, since it made Alken sound different than the smoother Ret-Milan.

But the thing is...
The reaction wasn't awful. Everyone was polite and supportive, and one guy asked to see my paper copy afterward so he could look at it more.

But it got vastly less reaction than the (much shittier) comic we did on Monday, and much less than the guy who followed me, who won the crowd over by saying "blowjob".

Some people did some really awesome stuff (my TA read some of her unpublished novel, which was very neat), but nothing got as much reaction as the "blowjob" guy.

What does that say about us?

...

Still, it was a very neat thing that we got to do, and it was really cool of both our teacher and my TA to be so accomdating to my kind of weird idea. We're certainly not the first people to perform a comic (I remember hearing about David "Feminist-Homosexualist Axis" Sim doing one like a year ago), but I think it's something that should be explored further. Maybe.

2005-12-02T17:04:00.000-08:00

Every article (like this one) in the mainstream press about comics always mentions Chris Ware as the pinnacle of comics acheivement. Chris Ware did Jimmy Corrigan and Acme Novelty Library and a lot of other very visually intricate, elaborately composed, extremely hard to read books.

Off the top of my head, I can think of two people I've actually talked to who liked Chris Ware--my first boss at Barnes & Noble, and Dan Clowes, who mentioned Ware when I saw him at Bookshop Santa Cruz.
I like him fine; I bought Jimmy Corrigan in 12th grade and somewhat enjoyed reading it.

But unlike David Boring or Sandman or Watchmen or Blankets or From Hell, everyone I've shown it to has started at it for awhile before dismissing it as unreadable.

Obviously popularity isn't the best judge of something's merit, and I'm glad that Chris Ware's work is out there.

But I think that comics are a medium, like film, which is so fundamentally accessible that it seems wrong to pride someone who seems to devote themselves to being hard to read as its champion. It's one thing to present complicated ideas, or a complicated story, but actually just making the thing hard to read is, in my opinion, a serious impediment to greatness.

2005-12-02T02:40:00.001-08:00

I have real things to write about, and better things to do than be writing about even those things, but I feel like saying--

When I first showed everyone the Quamran short prose story back in 12th grade, Amanda said that it was so clearly "Kane" that even if it didn't have a name on it, she'd know I'd written it.

At the time, I thought of that as kind of patronizing, but now I sort of like that about it. So, when I'm thinking if I should throw in references to things that I particularly like or don't like, that might make people who know me and pick up on them roll their eyes, I think, what the hell.

It's not the be all and end all of me by any means, but I think even if you didn't know me you could probably learn a lot about me by reading it.

You know. I mean, if you wanted to. And stuff.

Fighting corporations with clip-art, and why it doesn't work.

2005-11-19T16:42:00.000-08:00

Thursday night, I saw "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices", a documentary of sorts about why Wal-Mart is bad for the world, with Erika, because she wanted to see it, and it was in the Porter Dining Hall.

It was, as it turns out, stunningly shitty.

It was poorly edited on an immediately obvious level, with arbitary jump-cuts and tacky graphics (words like "THE STORE WAS CLOSED DOWN" fly at the screen, in time with ominous chords on the soundtrack, like a parody of a 20/20 episode).
But what really made it unforgivably bad was the failure to arrange the footage in a way that was emotionally engaging.
This material is perfect for a Fahrenheit 9/11 style emotionally-charged (even, arguably manipulative) piece--we have stores who've been owned and loved by families for generations, now being shut down; we have poor minorities who can't get real health care, and we even have the Chinese factory workers who get paid horribly--some of whom seem naive and sweet, some who have borderline-Marxist rhetoric. And to top it all off, you have those greedy motherfuckers at the top, the Waltons, billionaires who don't even pretend to care about the unwashed masses under their feet.

This could have been a great movie. Basic fluency with cinema from its makers should have it least made it a pretty good movie. But I'm convinced that the people who made it basically had no idea how to make a film.
Just as much as a fiction film, a documentary has to tell a compelling story. A quasi-propagandistic politcal documentary* doubly-so.
Fahrenheit 9/11 opens dramatically with the dream-like sequence about the 2000 election, comes to a climax in a contrast between brutality and Iraq and Britney Spear's flippant support of the president (as well as juxtaposing the devastation in Iraq to the shoddy conditions of people living in Flint).
The film ends omino uslywith a quote from O'Brian's speech in 1984, where O'Brian endorses perpetual warfare as a way to control the populace.

Wal-Mart does no such thing. It spends the first 45 or so minutes of its hour-and-a-half running time talking about "mom and pop" stores that were shut down by Wal-Mart, then transitions to the poor employees for awhile. Even there a lot of opportunities have been missed, but it's not too bad. Then things start going downhill. We go to China and Bangledesh to see what factory conditions are like, and talk to some of the people who work in them (complete with traditional "Chinese" music, so you know what country you're in). In a better movie, this could be the highlight--this is the side of the American economy we don't see, and the conditions these people live in are appalling. But it comes in at such a late point in the movie and is bridged to so awkwardly that it just feels random and uncompelling. The last 20 minutes spend some time with a black female Episcopalian preacher in Inglewood and her fight to keep the company out of the city, but the movie doesn't find time to linger on her kind of interesting leftish religious message because it has to talk about all the people who get assaulted in Wal-Mart parking lots--shitty to be sure, but only tangentally relevant.
The movie ends on a contrived positive note, with various legal victories over the corporation accompanied by the word "VICTORY" flashing across the screen in every font the editors could dredge up from their hard drive.

The movie is an arbitarily-organized mess. The outline wouldn't pass muster in a high school English class.

The movie ended to enthusastic applause, but I don't think my reaction was a unique one. As the credits rolled and I made my way upstairs to the bathroom, I overheard comments like, "That was kind of a good movie, but kind of a really bad movie," and "It would've been good if Michael Moore had made it."

I think it's like this--
You don't have to understand a lot about an art form to notice when it's done badly, but you do to avoid doing badly in your own art.
I was recently annoyed by a comic about prisons whose author visited us and basically admitted he knows nothing about comics. And the shitty layouts and bubble placements in his comic make this painfully obvious. He, like the makers of the Wal-Mart movie, are convinced that their cause is sufficiently important that their lack of fluency in their media doesn't matter.

In my opinion, this is kind of like someone deciding to become an ambulance driver despite not having a driver's license.

By a weird coincidence, last night this column I read by a marginally successful comic writer, Steven Grant, said:

In one of his novels, author William Burroughs...expressed the general philosophy: 'Whoever says if something's worth doing it's worth doing well is dead wrong. If something's worth doing it's worth doing no matter how well you can do it.' Which is true. This is how we learn, by doing....What isn't necessarily true is that it will be worth it to someone else. And there's the rub
...
There isn't any sort of Manichean split between craft and art. Craft without art is pretty damn pointless, it's true (not to mention annoying as hell). But art without craft is as bad. The point of craft isn't to break the spirit but to facilitate communication, because, really, that's what we're trying to do: communicate.
(You can read the rest here, though it's largely about punk rock and comic books)

While the Wal-Mart movie and prison comic people don't claim (I think) to be making high art, they need to recognize that a basic fluency with the conventions of their chosen media (what Grant calls "craft") and how to use them is neccessary if they're going to create anything that even the layman (no pun intended, Erika) can respect.

In a way, this makes me think I should try my hand at more publically useful works that are at least nominally technically proficient (I don't think I'm giving myself a huge compliment when I say I'm both a better film maker and a better cartoonist than those people). I suppose we'll see what happens after I finish Quamran

--
*A documentary is, according to my Film book, "A non-fiction film that presents (presumably) real objects, people, and events." It's not assuming objectivity, so I'm considering this and Michael Moore's movies (and for that matter, I guess, things like Triumph of the Will), legitimately documentaries.

Kitchen prose and gutter rhymes

2005-10-25T15:29:00.000-07:00

My aunt Kevyn* was visiting from Virginia, so my mom drove her up here to Santa Cruz the Friday before last.

I was in kind of bitchy mood (aside from interpersonal problems, I have insomnia and two canker sores), so I doubt I was the best of hosts, but we had a pretty good time.

My mom and I played ping pong in the living room, which led to much hilarious flailing on her part.

I had to go to Nine and Ten, so we all walked there, and then we ate at that weird vegetarian Gelato-heavy oxyen bar-having Italian restaurant and messed around downtown.

A few weeks before leaving SLO my mom had bought me a Jethro Tull greatest hits cause she wanted me to hear it, and most of it I liked fine but wasn't crazy about (just kind of 60s rock with flutes), but I really liked one song, "Songs from the Wood", so I asked her if she'd buy me that CD, so we stopped at the shitty Discount Records store and bought it. I really like it a lot, and I wonder why no one listens to them anymore, unlike most popular bands from that era.
IM me and I'll send you some.

We hung out at Bookshop Santa Cruz for awhile, and I bought a shitty copy of The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari for $6, and then got Clash of the Titans at Borders with my gift card. The bus strike is still in effect, so I took full advantage of one of my few opportunities to shop downtown.

My aunt talked to the umbrella guy a bit (they were both wearing pink!) and watched the weird accordian guy. I was more impressed, as I always am, but the crazy giant homeless percussion band, which this time had a saxophone guy, making it much better. Lots of hippies danced around, and a couple waspy little kids who were too innocent to realize how out of place they were.

There was a huge party happening in the Greenpartment, and I didn't want to deal with that, so I stayed at Nikki's.

In the morning, my mom and Kevyn picked me up and we ate breakfast and Brasil, which is a pretty neat little restaurant.

Afterward, we returned to a Greenpartment filled with people playing Super Smash Brothers.

Quincy (not looking up): Hey Kane. Is that Nikki with you?
Me: No, it's my aunt.
Quincy: Hey Aunt Nikki.

Soon, they left back for San Luis. Jake and I played a game of Wacraft against Frank (we won!) and then I got a horrible migraine.
I turned off all the lights and listening to audio books for about an hour, and then I mostly felt better.

I called Erika, since I haven't seen her in awhile, and she said she wanted to hang out, but not til later. I watched The Simpsons with Frank, Kailey, Jake and Quincy for awhile (Frank bought the DVD of the season which has all the good ones) and around midnight I met Erika at Cafe Revolucion. I knew they'd be out of good things to drink, so I brought my own tea bags, which she soon saw the wisdom of.

Afterward we went back to her apartment and talked for awhile. She seems really happy in Santa Cruz, probably more so than me, really, and talking to her made me feel a lot better.
I showed her Quamran, which her lack of livejournal/AIM/etc has prevented her from seeing before now, and she played me a song she recorded.
It was really nice and I think I need to spend more time with her. It's still funny for me that she's living so close by.

Today absolutely nothing happened.
Tomorrow I have to write a paper on Singin' in the Rain, which I should have done today.
Life is pretty decent.

--
*My mom is named Shawn, their other sister is Colin. They're all about the questionably misspelled masculine names.

But a herring! Doesn't! Whistle!

2005-10-15T17:03:00.000-07:00

This post has been two weeks in the making, cause a lot happens in it.

Friday the 31st I had dinner with Amanda, who lives here now, at her garage apartment on the outskirts of the town, near Capitola. It was slightly surreal since I'd kind of assumed I'd never much see her again and now she lives near me. But it was fairly nice.

That night my dad and Jamie came up to bring Farabundo and my bike. Frank and Ryan came in hilariously drunk/stoned and offered my dad a Newcastle. He politely accepted, and they ran away giggling like schoolgirls.

Then we went and ate at Saturn, where after thinking back on the Greenpartment my dad said, "I guess having a ping pong table take up the entire main room is kind of strange."
Across the street and visible from our booth, some guy got kicked out of a bar, tried to run back in, got stopped by the bouncer and left. Then eight cop cars came over the course of 10 minutes. The Santa Cruz police are good like that.

The next day, it was time to leave for Berekely to see MirrorMask. Nikki had gotten a ride from her (now) roomate Kris's boyfriend Ian and was already there, so I had to take the Greyhound alone. That alone wasn't so bad, but there was the added problem of how to get to the greyhound station. You see, there's this bus strike going on. The bus drivers want health care and the management wants, I dunno, to punch kittens, so until they get it resolved, it's obscenely difficult to get downtown.

Theresa said she'd give me a ride downtown to make the bus at noon, but the noon bus was sold out, and she wasn't able to take me to the next one, at 4:30. But she did help me get directions from the San Francisco stop to Berkeley.
So I walked down around 3, desperately hoping I wouldn't miss it. I didn't, and had a more or less uneventful Greyhound trip.

At some point I realized that the bus stopped in Oakland before San Francisco, and that's significantly closer to Berkeley, so I decided to get off there.
I called Nikki up and got her to find directions from the Oakland Greyhound stop to the BART station.
With contained reticence, I got off in Oakland.

I've been to Oakland before, and didn't think anything particularly bad about it. But this particular chunk of Oakland was...I don't know the weird? Scummy? Dingy? I asked some guy how to get to 21st street and he pointed me in completely the wrong direction. It was a really awkward moment when I walked past him in the opposite direction of what he told me, and it turned out he was actually sitting on a bench about 5 feet from the 21st street sign, so that was goofy.

I ran across the street and almost got hit ("Hey, I'm walkin' here!") then after asking for slightly better directions from another guy, found my way to a bigger "classier" street. It's weird how big cities have piles of expensive corporate shit so close to scummy poor shit. This is why I wouldn't like living in a big city. A bouncer looked at me suspiciously for walking past the door to the theatre he was bouncing. I saw that Jethro Tull and P. Diddy were both going to be there soon. I can only hope together.

The BART station had like 3 levels so it was hard to find the right part, but I did eventually. There was one other person waiting to go to Berkeley, a middle aged black woman named Alicia who was in Oakland watching a Will Smith movie being shot. She told me she was an actress and had co-starred in a play with Danny Glover's wife, and had starred in one with Denzel Washington as a stage hand. I don't know if she was telling the truth, but it was a lot more fun to take her word for it, so I did.
She asked me my star sign, both American and Chinese. I told her I was a tiger, and she said so was her late husband, and that tigers are gangsters. She told me she was from Chicago, a gangster town, and I'd fit right in (though she'd grown up in the whiteland that is Wisconsin).
So that was fun.

After rushing back and forth around Berkeley with Nikki and then Anna, we ended up having crepes and then seeing the movie. I got in first, while Nikki waited outside for Anna to come back with her friends. They came in just as it was starting, but didn't miss too much.

MirrorMask is good. It's not as good as it could've been in some ways--the plot's kind of episodic and arbitrary, and it doesn't have a very satisfying ending--but it has neat dialogue, charming (if shallow) characters, and looks gorgeous. I can be but so critical when I want to see it again already.

(If you’re curious, you can watch a lot of clips from it on RottenTomatoes.)

After the movie we ate at some sort of diner where for complicated reasons they gave Nikki a giant pile of cherries, and then Anna and Nikki walked me to David Priddy’s apartment to spend the night. It was slightly weird since David and I never much hung out (except for with Erika), but we just fucked around talking about movies and stuff (especially his copy of SLAMMED, which he let me borrow).

I read for a little while (Neil Gaiman’s latest novel also just came out, coincidentally) and then fell asleep on the couch bed, sleeping far longer than anyone else who lived there.
David helped me find my way back to Anna’s.

Anna, Nikki, and I went to a nearby dining hall for breakfast. Then they dropped me off at Comic Relief, this really classy comic store while they did other things.
They’d just had Neil Gaiman signing like two days before, so they had basically every comic he’s ever done autographed at cover price.
Which would be great, except I already have all of them, and I’m not going to rebuy a $20 book just because someone wrote their name in it, even if that someone is Neil Gaiman.

The last time I went to Comic Relief was in 2001, back when the idea of "serious" comics was exciting and new to me. Back then, I could pretty much pick up anything that looked to be vaguely realistic (or at least non-superheroey) and be guaranteed an interesting experience. Being both better read and more jaded now, I found less indie comics that were to my liking. Though this crazy Dave McKean (who directed MirrorMask) graphic novel caught my eye, but uncaught it with a $50 price tag. Maybe for my birthday.
I ended up reading a Star Trek comic, then getting this adaptation of the beginning of the Book of Mormon (!), by Mike Allred, who is a hip pop-arty comic artist (he did all the art for Chasing Amy, if that rings a bell) and not someone you’d expect to be a Mormon, but apparently he is. I also got a nifty Comic Relief t-shirt.

After meeting up with Anna and Nikki and eating, it was time to go back. Nikki and I got on the BART, hoping to make our way to Oakland in time to get on the Greyhound to SC.

We made it just in the nick of time, only to find out that the bus was sold out. After a probably too loud, “I hate Oakland” from me, Nikki called Kris and Ian, who agreed to give us a ride back to Santa Cruz, which was really nice of them.

We sat on the sidewalk outside the BART station for about an hour, across the street from the Jethro Tull place.For some reason, they couldn’t find their way to Oakland (I certainly can’t blame them), so we had to take the BART farther north to meet them so we could drive back South.

The rest of the trip went without incident. Ian dropped us off at the Greenpartment, where we came in and were laughed at by everyone.

Turns out that there had been a top secret showing of MirrorMask, along with a bunch of other movies, at the theater here, so everyone else saw it without having to go out of their way.

Wah wah waaaah.

"This is some wild, deep, far out society." --My creative writing TA

2005-10-14T04:11:00.000-07:00

Today a large portion of my Creative Writing section was devoted to people's responses to (most of) the first two chapters of Quamran, which I'd given to them last week to read.

It was really interesting to hear their reactions. They understood it a lot better than I feared and seemed to basically enjoy it (I worried the scifi would put off the indie folks, and the ambling dialogue would put off the geeks), but some of their reactions surprised me.

The TA thought Nei-Ly needed to be more emotive. I agree in some ways (his reaction to Anra being in his room is kind of ambiguous for example), but less so when she says, "I get that he's jealous of Jaril and dissapointed at not being picked. But he could be a little more dissapointed and jealous." Sure, he could, but he wouldn't be. I'm a lot more verbose and, um, emotionally open than he is, and I don't think I'd flat-out admit to being jealous.

I thought that people would find the beach scene cheesy and like the more naturalistic feel of the scene in Nei-Ly's room, but it was basically the opposite--they seemed captivated by Kri-Len ("You force the reader to make certain assumptions about the society, which are then subverted by Kri-Len" said one guy) and hated Anra), one person even going as far to suggest that she was a government spy (!).
I thought this was kind of funny because Anra is the only character (other than Nei-Ly obviously), who I would really identify with myself. She's not "brainwashed" (as the TA put it)--she's just pragmatic. If you had a friend who kept talking about how society sucks and people were jerks all the time, and was blatantly disregarding the feelings of your mutual friend, wouldn't you tell him to shut up after awhile? Obviously the story isn't coming out on her side, nor should it, but she's basically a decent person. If she's an antagonist at all, it's no fault of her own.

I think disliking Anra might come from the perception that Quamran is a dystopia, and since Anra seems to be endorsing it by discouraging Nei-Ly from complaining, they dislike her.
But while Quamran is far from a utopia, it's not supposed to be an oppressive hellhole either. One guy remarked that "there's no big brother" and their religion is "relatively harmless". And I think that sums it up well--Their religion, like any, can be good or bad. It becomes a reflection of the people who practice it as much as the converse.

One girl, Julie, compared Kri-Len to Clarice from Fahrenheit 451 (I find that title so hard to type post-Michael Moore), which didn't occur to me cause I haven't read it since 7th grade, but is a pretty good comparison. The fact that Nei-Ly lived in a numbered apartment reminded her of 1984, a comparison which makes less since to me, but whatever.

All around, I really liked what people said. I agreed with a lot of it, and when I didn't, it was intelligent enough to be informative. It made me feel encouraged about the accessibility and meaningfulness of the project.

I liked the way one guy (Steven "Jamie" Thompson) summed it up, "It's kind of an interesting concept: a society based upon faith, which in turns seems to be based upon technology and mathematics. Strange tension pulling there."

I'd say it's more based on political theory than technology (though math has played a role in waht we've seen), but I like that.
I just hope that tension will pay off into something satisfying. I've never written anything this long before, and the impression I've gotten from some people is that it's getting to the point where that build-up needs to pay off.

I'm doing my best folks!
And if you have any other critique or would like to weigh in on these comments, I'd love to hear it.

Love will steer the planets, and peace will guide the stars

2005-09-24T19:32:00.000-07:00

The trip back to Santa Cruz last Monday, courtesy of my mom and Gene, was unnotable but good. I dropped my scanner when bringing my stuff in, and I can't get the lid back on, but it still scans, so c'est la vie.

The Greenpartment*, our new home, is pretty kickass. It's got two floors, and down here it's just me and Jake's room, and Dan's, so it looks like it'll be pretty easy to be reclusive if that's what one wants to do. Upstairs is Eric in another single, and Frank and Ryan in a double, though Frank is currently in Baton Rouge helping hurricane victims, and will be for at least several days.

Dan is the only guy living here I didn't really know before (I'd only met him a couple times), but he seems pretty cool. Some of the sparse conversation I'd had with him before revolved around Sandman, and we ended up having a neat talk about graphic novels while he perused my newly-arranged collection.

Right when I got here, I ran into Jake (my roomate once again) and Quincy, who was loitering in our Greenpartment. It didn't take long for Angelo and Nikki to come, and after a very halfassed meeting with our RA (I think Bundo's forthcoming arrival will go without incident), we went to Mission St for pizza, then came back and Angelo, Nikki, Jake and I went to Kresge to get free ice cream/sorbet (coconut sorbet is the Jesus of sorbets) and to watch "The Lost Boys", which all but the most unhip of you know was filmed in Santa Cruz.

It's a weird movie because it veers wildly between moments of genuine artistic and technical awesomeness (the shot of the dog chasing the mom which is then intercut with the kid running after the mom is pitch-perfect) and near-incompetent hilarity ("How do you like those maggots? Cause that's what you're eating, you know. Maggots. Not rice like we said. Actually just kidding, it's rice").

Tuesday there was a really shitty psuedo-First Rain where it drizzled for about 5 minutes in the early afternoon and 15 determined people got naked for 20 minutes and then went home.

Then the Dell-sanctioned guy came out to fix my computer. He put in a new motherboard and CD drive. The good news is that now the CD drive, sound, and even the touchpad work again. The bad news is the computer overheats after being on for about 20 minutes and then shuts off. He's coming today or tomorrow to fix it for real.

Ghun.

Later was Nikki's birthday party, which involved many cupcakes.

I came home, along with Angelo, and watched the pilot of Stargate SG1 with Ryan and Megan. I don't think it's much worse than the movie, and it was pretty enjoyable, but I don't think Stargate is really my thing.

Later still I watched They Live (the best socialist action scifi movie ever), which I had bought at Borders the night before, with Angelo, Jake, Eric, his friend Colin, Kailey, Natalie, Teresa, and eventually Nikki. It was weird to accumulate so many people suddenly, and I don't think all of them particularly liked it, but it was good times.

Then Angelo, Nikki, Jake, and I went to Saturn, cause we were hungry, and Nikki was hungry for cheese fries. Some homeless guy who spit a lot tried to tell us why women are bad, so I asked our waitress to make him leave, which she sort of did. Everyone in the restaurant sang happy birthday for Nikki and it was very amusing.

Wednesday night me, Angelo, Nikki, Quincy, Jake, and Dan played Risk, which went pretty well, though I got mad at Nikki for ruining my domination of North America, so I made my mission to wipe her out in Asia, rather than, say, win.
I found out that Dan is into Rhapsody's Rain of A Thousand Flames video, which is excellent and you should see, whether you love Rhapsody or absolutely hate them, because it is quite simply a beautiful thing.

The Dell guy was supposed to come back Thursday morning, but it turned out he couldn't make it before my class at 2. He said maybe he could come at like 6. Ghun.

Then I took a bus to Intro to Creative Writing, which is at Stevenson. For those of you who don't know the campus, Stevenson is about as far as you can possibly get from Porter while still being in the same zip code.

I made the trek from the bookstore bus stop up the hill to neighboring Cowell, then stumbled to Steveson, and had little trouble finding the room.
I congratulated myself on being 15 minutes early.

But...

The room was dark. The door was unlocked, but no signs of a class whatsoever.

I found the college office and got online--it turned out that what I have thursdays is not the actual class, but the discussion section, which doesn't start til next week.

The bad news was I went all the way to Stevenson for nothing. The good news was that there was time to get my computer fixed.

It took the Dell guy the same amount of time to get to Porter from Highway 17 as it did me from Stevenson. But we met up without incident and it turned out that his fight with Dell over parts had resulted in him getting 2-3 copies of all of them.

With the exception of my hard drive and battery, he replaced everything inside the computer, and (as of this writing) it all works spiffy.
So, I basically have a new computer for free, and it's kicking ass.

He was a pretty fun guy, though as we walked back to his car (I helped carry things) he pointed out which Porter girls he wanted to bang, which was a little uncomfortable.

Then it was off to Film 20A, which I went to with Jake while Angelo and Nikki happily attended their very important class, called Muppet Magic.
Our teacher is a somewhat effeminate New Zealander, and seems pretty cool.
We watched a bunch of silent movies, which prompted one guy so ask why they were all in fast forward.
*sigh*
We watched a really nifty movie by Thomas Edison about a machine that turns dogs into sausages and back again, which I think we were supposed to not like that much, but whatever, it was nifty. The idea is so bizarre but very similar to the Star Trek transporter or, for that matter, any computer, so it's interesting, and the effect was well-accomplished.

During the class I got a migraine which went from annoying to unbearable over the next hour. Angelo and Nikki came over with plans to make omlettes, and I wanted to buy Neil Gaiman's new novel, so we went downtown. I borrowed Eric's sunglasses so the light would hurt less, and kept my eyes closed on the bus ride.

Angelo went to a concert featuring The Unseen, and agreed to meet up with us in a few hours.

I bought the book at Borders (don't tell) and got coffee there too, which made me feel much much better. This could be a very bad sign, but for the moment, things are better.

Nikki and I had a nice time drinking coffee and chatting (my bookstore skillz make the poorly-run Santa Cruz Borders slightly painful, but interesting), then we went to Trader Joe's to pick up general food and omlette-making supplies. I bought a bunch of stuff, all of which was under $3, but it was several things, so I was worrried. But I only spent $20 of my mom's money, so it worked out.

The bus driver wouldn't let me on the bus without paying $1.50, cause I left my ID in the dining hall, and wouldn't let me on with the $1.25 I had, so I had to borrow a quarter from some random dude. He was really assholey about it, which I tried to repeat as loud as possible whenever possible for the rest of the trip back. But really, if I were a fucking bus driver, I wouldn't have much patience with people obviously richer than me with more prospects than me (that is to say, in college) being stingy with money.
So, he is in fact a colassal asshole, but I guess he's an asshole for a reason.

We came back and Kailey was over for some reason, and she played us a band called Harry and the Potters, who are really great.
They're kind of like if Blind Guardian sounded like Cake and their songs were about Harry Potter and they looked like this.

They are very good.

Then we made omlettes, which involved cannibalizing the cooking supplies of everyone who lives here. No one even knew what they had, because cooking supplies appeared to be mostly parent-chosen. We couldn't find a cheese grater, so I cut it up with my knife, which Nikki made smaller with Ryan's knife. It was a good system.
The omlettes were slightly gooey, but had good spinach and good cheese, so it was a victory all around. It was also the most egg I've eaten in like a year and I don't intend to do it again, but it was probably my best night back so far.

Saturday I saw The Corpse Bride, which I'll talk more about in a later post, probably, and reinstalled Windows to try to fix the last of my problems. This created more problems than it solved, such as an inability to play DVDs, go on the internet, or open my Flash files. The first two were solved fairly simply (though Quincy had to help me reinstall ethernet drivers we downloaded on Jake's computer), but still working on the Flash situation.

Unfortuantely, I can't get back to work on my comic until I fix it.

Ghun.

--
*The reason for this name has long since faded into the mists of time.

Could this still be real, or just some kind of Hell?

2005-08-21T17:23:00.000-07:00

So, last Saturday (the 13th) we went to Ozzfest in Mountain View.

Angelo spent the night on Friday.
My dad woke me up at 7 am. Jamie came over at 7:30 and then we took off, my dad and Jamie in his car, and Angelo and I in mine.
The 3-hour drive from SLO to Mountain View was nice. We were menaced by a guy with a boat hitched to the back of his car (alias "Boaty") who thought it would be a good idea to be going 75-80 with a boat, but he went away soon enough and the rest of the drive was without incident.

They had us park in a makeshift dirt parking lot. When we got out, some guy gave me the CD for his band, which I've yet to listen to--I think it was called something like "Death to all", but I might've made that up.

When we got there, we were told that if we left again, we wouldn't be allowed back in. This meant we would be trapped in Ozzfest for 12 hours without our own food or drinks or (this proved the worst for me) books.
More strangely, they let us bring water bottles in, but confiscated their lids because, "you could use those to refill them with water". Any water purchased during the festival came without tops.
Um, alright.

The area immediately inside the gates basically looked like the Renaissance Fair--lot sofonly less nerdy.
No, wait.
It looked basically like the Renaissance Fair, only with lots of overpriced Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden shit instead of overpriced corsets and jester hats--so, just as nerdy, but in a more "metal" way.

Ozzfest was filled with nerds, and I don't mean that as a perjorative. I just mean we (me and Angelo) didn't stand out as the lame ones, even though I was wearing a Rhapsody shirt and he was weary a pirate radio shirt Bowen found on the ground that isn't even black.

The four of us ambled toward the second stage, a large propped-up affair surrounded by a mass of people, broken only by a semi truck (!) filled with PlayStation Portable demos, and some kind of VIP seating truck.

It was about 11 at this point, and a band was already going. I don't remember them very well, but my dad seems to think they had a girl singer, so with that information and the website I'm led to the conclusion that it was Arch Enemy.

Angelo and I kind of ignored them and walked around for a bit. Jamie bought a program for $15, and I saw a Rob Zombie shirt I liked, but it was $30, which is more than I'm willing to pay for a fucking T-shirt.

We went and bought some pizza, from the one place we could find that didn't look at me blankly when I asked if they had anything vegetarian.
The crowd was a hilarious combination of older metal dudes, gothy teenagers, misc nerds, and what Angelo calls "concert jocks", big mean guys. There were some (usually rather...Ruebenesque) women who put tape over their nipples and then painted themselves, usually in bright not-particularly-thematic colors.

When we came back to the stage, the singer from another band (Gizmachi, maybe?) was complaining about someone flashing something called "fake boobies" at them, and so someone dutifully flashed them properly. He referred to the audience as "'Frisco", which confused me, since we were a good 40 miles from anywhere one could reasonably refer to as 'Frisco.

After a few confused moments ("Wait, is this band called, 'Soilwork'? The fuck?"), we ambled back over to my dad and Jamie, who were off at these shaded picnic tables to the side of the stage. They were looking through the program, which didn't appear to be in any particular order. We let some guy borrow it so he could try to figure out when As I Lay Dying was coming on, and while I doubt it told him, they ambled out soon enough.

That guy was pretty nice, but for the record, fuck As I Lay Dying. Between songs the guy said vaguely angry stuff and then they went back to doing really generic distortion heavy thump-guitar and screaming "Yaaaaaaaaah!"
Angelo and I stopped paying attention to what they guy was saying and made up our between song banter and lyrics.

Me: Ok, this song's called "Return of the Land of Me Going 'Yah'."
Angelo (perfectly in time with a song he's never heard): Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Yaaah! Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
Some metal guy: *looks at Angelo and nods approvingly*
Me: Alright, this next one's a little something called "Battle for the Planet of Me Going 'Yah'".
(repeat)

Around that time there was also Mastodon. Before they came on, Angelo said, "Isn't that the band where all their songs are about Vikings?" And I couldn't understand a word, so I couldn't tell you if that's true or not. But Wikipedia tells me they could be classified as "Progressive Sludge Metal". I don't know what that means, but it's ok by me. Keep on truckin', Mastodon.

Soon after that came Killswitch Engage, who my dad likes a lot. They're pretty good generally. They do the "screamy than pretty" thing vastly better than most bands, and all around I approve. But live, the pretty part doesn't work well, because the audio levels are balanced for screaming, so when the singer isn't screaming he just gets covered by the guitar.
Speaking of which, their guitarist wouldn't shut up, which was sometimes pretty funny--"This show is so fucking metal. You know how fucking metal this show is? Look on that hill right there! (Points to a mounted police guy) There is a guy on a fucking horse! That's fucking metal! FUCK!"
But my dad didn't like him because he said a song was about eating pussy instead of about broken hearts, like it's supposed to be.

After Killswitch finished, we knew it was time for what we'd all been waiting for--Rob Zombie. Zombie was a big enough act to get onto the first stage, with Black Sabbath and the rest, but he likes the energy of the second stage, with its lack of assigned seating, so he chose to play with the smaller bands.

Angelo convinced me to move closer to the front, which wasn't too difficult. I was behind a lady with a Korn tatoo on her neck, and I felt bad for her.

After too much waiting, the generic between-band music stopped and the Alvin & The Chipmunksesque preacher from "The Sinister Urge" tellilng us we'd "All Burn in the painful everlasting firey hell!"
Then a guitarist in a skull mask came out and started rocking, followed by a similarly dressed and comically overzealous drummer. Soon, Zombie himself came out. The gaunt creepy figure on the cover looked so little like the guy we saw talking about movies at Comic-Con and I'd wondered what he'd look like on stage. It was a pretty good balance between the two. He looked badder as than he had in San Diego, but he didn't look all dressed up and stupid.

He played all of his and White Zombie's most notable songs, including Living Dead Girl, with the unfortunate exception of "I Feel So Numb". He and his new band sounded great and they did great audience participation stuff, like throwing beach balls into the crowd, and he threatened to dub in the audience from Denver in our place on the live CD if we didn't rock out hard enough.

I don't understand how anyone could prefer As I Lay Dying and thier ilk to Rob Zombie. One sounds good and is silly and fun, and one is "Yaaaaaaaaaaaaah".

The down side to Rob Zombie was he was too popular and good to support the size of the second stage. For some reason, as soon as he started, people wouldn't stop moving. Not, like, mashing and stuff. That'd be fine. I could've handled another bloody nose.

But no. It was just people ambling around like jackasses. Everyone at the front wanted to be at the back. Everyone at the back wanted to be at the front. Then they'd change their minds and switch back. One fat greasy guy just decided to sit on me for awhile.
So I wormed my way to the back (becoming that which I hated most) and hung out with my dad and Jamie again.
Fucking Ozzfest assholes. No manners.

After Rob Zombie, the second stage was through and everyone made migrated to the main stage, a permanent assigned-seating venue that's actually the point of the place. The walk there was crowded and tedious. Some dude yelled in my dad's ear, and some person hugged me (!) and kept moving.

We finally got there, and slumped into our seats, which were to the left side and very close to the stage.
We came in when some band I ignored was finishing up. After they were gone, big TV screens projected Ozzfest promos from some premium-only music channel called Fuse, which consisted mostly of this girl being annoyingly "sassy" and giving the metal sign and then asking band members if they liked metal.
There were also ads for The Devil's Rejects and some piece of shit show about an escapist magician. I thought it was called "Crisis Angel", but it's actually "Criss Angel: Mindfreak"--"Chris" is just spelled all retarded for no reason. The show has nothing to do with metal other than that he has long hair and they let Rob Zombie be in one episode (apparently)--A&E just threw a bunch of money at them.
and one of the first bands on that stage was Black Label Society, who I generally approve of and who eschewed Ozzfest's typical strategy of putting the crap at the beginning.

But...

I just couldn't bring myself to care. I felt really drained from the oppressive crowds on Rob Zombie and the trek between stages and despite all the noise I was ready to take a nap right there.

Through the power of text messenging, Angelo suggested we get dinner, as it was about 5 o'clock and the prospect of listening to Shadows Fall (which is a way better livejournal name than band name) followed by Mudvayne (which is a way better name for a sewer pipeline than a band).

We went and bought mediocre $6 burritos and topless water and went up onto the grass behind the seats where we'd get a much quieter view of the procedings. Speaking of topless, there were these two 15-year-old girls who did the boob paint thing, only with confederate flags, and quickly became Angelo's arch-enemies.

We sat on the grass for awhile, watching the horse on the hills, the people playing golf in the distance (I'm sure they were crazy about the inescapable noise of Ozzfest), and occasionally talking about how much we hated Mudvayne or Nazis. Speaking of which, Mudvayne had these big red banners with black-outlined white circles on them. Sound familiar?

But they made sure to let us know that they support our troops, so that makes everything ok.

Just kidding. Fuck Mudvayne hard.

After 2 or 3 weeks, Mudvayne finally wrapped up. At this point, we were very much not feeling the Ozzfest spirit and just wanted it all to be over. It occurred to me that Metal has no pretense of having any sort of real principles behind it--Like, a punk rock show where water costs $4 a bottle can cause riots (and has), but metal's only ideals seem to involve being loud and maybe wearing black.

I thought about how the metal that I like (from Rhapsody to Rob Zombie) is very fun and tranparently silly, compared to the aggressive unpleasantness of Mudvayne. But neither has more of a legitimate claim to the term.

Iron Maiden was supposed to be next. They'd been one of the acts I was most excited to see (the other being Rob Zombie), but I was feeling so burned out I wasn't even sure if I could enjoy it.

I decided to pee, which I really should've done during the band I hated instead of between bands, but I'm dumb. Eventually I got into a bathroom. It was crowded as hell with goofy metal guys.

Then one dude, having just finished washing his hands, turned to everyone and said, "Who came here to see the greatest fucking band in the world--IRON MAIDEN!"
It was hard for me to clap with peeing, but I appreciated the sentiment. So many metal people just like to be assholes and act like they're better than you cause they're meaner, and here's this guy trying to make a positive connection with people.

Then some asshole retorted, "If you think they're so great, why are you in the bathroom when they're about to start?"
I didn't stay to see if the guy gave the obvious answer ("Cause I had to pee").

I hobbled out to our seats and saw that Iron Maiden had just begun.
Within a few minutes, all my negative feelings were gone.
The stage was perfectly laid out, in a beautifully garisharray of spooky imagery exactly as it would have been in the early 1980s. The band was all dressed in tight clothes, with the lead singer wearing pants with frills all the way around. They had four guitar players.*

I didn't know every song, or even most songs, but they sounded great, and the crowd was really into them. Were these the same people who'd just been listening to Mudvayne? It hardly seemed possible.

The singer ranted to us about how much he hated corporate America, and how in contract with other metal celebrities (read: Ozzy), "Iron Maiden's never going to suck corporate cock!"
He ranted between songs, barely comprehensible in his hilarious English accent.

Iron Maiden guy: I fucking hate venues like this one, with "assigned seating"!
Guys in front rows: Yeah! Metal!
Iron Maiden guy: And I hate you assholes in the front rows who are only there because you paid more!
Guys in front rows: Yeah! Metal!

And the best part--
"I fucking hate venues like this one! Iron Maiden hates venues like this one! You know why we're playing here? You know the only reason? Cause we fuckin' hate em!"

Huh?
I don't know.
But it was badass.

When they played "Number of the Beast", they had a Baphomet-type goat god rise from under the stage, and every time they said, "Six! Six six! The number of the beast!" a giant 666 flashed behind them.
While I'd never been super into Iron Maiden (though "Beast" and their hilarious version of "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" have been staples of my car music all summer), they're undeniably kin to all the bands I do listen to a lot (particularly Gamma Ray), and hearing them, and seeing their ridiculous outfits, and their senseless-but-well-meaning anti-corporatism, made me remember why I'd go to something like Ozzfest in the first place.

After Maiden, Angelo brought up an interesting point--if there's enough of a market for a band like this that (it appears) people are more interested in them than shit like Mudvayne, why don't they invite more bands of this type and less of that? Probably because they're more confident in their ability to make money through selling overpriced water than by having good music.

After more stupid TV promos, we got to Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne's band who essentially created Metal. I've never listened to Black Sabbath much (except for "Iron Man", which is a great song), but they were quite awesome, and I liked that they were them because they were something everyone could agree on. Aside from one dude who yelled (jokingly, I hope) "Get off the stage!", everyone at Ozzfest wanted to hear Black Sabbath.

Ozzy Osbourne is a ridiculous man, but you knew that.
What's great is that he knows it too. Angelo thought he acted too bouncy and insufficiently scary, but he's far too ridiculous to ever intimidate anyone, and I'm glad he didn't try.
He just went out and saw a bunch of people who all like metal (and, by extension, him) and he just looked happy to see everyone. He hopped around while singing and just looked happy.
He was wearing all black, but it also looked to be a sweater and sweat pants. He mooned the crowd goofily and then threw his shirt into the audience, revealing his flabby body, of which he didn't seem remotely embarrassed.
He finished with "Iron Man", then came on with three or four encores with very little prevocation. He just didn't want to stop.

Finally, with an urging from Ozzy that we not drink and drive, Ozzfest was over. It was about 1 am, meaning we'd been at Ozzfest for 15 hours.

We went out to the car and realized that there was no chance in hell of us getting out soon, since the cars were so piled up. We decided there was no point in, in my dad's words, "sitting there getting carbon monoxide poisoning", so we had what is apparently called a "tailgate party", where we sat on the back of his car and ate sandwiches. Not knowing that we wouldn't be allowed in and out, Jamie had brought large amounts of food, a combination of vegetarian lunch meat and sandwich supplies, and stuff from her job at the hot dog stand.

Some people offerred us beer, which we declined but was kindly, and then one guy wanted a sandwich. He was kind of tripped out by the idea of people who don't eat meat ("So...what do you barbeque?") but he seemed to enjoy it, and he was nice.

And before we knew it, the dense wad of cars had drizzled out, and we were ready to leave.
We parted ways with my dad and Jamie, and gingerly made our way to Nikki's house in Santa Cruz.

Our time in there was nice, but uneventful. I dragged them to some comic stores, we found a dragon-themed shop run by two middle-aged women which amused me to no end, went to the aforementioned beach, and watched a movie where Malcolm MacDowell plays HG Wells, fighting Jack the Ripper in modern-day San Francisco. We went to the boardwalk, which I'd never really done, and rode some roller coasters and went in the awful haunted house. We got and shared good Chinese food.

And on Tuesday evening, Angelo and I decided to head back to San Luis. I bought an Iron Maiden CD on iTunes (they made a convert out of me), which became the soundtrack for our treacherous return drive.
We'd made the mistake of taking the 1 instead of the 101 and were stuck on a hilly ocean drive that I'm sure is very pretty in the daytime but at night is desolate, slow, and dangerous.
The average speed limit was 35 mph.
The most interesting thing we saw the whole way was some pigmy foxes who wouldn't run away from my car cause they were picking roadkill off the road.
We stopped in a "town" (three buildings) called Gorda (my subconscious keeps renaming it Puta), where I asked for a bathroom and the guy made fun of me and I didn't realize it until after we'd left.**

After hours of no civilization, we were dropped off in San Simeon and from there it wasn't long to Cambria to Cayucos to San Luis. A car full of 15 year old putas pulled up next to us in Cayucos, and then mooned us. If a fat guy moons someone, it's presumably supposed to be gross. If a girl flashes someone, it's presumably supposed to be sexy. This failed on both counts, and we gave exactly the approrpriate reaction--none.

And, honestly, once you've been mooned by the Prince of Darkness himself, everything else just seems tame.

--
*One of them was probably a bass, but that's still a hell of a lot of guitars.
**He told me the bathroom was on the other side of the road. But see, there's nothing on the other side of the road but ocean. But see, you could pee in the ocean. Comic gold.

What powerful but unrecorded race/Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

2005-08-16T11:20:00.000-07:00

Today's picture is sort of a combination of these really pretty rock formations we saw at the beach today and this really not-pretty Iron Maiden album cover.

I'm in Santa Cruz, at Nikki's house. Angelo is here with me. Saturday he and I went to Ozzfest in Mountain View, which I will describe in detail soon. Now we're hanging out here for a few days.

Ruins are cool.

Just a test...

2005-08-11T15:22:00.000-07:00

I just realized you can upload pictures to blogger, so I'm going to try it out.

Classy, girly, and mysterious, this little number keeps all the super men guessing!

2005-08-11T15:13:00.000-07:00

Santa Barbara
Last Wednesday I went to Santa Barbara with my mom. I drove all the way both ways, which was good because I haven't done a lot of freeway driving in the past, and I need to practice. It went really well. Passing large trucks still makes me nervous and I tend to overcorrect, but not enough to be a real problem.
My mom is easily goes frantic while riding in a car she's not in control of, but she remained unfreaked for the most part.

It took forever to find parking in Santa Barbara, a city which seems to have decided not to have parking decks as a point of pride, but hasn't bothered to come up with a decent substitute. Ah well. Once we did find parking, it was pretty reasonably priced.

We ate lunch at a place called something like The Natural Cafe, cause my mom wanted something organic/vegetarian/healthy/whatever. I got tempeh tacos and guacamole, cause I fell in love with tempeh in Santa Cruz, and you know me and guacamole. It was pretty good, though the hippieness of the establishment compelled them to put sprouts on it which, while not unappetizing, isn't very Mexican.

Then we went to this place that sells gourmet dog treats, because "Floberz wouldn't like it if she found out I was here and didn't get her anything."

We stopped in a Scientology place (reading room?) that had these hilarious psuedo-futuristic touchscreens that played video clips of L. Ron Hubbard talking about releasing evil energy from your body. They looked very expensive, yet somehow still very unimpressive. I took a pamphlet, which explained (among other things) how the invention of psychology directly lead to the holocaust. In the words of Andy Richter, their religion is laugh out loud stupid. But such fun!

Then we stopped at a Pottery Barnish place for my mom and then the comic store for me.
Santa Barbara's Metro Comics is weird place, because it's a pretty good comic store, but still very much a comic store. They have a good selection organized in a comprehensible way (something completely alien to Captain Nemo's in San Luis), but that also makes some of the frustrating quirks of comic stores apparent.

Suppose you run a bookstore or a comic store (or for that matter, an auto supply store or a supermarket). You order 6 of product x, 6 of product y and six of product z.

In one week, you've sold 2 of x, 2 of y, and all 6 of z.
In two weeks, you've sold 5 of x, 2 of y, and you no longer have any z.

So, what do you do?
If you're a normal bookstore, you probably keep your order of x the same, drop your order of y down, and increase your order of z.
A comic store, in contrast, would keep all their orders at 6, figuring they were right about x, y will sell eventually and z is just a fluke.

No wonder comics don't sell (Angelo suggested this weirdness is the fault of the distributors, not the actual stores, and considering one company has a virtual monopoly* on distribution and can pretty much make up the rules, he may have a point.

So that was exciting.

Tom Petty
The next night, my dad and I went to see Tom Petty at the Midstate Fair. Jamie had to work at her hot dog stand, so he had asked me to go with him.

It took about an hour longer to get there than expected because the fair traffic made getting into Paso Robles, the shithole town nominally in SLO county, is normally non-existant, but the fair made it packed.
At the freeway exit, traffic was dead stopped, and we were behind a Honda Element (ick) who was pased by a Hummer (ick ick). I can't believe people actually drive those.

I'm not even going to talk about parking.

On our way from the car to the fair, we saw a wad of drunken teenagers. One of them yelled my name, and I realized I knew her from, like 10th grade. Then I realized I knew all of them. Man, being in San Luis is awkward.
They bragged that they'd taken the 1 instead of the 101 and so they probably beat us there. Then we got into line before them because they were drunk and goofy. Then it didn't matter because there was assigned seating.

The fair is basically a grease and beer filled monument to hillbilly capitalism. It doesn't seem like something that exists in the same world as I do, about as familiar as the Mos Eisley cantina.

I decided to refer to everything large and fair related as a Tilt-O-Whirl, regardless of whether or not it tilted or whirled.

We had slightly shitty seats, on high school-style bleachers to the right of the stage, but we could see ok.
The crowd was an odd bunch, roughly 1/3 indie kids my age, 1/3 yuppies my dad's age*, and 1/3 rednecks who were probably at the fair anyway and just gravitated toward the loudest thing that was near a beer vendor.
People started throwing a beach ball around the crowd, and a loud balding guy and a mustached fellow who looked like the Alabaman Freddie Mercury decided to take charge and yell at everyone who didn't throw the ball the way they wanted.
Bizarrely, both men dissapeared once the show actually started.

After waaaaay too long, Tom Petty came out. There was no opening act though, and once he and "The Heartbreakers" appeared, they immediately started rocking out.

Believe it or not, there's a time when I was really into Tom Petty, when if you'd asked me my favorite song was I would've told you "Into the Great Wide Open".
It should be noted however, that at that point I was also 8, and I haven't listened to Tom Petty much since my age has been in double digits.

This meant most of the songs sounded earlier familiar and I could usually remember the chorus but nothing else. Still, they sounded great and my memory was enough that I didn't feel totally out of the loop. I used to feel awkward at shows because I was worried people'd be annoyed if I didn't look sufficiently into it, or would make fun of me if I was too into it.
(In my blood-loss-Gwar-delirium, I was worried the singer would jump off stage and throttle me if I didn't flash the metal sign ferverently enough.)
But, of course, no one at a concert has any reason to be paying attention to me, and (from my vantage point) everyone seemed to be having a pretty good time.

Some people right next to me smoked cigarettes, which pissed me off, and (different people) smoked weed, which while not ideal, was much less bothersome, and was quite funny when a perfectly-timed puff hit me during the first chorus of "Last Dance with Mary Jane".

They didn't play my aforementioned favorite song of theirs, but they did do just about every other one I'm familiar with. My dad correctly predicted the encore ("Refugee") and felt even more badass than usual.

Since then...
Last night I watched The Hulk with Angelo, which is a weird movie, because you can tell they wanted it to be good, but they failed miserably. The first half is really talking and boring, and the second half is all CG fighting...and boring. The goofy scene transitions were probably supposed to look like a comic book, but they didn't, and evoked a late 60s B movie more than anything. Ah well.

Finished my comic pages on time this week and, uncharacteristically, I feel pretty good about them. Hopefully this trend will continue.

I hadn't seen my mom in awhile, so then she spontaneously showed up at my work today, so we ate together, which was nifty.

After work, I went with my dad to Staples, because he stepped on my headphones and broke them so we needed replacements. Staples has stopped selling cheap headphones that don't have a microphone attached. You can either buy ones without a mic for $30 or ones with a mic for $15. So after checking both Staples and grumbling, we got those. I guess I mic could come in handy...eventually.

Then we went to Jamie's for dinner and watched some of the mediocre-but-fun T3, and then I came home and watched some Tales from Crypt with Jessy, which was good fun.

The bad news is I can't find my wallet, but I'm pretty sure that it has to be around the house, so I'm trying not to be too freaked out.

--
*Doesn't "Virtual Monopoly" sound like a horrible CD-ROM that would've come out in 1995?
**Though of course I'm not indie and my dad is certainly not yuppie.

What a great, great day. Oh, no wait. What I did there was say the exact opposite of the truth.*

2005-07-31T20:59:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday at work could be described in one word--awkward. I was awkward, the customers were awkward. It was just an awkward day. Then at the end I was enraged.

Incidents with customers

Incident 1: Employee tries to buy something from me. I didn't give her the employee discount.
Fault: Partially hers, because she didn't seem to understand the procedure to get said discount, but the fact that I didn't recognize her didn't help, and that's my fault. So, both.

Incident 2: A nerdy redhead girl with a Batman messenger bag buys a fantasy book declines to get a discount card, and then I forget to tell her how much said book costs, so we just kind of stare at each other for awhile.
Fault: Definitely mine. After I apologized, she jokingly accused me of being distracted by her beauty, but that's actually kind of what happened.

Incident 3: A guy buys a membership card from me, then returns it indignantly 20 minutes later because he didn't realize it costs money.
Fault: His, without a doubt. He claimed I didn't tell him how much it cost. Even if that was true (which I doubt), he had asked me how much he'd need to spend for it to be worth it, and I told him over $250. 10% of $250 is $25. It costs $25. Our conversation would not have made sense if he didn't have that information.

So far so goofy. By the end of this I was feeling embarrassed from the first to and defensive from the third. I took a desperately needed lunch break, with my dad at Pizza Solo, and then came back and relieved Susan from the front so I was by myself up there.

Incident 4: Things were pretty dead, so after 20 minutes or so I decided to go around the perimeter real quick and check on everything.
When I came back to the front, a woman in her fifties was waiting. I apologized for making her wait. She said, "You guys are all asleep tonight!" I explained why I'd been gone, and she nodded blankly. She then handed me a huge wad of books and told me she only wanted to buy one (a cheap paperback) and that I should put the rest on hold. She asked how long we hold things for. I said three days. She asked if that meant she could come on Wednesday night and pick it up. I said it's possible it would get reshelved in the afternoon. She glowered and said, "That's not really three days now, is it?" I said, "Well, sorry." She asked if I could make a special notation so that she could hold it for longer. I agreed.
I rang up her paperback. She paid with cash, I gave her correct change.
Just then, Susan came back. The woman called Susan over and demanded that she make the note for me because she didn't trust me. I reminded her that I said I was going to do it. Susan said she didn't mind, and I relented.
Then the woman decides that she wants to RETURN $10 THE BOOK SHE JUST BOUGHT SO SHE CAN IMMEDIATELY BUY IT AGAIN, with credit instead of with cash. I take the book back and slam it down on the counter. I call a manager to do the return (it's a complicated process).
The woman demands that someone other than me do this because she thinks I'm "too tired" to do a good job. Susan offers to do it for me and takes over my register. I stand there glaring at the woman. She's stopped paying attention to me entirely.
Even after all this, I want to make ammends. I tell her that the reason I told her about them reshelving books after three days isn't because I do it myself or approve of it but it is nonetheless what is done and I wanted her to be informed. She looks up at me with a blank stupid stare--totally oblivious to all the bitchiness she's responsible for, which I thought was very revealing--she wasn't just caught at a bad moment--SHE'S HABITUALLY HORRID TO EVERYONE SHE ENCOUNTERS.
Susan told me I should go take my last break (it was past time anyway). I grudgingly left.
Fault: errrrrrrrrrrrrAAAAAAAAAAAUGGGH! GHUNGHUNGHUN! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

I went to the cafe and ordered hot cocoa. I told Melissa, who works up there, about it, and she said if the woman came up there she'd fuck up her drink for me. I said she'd be easy to recognize, as she'd begin bitching again as soon as she got upstairs.

While I was sitting in the break room, sipping my cocoa and trying not to get too angry, Susan came in and told me that she didn't force me to break because I was incompetent, but because she didn't want me to go ballistic. While this is I suppose no less insulting, it's much more accurate. I told her it was fine.
And it was, though I still spent the next hour on the verge of tears and spontaneously cursing and had a hell of a time recovering.

Melissa's boyfriend ditched her, so she asked for a ride home to the Laguna area. She invited me to a bon fire which we be held at an indeterminate point this week, which could be fun.

But if that woman comes in again...
All the nerdy redheads in the world couldn't stop me from bringing on the pain!

--
*If anyone can figure out where that comes from, I'll owe them a soda.

Four legs good, two legs bad

2005-07-09T03:13:00.000-07:00

Tonight I saw Margaret Cho at the Cal Poly Performing Arts Center with my mom, Gene, and my mom's friend Lois.

She was in town in connection this gay pride event they're having this weekend.
She was funny, and the guy opening for her (one Bruce Daniels) was pretty good too. Overall, I really enjoyed it, though I can't think of any way to aptly describe what I liked about it, since I couldn't possibly tell any of it as good as her, much less in writing.
The thing that bothered me though was the way both her and Bruce would occasionally make halfassed political statements to gain applause. I don't think it's bad for a comedian to be political, but I think if they do it had better be funny.
Making a joke about how morning after pills should be given to you with your bill at restaurants just to make a point that Bush can't control women is funny. But standing in front of a crowd in town for a gay pride fest and saying, "I support Gay Marriage!" during a lull just feels like pandering.

Today I got paid, which was of course nice, and I bought the Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell audio book, so I have something to keep me entertained (yet not too distracted) while working on my comic. I just barely finished my pages for this week, but I did and here they are. God, I wish anyone was reading it. I don't want to be an attention whore, but it sort of defeats the point of doing something like this if no one cares, and they don't. In a certain mood I'm tempted to just put up a notice saying "Cancelled due to lack of interest", but I guess that's rather premature and childish.
42 people have this journal friended, and 5 have that one, which is way more important to me. I don't get it.

A few nights ago we watched the 1954 cartoon of George Orwell's Animal Farm, because Angelo wanted to see it. I haven't read the book, but I found it kind of captivating and ended up watching it twice in a row, the second time alone and with the commentary track. The movie was (allegedly) actually funded by the CIA, who chose to play up its anti-Communist message and downplay its criticsms of capitalism. This is most evident in a tacked-on ending where the pigs, representing communists, are overthrown by the other animals they've oppressed.

So, having finished that, I was happy to find that Hollywood had the second (and as far as I know, only other) adapatation of the story, done in 1999 with Babe-style effects courtesty of the Jim Henson Company and an all-star cast, with Patrick Stewart as Napoleon (pig-Stalin) and Kelsey Grammer as Snowball (pig-Trotsky). It's well filmed and well-acted, but manages to somehow be simultaneously less melodramatic and more heavy handed than its predecessor, which isn't a good combination.

Spoiler warning, for something written 50 years ago, but if you haven't read it I don't want to ruin it

When the Boxer the horse is sent to the glue factory in the cartoon, the donkey realizes where the van comes from, and chases after it baying in panic. The horse seems to bend the sides of the van as he hangs halfway out, thrashing back and forth in panic. The logo on the back is a skull and crossbones with the face of a horse.
In the live action version, the horse is calmly lead into the truck. Then they close the door and it says in giant letters GLUE FACTOR AND HORSE KILLER. All the animals look vaguely upset, and the van drives away.

But what really bothered me was the ending. The new one is actually MORE PRO-CAPITALIST THAN THE ONE FUNDED BY THE CIA.

The story is told through the eyes of a dog named Jessie (baaaaaaaaaaaaar). She flashes back to the main events of the story happening and then once everything important happens, she just tells us that the farm fell apart, with no real explanation. Then she goes back to the farm and her puppies, who had been brainwashed by Napoleon are, like, nice again somehow.
So far, stupid, but I can understand why they wanted it happy.
But here's the thing--
THEY GET NEW OWNERS
This Kennedyesque family moves in and takes over and Jessie says, "At long last we are free"

Apparently the lower classes need some "owners" to take care of them or everything just falls apart.
Even if you don't take the story as an allegory (which no one would do), it's still a horribly ending, because it means that all of the main characters' struggling was for nothing. Bleh.

I guess I should have been suspicious that the back of the box says, "Populated with a wide variety of barnyard animals, ANIMAL FARM is sure to leave the whole family squealing with delight."
Ah well.

Tomorrow I'm going back to Santa Cruz just for the night, because my dad and Jamie are going up there to see a concert, and someone should go try to keep Nikki's beastliness in check.

"Se creen muy guays, pero solo son unas putas estiradas!"

2005-06-26T01:50:00.000-07:00

I'm at Nikki's house in Santa Cruz with her and Angelo [well, now I'm not...but I was when I started writing this]. We came (at least, I conceived the trip) because Daniel Clowes (cartoonist of Ghost World, David Boring, etc) was signing to promote his new graphic novel Ice Haven.

The trip by Greyhound was unnotable, which I suppose is what you want from a Grayhound trip. There were some high school-age skanks from Tennessee (!) who tried to annoy us, then called us gay when we didn't take the bait (which provoked a lot more laughter from us than it probably would've back where they come from). Fortunately, they got off in Paso (still on SLO county), so we didn't have to deal with them for long.

We got to Santa Cruz at 4 and went to Saturn Cafe, where we met Nikki. We went to Bookshop Santa Cruz where the signing was going to be, and I bought Ice Haven. Nikki asked me why I got it when I already had the comic book version (the new hardcover book only has a couple pages that weren't in an issue of his comic book I bought in 2001), and I couldn't really justify it, other than to say that it wasn't very nice to go to a signing at a bookstore without buying anything, which particularly sucked since it took the last of my money.

When we came back later for the actual signing, I saw something far more awesome than Ice Haven at the signing table--Mundo Fantasmal--Ghost World in Spanish! It turned out to cost $5 less than Ice Haven, so I exchanged them and pocketed the difference.

Some nearby dude asked me which Clowes book he should buy. I told him to get Caricature, the short story collection, and he did. I talked to him for awhile about how he used to do art for Atari, and how he wanted to do a comic or something even though he didn't know much about them. I gave him my website, and he said we should collaborate. Obviously that's not going to happen, but I enjoyed talking to him.

The crowd was pretty interesting. There was an old men wad, a gutter punk wad, and an indie girl wad. Not sure where we fit into all that.

[My description of this even is kind of me-centric, becuase I assume if you're reading this you care about me. If I were writing this for, like, a newspaper, I assure you it'd be a lot less self-obsessed]

The girl who worked at the bookstore said that Daniel Clowes wasn't going to give a talk or anything, but that he would answer some questions. Then he came out. He looked older than I expected--He's the same age as my mom, and looks a good five years older.*

Daniel Clowes (left) and someone else on Google

After a few seconds of dead time, he was ready to assume no one had any questions and move on. Figuring that others (like me) just didn't want to be the first, I raised my hand. I asked, rather generically, what he's working on now. He said he'd just started a new comic, but declined to give specifics. Later I asked him why they'd added Steve Buscemi's character to the Ghost World movie (he isn't in the comic). He said it was to make it more interesting for him to write and, "because otherwise it'd be a 45 minute movie."

The guy I'd been talking to earlier asked him if it was harder to make striking imagery in comics than in movies. Clowes said striking imagery isn't the point, it's how well the imagery draws the reader into the world of the story.
Nikki asked how much he plans before doing comics, since it's often hard to figure out what you're doing. He said he starts with a vague structure but gives himself lots of room to improvise and expand. He likened this to improv in Jazz, then said he hated it when people compared things to Jazz, but that he was going to do it anyway.

Someone asked if Clowes used a tablet. He said he does it all by hand, except colors. This prompted someone to ask if he does inks digitally. He reiterated that he does it all by hand except for colors.

Finally, failing to get Angelo or Nikki to ask it for me, I asked the ultimate question. Clowes jokingly accused me of being a plant put by the store. I smiled, then popped it--
"How do you feel about being compared to JD Salinger?"

...Nikki seemed to think I'd be dissapointed when he didn't proclaim that he hated JD too and we should be the best of friends, what he did say made me happy. That the comparison is utterly superficial, based on the the fact that they both write about introspective teenagers. He said that he did admire the fact that Salinger (allegedly) wrote a bunch more novels and kept them secret, but that is a pretty neat idea, in an arrogant prick sort of way.

Shortly thereafter the Q&A was finished and it was time for the signing. I overheard him tell a girl that he'd never been to Santa Cruz before, which is kind of surprising considering he lives in Berekely. He was a lot more open and engaging one-on-one than in front of everybody, and he seemed more comfortable. He blacked out the teeth on the girl on the coverpage of her "David Boring".

When he got to me, he saw my book and asked, "You can read Portugese?" I told him it was Spanish, and he said that he'd met the translator, who was a goofy old guy who'd "never seen a teenage girl in his life," so the translation was pretty horrible.*

As he diligently wrote my name and then his in my two books (I'd brought along Caricature), I tried thinking of something else to say to him. If I was talking to anyone else, I'd have no trouble saying that I think Dan Clowes is one of the greatest cartoonists (or whatever you want to call them) ever to live, but you (well, I) can't comfortably say that to a person's face.
So I told him that I'd read David Boring when I was 13 (I think I meant 14) and fell in love with it. He laughed and said, "I'm surprised no one called the authorities." I said I'd like to make comics too. He seemed to approve, but warned me, "Just don't expect it to be a career," referring to his earlier explanation that cartoonists don't make any damn money.

All in all, a very nice experience. If you meet someone who's work you like a lot and don't get along well with them, it's kind of a weird feeling, because every time after that when you look at their work, you're reminded of it. But he seemed genuinely cool, and I really liked talking to him. That shouldn't be important, I guess, but it made me happy.

Atari guy has yet to email me. Whatever.

That night we rented Boogie Nights, which I thought was thoroughly entertaining...for the first hour and a half. The next three hours were a bit tiresome, and by the end, I didn't care enough to be looking at the screen when Marky Mark whipped out his prosthetic wang. I don't really see how the movie was supposed to work. It's too absurd to be taken as something that could really happen (ie, the shootout where everyone dies except the person who matters, and Heather Graham's perpetual roller-skate wearing***) and too dismal to just be entertaining. The result is by no means the worst movie ever made (or even the worst starring Marky Mark), but I definitely think it's grossly overrated.

The next day we lazed about. Nikki made pancakes, and we sat around watching Star Trek and MacGyver. Man, MacGyver's cool.
Then we went up to campus and went on a short walk/hike through the forest, in which I studiously avoided all logs. Nikki climbed a tree then got scared.

That night we watched a Mystery Science Theater that Nikki had on tape. My favorite part was where a dude screamed, "NOW!" and one of the robots said, "...is the winter of our discontent!" but I can't explain why that tickled me so.

The next day, after some more Star Trek, we took the Greyhound back. Nikki decided to come with us. I finished Mundo Fantasmal on the way and suddenly thought I was really good at speaking Spanish, but on a bus filled with Mexicans (having stopped in Salinas), I was quickly reminded that I am not. A little girl was trying to put her bag in the overhead compartment. I meant to say, "Necesita ayuda?" ("Need help?") but accidently said, "Necesita arriba," which doesn't mean anything but she interpreted as ("That needs to be up"), so she thought I was giving her shit about not having her bag up already.
Wah wah.

When we got to SLO I found I had a phone call from Jessy, who wanted to watch Reign of Fire, I guess because it has Christian Bale being badass. Nikki, Jessy and I abandoned Angelo and John at a gas station for awhile and drove around looking at the moon. What losers.

Today (Thursday), it was back to work at B&N, which was pretty cool. I cashiered for the first time, and it was much easier than I expected. I helped an old guy find a collection of short stories on CD and somehow ended up telling him that I was a film major and drew comics. He asked if I'd like to do some editing and/or storyboards for him, he assured me for money. I took his card.
Why do I have such a way with older men?

--
*He also looks about fifteen years older than Neil Gaiman, who is one year older than him. Funny how people age differently.

**In the real one:
Enid: Since when have you worked here?
John Ellis: Since always last Thursday!

In the translation (translated back, obviously):
Enid: Since when have you worked here?
John Ellis: Always, on Thursdays!

***Why is Heather Graham a slut in every movie she's ever in? She's not a bad actress, you'd think she could maybe do something else sometime.

A story in pictures

2005-06-02T04:00:00.000-07:00

FRANK: Let's go for a hike!
KANE AND KAILEY: Okay!

FRANK: Hiking sure is fun!
KANE AND KAILEY: So much fun!
FRANK: Look! A log suspended over the water! It is the only way to get to the other side!

FRANK: See? It is easy!
KANE: I see!
FRANK: Kane, your turn! I can only assume your extra 60 pounds of weight will have no effect on the safety of the situation!
KANE: I see!

KANE: This is precarious, but exciting!
KAILEY: Oh no!
KANE: WHAT??

CRASH!
SPLASH!

FRANK AND KAILEY: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
FRANK: I will drag his carcass from the water!
KAILEY: Kane, are you ok???

KANE: GHUUUNN.
FRANK: So, what should I do?
KANE: GHUUUNN.
FRANK: I'll go get paramedics!
KAILEY: Kane! Say something! Talk to me! Tell me about...The Da Vinci Code!
KANE: It's really bad! Not unlike the pain in my leg! GHUUUNNN!

20 minutes later
HELICOPTER: CHOP CHOP CHOP
KAILEY: They sent you a helicopter!
KANE: ...why?

One Hour Later

Firemen: HUTHUTHUTHUTHUTHUT

EMT: I am really badass and awesome.
KANE: Um, yes.
EMT: You should go to the hospital.
KANE: Yes.
EMT: This is all her [Kailey's] fault, isn't it?
KANE: No, it's all Frank's. Fuck Frank.
FRANK: Lo siento.
KANE: Claro.

Later
NURSE: Welcome to the hospital. Those firefighters dragged you through poison oak, so now we have to swab off all your exposed body.
KANE: Ghuunn.
NURSE: Now we have to go do things for an hour! But don't worry, there's nothing to read or do!
KANE: Ghunnn.

One Hour Later
X-ray lady: Hello, I am here to irradiate your leg/groin.
KANE: Ghunnn.

One Hour Later
Doctor: Dog my cats, but your bone's as unbroken as can be!
Kane: Oh, good.
Doctor: ...Except that it has a cyst in it for some reason?
Kane: Is that because of this?
Doctor: It's just one of those weird little things about how God made us.
Kane: Oh, alright.
Doctor: But get it checked up if you don't want it to fracture.
Kane: Ghunnn.

Two hours later
Nurse: Here's some clothes.
Kane: Why does this shirt say "Temporary Organ Donor: I've got an organ you can borrow all night long"?
Male Nurse: Yeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaah.

One hour later
Male Nurse: Have some crutches.
Kane: Okay.
Nurse: So, do you have a ride home?
Kane: No.
Nurse: What about now?
Kane: No.
Nurse: What about now?
Kane: No.
Nurse: Fine, we'll call you a taxi.

One hour later
Nurse: Here's some tylenol and vicadin! Have fun.
Kane: Ghunnn.

FIN!

But, truth be told, their troubles had just begun.

2005-05-04T01:51:00.000-07:00

Click to read, then click on the page to go to the next one.

My dad was visiting this weekend, and Saturday morning, we picked up Angelo and Nikki from her house and went to his, where we took over a longue/kitchen and made it the base of our 24 HOUR COMIC PROJECT.

My dad gave us caffeine and ephedrine pills, and then left for SLO.

At 1:30, we began.

About an hour later, Angelo gave up, because he realized he was hating it.
Nikki and I trodged on.

We all watched Return of the King and Equilibrium while we drew away. Nikki put iPodded it up, much to my chagrin.

I realized suddenly that I had no usable pens, so Nikki and I went to the art store, and also Trader Joe's for snacks. Angelo bought millions of bean burritos at Taco Bell.

Then this other dude came in. His name was Muhammed (or possibly "Mohamet" or some variation), who is an exchange student from Chad which he immediately followed with "a country northwestern Africa" apparently not having too much faither in our geography skills. He was pretty interesting to talk to, and was very nice.

He ate some of my guacamole, then asked if it had pork in it. I assured him it didn't. He said, "Good. I...don't like pork." I asked if he was a Muslim (like Jews, they don't eat pig). He said yes. Was he afraid of admitting to being Muslim to a white American? I guess I couldn't blame him.

It was pretty cool until he took control of the remote and refused to watch anything other than BET, anime, and some halfassed special on UFOs. He really liked the UFOs for some reason.

BET is really painfully bad. They had ads for quality things (like an examination of the various uses of "the N-word" and what that says about race relations in America, but all they were showing was this sub-MTV quality spring break-type show, with the two male hosts creepily hitting on the female one in between terrible terrible rap segments.

One presumes that an African stuck in the US would, in my mom's words, "want to see people who look like him," and I can understand that. But fuck, I'd much rather watch "Barbershop" than "The OC".

I also thought it weird that he and this Austrian guy whose name escapes me spent their whole Saturday night watching TV. They live in the middle of downtown, I'm sure they could find something better to do. Ah well.

Eventually, both those dudes and Angelo went to bed, and it was just Nikki and I, drawing away. This Austrian guy came in and watched some more crap TV, but once it got late enough, everyone wandered off and we had quiet. It was going pretty well. We had to awkwardly sneak into Angelo's room without waking him every time we wanted to pee, and the massive amounts of caffiene (from pills, soda, mints, and coffee) made that a regular occurence.

The CSO* came by, and having established that we didn't live there, established that he also didn't care. He asked for some coffee (though he forgot to actually take any), and then shot the shit with us for awhile before going back to work.

We comicked along, and had a nice free-associated conversation and talked in some capacity about every single person we both know, and several we don't.
The sun came up, and we had rasberry sorbet.

Nikki had some layout problems, but for the most part everything was going well artistically. I did a kick-ass splash page.

Then, around 8 am we both had to pee again, and rather than bothering Angelo, we went to the bus station across the street.
It was very bright out and there were hardly any people. Nikki likened it to "28 Days Later".

We peed and came back without incident, but then things started to go downhill.

I almost fell over in the hallway and had to hold onto a railing to get back to the room. My hand was shaking liek hell, but I forced myself to keep drawing.

Nikki gave up on drawing entirely and started cleaning up.
At 9:30, I realized I was becoming useless, so I took a nap, and told Nikki to wake me up in an hour (or two, don't remember). At 11:30, I got back up, and we found a now-awake Angelo.

At this point, Nikki was totally delirious. I told her to sleep now that I was done, and she said she couldn't because "Every time I close my eyes I see alligators". She was also having visions about an evil rat who knew everything. Angelo tried to decrazitize her, while I struggled to finish my comic.

I finally did, pretty much exactly on time. ">Hooray.
It's only 16 pages, not 24, but I've seen them like that before, and fuck you, that shit can't be possible.

Nikki went home, and Angelo came back to campus with me. It was at this point that I realized I was incredibly sick, probably from all the pills we'd been taking, and the fact that I hadn't eaten in 15 hours, and the food I'd eaten before that was almost entirely Taco Bell. Two days later, the thought of Taco Bell still makes me want to vomit, and at the time it was uncontrollable.
I had to get off the bus, where I coughed up bile onto the ground at Stevenson, but didn't have anything in my stomach to come up. Angelo had to get to a recital and was already late, so he left, and I was stuck lying in the dirt waiting for another bus to come.

Eventually one did, and I stumbled back to Porter where I celebrated my acheivement by failing to take a nap and muttering incoherently to Jake and Stephanie, who were doing more sensible things.

All in all, I'm more or less happy with the results, though I don't plan to do this again any time remotely soon. Maybe in a year I'll forget how painful it was and be persuaded to try again.
Maybe.

--
*"Community Safety Officer". Their job is to tell people not to smoke outside my window and tell me not to play Warcraft in the dining hall at 2 am. Unlike most authority figures, they're generally good folks.

Saaaan! Fraaaaan! Cisco!

2005-04-16T03:12:00.000-07:00

I wrote this slowly over the past week, but here's an account of my doings in the last week or so, most notably rocking out in San Francisco.

Last week me Angelo and some dude named Glen who's new to BSN went to Holy Cross Chruch (after which "Santa Cruz" is named) to film the priest talking about the Pope's death, for our story. Glen was a useful enough fellow, though he didn't say or do much. He kind of reminds me of Dante from SLO, who actually goes to school here now, but who's at College 10 and I ignore. Anyway.
The priest used to be a graphic designer and rock music critic in Bakersfield. Then he became a priest. I wanted to ask him about what happened between there, but it wasn't really relevant.

Today me and this other new guy Liam went to the Newman Catholic Center just off campus to interview more Papists--another priest, some dude who claimed the title of "Brother", and a senior from the university. I know it's not a fair statement to make overall, but Catholics seem more liberal and, frankly, normal than other hardcore Christians I've encountered. Hmm.

Then, White People Class, which has been pretty awkward and absurd. I had to argue with the teacher about the assertion that only white people can be racist, and then had to argue with the Token Conservative Guy (TCG) about how, while genetics determine physical features including skin color, the way that we use those traits to categorize races is a matter of cultural background, not fundamental genetic difference.

Me: I mean, a red-haired person and a blond-haired person are genetically different.
TCG: Are you absolutely sure of that?
Everyone: YES!

More on this class later.

On Thursday night I showed Hillary how to edit the story so she could do it while I was in SF. Then I went and hobnobbed with the SCTV (campus TV) people cause Frank didn't want to go, ate free Thai food and helped them design a masthead for their campaign to get more money from students.

Friday, after half-sleeping through Deep Space Nine, I gave some vague instructions to the other people in my group ("Try to sound newsy") and then went downtown to meet Angelo and Nikki to catch the bus to SAN FRANCISCO.
Well, the bus to San Jose, which connects to the bus to Freemont, which connects to the BART to San Francisco.

Aside from horrible rain which came and went randomly, there weren't any real problems getting there. We arrived in downtown SF at about 6, then decided to eat. I suggested we go to Chinatown cause I enjoyed hanging out there last time I was in SF. Unfortunately, this proved rather difficult to find, because we had no idea what we were doing. So we stumbled into a mediocre pizza place and ate millions.
The LCD screen on my digital camera got broken somehow. While the camera still works, I kind of lost interest in it as a soncsequcen, so there's no pictures for the post. Sorry.

I stayed with Lara, while Angelo and Nikki stayed with Nikki's friend Anna (). We met Lara at a terrible discount bookstore after eating, and then we all went to see "Sin City" at the Hideous Theater of Technology and the Future. The HToTaF costs $10/ticket and has movie posters that come to life, telling you to buy things that the movie theater doesn't in fact sell, but that someone told them you'd want. I wanted a cinnamon-apple pretzel, but it cost $5, and that's more than I'm willing to pay for a fucking pretzel.

"Sin City" was really amazing. On this week's BSN, Natalie's doing an editorial about how sexist the movie it is. And she's absolutely right. But, it seems to me, "Sin City" is a manifestation of pure id. It's a world that, while ostensibly like ours, is populated by people that could only exist in Frank Miller's head. Like with Wuthering Heights, it's a created world that the author so passionately believes in that, regardless of what's happening at any given moment, it's fascinating.

Angelo and Nikki had to leave 2/3 of the way through to make the BART to Berekely to meet Anna, so that sucked for them.

Then Lara and I went back to her dorm. They have a receptionist posted 24/7 (apparently), and if you're a guest you have to give them your ID for the duration of your stay in the building. I was told that I couldn't take a shower because it's an all-girl's dorm*, and I forgot to bring a sleeping bag, so I had to sleep on the floor, but Lara was a very good host, and gave me lots of tea and soda and food. She said she had to much money on her meal plan thing, so I was actually doing her a favor...or something.

When we got there, she made me cinnamon tea, and we watched "Garden State". It's a very nicely made and acted little movie, though I had trouble empathizing with the characters. She was stupid and whimsical and he was tortured and submissive, and, for all my qualities good or bad, I don't think any of that fits me. None of it seems particularly un-realistic (except maybe the guy living in the gulley), but I never really felt like it was real either. I enjoyed watching it, but I don't think it's as brilliant as some would suggest. Though I suppose that's subjective, and if you have a reading of the movie that explains what I'm missing and why I'm lame, I'm totally happy to hear it.**

The next day was the reason we came to SF when we did--The Alternative Press Expo.
The convention was free to Comic-Con attendees for some reason, so I didn't have to pay. It was very cool.
I got so sick of Comic-Con last time, and while APE would never attract a Neil Gaiman or Kevin Smith (and shouldn't), it was so much nicer.
Big enough to have lots to look at, but not big enough to be crowded and shitty. And since it's all small press, it's mostly cool comic creators (yes, and pretentious zine-making punks/anarchists/goofy folk)--no anime and Hollywood promos.

Right after coming in I ran into Keith Knight who does the comic strip The K Chronicles. I've seen him at about every convention I've ever been to, and he always remembers me, and he's so cool about it. We talked for like 10 minutes and it was really casual and pleasant--it didn't feel like talking to a (relatively) famous person...it was just like talking to an old acquaintance you haven't caught up with in awhile. Very neat.
I also got to meet Derek Kirk Kim, one of my favorite web cartoonists, who was much less lame than he implies in his work. He asked me where I went to school and then told me that he used to hang out in SC a lot, which explains some of the stuff in his comic--

Lara bought a purse with a whale on it.

Angelo, Nikki, and Anna showed up, and Lara had to go, so it ended up being me and Angelo checking shit out, while Nikki and Anna did separately. We ran into a character designer from "Kim Possible", whom we made do a drawing for Angelo's sister, some other webcomics people I like and bought print stuff from, and a guy from Nikki's art class who was trying to look professional (I suppose he's pro enough for "alternative press", to be fair). He got snooty about how he uses Illustrator, not Flash, and then we ran into someone who does similar work to his only way better, and does use Flash. In conclusion, fuck that guy. But not in a bad way.

After all that, the four of us went to Chinatown (for real this time, and it was actually depressingly easy to find). Some old Chinese guy gave us a menu for the restaurant he worked for and then followed us for 10 minutes to make sure we actually went there (Anna insisted that we not, on principle).
We ended up at a little place that I chose because a) it was reasonably cheap and b) had vegetarian stuff and c) there were no other white people there.
So that was kinda nifty.

Then we went to Virgin Megastore so that I could meet Lara in an easily findable place that was still open at midnight. When we got back to her dorm she suggested we watch Amelie, but I didn't feel up for something that I felt really disserved my attention, so she put on a DVD of the Gilmore Girls and we watched about 3 of them. It's obviously not something I'd watch on purpose, but it's a lot better than most dramatic TV shows on now, so I don't object.

Got up at about noon and took the BART to Berkeley, which went better than expected. Met up with Angelo, Nikki, and Anna and had crepes. I'd never had crepes before, but I enjoyed it--it was basically just a quesadilla with thicker bread and apples in it, though yummier than that sounds.
Then...the trip back, which takes a lot longer than the distance justifies, but that's what you get when you take public transportation.
It was somewhat tedious, especially since one bus got us there late and we spent about 2 hours sitting in San Jose (which, incidentally, smells like poo. The entire town. Poo-smelling capital of the world). We all read every single comic that I bought on the way back.
Angelo spent the San Jose-SC trip talking to an old lady about jazz.

All around, it was a pretty cool experience, and I'd happily go again. Sadly, I'm pretty cleaned out financially from the trip, but I suppose it was worth it for the awesome.

--
*Though being greasy's somewhat appropriate for a Comic-Con.

**Geeky side note: The conversation with the nerdy guy who speaks Klingon was somewhat funny ("This one means Kill Kirk... And also, hallelujah... Depending on the context"), but, while I'm certainly not nerdy enough to speak Klingon, I'm nerdy enough to recognize Klingon.
It was created by a UC Santa Cruz graduate who's an expert on Native American and south Asian languages who, like Tolkein, created a complete artificial language, which I think is damn cool.
It would have taken minutes for the people making the movie to have found someone who actually speaks Klingon--or to get the book out of a bookstore--and find out how to say whatever they wanted.
If I were making a movie, that's exactly the sort of detail I'd be proud to get right.
They could have at least faked it better--as is, it just seems very condescending.

2005-04-02T19:28:00.000-08:00

"TOP SECRET" movie completed.
Airing tonight at 1 am.
Feedback appreciated.

I've got a shield!

2005-03-03T03:35:00.000-08:00

"I just got in from Indonesia, and boy did my family drown!"
--Oderus Urungus, GWAR

I went to Gwar with Angelo, Nikki, and two of Nikki's housemates, one of whom obtained the tickets.

We got to the Catalyst at about 7:30. The club was surrounded by seedy gutter punks, which aren't really what I think of when I think of Gwar. Maybe they're always there, I don't know. There were also misc. metal-looking folk, who seemed quite displeased that the show was sold out. I felt sort of bad that I got to go in when they didn't, but they were probably to metal to have planned ahead, so I guess it makes sense.

The security was pretty high. They patted us down when we went in and took my digital camera (it didn't occur to me they wouldn't want those there, though I guess it's kind of obvious). They also wouldn't let anyone under 21 leave and come back for some bizarre reason, which turned out to rather suck as we had to sit through two nothing-bands before Gwar showed up.

The first was called Alabama Thunder Pussy. "Pussy" because they're an all-male band, "Thunder" because they're loud, and "Alabama" because they're from Virginia. They weren't bad at all, but there was also no reason to care. I can probably never be as good a musician as anyone in Alabama Thunder Pussy, but any band I was in band would, regardless of quality, be more interesting. I paid slightly more attention when their singer announced, "Ok, this next song is about werewolves." But it was pretty much the same thing, so it was back to earplugs for me.

Next was a band called All That Remains. This one guy with poofy hair whose name I forget was there, and he said, "Judging from the name, this band's going to be obnoxious goth metal like Cradle of Filth, only worse." He was absolutely right. Very loud tedium ensued.
All That Remains played for what felt like about 5 hours, during which time I was seriously ruing the prohibition on going outside, because I needed a break from suck.

"I miss Alabama Thunder Pussy!"
--Nikki

Some guy in the back lit a joint, which was annoying, but I can't say I blame him.
Poofy haired guy made and held up a sign that read, "YOU SUCK". No one argured. The majority of the crowd was cool with A.T.R. at first, but everyone was there to see Gwar, and clearly their patience was being tried.
"Are you guys ready for Gwar?" All That Remains guy yelled.
The audience exploded into applause, growls, etc. "Great, cause we've only got 2 more songs to do!"
A collective, metal-filled slump.

Finally, it the lame people slumped away, and it was time for Gwar. Everyone crowded toward the stage. Black tarps were removed to reveal Gwar's set--sort of cross between Rob Zombie and an 80s fantasy movie. A guy in a foam redneck rapper costume came out and acted lame. Then the lead singer, looking vaguely like the villian from The Sword and the Sorceror and decapitated him. After being decapitated, he politely stayed in place and leaned foward so he could squirt Koolaid blood from his neck stump into the audience. Gwar started playing.

Best picture of Gwar I could find online.

You know, I really don't remember the music at all. I've listened to Gwar before, mostly courtesty of Angelo, and a lot of it is pretty funny*, but unless you know the songs well already, which I don't, the songs become a blur admist the all-encompassing spectacle. Between each song they'd have various famous people they didn't like come out in the form of people in foam suits, and they'd dismember them with big fake swords, making them spray every conceivable bodily fluid into the crowd.

"The semen tastes like coconut!"
--Poofy-haired guy

Everyone mashed pretty much the entire time. For awhile, I was into that. Everyone was pretty nice, and releasing that kind of energy is exhillarating. Then, some dude decided to crowd surf. There were thugs at the front to provent anyone from getting onto the stage, but whatever. That was fine too until the guy in question slammed his elbow, with most of his wait behind it, straight into my nose.
A security thug saw and asked if I was ok. I said I was fine, and he left. Then, blood started gushing out of my nose.
In most settings, perhaps even most mosh pits, this would some attention. But Gwar was spraying the audience with fake blood the entire time, and I was already covered in that, so it was difficult to notice the difference. I tried to get away from the moshery, and moved onto the stairs at the sides of the room, but the thugs thought I was trying to sneak into the bar upstairs and stopped me, so I was stuck at the far left side of the room, on the outskirts of the giant people wad. In fleeing, I lost Angelo and Nikki, and didn't see them or anyone else I knew until after the show.

At this point I realized my hands were covered in (real) blood, and I was worried about getting it on other people. I didn't want to wipe it on my clothes, because I was worried it would stain (I was wearing all black and dark grey so this shouldn't have been a concern, but the loss of blood wasn't helping me think clearly), so I tried to lick it all up. I don't know what the fuck I was thinking.
After that, I felt lightheaded from the loss of blood in my veins, and nautious from the preponderence of it in my stomach. I held onto a poll so I wouldn't fall over.
Gwar spewed more fluid at everybody, dismembering Paris Hilton, Michael Jackson, Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush.
Everyone was screaming along with the band, slamming into each other and throwing metal signs and middle fingers into the air.
I closed my eyes and felt like I could seriously have lost consciousness right there...but I couldn't and wouldn't. Gwar was incredible to see, and my semi-consciousness made it all the more intense...I expected it to be funny, and it was funny, but it had the frenetic sinister energy of a fever dream.
I wanted to politely headbang from the sidelines, but moving my head wasn't happening. Whenever the singer (Oderus Urungus) looked in my direction, I became worried that my lack of rocking would offend him and tried to desperately to look more energetic. In retrospect, this also makes no sense.

My favorite part of the show was when Oderus said that they were bringing out a giant alien worm who was the incarnation of pure evil. The worm hobbled out** and made small talk about how long he'd known the band, etc. They apologized for his lack of obviously evil behavoir, and then they asked him about the metal circle on his chest.

Worm: I have a shield!
Gwar: Oh...Is it an evil shield?
Worm: I have a shield!

Some indeterminate and terrifying amount of time later, the whole thing was over. It climaxed (no pun intended) with the singer spraying the audience with "syphilitic urine" from his giant fake penis.
The band went offstage, and the background music became "Beat It". I barely noticed the difference.

Nikki, Angelo, and I, post-GWAR. Prior to the show, Angelo's shirt was white.

After we went back and got our stuff from Angelo's apartment (Jocelyn told me that having a book was unacceptable in the precense of Gwar, so I left it there), we went to Saturn Cafe, because it was nearby and open at 1 am. I put Queen on the jukebox (Nikki called this "detox"). They fucked up and forgot to give us food for a long time, so I got my chocolate shake free.***
I was shaking and giggling from the blood loss. I realized that the restaurant was decored with inexpensive children's toys, and I started playing with them. I found a doughnut-shaped rattle incredibly entertaining for a couple minutes (and helpful to my jittering state), which probably didn't do much to convince people I wasn't high, but I was completely beyond caring about such things.
Then I saw it--
A brown plastic cow.

I made him walk around as I said, "Moo-cow" over and over again. I can't articulate that in a way that doesn't make it sound totally insane, and I guess it was, but I found this cow so endlessly entertaining. It was bizarre, because I know how silly I must have seemed--Nikki tried to bring me out of it by telling me to complain about The Da Vinci Code, and all the normal stuff went through my head, but I just murmered something about Essenes and then went back to saying "Moo-cow".
I asked the waitress if I could keep Moo-cow and, either because she felt bad about the serving mistake or because she didn't know what I was talking about, agreed.
By the time we left I'd stopped shaking or anything, but then I was spinning Moo-cow around while humming "The Blue Danube", which probably isn't much of an improvement.

Nikki and I caught the last bus leaving downtown (Angelo lives feet away). I stumbled back, took a shower, ran into Hillary in the bathroom and told her about Moo-cow, then I went to bed and happily slept through class.
"I got hit in the nose til I bled," I told anyone who would listen, "I fucking earned a day without Earth Science."

--
*"In the name of GWAR, in the name of love/In the name of the blood dripping out of the sun/I call out your God, till before me he stands/But don't send me Jesus, he's only a man/Meat Sandwich!!!"
**My vantage point let me see the guy getting into the incredibly elaborate worm suit all through the previous song. Surreal.
***I think the fact that I got a soyshake instead of a milk one underscores how un-metal I am.

2005-01-29T14:44:00.000-08:00

The Latest BSN
Featuring me and Nikki anchoring hilariously, and the debut of Horrible Marionette!

2005-01-10T14:22:00.000-08:00

At Porter, around 1:30 am.
Click on the picture to enlarge.

Overall, a decent, if uneventful weekend. The fact that it was mostly spent inside was somewhat mitigated by when I was walking home from the bus stop tonight. Those leafless trees were casting heavy shadows everywhere. I spent several minutes photographing them, which was somewhat more difficult than it should have been--my new camera's really good at taking high resolution pictures, but they blur fairly easily. That's cool if you're going for vague artiness, but more troublesome for capturing something legitimately pretty that you stumble upon.
But the end result came out very nice, I think.
And really, it's only because of the camera's small size that I had it with me at all. So, awesome.

Sadly, in the process, I scared a family of racoons that was eating out of the garbage right next to me.

Sorry guys!

I could be (and probably am) totally wrong, But it's still interesting

2005-01-10T14:18:00.000-08:00

From Pantheon.org--

In Irish-Celtic mythology, the Tuatha Dé Danann ("People of the goddess Danu") are the Irish race of gods, founded by the goddess Danu. These gods, who originally lived on 'the islands in the west', had perfected the use of magic. They traveled on a big cloud to the land that later would be called Ireland and settled there.

Shortly after their arrival they defeated the Firbolg at the first battle of Mag Tuireadh. In the second battle of Mag Tuireadh they fought and conquered the Fomorians, a race of giants who were the primordial inhabitants of Ireland. The Tuatha Dé dealt more subtly with the Fomorians than with the Firbolg, and gave them the province of Connacht. There was also some marrying between the two races.

The Tuatha Dé themselves were later driven to the underworld by the Milesians, the people of the fabulous spanish king Milesius.

Ok, in Greek mythology Uranus and Gaia gave birth to the Titans, who then defeated them. The Titans, like the Fomorians in the Celtic story, were a race of primordial giants. They were defeated by Zeus and the other Olympians, who then established themselves as the gods worthy of worship by humankind.

It's possible these stories are so strikingly similar because there are certain mythological patterns that people respond to and all that other Joseph Campbell shit, which I'm all for, but it seems just as likely that when the Romans came over and dominated Britain and Ireland, their stories conflated with the native ones and produced something which took elements from the pre-existing Celtic mythology and grafted it onto a Greek story.*

This happened more obviously in some cases (the Romans created a new goddess that combined one of their goddesses and the Celtic Brigid, called "Aquae-Sulis". You can see stuff deticated to her at the temple in Bath.).
There are of course other explanations--both mythologies feature a female triple goddess of war, but Pantheon also notes that the Celtic one, Morrigan, likely dates back to the "the megalithic [pre-historic] cult of the Mothers," so it's possible that they evolved from a common root.

But the theory doesn't seem implausible. It's also likely a fact in Native American flood stories, which are so similar to the one told iN Genesis that Western tampering seems a much more likely explanation than anything else.

Something to think about.

I wish I could take random classes in things that interest me, so I could write about shit like this and actually know what I was saying.

--
*Since the Romans' mythology came from the Greeks', obviously.

Why I'm smarter than "Correspondent Steve Kroft"

2004-12-27T05:01:00.000-08:00

Gene was watching 60 Minutes tonight and they did an abysmaltacular story on us "echo-boomers"--the children of baby boomers. It was clear that they had nothing meaningful to talk about (even by 60 Minutes Standards) so they decided to fill up the time with gross generalizations and a minimum of actual reporting (even by 60 Minutes standards).

The segment begins--"And whether you call them 'echo boomers,' 'Generation Y' or 'millenials,' they already make up nearly one-third of the U.S. population, and already spend $170 billion a year of their own and their parents' money. Almost none of it is spent on boring things like mortgages and medication. And the world is falling all over itself trying sell them things. What brands do they love? Sony, Patagonia, Gap, Gillette, Aveda."

Now, being a "Millenial" myself, I may not be as smart as the folks at 60 Minutes, but I can't help but notice three huge problems already--

a) Buzzwords--does calling 12-20 year olds "echo boomers" really help you understand anything?
b) Fear-mongering--Oh no! Generation Y controls the money! $170 billion of it! They're like the Jews of the 21st century!
c) horrible horrible logic--we have most of th emoney, and apparently spend it all on 5 companies. I can't tell you what Patagonia and Aveda make offhand (I want to say backpacks and shampoo respectively, but I don't really know or care), so I doubt that's true. And if it were, wouldn't those companies be insanely wealthy? I mean, I'm sure they're doing just fine, but if Sony's making something like $34 billion a year (1/5 of that teenager money for the number one of the five companies we're devoted to), shouldn't Kodak and Nikon have closed up shop by now?

The show then stops to remind everyone that we grew up with, "500-channel TV...cell phones, music downloads, and Instant Messaging [sic] on the Internet."

This is followed by a non-sequitir clip of two college age "echo boomers" saying that their generation is too rigidly managed.

Dr. Mel Levine, a professor at the University of North Carolina, is one of the best-known pediatricians in the country. He says it's had as much to do with shaping this generation as technology.

"They have been heavily programmed. The kids who have had soccer Monday, Kung Fu Tuesday, religious classes Wednesday, clarinet lessons Thursday. Whose whole lives have really been based on what some adult tells them to do," says Levine.

"This is a generation that has long aimed to please. They've wanted to please their parents, their friends, their teachers, their college admissions officers."

It's a generation in which rules seem to have replaced rebellion, convention is winning out over individualism, and values are very traditional.

The whole "rigidly-managed" time thing is a stereotype which the show dosn't bother trying to support (though there probably is some truth to it. But the next assertion is puzzling--we want to please others. Is that more true of us than children a decade ago? 60 Minutes isn't concerned with providing any kind of evidence, but the answer seems to be an unequivical yes.
The last statement is both literally senseless--how can values be changing in a way that makes them "more traditional"?--and staggeringly insulting. These people refuse to look at us as individuals, yet then complain we lack individuality.

But wait! Our lack of individuality isn't a bad thing. Because we're, "worrying less about leadership than follower-ship," we're also more obedient!

And you can already see some results. Violent crime among teenagers is down 60 to 70 percent. The use of tobacco and alcohol are at all-time lows. So is teen pregnancy.
That doesn't sound so bad. But the next statment is key--
Five out of 10 echo boomers say they trust the government, and virtually all of them trust mom and dad.

Our one good point is that we trust, not just our parents, but the government. That's an interesting (and, like all of them on 60 minutes) unsupported statistic, and one I find particularly hard to believe. According to The Boston Globe, "Senator John Kerry won the under-30 [vote] with 54 percent of the vote to President Bush's 44 percent. The Democrats lost every other age group" (emphasis mine).
If we trust the government more than anyone else, why are we the ones who least support the current government? Do they just mean we have inordinate fate in democracy, or think Congress is really awesome, or what?

The do, more or less correctly, note that we're comparitively media-savvy.
They are the most sophisticated generation ever when it comes to media. They create their own Web sites, make their own CDs and DVDs, and are cynical of packaged messages. They take their cues from each other.

We're the least individual generation, yet we make our own entertainment instead of letting others make it for us? Alright...

A well-placed product on one of their pop idols, like Paris Hilton or Ashton Kutcher, can launch a brand of $40 T-shirts and trucker hats. But they also shop at vintage clothing shops.
...or not. Explaining the discrepancy here is simple--the Paris Hilton-lovers and the vintage clothing-shoppers are not the same people. But to acknowledge this obvious fact would be to admit that we're more "individualistic" than they suggested, and then they'd have to do research, and talk to lots of different kids, and that'd be hard.

After talking about car ads for awhile, they explain that not only do we control the money--we also control the media! Golly! We're like the Jews of the 21st century!
"Echo boomers have their own television network--the WB"
Do you watch the WB? Do you know anyone who watches The WB? No, you don't.
Considering how pervasive we are, you'd think our channel would be doing better.

They then describe how our sheltered lifestyle makes us ill-suited to the real world, explaining that we expect to be "heroes and heroines" and can't stand it when that's not the case.
"I talked to the CEO of a major corporation recently and I said, 'What characterizes your youngest employees nowadays?'" says Levine. "And he said, 'There's one major thing.' He said, 'They can't think long-range. Everything has to be immediate, like a video game. And they have a lot of trouble sort of doing things in a stepwise fashion, delaying gratification. Really reflecting as they go along.' I think that's new."

Levine calls the phenomenon visual motor ecstasy, where any cultural accoutrement that doesn't produce instant satisfaction is boring. As echo boomers grow up, they'll have to learn that life is not just a series of headlines and highlight reels.

First, the reason I generally don't play video games, is that (in my experience) they're not immediate at all--they're tedious and time-consuming with little reward for a lot of work. Wuthering Heights has about as much instant gratification as Halo 2.
Second, this statement is particularly hard to accept considering the success of the Harry Potter books with our age bracket. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is 870 pages long. Regardless of content, you simply cannot read a 900-page book with out "reflecting as you go along."

The segment ends with--
"What would you call your generation?" Buckingham asked Scott, one of her focus group participants.

"Perfect," he says, laughing.

"Oh, Generation Y--will you ever learn? Well, you fucking better if you want to be a useful part of the work place. Except for the 'being a team player' part. Keep that up."

You know what? We're not perfect. I'm continually frustrated by the unreflective goofiness of people my age--and those are the ones I like!
That nobody's perfect goes without saying. That 80 million people can't all be imperfect in the same way should be just as obvious.

I find the suggestion that everyone my age is basically identical (and identically fucked up) personally offensive.
If you're going to talk about a specific trend, you're going to have to have to have some solid numbers to back you up.
If you're going to talk about a "generation" as a whole, you're going to have to do a lot more work than that.

Besides, are we substantially worse than past generations?
Not that ritalin-dependence and media obsession are good things, but the last generation was, as 60 Minutes sagely put it "self-absorbed [and] egocentric".
And do we really want to romanticize the generation before that? I'm sure the world was a much better place when blacks had separate water fountains, women couldn't work, and Japanese Americans got put into camps.

But there's a certain group of people who do want to idealize the WW2 and post-War generations**--people who are part of them. They write and buy books calling themselves "the greatest generation", praise themselves for raising awesomely hip kids and, more importantly, they watch 60 Minutes.
It's sad that pandering to misconceptions and fears about "the kids today" then cutting to Andy Rooney rambling about nothing** is what 60 Minutes considers respectable journalism.

You'd never see this garbage on Banana Slug News, believe you me!

--
*1922-1927 and 1928-1945 according to Wikipedia, assuming it isn't bullshit, which it is.
**Andy Rooney ranted about how college professors spend all their time "sitting on the sidelines in funny costumes" and "don’t work hard enough".
Therefore, they should form their own (completely non-democratic) branch of government where they can advise the president and congress how to act smartly.

VIDEO GAME VIDEO GAME VIDEO GAME

2004-12-24T15:29:00.000-08:00

Holy fuck, this article is brilliant. Let me see if I can pan movies as well as this dude. I suppose it's possible he's seen the movie's he's talking about, but he gives no evidence of such, so I'm going to kick it up a notch as they say and only review movies I haven't seen--

NATIONAL TREASURE
A disastrously bad fiasco of a film starring a slumming Nicolas Cage in a terribly bad role. They may as well have handed out joysticks to the audience and made them pop in quarters, because this movie's plot is nothing but video game material. Bad.

POLAR EXPRESS
This horribly awful abortion of a movie stars a dismal Tom Hanks in a bloated story of Christmas suck. With all the overdone CGI, this "film" looks more like a video game than anything.

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
Andrew Lloyd Webber's popular musical makes an awfultacular transition to the big screen in this tragically lame badfest. With more attention paid to flashy visual imagery than to story or characters, director Joel Schumacher (Batman & Robin) seems to think he's making a video game instead of a movie.

Jim Carey and a couple of kids I know nothing about star in one of the worst movies of the year.

LEMONY SNICKET'S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS
Harry Potter this ain't. Jim Carey drives the final coffin nails into the suck chunk that is his career in this painfully terribleful garbag-o-thon. More like "Lemony Nintendo's A Series of Things That Are Better Suited to A Video Game", am I right?

HOTEL RWANDA
This abysmalacular bastion of suckery represents the ethnic cleansing in early nineties Rwanda as two parallel paddles with a bouncing monochrome ball moving between them. You're going to be "pong"-ing your way out of theater halfway through this Dionysian revel of spectacular baddery.

The Gospel of John--Really worth the trouble?

2004-12-16T02:28:00.000-08:00

ScriptureMonkey: you should read the gospels. I'd like to hear your opinion on them
eeuuugh: Maybe I should, not right now though.
ScriptureMonkey: fair enough
eeuuugh: what are they about?

I realized tonight that I've never read The Gospel of John all the way through, so I'm doing that now.
And no, it's not appropriate to the season, because Jesus' birth (and the wise men, and all that) is only mentioned in Luke, and briefly, though you wouldn't know it from what a big deal people make of them.

Anyway, John? Kind of sucks.
Christians like John even more than the other gospels (a lot of tracts they give out say shit like, "Read the Bible every day! Start with the Gospel of John!"), I guess because it makes the biggest deal out of Jesus being God, and they're into that. But it's turgid repetitive prose hardly seems the best way to win converts.
It's the latest of the gospels (despite what it implies, it was almost certainly written a generation after Jesus lived), steeped in Greek mysticism, ahistorical, anti-semetic (a lot of actions are attributed to "The Jews"), vaguely boring...

And worst of all, Jesus just comes across as kind of an ass.
He's talking to a Samaratan woman who mentions that Jews think they're more important than Samaratans. He replies, "You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks."

So, "Yeah, the Jews are better than you, but I'm better than the Jews, so, it rocks to be me."

"The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”

Then Jesus declared, “I who speak to you am he.”

"Oh, fyi, that's me. LOL."

It's not too different from scenes in the other gospels, to be sure, but only in the sense that the "C3PO in a robot factory" scene in "Attack of the Clones" was like "Empire Strikes Back" since both had 3PO getting dismantled.
The basic idea is more or less the same as its predeccessors, but it's more caught up in how everything figures into an obnoxious pre-determined plan than in actually telling a decent story.
Just as we need Han Solo, we need the sermon on the mount.

Worse still, John** cares more about working out his theology than giving you any reason to believe in it.
You get sentences that are vaguely mystical but mostly just confusing like "The one who comes from above is above all; the one who is from the earth belongs to the earth, and speaks as one from the earth." God's awesome, Earth...something. Whatever, man.

John has its moments to be sure--"Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" is John's, and it's one of my favorite things in the Bible.
And that double-bladed light sabre fight in "Phantom Menace" was pretty cool, but it didn't make up for Jar Jar.

John does disserve some points for originality. Matthew and Luke were (probably) both mostly a hodgepodge of Mark and The Q Gospel, while John did it's own thing.
And it's pretty damn impressive to have something you wrote being widely read 1800 years after you died.

But next time you're looking for your Jesus fix (and you will be), I'd still recommend Matthew's completeness or Mark's originality over John any day. Or, alternately, The Brick Testament, if you're into that kind of thing.

--
*IRONY
**There's no reason to believe The Gospel of John was written by John the Evangelist, John the Baptist, John the Divine, or anyone else named John, really. But that's what the book's called, so what else am I gonna call him?

4 out of the 5 voices in my head think Hot Topic's retarded. The other one bought a shirt.

2004-11-15T11:30:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Nikki, Angelo, and I went to the Hot Topic in Capitola to do research so we can market Flash-drawn ironic shit to goth kids, and then use the money to fund awesome things, like making more comics and movies and putting a stop to global warming.

This is a spider whose name I believe is Bagonia. S/he will eventually be joined by a cute goth girl with red hair wearing a jumper, if we remember to finish.
Obviously this needs an ironic catchphrase underneath. If you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them.

We probably didn't need to take a bus out of town to figure this out, but we boiled down the unifying elements of almost all Hot Topic clothing to--

1. Black, but with--
2. Stark pastel colors (high contrast images, ala Che, are common, but not universal)
3. Characters that are adorable, yet--
4. Creepy in a way that is--
5. Ironic and (allegedly) nonconformist

We haven't quite figured out what to do with this ("Step one, design characters....Step three, PROFIT!"), but that will come with time.

We went to the Capitola Mall, and I realized I don't think I've ever been to a real mall before. Odd.

Hot Topic is a strange place. There's a level at which it's incredibly depressing, because seeing things you like to think of as original and cool are popular enough and obvious enough to be mass-marketed. It's funny that the only movie they sell is Donnie Darko, because they know that everyone who thinks they're different likes Donnie Darko, but the fact that everyone wants it makes it not so different.

But I'm not telling you anything you don't already know.

The thing that makes it ambiguous and weird is that some of the stuff there is undeniably nifty. Most of it's awful, but some is damn cool. After much moral deliberation, I bought a "The Darkness" shirt, because I sort of like The Darkness, and I need shirts.
I think the problem is that Hot Topic fails to convince you that it is itself underground and hardcore. I can't explain why, in a world where Rage Against the Machine and Fight Club were both produced by huge conglamerate corporations and still seemed like they were fighting the establishment that Hot Topic (a relatively small company*) doesn't.
I think the irony's just a bit too obvious. I'm sure many would take issue with me on this point, but I don't think you can look counter-culture while spending your time and money at the fucking mall.

Afterward we went to a store whose name I forget that was basically the same thing for marginally older people--"Hot Topic with boobs" as Angelo put it. They had a shirt which I thought Frank would like that says, "I have the dick, so I make the rules" (because Frank is a delightfully sexist asshole.
For balance, they had another shirt that said, "I have the pussy, so I make the rules," which is a great example of the "fight sexism with sexism" attitude that I've been bemoaning of late.

All in all, I think this was a pretty cool weekend. Nothing amazing happened, but I made some good progress on my comic, went some places I've never gone before, and just generally had a neat time.

--
*They are, however, publicly traded. And their stock is goin' up! You should invest in Hot Topic, hardcore. All the cool kids are doing it.**
**Or maybe not. What a bunch of fucking posers.

FUN BONUS FACT: Emily the Strange was created by two guys in Santa Cruz. They were unavailable for comment at press time.

"Hello, I have a purple shirt and disapprove of war. What's your name?"

2004-11-12T16:56:00.000-08:00

Click here for a brief, uninformative sneak preview of new comic!

This is the first panel I've finished for the comic I'm making for Arts in a Multicultural Society. This scene probably won't make it into the finished comic, but it was a good place to start.
The comic as a whole has nothing whatsoever to do with current political events, which is partially why this scene is being cut.

I had to draw by hand for like an hour before I got a drawing of her that I was happy enough with to bother to scan and Flashitize, which doesn't make me feel optimistic about my productivity for the comic as a whole, but we'll see.
If I finish this successfully, it'll be the longest comic I've done since "Son of the Morning," which is kind of sad if you think about it.
This'll be good for me. Or something.

The first time I've heard someone non-ironically call someone else, "comrade"

2004-11-06T17:29:00.000-08:00

Oh, good.

Thursday night, I went to a meeting of the International Socialist Organization on campus.*
The socialists were not, as I predicted, either incredibly dumb or incredibly awesome--they kind of ran the gamut.
The meeting was advertised in huge letters on the chalkboard in my Politics class--a class with several hundred people.

We came to the meeting, in one of the conference rooms above the bookstore, a few minutes after 8.
Not counting the six members of the Organization, there were four people there, including me and Stephanie.

The guy I talked to on the phone was very nice, and showed me their huge wad of Socialist and misc. left wing literature. I asked if they lent them to you or what. He said that they were for sale only, but "there's no tax." Ok...

We were introduced to everyone, and told to sit down at the semi-circular table.
They began by having some dude talk about the election--not as much about why Bush won (which would involve considering that most of the American class, for whatever reason, seem to think Republicanism is a good idea), but why even if Kerry won, it wouldn't be a good thing--since he's nearly as conservative as Bush, albiet not, "The Devil incarnate".
They supported Nader/Comejo for president this year, but to them that's pretty much incidental.

As far as I can understand it, they're banking on things getting so bad in America that the proletariat will be motivated to reuinte and abolish our current system.
On some theoretical level, this sounds ok to me, but in practice, (aside from being terrifying), I'm not convinced it would work at all.

Even if people were sufficiently mobilized to overthrow the overhwhelming power of the American government, what's to make sure that the nice Socialist system would be set up instead of a couple more assholes taking over and making things even worse?
If this election has showed us anything, it's that lower middle class folk in that huge middle chunk of America aren't the most staggeringly perceptive people. If you could establish a neat little Socialist system, it'd be awesome, but I'm having trouble making that inferential leap.
Maybe it'd happen after the third counter-revolution or some such. Comforting thought.

The mood of the place was incredibly awkward. The turn-out was very low, but there were few chairs, so apparently they weren't expecting otherwise. Whenever anyone spoke, they were followed by minutes of awkward silence.

Then the guy I'd spoken to came up next, and gave a half hour speech about the way the Socialist society would work after the revolution.
I really like him, because he's a very clear intelligent speaker, but doesn't seem particularly aware that he is. He doesn't seem overly attractive, charasmatic, or even smart**--just clear, earnest, and thoughtful.
The basic idea is that society would be organized into regional collectives of 500 or so workers, governed by a council from within their ranks that can easily and quickly be replaced if they're assholes. They represent the collective on a national level, because national coordination is needed for shipment of goods and such.
This sounds basically ok (I asked who does all the terrible jobs that no one wants, and they said everyone would alternate, which is a sensible, if obviously problematic, answer), though there's still the problem of who's going to set this system up to begin with--the members of the International Socialist Organization?

He talked about how revolutions in places like Russia and China had been co-opted because they were run by people not from the proletariat...but all of these people are University students, and don't seem terribly working class--are they supposed to precipitate the revolution and then just sit back and let it happen?
Honestly, I don't know how much faith I have in "the proletariat", whoever they may be. On a pragmatic idealogical level because you run the danger of mob rule by the un-educated, and on a personal level because (though I hate to admit it), just about every career ambition I have depends on being comparitively well-off. Is there a lot of time for cartooning in The People's Republic? Though I suppose communal labor could be likened to housework--something everyone has to take care of on a regular basis before going on with their own shit.

But for all my bitching, I have to admit I find Marxist rhetoric really appealing on some level***, and I want to believe in it.
I love the closing words of The Communist Manifesto--
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of all countries, unite!
Our current system of government (and for that matter, of life) is deeply fucked up on some level, but is it (in the words of Wallace Shawn in the play we had to read for Multicultural class) "irredeemingly corrupt"?
I find it hard to believe that capitalism as it exists today can continue to do so three hundred years from now. Maybe that's partially based on my childhood belief in the quasi-Socialist future of "Star Trek", I don't know.
But a fundemental reconstruction of society requires a revolution, and is that really what we want? I seldom think in those terms, and don't really like to--planning for the future neccessarily assumes the future will be like the present.

The triumph of evil this last election shows that something needs to change. The ISO would say that that "something" is "everything".
I don't know where I stand on that.

I asked for a copy of their pamphlet "The Future Socialist Society". Someone offered to give theirs up to me, and it was after that that they revealed it cost $3. I felt bad for making them go through all that effort, so I relented.
I'm not sure how I feel about this though. It's 30 pages long and black and white (except for the cover). There's no way $3 is cost, so does the difference go to the ISO? Cause trying to raise funds for Socialism through selling stuff is pretty hilarious if you think about it.
Damn peer-pressuring socialists.

They asked us to go with them to some kind of seminar or something in San Francisco. I said maybe. I'm kind of fascinated, but I don't know that adding Socialism to my life will make it any happier or better. We'll see.

--
When I came back, Nikki came over, and the CRE (asshole who is in charge of something or other and who everyone ignores), got mad at us for being too loud while it was technically quiet hours, even though everyone else in the building was still awake (except, apparently, for him). He said that he normally would have let us off with a warning, but we were just too annoying. He asked for my name, I gave it to him, he accused me of faking it, then he assholed away to wherever assholes go when they're done voting for Bush and giving people speeding tickets and such.

Fucking jackass.
Let him tremble at revolution! I've nothing to lose but my chains, puto!

--
*The International Socialist Organization, that is, not to be confused with the other Santa Cruz ISO.
**Which isn't to say that he isn't, but that he doesn't act like he is.
***Do right wing people feel the same way about fascism as I do about socialism? I wonder.