Photo by Walter Kundzicz

Look out, I’m about to spew words about recent things I’ve consumed.

Netflix movies

Death Race 2000: Pretty goddamn brilliant. Proto-Starship Troopers-style sci-fi exploitation with a nice satirical bite. There’s a lot of Roger Corman productions on Netflix these days and I’m eating em up. The Big Bird Cage was another good one, also Switchblade Sisters. I love exploitation’s total embrace of excess and feeling: it’s horror, sex and violence congealed and lobbed right at your face. Which doesn’t always make it palatable, but at least it doesn’t pull any punches.

Theater movies

Gone: I saw this with a friend who has a thing for Amanda Seyfried. Afterwards I totally got it, because Seyfried turned in a great peformance. She was crafty, intense and unreadable. The movie kept me entertained. Low expectations are always a good thing. I loved Amanda Seyfried’s blue car.

We Need to Talk About Kevin: What a weird-ass movie. In fact it was best in its most weird and abstract moments. The problem was it was so fucking looong. I loved the fact that it was a movie about a school massacre where we won’t supposed to give a shit about the victims, it was all about the mom. It was a maternal horror story, but the horror stuff, especially toward the end, wasn’t punchy enough, it dragged and groaned. The brutal office party scene sticks with me, as does the opening sequence.

Books

The Hunger Games: Clearly readable, an achievement that one shouldn’t gloss over (even though I just did). I’m sure a million amateur pundits have weighed in on this already, but it’s truly a testament to how far we’ve come as a nation that an exploitation story about teenagers killing one another (and not having sex, of course) is one of our most popular stories among kids and adults. The romance was weak, as was the fact that they changed the rules halfway in. On the fence as to whether I’ll read the next two.

Champion, Photographs by Walter Kundzicz: I haven’t said much about my trip to New York a couple weekends ago, but geez, it was kinda brilliant and I kinda kicked some ass. I sold copies of Backwoods at the Rainbow Book Fair, and my table happened to face that of photographer Reed Massengill. After I got over my jealousy of how many books he was selling we had an enjoyable time in one another’s company. He has several books of photography and they’re pretty brilliant, erotic and human. But before the day was over I traded him one of my collages for this book of photographs, which he edited. It’s fantastic not only for the brilliant Kodachrome colors and hot dudes. Kundzicz has a sense of humor and poses his dopey muscle men with all kinds of esoteric fetish objects: football helmets, pitchforks, dish racks, eye patches, binoculars, telephones…the list is endless. It’s absolutely hilarious and unique.

Shirtlifter by Steve MacIsaac: I picked up several issues of this comic when I was Chicago some time ago and I’ve been meaning to write about it since. Anybody who enjoys stories of modern gay white men (re: Weekend) would do themselves a service to check these comics out, which are unflinchingly honest and crisply told. Lots of sex, though whether it’s erotic or not is sort of up for grabs. I’m more a fan of the strong, melancholy narration.

Repost from old blog, 10/9/2006

“In countries like the U.S. and Great Britain, we exist in a wholly sexualized culture, where everything from cars to snack food are sold with a healthy slathering of sex to make them more commercially appealing. But if you’re using sex to sell sneakers, then you’re not just selling sneakers, you’re selling sex as well, and you’re contributing to the sexual temperature of society. You’re going to get people who, unsurprisingly, become overheated in that kind of sexual environment, and if they attempt to assuage their desires by resorting to the widely available medium of pornography, they’re going to have their moment of gratification, and then they’re going to have a much longer period of self-loathing, disgust, shame and embarrassment. It’s almost like a kind of a reverse Skinner-box experiment, where once the rat has pushed the lever and successfully received the food, then he gets the electric shock.”
–Alan Moore

I just finished reading Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s incredible graphic novel Lost Girls. I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect from this book, even though I was intrigued after reading interviews with Moore (the quote below is from a wonderful interview with the Onion AV Club, and I urge you to read it because it nearly blew my mind). Being somewhat of a [novice] student of erotica, though, I had to pick it up.

…more (more…)

The ACME Novelty Library Volume 20 by Chris Ware

Chris Ware’s already mind-blowing work continues to evolve by leaps and bounds. This book is part of his ongoing Rusty Brown narrative, and one gets the sense that Ware has largely abandoned his initial conception for the project and gone wherever his nutso-genius brain has led him. While the first couple Rusty Brown books were somewhat disappointing rehashes of Ware’s formal and thematic favorites (experimental design, loneliness), in subsequent volumes the narrative has become increasingly fragmented, focusing longer stretches on seemingly tangential characters. #20 takes this approach to its extreme, honing in on the high-school bully character from previous volumes and laying out his entire life, from birth to death – or, more precisely (this being Ware and all, precision is paramount), from nothing to nothing.

Visually it’s as gorgeous as anything he’s ever done, designed to within an inch of its life (and, as Matt Seneca points out, in some ways the book design is the narrative). It would be a shame for the casual reader to avoid this book just because it’s ostensibly part of an ongoing series (and for its generic/numeric title) – it works perfectly on its own. I couldn’t put it down, read it in one gulp, heart racing. It took my breath away.

A brand new driver’s license; a low-riding muscle car; an incandescent blaze of searing red light; “Stairway to Heaven” blaring from the AM/FM radio. These elements all dance and intermingle on the page, sweeping you inexorably forward with an emotional rather than narrative thrust. Ware treats comics like a hieroglyphic code, a language for unlocking some unspeakable truth.

– Joshua O’Neill, a much more capable reviewer than I.

X’ed Out by Charles Burns

I’m sorry to report that this book annoyed me before I even opened it.  Charles Burns’ last major project, Black Hole, is probably my favorite comic of all time – rich, strange, beautiful, nostalgic.  So I had high hopes for X’ed Out, but was bothered outright by the fact that it’s a hardcover book.  Whatever happened to alternative comics – like, actual, stapled comics that cost five to seven dollars?

Then there’s the back cover blurb:  ”From the creator of Black Hole comes the first volume of an epic masterpiece of graphic fiction in brilliant color.”  So that’s why I’m paying twenty bucks for it – because it isn’t a comic book, it’s an epic masterpiece of graphic fiction.  Give me a break – the fucking project isn’t even finished.

Okay, okay, I know that’s just marketing.  And it’s quite pretty, and Burns is apparently going for a Tintin homage (though those books are softcover, to the best of my knowledge).  But, because I bought both books at the same time, I can’t help but compare it to Ware’s Acme Novelty #20, which somehow seems justified as a complete work, between two hard covers (not that his earlier volumes, also hardcover, were always of the same caliber) .

The book itself was interesting enough, and seems to be going in a good direction.  I’ll save any final judgments for the completed work, when I’m sixty dollars lighter and one graphic-novel-that-coulda-fit-in-the-space-of-four-comic-books richer.

Repost from old blog, 11/5/2009

I recently read some new comics.

Spent by Joe Matt

What It Is by Lynda Barry

Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse

My good buddy Nils draws whacked-out misfit comics and drawings.  Here are some of my faves.  Visit Skeleton Balls for more.

(click for larger)