Kurt Vonnegut.

This is only my second day back from my Okinawa trip, but it feels like one long, continuous day since I left, and the trip itself feels like it happened months ago. I am not on island time anymore, but I am not yet on LA time. I drank island awamori with Jeff tonight, but even that could not convince me to go to bed, and here it is 6:30am.

Being in the islands was fantastic, but I think my greatest sadness hit me as I left Yonaguni, the first and furthest small island that I visited. I did not expect the kindness that I received there and I felt terribly lonely to be leaving friendly people behind me indefinately. There were good times ahead of me though, and it it felt great to be unaware of the world for that short two weeks.

Coming back to the US, I was greeted with many unfortunate news stories that had transpired while I was away, oblivious to US current events. The first was of course the VA Tech shootings. While in Yonaguni, a week before the massacre ocurred, Naomi had asked me whether I'd ever used a gun. It seems like an unusual question, but reflecting back on what people know of LA and the US, maybe it is totally logical. Anyway, I have used one, so perhaps my surprise at the question is more unusual than the question itself.

In the wake of that news, there has been the following story of the NASA Space Center contractor who killed himself and a female hostage in Houston. There have also been a flurry of small, local alarms and building closures now that the media coverage of these events has everyone on edge and in fear of their safety. A local high school was closed today after a teen went missing with two of his parents' handguns. Does this kind of thing happen everyday and go unreported? Is it suddenly news because it is a convenient tie-in to the VA Tech story? When that story finally dies, will these smaller ones go away too? Or was that large-scale massacre like a full moon, upsetting the equilibrium of people teetering on the edge of their sanity? Is our society so pathological? Does our way of living make that many people sick, or is it by sheer power of numbers that we see more evidence of murderous rampages than in other countries? Or is it our citizens' convenient access to handguns that differentiates their outbursts from those of their crazy counterparts abroad? Will we ever develop the will, as a society, to limit our free access to guns in exchange for a reduction in wanton murder sprees? Gun activists say that people, not guns, are to blame for killing. Which people are to blame for Seung-Hui Cho's ability to purchase handguns off the internet?

Today I also learned that one of my favorite writers passed away on April 11. Kurt Vonnegut was 84 years old and survived the firebombing of Dresden Germany during WWII, a scene he later depicted famously in his novel Slaughterhouse-5.
What is there to say? Vonnegut was a writer who was often erroneously classified as a science-fiction novelist, although he was more succesful at transcending the genre ghetto than other great American writers of the late 20th century, such as Philip K. Dick (although the two have little in common). He was a satirist, a social critic, he used very simple prose and had very sharp wit. His accessibility and acerbity attracted me at a young age and I quickly dissolved most of his major novels and short story collections.

Although opposite in writing style, his sensibilities are more in line with his equally luminous contemporary, Thomas Pynchon I think. They both have a kind of gleefully goofy irreverent humor, concern for the fate of humanity, contempt for authority, cautious attitudes towards technology, disregard for narrative chronology and they have both written books featuring robots, talking animals and end-of-the-world scenarios.

Vonnegut always seemed to me like the cool old crotchety grandfather of American writing; the kind whose complaints you would love to sit and listen to. After buying and reading more than 13 used paperbacks when I was a teenager and only had $4 to spare for a book, I eventually eased out of my Vonnegut phase, but like a great relationship, the memories lasted long after it ran out of gas. I think having such a literary gradfather in my early teens was formative and contributed to the brand of cynical idealism that is my current philosophy. Vonnegut was someone who was humorously cynical, but not without hope that his work as an artist-observer and cultural critic could prevent us from causing our own absurd decline.

In recent times, Vonnegut retired from writing fiction and turned his attentions to magazine articles, wherein he often gave the Bush Administration the much-needed ass-ripping that so many other writers have been unable to muster the balls for. Vonnegut, a man in his 80s, a distinguished man of letters, highly regarded and recognized, did not have any fear of offering his opinion when something struck him as absurd - it is what his entire career was founded on - and the recent Bush years provided him with ample fodder for magazine articles, but sadly, seemed to diminish his optimism for the fate of humanity.
LA Weekly columnist Dave Shulman, in his obituary to Vonnegut, quotes a passage from his recently-published non-fiction collection "A Man Without a Country:"

"Many years ago I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for the dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.
But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable."

Sadly I missed an opportunity to see Vonnegut several years ago when he read at LA's Armand Hammer museum. I normally try to see the people I consider the cultural heavyweights of my own time. I felt that Vonnegut's passing might be soon in coming, due to his age, and there was an incident several years ago, when his house caught fire, which I thought might have been his last call. I'm glad he lived long enough to get a few more jabs in at deserving targets, but I hope that the above quote was not representative of how he felt at the end. I suspect that it was not his final verdict on humanity, even if the pessimism towards the US culture, state of education and political system was genuine. People like Vonnegut are part of why I can accept the unwieldy American identity as my own, because in the end, all such arbitrary identities become irrelevant and the only thing that bonds people together is their ability to comprehend one another. For every unreasonable, ignorant, fearful, greedy, or weak force in the world, and for the mindless collectivism feeding around those forces, let their be a Vonnegut who can gently or scaldingly, with humor or frustration, provide a counterweight of independent thought to inspire people to question any seemingly obvious logic.

I wonder whether in this post-modern era, in which people seem to be unable to create anything that is not a direct reference to some pre-existing idea, when we will produce another like Vonnegut. Is such a person already at work and I am just unaware of it, or has our culture become so stagnant? He was that old grandfather, but for all of us who grew up at his knee, has no one yet stepped forward to resume in his place? Will we create another Vonnegut who is not merely "another Vonnegut," self-consciously referencing his predecessor's style and voice? How will our generation write our own stories and histories, how are we reacting to our own times? We do not have the grand historical furnaces of the Great Depression, or a Great War in which to fire our collective generational identity, but are the significant events of our own histories simply not registering on a generational scale the way they did in the 30s and 40s? Are we not at war now? Are we not in economic decline? Are the events of our lives grand enough to call attention to themselves, or must we continue to have the volume turned up with each succeeding generation? Can the events in our time compress each of our loose carbon bodies into critical diamond minds? Do we not love? Do we not die? Can our generation not also be great if we choose to be? Will we grasp the materials at hand, the events which unfold like historical threads around us, and make it so?

There is one last quote, again from an article that was collected in "Man Without A Country:"

"The Army kept me on because I could type, so I was typing other people's discharges and stuff. And my feeling was, 'Please, I've done everything I was supposed to do. Can I go home now?' That's what I feel right now. I've written books. Lots of them. Please, I've done everything I'm supposed to do. Can I go home now?"

Ryszard Kapuscinski

"The most important thing is to write. And to write, I need the stories." -- From Los Angeles Times Obituary.
Just learned of the death of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski.
I read his book, "The Soccer War," a few years ago when I was looking for more information on the little-known war that broke out between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969 over the outcome of a soccer game.
Kapuscinski covered wars and third-world governments all over the globe. The Soccer War not only included detailed accounts of his time on the ground in Honduras during the 1969 war, but also chronicled his time in the former Congo, where he recounts reactions to the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.
It's hard to imagine his writing, which captured the absurdities of the conflicts he witnessed, appearing in objective newsprint. He was a much better writer than the label "correspondent" would suggest. And as the Times obit has noted, he didn't do too bad, making it to 74 years old after tempting fate with his life so many times for the sake of his occupation.

Donald Richie on the Death of Yukio Mishima

Came across this in the recently published Japan Journals by Donald Richie.

"'Japan is gone, vanished, disappeared... [T]here is nothing left to save.'
When I first learned of his suicide that is what I first remembered - that he already knew that there was nothing more to save. His may have been a political statement, an aesthetic statement, but it was also a despairing personal statement.
...And it is true that a real romantic is he who compares things as they are with things as they ought to be and then has the strength of character to live by those standards which he himself finds better."

Harlan Ellison, Still Angry After All These Years

DISCUSSION / BOOK SIGNING - Oct. 29 - Skylight Books
Moving to Los Feliz was a mixed bag for me. I've been there for almost a year and I love that I can walk to anything I might need (grocery stores, post office, library, movie theater), but I am also irritated at having to share that convenience with LA's trendy elite. Resistant to the Borg-like mentality which compels LA's scenesters to emulate each other in heroin chic-derivative dress and mannerism, I often feel like an outsider walking the streets of my own neighborhood. As much as I bristle at the rude treatment received from coffee shop waitresses whose minds are on their afternoon auditions, I accept it as the cost of living in a bohemian atmosphere that provides a sustainable ecosystem for places like Skylight Books. I've never lived in any other famously bohemian neighborhoods, like Haight-Ashbury or Greenwich Village, but I imagine they would be stimulating and irritating in similar ways.

I love to visit Skylight. It's not that I can afford to buy new books (I can, but if I indulged in the practice as much as I am tempted to, it would become an expensive habit), but Skylight is one of those bookstores that gets writers like Harlan Ellison to make an appearance, and I love the fact that I can discover events like this on my way home from the supermarket, walking down the street with a bag full of chicken drumsticks and garlic. Beyond that, they are one of those bookstores, which are becoming increasingly rare, into which you can walk and make a discovery, rather than going into Barnes & Noble because you expect to be able to find that classic Ray Bradbury book that you would like to give as a gift, and discovering that it is not stocked because they need the shelf space for John Grisham.

Having written over 1000 pieces of fiction, from short stories to television scripts, and edited numerous anthologies, Harlan Ellison is now one of the American elders of science fiction literature. He's matured into grandaddy status, having outlived Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick. He used attract media for his "live" storywriting sessions, where he would sit in the window of a bookshop and type an original story. He wrote the original "Star Trek" episode "City on the Edge of Forever," in which Kirk, Spock and McCoy travel back to America during the Depression, as well as several influential episodes of the original "Outer Limits;" two of which, "Soldier" and "Demon with a Glass Hand," provided the inspiration for "The Terminator." Ellison was recounting this story when I walked in. Apparently, James Cameron almost went on the record in a magazine interview, giving credit for his story to Ellison, but had his lawyers contact the magazine shortly before publication to remove the quote. There was eventually a legal settlement, and Ellison is credited as an "inspiration" in the final credits of the film. Ellison comes across as principled and vindictive. In response to his almost being snubbed out of credit on "The Terminator," he took out a full page ad in one of the trade magazines, reprinting the "inspired by" credit from the film under the title "Exhibit A."

"He thinks his shit don't stink! He really thinks he is emperor of the world or something," Ellison exclaimed about Cameron.


One thing Ellison is not is modest. He doesn't even give the impression that he would claim modesty as one of his virtues. He sings his own praises, recounts his own accomplishments, and in true geezerly fashion (he's now in his 70s), condemns today's generations for allowing the internet to provide them with a false sense of informed awareness. I can't say I disagree totally with his cynicism, although since no one in the audience was as old as Ellison, I wondered if we were granted special exemption from the uninformed masses by virtue of being in his sage presence. I'm capping on the man a little bit, but I think Ellison has always been a kind of cynical geezer - in the best way - as a critic of media and society, who has been prone to outbursts along the way - over anything from tampering with his work (which includes posting it online without permission, see the legal case against AOL), to making assaults on people in public (various documented cases online, differing circumstances).

He says he has had quadruple bypass heart surgery and has been warned against having emotional outbursts, "but it happens... everyday." Certainly there is record of him having outbursts in public, and some of those have been dark accounts. I tend to romanticize people with angry, emotional natures, perhaps since I identify so well with them, and I am drawn towards the manifestation of this nature in his work and in certain aspects of his life (being a Hollywood outsider with enough power and contempt for producers to turn them down, participating in the Selma-Montgomery Equal Rights marches). Harlan Ellison, like Terry Gilliam, is the type of personality who indentifies himself as the underdog, and if you identify yourself as such too, there's an instant attraction. (For evidence of my own geezerliness, just review the first few paragraphs). There is a substantial amount of legend surrounding Ellison's brash public behavior that is less than a romantic underdog fable, but I am mostly familiar with him for his writing.

Among those who may only know him for his legend are those who would hire him. Ellison described the process of collaboration between him and the producers of the upcoming "Masters of Science Fiction" series as a back-and-forth game of indecision. The executives wanted Ellison to pick a story. "I have 1400 stories! How the hell do I know what they wanted?" he screamed. "Apparently they have time to be executives, but they don't have time to read." Then he was asked for an adaptation of "Repent Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman." Despite it being a reader favorite (undoubtedly why it was chosen by the execs), Ellison did not feel it lent itselt to a television adaptation. "Why can't something that you like exist in it's own medium?" he begged. It must be a particularly nagging question for a guy who's been so prolific and had so many of his pieces adapted, directly or indirectly, to varying degrees of success. He expressed his amazement that he was not only courted for the series, but that ABC, who was putting up half of the funding for the show, stipulated that their involvement would be contingent on Ellison being attached. If this is not a case of Ellison's ego self-deluding him, it is a nice piece of irony. "There are studios where I am still not allowed to work!" he hollered. "They lay out minefields when I walk on the lot." I guess as you get older, your legend grows, and whether that is owing to the stature of your work, the myths that surround you, or simple longevity, having a reputation for being "difficult" ceases to be a handicap when your name is synonymous with big sales.

I've always found it interesting to see the legends of my own time up close, whether that be James Brown, or Charlton Heston. Whether you love their work or hate it, and however you feel about the individuals themselves, there is some charisma that these people use to cast a spell over millions of people. In his immodest way, he told the room that there were things he could not do and things he was great at. "I can sing well," he told us (apparently he has sung professionally, casually name-dropping that he is good buddies with Mel Torme). "I can do these kinds of public speaking events. And I can write like a son of a bitch." I find it interesting that he excels in two talents, writing and verbal storytelling, which are not always co-occurent, and I can count it as an experience to have heard this son-of-a-bitching writer hold court and charm an audience with his brashness for an hour.

Tomine Talks and Signs

DISCUSSION / BOOK SIGNING - Nov. 5 - Skylight Books

I first saw Adrian Tomine's art at the GR2 gallery on Sawtelle. GR2 is one of Giant Robot's many storefront operations these days. Besides running interesting interviews with Japanese, Hong Kong or Korean filmmakers, Giant Robot succeeds, like any good art and culture magazine should, in occasionally turning my head slightly to catch something new on the passing cultural landscape.

That's exactly what happened when I walked into the Adrian Tomine show last summer. I saw a wall of 20-30 ink and watercolor panels that were as detailed in their capture of emotion as photography is, yet simplified in their high-contrast style of line drawing. They were like snapshots of people caught unobserved in mundane daily activity, whose faces revealed something about what they were thinking. Tomine struck me as an eavesdropping doodler, with a flare for capturing the expressions of people-in-passing. On some of Tomine's panels, he would scribble an impression or additional detail about the people he was spying on. "Deep in thought (or maybe just staring at his expensive-looking shoes," is written over a guy riding the train. "Making subtle facial reactions as one Wall Street guy explains to another his plan for 'scoring' with his ex-girlfriend when she comes to visit," reads the text beside a weary looking woman trapped between two jovial men.



I suppose the ostensible filmmaker in me appreciated the panels not only for their visual qualities, but for their stripped-down storytelling. Each one seemed like a micro-world of one or several characters, colored in their distraction or anxiety, with the past or future glazed into their eyes or reeking off their clothes.

I would have loved to walk out with one or more of these little ink panels, but each was attached to a price tag of $200-$400. Although I believe in "supporting the arts," I have never "owned art." Not the high-priced one-of-a-kind variety. So, bumbling around the store, I came across Optic Nerve - Tomine's comic book.

To anyone unfamiliar with the current state of comics, Optic Nerve might come as a complete departure from the expected. Super-heroes are still the driving force in that end of the publishing industry, but there has been a growing niche of illustrated fiction, autobiography and even journalism in comics that goes back at least 20 years to works like the Hernandez Bros.' Love and Rockets. Optic Nerve continues that tradition.

I am actually not well-versed in the existing body of comic literature out there. Having never been much of a comics reader as a kid, I did not naturally gravitate towards "adult comics." Many comics readers would mark the publication of Alan Moore's Watchmen and Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns as key moments in the evolution of "adult comics." Each put a post-modern spin on super-heroes, exploring real psychology, politics and graphic violence. They were not simple, innocent tales of heroism. The adult "superhero" that emerged in the following years was more often than not an "antihero," the protagonists and antagonists of these stories each had a moral yin and yang. The gradual over-arching trend which culminates in works like Optic Nerve shows a move away from mythic characters altogether.

Optic Nerve is mostly populated with people in their 20s, living in and around Oakland and Berkeley, who have unhappy or awkward relationships. It does not tell one continuous story, but is a collection of short vignettes that read like fleshed-out forays into the worlds of Tomine's ink drawings and watercolors. They're great short fiction, small slices of mood, with an authenticty that feels autobiographical. Initially I picked up Issue #1 as an affordable way to take home some of Tomine's drawings, but I found the stories, with their occasional cliff-hanger endings which emphasized mood over narrative, to be addictive. I have scooped up the remaining issues in print (Drawn and Quarterly is currently re-printing them all), but was surprised and frustrated to learn that there were only 9 issues in total. To add to my frustration, Issue 9 was the first of a serialized three-part story - a departure from the normal anthology format.



Optic Nerve seems to have been an on-going project for Tomine since his late teens, when he published it himself. Since he has been signed to publisher Drawn and Quarterly, issues have appeared as seldom as once a year. Doing all the writing and art himself, in addition to making a living with illustrations for mainstream magazines like the New Yorker, doubtless slows down production time. So I was enthused to hear that Issue #10 was soon to be on shelves and Tomine would be making the rounds doing in-store appearances.

The event drew a sizable crowd. There was some discussion on the settings in which comics now find themselves, which was interesting to ponder as I took in the faces of LA hipsters and literati - this was not Comic-Con. Tomine remarked that comic book art is out of context when hung on the walls of a gallery. The art is the book itself, he argued, the painting or drawing done to make it just a part of the process in creating that piece of art. After a lot of talk about whether or not the work was autobiographical or not and what sources served as influences, I felt that was the nugget of the evening. Art might be commerce, as Warhol argued, but you don't always need to be in the company of the trendy or the well-dressed, drinking shitty wine and receiving disapproving glances to appreciate it. For two or three bucks you can read it a few times and still have the author sign the worn cover.


Interview with Adrian Tomine
NY Times article on graphic novelists
Online gallery of Tomine art for sale