Are you as pissed as I am about the impending arrival of 100+ 7-Eleven stores and the Big Bite they will chomp out of Manhattan's bodega community? Yesterday, my Black Balloon colleague Jake reminisced on the homely bodega's many high points. I feel you, Jake, but let me just say one thing: if this were actually an invasion of sebun-irebun, the cheery kombini(convenience store) chain owned by Japan's Seven & I Holdings Co....now that might not be so bad.
Just think: spotless, well-lit, one-stop destinations for sustenance, banking, even package shipment and receiving.
I'm heading to Tokyo next month. Most of my money will go toward concert tickets and fetish bars, so I have willingly resigned myself to “dining” at 7-Eleven at least half the time. Meaning a tallboy of Suntory and a transcendent katsu-sando (breaded, deep-fried pork cutlet and sauce on springy, crustless white bread) for 500 yen, or approximately $6. Breakfast—or whatever—of champions.
Of course, to make these 7-Elevens truly authentic, they would need to beam in a Japanese staff. The super-polite kind who will inquire if you want that curry pan microwaved, and who won't get on your ass if you loiter in the store for three hours, soaking up free WiFi and paging through phonebook-sized manga journals with busty gravure idols on the cover. Yeah, not gonna happen.
Then again, “Big Gulp” doesn't exist in the Japanese vernacular—let alone “Big Bite.” So a proper sebun-irebun in the Big Apple? Fuhgettaboutit.
Image: Ragamuffinsoul (Big Gulp) and Wikipedia (katsu-sando), photo-chopped by the author.
The new book How To Sharpen Pencils by David Rees got me thinking about what other guides might be useful to writers. The genius behind Get Your War On did, in fact, start a pencil sharpening business, and he subsequently wrote the instruction manual in the hopes that all of us might one day be free of the tyranny of not knowing how to sharpen pencils.
Since Rees has the pencil covered, I had to come up with something just as essential. My first idea was a book called How to Not Set Yourself on Fire. Unfortunately, this does not gel with my skill set. My second idea, which can’t guarantee you won’t set yourself on fire, might actually prove a tad more practical for writers struggling to make a living. I call it, Harnessing Your Inner Scrappiness.
Embrace the Loss
The first thing you’re going to want to do is let go of any notion that you will make enough money to eat and pay rent. Eating and sleeping in what society deems a decent shelter is for bankers and doctors. Stop fighting this. Just as what you own ends up owning you, once you live nowhere, you live everywhere. You don’t need a roof. Roofs are bourgeois.
Any Item Can Provide Shelter
I once slept underneath a deflated air mattress, utilizing it as a blanket, as there was no blanket. You know what it was? Warm. And waterproof! Sure, cardboard boxes are classic, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use almost anything to cover and warm yourself. Give that trash bag a nice shake and tuck yourself in.
Any Item Can Be Clothes
Just because you’re homeless doesn’t mean you don’t have a personality. Discover your inner flair. Tie a bunch of shoes together to form a cape. Wouldn’t that discarded oil can make a lovely hat? Maybe you want to string used tissues into a scarf. Only your imagination can stop you.
Put It In Your Mouth
Teach your stomach to digest food alternatives. Start with natural substances like leather and wood. Synthetics are something you’ll want to work up to. Putting almost anything in your mouth will help saliva production, which is good for overall mouth health. And yes, there will be a lot of things you’ll be putting in your mouth. Lots of...things.
Befriend Rodents and Insects
Make nice with the scurrying inhabitants of the underworld. Not only do they know where the food is; if trained properly, they can also provide much needed companionship. The faster you learn to put up with all those itchy bites and strange rashes, the faster you can pretend you’re not talking to yourself. Which you are. A lot.
But maybe scrappiness isn't your thing. There are five gabillion how-to guides out there to show you how to, you know, do things. Perhaps you want to draw manga? Or maybe you haven't figured out how to eat stuff. Or yes, and this is probably necessary. Because you haven't figured that out yet.
Image: The Awl
Few record stores match a serious selection of wax with proper in-store performances—and that addictive indie spirit—like London's Rough Trade East. Now BrooklynVegan announces that Rough Trade is coming to Williamsburg this autumn. To a live-music lover and vinyl junkie, this just sounds sweet.
There is little to go on beyond Rough Trade's press release, which uses the term “saturnalia” (noun: unrestrained revelry; orgy) in the second sentence. Oh yeah, and the somewhat divisive news that they've partnered with Bowery Presents for live shows. Look: I whine about Bowery Presents ticket prices less now after acclimatizing to the expense of seeing live music in Tokyo. If it's dope, I'll pay.
Chris & Cosey. aka Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti, or Carter Tutti—one half of industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle and among the most seductively sinister soundscape duos today. Performing: '85 darkwave classic Technø Primitiv.
Super Furry Animals. Golden-voxed Gruff Rhys and his Cardiff mates released two slabs of psychedelia on Rough Trade (2007's Hey Venus! and 2009's Dark Days/Light Years) plus Rhys' eclectic Candylion. Performing: A selection from their back catalogue (including wobbly-edged burner “Juxtapozed with U”) plus some Welsh a capella would entice quite nicely.
A Cabaret Voltaire reunion. Hey, this is my wishlist, dammit! The Sheffield-based post-punk avant-guardians, as danceable as Joy Division but thrice as dour—if you can wrap your head around that one. Performing: Red Mecca, a startlingly salient comment on Islamic and Christian fundamentalism...recorded over 30 years ago.
Mazzy Star: Hope Sandoval (gossamer crooner) and David Roback (über-musican) with band tour Europe this summer and have a new LP—their first in 15 years—on the way. Performing: Hell, they could do nothing but Bieber covers and I'd be happy.
Before visiting a new city, I make a prioritized shortlist, and “best record shop” falls just after “best dive bar.” I usually eschew Austin's renowned Waterloo for its quirkier southside kindred, End of an Ear. I get hyphy within Haight-Ashbury's mega Amoeba, and while in Tokyo I alternate between Disk Union's punk-postered walls and Spiral's exquisite audiophilia. NYC claims top for noise (subterranean Hospital Productions) and electronic (DUMBO's designer-y Halcyon).
Rough Trade NYC's imminent arrival is probably making Other Music a little nervous (watch this immediately), not to mention the longstanding Williamsburg stores Sound Fix and Earwax. May the spirit of saturnalia unite us all.
Image: BrooklynVegan
Welcome our antebellum vampire overlords, infecting young adult fiction with chalky, angular cheekbones and numbing chastity! The undead are everywhere, from Twilight to Seth Grahame-Smith's New York Times bestseller (no joke) Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. I'd managed to steer clear of this post-Lestat world until Vulture highlighted an annoying paradox: fanboys have their Underoos in a knot over the “unrealistic” overhaul of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, yet they seem totally hunky-dory with the idea of Lincoln staking vampires. Here we go!
My beef isn't really about converting Grahame-Smith's tiresome mashup novel into a film. It's a made-for-summer blockbuster, akin to last year'sCowboys & Aliens (which was based off a graphic novel). In effect: pure eye-candy, with historical accuracy totally suspended in favor of dudes on horseback rustling up UFOs or America's 16th President brawling with bloodsucking plantation owners. At least in Vampire Hunter's case, Benjamin Walker (star of Tony-nominated musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson) plays honest axe-wielding Abe and scream goddess Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays his wife. I'm hesitant toward director Timur Bekmambetov, whose style is like Michael Bay on pyrotechnic steroids, though he “cut his teeth” on vampires with the frenetic Night Watch—Russia's highest grossing film ever.
It's the silly collision of genres, or stitching a historical figure into the realm of fantasy, that irks me. I'm looking at you, Quirk Books, and your highly lucrative fusing of public domain classics with horror/sci-fi tropes. We can thank Grahame-Smith's mashup debut, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, for launching this peculiar strain. As DreadCentral reported, P&P&Z is now an interactive iPhone- and iPad-capable eBook. However, its big-screen adaptation is in limbo, with Blake Lively, Emma Stone, Natalie Portman et alpassing on the leading role and three directors abandoning the project. I love me some zombies, but I don't need them interwoven with Austen's classic prose. Do fanboys read this shit?
Which brings me to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the archetypal mashup. What began as a grim indie comic parodying Marvel's Daredevil and preempting the mid-80s animal-based action boom (Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters, anyone?), spawned a tubuloso animated series and some far-out feature films. Thing is, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's original comic was drenched in vengeance and solitude, versus the kid-friendly, pizza-eating, wisecracking terrapins who made it mainstream—let alone Vanilla Ice's totally bogus cameo in The Secret of the Ooze. As for producer Michael Bay's remarks that the relaunched Ninja Turtles are aliens, director Jonathan Liebesman tried assuaging fan-fears: “anything we expand will tie right into the mythology, so I think fans will go apeshit when they see it.” Translation: this is a money-making franchise, and we don't dare mess that up.
Too early to predict if the turtles go mano-a-mano with Confederate zombies, but maybe that's best left for the pages? Cowabunga!
Image credit: Nerdbastards
Susan Sontag's As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 is out this week. This central portion ranges from when her hair was jet black to when that famous white stripe started creeping in. And because "Susan Sontag" should always be uttered in the same sentence as "cocktails," I've come up with a white-stripe cocktail with a nice purplish tinge to sip while reading her pensées.
The Sontag
2 parts Creme de Cassis (frozen for two hours beforehand)
1 part Triple Sec (kept at room temperature)
2 parts Sloe Gin (kept at room temperature)
In a pousse-cafe glass, pour in the creme de cassis, which should be already chilled to increase its density.
Hold a small spoon upside down over the cassis, with only the tip touching the cassis (as in the image below). Slowly pour the triple sec over the curve of the spoon so that it will float on top of the cassis.
Using a new, dry spoon, slowly pour the sloe gin over the triple sec in the same way to create a third layer.
Voilà! You now have a white-stripe cocktail as refined as Sontag herself. Now go read about what turns her on.
Susan Sontag image credit: Peter Hujar, Susan Sontag, 1975, time.com; spoon layering image credit: citypages.com
Fan fiction’s loyal partisans were probably tickled pink last week when the story broke that E.L. James’ book Fifty Shades of Grey was going to be optioned for a film. That book, which began as an imaginative response to the Twilight trilogy called Master of the Universe, explores the hawt hawt hawt relationship between sexual naïf Anastasia and sexually domineering Christian, and will, like Twilight, probably produce a triplet of middling to poor films the rest of us can enjoy on TNT the days we call off sick.
But in these, there’ll be more sex—apparently, one reader had to pop a Viagara just to get through the book. So what makes fans want to write their favorite characters into ropes and ball gags?
Don’t blame the net: erotic fan fiction has been around at least as long as leisure suits, even if it’s blossomed in the interwebs. And sometimes it finds inspiration in strange places: I was startled to come across Caitlyn Reads 2666, an erotic novel putatively riffing on Roberto Bolaño’s grisly epic. It’s hard for me to imagine wanting to embark on a sexual odyssey after reading “The Part About the Crimes,” but maybe I just need to think with my, uh, teeth more. And to imagine a castle. Complete with a dungeon. Mmm...dungeons.
Whatever impulse sprang these fandoms loose, assuming there’s a common one, it produces highly varied literary products. And the stuff usually isn’t even illustrated. It’s driven by narrative only. Lesser, better mortals might claim that this is rooted in essential differences between genders. Something about the male gaze, blah blah, something about female intuitions and narrativity, blah blah. See, clearly the proof is in evolutionary psychological pudding.
Fifty Shades of Grey stands apart from its estimable kin because of the monetary success it’s enjoyed. Not only has it been a number one bestseller (it had spent 18 days in that spot at Amazon as of April, 3, 2012), but the film contract it garnered is rumored to be on par with The Da Vinci Code. Some people are downright offended that E.L. James is making so much money while riding on the coattails (supposedly) of Twilight; others are celebrating the entrance of fan fiction into the serious literary world (i.e., the one that pays). As for me, I’ll give a nod to Shakespeare’s appropriations and grumble something about stickiness of creativity, especially once money enters.
Because let’s face it, it’s money that’s at stake here. We can argue about the ethics of Fifty Shades of Grey, but really, the ethics behind its creation and that of the rest of fan fiction are the same: writers appropriate other writers’ characters and put them into novel—sometimes really novel, if you catch my drift—situations. Published authors from Anne Rice to J.D. Salinger strongly disapprove; others not so much. Presumably Stephanie Meyer didn’t care about Fifty Shades, or she saw it as a way to increase attention for Twilight.
After all, that’s synergy, my little munchkins.
Image from flickr user Sarah Dawes
We hardcore fans of David Lynch's signature blend of West Coast decay and psychedelic phantasmagoria will lap up just about anything the man brews, so long as it's a moving picture. His “Signature Cup Coffee”? That got mypulse racing! Cooking quinoa? Why the hell not? Amateur meteorology? Bit dull, though granted this is LA weather. Now Lynch ups the ante with a batshit music video for “Crazy Clown Time,” the title track from his 2011 solo album (explored by our own Kayla Blatchley last November).
Clocking in at seven minutes (the approximate length of his classic Rabbitsepisodes), “Crazy Clown Time” is described by Lynch as “intense psychotic backyard craziness, fueled by beer.” No Mystery Man nor Frank Booth, though there's plenty of classic Lynchian imagery to enthrall and confuse us. I invite you to cue up the video and join me as I plunge deep into aMulholland Drive-style puzzle box:
0:01 Lost Highway-like onscreen static (also like Rammstein's “Rammstein” music video, directed by Lynch for the Lost Highway soundtrack)
0:04 engulfing flames, uh Twin Peaks...? (and, by title, Fire Walk With Me)
0:07 distant horizontal shot, used in Blue Velvet's drug den (the Roy Orbison “In Dreams” scene)
0:14 Lynch in profile resembling Eraserhead's Man in the Planet
0:32 woman sprawled on the grass looks vaguely like Masuimi Max, who cameoed in Inland Empire
0:40 from this angle, Bobby (with the “red shirt”) resembles Justin Theroux from Mulholland Drive
Pausing to transcribe a choice lyric verbatim: “Danny poured the beer. Danny poured beer all over Sally. Dannyyyy poured the beer. Danny poured the beer. Danny poured the beeeeeeer all over Sally.”
1:57 Sally starts kicking Danny's ass, a la Inland Empire: that part where Laura Dern and Julia Ormond get in a tussle on Hollywood Boulevard
2:10 choreographed jamming to the beat, ditto a cathartic Inland Empire(plus that red-dress blonde recalls Mulholland Drive's Laura Harring “in disguise”)
2:45 choice lyric: “It was crazy clown time. Crazy clowwwn tiiime. It was real fun.”
3:16 Petey (the '80s punk) lights his hair on fire. Taking a cue from Lynch's description of a painting in his exhibition at Jack Tilton Gallery: “It's our world, and all it is is a boy lighting a fire. And here is his neighbor, the neighborhood girl whom he likes a lot.” As in, quit reading so damn much into it.
4:00 echoes, noises, tape effects, jarring camera movement, i.e. all signature Lynchian elements: Eraserhead on down the line, conjuring strobe-lit frights from previous films (Inland Empire: Nikki confronts The Phantom; Lost Highway's videotape; Mulholland Drive's Club Silencio)
If you've listened to the Crazy Clown Time album track, then Lynch's video is incredibly literal. Lines like: “Bobby, he had a red shirt. Susie, she had hers off completely” become just that, the sorta-Justin Theroux-looking dude pounding back two beers, the blonde woman grinding against a Blue Velvet suburban lawn. This leaves the inclusion of a football player (recalling album track “Football Game”?) and the mustachioed guy on the lawn total mysteries. (Perhaps Twin Peaks kingpin Jean Renault?)
But no matter how bewildering it gets, I am heartened by Lynch's own words in an interview about his artwork:
"You are interpreting it very well yourself. It strikes you a certain way, gives you a certain feeling. And that's it. If there was meant to be more, there would be a whole text for it. It is what it is."
Image: two still frames from Youtube, photo-chopped by the author
[In memory of Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012]
First the undergraduate at Radcliffe College, Harvard, fiercely looking out at the world as her manuscript wins the Yale Younger Poets Prize—
Now, careful arriviste,
Delineate at will
Incisions in the ice. (The Diamond Cutters, 1951)
—and a calm but insistent feminist writing history through, for example, Emily Dickinson—
you, woman, masculine
in single-mindedness,
for whom the word was more
than a symptom –
a condition of being.
Till the air buzzing with spoiled language
sang in your ears
of Perjury (I Am in Danger— Sir—, 1964)
—and then a woman, pure and simple, writing capital-H History through her own life—
I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today. How well we all spoke. A language is a map of our failures. Frederick Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton's. People suffer highly in poverty. ... In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. There are flames of napalm in Catonsville, Maryland. I know it hurts to burn. The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning. I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor's language. (The Burning of Paper Instead of Children, 1968)
—and determined to root out truth with her writing—
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
. . . the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth (Diving into the Wreck, 1972)
—and a poet whose poems, as W. H. Auden said, “speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs”—
I am a woman in the prime of life, with certain powers
and those powers severely limited
by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
I am a woman in the prime of life
driving her dead poet in a black Rolls-Royce
through a landscape of twilight and thorns. (I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus, 1968)
—and herself a multitude of personae, calling herself by turns feminist, intellectual, Jewish, deeply political, mother and wife, lesbian, and yet always human—
If they call me man-hater, you
would have known it for a lie
. . . But can’t you see me as a human being
he said
What is a human being
she said (From an Old House in America, 1974)
—and now an elder stateswoman, her life tempered by death—
Burnt by lightning nevertheless
she’ll walk this terra infinita (Itinerary, 2012)
—unforgettable, unmistakable, a poet whose lines have wrenched open a space for marginalized voices, a poet to whom twenty-first-century letters owes an immeasurable debt.
Image credit: chicagotribune.com
In the wake of The Lifespan of a Fact and the agony of Mike Daisey, The Awl has rounded up almost a dozen quotations on David Sedaris and his often slippery handling of facts. Reading them, I realized that this issue had been more or less settled in my mind since I heard him read "I Like Guys" on This American Life—a recording that begins...
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Prometheus, Ridley Scott's upcoming Alien sorta-prequel, is the only film I care about in 2012. The Avengers? Slag off! The Dark Knight Rises? Only if Marion Cotillard plays Talia al Ghul. OK, so I'll coincidentally be in Tokyo this May for the premiere of Sadako 3D—of Ringu/The Ring fame—but that's neither here nor there.
After a lot of hinting and fanboy-rumoring, Scott unveiled a bonkers Prometheus trailer at WonderCon 2012. Predictably, the blogs facehugged the shit out of it, parsing out each and every detail. Bloody Disgusting, one of my trusted go-to sites for all that is cinematically bloody and/or disgusting, offered a slew of screen-grabs with commentary like “yes, that looks like a Xenomorph to me, too.” (If you're just joining the party, theXenomorph was the primary antagonist of the Alien film series. Quoth Wikipedia,“a fictional endoparasitoid extraterrestrial species.”)
I've been intrigued since a Sky News tip that the Space Jockey, that huge-ass desiccated lifeform from the original Alien, will figure significantly inPrometheus. Also: that H.R. Giger, the Swiss biomechanical alchemist responsible for the Alien design itself, is contributing Prometheus set designs. Corridors that resemble jumbo industrial-design ribcages? A fully-functioning Derelict, the junked wishbone-shaped spacecraft containing the long-dead Space Jockey? “Proper” Xenomorphs or not, I am beyond stoked.
A fan already spliced the Prometheus teaser from this past December withclips from Alien, highlighting the films' respective contextual similarities, down to the repeating, distorted Wilhelm screams. Blogging last month about the rumored Blade Runner redo and the perils of cinematic replication, I included Scott's comment that Prometheus shares “strands ofAlien's DNA, so to speak.” More than that: they exist emphatically within the same universe.
This ain't no Men in Black III, that's for damn sure. Like the Greek god himself, Scott brings us mortals a much-needed dose of “hard sci-fi,” perfected by him in Blade Runner and largely poisoned by American cinema subsequently. I was a kid when James Cameron's Aliens came out, which was awesomely entertaining but lacked that deep-space dread of Scott's original. In spite of a few highlights—like David Twohy's genuinely dope Pitch Black (no small thanks to Vin Diesel) and Paul Anderson's Event Horizon for its glorious gore—there hasn't been a Scott-calibre sci-fi thriller since.
“In space, no one can hear you scream,” says that iconic Alien trailer. Guess what: that doesn't apply to theaters. There's gonna be a lot of screaming, and June 8 can't come any quicker.
Image: courtesy Badass Digest
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