Taking Dinosaur Jr. Camping

I put on Green Mind today, playing it on my phone while driving. Listening to it transports me back to 1991. I could feel the cheap foam headphone covers sitting on my ears as I fold and unfold the tiny liner notes from the cassette. I would stare at the cover photo during the solos and guitar noodling, and read and reread the text inside. I am sitting at a campsite in Yosemite, massive evergreens providing shade from the blue sky summer heat. J Mascis’s raspy yelp providing  voice to my teenage insecurities. I can hear the cl-clack of the Walkman reversing to play side two and when I take the headphones off, there are serene whispers from the river and wind and squirrels and birds.  Listening to the album over and over again, as only a teenager is capable, it feels as peaceful to me as the woods I am witnessing.

Yosemite, 2014

This Yosemite campsite has been a part of my life as few other places have. I was first brought here as a baby before my memories even began, and now bring my own children here. It is one of the few places on the earth that I don’t need a media distraction to survive. I can sit on the bank of the river, or better yet, float in it, and be enveloped by nature. I have never meditated in my house for more than a few minutes, but I can settle into a relaxed reverie among the leaves and needles and sounds and let the world outside disappear. I couldn’t tell you what was on the walls of my bedroom until I was twelve, but I can visualize for my kids the fourteen-foot-round boulder that was destroyed in the high waters and rolling rocks after 1998’s monstrous snowfall melt pushed coercive forces downstream. 

J Mascis seems like an artist I can relate to, even if the irony was that if I have the chance to meet him, I may not bother him and he would likely be happy about that. I liked that he didn’t bother putting his picture on record covers. I enjoy singers who don’t seem beholden to vocal consistency. I love the ragged nature of of the voices of Tom Petty, Laura Jane Grace and Kathleen Hanna. It’s partly because I can relate to how they made those sounds. I could maybe, on a good day, create a warble that could sound like that, whereas I could never make a sound like Roy Orbison or Aretha Franklin or Mariah Carey. I can’t identify instruments in an orchestra, but guitar, bass, and drums are within my mental grasp. J Mascis has a voice that I love singing along with.

This was my first Dinosaur Jr. album and I could see the control issues. "Guitar, J Mascis. Bass, J Mascis. Most drums, J Mascis. Produced by J Mascis". DIY with a boldfaced capitalized underlined Yourself. When you’re a teenager that can find few to relate to, that solitude is welcoming.

I’ve always been happiest when asking questions. Answers leave little mystery to uncover and seldom satisfy, but questions are eternal. Any answer can be followed with a question. The first chorus on Green Mind is a question, and goddammit if that didn’t resonate with me. 

We’re all nuts, so who helps who?

Some help when no one’s got a clue

Baby, why don’t we?

Chris Cornell, 1964-2017

   My mom was a suburban baby-boomer hippie who felt like she had become a television addict when she started staying home with me, her first child, so, she threw it out. Like many kids of divorce, I spent every weekend with my grandparents who were of the mind that television would destroy intelligence, so watching was restricted. Reading books, magazines, and comics, and listening to comedy and music became the refuge of this odd little introvert.

    Once I wrangled a little spending money, those things combined and overlapped. I love reading, and I love music, so I loved reading about music. I subscribe to the theory that an older sibling can help develop a more advanced taste in pop culture, but I didn’t have one, so the magazines I read became the voice to which my curiosity would listen. I started with the normal things a ten-year old in 1984 would absorb, Prince and M.J, Bruce and Madonna, but a subscription to Rolling Stone and a desire to find voices I could relate to as a semi-misanthropic tween started to encourage me to dig deeper.

    The magazines Spin and Rip had a tone that resonated, and both played a role in helping drive my curiosity toward thrash metal, punk, and hip-hop. I am now very aware, by the way, that those two magazines were published by two titans of American pornography, Rip even being the very first non-pornographic magazine published by Larry Flynt. I will leave it to the Freudian analysts figure out exactly what that means. Don’t get me wrong, I would read any piece of trash that would recycle press releases about bands (I’m looking at you Circus and Hit Parader), but my skepticism lead me to drop those when I found the more self-aware alternatives.

    So it was, that at age fifteen, the power of major label music press and a Warehouse gift certificate lead me to scoop up a copy of Loud Love. The sound was earnest, and a bit self-important when I look at it now, but imagine how earnest and self-important play at fifteen. And, saving grace to a kid who loved stand-up comedy, it had some childish humor on board, including a Spinal Tap-style song about fucking. It remains my least favorite musically of those first five Soundgarden records, but at the time I listened to the shit out of it. I went back to UltraMega OK and Screaming Life, and by the time Badmotorfinger was released, I was a committed fan.

    A couple years later, when music obsession and disposable income combined to encourage me to comb the record stores with an undiscerning mind, buying up imported CD singles and promo compilations, Soundgarden became the flag that signified my commitment to collecting records. A Sub Pop Records singles release forced me to find a record player, and the encouragement of an ill-chosen paragon turned me into a completionist. At one point I owned something like sixty different records, tapes, and CDs of music, later sold to a cokehead friend who had even more disposable income than I.

    Chris Cornell’s structurally poetic but vague lyrics resonated with hidden depth to me. To date, the meaning is usually still hidden well enough that I’m not sure if it’s obfuscated or absent, but they resonated. I always hated the leather-and-hairspray costumes of 80s metal, and hated more the costume-costumes of Alice Cooper and KISS, but a costume of Doc Marten’s and flannel shirts seemed everyman enough to accept.

    Soundgarden helped me find Mudhoney, The Descendents. and Sonic Youth, and those lead me to find all my favorites in each little niche and subgenre of the rock and roll that ties it all together. Chris Cornell was the face of a band that ties into finding Sleater-Kinney and Sage Francis and Secret Chiefs 3 and Steve Earle and Slug and Sleep and Slobberbone and Sigur Ros, and many other bands I love outside the “S” section of my collection.

    I did grow apart from Soundgarden at some point after selling the collection, and only dabbled in Audioslave and the solo records, but reading about Chris Cornell’s passing hit me hard in nostalgia circuits. I will always appreciate Cornell and Soundgarden in helping to open the gateway to so much music that still thrills me to this day. Many bands that were my favorites then don’t hold up when I listen today, but I can still listen with great pleasure to dozens of songs he helped create in the 80s and 90s.

    Rest in peace.

Manchester By The Sea by Kenneth Lonergan

I believe that not only is pain relative amongst us, but also relative within us.

For example, just because I have broken my collarbone and you have broken your collarbone, there can be no way to identify whose pain was worse. Your broken collarbone may hurt worse than mine, or it may not. There is literally no way for us to know, and may never be.

Additionally, I believe that breaking my collarbone today will find a level of pain that I attribute to it that may be adjusted in the future should my appendix explode. Today’s pain can only be measured in terms of the known pain of previous existence, not any future pain.

Personally, I’ve never broken a bone, and I’ve lead a charmed life of such relatively low pain that the worst pain I’ve ever endured was a sinus infection. I doubt this pain can even be close on the same (impossibly) objective scale of pain as say, childbirth or a heart attack.

It is impossible to recognize where individual emotional pain would fall compared to the pain endured by the character of Lee Chandler in this film. One can imagine that most viewers can clearly identify the source of their own peak emotional pain. Thanks to Casey Affleck’s subtle performance, demonstrated through clear body language, we can see how he deals with the pain, and doesn’t. The narrative constantly flows in and around his perception. Nearly every single scene is afforded his perspective, past and present setting the tone for the future. The handful that don’t are offered up to deepen our understanding of the second lead, Patrick Chandler, played by Lucas Hedges. Their pain is their own, as is how they deal with it.

I believe that without sadness we cannot appreciate joy, because joy is as relative as pain. I have a hard time remembering the times of greatest joy in the same method as I can single out the greatest pain. Perhaps because happiness is so intertwined with sadness. When the movie ends, it provides cathartic relief, a balance to the sadness in knowing that you get to decide how happy the stories of the characters can become. The movie certainly prepares you for the idea that nothing is easy, including the lives as they continue offscreen, but it gives you just enough hope that the characters will find happiness.

I find happiness in realizing that I get to decide how a respond to the sad times. I find, that at my age, I can understand that the sadness and pain is only relative, and that I only know it in terms of the joy I’ve known.

Girl in Dior by Annie Goetzinger

This 100-page story is historical fiction that covers the 1940s and 1950s. Quoting the brief note at the end of the story, it features “Clara Nohant…a fictional character. Her tale is intertwined with that of Monsieur Christian Dior…”

It is beautifully illustrated in fine line and watercolor. It is rendered in a realist style, with muted colors that pair well with the lush ink line. The layouts are quite traditional, and it is easy to quickly fade into the story flow while reading. The lettering is solid, and the script, translated by Joe Johnson, mostly avoids odd phrasing. The story flows quickly due to Ms Goetzinger’s skilled staging and is presented in a straightforward manner with an emphasis on situational clarity in the transitions, using art and script to bring the reader along.

As a novice to the source information covered here, it reads easily, and I was able to define any unknown terms through context without getting lost. I presume that it may feel a bit slight for anyone who’s knowledge of the source material is great. There is plenty of supplemental material in the version I read* and the acknowledgments indicate significant research done.

The story wisely used a woman’s perspective to investigate a historical male figure. It seems the respect he showed his cohort of expert women was supported by the respect the story gave them, including its protagonist, Clara.

Overall, the pictures are sumptuous and the story is smooth. I expect that anyone with interest in the topic or who appreciates its look would be engaged.

*Girl in Dior by Annie Goetzinger, 2015, NBM edition. Translation by Joe Johnson, lettering by Ortho. Originally published as Jeune Fille en Dior, by Darguad, 2013.

Jay Kennedy, 1956-2007

I went to San Diego Comic Con every year for 20 years, and I sold comic books for most of those. In a business like comic book retailing, at an event like San Diego, you meet people that you tend to run into year after year, and if you share a common interest, you tend to continue the same conversation year after year. There are many such people that I see in San Diego, but there are few that I enjoyed speaking with as much as Jay Kennedy.

I first spoke to him about seven or eight years ago, and while I ran into him at a few other comic shows, he and I spoke at every San Diego in recent memory. Our conversation started because of a common interest, independent and underground comic books. When I realized that I had read and referred to his book regularly, I started a conversation. Each year we picked up where we left off until it the conversation continued down other avenues, both personal and professional.

The people that you see, many of them come and go, and you rarely know why the leave or where they go. Many of them you never learn about, and many of them you don't even remember. Jay happened to be famous enough that I heard about his death the day after it happened (on The Beat), and he had made enough of an impression on me that I was struck with sadness. People don't bother writing reminiscences like this if they don't have anything nice to say, and here I have nothing but nice things to say.

Jay was one of the very nicest people that I met thanks to San Diego, and talking with him about comics (books or strips) was always a conversation I looked forward to, and each summer won't be the same without the chance to see him.

(Originally written in 2007, light re-write in 2016)

Alvin Buenaventura, 1975-2016

I barely knew Alvin, and he barely knew me. We first met more than 20 years ago, when we were both teenagers. I was a comics retailer who sold at all the shows, big and small, in Southern California, and I was one of the few who carried a wide variety of independent comics and undergrounds. He would occasionally shop with me. I recognized a kindred spirit, and we would talk briefly about what we enjoyed.

I was a relatively withdrawn kid, who loved comics more than anything, and never felt more comfortable talking to strangers than at a comics show. Even still, I probably never even shook his hand or properly introduced myself until nearly decade later. When I saw him again I saw that he was publishing books by and with some artists that I admired most in the world. I asked him if he recognized me from those Los Angeles comics shows. When he said yes, I felt like the world was a little smaller and more accessible. Here, now, another decade later, it still makes me feel less alone in the world, even learning that he’s gone.

I recognize that this remembrance is self-serving. However, as I sit here in sadness processing this loss to the comics world, I am grateful that I know Alvin and people like him. The small world of comics has always been a welcoming community for me. I hope that it gave Alvin some sense of peace in his, by all accounts, tumultuous life.

In my own life I learned only a few years ago that love is an action, not a feeling. Alvin demonstrated as clear a love for comics and artists through his work as anyone I’ve ever met.

mewithoutYou, July 2, 2015, Fitzgerald's Houston

    My most shameful exhibition of greed and entitlement happened when I was age eleven, and it involved a G.I. Joe toy.

    In 1985 I was in the odd position of living in a fairly low-income house with my single mom during school days, while being widely spoiled by grandparents on weekends. So, I frequently wore thrift store clothes and ate food from those blue generic cans during the week, and yet watched Saturday morning cartoons and was able to convince people to buy those toys for me on special occasions.

    In December 1985, I had a modest G.I. Joe action figure collection and coveted the large pieces to complement them, like the U.S.S. Flagg ircraft carrier. Christmas day arrived and I tore through the bounty that my mom’s parents had provided in their immaculately organized mid-century home. Perfectly wrapped presents were ravaged in seconds, and on to the next, until the pile of paper sat next to the uncovered boxes.

    I surveyed the now-unwrapped gifts in front of me. The kind of emotional displeasure that can happen to a privileged pre-teen descended upon me as my sister opened her Barbie Dream Car. I realized the box which it came in would hold all of my toys together in their boxes. I started crying, blubbering something about “it’s not fair.”

    Thirty years later, I am mortified that I was such an ungrateful kid. However, I am also grateful that through all the other all-too-typical bullshit I experienced due to an absent dad and depressive mom — the insecurity; the retreat to the fictional world; the reliance on the kindness (and cruelty) of the kids in the neighborhood; the need to control my surroundings; basically, all the things that happen that we don’t deserve — that I was given the opportunity to wear this minor setback as a personal tragedy.

    Then, as I was sniffling, I was told to go into the bedroom and look in the closet. There, below the upper-middle-class wardrobe, was a giant box containing the G.I. Joe Transportable Tactical Battle Platform, a gaudy piece of cheap plastic designed to emotionally satisfy spoiled brats like me on Christmas Day. My present was so fucking big my grandma probably couldn’t use a standard roll of paper on it, and went the secret finale route. I smiled through drying tears, and for those weeks or months, when I was tossing 3-inch-tall plastic army men around a oil-platform-looking-contraption, all was right with the world.

    The evening of July 2nd, 2015, I woke up from an afternoon nap and contemplated my evening plans. My kids were with their own grandparents (being appropriately spoiled themselves). I had put in an extra few hours for work that day, and I didn’t need to get up until 9:00 the next morning to pick the kids up.

    After sending one half-hearted, exploratory text to friend, I decided to drag my ass, solo, the forty minutes down Hwy 45 to see mewithoutYou play at a local club, Fitzgerald’s. I had first found out about the band a year earlier, and had seen them play once as opening act. I am a rabid fan of one album, It’s All Crazy, It’s All False, It’s All a Dream, It’s All Right!, and am familiar with a couple other albums, but just barely.

    I timed it perfectly, and greeted the bouncers as the band greeted the crowd. The show wasn’t packed, and I had a nice spot in the back to watch. They played only a single track from my favorite record, but they sounded great. The energy was good and the crowd was pleasant and passionate.

    After 45 minutes, they walked off stage and said thanks. 

    I double checked the time and thought, Well, shit. I hope the encore is long. That’s a pretty short set for a headliner. I would have thought with a half-dozen albums worth of material, they could have played for another 45. I know they don’t owe me anything, but man, that was a short set, I guess their heart’s not in it. 

    Basically, I was petulant eleven-year-old all over again. They didn’t owe me shit, but my entitlement was riding high.

    They came back out and played two more songs, finishing strong with super high energy. Then the singer, Aaron Weiss, said something interesting. He said that he would be out in the parking lot with an acoustic guitar after they broke down and he loaded out. In my mind, I was already planning on finding somewhere that had wifi and fried chicken for a post-show dinner or to maybe catch a movie (it was only 10:15 after all). I didn’t leave, though, and I dried my figurative tears.

View fullsize

Aaron Weiss of mewithoutYou

    I posted up in the parking lot, and waited. As promised, the band loaded out through the side door, and then Mr Weiss came out with a guitar and proceeded to kill it for another 45 minutes (!), taking requests and charming the crowd of about 100. He even played many of the songs from the album I love the most, so that I could sing along with the crowd.

    It was a magical experience, shared with a group of strangers that were uniformly respectful and appreciative, led by a man so generous he spent even more time after putting away the guitar to shake hands with, talk to, and hug members of the crowd who huddled around to voice their appreciation.

    I have spent years trying to reconcile the unfair circumstances of my childhood, and frequently think of how I am just as capable of being unfair. I am grateful to have been gifted with an experience, a little sliver of time on a summer weeknight, to remind me that the world is full of wonderful things if I keep my eyes and ears open and appreciate what I have.

A Quick Thought on Entertaining Comics

I just read these old writings (out of order, naturally):

Chris Mautner on E.C.

Gary Groth in Response to Chris Mautner

I enjoyed reading both, but there was a glaring omission in that neither talked about the worst thing about the Feldstein E.C. stories—more than the Kurtzman, but not exclusively so—the captions.  These have too frequently broken what I feel is a critical rule that captions need follow, specifically, that the words and pictures work together to provide something they can't separately.  Groth puts it better than I am able: "[...]burdened by formula and cliche, the writing prolix, overwrought, and fatuously earnest."

The worst thing about the captions is that they were so frequently unnecessary.

As a reader, this caption is a complete waste of my time. In fact, the caption wastes my time because it keeps me from spending time parsing the artwork as storytelling because it stomps all over its imagery. This caption takes a wonderful landscape and prevents me from relishing in its details by spitting a few at me. A great writer could spend 1000 words painting this scene for me in the same detail that Krigstein creates with a few dozen pen lines supported by wonderful flat colors.

Many of Krigstein’s stories do not suffer this same indignity, as Kurtzman-as-editor-or-writer had a masterful eye for cartooning and using the whole of the page to tell the story, not relying on dry expository captions to describe what was already so wonderfully rendered.

Optic Nerve 13 and 14 by Adrian Tomine

    For the first time as an adult I traveled to New York City in 2013.  I stayed in Brooklyn and one of my first searches was for the nearest comic book shop.

    I found that Bergen Street Comics was several blocks away and checked their website to make sure they had interesting stuff.  Not only did they look like my kind of store, but they had a signing/book release scheduled for just a few hours later.  Adrian Tomine was celebrating the release of the latest issue of Optic Nerve at the time, issue thirteen.  Optic Nerve is of one of the few remaining comic book series being continually, if slowly, published that originated in the early '90s. This period was the last comics boom, when there were enough stores around to support the sales of periodicals that weren't all about genre.  It's only been in the last several years that the market has been built up by fine retailers, like Bergen Street Comics, to support a market other than the top 50 sellers in the industry -- the Walking Deads, the company crossover events, your Jim Lee-drawn or Grant Morrison-written superhero books, etc, etc, ad nauseum.

    The first time I shook Adrian Tomine’s hand was at APE Con in 1994 (or so), around the time of the release of the first issue of this very same series.  I had purchased artwork as well, and had done the same in various venues in the intervening years.  When I said “hello” to him, he was as genial as ever, and even noticed that I was familiar. It reminded me that in comics you can walk up to and have a conversation with the creators who shape and influence the field as though they were a friendly face from down the street.

    Tomine has quietly improved his art and writing over the years. Steadily, glacially releasing new comics stories that add layers of depth and subtlety. His draftsmanship has stayed roughly the same, with the only evident weakness being somewhat posed figures. In his illustration work, his most constant appearances in the world, usually at the New Yorker and its ilk, he has developed some tools that he doesn’t use in the comics, particularly the color and scene-building of these more dense illustrations.

    His line work in the comics has taken on an ever-so-slightly rougher edge over the years, which serves to give his work its own signature. His writing has matured to a comfortable level of nuance. While it may be unfair to compare the writing to stories that came out more than a decade ago, that’s also only a 150 pages of comics work ago as well, so one must compare. As per usual, the stories are character driven, and they invite a re-read much more than stories from the first five issues of this same series. Again, slow, but steady improvement. It’s nice to see him build his skills as a distinctive cartoonist, building upon and shedding the artistic influences of his earlier work.

    Issue fourteen, released roughly two years later, sees the trend continue. There is as much familiarity in his characters as there is distinctness, the sign of a thoughtful creator. There is even a story in this issue in which he departs from his clean-line approach and develops a rougher, more expressive line. This short, which honors deceased Japanese master Yoshihiro Tatsumi, uses a style of draftsmanship that is unique for Tomine in his oeuvre. I was happy to see this little experiment in action. The only comics work I can think of that came close was the short book he did about getting married, in which the art appeared to be closer to sketchbook style. The main story from issue fourteen uses a twenty-panel-per-page layout that is a welcome tool for his typical, pen-drawn finished work. It also helps enhance the power of the form with a tight pacing per page that supports the arc of the story.

    These two issues are a strong addition to the series, and to Tomine's legacy.