Bill Randall

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Warren Craghead, a singular cartoonist and a fine fine artist, has released his latest tiny chapbook on his web site. I picked his interpretation of Apollonaire, How To Be Everywhere, as the finest comic of ‘07. So it’s a treat to see another book so early in ‘08.

Best of all, you can download and print it yourself. Pretend you’re a cutting-edge artist making ‘zines in the attic! Print, fold, staple, cut, until the carpal tunnel threatens your livelihood.

Now I need to head for Portugal to compare the drawings with the sights. Another link: my interview/essay on the artist, covering his interactive site “A Map’s Little Spell.”

With the early, sudden success of her memoir Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi has found herself in a tough place. She spoke to the divide between the West and Iran, and so came dangerously close to becoming one of the few Voices of Iran out there. Yet speaking for her country would require broad generalizations, and Satrapi’s work seems much more concerned with the details of her own life. Her latest, Chicken with Plums, focuses on the very specific plight of her great-uncle. It is a far cry from the political journalism the marketing department might have preferred.

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My brother and I spent our childhoods checking out Monsters of Toho Studios from the library over and over. So when a new monster took a page from Blair Witch, we met some of our oldest friends at the theater on opening night. I mean, come on: giant monsters.

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Something to get lost in, The Stacks opens with at least a partial map. As if he understands we’ll need some help, Marc Bell offers four pages of “secret codes,” clueing us in to the fact that “oven mitt means ‘take it easy’” and “nipple’s [sic] mean macho—man very much alive.” Forty pages of odd art later, he notes that “young Klee wondered if women had udders.” Maybe not in our world, but what they have in Bell’s curious world, only he knows. His entrancing doodles riff not just on Klee, but Philip Guston too. Like both those fine artists, he delves into Old Time cartooning as if it’s the fundamental image of a thought. The characters aren’t fun playpals but chunks of meaning rearranged, and The Stacks becomes a map of his mind.

Fortunately, Bell never seems to build his world from within his hermetically sealed studio. He makes frequent enough reference to the world outside, whether in lists of celebrity names or Canada Council for the Arts rejection letters. All these things get transformed by his bottom-feeding sensibility, as scrap paper and envelopes become art. That palimpsest of the outside reminds that about half the pieces in The Stacks originally surfaced in a gallery show. The other half appeared in an early mini-comic. Perhaps “comic” is off the mark, since only one traditional comic-with-panels appears in the whole book. The rest runs the gamut from paintings and collages to intricate, lighthearted drawings, and everything builds his vision of an off-kilter world.

Unlike many of his peers in both fine arts and comics who use such imagery, his vision’s not limited to the ironic. Instead, he’s created a world that’s whimsical and open. It invites lingering. What it lacks in immediacy, it more than makes up for with a sense of depth that extends beyond the page. As a whole, The Stacks rewards a second visit, and I get the impression that Bell’s world could take visitors, in the short or even long term. After all, anywhere that Tim Ho-Ton sponsors the Canadian Curlers is a place I’ll gladly sit a spell, even if Canadia [sic] doesn’t have an udder. That is to say, excellent work.

This review originally appeared in the October 2006 issue of The Comics Journal, #278.

Somehow I saw The Beaver Trilogy by Trent Harris recently. A friend had unearthed a copy of this profoundly odd film, with Young Sean Penn aping a guy who impersonates Olivia Newton-John, along with Crispin Glover and the actual guy. The film’s one of those back alley masterpieces, like The Holy Mountain or El Topo, long unavailable, more imagined than seen.

Yet one could still see those films as a midnight movie, or on foreign video. Harris’ movie has never appeared on legit video anywhere, and rarely screens at festivals. I guess rights issues should take the blame. The cost of licensing Newton-John’s songs must be out of reach for such a small film. That’s a shame, and a flaw in the way rights are assessed: would that prices were scaled somehow. These laws kept the masterpiece Killer of Sheep out of the public eye for decades. They ultimately restrict profits for filmmakers and musicians both instead of protecting them.

Having heard about Beaver a while ago, I already had quite an elaborate image of it. In my mind, all the action unfolded in a parking lot at night, under harsh halogen lights. Of course, the real film didn’t resemble my notional one, and I felt underwhelmed while watching it. The editing in the documentary part seemed unduly rough, while the fictional versions felt rather flat. I suppose some letdown’s inevitable.

But they’re all well-crafted individually. Alone, any of them would hold my interest, whether as an outsider doc or Hollywood mistake. Taken together, they resonate, building something that has since lingered and grown in my mind. This film is layered. Its simplicity defies easy understanding, much like any of the three versions of this guy who so loves Xanadu.

So the three parts of the film echo one another, reverberating more loudly as they overlap and repeat. The structure doesn’t hint at Rashomon so much as Celine & Julie, that feeling of free variation. Different actors could keep performing “Olivia” to infinity, each with unique grace notes. While film actors usually define a character once and for all, Beaver’s Olivia lives on as pure potential. Crispin plays Sean plays “Olivia,” and someone new could play Crispin years from now, like a Latter-Day Hamlet.

Always interesting Harold Henderson has summed up an article in Technology Review on television news quite well:

TV “news” isn’t liberal or conservative, it’s stupid.

Written by former Dateline NBC producer John Hockenberry, it covers twelve years of missed chances as producers continually look for an “emotional core” where there isn’t one. Not Al Qaeda’s complexities; firefighters. Not politics; puppies.

His main point is that network news is doomed, thanks to the self-organizing communities made possible by the Internet. No kidding. He chronicles the inside reasons throughout the article, and make me feel glad not to work in network news. Let it die.

The vacuity of the network form, especially of Dateline, comes into fine relief near the end. Hockenberry laments one of his pet projects that got cut. He thought it innovative. In it, a porn spammer gets confronted on-camera by a miffed housewife, like a watered-down To Catch a Predator. When he mentions that dreck in the next sentence, I wonder if he can’t see the connection.

More interesting are the suggestions, not developed, that 1) ads are innovative because they respect the audience; and 2) something inherent in film/TV leads us to look for the emotional core. You can’t control the Kuleshov effect, in other words. So filmed war coverage has to be Us vs. Them. Even worse, it always becomes mythic. Which leads to the question: how different would my country and its politics look if we’d all just been reading about 9/11? Or better yet, if all the voters had seen nothing but tables of raw data the entire time?

This has probably made the rounds already, but: Researching an article on KONDOU Akino, I ran across a link to FUYAMA Taruto’s animated take on Jim Woodring’s Frank.Here’s the link.

(Picturebox has a clip on Youtube, but the above links to the whole short.)

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My list of the Best Five Comics of 2007 should be at the printer for issue 288 of TCJ. I sent it off in October, but proceeded to play catch up in the interim. Looking at other lists online– especially Time’s, which seems to have been compiled by algorithm– I rather like mine (cough cough). But I am reminded that I read some fantastic books only after the deadline passed.Had I written at year’s end, I would change not a thing about the five I selected. Except perhaps lobbying for a Best Ten, which might also contain:

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Apparently some of the Elephant Six folk down Athens way have finished Major Organ and the Adding Machine, a long-dreamt movie project. Orange Twin has a .flv trailer up for download, get VLC or Miro to watch it.

I can’t wait– it looks goofy as all get out and undoubtedly undistributed, in the great tradition of odd-lark movies Adolfas Mekas fired up with Hallelujah the Hills, still a royal pain just to see. Major Organ’s design reminds me of some of the Residents’ films while the touched Southern Gothic-hippie-Victorian sensibility is thankfully E6’s own. I am wholly prepared to like this thing willfully, whether or not it’s any good.

Link via hometown hero You Ain’t No Picasso from Optical Atlas, who broke the news.

In his Best of 2007 column for The Chicago Reader, film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has announced that he will retire when he turns 65 in February.

At first I was horrified, considering Harold Henderson was just excused from the paper. But it turns out to be just a well-earned retirement. He will no doubt welcome the freedom from reviewing mountains of dreck, and hopefully we’ll see more books from him, as well an an occasional article in the Reader.

I have long admired Mr. Rosenbaum as one of the two best writers on film in English currently working (David Bordwell’s the other one). I have especially enjoyed his book Essential Cinema: On the Necessity of Film Canons, and found its list of 1000 Essential Films a great resource. Most of the other lists repeat the same films ad nauseum. This one actually tips its pen to the breadth & depth of the medium, and it’s quite personal to boot. (I’m ashamed to say so far I’ve only hit about 400, classic Hollywood tripping me up and all.)

So thanks, Mr. Rosenbaum, for the fine essays and your exquisite taste. Thanks especially for Khroustaliov, Ma Voiture! That thing’s insane.