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Saturday, January 11, 2003
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Recommended Daily Allowances
Chef Boyardee. Canned chili. Chili dogs. Macaroni and cheese. Dinty Moore beef stew. Vienna sausages. Velveeta cheese, or those plastic wrapped American cheese slices. Baloney and Wonder Bread. Hamburger Helper. Pizza rolls. Gravy in a jar and mashed potatoes in a box. Fiddle Faddle. Ramen noodles. Cling peaches in heavy syrup. Tiny marshmallows and Jello. Toaster waffles. Tator tots. Frozen pizza. Hostess pies, Twinkies, Little Debbie cupcakes, donuts, Zingers. Pudding. Instant coffee. Nestle's Quik. Chocolate milk. Captain Krunch. Microwave burritos, corndogs, chuck wagons, and cheese burgers. Shoe string potatoes. Slim Jims and beef jerky. Potato chips. Fudge. Cheez Whiz. Pork rinds. Milwaukee's Best and Fried eggs, every fucking morning, fried in lard, fried eggs and instant fucking coffee and cigarettes. Nothing but shit, every single day, every single fucking day.
8:17:12 PM 
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Mix Tape
Eddie Bo, Hook and Sling
SE Rogers, Toomus Meremereh Nor Good
Willie Wright, Right On For The Darkness
Buzzcocks, Ever Fallen In Love
Brother Byron, Booty Whip
DQE, Go Bananas
Arthur Jackson, Philosophy of Chopp Funk
Alex Chilton, What's Your Sign, Girl?
EPMD, I'm Housin'
Jimmy McGriff, I've Got A Woman
Lunar Funk, Slip the Drummer One
Senor Coconut, Autobahn
Atmosphere, Modern Man's Hustle
Chills, Heavenly Pop Hit
P.P. Arnold, First Cut Is The Deepest
David Robinson, I'm A Carpenter
Congos, La La Bam Bam
Pet Shop Boys, The Night I Fell In Love
Spittin' Image, J.B.'s Latin
Brigitte Bardot, Harley Davidson
Vibrators, Keep It Clean
Winstons, Amen Brother
Hi Rhythm Section, Superstar
Van Morrison, Wavelength
Austin Pitre, Flames D'Enfer
Fela and Nigeria '70, Trouble Sleep
Iggy Pop, The Passenger
Pere Ubu, Bus Called Happiness
Uncle Sam, The Big Apple
Robert Jay, Alcohol, Part 1
Fearless Four, Rockin' It
Bo Diddley, Go For Broke
Joe McPhee, Shakey Jake
Bar-Kays, Holy Ghost
Gene Chandler, Rainbow '65
Interpretations, Jason Pew Mosso
Emperors, My Baby Likes To Boogaloo
LL Cool J, I Can't Live Without My Radio
Hot Wheels, Badder Than Evil
Natural Bridge Bunch, Pig Snoots
B.O. Junior, Coffee Pot, Part 1
Brother Jack McDuff, The Vibrator
7:54:37 PM
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Nightstand
I'm a compulsive reader, a habit born of a lifetime of late nights and obsessive scrounging in bookstores and libraries. There are books piled in every room of my house, and I'm unable to sit still unless I have some sort of reading matter in my hands. I'm a browser and a dilettante; I'll read pretty much anything, but increasingly find myself gravitating toward the most obscure subject matter --lately: ancient burial practices and early manuals on embalming, an early 20th century history of gymnastics, books on dowsing, a study of ventriloquism down through the ages, crackpot science and psychology, biographies of lunatics, a history of klezmer, etymology, a couple fat, illustrated volumes on beetles, a little pamphlet on people who have gone over Niagra Falls in barrels (Niagra and the Daredevils). I spend a lot of time looking for stuff that confirms my geekiest, most paranoid adolescent suspicions that nothing is real and that I'm an alien in a jar on a shelf on some other planet, dreaming this world.
Some books you don't really read; you look at them, or through them. Collections of photographs or artist's monographs. Reference books. Music or travel guides. I probably spend more time with these sorts of books than with any other. One book I've been exploring the last month or so is a collection called Vernacular Drawings by a guy who goes by the unfortunate name Seth. His real name is Gregory Gallant, apparently, and for a number of years he has been publishing a really terrific comic book called Palooka-Ville. A few years ago Drawn and Quarterly, a small Montreal publisher that has been churning out consistently great graphic novels and comic books, published a beautifully printed, illustrated, and written Seth book called It's A Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, the story of a small town Canadian cartoon obsessive's search for an obscure New Yorker gag artist of the mid-twentieth century. The book is an example of how great and real so many graphic novels are these days, full of quiet, poignant drama and recognizable hangdog characters. Like a lot of other terrific stuff in the genre, It's A Good Life is a compact masterpiece of realism, complete with a sense of boredom, restlessness, and the exhausting perils of simply making a living that is missing from so much modern fiction. I've long recognized that work no longer has much of a prominent place in today's fiction, precisely because so many young writers come of age without ever really struggling with the sort of day-to-day grind of shit jobs and subsistence that lends such exhausting gravity to most real people's lives. Name a convincingly great blue collar novel of the last ten years or so. Or give me some examples of writers in whose books the actual occupation of the characters plays an important role in the story. It often seems like everybody in novels anymore is either a professor, a writer, or, at the commercial end of things, a cop or a private detective. You can blame that, I think, on the fact that so many young writers go directly from college into graduate writing programs and then into jobs teaching in those same writing programs or working in publishing. I know there are exceptions, but they're generally not very convincing or very prominent. The virtuous exceptions are, of course, in the margins, in the work of the fringe artists who are laboring to write and draw compelling stories that somehow capture that ongoing sense of struggle and futility, as well as the pure quest for imaginative escape through fantasy, art, and nostalgia. And tons of those artists and writers seem to be working in the graphic novel format, a genre with a rich history of exhausted protagonists grinding away at their lives. Think of Harvey Pekar, or, more recently, the Beckett-like pathos and absurdity of Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan. Seth's Vernacular Drawings is a collection of striking full-page illustrations drawn from his sketchbooks, and most of these pieces are as fully realized and loaded with telling details as an Alice Munro short story. Seth's characters are carefully observed men and women, bundled up in winter garments and often huddling together at bus stops, or, alternately, studies drawn from the artist's interior life, a world steeped in nostalgia and the history of comic books and cartooning. It's really beautiful, often heartbreaking stuff.
The other book I've been dipping in and out of lately is David Thomson's The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, an update of the British film historian's quirky and landmark 1975 volume. This is a reference book as informed by its author's thorny personality as was Samuel Johnson's dictionary. Thomson's a guy who always seems to be angling for an argument, and there's plenty of stuff to quarrel with in his book, which is full of just plain strange language and often maddeningly opinionated and wrong-headed conclusions. It's also hugely entertaining, and alternately passionate and coolly (or savagely) dismissive. You don't have to dig much further than Thomson's entry on Angie Dickinson --in which he announces "the plain fact that Angie is [my] favorite actress"-- to recognize that the author is a critic with a seriously eccentric bent. At his cattiest and most cruel, Thomson is almost in a class of his own. Here, for instance, is his level take on Roberto Benigni: "I despise Life is Beautiful, especially its warmth, sincerity, and feeling, all of which I believe grow out of stupidity. Few events so surely signaled the decline of the motion picture as the glory piled on that odious and misguided fable." Or this entry on Michael Eisner: "It is not Mr. Eisner's fault that he looks like a thug and speaks in such a way that makes you want to get out of the room. It is certainly not his fault that he may remind us of Shrek....He is a giant figure, breathlessly positive and chronically shallow. And --as Kane once said of Walter Thatcher--he represents everything I hate."
Who can forget the great Senor Wences? A guy who can make a long and decent career out of nothing but a hand puppet and a head in a box deserves the highest praise and at least a modest little back alley apartment in Olympus. "S'Ok?" "S'Awright!"
6:18:46 PM
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© Copyright 2003 Brad Zellar.
Last update: 4/6/03; 9:57:36 PM.
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