Review

What I learned in Europe:

1. Yellow subways make me want to move to Berlin.
2. You will get hit by an 83 year old Dutch lady on a bike in Amsterdam, if you don't watch out.
3. Van Gogh liked Japanese prints.
4. Champs Elysees is a big, ass street.
5. French cigarettes are not like American cigarettes. They're made of unicorns.
6. Reading a fantasy novel on a train in Belgium is not as dope as it sounds.
7. The seats in Berlin subways are like 80's Jordans. Awesome!
8. Vietnamese food in Germany is delicious. Monsier Vuong!
9. Ricardo Villalobos likes to smoke while he DJ's. A lot.
10. Richie Hawtin is not as tall as I thought he would be. Especially when I accidentally saw him in the bathroom.
11. Bathrooms at the Panoramabar are like standing inside a pinball machine with angry cokehead youth pinball parts.
12. The Sorbonne is, like, nice.
13. Deleuze is dead. For reals.
14. Derrida is also dead. I think.
15. Kissing in Paris is like hailing a cab in NYC: necessary.
16. Tom Cruise, according to a new and temporary German friend, is a good Count Stauffenberg. 17. Dutch TV is c-r-a-z-y.
18. Kid 606, while biking past me in Kreuzberg, made me think, what the fuck?
19. The Kirk bar in Berlin reminds me of a place I once wanted to dream about drinking in.
20. German beer is the new water (Hello, Jever!).
21. Camille, in the Le Marais neighborhood, has the best escargot and steak and crazy, ass lady who wanted to eat my girlfriend and I.
22. French Jews love blasting Israeli pop out of midget speakers at 1AM.
23. Tiny cars in Europe make me laugh. Tee-hee.
24. I speak French. I think.
25. Birthdays in Germany are nicer than I would have thought.
26. Squatters in Amsterdam, because they were across the street from me, are no joke.
27. The Red Light District, on a ghostly night, is terrifying.
28. Race in Amsterdam, where I never saw a black person in the daylight, but saw plenty in the Red Light, is weird.
29. Bikes!
30. Bone Thugs-n-Harmony are playing in Paris soon. WTF?
31. Anne Frank loved movie stars and putting pictures up in her bedroom.
32. What "smartshops" really mean.
33. Pavarotti was loved in France.
34. Africans want you to buy shit beneath the Eiffel Tower. I didn't, though.
35. Cab drivers don't like big tips.

The surreal comic by Paper Rad's Ben Jones and illustrator Frank Sontoro and lettered by legendary punk rocker/writer Aaron Cometbus, makes me wonder why movies exist. After all, who needs them when Castle, the protagonist of the Cold Heat (Picturebox) series meets Howard Stern and street artist Barry McGee (aka Twist) in the same series. You can't write a story that good.


In Cold Heat, Castle, the 18 year old female protagonist--well, I don't want to spoil it for you. I'll just let Job the Blogger tell it, he does a better job.

"The plot, however, is actually extremely straightforward, following a teen girl named Castle who’s in an awful lot of trouble. The corporation she’s been interning at has just been bought out, and she’s out of a job. The CEO she’s been sleeping with can’t help her with anything anymore, though he’s still an asshole. The lead singer of her favorite band, Chocolate Gun, has just committed suicide. Her and her father are dirt-poor, and now it turns out that the free antidepressants they’ve been given might have some particularly nasty side effects, like causing wild hallucinations, or prompting violent activity that the user can’t remember, or possibly even literally turning people into monsters. them show you how they made it."

Let them show you how they made it, too.




Surrealist comics, much like Matthew Thurber's excellent 1-800-Mice have a strong history, yet still annoy critics (not enough illustrative skill, thin plots, etc). The bigger, psychedelic picture their missing is that comics are windows. They're spaces for recording the narrative abilities of the imagination. Santoro's
painterly ability and LSD coloring works so well with Jones's bizarre creatures and spacey backgrounds. In Issue 4, some points of the plot are finally sewed together, albeit slowly, and surprises are in store. But, unfortunately, shit like that doesn't sell so the market for Cold Heat is thin, so the series has been discontinued after Issue 4. Their publisher, Picturebox, is selling the entire series in one package.

Ultimately, Ben Jones (check out his work in Paper Rad!) and Frank Sontoro have created a series that will set the standard for future psychedelic comics. Like M. Sayyid of Anti-Pop Consortium once rapped, "I bring heat like three jackets on." Seriously.

I finally got it. On page 365, I got it: James Hetfield. Judas Coyne, the protagonist for Joe Hill's great debut novel, Heart-Shaped Box, is described to be a spitting image of Metallica's lead singer and that was the image I was looking for. An aging rock singer in his 50's collects occult things such as a snuff film, weird objects and such. He decides to buy a dead man's suit which also comes with, you guessed it, a dead man. Hill, who just happens to be Stephen King's son, is far more pop-culture friendly and hipper than Papa when it comes to the references (when is the last time you saw 50 Cent & Eminem's names in a novel?). Yet, there are comparisons in the flashy, but modest prose he uses to whizz through the story. One thing I'm delightfully alarmed by is the speed of the narrative. Nabakov, Marias or Eudora Welty this ain't. You will be amazed by the genuine page-turning abilities of Hill. Cliches are cliches for a reason, unfortunately.

Similarly, that is my biggest criticism. Plot-wise, the novel suffers in the middle a bit on Coyne's journey to Florida with Marybeth. Coyne spends time pondering his fate and thinks thoroughly about why this damn ghost is out to kill them. It slows down the narrative somewhat, which would normally be good, but it made it a bit boring. That said, shit picks up like a Metallica song and gets thrashy when Craddock comes into the picture. What a great and frightening character. Old people are scary. The book is certainly filled with great characters, people you care about and who change. What more could you want?

Normally, I loathe novels that use rock singers as their main characters. Weirdly, the main character for the book I'm working on is a DJ of sorts. DeLillo tried it, so did Lethem (whose latest I'm scared to read), Harlan Ellison (whose Spider Kiss I've never read but could be great), William Gibson's Idoru and even Delany's The Einstein Intersection (whose lead character Mouse was a musician of sorts) all have tried the rock-singer-as-main-character route. Some fail, some succeed. I was in an elevator with the book in hand when someone asked me if it had anything to do with the Nirvana song. Yes, it does. It's one of the grungiest novels I've ever read. That's a compliment.

****

British animators Shynola have done videos for Beck, Radiohead and others. They also did the the most amazing little short I have seen in forever. Its called The Littlest Robo and is about a little boy and a robot and his rocky relationship with his father.

Watch it here.

Gary Sullivan's DIY comic, Elsewhere, explores biography as an artistic construct. A poet, cartoonist and blogger, he started drawing and writing the Elsewhere comic series in 2005. Like what I imagined comic books could be, they are portraits of places and abstract feelings more than stories with plots. Not as sappy as Adrian Tomine but almost as emotionally resonant, the first one explores a trip to Japan as a series of vignettes and black and white illustrations. Plus, I like his hustler's spirit: he's selling his comics on his blog, free of shipping charges. Authors, like rappers, need to take notes because publishing companies only like you if you are making them money. And though it's harder to print up copies of your novel like it is to burn a CD, its still better than getting wrapped-up in a shitty deal. Who knew we could learn so much from drug dealers?

Thus, Gary Sullivan's comic is an excellent way to transform narration into something beyond beginnings, middles and ends. Plot, as the below example illustrates, does not exist. The riddle below demonstrates this point.

From the following account of the plot, identify this classic American Depression film:

"An unwilling immigrant to a New Land of Opportunity, a dissatisfied young foreign woman kills an older woman whose face she never sees. After she recruits three equally dissatisfied strangers, they go on to kill again..."

Answer: The Wizard of Oz.

More important are the narrative qualities and details that construct a story. And Sullivan's comics do a great job at exemplifying that difference in low-budget arts is still necessary.

* * * 1/2

Gaspar Noe, French film director, has made one of the most disturbing and psychologically poetic works in recent years. Hard to find on DVD in the US, I Stand Alone is worth hunting down for the ending alone.