Dogs and Bears

A great children's book. An account of having met one of my favorite writers. Old newspaper comics. A round of Roulette turns up someone else's comic strip with me in it. Two unimpressive movies.

Literature Labrador

I read a great childen’s book called Stop! Bot! by James Yang. It’s a vertically-formatted picture book in which a pedestrian child loses control of his “bot,” a remotely-controlled robotic-helicopter-drone gizmo. A complaisant doorman outside of the building next to which the bot ascends starts rushing up flights of stairs to catch it for the kid, soliciting help from building residents, animals and even a carnivorous plant as he goes. Beautifully illustrated, cleverly written and interesting use of format. I have placed five more Yang books on hold with the library.

I’m deep into my re-read of The Big Nowhere by James Ellroy. In the next installment I’m going to get into my thoughts on the contents of the book so far. And I might as well start spreading the word now that that discussion will involve significant spoilers on the book. I’ll put another warning up front before that section of that entry. It’s no spoiler to say the book is very good, perhaps not as good at this point in the going as The Black Dahlia. But The Big Nowhere is a longer, more ambitious and sprawling book that foregoes the first-person narration of The Black Dahlia for the third-person narration Ellroy utilized in the earlier Lloyd Hopkins novels, here fractured across three protagonists rather than one. This tripartite narrative structure became standard issue for several of Ellroy’s career-best novels including L.A. Confidential, American Tabloid and Blood’s a Rover. In that next newsletter I’ll take a look at this structure as instantiated in the three disparate protagonists of The Big Nowhere, and I will be RUINING their fates and one or two of their surprise secrets for anyone who hasn’t read the book.

You know, I met ol’ Demon Dog James once. When Blood’s a Rover was released in 2009 me and my buddy who’s also a fan went to Ellroy’s book-signing event together at the main branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia. It was really fun to witness firsthand his bebop-madman/deranged-reverend schtick and the odd balance of patience and brusque dismissiveness with which he conducted Q&A, a portion of the event he kicked off by tossing aside his notes and proclaiming without warning “Somebody ask me a question.”

One of the questioners asked him if he had any thoughts on Thomas Pynchon or Inherent Vice because Pynchon’s novel had just been released around the same time. I’d read Inherent Vice too and there’s no particular reason to compare them, which of course Ellroy understood instinctively, but I guess the premise of the question had something to do with Inherent Vice being a species of Los Angeles detective noir and so finding Pynchon straying into Ellroy’s expert genre. Ellroy simply trashed him outright as a writer and made fun of him as a man who eschews publicity, something Ellroy himself gobbles rabidly at every opportunity. “Guy hasn’t had his photo taken in fifty years, gimme a break” is pretty close to what he remarked and that seemed to summarize his view, even though I’m not sure I understand why Ellroy sees that as suspect.

He also fielded an oddball written question from someone asking if he would ever be interested in dating, I’m pretty sure if memory serves that it said, a “middle-aged Jewish composeress.” He was rather nonplussed, or maybe just confused. The questioner ostensibly seemed to be asking on behalf of herself, though pointedly there is a Jewish antihero lust-object named Joan in Blood’s a Rover who it has been said is closely inspired by a real-life paramour of Ellroy’s who seems a likely candidate for the “J.M.” to whom Blood’s a Rover is dedicated. And he only likes classical music so I guess the nameless “composeress” in the audience figured maybe she could get in the pants of his finely-tailored bespoke two-piece suit by writing him a noir sonata or something. She may even have said something in her question about writing something for or with him. Anyway it was a peculiar question and I don’t think even Ellroy could mine an involving answer out of it, or at least not one whose contents I recall.

After the Q&A he proceeded to the signing table, standing rather than sitting and looming over me and most of the other average-heighted fans in attendance. I had with me my brand-new and partially-read copy of Blood’s a Rover and the copy of American Tabloid that I’ve had since I was fifteen. When it was my turn I stepped up and said “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Ellroy” and stuck out my hand.

“Call me DOG,” he said as he shook it. I’m absolutely serious that this is verbatim what the man said. “Okay, Dog!” I said. He was really nice about taking the time to sign both of my books and I told him that American Tabloid was my favorite novel ever (there are days when I still feel this way). “Just wait until you read this one,” he said. I told him I was really enjoying it so far and he said “Don’t get me wrong; I’m a Tabloid man myself,” but that the new one was even better. And actually one can make a case that maybe he was right, since the two books are pretty different from one another and Blood’s a Rover ventures into some deeply bizarre and hallucinatory territory, including the Joan character and her whole deal, that American Tabloid for all of its masterfulness never touches.

Anyway, in a sense both of those excellent books, either of which stand up fine as solo reads and which I highly recommend whether or not you’ve read another word of Ellroy in your life, are downstream of The Big Nowhere, since The Big Nowhere represents a significant upping of ambition ante and first deployment of that above-referenced tripartite protagonist setup, without either of which the Dog couldn’t have written those later and better books.

Comics Collie

Reading old Popeye comics is fun. Castor Oyl used the luck from the whiffle hen to break the bank on the island and get it all down to the boat with help from Olive Oyl, Ham Gravy and Popeye. The villain Fadewell dispatched his henchman Snork to ingratiate himself onto the gang’s boat and help recover the money, which resulted (in quite an elaborately drawn-out sequence of daily strips, as if Segar was taunting the audience to build suspense while also advertising that he himself was stalling for time to figure out what happened next) in Snork shooting Popeye sixteen times with a handgun.

Popeye almost perishes and while Snork is beating up Olive Castor puts his own gun to Snork’s head and pulls the trigger on an empty chamber. A bit like something out of an Ellroy novel, though in Segar cartoons no one is for example getting eviscerated with taxidermied animal dentures and then having his eyesockets ejaculated in. Popeye recovers his strength with help from the whiffle hen which imbues with luck anyone who scratches her head and clobbers Snork (and Fadewell after Fadewell comes aboard Castor’s boat). Good, violent, freewheeling comics storytelling. I definitely get the sense that Segar wasn’t planning this out very far in advance and I love it. You can really get away with weird time crunches and stretches in newspaper comics in ways that are tough in other media.

E.C. and the Oyls and I are onto the next adventure and Castor has gone back down to the docks to call in Popeye to sort things out and beat up this other asshole named Herringbone who wants to marry Olive for the money. So one can see Popeye’s lack of pretension and seaworthy toughness edging him towards the center of the Thimble Theater stage. Segar may have been preoccupied for a few weeks because there is a dip in drawing quality during this run but I’m sure he’ll bring it back around again. If you cartoon for long enough it’s impossible not to get better and you can often see newspaper cartoonists recovering from stumbles and improving very quickly when you read their strips faster than one installment per day.

Roulette

Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit by Charles Bukowski, read in 2018. I’ve read all five of Bukowski’s Henry Chinaski novels and really dug ‘em, especially Women. He was a great writer of drunken, degenerate semiautobiographical fiction. But he wasn’t a good or interesting poet, at least based on this one volume I read after having found it on my then-roommate’s bookshelf. Like the title itself the poems in this book are mostly pretentious, overlong and lazy.

Don’t Get Eaten by Anything: A Collection of “The Dailies” 2011-2013 by Dakota McFadzean, read in 2015. Dakota is one of my very closest friends and, independently of that, is also one of my favorite working cartoonists. His name got brought up in a previous entry when I found myself writing about the work of our former colleague Andy Warner with whom we co-founded a comics and art anthology series.

For years before I knew him Dakota was maintaining a daily cartooning practice called The Dailies wherein he would write, pencil, ink and color a four-panel strip about any batshit thing that happened to come into his mind or that he felt like drawing for fun. He would post these comics to his website and eventually they got collected and published as this book volume Don’t Get Eaten by Anything. He gave me a signed copy and I read every single strip in order, including the one that I am in: I asked to be in the strip with the actor John Hurt because I like John Hurt so Dakota put me and John in an installment where I demand that John stop “narrating my groceries.”

See above re Segar and a daily cartooning regimen: something Dakota and I used to talk about a lot when we were cartooning students together is the significance of daily practice. He taught me a great deal about the value in committing to a certain creative framework every day without overmuch consideration for outcome. Just show up, do the work and see where your imagination wanders off to and what comes out from beneath your pen. In Dakota’s case it helps that he is one of the very best draughtsmen and colorists currently working because his design and drawing capabilities allow him to bring to life anything that his limber, troubled mind can cook up, from the mundane to the pastoral to the psychedelic to the cartoonish, more often than not within a single strip. His sensibility is informed equally by absurd silliness and nightmarish existential dread and a lot of the jokes or joke-adjacent premises he concocts, many of which are laugh-out-loud funny and sometimes disquietingly unsettling, are suspended in tension between these emotional poles. I still learn a lot from Dakota about the purpose and process of showing up to the drawing desk and being a cartoonist every day; I just don’t do it half as well as he does. Much like you wouldn’t want to leave Segar out of any survey of daily comics of the last century, Dakota’s book is a must-have for anyone who wants in on the cutting edge of what the comics medium can be in our bewildering modern times.

The Zodiac by James Dickey, read in 2019. I don’t remember much about the book-poem The Zodiac except that it has to do with a guy voyaging alone on a small craft at sea and navigating by the zodiac constellations in the heavens. I do remember why I read it: at the time I was filling out my card for the Seattle Public Library’s summer “Book Bingo” game and there was some reason that a quick-and-dirty read-through of The Zodiac, which is a short book, would fill in one of the squares. Maybe it was simply to read a book of poetry so I picked a book with a single moderately-lengthed poem in it. I’ve read two other Dickie books — the sociopathic war adventure To the White Sea, which was Dickie’s last novel, and the brutal, brilliant and enthralling Deliverance, an excellent book you can’t go wrong with. The Zodiac didn’t make much of an impression on me for good or ill.

Picture Pointer

The Velvet Underground, directed by Todd Haynes, 2021. Haynes chose to compose this documentary as a sort of visual, auditory and narrative collage, I suppose as a direct gesture towards The Velvet Underground’s music with respect to their dense and layered textures and lyrics. A confrontational, devil-take-the-hindmost aesthetic crams too much information onto the screen for one individual to process, suggesting that even fans like myself or Haynes needn’t even try to take in the totality of The Velvet Underground’s significance. This is cool, sometimes a little tedious and occasionally downright frustrating, indeed quite like The Velvet Underground’s music except just not as fun to consume. The spectral forces of Nico and Lou Reed, they of famously unpredictable moods and dire outlooks, haunt the viewer and talking head interviewees alike.

One of those interviewees is Mary Woronov. At the time of filming she was (and presumably remains) an old, gray-haired and fabulously cool and stately woman. As a breathtakingly sexy twenty-something she was an Andy Warhol hanger-on and he installed her in The Velvet Underground as a backup dancer and stage accoutrement, experiences on which she reflects with the benefit of being close to The Velvet Underground without having been a charter member per se. It took some research on my part to realize that Woronov was also the female lead in the great subversive underground film Eating Raoul from 1982.

Cocaine Bear, directed by Elizabeth Banks, 2023. Easily the worst film I’ve seen this year, and there’s no way to spin that as a recommendation that you spend any time on it.

Very, very loosely based on true events from the Eighties where an amount of cocaine was air-dropped in a failed smuggling operation and ended up being ingested by a black bear in a National Forest. In this version law enforcement, criminals and civilians (including two insouciant children) all converge upon the bear’s territory for different reasons, figure out that the bear is very high on lots of cocaine and get variously maimed and/or killed by her.

I guess if you read Cocaine Bear as an attempt to make the kind of movie someone might enjoy while using cocaine it explains why it’s so frenetic, over-cooked and convinced of its own cleverness. The CGI with which they rendered the bear is laughable. Much of the casting is glancing and second-rate; one can imagine more famous and talented show-biz figures who were unmoved by the shit script and knew better than to get involved. (To his credit Ray Liotta, who never seemed to mind getting typecast, signed on and chose not to somnambulate through the cavalier asshole drug-trafficker role he inhabits in Cocaine Bear.) The story never finds a footing because it keeps concatenating from one cluster of protagonists to another and still needs to schedule time for the title creature to intrude on the proceedings. The faded and dog-eared tone is liberally cribbed from good movies like Pineapple Express and not-quite-good but at least more professional and detail-oriented ones like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Cocaine Bear, not profiting from the comparisons it’s inviting, comes off like a grim try-hard training run for the drug action/comedy genre. Miss.