Few films in history have been as meticulously pored over as the Star Wars trilogy, which is why the best compliment owed to The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back is that it feels completely fresh. An exhaustive, official biography of one of the most beloved films of the past thirty years,... more

Few films in history have been as meticulously pored over as the Star Wars trilogy, which is why the best compliment owed to The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back is that it feels completely fresh. An exhaustive, official biography of one of the most beloved films of the past thirty years, Making Of runs a sprawling 350 pages, is replete with interviews and insights from George Lucas and dozens of other contributors, and contains over 1,200 rare photos, including conceptual art, storyboards, candid set photos and special effects designs. More importantly, it’s a smart and candid history that doesn’t shy away from the underlying sources of drama that fueled Empire’s production, from Lucas’s brush with financial ruin when the self-financed film went massively over budget, to on-set bickering between Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher, to creative tensions between the producers and their hand-picked director, Irvin Kershner.

Honed down from a file cabinet’s worth of material compiled by Lucasfilm executive editor J.W. Rinzler and his team of archivists, Making Of charts the film’s journey from pie-in-the-sky ideas in a notebook to an inevitable reality in the post-Star Wars world to a grueling international shoot punctuated by injuries, narrow escapes, and financial and creative arguments, to a post-production headache that pushed its special effects artists to the breaking point. (“ILM veterans say it’s the hardest film they ever worked on,” Rinzler says.) Although the book allows for multiple, even conflicting views on certain events, it never loses the ring of authority, which is not surprising considering that Rinzler has previously authored books on a number of Lucas works, including The Complete Making of Indiana Jones, The Making of Star Wars, and The Making of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Rinzler recently called up SuicideGirls to talk about how he went about the task of documenting the making of a classic.


J.W. Rinzler: Did you make it all the way through the book?

Ryan Stewart: I did! I read the whole thing in one sitting. I think the centerpiece has to be that extensive, live microphone transcript from the Carbon Freezing Chamber set.

JWR: Parts of that had been published before, in the original paperback that Alan Arnold wrote. He deserves credit not only as the author, but as the person who actually thought of putting a mic on Irvin Kershner. I don’t think that had been done before. But what happened when I was doing this book was that we got hold of the original tapes that Arnold made, and instead of going back to his edited transcripts and his manuscripts, we went back to the original tapes and had them re-transcribed. So, what you get here is a much more expanded and a more verbatim record of what went on during that day, on the set.

RS: How do you feel the actors come off? There’s a lot of “Harrison isn’t speaking to me, and I’m not speaking to him, and here’s why...” It’s like high-school.

JWR: I think that might have been a particularly hectic day. I don’t think it was always quite that crazy. Being on set that day was very difficult because of all the steam. It was also a set that had no walls, and it was an extremely complex, emotional scene. So, I don’t think it was normally that crazy, but I do think there are elements in there were constant. Kershner was always working really closely with the actors and they were always extremely engaged in figuring out what was right for their characters. They were all participating.

RS: We get little flashes of Carrie Fisher’s personality, too, and the book delves a bit into her bohemian lifestyle at the time. Was her recent revelation that she did cocaine on the set news to you?

JWR: It’s old news. Carrie’s been forthright, I think for a number of years now, about her personal life. And she’s been documenting it in her own way. So, yeah, it was definitely no surprise to me.

RS: Is there more to the story, meaning her behavior on set?

JWR: I think that’s pretty much the whole story. And also, I really didn’t go in for a lot of the ‘Who was angry at who on what day?’ kind of thing. But people did talk about it, and it was in the transcript, and so that’s just how it ended up being in the book.

RS: The transcript also gives us a window into Kershner’s atypical shooting style, which was to skip the full master and go straight to mini-masters, more closely framed shots, which can complicate things.

JWR: Yeah, I haven’t seen all of Kershner’s films, but I did watch a few of them for research purposes. I watched Raid on Entebbe, Eyes of Laura Mars, and The Return of a Man Called Horse. I watched a couple of others, too. I don’t know whether he shot those films in the same way that he shot Empire, but I know that [skipping the master shots] did cause problems in the editing room. George and Paul Hirsch liked to have more material, they liked to have the masters just like they liked to have the close-ups and medium shots, and in this case they didn’t have as much material. So, I think for certain scenes they were forced to do it pretty much the way Kershner had planned it, and other scenes not so much. But as Paul Hirsch has said, he thinks it ended up being a good compromise between the two styles and I think I would agree with that. But the thing about George is that he loves editing and Empire really feels different from the other Kershner films, so I would think that regardless of how he actually filmed, what happened in the editing room added up to a little bit of magic.

RS: Did the second unit end up taking over some of the film’s important dramatic scenes? The book talks about how overtaxed Kershner was on time alone.

JWR: I think Kershner did pretty much all the first unit. There was obviously a fair amount of second unit stuff that he couldn’t do, but those weren’t principal scenes. They were pick-ups, they were perhaps some scenes with Yoda and the mechanical units and things like that. I think he’s just such a perfectionist that even when it came to those scenes he would have preferred to have done them.

RS: One thing I expected to come across in the book, but didn’t, is Harrison Ford making a vocal argument for the noble death of Han Solo. Maybe that’s an urban legend.

JWR: I’ve heard of that, but I think it was something that happened more in connection with Return of the Jedi, as opposed to Empire. I haven’t researched Jedi yet, so we’ll have to see.

RS: That book’s due in another three years, right?

JWR: If we do it, yeah, it would be done in time for the next thirtieth anniversary. And it means that I get to work mornings and weekends again for a couple of years. [laughs] But we’re still not even sure if we’re going to be doing it. We have to wait and see what the sales are for Empire, cause it’s a big investment for the publisher.

RS: I had always assumed that maybe Harrison Ford had been offered Indiana Jones by the time he was doing Empire, so they threw the carbon freezing in as insurance.

JWR: No, the timing doesn’t really match up for that. I don’t know if you’ve got a copy of The Making of Indiana Jones, but George didn’t really decide upon Harrison Ford as a serious candidate for Indiana Jones until after Empire had already come out. I think they saw Tom Selleck and then things happened so that Tom Selleck couldn’t do it, and then what happened was [American Graffiti screenwriters] Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck went to a preview screening of Empire and afterwards they said to George “You’ve got to have Harrison Ford play Indiana Jones!” And Spielberg had been pushing for him as well, but all of that was not on his mind while he was doingEmpire. He was concentrating solely on trying to get the film finished before the money ran out.

RS: Was that surprising to you, learning of the serious financial jam George got himself into?

JWR:Yes, that was one thing I found surprising. When the bank pulled its money, I had assumed that George and everybody else still had enough money to just kind of go forward, you know? They were about two-thirds of the way through principal photography at that point, but in fact that was completely it. You have to remember that there was hardly any licensing at that point and he didn’t know how he was going to be able to pay the cast and crew. The level of desperation was a lot higher than I’d thought it had been.

RS: Was the danger that if George went crawling back to Fox to complete financing of Empire, they’d take his Star Wars licensing rights?

JWR: No, licensing wasn’t that big yet. And also, everyone thinks that George had the licensing rights for Star Wars, but he did not. Star Wars was 50/50. Fox was already doing pretty well with Star Wars, but what George had the rights for was Empire, and there wasn’t really licensing for Empire at that point. What he was actually afraid he was going to have to do was give back the Star Wars sequel rights to Fox. But instead of doing that, he basically just gave them a better deal on Jedi and he was not very happy about that.

RS: George was pretty available to you throughout this project?

JWR: Oh yes. Just as with the Star Wars book and the Indiana Jones book, I definitely needed his input, and also he wants to give his input. We have a working method now where, basically I write the rough draft – a draft that’s fairly rough but also fairly complete – and then I give it to him and he reads it in great detail and makes comments. It reminds him of all the stuff that happened back then, and then we have a long interview. One time it was like, three and a half hours, for one of those books. And we go over everything, all the pieces that are missing. There are always pieces missing, and people have conflicting versions, but George doesn’t mind if we end up with conflicting versions as long as his version is also included in there. Everyone has their own version of reality, of course. So yeah, he’s very involved and he sees the layout before it goes to print.

RS: What other kind of access was granted to you? Did you actually sit down and watch the twelve reel assembly edit of Empire?

JWR: Well, I was very fortunate to have an ally in the film archives who does a lot of pre-research for me. And we basically did go through all twelve reels, but sort of in fast-forward, and he would say “Now look at this part,” and “Look, this part is really different from what came later” and “This is different in such and such a way.” He would cue up certain things that he thought I’d be interested in, because he knows the films much better than I do, and as a result saves me probably an entire week of work, which is invaluable.

RS: Assuming you had the run of the archives, what’s the coolest thing you encountered in terms of props? Did you run across Yoda?

JWR: Yes! In fact, if you go to VanityFair.com, we have a sort of director’s cut of the making of The Making of the Empire Strikes Back, and they actually found the Yoda puppet after they went to press, so they were able to film it and get it into this video that we made about the making of the book, just as a kind of add-on. But yeah, I’ve seen pretty much everything. I’ve visited the archives many times, in fact I’ve spent entire months there.

RS: It’s a shame Frank Oz didn’t get acting accolades for his performance.

JWR: Without a doubt. That one is such a no-brainer. That Frank Oz didn’t get at least a nomination for Yoda is one of the many, many, many oversights of the Academy. But that’s the nature of awards, they’re never on the money.

RS: At one point in the book you make a passing reference to a notebook of George’s that contains his notes for Episodes VII through IX, the continuing adventures of Luke Skywalker. Are the ideas in that notebook public, or is it all under lock and key?

JWR: I really don’t know, but I think much of it is probably locked away in George’s head. I do know that he’s spoken with Mark Hamill about it, and I know he’s spoken with Jim Bloom, the Industrial Light & Magic manager, about it. And he’s talked to other people about his ideas for it. I’ve personally never seen it, so I don’t know whether he actually wrote down the stuff or not. So much of the stuff that you write down as little notes can seem like it might have been for the prequels, or maybe for the next trilogy, after the original trilogy – he moves things around a lot and things shift. If you read The Making of Star Wars you might ask “Who was the ‘half-man, half-mechanical person’ that’s mentioned?” Well, it kept changing from draft to draft. So, I doubt that a lot of that stuff is fixed anywhere, except in George’s mind.

RS: Do George and the main cast members consider Empire to be the pinnacle of Star Wars, as far as you know?

JWR: I never really asked people if Empire was their favorite. I know that all the ILM veterans, to a man, and woman, regard Empire as the hardest film they ever worked on. I don’t know if that means it’s their favorite, though. And I don’t know, for George, which one is his favorite. I do know that there are lots of people at Lucasfilm who like Empire a lot, but there are also lots of people who like Star Wars, the first one.

RS: Do you remember your first impressions of Empire?

JWR: Well, let’s see, it came out in 1980, so I would have been 17. Actually, I told George this story once and it made him laugh, but I was not there opening day. I was kind of in my own world back then. I had seen a preview of Star Wars, though, I was lucky enough to go to a preview of that one, and it was mind-blowing. But for Empire, I was just in school one day at lunch and some guy came up to me and was like “Hey, I just saw Empire and I’m not going to tell you what happens, but I will tell you two letters – OE.” And I said “Oedipus?” And a friend of mine goes “Oh, Vader must be Luke’s father.” [laughs] The guy was like “How did you know that!?” So, before I even saw it I had the movie essentially ruined for me, in a sense.

RS: Do you agree with the line from Kevin Smith’s Clerks, that people continue to respond to Empire because “life is a series of down endings?”

JWR: I don’t, no. I would disagree with that, although there may be an element of truth to it. I don’t know the reason why they do, but I think in general it just has so many things in it – it’s such a rich canvas. The characterizations are deeper than in Star Wars. People are really able to get into the minds of Han Solo and Luke, and then you have Yoda who comes in, and then there’s Boba Fett arriving, and you’ve got this incredible snow battle that starts the whole thing out, and it’s got many more effects shots than the first film, and then there’s this incredibly personal duel at the end… You’ve just got so much stuff going on at so many levels that I think it’s incredibly rich, and yet it also moves so quickly. Even today, 30 years later, the film moves as fast as a modern movie, and in some ways faster because it has more context to it. It’s just a brilliant film.





The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back is in bookstores everywhere.

(image) [Razzi in Sounds Like Fun] Hi this is Missy! I started SuicideGirls ten years ago and for a good part of those ten years we've been trying to create a tv show about our live tour: the SuicideGirls Burlesque Show. Vh1 has been nice enough to give us a shot at it, and so we're going to... more

[Razzi in Sounds Like Fun]

Hi this is Missy!

I started SuicideGirls ten years ago and for a good part of those ten years we've been trying to create a tv show about our live tour: the SuicideGirls Burlesque Show. Vh1 has been nice enough to give us a shot at it, and so we're going to start things off by looking for some of the most unique, interesting & beautiful burlesque performers in the US.

If you are a female over the age of 18, eligible to work full time in the United States, and have a background in dance, we would love to meet you!

We are looking for women who are:

INDEPENDENT
DYNAMIC
SEXY
STRONG
EDGY

Those with tattoos, piercings, and talents such as burlesque dancing, fire twirling, contortion, aerial talents on rings or silks, or anything unique are encouraged to apply.


[Korento and friends in Moulin Rouge]

Open call auditions are being held in Las Vegas, New York and Los Angeles to find dancers for this documentary style series about pursuing your dreams in the world of burlesque.

Please email the following information to the appropriate casting associate for the city you would like to audition in:

Name
Phone #s
Dance style / background
3 Photos (to include close-up face shot & full-body shot)

**Depending on which open call you wish to attend,
the subject of your email should read:
"Vegas", "NYC" or "LA"

The casting associates will respond with full audition details.

OPEN CALL AUDITIONS

Las Vegas - February 26th:
Caesars Palace in the Roman Ballroom
Jen - BShowCasting@Gmail.com

New York – March 5th:
Carrie - CarrieDanceCasting@Gmail.com

Los Angeles – March 8th:
Greg - BurlesqueShowCasting@Gmail.com

If you are unable to make the open casting calls in the cities listed above, but would still like a shot a participating in the show:

Please email: BurlesqueShowCasting@gmail.com

Name
Phone #s
Dance style / background
3 Photos (to include close-up face shot & full-body shot)

**The subject of your email should read:
"UNABLE TO ATTEND OPEN CALL"

Click to read the eligibility requirements

Good luck!

Really excited to meet you all and see your talent!

xoxo
-missy

(image) [Razzi in Sounds Like Fun] Hi this is Missy! I started SuicideGirls ten years ago and for a good part of those ten years we've been trying to create a tv show about our live tour: the SuicideGirls Burlesque Show. Vh1 has been nice enough to give us a shot at it, and so we're going to... more

[Razzi in Sounds Like Fun]

Hi this is Missy!

I started SuicideGirls ten years ago and for a good part of those ten years we've been trying to create a tv show about our live tour: the SuicideGirls Burlesque Show. Vh1 has been nice enough to give us a shot at it, and so we're going to start things off by looking for some of the most unique, interesting & beautiful burlesque performers in the US.

If you are a female over the age of 18, eligible to work full time in the United States, and have a background in dance, we would love to meet you!

We are looking for women who are:

INDEPENDENT
DYNAMIC
SEXY
STRONG
EDGY

Those with tattoos, piercings, and talents such as burlesque dancing, fire twirling, contortion, aerial talents on rings or silks, or anything unique are encouraged to apply.


[Korento and friends in Moulin Rouge]

Open call auditions are being held in Las Vegas, New York and Los Angeles to find dancers for this documentary style series about pursuing your dreams in the world of burlesque.

Please email the following information to the appropriate casting associate for the city you would like to audition in:

Name
Phone #s
Dance style / background
3 Photos (to include close-up face shot & full-body shot)

**Depending on which open call you wish to attend,
the subject of your email should read:
"Vegas", "NYC" or "LA"

The casting associates will respond with full audition details.

OPEN CALL AUDITIONS

Las Vegas - February 26th:
Caesars Palace in the Roman Ballroom
Jen - BShowCasting@Gmail.com

New York – March 5th:
Carrie - CarrieDanceCasting@Gmail.com

Los Angeles – March 8th:
Greg - BurlesqueShowCasting@Gmail.com

If you are unable to make the open casting calls in the cities listed above, but would still like a shot a participating in the show:

Please email: BurlesqueShowCasting@gmail.com

Name
Phone #s
Dance style / background
3 Photos (to include close-up face shot & full-body shot)

**The subject of your email should read:
"UNABLE TO ATTEND OPEN CALL"

Click to read the eligibility requirements

Good luck!

Really excited to meet you all and see your talent!

xoxo
-missy

Matt Johnson of Brooklyn dance-punk duo Matt and Kim has been giving whirlwind interviews all afternoon, ten minutes at a time, but he still has energy to chat with SuicideGirls about his band's new album, Sidewalks. The first single, "Cameras," is so catchy that it's led Matt to tell... more

Matt Johnson of Brooklyn dance-punk duo Matt and Kim has been giving whirlwind interviews all afternoon, ten minutes at a time, but he still has energy to chat with SuicideGirls about his band's new album, Sidewalks. The first single, "Cameras," is so catchy that it's led Matt to tell the press, "We don't write songs anymore. We write anthems."

We've heard the new record, and Matt is absolutely right. He and his bandmate/significant other, Kim Schifino, have put together one hell of a danceable album. You'll have to buy the album, though, because Matt tells us that he and Kim won't be playing any of the new songs live, except for "Cameras." Unlike many bands touring a new album, Matt and Kim will only throw down the songs the people came to hear.

Matt is nearly as much in interviews as he is at a show -- which is to say, really, really fun -- and he told us some great stories about the new album, his life with Kim, and some surprising things he's never tried.

Jay Hathaway: How's all this whirlwind interviewing going?

Matt Johnson: It's good, it's good. I can take care of it. (coughs) Well, other than this impending bronchitis that I haven't gotten rid of for like a month. I've been doing plenty of sleeping, so that just keeps my energy in check.

JH: I read about your bronchitis a while back. I'm amazed it's not gone by now!

MJ: I would've thought, too, but I think drinking 'til 4am every single day for months on end doesn't help you get rid of it too quickly!

JH: So true. What are your ideas for videos for the new album?

MJ: We have one in the pipeline. We were planning on shooting before we left on tour, which was in early September. We ended up not being able to, so we're going to shoot when we finish this tour in mid-November. I can't disclose a lot of information on it. I think it will probably make some people mad, but I think it will make more people happy.

JH: Do you think it'll be as controversial as the "Lessons Learned" video (where Matt and Kim got naked)?

MJ: No, probably not. It's a little bit of a different angle, but we'll see. We'll see what comes out.

JH: I've heard you're only playing one of the new songs live. Is that true?

MJ: I just know that when I go to a show, and the band says, "Who wants to hear a new song?" everyone kinda just says, "No, we want to hear the stuff we know and can sing along to!" So we decided this was going to be the last tour of our last album, Grand, as well as a bunch of older stuff, and we do a lot of cover interludes for 10 or 20 seconds between songs. It still feels fresh and new, but we decided not to play any of Sidewalks yet, for the most part.

JH: In an interview a while back, you said you'd never seen Star Wars and never put milk on your cereal. Have you done either of those things yet?

MJ: I have not! Last night, I said to Kim, "I know I can get no one to cheer in this crowd if I say 'Like me, who out here hasn't seen Star Wars?'" And, of course, no one yells, because everyone's fucking seen Star Wars except for me. It was just one of those things. I realized at one point I hadn't seen it yet, and I thought, "Huh. That'd be funny if I never see it."

And then with cereal and milk, I -- dry cereal has basically been one of my favorite foods since I was a kid, and at one point I realized I had never tried cereal and milk together, combined before. I was like, "Huh. I wonder if I can just make it forever." Even this morning, I had a cup of dry Honey Nut Cheerios. It's delicious. I eat it out of a coffee mug, like my morning coffee.

JH: Do you have any other firsts you'd like to achieve, either musically or personally?

MJ: I'm sure there's a lot. I haven't thought about it so much. I have a weird intrigue to teen drama shows, in the sense that where I grew up in Vermont, I went to public school, but even public school was a graduating grade of 17. There were like 50 people in my high school, so there was no such thing as popularity. I'm intrigued as an idea by popularity at school. And then when I went to college, I went to art school at Pratt in Brooklyn, and I never really got it then. That's not something I will ever experience, so I wonder what regular school -- like, we never had a football team at any of those schools, so it's a weird part of American culture that I think everyone experiences, except for me. I'm just there watching Gossip Girl, like, "What is this all about?"

Musically, with the band, we've been wanting to collaborate with -- well, Kim and I are big hip hop fans, and we want to collaborate with some MCs and a couple of producers. Everyone's so busy, including ourselves, that we just haven't been able to make it work yet. In the indie rock world, there's never really any collaborating outside of the band. It gives you a chance to make something that you wouldn't make by yourself.

JH: Was this the first album you've gone into a studio to record, instead of doing it yourself? Did you learn anything new

MJ: We recorded our first album in the studio, but we didn't have any money or anything. We recorded it in all of nine days. When we went into Grand, we did it ourselves because we wanted to try whatever the fuck Matt and Kim wanted to try. If Matt and Kim wanted to try a mean harmonica solo on a song that was going to suck, at least we wanted to try it, you know?

Then going into this album, Sidewalks, we had enough money to work in studios with people who knew what the hell they were doing in the recording department, and still take as much time as we wanted to do whatever dumb things we wanted to try. It was a similar length to our last album, Grand. We spent about 9 months on each of them. But with this one, we were able to spend more time on the songs, and less time on recording shit.

JH: When you and Kim spend so much time together on the road and in the studio, how much does your working relationship affect your romantic relationship, and vice versa?

MJ: We've realized that there's pretty much no separation between the two, even though we call our working relationship Matt and Kim, and our personal relationship we call Kim and Matt. There's not really much differentiation. But the craziest part about it is after all the time we spend together -- which is every hour, every day -- Kim and I shared a cell phone for five years, and we never had to call each other. That shows how much time we spend together. -- the crazy part is that we haven't killed each other yet. We don't seem to have the desire to. We continue to get along. I can't figure it out. Even after we've been in a bus for two months together, and in each other's space, we get home and it's like, "You want to go out and get some dinner?" We only leave each other if someone has to use the bathroom, basically.

JH: What kinds of jobs did you guys have before you were in a band? Do you have any good shitty job stories?

MJ: My first job was at a wine-bottling place, when I was like 14. My whole job was taking bottles out of a cardboard box, and putting them on a counter, and someone would take them away from there. A machine could have done my job. That was terrible.

Another one I had was, have you ever driven down the road and there's the guy turning the stop and slow sign? And you're like, "Man, that job must suck!" Let me tell you something: that job does suck. I definitely did that my senior year of high school. So, I've had my share.

Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky's bloody epic Santa Sangre, which was inspired by the story of Mexican serial killer Gregorio "Goyo" Cárdenas Hernández, has been praised as "a throwback to the golden age, to the days when filmmakers had bold individual visions," and derided... more

Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky's bloody epic Santa Sangre, which was inspired by the story of Mexican serial killer Gregorio "Goyo" Cárdenas Hernández, has been praised as "a throwback to the golden age, to the days when filmmakers had bold individual visions," and derided as "a massive clearance sale of leftover psychedelia." It's story and imagery has been dismissed as "a series of banal Freudianisms involving a circus family" and celebrated as "a wild kaleidoscope of images and outrages, a collision between Freud and Fellini." But love it or hate it, you'll never forget it, since with Santa Sangre, Jodorowsky firmly straddles the line where madness becomes genius.

Conceived and directed by Jodorowsky, who wrote the screenplay with Claudio Argento and Roberto Leoni, Santa Sangre tells the story of a young magician named Fenix, the son of two circus performers, who witnesses the death of his overprotective mother, Concha, at the hands of his knife throwing, hypnotist father. Concha, who in the big top is suspended from great heights by her hair, also happens to be the leader of a religious cult, which worships a girl whose arms were cut off during a violent rape. The sect's temple of worship, which houses a pool of holy blood (hence the film's name), gets bulldozed in the opening sequences. After his mother's murder, Fenix's arms are possessed by Concha - whose own arms were severed in the fatal attack by her husband - and a killing spree ensues.

Santa Sangre was released in 1989, over a decade and a half after Jodorowsky's defining films, El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973). The low budget horror movie-cum-art house masterpiece has since gained bona fide cult status, resulting in its first official US DVD release via Severin Films in January of this year.

The multi talented Jodorowsky (who, aside from filmmaking, has also mastered comic book writing and the tarot), had previously scored his own films, but with Santa Sangre he handed the musical reigns over to English musician and composer Simon Boswell. An integral part of the post-punk power pop band Advertising, after the outfit's demise, Boswell went on to score over ninety films including Phenomena (Dario Argento), Dust Devil (Richard Stanley), Shallow Grave (Danny Boyle), Lord of Illusions (Clive Barker), and Hackers (Iain Softley).

Ironically for a composer whose résumé has a distinctly devilish slant (his latest credit is the Richard Driscoll film Back2Hell), Boswell in recent years has been collaborating with the Vatican, producing music featuring the voice of not one, but two popes. He provided the score for Santo Subito, a DVD released in 2007, which commemorated the life and death of Pope John Paul II. That was followed up with contributions to Alma Mater, an album released in 2009, which featured the voice of Pope Benedict XVI. Boswell's next papal project is an album celebrating the fast-tracked deification of Pope John Paul II, which is set for release this spring.

Given that we are a counter-culture community, when we called Boswell up, our initial focus was on the colorful orgy of sin that is Santa Sangre. But since you can't have saints without sinners, our conversation also explored more outwardly virtuous topics, and how often the best art is a seemingly contradictory balance of heavenly and hellish elements.

NP: I understand you were in LA recently. What was that trip about?

SB: That trip was about the Santa Sangre screening at the American Cinematheque. I gave a little talk beforehand and then did a Q&A at the end.

NP: When you first got involved in the project, you probably didn't think you'd be flying halfway around the world to talk about it over twenty years on.

SB: No. Well, that's true, one wouldn't. But I've been asked so many times in my career, "What's the best film that you've done?" And I have to say, when I think about it, it was very apparent even at the time that Santa Sangre was just quite a unique piece of art really.

NP: How did you get involved? Were you aware of Jodorowsky before you got the call to do the job?

SB: The whole connection to the Jodorowsky film came about through Dario Argento, the Italian director. That was the first movie I ever did. It was called Phenomena, or Creepers as it's called in the States. His assistant A. D., Michele Soavi, directed the second film I did, and the first film was produced by Dario's brother, Claudio Argento. He asked me to do Santa Sangre, so there's sort of a creative connection going through there. But I had seen El Topo when I was a student at the cinema, and it had never left me. At the time I'd never seen anything like this either, so I was aware of Jodorowsky going way back actually.

NP: The Santa Sangre project was very much an unknown quantity, at the time because, discounting Jodorowsky's kids fable Tusk (1980), there had been a huge gap between El Topo (1973), The Holly Mountain (1973), and this one.

SB: Yes, it was an awful long time. Obviously, there's great difficulty in raising money for films like that, which are supreme examples of art house cinema and probably don't make any money. There was a lot of difficulty with him raising money, but when I asked Alejandro about it, he said, "Well I don't consider myself a filmmaker." He said, "When I make a film I'm a filmmaker, but otherwise, I have plenty of other things to do." It's interesting. It's not like he felt he had a career as a filmmaker. So that was his take on that.

NP: When did you first come face to face with Jodorowsky?

SB: I flew to Rome and met him there whilst he was editing Santa Sangre, and watched the film with him. We talked through a few ideas, but he mainly sort of sent me away saying, "Just do what you want to do."

NP: So there was no grand brief?

SB: No, no, not in the slightest. It's funny I discovered subsequently - I didn't really know this [at the time] - but he was keen on me doing the music. I mean he's a musician himself.

NP: Right. This was the first film on which he'd actually handed over the reins for the music to someone else.

SB: Yes...Dario and Claudio were pushing me because I was doing a lot of electronic music which, at the time, seemed quite fresh and quite different. It was sort of somewhere between Tangerine Dream and Mike Oldfield. I think Tubular Bells is probably an influence on loads of film composers.

But it was the idea I think of doing what was kind of fake orchestral music, but with synthetic sounds, with synths and samples. It was a little bit like the Clockwork Orange soundtrack. It clearly must have sounded nothing like that, but Jodorowsky - I mean he's a true artist in the sense that he's very happy to allow the creativity of other people to come to the fore - so I think it intrigued him, the idea that on this very organic film set in Mexico there would be an electronic score.

NP: Did he involve himself at all in the music for Santa Sangre?

SB: No, no, not at all. There was only one scene [in the film where he gave me specific input]. On the first day that I met him we were watching it through, and there's a scene where the knife thrower's wife, Concha, gets her arms cut off. It's pretty grizzly, and I said to him, "Do you want me to write something horrible for this? Something really unpleasant?" And he said, "No, no, no, no, no, no." He said, "This is like a moment of religious ecstasy for her. It must be wonderful, beautiful, uplifting. She's going to heaven." It was a very early lesson for me in smart movie making if you like, which is to...

NP: To not do the obvious?

SB: Well I get really irritated with most film music these days, and most movies. Because film music it seems to me tells you the same information you already know.

NP: Right. And I don't always want to be told in a heavy handed way what I should be feeling. It's good to work it out for yourself.

SB: Absolutely. I think there's a lot of paranoia in the film business about "let's make sure everyone understands the scene." Just kind of treating the audience like morons really. Clearly that is the case. When there's a car chase they have really car chasey music, and if there's a love scene they have some soupy love theme. And it's very interesting, Jodorowsky was the first one, but Dario also pointed this out to me. He said to me, "You know you can write beautiful music for something horrific." That makes the audience actually question what it is they're watching, and makes them more engaged in a film than less engaged. You tell people the same information twice, it's just like having too much of something really, and it usually turns me off the movie.

NP: When you saw the bare bones of Santa Sangre coming together in the editing room, what was your first impression?

SB: Well my first impression, having seen El Topo previously, was that it's been made more like a work of art than it has a movie. It has this strange atmosphere - not of bad acting - but a kind of very mannered, slightly awkward acting. They made it in English with a lot of very heavy Mexican accents. And I was just aware that the look of it was just incredibly beautifully crafted. The color palettes and the way the subject matter has something of surreal art about it.

It is quite a surreal movie. All that stuff with the elephant, when the elephant dies...it's like a Magritte or Dali feeling picture in the sense that it's just a bit bizarre. And what it makes it even more bizarre is it's not explained at all. It's not necessarily a part of the plot. It's just there because it's wonderful and crazy really. So I just knew it was a very special film. I took it in my stride because at this point I wasn't thinking I was going to be a film composer. I didn't set out to be one, so I just kind of reacted honestly to the images. And because the images are so inspiring, I think I wrote some good music for it, but I also wrote some stuff I cringe at now, because I was very naïve.

NP: Well when synthesizers first came out there was the novelty element. It's only with the passage of time that we can look back and see what kinds of synthesized sounds have dated and what haven't. You don't have that issue with a violin for example, because the violin's been around for hundreds of years.

SB: Yes. I think that's very well put actually. It is interesting, you can tell which movies date and which don't, and in the same way, you're right, there's certain bits of music... But it wasn't like it was all synthesizers. There was a guitar scene in there which I wrote and played myself, which I think really expresses the soul of the young boy in it. It's very simple and full of yearning and lost innocence as well.

NP: Have you kept in touch with Jodorowsky over the years?

SB: I have actually. I don't see him that often, but I made an album over a period of 13 years actually, which I was sort of finishing about 5 years ago. I cut a lot of my film scores up into bits and then reassembled those bits as if they were samples other people had made, but it was all my own samples as it were, and created new pieces. I wanted to involve some of the filmmakers that I was particularly proud of having worked with to [do] spoken word stuff on the album. At the same time I also filmed them doing it. So I rang up Dario, and I went to Rome and filmed him saying his lines that I had written for him, and I did the same with Jodorowsky in Paris.

NP: And the "Close Your Eyes" music video was borne out of that project (see below).

SB: Yes. I had already filmed Jodorowsky five years ago doing his bits, that's on the CD, on the album. But I just thought, why not make a kind of pop promo. When they said to me I could use any clips from Santa Sangre I thought, okay, I have to do this.

NP: I know that Jodorowsky's working on a sequel to El Topo - is that something you're going to be working on?

SB: I'd love to say yes, and the only reason I'm saying I'm not sure is because he's been trying to make that for about 10 or 15 years, and I think it's by no means certain that he'll make it. I'd like to think he'd ask me but, as it's sort of the son of El Topo, and he did music for El Topo, he might want to do it himself. So I wouldn't feel at all bad about whatever decision he made on that really. I'd love to work with him, but I think he takes each kind of film on its own merits really.

NP: Has he spoken with you about the project in general?

SB: No, not really. Have you got the Santa Sangre DVD?

NP: Yes.

SB: I interviewed him. This is about the same time that I went to Paris to film him...El Topo 2 didn't come up, but I asked him about Holy Mountain and the Beatles and John Lennon. Because he was sort of taken up by John Lennon after El Topo came out as some sort of genius guru, and there was talk of him directing a Beatles film if you can imagine, which would have been amazing. And in that interview, he does talk about George Harrison. Harrison was going to be - I forget which - the thief I think was the character in Holy Mountain that he wanted to be. But Jodorowsky said, "Well there's a scene where the thief has to strip naked and have his anus washed."

NP: And Harrison wasn't up for that?

SB: So Jodorowsky said, "You don't have your ass washed, you don't do my movie."

NP: Harrison quite literally wouldn't put his ass on the line.

SB: There you go.

NP: Given the subject matter of Jodorowsky's films, particularly with regards to religion - I understand, though spiritual, he's very disapproving of organized religion because of the destruction it brings - your career has taken a different and unexpected turn because you're now working with the Pope.

SB: [laughs] Yes it has...I mean there are things that I'm deeply uncomfortable with about the Catholic Church. I'm not Catholic, I'm not religious at all. So I'm struggling with why I was asked to work with them, but they seem to quite like me. In fact the best explanation I had for it is that - there was a documentary being made about of the making of this thing, and the director of the documentary asked the priest who is creatively in charge of the project, "Why Simon Boswell? Why have you picked him?" And he kind of fell about laughing, and he said, "Jesus loves the sinner."

NP: [laughs]

SB: [laughs] So, knowing my dysfunctional lifestyle, I'm happy to have that on my gravestone really.

NP: Has that priest to watched Santa Sangre?

SB: Probably not. They're actually rather sweet. I mean there's a lot of stuff that's very difficult and wrong with the Catholic Church obviously - that's had a lot of publicity recently - but they're very kind of sweet and naïve a lot of the priests that I've met.

I first got involved when they asked me to write some music for a DVD which had the funeral of John Paul II on it, and there's two stories I can tell you actually. I was on holiday near Rome because I knew this project was coming up, and I went into a meeting in the Vatican and I had my laptop bag with me. They were trying to show me this footage on the DVD. All these priests couldn't make the technology work, so I said, look, I've got my laptop, we'll watch it on here. I took it out and then saw my battery was flat, so I rummaged around in the bag and pulled all this stuff out, and onto the floor fell a copy of The Da Vinci Code.

I put my foot on that as they sat behind the desk, so I had to sit for an hour in the Vatican feeling this book burning a hole through my shoe. But at the end - this is sort of going back to their naiveté - Don Giulio, who's the priest who christened me a sinner, he said to me, "Wouldn't it be great to have a song on the end of the DVD?" I said, "Well, I don't know, maybe." And he said, "Simon, you've worked with Elton John - why don't you ask Elton?" I looked at him and I had to say, "He's homosexual." He went [Simon puts on a very shocked Italian accent], "No, no."

NP: [laughs]

SB: [laughs] I thought that was quite sweet really, the idea the priest is completely unaware that Elton John is gay.

NP: Do you have any more Vatican projects in the pipeline?

SB: Yes, we do actually, funny enough. I find it so strange answering these questions as if I've become some sort of weird Vatican...

NP: Well you are the go-to guy for Vatican music.

SB: Yeah. I have to console myself actually with the fact that Michelangelo probably was too [for art] - and we don't know what he was thinking. I mean when he was doing the Sistine Chapel, he could have got there in the morning and said, "I'm not working for those bastards today." I mean, who knows what he thought.

We're doing a new album which is going to be a tribute album to John Paul II who is being made a saint at the beginning of May. We've composed some new tracks using Gregorian music, and this time asked some people to perform them. We have Andrea Bocelli, we have Placido Domingo, and we have various other world stars who are going to perform on the album. And we're trying to get a big concert together in Krakow where John Paul was born to commemorate his death. So that's the next project for the Vatican.

NP: You realize you're setting a whole new precedent for the deification process. Now no pope can be deified without a soundtrack album and at least a couple of world famous opera singers singing on it.

SB: I know. It's hideous. I'm sorry. I apologize now. But I don't think it's as bad as X Factor.

NP: Nowadays art is judged in terms of sales, and with these papal releases, the legacy of popes will be judged by how many records they sell when they die and are deified.

SB: What's interesting is of course that's how all the world thinks, but the Vatican really don't consider themselves to be a commercial entity. I mean there was a lot of difficulty in getting this album released, and they didn't want to be paid for it either. There's some payment you make to license the Pope's voice, but they really discourage people thinking of them as a business. But obviously the rest of the world thinks that way, so there's going to be some sort of comparison between things.

The last one didn't sell anywhere near what we thought it would. But I think that's because they didn't try and sell it to Catholics. They sold it to the rest of the world as a sort of classical crossover album.

NP: You don't think it's because the Catholics are more adept at downloading?

SB: [laughs]. That's a sin. Don't you know that? No, it was kind of wrongly marketed. I was only one of three composers on the album. I probably did about half of it. It was really nice music, and I think the record company got carried away with the fact that it was this classical crossover music, rather than just for Catholics. And clearly that was a mistake in terms of sales. Because if only five percent of Catholics had bought it would have sold more than Thriller, and I'd be speaking to you from a much bigger house.

NP: It is interesting the relationship between the Catholic Church and commerce. I remember going to the Vatican and on the roof there's a hut with nuns selling plastic rosary beads. I was like, haven't they read their own Bible? I mean even I know that Jesus disapproved of that kind of thing.

SB: Yeah, well I think there's a great gulf between the things one knows about Jesus and his preachings and his sayings - a huge gulf between that and organized religion in general, whether it's Catholic or Church of England or whatever. I think they've lost the basic principles of all of that stuff to be honest with you. But you know, I have to say, it's been a learning curve for me doing it because I was quite moved by being in [the Vatican]. I mean there's a lot of fantastic art that's been made in the name of religion. The Catholic Church, and churches in general, have been incredible patrons of wonderful art.

NP: Incredible patrons of the art, but then also, particularly with music, they've had a very uncomfortable relationship with artists. For example, if you make music you can shake your hips to it's considered akin to devil worship by some.

SB: You mean like Elvis wiggling his hips, that sort of temptation.

NP: When you're doing the music for the Vatican projects, have they ever come back to you to complain that anything's to jolly and therefore inappropriate?

SB: I didn't feel that sort of pressure from the Vatican. I think they're quite keen on uplifting music actually. In fact there's one track which we didn't use in the end...There's a whole branch of music which is called marian music, which is written to the memory of the Virgin Mary, particularly in Italy. It sounds like Neapolitan music, like Volare or some sort of thing Dean Martin might have sung. It's wonderful actually because there's all kind of oom-pah stuff. It sounds very jolly and very Italian. So I don't feel there's any problem with that. There's a huge debate though about the happy clappy stuff that came in the '60s, when you couldn't go into a church without some god-awful guitarist singing some new hymn he'd written. I think the current Pope is very disapproving of that, and my god, I agree with him.

NP: So he's not a happy, clappy Pope?

SB: He's not a happy, clappy Pope. No, he's not. Basically he likes Mozart and music like that. That's pretty uplifting stuff.

NP: It's interesting when you talk about the marian genre of music because that seems to be reminiscent of the Santa Sangre music in the scenes where Concha is fighting to preserve her temple.



SB: Yes. Yeah, well that's interesting...In fact, I saw that scene just recently, where they're confronting the people who want to knock their church down. They sing this song called "Fin Del Mundo," which is a Mexican song about the end of the world. One of the jobs I had to do quite a lot of in Santa Sangre was to fix or add to things which they'd literally recorded live on the set. When I got that clip there was just people singing. You could hear like one guitar way off in the distance. I had to stick a load of guitars and things on it and make it into something that sounded like it was a bit more peppy really, give it a bit of zap.

NP: In the DVD extras Jodorowsky talks about that scene. How he was searching for authentic music, and how he was randomly tapped on the foot by a beggar in the street. He saw it as a sign, and asked the guy where he could find some music. And the guy, as it turned out, was in a blind choir, which Jodorowsky then used for that scene.

SB: Exactly. It's funny, that's very particular of Jodorowsky. He finds meaning in wherever life takes him. I really admire him for that. You were talking earlier about his interest in spiritual things rather than organized religion. You know he is very knowledgeable about the tarot and he gives tarot card readings every Wednesday in a café just on the corner of the block where he lives in Paris. Loads of people come from all around the world every week to have their tarot read by him.

NP: Have you had your tarot read by him?

SB: No, I haven't. I was a little bit scared really.

NP: Well of course the Catholic Church would say tarot was akin to devil worship.

SB: Oh my god, of course they would. They would indeed. But you know, it's funny, people talk about the Catholic Church like it's all of a like mind - and it's not. What I discovered was that it's full of people who don't agree on all kinds of things. It's not like they're all unified in this particular way of looking at the world. Being a Catholic means lots of different things to different people.

NP: Even within the church - or maybe especially within the church.

SB: Yeah, even within the Vatican City. I mean there are different orders of priests. You have Paulines and Jesuits, and they really have a different world view actually. The Paulines, for example, run the whole media wing of the Vatican, and they're more relaxed. They wear jeans and are much more into film and music. They run all the Catholic bookshops all around the world, and are involved in the media, the newspapers and TV stations that the Vatican own. And I'm sure they're at complete loggerheads with the Jesuits who are part of that rather austere group who want everyone to be a bit miserable.

NP: On the DVD you talk about how Jodorowsky had this fatalistic approach to the music; He'd hired you, and therefore the music he got was the music he got because it was in your hands.

SB: Yeah.

NP: Ironically that seems to be a similar approach to what you experienced with the Catholic Church.

SB: Doesn't it, yeah. That's interesting. Yes. I guess so. It is a sort of fatalistic approach. I have to say I've really taken that lesson through into my life...and also coincidences that you come across in your life. I'm more of a believer in Jung than anything religious, and Jung says that what we see as being coincidences is really our unconscious making things happen for us. It's not that there's a level of awareness, but our unconscious drives our life in certain directions that we're not aware of, which is why things happen that you think, my god, that's such a coincidence.

NP: So there's a connection in the work process, because you're attracted to situations where you're not being micromanaged. You want to work with people who will trust your choices - even if it might not be their choices - because, at the end of the day, that's why they hired you. That's the whole point with art. You're not buying a commodity, you're buying someone's creativity and taste.

SB: That vision. That's true. Absolutely, and you know, this couldn't be more relevant I suppose. I find that the best directors one works with are directors who are generous enough and secure in their own selves enough to hand something over to someone. And that the worst directors just try and control everything, being sort of Nazi directors that are very unwilling to let people do their thing. And it's really, I think, a function of being a secure person or insecure person.

NP: So beyond Jodorowsky and the Catholic Church, who are the directors you've had good experiences with?

SB: Richard Stanley, for example, do you know his work? I did work on most of the stuff that he's made. There's a movie called Hardware and a movie called Dust Devil, and I think some of my best music has been for him and Jodorowsky and people who just let me do my own thing, you know, let me have an interpretation of my own on the film. Clive Barker also was like that. He's very trusting. It's very difficult I think for directors to hand over their baby essentially to someone doing music. Because music is the one thing you can't really describe in words, and it has a huge influence on the outcome of a film, so it's a great act of trust for a director to hire a composer. I'm always very aware of that.

NP: What's next for you?

SB: I'm working on a film with Richard Stanley, which is a film with different segments by different directors. And I've just been to Sundance, and there's a movie called Hobo With A Shotgun. It's a Rutger Hauer film, and it pushes the level of bad taste to a new high or low, whichever you want to describe it. It's a completely over the top movie, and I think it's going to be a crossover hit. I didn't score it. I was contacted about them licensing a song that I'd written for the first movie I ever did with Dario Argento for this really cool sequence. I'm very pleased about that. That's coming out, and I think will take the world by storm.

NP: I'm glad. I think Rutger Hauer is really underrated.

SB: Yes, I think so too.

NP: He's a very intriguing presence on the screen.

SB: Yes. Particularly in this film, let me tell you. It's very funny, but completely over the top.

NP: There is that fine line between bad taste and genius. That's always something that Jodorowsky's straddled isn't it? People love him or hate him, or say his work's tasteless or high art.

SB: Yes, that's true. That is true. Even in Santa Sangre, the elephant sequence, that scene's gratuitous but in a rather wonderful way. It doesn't tell you anything extra about the film's story. It's just a wonderful, weird thing. I think it's very difficult to ride that line, and let me tell you, Hobo with a Shotgun has some scenes which you will not believe....

What's this website you've got? What is that?

NP: Suicide Girls? It's a counter culture website. It's named after a term Chuck Palahniuk coined. He was talking about how those with tattoos and piercings are essentially choosing to commit social suicide by permanently marking their body, which ultimately means that there are certain sections of society that they're permanently barred from entering or getting approval from.

And of course there's a big rite of passage tattoo scene in Santa Sangre between Fenix and his father, so it's an iconic film within our community. Also SuicideGirls is about redefining beauty, and Santa Sangre is a very beautiful movie, but it could also be perceived as being ugly by some. There's beauty in the ugliness and in the horror.

SB: Yes, exactly. No, it's true. That's very interesting. It's a very interesting observation. And it's very true. Yeah, of course, tattooing is a big statement, isn't it really?

NP: And the choice that Jodorowsky made that you were talking about earlier with the music in the scene where Concha's arms are sliced off, he was inclined to see that as a moment of transcendence, but someone else might only have envisioned it as a horrific and ugly scene. He chose to see the beauty in it.

SB: Yes, yes, absolutely. I think that's what great artists do to be honest. They create a resonance within things, between what you see and what you feel. The contradiction is everything - it's how life really is.

So when I look at my life, and how I work on horror movies and with the Pope, I remember one thing. As a teenager the writer who influenced me the most was William Blake, and in particular a work of his called The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Even when he wrote it, which was the late 18th century, he was making a statement against the church basically, but saying that true creativity has to have both energy, which he sees as hell, and form, which he sees is like heaven or the restrictive aspects of the Church like the Ten Commandments.

His famous poem, "Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright," is about the idea of taking this pure energy and putting it into words, into the restrictive form of poetry, where this contradiction allows the finished poem to throb and burst as the fire within tries to bend the bars of it's prison. For me, this is a sensible way to see the creative process, which is to put something that contains chaos, or comes from chaos into something that has form, like a film, just as Jodorowsky did. But not a film where the violence of that scene with Concha is just violence. It must contain an element that challenges, that pushes, that provokes and even insults.

That's what the best art is, for me. It's stuff which is inexplicably contradictory. And when I was sitting at night, pretty much alone in St. Peter's - because we recorded in there at night with a Gregorian choir - I remember not only being very moved by it being a very spiritual experience, being in that huge space, surrounded by Michelangelo's art instead of by a zillion Japanese tourists, but that it was also that I couldn't be a better living embodiment of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In my life, as well as my art. Horror may be beautiful. And beauty may contain true horror.


The first official US DVD and BluRay release of Alejandro Jodorowsky's Santa Sangre is available now. The 2-disc set features a new high definition transfer of the original film plus over five hours of additional content, including an interview with Jodorowsky conducted by Simon Boswell.



Close Your Eyes, an album of music drawn from over 50 of Simon Boswell's original film scores which features the voices of numerous singers, actors and directors (including Jodorowsky), is available via iTunes and at SimonBoswell.com/.

Sources for quotes: Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times (positive) and Hal Hinson, Washington Post (negative).

(image) [Razzi in Sounds Like Fun] Hi this is Missy! I started SuicideGirls ten years ago and for a good part of those ten years we've been trying to create a tv show about our live tour: the SuicideGirls Burlesque Show. Vh1 has been nice enough to give us a shot at it, and so we're going to... more

[Razzi in Sounds Like Fun]

Hi this is Missy!

I started SuicideGirls ten years ago and for a good part of those ten years we've been trying to create a tv show about our live tour: the SuicideGirls Burlesque Show. Vh1 has been nice enough to give us a shot at it, and so we're going to start things off by looking for some of the most unique, interesting & beautiful burlesque performers in the US.

If you are a female over the age of 18, eligible to work full time in the United States, and have a background in dance, we would love to meet you!

We are looking for women who are:

INDEPENDENT
DYNAMIC
SEXY
STRONG
EDGY

Those with tattoos, piercings, and talents such as burlesque dancing, fire twirling, contortion, aerial talents on rings or silks, or anything unique are encouraged to apply.


[Korento and friends in Moulin Rouge]

Open call auditions are being held in Las Vegas, New York and Los Angeles to find dancers for this documentary style series about pursuing your dreams in the world of burlesque.

Please email the following information to the appropriate casting associate for the city you would like to audition in:

Name
Phone #s
Dance style / background
3 Photos (to include close-up face shot & full-body shot)

**Depending on which open call you wish to attend,
the subject of your email should read:
"Vegas", "NYC" or "LA"

The casting associates will respond with full audition details.

OPEN CALL AUDITIONS

Las Vegas - February 26th:
Caesars Palace in the Roman Ballroom
Jen - BShowCasting@Gmail.com

New York – March 5th:
Carrie - CarrieDanceCasting@Gmail.com

Los Angeles – March 8th:
Greg - BurlesqueShowCasting@Gmail.com

If you are unable to make the open casting calls in the cities listed above, but would still like a shot a participating in the show:

Please email: BurlesqueShowCasting@gmail.com

Name
Phone #s
Dance style / background
3 Photos (to include close-up face shot & full-body shot)

**The subject of your email should read:
"UNABLE TO ATTEND OPEN CALL"

Click to read the eligibility requirements

Good luck!

Really excited to meet you all and see your talent!

xoxo
-missy

by Damon Martin When the Republicans took over the House of Representatives, it was with a promise to balance the budget and take back the old time values of our Founding Fathers. So far the GOP’s best efforts to reduce spending has been to try to cut funding to NPR and PBS, redefine rape under the... more

by Damon Martin

When the Republicans took over the House of Representatives, it was with a promise to balance the budget and take back the old time values of our Founding Fathers. So far the GOP’s best efforts to reduce spending has been to try to cut funding to NPR and PBS, redefine rape under the law, and now they want to take away essential medical services from women nationwide.

Yep, that’s right, the latest Republican brainstorm was proposed by Representative Mike Pence of Indiana. It would pull all Federal funding from Planned Parenthood, which was given $363 million dollars last year by the government, and helped treat or give medical services to millions of Americans.

Started in the 1920′s by Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood provides medical services ranging from birth control to cancer screening to pregnancy testing and counseling, as well as STD testing and treatment, and yes – that word Republicans hate so much – abortion. While the funding from the government never directly goes towards abortions, the money does fund clinics who provide those services, and that’s fundamentally why Republicans are after the organization.

Shutting down abortions nationwide by any means necessary.



The law, if it passes, would pull funding to Planned Parenthood and 102 affiliates, which according to the organization, would in turn leave 48% of Americans currently eligible for receiving care, out in the cold.

Pence has said publicly that this bill is just another way Republicans are trying to reduce the deficit and cut spending. Looking at the big picture however, as was the case with NPR, the Republicans are once again trying to fix a trillion dollar problem by cutting pennies – while moving forward with other areas of their agenda. Republicans continue to target women and abortion in many of their “cost cutting” strategies, instead of looking at real problem areas that exist with the national budget.

For example, HBO host Bill Maher on his Real Time show last Friday night used a prop to illustrate the bloated expenditures that make up the biggest part of our national budget. It was symbolized by two huge pieces of chicken, a pile of mashed potatoes and a giant mess of macaroni and cheese, which represented the military budget, Social Security, and Medicare and Medicaid.

Federal budget tweaks have yet to negatively impact those areas, and, as a matter of fact, the defense budget went up again this year. Also just to note, the nuclear program, which encompasses thousands of weapons, doesn’t even fall under the defense budget, it falls under energy.

To compound the situation with regards to women and what Pence and the Republicans are trying to pass off purely as spending cuts, several states are trying to pass laws to take things even further back towards the Stone Age as well. In South Dakota, legislation is currently pending that would make it legal to kill an abortion doctor. And in Georgia, they are trying to pass a law that would change legal terminology in “criminal law and criminal procedure” in pre-conviction proceedings so that rape victims could only be called “accusers.”

While the Pence bill has little chance of surviving beyond the approval in the House of Representatives, it’s still should be noted that the Republicans are time and time again trying to take funding away from crucial services like Planned Parenthood.

Pundits from both sides have taken up the battle, including Representative Jackie Speier, who took to the Congress floor and gave her own emotional account of an abortion she had due to unforeseen complications with a pregnancy.



“For you to stand on this floor and to suggest as you have that somehow this is a procedure that is either welcomed or done cavalierly or done without any thought is preposterous,” Speier said.

Conservative mouthpiece Glenn Beck took an entire hour on his show on Fox News to rail against Planned Parenthood, and even went as far as accusing Planned Parenthood of sex trafficking. He also painted Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger as a racist and essentially someone who hated children. His personal attacks went on for an hour straight (although I could barely stomach 10 minutes of his drivel).

Technically, because Beck is so absolutely batshit crazy, he might actually help the cause of people supporting Planned Parenthood, so I guess maybe we should encourage his personal lunacy.

Despite the best efforts of the enlightened opposition, Pence’s bill passed the House of Representatives with a vote of 240-185. Of note, three Republicans did vote against the bill (Rep. Jeff Flake, Rep. Walter Jones and Rep. John Campbell). It will now make its way to the Senate where it will in all likelihood be bounced by the Democrat controlled caucus, but it doesn’t mean the Republicans won’t keep trying. Meanwhile the left need to expose the right’s backhanded attempt to destroy women rights under the guise of cost control. (After all, if a measure like this did go through, so-called “pro-life” Republican should be prepared to increase budgets for welfare and Medicare to pay for all the additional unwanted pregnancies and children cuts to Planned Parenthood might cause. )

It’s an attack on a woman’s right to choose in America, plain and simple. Republicans should stop pretending it’s anything else.

Over the past five years, Austin rockers … And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead have broken from Interscope, put out a series of increasingly challenging and complex albums, and started operating under their own imprint, Richter Scale Records. It's been a tough ride for Trail of Dead, but... more

Over the past five years, Austin rockers … And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead have broken from Interscope, put out a series of increasingly challenging and complex albums, and started operating under their own imprint, Richter Scale Records. It's been a tough ride for Trail of Dead, but it's led them to their new LP, Tao of the Dead, which came together more easily than any record the band had ever done before. They finished it in just ten days.

Tao of the Dead is Trail of Dead's 7th full-length effort, featuring a slimmed-down four-person lineup of founding Trail members Conrad Keely and Jason Reese, lead guitarist Aaron Ford, and Midnight Masses frontman Autry Fulbright. They recorded the album in two parts, each with a different producer. Part I consists of 11 separate tracks, while part 2 is a continuous 16-minute track with six distinct movements. The Tao Te Ching, a classic Chinese text that dates back to the 6th century BC, provided a name for the record and the lyrics for part 2.

Trail's Conrad Keely is a visual artist as well as a musician -- his striking drawings appear on the band's album covers -- and he's releasing the beginning of a graphic novel along with Tao of the Dead. Listeners will have to draw their own connections between Keely's steampunk-tinged sci-fi story and Trail's music.

We talked to Keely and Fulbright about the making of Tao of the Dead, the influence of the Tao Te Ching, and Keely's new comics project.

Jay Hathaway:
Let's talk about your new album. How did it take shape into two different sides?

Conrad Keely:
It evolved that way. It was just natural that that was the right way to do it. We didn't have to talk about it or anything. It just kind of happened. That was the general experience with recording this record, as well.

JH:
Did you plan on bringing in two different producers for the two different sides? How did that happen?

CK:
We started one part with one producer -- our old producer, Chris Coady -- and he did part two with us. He did the basic track. But we always knew that we were going to do the full side with Frenchie [Chris "Frenchie" Smith], and I think the idea originally was that part 2 was going to be an EP, but instead we just made it part of the record.

JH:
So it just seemed like the two sides fit together naturally?

CK:
They fit together, but they're definitely separate. They're like two different experiences.

Autry Fulbright:
I listen to part 2 first, that's my experience, but I think everyone's going to be able to interpret it however they like as a whole thing. Even though we started with part 2 and continued with part 1 and they had their rightful places on the record, it stands as something that can be unique to anyone that listens to it.

JH:
How do you translate that to the live experience? Are you going to play the entire 16 minutes of part 2 at each show?

CK:
I think if we do side 2, we would like to perform it as one piece. It's not separable. So that's the plan, but part 1, we've already performed songs from that. The first time we played Weight of the Sun was a few months ago. I think the answer is that we don't know yet.

JH:
Is the tour lineup going to be just the four of you? I know it was kind of a stripped-down band for the recording of this album.

CK:
For now, I think it will have to be, but that's not saying that later on, we might not have more than one band. Obviously, we've been known for that. For now, we're just going to do the four thing, and it feels good this way.

JH:
Autry, are you in the band full time? Are you still doing Midnight Masses? What's your situation?

AF:
In a word, yes, to all of those things. I still have other projects that I'm working on, that include other members of Trail of Dead as well. I'm really just making music, and right now Trail of Dead is something I'm putting my focus on. I continue to look forward to more touring and more writing with everyone in it.

JH:
Did you contribute to the songwriting and the lyrics on this album? I know you're a writer yourself.

AF:
Not really to the lyrics. I think we were all under agreement that the Tao Te Ching was a great influence on part 2, and it became the album's namesake.

CK:
But the music was really collaboratively written on this record.

AF:
When we played together, a lot of the ideas came from jamming.

CK:
Which makes it different from some of our previous records, I think.

AF:
It was really great to just go in and make ideas bounce off each other, especially since we hadn't played in that capacity together before.

CK:
Yeah.

JH:
This is the second album you've put out on your own label ...

CK:
You mean under the Richter Scale imprint? I guess, officially. I consider everything we've done to be under the imprint of what we do. I just gave it a logo. I mean, we've never done any of our records without the help of the labels, really.

JH:
How are things different for you now than they were five years ago, when you were on a major label?

CK:
I think a lot of that pressure is internal. I think that back then I was a lot more stressed out about putting stuff out, but I don't think that came from the label. I think that was just self-imposed. And these days, I feel a little bit less self-conscious about it. The label has been a huge help. One of the things I really like about working with Superball is that there's so many different new formats, and ways to put things out, and it's been kind of an adventure finding out ... I mean, this album was done in four different formats, and we've never done that in the past.

JH:
You guys are doing vinyl for this record, then?

CK:
The vinyl's going to be three sides, with an engraving on the fourth side.

JH:
It must have been fun to do the cover art for that, and get a bigger canvas.

CK:
I've always designed on vinyl size. Even the albums that we didn't put out on vinyl were always ready for vinyl. They just had to be shrunk down to CD. I always design intending it to be 12 inches.

JH:
You're a band that's always made albums that are meant to be listened to as albums. With the success of iTunes, and music sales increasingly focusing on individual tracks, what do you think about the future of the album as a format?

AF:
I feel like the fact that we're doing it means that people are still doing it. The music that we both like are albums. In the 90s, where it was a more CD-driven music world, and a band could have one good song, and you'd have to buy the entire CD. To me, an album wasn't good unless it had several great songs, which meant the whole record had to be really good. I wasn't just thinking about that one song in the middle of the album. I listened to the album from start to finish.

CK:
Also, I think there are lots of bands that -- at least, the bands that I admire these days -- are putting out albums.

AF:
I feel like that's my favorite music that's around now. I don't believe in just a ...

CK:
iTunes shuffle!

AF:
Yeah!

CK:
Unless you're having a dance party. Then it's okay.

JH:
What are some of those bands? Who's putting out really great music at the moment?

CK:
I like the Die Antwoord album a lot. I was really obsessed with them. The new Beach House record, I think, is beautiful from beginning to end. A complete album.

AF:
I think Tame Impala's record, Innerspeaker, and Steeple by Wolf People have been my two favorite ones. And again, those are albums I listen to from start to finish.

CK:
It's definitely not a dead art form, if that's what people are worried about.

JH:
How did the Tao Te Ching come to influence the record? Where did you run into that, and how did it ge written into the second part?

CK:
When we were recording part 2, and I needed some lyrics to sing for the scratch vocals, and the only book that was around was the Tao Te Ching. The lyrics just fit. The reason that it struck a chord was that I'd been reading The Art of War and this book by Baltasar Gracian called The Art of Worldly Wisdom. Although all three of these were not written in the same time period, they all expressed a really close philosophy. I was surprised that the Tao Te Ching wasn't a religious or spiritual book as much as it was a practical book.

JH:
Have you finished the comic you're working on, this graphic novel?

CK:
I haven't. We're hoping to work it into the next two records, actually. But I've finished enough that it's going to be released probably right after the record comes out.

JH:
How does that relate to the album? I haven't seen the comic yet, but I've heard it's a steampunk story that you've been working on for a long time ...

CK:
I don't want to tell you how it relates. I want you to discover by checking it out. Because I want to see the connections that people make. That's half the fun, I think. Does that make sense?

JH:
Yeah, definitely. So, we've been hearing a lot about steampunk recently but you've been working on this story since before there was any kind of trend ...

CK:
There were people who'd ask me if I was into steampunk before I'd heard of it, and I didn't know what they were talking about. They'd ask that in reference to my work, my drawings.

JH:
Do you consider your drawings steampunk?

CK:
It's a bit more grounded in science fiction. It takes place on another world that doesn't relate to earth at all. It depends. It's such a wide genre. I consider Jules Verne the father of it, in a way. He was a big influence on me.

JH:
It seems like every time you put out an album, it gets compared to Source Tags and Codes. How do you feel about that, and what's your opinion of that album now?

CK:
As you can well imagine, that's kind of frustrating in some ways. Especially when I think about this perfect rating we were given by a popular online magazine. I didn't even think it was a perfect album. I don't think of that as a perfect album for us. I think of it as a developmental album. It was what helped us develop into what we are, but it wasn't some kind of penultimate statement. I guess I just have to apologize to all those people who think that was our best record, because I feel I've moved on from it. I'm probably happier about our new record than I am about any record we've made, including Source Tags.

JH:
Is it that way every time you put out a record? Do you always feel like what you've just done is your best work?

CK:
No. The last three records were very difficult. They were disastrous in some ways. But that had more to do with the difficulty of making them, and all those things that happened when they were being made. It was kind of the opposite with this record, because there was such a flow and it was so easy. It just kind of came out, y'know? We had fun doing it.

by SG’s Team Agony feat. Squee and Clio Let us answer life’s questions – because great advice is even better when it comes from SuicideGirls. (image) [Squee in Philosophy] Q: I have this problem…every time I meet a potential girlfriend I end up in the “Friend Zone” and it sucks, hardcore. more

by SG’s Team Agony feat. Squee and Clio

Let us answer life’s questions – because great advice is even better when it comes from SuicideGirls.



[Squee in Philosophy]

Q: I have this problem…every time I meet a potential girlfriend I end up in the “Friend Zone” and it sucks, hardcore. Just wanted to know how I can avoid this Twilight Zone friend anomaly thing. Thanks.



A: Wow, this is a toughie. I can see how you may find this situation frustrating, but I know I could never consider a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship with anybody I couldn’t first feel a very strong friendship with. Surely being friends with someone is the perfect test as to whether you’d be compatible enough to take it further. If my boyfriend wasn’t one of my best friends, I wouldn’t be with him.

Maybe it’s time to take a step back and look at it from a different angle. If people like you and respect you enough to consider you a friend, surely that’s a great compliment! Of course, if you want more, it can be a bit gutting, but sadly enough, this is just a fact of life. Not everyone we fancy will fancy us back. I would embrace their offers of friendship and take them as a compliment. And look on the bright side, having a lot of female friends usually leads to meeting their female friends, increasing your chances of meeting that special someone!

Squee

Xxx

***



[Clio in Born Into A Light]

Q: So I guess my problems are:

• My grandfather has Alzheimer’s, my only stable father figure in my life doesn’t remember my name or who I am.


• My grandmother has zero stress resistance, so with this situation, she became obsessed with food and doesn´t talk about anything else.


• My mother became depressed because of the constant bossing around of my grandma.


• I’m taking a design course, and because I’m too demanding with myself, I often quit in order not to fail.


• And these high demands also apply to my love-life where I easily discard anyone who doesn’t fit my ideal psychological profile…

I guess I’m a bit lost with all this…

A: Yikes, I’m sorry you’re in such a shitty place right now. Bad things really come in, well, fives in your case. I think it’s important to take things one day at a time and have something or someone to be there for you when it all gets too much; whether it’s a friend, a therapist or a diary to help clear your head.

Do you have a friend who also has experience with a loved one suffering from Alzheimer’s disease? It can be helpful talking to somebody who’s been through the same kind of ordeal. Your grandfather’s doctors should be able to give you advice on how to approach him depending on which stage(s) he might be in. And, needless to say, visit him while you still can and cherish the memories you have.

As for your grandmother, perhaps if you take her to someplace nice that doesn’t revolve around food it might take her mind off this and you can try shifting the conversation to a different topic. Has your mother addressed her issue(s) with your grandmother? I don’t know your living situation, but it sounds like it’s in her own best interest if she takes some distance to avoid getting more depressed. However, this is something between them that you can’t do much about except be supportive of your mother, and help relieve some of the stress she is currently under.

Out of all the things you’ve mentioned, your high standards are probably the only things that you alone can fix. You wanted to take the course enough to enroll for it, so what good is it going to be sabotaging your own efforts? Is being a quitter better than being a failure? If you’ve really lost all hope in yourself, find somebody who can help you point out your own best qualities when you’re feeling discouraged (a personal cheerleader, if you will) and that will keep you on track. Make a list of things you like about yourself and reasons why you can and will succeed. You don’t have to be a straight-A student, just do the best you can do and if you end up failing at least you know you did all you could.

As for your last problem; Accept that the ‘perfect’ partner is going to be just as flawed as you (maybe a little more or a little less), and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. The sooner you lower your expectations the more likely you are to find someone compatible. I used to think I had a ‘type’ but actually ended up having much better relationships with people who don’t fit the bill at all – and I’ve come to embrace that. Chances are that what works for you isn’t the same as what you’ve been looking for.

I hope things will get better for you and that maybe this can help you just a little bit with what you’re going through! Don’t give up.

Clio

xoxox

***

Got Problems? Let SuicideGirls crack team of Agony Aunts provide solutions. Email questions to: gotproblems@suicidegirls.com

Camilla d’Errico burst onto the comics scene earlier this decade and doesn’t seem to have slept since. It’s not just that she worked on comics like “Burn,” “Make 5 Wishes,” “Mightmares and Fairy Tales,” “The Sky Pirates of Neo Terra,” and her own “Tanpopo,” though that’s certainly... more

Camilla d’Errico burst onto the comics scene earlier this decade and doesn’t seem to have slept since. It’s not just that she worked on comics like “Burn,” “Make 5 Wishes,” “Mightmares and Fairy Tales,” “The Sky Pirates of Neo Terra,” and her own “Tanpopo,” though that’s certainly a full time career in itself. d’Errico has been an artistic dynamo, moving from one form and one media and one genre to another. Besides comics there’s illustration for a variety of sources, a print done in collaboration with Neil Gaiman, toys, a series of Ride Snowboards, clothing from Hot Topic, not to mention gallery shows around the world.

This month Dark Horse releases her first art book “Femina and Fauna” and she spoke with SG about her rich and busy career, her use of color, and what we can look forward to from her in 2011.


ALEX DUEBEN:[/B} How do you describe your work? I see phrases thrown around like “lowbrow” or “pop surrealism” but I’m never exactly sure what any of them mean or if they mean anything to artists whose work it’s being applied to?
 
CAMILLA D’ERRICO: Pop Surrealism and Low Brow are actually pretty well defined in the art world, and I’ve seen many other new names for artists that show in certain galleries that have traditionally shown Low Brow or Pop Surrealism artists – like New Contemporary, Urban Contemporary, and New Brow and even New Figurative. The way I see it, is that people are trying to define an art movement that can’t be reigned in because it’s like a creative explosion – like the big bang! It’s all constantly evolving. I’m labeled under many of these categories and I use them as well in ‘marketing’ – because people need to be given definitions so they can put what they are looking at into context. As far as I’m concerned though, what I care about is that people look at my art objectively and hopefully appreciate it. And if they don’t, that at least they have a good reason not to – and not dismiss it because it’s Pop Surrealism or Lowbrow or Manga. Labeling and pigeon-holing artists is horrible and hurtful.

AD: We’re about the same age. What were you watching/reading as a kid that really influenced you and made you want to be an artist, or at least provided these influences?

CD: What didn't I watch in the 80's! It was all about He-Man and She-Ra, nothing got me more excited then those shows. Astro Boy and Sailor Moon guided me into the world of anime and once there I was in total heaven. It opened my eyes to new storytelling styles and storylines that were developed over 24 episodes instead of episodic storylines that were characteristic of North American cartoons. My first comic book was The Darkness by Top Cow. And I fell into the world of Witchblade, Michael Turner, Silvestri and trickled my way to Humberto Ramos. Its an amazing thing to be influenced by so many different styles of both art and storytelling.

AD: Were your parents supportive of this decision to be an artist?

CD: Like any parent, especially old world Italian ones, they wanted me to have a successful future. Terms like "starving artist" tend to scare a caring parent into siding on the more practical and conservative side. They always believed in my talents, and were always supporting me when I had exhibitions in school and when I chose to study in college. They tended to steer me into a more secure future, like teaching or animation. But they never once told me not to do art, in fact my father was the one who brought me to comic con in ‘98. He was the one going up to the publishers and talking to them about careers and bringing my, then, shy self up to talk to them. They are really proud parents and my art has brought me closer to them, especially my mom and its really wonderful. 

AD: I know you went to art school. Was it a useful few years for you? Did they encourage and support the kind of work were you doing?

CD: I went to several art schools, 3D animation, Fine Arts and Illustration and Design. I found that I learned so much from each experience and that although I am in a completely different field this experience has given me extremely useful skills. My teachers in the Design program didn't encourage my comic side, and tended to be a little dismissive. When they realized that I was not going to change my mind, they became encouraging. My painterly side was brought out during these years and its how I discovered that I could paint!

The courses definitely structured my chaotic artist mind into a more disciplined one. I am thankful for having done the courses because deadlines are what make the world go round, and previously I was falling off the edge of it! I am thankful for the discipline and would highly recommend any artist that has trouble finishing work, to go to a program where they whip you in shape! I met a lot of artists that absolutely inspired me and I still keep in touch with them.

AD: You started working in comics and then you segued into painting and fine art. How did that happen?

CD: Since I was a teen I dreamed of being a comic artist, so the idea of me being a painter never really crossed my mind. Even after college it wasn't a direction that I intended to go in and it sort of happened, almost by way of a universal slap in the face! I credit Ken Lum at the Ayden Gallery in Vancouver for this. He was the first person to suggest I do a show with full color paintings, just to see if I could and if I liked it. Its an interesting moment in a person's life, when they are suggested something that hadn't really occurred to them. If Ken hadn't asked me to do full color paintings, I don't know if I would have. Imagine if Mozart hadn't been put in front of a piano. Not that I'm Mozart, but just to say, if you never try something how do you know your not good at it? I really love painting, and I release a different side of myself in these images, subconscious thoughts, riddles and emotions that I otherwise couldn't express. I'm glad that the universe opened up this path for me. 

AD: One aspect of your artwork that really stands out is your use of color. Where did this palate and approach to color come from?

CD: I adore color! My eyes are always hungry for rich and vibrant colors to eat up. Not sure if other artists experience the sensation of wanting to taste color but I do! When I look at a green lawn, or the colors of the ocean, the gorgeous colors of parrots, I'm mesmerized by them. I grew up with peach faced love birds, and I remember staring at their feathers and detailing how the colors faded into each other. Moments like these inspire me and I can't help but pour those onto a canvas.

AD: You enjoy working with water soluble oils. What’s the benefit of that particular type of paint for the kind of work that you do?

CD: There are many amazing aspects to these paints – Holbein DUO paints. Oils carry a higher pigment load than acrylics, richer colors, and the smooth blending. But unlike regular oils, these water soluble DUO oils are not as toxic. You don't need paint thinner to clean the brushes or the highly toxic mediums to mix with the oils. I work in a small studio and its not recommended to use regular oils unless well ventilated. So the DUO oils are perfect for me. Its also a beautiful effect to see them thinned with water. It creates illusions and people don't know what its painted with, and that adds to the painting's mystery.

AD: So the art book, Femina and Fauna. How did this come about?

CD: I had been wanting an art book for a long time and so many fans bugged me about it too but I have to say that although I did look into it, into various avenues and publishers, it sort of happened naturally during a meeting with Dark Horse editor Samantha Robertson. I had done a couple of projects for them – Vampy Cat Plaything and the cover of Dark Horse Myspace Presents. And of course Dark Horse was the first company to license my work – the journal and stationery sets. I love Dark Horse Comics, they are a great company and I’m so happy that they published my book. It’s a great fit and a preview of more great collaborations with them in the future.

AD: Where did the title come from?

CD: I have to credit that to my sister AdaPia. Many people know her or of her, as my manager and business partner. Lots of what “I” do is a “we do” because she makes so many things happen. She’s also got a knack for words so when we were all brainstorming, she threw this one out there and it’s so fitting!

AD: Ashley Wood wrote the forward to the book. How did you get to know him and why did you ask him to write a few words about your work?

CD: Ash is my hero. I'm not shy to say it. When I was first entering the world of comics, I picked up one of the most unique books I'd ever seen, Popbot, and this opened my eyes to an entire new world. I had no idea that comics could be painted, that they could exist outside the "standard" paneling, and flow freely and express themselves with few words. I was blown away. We had a connection, Ride Snowboards. I was doing the new series of boards and Ash had done the last, so I took the opportunity to email him. I was SO nervous, to email your idol is not easy. But we began a rapport and have been friends ever since. I couldn't think of a better person to write the forward, he's the reason why I think outside the box!

AD: It was announced a while back that you were working on a project with Grant Morrison at Vertigo. Is that still happening?

CD: It is! However, Grant is like a god and so we must all wait for his schedule to clear up – and probably also for him to get into the story. It’ll be a creator owned graphic novel. I’m still excited about it, and whenever it happens, I’ll be ready! I was even in his documentary … though I wanted to crawl under the seat when I saw myself since I’m quite shy, but at the same time proud to be in there. I know it’ll happen, like I said. I’m ready when he is.

AD: Is there anything that you haven’t tried your hand at, but would be interested in trying?

CD: I've tried lots of things, sculpting, water colors, oils, acrylics, ceramics, soap stone, sculptures made of found objects, paleontology (when I was a kid I thought I found a dinosaur foot!). I think I'd really like to do more sculpting, and maybe learn to carve wood. Actually, sewing sounds like fun! I've always loved fashion and it would be so great to learn to make outfits, especially if I could design the fabrics.

AD: So 2011. Your first art book is now out. What else can we look forward to seeing from you this year? 

CD: More Tanpopo! Issues 4 and 5, plus vinyl toys – my very first vinyl of my character Kuro from the Tanpopo series. I’m also working on a mini manga for a Spanish pop opera singer, Monica Naranjo. Once that is done I’m going to dive into a new graphic novel with a French writer, and you’ll be seeing some Sky Pirates of Neo Terra stories – and the game version go live in March. I’m also prepping a solo show for 2012. I haven’t been painting much the past few years other than my Helmetgirls solo last June so I’m looking forward to producing a body of incredible, full color paintings. And of course – you’ll be hearing more about Helmetgirls.

AD: Well I’m certainly looking forward to more Helmetgirls. Did you want to talk a little about Tanpopo? I can’t help but feel that it’s something that falls off a lot of people’s radar.

CD: Tanpopo is my passion project! I started it as a single 20 page self-contained story and printed only 100 copies, but it was so popular, selling out in only two conventions, that I expanded it into a series of 10 books. It's based on classic literature - poetry and prose. The overall story arc was inspired by Goethe's Faust and each book is inspired by a different piece of literature. I take the literature and use the original (public domain) text to narrate the story of Tanpopo and Kuro. Tanpopo is a mysterious girl who is superhumanly smart however she feels no emotion. She laments her existence, knowing everything, but yet feeling nothing. So along comes this cute little character, Kuro, who as it turns out is the devil in disguise. He tells Tanpopo that he'll guide her through the world and teach her to feel emotion. She leaves her machine of knowledge - the only world she has ever known - and goes with Kuro. He maintains his promises by creating situations where she will feel emotion. A trickster, a shapeshifter, a sly fox ... but at the same time you can't hate him! Being that he is the devil, and he's ultimately after her soul, I wanted the story to play on a lot of different themes, that are not necessarily about evil or good.  It's a very emotional story, and each issue brings her to more emotional peaks that I really want the audience to feel with her. What's surprised me about it is that it has been SO appreciated by people and especially young people who LOVE reading classic literature in this format.  It's like an indie, underground cult book.  This year I'll be releasing issues 4 and 5, where Tanpopo feels anger and fear. Very strong emotions that I'm excited to draw.

As for Helmetgirls, you'll definitely be seeing more! Lots more.  I'll be making some announcements about it soon, and releasing some new images too.  I can't say much more than that, but for sure this year the website, www.helmetgirls.com will be going live!

by Blogbot …well he didn’t exactly do it, but some wag has remixed moves Tom Yorke busted out in the “Lotus Flower” video and mashed them with Beyonce’s “Single Ladies.” (video) Oh, and we hear his band might have a new record out or something (Zzzz). more

by Blogbot

…well he didn’t exactly do it, but some wag has remixed moves Tom Yorke busted out in the “Lotus Flower” video and mashed them with Beyonce’s “Single Ladies.”



Oh, and we hear his band might have a new record out or something (Zzzz).

At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, there were two films in which a religious fundamentalist threatened the lives of gay or gay sympathetic characters. Kevin Smith’s Red State got the most attention with a full on religious protest out side the screening. However, The Ledge also explored a similar... more

At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, there were two films in which a religious fundamentalist threatened the lives of gay or gay sympathetic characters. Kevin Smith’s Red State got the most attention with a full on religious protest out side the screening. However, The Ledge also explored a similar idea. In The Ledge, Gavin (Charlie Hunnam) crosses paths with his neighbor Joe (Patrick Wilson), a Christian who vocally fights against a gay lifestyle. Gavin is an atheist and lives with a gay roommate, so he gets in Joe’s face. Joe ends up forcing Gavin to climb onto a ledge and jump, providing the tension in writer/director Matthew Chapman's film. Chris Gorham plays Gavin’s roommate Chris. Joe first reveals his perspective when he thinks both Gavin and Chris are gay. Later in the film, Chris brings home a new boyfriend and tells Gavin about their attempts to be accepted by the Jewish faith. In a film debating the hot button issue of the day, Chris represents those actually living it.
Gorham spent an exhausting Saturday afternoon in interview after interview the day after the Sundance premiere. At least it was warm looking out a window on the snow covered Main St. in Park City, UT. Gorham may be best known to TV audiences from the series Ugly Betty and Covert Affairs. We had 13 minutes to cover the scope of homophobic prejudice, and season two of his hit spy show.
SG: How important a role does Chris play in the film's themes?
CG: I remember my very first meeting with Matthew, I came in and he asked me what I thought of the part. I told him first, I just love this character because he has so many things in his life that he could be complaining about and he’s not that guy. He’s very optimistic. He’s very loving. He’s a good friend and he’s looking for the same thing that everybody’s looking for in life, just somebody to love them and make some modicum of happiness. It’s such a nice and important kind of C story throughout the movie. It’s really the only healthy relationship in the film, the one between Chris and Gavin. You see just two regular guys who are friends who care about each other. All the other relationships in the movie get so complicated.
SG: Well, Chris and his boyfriend seem healthy.
CG: Yes, yes. Chris and Frank then halfway through, you see a love relationship that is also working. It’s funny, in the very first scene, I think it’s the first scene with Chris and Gavin where he makes a joke. He says, “Full of light. It’s full of light.” He says it to bug Gavin to get under his skin because it’s a hobby for him. That’s what he is in this film. He’s the guy that’s full of light. He’s kind of the light at the end of a tunnel, for Shana (Liv Tyler) at the end of the movie too because she needs a friend and so does he.
SG: There’s really a whole story in that subplot.
CG: Yeah, there really is. So I just love that character and I was really happy that the audience responded well to him because you’re right, I think it is an important part of the movie.
SG: Do you weigh in on the theological debate of the movie?
CG: Personally? Yeah, I have my personal feelings. It’s just not something I really talk about but I think it’s an important debate to have and I think it’s an interesting debate to have. For the most part, I think the film’s pretty fair about it because you see a lot of different points of view on it. You see the way faith, sometimes maybe more than religion, faith affects people differently and how people treat it differently.
SG: Can you engage someone like Joe who’s that extreme?
CG: No. Someone like that, there’s no debate to be had with someone who is inflexible within their stance. If you’ve made up your mind and no one’s going to change it, then there’s no debate. With some people of faith like Joe, and some people not even as extreme because he’s an extremist as any other religious extremist would be, there is no debate. He makes that very clear in the movie. When they try to have the debate between Joe and Gavin, they try to talk, they just can’t do it.
SG: I would say you need to avoid people like Joe. There’s nothing good that can come from that.
CG: No, there’s nothing. It’s interesting because religious extremism is so present in the dialogue today. It’s so present in our lives. It’s something people think about a lot. I think most of the time it’s thought about as an other, as someone overseas or not us. But that kind of extreme exists everywhere.
SG: Did you have one day at the bottom of the building?
CG: Yes, yeah. At the end of the movie, that was actually my last scene. I ran to the airport directly from there. I was in the middle of shooting Ugly Betty when I was shooting this movie so I was bouncing back and forth between Baton Rouge and New York. I did it while I was shooting my last episode, their second to last episode.
SG: Why was it so important to get this part and push yourself to a physical extreme like that?
CG: I just thought it was such a smart movie. It’s talking about something that I don't think gets talked about in an intelligent way very often. I just love this part. I just love this character.
SG: You just couldn’t let anyone else have it?
CG: No. I went in and I met and I gave my pitch on what I thought it was and what I thought it could be. It felt like Matthew and I were on the same page from the first conversation. Actually, myself and my whole family, we had taken a picture for the No H8 Campaign. We took a family portrait for them, me and my wife, our two boys and our baby girl at the time, because I’m in an interracial marriage which was illegal not that long ago. So we’re very supportive of gay marriage. Our photo came out that day, the day of my meeting. The photo was put up on the No Hate [site] and they wrote a beautiful blog entry about us and about our support of the cause and how the arguments against gay marriage are the exact same arguments that had been used against interracial marriage.
SG: Don’t the haters see that?
CG: And it will happen.
SG: But then there’ll be something else.
CG: Of course there will. There always will be, which by the way I feel is no reason to despair because there will always be something. There is always something to fight for and there is always something that you are justified to fight for.
SG: I think the next issue is robots.
CG: Robots? Robot marriage. Well, that’s a slippery slope. [Laughs] Anyway, that picture and that blog entry came out that day and I found out about it as I left the meeting. So I immediately e-mailed Matthew and [producer] Michael Mailer and sent them a link and said, “See, I wasn’t bullshitting you. I really do care about this cause and I would be honored to be in this film and to play this part.” So it all worked out and I was very grateful.
SG: How is Covert Affairs going?
CG: Covert Affairs is going great. I think we were the number four show over the summer and we were the number one show on cable in a couple demographics so it was a hit. We were thrilled. We’re about to go into production on season two in March. Piper [Perabo] was nominated for a Golden Globe which is amazing. I had some really good conversations with the writers, at the Globes actually, and found out about some really great stuff they’re planning for me personally but for the show overall for next season.
SG: Do you know what kind of cool spy missions you might go on?
CG: I don’t know mission specific stuff. I do know a couple specific episodes they’re doing for me that I can’t talk about yet but there’s one in particular that I think people are going to be really excited about.
SG: Do they have to do with Auggie being blind or are they completely unrelated?
CG: One of them is going to be a big reveal of Auggie’s past, yeah. You’re going to learn a lot more about what happened.
SG: Could that be a flashback episode?
CG: I don't know, we’ll see.
SG: Would you like to play Auggie younger?
CG: Yeah, it’d be fun. It’s interesting because in the show, he’s given a couple different versions of how he’s lost his sight. They’re both similar but they’re kind of different versions I think. Honestly, they haven’t even told me exactly how he lost his sight. They’ve been keeping it under wraps so we may find that out in season two.
SG: We don’t want spoilers, but it’s hard to even be vague when you haven’t read the scripts.
CG: And I don’t have a lot of specifics but they’ve told me they are going to get Auggie back out into the field again. They’re bringing, for Piper’s stuff, they’re bringing on one of the favorite guest star spies from last season is coming back. They’re going to continue wrapping up some of the threads that were left open from last season, like dealing with the leak.
SG: Do you think season two might be too soon to reveal how Auggie lost his sight?
CG: No, I don't think it would be too soon because that’s not his arc for the series. I think it’s one of the mysteries about him and one of the things that I really like about how they’re writing him is they’re doling out information a little at a time, like he does. He keeps his personal life pretty close to the vest so I don’t imagine it’s going to be a situation where they’re just going to vomit up everything in an episode and that’ll be it. They’re too smart for that.
SG: Do you prefer getting out in the field or do you like the office scenes?
CG: I like them both. Getting out in the field is a lot of fun but the way they did it last season was so organic and justified which I think is why it was so successful.
SG: It was right in the pilot so it was always an option.
CG: It was always an option but really the real episode where he’s out in the “field” field was episode seven, was "Communication Breakdown." He has to help his ex-girlfriend, he’s on the train, he’s on a mission. The downside of that for me is I have to work a lot more. Normally when I’m in the office most of the time, I work two to three days a week and then I can fly home and get to see my kids which is great.
SG: Have you been at Sundance before?
CG: No, this is my first time.
SG: What have you gotten to see so far?
CG: Just our movie. It’s the only movie I’m going to get to see because we’re only up here until tomorrow. We saw our screening yesterday and then it’s been nonstop but it’s okay because I love the film so that’s what we’re here for.
SG: What did you think of the reaction at the screening? I was surprised that people were laughing when Joe starts giving his anti-gay religious spiel.
CG: Yeah, I was too. I was surprised at a lot of the laughs. We were talking about it earlier actually. It didn’t feel like they were laughing at the film. They were kind of laughing at him which may be kind of an audience specific thing. I don't know that we’ll get that reaction in every audience. It’d be interesting to see it. It’s one thing seeing it up here. It’d be interesting to see it at other places around the country and see what the reaction would be because I imagine it would be very different depending on where you are.
SG: Maybe this audience was so progressive, they think what Joe’s saying is silly. Other audiences may not be so progressive.
CG: No, no, you’re right. There will be people, at least for a bit, who’ll probably agree with him.
SG: Are you at peace with the end of Ugly Betty?
CG: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was really only in it for the first two years. I just had a great time. These things don’t last forever so the fact that they had four years I think was pretty remarkable.
SG: Was it nice to get to go back though?
CG: Yeah, it was great. I had a lot of good friends and he was a fun character to play.
IFC Films will release The Ledge this year.

Not that people didn't already know this, but ... My world . . . she ends! No, this is not much of a serious news story. I'm just easily amused. more

Not that people didn't already know this, but ...

Say it ain't so!!!

My world . . . she ends!

No, this is not much of a serious news story. I'm just easily amused.

Since the Girls board is overload, I've decided to start this topic here. Just to point out Synnove's hot new profile pic: (image) so hot!

Lucy Lawless’s most famous roles have taken her to different eras of history. As Xena in Xena: Warrior Princess, she starred in a comedic interprettion of Greek mythology. Now on TV’s Spartacus, she’s in an ultra-violent depiction of Roman gladiators. Her character, Lucretia, runs a gladiator school... more

Lucy Lawless’s most famous roles have taken her to different eras of history. As Xena in Xena: Warrior Princess, she starred in a comedic interprettion of Greek mythology. Now on TV’s Spartacus, she’s in an ultra-violent depiction of Roman gladiators. Her character, Lucretia, runs a gladiator school with her husband Batiatus (John Hannah).

Spartacus: Gods of the Arena is a prequel to the Blood and Sand series, currently airing on Starz. The original idea was to do a short series without the title character while actor Andy Whitfield underwent cancer treatment.

Unfortunately, Whitfield's cancer came back and the series has been forced to move forward with a new star, Liam McIntyre. The prequel is airing to tide viewers over until what was originally intended as season two airs.

Lawless returns as Lucretia. The show is set five years before she and her husband Batiatus start running the gladiator school. In it, a gladiator named Gannicus (Dustin Clare) is positioned as the one that could take them to fortune and glory. Lawless is slated to return for the second season as well.

I may be overthinking Lawless’s role in the portrayal of women in Hollywood. I look at Xena as a strong heroine and an image of alternative beauty. Lawless graciously indulged me but she was modest. I approached her in the hallway of the Langham Hotel in Pasadena, after a Spartacus presentation to the Television Critics Association. She kept insinuating that it was just a job, but I tried to tell her it meant a lot more to us.

SG: What is Lucretia like in the early years?
LL: We start at a time when Lucretia purely is madly in love and is dutiful to her husband. He is the sun and the moon to her. I think she tries to run a good house for him. She’s still in the honeymoon phase of life. They’re very much poorer. There’s far less jewelry. We made choices with the costume. I came in and the idea was to dress her in sort of subtler version of what she wore before and I said, “Ooh, how about, I’m kind of wanted like she’s come right out of the Sistine Chapel out of those paintings. She should have those kind of pinks and blues, things she would never dream of wearing later are all possible because she’s full of hope and has some measure of innocence. Then we break it down so you see the effect of the costume and the hair. Hair and makeup and costume are very well designed to tell story.
SG: How do you enjoy playing that side of her after a whole season of sort of scheming behind his back?
LL: Love it. Well, it’s so nice because it gives you so far to go. A time when she took good care of her slaves because she cared about their well being, when she had potential for true, genuine friendship, when she had trust in other human beings and you see that chipped away and eroded throughout the course. Her husband’s father is still on the scene. This is when Batiatus’ father is still alive and so they have a really complex beautiful relationship.
SG: Do you enjoy the Greek gladiator period equally or more to Xena style mythic fantasy?
LL: You’re talking about not apples and oranges. This show and Xena are, I don't know, watermelons and some other exotic fruit. I had an amazing time. Xena was the most fun I ever had just in every day work. That was the most fun I’ve ever had. This one is the most complex rewarding role itself because it’s so difficult. I find it really difficult and I want to give myself wholeheartedly to this job. Where Xena was kind of a life start and I didn’t give it two thoughts really.
SG: Even as a fan of storytelling, would you go for the comedic historical fantasy or the hardcore violent one?
LL: No, we love both of them. I see Xena as sort of like a Galaxy Quest mode of entertainment and that’s totally valid and lovely and I enjoy watching those. There’s nothing wrong with pure entertainment. This is also pure entertainment but there’s a lot of complexity to it.
SG: Kickass woman heroes are so common now. Do you see your role in expanding the acceptance of that?
LL: I think Xena certainly was a very important stepping stone in that. I don’t give it too much thought because that was just my privilege to be associated with it. It’s not like I made the show happen. I was the lucky actress who got to be in that show that happened so I think it’s fantastic and I love it. I was pleased to be part of that movement.
SG: I think we can thank Xena for Alias, Zoe Saldana and Angelina Jolie's roles.
LL: Well, no, I’ve got to give all that credit to Sigourney Weaver in Alien. To me she’s the ultimate.
SG: But if there’d been nothing in between it wouldn’t have gotten this far.
LL: Or perhaps, I know that the French people, when they were trying to pitch Xena initially, after she played as a character on Hercules, they were saying, “No, France will never accept a female action hero.” We were like, “What are you talking about? Where’s Joan of Arc from?” It did become very successful in France so I think perhaps in television there was a market for it. So maybe that, that’s the difference.
SG: Do you ever look at the current crop of kick ass women, who’s got it right and who’s doing it wrong?
LL: No. Sorry to say, I’m not really attracted to watching those kind of shows. No, and I’m not critical in that way so much either. I’m just like, “Oh, wow, she’s working hard. Good for her. Good luck with that.” But no, I don’t watch them and take them apart. Nothing to do with me.
SG: You have a nude scene in the first season of Spartacus. Was that a huge decision for you?
LL: It wasn’t really the decision initially. It was just that this was too good a role and the fact that that was part of it didn’t detract. It was like this is just too great a show to turn down. It was later on, I got to repent at leisure, put it that way. But, I still maintain it’s worth it to tell these stories. Even though I found it very hard to do, it was worth it to me to go through that to be part of this story whereas I probably would not have, never say never, but I probably would not ever pose in a magazine naked because I wouldn’t find that in any way rewarding or ravishing or useful. It would be something of celebrity but it wouldn’t be acting, whereas this role in its entirety is all about the acting and it’s extreme.
SG: Did you hear any gratitude from all of your fans that are like, "Thank you for sharing that with us?"
LL: I am kind of getting this kind of 40s Fox thing and I’m quite thrilled with it. I wouldn’t have tolerated that as a younger person. I wouldn’t have liked that at all. But at 42 years old, I’m like yeah, bring it man because I’m so grateful. I realize how rare it all is.
SG: Did you have an issue with being gawked at as Xena?
LL: No, it wasn’t that. You don’t want to be objectified. You feel threatened at that age, that people want something from you that you can’t possibly deliver. But, the cool thing about Xena was that she was a great kind of feminist icon as well so no, it was awesome. It was a great experience.
SG: I’m asking all these analytical questions. Do you feel you had a role in changing the image of beauty?
LL: Oh, I would love to have. I never even thought about that but I would love to think that I was. Again, it’s kind of by default. I was just a jobbing actor. I was lucky to get the gig. I didn’t do it for that reason but it’s nice that there’s this wonderful holistic sort of spin-off.
SG: You showed that you can be tough, have definition and be muscular.
LL: Yes, I think zaftig was the word I was saddles with at the time and I didn’t like. Zaftig means great big Amazonian. I didn’t really like that either because I felt like, “They’re calling me fat!”
SG: That's good company to be in. Wonder Woman’s an amazon.
LL: Right, well, they certainly meant it as a compliment too but I think as a 20-year-old society’s pushing a different kind of model. You know who I think is actually doing great things for the appearance of women is that Kardashian girl. Kim Kardashian is giving an alternative, and I don’t know very much about her, I don’t read articles but just looking at the pictures you go, “Great, there’s a girl with an ass and that’s fabulous.” On behalf of all girls with asses, thank you.
Spartacus: Gods of the Arena airs Friday nights at 10 on Starz.