by Nahp A column which highlights Suicide Girls and their fave groups. (image) [Rogue Suicide in Wild Things] This week Rogue tells us why she loves to hang with Harry Potter and the SG Hogwarts crew. Members: 2,323 / Comments: 28,676 WHY DO YOU LOVE IT?: Well Harry Potter is pretty much my obsession... more

by Nahp

A column which highlights Suicide Girls and their fave groups.


[Rogue Suicide in Wild Things]

This week Rogue tells us why she loves to hang with Harry Potter and the SG Hogwarts crew.

Members: 2,323 / Comments: 28,676

WHY DO YOU LOVE IT?: Well Harry Potter is pretty much my obsession

DISCUSSION TIP: Just be yourself and jump right into talking with everyone!

MOST HEATED DISCUSSION THREAD: Don't think I have found one, but these pics of Soya Suicide from the Scarification thread are pretty hot!





BEST RANDOM QUOTE: “Actually, the main characters in the Potterverse are around 25...Harry was actually born in 1980,
 so, technically, they're ALL legal. 

Ba-zing. 

I want me some Draco. Mmm.” ~ excerpted from the “who would you” thread.

WHO’S WELCOME TO JOIN?: Everyone! Though respect allegiances when entering the Slytherin Common Room – “No Mudbloods Allowed!!!”


***
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Hollywood nearly killed Tank Girl. Dodgy movies have a way of doing that to people. Tank Girl's creators, writer Alan Martin and artist Jamie Hewlett, would be the first to say the 1995 big screen incarnation of the cult comic strip character, which they had zero control over, wasn't all that... more

Hollywood nearly killed Tank Girl. Dodgy movies have a way of doing that to people. Tank Girl's creators, writer Alan Martin and artist Jamie Hewlett, would be the first to say the 1995 big screen incarnation of the cult comic strip character, which they had zero control over, wasn't all that it should have been. Indeed they might even say it was a "shit sandwich" (well, actually, Martin did). Fortunately, Tank Girl's superhuman, and her fuck you spirit would never allow a bunch of scummy film execs and industry cheese weasels to have the last word. Down but not out, after a hiatus of over a decade, she put her Tank Boots back on, and kicked, screamed and farted her way back from near oblivion, with a little help from Martin.

In the process of documenting Tank Girl's past for a best-of book called The Cream of Tank Girl (out October 2008), Martin found a renewed passion for his foul-mouthed, mutant kangaroo-humping friend. Original draftsman Jamie Hewlett may have moved on to pastures new with Damon Albarn and their virtual Gorillaz band, but Tank Girl has found new pen pals to roughhouse with.

With a slew of fresh Tank Girl adventures already in print, in the bag, and on the horizon, Martin and his badly behaved progeny are smashing ("Sleesh! Plock! Glump!") their way into one of their most prolific periods ever. We sat down for a long distance chat with Martin, and took a gander at what the future holds for Tank Girl.

Alan Martin: Where are you calling from?

Nicole Powers: Los Angeles.

AM: What accent is that? It doesn't sound very American.

NP: No, you've got me there, I'm actually from Sheffield.

AM: Are you? That's just down the road from me then.

NP: So where are you right now?

AM: Well not just down the road, I live in Berwick-Upon-Tweed just on the border with Scotland.

NP: That's along way from where Tank Girl started in Worthing.

AM: It is, yes, thankfully.

NP: How did you end up there?

AM: My wife started a business with her mother running a shop, so we now live here and started our family here, a long way from Worthing. It couldn't be further in fact without going into Scotland.

NP: So are we going to see Tank Girl painting her face blue and going all Braveheart on us?

AM: [laughs] That's a good idea actually. I hadn't thought of that, but yeah, we could take it in that direction.

NP: When you created Tank Girl some twenty years ago, what was the original concept? What did you have in mind?

AM: Nothing really. It was just a hotchpotch of ideas, of things that we liked. There was no real formula to it. Everything that went in just had to tick the cool boxes, you know. Did it look good? Did it sound good? Did it taste good? If it did, then it was OK to go in our comic. So pretty much everything that we were into, the style of clothes we were wearing, and all our friends were wearing, whatever band we were into. And as far as formulating story lines or plots, it just never happened. There was no high-brow construction. It was just what do we like? Brilliant, we'll put it in. That was as far as it went.

NP: You mention the clothes, and I have to say out of any comic book character Tank Girl has the coolest wardrobe.

AM: Yeah, well that's all entirely down to Jamie. I just dress like a tramp basically.

NP: If we opened up your closet doors what would we see?

AM: Mould. [laughs] Mildew and mould. No, I'm not that bad really, but Jamie is a real clothes horse, he really loves his clothes. He always did, even when he didn't have much money he was very, in a way, sharply dressed by going to charity shops and thrift shops, if that's possible. But he always had a very idiosyncratic style that was all his own, so that completely carried through to the comics. But the gang that we were all in, we all dressed very similarly in the current styles that were around, we all had leather jackets etc., etc.. So that all filtered through into the original Tank Girl, and then, as time went on, hippy influences came in as crusty and grunge reared its head and everything mutated slowly right the way through to Brit pop, when it all just went down the pan.

NP: That was one of the things that shocked me with the Tank Girl book, I never realized that she had a psychedelic, flower-powered, hippy-dippy period. What was that about?

AM: [laughs] I think it was a lot to do with us smoking too much pot really, and watching Easy Rider whilst we were drawing comics. There was definitely a few months where we were getting very stoned and watching Easy Rider or Woodstock the movie or whatever else was made in that era, you know, anything with Jack Nicholson in from the mid-sixties, so that all just filtered through, and then the same as all the original influences, they just sort of disappeared as we moved onto something else with our limited attention span.

NP: She has changed over the years. I guess if she was in her mid-twenties in 1988 that would put her in her mid-forties come 2008.

AM: Yes. Well, I guess the only mention I ever made of her age in the comic was at the beginning of one of the early strips when she says, "I'm 23," and that was when I was 23. So, yes, she'd be exactly the same age as me, and I was 22 ten it all started and I'm 42 now on her 20th anniversary. You don't need to be a mathematician to work that one out, but yes, she would be in her forties.

NP: Would she be wearing sensible shoes by now do you think?

AM: Some of the time, some of the time with her tongue firmly in her cheek. We did actually, when Ashley Wood, the artist who did the comeback series last year, The Gifting, he did the initial publicity poster for it and he drew her looking like a librarian. The picture came through to me and it was just a complete shock. I looked at it and went, "Oh my god. That is truly upsetting because everyone is going to say, 'why isn't she dressed like a punk anymore.'"

Then I thought about it and I remembered a line form the beginning of Darling with Julie Christie. In the movie she [talks] about not rebelling being the new rebellion, and so I wrote a blog about that and put it out, and the backlash was phenomenal. People were so upset. They thought that Tank Girl had changed into this sort of normal working girl, a nine-to-fiver dressed in middle class clothing, and we were almost lynched for it. Absolutely no one had a sense of humor about her. I was sat there going, "this is great," because it got us so much more publicity than if we'd just drawn her wearing what she was wearing when everyone last saw her.

NP: You really know how to ruin people's days.

AM: I know, but originally, like I say in The Cream of Tank Girl, that was what happened first time around, we were always battling other people's preconceived ideas of what she was. If anyone came up to us and went, "Brilliant, she's so much like me," we'd look at the and go, "Right, we're going to make her so much not like you the next time she comes in a comic." So we just kicked back against everything that tried to assimilate her, that tried to claim her or dominate her.

And it worked again with Ashley. I don't know whether he was actually thinking that, or whether he just doodled away and that's what came out but, yes, the backlash had started even before the comic came out. I was just laughing because, you know, it's a comic character, people need to get a bit of perspective really.

NP: Obviously Tank Girl had her Hollywood period. I always knew Tank Girl was going to go Hollywood because she had really white teeth. She was destined to go there. And I was watching the film last night, and what struck me was I couldn't understand what Gwen Stefani was doing running around in a tank. Lori Petty has the Gwen Stefani look, voice and...

AM: Or perhaps the other way around.

NP: I think so, I think so.

AM: Which came first, yeah. Yes, well, you know, people have their influences, however perverse they might be.

NP: In interviews you talk about how you would have liked to put Grange Hill and Benny Hill references into the Tank Girl script...

AM: Well, we were never actually really allowed to touch anything to do with that film. It was actually written into our contract that we weren't to have anything to do with it, but they did sort of wave the script in front of us. I think that quote came from Jamie, and I think it was a bit of artistic license there, but we did want to include references to the stuff that was in the original comic, but, obviously, ninety percent of it would have been lost on a worldwide audience because it was purely Brit stuff. The children's TV shows that we referenced, and the seventies pop bands, would have been lost on an American or even Australian [audience], so yeah, any idea like that we put forward to them was vetoed instantly, and so we soon thought that we wouldn't bother so...

NP: You say that, but since the success of shows like The Office, Ali G, and Little Britain, which is now in the USA, American's have become a lot more tolerant of us Brits twittering on about shit that means nothing to them, and they kind of get a kick out of it on some level, so do you think if it had been written today, you'd have been able to get away with a lot more?

AM: I still don't know. They focus grouped it in front of sixteen year olds. I think with The Office, and stuff like that, you'll get a more high-brow audience, even though it's quite a daft show it will be more lenient. But with your average MTV crowd, probably they'd look at it and go, "sorry, I don't know what you're talking about. This is absolute nonsense, I can't understand it," and they'd maybe be less tolerant of it. But, that said, I didn't think that was the audience we should have been aiming for. It shouldn't have been MTV, it should have been a much more cult film, it should have been much lower budget, and it should have had me writing it.

NP: Would you go for it again if you had the opportunity to do it right?

AM: We don't own the rights. MGM own the rights. We sold the rights. "In perpetuity" I think it says on the contract. MGM/UA own the rights, but I think it's actually been sold on to Sony. Anyway, whoever's got it probably doesn't even know they've got it, and I think the idea of doing another movie might be like throwing good money after bad, but you never know, you never know. I never thought I'd write the comic again -- that happened.

NP: What inspired you to revisit Tank Girl?

AM: What happened was, about seven years ago, Titan, the U.K. publishers, came to us and they said, "we'd like to have a bash at reissuing the Tank Girl stuff," because...there was obviously interest still out there. They said they'd like to reissue all of the original books. I wrote introductions for them and for one of them, because it was a bit of a thin book, I wrote a fake script supposedly that hadn't been used back in the early nineties, just to fill a few pages. It was an unused script with no images or anything, and I wrote it in about a day, and I just sat there and thought, "Well, that was easy." Then I looked at it and thought, "Well, actually I think that's quite good as far as Tank Girl scripts go."

So I suggested to them that we generate some new stuff, and then I started writing some more prosaic stuff rather than scripts, just short stories etc., and that formed the basis of my novel in inverted commas, Armadillo, which came out earlier this year. From then on it all just sort of spiralled. After that I wrote The Gifting, the series, and then punted that around looking for artists, and eventually came up with Ashley Wood, and it all grew from there.

NP: And now you have Rufus Dayglo doing some of the art.

AM: Rufus is pretty much doing all of it now. He's a comic drawing machine, and my savior.

NP: So how did you bump into him?

AM: Well actually, when I first wrote the Armadillo book, I was having trouble getting it published, so I published it myself and sold it on eBay. I was just printing to order. People would order it from me, I'd print it off on my home printer and just package it up and send it out. I sent it out around the world, to Japan and America and Kuala Lumpur, and various places, and Rufus in London, being an avid Tank Girl fan from back in the day, and also a comic art dealer, so he's always looking for stuff like that, he bought a copy off of me. Then he just got in touch with me, and he said, "This is great, what else are you doing?"

I told him that I'd written some comic scripts, and he said, "Well, why don't you do it with Ashley Wood, 'cause Ashley's a big Tank Girl fan." So he actually put me in touch with Ashley. At the time Rufus was working for an animation studio, but eventually he just ended up being the artist. It just seemed so natural. Ashley brought him in to do some layouts on the first comics, and from that we could just see that he had the sense of humor, and he had the style, and it all worked very well. We haven't looked back really. Rufus is just doing so much, he just has so much output. He's a very fast artist, he does two pages a day, so I'm having trouble keeping up with him because I don't write that fast.

NP: Stylistically what do you think Rufus brings to the page?

AM: I mean it's a whole different Tank Girl from what Jamie used to do, but Rufus is like an original punk. He knows loads of punks, not just punks on the street, he knows lots of actual punk bands etc.. He was very good friends with Dee Dee Ramone, who's going to be making an appearance in one of our comics actually, in Skidmarks.

He's a spikey-haired chap. His arms are covered in tattoos of Mick McMahon's Judge Dredd, and you just need to look at him and you know he's got style that is just sort of oozing out of his pores. In the same way Jamie had his particular style, you can tell instantly just by looking at him. He's a very impressive look, and he brings that to it, and his own peculiar sense of humor etc.. He brings the full kit. Everything I need, and also empathy with my scripts and my sense of humor.

NP: What can we expect in the future from you guys?

AM: Well at the moment we're just concentrating solely on standard comics. We're doing a strip in the U.K. in Judge Dredd Magazine, which is called Skidmarks. That's just eight pages a month, but that will be put into comics which will be come out as a mini series which will come out next year. That will be available in the States. Then that will come out in a graphic novel.

Next year we're doing another series with IDW, who did the stuff with Ashley Wood for us, called The Royal Escape. That's scheduled for around late spring I think. Also, we've got a whole new series that we're doing with Titan called Bad Wind Rising, which will be lots of little stories. So really, just a complete blitz on comics.

Also, it's taken a long time to manifest, but with original 200 AD artist Mick McMahon, were doing a six part comic called Carioca which is a whole complete departure from what Tank Girl usually looks like, and usually sounds like. It's a strange hybrid, but all very interesting stuff.

NP: Does Tank Girl appear in all these strips?

AM: It's all Tank Girl. Everything I said, it's all Tank Girl, that's what she's up to until, pretty much Christmas 2009, and maybe a bit beyond that.

NP: You have this book, The Cream of Tank Girl, coming out. Was that a trip to put together? Because you've got early sketches and bits torn off someone's jacket. How was it pulling all that stuff together? Was it all organized? Or did you have to rip the house apart?

AM: Well at lot of it was in my mom's loft, a lot of it was in Jamie's plan chest, and the rest of it was on eBay. I spent about a year just gathering magazines. I had a few copies of Deadline, where it was all originally produced from back in the day, but I've now got a full set of them. I had to get all that together, and I had to rifle through my mum's loft and rescue bits and bobs that were just buried in trunks from 20 years ago. Jamie's stuff as well, I had to go through his archive, if you can call it that, and scan all that in.

It was a labor of love. It took about a year and a half, even though it doesn't look like it, just to actually get enough stuff that was of good enough quality to make a book and then sit down and make notes on all of that, and chronologicalize it. It was a work.

NP: In that process of rediscovering your own life, what did you discover that you'd forgotten you knew, or forgotten you felt, or forgotten you did?

AM: I don't know if I'd forgotten any of it to be honest. I think because I'd spent so long not writing, and doing jobs that I didn't want to do, I dwelt on the stuff that I did love to do, and those memories maybe sort of became larger than life. I don't think any of it was buried in my memory, it all came to the fore very easily.

NP: Did the process of looking back bring back the enthusiasm? Because right now you're probably going through one of your most prolific periods ever.

AM: Yes, I was a lazy sod back in the day. I really didn't do a lot for my bread and butter. Yes, it did, it definitely rekindled my love for the character. Because the last thing that we did, the movie, not that we did it, but it just left such a bad taste in our mouths. We didn't even discuss it, we just knew we had to leave it behind, so that rekindled my enthusiasm, but also becoming a father has made me pull my finger out.

NP: How many children?

AM: I've just got one at the moment, just a little two-year old. A little boy, Rufus.

NP: It's going to be interesting as a dad, because obviously Tank Girl was quite a controversial character, with a potty mouth and some interesting sexual peccadilloes. At what point would you want your son reading this?

AM: It's funny...my nephew had an argument with this kid at school. He said, "My uncle writes Tank Girl." And this other kid, who'd obviously never even heard of Tank Girl, said, "Yeah, well so does mine." He had this big argument with him over whose dad actually wrote Tank Girl. So he told me that, and I though I could just give him a copy of Tank Girl and like sign it and he could take it along.

Then I thought, no, all of this has got swearing in it. So the last series has no swearing in it. Visions of Booga, it has a "bastard" here and a "bitch" there, but it doesn't have any F-words or C-words. So I'd given him the whole collection of that and he's sort of proudly taken it to school to show his mate and say, "Look, there you go." And we name checked him on one of the pages as well, just to really sort of rub it in. So I'll probably show my son that one first to break him in, then wait until he's eighteen and say, "Look, this is what it's really about."

NP: Do you think that's going to influence you as you're doing the Tank Girl stuff moving forward? Are you going to make it more PG-13?

AM: I don't really think about it to be honest. I know that so many people are going to be reading it as well that he just has to join the fray really.

NP: At least he'll learn some decent swear words reading your stuff.

AM: Exactly. He's going to go to school, he's going to learn how to swear, he's going to learn dirty jokes and read pornography behind the bike sheds and do everything that everyone else has done, so really I'm not in denial that a fifteen-year old boy might actually come into contact with some of the nastiness of the world. I'm just hopeful that he'll have my sense of humor about it all.

NP: And swear well.

AM: Well, yes, that's the dream isn't it. You can always hope. [laughs]

NP: So one of the other things I noticed about the book is that it's got a lot of bloody pirates in there. It's a good job I'm partial to pirates post-Johnny Depp. What's that about?

AM: Well there's only two strips. Really, that book, it isn't just Tank Girl, it was all about everything that me and Jamie did in that time, but the majority of it was Tank Girl. We slipped in everything else that were collaborations that we did, like the Ginsberg, Stipe & Kerouac strip that went into ID Magazine, and various other ideas that went nowhere like The 16s, and good pictures. It was just trying to compile everything that was mine and Jamie's collectively because it just hasn't been seen in a long time. The main thrust of it is that Jamie has a lot of people who are very interested in his art, and there's nowhere to see that stuff, how it all manifested, how it all evolved. So I thought it would be an interesting anthropological exercise to put all that in -- plus it fills up the pages.

NP: Are you and Jamie likely to do anything in the future?

AM: Well, Jamie's main collaborations are with Damon and his music now, so probably not, but never say never. He's just off on a different trajectory at the moment. I know he doesn't want to draw comics, but I'm very much into writing comics, so I wouldn't say anything in the near future, but who knows.

NP: Is he cool about you carrying on with Tank Girl?

AM: Absolutely, he's really supportive. He just let me go wild with it. Said get in there and do whatever you want with it really. I think as far as he's concerned he's sort of washed his hands of Tank Girl. Unless somebody actually came along and said, "Right Jamie, do an animated movie of Tank Girl, here's a hundred million," I doubt whether he'd have any interest in it, and he might not even then.

NP: But it still smacks of a generous spirit doesn't it?

AM: It does, yes. He's been very generous indeed, just letting me run wild with it. I can't imagine many other people doing that, but, because Tank Girl was always such a free-for-all in the first place it would be difficult for him to try keep a tight rein on it, or just say no completely. The spirit of Tank Girl runs like a wild horse. It's untamable. I don't think anyone could try and nail it down.

NP: Did Jamie have anything to say about the return of Tank Girl when she was dressed like a librarian?

AM: He laughed at it all basically. That's one of my criteria, my goals with everything I do. My target audience is Jamie. I'm always thinking, "Will Jamie like it? Will Jamie think it's funny?" Usually I keep on a sort of even keel because that keeps her where she always was, because that's how we always used to work. He was thinking, "Will Alan like this?" We were both sniggering at it together. So when I write, I'm always thinking of my old mates and various Tank Girl fans, and predominantly Jamie. Will he think it's funny? And now Rufus as well, because Rufus has to sit there and draw the damn stuff.

The other thing that Rufus loves is the fact that I'm always a little bit behind with my scripts, so he never knows what's going to happen in the next episode. Whereas with a regular job he would get a synopsis, he would get all the scripts up front, he'd read the whole lot, and he's be bored before he was half-way through the first episode. But the stuff we're doing at the moment, he says he loves it because each month he just does not know what's coming next. It's like reading a comic, but very slowly because he's drawing it.

NP: It's funny you say that you get things in late, because I went to the new website and it said, "Coming Summer 2008," and yet it's autumn.

AM: We did have it up by mid-September I think, which is late summer. It's up now though. It's full-fledged now. It hasn't got the animation and stuff that we're planning to do on it but it's definitely there. So go and have a look, because it's blossoming into a nice site.




Thanks to the rather wonderful Rufus Dayglo for the exclusive Tank Girl illustration. Love n' pencils right back at ya!

Alan and Rufus will be doing an exclusive page a month of Tankie for Suicide Girls. The first installment will run November 2. Check back the first Sunday of each month for more.

Septum Pierced!!!!!(image)(image) I fuckin luv it!!!

“Every other band was on stage because they wanted to be rock stars, this band was on stage because they had no fucking choice,” sums up Tony Wilson’s narrative. A camera pans across stark landscape of decrepit factories and abandoned warehouses. Wilson says, “I don’t see this as the story of a... more

“Every other band was on stage because they wanted to be rock stars, this band was on stage because they had no fucking choice,” sums up Tony Wilson’s narrative. A camera pans across stark landscape of decrepit factories and abandoned warehouses. Wilson says, “I don’t see this as the story of a group, but of a city.” The group was Joy Division and the city was Manchester, England. It was 1976 and the group was about to change music, and their city, forever.

Joy Division, the true story of the meteoric rise and fall of one of the most influential bands of our time, is the new documentary from director Grant Gee and producer Tom Atencio that traces the band’s history through never-before seen footage, bootlegged audio recordings and rare photos, as well as through in-depth (and at times incredibly painful) interviews with bassist Peter Hook, guitarist/keyboardist Bernard Sumner, drummer Stephen Morris, and Factory Records founder, the late Tony Wilson.

Joy Division formed in 1976 in Salford, just outside of Manchester, after Hook and Sumner caught a Sex Pistols show and decided to give punk rock a shot. The band’s first album, Unknown Pleasures, was released on Tony Wilson’s Factory Records in 1979 and quickly established Joy Division as the aggressive yet atmospheric post-punk pioneers we know today. Theirs was music you could lose yourself in over and over again. But by February of 1980 the momentum of success had begun to take its toll on the band, most notably singer Ian Curtis, who’s physical and emotional fragility was unable to sustain the pressure of expectation. On May 18 1980, a 23-year-old Curtis hung himself, mere days before the band was to hop a flight to America for what would have been their first stateside tour. The band’s brilliant second album, Closer, was released after Curtis’ death. Joy Division was no more, but their story became that of legend.

The day after the documentary's Los Angeles screening I met up with Peter Hook at Rhino Records for our interview...

Erin Broadley: Did you enjoy the screening last night?

Peter Hook: It was a bit weird but good. It was quite odd because it was so arty and sort of restrained. I thought it would have been a bit wilder, really. It wasn’t as crazy as I thought it was going to be.

EB: What led to the decision to get involved with the documentary? When Anton Corbijn’s Joy Division biopic, Control, came out last year, there was speculation as to whether or not the band was happy with that fictional representation.

PH: The interesting thing is that the Joy Division documentary actually came about before Control, but Control happened quicker. I don’t think the documentary would have happened afterwards because we would have been so sick of talking about Joy Division, and so sick of living with it, that we wouldn’t have been able to do it. You wouldn’t have been able to give it the objectivity. It wouldn’t have been as fresh and honest. Tom Atencio’s timing was perfect, really. The interesting thing about the documentary is that I’ve never heard Bernard and Stephen talk about Joy Division like that. It’s something that we didn’t do, and we haven’t done.

EB: There’s that point in the documentary where it’s said that men don’t talk.

PH: It’s true. The sad aspect of it is, that if the three of us had done the interview together, you wouldn’t have said hardly anything. You just wouldn’t do it. Separately you’d do it. The interviews were done by John Savage, who’s a great friend of ours, an old journalist from Manchester who started in the punk era just the same way that we did. So you’re talking to someone you know very well, who knows the story very well. And obviously Tom Atencio we’ve worked with since 1982, so we know him very well. You open up to these people much more than you would do to somebody you didn’t know. And, to me, in the documentary it paid off.

EB: The documentary starts with Tony Wilson saying it’s more than just a story about a group; it’s a story about a city.

PH: Yeah, that’s Tony Wilson’s interpretation of it… that it all was about Manchester. And I suppose it is. You are subconsciously fueled by your surroundings, especially when you’re a kid. And the thing is that Manchester gave me the fuel to want to get out. And ironically it draws me back, every time I leave. When I leave here now I’ll be going back to Manchester. It’s quite odd seeing all these places in the world, all these different cultures, and you still always go home to Manchester.

EB: Maybe Tony saw things more like a scene.

PH: He’s a journalist. I’m just a stupid fucking musician. [Smiles] I don’t see any further than the end of me guitar.

EB: [Laughs] Well, I did love your description of him as an alien with tentacles.

PH: [Laughs] In that time, considering I’m just a working class tosser from Salford, to see somebody like him, it was like Doctor Who. It was wild.

EB: Was it hard for him to win Joy Division’s trust?

PH: Not particularly. Tony was a very confident guy. He was a star in his own right when he met us. So he always treated you in the same way, which was with a healthy dose of disdain [laughs]. He was always the boss and was treated in a sort of reverent manner. The Joy Division story is to do with Manchester. And it’s to do with the re-growth of Manchester that happened at the end of the ‘70s, and the fact that Factory Records, the Hacienda, Joy Division and New Order came from that. It’s a tale of regeneration. It does have an effect on me when I see it. I find the documentary, and Control, still quite upsetting really. It really does tug at your heartstrings. It’s always difficult for me to watch either of them. I certainly don’t find it a joyous occasion. But I do think that the two of them go together so well, which was something I didn’t expect. Very surprised. I was fuckin’ amazed at some of the stuff Tom got because he had stuff that I hadn’t heard. And I was like, “Where’d you get that from?!” Everybody has a different memory. It was hilarious last night when the documentary said that Bernard came up with the name for Joy Division. I don’t remember that at all. As far as I was concerned, it was Ian that had the book the House of Dolls and came up with the name Joy Division. So his memory of it is completely fuckin’ opposite to mine.

EB: Everything I’ve read has linked it to Ian as well.

PH: Yeah, it was Ian! It was Ian’s book. [Laughs] It’s funny that everybody has a different memory. And none of it is true. It has to be an amalgamation of it that’s true. It depends who you ask.

EB: Even a documentary is just a patchwork semblance of what really happened. One thing that’s said in the end of the documentary is that since there were only two things Joy Division actually created, Unknown Pleasures and Closer, that everything since has just been “merchandising memory.”

PH: Yeah. Well, it probably would have been nice if the “merchandising memory” was actually done by the band.

EB: [Laughs]

PH: It was quite interesting. Because we were punks when we first began, we didn’t do fan clubs, we didn’t do t-shirts… we felt it was crap and it was robbing people and it was mindless cashing in. We didn’t do Joy Division t-shirts. Ever. But when we got investigated by the tax man because of the Hacienda, the tax man said to us, “What I see whenever I walk round Manchester is Joy Division t-shirts. And in your accounts I don’t see any money for Joy Division t-shirts. Where’s the money for the Joy Division t-shirts?” And we said, “Well, we don’t do them because we don’t believe in it; we think it’s cheap merchandising gimmick.” And he went, “Well frankly I don’t believe you and I’m fining you.”

EB: Wow.

PH: He fined us for hiding our t-shirt revenue when we never fucking had any. So let that be a warning to you.

EB: [Laughs] Okay, well if I walk around and I see anyone wearing t-shirts with my name on them, I’ll make sure to put a stop to it.

PH: Mhmm. Make sure you get the dough.

EB: In the early Manchester scene, one thing that is brought up in the documentary is Joy Division’s “I’m fucked” mentality versus the “Fuck you” attitude of other punk bands. I thought that was a really interesting way to sum it up. Where did you find the balance?

PH: [Laughs] Yeah. I think the balance was sort of thrust upon you, really. If anything, as Bernard says, and as I said last night, we must be the only two people that don’t like Unknown Pleasures, which is quite ironic when you’re the one who bloody wrote it. Quite odd, really. The thing is, I appreciate it now what Martin [Hannett, the producer] did. At the time I was too young. I was too obnoxious -- a full of myself youngster -- to appreciate anything. To me, Martin was like you parents… fuck off. That’s why I became a punk, so I could tell everyone to fuck off, and that’s it.

EB: What was it about that album that you thought made it so impenetrable?

PH: I thought it was too subtle. I wanted it to be the way we sounded live, like the Ramones. [Laughs] But I’m prepared to admit that I was wrong. Martin gave it a depth, gave it the appeal and the ability to last a long time. To get music that you can lose yourself in is quite rare. Martin had that ability. He made Joy Division so that you could lose yourself. He proved that he could make it last, and he did make it last. I think Bernard and I would have made a much more one-dimensional record, because it was always Bernard and I who were the most pushy. Martin made a very three-dimensional, if not four-dimensional, record. Something you could lose yourself in; it had lasting power. [Laughs] He was a fucking maniac… a really weird character. A genius, but obviously troubled. He was a gift to us and basically Bernard and I learned how to do produce so then when he got difficult, we got rid of him and did it ourselves. It’s all about ego isn’t it?

EB: When you started you could barely play your instruments but then…

PH: …it all happened so quick. That was the thing about punk. The ideology of it was let’s not wait, let’s do it now. It was very instantaneous. What I liked about punk was that you admired the people who just got up and did it, regardless of whether it was bad or good. The thing you appreciated was that they just got up and did it. There was one wonderful band from Manchester called The Worst… and they were the worst. They had no songs; it was just a drummer and a guitarist and they’d just do it. That was what punk was all about. It couldn’t last. It was like bloody metal machine music. But in the context of what we were doing -- and the building that we were using, a squat on Oxford road in Manchester for all the bands to play in -- it was perfect.

EB: The first TV appearance you guys did was Granada, right?

PH: Yeah, I remember how nervous we were. I remember going out in the afternoon and Rob Gretton [Joy Division’s manager] buying me that shirt that I wore because he felt that the shirt that I had was too scruffy. So he took me and paid 3 pound 50 for that shirt and I wore it that night. I wore it for ages until it got ripped when I did a gig with Dexy’s Midnight Runners in Birmingham. I can remember ripping that fucking shirt on me bass cab.

EB: Was it emotional?

PH: It was. I remember I was really pissed off. Really fucking annoyed because I liked that shirt. But it’s the nerves mainly. I remember how nervous we were [to play Granada]. That was a big thing to happen to you. It was fantastic. I remember the momentous occasion very well. To get to go to Granada studios, and to go into the Cantina dressing rooms, it was like, fuckin’ hell!

EB: Like you said, it all happened very quickly. Do you think you were ever fully aware of how much that momentum had caught up to you guys or how much pressure was mounting towards the end?

PH: No, we were very young and very fit so we were ok. You were only aware of the pull it was having on Ian because he wasn’t well. So that was a problem. The thing is, when you start you desperately want to play anywhere and do anything. It was interesting because I remember us doing a concert in Oldham near Manchester as Joy Division and nobody came. Nobody. No one. [Laughs]

EB: Just a dog and the bartender?

PH: Just the bartender. And he started sweeping up while we were on. Then six months later you’re playing to a packed room. Same material but to a crowd that are going ape shit. It’s wild when you think of the gulf in that. We started getting popular after the Buzzcocks tour, which was wonderful because we actually blew the Buzzcocks off a couple of nights… fucking blew ‘em out of the water. It was fantastic. Hilarious. We started getting offered loads of gigs and Ian, even though he was ill, because he’d being working for this and working towards this, was desperate to do the gigs. It was heartbreaking for him to have to admit that physically he wasn’t up to it, and he fought that right ‘til the end. He was his own worst enemy. Basically what Ian would do to you, you’d say, “Ian you’re ill. Maybe you shouldn’t be doing this.” And he’d go, “I’m fine, don’t worry about me, I’m fine.” And you’d go, “Thank God for that. Right, let’s get on with it.” It was always him. He was never pushed to these gigs kicking and screaming. He pushed himself because he didn’t want to let you down.

On our part, you can only put it down to inexperience and naiveté. I did a Radio 4 thing in England recently, and the guy said to me, “How could you let that happen?” And you’re like, “Oh fuck.” But it’s true, you see. How could you let it happen? You dickhead, you fucking did that. How could you let that happen? You’re like, “Oh fuck, I did that.” We did. We should have stopped it. But we were all so caught up in the whole occasion and because Ian was going, “Don’t worry, you’re fine, I’ll look after me self, we’ll be all right.” You’re like, “Oh thank God we don’t have to worry about that now he said that he’s okay.”

EB: But don’t you think at a certain point, because you guys were so young, it was the responsibilities of your managers with the experience not to let that happen? Somebody on the periphery looking out? Where were they?

PH: Yes. There was a lot more people that made bigger mistakes. His psychiatrist, his doctor, the people treating him in the hospital, they all fucking let him go.

EB: I don’t think its up to a bunch of 22-year-olds to be able to…

PH: Yeah, but it still doesn’t stop you from not feeling responsible. It also doesn’t stop people from turning around and saying to you that it’s all your fault. But there is a responsibility, which I suppose is one of the things you have to live with… “What if I’d have done this?” If it happened to me 10 or 20 years ago, I would have just gone, “Stop… fucking sort it out.” Then we were too young, too naïve, too hopeful and you were so grateful for the things that you were being given, you were desperate not to pass it up. It was a combination of all that, plus the guy telling you it was ok. None of us knew. It was really, really sad. I was with him the night before he died and I drove him home and we were so excited about going to America. That was why I was in such shock when I was told because I’d been with him on Friday night. I drove him home. How’d you get from that to that? Fuckin’ hell man. It’s unbelievable. It was unbelievable. Who the fuck knows what happened.

EB: For a lot of people the end of Joy Division was a symbolic loss. And the fact that the band never made it to America just made it even more precious to Manchester.

PH: Yeah, even I often wonder what would have happened. Whether that’s a good or bad thing, I don’t know, really. It’s a very difficult decision. I was doing an interview before and the guy said to me, “Oh, you’ve been in two of the most important bands of the ‘80s and ‘90s," and I suppose the thing is, if Ian hadn’t have died it would have been one band. It’s weird the way that things work out, really. People always say, “Well what do you think Joy Division would have been like if Ian had lived?” And I think “Blue Monday” would have been by Joy Division, with Ian singing. I don’t think our development would have changed that much. With Ian singing New Order, I think you would have gone the same way.

EB: You have the New Order Live In Glasgow DVD that just came out. What’s going on with that?

PH: Well, it was planned before New Order split up. The record company asked us if we’d do one this tour so it was done simply as that. Stephen and I got involved in the production of it. We oversaw the editing, put the pictures together, we mixed the sound and put it all together. Stephen went and collected the rare and unseen footage, which I thought was wonderful. [Laughs] But when I saw the headline “New Order Celebrates Career in Glasgow,” I don’t remember it being very celebratory, to be honest, but maybe that’s just me. It was nice to be involved in it. I think one of the bad things that’s happened to musicians is that when you don’t get involved in everything that you do, then there’s no quality control and that I find off-putting and is a sad part of our business. So I was delighted to be involved in it and to do it to the best of our ability. It’s all the more poignant because New Order have split up. It makes it quite an odd situation. To be honest with you, it’s an odd situation to be here talking about it. Because I’d rather not. [Laughs]

EB: Then you don’t have to…

PH: [Laughs] No, I don’t mind. The thing is, whilst my memories of New Order at the moment are very clouded by the split and what happened after it, I’m the first one to sit up and look at it and go, “Well fucking hell we achieved something wonderful.” And I’m glad, especially because Stephen and I were involved in doing this one. This is a celebration of our career; it just wasn’t a very celebratory night. Basically we were all getting on each other’s fucking nerves. We were all sick to death of each other and it wasn’t a great atmosphere, but as it happens, your professionalism overcame that and you still created something wonderful. I suppose that’s the thing about the chemistry of groups, is that a group can still hate each other but actually create something quite brilliant. You always seem to need a bit of angst and a bit of pain to make great music. So I suppose New Order were very lucky in that they found a way to stay in constant pain. [Laughs].

EB: Well what’s up next for you?

PH: These days I'm deejaying. I’m on the “old fucker who used to be in a band” circuit, as my mate calls it. And I’ve got a new group I’m working on called Freebase, with Manny who used to be in the Stone Roses, and Andy Rourke who used to be in the Smiths, which is coming along quite well, yeah. I’m quite happy.

Joy Division, the documentary, is out now on DVD. Buy it here. Also available on DVD is New Order: Live in Glasgow. Buy it here.

I do apologize that i have not been able to get a full set up, Im having a bit of trouble getting mine and my photographer's schedules to match up to be able to get up a full album.. But i have taken the odd good picture from my phone and I will continue to add a good one here and there, over the... more

I do apologize that i have not been able to get a full set up, Im having a bit of trouble getting mine and my photographer's schedules to match up to be able to get up a full album.. But i have taken the odd good picture from my phone and I will continue to add a good one here and there, over the next couple days, until i can set something up, Thank you for being so patient!
AMO

this was in another thread, and it got me thinking: RagleGumm said: (image) (image) But also (especially in the eyes): (image) (image) i've always thought that fractal looks a lot like natalie wood - an actress from the 60-70's, was in rebel without a cause, gypsy, the great race, etc. but i... more

this was in another thread, and it got me thinking:

RagleGumm said:




But also (especially in the eyes):




i've always thought that fractal looks a lot like natalie wood - an actress from the 60-70's, was in rebel without a cause, gypsy, the great race, etc. but i definitely see the resemblance above.

anyways, anyone else notice resemblances between any of the girls and particular celebrities?

Alex Borstein named the DVD of her standup Drop Dead Gorgeous in a Down-to-Earth Bombshell Sort of Way with a nod and a wink, but I think she’s very sexy, straight up. Borstein first got noticed with her array of characters on Madtv but she developed a strong cult following with her voice work and writing... more

Alex Borstein named the DVD of her standup Drop Dead Gorgeous in a Down-to-Earth Bombshell Sort of Way with a nod and a wink, but I think she’s very sexy, straight up. Borstein first got noticed with her array of characters on Madtv but she developed a strong cult following with her voice work and writing on one of the best televisions shows ever, Family Guy. Borstein’s main role on the show is Lois, the matriarch of the Griffin family. At first Lois was just a foil for Peter Griffin’s insane antics but soon Lois developed some very interesting quirks of her own, shepherded along by Borstein who has written some of Lois’ best moments.

But Drop Dead Gorgeous is another side to Borstein, one that is totally and completely filthy when liberated from television’s rigid standards and practices. Borstein speaks freely about her cunt, the impossible ideals that Hollywood insists upon and performs of series of amazing impressions from Renée Zellweger to Charlize Theron in Monster.

Buy the DVD of Drop Dead Gorgeous

Daniel Robert Epstein: I just saw the new Renée Zellweger movie yesterday and thanks to you I couldn’t stop picturing your impression of her.

Alex Borstein: What new movie is she in?

DRE: Miss Potter about Beatrix Potter.

Alex: Good Lord.

DRE: It was good, though [laughs].

Alex: She drives me a little nuts, I can’t help it.

DRE: It seems like a few people at Family Guy have it in for her. You guys are always making fun of her.

Alex: It’s fun to make fun of everyone, that’s our motto.

DRE: Why so much on Renée Zellweger not that I have any special love for her?

Alex: I think that her voice and “I’m going to gain five pounds to play a fat lady,” annoyed everybody. Then watching her chew the scenery in Cold Mountain. My husband said that the way she gained the weight for Bridget Jones was by chewing the scenery in Cold Mountain.

DRE: Have you always been able to imitate her?

Alex: Yeah. I always say some of the best impersonations come from people that somehow permeate your head. For some reason you get stuck on them whether you like them or hate them. There’s just something about them that’s very listenable or watchable and then you start emulating it and all of a sudden you’ve got an impersonation.

DRE: Did you ever do her on Madtv?

Alex: I didn’t. A lot of the time on Madtv we were relegated to doing people that they thought we visually most looked like. That was probably one of the weaknesses. They were very in love with the makeup and hair department. They would sometimes prefer to spend five hours with prosthetics and have someone look exactly like someone as opposed to, “Is this the best possible sketch we could do for this?”

DRE: What’s always funny about stuff like that is, do they really think people are going to believe you are those people?

Alex: Right we’re not trying to cash one of their checks at the bank. We just want to make some comedy. Sometimes I wouldn’t get to do a lot of those people. Being short and pudgy, they would never think of me first to play someone like Renée Zellweger.

DRE: I thought that Drop Dead Gorgeous would be pretty dirty but it was certainly a lot dirtier than I ever imagined.

Alex: Yeah, it’s definitely a filthy little show. I can’t help it, I have a bit of a potty mouth.

DRE: I know you were in comedy troupes but were you ever a standup comedian?

Alex: The first time I ever did standup I was 16 at a little club in southern California. My parents had to be there because I was under 21. I did standup there for the first time and then a couple more times. Then I abandoned it. In college at San Francisco State I revisited it a few times and I did this little comedy competition and Certs breath mints sponsored it. The people who were the celebrity sponsors were The Kids in the Hall so I was very excited.

DRE: That’s pretty cool.

Alex: That was really cool. I did not win but Margaret Cho did. But what’s funny is that she didn’t really go to our school. I think she signed up for an extension class just so she could be a ringer in the competition.

DRE: That’s so funny.

Alex: Yeah, then I abandoned it and got more into sketch with some people in college. Standup is just very lonely particularly if you’re a woman. If you go to those clubs, none of those guys really want to talk to you or hang out with you or think you’re funny.

DRE: My best friend is a woman and she’s one of the funniest people I know. We’ve had many conversations about whether women are funny in general. She agreed that women might not be as funny simply because the world doesn’t allow women to be funny, for the most part

Alex: I think so. That’s part of it. Most women see it as, either you’re going to be beautiful and attractive and have the male gaze upon you and attract lots of men or you’re going to be funny and be one of the guys. The world doesn’t like to allow for both. There are some people that cross over. Look at Lucille Ball. She was such a huge phenomenon because she was wildly attractive, really funny and accessible at all angles. Somehow she was able to make it work.

DRE: I hope you’re not thinking I’m a big misogynist now.

Alex: Oh no, it’s absolutely true. I often wonder that if I was a guy and had done the same amount of work that I’ve done could I be at the level of a Will Ferrell or Jack Black or Dane Cook. It could be the fact that I’m a woman has kept me back or maybe I’m just not funny.

DRE: [laughs] No, that’s definitely not true.

Alex: I think my career would be really different if I was a guy, but then again maybe I would blend into the crowd too much because there are so many men. Maybe I stand out more being a woman. We’ll never know because I don’t have a cock.

DRE: [laughs] Do you find that people in Hollywood are still surprised when a woman is funny?

Alex: Yes. I was in Montreal hosting the comedy festival there and you definitely get guys going, “Hey, you’re really funny.” I think it really still surprises people and all of a sudden they look at you with new eyes like, “Wait a minute, she’s not just a woman, she’s a funny woman.”

DRE: I read that you and your husband basically put together Drop Dead Gorgeous by yourselves.

Alex: Yeah, we did. It was really a fun thing to do together. We’ve always tried to work together. We both were members of Acme Comedy Theater in Los Angeles.

DRE: Wasn’t [Family Guy writer/producer] Steve Callaghan was part of that too?

Alex: That’s right. Also Adam Carolla and Will Ferrell did some stuff occasionally with Scott Wainio who was a writer on SNL. Then my husband and I tried writing together and we almost stabbed each other in the fucking face with pencils. It was not a good thing for us to write together. So this seemed like a really cool opportunity where we could work together and do something creative and have fun. He’s a director so he knows a lot about cinematography so it was a neat opportunity for him to shoot it. We just wanted to see if it’s possible to move outside of the system because most of your options are to sell your special to HBO or Comedy Central. Then they own it and that’s the end of it. They have the right to edit it how they want and even to air it or not. I just didn’t want to do that. I was at the point in my career where I had visibility from Madtv, movies and Family Guy so I didn’t need to get my name out there, which most comics do when they do a special like that. I don’t really need to have my name bandied about Comedy Central every five minutes. I don’t need the money up front. It’s been a really fun experiment and so far, knock on wood, very successful.

DRE: So it’s been selling pretty good?

Alex: It’s been slow, but it’s been steady. There has been zero publicity. FOX figured, and they’re probably right, that all we really need to do is put something Family Guy related on this and have it on the shelves next to Family Guy and put a flier in the Family Guy DVD and that should take care of all the sales. So far the DVD has been very successful. It hasn’t had the normal decay of sales after the first week. The first week of a DVD’s release is usually pretty much all it’s going to sell but this DVD is different. It’s one of those titles where it’s been slow, steady and growing.

But also we’re doing this tour to Apple stores all over the country doing something called Made on a Mac Presentation since the special was edited on Final Cut Pro. We basically tell the story of how we made it. I started touring this in 2002 and then we shot it in 2004 and it has taken this long for it to hit the streets. So it’s a fun and interesting story and it’s also really informative for people who are trying to take back some control from Hollywood and make their own projects and be very self-sufficient. A lot of people are doing that now like that sitcom on FX called It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia.

DRE: Everyone says that’s really good but I haven’t watched it yet.

Alex: To be honest I’ve only seen a couple. But those people got together and made their own pilot presentation. They just were like, “Fuck it. We’re sick of waiting for a break and waiting for this giant machine to notice us.” So they just went ahead and did it. Another friend of ours did it with a show called Sons and Daughters that was on ABC.

Made on a Mac Presentation is like a take back the night thing to show how you can take control of your own career.

DRE: Did you have to give up any rights when FOX agreed to put it out?

Alex: No, I was going to distribute it on my own last year. I was going to release it in February as a birthday present to myself [laughs]. I was spending some time with the people from FOX in Montreal. One of the people at home entertainment was like, “Oh my God, you should bring that in. You should talk to us about it. Maybe we can release it. Maybe we can do it as something that goes along with Family Guy.” I thought, “That’s not a bad idea.” So I pitched them in January and they said yes pretty quickly. I do have all the ownership of the whole piece. They get a percentage for distributing it but this way I managed to really hold onto a lot of it, which is rare. The downside is that maybe if they had a bigger chunk of it they would work harder at publicizing it. But I prefer a slow and steady tortoise to a hare that may not finish the race.

DRE: Was anyone offended by your act when you took it on the road?

Alex: Not really. I’ve never really had any negative response from anyone about my standup because most people coming to see me know what they’re in for. Also I’m pretty careful about where I perform. For instance, we have a house right near downtown Seattle. They had the Seattle International Comedy Competition recently and they asked me to be a judge at one of the finals and my husband to be a judge at one of the other finals. They had five nights of finals and they asked me to perform. I knew it wasn’t going to work in this small community where there are only 10,000 people and I have to see all of them at the market the next day. I think it is important to know your venue and know your audience.

DRE: I loved the bits in Drop Dead Gorgeous where you read the breakdowns of character descriptions. Are you still sent stuff like that?

Alex: For the most part I get 98 percent less auditions than someone that could fit any of those descriptions. A lot of the times I hear nothing about it because they don’t call if it’s something that I’m not right for. But sometimes you’ll lose faith and you’ll be like “Let me see. Let me take a look at the breakdowns” and it is so dismal. But I’m developing some TV stuff for myself and writing a feature and you find yourself falling into the same traps. You find yourself saying, “Oh maybe they’ll have this girlfriend,” and then you’ll find yourself not really developing the girlfriend character so much. You just know she’s going to be cute and that’s all that matters. It’s like, “Wait a minute, now I’m just as bad as the enemy.” It’s easy to see why it happens because it’s shorthand, laziness and it’s easier than spending the time developing a real human person.

DRE: You seem about as pop culture savvy as anyone but is it still difficult to keep up with Seth MacFarlane?

Alex: Yeah, it is. But Seth’s pop culture knowledge is very retro. Seth doesn’t own a computer and he doesn’t really watch television. Everything that Seth knows has already happened.

DRE: I knew he didn’t have email. But I didn’t know he didn’t have a computer.

Alex: He has one at work but he doesn’t have one at home and he doesn’t want one. He doesn’t understand MySpace and he despises most new music.

DRE: It is so strange because he is certainly at the right age to be into newer stuff.

Alex: He’s in his early 30’s but he’s just got an old soul. He’s got that Rat Pack soul but the great thing about that writer’s room is that we have 15 writers and everyone brings something different. We’ve got ages ranging from like 27 to 55 so you’ve got all these different references. There is such a cool mixed bag of people bringing in bizarro references. I certainly don’t have my hands on the pulse in terms of the pop culture. My husband and I just went to the Billboard Music Awards in Vegas a couple days ago and half of the people nominated we were like, “Who? What?” Someone named Chris Brown won everything. Never heard of him.

DRE: I don’t know who he is either.

Alex: But you certainly can’t help but know about Paris Hilton or Britney Spears or Gwen Stefani or Fergie.

DRE: How is a decision made to include something like the Tim Curry character from Legend in a Family Guy bit?

Alex: We all sit around a big table together and people bark pitches. It is as though you’re at a party with cocktails and frankly sometimes cocktails are involved. I remember one of the episodes that I wrote was called Deep Throat. Peter and Lois created a folk group and Brian is going after Mayor West in a Watergate parody. In the script we had Mayor West sitting in a hotel room watching TV. I wrote that he was just watching cartoons. Then the only other female writer, Cherry [Chevapravatdumrong], had him commenting that he was watching a cartoon called Jem. I didn’t know what Jem was but everyone else cracked up and I was like, “Ok, put that in. It’s weird and interesting.” That’s pretty much how it goes. If a lot of the people in the room respond or even if it’s just one person responding in a huge way, they’ll go for it.

DRE: How did you end up joining the Family Guy writing staff?

Alex: When I first started I started just doing voices. I was doing Lois and everything grew. I would start doing more voices and then I would ad-lib a lot. When Seth created the show he was 25 years old. I don’t think he ever had a girlfriend and the only women he knew were his mom and his sister. So he had absolutely no idea what he was doing and he will admit that in a heartbeat, like, “Ok what do girls wear? They wear hats. Ok, Meg will have a hat.” That’s pretty much how he decided things so it was freeing for them when I’d come in to do voices and I would change things to make it a little more like something a female character might say. One of the executive producers, Chris Sheridan, said, “Would you ever write for us?” At that time I was writing for myself on Madtv and before that I had written for cartoons like Casper and Pinky and the Brain. I told them that I would love to do it but that it is just a matter of schedule because I was working for Madtv at the same time. So what we did is that I started working at Family Guy on the summer hiatus from Madtv. Then when Madtv went back to shooting, I would just come into Family Guy as a writer on the days we didn’t shoot. I was getting to split my time all over the place and I learned so much. Madtv and Family Guy together really was comedy boot camp.

DRE: Seth has obviously changed his look since he first started Family Guy. He lost the glasses, got some cool looking hair and my wife said he’s hot now.

Alex: He thinks he is. I don’t want to crush any dreams, he usually does wear glasses but when he goes out for events he takes them off to be cool. But he’s still wildly insecure and has absolutely no idea who he is and he doesn’t understand even an iota of the opposite sex like most of the writers on television. But he started at 25 and now he’s edging on 35 so he’s a very different person.

DRE: Especially when you have money to buy nice clothes.

Alex: Exactly and he has people to tell him what to wear now. People that can say, “You know what? What if you could wear this vintage t-shirt and your button down shirt open?”

DRE: I asked [Family Guy writer/producer/voice actor] Mike Henry what offends him and he said that he doesn’t like stuff about kids like the Cancer boy character from Family Guy. What offends you?

Alex: Oh nothing, really. See, that’s what happens. All of a sudden when people have kids they change their tune about what offends them. It’s very interesting.

DRE: I get worried about that too. I don’t get offended very easily and I don’t want that to ever change.

Alex: It’s very interesting how it will change a person but I don’t think it’s definitive. They have a kid and for the first two years of the kid’s life they’re not cool with any of those jokes anymore then maybe after a few years they start to mellow.

But not much offends me. I’ve always been heavy and I’ve always thought that a lot of fat jokes were hilarious. I’m a Jew and I think Jew jokes are hilarious. I laugh the hardest at a lot of our Holocaust stuff on the show. I was just raised with laughing in the face of everything.

DRE: What about Mel Gibson?

Alex: I find him to be an idiot. He clearly is anti-Semitic to some degree but I think a lot of people forget that one of the things about living in this country is that you’re allowed to be anti-Semitic, you’re allowed to hate Jews, you’re allowed to hate white people and you’re allowed to hate black people. It may not be politically correct and cool but if the Nazis can march in Skokie then Mel Gibson has every right to say Jews are whatever. We don’t have to like it, I certainly won’t go to his movies and I don’t want to support him as an artist. Not that I was that interested in his work anyway. But I think people forget that there’s a difference between being like-minded and having the freedom to say what you want.

DRE: You’re right. I hadn’t really thought about the fact that he is allowed to say whatever the hell he wants.

Alex: Yeah, everyone forgets that just because you shouldn’t say something doesn’t mean you can’t. I think he’s a moron especially if you’re a public figure and you want to sell tickets so because of that I think he’s an idiot. But for me it only solidifies the fact that anyone would have to be stupid to be anti-Semitic or racist.

DRE: What’s your favorite Lois storyline that’s been on Family Guy?

Alex: We have an episode that is coming up that I wrote called; It Takes a Village Idiot and I Married One. Lois runs for mayor of Quahog and wins. It stemmed from another one woman show I was working on called Women and Jews: Why We'll Never Be President. I was in this headspace where I felt that a woman will never be president. So this storyline came out of that. I had these fantasies about a woman president that would be fair and there’d be no corruption. That’s a bunch of bullshit fantasy. In the episode Lois gets just as bitten by the corruption bug as anyone. We liked what happened so much in the episode that we wrote a book that’s going to come out in April to coincide with the episode.

DRE: Cool! Did you work with any of the other writers on it?

Alex: Yeah, Cherry and I wrote it together. We always laugh at these memoirs people release. It always makes us laugh when anybody assumes the rest of the world cares to read about their lives. We took a look at It Takes a Village, My Living History, Ann Coulter’s Godless and blah, blah, blah. We had this idea to write a book that looks at Lois’s time in office and the book has Lois pontificating her views and telling her story. What’s fun about it is that it has chapters by all the characters in the show where they chime in on her time in office and how they think she did. Of course it has a lot of rambling tangents with a lot of poop jokes.

DRE: Are you guys planning on responding within the show to what South Park did about Family Guy?

Alex: I don’t know. I’m not sure where everyone is on that. I just know that none of us really cared; we were just excited to be mentioned [laughs]. It is that excitement of, “I murdered a person, now I’m famous.” I think Seth was annoyed but I think Seth just gets that way. It’s almost like someone took a swipe at his child. I think we have made some slams back but I don’t know if they made it into the final draft of any of the scripts. We are able to do that because in the nine month process that it takes to make an episode, when we get right toward the end where it’s going to air we do last minute rewrites so we have the opportunity to change things. For instance if we have a Britney and K-Fed marriage joke, when that comes up now it will no longer going to be appropriate so we’ll have a last minute opportunity to alter it or to replace it completely but we would have to use the existing animation. Sometimes that’s how we can slip things in that are very timely because we have that last minute pull cord where we can slip something in.

DRE: Are you still working on the cartoon Angry Little Girls?

Alex: I worked on Angry Little Girls for a little while but not anymore. There was just too much going on. I’m doing some other live action TV development so I helped develop Angry Little Girls and even did an outline. Then at that stage, unfortunately I was like, “Uh-oh, I’m not going to be able to do all of this.”

DRE: Is it still going to air?

Alex: I think so. I think someone else is picking up where I left off and going to be developing it through completion.

DRE: What do you know about SuicideGirls?

Alex: My husband told me that he knows what SuicideGirls is but I know very little.

DRE: The fact that your husband knows is good enough.

Alex: But that reminds me I would really like to have Lois do a totally nude layout for Playboy.

DRE: [laughs] That’d be great. Do you remember when Jessica Rabbit did one for Penthouse?

Alex: She did? Well I think Seth enjoys Playboy more than Penthouse.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

by Nahp A column which highlights Suicide Girls and their fave groups. (image) [Rogue Suicide in Wild Things] This week Rogue tells us why she loves to hang with Harry Potter and the SG Hogwarts crew. Members: 2,323 / Comments: 28,676 WHY DO YOU LOVE IT?: Well Harry Potter is pretty much my obsession... more

by Nahp

A column which highlights Suicide Girls and their fave groups.


[Rogue Suicide in Wild Things]

This week Rogue tells us why she loves to hang with Harry Potter and the SG Hogwarts crew.

Members: 2,323 / Comments: 28,676

WHY DO YOU LOVE IT?: Well Harry Potter is pretty much my obsession

DISCUSSION TIP: Just be yourself and jump right into talking with everyone!

MOST HEATED DISCUSSION THREAD: Don't think I have found one, but these pics of Soya Suicide from the Scarification thread are pretty hot!





BEST RANDOM QUOTE: “Actually, the main characters in the Potterverse are around 25...Harry was actually born in 1980,
 so, technically, they're ALL legal. 

Ba-zing. 

I want me some Draco. Mmm.” ~ excerpted from the “who would you” thread.

WHO’S WELCOME TO JOIN?: Everyone! Though respect allegiances when entering the Slytherin Common Room – “No Mudbloods Allowed!!!”


***
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Got a job offer today....not too excited about it but it could lead to a quick promotion if everything goes well. Have a final interview tomorrow so I will know for sure then. Hopefully I can get the weekend off for when my buddy comes into town the first week of February.....

Our THIRD hardcover book, Hard Girls, Soft Light is now available in the shop!! Over 200 pages of beautiful SuicideGirls. It's everything you dreamed it would be. (image) more

Our THIRD hardcover book, Hard Girls, Soft Light is now available in the shop!!

Over 200 pages of beautiful SuicideGirls. It's everything you dreamed it would be.

There's a thread for blue and red but what about purple, pink, orange, green etc? (image) (image) (image) (image) (image) (image) (image) more

There's a thread for blue and red but what about purple, pink, orange, green etc?

Man I love this job! After three long years of wooing I finally got a chance to talk with the legendary comedian Al Franken. After many successful years as a standup comedian and Saturday Night Live writer, Franken has released a number of hysterical and popular books such as Why Not Me? and Rush Limbaugh... more

Man I love this job! After three long years of wooing I finally got a chance to talk with the legendary comedian Al Franken. After many successful years as a standup comedian and Saturday Night Live writer, Franken has released a number of hysterical and popular books such as Why Not Me? and Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot. When Franken released Lies and the Lying Liars in 2004, esteemed filmmakers Nick Doob and Chris Hegedus followed and him and documented the experience. Now it’s all been put together in the film Al Franken: God Spoke.

Check out the official website for Al Franken: God Spoke

Daniel Robert Epstein: What did you think when such prestigious documentary filmmakers wanted to do a film on you?

Al Franken: I was very excited because I liked their work.

DRE: Did you ever feel pressure to be on for the camera?

Al: No, I thought that would be a bad idea. There were certain things I know I did that I wish were in the movie but it’s their movie [laughs]. You know that party where the Republicans all are?

DRE: Yeah, the Newsweek party.

Al: Yeah, I saw Charlie Rose at the party and Charlie sees the camera and he goes, “How long have they been following you?” I said, “Like a year.” He goes, “well, how are you going to end it?” We didn’t know at the time and I said, “you know what, if we can’t find an ending I may have to murder someone and Charlie, it could be you.” Then a couple months later, we’re in Minneapolis and I was saying something like, “Why don’t we just end the movie by including that clip in earlier and then have me murder Charlie Rose.” They would follow me as I go into his apartment building, go up the elevator, knock on his door, Charlie answers and then you cut to me pistol whipping Charlie while he is on his hands and knees begging for his life. Charlie is doing a terrible job of acting and then we cut to Kevin Spacey as Charlie Rose and me pistol whipping him and killing him. Then we cut to The Charlie Rose show with Charlie, [director] Nick [Doob] and me asking why we put Kevin Spacey in. Now I knew they weren’t going to end the movie like that but I thought it would be very funny to put that in. But they decided otherwise.

DRE: Is this the closest we’ll get to an HBO type special from you?

Al: I’m not ruling out an HBO special for me in the future.

DRE: It was a lot of fun for me to see you interacting with all your “enemies.” Is it difficult for them to attack you because you have years of comedy experience so you could snap back at them?

Al: They can certainly attack me when I’m not there. They do that all the time. I was with Mark Luther who is our resident dittohead [a fan of The Rush Limbaugh Show] on my Air America show. He’s the guy we have on like once a week and we play Rush Limbaugh and Mark has to try to defend him. Mark has known me for 39 years. He said he was listening to some right wing show and this guy said he was at a hot dog stand with me at the Republican convention in San Diego and this guy tried to say hi to me and I was really rude. I said to Mark, “Does that sound like me?” Mark says, “you know that doesn’t.” I got to put up with that crap.

DRE: How important is it for you to never lie?

Al: It’s really important to me not to lie. It’s real important not to make mistakes. But you make mistakes. There’s a difference between making a mistake and lying. We had one mistake in [the book] Lies and the Lying Liars. We included a preliminary report on the damage that was done when the Clintons left the White House. The report said there was no damage done, [laughs] but remember Arie Fleischer [George W. Bush’s press secretary at the time] and all these guys were saying there was all this huge vandalism that was done by the Clintons as they left but that was just a big myth. The second report came out and said that there were some W keys removed from the computers. There was also some incredibly minor stuff that might have occurred when a rug came up or a phone line got ripped out. But that was a mistake because we used a preliminary report but that happens. There’s a big difference between that and then doing the painstaking lying that Ann Coulter does, where you just have to labor and labor just to make a lie.

DRE: In the movie you say she’s a smart lady. Is she smart enough to delude herself or does she know she’s lying?

Al: I think she is deluding herself some of the time and she knows she’s lying some of the time and justifying it. I did a debate with her which I will not do anymore because it is not any fun. I repeated a litany of lies that she’s done and she just wouldn’t respond. She’d go, “This can’t be about Ann Coulter. Ok, I’m a flawed person.” I think there’s something desperately wrong with her and I think that there’s a self-esteem issue there. Most of us try to do our best work and see our work as an extension of ourselves and try to do something that is good.

DRE: Are you serious about running for senate in Minnesota?

Al: I’m serious about it but I don’t know if I’m going to do it. Obviously it’s a big personal decision and also I don’t know what the rest of the DFL thinks. I’m getting an idea that a lot of people want me to do it [laughs]. I told myself I don’t have to decide until next year.

DRE: What’s it take to get young people involved in politics today?

Al: They just got to feel that it means something, that it means something to their lives. Our politics has to be more about the future than it is now. Look at these huge deficits and look at the investments in prisons and weapons as opposed to investments in education.

DRE: It’s all short term.

Al: Very short term thinking. But we also have to convince kids that it is worth the work and it is actually a lot of fun and also real important at the same time. How many things are fun and important at the same time? [laughs]

DRE: Just to talk about comedy, Harry Shearer said that everyone who’s ever worked on SNL secretly hated it.

Al: No, there were times when I hated it. There were times when it drove me nuts, especially toward the end where it was getting unwieldy with all the cast members. There was just a tendency to start getting too many people. It started to get frustrating to me because we would produce too much and I had kids and we were staying there way too late at night. But mainly I loved being there. The best memories of my life are always going to be rolling on the floor laughing up on the 17th floor on a Tuesday night and writing with incredible writers and cast members. That’s the quintessential memory of Saturday Night is Live.

DRE: Robert Smigel told me you brought him to Saturday Night Live.

Al: Yeah and it was a very interesting thing. He was in this review in Chicago and there was really funny stuff in it and there was stuff that wasn’t really funny. I said “Somebody in this group is really good.” [laughs] They had the right ethic of every one of them writes everything and none of them writes anything kind of thing. That’s all fine and dandy except I couldn’t hire everybody and somebody there was the guy. So I kept coming back to the show and figuring out by who was in what sketch and talking with them and it was Smigel. I really saw a talent there.

DRE: As a comedy fan I must ask, would you and Tom [Davis] ever do something together again?

Al: We actually just did. We did a fundraiser in Minneapolis on June 8th and we did a half hour together.

DRE: Old stuff?

Al: Some old, some new. It was great.

DRE: Is it wrong for me to want Joe Lieberman to become president just because he’s Jewish?

Al: Wesley Clark is half Jewish.

DRE: Oh good! Great I’m in!

If you had a tattoo, what would it be?

Al: Oh, it would be a dot on my ankle [laughs].

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

YAY!! Im finally in my first magazine. If you would like to check it out then you muuuust order issue #6 of Ink Pushers Magazine, I have a one page spread, its pretty cute share my excitement and order one ;D NOOOOW on the other hand if I could go PINK Id be fucking extatic. I want to do more sets! more

YAY!!
Im finally in my first magazine. If you would like to check it out then you muuuust order issue #6 of Ink Pushers Magazine, I have a one page spread, its pretty cute
share my excitement and order one ;D

NOOOOW on the other hand if I could go PINK Id be fucking extatic. I want to do more sets!

by Laurelin (image) I remember in high school being obsessed with this one guy. Jackson was the epitome of everything I thought was cool: he rode BMX bikes and wore baggy jeans and flannel t-shirts with different band shirts underneath like NOFX and Pennywise. He didn’t drink or do drugs or hang out... more

by Laurelin




I remember in high school being obsessed with this one guy. Jackson was the epitome of everything I thought was cool: he rode BMX bikes and wore baggy jeans and flannel t-shirts with different band shirts underneath like NOFX and Pennywise. He didn’t drink or do drugs or hang out with the cool kids, but he was always smiling and surrounded by people. He was different and I liked that.

We wound up dating for a while (it seems like a long time, but in retrospect it might have only been a few months; time is different now). He broke up with me at the end of my freshman year and I was devastated. My first heartbreak, my first bitter taste of a feeling I would in time become so familiar with. That being said, there is nothing to be done but move on, keep going to class, keep on smiling like nothing was wrong. Eventually I lost interest in Jackson and the feeling faded. I was moving on and Jackson was nothing more than a blip on my radar. That is, until Jackson started dating Jill.

Suddenly I missed him with a fierceness that can only be likened to the hunger a vampire feels after waking, born as a creature of the night for the first time. Suddenly it seemed like there was no one else, that Jackson was the only one for me, no one else should have him, especially not Jill. Who was Jill? Where the hell did she even come from? She was nothing like him; she didn’t even LIKE the music that he liked, the music that he and I liked. It was all consuming, and soon Jackson was all I could think about. I wanted him back. I remember that feeling like it was yesterday; unhealthy obsession.

My cell phone buzzes and I glance down. My heartbeat increases when I see his name. This one I think I’ll write back to, this intriguing man who isn’t really like anyone I’ve ever met before. This has been one hell of a week for me and my buzzing cell phone, which is filled with messages from people I never expected to hear from. I have spent a lot of the past year unable to move forward constructively when it comes to a few kinds of relationships in my life and for whatever reason I have just totally and completely moved on. I simply woke up one day and stopped texting, stopped calling, stopped inviting these guys out with hopes of rekindling romance. I just stopped chasing them. And the second I stopped, all of a sudden they noticed.

If anyone had told me that these guys would be saying the things that they have been saying to me in the past few weeks I would have laughed. If you had told me they would be showing up at my bar, sitting and hanging out until closing and then asking to walk me home, I wouldn’t have believed it for a second. Now, as I choose to go home alone, I acknowledge that they only want me the way I wanted Jackson back once I saw him with Jill. They liked me chasing them and once I stopped they finally looked back, circling back like a dog with a lost bone, sad that the game is finally over.




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I first heard of Terry Zwigoff in the autobiographical stories of Harvey Pekar that were drawn by R. Crumb. I knew he was very into artwork, music and comic books. But I, like many others, didn't really get into him until he directed the documentary, Crumb, in the early 90's. Even though the... more

I first heard of Terry Zwigoff in the autobiographical stories of Harvey Pekar that were drawn by R. Crumb. I knew he was very into artwork, music and comic books. But I, like many others, didn't really get into him until he directed the documentary, Crumb, in the early 90's. Even though the brilliance of Zwigoff rolled off of that work we didn't get to see another film of his until the narrative Ghost World was released. That film was an adaptation of Daniel Clowes' graphic novel. Both Clowes and Zwigoff were nominated for Best Screenplay by the Academy Awards and now they've teamed up again for Art School Confidential.

Check out the official site for Art School Confidential

Daniel Robert Epstein: Are you surprised to find someone like Daniel Clowes that you connect with so well since he's 15 years younger than you?

Terry Zwigoff: It's hard for me to find anybody of any age that I connect with well. I had that experience with Robert Crumb. We bonded very quickly and became friends. I had the same experience with Dan. Both happened to be from the underground cartoonist background. I could tell from reading Dan's and Robert Crumb's comics that we'd hit it off. We have such strong ties to humor with a similar sensibility and worldview. You think that about a lot of people. When I met Woody Allen, I thought, "Oh yeah I'm going to hit it off with him." But that didn't happen. John Malkovich had a great Woody Allen story. Malkovich keeps to himself on set and is very quiet. He told me that he was doing Shadows and Fog with Woody. At some point during shooting an actor pestered the director for advice, he wanted Woody to give him advice or direction. I guess Woody Allen doesn't talk much to actors. Near the end of the film Woody Allen came up to Malkovich and went, "Are there any other actors like you?" and John said, "What do you mean? Good actors?" He said, "No, actors that don't bother the director and instead of just behave." He really wanted names. I sometimes ask actors the same question because I want to work with those people too. Steve Buscemi is one of those few actors who you always want to work with because he's so easy to work with and so helpful. A lot of actors are temperamental, very difficult and very skittish. That's why they're good actors, too sometimes. Weird breed, I guess.

DRE: Do you do well with actors?

TZ: Sometimes yes and sometimes no. To quote Charles Crumb "Some people like me and some don't." Some actors feel very insecure and they want the director to be their daddy and their psychiatrist and their best friend and to bully them. You just have to take different approaches with them all. I'm not so good at some of the approaches. I like to be pretty honest and direct with the actors. If I don't know what the fuck is going on in the scene, I tell them, "Look, I'm lost" or something. They don't like to hear that.

DRE: They like everything to be perfect.

TZ: They at least like you to have this front, which if you talk to any director alive, there are places in the film where they didn't have any idea what was going on. They just hope it works out. Sometimes I find myself in the situation where I like to draw upon the actor for help. I like to try to collaborate and come up with a solution. It's not always that apparent to me at the start of the scene. Even if it is, I try to keep that opinion to myself and see what they come up with themselves. It might be better than my idea.

DRE: Do you consider this the definitive cut of Art School Confidential?

TZ: Yeah, it's pretty much what I wanted. We went through a number of cuts of the film, screened them and got feedback. It's tough because your first impulse as a director is that anything the audience laughs at, leave in. Anything that they don't laugh at, cut out. Dan Clowes' work has stuff in it that you only find funny or interesting after you think about it. In fact, a lot of films he works on seem to hold up a lot better over time. You can see it a second or third time and get something out of it that you didn't the first time. In the script for Bad Santa, there was so much stuff where it was obvious to me what the intention was, where the jokes were, how a line was supposed to be spoken. Dan's stuff is much more subtle, nuanced, enigmatic, much more esoteric.

DRE: Besides Daniel's involvement in your work, do you see yourself as an auteur?

TZ: I don't subscribe to it as much as a lot of people. I think film is such a collaborative work. The writer has so much to do with the script then there's the director, the actors, the editor, the composer, the producers. As the director, you have the final say so that the individual vision that comes out of it is your responsibility. It's hard to say that I am the sole author of this work. Part of the thing I enjoy about is the collaboration and that's part of the thing I hate about it.

DRE: I was just talking to Daniel in there and he was saying how important the words that he wrote are to him. Is it difficult to cut Dan's work or is that just the way it has to be?

TZ: On the set, I try to get them to say the lines correctly. I call on the script supervisor and it's part of their job to tell you, "Hey they missed a wordd. They substituted a word with this." To make sure you're aware of it. Sometimes they catch it, sometimes they don't. A lot of the time, they don't and you discover it in the editing room. Usually it's not a big deal but when it's a big deal, you notice it. In the editing room, it's hard. It was hard to have Dan come into editing, occasionally he'd stick his nose in. He says at times it's just a different thing that he had in mind that he would have done it differently than I would have done it. But he waits and he sees what I do and generally he's okay with it. I always try to have a big variety of performances. If we have time for improvisation I want to get a couple of takes of that as well.

DRE: Was there much improvisation in Art School Confidential?

TZ: Absolutely. It depends on the actors. Some actors are really good at it. Malkovich was really terrific with it. You can never quite predict whom it's going to be good with and who it isn't. Certain directors like Christopher Guest manage to assemble the greatest actors in the world. I try to get whatever material I can for the editing room so I have choices. That's why it takes me a long time in the editing room. Oftentimes, my editor will sit there and cut me 26 versions of the same scenes with just subtle differences. I cannot sit there. By take 25 I've lost focus. Cut your three best versions and let me see those.

DRE: I told my wife when we were preparing for the wedding that I didn't want to see everything, I want to see the final three things.

TZ: That's right. The editor is trying to be very deferential to the director but at a certain point, he has to just do it.

DRE: What's your opinion of modern art school?

TZ: I don't know anything about it. My concern was to make sure that I gave a somewhat truthful representation of it on screen. I've never been to art school, which is tough as a documentary filmmaker, but then again I've never strangled anybody either. It's not like you have to do it to be able to shoot it in a scene. It helps to have people around you who you can fall back on, you can say, "Well, what do you think, is there something wrong here, with the overall picture?" Dan would say, "Well, that guy wouldn't be drawing with charcoal in this scene, everybody would have to draw in pencil" or whatever.

DRE: What the undercover cop was creating in Art School Confidential was basically outsider art, do you like artwork like that?

TZ: I came across a few things that I bought from this place in Pasadena that uses artist therapy for mentally disturbed adults. All their stuff is for sale. There's a place similar to it in San Francisco, but all the hipsters have discovered it. So you can never find anything good there. People go in there everyday and grab the good things.

DRE: It's like that here in New York too.

TZ: But this place was sort of an untapped gold mine. The art director went there and brought me photographs of a bunch of the paintings. I said, "Oh, man. That one looks like Henry Darger painted it. How much is that one?" "40 bucks." "Okay, got to have that." They have some interesting art there.

DRE: Your first films were documentaries. When you started doing narratives, was it that much of a shift for you?

TZ: Yeah, it's a tough shift. There's some stuff that overlaps. Certain things you learn in the editing room, what you're going to need for cutaways, action shots, the mechanics of things that once they sink in and become second nature, your job gets a lot easier. Then you get to focus on things that are really important in directing and not that mechanical stuff like continuity and eyeline. That's stuff that the script supervisor can cover you for anyway. A lot of it is a whole other art form.

DRE: Have you become a much more relaxed filmmaker?

TZ: Yeah, it gets easier as you get on. It also depends on the film, the situation, the actors, how much time you have to shoot, but in general I say that it gets easier as you go. Some directors' first film is amazing, but other directors like me, eh. But by the time I make my tenth film, I'd like to think I'll know what I'm doing.

DRE: I read an interview with you from internet where you said you feel like a failure and a fraud.

TZ: I read some of that stuff on the internet and so much of it is so inaccurate, patently false and filled with half-truths. I was reading the trivia for Bad Santa on the IMDB and it said that Larry David was my first choice for the part played by Billy Bob [Thornton]. That's completely false. I love Larry David, I love Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. But he was never at all a candidate for that. Then you can't get rid of them and they stick with you.

DRE: I just got the Crumb DVD, how was doing the commentary on that?

TZ: It was really painful. To keep it fresh, I thought I wouldn't look at the film and that as the scenes came up I would just talk about them. I wound up doing this commentary where Roger Ebert led the discussion and any time something interesting did come into my head he would start to talk and ask me something else. Eventually I may do another commentary by myself. I wasn't quite prepared and I felt tongue-tied and inarticulate doing it. It certainly was not at the caliber of the stuff Peter Bogdanovich does where he's so eloquent on his DVDs. He's quite a speaker.

DRE: How do you look back on Crumb now?

TZ: I always thought that was a good film. I never had any doubt, I was very confident even when it was being rejected. Every film festival we entered in rejected it.

DRE: What is the new documentary you are working on?

TZ: It's called The Moe Family. It's mostly about Tau Moe. He was a Hawaiian singer who recorded in the late 20's. He made some records with his three uncles while on tour with a French woman promoter, Madame Riviere. They went to the Far East, stopped in Japan and recorded four songs for Columbia. They are all very rare records and very intense. They're as good as any great blues record you hear from the 20's. The guy was an intense singer and songwriter.

DRE: Did you make it before he passed away?

TZ: I shot all the footage before he died. I just haven't had the money or the time to edit it. It's been sitting around for about eight years.

DRE: Are you still into collecting things?

TZ: Less now than I used to be. I still collect records, but I'm not quite as driven to do it. I'm very happy with the records I have. I have plenty. It seems like the price of records is so insane these days that if I do have any money, I'd rather buy a piece of furniture or a piece of artwork. You can always get CDs. It's not quite the same experience but it's close. That's something that is reflected by the ending to Art School Confidential where he's separated by that pane of glass from that kiss. You're there but not quite.

DRE: How was it having such a big mainstream hit with Bad Santa?

TZ: I liked the film but I liked my version better. I thought my film was much more moving and just as funny if not funnier. When I got that script, I could see it was going to be a big hit if it was marketed in a certain way. First thing you need to have a chance of making a successful commercial film is a concept you can get across in a ten second TV ad. With Bad Santa you can do that. With Art School Confidential or Ghost World, it's sort of tough. I do remember one of the Weinsteins telling me that if Miramax had released Ghost World, they could have cut a trailer for that thing and made 50 million dollars. I don't doubt it.

DRE: How long ago did you do your directors cut of Bad Santa?

TZ: I did it when it became clear that they were going to go with a different cut for the theatrical version. I asked Bob Weinstein if he would preserve my cut, and at least put it on DVD and he agreed to do it. In fact they put up a lot of money to do it right. But then they sold their company to Disney, so Disney owns it now. I went to them and asked if they would put it out and they kindly agreed to do so.

DRE: Did you see Badder Santa?

TZ: I did. It's uneven. All the scenes in there didn't quite work out for me. It works on a certain level where there are scenes in there I like and other scenes I don't like. The whole thing doesn't quite have this consistency to it. My cut is a character study of Billy's character. It generally makes his character arc and his relationship with that boy much more truthful and ultimately much more human. The audiences in the test screening wanted Santa to be nicer to the little boy. But that wouldn't make any sense. I always thought of Billy's character as a W.C. Fields character. He has to put up with this pest. Eventually when Billy has affection for him, it is earned. Therefore it just seems more truthful and more emotional to me.

DRE: I know you've known Harvey Pekar a long time, what'd you think of American Splendor?

TZ: It was a good film. But I thought the guy that played Robert Crumb acted really bad. That was the only weakness I really saw in that film. There were moments I liked more than others, but I say that about most films.

DRE: Are you writing the next thing you're doing?

TZ: Yeah, Jerry Stahl and I are writing an adaptation of Laurent Graff's book Happy Days for Johnny Depp.

DRE: Had you known of Jerry before?

TZ: Yeah, he came up and introduced himself to me at the Ghost World premiere years ago. I really liked him. He really sincerely loved Crumb and Ghost World. I spent a long time talking to him and we kept in touch over the years. He sent me the things he was working on like the novels Perv: a Love Story and Plainclothes Naked. Then just recently I was reading Permanent Midnight on a plane and it was such a great book. I called him up and left this long message on his answering machine last night to that effect. I realized I left him a backhanded insult of a compliment. "It was so much better than your other books." [laughs]

DRE: How did you and Jerry come together to do the adaptation?

TZ: Johnny and I share the same agent. She called one day and said, "Johnny wants to meet with you about this book. He wants you to turn it into a film for him." I don't consider myself a writer but I liked the book though I knew it would be a tough one to adapt. I said that I would meet with him but that I wasn't sure if I wanted to write it. I really liked him at the meeting, which surprised me; I don't like most celebrities or movie stars. I told him my concerns and he said, "Well, have you ever heard of this writer, Jerry Stahl." Since then we've been doing it through phone and email since he lives in LA and I live in San Francisco.

DRE: Have you ever heard of SuicideGirls?

TZ: I have heard of SuicideGirls. Is it a website?

DRE: It's like Playboy for punks.

TZ: Playboy for punks, really? Is it done by only women?

DRE: Mostly women.

TZ: It's got nudity on it?

DRE: Yeah, beautiful girls.

TZ: I'll check it out. I've heard of it but I'd just get lost in it. I would end up wasting all day puttering around on the internet.

DRE: They're softcore pictures.

TZ: Now you've lost me.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

I was recently fortunate enough to spend some quality time with Cory Doctorow, discussing topics related to the plot of Homeland, the thrilling follow up to his contemporary classic novel Little Brother (which serves as a primer on civil rights in the digital age). Our conversation spanned 90 minutes... more

I was recently fortunate enough to spend some quality time with Cory Doctorow, discussing topics related to the plot of Homeland, the thrilling follow up to his contemporary classic novel Little Brother (which serves as a primer on civil rights in the digital age). Our conversation spanned 90 minutes and ran into excess of 17,000 words, so the need for brevity dictated that I had to edit our interview heavily. However, Doctorow has an avid following, and rightly so. Hence I figured those of you that enjoyed the first installment of our interview might appreciate this second bite at the apple.

In the first part, we discussed Burning Man, which is where the action in Homeland kicks off, and the student debt bubble, which serves as a backdrop to the book. In part two, our conversation delves further into the post-Occupy politics of Homeland. In Doctorow’s book, our hacktivist hero Marcus Yallow, having been forced out of the education system due to financial pressures, gains a position as a tech guru for an independent political candidate. Our discussion therefore naturally turns to the limitations of two party systems, the potential social media has to transform the political landscape, the pros and cons of clicktivism, and the perils of online activism, which is especially poignant given that Aaron Swartz contributed an afterward to the book.

Nicole Powers: It does seem like we’re living for the first time in recent memory in an era where politically and socially things are regressing rather than progressing.

Cory Doctorow: Regress and progress are not uniform…We have the access to the organizing tools now that we didn’t have access to when I was younger. I’ve said this many times when I was an activist in the 1980s, 98% of my job was stuffing envelopes and 2% was figuring out what to put in the envelopes. Today we get the envelopes for free and the address books for free. That’s just a giant qualitative change and it does make it possible for us to do things that we weren’t able to do before…

One of the criticisms that Occupy consistently received was that it refused to center in an ideological program. It’s very hard to find out what Occupy was for. In general we knew what Occupy was for. I mean Quinn Norton in her eulogy for Occupy said that Occupy’s manifesto was: Things are fucked up and bullshit. Clearly that was the underlying message of Occupy. But turning that into a program was something that they were very reluctant to do, although elements of it emerged.

I think one of the reasons that political movements have been so concerned with constitutionalizing early on and setting out a program is because group forming is expensive. When it costs a lot of time and energy to get married, you want to make sure that you’ve got something in common so that you don’t end up getting divorced right away. When it’s cheap to form a group, to all show up, when you get the envelopes and the letters and the stamps for free and the envelope stuffing doesn’t take any time, then it makes sense to all go hang out together for a while and see whether you have enough goals in common to go on – to march together. Because it’s not a big deal to have a divorce a little while later, and then reform in some other configuration...

I think that the willingness of Occupy to do what programmers would call late binding of a program was its real strength. It was one of the things that made it possible to go on, because you never had to decide whether or not you were on or off the Occupy program. You never had to check a list of tick boxes to decide whether you were there for the same reason as everyone else. You could all say well you were more or less here for the same reason.

As someone who grew up among Communists whose movements have consistently been ridden by ideological differences that are literally incomprehensible to people who are not in the movement, people who seem to have so much more in common with each other than they have with anyone else in the world, and yet who can’t stand to be in the same room with each other, I understand this. I mean, devoting your life to a political ideology that’s not mainstream is an enormous expense. It’s a huge sacrifice to make. It’s something you can only make if you’re really sure you’re right. If you divert some of your energy to trying to form a group that you know is just going to fall apart, and if that energy is a lot of your energy, a lot of what you’ve got left over from this big sacrifice that you make when you devote your life to political change, you end up with a net deficit. You end up spending more money or more energy recovering from fissioning, from fracturing, than you get back out of the system in terms of coherent political action.

But if you can make the cost of organizing low enough, you can do lots of things that you couldn’t do before, you can all show up and decide later whether you’re all there for the same reason. And that’s great. It points us to a future where we stop characterizing our politics in terms of left and right, which are a silly way to characterize your politics because left and right don’t make any sense. Left and right leaves you with Evangelical Christians and certain feminists on the same side of pornography. They are bedfellows, to use an unfortunate term, on that issue, but they’re not on the same side of a left-right spectrum.

We have other spectrums –– authoritarian / anti-authoritarian, materialist/spiritualists, centralist/decentralist –– and if it’s cheap enough to form a group, we can start to add more nuance to our politics than just left or right, and maybe we can stop having to hold our nose and support politicians and political movements that when we look at them, we go well, Obama, is technically a Democrat and he’s not Mitt Romney, but he does believe in extra judicial drone assassination of American citizens far from the field of battle, nevertheless he is the left wing candidate, so I guess I’ve got to vote for him. If we can have a more nuanced political discussion than left and right, maybe it’s the beginning of something much better than what we’ve got now.

NP: Right. That’s what I’m seeing with Occupy. From the outside people aren’t seeing the numbers on the street anymore so their perception is that it’s failed. But from the inside what Occupy did was help us all find each other. Now we’ve all figured out who’s into what and who we can work with on particular issues, there’s no need to be a homogenized mass.

CD: And it politicized people, it politicized people who hadn’t been politicized. There is a lot of cynicism about clicktivism and the idea that if it’s too easy to be politicized, if all you need to do to take action is click an online petition, then it siphons off energy that could be used to change the world. It’s probably true that some people go, I’ve done my bit, I clicked that petition. But other people who never would have taken any political action start with that one click.

The height of the barrier to entry has to be correlated with the overall size of the movement. If it takes an enormous affirmative step to start your journey, then a lot of people will never start. If on the other hand it’s cheap to try, then a lot of people will try. And the more people you have trying, the more people you will have who will find that it’s what they want to do. That’s the upside of it. This is why I’m not cynical about clicktivism. This is why I’m glad to have a spectrum of ways that people can engage. The shopkeeper understands that the first requirement for selling things is getting people in the door; a political activist has to understand that the first requirement for building a movement is to have people take some step to want to be involved in a movement. And the smaller that step can be, the easier it is to get them involved.

I think of it like a church…It’s a tiny minority of people who join the clergy, but all of the people who join the clergy started by showing up on Sunday. If step one is issue all material things, take a vow of silence and a vow of chastity and wear a hair shirt for the rest of your life, your clergy will be thinly populated. You need a step one that isn’t total engagement for the rest of your life, right?

So one of the things that having cheap group forming does is it makes it possible to have a cheap step one, a cheap entrée, a thing that you can do that makes some difference –– and it does make some difference. A lot of people spreading links about SOPA led to a slightly smaller number of people calling our senators about SOPA, and that made a huge difference. That actually changed the world. But if it wasn’t for all the clicks that started it, including the people who just clicked once and never did anything else, that movement wouldn’t have gone to the visibility that it had gone to where people started calling senators, and the overall number was the thing that shifted the political debate.

NP: I think too that the sign of success with regards to clicktivism is the amount of resources that the government is putting into social media. One of the things you cover in the book is the use of “sock puppets” [fake social media accounts that respond to posts from the accounts of legitimate activists with negative comments and misinformation].

CD: …When we had the HB Gary leak we saw that the Air Force intelligence arm was tendering bids for software to help them run astroturf campaigns, to allow individuals to run up to 20 sock puppets on the internet and keep their identity separate so that they could poison political discourse. One of the worst things about this, about astroturfing is that, like an agent provocateur, it makes it very, very hard for people within a movement to know whether they can trust each other. It is totally corrosive to dialogue, to discourse itself, because it means that you don’t know when you’re talking with real people and when you’re talking with imaginary people or people who are being paid to espouse a point of view. Ultimately it actually, I think. ends up deprecating dialogue as an alternative to violence or civil unrest, because if you can’t talk, you’re left with just anger. If you can’t actually talk out your differences, all that’s left is anger.

I think that a horrible example, we’re seeing this right now in Pakistan. The CIA used false vaccination campaigns as a way to go door to door to find Osama Bin Laden. Pakistani militants are murdering Red Cross vaccination campaigners now who are actually trying to eradicate polio in Pakistan.

When you take a thing that is itself a net good, which is people talking to each other instead of killing each other, and you poison that, what’s left is whatever is left behind. You actually end up voiding it as a legitimate means of advancing an agenda, and then people end up doing whatever else is left behind. It’s a very, very short-sided tactic to engage in this…

NP: I guess this is one of the reasons why the National Lawyers Guild win recently was so important, that protesters have the right to sue army infiltrators.

CD: That’s one of the things that has made the story about the coppers who infiltrated the environmental movement here so poignant, apart from the fact that they sometimes impregnated activists and had children with them, but that you know on both sides, it’s so corrosive right? They acted without personal integrity, they destroyed their lives, they destroyed the lives of the people they are charged with surveilling. What they did poisoned our ability to actually have social change groups that work for social good, because you spend all your time trying to figure out who’s an agent and who isn’t.

I remember my parents were politically involved with someone who it turned out was clinically depressed and committed suicide. His behavior was erratic and some of his political friends thought that he might be in an agent provocateur, and they maybe didn’t extend to him the empathy that they could have because they had lived through an agent provocateur within their movement. The Canadian government had used agent provocateurs with left wing groups in Canada, and his erratic behavior, one of the things it gave rise to was that suspicion. What a tragedy, right? What a tragedy to socially isolate people who have problems by poisoning the well. It really is a real evil…

NP: In the book you have a character called Joseph Noss, who’s a “good” politician. Do you think there’s such a thing as a good politician or is it an oxymoron?

CD: I think there are lots of real good politicians, absolutely. One of the things about politics is that it’s small-p political, because the only way to attain the level of organization necessary to win a big campaign is to form a party that’s in coalition with a bunch of different interests, as you see with the Torys, for example, in this country. Are Tory’s pro or anti Europe? Are Tory’s pro or anti gay marriage? Are Lib Dems copyright reformers or are copyright maximalists?

Well, the Business Secretary just announced that the City of London is going to have an independently funded copyright police that will be actual police officers whose job it is to enforce copyright. Although copyright violations are not a crime, they’re a civil matter…It’s like having contract police who are out there enforcing contracts. Or real estate police who make sure that people aren’t misreporting the square footage of their house. These are civil matters and yet we suddenly have police. That’s the Liberal Democrat Business Secretary who has imposed it, but the Liberal Democrats are also the party that passed a resolution saying that national censorship regimes should never be an effective remedy for policing copyright. So which one are they? Well, they’re both. They represent a coalition of different kinds of interests.

Just like the Republican Party in the US contains fiscal conservatives and social conservatives. Some of them are both fiscal and social conservatives, but there’s a lot of people who are socially liberal and fiscally conservative. And there are a lot of people where social conservative is code for young earth creationist. There are a lot of people on the fiscal conservative side where that’s code for investor class, who would be broke if they only bought interests in oil wells that would be where they are if the earth was 5,000 years old. I mean, you can’t be a real fiscal conservative and a social conservative. Social conservative means investing in oil wells where they would be if the earth was 5,000 years old and not believing in dinosaurs, right? There are fractions and fractions within these parties. So in order to be a politician you have to be someone who’s capable of first being political within your party, which is to say, convincing all the different wings of your party that you can serve their interests equally –– which is to say that you have to marginally inoffensive. You have to be part of the status quo.

Nowhere is this more visible than places like Singapore. Singapore is a really interesting example of how you can talk to the rhetoric of social equality and use it to maintain social inequality. Singapore’s origin story is in race riots and racial discrimination between and among Chinese, Malay and Tamil people. Those are still the three major ethnic groups, although the ethnic divisions as always are very, very artificial. In the same way that you were a Tutsi if some distant male ancestor was a Tutsi, even if all your other ancestors were Hutu –– or even you were a Tutsi if the Belgium authorities had written the wrong thing on your great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather’s identity card –– by the same token, there are people who are technically Chinese, who all of their ancestors are Malay except for some distant Chinese male ancestor.

In Singaporean politics, one of the things that they do, whenever it looks like there’s an effective independent political campaign in one of the electoral districts, they will announce that in the interests of ethnic harmony they will convert the single parliamentary seat into a triple parliamentary seat that will have one Tamil representative, one Chinese representative, and one Malay representative, which on its face looks incredibly egalitarian. There have been proposals to require every electoral district in the UK for example to elect one woman and one man in the name of equality. But the thing is that only the state in Singapore has the organizational capacity to field three candidates in any one political district. Whereas the independent parties are necessarily far less organized than the 30 or 50 year incumbents who run for Singapore. So not only do their votes get diluted, they can’t put a candidate on the ballot, because while they can get the signatures necessary for one candidate, they can’t get them for three.

What this exploits is the fact that organizations used to be expensive and are expensive wherever you don’t have the internet because it’s hard to canvas around to find the right candidates. So the theme of Homeland, in part, is how you can run a political campaign without necessarily having to use a party to back you. Parties are necessary evils, right? They’re not good unto themselves. They’re actually the least worst way to organize candidates in all 50 states or in all of the political districts in the UK or whatever. But parties by definition require representatives and representative governments do sometimes vote against the interest of the people that they represent. That’s what a three line whip is. But we tolerate them because how else could you get a voting bloc that would manage to have some coherence in leading the country across all the different areas where we have representatives.

The Lib Dems traded their political future for the next 20 years for a referendum on alternative voting, which they were then betrayed on by the Torys and which we didn’t get. As a result, we are going to still have essentially a two party system where most politics is governed by wealthy influence brokers instead of by the representative interest of people. But with the internet, you could imagine it being possible to field candidates in 50 electoral districts, or 100 electoral districts, without having a formal party or having a much more lightly construed party, a party that’s just fragmentary relative to the kind of monolithic parties we have now. A party that looked a lot more like a coalition then a party.

NP: In the run up to the election I was thinking about how I would use social media tools to promote a candidate. And, yes, you could run a candidate with almost no money, however, one of the biggest stumbling blocks to that is Facebook, because they are now charging you to connect to your own base.

CD: Absolutely. Facebook is one of those things that succeeds very well and fails very badly…I could tell that their business model was the drug dealer business model; The first taste is free and then after that you pay. Then the more dependent you are on it the higher the cost. That was totally obvious to everyone who’s ever seen internet services come and go. I saw that coming a long way off. There are more social media alternatives and we can hope that there will be more still. At least one of the things about Facebook charging is that you know what it costs. But ideally what you do is you reserve that money for something better than paying for stamps and envelopes again, because that’s the game changer, not having to pay for stamps and envelopes.

NP: It’s particularly obnoxious when it comes to politics because it yet again means that the special interest groups and the traditional parties have the advantage over the independents and the grassroots candidates, and because of the sheer volume of people on Facebook, to some extent it’s taken away the democratization of the internet.

CD: Yeah, I agree. There’s something interesting that happens with the social networks and their desire to be integrated into government that gives me a little bit of hope. Obama, when he was running in 2008, used YouTube to do these fireside chats. After he took office, he wanted to continue, but the federal government has limits on its ability to collect data on people. They couldn’t set a cookie for you when you were looking at Obama’s fireside chats once he was in office, once he was president. Also it has to be downloadable and nonproprietary. So YouTube built an entire parallel backend that any video can be accessed through that allows for downloads and doesn’t set a cookie. So you can watch any video on YouTube anonymously and download it. Which is pretty cool.

Facebook at one point, the NHS [British National Health Service] put ‘like’ buttons on all the disease pages on the NHS online portal. Which is a terrible idea because every ‘like’ button sends a beacon back to Facebook, so they would know if you were looking at chlamydia or cancer or HIV, things that you might not want to have widely known or facts that you might not want to have sold about you. The NHS immediately removed those buttons after going through a palaver. But what if instead the NHS had negotiated that Facebook has to provide two ways of embedding a ‘like’ button: one is the normal way that gives you a beacon every time you land on a page with a like button, and the other one only gives them a beacon if you click it. So if you wanted to like something about alcoholism so that your family would see it because you were worried about how much they were drinking you could, but merely visiting a page on alcoholism wouldn’t send any information to Facebook, well then we might have had a Facebook that was a little more useful to all of us, right? Where all of us who have web pages, where we put Facebook like buttons, would’ve had those web pages not send information to Facebook unless our users chose to send information to Facebook.

And again, I wonder if there isn’t some leverage to force them. If for example they want to be used in political referendums or in some other political context, where charging for reach would be inconsistent with being used for some public purpose, if we can’t in fact use it as a bit of a stick to beat them and say, all right, we will use you for public purpose but you have to do so in a way that, for example, allows free interchange with Twitter and other social networks, uses some standard defined mechanism for getting information in and out of Facebook, and that allows deterministic reach to everyone who’s liked, who’s opted into some social group on Facebook. At which point, we might have more broad access to it all around.

NP: I would love to see that and I think that that is possible, especially given what’s happened in with Instagram.

CD: Well, I’m not a market doctrinaire, but I think that this is where having a market matters…The reason YouTube created all of this parallel infrastructure to keep Obama there is because of the cache of having Obama there and the cost to them if Obama had decided to do his fireside chats on Vimeo instead. This is how we get this stuff out of them.

To return to regulation, it’s one of the reasons that copyright wars are so dangerous…and other kinds of bad speech wars, libel, pornography, whatever — stuff that I don’t actually approve of. I don’t like people who libel other people. I’m not a fan of child pornography. All these things I would prefer to have the world without. But when we make things like Facebook or YouTube or Twitter responsible for them, copyright infringement, whatever, when we make them responsible for it, what we do is we say, okay you giant corporation, you have to divert some of your resources, your prodigious profits to policing users for this and to setting up some kind of response team and takedown whatever. On its face we go, all right, mission accomplished, but what that ends up doing is saying if you want to start a competitor to YouTube, you would also have to have access to those prodigious resources that would allow you to affect those takedowns for libel or for terrorism or for copyright infringement or for pornography or what have you, if you have some extra special burden in the law. What we then end up doing is we end up saying nobody will ever be able to compete with YouTube. Because YouTube could’ve never have grown to where it is now, where it can actually afford all the infrastructure, content ID or any of the other things that it does to police the content that it gets, if from the start it had been required to have all of those automated systems. So then you end up with just YouTube.

Again, competition doesn’t solve all of our problems. Markets don’t solve all of our problems. But if our regulation of Facebook’s behavior is not cautious in that it makes it much more expensive to found a Facebook competitor, then we will only ever see Facebook growing and growing. Because the thing that will starve Facebook is competition. The thing that will ultimately cause it to offer better deals to the people who use it is the fear that people who use it will defect to a rival service. That’s always going to be a much more effective curb on its behavior than the fear of a regulator. We’ve seen what regulation looks like with big corporations. Again, HSBC, you know? If you launder drug money, you get a slap on the wrist. If Facebook knows that it’s regulators are its pals, then it will continue to behave badly. If Facebook fears someone who is as big and as awful as it, that has grown just as quickly as it has and is challenging its longevity the same way that it beat the shit out of MySpace, then I think we have a real chance of getting Facebook to behave itself.

NP: But do you see any serious competition coming up?

CD: No, and I’m worried about that. I mean, Twitter, obviously, Google + a little. It’s funny because Google has historically been willing to issue profitability in one line of its business to gain profitability in another. They give Android away to keep the mobile market open so that they can sell search ads in the mobile space, which is a huge source of revenue for them. But they really, really seem to want to keep a high CPM in Google +, a high advertising rate, and so they want everyone to use their real name. They want to be as Facebook-like as possible. Obviously real identities give you higher CPM.

NP: I hate this idea of forcing people to use their real identities. It’s a basic tenet of internet security that you don’t want your real life personal information out there in the universe. Germany has actually just ruled that Facebook’s practice of requesting people use their real IDs violates their citizens’ right to use online services anonymously, and I think that’s a step in the right direction. I actually think it’s irresponsible of a social network to demand that you use your real name.

CD: Especially given how many fuck ups Google has had with Buzz, where they’ve inadvertently done things like expose people’s identity to their stalkers. Basically, requiring people to use their real names in services where they often regret their disclosures, it’s like requiring people to wear flaming trousers around the gunpowder barrels. We know that people make inadvertent, over disclosure with social networks and that they often regret their disclosure after the fact. Forcing them to use their real name increases the likelihood that their over disclosure will have some real world cost.

NP: I’ve had to move because of a stalker. I’ve had a restraining order too. Demanding that I use a real name online is downright dangerous, and could potentially disenfranchise me from the online world to my detriment.

CD: Google argues that people will be politer if they use their real names, but we’ve seen so many people who are perfectly capable of being impolite when they use their real names, and we’ve seen so many people that are capable of being polite. It’s clear that real names are not the whole story of politeness. That a lot of it has to do with system design and some of it has to do with scale and some of it has to do with other stuff. It’s not merely politeness. Everybody knew Muammar Gaddafi’s name. It didn’t stop him from doing what he did. No one knows the name of the guy who braked and let me cross the road with my daughter this morning, and yet he was very polite. It’s not merely a case of the greater internet fuckwad theory. It’s not merely the case that anonymity plus the internet equals flaming, equals trolling.

NP: We’re all so worried about pedophiles, but then you’re demanding that kids use their real names so that the pedophiles can find them.

CD: The answer is that they don’t let kids on there. They claim cop-out compliance. In the US 13 year olds really aren’t supposed to use online services. They have to have official permission from their parents and it’s a real palaver. That’s why you often have to enter a birth date that’s more than 13 years in the past to use a bunch of services. It’s for cop-out compliance. It’s totally ineffective at keeping kids off social networks. It also means that social networks can’t design systems that are safe for kids. It’s a complete lose-lose rule.

NP: Finally, the one thing that I’d like to talk about which you touched on earlier is the criminalization of copyright.

CD: Yeah, one of the biggest differences between civil and criminal statutes is how easy they are to parse out. The corollary of ‘ignorance of the law is no defense’ is that the law should be easy to understand. So criminal law tends to be a lot more straightforward to understand than civil law. I mean, if you by accident happen to wander on to a trading floor and inadvertently bought $20M worth of securities, there’s a pretty good chance that you violated security law, because it takes a lot to learn how to trade securities legally. You would never accidentally wander onto a security trading floor and accidentally put $20 million worth of orders for exotic derivatives. Whereas, on the other hand, you know in your soul that punching someone in the nose is wrong. It’s very hard to accidentally assault someone. It’s rare that if you assaulted someone you would’ve done so on the misapprehension that what you were doing was allowed, right?

Copyright is an arcane body of law that most people, including people who work for the entertainment industry, are unfamiliar with, and it’s very easy to get wrong. To give you an example of how easy it is to get wrong, a Dutch composer who wrote the theme song to the anti-piracy commercials that are put before videos discovered that his composition had been used without correct licensing and had been pirated by the people who make anti-piracy videos. So if the people who make anti-piracy videos sometimes get it wrong, then you and I are going to get it wrong all the time. There is no copyright law that is simple and straightforward enough for a 13 year old girl to get right when she makes her Harry Potter fan site while in her parents basement in Brighton and still complex and nuanced enough that Warner Brothers can use it to successfully license Harry Potter to Universal for a Harry Potter theme park.

What we are creating when we criminalize copyright is we’re creating a system where all of us will be violating not just civil rules that might cost us a fine if we get it wrong, but criminal rules. We have a system that is as arcane as finance law, but that is expected to be followed by everybody and when you get it wrong, you go to jail. That’s just a fucking disaster. And the reason everybody has to obey it is because unlike finance law, where it only applies to things people in the finance industry do, copyright law, which used to only relate to something the people in the copyright industry and entertainment industry did, which was handling copies of creative works, is now something that we all do a million times a day because the internet only deals in copies. Every time you click the mouse you make copies…

Where we’ve ended up with copyright law is that everybody violates it all the time, and the penalties keep getting more and more harsh because we have hyperinflation in copying. And rather than deciding, we’ll only apply copyright law to people who are in the industry, even though copying takes place inside and outside of the industry now, we said instead, everybody who copies needs to be governed by industry regulation. I’m here to tell you, nobody is going to be able to obey industry regulation. It’s too complicated for any normal civilian to get right.

NP: I love the story that you had on BoingBoing recently about the 9-year old Finnish girl who had her Winnie the Pooh laptop confiscated by the police.

CD: Yeah. Her laptop was seized because she listened to music the wrong way. The family could show you that she literally did listen to the single the wrong way. Instead of listening to it on the radio, she listened to it on the Pirate Bay. Having listened to it, the family bought the CD, bought two tickets to the concert, bought a t-shirt and so on. And they literally came in and took away her Winnie the Pooh laptop because she listened to the single the wrong way in deciding whether or not to buy the CD.

Before you got here, I just finished a column for The Guardian about this. It’s about the fact that piracy numbers go way down when you can buy the works legally. For example, when there’s a major release like Wreck-It Ralph, that’s a new Disney/Pixar movie that comes out in the US two months before it comes out in the UK, as has just happened, in the UK there’s a lot more piracy of that movie because people can’t buy tickets to it and yet they’ve seen adverts for it, and their friends are talking about it on Facebook and Twitter. All the research shows us that if Wreck-It Ralph were in the cinema at the same time in the US and the UK that piracy on Wreck-It Ralph would go through the floor in the UK. But whenever a study shows this, the industry goes into overdrive to tell you that watching the movie at the wrong time without paying for it is totally wrong and theft. Regardless of whether not piracy numbers go up or down, its theft and it’s just wrong and you shouldn’t be allowed to do it.

And it’s a bit weird; why would they be defending their right not to sell you a ticket to the movies? The reason for that is that there’s two different pipelines for cinematic exhibition. In the US it centers around holidays that are observed in the US, like Thanksgiving when all the blockbuster movies come out. Here it’s centered around holidays that are not observed in the US but are observed in the UK, like bank holidays and half-terms. They want Wreck-It Ralph to come out at half-term here and they want Wreck-It Ralph to come out at Thanksgiving there. They make more money if Wreck-It Ralph comes out that way.

Now, there are lots of profit maximization strategies that look like this. Cinemas charge more for fizzy drinks then you would pay at a grocery store, but the limit on how much they can charge for fizzy drinks is set by the point at which they start to lose more money from people who sneak the drinks in because the prices are too high than they make when people are willing to pay for more for this. You can see that a cinema could actually reduce the number of people who sneak drinks in by paying for more security, but eventually they’ll always hit this limit where the cost of insuring compliance is higher than the profits that they’re making from the profit maximization strategy.

But one way that they can offset that is by convincing us to pay for it. What if instead of the cinemas deciding to hire their own security to stop people from bringing in their own drinks, they instead claim successfully in the halls of power that bringing your own drinks to a movie theater was a form of a theft and that the police should be set outside of the cinemas to stop people from bringing in their own drinks and that the public should pay for huge jail sentences for people who brought in their own drinks…In that case they could actually raise the cost of drinks much higher, right?

That’s essentially what the entertainment has found is that it’s cheaper to pay lobbyists to wander around Whitehall beating their breasts and crying about piracy then it is to bring movies out on the same day and date all around the world, because they can realize those extra profits from delaying release. So this is what they’ve done. They have basically pursued this PR strategy of calling people who would actually buy this if they were willing to sell it to them thieves and then convincing the public to pay for the enforcement…

I get that, but we hear a lot of talk about scroungers. We hear a lot of talk about people who enrich themselves at the public expense. Well, copyright comes at the public expense. Enforcement actions, a city police force locking people up, clogging the courts, all of those things represent an enormous public expense, and when they’re not about protecting your property interests but instead maximizing your profits by creating artificial interventions in the market in the form of the willingness to stop people from availing themselves of entertainment products that you’re not willing to sell them, well then it’s up to us to actually say, okay the free ride stops here.

Because they will continue to take the free ride for as long as we offer it. Corporations are externalizing entities. If a corporation’s duty is to maximize its shareholder revenue, then a corporation that doesn’t pay fines for polluting the water system and doesn’t have to pay money to purify it’s waste, it should, in order to maximize its shareholder value, pollute the water supply, because it’s duty is to not spend one penny more than it has to.

So we need to set up negative incentives. We need to have fines for pollution that are bigger than the cost savings that you get from dumping your waste in the water supply, otherwise these externalizing rational actor corporations will dump their waste in the water supply. Likewise, we need to say to the entertainment industry, our willingness to publicly subsidize your profit maximization strategy goes this far and no further. And I think this far should be not very far, otherwise they will continue to figure out ways to maximize their profits by externalizing their enforcement costs to us.

NP: But what kind of lesson has that taught that 9-year old girl about respect for authority and for respect for the law?

CD: Well, that’s true, but remember the entertainment industry’s job isn’t to maximize worldwide respect for the law, it’s to maximize their profits. If you have a coercion based business model, you can’t individually coerce everyone. You can’t put an enforcer in everyone’s house to stop them from doing it. You have to convince them to police their own actions, and we’ve known for as long as there have been heads on pikes that one way to convince them to police their own actions, especially when that policing comes at their own expense, when they have to issue doing something that would otherwise make them happy is by terrorizing them.

In North Korea, if you deal in the black market and take food that’s above your horrible meager ration you get sent to a prison camp and you’re sent to what’s called a three generation sentence where you, your children, and their children all have to live in the prison camp. The idea there is that it’s impractical to police everyone’s every move. Instead what you do is you terrorize them so that even when they’re starving they don’t buy black market food.

The entertainment industry’s strategy is you make examples out of people. You make examples out of the people that you catch so the people that you can’t catch modify their own behavior because the consequences are so cruel and horrible. Your 9-year old has her Winnie the Pooh laptop taken away. They’re not interested in instilling respect in that 9-year old for the entertainment industry. I think they quite rightly understand that that 9-year old will hate the entertainment industry forever. What they’re interested in is all the other parents of all the other 9-year olds going, ‘Honey, we need to police everything you do with that laptop because otherwise the entertainment industry is going to beat our door down and is going to have the police come and seize your computer.’ They don’t care that they lost her as a customer. They don’t care that she was buying tickets. What they care about is the broader message that they send to everyone else. That is the same message that a head on a pike sends. It’s what every bully does to keep their seat of power. They don’t terrorize retail, they terrorize wholesale. They make examples.

NP: They terrorize on one end, and on the other they’re enforcing compliance with the new three strikes policy.

CD: Well, that’s the same thing right? You don’t disconnect everybody from the internet with a three strikes rule. You disconnect a million people from the internet and the other 69 million people go, ‘We better not do it.’ From the entertainment industry’s perspective, taking 1 million people out of the economy, which is what taking them out of the internet does, is a small price to pay because the rest of us pick up the cost of one million people being taken out of the economy, not them….It’s worth it to them to take a million people out of the economy if the other 69 million can be terrorized into doing it. The same way that a feudal senior who puts one pheasant’s head on a pike loses a pheasant working in the field but gets more work out of all of the pheasants who remain.

NP: I can also see, with the ISPs being forced to snoop on us, that they’re going to have algorithms to filter the footprints of copyrighted movies and throttle them, in the same way that YouTube can sniff the footprints of copyrighted music and have a bot automatically take content down.

CD: Well, this is what Japan has proposed…Because now there’s criminal penalties on copyright, two years in jail for downloading, 10 years in jail for uploading. The entertainment industry has found some untried and unproven technology that’s literally a black box that the ISPs have to install that monitors all traffic and drops any connection that looks like it matches a copyright fingerprint. And again, this is the difference between a system that works well and a system that fails badly. It maybe that content match works really well for figuring out who to give money from ads to, the content ID on YouTube, but it works really badly for randomly disconnecting people who are conducting all of their discourse online. And the most indigent part of this is that the entertainment industry expects ISPs to license this technology from them and pay them an annual licensing fee –– for having a black box that they operate on their network that disconnects their customers from the internet periodically. But again, this is about externalizing costs, right? They’re not bearing the costs, the costs are being born externally by third parties, by the ISPs in this case.

NP: Attached to the copyright issue is the attempt to criminalize links, which affects you and I as journalists. We’ve seen this with the Richard O'Dwyer case, even though that fell apart, and with the Barrett Brown indictment.

CD: Yeah. The best response I ever saw to that was from a guy here in the UK named Chris Raettig...He maintains a personal website that links to horrible corporate anthems. A lot of corporations have songs that they’ve commissioned songwriters to write about them. He linked to the KPMG corporate anthem. Because he humiliated them, KPMG sent him a lawyer letter saying we have a policy on our website that says you are not allowed to link to us without our permission –– can you show us the letter our lawyer sent you giving permission to link to our website? Instead of answering, he went and stood near the KPMG office which I think is in the Docklands with a sign that said, “KPMG this way,” and took a picture of himself and said, I didn’t need anyone’s permission to tell people where your offices were, I don’t need anyone’s permission to tell people where your website is. I mean, describing the factual existence of a thing should not be a tort or a crime…All a link is is a statement about a thing that exists somewhere on the internet. It is not the thing. So regulation of links, mistakes the map for the territory.

NP: And it’s terrifying.

CD: It really is. I mean, it’s an enormous curtailment of speech. It really, really is.



Read part one of my interview with Cory Doctorow. Homeland will be available online and in bookstores on February 5, 2013. Catch Cory on the Homeland book tour (February 5th thru 26). Visit us.macmillan.com/ for a full list of venues and dates. For more on Cory visit craphound.com/. A free copy of Little Brother can be downloaded under a Creative Commons license here.

HI EVERYONE ! how are you today tonight ? i hope it was good week and for you me it was great with my lovely mom <3 i think lot of place is same but is very cold recently lot of rain and snow snow .. cold but beautiful <3 i promise to post sometimes any sexy or nude pics so i do it (image)... more

HI EVERYONE !

how are you today tonight ?

i hope it was good week and for you

me it was great with my lovely mom <3

i think lot of place is same but is very cold recently lot of rain and snow snow .. cold but beautiful <3

i promise to post sometimes any sexy or nude pics

so i do it




hope you will like it

see you ...

Some SuicideGirls have been modeling for the site for 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or even 10 years. We thought it would be fun to show you a look back and some of the SuicideGirls throughout the years.

 This week we bring you Sinnah!
 Sinnah has been a SuicideGirl since 2006 and she has 11 strikingly sexy photo... more

Some SuicideGirls have been modeling for the site for 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or even 10 years. We thought it would be fun to show you a look back and some of the SuicideGirls throughout the years.



This week we bring you Sinnah!


Sinnah has been a SuicideGirl since 2006 and she has 11 strikingly sexy photo sets. Enjoy this gorgeous look back at the stunning Sinnah…



From her first photo set Cursed Cat Ears shot by P_Mod in 2006:







She shows us some of her favorite things in Ptit Biscuit shot by ENte in 2007:





Sinnah looks sexy in this classic black and white set Eglantine shot by Valium in 2008:





Sinnah and Dwam kick some Slytherin ass in Strip Potter shot by P_Mod in 2008:







She fights other SGs for a coveted tattoo appointment in Battle Royale shot by P_Mod in 2008:



Sinnah meets her cartoon boyfriend in Page Blanche shot by P_Mod in 2008:





She makes your dreams come true in her set Dreamlands shot by Nemesis in 2009:





Sinnah gets some fresh air in the sexy set Blinded by the Lights shot by Mergana in 2010:







Shes smokin hot in her set Answered Prayers shot by Albertine in 2010:





This French beauty is just waking up in her set Toit Brulant, Petite Chatte shot by Waikiki in 2011:







There is no Love Lost in her sensual set shot by Cherry in 2011:







Hope you enjoyed the lovely look back at the gorgeous SuicideGirl Sinnah! Be sure to keep an eye out for a new set coming soon to member review!

 Become a member TODAY for only $4 a month (if you sign up for a year) to see all 11 nude pin-up photo sets of Sinnah - http://suicidegirls.com/join/


I'd just like to take a second here to show my complete and utter excitement over the past day or so, because I am in awe of the curvy lovelies that have gone up... all in a row. So yeah. Just. Thank you girls for being awesome. xo