(image) by Blogbot (image) (image) (image) Artist / SG Member Name: Rachelle Suicide Mission Statement: Since I was a child, I've always loved to draw. I've always been attracted to traditional tattoo art; the bold, clean lines and contrast. The designs looked good 100 years ago and still look... more

by Blogbot







Artist / SG Member Name: Rachelle Suicide

Mission Statement: Since I was a child, I've always loved to draw. I've always been attracted to traditional tattoo art; the bold, clean lines and contrast. The designs looked good 100 years ago and still look good today; I love the timelessness. Some of the designs I paint are original drawings. I've done a few commissioned pieces, which are a fun challenge. I have a huge library of art reference books (I've been collecting for years, and have spent a small fortune!) and I love getting to utilize it. Other times, I re-draw vintage tattoo flash and add my own style to it.



Medium: Pen, watercolors..


Aesthetic: Bold, colorful, tattoo-flash-esque, pinup ladies, birds, flowers, anything and everything really.



Notable Achievements: I am self-taught, no art school or classes. I sold my first painting last year. It's pretty fantastic to make a little money doing something you absolutely love.

Why We Should Care: Everyone should make art, it's cathartic. To be honest, I would paint whether anyone cared or not.

I Want Me Some: Send me a message on SG or email me at RachelleSuicide@live.com and we can work something out.









***

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by Steven-Elliot Altman (SG Member: Steven_Altman) Our Fiction Friday serialized novel, The Killswitch Review, is a futuristic murder mystery with killer sociopolitical commentary (and some of the best sex scenes we’ve ever read!). Written by bestselling sci-fi author Steven-Elliot Altman (with Diane... more

by Steven-Elliot Altman (SG Member: Steven_Altman)

Our Fiction Friday serialized novel, The Killswitch Review, is a futuristic murder mystery with killer sociopolitical commentary (and some of the best sex scenes we’ve ever read!). Written by bestselling sci-fi author Steven-Elliot Altman (with Diane DeKelb-Rittenhouse), it offers a terrifying postmodern vision in the tradition of Blade Runner and Brave New World...

By the year 2156, stem cell therapy has triumphed over aging and disease, extending the human lifespan indefinitely. But only for those who have achieved Conscientious Citizen Status. To combat overpopulation, the U.S. has sealed its borders, instituted compulsory contraception and a strict one child per couple policy for those who are permitted to breed, and made technology-assisted suicide readily available. But in a world where the old can remain vital forever, America’s youth have little hope of prosperity.

Jason Haggerty is an investigator for Black Buttons Inc, the government agency responsible for dispensing personal handheld Kevorkian devices, which afford the only legal form of suicide. An armed “Killswitch” monitors and records a citizen’s final moments — up to the point where they press a button and peacefully die. Post-press review agents — “button collectors” — are dispatched to review and judge these final recordings to rule out foul play.

When three teens stage an illegal public suicide, Haggerty suspects their deaths may have been murders. Now his race is on to uncover proof and prevent a nationwide epidemic of copycat suicides. Trouble is, for the first time in history, an entire generation might just decide they’re better off dead.

(Catch up with the previous installments of Killswitch – see links below – then continue reading after the jump…)



[THE KILLSWITCH REVIEW – CHAPTER FIVE, PART ONE]

[FALSE IDENT]

[Previous Chapter]

Haggerty considered stopping downstairs to order a new black box — it wouldn’t take long, as his requiem was on file — but the Dragon had sent word that he was to get himself to State with no further delays. And the more he thought about it, the more inappropriate registering a lost box seemed right now. How would he explain it?

A huge mass of people overflowed the quad in front of State Facility Four. From the ramp, Haggerty could detect Clone Jesus fans holding burning candles, and heard the band’s music blaring from hundreds of coms set at maximum audio. A cadre of what Haggerty guessed to be angry parents milled about on one side beneath a SAVE OUR CHILDREN FROM CLONE JESUS! banner. Nearby, another group gathered under a banner proclaiming INDIVISIBLE! —The term niggled at Haggerty’s mind for a moment until a connection was made. Haggerty remembered that the Indivisibles were the back-to-nature cult founded by Svoboda, the character Tanner had mentioned that morning. Nice to know the Religious Right weren’t the only extremists represented in the somber crowd. Interspersed throughout were what appeared to be ordinary Conscientious Citizens who likely were neither parents, Clone Jesus fans, nor political extremists — people with the dazed look of accident victims driven from their climate-controlled compartments into the torpid streets in search of fellow witnesses of the tragedy to share their grief with.

Yet most of the country was still asleep. Haggerty recalled Doug’s words uneasily. If throngs this size and variety were forming in the middle of this stifling night, what would morning bring, when another twenty-two million NewVadans awoke to endless repeats of the triple press — to say nothing of the rest of the country, the rest of the world? As the review agent assigned to those presses, it was his responsibility to find answers and prevent disorder.

Elsa gained clearance and slotted into the parking structure adjacent to precinct headquarters. Since there was no direct access to the building, they were forced to find the street entrance. They made their way through the crowd to where soldiers in riot gear ringed the facility’s perimeter. Haggerty displayed his BBI identiplate to a harried sergeant, who waved him and Elsa through to the lobby.

The hypersteel walls, once gleaming silver, were now gray, pitted, and scored. Police departments had been consolidated into statewide agencies in the middle of the twenty-first century, and there was little money for noncritical expenses. Although the state and federal governments both contributed funds, there were too many cities with similar claims and not enough credits to go around. Consequently, police were dependent on local taxes for their operating budgets. Credits were tightly allocated, resulting in massive layoffs and the freezing of police wages and benefits. Forensic labs had been closed and precincts consolidated. The NewVada precinct façade had gone uncleaned for decades, while carpeting inside was threadbare and the waiting rooms all had broken furniture not likely to be fixed or replaced soon.

But the city’s police force boasted state-of-the-art security equipment, weapons, and surveillance, and the guard on duty was protected by a permaglass partition that could stop a rocket.

“What can I do for you?” she asked briskly as Haggerty and Elsa approached.

“Review agent Haggerty, BBI,” he told her. “Here to meet Detective Woyzeck.”

“He’s expecting you,” the guard said. She was about to buzz them through the security gate when her attention riveted on the lobby viewscreen.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Not another one.”

Haggerty and Elsa followed her gaze.

A boy stood on a rooftop, scattered lights from hypersteel towers glimmering behind him in the black night, a beatific smile on his face and an earset just visible beneath his shaggy brown hair. He couldn’t be more than twelve years old. “But I understand,” he said dreamily. “Maybe someday you will, too.” He stretched his arms wide, closed his eyes, leaned backward, and tumbled off the roof to the beltway below.

“We believe this footage was somehow sent directly to Channel 115 from the victim’s com,” a voice droned as a smiling picture of the boy filled the screen. “Timothy was a sixth-grader at NewVada Primary Education Facility 29. He had recently been approved for a full athletic scholarship with complete bio-enhancement, to the Mid-level Education Facility of his choice.” The screen split to include a live shot of the boy’s body splayed against the beltway, blood pooling around him.

“Don’t know how the kid got the roof door access code,” the guard said, returning her attention to Haggerty and Elsa. “Or the other jumpers, either.”

“There were more?” Haggerty asked with growing dread.

“Half a dozen so far,” the guard said grimly.

Doug’s worst-case scenario had started. The sooner Haggerty could talk to the band, the sooner he could get them to stop what was happening.

The guard pulled herself together. “You’re assistant a ’droid?”

Haggerty nodded confirmation.

“You can enter through the security archway to the left,” she instructed him. “But your assistant’s powerpack will raise hell with the scanners. I’ll open the gate for her.”

The guard depressed several buttons on her station console and Haggerty passed through the archway, peering at the elaborate sensory display that was capable of identifying and, if necessary, detaining or stunning him. The guard then drew the gate aside just enough for Elsa to squeeze through, and manually searched her for weapons before clearing her to join Haggerty and returning to the viewcast.

Detective Woyzeck met them, moving sluggishly like someone who’d downed too many bottles of KeepAwake in too short a time.

“We gotta stop meeting like this,” he greeted Haggerty. “Wanna guess who I just had to fend off?”

“Antonio Stelwyn and our new buddy Primrose.”

“You got it in one. What do you say the two of us retire right now and get the hell out of here?”

“Where do I turn in my identiplate?” Haggerty deadpanned. “Have you gotten a lead on the other two kids?” he asked.

“They were carrying false ident and there’s nothing to tag them with yet,” Woyzeck said, leading them toward one of the unoccupied interview rooms. “That’s the problem with kids — no priors, and if they haven’t applied for licenses or work visas, they slip through the cracks. Sure the Feds can break the Privacy Act and order a warrant for a DNA trace, but so far they’ve denied our requests. No idents off the boxes?”

“They were black market units, serial numbers thoroughly effaced.”

Haggerty took a seat in one of the room’s mismatched chairs.

“Why am I not surprised?” Woyzeck sighed, seating himself on the opposite side of the scarred wooden table.

“At least four JCs committed copycat presses after the viewcast,” Haggerty said, “and I hear you’ve had reports of a half dozen illegal suicides. BBI’s nervous it’s going to get worse.”

Haggerty explained contagion theory briefly to Woyzeck, then asked. “What charges are you holding the band members on?”

“Band and their manager, Shintag Lake,” Woyzeck corrected. “Who’s a real shithead. Has his lawyers all over us threatening illegal detainment suits. Chief gave him the main conference room upstairs and a couple of phone lines. They’re currently being held on three felony-two manslaughter counts of assisting an illegal suicide and a violation of the ordinance making it illegal to conduct a suicide for entertainment purposes or to host or promote such events.” He grimaced. “But the charges may not hold up, because although they seemed to condone the presses they did not assist them, and the language of the ordinance is weak and has never been tested before — as their lawyers rudely pointed out.”

“What do the band members say?” Haggerty asked.

“The lead singer, Zephyr, pled the Fifth — right after he told me to fuck off. Wiseass. Then the rest of the band did the same. Except the bass player, kid named Cherub who actually seems like he gives a crap. Lake claims they knew the kids but had no prior knowledge of their intentions.”

“How long can you hold them?”

“Not long with the amount of pull they have,” Woyzeck said in disgust. “It’s gonna be out of our hands soon, anyway. Feds are on their way. Should be here within the hour.”

“I’d like to talk to the bass player and the manager,” Haggerty said.

Woyzeck chuckled. “Mind telling me how I broach that to my boss?”

“What if I offered you a few more charges, like that the minors were using illegal narcotics while partying with the band. Think that’d get me in?”

“You have recorded evidence?”

Haggerty nodded.

“When could we have it?”

Instantly, Haggerty thought, scratching the back of his neck. They just needed to show Elsa to the appropriate interface. But right now, the recordings were his only leverage.

“I’ll have BBI send it over the minute I complete my interviews,” he said. “I realize the time to build your case is limited.”

Woyzeck scrutinized Haggerty’s face with the skill of an accomplished poker player, his expression giving away nothing. Whatever he was looking for, he seemed satisfied he’d found it.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll go talk to the chief.”

“Thanks,” Haggerty said. “Tell him I’m just interested in learning if they knew how the kids came into possession of the black boxes.”

Once Woyzeck had left the room, Elsa turned to Haggerty.

Keep it private, Elsa, he linked. The interview rooms are probably under full surveillance.

Then you do realize that those recordings are still uploaded in my storage banks.

Of course, but I don’t want Woyzeck to know yet.

Haggerty fingered the dead girl’s keycard through his pocket. He needed to get the damned thing decontaminated, investigate its info, and make sure he gave it to Woyzeck in a way that wouldn’t land him in trouble.

* * *

Excerpt from The Killswitch Review, published by Yard Dog Press. Copyright 2011 Steven-Elliot Altman.

Steven-Elliot Altman is a bestselling author, screenwriter, and videogame developer. He won multiple awards for his online role playing game, 9Dragons. His novels include Captain America is Dead, Zen in the Art of Slaying Vampires, Batman: Fear Itself, Batman: Infinite Mirror, The Killswitch Review, The Irregulars, and Deprivers. His writing has been compared to that of Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Michael Crichton and Philip K. Dick, and he has collaborated with world class writers such as Neil Gaiman, Michael Reaves, Harry Turtledove and Dr. Janet Asimov. He’s also the editor of the critically acclaimed anthology The Touch, and a contributor to Shadows Over Baker Street, a Hugo Award winning anthology of Sherlock Holmes meets H.P. Lovecraft stories.

Steven also bares ink on his body, and is bi, as in bi-coastal, between NYC and LA. He’s currently hard at work writing and directing his latest videogame Cursed Love, an online free to play gothic horror RPG from Dark Hermit Studios, set in Victorian London. Think Sherlock Holmes, Jack The Ripper and Dorian Gray mercilessly exploit the cast of Twilight. Friend Cursed Love (Official Closed Beta) on facebook and you can have fun playing out this tawdry, tragic romance with Steven while the game is being beta tested!

Diane DeKelb-Rittehouse spent several years in Manhattan as an actress before marrying her college sweetheart and returning to the Philadelphia area where she had been born. Diane first worked with Steven-Elliot Altman when they created the acclaimed, Publisher’s Weekly Starred-Review anthology The Touch: Epidemic of the Millennium, in which her story “Gifted” appeared. Diane has published a number of critically acclaimed short stories, most notably in the science fiction, murder, and horror genres. Her young adult fantasy novel, Fareie Rings: The Book of Forests, is now available in stores or online.

Interested in buying a printed copy of The Killswitch Review? Well, Steve’s publisher Yard Dog Press was kind enough to put up a special page where SuicideGirls can get a special discount and watch a sexy trailer. Just follow this link to KillswitchReview.com and click on the SG logo.

* * *

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Fiction Friday: The Killswitch Review – Chapter Two, Part Two
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by Yashar Ali (image) [Xtine in Dr. X-Girlfriend] My friend Karen (all names changed to protect privacy) was confused and frustrated when she called me on a Friday night. About a year ago, she met a guy, Michael, through work. They met a few times for drinks with colleagues and then one night, she met... more

by Yashar Ali


[Xtine in Dr. X-Girlfriend]

My friend Karen (all names changed to protect privacy) was confused and frustrated when she called me on a Friday night.

About a year ago, she met a guy, Michael, through work. They met a few times for drinks with colleagues and then one night, she met him for dinner, which ended with the two of them “hooking up” (whatever that means).

She liked Michael a lot, and wanted to see him again.

After they had dinner, a week went by when Karen got a text message from Michael, “What’s up? How are you?”

She was happy; he wanted to hang out again.

Now, Karen wishes that was the last time she ever heard from him.

As she explained the manner in which she and Michael were communicating, I realized Karen was dealing with a situation several other women very recently talked to me about.

Since their last night together, Michael kept in touch with Karen on a regular basis. Every couple of weeks, Karen received a text or email from him. The messages always started out the same way, “What’s up?”

Karen would always respond.

“How are you?”

“Good, what’s up with you?”

Karen would proceed to fill him in on her life and Michael would always respond with the same short answer, “That’s cool.”

After one or two text messages, Michael would usually disappear. But a couple of weeks later, he would show up again. Sometimes their conversations would go deeper — ten minutes of texting back and forth. Karen would find hope in those longer texting sessions, thinking that he was finally engaging with her.

Michael would sometimes get more creative, giving Karen the impression he cared about her and her life.

“What’s up? How was your holiday weekend?”

“What’s up? Saw your Facebook post, so funny.”

A couple times he even texted, “We should have dinner soon.”

But every time Karen agreed to dinner, Michael would tell her about his really busy month at work, delaying the need to schedule a real date. Then, he would never follow up.

This faux-relationship wasn’t going anywhere and Karen was left feeling confused and frustrated about Michael’s intentions.

But these sporadic texts weren’t even about sex. Michael never even proposed any sort of rendezvous. And Karen’s motivation was certainly not friendship. “I have enough friends,” she said.

“He’s not even trying to sleep with me, what’s the point of all this?”

I told her, “Karen you’re being e-maintained”

“Is that an official term?” she laughed.

The week before, I had come up with the term as a joke, but the idea actually made sense. Michael was maintaining her — keeping her, in his mind, satisfied — and he was doing it electronically.

My friend Julia was dealing with the same issue. She was subject to these short, rapid bursts of texting with men on a consistent basis and she always got her hopes up that something was moving forward, but there was nothing. No substance at all.

“Are these actual adult men with responsibilities or are they children? I can’t figure it out,” she said to me.

I’ve always been fascinated, and disgusted, by the notion that in order to be happy, women need to be “maintained” in a sexual and/or romantic relationship. This kind of treatment of women is on par with our taking care of a car in need of an oil change or dealing with a wood deck in the backyard in need of a coat of varnish.

The concept of maintaining women is billed, through the conditioning our culture imposes on men, as a solution to keep women from being hysterical. According to mainstream social ideas, women are illogical and crazy when it comes to relationships and dating. Men engage in conscious maintenance as a way to “calm” women down so they can get what they want from their women partners (sex, attention, etc.).

This is why so many men are in a rush to cram their love and affection into holidays, birthdays, anniversaries. We don’t teach men or boys that day-to-day affection is equally, if not more important, than special dates.

And what has always been alarming to me is that this so-called maintenance of women has defined behavior that shouldn’t be considered “extra” in any kind of relationship or partnership. Acts of maintenance consist of behavior that should be inherent and the foundation of all relationships: basic human respect, affection and attention.

So, if men are taught about certain critical steps to keeping women happy, “duties” that are treated not as normal behavior, but as annoying, time-consuming steps, how does this make women feel?

My friends, who are or were dealing with e-maintaining, or even just dealing with good-old-fashioned maintaining, are left in a strange, emotional limbo. Women who are “maintained” by men, electronic or otherwise, are made to feel legitimate for short periods of time and then left to question their position with their partners, and sometimes themselves.

Are these women supposed to be happy with a guy who stays in touch every-so-often on his terms? Are they supposed to be satisfied when their spouse buys them an expensive piece of jewelry or remembers their anniversary? Even though their love and/or attention come in waves — inconsistent and sometimes abrupt — are my women friends ungrateful for expecting something more, something more substantial, something more basic? Does any form of maintaining make up for days, weeks, months, years of emotional silence from men?

We’ve always conditioned men to maintain women — this isn’t something new. What’s different is this “maintenance” has become completely electronic for some men, and the men doing the “maintaining” aren’t seeing or even making an effort to see the women they connecting with. Men are just texting, emailing or using social media to give the impression they are checking in or they care — in order to maintain these women.

For these men, the definition of “maintenance” has shifted from traditional strategies like sending gifts and engaging in the occasional dinner, drinks or movie, to this incredibly convenient and empty form of communication based on text messages, emails, and social media: e-maintaining. And it is a mode of communication that isn’t even based in reality.

For some of my women friends, this kind of texting/emailing communication was keeping them engaged until they discovered what e-maintaining really means.

Some of the men I spoke with didn’t even realize their e-maintaining of women was a pattern of behavior. Most of them admitted to doing it when they were bored: waiting at the doctor’s office, in bed at night when they couldn’t sleep, at the airport.

But many of these men knew exactly what they were doing.

“You can’t write about this, you are literally ruining the greatest scam of the century,” my friend Carlos told me over breakfast.

“What’s the scam?”

“I can keep these women satisfied by just texting or emailing. I don’t have to do anything else.”

“It’s like walking a dog, as soon as you do it, they just calm down,” a progressive friend (more on that later) told me via email that same day.

So why not move forward, especially if some of these women are willing to sleep with them?

“Its about options, possibilities,” a friend added.

“I do this because I don’t want to hear her bitching about how I just call about sex, so this way I have a history of having stayed in touch.”

My friend Josh gave an example, “Last Thanksgiving when everyone was out of town, I had someone to hookup with, we even went to the movies.”

In this age of digital communication (texting, Facebook, email), our way of connecting has obviously become more frivolous. While our random, electronic check-ins with friends are usually made with good intentions, the men who engage in e-maintaining don’t want to be friends with the women they text and email (the women don’t want friendship either), and more significantly, their texting is not filled with good intentions.

So, is e-maintaining ultimately about men and women placing different weight on communication? Do women believe that communication is about moving forward — are they being practical and mature? And do men see communication in this form in a more flippant manner, that it doesn’t necessarily lend legitimacy to their desired outcomes?

Is e-maintaining more evidence of gender imbalance in our culture? Does this virtual maintenance of women show the lack of respect our culture requires or expects men to have for women?

Last week, I checked in with Karen to see if she was still pining for Michael and frustrated by his e-maintaining.

She has moved on.

And from now on, Karen’s policy is very simple when it comes to communicating with the men she is interested in, “Where’s the beef?”

The lack of substance in an e-maintained relationship no longer satisfies her.

***

Yashar Ali is a Los Angeles-based columnist, commentator, and political veteran whose writings about women, gender inequality, political heroism, and society are showcased on his website, The Current Conscience. Please follow him on Twitter and join him on Facebook. 

He will be soon releasing our first short e-book, entitled, A Message To Women From A Man: You Are Not Crazy — How We Teach Men That Women Are Crazy and How We Convince Women To Ignore Their Instincts. If you are interested and want to be notified when the book is released, please click here to sign-up.

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by Oogie A column which highlights Suicide Girls and their fave groups. (image) [Sash Suicide by Cameron Stewart] This week, Oogie Suicide paints us a picture of what goes down in SG's Fan Art Group. Members: 2,640 / Comments: 37,886 WHY DO YOU LOVE IT?: Being an artist, I love to look at what... more

by Oogie

A column which highlights Suicide Girls and their fave groups.


[Sash Suicide by Cameron Stewart]

This week, Oogie Suicide paints us a picture of what goes down in SG's Fan Art Group.

Members: 2,640 / Comments: 37,886

• WHY DO YOU LOVE IT?: Being an artist, I love to look at what other people can do with their artistic talents. Whether it be with pen, pencil, acrylic, oil, watercolor, spray paint, Photoshop, or whatever else they can think of to use to make something beautiful. I also visit the group for inspiration. I've always wanted to use Photoshop, but have never gotten the chance to, but I was introduced to many other new and different styles by so many different artists that I am just dying to try. I also love this group because it gives me a chance to show the ladies that I draw my fan art of them! I love doing fan art, and I love making people happy.




• DISCUSSION TIP: Open your mind and go to inspire others, go to reinforce others, or just go to look at some amazing art

• BEST RANDOM QUOTE: "Holy shit...Is it wrong that I want to grab people nearby in the coffee shop to show these to them?! You've chosen some total babesicles, too!" – Lyxzen Suicide commenting on the above piece of art of by Cameron Stewart.


• MOST HEATED DISCUSSION THREAD: I believe the most heated, or in this case the topic with the most positive feedback on their art, is the art by SG’s very own, Cameron Stewart. His artwork can be seen in this group, and also in the SuicideGirls Comics.


• WHO’S WELCOME TO JOIN?: Anyone with artistic talent, anyone that has appreciation for art, people who want to be drawn, really anyone at all.

[Ackley Suicide by Cameron Stewart]


***
Related Posts:
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SuicideGirls Group Therapy: Gallows on Pen Pals
SuicideGirls Group Therapy - Satya on Hip-Hop
SuicideGirls' Group Therapy - Tovi on Veggie


SuicideGirls' Group Therapy - Aadie on Suicide Boys
SuicideGirls' Group Therapy - Haydin on Ballet
SuicideGirls' Group Therapy – Psyche on Slut Pride
SuicideGirls' Group Therapy – Thistle on Yuppie Scum
SuicideGirls' Group Therapy – Eden on Tattoo
SuicideGirls' Group Therapy – Damsel on Dreadlocks


SuicideGirls' Group Therapy - Chrysis on Itty Bitty Titty Committee


SuicideGirls' Group Therapy - Otoki on Feminists
SuicideGirls' Group Therapy - Zephyr on Doctor Who
SuicideGirls' Group Therapy - Ryker on Harry Potter
SuicideGirls' Group Therapy - Bradley on The Kitchen
SuicideGirls' Group Therapy - Apple on All Your Base Are Belong To Us
SuicideGirls' Group Therapy - Setsuka on Ass Appreciation
SuicideGirls' Group Therapy - Noir on The Kitchen
SuicideGirls’ Group Therapy - Exning on Body Mods
SuicideGirls’ Group Therapy - Ceres on Girls Only
SuicideGirls’ Group Therapy - Frolic on Celeb Worship
SuicideGirls' Group Therapy - Cheri on Skateboarders
SuicideGirls' Group Therapy - Noir on SG Military
SuicideGirls' Group Therapy - Exning on Weight Loss
SuicideGirls' Group Therapy - Aadie on Cute Overload
SuicideGirls' Group Therapy - Eevie, Luffy, and Praesepe on SG420
SuicideGirls' Group Therapy - All on Urban Art
SuicideGirls' Group Therapy - Clio on Hardcore Music
SuicideGirls' Group Therapy - Epiic on Hirsute
SuicideGirls' Group Therapy - Tarion on Atheists
SuicideGirls' Group Therapy - Rambo on Photography
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by Oogie A column which highlights Suicide Girls and their fave groups. (image) [Sash Suicide by Cameron Stewart] This week, Oogie Suicide paints us a picture of what goes down in SG's Fan Art Group. Members: 2,640 / Comments: 37,886 WHY DO YOU LOVE IT?: Being an artist, I love to look at what... more

by Oogie

A column which highlights Suicide Girls and their fave groups.


[Sash Suicide by Cameron Stewart]

This week, Oogie Suicide paints us a picture of what goes down in SG's Fan Art Group.

Members: 2,640 / Comments: 37,886

• WHY DO YOU LOVE IT?: Being an artist, I love to look at what other people can do with their artistic talents. Whether it be with pen, pencil, acrylic, oil, watercolor, spray paint, Photoshop, or whatever else they can think of to use to make something beautiful. I also visit the group for inspiration. I've always wanted to use Photoshop, but have never gotten the chance to, but I was introduced to many other new and different styles by so many different artists that I am just dying to try. I also love this group because it gives me a chance to show the ladies that I draw my fan art of them! I love doing fan art, and I love making people happy.




• DISCUSSION TIP: Open your mind and go to inspire others, go to reinforce others, or just go to look at some amazing art

• BEST RANDOM QUOTE: "Holy shit...Is it wrong that I want to grab people nearby in the coffee shop to show these to them?! You've chosen some total babesicles, too!" – Lyxzen Suicide commenting on the above piece of art of by Cameron Stewart.


• MOST HEATED DISCUSSION THREAD: I believe the most heated, or in this case the topic with the most positive feedback on their art, is the art by SG’s very own, Cameron Stewart. His artwork can be seen in this group, and also in the SuicideGirls Comics.


• WHO’S WELCOME TO JOIN?: Anyone with artistic talent, anyone that has appreciation for art, people who want to be drawn, really anyone at all.

[Ackley Suicide by Cameron Stewart]


***
Related Posts:
SuicideGirls Group Therapy: Jensen on Online Dating
SuicideGirls Group Therapy: Gallows on Pen Pals
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I first learned about Dito Montiel when his first film, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints came out. It was notable for a cast including Robert Downey Jr., Shia Labeouf and Channing Tatum before they broke out, and Rosario Dawson who was already a star. Based on Montiel’s own book about growing up in... more

I first learned about Dito Montiel when his first film, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints came out. It was notable for a cast including Robert Downey Jr., Shia Labeouf and Channing Tatum before they broke out, and Rosario Dawson who was already a star. Based on Montiel’s own book about growing up in and leaving New York, it introduced Montiel’s voice to Hollywood, particularly in dialogue that’s more like real people who have trouble articulating, rather than polished Hollywood screenplay.

His next movie was the studio action movie Fighting, also starring Tatum as an underground street fighter. Now that I knew who Montiel was, I stopped when I saw a Dito Montiel CD in a bin at the massive used record store Amoeba. The album had sophisticated music, layering different instruments with harmony and telling stories about, again, growing up. Montiel is also a painter. Tatum again stars in Montiel’s third film, The Son of No One. He plays a cop who gets assigned to the precinct of the housing project where he grew up. Tracy Morgan plays a stark, dramatic role as his childhood friend, now in rough shape from a traumatic childhood of abuse. Al Pacino plays police chief with ties to the old case.

Montiel is now a west coaster like me. This is the third film I’ve had the opportunity to interview him for. Despite the serious subjects of his films and the raw style in which he portrays them, he always seems like lovable friendly guy. He even got a bit shy when I started asking about his music this time.

Suicide Girls: What is the idea behind your “A movie by Dito Montiel” credit?

Dito Montiel: It always says that on my movies. I like movies. “Film” feels a little corny for me.

SG: If I watched all three back to back I’d notice that. I didn’t remember.

DM: It’s okay. I like movies. I’m so uptight, it’s like “film” I feel like ughhh. Like a "novel." It’s a book!

SG: What is your unique vision for stories?

DM: I don’t feel like any of my movies are particularly unique. Maybe the characters are a little more real than we’re used to seeing, in my opinion. One of my favorite movies is 25th Hour. I love it so much. When I saw that movie, and I’ve yet to sit in a room with three people that agree with me, but I love it and I thought that’s a movie where Ed Norton in it is going away to jail for five years or something. He’s totally slowly having a terrible time. I see movies all the time where people say, “I’m going to do 10 years. I can do that standing on my head.” I don’t know who does one day standing on their head. If I were going to prison for a day, I’d be devastated. Jake, my editor, said we should have made this movie about garbagemen because then people wouldn’t throw the cop thriller into it, but that is very cliché in a way. This is really just the story of a bunch of people that really wish they could push everything right back into the closet and life could be good again. That was the realness that I was trying to make.

SG: Was it really that good for them before?

DM: It was better than this, which is the way I see life sometimes. As long as something terrible isn’t happening, something terrible isn’t happening.

SG: If this is based on people you knew growing up, was there also a murder in your community?

DM: Yeah, there were a few but in particular, the thing that sparked this story, of course it’s fiction, but in my real life, I used to hang out at the Ravenswood Projects which is right next to Queensbridge Projects. We filmed in Queensbridge. Ravenswood is not as picaresque. We used to hang out in a guy’s apartment there, a kid, we were all 14, him and his grandmother. It was a weird situation. This one guy used to come in and terrorize us a lot. He was 18, a crackhead named Hanky in real life, like in the movie this guy Hanky. He used to come in and one day he got killed. Not by us, someone killed him and he was just dead in the hallway and I remember the police were out there eating sandwiches, smoking, joking and taking him away. My friend Vinny at the time looked at me and said, “Nobody cares. Nobody cares about anybody here.” That strange notion stuck with me. It just stayed with me and I thought this is a little world where we really believed no one cared inside these walls what happened. So in the movie there’s a kid Vinny who says, “Nobody cares, just throw him in the garbage.” There’s a cop who says, “Nobody cares, not a single fucking person.” In the end, “No one cares about an old cop.” That notion was the seed for the movie.

SG: And you feel it’s gotten worse, if things were better then?

DM: In real life? Well, that’s interesting because when I first came to Los Angeles, a friend of mine that I grew up with was on skid row out here, funny enough, living there. I went down there and I thought well, skid row in L.A. sounds better than the hard times in New York because there’s no winter. But when I saw skid row out here, I thought, “Oh my God, there’s about 20 blocks in downtown Los Angeles no one cares about.” I’m thinking people are probably getting raped, murdered, robbed and we don’t hear about it. Meanwhile someone gets robbed somewhere else, it’s headline news. I’m not trying to make a big political statement but there are pockets of the world. Maybe now it’s a little more broadcast, or less, or people are a little bit aware of what’s going on, with this Occupy thing. But there are a lot of people that believe that no one cares about them and they might be right.

SG: How was this Sundance different for you than 2006?

DM: I don’t know, less free stuff. [Laughs] Look, I wouldn’t be doing this stuff if it wasn’t for Sundance. They took me into the labs back then for my first movie. It sounds corny and I’m not trying to be an advocate for it, but I can’t not be. To this day, I contact Michelle Satter who runs it about anything, from “do you know a good DP” to “I need a cool actor that does this” to “hey, will you get someone to read my script?” Within four hours, Frank Pierson who wrote Dog Day Afternoon or someone of that caliber will write me back because Michelle contacted them. He’s like, “I’ll read your script, I’ll give you some notes this week.” It’s like wow, what a beautiful family. It is Wonkaville so I’m a big fan. It was just as fun.

SG: What about being a closing night film as opposed to your debut five years ago?

DM: It’s all nuts. I get more time to screw around I guess.

SG: But are there higher expectations the second time you’re there?

DM: You know, I think the only thing that is a little scary is I think independent films are really hard, getting harder and harder. From what little I know, I don’t know much about movies, but it’s tough to make a movie. Even five years ago, I think if you had the cast that I have, everyone would think you made at least a $25 million movie. They don’t believe we made a $5 million movie with this cast but we did. And it took this cast to make a $5 million movie because it doesn’t have explosions and it doesn’t have chase scenes or supernatural. It’s very honest and real. It’s the kind of movie I love. So I think sometimes maybe people aren’t ready for that yet. They think, “Oh, what’s this independent movie doing here with this cast?” Maybe that’s a little different when you’re the closing night film with this. The expectations are “what kind of movie is this?”

SG: You do music also.

DM: Well, I used to.

SG: Not anymore?

DM: I mean, I’ll pick up a guitar here and there.

SG: I have one of your albums. Was your music also autobiographical?

DM: Yeah, of course. That’s funny.

SG: How did you learn the layers of sounds and harmonies and different instruments?

DM: I learned from friends, feelings, the same way. It’s all art. Writing movies is not that different.

SG: You’ve said that before, “It’s all art.”

DM: It is. More musicians should make movies and more movie guys should make music.

SG: Whenever a big musician comes into movies, they get a lot of shit for it. Madonna still can’t get taken seriously.

DM: Right, well, because you’re lucky enough to be a superstar, that’s a good problem. Don’t worry, when you keep failing at things like I have, nobody knows you’re reinventing yourself.

SG: Is it all movies and books for you now?

DM: That keeps me occupied and I like it. I love to write and it all stems from that. Music was always writing to me. I was not a good singer. I was a writer.

SG: Maybe I enjoy hearing singers who aren’t perfect. Like on The Sing-Off, the ones who get kicked off are the ones I like.

DM: Oh, me too.

SG: Because they don’t sound like everyone else!

DM: I’m with you all the way. I’ll always be like, “I love that guy.” And everyone’s like, “He was bad.” I’m like, “But everyone else is perfect.” In movies too. Acting, I love the imperfections.

SG: Is the internet a good thing for art? What would you have done if you’d been exposed to something this massive growing up?

DM: Boy, it’s gotta be scary. It’s scary now. I don’t know. It’s a weird thing. It’s so odd, I’m glued to it like everyone else. It’s a strange thing because it’s really great that you can do anything and put it out there, and people will see it. I started playing in a band when I was 14 years old. We had no dreams of anything. Nothing. We used to play at a club called the A7, Avenue A and 7th Street downtown in New York. That was it. I’d never even think we’d play anything bigger than that and we didn’t aspire to do anything bigger than that. There was something really beautiful and pure about that. Maybe the internet changes that because I don’t even go to Yahoo or CNN.com anymore. You go to Facebook and you find out how everything pertains to you. “Hey Dito, there was a hurricane today in Miami.” Oh wow, there was a hurricane today. So it’s odd but in a way I guess it’s the way it is. Look, it’s the most powerful thing in the world.

SG: You talk about the A7 club, theoretically now someone in California could see your performance at the A7. But maybe because of all that access, someone in New York wouldn’t have wandered into the A7 and seen you live.

DM: Yeah. I’m really happy I grew up the way I grew up, as crazy and wacky as some of it was. I like it. But it’s impossible. People 30 years older than me when I was a kid would say the same things about the ‘50s or the ‘60s. That’s just the way of the world.

SG: What is your creative life like now?

DM: I write all the time, same as always. No one’s ever handed me anything so I never think anyone’s going to hand me anything so I just write because boy, would I love somebody to give me Indiana Jones 4, but they’re not gonna. So I better write my thing and somehow my stuff always brings me right back to the place I grew up in.

SG: Well, they brought you Fighting. Do studios still come to you?

DM: Yeah, of course. I’m talking with a couple now about some things. I know that making a movie is at least a year of my life. I obsess to a point of craziness. Every musical note, every edit, me and my editor literally sit and I don’t leave. I go to extras casting, I’m just kind of nuts about it and I love it. You’ve got to find something that you really feel like I can do a really good job at this, or I’m going to love it. This movie, The Son of No One, I don’t imagine it’ll make $100 million at the box office but I love it and I will always be able to feel good about making this movie. That’s what I hope to keep being able to do.

SG: How much time do you have to see movies, music and exhibits and experience art?

DM: Oh, I see a lot of movies and I watch a lot of reality TV if that’s art. I don’t know if that’s art but I love it. It’s so real. Even if it’s not real, it’s real. You always find time. Remember, when you get to make a movie, you’re surrounded by artists all day long. It’s nuts. You have a DP and camera guys and you have electricians. I’m learning from everybody all day long. I’m more interested in what movie craft service was on last and what the actors were like than going to an exhibit. That’s my exhibit, living life. It’s a really nice world to be in because the art comes to you while you’re working. Pretty cool.

SG: What would you do if you had a movie and Channing Tatum wasn’t available?

DM: [Laughs] I don’t know. We’re friends. I started writing this halfway through our last movie. I looked at him, he did a scene and he was really good and I said, “Man, you can really act.” He kind of laughed. I said, “I’ve got a movie. It’s a little movie. It’s very subtle. No big things blowing up, nothing crazy and I think it’ll be really fun.” So he said, “Let’s do it.”

SG: Would Tracy Morgan go back to joking around in between takes?

DM: No, anything but. He was very remarkably serious. I forget what projects he grew up in, but he was almost going too far into the role. I think it was touching on strange spots in him but he still is Tracy. I was very happy about him. It was strange casting but I’m very happy we did it.

SG: Do you give someone like Al Pacino directions?

DM: Well, direction is the script. You write it and you write it as good as you possibly can and you pray somebody likes it. In this case I got really lucky because the top of the heap liked it. He shows up and we do a rehearsal and I’m a fan first. I don’t pretend to be anything but that. I’m a fan and of course I’ll give some thoughts. That’s all a director really does, give thoughts. That’s the way I work. I pretty much look in awe. He’s that good. He was doing us, he was doing Shakespeare in the Park at night, he’s Al Pacino. That’s Michael Jordan. Yeah, Phil Jackson did do something with him, but he’s Michael Jordan.

SG: Did you shoot on film?

DM: Yeah, 35mm.

SG: Is that getting lost these days, especially in indie film?

DM: It’s getting harder, understandably. You can’t stop the future. It will be gone, I know. I’m holding on because I love it. There’s something strange about it that is magical. I don’t know how much longer. That may be the last one. It’s getting hard. It’s like shooting stills on film. I don’t know anyone that does that anymore.

SG: What does it give your film that is has a grainy look?

DM: I don’t know. I try really hard to write complete and utter honesty even at the cost of the movie being more exciting. I try to push the acting to be as honest as humanly possible. My editor does the same with editing. Film somehow brings a touch of something, even though video sometimes looks more real. It looks too real. Film still feels like a movie. I want it to still have that thing.

SG: It’s also different watching film in a movie theater. It’s meant to be projected. Digital looks the same on a big screen or a TV set.

DM: Right, and film sometimes looks weird on your TV which is getting really odd.

SG: Do the folks from home still keep in touch?

DM: Of course. Oh yeah, Nerf was literally just here. He left two days ago. He was staying with me out here. He’s in

The Son of No One for one second. He’s an ambulance driver because he drives an ambulance. He’s in the background with Pacino. When I go to New York, I go to where I grew up and I stay there all the time. I’m actually going next week. Of course, home is always home. That’s kind of the way it is.

SG: What are you doing next?

DM: Just writing now so we’ll see. Hopefully something cool.

SG: The two films based on your experiences growing up were difficult experiences. Do you have some joyous experiences you can make a film about?

DM: Oh, it was all joyous. This movie is particularly hard. Saints I thought was kind of joyous. There are some parts but it was kind of fun. The kids are so goofy and crazy but this was a hard movie, I know. Of course. I wrote this book called The Clapper and that’s a movie I want to do really bad. That actually all takes place here in L.A. Hopefully I’ll get to make that. It’ll be another very difficult movie to make but it’s purely fun.

SG: Is that like the guy on the film set who claps the board for sound?

DM: No, no, no. It’s about a guy who’s a paid audience member. When I first came out here, I did it for a little with my friend over at Gower. They pay you 50 bucks to sit in the audience of horrible shows and pretend they’re funny when it says “applause.” So hopefully we’ll make that.

SG: I knew about seat fillers, but actually paying for clapping?

DM: Oh no, it says “applause” and you applaud, laugh, laugh, clap, clap. Then you do the next show. Judge Judy…

SG: I’ve been to tapings. I just thought they were tourists who are all happy to get a free ticket.

DM: Well, you do get the tourists on some but the really bad shows, the REALLY bad ones.

SG: Did any of those shows make it several years to become hits?

DM: A lot of infomercials. We did some infomercials and we did Judge Judy a few times.

The Son of No One opens November 4.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, General Motors’ EV1s were the Apple Macs of cars. Ahead of their time, they were only driven by an enlightened “different” thinking few, but those that did felt passionately about their high tech machines. A fully electric plug-in vehicle with a range of between... more

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, General Motors’ EV1s were the Apple Macs of cars. Ahead of their time, they were only driven by an enlightened “different” thinking few, but those that did felt passionately about their high tech machines.

A fully electric plug-in vehicle with a range of between 70 and 140 miles depending on model, the EV1 was first introduced into the marketplace in 1996. Available in limited test markets on a closed lease-only basis (whereby no actual purchase was allowed), it was developed by General Motors partly in response to the California Air Resources Board’s requirement that the seven major auto companies in the US had to make at least 2% of their output zero-emission vehicles (ZEV) by 1998 in order to sell any cars within the state (with further graduated steps stipulated up to 10% in 2003).

Though grudgingly produced by General Motors, the vehicle was beloved by the few consumers lucky enough to rise to the top of the company’s reportedly vast waiting list. But it was likely a car that was never intended to succeed. General Motors seemingly put more effort into fighting the CARB mandate in court than meeting existing demand for vehicles or marketing the EV1 to create even more. It was therefore not uncoincidental that the demise of the EV1 occurred in tandem with the gutting of CARB’s ZEV rules. The EV1 program was officially cancelled in 2003, and a total recall was put in motion, with repossessed cars being not only compacted but shredded for good measure too.

A 2006 documentary, Who Killed The Electric Car, chronicled the crushing demise of this groundbreaking car. In it filmmaker Chris Paine highlighted the collusion of the auto industry, oil companies, and politicians, who all had a vested interest in seeing the electric vehicle die an untimely death alongside CARB’s environmentally prudent directives. Catching the zeitgeist, Who Killed The Electric was the third highest grossing documentary that year (Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth being the first).

However, a decade after General Motors presided over the funeral of the EV1, the killing of the vehicle has proven to be a costly mistake. With gas prices rising, Toyota filled the rapidly increasing fuel-efficient void with their hybrid Prius, which went on sale in Japan in 1997. Following its worldwide debut in 2001, Toyota have sold over a million Prius cars in the US alone, and the rest of the auto industry has been scrabbling to catch up.

With revenge being served on a platter less than a decade on, Paine and his documentary team were compelled to reexamine the fortunes of the electric vehicle in a follow up film. The first had centered on activists working from outside the industry, with this film Paine chose to follow a diverse group of instigators working from within. Revenge Of The Electric Car therefore features four EV evangelists who are attempting to drive the future of the automobile into the present: Bob Lutz (General Motors’ Vice Chairman up until May 2010), Elon Musk (Tesla Motors’s CEO), Carlos Ghosn (Nissan’s President and CEO), and Greg “Gadget” Abbot (a DIY electric engine retro-fitter).

SuicideGirls recently visited Paine at his ultra green home to talk about his cinematic “I told you so” and the electric awakening of a sluggish car industry that was in need of a shock. After checking out the 2008 Tesla Roadster parked in Paine’s garage, the irony was not lost that we were conversing about, and anticipating the dominance of, the gas-free vehicle in the heart of LA’s oil country amidst the pumpjack nodding donkeys of Baldwin Hills.

Nicole Powers: So let’s rewind and talk about the first film, and how all this began.

Chris Paine: Well, I had one of those cars. I had one and then they took it away. I dropped it off to have the tires checked for something, and [the GM dealership representative said], “Oh, you won’t be getting your car back.” I’m like, “My lease still has another nine months.” And he says, “Yeah, well we’re just going to keep it.” I said, “Well can I get my gym bag out of the car?” [He said,] “Oh, It’s already gone.” [I said,] “Well where has it gone?” [He said,] “We can’t tell you where it’s gone.” [I said,] “You can’t tell me where the car is gone?” And then, you know, the car companies were all saying, ”Well nobody wanted these cars…” And we go, this is just not the whole story…

So that film became an issue movie about two things. One about what happened to these cars. Because the trail was so hot, we could actually follow the step by step. I think that what happened when they took out the streetcars in the ‘50s, a lot of those trails got very cold and it was hard to like do it. We took the title from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which was really about streetcars in Los Angeles. That’s sort of the backstory.

Then we also thought that the film…it could’ve been about a lot of issues, it just happened to be about the electric car, about what happens with corporate lobbies that take over government. They eviscerate really good programs that are in the public good…for whatever corporate reasons they have. We busted both the oil industry through the Western States Petroleum for their astroturf campaigns, where they would pose as consumer groups but really just be the oil companies. They got behind stopping public funding of charging. And then the American Association of Automobile Manufacturers, which was behind trying to gut the regulation for zero emission vehicles.

The challenge of that film was to make an issue movie interesting and to keep the momentum going. This film, we decided we did the issue movie. People are a little bit issued out. There are so many things going on. Let’s make a movie that’s just about pure momentum –– characters and momentum…Like a regular narrative film. Because if we were going to do the issue movie, it would be 10 hours to do everything: coal, batteries, where does power come from, why gasoline is so bad, the history of the vehicle, etc. etc. This would take forever to get right. And if we can pick sort of four characters that represent different pieces of international business right now, and how sometimes from within you can get something going, it would be a different kind of message…

The reason to do did a different kind of momentum besides kind of an artistic experiment is that I found in 10 years of arguing for electric cars that there’s no winning the argument. Because while I think that the argument for electric cars is completely done, you can’t change most people’s minds through argument…What turns people are emotional experiences. The experience, for example, of driving in one of these plug-in cars…Suddenly all of your intellect goes to defending what you like as opposed to trying to beat someone in the argument. So that was kind of the idea for the film…Let’s just give people an experience, and maybe as a result they’ll want to go out and try one of these cars. That will probably do more to convince people than any amount of arguing about air or oil or anything else.

NP: A lot has changed in 10 years since Who Killed the Electric Car? GM may have ended their electric car program, but Toyota and the Prius have been ruling the auto industry since then and everyone’s been scrabbling to catch up. There must be that temptation to say, “I told you so.”

CP: Well, I figure the “I told you so” is implicit in the word “revenge.” We got some push back from a couple of reviews saying, “It’s not a revenge.” But, if you can’t track that Hummer went bankrupt and that all the car companies went bankrupt and that all these things failed because they made so many stupid decisions in the ‘90s, then you weren’t paying attention because it’s a big reversal. The auto industry went from fighting tooth and nail to kill electric cars to being champions of them, and it’s just remarkable. I think it’s one reason that we decided to make another electric car film when we had no plans to do so when we finished the last one. Because you don’t usually see things turn around like that. And from some of the same people even.

NP: I could not believe that you got [GM Vice Chairman] Bob Lutz to participate in the movie. That’s kind of amazing. How did that even come about?

CP: He’s just brave. I think he convinced a lot of people at GM that never wanted us to come in the gates…The first interviews we had with him were pretty stiff, and over the three years that we were checking in with him, things became more relaxed and we got to really do a portrait of someone.

NP: When you decided to make this movie, how did the first contact come about?

CP: Dan Neil, [who was] at The LA Times then, asked my opinion on the Volt, because it was suddenly announced that GM was going to work on a new electric car. I told him, “Hey, if they’re really going to do it, I would totally support it because that’s what we want them to do –– to make plug-in cars.” And then, I can’t quite remember the sequence, but Bob Lutz and I exchanged emails. I had his email address from the first movie for some reason. He said, “Are you really in favor of the Volt if we did that.” I go, “Yeah, I totally support that.” And he goes, “Oh, well, we’re really going to do it.”

Somewhere in there Elon Musk, who I knew because of the Tesla out there [indicates his garage], I asked him if I could start tracking his journey and he said, “Sure, come on in.” So, I told Bob Lutz, you know, I was tracking Elon, and Bob said, “Why don’t you come to the GM 100th Birthday Party.” So my producer, Jessie Deeter, she’s out of Frontline, said, “Okay, well we have to be super careful because this is going to be cooption [because of the] massive spin machine we’re about to walk into. If we’re going to work with the car companies, we have to be really careful not to take any free gigs and not to go on junkets, and understand the difference between press and an actual access to something, and it’s going to be a very tricky balance for the next few years.” And it certainly was. But I think as time went on, we could begin to understand what was more authentic and what was less authentic, and choose those moments to put in the film. So that’s how it started. Once we had GM, we went to the other car companies, Toyota and Ford and everybody else, Fisker and Better Place in Israel. Some of them said no, and some of them made it very impossible to reach them. And some of them said yes, but their stories really changed a lot and they didn’t really work with for film, so we ended up with these four.

NP: So Nissan, how did that come about?

CP: Nissan. We approached them. We thought it would be a no for sure, because they’re a very secret company. Peter [co-writer and producer P.G. Morgan] and I were here and they asked if they could send two people to talk to us. We were over here. We met them for a ten o’ clock [meeting], just like this. Ding dong, two guys came in and they grilled us for about 90 minutes about the first film, what we were doing in this film, what we were doing at GM, and what our security provisions were for footage. Because Tesla had an IPO and GM was facing bankruptcy…we had a super secure editing process. If any of our footage got out it could adversely price the stock.

NP: Presumably you also had to have an internal Chinese wall where you would not be passing information along.

CP: Exactly. Exactly. They were competitive with each other. We told them all of our procedures and stuff. Then they said, “Thank you,” and they went to the door. I said, “Where are you guys going?” They said, “We’re going back to Japan.” They’d flown in –– [Nissan Chairman and CEO] Carlos [Ghosn] had sent them –– and then they flew back. Then about two days later we got permission to come to Japan to track Carlos. So all of our Japanese scenes started there. At one point we were all in one hotel room because we wouldn’t take their junket and there were no other hotel rooms. We were all on top of each other and we did sort of envy the other journalists that were there. Everybody’s like, “You guys, what are you doing? You think you’re being purists over here.”

NP: But it’s important…That integrity is lost a lot of the time these days.

CP: Yeah. It hurts me sometimes…We’ve had a couple of negative reviews where they’ve said “your film felt like a commercial” or “you got a little close to the companies.” You try figuring out this balance, it’s really hard to do it…It’s been a very tough balance. And the car companies are often annoyed at us, you know, it was challenging. But I think it came out all right, and we got kind of a portrait of different kinds of entrepreneurship in this country. It happens to be about cars…

NP: I love the fact that you have the independent guy working out of his warehouse/garage. I understand he’s a friend of yours?

CP: Yeah. When you drive down the road here, over the hill you can see the rebuilt, where he used to live. That’s the thing that burned down. So he was right there. I wasn’t thinking he was going to be in the film at first. Then the horrible fire happened, and he found that little controller in the ashes and it’s blinking, and he’s going, “We’re going to build it.” I’m like, well that’s the spirit of the film. Even if you’re in a huge corporation, you’ve got a lot of push back.

NP: Right, because GM were in the ashes too.

CP: Exactly. And the best people will rebuild. They don’t give up at that moment. They say, onwards. Elon, he’s a playboy with millions of dollars or whatever…

NP: And he almost went down to his last cent of PayPal money with Tesla.

CP: Everything…His ego stripped down and people attacking him on a personal level…You’ve got to be tough.

NP: From the very little guy to the very big guy, they all have this similar rising from the ashes story.

CP: Yeah, that’s sort of the story, exactly. I’m glad that came through.

NP: I was in a way surprised that there wasn’t much about the Prius in the movie given that that was very much the game changer.

CP: I know. Well, we mentioned it in the beginning that it was one of GM’s motivators, that they wanted to compete with Toyota, that they had run away with the efficient market. Bob Lutz says it. But we couldn’t get access to Toyota. They wouldn’t let us in for whatever reason.

NP: I guess because Toyota felt maybe that they didn’t need to give you access because they already owned the green market, whereas Nissan is trying to catch up to Toyota so they have the incentive to participate.

CP: I think so, and I think our first film really helped Toyota because they had the only product that was really efficient when gas prices hit $4.00 a gallon in the States. They were the only people that had an efficient relatively green car. Their sales went from loosing lots of money to really on the up and up. The other thing is…[with] the Prius, you could never plug it in.

NP: That was the frustration for me. It made no sense because it already had rechargeable batteries. All you needed was the ability to plug it into a wall, and you’d have never needed gas most of the time, because most car journeys are in the realm of less than 20 miles.

CP: Yeah, well there’s a reason for this. It’s not proven, but a lot of people believe that this is the reason; it’s because Chevron owned the technology for the nickel metal batteries which were in the Prius. There was a big closed settlement that happened about the time, right before our last movie came out, that Prius could indeed go ahead and use those batteries, even though Chevron owned the patents, but it had certain limitations. So a lot of people think the limitation was they could not put a plug on it. Whether that’s true or not, the reason that the plug is now coming in the Prius is that they’re switching to lithium batteries…But, it’s very difficult to prove that and we had to with all our films be very careful with our legal and all that.

NP: I remember in the first film there was the mom and pop operation that had developed this far superior battery, and their patent got bought just so that it could be put on ice.

CP: That was the company. That was it.

NP: Ah, Chevron was the company that bought their patent?

CP: Exactly…Iris [Ovshinsky] passed away right after the first film came out and we miss her a lot because she was actually the physicist in that relationship, or she had the PhD, and her husband [Stanford] was like the salesman. She was the quiet brains, you know.

NP: I had a conversation with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — that discussion was more on the issue of coal –– but one of the things that he said was that basically the tipping point will come when it’s just plain cheaper to use green energy. One of the problems specifically with coal is that there’s so many subsidies that the price is artificially low. Are there similar economics going on in the car industry?

CP: Oh sure. I mean, the gasoline engine is almost fully amortized, because they developed it over 100 years. They know how to make thousands, and tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands of these at the lowest possible price. When you start a new kind of automobile, ie. with a motor and batteries, which in theory is much cheaper because you only have a few parts versus an entire engine, it takes a while for economies of scale to kick in. It’s hard for them to get their manufacturing price down to what the gas car is…That’s the first difficulty they have.

Now one thing they have going for them is that electricity is a lot cheaper. Even in the US where we’re 50% coal, electricity as a whole runs about $1.00 a gallon, compared to $4.00 for oil. That is a big cost advantage for the consumer. But the consumer will only make those changes when they’re really hurting at the gas pump. It happened the first time we paid $100 to refill our trucks and cars in 2008. When we’re paying that again, as fuel prices go up, and it’s hard to say how that will happen, but peak oil means that we’ll keep going up…Kennedy is absolutely right, it’s the price of gas that will push them to alternatives.

NP: Also the price of the actual cars is a problem. I recently had to buy a new car. I would’ve liked to have bought a Prius, but the difference was just too great. The Prius cost almost double what my car cost, and I get 28 mpg versus 40-something [highway] on the Prius –– because you can’t plug it in.

CP: Yeah, the prices are hugely important. I think that Carlos understands that. I think they all understand, and they’re trying to do that. But Nissan had to even raise their price on the Leaf recently. They raised it like $2,000. They’re not going to be able to compete with the $10,000 economy car. They can’t do that for a while. I think they will in time if all the people...that are buying $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 cars…step up to the plate.

The rest of us, that can only afford a $20,000 [car] or whatever else, this is where ride sharing and test drives [come in] —because every time someone goes down and test drives a plug-in car, they become a convert and they can tell someone else about it. This is only possible really now, that you can go to a dealership and test drive an electric car to feel and see what it’s all about.

I hope that our film is part of the inspiration for people to go out and check these things out because they couldn’t do it after they crushed all those cars in our [first] movie. They were almost impossible to find…I really believe that the experience of this is as important as any argument. Ultimately, of course, you’re right, it’s the price of these things, and the price of oil that will determine how fast this happens.

NP: Part of me wonders why GM, the moment the Prius started taking off, didn’t just reboot the EV1 since they already had the technology developed.

CP: Pride, I think.

NP: I think it was.

CP: Yeah. I mean, they say it’s because they were never able to get the costs down and that the car was costing them $100,00, but it didn’t have to cost that much. They could make that car much cheaper than that. So I think it’s pride. Also I think it’s why they got into so much trouble in California. Because they wanted to win the battle against California, they forgot about their brand. They obviously forgot about the environment and the consumer and everything else. It was a big disaster.

People say, “Well don’t you want General Motors to go bankrupt?” I’m like, I don’t particularly like car companies, but if these car companies go bankrupt it’s a huge allocation of resources to rebuild industries like this. You think the pollution is bad, it’s much better to use existing factories. Of course it’d be great if we rode bicycles and did public transportation, and this should happen, but the reality is we make tens of thousands of cars all the time so we should be making plug-in cars. General Motors is trying to do something about it. So why not? Because they’re American jobs. I mean, why do we need to import everything from China?

NP: When did you finish shooting this film?

CP: We finished shooting end of 2010.

NP: What updates from the intervening year would you like to have been able to include?

CP: I wanted to get in this idea that how much electricity is in every gallon of gasoline. Because you hear a lot of people say, “Oh, where does all the electricity come from?” Which is a very good question. And, “Isn’t it just coming from coal?” Before you even get there, think about who is one of the biggest users of electricity in the world. The answer is: it’s the oil industry. Because it takes a lot of electricity to turn black crude oil into gasoline. Like 4-7 kilowatt hours of energy. How much is that? If, instead of charging up the crude oil to make gasoline, you put the energy into a battery, you could drive your Leaf 20 or 25 miles, just on that electricity alone. Just on the refining. No Saudi Arabia. No shipping it over. No driving the truck to the gas station, no anything else. Just the refining. So there’s stuff like this that I would love to have in the movie because it’s data that people need to understand…to start using electricity wisely and not waste it converting fuels into other fuels…But again, every time we tried to detour into something like batteries from cars actually don’t end up in landfill and there’s actually only 1% or 2% lithium in a lithium battery, most of it is like completely benign –– every time we did that, the movie would stop moving…

And to answer your question, we wanted this movie to end when electric cars were actually available to people to buy again. Because the first movie ended when they were destroyed, so I said this movie is going to end when they’re actually in showrooms again. That was sort of our end point. Now, if we had kept it going, right now what would the story be? Well, Volt sales haven’t been that good. They were hoping to sell 10,000 and I think they’ve sold 4,000.

NP: Why do you think that is?

CP: Two reasons. One: they came in at a little high price point and they’ve lowered their price now. Two: they’ve marketed the car really strangely, and probably because they had too many focus groups. They’ve marketed the car as “more car than electric.” And nobody even knows what electric means. They should’ve just said “more car.” You know, it’s like it does more. It runs on two kinds of systems. GM, as good as their engineering is at least on electric cars, I think their marketing has always been a little bit confused…

NP: I think car companies a lot of the time only know how to market a car on machismo. Car commercials are always very testosterone driven…And it’s hard to market an electric vehicle on testosterone.

CP: Yeah.

NP: It’s like when you’re watching Top Gear, it’s the running joke that the presenters hate…

CP: Electric cars.

NP: And the reason they hate electric cars is because they feel that they’re emasculating.

CP: Yeah. Well, that’d be a great movie. I’d love to do that. Or maybe a short. Maybe we just will. Because you know they got in trouble for defaming both Tesla and Nissan. Did you hear this?

NP: Yes.

CP: Screw those guys. It’s so important that this technology get a foot hold and when they set up bullshit that is not true, just to have a laugh on their show — they certainly shouldn’t be running on BBC on state run money…

NP: There needs to be a disclaimer if you’re presenting something that’s untrue during something that purports to be a consumer test on a factually based show.

CP: Of course. That guy can just go to hell. I’m glad that Nissan busted them in such a classy way with their own GPS data from the car. Did you hear that?

NP: No.

CP: That’s how they got them. Because, you know, he runs out of power in a disabled parking space…[And Nissan goes,] well actually, the GPS shows that you drove the car around the block for like about 40 miles before you even started your range test and we can see it. Here’s the map of where you went in your car. So why are you making this claim on your show that you ran out of power on a fair test? And they were like, “Err, it’s just a TV show.” Well, excuse me, I spent $6 billion developing a technology so we can get the fuck off of oil and you’re going to set me up like our cars can’t do anything? That’s not fair.

NP: Right, because it’s so much bigger than shits and giggles on a TV show. It’s about people in Iraq and Afghanistan dying.

CP: Yeah. Yeah. Cluster bombing weddings of people that are there because they happen to be in the way, and British soldiers losing their arms because they’re trying to do the right thing. I’m glad your TV show has great ratings, but to hell with you. You can tell I’m pretty fired up about this. I’d love to take that guy down if I could. I know it’s a show people enjoy, but the mitts are off.

NP: I enjoy that show, but their attitude to green technology is one area of blindness that disappoints me. But I do think it does come down to this idea that electric vehicles are emasculating. People like the smell of gasoline –– it’s manly because it’s dirty….It goes back to your point about how GM doesn’t know how to market the Volt.

CP: And it went back to why the gasoline car took off in the first place. Because the women and the doctors would have the electric cars because they could keep their hands clean, they were quiet.

NP: Right, we used to have electric cars back in the day.

CP: But the men who were making those purchase decisions, wanted noise, they wanted to feel like they were a lion roaring. Its all primal, the noise and all that. I think it’s one reason that Tesla did not put the word electric on their sports car, because they wanted to keep it a pure play – fast.

It’s not like trains continued forever. They were way sexier than a car is. More powerful. You have all the imagery from movies of trains and we thought they’d last forever… And I think the whole generation that gets electronics…people want their iPads and digital phones and none of them make noise and they’re incredibly sexy…The electric car is like that. It’s a 21st century [thing]. Jeremy can live in 1955 with his masturbating teenage boys all he wants but a lot of us have moved on.

NP: If Electric Car was a trilogy like Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, what do you hope the third movie would be?

CP: The third movie?…I was thinking about that this morning…I thought if nobody buys these cars and the oil price drops to $3.00 a gallon again and everybody decides to get out for awhile, then it’s going to be Curse of the Electric Car –– if we kept the monster theme going. I hope that doesn’t happen. I’d like to see my next movie be about bicycles, because I just see in so many cities around the world bicycle is really having a renaissance right now, and it’s terrific.

NP: What’s happening in London with the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme, where you can just pay £1 [$1.50] and rent a bike for 24-hours, and just leave it in any bike station when you’re done – it’s amazing. When I lived in London, my commute to work used to be a bicycle ride through Richmond Park amongst all the deer. But I would not ride a bicycle in LA because I’d be dead within a week. The basic problem is the cycle lanes are also the bus lanes that are also the right turn lanes –– that’s a recipe for death.

CP: I know. You’re exactly right. If you go to Washington, DC they have concrete barriers protecting you from the vehicle trains.

NP: I think the cycle lanes here are more of a hazard than a help because it gives people a false sense of security.

CP: I agree. LA would be an interesting place to tell that story because you do have a strong community, we have the midnight rides, we have government that wants bicycles to succeed. But you’re up against a huge generational pushback…This is a generational thing, I think. I’m very attracted to doing something about bicycles but a lot of bicycle movies are being made and the trick is how do you find a subject you can reach a lot of people on that’s not just another bicycle movie. How do you make it exciting and sexy? I think that we figured out how to do that, to a certain extent, in our Electric Car films. Because you wouldn’t know that there were maybe stories locked in there that would be interesting to most people. I’m sure that’s true for bicycles too, it’s just you never know where it is.

NP: Well, going back to your Who Framed Roger Rabbit theme, in The Valley they’re actually turning the old rail tracks into bicycle tracks. Wouldn’t that be amazing if they did that with the trolley tracks all the way down to Santa Monica Blvd., so you could ride all the way down from Hollywood to the Beach.

CP: Yeah. Yeah. That’s good. And there’s a lot of people that care about them. I think, for electric cars it’s going to be another five years before we get another feeling for it –– maybe ten. I was amazed that this turned around as fast as it did, from “we’re going to kill every one” to “oh, we all want to make them.” I mean, Mercedes, BMW, they all want to do it now. When they switched from horses to cars, that took about 20 years, so I think we have to give just a little bit of time.

NP: Another 10 years, halfway through the process.

CP: Yeah, I think so. And for everybody to understand that gasoline is not forever and that the environmental stuff is real.