Michael Robbins made a splash in the poetry world when his poem “Alien vs. Predator” was published in The New Yorker in 2009. The poem, which called Rilke a jerk and included the line “That elk is such a dick,” was atypical for the magazine. Robbins, who received a Ph.D. in English, would go onto... more

Michael Robbins made a splash in the poetry world when his poem “Alien vs. Predator” was published in The New Yorker in 2009. The poem, which called Rilke a jerk and included the line “That elk is such a dick,” was atypical for the magazine. Robbins, who received a Ph.D. in English, would go onto write poems like “Dig Dug,” which was inspired by the video for Guns N' Roses’ “November Rain” and has just had his first book published by Penguin Poets, Alien vs. Predator.

Robbins’ poetry owes as much to hip-hop and contemporary music as it does to classical poetry and it’s clear from talking with Robbins that while he is as obsessed with pop culture as the rest of the us, he’s more concerned with poetic form. His poems take place amidst chain stores and suburban wastelands with references to the Care Bears, Jeffrey Dahmer, Soylent Green and everything in between.

However, he’s interested in what has always been the focus of poetry: truth, beauty, ugliness, vulgarity and making some sense of the world in a fun way that sounds good when read aloud. In talking with SG, Robbins quoted Rimbaud and Eliot with the same ease with which he discussed Guns N' Roses. and complained about the laziness of many contemporary artists, and, as in his work, was not just fun to talk with but was thoughtful in talking about life and art.


ALEX DUEBEN: The title of your poetry collection is Alien vs. Predator. How did you decide on that title?

MICHAEL ROBBINS: It honestly just came to me when I was trying to think of a title. I never am sure whether the justifications or interpretations that I give for the title afterwards have much to do with that initial decision. I mean as soon as I thought of it, the title made sense to me. It’s a cheeky appropriation of a schlocky movie franchise. Also, they’re both major words in American culture. We’re always catching predators and legalizing aliens. It made sense to me. I mean the book is partly about my feeling of alienation and being preyed upon. (Laughs)

AD: It’s interesting that you phrase it like that. What do you feel preyed upon by?

MR: What don’t I feel preyed upon by? (Laughs)

AD: I ask because I think it’s possible to read the book as being preyed upon by pop culture, but I don’t think you mean that.

MR: No. I’m not going to bite the hand that feeds me, but I do think the pop culture angle has been getting too much attention to the exclusion of other aspects of the book that I’m interested in. I mean I understand it. You have a book of poetry that talks about black metal or something, you have a topic to talk about and it’s handy, but the attractive surfaces are meant to be sinister as well. It’s about being preyed upon by capitalism, I suppose. I meant for it to be something of a dark book. (Laughs)

AD: I think the definitely feels that way.

MR: I’m preyed upon by lots of things. Stephen Dedalus has that line in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man where he says “I fear many things: dogs, horses...” I can’t remember exactly what the list is, but that’s pretty much how I feel. I’ve spent a lot of my life dealing with anxiety and depression and spent a lot of my life kvetching about the way we’re all sort of subordinated to the logic of the market. The pop culture is there in part just because I love it, but it wouldn’t be there without the economic apparatus that supports it. It’s not a wholly negative thing. Capitalism is a dialectical thing. Marx himself celebrated capitalism as an advance over feudalism.

There’s alienation and there’s predation and there’s also the sense that I myself am the predator consuming pop culture, consuming goods. It’s that sense of conflict that the “vs.” part is supposed to get across. There’s a great deal of conflict in my own absorption in these things, but like I said, that’s an interpretation that I can impose after the fact. At the time I’m not sure that I was thinking about these things, but that’s how poems work. They don’t necessarily make themselves clear to you right away.

AD: As you pointed out your work is sometimes treated a novelty because you use pop culture, which is not often addressed in poetry.

MR: Well, it is. That’s another thing that frustrates me about the concentration on it. Again, it doesn’t frustrate me to the point that I’m not very, very pleased that the work’s getting attention, but pop culture gets addressed in poetry all the time. I’s just a lack of familiarity with contemporary poetry that leads it to it seeming to be novel in my work. I mean Paul Muldoon is often writing about pop culture. My friends Nick Demske and Anthony Madrid both have books that are immersed in pop culture. My friend Anthony Madrid has these great lines: “Maybe I’m just like my mother. / She’s never satisfied. / Maybe I’m just like my father: / Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.” It’s there. Contemporary poets are writing in the culture that they live in and they respond to it. I would say that my work is sort of manic about it. (Laughs) There is perhaps a difference of degree, although Nick Demske is a terrific poet who is just dripping with pop culture.

AD: You wrote a piece for Poetry a little while back where you reviewed a few books and in talking about Ruth Stone you took issue with her heightened language.

MR: I don’t think so. I think poetry has to be heightened language distinct from ordinary English. If it’s not patterned language, then it’s not poetry. What I took issue with in Stone’s work is her treating poetry as a kind of chapel that we all go to and forget our lives as people immersed in the ordinary. Even her treatment of the ordinary seems to me to be pious. Piety in poetry annoys me. But if you’re just taking English and not doing things with the language, then I don’t know what the point is. Pound said “great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.” I do believe that language can exist in a heightened form without being pious. I think that the heightening of language is what poetry does, but it’s a question of how that heightening takes place.

AD: I think that’s very true. Rhythm and structure are clearly very important to you and it feels like you’ve internalized poetic form and structure, but you’re writing about the world you see, the world around us.

MR: I think that’s just what poetry should do.

AD: “Should” being the key phrase in that sentence.

MR: Oh definitely. I mean Rimbaud said: It is necessary to be absolutely modern. I think that poetry, if it’s not responding to contemporary life, is failing to be poetry. Poetry for me is just a way of responding to contemporary life, responding to contemporary conditions and I would never want to deny that one must be absolutely modern. I don’t know what else art is for if it’s not a way of being contemporary; if not a way of making sense of the life around us. That involves me in Best Buy and Red Lobster and popular music, but I think it’s possible to do that without eschewing the traditional means of imparting pleasure. Pleasures of sound, because sound to me is part of what makes poetry poetry. The intricate or rhythmical patterning of language. It doesn’t seem to us to be anachronistic in hip hop. There are some great poets writing in hip hop at the moment. I don’t feel like poetry should have to be composed of boring sentence fragments. (Laughs)

AD: I do remember Paul Muldoon wrote a poem about music, I think it was Sleeve Notes?

MR: Yeah, Sleeve Notes. I do think that as I’ve said elsewhere, the way I respond to popular music and the way I respond to poetry are not mutually exclusive. Certainly I make obvious distinctions between them, but music has been an extraordinarily important thing in my life. I always think people are exaggerating when they say that rock and roll or a DJ saved their lives, but it’s an understandable hyperbole. It can feel like that, especially when you’re younger. I’m old now. (Laughs)

AD: And in your poems so much is going on amidst the pop culture references; the sort of things that have always happened in poems and that have always been discussed, just in a different landscape.

MR: I hope so. I don’t think one should hesitate to be beautiful if one can. It’s again a question of the kind of beauty. There’s a striving for beauty that annoys me in poetry, a kind of processed beauty. I often think of it as kind of the James Wright epiphany. I love James Wright and I love the poem A Blessing, but the way that poem ends with him realizing that if he stepped out of his body he would break suddenly into blossoms, that sort of gesture or device where one ends a poem with a little lyric epiphany and one steps out of one’s body in some way or rises into the air or has become a cheap way of accessing beauty without earning it. I’m wary of that. I think that there’s a hell of a lot of ugliness in the world and that ugliness can be treated in a beautiful manner.

AD: That’s a prominent trend in all art forms, even among good writers.

MR: It’s like American Beauty. Who was that, Sam Mendes? That to me is my exemplar of unearned emotion, unearned pathos, unearned beauty. It has all the trappings of beauty, but it only goes through the motions. The cheap reliance on things you already know to make you feel as though you’ve experienced beauty. That of course is a very common problem in art. I would never want to suggest that I don’t fall into that trap myself sometimes, but I try to be aware of it.

AD: That is a good one. I always think of Brideshead Revisited where the ending doesn’t quite fit with what came before and feels uncomfortably shoehorned in.

MR: Well yeah, you can just have Chancy walk on the water– (Laughs)

AD: –And then it becomes something else entirely.

MR: Yeah. Instead of finding a way to actually convey the complexity of meaningful experience, you can just throw in a little gesture that is a shorthand for it. That’s what annoys me about Ruth Stone. I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead. She had a hard life and made art out of it. I’m in no position to dismiss her life’s work, but that’s what annoys me about poetry like hers. It’s what annoyed me about certain of Robert Hass’ poems. It what annoys me about Mary Oliver and Billy Collins and Sharon Olds (Laughs). One could go on and on. In fact, I’m probably not supposed to. I mean I’ve already attacked all of these people in print, so I’ll try not to name anyone I haven’t already dissed so as not to impair my job prospects. (Laughs)

AD: I always come back to Larry McMurty’s book Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen and that juxtaposition of reading Benjamin at a DQ in rural Texas, which seems like it would be dissonant, but it’s not at all.

MR: And Benjamin would have been the last person to ignore Dairy Queen. I am living at the moment in Hattiesburg Mississippi so I’m experiencing a lot of that dissonance myself, but it’s not dissonance. Intellectual work should be available to us wherever we are, not just on the steps of the Met. Art should speak to people in Hattiesburg with the same pressure and the same urgency that it speaks to someone in the New York Public Library. Which is not to say that I can’t wait to get out of Hattiesburg. (Laughs)

AD: Are you teaching there this year?

MR: I have a one year visiting position as Visiting Poet at the University of Southern Mississippi. It’s been interesting, but I’m moving back to Chicago at the end of this month.

AD: When did you first become interested in poetry?

MR: The first poets that I remember reading with any attention were Yeats, Rimbaud and Dylan Thomas. I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of them. (Laughs) I was probably in junior high or high school and it was partly that that attracted me. I didn’t know what the hell Yeats, or especially Thomas, was talking about. I’m not a big fan of Dylan Thomas, but there was a poem–and I can’t even remember which one–that went on for a hundred lines and then there was a stanza break and then another hundred lines. The hundredth line rhymed with the hundred-first line and the hundred-second line rhymed with the ninety-ninth line and so on until the very last line of the poem rhymed with the first line two hundred lines before. There was no way you would notice this hearing it, but that sense that intricate patterns could be sustained in ways that connected in ways that you had work to understand was fascinating to me. I probably should go ahead and pickup Dylan Thomas. I’ve hated him long enough.

Yeats and Rimbaud continue to me a lot to me. Rimbaud’s going to mean a lot to any kid who’s growing up in a conservative city and likes punk rock, but I find his work deepens as you get older. Rimbaud says in Illuminations: “Is it possible to become ecstatic amid destruction.” That spoke to me as a teenager and it speaks to me now in a more nuanced way as someone living in late capitalism in a country that is conducting an assault on its most helpless citizens.

AD: You recently received your Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

MR: Yes, I did. I’m a doctor. I tell my students not to call me Dr. Robbins, but they keep doing it. (Laughs) It’s horrible. I think if you’re not Condoleezza Rice or Henry Kissinger, you should think it’s totally pretentious to be called doctor if you’re not a medical doctor. I mean they should too, but they’re beyond shame. (Laughs)

AD: Why did you decide to get a Ph.D.?

MR: I wanted to become an intellectual. (Laughs) I know that sounds horrible. I realized that I had a disease, the disease of autodidacticism for a long time. It’s an exhilarating thing to be an autodidact, but it’s also possible to have the wrong conversations with yourself. Not the wrong conversations, but to have conservations that don’t move you past certain assumptions in a way that the conversations at a great university like the U of C allow you to do. I just wanted to study with people smarter than me and really, really, really think about this art form that I decided to devote myself to. And to think about it hard. One thing I find is that not enough younger poets are immersed in the tradition as deeply as they should be. Reading George Herbert or reading John Donne, and in contemporary work reading outside what I thought of as my little corner of the tradition was, I don’t think I could have written this book without that experience. It broadened my idea of what poetry was, what it could be, where it comes from, and what it accomplishes in our lives. It was a very valuable experience. I was lucky. I studied with Robert Von Hallberg and Oren Izenberg. I was thirty-something when I entered the Ph.D. program and I feel like they taught me how to read poetry. I also have an MFA and a masters degree, both of which are kind of useless.

AD: Where did you get your MFA?

MR: I never tell anyone that. (Laughs) It’s a part of my life I would like to forget. There’s that I use this epigraph from Fucked Up, the hardcore band. It’s the only epigraph in the book and it introduces the fourth section and it just says “I’ve wasted a lifetime / Not proud of it” and that was just a little personal reminder. I don’t want to say I’m a late bloomer. By the Frost/Whitman/Stevens model for first book publishing, I’m doing all right but I took too long to really get serious and my MFA experience was part of that. I’m like a born again Christian in many ways. Not literally, although I am interested in Christianity. What I mean is there’s this sense that your old life is gone and you’ve cast off some kind of skin. That’s how I feel about the first, oh, thirty years of my life. (Laughs) I was very irresponsible for a very long time.

AD: I can relate a little to that.

MR: I think a lot of people can. I just gave a copy of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son to a friend of mine and she read it and we were talking about that gamble–I don’t know to what extent it’s autobiographical–of living a dissolute life in the hopes of turning it into art later. Just what long odds those are and how likely it is that you’re not going to get swallowed along the way. I feel grateful that I can put that epigraph from Fucked Up in my book. (Laughs)

AD: With so many pop culture references in your poetry, do you ever worry about the book being dated?

MR: I think everyone should worry about that. (Laughs) But sure. William Logan has some line about, I don’t know if it was Tony Hoagland or who mentions Britney Spears in a poem and how Britney Spears will be forgotten in ten years and your poem will look ridiculous. I think William Logan knows exactly nothing about Britney Spears, but sure, one worries about it but I would hope that what matters in the poems is more lasting than the cultural references. A number of [the pop culture references] aren’t too contemporary anyway. There are references to the Stones and to Berryman, but I hope that what’s lasting in the poems will outlast their topicality.

AD: I just think of a poem like Dig Dug, which I enjoy, but I also remember when the video for November Rain was released and I appreciate that you found the right rhyme for “Axl.” I wonder if it lacks something without that background and personal knowledge, but I think the poem works without it.

MR: I hope so. There are cultural markers in poems. There just are going to be. It’s not like I don’t think about it. The book’s been getting a lot of attention, but how many books have gotten a lot of attention that nobody reads in ten years and no one has heard of the person. (Laughs) You’re foolish to assume that you’re going to be immortal. I don’t care. I’m happy to be a poet that people read during my lifetime and after that, I won’t have any idea what’s going on. (Laughs) I’ve never understood the bid for immortality. You’re not going to be around to care.

It was actually my mentor and friend Oren Izenberg’s idea to write a poem about the video for November Rain. He was going to write something about it and I just ran with the idea because I loved it. Slash is upset and the helicopter is swirling around and he’s just got to play a solo in the desert. There’s no chord connecting his guitar to an amp, but he doesn’t care. It’s an important image. It’s like the moon landing for my generation. (Laughs)

Stan Lee was recently named the 26th most influential American by Atlantic Monthly, but if it was up to me I would have put him quite a bit higher. Lee is, of course, best known as the co-creator of Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four and dozens more, though controversy has always swirled around how big... more

Stan Lee was recently named the 26th most influential American by Atlantic Monthly, but if it was up to me I would have put him quite a bit higher. Lee is, of course, best known as the co-creator of Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four and dozens more, though controversy has always swirled around how big his real contributions might have been. But first and foremost Lee has always been the consummate salesman, whether it was selling the latest weird Spider-Man villain to the readers or hosting the television show Who Wants To Be A Superhero?

Lee’s latest projects are totally without connection to Marvel Comics. His company, Purveyors of Wonders, has been producing original characters for straight to DVD movies. One of the best is Mosaic, an animated film starring the voice of Anna Paquin as Maggie Nelson a high school student whose father is an Interpol agent investigating a mysterious race that can change appearance at will. After Maggie is bathed in the power of one of her father’s discoveries, an ancient runestone, she gets all the powers of a chameleon. Maggie teams up with a member of that ancient race, codenamed Mosaic, to defeat the evil Mannequin who wants to take over the world.

Check out the official site for Stan Lee Presents: Mosaic

Daniel Robert Epstein: So Stan, these are the Purveyors of Wonders projects you’ve been talking about for years.

Stan Lee: Yeah Purveyors of Wonder or POW! is our company. Obviously we wouldn’t purvey anything that wasn’t at least wonderful.

DRE: How involved are you with this?

Lee: I come up with the basic concept for what we do. I’ll write an outline or a treatment or something of that sort. Then we find the best script writer to put it into script form and I stay on top of the whole operation.

DRE: Do you find it difficult to keep relevant?

Lee: I have this one problem. I’m a little too hip. I have to cut back as much as I can because I don’t want to lose too many readers or too many viewers because I am too advanced. When I walk past a bunch of kids playing ball in the street I am always surprised when they don’t yell at me, “Hey fella we’re one man short. You want to join us?” I still feel like I’m one of them.

DRE: I interviewed Roger Corman not too long ago who I believe you’re friends with.

Lee: He’s a great guy.

DRE: His company is now doing stuff straight to DVD. I think some of the best stuff I’m seeing now is straight to DVD. Do you feel this is a really untapped market?

Lee: I don’t know how untapped it is because we’re starting to tap the hell out of it. It’s a great market absolutely.

DRE: Did you find more freedom in straight to DVD movies than theatrical films or even comic books?

Lee: We can do whatever we want but I still love movies and television. But the beautiful thing about POW is that we’re involved in all of them. We’re working on movies, TV series, videogames and we’re doing things for cell phones. DVDs are fun because we just decide to do one and we damn well do it.

DRE: People have trouble creating new franchise characters, what’s the key to writing compelling characters?

Lee: Sure I’m going to tell you so that all our competitors can make note and put us out of business [laughs]. The key is to create characters that people will care about and will want see more of. Now how you do that, I am not going to tell you.

DRE: [laughs] We spoke of a few years ago and you said that you weren’t a fan of pure fantasy, did you relax that a bit for Mosaic?

Lee: It depends on what you’re talking about pure fantasy. If your story has nothing but fairytale qualities then I’m not interested in it. Fantasy has to be tempered with reality. For example, one of the famous fairytales is Jack and the Beanstalk. The fantasy element is that he had magic beans and they grew a giant beanstalk that went up to the sky where a giant lived. That’s fantasy, but it was coupled with reality. Jack was a poor kid who lived with his mother. They didn’t have enough money and finally she told him to sell their cow. By making the character’s realistic and empathetic, you can go into fantasy but if everything is fantastic then it gets boring.

DRE: I know that you said many times that the executive producer credit you get on the Marvel movies are honorary.

Lee: I really don’t have that much to do with producing the movies. Though many of them are based on the things that I have written years ago. As far as the production of the movies, there are so many talented people that they don’t need any help from me.

DRE: Would you be interested in being more involved with the Marvel movies in the way you are involved with the Purveyors of Wonder projects?

Lee: Any creative juices that I have, I can expend on POW so I don’t have to butt into other projects. At POW we are doing so many things that I’m totally involved in so I do manage to keep busy and stuff.

DRE: I read that you will be making a cameo in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

Lee: Yes and it’s a great appearance too. I have a couple lines to say and I think the viewers who are old Marvel fans will get a kick out of it because my appearance is based on something that happened in a Fantastic Four story years ago.

DRE: I assume that means Willie Lumpkin will be using his ear wiggling superpower.

Lee: I’m not going to be Willie Lumpkin in this one. I’ll be an even more recognizable figure and I can’t tell you anymore.

DRE: Obviously I write for the internet and so much of the comic book community can be traced back to the fanzines that came about after you started printing people’s addresses on the Marvel Comics letters pages. What made you start doing that?

Lee: I just wanted to make everything personal and friendly and make it seem as if we’re all part of a little club. I wanted to have a warm friendly feeling for everything we did and I thought that helped.

DRE: Did you have any inkling that people would start corresponding with one another?

Lee: I hoped that would happen like that and it did and it was very satisfying. It was very gratifying.

DRE: I read that Atlantic Monthly voted you the 26th most influential American.

Lee: I don’t know how I missed being in the first 25 but you can’t win them all.

DRE: What does being a living legend mean to you?

Lee: Between you and me I don’t give it much thought. I just keep busy doing what I am doing and having fun working with people that I like. That’s the most important thing. I’ve always worked with people that are very talented and whom I like personally so it doesn’t feel like work. You are joining your friends and you get to have a good time.

DRE: I always wondered why it seems that Marvel and whoever their parent company is never gives creators like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko their due. What are they afraid of?

Lee: I don’t know what you mean but if what is it you would want them to do?

DRE: It always seemed that they never seem to get as much credit as they deserved.

Lee: Everything that they’ve done, their name has been on. I make sure of that. How much more credit could they get? Anytime I do an interview and we are talking about Spider-Man or Dr. Strange, I always mention Steve Ditko. When we talk about some of the other things I always mention Jack. Nobody has been hiding them. Marvel publishes a series called Marvel Visionaries and one whole book was devoted to Jack. I think they’ve done one devoted to Steve Ditko. I’m happy to say they did one devoted to me. I don’t really know what more you would want. I’m not a spokesman for Marvel so I’m not speaking as a Marvel representative but just as a guy outside looking in.

DRE: Years ago Daniel Clowes wrote a book called Dan Pussey and it had a Stan Lee-like character and Kirby had a character based on you in New Gods called Funky Flashman. How did you feel about those?

Lee: At that time Jack was mad at me and he had some fun doing it. I thought it was funny.

DRE: You thought it was funny even though he was mad at you?

Lee: Well, he didn’t stay mad very long. If you’ve worked with an artist for years. it’s almost like a married couple. Every so often you have a quarrel then you get over it.

DRE: Are you working on any new comics?

Lee: Not really. I did some comics for Marvel called Stan Lee Meets. I am in the story and I meet Spider-Man and then I meet Dr. Doom. In another one I meet The Thing and Dr. Strange. John Romita Jr. has done the art. We planned to do that five years ago and I forgot all about it and John was busy. But he got the artwork done a couple months ago. I’ll do a story if something comes up and if they ask me but basically I am pretty much out of comics now.

DRE: Howard Chaykin told me that he doesn’t think comic books are going to last through his life time, which is another 30 years or so, because of computers and the internet. Do you think comic books have a lot of time left?

Lee: I think that comics will be around for a hell of a long time. My gosh, comics are fun to read. Now there is more competition then there has ever been. When I was writing comics they didn’t have television, they didn’t have videogames, they didn’t have iPods and they didn’t have computers. The only competition was movies. But comic books take their place with all the other forms of entertainment and I think that they’ll always be here.

DRE: It’s interesting that you say that while you’re not working on comics anymore.

Lee: Believe it or not I don’t think that I am so important that if I am not working on comics, the companies would fall. People would think that I am stupid or the most conceited guy in the world. Comic books are a great way to read a story. Movie producers are getting more and more interested in comics because they realize that they are great sources of material for TV shows and movies.

DRE: Marvel has many amazing properties but most of them are not nearly as popular as the X-Men and Spider-Man, do you think Marvel has properties that could be as popular in movies as those characters?

Lee: I don’t know if they could be as big as Spider-Man but there is always a chance. I don’t think that anyone will agree with me but I feel almost every character can be successful depending on how you write and produce the character and who plays the role and who directs it.

DRE: A lot more women are interested in superhero comics than ever before. Was that an audience that you found difficult to crack in the 60’s and 70’s?

Lee: Back then there weren’t many female readers but the movies have helped a great deal. Women who have seen X-Men and Spider-Man realize that there is romance, human interest and quite a bit of realism in them besides the fantasy. That’s what women like so more and more women are getting into comics and comic movies.

DRE: You’ve said publicly that you and Steve Ditko were never friends, right?

Lee: Well, we didn’t socialize. But I always thought of him as a friend when we worked together. I had great respect for his brilliant talent. He was so important in creating and making Spider-Man important.

DRE: Do you ever think he’ll show himself publicly again?

Lee: If I had to guess, I would say no. If he hasn’t done it in all these years I don’t know why he would do it now. For some reason the guy just doesn’t want publicity or he just doesn’t want to speak to the press. It’s certainly his prerogative.

DRE: How many Stan Lee related tattoos have you seen on people over the years?

Lee: Quite a few. When I would go to comic book conventions for autographing, very often somebody would roll up their sleeve and say, “Would you sign under the Spider-Man tattoo?” Or under the Dr. Strange tattoo. One of them actually had a tattoo which was a caricature of me [laughs]. I don’t think it did me justice, but hey, what are you going to do?

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

by M. J. Johnson (image) [Zoey in Envy] When someone is trying to prove how open minded they are about people, they will often say something along the lines of “I don’t care if they’re black, white, yellow, red, gay, straight, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, or Buddhist.” This is supposed to prove... more

by M. J. Johnson


[Zoey in Envy]

When someone is trying to prove how open minded they are about people, they will often say something along the lines of “I don’t care if they’re black, white, yellow, red, gay, straight, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, or Buddhist.” This is supposed to prove that all people are equal in their mind.

But what about a person’s body size?

We live in a sizeist society. Long past the time when it was acceptable to judge someone’s worth based on sex, gender, race, culture, religion, body mods, or ethnicity (though such judgments DO still occur), it is common and largely acceptable to judge someone based on their body type. Comedians commonly joke about Chris Christie’s weight, as if that has something to do with his terrible politics. Articles are written about Keira Knightley’s body type in which self-proclaimed beauty experts call her “dangerously thin” and encourage parents to keep their daughters from seeing her movies, lest the young girls think they need to look like her.

I am a fat man. I’m 6’2” tall and weigh somewhere around 335 lbs. I have a ring of fat around my middle, and climbing 6 flights of stairs makes me breath heavy. Based on that physical description, many people would write me off as an individual, not worth their time and effort. Any opinion of mine could be dismissed because it came from my body.

And I can hear the criticisms: “You’re smart, why don’t you exercise? Why don’t you eat right?” Well, it just so happens that I do. Until I moved to a different state, I was going to the gym 4-5 times per week, 1-2 hours at a time, where I did a cross between aerobic and weight training. My blood pressure is well within the normal range for my age, and my resting pulse is below 80.

But I am still fat. I don’t overeat any more often than a normal sized person; I average about 2500 calories per day, which is just enough to keep someone my size going. I rarely use salt, eat lots of fruit and little red meat, drink water almost exclusively (with an exception for a daily coffee, no sugar, no flavors). I avoid sodas like the plague, and cook almost all my own meals.

Maybe I’m atypical. Maybe I’m genetically predisposed to obesity. Maybe nothing I can do will ever result in me being thin. Or, maybe I just haven’t hit that perfect relation of exercise to food that will turn me into an Adonis.

The point is, nobody can tell that by looking at me. Nobody can tell whether I exercise or sit around playing video games all day. (I don’t. Can’t stand the things.) All anyone can see is that I’m a fat man, and far too many people will dismiss me as such.

This is far from a new idea. For over a century, obesity has been used as a symbol of greed, corruption, and downright evil. There is a reason Dashiell Hammett made the principle villain in his book The Maltese Falcon obese, known for the first half only as “The Fat Man.” This was the Great Depression; anyone with more than enough to eat must have been crooked. The film version came out in the 1940s, at a time when the only roles black actors could get were as servants. Funny how one type of prejudice is not acceptable today, but the other is.

“But people have no control over their race like they do their weight.”

That would be a valid argument, if it were anywhere close to reality. But the truth is, the reasons behind obesity, and why one person gets fat while another does not, are myriad. And, while an inactive lifestyle is, if not the main factor, often a large reason, it is not the only one. Medications, medical conditions, genetics, depression, sleeping habits, limited access to healthy foods or safe free exercise areas (parks, walking trails), even the weather can be factors to obesity.

Of course, us fat folks aren’t the only ones being attacked by sizeism; thin people are often stereotyped as bulimic or anorexic. Yes, those are terrible diseases, but they are not the only reason people are thin. Where an obese person can have an underactive thyroid, a thin person’s can be overactive. This can result in a metabolism that burns away huge amounts of food, faster than the person can eat. And before anyone gets their “Oh, I wish I had that problem” hat on, think about it: always being hungry, needing to eat huge amounts to keep from feeling ill or passing out, spending larger and larger amounts of money just on food.

Why does this happen? Why is sizeism an acceptable prejudice? Maybe it has some connection to the “Cult of the Perfect,” the subconscious worship of beauty. Angelina Jolie wrote a book a few years ago, about her work among the poor children of Third World countries. The message of this book is good, but the writing is pretty pedestrian, and it is far from the only book on the topic. But, because of her celebrity, built largely on her looks, the book was a best seller. It is great, or would be if people actually read the book. I fear many people just bought the book because it was by her than for actual social/cause awareness. Sally Struthers has been doing much the same work for decades, but the most common reaction to her is to make a fat joke.

The point of all this is, you simply cannot tell what is going on by looking at the outside. The basis for all prejudice is ignorance, and that applies to sizeism as well. Unless you are that person’s doctor, with a complete medical history in front of you, it is impossible for you to make any judgment about a person based on their body. And even if you do have that information, passing judgments about someone as a person based on their body-type is no different than passing judgment based on race, ethnicity, gender, sex, or any other physical attribute.

This isn’t about attractiveness; everyone has, and is allowed to have, their type. If someone is not your cup of tea, so be it. This is about making assumptions about a person, stereotyping them, based on their physical form.

And that is always wrong.

Ted Naifeh first gained recognition as the artist and co-creator of the comic series “Gloomcookie,” but it was the release of his own creation, “Courtney Crumrin” that really made his reputation. Since the initial miniseries “Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things” was released a decade ago... more

Ted Naifeh first gained recognition as the artist and co-creator of the comic series “Gloomcookie,” but it was the release of his own creation, “Courtney Crumrin” that really made his reputation. Since the initial miniseries “Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things” was released a decade ago by Oni Press, Naifeh has returned to the character a few times in between other projects.

He illustrated “Death Jr.” comics, collaborated with Tristan Crane on “How Loathsome” and illustrated Holly Black’s “Good Neighbors” graphic novel trilogy from Scholastic. Naifeh also wrote and drew “Polly and the Pirates” and wrote a sequel which was released earlier this year.

Courtney has always remained Naifeh’s best-loved creation, and this month Oni Press debuts a new full color “Courtney Crumrin” ongoing series, which serves as both an excellent introduction to Courtney and her world for new readers and a welcome return for those who know her well. Naifeh may have joked that the ten year anniversary of Courtney is making him feel old, but Naifeh remains just as talented a creator and as nice a person as he was when we first met years ago.


ALEX DUEBEN: First of all, congratulations. It's been ten years since Courtney Crumrin first appeared. Does it feel like ten years?

TED NAIFEH: What are you trying to do, remind me how old I am? Seriously though, it feels like a lifetime, since the person I've come to think of myself as, at least in a professional capacity, was born with this book. On the other hand, In re-reading it, I still find some of it very fresh. It looks and sounds like me.

AD: Why did you decide to recolor the original Courtney Crumrin comics and what made  Warren Wucinich the person for the job?

TN: It's always a tough decision. I had some very talented people approach me wanting to color it, and even doing brilliant samples. And Oni sent me two different guys, one of whom did a very tight professional job, and the other one doing something a little weird and experimental. I chose the experimental guy. He turned out to be perfect. It's very easy to think of coloring as a craft, where the goal is to do a quality, workmanlike job with all the bells and whistles in their proper place. But what Warren does is experiment, try things, take chances. Sometimes his experiments don't quite work, but Jill Beaton and I give him feedback, and the result is simply this: every page is unexpected. And that's exactly what I wanted. It's not craft, it's art.

AD: Why a Courtney Crumrin ongoing series and why now?

TN: We changed the format for two reasons. One, the limited series just doesn't appeal to comic shops anymore. They want trades, or they want ongoing series. The second reason is that I needed an excuse to commit to Courtney. I really want to spend more time building her world. But once you're done with a mini-series, it's hard to commit to another. I regret that I didn't stick with the character and build more momentum. Even if I'd only done one mini-series a year, I could have had ten Courtney volumes instead of 4 by now. And who knows? She might have gotten a lot more followers. People like stories with a deep history. That's one reason Bone did so well. Jeff Smith committed to it.

AD: Has crafting an ongoing series changed your approach to Courtney or how you tell the stories? You've done miniseries and graphic novels, but never an ongoing like this.

TN: Yes, very much so. I'm building a longer form story, where each arc feeds directly into the next. You'll see when the first arc is done. It ends on a cliffhanger.

AD: Why did you decide to make the ongoing series in full color?

TN: Color books do better, for one thing. Everyone wanted it. And it looks great. But also, I've been experimenting with my style a bit, and my pages just seem to benefit from color. I've been using more heavy black brushwork. Warren adds a lot of depth and atmosphere to it.

AD: Does knowing that the book will appear in color mean you do anything differently from an artistic perspective?

TN: It frees me up to let the lines tell the story. I've been using less crosshatching tone to add depth. If you look at the first volume, it's riddled with crosshatching, essentially doing the job of a colorist. I don't need to do that as much. That's not to say the pages are unreadable without color. They're just not quite as atmospheric.

AD: With the ongoing, will we see one-off side stories like Portrait of a Warlock as a Young Man and tales of other characters appear as story arcs told within the series?

TN: Yes, I have stand-alone story coming up about a middle-aged Aloysius. It's funny though, I know folks like Aloysius, but they're less interested in him when he's on his own. He's like the elves in Middle Earth. They're interesting, but they need hobbits around to create contrast. Without Courtney, Aloysius isn't quite as mysterious.

As for other spin-offs, I've been thinking about it, but I need to decide which character to follow. I'm open to suggestions.

AD: That's an interesting observation about Aloysius. I guess that he's such an interesting character who has clearly lived such a colorful life, but we don't necessarily want to know the stories. Having said that, I hope we'll be learning more about Miss Crisp, and more about Butterworm. And you can always do a story about the cats. I hear people like cats.

TN: I don't know that we don't want to know, I just don't know that he should be the star. Maybe my co-star should have been a little more fleshed out. I will eventually do more tie-ins, which will be easier with an ongoing series. I definitely want to do more cat stories.

AD: Is the plan for you to write and draw every issue or will we see the occasional guest appear?

TN: For this series, for the time being, it's going to be all me. But I may have guest artists draw a spin-off series.

AD: Another series of yours that I'm a big fan of, Polly and the Pirates, had its second volume come out a few months back. How has the response been and will we see a third volume?

TN: The sales were great on Polly 2. Everyone seems to like it. I'm going to write Polly 3 as soon as I have some spare time.

AD: As far as the second volume of Polly and the Pirates, I was a little disappointed to learn that Norton isn't the actual Emperor of America as was implied in the first volume. Polly does spell out why we love Norton so, but what was the thinking behind that?

TN: I don't like to go too far in analyzing my own work, because, ya know, what am I, a psychology expert? But with Norton, it suppose it depends on how you look at it. By legal standards, Norton isn't the official emperor of America. But if you were to ask anyone in the Polly world who they thought the emperor was, they'd say Norton. Unless they're cynical bastards, of course. The idea is rule by individual consent. That's the kind of world Polly lives in, a much gentler, more optimistic world than ours.

AD: Will we ever see a new edition of How Loathsome one of these days?

TN: Yes, I don't see why not. I just haven't taken the time to go hunting up a new publisher. Tristan Crane and I have talked about self-publishing, though I'm still old-fashion enough to think of that as the last desperate refuge of an idea no one but me likes. Obviously, I'm getting old.

AD: I remember you told me years back that you had an eventual ending in mind
for Courtney. Has that ending changed?

TN: Nope. The series isn't going to last forever, and I intend a pretty grand finally. I still have other stories to tell.

AD: We've spoken professionally and informally a few times over the years and you've mentioned a few projects that have never come to fruition like Princess Ugg and Zenith. Have they been abandoned, are they on hold?

TN: Like I said, the Courtney series isn't going to go on forever. Those two series are very close to my heart, and will come eventually.

AD: Just to end this where we began, what can people expect from the ongoing series and preview a few things we'll be seeing in the coming months?

TN: I don't want to give too much away. I'm just going to say that the status quo of Courtney's world will be shattered.

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 Waikiki! Waikiki has been a SuicideGirl since 2006 and she has 13 strikingly sexy photo sets. 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 Waikiki!

Waikiki has been a SuicideGirl since 2006 and she has 13 strikingly sexy photo sets. Enjoy this gorgeous look back at the stunning Waikiki...

From her first photo set Lost Highways shot in 2006 by Albertine:





We are sprung on Waikiki in her set Spring from 2006 shot by Albertine:





She comes upon a motor Crash in this sexy set from 2006 shot by Albertine:





She's a Castaway in this hot beach set shot by Albertine in 2007:





Waikiki gets some Satisfaction in this fun set from 2008 shot by Albertine:





She melts our hearts in Pulsacion shot by Pulse in 2009:





Waikiki is Dreaming Uruguay in this stunning set shot by Nicolletta in 2009:





She is beyond sexy in Amor y fuego shot by Pulse in 2010:





Waikiki has the sexiest seductive gaze in Perla Nera shot by Albertine in 2011:





She shows you what her day is like in All of Me shot by Albertine in 2011:





Waikiki takes a Walk on the Wild Side in this gorgeous set shot by Alissa in 2012:





From her most recent set Right There shot in 2012 by Alissa:







Hope you enjoyed the lovely look back at the gorgeous SuicideGirl Waikiki! 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 13 nude pin-up photo sets of Waikiki - http://suicidegirls.com/join/

by Nicole Powers (image) Amanda Palmer is truly an artist of and for the people – sharing her heart, soul, and music with an unparalleled generosity. Going it alone without the backing of a record company, she went cap in hand to her fans via Kickstarter asking them to support her first post-label... more

by Nicole Powers



Amanda Palmer is truly an artist of and for the people – sharing her heart, soul, and music with an unparalleled generosity. Going it alone without the backing of a record company, she went cap in hand to her fans via Kickstarter asking them to support her first post-label “big, legit, studio album undertaking” to the tune of $100K. Thanks, in part, to the unique and very honest rapport the former Dresden Doll has with her fanbase, the response was massive; she covered the requested amount nearly 12 times over – raising $1,192,793 via 24,883 backers. The resulting album – Theatre is Evil – was unleashed via Palmer’s own imprint, 8 Ft. Records, on September 11.

To appropriately mark the release of her much anticipated first full-on full-length in four years, Palmer and her newly assembled Grand Theft Orchestra have embarked on a two month-plus North American and European tour. SuicideGirls attended the official record release party on Tuesday September 11, at Webster Hall in NYC. The show, which was the second date of the tour (the first being in Philly the night before), was simultaneously webcast globally via YouTube.

The bulk of the show was quite rightly taken up with the new tracks, which ranged from raucous rock-infused ditties (“Olly Olly Oxen Free” and “Do It With A Rockstar”) to post-apocalyptic alt cabaret (“Smile: Pictures or It Didn’t Happen”), to new wave pastiches (“Want It Back” and “Bottomfeeder”), to songs so beautiful that they would have broken our heart had it not already been smashed to smithereens (“The Bed Song,” “Berlin,” “Trout Heart Replica” and “Grown Men Cry”).

The band, her phattest to date – complete with revolving volunteer string and horn sections (which vary from date to date) – sounded epic, while Palmer was completely in her element. She conversed intimately with her audience, shared their secrets via a confessional note box, and, during songs, hopped from keys to drums to guitar – and then off stage. Indeed it seemed fitting as an artist of the people, that she surfed the audience with such art, ease, and elegance on more than one occasion.

Having made grown men and women laugh, cry, and rock out in the extreme, Palmer drew her triumphant set to a close with “Leeds United” – a personal fave of this humble scribe. Judging by the raw emotion exuded by the crowd en mass, we could tell we weren’t the only one in the room that had loved and lost. The glee with which the packed house joined in with the unlikely anthemic chorus verged on indecent. But, indeed, “Who needs love when there's Law And Order? And who needs love when there's Southern Comfort? And who needs love when the sandwiches are wicked and they know you at the Mac Store?”



And who needs love when you can have a night out – or in – with Ms. Palmer?

...Talking of which, download your copy of Theatre is Evil – NOW for FREE – like immediately!

A pioneer in the *awkward* area of downloading, Palmer pragmatically balances her need to finance her creativity with the realities of intellectual property and commerce in the digital age – not to mention in these tough economic times. All she asks is that you observe the honor system – no questions, no judgment. Leave a little in the virtual tip jar if you can afford it (or when you can, if you love it). Then do what the lady says, and share it with a friend. They’ll be grateful you did, as will Ms. Palmer, since you can’t put a price on new fans!



For more images from the show, visit our photo gallery.

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(image) by Aaron Colter (image) Wild Children by Ales Kot and Riley Rossomo is one of the bolder comic releases of late. With an industry still stuck in rehashing old characters and making blockbuster movies, Image Comics has given two independent creators the opportunity to publish a graphic novella... more

by Aaron Colter



Wild Children by Ales Kot and Riley Rossomo is one of the bolder comic releases of late. With an industry still stuck in rehashing old characters and making blockbuster movies, Image Comics has given two independent creators the opportunity to publish a graphic novella that is equal parts teenage rebellion and conceptual reality.

SuicideGirls reached out to the creators to talk about the inspiration behind the book, since any review of it would contain spoilers. If you've already read Wild Children, this should give you some insight into the creative process behind the title. If you haven't, don't worry. This interview should give you enough reason to check it out soon at your local comics shop.

Aaron Colter: Ales, what made you want to write a book like this?

Ales Kot: About twenty different things, really. As with almost everything, the origin of Wild Children can be traced to my childhood. My parents led me to question authority and desire to understand things as they truly are, and not just as they are presented. I took it a bit further than my parents expected. I loved school in the beginning, but the overall atmosphere of it quickly unfolded itself as a prison-like structure created to build docile citizens that would perpetuate the already dead dream of capitalism and infinite growth. Pair that up with the messy divorce my parents went through when I was about ten, and I quickly realized things were much more complex than the teachers were saying. So I began questioning them, first with an honest interest, and then eventually just to piss them off, because being nice never got me anywhere with them - except for the few that were at least partially aware of the absurdity of the system they were both facing and keeping alive.

AC: Riley, what made you want to draw this story?

Riley Rossomo: Young people get often painted poorly in the media - either as violent geek shut-ins about to snap, or nymphomaniac cheerleaders. But the range is so much greater. Young people can be brilliant, well-intentioned individuals. Wild Children addresses some of that, it doesn't fall back on typical teen archetypes.

AC: Following the tragedies in Colorado and Wisconsin, are you worried that Wild Children will be seen as insensitive or promoting violence?

AK: Not at all. Wild Children is not a cheap army propaganda-style FPS like Call of Duty. Ultimately, it will be whatever people decide to see it as, but that's beyond my reach. The intent is not there, and we don't care about cheap sensationalism, although the comic kind of invites it.

Anyone who uses fiction as a crux when explaining their own stupid decisions -- "The Devil in the Comic/Game/Movie/Music Made Me Do It" is a person that needs therapy, and lots of love and patience. Anyone who supports that logic will likely require the same.

AC: Were you both rebellious kids? Did you get in trouble in school a lot?

RR: Yup. I couldn't handle people telling what to do without giving me a reason. I loved reading, so I'd read all the assigned books, but thought it was a huge waste of time to regurgitate my thoughts in essay form. I was pretty angry – mostly I would skip class, go to the arcade and play video games or paint, draw or silk screen. I had a couple great art teachers that would let me do art in their classes, even though I was skipping other classes to be there. I liked girls – they were probably the biggest draw. And it was the best place to go to when you wanted to acquire anything illegal. Very little learning happened in the class.

AK: Yeah, once I hit a certain age, I definitely did my best to get in as much trouble as possible. It's not that I wanted the trouble – I just wanted to show that I didn't care for the fake rules and spineless non-authorities, and that they wouldn't put me down. A history teacher once gave me a verbal test in front of the entire class because she suspected I was off my tits, and I got B+, although I should have gotten an A. Nearly everyone in the class knew about my state, so it's still one of my fondest memories. Apart from that, I skipped school a lot, first because I simply hated it and was bullied, later because I just wanted to hang out with girls or read somewhere quiet on my own. I remember a school where some schoolmates used to do speed off the toilet boards, sex in class, things on fire…the first time I had a gun pointed at me was in front of the first school I went to. So I guess there was some trouble, yes.

AC: Are either of you familiar with the concept of brain-hacks? Essentially tricks to shape your reality. A new book called D.I.Y. Magic by Anthony Alvarado touches on some of these notions. I ask because Wild Children talks of magic. Are either of you interested in magic on any sort of level?

RR: I love magic. I like street magic, metaphysics, performers that use misdirection in new ways. I think there's a lot more out there than I can conceive of. There's so much in the world that can't quite be coincidence, or chance.

AK: Oh, absolutely. I hack my brain – more accurately, my entire being – and Wild Children is definitely a brain hack, or at least an honest attempt at one. I meditate, explore reality, observe how my mind shapes it, do my best to learn as much as I can and then implement all the new tricks into my daily life. I haven't heard of D.I.Y. Magic, but I'm going to read it now. I'm currently reading Colin Wilson's The Occult for the first time and it's a crucial experience. I don't think there's any difference between what we call magic and what we call science. It's just about seeing the hidden strings and learning how to operate them. Words and pictures are some of the strongest magical/scientific properties in our daily arsenal, because they shape the reality we live in to an uncanny extent. And, as Harvey Pekar said, you can do anything with words and pictures...Magic. It's fun. Take it seriously. Like it's science. Because it is. Just work to see the hidden threads.



AC: The notion of comics being a separate reality or a meta-world within a world that we create is something that's very Grant Morrison in ways that resemble his work The Filth and even concepts in The Invisibles. What other comics inspired this project?

AK: Kill Your Boyfriend by Grant Morrison and Philip Bond – a great story about teenage revolt that I loved as a kid. It's very similar to Badlands and Natural Born Killers, it's angry, it's fresh, it's short, and it packs a punch. I loved that comic, and it came out in the same format as Wild Children – a short graphic novella. I also thought about Shoot, the long-unreleased Hellblazer story about school shootings that DC Entertainment shelved back in the day because it was about to be released just as Columbine shootings happened. I disagreed with that decision – the comic wasn't sensationalist at all, and it had some important things to say. When I conceived of Wild Children, I wanted to combine these two comic books into a new one, into a graphic novella that would feel truly 2012 while paying its respects to the stories that influenced its birth. Casanova and the brave way it approaches itself and the medium. Asterios Polyp for some of the more theoretical stuff in the middle. John Smith's writing influenced the ending. Graphic novellas by Alan Moore, Warren Ellis and their collaborators. There are some nods to Frank Miller's early work in the beginning. Dash Shaw's work. Matt Seneca's webcomix – I love Affected – and his comics theory as well.

The inspiration related to Wild Children hit from many different sources. Filmmakers like Cronenberg, Lynch, Godard, Kubrick and Tarkovsky were instrumental in forming my approach early on, and they still influence me a lot. Music by Flying Lotus, Fuck Buttons, Pictureplane, Aphex Twin, DJ Rupture, Kode 9, Burial, Coil, early Marilyn Manson. Al Columbia's art, anything Brandon Graham does. Books by Hakim Bey, Robert Anton Wilson, Kenji Siratori, Jorge Luis Borges, P.K. Dick, Douglas Rushkoff and others. Some of the ideas in Rushkoff's Life, Inc. influenced Wild Children quite directly.

AC: Something else that comes across in the book is that all of the adults seem threatened by teenagers, who are, for the most part, harmless on a large scale. Do you think society is afraid of teenagers in real life? If so, why?

AK: It's quite clear that some parts of our society are afraid of teenagers in real life, yes. People who are shriveled inside, whether they're physically young or old, forget to question things, and live in their temporary sand castles, often doing everything they can to keep them standing, regardless of how much harm that imposes on everyone and everything else. The teenagers inevitably belong to our society, and it's often quite impossible to destroy their idealistic energy right away.

It's not exactly correct to say that only young people push things forward – it's people with a young attitude, wanting to learn, to discover the world, be in awe of the universe, that make the world a better place to live, and help us all evolve. But we're often taught to expect the worst – 31% of Americans are likely to suffer from an anxiety problem at some point during their lifetimes – and when we're worried or downright scared, rules make us feel safer, however temporary that illusory safety is. And rules are, by and large, something the new generations seems to have less and less use for. "Chaos is evil, rules are good." is an excruciatingly stale narrative. The world is much more complex. Question everything.

AC: As bad as our generation may have it, there may be less opportunities for those just now starting to grow up. Why do you think more students in America don't demand access to education in the same way students in other countries have?

AK: Because they don't believe in the system, perhaps? I'm genuinely not sure if I can answer this question well enough, but I'll do my best. I imagine that a huge part of it is the fact that we're observing the collapse of capitalism, and whether we want to acknowledge it or not, we know that's what's happening. We're offered a choice between a guy that believes that corporations are people, supports penalties for doctors who perform abortions, won't release his tax returns and most likely would perform fellatio on a pig for a nickel, or a guy that supports extraordinary rendition, secret kill lists and illegal spying on the people he swore to serve and protect.

AC: If you could give you teenage self one piece of advice, what would it be?

RR: Make more art, and let your anger go.

AK: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Wink, wink, wank.



For more information visit:
aleskot.com/
rileyrossmo.com/
imagecomics.com/



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G Willow Wilson first made a name for herself in comics in 2007 when the graphic novel “Cairo” which she wrote was published by Vertigo and made a splash, combining fantasy and realism in an attempt to capture life in Egypt’s capital city. She followed up the book with the series “Air,” which... more

G Willow Wilson first made a name for herself in comics in 2007 when the graphic novel “Cairo” which she wrote was published by Vertigo and made a splash, combining fantasy and realism in an attempt to capture life in Egypt’s capital city. She followed up the book with the series “Air,” which was also illustrated by her “Cairo” collaborator M.K. Perker and other comics work including “Superman,” “The Outsiders,” “Vixen” and most recently “Mystic.” She’s also published nonfiction in many places including “The Atlantic Monthly” and “The New York Times.” In 2010 her memoir “The Butterfly Mosque,” was published about her move after college to Cairo where she met her future husband and came to fall in love with the country.

Her new book is her first novel, “Alif the Unseen.” The story of a hacker in an unnamed Arab Gulf country, the book involves the jinn, a battle with the state security services overseen by “The Hand,” the nature of storytelling, the power of the internet and climaxes in a revolution. It’s also a book that was written before the uprisings known as “the Arab Spring” erupted last year. We caught up with Wilson and spoke about the book and the current political climate in the Middle East following the Egyptian Presidential election.


Alex Dueben: Where did book begin for you?

G. Willow Wilson: It started from a number of seeds of ideas. One of which was the fact that I was really passionate about writing something about the impact that the internet was having on youth culture and the discussion of religion in the Middle East and bleeding over into the blogosphere here in the United States. I’d been living in Cairo and the internet was one of the main ways that I was able to not only keep in touch with people back home in the U.S., but also to reach out to others in the Middle East. What I found was really surprising to me. People were using the internet as a way to circumvent the censorship that is so prevalent in parts of the Middle East because the internet is still harder to censor than print media or television media. All of these different groups of people, who would ordinarily have no reason to talk to one another, were all of a sudden having conversations. Islamists and secularists, modernists and traditionalists, and all of the different demographics of people who would have to band together in order to enact any kind of change. For a long time pundits in the West said that change in the Middle East was going to be slow or impossible because these groups had such different ideologies, but what I was seeing was that people were actually trying really hard to find common ground because they had common problems–mainly the absolute lack of the freedom to chose their own government.

I thought that was very exciting, but at the time I really couldn’t get any traction here in the U.S. for an article or a book about this phenomenon because people really didn’t understand why the internet was such an important tool of communication. I think a lot of people in traditional media because they didn’t understand what was going on on the internet, they assumed that nothing was going on on the internet. Which today seems silly, but I said, you know what, I am going to put this in a novel. Sometimes people will latch onto an idea in fiction that they won’t necessarily latch onto in nonfiction because in fiction we expect the unusual. That was a big part of it. And another part was a desire to combine all of these things that I was interested in all of these audiences that I usually address separately and write about all of those things at once. It has modern fantasy and that could drawn on my comics-reading audience and it’s also got religion and politics which I write nonfiction on, so for me, it was also when I stopped censoring myself.

AD: Why did you decide to write a prose novel and not another graphic novel or comic series?

GWW: The scope of Alif the Unseen seemed big enough that I wanted a prose book because I knew that there were going to be things that are difficult to portray in pictures. There’s literary slights of hand that you can do in prose that are harder to pull off when you need concrete visual images as you do with graphic novels. I thought it was too big to be a graphic novel, so I decided to go with prose.

AD: You made the point that there wasn’t an awareness or interest in youth culture or Middle East culture is, I think, spot on, but it’s interesting you used a novel to address this. By focusing on the internal life of a character, it allows the reader to get into the character’s head and bypasses that orientalist notion of “the other.”

GWW: To me that’s the beauty of fiction. And in particular, the beauty of genre fiction. Taking people so far outside the realm of their own ordinary experience that they’re forced to give up a lot of their preconceived notions and react spontaneously to the characters in the story and the events in the story instead of drawing in with a notion of how things should work. To me that was what was so valuable about Alif as a novel, and not only as a novel but a work of speculative fiction.

AD: It’s been interesting to read non-genre critics respond to the book often in very interesting ways because they’re drawn to the book because of the subject matter but then they seem confused by the fantastic elements in some entertaining ways.

GWW: [laughs] It’s such a genre-bending book that I think people who are used to reading literary fiction, which has a limited set of tropes, get caught off guard a little bit. But that’s part of the fun of reading a book that takes you a little bit outside your comfort zone. Or at least I hope it is.

AD: I think so, but again if you’d written a book about a hacker in a Gulf country that ends in revolution with no fantastic elements, the book would have had a slightly different readership and a slightly different response.

GWW: Probably so. I wasn’t really interested in making a straight up political statement or disguising what should have been nonfiction as fiction. I wanted to tell a good story. I wanted to tell an exciting story that had the touchstones of modern politics and real life events and real life people, but at the same time break away from expectations about what the middle east is like. I wanted it to be the kind of book that I love to read, the kinds of books that I enjoy reading, so that’s the kind of book that I wrote.

AD: You’ve written about the jinn before, in your graphic novel Cairo. What do you find so interesting about them?

GWW: There’s so much fascinating mythology surrounding the jinn, analogous in a lot of ways to the mythology surrounding elves or faeries in Western mythology. They’re largely an untapped resource in English-language literature because they’re really not part of our typical fantasy canon. There was a lot there that I thought was worth talking about and they’re also a very interesting and convenient way of speaking about the ways that we people living in the modern, rational 21st century could be religious. Jinn are in fact mentioned in the Qur’an. They’re part of the canon of Islamic literature, but among the increasingly practical scientific people in the Middle East and other parts of the Muslim world you’ll often see reluctance to talk about jinn and the unseen in a literal way. They fall outside that very pragmatic way that we see the world. This is true in the book as well. Alif of course is very reluctant to believe that the shady character he meets whose help he needs is anything other than a human being and really resists the idea that there’s anything more going on. It was a very interesting way to examine how we as modern humans interact with our own myths and our own religion.

AD: That’s true of many religions, Judaism and Christianity, just to stay in the same family, have fantastic elements that are largely or completely ignored.

GWW: That’s very true. It’s become somewhat uncool to talk about these things and I think the more academic our understanding of religion becomes–and this is equally true for people who practice religion in some ways, this is not a statement about atheists or non-practicing people–even practicing people prefer to focus on law and on ethics. We become increasingly nervous at the more transcendental aspects of religion that were very important to our pre-modern ancestors. As a writer of fiction and a longtime fan of Neil Gaiman and the modern fantasy writers of that generation, this was a really interesting topic for me to kind of dig my teeth into.

AD: I don’t want to give away much of the plot but there’s a point where Alif is in prison and The Hand has a great line talking about how if the citizens were given the right to vote, they would vote for either their own tribe, the Islamists or whoever paid them. That’s been what many people including lots of powerful Arabs and lots of influential Americans have been saying for decades.

GWW: Yeah. That’s the cynical, realist traditional interpretation of what would happen if you gave democracy to people in the Middle East. One of the reasons why we, though we are in theory the great spreader of democracy, have been reluctant to court democratic movements in the Middle East is because of that exact fear. I started writing the book before the Arab spring broke out and I didn’t want The Hand to be right, but I had a terrible inkling that if there were to be revolution or a series of revolutions in the Middle East, that that might be the outcome. In the book I chose the optimistic route and I back Alif’s assertion that freedom is not a dead idea. That people do want that choice and no matter the outcome that is a noble struggle to undertake.

It’s been interesting to see the Arab Spring unfold and compare it to what happened in the book. I pay particularly close attention to Egypt because that’s my second home and it’s where my husband’s family is and where most of my books still are. [laughs] A good chunk of my life is there. It’s been very very interesting to see the aftermath of the first free Presidential election in really the history of Egypt. To see this, in theory, moderate Islamist elected and everybody’s waiting to see what he’ll do. So far the threat of popular revolt, the reminder that the only reason that he’s in power is because a popular revolt put him there, seems to have been enough to at least make him appear to toe a line of equality. He’s made promises to appoint women and Coptic Christians to his cabinet. He’s done everything short of bend over backwards to reassure people that he’s not out to create a Saudi Arabia in Egypt because that’s not something that the people in Egypt–and I think, in most of the Middle East–want.

I think Islamism has had a chance to play itself out. We’ve seen it in Saudi Arabia. We’ve seen Shia Islamism in Iran. We’ve seen Islamist groups take control of parts of Somalia and parts of Sudan. People are, I think, cynical of that dangerous, golden age thinking. That if we just roll back the clock to the seventh century, everything will be okay. And it seems that even people who are practicing Muslims are becoming skeptical to that idea because they’ve seen the terrible fallout that goes along with some of these ultraconservative regimes in various places. I think it’s healthy for these ideas to be aired in public so that they have a chance to be tested and criticized so I think there’s good reason to be optimistic. I, like many people, are watching with anticipation to see what happens next in this new Middle East.

AD: It’s incredibly interesting and as you point out, now-President of Egypt Morsi was running against a candidate whose platform was essentially, forget about my career and what I’ve done, I’ll keep the Islamists in check.

GWW: Right. And he got a very good showing. Morsi only beat him by a few points. That shows that people are deeply worried about these things. But at the end of the day they’re not interested in a repeat of the old regime. The threat of Islamist takeover was the excuse that Mubarak used for thirty years to jail and torture dissidents of all stripes including secularists and to impose this emergency law that strips Egyptian citizens of even their most basic rights of free assembly and free speech. I think the election of Morsi shows that the people are willing to take that risk in the name of freedom. I think the people went the optimistic route and I and a lot of people are hoping that is rewarded by a government that works, but we’ll see. It’s too early to tell.

AD: It’s been exciting to see as across the region in Tunisia and Libya and Egypt, different governments emerge.

GWW: It’s exciting and chaotic. Revolutions are not easy things. They take a long time. You look back at our own history, even though we enshrine the year 1776, it took almost one hundred years for us to really get things sorted out and decide what it meant to be a United States. It took a series of small wars and a Civil War before we really sorted that out. Revolutions are not easy things and sometimes it takes a while for things to shake out.

AD: Your book touches on that at the end where it may be a hopeful ending, but it’s not a perfect, utopian ending.

GWW: I was at that point projecting forward and thinking about what mob justice means. Even if the mob in question is a revolutionary mob and has the highest ideals when it comes to giving the power of government back to the people, at the end of the day, a mob’s a mob. Sometimes innocent people get caught up in that momentary fury that is necessary to topple a dictatorship. Look at Tahrir Square. Innocent people have suffered when crowds get angry and I wanted to keep that in mind. When I was writing that scene, because the events in Tahrir Square had not unfolded yet, I was thinking about the French Revolution and some of the similar things that occurred during that time period. There’s no reason this wouldn’t happen in this situation in the Middle East as well where you get so many people in the same place at once who have been so angry for so long. For a brief period of time, mob justice prevails and that certainly comes through in the book. It is not meant to be an entirely sunny, wonderful you have a revolution, the end, happily ever after sort of an ending. I try to take into account what inevitably happens when great great upheaval is experienced.

AD: What are you working on now?

GWW: Right now I’m working on another novel. It’s set about five hundred years ago during the age of exploration. One of the characters from Alif the Unseen appears in it. Since it takes place so many centuries ago, I’m sure you can probably guess which one. [laughs] It’s high seas adventure with a twist so it’s been a lot of fun to write. It’s not finished and possibly won’t be for a while.

AD: Just as a final question, and we’ve been touching on this, I’m curious about your thoughts on the future, especially in Egypt.

GWW: I wish I had a crystal ball so I could see. What I hope will happen is that after a period of adjustment, which I think will consume the entire first term–possibly only term–of Morsi’s Presidency and at least the next Parliament, that people will get down to the business of fixing the economy. That’s my hope. I think we forget that really the breaking point that brought about revolution in Egypt was the fact that people were starting to find it difficult to feed themselves in many circumstances. Inflation was so high that a pound of meat cost more in dollars in Cairo than it does here in the United States. This is a country where a lot of people live on the global poverty line of two dollars a day. You can’t sustain that. The real problem is the economic tailspin that the country has spiraled into and I think the real test will be whether the Morsi government can start to pull it out of that tailspin. Irregardless of the discussion of religion, irregardless of the discussion of foreign policy, that is going to be the real test. I hope and pray that they’re able to at least begin to turn it around because that’s going to determine the future of not just for this generation of Egyptians but for the generations to come.

by Lee Camp (video) Every pundit, wonk, and thick-headed pig-headed dick-headed talking head in the entire nation has been postulating, extrapolating, and bloviating about who will win the presidential election this November. They don't know the answer. They'll tell you that they do, and then... more

by Lee Camp



Every pundit, wonk, and thick-headed pig-headed dick-headed talking head in the entire nation has been postulating, extrapolating, and bloviating about who will win the presidential election this November. They don't know the answer. They'll tell you that they do, and then the following day, they'll tell you they have a new answer. But I do know. Check out the video to find out. If the guy I talk about in this video doesn't win, then I will dance naked onstage at the Apollo. And unlike the Suicide Girls, very few people want to see me dance naked.



Also, if you're within 1000 miles of NYC this weekend, come to the big Occupy pre-#S17 concert that will feature me, Tom Morello, Jello Biafra, Rebel Diaz and others. It's at Foley Square on Sunday Sept 16th, starting at 1 PM.



Related Posts:
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Moment of Clarity: Why The Occupy Anniversary On September 17th Matters
Moment of Clarity: Life Is This Miniscule Thing…It’s This Moment And Then It’s Over…Use It Wisely My Friends
Moment of Clarity: A Category Five Shit Storm Hits The RNC
Moment of Clarity: Study Reveals Experts Are Morons...And Here's Why
Moment of Clarity: Todd Akin, Paul Ryan, And The Fifty Shades of Rape
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Moment of Clarity: A Bedtime Story About Fraud, Corruption, And Snorting Koch
Moment of Clarity: Your Vote Will Be Stolen And Here's How
Moment of Clarity: Why Can't War Be Fun For The Whole Family?
Moment of Clarity: On The Brink Of Cultural Singularity
Moment of Clarity: Storming The Headquarters Of Chase Bank
Moment of Clarity: The Euro Was Designed To Fuck You 12 Ways Til Sunday
Moment of Clarity: This Video Is Not Fracking Offensive
Moment of Clarity: Go Greenland, Scratch That, A lot Of It's Already Gone
Moment of Clarity: America Is Too Fat, Skinny & Free!
Moment of Clarity: Did The Lord Say To Be A Greedy A$$hole?
Moment of Clarity: LIBOR – Ladies Intimately Bending Over, Rearview
Moment of Clarity: The Shadows Are Taking Over

by Steven Whitney An alarming crusade that threatens not only the democratic ideal but our very democracy itself is currently sweeping the country. Falsely posing as stern protectors of electoral integrity, the GOP has started yet another costly and totally unnecessary war – The War on Voter Fraud. more

by Steven Whitney

An alarming crusade that threatens not only the democratic ideal but our very democracy itself is currently sweeping the country. Falsely posing as stern protectors of electoral integrity, the GOP has started yet another costly and totally unnecessary war – The War on Voter Fraud.

It might be a just war...if it were true. But like so many GOP grand proclamations, it’s a sham, merely another false charge Republicans are criminally deploying to their advantage.

A new study released this past August 12th and financed by the non-partisan Carnegie and Knight Foundations examined thousands of court documents, official reports, and media reports involving voter fraud since 2000 and found conclusively that voter fraud is “virtually non-existent.” Of roughly 600 million votes cast since 2000, there were only 10 cases of alleged in-person voter fraud. 10...and those were just alleged. There were no convictions of in-person voter fraud during that time frame. Not anywhere in the US. Not one. In fact, you are sixty times more likely to get hit by lightning in any given year than the US is going to suffer from voter fraud.

But what the hell, there weren’t any WMDs in Iraq either...and they got away with that one (at a cost of more than a trillion dollars and thousands of American lives). And this is clearly in the same realm, a Machiavellian twist of a tactic Naomi Klein labeled “The Shock Doctrine,” manipulating real or made-up disasters (or threats to your “freedoms”) to urgently push an extreme political or economic agenda that no one in their right mind would otherwise consider – in this case, limiting the number of votes cast in elections.

For the GOP controlling votes is, indeed, an urgent matter. As US demographics tilt rapidly toward fuller minority share – a long-standing goal of true democracies - the party of “old white guys” is losing its dominance. They could, of course, try to appeal to minorities, but Republicans really don’t want to include in their party millions of people who were probably born in Kenya. So the only other option is to prevent them from voting.

How do they do it? The two most effective methods are to pass laws in GOP-held state legislatures requiring obstructive Voter ID standards or to restrict voting hours and days to an absolute minimum. Usually it’s one or the other and sometimes both. In addition to the financial implications associated with existing IDs laws, the potential cost estimate for ID requirements advanced by the GOP in 2011 in 35 states runs as high as $838 million for the first four years alone – certainly an unreasonable burden to taxpayers at a time when state treasuries are suffering severe budget crises.



But even more destructive is how these requirements negatively affect individual voters. Almost all of the proposed or enacted photo ID laws involve some monetary cost – passport books cost $140 and a driver’s license additionally requires both a written and a road test. Not only does that place an “unreasonable burden” on potential voters, it flies in the face of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

What voting blocs are most affected by these restrictions? Roughly 25% of African-Americans, 20% Asian-Americans, 19% Hispanics, 18% of those between the ages of 18-24, and 15% of Americans making less than $35,000 per year. And, of course, seniors of all stripes who no longer drive or travel out of the country but who still want to vote to keep Medicare.



Not coincidentally, those are the very groups who generally vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. It should also be noted that every single state undergoing a “voter purge” has Republican election officials. It’s also no fluke that that the GOP claims that voting fraud in these demographics is most flagrant in precisely the same states that polls indicate are still undecided, the so-called “swing states” that will end up deciding the election.

In Wisconsin (10 electoral votes), Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen petitioned the state Supreme Court just a few weeks ago to reinstate before the November elections a Voter ID law passed by the Republican-controlled legislature, hopefully at a date so late as to make any legal appeal impossible.

In Florida (29 electoral votes), GOP Governor Rick Scott fired one Secretary of State who refused to implement his plan to suppress votes and appointed one who will.

Jon Husted, GOP Secretary of State of Ohio (18 electoral votes), singled out two large Democratic districts for fewer voting days and no evening or weekend voting hours, privileges all Republican precincts retained. A Federal Court intervened, ordering Husted to cease and desist all efforts to limit voting access. Instead, Husted defied the order, continuing his path of suppression. Husted is due in court this week to ask for a stay of the order until the appeal process has been exhausted, which would occur only after the election. Husted is also running a 3-card monte ruse with polling places, switching them to one suburb after another. At this late date, voters in Toledo don’t even know where to vote!

And that’s just the tip of the figurative iceberg – confusion and suppression reign in nearly every state controlled at some level by GOP leaders masquerading as crusaders for honesty and transparency in the election process when just the opposite is true. Ohio Republicans on the Board of Elections even admitted that the ID requirements specifically targeted black voters. Despite the hue and cry, Republicans will not be moved – they know suppressing up to 5 million votes nationwide is the only way they can win the election. Of course, all of this is criminal...but if the GOP has its way, it’ll be too late to stop them and if they win the election, their Republican brethren will hardly seek prosecution.

But there are some prescriptive actions that could minimize the negative effect of these illegal purges, both now and in the future.

First, no fair-minded citizen in a participatory democracy wants anyone’s vote to be stolen or unduly suppressed. Whatever one’s party affiliation, everyone in a democracy must strive for transparency in, and the legitimacy of, the election process. More than anything else, free elections are what keep us free. Otherwise we’re just another, albeit bigger, banana republic, where those on top steal whatever they can – money, votes, and your country. So whether you’re liberal or conservative, if someone – Republican or Democrat – tries to deny citizens their right to vote, you must vote against them. The reason goes to the heart of American values – stealing votes is the grossest betrayal of the democratic ideals our nation was founded upon and for which millions of Americans have died over the last 240 years.

Secondly, federal judges and prosecutors need to adopt a zero-tolerance policy toward those who would suppress the most fundamental of American rights. If election officials ignore court directives to restore order, our courts are honor bound to issue bench warrants and throw them into the hardest and most unforgiving lock-ups imaginable – Alcatraz factored by ten – until they fully comply with the law. Just because they have a government title in front of their name does not mean they are above the law, especially as they have sworn to uphold it.

Lastly, it would be sweet irony – and a GOP nightmare – to use Citizens United to help get out the vote. With the influx of undisclosed money flowing into the coffers of SuperPACs on both sides of the aisle, the price tag of this November’s election is in the vicinity of $5.8 billion (including approximately $2.5 billion for the Presidential election alone).

Now, one or more SuperPACs needs to put aside one-half of 1% of that total - $29 million – and spend it on getting minorities and seniors state IDs acceptable for voter verification. And, like the GOP, it needs to focus on large swing states. For instance, the basic cost of an Ohio-issued photo ID is $8.50, or $5.1 million to purchase IDs for 600,000 voters. Florida’s photo ID can be had for $25.00, or $15 million to secure voting rights for another 600,000 citizens. Allow $8.9 million for administration costs and voter outreach and 1,200,000 otherwise disenfranchised voters can pass any challenge at their polling places. Those two states alone are enough to make a real difference.

Alternatively, federally-issued passport cards cost only $30. And they’re good for ten years, or five elections – 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020 – six bucks per cycle. So 700,000 passport cards would cost $21 Million, plus $8 million for admin and outreach, equals $29 million. Implemented every two years, this expense would sign up three and a half million minority and senior voters over ten years. In emergencies, the Passport Office promises to have your document ready in 3 working days – and if an important business meeting in London meets that criteria, your right to vote should be given equal weight.

When you figure that over $4 billion will be spent on media advertising alone this year, spending $29 million to actually insure the voting rights of 1.2 million minority and senior voters is comparably little money well spent – and money certainly spent in the cause of true democratic principles.

Besides, the SuperPAC(s) should get all of their money back. If states demand payment for an ID that is required to vote, that is a “poll tax,” and against the law. So if the SuperPAC(s) putting up the money sues both the state and the individuals involved for full reimbursement, and then recycles that money every two years until Republicans no longer think stealing your vote is a good investment, it’s a net gain for everyone involved (except those rigging the vote). If Jon Husted was personally on the hook for, say, $10 million, he might change his mind about letting you cast your ballot.

These are options to correct just the false In-Person Voter Fraud touted by Republicans. In an upcoming column, I’ll be talking with Greg Palast - arguably our country’s leading expert on this issue – about everything you need to know about real voter fraud.

It may well be the most important issue facing America’s survival. If the illegal GOP purges succeed in suppressing large demographics from voting, our nation relinquishes both the moral high ground and democratic principle to every other country capable of running clean elections.

And, too, we don’t want to awaken on November 7th only to discover that yet another election has been stolen.

Related Posts:
Character. . . And The RNC
The Do-Damage Congress: Who’s Responsible?
Worse Than A Do Nothing Congress
Forget The Barbeque On Labor Day – It’s Time To Take Care Of Business
Chicken Shits: The Slippery Slopes of Chick-fil-A
The Vagina Solution
Fighting Back Part 4: The Big Liar, Intimidation And Revenge
Fighting Back Part 3: Fighting Fire With Fire
When The Past Is Prologue
Fighting Back Part 2: Defining Rovian Politics
Fighting Back
The Electoral Scam
Being Fair
Occupy Reality
Giving. . . And Taking Back
A Tale Of Two Grovers
A Last Pitch For Truth
America: Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.
Gotcha!

Oh man do I have a lot of photos to share. The biggest news of all... Sash and I are married Hildreth shot our wedding. These are some of my favorites... (image) (image) (image) (image) After the wedding we went to Minocqua, WI for a little vacation to tide us over before the official honeymoon. These... more

Oh man do I have a lot of photos to share. The biggest news of all... Sash and I are married

Hildreth shot our wedding. These are some of my favorites...










After the wedding we went to Minocqua, WI for a little vacation to tide us over before the official honeymoon.

These were taken in the morning before the fog cleared...







And once the sun came out so did Sash









A couple Sash took of me...





The last couple weeks of work has been relatively slow, which has allowed me to get out and shoot more often. Here are some pictures taken in the last two weeks.

Sash



















janettulip

















That's it for now.

(image) by ChrisSick In which we analyze exactly how many blowjobs Bill Clinton deserves to be given, the death and resurrection of the post-convention poll bounce, and the alternative universes of the GOP. (video) Got-damn, Bill, you lookin' mighty fine. If you haven't seen former President... more

by ChrisSick

In which we analyze exactly how many blowjobs Bill Clinton deserves to be given, the death and resurrection of the post-convention poll bounce, and the alternative universes of the GOP.



Got-damn, Bill, you lookin' mighty fine.

If you haven't seen former President Clinton's speech at the DNC yet, I would suggest that you:

A. Consider moving out from underneath that rock you're living under.

AND

B. Pucker up your best blowjob lips, 'cause after watching that speech, you're gonna wanna properly congratulate the man what gave it.

And — goddamn — he deserves it! Bill Clinton didn't just make a persuasive statement for Barack Obama's reelection, he made a powerful argument for liberalism as the solution to our current economic malaise, as well as the pathway to future prosperity in a technocratic global economy. And, in doing so, he slid a rhetorical ice pick straight into the lungs of every Republican attack raised this election cycle.

Close your eyes. Repeat that line while doing your best Clinton imitation. Punctuate the pauses with a subtle point of your thumbnail. Turn out the lights. Take it slow. Point that thumb. And then, you try and tell me you aren't hot in the bathing-suit area. I defy you to.

Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's yet another symptom of my degeneracy into Werewolf Disease. The doctors tell me it's the most severe case they've seen since Glenn Beck was fired from Fox News for finding new sides of his mouth to lie out of. And, worse, they tell me that there's no cure – but for the reelection of Barack Hussein Obama.

But there's good news on that front. Friends, countrymen, election junkies — I give you the death and resurrection of the post-convention bounce:

The Nate Silver post Wright refers to makes for predictably fascinating reading, but let's cut to the back of the page, here:


[source: Nate Silver/FiveThirtyEight]

That is what a post-convention bounce ought to look like. The Real Clear Politics’ average of polls that I typical cite shows a disappointing average of +1.6 for the President. But when you start to tease out the numbers, you see why that’s misleading – namely that the majority of the polls being averaged are from the middle of last week. The two best indicators — Rasmussen and Gallup's daily tracking polls — both show a much greater amount of heat for the President, weighing in as of today (9 Sept, 2012) at +4 for the President from Rasmussen and +5 from Gallup, despite the variations of voter models and house effects for each.

Meanwhile, Silver's indicators show a 6.7% increase in the odds of the President winning reelection, a 0.6% increase in the popular vote to his favor, and an increase of 11.4 votes in the Electoral College (for a total of 316.9). Intrade — my other handy predictor — shows a 3.5% increase in the odds of Obama winning compared to the post-RNC numbers, that settled into a +2.5% increase for a current 58.3% chance of reelection for Obama.

Now, as much fun as I'm having seeing how many times I can work the words “Bill Clinton” and “blowjob” into the same sentence, obviously, the former President wasn't solely responsible for the success of the convention. Other highlights included:

• Julian Castro's keynote, which reminded some of Obama's 2004 speech that broke the then-Junior Senator onto the national scene.


• The First Lady’s speech, which made voters (the ones who aren't racist jackasses, at least) fall in love with her all over again.


• Joe Biden, who proved that he can be at least as classy as the dude from the Dos Equis ads.


• And the President, who was, well, the President, and there.

Okay, so the President either underperformed or purposefully decided to leave his A-game at home. And we could dissect, at length, the myriad reasons why this may be true.

But, really, there's no need to. Because it’s irrelevant.

If Romney had gotten a meager +1.5 bounce out of his convention and Obama performed roughly the same, examining why his speech was so muted in comparison to previous examples of his rhetorical abilities would be a worthwhile exercise. But it simply does not matter. The Democrats clearly had a more successful convention than the Republicans, even by completely meaningless measures.

Except in the alternative universe that so many Republicans seem to enjoy residing in.

One of the advantages to being an occasional blogger for a well-known alt-pinup site as opposed to being, say, Dick Morris, is that I don't have to make sudden, off-the-cuff predictions that can easily be refuted within days. Also, it means I don't have to wake up every day being Dick Morris.

Presumably, after writing that, Dick swallowed another pint of LSD and decided the rest of the universe simply does not exist.

The rest of the GOP decided, even before the convention, that the strongest line of attack against Obama would be to recycle the Reagan question of Carter, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

For those under the didn't-hear-about-Clinton's-speech rock who revel in being ignorant of all salient facts, two things to be aware of:

1. While overall unemployment was less under Carter (about 7% compared to 8% under Obama), other economic indicators, such as inflation and interest rates were much, much, much higher. So high, in fact, the Misery Index became a popular reference point to better understand the pain caused by economic conditions of life during the Carter administration. Obama's highest score on the Misery Index is still below Carter's lowest.

2. Another relevant detail to keep in mind when considering this argument is that we're not losing nearly one million jobs a month, like we were in early 2009.



See that giant fucking dip in the middle of January, 2009? Yeah, over that shit.

But the Republican alternate universe isn't simply home to bizarre economic statistics or surreal interpretations of events. It's also home to a completely different definition of “facts” than here in the regular ol’ universe:

There seems to be a sense among many Republicans that the lack of lies told at the DNC — as compared to the RNC — reflected by the lack of the media's debunking and citing said lies, proves media bias. James Fallows (who, I believe, first used the phrase “post-truth” that so frighteningly describes our current discourse) sums it up nicely:

Oh, Republicans. Please, never change. Never cease to be so amazingly, mind-blowingly insane.

Except, wait.

Actually do change, since you're killing our Democracy.

There's 57 days, 12 hours, 35 minutes, and 12 seconds left before election day and no cure yet in sight.



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by Greg Palast (image) This is a true story. CHICAGO. In a school with some of the poorest kids in Chicago, one English teacher–I won't use her name–who'd been cemented into the school system for over a decade, wouldn't do a damn thing to lift test scores, yet had an annual salary... more

by Greg Palast



This is a true story.

CHICAGO. In a school with some of the poorest kids in Chicago, one English teacher–I won't use her name–who'd been cemented into the school system for over a decade, wouldn't do a damn thing to lift test scores, yet had an annual salary level of close to $70,000 a year. Under Chicago's new rules holding teachers accountable and allowing charter schools to compete, this seniority-bloated teacher was finally fired by the principal.

In a nearby neighborhood, a charter school, part of the city system, had complete freedom to hire. No teachers' union interference. The charter school was able to bring in an innovative English teacher with advanced degrees and a national reputation in her field - for $29,000 a year less than was paid to the fired teacher.

You've guessed it by now: It's the same teacher.

It's Back to School Time! Time for the editorialists and the Tea Party, the GOP and Barack Obama's Education Secretary Arne Duncan to rip into the people who dare teach in public schools.

And in Arne's old stomping grounds, Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is stomping on the teachers, pushing them into the street.

Let's stop kidding ourselves. This is what Mitt Romney and Obama and Arne Duncan and Paul Ryan have in mind when they promote charter schools and the right to fire teachers with tenure: slash teachers salaries and bust their unions.

They've almost stopped pretending, too. Both the Right Wing-nuts and the Obama Administration laud the "progress" of New Orleans' schools–a deeply sick joke. The poorest students, that struggle most with standardized tests, were drowned or washed away.

One thing Democrat Emanuel and Republican Romney both demand of Chicago teachers is that their pay, their jobs, depend on "standardized tests." Yes, but whose standard?

Here are an actual questions from the standardized test that were given third graders here in NYC by the nation's biggest test-for-profit company:

"...Most young tennis stars learn the game from coaches at private clubs. In this sentence a private club is...." Then you have some choices in which the right answer is "Country Club - place where people meet."

Now not many of the "people [who] meet" at country clubs are from the South Side of Chicago--unless their parents are caddies. A teacher on the South Side whose students are puzzled by the question will lose their pay or job. Students on the lakefront Gold Coast all know that mommy plays tennis at the Country Club with Raul on Wednesdays. So their teacher gets a raise and their school has high marks.

And while Mayor Rahm promises kids in "bad" schools new teachers (the same ones at lower pay) at high-score schools, in fact, they are never actually allowed in.

But Rahm, after all, is just imposing Bush education law which should be called, No Child's Behind Left.

You want to know what's wrong with our schools? Benno Schmidt, CEO of the big Edison Schools teach-for-profit business is a creepy, greedy privateer. But he told me straight: that before Hurricane Katrina, his company would never go into New Orleans because Louisiana spent peanuts per child on education. He made it clear: You get what you pay for. Not what you test for.

So the charter carpetbaggers slither in, cherry-pick the easy students, declare success. The tough cases and special ed kids are left in the public system so they can claim the public system fails.

Here's what the teacher who was terrible at $70,000 but brilliant at $41,000 told me:

"They're not doing this in white neighborhoods. And they want to get rid of the older, experienced teachers with seniority who cost more. Get rid of the teachers and, ultimately get rid of the kids. And the charter school gets to pick the kids who get in."

It's simple. When you look at the drop-out rates in New York (41%) and Chicago (44%), the solution offered is to pay teachers less. They punish those who dare to work in poor schools where kids struggle and you can bet that "washing away" half the kids in our schools is, in fact, exactly what they've planned.

It's notable that, when he lived in Chicago, Barack Obama played basketball with city school chief Arne Duncan, but Obama sure as hell didn't send his kids to Arne's crap public schools. Those are for po' folk.

His kids went to the tony "Lab" School in Hyde Park. Obama knows what Duncan knows and what Romney knows: there's no money and no need for universal education. Yes, they like to say that "children are our future." But they mean the children of China are our future, the Chinese kids who will make the stuff we want and the children of India who will program it all for us.

After all, how much education does some obese kid from Texas need to stack boxes from China in a Wal-Mart warehouse?

Education is no longer about information and learning skills. It's now about "triage." A few selected by standardized tests or privileged birth will be anointed and permitted into better and "gifted" schools.

The chosen elite are still very much needed: to invest in India and Vietnam, to design new derivatives to circumvent the laughable new banking laws, and to maintain order among the restless hundred-million drop-outs squeezed out of the colon of our educational system.

Democrats' Bantustans, Republicans' Value-less Vouchers.

The Obama/Duncan/Emanuel plan is to create Bantustans of un-chartered, cheaply-run dumpster schools within a government system. But Romney and the GOP would give every child a "choice" even outside government schools with "vouchers."

Of course, the "vouchers" don't vouch for much. Romney's old alma mater, Cranbrook Academy, runs at $34,025 a year, not counting the polo sticks and horse. The most generous voucher program is Washington DC's, beloved of the GOP, which pays about $7,500, or if the student's "choice" is Cranbrook, about 2 months of school. Hyde Park Day School Chicago is $35,900. To give each kid a real choice, not just a coupon, means a massive increase in spending per pupil. I didn't see that in the Republican platform, did you?

The experienced teacher in Chicago who took the pay cut was offered one consolation. She was told she could make up some of the pay loss by quitting the union and saving on union dues.

So that's the program. An educational Katrina: squeeze the teachers until they strike, demolish their unions and drown the students.

Chicago's classroom war is class war by another name.

Class dismissed.


***


A version of this story originally appeared in the Occupied Chicago Tribune.

Greg Palast is the author of the recently published, acclaimed book Vultures' Picnic and the New York Times Bestsellers Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. For two decades, Palast was an investigator for Chicago-area unions, including the Chicago Teachers Union.

Palast's brand new book Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, will be out on September 18.

You can pre-order Billionaires & Ballot Bandits from Barnes & Noble, Amazon or Indie Bound. Author's proceeds from the book go to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund for reporting on voter protection issues.

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Audrey Tautou is a sweet petite thing. She is a so beautiful and charming. It is easy to see why Jean-Pierre Jeunet first cast her in the sweet and tender Amelie and now again in A Very Long Engagement as Mathilde. A Very Long Engagement is set in France near the end of World War I in the deadly trenches... more

Audrey Tautou is a sweet petite thing. She is a so beautiful and charming. It is easy to see why Jean-Pierre Jeunet first cast her in the sweet and tender Amelie and now again in A Very Long Engagement as Mathilde.

A Very Long Engagement is set in France near the end of World War I in the deadly trenches of the Somme, in the gilded Parisian halls of power, and in the modest home of an indomitable provincial girl. It tells the story of this young woman's relentless, moving and sometimes comic search for her fiancée, who has disappeared. What follows is an investigation into the arbitrary nature of secrecy, the absurdity of war, and the enduring passion, intuition and tenacity of the human heart.

Check out the website for A Very Long Engagement

Daniel Robert Epstein: What attracted you to this character?

Audrey Tautou: What I liked the most about Mathilde was her determination and courage. I liked her love for Manech and the way it gives her power and the way it enhances her to find him. I like her pride. She is very brave and very strong.

DRE: How was it playing a character from a novel?

AT: At the beginning it was harder for me because when I prepared for the movie I already had a vision of Mathilde from the novel because I read the novel first and when I first read the script I had in a way another one. The two stories are not exactly the same and the parts are not exactly completely similar. So to try to make a connection between the Mathilde in the novel and the Mathilde in the script and the universe of Jean-Pierre Jeunet took me some time to find out.

DRE: When did you read the novel?

AT: Oh it was a few months before they started writing the script.

DRE: When you saw the film, did you see things you didn’t expect or surprised to see that came from the script or what you read in the novel?

AT: When I saw the film I wasn’t surprised because Jean-Pierre is a director who prepares a lot for his movies, so he knows exactly how he is going to shoot and we have a pretty precise idea of how the film is going to be. I was very impressed by the warmth of the scenes because I hadn’t seen anything like that. The difference between the novel and the movie was already in the script. I thought in the novel Mathilde was more petulant, she could abuse and insult people, she could swear.

DRE: Was she angrier?

AT: She was more extroverted.

DRE: Would you have liked that to have been kept in the character?

AT: Oh no because the character is the baby of Jean-Pierre’s film and he is very modest and discreet about it. He is very modest in his way of being so he likes characters who are modest who don’t expose their feelings. But I like how
Mathilde in the movie kept pain inside herself.

I think the difficulties of this part were to contain the emotion because when Mathilde has this emotion she is full of tears but the tears stay right there. For me this is difficult and more difficult when a situation can help you to shout and cry because her state is a latent one, an emotion that she retains the whole movie, it’s practically a mood that she plays, a state of her spirit and it’s difficult to play a mood.

DRE: How has your relationship with Jean-Pierre changed?

AT: The relationship changed because the part was different so I was different too. I put my "lightness" between brackets, I was less funny. I lost my spirit of giving.

DRE: What kind of advice did Jean-Pierre give you about the character?

AT: I don’t know if he gave me advice because he knew me better than at the beginning of shooting Amelie, so I think he really trusted me. He knew that if it took me more time in the preparation to have an idea of how far she could take the emotions and how she could behave. He knew that I would do something he would like.

DRE: So he let you guide your performance.

AT: Yes but we discussed a lot during the preparation. I spent 2 months in the studios where everybody was preparing the movie: the costume, the set designer, the hair, make-up, everything. I spent two months preparing just to try to feel the atmosphere of all these people because there were maybe 600 technicians. So I wanted to feel where everybody wanted to go. Jean-Pierre and I discussed very subtle things but it was more a maturation part for me.

DRE: When this character was adapted, did you expect her to be in a wheelchair as in the novel?

AT: I knew from the beginning that Jean-Pierre did not want to keep her in the wheelchair because it was too restrictive for the frame. He is very creative with his shots; he likes to be really free, as he used to say in the scene when she climbs down the mountain running after the car, that would have been difficult in a wheelchair.

DRE: Jean-Pierre said that you were not very star oriented, that you didn’t like the whole star thing, but how have things changed since you’ve become better known and more internationally accepted. You’ve been getting more offers to do films in English and in other countries, how has this changed things?

AT: I like the creation of a movie. I like to be on a set with a team and technicians. Everything else for me is not normal. When I wanted to do this job it was for making movies not for the glitter. Of course with the fame I got more offers from different countries so it is great to have huge luxuries for an actor to work and to have the choice. I can’t enjoy anonymity but I can hide myself.

DRE: What made you want to work with Jeunet the first time and now the second time?

AT: Because I love his cinema. For me it is a very personal and unusual universe. We are not used to seeing that kind of direction in movies. He has his own elegance, his own aestheticism, the way that he transcends the every day life of his characters. I like his poetic way of shooting. I was attracted by his work and by him.

DRE: Did you help Jodie Foster with her French for her role in A Very Long Engagement?

AT: She speaks perfect French, so I was way behind. I was at a much lower level of English. When I did Dirty Pretty Things I could say maybe two sentences so every word and sentence was a challenge. I worked so hard and she speaks French like a native.

DRE: So you don’t think you’re going to do another film in English?

AT: I did another one, but it didn’t really get seen. I like to change parts, so I like to learn. It is not a problem for me to prepare.

DRE: What was easier the English or playing the tuba?

AT: Oh the tuba was easier.

DRE: Do you think of reprising the Amelie role?

AT: No never. I never want to do the same things twice. I like surprises.

DRE: What’s your own romantic sensibility? Can you go as far as this woman did for love?

AT: I have no idea. This kind of situation of losing somebody without knowing what happened would be impossible to bear. So that situation also makes the love bigger and the necessity to find the answer. But I think that it is very rare to find this kind of absolute love. It’s very intense and absolute. Manech and Mathilde are the typical romantic heroes, like Romeo and Juliet.

DRE: So that doesn’t exist in real life?

AT: I think it can exist but I don’t think it exists for everybody.

DRE: Would you say that Mathilde has a destiny and works very hard for it?

AT: Yes, I think that it’s important to try to fulfill our dreams and to fight for that. I think that’s the whole message of that movie and I really appreciate that. I think it’s important to be active in this dream, not to be just lying in bed saying "Oh, I would like to do that and never actually doing it."

DRE: You said that you don’t enjoy being anonymous, do you find this in the United States?

AT: Yes, it’s nice and much better here. People are more distant and are not as intrusive here in New York. People in France are very intrusive when they recognize you.

DRE: Are you living here?

AT: No I am living in Paris.

DRE: What did you know about the First World War, if anything?

AT: Before I did the movie I had a scholarly knowledge. It’s difficult to summarize but I knew about the war; executions, trenches. I knew the main battles; that soldiers did not talk a lot when they went back home and it was difficult for them to talk about the horrors of the war. There were two different worlds between people who stayed in the country and the ones who were waging war.

DRE: What is this movie with the Russian dolls that you did?

AT: It is five years after the events of L’ Auberge Espagnol so it is the same characters. It is difficult to talk about a story when it is written by Cédric Klapisch because in a way there is no story but in a way it talks about many subtle things in life. So the heroes are asking themselves the same questions about life, couple and how to build your family. It’s the same, it’s very funny.

DRE: Were you always planning on being an actor? Is that what you always wanted to do?

AT: No before I wanted to study monkeys.

DRE: Are you studying monkeys now?

AT: No [laughs].

DRE: Are you expecting to make a movie with monkeys?

AT: Sigourney Weaver already did it so probably not.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

by Lee Camp (video) Look around you. Are there zombies? Are there vampires? If you answered yes, then maybe you don't need to watch this video. If you answered no, then I'm about to change your mind...or eat it. Related Posts: Moment of Clarity: Why The Occupy Anniversary On September 17th... more

by Lee Camp



Look around you. Are there zombies? Are there vampires? If you answered yes, then maybe you don't need to watch this video. If you answered no, then I'm about to change your mind...or eat it.

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by SG's Team Agony feat. Clio Let us answer life's questions - because great advice is even better when it comes from SuicideGirls. (image) [Clio in Born Into A Light] Q:I’ve wanted to ask this so many times, but knew no women would tell me the truth unless they did not know me. I’m 27 and... more

by SG's Team Agony feat. Clio

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


[Clio in Born Into A Light]

Q:I’ve wanted to ask this so many times, but knew no women would tell me the truth unless they did not know me. I’m 27 and was born with Muscular Dystrophy. All my life I’ve asked girls out and they all said no but would lie about why, though I know it’s the chair. All I ever wanted was the truth. Women are all I can think and dream about. Every guy I ever knew, even my dad, has told me no girl would ever sleep with me unless I paid for it – and that’s if I’m lucky. I can’t take much more heartache. I need to know if all women are going to look at me the same way and just face it that its just a dream I need to get over.

A: This is a difficult question to answer, but let me start by saying FUCK what your friends and your father say. Don't let anyone tell you that you're any less worthy of having a girlfriend than an able-bodied person. It's discouraging for anyone to be put down over and over again, and I honestly can't tell you if a relationship’s in the cards for you or not, but don't give up on your dream of finding yourself a lady. I did a quick online search on your condition and relationships, and I found plenty of stories from people with Muscular Dystrophy who are dating or even married with children. So regarding your question if all women will reject you based on your wheelchair; the answer is no. You might have to work harder at it than the average guy, but confidence and a positive attitude will significantly improve your chances of landing a date, regardless of your disability.

Good luck!

Clio
xoxox


***

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