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

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

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

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

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

Erin Broadley: Did you enjoy the screening last night?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EB: Maybe Tony saw things more like a scene.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EB: [Laughs]

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

EB: Wow.

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

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

PH: Mhmm. Make sure you get the dough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EB: Was it emotional?

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

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

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

EB: Just a dog and the bartender?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EB: Then you don’t have to…

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

EB: Well what’s up next for you?

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

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

In his 30 year career of writing, directing and producing movies, John Carpenter has made more people mess their pants than Billy Madison. He is best known for directing the original Halloween, The Thing and more recently he was unofficially “inducted” into the Masters of Horror by directing two episodes... more

In his 30 year career of writing, directing and producing movies, John Carpenter has made more people mess their pants than Billy Madison. He is best known for directing the original Halloween, The Thing and more recently he was unofficially “inducted” into the Masters of Horror by directing two episodes in the first two seasons. For his latest episode Pro-Life, recently released on DVD, Carpenter again teamed with the writing duo that penned his first episode, Cigarette Burns. Pro-Life tackles the sensitive issue of abortion and whether there is a right situation for having one but puts it into a horror movie context with terrifying and gross results.

Buy the DVD of Pro-Life

Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?

John Carpenter: I’m waiting for basketball to start. I’m a big basketball fan.

DRE: I’ve heard.

John: I’m going to play a couple of videogames. I’m finishing up one so I can make room for God of War 2.

DRE: It’s funny, I told a friend of mine that I was going to be talking to you and he said, “Ask him about basketball and videogames.”

John: Well, it’s March Madness so that’s always fun. I watch that out of the corner of my eye. But I’m a real big NBA fan. Right now, the Phoenix Suns and the Dallas Mavericks are just great. They had a great game the other night.

DRE: What’s your favorite team?

John: You got to love your home team. You got to be true to your home team but the Los Angeles Lakers suck. We’re just in awful shape right now. But I like the Phoenix Suns. I like the Dallas Mavericks.

DRE: Have you always been into videogames?

John: No, my son and his friends actually got me hooked on them. I guess it was in the 90’s. As my son grew up and became interested in videogames, I played along with him. I really loved it so I had my second childhood through him.

DRE: What systems do you have?

John: I have PlayStation 3, I have Xbox 360, I have PlayStation 2 but I don’t use it much anymore. I’ve got GameCube that I just don’t use. I’ve got basically everything.

DRE: I don’t know if you’ve seen 300 yet…

John: Not yet. I’m anxious to see it.

DRE: Often when film critics don’t like the story in a movie they will say it is comic-like but since 300 is already based on a comic book they started comparing 300 to a videogame. But they seem to forget that videogames, like comics, have some pretty complex stories. Would you say that videogames are starting to get close to being as complex as films?

John: With some videogames, because you’re involved in the action yourself, are truly exciting. You get lost in it. Whereas a movie is really a passive experience. You’re sitting, eating popcorn. If you’re at home, you’re drinking a beer, smoking a cigarette, whatever you’re doing. That’s a different experience. That’s what I grew up with, movies as passive entertainment. When critics compare 300 to a videogame, I’m not quite sure what they’re talking about. I think they’re talking about computer generated graphics. I think that’s a way in to attack a movie on the grounds that it’s more of a videogame or a comic book or something.

DRE: They can’t insult it by calling it a comic book-like movie. They just come up with something else they don’t really understand to compare it too.

John: Well, it’s all an insult, like this is not important enough. That’s the way it always happens.

DRE: I read about some videogame you were involved with a couple of years ago, Psychopath.

John: Yeah, that’s still percolating away. I’ll be involved with anything if it pays me money.

DRE: [laughs] With Pro-Life, was it just a coincidence that you decided to film another script by Drew [McWeeny] and Scott [Swan] or did you help them with it?

John: The first project that we did on Masters of Horror was a Drew and Scott original that I read [Cigarette Burns] and I thought, “This is great. Let me do this. I want to do this.” Then the second season came up and they pitched me, “We have this idea about a monster movie in an abortion clinic.” I said, “That’s great!” I love working with those boys. They’re just really talented. As writers, they’re very open and we worked it up a little bit. They just do a great job for me.

DRE: Since Cigarette Burns is all about film buffs did you connect on that level?

John: Yeah, we connected in the sense of loving horror, loving science fiction, that kind of a thing. Drew and Scott are very talented writers. They’re very knowledgeable about the genre. That always helps you when you’re doing something like an hour cable show. I suppose we’re all geeks in our own way. My brand of geekdom goes all the way back to the 50’s and 60’s. I’m the older geek.

DRE: You’ve got a couple of years on them.

John: Yeah I do, quite a few actually.

DRE: I thought that Cigarette Burns had an interesting look to it, cinematography-wise and production design-wise while Pro-Life was a bit more straightforward.

John: It was the same crew but it’s a different story. So your look and the way it feels is always going to be dependent on the story. The story and the look of Pro-Life is very different. It is set in a clinic so you can’t really apply the same techniques.

DRE: Had you known Ron Perlman before casting him in Pro-Life?

John: I met Ron for the first time at the very end of Cigarette Burns. There’s a famous hotel in Vancouver, where everybody who’s shooting there stays, called the Sutton Place. I met him in the bar one night and I said, “I really like your work and The Name of The Rose is one of my favorites.” We started talking and then he accepted the role in Pro-Life. It was very cool.

DRE: I read that you’re not a big fan of method actors. Is that true?

John: It doesn’t matter. It depends on how much work I have to do. Some actors come prepared and ready to go. I can give you a list of those, Kurt Russell, Sam Neill, Jeff Bridges. We work ahead of time on the rehearsals and we come ready to go on the set. Some actors need emotional stimulation and support and sometimes intellectual stimulation and support right on the set as we’re doing the work. That’s a little hard. So it’s all about my comfort.

DRE: I read that Ron was a bit of a method actor, but I’m sure you guys got along.

John: I didn’t see method in him at all. We talked real briefly about how to play the character in the beginning. I just said, “Play him as a hero. Play him as a good guy. He’s a strong man. Don’t have one moment of doubt about what you’re doing except for at the end.” That was it. We just did the work. It was fun.

DRE: I shouldn’t have, but I got stoned before I watched Pro-Life.

John: I got stoned while making it.

DRE: [laughs] I really almost got sick when it Ron was aborting the male doctor’s insides.

John: Actually that was a more elaborate scene originally in the script. The boys wrote something I’ve never seen. I said, “You can’t do this, okay? We have to tone this down a little bit.”

DRE: That was toned down?

John: That was really toned down. Oh man, it went on and on. Page after page of it and it was rough.

DRE: I don’t know how much of this new trend in horror, the torture porn, you’ve seen, but it seemed like that sequence was making a comment on that just because it was so outrageous.

John: It is but you don’t see anything. It’s all implied, which is just the reverse. Torture porn is what you see, the close-up. You get to see all the grotesque stuff. Listen I’m a big fan of the Saw movies. I love that shit. I don’t know if I’d want to do it but it’s great fun to watch. It is like the zombie movies in the 60’s and 70’s, with biting chunks out of people and all that stuff. It’s all great.

DRE: I got a chance to interview Drew [McWeeny] last year. He said that you’d never be able to guess his politics from watching Pro-Life. Was it important to keep the points of view a bit murky and not make something more pointed like what Joe Dante did with his Masters of Horror episodes?

John: That’s just not me as a director. Joe did a great job with his show. He did it out of passion. That’s not the way I approach things. I didn’t want to make a political statement though I have before. In the movie called They Live, I made a pretty strong political statement. In this one I can unfortunately see both sides of it so I can understand it. If you want to know my politics, I’m a pro-choice guy because it’s none of my business as a male. That’s a decision a woman has to make. But I understand how pro-life folks feel. I don’t agree with it, but I understand it. I think Ron did a good job being that guy.

DRE: He was terrifying and almost sympathetic until he sucked out the guy’s guts.

John: That’s where he goes over the top. He’s motivated and getting revenge.

DRE: I know you’ve done plenty of television in the past, including your own show. Have you ever had as much freedom script-wise and content-wise as you did with these Masters of Horrors?

John: Yeah, I’ve pretty much always had freedom. I’ve never really experienced too much censorship or lack of freedom in that area. I’ve been lucky. Actually that’s my whole career. Staggered into it. Staggered through it. Staggered to the chair. It’s always been great.

DRE: These Masters of Horror episodes just seem so personal. Is that the result of the scripts or was it the lower budget that makes things seem a bit more intimate?

John: Every director makes a movie in a different way. Takes his ten days of shooting, which is what we had, and takes it to where he wants it to go. Some people write their own scripts. Some folks have scripts written for them. Everybody’s different. But it’s fun to see everybody work.

DRE: Don Coscarelli told me he didn’t want to do an episode for the second season because he says with all the time and energy he put into making it, he feels like he could have made a feature film. Do you have the same attitude?

John: Hell, it’s fine. Look, it’s great to be able to go and prep for a few days and shoot for ten days and go home. You don’t have the physical and emotional pain of a feature. So it’s a vacation time. I still hate to get up in the morning. God, getting up is really rough. But other than that, it’s pretty much fun.

DRE: With Pro-Life, you could have taken the choice to not show the monster, what made you decide to do that?

John: Well, it would be pretty hard not to see him. He’s a pretty good monster. He’s reminiscent of an old movie that I saw when I was a kid called Curse of the Demon [directed by Jacques Tourneur]. That’s what he’s based on, sort of. Drew and Scott had a hand in fashioning him and I said, “I want him to look like your dreams too.” But we kept him in the dark. I think he’s got a big mouth. He roars a lot. Monsters are fun so why keep him in the dark? I remember once this actress and I were having lunch and she was lecturing me like, “You never show the devil. That’s just not done in movies.” I said, “Well, why not? If you could really have a great devil, show him. Where does that rule come down?” So sometimes it’s good not to see, but hell, we love watching monsters. Show me my monster.

DRE: Obviously you’re a big music fan and you do a lot of the music for your projects. How was it working with your son Cody on the music?

John: He was at the right age and he had the right talent. It worked out. It was fabulous. I’m really proud of him.

DRE: I interviewed your ex-wife [Adrienne Barbeau] last year and she said Cody’s band is wonderful.

John: He’s involved in music. He’s also in Japan right now finishing up his degree in Asian studies. He’s a Japanophile.

DRE: Did he capture the John Carpenter music flair that you wanted or did the two of you work on it together?

John: The themes are his. They’re very different than mine. They have their own unique feel to it. I’m just so delighted. It’s also really fun to see him get paid and I don’t have to worry about it.

DRE: I talked to Norman Reedus and I asked why his character in Cigarette Burns didn’t really have any reaction when he saw the angel. Norman said, “Well, what do you do when you see an angel? No one knows.” Was that what your thinking was?

John: If I walked in and saw an angel there and I had somebody like Udo Kier talking to me out of my side, I would think, “This whole thing is ridiculous. This is a fake.” I don’t know what I would think. Norman played it perfectly. I would go with what he said. No one knows.

DRE: I spoke with Will O'Neil who wrote one of those Snake Plissken comic books a few years ago. He had said that you, Kurt [Russell] and [producer] Debra Hill owned the character of Snake. Is that true?

John: Yes, but we share it with Canal Plus. It’s a long story, but the movie was originally made for a company called Avco Embassy. Avco Embassy was sold to Dino De Laurentiis. Dino De Laurentiis sold his share to Canal Plus.

DRE: So in this remake they’re talking about...

John: I don’t know that it’s a remake. I think it’s a lot about Snake before he gets to New York.

DRE: But it just made me think that maybe the remake rights might be different than the rights to the character Snake Plissken because none of the articles mentioned you guys being involved with the project. Are you guys going to be credited producers?

John: Executive producer.

DRE: Do you have any desire to be more involved?

John: My main involvement is I read the scripts and make sure the character is the same character that we wrote originally. I think that would be cool. My other main involvement in this project is to extend my hand and have a check placed in it.

DRE: It’s always nice when you don’t have to do anything, right?

John: You’re right. After 30 odd years of being in the fucking business, it’s nice to not have to do anything and get paid. That’s what I’ve been trying to do all my life.

DRE: Then the past few years must have been pretty good for you.

John: Not bad. Not bad.

DRE: Obviously Snake was a character that was perfect for the time he was in, so do you think Snake will lose the faux mullet?

John: I don’t know what to do about that. That’s not my decision. Snake is a character who was born out of the 1970’s when New York was having real problems. He came out of a post-Vietnam era and he was an anti-authoritarian. He was a really unique type of character back then. He’ll probably be reinvented for his time. But we’ll see. I don’t know if he will be mullet-less or with the mullet.

DRE: Have you ever seen any of Gerard Butler’s previous movies?

John: Yes, I like his work.

DRE: I think you’ll be very impressed after you see 300.

John: I can’t wait to see 300. It sounds really exciting. It looks great.

DRE: You don’t seem to mind these remakes, is that a result of you directing remakes yourself?

John: Well, if I’m not directing a movie, it’s not really mine. I’m flattered when somebody wants to take an old film of mine or a story of mine and rework it. I think that’s nice. I’m not trying to protect golden calf or something. It just isn’t that way. It’s just a damn movie, man.

DRE: On the other side, I don’t think you’re involved with the Halloween remake.

John: No, I bailed out of that after a while. But Rob [Zombie] has been a friend of mine for years. He did a song for me way back when [for Escape from LA]. He’s a real nice guy. He called me up when they were going to make it and I said, “Just make it your own. Hell. That’s the most important thing. Make it yours.”

DRE: If they re-use a piece of your music, will you get a check then?

John: Oh yeah. Big time. There was an agreement made, I can’t remember when it was finalized, but every time a sequel is made there are certain payments. I encourage more and more sequels.

DRE: I heard about this his project that you might be doing next, L.A. Gothic.

John: Well, I’m involved in a couple of things right now. I just don’t know. The script for L.A. Gothic is very good. I’d like to tweak it a little bit, but we’ll see. When it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, there’s always basketball.

DRE: From what I’ve heard, you might not have been too happy with your last feature film [Ghosts of Mars].

John: The experience was pretty grim for a number of different reasons. But I have to take responsibility for it. It’s probably my fault. Look, when one gets burned out on the business, it really can be destructive to you, emotionally, physically, in all sorts of ways. It’s easier when you’re young, but as you get older, it’s more and more difficult. So I decided, “You know what? Fuck this. I’m going to take some time off.” Now it’s been the best time in my life.

DRE: Does doing the Masters of Horror episodes make you think, “Maybe I could spend two years on a feature again.”?

John: Oh sure. I love making movies. I love directing. It’s always been the love of my life. But I do have other issues. Myself. My own happiness. My parents. My mom died a couple of years ago. I went through that.

DRE: It’s interesting that both of your parents were still around with you for so long because you think that a guy who made the films that you made that maybe...

John: I didn’t have parents, right?

DRE: [laughs] Oh, I really screwed this one up.

John: Yeah, I really didn’t have any parents. I was left on a doorstep.

DRE: [laughs] Do you see doing something as personal as dealing with your mother’s death in a film?

John: In this business, I’ve learned to never say never. I’m attracted to stories. If I create the story or if someone else does and it is good, I’d be interested in it. But movies are really about fake life, not real life. Fake life is more fun. Drama, comedy, horror and all those things are fun to do. That’s what I’ve been involved with, in my career so I’ll probably keep doing it.

DRE: I was actually on the set of the prequel to the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. When we were interviewing the producers, I asked them why didn’t they ask Tobe Hooper to direct and they said, “Tobe Hooper doesn't have anything to learn from me. He's done it all a million times.” To me that was just insane.

John: But there’s a grain of truth in what he said. They’re not going to be able to control Tobe like they can some young guy. They can control you better when you’re green and starting out.

DRE: So that’s what it comes down to?

John: Partially it does. If you have a commercial background or a music video background or some tricky background, you bring your panache to the project. So you run around and get a bunch of trick shots and you’re not demanding final cut, so in the end it brings a breath of fresh air to the project. Tobe’s already done his movie. He doesn’t want to do it again.

DRE: What would happen if someone wanted you to remake one of your films?

John: That’s happened. I don’t want to do that. I’ve done it. You’d be treading the same ground. Especially with the Halloweens. That’s where it came up. We finished the story off. But that’s my personal opinion.

DRE: How soon do you think you want to get a project up and running again?

John: I don’t know. Whenever it happens. If I get a project going, that’s fine. If I don’t, that’s fine. It’s not life and death.

DRE: Have you heard of SuicideGirls before?

John: I know all about you. I know everything.

DRE: It’s got tattooed, naked girls who like your films.

John: That’s my idea of heaven. Tattooed naked girls who enjoy horror movies. There’s nothing better than that.

DRE: Have you ever seen a John Carpenter related tattoo on someone?

John: I haven’t.

DRE: I’ll have to email you one.

John: Would you? I think I need to see that.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

by Nahp A column which highlights Suicide Girls and their fave groups. (image) [Noel Suicide in Sunday Paper] This week Noel gives us the skinny on SG's Strip Club group, a venue to rate, review, discuss and inquire about strip clubs around the world, and discuss matters of etiquette for those who... more

by Nahp

A column which highlights Suicide Girls and their fave groups.


[Noel Suicide in Sunday Paper]

This week Noel gives us the skinny on SG's Strip Club group, a venue to rate, review, discuss and inquire about strip clubs around the world, and discuss matters of etiquette for those who frequent them.


Members: 2,067 / Comments: 11,088

WHY DO YOU LOVE IT?: Because when I first started dancing I did have my doubts, and fears. Once I joined the Strip Clubs group I found so much support and comfort in the other SGs and members. I am now very happy working as an exotic dancer/model. I have met some incredible people, and life long friends by conquering my insecurities which I strongly believe I would not have done without SG.com, and the Strip Clubs group.

DISCUSSION TIP: I'm not sure if I have any discussion tips. This group is very liberal, and accepting. If you feel the need to start a thread, or add on to a pre-existing one, my advice would be to jump right on in!

MOST HEATED DISCUSSION THREAD:
Lap Dances DOs and DON'Ts.

BEST RANDOM QUOTE: "Apparently doing the running-man on stage also works." - Vivid Suicide

WHO’S WELCOME TO JOIN?: Everyone.


***
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Title: What The Hell Are You Eating?? Corny Title: Q: Why Did The Chicken Nugget Have Ears? A: Because It Was Made Of Corn! by Lee Camp (video) Okay, I know it's not polite to comment on someone's diet, but you and I need to talk. ...You're eating too much corn. Really, you have to chill... more

Title: What The Hell Are You Eating??
Corny Title: Q: Why Did The Chicken Nugget Have Ears? A: Because It Was Made Of Corn!


by Lee Camp



Okay, I know it's not polite to comment on someone's diet, but you and I need to talk. ...You're eating too much corn. Really, you have to chill out on the corn. Breakfast, lunch, AND dinner? What are you nuts?! And I know what you're thinking - "I don't eat that much corn." But you've forgotten about one thing - the fact that you're wrong. Watch the video.



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(image) by Chris Goodman “You’re never alone with the Dirty 3,” reads the etching in the run out groove on side B of their 1996 release Horse Stories. They couldn’t be more right. Falling in love, falling out of love, whatever it was… If you’re a fan of the Dirty Three you can pinpoint the... more

by Chris Goodman

“You’re never alone with the Dirty 3,” reads the etching in the run out groove on side B of their 1996 release Horse Stories. They couldn’t be more right. Falling in love, falling out of love, whatever it was… If you’re a fan of the Dirty Three you can pinpoint the exact moment you heard their records. They spoke with brilliance and clarity beyond you and let you know that wherever you were, whatever was happening, you weren’t alone everything was going to be alright.

Their February release, Toward the Low Sun from Drag City, digs in the second you drop the needle. This doesn’t start like your usual Dirty Three album building on a slowly picked out guitar chord or dancing around Warren Ellis’s pizzicato melody. This album blasts off with “Furnace Skies’ ” overdriven violin and manic drumming, only to take it back down and ground you on the second track of the album “Sometimes I forget you’ve gone,” which features Jim White’s intoxicating drum rolls, Ellis’s sparse piano parts and Mick Turner’s unwinding guitar. When performed live Ellis has related, in his quips between songs, that this is about checking the outbox of your email only to find that all the letters you’ve sent someone telling them how you feel were never received…As the recipient has died. This is their first album in 7 years. And it’s fucking amazing.

In addition to the Dirty Three, Warren Ellis stays busy with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, their side project Grinderman and a slew of soundtracks to movies you’ve seen but you might not know he worked on. The Assasination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The Proposition, The Road and recently the John Hillcoat film Lawless, which was adapted from the novel The Wettest Country in the World from Matt Bondurant. Ellis even contributed to the the soundtrack for West of Memphis chronicling the trial, imprisonment, DNA testing and eventually release in 2011 of three boys from West Memphis, Arkansas wrongly accused of murder and imprisoned for 18 years.

I caught up with Ellis in Montreal on the first night of their second 2012 tour to get his take on creativity, how music and touring has changed in the last 20 years and how working on soundtracks taught him to challenge himself…


Chris Goodman: This is the first night of the tour? Did you guys meet up to rehearse the material beforehand?

Warren Ellis: Well we’ve been playing concerts off and on all year. But we met up in New York before the tour. We just played two weeks ago in England as well. This is all apart of a world tour to celebrate the release of our new record.

CG: You’ve been a band for 20 years. Is touring easier or harder these days?

WE: In a practical sense some things have gotten a lot easier. You have GPS, which we didn’t have in the ‘90s. You used to get a bunch of show dates and then try to find a map or something. It was a much different world then. There was no internet. And there were pagers. You tried to find a hotel with a fax, ya know. Things have really changed.

For me the big difference now is that I’m 15 years older than I was then. But touring is a big part of my life still and technology has made certain aspects of it a lot easier.

CG: I remember when I bought Horse Stories. Headphones on, sitting the floor checking the art out I realized there was an etching in the runout. “You’re never alone with the Dirty 3.” That spoke to me so much. Do you think with so much music being primarily online or on mobile devices that it takes away from the experience? That is a lot less tangible now?

WE: To be honest, everyone has an opinion about that and everybody’s kind of right. It depends when you grew up. I come from a generation where vinyl was a very important thing. We saw them try to get rid of that but it’s hung around and vinyl’s on it’s way back up.

There’s more things people spend their money on now. Back then there were only a handful. It’s just a different world. To me it seems the live shows are where things are really great these days because everything is much more connected. Some people have iPods and they listen to music on that, I mean I use one, but it’s seems like an incredible amount of information rendered into something that makes it feel kind of invalid or something. There is something very different about having 30,000 songs on an iPod and plugging it in as opposed to having a record in your hands and putting it on. The record is kind of contained. But basically you’re just listening to the stuff so I really don’t know if I have an answer about that.

I still love the format of records. I love making and listening to records. I like that vinyl is still around and available because it’s what I relate to. I really engage it in a different way. But for kids growing up with all this new stuff they relate to it differently. Sonically I still love the sound of vinyl but if I want to hear something I’ll listen to it on whatever.

CG: It’s too convenient to not have an iPod I guess?

WE: It is. It really is if you wanna hear “LA Woman” when you’re walking through an airport.

CG: How about technology and the recording industry?

WE: Everybody was down on ProTools a few years ago. And now everyone thinks it’s great. What you lose with the tape you gain with the time that you can save recording digitally. All things have their good and their bad.

CG: So Toward the Low Sun was recorded on ProTools?

WE: Yeah. Cinder we recorded on tape but this time it was digital.

CG: Did you guys have the material ready before you went in? Or do you just book the studio time and figure it out? I’ve read you don’t rehearse much…

WE: We’ve always been like that. We have ideas but we arrange them in the moment. If we flesh things out too much we lose the dynamic that happens when we’re working it out as we go along. That’s been one of the interesting things with the Dirty Three, to try to document that aspect. I mean we’ve tried to make this record a few times and it never worked because we were trying to flesh it out too much. Then we decided we had to go in with really skeletal ideas and just take some risks like we used to do.

CG: Toward the Low Sun really has a lot of breathing room. A lot of space to it. “Furnace Skies” really hits hard in, but it’s followed by “Sometimes I Forget You’ve Gone” which is very sparse and light.

WE: Space has always been important. You can easily choke things. The first two tracks were actually recorded in that order and signaled our way into the record, which had been elusive for about 7 years.

CG: Any recording after the tour?

WE: We’ll do the tour and hopefully we’ll get another one underway quicker than this one took. It’s the way it goes though. For the last 15 years we’ve all been involved in other projects. We’ve got families now. We take it when we can and try to keep it moving.

CG: Would you say music is something you create or something that exists out there and is just channeled through you?

WE: If I started to think about that too much it would get pretentious. I know when I play live that there is something else going on. I still don’t know what it is and I don’t want to know what it is because the day that I understand it will be the day that it will stop. Whatever that is I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s some communication with something else out there but it is very addictive and making music is like that too. Anything creative is like that. It opens up something in you, give you access to something you can’t get anywhere else in your life. I know that it doesn’t just fall from the sky. I know that from soundtrack work because not much of that falls into your lap. You have to go out and look for stuff. Music is about going and searching and then making the right changes…It’s not just all given from God or something.

CG: When you do the soundtrack work do you hear “We need happy music now,” or “We need pensive music”?

WE: Nick and I kind of make what we want but at a certain point you have producers or directors saying, “I don’t really get that.” Then you try to work out a way in there to keep yourself happy but sometimes their suggestions are really correct. When we were doing West of Memphis there were a couple of cues there that Nick and I really liked but Peter Jackson really wanted something else. We found something else and when I watched the film he was right. You hope the people working on a film make suggestions for the right reasons but sometimes you can’t see them until it’s done.

I initially found the thought of making music for something else very daunting sort of. Like it would cut my freedom off. But then I realized it could be liberating to be told something wasn’t what they wanted and do try something else. I realized it was about creation.

I can really draw a clear line as to when I started feeling and listening that and how things changed for me and made me look deeper. What first appeared as daunting and counter-creative was actually all in the name of creation. Sometimes it’s good to have a framework. Sometimes it’s good to have constraints put on you to bring out creativity.

CG: Creatively, do you think being satisfied is counterproductive, maybe? That you shouldn’t feel like things have ended and that it was “good enough?”

WE: There’s a point you reach where you feel that something has really happened with the music. You feel enlightened by it… You have to feel that to truly let it go. When you don’t feel it, that’s when you stop engaging and then you become kind of dissatisfied and you start looking toward the next thing and you think, “How can I do something really good” again. With me, there is always a moment when I have to feel, listening back, that I really got it or I won’t settle. It has to be really great. And it is a small window when that happens, when I decide to let it go and I don’t feel that sense of dissatisfaction. I’m always thinking that the next thing I do will be the one that’s really great though… But you have to take risks.

I don’t believe in the starving artist stuff. The struggling artist. Or that when you have kids that’s the end of the deal and the creativity is gone. It’s crap. A lot of that stuff is just romantic and in my experience it has no bearing.

CG: I guess if you talk about what you do too much it can get pretentious.

WE: It can get precious. You can get self-indulgent. And I think that might be something that’s good when you’re young. I’ve been doing this for 20 years now. When I was young I wouldn’t listen to anybody, fuck ‘em. But about 10 years ago when I did the Proposition soundtrack I realized to move in a different world I had to learn a different tolerance and to open myself to different things. I couldn’t have done that when I was younger. It’s not something that you can see as it happens though. You have to look back at your life to understand.

CG: So your outlook on creativity really changed when you started working on the Proposition soundtrack?

WE: Things changed when I had to work for something else entirely but still find my place in it and at the same time feel like what I had done was something of worth.

I still had the esteem for it like I did with my other records, but I was aware that it was being pushed from other directions and not just internally from the group. The great thing about a band is you just satisfy yourselves and that’s it. But sometimes it’s hard to move beyond that and you need things thrown at you to grow.

Doing the soundtrack for The Assasination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was one of the greatest learning experiences of my creative life. No question about it.

CG: With movies it’s bigger than you. Bigger than a group. Other people are depending on you for it. Your work reflects their big picture, their outcome.

WE: Exactly. You’re working for a film. You’re serving the film. And it takes on its own life once it’s out there. Like a record, things change when you put it out there and it’s out of your hands. But that comes back to letting things go.

CG: You worked with John Hillcoat on The Road and now Lawless…

WE: Well Nick had written the script and the idea always was that we’d do the music for it.

CG: What are your influences these days? What turns you on?

WE: I still find the stuff I liked as a younger man relevant. John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Neil Young, AC/DC, Beethoven, Stravinsky. It feels great to put on a John Lee Hooker record and think, “Man, I was right 20 years ago with this stuff.” It still moves me. Van Morrison, Nina Simone. Or it’s inspiring when I go to a gallery but you can’t really say when things inspire you. I just like seeing and listening to stuff that’s being created.

CG: Van Morrison…Astral Weeks might be the best album of all time.

WE: I think Veedon Fleece is my favorite one of his.

CG: How do your kids deal with you and your wife[Delphine Ciampi] both being musicians? Do they think you’re cool?

WE: They’re my kids and I’m their dad. They’re not meant to think I’m cool. What I do outside of being a dad is just what I do to them I guess. As they’ve gotten a bit older I think they find what I do a little more interesting. (a long pause)…I think they think I’m a dick. Like anyone thinks their dad is a dick.

CG: How did Eastwood guitars end up releasing the Warren Ellis signature tenor guitar? Which, ahem, I bought in the cherry finish...

WE: Yeah, it’s great! They came to me and asked and I gave them the specifications and away it went.

CG: Any new Grinderman material coming out soon?

WE: I can’t say.

CG: Any solo work from you?

WE: I find doing stuff on my own not particularly enjoyable. I like making music with people and I like what they bring out in me. I don’t find it nearly as thrilling as playing with others.

Toward the Low Sun is out now via Drag City. Visit their website for more info and tour dates.


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(image) by ChrisSick Or a further examination of the alternate realities of Republicans worthy of an episode of Star Trek and the consequences of deciding that it is more important to defeat your opponent than to be victorious. I'd like to open this column by saying, simply: You're welcome. more

by ChrisSick

Or a further examination of the alternate realities of Republicans worthy of an episode of Star Trek and the consequences of deciding that it is more important to defeat your opponent than to be victorious.

I'd like to open this column by saying, simply:

You're welcome.

I've spent the last hour, in preparation for writing this piece, reading through The American Spectator, National Review Online, The Washington Times, The Washington Examiner, and The Weekly Standard. These are reliable barometers of conservative opinion, and their contents are not apt to be easily discarded as just the shrill manifestations of the fringe extreme of the right the way, say, Breitbart or FreeRepublic might be.

I just want to make one thing perfectly clear. I do this because I love you.

"Enlightened" by these right-leaning media source, here’s what I found out, among various other things (like how the President loves Muslim terrorists):

1. Nothing has improved under Obama's first term.
2. Polls are meaningless because they're only polling Democrats.
3. The media is shamelessly campaigning for Obama.
4. The 2008 Stimulus was a complete and utter failure.

The interesting thing about these articles and these sites is that this is the face of conservatism that you're likely not seeing if you read reliably liberal sites talking about what conservatives are saying. These are, bluntly, not the sites I tend to link to when I'm trying to mock conservatives or conservatism here in my column.

These are smart, well-educated, and articulate conservatives. I wouldn't want to have to debate one in a public forum, regardless of how secure I am in my beliefs and values, or even my facts. Because, if nothing else, these people are devastatingly talented rhetoricians. But rhetoric is, primarily, about swaying your audience, not telling the truth.

So when Arthur C. Brooks, writing for National Review Online, talks about the Stimulus failing, he makes a pretty compelling case. He does so, first, by focusing on the well-documented drop in sales of new cars after the end of the Cash for Clunkers program. He ties this into a spirited defense of free-market principles as voiced by the current crop of Republicans, citing a wide-ranging study that links economic freedom — as defined by tax rates and government regulation — with economic prosperity.

All in all, its a pretty compelling argument. There's one major problem with it: he narrows his focus to one program largely judged to be a failure without taking on the rest of the program, a third of which was focused on tax relief. He also doesn't bother to engage the fact that most economists believe the Stimulus worked. These facts, of course, are inconvenient to his argument, so in the hope of swaying readers, he ignores them.

I, oddly enough, faced a similar choice tonight while writing this column. I wanted to include the line I'd seen repeated a few times around the rightwing noise machines, that Romney's 47% comments were actually a winning argument. But when I searched the publications I listed in my first full paragraph, damned if I couldn't find one.

I was shocked to discover that — near uniformly — the more “respectable” conservative publications had roundly denounced Romney's comments as both misleading of the economic realities that go into the tax code and who pays and who doesn't, and both tactically foolish and not indicative of conservative policy as they argue for it.

So I deleted the line and thought it was worth mentioning that I started with a perception that research turned out to be false, so I changed my perception, rather than ignore evidence to the contrary. The links I provided above are a small sampling, but what I saw fairly consistently in them was writers ignoring contrary evidence to a position they clearly wanted to argue for, rather than engaging it.

Why is this important?

Because these are the sharper tools in the conservative shed; these are the adult tables at the conservative Thanksgiving dinners, these are whatever your metaphor of choice is for the smart, intelligent, articulate end of conservative media. And they get kinda crazy sometimes and aren't shy about ignoring evidence that contradicts their comforting narratives. These people are, after all, in the business of attracting readers, not being bold truthtellers.

And this is the high watermark of the conversation. From there you get down to conservatives who lie — constantly — complaining that the media is lying to get Obama elected, that voter fraud is running rampant despite all evidence to the contrary, to attacking facts as objective things that can be checked or verified. And then, thankfully for the lolz, there's always Fox News.

And a lot has already been written about this subject by writers more experienced and qualified to do so than myself. I'd suggest James Fallows at The Atlantic as a great starting point on the topic of conservatives totally losing their shit – legislatively, in the media, and intellectually – during the drive to go all-in against Obama. As someone who's beat is the strategy and tactics of a modern election cycle, this concerns me for one primary reason (as an engaged citizen in a floundering democracy, I've got a fuckton of other reasons I'm concerned)…

Because it leads to bad tactics. I've been saying since this election started in January with the beginning of primary season, Republicans have made a strategic choice — it is more important to them to defeat Barack Obama than it is to win the White House. These two goals sound like they're more or less the same thing, but there's a great strategic difference between the two.

I said in my last column that this is a base election. Both candidates are charting a tactical course that is more about making their opposition so incredibly unacceptable to voters, because they — at bottom — have nothing worth actually running on themselves. They can't convince you to vote for them, but they can convince you to vote against their opposition.

Since the beginning, Mitt Romney's campaign has set out to tell you how bad this President has been, thus convincing voters to vote for him as the only alternative. He's yet to offer detailed policies, but he has plenty of attack lines and corresponding attack ads. Alex Pareene — among others — offers an interesting theory of why, just maybe, this strategy has a lot to do with the perceived media bias against Romney, and he gets to swear so I always link to him rather than more staid commentators:

Or, to put it another way: bad news, conservative friends your candidate is losing because he is a bad candidate running a dismally bad campaign. Polls aren't weighted against him, they're using a variety of methodology and generally finding that the President is winning. The media isn't out to get him, Romney just keeps making stupid mistakes. His campaign is so deeply in trouble that convention speakers used their time at the dais to pitch for themselves rather than for a Romney presidency.

Because their aim has never been for Mitt Romney to win the presidency. It's been to deny another term to Barack Obama. This is why we've seen we've seen endless pieces about the so-called vetting of the President that routinely uncover nothing. This is why each potential scandal is suggested to have Watergate-proportions behind them, yet reveal nothing of the sort. This is why — in Pareene's formulation — Mitt Romney fails to bullshit the press, because his greatest applause lines, that his audience is dying to hear, are about how the President is a filthy liar, or un-American, or a secret socialist. They're not about how great President Romney is going to be for anyone who doesn't define “great” as the guy who repeals 100% of Obamacare on day one.

And in that alternate reality, where all those horrible things are true, the good news, for Mitt Romney at least, is that he's winning.


[Above: Courtesy of UnSkewed – Where they boil the liberal bias out of every poll]

Next week is the first Presidential debate, so I'll be back after that with less dense reading and much more swearing.


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Paul Dano has been one of the most interesting actors to watch in the last 10 years. He’s done several hard hitting indie dramas like L.I.E. and The Ballad of Jack and Rose, and that famous “I’ve abandoned my child” scene in There Will Be Blood. His youthful face has kept him in teen comedies,... more

Paul Dano has been one of the most interesting actors to watch in the last 10 years. He’s done several hard hitting indie dramas like L.I.E. and The Ballad of Jack and Rose, and that famous “I’ve abandoned my child” scene in There Will Be Blood. His youthful face has kept him in teen comedies, dramas and dramedies, from The Emperor’s Club to The Girl Next Door.

It was probably Little Miss Sunshine that made viewers learn his name. Stuck in the van with Steve Carell, Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette and little Abigail Breslin, Dano played the older brother who just wanted to join the air force. Since then he’s popped up in big studio movies like Knight & Day and Cowboys & Aliens.

Currently, Dano stars in Being Flynn, based on author Nick Flynn’s memoir Another Bullshit Night In Suck City. Dano plays Nick, then an aspiring author volunteering at a homeless shelter. His estranged father Jonathan (Robert DeNiro) comes back into his life and even shows up at the homeless shelter. Jonathan Flynn left before his wife Jody (Julianne Moore) killed herself, a suicide Nick believes he caused with a short story he wrote. Guilt, homelessness and even falling into drugs himself makes Nick a very juicy role for Dano.

Dano gave us some time to speak with him when he visited Los Angeles with the film. Though I’ve been watching him for a decade this was actually the first time I met him in my Hollywood career, although for all this time I’ve been saying his name wrong. I learned the correct pronunciation of Dano after hearing all of the Focus Features staff refer to him all day. Good thing I didn’t make a “Book ‘em, Dano” joke because that’s not how it’s pronounced.

Suicide Girls: So it’s Day-no?

Paul Dano: It is.

SG: I apologize. I have been saying it wrong all this time.

PD: You know, I think there’s a lot of people out there who say it wrong. It doesn’t really bother me.

SG: You’re able to tackle a lot of tough material. What is your connection to these subjects?

PD: I guess I like to feel challenged. That’s sort of what makes me want to work hard more than the paycheck or something. I really like what I do and I’m really inspired by people who do it well so I think I just like to feel that rush of fear, like I know I can do this but I don’t totally know how. That’s just the kind of thing that gets me out of bed as opposed to something else.

SG: I like movies that deal with tough issues in a good way. Do you have a sense of what the right way is?

PD: I don't know. I guess once you’ve chosen to take on a part, it’s amazing how the horse blinders come on for me and I think for a lot of people. There’s nothing that you really start thinking about except what is best for this character, how am I going to become him. What can I bring to it, how can I get away from myself, how am I going to set myself up to do the best job on the day and what kind of prep do I need to do? I don’t make a conscious effort to do anything else but that.

SG: Do you gravitate towards characters who are very different from yourself?

PD: I think so. Obviously there’s something in me that can relate, empathize, connect, whatever, with the characters I play but I definitely feel like when I think about some of them, I’m really nothing like them. Nick’s situation, I really am moved by and I identify with certain aspects but the fact that I’m not a big drinker, I don’t like doing drugs, but that’s a turn-on that this guy does. Why? Why does a person do that? And sort of getting into that world. I’m sure there are either themes to some of these characters you’re referring to or there’s always a personal connection without a doubt.

SG: I ask in the interest of trying to understand what you like.

PD: I guess I do like conflicted characters. Inner conflict to me just is attractive as an actor. It gives you something to really struggle with, to really sink your teeth into. It gives you something emotional, it gives you something psychological and I just like that. I like that. I don't know why. If I was just asked to play myself, I think I’d get really bored quickly. I don’t wanna do that. And if I was asked to just play one note in some of these more bland films, I’d just get bored. It’s not fun.

SG: I would have assumed you weren’t an addict, but I didn’t know you don’t care for drinking anyway.

PD: No, I like to have a glass of wine. I drink. I have other ways of being self-destructive I’m sure but that’s not my main way of doing it.

SG: So how do you give that authenticity to the performance without having experienced it?

PD: Especially with this film, look, for me one thing that was important was to understand a guy like this emotionally. Why do you self-destruct? Why do you end up passing out in a stairwell with a crackpipe? That’s I think really interesting and I think there’s an emotional psychological reason behind it and that’s what makes me able to get there. I did not go and actually smoke crack. You’re tempted to. You’re tempted, oh, should I actually try this? You want to be a committed actor but you don’t need to actually. Sometimes you do. You’ve got to put some things into practice.

SG: That one would be illegal though.

PD: No, you know, some things you have to put into practice but really the addiction aspect for Nick, I did not want to be the stereotypical druggie guy and I don't think most of these people are. There’s a lot of people who are addicts of some kind out there who are normal people who are going to work every day and who are having a bad time alone at night. I did not want to do this grandiose addict thing. That’s not who this guy was I don't think. So I did my research, talked to people who have had this problem and read about it and then tried to understand who Nick was as best I could.

SG: So you went inside out, you didn’t start with the symptoms?

PD: You do both. You need to know what the external is but I think the reasons for Nick turning to those things was he was coping with this crazy issue of his father being a homeless man in the homeless shelter that he works at. His father is a lunatic writer. Nick wants to be a writer. Is he gonna end up like his father? Did he kill his mother? So he’s got a lot of reasons that he is trying to defuse his inner state. So it makes perfect sense. It just gives you the reason why you’re going to that. But the first thing I think I did for this was actually I’ve gotta get to the shelter and get out

there. So you do inside and outside.

SG: Had you ever volunteered at a shelter before this movie?

PD: No. When I was a kid growing up in New York I think at school we had to do, I think we did a soup kitchen thing

but that was through school. I don't think I had and I think in high school I delivered some stuff sometimes from a grocery store to a place. That’s something my parents did so every now and then I would do a drop off for them. But no, aside from that and a couple little things.

SG: I admire that because I’m sensitive to the homeless situation but don’t think I could emotionally handle getting hands on.

PD: You know what, it was a pretty great experience. Especially what I said about most of these people, there’s a lot more normal people than you think who are homeless and that was really eye opening for me. Talking to people and going my God, sometimes you’re not that far from it. You just don’t know it. There’s people who are three months homeless or three weeks homeless and you go geez, wow. You just lost your job and you couldn’t [keep up.] Stuff happens. And you have your people who are crazy or addicts. It was a pretty great experience and we’re going to do some screenings I think for shelters to raise some money, so that’ll be nice coming up in a few weeks.

SG: Living in New York, do you give money to beggars?

PD: Yeah. If I have change in my pocket, I usually give it to somebody. I especially give it to the people who are working for it. I take the subway every day almost and you have your people who might sing or play guitar or do a dance. Yeah, if I’ve got change, I will give it. Growing up I remember being affected by the image of the homeless when I was very young. Then as you grow older, you start to rationalize that and get used to that image. In some ways it becomes a part of your life. You’re in New York, the same thing here in L.A. This was definitely a nice experience to have my eyes reopened to the issue and also just to understand the personal element. They’re real people and a lot of them are more like you than you know.

SG: When you do roles in Cowboys & Aliens or Knight and Day are those really aggressive auditions?

PD: It depends. Sometimes you might get offered a part. Sometimes you have to go through the process to get it. Some of them are super competitive. It just depends.

SG: You’ve played several young characters or high school that a lot of people relate to. Were you popular in high school?

PD: I think I did all right. Yeah, I had a lot of friends. Some people had a really tough time in high school. I had a great time in high school I also had a tough time in high school but I had a great time. I look back on it fondly and I had some great, great friends and I have some good memories so I think I was all right.

SG: Have your young features been a helpful tool as an actor?

PD: I don't know. I guess if that’s what the part is, maybe. I’m not sure. Yeah, sure, I think it’ll be a good thing ultimately.

SG: Was there a moment where you felt: I am an established actor?

PD: I do remember starting to get recognized for the first time and how sort of horrible that was. It was definitely shocking and weird but no, I don’t really think about that too much.

SG: What were you being recognized from?

PD: I think when Little Miss Sunshine came out I started getting recognized and it was weird. You get used to

it and it can be a nice thing sometimes but that’s not the impetus to try and be a successful actor for me. I could do without it.

SG: Was there a moment you thought: Yeah, I’m good?

PD: Yeah, I think I’m doing all right. I would not try to keep doing this if I didn’t think I had something to offer.

Being Flynn opens March 2 in limited release.

Though Kinky Friedman was born in Chicago everyone knows he has the heart of a Texan. Friedman first came to notice as a musician with the Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys which created satirical country music. Soon Friedman brought his satire up to a new level with his novels using a fictionalized... more

Though Kinky Friedman was born in Chicago everyone knows he has the heart of a Texan. Friedman first came to notice as a musician with the Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys which created satirical country music. Soon Friedman brought his satire up to a new level with his novels using a fictionalized version of himself as a private detective solving crimes in New York City. Friedman’s most recent bid came as he ran for governor of Texas this past midterm election which he lost to Rick Perry.

Right on the tail end of the campaign Friedman released the book, The Christmas Pig, which is about a fictionalized land where the king needs an artist to create a nativity scene. The king decides to hire an artistic but mute child prodigy. While the child is creating the scene, he becomes friends with a talking pig who helps him along the way.

Buy The Christmas Pig

Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?

Kinky Friedman: Well, I’m on a book signing tour for The Christmas Pig.

DRE: I loved the book, by the way.

KF: You’ve read it already, wow. You don’t waste much time Daniel. It’s a lovely little Christmas book that has turned out to be one of my best efforts.

DRE: [laughs] We Jews are always inundated with Christmas and Christmas stories and a lot of them are done by Jews. What made you decide to write Christmas Pig?

KF: Kind of like Dostoyevsky I took an assignment to write a celebrity Christmas book to earn gambling money for Vegas. It turned out to be a better book than I anticipated because sometimes when you set out to write the great American novel or paint your masterpiece, you never do. It’s always done accidentally. The great work is done obliquely by people who are trying to pay the rent or gambling debts, either one will work. Once you can get that mindset going you have a chance. But Christmas Pig goes beyond Christianity and Judaism. As Thomas Payne said on his deathbed, “The world is my country; to do good is my religion.”

DRE: Have you ever known a kid like Benjamin?

KF: Yeah, I have. In fact I know several but I know one very much like that and I suspect there are lots more. His autism is academic and a lot of autistic kids are brilliant artists. I also knew a pig once.

DRE: It wasn’t a talking pig I assume.

KF: No but close though. I’ve never really known a king though. Mark Twain only met one king. It was the king of Hawaii.

DRE: Why did they offer you a Christmas book?

KF: I don’t know. That was David Rosenthal’s idea at Simon & Schuster. It’s worked out well because the wonderful Germans have already translated it with illustrations for next Christmas. If the Germans like it, the rest of the world can’t be far behind.

DRE: Was part of the fun you being a Jewish guy writing a Christmas story?

KF: Well, I kind of am a Judeo-Christian. I contend that I have Jesus and Moses in my heart and they were both good Jewish boys that got in a little trouble with the government. I don’t think of myself as a Jewish guy. I’m pretty damn open about being Jewish, but none of it makes a lick of sense. Heroes of mine are Father Damien, a Catholic priest who died of leprosy over 100 years ago. Martin Luther King was one. Gandhi, Breaker Morant. A lot of people who weren’t Jewish are my heroes. Jesus was just one of a great line of misunderstood people that I admire.

DRE: Do you celebrate Christmas?

KF: I don’t celebrate anything but hunting accidents. I don’t celebrate holidays. I don’t like them.

DRE: Why is that?

KF: Because they’re stultifying dull. I think life is moments, that’s all. I don’t think you can contrive having a Jewish singles of Dallas Purim party and make it soulful.

DRE: [laughs] Was that your pig on the cover of The Christmas Pig?

KF: Might as well have been. No, my pig has already gone to Jesus.

DRE: I read that you save many animals. Do you eat meat though?

KF: Yes. I have been a vegetarian in the past although I still love a big, hairy steak. Do I eat pork? No. I don’t eat pork for spiritual reasons not for any narrow, stupid religious reasons. I like pigs, I think they’re really smart, good and I think we’re very deceitful toward them. Pigs are getting them a very bad deal. It’s like the horse sslaughter plants in Texas that I’m trying to close. They’re shipping meat to France for people to eat. After you get past closing the horse slaughter plants then you should close the cattle slaughter plants too.

DRE: Are you still involved with the Max Soffar case?

KF: Yeah, I don’t know where it’s going to go except that I’m now closer friends with the governor than I’ve ever been. That’s one that’s really an injustice in a lot of respects. I don’t think Max did this crime and I don’t think that there’s much evidence that he did either. Yet two juries have convicted him. Why did that happen? When was the last time we executed a rich man in Texas? The answer is never.

DRE: That’s crazy.

KF: Yeah so it’s probably true in New York. You wonderful, progressive motherfuckers. You are probably the most parochial, provincial group of people on the whole planet, people around New York. Particularly Manhattan because they look down on you as well, they don’t think Queens exists.

DRE: Well, I just moved to Queens.

KF: Then you just step up. It’s a real place in the world. The Christmas Pig was written for people. It wasn’t written for Jewish intellectuals. This is a book for people who can read between the lines. Really being Jewish or being Christian is pretty damn similar.

DRE: If they follow the basic rules.

KF: Yeah, which they never do. Those are the ones they totally ignore. That’s why Israel’s main support comes from the Christian right, not the Democratic left who ought to support Israel if they look at the Lord.

DRE: Do you still create music?

KF: As little as possible.

DRE: Why is that?

KF: Because I never have time. I hang around musicians a lot. A lot of them are good friends of mine. I like music but mostly I’m writing and campaigning even though that’s over with. But I may get back to music though I doubt it. I say musicians can run this country better than politicians although we won’t get a lot done in the mornings. We’ll work late and we’ll be honest.

DRE: Obviously you didn’t win the bid for governor in Texas.

KF: Well, the people have spoken the bastards, as Hunter Thompson said. The people have mumbled actually. There was a pretty apathetic turn out. I gave Texas my phone number and she never got back to me. But the whole point of the Alamo was not that they won or lost but the fact that they stood up against insurmountable odds and it led right to the battle of San Jacinto and the formation of Texas. The Alamo, while not being a technical victory, was what sparked and continues to spark the imagination of millions of people. It was like when Kissinger asked Chairman Mao if he thought the French Revolution made a difference or not and Chairman Mao said it was too soon to tell. That’s where we are at this point.

DRE: What were your expectations?

KF: I thought the people would turn out. Had they voted in big numbers, we would have won. They did not. As long as the turnout is low, the Crips and the Bloods are always going to control.

DRE: I know they attacked you for a few things you said. Do you feel like you should have said those things?

KF: No, not at all. Particularly the Democrats proved themselves to be vicious and the main victim was the truth. That was the casualty. I would have looked to the Democrats to stand up to the truth but they didn’t. They pretended that they didn’t understand what satire was. In other words, they pretended that they didn’t understand Mark Twain or Voltaire or Borat or Blazing Saddles. They pretended that I was a raging racist like the guy in To Kill a Mockingbird. To paraphrase Mark Twain, he said that the three most precious things in America are Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Conscience and the prudence never to use either one of them.

DRE: What do you think of Governor Rick Perry?

KF: Well, he called me yesterday. He’s been very gracious. He said that he could use a guy like me to reach the people he can’t reach, which are a lot of Texans. The vast majority of them are black. So who knows, there may be some bridge building here. We might both end up working for the people of Texas. I like him personally. I don’t think he’s been really been an activist type of governor in the past six years. There are a lot of areas that I don’t think are doing well such as education, immigration and environment. Those are big ones.

DRE: How do you feel about the Democrats getting control of Congress?

KF: Totally irrelevant. Just a different set of lobbyists moving to Washington.

DRE: You don’t think there’ll be any change for the good?

KF: Very unlikely. I think I’ve really had enough of the Republicans and the Democrats. The two party system is offering us some of the worst candidates that you’ve ever seen. If the best we can do is George Bush and John Kerry we’ve got a serious problem. We can’t even nominate guys like McCain and Rudy [Giuliani] for starters because of the system. George Washington was right, we don’t need two political parties. All government needs is common sense and common honesty.

DRE: When will that happen? Never?

KF: Never. Well, Texas had an opportunity.

DRE: You think you’ll run again?

KF: Pretty doubtful, I’m getting pretty old. I’m 62 years old which is too young for Medicare and too old for women to care.

DRE: When did you start doing the animal rescue?

KF: We opened Utopia Rescue Ranch eight years ago and it’s a real eye opener to deal with abused and stray animals and to see what people have done. We’ve adopted over 1500 animals in the past eight years; it’s a really great thing.

DRE: Was there something specific that led you to doing that or was it a decision?

KF: It was a dream. Cousin Nancy runs the ranch. She wrote a book called The Road to Utopia: How Kinky, Tony, and I Saved More Animals than Noah. That’s the whole story of the rescue ranch.

DRE: What’s the next project you’re working on?

KF: Maybe I’ll do a book on the campaign. We’ll see. I don’t think I’ll do another mystery book until I hear the literary world clamoring for it’s return.

DRE: We’d love to get you a membership to SuicideGirls.

KF: Well the problem I have is that I don’t use the internet at all. I think it’s the work of Satan. I don’t have email or any of that shit. Even Willie Nelson doesn’t approve of that. Willie was a little bit irritated when I told him I don’t use email.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

by Cameron Frye For those of you who haven’t heard the news, I’ve lost 270+lbs. Since losing the weight, I’ve entered the dating world and it’s been....nice? Who am I kidding, it sucks. But I can’t be anti-social Suzy for the rest of my life and I can’t get drunk and hope for the best anymore. more

by Cameron Frye

For those of you who haven’t heard the news, I’ve lost 270+lbs. Since losing the weight, I’ve entered the dating world and it’s been....nice? Who am I kidding, it sucks. But I can’t be anti-social Suzy for the rest of my life and I can’t get drunk and hope for the best anymore. So I have to put some effort into finding someone and conning some unlucky bastard into loving me.

It was so much easier when I drank and it was always a surprise. I use to equate it with getting a goodie bag after a birthday party. The majority of the stuff was horse shit, but occasionally you’d find one gem to keep you occupied for a while. You have to admit, there’s no better feeling than waking up in the morning and finding out from your friends or from the guy that’s sleeping next to you what you did the night before and following it up with an awkward doctor’s visit filled with judgment on Monday. How I didn’t get herpes is still beyond me. But that’s not why we’re here!

We are here to read about my entrance into the dating world and what I’m doing to make it more enjoyable.

So I am going on a lot of blind dates or first dates or torture sessions (whatever you want to call them) and they’re painful. It’s filled with awkward conversations and judgment. I just assume they’re thinking the worst of me (I admit I’m doing the same to them) and I can also assume that the friends who are setting me up, think very little of me or they’re getting back at me for something fucked up I did in the past. Listen, it’s not my fault he lingered a little too long after that kiss and, really, you’re the only one to blame. You gave us permission to hook you up.

Anyways, after accepting another date from a bad karma charmer, I’ve been scheduling a second “date” for later in the evening. Ok, it’s not really a date. It’s just my version of the nightcap and, since I can’t drink right now or indulge in my favorite desserts without getting sick and vomiting all over the place, I need something to take the edge off.

So, I’ve been meeting up with one of my many hook ups from Christmas’ past and having sex. The way I see it, they’re performing a service and if anything, the lucky fella I really want to be with will thank them in the end or at least that’s what I’m telling myself this week.

Since losing the weight equivalent of a defensive lineman for the New England Patriots, I’m not 100% comfy with my appearance out of clothes. Granted, that’s normal and that’s why God created the dark - but I still think the more ‘practice’ I have being naked with a guy, the better. Right now my body looks like its melting and that’s not exactly a big selling point with guys out there. I know, I know, it’s more than looks. But that’s bullshit. If it was, I would have been beating them off with a stick when I weighed 448 and had the slight resemblance of Mama June on ‘Here Comes Honey Boo Boo’ - just sans neck crust. *shudders*

I doubled up on the ‘dates’ this weekend. The first one was with ‘a really nice guy’ that worked with my friend’s husband. Attractive, good job, well dressed - just nothing there. He had the personality of stomach cancer and was more into talking to his reflection in the mirror than me. Translation? He was a less witty Patrick Bateman.

Now I fully admit to checking myself out in the mirror when no one is looking, but he was looking at himself the entire time. I saw him winking at himself in the mirror once or he had a thing for the 60 year old he saw sitting behind us. I won’t lie; she was a looker...in 1954.

For almost two hours I sat there listening to him ramble on about Mitt Romney, soccer and his new BMW. He was also one of those guys who needs to know everything about what he was going to eat. I care about animals, I really do. But I don’t need to know the life story of the chicken that’s being added to my salad. I’d rather assume, the chicken gave his life for a noble cause – like to earn money, so he could feed his starving children and the world is a better place for it. OMMMMM *ding* Namaste. After hearing the chicken life story, I contemplated stabbing myself with my salad fork.

Instead of ruining a perfectly good outfit or dealing with a trip to the hospital, I decided to text Round 2 and asked if he wanted company earlier than we had planned. When he responded with a “yes,” I couldn’t have been happier. Well, that’s not true. I was happier than a pig in shit when Round 1 asked for the check. When he wasn’t looking, I might have greased the waiter and said there’s more if he can get me out of there in less than 10 minutes. It worked.

Boring Bateman got a little grabby on the way out. Evidently, he thought he won me over or I wasn’t picky. While I was trying everything in my power to get away, he got blinded by his reflection in the mirror and I was able to hop in the first available cab.

I guess, in a way, I should be honored. I mean, he didn’t drink much and I did look good. I'm going to assume that's what made him a little rapey. Two points for the kid.

I texted round 2 and said I was on my way. I’m going to be honest, I was nervous. It’s like I said before, it was much easier when I drank. Everything is. Ok, maybe not driving, raising a child or threading a needle, but hooking up was. When I was drunk, the real me came out. I wasn’t the insecure ass that I usually am. I just didn’t care. I was more concerned with having fun and not getting pregnant or worse.

But the bucket of fun was forced to be sober and now we’re forced to dazzle people with the personality we really have, which in itself is a horrible idea. Deep down inside, I’m a good person – but I’m kind of an asshole. I laugh at awful things and I make awful jokes. I’m not exactly the girl you bring home to mom. That is, unless your mom loves Louis C.K. (Talking of which, can someone put in good word with him for me? Listen, I used to be fat – I can suck a mean dick. Feel free to pass this info on to him).

I met Round 2 at his place. Round 2 lives near one of my favorite bakeries and a place I’d stop off at if I had an exceptionally bad day. There was a sad moment when I wondered if I could break in, grab a cupcake, not get caught and still make it up stairs for cock. I tamed the Super Sugar Force and headed on up to his apartment.

It’s weird, I was far more comfortable walking into his apartment and jumping into sex, than I was sitting down and having a peaceful dinner and getting to know someone. Being sexually confident and going for what I want in the bedroom is cakewalk or fart. (BTW can we please stop farting on cakes? You’re wasting a perfectly delicious treat.), It’s much easier than letting down the walls and letting someone in. I swear, I didn’t get that from any self-help nonsense. I came up with that embarrassing piece of verbal vomit myself.

I know why being sexually aggressive is easier for me, I had to do that most of my life. If I wanted something, I had to go get it myself. If I wanted someone, I had to do everything in my power to make them want me. But controlling that side is hard. I use to pick some awful men (i.e. married men or men already involved) to keep in my fat stable and I’d like to think I’m better than that. I just need to start believing it. I really need to stop talking to my mom when she’s watching her favorite TV shrink of the moment.

Until that happens, I’m going to keep on having fun the only way I know how. At least I know I’ll go to bed with a smile on my face and my vibrator batteries live for another day.


Since losing weight, Cameron Frye has gone from writing about sports to writing about sex. You can follow/stalk her on Twitter or read her ramblings on DigBoston.com/. If you know Louis C.K. - put in a good word for her. Also, she's now accepting tattoo artist recommendations in the Boston area.

by Steven Whitney Nation-building is a perilous task, mostly because the people you are allegedly “saving” from oppressive regimes often don’t share the same world view or want the things we think they should want. For decades, hard line American foreign policy experts found it expedient to install... more

by Steven Whitney

Nation-building is a perilous task, mostly because the people you are allegedly “saving” from oppressive regimes often don’t share the same world view or want the things we think they should want.

For decades, hard line American foreign policy experts found it expedient to install or keep in office leaders whose greatest (and sometimes only) asset was their pro-American stance, aided by billions of American foreign aid dollars. They didn’t care if we were propping up a royal personage (Hassan II / Morocco), an upwardly mobile warlord (Barre / Somalia), a cruel dictator (Pinochet / Chile), or even an outright mass murderer (Pol Pot / Cambodia). It was a classic devil’s deal: as long as these puppet dictators let the USA pull their strings, we supported them, usually disregarding the popular (and underground) leaders who might have been elected by a democratic process. It was and is an anachronistically paternalistic policy – America as Father Knows Best – and it is thankfully dipping below the horizon of our history.

In the meantime, the excesses of these tyrants eventually turned their countries against them, most recently in Libya, Syria, and Egypt. And we supported the rebellions. But if America is going to promote – or at least not get in the way of – democracy abroad, it must realize that it is often not going to like the results. These new democracies are not created to please us, but rather to free their own people and let them choose their own leaders – that’s what democracy is about.

Like life itself, politics is a messy business, especially when you do the right thing and it doesn’t turn out the way you wanted or expected. In this new century of global integration, we have to stop acting like spoiled children accustomed to always getting our way and learn that self-determination means just that.

There’s a price to be paid for freedom...and often it is spread around unpredictably.

* * *

Republicans and Fox News howled when they discovered that “God” was not mentioned in the 2012 Democratic Platform. A veritable hue and cry followed. Democrats hastily put together a Yay or Nay convention floor vote with no audible winner. While the word “potential” was eventually changed to “God-given,” the DNC might have seized the opportunity to point out that the Constitution of the United States, the document office-holders are sworn to uphold, also does not contain the word “God.”

Look up the Constitution on the web. Then click Find for the word “God.” It won’t come up...because it isn’t there.

Our founders were extremely clear about the separation of church and state. Anyone who thinks otherwise should spend the rest of their days searching for God in our Constitution.

* * *

In most cases, children first discover the world at large in their local library...and adults find almost anything they need to learn or want to enjoy. Except for actual schools, libraries contribute more than any other institution to our growth as human beings and to the society we live in. They are the social hub of information sharing and, unlike most elected officials, libraries serve their entire communities, so when even one is in danger of closing, it’s imperative that the community push back.

Faced with just such a threat the good citizens of Troy, Michigan pushed back against the Tea Party / Grover Norquist tax fanatics. Watch this short video to see how the smartest use of reverse psychology I’ve ever witnessed saved their library.



These voters are not only informed, but amazingly creative. Bravo!

* * *

Writers generally love words. Lately, one phrase keeps intruding on my thoughts – “to the manor born.” It holds visions of British aristocracy, Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs. But now American has its own version.

Doesn’t Mitt Romney (and to a lesser extent, Paul Ryan) perfectly embody the concept of “to the manor born?”

* * *

Time magazine recently reported that more than one hundred bird species, including chickens, engage in some sort of homosexual behavior, much of it “casual sex.” And a study at Virginia Tech in 1964 discovered that cockerels placed in cages only with same sex chickens started getting it on pretty quickly. Of course, the bible on the topic is Bruce Bagemidhi’s Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity, which confirmed Darwin’s finding that diverse sexual behavior – homosexuality, bisexuality, and more – naturally occurs in almost all animal species, including humans and chickens.

As a result, anonymous sources have revealed that in an all-out effort to prevent gay chickens from hitting their grills, CEO Dan Cathy has commissioned famed Minnesota sex orientation adjuster Marcus Bachmann to visit every one of Chick-fil-A’s facilities to “pray the gay away” from their otherwise magnificently heterosexual chickens.

Fowl behavior, indeed.

* * *

Our Worse Than a Do Nothing Congress recently set a new and shameless low in governing standards. On September 21st, members of Congress recessed for the all-important business of getting re-elected in November. It was the earliest exit from D.C. in over 50 years.

Congress reconvened from its summer vacation on September 10th – and worked nine full days before calling it quits – obviously spent by their oppressive workload. They might not have come back at all but, as always, Republicans had some important bills to block.

First up was the Veterans Jobs Bill, which would have created jobs for 20,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It actually passed 58 to 40, but Senate Republicans killed it by lodging an objection that then required a 60 vote passage.

House Republicans also stalled the Farm Bill because its $23 billion cut in farm subsidies over ten years was not nearly enough. And, too, the GOP wants to replace subsidies with a new privately run “crop insurance” program with projected costs of over $1 trillion that creates myriad irrational incentives for small farmers (while, of course, favoring huge agribusiness concerns).

Attached to the farm bill was a provision passed by the Senate cutting food stamps expenditures by one-half of one per cent. House Republicans want to quadruple the cut, so the bill was effectively tabled. Food stamps help feed 46 million Americans, many of them working families, part of the 47% of Americans Romney/Ryan accuse of feeling “entitled to food,” and if the GOP has its way, “those people” will be dining only at Midnight Missions throughout the country

Due to so much unfinished business, Congress will reconvene after the November election. Since some – and hopefully many – Republicans will be lame ducks by then, perhaps a few will veer from the hard party line and actually use their votes to help everyday Americans.

* * *

The biggest mistake President Obama made during what is hopefully his first of two terms was during his OLITICS" target="_blank">State of the Union address before Congress in January, 2009. Back then he should have declared that in the almost 3 months since the election he had been briefed on every aspect of our government and that everything was much worse than we – and he – had been told.

I’m sure he wanted to use that forum to regenerate his message of hope, but his lack of candor supplied the GOP with their rallying cry today: “He didn’t fix our mess fast enough!”

The Bush/Cheney administration left our country in disastrous ruin on almost every front and it would take more than even the full team of Avengers to repair the damage, especially when Congress does nothing but obstruct proposed bills that would help us regain our fiscal health.

Instead, Obama’s first SOTU address fostered what by then was unrealistic hope and, when truly miraculous change didn’t happen, the President was blamed by every screaming Republican.

The truth is that Bush/Cheney dug us into such a deep hole, it might take a full decade or more to recover, even longer if the GOP maintains its obstructionist posture or, heaven forbid, gains power and returns to the policies drove us off the cliff in the first place.

On Election Day, all you really have to do is remember who led us into the quicksand of failed policies from 2001 to 2008. And then vote.

Related Posts:
From Death And Despair. . . Dreams Can Soar
Modest Solutions To Voter Suppression
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!

The four season run of Childrens Hospital on Adult Swim has also mirrored Lake Bell’s rise in popularity and success in the entertainment industry. What began as a web series created by Rob Corddry is now an Emmy winning television mainstay. While playing Dr. Cat Black on the comedy, Bell has appeared... more

The four season run of Childrens Hospital on Adult Swim has also mirrored Lake Bell’s rise in popularity and success in the entertainment industry. What began as a web series created by Rob Corddry is now an Emmy winning television mainstay. While playing Dr. Cat Black on the comedy, Bell has appeared in big movies, comedy and drama, and this year she directed two episodes of Childrens as well.

Childrens Hospital is ostensibly a comedy set in a hospital, though not a children’s hospital. It’s named after Arthur Childrens. And the characters are doctors, but the random episodes can put them in a horror movie, a courtroom drama, whatever. Bell plays Dr. Cat Black, who at one point died, but then it turns out she didn’t really die. That’s Childrens Hospital.

Bell was at the Creative Arts Emmys on Saturday, Sept 15 where Childrens Hospital won the Emmy for Outstanding Special Class: Short-Format Live-Action Entertainment Program. That’s a mouthful. It means the best show under 30 minutes. Adult Swim airs blocks of 15 minute shows.  After the big night, Bell returned to the editing room on the film she directed. She also took on a kick ass role in the upcoming film Black Rock, about women on a camping trip fighting for survival, which premiered at Sundance.

While putting the finishing touches on In a World…, Bell chatted about her creative growth on Childrens Hospital and what’s still to come this season. She also shared a good perspective on her sex appeal, which has gotten her on the cover of Maxim[/ur]l and other provocative photo spreads. Childrens Hospital airs Thursdays at midnight on Adult Swim.

Suicide Girls: Childrens Hospital is going really well for you. Is it a good thing you met Rob Corddry on What Happens in Vegas?

Lake Bell: I can say that as I stood on the stage of the Creative Arts Emmys winning an Emmy for our tiny, irreverent, politically incorrect, hilariously fun joy of a show that is Childrens Hospital, I can say that yes, I was very pleased to have met Rob Corddry on What Happens in Vegas.

SG: Did you guys hit it off right away?

LB: Yeah, our parts entailed getting into each other’s faces and numerous disgusting fart jokes and things like that. So immediately we were of like mind.

SG: Was this your first experience at the Emmys?

LB: Totally. Yeah, I have never been in the running for anything like that. I don't think we ever thought that would be the case. It’s utterly shocking.

SG: That was the Creative Arts Emmys. Do you get to go again to the televised Emmys show too?

LB: You don’t get to go to both. I mean, you wouldn’t necessarily want to. I think award shows are inherently kind of tedious unless you or a dear friend or a family member are nominated for something, or some sort of team you’re a part of is nominated. Otherwise it’s kind of you’re there and you’re like, “Well, I don't know what I’m doing here.” Just five hours of hanging out instead of watching it on television and maybe seeing the close-ups of everyone’s face’s delight or horror.

SG: Had you always wanted to direct?

LB: I did but I just never had the audacity to do it until one day my agent suggested it. I was like, oh, eventually I’ll take on something to direct. I had written a feature that I was looking for a director for and he was like, “Well, why don’t you direct it?” I’m like, “I’m not a director. I would never all of a sudden give myself that title without doing it.” He’s like, “Well, then write a short film and direct that and see how you like it.” I was like, “Great idea. I’m going to go do that right now.” So I literally went home, I had had a couple of characters that I had written and I was like all right, I’ll mold this into something that I think has a beginning, middle and end. I’ll make that the short film and that was the little short film. I wasn’t starring in that one though. It starred Michaela Watkins called Worst Enemy. So I directed it and it got into Sundance and that was the beginning of feeling somewhat a little more confident even though understanding respectfully that A, this is just something I like. It felt good. It felt like home. It was like, “This is really fun. I love the collaboration and I love the team aspects of it.”

SG: Was it easier to direct an episode of a show you’d been on for three years already?

LB: I think if anything it was a little harder because it wasn’t something that I wrote so it’s sketch comedy. I’d never directed barely anything let alone sketch comedy which is very specific. It’s kind of surreal sometimes too so the two episodes I had, they gave me like a director’s black which is ostensibly two episodes you’ve got to direct at the same time. Both of them were super ambitious. One of them was a pseudo airborne amnesia Contagion movie which was the season premiere this year and then the other one that’s coming out October 4 is likened to a Hanna meets Bourne Supremacy but all obviously within 12 minutes. So those two things to shoot at the same time, I was like, “Way to go, guys.” It was fun.

SG: Since you’ve started directing, are you taking to things you took for granted as an actor?

LB: I’m actually sitting in my edit room right now on the feature that I referenced before, that I was saying I wanted to direct a feature. So I did end up directing that and I think post production, as I sit in it, seems to be the most challenging. I think every step that I’ve taken as a director is, certainly at this point, new, exciting, inspiring. It’s a constant creative evolution and I find that a huge turn on. To have great people around you and to collaborate with people and that kind of a thing, but then also feeling energized by the fact that you know what you want is really liberating and intoxicating.

SG: Are you better able to get that feeling as an actor, now that you’ve directed?

LB: I don't know, we’ll see. The last thing I acted in was my film so I actually haven’t taken an acting job since I starred in my feature, so it’s the kind of thing where the last director I worked with was myself. We’ll see, now after having gone through the war of making a film and being a crew member, how it will play out when I’m on somebody else’s set. I think if anything, I had an obvious reaction that it had a tremendous affect. I already was the kind of actor who would arrive on the set and want to just be part of whatever the vision of the director wanted. So what are you excited about, what do you need me to do, why do you want me to play it? I’ll get to set early, I’ll just sit here and wait, don’t worry about it, I got it. I already had that kind of mentality. I don't know if that’s being a middle child or a child of divorce. That’s how I was anyway.

SG: Were the episodes of Childrens Hospital you were not in when you were in post on the episodes you directed?

LB: Yes, pre-production or post-production. You know, it was the first time I was taking something on that I did not want to let my team down, my Childrens Hospital team. So we talked about it in production meetings and I was like, “I really feel like I shouldn’t be in the episodes A, that I direct or when I’m in pre-production because I just want to be as present as possible, and when I’m running the machine I want to be as efficient as possible so that we make something fun and have a good time.” This season I’m going to be in the ones I direct.

SG: Do you already know what those episodes are?

LB: No, they’re still writing them.

SG: It’s funny you describe Childrens Hospital as sketch comedy. It kind of is. Is there any consistency from week to week?

LB: I guess I refer to it as sketch because when I think of it in comparison to what I write and what I do, it lacks logic and the characters are kind of interchangeable. We pride ourselves on that illogical kind of tornado of comedy. I don't think of it as subtle in any way.

SG: Definitely not. Are the characters even the same from week to week?

LB: I mean, barely. We sort of joke about part of what’s so accessible and why we can have who we have on the show is because the characters, if for instance Malin [Akerman] has to go shoot something or if Erinn Hayes has to go shoot something then Malin could play Erinn’s part, or I could play Rob Huebel’s part. Whatever the storyline, there’s no sexual sort of delineation so anybody can be in love with anyone and anyone can take on anyone’s qualities at any given moment. So I think we have fun with the idea of switching attitudes. Occasionally there’s some sort of cohesiveness but it can all be derailed within the next episode, so the second you think know, there’s no character arcs to deal with.

SG: Is there something freeing about putting your feelings right on the surface like that with no subtlety?

LB: No, we’re not. There’s no feelings. We’re just acting like a bunch of idiots. It’s really just like grown up adults who have lives and pay taxes and maybe have husbands or wives and kids all acting like maniac 12-year-olds. And being paid a modest small sum to do so. That’s why we love it so much because it’s like comedy camp.

SG: As you’re getting so much satisfaction behind the scenes, how do you feel about the glamour part of your job, the red carpets, awards shows and appearing in Maxim?

LB: I really like the juxtaposition of being in Maxim and directing your first feature in the same year. I don’t see why you can’t do that. It’s super hot to pose in uber sexy scenarios and makes me feel great as a woman, which is a completely different thing than directing. They satisfy very different parts of my being and all the magazines and the red carpet stuff is obviously, I think we can all admit, is pretty frivolous when it comes down to it. Even directing is fun. It’s not like anyone’s curing cancer over here doing what we do but it’s sort of exhilarating to be able to wear both hats and I definitely get much more sustenance and emotional inspiration obviously from writing and directing. Or even acting for that matter. All that other stuff I find sort of a necessary evil or you can turn it into something that’s hilarious. Or even like playing a part. The Maxim thing or even just doing a photo spread, it’s like you’re playing this kind of role for a second. It’s nice. It’s like date night with yourself.

SG: I also got to see Black Rock at Sundance. Was it fun to go primal?

LB: Yes, that was fun. I mean, it got weird up in the woods over there with me and Katie [Aselton] and Kate [Bosworth.] We had such a strange kind of emotional, raw dynamic when we were shooting that movie  because we actually lived together all in this little cabin by the water. Katie and Mark Duplass, that’s actually their real cabin. We lived in their little home and we just cooked mac and cheese every night and watched Deliverance, then went back in the woods again and foraged for scenes. It was super primal.

SG: Speaking of sexy, that body warmth scene was something else. You and Katie Aselton stripping in the woods to keep each other warm…

LB: It’s sort of sexy and also sort of not sexy at all I think. When I look at it I feel like first of all, we were fucking freezing. Even going in that water, I almost died in that water so I feel like I earned my nudity stripes on that but also earned my 40 degree water swimming stripes.

SG: Was that your first ever full nudity?

LB: I mean, I’m nude every day when I get in the shower.

SG: That we’ve seen…

LB: But I got the girls out for How to Make it in America too. I don’t really care that much. My agents do care more. It’s like my representation do care more about what you show and what you don’t show and stuff like that. I just never have. When I was younger it never really bothered me and then as my career has moved forward, I’m just less precious about it. I don’t see what the big deal is. And by the way, it’s like you might as while show it now when you can.

SG: Were you funny as a kid? Did you always know you had that gift?

LB: I was trying to make people laugh as a kid but my brothers and I laugh about it because my parents were divorced and remarried and I think most families have to deal with that at one point. But mainly, I think I just never wanted to go to bed and to this day I’m an insomniac so I would try to procrastinate any way I could, not go to bed. So I had a show called The Late Late Show which was I understood that my parents thought it was very cute when I tried to do little plays and things. So if I could just cue that to happen right before they said, “Okay, everybody goes to bed now.” If I could just get that to happen, then I would not ever have to go to bed. So I would buy myself like an hour if I could just start doing a play, so I started to make up plays and stupid shit just to get out of sleeping and that was called The Late Late Show. It became a tradition, especially when parents had friends over and stuff because then you had like a little audience going.

SG: In the movie you directed, are we going to get to see another new side of you in that?

LB: Yeah, it’s not glamour at all. I’m really proud of it. It’s a total dream come true to be sitting in this room and looking at a still of it right now as I lock picture today. I’m excited for everyone to see it but it’s definitely a very unplugged version of myself I think.

SG: What is the movie about?

LB: First of all, I never remember that I’m in it. I always think of it as the thing that I’m working on and I refer to myself as Carol which is the name of the protagonist in order to be able to edit objectively. So I always forget at the end, people are like, “Oh, you were great,” and I’m like, “Oh, oh, oh, in the movie, got it, got it. Thank you so much.” But I never think about it. I always think of everybody else in the movie is really great. It’s about a two bit female vocal coach who sets out to be inadvertently the first woman to say the words “In a world…” a la the famous movie trailer phrase. Her father is the patriarch of the business and it’s basically a comedy about voiceover work.

SG: Like the trailer voice, “In a world where…?”

LB: You know in the beginning of every movie that ever was that’s epic, it goes, “In a world where one woman gets…” Yes, like that.

SG: And that’s Carol?

LB: Yes, she’s like a two bit vocal coach. Her dad is the patriarch of the business, the guy who gets everything. It’s kind of like a neo-feminist comedy about the voiceover industry.

SG: Will we see this at some of the festivals?

LB: I mean, your lips to God’s ears, I hope. I’m going to try my best. I hope. That is the intention. Obviously it’s helpful to do that. I will submit, how about that?

by Chris Goodman (image) When asked to describe Guided By Voices in one word they all said “family.” The original line up is back together, and they consider themselves and the fans one big family. 2012 was a busy year from the start with a January release of Lets Go Eat the Factory, their first... more

by Chris Goodman



When asked to describe Guided By Voices in one word they all said “family.” The original line up is back together, and they consider themselves and the fans one big family.

2012 was a busy year from the start with a January release of Lets Go Eat the Factory, their first album since 2004, which was quickly followed up by the July release of Class Clown Spots a UFO. In addition, November promises the release of yet another full-length entitled The Bears for Lunch, which is to be followed by English Little League, in February 2013. Now reformed, these guys are unstoppable.

“If you write 3,000 songs 30 of them will be good. Good enough to play a show in Pittsburgh,” says Robert Pollard as he struts around the stage cigarette and Miller High Life in hand passing around a bottle of tequila to the audience. Pollard’s banter between songs is pretty damn entertaining. At one point he misses the lyrics on “If We Wait” three times and explains, “Listen, if you get a bunch of 50 year old men on stage drinking and fucking around, they’re gonna fuck songs up. If you wanted KISS, you didn’t get it!”

Everyone knows the music. Everyone loves Pollard’s high kicks. Every song plays like a drinking anthem for an endless summer night that you’ll remember for the rest of your life. A GBV show is more like a party with friends. They kick it off with new material and the intensity never dips or waivers for a second. The entire audience is singing along with every song.

“It’s nice that people know more than ‘Game of Pricks,’” drummer Kevin Fennell says to me. “They know it all.” The band ends with three encores, over 40 songs in all, and we’re all left looking at each other surprised that we heard every song we wanted them to play.

I caught up with Fennell and Guitar player Mitch Mitchell after the Mr. Smalls Theatre show in Pittsburgh, PA, and though it was hard to hear them while all the bottles and broken glass were being cleaned up, I was “Smothered in Hugs” (ha ha) and given an attentive and warm interview.

Chris Goodman: You guys started in ‘83. It’s 2012. 30 years later…What keeps you going?

Kevin Fennell: A lot of it is the new material. I’ve always said this is more of a brotherhood than just a band. We’re so close, like a family. And I know that it sounds cliché but it’s so true. There’s a lot of love going on here.

CG: You reunited in 2010 for the Matador 21st anniversary party with the original line up. That has to add to the dynamic and intensity, being together again…More so than when members were floating in and out?

KF: Some fans might like the other lineups, but personally I think we’re all partial to this one.

CG: Do you have time for any other projects outside of GBV?

KF: I’ve got a day job. We all have day jobs. So between that and the music, making records I stay pretty busy.

[Kevin gives me a hug and gets back to packing his drums up. Mitch’s girlfriend brings him over then he gives me a hug and asks what he can do for me…]

CG: Mitch. It’s an honor. GBV has a new album coming out in November and another scheduled for release in February. Where does it come from at this point? What keeps you going?

Mitch Mitchell: It’s the free beer. It keeps us going. The venues give it to us. They have all been great. The places and the people treat us so well and that truly means a lot. When you’ve played music for the majority of your adult life, you find some clubs really treat you like shit. I’ve never played here before but this was really a great place to play. And like I said…they give us all the beer we can drink. We’re all stoked. You can’t argue with beer.

CG: Is there going to be another tour after the next album?

MM: I hope so! We actually have a gig lined up for New Years Eve...It’s at Irving Plaza. I just found out today actually. We’ve always had a great response on the East Coast. New York, Philly, DC, Boston…These are some of the best rock cities there are. You go out to the West Coast and it’s a different kind of rock. The East Coast is the ballsy rock. But you know, rockers rock, man. Where rockers live, we will find them.

CG: Everyone was talking tonight about how stoked they were to see the original line up. Tobin Sprout is back. That’s huge for a lot of people. I heard “bigger than the Beatles” and “my fuckin’ heroes” thrown around all night.

MM: These guys are our heroes! You, the fans. They come to the shows. They support us. They have to work in the morning. I mean we play this music because we like it. We tour because we like it. The fact that other people can dig it is such a driving force though. To be on the road traveling it’s so nice to know you pull in somewhere and it’s like we’re all friends and they know your name and we all know what crazy shit we’re going to get into tonight. That is what means a lot.

CG: What’s the news with Mitch Mitchell’s Terrifying Experience?

MM: We do shows around our hometown. We don’t tour a lot. Just stick close to home and have fun.

CG: Is there an album coming out?

MM: Well there was, but things kind of snagged. I need to find out what’s up with that. I’ve got tons of new material. Two records recorded and ready to go and I’d like to get the shit out. The records are actually done, we just have to find out how to get them released. I’m kind of ignorant to that side of music. I don’t understand the nuts and bolts to putting a record out. If I have to put this shit out myself somehow then that’s what I’ll have to do I guess. We really put a lot into it and I’d like to get it to people GBV is my first and foremost priority, but the Terrifying Experience is like my baby. It’s a great time.

CG: How did you start playing music?

MM: When I first started I was 9 years old and I went to take some lessons at a music store. I listened to a lot of music growing up and I had always wanted to learn to play guitar. And I figured you had to learn from someone that already knew and that you couldn’t figure it out on your own. You had to be taught.

I found a guy at this music store called Dayton Band and I signed up for lessons. The first time I met with this guy he says, “The first thing you need to know about music is ALL drummers are crazy. The second lesson is that most drummers are assholes.” I mean this was my first guitar lesson. And he was right. To this day most of the drummers I’ve met are the nuttiest people in the band.

CG: So you had two lessons, and then figured you could just listen to Stones records and figure the riffs out?

MM: Ha. I took two fuckin’ lessons and decided I’d do it myself. That experience molded me. I learned to do things myself. I know a lot about drummers. Kevin and I have been playing since I was 10 years old. I love him with all my heart. I don’t ever have to look at him to know what’s happening or what he’s gonna do. It’s an unspoken connection.

CG: So there were ups and downs, but how the hell have you stayed a band for 30 years?

MM: The best advice I can give to guys in bands is to just drink and drink and drink! And to rock. If you can drink every night with the guys you’re in a band with, you will become unstoppable. It creates a special bond. Like brothers.

CG: So what have you been listening to lately?

MM: My girlfriend turned me on to Off! recently, Keith Morris’ band.

CG: I found those guys through my roommate and didn’t know who they were and I thought, this is so good but the singer is biting Keith Morris hard. Then I realized it was Keith Morris. I was blown away that they had that whole thing going on.

MM: They are as punk as a punk band gets….You know those early punk bands influenced me so much growing up. With music and skating. These bands just epitomized a lifestyle and a way of thinking. You related to these guys like you knew them, ya know. It was emotional on so many levels. The music and the attitude just spoke to me. And that’s how you connected to them. You hear them play and you might not even know what the hell they’re saying but you just ‘got it.’ And when you finally read the lyrics you realized these guys are going through what you’re going though. That’s how punk spoke to us…

CG: Who else really spoke to you growing up?

MM: Another band I always loved is the Descendants. Those guys just had it. All those old punk bands too…Septic Death, Christ on Parade, DRI, Subhumans, Black Flag and all those SST bands…All those old punk bands are the best. I wish I had the chance to meet them all and thank them… In my heart that shit is the core of what’s driving me. That balls-out attitude and just giving it everything you’ve got.

CG: I interviewed Mike Watt once and it changed my life…

MM: That dude is fucking amazing. I’ve been trying to hook up with Keith Morris for a while…

CG: You’re in Guided by fucking Voices and you can’t get a hold of Keith Morris?

MM: I’m computer illiterate man. I’ll have to have Gwen do that.

CG: Any last words?

MM: I’ll paraphrase Mike Watt on this…That this is all a mutual experience and it’s not just what we give to the fans…It’s what we get back that keeps us moving.


More information can be found at robertpollard.net/. You can try gbv.com but you will be directed to a site that was probably last updated in 1998. It’s actually kind of worth a look…Mitch Mitchell’s Terrifying Experience can be found on Facebook.

by ChrisSick Or, a helpful guide for aspiring Werewolves and how that leads to the strangulation of senatorial aspirations by very expensive coattails. Silver offers two potential hypothesis to explain the sudden decrease in the chance of Harry Reid losing his gavel come January: One is that Romney... more

by ChrisSick

Or, a helpful guide for aspiring Werewolves and how that leads to the strangulation of senatorial aspirations by very expensive coattails.

Let us, for a moment, in a relatively slow week that's already been much dissected and discussed, get a bit...elemental.

Politicians, at bottom, have only one job that comes in two parts. Traditionally they really only had to work at this job in the late summer and early fall, but these days they tend to be year round affairs. To be a politician:

1. Move in a straight line.
2. Move your opponent off their straight line.

That line, of course, being basically a straight shot to whatever office they're running for.

This is politics at its most basic, and come debate night, as you soak in the warm stream of disinformation fed to you by professional talking heads — many of whom should probably be in prison — you'll probably hear the phrase on-message quite a bit. You'll hear, and surely have heard, much talk of candidates building narratives. You'll hear dissection, autopsy, and painful amounts of over-analysis about who “scored” with good lines that most effectively needled in their side's pre-established talking point.

Its all horseshit, of course.

“Narrative,” “on-message”, and “talking points” are really creative and educated (-sounding) ways of saying who moved down their path the straightest and who deviated the most. Because that's all politics — in a two-party race/system, anyway, which is all I'm intimately familiar with as a citizen of this country — really is about. Whether you move your opponent off his path by accusing them of not paying taxes for ten years or of fucking their livestock, it doesn't really make much of a difference at the end of the day.

Everything else is phoney artifice and bullshit jargon thrown at voters, candidates, and media alike to blind them with science and convince them that David Axelrod or Ed Gillespie is really worth somewhere between $175,000 to $1.3 million per year they earn advising their candidates. Their job is to come up with a good story somewhere between six months to a year before the election, and then spend the rest of the cycle as glorified babysitters and occasional mouthpieces. A job — it's worth noting — that Ed Gillespie still manages to both fuck up and get paid a bonus for, somehow.

Those of us in my age group — the one that was politically aware but not yet politically active during Bill Clinton's first and second terms — are familiar with one of the greatest narratives of modern politics, because it's only four words long: The Man From Hope. But no matter how much attention you were paying in junior high, you couldn't fully grasp Clinton's incredible political ability until you heard him get the DNC to applaud George W., moments before turning it into an attack line against congressional Republicans.

Which brings us neatly back to my point, about the line and how one follows it or doesn't. From the jump, Obama and his team have called this a choice election, while Romney and his team have called it a referendum election. And — please, allow me to parse the bullshit for you since I'm pretty sure it's part of my job here — that should tell you all that you need to know.

Neither team feels strongly enough about its message or its candidate (read: product), to trust that voters will vote for them. This is why this is a base election (in more ways than one), because unless you're already in the bag for one of the two candidates, its extremely unlike either is going to offer you a very compelling reason to vote for them. So the best they can hope for is to convince you to vote against their opponent.

To that end, Romney's “straight line” was through convincing voters to — in the memorable words of a geriatric cowboy arguing with a chair while trolling his way to a nation's heart — fire the President for poor performance. And Obama's was to scare the living shit out of you by basically pointing to Republicans not named Romney (cough, Paul Ryan, cough) and reminding you all those white dudes share the same party.

It's really that simple, and every day Romney spent talking about his taxes, defending his 47% comments, or trying to dispense with the notion that his campaign was in disarray — and holy fucking shit that was just this week — he was off his path and losing this election. Now both the head of the RNC and his own VP have taken up the language of “choice election,” which is pretty much his two biggest public supporters hammering the last nails in — what I'm sure is — his very expensive and luxurious coffin.

But seriously, fuck that guy. Never liked him.

In fact, he's so bad at this, that he's knocked every Republican Senator off their path this past week.

Silver offers two potential hypothesis to explain the sudden decrease in the chance of Harry Reid losing his gavel come January: One is that Romney is so terrible he's hurting all of his party’s candidates in tough statewide elections.
The other is that their own extreme conservatism is hurting the entire GOP brand, as evidenced by moderate candidate Linda McMahon of CT (yes, that Linda McMahon, we live in a country where the best experience you can have prior to going into politics is, actually, pro-wrestling. Suck it up, buttercup!) and mostly-moderate Senator Scott Brown of MA are distancing themselves from the national party.

My modest suggestion is that both reasons factor in. Because, really, under the circumstance who can stay on the path, or if you prefer, build their narrative, stay on message, or stick to their talking points? Romney cannot stay on message, because his message changes from day to accommodate his audience while simultaneously accommodating his rapidly degenerating-into-insanity-base.

It isn't that Romney’s a bad politician, he's exactly the best the Republicans had to offer this election cycle. It's just — in part — that Barack Obama is actually a very good politician. If there's any lesson liberals and Democrats needed to take away from the Bush years, it was the danger of underestimating your opposition. Jokes about Karl Rove's weight may play well with the peanut gallery, but really, underestimating that man as a political strategist is just shy of insanity.

And when you compile the long list of things that the Conservative Right is convinced that Obama is — a list that would have to include how he's a stunning incompetent, bumbling idiot, and empty suit, who ALSO somehow managed to trick 53% of the country to vote for him, while concealing his secret Muslim origins and Marxist ideology — it isn't hard to see how underestimating their opposition lead the GOP to the hole they're in now.




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Our story begins with a poker game gone bad... a lifeless body on the floor, hand still clutching its cards... whacked on the head with a bass guitar. In the background, Mike Patton's haunting film score crescendos over the radio waves as the other two poker players argue over what to do with the... more

Our story begins with a poker game gone bad... a lifeless body on the floor, hand still clutching its cards... whacked on the head with a bass guitar. In the background, Mike Patton's haunting film score crescendos over the radio waves as the other two poker players argue over what to do with the body. Incinerator? Garbage disposal? They haven't a clue.

Without a doubt, Derrick Scocchera's short film, A Perfect Place, is a dark comedy, wonderfully directed and acted. But it is Patton's striking film score that ups the ante on this noir story; it transforms every scene, drives the action, and pushes the audience into a surreal world that they have visited only in late night, restless dreams.

While some musicians skulk and idle in the corners of your iPod, Mike Patton charges forward like a maestro possessed, and continuously delivers transgressive albums that one-up the status quo. In recent years, we've watched the former Faith No More and Mr. Bungle frontman push new ground with bands Fantomas, Tomahawk and Peeping Tom (amongst others) and now with A Perfect Place, we get to enjoy his debut as a film composer.

Released April 1st on Patton's Ipecac Recordings -- a geeky enclave of the alternative underworld, marked by a distaste for run of the mill, rock-n-roll schmuckery -- both the film and score to A Perfect Place are packaged as a double-disc and are a must-have for cult connoisseurs.

SuicideGirls had to get the details so we dusted off the ol' video camera and met up with Patton over sake and fresh eel in San Francisco's Japantown to chat about his foray into film scoring...

Check out video footage from our interview here.


Erin Broadley: How are you?

Mike Patton: I’m good! How are you?

EB: Fantastic.

MP: Hungry?

EB: Hungry indeed. You live around here… how do you like Japantown? Come here often to buy Samurai swords?

MP: Or 39-cent Hello Kitty stickers.

EB: [Laughs] Oh, my favorite. So let’s talk about A Perfect Place, which you scored. First film score you’ve ever done, correct?

MP: True.

EB: How was this experience compared to some of your other projects or bands?

MP: It’s 100 percent different. If it’s one of my own projects or even a band, it’s done when it’s done. You have the ultimate veto power. When you’re working for someone else, you’re a hired hand in a sense and he tells you when it’s done.

EB: Right, the director gets final cut.

MP: Yeah, and rightfully so.

EB: How did you meet the director, Derrick Scocchera?

MP: I was a big laserdisc guy and he had a store in my neighborhood and I used to go shop there a lot. So being a regular customer, I got to know the people who worked there and I got to meet him. It was really a great store. It was so great, [laughs] of course it went out of business. I spent a lot of money in there. We got to be friends and from that point on, he was working for Zoetrope for Coppola for a while and we’d call each other from time to time to talk about film and talk about music. I’d invite him to my shows and he’d send me stuff that he was doing. He started an independent company [Fantoma Films] where he was putting out great DVD box sets from really historic directors… Mario Bava, Fassbinder… he put out lots of great stuff that, even if I didn’t know him, I’d just go to the store and buy it. He put together great packages and I was a fan of what he was doing and he said, “You know what? I also write scripts,” and sent me a few scripts and it’s hard for me to tell what a movie is going to be like from reading it on paper, but there was a kinship there and when he said, “I’m going to make a short film and I want you to score it,” who was I to argue?

EB: With the 2004 film you starred in, Firecracker, some wondered why you didn’t also score the film because a lot of the music you make has a very cinematic element to it.

MP: Yeah. For a musician, using film is part of your vocabulary. At least for an untrained musician, I think it’s important. It certainly works for me. With Firecracker, I did not want to act in the movie; I wanted to do the score. And the director -- again, sort of an acquaintance who turned into a friend -- he was adamant and said, “No, no. I’m not letting you do the music; I want you to [act]. I want you to stretch out. I want you to try something new.” And I said, “Well, okay, I’ve looked like a fool before, why not again?”

EB: For A Perfect Place, was there any point where you were down on the set, checking it out?

MP: No. I would have loved to but I happened to be out of town when they were filming it and, you know, a film like that is pretty renegade. I think they barely got the permits that they needed to do it and a lot of it was done at night. It’s a short film, black and white, beautifully shot, almost like a play in that there’s just very few characters and very few sets, but the strength is in the writing.

EB: And the characters. One of my favorite characters is the little old lady who has a collection of bow ties in her house, which is just one of those simple quiet elements that can really define a character.

MP: Yeah. The best part of it is, it starts out with guys playing a card game and they basically, quote unquote, kill their friend who was cheating, [laughs] or so they thought. And somehow, even though we maybe wouldn’t be driven to those lengths, you can relate. If you were to kill someone, all these questions would come up. It’s not as easy as Scorsese would have you believe: you kill somebody, you drop some lye on them and you bring them out to the suburbs. It’s a lot harder sometimes so I think that’s one of the premises of the film.

EB: One thing about the score, it taps into a lot of the same themes that are in the film. Were you crafting these compositions scene by scene or was it more, “Here’s a word, here’s an idea, go with it.”

MP: A lot of the film was basically done, or close to being done, before I started. Being friends with the director, he showed me a couple of scenes. Also, he would just describe a scene to me and say, “I need a theme for when the old lady puts on a seventy-eight and I want it to sound like Enrico Caruso.” One of the best directions he gave me was from the outset he said, “I want one major theme, and I want you to come up with a zillion variations including the source music, including a seventy-eight record, or when the guys are in a car, flipping the radio dial, I want you to write a piece like that.” In a sense, I was doing the score and the source music, in one. It was fun.

EB: The music really moves the scenes along. That’s one thing I noticed; it’s tied into the scenes enough that it helps the narrative progress.

MP: One can only hope!

EB: How did you strike the balance between somewhat heavier sounds and dark subject matter and still retain a sense of humor within this score?

MP: Didn’t think about it. To me every project or every piece of music has a certain amount of requirements. Maybe I’ll set out to create some sort of heavy and dark atmosphere and in the end it becomes comedy. To me, it’s about maintaining a balance and it’s really hard to quantify that. It’s hard to describe what that balance is but I know it when I hear it. The most important part is when it’s done, let it go.

EB: Right. You’ve said before that one of the hardest things to do is to pull back and press stop.

MP: Yeah, yeah.

EB: Does it get any easier over the years?

MP: Eh, depending on the project. To me, certain projects are easier than others. Fantomas… I know exactly when that music is written and done and there’s no more tweaking to do. Something like this film score is a little more difficult; I was on unfamiliar ground. Sometimes when you’re dealing with a collab or maybe a guest vocal for somebody it’s also hard to know because ultimately, you’re deferring to someone else. Usually it works out. But I’ve done a few collaborations or guest spots where it just didn’t work out, either the artist wasn’t happy with it or didn’t feel that it suited the track. You do your best and ultimately if you’re a guest you’ve got to know when to go, “Okay! You’re the boss.”

EB: It’s like being a guest in someone’s house. You’ve got to know when to step down.

MP: Oh yes, I’ll leave now. I pissed on your couch but I’m leaving.[Laughs] I tracked in mud on your expensive carpet…

EB: [Laughs] I’ll pay for the cleaning bill.

MP: Yeah, exactly.

EB: Back to A Perfect Place, the score you did is about twice as long as the actual film so how did you decide which music was included? Or why the choice to include extra tracks in the CD available?

MP: Ultimately, it is the director’s decision. There were certain scenes, certain cues where I did two or three different versions. Like, the thing we were calling the “Alley Theme,” where they’re dragging the body out to the alley, he wanted something with a beat and percussive so I gave him two different choices. He chose one and used it and then, you know, had the other sitting around so it’s like, I guess you just put them on the soundtrack.

EB: Yeah, why waste something good?

MP: Yeah. Also, I didn’t want to put out a CD that was 20 minutes long and a film that was 20 minutes long. I wanted to extend the CD a little bit and make it a little more desirable.

EB: Right, and to have them be able to exists independently on their own…

MP: Well, yeah! Actually, the director made some great suggestions… it was his idea to do a vocal version of the main theme, almost as a single, or whatever. It never got used in the film and was a complete afterthought, but that was his idea. That was [the] “Twist” theme that I did with vocals and it’s probably one of the standout tracks on the album.

EB: It’s a fun track, yeah.

MP: He gave me some direction that was a little hard to follow, just because he was aiming really high. Like, “I want a main theme that sounds like Elmer Bernstein.” And you just don’t press a button and…

EB: …become Elmer Bernstein!

MP: Yeah. That’s like saying, “I’ve got an idea for a street fight and I want you to be Mike Tyson.”

EB: Just do it, channel it.

MP: Yeah, just grow and kick some ass.

EB: And get a tattoo on your face [laughs].

MP: Yeah [laughs]. Bite somebody’s ear off. It was very challenging in that respect but I’m glad he was aiming high and forced me to aim a little high.

EB: Last year you got a lot attention for the sound effects you did for the creatures in I Am Legend. Any afterthought on that whole project?

MP: It was great.

EB: You and Will Smith best buds now?

MP: Oh yeah. He was in the studio, patting me on the back.

EB: You guys are gonna put out a rap album, like Fresh Prince.

MP: There you go. Fresh Mike.

[Both Laugh]

MP: No, uh, [doing the sound effects] was clinical and dry and fun and easy.

EB: Was it flattering in the least that they wanted a more human element to the scariness of the film?

MP: Yeah, it was great. It was a completely unique opportunity and it probably wouldn’t have come my way unless someone involved in the film didn’t put their ass out there and suggest me. So I’m really thankful and would love to do more stuff like that.

EB: You’ve said before that to keep things interesting, you have to continually reinvent or find new ways to say what it is you want to say with music. How do you find ways to make that happen without feeling redundant?

MP: That’s a difficult question and even harder to realize. You just keep trying. My way of doing it is just to keep doing things. Stay busy. My way of learning and getting better and growing is by doing.

EB: You started Ipecac in 1999 with Greg Werckman. Coming up on your 10-year anniversary, obviously you have expanded your roster and are still going strong. How has it changed in recent years compared to when you first started?

MP: It’s been great. I would say the main struggle has been [that] we’ve kept the same amount of employees and the same business model, if you will, meaning Ipecac is like three or four people. Always has been. Yet, we’re getting more and more submissions and personally I’m finding there’s more and more great music that needs to be put out! But we don’t have the manpower. I’m a little nervous about expanding. What we’ve done so far has worked. If we were to listen to our distributors and whatnot, we’d hire 15 more people and run it like everyone else runs a label.

EB: Then again, you don’t want to be like everyone else runs a label because we’ve seen what happens there.

MP: Yeah. If you really think about it, the reason we’ve been successful is because of the way it’s gone. Ultimately the way we do it, if you’re looking for half a million dollars and a bunch of hype, we’re not the right label for you. If you want to record cheaply, which is not to say that it can’t be a great sounding record or an amazing record, but do it smart, and then you will ultimately be rewarded because you will make royalties and not dig yourself some sort of loan shark hole where you’re constantly in the [dark]. Our label is not for everybody, but people who understand that aesthetic will be really happy with us and we’ll be happy with them.

EB: Another thing you have coming out in 2008 is [the video game] Bionic Commando. You do the voice of one of the lead characters. Tell me a little bit about how you got involved in that? You’ve always been a bit of a video game enthusiast.

MP: Yeah, that sort of dropped out of the sky and I think it sort of came about because I did a couple of other video game voiceovers and once your name is in the hat…

EB: …You’re on their contact list.

MP: Totally. So I got the call and I was familiar with the old ’80s Nintendo game .

EB: What character do you play?

MP: The main guy, Nathan. Basically, what I did was… I will tell you that my best point of reference was I was trying to channel Henry Rollins [laughs]. It was a real drill sergeant, tough guy.

EB: Did you method act it? Getting into character, weight lifting every morning?

MP: I didn’t go quite that far but you have to have some point of reference and Henry was mine. And Henry… no offense [laughs]. Hey, eat your eel!! I’ve already eaten my eel.

EB: Okay, I’m going to eat my eel and you tell me what else we can expect from Ipecac in 2008.

MP: New Melvins, new Dalek, Farmer’s Market, Desert Sessions, Mondo Cane, Rhazel… Finish your eel. Be a good girl.

EB: I’m finishing my eel… dad. [Laughs]

MP: [Smiles] I’ll take that as a compliment.

EB: Mike Patton’s my daddy, telling me to finish my eel.

MP: Finish your eel.

EB: [Laughs] How do you balance being a businessman and an artist without completely losing your mind?

MP: I don’t think about it, just kind of do what I do. The label is a part of every day; it’s just a matter of how much of that day. Sometimes it’s more; sometimes it’s less. To be honest, it’s rewarding and most of the things that I do, my contribution to the label is things that I’d be doing anyway. Listening to music, listening to new artists… I would do that anyway, even if I didn’t have a label. So to have a purpose in doing that is even better.

EB: And to put a roof over their heads and not have them be wandering, homeless stray pieces of music.

MP: Yeah, like I said before, the real trouble is there’s too much great music and we can’t do it all. And that’s in the last year or two become a reality. It’s a bitch. If I heard something great tomorrow, I’d have to tell an artist, “This is great, I’d love to put it out, but I can’t do it until late ’09.”

EB: There’s no promises of grandeur right away like there are with other majors.

MP: [Laughs] There’s no promises of grandeur, period. But just on a timeline vibe, no artist wants to hear that. I can totally relate but we’re in that position right now and that’s just the way it is.

EB: So what’s your next release we should be looking out for?

MP: Mondo Cane. It’s a new project of mine. It’s an orchestral project of ’50s and ’60s Italian pop tunes that I arranged.

EB: Fabulous.

MP: It’s a crooning record but with an orchestra. Not many horns. And, I wouldn’t say very jazzy, but much more orchestral ballad stuff. Lots of singing. But it’s not in English. Summertime we hope.

EB: Well, any parting words of wisdom?

MP: Eat your fuckin’ eel!

EB: I’ve eaten pretty much all the fuckin’ eel.

MP: Pretty much?

EB: I just didn’t eat the skin!

MP: The skin’s the best part!


Video Exclusive:


For more information on Mike Patton and to buy A Perfect Place, go to ipecac.com.

by M. J. Johnson I went into the park because I wished to read my book. What could be better than spending a warm afternoon with my back to a tree, a good book in hand, a cup of coffee next to me, cool grass and dirt under my butt? Well, apparently, I’m the only one who was thinking that way. I... more

by M. J. Johnson

I went into the park because I wished to read my book. What could be better than spending a warm afternoon with my back to a tree, a good book in hand, a cup of coffee next to me, cool grass and dirt under my butt? Well, apparently, I’m the only one who was thinking that way.

I recently moved to Iowa City; it’s a funky little college town, sort of a mini-Portland. On one side of town is this HUGE city park (cleverly called “City Park”), which is roughly the same size as the village where I grew up. There are pavilions and playgrounds, ball-diamonds and soccer pitches, and even a little train kids can ride. And the place was PACKED! Every pavilion had a family reunion, and the playgrounds were humming with giggles and screams. The walking trails were full of serious runners and leisurely walkers. There were even people using canoes to annoy the ducks.

But only I was on the grass. There weren’t any signs telling people to stay off the grass; in fact, there were benches and grills scattered all around under the trees. There just weren’t any people off the paths.

Hundreds of people, gathered in this tamed forest, and only I walked on the grass. Only I sat under a tree. Only I dared to leave the concrete or wood-chips.

Carl Jung talks about the Collective Unconscious, a sort of racial memory (where the “race” in question is “human”), which forms our psyche and explains why people in different cultures have similar stories and fears. Based on fairy tales and stories, forests are a place of human fear. Hansel and Gretel? Little Red Riding Hood? Any knightly quest, all have scary things hidden in the wild places. Our ancestors learned to fear the woods because all those trees give predators a good place to hide.

Has this translated into a fear of leaving the concrete path? Are we all so afraid of the wild that we don’t want to even walk on the grass? When I was teaching, I had to laugh at students who went far, far out of their way to get from class to class, simply because that’s where the sidewalk went.

Do we quaver at the feel of uneven ground under our feet? Does the thought of getting our shoes dirty terrify us? Are grass-stains scary? Do we think a mountain lion is lurking in the trees over our heads? Do we still fear the witch in the woods?

Or is it something else? This park did not have “keep off the grass” signs, but many do. People spend millions of dollars every year to create lawns to see but not walk upon. Shoe companies create specific shoes for running on roads, dirt paths, or sidewalks, but the human foot is designed to run on grass, to step where no one else has stepped.

When Thoreau went into the woods, he wanted to wake up knowing that he was surrounded by nothing but nature. He reveled in squirrels who invaded his home, and spent hours just studying a war between black and red ants (scholars like to debate whether he really saw the ant war or not). He spent chapters describing the quiet.

When was the last time things around you were really quiet? I open my windows at night and listen to people in the parking lot, cars on the road, fire engines, shouts, motorcycles, and some annoying brat with a whistle. We buy white-noise machines to play static so we can sleep. We have televisions and radios and ipods playing at all times, and claim its because we “live for music.”

Humans have never been all that comfortable in the wild; we’re fragile when compared to lions and tigers and bears (oh my!), so we build caves (houses) and cut down the trees, then complain that all the wild places are disappearing.

We’re supposed to be a part of nature, not separated from it. So, there is no reason to walk on the sidewalk.

Except for the bears.


M. J. Johnson is the professional name of Coyotemike. He has written a moderately bad e-book called The Bastards Club and is working on getting more serious work published.

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by SG's Team Agony feat. Aadie Let us answer life's questions - because great advice is even better when it comes from SuicideGirls. (image) [Aadie in Time Out] Q. I’ve been married for two years and my wife told me she wants to separate. It’s been three months and everything I do or see... more

by SG's Team Agony feat. Aadie

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


[Aadie in Time Out]

Q. I’ve been married for two years and my wife told me she wants to separate. It’s been three months and everything I do or see reminds me of her. I want to move away but I’m on probation and can’t. I’ve tried dating other women but every time I go on a date all I can focus on is how it’s not the same as with my wife. She’s already moved on and I see no hope of us getting back together. What should I do?

A: You need to focus on you. You have devoted two years to 'us' and she left. For that I have empathy for you, but now it’s seriously all about you.

Going on the odd date here and there is healthy but don't over do it. I think you need to find yourself again in the aftermath of a relationship that very much defined you. It’s sad when people separate but sometimes that’s just the way it is.

Now it’s time to reintroduce yourself to yourself, get new hobbies, go to new bars, join a new gym, get a new hair style even. Find new friends, and also reconnect with old ones who perhaps fell by the wayside as you put more energy into the relationship.

For the moment, instead of looking to replace one relationship with another, build up your social circle and social life, so you have plenty of support and distractions. This will also help you when you are ready to find love again, to perhaps find it in a more organic and less overwhelming way through friends and friends of friends.

It’s going to be difficult, but you’re worth more then you know. Take a deep breath and hold your head up high. Your new life is beginning. You can only move forwards from here.

Aadie
xoxo


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

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