Matt Maxwell's Blog: Highway 62 on Goodreads, page 17

FULL BLEED: BLACK PHASE

Trying to remember if I used this title before or not. Probably, back when I was with another provider and then got in a fight with them about who actually owned the domain and kiss a little of that good free content goodbye, you know? Long enough back that nobody's going to complain that I recycled it, and if I did, fuck 'em. It fits.I guess maybe the problem is that I'm together enough to understand how fucked-up things are right now. In the past, I had enough distractions and everyday brushfires that it wasn't the issue that it is today. Never figured I'd get here, you know? 'Cause I believed that bullshit about persistence and hanging in there and everything will fall in line.Look, it's well-meaning bullshit. It's the kind that you embed in a movie and have a character say a couple times to make sure that those who were asleep the first time would get that hidden meaning, the hero's journey would be complete, the viewer gets that dopamine hit of catharsis and WHAM. Enlightenment. Moral delivered. Keep chasing your dreams. Yeah, I love movies. I hate this sort of tidy thing. Yes, we like the tidy thing because life simply isn't. But sometimes enough well-meaning BS is too much.Yeah, I get like this around this time of year. Birthday coming up and that's not a milestone you can ignore super easily. Turning of the seasons, sure. We've all got air conditioning. But plop that cake down in front of me and all those candles and gosh is it hot in here or do I just have my collar on too tight? Shorter of breath and all that. You've heard the song.So, yeah, things are no longer in crisis mode and then you gotta deal with all that shit that you don't want to 'cause the house is on fire and you'll just do that later. And when I say "you" here, I mean "me" but it's hard to type that, so let's just keep some distance in here so I don't hyperventilate or scream into a pillow for an hour instead of staying focused.Black phase. And you've run out of excuses to see that you're soaking in it. Oh, don't worry, the black phase isn't permanent. It's the foundation, dig? Black phase to white phase to red phase. It's a process. Because in alchemy, the process is meant to transform the alchemist, not the base metal. At least that's the way I learned it.I mean, the black phase ends, right? That's what I hear, anyways.I submitted my first book to a major publishing house in 1991. It's possible it was all of 1992. Huuuuuuge difference now, right? It got kicked back, but did I have any fantasy to show them? Yeah, nah. I didn't. I wouldn't have a fantasy novel together until 1995 I think. And even then, it wasn't what they wanted. But hey, I wrote two novels. That should separate me from the pack, quite the accomplishment, don't let me throw my shoulder out with the back-pats. That hurts.But hey, that's only twenty-five years ago. Maybe I just wasn't good enough. I hadn't persisted enough. That dream is there to chase. Catch it and steal its skin then demand your wish before you return it. Yeah, that's a dangerous game. What if it doesn't want that skin back? Then you've really done it. I hope you know the myth I'm talking about. Haven't got time to recount it here.So yeah, persistence isn't enough. Not by itself. As I was reminded by a guy who I'm still shocked follows and interacts with me pointed out, it's about you yourself giving a fuck about the work. And that's a hard thing to remember, because it's not a weight you can shift to anyone else. Sisyphus doesn't get to ask for help, right? Worrying about whether your wife or family will pat you on the back? That's a trap. Thinking that being published will shift that weight and things will be easier? Wow, is that ever a trap. Contrary to what it seems like, I've been published for close to the last ten years now. Even made the kinds of money that you're supposed to feel good about (for short pieces that is) and have worked on projects that fell just short of the NYT bestseller list. Yeah, my name's not on 'em, but they wouldn't be there without me doing some of that lifting.Then I got into a deal where someone not me was publishing a book with my name on it. I figured that would take that feeling away. Which, as any Buddhist will tell you is a bad move, 'cause you're investing an external event with power that it simply doesn't have. I've been looking in the wrong place, because, well, it's easier than doing the hard work, right? What can I say? I'm weak. Only human. And like Mr. Quimper says, it's hard to walk in this world. (Really, it's not reversed. It's printed like that.) Life gets in the fucking way. That's what life likes to do. My issues have been easier than some folks have to deal with and a lot heavier than what a lot of other folks deal with. My own load. My family's. Sometimes the weeds get higher than the garden. Sometimes they gotta get hacked down. Overgrown. Black phase. That's the raw material. The base of the process.Fair to say that the only one who can open that door is you. Is me. And yeah, I've talked about the power to just come out and forgive yourself. Maybe that's the one time that forgiveness shouldn't be tied to good works? At least to shift the pack initially, then the work really begins. Is this making sense?Do I feel better? I don't know yet. Do I know what's happening yet? Not until I find out if the publisher I've worked with in the past will be picking up the work. I mean, then I'll know whether I'm publishing it or they are. All I can do otherwise is move into it, pick up the scythe and clear a patch today. Tie that off in a sheaf and do it again tomorrow. Sun's getting lower every day. That cake is coming. It's always coming.

FULL BLEED: GOT THEM GOTHIC DARKWAVE BLUES

I know. I'm supposed to do this regularly. Saw a thing on the Social Media Hustle Lifestyle and it said that you gotta keep up the posting frequency you started with. So if you're doing say five posts a day on Instagram, well you by god better keep posting that much every day or you're gonna slip in the metrics. You don't want your metrics to slip, well do ya!? Gotta be like a shark. Gotta keep swimming. Never stop.Gotta keep that brand alive.Which is why I'm back on Instagram. Yeah, I know. I may as well be on Facebook, too. Well I'm not. But you can check things out at hwy_62 on Instagram. Go ahead, hit me up. Let's see some numbers jump from this call to action. That's what I'm supposed to be doing, yeah?As you can tell, I'm deep into the Hustle of selling myself out here on the internet. I, a genuine person exactly like yourself, yet aspirational and carefully-curated. Not at all gawky or awkward in the flesh. Always there with a firm grip and a bright smile, impeccable. Not sweaty or uncomfortable. Listen to what I have to say and you can be like me. Not only author as product, but author as life guide. If only you love me without thought or reservation.Nah, I don't believe this, but the people out there selling you on the Hustle do. You know the ones. They're saying that you gotta spend more time selling the art than making the art. And they can tell you just how to do it right. Beat those metrics. Get those keywords jumping. SEO your way into your readers' hearts. The work itself doesn't matter. Only the selling does.There's truth to that, but there's a lotta bullshit there. And hey, even if you become hugely popular, you gotta stop being a goddamn human being, dig? Look at the thing going on with the famous, highly-image-based-singer and the music journalist who dared to write a piece examining the work fairly, not with an agenda, and not even slamming the work. The brand demands fealty, dig? And if you're impure, well, you can be cast out pretty easily. There's hungry fans who'd be more than happy to do the work for you. This goes for say, thin-skinned NEW YORK TIMES columnists, too. Though at least they'll personally go over your heads and try to flex on your boss to get you fired. The singer, well, she's just casting you out of the church, out of the flock. Love wholly or not at all.Keep those positive metrics flowing. Rack up the likes and engagement. The work will take care of itself.The funny thing is that it's the reader that makes the art. It's the listener that makes the art. Sure, the creator/creatrix/creating individual who doesn't want to be tied to gender fabricates the work. But without a reader or observer or listener, there isn't any work. Sure, objectively there's a piece that can be pointed at. The truth of it is that there's gonna be a different work for every different reader who takes the work in. It's co-created, a lovely truth that was swung well by Alan Moore and JH Williams III at the end of PROMETHEA. Honestly, hold fast to that, the opinion of the work being a reflection of the reader/listener/observer. Because you cannot prevent it. And trying to prevent it only makes you look like a goddamn asshole.Yeah, I'm comparing my experience with QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS (available now from finer booksellers or Broken Eye Books or Amazon) and that of Queen Moody Bummer or NYT op-ed guy pitching a hissy fit online. I'm envious. I'd love to have a fractional percent of any of their fanbase. But maybe just stop at the fractional percent, you know? But I got reviews on QONT that are baffling. Just like I got reviews on STRANGEWAYS, my long-ago graphic novel series, that were equally so. Too long. Too short. Feels like it's hurried. Obscure. Just right. All over the goddamn place. But it's not a thing you can engage on. Even at the indie level. Sure, maybe reach out to a critic who absolutely got it and say "Hey, thanks for absolutely getting what I was going for in the book/movie/record" but leave it at that. Going after a bad review is just poking the bear. There's a lot more of the bear than there is of you. And if you're getting your fans to go after critics, or going after them at the workplace, well, we're back to asshole behavior.Folks, I know I'm an asshole, but I try to manage it. Though often my coming across as an asshole is a manifestation of awkwardness, fatigue, desperation or just being done for the day. I am filled with multitudes.Would I like all my reviews to be positive, but not so positive as to arouse suspicion? You bet. I'd love it if people simply left reviews so I could get my metrics running over at Amazon. Yeah, I think about that, way more than is healthy.But going after a bad review? You've got too much time on your hands or you need to reassess your priorities.Speaking of priorities and selling things, I've gotten to a point in my work where if I think for a second about selling the work, I lock up. Yeah, this means I'm a dilletante and unprofessional and I just don't know the market. Sure. Whatever lets you sleep at night. Truth of it is, it's frustrating and draining and borderline humiliating to consider the audience in this particular way, the way that the Howling Pit has got us going. I'm working on a new thing, tentatively titled THE DROWNING CITY. It's a follow-up to QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS, though I think there's a book that belongs in-between the two. Not to mention CINDY SAYS, which is a sideways prequel (just set before in time, not a real prequel, though it does feature Alondra and Ariela as the Trouble Girls early into their career with No Tomorrows.) And then there's THAT BLACK RADIANCE, which will finally address some of the storylines left deliberately untouched at the end of QONT.I just have to decide on presentation. Series of novellas or bigger chunks of story as novels. I figure that I can do the novellas as digital originals and then sell a couple of them bundled in print books that would actually have a spine presence on a shelf (yes, that matters -- why do you think fantasy books run so goddamn long). But those different forms have very different needs, narrative-wise. One's much more a serial and the other is the massive chunk. Still chewing on that. So, yeah, that's what I've been wrestling with lately. Let's talk about some good stuff instead.Read the new novel by Richard Kadrey, titled THE GRAND DARK. It's a good book, lots of fun. Interesting setting, well-realized. Would make for a pretty amazing miniseries, honestly. Kinda CABARET in a much more technologically bent world, though fighting the same forces that ground the Weimar Republic to dust.Moviewise, I'm still chewing through what Amazon has to offer. The latest was CANDYMAN: FAREWELL TO THE FLESH, a 1995 horror film, adapting Clive Barker to the screen. I was afraid that as it was a sequel and the first was so very good, that this would be a letdown. Pleasantly surprised to see that not so. Moving the setting to New Orleans was a great move, and it couldn't have been done anywhere else. Recommended.Uh, comics. I'm re-reading THE INVISIBLES as decompression at the end of the day.Musically? Still on the coldwave/darkwave tip. Like so: Hante.I did take a recent trip to LA and Long Beach for the Long Beach Comic Con and the C3 Expo. Maybe I'll write something up tomorrow, but no promises.

FULL BLEED: SHE BROKE MY HEART BUT I LOVE HER JUST THE SAME

Yeah, long time away. I've basically spent the summer off of social media of all types. I've embraced antisocial media and I have to say, it's been pretty great. I mean, I love you all. I really do. But I had too many voices in my head. So many that I couldn't hear my own at times. When and if I come back, things will have to change, but for the life of me I can't quite see what that looks like. Anyways, this is a first step towards that. Longer pieces. Longer than I used to write. More sprawling. Less bite-sized. You're in for it or you're not. I can't spend any more energy worrying about whichever side of that you fall on, dig? That's really where the writer ought to be anyways, just not really giving a fuck about who's reading it until it's read/viewed/heard/whatever. I guess that's solipsism. Well, embrace solipsism. Which probably makes the perfect time to try and get my arms around ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD.Weird, that you'd expect, given my public predilections towards recent history and the city of Los Angeles and all, that this would have been one of my favorite films of the year. I mean, bar none, on its surface, I should be into this. Los Angeles in 1969? That should be catnip to me. And yet.Don't get me wrong. It's a film I enjoyed. I'm not sure it's a good film, though. Well, rewind. It's good as filmed entertainment, as visuals, as simulacrum of history (with some roadbumps but more on those down the line), as a thing to watch in a theatre with other humans, it was good. But that doesn't make it a good film. Maybe a good experience. Now, some of this is on me. I don't think I've wholeheartedly enjoyed a Quentin Tarantino film since JACKIE BROWN. That's a while now. And I'm a weird case. Always have been.All this said, ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD is certainly a provocative film. It's got me thinking even a week after the original viewing. Part of that is the film itself, part of it is me picking this week to crack open my recently-acquired copy of HELTER SKELTER by Vinent Bugliosi (and Curt Gentry of THE LAST DAYS OF THE LATE GREAT STATE OF CALIFORNIA fame). I found a good hardback copy on a used book trawl about a month ago and the film was a good excuse to dig into a book I hadn't read since the eighth grade (in 1980 or 1981 and yes I'm old and was precocious.)Needless to say, spoilers for ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD follow. (Oh, and minor spoilers for YESTERDAY as well. You heard me.) Bail out if you haven't watched yet or have any interest in watching. Because the central question of the film, the only one worth considering, no matter what the characters say or do, will be revealed and ruined if you stick aroud.Still with me? Good.Okay, let's start by acknowledging that Tarantino is in a position that I'm envious of. He gets to make the films he wants how he wants and is able to attract all manner of talented actors and crew to them. He gets to place music, set the tone, etc. I'd love to be in that position at some point, not in directing, but in writing certainly. That's the rub, right? In the age of the Howling Pit, you can write whatever you want to, but you may end up being the sole audience for it. Ha ha, only serious.Tarantino exploded from RESERVOIR DOGS to getting Oscar nods on his second (or was it third?) film, PULP FICTION. Yeah, he got just two for that one. Two. Oscars. And yet he was grouchy that he knew he wasn't going to get Best Picture. I saw that as at happened and it took some swagger to even bring it up while on camera. But hey, that's part of the package, right? Author as product.Which may be one of the reasons he's where he is and why I'm where I am (selling dozens of copies but goddammit, it was the book I wanted to write.) Swagger sells. And me, I can't do swagger even if you point a .38 to my head and threaten to blow my brains all across the backseat of that Impala. It ain't in me. Whereas Tarantino is living, breathing swagger. It comes across in his writing at the best of times. It's convincing. You buy it. You're into it. At the best of times.Gonna be honest. I was looking for that in ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD. There were flashes of it, some pretty pure verve. But it wasn't hitting like a pocket nuke. What would again? Is it even fair to ask for that sort of force to be unleashed? Maybe not, but the heart wants what the heart wants. You're given expectations. It can't be helped.And while HOLLYWOOD wants to present an atom bomb to the culture, annihilation of history and immediate rewriting, absolution of accrued cultural sins, the innocent spared a heinous death and uneasy resurrection as martyr/victim where humanity is stripped away and they become a mere concept. It wanted that so bad. And I kinda wanted it too. Who wouldn't want to see a national nightmare short-circuited and prevented? I mean, Manson was found responsible for eight, nine deaths? (Legally -- speculation, founded and not, places the victim count of The Family at somewhere in the mid-thirties.) And it is Manson and the Family we're talking about here. The previews danced around that, teased it out, threatened murder and mayhem, as inevitable as Pere Gravity. The feckless and shiftless hippie murders, where American innoncence was gutted in its sleep and everything went wrong. Track it all back to nineteen sixty-nine, okay?We're gonna short-circuit history. Write us a better world.God damn I wanted to believe it. Just like imagining Adolf Hitler trapped in that movie theatre at the end of INGLORIOUS BASTERDS was a fitting end, seduced by film and burnt to a crisp. Purge the bad blood. Prevent the bad thing from even happening. HOLLYWOOD a fairy tale, got it? Sure, it's something else for about 95% of the runtime. But that last few minutes? Pure fairy tale. Not a damn thing wrong with that. Just like when I say that ROCKET MAN is a legit musical. This isn't a criticism, but an observation. HOLLYWOOD wants to prevent the bad thing from happening, maybe make a better world out of it. That is an admirable aim. Instead of blundering into a house filled with tired pregnant and drug-dulled socialites and actresses, the Manson Family storms into a house with a trained pitbull and Stuntman Cliff who imagines himself able to take Bruce Lee in a fair fight. (Yes, this is a ding on things -- that entire sequence was bad and rang hollow as one of QT's onscreen appearances in his own films minus say DOGS.)The final turn in the film is a bloody reckoning, a purgation, a fervid desire that This happened instead of The Bad Thing. You know, the bad thing, which was one of the harbingers of the end of the Age of Aquarius right alongside Altamont and the assassinations of 1968. I mean, pick your signifiers, right? It's nineteen sixty-nine, baby.But see, I knew what I've known since eighth grade. Manson was a puppeteer and wasn't going to be scared off by one night of a setback. He'd still go after Leno LaBianca and wife or some other luckless souls who happened to be neighbors to addresses that he remembered out there in the Hollywood Hills. Or he'd have gone after Dennis Wilson or some other pigs. That's the What Was. Not to mention the murders before the most infamous ones. Those would still be in the bank.And in my heart, I wanted to have the plot of HOLLYWOOD to be the thing that happened. Stuntman Cliff annihilates the Family and his buddy Jake Dalton pulls out Checkov's Flamethrower and burns the last would-be assassin to a crisp in his own swimming pool and then sets down to finish his pitcher of margaritas right out of the god-damned blender top. Imagine that. Imagine that America. Who knows what else would have been prevented? Everything. Everything could have been turned back. I almost want to deal with this from the frame of alternate-reality fiction, and probably unfairly, already have. But QT isn't a speculative fiction writer (more accurately he writes comedies of manners in the middle-underworld and suffused in popcult, with guns and stuff.) Just like YESTERDAY falls real short as alternate-reality fiction (a world without cigarettes? What?) History has pivotal moments, certainly. But those pivotal moments and events and personages are vast collections of many, many smaller moments and feelings and disruptions and plans reached for. Short-circuiting The One Thing might not be enough. But, like I said, that's in meticulously-researched historical fiction. (This is not to say that HOLLYWOOD wasn't; I have no problem seeing that QT did the homework.)Which leads us to historical simulacrum. ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD traffics in that, hardcore. And it nailed that vibe, the sort of feeling when the Santa Anas kick up and native southlanders know that there's fire on those winds, but they don't want to think about it too much else the coax that conflagration into reality. Again, that's the crux of the film, that we know there's murder coming and that's the only way it can be. All the talk about Dalton's career and doubts and Cliff's gliding through life, all that is secondary. (Dalton, in particular is well-realized by Leonardo DiCaprio, no doubt, having to act as an only okay actor flubbing his lines and using that doubt to sharpen his skills. It's all on the screen. It's all on his face.)Margot Robie perfectly incarnates the born-of-carnage and fashioned-in-retrospect myth of Sharon Tate. While largely superfluous to the plot of the film as it unwinds, the moments of Robie/Tate in the Bruin theatre watching the audience watch her performance in (one of the many) film-in-films of HOLLYWOOD was a pretty pure joy. She's radiant and kind and perhaps the nicest character ever to flow into one of QT's films (she even snores -- she's human like the rest of us!).And, of course, Los Angeles plays itself to the nines. Isolated midcentury pleasure pads laid out in the hills, neighbors cheek by jowl but never knowing one another until Something Terrible happens. Hippie girls with mercurial moods and sharp teeth are out there rummaging in the Ralph's garbage bins. Traffic jams cleared out. Skies freshly smogged (really -- pre-catylytic convertor smog was a hell of a thing). KHJ radio blasts out the hits with the Real Don Steele between songs. The Van De Kamp bakery blue windmill is out there just off the freeway in Panorama City. (About the only bum notes were the closeups of the gag dog-food labels which read like something out of MAD magazine and seeing the wrong buildings off Cliff's shoulder as he drove down the 5 in the Valley.)I wanted to come out of HOLLYWOOD entertained, and I guess I was. I still struggle with the last 5% of the movie obliterating much of what came before. I mean, I guess I understand why the plot moved the way it did, but I'm thinking that perhaps this would be a story better worked out completely bifurcated. One story of Cliff and Jake paling around Hollywood like Butch and Sundance. That was a lot of fun. But Cliff and Jake rewrite history and prevent one of the century's most infamous murders doesn't ring right. Or maybe it felt like it needed more weight. Sure, since the murders never happened, there never would be that psychic weight in the first place. I get that. Maybe the lightness was the point. You never think about the bullet that missed and the one that lands in your breast, well, that's all you end up thinking about. For a short while.There's other ground I wanted to cover, like why does Polanski wear the velvet suitcoat that Alex does on his mall prowl in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (and is that in turn another fashion echo of DJANGO UNCHAINED?). Why even bother with Steve McQueen stating that he never had a chance with Sharon Tate (Yeah, I know why, if McQueen failed then what chance does any mere mortal have). The gross misrepresentation of Bruce Lee as a person (at least in the mind of Stuntman Cliff) really sticks, though we do see him instructing both Tate and Jay Sebring, for all the good it did them in That Which Happened, our world.Ultimately it boils down to Tarantino making the movies he wants, the way he wants. I may not be blown away by all aspects of them, but the fact that they're still rolling around in my head more than a week after has gotta stand for something.As a final aside, just finished the re-read of HELTER SKELTER that I'd started just after the film. I won't lie. That certainly colored my view of history as depicted (but I had largely the same objections as I watched the film, so there was a basis for that.) For a 400 page true-crime book, it reads pretty fast. I credit that largely to Curt Gentry, but I suspect Vincent Bugliosi's meticulous note-taking and logical construction of events made things a lot easier.

AUTODRIVE - process

As we all know, writing for comics isn't like writing for prose. Comics are locked to the unit of the page (yes, digital comics aren't, but for the most part, they still pretend they're print comics so they kinda are.) This is neither good nor bad, but it is a thing that you have to work within or you'll be in trouble. Or you're making the comics on your own and drawing it all and you can take as long with a sequence as you'd like. That works, too. Too bad I'm not drawing this. Can't say who is just yet. Hopefully soon.But I thought I'd show a little of the page process that I'm working with. See these? Yeah, they're double-page spreads, just like in a printed comic book. Gotta honor the page turns. I'd written some script pages for what I thought was going to be a sample sequence. It turned out not to be. Then the next ones I thought would be weren't either. Yeah, funny, right? I think I've finally figured out how to open things so I could work from that. Anyways, the scripting that I'd done before didn't really have any page structure to it, and going back to it and trying make it adhere to a structure didn't yield any good results. So I'm going back to basics and just looking at one set of pages after another, enough times to cover six issues worth of story. Which I've just done. Granted, they're pretty airy, which is fine because one of the things I've done in the past was cram too much stuff in. I still lean that way in comics, and prefer pages to feel weighty. But that's not the style we do things today. It's not the bronze age anymore.That said, when I'm looking at the pages filling up and getting the rhythm down, I'm finding that a lot of things which I thought were important in the original story notes will either have to be backgrounded or just ditched. Maybe they're not that important after all. I mean, they were, but they're not more important than the story itself. Yeah, I'm one of those narrative guys, not just letting atmosphere be there and letting things happen. Look, when you're paying for all the pages, and you only get so many in an issue, you gotta make sure that they all matter, dammit. I thought that way with STRANGEWAYS and I'm still thinking that way. Just trying to work more closely with the structure of the final book.Also, weirdly, things work differently when I'm looking at notes written in a computer versus transferring them to imaginary pages. Not sure why, but things just fell into place a lot better. Of course, I could be kidding myself. We'll know once the artist I'm working with gets the script pages based on all this stuff. Maybe it'll be back to school for me, then. We'll see.

FULL BLEED: CONTROVERSIAL SUBJECTS AND DEPICTIONS

Yeah, I know. Cloth doesn't work like that.Well, in all my copious free time, I'm reading comics again. Of course, being me, I'm not reading regular comics that people are talking about now. I'm reading old comics. And I'm not even reading the old comics that people who talk about old comics are reading. I'm just reading weird stuff.Like SABRE. For those of you who don't know, SABRE started out as a graphic novel back before the term even existed. It was created by Don MacGregor and Paul Gulacy, published by a very young Eclipse comics, well before MIRACLEMAN and such (given that's what they're most remembered for these days, which is a shame since they put out a range of diverse and brave material, only ten years or more ahead of their time.) Eclipse exists in an intersting kind of interzone, being born before the direct market started to take hold, printing material from a bunch of outsiders and some old-timers and reprint material (not unlike what Fantagraphics was doing at the time, only not coalesced around THE COMICS JOURNAL as a central core.) Like I said, ahead of the time.So, SABRE is a near-future (now in the past) kind of SF/action/meditation book. It's ambitious, to be sure. And the fact that it wasn't really published with any kind of commercial appeal in mind is astonishing. Yes, MacGregor and Gulacy were relatively big names, or at least known out in comics in the seventies, but they weren't a guarantee of big sales. And indeed, the makeup of the DM and the patchwork kind of distribution system for comics (remember when we had more than one distributor?) didn't do it any favors. The material didn't do it any favors, either, refusing to shy away from controverisal subjects and relationships and frank depictions of sex would put it in the MATURE READERS category well before that became a thing in comics.Delays between issues and a rotating cast of artists (some more well-accepted than others) and its idiosyncratic style probably contributed to an early demise as well. But still, it got fourteen issues (the first two were really reprints of the graphic novel in color, and the only ones that Paul Gulacy worked on). Today? Can a book even make it this long being this deliberately prickly and so goddamned determined to be its own thing? Pretty miraculous, honestly, probably because it was a book that MacGregor really wanted to have out there. And that's admirable. I hope the creators made money off it, but I know the realities, particularly of the comics world back then, and it's entirely likely that this was a pure labor of love. Yeah, admirable.It's also insane. And I mean this in the best possible way. The only other books like it are those crazy adventure books that Marvel put out in the seventies (because, yeah, Don MacGregor wrote those and had some great artists like Craig Russell and Billy Graham working on them.) You may not necessarily like MacGregor's writerly voice, but it is unmistakable and might be the strongest force on the page, even moreso than the grid-breaking layouts of his collaborators (Graham and José Ortiz in particular), which is saying something.And they put SABRE out for fourteen issues over a space of four or five years. Just unthinkable today.Anyways, SABRE might not be my favorite comic ever, but there's absolutely nothing else like it, the way it distorted time and combined very personal views of sensuality and responsibility with raw politics and the morality thereof. Just wonderful, and you'll know if it's for you within a few pages. No problem there.The other big thing I read was the Mike Baron/Pander Brothers GINGER FOX miniseries from Comico in 1988. The Pander Brothers had I think just finished their work on Matt Wagner's GRENDEL series for Comico, which was already a pretty crazy book, super stylized and of the time. But GINGER FOX made GRENDEL look sedate and realistic by comparison. It's pure, expressionist delight. There's not a lot of realism to be found, so if that's your thing, you should look elsewhere. GINGER FOX takes place in LA, following the eponymous lead character who's now the head of a movie studio and deals with motherhood, a vendetta put on by a psychotic gossip columnist, mountains of drugs, armies of sleazeballs, a feckless board of directors, a maniac ex-husband, murders and kidnappings, oh and a ninja or two. Storywise, things keep rolling and never settle for very long, but the star of this book is the artwork and its depiction of a highly graphic LA in a highly graphic period. And as an aside, the crew that worked on these comics was slated to do the MAX HEADROOM comic book that was pulled I think after original solicitation (or maybe just an announcement in AMAZING HEROES.) Anyways, well worth your time if you want a taste of something different.Oh, okay, I read a current comic too. This one being ALIENS: DUST TO DUST, the collection of the recent series by Gabriel Hardman and Rain Beredo. I really loved this book. Gabriel Hardman (disclaimer, he is a friend) is one of the best storytellers in comics today. And DUST TO DUST is pure action and horror, with pauses only long enough to catch your breath before things explode again. It's a fast read, but you'll want to go back and look over the art a second time. By the by, it's a good fast read. It's fast because it's constructed to go fast, not really linger because if you do the aliens will rip you to shreds. It's the closest you're going to get to the vibe of the film ALIENS in a comics page, so if that appeals, go get it.

FULL BLEED: SUMMER IS FOR IMMOLATION

Yeah, it's been a couple months. Oh, you could've been getting that free content over at Twitter in the meantime. I've been posting all kinds of crazy stuff over there, long research threads, music video impromptu DJ sets, confessionals, photography, you know, giving that value to Jack instead of keeping it here where I could be raking in all that sweet ad revenue. Oh, wait. I don't have any ads here. I'm not counting your clicks. Dammit. I knew I was doing something wrong. Maybe a lotta things. Sounds about my speed.Anyways, came to the conclusion that it's time for a break from Twitter. Probably was a long time ago, but sometimes I'm dense and it takes awhile for the message to get through. Suspect when and if I return I need to slash my follow list something fierce. And a lot of people will take that personally. Maybe there's a way around that. But I have to say, letting the whole world into your brain on a mainline on the regular is probably not a great idea. It wasn't always like that. Or maybe it was and I'm just figuring that out.So, since I'm back here posting stuff, let's talk about my current comics project.That's right. I'm doing a comics project again. I said I'd walked away from it. You're right. But I'm handling this one differently. Promise that I won't take it all personal.The new project is called AUTODRIVE and it's adjacent to the last comics thing I pitched around, called THE FUTURE AMERICA (and that name is likely to go away, but maybe it'll stick around as the title of the letter column or something.) The blanket heading will be 19XX. Was gonna be 20XX, but retro-past, not retro-future is where it's at now. Seriously, look around. Cyberpunk happened and we missed it. We didn't get implants or hyper-tuned reflexes or scalpels under our fingertips, but we got everything else. Cyberpunk has become a loose collection of aesthetic signifiers, as empty as vaporwave, yo. This isn't to say that it still doesn't have a place in my part, cyberpunk that is (vaporwave was created for another generation entirely and they can enjoy it). Cyberpunk ended up being about the 80s and sorta the 90s far more than the future. But that's the way it always with actual sci-fi, right? Did that phrase make you mad, that I was using the diminuitive? Don't take it so personally.Anyways, hashtag cyberpunk is a place for other folks to go play and set their AAA console games in. You bet. Hundreds of thousands of human hours to play in a world that was created coming up on forty years ago. Aesthetic signifiers. So tasty. Throw some more neon on there. No, seriously, I love neon.But yeah, wasn't cyberpunk supposed to be cautionary? Even though it was hopeful 'cause we didn't annihilate ourselves in nuclear fire? Gibson himself said that when asked if the Sprawl was dystopian. So, yeah. Yet, here we are jacked into the matrix and zaibatsus in all but name are buying up worldwide water rights and bunkering in for the next hundred years. Gotta prepare if you're going to profit from the Jackpot, right?Seriously, THE PERIPHERAL is genius and shoulda made cyberpunk obsolete. Who better to do that to the cultural cloud he (unwittingly) conjured up just looking around through the end of the seventies.Oh, right. AUTODRIVE. It's set in the world of the groovy, chunky future we coulda had if we'd been brave enough. There's a bunch of research posted over at thefutureamerica on tumblr. Go check that out. Nothing is an exact match, of course, but you can get the vibe.Right now AUTODRIVE has a rough story outline, a first issue of page beats (mostly), an artist who's interested but the contract isn't done yet. It will not be crowdfunded. And if we can't land a regular publishing deal, I'm not positive that it'll actually happen. Look. I've done the back of the Previews catalog before. And that was ten years back when managers actually ordered out of it. Now it's pre-orders or nothing. I don't know how to beat that beast. Oh, sure, here comes "just write something that people want to read, you big dummy!" which is the equivalent of "git gud!" and you can park that somewhere else 'cause I'm gonna slash its tires if I see that stopped on my street.As I've noted before, Kickstarter and the like are not things that work for me. I've got the commercial fiction sense of a spider plant, which is to say none. I've never written to confirm biases or with a market in mind because that's never been the way I've worked. "Oh but you have to think of a market." Sure I do. It's all weirdos. Weirdos rule everything around me. All of my heroes have been weirdos and off-beat. I don't see that changing anytime soon.Ok, just about out of social media time, so I'll follow up on this later.

FULL BLEED: THIS AIN'T NO FOOLIN' AROUND

Spoilers for BLACK SUMMER follow, though they're pretty oblique.EDIT - And since I call out the cinematography and lighting, lemme credit where it's due. Yaron Levy and Spiro Grant were responsible for the cinematography, Yaron Levy the lighting. I'll get this right sooner or later.If you've known me for any length of time, you have probably figured out that I'm a sucker for zombie movies. I've watched, well, a lot of qualitatively bad movies in my time, hoping that there's a flash of something new or a composition or a shot or even writing that injects some new life into shabby walking corpses. I'm the guy who can see something interesting in RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD III, for crying out loud (though it is...uh...problematic at its incept, to say the least.) WORLD WAR Z was nice in that it inverted things and went from the global to the personal at the end, even if it ended up bearing little resemblance to Brooks' structure, and it was nicely shot (which is not a given these days.)Zombie TV, a lot less so. My issues with THE WALKING DEAD are legion. The first episode, however, remains a stand-out in the genre, at least until he gets to the department store full of people yelling at one another. But I watched several seasons because what else are you gonna do when you're on the elliptical. FEAR, I watched out of misplaced duty to a story idea I had (which would draw inevitable comparisons.) I shouldn't have. Once it got past initial days of outbreak, it became tedious and a replication of everything I disliked in its parent show. Z NATION is okay, but I'm rarely in the mood for it. It's just there. I know, sorry folks. You work hard on the show and everything, but it's not my cup of tea. I am, however, a pretty big fan of John Hyams. His UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING was a bone-breaking and sparse reimagining of the physical action spectacle. Throw in a healthy dose of PKD in the storyline and it was a goddamn delightful surprise. Which led to heightened expectations for BLACK SUMMER. I was going to see it anyways, given my weakness for zombie visual entertainments, but this was a kicker.I'll be honest. The first couple of episodes of the show were a disappointment. Not in quality or atmosphere. Those both delivered in a way that TWD has honestly forgotten how to, depending solely on viewer investment at this point. BLACK SUMMER sweeps all that away, dropping you into the collapse immediately, without explanation or backstory or anything. We see only what we're shown of these characters, sometimes given conflicting backstory, sometimes misled by other character's reactions or intimations. The cinematography was lean and did a great job in making familiar landscapes alien and threatening. (More on that later.) The writing was taut and I figure that you were either into it or not (and a number of correspondents I chat with weren't.)My disappointment, for lack of a better word, stemmed from running straight into the arms of zombie cliche, of the instant apocalypse. Ultimately it presented a world where survival was the only goal and the only sin was to fail in that effort. Okay, perhaps overstating it, but you get the picture. I had hoped for more, some carving out of a different psychic space or illumination beyond nasty, mean, brutish and short. Part of this is a choice to start things at perhaps the moment that things really fall apart (when for me, it's the time before then that's where the money melon is to be found: how things stress-fracture and unravel before snapping straight to LORD OF THE FLIES.) It's not my business to tell Mr. Hyams what to do. (The only person that can possibly apply to is myself). He had his story to play out his way.Once I got over myself and understood that, practicing radical submission to the work, I could appreciate *how* Hyams was pulling off what he was. Minimal (but never feeling cheap or artificial) sets, a handful of props to spell out the unfolding disintegration, contrasts of suburban and brutal, consistent and muted colors with punches (particularly in the underground club/heist sequence), messy and chaotic fight sequences (as opposed to the touches of MMA/balletic choreography of UNIVERSAL SOLDIER), all these felt like the stuff that I really liked in UNIVERSAL SOLDIER (which I won't shorten down to US because well, you know). The zombies are fast and bestial, which leaves very little opportunity for (misplaced or not) empathy that TWD mines and has been a hallmark of Romero since '68.) Again, not my first choice, but is right for Hyams' kinetic sense. The characters, as mentioned before, are sketched out cleanly, but briefly. The writing is pretty lean, as lean as I've seen on a television much less Netflix gig in a long time. This is not a slam, by the way. Less is more. I try to stick to that in my own fiction/scripting. Leave some space for the viewer to put themselves in or fill it out. That's great. Let's have more. But it is a risky move, particularly in the era of prestige streaming where episodes run long more often than not. BLACK SUMMER sidesteps this completly by simply giving you what you need as a viewer. Do a little work. It's not hard. I'm sure that this feels under-written to lots of folks, but not me.Hyams and crew also broke out of the whole 40-60 minute episode framework as well, which made things feel a lot more immediate, and dare I say it, "fresh." By going brief (think of it like a wedge: first episodes more traditional 40-ish, tapering down to 20 or so for the last half of the series) BLACK SUMMER doesn't bog down in soap opera subplots or the psychodrama that drives TWD. Yeah, the comparison is unwelcome, but we're also pretty limited in apples to apples options, so bear with me. All of this functions to serve the shifting ground that we're stuck on as viewers, particularly at the start. And the show chooses to have some fun with the structure at the opening, setting up multiple threads and characters, some abandoned until the very end, some short and cut off quickly. A lot of what goes on is driven by what we don't know. Which is a difficult tightrope act for zombie stuff to walk. There's a lot of close reading as to how the oubreaks start, what the transfer mechanism is, how the zombies are and how to fight them. Which is straight thrown out the window. They're there and they're in your face, running you down. Even one zombie is a threat, enough to send characters running. Two is enough to pin five people down in a location indefinitely. Immortality has its advantages. But there's no dissection of zombie physiology or trying to tease out clues as to how to defeat them. Just surviving is all that can be managed.A quick return to some of the lighting/cinematography. A common complaint of mine is that folks often don't know how to set up and record digital images. Really grinds my gears when I click on an indie thing and it's all "well, we just set up outside and didn't light this and it shows." BLACK SUMMER does not do this at all. It's got a consistent look and feel, particularly on the interiors, which feel like they're naturally-lit (but I know they took some time to do setups and it shows) but never distracting or artificially so. The lighting is motivated. Now, this is less so in the exteriors, but they feel like this is a deliberate choice and not because the cinematographers just let stuff rip. The reality of the show feels lived-in and inhabited, not just thrown-together, and the lighting is a critical part of that.Ultimately, BLACK SUMMER isn't as much about zombies as it is about life during wartime on the streets of anytown, USA. It's a precipitous descent from a shaky stability into urban warfare against an enemy that can't be stopped more than momentarily. We move from bunkered suburban families eagerly running to military convoys for assumed safety to streets ruled only by those insane enough to step outside into the black zones and ultimately into a downtown and refuge that is anything but. Distant bombs and gunfire, screeching overflights, an ineffective remnant military, fatigue and shellshock, boredom and hyperactivity, planning and chaotic reactiveness, all these things swirl together in a slow whirlpool that rushes you right through the disintegrating heart of the US.As I said before, I'm always looking for a transformative moment in these crises, where something can be born past relentless brutality and calculation. That's what I pursue in my own work. BLACK SUMMER doesn't deliver that, and it's probably unreasonable for me to expect it to. It does, however, break the mold in some interesting structural ways and ends up feeling more like a long episodic film than a bloated season of television. I got over myself and enjoyed it a lot. I can't tell you what you will do with it.EDIT to add that I should probably work on a completely separate piece about art and submission and criticism/critique (not the same things) and how personal expectation is something best left behind. I only briefly touched on it here. And no, I can't get over myself when it comes to a lot of things, so when I can, I'm glad.

FULL BLEED: ALTERNATE ANTEDILUVIAN EXPLANATIONS - 5

I was supposed to get up early the last day, catch some of that good light.I chose not to. Rolled out of bed and over to the NoHo Diner which, as always, beat Denny's as an option. Walked around the morning heat and overcast along Magnolia, shot some close-ups of concrete and grime. I love doing that and then having people ask me why I do. Proves we're not in a simulation is my usual reply. Particularly in the world of curated grime in game and movie effects art. Instead of being cool models, it's about pores and rust and pockmarks. Detail washes everything out and obliterates what you were going for in the first place. Just like all those dudes making up fake worn vinyl album covers for their brand new synthwave release. Stolen age, you dig? Stolen weight and power.Drove down the Miracle Mile to the Petersen Auto Museum, which is nothing less than a fantastic place. Take the vault tour. You can't take pictures, but you can get up close to all kinds of strange and wonderful vehicles that you simply aren't going to see anywhere else. Ask about the haunted car. I won't tell you which one, but see what kind of reaction you get. Besides that, there's the Buick that drove FDR and Churchill and Stalin to the Yalta Conference, Robert Kennedy's last ride, same with Eva Peron, Saddam Hussein's Mercedes and the one that used to drive Ghadaffi around. Or the Pantera with three bullet holes that Elvis himself installed.Upstairs, there was more conventional fare, but still some breathtaking vehicles. How about the Bugatti that was a gift from the government of France to the future Shah of Iran? That thing's a dream.Or the low-riders?Or the gross vernacular of the Juxtapox exhibit?Or chrome type in the wild?I'm alligator-arming this one. I should have a lot more to say, and wonder how I can even say it. How cars are amazing, ingenious, breathtaking and yet the avatars of a network of industries that's stripping the planet? Hard to love on those grounds, but impossible to hate.I wanted to make a trip down to Wilmington or Signal Hill to shoot some of these urban oil wells that are still standing, still working in the heart of the sprawl. Maybe next time. Didn't like which way the clock was turning and had to get something to eat and ship the books I'd recklessly purchased on this trip back home. Back to Costa Mesa/Newport confluence and Taco Mesa, which used to be an old haunt but that was only a lifetime ago. The nachos al pastor still have great grilled flavor and pineapple to throw in some sweetness, though.Then to sit down in the airport lounge and start writing up stuff for an idea that's turning into a thing called AUTODRIVE. Of course, as in true nightmare fashion, I left the iPad on the plane. Lost and found, sure.Yeah, I'm not making this last part up. I know exactly how it happened. Had my camera out to shoot through the window on the flight. Didn't latch the case when I put it back, pulled on it and the camera made a short tumble to the floor just as I was getting ready to get off the plane.And that damn iPad was sitting on the seat next to me. Ah, the kindness of my fellow human.I know. Losers weepers.

FULL BLEED: ALTERNATE ANTEDILUVIAN EXPLANATIONS - 4

Sunday. Breakfast on West Adams, but I don't think it was actually the West Adams neighborhood. Out of the three tables occupied in the place at 8am, two of them were filled out by LAPD. That's usually a good sign, as it comes to quality of food. One of the best breakfasts I've had in LA was at the Academy comissary in Elysian Park. That and Nick's, which used to be run by ex-LAPD, though I haven't been back in many years and heard that it's gone downhill since then. But you hear that a lot about a lot of places. Sometimes it's even true. Anyways, I had the chilaquiles with carnitas and a lot of coffee. Dependable.Back to Wonder-Con. Spent most of the time there at a writing roundtable sort of thing. Probably more useful for people on a different stage of their arc than for mine where I was. Eh. Happens. Honestly, that's it. By the time I was done there and had walked a bit of the hall, I was kinda done with the place. Enough so that I wasn't going to wait to try and run into people I'd yet to see. Maybe next time. Like I said before, the important stuff at the show had happened on Friday. We'll see if anything comes from any of that.Drove up to the westside to visit the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which believe it or not, I'd never been to before. I'd heard a lot about it and wanted to go, but things just never worked out properly. Rode the 405 up to La Cienega (okay, it's Jefferson way down there) and followed it up through one of the biggest urban oilfields still operating. Yeah, we're still pulling the crude right out of the ground there. Was a time that California (not Texas, mind) was producing over 25% of the world's oil. Not the US'. The world's. It's still pumping. Wilmington, Carson (that gas works isn't just for show) and Signal Hill. There's a long stretch of pumping well heads and tanks just out in the open, not disguised at all. Though in fully urbanized areas, the towers are hidden under facades. They look like telecom switch banks or something. You wouldn't know it at first glance, but they're there. Tried to get some pictures but no good angles made themselves available. Noted it for the future. Heat and breeze tussled the entire way up, and I got plenty of both as I passed low stucco and empty asphalt lots, finally evening out to ocean breeze as I went under the overpasses for the light rail before turning hard to the ocean. Parked at a side street off of Venice Bl and laughed at the 2-hour parking sign on the street where there were tents set up and cars that had taken root before our last president had been sworn in, or at least that's what it looked like to me. Walked on over to the museum and wasn't sure what I was getting myself in for. Dodged the backed-up traffic queue for the In-N-out and photographed the translucence of the red-pink succulents on a field of squirming green ground cover. LA remains alien and weird when it wants to.As to describing the Museum of Jurassic Technology, well, that's tough. First of all, it's more art exhibit and tribute to oddball mania/obsession more than it is a museum. It's an art project that slipped its enclosure, and that's just fine by me. On the offerings list today, Anasthius Kirchner and his oddball natural philosophy, the trailer in America in the 20th century, Ricky Jay's collection of disintegrating celluloid dice, something about bees, fantastic bestiaries and alternate antedeluvian explanation theories (ah, it makes sense now.) Being submerged in someone else's manias is a hell of a thing. Radical submission. You can't question the curation, because it's there and set whether you like it or not. You can roll with it and maybe learn to love it or just leave. Narration on exhibits was too soft, music was too loud, writing too oblique. Or was it the opposite of that? You'd have to be there to know for sure. Unfortunately, I only had a short time there (meeting a family member who I hadn't seen for some time and I'll just leave it at that because it's frankly best.) I took in what I could and some of it picks at me still. I'm certainly going back, hopefully for a much more leisurely visit.Though I will say that their bookstore was maybe the single most dangerous bookstore I'd stepped into that whole trip. Which was saying something. As it was, I only made it out with a copy of SCIENCE FRONTIERS II (from the Sourcebook Project press) and a book on sacred geometry. I could've walked out with just about the whole damn catalog stuck to my fingers.Nosed my way through traffic on the 110 because that's where I like to spend my time. Checked into my hotel of record in Burbank and soaked up the AC for a few minutes before heading out to grab some dinner ahead of the evening's plans. Which were not set. As long as I've been coming down to LA, I've been meaning to get over to Universal Citywalk. Yeah, it's a tourist trap and it costs a goddamn fortune to park there. But there's a fair bit of vintage neon that I'm not going to see anywhere else. And I do love neon. But then on the other hand, friends were going to head over to the Egyptian in Hollywood to catch a noir film or two (given that Noirfest is running right now, and continues, with TOUCH OF EVIL last Saturday). That could be good, too.I mulled over the options as I sat town at Bob's Big Boy in Toluca Lake. Sadly, the neon out front was not running, even when I was leaving and the sun was well down. A bit of a bummer. As for the place itself? The double-decker burger wasn't quite as good as I remember it, but the particular scent of the seasoning salt on the fries and the red relish on the burger was quite the whammy. I ate more than my share of those (and Pappy Parker fried chicken) when my family went to the Big Boy in El Toro (which I believe is gone now and has been for awhile). It didn't make me feel like a kid or anything, but there was a Proustian jolt on the first hits. Then reality set in and it was just a kinda dry-bun burger, but I was good and hungry, so I didn't argue.Opted for the noir screening with friends. I don't figure that Universal Citywalk is going to burn down anytime soon. Maybe I'm wrong. I'll live with it if I am.Got to Hollywood early ahead of the screening and parked up Cherokee and walked around Scuzzy Disneyland for awhile. Ocurred to me that I was walking right past the exact location of the Last Prayer club, as described in QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS. Got a chuckle out of that (particularly since an nearby address is a community policing substation - ha.)Hollywood Boulevard is weird. It's still a magnet for weirdos and crazies and families gawking, tour busses and ride-hailing cars stopping at sidewalks with little or no notice. The whole place smelled like dank and bacon-wrapped hot dogs jammed with grilled vegetables. I couldn't tell you how many vendors I saw selling those all over the place. Lots of Jarritos on ice, too. Club tunes pumping out of open bars and dudes loudly out-duding one another with deals they were close to closing or other ephemeral achievements. If I could've bottled that confidence and sold it, I'd have made a mint. Oh, and lots of neon. Not always beautiful. Not always vintage. But a lot of it. It still fills out the air in a way that nothing else does. It brings in an atmosphere, even inside a street-front fortunetelling parlor or wig shop or second-hand clothing store or just an evocative name left enigmatically up on a wall. Nothing else is like it. Don't tell me those LED signs are just as good because they're not. I can tell the difference.Photographed an odd selection of stars on the Walk of Fame. Didn't find Godzilla's, but there's always next time.Made my way over to Grauman's Egyptian after walking the busy blocks of Hollywood (as far down as the Pantages on the east side and, uh, oh geez, to the Roosevelt on the west). The film was THE NARROW MARGIN, a b-level potboiler, but about as good as those things get. Sure, there were a few janky moments, but there were laughs and wisecracks and heartache and dilemma and triumph. What more can you ask for out of your entertainment? I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot or leaving it out on purpose. But you get enough of the picture.Slow drive over the hills back to Burbank and plans to get up early to get that good light out somewhere.That didn't happen.

FULL BLEED: ALTERNATE ANTEDILUVIAN EXPLANATIONS - 3

Saturday was a skip day. As in I skipped the show. I often do, particularly since Saturday is the worst day to just walk around. If I'm at a table, sure, I'm all TCB and will be there before the floor opens. But this was a more casual show for me, so it was wake with the sun and then drive from Costa Mesa to my literal hometown. Okay, not where I was born, because I don't remember that, or anything until my family got out to Laguna Niguel. Being from Orange County and thinking of it as "home" when someone says the word is a real weird feeling. While not the origin of the planned community as a tool of white flight and edge-city building, Orange County as a whole, particularly the south, feels like a climax predator version of it. Sure, there were outposts before the sixties, but it grew up overnight then, with pains stretching into the seventies, eighties and beyond. But the bones were laid down in the meltdown of Los Angeles as a place to raise your kids. And yeah, we had weirdos and miscreants like the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and biker gangs servicing the troops at El Toro and reaching down to Oceanside/Pendleton. But for the most part, it was a planned suburban paradise. It's still that way, just more overbuilt. But goddamn if I can't feel those hills and the splaying stretch of Crown Valley Parkway (Raceway) in my bones every time I drive over them. Sad, right? It's a whitewashed and bled-out lifeless town, good only for quiet Republicanism and tourists going to Salt Creek or Los Alisos or Main Beach in Laguna Beach itself.Still, it's home. A hometown that I couldn't afford to live in now. And yeah, it's changed, but I can see all the stuff that hasn't still, or yet. The Harbor House is one of those things. It's just a common, garden-variety cafe. But I can't count the times I ate there after hours with friends through high school or even into college. And while the interior has changed, the food really hasn't. So I made the drive, half in the shadows of the overpasses and the colossal interchange of the 5/405, which still makes me think of mammoth dinosaurs frozen in time. Just look at the silhouettes and you'll see it too. I made the drive back to Dana Point. The food itself was nothing spectacular, even with the added seasoning of, well, nostalgia. They still don't quite have pancakes right, probably never will. Since I wasn't due in the Valley for several hours yet, I took my time and rolled through San Juan Capistrano, right nearby. Stopped in front of a historic streamline moderne building on the main boulevard, just half a block from the mission itself, which dates to 1776. I'll spare you the history lesson where the Franciscans forcibly converted the Juaneño indians and more or less enslaved them etc etc. Oops. But hey, swallows! Architecture! Yeah, my hometown is built on other people's bones. Welcome to America. If you want to read more about that, check out ETERNITY STREET by John Mack Faragher, though it's more particular to the founding of Los Angeles through the language of violence. Still, an eye-opener. Walked around the walls of the mission in the bright, hard sunlight. It was going to be hot and was already warm and it wasn't yet even 9am. The prickly pears on the walls were heavy, laden with fruit that was still green but would swell to a bruised purple and ripeness in time. Busloads of tourists were already arriving, milling around the entrance of the Mission, selfie sticks at the ready. Hey, I don't begrudge anyone taking pictures, just that I'm not big on pictures of myself. Narcissist self-deprecation, you understand. Can't be helped.History becomes strange here. Eras collide and are slapped up with a new coat of paint, fresh and unmarred. But that's Southern California all over. The place eats youth but reveres age, at least in architecture (so long as it's not in the way of building new apartments) and cars. Vintage moves units. Vintage brings in tourists. And I oughta know, because that stuff is in my veins and it is restless and hungry all the time. Drove the 405 for almost its entire length, punching out just shy of the 118 and driving around that end of the Valley for a while. It's weird to see fingers of LA proper like Sepulveda Boulevard stretching all the way over here, poking into industrial yards and scrap metal operations butted right up against bargain shoes and families with kids, dad hauling the scooter because the boy tired of it but wouldn't leave it home like he was told. Hell of a place, LA. And yeah, I joke about nuking the Valley, but I'd miss it if the Big One swallowed the place whole. After driving aimlessly and putting a frightening amount of gas into the tank (it only showed half-empty and yikes) I settled over at the Sepulveda Dam and flood control basin. You'd have thought that the place would still be under water. I mean, the hills all around Chavez Ravine were as green and lush as I'd ever seen them. The LA River was swollen and full, according to friends. Hell, there were probably frogs over in Frogtown. But water in Southern California doesn't lay still long. Like lava from a volcano popping up from the Miracle Mile, it rushes right out to sea. Though I saw a lot of greenery amidst the detritus at the bottom of the basin, I didn't see a lot of water. The sun was high and hot, beating hard for March and let me remind you that the Valley can bake as well as any place this side of Tucson once summer decides to haul out the big guns.Walked the base of the dam and the top, at least as much as the iron fences would allow me. It's not the most spectacular dam, but it does the job, distinctive vaulting butted right up against an aggregate of white rock and glittering shards of beer bottles. Graffiti there is always fresh over a layer of primer gray. That's not a battle that can be won, but people keep fighting it, on both sides. Maybe the temporary mark really does mean something even if only you see it. Or maybe that's just youth talking, and we all know this town loves to eat youth, eat it raw and whole. But it hasn't eaten the wetlands in the basin, not just yet. Birds singing aggressively, just out of sight; a giant vulture soaring on thermals radiating off the wall of the dam; constant rustle of squirrels and lizards and rats in the scraggly shrubs when you stop and stand for just a moment. And that River still trickling through the heart of the city, whether it's in a gravel and sand bed or concrete mainline of flood control channels.Drove along Burbank Boulevard, admiring the golf courses and recreation areas cheek and jowl with ramshackle and tenacious homeless encampments. Yeah, THEY LIVE remains documentary. I said that already, right? It's real, just the yuppies aren't aliens and they're out in plain sight.Finally found the Valley Relics Museum, where I was meeting friends and taking in the sights of things that are adjacent to my youth, but not really of it. I mean, my grandpa owned a Dairy Queen in Riverside, but not one out in the Valley. I saw commercials for Love's BBQ pit and remember there was one right off El Toro Road that my family drove past on the regular, but never went inside. I remember the Pup 'n Taco and Pioneer Chicken (click that link for a remembrance by Kaleb Horton, who perhaps not coincidentally was one of the friends I was meeting along with his wife Marie, and the other being the other half of The Roswell Incident) but I never lived them. Though I do recall shopping at both Fedco and Gemco (which did Costco before Costco, but not in the industrial quantities). This was stuff I saw on TV and was close by, part of the collective memory of the Southland. Okay, so I ate at Jack in the Box a bunch, so the spectre of plastic Jack was enough to bring me to a halt. The museum itself was filled with oddities that together formed an assemblage of a remembered past, just that nobody was necessarily going to remember it the same way as anyone else, like any fiction. Roddy McDowall's facial applications for PLANET OF THE APES alongside the custom Nudiemobile and Mannix' suit coat, the desk from UNSOLVED MYSTERIES (which to some was a cultural touchstone like IN SEARCH OF is to me), a handful of arcade cabinets and pinball tables lit with neon signs from businesses that died thirty years ago, all warming in the March sun in a hangar that would become an oven before two in the afternoon. It's a hell of a place and maybe doesn't make a lot of sense, but does allow for the tugging on various ribbons of memory and lost experience.Spent the drive back to North Hollywood and the Idle Hour tapping fingers to whatever the iPod served up (since it was working again). Joe South's "Hush" came on and god damn that's a perfect song with perfect sound. Just right for ordering around a V-8 while crossing the Valley in constant construction, teardown and renewal. I almost played it a second time, it was so good.Coming back to North Hollywood was another dagger to the brain. I used to work there, and lived there for a short time, at the end of the last century and beginning of this one. And I mean that literally. I was out of there a year before 9/11 happened and it may as well have been a different world. But back then, the Idle Hour was locked and shuttered, apparently home to the son of the original owner, who had no interest in running an actual bar there. But it's been sold and remodeled (though the original facade and interiors largely remain). They make a nice old fashioned, though paying that much for a well drink rubs me a bit the wrong way. Still, a good time can be had there if you're with the right people. But god, can we please put an end to the 1977-1985 rock playlists? Okay, keep the ELO, but make it more deep cuts. Honestly, that's the wrong nostalgia, my dudes. I'd DJ there for drinks and parking and a hamburger. Get in touch. Talk ranged from film to dead bodies in rental houses to the best live album ever (hint: Jerry Lee Lewis). A good time. One that I don't get much of cause I live in the goddamn sticks.Said my goodbyes and went to walk up and down Lankershim to make sure I was of clear mind before I got back behind the wheel. You're right I'm a lightweight. Besides, the good light was just hitting. Felt a sting as I looked over the yellow stucco of the former Odyssey Video shop exterior. I rented a ton of movies there when I lived just up the road and worked just down the road and had a DVD player in 2000 and felt like I was finally in touch. Shot a lot of pictures. Chakra adjustments, an abandoned empty of Jameson's, a surprisingly grass-filled vacant lot encased in chain-link, strange facades and a neighborhood in turnover. I recognized very few of the shops and restaurants. The building where I used to work at Netter Digital and maybe I'll even write about joining the circus one day, but the cubicles and SGI Indigo workstations are gone now. Apartments going up. Lots of them. People want to live in that NoHo Arts district. Hey, we got a neon clown just down the street. It's lit.Stopped in to Blastoff Comics and hand sold some QUEEN OF NO TOMORROWS because they sell book books as well as comics and hopefully something comes of that. Sun was just about down now and shot some photos in an aesthetic I'm gonna call Smogwave/Hedorahgroove and look for it. It's all over Tumblr if you squint. Finally saw a couple restaurants I remembered right on Magnolia (you can see them in the opening of ERIN BROCKOVICH if you're quick), but everything else was gone. The Quizno's where I ate shame lunches, the DQ where we'd go get our 4 o'clock break Blizzards, the Chinese place down the road which always had a C cleanliness rating but I ate there all the time anyways, the bank where I had an account and once ran to on a Friday while the place I worked was in the process of bleeding out so that my hand-cut check would actually clear because I worked hard for that money and did not want to get told that nope, no money. All that gone. Maybe I'm the only one who remembers or cares.Maybe.Drove at dusk down the 101 to the 405 to Sepulveda and to the Westside. Ate really excellent ramen with one of my longest-time friends, walked around Sawtelle, shot a lot of pictures. Slept like the dead on their couch even though there was a gap between cushions and bare frame that would have tested the hardest-boiled private detective. Shoulda opted for the sake at dinner and just blotted out. Sorry, man. I'll just roll up a towel next time.