Modern Jackass

2007-12-07T14:13:00.000-08:00

Ohio Elections Commission rebukes Latta for lies about foe

BY JIM PROVANCE
BLADE COLUMBUS BUREAU

COLUMBUS — The Ohio Elections Commission unanimously slapped congressional candidate Bob Latta with a reprimand after ruling today that his congressional campaign knowingly or recklessly lied about opponent Steve Buehrer’s positions in political flyers.

Even the Latta campaign’s attorney, Scott Pullins, admitted statements that Mr. Buehrer “opposed’’ prayer in public schools and “didn’t want’’ the Ten Commandments posted were “misleading,’’ a “cheap shot,’’ and a “political low blow.’’

But he argued unsuccessfully that the false statements did not rise to the level of a violation of Ohio election law.

Mr. Latta and Mr. Buehrer are campaigning for the GOP nomination for the 5th District congressional seat, which will be decided in tomorrow’s election. The seat became open with the death of Paul Gillmor, and will be decided in a special election on Dec. 11.

Today’s reprimand marks the most severe stance taken to date by the bipartisan commission in dueling complaints filed by both sides. The commission had previously found that state Senator Buehrer (R., Delta) and a Washington political action committee supporting him had made “false statements’’ about Mr. Latta's 1998 vote related to taxes, but imposed no penalties against either.

The commission had the option of referring either candidate for possible criminal prosecution, but opted not to.

At issue were for varying statements included in Latta mailings in October that Mr. Buehrer “opposed’’ prayer in public schools and “didn’t want’’ the Ten Commandments posted.

The Latta campaign extrapolated the statements from a 2002 Vote Smart survey that asked candidates to check specific positions they support. Mr. Buehrer left statements about prayer and the Ten Commandments blank.

Losing a valuable day of campaigning the day before the election, Mr. Buehrer told the commission that a disclaimer with that survey specifically stated that failure to make a mark next to those statements did not necessarily indicate opposition.

He also noted that, while both were serving in the Ohio House, state Representative Latta (R., Bowling Green) had an office adjacent to his where Mr. Buehrer has had the Ten Commandments posted since 2003.

“Mr. Latta was in and out of my office numerous times and the document was always posted where he or anyone else could see it,’’ he said. He added he supports voluntary prayer in schools and the voluntary posting of the Ten Commandments in government buildings, including schools.

“I would certainly not be in favor of mandatory posting of the Ten Commandments,’’ he said. “I don’t think public schools should have the Ten Commandments stuffed down their throats, but I certainly think that if the word ‘voluntary’ would have been in that (survey question), I would have supported it.’’

Scott Pullins, attorney for the Latta campaign, stopped just short of issuing an apology.

“It’s not reckless,’’ he told the commission. “Was it misleading? Yes. Was it a cheap shot? Yes. Was it a political low-blow? Yes. Did I want that statement to go out? No. Does the Latta campaign regret making that statement. Yes. But that’s not the standard this commission has to comply.’’

Contact Jim Provance:
jprovance@theblade.com
or 614-221-0496.

Read more in later editions of The Blade and toledoblade.com

2007-12-07T14:07:00.000-08:00

Bob Latta

Bob Latta

Bob Latta

2007-11-03T07:50:00.000-07:00

How Oprah Ruined Plagerism or Salon Equals Slate Plus Time

Salon: "How Oprah ruined the marathon", Edward McClelland - November 3, 2007. http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/11/03/marathon/

Slate: "How sluggish newbies ruined the marathon", Gabriel Sherman - September 22, 2006. http://www.slate.com/id/2149867

2007-10-31T18:57:00.001-07:00

Cat and Girl is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

2007-06-15T06:46:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: Mike Sterling is still your source for information on the Elfquest orgy.

2007-01-02T17:24:00.000-08:00

The Beaver Trilogy

2006-12-07T06:14:00.000-08:00

Mark Evanier tells us about Peter Leeds.

UPDATE: Peter Leeds was a wonderful character actor who passed away a little more than ten years ago. For several years, Peter Leeds worked more days than any other member of the Screen Actors Guild.

2006-10-13T08:45:00.000-07:00

Dear SCAM,

I have an Everyday Problem, could you please direct me to an Everyday Solution?

-- Loyal Reader

-------------------------------------------------

Loyal Reader,

Problem solved.

-- SCAM

2006-09-25T21:33:00.000-07:00

Blagojevinyl Hair

2006-09-25T19:07:00.000-07:00

5-Minute Guaranteed Ukulele Course

2006-09-25T12:09:00.000-07:00

Esquire, October 2006

A National Knife Fight: Illinois Sixth Congressional District

Click Image to Magnify

Click Image to Magnify

2006-09-21T16:41:00.000-07:00

PeoplePC Fax Number (415) 837-3857

PeoplePC
PO Box 26909
Santa Fe, CA 94412
Phone 1-888-587-9669

If you cancel your account by phone, it is highly recommended that you give, "I am moving over seas" as the bullet-proof reason for your cancellation. Any other reason will result in endless sales pitches and the delay of your cancellation.

PeoplePC
100 Pine Street, Suite 1100
San Francisco, CA 94108
FAX (415) 837-3857

If you are going to cancel by fax click here for a form you can fill out and fax or mail in to cancel your PeoplePC account.

Or you can cancel by e-mail by sending your user name and the last four digits of the billing credit card to cancelrequest@peoplepchq.com

2006-09-06T19:40:00.000-07:00

Click on the Picture to see where the Islamofascists are according to Google.

2006-09-01T07:04:00.000-07:00

Once again, disappointment.

2006-08-29T15:00:00.000-07:00

Click on the picture to magnify.

2006-08-24T17:48:00.000-07:00

2006-07-21T19:52:00.000-07:00

Can't fight this feeling

BY STEFANIE PERVOS | STAFF WRITER
spervos@pioneerlocal.com

Excitement and wonder top off village's 50th birthday bash, REO concert

Elk Grove Village's 50th Birthday Bash went off "without a hitch," Mayor Craig Johnson said.

Despite a slow start because of the heat, about 7,000 residents filled the stands of Haskell Memorial Stadium at Elk Grove High School by the end of Sunday evening. The celebration ended without any arrests or health problems.

More about the winners and Pam Scully's take on the event. Page 5

"It was really possibly the finest night Elk Grove has ever had," Johnson said.

Entrance to the event was free and included an REO Speedwagon concert, brownies and ice cream and a fireworks display.

Johnson kicked off the evening by thanking Elk Grove High School and District 214.

"Have you ever seen Elk Grove High School change from a football field to a concert stadium so quickly?" he said.

Over the past eight months, more than 13,000 raffle tickets for the Hometown Home Giveaway were sold at $50 each. Johnson presented 11 civic groups with a check for $11,500 each from the contest's proceeds.

The 10 finalists for the giveaway, already the winners of $1,000 cash, lined up in the order they purchased their tickets. Each had a chance to win the fully furnished, $600,000 home at 1099 Cheltenham Road, built by Centex Homes. From a fishbowl, each chose the key they hoped would open the door of the model replica of the home on stage.

Chris Soriano, assistant finance director for the village, was up first. He tried his key in the door but it did not budge. The next finalist, Kim Mills of Elk Grove Village, was also out of luck.

Emil Schiavo, a freelance photographer hired to take photos of the birthday celebration, was up next.

He chose his key and handed it over to his wife, Barb, so he could take the picture. To her complete amazement, the door opened.

"I want to know where Fire Chief Miller is with the ambulance" she said, the color drained from her face.

Emil Schiavo was shocked he had won the contest, though he had been predicting he would be the winner.

"Even though I was hopeful I'd win it, it's still a surprise to pick the key that would open the door," he said. "It's kind of strange because I had this feeling all along that I would win."

The couple has lived in Elk Grove Village since 1969 in two different Centex Homes. They are planning to move into their new dream home, at least for a short while.

Before the excitement of the giveaway died down, REO Speedwagon took the stage. Lead singer Kevin Cronin told the crowd it had been 35 years since they had last played in Elk Grove Village, and it was time to come back and educate young residents on their music.

The band rocked out to classics "Can't Fight This Feeling," "Keep On Loving You" and "Time for Me to Fly." They also introduced a few new songs of their new album, which comes out next year.

Peter Roskam, 6th District congressional hopeful and an avid REO Speedwagon fan, was invited by the mayor to attend the bash with his family.

"Hearing REO kind of takes me back," he said. "They're one of those garage bands that made it big."

Michelle Graves, another REO Speedwagon fan, has lived in Elk Grove Village for 24 years. Though she was disappointed not to have won a new home, she thought overall the 50th Birthday Bash was a success.

"I think they did a lot of planning and the mayor does a great job," she said.

http://www.pioneerlocal.com/cgi-bin/ppo-story/localnews/current/eg/07-20-06-982943.html

2006-07-21T19:46:00.000-07:00

Stem-Cell Issue: Republicans' Undoing?
Disgruntled Party Moderates
Could Pose Threat in Some
Suburban Congressional Districts
By JACKIE CALMES
July 21, 2006; Page A4

ELMHURST, Ill. -- At her home in this Chicago suburb, 68-year-old Alice Doyle has a sign in her front window for the Republican candidate for governor. But on a recent morning, she joined a small group at her neighbor's house to lend support to the Democrat running for Congress in this historically Republican district.

The candidate, Tammy Duckworth, 38, is an Iraq-war veteran and double amputee. Her subject at the coffee this day is public funding for medical research using embryonic stem cells. She endorses it; her Republican rival, Peter Roskam, 44, has led the fight in the Illinois Senate against it. Not coincidentally, 600 miles away President Bush was about to cast the first veto of his presidency against a bill permitting federal funding for such research, charging that it "crosses a moral boundary" in promoting "the taking of innocent human life."

While Ms. Duckworth jumps on the issue, Mr. Roskam dodges it. "There are bigger issues going on in this campaign." says spokesman Ryan McLaughlin, declining to make the candidate available despite several requests over two days.

The Republican's reticence is understandable. While Mr. Bush's position cheers religious and social conservatives in the Republicans' base, nationwide it has alienated many moderates and has some questioning their fealty to a party increasingly defined by its cultural conservatism in emphasizing its opposition to issues such as gay marriage and abortion. "I think the Republican Party is in the Dark Ages on this," says Mrs. Doyle, a registered Republican who says she now "tends to vote Democratic."

Moreover, as the party has grown more socially conservative over the past quarter-century, the suburbs where many Republicans live have become more diverse and politically independent, marked by a mix of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism that is testing Republicans' dominance there. "Those districts aren't as reliably Republican as they were," says campaign expert Bernadette Budde of the business-backed political advocacy group BIPAC.

That, in turn, has Democrats hoping to capture some of their foes' strongholds, by picking up disgruntled Republican moderates as well as independents. Whether they do could determine if Republicans keep their majorities in Congress after November's elections.

In Missouri, the stem-cell issue is prominent in Democratic Auditor Claire McCaskill's campaign to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. Jim Talent, and a separate initiative backing research is on the ballot, stoking interest. The issue also figures in Senate races in Ohio, Arizona, Minnesota, Montana and Virginia, and in suburban House contests in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Colorado and Washington. In Missouri's Aug. 8 Republican primary, conservative Rep. Todd Akin, a foe of the stem-cell bill, is challenged by state Rep. Sherman Parker, who strongly supports expanded research and has written that such debates "will determine whether we are a party controlled by social fundamentalists."

The president's position is a minority one, even among Republicans, polls show. The question of government aid for embryonic stem-cell research is popular across all regions, ages and political groups, amid scientists' claims that the cells hold the potential for treatments or even cures for diabetes, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and Lou Gehrig's diseases, multiple sclerosis, cancer and neurological and spinal-cord injuries.

"This is a big deal in a lot of these suburban districts," says political consultant David Axelrod of Chicago, who is working for Ms. Duckworth. "Republicans are trying to satisfy their base, but I think there's some cost."

But at the National Republican Campaign Committee, spokesman Carl Forti predicts the stem-cell question will be a "nonissue" by the fall, and White House aides agree, noting that it never became the big issue in the 2004 campaign that some had forecast.

The race in the congressional district west of Chicago will be a test. For nearly 32 years its representative has been Republican Henry Hyde, nationally known as an abortion foe and a leader in the House's impeachment of Bill Clinton. While the district includes the parts of Cook County outside Chicago, its heart is affluent DuPage County, dubbed "America's Most Republican County" by the local party.

But there are signs of change. Mr. Hyde's re-election vote dropped from a typical 65% in 2002 to 56% in 2004, his lowest ever. While the first President Bush got 68% of DuPage's vote in 1988, his son won 54% in 2004.

Now 82, Mr. Hyde is retiring. Mr. Roskam, his would-be successor, is a trial lawyer who was an aide to Mr. Hyde and former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay before going to the Illinois House and then the state Senate. He's "a younger version of Henry Hyde," the DuPage Republican Party chairman, state Sen. Kirk Dillard, has said.

Mr. Dillard illustrates the way the stem-cell issue has split his party. He switched to support funding for research in the state Senate, imploring, "How can you not be for this?" In an interview, he says he was influenced by advocates from nearby Children's Memorial Hospital and a local pediatrician.

Another proponent is the Republican leader of the Illinois House, Tom Cross, a protégé and former history student of U.S. House Speaker Denny Hastert of Illinois; his 13-year-old daughter has juvenile diabetes. "Everybody knows somebody who's got some connection" to conditions that might be helped, he says. "But has it translated into people leaving the party? I haven't seen that, yet."

Just as Mr. Hyde argued in House debate that embryos are human beings -- "I myself am a 992-month-old embryo" -- Mr. Roskam likewise was passionate in successfully blocking any state funding for research in the Illinois Senate. "We are asked to pit one life against another," he said in 2004. In an interview with the Journal earlier this year, Mr. Roskam called his views "well within the mainstream" of the district. Those voters who do disagree with him, he added, support him because they share his views on keeping taxes low and other issues.

Not Mae Pearson, a 77-year-old widow at the Duckworth coffee. "I was raised Republican -- strong Republican -- and I thought it was so wonderful to move to DuPage County after I got married" in 1950, she says. "But it's just too hard to be a Republican anymore because it's not the Republican Party I grew up in."

"Embryos count, people don't," complains George Strejcek, 62. He and wife Elizabeth, 58, describe themselves as former Republicans. "Goldwater I could tolerate," he says. "But with these Republicans, they forget we live in a democracy, not a theocracy."

"They're not fiscally responsible either," his wife says.

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB115344108408113095-hD7H5_rBzlQQrtkxAYAGOtHuTgM_20060819.html?mod=tff_main_tff_top

2006-07-21T18:42:00.000-07:00

2006-05-19T09:22:00.000-07:00

2006-05-12T14:34:00.000-07:00

The awesome Acid Mothers Temple
Greg Kot, Tribune music critic.

For those who think they no longer have the capacity to be overwhelmed by music, consider Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. The Japanese quintet's performance at the South by Southwest Music Conference two years ago was enough to dash even the most jaded hipster against the rocks of their seen-it-all complacency.

Here was a band that extracted space-trucking noise from chasms of near silence, tucked folk melodies inside screaming guitars and squalling synthesizers, and channeled the droning tonalities of Eastern throat singing while playing at crushing volume levels. The band flaunted more hair than Foghat, more volume than Blue Cheer and nearly as much speed as Hawkwind.

Trouble was, that awe-inspiring visual and sonic spectacle couldn't fully be appreciated on any of the band's albums. Their recordings were a mess, frankly--a sometimes gleeful mess, but a mess nonetheless, and difficult for all but diehards to sit through. Now there's "Mantra of Love" (Alien 8), and it marks a turning point for the band, one acknowledged by founding guitarist Kawabata Makoto in an e-mail interview. "On this album we prioritized the idea of song," he says. "You could say that we have changed from our previous focus on chaos and drones. But we have always had a `song' element in our music, and this album has just provided us with a chance to change that focus."

"Mantra of Love" consists of only two tracks, but they bring a previously unheard coherence and clarity to the band's aural delirium. The 30-minute "La Le Lo" opens with a long section of melodic, almost soothing wordless chanting and scatting by singer Cotton Casino, before the backdrop of sitar, guitar and analog synthesizer overtakes her. A dervish swirl of instruments builds in volume, speed and intensity before collapsing. The 15-minute "L'Ambition dans Le Miroir" is the chill-out after the frenzy, with Casino's voice and Higashi Hiroshi's moonscape keyboards drifting serenely out of earshot.

It's a culmination in many ways of a 10-year ride that began in the mid-'90s, when Makoto put together an array of outcast musicians called the Soul Collective, which morphed into Acid Mothers Temple.

"I had searched high and low [since 1978] for a record that combined Deep Purple-style hard rock with Stockhausen's electronic music, but hadn't found anything like that. So I decided to make my own," Makoto says. "That dream only became reality when AMT was formed. As we have played together we have slowly discovered that kind of music that we should be playing. I describe that music as `trip music'--but in a different sense from psychedelic rock."

The Soul Collective has some similarities to the communes of the '60s. It was forged, Makoto says, out of necessity, as a musical sanctuary of sorts for artists ostracized by Japanese society. "There is no work for us and we have rejected virtually all types of social responsibility and obligation," he says. But Makoto is not trying to re-create some hippie experiment in socialism. "My experience of living in hippie and beatnik communities only filled me with despair," he says. "They were no more than a smaller version of society, and they contained all the problems endemic in society at large. I became disgusted with the ideological hypocrisy of the ecology movement. Our only slogan is, `Do whatever you want come what may. Don't do whatever you don't want, come what may.'"

In the "don't" category for Makoto are chemical enhancements, even though the music sounds like it could've been made under their influence. "I tried all kinds of drugs when I was younger, mainly because I wanted to know what they could show you," he says. "But I have absolutely no need for them anymore. Drugs can provide you with a clue, but to find the `answer' you need to progress through them to the next stage."

The next stage, apparently, is in music that combines extremes of beauty and chaos. In that respect, Acid Mothers Temple shares a certain aesthetic with a handful of Japanese bands such as the Boredoms, Ghost, Ruins, High Rise and Fushitsusha. What's in the homeland's water that produces such boundary-pushing music?

"Not just Western music, but all kinds of culture are imported into Japan," Makoto says, "and the Japanese excel in the compression of sensory and intellectual data. When we were in our teens there was little information about rock music available to us, so many of us developed our own elaborate imagined fantasies about this music. I, for example, saw some photos of Pete Townshend and I imagined that in performance he played his guitar entirely with that swinging arm movement. Or I would look at all the amps and imagine that the distortion he played with was caused by all the amps being played at maximum. Those kinds of misconceptions have a played a great part in the formation of our performance styles."

The awesome Acid Mothers Temple, Chicago Tribune, May 28, 2004 Friday

2006-04-20T08:26:00.000-07:00

2006-04-19T08:07:00.000-07:00

2006-04-17T13:00:00.001-07:00

2006-04-17T13:00:00.000-07:00

2006-04-17T12:58:00.000-07:00

2006-03-13T07:03:00.000-08:00

The World Book Day poll conducted by the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), in which librarians around the country were asked the question, "Which book should every adult read before they die?"

~~To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee~~
~~The Bible~~
~~The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien~~
~~1984 by George Orwell~~
~~A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens~~
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
~~All Quite on the Western Front by E M Remarque~~
~~His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman~~
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
~~The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck~~
~~The Lord of the Flies by William Golding~~
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Tess of the D'urbevilles by Thomas Hardy
~~Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne~~
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
~~The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham~~
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
~~A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess~~
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn

Via Guardian Unlimited

2006-02-09T19:24:00.000-08:00

2006-02-09T19:11:00.000-08:00

2006-01-28T20:07:00.000-08:00

2006-01-28T17:54:00.000-08:00

2005-11-20T14:48:00.000-08:00

2005-11-10T20:54:00.000-08:00

2005-10-26T13:56:00.000-07:00

Jim Woodring
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)
There’s no denying it, Jim Woodring is just plain weird. But thank god he is because he’s produced some of the most bizarre and indelible images ever. He introduced himself to the world with his autobiographical work Jim and then his freaky little woodland type creature Frank. Now he’s collected a number of his images in the book Seeing Things.
Buy Seeing Things
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?
Jim Woodring: Today, I’m painting covers and doing designs for these cardboard boxes that these Japanese Frank toys are going to come in. I designed it, but this company Presspop built these plastic Frank figures. They’re actually kind of big at about eight inches tall. His two companion accomplices are with him and they’re in these boxes I’m designing and they should be sold this year.
DRE: Are they a limited edition type thing?
JW: No, it’s not limited edition. Although I don’t know what they’re going to cost. It might turn out to be a limited edition simply by virtue of being overpriced. They’re just toys; little articulated figures that come in a box and I’m trying to package them as enticingly as possible. The tops of the boxes are going to be watercolor vignettes showing the characters and then there will be a label on the sides. I hope it works out. I’m in the early planning stages so I’m not entirely sure I’m on the right track, but I hope so.
DRE: Since the new book is called Seeing Things. Does that mean, this is how you see the world?
JW: In some ways it is how I see the world. At least some aspects of it. I guess it’s more a reflection of how I would see the world if I could see the things I’m thinking about.
DRE: Do you want to see the things you’re thinking about?
JW: I don’t really have a choice. I could jettison my perspective and try to be a more normal person, but I don’t think I’d succeed at that. I think I’d just be empty. I don’t think I could replace it with something more conventional. That’s not an option for me.
DRE: When you look at a frog, do you see it as the way you later draw would draw it? Or is it later when you go, “It’s time for me to draw” that the frogs come out that way?
JW: Well, if you notice there are no human beings in that book. I tend to use frogs as stand-ins for human beings, because when it comes drawing people for symbolic pictures, I never quite know how to go about doing it. If you draw them so that they’re like portraits, then the picture becomes about that personality. But if you just draw placeholders the figures tend to be very minimalist. They don’t have a lot of personality. It’s hard for me to know how to draw people, so I draw frogs because to me they’re kind of stripped-down versions of human beings.
DRE: What do you see in frogs that others don’t?
JW: I’ve always been fascinated by frogs and I’ve always loved to look at them. They’re good food for thought. I guess in France they’re just good food. They have a lot of interesting attributes. If you have a spiritual event; they’re amazing because they’ll just sit still as if they’re meditating for a long period of time, but they’re never out of it. They always notice when a shadow approaches and then they move like greased lightning. They live on the land and in the water. That amphibious quality is something you can compare to the way people live in both the animal and the spiritual world. They’re strangely anthropomorphic. They almost seem to have hands. They have faces you can read expressions in more readily than you can read them on the faces of other animals. I don’t know what it is but they’re easier to figure out than people. I guess the reason why I don’t draw people very much is because I don’t understand them. I don’t understand us so I never quite know what to show. It’s easy for me to draw people in deplorable circumstances doing terrible things subject to abominable forces. But I don’t want to just do that all the time; I don’t want to heap another log onto the fire of “Here’s what’s wrong with the human race.” So I sidestep it by doing it with frogs.
DRE: Would you eat a frog or do you have too much respect for them?
JW: Oh I’ve eaten them. I’ll eat anything. I’ve even eaten whale meat.
DRE: How is whale?
JW: Terrible, it tastes like liver.
DRE: Where’d you have that?
JW: Japan.
DRE: Of course. They eat everything over there.
JW: Yeah they do. They have such a refined sense of barbarism. At the same dinner I had the whale, I had living fish, pregnant fish stuffed with eggs and liver torn pulsating from the bodies of crabs. I guess pain connected with the food makes it taste better.
DRE: They’re okay with that over there.
JW: They love it. It’s part of their exquisite sensibilities. I think it’s a good thing.
DRE: I spoke to Gary Panter when Jimbo in Purgatory came out. Something in both your guys’ work seems to connect more with people outside of America.
JW: I think that could be true.
DRE: As you said, you go over there and you’ll eat everything. Did you find that you have more in common with people that aren’t American?
JW: I don’t have anything that I can determine in common with the Japanese. One of the reasons I like going there is because it’s such an alien experience for me. I never know what they’re thinking or what they want or why they do what they do. I enjoy being in Japan because there’s a reason for me not to understand everything. I’ve been to Europe a few times and I may identify with European sensibilities more than mainstream American ones. But I feel pretty at home here in Seattle. I feel like I’m among people who are like me here.
DRE: Certainly you connect with Bill Frisell.
JW: Yeah, we do. It can be difficult to find someone far away with whom you have a common chemistry. I have a better chance of doing it here than I would in Idaho or somewhere.
DRE: How does this artwork fit in with Mysterio Simpatico?
JW: For that project Bill composed music and I did drawings. We discussed some ideas about where the stuff would go and I would go over to his house and listen to him compose some things on his guitar while I drew pictures accordingly. Then he would refine the music and I would refine the drawings. And I turned the music into some kind of filmstrip using that Ken Burns pan and scan approach. Three of the filmstrips were just images that were edited together via pans and fadeouts and truck-ins and truck-outs. Then three of them were pieces of flash animation using more sort of geometric, iconic shapes.
DRE: Did you know how it was going to come out?
JW: No, we didn’t. It was a little bit of an experiment. We assumed that it would work simply because we have similar sensibilities about things, which is what the title refers to. So I didn’t know exactly how well it would work, but I thought that it would work and I think it did. It was kind of a refined connoisseur’s treat. I think that people who go to hear Bill improvise and rock out on guitar didn’t get what they wanted and people who like to pore over drawings didn’t get what they wanted. It existed somewhere between the two and for some people I know it worked really great. I know a number of people who really liked it or at least said they did. Then I know it was totally wasted on some other people. It was art, goddamnit. It was a big, high-faluting art project and if anybody didn’t get it, they can go fuck themselves.
DRE: Were you into a lot of high-faluting people when you were growing up?
JW: No, as a matter of fact, I grew up in cultural isolation. My son has grown up knowing artists and writers just because they’ve been around the house. But when I was growing up, I lived in a town that was so lily-white I didn’t go to school with a black person any of the years I went to school, from kindergarten to high school. I lived in the whitest, the most sterile, most pampered place. It wasn’t pampered like Beverly Hills or anything but it was this upper-middle class, cream of nowhere place. I didn’t know anybody who was interested in anything intriguing or deep or mysterious or artistic or adventurous. It was just work at some job making money, come home, get drunk and have a barbeque. That was it. It was fucked. It was a terrible situation for me; I was beating my head against the wall all the time because I couldn’t relate to anything.
DRE: How did you come to do art from that background?
JW: What happened was is that I’ve always had this vision I’ve wanted to express and I’ve done that ever since I was able to focus from the age of 12 or 13 on. But I really had no idea what kind of career I would or could have as an artist. I didn’t have the sophistication to plan to be a gallery artist or a cartoonist or illustrator; I just worked on trying to learn to draw and to express this vision. I was in my late 20’s when I started self-publishing this thing called Jim, which was this illustrated, autojournal that dealt entirely with inferior issues that I had. I met Gary Groth through my friend Gil Kane and Gary offered to publish Jim if I would put some comics in it. That’s when I started drawing comics. I’d always drawn cartoons, but I hadn’t thought seriously about being a professional cartoonist because I had no idea to go about it. So once the opportunity was offered to me, that’s what I did.
DRE: Is your stuff funny to you?
JW: Sometimes it is. There’s a drawing in Seeing Things called Crash, which shows a skeleton in an airplane about to crash into a great, big, pompous-looking toad. I remember when I drew that; my wife and I laughed ourselves sick over it. We thought it was an absolutely hilarious image. So under those circumstances, yeah I thought that was funny. Unfortunately, I drew that thing on September 9th, 2001. There’s a local tabloid here in Seattle called The Stranger. It used to run my drawings in the back with the ads where nobody would see them. That drawing was slated to run that week and then 9/11 happened two days after I did the drawing. It looked like that drawing referred to 9/11 with the airplanes crashing into things and the skeletons, so I had them pull it. I was afraid if it was printed, it would look like I was making fun of it or something. I came to look at that cartoon with a certain loathing but before that event I thought it was hilariously funny. There are other drawings in that book that I think are really, really terrifying. There’s a drawing called The Holy Land in there, that just upset me when I was doing it because it so perfectly expressed some profound art-related fears that I had. Then there’s a drawing called Good Standing that I was laughing all the time I was drawing and I thought it was funny.
DRE: You’ve been working with Fantagraphics for so long and they really seem to treat you and your work with the respect it totally deserves. Are you able to feel artistically satisfied with the work you do?
JW: Oh sometimes. There are fleeting moments of satisfaction but those are short-lived. I generally feel spurred on by anxiety and a sense that I hadn’t achieved anything. I used to have this really infantile attitude that one day I would create a picture that was so good that would absolve me from all human responsibilities. I always thought that if you were a really great artist or a cartoonist that you didn’t have to worry about anything anymore. You could knock on any door and say, “I’m Jack Davis and I’m hungry and I need a place to sleep” and they’d go, “Jack Davis! Come in.” Or that the government would say, “I was looking at Jack Davis’ income tax return. He’s not doing that well, I think we ought to lower his taxes.” I just had this feeling that if you were a success as an artist that your future would be made. I don’t know why I thought that, like I said, it’s an infantile notion. But that feeling took a long time to fade out. It took me a long time to grasp the fact that people can do work that’s as good as they can possibly do and still end in squalor and despair.
DRE: But that’s not going to happen to you.
JW: Oh, you think not?
DRE: I hope not.
JW: It very well could.
DRE: Do you still do stuff for The Stranger?
JW: I’m through with The Stranger. The new art director fired me in a way that pissed me off, so I don’t think I’ll ever do anything for them again.
DRE: What happened?
JW: He calls me up and goes “I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is, I still like your work and want to use it from time to time. The bad news is that we won’t be needing your cartoons anymore.” I was giving these people the very cream of what I had to offer for a mere 50 bucks a week. They decided that they didn’t need my cartoon anymore. I was so irritated so I think I’m through with them.
DRE: What other commercial work are you doing?
JW: Right now I’m painting a poster with an owl in it for some water conservation group. But I don’t do that much commercial work, really. I just did a CD cover for a friend to put out a band, but I didn’t get paid anything, so I guess it wasn’t really commercial. I just did the image that’s going to go on the cover of this big Ramones box set that Rhino is putting out. It’s called Weird Tales of The Ramones.
DRE: Years ago I visited Barry Windsor-Smith’s house and I expected to see great suits of armor and things like that but it wasn’t like that at all. What kind of artwork do you have in your house?
JW: I have some golden age Dutch painting reproductions like a Vermeer and a Rembrandt. I have some cartoon artwork like the original art for Why I Hate Christians by Dan Clowes hanging up. Also I’ve got a bunch of medical models and scientific equipment. I’ve got a giant statue showing a frog’s nervous system. I have some luminous discharge tubes, other scientific equipment and stuff like that.
DRE: That’s bizarre.
JW: Yeah, there’s not that much of it and it’s a great, big house so it’s kind of spread thin.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
web address: http://suicidegirls.com/words/ Jim Woodring/

2005-09-15T15:41:00.000-07:00

2005-08-02T10:22:00.000-07:00

This American Life's Ira Glass describes the thing that we all do at some point: talk expertly about something we don't actually know anything about. It's so common, explains This American Life Contributing Editor Nancy Updike, some friends of hers invented an imaginary magazine devoted to such blathering. It's called "Modern Jackass."