Author: Don

“All this energy calling me back where it comes from…”

ClevelandCleveland by Harvey Pekar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Probably the only thing Harvey Pekar and I have in common is the city of Cleveland.

It’s supposedly the hipster thing to do nowadays to declare Pekar a genius while admitting you’ve never read his work. Fine, guilty. But at least I’m not one of those folks who came to his work as a direct result of watching the American Splendor biopic (still haven’t seen it, but soon). Anyway, my previous experiences of Pekar were his appearances on David Letterman in the 80s. (As a kid, it seemed for years that the only guests Letterman had were Pekar, Fran Lebowitz, and Howard Stern. More likely, these were the only guests that were memorable, having held my interest and attention.) The fact that he was from Cleveland and talked about Cleveland didn’t mean that much to me at the time.

It’s to my everlasting regret that I never came to underground comics at an earlier age. I just couldn’t brave the densely-drawn comics in “that section” of the comics store where American Splendor, Heavy Metal, and others were shelved, near the porn comics. But better late than never, and I’m glad my first real taste was from Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland.

The fact that the book gives a good-enough history of the City of Cleveland over the years is almost beside the point. It, like most of Pekar’s work in American Splendor is really about Pekar alone and his observations. It just so happens that there are years where his observations on Cleveland and mine coincide.

When he talks about the things that happened in the late 80s/early 90s–Toby Radloff’s 5 minutes of fame, the decline of Cleveland schools to the point where the State of Ohio took them over, the hospitals taking over the local economy, etc.–he’s talking about a time when Cleveland was my home, during years when there was every chance that we might’ve bumped shoulders walking down Coventry, or up the steps of the main branch of the Cleveland Public Library. Some of the times that were his own, like the experience of running up the stairs of Cleveland’s (Old) Arcade, I independently experienced (as did a lot of Clevelanders) 40-some years later. To me, Pekar isn’t to be praised just for speaking general truth, but for speaking some truths that I can verify.

So, I have to give Cleveland a very biased 5* out of 5.

View all my reviews

“…we’ll muddle through, one day at a time”

I’m actively juggling plates.  That, and fighting off whatever Andromeda Strain I might’ve picked up at work, hence the extended absence.  But these are plates that put me more and more in a position of having to (temporarily, at least) set aside the things that threaten to derail my momentum if any of the seeds I’ve sown are to bear any fruit.

I’ve been doing my best giving those things the Dikembe Mutombo treatment when necessary…

…and just taking things one day at a time.

“And as you stay for the play Fantasy has in store for you, glowing light will see you through…”

My brain has finally recharged after my first World Fantasy Convention evar! I met so many people, renewed some old acquaintances, and once again was shown just how much Barcon and Con-Suite-Hallway-Con and people’s individual readings are slowly starting to matter more to me than panel programming. Unless I’m on a panel, of course, which I was!

Here’s what else I learned…

  1. You can’t carry enough business cards at WFC.
  2. Like an air traffic controller from a ’70s disaster movie, I just failed to realize just how much James L. Sutter was on my radar until I met him face to face.
  3. I’ve heard of shitty hotel con bars before, but the bar this year was just, overall, the worst bar ever.
  4. When kids nowadays say, “This is this shit!” they’re talking about Michael J. DeLuca’s chocolate pepper stout home brew.
  5. Speaking of DeLuca, a 7″ tablet full of panel notes is simply no match for his MacBook Pro’s worth of notes.
  6. Speaking of panels, I found that I felt less like a redshirt on the Bibliofantasies panel and more like Chekhov in his first few episodes of ST:TOS.
  7. If there really is such a thing as an “Asian YA Mafia,” I SO want in. Just tell me who I have to whack. Hell, I’ll even start writing YA (maybe).
  8. I really need to write and submit something to Beneath Ceaseless Skies.
  9. After 2 or 3 cons, I finally learned that, yes, I could have a brief conversation with Ted Chiang without my face melting off like I’d just poked the Arc of the Covenant.
  10. If I’m at a con where Cheeky Frawg has a party, I’m so there!
  11. ChiZine throws a mean party, too!
  12. Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders from io9 are every bit as cool as I’d imagined!
  13. The most innovative drunken-snacking invention ever–taco fixings in a Dorito bag! Thanks, Ad Astra!
  14. It’s odd how I could not see someone from my town the whole con, yet it seemed every time I turned around, there was Peter Straub. Kinda like how I barely saw my Dragon*Con roomies two years ago, yet Sylvester McCoy was just everywhere!
  15. Next time, how about saying something when a legendary 40-year veteran of SF/F editing comes into your party room and NOT just sit on the couch, slack-jawed as he walks in, heads for the swag, grabs a book, and walks out?  Gotta say, though, the Dagan Books meetup was still a blast!
  16. “And now it’s time for a breakdown,” as the song goes: Carrie, Wes, Mike, Scott, James, Simon, Eugene, Carol, Michele, Amy, Tina, Helen (and her sister), and the 4 or 5 others (at least) I know I’m forgetting (Sorry!!), you made my con!

“Keep on talking all you want. Well you don’t waste a minute of time…”

Next weekend, I’ll be at the 2012 World Fantasy Convention in Toronto.  Won’t get there until late Thursday, though.  If you aren’t able to find me at the bar, or with the Dagan Books crew, you’ll be able to catch me at Vaughn East at 3:00 pm Friday at my first panel ever…

You’re probably thinking, “There goes the neighborh…” “How did a yahoo like you get on a WFC panel?”  Probably because of the book I co-edited, Bibliotheca Fantastica.

So yes, I am ostensibly relevant to the panel’s interests.  But still, I look at that lineup of my fellow panelists, and all I can think of is…

I switched the lyric from Steve Winwood’s “Freedom Overspill” that I was going to use as the title of this post.  It was originally a line from the bridge…

You got no right going around
Talking ’bout the things that you do

But screw all that because, hey, ZOMGI’mgonnabeonaPANELatWFC!!!ZOMG!!!  So, here I am–rather, there I’ll be–hopefully caffeinated, fighting off my imposter syndrome, and talking about books!

“I’m just looking for clues at the scene of the crime…”

This is a “Proof of life” post.

I do have stuff I could be talking about.  Just don’t quite have the wherewithal yet.  Mostly because it requires a level of organizational thought which I’m not currently capable, since I’m still recovering from whatever Andromeda Strain kept me away from the dayjob last week.

In the meantime, here’s the stuff I’ve been marinating my brain in for the past couple of weeks…

1
You’d think I’d have known, as a comic book guy, that avowed subbie and Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston actually had a hand in creating the polygraph.  I’m truly ashamed that I never knew, or at least never retained that information.

2
My current favorite comedian: W. Kamau Bell.  I’d only kinda sorta heard of him and then a couple of months ago, I’d heard Elvis Mitchell interview Bell on KCRW’s The Treatment.  From there, I caught a couple of episodes of the podcast Bell does with guitarist Vernon Reid, The Field Negro Guide to Arts and Culture, and the first half of the first season of his TV show Totally Biased.

And, it just so happens he was on a recent episode of Marc Maron’s WTF podcast.

3

Modern racism functions not by applying malice, but withholding forgiveness. We write so many rules that compliance is impossible, then enforce them selectively.

4
I am trying to follow some of the advice from the Inkpunks blog on Reigniting the creative fire…
5
6

“That’s just the way it is. Some things will never change…”

Seems like a lot of PBS documentary films set in the Philippines are coming out of the woodwork lately.  A few months ago, I saw Left By the Ship on Independent Lens , and last week on POV, Give Up Tomorrow. That’s awesome!!  Okay, I might be a little biased. 
Give Up Tomorrow was more relatable to me.  Not because anything in my life resembles the predicament of the film’s primary subject, Paco Larrañaga… well, come to think of it, no one’s life could.  Back in the late 90s, well before the social media and just before the 24-hour news cycle, I remember catching the occasional word about the Philippines’ version of “The Trial of the Century.”  I never took the time to learn much about it, thinking it was just some Filipino hyperbole.

From the film’s website…

As a tropical storm beats down on the Philippine island of Cebu, two sisters leave work and never make it home…

GIVE UP TOMORROW exposes a Kafkaesque extravaganza populated by flamboyantly corrupt public officials, cops on the take, and a frenzied legal and media circus. It is also an intimate family drama focused on the near mythic struggle of two angry and sorrowful mothers who have dedicated more than a decade to executing or saving one young man, Paco Larrañaga.

So, no, unlike Paco, I’ve never been convicted and sentenced to death for rape and murder, even though 35 witnesses and at least one photograph place me 350 miles away from the crime scene.  But when I hear the stories of the things the victims’ family and Larrañaga’s family did to try and prove Paco’s guilt or innocence–things people in most civilized countries would call trading in influence, corruption, cronyism, and nepotism–I remembered how I grew up hearing that those sorts of methods were, regrettably, simply “the way things are done.”  Or, in the immortal words of Bruce Hornsby and the Range, “That’s just the way it is.”  In other words, you needed to do what you needed to do in order to get your due in what everyone knows is a broken system.

Because if you think your son is suffering through what you see is a gross miscarriage of justice, and you had the position and influence to take advantage of an international law to get him moved to another country, what might you do?

If you think someone is about to get away with the rape and murder of your children because you fear his family could use their position and influence to do just that, and you have relatives who are cops, or who literally work in the office of the President of the Philippines, or who actually happens to be The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines, what might you do?

The amazing thing about the film is it’s example of how virtually every person in it really does see her or himself as the hero of his or her own story.  From Paco, to the Larrañagas, to the Chiongs (the victims’ family), even down to the judge who gave these bizarre rulings and even fell asleep (yeah, you read that right) at different points during the trial.

Well, except for maybe one person.

Near the end of the film, Paco’s mother berates herself for not having allowed her son to flee the country to the US or Spain (where they have relatives) when the charges were announced, against the advice of virtually everyone around her.  That strategy isn’t so unusual, even for ostensibly innocent people: go on the lam for a bit, maybe to another province or another country, let the heat die down a bit, and let the evidence wind its way through.  But Paco’s mother refused to play that game.  She applied the reasoning that most others would apply: 35 witnesses + 1 photograph = This’ll get straightened out in a jiffy.  And because she made that bet, she continues to ask herself to this day if she was a bad mother.

When people can feel like a failure as a parent for trusting the system, it’s no wonder they think they live in a world where “some things will never change.”

“But behind the chalet, my holiday’s complete…”

Popping my head out of the woodwork (read: out of my ass) again, because it’s been too long.

Stuff going on that’s too personal to report, but what I’d like to do is at least get to the backlog of stuff that isn’t too personal.

Because, you all missed me, right?  Right?

Anywho, can totally relate to Hercules, here.  Suffice it to say that my current struggles are ultimately described perfectly in this picture.

“Kevin Sorbo ain’t got NOTHIN’ on me!”

But don’t worry.  My resolution is to start getting things back into place and, as appropriate, TOSS SHIT INTO SPACE, just Lou Ferrigno does…

“Funny how things come undone…”

As is typical, it’s been weeks since Readercon and I’ve yet to post anything on it.  I have those posts in the works–it’s just been an hard couple of weeks with Life, the Universe, and Everything.  I’ll be honest, I’ve been in my own personal funk.  Given that, posting my con wrapup has been the last thing on my mind. But I find myself so appalled and disgusted with the whole Readercon harassment debacle — I’m still a little too disgusted to rehash it, so here, just read it — that I realized that I’d never get my con posts up unless I talked about this first.

Readercon 23 was my third go-round. I’d been looking forward to it every year since my first because I felt I knew exactly what Huey Lewis was talking about in the song “Finally Found a Home.”  Now, that home is threatened because a Board of Directors couldn’t follow its own rules regarding an asshole who couldn’t keep his hands to himself, resulting in a community backlash of such everlasting gob-stopping proportions that I bet the Catholic Church looks at the backlash they got over their sex abuse scandals and says, “Got’damn, I think we got off kinda light….”

I support those who are willing, depending on the BoD’s willingness to follow certain remedies, to vow never to attend Readercon again.  I also understand that there’s a case — some, via the links above, say multiple cases — to be made for staying away from Readercon whatever the outcome.

I know things need to change.  And I want them to change.  Because I just found this place, goddammit.  I’d finally found a home.  I was learning Readercon’s groove, I was keeping an eye open for ways to become more involved.  Hell, one of my two favorite writers IN THE WHOLE ‘VERSE, a personal inspiration of mine — one of the few inspirations of mine I had not yet met at a Readercon (I’ve now damn near met all of them there) — planned to attend next year.

Or rather, had planned.  I know this because this writer signed the petition pledging not to return unless the BoD followed the remedies specified.  Again, good for that writer and everyone else who followed their conscience and signed!  I wish I shared that particular conviction as much as I share all the rage and disgust. 

And yet the idea of me, personally, taking the position of “You gotta get your shit together, or I walk” feels a little dishonest on my part.  So, what would be honest for me?  Where does that leave me? 

With the uneasy feeling that if I’ve ever had a “Man in the Mirror” moment in my life, this might be it…

The things you think about at 2 am.  

(Sorry, comments are off, and would be even if I wasn’t still in a funk.  ‘Cos this is all just too… yeah, I knew you’d understand.)