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July 16, 2010 03:45American Blender
Every time a celebrity dies, the movie-night crowd knows to brace themselves for something from their filmography -- assuming it was someone connected in some way, shape or form to the movie biz. I hate being predictable like that, but I just have to face facts. I'm a star-fucker necrophile, and I'm not likely to change my ways at this stage of the game. Despite my pathological determination to expose the Wednesday night guinea pigs to forgotten B-movies every time some obscure cult actor kicks off (Vampira, anyone?), I make no apologies for this past Wednesday.
Comic book author/legend Harvey Pekar died this week. And I always felt he was something of a kindred spirit. Not because we had both been at San Diego at the same time, hawking our independent-comic publications, or because we're both cynical depressives who married our own groupies. But because Paul Giamatti played Harvey in the movie adaptation of American Splendor and everyone says I look like Paul Giamatti. Paul looked a lot like Harvey in the movie, so I guess that means I kinda look like Harvey Pekar by one degree of separation. Lucky me, I know.
So obviously I had to run American Splendor on Wednesday. Now that that's out of the way, I figure next Wednesday I can run another biopic -- something like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Because I totally look like Brad Pitt too. I swear, it's like looking in a mirror. A broken mirror covered with toothpaste spittle in a steamy bathroom. 
For all my Italian-speaking readers (hey, Morena!) there's a new article about Longshot Comics by Maria Caro over at ziguline. My understanding of what was said is limited to the power of free online translation sites. Not always the best way to grasp the nuances of what's being said, if my own words from the comic's introduction, interpreted and bounced back at me through the filter, are any indication.
"Like many other ideas, came to me in mind while I was under the shower… I found myself in feet on the platform of ceramics, knot and insaponato. Not tried of figurarvi the scene, is not a beautiful image. Me I was some there, with struck on struck that liberations in my head bloomed, and nothing paper and pen in order to annotate them."
Following the Italian edition of The Long and Unlearned Life of Roland Gethers, folks in Italy love me almost as much as the Germans do. All I need to do now is get big in Japan and I'll have won the former-axis-power trifecta. That should be easy enough once I redo the Longshot art so all the dots have giant eyes. Before that happens, however, there may be other Longshot translations in the works. Details will be blogged about when there's official paperwork.
July 03, 2010 12:19Stupid Planet Broke My Phone
Says Canada, "Hey, did you feel the earthquake we had last week? It rattled my windows and made one of the paintings on my wall slightly crooked. They say it was a 5.0 on the Richter scale. It was really scary."
Replies Haiti, "Fuck you."
More annoying than the excited buzz about the earthquake a few of us in our sparsely populated country actually felt, was the fact that my phone line went dead for half an hour afterwards. When it came back, there was static on the line that got worse and worse until, nearly a full week later, I had to call up Bell and speak to a very nice computer who dispatched a technician to come and fix it. And by fix it, I mean replace everything, because the earthquake had rattled some shoddy workmanship loose, drawing attention to the fact that the whole thing was held together with tissue and spit.
And speaking of shoddy workmanship, it left me kind of surprised there was no actual measurable damage to Montreal's mafia-built infrastructure. Usually it needs little to no encouragement to fall down, particularly when people are standing under it. Looking at it funny, or sneezing within ten city blocks of it usually suffices. I guess it goes to show that, as seismic events go, this one was a bit of a non-starter. The technician who fixed my phone line didn't even know we'd had an earthquake the week before, and looked vaguely confused when asked if he'd done any other earthquake-related repairs lately.
While Montrealers went about their post-earthquake business in that je-ne-give-a-shit-pas sort of way, either failing to notice the shaking at all, or assuming it was the people in the next apartment over having vigorous French-Canadian sex, Toronto, true to form, panicked. Entire office buildings were evacuated just in case there was any real danger of someone spilling their coffee. This is the same city that calls the military when it snows. Snows in Canada. Really. Not a joke. The entire rest of the country still points and laughs about that one. Oh Toronto, you know we only tease you because we all hate you so very very much...
Anyway, yeah. Earthquake. No big deal. Phone line fixed. No charge because it was all outside stuff. But if you tried to call with a big job offer last week and all you heard was static, do call back soon. Eyestrain Productions wasn't disinterested, merely broken.
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