September 28, 2003
Tenacious D
I mean really what's not to like?
Although I must point out that Young Nastyman was in fact brought to public consciousness via Alan Moore.
September 26, 2003
Time for Mallrats?
You all knew that I was the Art Director on Mallrats right? Well, I'm selling off a set piece from it on eBay. Go buy it. You'll feel better and our kids can get those groceries they've had their eyes on.
Also for a limited time you can see some of my never-before-seen continuity photos from the Mallrats set.
September 25, 2003
CA Recall
Do you wonder about the CA recall? I've been trying to figure it out since I moved back but thanks that amazing 21st century technology called "cartoons", it all makes sense now. No seriously it really helped me. I need things visual, dammit.
Via Arianna Huffington for Governor
September 22, 2003
eBay is part of it?
Who would have thought that a money making powerhouse like eBay would be in on it? I thought internet corporate powers were kinder and gentler?
arrrgh matey...
After careful consideration we determined that "Gypsy" was just a stupid name for the cat. We got to know her a little bit better and bandied about a few more names until it hit us. I think you can tell from this picture that it should have been obvious all along.
So without further ado...meet Molly Daggers.
September 20, 2003
Zoe's new pal
Mary and the girls volunteered for the car wash fund raiser. They came back with a new kitten. We are thinking about naming her Gypsy Rose Lee. Zoe is a little freaked out. So far Gypsy has shown her the business end of her claws about three times. Okay...how cute is she?
September 19, 2003
Johnny Cash
Why Johnny Cash was so great
-------
Via The Guardian Unlimited
Alone with the Man in Black
I went to do an interview with Johnny Cash - he so moved me that I gave up my job and became a novelist
Louisa Young
Tuesday September 16 2003
The Guardian
So there I was, sitting in Johnny Cash's front room in Hendersonville, Tennessee, about 10 or 12 years ago. He'd been with journalists most of the day and I was the last. A couple, I knew from chatting to them, were hacks with less than no interest in country music. I was worse - I was a fan.
He's looking a little tired, and a little fed up, in a polite way. The room is dim, lots of furniture, glass-fronted cabinets full of June's crystal and cut-glass collection.
"So," I say, "Are you still the Man in Black? Can you tell me why?"
He goes into the stock answer: quoting the song lyrics, about wearing black for the poor and the beaten down. But I know all that - I'm wondering if that's still how he feels, 30 years later. "I mean, are you still doing it?" I ask. "For the same reasons?"
"Now?" he says gently. There's a wry look in his eye. "Now more than ever... "
We get to talking about the evils of the world. I mention a song he recorded: Here Comes That Rainbow Again, by Kris Kristofferson. It's a small drama. A pair of Okie kids, a waitress and some truckers are in a roadside cafe. The kids ask: how much are the candies? "How much have you got?" the waitress replies. "We've only a penny between us". "Them's two for a penny," she lies.
A trucker notices. "Them candies ain't two for a penny," he says, and "So what's it to you?' she replied. Then when the truckers leave "She called 'Hey, you left too much money!' 'So what's it to you?' they replied."
It sounds hokey - but it's not, not the way Cash sang it, and certainly not in its first incarnation - the song is based on an intensely touching scene from Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.
I mention this.
"You know that book?" he says, his face lighting up.
"I love that book," I say. "And you know that book!" Why am I surprised that Johnny Cash has read Steinbeck?
"Know that book?" he says. "I was that book." He smiles at me. It's kind of like being smiled at by Monument Valley, or the Hoover Dam. He pronounces it "Grapesawrath", like Rose of Sharon is pronounced Rosasharn.
"You like that song?" he says, and he pulls over his guitar.
What, really?
He tunes up. I can't quite believe my fortune here. He starts to play, and he sings that song. In his front room. That pure, deep, thundery, reverberating voice, just across from me on the other sofa.
"All that was part of my childhood," he says, when it's over. Then he tells me about the flood when he was a kid, that leads to Five Feet High and Rising. "You like that song?" Yes I do.
He sings it for me.
"What else, now," he says. "You like Man in Black, don't ya?"
Well yes, I do. And I Walk the Line, and the Tennessee Flat-top Box, and the Long Black Veil, and Ring of Fire, and the Ballad of Ira Hayes, and John Henry, and some I'd never heard before.
So, we were there all afternoon, in that shadowy room, and it was one of the finest afternoons I've ever spent, and definitely the worst interview I've ever done. We hardly talked. This is how he's choosing to communicate, I realised. By singing. Which from a singer is not unreasonable - in fact it's possibly more right, more true, than answering interview questions. Also - I turned the tape recorder off. Why? A one-on-one personal Johnny Cash concert on the sofa and you turned the tape off? Why? Answer: because I knew this was not something which could be repeated. Couldn't be, shouldn't be.
He did say one thing I remember: "You have to be what you are. Whatever you are, you gotta be it."
And I came out realising that I didn't want to be a journalist any more.
Although it was journalism that had given me this extraordinary day, I didn't want to be the person oohing and aahing on paper about Kris Kristofferson, John Steinbeck and Johnny Cash. I wanted to be the person writing and making the stuff that makes the other people ooh and ahh. Cash loving Kristofferson's song; Kristofferson loving the way he sang it, both of them loving Steinbeck's book. I wanted to be one of them. Yeah, I know. But I might as well admit it.
Somebody took a photo with my camera of Johnny Cash and me standing grinning outside his house, squinting against the low spring sun. He's in black, I'm in green. He has his arm round my waist. He picked me a daffodil from his front garden, gave me a kiss, and then I went home, to give up journalism, bit by bit, and start trying to be what I was: someone who wanted to create.
I had the daffodil on my desk while I wrote my first book. I still have it - a little dried-up papery ghost of a thing, reminding me that that's what integrity means: being what you are.
Louisa Young's latest book is The Book of the Heart
louisa@louisayoung.demon.co.uk
Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited
September 18, 2003
September 17, 2003
Web design is
I always knew that but with up to FOUR--count 'em Four web designs to choose from there really is no point whatsoever to paying some goddamn web designer for this type of thing.
September 16, 2003
Today...
The funniest thing I heard today was--
"Pirates are the new ninjas."
From Mary Belle.
September 15, 2003
Interview
I know what you were thinking? What makes Shawn tick? Why is he so strange and does he ever grant interviews? Why yes...yes I do. Read it here.
Via Pin-up Heaven
September 12, 2003
When I was 17...
--it really wasn't a very good year. When I was seventeen I was probably drunk and curled around a toilet somewhere in Northeast Minneapolis. I couldn't actually tell you because a lot of 1982 is a blur to me...sorry.
Today Logan is seventeen. Happy Birthday Logan! To commerate the event I've scanned in some early photos of him. Check em out.
September 10, 2003
How the Jews created the comic book industry
Part I: The Golden Age (1933-1955)
"The comic-book industry was built from the ground up at the height of the Great Depression by enterprising American Jews who fashioned a pantheon of the world's most famous superheroes.."
September 08, 2003
A poem by Carolyn
Carolyn is 10 and wise and beyond her years. She wrote this in the back of her notebook.
Chamber of chambers
Love of loves
Secrets of secrets
Above and beyond
Past the city
Through the valley farms
On to the woods where the patience and pride lay.
Past all rainbows, clouds and planes
Past violence, gossip, controversy and fame
Through Earth and through sky
Through the willows of dark sky
With stars floating by.
Beyond the heavens, through Gods light,
Through positive thinking
Through pride, power, love and care
Through support and drive
Though everything true,
Through every place with dim lights,
open branches and dew.
Through sticks and stones
Through passes of shine.
Now everything is still…
Do you think it’s fine?
September 05, 2003
Holy cross franchising Batman!
Once again the geek in me rises to the top...
If you are like me; you've always wondered what would happen if they made a GOOD Batman movie. You know, with a realistic costume, a Joker without Jack Nicholson's weight and scenery chewing problems, and of course what would happen if Batman had to fight the titular characters from Predator and Alien.
Unlike most of us Sandy Collara actually did something about it with his short film Batman: Dead End.
September 03, 2003
Elvis and Me?
I'm listening to music this morning 'cuz the Marys went to beach and the kids are at school. It's the first time I've been alone since we moved here. I came across this Lisa Marie Presley cover of Don't Cry Daddy.
I have to admit when Natalie Cole did her duet with Nat a few years back- it made me kind of nauseous. For some reason this Lisa Marie and Elvis duet made me feel horribly nostalgic?
It was so strange to hear it. As any late 60's/early 70's child of divorce can tell you; that song always makes you think of having "the conversation" with one or both of your parents just before your dad moves out.
You know the old standbys- It's not your fault, don't feel bad, daddy has to move out or mommy will be forced to kill him in his sleep etc.....