American Splendor, comic book movie, and hidden rant

First off the hidden rant about job hunting... read at your own risk ;-)

( Read more... )

Whew! Now back to our regularly scheduled program.

American Splendor - a movie about Harvey Pekar's life based upon comic books about Harvey Pekar's life. American Splendor (the comic not the movie) by Harvey Pekar and assorted artists, (notably one R. Crumb) is one in a long line of underground adult reality comics. Reality comics are very different from most mainstream comics in that they are based on the real life of the writers or people writers have observed. Nothing really fanciful happens in these comic books. There are no superheros, elves, or magicians. It's real life baby and it can be ugly. Often depressing. Sometimes sleazy. Most of these comics show us the underbelly of life, the ordinary day-to-day crap.

Comics and artists that fall within this arena include, but aren't limited to:
Harvey Pekar and American Splendor
Ghost World
Stranger Than Paradise
R.Crumb's work
Felix the Cat (somewhat crass and pornographic)
Maus - art speiglemen's work (deals with the Holocaust except with the figures looking like mice and cats)

Most people think comics are superhero kid fare and limited to X-Men, Superman, Spiderman, and Batman characters. Ah.
Sorry. Nope. If you think that? Get thee to a comic book store post haste!

American Splendor, the movie, is an interesting mix of documentary, regular film, and comic book animation. The use of the three mediums makes it possible for the viewer to enter Harvey Pekar's mindset. We see how Pekar views himself, how his artists view him, how his wife views him and how outsiders do. We get all points of view. We also get an inside look at the making of art - both comics and film and the exploitation of that art through mediums such as the David Letterman show. Letterman and MTV make fun of nerds and slackers like Harvey and his friends. Yet seem completely unable to grasp where Harvey and friends are coming from and may as a result be out of touch with a good portion of their audience. The movie shows us the mundane absurdity of Harvey's life.

He is a talented and intelligent writer working as a file clerk in a hospital. He has a small two bedroom house stockpiled with his collections which range from records to comic books. Most of his life consists of collecting, slubbing around Cleveland, Ohio which seems to always be the same shade of dull gray. The humor in his comics comes from the absurd situations of ordinary life. Examples: the old lady in the super-market line who insists on arguing with the cashiere about the price on every item no matter how cheap or expensive it is. The friend who feels the need to drive 120 miles just to see The Revenge of The Nerds - b/c he is a nerd and wants validation. OR his new wife - whom he meets when she writes him to ask for the latest issue of American Splendor. He loves her writing style. They start a correspondence. Meet. And two hours later after throwing up in his bathroom, she says they should get married.

One of the people I saw this film with - said it skeezed her, just like Ghost World did. She's an upbeat person and found a film on such...a slacker's life to be depressing.
I disagreed. I found it oddly up-lifting. Harvey unlike the characters in Ghost World isn't lost or even a loser. * SPOILER WARNING* ( Read more... )

He may not have looks, money, or any of those other things our media tells us equals success. But he has love. He has friends. He is able to publish his art and express himself through it. This in of itself is really all the success you need.
Harvey's curmudgonly appearance and attitude misleads us at first, but as the film peels back the layers of Harvey's personality - we begin to see how truly warm and cool Harvey is. The curmudgon is only the cover. It's a nice change from those films where the cover is bright and glistening, with beautiful stars, sappy romance - but when you open it? 0 substance. American Splendor? All substance.

Ugh!! I changed to MSN8 recently and it keeps disconnecting me after an hour. Highly annoying. Hopefully this will post!

Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies

Doing something I don't ordinarily do - starting with a poem which currently fits my mood, by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

http://lennon.pub.csufresno.edu/~kds31/mil3.html

Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies

Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age
The child is grown, and puts away childish things.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.

Nobody that matters, that is. Distant relatives of course
Die, whom one never has seen or has seen for an hour,
And they gave one candy in a pink-and-green stripéd bag,
or a jack-knife,
And went away, and cannot really be said to have lived at all.

And cats die. They lie on the floor and lash their tails,
And their reticent fur is suddenly all in motion
With fleas that one never knew were there,
Polished and brown, knowing all there is to know,
Trekking off into the living world.
You fetch a shoe-box, but it's much too small, because she won't
curl up now:
So you find a bigger box, and bury her in the yard, and weep.
But you do not wake up a month from then, two months
A year from then, two years, in the middle of the night
And weep, with your knuckles in your mouth, and say Oh, God! Oh, God!
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies that matters,
—mothers and fathers don't die.

And if you have said, "For heaven's sake, must you always
be kissing a person?"
Or, "I do wish to gracious you'd stop tapping on the window
with your thimble!"
Tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow if you're busy having fun,
Is plenty of time to say, "I'm sorry, mother."

To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died,
who neither listen nor speak;
Who do not drink their tea, though they always said
Tea was such a comfort.

Run down into the cellar and bring up the last jar of raspberries;
they are not tempted.
Flatter them, ask them what was it they said exactly
That time, to the bishop, or to the overseer, or to Mrs. Mason;
They are not taken in.
Shout at them, get red in the face, rise,
Drag them up out of their chairs by their stiff shoulders and
shake them and yell at them;
They are not startled, they are not even embarrassed; they slide
back into their chairs.

Your tea is cold now.
You drink it standing up,
And leave the house.

Been thinking about childhood lately...now that I'm at least 16 years past it. And my little brother is going to have a baby. Auntie shadowkat. Weird ring to it. (I shouldn't say anything of course - might jinx it.) While I appear to be reaching that age where if I don't have kids, I never will. Not overly upset about that, strangely enough. But it got me thinking about childhood... How time seemed drag on so. Days lasted forever. Weeks. Months. I'd never ever grow up. Never get out of high school. Never make it through that class. Or the long hot sweat drenched summers at the local pool. Now much older - time seems to jump by when I'm not looking. Suddenly I'm at midlife and I've done nothing I think to show for it. Where has my childhood gone?? My dreams? My fantasies? Those days I sat telling myself stories in my room or listening to the radio watching my Siamese cat named Simon, long dead these 20 years. The days I explored tunnels and creeks and made mud-pies and picked raspberries...and told ghost stories in forts made of blankets.

[Discussion of a remembered childhood death ensues...like the poem]( Read more... )

But it's not just death - I feel in this poem, but a wistfulness, a despair at growing older, an odd nostalgia for easier or if not easier, less responsible times. How the adult often forgets the trauma of the child. Just as Catherine Madison, in the BTVS S1 episode the Witch, believed her high school days were the best. She would do anything to relive those pristine days when she was head cheer leader . I had a friend as a child, also back in PA, whose parents met in high school, to them their best years were the high school years. They'd never moved past those years. He was the most popular boy. She was the most popular girl. As adults they struggled to recapture that brief time in their lives. And they were always telling their children that high school was the best years of your life. My parents believed college and the adult years were - high school they said was brief and for most traumatic (they were right in my case, I barely remember those years and have 0 desire to relive them, in a way my mother was more like Buffy's with no desire to be the high school girl again, while my best friend's was Catherine Madison wishing she could, possibly through her daughter.) No it's not high school I feel nostalgic for, so much as childhood - that gentler, more innocent time, before I realized how different boys were from girls. Or knew what a period meant - outside of the punctuation mark at the end of a sentence. Those years before puberty set in and all the raging hormones. My mother of course does not remember my childhood quite as rosily as I do...perhaps because our memories protect us? Preserve what we wish them to preserve? I don't know. Yet, even within those memories, dark shadows hide, shadows like the boy on the bicycle who died so tragically (which I discuss in the hidden section above) or the vague shadows that break into that sunny innocence and force us to grow up just a little. Truth is, no matter how much better the past looks in hindsight, it isn't really. It's just blurred is all.