Graffiti from Melrose Ave in West Hollywood. Whether you interpret this picture of Landobama Calrissian as an idealistic president's frustration with the economic situation he inherited, or disillusionment on the part of Democrats who wanted more from an Obama first term, I think we can all agree that Romney could not rock a cape and blaster like that.
Here's hoping the same artist does Biden Lobot soon.
Posted without comment: photos from a ten-hour drive through Colorado and Utah, including an unplanned scenic detour along 40 West.
And that weird Ralph-Steadman-meets-Geico-commercial sign for the Gonzo Inn, our lodging for our three nights in Moab? That's posted way without comment.
Boulder remains suspiciously nice. Cyclists, multistory independent bookstores, temperatures below eighty degrees. Even the homeless people seem to be more street performers than living indictments of capitalism; one guy has memorized every ZIP code in America, another contorts himself into a transparent plastic box, and another plays a cello while balancing on it.
Today we drove up to Estes Park for a morning horseback ride. I told Dad that this probably would not come up, but if I was thrown from my horse and fell into a coma forever, he had my go-ahead to turn off the life support. The horse in front of me enjoyed releasing a long fart every time my horse caught up to it, but apart from that nothing bad happened.
Estes Park is also home to the Stanley Hotel:
Some literary history: in 1974, horror novelist Stephen King hit some writer's block while trying to start his third book. On his publisher's advice, he went for a vacation. September found him driving through Estes Park with his wife and son. With the road west through the Rockies already blocked by snow, the Kings turned to the Stanley. It was still a summer hotel in those days, and Steve and his family happened to drive up on the very last night that the Stanley was open for guests. They checked into room 217, Steve's writer's block vanished like an apparition, and the palatial-but-spooky building was immortalized as the basis for the haunted Overlook Hotel in The Shining.
I remarked to Dad that if they'd had online hotel bookings in those days, the world probably would have been deprived of Jack Nicholson's ax-waving shenanigans.
Some TV history: Stephen King returned to the Stanley to shoot the 1997 ABC miniseries, Stephen King's The Shining, which followed the plot of the book more closely than Stanley Kubrick's film.
Scenes from Dumb and Dumber were also shot at the Stanley. Apparently Jim Carrey also stayed in room 217 for three hours, then emerged in a panic and relocated to a nearby guest house for the remainder of shooting. He never publicly said what he saw in there.
Here are some shots from yesterday's drive through Kansas:
Farm!
Self-aware antique truck!
Wind farm!
Sunflowers!
Here's what the remaining 430 miles of I-70 looked like:
Not pictured: an unironic billboard painting of Jesus staring out of a cornfield at oncoming drivers. Children of the Corn ain't just for Nebraska anymore!
Everyone at the fly-infested McDonald's in Burlington, CO, right across the border, looked as shell-shocked from Kansas as we were.
Remembering a happier meal in Kansas City.
But then we sighted the Rockies and our weekend stopping point at Boulder. So far it's suspiciously nice here. More findings later.
A rain storm headbutted us this morning as we continued west on I-70, crossing into Illinois. The late essayist, fiction writer, and tennis prodigy David Foster Wallace grew up in Illinois and described it as consisting mostly of violent weather patterns and corn, and we saw nothing to belie this.
Stopped for a late breakfast at a Cracker Barrel east of St. Louis. At the table next to ours, an older couple was in the process of telling their son, Jerry, that they were cutting him off. Parents: if you are looking for a public place where you can take your twentysomething son and toss him into the churning waters of financial independence without the risk of his knocking the table over or otherwise making a scene, consider your local Cracker Barrel.
Drove through St. Louis and Cool Valley, MO, which I can only presume is the birthplace of both Miles Davis and the Fonz.
Also visited the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, MO. No joke, it was an informative museum that solicited visitors' opinions and debate on the many controversial choices that defined the Truman presidency. With political discourse having taken a turn for the kneejerk in recent years, it's nice to see an ex-president encouraging critical thinking skills from beyond the grave. The late President Truman, his wife, and their daughter are buried on site, like the pharaohs of old.
Saw The Dark Knight Rises after checking into the hotel. Dad's first time, my third. Missouri frogs are adventurous devils and will sometimes occupy your car while you're seeing a movie.
It did not seem to be an eats-people frog like in Stephen King's "Rainy Season".
Next, we visit another Stephen King staple: Boulder, Colorado.
After a rollicking eleven days on the east coast visiting family and friends in PA and DC and seeing a little late-night Satanic blues rock showdown play that I wrote (and which you can totally still catch, DC friends!), I'm returning to LA. But I'm not going alone!
My Dad, Jim Sullivan, has joined me in loading up our 2009 Toyota Prius with comics and artwork and driving it across these United States, which is something I have wanted to do ever since I read Denny O'Neill and Neal Adams' comics about Green Arrow and Green Lantern doing basically the same thing in the 1970s.
This may happen.
Today we drove west for some ten hours down route 70, from Glenside to Indianapolis. Highlights from the road include:
-a speeding ticket
-a sign advertising the Creation Museum
-a dead deer
-a weirdly defensive billboard advertising coal: "Wind dies. Sun sets. Nuclear?"
-the Rushing Wind Biker Church
-an Indiana marching band practicing in what the Prius identified as 102 degree heat
-trucks carrying weird crap from recycled kitchen grease to airplane wings
Airplane wing!
Before storming our hotel and demanding beer, we visited the Indiana World War Memorial Plaza, which includes a breathtaking shrine and a museum with an assortment of uniforms and weapons dating back to the American Revolution, plus enough period reprints of propaganda posters to wallpaper Captain America's two-bedroom hi-rise.
Jim Sullivan, dwarfed, as all men are, by the War Memorial.
Also impressive: the Soldiers and Sailors Monument.
"No actually, [Darkseid is] not the most powerful, but he's the most relentless. In other words, Darkseid is strictly a first-rater. I don't classify gods as far as their power goes. I classify them as far as their personality goes. Each god, if he used his power right, could defeat another god. If I used my power right I could defeat anyone on Earth if I wanted to. As a man, if I used my physical strength at its best, I could overpower anybody I wanted to. If I did it right."
-Jack Kirby, in a 1971 Train of Thought interview
One of many reasons you should read Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus. Someone make "I could defeat anyone on Earth if I wanted to" into a motivational poster.
Returned to LACMA yesterday to see if it still rocked. It does.
Spent more time in the modern art wing, which has giant stacks of plates, a giant video projection of a man moving his fingers while talking about moving his fingers, an observation deck that you can reach via a large elevator in a shaft filled with angry pop art and Orwell quotations, and this Nam June Paik video installation, Video Flag Z:
DC friends, Nam June Paik is the artist behind the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Electronic Superhighway, so seeing more of his work produced a nice, homey feeling.
But the real modern art party started with this motherfucker:
Metropolis II refuses to be contained in one shot.
Metropolis II was completed last year by Chris Burden (he who created Urban Light, the forest of lampposts in front of LACMA) and eight assistants. It's basically a model train set for Hot Wheels as built by comic book artists of the sixties and seventies during an acid trip.
There is a Metropolis 1 somewhere. It's not like that prank where you release mole rats into an office building with "1", "2", and "4" painted on their sides.
According to LACMA, "It includes eleven hundred custom-designed cars, eighteen highways, and a variety of architectural structures made of wood, glass, natural stone tiles, and other materials."
Metropolis II laughs at your efforts to photograph it.
"The artist estimates that every hour, one hundred thousand cars circulate through Metropolis II, making it very much like a miniature Los Angeles."
This thing is just begging for a world-weary cop and a crooked museum trustee to have a climactic fistfight inside it.
During my visit, whatever engine propels the miniature cars seemed to be turned off. Traffic along the eighteen highways was at an utter standstill, making it very much like a miniature Los Angeles at rush hour.
"Your name?" said the police car in a metallic whisper. He couldn't see the men in it for the bright light in his eyes.
"Leonard Mead," he said.
"Speak up!"
"Leonard Mead!"
"Business or profession?"
"I guess you'd call me a writer."
"No profession," said the police car, as if talking to itself.
-Ray Bradbury, "The Pedestrian"
No joke: Ray Bradbury spent most of his life in Los Angeles without ever learning to drive. "The Pedestrian" is based on an incident in which he was walking down Wilshire Boulevard with friends and police rolled up and questioned them, because who the hell walks anywhere in LA?
"Ten blocks of that, winding down curved rain-swept streets, under the steady drip of trees, past lighted windows in big houses in ghostly enormous grounds, vague clusters of eaves and gables and lighted windows high on the hillside, remote and inaccessible, like witch houses in a forest. I came out at a service station glaring with wasted light, where a bored attendant in a white cap and a dark blue windbreaker sat hunched on a stool, inside the steamed glass, reading a paper. I started in, then kept going. I was as wet as I could get already. And on a night like that you can grow a beard waiting for a taxi. And taxi drivers remember." -Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
Someone must've heard my incessant references to Amazing Spider-Man #33, because last night my friend Chad invited me to the red carpet premiere of The Amazing Spider-Man, a movie for which my excitement stemmed almost entirely from the video above. Say what you will about how comics and movies don't need to keep rehashing origin stories, but Andrew Garfield is clearly a guy who gets Spider-Man and cares about the character, and that goes a long way with me.
Plus, free popcorn!
The premiere was in Westwood, near UCLA. I took a few pictures of the crazy premiere ambiance, but didn't get any action shots of the time I tipped a large machine over onto Mr. Garfield so I could watch him escape while delivering an inspirational speech, nor did I photograph our subsequent team-up after we resolved our petty differences to fight a common evil. J. Jonah Jameson would have my head.
Spider-van, spider-van! Does whatever a...I'm sorry.
The view from the front of the line.
This was the theater with the stars in it.
There were two theaters, one for talent and one for us. The producers, director (the aptly-named Marc Webb) and cast did pop in to our theater to say "Hi" right before the film got going, though.
This past weekend I had the good fortune to attend the Six Seasons and a Movie Art Show hosted by the PixelDrip Gallery in Koreatown. The trailer above explains it better than I can, but basically the event was a collection of fan art celebrating the cult NBC sitcom Community. To say I am a fan of Community is similar to saying that Captain America did not take a shine to Hitler. Anyone who has heard me fail to shut up about this consistently heartfelt and innovative series knows that it is a big part of why I love television, and yesterday afternoon I got to hang out in a gallery filled with fans and artists who felt the same way, and most of whom were as talented as all hell.
Come with me on a magical camera phone tour! Be warned. We're about to look at a bunch of fan art that references a sitcom that references its own references to TV and film tropes. If you're not a fan of the show, it'll get confusing in there. Keep tight hold of my hand.
You enter through a Dreamatorium, so right away you know these guys aren't playing:
The art show, while in many ways a celebration of Community's narrowly escaping cancellation this past season, was also something of a wake for series creator Dan Harmon, who was recently fired by NBC after three seasons as showrunner. Here's a piece called Harmonless, by Harmon's Channel 101 co-founder Rob Schrab:
Note the reference to the Dan Harmon/Chevy Chase phone feud in the background.
Luckily there will be some continuity in the writers' room when Community resumes in the fall. Megan Ganz, who wrote some of the series's best episodes, including "Cooperative Calligraphy" and "Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking", will still write for the show. She also contributed a ton of origami sculptures that she made during meetings, fittingly entitled Meeting Notes.
If Ganz were any more my hero, she'd be Batman.
I only caught the tail end of the weekend-long event, but activities included a live band, electronic remixes of music from the sitcom, viral video screenings (this Dark Knight Risestrailer mashup was my favorite), trivia, a Winger Speech contest, and my favorite, textbooks that attendees could deface with their own doodles, just like unenthused students at Greendale Community College!
A Darkest Timeline lemur. The evil goatee is from the Community episode "Remedial Chaos Theory",
which itself references the old Star Trek episode "Mirror, Mirror". See what I mean?
Inspector Spacetime inspects the cover of this Spanish textbook.
There were plenty of other shout-outs to the show, like Boob-a-tron here:
And this playable demo for Journey to the Center of Hawkthorne:
The references continued into the men's room:
Extras aside, there was some bloody marvelous art on display. The show officially became nerdy enough for me when I saw John Trumbull's picture combining Troy and Abed with Jack Kirby villains MODOK and Arnim Zola:
My new favorite artist from the show is Jennifer Jeong. The works she had on display were crisp and cartoony in a way that nailed the spirit of the series for me. Check out her Evil Abed:
Here's a more elaborate picture by the same artist: Remedial Chaos Theory, an ensemble portrait commemorating season three's best episode.
Check out how simple and different all the individual expressions are: Shirley's indignation, Pierce's sinister good humor, Abed's contemplative puzzlement, Jeff's "Couldn't give a shit" look, Annie's wariness, Troy's defiant candy-cigarette-chewing, and Britta's happy, awkward abandonment. It's an intricate picture with a ton of heart, and for me it shares those qualities with Community itself.
But really, there was never any question about which of Ms. Jeong's prints was going to end up on my wall:
Inspector Spacetime is Community's thinly-veiled version of the long-running British sci-fi series Doctor Who, so this action shot of Abed, Troy and Annie reenacting an Inspector Spacetime adventure is basically a portrait of the baby my two favorite shows had.
Needless to say I'm glad I went. The talent on display was an inspiration, and basking in a room full of love of a television show that is itself based on a love of television...well, it felt communal.
