Monday, December 17, 2012

Staring at Slides of David in Art 101 

This is creation,
he says,
a work of art out of rubble.
Imagine Michelangelo
chiseling masterworks of the human form
from what amounts to a lump of rock,
a rock teetering on the edge of a cliff,
waiting for the coyote to come along
and push it over the edge,
only for said coyote
to trip and fall and somehow end
up underneath the falling boulder
and they fall together,
fall long enough for the coyote
to pull out a sign saying
“yelp” or “help” or “wouldn’t you just know it?”
before he hits the ground
before the boulder hits him
and together they hit the earth hard,
but the coyote slinks out from underneath
as flat as a pancake
in time to see the dastardly 
road runner speeding by
only to stop long enough
to stick out his tongue--beep, beep--
in a mocking gesture--meep, meep--
only so the coyote can rise
accordion-like--phoenix-like--
from the rubble to do it all again,
but next time he’ll build his own wings
and glide on air, hovering 
over the road runner for miles and miles
only to fly into 
the side of a mountain.

This is what art takes,
he says,
pain and failure
and the ability to get up and do it all again
and for nothing, for no monetary gain whatsoever.
Ah, the coyote, the wild and wily coyote,
a truly respectful figure,
someone out of the days of chivalry,
an idealized form, a person,
a Don Coyote,
whom we all should aspire to.
Forget the fact  
he never gets what he wants,
he never gives up
and there is the art,
there is creation.

But that’s the trouble, isn’t it,
he says,
the never giving up?
It’s not easy to sustain such an attitude
after years and years of pain and failure.
But you must remember
the years and years of pain and failure
will eventually pay off,
maybe not in financial rewards,
but personal rewards,
personal triumphs.
Someone, somewhere, one day,
will see what you have done
and they will respond.
But remember,
the years and years of pain and failure
lead the way to art
and art leads
the way to life.

So I say, to myself,
Is that why you're here, oh Yoda
lecturing us about art 
instead of creating it? 
 

Saturday, December 8, 2012

In defense of future posts

"Advice From the Experts"

I lay down in the empty street and parked
My feet against the gutter's curb while from
The building above a bunch of gawkers perched
Along its ledges urged me don't, don't jump.

                                              --Bill Knott

I don't write a lot of poetry. Mainly because I'm not very good at it. And yet, I can't stop writing it.

Poetry is unappreciated in today's world. Not under. Un. Unappreciated to the point of obsolescence. That much is obvious. I get it. I do. But it's a shame, really. Poets used to be highly regarded citizens. The word of a poet could change the world. But that's all disappeared. Writers, in general, have loss their influence. Books, too. No one seems to want to learn anything anymore, not since we've been able to open up a Search engine and find what we're looking for within a few seconds. That's not knowledge. That's laziness. Here's the things: thanks to the Internet, there's so much information out there, more than we've ever had access to before. It's too bad all we use it for is porn and pictures of cats. The cats! The cats!

I'm not any better than anyone else when it comes to laziness (for example, abusing the Internet for a laugh when I really should be writing). But, dang it, there's so much potential at our fingertips.

With our increasingly short attention spans and our need for a quick fix (thanks, again, to the Internet), poetry as an art form should shine on the Internet. Got ten minutes? Pull up a poem. It's that simple. It's that complicated. 

There are poetry phone apps out there. And that's good. But the only people who most likely know about them already read poetry to begin with.

Poetry, like comic books (whoa, where'd that come from?), needs better marketing. (Now that is a phrase I never thought I would say. But there it is.)

In the future, we will all wear sterile silver clothing. No, wait, that's not what I meant.

In the future, I plan to highlight some of my favorite modern(ish) poets who I feel are worth anyone's time and effort to read. And by modern I mean contemporary poets not modernist poets (although a few will more than likely creep in).

Like Bill Knott, for instance.

Poetry seems to be synonymous with "pretentious," with "boring." If people think about it at all. But it doesn't have to be boring. People seem to forget poetry can be funny. Granted, some might disagree with me there, having their own opinion of what "real" or "true" poetry is, but it's true. Poetry can by funny. And fun. Like a trip Cedar Point. Or the Moon. Fun!

And that's what I hope these future blog post will be. Fun.

Remember: a poem a day keeps Alzheimer's at bay.

Tuesday, August 7, 2012


Here's a story I wrote for another, uh, story. It was written as a bedtime story a father told his daughter. It didn't quite fit in the story. At all, really. I'm not sure how successful a story it is on its own, either. Of course all the stuff about Mali and the Sahara are actually from the father's POV, not mine. So, please, don't take this as my personal feelings on Mali and its people.

I was going to rewrite it a bit, clean it up a bit, but then I thought screw it. I did cut a few references to the daughter and made it a little less dad-telling-his-daughter-a-story-ish. No one is going to read it anyway. So here it is. For no one.


Good evening. You look all snug and comfy in your bed. Bet you feel nice and warm under the covers, don’t you? Well, tonight’s story doesn’t come from a book, so there are no pictures for me to show you, you’re going to have to see the words, see the pictures, on your own. Close your eyes. Just try to see the what I am saying. It’s not hard. Ready?

What I see is sand. Hills and valleys full of sand. And a deep blue sky. Can you see that? Now open your ears and listen to the history of a certain man and what he did to help others.

In the deserts of Mali, there is no water to drink.

Mali is a part of the Sahara, one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. It is so dry nothing grows there. For miles and miles all anyone can see is sand. And for miles and miles there is not a drop of water to drink. Water, as I’m sure you know, is why we are all here on this planet. We are all water people. It’s good for everything. We can drink it. We can cook with it. We can swim in it. It keeps us alive. Well, unfortunately, not everyone has enough to drink. That’s a bad thing.

A long time ago a man set out from Mali to look for water for his people. When he left, his name was Nabo the Foolhardy. No one believed in him. They all thought they had seen the last of Nabo. He wandered the desert for a long time, finding nothing, nothing at all. 

Until one day he found a frog. 

Frogs, you see, are full of good things, even though people may tell you different. You can’t get warts and they can’t get stuck in your throat. They're harmless and they’re special. He watched this frog for hours, until, as the sun began to sleep, the little frog hopped away. But the frog had left something behind. No, no, it’s not what you think. You know what that frog left behind? 

Water. 

Water in the sand that had seeped from its skin. So, Nabo the Foolhardy grabbed all the frogs he could find. Now, this wasn’t easy mind you. There just are not that many frogs in the desert. In fact, it was a task that took him several years, but he managed to collect enough frogs for a little experiment. And you know what he did with all those frogs? 

He took them for a walk. 

He walked long and far, through sand and dry river beds where the mud was too thick to drink for humans but the frogs soaked up all the moisture,all the water that was still in the mud and then when he saw that the dry river bed was even dryer than when he started he picked up one frog, brought it to his lips, and squeezed. Not too hard, though, he didn’t want to kill the kind frog, but he squeezed just hard enough that water came spilling through the frog’s skin. And Nabo drank and drank until his thirst was quenched. 

Then, he smiled. 

He gathered up all his frogs and went back home. When the villagers saw him coming over a hill, they rejoiced and then they laughed. They rejoiced that he was alive but they laughed, for they saw what was following him. As Nabo came down the hill, he was followed by hundreds and hundreds of frogs. A few of the people didn’t laugh. A few screamed “It’s the plague, the plague” and ran away forever. But Nabo calmed the rest and answered all their questions and showed them the miracle of the frogs. 

No longer was Nabo known as the Foolhardy. He was Nabo the Great and he lived a long, happy life as a hero to his people. 

Today, if you go to the center of Mali, you’ll find Nabo’s Frog Farm, a fenced-in, tarp-covered pen holding thousands of hopping frogs, one for each member of the village. One frog supplies enough water for one person for an entire year! That’s how the people of Mali have survived for a thousand years.




Saturday, July 28, 2012

Mandrake, the Phantom, and Elizabeth Falk


A few months ago I had the privilege of talking with Elizabeth Falk, the widow of Lee Falk, creator of the Phantom and Mandrake the Magician, at the Boston Comic Con. There were a lot of great people to see there (I'm still bummed I didn't get a chance to talk to Peter Bagge--Hate was my Indy comics gateway drug--but them's the breaks) but the only one I really talked to was Mrs. Falk.

I was aware she was his widow but my friend was not. He asked if she was his daughter, which made me want to hide my face but it's a fair enough question. She was about twenty years younger than he was when they married. She still looks great, by the way.

In its day, Mandrake the Magician was as well known as Spider-Man or Garfield. It depends on how you look at things but Mandrake could be considered the first "superhero" in comics. His superpower was making people believe anything he wanted them to, simply by making a gesture. The strip began in 1934, four years before Superman. Not only that but the Phantom, who is without superpowers and relies on his strength and wits, was created in 1934, five years before Batman. It's hard to say who came first and maybe it really doesn't matter (hey there hipsters) but it's interesting none-the-less. Falk continued writing the Phantom from 1934 until his death in 1999. That's dedication. That's love for what you do right there.

I admit I'm not all that well read in Mandrake or the Phantom but I've recently been trying to correct that. While the Phantom, if not widely read, is still remembered, it's too bad Mandrake's been largely forgotten because it's really good stuff.

There are better examples, sure, but "pussy-visaged" is hard to beat.

A friend and I were lucky enough to see some of the original art pages for Mandrake and the Phantom comic strips, pieces from Mrs. Falk's own collection. Unfortunately I don't have any photos of the art, but like all art it's better seen in person.

While Mandrake was modeled after Leon Mandrake (among others, too), a real life magician, the look of Mandrake was modeled on Falk himself, who sketched the early strips before asking Phil Davis to draw the strip, which he did until his death in 1964. She even told us that Mandrake's smoking jacket was modeled after the same jacket Falk would walk around the house in. Okay, so maybe that's only interesting to me, but still.

Falk wrote the scripts while the art was by Davis, whose art really stood out. You could see individual ink strokes and the texture of a striped overcoat that gets lost when printed on newsprint. The word balloons were still there, some cut out and pasted on, others written directly in the panels. 

I couldn't find scans of the art I saw but I mean just look at panels 5 and 6. Uh, please.
 
One panel had a great looking dinosaur, which had to have taken hours and hours to fully render despite the fact that the majority of the detail would be lost due to the limitations of the printing process back then.

Then on the next page Mandrake boarded a rocket ship blasting off to who knows where.

Dinosaurs and rocket ships? Why haven't I read Mandrake before this?

Who can forget Brass Monkey, that funky Monkey?
I think the most interesting part of the conversation was when Mrs. Falk started talking about Fellini. Yes, thee Fellini. Federico himself. Apparently, the Falks were good friends with Fellini and would stay at his villa whenever they were in Italy. There was even a talk of a Fellini Mandrake the Magician movie. Now there's a lost opportunity if I ever heard one. Mrs. Falk even did a quick impression of how Fellini sounded like on their answering machine (apparently his voice was really high and excited). It was a bit surreal.

Despite his famous comic creations, Falk preferred theater. On the stage, he directed Charlton Heston and Marlon Brando, among others.

That's not to mention all the trips he took all over the world.

I get the feeling a biography on Lee Falk would be one fascinating read. Someone needs to get working on one right now.

They were selling the art, too. And we got a really good price on a set of 3 pages: $7,000. My friend seriously contemplated buying them. I kind of wished he did.

By the way, Mrs. Falk herself is an accomplished stage director and writer and helped write some of the later Phantom strips. She was the first woman ever to direct a stage play at Shakespeare's Globe Theater in London. How cool is that?

Yeah, she's pretty awesome.

Man, sometimes I hate Comic Cons, but sometimes I love 'em, too. 

Mandrake, the Phantom, and Flash Gordon in the 80's!
Side note: One of my professors in college is the Phantom expert Robert Griffin who was a consultant on the Billy Zane Phantom movie. Um, well, at least he got to meet Kristy Swanson and Catherine Zeta-Jones, so that's something.



*All material related to Mandrake the Magician, the Phantom, and the Defenders of the Earth copyright King Features Syndicate.

Thursday, July 19, 2012

There's this thing called Good Reads . . .


If you haven’t heard, there’s this website out there called Good Reads where you basically build a virtual bookshelf of all the books you’ve read, are reading, and plan to read.

And it’s addictive. I joined three days ago and I have already listed over 400 books in my “My Books” shelf, all star-rated and a few with reviews.

According to my “stats”, apparently my top two most-read (i.e. Favorite) writers are Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns, which (no offense to either of them) is far from the truth. They’re both comic book writers and I read a lot of comics, especially Batman and Green Lantern. And it just so happens that both Morrison and Johns have been writing those characters since 2004/2006. Morrison on Batman, Johns on Green Lantern. And since I’ve read every Morrison Batman and Johns Green Lantern book they’ve written in the past 6-7 years, well that comes out to a lot of comic books.

Side note: In case you were wondering (and I know you weren’t) I own every Green Lantern comic book published since 1976 (starting with issue 90, which was published 4 years after issue 89)*. No fooling. That’s 36 years worth of the Emerald Crusader’s adventures. Money well spent, you ask me. Money well spent.

This is what I say to women after I tell them I read comics. Especially after I tell them I prefer Kyle Rayner as GL.
 
*Full Disclosure: I am missing a few Action Comics Weekly issues that were published after the cancellation of Green Lantern Vol. 2 and the start of GL Vol. 3 (circa 1988, a dark period in the life of all the Green Lanterns). Mainly because they’re not very good and I refuse to pay more than 50 cents an issue.  Right off the bat, Hal Jordan pimp slaps Carol Ferris (his on again/off again girlfriend) several times. To be fair, she was Star Sapphire at the time [was she, or was she just dressed like SS? I forget]. Yeah, she was evil for a while. She got better.

Image from Green Lantern Reborn, art by Ethan "I draw one crazy Sinestro" Van Sciver

Monday, July 16, 2012

Hey look, it's Poetry! Everybody loves Poetry.


The Illusion of Movement

I.

I stare out of the subway window, out at the darkness, as the occasional light flashes by when out of nowhere the tunnel, the earth itself, opens up and I see another train below us--us, as if I'm a part of all of this, as if these people in here are a part of me--and then it's gone, cut off, the wall is back but something is different now, pictures flicker by, a series of photographs, and as we--us again--pick up speed the wall becomes a motion picture, a commercial on the Green Line--even away from the TV we (goddamn it) can't escape them--pretty people at the beach, burning on a suntan, wading in the water with bikinis and boxers, but the images don't do what they're supposed to do all they do is make me think of the suicide dolphins, the self-destructive beached dolphins that appear every other year--the hundreds! the hundreds!--to throw themselves on the sand and soak up the sun as they gasp for breath and when the people--when the heroes--come they can only save a few and we--they--cry.

II.

Never show the dead dolphins in the pictures of the beach, in the commercials at the beach. 

Never show the dead fish washing ashore, never capture the smell the fish bring, the rainy day fish smell, the rotting body fish smell. 

Never show the seagulls shit on someone's head or into a child's ice cream cone. 

Never show the hot sand burning feet. 

Never show the Portuguese Man o’ War, the not-really-a-jellyfish jellyfish, floating dead a few hundred feet away, still dangerous, still toxic.

Never show the fat people.

III.

Someone blows out the candle and then the pictures are gone, the pretty people are gone, and I can’t even remember what product they were selling but it was probably beer or shoes or suntan lotion, which would be the most logical but commercials are never the most logical.

I’m back in darkness, back in the tunnel as the occasional light flashes by and I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be the same light, a single light, and I’m on a movie set, and outside is a man out there with a light on a dolly, a light on a swivel he keeps spinning around to give the illusion of movement as two or three other people shake the subway car for extra effect.

The conductor hits the brakes hard and I fall into the woman next to me who looks at me with dagger eyes as if it was my fault and I fumble out a sorry, tell her I didn’t mean it in the slightest and she calls me a little shit and pinches the back of my arm, digging nails into flesh, drawing blood, making me scream a high pitch whiny bitch scream, but I don’t say anything to her.

The doors open and I know it's not my stop but I get off anyway and turn back as the doors close. She breaks into a smile and waves goodbye with her finger as I stand there staring, rubbing my arm, waiting for the next train.


Friday, July 13, 2012



"What are fears but voices airy?
Whispering harm where harm is not;
And deluding the unwary
Till the fatal bolt is shot!"
        --William Wordsworth, from the awesomely titled "Inscriptions - Supposed to be Found In and Near a Hermit's Cell, 1818 - I" (Yes, there is a sequel!)

So I'm a bit behind the times. It's 2012 and I just found out there are these things called Blogs. I think they're pronounced Bee logs. I imagine they're similar to the Balrog from Lord of the Rings, but I could be wrong.

Since this blog resides on the internet I figured I'd go all pretentious and name my blog after a two hundred year old poem by a dead white guy. A poet whose last name just happened to be Wordsworth. Yeah, and my real last name is Pussymerit.

But along with being pretentious, I think the name fits. I guess. Because this blog is going to be all about deceit apparently. Hm. Maybe I should rethink this.

Actually, the title refers to me. I am the unwary. Unwary of this whole internet thing. I've been hesitant to start a blog. Hell, I've been hesitant to start many things. I've stayed away from all social media for some unknown reason. Not so unknown really. It's fear. Fear of what I don't know. Hence, the Wordsworth quote. Plus, for awhile I felt there were too damn many blogs out there already and I didn't want to become another rusty clog in a machine of shit. But then I thought, you know, I would never say there are too many books out there, or too many movies, or songs, or religions--well, maybe that last one.

Anyway, I talked myself into this whole blog thing. Well, I had a little help from a friend, too. So she shares the blame if this turns out bad. But, really, how could this turn out bad?

So what's this blog about? Good question. Hopefully I'll have an answer one of these days.