Click if you dare.
This was sent to me and now I share it with you. You must keep watching. Do not stop.
This was sent to me and now I share it with you. You must keep watching. Do not stop.
Magnum Search results for: California Trip
From Dennis Stock. These shots are so unbelievably cool.
As seen on Boing Boing.
There's gonna be a little (re)construction around here as I tidy some stuff up. Probably no real content today, but I want very badly to talk about Steve Gerber's run on THE DEFENDERS, which I'm near the end of right now. And some of my favorite giant monster movies.
But hammers and nails first.
Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.
Three members of my family have gotten it (my son just an hour ago.) I know I'm next.
No content until this passes.
The Strangeness of Brendan McCarthy: Design > Mutant Turtles 2001
I couldn't have made that up if I wanted to.
1) STRANGEWAYS: MURDER MOON is off to the printers. Done. Barring technical foul-ups on my end, which I'm awaiting actually.
2) Jeff Parker of Marvel Adventures: Everything and David Wellington of the MONSTER trilogy, and others, were kind enough to throw some complimentary quotes my way. Well, the book's way. I'm not so compliment worthy.
3) I'm glad I'm working with Imprimerie Lebonfon and not Quebecor at the moment. Tip of the hat to Uncle Lar for introducing me to them. And for all that other stuff.
4) I rewarded myself by finishing off my viewing of Nightbreed. What a strange movie. Plenty of art, but not as much artfulness as I'd hoped. And watching David Cronenberg tear it up as the psychotic psychiatrist was very very weird after my watching a bunch of middle-period Cronenberg films recently. Is it horror? Is it dark fantasy? Is it epic fantasy? Am I confused? A little.
5) I'm not small! That's just shrinkage! Did I really say that? I must be loopy.
6) Going to San Francisco this Saturday. Food recommendations? I'm partial to sushi if it doesn't cost both the arm and the leg.
7) Trying to figure out when I'll read comics again. Probably when I finish my Jim Thompson tear, which is just starting.
8) My office is almost done. This has only taken twenty times longer than I thought it would.
9) Stomach flu is a harsh mistress.
When you use Google.
I guess this happened early last year. At least I think I remember it happening. Maybe?
BibliOdyssey: Wondertooneel der Nature
I have to admit, I've got a weakeness for pre 19th-Century scientific illustration. Like alchemy texts of old, everything is presented deliberately, as if revealing or reinforcing a hidden meaning.
Odlandscape: LA's "Steel Cloud" (1988)
Such an evocative name, I cribbed it for a Roswell Incident session that was recorded back in 1996 or so. You know, the Roswell Incident, the band that I co-founded with fellow malcontent Chris Barrus who I knew from my ne'er do well days at UC Irvine.
Anyways, here's some background on the "real" Steel Cloud of Los Angeles. Which isn't real at all, as it never got past the model stage. But it's an intriguing look all the same at what some folks will do in the name of Capital A Art.
Whilst in San Francisco to get my copy of BLACK DOSSIER signed, I was asked by Ian (Brill of the Building fame) about what makes me happy lately. He knows that I'm usually grumpy and prickly about Things In General, so if something makes me happy, it must be pretty good.
Here's a few of those things, and some that occurred to me later:
THE DEEP BLUE GOOD-BYE by John D. MacDonald. Beautiful prose, engaging story and smarter than it has any right to be.
SHINE ON ME by The Prisoners. This tiny single (three songs) packs so much epic goodness in that there ought to be a law against it. Driving, melodic, swirly organ (thanks to James Taylor), biting songwriting (perhaps not as clever as Paul Weller, but Graham Day knows what the hell he's doing.) it came out several (maybe ten) years ago now, but it never fails to put a smile on my face.
THE RISE AND FALL OF ZIGGY STARDUST - the film, that is. Wow, just wow. I love the album to pieces, but this performance blows the recording out of the water, and not just because Bowie is on fire, but because the Spiders are as well.
THE WOODEN SHJIPS - monster psych like you like it.
JOHN CARPENTER - watching a good deal of his output right now. Really, there aren't any losers in his films up to the nineties. THE THING, THE FOG (of which the best parts are all last-moment additions put in when the original cut didn't deliver), ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (audacious to say the least), THEY LIVE, THE MOUTH OF MADNESS (which I really should watch again.)
ALL-STAR SUPERMAN - Duh. Why is Superman Superman? Read and learn. I wish that Batman was delivering the same zing, but it isn't.
DEBATE - Superheroes are not hard. If you think so, you're probably doing it wrong.
THE ISOTOPE - James is a king among men. Who else could actually sell me on WORLD WAR HULK? He gets it, and talking comics with him makes the trip into the city worthwhile. Even if parking in his neighborhood is an exercise that would test the patence of a Zen monk.
KEVIN O'NEILL - If I was a good blogger, I'd scan the sketch of Nemesis the Warlock that I had done. He makes the new LEAGUE book shine, particularly the fine erotica of the Fanny Hill subsection. Sublime.
LA FIESTA - A local taqueria that stands head and shoulders above the rest. And coming from San Diego, I've got relatively high standards in that regard. Carnitas with enough roasting to make them a little crispy yet succulent. Prepare my bypass surgery, stat!
KING FOOT SUBS - A kimchi beefsteak? Yes please.
Required reading. Disruptive technologies (like the OGN and webcomic) rule. Thesis, meet antithesis. Can't wait for the synthesis.
Speaking of which, guys like this are part of the problem, not the solution. Oh no, young males not the end-all, be-all of the videogame market? Everything I know is wrong!
Substitute "video games" for "comics."
Thanks to Dorian for pointing this out.
Two things come to mind.
1) Larry's birthday is tomorrow. Be sure to wish him a happy one.
2) I really should go to Denny's and claim my free breakfast. And then I'll light a pyre for the memory of my youth, fire it with gasoline and watch it recede into the distance by way of my rearview mirror, Joshua trees and creosote crowding out the dwindling smoke trail.
Or an attempt at explanation:
Destroy all arbitrary genre boundaries. That is all.
By the way, the category "Logos" has nothing to do with corporate emblems, but more the Greek concept of the underlying order beneath the face of nature, beneath even chaos itself. That explains something, I hope.
1) I've finally booked my hotel space for SDCC 2007. I haven't done that since the convention was being held in the old Civic Center auditorium back in 1988, when we crammed 5-6 of us in a room and people slept wherever they could. I'm an adult now! I get my own room and my own bed and everything! Just that it's a touch further out than I wanted to be, but it's not costing me $350 a night, either. I have to say, this is all going to be very weird, coming back to the city that was home for the last seventeen years, just as a tourist.
2) TESTAMENT is the only regular Vertigo book I'm still reading. And that last bunch of launches looked so promising, too. But somehow Doug Rushkoff's alternate retelling of the Old Testament with a celestial cast wrapped around near-future conspiracy adventure in which we're left to doubt whether or not the Good Book is as rock-steady and fundamental as we've been led to believe. The Babel/Marduk storyline went down pretty well, probably because it wasn't as directly tied into the retelling of the bible stories as some of the first few issues were. Still some neat stuff being done with panel/page layouts too.
3) Congratulations to Larry, Mimi and young master Walker (who's too young to get Walker, Texas Ranger jokes, but that time will come.)
4) Listening to Savage Republic never gets old. Damn but that's some good stuff. I wonder if the CDs are still available through IPR?
5) Strangeways, under the title MURDER MOON, has gone out to Diamond for approval. I don't see them turning it down, but then some really strange things have happened along the way, so who knows?
Courtesy Dirk comes The Realist Archive Project (with not-safe-for-work banner image...might wanna rethink that choice.) The Realist was strangely influential on my teenaged mind (strangely because it wasn't commonly available and my exposture to it was through an omnibus volume that my dad had picked up long ago.) The Realist is savage, ruthless satire for a time that demanded such. Its return is welcome indeed.
I’ve done that you haven’t. Ready? Go!
1. Flown across the country for a single concert. Granted, this was the (held in Providence, RI) and it featured literally my favorite music at the time (including the only US performance by Flying Saucer Attack, whose performances in the UK were rare enough as it was.) It cost a small bucketful of money but would’ve been a value at twice the price. Breakfast in the same café as and being called a “coont” by Nick Saloman of the Bevis Frond? Priceless. The Magic Hour reunion set? Transcendant. Bardo Pond ripping skulls open with “Yellow Turban”? Sublimely sublime.
2. Driven 9000km in two weeks. In Australia. Post-college-graduation, myself and three friends flew to Australia to visit another friend who was spending a year abroad there. We rented a car. We rented a car with unlimited mileage on it. They said so right there at the counter as we shambled off the plane. Then they gave us the keys, the fools. Point of origin, Wollongong. To Brisbane in the north, then Townsville, then inward to Mt. Isa and on to Alice Springs, the Rock, down to Mt. Gambier and the shocking greenery of Victoria, to Melbourne and shotgunning back to Sydney and to Wollongong, returning on a Saturday night just as the pubs let out and the streets were filled with drunken zombies.
3. Designed the official website for one of my musical idols. Okay, “idol” might be a bit strong, but he was certainly a musician who’s work I enjoyed and writing I respected. This being, Stan Ridgway, who I’ve mentioned before here. A chance posting on USEnet back in the day got him and I talking, and I took the opportunity to set up a website that matched up the sensibilities of his music (particularly the album WORK THE DUMB ORACLE, which had come out right around that time.) This was back in the days when Yahoo had something like fourteen hundred websites devoted to musicians. Fourteen hundred. Hell, there’s probably fourteen hundred pages about dust mites now, but back then, having a website was just a little unique.
4. Worked for one of the scientists who helped invent The Bomb. Yep. That bomb. You know the one. Kept the world on pins and needles for nearly fifty years. My first real job out of college was working for the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, which was filled with interesting people. Too bad the work itself drove me nuts with boredom (so much so that I actually wrote most of the first drafts of my first three novels while on the job—ssh! Don’t tell anyone!) Herbert York didn’t actually work at Los Alamos, but at Oak Ridge. He was a cordial guy, very friendly, talkative. I kinda miss hearing some of the stories that he used to tell, and really for me, he put a human face on this chain of events that so dominated life in the US through the “end” of the Cold War.
5. Eaten * two * Tommy’s double chili-cheeseburgers from the original stand on Rampart in LA. Before eight in the morning. Yeah, I was young and foolish once, too.
The other five will be forthcoming, but this seems quite sufficient for now, doncha think?
Back to work. Commenting is re-enabled, but you need to have a TypeKey ID to do so. We'll see how this works. Getting one of these set up is not a big deal (even I can do it.) If it keeps the spam out, great.
Will likely make some changes to the templates as time permits. Also will be organizing things a tad differently. Planning on individual sub-blogs (is there such a word) for each of my ongoing projects, but will be linking the mess of them back to this one. Highway 62 as such will be a catch-all of a sorts and will be discussing more than comics. Hopefully some of this will be of some interest to the readers I've managed to alienate by letting the weeds grow higher than the garden around here.
That I'm allergic to wasp and bee venom? Yeah, well, after reading this, I've decided I'm never going to Alabama.
Ever.
Montgomery Advertiser.com -
Giant nests perplex experts
Wasp nests that take over abandoned cars, abandoned HOUSES.
Yeah. Never going to Alabama...
ABC News: Russian Refuses to Accept Math Prize
Offered without comment.
Like as in, it's gone. Mail me if I've moved you to anger with whatever I say here. I'm tired of footing the bill for someone else's spam. Trackbacks aren't off yet. But they're next.
I should have something useful to say later on. Perhaps a weekend post...
Okay, how the heck are all these folks from disney.com getting to my little old site? I can't track back and I'm...curious, 'cause I'm getting more pings from Disney than I am from The Beat. I find this...odd.
Anyways, welcome aboard. Feel free to get in direct contact with me if there's anything like cash development offers in the offing. Otherwise, enjoy the lovely content.
My name’s Matt Maxwell, a quite nearly perfect secret identity monikker, if ever there was one.
I was born in California, between Kennedy’s assassination and the Moon landings, which I can dimly remember seeing on the unsteady and flickering tube of our old Zenith television. Though that may well have been one of the later landings, and not the first one. When my family moved to our new home in south Orange County, I can clearly remember being surrounded by rolling hills covered in grass that was only green for three months of the year. By the time I finished high school, the hills had been paved with stripmalls, condominiums and low-density living as far as the eye could see.
My college years were spent in alternating states of unmotivated torpor and ecstatic frenzy, depending on the drudgery level of the classes involved. Against all hope, I graduated with not one, but two degrees: English Literature and Social Sciences (emphasis on Sociology—further emphasis on Ethnomethodology). Neither of these degrees came to be of much particular use in the real world. But they’ve provided an invaluable toolset for writing. And it should be as no surprise that I ended up in fiction, after being raised by a reporter turned novelist and a novelist turned novelist.
After college, I worked for a number of years at a multi-campus thinktank based at UC San Diego, where I was surrounded by professors who’d worked on the Manhattan Project and in international diplomacy and political science. Of course, I was a glorified receptionist who had to fight tooth and nail to prove myself more useful working on computers and setting up webpages (back in the glory days of 1994.) It was a fight I never won, and I burned out on the place.
Of course, I’d managed to write the better part of three novels while I was working there. Hey, text on a screen looks like text on a screen. The kicker was that none of those novels went anywhere, so maybe work got the last laugh after all. Around that time, I started fiddling around with the electric guitar and started up a band called The Roswell Incident with a longtime friend of mine. That continued off and on for a number of years, playing on radio shows and at friends’ parties. Never released an album, though there’s certainly enough material recorded to do so.
Sometime along the way, I’d been bitten by the Photoshop bug. I’d taught myself the program, back around 2.0, before there was such a thing as layers. And if you’ve ever worked in Photoshop, I dare you to do your average job without using layers, just a float for cut and paste. Go ahead. It builds character. My work had caught the eye of a small record label in LA, and I managed to get some work from them. Eventually, I figured that I could get paid for that like a real job.
My mistake was thinking that I needed a piece of paper to get those jobs, so I went back to school. This time, to a small tech school, learning desktop publishing/multimedia/animation. That went well enough, but ultimately it proved to be a bit of a side-track. Though it did provide some structure and focus, which is something I can usually use a shove with, so I suppose it all worked out.
And then I fell into animation. I’d done well in the classes, working with Electric Image and After Effects. Then I took a course in LightWave and spent a few months getting a reel together, between the odd freelance job. And going back to the tech school where I’d been a student, to teach animation for a term. While waiting to hear back from the demo reels I’d sent up to animation/VFX houses in LA, I took a job as an animator on Thumb Wars, a deranged parody of the original Star Wars.
After finishing that, in the summer of 1999, I finally received The Call and took a job with Netter Digital, production house for Babylon 5, as well as the 3D Voltron series. There, I worked on Max Steel and Dan Dare before the shop imploded under the stress of trying to deliver animation on a hyperunrealistic schedule, driven by producers who simply didn’t understand the differences between 2D and 3D animation. And did I mention that I was still technically living in San Diego at the time? I did the commute twice a week and stayed in a very small studio apartment four nights a week.
Until, like I said, Netter fell down and went boom. I then returned permanently to San Diego to take care of my first child. And then my second.
During that time, I finally got back into writing, after hiding from it for years. Rediscovering a love of comics that had been all but snuffed out by the Image Revolution, I jumped back into funnybooks in 2002. By 2003, I was writing the column Full Bleed for the site Broken Frontier, and was getting the first draft of Strangeways off the ground. Which more or less brings us full circle, or at least to where I am right now.
If I have to blame anyone for getting into comics, it’d be Bill Mantlo and that one issue of The Micronauts that cracked my skull open. Issue #29, which found our heroes being shot into the brain of their then-comatose leader who had been gravely wounded in battle with his mentor, the evil Baron Karza who had joined up with the forces of HYDRA to lay waste to earth. And while taking their bicameral vacation, they fought against their own nightmares and the captial-N Nightmare of Dr. Strange fame, all deftly illustrated by Pat Broderick. I’m not saying that any of my work has that same sense of unbounded wonder and fervid imagination, but that sort of thing inspired me, and still does.
As for who to blame that I’m still in comics? Point that finger at Grant Morrison, whose work I didn’t really get the first time around, but once I’d been led back to comics with a real hunger for fantasy and Big Ideas, his work was the one to scratch my itch.
And now, back to work for me. Keep poking around here if you want to.
Hmmh. Seems to me that this should be updated...
There are days during which it's difficult if not impossible to operate with a positive mental attitude.
This is one of those days. I won't miss it when it's gone. Not one bit.
But here I am, with a program that will perfectly emulate all of those old 8-bit and smaller microprocessors working their little silicon guts out, moving sprites around on the screen. It's like the ghost of every arcade game I've ever played.
Well, maybe a little. But only tangentially.
Five years ago today I started the only actual job I ever loved, that of being a digital animator up in the looney-bin known as Hollywood. Okay, North Hollywood, so it was actually in the Valley and hence not Hollywood, but a close approximation. I learned quite a bit there, but the single most important thing that I learned: don't be amazed that good things come out of the Hollywood system (you know, the odd Blade Runner or Terminator or Iron Giant), rather be amazed that anything gets finished. There's a project-management cliché about herding cats. That's a little off. It's more like herding giant squid. On land. While riding lobsters.
The work was often under imossible circumstances and unfulfilable expectations (try explaining to a producer that you don't just "push a button and make it look good"), and yet, I miss it sometimes. There's something to be said for the social aspect of working in a bullpen situation with a ton of other creative (and often lunatic) folks. Of course, there's a lot to be said for not having to put in sixty to eighty hour work weeks (did my share of those thanks to other people's Bad Planning).
Not that the hours in dad-hood are all that much better, now that I think about it...
But there was good to be found, even in crunch time, when people lost it one by one or desperately held onto sanity by whatever lifeline could be found, whether it be episodes of The Simpsons, multiplayer Deathtank on the Sega Genesis, mercilessly mocking other co-workers and management, midnight trips to In-N-Out Burgers, discussions of philosophy and the Meaning of It All while you're waiting for that damn test render, browsing the resin kit porn online, or trying to outdo one another in insane displays of geek toys like armies ranked for a genre-smashing muster: Star Wars toys mingled with Bat toys with esoteric Japanese toys that have no name. Funny, there wasn't much drinking. Not until everyone got fired. Then there was a fair bit of it.
Of course I felt like a ghoul, because I wasn't one of the lucky ones (hell, I ended up quitting a few months later and I would have been eligible for some of that unemployment I'd been paying into forever) who got laid off. It's hard to see it that way in the moment, though.
So pardon me this indulgence as I mark the occasion and note how much has changed since then. And I laugh to think that my main workstation was a 433mhz Alpha. Talk about stone age tech...