Like an Oven Mitt Cast in Iron

Just when I thought Chris Ware couldn't possibly do anything to further elevate his game, now comes Acme Novelty Library Volume Nineteen. I rant and rave about Ware to anyone who'll listen, but this time you really, really, really must obtain his latest collection, even if you've been steadfastly ignoring my prior sycophantic rants about him. It's the motherlode.

It's a honest-to-God Science Fiction story, real Science Fiction. At least the first part of it is. Somehow, the intro piece "The Seeing Eye Dogs of Mars" manages to capture something unnameable but dreadful. In doing so, he scores a direct hit to the buried consciousness, in a way that his previous SF outings (like "Rocket Sam" and the Steampunk-ish future adventures of Jimmy Corrigan) lacked. And I hope y'all hurry and read it so you can explain a couple things about to me that seem to have flown over my head.

I can't go into the content without committing spoilers, such is the integrity of the story. But I will note that it's interesting to see that Ware is seemingly showing some subtle influences from Daniel Clowes these days. Then again, maybe it's just that they've been drawing from the same well for a long time now. Both the drawings of the pony-tailed woman, and the plot device of learning dark truths about one's father via his old pulp fiction/comics, are both very reminiscent of Clowes' quintessential masterpiece David Boring. It's fair game anyway, since some would say (okay, I would say) that Clowes entered a Ware-imitative period of his own several years ago which has produced comics like Ice Haven that have an odd Ware-Clowes-hybrid feel.

Be warned, though: the comic, like most of Ware's best works, is depressing as hell and can lead to insomnia followed by troubling dreams. Ware himself once felt the need to apologize for one of his collections, admitting that reading it felt "like being slapped with a wet oven mitt over and over", or words to that effect. Volume nineteen is mother of all literary wet oven mitts.

- - JSH

Fibrousness

Although I am - and will always be - a painter first and foremost, I'll try my hand at makin' anything. So it shouldn't really come as a major surprise to anyone that my all-seeing eye has landed on fiber arts.

My main interest, however, is in the fiber itself, not so much creating cutesy stuff out of it. Armed with an arcane medieval torture device known as a Drum Carder, I create fiber "batts", which are cotton candy-like spun loaves of mohair, merino, silk, angora, camel and whatever I can find laying around. These batts are then utilized by hipster Etsy chicks to make their own handspun yarn from, either on a wheel or by drop-spinning with a spindle.

I've always been intrigued by textiles, fabrics, sewing, yarn, fibers, and such. To me, it's no different from carpentry or bricklaying, or sculpture, in that you're taking raw materials and smushing them together by any means necessary. As with my painting, my music, and practically everything else I've ever done in life, my fiber-art pursuits are raw, primitive, expressionist, and more about immediacy and results than the sort of finesse and grace one normally expects from the genre.

Plus it's a great way to meet ladies.

I don't venture too deep into the waters of knitting or crocheting (I've tried), not because it's girly-girly, but because it's a royal pain in the ass and takes way too long. I'm currently developing a new textile technique for lazy louts who ain't got no patience for anything that involves hooks and needles. Sort of like caveman-tatting. You'll see. All in time.

- - JSH

Uncle Kenny's Gourmet Bourbon Cookies

All too often, I'm disappointed in stuff whose selling point is being made with bourbon. Usually there's just not enough bourbon in such products to make it worthwhile.

Not so with Uncle Kenny's. These cookies are so impregnated with the tasty goodness of real Kentucky bourbon, you might actually get a buzz from eating them. When you open the bag, a cloud of aroma that smells like a distillery wafts out and socks you in the face. Yum. And considering that each cookie inside the bag is individually shrink-wrapped, that tells you just how powerful-smelling and -tasting these silver dollar sized lumps of joy are.

- - JSH

That Thomas DeQuincey Feeling

While housesitting for my pal Carla this past weekend and perusing her library, I happened upon a shelf of dusty and brittle old hardcovers presenting a series of classics in British literature. One title caught my eye - "Confessions of an English Opium Eater".

It was authored by Thomas DeQuincey in 1822, and written in a truly over-the-top addled-intellectual drug-damaged style, and almost completely bereft of paragraph indentation. Open the book anywhere and start reading in your most pompous John Cleese voice, and you won't be able to stop until your girlfriend beseeches you to please shut the fuck up.

My favorite example of the book's fevered style is on page 189 (Home Library edition, A.L. Burt Co.), where 2/3 of the page is taken by a bizarre footnote that goes off on a tangent about the evolution of teaspoons:

"According to the modern slang phrase, I had in the meridian stage of my opium career used "fabulous" quantities. Stating the quantities - not in solid opium, but in the tincture (known to everybody as Laudanum) - my daily ration was eight thousand drops. If you write down that amount in the ordinary way as 8,000, you see at a glance that you may read it into eight quantities of a thousand, or into eight hundred quantities of ten, or lastly, into eighty quantities of one hundred. Now, a single quantity of one hundred will about fill a very old fashioned obsolete tea-spoon, of that order which you find still lingering among the respectable poor. Eighty such quantities, therefore, would have filled eighty of such antediluvian spoons - that is it would have been the common hospital dose for three hundred and twenty adult patients. But the ordinary tea-spoon of this present nineteenth century is nearly as capacious as the dessert-spoon of our ancestors. Which I have heard accounted for thus: Throughout the eighteenth century, which first tea became known to the working population, the tea-drinkers were almost exclusively women; men, even in educated classes, very often persisting (down to the French Revolution) in treating such a beverage as an idle and effeminate indulgence. This obstinate twist in masculine habits it was that secretly controlled the manufacture of tea-spoons. Up to Waterloo, tea-spoons were adjusted chiefly to the caliber of female mouths. Since then, greatly to the benefit of the national health, the grosser and browner sex have universally fallen into the effeminate habit of tea-drinking; and the capacity of tea-spoons has naturally conformed to the new order of cormorant mouths that have alighted by myriads upon the tea-trays of these later generations."

Christ, Tom.

Not surprisingly, DeQuincey got a lot of flak back in the day about how his book seemed to actually glorify being a hophead instead of providing a warning. According to Wikipedia, "The fear of reckless imitation was not groundless: several English writers — Francis Thompson, James Thomson, William Blair, and perhaps Branwell Brontë — were led to opium use and addiction by De Quincey's literary example. Charles Baudelaire's 1860 translation and adaptation, "Les Paradis Artificiels", spread the work's influence further."

For much of the book, DeQuincey's mind wanders on stream-of-consciousness tangents about everything under the sun. Much of it enters into rather murky metaphysical waters, and having read this deranged leviathan of a tome in its entirely multiple times, I am convinced that it was a formative influence on the likes of Nietzsche, Crowley, Hubbard, Lovecraft, Burroughs, LaVey, and even Dali. (Crowley in particular, I believe, surely patterned his own "Diary of a Drug Fiend" after DeQuincey's book.)

As a bonus, this edition comes with an additional essay called "On Murder, Considered as one of the Fine Arts", which is a Swiftian defense of murder whose level of irony is so subtle that some who have read it thought he was serious. (And who knows, maybe he was.)

What I really want to know now is: has Nick Tosches read the book? Could it be that, having been nurtured on his loftily sarcastic prose in my own formative years, I've come full circle and stumbled upon the - dare I say it, antediluvian - template for Tosches' own gift of gab?

- - JSH

A Boxing Rag, Gloria Grahame, and Yours Unruly

The other day, in a bit of random online research to locate a reproduction of a Weegee photograph, I stumbled across an image of Gloria Grahame I had never seen before. That is the image you, dear reader, see above.

I've long worshipped the bronze idol of Gloria Grahame. How best to describe the lady for those of you not already initiated into her cult?

Based solely on her performances as an actress in film noir classics ranging from In A Lonely Place to Odds Against Tomorrow (honorable mention: It's a Wonderful Life, Macao, The Bad and the Beautiful, the Big Heat), Grahame is the perfect noir goddess. If perhaps you think she's not quite the bombshell you were expecting, add to this mix her actual biography: never quite made it as an A-list leading lady, her marriage to director Nicholas Ray, himself the ultimate Hollywood studio system era nonconformist, resulted not only in her deflowering Nick's stepson, but then, following her divorce from Nicholas Ray, she married the son after his 18th birthday (itself a marriage doomed to ruin), and then beyond even her good looks, Grahame starts to become the ultimate damaged goods femme fatale. In her best performances, these autobiographical loose screws shine through. "I don't think I ever understood Hollywood," Grahame said once.

So to stumble upon this image of Gloria, my obsession with this actress already obviously, irrevocably in place, I just had to fall in love all over again. When I shared it with thee JSH, he quipped, "Barefoot and boxing gloves. Now there's a look for Spring." I don't have to add too much more.

Which leads me to the subject of boxing. Which also leads me to the subject of the start of this blog, which began about a year ago. In one of JSH's early entries, he was bitching about the lack of boxing magazines at his local Border's. Something that I've meant to mention is that at my local Lexington tobacco shop/newsstand, Fayette Cigar (at which I purchase all the tobacco products you have and will have read here first), Dale & Co. keep it real, with both the Ring and Boxing Digest on the stands. I just today, when refilling my roll your own organic American Spirit cigarette habit, picked up the new issue of the Ring.

--JTD