Rules To Vivere By

Angouleme 2012

2012-02-03T08:36:00.000-08:00

Angoulême Report 2012

The poster by Art Spiegelman was hung everywhere...
and I mean EVERYwhere.

Located as it is in France, Angoulême is nothing like any American town. For instance, unlike, say, Philadelphia, Angoulême has no nickname for outsiders to rattle off under the mistaken impression that this makes them seem like insiders. One does not travel to “Anggie”. Hmm… Do any European cities even have nicknames? How sad? Without nicknames how can any European town ever achieve the excellence of something like the Philly Cheese Steak.

I began my two-week stay there teaching a group of bright, skillful students at the EESI Masters Program. Yes, a MASTERS Program in CARTOONING! I know that this may seem an alien concept to many of you who think of Masters Programs in terms of Law, Medicine, and Pink Floyd studies.

Each year the Festival committee chooses some famous cartoonist to be President of the Festival. They make their choice based on the systematic American Electoral College model meaning that systematically nobody understands how it is done. This year Art Spiegelman was chosen to be Grand Pooh-Bah.

To appropriate W.C. Fields’ epitaph, on the whole, Art Spiegelman, from the moment he was selected, claimed that he would rather be in Philadelphia. In the first sign of cultural rift, he referred to it as Philly.

Art said that after a day of being hounded by paparazzi he, "understood why Jim Morrison killed himself".

Too bad for him. For a guy who professes to not wanting to be part of a club that would have him for a member, my chum, Art, has a lot of membership cards. This is good for me, ‘cause when it came time for him to get a very private showing in the very private museum archives with his own very private film crew, I was invited to tag along as long as I behaved myself and did not drool all over the original artwork (too much).

Hillary Chute, Art Spiegelman and I enjoy the original art of Calvo.
(keep your eyes peeled for my upcoming ebay auctions)

It’s a good thing that the Angoulême Comics Festival is an annual event. If it occurred only once you would not know if it was worse than the years before…and hence you would not have anything to reference for complaining. And complain-we-must at the Angoulême Comics Festival because mixing equal parts of “Cartoonists” with “France” creates the perfect Kvetch Cocktail. I had many conversations this past weekend with people trying to find things to complain about, including the usual subjects:

• The Crowds?

Maybe the price of gas lowered the number of school groups in attendance, but in past years the sheer number of jeunne filles and garçons made even slogging through the streets impossible. The best you could do was stand still and hope that the human tide would carry you downstream to an exhibit that you wanted to see or maybe to a bakery. I suspect that teachers finally wised-up to the fact that a comics festival makes a lousy field trip. I, for one, would prefer to take a field trip with my class to the beach where if mon petit Jacques is being eaten by a shark at least I can see him disappear.

Inside those white tents thousands of comics await purchasing.
Outside, the locals curse the extra five minutes it takes to cross the damn street.
Above, a gargoyle finds it all amusing (look closely).

• The Weather?

Who doesn’t like to bitch about the weather? In Italy, university courses are given on Weather Critique, yet even my ol’ Italian amici, with whom I had dinner with on Friday night, could find nothing to criticize about the Angoulême weather. This led to a very dull table conversation. They perked up, though, when the French-style coffee was plunked down and they finally REALLY had something to complain about.


There was a very cool show of cartoonists' paintings. Here is Cowboy Henk in oils by Herr Seele	.

My favorite exhibit of new work was by Vincente Perriot
in part because to get there you had to climb a tight 300 year-old stone staircase.

• The Exhibitions?

You may not give a damn about the work of Art Spiegelman but you would be in the minority at Angoulême last week judging by the throngs at the Musée de Cite. Like it or not, you cannot find fault in the installation of this massive display of his work. Last year’s Baru exhibit (see previous blog below) left people with plenty to complain about from their hospital beds while recovering from fractures received stumbling around in the darkness. Much of Art’s work works well on a wall due to its graphic appeal, confrontational content, and the fact that scientific studies have proven that people really, really like art that has plenty of cats and mice.

But his secret weapon in this case was that all the framing and hanging had been supervised by Rina Mattotti who hangs comic art for fun and profit at the Gallerie Martel in Paris. Rina is a genius when it comes to this sort of thing. She is also very nice, smart, and, being the wife of Italy’s greatest arbiter of female beauty, Lorenzo Mattotti, she is also beautiful. Many women want to kill her. (But oddly, no men do, for some reason that my wife will not allow me to understand.)

Rina is also a very good person to sit next to during a Festival Official Opening Ceremony because she has a nice fluffy coat that doubles as a pillow. You do not want to ever miss the Festival Official Opening Ceremony if you happen to be a 2 X 4 block of wood. All others should head to the bar. Let’s put it this way, if you were to take a vote as to what the high point of this ceremony was, the audience favorite would surely be the elderly Taiwanese man in a crisp grey suit who performed a brisk incomprehensible show with two traditionally dressed hand puppets that would not be out of place at a birthday party for six year-olds.

Across the river from the Spiegelman retrospective, is another Musée de Bande Designee (which roughly translates as the “Museum of Band Aids”) that housed the “Musée Privé de Art Spiegelman”, Art’s hand-picked version of the best and most important comics culled from museums, collectors, and dumpsters from all over the world. Rather than describe the show, I’ll just offer up a few pix of what you missed so that at least YOU will have something to complain about.

Chester Gould

Harold Gray

Kurtzman and Elder

Preliminary sketch by Caran D'ache

Milt Gross

Opper

• The Programming?

What follows is my in depth coverage of several excellent panels:

• Whatever Eddie Campbell says is wonderful because he has got the coolest accent of anyone in comics. He comes from the Sean Connery neighborhood of Scotland.

• Lorenzo Mattotti and Jacques de Loustal like to work for the New Yorker because they can make jokes with their editor, Françoise Mouly, in French about the editorial policy without anyone understanding what they are saying.

• After books detailing the Bosnian war and the Palestinian conflict, Joe Sacco’s next book will be about Pink Floyd, or maybe it was the history of the Philly Cheese Steak. Sorry, Joe, these panels began to kinda run together.

• Hillary Chute’s in depth interview with Art Spiegleman revealed that as a youth Art had learned about ~~Elliot~~ Alfred Caplin changing his Jewish-sounding name to Al Capp and so Art tried out several nom-de-plumes before settling on art spiegelman. His real name is Reginald Potterby.

Angoulême may be small but it appears impossible to start from any given point and actually arrive in time for any given event. However I did manage to arrive 20 minutes early to a RAW magazine panel. The place was packed so I sat in the only remaining available chair which happened to be on Charles Burns’ lap...not so good since he was one of the speakers.

Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Françoise Mouly, Charles Burns
(not shown 257 audience members in a room meant for 35)

It was the Year of the Spiegelman, right? So it might be expected that many Festival attendees might be interested in a RAW panel with Charles, Françoise Mouly, and Aline Kominsky-Crumb. The organizers’ brilliant strategy was to stage the panel in the Hotel du Palais. Sounds like it must be a grande palace with a ballroom, right? Nope. Hotel de Sardine Can had a lobby that sat about 35 people uncomfortably. This way everyone turned away would have to…go out and spend more money on comics! Formidable, oui?

O.K., so let’s see where was I on the complaint list?

Crowds? NO.

Weather? NO.

Exhibits? NO.

Programming? NO (sort of).

That leaves the Food and the Company (highly subjective subjects) to complain about. I know that many of my cartoonist pals do not really care much about food since they live on coffee and twigs, so they can skip this part and go out to forage but be sure to come back in a few paragraphs.

Centuries ahead of America, the French have discovered a way
to make a grilled cheese sandwich with the cheese in side AND outside!

I made it a point to eat duck at least once a day, a feat impossible in the U.S…especially if your goal is to eat duck prepared a DIFERENT WAY at least once a day. I had breast of duck with green pepper cream sauce, grilled duck, duck Pate de Grandmere (basically ground-up duck and ground-up grandmother mixed-together), duck with orange sauce, braised duck with rosemary drizzled with fig sauce, duck crepes, and duck tartar (duck mixed with tar, twice). I also had a sandwich on fresh baguette with spinach, goat cheese and honey. I though that I was ordering a duck sandwich but this actually turned out to be delicious and I recommend it. Much better than the Anggie Cheese Steak.

And as for the company? Well, take away everything to complain about and cartoonists are kind of somewhat nice people. Here are pix of me with cool cartoonists that I shamelessly display in the vain hope that you will think that I, too, am really cool, and will invite me to your birthday party. I’ll even bring the traditionally dressed hand puppets.

Kriota Willberg, Bill Kartalopoulos, Bob Sikoryak and I
built our own table at Le Chat Noir out of popsicle sticks and pipe cleaners

Kai Pfeiffer and Ulli Lust are three sets of twins.
There can be no other explanation for the fact that every time I turned around: there they were.

Philippe Dupuy, Theirry Smolderen and I
"coincidently" meet on this bridge every year to have our picture taken.
(I am not supposed to know that Philippe actually lives on the bridge)

If you want to learn how to make comics and you are Italian get in touch with
Marco Bianchini and Graziela Santinelli of the Scuola Internazionale di Comics.

Bill Kartalopoulos left his hat at home. And what is Art doing?! Smoking?!?!

The Angoulême police are after Igort for breaking the law; Cartoonists are not allowed to look like movie stars.

Dang! Missed this!

Angouleme 2011

2011-02-06T08:14:00.000-08:00

Many of those who annually attend have told me that this year’s comics festival in Angouleme was not a particularly memorable event. For me, however, Angouleme 2011 was a banner year.

It all began when I got off the plane at Airport Charles De Gaulle.

In an effort to shake off the global misconception that the French are a bunch of xenophobic snobs, the French government has arranged it so that all travelers arriving at DeGaulle airport are welcomed by their own personal café. The name of mine is, simply, “Paul.” This fine establishment offered a swell foie gras and smoked duck sandwich on decent baguette for under 4 euros, no kidding. Oddly, although I showed them my name on my passport, they still made me pay up. Those inscrutable French!

I arrived a week before the actual Festival began to teach at the Masters in Comics program at the European School of Visual Arts. As evidenced from the photo here, my personally suave brand of bon vivant American-style fit right in with my students’ continental hipness. You can see here in their eyes the deep respect and admiration which they held their remarkably hip teacher.

And look what they produced in four days: a 24-page mini-comic! This group really worked hard, even if they did not understand a word of what I was saying:

The teacher, writer, historian, and comics theorist, Thierry Smolderen, generously coordinated my schedule and I am deeply grateful to this scholar for introducing me to his talented students and for introducing me to his theory regarding Rudolph Töpffer (the creator of the modern comic form) as literary critic. Mostly, though, I am grateful to Thierry Smolderen for introducing me to the best restaurant in Angouleme for duck breast in a green pepper cream sauce.

The profane marriage of “Commerce” and “Art” at Angouleme is not what you would call an egalitarian relationship. A good marriage counselor could make a quick euro here.

“Commerce” dominates. Huge tents are filled with vendors pushing product. Most of it is crap (stuff I do not like), though some of it is good (stuff I like). In any case, thousands of products and euros exchange hands during the three days of this Festival. Owing to the peculiar geography of the hilltop town, this hailstorm of commercial activity actually creates a swirling vortex that magically sucks bills and credit cards out of wallets as it brainwashes otherwise sane men into thinking that Tintin is one of the crowning accomplishments of human endeavor.

Meanwhile the neglected spouse, “Art”, in the form of artists’ exhibitions, events, interviews, and roundtable discussions appear randomly around town wherever they can find a space. The free map supposedly directing you to your destination is absolutely worthless (it was designed this year by Gracie Allen and Associates). Hence, you kind of stumble upon these little Art happenings if you’re lucky. Actual comic art, with no place in the center of the festival, displaces the ordinary living spaces of the local residents. I saw two elderly Angoulinians storming away from a church, murmuring and twiddling their rosaries in a panic because nobody had told them that twelve o’clock Mass had been preempted by a live Comic Art event: a Ninja draw-off between two manga cartoonists.

(Ha! And you thought I was making this shit up!)

Despite an acute lack of publicity, and a program that listed me as Paul Karazik some people whom I did not (exactly) bribe showed up for my event. The large sign outside the auditorium with “APPEARING TODAY: TINTIN!!!” written by me in crayon may have helped. I rolled up my trouser cuffs, applied an entire tube of gel to my hair to fashion a single spike, and tried to act as asexual as possible. This actually fooled a few near-sighted middle aged men who came up to me after my presentation, asked for my autograph and whether Hergé really was a bastard to work for.

Each year a select committee of comics insiders carefully throw darts at a wall covered with Post-Its bearing cartoonists’ names to choose the big-name cartoonist who will set the tone for following year’s festival. Baru was chosen last year so this year he got to set the tone and he probably also got to have a coronary from organizing the enormous retrospective of his work on display.

I loved the exhibition of his work, but not because of all the art on display. The room was dark and scary. Makes sense; lurking menace is a theme in Baru’s work filled with slightly grotesque and tortured souls fighting to survive and often just plain fighting. But too much work hanging in one room makes me queasy….my eyes begin to spin. One two-sided wall-hanging separating two sections of the hanger-like gallery displayed over 200 original pages. Impressive…but illegible as they stretched upwards into the darkness.

(A wall of Baru.)

So why did I love the exhibit? Well, to evoke the semi-urban youth of Baru and the hoodlum pals he is so keen on depicting, they kindly set up an old pinball machine for heathens such as myself. Hoo-ha! I scored 2300 points on ol’ “Jack In The Box”! I went back for a second go at it the next day but the clanging bells drove serious gallery worshippers nutty so they unplugged it. Sad.

(Here is Baru hard at work. Sometimes he would actually let others play "Jack in the Box!")

Part of setting the tone for the Festival is actually setting the tone. Thanks to Baru, the soundtrack for Angouleme 2011 was, and I am not making this up, Rockabilly.

Baru’s work tends towards the nostalgic and he grew up at a time in France when Rockabilly was making a big impact on the culture, shattering eardrums and domestic bliss, alike, as teenagers turned to black leather, slicked hair, and Coca-Cola.

Several days before the festival, small speakers began to appear on telephone poles throughout town so that during the festival, the tinny twang of Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins floated above the din of the comics-drunk attendees. It was weird to walk across the footbridge to the Musée de Bande Dessinée as Elvis wailed “Mystery Train”, but somehow entirely appropriate. Surrealism began in la belle France, oui?

I arrived at the Musée (what we in the U.S. call a “Bookstore and Café”) just as the dapper French cartoonist, Lewis Trondheim and his wife, the extraordinary colorist, Brigitte Findakly, appeared. Monsieur Trondheim makes it a policy not to sell his original work but the Musée really likes to have examples of work by all of the major cartoonists, and Trondheim is major. So they have come up with a very clever solution.

Each year Trondheim appears at the Musée with 10 pieces of art that he exchanges for the 10 pieces of art that he left there the year before. The Musée is kept well stocked with Trondheim originals and Trondheim does not sacrifice his originals and is granted visiting privileges. As an American, I found all of this kind of shocking. I mean, what’s the point if no cold hard cash exchanges hands?!

(Lewis Trondheim, Jean-Pierre Mercier, Brigitte Trondheim, Joe Buttinski)

(Trondheim signs contract while Mercier looks on.)

It was really nothing for Jean-Pierre Mercier, the affable "Scientific Advisor" of the Musée de Bande Dessinée to invite me to view the extensive archives of the global collection of comic art throughout the ages. He, after all had the keys. For me, however, entering the triple-hermetically sealed vault required fingerprinting, a retinal scan, and the deposit of a vial of blood.

Unlike our primitive government, the French legislature actually supports and funds the arts including, evidently, this comic’s museum and the festival itself. They dump money at culture the way the United States government supports and funds the spawning of corn and weapons of mass destruction. Although the French have a couple of hundred years on us, there is still time to catch up…but first we must all start smoking again.

The Musée’s archive is lined with walls of flat files bulging with comic art originals and related ephemera.

I drew up a wish list of work I was interested in viewing and Jean-Pierre made good. He is genuinely knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the work. In addition to Americans, including Herriman, Opper, Bushmiller, Gould all the way up to Ware, I was treated to some fine selections from a collection that is naturally Franco-centric.

(Jean-Pierre flips through hundreds of Calvo originals)

(A cool li'l Calvo 'Exquisite Corpse' type booklet)

The museum has a staggering collection by Calvo whose career only spanned 20 serious years during which he produced an astonishing amount of very detailed work and at least one masterpiece, “The Beast Is Dead” (if you are unaware of Calvo, Google-image him right now, I’ll wait.) According to Jean-Pierre, before she died, Calvo’s daughter reported that she had only one clear memory of her father: hunched over the drawing board.

But the object that Jean-Pierre is most excited about these days is a new acquisition, a small hand-made journal by one of the most prolific of all French cartoonists; Cham (he completed over 18,000 pages in his lifetime). This booklet is the mythical travel journal of a mythical explorer. It is a beautiful object and it fits in the palm of one’s hand…I know.

Upon leaving, they gave me back my test-tube of blood, but stripped searched me anyway. Please address all correspondence to the Angouleme Penitentiary, cell #313.

(Evidence)

Reading the Picture Writing on the Wall II

2009-06-21T09:53:00.000-07:00

O.K. so your kids are smarter than you, and your dog runs the household. In short: your life is a comic strip. But have you ever actually walked into a comic strip?

Although I risk the chance that the Padua Chamber of Commerce may sic a fatwa on my ass, walking into the revered Scrovegni Chapel in Padua is just like walking into a comic strip. Actually it’s like walking into three comic strips with each story cycle wrapping around the interior wall in three ascending tiers with the columns of the architecture separating the panels. As I have said before, I am suspicious of the whole idea of comics on the walls but in this case, if the comic strip was painted over 600 years ago by a guy named Giotto, it turns out to be a pretty good idea.

When in Italy I spend most of my time in Florence where dead artists are revered for their aesthetic contributions to the history of Western Art as well as their hypnotic power to attract tourists and their billfolds to town. Giotto is on the A-List of Dead Maestro Magnets. In Florence you will find the following things named after Giotto: hotels, gellaterias, coffee bars, and I swear that I heard a woman call her precious chow dog, “Giotto” (or maybe she called to her Giotto dog, “Ciao”).

I even rode in a Giotto Bus as part of a marathon hellish travel day configured by that busy, busy travel agent, Satan.

Giotto himself represents a turning point in Western Art (and no I don’t mean the kind of Western Art where broncos are being bucked by grisly guys who look like Gabby Hayes). Before Giotto, human figures were painted stiff and stilted. After Giotto they appear more relaxed and human. Think about the two final candidates in our last Presidential election and you’ll get the general idea.

But the real genius of Giotto is his staging. Take the famous heartwarming story from the Bible so dear to the hearts of many: The Slaughter of the Innocents, a tale that contains both no miracle and no apparent moral. A tale that appears to have been invented whole cloth by “Matthew” for the sole purpose of scaring the wits out of mothers and small children.

Yet many artists have been compelled to paint this story telling of a massacre of babies by the Romans for probably many of the same reasons that “Friday the 13th” keeps getting remade. It touches an archetypal chord somewhere deep in the collective unconscious of humankind and, as we all know, Splatter sells.

Choosing the right moment and staging it clearly is one of the most important tasks of the graphic narrator from Giotto, to Hogarth, to Kirby, to Crumb.

The classic depiction of this chestnut generally comes staged in two different versions: Before (The mothers weep as the Romans enter with swords.), and After (The mothers weep as the Romans leave with bloody swords.). Giotto chooses neither the Before or the After.

So what does Giotto show? His version in the Scrovegni Chapel shows the obligatory and ghastly pile of dead babies but the Romans are not yet leaving because there are two babies left. One is about to get it and the other is being wrest from the arms of his mother. It is not hair-raising (Before). It is not mournful (After). It is the moment just before the end when the last flicker of hope is about to be extinguished. It is chilling.

One could even go further (and believe me I will) to say that the very composition amplifies this chill. Squint your eyes at this painting and you will see an enormous “X” smack dab in the middle of the picture. Constructed from the Roman sword and the wrested baby. “X” for Exterminate.

The common line of rubbish about old fescoes is that they taught Bible stories through pictures to people who could not read. Pardon me, but back then you would not be in that church if you did not already know those stories. My personal theory is that the paintings were there to tell you what to think and how to feel about those stories. Believe it or not, pardner, that is a significant distinction and Giotto makes you feel.

(For more on this point of view I refer you to, “Storytelling in Christian Art from Giotto to Donatello” by Jules Lubbock)

Reading the Picture Writing on the Wall I

2009-04-06T12:22:00.001-07:00

Exterior of "City of Glass" exhibit:

Note windows. When the sunlight comes streaming through they cast these awesome shadows:

When my wife, Marsha, and I told our friends in Florence that we were going to Pordenone in northern Italy they told us we were crazy. “Pordenone?!” exclaimed Luigi, “You might as well go buy yourself a nice firm mattress and a down comforter and hibernate for a few days!”

Gina suggested that if we really had to go to that sleepy excuse for a town we should pack some amphetamines just to keep our eyelids open.

On top of being boring they also said it was ugly.

Let’s face it, Florentines are snobs. They can say with fair certainty that any other city on the planet is boring and ugly and know without even searching Google Images that they are probably correct.

It’s one of those jokes that is really not a joke to say that most Italians consider any other city, town, or bus stop other than theirs is beneath their contempt. According to Florentines I have spoken to (and this is all true), Napolitani are scoundrels, thieves, and ride twelve to a Vespa, Milanese think they know how to dress because Milan is the Fashion Capital of the Planet but they are all slobs, and Pratesi who live exactly 20 minutes away all drive huge cars and drive them all very badly.

Pordenone to these people is a 38.2 square kilometer horse tranquilizer filled with 39,000 ugly people, 24 boring meters above sea level.

Once a year Pordenone holds the Dedica Festival (which, much to my relief, is not a Greatful Deadica Festival), a two-week celebration of the life and work of a single living author. This year’s celebrant was American writer, Paul Auster. The Italians are nuts for this guy.

Because David Mazzucchelli and I adapted Auster’s novel “City of Glass” into a comics story (or what your librarian once referred to as “Trash” and now proudly shelves as a “Graphic Novel”) someone thought it would be a good idea to invite me along, too. Or maybe it was just because my name, in case you missed it, is also Paul.

I had this fascinating fact pointed out to me innumerable times by various chuckling Italians. Imagine! Two guys on the planet Earth have both been named Paul and they’re both, you won’t believe this, Americans! Fortunately they did not continue to note that one of the Pauls is a fabulously talented writer, poet, translator, filmmaker, who himself looks like a movie star and who smokes really cool black Dutch cigars and the other Paul takes his dog for a walk every day rain or shine.

Unfortunately David Mazzucchelli could not attend Dedica because his name is not Paul.

Pordenone turned out to be small but nice and up to date, and remarkably clean. This was especially notable after spending a week in Florence where there is scientific evidence to suggest that cigarette butts actually breed in the gutters. We were even put up in a place called the Hotel Moderne, which it was (although the Internet service and I restaged the Cuban Missile Crisis in Room 313. I played Khrushchev.).

Shortly after arrival we strolled across the piazza (Italian slang for “pizza with an extra ‘a’”) to the theatre for the opening night presentation. 1500 Auster-hungry fans filled the joint to capacity. People were turned away. Teenage girls with Paul Auster haircuts baring signs that read “We LUV You, Austerone!!” (roughly translated as: “We LUV you Biggie Auster!!”) were carried away weeping by grim Polizia.

The presentation began with a surprise short film made by Auster’s pal, Wim Wenders. At least it was attributed to Wenders, but it sure was hard to tell. As a tribute to Auster’s recent novel, “Man in the Dark” (a story I honestly loved and recommend), Wenders got the clever idea to film his tribute …in the dark! It’s a good thing for ol’ Wim that Auster’s recent book was not called “Man in the Shea Stadium with the Mormon Tabernacnle Choir, seventeen trained seals, and the June Taylor Dancers”.

Auster was interviewed and among many of the erudite things he said was, that, “A novel is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on very intimate terms.” Nice, huh?

Two guys named Paul:

Paul K. admits that despite a lot of head nodding and smiling this is the amount of Italian that he really understands:

The next day we all went to the civic building where they had installed an exhibit of original art from City of Glass. I am suspicious of the very notion of putting comics on the wall but I gotta hand it to the guys who organized this show, Giulio Devita, Andrea Alberghini and their team, this was a smart little show. In fact, here is a video made by Davide Coral of me seeing the thing for the first time. (Warning: It plays very smoothly on a computer with some power but on a computer like my laptop built some time in the previous century it looks all jerky).

Paul Karasik from Davide Coral on Vimeo.

Upon our return to Florence our friends were quick to ask with a knowing smirk, “So how was Pordenone?”

We reflected for a moment. Marsha had eaten what she claims were the best gnocchi she has ever had and she is hard to please in the gnocchi department. I was ego-tripped out. And ultimately we were both charmed by the hospitality of our hosts and by the enchanting tourist-free city itself.

“Well, it sure ain’t Florence,” we admitted.

Swell limited edition (100) facsimile edition of my sketchbook breakdowns for City of Glass:

San Diego Con Report

2007-08-22T10:03:00.001-07:00

This happy conventioneer is filling in the gaps of his Huckleberry Hound collection(note checklist on right)

***
SAN DIEGO CON REPORT

By the time I arrived for my first day ever at the 38th annual San Diego Comic Con, admission for all four days was completely sold out. This resulted in a separate open-air mini-convention just outside the convention hall: The San Diego Ticket Scalpers Con.

Imagine, if you will, the circumstance where people are willing to pay scalper’s prices to get into this event. Bear in mind, this is not an event like, say a basketball final or a Rolling Stones Farewell-For-Godsakes-Farewell-Already concert. No…this is an event in which the primary goal is to siphon off as much from your Visa card without the wife finding out. What, you though the “Con” in San Diego Comic Con stood for “Convention”? Ha!

How can I begin to give you a picture of the enormity of this event? Imagine the largest airport you can think of. Empty it (except for Security). Refill it with hundreds of tables piled with plastic things and lots of people touching them. At first, I was overwhelmed by table after table after table laden with action figures, DVDs, video games, and, what else? Let’s see…oh yeah, comics. This is a Comic-Con, right?

After a while, I became less traumatized by the shear volume of stuff being hawked. 99.9% of what I saw I was not interested in. To be more precise, 99.9% of the stuff I saw I simply could not understand since I lead a sheltered life in a thatch hut in the woods. Electricity? What's that? Once I began to treat all of this merchandise as an endless continuous fogbank, I found that I could begin to find my way to the places I really needed to go: the Starbucks kiosk and the bathroom.

Lots of folks were dressed for the occasion: superhero costumes, devil horns, capes, this season’s latest Jediwear, fake-fur codpieces, and bikinis. There were a lot of people who looked like zombies, and then there were a lot of people dressed up as zombies. You could tell the latter ‘cause they trailed toilet paper and smelled faintly of ketchup.

I had on a tie and felt grossly overdressed. However, here’s a tip from the ol’ seasoned pro who has attended approximately one San Diego Con: Wear a necktie. A nice unlimited edition silkish tie from J.C. Penny’s secured the VIP treatment wherever I went. This meant receiving a hint of a smile to go along with a firm, “No sir, this is not an exit. Turn your sorry ass around.”

For many con-goers, attending the San Diego Con means achieving one of the biggest thrills of a lifetime: standing in line. Wherever I went I saw lines. Lines for sneak previews of coming films and T. V. shows, lines of outtakes from old movies and T.V. shows. and lines for the bathroom.

Since I have already mentioned them a couple of times, a word about the bathrooms at the San Diego Comic Con. I know that dozens of volunteers were hired during the course of the weekend to help direct traffic. I spoke to several and hung out for a while in the Volunteers Briefing Room out of curiosity and free snacks. They had volunteers manning the doors, directing traffic, refereeing light-saber duels, but unfortunately not a single volunteer on bathroom duty.

You would have to pay someone cold, hard cash to grapple with those Convention Hall bathrooms. Remember, this is San Diego where every third restaurant is Tex-Mex and the official food of the city is the chili-dog. It has been proven statistically that the more comic books you read, the more chili-dogs you are liable to consume. The cost of a pretzel at the Convention Center is higher than a mint copy of “Playful Little Audrey #67”; so many conventioneers get fueled up on their way to festivities each morning. Hence, the very least the Comic Con organizers could have done was to station a volunteer at each bathroom door to issue gas masks and disposable plastic wading boots.

Across the hall from where I was scheduled to speak there was a line of several dozen people waiting for a Q and A session with a T and A starlet who once played the well-endowed three-breasted Venusian from the third season of Battlestar Protractica. I passed another line that had clearly been forming for hours judging by the fact that most of the waiters were sitting on the floor. When I asked why, I was told by a Kingon that this was a line to get a (I swear this is true) ticket that may or may not allow the ticket holder to get an autograph of Stan Lee. I moved quickly on when the nervous Klingon, sensing that I might be trying to butt in, stuck a phaser in my gut.

A surprise came when I arrived at the hall where I was to speak about the golden-age cartoonist, Fletcher Hanks (Who he? Go to: www.fletcherhanks.com and buy a t-shirt for God’s sake), only to find it ¾ filled with people waiting to hear about this dead guy whose strange work has little relation to the computer generated imagery I had been bathing in all day at the Con. There must have been about 100 people in the room and none of them were related to me! The lecture went very well. They laughed at the right times and nobody tried to lynch me at the end.

Given the fact that my lecture had nothing to do with any video game and not a single Hollywood starlet appeared semi-clad on stage with me (although, believe me, I tried to find one), I was very pleased with my turn out, until someone pointed out to me that if there are 2.5 million fans in attendance at this Con that meant that about .000025% of all attendees came to my show.

When “my pal” mentioned this I recalled that indeed there had been several guys simply using my lecture hall as a reading room, and against the side wall there was a group engaged in a game of Dungeons and Dragons or perhaps craps, and several audience members were clearly there only to get a good seat for the next lecture (the Wonder Woman Wet T-shirt Contest), and one fella had taken off his shoes and was stretched out across four chairs in the front row snoring pleasantly, a half-eaten chili dog resting on his heaving tummy.

So what did the 2007 San Diego Comic Con leave me with?
1. A deep appreciation for the modern technology it took to create the triple paned windows in my hotel room that masked out the sounds of the freeway and airport.
2. A well-read copy of “Playful Little Audrey” #67.
3. A reconfirmation that a terrorist group need look no further than the San Diego Comic Con to make their case against the gross appetite of this wasteful culture.
4. A blue-green bruise in my gut from that Klingon’s phaser.

Restaurant Review

2007-02-18T08:22:00.001-08:00

Do you remember the animated cartoon character Astro Boy? He was a quasi-boy like Pinocchio except instead of being a puppet; Astro Boy was a robot with very peculiar feet. Sometimes they turned into rockets and sometimes when he walked they were kind of like suction cups or toilet plungers hitting the ground. They even made a sucking noise as he walked.

I heard this same sound, “Soook. Soook. Soook”, as I walked up the stairs in the restaurant, Mariola. This is due to the fact that Mariola’s is a very old restaurant and they are so busy making delicious things to eat that they cannot be bothered with time-consuming tasks such as washing the sticky stairs.

Also, a tip if you should choose to dine there: do not under any circumstances touch the handrail. You will need a pair of pliers and a beefy guy from the highway department to pry your fingers from the glue-like railing finger by finger.

Mariola is located in a small town called Jesi (pronounced Yay-see) where one of the campuses of the International School of Comics is located. Every week I taught in Jesi as well as two other branches of the school in Rome and Florence. I could never quite get a straight answer from anyone exactly why there was a branch of the school in Jesi, but I think it had something to do with the notion that they wanted to teach the students that professional cartooning is a struggle, so they located it in a town that was a struggle to get to.

The head of the school in Jesi is a buoyant woman named Graziella. Graziella knows details about each student’s life that even the students themselves do not know. Hence she is able to keep them in line much as a mother duck keeps her ducklings in line. They love her and she loves them but occasionally she needs to give them a sharp nudge with her bill.

There is little not to love about Graziella. She was born and raised in Jesi. Her mother was a professional cook who liked her profession so much that on a Sunday, her day off, she would ask little Graziella, “What shall we do today for fun? Something special together, eh? I know…let’s bake a half dozen pies!” As a result of this upbringing one of the many lovable things about Graziella is that she loves food. She says that the reason that she is so fond of the city of Naples is because you can buy fresh bread on Sunday. “Imagine! Fresh bread on Sunday,” she exclaimed to me, “Now that’s a city I could live in!”

This appreciation for food, cooking, and restaurants was very fortunate for me because every week she took me out to dine at one of Jesi’s fine restaurants. We ate well and in very nice, clean, modern restaurants.

But I was curious, “Garziella,” I asked innocently one day, “are there any restaurants in Jesi that are not very nice, clean, modern? Restaurants that are old and, y’know, rustic?”

In answer she looked over her glasses at me and smiled that smile that I had seen her give the students as she got them in line. “You want rustic? I’ll give you rustic.”

This is how we ended up at Mariola’s one fine afternoon along with her son, Elia, and my translator, Rafaella. The hand painted sign outside reads, “Da Mariola, Vino e Cucina”: “Mariola’s, Wine and Food”. Note the order.

The woman who runs the joint is named Maria . Mariola is a nickname of endearment. But nobody in Jesi calls the restaurant “Maria’s” or “Mariola’s”. It has always been known as “Maria Culo Bello”, or “Maria with the nice ass”.

How about that, huh? Not so odd, really. After all in the U.S. we have an entire restaurant chain named “Hooters”.

“Back in the day Maria’s nice ass was well known around town,” Graziella told me, “Maria herself used to proudly explain that it resulted from cooking day after day. All the exercise from mixing and bending over to put food into the oven and taking it out gives one a nice rear end.”

I even met an American on the train a few weeks later who had lived in Jesi for a while. As with most conversations I had in Italy, within minutes the subject invariably turned to food and restaurants and for a moment as we talked I could not remember the name of the restaurant, “Mariola”.

“I went to this really unique place,” I began to tell him, “It was called Maria’s…no…Marianna…no, that’s not it”

“You mean, Maria Culo Bello?” he snapped.

One enters the restaurant into a dark room with a bar. The dining room is on the second floor (known in Italy as the Prima Piano, or, logically, the First Floor) so we “soooked” up the stairs and entered, except for Elia who was still prying his left sneaker off the top step.

Several years ago my brother-in-law, Steve, took us to a little restaurant in the Tuscan hills referred to by the locals as, “Dracula’s Wife’s”. not because the owner was evil, but because there was no better way to explain his blood-sucking wife. When you entered that restaurant, Dracula’s wife, herself, would hand out the menus and take the orders. She would then proceed to bring to the table whatever happened to be ready in the kitchen or whatever she had too much of. Whether it resembled anything you ordered or not did not matter. What did matter was that you shut up and ate.

At Mariola’s the waitress simply skipped the pretext of handing out menus. She gave us our order. “There’s 3 portions of lasagna left, so that leaves one of you taking the rigatoni. Skewered meats sound good? Good. Water? Yes? Wine? Good?”

She left in a puff and we looked around the room. Three elderly men sat at one of each of the three other tables. They looked as though they had eaten lunch daily at Di Mariola for most of the 150 years that the place had been serving food. If they were curious as to who these strangers were, they did not let on, as they were far too involved in relishing the food before them.

(Graziella shoots Elia "the Look")

Light streamed in through two open windows gently lifting the lace curtains. Good thing, too. If any serious gust were to burst through, the delicate threads holding these ancient curtains together would disintegrate. The room was painted an off-white and decorated with a pattern: “Splatter-di-marinara”. A charming 8” aluminum air duct ran up the corner and diagonally across the ceiling. There was a small painting on one wall that could have been a landscape, or an expressionistic portrait of a pizza.

(Rafaella demonstrates the tensile strength of the so-called curtains)

This was not exactly the cozy wooden beamed trattoria that I had in mind when I said the word “rustic”. Did I mention that the dining room was lit with 3 and sometimes 4 flickering florescent tubes?

The lasagna showed up just as I was considering bolting for the stairs. It didn’t look like much. Just lasagna only flatter. Not the gargantuan constructions that I am used to in the States with bits of the kitchen sink sticking out here and there. Graziella shot me another one of those glances over her glasses as I took my first bite. As I chewed, she tilted her head to one side and raised an eyebrow. I swallowed and she smiled. Word exchange during ecstasy is not necessary.

We licked out plates clean and I had a crunchy nibble on the plate, itself, in hopes of divining a few extra morsels that might have seeped into the porcelain molecules, when the skewered meat arrived. In between each tidbit of chicken, sausage, and, well, let’s call it “other meat”, was a bay laurel leaf folded in half and skewered. This gave every bite a particular flavor as the bay interacted differently with each meat.

(At Mairola you can have some coffee with your sugar)

Coffee and a simple piece of torte were followed by the appearance of Maria Cullo Bello, herself coming to inspect the strangers. I must admit that I was a bit disappointed. In her housedress and apron it was difficult to tell if she had any culo at all, let alone whether it was bello. She stood at the end of the table and surveyed our work. Seeing the clean plates, she determined that we were worth speaking to and proceeded to give us the history of the restaurant most of which, I am sorry to say, I did not understand. The most important part I got: she had been cooking in that kitchen for 65 years. There are certain things that you learn after cooking professionally for 65 years, like, for instance, how to cook.

(Herself)

To top things off she pulled out a bottle of homemade after-dinner wine. We toasted her cooking, tossed it back. We toasted the town of Jesi for supporting this fine institution, and tossed back another round. We toasted a few more things as well, and tossed a few more back. At this point we, ourselves, were nicely toasted.

We soooked down the stairs and as I passed the kitchen and saw the dishwasher. She was older than Maria, herself. Could she be Maria’s mother? Possible. Certainly it explained the reason why I could spell my name on the greasy edge of my plate. I will say nothing about the bathroom.

“How does the town allow her to stay open?” I asked Graziella. “In the States, the Board of Health would have closed her down years ago.”

“Who do you think those three guys were who were dining when we came in? She has every official in town eating out of the palm of her hand. And…” Graziella shot me another one of those over-the rim-looks, “they all remember that bello culo.”

Rapallo Report

2006-12-03T11:36:00.000-08:00

(A castle filled with comics)

I was invited to Rapallo by Luca Boschi who is a walking encyclopedia about 20th Century Italian Pop culture specifically comics and animation. He is also a cartoonist and journalist and a member of a society of comics fans who hold an annual feste di comics in Rapallo. He got me on the guest list and, without telling me, got me into a lot more.

Rapallo is a seaside town. Cafes and restaurants line the street fronting the beach. The boardwalk (actually, more of a brickwalk) rings the semicircular beach. A leisurely stroll from one end to the other might take 30 minutes although judging by the median age of most of the Rapallans I saw this walk might take as long as two days. At one end, jutting into the bay, is the regulation boat rental closed for the season. At the other end, jutting out into the bay. is the regulation castle. It is a small castle that got kicked off the hill overlooking Rapallo by the other bigger, meaner castles.

Inside the castle was an exhibit from two schools of comics. As you walk in you see work by students from the comics school of Milan. My gang, the Scuola di Comics Internazional, filled the galleries on the second floor, or what is known in Italy as the first floor. When I arrived with the head of the comics school in Florence, Marco Bianchini, and his sweet wife, Novella, the rest of the school clan (5 or 6 former students and the Assistant Director, Sara Sasi) had only just arrived. We walked to the castle along the water gasping at the stunning beauty of the El Greco sky, the sharp hills rising from the sparkling water, and a sailboat on the horizon thoughtfully placed there for our cameras.

The first person I was introduced to at the castle exhibit was Ivo Milazzo, one of the few mass market Italian cartoonists whose work I can actually identify and admire. The Italians have a penchant for the American Western and on and off for many years Milazzo has drawn a feature called Ken Parker. One of the reasons I like Milazzo’s work is ‘cause it is nice and loose and he is not stingy with the black ink. Another reason is that I can usually follow his stories while still retaining my shamefully minimal abilities to read the Italian language. He is a nice guy and I never met anyone named Ivo before so I said his name as much as possible. He kept his distance for the rest of the night.

Ken Parker is rivaled in popular sales only by another Western character called, of all things, Tex. Tex is the longest running non-humor series in Italy now being drawn by my boss, Marco, along with a rotating stable of 5 or 6 other cartoonists of the “realistic” school of comics.

“Realistic “ is an interesting choice to describe Tex. Of the 300 page story he is working on, Marco told me that he hands in about 20 pages at a time for approval. He got a call about one scene that he had drawn where Tex is beating down a door. Now you can imagine that beating down a door with one’s bare fists takes some exertion, even if you are a beefy chappy like Tex. So Marco drew his face in a grimace indicating masculine exertion. “Uh-uh,” said the editor, “Too much masculine exertion. Change the face.” Tex, it seems, is only allowed to show a minimum of masculine exertion. In fact, I am told, that Tex only has four facial expressions, well, actually five, if you count “affection”, but this is used so rarely that even Tex scholars keep it in the footnote category.

Tex has a sidekick, named, I kid you not, “Pard”, as in “Pardner”. I assume that this is the guy’s full name as he is never called anything other than, “Pard”. “Don’t forget to bring home a quart of milk after your 12:00 showdown with the Dalton gang, Pard,” Mrs. Pard calls from the screen door.

We went to a theatre where a presentation was being made about animation. As the speaker spoke about the process of making an animation the same 35 second loop of animation played behind him on a screen. I saw a guy’s head expand and burst 274 times.

Afterwards we stood around, sipped proseco, nibbled crackers and I caught up with the lives of my students who had graduated last year and whose work was being exhibited. A fellow who spoke English came up to me. He was German and had come to a lecture I had given last year in Erlangen. He is a huge comics enthusiast and had driven all day from Germany to come to Rapallo. Strange? As far as I could tell, the comics festival in Rapallo was not exactly a must-see event. It is organized by fans of comics for fans of comics. There are no tents with sellers booths, no people walking around in costumes. But take it from an insider, anything is possible when it comes to the mad passions of a fan boy. Still I felt that maybe I was missing something. He showed me his most prized possession: a sketchbook filled with sketches by famous artists. He trailed Robert Crumb for a full day finally cornering him coming out of a church in France somewhere. The sketch was very nice, but a little shaky.

The next thing I know we are headed to a restaurant that I had been told was very particular. “Particular” is one of those words Italians use that mean many things depending on how it is pronounced. I can’t begin to pretend that I really understand all of the word’s nuances but when Luca Boschi told me that this restaurant was “particular” he paused for a moment before saying “particular” and looked meaningfully off into the distance as if to see if there might be a better word, but nope “particular” it was, and is.

When we arrive I notice that comics characters had been brightly painted on the side of the restaurant. In fact, you cannot miss them. I was so amazed that while staring at an enormous The Phantom I walked smack into Dagwood and nearly broke my nose. But inside the restaurant the decorations were not merely gaudy wall paintings by a talented Rapallan art student. The walls were covered with framed hand drawn original comic art by…well, by just about everyone. They had to escort me to my seat.

On the way to my table I passed Herriman, Kelly, Gould, Opper, Segar, Caniff. Y’know the usual guys you see hanging around the walls of a restaurant in the middle of figgin’ nowhere. Then I sat down at my seat and my jaw, which I had just scraped off the floor hit my plate with a clank. There at my elbow, woven (not merely printed) into the rose colored linen tablecloth, were my pals Nancy and Sluggo.

Should you want to drop by some time for a plate of pasta with funghi or chicken braised with olives and white wine while admiring a full page Bushmiller Sunday from 1952, the name of this joint is U Giancu which was the name of the original owner and is also the name of the son who now runs it whose name is also Fausto. Confused? Don’t worry, everything at this place is a little askew and the tilt only got more pronounced as the evening fell into full swing and I met U Giancu/Fausto , himself.

He looks like Mr. Clean’s father-in-law. When we met, he knew who I was, poured me a gallon of wine and handed me a mound of pasta the size of Mount Rushmore. I was surprised to find out that many people seemed to know my name and came to shake my hand and pour me some more wine and before long I was having a very jolly time, indeed.

Fausto has a trademark. Every time he goes into the kitchen he comes out with plates of grub in his massive arms and a different knit watch cap on his bald head. How could I tell they were different? When I first met him he there was a miniature golf player on the cap. Every time Fausto moved his head the duffer swung his little plastic putter. Over the course of the evening I saw him in caps featuring a variety of animals, Spiderman, a glass rocket ship, and, I believe, a toilet.

After dinner, Fausto stood on a chair in front of the bar and got the room silent which took a few moments. I figured that something good and weird was about to occur so I snagged a front row seat. He called up an elderly gentleman named Carlos Chendi who has been writing stories for Disney Italia for 40 years and presented him with a box. Oh, great, an awards ceremony. I have sat through many an awards ceremony in Italy since I have been here. At best they are dull.

I am siting there trying to figure out how to sneak out of my seat and get a good look at that Dick Tracy strip across the way when something really weird does, in fact, happen.

Carlos calls my name and I am shoved up to the front and presented with this box containing a plaque with my name on it commemorating this night. I am stunned but now I realize why all these guys knew my name thanks to my pal, Luca Boschi, I am the surprise honored guest, but the surprise is on me. Fortunately, I do not make too big of a fool of myself and remember to say nice things about Italian hospitality and the high quality of the output of Fausto’s kitchen.

(Fausto, Carlos, Paul, Luca)

After they dispense with me they give out some serious awards to cartoonists who have really worked hard this year and deserve recognition. As the ceremony concludes more people shake my hand, but a couple of honest guys ask me, “Just who are you, anyway?” At this point I am able to pull out the brand spanking new copy of “Citta di Vetro” which had just been released as a deluxe newsstand edition that very day. When they see David Mazzucchelli’s name on it, they grin, shake my hand again, and pour me some more wine.

(Milazzo endulges a fan. Note Raymond and Caniff in background)

Soon it is time for dessert and I learn the true purpose of the evening and why that German guy drove all day to get here. Fausto sits me down and, asking me if I would mind drawing some pictures for a few fans, pours me a stiff grappa. I look around and see that these fans from the Society are all scurrying around from table to table to get sketches from all of the artists and the 10 watt bulb in my head flickers to light.

As I continue to draw a miracle occurs along the lines of the loaves and fishes; my grappa glass never appears to be empty and I know for sure that I was tossing those babies back. But that is about all of which I am certain. From that point on the evening gets a bit fuzzy.

When I come to it is the next morning and I am not sure how I got to the hotel. I crawl to the bathroom and look at my sorry face in the mirror. On my head is a knit cap on top of which is bouncing a bobble-headed Topo Gigio grinning ear to ear.

Lucca Report 2006

2006-11-12T10:21:00.000-08:00

In most ways this years’ comics festival in Lucca was a huge improvement over the one I attended last year. By moving the festival inside the walls, which surround of the city, the business of comics festivals (the meetings, the networking, and the commerce) improved dramatically. Also improved was the fun of comics festivals (the collecting, the trading, and the hemorrhaging of the credit card). But many would agree that the biggest improvement of all was only having to walk one minute out of any of the dozen or so massive tents to find a great cappuccino.

In past years the festival has been held outside the city walls, inconveniently located in a run- down parking lot a good 30-minute walk to the center of cappuccino. Hence people were always running late for luncheon meetings, lectures, and staged reenactments of the battle of Zxon 5 from the 2nd volume of the “Worlds and Galaxies Untred Upon” trilogy: “Barf’s Revenge”. Hey, it’s hard to stage a faithful reenactment of a pivotal battle when your head Squatsch Sergeant is on the other side of town and he’s the guy with the enchanted crystal Burpon.

For the underinformed, the official title of this festival is “Lucca Comics and Games”. The Games part is big. All the major video game designers are present hawking their wares along with all of the fantasy card games, board games, and action figure games. I even saw a few guys squatting in semi-hiding behind one of the tents playing a craps game. I suppose they were embarrassed ‘cause their game is so old fashioned and has only two moving parts.

Along with the games territory comes the opportunity to get oneself dressed up as a favorite game character, especially if oneself is a girl between the ages of 15 and 20. There is even an entire area of the pavilion devoted to this activity called CosPlay, a clever and catchy combination of the words Costume and Platypus.

As I understand this (and remember I am a 50 year old American male, not exactly the informed audience for this particular activity), in CosPlay you and your buddies get dressed up in your favorites fantasy figures and put on small skits. I saw some robots and Stormtroopers go at it with black painted papertowel rolls.

But in many CosPlay plays the play is merely a vamp. Mostly I saw adolescent girls dressed in skimpy outfits posing with each other, pausing in tableaux, and then changing poses and pausing again. As far as I could tell the poses were not slides in an ongoing storyline, but just cool poses. It seemed merely odd to me until I looked around and saw a bunch of old guys drooling with cameras waiting for the next tableaux. I got the hell out of there, pronto.

A woman explained to me that CosPlay is actually a very creative activity for girls because a lot of them make their own costumes and write their own skits. It was described as a healthy alternative to the kinds of mischief many teenagers get mixed up in. Maybe so, but as far as I could tell the Vampirella and baby doll outfits that these girls poured themselves into outnumbered the Amazons, Valkeries and Presidents of Germany as role models by 10 to 1.

Not all costumed festival-goers indulge in the regimen of formal CosPlay. They simply get dressed up and wander around. Mostly it is long black robes and painted faces, but I noted an interesting fad: The Big Object trend. Lots of Big Swords and I mean BIG. Big Guns, Big Lightning Bolts, Big Shields, and Big Carpet Tubes Painted Black also known as Big Things. Why the Big Objects? Well, holding your symbolic icon lets others know immediately who you are just like those ancient frescoes of the Saints that pepper the interiors of Italian churches. So, on the very same day in Lucca, I saw two guys with Big Keys. One was peeling on the church wall: St. Peter. The other was peeing on the alley wall: Sargon the Magnificent.

In the States I do not think that you would get very far from the parking lot without someone making a big stink if you came dressed up as a girl in a black bikini scrambling around on all fours attached to a leash held by your black-faced boyfriend wearing black paper mache ram’s horns. I later learned that the boyfriend was one of my cartooning students from the Scuola di Comics in Florence. I am going to look at his work a bit differently from now on.

I guess the weirdest costume, though, was the guy in torn jeans and a tee-shirt who had a large metallic pyramid for a head. When I mockingly described this to my students they looked at me like an idiot and solemnly explained that he was dressed as a magic talisman from a game that everyone knows about a duh.

The antics of these dolts prancing around are all so silly and ridiculous. Look, I generally let my fellow man live his or her own life. I am tolerant if someone wants to spend their time and money participating in events like Nascar racing or Pet Shows. But Gaming?! I just don’t get it. Why don’t they devote themselves to something really important like, say Comics?

There were several huge white tents filled with comics vendors. I sat in the Coconino Press table because I am lucky enough to have my book, City of Glass (co-created by the great David Mazucchelli), printed by an outfit called Coconino Press. Coconino Press is an oasis of decent comics in Italy (meaning: they print stuff I like). The best thing that can be said about most Italian comics is that they are called ‘Fumetti’, or “little puffs of smoke” based on the design of word balloons, I suppose, but maybe it was someone’s idea that they should all be burned. (Hmmm…I think I may lose some friends, here.) Anyhow, let’s just say that of all of the 9 or 10 editions of ‘City of Glass’ the best and most beautiful by far is the one published by Coconino Press. (Oops, there go a few more friends). Plus I get to say the word “Coconino” a lot and it’s a fun word to say.

The Coconino boys sold a hell of a lot of books at Lucca. Foremost among these books was one that debuted at Lucca called “S” by the cartoonist, Gipi. As I have said elsewhere in this blog, two of Gipi’s short books are available in English from Fantagraphics )http://www.fantagraphics.com/ignatz/ignatz.html) and I won’t invite you to my birthday party if you do not buy these books right now and read them. I wondered why the seat next to Gipi was always vacant whenever I came back to the booth from my regular cappuccino breaks but after a while I realized how demoralizing a location it was for another author. It was not merely that everyone on the planet seemed to want this book (while I had to bribe several students to even come by to even say hello to me). No, the painful part was watching him, out of the corner of my eye, dash off one beautiful watercolor illustration after another with such ease. If I didn’t love this guy so much I would hate him.

Coconino invited another American, R. Kikuo Johnson to Lucca to sign copies of his swell debut book, “The Night Fisher”. Kikuo is a smart and good-humored fella who also draws well. We snuck out at sunset to climb one of the two towers remaining inside the city to look at the other tower. People in the other tower were doing the same. It felt like one of those surreal wordless French gag cartoons from the 60’s. Kikuo likes the Jack Kirby of the Big Ant era while I prefer Jack Kirby of the late Captain Victory era, and if you know what that means God have mercy on your sorry soul.

On the train headed back to Florence I was getting ready for a very important nap (what the Italians call a ‘pizzolino’, another word I love to say), an activity that Italian train seats are ergonomically designed to discourage, when a couple got into the seats across from me still buzzing from their thrilling day at the festival and anxious to talk to someone about it, even if that someone only understood about 12% of the Italian they were speaking.

For them, it was the best festival, ever in the universe. And I think they really meant it, too. You see, he was Kaloo from Kabu (or Kabu from Kaloo, I never quite got which) and she was his mortal enemy, Cassandra, from Plowman’s Planet. They were usually mortal enemies, but they had buried the hatchet for the Lucca Festival to demonstrate that interplanetary brotherhood was possible. After a while they gave up trying to talk to me and cuddled shamelessly. She caressed his spiked tail as he whispered sweet nothings into one of her six ears.

Where’s that guy with the Big Key? Lock me up, Scotty.

Who watches the Watchmen? R. Kikuo and me, that's who.

Barcelona Blog

2006-11-07T04:29:00.000-08:00

It is Sunday afternoon and I am sitting in the Barcelona airport taking a little time to think and write about the past two days. Actually, I am taking plenty of time to do this due to my ongoing inability to tell the difference between 14:00 and 16:00.

I arrived in Barcelona two days ago and the first thing that raised my curiosity about this town were the directional signs in the airport. The arrow icons were in Spanish, Catalan, French and English. Rather that saying the usual, “EXIT”, the sign in English read, “WAY OUT”.

I have been here as a guest of Kosmopolis, what the promoters dub a “literary feast”. Well, it was literary, I’ll give ‘em that, but the feast amounted to an all-you-can eat supply of warm water, bottled juice, bad coffee and a bowl of tiny graham crackers in the guests’ lounge. To be honest, they also fed us a fine lunch that I skipped out on ‘cause I was afraid someone would ask me exactly what I thought I was doing there, a question that I would be hard put to answer. Kosmopolis, which roughly translates from Catalan as “Cosmic Metropolis”, is an annual contemporary arts exposition heavily funded by the City of Barcelona and the Cosmos. It includes things like speakers (me), workshop leaders (also, me), live music, installations, performance artists, technogeeks, and major gallery shows (all not me). I saw some super-cool stuff, and some fairly weird shit.

Let’s dispense with the super-cool stuff since it is less fun to write and read about. There were two monster exhibits. Bamako is the annual collection of the best photography from Africa. The other show was a bone chilling visual history of the Chernobyl disaster. Both great.

As to the weird shit; I sat in on a lecture about the future of computer game programming which sounded to me like a strategy session for alienating future generations from the bothersome and smelly business of human contact. Another workshop was about the future of high-speed information sharing where the information was shared slowly and, to me, largely incomprehensibly. A poetry slam in Catalan consisted of two heavy amplified bald guys yelling nouns at each other.

I suppose that my talk would fall somewhere in between “super-cool stuff” and “weird shit” depending on which side of the stage one sat. I spoke and showed slides describing the process of co-adapting (with David Mazzucchelli) Paul Auster’s novel, ‘City of Glass’ into a comic. I did this in English while two people sat in a booth to the right of the orchestra seats and tried to translate my comments into Catalan via little earsets worn by the audience. This was a bit disconcerting at first as I am used to having my speech translated simultaneously in class by the amazingly effective Italian translator, Vanessa Petrucci. Unfamiliar with both comics and my vague attempts at humor, the two translators struggled in the booth to make me sound coherent to the audience of Barcelonans. The windows of the booth began to fog up after about 15 minutes.

It might have seemed like weird shit to the audience of 500, but to me it was super-cool. From my viewpoint on stage I watched the audience stare at me blankfaced, turn their heads to the translation booth, then turn back to me with further mystification. Like watching people watch a tennis match.

Many events occurred simultaneously because Kosmopolis is housed in an enormous four-sided building with an open courtyard that was once the Barcelona orphanage. The building was in poor condition when the city gave it to the Cultural Council who proceeded to completely rebuild the interior and give it a 21st Century sheen. One of the four sides was a hopeless mess when bequeathed, so they just tore down that side and replaced it with chrome and glass and escalators.

Most of the other guests were high-minded literary types or future-thinkers. There seemed to be about a dozen Russian writers who traveled in a group with a fog of gray smoke resting on their shoulders. This was all good, ‘cause I didn’t have anyone to talk to and could come and go as I please.

I did a lot of walking around Barcelona. I walked to the Gaudi gardens, the Gaudi museum, and the Gaudi cathedral. I saw a lot of Gaudi. I strolled around in the old part of town, which is very easy to discern as all of the streets in the new part of town are built on a grid. The old town is a snarl of teeny streets opening onto courtyards. One snaking road led me to the Saturday morning market. It is a lot like the Centro Market in Florence except that in Barcelona they gaily display their dead rabbits hung by the feet with their appetizing fur still on.

The tiny streets, designed for pedestrian and horses but not SUV’s, reminded me of Florence, where I am now living and teaching, but with a few significant differences. Although Barcelonans talk on their cellphones plenty, it is not with the same fanaticism, as do the Italians. In Florence people look at you funny if you are walking down the street not talking on your cellphone. In Barcelona I saw many people walking down the street talking to each other as well as people walking down the street >gasp< silently.

I also deduced in my fact-finding in-depth tour of exactly three churches that Jesus and Mary appear to have switched roles from their Italian counterparts. In Italy Jesus is generally seen either peacefully alive or peacefully dead. Mary is generally seen suffering. In Barcelona every Jesus I ran into was twisted in agony while Mary had just returned from the hairdressers. In fact I went into one church and saw a local good churchlady up on the pedestal fixing the hem of Mary’s dress. It would take a better sociologist than I (like, say, a real sociologist, or perhaps my sister, Judy) to divine the divine meaning here, but in the U.S. we have both the peaceful Jesus and the peaceful Mary and look at the mess we are in.

The best part of my visit to Barcelona was not the stroll through the charming old streets, or the Gaudi, or the poetry slam. No the best thing by far was my hotel room. The apartment on Via San Gallo in Florence where I have been staying is clean and modern but it is also teeny. To take a shower I have to rotate in-place in the coffin-like shower stall and strategize my ablutions so that I do not run out of the four minutes of allotted hot water. In the modern and spacious hotel room in Barcelona I took the kind of shower I have been yelling at my daughters for years not to take and what is referred to in my house as a Hollywood shower. I meditated in the rain forest.

The other aspect of my Florence apartment that really has me looking for another place is the fact that I cannot seem to get a completely solid night of sleep without being woken up. And the cause is always some different. In the past three weeks I have been roused from slumber by: the baker across the street loading and unloading baked goods from his little truck, the mysterious guy down the block who comes and goes throughout the night, but instead of having a door he has one of those roll-up and roll-down metal store-front protectors that he loudly rolls-up and slams-down whenever he enters or leaves his place which is quite often throughout the night, people throwing stuff into the dumpster directly below my window (a favorite thing to throw out in the middle of the night appears to be brittle plastic objects), and let’s not forget (will I ever?) the guy who I thought had been stabbed but turned out only to have stomach problems that he wanted the entire block to know about as he vomited virtually non-stop for 20 minutes, pausing briefly from time to time to gasp for air and to curse the city of Florence, in front of the dumpster and then laid down right there.

I had not realized how starved I was for uninterrupted sleep until my first night in my three star Barcelona flat in a large bed with crisp sheets and triple-glazed, modern, sound-proof windows so that no intruding noise from the street below could wake me up. That was the first night.

The second night I stayed out late and staggered home in anticipation of Little Paulo In Slumberland. I laid me down to sleep and those triple-glazed windows did their magic. Unfortunately I did not have a triple-glazed door at around 3 AM. Bone rattling raw mega-decibels sawed through the wood. Evidently the British couple next door was having a bit of a tiff. I could not get the salient details, even though I stood shamelessly in my underwear in the dark with the water glass from the bathroom pressed against the door as I have seen in the movies. The gist of the spat appeared to have had something to do with her walking into the room while he was having sexual intercourse with another woman. “You said you fookin’ loved me, you fook!!!”

He landed out in the hall while she yelled, no, really screamed at him. He tried to pretend that everyone else up and down the hall was not also listening with their water glasses pressed to their doors. Almost shyly he repeatedly asked her to: “C’mon, the door.”. Eventually he gave up that nice-guy tactic in favor of, “Open the fookin’ door you fookin’ fook!!!”

Eventually she let him back in. This turn of events was shortly followed by the sound of scuffling, thrown objects hitting the wall and breaking, and what I think was the sound of spraying water. The management let this go on for a half hour or until they were certain that nobody was actually being murdered and that every other guest in the joint was awake (Management has principles, after all) and eventually some guys came in and pulled them apart. I wish I could give you a detailed account of the dénouement and describe the black eyes and torn clothing, but a hard-hitting crackerjack crime reporter I ain’t. I cowered behind my door and creeped back into bed to try to make up for lost zzz’s. But I couldn’t go back to sleep.

I don’t think that I have every heard such a fight in my sheltered life. When my parents fought it was with multi-syllabic words through clenched teeth over strategy for enacting public policy for the disabled. When my wife and I fight we generally choose stone cold silence (although I am prone to mutter what is really on my mind under my breathe like a steam valve on a pressure cooker). I tell you, I was rattled.

In the morning at the remarkably taste-free free breakfast (how do they do that?) I scanned the couples to see if I could detect the guilty, but everyone else was doing the same. The place was filled with more fake ear-to-ear grinning than ever witnessed before in the dining hall of the Gran Ronda Hotel, Barcelona. It was WAY OUT.

Former orphanage

Thoughtfully placed signs everywhere in case I lost myself.

Saints and Sinners for sale.

3 Wise Men and 3 Wise Guys for sale, too.

UPDATE!

This just in from one of my sharp-eyed students, Corrado, from the Scuola di Comics Internazionale in Roma. More Sacred and Profane combinations viewed through a plate glass window. Mussolini, Che, and the Pope. Anyone else have a contribution?

Luzern Report

2006-05-25T12:50:00.000-07:00

I advise you to go to the Comics Festival held annually in Luzern if you want to see some very interesting contemporary comic art without a lot of commercial hawking, or if you feel like getting away from it all and, just for the hell of it, spend a lot of money. I could go on and on about how expensive things are in Luzern and come to think of it, gosh darn it, I think I will.

Sometimes I get hungry and when this happens I like to eat. I went to a restaurant. Not some fancy place with a curtain over the front window to ward off those pesky customers, but a dumpy place with a lot of young people inside smoking and drinking beer. I found out why they were not also eating when I was served a pile of potato slivers covered with melted cheese and served in a tub of crème di cholesterol. The sum total of ingredients came to about $0.37, the sum total of the bill came to about $27.50, and I came to on the floor with nice people pouring beer in my face.

The local people I came in contact were seemed very “nice”. Everyone smiled a lot. When I went into a store to buy an English newspaper the storeowners smiled a lot. I tried to speak in French/German to ask for directions, they still smiled a lot. As each painful syllable dribbled down my chin and landed with a thud they continued to smile a lot, but I could see the wife impatiently tapping her foot while the husband eyed my wallet with suspicion. The smile muscles on their necks throbbed.

The festival that these folks put on really is exciting. Here’s how it works: sprinkled throughout the small city are a dozen or so exhibits, installations, really, featuring an international array of comic artists. You are given a booklet with a list and a map and set off to fend for yourself. This is probably not a problem for most European festivalgoers, but it seems that when I am dropped into a new foreign town with twisting streets inherited from the Bronze Age I suddenly have the sense of direction of a toothbrush.

Nevertheless, I stumbled across some very fine exhibitions.

There are a bunch of guys from Hong Kong who call themselves,”Springrollll”. They created a fascinating exhibit of drawings, comics, and dolls that had something to do with the history of Hong Kong, or maybe not, but it was very cool.

Jonathon Rosen was one of the few Americans exhibiting and he ate up a few walls with a few massive paintings while visitors in the adjoining room were hypnotized by his mesmerizing and inventive film in which something may have happened.

A group of students from der Ecole d’Arts Applique aus Genf created an installation on the walls in 3D where you were handed a pair of those 3D glasses as you entered. I think that it was a wrap around cityscape, or Martian landscape, but it might have been the inside of a Salvatore Dali’s refrigerator. They were also doing some very sophisticated screen printing on sight under the watchful eye of their printmaker/teacher Christian Humbert-Droz, whom I spoke to in the courtyard outside the exhibit while two of his most accomplished students gave a third student an art installation hair cut that spelled out the name of their favorite band.

Anke Fruchtenburger makes really nice drawings and her exhibit in which large frames from a comics story wrapped around four interior gallery walls was stunning. It was about a girl who had a problem, I think.

Finally, under the train station there was an exhibit that I really did understand. It included works by about eight artists who all work in some kind of comics/illustration reportage. The work was very linear and concrete because it was all based on reporting about real places and events. On artist named (Yves) Noyau particularly stood out for me even though here he was only represented by some open sketchbooks:

Also in this exhibit was the work of my pal, Ulli Lust, whom I met at the Napoli Comicon. Ulli’s work in this show was a report about the town of Luzern itself. She is considering dropping her last name when she travels out of town because of the eyebrows and expectations that it raises. She has a cool website:

http://www.ullilust.de/

Ulli invited me and fellow American cartoonist, Peter Blegvad, to tag along to a dinner she had been invited to by some Finnish cartooning students. Free meal? At this point the numbers on my credit card had been worn down to nothing so I gladly assented.

Turns out that these students were staying in the house of some chums who were out of town for the weekend. Eventually we thought that we had found the house. But it looked so run-down that it was hard to tell. There was a good reason that it looked abandoned: it was! These kids were squatters and the place is set for demolition sometime soon. Sad and filthy stuffed animals stuck to the windows looked down on us as we tossed gravel at the second floor windows to get someone’s attention. One of the young women came down and welcomed us in explaining that, if for any reason we had to leave, the only way to reenter was to slide one’s tiny European hand through the mail slot and reach around to the functioning doorknob on the inside of the door. Looking down at my size 12 American mitt I entertained the idea of staying outside. Climbing the dark twisting staircase I was overcome by the strong suspicion that several male cats may possibly be in residence.

The flat brought back to mind an apartment I had visited a few times in Washington, D.C. back in the early-70’s that had been decorated in the same kaleidoscopic fashion one might call “Louis the 14th Hippie”. One of the hallmarks of such décor is that virtually every vertical surface is decorated with something…anything, and all of the horizontal surfaces are decorated with stuff that people left there sometime in the past.

The students could not have been more delightful, however, nobody was exactly certain what to do about dinner. I shooed them out of the kitchen, since I love to cook, and since, judging by the state of the kitchen I figured that I wanted to know exactly which of the available ingredients were going into my dinner. There was no refrigerator and maybe that was a good thing because when stuff is rotting out in the open it is more likely to get thrown away. I made a nice, simple pasta. It does not take too much to make a nice, simple pasta and here is the secret. Cook the pasta correctly (lots of water, lots of salt in the water, don’t overcook) and make sure that whatever else you put on top of it, you put in something peppery and something sweet. If you have nothing else but olive oil, black pepper, a little honey and salt you will be fine. Especially if, prior to serving, the diners have already plowed their way through several bottles of wine.

A group of about eight of us had a jolly time. If you ever need a good dinner guest to enliven a table I suggest that you call Peter Blegvad. He tells great stories, asks interesting questions and pays attention to the answers.

About an hour after dinner we all decided that we needed more to drink and after going through all of the empties on the table as well as those scattered about on the floor we concluded that to do this we needed to actually get up from the table and navigate through the semi-functioning door. Rather than heading back into the nauseatingly quaint and pricey town center we took a left and after walking a block or two we actually encountered people who did not have the same color skin as ours and bars that did not require a second mortgage to purchase a beer.

When I came to in my room at the I-Kid-You-Not “Hotel Tourist”, it was the next morning and I spent my last few hours in Luzern receiving resuscitation from the magnificent collection of Paul Klees drawings and paintings at the Rosengart collection. If you ever need a cure for a hangover, three solid rooms of Paul Klee will do the trick.

Rule 17

2006-04-01T01:34:00.000-08:00

Judge a Book by it's Cover

I have not stepped foot in any of these Florentine hotels. They might all be swell. These are my own highly scientific empirical observations based on walking by them or looking at their names in the Yellow Pages:

The River Hotel: It is not very close to the River.

The Pitti Palace Hotel: Fewer and smaller rooms than the namesake. Also less art on walls.

The Golf Hotel: The closest golf course is Luigi’s mini-golf in Prato.

Hotel Michelangelo: Michelangelo designed some of the greatest bits of architecture in the city. Critics laud his staircase to the Medici Library with its bizarre half staircase that leads magnificently into the rest of the staircase. Needless to say he did not have a hand in the design of the Hotel Michelangelo.

Mona Lisa Hotel: There may be a reproduction of Leonardo’s painting in the lobby.

Hotel Souvenir: It’s a hotel and a t-shirt!

Canada Hotel, Arizona Hotel, and the Boston Hotel: Good choices if you are out late drinking and the only thing you can remember is where you were born.

The Real Hotel: It is.

The Jolly Hotel: It is not.

The Grand Majestic Hotel: It is neither.

Hotel Tina: Only people named Tina are allowed to register.

Dante Hotel: Seven rings of rooms each hotter than the last.

Real Hotel: Hope so. They paid good euros to be listed in the phone book.

Rex Hotel: Only for guys and their moms.

Hotel Airport: Owners couldn’t make up their minds. Is this a hotel or an airport?

California Hotel: Such a lonely place, such lonely place.

Residenza dei Pucci: Dogs welcomed.

Napoli Report

2006-03-10T02:28:00.000-08:00

(signing at the Coconino Press booth. l. to r.: Gipi. Marco, Baru, Paul Karasik, Igort. Ever notice how all the GREAT cartoonist have only one name?)

From the Florentines, this is what I have learned about other Italians:

The Siennese are snobs.
The Luccans are xenophobes.
The Pisans are morons.
And people from Prato (right over the hill barely 20 minutes away, mind you) not only do not know how to drive, but they drive big, fancy new cars because they are show-offs.

Bring up the name of another town that you might be considering visiting, and everyone will have an opinion about what is wrong with the citizenry as well as with you for lacking the God-given common sense to want to go anywhere else in Italy. This animosity has been explained to me as a result of hundreds of years of turf wars where everybody was trying to take over everybody else’s towns. Italy did not become a Republic until 1861, and even now a Florentine can have trouble understanding the speech of a Sicilian should he be lacking God given common sense and find himself in Sicily (where, I am told, those barbarians do not know how to make a decent cup of coffee). In conversation, the mention of a trip to another town will merit at least one or two side-swipes, but mention that you are going to Naples and expect a head-on culture collision that will snarl-up conversational traffic for at least 30 minutes.

I made the mistake about bragging to some of my Florentine friends that I had been invited to attend the comics festival (from now on referred to as “Comicon”) in Naples and I am now qualified to write the guide book on why not to go there for a visit.

Florentine checklist:
In Naples:
DO be very, very careful whom you talk to.
DO look both ways and make sure your insurance is paid up before crossing the street.
DO accept directions from nobody, especially anyone in a uniform. (You will note that this last directive is a double-negative, or a double-positive, or something. I could not remember anything else that anybody told me to do that was draped in a positive tone.)

In Naples:
DON’T wear a Rolex.
DON’T accept opera tickets from a stranger because he will then know that you are out of your hotel room from 8-11 and take everything that is not bolted down, but they usually bring bolt-cutters, too.
DON’T forget to count your change.

My neighbor summed it up when he heard I was going by putting his hand gravely on my shoulder and explaining to me in terms that an American might understand that Naples is, ‘like the Wild West”.

The one thing that everyone begrudgingly admitted was that in Naples they do know how to make pizza, sort of.

Most of all, my Florentine sources informed me: do not expect to be treated well. The Neapolitans do not know how to treat a guest. “Spoil a guest” is one of the Italian Commandments right after, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s mother-in-law who makes really good gnocchi”.

They were wrong. As the guest of Comicon Napoli 2006, I was treated very well. The coordinators tried to make me feel as though I was right at home in America by providing me with a luxurious room at a Holiday Inn with a stunning view of some huge, ugly buildings (I was later informed by a Florentine that downtown Naples is thick with huge, ugly American-style skyscrapers because the Mafia runs the city and they are a bunch of thugs with no taste who like to pour a lot of concrete).

The Comicon itself was held in a castle. Yup, you read it right, a castle. Well, why not? Comicon…Castle! Get it? They both begin with the letter “C”, dummy! In a castle setting it is only marginally embarrassing to see grown men and women in medieval costume casting spells on one another and plunging cardboard swords through latex bodices. Can’t have a Comicon without those guys showing up. The subdued and tasteful lighting protected the delicate comic books and comic book readers from the natural light they so despise. And as far as I could tell, the infamous thieves of Naples were nowhere in sight due to the immediate presence of real dungeons directly beneath the Comicon.

Upon entering, I was set to do a book signing at a special desk with a beautiful new halogen lamp and swivel chair with the price tag still dangling. Wow! Unfortunately, the room I was to sign in was tucked behind a gallery wall so far off the beaten path that they had to send a rescue team in pith helmets to locate me with bloodhounds when the time was up. Fortunately, I had brought the crossword puzzle. unfortunately, it was in Italian. Actually, one comics fan did stumble upon me, took a quick look at my book (which contains exactly zero superheroes) and asked me if I would draw a picture of the super-character he had made up: Dinosman. My Italian has improved a little since I came here six months ago, but I think that I still missed a lot about the nature of Dinosman as described to me by this kid. As I understood and drew him, Dinosman is half man, half dinosaur, and one of his legs is either a rocket, a bazooka, or a cannoli.

If you do not know this about me already, in addition to making comics I like comics, too, especially old, stupid comics. I bought two old stupid comics at this comicon based on a purchase I had made last fall in Lucca when I bought a digest-sized comic called Gey Carioca featuring the comic adventures of the title character, a shapely gal. These adventures mostly consist of Gey losing her clothes and then trying to find odd objects lying around with which to cover herself.

At the first used-comics stand that I went to at the Napoli Comicon, one of these books just popped into my hands. I spent the next 20 minutes trying to find more issues with almost all of the vendors looking at the cover of this piece of trash I had lovingly clasped to my heart and then shaking their heads grimly saying, wordlessly that no, they had no other issues of Gey Carioca for sale, no, they had never seen Gey Carioca before, and yes, maybe I should seek professional help, the 24 hour on duty Comicon Psychologist was down the castle hall, third moat to the right.

The owner of the very last booth I went to was a grizzly guy who looked at the digest, snapped his fingers, and pulled a tabloid-sized version of Gey Carioca out of the 1 Euro bin. He knew that the artist was Paul Campani and he would be pleased to make this issue a gift with his compliments because he would just as soon be rid of the stupid thing. What I discovered back in the luxury of my luxurious Holiday inn room that night was that the Gey Carioca he had given me was done in 1948 and the digest I had first bought was printed in 1973. Both issues feature the same story but the later edition is completely redrawn panel-by-panel by Paul Campani who updated the hairstyles and cars but had also become a much better (or much worse, depending on one’s taste) artist in the intervening 30 years. I was also to learn from Alfredo Castelli (the great Italian comics historian and another Comicon guest) that Campani was one of the most important designers for early 60’s Italian T.V. animation and that his animation style set the standard for that pivotal era when suddenly every Italian home had a T.V. Thus Italian Baby-boomers recall his work vividly without knowing the guy’s name from the program “Carousel”. I was also told that “Carousel” which was broadcast at night, became the way many children learned to tell time because mothers across Italy told them that they had to go to bed right after “Carousel”: 8:00.

Well, that was more about nothing than I bet you expected to get into. But this is what happens when a comics geek gets his engines revved up. At least I didn’t ask you to draw me a picture of Dinosman.

(Note: In all Gey Carioca drawings above, the example on the left is from 1948 (more Milton "Terry and the Prirates" Caniff style) and on the right, completely redrawn in 1973 (more Bill "Mad" Elder style, but with 1970's hair).

UPDATE:
As I made those scans yesterday, I took a closer look at Gey Carioca and now have my doubts whether the 70's version is, indeed, by the same guy, Paul Campani. Here's why: after you get beyond the hairstyle and hardware updates, and the fact that different formats called for different sized panels (and thus different compositions within those panels), the big difference between the two is the rendering. The 70's renderings of the 40's drawings are crisper and loonier (much more to my taste than the sub-standard Caniff rip-off that was so prevelant in the late 40's). But here's the thing: if Paul Campani had become so much better at drawing over 30 years why in the world wouldn't he improve the dumb-ass mistakes he made back in 1948? I now believe that he 1970's artist simply put Campani's drawings on the light table and redrew them with his own "style", changing the shape and compositions to conform to the publishers digest-sized demands, changing the style to conform to modern sensibilities, but did not change the figures to conform to the rules of anatomy or perspective. The earlier version is signed, "Paul", but the latter version is unsigned. Any help here, scholars?

...and pardon me for abruptly shifting gears, but I also believe that you should go read the interview with Ali Shalal Qaissi , the guy standing on the box wearing a hood from the infamous Abu Ghraib photo. While typing the incosequential drivel above, all I have been thinking about is that damn photo. It is important to see that photo again, have a face to put behind the mask, and feel that sick twist in your stomach. By the way, he says he was actually electrically shocked five times while standing on the box. The Specialist who was convicted was acused of only threatening to shock him.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/11/international/middleeast/11ghraib.html?hp&ex=1142139600&en=762326e6cb35fa0d&ei=5094&partner=homepage

ANOTHER UPDATE

...turns out that Ali Shalai Qaissi is not the man standing on the box in the famous Abu Ghraib photo. He contends that he stood on another box at another time and was electrocuted, as did other prisoners.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/18/international/middleeast/18ghraib.html?hp&ex=1142744400&en=f5a8a35705134516&ei=5094&partner=homepage

YET ANOTHER UPDATE

This in from comics scholar and author, Alfredo Castelli:

"...concerning the pocket "Gey Carioca"

Ten monthly issues, published by Edizioni Alpe from July 1973 to March 1974. Alpe had published the original series in 1948.

The series was redrawn by Attilio Ortolani ("Attor"), factotum artist at the Alpe publishing house (he did touching-up of pages, titles, filler stories etc). I should have guessed, as I used to know him well, but I didn't because he was specialized in humor drawings (Alpe published several humor comics such as "Cucciolo" and "Tiramolla", which, for a short time, were serious competitors to "Topolino/Mickey Mouse"). "Attor" also drew for a weekly called "Il Monello" new episodes of a short-lived American series, "Tippy Teen", when the original stories finished. Continuing under license discontinued American series was a common practice in Italy. One of them, "Little Eva", originarily published by StJohn, ended in 1952 in the USA; in Italy it lasted - with a new 8-page episode every week - until the late '70s (I myself wrote tons of Eva scripts in the '60s).
I lost contacts with Attilio 30 years ago or so, and I suppose he's retired and on his 70s. If it interests you I think I can find him easily thru colleagues.

For what concerns Paul Campani, see

COMICS
http://www.lambiek.net/artists/c/campani_p.htm
http://www.tebeosfera.com/Seccion/RRP/04/Campani.htm

"PAUL FILM" ANIMATED CARTOONS (Campani's job since 1958)(*)
http://www.pupiland.com/articolo.asp?articleType=ieri&articleID=227

* He also did many "Popeye" TV Cartoons for KFS under the imprint "Rembrandt Films"

Rule 16

2006-03-07T04:19:00.000-08:00

Can I just stop giving travel advice for a minute and simply give you an order? Good. The next time you are in the neighborhood of the Central Mercato in Florence, for God’s sake go to Nerbone and have a brisket sandwich.

The Mercato is a square block two-story warehouse of food. The downstairs is primarily a meat and cheese market with the random herb and vinegar shop thrown in just to keep the arteries unclogged. Although there are hundreds of different meats available in all forms it is fairly easy for even an American to identify the various cuts. This is because a lot of the meat still has its head attached. Upstairs are the fruits and vegetables. Prior to entering, take out your travel-sized can of WD40 and apply liberally to the neck: guaranteed, your head will spin. In the pursuit of honest and accurate reporting, I decided to carefully count all of the stalls and came up with the exact figure of: a lot. While my daughters do not share my unnatural obsession with aging newsprint, we all do love to cook and eat and a few of us do not even mind doing the dishes. The stalls in the Mercato are run by people who are serious about food, too…serious about selling it. The prices are competitive, the stuff is fresh, and great care is given to the presentation. It looks so good that you want to touch and squeeze everything, but please do not or the vendor may touch and squeeze your throat. I saw one tourist poke a grapefruit and within minutes his left hand was for sale downstairs next to a pig’s head.

The vendors’ day probably begins around 4 AM and by the time it rolls around for a mid morning snack, they head for Nerbone. Tucked in a far corner of the Mercato, Nerbone may as well be the culinary annex to the Duomo; it is that close to heaven. There is not much on the menu, but it is simply prepared and, given its proximity to the freshest food on the planet, it is, of course, fresh.

The other morning I wandered by around 10:00 and there were five guys who had already put in a good day’s work chopping off the hands of tourists all eating plates of pasta with tripe and drinking wine which I noticed was laced with water…after all there was still another full work day in front of them closing up shop. I swung by several times over the next half hour to detect the most popular dishes and also because I could not read the hand written menu tacked up on the wall. I needed to find something that someone else was eating so I could point to it with one hand while waving a fistful of Euros in the other.

On one pass I saw three husky men all attacking the same plate of cooked greens with slices of garlic the size of poker chips. On the next go-‘round I caught a crew of German tourists drinking beer and eating pancake stacks of roast pork slices. I knew I was getting close. Then on third circuit I saw my destiny. A guy, whom I recognized as one of the fish vendors, was tucking into a panino and I could tell I had to have one, too, just by looking at him. For a few seconds he went all fuzzy, as though he had turned to vapor. Hovering at mouth level, however, the panino remained in sharp focus as most of his corpuscles concentrated solely on that roll filled with hot brisket. Lucky for me the Maestro is very good at divining the needs of those of us who are Italian-impaired. I didn’t even have to point. Drool overcomes all language barriers.

He plunged a fork the size of an ox yoke into a steaming vat and withdrew a brisket that had been simmering for some time in what looked like a sea of grease, garlic chunks, and liquid temptation. He sliced open a roll and deftly dunked the bottom half momentarily into the vat. I would gladly have offered to dunk my head in as well, but that service was not offered. With his mighty Norman Bates’ signature knife he trimmed off several steaming slices, arranged them on the roll, momentarily assessed the stack, then added a few more until it was just right by his experienced standards. He then tossed on a little black pepper, a little (well, O.K., a lot) of salt, a dollop of salsa verde (it’s green, so my daily quota of the vegetable food-group could be checked off), a dollop of salsa picante (it’s red so my daily quota of the red food-group could be checked off), dunked the exposed bottom of the top half of the roll in the steaming juice, plunked on the lid, and tucked the whole thing neatly into an open ended plastic bag just made to fit. It is a good thing that it was early in the day because around 1:00 there is no place to sit and if I had not been sitting down I would have fallen to the floor and started to speak in tongues, the level of ecstasy was that high.

Angouleme Report

2006-02-01T01:20:00.000-08:00

Rules Pour Vivre By When Attending a Comics Exposition in France

The most important comics festival in Europe (excuse me, the most important comics festival in our particular galaxy) is held annually in Angouleme. It is called “Angouleme”, after the town named Angouleme, where it is held. Got that? So when you ask someone, “Are you going to Angouleme this year?” It does not mean, “Are you going to visit the town of Angouleme this year to check out the scenic view?" It means: “Are you going to the most important comics festival in the galaxy this year?” In other words, “Angouleme” is synonymous with “comics festival” the way that “Bilbao” is synonymous with the Guggenheim Museum, or, “Anaheim” is synonymous with Disneyland, or “Baghdad” is synonymous with insurgent acts of violence against an enemy that shouldn’t be there in the first place. Are you going to Baghdad this year? No, I decided to take the year off and encounter random car bombs in the comfort of my condo in Passaic.

Americans consider San Diego synonymous with comics festivals, but from my vast experience of never having attended the San Diego Comic Con, let me tell you that the two events could not be more different. For one thing, when in doubt, comics fans in San Diego dump ketchup all over their food, while the comics fans in Angouleme glop on the cream sauce. Then there’s the age difference. Your typical European comics fans tend to be an older, world-wearier 25, whereas American comics fans are the far less mature 24 and tend to go for the juvenile superhero titles. There is barely a superhero in sight at Angouleme. The refined European tastes lean more towards down-to-earth tales of grim reality where talking animals have graphic sex with babes holding howitzers. But, let’s face it, no matter where you’re from the real purpose of a comics con is for those with like-minded interests to get together and have a fun time spending money.

The gathering itself does not take place in one central mammoth convention hall but is sprinkled in tents throughout the town. Existing structures also house various symposiums and gatherings. The press room, in a modest wing of the City Hall (which is basically a friggin’ castle), is decorated with floor to ceiling tapestries, velvet wallpaper, and gigantic palm trees with monkeys chattering in the upper branches. I left as a standoff was going on between an Alpha Male and Quasimodo for domination over the gigantic chandelier.

They strategically schedule this festival to coincide with what the French Farmer’s Almanac predicts will be the most inclement weekend of the year. Sounds like a bad idea, huh? Au contraire! Very clever, these French! Cold weather forces conventioneers inside buildings and it is a proven scientific fact that most credit card transactions occur inside, you guessed it… buildings! Years ago, before ever there was a comics exposition in Angouleme, the town was deserted during this weekend, and most every other weekend. The boulangers would sit sadly in the shop window and watch mould grow on their breads and cakes in the display cases. Now when this weekend rolls around the jolly boulanger is selling his wares like hot gateaux.

* * *

Travel smart
What the Departement du Tourisme does not mention in their copious literature is that to survive the weekend in Angouleme you need to pack the following:

Head to toe foul-weather gear:
When the snow began to fall on the second day, the dusting transformed the slightly grungy gothic town into the Brothers Grimm. But by the end of the day the slippery sludge made everything merely grim, brother, very grim.

Ropes, carabineers, a set of those small alpine pick axes:
Angouleme is a city built on a hill, a steep hill. Small way stations are set up at several strategic points of altitude where beautiful French nurses administer CPR (in French this roughly translate as Chequesbook Procuremente Rendezvous).

12 extra pairs of disposable shoes, socks, pants, and feet:
A basic tenet of slapstick comedy is that it is funny to see someone else fall. It’s no joke, though, when you are dashing down a slush coated hill trying to make a scheduled bus and you slip and fall right on your Asterix…and crack the spine! I speak from experience.

A tank of oxygen and a portable iron lung:
Necessary after the ascent up the hill where, instead of pristine alpine air, one encounters a hazy pea soup of cigarette smoke, speaking of which, don’t forget to bring:

A carton of cigarettes:
Whether you smoke or not, cigarettes are very handy to have on your person. I am not going to make (too many) broad generalizations about the European attendees of this festival, but I found that if you need directions many people will stare in silence at the mangled English-French syllables dribbling from your mouth until you pull out a pack of smokes and offer one at which point they will personally escort you to the doorstep of the address you seek if you also have a match.

* * *

Let Intuition Be Your Guide
The Dept. de Tourisme kindly prints hundreds of thousands of handy maps directing attendees to the various tents, pavilions and panels sprinkled about. These are very useful as filler for the hundreds of thousands of garbage cans to prevent them from being blown away. I am pretty good at reading maps (I can get from Canal St. to 59th St. on the IRT without getting lost) but I was continually losing my way with that damn map in hand. The reason is this: Angouleme is a spider’s web of teeny streets with temporary tents erected here and there…wherever there is an open square. It does not lend itself to accurate mapping. Once I ditched my map everything went well. After that I got lost on my own and without that map in my hand I did not look like such a (complete) moron.

* * *

Be patient
There are many reasons to attend Angouleme not the least of which is to get your books signed by your favorite artists. Knowing this I still could not believe my eyes when I saw the hordes of people lined up to get sketches by the guy who draws the animals dressed up like Philip Marlowe, or the guy who does the comics of the large-breasted swords clasping razor-sharp women, or the guy who draws the cigar smoking devil in a trench coat. Imagine, waiting an hour for any of those guys? No way! Not me! Instead, I waited an hour to get drawings from the guy who draws couples floating in water, the guy who draws hideously beautiful expressionistic gutter scum, and the guy who takes a couple of trips a year and publishes his sketchbook drawings in absurdly expensive albums. I had plenty of time to do this because nobody was really that interested in getting a sketch from me (the guy who draws a guy on the telephone) in the recently (and handsomely) republished French version of “City of Glass”. 17 people did come up to me and ask what my collaborator on that book, the justifiably beloved and extraordinarily talented, David Mazzucchelli, has been secretly working on for the past 10 years. I simply smiled in that smug, condescendingly knowing way that makes my daughter want to abdicate lineage and shrugged. Actually, I don’t really know what he’s been up to, either, ‘cause he won’t tell me, so don’t ask, O.K.?

* * *

Set Your Priorities
There are dozens of publishers, exhibits, panels, and events going on simultaneously. To make the most of your time, to make sense of the chaos, and to make sure you keep breathing, you need to stay focused. Come with a plan of attack and follow it decisively. I came with a group of students from the Scuola di Comics in Florence where I am teaching this year. Their goal was to show their work to publishers and get published. I am pleased and proud to report that many of the best of them walked away with the possibilities of contracts. A middle-aged man and his teenaged son were in line in front of me to get the latest sketchbook by Jacques Loustal signed by the great artist. They had a small address book, but instead of addresses it alphabetically listed the hundreds of albums they had in their collection. These people had goals that they met.

I, too, had a goal that was met. In a tiny bakery, which I may never be able to find again with or without a map, I had a perfect brioche.

I had another plan, too, although I did not realize it until I got home and downloaded all my photos. Upon reviewing these pix I realized now that my subliminal plan was to get my picture taken with as many of my idols as possible in the bizarre hope that:

a) By sitting next to them and having the flash go off, somehow my total body of published and unpublished work might somehow reflect a bit of their brilliant sheen and magically appear better than it really is.
b) Even though I only sat next to them for a nanosecond I could publish these pics on my blog and make everyone think that these titans were my best friends, or at least would lend me 5 euros in a pinch.
c) Some of their natural European panache would make me look like less of a dork or at least that, maybe, in sitting within the spectrum of their coolness that my hat would not look as ridiculous as my wife says it does.

Well, anyhow, let me tell you, that was one hell of a brioche!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

When Ever Meulen does a sketch in a book he takes out his drafting tools and creates a tightly designed rendering using templates, a tiny ruler, and razor sharp pencils.

http://www.griffioen-grafiek.nl/evermeulen.htm

I had always assumed from Jose Munoz' dark and savage drawings that he would be a brooding misanthrope. He's not.

Gipi and I go way back...about three months when we met at Lucca. He won the Grand Prix for Best Album hours after this picture was taken. Although it is said about many people, in this case it is true: it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. It took him a day to recover from the shock. You Americans are now fortunate enough to be able to read his book, "The Innocents" through Fantagraphics in a format that is affordable and beautiful courtesy of Igort at Coconino Press. Go here and buy Gipi's book immediately or I will never post another blog...wait, on second thought...just go there and buy:

http://www.fantagraphics.com/recent/cmx.html

Lorenzo Mattotti is considered something of a God in Italy where they do not really care too much about comics. However, they do care about Pinnocchio (the little Italian boy who never grows up, a-duh) and he did a lovely illustrated volume of that tale a few years back. But, more importantly, Mattotti loves and draws beautiful women. I horribly lettered one of his strips for an English translation 25 years ago in RAW and I finally got to apologize.

http://www.mattotti.com/

(L.to R.: Charles Burns, Joost Swarte, and Sgt. Dork)

I am assuming that this is being read primarily by Americans (hi, mom!) who probably know Charles Burns and have read his new book "Black Hole". No? And you call yourself an American?! Go here at once and buy this twisted tale of mutant love:

http://www.randomhouse.com/pantheon/graphicnovels/blackhole.html

Joost Swarte has one of the greatest websites on the internet because it actually asks you to figure it out yourself. Even just watching it download is worth the work.

http://www.joostswarte.com/

(L. to R.: Anders Nilsen, Paul Hornschemeier, Clarabelle)

I don't know what I did. Maybe it was my loud obnoxious American gushing, shameless asskissing, or stupid hat, but all the Americans I met were way cooler than me and kept me at arm's length. When I told a nasty anecdote in an unecessarily loud phony French accent in a restaurant about obnoxious French behavior I had witnessed I thought Kevin Huizenga was going to renounce his citizenship, melt into the floor, and/or murder me in any particular order, and, I am ashamed to say, that he had every right. They are old hands at this European comics thing, I guess, and I was so thrilled to be there that I behaved badly on more than one occasion...O.K., O.K.,...most of the time. Anyhow, I apologize to these guys and hope that sometime in the future they will speak to me again, in English.

All three are top notch cartoonists though (they are all so smart that it hurts) and you should go here now and not hesitate to buy all of their very fine books (hmm...by the time I finish with you today you will have spent most of your paycheck.)

Kevin Huizenga's "Ganges"
http://www.fantagraphics.com/recent/cmx.html

...and while you're there, don't miss Matt Broersma's super-fine "Insomnia"

Anders:
http://www.margomitchell.com/thc/an.htm

Paul:
http://www.margomitchell.com/thc/ph.htm

(L. to R.: Buster Cretin, Ben Katchor, Richard McGuire)

I was walking across the street when I heard my name called. It was Ben Katchor and his wife. We stood in the falling snow and chatted casually as though it were Bleeker and 6th Ave. and this happened all the time. Later I went to a slideshow reading that Ben gave, We could have seen twice as many slides without the translator speaking after Ben for each slide because when the lights went up it appeared that everyone in the room was American.

Richard had a great surprise when he saw his design had been used as a graphic for a poster all over town announcing a lecture series. I guess nobody thought about telling him. Fortuantely the poster design was very nice and he was pleased. A very good store whose name I forget even painted some more of Richard's Popeye designs on the gate next to their store:

Rule 15

2006-01-15T11:13:00.000-08:00

Hide Your Euros

The Ponte Vecchio is the oldest bridge in Florence. The others were blown to bits in World War II to prevent the Allies from getting across the Arno and getting in line ahead of the Germans for tickets to the Ufizzi. Unlike most bridges in the world, this bridge is not about connecting two points, this bridge is a destination unto itself…or so several hundred thousand tourists are led to believe daily. “Ponte Vecchio” literally means old bridge, named so because in the time it takes to travel through the throngs from one end to the other you may discover that you have become a grandparent. I was skeptical about this thing from the moment I saw it filled with people. I have a general rule of thumb that has served me well, never hang around a place where lots of people mill around listlessly like stadium rock concerts and jail. I mean, this is a bridge and an old bridge at that (old as in 1345, not old as in 1945), and if you think it is a good idea to tread over something that old and creaky along with tons (and I mean, literally, tons) of other folks, that’s your business. High on my business agenda is staying alive to have at least one more capucinno and pasta dolce.

If you want to make sure that you will not be missing anything by staying on the shore, the following fact-finding report is provided here as a public service so that you do not have to go yourself. This is what you will see if you walk across the Ponte Vecchio:

1. Lots of jewelry, most of it real gold, in the store windows that line the bridge.

2. Lots of jewelry most of it not real gold inserted into fleshy mounds of teenage flesh.

3. Guys taking pictures of their girlfriends.

4. Girls taking pictures of guys they wish were their boyfriends.

5. Guys taking pictures of famous Europeans that happen to be printed on the Euros in what used to be your wallet.

6. Jewelry store owners rubbing their hands together and panting slightly.

Review that list. Did I say anything about the spectacular view from the bridge? No? Hmm…could that be because is no spectacular view from this bridge?! A bridge with no view! Wow! Gotta see that, Marge! Actually there is a small opening at the peak between the shops that line the bridge but it is generally filled to the max with pickpockets smoking, trading quips, and counting out their nice, fresh Euros. The view itself is obscured by a statue that itself is obscured by the kajillion bicycle locks…hmm… maybe it’s not a sculpture? I don’t know what they hell it is. All I know is that people are taking pictures of the fence around it ‘cause it is covered with bicycle locks. And just where did those bicycle locks come from, anyway? From all the bicycles that were stolen to procure the locks. It is a folk art monument to petty crime and you can have your picture taken in front of it with somebody else’s boyfriend while somebody else’s girlfriend picks your pocket and the guy in the jewelry store window rubs his hands together.

The Medicis had a private hallway built above the bridge connecting various bits of Medici real estate. Back in the day, the Medici family ran this town and if they had to get from one side of the Arno to the other they sure as hell were not going to walk among the riff-raff and they already had all the gold jewelry anyone could want as well as all the boyfriends and girlfriends. And really, when you are that rich and powerful you do not care about having your picture taken next to a fence covered with bicycle locks (although there is a portrait in the Uffizi painted by Leonardo of Lorenzo de Medici the Moronic smiling like a dope next to the fence with a pair of bolt cutters in his hands). This elevated hallway, the so-called Vasari Corridor, is lined with paintings of self-portraits by such artists as Rembrandt, Rubens and Hogarth. As far as I know, to this day you must be somehow related to a Medici to gain access. There is also a rumor of a secret Medici tunnel running underneath the Ponte Vecchio lined with paintings on velvet of sad clowns. Adolph Hitler, an amateur painter, was known to have revered the sad-clown-on-velvet genre and this is the true reason why the bridge was not bombed by the Nazis.

Rule 14

2006-01-09T00:37:00.000-08:00

(Note chains)

Bring your own tree

I am sorry to report that the Florentines do not understand the true meaning of Christmas. This being the most Christian country in the known world outside of Crawford, Texas, you would think that the celebration surrounding the birth of Christ himself would evoke the proper Christmas Spirit. Nope, they simply do not understand that to have Christmas means to have your house, garage, and lawn ornaments drenched in zillions of twinkling little lights.

On the other hand there is one hallowed aspect of this sacred time that they do properly recognize: the ceremonious emptying of the wallet. The days leading up to the 25th found the streets of Florence awash with happy holiday shoppers gleefully continuing the great Christmas tradition of maxing the credit card. ‘Tis also the season to reflect and evaluate your relationship to your fellow man, particularly your fellow family members. Is your sister worth an Italian hand-tooled yak skin purse or should you just send her a candy bar this year? According to the signs in the shop windows there were sales galore. Upon closer inspection, I discovered that the word “sale” has a different meaning when used by the Florentine shopkeeper. When he posts a sign in his shoe store window that says, “SALE!” it means, surprise, that he has shoes for sale inside.

We went to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve at our local church. They went crazy building churches back in the 1400’s and there are old cavernous churches sprinkled all about Florence. Going to Mass at one of these is a bit like going to church at the bottom of the Grand Canyon except the frescoes are much nicer.

The church-going population in Italy has been steadily declining in recent years (like, since 1725). Blame it on the low population growth, the shredding of moral fabric, or the bossa nova, these are lean years if you are in the soul-saving business. This being Christmas Eve, however every seat in the house was full. Still, that meant that there was plenty of room for us and about 50 other people who came late to stand in the rear and still plenty more room if we had wanted to bring along our pet aircraft carrier.

I’ll admit to being disappointed that they did not crank the organ up, but I guess with a diminished regular congregation they cannot maintain it. Instead the music was provided by a guy with a guitar joined by a small choir of angelic voices and, I believe, a set of bongos. Because of the cavernous acoustics of the church it was next to impossible to hear what was being said even with amplification, not that I would have understood it anyway since it was mostly in Latin and not even Pig Latin, angit day! However, any one of the dozens of little old ladies in the congregation who know the words by heart could have stepped up to the pulpit and taken over in a pinch should the priest have decided he had more interesting places to go like, say, the back of the church and hang out with our fascinating crowd.

Our group of Giovanni-Come-Latelys included a guy with a greasy ponytail and sunglasses (remember, this was MIDNIGHT mass) who did not even feign interest in the proceedings and kept going in and out of the church fiddling with a cellphone and a pack of Marlboros. There was the passionate couple who found the only vacant seat right in the Confessional thus taking care of both the sinning and the repentance in one-stop. There was the lady next to me who may be a Saint by now for working the miracle of simultaneously tapping her toe and snapping her gum whenever the music started while applying yet more mascara.

It was a quiet, subdued walk home. Without the glittering lights it hardly felt like Christmas at all. Usually we come out of Christmas Eve service back home singing those great carols (“Blue Christmas”, “Jingle-Bell Rock”), but we did not recognize any of the tunes sung by the little choir and guitar except one of the songs that sounded to me like, “Puff, the Magic Savior”.

New Year’s Eve is a different story. Many celebrants simply couldn’t contain themselves and the sound of firecrackers began early...three days earlier around two in the morning, as I recall. The assault grew steadily until by midnight of the 31st the whole town shook and the sky was lit with bright colors. It made me really feel good to be alive and not living in downtown Baghdad where this is a daily and far more deadly occurrence. This is not to say that downtown Florence is not without it’s dangers on New Year’s Eve.

We were about to walk home from a party across town but our friend, Camilla, insisted on driving us home. “It’s dangerous out there,” she explained. We laughed and told her that we were not afraid of teenagers with fireworks. “No,” she continued, “It’s REALLY dangerous”. She explained that it is a quaint tradition in Florence to throw things out the window on New Year’s Eve. In a symbolic purging of the old year you are supposed to throw out old objects that you do not need any more. Dawn of January 1st finds the streets of Florence littered with old socks, underwear, and tennis shoes, as well as tables, chairs, and ex-wives. We were told that appliances were a favorite projectile and gladly accepted the ride home.

Resolutions?
1. Spread goodwill.
2. Floss daily.
3. Fewer carbohydrates.
4. Learn “Puff the Magic Savior” on the ukulele.

Rule 13

2005-12-12T08:30:00.000-08:00

13. See some art

Sooner or later I had to give you some advice about viewing art in Florence. Some folks think Florence and they think: “Uffizi”. Sure, if you are looking for quality of amazing art plus quantity, the Uffizi is the place. One room has so many paintings by Botticelli, that they have given to simply hanging them on hooks on top of each other. And don’t miss that pile of Michelangelos in the corner of Gallery 763. Some snobs dismiss them as lesser works but I suggest that you rifle through that bin and keep your eyes peeled for a charcoal study of David. It’s neat!

Should you choose the Uffizi, remember, that you must divide the sum of quality plus quantity by the wait factor, which is proportionally multiplicable by 7 if you are standing in line with anyone under the age of 16. While standing in line at the Uffizi, women have been known to go through their entire menopause cycle. However, some visitors feel that the show outside the Uffizi (musicians, jugglers, young women in halter tops and some truly first-rate pickpockets) is better than all that boring crap hung on the walls inside. If you are budgeting your art viewing time due to the fact that you would rather spend your precious hours in town buying fine leather goods, doing a test survey of every gelato stand in town, and having the breathtaking experience of negotiating a good price on a pair of sunglasses from a street vendor, may I recommend a trip over the river Arno to Santa Maria del Carmine. Everything that you need to know about Renaissance art is in one little chapel in this church. You can go there, see it, get it, and then go back to looking for a swell pair of shoes which is really the reason you came to Florence in the first damn place.

Granted, there are no Boticellis at Santa Carmine, or any Michaelangelos. But take it from me; if you’ve seen one Michaelangelo, you’ve seen ‘em all. I saw that Mona Lisa he did, waited an hour and a half, and you could barely see it through the glare of the protective glass. So I bought a t-shirt of that other painting of his, y’know, that swirly one, “Starry Night”, and when I want to see it, I put on the t-shirt and stand in front of the mirror. Of course it’s backwards, I know that, but if I take a digital picture of me wearing the shirt and hold that up to the mirror, it’s as good as the real thing except it’s in my house where the beer is free and you hardly ever have to stand in line to go to the bathroom.

Santa Maria del Carmine is a hike across the Arno and down a few side streets. It is a church built by the Carmelites, an order begun by a bunch of dissatisfied and overweight Christians looking for a non-fat substitute for Carmel Regular. It’s a bit off the beaten path so it is rarely crowded. You buy a ticket and are ushered into a dark room where they play a really cool movie. The movie begins with a computer animated segment of the church slowly catching on fire back in 1563. It shows the tiny little embers slowly turning into flames and quickly spreading up the wooden posts and beams until the whole thing comes crashing down in an enormous roar of special effects. It was very cool. I imagine that there was some other cool stuff in the film, too. But after the fire cartoon, some art historian began to talk and I fell asleep. Hey, I was tired from the hike across the river and the five gelatos I slurped on the way over.

After the fire they rebuilt the joint, but amazingly enough, one could even call it a miracle, the Brancacci Chapel survived. The Brancacci chapel is the reason you take this hike in the first place so it is a good thing that it survived. “The Life of Saint Peter”, frescoes in the Chapel were commissioned by a neighborhood merchant named Felice Brancacci. I guess that’s why it’s called the Brancacci Chapel, huh? One of my favorite factoids about these paintings is that when Brancacci “fell out of favor” with the church they erased all of the portraits of him and his pals from the walls and replaced them with some other jamokes. I am still researching what exactly he did to fall out of favor but evidently it wasn’t quite enough to change the name of the chapel to the Jamoke Chapel. Brancacci hired two painters to do the original work, Masolino and his student Masaccio. While they were both hip to the changes that had occurred in the art racket since Brunellesci had discovered perspective, Masolino clung to the traditional style of showing figures posed stiffly full frontal, while that upstart Masaccio, had his figures showing emotion in pose and expression. Think: the “C.B.S. Nightly News with Roger Mudd” versus “Desperate Housewives”. Thus in a single chapel area you experience a major turning point in Western Art. Masolino painted Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden on one wall, erect and serene, while directly opposite them, conveniently considerate of future generations of tour guides, Masaccio shows the two being evicted, bent over and full of anguish. A third painter, Filippino Lipi, whom, I understand was not a Philipino at all, came in to pinch hit when these two other guys failed to finish (O.K., O.K., Masaccio died and Masolino was too old to make the trip across the Arno every day). His work is also very good, but I would be hard pressed to tell you why unless you want me to put you to sleep and I know that you just want to get the hell out of here and buy those shoes.

Rule 12

2005-12-05T02:28:00.000-08:00

17. Bring baby

Kidnapping is still illegal in most sectors of the world, so in planning your trip to Italy it is highly recommended that you get pregnant a year and a half in advance so that you can bring a small child with you. If you lose your wallet, passport and credit cards but still have an infant or toddler you are good to go. As the Good Book says, “…and a child shall lead them…straight into the Uffizi”. (Actually, just before we arrived here, a racket was broken up by the cops just around the corner from the Uffizi where small children were being rented out by the hour to tourists wishing to avoid standing in line for six hours waiting to look at some pictures by Botticelli.)

I first encountered this some years ago when my nephew, Theo, was still small enough to fit into one of those baby backpack thingys. The Medici Chapel is one of the most stunning structures in Florence and that is saying a lot in a town where my bathroom here is nicer than the brand new reading room at the public library back home. The Chapel is a hugely popular tourist attraction but my sister would not consider turning back when I pointed out to her that the line stretched out the door and halfway to Sienna. With Theo riding shotgun, the waters parted, the Red Sea of tourists drew back, and on we marched to the Promised Land.

My astonishment did not stop there. The guards inside were mostly Italian women of the Grandmother (or “Nona”) variety. One look at Theo and they dropped that severe scowl of Dracula’s Mother-In-Law that won them the job in the first place and became soft dripping mounds of tapioca pudding. I would be remiss in my duties as a doting uncle not to mention that Theo circa 1997 was extraordinarily cute when he was not howling his fool head off. Although he was on his best behavior that day (Judy had made sure to give him a double dose of soporific mother’s milk before we hit the street), even if he had been yelling his fool head off these old nonas would still have melted. Not only was he a toddler, but, he was also blonde, and he was a boy. My sister explained that this trifecta combination put Theo a furlong ahead in the cuteness derby. Have you ever seen a brick shaped elderly woman take a child’s hand and rub it up and down her whiskered cheek like a mini-mop murmuring, “Bello, bello, bellisimo.”? I have, friends, and let me tell you it is not a pretty sight. To this day, I believe that if Judy had not kindly, yet firmly wrested Theo’s sweet, pudgy hand away, that old bat would have chomped off each of his delectable little fingers one-by-one.

Rule #11

2005-11-28T14:47:00.000-08:00

11. Drink coffee
Did you make the typical American mistake by giving up coffee sometime around 1998? You and millions of others were duped into thinking that coffee is bad for your heart, your relationships with family members, and sex. HA! American coffee consumption is down and as a result we have become a nation of cock-eyed boobs more self-absorbed than a good daily jolt of coffee would ever allow. We have let down our guard and in return we received George W. Bush, a war with no end in sight, most every country in the world planning or applauding our inevitable downfall, and what's with this Paris Hilton thing?

But what about Starbuck’s you ask? How could our national consumption of coffee be down given the Starbucks phenomenon? Starbucks, laddie, does not count as coffee. Starbucks is jazzy and fun. You go to Starbucks for a frothy sweet Frappaccino and to work on the crossword puzzle while listening to theraputic piano jazz, not to get a cup of coffee. Ask the chipper counter guy, pardon me, “barista” for a small coffee and you’ll be scolded. Starbucks coffee only comes in Tall, Grande, and, now, Rio Grande. Supersized coffee, sigh, how pathetic.

This all leads me to say that in Florence they do coffee right. Everyone drinks coffee, it is good coffee, and it is consumed not in insulting paper cups but in good solid ceramic. You do not scamper down the street chugging a bucket of coffee as you dodge traffic and talk to your plumber on your cell phone. You stand at the bar, you stop everything else, and you concentrate on getting that stuff into your system. No Grandes here, no sirree. Coffee is served by the thimbleful. This means that you can drink it all day long.

Is there really a link between coffee consumption and the body politic? Voter turn out was 3.7 trillion times higher in downtown Florence than in all of the state of Idaho. Sure, the Italians got Berlusconi, a guy who was being investigated for fraud and so he simply passed a law to exclude politicians from criminal prosecution while in office (this is true, by the way, and so please do not forward my blog to George W.). Did I mention that he owns most of the media outlets in Italy, as well as, I believe, the electrical outlets and several dozen emotional outlets. But nobody ever thought Berlusconi was a nice guy, or a sincere guy, or a guy who was anything less than self-serving in the first place. They would vote for him again in a heartbeat but everyone hates him. Berlusconi, unlike some other world leaders, is obviously a coffee drinker who knows that his actions are being tracked by a nation of coffee drinkers.

Rule #10 You are how you dress

2005-11-13T23:18:00.000-08:00

Contrary to the natural human inclination towards vanity, when you walk the streets of Florence you must dress down, or, better yet, dress dorky. This is tough to do when you are surrounded by Florentines, as they always look sensational. Make-up is applied to the Florentine female face tactfully, discreetly, and several dozen times daily. Taking out the garbage calls for eyeliner. There is a kind of tradition in Florence of getting a bit dressed up after dinner and strolling around town smiling at other sensational and satisfied Florentines. They even have a name for it: “Il passaggiata”. There is a kind of tradition in my house of digging a trench in the couch and pretending to read the newspaper until you fall asleep with your mouth open a minute and a half later. We even have a name for it: “Il passing out”.

So why dress down? For one thing it is hubris to contend that you could ever possibly keep up with the high standard of chic-casual gorgeousness that oozes from the pores of these people. But the real point here is that even if you were to pull off an imitation that might pass for fashionable on the dark side of an unlit alleyway at two in the morning, you would not want to.

You would not want to pass as a Florentine because then a real Florentine might then treat you like a fellow Florentine and that means talk to you. If there is one thing these people like to do it is talking (more about this topic later, I assure you, I would love to talk about it). And if they do talk to you, it is expected that you respond…in Italian.

The other day I was standing in line at the super market when an elderly woman asked me where the casaba melons were…at least I think that’s what she asked me…I was dumbstruck and did not know what to say, and if I did know, I would not know how to say it. Then it all made sense to me. The old bat was nearly blind! She could not see to whom or even to what she was talking. So I turned her in the right direction and gave her a little shove. You see, usually people take one look at me and see a tall American, possibly a moron, most certainly a dork. This is not only due to my height, build, skin color, and usual slack-jawed look of bottomless befuddlement, but also the way I dress.

When I say dress down, I don’t mean just put on your well-worn baby blue Old Navy polo (actually, if you do that you may very well be mistaken for a Florentine). No, when I say dress down so as not to be engaged in conversation, I mean: dress like me. From the top: bad haircut three or four months old, glasses that were barely stylish in 1983 when they were purchased, untrimmed facial hair, t-shirt that proudly declares you are a fan of “Porky’s All-You-Can-Eat House of Lard”, cargo shorts, each pocket bulging with, well, let’s just say “stuff”, mismatched socks matching mismatched shoes caked in dog poop. It works, friends. Waiting at a street corner yesterday a beautiful young woman with freshly applied eyeliner looked up at me from her street map and then turned to my dog to ask for directions.

Lucca Report

2005-11-06T23:59:00.000-08:00

Geography quiz
Choose one:

a) Lucca is a charming town nestled in the Tuscan hills and surrounded by a magnificent ancient wall.

b) Lucca is a charming town nestled in the Tuscan hills where grown men and women run around wearing cardboard wings, swinging plastic sabers as they stage battles just outside the magnificent ancient wall.

Of course, the answer to the above quiz is “c” because the answer to all Geography quizzes is “c” even if you are not given “c” as a choice, and if you did not know that you are either, a) stupid, b) never took a Geography quiz, or, c).

Lucca is probably the only charming Tuscan town where mom and dad can bring Jeff, Jr. and they will all find something that they will like. Dad will go for the magnitude of the walls surrounding the town, which will make him ask himself if he remembered to activate the alarm to the bike shed? Mom will be enchanted by the statuary and architecture, which will make her ask herself why she has been in Italy for a week and still not bought a pair of shoes? Jeff, Jr. will dig the guys dressed like barbarians and the babes in bursting leather and ask himself why go back to Passaic?

We were warned by the frank description in the guidebook that the citizenry of Lucca are not your typical warm and welcoming Tuscans. Other towns had walls, too, but over the centuries they realized that the days of invasions were over and dismantled the walls, using the bricks to build useful things like McDonald’s (which, of course, only served to renew the modern assault). I asked an elderly woman at a bus stop directions to San Frediano. Slowly she looked me up, she looked me down. Barely parting her lips she explained how to travel all the way across town and all of the landmarks I would see along the way. This detailed description was delivered at what astronauts call “Mach 10” and what we call, “Mach incomprehensible”. She then gave me another slow up and down to make sure that I did not understand and that was that, thus showing me that she not only knew the way to San Fred but that I was an idiot.

Don’t get me wrong, after a weekend in Lucca, I believe that they have done the right thing by keeping those walls intact and showing hostility to tourists. In fact, I think that they should install a guard with a clipboard at every portal to present each visitor with a questionnaire.

Who’s faster Superman or the Flash?

a) Out of my way I am late for work.
b) What’s the Flash
c) Well, that’s an interesting question. Of course, since both heroes are members of the D.C. Universe, this question has popped up from time to time. In # 176 of The Flash the two guys had a race but it was a staged to distract Sinestro from blowing up the world by tricking him to bet all his money on the Flash to Place. A few years later, the issue was raised again in The Justice League of America #233, but this time both Superman and the Flash rode horses because they were complaining that their girl-friends, Lois Lane and Iris West, were not paying them enough attention and since everyone knows that girls like horses, maybe they would come to the track to watch the race and go out for coffee afterwards with the two mighty heroes. They vied for the title a third time in Adventure Comics….etc., etc., etc….

Once a year the town of Lucca plays reluctant host to thousands of comics and video games fans. This is reason enough to keep those walls standing and to give strangers wrong directions. In Italy it is the largest comics festival. This requires a revision of the word “festival”, which one generally associates with confetti, gayety, and snappy trumpet music. This Lucca “festival”, one generally associates with pimples, body odor, and lengthy, frank, soul-searching discussions about who is faster, Superman or the Flash. On top of this many, many participants dress up as their favorite genre characters, This can make getting down the aisle to find a cup of coffee like running (or, rather, crawling) the gauntlet. A pair of paper mache wings knocked off my hat and when I reached down I tripped on a devil tail. Rising to my feet I had my eye poked by a metal spike affixed to the tip of a leather bustier. Some fun, this festival.

The awards ceremony for the big festival winners (Best artist of the year, Best game of the year, Best Playstation sound effect of guy’s head getting ripped off of the year) takes place in a church. Yes, a church. But not some dinky storefront joint in a dilapidated suburb. This is your high baroque style church with every square centimeter decorated with gold leaf and mosaic to the glory of God. They have ripped out the pews, however, and replaced them with nice plush auditorium seats, which is a good thing because it is very difficult to nap in wooden pews and sleep is required to make it through the endless ceremony. A stage has been constructed at the apse. There, projected onto a huge screen where the altar once sat, was the logo of the Lucca comics festival: a glowering female warrior figure with six arms most of them holding weapons but at least two of them holding her cantaloupe breasts. I am not a religious man, but I memorized the exits should God decide to take any of this personally.

I attended the festival as a guest of Igort (he’s one of those guys with one name, although, when you meet him he seems like one of those aristocratic guys who should have three names), the Italian publisher of Coconino Press who have reprinted the comics version of Paul Auster’s novel, “City of Glass” that I made with David Mazzucchelli. Despite the fact that it is named after a dirtswept town of 122,754 in the middle of the Arizona desert, Coconino publishes very, very beautiful books, so beautiful, in fact that I proposed marriage to a copy of Marti’s “Taxista”, but my wife caught me and hit me over the head with an equally beautiful copy of Matt Broersma’s “Insomnia”. The artists who draw these books are a soft-spoken lot and very friendly. Although only a few could speak English we bonded instantly upon meeting by giving the universal cartoonist’s secret handshake: shake a moth out of your otherwise empty wallet and cry on each other’s shoulder. We sat in a line with pencils, pens, and watercolor sets and spent the day inscribing books. I was the least well-known of the bunch and still personally inscribed at least 50 copies: “To my close personal friend, Dear Ebay winner”.

If you think that sitting in a stuffy tent all daylong inscribing books is a cool, prestigious activity that is good for the ego, you:

a) have never sat next to a booth blaring Playstation 2 sound effects of guys getting their heads ripped off for 12 hours.
b) have never had people walk away from you in mid-sentence when they realize that you are not your far more famous and talented collaborator.
c) really do think that the Flash is faster than Superman because of his performance Action Comics #567 where he went Mach-a-zillion and zipped himself into an alternate universe where regular guys wear plastic wings and the superheroes get to relax and drink cappuccino.

Igort, Gipi (they both have fine books out in English, buy them now), and me.

Me and Craig Thompson (not only has a hugely successful book in English but also is American, speaks English and seemed to understand most of what I said)

Rule #9

2005-11-01T11:56:00.000-08:00

9. Think twice before sending a package.

The Post Office in my neighborhood glistens. It shines on an ancient street with the venerable dome of San Frediano in the background. The P.O. displays lots of chrome and glass and an electronic number dispenser that makes a beep when you take a number. Taking a number is important because it gives you time to go down to the corner, have a cappuccino, get a haircut, read the paper, do the crossword puzzle, get another haircut and do your grocery shopping without losing your place in the batting order. It is not so much that there are lots of people waiting to do business in the P.O. It is just that on average each transaction takes the length and contains the same amount of drama as the first act of La Boheme.

Now there are plenty of mornings of my life that I have given up willingly over the years: watching reruns of “Our Miss Brooks” when I was a squirt, that year-long double period of Mr. McCorn’s 8th grade Geography class (where Mr. McCorn had the audacity to teach about the doldrums and not mention his class by name), sitting for hours outside Desiree Talbot’s dorm purposefully not drinking out of my coffee cup so that it would look like I had just happened to sit down. But nothing compares to the void that you feel between your ears and in your soul as you leave an Italian post office after sending a package.

Back in the States, the USPS emits some red-tape but basically, you go into the P.O. fill out a form the size of a 3 X 5 card get your package weighed, pay, and go get a cup of coffee (yes, in a paper cup). Italian postal red tape is twice the width and twice the strength of your average duct tape. The poste clerk shot off many questions regarding the weight and contents of the package I wanted to send. In some of these questions I even understood a word or two and nodded as if I understood and agreed with each syllable. I am such an agreeable guy. I am also hell bent on not looking like a complete dolt, but, of course, a dolt is exactly what I appeared to be: nodding my head up and down vigorously, repeating “Va bene, va bene, va bene,” and wearing a grin borrowed from Alfred E. Newman. Based on my nod rate per second I was given a certain number of forms to be completed…all in triplicate. The perforations on the forms gave away the secret: they were actually printed on toilet paper. If you press down with any vigor, they shred, but if you don’t press down hard enough you may find yourself doing all of the triplicate forms individually…believe me. I stood by and watched Marsha go through writing the same info three times while receiving a blitzkrieg of deadly ice pick stares from those waiting in line behind us. I fended these stares off with my bold and manly defense: basically a stupid grin, a shrug, and a look that attempted to distance myself from my wife as much as possible while still holding the package with my fingernails as she affixed the label (a look of Matrimonial Mutiny that is admissible in a court of law as grounds for divorce in Idaho, Missouri, and the District of Columbia).

Dripping sweat and in desperate need of another cappuccino, as we left the Post Office, we wondered why this necessity for different forms, different stamps, and different classifications. I suggested that it was about employment, that somehow giving people more work to do gave them a greater sense of importance and duty. Marsha’s point was that it gave some kind of order to the Italian world that is more organic by nature. My sister, who has had much more contact with the Italian people than I, maintains that in the Italian view, the worth of any transaction between two people is valued based on the length and the quality of discourse and contact. In other words, no matter how many people are waiting behind you in line at the butcher, the longer you talk with the butcher regarding the quality of the chicken you are purchasing, where it was hatched, the weather, your family, his family, anything, the better the chicken will taste when it finally gets to the table.

Following this line of reason I imagine, after going 10 rounds in the ring with the Poste clerk, that my little package is not in the dark chilly cargo hold of some greasy freighter, but snuggled in a luxurious first-class leather lounger. And as the stewardess kindly turns off the reading light, my little package murmurs in it’s sleep, “Va bene, va bene, va bene.”

Rule #8

2005-10-24T05:13:00.000-07:00

8. Don’t know how to speak the language? Don’t worry.

Unlike the stereotype about the French and their attitude towards foreigners who mangle the French language, the Italians, or at least the Florentines whom I have encountered, find it merely amusing when I go into a hardware store for an electricity converter and ask for a casaba melon. They correct me the way you correct a small dog who continues to sit when you’ve told him for the thousandth time to rollover: firmly, emphatically, but with a touch of pity for the dumb creature, me.

Here’s the trick: when you don’t know the word for something, like “electricity converter”, make it up. Pantomime the action of plugging something into something else while saying “casaba melon” applying what you think sounds like the fakest most exaggerated Italian accent possible. Really lay it on. The faker that you sound to yourself, the better. Think Chico Marx. I guarantee that the hardware store man will produce an electricity converter for you immediately or misinterpret the plugging-in pantomime and ask you to have sex.

“The best way to learn Italian,” my American friend told me, “is to watch as much Italian T.V. as you possibly can. My kid learned Italian in three months by watching T.V.”

This is a common myth and I can only assume that this kid has since come up with a new theory of relativity because it would take a genius to learn Italian that way. This might have been possible for me when I was a kid. They say that kids learn languages faster than adults, but more importantly, let’s face it, television ain’t what it was.

When I was a kid they’d show a box of Wheaties, they’d show a champion athlete doing something amazing like throwing a box of Wheaties for a touchdown, they’d show him pouring Wheaties out of the box of Wheaties and eating a bowl of Wheaties, then, in case you missed it, they’d show the box of Wheaties again, all the time repeating the word, “Wheaties,” “Wheaties,” “Wheaties!”. Even a three year-old could tell that what they were selling. A duh! Obviously it was an ad for a washed up former champion athlete trying to buff up his so-called career.

These days, though, advertising has become so cool, so detached that to even hint at the product’s name is to be considered crude. How are you supposed to learn a language that way? The other day on Italian T.V. I saw four ads in the same hour of programming featuring couples on the beach. Since they did not show any logos or boxes of Wheaties I had to really guess what they were selling. I suspect that one of them was for a car, ‘cause there was a car on the beach with the couple. The second, I guess, was about pet food, ‘cause there was a dog on the beach with the couple. The third may have been for either diapers or Planned Parenthood, ‘cause there was a baby on the beach with the couple. God only knows what the fourth ad was for, but there appeared to be a small nuclear reactor strolling down the beach with the couple.

O.K., skip T.V. Maybe if I could go to a movie where I knew the story I could pick up a little Italian.

“The Merchant of Venice” starring Al Pacino was playing at the open-air theater down the block. I thought that I kinda knew the plot of “The Merchant of Venice”. I guess not. Even the big “pound of flesh” scene was a mystery to me. I swear that Shylock said that he would lend him the dough for a pound of casaba melon. The dubbing didn’t help at all. I have to admit that they got Al Pacino to sound like Al Pacino talking Italian, but everybody else sounded like Al Pacino, too…and they all looked like Al Pacino, except the girl, who was a lot prettier than Al Pacino, but when she opened her mouth: Alice Pacino.

By the way, the open-air theater is very cool. Just imagine a movie theatre with no roof, a fully stocked bar, and half of the audience smoking and drinking non-stop through the entire film. They even insert a forced intermission mid-soliloquy so that you can get more drinks and buy more cigarettes. Fortunately it began to rain so we got a rain check to come back another night.

We waited until a film was playing that I felt confident that my wife, daughter and I could follow without a problem: “Batman Begins”. Do I need to tell you that I understood this less than “Merchant of Venice”…and I had just seen “Batman Begins” three weeks earlier at my local theater back home in English! My daughter, Nora, kept elbowing me in the ribs asking me to explain what was going on. I simply shrugged and whispered, “It’s ‘Batman Begins’, it’s ‘Batman Begins’”. As though, by repeating the title, the mists of confusion would vanish and all the plot points would be laid bare. I don’t think that the rest of the audience got much out of it either even though the actors spoke Italian. By the end of the picture most of the audience was at the bar drinking and smoking glumly. Several looked up at us as we walked by with expressions that asked, “You’re Americans. Maybe you can tell us what the hell that was all about.”

A brief pause

2005-10-24T00:52:00.000-07:00

A few of you just tuned in having been made aware of this site by reading egon (http://www.egonlabs.com/), a comics-related info site and a damn good one at that if you, like me, like to keep abreast of the cutting edge work by guys who really, honestly and truly thought that the world of The Little Rascals which they (O.K., we) watched on afterschool T.V. was the way the world really should be, but when they (we) went out into the neighborhood to try to organize soapbox derbies were promptly laughed at and ridiculed to the point of never setting foot out of the house, thereby discovering the hexed pleasures of reading comic books and memorizing each and every panel as a substitute for interacting with their (our, our, our) so-called peers. Anyhow, guys, and I do mean Guys, if you are looking for the arch and icily detached irony oh-so-popular in today’s comics climate, forgive me if I disappoint. This blogsite has nothing to do with the comics side of my multiple personality disorder, the side on display here is the befuddled old fart side. But just to prevent your trip from being an utter waste of time I have included the drawing below that I did for James Sturm, author of “The Golem’s Mighty Swing” a swell read and Time.com’s Best Comic of 2001, that can, and should, be purchased here:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1896597718/103-5802431-2703819?v=glance

and his recently opened Center for Cartoon Studies:

http://www.cartoonstudies.org/

Rule #7

2005-10-18T12:56:00.000-07:00

Up and over the hill from us is a very rare store. It is large and well lit and sells everything a modern Italian housewife might need to make her modern life easier, from diapers, to fresh mozzarella, to 90 proof gin. It looks very much like a modern American supermarket. Those nutty Italians have even given this store the quaint name, “Supermarket”. When I went to the checkout line the nice, young cashier even persuaded me to get a card just like the card in my wallet from that HumongoMart back home that gives me huge discounts on certain items. In fact, with this new card, every time I grab a bottle of wine off the shelf, they give me two Euros and a corkscrew. I do not think that we will be shopping there too often, though. It’s a bit too much like shopping at home and besides the temptation to buy lots of stuff is so great that I gave myself a triple hernia climbing the hill back to the apartment loaded down with diapers, fresh mozzarella, and gin.

Now your typical market in Florence is a mom and pop and, usually, mother-in-law operation. There is the fruit and vegetable market where you buy your fruit and vegetables, your meat market where you buy your meat, your bread and pastry market where you buy your guilt. At the foot of our road is another operation completely. Neither supermarket nor quaint family shop, it is called, simply, “Penny Market”, not “The Penny Market”, just, “Penny Market”. So what do you buy at Penny? Whatever the hell it is that they’ve swept out of the warehouse that day, tied into bundles with greasy twine, backed the truck into the rear of the store and dumped into the Penny cavern. At this point it is a free-for-all. “Anyone seen any onions? I need some onions.” “No, but here’s a six-pack of shampoo.” “O.K. what the hell. Onions, shampoo…my husband will never know the difference.”

It is very common for the small market owner to take a certain amount of pride in his window displays. Using the colors of his produce as a palette, our local fruit and vegetable vendor paints a sumptuous still-life that beckons the shopper. The windows of the Penny are completely covered over with orange sheet metal. If my sister had not dragged me there I would not know that it was a market to this day. I had assumed it was an electrical transfer station, whatever the hell that is. She explained to me with a sniff that Penny was a German outfit as if that would explain it all. And maybe it does ‘cause it sure ain’t Italian.

There are some major deals to be had at Penny, but first you need to put on your pith helmet and be sure to take a flashlight to check those expiration dates. That is, if there are any expiration dates to check. A lot of stuff at Penny comes from Slavic countries whose names you used to know. In a cost-saving measure they have skipped over the labor-intensive part of the production line where the expiration date gets stamped on the products…this includes meat products. I suspect that many of the meat products on sale at Penny were slaughtered sometime in the previous century. This notion is borne out by the decontamination booth you walk through on your way out. As soon as she opens the door, I can tell if my wife has been to Penny by the scent of one of your three choices of decontaminants"Happy-Go-Lucky Lavender Sunrise", "Citrus Rainbow Yum-Yum", or "Salami".

The tip here is that to really experience the true heart and soul of Italian culture, shop at your local markets. Get to know your shop owners and, if you go there regularly, within a little while, say three or four years, you will be treated like a family member when you walk in. That is, you will scolded by the mother-in-law for not showing up for the last 24 hours (or even writing) and be asked to mop the floor. But it will all be worth it because…wait…gotta run, I smell the shampoo burning.

Rule #6

2005-10-13T00:30:00.000-07:00

Rule #6 Be cool

Just because they serve coffee only in ceramic god-bless-them cups (and not ever in paper cups or ceramic mugs with donkeys painted on the side) and pee when necessary behind dumpsters, do not forget that these people are cosmopolitan city dwellers and that means that they are very cool.

We were walking into town the other day down the sidewalk along the Arno when I caught the eye of a guy leaning on the raised stone wall above the river with one arm bent, the other holding a cigarette. He looked at me for an instant then shifted his eyes to the Arno while giving his head an almost imperceptible twitch toward the river. This small, and very cool, motion, silently said, basically, “Hey, meathead, if you would lift your leaden gaze off the pavement scanning for dog shit, you might see something interesting in the river.” I followed his glance.

In the middle of the Arno running diagonally across the river between Ponte Vespucci and Ponte Carraia is a kind of ledge over which the water flows. When the river is high it is completely submerged, but when the river is low, only the lower end is under water allowing people to walk halfway across the river without getting wet to fish, read a book, or, in the case on this sunny late August morning with the starlings flitting about merrily overhead, wash up dead.

By the time I had arrived at the scene, the body was covered with a white sheet and six cabinieri and one detective were standing around waiting for the guy in the white jump suit who was walking towards them along the ledge. The cabinieri were easy to identify because of the uniform. But how did I know that the seventh guy was a detective? I swear to god he had on an open trench coat with a dangling belt, and badly fitted hat, and was smoking a cigarette. He also has his own little rain cloud above his head like that guy from Li’l Abner and wherever he walked he left small pools of rainwater. Ipso facto: Detective.

Now, I will admit to be very impressed with the coolness of the guy leaning on the wall, and even more impressed with the cabinieri dressed in long pants and crisp jackets on this hot morning, and, of course, all detectives are cool, but the one who broke the coolness record on this bright day was the girl in the bikini on a towel not 50 feet away from the corpse. A photographer from one of the papers had to practically step over her on his way to the crime scene. She just kept applying sun tan oil on her glistening arms and then rolled over. Ever so cool.

I, ever the meathead, stepped right into a pile of dog shit.

Rule #5

2005-10-13T00:29:00.000-07:00

Rule #5 Bring Stuff to Read

If you get tired of trying to comprehend the newspaper headlines or the intricate signs on the bus stop poles, there is one English bookstore in Florence that also serves as a paperback exchange. My 15 year old daughter, Nora, will and must read any book whose cover depicts a girl from the waist down in a mini-skirt holding a shopping bag. There are thousands of these books and we had to rent a minivan to get them home from this bookstore, which appears to specialize in such literature. There does not, however, appear to exist a copy of “Black Boy” by Richard Wright anywhere within the city limits of Florence. Unfortunately, by next Monday, when school opens, she needs to read and write a book report about “Black Boy, and not “Where’s My Damn Mascara?: The Memoir of a Cute Shopaholic with a Pierced Bellybutton and Boyfriend Troubles”.

Rule #4

2005-10-13T00:28:00.000-07:00

Rule # 4 Practice Strategic Shopping

Unlike the shops at your local mall, you cannot expect everyone to open up at 10:00 and close at 7:00. Our local baker is opened in the mornings from 7:00 until 12:30 and then reopens from 5:30 until 8:30. On Saturdays her morning hours are the same, but on Saturday evenings she is only open until 7:45. On Sundays she is open for 17 minutes beginning at 9:26.

If you can’t memorize all these times, and I must confess that my memory lacks, do what I have done and make a simple chart with the days of the week written across the top and the various necessary stores listed along the side. Every time I go out, I simply carry the chart down three flights of stairs, unlock the wheels, and roll it along beside me down the street although sometimes the wheels get caught up on the syringes in the gutters.

The only store that appears to be open whenever you might want it to be open is Blockbuster Video. This may be due to the fact that Blockbuster is such an American institution that they figure all of the Americans in town will expect it to be open whenever they want it to be open. When you walk in you will find that it looks just like the Blockbuster at your mini-mall back home, and just like that Blockbuster back home, three people can walk into it together, scan the hundreds of selections in the racks and not find one thing that they really want to see.

And here’s another little shopping tip. In America you say, “Gimme a pack of Marlboros”. In Florence you say, “Good morning, ma’am. How are you? Fine? That’s nice. Me? Not bad, not bad. Little cold last night, but that’s the end of September for you. What a pretty dress. Yes, yes, very pretty in truth. Oh, me, well I suppose I would like to purchase a pack of Marlboros.” The rule here is simple: be nicer than you would think humanly possible in entering and leaving any store and you will get the best pack of Marlboros the store has to offer.

Rule #3

2005-10-13T00:27:00.000-07:00

Rule #3 Watch Your Step

Our apartment is just outside of downtown Florence in a charming neighborhood. Just a short stroll down a secluded side street leads to a large park. I noted on my charming walk this morning that in the charming gutter rested two charming syringes, needles intact.

But I don’t want to linger on the rampant heroin use engineered by organized crime that plagues this town and is the reason why people even chain their flower pots (I’ve seen this) to their barred windows. The park, Villa Strozzi, is a haven of natural beauty and a godsend for us dog walkers. It also appears to be a godsend for the junkies, too. But let’s not speak of that, here, or of all the used syringes piled around the sand box that are swell makeshift squirt guns for the kiddies,

Contrary to our initial impression, not all of the dogs romping in the park near our apartment are named, “Donnie”. Those sneaky Italian dog owners tried to trick us into thinking this was so. When they saw us coming over the syringe littered hill, they commanded their dogs to retrieve sticks and such by calling, “Da mi.” over and over and over. Almost had us fooled, too, until we tried calling our dog, “Donnie” and she picked up a stick and trotted up to us obediently ‘cause her Italian is better than ours. So, if you see a cute dog on the street, give it a pat on the noggin, smile, say, “Da mi”, and give the owner a little wink to let her know that you are in on the joke, too.

One remarkable thing about Florence is that you can take your dog pretty much anywhere: into the central market, into the bakery, into the bank, into the seedy apartment of the guy you buy your heroin from. At my local bar if a dog comes in before 10 AM, they are given a free doggie biscuit and cappuccino to wash it down. This national permissiveness for dogs is a good thing if it is simply impossible to consider spending a year apart from your precious Rover or Rex or, in our insane case, Rahima (just who is the master over whom, here, anyway?) and are insanely determined that you must bring your dog with you from the States.

However, the Italian acceptance of dogs is a bad thing if you don’t give a shit about dogs. This is because the dogs give a shit but the Florentine dog owners do not appear to give a shit about picking up. In other words, keep your radar trained to the pavement. Not only will this keep your shoes clean, but if someone happens to come at you with a squirt gun you are sure to be able to find a few used syringes at your feet to use in self-defense.

Rule #2

2005-10-12T23:16:00.000-07:00

Rule #2 Do not drive and avoid walking

If your hearing or reflexes are poor, or you have just had a few Florentine-style cocktails in a donkey mug, do not attempt to drive.

Even on the winding, narrow and disarmingly quaint streets cobwebbing the hills around our house it is not safe. Anyone driving a car or motorcycle considers it their God given right to go as fast as humanly possibly once the ignition key is turned. No self-respecting Italian driver would put on his Fiat one of those bumperstickers that read, “School’s Out, Drive Safely”. Drive WHAT?!! This is Florence, not Larchmont! Might as well put one next to it that says, “I am a fruitcake. Eat me.”

Outside of the city Italians drive at speeds seen only in the states once a year in Indianapolis. Tooling down the AutoStrata with my brother-in-law, who has lived many of his adult years in this country, I asked whether he had ever seen anyone pulled over for speeding, he looked at me blankly. “What do you mean, ‘speeding’?” I pointed to a sign on the side of the road. “Isn’t that a sign indicating the speed limit?” I asked. “No,” Steve explained, “That is the number 35. Even if someone were to be ‘speeding” as you put it in your endearingly American way, who would stop him?”

This struck me as remarkable and I have since made it my business to look for cops whenever we travel out of the city. Never have I seen a cop car on the highway, and rarely do I see one on business in the town. There also are no Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thrus. Coincidence? I think not.

I will admit to hearing their repetitive sirens, particularly in the dead of night. Actually, only in the dead of night when they wake me up out of my beauty rest. My wife hypothesized that the sirens’ monotonous melody may have been lifted from the first four notes of Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan wail repeated ad nauseum, and I do mean nauseum. I have discovered that the sirens’ irritatingly atonal drone was, in fact, scored by Phillip Glass. Before Philip Glass came along, cops used to race to any given bank robbery blaring Dean Martin singing, “Volare”, but they put a stop to that when they found that other cars did not get out of the way but rather tried to run the cop cars into telephone poles.

The lack of a visible police presence is triply remarkable as there is not one, not two, but three police forces in Florence. The Vigili Urbani, or municipal police, wear blue uniforms in winter and white in the summer. The Carabinieri dress in red striped slacks and wear shiny black shoes. La Polizia wear powder blue uniforms with fuscia stripes, white belts, and stylish berets. That is what they wear and this being Florence what you wear and how well you wear it is really the most important thing. What they all do remains a mystery.

Rule #1

2005-10-12T23:13:00.000-07:00

Rule #1 Beware of the pasta
Whenever I told one of my chums back home that I was going to live in Florence for a year they would inevitably make a comment about how wonderful the food is as they removed the knife they had stuck from in between my ribs. That wine! That olive oil! That pastry! Yes the wine and the olive oil are terrific and I have consumed gallons since coming to town, sometimes separately, and sometimes, as some guy named Luigi, whom I met in a bar called it, “Florentine-style”: equal parts Chianti and olive oil in a ceramic tumbler with a donkey painted on the side that is glugged down in one breath while everyone in the bar laughs hysterically. I did not get the joke, but then again, I am an American and much Italian humor is lost on me.

But listen up: beware of that pastry,

Evidently the Italians put an extra secret ingredient into their pastries. My wife thinks it is the high quality of the butter procured from contented cows grazing on sweet, rich Tuscan grass. My daughter goes for the theory that it is the fillings made with real fruit and real cream that makes the difference. I lean towards the hypothesis that heroin is involved. Nothing else could explain the addictive quality of these innocent-looking little depth charges.

Our apartment is a thirty-minute walk to the central area of town known as “Centro” (which roughly translates as, “Central”). Our neighborhood, known as “Monte Uliveto” (which roughly translates as, “Monte Hall”) is on a steep hillside with a swell view of the city below. To climb up the hill requires stamina, willpower, and an extra lung. Since moving here, I have made the climb at least two times daily and would have lost 15 lbs already had I not just come from my two daily trips (at least) to the local bar.

A bar is a place where you can get a drink, as in an American bar, or a coffee, or if that guy Luigi is around, a Florentine cocktail in a donkey mug, but all I get at a bar is a cappuccino and one of those sweet filled pastries that they call a “pasta” not to be confused with “pasta”. Even though they are exactly the same word and designate a food substance, pasta is not pasta.

How the Italians keep their pastas straight is a mystery. Maybe it has something to do with pronunciation. I guess my accent must be pretty good ‘cause after ordering my cappuccino when I say, “Una pasta, per favore,” to the barkeep, he never ever slaps down a plate of linguine with clam sauce. These pastas look much like the innocent little pastries from home that I have no trouble avoiding. But here, with their secret additive, they are my destiny, as Paul Anka once sang, they are what they are to me…heroin in a flaky crust.

Rules To Vivere By

2005-10-10T01:33:00.000-07:00

Rules To Vivere By

Although we have only been here for a few weeks I already consider myself an absolute authority on all things Florentine. Quite an achievement given the fact that the only words in Italian of which I am dead certain are “cappuccino” (although I did have to use spell-check just now) and “ciao” (although I do not really know what it means literally, I use it a lot especially when I do not know what someone is saying to me which is about 97% of the time and it seems to placate them long enough for me to get a cappuccino). I believe in sharing the lessons learned from my rich experience of weeks and, yes, even days. Hence this irregular journal, “Rules to Vivere By”. (Please do not bother to point out that the verb “vivere” means “to live”, thus making the title of this series, “Rules To To Live By”. My daughter, Nora, has already pointed this redundancy out to me on several occasions. Well, too too bad, that’s my title and I’m sticking with with it.)

So, should you be planning a trip to Florence or even if you simply want to hear some Americano gas off about all of the quaint mysteries of Italy that he and several million other Americanos before him have discovered for the very first time, here is some basic straightforward advice from the old pro and experienced world-traveler (New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Oak Bluffs and a very wet week in the off-season of Costa Rica).

Ciao!…er, uhm… maybe I mean, Cappuccino!