I am captivated by this trailer for "Sita Sings the Blues," Nina Paley's take on "the greatest breakup story ever told." I'm going to see the sneak preview in San Francisco this weekend, but you can bother her yourself and find out when she will release her little bit of genius to the world!
What if... Dorothy's journey to Oz was a sexual journey, where she unlocked her lovers' doubts of stupidity, heartlessness, and cowardice? What if... that tornado was the metaphorical first orgasm she never, ever forgot— when life explodes into color?
Imagine Alice— yes, Alice of the Wonderland. A perverse little girl to be sure. Her relationship with the Red Queen is a twisted erotic legend for the ages. And how did a talking caterpillar come to be a conversational cock?
Or what about Wendy, from Peter Pan, who followed her "lost boys" into the garden of forbidden delights, including tea-room cruising that may have been lost in the original edition? Someone had to stand up to Captain Hook, even at the expense of her own virtue.
Now imagine all three of these women coming together in their adulthood: Dorothy, Alice, and Wendy— sharing their sexual histories for the first time.
Artists Melinda Gebbie and Alan Moore have done more than imagine it: They've written, and more to the point, illustrated, a three-volume erotic odyssey on the subject, that is so realistic it feels as if you knew the erotic mythology all along in your bones. Welcome to The Lost Girls.
Melinda is like family to me: she's my ex's ex! Her early erotic drawings and underground comics are legendary. Alan, her partner, is famous for his graphic novels like The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, and V is for Vendetta.
They spend SIXTEEN YEARS writing and illustrating this book.
SB: My god, who spends more than sixteen minutes doing anything in publishing today? — It's like you're out of another time! I sat there looking at your book, in awe— and in fact I started hating you, because I felt like everything I ever did added up to seconds of meaninglessness.
Alan Moore: Iain Sinclair does that to me, inspire me to envy and despair.
Yeah, I was 36 when we started... I’m 52 now! When we first got together we thought we were doing eight pages for an anthology. I’d just met Melinda for the first the first time, I was a fan.
The thought of working with a woman on this subject was a radical idea. I mean that in terms of the comics industry, even if that seems imaginable everywhere else.
Within the first few weeks, we realized our ideal was going to take A LONG TIME. It wasn’t productive in the beginning. I couldn't think beyond a smutty parody, which is not what the world needs. Mel said that she liked working with three characters, and Alice Wendy and Dorothy came into the picture.
Once we said those three names, there was a sort of thunderclap. We thought about a few others, casting around, but no one else came close to their chemistry.
SB: How do you work together? Did you comment or fiddle around with each other’s medium--- did Mel write or did you draw?
AM: Very few people know how it worked. This project was unique in my career. Normally, for the last 25 years of my work, there’s distance between myself and the illustrator— they lived one place, I lived in another.. I’d write these very long scripts, with detailed descriptions: how many panels are needed on this page, a rundown of each descriptions, DOP shots, atmosphere, acting, etc. I would be open to their me ideas, but the dye was basically set.
In the beginning with Mel, I gave her these sort of scripts, designed to break an artist spirit— (LOL). She found wading through my acres of notes really tedious. Ever the one to be obliging... I did thumbnail sketches of what I wanted with her by my side, talking and brainstorming. Then she created wonderful pages of artwork, based on my hieroglyphics. I would then put dialog in, influenced by her drawings. It was an ongoing conversation.
SB: I know it's awful to play favorites, but i couldn't help loving Dorothy's character the most of all. Is it because I'm American, or what do you think?
AM: Oh, she's the most feisty, the most adventurous, she’s also incredibly gorgeous. Her illustration reminds me of Clara Bow, who was always one of Melinda’s favorite.
We spent so much time decoding these characters. We wanted familiarity, but radical new interpretations.
SB: Why is your project so controversial in some comics circles? Isn't that a little old? When Wimmin’s Comix came out in the 70s, THAT was shocking— that women made explicit sex pictures and stories. They were two decades ahead of their time.
So now…. with The Lost Girls, why would we think that the audience is scandalized? Do people still think comics are Superman eunuchs? Certainly the fans can't feel that way...
AM: I don't get it, either. Robert Crumb was a pioneer of the kind of stuff we’re doing, and 40 years ago people would say the same scandalized things. We have a current social panic going on, but how we can forget what we’ve just been through?
Ever since the outset of my career, where it was appropriate, I have treated the characters I worked with as fully rounded personalities, having some sort of sexuality would be an important to a personality! Even with The Swamp Thing, decomposed vegetable matter, he should have a sexual life of some kind! Erotic experience is going to be part of any fully-rounded character.
If Lost Girls is shocking, it's because I’ve gotten rid of heroes. We're talking about sex, frankly, at greater length, and it's sustained work of erotica. I've put more of myself on the line.
In doing so, I'm stating that, that on some level I can find myself aroused by what we've created, and that a level of self revelation that I’m unaccustomed to. Before Lost Girls I had never taken it to this extreme.
SB: Well, I think you'll find yourself in good company! You know, in the end of the story, World War I is breaking out, and we see German soldier invading the hotel where the women have been gathering. All the dialog switches to German. What are they saying?
AM: I wanted it to be authentic. I knew people would blog about it and the translations would come soon enough. The general drift is that the soldiers are bivouacking. They talk about the French as a bunch of homo shits, that sort of crude comment. The say, "this place smells of fish" — and other ugly sexist comment.
They are soldiers who don't want to be there, in a cold place, and they are going to their deaths. As they break Alice’s mirror, the say, "C'mon, you cunt"— it’s brutal penetrative language.
The fragile fantasy universe of the Lost Girls has been broken and the voices of the WWI are intruding, destroying everything that was beautiful and sensual and cultured about Europe in a process that would irrevocably damage its heart. It's never got over that devastation even a century later.
-----
I also spoke with Melinda, at length, in a hot tub. This is my favorite interview technique. She is so proud of how this book has been produced. I can't tell you how long it's been since I met an author who was truly and deeply satisfied by every aspect of their book's production. She knows it's her life's work, and she has never compromised it. I was inspired.
And then we gossiped for about four hours about ours and every else's love lives.
Mel brought Aretha and I three presents:
Lucia Joyce, To Dance in the Wake— a biography of James Joyce's daughter
Don Quixote, the audiobooks, read by Christopher Casanove
Ulysses, the audiobooks, read by Jim Norton and Marcella Riordan
What a treat!
I put together a gallery of some of Melinda's work, both from her tender youth, and from Lost Girls' maturity. You can view the whole opus, generating from the time she was drawing her first female portraits and her first erotica. Let the drooling begin...
Top illustration from The Lost Girls, and photo of Melinda Gebbe from 1969, taken by Honey Lee Cottrell.
You better not shout, you better not cry—
You better not pout, I'm telling you why—
Paul Krassner is Coming to Town!
I seem to have come down with a touch of bird flu, but I am determined to get well by the time Paul comes to my hometown, on Thursday.
What can I say about Mr. K that you have not heard before? Paul never misses a trick. I think that should be his epitaph. He is one of America's gifts to satire. Mark Twain would have been his best friend. Lenny Bruce actually was. He is one of the last radical political observers with an epic sense of humor.
Paul just got back from that gigantic comedy fest in Las Vegas, and here is his report on all the best lines. God, I love Jon Stewart. I can't control my sexual fantasies about him; I might have to go on Oprah and get cured.
Below is the tail end of Paul's book tour, for his new book, One Hand Jerking. I'll see you in Capitola if you can make it— just don't french me, because that's how this thing spreads.
Tuesday, Dec. 6, Cody's in Berkeley, 7:30
Wednesday, Dec. 7, City Lights in San Francisco, 7 p.m.
Thursday, Dec. 8, Capitola Bookstore/Cafe, 7:30
In 1967, Paul Krassner published MAD artist Wally Wood’s
parody, "The Disneyland Memorial Orgy," as a center-spread for his satirical magazine, The Realist, and then
as a poster. You can still get the poster today, from Paul's web site.
Spain Rodriguez came to my Xmas party, last month, before all hell broke loose. He said he had a special treat to show me. I started pawing at the rolled-up poster paper in his hands, but he held back a bit.
“You can’t keep this though, I have to send it to a collector tomorrow, it’s the original—”
“What do you mean, I can’t— hey, is it a new jam?”
That’s exactly what it was. Every so often, the surviving Zap! underground comix artists (Moscoso, Gilbert Shelton, Robert Crumb, Spain Rodriguez, and S. Clay Wilson ) all gather round a giant piece of paper with pen and ink and start drawing together. The resulting panel cartoon is a Zap Jam, which then gets made into a few posters or published in a upcoming comix book.
I opened up the giant pages Spain had in his arms. At the top of the the first page was the title of the story, “Circle O’Jerks” accompanied by little hallucinatory self portraits of all the artists. One of GIlbert Shelton's little freak gnomes has the bug-eyed question bubble, “Who the hell is Susy Bright?”
A panel later, Wilson has one of his deranged slut bulldaggers lying spread-eagled in the center of the action, with a note below that says “Not Susie Bright.”
Further on the story, another wench appeared, drawn by Spain, is bent over in platform shoes— “Still Not Suzie Bright.”
You have to imagine how hallucinatory the whole picture is. There’s a running gag about me, but also a stream of psychedelica about the Patriot Act and the new American regime. Everyone draws on top of everyone else. The mystery of "Susie Bright" grows even more intense. WHY Susie Bright? gets asked on the second page.
I gasped as I read along, sugarplums of immortality dancing in my head. I looked at Spain like he should admit something.
“I had NOTHING to do with it!”
And I know enough about these jams to know that his claim must be true— if any one of them came in with an agenda, he would be told to fuck off by the rest of the group.
The reason I know this so well, is because of a story that is about ten years old now.
Spain and I are old neighborhood friends, connected through ex-lovers and political/cultural enthusiasms. His wife, Susan Stern and I, became buddies during the 1986 Meese Report shenanigans, and we both had daughters within a year of each other.
I knew Spain's work because when I was in high school, my dad turned me onto underground comix, and I became a huge fan of Spain’s Trashman character, a commie superhero with vast historical contexts, who wears a mean trenchcoat.
It’s ironic, in my case, that underground comix were associated with sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Even though those aspects weren’t lost on me, I was more interested, at 15, in the political aspects. I loved the silly stuff like Fat Freddy’s Cat, who was the hip predecessor to pabulum like Garfield.
Wilson’s biker brawls and orgies just plain scared me. I liked Crumb the best when he made fun of “White Man,” the ultimate WASP with a stick up his butt. I didn’t stare for hours at Moscoso or Rick Griffin's work until I dropped acid, and perhaps that’s as it should have been.
Spain is the reason I moved to France one year, when my daughter was just a few months old. I was coming out of a laundromat on Valencia Street one day, rather blue because I’d broken up with my partners at On Our Backs. I was essentially out of work. Spain passed me by on the street, and said, “Hey, do you know anyone who wants to go live in the south of France for a couple months?”
“Yeah, me.”
I went from sarcasm to a one-way ticket within 24 hours. I swapped houses with one of Spain’s old friends who was part of a group of American expatriates in rural France. They were virtually all connected through underground comix artists, or the origins of the prostitutes’ rights movement: C.O.Y.O.T.E. My only American “neighbors” within miles were Margo St. James, Gail Phetersen, a couple other COYOTE folks, and Robert and Aline Kominsky Crumb .
Life is different there. Margo was working construction, and could have passed for a male laborer if you passed her in the street. “Construction” in this part of France means remodeling medieval wrecks into homes for rich expatriates from other countries, mostly England and Germany.
Margo had a boyfriend who looked like Rasputin and apparently was the living inspiration for the whole concept of Grand Theft Auto. The only elements of California Margo were her big pot of lentil stew on the stove, and a beautiful library that was entirely dedicated to the history of COYOTE.
The Crumbs lived in a beautiful maison on a riverbank that was infamously purchased for two of Robert's sketchbooks. Aline was keyed expertly into their small community; everything French was explained and finessed by her flawless interpretation. She was like the role model of how to transform your life in one giant WHOOSH.
Robert, at the time could barely say “Bonjour!" He had a beautiful studio to work in and listen to his old 78s. A lot of people know from his biography that he collects things. It was like being pals with the curator of an esoteric museum where you can touch things and have your own personal docent explain it all.
At the time, I moved to France, I was publishing the Herotica books, the first books of women-authored erotica— god,that’s hard to believe now! Robert had read Herotica 2, and was incensed... over this one sentence, in one of the corniest stories in the edition.
"What is all this OBSESSION with muscular thighs?” he demanded. We were dawdling along the riverbank one day while Aline ran by us like a triathlon pro.
He pointed out a particular story where a woman described her lovers thighs as "muscular." He pointed out that he could never hope, nor would he want to hope, to have muscular thighs. He went on and on, until I wish I’d never heard of muscular thighs!
I tried to interrupt that it was a little myopic to pick on this one description out of the whole book, which surely didn't describe every female author’s preference, but he wouldn’t let up.
“Robert, she’s not rejecting you personally!”
“But of course she is, that’s exactly what's she’s doing!”
“I can’t believe you’re saying this when all the girls in your comix have muscular thighs of the first caliber— are you worried you're hurting some skinny girls' feelings?”
“That’s not the point...”
Aline ran by us for the second time in her shiny lycra tights which seemed exactly the point.
Okay, so what about his porn collection? As you can imagine, he has a cache of the most odd magazines from the magazine heyday of American porn. A real Times Square blast from the past. I was dazzled. 70s era American porn is so funky and off the wall and utterly individualistic... the opposite of corporate branding.
I remember this one magazine he had— I wish I could remember the title— that was something like, “Worship My Black Cock.” It was entirely in b+w newsprint. The title was in the form of a command. Every word in the magazine was in big letters with lots of exclamation points, all repeating the same message, like a Dr. Bronner soap bottle. All Truth! All One! All Worship My Black Cock! Helvetica Uber Alles!
And who was the king who sat on this ebony throne? The edict was being issued by what appeared to be the dumpiest, most uncharismatic middle-aged man you ever saw in your life, with the figure of Pillsbury Doughboy. His skin was ashy. He was surrounded by a couple of white women who were his equal in frumpdom. They did not appear to be in shock or awe, although they dutifully presented themselves to him in all the appropriate porno positions.
The text said their lives had been SAVED FOREVER by Mr. Wonderful's sexual prowess, and there was a residential address and phone number in New Jersey where you were exhorted to call him and join their merry band. I wanted to make a long distance call on the spot, and ask the King if he had Prince Albert in a can, but Robert reminded me that the magazine was years out of print.
At the time I was living in France, I was freelancing for a lot of New York magazines, and although Robert had not yet been canonized in Terry Zwiegoff’s movie, his work was revered by the editors I worked for. They would beg me to convey messages to him about how they would deliver sacks of gold to his door if he would deliver one illustrated panel to them, about anything, any subject.
As someone who was, at the time, trying to wrest my way up to $1-a-word writing rate, I was stunned by what looked like to be that much in demand. He, on the other hand, was annoyed. He said, as firmly as his opinion on women’s erotic labors, “I have to finish my Kafka book,” he said, and that was that.
I noticed, this past month, December 2004, that Robert finally did a cover for the New Yorker. It only took them ten years of asking.
Okay, fast forward back to San Francisco, a few years later. It was 1994. Spain and I both lived in the Mission, as before, and once again, our meeting was random. I called him about something, and he said, “No, I can’t make it, we’re doing the Zap Jam at Wilson’s house all day.”
“You’re all at Wilson’s, right now, everybody? Robert’s in town?
"Yeah—"
“Can I come over? I promise not to be a pest, I’ll just take off all my clothes and sit there quietly.”
“Sure, why not?”
So I walked over to Wilson’s flat, and even though I was kidding on the phone, once I got there, it just seemed like the thing to do. Wilson gave me a great hug at the door and ushered me in like it was Buckingham Palace. Moscoso let me have one of his wife’s special sandwiches— the best sandwich I ever had. We all got along swimmingly.
I took off everything but my cowboy boots and sat on Wilson’s sofa, reading copy of the Chronicle. I had no idea whether any of them were drawing me or not; it was as if they were simply indulging my fantasy of being a muse, in a most good-natured way. I think we all thought it was pretty funny that we should be doing this so “late in our careers.” After the sandwichs and jokes, it got pretty quiet and all you could hear were their pens scratching away and me turning the pages of the Chron. I remember feeling as relaxed as I’ve ever been.
And then, out of fucking NOWHERE, Wilson exploded. He was in another room, or maybe the foyer, yelling. “She’s got to go!” Spain and Vincent went to investigate. I could tell it was about me, and all of a sudden, I felt like the Pope had come home and found me buck naked. I started pulling on my shirt and by the time I was buttoning up my jeans, Spain was in front of me, sheepishly, saying he was SO SORRY, but Wilson was going to go on strike or lose his nut if I didn’t leave the premises immediately.
“What did I do?”
“Nothing, he’s just like this...”
It was like I had besmirched the hallowed ground with my girlyness or something. I have no idea. I left, with much pained looks and apologies from my other hosts.
“Well, it was fun while it lasted!” I said, and everyone (except Wilson, still shouting in the back), nodded vigorously.
A few months later, Spain gave me a signed poster print of the whole affair. There I am, cross legged in one panel, with various hallucinations around me. I was so honored! Wilson’s tantrum just seemed to add luster.
Time went by, Crumb, the movie got made, and it was a sensation. When Robert was next in San Francisco I didn’t hear from him, but Spain told me that he stood up the rest of them when they made a date to do a new Jam. Everyone was pissed. He had been impossible to pin down, and then welched at the crucial moment. Robert said that he never had agreed to meeting in the first place. Bitter accusations were made.
“Is that it, does that mean it’s all over?”
Susan Stern rolled her eyeballs. “It’s never over with this bunch.”
What got produced instead of a Zap Jam was even more intriguing, like a Zap version of Rashoman. In an issue of Weirdo comix, Crumb illustrated a story on his own, about how he came to San Francisco to revel in the loving arms of bodacious groupies and good times, but instead was plagued by his loser, whiner so-called friends of yore, who could not get it together to do anything but carp and pull on his tail feathers.
What followed Robert's account of his fateful vacation were two contrasting accounts by the other Zapitistas, plus Paul Mavrides. I’ll never forget Paul’s illustration of a trembling Crumb, pretending to be with a hot babe, but in fact masturbating to a Telly Tubbies rerun in a SRO hotel in the Tenderloin.
The others drew a story in which Crumb is recalled from the '94 Jam, salivating with an erection, gob-smacked by the divaesque Susie Bright posing like Marilyn Monroe in her prime‚— ”Oh yeah, he really hated that,” they sneer.
HA!
I guess this purging made everyone kiss and make up, or move on to other arguments, because it’s all water under the bridge. Honey Lee, who introduced me to Melinda Gebbe of Wimmin's Comix fame, framed my immortal 1994 Jam for my bathroom wall.
But now, with Spain's Xmas revelation... I have a new destiny! I’ve been conjured up again, like a genie, more distinctive in memory than in real life! Seeing my various incarnations in this new Jam was, for me, like ascending to the Mt. Olympus of Bandes Desinees.
In the last panel of this Circle O'Jerks, after so much existential suspense, the real Susy/Suzie/Susie emerges, leading a giant “Rug-Muncher’s Brigade.” I’m so gosh darn proud.
In case you're wondering, this is my past oeuvre in underground comix:
Twisted Sisters, edited by Diane Noomin, intro by Susie Bright
SHE: Anthology of Big Bitch, by Spain Rodriguez, intro by Susie Bright
Young Lust 7, 20th anniversary issue, edited by Jay Kinney and Susie Bright
P.S. All the graphics I reprinted here are from either http://www.LastGasp.com or http://www.lambiek.net, both of which I recommend as sumptuous places to lose your mind.
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