Soggy with nostalgia

So I’m assuming you’ve read this post by my Spouse, Kip. It’s about the six bright young things in comics known collectively as Pants Press. But it’s also about our gang when we were bright young things—well, specifically me, Amy, Barry and Paul. Let’s call us the Haberdashery, my favorite of the names that Scott foisted upon us.

My gang back in the day: Amy, Barry and Paul

This post of Kip’s has got me ruminating. God, I remember phone conversations with Barry, each of us determined to be published by 25 years of age. Ha! And I also remember when Paul, and then Amy, put aside cartooning for other pursuits. (Paul used to cartoon like this, and this was a typical Amy drawing.)

But what it most got me to thinking about was how we all met. Funny, I actually have been requested to recount how I met various people a few times the past couple of months, Barry and Kip included. With the people I meet these days, it‘s a pretty simple path—introductions usually begin via websites and email. Back then it seemed all so much more convoluted and subject to happenstance.

First, for me, there was Amy. We met while attending Rumson Country Day School, a posh preppy school that was my warm-up for boarding school. We Did Not Fit In, so eventually formed a team and discovered all that we had in common. And, according to Amy, I gave us one more thing to have in common, by introducing her to the wide world of comic books.

Fast forward a few years. I’m in college, so is Amy. We were dabbling in mini-comics at this point. I train from Pittsburgh, where I’m going to school, to Jersey City, where Amy is living at the time. Soon after I arrive, we train into NYC to attend a comic book convention. There’s someone she wants me to meet (several someones, actually) but primarily she wants me to meet Scott McCloud, the cartoonist who does Zot!, a comic we both bought regularly.

Having just recovered from mono and being fairly train-lagged, I don’t remember much of that Con. Except that I spelled Scott at some point, so he could use the restroom, I bought a page of Destroy! at a college discount (Scott’s idea) and, for some reason, Will Eisner touched my cheek (I think I had just done a fan-girl gush at him). And I only really remember the whole watching Scott’s table bit because Amy likes to recount that moment of glory of when I was Scott McCloud for a few minutes. I do remember Amy seemed disappointed that a few people hadn’t made it, some people she’d met at Scott’s table during previous conventions.

Move ahead a couple of years. I have graduated college and Amy was about to transfer to another one out in Portland, Oregon. We have decided to go to the Chicago Con with those people she’d met around Scott’s table. In preparation for this, Amy and I were going to spend the weekend with one of them in Manhattan to help them produce, collate and staple their anthology mag, Event Horizon. At the very, very last minute, Amy announced that she couldn’t go to Manhattan because she needed to help her mother with her catering business. She insisted that I still go to help and then promptly phoned the one in Manhattan and handed me the phone so we could work out the details. And that was my introduction to Barry.

Barry was to meet my train from Jersey at Penn Station. Not convinced that we were able to describe ourselves succinctly enough (or that we were that interesting looking) we told each other what distinctive clothing we would be wearing. I also agreed to carry my stuffed Gund lion. For the life of me, I can’t remeber what Barry wore that was distinctive. I want to say a top hat, but as I am generally overfond of the idea of Barry in a top hat, I don’t trust that thought.

What I still find striking to this day is the descrepancy between Barry’s voice and his appearance. His voice is soft, lilting, what some would describe as effeminate—certainly most phone solicitors address him as “Ma’am” when he picks up the phone.

We actually circled each other a couple of times in Penn Station, unsure if we were us. On my part, my confusion was based on the fact that Barry looked like a thug. He appeared more likely to lead a motorcycle gang and smash beer cans on his forehead than to produce sensitive brushworked cartoons.

Go to his blog, and scroll down til you hit the last figure in the right hand column, right below the Tony Krushner quote and above the site meter icon. That’s Barry, except his hair isn’t usually under such tight control. It was particularly wild that day and his beard and mustache were scraggly and of ill repute.

We eventually introduced ourselves and I found out that I looked much more butch than he was expecting as well. Plus he’d thought my stuffed lion was a dog. I barely had time wonder how many other dorks wander around Penn Station clutching stuffed animals before Barry herded me off to the Long Island trains so we could meet Paul. Barry spotted him as soon as we reached the platform, made sure Paul saw us, and then started to pull me away in the opposite direction. I remember the odd confluence of emotions passing over Paul’s face: amusement, annoyance and (I think) delight that Barry was doing something so Barry-like.

Barry finally let Paul catch up and introductions were made, but before we left the station they made me open the portfolio I was carrying and show them what I‘ve done comics-wise. They made noises and gestures of approval, and then we went off to the subway.

And spent the weekend not producing the next Event Horizon as they both still had things left to draw. It was all very fun though. Barry and I stayed up late talking about sex and sexuality, the morals of society, and an anecdote Barry told about one of my future, yet-to-be-met husband’s best men, Phil. Apparently, Phil had a habit of calling out “Come in naked!” whenever someone knocked on his door. Well, one day, Barry did—thus curing Phil of that particular greeting.

Much of that weekend summed up my soon-to-be friendship with Barry. The talks we had, the sharing of art techniques (at this point Barry was using black Letraset Graphic Tape to create his borders—madness, I tell you, madness!) as well my ending up doing all the dirty dishes in return for being fed. Also, there was the event of Barry disposing of the grease from the bacon he’d just cooked by opening a window and pouring the pan leavings into the alley some three stories below. When I expressed my dismay, he assured me it was all right, that he and the people he shared the apartment with did it all the time to deter the nefarious nighttime activities that went on in that same alley. Over the years, I’ve learned how Barry likes to elaborate on the events of everyday life, seeing how much he can get away with before confessing. Now, I did see in the alley evidence of the events Barry described, but now I would know to question if they truly dumped their grease like that, or if he did it just to shock me.

Kip, Paul and Barry.

I didn’t really to get to know Paul that well that weekend. We actually got better acquainted after Barry (and Kip) moved to Boston, then Amherst, Massachusetts. I used to drive up from New Jersey various weekends, sometimes picking up Paul from a train station along the way. We got a chance to talk and gossip before entering the social fray, which would still often focus around meeting with Scott and now Ivy. In fact, it felt like Kip and Barry were following Scott and Ivy for a bit—first Boston (where they didn’t actually live, though Ivy was working at a museum there) and then Amherst.

Scott and Ivy at a Chinese restaurant in Boston.

I actually ended up sharing a house with Barry, Paul and a few others in Amherst for a couple of years (and Kip, with whom I was also sharing a bed at this point). One of my favorite things we did as a house was taking turns reading aloud from The Lord of the Rings. Whereas Kip continues to rave about Barry doing a Wallace Shawn impression for Gandalf, I was always fond of Paul’s rendition of Frodo and Sam as Kermit the Frog and Fozzie Bear.

From left to right: Emily Care Boss, Kip, me, Matt Schlotte, Charles Seaton, Paul, Barry, Sarah Kahn, Brad Rosman and Chelsea. Missing: Scott Diberardino.

Oh, how did I meet Kip? (And what did he look like back then?) Well, the way I remember it, we met on the day of the Gay Pride march in NYC, I think in 1990. I was made an honorary Obie so that I could march with Kip and Barry and the other Oberlin alumni, who were accepting of we three bi’s. It was to be a few years before Kip and I embarked on our romantic relationship; at the time, we were both embroiled in our own separate tormented and doomed love affairs. Though Kip did do something very gallant for me that day: As the parade broke up and we started to go, I suddenly remembered that my backpack was still in the trunk of the convertible full of drag queens, who’d been kind enough to let me stow it there for the march. Kip immediately charged after the car and retrieved my bag. I was very relieved, as we’d stopped by Forbidden Planet before the march, and it was loaded with comic books.

The Bird’s Eye View

As I continued to peruse the book Nineteenth Street (mentioned more throughly below), I began to realize where I had seen some of houses in it before. Or, at least, one of the 19th century etchings of a particular house.

A while ago, I discovered the online map collection of the Library of Congress. Naturally, I went to the Cities and Towns Section and entered the places I have lived to see what historic maps I could find. For Portland, I found two wonderful Bird’s-eye-view maps, one from 1879 and one from 1890. The map from 1890 is the one whose border highlights certain buildings about town, including a couple of the houses in Nineteenth Street. In looking at the one from 1879, you can see the progress they made. You can also see in the foreground the gulch of a dry river bed that I believe is the basis for the 405 bypass. And if you zoom in on the upper right, just across the river on the forward swell of land, you can see Old Asylum Street that used to run right close to my house. (Item No. 16 is the Asylum itself)

But actually, the city that I found that had the most impressive maps over time is San Franciso, in a from-a-wilderness-into-metropolis sense. Although, I have heard that the funeral home just up on Hawthorne used to be the main building of a dude ranch…

Guide books and time maps

I received many lovely gifts for my first round of the Holiday Gift Exchange—I will participate in a few more before the end of January. Actually, I wish the whole gift exchange and focus of festivities would switch back to the New Years, a nice neutral place, or the Solstice proper. I adore the Holiday season and the light displays and I hate that they inspire admittedly justified feelings of resentment from non-Christians—I caught “the Grinch who stole Christmas” on Christmas Day and—damn—those Whos down in Whoville came across particularly smug.

But I’m getting sidetracked. Like I said, many nice gifts. But one that really hooked me and stood out was a gift from the Spouse, a book he saw and bought spontaneously while searching for something else. The title: Wildmen, Wobblies & Whistle Punks: Stewart Holbrook’s Lowbrow Northwest. This book is a collection of articles and essays by Holbrook, a journalistic historian whose mission was “to put into books the figures or portions of American history that I think have largely ignored or badly treated.” He scorned the pioneer heroes in preference for the stories of loggers, rascals, prophets, Wobblies, lunatics and the low-lifes.

Clearly, I’m really enjoying this book. He deals mostly with the period of American history I’m most intrigued with as well as the angle I’m most interested in. And what I’ve read of Holbrook, I am really liking him as well. He was a New England native who chose to live in Portland in 1923 “because Portland has the finest public library in the West.” He wrote constantly, producing 3000 to 5000 words a day: books, essays and articles for a wide range of magazines. At the height of his popularity, when he was confronted with a steady stream of letters, he composed the following form postcard, “Dear Sir or Madam: You may be right at that. Sincerely, Stewart Holbrook.”

So, when running some errands this morning along Hawthorne, I stopped into the Powell’s to see what books they had by him. I did find a few, including an overview of the Pacific Northwest where he recounts the infamous coin toss for the naming of Portland, Oregon—Mr. Pettygrove, a native of Maine, voted for Portland,

whereas Mr. Lovejoy wanted Boston, his hometown. Beyond this, these men are best known for the streets named after them in Northwest Portland, which then, for Lovejoy at least, translates to a character on The Simpsons. ( I used to live in a house on the corner of Simpson and Albina in North Portland—with Kip and Barry, in fact)

But I actually chose to buy another book called Nineteenth Street, a pictorial overview of historic mansions on a street right near where Kip and I used to live in Northwest Portland, built by families whose names also live on in street names about Portland: Flanders, Glisan, Burns, Weidler, etc.

Within this book I found my dream house:

Perversely, I would want the interiors to be classic Craftsman with Mackintosh stencil art to resolve the odder shapes. What can I say: ideally I’d have a house near impossible to draw on the outside and gridded for easier perspective drawing on the inside.

I recognize most of the houses in this book, even those that don’t exist. Portland is fond of putting up plaques about town with pictures of what used to be there. Most of these pictures are from the archives of the Oregon Historical Society, like the photos from Nineteenth Street and the anonymous photo above. I adore then-and-now photo pairs in general; I did my own for our house, albeit the time lapse was only a year.

And certainly not as sophisticated as the Archaeological Collage done by Gregory Cosmo Haun. I’m particularly fond of the Portland Hotel collage. He also uses the OHS as a source for historical shots. And I’m pretty sure I know where he got the aerial photo shot on his page about his Belmont Dairy Mural.

Portland Maps is an awesome resource of information maps for I guess every address in Portland. Here is the result of a random address I entered. Then I went to the map overview for it: property, zoning, water, elevation and so on. Naturally, I am most attracted to the aerial shots.

But I adore maps in general. And that was actually what Kip was looking for in the first place, when he came across the Stewart Holbrook book. You see, my other gift from Kip is a trip to British Columbia. In particular to the Broken Islands off of Vancouver Island. Seems there’s this one named Dicebox Island…

Spent all my money on booze and strippers

Well, no, not really. But I did have a good time last night during Christopher’s field trip to Mary’s Club, said to be downtown Portland’s oldest strip club.

We ended up as a group of about a dozen by the end, but no one unknown to Christopher except Mark and Elaine, who proved to be good sports when I had to cancel our tentative dinner plans with them last night and instead joined us at Mary’s (we had commited to Christopher first and simply forgot when discussing dinner and watching The Seven Samurai with them)

Mostly it was a gang of the usual suspects, including Kevin, Kip and Eric—Barry couldn’t make it, alas, he was working last night. Though I most certainly enjoyed the company I kept last night, I was disappointed that Barry could’t make it last night. Beyond the joy of his presence, I had met him at the end of the ’80s, when most of the comics we read seemed to have some scene or another in a strip club. The nostalgia value would have been interesting. Actually, I believe it was the late ’80s or very early ’90s that one of my favorite issues of Joe Sacco’s Yahoo was done, in which Sacco illustrated a script written by Susan Catherine detailing her experiences on the stripper circuit.

More…

So, yeah, good people, good conversations—though I often wasn’t looking at the person I was talking to, out of fear of being rude to the stripper on stage while she was performing. Now, the whole stripping thing was odd for me only because it all seemed so normal and inoffensive. I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve gone to so many life drawing sessions at Hipbone that people taking off their clothes and presenting themselves has lost a lot of the thrill for me, or if it’s just that a moral circuit in my brain is broken. There are so many things that I just can’t get worked up over: porn, most sex acts between consenting adults, who’s doing whom, people who like 7th Heaven, and so on. Personally I save my rage for acts like rape, torture, racism, land mines in Iraq, not to mention corporate hanky-panky. And a certain Commander-in-Chief often gets my blood pressure up.
I found myself feeling perfectly comfortable at Mary’s Club. It probably

helped that there was a definite feeling that the strippers had some control of their enviroment. The crowd was all in all a good friendly one,  peppered with women beyond our group. Of course there was that one asshole who has to stand out with a swagger and macho talk. He was quickly dressed down by the stripper on stage who took his drink and sent him on his way. She was already my favorite, being as impressively limber and athletic as a gymnast and having done a routine to “Eleanor Rigby”. I mean, she wrapped her legs around the pole, hung upside down and took her top off, and she could keep one foot on the stage while touching the ceiling with the other (damn!). Turns out that she was the mother of our cocktail waitress. A family joint is Mary’s!

The only time I felt faintly uncomfortable was when one customer requested a table dance. This act took place off in a corner, half-hidden from the general club by a video poker machine. It wasn’t anything I saw happening, which was not any different then the act on stage. I think it was the fact that it was happening in a corner, half-hidden, that made it seem furtive and wrong though I know the only intent was discreet.

Or maybe I was reminded by a truly vile segment of Desmond Morris’s TV mini-series: The Human Sexes. He had just finished going on about how women body builders grossly deform their bodies. Cut from a female body building competition to an example of what Desmond deems the natural woman—a skimpily dressed big busted lass preforming a lap dance for some guy. I cannot even begin to describe my rage over this, all from a guy whose own figure more closely resembles the Venus of Willendorf than the presumed male ideal of Arnold Schwartznager.

But beyond that, my only discomfort came from the usual bar nonsense like cigarette smoke and some guy interupting the conversation Elaine and I were having to ask if either of us played pool—totally ignoring our husbands on either side of us. We lied about not knowing how and went back to talking and tipping the strippers.

I didn’t find it very sexual though. Not even tiltilating from the sense I was doing something naughty. Again, I’m don’t know if this stems from life drawing or what. Probably just not my thing, which I don’t believe is because I’m a woman. I know and have known woman who are aroused by this kind of display and not with that defiant “If men like it, I’m going to like it” attitude accompanied with either a mad glee or the look one gets before swallowing castor oil.

Stripping and porn in general are odd things with so much meaning and possible meaning for so many people. Some people are angry about it because it’s Wrong. Why it’s wrong splits off into many categories, from God doesn’t like it to it’s demeaning to women. But I don’t believe it is inherently demeaning and, let’s face it, all the clothes I ever owned and all the obscenity laws I lived under were man-made, not divinely requistioned.

I am not so naïve as to ignore the society and culture that we and Mary’s Club exist in. Of course along with sex comes power and the question of who has it— as Ani DiFranco states, “Any tool is a weapon, if you hold it right.” And though there are alternative venues featuring men- or women-only clubs, neither can shake the looming shadow of the forbear they’re a response to: the “Gentleman’s” Club, the Peepshow, 20 Nude Girls 20, XXX, Shag McNasties, and so on.

The first and only other strip joint I have ever been in was in Pittsburgh, where I was attending college—a totally different experience than Mary’s Club. In fact, it was the stereotypical Strip Club, with peepshow in the rear and adult book store attached, along with a sleazy atmosphere. Unlike Oregon, the strippers didn’t lose their thongs—which made it worse somehow. As Becca pointed out to when we discussed strip club experiences, declaring something obscene and then censoring it makes it seem even more obscene than the original thought.

And whereas I would never use my experiences or opinions to invalidate another person’s, the idea that strip clubs or porn incite violence or discrimination against women just doesn’t jive with me. Does it help? No. Nudity is vulnerabilty, vulnerability gives the appearance of a victim.

But I believe those who would harm another would do so regardless. I was molested by a couple of men growing up and I was shown porn to—I don’t know—get twelve-year-old me in the mood? But other adult men in my life then that I later found out read Penthouse would not only never have done that to me, but condemn the men who did.

I guess for me it’s like complaining about the color of the paint on a house while the foundation is crumbling. We are all taught, male and female, from very early on to appreciate a certain type of female ideal form and then our gender training veers off: males are taught that they should want her, females to be her. And just as the allegories of Justice and Liberty are represented by women, so is Sex, draped over cars or hawking electronics.

Really, Pornography just seems so much more honest somehow.

It must be the Holiday Season!

Work just got its first tin of multi-flavored popcorn. Decorated with the
presents-under-the-tree theme as opposed to that perennial favorite, the-horse-drawn-open-sleigh-ride.

For me, this is truly the herald of the Christmas Frenzy. I mean, the stores
have had the decorations and music going since just after Halloween.

I like the popcorn though. Good afternoon snack.