Satellite Sam
when I say |fname| you say |fname|.
|fname|.
- matt fraction -
The home stretch of SATELLITE SAM lies under my shoes; with luck, I will finish this week. Most of the issues of "volume three" (subtitled something like 'Satellite Sam and the Limestone Caves of Fire') span more than twenty pages; I suspect, as Howard and I say goodbye, we let ourselves get a little sentimental. The cover price stays put, though; that's the cost of sentiment, I guess.
The story will get collected in a trade and then all fifteen issues and all the special material generated for the issues and collections will get collected in a nice oversized hardcover with an amazing cover. #11 printed over the weekend and is on its way to stores now.
Finishing a book means freeing psychic space and brain cycles, it means opening up like five and a half feet of bookshelf and freedom from forever hunting for Yet Another Reference that adds invisible verisimilitude nobody but I see, it means I can put these characters and their nightmares and their endless voids to bed, if only for a little while, and go on to other things, other crises, other catastrophes walking around in fine-cut suits.
I won't miss Mike and Kara and the rest of the Le Monde gang, I don't think. This book, a dark ride even at its brightest, fought me in the writing, growing from a "six or seven" issue miniseries at its inception to a planned multivolume, multicity, history of modern entertainment, recovery culture, and the commodification of sex as an entertainment product. The closest thing to a novel I've yet to write, it felt like shit to live through and I wonder how it stands as a finished completed thing. These unhappy people, with their holes never filled and their anguish unarticulated (because pain needs understanding to be healed and to understand something one must survive it, yeah?), made for hard fellow travellers the last four or five years.
Some of these fucked up people I ended up feeling great compassion and sympathy and empathy for, and maybe I understood more about my own dark places for having created them and walked with them a while. That some of them earned a little grace in the end feels better than anything I've ever written.
That I wrote so many second acts that bleak year of our lord 2014 and started therapy again connect, surely, through the enantiodromia of everything that Was. "The pain of the past in its pastness./ May be converted into. /The future tense of joy," as the man once wrote. "You may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with you," wrote another.
Somewhere between these two truths there once lived a book called SATELLITE SAM.
Goodnight, you motherfucker, goodnight.
THE SATELLITE SAM READING LIST
First off, I read an article online about Carlo Mollino and his son discovering the old man's secret archive of personal photographs of prostitutes he'd taken over forty some years. I don't remember where I read it, who wrote it, or when I read it but it stuck. Monographs of these polaroids were insanely expensive as SATELLITE SAM began; in October 2014 an affordable edition was made available and diligent hunters unafraid of foreign used booksellers online can find even more.
I was lucky to find a collector that owned a complete catalog and had scanned them all with ferocious meticulousness. This collector (and the many others like him) reminds me very much of Carlyle White. And while I may not share his voracious predilection for pornography and erotica, as a borderline-OCD case I understand the collection and cataloguing compulsion and they have my gratitude for the steadfast dedication and serious attention they give their... hobby? "Obsession" sounds judgmental. Their passion. Their passion gave me the book's gestalt. Thanks.
My friend, the genius artist, visionary, and waist-coated madman Steven Sanders turned me on to SPACE PATROL, the old DuMont show, while we were working on FIVE FISTS OF SCIENCE, I think; he would have it on in the background while working. I found it charming and ambitious and the stories Steven told me about the show's creation (gleaned from SPACE PATROL by Jean-Noel Bassior) hilarious. Another psychic pin dropped.
Jeff Kisseloff's THE BOX: AN ORAL HISTORY OF TELEVISION 1920-1961 came next. It remained a primary source from start to finish.
Everything else was of varying degrees of use and value; some books I devoured cover to cover and they informed the book inside and out; others I bought for but a page, a paragraph, a line that gave some little tweak of detail that inched the story forward.
Most often used were
TUBE OF PLENTY, by Erik Barnouw
PLEASE STAND BY, Michael Ritchie
SAME TIME, SAME STATION, James L. Baughman.
THE FORGOTTEN NETWORK: DUMONT AND THE BIRTH OF AMERICAN TELEVISION, David Weinstein
NBC: AMERICA'S NETWORK, Michele Hilmes
THE IRON GATE OF JACK AND CHARLIE'S "21", by Various. Especially wroth getting if you're a fan of cartooning and the golden age of the strip artist.
The afore-mentioned SPACE PATROL by Jean-Noel Bassior, and SAY KIDS! WHAT TIME IS IT? NOTES FROM THE PEANUT GALLERY by Stephen Davis informed the depth and richness of backstage antics that'd scandalize and traumatize the stuffed shirts at today's network television to the point of cardiac arrest.
THE COMPLETE REPRINT OF JOHN WILLIE'S BIZARRE and EXOTIQUE COMPLETE, edited by Kim Christy from Taschen books as well as Craig Yoe's SECRET IDENTITY hepped me to the golden age of smut, kink, and the plain brown wrapper racket. Also to the anonymous creator of tijuana-bibles.com, I owe you one. Thanks for enabling me to write straight-up pornography for Howard to draw.
The Criterion Collection put out a multidisc set called THE GOLDEN AGE OF TELEVISION that was indispensible, most especially "The Comedian," written by Rod Serling and directed by John Frankenheimer and the making-of material attendant. Also THE STUDIO ONE ANTHOLOGY released on DVD by Koch Vision.
Everyone that's ever uploaded old kinescopes to YouTube. Anybody's grandfather that ever for some goddamn reason decided to SAVE old kinescopes so their grandkids could upload them to YouTube.
KOVACSLAND, A BIOGRAPHY OF ERNIE KOVACS by Diana Rico, and the various online repositories of Ernie Kovacs treasures maintained by Josh Mills, Ben Model and Al Quagliata. What a man. What a loss. What a fucking lunatic.
The deep, deep, well of data at THE ARCHIVE OF AMERICAN TELEVISION (www.emmytvlegends.org) as well as time spent at the Paley Center for Media served me well; my gratitude to everyone there who helped me.
The rest of that goddamn pile:
THE NEW YORK CHRONOLOGY, James Trager
THE FORBIDDEN APPLE: A CENTURY OF SEX AND SIN IN NEW YORK CITY by Kat Long
HIP: THE HERBERT HUNCKE, edited by Benjamin G. Schafer
EVERYBODY LOVES SOMEBODY SOMETIME, Arthur Marx
MARY AND LOU AND RHODA AND TED, by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong
HOW SWEET IT WAS, by Arthur Shulman & Roger Youman
HELLUVA TOWN: NEW YORK CITY IN THE 1940s and 1950s, Vivian Cherry
BLAST OFF! ROCKETS, ROBOTS, RAY GUNS, AND RARITIES FROM THE GOLDEN AGE OF SPACE TOYS by Mark Young, Steve Duin, Mike Richardson.
THE HISTORICAL ATLAS OF NEW YORK CITY, Eric Homberger
THE HIP, by Roy Carr, Brian Case, Fred Dellar
THE TUMULTUOUS FIFTIES, by Douglas Dreishpoon and Alan Trachtenberg
BROADWAY BABIES, by Ethan Mordden
WASHINGTON CONFIDENTIAL, NEW YORK CONFIDENTIAL, CHICAGO CONFIDENTIAL, and U.S.A. CONFIDENTIAL by Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer. Paperbacks of these can be found dirt-cheap and have to be seen and read to be believed; I found myself alternately repulsed and direly nostalgic for the portraits they paint.
The GAY TALESE READER no way by Gay Talese
LOVE ON THE ROCKS, MEN, WOMEN, AND ALCOHOL IN POST-WWII AMERICA by Lori Rotskoff
The AA Big Book
NOT-GOD: A HISTORY OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS by Ernest Kurtz
Various issues of AA's magazine GRAPEVINE from 1950, 1951, and 1952. My gratitude to those that endeavor to preserve AA's history against a tide of shame and misunderstanding.
WOMEN PIONEERS IN 12 STEP RECOVERY, by Charlotte Hunter, Billye Jones, and Joan Zeigler.
DISSENT magazine, Summer 1961.
BOOTLEGGERS AND SMUTHOUNDS, by Jay A. Gertzman.
WONDERFUL TOWN: NEW YORK STORIES FROM THE NEW YORKER edited by David Remnick.
THE GAY METROPOLIS: THE LANDMARK HISTORY OF GAY LIFE IN AMERICA, by Charles Kaise, which among its many other amazing gifts and revelations about what gay life meant in the city during the fifties, was the origin of the phrase "cookiepusher."
NEW YORK IN THE FIFTIES, by Dan Wakerfield
MANHATTAN '45 by Jan Morris
DEAN & ME by Jerry Lewis which might be one of my very favorite books ever written, even if every other word is complete bullshit.
DINO: LIVING HIGH IN THE DIRTY BUSINESS OF DREAMS by Nick Tosches. Whatever imagined nostalgia and fondness you may have for "The Ratpack" and this age of swingin', suit-wearin', hard-drinkin', hard-livin' entertainers will be beaten from you by the final page of this book.
A DRINKING LIFE by Pete Hamill.
THE HISTORY OF GAY PEOPLE IN ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS,by Audrey Borden.
BIOGRAPHY OF MRS. MARTY MANN by Sally and David R. Brown.
THE COLLECTED WORKS OF PADDY CHAYEFSKY
MAD AS HELL: THE MAKING OF NETWORK AND THE FATEFUL VISION OF THE ANGRIEST MAN IN MOVIES by the deadly David Itzkoff, who was kind enough to share his work with me in its manuscript form.
THE STORK CLUB, by Ralph Blumenthal
DESILU: THE STORY OF LUCILLE BALL AND DESI ARNAZ by Coyne S. Sanders and Tom Gilbert
Then, of course, to limber up and prepare myself to do my best Howard Chaykin impression I needed and frequently referred to:
HOWARD CHAYKIN: CONVERSATIONS edited by Brannon Costello
And almost everything Howard's ever done, THE SHADOW: BLOOD AND JUDGMENT, BATMAN: DARK ALLEGIANCE, BLACK KISS and BLACK KISS 2, SCORPIO, BLACKHAWK, TIME2, and as always and in all things, AMERICAN FLAGG!
Howard also has a shitload of knowledge from this era at his fingertips; on more than one occasion I used him as a primary or at least secondary source and trusted his lifelong Manhattan compass to better-inform the story. Thank you, Howard, jesus christ, thank you.
Alright. I have a book to finish. Get the fuck out of here.
MF
26 Jan 15
- kelly sue demonic -
My head's in sixteen different places right now, so I already feel guilty for taking up your time with what will undoubtedly be a scattershot ramble that I haven't even started writing yet. As bastards say: "apologies in advance."
Finished my 2015 Uberlist. Even making the list was a chore, which feels significant somehow, though I can't articulate why quite yet. Maybe something to do with the twin truths that a) I can't afford to be whimsical with my time the way I once was; and b) I have a lot better idea of how much can actually be accomplished in a year than I once did? Whatever the reason, my list is far less fun than previous versions, but I suspect it might also be far more useful. We'll see, I guess.
We spent $150 at Powell's on a date night splurge Saturday evening. Left with two grocery bags full of books, including THE DO IT YOURSELF GUIDE TO FIGHTING THE BIG MOTHERFUCKING SAD by Adam Gnade, JAILED FOR FREEDOM by Doris Stevens, BAD FEMINIST by Roxane Gay, LABELING WOMEN DEVIANT by Edwin M. Schur and LOUDER THAN HELL: THE DEFINITIVE ORAL HISTORY OF METAL by Jon Wiederhorn and Katherine Turman. I've been making my way through the latter on Kindle for the last couple of months, but some books just don't lend themselves to ebook reading for me and this is proving to be one of them. I feel the need to flip back and forth and that just doesn't work for me on screen.
Speaking of screen reading, have you tried that new Amazon whispernet thing? It syncs your Audible.com listening to your kindle reading. I'm making my way through OVERWHELMED: WORK, LOVE AND PLAY WHEN NO ONE HAS THE TIME by Brigid Schulte that way right now and I'm loving both the book, and the tech... despite the fact that the book is raising my blood pressure.
Oh, hey, today's the Final Order Cut-off ("FOC") for Bitch Planet #3: the Origin of Penny Rolle. If you intend to pick it up, it would be great if you gave your retailer a heads up today -- drop them an email or hit them up on Twitter or Facebook, even. (We want to make sure they actually have an issue for you. Lots of folks having trouble getting their hands on Issue #1 and we've had to do a second printing--which is a great problem to have, no doubt!-- but it means folks have to wait for it, which means some will lose interest... it's just a missed opportunity we'd like to avoid. So, if you plan on picking up a physical copy, you'd do us a solid by giving them a heads up.)
Oh, hey. Just got a letter from a guy explaining to me how feminism hurts women, who are, by nature--SCIENCE!--more delicate and submissive than the radical outliers who spearhead this movement so... you know. I got that going for me.
Try not to roll your eyes so hard you hurt yourselves, ladies.
#ICYMI
Bitch Planet #1 sold out. Going to second printing.
Casanova: Acedia #1 Advance Review at Paste.
KISS Meets J-Pop, or The Greatest Thing Kelly Sue Has Ever Seen Ever
Why Bitch Planet Should Be On Your Pull List at Dork Shelf
Image's Comic Books are Insane. That's Why People Can't Stop Reading Them. at Vox.
tl;dr
January 28 - Bitch Planet #2, Casanova: Acedia #1 and Sex Criminals #10 on sale
February 11 - Satellite Sam #11 on sale
February 18 - Bitch Planet #3 on sale
February 18-21 - ComicsPro Annual Meeting in Portland, OR
February 19-22 - KS at Disney Princess Half Marathon Weekend
February 25 - ODY-C #3 on sale
March 27-29 - Emerald City Comic Con
Milkfed Logo by Rian Hughes.