Transmetropolitan Soup For The Soul #1

Martin and Osa Film Festival…

Had the showing of the Asmat bisj film (full title = “The Lives of Our Ancestors: An Asmat Bisj Ceremony”). The crowd was small, about 20-30 people. The movie went over well. Alot of people came up and complimented me and had questions. The long section of the Asmat man telling what the preparations for the Asmat bisj went over well, a concern I had. The crowd really liked it.

Lamont Lindstrom, an anthropologist from the University of Tulsa, did a great presentation on Vanuatu and some of the context of the Johnson’s productions. I talked to him for awhile. He did his fieldwork in Tannu in Vanuatu and knows Lowell Holmes and Dorothy Billings from Wichita State.

John Tibbetts, from KU, talked about Buster Keaton (they have a major Buster Keaton film festival in Iola, about 30 miles away). He showed a short that was made by the Canadian Broadcasting Company when Keaton was in his 80s, called the Railrodders. It was excellent.

Now that this is over I will relax for the evening. Then I have to write two papers that are due on Tuesday and another one due on Wednesday. After I tweak a few things on this documentary I’ll get it uploaded onto our museum site and then I will crank out this historical documentary on Samoa in the 1950s for Lowell Holmes. Then it is onto a short film on the Korowai, edited out of last years New Guinea footage. Somewhere in there I need to work on my thesis.

Once Upon A Time: The Superhero

Youtube has this documentary up. Made in 2002 and a great set of interviews and really good film. I posted it on here in its 10 parts. Start at the top and go down…

Martin and Osa Film Festival in Chanute Kansas

The wife and I are chilling here, about 10 PM, at the Tioga Suites hotel in Chanute KS. Tomorrow is the matinee of the Martin and Osa Film Festival and I am showing my documentary at 10 AM. Strangely I am not nervous.

This hotel is really nice. It is on the national register and quite an antique. Unfortunately it has fallen on such hard times that they are renting out the rooms like they are apartments for 295 dollars a month. There is a nice looking hotel bar, but it is chained shut with a combination lock and apparently closed. Free wireless though. That is how I am writing this.

Tonight they had a screening of some old footage from the 1920s. It was alright stuff, horribly ethnocentric and insensitive. However much they might have mocked and insulted the Vanuatu people in this film, I know that the natives mocked and insulted them just as much. They were stupid white people who didn’t know how to do anything – that kinda stuff. I know, I’ve seen it first hand. Natives think we are funny in the same kinda ways we laugh at the “childlike” behavior of them. They wonder what is wrong with or skin, why we get up in the stupid clothes. Why we can’t eat their food, why our food has tin skins. So I guess it is fair, but I am also glad that we haven’t gone back to acting like that.

Alan Moore Can Kick Your Ass!

Alan Moore is the author of Watchmen, V For Vendetta and some of the greatest issues of Swamp Thing ever written. He is interviewed here by Stewart Lee, discussing his unusual religion. And he can kick your ass.

Some Jack Kirby Goodness

Youtube clip from an out-of-print documentary called The Masters Of Comic Book Art.  Narration from the cantankerous and litigious Harlan Ellison.  Funny, a documentary clip about a guy who should have sued for the rights to some of his work narrated by a guy who has written the book on suing people for being remotely similair to his work.  Dig how fly Ellison is with the 1980s jacket and hair.  Still Ellison is a great writer.

Little House On The Prairie and Morphine Addiction

I was finishing up a report I had to get out in the email this morning and the wife was watching Little House on the Prairie. Writing away and then my attention is drawn to the screen because some characters was screaming “ohh God, ohh God please make it stop”. Yep, this was a scene of Little House on the Prairie where the son Albert kicks morphine in a sick room scene full of twitching legs, cold sweat and a scene of vomiting (that thin white drug addict puke, not health chunky stuff). Charles, the dad has to hold the son down while he convulses and screams for interruption from the deity. Some shaky handheld camera stuff too. As I was watching this I could not help thinking how horrified family television audiences must have been. If you have ever seen a drug addict going through that little circle of hell that comes when the monkey stops being insistent and turns rabid…well, you wouldn’t want a kid to see it. But they made it a couple of minutes of this episode. I laughed a little at the scene, mainly because it seemed so deranged that it was happening on the nice and safe Little House on the Prairie.

I wonder about the TV/Movie drug addict thin white puke, as far as I know their puke might be thin since they don’t eat much but puke tends towards the brownish orange tan color. In all my years of vomiting and seeing people vomit I have never seen white puke from anyone but an infant. I have seen yellow (probably from bananas) but not white.

Next, on a special episode of Little House on the Prairie, William S. Burroughs comes to town and does a reading of Naked Lunch.  Charles admits he enjoys buggery but Burroughs is not interested.  Albert steals all of Burrough’s pot and Burroughs comes at him with an 18 inch hunting knife threatening to “cut off his thieving gonads”.  You’re not gonna believe how this episode’s gonna end!  Special guest music performance by Lou Reed.

Showed the first Asmat film today…

Had my first showing of my Asmat bisj ceremony film today for a class of about 70 students.  I think it went over well for a rough cut.  I noticed a couple of typos in the subtitles, and there were a few other mistakes.  The cinematography was not so great with what I had to work with, and that I cannot change no matter how much I want to.

I left in the long 10 minute section where one of the village leaders explained the preparations for the bisj ceremony.  I was a little worried this would not go over so well.  I could hear people getting restless in their seats, but no one openly complained at the end.  They might have been polite.  I was self-depricating, so that might have calmed some negative reactions.  Maybe since I showed that I didn’t think I was some kind of documentary genius (or at least thought I was) it was easier for the audience to be kind.

The narration was ok level wise, but the I need a pop screen because the “p’s” were bad.  I will have to iron out these things before the showing at the Martin and Osa film festival in Chanute, KS this weekend.  That is what I am really nervous about.

What I’ve Been Reading Lately…

Wolverine First Class #1:

A return to the good ‘ole days of the Xmen living in the mansion and acting like it was a learning institution. This was back before House of M, back before Extinction Agenda, back in the days that made Chris Clairmont a god among comic readers. I like this phase of the Xmen from the 1980s. Reading this made me miss it. The story in the first issue is a mission Wolverine is assigned to by Professor X, a mission in which he has to take Kitty Pryde. They travel to a small town and free the local residents from the effects of a mutant whose powers to project emotion has made the whole town paranoid and frightened, enough so to take it out on our pair of Xmen visitors. Overall a good story, but I don’t know if I’ll stick to this title. Not a side of Wolverine I am incredibly psyched to return to, though I enjoyed it once. Might wait for the first trade and read that.

Scalped – First two trade paperbacks:

I had heard alot about this series, mainly how great it was. It is a sleeper hit. It has the Vertigo feel, the crime drama of 100 Bullets but not the weird approach to social experiment and all the political conspiracy stuff. An FBI agent has been assigned to go undercover on a Native American reservation full of poverty, organized crime and some dark secrets. The FBI man becomes a cop on the Tribal Police Force, accountable to a complex character named Red Crow – corrupt yet truly concerned with the future of his people. The writer of the series, Jason Aaron, wrote into the plot the American Indian Movement situation at Pine Ridge in the 1970s. The story unfolds that the FBI boss who sent our protagonist into the reservation is seeking revenge against three characters who were involved in the death of the FBI agents in the 1970s. The series is very sympathetic to this Peltier analog case.

While one could complain that this book shows the Native American situation in a negative light, I think it really misses the point to make such a complaint. The book is a crime book, it deals with the darker matters of human nature…people whose business is doing things to each other that is far from socialable. That is also what makes the book powerful, because as bad as the Native American criminals are the FBI goons (except for our protagonist) are the real scumbags in the book. I like this book and will probably keep up with it, but in the trades. The way this book is written makes it hard for me to go in for single issues. It would be too much like reading 100 Bullets in single issues. It would be so unfulfilling, like getting a quarter of a grilled cheese sandwich and 5 french fries at a diner…with 4 oz of Coke.

Dead Space #1:

This book is just plain awesome. A distant human future with the heavy industrial space feel, like in Aliens. A mining colony in space. A strange alien artifact is discovered. Is it the coming of a prophecy some of the crew believes in due to their strange religion? Is it dangerous alien technology? Well it was only the first issue so they didn’t answer all of that.

The art is very good and I like the story alot. The plot has an interesting premise, that the discovery of this alien artifact causes great fear in some of the crew and religious awe in others. The tension between the crew members who do not belong to the religion adds and interesting dimension to that caged in paranoia feeling. I am excited to see where this series goes. I hear it is going to be developed into a video game in the near future. I think it could be really good if it maintains the feel and horror sci-fi elements.

It does have a mood not unlike the old Dark Horse Aliens comics, except sepia and muted colors. That corporate future is here too, the cold and impersonal control over the lives of the workers, a bleak future of industrial toil in outer space.

First Post…

This is my first post. I am a graduate student in anthropology and got tired of using myspace for posting so I decided to get a real blog.