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Speaking of real life…

June 17th, 2006

I’m afraid things have been so crazy with the book tour that I wasn’t able to do new DTWOF episodes this month. I feel very bad about that, because it’s the second time in a year I’ve done this. But I’ll be back on track soon. Here’s an archive episode. Click the image to go to the bigger version (thank you, Nichael!) [Strip is now visible here without having to go to Flickr]
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Happy Father’s Day

June 17th, 2006

Okay. You know that scene in Broadcast News where the William Hurt character says “What do you do when your real life exceeds your wildest fantasies?” And the Albert Brooks character says, “Keep it to yourself.” You know that scene? Right now I feel like a peculiar amalgam of both those characters. But I’m not going to keep this to myself: Fun Home  just got an excellent, if not lavish review in the New York Times Book Review.

If the theoretical value of a picture is still holding steady at a thousand words, then Alison Bechdel’s slim yet Proustian graphic memoir, “Fun Home,” must be the most ingeniously compact, hyper-verbose example of autobiography to have been produced. It is a pioneering work, pushing two genres (comics and memoir) in multiple new directions, with panels that combine the detail and technical proficiency of R. Crumb with a seriousness, emotional complexity and innovation completely its own.

Well, the R. Crumb thing is a bit over the top. But I can’t tell you what a strange sensation it is to get all this establishment recognition after spending my whole career on the fringes of acceptability. I feel depressurized or something, like I’m getting the bends.

PDX

June 16th, 2006

The Portland airport has free wi-fi. Such a civilized, community-spirited city. I’m posting this on my way to Seattle. The thing I’ve always hated about travel is the unfamiliarity of everything. But when you travel a lot, the unfamiliarity itself becomes familiar, if not routine. Here I am in the Kafkaesque security line just a few minutes ago.

Powell’s, Portland OR

June 16th, 2006

Man! What a day. Up at 6 to fly from SF to Portland. A radio interview at KBOO. A pit stop at my hotel for a shower. A trip to In Other Words, the very pleasant women’s bookstore here. Then to the Powells.com warehouse building, where I had a really fun conversation with Craig Thompson, comix wunderkind, which will be published in the Powell’s newsletter at some point. Then off to Powell’s proper, the downtown bookstore, where there was a frickin’ HU-UUGE crowd to hear me read. What an audience! What a city! But whenever I say that to people from Portland they get all nervous and tell me not to move here because there’s already too many people.

That’s me in the middle of the room, running my powerpoint show. This was a good setup. Standing in the audience, or behind them, works better than standing up front. Because up front I have to look at my laptop. In the back, I’m looking at what the audience is looking at, which feels better.

Now it’s almost midnight. I just had my room service dinner. And I’m starting to crash.

Attention Midwesterners!

June 16th, 2006

New dates are up for Alison’s Fun Home tour in Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Madison and Chicago. Also, you can catch an informative interview from The Forum on KQED San Francisco on Realplayer right here. (posted by Katie)

Cody’s, 4th Street, Berkeley

June 15th, 2006

Now I’m in Portland, but I’m posting about last night’s reading at Cody’s in Berkeley.

We had to rig another impromptu screen, because they didn’t know I was going to be doing a visual presentation. But it worked out just fine. There was a large, very engaged audience.

They had questions not just about Fun Home but about the trajectory of my Dykes To Watch Out For career, and were coming up with all kinds of business strategies about how to make the strip more sustainable. It was a surprisingly un-Berkeley-ish sort of discussion.

Driving back to the city across the Bay Bridge, I took this picture of Mt. Tam. God, what a beautiful place.

LGBT Community Center, SF

June 15th, 2006

Last night a whole buncha wonderful people came to my reading at the community center in SF. The building is this huge handsome place, all very well-appointed. They had excellent equipment too–look how big they could project the pictures from my book.

I’m sorry this is such a brief post. Maybe I’ll elaborate later, but right now I have to race off to my reading in Berkeley at Cody’s.

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books, SF

June 13th, 2006

A sizeable crowd came to my reading at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books tonight. They had some particularly good questions. Martha, my literary escort, counted 83 people in the audience. It’s so wild being on a book tour with a big publisher. I’ve published books for years with small presses, and either they didn’t send me on a tour at all, or they sent me on a tour that I had to partially fund myself. And of course I’d be on my own, renting cars, finding bookstores, staying in peoples’ houses.

But with Houghton Mifflin, they have a literary escort in each city who ferries me around to things. Plus they’re putting me in really nice hotels. Here I am having my room service dinner after my reading tonight.

Earlier today I went by the Cartoon Art Museum to see the No Straight Lines exhibit. It was very cool seeing peoples’ actual original artwork. Here I am looking at a piece by Jen Camper.

The Fun Home tour: A Different Light, LA

June 10th, 2006

Here I am last night at A Different Light, helping the bookstore guy to rig up an impromptu screen for my “reading.” Man. I thought I was done with the techno-geek stuff when I finished all the complicated computer work on Fun Home. But apparently not. Now in order to read, I have to lug around all this equipment–my laptop, a projector, cables–and I have to make sure bookstores are set up for me to do this powerpoint presentation.

It’s worth it, though. It’s really cool to project the story and narrate it to an audience. A very nice crowd came last night to A Different Light, even though the Dyke March was amassing at the same time. Soon after I finished, there was this tremendous roar of motorcycles from Santa Monica Boulevard. It was the Dykes on Bikes starting off the march. But I couldn’t even run to the door and watch because I had to finish signing books then rush off to the airport to catch a 10:20 flight to San Francisco. Which ended up not taking off until nearly midnight.

God, air travel is torture. Here I am as we sat on the tarmac waiting to go. At least I had all three seats to myself.

The Cardboard Cobbler

June 10th, 2006

Yesterday I went to Phranc’s studio for a couple hours. We worked on stuff for a show we’re doing together this fall at Pine Street Art Works, the gallery in Burlington where I had my book launch last week. Phranc’s been making astonishing things out of cardboard for years–it started with shoes, I think, then she moved on to all kinds of clothes and other objects. Pop tarts! Lifejackets! Cardboard chocolates! Check out her blog.

Her latest venture is Phranc of California, a line of clothing fabricated entirely from paper and sewn on her grandmother’s sewing machine. Here she is creating a hand-painted length of striped fabric from which she’s going to make a shirt. That’s me in the background making a life-size paper doll of Phranc. It’s a mock-up to see if we can figure out a way to get the paper clothes onto flat cardboard cutouts of these big drawings of people. The people will be part of my contribution to our art show.

Here’s a close-up of Phranc making stripes. She’s gonna painstakingly stripe up that whole huge sheet of paper. It’s an amazing feat.