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on Altcomics New York
After everyone settled in, I opened with little introduction, playing two voice memos from my phone on a rather good sound system —
Katie Lane’s the cartoonist I’m most excited about right now
also: Steve Grove.
my favorite cafe is Honey Moon &
I don’t know if Caveh is coming.
Not knowing what to do with my body, I paced around.
^Above, filmmaker Caveh Zahedi as he appears in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001)
I made the recordings in the morning and got a call from Caveh Zahedi in the afternoon. We’d fallen off in e-mail over the past week and as I circulated the flyer with his name on the bill I wasn’t completely sure he’d be there. Before the call I sent him some new takes on the jacket design for A Journal of the Year I Wrote This Journal— a book of his diaries, coming out this year from 2dcloud.
“So this is tonight? Can I read anything? Or should I read from the book?” Caveh spoke quickly.
“I think the book” I said.
He sounded a little disappointed. “Well, I guess I’ll do that then.”
^ A Journal of the Year I Wrote This Journal as previewed in Compact Magazine
After my recordings, I read a piece called Gossip from an issue of Altcomics Magazine I’m editing— Something Katie Lane’s in as well. Then I read another piece about watching Lola (1981) and The Wicker Man (1973) the last time I was in New York.
Caveh called back a couple hours later
“You’re playing a film tonight, right? That Japanese film? Kathy thinks this is a terrible idea but — I just completed a film and I wondering if we should play that instead.”
“How long is it?”
“It’s a feature.”
Exciting but confusing. There was a door fee and I didn’t know who was showing for what. So, no new Caveh movie. I didn’t think to ask what it was — the Joseph Cornell biography?
I walked the mile and a half in Queens from trendy Ridgewood to industrial Mesbeth in a heavy mist, and had to make my way around a roof fire being put out. As I came on the former laundromat, called The Laundromat, Caveh called to propose we screen a new episode of The Show About the Show. “It’s 25 minutes.” I thought The Show had ended but we’re two episodes into a new season.
The New York Times Magazine write-up describes The Show as a “metadocumentary series that is sort of like if “Scenes From a Marriage” were crossed with “Synecdoce, New York” and then filtered through reality TV”.
I didn’t know what to expect in terms of turnout. The Altcomics event the weekend before in Chicago was packed. The readers were selected by Katherine Dee of The Computer Room. Two poets flew in from Austin. The group seemed to know each other from Twitter. In the bedroom of the apartment gallery there was a small show of paintings by Blaise Larmee — glowering faces, a masturbating figure in repose, a smiling self-portrait, a tormented figure in front of a radiating heart. A couple days after the show I posted Blaise’s account of cancelation to largely negative responses on social media.
A dozen people turned up in New York. “I don’t know why they ask me but people always ask about the Lale book” said Austin English. Austin’s wearing a leather jacket, has long curly sideburns, squints. I said it’s not happening, Lale pulled it — explaining her discomfort with Raighne funding the label with his participation in clinical trials. "We haven’t announced it yet.” But Raighne wrote everyone who pre-ordered and returned their money.
Austin’s an editor for The Comics Journal and teaches a class on Comics History at SVA. He’s a devoted advocate for comics and art comics and a wonderfully original cartoonist. Gulag Casual, a collection of his work published by 2dcloud, can now be bought from his distro/publishing house Domino Books.
^ Gulag Casual
“Well, that has to be understandable, right?” said Austin, about the trials. I said “Yes.”
“I brought this” pulling out 3 Books, the Blaise Larmee book published in 2015 by 2dcloud and pulped in 2018. Katie and her girlfriend Lydia paged through it. One held it up while the other turned the pages. The book is thick but possible to speed-read in 15 minutes.
“I thought those were all pulped” said Austin
“There was a single box left. 25 copies”
“Ah, there was a box” It’s indistinguishable from the lore the book spins about itself.
I asked Katie what she thought
Katie, “I think it’s beautiful”
“Well” Lydia, “He draws beautifully. But I don’t get the pretext. It seems like a lot of it is made up?”
I said to Katie, “You should write a review!”
Katie smiling to Austin “For The Comics Journal?”
Austin smiling, “Ahh, I don’t know about that, I don’t know” waving his hand.
“Too hot to handle” I said, smiling, and put it back in my totebag.
Katie read her comics while Lydia changed the slides. What do I like about Katie’s comics? We go from bar, walk, apartment, bed. A phone is held and we see through it to the hand holding it. The handwriting throughout is an unaffected scrawl. Before this she was doing a series called Single Camera Sitcom — digital collage comics which seemed prolific and, to me, impenetrable. Her switch to drawing is recent — “I just couldn’t draw before, at all, and then suddenly I knew how.”
^ Katie Lane “I Hate My Girlfriend”
Her drawing feels like a kind of anti-style — do you know what I mean? — which takes place in relatively stable conceptual space. They never lose the weight of happening. Katie seems new because of the switch, but she’s ahead.
Caveh sat down cross-legged on the carpet in front of the screen projected with no-input blue and read from The Journal for ten minutes
“I got stoned a lot this year, stoned entries are in italics…”
Then he got up to plug his laptop into the projector to debut the new The Show About the Show.
It’s funny in the beginning and moves into being the most harrowing episode of the series . There was a beat of hesitation after the credits rolled before we clapped. Then everyone picked up to go. No energy for a movie. I walked up and said “That was great” then, looking at his expression, which was wrought, “Or. Intense.”
“I can’t watch it alone”, he said and put on a silver knit cap.