The Pittsburgh Toonseum is one of only three museums in the United States dedicated to the cartoon arts. This is a great, short documentary that just happens to feature me, along with a number of other awesome people from the Pittsburgh comics scene.

Author interview

David Wiseheart has posted an author interview with me about Scratch on his blog. You can read it at http://kindle-author.blogspot.com/2011/10/kindle-author-interview-wayne-wise.html?spref=tw

Poke around while you're there to discover a lot of new authors. He's providing a lot of press and promotion for Ebooks, as well as information on the whole topic. You can check out his books as well.

Thanks Dave!

David Bowie: Starman

I just finished reading David Bowie: Starman by Paul Trynka. What follows isn't a review as much as it is personal observations.

Anyone who knows me knows that I've been a music fan from a very early age. It accompanies me every day. I listen at work. I listen in the car. I listen when I'm writing. I'm listening to an obscure Bowie release right now (In Bertolt Brecht's Baal). I'm a fan of music, but as a part of that I have always been a fan of the musicians. For me to really get into a band or musician I need to be fascinated by them as people. I follow careers.

I'm just young enough to have missed the whole Glam era of David Bowie, and as much as The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars is respected now it wasn't a massive hit in the United States when it was released. I didn't become aware of Bowie until his single, Rebel, Rebel was released in 1974. The opening guitar riff of that song is one of the key moments that made me a rock and roll fan. The other was the opening of Alice Cooper's School's Out. Nothing can make me twelve again like hearing either of those.

I bought Rebel, Rebel and played it over and over on my tiny, mono speaker record player. The b-side was the song Lady Grinning Soul. At the time this song did nothing for me. I think I only played it through a couple of times. Now I love it. I was thrilled to see this was the song that Dakota Fanning, as Cherie Currie, lip-synched in full Aladdin Sane makeup in The Runaways.

I saw very few pictures of Bowie during his glam years back then. Diamond Dogs was the first album of his I was consciously aware of. Either he wasn't getting a lot of coverage in the music mags I was reading or he had moved into his Thin White Duke persona by then, wearing tailored suits instead of colorful spaceman outfits and makeup. If I had seen the Ziggy or Aladdin Sane outfits I'm sure I would have bought the albums. I'm pretty aware that it was the costumes and makeup that made me interested in Alice Cooper, KISS, and even Elton John at the time.

I bought the single for Fame and even then I think I would have listed it as one of my favorite songs of the era. But for some reason, as I moved on into buying albums instead of singles, I never picked up a Bowie album. At the time I was most into KISS and Queen, Bowie was recording his Berlin trilogy of albums, Low, Heroes, and Lodger. The singles from these didn't get a lot of airplay in my market then, and even if they did, these albums were so experimental that I don't think my 1970's KISS-addled Rock and Roll brain would have appreciated them.

Around 1980 I bought a used, dull primer gray-colored Ford Granada with an 8-Track player built in. The previous owner had left his copy of Heroes in the dash. This was the first time I ever listened to an entire Bowie album. Like I said, it was experimental, and not what I was used to at all. But something about it clicked. I loved the album, weird instrumentals and all. The song Heroes quickly became a favorite and remains one to this day.

Even then 8-track players were becoming a thing of the past, and I installed a cassette player. Most of what I played in it were home recordings of the vinyl albums I owned, but I did purchase a few new cassettes. Ziggy Stardust was among them. Somewhere in there it became a desert-island album for me, one of the few records in my life that I think of as a perfect album (and I recognize how debatable that statement is about any album).

But I still didn't really go back and explore his career or catalog. He was always there in some form, but for some reason he remained on the periphery of my musical life. In one of my early excursions into the world of dance clubs and bars a friend and I went to a club in Wheeling called Tin Pan Alley. There was a lighted dance floor straight out of Saturday Night Fever, playing all the disco hits. I settled into a chair in the smoky attic room and listened to a cover band. The only song of theirs I remember is Space Oddity (Ground Control to Major Tom). I did buy that album around then, along with Aladdin Sane.

Bowie was part of the video revolution of the 80's. I remember seeing the videos for Let's Dance and Ashes to Ashes and liking them. I loved the song Blue Jean and remember seeing the extended 20-plus minute short film. I cracked up at the antics of Bowie and Mick Jagger trying to outdo each others mugging for the camera in their Dancing in the Streets video (which I remember first seeing on the big screen in a theater for some reason).

I saw Bowie on his 1990 Sound and Vision tour, billed as the last time he would ever perform his hit songs. That wasn't true of course. This was my first trip to the Star Lake Amphitheater. The show was amazing.

Finally, as part of the CD revolution, I started going back and picking up Bowie's back catalog of records. They were being released with tons of extra tracks, so my timing was good. In the intervening years I've become a little obsessive and have most of his available work.

Back to the book.

I enjoyed the read. Bowie is a complex person, and I don't think I know him any better now than I did before. But that seems to be part of the theme of the book. Lots of people who know Bowie don't seem to know him very well. I don't read a lot of biographies, so I don't know how this one stacks up. There was a lot of information, and reading what was going on at the time of the recording of the various albums gave me new insights into a lot of the songs.

But, what I found most interesting wasn't inherent in the book itself, but the multimedia experience it became for me thanks to modern technology. In the introduction Trynka describes an early appearance of Bowie performing Starman on Top of the Pops in Great Britain and the effect it had on the country and an entire generation of viewers. He described it in great detail: the costumes, the implied bisexuality, Bowie wrapping an arm around guitarist Mick Ronson. While reading I wished I could watch the video. I quickly realized that thanks to YouTube, I could.

This proved true throughout my reading of the book. I had seen many of the videos, of course, but it was fascinating to read of some specific performance and then to be able to watch it immediately. This added greatly to my enjoyment of the book. I read about Bowie's coke-infused appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, and then saw it for myself. In the section that described the writing of the song Jean Genie the point was made that the guitar riff came straight from the Yardbirds version of Muddy Waters song Mannish Boy. The musicians were afraid to release it, but did so anyway. Three months later, glam band The Sweet released their song Blockbuster with the same riff. Thanks to YouTUbe I watched Muddy Waters, then the Yardbirds, then Jean Genie, followed by Blockbuster. These are all songs I'm very familiar with but hearing the musical throughline once it was pointed out to me was amazing.

If you're a Bowie fan, I recommend the book. Keep your computer nearby to enhance your experience of it. Someday books like this will have these things embedded right in the text (like I've done a little bit of in this blog).

Scratch gets a shout out!

My novel Scratch was featured on a book review blog. You can take a look at it at;

http://indiepublishers.blogspot.com/2011/09/scratch-by-wayne-wise.html

Thanks to Lisa Graves. Lisa is also an independent Ebook publisher. Take a look at her novel, Atlantis.

New Podcast Interview

I was a guest on today's Audioshocker podcast (Sequential Underground #25). I was interviewed by Nick Marino and and Shawn Atkins. These guys post a number of podcasts every week on a variety of subjects. Sequential Underground covers the topic of comics, primarily. We had a great conversation about my history in the comics industry, focusing on self-publishing and how that has changed over the years. We jumped from minicomics to my experiences with the Xeric Grant and, of course, talked about my new excursion into the world of Ebook publishing.

A couple of my drawings have appeared in the Project Basement section of their site.

You can listen to the Podcast at:

http://www.audioshocker.com/2011/09/21/sequential-underground-25-self-publishing-with-wayne-wise

You can find out more about Nick and his various projects at http://www.nickmarino.net/

You can see Shawn's work at http://weirdlings.com/eotu/ and

http://www.drunkduck.com/Gello_Apocalypse/

Geek Wisdom: A Review

Last week I read the new book Geek Wisdom: The Sacred Teachings of Nerd Culture. This is a collection of ruminations on the most quotable quotes from those things held dear by self-proclaimed geeks and nerds everywhere: Comic books, movies, Fantasy and Science Fiction books, and television, among others. The premise of the book is that these well-known and oft-quoted phrases are more than just a secret language allowing Geeks to find each other, but form a body of wisdom that are part of a secular, Pop Culture, mythic interpretation of the universe. A variety of authors contributed to this book and the whole was edited by Stephen Segal.

I need to say up front here that Steve is a friend of mine, and has been for quite some time now. I first met Steve when I was writing articles for In Pittsburgh Newsweekly and he came on staff as an Arts editor and eventually moved on to the Editor in Chief position. He also became a customer of mine at Phantom of the Attic Comics and our mutual love and shared interest in these topics cemented our friendship. We have had both a professional and personal relationship ever since. Steve is the editor perhaps most responsible for shaping my journalistic writing skills, and as a writer I followed him from In Pittsburgh, to Whirl Magazine and Pittsburgh Magazine.

So I'm kind of biased to like what he does is what I'm saying here. With that caveat in mind, read on.

Since leaving Pittsburgh Steve has worked for Weird Tales Magazine, won a Hugo Award, and is currently an editor at Quirk Books. Geek Wisdom is simply the most perfect project that Steve could have done. This so clearly reads like most of the conversations I have ever had with him. He has tapped into a concept here that every Geek knows deep in their soul. We all have these conversations all of the time. Our pursuits are not the frivolous, ephemeral things most people would believe, but are the result of a tremendous amount of thought, intelligence and, yes, wisdom.

The book begins with the well-known quote from the first appearance of Spider-Man in Amazing Fantasy #15. “With Great Power there must also come, great responsibility!” Since I fall primarily in the category of comics geek, this made me very happy. I see this as one of the truest things ever said in comics, and it provides one of the most pure motivations for a hero ever. But beyond the scope of the comic it is something anyone who wields power in any form to remember, whether that is political power or physical power, or whatever. Our words, the words of each and every one of of us, have to power to inspire or to hurt. We need to be aware of the power we have over those around us every day, and to use them responsibly.

And that's just where the book begins. While it does deal with heavy issues it never loses its sense of humor. That alone is one of the hallmarks of Geek Wisdom.

No matter how secular our society has become, or how far from traditional religion anyone has gone, we are all still seeking meaning in our lives, a way of understanding our place in the world and the universe. We are looking for stories by which to live.

Geek Wisdom does not present itself as a replacement for more traditional spiritual paths or religions. It does point out that wisdom exists wherever one chooses to look for it. Most of the analyzed quotes in the book fall firmly within the boundaries of wisdom established by those traditional paths. Pop Culture wisdom is the wisdom of the ages, tarted up in a new post-modern outfit.

The things you'll find...

I'm doing a vanity Google search and found a site that archives the two articles I wrote for No Depression Magazine in the 90's. No Depression is the primary magazine for the Alternative Country music scene (named after an old Carter Family song). One is on the band The Geraldine Fibbers (featuring Carla Bozulich), and the other is about Pittsburgh band The Deliberate Strangers.

I had no idea these were still out there.

http://archives.nodepression.com/author/wayne-wise/