Silent City Magazine #3

C#i3ty 1

Sculptor

John Lajba Interview with

Hunter S. Thompson Neva Dinova Filmmaker

SSilie nt lent 2

SilentCity Publisher/Managing Editor

Matt Goodlett

Senior Photographer

Mark Kresl

Editorial Intern

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Oran Belgrave Cover Artist

Lee Post

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Corrections to Silent City magazine: In Issue #2 we reported “Omaha is Bear Country” and also “Omaha is an underage teen looking for a booze fix on a Friday night.” After checking, we’ve found that, apparently, no, Omaha is still a Midwestern city. Silent City apologizes for any confusion this may have caused.

C i t y Why Start a Magazine and What’s the Purpose?

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a long letter to the reader

Aside from a cool but vague “manifesto,” written by someone else for issue one, Silent City has lacked the direction offered by a mission statement. Although my thoughts on the matter were clearly defined, there are a few reasons I was wary of putting them firmly into writing. During an interview with sculptor John Lajba for this issue, he spoke about downtown Omaha, and his words summed up my hesitation perfectly. He said: I think the ability to explore is very important. Our city should create a palette so we can define it through: people, though different ways of thinking, either through: music, creativity, performance. The less we can control the creative environment, and our own sense of self-expression, the better.

I had hoped Silent City would define itself through its content. I wasn’t eager to put up walls; I didn’t want to hedge it in, because I knew Silent City needed room to grow. But I realize now that if you don’t clearly define what you are, someone else will try to mold you into what they want you to be.

Early on there were those who constantly made references to literary journals, and even the Paris Review, saying that’s what this publication should aspire to be, that this was the ideal. I never had any intention of turning Silent City magazine into a literary journal. If I had, I would have printed off 100 copies and saved myself a lot of debt and grief. Even the few successful literary journals reach a very narrow audience of people that are a) interested in writing short stories b) like to read short stories c) want to look smart.

Literary journals die everyday without anyone noticing or caring, and I’ve never seen someone reading a literary journal while at a restaurant, a bar, or on the street. I’ve never actually seen anyone reading a literary journal anywhere. I like what Silent City is and what it strives for. I don’t care about it having a reputation. I’d rather it be accessible; I’d rather have it read.

This isn’t an underground publication, and it isn’t for elitists, or people that want to feel cool carrying it around; this is for the rest of us.

Who am I? I’m nobody. No credentials. No reputation. I don’t want to attempt to talk over you, because I’d rather have a conversation.

I would rather have someone come to Silent City to have a laugh and maybe stick around after to explore—to discover an idea, or a story, that makes them see things differently.

I’ve steered away from a heavy stock cover or glossy pages to bring this publication to as many different people as possible. There’s not an inch of this magazine that was created as filler. It’s my honest intention that every article, essay, or story will entertain or engage you; otherwise, it’s a waste of space.

My meager hope is that someone will read Silent City over a beer at the bar. She’ll come to a realization and shout out loud, “I don’t really hate reading. My 11th grade English teacher was just a pretentious bitch that force-fed me literature I didn’t like!”

I envisioned Silent City as an ideal place where instead of talking, people were doing. I had no illusions about the odds when I started this publication. I knew that it was likely that this magazine wouldn’t take off.

That’s why on the first cover of Silent City, I opted for the image of a Don Quixote figure galloping towards a looming city skyline. Producing an independent publication in this town is a little like tilting at windmills; it’s almost absurd to even try.

There’s a line from Don Quixote that to paraphrase goes, ‘One man strove to reach the unreachable stars; and the world was better for this.’

Just because the outcome isn’t guaranteed, doesn’t make reaching for your dreams, or an idea that’s bigger than you, any less worthwhile. The artists interviewed in this magazine are examples of that, and talking to them has made working on this publication, despite numerous frustrations, bearable. They create something out of nothing, against the odds and in the face of disappointment. They get back up after repeated failures. They turn ideas into reality.

Maybe there are better, smarter, more qualified people to run a magazine like Silent City. I’ve had people tell me as much, insinuate it, or second-guess me. These people aren’t standing up, though. They talk a lot. It’s rare to see them act.

So what is the mission of Silent City?

Silent City will seek to introduce you to people and voices you may not have known existed. Silent City is a place for artists to mingle and will cover all forms of art without distinguishing between high and low. You’ll have an equal chance of finding: Filmmakers, Cartoonists, Sculptors, Writers, Musicians, Journalists, Painters, etc. between its covers. Silent City is for people that would rather do than talk. Above all, Silent City is a home for ideas, and a refuge for great writing and the written word.

That’s the vision. This is the seed. Silent City. Come on in. We’re Growing.

matt goodlett

—

Silent 4

Letters to the Editor Why do you censor people?

Silent City has gotten a lot of grief for “censoring” profanity, essentially deleting a few letters of naughty four-letter words in the few instances that they’ve appeared in articles. Other free publications in the area adhere to this standard.

In larger less conservative cities, free publications, such as altweeklies, do feature profanities in all their glory. But also, many of their advertisers are escort services that could care less. Here in Omaha, in “the Heartland,” there are a number of businesses that consider themselves as catering to families. When I started out asking businesses if they would distribute Silent City, their reply was unanimously: If it doesn’t contain profanity. It’s the same deal if we’d like to one day land some advertising.

It was a no-brainer. The only question was what should we do with profanity in articles. I opted for the TNT and USA network substitution principle. It has created such colorful substitutions for profanity as: “Do you see what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps!” in The Big Lebowski and really so many great alternate lines in Die Hard and Friday. It’s probably for the best that we didn’t go this route, but I digress.

Printing four-letter words was essentially the downfall of the Omaha Pulp (which is ironic, because Pulp is a four-letter word). Early on, Pulp allowed curse-words, probably in an effort to appear edgy.

Then I’m told a priest started harassing their advertisers, saying that his congregation was going to boycott their businesses. As a result, Pulp lost a number of advertisers.

Omaha’s Voice of the New City was started pretty much because remaining staff members at Pulp didn’t like their profanity being censored. Not surprisingly, the Voice failed due to a lack of advertising.

The only advice I got from editors at both of these publications about starting up a magazine that was to be distributed for free was: Don’t allow profanity. It will be your downfall.

As an independent, startup publication, we’ve already got enough strikes against us. We have to choose our battles. Also, profanities have the habit of becoming crutch words that breed redundancy and deter creativity.

And call me crazy, but I prefer to reserve the term censorship for journalists who are tortured in Nepal, or to countries where you can be killed for expressing your opinion. I think attaching it to anything as trivial as removing a letter from a word that is easily recognizable is nothing short of insensitive to people that actually do endure real

censorship throughout the world, and do put their lives at stake by expressing their opinions. I also find it insulting to everyone who has sacrificed to bring this magazine to you, to create another outlet for writers and artists to promote their art and freely discuss their ideas.

So, please don’t think of our two-letter deletions as censorship.

Consider it a challenge. Can you figure out what the word is in less than 30-minutes? Congratulations you’re a freaking genius.

Here are a few more challenges for you. Get off your couch, get a job and stop leeching off of your parents. Or how about this: if you care to purchase a copy of Silent City, I’ll fill in all the missing letters for you personally, and you can get it in the mail. I’ve got a magic marker; I can make the time. If you don’t like our censorship, write about it in your blog about organic living or the one about tofu recipes that your cat likes. Feel free to boycott our publication—let someone else pick it up—but while you’re at it don’t listen to public radio or watch network television. If you think our publication isn’t edgy because we lack profanity then I say to you: Yippy Kay Aye Mister Falcon!

UPDATE: Silent City will most likely operate on a pay per issue basis after this issue. No idea if we’ll print F--K in big bold letters on the cover yet. It’s up in the air.

S i n c e r e ly, SC

Silent City sucks but at least it’s cheaper than toilet paper?

Adding a question mark doesn’t make that a question…Wait...Mom? Is that you... Ma?

What’s perambulating mean?

You must be referring to the last issue in which a writer stated that Bear Country was “perambulating” on stage. Without knowing what this word is you might confer a lot of potential meanings. Is perambulating similar to fornicating? No, certainly not. There was no fornicating on that stage…that night. But wouldn’t that have been something? While a good band and good show, I can attest that there was no perambulating that night at the Waiting Room. For the most part each band member stayed stationary. Perambulating calls to mind a jolly jaunt down to a glen. I even think of the crazy movements that the robotic band at Chuck E. Cheese make. It’s a big word that just sounds neat, makes the writer sound smart and that a lot of people don’t know. But in this instance paints a completely inaccurate description. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Send Letters to the editor to SilentCityMag@Gmail.com

SILENT CITY #4 FALL 2009 Featuring: Mark Kresl, Iain Levison, THE NEBRASKA FILMMAKING INITIATIVE MUCH MORE...

City 5

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Man Divided: Kyle Koliha 06 Corrections Department 10 Fight With Tools: Flobots 12 Aqua-Africa15 John Lajba 16 Home on the Plains 20 Hyannis is not Omaha 24 Imitation Life 25 Featherproof Books 31 Self-recording 26 Yukon King: Lee Post 34 Pia Z. Ehrhardt 38 Previews 42 Reviews 43 Hunter S. Thompson 46 Shop Talk 48 Tony Bonacci 52 "Big" Tim Guthrie 54 Contributors 55

Silent 6

Man L

Two Chord Truth’s Kyle Koliha Lives and Dies By Major and Minor

by M att G oodlett P hotos by M ark K resl

Divided

egend has it that at a crossroads one midnight, bluesman Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil to play the guitar as well as he did.

Others believe he perfected the guitar through a year of reclusive living and intense practice, resurfacing only once he’d perfected his art.

Koliha Koliha’s recent resurfacing in Omaha may inspire reminiscent rumors. Until recently, the last confirmed sighting of Koliha in his hometown was a show at the Sokol Underground over three years ago, where he accompanied the guys that are now Shiver Shiver. He was backup, didn’t sing, and played one small solo on an electric guitar. He was okay but didn’t stand out and would seem to have vanished from Omaha shortly after that show.

This period of his life was a crossroads for Koliha, but he didn’t sell his soul outright. Over the three years that followed he did devote his heart and soul; he gave everything, everything that he could to perfect his guitar playing and make it as a professional musician.

Fast-forward to early July and Koliha is back in the town that he grew up in, and is laying down roots. His homecoming show? An open mic at Mick’s. Koliha is starting over in Omaha, making contacts with venue owners, lining up shows. Sure, he could wait another few weeks until he’s gotten a paying gig, but in the meantime the hunger to perform remains and he’s got to feed it.

There are probably 10 people in the entire bar. No one really pays attention to Koliha as he gets on stage, until he strums his first note, then the second, into a bluesy slide where he bends notes until they nearly break. There’s intensity to Koliha as he performs his folk-inspired tunes. At times, the audience chitchats as he plays. There are other times during songs like “Something Nice” that Koliha’s voice erupts, his guitar takes on a life of its own, and something tethered moments before soars. You can look around at these moments and see every eye on him, no one talking, no one moving or even daring to breathe.

This musician with the demanding presence is not the same person that left a few years ago. As he plays, Koliha’s oblivious to the looks that the patrons give each other. The looks that say, “Why haven’t I heard of this guy, and where did he come from?” A better question is: Where did Koliha disappear to three years ago, and what happened to make him so freaky good at guitar?

City 7

S

hortly after his performance at the Sokol three years ago, Koliha was calculating what he could exchange to make it in another city to study guitar. He was saying things like: “I think if I budget one and a half meals a day I can make rent.” Music and faith would be the remainder of his sustenance. Fed up with his current situation, Koliha auditioned for the McNally Smith College of Music, a contemporary music school in Minneapolis. He got accepted and went on to get a degree in jazz and classical guitar.

Before that there were still a few small details: like getting a loan for college and finding housing, but he’d figure that out. The weekend before school started he packed a cooler full of food, his guitars, clothes and some pans into his ’94 Explorer and watched Omaha disappear in the rearview.

He found a loan, but no job. Found an apartment, but couldn’t move in until a week after school started. So, Koliha crashed on the couch of a friend of a friend and lived out of his car. Over the course of three years, he’d land on various other couches.

There’s a reason that it doesn’t seem cliché when Koliha says things like: “In order to make it as a musician you’ve got to live it, breathe it, eat it.” It’s because when he speaks about music, he talks about it with the passion and reverence that one reserves for a lover. It’s because the jeans he wears—that defy logic by holding together— aren’t designer. They fell to tatters from being one of the dutiful few in constant rotation over a three-year period.

For all intents and purposes he was homeless for months at a time. Koliha mentions that because he couldn’t afford a parking permit he walked a mile to school carrying two guitars. During winters in subzero weather, he’d carry heated potatoes in his pockets to keep his hands warm. Sometimes, he’d also take a shot of whiskey in the morning to keep warm. Koliha delivers the punch line: “So then I became a raging alcoholic” and laughs at his own joke, shaking it off. Although his travails sound like enough to drive you to drink, Koliha has seen too many musicians’ blow performances because of intoxication.

He didn’t find a regular job, sold equipment to survive, but eventually found that his diverse musical tastes allowed him to support himself with guitar playing alone. He was versatile enough to play classical guitar at upscale restaurants for $20 and a meal, or tour with a country singer—learning the entire repertoire in a week after her guitarist broke his wrist. He also did session work and taught guitar lessons to make ends meet. Koliha found that cover bands were a lucrative endeavor in the Twin Cities—he sometimes made up to $3,000 a month—but performing other people’s songs was slowly leeching his soul.

“It’s great in the sense that people like to listen and sing along to their favorite songs. But at the same time it really sucks to play a song that you wrote, and poured yourself into, then right after have a frat boy come up and ask if you know any Dave Mathews. Or have some old guy come up and request “Sweet Home Alabama,”” Koliha says. He rolled with the covers though—sometimes, for fun, busting out an acoustic version of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” or doing an impersonation of Roy Orbison.

Koliha taught himself to sing when he had the house to himself during summer vacations as a youth. He would belt tunes at the top of his lungs, imitating the likes of: Robert Plant, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Axl Rose and Bruce Springsteen.

While at Mick’s, Koliha notices that Nick Johnson is playing there later in the week. He says across the bar to Mike, the owner, that back when he was in high school, he watched Johnson perform at the Latte Lounge. Koliha would do his homework there every week and listen to musicians like Kyle Harvey, Sarah Benck and Johnson. Koliha recalls that Johnson used to play an acoustic version of “Sexual Healing.”

Mike laughs and says, “He still does sometimes, and at the end of the night you’ll see people pairing off and leaving together because of that song.”

From his stellar performance for an underwhelming crowd at an open mic, to more packed venues like the Barley Street Tavern and the P.S. Collective, it’s clear that Koliha takes every performance seriously.

He plays for a group of ten like he’s playing to a crowded stadium.

Nothing really deters him while playing either. He’s made it through drunken middle-aged women trying to dance on stage with him, hecklers, and the odd person, always inebriated, wanting to strum his guitar from behind him as he picks the chords.

At Mick’s he breaks the high E string while tuning between his second and third songs. All he says about the mishap is, “I didn’t need that one anyway. That’s how you keep on going.” He doesn’t let it faze him. He modifies a few songs and steers away from others.

“Being a musician is also about performance art, especially if you’re the singer-songwriter,” Koliha says. “You’ve got to live and die by it. It’s one thing to sing and it’s another to perform it. If you’re good at it, if you believe in it, you can get everyone else in the place to believe in it too.”

This is why he says that even when performing a 4 Non Blondes cover he would “do [his] damnedest to really make them pretty flipping good.”

Basically, he looked at every opportunity to be on stage as a

7

Silent 8

chance to improve.

“It helped in a lot of ways, just getting in front of microphones, becoming comfortable with that. I remember when I first started out I was really nervous on stage.”

It’s hard to believe that Koliha can’t pinpoint his first performance until you consider that he played 26 shows in April alone; he couldn’t tell you where half the venues were. One of his earliest memories of performing was at an open mic at Sean O’Casey’s Irish pub in West Omaha.

“I couldn’t drink [alcohol] at the time, so the owner gave me free Dr. Peppers,” Koliha said. “I must have had like 14 Dr. Peppers and couldn’t sleep for two days following that show.”

Koliha does remember how his interest in the guitar grew. It started with Jimmy Page and Led Zepelin’s II. He recalls his dad playing the album and being captured by the way his dad talked about it and says, “The first time I heard the solo on Heartbreaker I was done. It floored me.”

Then his dad gave him a 1970 Alvarez that Koliha describes as “cowboy chic.” From there Koliha’s tastes wandered more towards folk music and songwriters like Harry Chapin, Neil Young and Bob Dylan.

The most enjoyable musical scenario for Koliha is still performing his original songs.

Out of necessity he performed alone as a singer-songwriter in the Twin Cities. It was hard to put together a band, even with the pool of talent in the area. Though surrounded by exceptional musicians, they were often already involved in numerous projects.

One of Koliha’s hopes as he returns to Omaha is that he can put together a band to flesh out some demos, which in their current state he calls “shells of songs.”

He arrived back in town with a mission: to record an album. This

wasn’t possible in Minnesota, where Koliha worked constantly just to make rent with little time or money left for an album. Koliha says he could make thousands of dollars in a month, but there were also months that he made $500 or less, which made paying rent on a $650 studio apartment interesting. If nothing else his time up there inspired a few incredible songs. “The Cathedral” and “Whatever’s Left Will Burn” are some of his strongest works that commiserate his time up north.

Koliha said that it’s difficult to survive as a musician in the Twin Cities, because although there are many venues to play at, which cater to every type of music, it’s also oversaturated with many talented musicians and is “very cutthroat.”

S

ilent City’s initial interview with Koliha took place over the phone at 3 a.m., musician’s hours. He was preparing to move back to Omaha in a week and the dissonance of a man torn could be heard as the conversation progressed. There was a longing in Koliha’s voice as he spoke of his hometown, but there was also an already wistful tone for the life that he was leaving behind in Minnesota.

He missed the venues in Omaha, now demolished (The Ranch Bowl) or closed (The Cog Factory, The Music Box) that he grew up with.

The musical explosion in Benson as well as the Slowdown encouraged him. Most of all, he missed the sense of community and collaboration amongst the musicians that he knew in his native Omaha.

Then Koliha spoke about the commitment that music demanded and what he’d given up for it in Minneapolis. The lifestyle of the musician is notoriously difficult on romantic relationships. Music is a harsh mistress. When pressed if he’s leaving anyone behind in Minnesota, there’s silence for a long moment. Koliha says with a discordant tinge, “I’m leaving a lot behind.”

F

or good or ill, Minnesota served its purpose. Koliha learned some life lessons and grew up while away. Up North he also worked with the best and says, “I didn’t know what good was until I went up there.” One of his instructors, Bobby Stanton, was a session player in Nashville for years, and played with Johnny Cash and Chet Atkins among others. “He was the best player I had ever seen,” Koliha says.

“He could smoke you at anything and sight read music like it was a book. Being around players like that helped me grow as a musician. I also learned a lot about myself. That really helped me find my voice.”

Professional musicians routinely visited the school. This is how Koliha got the opportunity to ask Ice Cube some important questions concerning the rapper’s career. During discussion sessions, students were asked to write a question and send it to the front. Koliha’s went something like this:

Dear Ice Cube, Since your initial cinematic work of art, what you’ve done in the Barbershop series has really made you into a top shelf thespian, almost an actor’s actor. How do you think that has prepared you for roles in Are We There Yet and XXX 2?

Koliha said that despite the rapper/actors persona “he’s like a big Teddy Bear, and so happy and smiley. You just want to hug him.”

City 9

H

appy is the best way to describe how Koliha appears when seen in early July in the garden of Caffeine Dreams. It’s a picturesque setting with wind gently rustling branches and combing through the tall decorative grasses. It’s like the calm after the storm. Koliha seems refreshed in a subdued way and says that might be because, “I pretty much slept for the last 16 hours straight.”

Koliha slept all through the fireworks and mayhem of the Fourth of July. He doesn’t mind missing the action. He used to enjoy fireworks, but is forced to be much more careful with his hands these days.

Sitting at a bistro set, he looks relaxed. Something he perhaps notices because he shifts forward in his chair. Koliha realizes that comfort can be a dangerous thing for a musician.

“I never want to be that comfortable. I’ve played guitar for 18 years.

I got a degree in it, but I still practice for six hours a day,” he says.

He isn’t paranoid; he’s seen many a musical career stolen by comfort.

“The best piano player that I know works at Best Buy; one of my favorite songwriters teaches elementary school. The thing is, there comes a point in your life when you’re trying to do music or anything sort of artistic where you kind of have to put up or shut up.”

Meaning, for instance, that Koliha’s had job offers where he could make $35,000 a year and have health insurance, but they had nothing to do with music. Once found, Koliha sees the draw of a decent living as something that makes it “really tough to pursue music.” He’s still not ready to take that chance. Koliha would one day like to settle down and start his own family, but not until he can support them with his guitar.

Koliha emphasizes that music is a lifetime pursuit. There are still many lessons to learn but he’s ready for them. There’s a common adage claimed by nearly every genre of music that (insert genre) music is comprised of just two chords and the truth. While Koliha was recording at Electric Funeral Studios in Wisconsin, the recording engineer told Koliha that for as good as he played many of his songs were very simple. Then the engineer said, “That’s alright, all you need is two chords and the truth.” It’s an idea that Koliha took to heart. He recognized that everything a person feels could be divided into two chords: major and minor.

“Major can sound happy and bright, and minor has a darker more somber sound to it. Everything you feel can be found in those two chords: sadness, elation, joy, anger and longing. All the rest just help to add a little more sentiment to what you’re trying to say,” Koliha says.

Music has taught him the duality of the soul. The performance of “Please Keep Me In Time” at the P.S. Collective seems demonstrative.

In the song, a delay effect is used and the fluid guitar melody cascades into itself, the next note batting into the last producing a cacophonous criss-crossing with Koliha and his guitar becoming a buttress wedged in between. As the song ends, it is completely out of time, tense, and then silence hits like absolution. Essentially, it’s one man performing a duet.

In some ways Koliha seems to have been waylaid at the crossroads he came to three years ago. He seems perpetually split between comfort and frenzy, straddling the Twin Cities and Omaha.

This is good. It keeps him relentlessly moving, steadily working to improve his art.

For now, at least, Koliha continues to live and die between major and minor, inextricably torn between.

Silent 10

Corrections D e pa r t m e n t

by Michael Kun

F e b r u a ry In Joe DeLammelure’s “A Cross to Bare,” which was published in our January issue, it was incorrectly stated that Germany is shaped like a boot. Instead, it should have stated that Germany is shaped like a book. We sincerely apologize for any confusion this error may have caused our readers.

March In our Feburary Corrections, we erroneously reported that Joe DeLammelure’s “A Cross to Bare” should have stated that Germany is shaped like a book. Instead, it should have stated that Italy is shaped like a boot, and there should have been no mention at all of Germany as the entire piece takes place in Tuscany, which is a village in Italy, not Germany. We apologize for any confusion this error may have caused our readers.

April In last month’s Corrections, we reported that Joe DeLammelure’s “A Cross to Bare” should have stated that Italy is shaped like a boot.

In fact, the author intended to state that Germany is shaped like a boot, which in fact was what we originally published. Apparently, stating that Germany is shaped like a boot, when it in fact is not, and when anyone who has ever seen a placemat in a pizzeria knows that Italy is shaped like a boot, was meant to be a joke. We apologize for any confusion, but can you really blame us? I mean, we would have recognized it as a joke if it were, you know, funny.

M ay In the Corrections that were published in our April issue, we suggested that Joe DeLammelure, author of “A Cross to Bare,” might not be funny. Or might not be as funny as he thinks he is. We apologize for this erroneous suggestion. Joe DeLammelure? Funny guy. We’re laughing just thinking about some of his witticisms. That joke about Germany looking like a boot? Hoo, boy. If you could just see us now, you’d see that we’re practically doubled over with laughter. Germany?

Shaped like a boot? Please stop, I’m going to pee my pants!

June In the Corrections in our May issue, we used an unfortunate expression regarding urination in referring to Joe DeLammelure, author of “A Cross to Bare.” We did not know that Mr. DeLammelure recently had his prostate removed and is suffering from incontinence, and our remarks were not meant to ridicule him or diminish in any

way his victory over a dread disease. We sincerely apologize to him and to any readers suffering from incontinence, which we understand now is a serious medical condition that is no laughing matter. What is a laughing matter, however, is anything Joe DeLammelure might write or say, or even contemplate writing or saying. His joke about Germany looking like a boot? Priceless. His pun in the title of his article, calling it “A Cross to Bare” instead of “A Cross to Bear”? You’d have to read the title very carefully just to catch it. All the money his parents scrimped and saved to put him through college has paid off.

J u ly In our June Corrections, we erroneously provided you with private medical information about Joe DeLammelure, which is protected from disclosure by a variety of federal laws and regulations. We apologize and ask you to kindly discard your June issue, if you have not done so already. As far as you know, Joe DeLammelure’s prostate remains inside his body, and his urine is just fine, thank you. We also erroneously suggested that Joe DeLammelure’s parents scrimped and saved to put him through college. In fact, as we have since learned, Joe’s parents abandoned him at a very young age at an office supply store, and Joe lived on his own in a hut in the woods that he fashioned out of sticks and mud, teaching himself to read and write by candlelight while working in a coal mine to save money to pay his way through college. But that does not change our opinion about whether he is funny. In fact, it would be patronizing for us to pretend that the whole Germany-looks-like-a-boot thing was funny just because it was written by a self-taught, coal-mining orphan, don’t you think? Don’t you think that Joe deserves an honest assessment of his work? Don’t you think that is precisely what he would want?

Au g u s t Last month, in our Corrections section, we erroneously stated that Joe DeLammelure, author of “A Cross to Bare,” would like an honest assessment of his work. Apparently, Joe would like to be praised about his writing, regardless of the merits.

September In the Corrections that were published in our August issue, we erroneously stated that Joe DeLammelure would like to be praised for his writing. In fact, we should have stated that Joe would like to be praised about everything. Why don’t you just stop by sometime, Joe, and give us a list of all of the many things for which we should praise you.

City 11

Oc t o b e r You know how life is just chock full of surprises? You start the day expecting one thing, then something else entirely different happens?

Well, we at the Corrections Department are not immune to life’s wonders. So let us state for the record that Joe DeLammelure was incredible in bed last night. Sensitive, passionate, energetic, creative, selfless. He made us tremble. And now, after a few glasses of red wine, we understand the Germany-looks-like-a-boot joke. It was over our heads at first, but now we get it. It’s very, very funny. We hope Joe calls us again. We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, but he could be “the one.”

November In our October Corrections, we said that we hoped Joe DeLammelure would call us again after our intimate encounter.

We did not hear from Joe. Joe, did you lose the phone number we gave you? If so, you can call us at the office. Our number is on the masthead. We’d love for you to meet our mother. She’s making brisket on Thursday. For all of her many deficiencies, she makes an excellent brisket. (The secret ingredient? Beer. Shhh.) We told her all about you (except the prostate). She laughed so hard that she snorted when we told her about Germany!

December Last month, in our Corrections section, we made a completely unprofessional plea to author Joe DeLammelure to call us. To the extent that anyone was offended by our implication that we longed for Joe to hold us in his arms and press his lips against ours until we quivered, or that we would be available at any time to fulfill any fantasy Joe might have -- and we do mean any -- we apologize. And with the holidays fast approaching, if anyone is looking for a gift for someone special who may happen to work in the Corrections Department, might we suggest taking a look at the cashmere throws advertised on page 86.

J a n u a ry See anything you like, Joe? F e b r u a ry In our January issue, we erroneously printed the words, “We Love You, Joe” in bold red letters on the cover of the magazine, where the title of the magazine normally appears. We also erroneously included several “modeling” photographs of ourselves throughout the issue, including doing so in an article about human rights in China. We apologize to any readers who may have been disturbed by the photographs. We are not professional models. You do not need to remind us of that. You do not need to remind us that we could stand to lose 20 pounds, which could be the reason Joe never calls.

March Beginning this month, the Corrections Department will be taking a short leave of absence for personal reasons. In its place, we will be running old Peanuts strips. Joe loves Peanuts.

SilentCityMag (dot) com

Silent 12

Fight with toolS flobots use music to spread activism to new generation

by Matt Goodlett Photo by Matthew Walker

City 13

Not since Rage Against the Machine have such socially charged lyrics coalesced with music that is able to pump up an audience with a hook and an infectious beat.

But the Flobots are moving past empty fist pumping into the nitty-gritty reality of actually connecting listeners to efforts affecting positive change in their communities, the country, and one day the world. The word is spreading like wildfire not just through the powerful lyrics of their recent label-backed album Fight With Tools but also along with their grassroots non-profit, the Fight With Tools Street Team, an ever-evolving entity that was originally known as the Flobots Street team, and occasionally gets stripped down to the simpler moniker Street Team. The organization is also often referenced by its location on the web—everywhere and nowhere at once—at Flobots. org or FightWithTools.org.

It could be said that the epicenter of the activity is Denver, Colo. hometown for the Flobots and the Flobots pilot program for the Street Team. If one man could be singled out as the driving force behind the movement it would be Jonny 5.

Silent City caught up with Jonny 5: lyricist, organizer, and mouthpiece for the non-profit, by telephone as the Flobots traveled between Bakersfield to a gig in Portland, this summer.

If you’ve listened to the radio in previous months you will most definitely recognize Jonny 5’s voice disarmingly sing-songing the words “I can ride my bike with no handlebars, no handlebars, no handlebars” over a plucked viola. This single note and simple utterance spirals into a juxtaposition of increasingly complex lyrics and ends with the deeper more ominous “I can guide a missile by satellite. And I can hit a target through a telescope. And I can end the world in a holocaust.” At this point, the plucked viola has been replaced by chants in unison reminiscent of parading Nazi soldiers in scratchy World War II newsreels.

Like the band’s hit song, the Flobot’s Street Team pilot in Denver started off simply enough, and it seems to be spiraling quickly, this time in a positive direction.

Jonny 5 said: “I’ve been working at a school for the last two and half years and when I quit my job in December it wasn’t because I’d predicted we were going to get a major record deal, it’s because we’d been talking about this nonprofit for years and we found that the only thing missing from the equation was time. My time.”

The original plan was for the Flobots to fund their own tour and staff the non-profit on their own during the day. Then “Handlebars” got put into regular rotation on a Denver radio station, Flobots landed a record deal and “Handlebars” rose to #15 on Billboard charts, receiving massive play across the country. This was all an unexpected accelerant for the Street Team’s plans.

The non-profit was supposed to evolve gradually. With Flobots’ newfound fame, however, Jonny 5 said: “It’s like trying to build a houseboat in the middle of the river. We have the energy flowing towards this already, it’s just creating the minimal structures to be able to harness this power.”

Amber Feldman attended high school where Jonny 5 was known as Jamie Luarie and acted as a program coordinator for a peer tutoring program and another called A+ Angels. Now she’s graduated and taking a year off before starting college. She’s also among one of the first Street Team members and is currently assisting with the Flobots Myspace page and the design for the non-profit’s websites. The

ultimate goal of FightWithTools.org is to provide social networking for Street Teams across the nation and eventually the world. In any city, potential members can find other members and start their own local Street Team addressing issues in their own community. These local Street Teams are also able to communicate with other Street Teams across the country about national Street Team initiatives and to connect with the band about issues that are important to them.

Feldman said the first loose Street Team meeting for the Denver pilot program took place in November, 2007 and wasn’t very organized.

“We had a brunch and I think the Flobots band members outnumbered the people who came,” she said. Since then the program has grown to an estimated 50 active members in Denver ranging in age from 15 to 35. At the first official meeting, after the Flobots were signed to a record label in February 2008, the Street Team declared three areas that they would focus on: The Denver Children’s Home; voter registration, with The Colorado Progressive Coalition; and The Student Peace Alliance, working to lobby a bill. They’ve already done extensive work at the Denver Children’s Home, teaching workshops and spending time with the children and as of late August had registered 925 people to vote.

Russ Cordova is the Street Team band coordinator, a position that is meant to spread the Street Team to local bands across the country.

He got involved with the non-profit shortly after seeing the Flobots perform at the Denver Public Library for a workshop called “I Speak Out.” A week after that event in February 2008, Russ attended his first Street Team meeting and got involved in the early planning for the national Street Team model.

“Jamie got up to speak about what the vision was and really pumped everybody up,” Cordova said. “He got everybody so excited and it’s been nonstop from there. I mean he asked that we try to volunteer 15 hours in the course of three months, but everyone was so pumped and ready to go for it, I think we’d done 15 hours in the first week.”

Cordova visited Los Angeles when the Flobots performed on

“I believe that hip-hop has a very specific tradition of serving as a mouthpiece for communities and movements.

Personally, all I’ve ever done is write lyrics. That’s the way I express myself and it’s nice that you can pack so much into a song.” Jonny 5

Silent 14

the Carson Daly show and found many L.A. and West Coast bands interested in helping out the cause. A lot of these bands have already been involved with “Rock the Vote” initiatives in the past.

When Cordova was a teenager he saw Rage Against The Machine perform in Denver where they were opening for Cypress Hill and Funk Dubious. Afterwards, he got to meet Zack de la Rocha and Tom Morello.

“I asked them how I could get involved, and they kind of belted off some non-profits that were around and available globally but the band didn’t really reach much into it.”

Cordova said that RATM is one of his favorite bands. “You can definitely still go back and the music will fire you up and it talks about important things politically, but where did the band make a difference? Where did the band show us that what they were talking about, they were doing something about?”

Jonny 5 can’t point to another band that they’ve modeled the non-profit after. He likes to think that the Street Team is unique in its efforts to organize fans. If Flobots.org is the first such effort, why haven’t other bands thought of it before?

“Part of it is just timing,” Jonny 5 said. “The innovative online/offline organizing model is a pretty new thing. We’re looking at something like the Obama campaign, that used the Internet where they couldn’t build up a staff and built up a staff where they could.”

Jonny 5’s background is a good indicator of where the Flobots roots in activism come from. Before getting into music he worked in a youth organization in Rhode Island where he said all of his friends were organizers. “That’s the culture that I came out of, and I only went into music because I thought it could be an effective way to reach people. Personally, I went into it with that in my brain. Then the rest of the band saw the same power in music and we really went for it.”

The question is: Can people with music on the brain be persuaded to volunteer, to become social activists?

Feldman already had experience with social activism before joining the Street Team. She’s volunteered medical assistance to the Boys Scouts in the past and helped with tornado relief this summer in Colorado. She knew right away what the street team was. But when some current members joined the Street Team, at the first official brunch, they thought the Flobot’s Street Team was going to be like any other band’s Street Team, an outlet where they could help to promote the Flobots.

“Most times they say they’ve never done social activism before, but they come into the Street Team and start doing projects, end up liking it and they actually stay,” Feldman said.

As of late June an estimated 2,000 people across the U.S. were signed up to receive more information on how to become involved in the Street Team. On July 3 FightWithTools.org became operational.

Meaning the national Street Team model, although on its first legs was in full force, and these members began organizing and working on Street Team initiatives in their communities and national initiatives such as voter registration.

Feldman said: “There’s a lot of us and we’re all so completely different. I think that if the Street Team didn’t exist, none of us would have ever met each other, and now that we’ve met each other and started working together, we all realize that we can be great, that we just click together.”

As anyone who’s ever been to a concert knows, there is a kinetic

energy that surrounds music. In fact, the word “energy” comes up routinely when discussing the Street Team.

Cordova said, “The Street Team is meant to inspire people to make change, to do something in their lives and in their communities to push positive energy in this world.” Two of Cordova’s friends died in a two day period. He thinks the Street Team helped him deal with the loss, in the following weeks.

“Thinking of some of the stuff that I’ll be doing in the community with the Street Team during the week and turning it around into positive energy seems to make all the difference in the world,” he said.

Carol Mehesy, director of Flobots.org, is looking to the future of the Street Team. She said, starting in 2009 the Flobots’ non-profit will hold a national leadership conference and rally around one of the issues that the Street Team wants to address after the elections.

The Street Team held it’s first teleconference on July 13. It was the initial attempt at connecting Street Team members from across the country. There were a few bugs but overall the response was overwhelmingly positive.

Feldman believes it’s very possible that within a year the Street Team could have branches in at least 30 states. In late August, Mehesy said that their were already 60 Street Team branches formed.

Jonny 5 said: “I think positivity goes a long way. I also think there’s a time and place for the negative. I see that as truth telling, when people need to tell the truth about things that are happening in their community and things that are happening with us as a country. Our song ‘Same Thing’ could be seen as a negative song, or an anti-U.S. song, but I see it as an important reminder about where our country has been and what our foreign policy has been.”

Rather than just stating the negative through lyrics, the Flobots are rising above even the message in their music to do something about it. Perched atop the success of the hit “Handlebars” and a socially conscious album, the Street Team attempts to convert a new generation of music lovers to social activism, one fan at a time.

Guide to Flobots Online: Flobots.com – Band website Flobots.org – Street Team news Flobots.net – Flobots’ online comic AmericaWillBe.org FightWithTools.org – Street Team social

networking website

Web Exclusive Q and A with Jonny 5 at SilentCityMag.com

City

They Drink Because They Care

Aqua-Africa’s Fun Fundraising

T

he meshing of two truths formed the astonishingly simple basis for Aqua-Africa’s continuing series of fundraising events at the Blue Jay Bar and Grill: 1) Portions of Sudan need drinkable water. 2) College students enjoy drinking… alcohol.

A flyer for the last fundraiser summed it up as “a night of good karma and cheap drinks.” With a five-dollar cover charge, domestic bottles at two dollars and “aqua-shots” costing only a dollar fifty, participants seemed more than happy to help.

Jill Talman, a graduate student at the University of NebraskaLincoln, and Katie Hayes, both ventured from Lincoln to attend the last event that happened in March. Talman said it was worth the drive to support the event.

Fighting little media coverage and cold weather, word of mouth seemed to draw a large crowd despite even Creighton University’s Spring Break. Hayes said, “My girlfriend asked me to come out and anything that involves drinking and hanging out, and raising money for a good cause is always fun.” Some participants reported finding the event through Facebook. A third of those in attendance knew Buey Ruet, co-founder of Aqua-Africa, through college Forensics.

Kevin Freudenburg and Christine Osborn attended and are both members of the UNL Forensics teams. Freudenburg joked, “We’re rivals when it comes to Speech, but not when it comes to saving Africa.”

Ruet said that all proceeds from the cover charge went to the organization, whose goal is to raise $50,000 to begin drilling water wells in Sudan. The nonprofit started roughly two years ago, and has spent most of its time in research and development. Now they’ve moved on to the fundraising phase of their plan.

Ruet, and co-founder Jacob Khol, were both born in east

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Africa. Ruet is an undergraduate majoring in Political Science and Economics at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, and Khol is a senior at Northwestern College. They hope to begin holding events in other college towns such as Northwestern’s Orange City, Iowa very soon.

Like it’s fundraising events, the tenet of Aqua-Africa is simplicity.

While Bono and the rest of the world seek an elusive cure for AIDS as a panacea for Africa’s woes, Ruet said Africans die much faster from diseases related to drinking tainted water. A statistic quoted on Aqua-Africa’s website, aqua-africa.net, states “according to the EPA more than 4,500 Africans die each day from diseases caused by unsafe drinking water” and that among those deaths half are children.

Bringing clean water to Sudan is as simple as getting clean water in Nebraska. There are aquifers below Sudan similar to Nebraska’s Ogallala aquifer. The resources are there, they just need to be tapped.

“It’s very simple to bring this solution. It doesn’t take anyone with a PhD. All it takes is a little dedication and planning,” Ruet said.“The ‘I Drink Because I Care’ came about because we know that a lot of college students are apathetic to this kind of cause, you know. They’re not callous; they want to help out, but at the same time a lot of college students don’t have the funds to support this kind of ambition.”

David Campbell, who is a coach for the UNO Forensics team hatched the “Drink Because You Care” events, which seem to keep gaining popularity. Upon arrival, many at the event were already wearing the blue, white or pink “Aqua-Africa” shirts being sold Friday night.

Ruet said that his greatest obstacle to raising money has been the perceived inexperience of the organization. Not too many people seem eager to hand over $50,000 to a college student, but AquaAfrica board members have plenty of experience: Dr. Lyn Graves is acting as business advisor; Dana Bradfield has 35 years of Information Technology experience; Don Royer, operates a network consulting firm and was manning the t-shirt table at the last event. He said his cousin Les Royer is a professional well driller in the U.S. and has provided technical support to Aqua-Africa.

“We already have all of the logistics worked out; we have all of our licensing worked out; we have a company waiting for us,” Ruet said.

“Now it’s getting the funds. Like you see here, we’ll do anything to raise the funds.”

An e-mail message circulated before the event set the tone, “The charity is Aqua-Africa, building wells in Africa for people without clean drinking water. So naturally a bunch of Midwestern 20-somethings are going to drink alcohol to get them water.”

There were no speeches or sermons about the plight of Africa given at the bar at the last event. The mood was light. Laughter could be heard from every corner of the room over the beats of DJ Mammoth.

For more information on the next event or to make a tax-deductible donation visit Aqua-Africa.net. T-shirts have been $10 for white, $11 for pink or blue.

Silent 16

lajba molds hope through sculpture and life

by M att G oodlett P hotos by M ark K resl

S

culptor John Lajba’s favorite sculptures aren’t the high profile pieces he’s done for celebrities like basketball player Vince Carter or the memorial of Dale Earnhardt that stands outside of the Daytona International Speedway.

Listing his favorites Lajba says, “I did a sculpture once that a homeless person slept beside because he felt secure next to it, a sculpture that a person would come up and hug, a sculpture that a man grabbed with both of his hands—and he squeezed this rock. I did “The Road to Omaha” sculpture at Rosenblatt, for the College World Series, that fans use as a rallying point.”

Lajba keeps a few mementos from his career, like the NAPA Auto Parts sign with a picture of the first place trophy that he designed for the Daytona 500 race. Among these mementos is a Florida Tribune article. It mentions jet setting around the country in the middle of the night to meet with celebrity clients. Lajba gently dismisses the article with a laugh and says, “They portray me as some kind of secret agent.”

Within a moment of meeting Lajba, hearing his deep resonate voice, robust laughter or his many apologies for “talking like a crazy artist” it’s obvious that Lajba is down to earth.

The celebrity sculptures may be what Lajba is recognized for, but they aren’t his most important. Ask Lajba and he will tell you that his most important sculptures are the ones that people use without even knowing he’s the artist. He’ll tell you really, though; he hasn’t yet grown complacent enough as an artist to look back yet. Lajba, who has been a professional sculptor since 1982, turned fifty-one this year and he has much more work to do before he’s done.

A Fa m i ly S pac e

Lajba’s studio sits on the edges of the Old Market, where slick cobblestone overtakes paved city streets. Traces of Lajba’s family linger throughout the 14,000 square foot labyrinthine studio space among numerous knickknacks and sculpting equipment. A note from one of his children is scrawled in marker on a wall inside of a heart: “I love mom and dad.” A rosary, also drawn, rests above it. On his large drafting desk business cards are piled high, phone numbers are scrawled in every direction on a white mat in black magic marker, and among these are sketched a pair of hands brought together, drawn by his daughter Hannah.

In one room of his studio an answering machine blinks 26 messages: they’re messages left for Lajba by his children over the years.

“I just can’t bring myself to erase them,” Lajba says. He’s looking to transfer them to a more permanent format, but until then they keep persistently blinking, a warm reminder of his children in his somewhat austere studio, where industrial heaters hanging from the ceiling clang to life in winter, and Carhart overalls and coat are still necessary in the colder months. Other items that suggest family litter the area: a “happy birthday” streamer hangs from a moose head in the small entry room packed with a piano, elsewhere a pair of blue Pumas rest atop a vice grip bolted to the ground, a bike with a leopard print seat that his daughter occasionally rides in the studio leans against it. A skeleton, used for anatomical reference, wears a fedora and has the stub of a cigar, positioned by Lajba’s son, Harrison, stuffed into its jaw.

Hanging above a workbench, near the drafting table in the back of the studio, is a framed photo of Lajba’s late father. Lajba graduated from Bellevue University with a BFA in 1983, and took the photo while he was an art student there. In it, his father is gesturing for the viewer to come

City

closer. There appears to be something cupped in his hand. A cigarette? It’s hard to tell. While scrutinizing the photo, you attempt to discern what it is, squint and inch closer. Closer still. It’s still not quite recognizable. A little closer until your face is nearly pressed to the frame’s glass. Then you can’t help but smile. The gesture has worked.

The photograph is positioned over Lajba’s right shoulder as he leans back in his chair, smiles fondly and says that his love of sculpture began with his father, who he was influenced by, and also very close to.

“We used to take clay when I was four or five-years old; he would make something and I would make something. It was just a way of communicating and enjoying spending time with my father.” Lajba continues to smile as he remembers. “Then it became a form of personal enjoyment and satisfaction for myself.”

It’s understandable why Lajba would need traces of family in his studio, which he says has become like a second home for them; Lajba works 10 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week. At any moment Lajba is juggling eight projects.

Often when he describes his sculptures he speaks of the deeper idea behind them rather than their appearance. For instance, when he talks about the piece that he’s working on for the Sheriff’s Department on 156th and Maple he says, “It’s showing the whole idea of what it means to have that responsibility - to be there for the public.”

Another project for Children’s Square USA in Council Bluffs will portray a father leaving his three children to the care of Reverend Joseph Goff Lemen. These were historically the first children helped by the orphanage on December 23, 1882. That’s what the scene portrays, but Lajba discusses at length what he hopes to convey with the sculpture. He cycles through the emotions that everyone in the situation must have felt: the father so hopeless for his children’s future that he’ll give them up in order to protect them, the children possibly feeling betrayed, scared or angry and not understanding the decision, and the Reverend entrusted with this responsibility.

Above all Lajba says that it’s important to convey hope through this sculpture. To show “that when you’re at the bottom there is always a way up. It’s hard to do that.”

17

P r o c e ss a n d M at e r i a l s

Even when Lajba sculpts representations of famous people, he doesn’t put them on a pedestal. When sculpting a memorial to Dale Earnhardt he didn’t sculpt Earnhardt the racecar driver. Instead, he made the racing icon seem human and approachable to fans. Lajba also made a reproduction of the famous penny that was given to Earnhardt by a terminally ill girl before he won the Daytona 500 in 1998. This reproduction is now embedded in the wall at the raceway.

When Lajba’s not able to know his subject personally, he doesn’t do representational sculptures reproduced solely from photographs, because he believes that would be insincere.

Lajba says, “A lot of times, insight into a person is how they affect others.

How they’re looked upon in life. I think one commonality that all people share is all human beings are important, all human beings have value and we all have flaws too.”

Unpopular characters are not usually the subject of sculptures, but, if asked, Lajba thinks he could do it. In fact, he thinks it would be an important sculpture to do.

fact Lajba’s only sculpting award came in kindergarten at the State Fair. It was a sculpture of a mouse and a kangaroo. He won first place.

Silent 18

how to make a sculpting studio What comprises Lajba’s sculpting studio? One ping pong table, disco ball, rows of theatre seats, one antique tractor, red truck bed, one white truck bed laid vertically, several car bumpers, a skeleton with cowboy hat and half-smoked cigar–for anatomical reference, clay figures made by Lajba’s children when they were little, Mr. Suds, and one Honda motorcycle in a stage of repair.

One of the most important things that his mentor Father Lee Lubers, sculpting teacher at Creighton University, taught him was “not to be afraid of looking at reality, or afraid of responding to reality: the positive and the negative.”

Lajba thinks that the tendency would be to make the piece pure propaganda, pure evil. He would approach it in a more complex way. One way in which he would portray the infamous person in sculpture is through isolation. “I would put the sculpture in a setting where it was alone, where it felt alone, not on a pedestal or in a beautiful setting. When you’re alone is when your thoughts, either good or bad, can consume you,” Lajba says.

In a corner of Lajba’s studio is a terracotta fragment that was once ornamentation on the Masonic temple demolished in Omaha at 19th and Douglas. It has considerable weight and he hefts it across the studio. “What I found most interesting about it is not really the ornamentation of the fragment itself, but when you turn it around you can see how the worker put the clay into this mold with his hands and you can actually see his fingerprints on the clay. That’s where I see the value in it. It shows me human care, craftsmanship, pride,” he says delicately as he traces his fingertips over the tiny trenches left in the terracotta decades before. Lajba is developing clay bodies out of terracotta.

He’s utilized various other materials throughout his career and says, “I use the most appropriate material to express what I’m trying to express. For any artist, you should never be afraid of materials or enslaved to them either.”

Lajba is starting to work more in ceramic and has worked with granite, bronze and sometimes synthetic materials.

Several of the sculptures at the Western Heritage Museum were developed

by Lajba and made from resin painted with different glazes and washes to bring out their color.

Lajba’s sculptures start simply. “I do it just as perhaps a writer might do it. I write down thoughts and ideas,” Lajba says. “Then a lot of times it’s easier for me to understand those thoughts and ideas by working three-dimensionally.”

His sculptures always start with the face because Lajba says that’s where many of our most important senses are located: “there’s sight and smell and breath and life.”

Lajba often prefers stone for his nonrepresentational pieces, finding feelings through texture. He enjoys working with stone, even though it’s labor intensive, because once it’s carved the piece is done, as opposed to bronze where there are multiple processes to cast and finish it. He also says, “When you’re working on stone you have the dust in the air and things like that. It puts me in a very happy environment. I feel very safe when I’m working with stone.”

When creating a stone sculpture Lajba says: “I try to make them vessels, to make them places that you gather around. I try to make my stone pieces represent ideas of community whether they’re broken pieces to show perhaps how we’re not permanent…as people.”

Environment is paramount. Lajba recalls a piece that he sculpted for a location near Lake Erie in Erie, Pa. His work was influenced by the violent motion of the water, in contrast to the tall stoic pines, like telephone poles that swayed and bent to the wind. The collision of these two elements is evident as he discusses the sculpture in one long sentence that eventually comes to a crescendo.

“I would go out at night and these trees were maybe 150 feet tall, and they would be swaying in the wind, they were strong but if you’re in the forest at night with a full moon and…the idea of if you’ve ever touched the bark of a tree, the roughness of it, and the rhythm of the wind going through these trees, there’s the rhythm, there’s the pulse, and then there’s the undulations of

the water on Lake Erie, it’s almost like an ocean and that was what the piece was about. It was actually about a community of people, but their community is because of their environment,” Lajba says.

Lajba attaches meaning to all of his sculptures and says that he would never sculpt a piece just for decoration as an object. Rather, he’s constantly trying to communicate with his art.

Lajba says: “Look at the world that writing puts you in, and visual art is similar to performance art, or writing; it’s just a way of communicating. I think that’s what it should be. It shouldn’t be an object; it should be the world. What object is there in dance? But it’s still great art. What object is there in music?

Visual art should not be the object; it should be a vehicle like dance, writing, music. I really do believe that. Otherwise, then it’s just a bunch of stuff.”

When making a sculpture for Clarkson Hospital, Lajba kept the idea of communication in mind. The bronze sculpture, weighing 1,500 pounds, is of two hands, one resting in the other. The inspiration for the sculpture came to him while visiting his own mother in the intensive care unit of a hospital.

During these visits, Lajba witnessed the triumph and tragedies that unfold in a hospital. He realized while trying to communicate, and be there for his mother, that words were not always the best form of expression.

“I would touch her shoulder, touch her hand, feel the warmth of her hand, and that was the way that I could communicate with her,” Lajba says. “I think that the most important thing about that piece is to show that you’re not alone.”

N ot F o r g ot t e n

Lajba thinks that one of the worst things that can happen to a person is when they are forgotten. He says, “I sometimes go to estate sales and I see boxes of photographs and artifacts of these people. You always wonder what happens to those people and if they had children or ever did something significant to be known.” Lajba got the sepia-toned, waterdamaged photograph of a somber looking lady, in black stately attire, at one such estate sale. It rests above a metal locker filled with supplies and Lajba says, “Its eyes will follow you wherever you go in the studio.” They do.

“But at least she knows that someone in 2008 is still thinking of her.”

Even with all that he’s already accomplished, Lajba looks ahead to doing more work. “I want to do art about more things. I want to be even more productive. There’s just not that much time in the day.”

There’s the reminder of impermanence whispering in this statement.

One of his mentors, Father Lubers, passed away just this summer. Lajba gets a little more tired when hauling hundred pound bags of clay powder to make into clay. He remembers a time when he would carry them like they were nothing. Lajba’s sculptures will weather many, many years past his lifetime, but his unfinished work is not daunting for Lajba. “I mean all of my work, what gives me the passion, what gives me the strength to work as hard as I do is that I want to celebrate this wonderful human compassion that we all have,” he says.

Above all, Lajba hopes people “look at the figurative sculptures, and the nonrepresentational sculptures that I do and see something about yourself, about our world, but also really see something about truth.”

It’s obvious from speaking with Lajba that he’s had time to think about these questions; he’s developed a philosophy on life and through it art—or vice versa. This is why a rosary hanging from a pegboard in the kiln room of his studio, alongside other sculpting implements, doesn’t seem out of place.

It’s seems a silent affirmation that for him faith is equally important to both.

City 19

st. cecilia cathedral The home built by architect Thomas Rogers Kimball for his mother at 22nd and St. Mary’s Avenue has been purchased, and is being renovated by Lajba. Kimball designed St. Cecilia Cathedral, which at the time of its completion in 1959 was considered one of the ten largest cathedrals in the United States.

St. Cecilia Cathedral has great significance for Lajba. He was married to his wife, Bonnie, at St. Cecilia in 1988, he developed a sculpture for the cathedral, his daughter, Hannah, attends school at St. Cecilia and his son, Harrison, is a graduate.

“I try to have that pioneering spirit a little bit and maybe influence the neighborhood in a positive way. We planted a community garden last year in the yard. We would take those vegetables to our neighbors. Just to see the look on their faces, to think that someone who has this large, imposing house, and is trying to build the neighborhood back. It’s my mental therapy. Yeah, I work on the house, but I’m trying to work on the neighborhood.

Eventually, I’d like to live in it.”

Silent 20

Price makes the Midwest memorable Interview by M.G.

The collected essays in John Price’s memoir, Man Killed by Pheasant: And Other Kinships, resemble the beauty of fractal geometry found throughout nature. They are often deeply grounded—in place, in the natural world—and then spiral outward into formations of thought, making connections that poignantly push each story to a deeper, more beautiful, level of meaning.

Price has the remarkable ability to span half a lifetime, and varied subject matter, while still seamlessly fitting these stories together into one cohesive collection, that is as much an exploration of the natural world as it is a coming-of-age.

These essays evoke the panoply of emotions.

In “Night Rhythms,” Price writes about his experience working overnights as a nursing assistant. Price looks out the window at the traffic lights and notes: “There is no real control. The lights change according to timers, predetermined rhythms that go unnoticed during the day like the regular seizures of children who lie on playroom mats.

But at night I can see them changing while others sleep.”

The essay is the tragic recounting of what is most likely a terminally ill infant’s last night. Price accompanies the baby, and a doctor, who normally seems uncaring, across a courtyard to give the baby at least one taste of the tactile world beyond the confines of the hospital.

Other essays, like “Nuts” and “Moleman Lives!” demonstrate Price’s self-deprecating humor that makes his voice easily liked and accessible. “Nuts” is about Price’s trouble conceiving and the rivalry it starts with his neighbor. “Moleman Lives!” is about his awkward teen years and his sympathy for the Marvel comic’s villain.

Price’s work may be classified as a nature writing, but make no mistake, he is an impressive writer. Period. Price is an author the Midwest can be proud of.

City 21

How do you know when your stories are done?

I can’t remember who said that you don’t ever finish a piece you just abandon it. As a writer, you always think there’s more work to do. When I think it’s finished is when I share it with other people and they say it’s finished and it gets published. That’s when it is done. I could revise forever. I think that’s one of the things about nonfiction. You write it at a certain stage in your life and when that stage is over, whether it’s a week or a year later you see those events very differently and you could write a very different piece about it. One of the challenges with this book was some of these pieces were written over twelve years ago. The experiences themselves were often much earlier, and the choice is whether to stay true to the voice and perspective back when I wrote it or to the voice and perspective I bring to it as a writer today. I tried to stick with my perspective then as much as I can. So the “Nuts” piece, where we’re trying to have a baby - about a month later we conceived. But I wanted to write that piece from within the perspective of someone who was still worrying about that, and didn’t know what was going to happen. At some point you just sort of abandon [the stories]. A lot of it is just loyalty to the person that you were when you were in the midst of the experience.

How did you decide what tense to write these stories in?

There were a few that were written in present tense that I converted to past tense. I feel like present tense is sort of like chocolate, you can only stand so much of it – the intensity is higher. There were a few select pieces, or even sections within the pieces, where I wanted to ratchet up the intensity a little bit. I wanted to do that sparingly, because I think if you do it too much it feels forced, artificial.

Was there a point when you realized these stories could be a full-length collection? Was that your intention all along?

It hadn’t been. I published a lot of these pieces individually.

Beginning with that introductory piece, “On Haskell Street,” and then “Night Rhythms” shortly after that. They were published back in ’95 or ’96. So, you know, a dozen years ago. Then I started publishing some of the nature-oriented pieces in Orion, and I didn’t think of them as a book, I thought of them as individual episodes. It wasn’t until maybe about five years ago that I started to see there was this theme of kinship and interrelatedness that was present throughout. Nature was present in all of the pieces even when I didn’t intend it to be.

Even in the “Night Rhythms,” piece at the very end when I’m taking the boy across the courtyard over to the hospital. Then working with an editor, she really encouraged me to find the connections between the pieces and emphasize those. That was part of the major challenge of the revision—bringing the stories all together. I think that theme was there in all of them; it just took me a long time to see it.

When writing about your adolescence, were you tempted to make yourself look cooler?

A lot of us have some kind of history like that in our adolescence, those of us who become writers. Don’t you? That’s always a temptation in nonfiction. One of the joys of writing nonfiction is getting it right the second time. You can make yourself seem smarter, more sensitive, more together then you were actually in the moment. With that piece, I was really intent on being honest about what it was like to be an awkward teenager, because I think a lot of us out there experienced that. We may not have been short but we might have had some other thing that separated us, or at least we perceived that it separated us from others. And that, I think, draws us closer, oftentimes, to the natural world and to the animals in our lives—pets and all those things. So I wanted to be really honest about what that experience was like. The challenge was choosing which of the sort of geeky, awkward aspects of my life I was going to write about, because there were many.

Did you do any writing prior to changing your degree from medicine to nonfiction?

I’d done just a little bit. Most of it forced through assignments in classes. I’m not one of those writers that always knew I wanted to go into literature and writing. I’m always envious of those writers that talk about how they just knew they were going to be a writer when they came out of the womb. That wasn’t the case for me, at all. I didn’t like writing. I didn’t really even like language. I was a pretty shy person, and I’m still very afraid of public speaking. I think I turned to writing ultimately in high school just as a way to control something that I was afraid of. Drama gave me an interesting outlet that way. For some reason, [performing] didn’t bother me. I didn’t really discover writing until college; it was through professors exposing me to literature that I loved, and professors and friends who were passionate about writing.

If you talk about nature vs. nurture, among writers, I’m someone who was nurtured. It didn’t come to me instinctively.

What writers have had an impact on your work?

Among nature writers and essayists I was really drawn to the work of E.B White and Loren Eiseley, who is an essayist out of Nebraska who integrated personal stories, very moving personal stories, with scientific knowledge. He first modeled for me the possibility of bringing together a lot of my interests. I was interested in: religion, science, ethics and nonfiction seemed like a place where you could bring in that kind of interdisciplinary perspective. Eiseley really modeled that. Edward Abbey, the nature writer, taught me it’s okay to be funny in environmental nonfiction; it’s okay to try to be humorous even when talking about tragic things, and in fact, humor may be more necessary when writing about tragic things than other aspects of life. I really admired his humor, irreverence and self-deprecation.

Silent 22

Was the fact that you were already at Iowa University an influence on your decision to switch majors to writing?

Yes, I think so. It’s one of the happy accidents of my life, because of the great writing program there. Before I was even part of it, writing was just in the air. Great writers were moving through and giving readings. I remember when I was just thinking about becoming a writer, I went to a reading by Tobias Wolfe and then the next morning saw him having breakfast. Quite rudely, I invited myself to sit down, he was very generous, and we had a conversation about writing. I met T.C. Boyle there at a time when I was searching for examples of writers who have made a career out of it. Great writers were around. I wasn’t in the Writer’s Workshop, per se. I wasn’t in with the fiction and poetry people, I was in with the nonfiction program which is in the English department. I was there when that program just started to assert itself as an MFA, as a creative writing program. So that was really great, to be a part of that, to see that, nonfiction, sort of rise to prominence, to become more visible to the many creative writers in the programs there and also nationally. There were a lot of writers around and people weren’t apologizing for it. You didn’t have to explain yourself to anyone. Writing was considered a perfectly acceptable profession, and even a noble one. Not the case everywhere.

What’s is the most important piece of advice that you give to your students?

I don’t think writers read enough, probably because they’re writing all the time, which is understandable. But writers need to understand the tradition in which they’re working so that they can make some informed choices about who they’re going to be as a writer. This advice about “finding your voice” is very misleading. As if, there’s only one voice and you gravitate towards it naturally. As you start to write, you find out that you have many, many voices to choose from, and it’s a matter of finding what you’re best at as a writer. That’s something you sometimes don’t anticipate, a style that you don’t necessarily gravitate towards immediately, but you’re just naturally good at it. Reading will also teach you what’s going on in the literary world around you, what people have done before you and what they’re doing currently. It all sort of helps narrow your choices as a writer. It’s essential to a long-term career, I believe.

Do you hold a grudge against the West? In these stories you detail how it almost killed you a few times.

We’re here now. Even when I’m away for a while I come back and, of course, I love the mountains. It’s kind of a second home, in a way, because [my wife’s] from here, and so much of our relationship was set in the West and blossomed here. So, it’s an important landscape, and now we’re exposing our children to it,

and they love it, as well. In fact, I think my wife’s love of the West exposed me to the possibility of defining your life by place, which I had never done prior to meeting her. I started asking questions: What is it I care about in the place that I come from? What’s there worthy of commitment, if anything? I wasn’t really asking those kinds of questions until I met Stephanie. So the West, in a way, brought me back home to the Midwest.

I didn’t really think of myself as a writer of place until I started publishing in Orion. After that piece, “Man Killed by Pheasant,” got picked up by Orion. As a writer, I guess, I’m more specifically a nature writer. I still am a little uncomfortable with that term, because I think of myself really as a writer of place, and nature is a part of that. So it wasn’t until editors started to like my work about the nature of the Midwest that I started to think that maybe there’s something to be said there that people want to hear. Personally, that gravitation towards landscape was already in place, and that connection to place was already there, but the writing came later.

Are you happy with the placement of your book at bookstores? It’s been spotted in the Gardening and Nature section, the Biography and Memoir and elsewhere.

I’m just happy it’s shelved. I like it that it’s difficult to shelve my work. It means that it’s difficult to label. For me, that’s always been the kind of nonfiction that I’ve liked, the kind that you can’t slap a label on it, and minimalize it that way.

What’s your writing process, and on average how much time do you devote to a story?

I think they’re all different. Some of them came together relatively quickly and others took years. For the piece about my grandfather, I wrote the sections about my grandfather about ten years ago, but it just wasn’t there. I have that experience with my students, as well. They’ll write a piece but it’s just not coming together for some reason and you have to wait—you either have to become better as a writer, or something else has to happen to you in your life before that piece finds it’s meaning, finds its role.

That was true for the grandfather piece; it wasn’t until his death and the geese, going out there and seeing the geese with my students, that the earlier writing about his dementia kind of found a place, found meaning. That took about ten years. I wrote “Night Rhythms” on the back of prescription slips [while the story was unfolding], because I knew something intense was happening.

I didn’t know quite what it was, but I wanted to jot down some things—some thoughts, some details—that later became part of that essay. So for me, it comes in fits and starts. It’s usually never a smooth process; I’m not one of those writers who write everyday.

I just can’t, given my life. I admire people who do write everyday, but I think it can be discouraging advice to a writer to say you have

City 23

to write everyday no matter what or you’re not a good writer. I think for most of us, our lives don’t lend themselves well to that.

So it’s taken me awhile. I’m a slower writer, and I’ll put something aside for weeks, months, years and come back to it. This book has been a dozen years in the making. I think that’s common for a lot of writers, especially for those that have day jobs, and other things like family.

Are there certain questions that you ask yourself to extract the story when things are slowing down?

I’m someone who has to get it all out on the page as quickly as possible. So, when I sit down, I try to shut off all the questions. Just write and see what’s there. Sometimes there’s nothing there, but sometimes you can see the thread of the story. By story, I don’t mean, necessarily, like the typical narrative that you find in fiction, or the action, but maybe a line of inquiry, a story of thought, something that might be worthy of development that seems interesting to me. Then I’ll start to whittle away at the big mess I’ve developed, boil it down to its essence, and then work on instinct, for the most part. Then I’ll hopefully have a working draft, and I’ll start to ask the questions such as: What is this about? Who’s the audience for this work? That helps me make those final decisions about what to cut, what to weave in. Those kinds of questions: what, who, even form and style and voice—those come in pretty late for me in the process. I first need to get a lot of language on the page and see what’s there. If I start questioning it, I’ll just choke up; I won’t be able to write, because I’ll put too much pressure on myself to be too perfect early.

Can you see your style developing or changing by looking back at these stories that were written over several years?

I can. I think if you look at some of the early pieces like “Night Rhythms”, and “On Haskell Street” and you look at some of the pieces like “Mole Man,” which is one of the later pieces I wrote, you do see a development there, particularly a sense of humor. A lot of writers start out taking themselves very seriously. That can be a good thing because you need to do that early on. The battle for me was to take writing seriously and take myself seriously as a writer.

I think that spilled over into the writing; I wrote about serious issues. Later, I developed a sort of sense of humor. I’ve always felt like I have a sense of humor, but I haven’t felt, for whatever reason, free to use it in my work. The kind of humor I’m trying to create has to do with a sense of humility, a sense of fallibility, and early on as a writer I didn’t want to embrace that. Now that I’m in middle age, and I’ve been through a lot of things, I’m comfortable with it. I’m a little looser as a writer; I feel a little freer to exercise that sense of humor, to foreground that fallibility.

Do you have any plans for your next project?

I’m thinking about a new book that’s going to talk about parenting and ecology, particularly insects, so I call it my bug book. My kids are both into insects, and we’ve been learning a lot about them, more than I ever had learned growing up. [The insects] become a kind of emotional vocabulary for us, for me in particular, to talk about a wide variety of issues, like mortality. I lost my grandmother several years ago and both of the kids were very close to her. So the natural world provided a safe place to talk about that with the kids, about the cycle of life, that sort of thing.

That’s vaguely my next project. I just started it, so we’ll see where it goes.

Have you contemplated writing fiction?

Every nonfiction writer fantasizes about writing fiction. I fantasize bout it. I’ve actually started some fictional stuff, but I’m not at all sure that I’m any good at it. I want to make sure that there’s something worth the effort before I move through with it. Maybe someday I’ll do some experimenting with that, see what happens.

But right now I feel that I have a lot of stories to tell as a nonfiction writer. That’s another one of the myths of nonfiction. I think I read it in Vanity Fair once, where the person said, ‘Everyone has at least one nonfiction book in them.’ As if, there’s only one life story to tell and then you’re tapped out. I’ve found just the opposite. I feel like if you survive seventh grade, you have a lifetime of stories to tell.

You’ll never run out.

I think all writers kind of gravitate towards one genre or another. That’s part of the great challenge when you’re trying to decide what kind of writer you’re going to be. Of course, early on, I thought I was going to be a novelist. Everyone thinks that they’re going to be a novelist. That’s where the glory is. That’s where the highest potential for a movie deal is, all of those things that you fantasize about. The writers that I read, and admired, in most of my fiction courses were fiction writers. So when I was in a nonfiction class and the teacher told me I was good at it, I sort of resisted it.

This isn’t who I am. I’m a great American novelist. I’m not a writer of nonfiction. E.B. White said, ‘If you want to win the Nobel Prize, don’t become an essayist.’ So I wasn’t at all sure about that, but again I think that’s part of your education as a writer, embracing what you’re good at, even if it’s not what you choose to be good at, or want to be good at, I should say. That’s how it was for me.

Visit JohnTPrice.com for more information

Silent H ya n n i s i s N ot Om a h a 24

Hyannis is not Omaha. I mention this not just because defining a city by a single thing is stupid, or because I dislike sweeping statements such as Omaha is X for the attention they greedily try to grab, but because Hyannis really isn’t Omaha. It’s a town many miles from Omaha, past Lincoln, Grand Island and Broken Bow, approximately six hours, 363.71 miles away, tucked into the Sand Hills of western Nebraska.

Hyannis is also a band.

So, I’m sitting in a basement, in Omaha, with Hyannis. Half of Hyannis, Tony and Joey Bonnaci. The basement is their parents’, and also the band’s recording space. I’m thinking maybe Hyannis is some plural form of Hyenas when Joey and Toni Bonacci burst my bubble.

Hyannis is the town where their grandma lived, and that they visited during summers growing up.

When they say it’s pretty much a main street they aren’t joking.

Check out a map. Hyannis seems to be a quick stop on the way to someplace bigger.

The Brothers Bonacci are a significant force behind the band.

With Joey shredding guitars and Tony – older and a little wiser, but less experienced with the guitar – playing rhythm backup. Both are writing songs for Hyannis. All but one of Tony’s first songs made it onto their first album, but Joey is the more prolific songwriter, constantly working on songs. The two are splitting songwriting duties on their new album, that at one point was being whittled down from 18-songs.

A posting on the band’s website makes it seems like they’re going balls to the wall, though: “It’s mid-July and we’ve only started four of our eighteen or so songs for the new album. So, that means we probably won’t be getting you any news tunes this summer.”

The band started in 2006 and has two albums out, a self-titled fulllength album, and an EP called Off the Reels. One of their immediate goals is to keep their third and latest drummer, Ben Brich. He missed the Silent City interview, and the historic first night of recording, for some lame reason – he was graduating or something. So, I can only assume the worst of him until Tony and Joey say he’s jazz trained, and good. I guess that makes up for it.

Tony says, “It’s super cool, because the Kinks drummer was too, and we’re super obsessed with the Kinks.”

That’s right. They’re fans of the Kinks and the Beatles and Tony’s pre-gray hair is styled into an early Beatles Moptop, as is Joey’s slightly more bushy hair. A picture of Paul and Linda McCartney hangs above the band’s mixing table adjacent to their recording room.

Rounding out the Hyannis lineup is Micah Renner on bass guitar.

Tony says:“We all work at the same place. A restaurant called The Chatty Squirrel. We’re the only counter workers besides the cook. So, it could be called Hyannis Bakery.”

Most of the band was still in high school when it formed, Tony being the exception.

Joey started playing when he was fifteen. He joined the band One Mummy Case. After One Mummy Case, Tony and Joey had the Faint’s old practice space on 24th and Leavenworth. It was a perfect fit for both music and as a photography studio for Tony – some of Tony’s

band photography is featured on page 52. After awhile though, the space got too expensive. Tony picked up the guitar after his brother and learned by fooling around. He’s left-handed and turned the guitar upside down, and says he learned chords backwards. Then he just started enjoying playing chords and got into it.

Renner was bringing some equipment and joins the interview late. So Renner’s first contribution to the conversation is his origin story.

“When Joey was in One Mummy Case, Derek Higgins was playing bass and it was kind of weird, because he turned fifty when he was in the band,” Renner said, laughing. He then explains that it was weird because the youngest member of the band was 15.

Renner’s brother Isaiah was in the band and Renner used to hang out while they were practicing. At the time, Renner says he didn’t know how to play, but on the rest of the bands urging he picked up a bass guitar and started. Although he started simply, Tony says he got “all intricate and good.” Otherwise, as Tony says laughing, they’d probably have another bass player now.

Joey says, “It turned into Hyannis just from me and Tony making songs, and Micah playing bass. When we went to record our first album, basically we couldn’t afford the rent and all of the equipment that we needed to record. So we just gave that up, and moved the studio into the basement.”

The Bonacci’s basement works but probably isn’t ideal. It’s definitely not sound proof. As you enter the green room where the recording magic takes place, a small tapestry featuring a lion giving a half-lidded stare—either sleepy or seductive depending on your mood—greets you.

As we sit around, Tony slams an energy drink. Through the thin finished drywall you can hear him pissing later in the adjacent bathroom. A washer and dryer hang around the corner ten feet away from a new fire wire mixing board and the computer that Hyannis uses to capture their music. Clothes tumble in the dryer throughout the recording session, and at one point the dryer alarm goes off spurning an expletive from the green room.

Someone upstairs starts playing piano. But Hyannis makes it work and you’ve got to admire the band’s can do spirit.

The band will spend much of their summer recording in the green room. It gets hot because of acoustic foam wedged into the air conditioning vent. A window opening onto the street is opened just a crack during recording. Tony says jokingly, “Yeah we like to catch a car going by just to mix things up on the albums.”

He’s talking about warm-up methods. One that seems to work is to add the word “bitch” to the end of every sung line. It meshes well with his acoustic guitar strumming and a voice much improved from previous albums. It’s probably not a proven method, but it gets a guaranteed laugh.

A cat lazily sits on a load of laundry lying on a corner table, and passively watches the band do their thing. Later, a purple wig will be plopped on it. Tony will come out of the recording room with a little sweat on his brow. It looks like it’ll be a fun and busy recording for Hyannis.

making movies, dropping babies

City 25

An Account of The Imitation Life Shoot and the Death of A Dream

by M att G oodlett P hotos by M ark K resl

I t ’ s t h e l a s t d ay o f s h o ot i n g o n Im i tat i o n L i f e , the feature film concocted and executed by Mark Booker about four friends making a movie. It’s also November in Omaha with a windchill factor that dips the temperature below zero, whips hair into faces and turns the crewmembers’ lips purplish, the rings under their eyes a similar shade. The sun, falling in the sky, keeps getting stuck behind grey clouds and threatens to be lost forever behind the rooftop of the apartment complex where the movie is filming its final, and arguably most pivotal, scene—the denouement in which everything is resolved over a game of basketball amongst friends.

Matt Harwell, one of the producers, who also plays a lead role, explains to everyone that they must get this shot before the sun is lost. When I first meet Harwell it is at Booker’s apartment a month before production as he and several other actors are rehearsing.

He’s wearing a black turtleneck and my first thought is: Is this guy a GAP model or something? Later in the shoot Chris Marsh, who plays the comedic role of Biznuts—a role that a pre-fame Dane Cook supposedly considered—whispers conspicuously to Harwell off camera that, “It looks like a J. Crew catalogue exploded all over you.” Harwell becomes offended. But funny thing, handsome man that he is, Harwell, like Booker, will go on to do some modeling after Imitation Life.

Like the rest of the crew, I’ve been working on the film around twelve hours a day for the past four weeks, on at least two occasions working as much as 16 hours, but always with eight or more hours between the next shoot and typically with a day off each week. I’ll be told later that this schedule is light compared to most productions.

And it is.

Everything comes down to this next take. Uncharacteristically, the shot has been blown the last three consecutive attempts: there was a sound malfunction, a line was bumbled, the light was lost.

Harwell says the equipment must be returned tomorrow or they’ll be charged extra and it’s not in the budget. The Panavision Elaine 16 mm camera, won through a Panavision New Filmmaker Grant, must also be shipped back. It’s scheduled for another production. All of this is moot, because twelve hours from now Omaha will be dumped on with the first major snow of 2005 making a re-shoot impossible.

The crew clenches chattering teeth bracing for the next take, they cram necks into shoulder blades to huddle against the cold, the camera rolls, “action” is called, and everyone holds their breath…

Birth of A movie I’ve been on set nearly every day from set-up to takedown working as an apprentice Grip/ Electric, which means I mainly hold things and carry heavy stuff, set up light stands and roll and wrangle cords. It’s not glamorous, but it’s the most fun I’ve ever had at a job.

Booker, who is the screenwriter/director/producer/lead actor, has been with this project for over a year from initial idea to writing the screenplay—on the roof of his parents home in Ogallala, Nebraska— to pre-production rehearsals and the month of production. He’s also started his own production company Dropped @ Birth Productions and procured $110,00 in financing for the film, which will go on to cost $225,000. Although the camera rental is free, the film is costly and the processing alone will cost $15,000. All in the hope that one day Imitation Life will shape into something suitable for the festival

Silent 26

circuit that might garner the interest of a distributor and go on to have a wide theatrical release. Booker’s more meager hopes, never uttered aloud, are then a straight to DVD release. After production is completed, Booker will also create some musical tracks for the movie.

He’ll spend six weeks on a first edit of the film, while isolated in a cabin in the wilderness of Maine, where the immense Atlantic can be smelled on the breeze, and its rolling waves heard, but never seen through the thick trunks of barren trees.

I’ve never received or read the script, but I’ve pieced together what’s happening as the scenes have been non-sequentially shot depending on what days certain locations can be booked. These locations are a diverse sampling of Omaha: an abandoned wing of Creighton University Hospital, Memorial Park, The Old Market, Benson’s Main Street, Club Nico. Nowhere in the shooting are the cornfields that American Idol went out of its way to find, or the dull and dreary cinematographic lens that director Alexander Payne applies to his Nebraska. Luke Eder, who lives and works in New York City, and who early in his career worked on The Professional, is shooting Imitation Life. His father Richard Eder wrote for the New York Times for over 20 years as a foreign correspondent and critic, subsequently winning a Pulitzer.

When Imitation Life shoots at an apartment in the Old Market Lofts, Payne will visit the set wearing an In and Out Burger jacket.

I’ll skip the second half of a night class to visit the set unaware that Payne is there. Entering the elevator as Producer/ Unit Production Manager Ellen Myer and a man are exiting, I’ll notice Ellen and say, “Hey!” enthusiastically, to which the man will reply “Hey!” in turn. After the doors have shut, and the elevator has begun its ascent, I’ll drop my head and wince before asking another Grip what has taken me a beat to realize. “That was Alexander Payne wasn’t it? He’ll nod. “I’m an idiot?” He’ll nod again.

There’s no telling what Payne said to Booker on his visit, but several days later on Booker’s production blog, Booker will write something to the affect that he can’t wait until he’s a big-time director so he can come onto other people’s sets and tell them how to run things.

Overshadowing my brush with Payne, this night at the Lofts is memorable because it’s the first time that I see the choreography of the cast and crew working in unison.

Often, hours are spent lighting a set by the Grips and Electrics in conjunction with the cinematographer, and then small adjustments are made throughout shooting.

This night, numerous hours are spent on this single shot that involves: three actors hitting several marks, one Grip pushing a dolly, one Camera Operator on the dolly and one Assistant Camera Operator, to change the focus as the camera and dolly arrive at certain points along the dolly track. The shot becomes an intricate dance between the cast and crew all performed in a very confined space; there is no room for error.

My contribution to this six-headed monster is to hug the wall, keep the cord out of the dolly track and stay out of the way.

Increasing the difficulty, this scene ends with Harwell convincingly breaking down into tears and it’s a shot that takes six attempts, in addition to several rehearsals without rolling, to get the rhythm right.

As a result, Harwell has to generate the same amount of energy and emotion dozens of times.

W h e n f i l m i n g s ta r t s o n Im i tat i o n L i f e i n t h e fa l l of 2005 it has a lot of promise. Napoleon Dynamite won the grant a year prior—for a 35mm camera—and went on to gross millions at the box office. It’s assumed that they have donated the camera that Eder comments is brand new. At a pre-production meeting with cast and crew, Booker will mention that when this movie “goes on to make millions” everyone’s contracts will allow for more money to be divided. He says this half-jokingly and many in the room respond with forced laughter disguising a little hope.

People I mention the movie to aren’t ecstatic about the premise: it’s a movie about four friends making a movie. They say it seems clichéd, that’s it been done before. When Booker initially told the idea to his longtime friend and collaborator, Kevin Taylor, he even told him it was the stupidest idea he’d ever heard.

I know it’s been done, but I’m happy for the opportunity to help out and be allowed to learn something with no experience in filmmaking. As a Grip, the script really isn’t my business anyway. Later, I’ll find out from the crew that I’m fortunate enough to be on a set where someone isn’t yelling at me all the time, to work on a film made by essentially a bunch of friends. Most of the crew met on a previous production in Cozad, Nebraska. Two of the Grips have come from North Hollywood to work on this movie. Another who moved to L.A. from Cozad to get Grip work, has gotten none in L.A., and returned to Nebraska to work on this film. Eder and Assistant Director, Anthony Marks are both from New York City. Most of the rest of the crew is local to Nebraska.

The Grips from North Hollywood dream of getting into the Union so they can “get paid to sit on the back of a Grip truck.” During one lunch break I’ll watch portions of Volcano with them, their favorite film because it’s so bad. We laugh at portions of the movie that are unintentionally funny. Both of these Grips are also eager to light the female form naked, a challenge, but one they can handle. At the time of this article they had finally gotten their shot.

This discussion brings up pornography. While interning in L.A.,

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the Key Grip shot a commercial in which a porno set made to look like a dungeon was borrowed. She says, “It was surprisingly clean and there was a cabinet full of every imaginable toy or lube.”

Most of the out of town crew is living at the house where a majority of the interiors are shot. Four people are living in the basement, a few more upstairs in the bedrooms. Others are staying at Booker’s apartment, all allowing for savings on lodging. Dropped @ Birth Productions has the house for a month while the owners are away visiting family in Nepal. The house perpetually smells like curry, an aroma that is more pronounced when the high wattage lights, and dozens of bodies begin to heat up a room; air conditioning is never used during shooting because it would affect the sound.

Late nights after shooting has wrapped, members of the cast and crew will adjourn to the basement to watch dailies and have impromptu drum sessions with a pair of bongos and every pot that can be harvested from the kitchen.

Sinister Secret Ending One thing bothers me as filming continues. There’s a surprise ending and although I don’t know what it is, I’ve blindly signed a paper to the affect that I won’t reveal this super-secret to anyone lest I be sued or stoned to death. I never read the legalese, so I don’t know.

I do know that everyone else working on this film has happily sacrificed a tremendous amount to be involved. The collaborative spirit of independent filmmaking on a low budget guarantees that.

My meager sacrifice is sleep, but this too has its price. I’m finishing up my senior year of college, and in order to not fall behind I’ll take a lonely security position three nights per week from midnight to 8 a.m. at a shopping center. I’m still carrying a full course load and this demands some careful coordinating. I’ve scheduled one class with no attendance policy, strategically missed other classes the maximum amount before failing and moved my day job schedule around so that I’m only on for days that call for unloading trucks, or when filming isn’t happening.

Consequently as the production persists, I’ll become increasingly sleep deprived, paranoid and one or more beat removed from the rest of the world. At particularly long red lights I’ll blink my eyes shut for just a moment and be awakened by angry horn blares. Then this document that I’ve signed, the one about the secret ending, will cause me to wake up from nodding off at the security gig in a sweaty panic with the feeling that someone is watching me. Sleep deprivation and isolation will also cause mild late night hallucinations—usually around 3 to 5 a.m.—such as the time a mannequin in a store window will wink at me and lick its ill-defined lips. I’ll spend the rest of the night barricading myself in the makeshift security office, pretty much a closet, with a wheelchair pressed against the door, blowing my trusty security whistle for no one to hear until my lungs give out.

Occasionally, I’ll obsess about the secret ending and wonder: Is this movie really just a documentary about friends making a movie who are making a movie, BUT with— surprise!—people that think that they are helping make a movie?

Think about that for a second. Now think about that after going 36 hours without sleep, caffeine animating your body and it will seem completely plausible.

Three things further fuel this big ball of mistrust: 1) I’d recently seen trailers for the William Shatner project where he dupes a small town into believing that he’s actually filming a Sci-Fi movie there. The punch line is something like dumb hicks will believe anything.

2) On the second day of shooting, a “documentary” filmmaker, Mike Machian, arrives on the set with a bulky digital camera to get a “behind the scenes” look. Eventually, this will become the halfhour documentary Wake Up Filmmaker. Another contributor to the documentary, Rob Williams shows up occasionally with camera in hand. Three years later, this summer, when I see Williams again on the set of the local short, Love Owls, he’ll say he remembers me from Imitation Life. “Yeah, you looked really pissed at me.”

Nah, I was probably just tired, I tell him and laugh. And wary of your plots, I don’t say.

3) On a film, you’re hanging around actors, people that are paid to believably deceive. So, who can blame me for questioning reality?

At one point, Harwell finds out that I’m going to school for writing and says he’d be interested in seeing my work. He graduated with an English degree and taught overseas for a few months. I suspect he’s asking to see my work because he already suspects it’s going to be crap. I beat him at his own game telling him I’ll decline. I say, “I wouldn’t be able to trust your opinion anyways,” before narrowing my eyes at him, “Actor.”

And odd things do happen on set to provoke my delusions.

I walk into the house one morning after getting off of the security gig and grabbing an hour of unsatisfying sleep.

Booker descends the upstairs steps bare-chested with a white towel wrapped around his waist. Without looking at me he walks past to a large case CD wallet stacked on equipment cases crowded in a corner of the foyer. He starts to make a selection and stops, picks a ladybug off of a case, and cupping it in his palms, walks to the door. Once there, he gently blows the ladybug into the breeze as if he’s blowing a kiss into the morning dew. As he turns back, he has

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a wistful look on his face like he’s just made a wish.

He notices me. There’s an awkward moment as our eyes bump. I start to laugh nervously and scan the room. This has got to be some kind of candid camera set-up, right? Is it in the lamp?

“What?” he asks, smiling.

I glance suspiciously at the light fixture overhead, and seeing no lens, shrug my shoulders.

Nothing. Nothing odd about that. At all.

Unbeknownst to me, this morning has been reserved for filming some gratuitous nudity, but not the kind that the North Hollywood Grips would prefer. Booker has decided to get a shot of his man-ass, which the makeup artist complains she had to shave, as part of a post coital lay-in-bed-and-chat scene.

There were other signs of potential shenanigans, like Booker’s affinity for Andy Kaufman. The subject of Kaufman comes up on a marathon day of shooting that has the four friends interviewed by Rolling Stone magazine. Kevin Simonson—who in real life has been published in Rolling Stone, and whose interview with Hunter S. Thompson can be found on page 46 of this Silent City—plays the interviewer. Somewhere wedged in a 17-hour day of filming, interspersed with homoerotic frat boy humor between takes, Booker announces his love of the movie Man on The Moon and the biopic’s focus, Kaufman. He does a spot on rendition of a scene that takes place after Kaufman dies where Kaufman’s alter ego, lounge singer Tony Clifton, says to an audience, “You guys want to see Andy. Then you better get a flashlight and a shovel.”

Although known as a comedian, and the funny talking guy from the TV show Taxi, Kaufman constantly needled his audience for a reaction even if it wasn’t favorable. He turned many fans against him—becoming the guy people loved to hate—after declaring himself the Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the World and offering any woman who could pin him in a ring $1,000.

An interest in wrestling is something that Kaufman and Booker share. Booker started a backyard-wrestling league, the Championship Wrestling Federation, while he was still living in Ogallala.

On a lunch break the last day of shooting, the crew watches footage of one of Booker’s wrestlers get hit by a car that was supposed to be going 20 mph. The driver accelerated at the last minute and the wrestler went flying. The camera operator shouts, “You killed him!’ The driver didn’t, but the footage made the cut on one of those infamous backyard wrestling tapes that were sold on late night TV for a time in the 90s. Booker says because the CWF events got so big, you can no longer have a public gathering outdoors without a permit in Ogallala.

“You can’t even have a family reunion,” he’ll say smiling proudly.

While discussing Man on the Moon, Booker mentions the scene near the end where cancer-ridden Kaufman travels to the Philippines to visit a medicine man to remove his tumors and realizes that the magic is just a trick. His whole life Kaufman has been manipulating

the audience, making them believe what he wanted, and now he discovers that he’s been duped, as well. He smiles sadly at the irony.

Booker will get so excited after recounting this scene that he’ll shout, “I love that! I love to trick the audience!” Ironically, at least for the initial edit of the film shown at a swank, unofficial premiere for cast, crew and friends at Club Nico on October 15, 2006 few understand the surprise ending of Imitation Life. It must be further explained after the movie has stopped rolling.

The production of Imitation Life for me, the uninitiated, has an ethereal quality. One exaggerated by the disorientation of watching a sunrise bleed into a sunset, bleed into a sunrise without the lubrication of REM sleep, you witness everything become one big day.

By night, I’m walking the same loop around a retail outlet three times per shift unlocking and locking the same 15 doors. On nonshooting days, I’m lifting boxes off of an assembly line. Lift, turn, stack.

Lift, turn, stack. During shooting days, I watch people deliver the exact lines over and over again, with the same choreography each take as the single camera is moved to cover different angles. My entire life has become Déjà Vu. It’s a surreal experience that sometimes leaves you nauseous like a merry-go-round that won’t stop. Other times, you look up into the sky, see the stars spinning around, and the repetition lulls you into a waking dream that let’s you step outside of yourself, and watch your life like it’s a movie. You try to tell yourself, “Stop and pay attention.

No matter what happens next, this time, right now, is important.”

Scenes from a Borrowed Dream Imitation Life for me is like a borrowed dream that I’ve become a part of, and that’s why I think I can talk about it with just an ounce of distanced objectivity.

I never even quite remember my own dreams upon waking; they just leave me with a feeling. Three years removed from the movie, all that’s really left of Imitation Life for me can be summed up in small scenes, incidences, bits of dialogue spoken off camera. To wit: The night Imitation Life shoots a scene of one of the characters getting hit by a car on the main street of Benson, the keys will become locked in the van with the camera equipment. Marks is determined as hell, and unlocks the door with a coat hanger just as a locksmith pulls into the parking lot an hour later. The only reason a coat hanger can be snaked through the back window is, because vandals dented the back door just below the window with a pumpkin over Halloween.

The next morning a body will be discovered in a dumpster several blocks away.

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There are minor friendly skirmishes between the crew members who are vegetarian and those who enjoy meat. One night I’ll walk past Pat, the Camera Assistant, voraciously devouring some chicken in front of the Script Supervisor, Tessa, a vegetarian. Out of the corner of his mouth as he gnaws the bone he’ll say, “Do you ever get so hungry that you eat the bone too?”

Following a barbecue on a non-shooting day he’ll say to Tessa, “Jeez, there must have been nine different kinds of meat!” He’ll name them off on his fingers. “We had bratwurst, burgers, chicken…” Booker is now a vegan himself.

Pranks involving wooden clothespins abound. These are also known as C-47s, and Grips carry them by the pocketful to attach colored gels to lights. By the end of the shoot it’s impossible to find one without some phrase written on it in magic marker. One actor will get offended on his last day of shooting when he discovers a clothespin with the words “Meat receptacle” pinned to the seat of his pants.

Although Imitation Life has its faults, it’s amazing to look back and think that one person snatched this idea from the ether and transformed it into a reality, carrying it for two years, coordinating so many people and making others believe in this vision.

It’s also amazing to consider that this person was the same age as I was, 23, when filming started on Imitation Life. He was young, made something out of nothing and he did so while naysayers discouraged him from their 9 to 5 jobs, while former friends asked him when he was going to give up this filmmaking nonsense.

This may be the reason why Booker seems to insulate himself with humor, seems to keep rolling once the camera has stopped.

There’s the constant jokester, the projected persona, that serves either to deter Booker from the negativity directed at someone taking on an immense creative project or that aids in the myth of Mark Booker.

His self-mythologizing includes the story of how he and Harwell met: Booker claims that he met actor and friend Matt Harwell while partaking in a pharmaceutical study. Booker may have partaken in the pharmaceutical study, or just made the story up, to emulate independent filmmaking inspiration Robert Rodriguez and author of Rebel Without a Crew: Or H o w

a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker With $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player.

Rodriguez funded his first feature, El Mariachi, with money made from a medical study and also claims to have written the movie in a week while participating in it.

Making a film with no perceived credibility is daunting. When filming in public there are times that people stop and ask if we’re filming a commercial or a student film. Or ask who’s in this movie, like if it doesn’t have some washed up B-list actor then it’s not legitimate.

Eventually, I’ll adopt the responses I hear Booker give. He’ll say, “A bunch of up-and-comers. You won’t know their names yet, but in a few years.” Or, more often he’ll just name off the cast with no further explanation, with the implication being that the questioner should know who these actors are. The most recognizable name that the film has is Teresa Cassidy. Anyone of cartoon watching age in the 90s will fondly remember her as Teresa from the Fox 42 Kids Club.

She’s a last minute substitution for an actress that was set to play the protagonist’s mother and had to cancel.

While filming a scene at a fancier restaurant in West Omaha, an old lady who’s an extra asks Marks what his position is while he’s helping to clean a set up. Marks replies that he’s the AD, or assistant director.

“Oh, the assistant director picks up trash?” the lady inquires sweetly.

She’s playing up the part of the senile lady who’s aloof, doesn’t know what she says, but she does. I want to break this lady’s hip as much as I want to laugh, because Marks doesn’t deserve that. Marks just smiles without opening his mouth—you can tell he’s swallowing words— and notices something across the room, away from this “naïve” old lady, that needs his attention.

D e at h o f a d r e a m Filming for Imitation Life began just as filming for Out of Omaha wrapped. Out of Omaha had a much larger budget and a bigger production value. It had name actors like Lea Thompson, Dave Foley and, you know, the mom from Home Improvement. It’s also written

by Linda Vorhees who has taught, if she still doesn’t, screenwriting at UCLA. So the script, the movie, must obviously be good. But it isn’t.

It’s a terrible script with after-school-special-par-writing. It plays up the stereotypes of Midwesterners and it makes Omaha’s population look universally stupid and quaint. Many of the characters are also stereotypically religious. I can’t recall the last time I heard someone exclaim, “Merciful Martin Luther!”

This film also made me dislike Dave Foley, who at one point in his career—before the numerous estrogen injections he must have taken for this role—was funny. I do predict the movie will be salvaged as a drinking game. Anytime someone works the fact that they’re in Omaha into a sentence for no apparent reason—drink. Someone

Silent 30

mentions vacationing in Branson, Missouri—drink twice. Anytime an outlandish statement is made like: “No one from Omaha goes to California. We’re not Beach people,” or, “This is Omaha. We’re husky people with hearty appetites”—drink till you can’t feel anymore. I’ll go one step further with my prediction: Once revived as a drinking game, the movie will be attributed to a string of alcohol poisonings and banned from college campuses in the state of Nebraska.

For its bigger budget, the end result is about on par with Imitation Life. But, Out of Omaha did get write-ups in the Omaha World-Herald and fanfare at the 2007 Omaha Film Festival, at a packed screening attended by Ben Nelson. For its big budget and name actors, Out of Omaha, now known as California Dreaming, was released directly to DVD. The difference between its fate and Imitation Life’s may have been the recognizable names. Today, California Dreaming challenges Adam Sandler’s Going Overboard for the title of worst film that I’ve actually endured until the credits.

Im i tat i o n L i f e i n f i n a l f o r m h a d i t s o v e r d u e premier at the 2008 Omaha Film Festival, the only festival that would have it. While at the festival I overheard an usher talking about it. Even after a second edit, it’s the worst film she’s ever seen. Bad acting, bad sound, no musical score. It’s so sad, too, because the makers won the Panavision grant the year after Napoleon Dynamite.

Some consider Imitation Life a failure, and commercially it is. It certainly has its faults. The acting is at times honestly bad; most of the actors were giving their first performances. At times the sound is noticeably off. Booker has said the movie was originally called The Best Day of My Life and some of the movie might seem like wish fulfillment. The premise is also dangerous territory for a first time filmmaker to attempt. Somewhat akin to a novelist writing his first book about a guy who’s writing a book. Booker says that his parents don’t even like the film.

Still, there are also a few moments when a joke lands and it makes me laugh out loud. There’s a scene in particular where Booker is perched on the roof of a house with cardboard attached to his arms and leaps off attempting to fly—he did this stunt three times leaping from roof to ground with only grass to break his fall. It’s a simple scene, one that’s funny not just for the pratfall, but more because of the timing and reactions and the last little roll Booker adds at the end.

Some smartass will make associations from this scene, intended or not, to Icarus— Booker thought he could make a film on his own, at his age, what hubris, etc.

But Booker seems fairly pragmatic about the experience. Still, it must be disheartening to be so close to reaching a dream and falling just short. While recognizing its flaws, I can appreciate the ridiculous amount of work and time that went into making Imitation Life. Now, I can understand a fraction of the work that goes into making any film regardless of the end result. I’m a little slower to rush to judgment, although I still realize the importance of remaining critical. If you put your baby into the world there’s a chance that it’ll be praised or torn apart. It’s a risk you take.

After holding out hope for three years it seems that Booker has finally written Imitation Life off as a learning experience, but he hasn’t given up on film. He’s never made a penny off the film, and likely won’t.

He doesn’t apologize for the movie either; he loves it unconditionally.

Even if it wasn’t as successful as he’d hoped, he stands behind his creation, his baby. Dropped @ Birth Productions has dissolved, but Booker’s focusing more on writing and acting these days, giving up directing for now, and has vowed to never take on so many hats in a production again, even if it will save money. Imitation Life has led to other opportunities as well, such as a role in Steve Balderson’s (Firecracker) latest film, and Dan Iske’s horror film, The Wretched, that received a favorable response at the 2008 Omaha Film Festival and has been selected for a few other festivals.

Back on a cold day in November of 2005, the scene has played out and Booker has called cut. The Camera Assistant checks the reel. If hair or dust gets caught in a section of the camera the previous shot is no good. If the reel is clear he calls, “Gates clean!”

With a somber look he shakes his head. The shot is no good. My jaw slackens. I’m crushed. I’ve been wrangled in from passive observation of this scene, been here for hours, watching it lit and actors take makeup. It’s like the game winning touchdown being dropped.

Booker starts to smile. He’s holding back laughter. I want to punch the sonofabitch. This is serious.

Then he’ll say, “We haven’t been rolling. We got the shot three takes ago.”

I want to punch the sonofabitch. I’m freezing.

The thing that gets me is that even while on high alert the entire shoot, Booker has managed to get one by me. This isn’t the last time he’ll prank the crew before they part ways either. At a dinner that precedes the wrap party, two days later, a mustachioed Italian guy with long straight hair tucked under a beret will nearly give several crewmembers a heart attack, after he enthusiastically and without invitation hugs them as they arrive. Luckily, this is just Booker in disguise as Paulo.

So this last shot that’s been so built up is anticlimactic. It provides no closure, especially since there’s technically one more small shot to do back at the house. There’s yet a close-up that consists of a Rolling Stone magazine, with the four friends on the cover, being tossed onto a coffee table—on a larger production a second camera unit would have covered this.

Finally, after this little shot, all of the energy, angst and exaltations stored up over the past four weeks will be expressed in three words spoken by Booker. Like a slow clap, these words will be taken up by each crew member in turn and grow into a huddled mass of bodies and energy hopping up and down in the living room of a borrowed home.

This chant started by Booker will spread, growing louder, white-hot until it’s boomed in one voice. My last, best memory of Imitation Life is of the words “Burn it down! Burn it down! Burn it down!” expanding, rising, licking the eaves—raging, raging, raging past hope, into the silent curtain of night.

City 31

By Joel Thomas

People don’t read anymore.

At least according to Mac megastar Steve Jobs, who said so in January 2008, even claiming that 40 percent read less than one book per year.

Starting up a small independent press amidst such a decrease in literacy takes a lot of nerve, but that’s exactly what Jonathon Messinger and Zach Dodson have done in establishing Featherproof Press.

The minds behind Featherproof know the odds aren’t with them, but view themselves as the literary equivalent of an independent record label. The two derived some of their techniques from watching bands in the indie rock scene. They learned more directly from Girls Against Boys bassist Johnny Temple, founder of the successful Akashic Books. “He talked with us on the phone and gave us a lot of great advice,” says Messinger. “It really helped us get off the ground.”

The upstarts found another publishing model in Small Beer Press, run

by Kelly Link in Northampton, Massachusetts. More specifically, the indie rock ethos influences Featherproof in terms of a relationship with readers. In the music scene, Messinger explains, “we see a lot of ways that labels are able to connect with audiences that publishers don’t do. We’re trying to do some of that.”

One way Featherproof reaches out to readers is through minibooks, referred to as their “light reading series.” Featherproof’s website (featherproof.com) offers free downloadable mini-books containing one short story complete with cover art. In past interviews, the publishers have equated the mini-books to 7 inch records released by indie record labels. The website even provides directions for folding the printed pages into a book form. By providing the “light” reading, Featherproof not only finds new readers, but keeps established fans coming back, and therefore aware of new books to buy.

While with the mini-books, Messinger and Dodson just want to put out “good stories,” they look for something different in the books they publish. While Featherproof has “no aesthetic in the sense of commonalities in the writing,” Messinger shares, “we look for very

idiosyncratic books, like they could only have been written by one person and come from an unusual, unique mind.” As an example, Messinger cites Todd Dills’ Sons of the Rapture (see review, p. 45), particularly the author’s strange characters and views on the South.

“To my mind, I don’t know who else could have written a book like that. It’s very particular to Todd Dills.”

Featherproof also wants writers willing to involve themselves in the marketing process. Not unlike their indie record label counterparts, the publisher understands that more books sell when authors give public readings. As a result, their writer roster may inadvertently skew toward the young and less-attached because “for them, it’s easier and they’re more willing,” Messinger points out. “Touring is a big part of our publicity program, so we look for writers who want to tour.”

Featherproof readings and book release events often include musical collaborations, with a band playing after an author reads.

They don’t join music with reading just to be hip, but as savvy marketing. “We want to share audiences, and break out of the idea that as a publisher you only have this audience of people who sit in their apartments and read all night.” The idea of a reading as part of a bigger event is one Messinger has incorporated since before he and Dodson started Featherproof. As the host of a popular monthly reading, poetry, and comedy series called “The Dollar Store” (www. dollarstoreshow.com), he helped connect with a local audience that enjoys idiosyncratic, often risky writing. It didn’t hurt that he also already had ties with Chicago’s literary community through his job as book review editor for the Windy City’s biggest and best alternaweekly, Time Out Chicago.

Having successfully established their presence in the Chicago literary scene, Featherproof looks to become better known outside Chicago in the future. “It’s a challenge to spread out,” admits Messinger.

“We’re trying to do more things like attending conferences (look for them at AWP 2008) and literary festivals. (Our writers) touring is a big part of that, too.” Currently, Dodson and Messinger both work fulltime jobs, but “consider Featherproof as a second full-time job.” With continued growth, they hope to make Featherproof their major focus.

As Featherproof gains a reputation and hopefully financial success, Messinger looks to a local jazz, rather than indie rock, musician as his model for handling the accolades. When Ken Vandermark won a MacArthur “genius grant” in 1999, Messinger explains, he used much of the money to help build the Chicago jazz scene and support other musicians. “That’s something anybody would emulate…seeing that the work you do has a greater context, and can benefit people around in you in different ways. Featherproof’s publishers hope to do the same. “As we try to raise our profile, we try to raise the profile of people we really like. Whatever success we have, however small that may be, we try to not limit it to just ourselves.” With all the enthusiasm, creativity, and interesting stories that Featherproof is so willing to share, they might just convince people to start reading again.

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imperfections and experimentations

Self-recording No Longer Just For the Broke

by Matt Goodlett

The Black Keys recorded their first four albums on their own. They started in a basement studio, and moved to the second floor of the former General Tire factory, in an industrial section of Akron, Ohio, before finally collaborating with Danger Mouse on Attack and Release.

While interviewing Jonny 5 from the Flobots, Silent City found that the hit song “Handlebars” had actually been recorded in, and around, Denver three years ago, and self-released on an album called Platypus. It was re-released on this year’s Fight With Tools. Jonny 5 says the band produced this album with the assistance of a studio engineer. The album remained unaltered when a major label picked it up for distribution.

This made Silent City wonder if there was any draw to self-recording besides affordability. What type of self-recording was going on in Omaha? Where were bands recording? What equipment were they using? We surveyed several bands and musicians and posted their answers online at silentcitymag.com.

Silent City also caught up with Jake Bellows of Neva Dinova and Mal Madrigal’s Steve Bartolomei to get their take on self-recording.

NEVA D INOVA

Neva Dinova’s latest album, You May Already Be Dreaming, was entirely recorded in a studio. However, Bellows says that the band wasn’t happy with the performances that they originally laid down.

So, they opted to re-record on their own in a warehouse space on the northeast corner of the Goofy Foot Lounge. The room had a 20-foot ceiling made of tin, walls made of brick, and wood floors. The space had been a club at one time and there was a stage in the center of the room.

“We set up there and it sounded bad because of all the bounciness in the room. So, we begged, borrowed and stole a bunch of blankets, carpet, mattresses and rugs. We hung them all around the room and ceiling until we’d dampened the room enough to where it didn’t sound like a washed out bunch of crap when the cymbals hit,” Bellows says.

Bellows says the band changed microphone techniques on most of the instruments for most of the songs. He says, “It does have a cohesive feel but we were trying to make them each sound like themselves.”

Some of the more inventive recording that Bellows has done involves recording a kick drum through a speaker.

“My friend Doug went to engineering school and he showed me that trick. You can plug in a speaker and basically run a quarter-inch jack out straight into your channel and the speaker itself. The signal will travel backwards through the speaker into the board. It kind of blew my mind,” he says.

The memorable underwater effect in “Squirrels” was achieved in mix-down. The effect simulates the lyrics about following a diamond into a stream.

“We recorded it and it sounded pretty regular, but it was always the idea to drop that thing down and follow the diamond,” he says.

Bellows says he’d like to experiment more in the future. “It’d be cool to take a lot of chances in mix-down, you know. Just make some cool sounds and take it to different places.”

Bellows learned to record mostly through trial and error and by having “some smart friends.” At first, the mixing board was intimidating until an engineer friend gave him a simplified explanation. “It’s basically just a series of sends and returns like a switch board.”

Bellows says that now he’s recording at his house, where there are some limitations. “You can’t get a nice drum sound in a 20 x 12 room, with shorter ceilings, but you can still get a nice guitar and vocal sounds.”

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He wants to make some kind of album at his house. He’s doing a number of acoustic versions of earlier songs, a few new songs, and some covers. Potential covers include “Change is Going to Come,” “Sentimental Lady,” and “It’s Not Easy Being Green.”

Nonchalantly, Bellows says, “We’ll see what makes it. I’m just trying to do something different and have fun with it. If it sucks, I’ll burn the tape.”

You May Already Be Dreaming took some time because of the rerecording. Time was also lost when Bellows “got sucker-punched” at a bar and blew out an eardrum. Then there was touring in-between.

Despite the wait, Bellows seems happy with the overall album.

“I had the vision for the band to let me engineer it from the beginning. The guys were kind of nervous because it’s a hard job and I’d never done it before. I guess, in the end, my will won out in the sense that everyone was on board and it ended up working out,” Bellows says.

Another benefit of self-recording, Bellows says, is that you’re not depending on someone who wasn’t there for the inspiration of the song. “Producers and engineers do have amazing ideas, and it would be smart for a lot of musicians to listen to them, but in this case I thought we knew what we were trying to do, and to bring in another variable would have just made it a more difficult process,” he says.

“Also, I enjoy recording. Although it’s kind of grueling at times, it’s also fun to do and a different way of looking at music.”

Final thoughts from Bellows: “Get a four-track if you want to and just make music. You can do whatever you want to. See what happens.

Make some weird sounds. Create a loop. Figure out how to do it. Hit your tape hard to make it distort. See what that bass sounds like. Just experiment. That’s all it really is. Just a series of fun experiments. “

M AL M A D RIGAL

Mal Madrigal’s limited edition double-vinyl, Life Among the Animals and The Road is Glue, was recorded with the idea that imperfections are what make a performance.

“When you go to a live show you don’t ever think, ‘That drummer played a hair too quick on that beat.’ Usually as a listener, you enjoy the sum total of that performance,” Bartolomei says. “I think my favorite recordings are of bands that played live together, or mostly live. All of those little imperfections add character and add up to what makes it a unique performance, rather than a manipulated and pieced together semblance of perfection.”

Mal Madrigal’s recordings were done in the upstairs of D-Rocks Music in Papillion after hours. Bartolomei, and another member, work at D-Rocks and the owner gave the band access.

“The building was built in the late 1800s so it has all the acoustic properties of an old studio. It has a real open live sound and plenty of space,” he says.

Bartolomei started recording in high school with an eight-channel, half tape, reel-to-reel analog recorder. Vintage equipment seems to be a key ingredient. Bartolomei says that to get the sounds to the tape machine he uses vacuum-tube powered microphone pre-amps that come from the late 50s and have been modified to work with more modern equipment.

“I can’t quite place my finger on it, but there’s something that happens sonically when sounds run through tubes that’s kind of magical. Things come to life. Drums crack more and cymbals mellow out,” Bartolomei says.

Everything else about the setup is pretty basic. No fancy microphones. One thing that he says is important to consider is the instrument.

“A lot of people focus on the recording gear and forget that the instruments are 90 percent of it. For Mal Madrigal we all use older guitars, amplifiers and a vintage drum kit.”

There’s a reason for the retro ideology.

“The pre-amps that I use are from the late 50s and still working.

I can’t think of any studio equipment that I’ve bought in the last five years that still works,” he says.

“There are also certain sonic sacrifices, and it prevents any sort of individuality for the gear itself. Every once in a while some of this old gear will make a sound you haven’t heard before that has a certain characteristic that you didn’t expect and you can run with it,” he says.

Tape Op magazine, with its free subscription, has been helpful in teaching Bartolomei recording methods. He also recommends the website for the Chicago-based studio, Electrical Audio, as a resource that provides a message board and an opportunity to interact with a lot of engineers.

Final thoughts from Bartolomei: “I don’t think recording should intimidate. I don’t think the act of recording should inhibit a band from doing what a band does. At any moment, you play your songs together, and putting microphones in front of you shouldn’t intimidate you, or change the way that you do something. That’s the ideology behind my approach.”

Web Exclusive Find Out how they record: Big Al Band, DI-FI, Pat Langdon, The Shanks, Shine and others online at silentcitymag.com

Silent 34

Yukon King Lee Post Mines Broken Heart For Comic Gold B Y M AT T G O O D L E T T

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When the Japanese mend broken objects they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold, because they believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful. – Barbara Bloom, sculptor In high school I was named homecoming king, which I later discovered was voted on by the teachers, rather than the students, much to the student’s active and obvious disapproval (all of which I was oblivious of ). Basically, I got up during a sparsely attended football game - our team at the time was the lowest ranked in the nation - to meek applause and rode around the track in a jeep, giving the queen’s wave to the audience. I walked up a long stretch of red visqueen to the awaiting cheerleaders, who gave me a large Styrofoam heart on a cardboard tube and a puff-painted sash.

They then positioned a child’s soft plastic crown onto my head.

The crown had pipe cleaner numbers hot-glued on the front that looked a bit wilted. The lead cheerleader leaned in and whispered, “The real crown didn’t come in.” All I remember following that was blankly wandering around the high school dance later that evening, dateless, holding my Styrofoam and cardboard scepter, wearing my proxy crown as I surveyed my subjects, then leaving after 20 minutes to watch TV at home alone. Lee Post, creator of Your Square Life A few weeks before Valentine’s Day 2008, Bloom’s quote and Post’s homecoming story collide on the streets of Kyoto, Japan.

Post is traveling with his wife Alexandra, so you don’t have to feel guilty for laughing at his pitiful reign as king; things turned out all right for Post eventually.

It was near the statue of Astroboy, the Japanese cartoon character, that Post and his wife were approached by a small band of young Japanese students wearing matching yellow baseball caps and red backpacks.

At his blog Post states, “In broken English, they peppered us with questions. They asked us our names, what sports teams we liked, how we liked Kyoto. Then their hands shot out with folded paper cranes as a gift.”

The kids even had the Posts sign their signature books. Sure, the story starts out innocently enough but it ends with hordes of curious schoolchildren enthusiastically chasing Post and his wife back to an escape by taxi.

If there is a point to turning Bloom’s and Post’s quotes into a medley it’s that during his homecoming kingship you can almost hear young Post’s heart breaking, but a lucky audience has profited from Post’s aggrandizement of his once forlorn experiences with love and popularity in his comic strip Your Square Life.

It’s nice to think that maybe the mob of Japanese children acutely perceived imperfections in Post’s history that translated into points of interest and beauty. If nothing else, this thought should make you feel less guilty for having laughed at his earlier misfortune in high school.

Post said that YSL evolved from a zine of the same name that he’d produced for three years after graduating with a focus on cognitive neuro-psychology from the University of Washington.

Post even got a big research award while at the University.

“There were three of us on a panel meeting Nobel Laureates

and they’re asking us what we want to do,” Post said. There was the doctor who said he was going to do some research into cancer. There was the geologist who said he was going to become a professor and study rocks.

“Then there was me, and I’m like I’m going to go back to Alaska and I don’t know what I’m doing. Silence in the auditorium.”

And that’s what happened. Upon graduation, Post returned to his native Alaska, moved into a basement apartment, and was working overnight hours as a Mental Health Technician in the juvenile unit of a hospital, with little chance to date.

“So it became, finding a girlfriend became a big focus and was one of the reasons that I started the zine,” he said.

One of Post’s friends introduced him to Robert Meyerowitz, who at the time was the editor of the alternative newspaper, the Anchorage Press. Meyerowitz had seen some of Posts’ early comic strips in the zine and offered him a weekly strip in the Press.

Silent 36

“What better way to have a weekly advertisement that I needed a girlfriend than to have a comic strip?” Post reasoned.

It worked. Within six months of starting the strip he met and became engaged to his wife, Alexandra, a native of Belfast, Ireland who happened to be in Anchorage with an internship. The two were engaged only five weeks after meeting. Post said she left two months later, then came back to complete INS paperwork and then embarked on a trip around the world. Post said he’d periodically get a call from Australia or elsewhere in the world and the conversation would go something like this: Alexandra: I’m in the rainforest in an outdoor shower. Did you get the flowers ordered?

Post: Yes, I got them Alexandra: I’m in New Zealand on a Harley with a guy named Bear. How are those invites coming?

Post: They’re doing good honey.

A week before the wedding Alexandra returned to Alaska and the two have been together for five years.

The 145-page collection that comprises Lee Post’s The Very Best of Your Square Life, is hard to describe but is probably best summed up by the following description of one of his comics: A menacing monkey cosmonaut riding an asteroid falls to earth and crushes a clown. Both clown and monkey share the same thought bubble: “My life has been a long strange journey. Ah well…C’est la vie.”

Your Square Life is a strange journey, one that’s populated by lovable losers, unrequited love, blind ambition, offbeat humor, and of course, robots, lots of robots.

It’s evident when talking to Post where the odd humor in YSL comes from. His anecdotes follow the same template as his comics.

No matter how weird you may think the premise, in the last panel, last line, last sentence there is a punch line, or a payoff waiting, or sometimes just a sad, awkward beat but always a glimmer of humanity.

Post has compared the structure of his comics to that of writing haiku. One of his comics offers Post’s observation, “Rather than being funny or insightful, I worry the strip tends to lapse into bad short poetry.” The accompanying illustration of a man with an octopus on his head picking blooms from a low-hanging branch digresses and the comic takes a slightly more ridiculous twist reminiscent of a commercial for Obsession cologne: “Despair… raindrops…sadness…octopus. (*insert fart joke here).”

Describing his early comics Post said, “[They are] a mix between my pathetic cry for a girlfriend and basically me exploring my friends’ relationship problems through the strip.”

Many of these people feared for the future of YSL when they heard that Post was going to get married.

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it’s been a weird road from neuro-psychology, to cartooning, to juvenile justice.

An audience outside of Alaska is lucky that Post decided to end the strip after his 300th comic. If not for this, he may never have taken the time to collect the strips into a book.

Post described the anxiety that working a full-time job and having a weekly deadline began to impose.

“If I wasn’t drawing the strip, I was thinking about doing next week’s strip or trying to work drawing the strip around a camping trip or something,” he said. “Towards the end you really got the idea how some of those strips like ‘Beatle Bailey’ or ‘Garfield’ die on the vine.”

If nothing else, YSL really was one of Post’s selling points with Alexandra. “It turned out she had read the comic strip and that was one thing that I was able to impress her with, other than my handsome smile…I’m looking at her right now,” Post said, pausing a beat. “Yeah...Yeah, she just flipped me off.”

Is that a chink in Post’s romantic bliss? We can only hope that more comedic gold is on the way. visit Lee Post’s blog at YourSquareLife.blogspot.com

“I remember getting a lot of letters from friends at the time who were like, ‘Nooo! Your strip is going to turn into Ziggy.’ It was a big thing at the time with people saying, ‘What are you going to do if you’re actually happy and in a stable relationship?’” Post said.

It was a concern that Post shared, but six years and 300 comics later it’s evident that more material was available. In the 145 comics offered in his collection, there is rarely one that doesn’t offer at least a smile and many in the bunch that force upon you unexpected laughter.

Post has worked as a juvenile probation officer for a number of years and often wrote the strips during lunches and illustrated them on weekends. He said it was hard to keep incidents from work out of the comic.

As an example Post said, “I got a call the other day from an officer, who is a little bit odd, about a kid who was like going around knocking people in the nuts.”

Officer: You can’t let this go. This kid’s been hitting all these guys in the groin. And we need to arrest him.

Post: You know, that doesn’t sound like an arrest-able offense.

Officer: No, the kids are calling it sack-tapping.

Post: So there’s a string of sack-tapping incidents?

Officer: Yes! Yes, we have to do something about it!

Post: (mumbles) Oh god, why are we here?

There aren’t always moments of levity in Post’s job in juvenile justice, working with kids and teens in crisis. Early on, Post said he worked in child protection, which he refers to as “baby stealing” and as a juvenile probation officer he routinely fights in court “over what amounts to nothing.” On the other end of the spectrum, he also deals with cases that involve sexual abuse or violence. He said both his day job and art are rewarding and frustrating and part of the reason that he gave up the comic strip was so that he could focus on his job and family.

Silent 38

On Homewreckers and Broken Homes

Interview and Photos by M.G.

Many of the stories in Pia Z. Ehrhardt’s debut short story collection, Famous Fathers, are inseparably linked to New Orleans and were written prior to Hurrican Katrina. In this way they are unintentionally elegiac. Reading them offers a glimpse of a landscape that has changed dramatically in the three years since Katrina wrecked Ehrhardt’s city, her home. Ehrhardt says that in the aftermath of the flooding there was a choice to be made: to leave the city behind and start over, or to return. She said, “It would have been like a really terrible break up to leave. It’s a romance. The city doesn’t always treat us well, but I don’t think anybody wants a divorce.”

Famous Fathers often involves the complicated relationships of characters who are either divorced or adulterers.

Ehrhardt explores the complexity of these relationships through nuance: gestures, setting, all contribute to a subtle approach that allows for an emotional honesty that a lesser writer may have missed.

Sampling the first sentence from any story in the collection will give you a good idea where it is headed. In “Running the Room” a daughter is complicit in her mother’s affair. “Someone’s Flowered Dress” involves a marriage that lasts for one month out of every year. In these stories Ehrhardt moves quickly, laying out the situation, often a tangled scenario, so the characters become the focus.

The new face of New Orleans has changed a novel that Erhardt is currently working on. There may be no better writer than Ehrhardt to write fiction based in the landscape of New Orleans during its various stages of destruction and rebuilding. The photos interspersed throughout this interview were taken a year after Katrina. While a picture can show a glimpse of what happened, it will take a writer like Ehrhardt to describe the emotional toll, to fill in the gaps.

The devastation to the city itself is apparent with an open eye. The relationships that were strained by the storm, the families torn apart, will take a much gentler touch.

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How long have you lived in New Orleans?

I moved here in 1981, with my first husband, so it’s been 27 years.

The marriage didn’t last, but here I am.

Is it true that you can look out on City Park from your writing room?

Yes, I’m looking at it right now. The park’s really come back. People arrived from all around the country and volunteered their help to save the park, to pick up fallen branches and pull debris out of the bayous. There are ducks and white and black swans, gray heron and egrets. A couple of months ago the park had a bass fishing rodeo in one of the lakes.

Would these stories be different if you lived in another city; would you be a different kind of writer?

I think they might. This is a forgiving place and I think it gives me the freedom to get my characters out on limbs. I grew up in the Northeast, in Rome and Canada, so I’m not a born Southerner, but I feel taken in by this city. The people here are genuine and accepting of quirky, sometimes self-defeating behaviors, which my characters exhibit. The landscape’s lush, plants growing on top of plants, and even driving to the grocery New Orleans insists that you look at it with fresh eyes and not ignore it, not take it for granted.

Essay writing? I noticed on your blog that you say you keep Orphans by Charles D’ Ambrosio close.

I love his relationship with the city, how he explores the streets and treats Seattle like a complex character. I’m interested in writing about my relationship with New Orleans, because we’re staying here, but it’s requiring a lot of trust and faith in government and the people who make cities work. A city got destroyed by broken levees and it’s going to take the next ten years to build it again.

You really have to see New Orleans firsthand to believe what happened, how profound the damage is. My son played on a club soccer team and only three of the kids on it didn’t lose their homes. But they were boys and they didn’t cry. They did get a record number of red cards for fighting. None of us knew how to absorb what happened.

The water came in so fast and then it stayed, and everyone just kind of soldiered through. Everyone looked out for their families and families took in families and people reached out, people let people reach out and it’s just mind-boggling. I feel, even three years later, like all the sadness and all the grief from the storm is being stored in the back of my brain right now, and it isn’t yet ready to let it go.

You evacuated to Houston following Hurricane Katrina?

We did. My son and I went to Houston for four months so he could go to school, while my husband lived in Baton Rouge with his son and daughter-in-law and their newborn. My son’s high school had ten feet of water, so 400 of the boys from Jesuit in New Orleans were taken in

by Strake Jesuit in Houston. They went to school from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m.

A perfect schedule for a teenage boy.

Was it tempting to write about the experience? “How it Floods” was the only story about a hurricane? ( Note: It wasn’t about Katrina).

“How it Floods” was written back in 2000, and the book was put to bed right after Katrina, so it’s not about The Hurricane, but it’s prescient. We’d had evacuations in the city before. I remember getting in my car one night and crossing the Causeway at 3 a.m. and being a part of that exodus, but we were all back in the next morning, which is what we thought was going to happen with Katrina. I did some essay writing after the storm, but I got really jammed up. Blocked. I’m just now starting to set stories post–Katrina, in this new landscape, but it’s still hard. There are tens of thousands of houses that are empty, hundreds of hundreds of blocks that are empty, especially in New Orleans because most of the flooding happened in Orleans Parish.

I didn’t know how to get my arms around such a catastrophe, so I wrote short, scattered pieces and I’m collaging them into a novel. I want to write about tensions that Katrina brought about: moms who took the kids away to towns with schools while the dads stayed back at home to work, how families and pets piled in with relatives, how the elderly were forced to live in FEMA trailers.

Sorry to bring up such bad memories.

I don’t mind. I don’t want people to forget about the city. This is a really beautiful place down here.

Were you tempted to stay away?

Yes. We were. You think you have a clean slate, because you’ve lost your city, you’ve lost your grocery stores and your kids’ schools and your churches and all of that. I mean in your head the moon’s a balloon and you think you could live anywhere. Where do you want to go? Do you want to go to San Francisco; do you want to go to New York? But we wanted to come back here. I mean this really is the relationship that people have with this town. It would have been like a really terrible break up to leave. It’s a romance. The city doesn’t always treat us well, but I don’t think anybody wants to divorce.

Silent 40

We came home four months later. Moved right back into our house.

We had to get our roof fixed but we didn’t have flooding because we’re on a narrow ridge. There was nothing open in the neighborhood, but little by little my part of town is rebounding. Anything that opens up is a cause for celebration -- the pizza place, the ice cream parlor, the video store. We don’t take anything for granted anymore. You get to see and appreciate how cities work, by seeing one deconstructed. You understand what makes a fragile and diverse city like New Orleans so valuable and inimitable, so tough.

Two of the stories seemed a different tone. “Intermediate Goals” and “Stop”. Are there periods that you’ve gone through, that you can identify with from reading your writing?

It’s interesting you mention divorce. A lot of these stories were about adultery or divorce.

In a previous interview you said, “I try to listen to what the characters say and to what they leave out. I try to explore what they leave out through sensory details.” One of the things that I enjoyed about your writing was the subtlety.

Some writers seem to punch the reader in the face with what they’re saying. How do you balance those two extremes and make sure that the reader still gets it?

I was trying to look at those subjects from different angles, to understand the impact that affairs and divorce have on different characters. I try not to judge behaviors in my work. It’s easy to think: Mistress = bad. Father in affair = bad. It’s more interesting to me to walk in the shoes of a character who’s having one, and why? Is it about sex or is it about bridging to a parent who’s having one? Is it about ending or enlivening a relationship?

Yes, that’d be true. The stories feel like an archaeology of different tensions and worries and wants and preoccupations that I’ve experienced over the past ten or fifteen years. Not places I could return to, but stops I’m glad I made.

In terms of being subtle, I figure the reader’s probably three steps ahead of me, so I don’t have to over explain. Gestures do a lot of the work, and external details like weather and sounds and smells. They add layers. I do find when I’m uncomfortable about something, I tend to move through it really quickly or just kind of sidestep it. So after I’ve got the draft done, I go back and poke at the areas that I skimmed over. That’s inevitably where the trouble is. Then I go in there and try to make things worse, really screw things up, bring in another character, yet another problem before I throw ropes.

What’s important to you in discovering a character?

“Someone’s Flowered Dress” comes to mind and “Running the Room”. Do you come up with the situation first or do you have the characters in mind?

Well in “Someone’s Flowered Dress” the notion of a 30-day husband seemed like a really interesting idea. What would that feel like? How do you move around in that? How do you follow the rules? How do you feel those other 11-months? “Running the Room” I wrote when I was in graduate school. The New Orleans setting is important to that story because the errant couple does a lot of driving around and they’re noticing the prettiness of the city, the freshness and possibility of a free night out. I had the idea of a mom asking her daughter to be complicit in a love affair. How that would feel to the daughter, how that would feel to the mother, making her kid her accomplice, and how that would feel to the daughter’s husband. To answer your question, with those two stories, the situation first. The what-ifness.

Their dirt. Their desires and shames and dreams. When the daughter goes to see her father and his mistress who’s singing his opera, it isn’t melodrama. The daughter doesn’t yell, “Bastard!” She notices the nuances of the father with his lover, of how comfortable and natural and unfurtive they look together. I tried to describe what she’s feeling as her own affair is ending by honoring the richness of her father’s relationship, which is an inversion of her own. It wasn’t standing up and saying ‘How could you do this to mom.’ It’s more like, ‘What they have is so private and I’m filled by their affair, but not by my own.’

As a reader, that was not the direction I thought it was going to go in. You don’t expect a daughter to be an accomplice in her father’s affair. I liked that it went that way.

I think I’d written a draft that was a lot more melodramatic.

I had the mother there at the opera, I had the sister there, the sister’s husband, and they were all sitting and watching and I had to deal with all of these different reactions. I wanted to give the mother dignity in the story, too, because once she hears the tape of them speaking in Italian it’s over. Anything more would be kind of maudlin and self-indulgent for the writer, and humiliating for the mother. What might’ve dragged on longer in real life got stopped when it needed to in the story.

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“A Man” was a great story and also tragic. It seems different in tone from all the rest of the stories.

I read about a woman who had both of her arms cut off and was left for dead in a desert. I don’t normally take my stories from the news, but I did with that story. I wanted to understand how it felt to lose a limb and fall in love with the man who saves you, whom you can’t have. The ending came suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere: the presumptuousness of forgiving someone who wasn’t asking for your forgiveness.

You’ve contributed to several magazines and you’re a contributing editor to Narrative. Has that helped the writing?

Back when I was in graduate school, I read for Mississippi Review and when you read 300 submissions, you understand pretty quickly what’s working and what’s not and when stories own you and where they fall apart. The undeniable stories are just that. Opening paragraphs are critical. Every sentence pushing the story keeps me reading. You have to keep the editor reading! Even a worried one like me who’s afraid of giving up on something too soon. There are stories that are 70 percent there, and you want to get behind the writer and push them over the finish line, but that’s not the editor’s job. I’ve learned a lot from reading submissions: get to the point quickly, then, remember the point.

You had gone to graduate school, right?

I got about 15 hours in and then stopped because I had a middle school kid and I wanted to be home with him rather than driving late at night on the highway between New Orleans and Hattiesburg worried about running over shredded tires. I loved graduate school.

I love the workshop environment. I just did a guest workshop with high school students at the New Orleans Center For Creative Arts, and it’s fun to be on the listening/guiding end of having a short story discussed.

What’s the novel you’re working on about?

The novel I was writing before Katrina had to be reset into this new landscape because I didn’t want to romanticize New Orleans, but that turned the plot pretty much on its head. I thought it was going to be about a daughter trying to figure out her parents, but I’m not so interested in that territory anymore. Lately, I’m interested in writing about teenagers, about mistakes and near misses, alcohol and drugs and fresh sex, how kids dealt with the grief of losing everything to Katrina, about parents who have these promising, risk-taking creatures you can enjoy as adults, sure, but who you still have to shepherd home via text messages so they make curfew, get off the streets, and you can sleep. Some of it I’ll be making up.

Silent 42

Preview: Ex-mobster Jimmy Calandra Tells the Story of The Bath Avenue Boys The getaway car came to a screeching halt in the intersection just past a red light. Jimmy Calandra and Joey Calco, two wannabe Wiseguys still in their mid-teens, had just committed their first murder only five blocks away.

Unfortunately, a cop just happened to be stopped around the corner at the intersection. The screeching tires caught his attention and he hit his police lights. After shooting Mikey Hamster five times, Calco had handed the gun off to Calandra and now Calandra’s knuckles went white around the .380 as the cop approached the car.

Calandra stashed the gun out of sight just as the cop flashed a light into the car.

Calco was told to get his license and registration. As Calco leaned towards the glove box, his eyes met Calandra’s. Static sounded over the cop’s radio, followed by a report of a shooting on 17th Avenue.

The cop rested his hand on the hilt of his revolver.

The cop said, “You know what this is kid?” Calco looked to the cop’s hip. He didn’t answer. He didn’t even breathe. “This is your lucky day.” Without checking Calco’s license, the cop left and sped off to the murder scene that Calco and Calandra had just fled.

Jimmy Calandra would become a mob informant for the FBI and testify against Anthony Spero, the head of the Bonnano family, ultimately putting Spero away for life. Calandra would go on to refuse phase two of the witness protection program, but says today he doesn’t live his life in fear.

But before all of that, Calandra was just a kid who’d moved to Bath Avenue with his mother, who was newly separated from his alcoholic father. “Basically, back then Bath Avenue was known as a mob related area with all of the five families,” Calandra said. “I looked up to these guys.” By age eight he was doing petty thefts for the mob and dealing drugs. His gang of friends became known as the Bath Avenue Crew and graduated to bank robberies and murders. As Calandra got older he’d rub elbows with Sammy “The Bull,” John Gotti and become a regular guest at Anthony Spero’s dinner table: he became a part of the family.

Read the full story coming soon to SilentCityMag.com

Preview: John Holbrook’s Death Row Photography .

P h o t o s by J o h n H o l b r o o k

The images of Catherine Crews would come back to haunt John Holbrook. They were taken in the ditch where her body was found; bits of leaves and debris had gathered around the bloody mess in her forehead and become stuck like flies in honey. Holbrook was an investigator at the time, on the defense team for James Lee Clark, the man who bound, raped and murdered Crews. It’d be years later before Holbrook realized how the images affected him.

Then he began to experience Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

He started to take pictures himself. He had all of the hi-tech equipment from surveillance as a private detective. Why not?

Holbrook began to take pictures of the homeless and during color correction he messed up. He overcorrected and the effect put a halo around the head of one of his subjects. The pictures, he found, were an attempt to correct the horrible images he’d seen of Crews. Some of these images became part of, “Jesus 2000,” an internationally acclaimed exhibit in New York that went on to tour galleries throughout the world.

At the moment, Holbrook is photographing inmates on Death Row, in Texas and Florida. People who were supportive of his photography before—priests, friends and family— are now angry.

When he was approached by Amnesty International to contribute to “Voices From Death Row” in Oslo, Norway one name brought up was James Lee Clark. Clark was next in line on Death Row when Amnesty International spoke to Holbrook. On April 11, 2007 James Lee Clark was executed by the state of Texas. A few days later, Holbrook’s adopted son was born.

As an investigator Holbrook found, to circumvent red tape laid down for the media, that he could join the legal counsel of the inmates. His first assignment was to find a witness—a mystery man who may or may not have ever existed—in Corpus Christi.

Read the full story coming soon to SilentCityMag.com

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City 43

Knockemstiff by Donald Ray Pollock R eviewed by J oel T homas

Years ago, folks in hilly southern Ohio wrote ballads of heartbreak and sinners, of good men ruined by whisky and bad men ensnared by love. In his debut short fiction collection Knockemstiff, Donald Ray Pollock continues in that tradition. His characters, the residents of Knockemstiff, Ohio, find themselves bedeviled by whisky, beer, and all kinds of sex, of course, but also more modern demons.

While Knockemstiff’s stories of a semi-Southern grotesque way of life draw easy comparisons to Flannery O’Connor and Harry Crews, the characters’ chemicallyinduced mental fogginess and narrative tones steeped in depravity will remind some readers of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, among others. In Knockemstiff, people pop speed pills, huff whatever’s available, and bulk up on ‘roids until they burst. Knockemstiff turns the notion of simplicity and “good country folk” as a central element of rural small town life on its head.

Knockemstiff’s less than finest abuse substances almost as much as they abuse each other. Fathers and husbands tower as the worst offenders. Pollock’s first story, “Real Life,” introduces one such abuser. Vernon drunkenly picks fights with his wife, son, and strangers alike. More characters follow similar codes of conduct, but plenty show off other forms of violence. Sometimes the damage comes as a way of killing time -- good ol’ boys throwing darts at a slow-witted chubby boy who craves the attention, for example. In other pieces, though, the violence takes a meaner tone, with cruel abuse turning into physical and sexual torture that ruins lives.

Pollock’s protagonists themselves tend to witness or receive the undeserved punishment more than they dish it out. The author often introduces sensitive souls misunderstood by the surrounding barbarians. By narrating stories of depressed brutality and raw, unsophisticated hedonism through the perspectives of gentler eyes, Pollock provides firsthand accounts while portraying the ranges of anger, sadness, frustration, and family tradition in which so much of the abuse wraps itself.

In the aforementioned “Real Life,” Vernon’s son and favorite target, Bobby, recalls a childhood event through his adult point of view. He presents gritty realism tinged with the psychological complexities of a young boy wrestling with issues of machismo while besieged by his father’s cruelty. Likewise, “Schott’s Bridge” focuses on a central character whose naivety and curiosity deliver him into predatorial hands eager to destroy him.

Even with many of the stories centered around stubborn violent men dominating more transparent sympathetic characters, Pollock introduces only one major female protagonist. The middle-aged, wistful Sharon in “Rainy Sunday” isn’t even one of the terribly oppressed characters. She cares for her mentally ill husband who harms himself rather than her, and she occasionally helps her Aunt Joan troll for men at local bars and donut shops.

Perhaps as a reflection of Knockemstiff’s local culture, most female characters in the collection of stories remain relegated to traditional mother/nurturer roles and/or sex objects. Still, they aren’t stiff mannequins who only serve Pollock’s often bizarre plots. Readers meet women in Knockemstiff who prove to be as interesting and complex as any of the boys, men, and man-boys who live with and lust after them.

One such compelling female character emerges in Geraldine, referred to by her lover Del (through whose point of view their stories are told) as “Fish Stick Girl.”

The narrator explains that “even though she was probably the best woman Del Murray had ever been with – gobs of bare-knuckle sex, the latest psychotropic drugs, a government check – he was still embarrassed to be seen with her in public” because of her mental illness, which manifested itself frequently. People nicknamed Geraldine after her trademark antic, passing out cold greasy fish sticks she kept in her purse. In one story, “Fish Sticks,” Pollock weaves her fascinating personality into a story where her plot line isn’t even the strangest part of the story. Later in the collection, he brings her back in “Assailants,” where from Del’s point of view, she’s become more of a respectable woman and nagging nurturer than a bizarre sex doll.

When portraying the area’s residents, women and men alike, Donald Ray Pollock incorporates an aspect of life shared by many characters: the issue of staying in or leaving Knockemstiff, Ohio. Several declare or bemoan their inability to leave or escape. In “I Start Over,” middle-aged lifelong resident Big Bernie Givens groans that he feels “stuck in southern Ohio like the smile on a dead clown’s ass,” one of Pollock’s many great lines.

The issue may remind some readers of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio another book of short stories based on another small Ohio town. However, whereas Winesburg’s young residents all seem to dream of leaving, Pollock presents his readers with varying views expressed by his community’s members. Some believe themselves stuck, but their own demons keep them in town. Two of the characters, for example, steal a large supply of speed they plan to sell so they can leave town, but can’t seem to stop pilfering from their own supply.

On the other hand, a few people express fear of leaving the holler, a fear that leads them to surrender or willingly dive into depravity that helps them escape. As one of them points out, “forgetting our lives might be the best we’ll ever do.” In “Dynamite Hole,” one teenager becomes so afraid of leaving that rather than obey the draft board and serve in World War II, he flees into rough, uninhabited country and stays there long after the war is over, never truly returning to his own society.

Those who do leave generally find themselves in unenviable situations with unsavory characters. Two teen boys go to Florida, only to find themselves turning tricks to survive. Another teen boy hitch-hikes out of town with an ill-intentioned trucker. Readers find that of those who leave, most eventually return. Pollock’s protagonists find that the transgressive prey on the innocent and slightly less depraved everywhere, and while the Knockemstiff locale proves to be no different, at least it’s home.

Silent 44

Hiding Out R eviewed by J oel T homas

Perhaps because he himself reviews books for a living, Jonathan Messinger probably understands that his book will be initially judged by its cover. With a title like Hiding Out and a picture of a plainly dressed twentysomething lying on a hardwood floor with his face against the wall, the cover suggests that readers can expect a collection of short stories featuring coyly confessional hipbut-awkward young adults. We ready ourselves for literary descendants of Ichabod Crane and J. Alfred Prufrock who slink into low-budget movies and listen to Sufjan Stevens.

The stories themselves, however, introduce an array of characters and adventures with no easily-labeled typical protagonist. Sure, Messinger provides a shy romantically-challenged office worker, a lovesick robot-costumed geek, and a high school poet. But we also find a rude angel, daydreaming Chinese factory workers, a compassionate janitor who becomes a rescue worker, a family of kung fu instructors, and a wolf-hunter.

Interestingly, Messinger recently published a pseudo-expert essay (not included in the book) on kung fu strategies for defeating wolves. He laughs when I ask, based on my reading of the two stories and the essay, how much of his writing is autobiographical. “It’s not very autobiographical, really. I tend to take a kernel from real life, then build a story’s vision around that.” Two of Messinger’s obsessions, he clarifies, are wolves and kung fu. He studied martial arts for 15 years, but “Winged Attack,” about a father and son who both teach kung fu, isn’t about anyone he knows. Instead, it’s based on his observation that “there’s this whole culture that goes into martial arts schools...a strange atmosphere all about controlled violence and trust.” His wolf fixation is less experience-based, but he’s fascinated nonetheless. “For me, and a lot of writers, we have these topics, themes, obsessions, and the only way to get over them is

to address them,” he discloses.

With such diverse characters on display, Hiding Out’s stories themselves range from realism to absurdity. The aforementioned wolf fiasco in “Not Even the Zookeeper Can Keep Control” offers a satire on human nature bordering on a Twilight Zone kind of bizarre. On the other hand, stories like “The Birds Below” feel so real that one wonders if Messinger only changed the names. In that particular piece, the author shares, only the environment—a tree-lined suburban alley near his childhood home—is based on a particular place and time. “One Valve Opens,” according to Messinger not based on anyone in particular, reads so real that some readers have challenged the propriety of a story centered around a black high school poet written by a white author. “That’s the one I get asked about the most in a ‘what do you know?’ kind of way,” the writer informs me. “I think the implication is kind of racist, like those people are saying that black people and white people are such different creatures that I could never understand a black character.”

In addition to the “Julius” character, Messinger takes more risks throughout Hiding Out. The writer pushes against readers’ boundaries through choices in narrative voice and other prose techniques. For example, he writes “You Can Never Forget” in second person, pulling it off through relatable characters and psychological massaging. In “We Will All Write A Poem,” Messinger directly addresses the reader while telling his story, both inviting and commanding participation.

The variety of styles and voices gives the collection both breadth and depth.

Messinger notes that when he compiled stories for Hiding Out, the selection diversity played a role. As a book review editor, Messinger explains, “I read a lot of short story collections. I get tired of short story collections where authors limit themselves to a very specific theme or style. I think that if you want someone to read [the collection], you want them to read the whole thing. If by the fifth story, it all sounds the same, then the reader might not keep reading.” Using a music analogy, he expounds, “I thought of it as putting together an album. My favorite albums are very far-reaching in their style and attempt to do various things, but somehow they’re able to connect and tie together.”

The album-building comparison begs the question, which artists have most influenced Messinger’s writing? “The Flaming Lips,” he replies, especially for their “aesthetic of accessible experimentation” and “how seriously they take the performer-audience relationship.” He also finds much to emulate in the music of Jonathan Richman, both solo and with the Modern Lovers, because of Richman’s ability to blend “extreme goofiness with sincerity” in particular. The stories in Hiding Out feature plenty of both.

Holmes

R eviewed by M . G .

F

eaturing a graphic novel because its creator happens to share a name with the city that this magazine is based in is something of a stretch. Luckily, Omaha Perez created a fun and noteworthy re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes with his graphic novel, Holmes.

In Perez’s alternate, illustrated version of the classic detective story, Holmes snorts drugs, huffs ether and smokes opium as Perez exploits the fact that in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories Holmes partook in drug use, but only as recreation between cases. In this respect Perez’s version is more realistic, and is closely related to the movie From Hell in which Johny Depp plays a Victorianera sleuth with an opium addiction, although his character’s name is not Sherlock Holmes.

Perez crafts Holmes into a character that is all Id, a crazy frenzy of fornication and partying.

Kinetically, the story resembles a gonzo journey: Holmes becomes Raul Duke (Hunter S. Thompson) and Watson becomes Dr. Gonzo as they stumble through Victorian England rather than the Las Vegas of the 1960’s to locate a head stolen from Joseph Haydn’s decomposing body by phrenologists eager to study the famed composers genius.

One expansive illustration, featuring London Bridge as a backdrop, even has Holmes crazyeyed and yelling, “This is bat country, you fool!”

The few pages of illustrations created using a scratchboard technique are impressive, exhaustingly created and not to be missed. Overall, while glancing at the rest of the illustrations the character work may seem stilted and elementary in comparison to the scratchboard panels.

However, The text and images mesh perfectly to contribute to Perez’s askew view of Holmes.

Web Exclusive Panels from Holmes on SilentCityMag.com

City 45

Rosewater

R eviewed by M . G .

Alexei Gural’s independently produced graphic novel, Rosewater, takes place on an Earth on the brink of apocalypse where angels live as human beings in quasi-human form.

They look like humans, they live like humans, they die like humans, but they still have certain angelic powers depending on how much of their cherubic life they choose to hold onto. This appears to vary depending on how many human vices the angel partakes in during their time on Earth.

Jacqueline, a member of the world-famous band Rosewater, has very few of her divine powers left after partaking in copious drug use and a serious attempt at suicide.

Anna awakes in a desert with a head injury that has caused amnesia.

Jacqueline discovers Anna in the desolation and takes her under wing into the lone house in the landscape. Jacqueline reveals that they are actually in Georgia and that the rest of the world has taken on the same sandy appearance in what is referred to as “The Disintegration.” Keep in mind Rosewater was written long before M. Night Shymalan cleverly named his pretentious movie The Happening. During The Disintegration, buildings, humans and other tangibles begin turning into sand.

The only beings seemingly strong enough to survive this disaster were angels. As the story unfolds, it becomes apparent that the band Rosewater was the cause of it all and the world’s only hope, or ultimate destruction, lies with the band’s elusive and unstable lead singer, Rose. Turns out Jacqueline just so happens to be a member of Rosewater, and she and Anna embark on a cross-country trip to get the band back together.

The unique thing about Rosewater is that Gural, a collage artist, used live models for each of the scenes and then added an illustrative tinge to all of the photographs in a Photoshop-like program. The models were mostly shot in one apartment and then added to the backgrounds after the fact, but this lends to the overall comic book feel of the altered photographs. This method is probably what allowed Gural to produce the prolific illustrations in the 317-page novel by himself without losing sanity.

Occasionally, some of the details in smaller panels are overwhelmed by black, as if Gural was trying to create too much mood, or obscure too many background details. Sometimes it leaves the reader squinting, trying to decipher the subtleties.

There are no dialogue bubbles and occasionally the uniform lettering looks amateurish and too computer-generated. The dialogue itself is often overburdened with exposition and melodrama.

Even with those faults, Rosewater will keep your attention through most of the 317-pages, and it is a quick read, but at times, it seems like selfindulgence dreamed up by a heroin-addicted musician. Yes, only music has the power to unleash destruction upon, or provide salvation to the world.

Finally, someone reaffirms that the movie Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey was not just conjecture. Then again, a few of the models work nicely. Model/ actor Rebecca Van Dam, posing as Anna, has the perfect mix of facial expressiveness for the two dimensional role of the innocent amnesiac waking to apocalypse.

I will say this in all honesty, while re-reading the graphic novel for this review, an eruption of blood gushed profusely from my nose ruining several pages of the graphic novel before I could stem it.

Rosewater might just be that awesome, the kind of awesome that makes you bleed. Then again maybe my home needs a humidifier. Either way, Gural’s future work is worth keeping an eye out for as he matures as a graphic novelist.

Sons of the Rapture R eviewed by J oel T homas

At first browse, Todd Dills’ Sons of the Rapture appears easy to classify as part of a new wave of Southern Grotesque.

The basic elements are all here: distempered South Carolinian family members struggling under inherited insanity and wealth; underlying racial and sexual tensions seeking to explode; deeply flawed characters willing to perform extreme feats while attempting redemption.

In fact, Featherproof Books uses “the road to redemption is littered” as the marketing tagline for Sons of the Rapture. The book’s structure itself starts off somewhat reminiscent of Faulkner, the first half using various viewpoints to drive the plot a la As I Lay Dying. One of them is even a “crazy” son character with distorted prose requiring a little Interpretation—though unlike Vardaman, he never claims “my mother is a fish.”

Given the obvious overtones, however, the story’s development itself feels more reminiscent of the Beats; but not in a Keroucian search for Zen and the Lost America sense. Rather, Dills’ prose presents hedonistic characters whose winding conversations and confusing decisions recall Richard Brautigan’s Rimbaudian tales or a Burroughs slightly less obsessed with bodily function.

The cast of personalities evoke very little empathy from the reader, but are rounded and unpredictable enough to keep us interested.

The central character, Billy Jones, is a self-indulgent “starving artist” who would be a trust fund kid if not (surprise) estranged from father. He’s moved from South Carolina to Chicago, where he writes, drinks, shoots alley rats, and spends his time with romantic interests and a bisexual Latino block party musician called Artichoke Heart. His father Johnny and his father’s old pals, along with brother Bobby, drive the novel’s surreal Southern scenes with the requisite amount of drunkenness, debauchery, and violence necessary. Dills paints their personalities through first-person prose equal parts homespun rambling and friendly vulgar confession. One character begins his tale, “My mother was a crazy whore,” while another obsesses over a Rapture he’s convinced will leave him behind. A Mexican cowboy named Ariel rounds out the major characters, and provides perspective on an event that no reader would expect after the first half of the novel: a cattle drive.

Even without a clear-cut protagonist readers can cheer for, Dills inserts an indirect antagonist in Thorpe Storm. In his characterization, Storm will remind some readers of longtime South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond.

Senator Storm is a longtime enemy of both father and son, who decry his racism and abuses of power while observing his shrewdness. Occasionally, characters also reference an inept president without naming names. Sons of the Rapture is not a political book, however, and the friction between the Johnsons and Thorpe Storm has little to do with politics.

The plot Dills sets in motion wanders along slowly, allowing the reader to observe characters as they wallow through life and tell stories about other characters to hint at what’s ahead. With such wild characters beginning the novel in varying locations, forward-thinking readers might quickly come to expect that the story will culminate in a million dollar bash that careens past believability. Dills does not disappoint.

Silent 46

Hunter s .

Thompson C o n v e r sat ions with

I

BY KEVIN SIMONSON

conoclast Hunter S. Thompson needs no introduction. The outlandish originator of Gonzo journalism commandeered the international literary spotlight with his numerous best sellers, including Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell’s Angels. Even those who have never read his work have probably been exposed to Gary Trudeau’s Thompson-inspired “Duke” character in Doonesbury, or perhaps seen Bill Murray (Where the Buffalo Roam) and Johnny Depp (Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas) portraying Thompson in the movies.

Conversations with Hunter S. Thompson, the latest addition to the University Press of Mississippi Literary Conversations Series (written and edited by Beef Torrey and myself ) is the first book compilation of selected personal interviews that trace the trajectory of his highly visible, widely-publicized, prolific writing career.

Accounts of Thompson’s anomalous behavior, sinister shenanigans and menacing persona are wildly strewn throughout the mass media.

Thompson displayed an uncanny flair for inserting himself into the epicenter of major socio-political events of his generation, and his provocative commentary has reached millions of readers.

The engaging exchanges contained in Conversations with Hunter S. Thomson reveal Thompson’s self-determination, selfindulgence, energy, wit and passions as he discusses his life and career. They reveal the intriguing development of the infamous outlaw journalist’s raging, wild mind and his unique contribution to American literature.

I first met Hunter over 15 years ago when I booked him to speak at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. We subsequently became friends and I interviewed him for several magazines including SPIN, HUSTLER, the Aspen Daily Times and the Village Voice.

Hunter turned out to be a consistent ally and accomplice. He was generous with his Wild Turkey and I would get occasional carepackages in the mail (including dress shirts and a set of crystal wine glasses - of which I’ve broken all but one). I sometimes miss his predawn phone calls.

And at times…he could be less than a perfect friend. In Lincoln, he stole a robe from the Cornhusker Hotel and stuck me with the bill.

And then again..sometimes the pre-dawn phone calls weren’t always that much fun.

Walking into Owl Farm felt like entering a surreal museum. A machine gun was propped up against the side of his large screen TV. A butcher knife protruded from a door frame. The kitchen walls were (and still are) covered with 30 years of Gonzo memorabilia: several original Ralph Steadman paintings, photos of Bill Murray on the fridge, a rubber Nixon mask, dozens of newspaper articles (one, believe it or not, from The Fremont Tribune) and Scotch-taped notes.

One note, undoubtedly meant for one of Thompson’s assistant’s read:

“Moths….Millions of hungry moths. They will destroy all of our wool clothes by Labor day if we give them free reign. We must kill moths.

Get bug lights, mothballs, screens, Raid….many cans.”

In his bestselling book Songs of the Doomed, Thompson recounts his battle with Aspen authorities after a former pornographic film producer accused him of sexual assault. Thompson was facing misdemeanor charges of both simple and sexual assault (a twisted left nipple), marijuana possession, four counts of felony drug possession and use, and one count of possessing illegal explosives.

Said Thompson of the whole ordeal: “Basically, this is Germany in 1935.” He called himself “a victim of selective, malicious prosecution”… which was absolutely true. The Aspen authorities were out to get him and he needed help.

The case against Thompson was weakened considerably when I reported in The Village Voice and The Aspen Daily Times that the porn producer hadn’t asked authorities to investigate the incident at all and that she felt coerced by a District Attorney into pressing the assault charges. This information-coupled with sloppy police work and uncooperative witnesses-left the District Attorney’s office no choice but to surrender. All charges were dropped.

Hunter reciprocated by including me on the “Kingdom of Fear Honor Roll” in his 2003 memoir Kingdom of Fear.

I made my last trip to Woody Creek on August 20th, 2005, when I was invited back to Owl Farm to attend the infamous Hunter S. Thompson Memorial. At 8:46 that evening, Hunter’s ashes were blown out of a mortar, perched atop a 15-story Gonzo fist (two feet taller than the Statue of Liberty….). Other guests included Johnny Depp, Bill Murray, Ralph Steadman, Senators John Kerrey and George McGovern, Jann Wenner, Ed Bradley, Harry Dean Stanton and Lyle Lovett.

Co-author Beef Torrey lives on a small farm near Crete, Nebraska. He is the editor of Conversations with Thomas McGuane (University Press of Mississippi, 2006), and co-editor of Jim Harrison: A Comprehensive Bibliography (forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press).

His articles, essays and reviews have appeared in Firsts Magazine, Foreword, Independent Publisher, among others, and numerous scholarly and professional journals.

Conversations with Hunter S. Thompson will be published in June of 2008. The Literary Conversation Series publishes collections of interviews with notable modern writers. The roster includes Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and Ernest Hemingway.

Besides my interviews, the book will include articles that originally appeared in The Paris Review, Playboy, American Journalism Review, the Boston Globe Magazine, the Denver Rocky Mountain News and Atlantic Online – to name a few.

City 47

Simonson: What does your writing routine consist of?

Thompson: It’s very unusual that you arrive here on the same day as my box [of X-rated tapes]. I use these things for mood-setters to get in the rhythm of working. Caligula’s one of my all-time favorites.

I think I’ve suffered a general dip in adrenaline production and I’m addicted to my own adrenaline usually.

Do you still crank everything out on your typewriter or have you started using a computer?

I don’t like the little screen. It’s good for short stuff, but I think in terms of tangible weight. If I could get a big screen and show ten pages at once, but that kind of defeats the purpose. I really think computers are only as smart as the person who programs it, and I’d have to program the damn thing myself in order for it to meet my needs.

I had a girlfriend come out here and help you finish Songs of the Doomed, but she only lasted three days. Why do you have such a difficult time keeping editorial assistants around?

It’s my eternal quest for an editorial assistant or assistants. I need a staff of about six. I need a staff and apparently it’s become too onerous for people in this country. I’ve been interviewing people out here for I don’t know how long. Many people want to work out here, but many are too afraid.

I’m looking for a girl who is fast and vicious. She must be fun and smart. The real question is, of course: can she type? We can narrow this down pretty quick.

I’ve got a catalog of mail-order brides I’m currently considering bringing over. Right now English isn’t so important-I just need an Assistant. It’s a dating service, of sorts.

later on.” He said he’d try to do it, but I was scheduled for third. I replied, “Well Frank, if that happens, you know I’ll get drunk and mean. I’ll bring four huge thugs over there and they’re going to hold Letterman down while I shave his head on camera.”

Letterman has never liked me-he loses control of the show.

Letterman’s kind of a chickenshit.

The next day I was informed nothing could be done so I said, “You know what’s going to happen. I’ve been up all night and I’m nuts already. If I come over there and drink heavily, you know shaving the head might be all the humor I can find that afternoon.” Later, Letterman abruptly canceled it, and he had to talk, shovel smoke for 20 minutes, rather than have me on there.

Don’t you have a pretty impressive collection of robes you’ve stolen from hotels around the country?

I pay for those robes! They always go on the bill. They put them on there for $75 a piece.

The New York Times called you a “bitterly disillusioned idealist.”

Do you agree with this assessment?

Yeah. But so what? That comes with the territory, and it’s not bad company. They could have called me a “rich and joyful cynic”-like Ivan Boesky or George Bush. I take a certain pleasure in being a bitterly disillusioned idealist. It’s not as bad as it sounds. Maybe I’m just a romance junkie born addicted to the love and adventure ethic - cursed and burdened and stooped all my life from carrying the albatross of the “Romantic Sensibiltiy” - like Shelley and Keats and Lord Byron and Big Sam Coleridge and Keith Richards and Bob Dylan.

All those people went nuts, Doc. Is that what you’re trying to say? That you’re going insane?

Not me. Jocko. I am a brutal Southern gentlemen who somehow got into politics. There was no avoiding it, then or now. They are backing us out of our holes - and you know what happens then.

Would you have to marry them before you put them to work?

I’m not sure…I’m checking into that.

(perusing catalog) Kimberly from England looks like she could type.

Someone from Bangkok might work, too. I like Philippinos.

Why was your last David Letterman appearance cancelled?

Well, I’ve been on there two or three times. I hate to go over there to the studio and hang around for two or three hours. I get drunk and mean, pacing around for that long.

The producer called me up the day before I was scheduled and said, “Hunter, you’re going to be a good boy? You’re going to be nice this time?” And I said. “Yeah, Frank, don’t worry about it, as long as I can go on first. That way you don’t have to worry about my behavior

SIMONSON: On one of my visits to Owl Farm, I had noticed a peculiar Hunter-scrawled note taped to the refrigerator.

This same memo-in Hunter’s distinctive handwriting-was emblazoned on the cocktail napkins at Thompson’s memorial.

Silent 48

Shoptalk is a new segment that pits artists from various art forms together and eavesdrops on their conversation

Mark Booker

David Matysiak

C reator of the feature film I m i t a t i o n Lif e , actor in T h e W r e t c h e d and W a t c h O u t

C reator of T elephono , in the bands C oyote B ones , and R ump P osse

P hoto by M ark K resl

P hoto by N ik F ackler

Booker and Matysiak first met on the set of Nik Fackler’s Lovely Still, which was shot in Omaha. They agreed to be Silent City’s test subjects for a new “Shop Talk” (currently taking better name suggestions) segment. What follows are portions of their original conversation, held in early July at Caffeine Dreams. For the full transcript visit SilentCityMag.com.

[Like all good conversations this one began with a lengthy discussion about beards. We’ll fast-forward to the middle of this.]

Mark Booker:

Yeah you’ve got a beard in there, but you’re

beardless now.

David Matysiak: I am. I just shaved two days ago for the first time in forever…

MB: DM: MB: DM: MB: DM: MB: DM:

How big?

It never gets too big. It’s just that it’s always getting to that point where it’s a maintenance beard.

Gotcha. You can’t really tell, but mine always grows in really red.

Mine too, I’m waiting for it to grow back.

So Telephono?

I was just on the phone talking about Telephono, which is the first telephone interview I’ve done for Telephono.

There’s a lot of stuff being written about it right now.

Yeah, I’m my own publicist. All I’ve really done is send out press releases to people, which I think is cool. I hope people are embracing it for the same reasons that I’m excited about it. It’s a project that everybody can be a part of. It’s not like, “I’m cool because I’m this and you’re that.” It doesn’t divide people. So the NPR thing comes out on Sunday, the weekend edition. Then Paste, the magazine, is going to do something on it. So that’s cool and it was in the USA Today.

MB:

You’re getting a lot of attention and it’s a really ambitious project. Why so much? That takes a lot of time and effort. Why would you want to do it in the first place. It’s a great idea, but you had to know it was going to be huge.

DM:

I like to keep busy. I was at the Bemis [Center for Contemporary Arts] so I had to pitch to them some project ideas, and one of them was to do a [music] studio down there.

I tried to get funding. I was trying to make it like Daytrotter in Omaha, but [Bemis] is a visual arts center, for the most part, so it’s really hard for them to budget for a program down there. It’s more of a projectbased thing. That kind of brought me to where I was for the last six or seven months. I started working on Telephono as this thing that I would just try and see how it works. There’s a lot of things that I didn’t know as I went into it. I knew that I didn’t want people to get hung up on the recording quality issue. Now that the vinyl is coming out, I have to reiterate that the songs that are on the vinyl were mixed and mastered so they don’t sound like crap. But for the most part, I encourage anyone who does it to use a tape recorder, a four-track or a studio. It’s more about the process than the end result, so to speak.

City 49

MB: DM:

I did something. You sent me that track. How does it get back to you?

Well so when you’re done with it you pick someone else, but you’re going to cc me on that correspondence to the next person. Then you basically pass it off. You say, “This guy Dave is going to take over from here.” So, then I’m the liaison with him. I send the mission statement, this is what I’m doing this is where we’re at, and when you’re done you get to pick someone.

MB: DM: MB: DM:

When does it stop?

I don’t think it has to stop.

When do you decide, okay this is going on the vinyl?

That’s the hardest part, trying to say that I’m curating something here, or I have to put my fingerprints all over it. That was really hard, and I just had to go with my gut. I listened to all of them, and I thought all of them were really cool, but I think the reason that this project needed to be archived on vinyl is because—I wouldn’t call them highpoints, but there were exciting moments that happened. So it’s kind of like a reel of different things that happened.

I think what I’m going to try to do with the release party, on [July] 17, is put out tapes that archive the entire process, from one end to the other. A tape is a format where you have to put effort into fastforwarding. Then there’s a CD supplement that will come with it, and then the vinyl is like cut to the chase. If you’re going to listen to Telephono check these out.

MB:

Well the stuff on the Telephono Mypsace is good in it’s own right. Under normal circumstances when an artist created this, you would label that. Like, “What the hell are you doing, that’s not your kind of music?” The fact that so many people came together, no matter what the song is, you’re just f---ing stoked that it exists. I went to listen to the songs on the Myspace. Under normal circumstance I might be like, “Ah that’s alright’ and then move on with it but when I’m listening to this and everyone created it, it’s awesome.

DM: MB:

Yeah, there’s a collaborative spirit.

That’s cool. I sent mine on to someone. I went kind of crazy with mine and I was a little bit worried at first. I thought, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t go so crazy.’ Then I just went nuts with it.

DM: MB:

You’ve got to go crazy. That’s the whole point.

So it’s in Iraq right now. It made it half way.

ent SilDM: 50

That’s f---ing—that’s the best. When I talk to Paste I’ll say we have a track in Iraq right now.

MB: DM: MB:

I think he’s sending it to someone in South Korea.

What?! Oh yeah you’ve got to CC me that guy!

I think he’s going to South Korea in three weeks, and he’s taking it with him. He loves it, and he’s a bit busy right now— obviously, being in the army and being in Iraq. I told him about it, and he said to send it. He’s a huge Tim Kasher fan, and when he heard that Tim had helped with that other song, he said send it to me. Are you worried about it getting into the hands of people like that? People that are more well known? Are you worried about that at all?

DM:

The only reason that people like Tim are on there is, because I’ve known Tim and we’re friends. Hopefully, you could listen to it blindly and it’ll still sound cool. I tried to go out of the box. I could see a criticism of the project in the beginning being that: there are a lot of people associated with the same music community, but that’s natural. I’m in Omaha, and it’s a testament to how strong this music community is, and it’s a testament to how much talent there is here. This project started with me doing every track, and I think eventually from there someone in Omaha will get in on half of them, and it will branch off. Maybe you’ll start a track next time. I’ll keep doing it in Volume Two and Three. Maybe, I’ll be fourth in the line one day. So it’s just more of an exercise it’s just something to do.

MB: DM:

How long are you going to do this? Are you hoping for a Volume Four or Volume Five?

I hope so. I’m for sure trying to get a Volume Two in the works. There’s a lot of [the songs] still out there. Some of them have some pretty slow feet on them, but I’m not in any rush. I’m just stoked that we’re having the release of the first one, and we’ll see how that goes. There are 200 of [the albums] for sale.

MB: DM: MB: DM:

This obviously takes up a lot of your time. Are you still doing Coyote Bone?

I’m still doing Coyote Bones. I’m just writing right now.

I’ve got about 15 or 20 songs right now.

For a record?

Yeah, for a record. We had a bunch of songs. They were going to put out a live tape and I kind of scrapped that idea. I thought if I was a listener of our band, would I really want to listen to a live tape as a second release? I change my answer all the time. Right now it’s no. So, we scrapped all of those songs. We were just playing a lot of songs live and got burned out playing the same stuff, wrote new ones and then got sick of those. Now, we’re just kind of taking a break, and I’m going to step in a different direction. Doing this project totally helped me write those kinds of songs for the band,

because they have a different feeling to them, and I feel a lot closer to the songs now than the old Coyote Bones songs. I still like to hear [the old songs].

MB: DM: MB: DM:

You said originally that your album felt like a bunch of songs on a record together, but it wasn’t really a record.

Exactly, it wasn’t a record. It was like a mix tape.

So now is going to be your first approach at…

Yeah, that’s the approach I’m trying to take now, putting together a cohesive record. It’s exciting. It just takes a little time. I just don’t put any deadlines on myself, because I know I’m going to keep writing until I have enough material to start putting it together.

MB: DM: MB: DM:

That seems to be a fairly common thing for you. You just let it come and let it come.

Yeah I don’t like to force stuff. I think the more you overanalyze things the more you miss out on the true…

I mean could you ever be that writer. You know, ‘Let’s get this done.’

I could, and I have been. I think for ten years I was that person with my first band Jet By Day, in Atlanta and Athens. We wanted to put a record out every year, and we had record label stuff, and touring a month or two, and that was me just being militant. You know, “We have to have the record out by this date and we have to book studio time” I was that person that kept driving everybody. When that band fell apart, I didn’t want to do that again, for some reason. I wanted to take music from a different angle.

I wanted it to be something that happens instead of me making it happen. I do kind of miss meeting a deadline, but I’m not missing it enough go where it’s going to drive me to do it again.

MB:

You said that there were other people to motivate. Record label stuff, and other people in the band, but now it’s kind of just you.

DM:

It’s kind of just me, yeah. I play with our drummer Chris and we were playing with this other guy Karl and this other guy Braden, but Coyote Bones right now I’m just trying to retool and write.

MB: DM:

Are they part of the writing process?

It’s basically just me. Mason and I started the process with the record and now he’s on the road touring with Tilly and the Wall, pretty much all the time. So it’s kind of exciting because I’ve been writing records with him for over ten years. Now I

feel like I’m kind of writing with a new voice.

City

overanalyze, garages. Yeah, you figure it out, or check out 51 the transcript online at SilentCityMag.com]

MB: DM:

MB:

MB:

DM:

What’s your writing process? How do you begin it? How does it flow? When you feel suddenly inspired…

I think about it more and I feel like Telephono’s actually changed the way I write. Now I’m not worried about what goes into this part, which goes into that other part. Now, I’ll sit down with a keyboard or guitar and play. If I’m still into it after a few seconds, or a minute, then I’ll just keep playing it and keep trying to come up with new melodies. I’ve had a lot more success than I thought I would by just trusting myself and letting it flow. I don’t listen to it after. I go onto something else and then come back maybe a week later. Then I’ll say that’s pretty good, or that’s not what I want to do.

Well the ones that you can come back to are usually the keepers. You should do like music videos for Telephono.

[Talks of crossing over to other genres with Telephono.

What genres? How? Read it online at SilentCityMag.com.]

DM:

Yep, working. Nik Fackler and me have been working on this cartoon/variety show thing that we’ve been doing for almost a year now. It’s Rump Possee, this eighties workout band.

MB: DM:

Oh yeah, I love that.

We’re trying to adapt it into something that we can actually start shooting this summer, a pilot and start pitching it in LA.

MB: DM:

It’s going to be animated?

That’s the thing is, I don’t want to get too carried away with it, it goes back and forth in what it’s going to be depending on what we see as being a lasting vision. I don’t think you can do that too much. It’s kind of jarring for someone that wants to identify with characters in a show. If it’s too A.D.D., it’s too weird, sometimes people shut it off because it’s too much. So writing it, I’m trying to find a balance there.

MB: DM: MB: DM:

I’m a big Rump Posse fan.

I’ll have to give you a call when we’re ready to shoot.

I can watch

Well if you look at all of the major musical movements in history it’s all been a communal thing. It wasn’t one artist who came out and changed the world. It was [that artist] and a ton of other people. Grunge In the early 90s. It wasn’t just Nirvana, there were a lot of people there and they all went on to do really great stuff. Hip-hop early 80s. It’s all a communal thing, and I think too many people these days, fight and fight and fight. They make fun of each other, and hate what they’re doing when they should just be celebrating the fact that everyone is doing this wonderful thing. They wonder why they’re not making it as far as hip-hop or alternative music, and that’s because they’re killing it with their negativity and their fighting. This is like a true collaborative spirit and that’s why I think it’s bound for success.

Telephono is pure. I hope people just accept it as something that they can do, that people aren’t afraid to play something, and then play it for someone else. A lot of people on this project were like, ‘Oh wow you’re putting this out! I want to do it over.’ And I’m like, ‘No you did it perfectly.’ The best part is you weren’t thinking about what was going to happen, you were doing it, and then it was done and you felt good about it. It’s cool and it was over.

A few people have told me that this was the project that woke them up. They’re like, ‘Well cool, it’s not my band, it’s not my routine so it challenges you.’ I think as musicians and artists that we get so used to critiquing other people’s work. Sometimes if you’re in a band you keep writing the same kind of song. I’m not saying that I’m not that person too, I’m just trying to break those walls down. The older you get, especially as a musician it’s just so easy to hide behind them and be like, ‘Well, I’ll just write this song again. I’m comfortable with it.’

MB:

Whether you use it as a good term, or a bad term, people are going to judge you. Telephono is a good community project.

I was recently on a film called Watch Out and it’s being billed as the most offensive film of the decade. But all of my friends, and colleagues are really questioning my judgment as to why I’m a part of this film.

It’s got a lot of sex, and a lot of violence but ultimately the story is about vanity and how vanity is going to kill entertainment. What’s funny is no one’s really told me, “This is amazing. I’m so proud that you’ve been a part of this project, because it’s going to go out there and be amazing.” They’re like, “Why are you working with something so sexual.” I’ve gotten the gauntlet of criticism for working on this project. Working with those people: They were really nice. I still get messages from the director saying thank you for being in my movie.

There just needs to be more love, you know.

DM:

Too many people are on the bench squawking. Too many sideline squawkers. When stuff like that gets in my head, I imagine a bunch of dudes in a boardroom all in suits yelling at each other, and I’m in the middle of it. I’m like you’ve all got to leave.

You can be a part of it.

[Select words from this portion of the manuscript that has been omitted for length: Hippies, Utopia, soapbox,

[Much more of the transcript is available online at SilentCityMag. com. Did we mention that? Find out more about Mark Booker’s role in Watch Out, “the most offensive film of the decade.”]

Silent 52

The Band Photography of

Tony Bonacci Bonacci’s style, that he describes as “gritty, rough and traditionally unprofessional” has been successful at producing memorable portraits of bands that have graced album covers and press kits, and subsequently the pages of SPIN and Rolling Stone.

Meet the bands: Azure Ray (top) Orenda Fink from “Invisible Ones” (left)

City 53

Tilly and the Wall (top) Bonacci’s neighbor (left)

On Cinematography: The shots never actually come out how I planned, because I shoot it clean and rugged, but then Nik Fackler colorizes the hell out of everything.

– Bonacci jokes.

O

maha’s own Tony Bonacci has photographed plenty of bands and musicians in his day. The growing list includes: Tilly and the Wall, Azure Ray, Orenda Fink, Baby Walrus, The Faint, Coyote Bones, Mayday and Mal Madrigal. One of his earlier gigs was a Valentine’s Day cover shoot for the short-lived publication Voice of the New City, of infamous adult storeowner (Dr.) John Haltom.

Bonacci was only 19 when he landed his first band gig photographing Azure Ray. His friend, filmmaker Nik Fackler, was shooting a video for the band and suggested Bonacci shoot their press photographs. The rest is history.

“I used two of those huge fluorescent, portable lights. It was just a really crappy handmade lighting kit. It was at Orenda [Fink’s] house and just in kind of a small room. I was nervous, kind of unsure of myself, but I really like how they turned out,” he said.

Fink must have also liked the portraits, because Bonacci has

handled her photography ever since. He said that the memorable photo inserts for Fink’s album, “Invisible Ones,” were taken at a creek in Bennington, Neb. that was secluded and “a little scary.” They went down into the water, and Bonnacci says it was a really fun shoot.

Lighting is now an integral part of his photography. “I don’t use flash or strobe at all; I use photoflood, which is a continuous lighting that’s actually used for motion pictures. It adds a really cinematic, warm value to [the photos] that you don’t get with strobe.”

It’s impressive that Bonacci is almost entirely self-taught. “I learned with no training, just doing shoots, winging it, and by doing whatever I could to learn. That’s kind of how I developed my style. I’m not going to go to school to get this stupid clean cut imagery everybody else already has,” he says.

Bonacci has also acted as the cinematographer on a few of Fackler’s music video shoots.

--M.G.

Check out the story on Bonacci’s band Hyannis on page 24 | Visit Tony Bonacci’s music blog: www.the32ndtree.blogspot.com

Silent 54

The Meaning of Life, The Universe, and Everything, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Loving “Big”Tim Guthrie.

By Timothy Braun I met Tim Guthrie, the bombastic gonzo mixed media artist, in a rural mansion dropped between lakes and mountains and streams in northern New York State last summer. Guthrie is a mammoth man in both heart and stature, able to wrestle eight plates of Korean barbeque to his stomach, drink seven mugs of espresso, and burn a newly found amigo six albums from the likes of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club to Blonde Redhead all before it is time for whiskey pudding and a nightcap. He has the heart of a saint, the brain of a devil, and the laugh of Barney Rubble. His artwork is that of a rude, crude wizard of wonder: political, thought provoking, and subtle all at the same time.

Guthrie, like myself, excels at causing trouble, most notably calling the 43rd President of these United States a “liar” in public, before it was cool to do so. Guthrie committed this violation of red state statute at a Bush rally. In our circle of friends we have become known as Big Tim and Little T, or Venti and Grande Tim. And I ate a lamb burger with him in the heart of Omaha on his 42nd birthday.

Tim Guthrie is from Omaha, a graduate of Creighton University where he is now tenured faculty. He’s lived in Nevada, Idaho, Montana, and traveled extensively across Europe. But Omaha is clearly his home. He lives in a German style apartment building with his wife Beth and their new exercise machine known as the “octane.” Tim is a throat slitter, a fire starter, a mercenary, a hooligan, and “illuminati” in the war against mediocrity, as mediocrity is the greatest sin. He creates yellow ribbon bumper stickers reading “I Love to Follow Blindly,” animated epitaphs of Oppenheimer and his bomb that turned sand in to glass and Japan into Hell, and portraits of old friends as kings. His artwork is a kiss to the brain and a cowboy kick to the heart. I had grand dreams for his birthday, imagining all the trouble we could get into. We would need lawyers, bags of money, and weapons just in case we ran into demons or angry Indians trying to reclaim what is rightfully theirs in Nebraska’s largest town.

Omaha is a remarkably cool town and a pillar of the best midwestern urban renewal has to offer. Unlike Indianapolis, or Columbus, or Milwaukee, Omaha has a blending of neighborhoods that mix and move toward the hip downtown spots. The made-over warehouse district is one of the best I have ever seen, with endearing shops and local eateries and taverns that dot the sidewalks of wellworn brick roads, complimented with street musicians. The town reminds me of Belfast in the late 90’s, an invariant mix of laid back enthusiasm looking for a goodtime, but in no rush to find it. I drove into town as the sun set on May 11th, from a thirteen-hour road trip that started from the Alamo Heights district of San Antonio and I hadn’t eaten all day.

Now, 42 is a unique number. It is the number Jackie Robinson wore when he broke the color barrier in baseball. It is the number Ronnie Lott wore when he broke wide receivers for the 49ers, and, to a lesser extent, the Raiders, Jets, and Chiefs. It is the number

novelist Douglas Adams claims to be the answer to life, the universe, and everything in his book Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. But this number doesn’t appear important to Guthrie. Nor did he care it was his birthday. As I came rolling into town he seemed more amused in putting a good meal in my mouth, rather than opening presents or blowing out candles. We got scotch ale, and then headed to M’s pub for dinner. I threatened to ask our waitress to sing “Happy Birthday” but Guthrie cringed. I insisted on buying his birthday dinner (he had the Reuben sandwich, I the aforementioned lamb burger that was so hot it burned my hand.) He retaliated in buying me a Nebraska shot glass, complete with cows, a windmill, and a red barn painted to the side. This was as crazy as the night would be. No lawyers required. No use of guns. Little use of money.

Early on, we went back to his joint and waited for Beth to get off work. She’s a train conductor, and works late. And I noticed Tim just when he thought I wasn’t looking. He was quiet and silent, and maybe for the first time since we met, he looked calm as if there was little left to do. He downloaded the music I brought for his birthday.

I laid back on his futon, he lounged on an e-z-chair and we watched Keith Olbermann. We talked some of politics, but not much. He then introduced me to his favorite show, a fifteen-minute oddly drawn cartoon called 12 Ounce Mouse, yet I couldn’t seem to figure out which character was the rodent. When Beth came home, the two shared ginger snaps. This is all Big Tim wanted for his big birthday, to sit with his wife and have a cookie. For Tim Guthrie, this is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. This was Tim’s 42.

The next morning I slipped away early leaving a note on the sofa, not wanting to disturb Tim and Beth. This was for the best, as if I had stayed for breakfast I would have stayed for lunch, and probably dinner. And I didn’t want to disturb Tim’s birthday weekend. It was quiet when I left, just the way Tim wants it.

STEADMAN-INSPIRED ART BY TIM GUTHRIE

City

co n tr i b u tors

55

O r a n B e lg r av e is working on a degree. He doesn’t know which

one yet, but is positive there is one out there for him that does not have the dreaded and worthless liberal arts designation. When not greasing the myriad machines he has his hands on, he has been known to hang out with loons, both duck and human variety.

T i m ot h y B r a u n lives in Austin, TX. He is a professor of English at

St. Edward’s University. You can learn more about him at timothybraun. com ZA C H D O D S ON a k a b l e a c h e d w h a l e has made lots of

magazines. Besides Silent City, his Art Direction credits include shelter, No Touching and MAKE: A Chicago Literary Magazine. His design has appeared in Newcity, Punk Planet, Resonance, TimeOut Chicago, Mule, Young Chicago Authors and Bagazine. Zach’s hybrid typo/graphic novel, boring boring boring boring boring boring boring, is out now, on his own press, featherproof books.

M at t G o o d l e t t recently interned at Paste Magazine in Atlanta.

He;s the former editor of Pulp Magazine, and has been a reader for the Nebraska Review. His author interview and reviews have appeared in national and regional publications.

M a r k K r e s l is a native of Omaha. His still photography credits

include the motion picture Imitation Life as well as several video shorts.

He specializes in shooting artist portfolio material, photojournalism, portraiture, and nature photography. His photography has won competitive awards in Nebraska and Iowa. He is current president of the Omaha Camera Club, Nebraska’s oldest club for professional and amateur photographers.

M i c h a e l K u n is the author of the novels The Locklear Letters, You

Poor Monster and My Wife and My Dead Wife. His short story collection, Corrections to My Memoirs, was published in 2007, and his non-fiction work The Football Uncyclopedia was just published July. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California. For more information visit Michaelkun. com.

L e e P o s t lives in Anchorage, Alaska. He wrote and illustrated the

comic strip Your Square Life for the Anchorage Press from 2001 to 2007. In the past year, despite his best intentions to rest, he wrote four books, including a best of collection from his comic strips and two books for children, all of which nearly killed him. His latest artwork, exhausted rantings, and sketch diaries from his world travels can be found on his blog, yoursquarelife.blogspot.com. You can reach him at yoursquarelife@gmail.com.

K e v i n S i m o n s o n is the co-editor of Conversations with Hunter S.

Thompson and has been published in SPIN, Rolling Stone, Village Voice and Hustler.

J o e l T h o m a s is a free-lance writer currently teaching writing

courses at a college and a university in Indiana. He received his M.A. in English from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. His writing includes creative nonfiction essays as well as music and literary articles and reviews.

TI M GUTHRIE is a multimedia artist teaching at Creighton University.

He has won three Artist Fellowships from the Nebraska Arts Council and recently won two Omaha Arts and Entertainment Awards. His work is in collections throughout the world. timguthrie.creighton.

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