Here’s a review of THINGS UNDONE that was recently brought to my attention.

I had a dream last night that Werner Herzog had hired me for a film he was doing. I was over at a friend’s house discussing why we couldn’t start our film in the North Atlantic Ocean, because we didn’t have shark fins and we’d probably die of hypothermia. Werner happen to be there at the moment for some reason.

It wasn’t clear whether I was going to be his Production Designer, Art Director, Actor or all three. We were immediately flying to Germany…or was it an Asian country? At any rate the whole production crew were going to live in one big house during the entire shoot.

I remember having to share a room with several other people, and started thinking about my wife back in the states. For whatever reason I couldn’t find my cell found which made it worse.

We were all in a main room discussing what the project direction was going to be when Werner decided to get a group photo of us. There was a guy there filming a “behind-the-scenes” documentary from Werner’s film company as well.

So we group around this massive couch, and Werner sets up an old bakelight radio and it starts playing some German Opera or something. “We should have a little music for this,” he says in his easy comforting manner.

“Besides, the look on your faces make me out to be Charon or something.”

There’s these little girls playing on a shelf right next to him. The shelf was covered with Chinese porcelain tea services and they started to rattle and shimmy under their weight. He pays them no mind. But my focus is on them and he wants everyone to focus into the 4 x 5 camera he’s working with. I could feel the tension building.

Then out of the blue he picks up a tea-cup a small one at first and points to me,  “I want you to sob at the drop of this tea cup. No, wait let me get a larger one so you can really cry.” I look at him and say, “I’ll try, how long do I have?”

“Now.” All eyes were on me, and I couldn’t quite drop-in to the scene fast enough. The cup didn’t break the first time either, so that didn’t help, especially when he said, “Wait, start over.”

=s=

by DAVID AXE

It started with a threat. At a checkpoint in Baraki Barak district, Afghan security guards protecting the American combat outpost stopped a driver. When they insisted on searching the car, the driver rankled. “Fine,” he said, “you won’t be here in two days, anyways.”

At the outpost, soldiers speculated. Maybe the driver meant he would try to get the Afghan guards fired. Maybe he was hinting at a planned attack on the outpost. Maybe something else, something more dangerous for the roughly 100 Americans in Baraki Barak.

Two days later, Able Troop’s 3rd Platoon rolled into a district village to check up on some mosque refurbishment projects. As 1st Lieutenant Kevin Ellerbrock chatted up the village mullahs, a worried-looking man approached the soldiers guarding the platoon’s vehicles, idling on the main road through the village. The man spoke only a little English and the soldiers spoke no Dari; the platoon’s interpreter was with Ellerbrock.

The man said he was a doctor. He gestured to the trucks. He spoke urgently. The soldiers decided the doctor was trying to say one of two wildly divergent things: 1) There was a bomb in the road, or 2) He had an appendicitis patient in his car, and the Americans were blocking the way. Just to be safe, the soldiers relayed the bomb threat to the rest of the platoon. But no one took it too seriously.

Night fell around six. The platoon climbed into its trucks and trundled down a dirt road back towards the outpost. In a flash, the second truck in the convoy exploded. The front axle sailed into the air; the vehicle sank into a crater. From a tree-line on the right, AK-47s chattered, RPGs streaked out.

The convoy halted around its disabled truck, the vehicle’s occupants dazed but unhurt. They lowered their ramp to make their escape. They could feel rounds cutting through the air. They raised the ramp and sat tight as, all around them, their comrades aimed their weapons at the tree-line and opened fire.

Later, platoon sergeant Donald Coleman laid the blame squarely on his own shoulders — and on the lack of interpreters. “All the signs were there,” he said. “We chose to ignore them.”

* * * * *

I was in the first truck in line. The Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicle, built in 2008 by International Trucks, was fitted with a three-ton mine-roller attached to the front bumper. The roller was only good against pressure mines. The bomb that destroyed the number-two truck was triggered by a command wire trailing back to the tree-line.

I was squeezed between our .50-caliber gunner, Private First Class Judas Sanchez, and our two dismounts, Sergeant Jason Ide and Private Matt Hoats, pictured, the medic. Within seconds of the blast, Sanchez charged his gun and opened fire. Tracers lanced into the trees, answering the winking AK-47s. Behind us, we could hear our attached Afghan soldiers firing their own AKs and rockets. The surviving American trucks added their .50-calibers to the clatter. Ide and Hoats poked their heads out the “bitch hatch” — a small opening in the MRAP’s roof — and popped off rifle-mounted grenades. Hoats swore: his grenades had fallen short of the trees. Ide would make fun of him all night for that.

“Ammo! I need ammo!” Sanchez cried. Ide passed up a box. Between bursts, Sanchez peered through an infrared sight mounted next to his gun. Ten minutes into the ambush, the Taliban were still fighting. That was unusually brave of them.

(more…)

Sorry for my absence from this blog for a while. I’ve been taking advantage of the “calm before the storm” of promoting “The Year of Loving Dangerously” to work on another book, an all-prose political manifesto. It’s coming out in the fall of 2009. I’ve got 27,000 out of 40,000 words done, and it’s due December 15th, so wish me luck. Although, as usual, the last half is going by 5x faster than the first half.

SEAS grad draws ’sketchy’ life

With the edgy, graffiti-swathed New York of 1984 as its stage, “The Year of Loving Dangerously” tells the rousing coming-of-age story of the now renowned political cartoonist in the year his life fell apart.

By Tommy Hill

Published Thursday 19 November 2009 07:24pm EST.

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For the cockeyed Columbia student who took his acceptance letter as a one-way ticket to the upper crust, Ted Rall’s autobiographical graphic novel “The Year of Loving Dangerously” is a wake-up call. With the edgy, graffiti-swathed New York of 1984 as its stage, the full-color memoir, to be released next month by Nantier, Beall, Minoustchine, tells the rousing coming-of-age story of the now renowned political cartoonist in the year his life fell apart.

Long before he became an award-winning journalist and artist, Rall was a dedicated Columbia engineering student, committed to the grueling undergraduate marathon of interminable nights holed up in Butler, striving for the inevitable six-figure paycheck at the finish line. In the work, however, the young Rall is sidelined by a freak medical condition, forcing him to miss his exams in the first semester of his junior year. A series of unfortunate accidents over the course of the next few months sees him arrested, fired, broken up with, expelled, and evicted. In the blink of an eye, Rall is booted from his high-flying life in the Ivy League and comes crashing down on the mean streets of a still gritty New York. Suicide looks like a welcoming exit.

“The message I wanted to get out there in this book,” Rall said, “was that this could happen to anyone.” But as depressing as its premise is, “The Year of Loving Dangerously” is no mere sob story. As the title implies, Rall’s is also a tale of freewheeling sex and endless lusty exploits. The homeless, desperate Rall discovers very early on that sometimes a comfy bed is just a smooth grin away. He becomes, in effect, a gigolo—“For day after day, week after week, and month after month, I ended up crashing at women’s apartments.” What started as a hopeless nightmare turns into a gripping adventure that is at once a steamy quest and a struggle for survival.

Working alongside renowned illustrator Pablo Callejo, Rall has created a work that is as visually striking as it is emotionally moving. The intricately detailed panels, many of them based on photo records of New York at the time, vividly reconstruct the context of Rall’s most trying year in all its grimy, punky detail. Illustrations of Rall in his old haunts—bars, record stores, underground concert halls, and Columbia’s campus—are as rich and evocative as photographs.

By the story’s end, Rall has managed to piece his life back together. With a job and a place of his own, seducing women has lost its existential urgency. But, as Rall assured, “The Year of Loving Dangerously” is not the whole story. “This is only the first part of what’s going to be a ‘sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll’ trilogy,” he said. “I’ve got a whole lot more to tell.”

by DAVID AXE

Did you see the new movie The Men Who Stare at Goats? Remember Stephen Lang’s character General Dean Hopgood — the grinning, white-haired officer who championed Jeff Bridges’ character’s notion of psychic warriors? Well, Hopgood’s based on a real guy, an Army Major General Albert Stubblebine, now retired. Stubblebine was a big proponent of the real-life psychic-soldier programs that inspired the fictional Goats. He’s also a 9/11 skeptic.

The movie connection has gotten Stubblebine’s supporters all excited. And trust me, you don’t want to get these guys riled up. David Leffler, an advocate for a military meditation strategy called “Invincible Defense Technology,” defends Stubblebine on the IDT Website. Stubblebine “is satirically portrayed as attempting to walk through walls without success,” the site reads. “While there may be some truth to this, in reality, [Major General] Stubblebine was an intelligent pioneer in the development of human resource technologies. He understood the latent potential of the human mind that warriors would eventually be trained to harness.”

And what, according to Leffler, does this potential represent? To recap, Invincible Defense Technology practitioners access, via meditation, what they describe as an invisible “Unified Field” that connects all people.

Like energetic radio waves, accessing the Unified Field through techniques of consciousness causes “field effects” in the surrounding social environments. Therefore, the field effects of the Unified Field enhance the orderliness of social relations. Orderliness reduces friction and its social equivalent: enmity. With no enmity between them, former enemies become allies, and the nations become invincible because there are no enemies to fight.

Uh huh. For the record, this military meditation emerged from the same Iowa-based Maharishi School of Management, which teaches a lot of things, but certainly not management. Among the school’s practices: Yogic Flying, a supposed form of brain-powered levitation. Check out this video to see some Yogic Fliers in action.

Looks a lot like bouncing to me.

(Video: National Geographic)

A rave with reservations if that can be. While Ain’t It Cool News was at times appalled by what O goes through, even calling the book mysoginistic (which means he didn’t really get it) he waxes lyrical about Crepax’ adaptation of it:

“First of all, the Eurotica imprint of NBM Publishing has done a beautiful job of packaging this book together.
Crepax is a master storyteller and he wields a lyrical brush. His style is beautiful with a nouveau tendency towards elongated bodies and necks especially…but not grotesquely so. The smoothness of his brush work just glides across the page in most instances and only in the most intense moments does he allow his work to get rough and scratchy.
O is never less than always beautifully sexual. Crepax makes sure that her sexual beauty draws the reader’s eye even when the heart or mind might want to pull away from the events that are unfolding.
The beauty of Crepax’s art somehow makes it palatable and I found it to be something I couldn’t put down…
Guido Crepax truly was a master storyteller, and while he may have focused his talents in an area that many are afraid to go, if you can handle the content, Crepax’s THE STORY OF O is actually a must-have for those who love graphic storytelling in all its many forms.”

heh, heh, we really pushed his buttons.

oop, a bit late here, as it’s already a few posts down, but a warm welcome to Pablo Callejo, whose art graces Ted’s latest Year of Loving Dangerously.

Of course, you might already know him for his work with Rob Vollmar on Bluesman and the Castaways.

Always wondrous stuff.

And hopefully he’ll talk for both he and Ted who *grumblmumbl* hardly participates here even if I resort to pointing a gun at him!!!

Ted?… You there?

groan

On Dungeon Early Years 2:

“The Dungeon series remains a thrilling, sharp read, in this case thanks largely in part to Blain’s stunning art work. Certainly this isn’t a good jumping-on point for newcomers, but it’s well worth getting through the series to arrive at this point. You’ll be surprised where the journey takes you.”

and on Joe & Azat:

“An entertaining book, mainly due to Lonergan’s deft characterizations, both with Azat and his extended family, especially his abusive drunkard of a brother. Lonergan may be vague on a number of details, but the dialogue nevertheless rings true. The fact that it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome helps too. It gets in, makes its points and leaves. I wish more comics would follow that example.”

So says Chris Mautner on Comic Book Resource’s Robot 6.

That’s right, we use big words here because that’s what Terry likes–literate people to read literary works of art. The entire catalog of NBM books will make your head spin dizzy with thoughtful and provoking looks at life and the people living them. So do yourself a favor and make your holiday shopping that much easier…I mean hell they’re having a sale right now on Eurotica…you know…for the kids!

THINGS UNDONE and NORTH COUNTRY still available from NBM. They make great gifts.

A nice review here of North Country awaits you.

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Part of the action in my new book, Vatican Hustle,  takes place in the Italian porn industry. Truth be told,  I have absolutely no idea if there actually is an Italian porn industry but, come on, this is a country famous for its large tubular meats! Bologna, salami, various sausages– do the math!

And if there is a large, colorful Italian porn industry, I’m sure it includes talented performers like Fredderico Frombehindioli, star of beloved classics like “Menchanted”, “The Little Spermaid” and “Where the Wild Thing Is”.

Vatican Hustle! Fun for the whole family!