John Callahan interview, part 2

Here is the second and concluding part of the interview I had with the late John Callahan, Portland cartoonist, in the summer of 2005.

Q: So describe your weekly work schedule: When is your deadline, and how do you pace yourself?

CALLAHAN: I draw a lot of the cartoons on Wednesday. I do a lot of work at home, in the morning, and then I get out of the house in the mid-afternoon, early afternoon, and then I kind of go around either a cab or by wheelchair, and just have a good time. And think . . . and things come to me without much work.

This culture is becoming more like a cartoon all the time anyway. The mainstream news has the nerve to call itself news; it’s a joke, you know. And the infomercials that they call the news. How do you make a cartoon out of a cartoon culture? 

Q: What’s it like when you’re nearing your deadline and you don’t have a fresh idea in mind?

CALLAHAN: Well it’s not a problem, you know; I thrive on pressure and deadlines. When I used to be in the London Observer, they used to tell me to come up with a special cartoon half an hour before. It’s no problem; I like that. It doesn’t bother me, I get really good stuff out of that. The pressure, I think it’s kind of fun. I love being in London, because they have such a strange, sick sense of humor -- they love my weird cartoons.

An Interview with the late John Callahan, cartoonist, circa 2005

Last week, the latest Gus Van Sant feature, “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot,” opened in U.S. theaters. A biopic of the late Portland cartoonist John Callahan, it stars Joaquin Phoenix in the title role -- one that in decades past had been coveted by William Hurt and Robin Williams, with Billy Crystal and John Ritter also having been discussed as possibilities.

Back in 2005, before podcasting became a huge DIY and online listening activity, I was doing character voices for a science-fiction audio show called “Dry Smoke and Whispers.” One of the co-creators, Marc Rose, was (and still is) a crack audio engineer and voiceover artist himself.

He and I devised the idea of doing a podcast about creative folks and creativity. I would interview writers, painters, musicians, stage directors, and even chefs about their process and the practical facets of pursuing their work. I decided to call the show “Straight to the Art.”

With Marc handling all the technical facets, I could focus on finding and interviewing the guests. We had prepared half a dozen shows to roll out when the host, Purecast Media, shut down. Another bright idea down the drain.

One of the people I interviewed was Callahan. He wasn’t hard to snag. We lived in same neighborhood of Northwest Portland, and I occasionally saw him motoring the sidewalks in his wheelchair or hanging out at a coffee shop.

OMG . . . Did I Really Type That? (Best Typos and Misusage of the Language from 2017)

Last September, I posted a collection of the best typos and wrong words that turned up in content I edited and proofread for various web clients in 2016. Here’s the best from last year, with my snarky comments.

Jan. 10: Because of the snow storm, I knew the 11 o’clock news would be hugely entertaining tonight, so I turned on the teev and switched back and forth between the three network stations to catch dramatic video and reporters tripping over their English.

The award for best mangled prose of the night goes to Mary Loos, KATU meteorologist, who said she had only seen “thundersnow” once before in her career, when she worked in Boise, which was, quote, “almost, in a higher elevation, in a way . . . ”

She probably wanted to be careful to let us know she hadn’t yet verified the facts with her sources.

Feb. 15: Oh my god. This is one of the greatest typos ever: “is a violinist with the New York Reparatory Orchestra . . . ”

But can they ever really, adequately make up for all the symphonic crimes of the past?

(Maybe it was the inadvertent result of a Strauss fracture?)

And the "Yellow Submarine" Sails On. . . .

This afternoon, I have tickets for Carole and I to see “Yellow Submarine” on its 50th anniversary rerelease: “restored in 4k digital resolution . . . [with] the film’s photochemical elements . . . restored by hand, frame-by-frame [and] soundtrack and score . . . remixed in 5.1 stereo surround sound at Abbey Road Studios by mix engineer Peter Cobbin,” at least according to the promotional copy.

Technically, whoever’s distributing the film has jumped the gun; “Yellow Submarine” was not screened for the first time in the U.K. until July 17, 1968, according to the Internet Movie Database and Wikipedia, and not in the U.S. until November 13 of that year.

Objectively, “Yellow Submarine” is not one of the classic great works of world cinema. It’s riddled with lame puns, the story arc is simplistic and obvious, and the Beatles -- whose songs inspired the project -- really had very little to do with the finished product, other than a brief live-action appearance for several minutes at the end.

The band’s songs dominate the soundtrack, of course, although only four were created expressly for the film and had never been released before (and one of those was cut from the version released in the U.S.). The rest were recycled from more than a year before (four cuts from Sgt. Pepper), or two years before (a pair from Revolver), and one was nearly three years old (from Rubber Soul).

But who could complain? The visual animation, in all its vibrancy and variety, was spectacular. The “retreads” (such as “Nowhere Man” and “Eleanor Rigby,” as well as the title cut that inspired the whole thing and the song that created the characters of Sgt. Pepper’s band) are among the Beatles’ best.

“Yellow Submarine” was one of a small handful of movies I saw on first run as a child. My father took the whole family to see it in Portland, my future home, as part of a vacation by train from downstate. I don’t have any particular memories of that first viewing (I was only 9 years old, after all), save that it was in a theater at the south end of downtown along Broadway, but I know it must have been on the movie’s first run because the next summer, 1969, we drove to Europe and lived there for the next two years.

“Yellow Submarine” would become my fail-safe, feel-good movie for the rest of my life. I’ve seen it roughly a dozen times over the years, nearly always on a big screen, though it’s probably been roughly two decades since my last viewing . . . of my VHS copy, mainly to see what the excised “Hey, Bulldog” sequence looked like.

The second time I caught it was at a U.S. Army base cinema outside Hanau, Germany in 1970. Ticket prices at that house were 25 cents for kids, 35 cents for adults. (The most a grownup would pay for a blockbuster feature was maybe a dollar.) I smuggled a tape recorder into the house and tape recorded most of the soundtrack . . . and was thoroughly annoyed when a couple of little Asian boys hooted loudly and suggestively (“wooh! wooh!”) in the seats directly behind me during the tamely risqué animated sequence for “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” I tried to shush them up, but apparently their parents weren’t with them. But then, neither were mine, and I was 11.

The third and fourth times were on network TV at my grandmother’s house back in Oregon in the early 1970s (because my family, next door, had no television), and I audio taped it at least once again. These recordings, to which I listened many times in my teens, drilled the soundtrack into my head, so by the time I got to college on the opposite end of the continent, I knew most of the dialogue cold. My college roommate recalls my reciting nearly the whole movie to him in the appropriate voices and dialects (probably without the songs, although we’d sing some of those back in our room with him accompanying on guitar) while we walked around the campus.

I’d like to say I must have seen “Yellow Submarine” a couple more times in the late Seventies and early Eighties on the giant screen at the Harvard Square Theater, a grand old cinema that overlooked Harvard Square, across the street from Harvard Yard and the center of the university campus.

The Harvard Square Theater opened in 1926, and though it always screened movies, over the years it also hosted “magic shows, vaudeville, and rock concerts” by such luminaries as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Hall and Oates, the Clash, and Bruce Springsteen. By the time I was living in the area, the theater screened a different double feature of old films every night for a dollar, mostly from the 1960s and 1970a. I regard all the movies I saw there (including several I had recalled my mother raving about, such as “East of Eden” and “King of Hearts”) as an integral part of my college education. (The theater apparently shut down in 2012 and is poised to be replaced by a shiny new business complex.)

But I can't be certain I saw “Yellow Submarine” again there. What I DO remember, vividly, is trekking all the way out to the Stoneham Public Library for a free screening. That entailed riding the MBTA subways to the very end of the Orange Line, then taking a bus to the far northern suburb of Stoneham . . . and after the screening, an anxious hitchhike back into the city long after dark. Google Maps says Stoneham is nearly a dozen miles north of Boston; plus, I had to ride 4 miles west from Cambridge to get to the Orange Line downtown. Those were the days. (To the left, that’s a mammoth 2013 collection of background on every Beatles song -- recording dates, instrumentation, who sang and composed what, and the stories behind each composition -- which is well worth the price if you’re a fan like me.)

As I noted years ago on this blog, the Beatles formed the soundtrack for much of my life, as they did for so many others, not only in the U.S. and UK, but around the world. From the first song I heard on our kitchen stove radio when I was not quite 5 . . . to the beat-up used copies of many of their albums I bought in my early teens . . . to singing with my college roommate and his guitar (and being able to identify most songs simply by the bass line rumbling through the dorm walls, ceiling, or floor from other students’ suites) . . . to singing along with a crowd of some 500 at a Northwest Folklife Festival in Seattle Center in the mid Nineties, the Beatles have been an ongoing presence in my life.

I’m sure I will thoroughly enjoy this tenth, twelfth, or whatever-it-is viewing.

The Harlan Ellison Non-Interview, circa 1985

It’s been a week since the passing of a giant -- certainly in my life. Harlan Ellison, the author of fabulous short stories, provoking essays and commentaries, memorable television scripts, a great early rock ’n’ roll novel, and occasional comic book plots -- and one helluva raconteur -- passed away in his sleep on the night of June 27-28.

For those who knew him, it was a wonder he lasted so long, and a surprise and a blessing that he didn’t flame out in more dramatic fashion.

In the days since, I’ve spent many hours -- far more than I would have anticipated -- reading and sharing stories of the man by other fans, as well as defending his legacy and memory against the carpers who mostly knew of him only for his fearsome reputation and a few myths about his life.

I first read some Ellison stories in about 1974 or 1975. I first saw him speak and I started to collect autographs in 1981. Knowing he was fairly approachable and still had a listed phone number in the Los Angeles directory, one day in 1985 I called him from the East Coast in hopes of an interview. The result was a piece I published in a short-lived Boston magazine called What’s New.

I titled it “The Harlan Ellison Non-Interview”:

Opinionated, controversial, and highly quotable, Harlan Ellison is an interviewer’s joy . . . when he wants to cooperate.

-- Hello, is Mr. Harlan Ellison there?
-- This is he.
-- My name is Dave Loftus, Mr. Ellison. I wanted to interview you at a time that’s convenient for you.
-- Uh, I don’t mean to be cranky about it, but really no time is convenient for me. I hate interviews. I’m about as interviewed-out as I care to be. Everybody in the world wants to talk to me. You get to a point where you just don’t want to hear your own voice anymore.

This is understandable. In the past, Publisher’s Weekly, Contemporary Authors, Crawdaddy, the Dallas Sun, and TV Guide have interviewed Ellison. Specialty magazines like the Comics Journal, RBCC, and Twilight Zone have printed extensive Ellison badinage. Everyone hopes to get him to let loose in their pages.

Although he is now fifty years old, Harlan Ellison will always be viewed as an angry young man. It’s partly due to his perennial boyish good looks and his diminutive stature, for which larger, lesser beings torment him.

Despite the publication of Memos From Purgatory (a memoir of his ten weeks with a kids’ street gang in New York), two collections of television criticism, and Spider Kiss (which Greil Marcus called the best rock novel of the last twenty-five years), his work continues to be labeled “science fiction.”

He made his name in the Sixties with fantastic tales bearing eye-catching titles like “ ‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” and “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," and his legend spread largely as a result of antics at various science fiction conventions.

Perhaps that will begin to change now that a handful of essays written over the last twenty years for a variety of magazines are beginning to appear in hardcover and win praise.

“I’ve probably done more nonfiction than fiction in my time,” says Ellison, “and they’ve never wanted to collect it or reprint it. But because I insisted on the four pieces that were included in Stalking the Nightmare and they got such a huge response -- more than the stories did -- there’s been a great surge of interest in my nonfiction.”

The four essays in 1982’s Stalking the Nightmare included an account of the gruesome small-time carnival which 13-year-old Harlan joined after running away from home, how Canadian television screwed up an original Ellison idea for a series, the Voyager I flyby of Saturn, and “The 3 Most Important Things In Life” (which are sex, violence, and labor relations, natch).

His new book, Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed, is all nonfiction. It features profiles of fellow fantasists, several anti-television tirades, a paean to the city of Los Angeles, a beautiful eulogy to his mother, an account of Ellison’s participation in the 1965 March on Montgomery, a piece on Steve McQueen, an enraged call for gun control following Lennon’s murder, and a gentle investigation into a video dating service.

“This book has had nothing but good reviews,” Ellison remarks. “It’s the first book I’ve had in years that somebody has not found fault with on any grounds, and I’m really pleased about that.”

As a result, publishers are scrambling to issue other Ellison nonfiction. The Donning Company is struggling this winter to get out a complete collection of “An Edge In My Voice,” a series of columns Ellison wrote for Future Life magazine and LA Weekly in the early Eighties. The column won the P.E.N. International Silver Pen Award for Outstanding Journalism in 1982.

“The Harlan Ellison Hornbook,” a series of columns from the early Seventies, may be published by Jack Chalker later this year.

Aside from jaw fatigue, the normally garrulous Mr. Ellison has an additional reason for resisting recent pleas for interviews: “I’m working real hard: I was up this morning at five, trying to get books out of here. I’ve had a long period where physical disabilities got in the way, so now I’m really in a survival mode, as they say in the computer business. And anything that doesn’t contribute to it kind of drains the energy off me and keeps me from doing the kind of work that I have to do.”

The “physical disability” is a mysterious illness that has plagued Ellison for the past six years. One symptom was a “terrible lassitude” that struck about mid-day, causing Ellison simply to fall down and vegetate, retaining perhaps only enough energy to read. A long series of doctors diagnosed this and prescribed that, concluding brilliantly that this was an “idiopathic” disorder; that is, an illness of unknown origin.

Ellison kept his condition secret because his sufferings and drastically reduced creative output could mean death in the marketplace. By mid-1984 he decided he just didn’t give a damn anymore about identifying and curing the problem. So he went public, and with the help of some friends he went to work on moving projects out of the pipeline.

The word from the author is that the long-awaited Last Dangerous Visions, thirteen years in the making, will appear this year. As for other Ellison projects that fans have heard about over the past decade, who knows? Blood’s a Rover, the expanded version of his famous novella, A Boy and His Dog, was scheduled for 1980 publication, but has yet to show.

In the same state of limbo are: Dial 9 to Get Out, his novel about the crazy world of television production; Shrikes, for which Houghton Mifflin paid $154,000 on the basis of a plot summary; Nights in the Garden of Trepidation, a light fantasy about a troll who inherits the Brooklyn Bridge; and The Prince of Sleep, a surrealist character study of a man in the future.

As Ellison is wont to tell anxious publishers: It’ll be done when it’s done.

Readers familiar with Ellison’s hatred of the bitch goddess TV will be surprised to hear he is working for her again in a small way. “I’ve taken on the job of creative consultant for the new CBS Twilight Zone series.”

How did he get suckered into that? “I wasn’t really suckered into it. I went in with my eyes open. I look at all the material they want to use and say, ‘Look folks, this is real close to something that has already been done and you’re going to be sued; or, this is a dumb idea and you don’t want to do that.’ I may write a script for them as a lark, because I’d like to be able to say I wrote for The Twilight Zone, but I’m not actually immersed in production.”

What happened to his crusade against the glass tit, well represented by three essays in the Sleepless Nights collection?

“I’m sort of weary of standing out there all alone and saying, ‘TV is shit, folks, and you ought to burn your sets,’ and having everybody look at me, say, ‘Yeah, you’re right,’ and go back to watch Gilligan’s Island. I just figured, fuck it, the human race doesn’t want to do anything about it so who am I to piss on their parade?

“It’s hard to tell the Common Man that he should want something better than McDonald’s.”

Ellison’s new job as TV consultant hardly signals the demise of the man who once said of television: “I’m firmly convinced it’s evil.” Who said Star Wars was “awful, dumb, stupid, pointless crapola,” and Tolkien “imbecile shit.”

Although Harlan Ellison seems to hear time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near and is trying manfully to get down all he needs to record in the meantime, his Jiminy-Cricket-as-Zorro persona can’t have gone far and is sure to be heard from again.

If I’m lucky, maybe he’ll even let me interview him.

*          *          *          *          *

As it turned out, more than a decade later I would end up doing a little long-distance freelance work for Ellison, and meet him a few times after that on a kinda sorta friend-and-colleague basis. The autographs in my growing collection began to include more personal and playful notes.

But those are stories for another day.

Oh My God; Can't ANYBODY Stop Me? - Best Loftus Wordplay of 2017

As threatened, here are the worst puns and wordplay concocted by yours truly in the calendar year 2017 (except for the one on October 2, which must be properly credited to my best friend from grade school) . . . . 

Jan. 25: She went to art school to study Japanese graphic novel writing and drawing, and graduated manga cum laude.

Feb. 7: Okay, so Betsy DeVos is sworn in . . . but will she really do anything about grisly, bare attacks in our schools?

Feb. 22: Carole [searching for the comics in today’s Oregonian]: There was no C section.

Me: It was natural birth.

[sound of man being whacked with a newspaper]

Feb. 25: My throat has gotten sore from coughing up stuff.

I guess you could call it a case of Grate Expectorations.

March 13: Carole and I went to a Portland Art Museum event last week where a docent talked about the new traveling exhibit of works by Rodin.

Our guide told us a lot about Camille Claudel, but I’m puzzled that she never mentioned the fight with Godzilla.

March 25: I applied for a job as a vendor at the farmers market, but failed the test. They asked me to wrap scallions, but I sprung a leek.

Apr. 3: The counterfeiters had produced a perfect copy. It was an exact replica of the real document in every way. US Treasury agents might not have nailed the perpetrators, except that their product turned out to be infinitesimally heavier than the authentic version.

After the indictments were handed down, a Treasury spokesman issued the following statement:

“A Phony Thing Happened on the Weight of the Form.”

Apr. 8: If a large group of chickens suddenly crowd tightly together, that would be a cluster flock, right?

Apr. 9: We didn’t have enough items to rest hot dishes on our table, so we made the rounds of estate and garage sales in a game of trivet-al pursuit.

Apr. 16: There was a Rubicon Wrangler with the KQAC FM logo on its side parked across the street from the platform where we waited for a streetcar.

Carole: What does All Classical Portland need a jeep for?
Me: For driving the rugged Bach country.

Apr. 23: The priest instructed the architect that he wanted to baptize infants in marble receptacles decorated with angels, archangels, cherubs, and avatars -- but not the heavenly beings that perform priestly duties.

You see, he wanted to use only sans-seraph fonts.

May 2: When you're a barista, you can actually make more than you urn.

May 14: He had a lisp; his tongue couldn’t manage hard consonants. So even though his parents had named him Otis, whenever he introduced himself, it came out “Osis.”

He achieved knighthood, but he was a very poor fighter. The king made him the royal ferryman: he guarded the boat that carried people across the great torrent that cut across the kingdom.

So people became accustomed to referring to him as “Sir Osis of the River.”

June 9: It was only after I’d moved into the collective household that I noticed every other person there was drop-dead gorgeous. It dawned on my that I had become an ugly roomer.

July 31: After our final meeting with the oncology specialist who has guided Carole through chemo and surgery, Dr. Rebecca Orwoll (because she’s retiring next month to launch a new career as a teacher of English as a Second Language), we celebrated with frappuccinos. My wife winced when the frigid drink brushed her tonsils; I grabbed my nose and temples and feared a headache after my sinuses got chilled by a blast of cold liquid in my throat.

Carole said it’s hard to avoid stimulating the Vagus nerve when you drink a frappuccino. Worse, I added, “What happens in the Vagus doesn’t stay in the Vagus.”

Aug. 2: The watering hole on the African veldt was the best place to catch braking gnus.

Aug. 5: He claimed to have concocted an entirely unique line of aromatherapy drugs that could cure a variety of ailments, but to me it was just a lot of non-scents.

Aug. 22: I find it hilarious that most of the recent spam Facebook friend requests I’ve seen from pulchritudinous young women flashing deep cleavage or a similarly vertiginous canyon in their derriere cut by a thong include a little box along the left margin just below the main cover shot that reads: "Photos: nothing to show."

Could it be . . . just possibly . . . an actual case of . . . FAKE NUDES?!!!

Sept. 16: Sometimes, people set you up for a joke that you couldn't possibly have imagined. This morning, a Facebook friend posted the following:

“Conversation today. Neighbor said she’d read a book titled How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.
“So I said there’s another book title How Shakespeare Became Bacon. Y’see, cannibalism was widespread in England in those days, and poor Will, y’see, he got waylaid by some fierce rough boys, and . . . ”

after which I could not help but comment:

“And then there was the period when he became DeVere-ly suppressed -- I mean, severely depressed.”

Sept. 18: Herb had heard that his new renter would be moving in with a massive statue of Ba’al . . . and that turned out to be an idol roomer.

Sept. 21: Another dei . . . Another dolor. . . .

Sept. 23: Could we go Dutch on this?

I’m feeling a bit phlegm-ish today.

Oct. 2: I was startled to open the menu at this sushi bar and read the word “tapas.” But Ron assured me my wife would be unhappy if she learned we had been hanging out at a tapas-less bar.

Oct. 9: “I am sorry,” the female entomologist said to the male bug expert, “but I do not engage insects with men I do not know.”

Oct. 16: The research team at Dr. Felsham’s chemical testing facility made the collective decision not to take on the potentially lucrative but also politically dicey contract.

Clearly, it was a yellow lab.

Oct. 19: I don’t like to have anything to do with brokers. They’re always taking sell fees.

Oct. 19: I got an email whose header reads: “Desperate Asian Girls Looking for Dates!”

Why don’t they substitute mangos? Though not as high in Vitamin A, thiamine, and niacin, they have nearly twice the amount of Vitamin K, twice as much folate, five times the amount of dietary fiber, and many multiples more Vitamin C and E.

Oct. 23: It looked like a nice, suburban McMansion, but it was haunted by the ghost of a nanny who had died a horrible death there:  The Phantom of the Au Pair

Oct. 30: Chuck, a veteran member of the kitchen crew responsible for cutting up the fresh fruits and vegetables before they went into the salads and entrees, made an especially credible witness on the stand any time his employer -- an uptown restaurant -- became the defendant in a legal matter accusing it of poisoning diners.

He became known by his colleagues as the “Sue Chef.”

Nov. 10: I tell ya, I got the greatest straight men on the web. I figured it might be months before I got another opportunity like my DeVere crack a month or two ago.

But this morning, a friend commented on his FB page, “So I went to buy some expectorant and there were 46 choices. What’s up with that?”

. . . and what was there for me to say but: “Isn’t it amazing what people will try to hock these days?”

Nov. 22: Seymour spent long hours in the lab, trying to isolate and alter the sections of the human chromosome that would enable the breeding of workers unimpeded by the growth of hair on their heads.

He was hoping to market his own brand of dis-tressed genes.

Nov. 26: Herb enjoyed the peculiar practice of shredding a dollar bill from his weekly income and sprinkling it over his steak and potatoes.

He referred to this as “garnishing my wages.”

Nov. 27: I often feel very spiritual whenever I enter the fresh produce section of a supermarket. Perhaps it may be due to the lettuce spray.

Dec. 18: Harve and Sukey hated the cold and dark of winter.

So they started their own holiday tradition which they called . . . “Belize Navidad!”