Psyched To Get Miked @ Atomic Books

Zinesters Mike White and Mike Faloon sign and read new works
Atomic Books, Hampden, Friday, November 19, 2010

Friday, November 19th was the "Night of Two Mikes" at Hampden's Atomic Books, where owners Benn Ray and Rachel Whang doubled down on the literary-finds-for-mutated-minds on offer by hosting two zinesters-turned-authors reading from their works. Young people today sometimes forget that before the Internet made self-publishing and social networking pandemic, "zines" (along with comics and public access TV) were one of the few outlets for underground, alternative media in the early '90s - and the two Mikes were diehard pioneers of the medium.

Mike White was in town to read from and sign copies of Impossibly Funky: A Cashiers du Cinemart Collection, a collection of the best writings (and "13.2% all new stuff!") from his movie fanzine Cashiers du Cinemart (1994-present). (Besides main author Mike White, Impossibly Funky also collects articles by contributors Leon Chase, Chris Cummins, Skizz Cyzyk, Andrew Grant, Clifton Howard, Rich Osmond, Mike Thompson, and Andrea White.) Like White, Mike Faloon is a fellow zine publisher (Zisk, Go Metric), not to mention the drummer of the pop-punk band Egghead (1992-1998, 2010), but on this night he was reading from his short story fiction collection The Hanging Gardens of Split Rock.



Mike Faloon opened the festivities and proved to be a surprisingly talented orator, punching his copy with the confidence and natural cadence of a news anchor; he could easily switch careers from public school teacher to audiobook narrator. Mike White then delighted the audience by reading a hilarious "day-in-the-life of a movie theater employee" essay, one of the first things he wrote for Cashiers du Cinemart and a stellar reminder of why "workplace zines" are so popular - everybody can relate to work foibles and follies, especially jobs that involve dealing with crazy or irksome customers; White, who graciously plugged the comics art of Impossibly Funky's cover co-illustrator Jim Rugg (Afrodesiac, Street Angel, The Plain Janes), also revealed his Midwestern roots when he referred to sodas as "pop."


Mike Faloon is one Smooth Operator narrator

As an added treat, Mike White's wife Andrea presented him with a beautifully detailed, locally baked Ace of Cakes movie theater cake. "Impossibly Funky" was playing at this cake theater, with an outside crowd peopled by the very B-movie characters celebrated in the pages of Cashiers du Cinemart over the years. But fans couldn't partake of it until the following evening's "MicroCineFest Reunion Screening" at Station North's Windup Space, which the two Mikes also attended (and where Mike White's Who Do You Think You're Fooling? was screened).


Ace of Cakes's "Impossibly Funky" was the icing on the cake


Mike White: "I can have my cake and read it too!"


"Hmmm, can't wait to eat that marquee tomorrow night!"

It was fitting that the two Mikes made a pit stop in Baltimore to promote their books, as both authors, while not from Baltimore, have strong ties to the city's film and music scene - which it would not be a stretch to call Six Degrees of Skizz Cyzyk. Both Mikes have served as judges on Skizz's MicroCineFest film jury and "Mike the White" has screened film shorts at MicroCineFest (including Who Do You Think Your Fooling?, his infamous expose of Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs), while "Mike the Faloon" has played with Egghead at the Mansion Theater, Skizz's former home and screening/concert center. A number of Baltimore-based musicians and film geeks have also written for Cashiers du Cinemart, including Skizz and his sometime musical partner Scott Wallace Brown (Mink Stole & Her Wonderful Band, The Awkward Sounds of Scott & Skizz, The Bowlermen). Even local public access show Atomic TV popped up in CdC #13 in a "Zines of the Airwaves" review by Terry Gilmer (God's Angry Man).

As a result, the audience teemed with local musicians and filmmakers - Craig Smith (Psychedelic Glue-Sniffing Hillbillies), Degenerettes Rahne Alexander and Kristen Anchor, Jennifers and Garage Sale guitarist John Irvine, Joe Tropea (co-director of the documentary Hit and Stay and former Jennifers bassist), Dave Cawley (Garage Sale bass player, Urbanite fashion model, and erstwhile Go Metric contributing writer), Atomic TV's Tom Warner and Scott Huffines - who had either collaborated with the two Mikes or been influenced by their work. Naturally, Skizz was also there - Skizz Cyzyk, the Skizz with two Z's (not to be confused with Baltimore's other Skizzer, music producer honcho Skiz Fernandez).


Craig Smith drools over the "Impossibly Funky" cake (and book) whilst authors Faloon and White savor his good taste

Jim Hollenbaugh, curator of the Moviate Harrisburg cult film series, even drove down from Pennsylvania to see the Mikes and, of course, catch up on his Atomic Books shopping. Hollenbaugh also was in town to go to dinner with his pals Scott Huffines (Atomic TV, Baltimore Or Less) and John Waters.


Scott Huffines (Atomic TV, Baltimore Or Less) and Jim Hollenbaugh (Jim is holding up the copy of Katharine Gates' "Deviant Desires" he grabbed for an Xmas gift at Atomic Books)


Tom Warner (Atomic TV, Baltimore Or Less) and Jim Hollenbaugh

On the way out of Atomic Books, Japanese giant monster fan Dave Cawley was overjoyed to spot a car with a Michigan vanity plate proclaiming "GAMERA." Naturally, it belonged to none other than that purveyor of fine, eclectic taste, Mike White!


"I'm Dave Cawley and I approve this license plate!"

Related Mike White Links:
Cashiers du Cinemart
"Impossibly Funky" book

Related Mike Faloon Links:

Go Metric
Zisk Online
Egghead (MySpace)

Experimental Film Gets Punk'd

The color of infinity inside an empty glass
I'm squinting my eye and turning off
and on and on and off the light

It's for this experimental film
Which nobody knows about and which
I'm still figuring out what's going to go
In my experimental film
- "Experimental Film" by They Might Be Giants

Some - what am I saying...most - experimental films take themselves way too seriously. Which is why I love filmmakers who occasionally take the stuffing out of experimental film's pretensions. Coleman Miller's Uso Justo is one such film.



Uso Justo
I was lucky to see this short in 2005 at Skizz Cyzyk's MicroCineFest film festival, where it won Best EXperimental Film and Audience awards. It also won the "Ken Burns Best of the Fest" Award at the 2005 Ann Arbor Film Festival. Uso Justo is a hilarious restructuring of an obscure 1959 Mexican film, created in the same recontextual spirit as Woody Allen's What's Up, Tiger Lily? and the restructured narratives of experimental filmmaker Craig Baldwin (Tribulation 99, Spectres of the Spectrum, Mock-up On Mu).




You used to be able to see the whole film at the digital mag Wholphin's website, but no longer. This is an Internet Archives/Open Source Movie clip from Coleman Miller's film "Uso Justo":


Even as You and I

Even as You and I: Hy Hirsch as the Idiot Savant

Of course, an earlier spoof of the experimental excesses of avant-garde cinema was Roger Barlow, Harry Hay and Leroy Robbin's hilarious 1937 short Even - As You and I, which you can find on the Kino Video DVD collection Avant-Garde - Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and 1930s.

You can also see this film on YouTube, as shown below:

Even as You And I - Part 1


Even as You and I - Part 2


(Roger Barlow, Harry Hay & LeRoy Robbins, USA , 1937, b&w, 12 minutes)

This brilliant spoof of surrealist films highlights the fine line between making “amateur” home movies and serious “high art.”

In it, three men come across an ad for an amateur filmmaking contest and, after failing to come up with a standard Hollywood scenario (their script gets as far as “boy meets girl”!), they see an article on Surrealism in Time Magazine and take to the “hot” genre like melting watches to a Salvador Dali landscape painting. In fact, the film’s narrative was based on a real-life amateur film contest sponsored by Liberty magazine and MGM’s Pete Smith “Specialty Films” unit that the film’s three directors entered (two of the directors, Roger Barlow and Harry Hay, portray themselves in the film). As Nicolas Rombes comments on his Professor DVD blog:

Many of the images in the film are shocking and surprising in a surrealist way, and yet because we know this is a comedy--and because the film is linked to "amateur" practices--they are easy to dismiss. I think the fact that this short movie uses the amateur context to make a mock avant-garde film is sort of telling: even though amateur film and avant-garde seem at opposite ends of the spectrum (one highly self-conscious, difficult, and artistic, one almost purely mimetic and supposedly artless) they are in fact closely linked.

The Enoch Pratt Free Library owns another great spoof of experimental films its 16mm film collection, Carson Davidson's award-winning Help! My Snowman's Burning Down (1964, 9 minutes, 16mm).

Help! My Snowman’s Burning Down
In this Oscar-nominated satire on avant-garde surrealistic films (1965, Best Short Subject, Live Action Subjects), a beatnik in a homburg hat sits in a bathtub on a New York pier, typing on toilet paper and later fishing by casting his ring-baited line down the bath drain. When a female hand emerges from the drain, he paints one fingernail and it disappears. When he opens a medicine cabinet, he finds another guy shaving on the other side. Eventually his bathtub sets sail in the harbour, only to encounter a toy sub in the film’s climax. Check this item in Pratt's catalog. Don't have a 16mm projector? Not to worry, somebody uploaded this film to YouTube:

Help! My Snowman's Burning Down


A YouTube commentator claims that HBO used to air Davidson's short between movies "back in the old days when they played short films between top-of-the-hour showtimes." That sounds pretty cool; wish I had HBO!

I dunno much about Carson Davidson. Some sources say he was a cinematographer on a cult film called The Flesh Eaters (1964) that was directed by Jack Curtis. Other sources say "Carson Davidson" was a pseudonym of Jack Curtis (!)(?). Whatever, his films are pretty interesting and worth checking out.

The Pratt Library also owns another Oscar-nominated short (1956, Best Short Subject) by Carson Davidson, 3rd Ave. El (1955). And yes, it's also on YouTube.

Related Links:
www.colemanmiller.com
Coleman's Blog: the seemless universe