Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
madman - trans-species peeps sex *was* with chicks and bunnies... and
a bar straw. The trauma of remembering this horrific event may lead to
even more psychotherapy than I already have planned for the summer.

Erynn (and Neil) - I'm working on a back-up ride for you. Don't know
if anything will pan out, but I'm trying. As for new song. I can send
you an MP3 of a second one I did. But for more, you'll have to get my
bandmate to stop having problems with his a)computer, b)siblings and
c)dead relations. 

Tara - I vote for moose imitations and chicken calls, but I'm not
going to Chicago this time, so I guess my vote doesn't really count.

Dan Guy - Don't be too jealous. Some of us are simply more willing to
go into debt to play in this manner than others (weighing food vs. Neil
vs. school vs. thingies...)

Martha - I'd say having friends who are *former* huge stars is an
improvement, but I think it depends on their current job description.
Gamer geeks with a deadline are harder to get hold of than authors with
books being released. 

squeaks, doing her darndest to earn her Stardusts. :)
  

    
I don't know if I'd like David Bowie.  Maybe, but there are lots of famous
people I suspect I wouldn't like much.
  

    
I don't know if I would like David Bowie, but I'm pretty sure I'd like John
Watson, who looks like a couple of David Bowies stacked on top of each
other.
  

    
Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Tara--the uisgejack part.  I figured you had less say in the Tara
O'Shea part ;-)

Squeaks--if you were coming, we would do moose impressions, just to
hear yours.

Len--break a leg yourself!  How was Moulin Rouge?  I have a good
friend who just went to Houston to audition for Luhrman's La Boheme. 
Boy, have we got our fingers crossed on that one!

Shawn--thank God.  I'm from Mississippi, & I'm glad to see you &
JaNell here!  Welcome!

Chris--thanks for the link!

Kelly--welcome!

Mary, who just finished Kent Haruf's Plainsong & thought it was one of
the best books she's read in a long time.  And is up waaaaay too late!
  

    
Erynn -- You packed yourself? bwah hah hah.  That's marvelous. 
(Though I imagine it's rather bothersome in the packing department.)

Michelle -- Money is not the problem; as I said, I'd gladly fly in for
the evening.  The thing stopping me is that Neil starts touring right
when my wife is scheduled to give to birth to our first child, and I
can't very well go anywhere until that happens lest I miss it and I
can't very well go anywhere immediately after that happens as she'll
need help and support and love and stuff.  It's a worthwhile trade-off,
I suppose. ^^

I think I'd like David Bowie, but of course I have no way of knowing,
really.
  

    
I've known people that have met him and they say that he is very
charming and down to Earth, especially for who he is, but you never
know. A friend of mine's dad was a stage tech for him, back in the
Ziggy Stardust days and his job was to make him arrive on stage coming
down from the ceiling in an elevator. It was supposed to happen slowly,
the grand entrance. But something went wrong and the elevator zoomed
down too quickly and crashed to the ground with a bang, he rolled out,
quite shaken and reluctantly started signing. The guy assumed he was
going to be yelled at and fired, because that's what rock stars usually
do when something goes wrong. But after the show, Mr. Bowie approached
him, smiling, and said, "That was a lot cooler than I thought it was
going to be."

Michelle- Yeah! I want to hear it! Don't worry about the ride thing.
I'll be covered, but thank you anyway. I didn't mean to make a big deal
out of it, because it's not. When there are big things happening, I
have a habit of making trivial things into big things because sometimes
my brain doesn't work right under stress. 

Dan Guy- yes and then I unpacked myself and had a headache for a long
time. Now my problem is keeping the cats from packing themselves. Good
luck with the upcoming baby! That's so exciting! Do you know what it's
going to be? Have you and your wife agreed on any names yet?

Erynn, who finds it amazing that when I need help moving, suddenly all
of my friends have something better to do and run away....
  

    
Mary - I think I'd just show up with antlers on. ('so, what
Neil-related character are you showing up as?' - scary part; I'd have
an answer)

Dan Guy - That'll teach me to skim over posts when I'm in a hurry. I
completely missed the baby part! Yeah, I think of all the excuses there
are to have to miss Neil, that's the most acceptable and worthwhile.
Congrats!

Erynn - Just as well, since I got no useful responses on the ride part
(although I now know how to say 'thank you' in Magyar (koszonom)). And
the trick for moving is to invite a bunch of people over for a party,
then conveniently have a truck full of your things show up in the
middle of the party. A handful of thingies can back me up on this one.
:) Oh, and check your inbox in about half an hour.

back to cleaning and lots of reading.

squeaks (muppet muppet muppet muppet!)
  

    
        The famous people I've met, mostly through my quasi-famous father,
have mostly been pretty nice folks.  I'm reminded, however, of a bad
habit I've seen in my fellow geeks.  Whenever they have a role-playing
or fictional character who is Very Old or a time traveller or whatever,
and their character has met famous historical figures, they always
have to make this meeting fit their cliche of that figure.  So your
character talked philosophy with Voltaire, and discussed science with
Galileo, and Picasso showed them the sketches for _Guernica_ and on and
on.  Just once I'd like to see an immortal time-traveller or whatever
who took Voltaire's lunch order and got her butt pinched when she
turned her back on him, and discussed Galileo's overdue tailor bill,
and to whom Picasso showed his weird rash and asked "Do you think it's
spreading?"
        Likewise, when I met Patrick Stewart, he wanted to talk about
visiting the California wine country.  Danny Hillis wanted to show off
the stuff he built in his basement carpentry shop.  Tim Powers, one of
my favorite novelists, wished he had more time to talk politics.  And
so on and so forth.  In my admittedly-limited experience, famous people
are like anyone else, except that they're extremely well-known for one
thing, which apparently causes assumptions in a lot of people that
that's the only interesting thing about them.  I would suspect that the
famous would, statistically, skew nicer than average, because you
don't get famous without people helping you, so the system would tend
to select against jerks.  Leifeld and MacFarlane remain a statistical
anomaly.
  

    
Yes, I agree. However, many people seem to lose touch with reality and
forget why they started doing things and where they came from to begin
with. Most of them probably weren't always like that (conceited and
"holier than thou", I mean) and it mainly seems to be an actor/musician
thing (Noel Gallager anyone?) I don't see it too much with writers and
visual artists. But there is a certain Rock Star from here (Cleveland)
that a few of my older friends remember meeting in clubs and parties
back in the day. My first question to the was: "Were you close?" All of
their replies arrived at pretty much the same conclusions: "Are you
kidding? I tried, but he was the biggest ass***e!" and that was before
he was famous.... I don't know if it's all a famous thing, cus I know a
lot of conceited people who are "nobodies" (but they think they're
god) And MacFarlane I would never want to meet, or he wouldn't want to
meet me, because my foot would be lodged in his ass for a long time.

Neil- How's Brazil? Do you feel like a Beatle (or backstreet boy) yet?
  

    
neil - thanks for the help with the book . several copies at
alibris.com . and all i'd been searching for before was for anything
with a title that had both the words chesterton and essays . 

on a completely different subject . . . with all the talk ( not that
much really , but anyway . . . ) about creator's rights happening in
here right now , i was just curious how you feel about warning :
contains language being available on napster . 

sined justin .
who's listening to the live cd by josef k and recommends it to all .
  

    
streak - (whiney HomerSimpsonesque murmuring) You've met Patrick
Stewart? 

on famous people in general - Having met a few here and there through
club stuff (music people any way), I've tended to notice that if you
treat them like average joes and are cordial, then as long as they
haven't just had the worst sound check imaginable, they're pretty
damned human right back. Some are total jerks, some are really
friendly, all have an occasional bad day. Many take the extra effort to
be nicer to people because they are well known. Many make an effort to
seem unapproachable because they'd like a little privacy. 

It's also important to know that certain people have a stage persona;
and thus you should not throw a punch at one of the nicest people alive
just because he spits at you from the stage. 

squeaks, who has heard both 'total sweetheart' and 'stuck-up bitch'
about Siouxsie, and believes them both.
  

    
        <geekbrag>Well, I was on the set and they were shooting an episode,
so when they broke from filming the scene and Mr. Stewart sat down to
go over the remainder of the script, so my girlfriend over went over to
get a couple autographs and chat.  He's more impressive in person than
on screen.  A year or two later, I saw his _A Christmas Carol_ at the
Old Vic Theater in London.  And photos of me ran in the Astro City
letter column once.</geekbrag>  Had to turn that off before it got out
of control... :-)
  

    

I have to agree- a great deal of the time, you act like they are a human,
and lo and behold, they are. Like <streak> I've met a fair number of famous
people through my father- mostly musicians, in my case. And even the ones
whose music I loathe usually turned out to be such nice guys that I can no
longer say, "Oh, Chris Isaac? Man, I hate him." I'm much more careful to say
"I really don't enjoy his music," because damn, he was really nice. (And
better looking than ANY human being has a right to be.

Of course there are assholes, and I'd go so far as to say that the
percentage is higher than in the groups of human beings who don't get
worshipped.

Ya know, deja vu and all; I think we had much of this conversation back in
the old topic. See, Neil, you're so NICE that we keep bringing up how
surprising it is.
  

    
Powers is a sweetie but it's hard for me to think of him as famous.  I first
met him years and years ago in a con suite where he told me at great length
his theory that writers should never have credit cards.

Pretty sound theory actually.
  

    
I wanna see Neil angry. Not at anyone in particular, of course. Just
for kicks....
  

    

Dare I ask why writers should never have credit cards?
  

    
Erynn -- Thanks!  It's alleged to be a boy, in which case we're naming
him "Alexander Dominic Fowlkes" (showing slightly more reserve than my
parents who named me for a gunpowder plotter and then encouraged me to
burn myself in effigy every year).

Michelle -- Thanks.  I love the antlers idea!

Streak -- An excellent point.  (And on a barely related note, I was
re-reading Frank Miller's _Ronin_ in Borders yesterday and kept turning
to my wife and saying, "Hey, Leifeld totally stole this entire page
for 'X-Force'!"  Bah.)

Martha -- Writers shouldn't have credit cards?  Do tell!

Yesterday I got in the mail a package from Doubleday's marketing
department a bunch of promotional stuff for Chuck Palahniuk's upcoming
book, _Choke_.  It's got three posters, several sheets of stickers, and
what looks like about a hundred postcards.  (Checking eBay, I'm
surprised that none of it is there yet.)  I thought it was an
interesting idea, involving the fans in the marketing like that.  I
wish that other publishers did it.  (If I'm going to go to the trouble
of pasting up posters around town and slipping postcards into books and
the like, I'd rather be doing it for, oh I dunno, say, _American
Gods_? ^^)
     On the other hand, I mean, it's Chuck "Mr. Controversial"
Palahniuk and it's a book about sex addiction among other things, I
really don't think it's going to be suffering from lack of press so I
don't really see why Doubleday is going to this expense.
  

    
Writers should never have credit cards because THEY DON'T HAVE ANY MONEY.

Neil and about half a dozen others excepted.  But Powers is among the
majority.
  

    
Michelle - Antlers? you'd be the wild hart, would you not?
btw, how was your muppet mayhem??

Neil - Hope you're enjoying Brasil! I had the opportunity to spend
Thanksgiving week in Rio last year and had an absolute blast. I have a
coworker from there, and I may spend some time in the more rural parts
of Brasil this December, but it's all still up in the air. I hope
you're finding good things to eat, though. Everywere I went was *very*
carniverous (mmmmmmm)

Martha - I'm about halfway through Arbitrary Placement of Walls!
Loving it!! You'll quite possibly have to deal with me bugging you
about doing an adaptation of one of the stories for our October show.
*batting my eyelashes at you*

DanGuy - Congrats on the soon-to-be-offspring. Get your sleep while
you can!
  

    
Email from Claudine:

Hello,

After reading Suzanne's post about Vroman's, I feel compelled to mention
that the Vroman's signing will not be in the main bookstore on Colorado
Ave, but will be in their space on Lake Ave which houses their "Museum
Collection." I'm worried about potentially lost Neil fans who saw Vroman's
name but not the Lake Ave part.

Martha, I had no idea that Ditch Day was documented in literature. I'm a
grad student at Caltech now, and for six years I have watched the bands of
undergrads running around campus in matching t-shirts with amusement and
some envy. I've tried to find your work in local bookstores, but no luck
yet. Ditch Day was just this past Thursday, actually. Nothing too wild,
though the huge pink bra draped on the library was amusing.

I hopefully will see some of you at the LA signings,

Claudine
  

    
Thank you, Dan.

Claudine, probably the only way you'll find my book is mail-order.  It was a
ton of fun inventing an imaginary stack.
  

    
Neil, who is down in South America able to work his e-mail but not get on
the net or otherwise access the Well, sends me this:

======

Had an idea -- could you ask Lenny Bailes if he knows of a Dial-up
networking script that will get me connected with compuserve through the
Equant network -- he was so helpful with the whole Windows NT thing
initially...

===

Lenny?
  

    
Claudine, I'm trying to go down south for a signing or two. And a
bunch of thingies will be there. I can introduce you, if you haven't
met any of them yet. 

Dan - Muppets were a good way to introduce an apartment of people who
had never met each other before. But I may have to induce severe head
trauma to get some of the music ('tie a yellow (ribbit) round the old
oak tree'... 'old man (ribbit)'...) out of my head.

squeaks, who assumes this is Claudine of Eye of Horus sig file infamy.
  

    
Dan -- Thanks. ^^  That's what everyone says.

It's also my wife and my anniversary today!
  

    
I'm sending Martha the standard PPP Compuserve dialup script
that I know about.  If Neil's Brazilian network rejects this, it
may be necessary to insert some extra characters.