Where Wolf is Fine Art!
Plus, Comicpalooza and recommendations
Last week, I attended a great talk at the Museum of Fine Arts - Houston between author Karla Tatiana Vasquez and MFAH public programs manager Yeiry Guevara. Vasquez was in town to promote her new book The SalviSoul Cookbook: Salvadoran Recipes & the Women Who Preserve Them and the very entertaining discussion covered everything from Salvidorian cuisine to the world of cookbook publishing to the need to protect parts of a culture that have traditionally been passed down orally.
Because I’m a self-serving SOB, I feel the need to plug the fact that copies of WHERE WOLF were available to buy at the Museum of Fine Arts gift shop. Notice I’m on the shelf above Tim Burton. Suck it, Beetlejuice.
In addition to picking up WHERE WOLF at the MFAH, you can request a copy from your local library or buy a personal copy directly from the publisher, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Ghoulish Books in San Antonio, or Whose Books in Dallas. If you've read WHERE WOLF, please consider leaving a rating or review on Amazon, Goodreads, The StoryGraph, or wherever you discover new books.
I spent most of this weekend at the George R. Brown Convention Center for Comicpalooza. This was my second year selling comics at Houston’s largest comic book convention, and I had a great time. I love people-watching in general, so having the chance to sit at a booth at a comic book convention and watch people dressed in amazing costumes walk by is nothing short of a perfect weekend. Comicpalooza was only made better because I saw many old friends, picked up some great comics, and met some of my favorite creators. I am fully aware it’s pretty gouache to give a creator a copy of your own book while you’re getting a signature. Still, I’m a pretty gouache fellow, so I couldn’t resist handing Chip Zardarsky, Stan Sakai, and Ryan Ottley copies of WHERE WOLF. I can only hope that their Uber drivers enjoy the book…
The highlight of Comicpalooza, though, was getting a JOE’S APARTMENT trading card signed by Jerry O’Connell. Jerry wasn’t even supposed to be at Comicpalooza - he was there as a guest of his wife, Rebecca Romijn. I just happened to have brought some JOE’S APARTMENT trading cards to the show to give them away to people who bought WHERE WOLF in an effort to clean out some of the junk I had stored in my desk. Happy accidents make happy Robs.
IN A VIOLENT NATURE opens in theaters this weekend. Director Chris Nash’s horror film combines the slasher genre with liminal horror. The result is a haunting and methodically paced film that pulls from the tropes of the FRIDAY THE 13TH franchise and mixes in the aesthetic of a third-person video game live stream. Audiences watch as a silent killer stalks through the woods of a Canadian campsite in search of teenagers to “ki ki ma ma.” Before you think this is strictly an art-house endeavor (and it is a horror movie you want to watch with your pinkie up in the air), there are some truly gnarly kills in this movie.
I spent the second half of May reading Katherine Dunn's GEEK LOVE. When a carnival barker and a geek (the chicken neck-snapping kind, not the pencil-pushing variety) fall in love, they decide to manufacture a family of perpetually employed carnival attractions by doing a lot of drugs and hanging around toxic materials. Their resulting family of deformed malcontents plot and scheme to ruin each other’s lives in this darkly funny novel about love, devotion, and the cult of personality. It’s the book my soul has been missing.
It's crazy wild to read a book that feels like the solution to a missing hole in your brain that's been there your entire life. GEEK LOVE reminds me so much of weird fiction I love, probably because it directly influenced that weirdness in the last few decades since the book was released.
I finished revisiting all the MAD MAX films this past week, including a trip to the theater to see the excellent FURIOSA.
I thought I was watching MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME for the first time, but I must have watched it as a kid because I remember once having a smaller child climb on my shoulders and scream, "Who rules Bartertown" as we kicked the shit out of a kid on the playground.
Even though FURIOSA fits pretty seamlessly into the continuity of MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, I have officially stopped trying to figure out the series' timeline. These movies are all Dying Earth legends told by survivors trying to make sense of it all. Details like continuity mean nothing in the face of oral storytelling. Mad Max is like the post-apocalyptic Pecos Bill or Paul Bunyan. Maybe the movies feature the same character at the center of them; maybe they don’t. It doesn’t matter - not when the real appeal of the movies is watching a 79-year-old Australian go mad in the desert, conducting mass vehicular carnage with one hand and, with the other, assigning actors character names like Dr. Dementus, Rictus Erectus, The Octoboss and Organic Mechanic.
Long live the wasteland.
When I programmed ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN for Film Club at the Alamo LaCenterra a few months ago, I did not expect that this week we’d be seeing the closing arguments of the latest trial Donald Trump would find himself going through. But here we are, and tomorrow night, I’ll be watching an American cinema classic on the big screen with a packed audience. Join me in watching Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as they dig deep into corruption - something that feels so absolutely foreign to today’s political climate, right? Buy tickets here!
On Friday, I’ll be screening THE CAR at Graveyard Shift. This 1977 JAWS knock-off stars James Brolin as a sheriff tasked with saving his small town from a murderous car that’s running over people left and right. Is the car driven by a phantom? A demon? The devil himself? Only one thing is certain - this indestructible vehicle is driven by pure evil. Buy tickets here!