I have unpublished this piece and all of the comments. (Please see my February 14, 2024 essay.)
Author / Edward Champion
Mimi Pond (The Bat Segundo Show #548)
Mimi Pond is most recently the author of Over Easy.
Author: Mimi Pond
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Subjects Discussed: Different forms of memoir (and related resistance by publishing), James Frey, autobiographical fiction vs. memoir in comics, realizing Over Easy from a manuscript, working from a textual framework, trash-talking line cooks, Charles Dickens, Daniel Clowes, comic book characters often cast into inevitable film adaptations, imagination, picture books, Mama’s Royal Cafe as a locational inspiration, memory vs. reference shots, the difficulty of filling up sketch books while waiting tables, the mysterious Nestor Marzipan, keeping in touch with former restaurant co-workers, keeping gossip alive, taking notes, when memories elude the nostalgia trap, what 1978 establishments can teach 21st century diners, drugs and the willful stupidity of kids, disco wars, how a rudderless culture was maintained by a manager who made waitresses feel special by listening, what people found charming about diners in 1978, Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster, Todd Haynes’s miniseries adaptation of Mildred Pierce, dramatizing working-class life, how dishwaters can form more legitimate claques than art school, the haziness of art school, the green chromatic feel throughout Over Easy, the one character with a jet black character in the book, the cameo appearance of Flipper‘s Ted Falconi, “Art is dead!” proclamations, maintaining aesthetic standards during a time of bad music and bad art, the oppressive nature of avocado green, young kids today who glorify the 1970s, Peter Frampton, the band America, the influence of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, people who overanalyze comics, the early seeds of storytelling, being nursed at the bosom of MAD Magazine, working with Shary Flenniken at the National Lampoon, learning the basics of a comic strip, circular text around objects, cartoonists and the daily grind, doing monthly strips for the Voice, social commentary in comics form, drowning babies, editorial arguments with Drawn and Quarterly, politically incorrect language excised from the finished product, ironic epithets from 1970s liberals, the importance of getting upset to understand a time, Norman Mailer’s “fug,” living in a high mesa in San Diego comparable to the unshaded area of a picnic table, public park metaphors for living circumstances, the New York Times‘s claim that Oakland is the new Brooklyn, being attracted to bad poets before knowing their poetry is bad, the lack of good coffee in the 1970s, diners that once used real linen napkins, the virtues of not being judged for sleeping with anyone in 1978, and slut shaming and Lulu.
EXCERPT FROM SHOW:
Correspondent: What specific points in 1978 did you really feel compelled to capture? I mean, how could you do 1978 right while also adhering to the exigencies of narrative, which requires a kind of linear path and all that? What was the organizational process like?
Pond: I was just remembering things the way they were then. Things that really stuck with me. And I worked on this over a fifteen-year period, from about 1998 until early this year. It wasn’t so much that I was like “I’m going to capture 1978!” It was “I’m going to remember it the way I’m going to remember it.” So it wasn’t anything that specifically deliberate. It was just the time and the place and what it felt like at the time. And I did take notes over the years from the time I left up until 1982, until about 1998, and I also went back to visit many times. And I talked to my former co-workers, who very generously shared their experiences with me, which I also incorporated into the story.
Correspondent: Were there any stories or anecdotes that were pure romantic forms of nostalgia? Or things you wish would have happened? Anything along those lines?
Pond: No. I don’t think of it as nostalgia. Because there were too many hard lessons learned.
Correspondent: It was too rough to be nostalgic. (laughs)
Pond: Yeah, it was too rough to be nostalgic and there were too many people who wound up down the rabbit hole of drug abuse for too many years to have the dewy glow of nostalgia around it. It was one of those situations where it was really following up to a point until it wasn’t fun anymore. And there’s going to be a Part Two. I’m working on that now.
Correspondent: I know that.
Pond: Part Two gets darker.
Correspondent: Well, what about Part One? Did the darkness threaten to overwhelm some of the romance of the diner? The kind of effervescent look of the place and the feel of the actual book?
Pond: No. I don’t think so. I mean, I’ve always been in love with the look of that place. The first time I walked into it, it just felt like home. So I could just draw that counter and those booths and all that stuff endlessly.
Correspondent: Well, what does a diner like the Imperial — I mean, what could it teach diners of today? What does a 21st century diner not have that the Imperial did have?
Pond: Well, there were no rules. In the ’60s, the hippies threw out all the rules. And in the ’70s, we looked up and we just said, “Oh, the rules are gone. So which ones do we put back? And which ones do we leave out? And how does this all work?” And it was kind of up to you to figure it out. There was no one saying, “Just say no.” So everyone was going, “Woohoo! Drugs! Yeah, drugs are fun!” Like no one said, “That cocaine thing? That’s not such a good idea.” “Jazz musicians used to snort cocaine in the ’30s. So it’s really cool, right?” And kids are always stupid. And this is what drug abuse is about. Like heroin, people are just stupid enough. “I’m not going to get hooked!”
Correspondent: What was the common ground of such a place? You mention early on how the disco wars were what united the punks and the hippies. And then at the end of the book, we see this poetry night in which everybody is allowed his particular moment. Does it really take a place to unite so many subcultures? So many groups? What was the cross-pollination at the time that you were trying to capture here?
Pond: Well, the uniting force in that particular place was Lazlo Meringue, the manager.
Correspondent: Who everybody told their problems to.
Pond: Yeah. Everyone told him their problems. And he was one of those people that just made you feel like you were the most important person in the room. And he validated your experiences by telling you that the fact that you had observed this and you think that about it is meaningful. Not just “Oh! You’re full of shit.” And the other thing was that, yes, this was important and we need to write this down. Because we’re going to make some kind of art about this later. And that was very important to me. And it made all the difference. I mean, I don’t think I ever could have worked in any other restaurant after that. I made a few futile stabs at putting in applications after I left that place, but luckily — I say luckily — no one ever hired me again. And then I had a career as a cartoonist and I never had to go back to that. But it never would have been the same. I mean, his motto was “The Customer is Always Wrong,” which did not really mean that you were entitled to give bad service. In fact, we all kind of prided ourselves on giving good service. It was more like he had your back. And if anyone gave you any crap, he would back you up.
Correspondent: And presumably the walls between the kitchen and the restaurant were thick enough to prevent any of the customers from hearing all of the profane screeches and all that.
Pond: I think, at the time, people were down for that too. Because that’s the kind of place it was. A cook would drop the end of his roach into an omelet and the customer would finally go, “Oh, I found this. Ha ha ha!”
Correspondent: “How charming!”
Pond: Yeah.
(Loops for this program provided by 40a, dj4real, minor2go, and platanos. )
The Bat Segundo Show #548: Mimi Pond (Download MP3)
This text will be replaced
Why Amazon’s Firefly Must Be Rejected
On Wednesday afternoon, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos introduced Firefly, an app for its new Fire phone that can scan just about any object in the real world and, with the push of a button, allow you to purchase it from Amazon. As of today, 100 million items can be scanned and identified by Firefly. Firefly can read barcodes, a DVD cover, a QR code, damn near anything. It effectively turns every physical store into an Amazon showroom, where the customer can walk in, scan an object, and be on her merry way with an order waiting by mail or drone delivery. It remains unknown just how much Firefly tracks (such as scanned objects that the customer hesitates over) or what Amazon intends to do with the additional data it will connect through Firefly, but given Amazon’s $600 million contract with the CIA for cloud computing services, any sinister alliance is possible. What’s especially creepy is that Firefly can also recognize street addresses and phone numbers. Firefly intends to listen to any songs playing from your speakers and any movie screening on your TV, giving you the option to purchase these.
Assuming it garners substantial mass adoption, Firefly threatens to become one of the most insidious assaults upon American life, where every action and every quiet moment becomes an opportunity to squeeze dollars. It is the most salient example of Amazon reaching ever so closer to its ideal of vertical integration — a practice famously and rightly halted in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (1948), when the Supreme Court ruled that movie studios could not own their own theaters and maintain the exclusive right to show their own films. The difference with Firefly is that Amazon doesn’t have to make the products and could argue this if confronted with any serious legal challenge.
Amazon has just turned the entire physical world — the streets you walk on, the bedroom you retreat to, the shops you frequent — into a commercial marketplace. One can only imagine the fresh and awkward social hell to be experienced if a party guest points Firefly at someone wearing a snazzy dress. Rather than complimenting the partygoer on her sartorial flair, Firefly turns this into a potential sales transaction. One no longer has to seek exotic or bespoke items through languorous journeys in which one never asks for the time. With one simple app, the curatorial impulse and the quest for the obscure is traduced. Firefly threatens to deracinate the remaining tangible value of the physical world. It puts a price tag on taste, texture, hearing, sight, and smell. Will such quantitative objectification eventually extend to people? To credit poles that assess one’s financial worth along the lines of what Gary Shteyngart predicted in his satirical near future novel, Super Sad True Love Story?
The question that consumers must ask themselves is whether they want to live in such a world and whether convenience is worth pointing a phone in someone’s face. It is quite possible that establishments will fight Firefly by enacting “No Phones” policies along the lines of bars that prohibit Google Glass. But if Amazon is willing to take such a bold lead with Firefly, to truly view all humans as little more than avaricious hosts for the gargantuan corporate parasite, other companies will surely follow its lead.
We can Google any reference or half-formed remembrance with our phones. We can take photos of our families and friends. We can call anyone in the world from just about any location at a price and convenience that was inconceivable ten years ago. These are grand technological achievements that, on the whole, benefit the human race.
Firefly is a crass betrayal of this. It will cause many specialized businesses or establishments (such as indie bookstores) that operate at a precarious profit margin to go under. It could artificially inflate homogeneous products while expunging the artistic value out of the esoteric. But most importantly, it’s the first app to overtly put a price tag on everything in the universe. Think about that. Do you really want your friends to scan all the items in your house and get an instant cash value for everything you have struggled for years to build? (And how much sneaky data will Amazon grab to get a collective value on any individual’s possessions? Could this be compared against credit reports? Could this prevent working people from buying homes or small business owners from establishing credit?) Do you really want one company to encourage and profit from this rapacity?
That bald boorish billionaire has just signaled that he does not want to make your life better. He will stop at nothing to profit from you at every minute. Lex Luthor was never intended as a role model, but Bezos has set out to become just that. His efforts must be resisted by every thinking and breathing individual until the bright glow from his cretinous pate is permanently stubbed out.
The Forgotten Tower
The first fallen structure that I ever admired was a 237-foot tower that once stood at the intersection of Market and Santa Clara Streets in San Jose, California. It was known as the Electric Light Tower and was hurled into the real from a newspaperman’s idealistic vision. James Jerome Owen knew that electric lighting was the future and, on May 13, 1881, he wrote an editorial in the San Jose Daily Mercury calling for the construction of an enormous tower looming over two streets, an electric landmark that would stub out the gaslights, showering evening luster onto the city with the same indomitable force as the sun. It took only seven months for the idea to seize the imagination of locals, and the tower was constructed and lighted by December 13, 1881.
The tower never produced the searing glow that Owen longed for, but it served as a symbol of hope and progress to the people of San Jose. Electricity had only just arrived and the frame of the tower was juiced up by sizzling refulgence. Birds often smacked into its tempting bones, lured by the light, and it is said that policemen cadged a bit of pin money by hawking fallen duck corpses at local establishments. Drunkards often attempted to scale it. Moreover, San Jose had beaten Paris to the punch. Alexandre Gustave Eiffel pilfered the plans and, eight years after Owen’s gigantic tower was raised, Eiffel constructed his own version. This French treachery caused San Jose to sue Paris in 1989 for the century-long appropriation. In the trial, the architect Pierre Prodis claimed that the Eiffel Tower was merely a “trace job” of Owen’s vision. Paris triumphed in the court, but not without the famous engineer’s legacy sullied.
I learned of the tower when I was five, attracted to the pointillist rings glowing on photos and postcards. I was smitten by the great circular aura shooting into the onyx skyscape from the six carbon arc lamps planted at the tower’s peak. And when my parents took me to Kelly Park, I became overcome with tumultuous wonder when my little eyes snagged onto a replica of the tower built in History Park. The replica was only 115 feet tall, recently constructed, and I remember asking the tour guide why it was so small. I had somehow remembered the height of the original, plucking it from some stray placard that most tourists ignored. What was the point of reproducing a tower if you couldn’t put it in the right place or match the previous height? The tour guide, sifting through his mental arsenal for general historical information to answer my question, told me how the original tower fell. Gale force winds had ravaged the tower on December 3, 1915. It was the deadliest part of a vicious storm. The center of the massive metal structure wended and wobbled and, just before noon, pipe and metal poured onto San Jose’s streets. I closed my eyes and began to imagine the beautiful tower destroyed, and I remember silently crying, knowing that the tower’s end was needlessly permanent. I don’t remember the tour guide’s exact words, but there was a peremptory tone in his voice, a suggestion that it was mad folly to build another tower and cause harm to future San Jose residents. San Jose still suffered from wintry winds every now and then. And there was still the possibility, especially given the freak 1976 snowstorm from a few years before, that the tower could do more damage.
I didn’t remember the snowstorm because I was an infant at the time. But like the Electric Light Tower, it had been captured in family photographs assembled in blue-covered albums identified sequentially by numbered stickers, so that I could trace the precise moment that the memories of my life aligned with the photographs. I had no memory of the snowstorm, but I had lived through it. I was forming memories of the electrical tower, visions that made it more real than any representation, yet I hadn’t been fortunate enough to be alive during the time of its existence. (I would have similar feelings for the Victorian version of the Cliff House constructed by Adolph Sutro in 1896, a magnificent multiroom palace with sharp gables famously captured in photographs during a thunderstorm. It burned to the ground on September 7, 1907 — another architectural tragedy, another great structure destroyed on a whim.)
There hasn’t been a year when I haven’t thought about the tower. Yet I wonder how long I can keep its vision alive in my heart and mind. Nobody seems to remember it or care about it outside San Jose. Nobody wants to honor the tower that once attracted international attention. I can’t talk about the Electric Light Tower with anyone, especially on the East Coast. It is, like many funny ideas in the history books, an eccentric and possibly nonsensical idea. But for a decent stretch in history, it held one city together.
You Should Be Ashamed for Liking [Insert Genre Here]
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As [insert recent hot YA title] [enters into theaters / hits the bestseller list / is discussed by millions on social media], it can be hard to remember that [once upon a time / in a galaxy far, far away / before the Internet], an adult might have [felt embarrassed / consulted a therapist / thrown herself out of a window] to be caught reading the novel that inspired it. Not because [it is bad / it is for kids / the cover contains a strobing light that might harm epileptics / there are no trigger warnings for the dark content contained inside] [OPTIONAL REASSURANCE BREAK WITH DASHES CAN BE PLACED HERE: CONSULT SLATE EDITOR FOR OPTIONS] but because [it was written for teenagers / a handful of conservatives have rightfully protested it / it is akin to eating cultural vegetables / it is less than 300 pages].
[The once-unseemly notion / The commonly critical consensus / The overly stressed sentiment] that [it’s cool / it’s acceptable / it’s a gateway to other titles] is now [INSERT JEZEBEL LINK TO UNITE #YESALLWOMEN CROWD INTO COLLECTED INTERNET OUTRAGE OVER PIECE]. Today, [teenagers write Bella and Edward fan fiction / grown-ups brandish their copies of teen novels / baristas hope to be the next Kendall or Kylie Jenner] with pride. There are [INSERT FLAVORWIRE OR BOOKRIOT LINK HERE TO FOMENT OUTRAGE FROM READERS] that [adults should read / that YA is literature too / that YA does not cause hair loss / that any schlub with a tablet can write YA]. But [reading YA / writing YA / balancing Maureen Johnson books on the top of your head] doesn’t mean much these days. A [INSERT STATISTICS-LADEN PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ARTICLE TO SUGGEST AUTHORITY] by [a market research firm / an authoritative blogger / a minimum wage slave standing in a mall with a clipboard / Malcolm Gladwell] found that [INSERT STAT]. [Note to Freelancer: Our research team hasn’t established a house style on this point yet, but be sure to write a sentence or two on what the definition of “young adult” is supposed to mean. Work in “new adult” if you can.]
[CYCLE BACK TO STATISTICS-LADEN PW ARTICLE FOR TRANSITION TO NEXT PARA], which might be why I [wasn’t surprised / wasn’t shocked / couldn’t work myself up into a lather / didn’t shower today] over this news. I’m surrounded by [YA-loving adults / YA readers / people who are YA-curious], [online / in real life / both online and in real life]. Today’s YA, we are constantly reminded, is [worldly / adult-worthy / better than popping bubble wrap]. That kept me [closeted / bashful / terrified] about expressing my [morally superior / fuddy-duddy / rash / carefully considered] opinion: Adults should [feel embarrassed / throw themselves off bridges / form twelve-step support groups] about [reading / writing] literature for children.
Let’s set aside [the scholarly efforts that have shown YA to be a viable genre / the transparently trashy stuff], which [only academic quacks subscribe to / no one defends as serious literature]. I’m talking about [the genre the publishing industry / the shit that the Smart Bitches chick is always talking up / anything that Jennifer Weiner likes], often called [“new adult” / “realistic fiction” / “kid lit” / crack cocaine]. Those are the books, like The Fault of Our Stars [Note to Freelancer: It is important that you mention John Green’s seminal novel over and over. This is essential to fomenting Internet outrage. Failure to do so will be considered breach of contract.], that [are about real teens doing real things / suggest importance to young readers by quoting Shakespeare in the title], and that rise and fall not only on [the strength of their stories / the truth of their convictions / the telegenic quality of the author] but, theoretically, on [the quality of their writing / the loudness of their audience / the academic rigor of their defenders]. These are the books that could plausibly be said to [be replacing literary fiction / to be replacing movies / to be encouraging kids to engage in illicit activities] in the lies of their adult readers. And that’s a shame.
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