An Afternoon of Warhol at Stanford's Cantor Arts Center

As I usually do when I have a free Sunday afternoon, I headed out to the Cantor Gallery on Stanford campus today. Not because there was anything I particularly wanted to see, but because it's free and offers nice opportunities to get some walking done, and enjoy the fresh air. It also has a new central exhibition every few months, and I discovered today that they were hosting an exhibition of photography by Andy Warhol.

I don't feel I know that much about Warhol, despite a profile about him in Paradox Press's Big Book of Weirdoes from the 90s, so I gamely went to check it out. It's a review of the different themes and subject matter he took photos of throughout the last decade of his life, from the celebrity work he's known for to people in the gay community and the Studio 54 crowd, among others.

The Cantor Gallery actually acquired the contact sheets and negatives from the Warhol Foundation, so this is the first time a lot of these pictures are being displayed, which made it more interesting.

In any case, I was struck by a thought as I looked at the celebrity photos he took and that were in his interview magazine. Among the shots of Liza Minnelli, Nancy Reagan and Grace Jones, there was a photo of Michael Jackson as a rather young man, on which Warhol had traced lines following the contours of his face.

Looking at it, and the pictures around it, it struck me that it was similar to the famous Campbell's Soup painting, in that these celebrities are also brands and iconography that the public recognizes and responds to in specific ways. The silkscreen prints of Mao Zedong or Marilyn Monroe, or indeed this traced-on photo of Michael Jackson, seemed to me a way to try and distill that essence of who these people are, which made it even more interesting to try and locate the same meaning in the other pictures.

I don't know if these thoughts are ground-breaking (probably not) or so basic as to elicit snorts of derision (probably more likely), but if accurate, gives me a new way to appreciate his work and that of others in the Pop Art movement. It also gives me an insight into what he was interested in, which helps explain why he made the art that he made. Every artist has their preoccupations and pet themes, which show up again and again in their work, and for me, being able to identify these themes makes me like the work more.

It's on my mind quite a bit also because I recently spent a few idle minutes reading up on some of Neil Gaiman's work on Wikipedia, which listed certain themes he's played with since his early comics work. It also made me think of what the themes are that I'm most interested in for my own stories - future generations of literary critics will have to parse this out themselves, I suppose, but based on some of the stories I've been writing lately consciousness and artificial intelligence are fairly big, at least in some of my stuff.

On the other hand, a writer (or any other artist) probably shouldn't spend too much time teasing the themes out of his own work, right? Maybe it's all Freudian and I'm trying to express something related to shagging. Who knows?

That notwithstanding, if you're in the Bay Area, you should have a look at the exhibition. The page warns, somewhat euphemistically, that some images "may not be appropriate for young viewers", so I'll spell it out: there are some female and male nudes, which are generally quite tasteful and artistic, and then there are some photos of gay sex, including ejaculation. The more explicit contacts remain fairly small, but it's pretty clear what's going on, so if that sort of thing bothers you, feel free to skim that corner of the gallery and focus on the others.

And please do check it out! As I say, there are a lot of interesting themes covered, and if nothing else the pictures of celebrities, storefronts and Warhol's acquaintances in the drag community are fascinating artifacts of 1970s and 1980s New York, subject matter that I've always liked.

Roam Like Home: What I learned from three months of using my phone abroad

I've talked a little about my three or so months in London this past winter, where I was working on a contract to make some money after having lost my job back in December. From a money, and cultural, and social standpoint it was an interesting experiment - getting acquainted with a new company, new parts of London and new people, alongside all the things I already knew well about the place.

But there was another aspect that struck me about it recently. In the months I was away, although I bought a little pay-as-you-go burner phone, because my contract required me to have a local number, I continued to use my US smartphone as my primary means of communication. Not only that, I didn't make a phone call on it once - my bills from T-Mobile during that period remained resolutely the same as always.

The key is that my mobile operator here in the US is T-Mobile, which alone of the four big carriers offers free roaming for texts and data, albeit super-slow data, although as it turns out that wasn't such a problem. Voice calls are charged extra if you're abroad, whether making or receiving, but at 20 cents per minute (now raised to 25), even that wasn't excessively high.

Back when smartphones were newish, a number of reporters and analysts that I followed on Twitter were running experiments to see how they coped with using a smartphone as their primary or only computer. The conclusion seemed to be that they were actually pretty good as computers, and that if you needed to downsize you could do so without too many problems.

The result of my experiment feels a little more radical, somehow - in three and a half months of using a smartphone for messaging, surfing, texting and the like I didn't make a single phone call.

(OK, that's not strictly true, because I used my burner once or twice, but even in those circumstances I could have gotten around it - the burner was, as I said, more for my job and for signing up for stuff there in London, like a gym near my flat).

I guess we're still conditioned to think of our smartphones as phones first, but we've come to a point, with WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, social media and so on, to say nothing of texting, where the old voice calling capabilities are probably not as important as they were even as recently as the 3G years. There are so many ways of communicating with each other that voice isn't as necessary as it used to be, and even when real-time communications are necessary you can now just video call on FaceTime or WhatsApp and use your data rather than your minutes (though this proved a little tough when I was away from Wi-Fi, because as I said, my data was SSSSLLLLLOOOWWWW).

As 4G was rolling out in Europe and North America, one of the big ideas was Voice Over LTE, or VoLTE, similar to VoIP technology that apps like Skype use. This would have allowed users to make voice calls over the LTE networks that their phones connected to, rather than having to switch between the 2G or 3G radio and the 4G radio to call. But it seems we've bypassed that a little bit, by using video calling or just plain old VoIP through Skype and WhatsApp, and by having data allowances that are large enough to cope, if not actually unlimited.

One aspect of this unintended experiment that I didn't get to test was how long it would have lasted. T-Mobile's fine print says something about not roaming long-term, but doesn't really give a set amount of time after which they cut you off. I kept waiting for some kind of notice that they needed me to come back, but every month I just got another "Welcome to the United Kingdom" text explaining the terms of my roaming.

The reason this is important is that I do spend a lot of time overseas, and to be quite honest, I'd like to spend even more time overseas. But I don't want to have to cut off all my services when I do go, or fiddle about with things like prepaid phones (which get disconnected after three months of non-use), or any of that.

So I have to welcome the fact that some services just continue to work regardless of what country you're in. In fact, during those months not only did I use my US smartphone much as I always have, I also used my Netflix subscription as normal, with the exception of watching certain things that are only available overseas (like Star Trek Discovery). In a world where almost every aspect of living across multiple countries is a pain in the balls, frequently by design, it's nice to see that some companies don't hassle you too much about it.

I've mentioned T-Mobile US here, but a couple of European operators do it too, and with the abolition of roaming in the EU, this stuff is going to get even easier. And I can't help but welcome it.

RIP Stan Lee

Like the rest of the world, I heard today that Stan Lee died.

Since then, I've been seeing memes and memorials all over social media - references to the characters he helped create, or to the ones who came about because of what he was doing at Marvel in the early 60s. I've also seen eulogies and tributes from comics creators (and other notables) praising him for his impact on the culture.

I haven't seen a lot on the fallings-out he had with Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, who helped him create that universe, but to be honest, I don't know if that matters. As I read in one of the obituaries today, Stan himself didn't get all the ownership that would have been due him if he'd been working in another medium - that doesn't make it right, but it widens the picture a bit.

I never met Stan myself, or to my knowledge was ever in the same room as him. But he was comics' cool Grandpa, at least by the time I got into comics. The fact that his name was all over the books ("Stan Lee presents"), and in later years that he had all those cameos in the movies and on shows like the Big Bang Theory, made him an icon to more than just us comics nerds.

Still, I think even if someone's a public figure you've never met, you can have a favorite memory of them, and this is mine: the second time he went on the Nerdist Podcast, probably in 2013, he was talking to Chris Hardwick about his childhood. He was lively as ever, chatty and full of jokes, but casting his mind back he started to recite the jingle to a commercial he'd heard on the radio as a boy. And, in awestruck wonder, he mused to Chris what a wonderful thing that was that after all those decades he could still remember that. It melted my heart to hear it then, and I'm close to tears writing it down now.

My entry into superhero comics came about because of the X-Men, though a version far removed from the original book he came up with. From there I spread out into almost all of the Marvel universe, and then on to other books, mostly DC for the last couple of years. But even as a DC fan, you had to love Stan "the Man" Lee.

I'll be remembering him, tonight and for a long time, by reading the comics that he helped usher in, watching the TV shows drawn from his characters, and enjoying the movies he appeared in, possibly as the same character across each one.

We'll miss you, Stan - Excelsior.

Where Ideas Come From

I've been thinking about ideas lately, and how they turn into stories. This is because I keep marveling at the fact that in the last year and a half or so I've written four new short stories (five if you count the one that had its genesis as a movie with a friend), after not having written any short stories since 2011  or so.

The question writers dread is the one about where ideas come from, but while it is broadly unknowable, it can be answered. The problem is that the answer is never the same.

I believe it's Warren Ellis who likened the creative process to the birth of DC's Swamp Thing. A bunch of things, all collected or stolen from other places, fester in the subconscious until they're ready to emerge, remixed into something resembling but not totally like the components. It's a metaphor that's stuck with me for years (almost twenty of 'em), and I still agree with it 100%.

What's interesting about my five short stories of 2017-18 is that some have bubbled away for a long time, but others snapped into focus fairly quickly. To give you a sense, the one based on a movie idea was on my mind for years, since my friend and I put that treatment and script together; another one, which I wrote in May of this year, was inspired by a conversation I had in April.

It's worth remembering that ideas, as the conventional wisdom goes, are worth nothing on their own, which is what I think lay at the heart of that Swamp Thing analogy. Ellis, or whoever came up with it,  rightly points out how a story idea comes from all the disparate things you've read or watched or listened to over the years.

This is also why Ellis, among other writers, recommends reading outside your genre (and here I'm on firmer ground, because I explicitly remember this from his old column, Come In Alone). One of the stories from last year, which I wrote out by hand in Tokyo, came from an old issue of Neil Gaiman's Sandman (the one with Hob Gadlen) as well as the history of World War I. It may not have been obvious at the time, but I'm sure the decision to focus on that comes from the renewed focus on the Great War that's been present in the US and UK since 2014, when we marked the centenary of its start.

(And it's probably no coincidence that I'm writing this column, with this subject matter, on the centenary of that war's end)

As far as I can tell, the process for ideas to turn into stories, then, is to act as a receiver for interesting stuff, and then let it all accrete and build until it's time for it to come out. This means that you've been thinking about the story for a while before you start writing it, and so you probably have a good idea how it'll end. That ending may or may not materialize as you expect, because once you put pen to paper things take on a life of their own, but it's important to have that general road map.

If I had to give tips, then, they would be as follows:

• Keep an idea journal, and mark stuff into it whenever you get an idea for something that might be neat in a story.
• Read a set number of top-flight authors each year, and diverse authors in your genre, and just about anything else you can get your hands on (for our purposes here books can also be movies, TV shows, whatever).
• Think through your idea whenever you have some free time, and develop it a little. Put those developments into your idea journal.
• Write the damn thing when it's ready to come out.

The other interesting thing I've found about my own brain is its bias toward whatever medium I'm working in at the moment. Currently my ideas all seem to settle into short story form, but a year or two before that I was thinking in terms of movie scripts and treatments, because that's what I was mostly working on. Before that it was novels.

Yet that bias toward one format can work in your favor, as an idea that you developed as a movie can be repurposed as a short story or novel, and vice versa. In fact, now that I've taken the movie idea and turned it into a fairly different short story, I'm considering re-adapting that for a movie script. And so it'll go.

This is all meant to demystify the process a bit, and codify a little how I approach it. Yours may be different, but I'm sure it'd be interesting to compare, as everyone works differently. Feel free to comment with how you do it...

Catching up with the Legion of Superheroes

In my ongoing reread of all my old comics, I've just finished up my run of the Keith Giffen-Tom & Mary Bierbaum run on Legion of Superheroes, from the late 80s. I always associate it mentally with the Justice League run, which partly overlapped, forming a time when Giffen was basically the editorial director for all of DC's characters, except the Big 3 and the Vertigo universe.

Two things struck me on this reread, the first I've done since I bought these comics back in the 90s. One is that the story moved much slower than I remembered, and the second is the sense I got of the LSH fandom being somewhat apart from the rest of DC fandom.

Regarding the first point, there were just two major storylines in the 40 issues that Giffen co-wrote and drew or laid out: the first concerned the reformation of the Legion 5 years after the previous storyline (which is why this epoch is called the Five Year Gap), and the second was about the liberation of Earth from the Dominators. There were a couple of other minor stories in there, but the first storyline is just as much about telling readers what's happened to all the characters as it is about telling new stories.

This means we're left with a lot of ideas introduced early on by Giffen and the Bierbaums, but which never came to fruition. This isn't a huge criticism because what we did get was entertaining and well-written, but it's interesting to think that some of the characters that came out of this era of the Legion were positioned (because of various DC Universe retcons) as having always been part of the team, but we never learned that much about them.

For the second point, one of the things that attracted me to the Legion then was the sense of a huge history (the team first appeared in 1958). Some reading and research back in the 90s turned up back issues and fanzines talking about the Legion's history, confirming this impression. But the amount of letters from disgruntled (or happy) fans who'd been reading the book for decades, and who had strong ideas about favorite characters, was intriguing.

A lot of names kept popping up in the letters, and the Bierbaums themselves, who started as fans before turning pro, confirmed this in how they ran the letter column. They had their own language and in-jokes and references, much more so than the Justice League fans over in those books.

Back in the day, DC's books were a lot more diverse and not always explicitly connected, so although LSH started as a toss-off Superboy story, it quickly grew into its own little corner of the DC Universe, connected but largely unconcerned with what was going on in other books. But in terms of a fully realized universe, you could say LSH is up there with Jack Kirby's Fourth World books or the Vertigo books. The fact that the characters had personalities and histories also makes a difference - Superman and the Flash and Batman were basically all interchangeable in terms of personalities, whereas a lot of Legionnaires dated each other at various points in those initial 30 years of publication. And most notably, Legionnaires who died stayed dead.

The other striking thing is how mature the book is, despite not having the mature readers tag on it. In fact, I just checked and none of that series had the Comics Code Approval stamp, which is pretty innovative for a book that started out being about teenage superheroes in bright costumes in the future.

To start with, just a shitload of characters dies, especially in the first few issues. One issue features, on its cover, the villain of the storyline standing among the body parts of a former Legionnaire whom he kills in that issue. Other mature themes are non-explicit nudity, drugs, domestic abuse, same-sex relationships (as hinted in Lightning Lass and Shrinking Violet's relationship), and even transgender storylines, when it's revealed that Shvaughn Erin, a female supporting character with a long-standing crush on Element Lad, was originally a man who took a sex-change drug to get closer to him.

Most interesting was the revelation in the issue that addresses this story that Element Lad himself wouldn't have been bothered to date a guy. Pretty heady stuff for a book published 30 years ago, especially when you consider that trans rights are the current battleground in American politics, the way homosexuality was a few years ago.

What's sad for me is taking the book as a whole, from the first issue to the final one I own, in which that whole continuity is erased and rebooted to be in line with DC's Zero Hour crossover. I kept on with the book for a year or two after the reboot, but eventually lost interest and at some point got rid of those issues, even though I remember the first storyline being okay.

But how successful was this Giffen-Bierbaum relaunch? Probably not very, at least not to the same level as the Giffen-DeMatteis Justice League, which is still regarded fondly (and collected in trade paperbacks). The Legion went through another reboot after Zero Hour, creating yet another version of their origin, before being de-booted to something that reflected the book's continuity as of 1989 - but basically all of the stuff in the Five Year Gap isn't considered canon anymore.

And the reason that's too bad is that this was really something different - the Legionnaires were all grown up now, some dead, some different to what readers expected. The universe itself was also different: a grimy "used future" rather than the shiny, optimistic one that first appeared in the 50s and 60s, with Earth now under brutal alien control. There wasn't really anywhere to take the Legion after this, and anyway DC probably wanted it to conform closer to the rest of the continuity.

So while not the most successful book, Legion of Superheroes Volume 4 remains one of my favorites, and yet another indicator of why the 80s was the best decade for comics.