The writer who used to be ...

 I used to write for The Arizona Republic. The Republic was my longest-term employer. I worked there from February 1981 through the middle of January 1997, so pretty much 16 years. 

Being there so long I held a number of positions, most of them behind the scenes. I was a copy editor in the news department, which was responsible for our daily production of international, national, state and local news, for about seven years. I moved to the features copy desk, which was responsible for the daily production of our entertainment and lifestyle coverage. I used to describe copy-editing as "fixing mistakes and writing headlines." Really, it wasn't just fixing mistakes - such as grammar missteps and typographical errors - but also preventing them by asking the right questions to be sure that what the writer meant to say was conveyed accurately to our readers.  

It's not a glamor job. 

Once, There Was a Fanzine ....

 My friend "The Kizer" and I were deeply into comics back in the late 1960s. So much so, that I proposed we make our own "fanzine." At the time, fanzine meant a certain kind of amateur publication made by and for fans. The idea of this type of fanzine started in the science fiction fan community, but as far as I've been able to document, sometime in the early 1960s, comic book fanzines started to appear as well. 

Excelsior #1 cover, drawn by my
pal, The Kizer. 

For my pal and me, it's unclear exactly when we found out about fanzines. I think we might have attended Phil Seuling's Comic Art Convention in New York City in 1967 or 1968, and that could have been where the door opened for us. 

I know I got onto the mailing list of something called the DallasCon Bulletin, which I probably first saw at the Comic Art Convention. It was published by a group of fans who intended to put on a science fiction fan convention in Dallas. The bulletin was their vehicle to build up excitement for their convention. It was through the bulletin, I think, that I first heard of Fantasy Illustrated. This was a fanzine that combined original comic stories with reviews, history and news about comic books. 

Fantasy Illustrated's publisher was Bill Spicer, and he had high hopes for extending the form of the comics. So much so, that as I subscribed to Fantasy Illustrated, Spicer decided to change its name to Graphic Story Magazine. He was a proponent of the form and felt that if there would ever be comic books aimed at something other than "the bubblegum brigade" (i.e., young kids), then the form would have to be called something other than comic books. After all, the name "comic book" was based on the idea that these were "funnies," but the kinds of storytelling possibilities that Spicer saw were maybe akin to the French art films that were making noise at the time. It was in the pages of Graphic Story Magazine that I first heard of a "graphic novel." Nowadays, that's a commonplace. 

It may be hard to understand today - when some of the biggest film franchises of all time are based on comic book superheroes and comic book-like space operas - that the nerd culture we see on "Big Bang Theory" was very much a clandestine thing. Oh, how you'd be ridiculed if you told outsiders that you were a fan. 

I have to believe that the impulse to create something - whether it's a comic book, a song, a drawing or something else - comes from the pleasure one received from experiencing someone else's work, and then a corresponding reflex to try to create a similar pleasure for someone else. More confounding, when you try to analyze that process is that this act of creating in response to creations one has enjoyed is in itself a pleasure, even if there is no audience for that secondary creation.  

Below, I present the cover of our fanzine, Excelsior, pretty much as it was published in the fall of 1968. This is a teaser to a new blog where I will be writing a series of posts about the context of each of  Excelsior's stories and features, and then a re-do of it for 2022. That'll be followed by continuations and conclusions, what probably would have been the second issue of Excelsior, because I've always felt bad that we left these stories hanging, even though nobody really noticed us. 

I don't know how long this will take, but come along, I promise we'll both learn something. 

Angels on the train

Yesterday, we went to the ballgame in Phoenix. It was a big event for my wife and me because it was the first time we'd been to a big indoor venue since February of 2020, just as the world was shutting down for the years of the plague. 

The venue was Chase Field, renowned for its swimming pool and retractable roof, which rarely gets opened up during day games, especially as we approach June and the other summer months. 

The first test was taking the Metro light rail into downtown Phoenix. We chose a park and ride that had indoor parking. Our rail ride would take us through downtown Tempe and the Arizona State University campus (right past the school's basketball arena and football stadium) over the Tempe Town Lake (a dammed-up portion of the Salt River, or Rio Salado), a stop at the Sky Harbor airport's Sky Train and into downtown Phoenix by the Phoenix Convention Center. 

We wore masks aboard the train, but many did not. To each his own. 

Once we parked in the park and ride, we walked across the street to the light rail station and attempted to purchase tickets. I had trouble getting the automated kiosk to accept my credit card. A friendly gent, who I thought worked for the Metro line, came over to help out, and he figured out that I was putting my chip into the slot backwards. Sorry for the confusion, but two years of just tapping the card softened my insert-card-here skills. It turned out that he was not a Metro employee and was wearing his Diamondbacks colors. My wife called him an angel sent to make our day easy and enjoyable. 

So for the first time in a long time, we were out in a place where we didn't know people, with an assortment of strangers just waiting for the train. We chatted with the guy who helped us. There was another guy waiting who was dressed up as security, but actually that was his costume for Phoenix Fan Fusion, a comics and other pop culture event being held at the Convention Center. Another attendee, dressed all in black as Obi-Wan Kenobi - with contact lenses and a swooshing, lights-up lightsaber - also bought a ticket and stood with us. 

Time Again - Sal Sings and Plays (May 22, 2022)

At Arizona Songwriters Gathering, Jan. 29, 2022

Happy New Year, growing down, blood pressure and other things

As the New Year approached, I found myself saying, "I don't usually make New Year's resolutions but this year I am making one: I will have more fun in 2022." It may sound frivolous, but in a world like today's - where we're being torn at by all sorts of chaotic forces - it's easy to forget to have fun. That may be one reason the nation's blood pressure went up in 2021. The world is a grim place in a lot of ways, but it's also beautiful. So, having more fun is enjoying that beauty, at least to my way of thinking.

This resolution came about because of two different inputs. One was a Facebook post by a friend of mine who said he never makes resolutions and added: "Nobody ever resolves to do fun stuff." Well, I intend to prove him wrong, just to be spiteful. 😆

The second piece of it is that I've found myself saying this a lot in the past few months: "The worst thing that ever happened to me was I grew up, so I'm going to grow down now." I picked up the phrase "grow down" from some friends in high school, but I hadn't thought about it much till the past year.