Got a note from the Jersey Noir photog Mark Krajnak — he appreciated my comparison of his cover for the new Race Williams omnibus to Alan Ladd, somehow summoning that sort of evocative iconography. That’s what happens with art, if you can swing art.
Great photo.
And the shot above isn’t bad, either, is it? A collaboration between Mark and a cool cat named Stefan for a series of Christmas Noir images. Thought some folk might like to surf over and take a gander at the set.
Ordinarily, I do as little as possible for Xmas — if I could sneak past the season without hearing a single Xmas song, I’d feel a sense of riotous victory. But you know how it is, you have to go out in the world, gumshoe the mean streets. Subject your ears to Holiday Cheer.
Like last Saturday. I had a tour by appointment set up. Since we were between monsoons, they didn’t cancel out.
And as I rolled my machine into town I heard that also going on that day would be SantaCon.
Hundreds if not thousands of Santas, loud drunken Santas, half-naked Santas — I told the group that if they saw a thundering herd of red with white trimming coming at them, to throw themselves against the face of a building and ride it out.
You know, one Bad Santa does something ill-advised, the cops give chase, every Santa is a suspect and panic ensues — big stampede like a Buster Keaton movie.
That action had a kernel of its origins in The Suicide Club, but jumped to life during the run of the Cacophony Society. Remember back in October when I mentioned that my pal John Law was associated with The Suicide Club, Cacophony, Burning Man and etc. & etc.?
Among the etcs. was bringing the SantaCon concept to America. Now he gets to denounce it — one of the perks of being a pioneer.
Avoiding Death-by-Santa, we got through the tour, and toward the end one guy told me that the group was associated with the Kepler space telescope — astronomer types, they had discovered and named or numbered thousands of stars.
I looked at them and said, “Jeez, you guys should have taken the Fritz Leiber Tour!”
