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Baylis, Jonathan – Live From New York It’s So Buttons!
Live From New York It’s So Buttons!
So at the recent talk that Dan Clowes gave at CXC this year, he mentioned a few times the unreliability of memory. It had been on his mind because his mother and brother had both passed away within a month of each other, leaving him nobody else from that time to confirm or correct his memories. As such, everything he had left from that time was roughly “a memory of a memory.” I say all this to point out that it feels like the main story in this one came out of another issue of his series… but it might just seem familiar to me because I’ve read the story before, just in a different format. Anyway! This is the l’il comic that came with the next issue of So Buttons; I’ll review it soon, I just couldn’t pass this one up. It has two stories, and they’re doozies, drawn by J.T. Yost and Jeremy Nguyen respectively. The first, the one that triggered my memories, is the story of when the punk band Fear played on Saturday Night Live. The powers that be really wanted John Belushi to keep appearing on the show and they offered to let him pick the musical act (they also wanted an audience of legit punks). Things got ugly, stuff was smashed, and it was the first and only time SNL has had dead air. The story was recounted by Ian MacKaye of Fugazi, who was one of the punks in attendance (he actually got his voice on the air after a mic stand was knocked into the crowd). The other story recounts the story of how Lorne Michaels managed to get seats for his show and the story of Jonathan’s favorite baseball team, sort of. Based on where he was born, he went a little rogue with it. It’s another couple of solid stories from the story making machine that is Jonathan Baylis (and his artist friends). This one is new enough that it’s not listed in his store yet, but I’ll bet if you ask him about them that he has a few copies available. $5
Baylis, Jonathan & Various Artists – So Buttons #10
It’s the 10th anniversary issue of So Buttons! And no, it’s not quite an issue a year, if you go to his website you’ll see a few more issues here and there. Anyway, this is a hefty issue, with sections involving Birth, Life and Death, so the man covers a lot of ground here. I will just say before I get started that I’m sorry for the loss of his dog Mocha; as somebody who owns a cat who’s been around a little longer than this website (which started in August 2001, so you do the math), the whole pet mortality thing has become very real to me in recent months. Self-indulgent aside over, how’s the comic? The “Birth” section has two stories, one about Norman Mailer (and, oddly, another reminder that I should find a biography of Rip Torn ASAP), and another about how Lorne Michaels got his first literal seats at SNL from George Steinbrenner. Next up was the “Life” section, and it’s probably a good sign that this was the biggest section. Stories in here include his son’s first day of preschool, his idea of what his parents collected, a gone but not forgotten old Manhattan restaurant and how he tracked down a cookbook from the chef years later, and his reaction to the David Cronenberg film Crash. Which, as he makes emphatically clear, is a very different film than the one of the same name that somehow won as Oscar a few years later. Finally there’s “Death”, and in those two stories he talks about how important it is to be a bone marrow donor (if you’re younger than 45, sign up!) and another about the death of his dog. Here’s to 10 more years (or longer) of So Buttons, the man has a natural gift for storytelling. $5
