Category: Memento Mori

There was a lot about the fall of 2020 that was distressing and depressing and generally speaking not good. However, I found out yesterday that there was at least one small silver lining of which I hadn’t been aware. By the close of the year, my debut novel Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows had earned out its advance.

This is not monumental or earthshaking news, and maybe it’s really only of interest to me and my publisher, Ross E. Lockhart of Word Horde. This means that the earned royalties from book sales (print and ebook) have exceeded the amount I was paid as an advance on those royalties. I’ll actually be receiving another check!

As of the New Year, there are over 1,000 copies of my book out there in the world, on people’s shelves, and in their tablets. For someone just starting out in publishing, that feels pretty good. It’s a modest milestone that Christina and I will take an opportunity to celebrate this week.

Of course, if you haven’t read Memento Mori, and you’re the kind of person who likes weird fiction, The King in Yellow, underground horror films, Riot Grrrl zines, and general strangeness, then by all means purchase a copy and give it a go. I think you’ll enjoy it.

I also need to give a quick shout out to my publisher, Ross (buy all of his books!), who obviously took a chance on me and the book to begin with, and who is also an excellent person with whom to do business. Small press publishing sounds like a minefield sometimes, but Ross has a well-earned reputation as a stand-up dude who tirelessly promotes his authors and their work.

Finally, this post also comes courtesy of Molly Tanzer (buy all of her books, too!), who graciously invited Memento Mori to be part of the Word Horde StoryBundle in the fall. Without a doubt, it was those sales that pushed the novel over the top.

And if you already bought and/or read, THANK YOU, TOO! (Please consider leaving a rating and/or review on Amazon, GoodReads, etc. They really do help a lot.)

This popped up on my feed yesterday. It’s an episode of the Russian cartoon Well, Just You Wait!, but this one is essentially a commercial for the Quarz Zenit 1x8C-2 Super 8mm movie camera. This is the same camera that Tina Mori uses to shoot all of her films in Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows.

In Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows, Tina Mori steals a wind-up Super 8 film camera from a professor of Russian language and literature. This is the camera she uses to make all of her early films. But it’s not a cursed camera or anything like that. It’s a little weird maybe, but it’s certainly not supernatural.

The Soviet Union manufactured hundreds of thousands of these and other motion picture cameras. The first I ever owned was the 16mm Krasnogrosk K-3 motion picture kit, and the Super 8 Zenit 1x8C-2 and its kin are like younger siblings. Now I have four or five of them. Yes, I have a problem.

Since the end of the Soviet Union, these cameras have flooded secondary markets like eBay, where you can routinely find them for sale at bargain prices. These are quite often barely used if at all, especially if they are being sold from the Ukraine or Belarus. I imagine gigantic warehouses of 30-year-old camera kits just waiting to find homes with nostalgic hobbyists.

But I think nostalgia isn’t quite right, either. Kodak still manufactures Super 8 film (it is even bringing back a limited selection of discontinued film stocks, though not Kodachrome as yet), and they are famously attempting to reintroduce a hybrid Super 8/digital motion picture camera for today’s consumers.

There are also companies like Pro8mm, who not only sell Super 8 film and processing (including conversion to digital files for editing and output), but they also refurbish cameras into like new or better condition. There are also still film labs that process these smaller gauge formats, though certainly far, far fewer than in decades past.

While Kodak’s new camera is a hybrid of digital and analog technology, the Zenit Super 8 camera is almost entirely, doggedly, brutally analog (it does have a battery-powered internal light meter). While most of the Super 8 cameras that people bought in the U.S. and Western Europe and elsewhere had battery-powered motors and were made mostly of plastic, the Zenit is a lot of die cast metal and heavy composites. It’s weighty. To give you a better sense of it, here’s a short YouTube review of the 1x8S-2 (which is the version of the camera that was sold outside the USSR under the market name Kinoflex). The reviewer is German.

Aside from always delicate lenses, these cameras are virtually impossible to break during normal use. That’s certainly not the case with a lot of old Super 8 camera that you might have bought at the local department store or camera shop. And they can do everything except synchronized sound.

All of this tends to inspire romantic people like me (who wrote Memento Mori on a manual typewriter–no Delete key!). Why not make a movie with one of these? Many, many aspiring filmmakers still find their way to Super 8 as a filmmaking format either out of a retro sensibility, or an appreciation of film’s discipline over digital, or a sincere love of the small gauge film visual aesthetic. Of course, since each cartridge is only about three minutes of footage at normal speed, most of these films are short. In fact, there is an annual global competition called Straight8 that challenges filmmakers to make a short film in Super8 with all in-camera editing (go the page, check out some classic samples, ZOMG). That is, you don’t get to edit anything after the fact. You shoot each shot in order, send off the cartridge, and hope it all worked out! Here is Edgar Wright’s amazing Straight8, Forced Hilarity, which Wright introduces.

But others have been even more ambitious, if not more successful. Here is John Hand on trying to shoot in feature film on Super 8 in the 21st Century. Another guerrilla project, Buster, managed to do the Super 8 feature thing, as well.

All of these things, along with the decades-long history of home and amateur film enthusiasts that I have read about extensively, my own experiences growing up watching the Hauser family home movies on 8mm film (and inheriting many of them recently), and my more recent interest and research in the underground film scene contributed to the creation of Tina Mori’s obsession.

Next time, I’ll introduce you to that underground film world. But until then, do you have any memories of watching celluloid home movies? How is that experience, or your memories of that experience, different from the cellphone video that we see everywhere all the time now? I want to hear what you think.

A big part of Memento Mori: The Fathomless Shadows is issue #5 of the zine Final Grrrl created by Billie Jacobs. As I’ve written elsewhere, Billie’s voice in the zine is in many ways the farthest from my own, and so it was the one for which I had to do the most research. I want to share with you a little bit about what I found when I set about fleshing out Billie’s background.

Billie’s passion is horror movies. That’s what fills her thoughts most of the time. When her imagination or her creativity is sparked, it’s usually in relation to horror. That desire for thrills and chills is what fuels her reactor’s core. It provides energy, but it doesn’t entirely translate into identity.

As more and more people around her expected her to fit in somewhere, whether or not they had specific ideas about where, Billie resisted most of the conventional cliques. They didn’t want her and she didn’t see herself with them, even though she felt a desire to belong somewhere. She finally found what she was looking for when she came across a copy of someone else’s Riot Grrrl zine at her uncle’s copy shop.

Riot Grrrl is a musical movement rooted in punk aesthetics and driven by feminism. It began in the Pacific Northwest and in Washington, D.C. when young women began forming bands that would allow them to perform and express themselves in ways that they had seen young men doing . Many of them had been going to punk shows for years, but they didn’t feel like they belonged. They often found themselves relegated to the back of the venue. As Riot Grrrl started to build momentum, bands like Bikini Kill would often announce from the stage, “Girls to the front,” emphasizing that their shows were places where women were fully empowered to rock out.

More than a type of music, Riot Grrrl also encompassed a vital streak of political activism that focused on feminism and especially on protecting girls and women from abuse, but it quickly grew to include additional concerns like racism, homophobia, and ableism. Some of this growth was a reflection of the diverse interests of the women who made up the movement, while other aspects of it only grew after some members pointed out the shortcomings of the movement. For example, Riot Grrrl’s message and image were resoundingly straight and white at first, and it took some time for those who were viewed as leaders to recognize how that messaging could exclude some people who wanted to contribute. All of this activism was carried out in the form of loosely organized chapters where members could meet up for mutual support and planning, but more crucially it took place through the mail in the form of zines.

My go-to sources for Riot Grrrl history and aesthetics were two books and a documentary (in addition to a lot of listening to songs by Riot Grrrl bands and reading lyrics).

The Riot Grrrl Collection is a fantastically designed full-color collection of zine material, posters, and other printed ephemera from the movement’s heyday. This book gave me a crystal clear picture of the kinds of things that Billie would have been reading after she sent her $1 off in the mail to get a back issue of Girl Germs or the latest copy of Bikini Kill. It also comes with a fascinating introductory essay by Johanna Fateman of Le Tigre.

To get a better understanding of the bigger picture, I read Sara Marcus’s Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution. This book lays out the history, personalities, accomplishments, drama, and eventual decline from the peak of the Riot Grrrl movement in the mid-1990s, around that time that Billie puts together issue #5 of her own zine, Final Grrrl. If you’re interested in more than just the Wikipedia entry on Riot Grrrl, then this is perhaps the best consolidated resource.

But for a more complete sensory immersion in Riot Grrrl, I recommend Sini Anderson’s 2013 documentary The Punk Singer. This doc focuses on the story of Kathleen Hanna, the lead singer of Bikini Kill, as the spine of the film, but it also manages to establish a lot of the context for the wider movement. Most important for me, it presents the sights and sounds of Riot Grrrl together, most often through the voices of the women who made it happen. It’s fascinating and compelling, and I highly recommend it as a place to start, if you find yourself wanting to know more about Riot Grrrl.

Of course, there’s a ton more out there. In particular, I recommend looking into the amazing archiving and teaching work being done by people like Dr. Alana Kumbier. Alana and I knew each other in graduate school, and I’m fairly certain her work is where I became aware of Riot Grrrl zine culture in the first place. She has been involved in researching and supporting archives of zines and other ephemera, particularly related to queer communities and producers (like QZAP – The Queer Zine Archive Project), and she has co-taught courses on Riot Grrrl and zines.