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Below are the 14 most recent journal entries recorded in
luchaninjakeith's LiveJournal:
| Monday, January 19th, 2009 | | 10:52 pm |
| | Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 | | 1:35 am |
| | Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 | | 8:08 pm |
| | Saturday, January 12th, 2008 | | 4:23 pm |
An interview with a magazine publisher?!?!
This is perhaps my favorite article ever on Wrestling Observer or any other 'sheet' site - Steve "Dr. Lucha" Simms interviews publisher of Super Luchas Ernesto Ocampo on editorial philosophies, the Mexican magazine industry and dealing with maskedmen all day: Read it here.I'm always amazed at hearing print run and circulation numbers of the so-called "major" magazines out there. The lucha rags are bottoming out right now with runs of 20-30,000 - and that's in the returnable newsstand racket, so who knows what the actual sales are. According to Ocampo, they only send 1,000 copies to the U.S. for distribution (gotta think that's primarily SoCal and Texas). My old FPU runs in the late 90's - the height of the 'zine' era mind you - were 5,000, and that was I'm damn proud to say non-returnable, too. So every copy out there had a reader. I also had retail accounts in South America, northern Europe, Japan, Australia - basically five continents. Those were good days. Remarkably, now that I've phased into books and online, with WAY more exposure when you think in terms of hits and bookstore shelves and the like, it's still that old short magazine run that anyone remembers or acknowledges. I read all the time in blogs and forums that I'm no longer around at all or out of business, even from people who've purchased my books. I think that 90's zine spike was just a beloved period in many people's lives - lots of alternative culture discovery, lots of connecting with folks after thinking you're alone in your love of something. In a lot of ways the internet makes it too easy, so folks get jaded. Not that it's going to change any of what I'm doing, but I do scratch my head when my current efforts are essentially ignored and I'm defined by a magazine that hasn't come out in the better part of a decade... Now, it's looking bleak for the homegrown Mexican lucha magazines, too. There are currently 5 or 6 struggling rags left, and those who adapt to online fastest are going to survive into the next decade. Best of luck Mr. Ocampo! | | Friday, January 11th, 2008 | | 11:33 pm |
Sword Girls #2 - Saori
 I have another long photo-article on the Ninja80 blog in the "Sword Girls" series - this time featuring Akiko Kujo's 'Saori' character from "Kaiketsu Lion Maru." You have never seen a more defined pair of dancer's legs charging a group of hapless ninja shockers... See and read here: Ninja80 Blog | | Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 | | 11:53 pm |
Do all keyboards suck now???
The answer is NO! I'm hesitant to blatantly throw out a plug, but I'm so smitten with a holiday gift to myself and I know a lot of you are writers, so I wanted to share a gamble that has actually paid off - namely this Matias Tactile Pro 2 keyboard. I have a hard time these new shallow depression-less keyboards - especially Apple's new slimline piece of shit. I nervously took the plunge on this pricey but renowned Matias deal, which is touted as a real throwback to a previous era. And yeah, it is... Think late 80's/early 90's and what keyboards used to be: keys spaced out like a Selectric typewriter, individual springs under each key for resistance, crisp loud "clack" sounds with each keystroke and a big meaty "plunk" when you jab the space key. It's a STEEP price though - at a bullshit $130-$150, but if it's your trade, the performance improvement is worth the investment. Some detractors - no light on the Caps Lock, needs more USB inputs, but all-in-all I love banging on a real goddamn keyboard again. Kinda frustrating to pay a premium price for something that had to be meticulously retro-engineered just to get back to what you used to get free with your computer in the first place, though. Matias' site is here, but it's cheaper at places like Small Dog Electronics and Mac Mall, so go third party. OK, unsolicited shill ends here. | | Sunday, January 6th, 2008 | | 11:58 am |
Let's talk art on internet radio!
Does that phrase make any sense? Oddly enough, YES! I love broadcast radio alternatives. I'm a dedicated SIRIUS satellite radio subscriber (yes, I came over for Howard). But I've yet to fully grasp the podcast. Guess if my computer is on, I'm working, not looking for audio content. Or if I am, it's music and not talk. That's certainly the case with my iPod - music not talk. But I can't argue with the exposure podcasts yield and can relate to them with a certain retro sensibility. People used to buy 45 rpm records of Beatles interviews and comedians on Ed Sullivan. This is sort of the same notion, grown up in a major way with a vastly bigger audience potential. Someone once suggested I do the FPU "Lucha 101" section as a series of podcast lectures rather than articles. I do have a knack for running off good shit live and in interviews, so maybe... In the meantime, I've been enjoying Javier Herndez's 'Internet Radio Show' over at Planet Comic Book Radio. Tuesday night he's got Rafael Navarro in studio talking various art influences and whatnot. The notion of connecting to the internet to LISTEN to a comic book creator TALK about artwork is a weird one, and one that could only come about in this new weird era of media re-definition and experimentation. | | Tuesday, January 1st, 2008 | | 10:14 pm |
Sword Girls #1 - Kagero
Been watching a lot of 70's and 80's Japanese TV lately, real formulaic and episodic stuff - like period-set equivalents of Magnum PI and The Mod Squad with samurai and ninja. Many of these shows feature knife-wielding hottie sidekicks that adhere to some strangely rigid formulas of dress and behavior, and I'm increasingly fascinated with this character type. The first of several mini-articles with piles of pics is on the main blog over at Ninja80: http://www.xanga.com/N80_Ninja_KitschFirst up is a look at Judy Ongg's 'Kagero' bounty hunter/shinobi-skilled spy from "Shokin Kasegi." This was a quirky show Tomisaburo Wakayama made in between Lone Wolf & Cub films and The Bad News Bears Go To Japan. She's just the most gorgeous, bee-stung and booty-licious tiny thing you could ever ask for... I'd mirror, but the image thing is pain. More later.  | | Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 | | 9:29 pm |
R.I.P. Huracan...
Last week, working on the altar, it occurred to me that we had drafted the list of tributees a month earlier, and heaven forbid by now it might be a longer list. Had the event been on the real holiday instead of the more convenient Saturday before, we would have had a last minute addition, and this is one close to my heart. Daniel Garcia made a mask famous and a move fundamental. As the ring's first HURACAN RAMIREZ, he elevated a modestly successful film character into an icon of lucha libre, and as the man who made the "huracanrana" a household word for lucha fans and a staple of the sport, he became a ring legend. His mask is omnipresent, even today after so many underwhelming "Juniors". He was a pallbearer to Santo and an active spokesman for lucha well after his unmasking and retirement. He passed away today at the age of 80. Back in 2001, I gotta say I was a jaded publisher with a failing business and a waning interest in my original inspiration. I gave in to some bitterness, and needed to find something that would snap me back into "fan mode." I had some of the hooded "staff" set-up at LA's Shrine Auditorium for a comic show, and was losing my shirt yet again. Determined to make the best of a bust day, I got in line to meet some lucha talent signing autographs for Bart Kapitzke's "Alternative Wrestling Shop." Daniel Garcia was making his first such appearance in LA, and was overwhelmed by fans. He still took time to shake my hand and sign a souvenir hood. I gave him a fat envelope full of everything lucha I had ever published - I do this alot - less of a networking exercise than a simple "thanks" to the ring guys. His English wasn't great, but he thanked me, took a quick curious look, but nothing more came of it. The rest of the day continued as a washout, so I had everyone pack up early and get lost. As I was going out, I said hi to Bart, and congratulated him on a good turnout for his table at least. The crowds had thinned, and I saw Garcia talking to his translator and pointing at me. We walked over, and he's holding up an FPU #4. He give me a REAL handshake at that point (with a vicious grip!), a big smile on his face. He stumbles over some broken English to the tune of "Hey, you do good. Thanks from us". US!!!! 'US' meaning 'us guys' - the lucha community. Then... he gives me a good natured cross arm slap across the chest and shoulder blades! I'll never forget that moment. I use it to remember why writing about these guys is worth it. It's the single best personal interaction I've ever had with ring talent. That's the power men like Daniel Garcia have, for them it's just another Saturday in some hall somewhere, but for people they affect, it's unforgettable. The real stars know that, they know how important each and every handshake can be. They never let us fans down. Being my age, I never had the pleasure of seeing Huracan in the ring, but Garcia the retired ambassador of classic lucha had a major impact on me. A short little instance at a signing, a friendly encouraging word at the right moment that has kept on fueling me - I'll always be thankful. I love telling this story. I just wish I wasn't telling it at such a sad occasion. Rest in peace Huracan - your mask, your ring style and your good will to fans even in distant lands make you eternal. Keith Rainville 11/1/2006 Current Mood:  sad | | Friday, October 27th, 2006 | | 12:27 am |
Hollywood Forever this Saturday night sees the debut of FPU's tribute altar to masked wrestlers throughout the ages! See life-sized skeletal enmascarados grapple for the souls of the departed, with tributes to over 30 famed maskedmen who have shed the mortal coil, gorgeously framed by a "ring" with calavera turnbuckles, and traditional offerings to the departed. On-hand at any given time of the night will be FPU publisher Keith Rainville, HOODTOWN author Christa Faust, "GoreGilla" himself Dave Buscemi, and other friends of FPU. We'd love to see you all there, and our tribute to masked wrestlers is truly breathtaking. It choked us up just making it, but to see it candlelit in the surrounding of one of LA's biggest Dia de los Muertos celebrations will be truly amazing. Saturday, October 28, 2006 4:00 p.m. - 11:00 p.m. Hollywood Forever Cemetery 6000 Santa Monica Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90038 http://www.ladayofthedead.com/ | | Sunday, October 15th, 2006 | | 11:22 pm |
Last week I proofed advanced galleys of Lucha Noir and man does it look great. This new printer I'm experimenting with seems to be working out great (knock on wood!) and we should be shipping product by mid-November. I'm working on some special discount packages for the holidays, too - something like LN and HOODTOWN in a package for $30... making for ideal holiday gift shopping! More later... Meanwhile, work continues on our Altar to Masked Wrestlers for the Hollywood Forever "Dia de los Muertos" event on October 28th. Our little tribute has grown into a 6-foot ring of bones with life-sized skeletal combatants and visages of 30 maskedmen who have shed the mortal coil in the past seven decades. It'll really be something!!! And yes, we are working behind the scenes of a whole new FPU website, so stay tuned. KR | | Sunday, August 13th, 2006 | | 5:32 pm |
And the mirroring starts now...
Haven't really done anything in LJ, but I think it's about time to start mirroring, so here goes: Dare I even THINK things are approaching back to normal? After the blitzkrieg rush to hammer out the Campeones script, which came on top of a different blitz at the day gig, plus a week of business taxes, two weeks of jury duty, and various other ways life gets in the way of independent publishing, I'm looking at what may just be a normal Fall. Normal in that the day gig gets 200% busier every September, and I consult on one, possibly two, different lucha-related flicks in development right now. BUT, that's much more of a normal plate for me and the FPUniverse, so given that window, the Rafael Navarro artbook should be on schedule. Raf and I are completing the text in the next few weeks, and work progresses on the artwork. Some of the original stuff, particlarly the "lost" stuff from way back, was in bad shape, so it was a lot of archival-restoration-type Photoshop work. That bad patch is out of the way now. I'd love to thank everyone for the praise of the "Lucha Noir" preview binder that Raf had out at both San Diego Comicon and Wizard World Chicago. People are chomping at the bit for this thing, and lots of art folk want it to, which is just fantastic. Meanwhile, I'm once again poking around a "Masked Adventures" story I started for the old "Mr. Unknown's" line back in 2001. It's in a tenth incarnation right now, this one feeling pretty damn good. I'm not a fictioneer by trade, so this thing is more a labor of love, and something I do to fulfill the workaholic's definition of "relaxation"... FPU web woes continue, mostly because I can only keep so many burners going. I'm looking into hiring a firm to master the thing now. I want a CMS-based site with major back-end control, and those folk aren't as easy or cheap to come by. The reason the loss of the full FPU-web hasn't hurt so much is the explosion of activity we've had on Amazon.com. Christa's "Snakes on a Plane" novelization led to the biggest spike in crossover sales for HOODTOWN I've ever seen. The future for FPU is definitely in second- and third-party vendors, and I'd love to have a time when I'm wholesaling everything and not fulling orders myself. | | Saturday, June 17th, 2006 | | 9:41 pm |
BLACK FACE - the FPU Take on "Nacho Libre"
I can't recall ever sitting in a theater and seeing a movie that one minute had me completely engrossed and loving it, and the next had me seriously contemplating walking out, OVER AND OVER AND OVER... But that's exactly what NACHO LIBRE did to me today, a film that endeared me then assaulted me on an emotional sine wave, a frequency whose highs were the finest and most authentic vintage lucha libre trappings ever filmed outside of Mexico's golden age cinema. The lows were Jack Black. All Jack Black. Period. First the highs - much of this film is Jared Hess' love letter to Oaxaca and rural Mexico, and to authentic Mexican wrestling and the iconography of the mask itself. The crowd extras, party goers, orphans, promoters, jobbers, announcers and thugs culled from everywhere from CMLL to Mexican indie promotions to the local populace were simply miraculous. Faces this rich haven't been found since the days of Leone... priceless! The countryside vistas are equally enthralling. With legendary lucha journalist Lourdes Grobet on as advisor, the rings are perfect, the arenas are perfect, the ringside fans are perfect, the decayed murals, lucha shrines and faded event posters are all perfect. The hoods are perfect. The rudo heavy is ASTOUNDING - lucha standout Silver King in a superb performance as Ramses. The feral minis - somewhere between Alushe and those hairy circus twins billed as wolfmen - are great. The amazingly cool paddle fans they're giving out this weekend - one featuring a photo of Black's masked visage, the other a banner-like crude painting of the same - are the bomb. So what went wrong? Well, with so much authenticity on screen, having a white guy play Mexican with an accent ranging from Ren to Jose Jimenez jars the hell out of you. Black is simply HORRENDOUS, and whoever thought the idea of him playing ethnic doesn't understand what year it is. If lucha was African instead of Mexican, would he have done the same role in black-face? If lucha was Chinese, would he have taped his eyes up and had the digital post folk fade his skin yellow? Inconceivable. So why was it OK for him to deliver this just awful performance. I'm not climbing on a racial soapbox here. I'm as white as it gets. But today I was embarrassed as hell, it felt like being at a party where someone just said the word "nigger" in conversation, and you make eye contact with a black person just after. You didn't say it, but you'd rather be anywhere else at that moment. And what has killed me from the start with "Nacho Libre" is how plain unnecessary it all is. Sure, Black's the draw, he's the Nickelodeon golden boy right now (are they aware of his Tenacious D pedigree at all?), he's the co-producer and the reason this flick is on the public's radar at all. Fine. Movies need stars. But write the role of him as a white lucha mark from LA, who can be a missionary, and he wants in the lucha scene. Maybe even keep the accent - that'll be the joke, how obviously un-Mexican he is, and how no one's falling for it but him. They just did not have to write him as Latino, and this bullshit excuse of 'my mother was Scandanavian' does not give him a pass to roll his R's. This is a movie, not some SNL skit. In 1976, Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor made history with an amazing scene in the adventure comedy "Silver Streak." They needed to sneak Wilder past some cops, so Pryor disguises him with shoe polish, a big hat, chrome shades and a purple satin roller jacket as a funkified shucking and jiving radio-glued-to-the-ear walking stereotype. Wilder is so bad and so unconvincing, it kills. That's the gag. HE'S the idiot for thinking that's authentic behavior. Jack Black's more-Mexican-than-Mexican bullshit here is WAY off this mark. And for NO good reason. Writing him as a white guy idolizing an occupation so inherently Mexican as lucha, and trying anything to get in it would have made a great statement. NL is anything but... Black aside, the film is also just plain flawed in it's writing and editing. Chunks feel missing. Events happen in the wrong order (watch for the bee sting welts), and there are missed opportunities all over the place. We never see anyone actually train, despite being teased often with the exterior of a rural gymnasio. Damn it, let us in there!!! Black is for no apparent reason, unmasked during the last match, which ruins an otherwise beautiful moment when the orphans show up at ringside in home-made Nacho hoods. I was almost choked up. For real. Then they cut back not to Nacho's masked face, which would have made sense, but rather to Jack black hamming it up with his eyebrows...AGAIN. Yawn. The film is also bogged down with complete nonsense like rat-tunneling fat chicks, mule-shit in the face gags with no apparent logic (or laughs for that matter), and WAY too much time on un-funny gags like toast crunching. What the fuck... BUT, ultimately, it's worth plopping down a saw buck... even if it's just to see the scene of Ramses getting oiled-up, or the scarred up rudo henchmen with foreheads like Abdullah the Butcher's. Like I said, the stuff that's right is SOOOOO right, the peaks so high and satisfying, it makes the valleys in between hurt all the much more. I paid a lot of attention to the audience today as well - which in a SoCal suburb was a healthy mix of Mexican-Americans (and let's face it, Mexicans in America), with white kids, a variety of Asian minorities and some Armenian folk thrown into the mix (have I ever mentioned how much I love SoCal?). There were plenty of laughs throughout, but rarely if ever was everyone laughing at the same thing at the same time. There were a lot of quiet Latinos, who would explode during the lucha scenes. There were people dead during anything with Black in a mask, but who would pop on command at his eyebrow antics or typical (and tired) Black scat routines. Most everyone laughed at the copious fart jokes, but that was the rare common ground. Is NACHO LIBRE going to be a monster hit, with legs like "40 Year Old Virgin" or "Old School"? I doubt it. It'll be strong as hell this weekend, but I think most of middle America may ignore this (as they did with "Dynamite") in the wake of the Nascar-feulled "Cars". Who knows... Is it the next big step for lucha? Probably not. It may have a benefit for some of us (we did see a spike in sales this month), but for my money, the Saturday that the Blue Demon Jr. episode of "¡Mucha Lucha!" was higher rated than "The Batman" was an hour later says a lot more about lucha libre's potential to entertain than this film does. It's a step, sure, and if we see some more Santo DVD's north-of-the-border, GREAT! And I'd love to see "Life Behind the Mask" and the Mil Mascaras flicks shooting outside of St. Louis get distribution, too. And to whoever made the decision, on behalf of the all-white staff of FPU, fuck you for having Jack black play Mexican. What the hell were you thinking... Keith J. Rainville Publisher - FPU | | Monday, February 14th, 2005 | | 12:25 am |
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