Gendy Alimurung

Everything Counts in Large Amounts

Gendy Alimurung
Illustration by J.T. SteinyWhen individual units combine to form complicated, intelligent structures with well-coordinated divisions of labor, command hierarchies, and problem-solving skills — that’s a swarm. More than just strength in numbers, the swarm is an emergent property: the whole can achieve what the parts alone cannot; but paradoxically, without......
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Portals to Other Worlds

Gendy Alimurung
Photos by Wild Don LewisIt is a perfect Southern California day, bright and crisp. I am looking for comic book stores. Good ones, mostly. But unusual will do. I have few criteria: organization, selection, geek behind the counter with an encyclopedia for a brain. A good comic book store is......

Strange Daze

Gendy Alimurung
To look like Emily the Strange, you need a ghostly white oval face, long black hair, a short black dress and Mary Janes. Four black cats would follow you around wherever you go — graveyards, secret laboratories, dungeons, dark stairwells. You would listen to the Damned, the Germs, the Clash......

The Last Hallowed Haunting

Gendy Alimurung
When Gary Corb was 12, he fell in love with Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion. In his front yard that Halloween, he set up a cardboard tombstone, a plastic rat, a severed hand and a Styrofoam head used for displaying wigs. When he was done, Corb called his dad to bear witness......
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Tee Is for Tits

Gendy Alimurung
Periel Aschenbrand is a bad, bad girl. Author, artist, agitprop political activist, Aschenbrand designs sexy little T-shirts that say things like “Drug Dealer” and “Does ‘Date Rape’ Mean I Get Dinner?” and — her most famous — “The Only Bush I Trust Is My Own.” The Bush T-shirt, part of......

Huggy Shirts

Gendy Alimurung
In the future, your handbag will yell at you if you leave the house without your wallet. Your umbrella will nag you to bring a scarf. Your shirt will hug you, on its own, and you will have deep, meaningful, existentialist text-message conversations with your jacket. All your clothes, most......
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Potter by Dale

Gendy Alimurung
When Jim Dale reads Harry Potter, he does all the voices — hundreds of them. Hermione is the voice of his first girlfriend (they were 13). Dobby, the house elf, is the midget who stood behind him in a crowded elevator and said, “Excuse me, sir, could you take your......
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The Voyeur

Gendy Alimurung
Photo by Ted SoquiHoliday Reinhorn’s secret writing clubhouse has a bright red door. It is separated from the main house and overlooks the swimming pool. “Is this the pool in ‘Fuck You’?” I ask. In the story, which appears in Reinhorn’s debut collection, Big Cats, a woman shares a quiet......

He Who Must Not Be Named

Gendy Alimurung
One week before the J. K. Rowling billion-dollar book release love orgy began, a guy named Joel Stein called out the nation’s Harry lovers.“Hogwarts fans, you are stupid, stupid, stupid,” wrote Stein in his Los Angeles Times opinion column. “Isn’t it a clue that you should be ashamed of reading......

Gummy Boobs

Gendy Alimurung
There were far fewer people at the second annual Cosmetic Enhancement Expo than you might imagine, considering that Los Angeles is, after all, the home of the augmented tit and reduced ass. One exhibitor, an author hawking a tell-all book on The God Complex, supposed that attendance was down because......