The New 52: Part Two (or why you should care)

I am a big advocate for superheroes. Superheroes and the reading of them are like vitamins. They strengthen parts of the spirit and morale.

Reading is great for you. Reading fiction, even better for you. But contemporary fiction doesn't do much in the way of giving one things to aspire to. Literary fiction (and this is more or less true of a lot of genre fiction as well) relies on the conflicts produced by characters who have deep-seeded flaws.

Might it not be a good idea to now and then read about people whose defining characteristic is that they are inherently good? I mean, isn't that what the whole New Testament is supposed to be about? Here's this guy, he's just...really nice to everybody. Like as in nicer than nice. All the time. Look, he's handing out some fish to some strangers! Look, he's helping out some blind people! What a nice guy!

Reading superheroes lets you get all that positive Jesus-y energy without all the unpleasant Christianity. Comic books are chock-full of positive role models. Of people we could aspire to be.

But they're difficult to crack into. Comic books are arcane, they're drenched in nostalgia and stale narrative. They lock out all but the most devoted fans, pandering to those of us who are willing to retain encyclopaedic knowledge about character histories.

Now it's possible that the DC relaunch will quickly devolve into more of the same. But it's also possible that the door into the DC universe might be unlocked to the uninitiated for the first time in decades. And there could be treasures within. What follows are some suggestions for books that should provide the easiest access to people who've never read a comic book in their lives.

1. Action Comics by Grant Morrison & Rags Morales. Rookie socialist Superman. If that three-word pitch doesn't sell you, you should probably stop reading now. Morrison has already done visionary work on Superman at the end of his career and is going back to the character's Seigel & Schuster roots for this story of Supe's first arrival in Metropolis. One of the best writers in comics on the medium's most iconic character.

2. Batman by Scott Snyder & Greg Capullo. Snyder's recent work on Detective Comics has been nothing short of amazing. His American Vampire, which started out as a collaboration with Stephen King, was so good that King got dropped off the title (okay, that's not exactly how it happened, but if writing American Vampire was an arm-wrestling match, Snyder would be Stallone in Over the Top and King would be...everyone else in Over the Top). He's the closest writer in ages to write a Batman that feels as basic and real as Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. Greg Capullo's chunky artwork was practically made to draw Batman.



3. Justice League by Geoff Johns & Jim Lee. One of the biggest writers in comics paired with one of the most influential (for better or worse) comics artists of the past twenty years. If they can keep this book on track and out on time, it should be pretty remarkable. Plus, this is the A-list Justice League: Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern. The big guns. I'd imagine the notoriously dilatory Lee has six issues drawn already, since a lot of DC's hopes are riding on this book.

4. Batwoman by JH Williams & W. Haden Blackman. Now we get into risky territory. Williams is one of the best artists working in superheroes. He pushes the limits of what a page can look like. And Kathy Kane is DC's high profile lesbian superheroine. Under the pen of Greg Rucka, she was a wonderfully fleshed out and balanced character. Williams' writing is the x-factor here; he's one of several DC artists who are getting the bump up to writer. But unlike some of the others, Williams might have the chops to carry this book.

5. Wonder Woman by Brian Azzarello & Cliff Chiang. Here's a character that's been struggling for an identity for ages. For whatever reason, WW has never caught on at the level of Superman or Batman. I might have preferred a return of Gail Simone to this book, I'm interested to see what Azzarello brings to it. Mostly known as a crime writer, Azz is promising that Wonder Woman will have a strong horror vibe to it. Could be a disastrous return to the bondage fetishism of WW's roots, or a chance to set the Amazonian mythology aside and let Diana step up into DC's big three where she belongs.

6. Batgirl by Gail Simone & Ardian Syaf. This one threatens to remain bogged down in continuity. Barbara Gordon reclaims the mantle of Batgirl after decades in a wheelchair. A whole lot of fans are, somewhat rightfully, offended at this mysterious, miraculous recovery and to keep those folks from rioting, there's going to be some 'splaining to do. But some of us think that Simone, one of the best writers on DC's stable and the only female writer involved in stage one of the relaunch, could be able to pull this off. Simone excels at writing strong, deeply realized female characters, which is exactly the treatment Barbara Gordon deserves, in or out of the chair.

7. Aquaman by Geoff Johns & Ivan Reis. Okay, this probably shouldn't be on the list. After all, Aquaman's power is that he talks to fish. But I've always had a soft spot for the guy and desperately want him to be cool. Geoff Johns has made Hal Jordan cool and almost had me convinced Barry Allen wasn't a narrative dead end. I'm hopeful he can do the same for Arthur Curry. But that doesn't mean y'all need to read it.

8. Animal Man by Jeff Lemire & Travel Foreman. Marvel has been very good at getting folks from indie comics to come write superheroes, with high levels of success. Huge paychecks probably don't hurt. DC's mostly plucked their talent from the mid-nineties and seems to have managed to piss off the very talented Brian Wood enough for him to abandon everything he's writing for DC. But Jeff Lemire is the real deal. His Essex County is stunning and Sweet Tooth continues to be on my reading list by virtue of being just wonderfullly weird. I wasn't huge on his Superboy work, although a lot of people were. But Animal Man, a superhero with strange animal-based powers and the ultra-rare ability to maintain a wife and two kids, could be the perfect fit for Lemire. And could be one of those books that creeps up and changes the game entirely, the way the big bad Brits did in the late eighties. Too much pressure for one book? Probably, but I'm betting Lemire is impressive right out of the gate.

Some of these might not be for you. And there might be some I'm leaving out that are totally for you. But if on some Wednesday this month, you happen to find yourself with three dollars to spare? Might not be a bad idea to go pick up a comic for once. Just saying.

Oh, and I swear pretty soon I'll start writing about books without pictures.

The New 52: Unsolicited Thoughts on the DC Comics Relaunch

It's apparent I haven't written for this blog in...oh, seventy years. Two and a half years, to be exact. I was thinking last week that, being between books at the moment (I'm in edits on one and pre-writing on another), maybe I would start up a new blog. Then I remembered I've had a whole bunch of blogs before and maybe I should just go back to this one.

Rather than doing anything remotely ambitious, I figured I'd talk about comic books.

For the record, the novel I'm starting to put notes together on has a lot to do with comics, comic book conventions and how fantasy narrative works. So I have an excuse.

In case you haven't heard, DC Comics, a company whose output makes up probably 40% of the floppies produced every year ("floppies" here refers to single issue comics, usually between twenty four and thirty six pages long with half that again in advertising, much of which is for other comics or comics-related merch), is about to do a company-wide relaunch of its superhero universe, releasing fifty-two number one issues in the month of September. If you're a comic book fan, this is huge news. In fact, it's hard to think of a cognate to this in any other form of entertainment.

Of course, it's a marketing move. Maybe not 100% a calculated marketing move, but largely a marketing move. DC has perennially lagged behind its competitor, Marvel Comics, in market share and this is what they're doing about it. Many of the characters are getting redesigned. Most if not all of them are going to be younger than they were before. And they're shedding the years of convoluted "continuity" that's come before, a sort of narrative baggage that the characters have been carting around for decades.

Continuity is another tricky thing to explain to an outsider, so let's try an analogy. If you were going to start reading the Harry Potter books (or watching the movies), you wouldn't start with the fourth one. Built into the fourth book is the expectation that you've read the previous three; there's a degree to which the narrative won't function if you don't bring that other knowledge in with you.

Now imagine that Harry Potter books have been coming out for fifty years. And that Harry lives in the same narrative universe as characters from the Narnia books, the Dark is Rising books and Madeline L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time books, each with fifty years of constant narrative trailing behind them. That's what comics continuity is like: dozens of characters who have amassed fifty years worth of intertwining, often contradictory stories (hard-core fans will do amazing mental acrobatics to reconcile discrepancies in continuity, as will comic book writers, many of whom started out as hard-core fans). And any of these stories can be called up into relevance at any time.

You can see where this might be daunting for a new fan. Someone who walks out of the Green Lantern movie, goes to their local store and picks up the latest issue will be left to stare blankly at a story that includes not just Green Lanterns, but Yellow, Orange, Violet, etc. This Lucky Charms of Lanterns situation is easily understood by someone (like me) who's been following the book for years. But it's illegible to a noob.

So in an attempt to bring in new readers, DC is ditching most (although not all; back to that later) of its continuity. And they're offering same-day digital availability of all of their titles, a move which might be more significant for the industry than everything else.

All of this has caused calamity within the comic book community and has gotten some amount of press in the world outside. A lot of fans are pissed off about the erasure of continuity. Which makes sense, especially for DC fans, because the DC universe is, in a way, about its continuity. Not only does DC trump Marvel in having superhero legacies (many DC icons have been, at one time or another, replaced by their sidekicks or someone new picking up the torch. See Batman, the Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, Starman. Of course, most of these torch-passings have been reversed eventually), the DC universe itself has been in a sort of existential crisis (that was an inside joke) about the contradictions in its shared narrative for decades. In an effort to "make it all fit", they've tried multiple dimensions, hypertime and the occasional rewriting of the timeline from scratch. Even this relaunch doesn't come out of nowhere: it supposedly flows out of the "Flashpoint" miniseries that wraps up tomorrow. We'll see about that.

But leaving aside the debates within the comics community (pants? no pants?), the question of whether or not this will bring in new readers remains. And while I'm rooting for this to be a huge success, here are a couple hurdles I can see.

1. Floppies are bite-sized. Most of us have watched enough television that we can handle serialized narrative. You hit the "Oh snap!" moment at the end of an episode of Lost, the screen goes black and you understand you'll have to wait a week for another fix. Most of us probably prefer binging our way through a full DVD worth one Saturday on the couch, but the waiting is part of a novelty cost: we get to see it right away. Then it's hurry up and wait.

But imagine if each episode of Lost was a half hour long. And they came out once a month. That's about the rate narrative gets doled out in comics.

For those of us who have been comics readers for a while, this is fine. We have several titles we follow and there's a ritual to going down the comic book store on a Wednesday and seeing which of the titles you dig has come out, then rushing home and moving incrementally ahead in the adventures of your favorite characters. And because the stories are going on in a shared universe, it becomes a little easier to keep incredibly long-form narratives in your head. Something that happens to Spider-Man may be referenced in a Captain America or Iron Man comic.

But these are very ingrained habits, and are foreign to most non-comic book readers. I'm not saying someone who doesn't read comics can't do this, I'm saying it may be difficult to get them to start. I started my wife (who is much smarter than me) reading The Unwritten and she really liked it. Until she had to wait every month for a new issue. By the time the next issue came out, the last one was more or less forgotten.

Among comics fans, there's a somewhat recent phenomenon referred to as "waiting for trade". What this means is that you stop following a comic on a monthly basis and wait for a whole storyline to be collected in a trade paperback. This is a much more natural form of reading and what most people probably prefer. The switch to reading in fits and starts, even with DC's commitment to getting books out on time, is going to be a tough sell to most readers.

2. The insularity of "top creative talent". It should first be noted that there have been numerous attempts to bring non-comics writers into the industry. Writers from Lost, Battlestar Gallactica and other series, as well as bigwigs like Stephen King and Kevin Smith have been given the keys to the shiniest narrative toys and told to let loose.

The results? Mixed at best. But the sales have generally been strong.

I will be the first to admit that many non-comics writers have failed to take advantage of some of the particular opportunities presented by the comics medium. I will also admit that most established, high end comics writers excel at exactly what they're doing. But outside of the industry, they're not marquee names.

This is particularly problematic within the DC relaunch, where many of the would-be marquee names are remnants of the nineties comic boom, their names largely forgotten (or never known) to the outside world and often snickered at within the industry. DC may have a hard enough time getting the fans excited about a book by Fabian Nicieza or Scott Lobdell (both keepers of the sprawling X-Men franchise through most of my teen years), much less getting anyone else's attention.

Yes, what this means is I want the writing staff of The Wire to take over the Batman books. Nothing against Treme, but seriously: right now.

3. The ladies were not excited about pants. When the relaunch was announced, one of the points DC editorial stressed was that all of its female characters would now wear pants. Not hot pants, regular pants.

In the minds of DC editorial, this seemed to be a major victory for feminism and a guaranteed increase in female readership. Of course, as game time approached, they reversed this decision and re-de-pantsed Wonder Woman. But pants (or tights, or whatever) are mostly colored in skin in a comic book, and the objections to Wonder Woman go deeper than the fact that she wears short shorts. It might not be a bad idea to enforce an editorial mandate against up-skirt shots and down-shirt shots by DC artists. If DC wants to really bring female readers on board, there are two major ways to do it.

Female writers and female artists.

I'm excited about Brian Azzarello writing Wonder Woman, because I'm excited about Brian Azzarello writing pretty much anything. But this should have been an opportunity for DC to frontline its current roster of female creators (which I think is pretty much Gail Simone, Nicola Scott and Amanda Conner) and bring new female creators into the fray. They should have been recruiting from all over the industry and beyond. What about Carla Speed McNeill writing the Legion of Superheroes? Or Karen Russell writing Element Girl? Hell, why not Sophia Coppola writing Catwoman? DC had a chance to bring in the ladies and all they had to offer was pants.

4. We're scrapping continuity. Well, not all the continuity. Marvel put out three huge superhero movies this year. DC put out one. Now not everyone was super-keen on Green Lantern, but it wasn't horrible and while it wasn't wildly successful, it wasn't an utter failure.

Folks coming to the continuity-free New 52 after digging on the Green Lantern movie might be surprised when they pick up Issue #1 of Green Lantern and find the man slinging the ring isn't Hal Jordan but Sinestro. Who is technically a Korugarian and not a man, but let's not split hairs.

Point here is, not all previous continuity is being jettisoned. It looks like all the continuity that DC Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns likes (or wrote) is still in play. So rather than a clean slate, we get a slightly muddied slate.

This brings up a numbers issue I'd like to address, one that illustrates just how dire the straits of comic books are right now. The lynchpin of the relaunch, Justice League #1, written by Johns and drawn by Jim "I only draw a comic every five years and it sells like crack" Lee, was pre-ordered at 200,000 copies. Biggest pre-order in a long long time. The comics industry is tumescent over numbers like that. The Green Lantern movie was pretty much considered a failure within the movie industry. It grossed $18 million in its first weekend. That means, figuring for a modest $10 ticket price, 1.8 million people saw the movie in its first weekend, almost ten times the number that will read what looks to be the best selling comic in three years.

I've gone on long enough. I'm hoping to post again on all the reasons you should get your ass down to the comic book store this month and start reading DC comics, but for now, while I'm pulling for them, I wish they'd gone a little bigger and a little smarter.

I'm also glad the Green Lantern books aren't getting the big continuity wipe. Because I'm a huge GL nerd.

Coming very soon: reasons you, yes you, should go buy some DC Comics starting tomorrow.

Reviews, mine.

Hey kids. In case you're interested, here's two book review pieces I've done recently, along with a review/meditation on some newly released Hank Williams stuff. Enjoy.

Omega: The Unknown by Jonathan Lethem
The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
Hank Williams

Debut of the new gig!

So it seems I am now the monthly country music columnist for PopMatters.com. Which I'm pretty excited about. I even did a little dance.

You can check out the first column here. Naturally I've decided to launch my journalistic career by misquoting Toby Keith. I'm pretty sure that's how HL Mencken got started.

In other news, I am about to dive face first into the second and hopefully final set of page proofs for the book. Do not envy me my headache. Small type's a bastard.

Oh yeah, and I'm back from Berlin. It was neat. I ate a blood sausage.

And so but.

So this is what brings me out of blog semi-retirement. Not the bike accident that tore up my face and left me with a shattered sense of what I looked like for weeks, so much so that when I look in the mirror, my eyes still go immediately to the new scars on my forehead, upper lip and chin, all of them faded now from their angry red to an apologetic pink. Not the cancer diagnosis that even now, as it enters its last week of real medical importance with the last of the offending tissue coming out of my neck in a chunk this Thursday, haunts my brain in a big black robe, checking its watch impatiently, or the accompanying paranoia regarding the upcoming surgery and its (statistically unlikely) threat to my facial-motor skills. Not any of the awfulness and growing despair surrounding the current election. No, not those. It's DFW.

One opens oneself up to derision (or at least would've last week) by claiming to be a David Foster Wallace fan. He was, after all, one of the smartest of the smart kids, and while he may have lacked some of the smarminess of Dave Eggers, his style had a type of intellectual intensity that reminded one, first and foremost, of the kid in the front row of the class, practically jumping up and down to get the teacher's attention, to answer yet another question posed to the entire class or worse, volunteer a bit of extra information on the subject at hand.

Extra information is certainly one of the first things that stood out in DFW's work, and as a style it's one I openly cribbed when working on my Flying Burrito Brothers book. Sure, it indicates certain...mental health issues when a writer cannot physically bear the thought of a stray related fact left on the cutting room floor. But it also indicates a deep investment in things, things in the William Carlos Williams sense: objects seething with meanings. In short (although nothing about DFW was ever in short), a sort of feeling that this fact might save your life. And if not that one, maybe this one. At the very least, maybe it'll be something you can turn over in your head for a little bit, while your laundry dries or in the seconds/minutes/hours before falling off to sleep.

This speaks, I think, to two things about DFW. The first is the difference between his mode of intellect (and expression of said intellect) and that of many of his contemporaneous young turks. When I finally got around to attempting "A Heartbreaking Stagger of Et Cetera", I was immediately (as in "before the first page"), I was immediately thrown out of the text by the feeling I was about to start a long conversation with someone who wanted me to know exactly how smart he was. The feeling was cold, condescending and alienating. DFW's work, no less showy and fact-packed (moreso on both counts) gives the opposite feeling. DFW was excited to tell us all the things he knew not so he could look at us smugly afterward, but because he knew we were smart. And he knew he was smart. And he wanted us to remember how fun that could be, how knowledge, even little trivial bits of it can light up the quotidian with the soothing warmth that a string of Christmas lights can give a kitchen, a sweet and needed opposite to the glaring overhead fluorescent of everything about the world that constantly threatens to overwhelm us with the almost blinding unknowledge of ideas ungrounded in things, of ideology uber alles. Or, in the case of many of DFW's characters (and possibly the author himself), the deafening roar of the solipsistic self. One of DFW's most resonant sentences (up there for me with Pynchon's devastating one-two, "They were in love. Fuck the war.") is Hal Incandenza's desperate lament at the beginning/end of Infinite Jest, when, unable to communicate from inside this all-encompassing sense of isolating self (whether because of a mystery drug as the novel suggests or because he's trapped in a pervasively ironic discourse where nothing can be said and meant, as the novel insists), he pleads to the "I am in here." As if the reader, speaker and author all need convincing.

The second, corollary to a love of knowledge because it's fun to be smart, is DFW's deep compassion. I can't find the quote now but I think it was Turgenev who suggested all art should prepare us for compassion. This sentiment might have seemed a little too moralistic for a lot of contemporary writers (and any statement that begins "the purpose of art is..." pretty much begs for a fight), but DFW seems to hold it close to his heart throughout his work. DFW was adept at drawing compassion out of a reader (often along with its ugly stepsisters, pity and revulsion) through his gift at a sort of narrative brutality, most notably in the threateningly honest "hitting bottom" narratives of "Infinite Jest"'s addicts, which serve not to advance the story but to offer an almost violent counterpoint to the ironic discourse employed by other characters in the novel (a discourse which, as previously mention, is one centrally concerned with non-meaning, anti-compassion and the protection of the solipsistic self and leads to one of the novel's central frustrations/thrills: a series of unsolvable ambiguities, sets of signs that mean neither one thing nor the other) and in the throat-grabbing two page piece, "Incarnations of Burned Children". But more often, DFW offered a training course in compassion through his intellectual investment in things. If he could teach readers to apply his sort of sprawling deconstructive techniques (not to be confused with Deconstructive techniques. Lower case, it means something like taking a watch apart to see how it works, learn how to put it together and possibly build a better watch. Upper case, it means something like taking a cat apart to see what a cat looks like when it's been taken apart) to objects around them, to invest those objects with attention and caring, DFW seemed to believe transference of those skills to the people around them would necessarily follow. This is of course not always the case: there are plenty of people who have a rabid curiosity for objects and no interest in other people. But in DFW's work, the two seem intrinsically linked. His obsessive inclusion is born of a sense of caring or attempting to care fiercely about the world outside of himself.

I first read "Infinite Jest" during my second summer in Boston. I could tell you I was living with a prostitute, dating a nineteen year old albino, drinking heavily and teaching sixty hours a week, but those are just a scattering of facts I've told so many times they have the snark of irony about them, for me at least. I could also tell you I'd just been kicked out of graduate school, which amounted, at the time, to the total destruction of every life-plan I'd had, and left me with the feeling of being completely adrift in myself, unconnected with the world ("life-plans" being, after all, just maps for how we want our selves to interact with/fit into the world). I could also tell you, in the spirit of inclusion, that when I went to Brookline Booksellers to buy "Infinite Jest" I nearly knocked over a small Asian woman who turned out to be Amy Tan. For those weeks of reading, mostly on the medievally slow B train of Boston's Green Line, the moments I passed locations mentioned in the book seemed like the first connection I'd had to the outside world, the fact of Mike's Liquor's, the actuality of the Cambridge subway station. Slowly, my feet extended out of myself and touched the ground again, legs shaky as a frequent subway rider's can become. In the months that followed, I returned to DFW's description of depression like a promise that mine would eventually retreat, that my depression and I were not identical (a difficult conclusion to reach from the inside of such a condition).

Of course, like Salinger, I could never read DFW if I had any plans to do writing of my own: the precision of his sentences, so different from Salinger's (closer, I've always thought, to a sort of hipster Henry James) but just as pristine, ringing, gorgeous, would invade and overtake my own cadence til I was thinking in DFWspeak. I would often point to one of the exchanges between Hal and his older brother in "Infinite Jest" as exemplifying all the modes of conversation Ford Maddox Ford and Joseph Conrad outlined and have recommended to numerous professor-friends the use of one or the other of his essays in their classes (I know I've focused largely on his fiction here, but the rest of the journalistic world is giving ample attention to his non-fiction). And I borrowed/stole his footnoting riff for my own nefarious uses. But his way of thinking, of taking things apart, putting them back together and taking them apart again, his ability not to distract the reader with facts but to ground and center the reader with them, to draw the reader out (rather than draw things out of the reader) into a space where they were vulnerable to ideas, to feelings, to other things became locked in my mind as a kind of underlying architecture, a palimpsest that changed the shape of everything written over it. I never scoured publishing schedules for news of DFW's next work or trawled through magazines hoping he'd contributed. New work would show up like the occasional and unexpected letter from an old friend, and like the best of old friends, the conversation would seem to pick up in the middle of a frantic sentence, bursting with a pent up enthusiasm that broke through every dull thing around it.

As goodbyes go, this one is overly long and rambles into places it need not. But I imagine DFW would have wanted it that way, and I'm a little less for knowing his next missive will never be delivered.

Rediscovered: The Thermals' "The Body, The Blood, The Machine"

Six hours into what looks like it's going to be a fifteen hour work day and coming off listening to three straight hours of Yo La Tengo, I'm watching the rain roll in and out and enjoying the jesus reference out of the Thermals' "The Body, The Blood, The Machine". Like a punky John Darnielle grappling with issues of Christianity. Darn fine stuff.

Sorry, needed to put something new up here and not feeling entirely lucid. Deep coats of work glaze as a long week concludes. Put together a new muxtape though, as if that's some sort of achievement. Enjoy.

http://noradio.muxtape.com

To Boldly Go Where No One Should Have Gone to Begin With...

I would have taken pictures, but there was really no point. Some time I’ll take you all to the Saturday Super Flea back home, you can imagine everyone there is wearing crimson with little triangular buttons and you’ll get the idea.

So as I’m writing this, I’m DJing the closing dance for the regional Starfleet Conference. Which is apparently like a Star Trek convention only not as freewheelin’. I think if we had done show of hands, at least sixty percent of these folks would either be card-carrying NRA members or at least highly sympathetic. Median age: 43 (to be fair, Helen throws off the curve a bit, this statistical outlier is certainly joining us from not just before the United Federation of Planets but a good decade before the United Nations). Median weight: deuce and a quarter and I’m being generous. Median facial hair: goatee. Lots of them and a fair count of mustaches.

When I arrived at the Ramada (seriously , how the fuck do I allow myself to be talked into these things?), I was greeted by the fairly ancient manager, who kindly waited til I had loaded in everything but a handful of XLR cables before asking if he could lend a hand. I snuck my gear in during the dinner, noting to my utter horror the lack of beer bottles and wine glasses on the dinner tables. A couple folks were sipping some sort of blue concoction, but for the most part this looked like a dry event. A dry dance party. I swear, I am never going to try DJing in Salt Lake City. You need social lubricant, people! Especially if you’re as socially…creaky as some of these ladies and gents.

Once I was set up, I snuck over to the McDonalds for dinner, where the young man at the counter sans front teeth reminded me that no matter how this week ended, I should count it in the plus column since I’m still wearing my whole face despite last Friday’s accident. A moment of relative peace before heading back. You know the view from up by the mall is actually…nonexistent.

Back to the Ramada, I excused myself to get passed a young lady managing to block the doorway all on her own. This is actually my first glimpse of the blue beverages, which I think Esteban jokingly mentioned to me as “synthahol” earlier in the afternoon. I think he was joking. The first emcee—

Time out. Two things have just happened. First, I noticed that everyone in the room was at the opposite end of the banquet hall, staring at me like the Blues Brothers in the country bar scene. Secondly, the very nice older dude with the hell of white mustache came over and requested some slow songs. His reasoning:

“A lot of us guys during this conference, we’ve got our ladies with us and we don’t get to spend much time with them. So this is our chance to make it up to them. So if we don’t have a couple slow dances, we’re screwed. Actually, we’re not getting screwed, which is the problem.”

Anyway, I put on “You Were Always on My Mind” by Willie Nelson followed by “Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers. And you know what? “Unchained Melody” kind of choked me up. No joke. I mean, that’s a whole lot of fucking song.

—the first emcee was giving out awards for Best Officer, Best Enlisted Man—

Time out again. Three Icelandic brothers, statistical outliers far to the left on the weight chart. All sporting hammer pendants. Hammer of Thor, they inform me. You’re thor? I’m tho thor I can’t thtand it. They don’t like me. No one here likes me.

—and so on. Did I mention that the Starfleet is divided into ships? Yep, it’s divided into ships. They’ve all got the name of their ship on their lanyards, along with their ranks, like, “Lt. Ed of the USS Syracuse. Why is it the Star Trek ships are all designated USS? Isn’t there supposed to be some sort of United Federation of Planets or is this just reinforcing US cultural/military hegemony? Hey, you know the Beatles version of “Twist and Shout” actually rocks pretty hard. And this whole endeavor is making me dumber by the minute. Also, not to be racist, but these people seem to only like music by white people. Stevie Wonder=death. Oh, and they all love KISS. And schmaltz! Any song I thought was far too sappy to be played went over like…I don’t know, what goes over well? Is that woman wearing fringed chaps?

Following the awards (which begin the trend of injokes I don’t at all grasp) is the auction of goods that would be passed over at your average flea market. Star Trek trading cards. Action figures on which the number imprinted on the foot must be checked before bidding can begin. Next time I go back to Buffalo, I’m totally digging out my old Star Wars toys and checking the tiny numbers on their feet. A picture of Patrick Stewart playing Captain Picard dressed as some kind of private eye, signed by Patrick Stewart. A set of commemorative coins that go for (no joke) a thousand dollars. More jokes I don’t get that slay the crowd.

And now it’s my big moment. I lead off with Peter Schilling’s “Major Tom”. Which I thought, you know, science fiction related. Involves counting. German. Can’t lose! The main organizer (decked out in what tuxedos will look like in the future) digs it, but he’s pretty much alone on that. At about this point, the first request for Faith Hill comes in and I started scanning the table around me for sharp objects. Requests that followed included: “Can you play some eighties?” during “In a Big Country”. House music. At least three separate requests for “Time Warp”. At least two separate requests for Journey. And I fucking hate Journey! Everyone knows that. I took out that ad in the Ithaca Times. At one point this eight year old kid starts requesting album tracks by Depeche Mode, waving away “Just Can’t Get Enough” in favor of “real Depeche Mode”. He’s thrilled I’ve got “Black Celebration” and for a moment I think there’s hope. Then his dad dragged him upstairs to their room and I’m left with the rest of them.

So the rest of them got me thinking a bit, as I warded off requests for really just the worst songs you can imagine. Now I am very much a geek in any number of ways. I can bend your ear on comic books, Star Wars, X-Files, you name it. I've never gone in for Dr. Who, but I own all of The Prisoner. But the Star Trek stuff has always left me pretty cold. I always thought it was because you had to keep track of a lot of stuff and I like my sci-fi pretty simple ("There's this Force. It has a Dark Side and...well, a side that isn't so dark.") But now I’m realizing the actual reason. Take Star Wars, for just a minute: a plucky band of rebels plots to destroy the oppressive empire. X-Files: a plucky pair of FBI agents attempts to decrypt a vast conspiracy by a shadowy and oppressive government. Star Trek: everyone dresses the same, has a military rank and everything’s pretty okay. It’s the ultimate dream of a police state, free will subjugated to a vaguely defined “common good”. The state is no longer the enemy: the state is ubiquitous. No wonder its fans seem to be, for the most part, conservative and fairly passive. They're supposed to be geeks, but geekism, I always thought, involves a basically inquisitive and acquisitional nature. There's nothing to acquire/inquire about the world of Star Trek that I can discern. Everything is in it's right place, Roddenberry's in his heaven and all is right with the world. All watched over by military-industrial complexes of loving grace.

And I realized I actually wished these people harm. I wanted bad things to happen to them. I wanted them to be eaten by Klingons or anally raped by Romulans or something unpleasant and thematically appropriate. But I couldn’t help trying to please them, struggling to make them like me, please for the love of god LIKE ME!

It didn’t work. They paid me, but they didn’t like me. And I’m out hopefully in time to see some of the Hubcap show. Those guys like me.

Mind-Blown on a Saturday Afternoon

Okay, if you haven't gone and downloaded the new Girl Talk album, "Feed the Animals", you really need to. I mean, you know this guy's shtick by now and this one doesn't really do anything fundamentally different from "Night Ripper", although it seems to me it's a little less heavy-handed with its hiphop samples. That is, Gregg Gillis isn't so much laying his frantic collage of pop hooks behind extended hiphop samples; he's integrating them more fully into the songs. It still has the breathless name-that-tune vibe of his earlier efforts, but it seems a little less ADD. When, for instance, Deee-Lite and Nirvana are seamlessly blended together, you get the feeling that both samples have been digested by the DJ, not just thrown together haphazardly. And yes, there's some Metallica in there and, well, I don't want to spoil any of it. I'm not sure it'll bear repeated listening: the primary joy of Girl Talk is just that: primary. It's the act of discovery, of puzzling out. What's left once the mystery's solved remains to be seen, but for now, this is speeding up a day that'd otherwise be creeping by.

Of course, maybe I'm just happy because there's a lot more classic rock on here. A lot.

Get it here.

The Pretty Things That Summer Brings

During my daily staring at my face too long in the mirror just now, I had cause to wonder if my nose has been knocked off center by my recent encounter on the Commons. The light makes it tough to tell.

Enough about my face, let’s talk about me. I’m finding myself in the last summer of my twenties, which it turns out is a little scary. Oddly, while most summers my mind turns to one thing (kidding, actually. I meant what you probably thought I meant), this summer I’m just feeling sort of quiet, cheerful in a general sense I think is not blindly optimistic but informed by an idea that even with my finances in a state of shambles and the most meaningful relationship in my life existing between me and my cat, things are better than they have been.

Luckily for me, this summer has led off with a couple albums that perfectly suit this mood. Vetiver’s Things of the Past, Bonnie Prince Billy’s Lie Down in the Light and even the Silver Jew’s Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea are pleasant, hopeful little albums. They’re more about affection than love, more about the dawn and the hours after than the night, although it’s clear all three have arrived at the dawn by waiting up.

A new Will Oldham, although not all that rare an occurrence, is always a welcome one. On one hand, Will gives me the creeps. Not just because a lot of his stuff is creepy, but a lot of his material in Palace goes to dark places that I find consistently thrilling and unsettling at once. He’s creepy because he manages to emote with an almost autistic blankness that allows the emotions to be drawn small and explode off the album. As he claims on Lie Down in the Light’s “For Every Field, There’s a Mole”, Oldham is the king of infinite space, but often it’s the infinite space between moments, or eyelashes. The massiveness of the very small, the infinitesimal of the gigantic. And, wait, is that an oboe?

In a recent interview, David Berman, who is another animal entirely, claimed that he could never collaborate with Oldham because Will collaborates with everybody. Berman deftly carried this analogy over to state that “collaborating with Will would be like collaborating with everyone Will’s ever collaborated with.” Which would mean collaborating with this guy:



But seriously folks. In the past few years, Oldham has moved past the stark roots of Palace to collaborate with the heavy guitars of Matt Sweeney on the amazing Superwolf album, then switched over to the guitarless kids in Tortoise for the fantastically weird but aptly titled covers album, The Brave and the Bold. Last year’s The Letting Go was a perfect distillation of what Oldham does with, an exquisite piece on mourning and loss with hints of what sustains us through the roughs. With Lie Down in the Light, the roughs are behind him and the listener is left with what remains: close friends and lovers, current and past. Lie Down in the Light is a collection of objects held so close to the heart they permanently retain their heat and an invitation to hold those objects in your hands, to take a little warmth from them to wash off the last lingering chills of the night before.

Pigs and music (but not music for pigs)

I've been meaning to put this piece up, but as I was less than thrilled with some of the edits it saw in print, I held off for a bit. But if you dig on pig, here's my piece from last week's Ithaca Times in the original, and over at my new favorite toy, muxtape there's a collection of pretty lazy songs, which is kind of what my brain has felt like the past couple days. That Mary Wells song just slays me and if you don't know the Capstan Shafts, the dude is the king of the under two-minute gem and loads of his stuff is available for free in various online places. And yep, that's Ithaca's the Settlers. Now with production! I'm not sure if the new album is supposed to be hush hush, but it needs to be out in the world, wreaking havok soon.

I might post about new stuff before the week is out, since there've been a couple remarkable albums out this month. But first I need to figure out how I feel about the new My Morning Jacket. The key lies in "Highly Suspicious", which you can go download here if you hurry. Is it a joke? Is it deadly serious? Not sure. I can tell you the new Silver Jews, Bonnie Prince Billy and Fleet Foxes are all lovely and make for good headphone fodder on a summer day.

On to the pigs!


This Little Piggery Went to Trumansburg

It’s spring, when a young man’s fancy turns to pork. Well, mine at least. Blame it on growing up in Buffalo, the easternmost outpost of the Midwest and a city that loves meat. After moving away, I was horrified to learn people thought they could have a barbeque without the inclusion of kielbasa or brats. There aren’t many things I miss about Cheektowaga, but the availability of great sausage is one of them. Oh, and my family. Them too.

So it was with trepidation I first approached the Piggery’s booth at the Ithaca Farmer’s Market. Proprietors Brad and Heather Sanford were friendly and eager to tell me about sustainability and the humane treatment of their hogs, but the proof is in the casing. An hour, two links and a dash of mustard later, I was drafting an evangelical email to friends and acquaintances, urging them to get themselves to the Piggery.

Lips and Otto (von Bismarck)

Off the grid in the outskirts of Trumansburg, Brad and Heather maintain a seventy-acre farm. As I pulled up the drive, scanning the pastures, I spotted a sheep lazing near a shed that looked like something out of the Smurf village, along with some good-looking chickens and myriad pieces of farm equipment. But, oddly, no pigs. I went around the back of the house and let myself into the basement kitchen where Brad and Heather were grinding meat for sausage.

Otto von Bismarck famously opined that “Laws are like sausages: it is better not to see them being made.” In this case, Otto was more on the mark with the former than the latter. In most states, USDA regulations make it nearly impossible to run a commercial kitchen in your home. That same set of regulations limits the seasoning that can be used in sausage, while saying little about the meat content. This allows larger sausage making companies to dominate the market with low quality product. Luckily, New York State allows Brad and Heather to operate in-house under the same codes as a restaurant kitchen.

The small kitchen was sparsely fitted out with two coolers,both full, a three-bay sink and an old chamber stove, a 1950’s throwback known for fuel efficiency. “One of the things people usually ask is, ‘Where’s your equipment?’” Heather told me, but all of the production is done with a simple hand grinder and a manual device for packing the sausage into its casings. I scoped out the hopper of the grinder to see what was going into the sausage, half expecting the mix of lips and assholes we fear are in our processed meats. Instead, I saw healthy chunks of meat with of fresh garlic and herbs. There might be lips and assholes involved in law making, but there were none in this sausage.

Pigs and their cellulite have gotten caught up in an unfortunate political analogy, wherein anything unnecessary and harmful to a legislative bill is branded “pork barrel”. Once a staple of the American diet, pork fell into disfavor due to its relatively high fat content. The result was two-fold: the price of pork plummeted and pork farmers moved toward leaner animals, producing pork chops that had all the gustatory appeal of a hockey puck. Even a dosing of Shake-and-Bake can’t conceal that without the fat, pork cooks up dry and flavorless. As Brad wrapped up a set of pork chops each roughly the size of my head, he pointed at the inch of fat girding each one. “That’s where all the vitamins are,” he assured me. “All the good stuff.”


Brad and Heather Bought the Farm

Just goes to show, your Cornell degree doesn’t dictate your destiny. Brad and Heather both graduated from Cornell with degrees in genetics and engineering, respectively, but ended up in New York City, with Brad attending the French Culinary Institute and Heather working in the record industry. About four years ago, they moved back to the Finger Lakes to take on “some sort of agricultural thing.” Originally planning to start up a hard cider orchard, they ended up purchasing their first couple pigs.

This is their first year of regular production and sales, but Brad and Heather have been busy in the interim. They’ve been building, trying out recipes and learning the finer points of pig husbandry, setting up their operation with an eye towards sustainability; the house and the kitchen run almost entirely off wind and solar power generated on the farm.

While Heather played with the punk band Trabant, whose single “Fascism is Sexy” was chosen as the theme song for a French children’s show, Brad hit up the Culinary Institute for a refresher course and has devoured every available book on chaucetuerie. Brad said 18th century books are the most helpful while modern books are pretty boring. “Feed them soy and some corn and they’ll be fine,” seemed to be the attitude of most texts, he said, dismissing texts intended for much larger farms. With the increased demand for corn for use in ethanol production, grain prices have gone up nearly seventy percent from last year, encouraging Brad and Heather to form partnerships with local growers while looking for alternative methods of feeding their pigs. Brad described using the pigs as plows, spreading barley and oats in with the larger grain feed so the pigs plant the next generation of their food while eating. Some of the plants were already sprouting and would soon provide a dietary supplement for the hogs.

Meet the Pigs
Pig aren’t as diverse as dog, but there are a number of distinct heirloom breeds. Chunkette, for instance, would chafe at being called simply a pig, since she is, in fact, a Mulefoot hog: a rare breed nearly bred out of existence due to changes in the agricultural market. The Piggery is also raising a number of half Tamworths, larger pigs with thick, bristly auburn hair, better suited for colder environments. But standard, pinkish Yorkshires (think Babe and Wilbur) are also well represented: one of the pastures was teeming with them, lazing about under a simple shelter, chomping on grass and goading Brad and Heather to play with them.

The idea of pigs wallowing in crap and eating whatever they’re slopped with is more of a judgment on how they’re traditionally raised than their natural habits. Given a little room to run, pasture and play, pigs are, in fact, kind of adorable. Contemplating whether or not I could keep one as a pet in my apartment, I asked Heather and Brad if they ever had trouble serving up animals they’d raised from infancy. She shrugged a little and told me they’d just had “one of our moms” in the kitchen the previous week. “But I guess I’ve come to terms with it,” she told me. “It’s all part of a circle of life thing.”

Scattered shots...

Joyce said the broken mirror is the symbol of Irish art. Of course, Mick said that time is on my side and frankly time and I are staring at each other across a line of scrimmage right now, so maybe one shouldn't trust everything one hears from across the pond. But if Joyce is right, my brain is currently the symbol of Irish art. Meaning I have the attention span of a Stiff Little Fingers song.

Which is to say, I haven't had any new musical obsessions of late and music has become more background noise than anything else. This was one of my primary fears opening the store, and while I'm sure it will pass, for right now my turntable is gathering dust. The week before last was spent largely researching and writing about Ithaca's new roller derby team, last week was a piece on pig farming and charcuterie which will hopefully see daylight tomorrow, and this week I've been jotting down notes for the other blog and wondering how I can make this into an article. And for whom. There's just so much I don't know about the circus arts. Does anyone know of any particularly good lit on clown colleges?

Also, in my capacity as drink-makin' monkey, I'm making a summer transition from whiskey to gin. I know, it's sacreligious and I will probably keep it like a secret when I visit the NYC for SchubertFest on Saturday (scroll down a bit). But a fellow ginthusiast has highly recommended I go to Death + Company, so a pre-rock show pilgrimage may be in order.

In other news, the book is back on definite go status after a month or so in a gray area. After some scheduling shifts and a fair brutalizing from the surviving member of the band in question, it looks like late September is the new July. On the bright side, that means I might have a free minute in July to get out of town, on the downside it means the advance check that's supposed to pay off the brand spanking new computer I'm currently typing on may slip even farther into the future.

New York crew, see you at Fontana's this Saturday, n'est pas?

Of mustaches and such...

Can I just very quickly point you towards some music. It's the end of the work day (part one) and I've spent most of it thinking about bus tickets to NYC and the incredible ATP Festival line-up in the Catskills of all places (Shecky Green opening for My Bloody Valentine!) and generally being antsy. It's my own fault, I wore very mismatched patterns and it's tweaking me out.

The two things that have been calming me down are the new Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album, Dig, Lazarus, Dig and the Fuck Buttons' Street Horrsing. First of all, I should admit I am not a lifelong fan of Mr. Cave. Mostly, I have been glad Nick Cave is out there being Nick Cave so I don't have to. Not that I could. But the last album with the Bad Seeds, which sported one good title, Abattoir Blues and one unforgivable title, The Lyre of Orpheus (I mean, come the fuck on) snuck its way into my regular listening rotation, borne largely on the back of "Cannibal's Hymn", which is heartbreakingly perfect, and by the time Mr. Cave wandered into the middle of The Assassination of Jesse James wearing a mustache that could shelter a small village through the rainy season, I was saying to myself, "Hey, this guy no longer seems like he might eat a baby for laughs." Follow that up with the Grinderman album, which might not eat a baby for laughs, but don't go handing your babies off to it just yet, and I'd swung around to being vocally pro-Cave.

This album knocked it down. I am getting Nick Cave's face tattooed over my face. Or at least his mustache. Cave settles into the creepy preacher vibe he's toyed with throughout his career and with the Bad Seeds (now with the Dirty Three's Warren Ellis firmly at the helm) locked in behind him, delivers dark, hilarious monologues that make the political seem irrelevant. When Nick Cave sees a problem, he skips write past the government and writes angry letters to God. In the same way certain Dylan songs can grab you by the throat and shake you with nothing more than a verse-verse-verse structure, Cave's lyrics are jaw-droppingly good, the urge to go back and hear a line again overwhelmed only by the need to hear what's next.

On the total other end of things are the Fuck Buttons, who have I think been getting a fair amount of press or at least a big gooey one from Pitchfork. Normally, the 'forkers choices in electrodrone leave me pretty cold, but this one gets it right. Some of the satanic screaming noises I could do without, but the tracks that don't sound like an exorcism in process are perfect examples of how repetition can be emotive. "Sweet Love for Planet Earth" with darkles and tincts with guitars (can anyone tell me where that phrase is from? it's been stuck in my head for half an hour) like the beginning of the best Explosions on the Sky tracks, but holds back the bombast. Imagine being at the planetarium, but the guy manning the show is so baked he abandons all the comets and big bang nonsense to just watch things flicker. "Bright Tomorrow" surges forward on a pushbeat that would be at home in 90s house music but manages to never feel rushed.

If you're feeling sinister (or not sinister enough), check out the new Nick. If you're feeling drony (which I am, I think due to a lack of vitamin B?), a couple FB tracks are pretty sweet evening wear.

All right, off to NYC for the weekend to see Misters Thomas and Kupstas in their performing capacities. If you're in the area: Goodbye Blue Monday, 8pm Sunday night. Awesomeness. Now I'm wondering if I can fit the new episode of Lost onto my crappy little iPod.

A Rather Lengthy Interview with Alison Bechdel

All right, first of all, if you haven't read Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home", you need to go out and do so. Preferrably by purchasing it and preferrably from your local bookstore or comic book dealer. As someone with a general distaste for memoir, I've had plenty of crow to eat lately with the publication of this book and "Persepolis". What Marjane Satrapi accomplishes is a series of broad-stroke vignettes, Alison Bechdel renders in a story intricate within a single panel and as a whole. Images, characters and books recur throughout, changed in each appearance by their context, by new information gained by the narrator and given to the reader.

Okay, before I start actually writing my article, I should draw back a bit. This week, I interviewed Alison Bechdel for the Ithaca Times. She'll be speaking at Cornell on Thursday, April 10th. Since only a line or two from the long and pretty awesome interview (especially after my contributions were edited down to make me sound like less of a slack-jawed mouthbreather) will make it into the article, I wanted to post the interview here. Thanks to Alison, and also to Devon Sanger and the FedEx guy.



Bob Proehl: I wanted to start off, I know this is a certain kind of nerdy, but, talking to you about digital distribution. I was noticing that you seem to be primarily moving Dykes to Watch Out For over to the website and more what you mention as being a kind of NPR model of financing. I was wondering if you were finding people were generous or supportive of that kind of model.

Alison Bechdel: It’s not working that great. People do make donations but it’s not making up for what I’m losing in newspaper revenue as all these papers are folding. It’s something but it’s not totally working. I think I’ll figure out a way to make it work. I’m not aggressive about it, I don’t push people to make donations cause I feel awkward about it, so I don’t know what would happen if I did more of that pledge scenario like they do on NPR.

BP: I was curious about that, as far what form that would even take.

AB: I could put up a post like, every six months saying give me some money. Cause I feel awkward about it. I don’t like paying for online content, nobody does.

BP: I’m kind of curious as to how these speaking engagements work for you. It seems like the visual and the prose are so tightly linked, particularly in Fun Home. So when you do these speaking engagements, are you lecturing, are you reading from the work, how do you generally operate these?

AB: The magic of Power Point, my friend. It’s really fun because I’m reading the script and showing pictures at the same time, it’s like a whole different medium. It’s like I have control over timing when I’m reading in a way that I don’t when people are reading on there own. It’s a really interesting experience, exactly when I click to the next slide and when I choose to read my narration. It’s really fun; people I think find it pretty engaging. It’s like you’re being read a picture book. You know, did you ever watch Captain Kangaroo when you were little and they would read with pictures? I used to love that. It’s kind of like that.

BP: When you do that, do you use the full panels with text or do you strip the text from the panels and just use the illustrations?

AB: I strip the narration from the panels but I leave the dialogue cause that’s too complicated to remove. And also, the other interesting thing. Part of it is I’ll be reading from my work but also I’ll be talking about my work and showing images of it as I go and that’s kind of like doing a live comic strip because you have a picture and then you have narration that goes along with it. And with sort of the two of them it creates sort of this third level, which is fun to play with.

BP: Kind of following up on that, I wanted to ask you a little bit about process. Clearly you’re doing a lot of photo referencing. The level of detail is kind of an amazing and on par with the kind of detailing you find in TinTin comics. At the same time you lead off in the narrative by describing yourself as Spartan and having this design aesthetic that’s antithetical to your father’s more ornate aesthetic. I was wondering if you find this kind of packing of detail in your art to be at odds with that description.

AB: That’s kind of an interesting observation. I never equated—I do have an extensive level of detail, I think often it even obscures my work a little bit. But I never thought about it as a kind of ornate-ness. I guess it is. I think of it more as I’m so desperately trying to get things down accurately, it’s hard to know when to stop with the detail. You know, do I draw the name of the book on the spines of the books on the bookshelf, do I draw the logo of the publisher on the spine, do I draw the wood grain on the bookshelf? At a certain point, it all becomes illegible. But I find it hard to know when to stop with that. But I feel like it’s somehow in keeping with my Spartan aesthetic. I want to be accurate.

BP: I didn’t mean ornate to come across in a sort of negative or over embellished sense.

AB: Well, I see what you mean; you could make a case for that.

BP: I was just wondering if you see that as being practical or literal to what you’re doing.

AB: It’s like an uncontrolled literalism. I wish I could be easier with more abstraction.

BP: I wanted to ask you about the function of books within the text. There’s a heavy level of allusion and there’s whole books that are being used as a mode of communication, particularly between you and your father. Particularly the writings of Collette and “A Happy Death” and…

AB: Yeah, the physical book becomes a kind of character.

BP: You actually make a mention of refusing to take your father’s copy of…I can’t remember which Camus book it is right now.

AB: Oh yeah, “The Myth of Sisyphus”.

BP: As someone who, for a long time has not been working in a book format, how is seeing this as a cohesive whole and more of a physical object different from a syndicated strip?

AB: It was kind of a hard leap to make. Because I’m so used to this temporal, temporary nature of the comic strip, you know? I make kind of things up as I go along, I can’t really go back and revise anything. I can make small changes, but I can’t change the story. So this was working with a level of permanence I wasn’t used to, and it was very daunting. But once I realized that I could rework stuff, it was really exciting to have the whole thing there before me and be able to manipulate it and get everything just right and work in all these internal structural things that I’ve never been able to do with the comic strip, so I kind of got into it, but it took awhile.

BP: Did you embark on this thinking of it as a book-length project?

AB: I did, I did. And that was just, you know, mind-blowing. I’m used to creating a two-page story at a time and now I have two hundred plus pages yawning ahead of me, I didn’t know how I was going to….

BP: Well, that’s quite a jump.

AB: In a way, what helped me was learning that even a graphic novel, even a full-length graphic novel has structural constraints to it. There are things you have to pin down and start working around. And that helped me to manage all those empty pages, when I learned that they weren’t really all that empty.

BP: What kind of structural constraints did you find you were running into?

AB: Things like, you want to use the act of turning the page, like if you have a surprising image or a surprising moment coming up, you don’t want people to just see that before its time, so you try to time it so it’s on a left hand page, so they turn the page and there’s the big moment. It’s like you’re telling stories in a physical way, in a two dimensional way. I think of prose writing as like one dimensional, it doesn’t really matter where anything falls on the page. And graphic storytelling is kind of like poetry, or concrete poetry, at any rate, in that it very much matters where on the page or within the chapter. You really have to deal with the physical reality of the book in an interesting way. And then I broke it down into chapters, which helped, and each chapter would have a beginning, middle and an end, it’s own little structural constraints.

BP: I mean, you can see the attention to some of the page layouts, but the idea of saving something for the left hand page—

AB: Well I’m not even very good at that. You know, real masters use that. And people also use the composition of a page spread better than I do. Sometimes I’ll use the opportunity of a page spread to further the narrative. Mostly I’m just going panel to panel.

BP: I wanted to ask some sort of general questions about fathers. You have a comment earlier in the book that the bar is set lower for fathers than for mothers. And in Dykes to Watch Out For, you’re kind of exploring this sort of reversal of gender roles in parenting, where you have a father figures who’s more of a traditional, feminine mothering role. And I was wondering, do you think the shift in gender roles in parenting, if there are any, are going to affect—you discuss your father as being sort of, I don’t know if mystifying is the word, but there’s a distance and mystery that doesn’t come across in the character of your mother. I was wondering if you think that shift is going to affect the sort of mysticism that parents can carry for their kids.

AB: I imagine that it would, that that’s all changing. I mean, somebody must be studying this. When I say the bar was set lower for fathers than for mothers, that’s very much a generational thing. My dad’s from a generation when fathers didn’t change diapers. And now they do. It’s really different. I’m sure that the whole absent father thing is going to change for the next generation, and they’ll be writing about their overbearing fathers.

BP: I was surprised to see, well not totally surprised, to see that the book had nearly been banned. There was a situation with a library in Missouri that was attempting to ban both “Fun Home” and [Craig Thompson’s] “Blankets”, which is kind of an odd pairing. I was wondering what your reaction and what your involvement was with that process.

AB: No, I didn’t really have any involvement, I kind of just watched from the sidelines. And actually, they put the book back. It was really kind of an interesting situation and it makes sense that it was “Fun Home” and “Blankets”, because they’re graphic stories and it was the images that they were objecting to, because the illustrated story is presumably a sort of an attractive nuisance, like kids are going to be more likely to pick this book up than another book that might touch on adult themes, that didn’t have pictures. And I don’t know, I guess that might be true, but banning it doesn’t seem like the proper solution.

BP: I mean, these are not books that are more explicit than a prose text.

AB: Only in so far as pictures are more explicit than words. And there is something to that, you know? I don’t know what the proper way of handling it is. My book is also, there’s something going on in Utah, at the University of Utah. A student, I think it’s just one lone student, but he protested having to read it for his English class. Because it was pornographic! He’s part of some group called No More Pornography. And so he got the teacher to assign an alternate text for him. It was on the news and everything. And it was just cause there’s one picture of, like, me having oral sex with somebody. I guess that could be pornographic, I don’t know.

BP: But other than the fact that it’s visual, it’s no more pornographic than the stuff you might read in a standard English class text.

AB: Exactly.

BP: The last quick thing, are you working on any sort of larger project now, other than keeping up with the strip every couple weeks?

AB: I’m working on another memoir. Theoretically. I’m kind of having trouble getting down to it. I’m writing a book about relationships. I’m going to draw on my own relationship history and weave it in with psychoanalytical reading that I’m doing and maybe more literature like I did in “Fun Home”. It’s all kind of hazy right now.

BP: Do you think there’s any particular reason that—

AB: Bob, could you hold on for one second, I think the FedEx delivery is here.

BP: Oh sure.

(At this point, AB goes to answer the door, carrying her phone and the FedEx guy takes over the interview for me)
AB: Hello.

FedEx Guy: That’s for you.

AB: Oh, and that’s for you. Did you know I had something for you?

FEG: Well, yeah, somebody called it in. Evidently, it wasn’t you?

AB: Yeah, it was me.

FEG: And you know, I gotta tell you, I’m psyched, cause I read the Best American Series…

AB: Oh really?

FEG: I love it and I was psyched to see your stuff in there. And I’ve been dying to tell you that, I’ve come here a couple time and you haven’t been here. I wanted to tell you I was psyched.

AB: Cool. That’s really sweet of you. Yeah, it’s a great series.

FEG: It really is. As far as I’m concerned it’s absolutely required reading. I haven’t really gotten into the other ones; I know there’s a bunch of them. A poetry series and a fiction.

AB: They doing a comics one now too, that’s just comics.

FEG: Is that right? Graphic novels?

AB: Best American Graphic Narrative or something, it’s called.

FEG: Cool, anyway I was psyched. Good to see you.

AB: You too. (Returning to the phone) Hello?

BP: Hello.

AB: Did you hear any of that? I was trying to hold my microphone up. (laughing) That was the FedEx guy.

BP: Yeah, I heard all of that.

AB:Isn’t that wild?

BP: That was great.

AB: Anyhow. What were you asking me?

BP: I hadn’t really formed this question too well, but the form of autobiography and memoir seems so prevalent among, I don’t know if I want to use the term alternative comics artists, but you know, outside of superhero publishing. Do you think there’s any particular reason for you that this form of expression seems to work so well for memoir and autobiography?

AB: I keep trying to work up my grand theory of this, because there is something that seems peculiarly conducive to autobiography in graphic storytelling. But I can’t think why. Except, the furthest I’ve gotten is the act of trying to draw yourself, it forces a kind of objectivity about yourself. I mean, this could be totally bullshit. I’m sure prose memoir writing, if you’re any good you also have to have a degree of objectivity about yourself. But something about that act of looking at yourself from the outside, the way you do when you draw yourself…I mean, I haven’t worked out this theory.

BP: If you think of writing longer prose memoir, you still have the project of constructing the “I”, of imagining yourself as a character.

AB: Now I’m thinking of examples of first person shooter style comics that I’ve seen, where you see everything through the narrator’s eyes, you don’t actually see this guy as a character; you just sort of see what he sees. But that’s sort of an experimental thing. You couldn’t really sustain that.

BP: And it seems that the opposite is more common of autobiographical comics work, the idea of having the artist in the panel.

AB: But maybe it’s just the tradition. I feel very inspired by R. Crumb and Harvey Pekar’s work for example. That kind of kind of gritty daily-ness and trying to be really honest about their real lives. Maybe it’s just that tradition that’s inspired everyone else to keep doing it.

As promised...

These things always take exponentially longer than I'd like, but here it is: ze mystery blog. Actually, there's no mystery to it. This is where you'll be able to find information on the book and the tour events as they develop. Things are starting to cook up a bit, especially given the fact it's all three months away. We've got our recruits.

The Gilded Palace of Sin

A Week or So of Nerdiness

Ah, the 60-cycle hum of dead air. Sorry for my absence of late. Several projects are in the works, some of them music related, some of them comics related. One of them might see a post later today, but for now, the fine folks at PopCultureShock have my review of "The Ten Cent Plague" up in their Alternate Currents column, which for a comic book nerd is pretty cool. You can check it out here.

Today or tomorrow, I'll be posting my interview with cartoonist Alison Bechdel, who wrote one of the best graphic memoirs I've ever read with 2006's "Fun Home". In fairness, the high point of the interview is the UPS guy. Next week, I'll be posting an interview with another of my favorite cartoonists, Terry Moore, whose "Strangers in Paradise" series was one of the few reasons to regularly visit a comic book store through much of the late 90s and whose new book, "Echo" just started last month. One of the original self-publishing brats. And yeah, mystery link later today.

The cookies of others.

When someone sends you semi-anonymous cookies in the mail, it means you have done something right. Or you have just eaten a fatal dose of arsenic. For now, I'm going with the former, but if this is my last blog post, assume it was the latter all along.

One of the nice things about being, at this point, primarily a vinyl listener is that you can get completely bogged down in one side of an album. That's what's going on with me and Beach House's "Devotion" right now. Beside the fact it's hardly come off my turntable at all (until yesterday morning when I was jonesing for Mingus with my coffee and eggs), very often after the need scratches the label on the first side, I just lift it back to the outer edge of the disc rather than flipping the whole thing over and exploring further. I love it when this happens, it's like planning a long trip full of stops you know will be amazing, but lingering a couple extra days with friends who are just too lovely to leave.

I saw these two open for Grizzly Bear a whiles back during my finish-the-book/visit-the-parents retreat and it was fantastic. Perfect music for the beginnings of a spring thaw. Diffuse light, cold with surprises. I thought I was hooked on the first track, but now I'm caught up on the third. Here they are, in order (the second, not included, is pretty swell as well):

Wedding Bell
Gila

Because some of you might enjoy it, here are a couple live tracks from the Super Furry Animals show at the store a couple weeks back. The one that was going to put the store on the map and ensure that we did tons of business for the rest of the semester? Well, the doldrums continue, but the show was one of those things where you just shake your head and wonder if it's really happening.

Rings Around the Moon
Runaway
Golden Retriever
In other reportage of things other people have known about forever, I finally got around to seeing "The Lives of Others". I mistakenly netflixed (it's a verb now) "Little Children" instead and forgot about my original target film. The Lawyer put it best (he so often does) in mentioning how remarkable it is that while American twentysomething filmmakers are largely producing meticulous mits of omphaloskeptic self indulgence (which is to say, "I saw 'Darjeeling Limited' this week"), this German cat, all of twenty four years, puts together this sprawling, near perfect commentary on, let's see, interpersonal relations, the role of the artist within the state, the history of the East German regime and the nature of the human soul under such an oppressive government. I'd be more enamored if the film dropped the "see what I just did" denoument, but it looks like my favorite recent films list just got another German in the mix.

This weekend, I am learning James Dean. I've never seen anything of his other than "Rebel Without a Cause", so Sunday night is going to be a "Giant"/"East of Eden" double-header. Ideally, this is going to kick off a sort of American Icons series for me. I'm loading some John Wayne onto the Netflix cue, maybe some Gary Cooper. Given that I'm already well-versed in Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart, who else should make the list? Maybe some Bogart? I dunno, Gregory Peck?

Take 'em to Missouri.

Intellectual props (or "Talented Portly Dudes, Thievin' on the Beatles").

Has the copyright recently expired on the guitar riff from "Dear Prudence" by the Beatles? Along with the entire song's abhorrent deployment in "Across The Universe", that riff has shown up in LCD Soundsystem's original "steal all you can motherfucker" masterpiece of a self titled album (which also includes everything this side of David Byrne's wallet)(incidentally, David Byrne's wallet is on the second album), but now the ultimate grimy duo the Gutter Twins have wheeled out this rocker from the crypt. George Harrison's corpse must be exhausted, and that dude was pretty tired while he was alive.

Don't get me wrong, I'm hell of psyched to have an album that combines the Marvin Gaye on ketamine vocals of Greg Dulli and the "bodies are buried in the barn" baritone of Mark Lanegan. Ideally, I'd be carving pumpkins to it, but tisn't the season. So I've been carving scary faces onto grapefruits to it. Not quite the same effect (more pulp, less structural integrity) but tres emotionally satisfying.

I tried very hard to find a picture of Jane Seymour's sister, to whom "Dear Prudence" was originally dedicated. For the record, she was hanging with the Fabs while they were learning to be more socially disconnected under the tutelage of the Maharishi Mahesh Yoshi (I think I have that right). While this period only did mild damage to them plucky Liverpudlians (inducing George to steel mantras from the Chiffons, among other tribulations), it was mentally destructive for the little Seymour sister, who suffered a breakdown and got a Beatles tune in return. It ain't enlightenment, but baby, what is?

Compare, contrast, lather, rinse, repeat.
"Dear Prudence"-The Beatles
"Never As Tired as When I'm Waking Up"- LCD Soundsystem
"I Was in Love With You"- The Gutter Twins