New Weird Song for the week is Lenny Kravitz doing Are You Gonna Go My Way Unplugged. It’s a cool song in normal form and this is a laid-back and bluesy version. Even though the only Unplugged album I can listen to all the way through is Nirvana’s, the opprotunity to mess with their hits brought out a very playful side of a lot of artists. There will undoubtedly be a good number of songs from the Unplugged collection up here over time.
Read Grant Morrison’s new book WE3 last week and as usual, Grant Morrison kicks my ass. I can’t believe the little throwaway things he does that shows how on the ball he is. In the first couple of pages, the bad guy speaks only in speech balloons with ? and ! in them, efficiently communicating exactly what he’s saying without slowing the action to read dialogue like ‘Hey, what’s that’ or something similar. He also shows a large closeup on a newspaper headline and then a smaller panel with someone pointing to the paper and their speech balloon goes around the paper, telling you what they’re talking about without bothering to use actual dialog. It’s those small things that hurt you as a writer, when you see somebody use something so elegant and use it so effortlessly. Curse you Grant Morrison!
Added a new Weird Song, this time not a cover or remake. It’s a song called In Love that Ben Folds did with William Shatner under the name Fear of Pop. Yes, it’s Kirk. And no, it’s not as horrible as you’d think. It’s basically just Shatner talking and overacting on top of Folds’s music.
Things like this thread and this response thread fill me with such boiling vitriol that I usually don’t comment for fear of seeming like I’m foaming at the mouth over here. The thread in question asked it’s mostly superhero reading audience “Why don’t you read independent comics?” and the answers range from laughably ignorant to well, less laughably ignorant. People actually ask questions like ‘Does a comic have to be in black & white to be an independent?” and of course there’s the ever-present device I like to call the “I have a black friend” Defense of people saying they read both “mainstream” superhero and indie books so as to seem like asking the question is an insult to their character. Of course these people never give examples of anything they read so it’s hard to say if it’s typical superhero-fan defensiveness or the truth.
Not to knock the guy who obviously put a lot into his response to the question in the second thread but, please. Give me a break. His first 2 paragraphs make me want to punch him in the throat. His answer boils down to “They don’t give me what I want in a comic” which he goes to say is basically fluffy happy stories where he doesn’t have to think too much and where he can regain his hope for the world and blah, blah, blah. If you don’t have the stomach to read the responses to the original thread, this guy’s response is all of them rolled into one. After bundling all comics that don’t come from Marvel and DC into the same independent bag, he loads it with stones and drops it into the river. Commense foaming at the mouth.
To all superhero readers who use the word “indy” to refer to everything without the comforting little M or DC in the corner, stop it. You make yourself look like a complete witless moron when you say everything in the back 300 pages of the Previews catalog is the same. Bone does not have the same attitude and sensibilities as Courtney Crumrin. Queen & Country is not a exercise in navel-gazing. Blankets does not have poor art because Craig Thompson didn’t fill in every vein and eye-gouging nipple. Repeat after me: “All comics not published by Marvel or DC are not the same. They do not share anything except a Mt. Fuji sized hurdle in the way of their sales because my superhero comics are taking up all the space in the shops.”
There is nothing you can say to justify not reading something because it’s not from Marvel or DC. Nothing. I don’t care what your definition of independent is. I don’t care that you didn’t like Strangers in Paradise. Neither do I. Saying it’s okay that all you like is superhero comics is not standing up for your rights as a reader, it’s brain-dead ignorance. That’s all. Is it okay to read superhero comics, yep. Is it okay not to read “indy” comics, nope. Because those are not two groups of things. Superhero comics is one thing, spy comics are another. Romance comics are another. Independent comics are All of the Above. Disregarding a group of people for some largely arbitrary reason is called racism, disregarding a group of books for arbitrary reasons like publishing company or distribution is called stupidity.
Grrr. I said it was going to be boiling vitriol. You were warned.
I’ve got a new Weird Song on the sidebar if anybody’s interested. It’s the pop band The Cardigans doing the old Black Sabbath standard ‘Iron Man’. And yes, it’s as weird as it seems like it will be from that description. Even you can’t stand the Cardigans’s other songs (like me), you have to listen to this if you’ve ever heard the original ‘Iron Man’, it’ll blow your mind.
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
I finally finished The Corrections, only 2.5 years after getting it for Christmas and 3 months after starting it. And wow, was it ever worth it. I don’t usually read this type of book, literary familiy fiction or whatever you’d call it. But I recieved Franzen’s other book, a collection of essays called ‘How To Be Alone’ free on audiobook for signing up with Salon.com and after reading that, I decided I’d have to at least try anything else the man wrote.
This is a powerful book, a very effective look at a family and into the brains of the 3 children and parents of the family. Not just one of those American Beauty style ‘look at how abnormal the normal suburban family is!’ books, this actually gets deep into the hearts and minds of all the family members and makes you think how they think. The children all get into situations of varying strangeness but you never get the feeling that Franzen went out of his way to find the wackiest thing each person could do. You believe that all of the characters made their own decisions based on their own brains and things couldn’t have turned out differently. All of the main characters end up as real people, which to me is the best and hardest thing a writer can do. Since this review is less than timely I’d imagine everyone who wanted to read this book already has but if you haven’t I recommend it wholeheartedly. It’s a big book, yes, but it doesn’t feel long. Like a movie you come out wonder how many hours have passed because you were so wrapped up in it, the 560 some pages will fly by.
On a related note, if any book publishers want to send me books to read, feel free to email me and I’ll send you my address. Somehow, I get a lot of hits to this site so at least a few people will see my inevitable review (can’t promise it’ll be timely though, for reference see the above review of a book published in 2001).
Bruce Sterling’s speech from the 04 SIGGRAPH is the first speech of Bruce’s I’ve read in a few months that didn’t make me completely infuriated with him. In it he talks about something I’ve been interested in ever since I listened to the interview that Massive Change Radio did with William McDonough, Cradle-to-Cradle design. Sterling doesn’t call what he’s talking about C-t-C but it’s what he’s talking about. Cradle-to-Cradle is the idea that everything you make should be able to be disassembled and reused for other products, or at least destroyed in such a way that it doesn’t hurt anything. The idea is that you use the roof of a car factory to produce solar power, you build the car so that all the parts can be taken apart again and used in a new car (or other product) and that the environment isn’t made worse by the use of harmful chemicals, etc. It’s one of those ‘duh’ ideas that you’d think people would think about in their daily lives but they just don’t, especially corporations whose sole interest is the bottom line. The interesting thing about McDonough’s work is that he’s helped companies actually help their bottom line by using C-t-C thinking. This is the important part and something that Sterling doesn’t touch on. Or rather, he has a different focus. Rather than showing companies that by helping the environment they can make more money, Sterling is talking to geeks about how we don’t have to be so stupid about manufacturing anymore. We are smart enough to be smart, basically. It’s a good idea and an excellent speech. I recommend reading it.
Thanks to boingboing for the link.
In order to spur myself on and keep track of where I’ve been, I’m starting two new progress indicators on the site. One is a map of how far I’ve ridden my bike, which is a map over to the left. The other is a daily writing update log where I put down what I’ve written that day. This is mostly to keep myself from slacking.
As of yesterday I’m officially just a writer. I was “let go” from my current job as a Software Tester for some very bogus reasons and one mostly true one. But a door is always an exit and a entrance at once and all that so I’m going to take this opportunity to push my writing out there. Couldn’t have happened at a better time as it turns out. I’ve been working harder on getting my stuff out there in the past few weeks than I have before; I’ve been getting up early to write, writing at lunch, I found an awesome artist to work on a comic with me, etc. We’ll see what comes out of this time but I have good feelings. Of course the blog related benefit of this is that I’ll have time to put more stuff up here.
One new “feature” of website will be my Weird Song of the Week, something I’ve wanted to do for awhile but never had the time. I’m a collector of weird covers, remixes, and just plain different versions of songs. The first set of songs will be a couple of cool/weird versions of the song “Ring Of Fire”, one of the most heavily covered songs ever. See the box on the side for a link. If you have some suggestions for Weird Songs, please let me know at the email linked below.
DANNYBOT: A Movie Like I’ve always said, the internet is the greatest vehicle ever invented for allowing creative weirdos to bless us with the products of their brainmeat.
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