After enjoying Julien Donkey-Boy so much, I decided that I should actually see Gummo. Which actually is pretty unpleasant, in some of the ways I was worried about beforehand. What's interesting is that, by all accounts, Julein Donkey-Boy was made in a much darker place, in a way that's almost brushed over in that ANP Quarterly interview: More paranoia, "my brain had pretty much melted." Gummo, by contrast, was made as this successful enfant terrible figure, flush off the success of Kids. If Gummo is not exploitative, (which it kind of is) it's kind of reveling in people's bad behavior, from sort of an outsider's perspective. Julien Donkey-Boy seems much more collapsed, and also much more invested in things like transcendence. It's sort of surprising, given Korine's reputation, and the stronger film for it.

Gummo has this moment of joke-as-metonymy, which I will attempt to paraphrase: "I knew a guy who was dyslexic, but he was also crosseyed, so everything came out right." Which seems to be the perspective it wants you to take on various kinds of troublesome behavior.

The issue is exactly to the degree to which Korine's eyes are crossed when it comes to the behavior in Gummo. Rich kids idolizing bad behavior on behalf of the poor and mentally ill.

In positive news: My friend Bryan Fordney's new video has been uploaded to the internet. I'm waiting for it to load now. Also, the Paper Rad Problem Solvers videos are now on Youtube, and are really great, as previously discussed. Speaking of things previously discussed, Dash Shaw's Bodyworld webcomic just keeps getting better, but I should link to the beginning of it, and just assume people will read all of it if they're interested. He also did a short story a couple of years ago that I thought was great. I should look into his over-700-page graphic novel that just came out.

I was looking into doing a medical study as a way to gain some extra money. I just received a phone call telling me I didn't qualify, because of something that sounded like "billy-ribbons." Too many of them were being produced by my liver, an abnormal amount. Looking into it, I think she was trying to say something about bile? My liver produces too much bile?

Altered States starts out as a poor man's El Topo, then becomes a poor man's An American Werewolf In Paris for a while. What's interesting is how it works like an eighties version of a seventies movie, in a way I, of course, can't really articulate. Something about the way the narrative is actually focused, and doesn't seem all that perfunctory, but the characters are basically cliches. Also: I really like how most of the special effects are video effects.

I also would like some kind of reason for why there's movies like An American Werewolf In London, The Thing, and Altered States- all those body-transformation/deformation themes all arriving at pretty much the same time. The David Cronenberg films of this time also kind of keep with these themes.

Oh man: In this Sound Of Young America interview with Jack Handey, I learn that guy wrote the Toonces The Cat and Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer sketches! And was friends with Steve Martin in the late seventies! CLICK ON THE LINKS!

In the world of sidebar blogs: Ben Parrish sends old Batman covers to Joel Brazzell, and through this I discover this really amazing stretch of covers in the early post-200s issues of Batman. Batman with a tiger head, or being led to the electric chair. Weird threats of death, and also: sexism. (One cover has Catwoman yelling "you just lost the battle of the sexes!" and another has women holding up signs protesting an unmarried Batman.) Where is this imagery coming from? Eventually there's a cover where Batman and Robin are trying to work out which one of the Beatles is dead, using album cover clues. Frank Robbins, Irv Novick, and the 1960s. The Batman TV show had been canceled, and the character was just invested with all this iconic imagery, but was just existing to be distorted. The Gardner Fox/Sheldon Moldoff era covers from just before that time are pretty good too. Heavy weirdness in the air, that doesn't seem far from early sixties wackiness at first glance, but... man, holy shit. Some dude, probably in his early thirties, hacking it out, psychological anxiety seeping through. (Batman, being pushed out of the door of a plane, the white house in the background, with the caption "Death casts the deciding vote!" Is this a response to the RFK assassination?)

Somehow this news doesn't count as news enough for me to hear it when it happens, but John Philip Law, the star of the movie Danger Diabolik, died this past week. This is as good an impetus as any to watch it again, or for the first time. Directed by Mario Bava but not a horror movie, a score by Ennio Morricone not working in his western mode, and one of the most fun movies ever. It's this masterpiece of vaguely psychedelic sixties-pulp that's been homaged so many times yet is not at all diluted.

In other movie news, Nick Nolte is starring in Alejandro Jodorowsky's next movie, with David Lynch attached as a produer.

For those of you who don't read every blog I link to, this post is about a video that's pretty amazing.

In the latest issue of Arthur, there's an interview with one Rudolph Wurlitzer. His was a name I didn't know, but I learned he wrote the screenplays for both Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop and Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid, as well as writing novels acclaimed by the likes of Thomas Pynchon and Donald Bartheleme. Pynchon was quoted, about the Wurlitzer novel Nog, that it was "proof that the novel of bullshit is dead." I read this and thought to myself, great. "I know exactly what you're talking about, Thomas Pynchon." Others might say "Don't Pynchon's book have a ton of bullshit in them?" and while this might be true it's not the sort of bullshit that grabs you as immediately apparent when you open up a book.

So, I ordered Nog from interlibrary loan. And when I went down to the library, I found out that said library also had a copy of Frank Santoro's Storeyville in stock. Frank Santoro reads this blog occasionally, and is very much a good dude. Storeyville was originally a comic published in newspaper tabloid format, and then reissued as a hardcover book last year from Picturebox, bearing back-cover blurbs by the likes of Chris Ware, Brian Chippendale, and David Mazzucchelli, a hell of a triumvirate.

I walked the streets on a very nice day with these books in my hands like talismans or totems, excited to high heaven to have such reading material.

Okay so Nog starts off strong, with a great first chapter, and then sort of falls apart to be about hippies free-loving about. I'm about halfway through it. It shares with Storeyville a sense of being about a narrator searching/becoming/dealing with the influence of someone they admire. Fair enough that I should carry them both around with the assurance they had lessons to teach me.

Storeyville I feel uncomfortable talking about, because I don't feel as strongly about it as Chris Ware did upon reading it in 1995. I don't think it's bad, I think it's good, there's some great drawing in it, but something in my reading of it- a lack of engagement with it's rhythms, maybe, or not reading it in the context in which it was written- makes it hit me not as hard as it hits other people. I think I will be able to write a pretty good essay about Cold Heat once that comes out, as that's a book very much of its time, that I read as it was being made. Sequences in Storeyville stand out, but the cumulative effect doesn't strike me- maybe it was reading those reviews that spoiled the last two pages elsewhere on the internet? Maybe it's the format change- The newspaper format, with it's cheap paper folded in the middle, kind of precludes flipping through in a way a book doesn't, it kind of forces you to read it and turn its pages deliberately. There's a lot of people talking about how the original edition was a perfect match of form and content, and how the new bookshelf-ready version is just an adaptation for these times, where a comic can find a place in a bookstore or a library shelf.

I don't know what I can say about Storeyville: The drawing, in general, reminds me of Ben Katchor's, except that I think it's better, and rewards looking at it more. The way color palette frames compositions, the more expressive moments- Right now I'm looking at the bottom six panels of page nineteen, which are awesome.

I really can't work out the pacing of it, at least not for a sustained amount of time, the way that constitutes reading a comic. I kept on looking at Cold Heat in single issue form- each one worked really well as its own thing, with its own pace, in a way where I'm not sure how it'll work as a graphic novel- Storeyville can be broken down almost into strips, sunday pages, which themselves function like paintings, and it's weird for reading momentum considering it as a whole- The story feels so slight, compared to something like Jimbo: Adventures In Paradise- another comic where you let the images work like paintings, but which keeps up velocity and ends up feeling epic in scope. The figure drawings are super-inconsistent, which makes certain scenes hard to follow. Although it works well in the action sequences. There's also this stillness at work in the frequent landscape drawings. Both of these things are great, but there's this tension between them which makes it hard for me to read. Some will say that the more sketchily drawn bits are to be read faster than others- this distinguishes between the more landscape-dominated scenes, and their feeling of tranquility (for example, page 8) and the more movement-oriented scenes (page 9). This guideline makes the more populated scenes even harder to follow. (Is it Ben Jones' influence in Cold Heat that makes the character designs feel more delineated/more likable?)

I like the way the dogs are drawn, as well as the birds and horses, even if the drawings of human figures doesn't always work for me. And it keeps on getting better, the more I look at it, free from any sense of narrative pushing forward.

Picturebox gets a rep for putting out experimental books that I tend to think of as being really exciting for the way they engage with a huge tradition of comics. But: Almost every time I read one, I'm disappointed at first glance. They all work really well in anticipation, and after the fact, but they all have these learning curves- I was disappointed in Ninja at first for not being in full color, and for having a lot more to take in than I was able to absorb in a first reading, that felt pressured by the drawing and the hype to be as fast as possible. Eventually I worked it out. Then Maggots came out, and disappointed me in being even more abstract than Ninja, until I came to admire the way it depicted movement and life-as-lived. The serialization format, which was completely economically unfeasible, really flattered 1-800-Mice and Cold Heat for the way that the initial issues gave you time to acclimate to the aesthetic so you could see how the other issues furthered it. Powr Mastrs is one of the few books I understood immediately, but that was after multiple rereadings of the story in Kramers Ergot 5- Other people admitted to rereading it before really getting its greatness.

Anyway, if you are reading this in Olympia Washington, Storeyville is available at the public library and is pretty cool. If you are reading this in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and are Frank Santoro, what's up dude.

I've been thinking about a radio show where Brazilian music dominates. I do not think this will happen, though, as that which I want to share is mostly confined to one compilation, the "Brazil 70: After Tropicalia" record put out by Soul Jazz.

What I would want to highlight about it is how much it feels to me like laptop music, conjured from organic instruments. Almost all of the songs are defined by these ecstatic moments, which, even though the songs have vocals and structure, seem to arise more from the arrangements: There's a ton of moving parts to these songs, all speeding up and slowing down and putting different things into focus. It feels like pop music in the emotions it evokes, even as the rhythms move in directions that make dancing hard to contemplate.

There's other compilations of Brazilian music that I thought I could mine. One, called "The Sexual Life Of The Savages" seems like a lot of people heard it because of the promise of Brazilian post-punk. It's not as interesting as Brazil 70, probably because the idea refers to rock band set-ups, which keep the arrangements more limited. The pop elements lead to it feeling like watered-down versions of Ut, or someone else from the New York Noise compilations Soul-Jazz puts out.

There's also a compilation just called Tropicalia. It is kind of cool when a song comes on with something you only know as a sample, but then the whole song floats by on that groove. The Brazil 70 stuff comes on and keeps going like J Dilla was serving as bandleader.

Paranoid Park is not that bad of a movie. "Not that bad" is a relative term, of course, and I use it mostly in comparison to Gus Van Sant's Elephant, which is god-awful. Both movies are dumb, but Paranoid Park has these moments where it becomes a skate video, almost, contextualizing it's stupidity. The dumbest moments of Elephant were where it pretended to be somehow insightful, whether in patronizing satire or in scenes of future school shooters making out in a shower. This isn't to say that Paranoid Park is good, just that the subject matter is chosen well enough for what the director cares about to not be really egregious and ill-chosen.

Did I ever blog about how The Great Silence is a pretty good film? The spaghetti western starring Klaus Kinski, directed by Sergio Corbucci in 1968? It was recommended to me, on a message board, ages ago by someone who I tended to argue with over film but who I gave credit to for being intellectually engaged. He was on the money about The Great Silence though.

Last night, my computer sprang back to life, smelling of sour milk. The keyboard, however, no longer works. So I can use my computer to consume things, like music, I can't really create anything new.

And music-consumption is tricky. When a record came up on my Soulseek wishlist, and I clicked "download containing folder," I learned that the user I was dealing with had everything in a folder marked "music." Someone has done this to me before, and I pointed it out, and they corrected it. I could not correct it so easily, being without a keyboard with a shift key that would allow me to highlight large amounts at once. I deleted tracks one by one before disconnecting my internet, but leaving Soulseek on in the hopes that eventually there would be a runtime error causing it to quit and reset to before I attempted such downloads. This didn't happen, because Soulseek doesn't really do anything that would cause it to experience an error when the internet is disconnected.

On Friday, milk was spilled on my laptop keyboard, initializing a phase of radio silence here at blog headquarters. At first I welcomed the possibility of a more analog lifestyle, but then practicalities began to rear their head.

The first thing I did, after flipping the computer upside-down so any milk that seeped in fell out, was watch Julien Donkey-Boy. I've avoided the films of Harmony Korine thinking they would be filled with nonstop negativity and exploitation. Julien Donkey-Boy is actually a very human film, with the only actively cruel character being played by Werner Herzog. Herzog is great, as he invests the character of the abusive father with this sort of zen machismo that is present in his very being, making for the most likable character of that type maybe ever. Maybe this means I should reconsider my decision to not watch any Todd Solondz movies.

Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries surprised me. It's structure is that of a multifaceted crystalline object, mapping so much of an individual's life- through flashbacks, dream sequences, and encounters with characters that reflect elements of a character's life or fears even as they don't advance the plot.

The last Bergman film I saw, Autumn Sonata, has superficially similar subject matter, but it's more literal, straightforward depiction of a sequence in time makes it play out completely differently. That film is more emotionally draining and brutal, as opposed to the warmth in Wild Strawberries. Autumn Sonata ending points towards the possibility of redemption that Wild Strawberries actually provides.

Wild Strawberries also has amazing black and white cinematography that allows for dreaminess, whereas Autumn Sonata looks shot on video, grounding in the concrete.

But the structure of Wild Strawberries- I'm not sure I've seen a film that's worked like that. It seems like most movies, if they have dream sequences in them, don't have characters that enter the narrative for a scene or two and then leave. And most films that would be that freewheeling wouldn't carry around the same amount of weight and anxiety that's Bergman's general territory. It ends up really resonant for the amount of empty space it carves out for itself. And despite all that, it still only runs for an hour and a half. That's what surprised me, and what made me love it.

Another week, another friend left town. But let's stay focused on the positive, and not become mired in myopia.

Thanks Amazon.com advanced search for publishers, which reveals that Picturebox is putting out a book for Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind- I assume the exhibition at Deitch Projects. They're also doing a catalog of Ben Jones paintings. Hopefully the plan for a complete 1-800-Mice book this year will still happen, although it didn't come up in a catalog show. (According to their website, they're putting out a complete Will Sweeney Tales Of Greenfuzz book in 2009, which I can imagine being released the same day as a Thurber tome.)

The newest song to be stuck on repeat is by this band on Orange Twin called Nana Grizol, that appeared on an mp3 blog. I could loop it so easy, ad infinitum, but not for healthy reasons. I'm sure you can imagine. I'm trying to track down the record, or at least a second track to determine whether a purchase would be sensible. The album art is terrible.

The new Silver Jews record has fucking awesome album art! Stephen Bush!

That Beck record that was really popular ten years ago, and was reissued recently has a bunch of songs on it I didn't remember at all! This includes songs that were hits, to a certain degree.

I don't know, people. This post is all about its first paragraph, and trying to avoid the feeling of weight accumulating. The weight, I guess- this is how I'm going to articulate it right now- is that of a pretty general anxiety, what am I going to do with the future. Everyone I know shares this, in this little town. The thing is, the more people are around, the more that weight is distributed, to the point of almost being a non-issue: In a large enough community, that anxiety abates because stasis becomes more appealing. There's an element of a big-fish-in-small-pond syndrome easily diagnosed, but at its best moments, a rich community feels more like an aquarium. Or that's all bullshit, actually, sound and fury that just signifies that I am missing a lot of people pretty goddamn seriously.

(Does it mean anything that I went back to an old record from a completely different period of my life, that I probably haven't listened to since moving to Olympia, and scarcely recognized it?)

One friend I haven't seen in a while wrote a pretty great review of Juno in the comments of the post where I talked about Juno, if you haven't read it.

I keep on thinking in terms of new habits. I would like to start gardening really intensely, and using the computer much more sparingly. Analog equipment: sewing machines, typewriters and tape recorders. Although digital video still. I don't know, it's a pretty vague vision.

I spent last Sunday at the home of my newest friend, a day before she left the west coast. There came a point where she said "Ever do the thing where you just stare at your face in the mirror for so long it becomes a bunch of different faces?" "No," I said, "but my buddy Alex said he did something similar as a kid, and that he later got the same feeling by drinking cough syrup." "Yeah, it's kind of like that." Then we sat and stared, my shortness keeping my face just barely within the mirror's frame. "Focus on the whites of your eyes," she advised. I did: mostly it was the edges of my mouth that shifted and warped. Minutes passed, and eventually I recoiled sharply to the right. "Did you see it?" "It happened like seven times, and finally I saw a face I really didn't want to look at. Dude looked like he was going to rape me."

This really happened. It is too subjective to ever be in a film, which is too bad for the cinematic art but amazing for life as a thing you live.

Today I learned that that girl ate some bad acid fairly recently, which probably played a factor in her leaving town, as well as my ability to get along with her all of a sudden. While talking crazy shit and eating rice with beets I liked her as much as I like anyone, and five days later I learn she's serving as a cautionary tale for the mutual friends who knew her for longer.

A thing I am determined to try to put in a movie is that moment where you are at a droney noise show, hearing all sorts of frequencies, and then you hiccup involuntarily and for a brief second the shift in ear pressure makes the whole scene much less intense, although only for an instant.

I just started watching Masaaki Yuasa's Kemonozume. Yuasa made Mind Game, highly regarded among my circle of friends, probably to the point of serving as a totem for all of the ones that do animation. (These people I generally don't consider anime kids, and I think they rank the Flash animation of Paper Rad about as highly, for different reasons.) This is his follow-up, a TV show less obviously expressive in its techniques(so far) but completely roughly beautiful and emotionally engaging. I don't think I can talk about the plot without making it seem embarassing, so it will have to suffice to say that there's this monkey character I really like, who's a small part. Okay I'll admit it: The show is mostly about flesh eating monsters and the sword-fighters sworn to kill them. I am really into it and interested to see how many consecutive episodes I can watch before getting sleepy. The ending theme lyrics start off with "I like to bite on the drops of rain. They're not sweet, in fact they're bitter. I like how the smell betrays my tongue."

Which as I type it brings to mind the Animal Collective song "Fireworks" the same way the associative nature of this post makes me want to point out that I've been rereading the David Berman book of poetry, Actual Air, (probably particularly "Self-Portrait At 28") as I try not to be disappointed in the new Silver Jews record. And the use of the word associative reminds me of the three hours of Gary Panter interview I listened to the other day, where he explains that Jimbo takes place on Mars, in the colony that's a combination of Texas and Japan, where time happens backwards so new artifacts of the past are perpetually being uncovered.

There is a noise ordinance proposed for downtown Olympia. I oppose this, and sent an e-mail to the city council urging that a public meeting be held to discuss the issue, indicating my negative stance on such an ordinance. (Many opposed think the proposal is written for the benefit of developers hoping to create condos in downtown.)

To my surprise, I actually got an e-mail from a city council member, that I very much wish to reply to, but my lack of knowledge is tripping me up.

In my original e-mail, I state that such measures as noise ordinances for commercial districts, in the way they neuter commercial districts, move Olympia away from being its own sustainable community and more towards being a suburb of Seattle and Tacoma. The response said that this was not the goal, but that "Downtown Seattle presents a model of success worthy of imitation." Obviously, the difference between Olympia and Seattle is that Seattle is more decentralized, there are several areas dense with small commercial businesses, which effectively serve the same purpose for their neighborhoods as downtown Olympia serves for the whole of the city. This is my main objection. However, what confuses me is this: I'm not quite sure what is being defined as "downtown Seattle." There's no real area in Philadelphia, for instance, that is classified as "downtown"- it would be kind of a misnomer for a city of that size. That said, I'm relatively unsure as to what area "downtown Seattle" refers to. It's not a city I particularly care for. Anyone who wants to define downtown Seattle for me, please do so in the comments.

So, I'm finishing up college, working on this short film as a final project. I was going to do it anyway, I'm pretty sure, I begun it not expecting to get any credit and then worked out a way to get credit so I could graduate this June. Last year, I made a little movie that I liked that has its problems- there's a lot of plot points that get depicted as abstractions. For instance, the climax of the movie is a guy being eaten alive by rats, I'm not sure how that reads. I was glad to not be graduating with my peers, glad that there'd been enough times where tuition never got paid to allow me another year to get my skill-set in order.

Now I'm working on this thing that was designed in my mind as a final project, and which I now realize is going to be completely tonally inconsistent and impossible to parse for any sort of emotional undercurrent. It's the sort of movie that, if someone had paid to produce it, there would be no return on investment upon its release, and whoever made it would never be allowed to make a movie again. Reviewing the audio I recorded today, I laughed a lot, and realized that, despite having seen so many movies, I'd somehow ended up an outsider artist anyway. My liberal arts education now amounts essentially to having grown up in a shack. I feel like I just found out I'm actually retarded.

I asked someone a couple weeks ago, "Do you think someone could puzzle together what a normal movie was, if they had seen a bunch of movies that were crazy in different ways, for instance Crank and Last Year At Marienbad?" The answer was no. The answer is no. Oh man. I'm really excited to finish it up and show it to people. I think it'll be really funny. I'm exhilarated.

The climax that I thought would be David Lynch a la Mulholland Drive is actually more David Lynch a la On The Air. (With puppets.) Oh man.

In other, perhaps related news: So the issue with the movie Juno is that, while all of the actors are fine, in the way that a big chunk of acting is the ability of an audience to project their own emotions onto them, every line of dialogue is completely atrocious and should not be allowed to be said by people in a movie, and the soundtrack frequently plays in such a way where it really seems not meant to supply emotion or a counterpoint to a scene, but just to show off the hipness of the movie.

Meanwhile, An American Werewolf In London is great, containing both Griffin Dunne's finest hour and a ridiculously gratuitous scene of car crashes. I saw it this morning and wanted to recommend it to someone in an unhealthy relationship this afternoon. Because of the part where the girl is with a dude that becomes a werewolf on the full moon, at her apartment, when she's not around. Yeah. Thought it was a potent metaphor for the times we live in. Unlike the movie Juno, which is really dismissive of abortions.

If YOU are not dismissive of abortions, you might want a copy of this movie I'm making. DVDs should be burned by the end of June, tell me if you want one.

Be Kind, Rewind ended up not being as good as I would want it to be, but I loved it nonetheless. As a comedy, none of the jokes really struck me as funny, despite the presence of people like Heather Lawless and Jon Glaser, not doing anything, but getting paid anyway. I like it for Michel Gondry getting naked with his process, and how, while it's less technically impressive than The Science of Sleep, it seems more open-hearted for the way it embraces community. It feels like a companion piece to Block Party in that way.

I really hope Gondry's next film ends up being the postulated Daniel Clowes collaboration of an adaptation of Master Of Space And Time, especially if the Clowes screenplay for a movie about the kids who made an adaptation of Raiders Of the Lost Ark ever gets made.

Until then I guess I am waiting for the release of Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, and Tokyo, the film anthology including an adaptation of the Gabrielle Bell comic from Kramers Ergot 5.

Last night I watched a terrible movie. It was called Southland Tales, Richard Kelly's follow-up to Donnie Darko. It was a huge failure, barely released. It's a sci-fi movie that's completely unable to tell its story competently, and so reverts to voiceover narration. Those last two things apply to Mike Judge's Idiocracy, and that was my favorite movie of the year it came out. Southland Tales feels more like another argument that the world depicted in Idiocracy is already happening, with this feeling that its unable to get past vapidity, so steeped in the stuff is it. (It has an awful cast, consisting of big-name stars and Saturday Night Live cast members. Although also people who are smaller than SNL: Booger from Revenge Of The Nerds, Will Sasso from MadTV, a woman from Poltergeist.)

It also feels like it might be Richard Kelly's spiritual shield.

It is stupid nonsense, on every level, and one of those levels would have to be the way it keeps on heaping levels on. But: The moral of the movie is "Pimps don't commit suicide." This is literally said four times, one of which is the last line of the movie. It just makes me feel that all that vacuous shit- the movie is all vacuous shit, it makes me never ever want to live in L.A., for the way it's pointedly dumb- it's the world Kelly lives in, and that's probably a deliberate choice. I think I get the feeling of watching the movie of knowing where the guy's coming from- and it's a stupid place, that's mostly pot-smoke, knee-jerk liberal politics, and immersion in celebrity culture but I guess it gets him through the day. Donnie Darko was a popular movie with its cult following that probably existed for the same "Wait, I know exactly where you're coming from" reasons, it's just that, with this movie, where he's coming from is a place no one else can relate to. I do feel like I can recognize it, though: It's a garbage heap. There's no real sense of aesthetics, or value, or emotion- and I don't think any of that is intentional! I think it was all arrived at honestly, through being kind of stupid.

I can't recommend seeing it to anyone, even as I wish more people had seen it so I could know I wasn't hallucinating.

This story is amazing.

Last Wednesday, I was invited to be on the radio to play some records. I brought along a copy of Wooden Wand's Harem Of The Sundrum and The Witness Figg, thinking I'd play one of two songs that struck me as stand-outs. When I say "stand-outs" in regards to Wooden Wand, I am talking about songs that might not end up being the "best" over time, just that thing in radio parlance where something jumps out as a single, or something with more clarity of light than murky atmosphere. When there, on air, my mind blanked on what the second song was. I played "Vengeance Part Two" because, looking at the playlist, I couldn't remember what song "Eagle Claw" referred to.

Later on I realized 'oh right, that's the song where the chorus is "don't say your last words 'til you die".' A lyric I take to mean a refusal to lay down and die a living death, kind of a flipside to David Berman's "on the last day of your life, don't forget to die" line from the Silver Jews song "Advice To The Graduate." On another hearing, I heard the line differently, as "don't save your last words 'til you die," which is sort of the opposite sentiment, but, right, don't view your life as a narrative you can control. Both of these hearings, which are kind of opposites in terms of "What am I supposed to do with these awesome last words I have lying around to use?" apply to Wooden Wand's music in the way in which it's so all over the place in its alternation between psychedelic jam albums and more straightforward singer-songwriter stuff. I can't name a favorite, "best" Wooden Wand record. The best record for the jammy stuff is the Wooden Wand And The Vanishing Voice album The Flood. The best song-oriented record would be the James And The Quiet. This is for records that are actually released on labels, there are slews of CD-Rs around on bootleg networks whathaveyou. There's one I really like from a Spring 2006 tour where Hush Arbors covers Neil Young's Sugar Mountain with a series of high-pitched unnerving notes.

The constant records, under a bunch of different names, is what sort of frustrates the narrative impulse which probably is what makes someone popular- It's hard to place a clear progression, hard for people to agree on a favorite record. How many of the bad reviews of James And The Quiet were probably written by people who wanted jammy stuff? Music reviewers- who I don't hate at all, who I don't think are silly or worthy of mockery- are dealing in words, and end up receptive to narrative clarity. When the record Second Attention came out, filled with religious allusions, critics didn't know what to make of it, so they complained.

The next record made by the guy who uses Wooden Wand as an alias will be done under a birthname, on a major label, and is rumored to sound like Tom Petty.

So this post is a tribute to the scrambled musical path of Wooden Wand, where even the bad records have their moments. Good times.

I buy very few comics these days, due to budgetary constraints. It seems like people who buy more have lower standards, in a way that's not necessarily to their detriment. The more things you consume, the easier it is to evaluate something on its own terms. I think I can listen to music more honestly due to the volume I consume, but when I buy a comic, I tend to have unreasonable expectations- I expect it to work on every level a comic can possibly work, rather than as just an aesthetic experience.

Anyway, Kevin Huizenga's Ganges 2 works on every level a comic can work. I listed his stuff at the top of my 2006 list- his complete output that year. Then, in 2007, nothing came out, except for a minicomic called New Construction that I didn't read because I would've had to order it through a website that didn't have anything else that particularly appealed to me. Ganges 2 came out today, after a hiatus that would suggest a year spent working on it.

New Construction, apparently, had deleted sequences from Ganges 1, a suite of short stories. Something appeared on Huizenga's blog (linked to in my sidebar) that seemed like something from Ganges 2 in the middle of last year. In retrospect, it seems like that was probably the deleted sequence that appeared in the New Construction zine, and that shows up in Ganges 2 in expanded form. There, it was a small vignette, with a vaguely poetic ending. Here, it's a period piece set during the dot-com boom that allows for all sorts of tangents and details. When that poetic ending is reprised here, it's still not quite amazingly moving, but there's less weight on it after the extended narrative of the rest of it.

Huizenga exists at this point on the alternative comics spectrum between something like Chris Ware (Eddie Campbell might be a better comparison point) and something like Paper Rad. Here, he starts talking about video games, and their kind of abstracted relationship to nature, which is vaguely the province of Jacob Ciocci. There's also a really great scene describing a fictional platforming game using some Ben Jones-ish details for jokes. But there's this more bookish/short story way of going about it, with a more delineated cast of characters playing off of each other, and the politics of the day and interpersonal dynamics are drawn in detail. But the tone is closer to melancholy than depression, because people are capable of warmth and feeling in Huizenga's comics. Sometimes, Huizenga navigates the divide even further, by using crazy cartoony doodles to communicate some kind of abstract epiphany in thought process at a comics' climax. I love it when he does that, but it seems like his best comics don't do that, in favor of being more controlled and concrete. His three stories from Drawn And Quarterly Showcase that were reprinted in Curses don't do that, for instance. This comic doesn't do it either, but it does start off with this abstracted overture of drawing that seems like something out of issue 18 of Paper Rodeo. It's kind of superfluous filler compared to the generally literary thrust, but it's great for what it is.

These are generalities. Here are specific bits I liked: The strip of panels at the bottom of a page where Glenn drives home, goes to sleep, and dreams of corridors. Specifically, the rhythm, cutting from outside a car to inside, to then being outside of Glenn's sleeping head and then inside a dream sequence, and how that is inforced by the compositions.

I also like how, on the very next page, the vistas of the videogame remind me of the movie Black Narcissus. There's this gorgeous palette of shades of blue that make up the color in the comic, so the technicolor of that film isn't diminished by the one-color of the Ignatz books' format. Black Narcissus had all painted backdrops, in keeping with the videogame's artifice later highlighted: It's a deliberate allusion, but a subtle one.

There's other things- the strength of comics to balance the subjective and objective, and the way that the captions tell a parallel narrative to the drawings, which happens in Huizenga's comics a lot, and is almost not worthy of note, besides to point out how dynamic the depiction of action in the images is this time around, and how lived-in the narration is, compared to the sometimes facts-cribbed-from-books nature of, say, "The Curse." That had it's own strengths, in terms of information about starlings I didn't know, that made it pleasurable to read, but this development seems distinctly like artistic growth.

This isn't to say it's perfect, that every choice seems like a good one- I don't know why there's that drawing of Glenn's head popping off in the middle of a meeting, but it's still a great comic, and those moments where it becomes a little too excitable are just evidence of reach exceeding grasp in a way that seems like it should be expected from a great cartoonist actively trying to become a better one.