The Calvin And Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book is the one Calvin And Hobbes book I have in my possession. I have all of them, at home in New Jersey, but after they got water-damaged, my mom bought a new copy of that book and sent it out here. That's the one with all the commentary about character names and the comic strip business and licensing and stuff. It's pretty great. There are two bits of commentary I want to write about. The first is when Watterson notes how all the great strips are out of print, and that modern work would probably be better if there were more historic documentation. The line is that each new generation of strip artists has to "reinvent the wheel."

This was written over ten years ago. Starting as of a couple years ago, old comics are starting to be reprinted in really complete form- The Krazy and Ignatz books, the Peanuts books, and Pogo is going to start coming out this year. All in complete form. These strips were the ones Watterson cited as major influences. But there's also all sorts of more obscure stuff coming out, thanks in part to that awesome Art Out Of Time book, and also due to the success of this stuff. So there's Gene Deitch and Jack Cole comic strips being reprinted.

There's also a bit where Watterson says that he thinks that, after so many comic strips about young boys drawn by men, he thinks a strip about a little girl, drawn by a woman, could be great. This is also interesting to me due to an interview I read with either Eleanor Davis or Andrice Arp, where they said that at the time they started going to comics classes at the Savannah College for Art and Design, they were the only woman in the class, but by the time they were seniors, things were more equal.

Right now, there's the Megan Kelso comic, Watergate Sue, being serialized in the New York Times, but that's not exactly what I'm talking about. I just think it's worth noting as a parallel. Megan Kelso went to Evergreen in the early nineties. I think some of the stuff that was printed in her Queen Of The Black Black was pretty cool, but the stuff in her second book showcases a leap in style and pacing to a place I can no longer understand, where indefinite periods of time pass between panels. Some people can parse the flayed minimalism and find great emotional moments, good for them.

This thought process was began just in general by my thinking about, as I waited for the bus, that 2008 will probably have a lot of great "graphic novels" coming out, as 2007 has been dominated by reprints of older work, next year will see more contemporary stuff being finished and collected. I'm thinking specifically of Anders Nilsen's Big Questions and Paul Pope's THB, but certainly the promise of collections of Cold Heat, Scud The Disposable Assassin, and Dal-Tokyo fit into this trend. So too would a theoretical collection of Megan Kelso's Artichoke Tales, but I neither know nor care if that will happen. Scud was supposed to come out this year, but I don't know if it was finished drawing before the creator, Rob Schrab, went back to directing The Sarah Silverman Program. It seems possible that it will be out before the end of the year, but I don't know. That would be a good one to read on the plane travelling in one direction or another for the holidays.

When "Watergate Sue" stops running in the Times, a new Daniel Clowes thing will start to come out, which I think will wrap up early in 2008. If that were to be collected into an issue of Eightball next year, that would also be great.

Weird- Yesterday, I was listening to a podcast from The Sound Of Young America, where the chorus of the Rihanna song "Umbrella" was likened to The Cranberries, and now I find that three weeks ago, Paper Rad posted a video on Youtube about just this very concept.

So a while ago, my camera started working again. For a long time, the eject button would not eject the cassettes within it. The digital video tape inside it was a recording I got Alex Tripp to do of me doing my version of "the aristocrats," for submission to the movie's DVD. It turned out there was a ten-minute time limit and so it was never submitted, but it was really weird to see something a little over a year old and so clearly coming from a different place, in terms of obscenity. I know that obscenity was the nature of the exercise and I just haven't had a reason to do that type of thing since then. But it was weird.

Just now, I looked over the beginnings of a screenplay, called "Cough Syrup" which I had started to write before that video was made.

Both of these were also done before I'd made any movie, including the cartoons for Animated Visions, I think.

Anyway, what exists of that screenplay- I think parts of it are funny, but on the whole, also way crasser than what my mind comes up with now. It's like there was some horrible tension that was just relieved that I wasn't even aware of. Getting older? Being on the west coast too long?

That said, tonight I was talking to my roommates about my new job, which I haven't blogged about. I work as a server at a retirement home. It's not that bad, my bosses seem alright, although my coworkers are weird. I thought they were all teenage girls, but I think they might actually be my age and go to the community college. I think my idea of age might be skewed by the people I hang out with? You know, you meet someone dumb, you think they're younger to give them the benefit of the doubt. These people aren't necessarily dumber, they just don't do the thing I and all my friends do. Anyway, they are all female, and I do imagine at some point an old man seeing me, the one male working this job, and calling me a faggot.

This then led to me imagining being verbally abused by an old man. "Bring me my Jell-O, faggot. Bet you'd like it if I used your mouth for a colostomy bag. Get me some cottage cheese or you'll be sucking on my prolapsed rectum like it was a dick." This is deeply crass, and I write it down for the sake of my own memory, as the actual things I work on that take more time are not as crass as that which I throw out to my roommates on the front stoop as they smoke cigarettes.

Note: I really like what exists of that unfinished screenplay and should be writing more for it, even though my thoughts are so seemingly tonally divergent now.

Maybe it's because I listen to The Best Show On WFMU so much, and that show's so clean?

If you are going to have a beard, you should be at least kind of David Berman.

"American Water" is so good.

Right now I am in a place where things are happening, in and around my life, big things, but let's wait for them to sort themselves out, so they are not being discussed perpetually, with real-time blogging. Let's keep on filling the void of content this way, for as long as we can.

Complaints about this new house:

The first one that comes to mind right now is scented candles. The one burning right now smells like a cooking sausage, and not in a good way. More like a hot dog. I went to blow it out and found it in some kind of metal cage and that it's not a candle so much as a small short pool of wax?

But last night I would've mentioned tarot cards. One roommate, who as of a week ago, didn't know how to read tarot cards, was reading those of another.

Also having arguments with people where you know they are wrong but they refuse to acknowledge the possiblility of their being wrong, due to misremembered information to substantiate their belief. You are correct if you guessed that this happens with the person what reads the tarot cards.

Filth, of a way grosser kind than the kind Alex created.

Hardwood floors in the bedroom- This leads to dirt on the floor that then becomes dirt on your feet that then becomes dirt in your bed. Awful.

That I'm sleeping on a double-size futon in a twin frame, and it is becoming abundantly clear how shitty this is for my back and is really becoming worse and worse. I have to do something about this.

Occasional terrible music, and the related decent music presented in an awful context- too loud for the type of music it is and sung along with poorly.

Watching TV shows on DVD by just pressing play all on the main menu screen, rather than "select episode" and then having three hours of TV play, sometimes to an empty room, or as someone falls asleep on the couch. Related to this is the watching of movies that have already been viewed multiple times, this weird TV as a presence exporting vague comforts thing. I like watching movies and TV too, but I watch it in a completely different way. Wet Hot American Summer has been watched, by the same person, three times since I moved in on July first, and it's been watched so many times by this person that it no longer provokes laughter. I am probably being a snob when I think of this as being weird.

Four out of my five roommates are fine on a personal interaction level. No one is awesome enough to make their bullshit charming- especially because in the case of the filth, it's a thing that's just denied. There's a lot of stuff that's just tics- all this garbage around here. Hopefully when two of them move out at the beginning of September- (no definite dates) that shit will be gone or will be thrown out in a big purge. Sorry, Beatles photo in the front hallway, you invoke my rage at cliched imagery. No apologies to you, multi-colored plastic bead curtain hanging on a wall, you just look like shit.

Again, the charm of the place is the fact that the landlord just leaves us alone and we can do whatever with the rooms in terms of painting. I kind of want to go crazy with this and glue a bunch of upturned cans to the floor, for the way the concave bottoms will reflect light. If I do this in my room, I also like the idea of sawing off the bottom of the door to better accomodate the new higher floor. Oh, yes, and the rent is low. These things should encourage awesomeness, but there's just this weird mire of mediocrity, which I'm capable of rising above, as is everyone else who lives here, probably, but no one's really encouraged to do so, because of how all-consuming the mire is.

I have a job interview tomorrow and even though I woke up relatively early it was not early enough for me to be tired at a reasonable hour.

I've been trying to read more genre fiction. Crime stuff, specifically. I'm writing these books where nothing's happening and I need to be reminded of how people write books with plots and forward movement. I will probably be off the crime kick soon. I know people who like this stuff, my friends Jason Sheridan and Loren Thor both have read the old stuff that was adapted into film noir. I'm reading, right now, Raymond Chandler's The Little Sister, but before that I was reading a more contemporary book, Drama City, by George Pelecanos, due to my fondness for The Wire, which he writes for. I'd already heard that the best thing about Chandler isn't the mysteries but the rants about Los Angeles, and this is considered his best novel, and on the inside cover of the Library Of America collection I have, it states that it has the most of that stuff than any of this other work. The book has The Long Goodbye in it as well, and as much as I liked the Robert Altman movie with Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe, I don't think I'll be able to muster the energy. It's maybe worth noting that for my stated goals, Chandler is pretty hard to follow plot-wise. But he's great philosophy-wise, respectable for his point of view. The rants about Los Angeles give power to his essays that are reprinted that take as a given that the person writing them is not a hack, despite that being the sea he swims in- He writes essays on mystery stories, and screenplays, and both are considered a hard road to hoe for the way that quality is drowned out by the white noise of other people's bad work and established formula.

I'm kind of over the idea, now, but they've got this stuff at the library and it's a whole in my education. Richard Price writes for The Wire, Dashiell Hammett precedes Chandler and Jim Thompson follows him. Mostly it seems like I'd rather read the stuff I tend to read, but I'm actually finishing these books, whereas Against The Day just kind of sits in front of a stereo speaker, with me three hundred pages into it.

The other book I got from the library on my last trip was the adaptation of Paul Auster's City Of Glass into a comic by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, which I think some people think is a superior work to the original novel due to its thematic concerns about something beyond language, but right now at three AM is striking me as not particularly memorable or impressive. It's good though. I read a thing making fun of Paul Auster a few days that was pretty legitimate. It was making fun of various "literary" types of writers by- wait hold on, I'll just find the link.

Here it is. I agreed with a lot of it. I think Don DeLillo is a pretty good writer, especially for Underworld, but every criticism of White Noise the author posits I thought about while I was reading it, and the teachers I've had who've put forth the idea that it's a "funny" book don't know from funny. I don't have the problem with the talk about vague looming important things, that seems a legitimate reporting of thought.

But I was talking about Paul Auster, it points out that his writing which gets called spare and minimalist is actually repetitive. This stops being an issue when it gets adapted into a comic, and a lot of the excess narration is removed. I liked bits of Moon Palace, though, and overall disagree completely with the conclusions that B.R. Myers reaches. Writers have tics, sometimes those are flaws, and surely no one should be beyond criticism, but Don DeLillo is actually a pretty fucking great writer, despite being bad at plots. I don't remember what Underworld was about, but I can't follow the plot in The Little Sister either, but both are satisfying on a chapter-by-chapter basis. Yeah, I don't know, I keep on thinking that maybe plots don't matter. The overall thrust of by Thomas Pynchon's V. leads to a place that's not nearly as satisfying and memorable as the scene of an operation of a nose that the surgeon narrates in song. My favorite Vonnegut books are the ones where plots are the closest to barely existing. Nothing really happens throughout Something Happened.

I'll take this moment to recommend yet again Salvador Plascencia's The People Of Paper, that book is fucking great. And it has a plot.

The next genre excursion should be into science fiction. John Samson reads a lot of it, Brian Chippendale says that all of Jodorowsky's stuff is an overt rip-off of Dune, which makes me reconsider my previous dismissal of it as being too nerdy. I should read more Philip K. Dick besides VALIS, because VALIS was fucking amazing. Salvador Plascencia said in an interview that the fantastic stuff in The People Of Paper should be taken like people take fantastic stuff in science fiction, and not just as metaphors. I think he was referring specifically to the mechanical turtles. That's how I read all of that anyway, to me that type of thing is so common to me that I can't imagine doing anything else, and really I just think I should just embrace that stuff more, because it just makes so much sense to me.

Oh man, I wonder how much this upswing in blogging activity has to do with not really having anyone to talk to about music and stuff? Fuck man. I don't want to keep on going on about Brian Chippendale but I do want to have a discussion with someone about whether Ride The Skies is better than Wonderful Rainbow, because I kind of think it might be. I'm making a mix CD now, really shortly after having just made one, I think for the sake of that kind of dialogue, and "oh boy what a great song." Methods of communication. I think what I'm trying to get across in this one is an argument for technology-powered ritual and wildness. "Hey Light" by Animal Collective shows up early, it ends with Silver Apples, the Ween song "Molly" is in there, so's Dan Deacon. That's kind of what I think that living in Olympia should be like, due to the abundance of nature- I want more ritual music and less coffeehouse poetry set to chords. So that's the argument this mix is making. The last mix I made was trying to say stuff too. It is much easier to make mixes to say things than writing novels, because I'm trying to say smaller things. It's even easier to cook meals and food, and I like the small thing that says when I give food to people. I would make that argument in a book but Raymond Carver already did. I invited you, readers of my blog, over for pancakes last week, right? The offer still stands.

I have two Ween records, but I feel they are the wrong ones to have. I have Chocolate And Cheese and The Mollusk, and they're both kind of awesome. I think Chocolate And Cheese is overproduced and too slick, but that's not why I think it's a wrong one to have.

I first heard of Ween by way of my brother, and I liked them for that goofy obscene thing that a nerd will like a band for in middle school. They Might Be Giants were my favorite band, I couldn't own Ween records due to my parent's strictness about Parental Advisory labels. I bought Chocolate and Cheese when I moved out, actually, one of the first things I did. The whole sticker wasn't much of an issue, in general- Independent labels avoided it completely, and I'd bought The Flaming Lips' Hit To Death In The Future Head and just kind of thought "fuck it, who cares" but that was when I was in high school, not middle school. (That album, by the way, is the best Flaming Lips record)

But I've been listening to Pure Guava and The Pod. When I helped Laura move, she told me she'd been listening to Pure Guava, "only the sad songs" and then explained that she meant sad in sound, not in lyrics, because the lyrics are uniformly goofy. What's weird is that after this was pointed out, I realized that almost all of the songs on that record sound sad, except for "Pumping For The Man." But it's a particular vibe those records have going on. Both were, if my memory serves, from the time when I was on Ween websites a lot, reading about them because I couldn't actually listen to their records straight-through, recording in a place nicknamed the Pod, where the two dudes lived with each other, getting really high and making music on the four-track. The actual album The Pod is considered a classic by Ween fans, but I think that's actually true for most of them and so is maybe meaningless. Anyway- what I realized is that The Pod and Pure Guava are what the band IS, whereas the stuff I own (and the country record that was released between them), is what the band DOES. The Pod and Pure Guava are kind of dark and claustrophic and really high. The lyrics are frequently nonsense, but they're mostly obscured by various tape effects. There's still some bad songs on the Pod- "Sketches Of Winkle" is a pretty bad metal goof, and "Captain Fantasy" is the same, albeit differently, but I can listen to Pure Guava pretty much front to back. It gets the hairiest with "Mourning Glory" which is pretty much noise with some rambling. After that, with better production, the song not-parodies, homages-with-goofy-lyrics shine through clearer, with less smoke haze, and maybe less sadness behind the haze. The Pod has the cover that's a parody of a Leonard Cohen best-of, shot in black and white but with a mask which I've alternately heard is for huffing Scotch Gard and is a Nitrous-Oxide powered Bong (which supposedly gets you high for days, but in a way where you feel sick throughout, although that seems weird considering the short term effects of Nitrous Oxide), and that's actually a pretty good way of describing what the record is: sad-bastard songs, all fucked up.

I find those "Best American" anthologies that Houghton Mifflin puts out kind of interesting. They first caught my attention with the "nonrequired" series, all edited by Dave Eggers, sporting celebrity introductions and cartoonist-drawn covers. This was in high school, eventually I came across the more specialized ones- "Best American Travel Writing" or whatever. Last year there was a "Best American Comics" for the first time ever, guest-edited by Harvey Pekar- who's awful. Tom Scharpling and Paul F. Tompkins making fun of that guy on The Best Show on WFMU made me laugh so hard my face hurt- they talk about how boring the stories he tells are, and then Paul F. Tompkins realizes- "I just remembered he doesn't even draw them! He gets other people to draw them- If comics are this perfect blend of story and art, he has neither!" But what was weird to me was a book labeled 2006 on it had a lot of stuff in it from the Chris Ware-edited issue of McSweeney's, which came out in 2004.

Today I saw a thing from the upcoming editors of the 2008 and 2009 books saying that the stuff was due for the 2008 book shortly- each volume comes out in the fall, (for Holiday purchase) with the label of the year of its release, but contains things from the past two years- one year's worth, split down the middle, essentially. So the 2007 books coming out will contain stuff that people who were more on the ball read in 2005 and 2006.

The 2007 Best American Comics book is edited by Chris Ware, which means it's easy to view it as a sequel to the McSweeney's. But I looked at the contributor list today, and it's really weird, in a great way. I'd heard that Kevin Huizenga and CF were both going to be in it. I saw that it's also going to have Gary Panter and Paper Rad in it. I have no idea what the Panter will be- maybe one of the minicomics, he sells on his website? but it's the Paper Rad thing that made me laugh hysterically. Because this is a book with crossover appeal, theoretically appealing to people who like the idea of "graphic novels" as literature. Paper Rad comics are pretty much the opposite of Chris Ware in tone, drawing, and point of view. When thinking about Paper Rad comics to be printed in the timespan the Ware book is going to cover, I remembered their piece "Kramers Ergot: Fuck You" starring characters from Seinfeld drawing comics about Bill Callahan of Smog whipping out his giant dick a la Boogie Nights before playing a show. I also thought about the piece Ben Jones did for the 2005 Small Press Expo anthology where Bart Simpson draws a comic that makes fun of Chris Ware that causes people to melt when they read it, and Bart then strips nude and slops the goo caused by the melting onto himself. I actually think the latter is the most likely to be anthologized because it contextualizes itself fairly understandably and Matt Groening won't sue. That comic's awesome. The idea of it being bought by old people, or even the middle-aged, is nonetheless mindblowing. The CF comic running is a reprint of a minicomic that was in itself an excerpt of a longer book being published this fall called Powr Mastrs that I'm really looking forward to. The cover, by David Heatley, depicts a pile of comics, with an original Heatley comic strip on the top of the pile but underneath it sit a bunch of covers that are all vaguely recognizable to me but the only one I can state with certainty is a copy of The Ganzfeld 4.

Both the Ware book and the Pekar one preceding it contain comics. I assume the Pekar one had a monologue sketchbook comic, one of which appeared in an Eggers Nonrequired Reading. Maybe the Ware book will have an excerpt from Big Questions? Although the idea of him running a monologue-sketchbook comic- man, that would be a big "fuck you" to most readers, in a way that would be pretty amusing to me. Not like my point is "Chris Ware is so punk." I just find it interesting, that while the idea that a popular figure's interests should be presented to the public is a sensible one, most figures whose works are of quality are into a lot of deeper, almost-esoteric work. Certainly if you're at the top of your game, you're not going to be interested in people who are doing watered-down versions of what you're doing, and if you understand your medium, there's a lot there. I also think it's interesting that David Lynch is really into classic Hollywood cinema, citing Sunset Boulevard as an all-time favorite. And, you know, Sunset Boulevard's great.

Last night brought me to downtown Olympia to see my friend Sam Adams off to Estonia for a year. Downtown was a strange place last night, with a Girls Gone Wild bus parked in front of a bar, on a block that counted five bars to it. There were protestors in the street and in the myriad bars, not with placards, just talking rhetoric about exploitation of women, and sometimes getting distracted to look at asses, if my understanding serves me correctly. They were crust punk types. One gave a speech and tried to give me a sheet of paper outlining his beliefs, and I said "Why should I take this if I already agree with your beliefs?"

He paused, and then said "Alright. How's your Playstation treating you?"

I said "I don't have a Playstation, but thanks for being condescending just because I don't want to placate you."

He then apologized and thanked me for calling him on it. Annoying.

We ended up away from there, in a bar with people I knew in it, but in a way that made me uncomfortable for their presentation- One person I hadn't seen in awhile, but at one point had a class with, and now had a haircut that spoke of professionalism and class. This is someone who I once talked to when drunk and she was spouting ironic antisemitism. I brought this up, and she said she didn't do that anymore. Her whole table had this distinct "girls night out" vibe, the feeling that everyone at it had their own distinct things going on in their lives, but this was something apart from all of it.

Meanwhile I was with Sam Adams, for whom a night out carousing at bars with friends seems very much of a continuity with the rest of his life. I never get an awkward feeling from that guy. The crazy people are a constant source of amusement, but he's not above them, he's able to keep them in line. He's a popular fellow, and will be missed, and I'm sure he will be fine in Estonia, because I am convinced he can be at home anywhere.

I said something to my roommate that I like the least a few weeks ago, which was surprising to me as I said it, but seems real enough to repeat now, for posterity. She was painting a picture and talking about how she doesn't know how to play an instrument, but wants to learn how, so she can play music. I say to her "Why? Music is hard. Like, I understand the punk rock idea of anyone can make music, but- you already have an artistic outlet, you paint. There's too many bands as it is. Instruments are expensive." Music is just one of those things that's really appealing to a certain age of people- The idea of wanting to be in a band is as common to teenagers as the idea of writing a novel someday is to forty-year-olds. I'm talking about myself as much as I was talking to her- I can't play music, and I can't draw, and I like music and comics, but I can write prose and I can make movies, and can articulate my emotions as well through that as anyone can expect to through music- Certainly, a lot of the people I know who play music might not be interested in that art-making element to it, so much as the idea of "playing" for the sake of fun, and ritual catharsis, which is valid, and its own thing, but that requires a decent amount of skill that some people will just not be able to get to even after shitloads of practice. You need to be fluent in a language to articulate how you feel in it, and most people will never be that fluent in drumming or guitar. Most people aren't even fluent enough in English to write about things, and that's their native language.

Note: I mostly only said this to her because I think she's dumb and doesn't have anything to say in any language and so I don't mind dream-crushing. But I've heard enough terrible music to think that maybe the idea that being a painter or a writer or a seamstress or whateverthefuck is just as valid as making music, and you should just go with your skillset and what you excell at or what makes you happy, rather than your ideas of what's fashionable and social within your subculture. This isn't meant to dissuade genuine outsider artists, just bandwagon-hopping scenester flies.

When I look at my iTunes playlist for all the music to come out in the year 2007, I try to start to group it all by sets of trends, and act like the conclusions I reach have more to do with music being produced this year than my personal tastes. I view certain sounds as signifying cultural trends, rather than small subcultural scenes- a few years ago I was thinking that all of the aughts would be defined by these cyborg sounds of the electronic and organic coexisting, either as a utopian dream or as a war breaking out.

So No Age and Deerhunter are droney rock bands with poppy, almost surf beats behind them. The new Liars record is like this as well. This doesn't mean anything. I like the new Magik Markers record- That's got songs on it, rather than the noise jams they made in the past that bored me when I caught the tail end of their set opening for Sonic Youth- The singer shouted "Do something!" and a crowd that had no reason to do so, because there was nothing outside of that shout that would encourage it. I kind of think that Magik Markers are dumb, based on that and the quote from the frontwoman found in The Believer music issue. Sonic Youth have the same kind of dumb, this invocation of sex-drugs-rock-and-roll as the be-all end-all of everything, that ends up being attributed to different kinds of work- it works great for vaguely arty rock music, but is tiresome as hell in the type of poetry that a Thurston Moore will write. But I guess that's not the actual point, and the actual music is the end of it? That makes sense, as a self-fulfilling prophecy- that the rock music will be better than the experimental work meant to glorify it. Like, if you look at John Cage as being punk, and that's what makes him good, it still stands to reason that an actual punk record will be closer to the point than a John Cage performance.

Um, the new Thurston Moore record is pretty good too, despite a few missteps, like ending with a tape recording of Thurston at age 13, recording the sound of Lysol. Or, you know, lyrical atrocities like "Wonderful Witches."

I have made pancakes for breakfast like every weekend since moving into this new place. If you live in Olympia and want pancakes, you should come by. Last week I made waffles instead, but the separating of whites from yolks and then beating the whites into stiff peaks is too much of a hassle, so tomorrow it's back to pancakes. I really need to work it out so the music I choose to listen to is played when I'm doing this, it's too frequently my roommates music, which, in general, is music not meant to be played at high volume being played at really high volume, and then sung along with, poorly. Usually when this happens I can be found playing music in my room, so I can run back to hear the sound of like Lightning Bolt's "On Fire" in the time it takes for the batter to bubble, and then running back to flip it over to brown. I listen to a lot of music I suspect would sound better loud but play at reasonable volume just because it has an element of obnoxiousness that other people wouldn't be prepared for. Take, for example, "Boyz" off the new M.I.A. record, which I was listening to just now. I wanted to write a post all about the new M.I.A., the new Eric Copeland solo record, and the new Oh No record, but this is the type of thing that I conceived of after only hearing little bits of each and hoping there'd be considerable aesthetic overlap, based on the way each addresses the idea of world music. I don't know, I still think it might be possible to edit a playlist that's just those records, shuffled up with some stuff removed- like, for example, the M.I.A. song "Jimmy" which played as I wrote the rest of this.

I meant to start blogging more consistently. It seems a productive way to spend time in front of the computer when my kind can't crank out the fiction as I would like to.

On the same library sojourn that led to me checking out the Millhauser book, the first thing I saw when I walked in the door was a copy of Gary Panter's Jimbo In Purgatory. It's massive, with a bright red cover printed with gold and black ink. It turns out that it actually is bigger than Brian Chippendale's Ninja. It's an inch wider, and just as tall. Both books cover my torso, whereas an average-size comic would only cover my face.

The thing is, there's margins to it, on each page, which Ninja doesn't have- Ninja consumes the paper its printed on, this has more of a frame. Each image has a frame as well, each page consists of a nine or twelve-panel grid, with a drawn frame boxing it in. It looks more like a painting. Or an engraving, actually.

Oh yeah- and it is really is fucking unreadable as a comic. There's an introduction that gives you a conceptual framework, that it's based on Dante's Purgatorio. Each page represents a canto. The poem is followable, narratively, but the comic isn't. The text people speak is just meant to refer to the poem, using references from outside sources- One line is from the Syd Barrett Pink Floyd song "Astronomy Domine," referring to water, because there's a part of the poem where water comes up? It's completely insane. And really hard to follow- The only part you're able to work out from the images is the conclusion- A purifying flame gets passed through, and on the other side is paradise. This is a cool moment, where the images from the panels kind of pass on into the larger frame, which lets the images breathe a bit more. Anyway, ir works more as conceptual art than as a comic, only it's visually stunning, which can't really be said of the sort of conceptual art that would be on a gallery wall?

Conceptually, I suppose, I approve. There's an explication- "purgatory" is a place of higher education. People are going for English degrees, they get this by quoting other people's work. (This is vaguely similar conceptually to John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy.) It's a thing to be passed through, to then be able to do whatever. The thing is, it's really tedious. I'm not planning on going to grad school. In Ninja, there's a panel where a guy on a cloud says "I must shit out all my borrowed ideas" and then proceeds to pop a squat, and that one panel amounts to the same thing, essentially.

What's weird is that- Ninja was drawn over five years, essentially, between 2002 and 2006. Jimbo In Purgatory was printed in 2004, but was completed before then- With the last pages being drawn in 2001. It's described as a work five years in the making, and if this is true, this would take it to 1997. 1997 is when the last issue of Jimbo came out- the one that would be reprinted in 2005 as Jimbo's Inferno. This fall, another Brian Chippendale book is coming out- Maggots, which was apparently drawn in 1996, the year Fort Thunder was founded, and it looks to be a weird and primitive thing. What I'm suggesting in my mind is this kind of weird twin psychic energy pulse that grows in beats back and forth between people who were probably largely unaware of the other, but are nonetheless pursuing the same things forward. Five years of Gary Panter doing this thing called Jimbo In Purgatory that's kind of unsatisfying on its own but leads inadvertently to this thing Brian Chippendale spends five years doing called Ninja. That said, I've previously established that I think that the 1988 book Jimbo: Adventures In Paradise is a masterpiece. The artistic success of that is probably what led to the publication of the Jimbo comic in the mid-nineties, that Matt Groening put out. But, there, the imposition of a schedule, one thirty-two-page comic every three months, led to Panter willfully going back to a more primitive style to start, so he could draw quickly at first and work up to more detailed stuff using the time he gained. Like he hit a reset button on his comics skill-set, going back to the primitive, which is where Brian Chippendale was at at the time, although in a completely different form. Brian Chippendale was drawing all over a Japanese catalog while Gary Panter was reprinting comics he did for a Japanese reggae magazine in the eighties. (That comic, Dal-Tokyo, will be reprinted in finer form later on this year, too, actually) (Now that I think of it, it might be worth noting that Gary Panter, after September 11th, decided to have that comic read right-to-left, in the traditional Japanese comics style. Chippendale, for his part, had been doing comics that went back and forth from left-to-right to right-to-left from tier to tier since he started doing his Maggots minicomics.)

Basically, when Panter finished drawing Jimbo In Purgatory, that was addressing a whole history of narrative, in a manner arrived at following a reset back to a primitive drawing style, Brian Chippendale was then able to return to comics he'd actually drawn as a little kid, and consider the stuff he was doing a continuation, and have that new work have much more narrative thrust than his work had previously.

The two shared an hour of signing at the Picturebox table at MOCCA in New York a few months ago, which in my mind must've been a sight to see. I'm sure they'd met before, but what a weird moment for crossing the streams, Ghostbusters-style.

The new Nina Nastasia record, You Follow Me, is pretty interesting. It's not just credited to Nina Nastasia, Jim White gets equal billing. Jim White has played drums on every previous record, I think. He's in Dirty Three, and when Steve Albini started talking about his job on a poker message board, he highlighted Jim White as being one of the best drummers he's worked with. Nina Nastasia was also credited as being one of the best singers. In this, the two get split billing, like how Interstellar Space was credited to John Coltrane and Rashied Ali. It's just the two of them, no singing saws of the kind that filled out The Blackened Air, no Tuvan throat singers like her last Peel session.

So Jim White plays the shit out of the drums, is what I'm saying- again, think of a free jazz record, only with horn freakouts being replaced by a singer-songwriter. The songs are pretty tight, there's just this huge beat to all of it. Kind of like how I hoped the stuff on the Bjork record Brian Chippendale would be, and was then disappointed to find wasn't there. There's emotion here, it's just played out in a different way than the string sections of the past.

Steven Millhauser wrote a short story, "A Precursor To The Cinema," that appeared in issue 15 of McSweeney's and freaked me out. It read like Borges, if Borges was interested in art history and film rather than just books. It described in really realistic language the fantastic, and summoned up a thing that felt huge to me.

So yesterday I went to the library to actually pick up a book of his, The Knife Thrower and other stories. Partly because I'm acquainted with the style and had a certain set of expectations, nothing startled me like that first piece. Maybe these stories just aren't as good, and the McSweeney's piece was later, so maybe he's just more developed. I don't know, though, he won a Pulitzer in the seventies, and his author photo makes him look like an old man. The book's not bad though.

Millhauser's stories, that I've read at least, all have this theme or point-of-view to them that I fully support. Although my metaphor for it is awful- Did anyone hear about that study that found out that pedophiles were really into Star Trek? And the reasoning postulated wasn't just "haha nerds," but rather that what appealed was this world of aliens and fantasy where more things were allowed?

Millhauser's stuff is like that, in this interest of larger and bolder entertainments, but that leads to some kind of transgression. He creates a world where there are mysteries and craziness, but then sees bad things as the conclusion of this. "Paradise Park" is about an impossible amusement park, "The Sisterhood Of Night" about a secret society of teenage girls, "The New Automaton Theater" about an imagined art tradition of miniature clockwork robots that act out dramas. The more traditional short stories, "A Visit" and "The Way Out" have eccentrics as the catalysts for the action. This a book of short stories- There are a few novels he's written, and a couple books that contain three longer stories apiece, and I don't know what those are like. I imagine they're all kind of similar- He wrote a book that postulated it was written by an eight-year-old.

Basically it's imagining a cooler world than the one we live in, but not a utopia. It gets a little repetitive, but always in the interest of opening things up.

It's too bad that Ingmar Bergman is dead. I think I've liked every movie I've seen by him, at least well enough. There's the possibility there's a movie I watched on DVD with Alex that I'm forgetting, that was really boring. But "Persona" is just straight-up great, "The Seventh Seal" has some really striking imagery, and "Saraband" was watchable and human. I never got mad at any of his movies.

I was pretty bored by the one Antonioni (sic) movie I've seen, The Passenger. But you know, two filmmakers, two artists, did their thing and they died. It's both sad that they died because they're human beings, but as artists, they'd said all that they had to say. Which I don't mean to imply it's less of a loss, because they weren't going to make any new masterpieces. I feel about it the same way I feel about Kurt Vonnegut- they've made enough stuff that I just feel like the whole of their consciousness is out there in the world now. Their brain is out in the world, it's just not all contained in one skull anymore. Oxygen and blood still reach it. I guess I am mostly talking about Bergman here, because he was more prolific. It's a cliche to say they live on through their work, but man- if you make that many movies, with that much variety between them, over the course of so many years and so many developments, you really really do. Rest in peace, you earned it.

Right before I went to bed, I drank the last of the milk from this bowl of cereal. I spilled some of it on the crotch of my pants. I am not happy about this.

(This is really funny to me and will be to you as well if you read "I am not happy about this" being said in a very serious voice.)

Here's a thing I heard from a friend: DMT, the chemical released by your brain when you die, that's also an extremely powerful hallucinogen enjoyed by your Philip K. Dick types, apparently smells like death- that is to say, it has the same smell as funeral homes and hospitals.

Wait, I'm not interested in talking about arcane drugs.

I think that since my table collapsed, and I've been sitting closer to my computer (bending over, bad for the back) it's harder to hear music, due to the way the speakers are placed in relation to my ears. So the new Sunset Rubdown album has another obstacle on the road to my enjoying it- I can't really work out the lyrics. The other obstacle is the way it's mixed so all of the tracks lead into each other with one instrument droning or beating on between songs, making everything bleed into blurriness.

I'm trying to work out this mix CD for a friend who doesn't download as much new music than I do- he has reasons to live- and I'm all caught up in this new stuff and I really want to work in other things, older music, for sincerity's sake. Last year I was listening to so much Mountain Goats and Daniel Johnston. I'm also trying to work out this thing where I send one along to his lady as well- I stayed at their shared house when I was in Seattle, and I want to work out this sort of parallel structure- a working title is "parallel lines in a slow decline" a reference to the Guided By Voices song "Tractor Rape Chain"- as a way to include multiple songs by the same acts and show their work in different contexts, but that's a hard thing to work out. Right now it's looking more like one disc will be noisy- starting off with "Mother Upduff" by Can leading into "For Reverend Green" by Animal Collective and the other one is where the quieter stuff will go, which isn't what I want at all.

It's stupidly late. Time for blogging to the max!

Some people just stumbled in, a crew of people that included one person who used to live here, as well as one person I used to live with- Luke, the guy from J208 who I didn't know when me and my friends descended upon that space. It turns out he didn't graduate either, despite being a year ahead of us at the time of that cohabitation.

But before that I watched Beetlejuice and the Strangers with Candy movie, and had a big old discussion about the nature of human experience that started off just being about DMT.

Two days ago my table collapsed as I was standing on it, wheatpasting construction paper to the ceiling.

The other day I read an interview with Brian Chippendale conducted by Dan Nadel that was really inspiring. The best bit: "I think it's good to model yourself after plants: Head toward the light, drink lots of water, get dirty every day."

I need new patterns. I realized that this weird esoteric code of references to The Best Show On WFMU and Paper Rad and 30 Rock and rock criticism is, now that Alex has moved away, a dead language. It is like I was cryogenically preserved.

I am sad once again about the things I've forgotten- the actual language of Spanish, the meaningless abstractions of higher maths, physical activity. Somehow I've abandoned them, and in their dormant state, half-internalized, I've become more socially assured, more aware of the type of person that I actually am, but feeling like that's hollow and incomplete.

The Brian Chippendale interview gives a guide to new patterns, in the things I've been neglecting. This is why it is so inspiring. But that guy doesn't have a real job, and that's the other thing, that's what makes his art so pure- it's all based on creative work, none of the weird dilution of having a day job and writing at night, which seems to me like a thing to do as a way to grow. It's not as pure, but- you know, his stuff, all of it, works on these notions of purity and expressionist catharsis, it's an energy that burns through everything. In the new Comics Comics, there's a letter, that ran right after one I wrote, but it's a much better letter- It talks about how superhero comics aren't adolescent power fantasies, but infantile ones, of bright color and violence and confusing plotting- It is called something like "the mental equivalent of jumping around a fire." Brian Chippendale's Ninja comics are pretty much superhero comics, and while they're not in color, they have that same ritual energy that is present at a Lightning Bolt show. I'm kind of dealing in different tones, but, weirdly, I still made a movie where a girl expressed a desire to become a plant. That same character lived in a backdrop that I'm turning the ceiling of this room into, that I broke my table trying to accomplish.

There are grand patterns at work, bigger than our own behavior. And how the conversation about DMT with a roommate started was my saying that it seems too big a divergent model of reality to confront, especially because other people who I like have confronted it, and processed it on to me, and now I would be processing such a thing through them. There's something overwhelming about how things are already processed, as opposed to unmediated experience. The same feeling of being overwhelmed that I get from certain supermarkets. And how in the past when I've been overwhelmed, it's because of the presence of the past in the present, causing an inability to make a clean break- Having things in a place I need to move out of, even as I don't know where I'm going to live, to cite an example of something overwhelming, as opposed to just rolling with what happens.

And I didn't know where this was going when I listed off the things that I could blog about, but it turns out that that's it. But the patterns internalized give you something to go off on. Like a dress made of geometry stretches on into the infinite, even as geometry joins the long list of half-remembered maths.

This blog is called "More self-absorption, more apocalyptic thinking."

I am frequently labeled as a contrarian, especially by people I've been in classes with. There is a lot of argument about this- contrarianism is linked to assholishness. You know that Onion headline "devil's advocate really just an asshole?" There's truth to that, which is why being labeled a contrarian irks me to the degree it does- I'm not playing devil's advocate, I mean the things I'm say. I do it a lot because I'm frequently presented by people who are being ideologues, and the world is more complicated than that. I feel conflicted about a lot of things, but I'm at the point where I can see things and disagree with them on the basis of there being things I disagree with, rather than just agree on the basis of there being things I agree with and end up in a cult. You know, the point is progress- thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

Note that for one class I was known for saying that Hegel, the philosopher associated with material dialectics, was a douchebag. This was specifically in the context of me disagreeing with the idea that followed, from Marx, that you're either a master or a slave. Come on, that's not true! I do agree with the fact that ideas if presented with their opposite lead to compromise at some point in the future- Which I think is what makes me not an asshole just saying things for the sake of saying them, because I believe in compromise.

What I want to get to is apocalyptic thinking.

But first, a digression- The fifties version of the future is a lot better than the one we have now, but couldn't modern technology be selectively applied to have that happen? So much of that was design.

Anyway, things get weird because there's this feeling of the conflicts ending. The idea of post-modernism is based on there being a lot of threads and people not feeling objective about things, there's this "end of history" phrase used by certain people in association with the end of the cold war. The latter is an especially stupid term. But still- there's a lot of conflicts which just kind of don't matter anymore. A lot of the positive thinking done by hippies with regards to an idea of enlightenment is that all conflicts will cease, because they'll realize they're all part of the same thing- which is basically humanity, but can also be described more complicatedly.

But I was thinking about the conflict between hippies and reality. Oh, that's putting it harshly. How about between the culture at large and the counterculture? I know that using those terms is stupid, because of how many different tangents and subcultures abound in each of them. That conflict has maybe largely been solved by appropriation. Which I don't mean in a bad way. Gary Panter's Rozz-Tox Manifesto works for me better than most manifestos.

So another way to phrase it, the thing I care more about, would be a conflict between spirituality and actual day-to-day living in a practical manner. This is I think where hippies are hoping to make real progress, when the shit goes down. But oh wait hey, the reason this blog exists, is to say that maybe that's already ended, and the good side lost, and that now what persists is this awful bullshit found in The Secret, and megachurches- you can pray for wealth or you can have positive thinking for wealth. A fake spirituality? Arguably, but it makes people feel the same way as the real stuff, seemingly.

So- yeah, apocalyptic thinking. The awfulness of that last bit combined with a lot of other things is what strikes me as symbolic of the end times, like there's this paradigm that exists that's just kind of terrible. Probably because it's one thing where I'm stuck on the thesis and the antithesis and trying to square out my own solution.

I don't know. I guess going back to that tangent is the solution- That we have alternate futures already envisioned instead of the one that we just slowly progress towards. There's the fifties one and also the Fort Thunder one. Oh and going back to victorian times there's also time travel and undersea adventures postulated. But we don't actually have time machines, same as we don't have jet packs. You know, I think it's better to stick with the recent past- a lot of people who decide to opt out of the future go back to a cavemen future, where they hunt and there's not actually agriculture, but there's technology like guns to make hunting easier, which I'm sure was basically imagined by some caveman.

"Decora" is Yo La Tengo's best song.

Also, once I work out a sidebar of links, I will link to the WFMU blog, which once a week reminds us that the world is weird, and if you have a dark sense of humor, amusing, and that is beautiful.

This blog post is called "Hot for discourse." I don't know how to make this blog have titles, nor do I know how to operate a links sidebar.

Anyway- One of my favorite critics is Douglas Wolk. He writes about music, including a book about James Brown, and was a WFMU DJ who once played six hours of mostly-rare James Brown on Christmas. Currently there's a review up on Pitchfork of a James Brown singles compilation, but he likes a lot more than just James Brown. He writes about comics, and both of these things have that combination of depth of knowledge that comes from pursuing a lot of different things, but still keeps a sense of value and quality. Anyway, he combines talking about the two at this link, which is why I feel obligated to mention it. His review of Brian Chippendale's Ninja that ran at Salon was one of the best I'd read because of his twin understanding of comics and music. At the link I just posted, there's links and talk of all sort of rare music. Oh, he's also going to start writing comics reviews over at The Savage Critics, home to some of my favorite other people I only know from the internet, like Abhay Khosla. That's a link to his first post, which made me gleeful at its apocalyptic thinking. If you can parse the nerdiness, you will be amazed. Some people can parse the nerdiness and then just get mad at it, but those people are not people I would ever socialize with, and so they don't read this blog. Alex, if you're reading this, this is a guy, who's message board ravings I would frequently read aloud, and also who first brought the movie Little Murders to my attention, for which I am forever grateful.

Sometimes I think for myself, but not today.

So, I've been going to this liberal arts college, doing creative work- Writing stuff, making movies. I've been doing it kind of outside the main channels for these things- Not taking the big writing classes, which are largely focused on experimental poetry, and not taking the big film classes, which are largely focused on experimental documentary work. I read the school newspaper and go "wow, this is really shitty," and chalk it up to the lack of editorial standards. Sometimes I go to the film screenings, and find some stuff that's pretty good, usually made by friends of mine. This was something I noticed in an animation class- That the people I was friends with did things I like, because there were shared aesthetics at work, and similar points of view.

Anyway- There's also a school literary journal. It's mostly poetry- almost all poetry, I think, but it does accept prose submissions. Anyway, I submitted this past year, kind of on a lark, and was rejected. Which wasn't really a big deal. The editor's someone I'm not really friends with- Someone I don't get along with at all, actually, and I realized I was just being sarcastic to her all the time, arbitrarily- somehow I'd never talked to her honestly. Until the whole literary journal thing, which was confrontational. I brought up that she mostly ran stuff from a circle of people that took classes taught by the same guy, she said she felt most comfortable coming up with a context to present that work, because she was familiar with the people who made it. Fair enough.

But anyway, here at this new place, that literary journal's in the bathroom. And there are people in it I'm on friendly terms with, or at least kind of know by acquaintance- We've taken the same classes, gone to the same shows, ridden the same buses, been at the same parties. I don't know, I figured there'd be something there in their work that I'd think was interesting.

Nope.

Seemingly, the whole experimental-poetry thing had filtered out all of the feelings and experiences that I had in common with these people. I don't know if it's just a result of their work being distanced from themselves, or if their work really does reflect them and my feeling of revulsion (a strong word, but yeah, pretty much) is just a reaction to that whole unbridgeable distance between two people thing. Either way, it's kind of a drag. What the fuck are people doing? Am I the only one at this college who takes the fact that Matt Groening is our one famous alum deeply to heart, as a signpost to try to be as real and iconoclastic as possible?

Come the fuck on, you assholes, you know deep down that The Simpsons is better than The Age Of Wire And String.

(This post's title should be: Jimbo In Purgatory.)

I don't know how to start this blog off, because I want it to go in a clear direction, but start from an odd place.

The thing about the whole porn-going-mainstream, debutante-sex-tape, pop-star's-vaginas, youth-of-today, that whole scene, thing, is the feeling of dishonesty. There's nothing wrong with being proud of your body, it gets weird when the idea of your body that you're presenting is distorted. Likewise, there's very little wrong with communicating your sexuality- except for the fact that sexuality is a really complicated thing that probably can't be communicated by having words written on the ass of your pants. Sometimes dreams show up in the subconscious that are really oddly sexualized, but not in a way that can be codified into fetish pornography- there are things in this world that are mostly just the province of our minds, that can't really be communicated by lifting your shirt up when the cameras are rolling. A shirt that shows a lot of cleavage projects sexuality like wearing all black depicts depression- not really getting at the core of the thing, to the point of maybe missing it completely.

This is where Shary Boyle's art comes in. I posted a link to her website when I first found it, after it was announced she was going to be in Kramers Ergot 6, but I didn't really talk about it. My first thoughts were probably "huh, that's interesting imagery" and "I like her color sense." But her drawings and sculpture capture bigger things than most art does. It really short-circuits my ability to talk about it, besides just giving that general context. It sums up other things as well, the general idea of having things inside you that bloom in such a way as to explode your body, which is largely separate from anything sexual besides it being tied to some kind of disassociation between body and mind. Her work screams. I read somewhere, from someone who's seen her earlier work, that it used to be concerned with awkwardness, shame, and trembling. But now it's moved on to be this vision of what the world should be, that exists on the other side of all the nervousness, where things go wild. It's related to surrealism, but free of the misogyny that tends to pop up with those dudes. I don't blame the surrealists for having that pop up, I understand how it happens. I'm just saying, that's not in her work, for reasons that should be self-evident. I did read, however, that Shary's work almost was on display at the Sea-Tac airport but was rejected for its "lesbian overtones." That's in quotes, but it's a paraphrase- they might've been "lesbian undertones" as well, or just subtext. It's a thing that bubbles up, and then only barely- I don't think it's crass, but I think it would be an odd thing for an airport, if only for the explosive quality of it.

As I wandered into the common area of this new living arrangement, I heard in the back room, where the women were, "You make me feel like a natural woman" playing from the stereo, and for a brief second I imagined someone was singing along with it, which I think is maybe always how it should be with that song. I attribute my logic about this to lingering Murphy Brown memories, but now that I type this I'm probably thinking more of a commercial for Herbal Essences shampoo than an actual episode of Murphy Brown.

I pointed this out to Alex before he left- The new M.I.A. video, I guess for "Bird Flu," is kind of biting the Paper Rad aesthetic. So is the album art, which I've since seen..

Just a note. I look forward to that record though- I like that M.I.A. I posted about her website before her record came out, talking about her little visual art doodles.
"Bird Flu" is named because "the beat gon' kill everyone!!!!" which I think is funny, and then holy shit that is indeed a good beat.

This is what I'm doing right now. I'm living out in the woods of Olympia, in a place with a broken dryer, so clothes dry by hanging on a line. It's nice to feel like you're in a position to aid escaped convicts and people caught up in slapstick shenanigans that have left them in the nude. It's the opposite of a luxury to get up in the morning and wander outside to pick up a shirt and socks and then put them on, but charming all the same, in a way that's preferable to a luxury, at least to me, right now.

The last Liars record, Drum's Not Dead, was pretty cool, but I had some reservations about it. Part of this was the weird rip I had which killed the flow. I got more into it when I heard it on vinyl. But part of it was this feeling of doubting the sincerity of the band. They had put out a record I liked, They Threw Us All In A Trench And Stuck A Monument On Top, and they kept on switching it up, various EPs. There was this impression they wouldn't stay still, and then their second record came out, which a lot of people hated, and they said they consciously removed everything that people said they liked about the first record, so it wouldn't become a crutch. I think all of this is great, and I liked They Were Wrong, So We Drowned. I saw a lot of continuity between that and all their other stuff. Then Drum's Not Dead came out, and it actually did seem really different. I read an interview where they talked about listening to Sunn O))) records. The first record was compared to post-punk, and it just started to feel a little bit like trend-hopping, somehow inorganic. But there were moments that still felt really sincere- notably the last track, "The Other Side Of Mt. Heart Attack." The first time I listened to the record I was so excited I just say down in a comfortable chair to listen to it as intently as I could. I ended up falling asleep, but that last track woke me up. Not because it's loud, there's just this clarity to it, this palpable emotion that's completely different from all of their other songs I would consider favorites. Someone posited it as a response to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Maps," because both bands lead singers were dating for awhile, and this seemed likely. Anyway, that song was like placing a flag at some very high point, the peak of a mountain, to use their metaphor. It claimed some territory for its own, after sneaking there in the night. It's a sudden moment, although it brings out a lot of the record after you've heard it. Like, "Oh, that's where this is going."

The new record then is able to roam around this territory, broader than it's been before. And so Liars are a rock band now. It's not just all these type of dancefloor fistfights and broken windows of the first few records, or the weird night in the woods of Drum's Not Dead. Emotion has been addressed by "The Other Side Of Mt. Heart Attack," and now it's just a thing that can be there, that can pop up on a song like "Pure Unevil" and not be a big deal.

It keeps on popping up. There's anthems and there's pop songs- Some people were making Jesus And Mary Chain comparisons, but "Houseclouds" makes me think of some Blur song or another. Alex also pointed out that some of the songs are like some of their more abstract b-sides, which is also true, only they've been turned into songs, albeit some of the less poppy songs on the record.

The first song starts off not so good, as the bad kind of drone-rocker, where "rock" is the goal but "drone" is what's achieved, seemingly accidentally- where the chords are being slashed away at, but it just seems tedious, like the chords aren't being changed enough, and there just isn't enough a sense of dynamics- but then there is a shift, and the second half becomes really interesting, and it becomes clear that the opening was just a further carving out a place, another flag planted. Liars are an amazing band.

I have the internet in my new home, but still no phone. Anyway, here's a blog I wrote late last night going on early in the morning.

When I think about what I would like this blog to be, I envision less personal talk and more writing about art and music. I would like to get my criticism skills up to snuff. But when late nights turn into early mornings and I feel the need to write things down, the thing I'm most likely to be critical of is myself.

Basically I worry about the way maturity is manifesting itself. I find more and more I'm acting in ways based on some kind of concept of coolness. People do this when they want people to like them. People wanting other people to like them and then acting in an artificial manner is kind of a hallmark of social interaction, but it's awful. Especially the whole "coolness" concept. Because coolness more often than not translates to emotional distance.

I'm finding this really hard to articulate. I can articulate it in fiction where you can maybe grasp it intuitively based on your own knowledge, but I'm trying to put it simply.

The issue that arises is that, in acting cool because you want someone else to like you, it becomes really easy to not actually care that much about the other person, because they don't know the entirety of you. And this is the thing in relationships- all of them, not just those based on undercurrents of lust, friendships as well- that always striked me as fucked-up. To phrase it in terms of romantic relationships, that element where saying "I love you" becomes a massive thing. It seemed to me so simple, there were times when I loved everyone. Why would that be problematic to say? But now, it just seems like there are very few people that I love, and a lot more that are kind of bothersome and problematic for one reason or another. And those reasons all translate to not actually being yourself around them to the extent that you feel you should be. The idea of "coolness" begets actual coolness, i.e. an absence of warmth.

It leads to these weird imbalances in relationships where one person likes the other person much more than their feelings are returned. I'm using the term relationships in the broad sense, but when you start to think about in the more common and more specific sense you find a situation that people take for granted as fact and turn into power dynamics and that is really disgusting and troublesome.

What I'm saying is that I very genuinely do not want to care what other people think about me. Or at least, I don't want that to dictate my actions. I think that's the ideal place to be. It puts you in a space where you can actually love people. This is idealistic, an urge towards childhood rather than adulthood, in a way that does seem problematic. It also points away from hipsterdom towards nerdiness, but clearly that is the way to go.

It can't all just be making art that reveals our deeper selves in the hopes that someone finds that presentational form attractive.

So I have a house. It's very close to the Evergreen campus, despairingly so. It's off in the woods, and the phone jack is busted and there stands a circuit board which connects to a phone that doesn't work. I feel like a guest there, off in my room, away from the people who seem nice enough.

Anyway, things worked out, is what I'm saying, although I'll be harder to get in touch with. My wireless card got bent in the move, so I can't access the internet in my new home for the time being. It will be replaced.

I feel distracted by the internet.

As I walked over to the school library I was thinking about horror films and how it's kind of not really my genre but still Alex and I were attracted to watching them. I think the deal is that the things horror deals in are things that are adjectives that can be attributed to good art, even if most horror isn't actually good- it always strives towards intensity, and to induce dread, which- I was reading someone talk about Brian Chippendale's Ninja, and he talked about how seeing something like that induces this existential dread, in that it's something you need to confront. Or Art Spiegelman, talking about Gary Panter's Jimbo in Purgatory, said that seeing it made him break out in a cold sweat in the presence of real art. So yeah, that intensity. It's also related to the way that even though that most of the music I listen to is gentle, there are things that are loud and intense in a way that wins you over easily in a live setting, because it's so impressive. Yeah.

My internet is no longer at my house. Here's a blog I wrote last night around 1:30 AM.

Oh, how I hate this.

I'm sitting around a half-empty and one-quarter-boxed-up house. I spent all day waiting on a call from these people who I met with yesterday, for them to tell me whether or not I could move in to their house. I called them up, talked to a nice person, and was told that another roommate just came in and they had to talk it over with him. Then that roommate called me back, and in his (torturously, not charmingly, not in this situation) awkward and roundabout way told me that they're probably going to go with a closer friend.

This is the reoccurring pattern, of meeting with people, and thinking it's going well, and envisioning living with them and how charming that would be, because I got along with them in the meeting, and then finding out that they have other friends who take priority. I understand putting friends before strangers. But this time- I think the call fell just after my birthday ended, after it ticked past midnight onto the twenty-eighth, and I need to be out of here completely on the thirtieth- I just started to think "Well, sorry I'm not cool enough for you" and then getting really mad, feeling really negative, depression and rage and panic and dread. Sitting paralyzed in a comfortable chair that I actually probably need to get rid of, waiting for that awkward-as-shit guy to call back and say "hey dude I'm kidding, you're golden." Knowing that won't actually happen, but feeling like it should, because of the sheer bullshit nature of the call itself.

That's what I hate, just feeling all that hatred, and how easily and arbitrarily it could've been love and praises to God had he said "oh yeah, you got the room, you can start moving in your boxes tomorrow." And it's because I'm not friends with these people, because I don't have preexisting relationships.

I feel right now like I either want to be held tightly, or to be struck by lightning, but with both of those being the same thing- this larger thing that could engulf me as I'm caught up in all this small petty bullshit.

The other day I ran into a friend of mine on the street as she was going into a store to look at dresses. I went with her and as she combed through the racks I occasionally offered my opinions, which ended up just being one opinion, that I really like geometric patterns, as a thing to engulf a body.

I'm listening to Kites' Peace Trials- The record that vacillates between noise tracks that grow more brutal and songs that become prettier and prettier. CF of Kites also draws comics, one of which I linked to on the Highwater site awhile back, and is in the SPX 2001 anthology, where the finale is a person drawing lines on the ground and being consumed by them as a form of escape from the drudgery of jobs.

I'm typing words on this screen, on Wordpad, and I'll post it to Blogger tomorrow, at school, as the internet is turned off here. I'm writing past the hatred, which is nigh-all-consuming- It's aimed at my not being cool enough, and at those that don't think I'm cool enough- so that maybe by one AM the only emotion left to deal with will be the trembling panic. Would that I could try to transcend it all the more by turning away from it and producing something beautiful, but I'm at the point in my book-writing where I don't really know what to do next, besides a general idea of there being something amazing and maybe holy, and I'm just really not in the space to produce that right now.

When I was thinking about geometric patterns the other day, I was thinking of them partly as this thing that suggests the infinite, partly as this thing which looks interesting in the way it folds on an actual moving frame, and partly as a way to visually depict music- Repetition with variation and patterns and math. What I want is for the speakers to push more than just the air, to actually push against my body that converts me into it, that I would dissolve and cascade through the room in zigzagging lines, and that when the music stops my body would just be multiple colors staining the
carpet and the walls.


God, OK, wait- can I just let that stand as the emotional climax, but keep on writing, because I want to go to sleep soon, and before I do that, I want to get out these other thoughts, that came after I was done listening to Kites, and was listening to The Mountain Goats instead. I feel bad whenever I say something that comes off suicidal, because I'm not suicidal. But the other day I gave someone my pitch for the meaning of life- That the idea behind life is that you make enough of an impression of the world so that when you die, you transcend that, and people remember you, even if only for a little while. Part of the imagery that I just tried to deliver is- something of your consciousness persisting even as you stop being something making conscious decisions all the time and having existence be something you have to work at. Pretty much if there was a book with all my thoughts in it and my name on it I wouldn't really matter if I was still walking around with my name on me. Likewise if you were to make some kind of scientific advancement or build some kind of shelter, there's nothing wrong with that being around instead of your actual presence. This kind of also reflects on the artist Ray Johnson, subject of the movie How To Draw A Bunny, and how I feel about what he did.

I also wanted to write more about CF's comics, and I could talk more about them, and how they relate to Ben Jones' comics, but I think it should suffice to say that they point towards transcendence, and I will single out as another example of this the two page comic in the Paper Rad, BJ And Da Dogs book about the guard.

I seem to have wandered down a rabbit hole of esoterica as of late. It feels like the thing that began in high school, of liking things that were "indie" as opposed to "mainstream", when I watched Wes Anderson movies and listened to Pavement records, slowly gave way to more history in college- I think the first record I bought in Olympia was a reissue of Television's Marquee Moon, and one of the first DVDs I borrowed was Taxi Driver. That's just filling in gaps in the canon. And then I started watching movies like Little Murders and liking them a lot more Taxi Driver. You know, it's this thing that develops. It's become a cause for anxiety, because my best friend, who watched these movies with me, is moving out. And today I went to look at an apartment and found a guy who is, in general, similar to me- The same basic type of person, probably, but who I would probably be more psyched on three and a half years ago.

I shouldn't be harsh on this guy. If I moved in, I'm sure we'd get along, and I'm really hoping I can move in, so I won't be homeless.

My former roommate Evan Hashi has probably done the same thing as I have. We have different personalities and temperaments, but- I think he's done the same thing. The only thing is, he's specifically into music. I love music as well, but- It's like his thing particularly- He plays instruments, mixes recordings, has a radio show. For me, I write prose, I don't play music, but I like music a lot more probably because of that failing. I also like comics a lot, and maybe that's because I can't draw? I don't know. Maybe it's not because, so much as in spite of. Anyway. Because Evan specifically likes music, he's further down that particular rabbit hole, but not in a way that I see as my future, although I could certainly be wrong about this. Evan pretty much stopped listening to new music a little over a year ago, and when LCD Soundsystem came on at a party he made kind of disparaging remarks comparing it to Liquid Liquid. This is basically fine, although that new LCD Soundsystem is pretty fucking good, and maybe a party is better for dancing than dictating music criticism to no one. I haven't listened to his radio show, but I've heard him talk about it. And the other night I went to a party at his house, where I got really mad at him playing records- Stupidly mad. The party was kind of lame in general, being 95% dudes, so that contributed. But anyway- Evan's at that point that Quentin Tarantino's at- Not in terms of the quality of the work he makes, but at that level of nerdy specialization. And not the point of Quentin Tarantino's soundtracks, which are great. But the point of Quentin Tarantino's movie screening nights and presentation of DVD releases, where he's putting out really bad grindhouse movies that have one or two appealing shots or character actors or lines of dialogue. So at the party, there was a time when Evan was playing records that were annoying and bad that were either canonized (Bryan Ferry) or just had one or two good things per song, that a well-tuned ear could appreciate. I described it afterwards as novelty records- like Dr. Demento, if he had a show on WFMU. And I think that WFMU is amazing.

I'm kind of hoping that the fact that I don't just like music or movies with an all-consuming enthusiasm will stop me from getting to that point, but if it doesn't, I guess that's fine- I'm sure it will bring me joy to be that nerdy. But right now, I like the things that I stumble across and get obsessed with to be the opposite of the small character role. I like pieces of art that are completely overwhelming, almost monolithic. You might recall me talking about how great Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain was. The newest thing to find my favor is Gary Panter's Jimbo: Adventures In Paradise.

Gary Panter is a cartoonist, whose life story reminds me vaguely of Daniel Johnston's- Love of Jack Kirby, religious upbringing, acid trip- Except that Panter only took acid once, kind of hated it, although attributes importance to it, and followed through with his rejection of his parent's beliefs. Which I guess makes it completely different. Matt Groening likes them both, also. But Panter and Groening actually became friends, and Panter wrote a manifesto, The Rozz-Tox Manifesto, urging artists to infiltrate the mainstream themselves, because if you don't, you'll just be co-opted. This was probably one part influential to Matt Groening to one part articulating things he already knew. At the time of The Simpsons starting up, Panter was designing the sets on Pee-Wee's Playhouse. He also apparently wrote a Pee-Wee movie with Paul Reubens that wasn't made.

Panter also kind of draws like Daniel Johnston, but moreso it's true that he kind of draws like Brian Chippendale. And if you trace one strand of current alternative comics, like Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes, the people who do magazine illustrations, back up to Robert Crumb, or the Hernandez Brothers, it's safe to associate the people who do gallery shows, like the Fort Thunder dudes and Paper Rad, back to Gary Panter. This is kind of a paraphrase from a review I read today of the comic Cold Heat, that I loved, and meant to eulogize, but didn't. This is maybe bullshit because who knows if Panter would've drawn comics without the whole underground thing that Crumb helped to get going, and Charles Burns is but one of many people whose approach is a little of column A and a little of column B. In the awful comics issue of the awful Vice, I think, someone describes Panter as the first non-hippie to drawn an underground comic book. He is kind of a hippie though. But he's also described as the father of punk art. He might be the first not-a-misogynist man to draw an underground comic book.

God, this is all so much preamble. Before drawing these comics, he made comics in the early seventies that he threw at Marc Bolan at a T. Rex show. I imagine the people reading this blog will be coming at it with a music context.

Anyway. A lot of the contents of Jimbo: Adventures In Paradise are taken from the pages of Art Spiegelman's 1980 anthology RAW. Maus ran it that same anthology, as an insert, because it's smaller. This book is big, which showcases the art really well. I imagine it's the size of the actual magazine RAW, but I've never seen those. It's the size of the Charles Burns' El Borbah/Big Baby/Skin Deep reprints, or issue 23 of Eightball, or the Krazy Kat Fantagraphics softcovers- It's a really good size for presenting art at just the right size where it starts to bowl you over, you could hide your whole face behind one, which I don't think you can do with a normal size comic. Well, you kind of can- but after a lifetime, I'm really acclimated to that size. Art tends to look better bigger. Anyway, Art, as an editor, really encouraged Gary to go crazy with the art, drawing different styles with every panel, which is pretty much what happens in this book. There's also one-page comics from this late seventies punk magazine, Slash, that is rougher in its drawing style. This isn't to say it's bad, just that it's not as impressive. But it all coheres together as a book.

Anyway, it's all pretty much the opposite of Robert Crumb. There are no painstaking drawn images of women's asses here- For one thing, the artist has admitted he doesn't know how to draw attractive women. But more importantly, the art is drawn furiously, energetically. For another thing- I don't sense satire here, or irony, or the neuroticism that's in Crumb. There's anxiety, and it's palpable, but it's about the state of the world, the fear of a nuclear apocalypse. Note: These were comics drawn during the 1980s. There's a sense of humor to it, but- Okay, how can I best express the point of view in this comic, in words? One one-page strip drawn in 1978 contains a caption that reads "Can't stand a little emotion? Go read Nancy!" This is kind of a joke, but it's followed up a month later, a page later, in 1979, by Nancy appearing in the comic to reprimand the title character, Jimbo- "OK MAN! What's this I hear... about your calling my strip devoid of sentiment? I mean right on the surface it functions as a nostalgic buffer against future shock for a tired and technology-torn species." Hopefully you can read in the prose, there's a certain velocity there, even when it becomes more poetic, as well as my description of the drawing as, this work is kind of the screaming in terror as it runs towards the future, fleeing from nostalgia, which is maybe a good way to establish it as having the same point of view as punk. Only it remains really empathetic. The final sequence in the book is about a fear of nuclear bombs, as Jimbo tries to stop a bomb from going off, but can't- It ravages everything. The last bit is a sequence about a horse on fire, and Jimbo trying to kill it to end it's suffering, but unaware of whether or not what he does actually creates more suffering? It's kind of an amazing summary of what it feels like to be human, especially coming at the end of a collection, rather than as a piece in an anthology. It's also the moment that's more sustained in its drawing style than anything else in the book. Oh wait, looking at it again, that's not really true, it switches up a lot still.

Anyway, I think it's amazing. It's also out of print. There are other Gary Panter books in print, but they're not as good- one's a sketchbook, one's a reprint of a comic that he drew that Matt Groening published in the nineties and sold for three-dollars blown up and packaged as a hardcover- That's a version of Dante's Inferno with each canto done as a six-panel comics page, loosely translated, with burning hell replaced with a shopping mall. You might be able to read that for free in a good bookstore, but it's not anywhere as mindblowing as this thing. It's sad that a lot of his stuff is either out of print, and scattered to the winds, and that he's not really that prolific as a comics artist. He does some short work, that'll show up in an anthology or somewhere, like he was in McSweeney's 13, but those tend to not be so good. He's also a painter, but you know- those aren't reproduced so much. He does prints, and they go for fine-art prices. Picturebox is doing a monograph of his work next year, which will be good, but- I think he's really great at comics, and only so-so at painting. It's possible that book will prove me wrong. But this book that I have is a masterpiece. I would offer you come by my house and read it if you're in town, but I'm moving soon, and need to pack it up.

Note to self: I should make a movie about how honesty in a positive sense can be just as overwhelming and terrifying as honesty in a negative sense.

I guess I'm a huge nerd, but the most recent thing I've added to my list of regrets is that I never went to Seattle to debate Christopher Hitchens. He's doing a book tour for his book "God Isn't Great: Why Religion Ruins Everything," which I put in quotes instead of italics because I'm mostly paraphrasing. I read in The Stranger that Seattle was the only city where no one arose to meet his challenge to debate all comers. The debate would revolve around the existence of God, which is something I believe in.

I think that had I showed up, my discussion would've taken a different tack than others. I wouldn't have discussed the Iraq war- I've seen him on Bill Maher's and he seemed really well-informed. I might've had a few zingers at the ready in regards to his Vanity Fair piece "Why Women Aren't Funny," which is just as wrong-headed and uninformed as you'd expect a piece with that title to be.

But my argument would've been based partly on my experience on LSD. Partly I would do this because it's funny, and easy to dismiss. Partly- you know, I already believe in God. But having a drug that triggers connections in different parts of the brain and leads to colossal feelings of there being things in the universe that are larger than you- I don't know, I think it's interesting. To some extent, it's dismissable. To another extent- you know, I tried to eat pizza, and couldn't, because it was intensified to the point where I felt like I was tasting the mold in the cheese and the yeast in the dough- I could sense all the bacteria reactions. These are real things. Other people become hyper-aware of blood rushing through their veins. One of the things I felt was the feeling that reality was much larger than anyone could comprehend. And I felt this all throughout my brain, in parts that I don't normally access. I don't know, I think that's interesting. I think that's worth contributing to a debate, even with someone who would probably shut me down harder than I've ever been shut down in my life.

But oh my God, have you read that "Why Women Aren't Funny" article? What a load of horseshit. Why would anyone agree with that guy about anything? He's not good at logic.

Two books I've read somewhat recently and liked a lot were Ian Svenonius' The Psychic Soviet and David Berman's Actual Air. The two are probably connected by clicks of Amazon.com recommendations, and their author's affiliation with the Drag City record label. Somehow my indie rock bias overcame my biases against political tracts and poetry. Both are really good, and honestly, calling Svenonius' book a political tract is probably a little dishonest.

Either way.

What's important about both of them is their clarity- Svenonius' book is insane with the stuff, in its ability to draw parallels amongst so many things, and multiple parallels found for the same thing, that it ends up cutting its subject matter into the shape of a diamond. It ends up being really cohesive as a set of essays.

Berman's book is poetry, and so it does the same thing. It's not metaphor, the parallels drawn. It's this way of seeing patterns emerge which is much larger than a single sentence could ever contain. It needs the tangents of thought shooting from strand to strand to map out the shape of the brain.

Does every book do this? Yes, a little bit, but there's something about fiction- that thing I love, that I read much more of than I read poetry and political tracts- with its narrative that forsakes this, in favor of the finality of a point that comes with a third act's resolution.

It emerges in a collection of Borges. It probably has more to do with the form of these books as collections of disparate works than their lack of narrative thrust, actually- It shows a set of thoughts all at once, rather than in progression.

I'm writing this book, and I can almost feel it approaching that, the size of thoughts accumulating. The thoughts are crazy thoughts that come in random bursts of typing. The shape that emerges isn't the shape of a plot. If you'll recall, I wanted that when I was reading Anthony Burgess' Tremor Of Intent, which I read between these two books, if memory serves.

I was talking about a friend of mine being crazy and gave as an example of something he would say at an inappropriate time, the Funkadelic line "I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe, I was not offended by them" and then I really felt that that line isn't crazy at all, and is in fact pretty much what it's all about.

I had my meeting with my professor where my work for the quarter was discussed. The thing she wrote seemed kind of laden with grammatical errors. The thought patterns are discernible, but it's the type of thing where I wish she wrote about what I learned rather than what I learnt.

I also went to the screening for people who were in SOS Media, the class I wanted to get into. I thought the thing I made was better than most of it. It's funny to see recurring themes- There's a lot of animals. Also, a lot of drones, which don't seem based on any real atmospheric consideration or aesthetic so much as it's a way to show work went into sound design. It happened at this animation screening last year- It's just this veneer of unpleasantness. Weird ripping off the surface elements of David Lynch. People also do like a "is this a dream/whoa what's happening" that's kind of taken from later David Lynch. Or people rip off the processing of voices from Twin Peaks. It just strikes me that it would be a lot more impressive to remind of something like David Lynch's student work, like The Grandmother. Granted, that stuff is really unpleasant and dark. But because it hasn't been cited so much- I don't know, I don't feel like there's surface elements there that could be ripped off. It's just so much the feeling of being set on fire and thrown in a river.

So, at this point, almost all of my friends are graduating from college. I'm not, there were two quarters when I didn't have any money for tuition, and so I've got some more time. But my good friend and current roommate Alex Tripp is graduating and moving away. It's going to be weird. Melancholic times are up ahead, looming in the future. We're out of this house at the end of June. He's going back to Alaska. My birthday is June 27th. I kind of want there to be some kind of party, something to take away from all the moving and attendant exhaustion. I imagine a backyard BBQ, fish tacos being grilled up to be seasoned with lime, and watermelon and lemonade on hand, Animal Collective on the stereo, drifting outdoors.

But next Thursday, my good friend and former roommate John Samson is coming to town. It's going to be great. Certainly there will be big parties. Or I should hope. He lived with Alex and I, along with Loren Thor, who is staying around Olympia at least for a while, and Evan Hashi (future unknown) in J208 on campus in what was an ongoing exercise in the best times ever. Hopefully there will be some photos taken of these weird and final moments. I hope I'm able to keep in better touch with these kids than the people I went to high school with. They're definitely a part of my imagined geodesic dome future.

I love these dudes. Deep friendships. I lived with these people, I shared a certain domestic intimacy. All of us are heterosexual, but I think there's something to be said for this intimacy that arises when for large periods of time, no one has a girlfriend. This is not to imply Fortress-Of-Solitude (the Lethem novel) moments, but just to say that it's not like there were women to share intimacy with. If we were female, our menstrual cycles would've synchronized. Our conversations were mostly jokes- but they were constant jokes, the type of thing that emerges from minds working automatically, saying whatever comes to mind. Everyone walked in everyone else's stream of consciousness, the waters got muddied.

I hope that none of them ever commit a murder because I would be obligated to lend them my bathtub to carve up the body and a couch for them to sleep on while they hide out waiting for the heat to cool down. But that probably won't happen, they're good dudes.

But you all know the difference I'm sure between keeping in touch with someone by telephone and walking around with them and responding to the same stimuli. The difference between AIM chats and face to face contact. And the difference as well between sharing current friends and meeting up with people and having the old times dominate the conversation, horribly. I'm not very good at the talk about the old times, and talking about what the old gang is up to, because of how horrible I am with keeping in touch with the old gang.

I'm listening to Elf Power. The winter is coming, and you have no time to waste.

What the fuck is up with these animated advertisments online now?

The worst are the ones for iTunes/iPods. Not just because they jump out of their frames with dancing, but the irony is that because they are such huge drains on computer's processors, they cause the product they're advertising (iTunes) to stutter, making it so I can't listen to music.

So I did my performance/video bit. There were technical problems, it was weird and baffling, but I don't think people hated it. At least one person really liked it.

Moving on from that, though, I just spent the last ten minutes looking at this record sleeve, that we somehow got for free of Mr. Rogers' album "Won't You Be My Neighbor." It's all songs for children meant to reassure them that they're special and loved. I haven't listened to it yet, I'm not sure I want to- Looking at the lyrics and explanatory notes is enough for me, in some ways. It's trying to communicate things that are so simple, in a simple manner, and there's these word choices to aid in that task that are kind of odd. I found the straightforwardness really pleasing and moving.