1-800-Mice is a great name for a comic book. Just say it out loud if you have doubts. In terms of crafting prose that rolls off the tongue, a comic pretty much just needs to nail it with the title. With movies and TV, dialogue needs to ring true, books and poetry might be read aloud. A comic just needs to have its voice captured in the form of brand recognition, especially with these one-person doing whatever the hell they feel like comics. "Love And Rockets" is a pretty good example. When I saw the title 1-800-Mice for the first time, I got all excited. I walked around with it in my head like a pop song's chorus for a day or two.

The comic itself is pretty good, which is why I'm writing about the title now, rather than when I first came to know it. It's a good name for a Matthew Thurber comic, specifically, because it seems like a non sequitur. It wouldn't actually work as a phone number. The first time I read one of his comics, I was half-distracted by trying to have a conversation or something, and couldn't really follow it. The prose- the dialogue/captions, that which is not drawing- is really distinct, it has these odd rhythms, and the stories themselves have the same rhythms. It seems like nonsense, because it will take these sideways detours. But it's not a Marc Bell comic, where the nonsensical dialogue is just this weird act of self-negation and deterrence: It actually builds and goes places. "1-800-Mice" actually ends up being a plot point. It's the name of a company that uses mice as couriers for messengers to parts of the world unable to be reached by cell phones. Which is, maybe, the plot point on which the whole world turns, thematically.

Because detectable within Thurber's comic is this anxiety about the modern world of cell phones. I'll cite examples of dialogue like "I spent too much time on the internet today. It's fucking up my DNA." "I hear that man... but how do we get out of the way... of waves?" and bits from thought balloons like "recurring nightmares of population density, a poisoned ipod or a generation lost to a suicide faddishness." And I think part of this is why anthropomorphic characters are being utilized. Thurber reviewed a Leif Goldberg zine where that sort of technique was admired for how it "helps level the playing field between humans and the Earth." There's an interview with Thurber in the same magazine as that review, as well as a comic involving humans turning into lizards. There's this weird natural world bubbling up through a cartoon world, which is one of those things that seems counter-intuitive, but actually makes perfect sense to me, in a way that's hard to articulate in the form of criticism.

It's because of this that I got obsessed with 1-800-Mice, with it really bothering me that there was a long period of time when a second issue was out and unavailable to me. Even though, after reading the first issue at the same time as another Thurber comic, the newspaper Carrot For Girls, I thought the latter was better, even though it's kind of not that great. I finally got issue two not too long ago, and that comic really was great.

The same magazine that hosted Thurber reviewing a Leif Goldberg zine had an interview with Thurber himself, that ended with him saying that he wanted to "figure out how to write funnier comics, more interesting comics, more readable stuff." It turns out when reading issue two that the key to making funnier comics is to make them more readable as comics, actually utilizing the panel-to-panel rhythms that have traditionally worked in comics rather than having apeshit layouts that are closer to psychedelic posters with a lot of text on them. Pretty much everything before that first issue had sequences that were largely unparseable on a first read. Here, the nonsensical weirdness just works as jokes, rather than artiness, but it doesn't detract from what makes Thurber interesting at all.

I attribute this shift to the publication of Art Out Of Time, edited by the publisher of 1-800-Mice, Dan Nadel. Art Out Of Time is a collection of old comics, drawn by people who were weirdos enough to have a distinct vision, and presented in a context that highlights that what these were distinct artists, and not just hacks, even though they were hacking out the pages at the time. Everything I've seen Thurber cite as an influence is kind of esoteric- the music of Caroliner, The Sun City Girls, and Captain Beefheart, the comic-zines silkscreen printed in the underground. Art Out Of Time presents stuff that works and tells straightforward narratives, originally for kids largely, and points out that it glows with weirdness anyway. It's like pointing out that the beat for an Usher song sounds like Black Dice to someone who really likes Black Dice, this kind of "wait, what" epiphany that leads to clarity because you understand how to channel idiosyncracy in a way that's clear.

So, suddenly, for an issue at least, (and I'm very much anticipating issue 3, which should be coming out imminently) Thurber's comics read all that much easier. What's weird is that, to me, they kind of felt like funny animal comics already. Kind of like how the Grant Morrison Doom Patrol comics that remain an all-time favorite channel silver-age superhero stuff that was already kind of weird because people were working at high enough speeds that unconscious anxieties spilled out and turn up that weirdness by utilizing a conscious awareness of a history of surrealist artwork. Only for "The Fox And The Crow" or something. Now, it's really been nailed, and the comic reads like Boody Rogers adapting fragments of an unpublished Thomas Pynchon novel. (Other Art Out Of Time reference points would be the nervousness of Rory Hayes, with the frozenness of Ogden Whitney surfacing on the page where Groomfiend is receiving a message from a coffee cup.) I cite Pynchon not just because I like him, but due to the size of the ensembles he works with, and the proclivity towards "funny" names that was in itself probably inspired by cartoons. (Oh, also the weird sexual practices: In issue two a cop fucks a duck! But not in the tawdry way that you'd see in a sixties underground comic, but in the weird and casual way it would happen in Gravity's Rainbow.) But I do really like Thomas Pynchon, and part of the reason I think that's a fair comparison point is because 1-800-Mice rules.

And while that's an obvious ending to an essay, I realize that I didn't get into, really, the way that sometimes out-of-nowhere, right after a tangent, there'll be occasional moments of straightforward emotional truth. Like, the "Megabat" page in issue 1: In itself, it's a complete detour from the rest of the comic, and then towards the end, there's a two-panel detour. And then, at the end: "I need to move," which, due to the context in which it appears and the way its drawn, I now think about everytime I think about how I need to move. That the context is pretty much completely fantastical makes it even more of an achievement. Or two panels on the page that wraps up that issue. It's the same improvisational methods that are so all over the place that enable the comic to be funny, when it is funny, are the same things that enable the emotional bits to come out of nowhere and be all the more resonant for it.

Oh oh: The ad copy for it, that appeared in issues of Cold Heat and probably nowhere else, "Like Maus without the holocaust" is completely hilarious and really should be thrown around more.

The thing that makes Guy Maddin movies work when they should be horrendous is that they aren't that tied up to the source material they're referencing. Brand Upon The Brain has this crazy frenetic editing that would never be in a silent film. It's powered by the digital editing software of today, but restrained by the idea of the serials he's referencing that it doesn't go off the rails into Tony-Scott-ville.

I didn't see it with the live narration, orchestra and foley artists of its touring iteration. I saw it projected on film, and then learned that the touring show was projected digitally: The live narration utilizes a teleprompter and a synched-up digital signal. The point is that this vision that critics take of Maddin as this nostalgist is an impossible mistruth.

Brand Upon The Brain is great. The Saddest Music In The World is maybe tedious, and some of his shorts might peter out and just feel like a stylistic exercise. This film, on the other hand- Sure, the framing sequence is easily forgettable, and the actual meat of the film might not have much of a climax, but the majority of the film is more persistently entertaining/interesting than any other indie film I've seen so far this year. It's one of those great examples of actual experimental work, in a narrative context, creating this thrilling sense of something happening that's more entertaining and direct than anything that consciously avoids anything too obviously formal for fear it might be distancing.

This isn't to say that the weird frenetic editing isn't overdone. (An effect used frequently was created by running a mouse back and forth on Final Cut through a series of shots, while recording it and then editing that back into it later.) This is supposed to cite that what is happening is the narrator's memories, as outlined in the framing sequence, but still that framing sequence is easily forgotten. It is overdone, but it's awesome, completely in keeping with the melodramatic narration, and the way in which the narrative piles its elements on.

Hell of a thing!

Sunday's episode of The Simpsons, guest-starring Jack Black and some comics people, was a weird experience. I guess almost every time I see a new episode of The Simpsons, it's weird and discomfort-inducing for a moment or two. It's still on the air, it really shouldn't be, and no one knows what to do with it. Occasionally, a joke will be really mean- I remember a "Bart torturing Skinner" sequence that seemed completely unacceptable to me. Generally, the vibe is that it's trying to be Family Guy- a show that I would assume everyone who wrote for The Simpsons would feel superior to. I just feel bad for large segments of people when I see an episode.

My theory as to why that show is still on the air is because Matt Groening is too much of a good liberal to lay off nice, funny people from what is probably the best job they will ever have.

Anyway, the last episode didn't have moments that were like that. It just had a bunch of jokes that were so nerdy and inside that I can't imagine normal people would get them. And they weren't delivered casually- They happened one after the other. Just relentless nerdiness.

There was this animated Tintin sequence, which I'm not even sure constitutes a parody or a joke. Because I've never read Tintin. If you have, and can explain if that was a joke, and how it was a joke, I would like to hear it. I get the impression things don't explode that much in Tintin.

I imagine that the general public was as dumbfounded and bored during the whole subplot as I was during that scene. Even the stuff that I understood made me vaguely uncomfortable- the bit where Lisa tells Dan Clowes how much she related to Ghost World? Yeah, that bothered me.

Still, I laughed at a lot of the nerdy shit, and in a way where I was really glad there was no one around to not laugh at that shit with me in the same room. I was really thrown by its existence, but that made me laugh, when I did laugh, all the harder: It felt like inside jokes being done on this grand scale that had to be alienating most people.

Or maybe no one watches The Simpsons these days.

I also laughed later on, at the sight gag of Homer with his stomach stapled, and then later on, post plastic surgery. Oh, and the "Count back from ten" "Okay, I admit it, I'm drunk" exchange.

During the subplot that was all nerd shit, all the time, the only joke that wasn't just an obscure reference was Jack Black's girlfriend saying the line "My name is Strawberry, and I have a lunchbox for a purse," which is hysterical to me. Way funnier than Alan Moore complaining about corporate behemoth employers mistreat his work. For the people reading this blog who might need that joke explained to them: That's what he does in real life! All the time! Not really a well-observed joke about certain types of people like the thing about the lunchbox purse is, no.

The last episode I remember seeing and thinking was okay was later highlighted by a blogger for The Onion AV Club as being written by the guy who did My Super Ex-Girlfriend, and having similar undercurrents of casual misogyny. That episode was good enough to have come from a season where The Simpsons was just starting to go bad.

When people talk about hip-hop/pop producers, Rich Harrison is underrated for weirdness. In addition to that Amerie song I really like, (actually, a lot of them are pretty good, and he does all those beats) he also did this new Usher song, "Dat Girl Right There," which I just heard, and is fucking crazy. I haven't heard about him listening to Black Dice, which Timbaland apparently does, but that really shouldn't matter- This song is way weirder than any Timbaland song I can name. Any contenders I am forgetting should be posted in the comments.

I wish either of those dudes would produce an Enon record. The new Enon is terrible for its generic rock and rolling- People saying it is the closest to Brainiac than any Enon record need to listen to Electro-Shock For President again. That record rules: It's weird dark minimal atmospheres (in a way kind of comparable to the last Kites record, actually) with just the slimmest bit of song structure for the vocals to freak out over. Seemingly when critics are comparing Grass Geysers... Carbon Clouds to Brainiac they are just referring to the points off Hissing Prigs In Static Couture that didn't age so well, which is just a handful of choruses where the vocals are mixed in a very 1990s alt-rock way. I am probably thinking of Veruca Salt as a comparison point. That didn't fuck up those songs, really, they're just the lamest part of an awesome band. (Or Smack Bunny Baby isn't so good, either, but that was before John Schmersal joined, so it probably doesn't count.) For Enon records, I guess I would put Lost Marbles and Exploded Evidence just behind Believo!

But yeah, that Usher song: Fucking crazy! That Amerie song: Pretty fucking good!

CF makes noise music and draws comics. Somehow, I've earned a reputation for liking noise music, when I pretty much just like Black Dice, and Black Dice side projects. And not even every Black Dice side project- The collaboration of Eric Copeland with Avey Tare, Terrestrial Tones, is not to be found on my computer, even though Alex owned a copy of Dead Drunk that I remember having some moments. Actually, maybe I should look into that. But anyway. CF makes noise music under the name of Kites, whose record Peace Trials I've talked about liking in the past. That one goes back and forth between brutal noise jams and folk songs, and the jams get more abstract and brutal as the songs become prettier, as the record goes on. I never would have downloaded that were it not for my affection for the guy's comics, as they've appeared in various anthologies. I can connect those folk songs to the drawing styles, almost. There's a warmth, and a simplicity: CF draws in a thin pencil line, occasionally embellished with watercolor paint.

Anyway, CF's put out a "graphic novel," his first after a bunch of short stories and minicomics and drawings. It's called Powr Mastrs, it's completely awesome, and none of the reviews I've read of it have articulated why. He also put out another record on Load pretty recently, which I'm listening to now, hoping to talk about.

For once, the weird hyperbole/nonsensical assertions that is noise discussion's stock in trade is accurate: The Load website describes this record as cold. Yes. There are human voices on this record, but they're not in syncopation with the instruments. Noise machines go fuckity-buzz-beep-bomp-skronk, while the human voice does spoken word: "Lady! No one's going to look at you that way! Put your compact away!" and sometimes get chewed up in the machines themselves. But Load also does the weird bullshit for a record for the comic, Powr Mastrs, and it's not even worth talking about.

Powr Mastrs is great, despite the lack of the watercolor paints that are sometimes a huge art strength, that make CF's stuff look like Henry Darger. Without it, the art sometimes gets into Charles Schulz territory, in terms of sideways figure drawing. There's also this weird geometric technical drawing aspect to the architecture, and the angles things are chosen to be depicted from. There's also these drawings of plants and animals which are really great, and where the drawings shine most obviously in terms of what's considered good drawing. The coolest elements of the drawing lie somewhere in between though, when figures get distorted of abstractions as their bodies pull apart. This happens in a lot of CF's comics: Some sort of hydrocephalic hallucination of power ripping things apart from the way they normally lie. More of a vision than a hallucination, actually, because the way the figures and the architecture look, so thin-lined in pencil, there's a sort of squareness that is different than what you'd see in, say, a Brendan McCarthy comic, which for the sake of the argument will serve as shorthand for psychedelia in the traditional "taking some mushrooms and throwing down the paint" sense. That stuff is muddier, this is more clear. The crazy distortions keep the geometric clarity of seeming drawn with s-curves and t-squares. It's awesome.

The noise isn't like that at all. It's, you know, noisy, against that sort of recognizability. Brian Chippendale travels in the same circles as CF. His comics keep the visual noise of crazy cross-hatching, and in Ninja it was made clear that that was deliberate. The panels that didn't have that, that were clean, were thought of as being bleached, gentrified for yuppies. The insane sketchiness was to reinforce a vision of a world that was more like Fort Thunder and less like a condo. Noise as something exclusionary, but also celebratory of vitality. CF's comics have a particular style, but it's not really of a piece with his music the way that Chippendale's work is.

CF's comic in Kramers Ergot 5, which he did the covers for, was signed "Fuck all you careerists and fuck the president," and in Powr Mastrs there's a note on the table of contents that says "law stay away." Tom Spurgeon has described CF's comics as being dissimilar to a sort of fantasy story about good triumphing over evil and more about weird social interactions that might be kind of unfair. What I like about this stuff is the way that sort of punk human personality elements are reflected in world-building and good stories, that sort of attribution of the transference of ideas from one consciousness to another. That's why I want to connect the comics to the noise- they come from the same person, and thus, theoretically, the same place, and in an effective piece of art, I tend to think the artist's vision is communicated. The noise only does that in terms of scene signifier: something so abrasive that it can only exist in certain contexts, and those contexts, due to their extremism, can have these lawless overtones: Shows held in houses, usually with fridges full of dumpstered food and drugs readily available. There's a whole set of associations. In Powr Mastrs, there's a "transmutation night" for witches off in the distance for lawless fun. There's also "beard parties," where immortal children pretend to be old.

In a lot of CF's short comics, there's this kind of transcendence, also, that comes from not being all that into conflict: "Race From Dying" from the SPX 2001 anthology had a dude opting out of work by drawing lines and patterns he could disappear into. The 2-page story in Paper Rad's BJ and Da Dogs had a character that took lack of conflict for granted in favor of making friends, kind of as a punchline. There's some kind of zen peacefulness that just sort of comes up. This is also vaguely evident in the folk songs from "Peace Trials" which hint at extollations of peace. Powr Mastrs doesn't have that, but it's not over yet, it has a while yet to go. So far it's just laying out the world of social relationships, which will maybe end up transcended in the future. But without that element- that "the point" element, the third-act conclusion that enforces the themes, there's still a lot to like. One element is the drawing, which is hard to articulate the strengths of, besides just saying that it's graceful. There's also the humor, and the world being built as an interesting one in itself, of just a world inside an artist's head.

The other night, I watched Elia Kazan's A Face In The Crowd. I liked it, but realized that it would probably blur in my memory very quickly with Billy Wilder's Ace In The Hole. Mostly, the two movies just share a tone.


Face In The Crowd is interesting for the way in which it depicts the idea of a down-home, folksy country musician as supporting conservative politics- made in an era in which conservative politics were unpopular. It was made in 1957, which while it might not seem like the most liberal of times now, it's still worth noting Eisenhower saying that if a president ever tried to abolish social security, every liberal in the country, including him, would rise up. The far-right politician in this film is someone who supports the abolition of social security, and is also described as "the last of the isolationists." What a weird little time capsule.

Ace In The Hole was made in 1951. It stars Kirk Douglas, as a journalist who manufactures spectacle to make a name for himself. It's simultaneously funnier and more of a tragedy than Face In The Crowd, but Face In The Crowd, being made in 1957 has a crazy little proto-film-psychedelia scene of over-editing that I find really endearing.

They are almost the same movie, some sort of flipside to each other. Both are about the way the media chews people out and spits them up, and there's some corrupting process along the way. Ace In The Hole is about a reporter manufacturing a story where there is none, with tragic results. A Face In The Crowd is about the subject being chosen and inflated in a way beyond his control. It's more sprawling- it takes place over a longer period of time, and is about a person becoming a celebrity and becoming corrupted, but there are weird brief looks into his foundational psychology.

A few nights ago, I was sick with a fever. It was pretty debilitating, leaving me unable to sit up or accomplish tasks, even basic ones like eating. I called in sick. The next day I woke up, feeling better, getting better throughout the day, after probably a little less than 14 hours of sleep. I was confident that when I awoke the next day, Tuesday, I'd be aces. I ended up sleeping more than I expected to, and feeling pretty awful, but different symptoms than I had at the first onset of sickness. I apparently look and sound terrible- I just heard myself talk, and it was not pleasant. I'm mostly worried about an ear infection- it's one part thing that is mostly gotten by three years old to one part the idea of an eardrum rupturing.

The word that I heard about how to avoid these first came to me by way of a story of things gone awry. A friend of mine had put minced garlic in her ears, and then freaked out and pushed it down to the point where it got stuck and she had to go to the emergency room. As I recalled this to an acquaintance who works at the school medical center, she expressed terror. If her ear drum had burst with the garlic inside, what is probably the worst pain ever would have had still more burning compounded on top of that. I then talked to someone else, a woman who is knocked up, and thus soon to be a mother, who vouched for the garlic method, although admitted beforehand that it seemed hippy-dippy, but also explained how the person who had it go awry did it wrong. She also advocated other things, like wearing earmuffs and washing your ears out with hydrogen peroxide before sleep. Anyway. I tried the garlic thing, it was pleasant to do. I will keep at it, I suppose. Looking up medicinal uses of garlic online finds things that seem legit, although some of them are more involved than I am willing to attempt for something that still gives off strong stenches of hippie vibes.

EDIT: and now I'm crying!

So, the Halloweeen party. I spent a lot of time making the costume, which still wasn't done in time. That was to be a jellyfish costume, made out of grocery bags. It just ended up looking like garbage. Anyway. The party was held at my house, and at the end of the night a girl, a friend of a friend, was drunk enough to find me attractive. So drunk, actually, that I could not in good conscience be okay with this. My roommates looked on, probably wondering whether or not I was a scumbag, as I resolutely did not move my face the forty-five degrees needed to make out, and instead stared straight ahead, trying to communicate telepathically "oh my god everybody I am fucking overwhelmed, but I swear that I am not a rapist." I need to wake up in a few hours to escort this girl, sleeping on a mattress in the living room, to the Greyhound station, when probably she will not remember anything. I will also make eggs to cure what is sure to be an awful hangover.

But the party went well, despite a lack of people I invited showing up, and the disc of music I made to play during costumed wrestling matches not playing. Costumed wrestling was fucking amazing.

While I was attempting to achieve telepathy, one of my roommates was giving me booze. Why? I don't know. It seems completely counter-intuitive. But anyway in a few hours I will wake up early and live to regret it.

My friend John Samson is completely insane.

I really need to travel out to Colorado. What a great dude.

I keep on calling a person who is in some state of transgenderification by the wrong pronoun. I think of this person as a male, but they would rather be referred to as a she. When I met this person, I did not think they were female even for a minute, despite signifiers in dress. The facial structure and such confirmed a history. Maybe people think I am an asshole, or being conservative, or something, because they keep on correcting me. I just keep thinking "I calls 'em as I sees 'em" because I can't see the person as female, even if that's how they view themselves.

In other news, the Steven Millhauser novel Edwin Mullhouse is pretty great, working in a fairly different way than his other short stories. His next short story collection, Dangerous Laughter, comes out next year, and if that contains all the stories I think it will, ("A Precursor To The Cinema," holy shit) and if the things I haven't read live up to that standard, that should be quite the book. But Edwin Mullhouse is a hell of a thing, completely misrepresented by its back-cover copy. It hints at a large number of themes while really elucidating childhood. Whether it evokes all childhoods or just the stuff of my demographic is kind of outside my power to say, but considering the age gap between Millhauser and I it seems to safe to go with the bolder claim. I have already promised to loan my copy out to someone because of how excited I was to talk about it after having finished it this morning.

Whoa dude, Bongwater

Bongwater!

I am referring to the band, who I haven't heard until now, when I began downloading their record "Too Much Sleep." I also downloaded a 1990 peel session, which is kind of terrible- most tracks are collages of disparate parts in a way that's just kind of annoying. But this, this, the first few tracks at least, are THRILLING. Adventures in sound. One member of the band is the producer Kramer, whose sound hasn't grabbed me in the past. But here, on his own, mostly, oh boy, it's like Joe Meek meets The Butthole Surfers or something. ("Something" could just as easily be "Faust.")With a girl singer. It's not a collage, it's a freeflowing river. Alex, download this. I would post about it on the Collected Animals board but that is a place that is growing in uselessness at a startling rate. I'm four songs in, it might fall apart, but every time it's seemed to fall apart at the beginning of one song it's found a beautiful place by the end. I would compare the experience of listening to this to the new Akron/Family record, "Love Is Simple" for the first time.

I've been working at the Capitol Theater for the last two years. Half the time I've spent in Olympia, and my involvement was probably the thing that sold me on Olympia. A couple of months ago, the guy who hired me, in a volunteer capacity, and taught me how to be a projectionist, was fired. I liked him a lot, but other people found him eminently disagreeable.

When this happened I felt weird and stunned. I don't think I had any idea how to process it. Luckily, the guy who told me that Jeff was fired followed this up immediately with talk of a strike. Which gave me a context.

After the meeting amongst all the projectionists about a strike, I thought about the idea that if I were the fired party, I would leave town. He was going through a brutal divorce, and then got fired, but got a chunk of money to prevent him from suing. If that were me, I would go on to new adventures. Probably I think this because it is that this guy is the lens through which I view the Olympia Film Society, and Olympia by extension.

He didn't do that, he stayed around, and we had a strike for a while. Over the course of the meetings, it became articulated that the projectionist community and some other people felt really alienated from the Film Society, and this was kind of a dealbreaker. It wasn't about the firing- although that was my reasoning behind the strike, as I viewed it as a labor issue- it became symbolic of general malaise. Every month that passed without a single good movie playing had been problematic as well for volunteers that were essentially paid in passes to see movies they didn't want to see. The decision was made to try to amend the Film Society's bylaws that the Board Of Directors be elected by members, rather than the Board being a self-electing, and thus autocratic, body.

The paperwork and petitions went through and a meeting was held. In a lot of ways, the spectre of that firing loomed large. So large, actually, that the rather reasonable idea of having the board be elected didn't pass. (There was a second part, that the board by immediately dissolved and a new one elected, which I understand people's hesitation about.)

This infuriated me, as I sat in the theater. People clapped as the decision for there not to be voting passed. When a woman got up to call bullshit, she was booed and told it was over. I looked around, wondering "God, who are these fucking assholes?" and I saw one former professor of mine who I didn't get along with, and who kicked me out of the class.

I kind of freaked the fuck out, existential-crisis-ly speaking. This thing that I gave a large chunk of my time over to, that I liked, and that made me like Olympia, was in the hands of the same assholes that represented everything I didn't like about Evergreen.

I just kept on thinking "evil will prevail." This was last Saturday.

It's worth pointing out that the majority of people who voted voted for a democratically-elected board. But not the two-thirds needed to change the bylaws. It lost by nine votes. I wasn't there in time for the vote, because I had to work. I didn't know I could just drop off my vote in advance, or something. I thought that people had to sit through the whole meeting, and hear both sides of the issue, etc. I was wrong, a lot of people dropped off their votes, some without knowing the issue, and then left.

Since then, a lot of people I liked who worked for the Film Society have quit. I don't think they're leaving Olympia. I spent an hour talking to someone who's actually a paid staff member, who was thinking about quitting not because of the election- they didn't have a personal stake in the race- but because their work is a lot harder if a lot of volunteers quit. She said that if she quit the Film Society job, she would probably also have to leave Olympia.

That conversation and others kind of lead me in the direction of not quitting the Film Society, even though it seems like it might get shittier in terms of people I deal with there. I really can't understate that community element, or how alienating it was when the election went the way it did. Hypothetically, it would be like me liking Olympia partly because of how liberal it is, and then finding out that the majority of people who lived there voted for Bush, because the liberals are actually in the minority, and just make up the overwhelming percentage of people I deal with on a regular basis. Finding out that it's not the people you deal with on a regular basis who make the decisions, but a group that might as well be called a cabal.

The word "cabal" was kind of thrown in the direction of my projectionist clique as well in our campaign. It struck me as really weird, but I guess we are that alienated. It's like being told that the group of people you see are the time are "hipsters" and are actually very exclusionary. Or that they're elitist in their taste, even though it seems to you that you like all the same things and it's all very popular. It's a paradigm shift. Only, you know, I think those people are wrong, who are throwing these terms around. I don't think they know what they're talking about, but they're maybe not aided by the people in question being kind of inarticulate geeks.

Maybe my feeling of wanting to quit is adolescent and unprofessional. I will concede that on the basis of that being the Film Society I want to be a part of. I want it messy and fun and not trying to compete in a capitalist market. The idea of "unprofessionalism" makes me feel like I'm not a volunteer for an arts organization, but free labor for some kind of bastard corporate machine that's nominally a non-profit.

I feel really conflicted about it. I definitely feel like the bastards won. I feel impotent and disenfranchised. The conflict comes in when questioning what to do when that's the way you feel about a thing.

Evil will prevail.

There are two things I want to write about, one important, one unimportant, both infuriating to me right now.

Okay, most unimportant thing first. The bigger thing will get a meatier post.

My roommates insisted on a party. I pitched a theme- Cat burglars. Everyone comes dressed in black, climbs in through the window, the lights are off, people bring their own flashlights.

Flash forward to now: What is this bullshit electroclash.

Backtrack to one roommate inviting the most people, me inviting no one.

Her friends have cat faces painted on. They are playing shitty electroclash. Before this was the Spice Girls. It all makes me want to get into the goddamn fetal position. If this were someone else's house, I would leave right now.

I did know this would happen.

The other more important thing I will write about in my next post is the

OH MY GOD NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU PUT ALIEN ANT FARM'S COVER OF A MICHAEL JACKSON SONG ON A MIX IN FUCKING 2007 NO NO NO NO NO OH MY FUCKING GOD I AM GOING TO FUCKING STAB SOMEONE

reason why I really wish there was a party tonight, I could very much get drunk and dance and be around my friends. But this thing is a fucking disaster. I need to move. I think I'm going to go to the woods right now and bring a fucking book.

EDIT: I went to the library and read Gary Panter's Cola Madnes, and when I came back I find out that the exact same songs are playing. One mix CD, on a loop.

This is a note to myself, posted in public so as to make me feel more accountable to it. The notes about waking up early like an adult would do were always kept pretty private, and so they are easier to ignore.

So on this message board that I post on that is kind of turning to shit, there was a thread about clothes. At first, the idea of thrift stores was brought up, and then it was lamented "oh man it's all about thrift stores these days, all these debutantes shop there now, I blame the Olsen twins, and now the prices are going up and it sucks." Then the idea of making your own clothes with silkscreening came up. This was also lamented as being in fashion right now. This is a music message board, for a band that's blowing up, (this is kind of what's turning the board to shit) but not as much as The Shins or something. I mention The Shins because they were a band I was into in high school and now feel weird and territorial about. I actually started to feel weird about pretty much all music since I moved to Olympia- I'm sure I've blogged about that feeling, where I realized that the private thing I had was actually a social thing for most people, and I had a different context that felt more pure to me.

Maybe it helps that the last Shins album wasn't so good that allows me to come to the conclusion I am getting to.

Fuck it, eyes open, okay, it's not weird and awkward. It's life, it's just part of the weird awkwardness that is life. But that's no reason to be territorial about it. No reason to be self-sabotaging, which is what I've been doing since high school at least. This isn't to say I'm going to embrace all the stupid modern bullshit that accompanies the things I like in this day and age. It's just meant to signify going for it, being a weirdo, with the understanding that at some point in the near future what I like and what the world likes will probably intersect in a way that will actually be advantageous to me. This is probably presumptuous. I'm not saying it will happen. But it's an option that I should be aware of, probably.

Another note, to the public at large: It seems like L.A. is becoming a thing. Not in terms of Hollywood, or that there are people I know who live there, but this scene I'm aware of from the blog for Sammy Harkham's store Family and ANP Quarterly. This could also be connected to Arthur magazine, and the venue The Smell. That seems interesting to me. Moreso because of the whole Hollywood and friends of mine thing, although I think it's pitched at this "art" level that those people don't give a shit about. There's also the whole Upright Citizen's Brigade theater thing, and the fact that the Comedy Death-Ray people are getting a TV show is very exciting. Not to say that I will move there or anything, but I'm aware of it's thing-ness and am pleased in the way I am whenever I get the idea that something is a thing.

Word through the wire is that the future trend is weird psychedelia. This is from a Grant Morrison interview in Arthur, and also elsewhere, a general "these things run in cycles, this is what's next" type of prediction that I was excited about when I read it in 2004 I think and that seems like it actually is a thing that's blooming, as I listen to Animal Collective shows being broadcast on NPR. I've been here all my life dudes, but maybe now is the time to start investing in land, art-wise, if my meaning can be gleaned.

(It was pretty cool in the new Arthur when the woods of Olympia were discussed in the C & D music column.)

All this means is all it's always meant, that I should make more movies and write more books or whatever. Be less self-defeating, and less inert. Part of that includes waking up early, fine, so be it. The alarm is set.

I know I write about Shary Boyle all the time, but she just updated her site with a bunch of new drawings and exhibition photos, and the announcement that she'll have the back cover and two pages in the next Kramers Ergot, and these are all very exciting things. The new drawings have worked in space and planets, expanding the range of the alternate worlds that were previously largely occupied by human bodies in the "Porcelain Fantasy" series. This is more geology than porcelain, and its reaching towards the cosmic.

The Kramers thing looks great, but next year will also bring a monograph called "Otherworld Uprising" which I think will probably be very much a thing as well. Seriously: My favorite contemporary visual artist.

Blogger is being weird about links right now, but: http://www.sharyboyle.com

So shortly after I assumed responsibility for paying the bills in my new house, I ran out of checks. I ordered more, then didn't see them arrive, leaving a bill to go unpaid. The person who saw those checks and put them in a kitchen cabinet meant to serve as a mailbox got mad because the one bill left unpaid was in her name. But I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk about the checks themselves, and how I listened to the person at the bank's insistence that "old english" was the font most people chose- Highly unlikely, but this combines with a misspelling of my address to strike me as humorous.

Sometimes people will say things to me that if I were the person talking to me, I would not bring up because it seems like it would be a touchy subject for someone like me. And I don't know if they don't think of things like that because I just play it cool all the time, or if it's just that the whole point of someone like me is that I don't have sensitive subjects. Although maybe the two are related, but they seem separate.

Like most people who are assholes, most of my regrets are concerned with times I could've said something obnoxious and seemingly wrong-headed that I totally believe, but didn't, because I didn't think of them at the time.

Today, as I cooked seashell-shaped pasta, I thought back to my class Art Media Praxis. When a kid suggested we watch a Hitchcock movie as an example of a normal film, well-done, for its editing rhythms, to contrast with Maya Deren or something. The teacher's response- "we all know what a normal movie looks like" is basically true, and I had a problem with the kid citing Hitchcock for how safe that is.

But anyway, what I should've said, was "Rope is an experimental film." Which I would argue, but I think is indisputable. Fuck, man, Rope. This blog post will take as a pretext that you've all seen the movie Rope, although you probably haven't. It's my favorite Hitchcock movie, done all in one take, with a moving camera, the splices between reels done as the camera moves past someone's back and the screen goes black for a frame or two. It's explained in issue 3 of The Ganzfeld how it was done- all the walls were on wheels, and the skyline outside the window was pretty thought out.

I realized that Rope is pretty much the opposite of another movie cited on my Myspace favorite movies, the Japanese anime Mind Game that is pretty much the only anime I like. (There are others I tolerate.) Rope is about committing the perfect crime. But the crime has already been committed, so the film then becomes about getting away with it. Meanwhile, the technical side of the film is this weird highwire act, with the same imperative- getting away with it, making it work, having all the artifice come off as reality. Alternately, it's about the morality- the leads imagine themselves as Nietzchean ubermensch, who should be allowed to do whatever they want. Jimmy Stewart realizes that this isn't actually the case, this is completely wrong- that there should be restrictions to behavior to keep us human and good. The film's likewise formally restricted, and this helps make the film good.

Mind Game isn't restrained at all. It's about living your life freely, and the animation is constantly freewheeling- it's stylistic exercises/excesses make the argument that characters in the film make. That movie has a part that's restrained in terms of its plot forward movement, but even that can't stop the nonstop shifting of visual approaches. I wanted to screen Mind Game, I think, because of how powerful the visuals are. The way that style can fit content in narrative works seemed like an important point to get across, along with the limitlessness of style that film possesses.

Tomorrow I'm going to see Animal Collective play in Seattle with Eric Copeland of Black Dice opening. That'll be great!

A terrible feeling at the pit of your being.

I've decided that the next few movie things I make will be collaborative. I was thinking a of making movie with one kid, longer in length than what I've done before, and a music video done for the band of the guy who sells me groceries.

I had the meeting about the movie today. That was kind of encouraging, he doesn't have any ideas as of yet. I was hoping we could work through the ones I have and combine those with his and hash things out but that hasn't happened yet.

But more of a bummer is this CD I'm listening to now, to pick a song for a video. I don't want to be negative, which is for me kind of a first time ever thing. But I will say that the actual CD seems really poorly mastered. And I'll just say that the songs are so self-contained, self-referential, or so suited to a live performance that I don't know how a music video could even be a thing. I had ideas for a music video but maybe they are just "video ideas," visual notions.

I don't feel like I'm superior to these people. Actually, the work ethic of the dude from the grocery store- he works a forty-hour-a-week job, makes music in a variety of different projects, one of which is actually liked by people? There are times when I am unemployed and not going to school and am still unable to write sizable chunks of fiction with any regularity.

But ohhhh boy. I don't know how I do the thing. You know? If art is the thing you make to stand in for personal communication, or to deepen it- to say something else- I still think that the idea of artistic collaboration is probably subject to all the problems of normal interpersonal interaction, vis a vis how the fuck do you do this.

I really like this quote, that I heard attributed to Peter Blegvad, which I will paraphrase- "Only a jailer would consider 'escapism' a bad thing." (referring to art)

I also like this quote that I came up with and will use in a movie someday. "You'll Rue Mclanahan the day you crossed my path."

So I could talk about the events at the Olympia Film Society. The guy who trained me and was something off a father figure for a small circle of Olympia AV nerds, Jeffrey Bartone, was fired by the board of directors. Fourteen projectionists stopped working in protest. One person remained, the most recent projectionist to finish his training, a male nurse who's kind of a fuckup. He is training people- One that I know of is an Evergreen Electronic Media higher-up who is disliked by most people I socialize with. When I went to see The Ten last night, there were more technical difficulties than usual, and a scratched-up print.

We're trying to work it all out.

The Ten is pretty good. Winona Ryder gives a really great performance, surprisingly. Kerri Kenney's bit is a highlight, unsurprisingly. A lot of the weakest bits have the best comedic actors. There's an animated segment, done by a Wonder Showzen dude, with an H. Jon Benjamin voice, that's not so great. A.D. Miles' bit sucks. Paul Rudd has a pretty dull part. Meanwhile, Michael Showalter is essentially an extra.

I haven't seen Superbad or Knocked Up, but I imagine both of them are better than this. It is possible also that The Simpsons Movie is funnier.

But what I wanted to talk about is something I've talked about elsewhere, how Flight Of The Conchords is not actually a funny show. I am convinced that it's popularity is attributable to social cohesion, relating to something rather than jokes. It's why people like Dane Cook or Larry The Cable Guy or all the things despised by the people who post on aspecialthing, only for a different demographic. It's about musicians living in New York, trying to make it, and the jokes are largely about dating. They're not insightful jokes, or funny ones, but the presentational context is appealing. I'm not saying that's the whole appeal, because it has broader support than that, but- it's not a really funny show.

If you think about it, this show is probably why Lucky Louie was canceled. Lucky Louie couldn't find support because the people the show was about don't have a lot of disposable income, and don't spend it on HBO. Flight Of The Conchords is slightly less funny, but can find a sympathetic audience of hipster-types. Lucky Louie isn't even the funniest show. Flight Of The Conchords isn't terrible, it's not unwatchable. It's just really overrated. And it's mediocrity makes an argument against the type of comedy I like, that it isn't really good, but that people can just relate to the people saying it.

I swear that I am laughing at the jokes.

30 Rock and The Sarah Silverman Program are way funnier than Flight Of The Conchords, despite their network TV and basic cable pedigree. I am now meeting people who don't like The Sarah Silverman Program, because they don't like Sarah Silverman ON THAT SHOW. They like her stand-up, and some might like everyone else on that show. But it's an unsympathetic character. This, by the way, is what makes the show funny. That show kills me. Some people prefer the Flight Of The Conchords. And they might deny the social cohesion element- that's kind of a big thing to throw in people's faces, that their tastes are short-circuited by their hipsterism, since hipsterism is so based on the idea of taste.

Certainly, there's signifiers for FOTC being a funny show. It has a bunch of really funny people on it that don't really do anything particularly funny. Eugene Mirman is the funniest dude. Kristen Schaal runs in the circles of people I think are funny, although I've never seen her comedy, I don't think. But really, those signifiers should be shot down by the fact that there's a lot of song parodies.

I talked to a guy who liked it, a fellow who lives in New York who was visiting my roommate. I made this argument to him. He said the later episodes are better.

Me: "Are they about more than just dating and song parodies?"
Him: "No, they're really random. It's just retardedly funny."
Me: "It's not retardedly funny. I've seen it, I'll giggle and I'll titter, but that's not retardedly funny, that's saying that's something is hysterical."
Him: "No okay I know that's saying something else. I mean it's retarded, and that's what makes it funny."

Anyway this guy, who the part where he describes the show as "random" is meant to be a tipoff to laugh at him, did a shitload of namedropping. All of really obvious things. He was also wearing an Of Montreal t-shirt when I had this conversation. Probably one bought on the most recent tour judging by the unpsychedelic font. I tried to tell him about other things in New York comedy- Invite Them Up, for example, and when I got around to trying to explain The Best Show On WFMU, which actually is occasionally retardedly funny, he left halfway through, I think to go smoke weed.

One of the few people who agrees with me about Flight Of The Conchords sucking is my good friend Alex Tripp, who's come to the same conclusions on his lonesome. When I lived with him and would watch movies and feel the same way about the movies, I felt that there might be a certain level of just picking up on general moods that then got amplified. The fact that both of us have watched this show in isolation from each other and reached the same "this show is not very good and actually makes me feel uncomfortable in how not very good it is" really reassures me. The other show that is really popular with friends of mine that Alex and I decided independent of each other wasn't very good was Arrested Development, but I don't have the same problems with that show that I do with Flight Of The Conchords. Or maybe I do, actually, but Flight Of The Conchords articulates that better. I did feel that Arrested Development was maybe getting a pass on the basis of the David Cross involvement, but that's not all there is to that show.

Seriously if there is something on either of those shows that is funnier than the Tracy Morgan dream sequence with Alec Baldwin as Jack Donaghy as Thomas Jefferson, I would like to fucking see it, and I will tell you right now that that Pet Shop Boys parody does not count even a little bit.

I've been hoping to stop just writing about comics, but waiting to see a movie to give me something else to write about. Today my roommate's girlfriend came down from Seattle, bearing an Animal Collective ticket I gave her money for, and also two movies from Hollywood Video. These were watched in rapid succession, which you may remember me complaining about.

The first was Blades of Glory, which I'm sure will fade from memory quickly. Pretty much exactly what I expected in terms of not being as funny as a movie directed by Adam McKay, but still having a fairly good cast, besides the people I don't care about because the things they were in that were popular, I dislike. This, for those of you who don't remember, is the movie about ice skating with Will Ferrell, who's great, and the guy from Napoleon Dynamite, who's awful. I do know his name, but I'm deliberately not saying it, because he's awful. Amy Poehler, Andy Richter, and Jenna Fischer contribute to my feelings of goodwill.

Next up was Zodiac, which I actually actively wanted to see when it came out. I feel like the more time that passes, the more David Fincher movies get dismissed, but maybe that's just the crowd I run with shifting. Anyway, this was a movie that worked. It didn't fuck around with any ridiculous CGI or flashiness, and I don't think it'll appeal to anyone's youthful anger. It is long, but probably as long as it had to be.

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.