Let me explain the Silver Jews.

Let me first begin by explaining why I feel the need to explain the Silver Jews. It's because of people like Matthew Perpetua, he of the Fluxblog mp3 blog, getting all bent out of shape when David Berman makes fun of Radiohead.

I'm not going to attack Matthew's taste: There are at least three things we are both into way too much (Pavement, The Wu-Tang Clan, Grant Morrison comics) that probably have kind of defined us. If you go much beyond those things, you'll find completely different ideas of what's valuable and what's mediocre, though. Still, I don't think I can make fun of him without making fun of those things I really like, so I'll refrain from doing that, and just explain the Silver Jews.

The section of the interview where David Berman dismisses Radiohead talks about the idea of music, songs, as a thing you can put in your pocket, and carry around with you, rather than this notion of music as this soundtrack to your life, in the background, that frames it in epic terms. These are two different mindsets. The three things I mentioned in that parentheses a paragraph ago kind of all work towards the latter effect. A lot of the music I like that Matthew doesn't- from Animal Collective, to Neutral Milk Hotel, to noise music, to The Shaggs- works to reframe the world in a way that makes the individual smaller in awe of the beauty of the world. A lot of the music Matthew likes that I can't stand is dance music that exists for a context to cast the listener as this superstar at the center of the world/dancefloor. He'd argue that the former, with its obscurity, pursues mediocrity. I would say that what the latter embraces and encourages is at best narcissistic and at worst sociopathic. It's worth noting that Stephen Malkmus and David Berman are close friends, and they probably share some personality traits. I kind of think that without the Berman elements of his personality, Malkmus would probably just be insufferably smug, forever the guy kind of half-ass improvising lyrics; never the Slanted And Enchanted version of "Here," just the Peel Session "I was dressed for Suck!" version.

I think of most of the Silver Jews fans I know as sort of carrying these songs around them, as well as David Berman's book of poetry. You kind of keep a quiet dignity about you, and don't project your voice in public like someone's shooting an indie movie of your life. There are so many similar traits to the people I know who like the Silver Jews that I have actually started to assume that people who I later learn have never actually even listened to them are fans: There's just a set of common traits.

It's almost kin to another type of fan of music/literature, would be someone who's really into Tom Waits and Charles Bukowski. That kind of person would probably be an upper-middle-class person who is kind of into slumming it, especially as it regards to drinking to excess. I like some of those people, too, but I also think it's funny when they're mocked.

But I don't think that Silver Jews people are like that. I think they value idiosyncracy too much to pursue such a narrow set of cliches. David Berman said, in another interview, that a fan told him he was disappointed to learn of his drug abuse because of how much of a cliche it was. But: I think the thing in common is a sort of suspicion of the upper class. Granted, this is absurdly common amongst a wide strata of bohemia. But here in this specific subset, even large cities are avoided. Being put in a position to struggle to survive is kind of an albatross. The Silver Jews didn't tour for upwards of a decade, and Berman just sort of shrugged off the idea of live performance by saying he's not the sort of person to be the center of attention in a large room. (A manifesto of sorts, stated by one who's lived it towards those uninterested, can be found in the song "How To Rent A Room.")

It's the sort of thing that might look like mediocrity but probably stems more from having made a list of simple pleasures and then deciding that those were more interesting than any other kind. (In the interview linked to, Berman talks about talking about records all the time.) And then, alternately, making a long list of things that were distasteful and then trying to avoid them completely. (He then talks about not wanting to write top ten lists fbecause of how easy and unsubstantial they are.)

This isn't to say that all Silver Jews songs are awesome- Actually, Mark Richardson's review of Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea sort of explains how the whole point of the Silver Jews is one that allows for there not to be wall-to-wall peaks; quiet dignity, remember? But even in the sort of dull moments there's a spirit that's there: "I'm going to shine out in the wild kindness and hold the world to its word."

(Tomorrow I am going to write a post about Flannery O'Connor and Nicholson Baker that will maybe serve to better elaborate these ideas I find useful and interesting in a way that's not about the Silver Jews.)

Pretty much every time I watch a Sergio Leone movie these days, my thoughts start off saying "Wow, this movie is awesome, and completely underrated, why don't people talk about this more?" They move on to "I just want to make movies for people's dads." By the end there has been enough things that didn't quite make sense that I just feel like they've gone on too long.

When I say "these days," I'm referring to my having just watched Duck, You Sucker- also known as A Fistful Of Dynamite and maybe also Once Upon A Time In A Revolution, as well as my fairly recent viewing of For A Few Dollars More.

It starts off amazing, maybe for the first thirty minutes, where characters are being introduced. I really like how much more vulgar and trashier it is than Leone's other movies in its opening moments: The opening shot almost mirrors The Wild Bunch, starting up with a shot of insects, but here they're urinated on. It stays pretty much great for another hour, approximately, until eventually the characters start to like each other and the revolution takes center stage. Not to say it's not interesting, or without its minutes during its last movement.

I feel the same way about Morricone's involvement, actually. Early on, there's all these amazing bits of music, with weird dissonances and rhythms. Eventually, though, a single, overly romantic, movie-score piece tends to dominate. It's probably the film's theme, which would seem to speak to a general problem of not knowing where its strengths lie.

The new Harmony Korine movie, Mister Lonely, is deeply mediocre. I don't have nearly as much to say about it as I have to say about The Dark Knight. The performances are all pretty bad. Werner Herzog, so awesome in Julien Donkey-Boy, is pretty mediocre here. Despite it being maybe more narrative and straight-forward than his other films, the endings are even more abrupt and arbitrary. Individual scenes don't stand out as distinct from the rest of the film, which seems kind of like a weakness.

When watching The Dark Knight, I came pretty quickly to the conclusion that it's a better movie than Batman Begins. The question is how it compares to the 1989 Tim Burton Batman movie, with its completely different tone. I compared Batman Begins to the 1989 film when it came out, too. There, you're talking about two films in terms of their success to start a franchise. Here, you're talking about two films about the same characters, and all the things those characters represent, responding to each other.

There's this thing, though, with the Christopher Nolan films- and I guess most of the superhero movies of the twenty-first century- of being really invested in the idea of gravitas, of importance. Real-world parallels. This, as well as the fact that the Burton movie really isn't that old, really seems to cast the action of The Dark Knight in these kind of mythic terms. And The Dark Knight works really hard to establish the conflict/relationship between these two figures.

There's something to the notion, I think, of these superhero comics as the closest America comes to a myth. The fact that these stories then become retold not out of any oral tradition but out of capitalism and exploitation of copyrights, and that they only find resonance after the fact, with the creators just sort of trying to make a buck on a trend- I find that completely American, in a really awesome way.

One of the things about the 1989 film and the 2008 film is how both are really of their time. Saying you prefer one to the other seems like it betrays biases just as surely as it misses the point. Still: The fact that the 1989 version had things like brightly colored vats of chemicals really appeals to me. It feels like comic books, kind of garish and retarded, with limited color palettes. The way that the 2008 version talks about terrorism- It's not problematic. It still allows for weird garish deathtraps and whatnot, convoluted moral decisions and whatnot, which is just as much a part of all the superhero comics. (Although- how weird is it that the poster image, depicting the side of a building on fire in the shape of a bat, does not happen at all?) It also allows for more property damage- that's the nature of a blockbuster film in 2008, as opposed to 1989.

But it's awesome. I love how huge The Dark Knight is, how chaotic it gets, the scope of the action scenes. The relentlessness to it, how somehow we're all so cynical or imagery-saturated that the tone feels like a horror movie, in how you wait for the other shoe to drop in every scene that lasts long enough for a normal interaction to play out. I love how it feels like a western, at the same time the Harvey Dent story feels like greek tragedy.

Although the ending's kind of bad, with its Two-Face stuff that just feels like a watered-down version of the Joker stuff, rather than the natural conclusion to a character arc, or even an understanding of the character as laid out in various other media.

What's weird, though, is how much it actually seems like a movie- especially when taking westerns into account. At the same time, the ending pretty explicitly seems to be setting up a sequel, with a new status quo, even as the rest of the movie- in working REALLY WELL as a movie, in terms of having themes and a point- works against a sequel even making sense of the world they've established- how do you top a conflict between chaos and social order?.I don't remember how the 1989 movie ends, although I feel pretty certain it wasn't in "stay tuned for THE PENGUIN" fashion.

In both movies, the Joker is the more interesting performance, and sort of what the tone of the movie revolves around, with the Batman figure being more stoic, and thus less interesting. There's no Prince songs in 2008, and no joy-buzzers that burn off flesh. Instead, there's knives, and a mannerism of flicking out the tongue when speaking. I prefer the 1989 version, but that's because of the type of person I am, my age, etc. Heath Ledger, like the movie he dominates, is fun and compelling to watch throughout. When his storyline's done, the movie takes a downturn.

It's weird that the slogan/recurring phrase for The Dark Knight is "Why so serious?" and it tries to play that as a threat, almost as a defense mechanism when that really is the question you want to ask the movie about its tone if you're someone who preferred the 1989 version. "Why so serious, Christopher Nolan?" And then Christopher Nolan thinks that if someone is going to make him smile, it will be by taking a knife to the sides of their face. This is the difference between the guy who made Insomnia and the guy who made Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. I guess I should just be thankful that the Darren Aronofksy version was never made.

Oh yeah: The Dark Knight had all these crazy bits of things exploding that I was really into, and laughed out loud in excited glee at. It also had bits that didn't really make sense and felt like plot holes.

Gary Panter, interviewing Philip K. Dick shortly before VALIS came out.

I really liked this bit from a Wall Street Journal interview with Lil' Wayne:

Wall Street Journal: How do you keep track of your ideas? Do you have a notebook of rhymes waiting for music?
Lil Wayne: I don't write my raps. I don't have time to put writing down on paper. If I did, I'd be a lot more dangerous.

Awesome.

So, the other night, Extreme Animals and Fortress Of Amplitude played a show I set up here in Olympia. It was pretty cool, those guys are very nice, etc. It was great. I'm not saying this up-front because I'm about to contradict it, just as my way of saying this isn't what the post is about.

Sometimes I try to look out at all the things that seem current to me, or that feel like the future, and I try to view them all as one kind of unified field. Essentially, I am looking at all of the things I like, and then I project myself onto the universe, as my way of saying, okay, I get all this.

David Wightman of Fortress of Amplitude is totally into metal and totally also playing rave music, while also apparently writing classical music for orchestras. And making CD-Rs of cheerleading music and going to grad school. He is 100% knowing what he's doing, and doing it all with total sincerity. It's kind of amazing. Jacob, the other guy in Extreme Animals, is also totally busy with a bunch of different projects but it seems easier to contextualize him and the things he's doing if that's the sort of thing you're into- you can make all the paintings and the videos and the music fit into a "Paper Rad aesthetic," rather than just being "the products of a dude with a restless, creative, mind." Maybe these Extreme Animals tours- separate from Paper Rad tours- work to recalibrate people's perceptions, to say "this is not the thing you are stealing graphic design ideas from. These are people who know exactly what they're doing. You do not know what they are doing, not really, not completely, not enough for you to try to emulate or write a paper about. The best thing you can do is get to know exactly what the hell it is you yourself are doing."

And then when they left I got a Donald Barthelme book in the mail and tried to look for clues there, you know, to try to work out what it is I'm doing, since these dudes have just connected the dots between technical metal, raves, and the internet.

I am a little bit in love with Carla Bozulich right now. I'm listening to the record that interview was ostensibly promoting. All over the place, frequently intense, occastionally unhinged. Demented in the best way, going for it in a way I could connect to Linda Sharrock or Lexie Mountain. I also like this bit from a review of an older record at the same website: "It sounds like what Flannery O'Connor would listen to before killing one of her characters. I listen to it all the fucking time." I'm listening to it for the first time, no new habits yet, but this is pretty good. Music that can control weather, that can split the sky open and summon torrential downpours.

The lost footage from Fritz Lang's Metropolis being found in Argentina is one of those things that completely astounds me. In the early 1980s, a completed version of Carl Dreyer's The Passion Of Joan Of Arc was found in a Norwegian mental hospital, after being thought lost. I don't know how this Metropolis footage holds up, either in terms of print quality or in the story being told, but the Dreyer example (in its restored form, probably my favorite silent film, beating out Murnau's Sunrise) gives me hope.

It all stands as a testament to the resilience of analog recording media.

Even though we'll probably never see the original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles' vaults still promise riches I hope to see unearthed before I die.

Hold on to me tightly as if I knew the way.

I put in Pavement's Westing (By Musket and Sextant) the other day, and it's a great record. It sort of has this thing in line with the up-to-Wild-Love Smog records: This way noise is integrated with pop songs in a way that's completely separate from the shoegaze records at the time. It's a lot uglier. the sexuality of shoegaze is lost in favor of self-loathing and anxiety. Stick your fingers in my mouth, pull my lips back and watch me smile.

That band Times New Viking would almost be mining this aesthetic, but the things I've heard from them seemed a lot more shallow and facile: More like garage rock.

The Smog record Julius Caesar would also exemplify this style, just bummed out as hell and expressing it through dissonance. There's violin lines that slash at themselves but still play melodies, catchiness persists through these rudimentary rhythms. Everything is chosen to sound fucked up but still be musical, as isolated elements, and then they're put together.

Is this what Royal Trux sounds like? They were all on Drag City around the same time.

I spent the past weekend taking in the Olympia Experimental Music Festival. It was one half inspiring to one half dispiriting. The issue comes in with the use of the word "experimental" and then seeing a lot of noise, or improv, or something with a visual score.

There was a woman performing under the name Knot Pine Box, who it seemed like a lot of people didn't like, but I enjoyed how her first song ended with the refrain "What if it's already been done?" because that seemed like a question not everyone else was asking. Not like it should be, necessarily, I can see it being a hindrance, if you were really concerned about not repeating anyone so much you never attempted anything.

Anyway: At its best, it seemed like people were doing exactly what they wanted to be doing. At its worst, it was like people were doing what was expected of them after a lifetime of being told they were unique and special. The experimental film showing was pretty bad about this kind of thing too. There's this thing that happens where the avant-garde gets absorbed into the academy, and then it's no longer the future, it's just this sad and dead little tributary. I have started to hear talk of "noise conferences" and noise as a course of study at art schools. I went to a school that had its writing programs largely concerned with language poetry and its film program concerned with autobiographical documentaries. I can imagine people being really psyched on going to noise school, but I can't help but see the spectre of grim death in the offing.

I can imagine the same thing happening with art comics as well, sort of concurrent with any kind of comics studies. The latter is totally a valid thing, a way of teaching the visual language. But I can also definitely imagine weird self-congratulation happening. You know: I think noise studies is a silly thing, and John Cage disciples are stupid, but the idea of teaching music theory is super-valid, and with that knowledge students should be able to do whatever they wish. (Maybe comics will avoid this academic maundering if, when talking about the school of thought that originates with Gary Panter, the Rozz-Tox manifesto is disseminated widely. But maybe it's the existence of that manifesto that is what leads to Jimbo not being taught as widely as Maus.)

I was saying to people at the experimental film screening that, while I've noticed a lot of students just referring to their work as experimental after it failed at its original intent, the people I'm friends with just refer to actual forward-thinking things as "next-level," rather than experimental. It's hard to view a lot of the stuff at the experimental music festival as "next-level," honestly, but at least a lot of it was sincere and enjoyable.

The new Pixar movie, Wall-E, is quite an achievement. It's the best film to come out of that production house yet, I would say: A mixture of 2001 and Idiocracy for kids. A love story between two robots, who are really only gendered by their abbreviations. Even then, Wall-E is this very gentle creature who's obsessed with a broadway musical, while the figure coded as being female blasts everything with a laser.

There are really so many things I liked about the movie: The human throwaway characters connected by accident when machinery malfunctions. The way sets were clearly different from each other, but uniquely mindblowing in their different color palettes. The way the point of the main character was to create new livable structures out of garbage.

Even the opening short was good: Embracing this sort of Merry Melodies comic anarchy for a procession of gags in a way I wouldn't associate with Pixar, due to Pixar's Disney association. The way that chaos was sort of greeted as a liberating force in the film itself.

And then the set pieces, oh my god: the dance sequence in outer space, and the use of nondiagetic dialogue to sort of reinforce that. Then, a hundred small moments. The damaged circuit boards. "Cupcake in a cup." Babies isolated from insulated parents.

Jeff Garlin! The music from 2001! Alternately: The large periods of time that would pass without dialogue!

And sure: I'm able to recognize and become distanced by moments of "How are they talking in space?" But I was also able to rationalize around these things: Maybe they can't actually hear each other, and what we're hearing is just what the characters are saying into the void.

This might actually be my favorite movie of the year thus far. We'll see what happens if Synecdoche, New York comes out, but for now: Wow, that was awesome.

I've been trying to teach myself how to write plots by reading genre fiction. It hadn't really been working out- I have problems making it through these books, due to the way they read not having as much of an emphasis on voice as what I usually read. Alternately, the plots have been feeling kind of invisible, which seems like the whole goal of good writing, that they feel as organic as possible even as they move towards their ending.

With Philip K. Dick's Ubik, though, you can kind of see the strings. It's a well-regarded book in his oeuvre, but it has the feeling of being made up as it was being written, kind of moving in distinct movements and acts. It creates tension by its gear-shifts into different territory in this way that feels hacked-out at its core, like the secret is just "Okay come up with some bullshit, and then come up with some more." It's just some pretty good bullshit.

I paid money for the new Girl Talk record, due to my fondness for Unstoppable and Night Ripper, even though I knew I probably wouldn't like it, what with the guy moving more in this DJ direction away from glitched-out songs. It's pretty dire. The idea of having the physical object around my house bums me out. It is really not transformative. 2008 has been a pretty disappointing year for music.

I do like the idea of paying an undetermined amount for music, but the fact that you're guessing how much the music is worth before you hear it is probably going to be more damaging to unexperienced artists in the future- It benefits people only after they've actually made a good record, and I get the impression that some musicians have no real way of knowing which of their records is better than others besides sales. (Note: This idea is just based on my telling the guy from Out Hud that their second record was really bad while their first record was pretty good, and him being really surprised that was a thing that people thought.) But seriously- the idea of owning music is you can listen to it whenever, but there are some things that you hear once and know you will probably never really care about it and can get everything out of it in three listens.

It seems like Black Pus, Thee Oh Sees, and Excepter are the only people who came out with records this year that were "breakthrough" records, that were actively better than what had come before, rather than just kind of disappointing. This is because those people all come from crazy noise backgrounds, and just sort of calmed down enough to put in more melody and song structure (although Excepter's Alternation was pretty good for this a few years ago), which is different from some indie rock band that's been around for over a decade who couldn't be bothered to write decent songs this go-round. (I am talking about the new Breeders and Silver Jews records, although probably also other things that I've forgotten about because I took them off my hard drive already.) I also like the James Pants record from Stones Throw, which is maybe kind of comparable to Girl Talk, but more deserving of your money.

This weekend, I graduated from college, and my mom came into town and stayed for three days. After she left, a copy of Dash Shaw's Bottomless Belly Button arrived in the mail. This seemed appropriate, due to the book's nature as a family drama, but I'm also reminded that it was the first book the artist completed following his graduation from New York's School Of Visual Art. It's a lot more mature than his last book, The Mother's Mouth, although still displaying some little tics and approaches that are completely jettisoned from his current webcomic Bodyworld. (i.e. self-conscious framing devices that act as a narrator)

Bottomless Belly Button reminds me of the last two Noah Baumbach movies, only improved by their shift to comics. The strength that movies have, of the distinct presences of actors, has been removed, and replaced with this kind of complicated cartoon set of symbols, which makes it feel less slight, and more epic and resonant. There's also a more detailed fictional world at work than you'd see in a typical indie family drama.

Anyway, it's awesome. It might not be the best comic of the year (although I don't think I've read a better one), but this will probably be Dash Shaw's year, based partly on this work he created fresh out of college, which strikes me as an inspiring thought.

The Double Life Of Veronique was the movie I heard about from Kieslowski fans back when I was watching the Three Colors trilogy and it was not on DVD. It is now, though, and it's great: Possessed of a color palette of red, yellow, and green that completely puzzles me how it was created, and seeming powered by its images: Irene Jacob singing as it starts to rain on her face, or handling a marionette designed to look like her, to name two prominent examples. Leaving aside any ideas of subject matter, it just seems so much more cinematic than something like White, or at least my memory of that film, which seems more plot-oriented and almost like a play or a short story. This isn't to say the other films I saw a few years ago are bad, just that this was better. I'm sure this isn't really insightful or deviating from common opinion at all, just adding my voice to the chorus, writing it down for the sake of my own memory.

This weekend, in New York, there's a comics festival going on called MOCCA. But here in Olympia, there was the Olympia Comics Festival, largely attended by locals. I imagine that, in New York, thes belle of the ball was probably the publisher I already talk too much about, Picturebox, with their debuting comics by Michel Gondry, and having him sign it alongside his son selling a minicomic. This was ordered from the internet.

In Olympia, I was blown away by the Sparkplug table, manned by Elijah Brubaker, who's drawing a comics biography of Wilhelm Reich. Sparkplug isn't really the best publisher- a lot of their stuff seems a little dull to me. But at their table they were selling all sorts of stuff, repping for other people- There were books on hand from Bodega Distribution, and minicomics by Tom Kaczynski and Matt Furie, and a lot of gorgeous stuff from New York's Partyka collective. They also had Anke Feuchtenberger books from the Belgian publisher Bries that I saw too late. (I should've bought a copy of W The Whore instead of Service Industry and issue 4 of Reich.) Anke is a German woman whose stuff looks like a way better Julie Doucet, filled with all this cryptic imagery. The Partyka stuff was what was most impressive to me, looking around the table. Lots of hand-sewn bindings, silkscreened covers and interiors, etc. It all looked amazing, and word from the internet is that the comics are pretty good too. I picked up a book called See Saw by Sara Edward-Corbett, which had totally lavish handmade packaging to collect strips from the New York Press about four elementary school kids. A few years ago, I talked about Bill Watterson's observation that, after so many years of comics about children, he thought a strip drawn by a woman, about a little girl, could be great. I was talking about how that seemed likely to actually exist at some point in the future, with there seeming to be more women reading and making comics. (I guess Lynda Barry could be said to be doing what Watterson was talking about, actually.) See Saw felt like another variation on that idea, filtered through this lens of handcraft that seemed to appeal to a lot of the women at the show I talked to. I walked away from the show even more psyched about comics, their weird potential, how they're currently exploding into a million different directions, because this seemed like the first time I've really been confronted with a large amount of beautiful handmade things, with an appeal separate from that of a mass-printed book. It probably would've been better if the cartoonists who'd actually done stuff like that had been present, for a greater feeling of the intimacy of exchange, but maybe it also would've been sadder, because it didn't seem like there was a lot of money changing hands. (Note: Most people doing comics based out of Olympia are doing really dull work, both in terms of presentation and subject matter.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This story is amazing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm sure I've talked about this before.

There is a scene that ends the documentary The Cruise, where Speed Levitch is standing in front of a door, pontificating. The door is labeled "Emergency Exit Only- Alarm Will Sound." It leads to the roof, or some kind of overlook. Speed is explaining how this sort of sign, this sort of wiring, is the opposite of "the cruise" as he defines it- being able to go wherever, being free. Sometimes these doors aren't alarmed at all, it's an intimidation tactic. You open it, and nothing happens. Although sometimes it's a silent alarm, and the police accost you within minutes.

He opens the door. No alarm goes off. He opens it wider, and because of the f-stop on the camera being for indoors, the frame fills with light and overexposure, and that's how the film ends.

It is an amazing moment of film-poetry, and it seems to capture an obscure feeling perfectly, through metaphor.

There are so many films being made, so much of everything being made. Sometimes it is worth it for when something like that happens, this weird metaphor added to the language, like the Gupta Empire coming up with the idea of zero. You know, that's why we have empires, or cameras and film stock.

Paper Rad news: That video Problem Solvers is amazing. Three segments, all with songs, all with lyrics that are hard to discern due to mixing, masterful use of Flash, very funny jokes. Also, apparently Wyld Fyle (the commerce-minded group of Jacob Ciocci, Ben Jones, and E-Rock) are doing a commercial for Corn Pops. And Extreme Animals did a cover of Archers Of Loaf's "Web In Front" at South By Southwest, that I would very much like to hear.

Newspaper news: The Stranger is a much better written paper than The Portland Mercury, with which it shares a design sense and probable owners. Portland is a better city than Seattle in almost all ways, but seems weirdly car-choked compared to most other cities in a way that kind of put me off.

Portland news: I went there to see the Boredoms and slept on sidebar-linked-blogger/shit-talker extraordinaire Ben Parrish's floor.

Music reviews: The new Silver Jews record is silly, although I like the parts where Cassie sings. Bands are letting me down in 2008!

Movie reviews: I started watching O Lucky Man!, the follow-up to If..., directed by Lindsay Anderson and starring Malcolm McDowell. So far, so good. It's tonally closer to The Ruling Class than If..., at least so far. Partly this is because of the professionalism of its construction.

I just learned that one of my favorite books, John Barth's End Of The Road, was adapted into a movie starring Stacy Keach and James Earl Jones. It doesn't look good, per se, but there it is.

Sometimes I will get two bands confused with each other, before hearing either one. For example: The Afghan Whigs and Archers Of Loaf were the same band to me back in 2003, and when I was in middle school, Blur and Rush were indistinguishable. The most recent confusion for me to correct were the bands Ecstatic Sunshine and Awesome Color. Awesome Color are on the record label Ecstatic Peace, which is a fine label, but as I learned when they opened for Dinosaur Jr., Awesome Color are kind of terrible. The difference between Ecstatic Sunshine and Awesome Color is that the former are pretty, with volume kind of on the fringes of the sound in a way I know will dominate live, but Awesome Color are just kind of dumb.

Ecstatic Peace are from Baltimore and are signed to Carpark, kind of like Beach House and Dan Deacon. All these acts use different instrumentation from each other, but all seem kind of pretty, and have some kind of relation to volume. Even Beach House, who are totally quiet and gentle, have organ used as this blanket in this way that's like early nineties shoegaze. So far Ecstatic Sunshine doesn't seem quite as great as the others but I've just heard a few songs so far. (Also I think they're instrumental. They kind of have that "instruments playing themselves" feeling, but more stripped down than when you hear a bunch of musicians jamming out.)

This is probably worth another post of its own, but I just watched three movies starring Warren Oates in close proximity to each other. He is good in all of them, and all are pretty good. These movies were Two-Lane Blacktop, Cockfigher, and Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia.

Dash Shaw's Bodyworld webcomic is totally great.

So's the end of this interview with Andrew Earles, for completely different reasons. Edit to emphasize: Just the end, where the interviewer asks Earles to define a hipster on. The reviewer betrays his not really having his own thoughts and opinions in favor of received knowledge and it's great.

Persepolis isn't so good. I am referring to the movie, having not read the comic. I thought about reading it, though, when it came out a couple years ago, and was generally acclaimed across the board. In the time since I've started to feel like the critics I like reading didn't really like it. Marjane Satrapi did other comics, which seemed like they were largely ignored.

I don't think I've read a big bashing of the book though, which does seem to be what the public is crying out for.

I walked out of the movie, thinking of the vague criticisms that haven't been quite formulated into essay form by other people. I left not because it was egregiously offensive, but because I felt like I "got" it. Where it was going, that there was nothing to get. The history happens in the background, and is never really presented in a way that's actually useful- knowing that world events effect some people is probably not as politically useful as knowing why the things are happening. The actual happenings are all in the background. What's in focus is this ordinary girl. This is what some people think is amazing, this is what works for people. But even her life isn't that much in focus, in terms of actually giving you insight to it. Was any of it in focus? It all seemed a blur, of signifiers of "ordinary girl"- western pop culture- and signifiers of Iran- revolution and the Shah. But why were things happening? The most vivid moments don't seem like they're coming from anywhere. Which kind makes them less than vivid.

I keep on thinking of The Wire, which is wrapping up now, and presents such a view of the way people effect systems while still being a part of them, and doesn't depict any of them as evil, just sort of at odds with each other. It gives you a great deal of insight into how political systems and bureaucracies work, by depicting them as made up of people, and then showing the consequences of people's actions. It's in deep focus. There, things that happen seem "real" in a way that they don't at all in Persepolis.

Also, Persepolis- while probably looking better as animation than it did as a comic- doesn't look so great. It has an alright style- an interesting one, that does the job (I guess- in a lot of ways, another style could convey more about character, or feeling, or information about Iran or whatever virtues the work's supposed to have that I didn't really pick up) but there's never a dynamic composition. There's a lot of cartoonists whose style doesn't really work for me and seems generic but who are masters of body language or balancing an image. Yeah- not a lot of body language in this one. These are the things that actually convey things graphically, like character, rather than just vague events. It's the same thing- not a real eye for detail, things aren't in focus. Things aren't felt. So I walked out early, maybe missing some stuff, but kind of convinced I wouldn't due to the nature of autobiography.

(Huh, Neko Case is covering The Train From Kansas City in audio form in the other room. I didn't know she did that.)

I liked The Savages, though, with its Chris Ware poster, and its single allusion to the work of Lynda Barry, and its eye for real things. It's probably also somewhat autobiographical, but with an eye towards details, and with a plot controlled by its characters. The detail about the toes curling up, Laura Linney surprised someone would want to read an unproduced play- and the way Philip Seymour Hoffman never offered- a student asks "what's the difference between narrative and plot." It's not the most visually stylized thing, but then, it's not animated, and has actors to do the work of conveying feeling with body language. There's even sight gags! This is Tamara Jenkins' follow-up to Slums Of Beverly Hills, a movie that was essentially okay, and this is better than, while still not being completely awesome. Who knows what of it I will remember months from now? (Probably Philp Bosco writing "prick" on the wall.) Sure, other things- the use of prescription drugs, the bad sex- will fade into other movies that had a better eye for detail, or that I just saw first, but still, it's got scenes other than that- where the subject matter is, with the decision to put the father in a nursing home- all of that works, and is well-observed, and can be recalled easier than I can recall the history of Iran as depicted in Persepolis.

Sometimes I read news that makes me go "What the fuck? No fucking way, no fucking way!" like the retard I am but keep hidden. The news of David Fincher directing an adaptation of Charles Burns' Black Hole is the latest thing to do this, even with a crazy election going on. That could actually work really well.

Oh also: I like this band High Places. I wonder if having an album that's actually produced will ruin them or make them better- it seems like it could go either way.

I saw some movies recently:

Jodorowsky's The Rainbow Thief is really normal, despite the title seemingly implying a whole movie that never takes place. It's really light compared with something like Santa Sangre. It's spiritual tones- "money isn't important" are the sort of thing seen in other movies, but here filtered through vague allusions to alchemy and somehow more convincing for Jodorowsky's well-established kook credentials.

Nights Of Cabiria has this one absolutely amazing scene involving hypnosis. The majority of the movie still feels cynical, even if that's not its intent- it only seems to be able to throw off the shackles for a brief period of time.

WR: Mysteries Of The Organism starts off with some fascinating documentary footage of Wilhelm Reich's followers and townsfolk, and then everything else is kind of dull, from the narrative stuff in Yugoslavia to the documentary footage of people just trying to be sexually liberated. The ten to fifteen minutes of documentary footage is interesting. So's the DVD menu. Elijah Brubaker's Reich comic is pretty good so far though. (Oh wait, I guess three issues have been printed. When I say "good so far" I'm talking about the first issue, which is the only one to be shipped to stores thus far.) I prefer the free expressiveness of the art to the restraint shown in Chester Brown's Louis Riel, although there's some stylistic choices that seems not so well-done.

David Lynch's On The Air is great! I started watching in on VHS, and have so far seen the three episodes that actually aired.

Every episode just leads to this slapstick everything-goes-wrong-but-it's-all-right finale. There's stupid sound effects all over the place, and things repeat in each episode that aren't quite gags, but are just weirdness. Miguel Ferrer is a really good actor. There's also bits of extended sexual innuendo of the type that annoyed me on Arrested Development. Holy shit, was this show ahead of its time! Although also while looking back in time- there's all kinds of corniness and one character is your standard "foreigner" caricature.

David Lynch just directed the pilot, but like with Twin Peaks, his style hangs over the episodes he didn't direct. It's kind of the opposite of what you'd expect from him- a slapstick comedy- but the way in which he's present totally works and is amazing.

I'm not bemoaning the loss of it from the airwaves or anything, because part of the reason I like it is because it's clear (ABUNDANTLY clear) why it would be a failure, but I would bet money it was funnier than anything on ABC at the time, or since. It's completely the opposite of The Simpsons or Seinfeld- probably the only examples of funny things at the time- partly because of how assured it is in its corniness and lack of hipness. Which is mainly why it's so great. I laughed really hard at this show, but it's funny on a number of different levels.

It seems like this great companion piece to 30 Rock, actually, in that its that show's complete opposite.

An ongoing list of movies that aren't available on Netflix for one reason or another, that I have either seen and am now recommending, or and hoping to encounter at the video store the next time I go to look for rentals, which will be Monday. This doesn't count things that were never released, like the Timothy Carey movie The World's Greatest Sinner, which I do hope to see at some point. (I'll recommend to people watching the Stanley Kubrick movie The Killing, and trying to pay attention to the character Timothy Carey plays, especially if you don't know who he is- Just watch that movie looking for anyone who might be a great character actor and you'll have fun. That movie's great!) I also won't list things that are kind of recent or that rumor has as coming out shortly that can be saved on Netflix. I'll mention things that are available to be saved on Netflix if the movie in question is really old and more likely to be found on video.

Brewster McCloud: I have seen this. It's great. Bud Cort stars in Robert Altman's favorite movie that he directed- it feels like it influenced Wes Anderson way more than Harold And Maude, or any of the other movies Robert Altman directed that I've seen, but with this kind of fractured editing and a freewheeling style that's completely at odds with the more controlled nature of some of those other things.

A Matter Of Life And Death: This is Sammy Harkham's favorite movie, and even though he's not the greatest cartoonist, that guy's proven his taste. This is apparently in the upper-tier of Powell And Pressburger films. Black Narcissus is amazing, as is Peeping Tom, and to a lesser extent The Red Shoes. The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp is good enough, and I haven't seen any of his other movies. I really want to see this.

Tampopo: This isn't available in a region one DVD. I tried to watch it on DVD on a player that couldn't handle it. The people I was going to watch it with have seemingly since seen it, presumably on VHS, and loved it. I've had it talked up to me quite a bit.

WR: Mysteries Of The Organism. This is on DVD! Criterion put it out this Summer! Netflix doesn't have it, although they have the director's follow-up, Sweet Movie, which is really filthy and I was totally into it. This is a kind of fractured-collage movie about Wilhelm Reich, and I guess also the political state of Yugoslavia in 1968? Anyway. The first issue of Reich, the comic book autobiography of Wilhelm Reich drawn by a dude who used to live in Olympia, is waiting for me to be purchased at the comic store the same day I rent this movie. The plans to build an orgone accumulator are delayed for the time being but will maybe start up again after that day.

Time Masters- Bryan Fordney said this was amazing and posted some screen grabs. I didn't look into it until now, when I found out it was the same director as Fantastic Planet, and has designs by Moebius! Dude!

On The Air and Hotel Room- the TV shows David Lynch around the same time as Twin Peaks. These actually are at the Olympia video store, unless they've been stolen since three years ago. If they're on VHS here, they might also be where you are.

The Rainbow Thief and Santa Sangre- I've seen the latter. It's pretty restrained and normal for Jodorowsky, although it has this sort of horror-movie vibe, and maybe the misogyny that people see in his comics but I don't get from The Holy Mountain at all. The Rainbow Thief stars Peter O'Toole, who you may know from the movie The Ruling Class, and Christopher Lee, who you may know from the movie The Wicker Man, if all you know about cinema is early seventies British-psychedelia films, which I think would be a totally fine thing for that to be all you knew. I really like the idea of them in a Jodorowsky movie. I also like the idea of just watching another Jodorowsky movie, actually. These are the last two movies he directed, in 1990 and 1988, respectively. Might as well bring up Tusk as well, from 1980, which might not be as good but I would probably watch.

Possession: Another movie recommended by Sammy Harkham! I don't know if people read that Family blog I link to, but I sure as shit do. This was brought to his attention by people who work at a famously great video store in Los Angeles. I bet they have this movie available. Note: They also screened it on film at the Silent Movie Theatre.

Phase IV: Another thing brought up on the Family blog. Saul Bass made a movie! It's a science fiction movie about ants! There's a lot of footage of ants running around because the plot sort of stops mattering to the film at a certain point! There's another movie with the same title starring Dean Cain that Netflix knows about but is probably terrible!

A Thousand Clowns: This used to be available on Netflix as a Play Now thing you could stream on your computer, but this laptop doesn't have the hard drive space for that. This is Jesse Thorn's favorite movie, he of The Sound Of Young America radio program that I also link to from the blog sidebar. Apparently it has both a man-child and a child-man as characters! I really want to see this.

Spirits Of The Dead: This is a horror anthology collection of three films, including one directed by Federico Fellini. I heard about this from that Eli Roth AV Club feature where he programmed a theoretical film festival. Apparently the other two movies aren't so great, but the Fellini one is amazing.

Hellzapoppin!: Alex Tripp had this shown to him in class once. Apparently it stars this old comedy duo, but this movie is really weird and plays with the form of cinema and cliches and whathaveyou. Alex loved it, and that guy is basically me when it comes to movie tastes.

The Landlord: Hal Ashby's first movie. Apparently kind of legendary in black cinema circles, I think? I hope to see it at some point. Maybe not so pressing as the others, but still.

Insignificance: Nicolas Roeg's career kind of fell apart after making a bunch of crappy movies, but this has kind of an interesting premise and a Jim O'Rourke album named after it. Jim O'Rourke's favorite movie, apparently, is Performance, by the way. This movie has no rock stars, but Gary Busey plays Joe DiMaggio.

Also it seems possible I'll end up renting Two-Lane Blacktop from the video store because Netflix has it as having a "very long wait." I'm not even sure I'll like that movie. I hope I like it enough to make it seem imperative that I see Cockfighter right away, because I like that that movie exists, but right now it seems like I will see it years from now because of how many other things I would rather see before that. (Apparently there's a scene in that movie where a dude presents the head of a rooster he bit off to his beloved as a gesture of his affection. Cinemaaaaa!)

The first part of this post is about Olympia:

My mom, who lives in the New Jersey suburbs, has talked to me about Olympia and its whiteness, its lack of urbanity. I tried to defend it to her, because she hasn't really spent any time here, and only knows what I tell her about it. I kind of defended it in bad terms, which I'll now redefine. Olympia, despite its lack of any real minority population, still has this culture that my mom and a lot of people like her romanticize and associate with different races, that's a lot "warmer" and more "wild" and "open" than people's traditional experiences with their neighbors. Someone at the Capitol Theater told me, that after they'd introduced me to someone and I was a huge weirdo and then ran off, that the person I was introduced to said "That's what I like about the Capitol Theater. People here are so different than what I'm used to." At the time I was just confused, but then I realized the thing how I was being viewed. That's the Olympia I live in, though.

The thing is, because it's done by white people, it's more easily accepted and integrated, dealt with. Right now, I believe, the single most popular record in the country is the soundtrack to Juno, composed largely by Olympia resident Kimya Dawson. I have nothing against Kimya Dawson at all. I am generally wary of things that are that embraceable, for reasons that have nothing to do with the thing being embraced: They can't help being lovable.

Oh right, that's a thing I wanted to bring up, that apparently there was, like, a half-a-million-dollar offer to her to write a theme for Wal-Mart? She turned it down.

I look around Olympia and see a place being developed in weird ways from what it was when I moved here, five years ago. Five years ago means I am in no ways from here. In all likelihood, the people moving into these condos popping up have a greater claim to this area than I do, as they're probably from neighboring towns I've never been to. Olympia's a safe place, with a lot less meth use than those places, and probably better schools. Incidents of violence are rare.

That story I told of being forced into a fight by some drunk out-of-towners the other week was notable for its oddity. The only thing that might keep property values down is the stupid anarchist/activist graffiti that we all suspect is being done by rich college kids who have recently moved to town. They're all stupid, but fuck it, god bless them for being unpleasant.

Still, areas filled of junk cars and old greenhouses are all getting cleaned up to make way for town homes and condos. I can't blame it on the pleasantness. I can't even call it gentrification yet.

But I do feel there's a thing out there in the mass culture that I find kind of offputting, encroaching upon some kind of graveyard. It seems possible it'll do good things- please god let it get Obama elected- (I'm sure that comes out of left field completely) but it is, in itself, its own blandness. Obama is nowhere near as bland as the last two Democratic nominees for President, as a person, but I think I'm just put off by the general mechanism that sways the masses.

The second part of this post is about movies and comics and music and shit.

This new mainstream would need to lead to a new "________" (multiple choice fill in the blank for a series of synonyms, with a) being something like "independent sphere" b) "underground" c) "counterculture") that could travel farther. The whole soft indie comedy is starting to feel at this point like Pulp Fiction-inspired neonoirs started to feel after Memento came out. (I like Memento, I'm citing it as a last hurrah.) I'm imagining a psychedelia that's vaguely informed by stuff like The Holy Mountain and the recently viewed Sweet Movie, only this time with satire that's actually funny. I saw Daisies after an interview in Arthur with Jimmy Joe Roche promoting Ultimate Reality. Ultimate Reality isn't quite the sort of the thing I'm talking about, but it's on the right track. It might vaguely feel like a poor man's Paper Rad, rather than an offshoot of its more narrative directons. (Man, that complete Cold Heat book can't come out soon enough. That kind of stuff might be exactly what I'm talking about. Only I imagine a movie instead of a comic, due to cinema's ability to integrate myriad parts to form an overwhelming whole and thus be accessible and communicative.) I talk about this sort of stuff all the time on this blog.

In addition to that stuff, I really like the movies made by Powell And Pressburger, The Archers. I just saw The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp- I'd tried to watch it before and couldn't make it through it, but that movie's pretty good. I was reading this thing about their mission statement, their list of thoughts- one was that a filmmaker needs to a be a year ahead of not just his peers, but the general trends, because a film takes a year to make. So, there's that.

I talked about Chameleon Street and the idea of a black Orson Welles. It turns out that some people think of The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp as a British Citizen Kane. Which it is nowhere near as good as, but: People talked about There Will Be Blood as being like Citizen Kane in terms of its American-ness, its story of capitalism sort of creating and destroying a man. The Powell and Pressburger film should probably be viewed as a British alternative in terms of not being about capitalism at all, so much as it is about manners and gentlemanly decorum falling out of favor as time goes on. Which means its not as interesting. (Meanwhile, A Matter Of Life And Death is called the British Wizard Of Oz and is apparently Sammy Harkham's favorite film, and is completely unavailable in the U.S. on DVD.)

As someone who doesn't care about Bob Dylan at all, I'm Not There just made me want to see Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid. This isn't to say it's bad: It's a fine movie, but it's at its best when its able to depict something other than Bob Dylan saying cryptic things in interviews and press conferences, which is approximately a third of the film- Essentially, that's all Ben Whishaw's depiction does.

I don't intend to post everytime I receive a compliment, but oh man. This is from my friend Jamie, who is currently a member of the band World History, who you should see while she's still in the band. About my movie, she said, in an e-mail, that it "reminded me of a harmony korine film, but with a lot more substance. and without the artsy arrogance. or chloe sevigny. i hate chloe sevigny." Thanks Jamie! (For future reference, I will only post compliments of me that include insults of other people. I might also just post any insult of other people that I am told I can post.) Jamie is also the only person to have paid for a DVD, as all other copies have been given away for free. She gets a thousand gold stars. If anyone wants a copy of that movie, "The Reason Why Our World Is Coming To An End," or the DVD I burned today, where I tell a version of "the aristocrats" for twenty minutes that I recorded in early 2006, after a winner of the contest to be a DVD extra was already announced, but before I learned that submissions had to be under ten minutes, contact me.