This weekend, in Baltimore, there was a festival of ten-minute plays. There were around twelve plays, around that length, for a bill of entertainment running around two hours. The work was, on the whole, pretty strong, with only one or two pieces that had one anticipating the end to their brief running time. A lot of people I don't associate with strong work really excelled, doing work that was darker than the more frivolous work they usually produce: A near-twenty-minute-monologue, about the inevitability of human extinction due to exponential population growth, was written by a guy who largely makes puppet-show music videos for self-consciously "fun" bands. Dina Kelberman did a pretty piece that ran through her normal themes, but for a more sustained length than usual, and with more visual panache. One actor involved said that the whole festival felt like it marked a highwater point for a certain set of Baltimore energies.

But the two threads, running through the majority of plays, from a variety of different playwrights- (although pretty much all would be in their mid-to-late-twenties) were the apocalypse, and characters not doing what to do in their lives. "The apocalypse" is a broad term, and one some involved would question- one playwright, Evan Moritz, described his piece as being about "the housing collapse," although it starred two characters scrounging for food. Others were more blatant than such ambiguities. Other plays were about apathy, or inability to make decisions, which, when taken in conjunction with the apocalypse thing, paints a pretty bleak picture of where the Baltimore mindset is at.

What's funny is I walked away from the festival going "OK: Don't write about the apocalypse anymore," despite the fact that, in embracing such darkness in material, the artists represented in the festival turned out some of the best, most mature work I've seen from them. And then, with that resolution in mind, I myself no longer knew what to do, what to discuss.

Because talking about such things has produced some phenomenal work, particularly in this decade. Kevin Huizenga has ruminated on total collapse from a number of different angles. The book I'm reading right now, Margaret Atwood's Oryx And Crake, is from still another angle, and she has other books in her bibliography also working as investigations of such territory. In some ways, this post is a follow-up to my last post, about the feelings caused by reading The Men Who Stare At Goats the same day I saw Up, and the fun-romp nature of the latter, but Up is Pixar's follow-up to the artistic high point of Wall-E.

And then, in the middle of all these thoughts, I stumbled across this horrible thing: A song called "Making Love," designed to explain to children why they shouldn't be scared by the sounds coming from their parents bedroom. It's horrifying, nauseating, and so aesthetically revolting that I am made to bandy about the term "pure evil." I recommend clicking on that link, to experience the horror.

So I called up my good friend Alex Tripp, to tell him about that song, and discuss the movie Up. In the course of that phone call, he informed me of something I hadn't heard about: Robert Zemeckis' plans to make a sequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, to be done entirely in 3-D CGI motion capture- Along the lines of his Polar Express or Beowulf. This pretty much made my head spin, giving me something I couldn't wrap my mind around: A movie that would so fully miss the appeal of seeing humans and cartoons interact with each other, because all would be animated. Another big chunk of the appeal of Roger Rabbit was the way cartoon characters associated with different animation studios/corporate monoliths interacted, but I don't think there's any chance of that being recreated, let alone with the new era of CGI characters sprouted from Dreamworks and Pixar.

Basically: These were ideas I couldn't understand, that seemed so wrong on the face of it that some neuron shouted "EVIL" and "THE END OF ALL THINGS." That I really wanted to talk about, but couldn't, because I'd sought to remove such end-times terms from my artistic vocabulary.

The only solace to be found, really, is in craft: If seeing things so disagreeable makes me feel that way, then the only response left would be to make things more aesthetically pleasurable. I was already thinking about such things: I haven't made a video in a year, and feel the urge to do so, with these novels done, and then I found this blog which made me realize how good even crappy movies can look, in a way that made me want to venture towards it.

But that's still not really having anything to say, just realizing that I would want to execute it on a very high level. That's barely a thought at all, and I'm left again thinking of how I don't know what to do. An existential crisis brought on by a song called "Making Love," and the idea of a sequel to Roger Rabbit.

The only inspiring thing is this Lazy Magnet box set. Lazy Magnet, Jeremy Harris of Providence, made one amazing record, Is Music Even Good, that Corleone put out. But he's also made a ton of CD-Rs and self-released cassettes, and he just put out a box set, collecting much of that material made from 2004-2009, with liner notes by him with an intro by CF. It's pretty inspiring, on the whole. It's not as singular an achievement as his actual record is, but it's a different kind of achievement, a document of a restless creative force. In the liner notes he highlights a specific song, "Species Wide Mass Suicide" (which appears on the Corleone release) as being one of the best songs he's ever written. I will refrain from quoting the lyrics to simply state that it feels the pressure to create, hard, and that song is indeed a high point of a record I think is an actual masterpiece.

Oh, man is not made for the cognitive dissonance that comes about from the day I had. Whereas last year's new Pixar movie was attended, in my life, by listening to an interview with CF that left me feeling deeply inspired, today I watched Up and read Jon Ronson's The Men Who Stare At Goats- which goes back and forth between the sort-of-amusing and conspiracy theories that leave you feeling awful.

Up is pretty much great. It starts sad, to give emotional underpinnings, and then starts moving fast. It ends up containing genuinely funny material. It feels like less of a curiosity than Wall-E did, more like a normal movie, but well-crafted and strongly executed in a way that I doubt any other summer blockbuster would be. In some ways, it might be more satisfying than Wall-E: Wall-E is sort of more deeply sad, to a point where it even creates a sad ending that it then avoids in a swerve. Up has emotion underpinning it, but moves according to "fun romp" tradition, and allows for a more cartoony world. Lots of fun.

The Men Who Stare At Goats is not terribly well-written: It's all over the place in its subject matter, in a way where it does this paradoxical thing where it ends up not being convincing of things you already know to be true. Certain things are covered in such a cursory or haphazard manner where characters start to seem made up even though they clearly are real. But then there's the conspiracy theory stuff, which doesn't really jibe with what the rest of the book is about, but still feels like evidence of a really horrible evil... I don't know know. It's written so poorly that the whole thing feels like it's only going to convince utter crackpots, despite being about real and interesting things. The book, ostensibly, is about the CIA's use of new age and psychic practices, remote viewing and such. The CIA used remote viewing during the cold war to try to monitor the soviets- but that's not really talked about so much as some tangential figure who went on Coast To Coast AM and ended up inspiring the Heaven's Gate cult to kill themselves.

They really should not have been consumed in the same day, two things each lying on the extremes of my interest in cultural consumption. The universal humanity and humor of Up, that makes you want to engage in the world and being understandable, contrasting against the way a book of conspiracy theories puts one's thought into a spiral of half-digested information as concentric circles around a void of sheer terror. Go see Up.

I recently checked out Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives from the library. It has since been returned, with only its first section read, and I am left to wonder why that book found the praise it did. Certainly, some of the praise- the comparisons to Marquez and Borges- feels like it comes from a place of racist oversimplifying. The Marquez comparisons have more to do with the amount each received by their respective generations, and most longer reviews (not the kind of thing to run on book-jackets) would grant that Bolano has nothing to do with magic realism. The book-jacket statement that "This is the sort of novel that Borges would have written" feels like it has only the most specious involvement with Borges, or novels. Here is a novel about writers (Borges talked about books) running around having sex with each other (That's what a novel is, right?).

As near as I can tell, the book is successful for how easy it is to read: It's compulsively readable, tales of the soap-operas of youth. But there's a lot of it: At over 500 pages, it feels like "You like books? Here's 500 pages of stuff to read; that's a book, isn't it, by definition?" It disregards content. But then, the content- about poets- allows for lots of name-dropping and reference points. It feels like preaching to the converted, or pandering, for a book to be so much about books and authors, but some people love being pandered to.

Granted, I only read the first section of the book, written in the form of a journal, but any skimming I did did not point to seismic shifts in terms of subject matter.

Meanwhile, I recently found myself employed at a job that had a comic book store within easy walking distance of it. I found myself there on lunch breaks, combing through quarter boxes. That is where I found Bernie Mireault's The Jam Urban Adventure Color Special, from 1987. That's a pretty good comic, for what it is: 1980s alternative comics in a superhero mold, roughly comparable to a bunch of comics from that era, but maybe nothing modern. The closest thing would be Madman, I guess, but these days that comic mostly stumbles on, with none of the weird vigor (or density of plotting) seen in this comic.

There was a Jam/Madman crossover comic in the nineties, that I've never read, and after that for a while Mireault was doing some backup strips in Madman. Those backup strips felt pretty markedly less ambitious: Silent comics, marked by (I think) a six-panel grid and some (I think) painted coloring. That was about a guy called Dr. Robot, who ran around in a big robot. He also did a comic around the same time called High Hat, which was about a guy in a top hat smoking joints. I guess he gave up, at least in terms of writing. They're alright to look at, I suppose, and maybe that was how he was pushing himself, towards painted color that felt designed for either glossy stock or computer monitors.

This Jam comic has flatter colors, that fit nicely with the brighter than newsprint paper. I think it looks great, and it reads well, a little clearer than the black and white issue of The Jam from a year later found in the same quarter box. The coloring really focuses the compositions, while still allowing for hyperactive layouts or delineations of architecture. A really cool comic.

Poking around the internet, though, I see pages from newer, yet unpublished work, and it, in black and white, doesn't look that good at all, actually: It has that sort of generic black and white boom comic look, inspired by underground comic's sense of style and texture, but with this frozen stiffness of Jack Chick tracts, or seventies Marvel comics. There's this grey-toned slickness that removes detail, rather than gives it room to breathe. It looks really bad. Oh well.

For the past several years I have been engaged with what would like to refer to itself as "the counterculture," loosely stated, a variety of people involved with "the arts" on a DIY basis. This group defines itself at least partly in its opposition to certain mainstream ideas, and places a great deal of its self-worth in its support of others in their community.

A large part of this group sort of prides itself on having "no rules," but the other has some certain guiding principles. I am interested in coming up with a list of said principles, specifically because I don't think there's really any kind of self-governance enforcing such codes, and a lot of people are shittier than they probably should be. (These rules can be picked and chosen from, and certainly a number of them are designed to implicate myself.)

So, okay, rules:

-Produce work, of some sort. Especially if you are going to offer criticism.
(Alternately, some would offer "don't criticize at all," but fuck those people. Their work, by and large, is awful, and so they have fear.)
-Don't produce bad work out of some misplaced desire for wealth (I would add "or the acceptance of your peers")
-No more coming to shows claiming to have no money with alcohol clearly in your possession as evidence of what you spent the last bit of your money on, with the implication being "I am going to trash your house, and you should feel grateful that I am here at all, as an audience member."
-No charging people admission cost when they have no money.
-Don't secretly have a trust fund.
-While attending shows, try to pay attention to work being presented, rather than attend to socialize. Except for art openings, because that's what that is for.
-No conspicuous consumption.
-Try to have as little a sense of entitlement as possible, besides what's outline in the Crass song "Do They Owe Us A Living," which I know from the Soft Pink Truth cover.
-Don't eat fast food, processed food. Try to avoid certain additives to the best of your ability.
-Don't shop at chain stores; steal from them if need be.
-Don't steal from your friends.
-Walk, ride a bike, or take public transit rather than use a car whenever possible. In event of tours, vegetable oil is the preferred fuel.
-Recycle.
-Compost.
-Grow your own vegetables.
-Don't eat meat.
-Don't smoke: it encourages tobacco companies. (I don't think anyone treats this as a rule, the coolness of smoking really wins out for most people.)
-Don't do hard drugs: All cocaine has been brought into the U.S. by way of deeply-fucked channels.
-Don't frown upon those that do drugs.-Don't be racist, sexist, or homophobic. Others would say, maybe just implicitly, "or be religious" but I think that's fucked up.
-Here I would say "vote," others would say "don't vote."
-Be politically active in some way above and beyond voting.
-Try not to spend a ton of time on the internet, especially w/r/t social networking sites.
-And while I wish "don't have a cell phone" was a rule, I know it isn't, anymore.
-I also wish "when choosing culture to consume, prefer things you expect to be good over kitschy crap" was a rule but it really isn't.
-"Don't watch TV" is the rule instead, which I consider generally unfair and simplistic.
-"Don't download music illegally" is a not a rule at all, but hey, why not consider it?

Anybody else with rules to add, please use the comments thread. I'm probably taking a lot of things for granted.

I'm not even interested in subculture, really, so much as I am in general self-governance and trying not to be an awful person. (I personally eat meat, and processed food, and like those things. I am working on trying to compost and grow my own vegetables, though, and it was nighttime gardening, combined with a conversation about people not paying for shows but showing up at beer, that brought this post on.)
Until next time, be a hippie, and also a punk.

Rest in peace, respect is due: to both Jack Cardiff and J.G. Ballard. The former, the cinematographer for Powell And Pressburger, whose technicolor Black Narcissus work is a real mindblower, and the latter, whose spirit combined with life experience to form a worldview I can't quite relate to but nonetheless evoked a specific something of the twentieth century.

If memory serves, this time last year I was hoping that Free Kitten's Inherit would sound like the Magik Markers album Boss. I think this hope was buoyed by them both coming out on Ecstatic Peace and having female singers. Now I am listening to the new Magik Markers record, Balf Quarry, on Drag City, and thinking it sounds like Free Kitten. This paragraph is inscrutable to all but a certain kind of nerd.

Other records to come out this year so far to be disappointing compared to an artist's older work include pretty much everyone that's not Black Dice. (And I guess despite my problems with the new Animal Collective record, it's still an interesting evolution and a little bit cooler than Strawberry Jam was.) Apparently there is going to be a new Lightning Bolt record coming out in a couple of months.

The reviews for the new Swan Lake album, Enemy Mine, are interesting to read for how a press release can skew critical thought. The argument being made is that it's a more cohesive record than their previous album, Beast Moans. Swan Lake is a band with three different songwriters, each with distinctive voices. On the new record, their tics are ever more pronounced: Dan Bejar does this theatrical style of singing which gets in the way of melody, which has been a problem for me on probably every Destroyer record released this decade. He doesn't do this on New Pornographers records, and he didn't do it on Beast Moans. Carey Mercer's songs on that record were little drips into the murk of recording. On Enemy Mine, his vocals are mixed as high as they are on Frog Eyes records, and are just as unlistenable for them. The Spencer Krug songs are the only ones that aren't distastefully obnoxious, and end up sort of operating on a last-Wolf-Parade-album layer of being basically bland. But I was maybe the only one who liked Beast Moans.

The new Akron/Family record has its moments, like a noisy instrumental called MBF, and it doesn't have anything as ugh-this-sounds-like-Phish-or-something as the last album's "I've Got Some Friends," but it doesn't seem like the peaks are as high as that record either. Maybe I should listen to it more. But the initial song has this bass sound that really makes it seem like jam-band lite jazz. What a weird case that band is: I saw them after their Angels Of Light split came out. Sure, that is still their best record. But they blew me away, totally transcendent, in the basement of the Eagles Hall in Olympia, Washington. Approaching religious experience, sure. And my interactions with them really painted them as world-class dudes. To this day, I have no reason to believe they're not world-class dudes: They are good friends with the Lexie Mountain Boys, and one member quit the band to live in a buddhist monastery. But they've become increasingly jammy, and the last tour schedule was really disconcertingly lame: A few dates in hippified zones like San Francisco, Austin, and Denver, each, and no shows anywhere on the east coast besides New York. Total jam band niche audience style, like they would rather play Bonnaroo than do the sort of shows that impress the hell out of everyone in attendance. They're not on Young God anymore, and maybe not even acting as Michael Gira's Angels Of Light backing band. I would still like to see them again, on a tour with Fire On Fire and Lexie Mountain Boys, playing in places that would be appropriate. God, this new record really is boring on the whole.

Oh yeah, Fire On Fire: Their first official album came out in the last days of last year, but I don't think it's available in stores, maybe only through the Young God website? That album's fine. Normally I like Big Blood more, but these are good songs, and I can't help but feel like they're fighting the good fight of what once was the toast of the underground.

Speaking of "freak folks," or "new weird americans" (were those things synonymous or not?) I wonder what the next record will be like from the guy who once called himself Wooden Wand? The last album was done under the name James Jackson Toth, and released on Rykodisc (through Slim Moon, former runner of 5RC, who rereleased the awesome Harem Of The Sundrum and The Witness Figg), and sounded like Tom Petty. The new one's coming out on Ecstatic Peace, (who put out the also pretty great James And The Quiet) under the name WAND, and I have no idea what it will sound like. Probably it will continue down on this road of blandness-as-artistic-maturity. (See also the Mirah record that came out this year, and remark to yourself that holy shit it's been ten years since You Think It's Like This But Really It's Like This. Maybe she was always kind of bland, but it was also charming and interesting, then.)

Oh great news: Criterion is releasing Last Year At Marienbad on DVD this June. I wonder if they're utilizing the new prints that toured just recently? Anyway, this movie is amazing, far superior to Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour, and probably my favorite film of the French new wave. It's great that more people will be able to see it in a decent form. (It's also going to be on Blu-Ray disc, which no one I know has, but I'm vaguely aware has superior image quality.)

There are certain signifiers that are everywhere these days, designated at this moment in time as arbiters of quality. By themselves, however, they're meaningless, and it seems as if in a few years time it will be these things that will again be rebelled against.

In comedy, there is this certain presentational style, of young males with shaggy hair, that can be vaguely associated with indie rock, that seems to short-circuit and circumvent the quality standards of reasonable snobs. I've talked about this in the past when talking about how the HBO show Flight Of The Conchords isn't funny at all, and I feel the same thing applies to the MTV sketch show Human Giant and approximately half of the cast of Saturday Night Live. (I also dislike the American version of The Office, which a lot of people like, and feels like it might fit this mold as well.) It feels like a mutation of the idea of "alternative comedy," like no one noticed that no one on The Comedians Of Comedy tour was traditionally attractive. What's disconcerting about it is how it misreads the idea of "taste" and makes it into something class-based. (That might be where the whole thing comes from, but it's really to be avoided.) Tim And Eric deliberately avoids this stuff, and while their show has its own weaknesses, it really makes it feel like its own voice.

In comics, it seems like the old model, where people gave far too much credence to mediocre auto-bio comics, has been largely abandoned, but these days I really feel like silkscreen covers make more of an impression than they should. The comics of Juliacks are really cool and distinct, but man: There is a zine rack at Atomic Books, made up of stuff that would be super-compelling when I saw it at The Olympia Comics Expo, that on closer inspection is not as powerful as things I want to give my dollar to. When you see a whole heap of the stuff it really makes you just want to pay attention to cool drawing again.

(Speaking of cool drawing, let me go on a tangent. My friend has a portable hard drive with a bunch of downloaded comics on it. He was talking shit on "comics made by graphic designers," which I then discovered, when looking at what was on his hard drive, that he was specifically talking about the work of this guy Jonathan Hickman, which I think he'd obtained accidentally. But holy shit is that stuff awful, deeply dull to look at. Comics made on Illustrator, like Achewood, but without the flair for dialogue, just that flat talking-head presentational style. Also on the hard drive were issues of the Geoff-Darrow-drawn Hard Boiled and the complete run of Sam Kieth's The Maxx. I am all for people trying to find their own voices but it's weird to look at those, back to back, and ask yourself why you would ever make the choice to read the Hickman comic, let alone make comics in such a deeply dull way. No one making mini-comics is making those mistakes, and they're not doing that weird over-rendering color thing that mainstream comics do, so they're a little smarter. I think that both of these trends are the autotune of comics, and will just make everything from this era badly dated in ten years time.)

In music, the signifiers are much the same as they've always been: Acoustic instruments still indicate sincerity- but the one that's really bothered me is the way keyboards and 4/4 house kick drums are supposed to make an audience dance. It feels fascistic as a death march to me. I should also point out that currently lo-fi production feels really "in" in a way that is totally fucking with critical perception, and that I feel really bad for any critic who ranked The Vivian Girls (who, according to all gossip I have heard, are awful people) on their best-of-2008 list. That's sort of interesting, because I sort of feel like a lot of these things have to do with the feeling of money implied by the decisions being made, and they're using traditionally "poor" sound. But maybe it's only appealing at this point in time because it's not actually "poor" in terms of money involved, since it's cheaper to just record on computer, rather than an analog four-track. I'm not trying to do a thing where I half-remember The Psychic Soviet, so I'll cut short this line of reasoning. This post is very negative, but it's meant to serve as prophecy that in time everyone will see past such artifice.

Oh boy, a perusal of WFMU playlists indicates the availability of the Big Blood and The Bleedin' Hearts CD-R, teased a year ago by the song "Oh Country." This has a cover of Syd Barrett's Terrapin. What an exciting band. They constitute half of Fire On Fire, whose record The Orchard was released this past December through Young God Records. I believe it's only available through their website, making it about as easy to find as Big Blood's The Grove that came out last year on Don't Trust The Ruin. I am hoping to set up a show for either of these bands the next time they travel.

Baltimore's Erin Womack just received a grant from the state of Maryland to get money to be an artist. Good for her. We run in some of the same circles, and recently I was talking to some of our shared acquaintances about the resemblance of her drawing style to that of Christopher Forgues, and one of these people had actually talked to Erin about her influences, and found out that a big one was the film The Color Of Pomegranates. Which I hadn't seen, or even heard of, but it turns out is actually considered a classic of world and Russian cinema. I am in the middle of watching it. And while it doesn't explain the similarities to CF's line it's pretty interesting in its own right, part of a specific strain of cinema that feels more connected to high art, with Last Year At Marienbad a possible comparison point. It's almost pure imagery at this point, with no signs of a narrative arriving at any point in the future, but still compelling and beautiful to look at if one can handle the pace. I look forward to finishing it.

It's inspiring to me for the distinctive way the images are framed, the way the human figures frequently stand small in deliberate tableaus, the way in which the camera must have been fairly far away or shooting with a wide-angle lens to capture the corners of the room. But that's for me as a video-maker. What it shares with Erin's comics is the way images are juxtaposed together, repetitions of imagery with no real narrative accumulation, with written or spoken language appearing sparsely and largely as counterpoint, and the ornate nature of the images in terms of landscape and costume.

I should maybe thank her for indirectly inspiring me to look into it, the same way I should talk to Jimmy Joe Roche about how his namechecking of Daisies in an interview with Arthur magazine led to my seeing that film. That issue of Arthur had the band Celebration on the cover, who I saw perform this past Friday night, with my friend Ami Dang. Ami herself won a similar grant from the state of Maryland, and I am supposed to collaborate with her in the future on a video project, in a thing that will probably end up with faint traces of the influences of both Daisies and The Color Of Pomegranates.

The new Animal Collective album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, is getting acclaim far and wide, at least in the music-criticism outlets that I've seen. Response to it has been more mixed in terms of people I talk to: Some might wish for a less-poppy record. I think the vocals are mixed too smoothly and are occasionally too high in the mix. But this complaint, as I voiced it, feels related to what I'm hearing from a lot of other people. Here in Baltimore, the small segment of people I talk to is put off by the lyrics, finding them silly and unrelatable.

Which I think says more about the faults of them then it does about the faults of the band. The lyrics are really straightforward, yes, but it still feels like a progression of a spirit of openness. But there's an audience of sort of inarticulate jammers that just want to get high and make music that Animal Collective has cultivated over the length of a few albums, that they themselves were for a while there, that is now left alienated by songs about wanting to provide for children. I think there's a segment of the Animal Collective fanbase that's being presented with a future that makes them deeply uncomfortable.

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about how art influences its audience. It seems like it is only musicians that are afforded the chance to say things like "Pavement were a really big influence on me," although this could be because they are most likely to be interviewed and asked about such things. I guess there are a great number of people blogging about comics who will admit that Grant Morrison's The Invisibles was an influence on their adolescence. Music is not so directly narrative, and so is usually talked about in terms of stylistic influence, despite the fact that people project narratives on to music as a means of relating to it.

This becomes interesting in the wake of hip-hop being the main force in pop culture for the last ten or so years. People have grown up with those narratives. What's odd to me is that it's a thing that youth can relate to so fully. Not because of racial issues, but because of confidence issues: I associate youth and adolescence primarily with insecurity, and find it hard to picture someone in the middle of all that attaching themselves to "Swagger Like Us," unless it serves as some kind of shield. Which is fine, except for the fact that there then is this narrative embedded within it, which people follow, and then -this is a complicated metaphor I don't want to mix- become embedded in the metal of it. And I think there then becomes this detached/debauched/anti-spiritual world that seems ever-more-lacking in innocence.

(There also rises, in response to this, a weird indie-gone-mainstream twee culture that's not particularly interesting either. Although I think that Animal Collective is still too sonically weird to be placed into that category as much as something off the Garden State soundtrack.)

At this point in the blog so far I have no real idea of how to connect these two different ideas and culture, and am hoping that by writing further I can make a thesis connecting these two things.

I would like to think that the last few Animal Collective records are just a little further along in the narrative that a lot of noise records are at. Consider for a moment that Hollindagain and Here Comes The Indian are, sort of, noise records, that they were touring with Black Dice around these times, and this was just shortly after Black Dice had stopped being a hardcore band that was punching their audience in the face. This could be the moment, then, after total freedom tears apart the city in a whirlwind and people now need to live on, and raise the next generation in the sun. There's also a narrative arc to the whole career of The Boredoms that sort of leads to this conclusion as well.

That moment where people can't move on to the next stage in the narrative is kind of always a little bit of a bummer though. I guess we should be thankful that the underground allows for that sort of that growth in reverence for people who've been around for a while, whereas the mainstream offering up tales of nihilism keeps on refreshing itself before alternate messages can proliferate. The sonic conservativism that often accompanies such personal progress is kind of a bummer, but I don't think that charge can really be levied at Animal Collective, who have enough background in folk music that that could've been moved into a duller direction if they had been those kinds of dudes.

The most recent episode of The Simpsons was a Heavenly Creatures parody starring Lisa. This is weird, right? Not because it's an obscure thing to reference for a half-hour's time, although the highly-specific nature of how it went about it's parody highlighted that element: Remakes of particular shots, multiple references to Josh Groban in place of the film's Mario Lanza. That all felt bizarre and tedious, but maybe no more than any other extended parody to grace a whole episode of an animated program. (It was also strangely emotionless for a Lisa-centric episode of The Simpsons, at least to a viewer primarily familiar with the first few, good, seasons.)

But what a weird way to evolve an archetype over a series of years, when depending on coming up with plotlines. The original idea of a smart little girl, who tries hard and wants approval, then becomes a vegetarian, then a buddhist, and then is placed in an intense friendship with a lesbian subtext. This is one for the culture studies majors in the room.

Everyone else is directed to this Youtube video of a child high on drugs from the dentist.

Oh, hey, my friend Griffin (who I met briefly in Olympia, then hung out with a lot more in Baltimore) got written up in Vice Magazine's blog. They kind of make him seem like a drug-addled asshole when he is one of the nicest guys ever. I think I am hosting/performing comedy at his birthday in March. He came to my first comedy thing and brought me some pizza and a sandwich because I had been feeding him for a few days before he played a show and got paid. He laughed really distinctively and it was awesome. Way to go Griffin.

While I am linking to other people's blogs, I have had to tell some other friends recently about why the blog Hipster Runoff is awful. Luckily, Nick Sylvester just articulated it really well for me.

This feels related to the post about The Silver Jews not being a band anymore, even though a completely different set of factors contributed to its happening: Kevin Huizenga will no longer be putting out his comic "Or Else." This has more to do with the feasibility of the comics pamphlet in a graphic novel world, but that format gave Kevin the chance to do whatever he wanted. Which, in the cases of issues 2 through 4, meant completely self-contained experimental books, priced cheap. He'll still be putting out minicomics, and his Fantagraphics/Ignatz thing Ganges (which is eight dollars per rigidly formatted issue), but the loss of a vehicle for him to do weird stuff is pretty sad. Or Else 4 in particular was pretty influential for how free-wheeling it was on its way to its end. Kevin is a great cartoonist, who has more range than you would expect from just looking at his more acclaimed work.

I imagine that his "Rumbling" story that began serialization in issue 5 will see publication when its finished.

What's funny is that while this bothers me, because Kevin uses Or Else to do whatever he wants, I still wish that Anders Nilsen would stop fucking around with the serialization of Big Questions and just put out a completed book, as each issue of that series becomes ever more expensive. That comic is done, and just being put out on this Chris Ware-informed release schedule of once-a-year, rather than in installments of whenever an issue's worth of comics is completed.

And again, I appreciate the value of the single-issue comic, and hope that, when Rumbling (or whatever Kevin's "graphic novel" ends up being) comes out, it is in a cheap format.

The Silver Jews are soon to no longer be a band. This is fine, of course: Their last three records weren't as good as the three that preceded them, David Berman's book of poetry was of a high enough caliber to convince me that pretty much anything else he does will be interesting. (He's now looking into screenwriting, although I've also heard rumors of a novel.)

But, attached to this news, in his posts on the Drag City messageboard, was the revelation that his secret shame was his father, a fairly evil dude named Richard Berman, who worked for corporations under a variety of fronts to spread misinformation and try to break unions and keep the minimum wage low. Somehow this seems like an important enough thing to note, to tell other people to investigate. Trying to put the work of father and son into a narrative of two forces working against each other seems kind of wrong-headed even as it seems deeply appropriate. It makes more sense than talking about Silver Jews records in a context of Berman's drug abuse and suicidal depression, and it makes that stuff seem less cliched.

To restate: The Silver Jews are about an abiding melancholy, taking comfort in simple pleasures, and acting in resistance to an abstracted them of the rich and powerful. This is done through observation, feeling, and poetry. Sometimes the abstract is forsaken for direct appeals. Meanwhile, Berman And Company lies on behalf of the powerful and their lack of empathy. Old stories, old feelings. The appeal of simple pleasures can seem like not quite enough in the face of all that myth, and so maybe then is where the depression comes in, in not being able to transform all that you've inherited, and to aim for self-destruction instead.

Transform and transcend. So the Silver Jews are no longer a band. They're now a body of work. I wish David Berman luck, and do not want to tar him with a mark like "hero." Let us all keep on living, and try to observe as honestly as we can and feel as deeply as we can bear.

This guy draws pretty cool.

I just gave my second go at the comedy thing. Again it went well, and again the out-of-towners for whom this is their life went over really poorly in a way that made me doubt how much of my success was due to being funny and how much was due to having an audience of friends and sympathizers. I got more applause when taking to the stage than actual laughter for any specific joke, but that's no complaint, really.

It is 2009, everybody, and while we all sit glowing in the monitor light of best-of-the-year lists, somewhere in the shadows lurks the idea of the best-of-the-decade list, and with it canon-building. Now is the time to revisit work from 2000 to 2002 to see how it has aged. I maintain my belief that this has been sort of an odd decade for records, with so many bands' central appeal being based on general aesthetic, and expect a "best-of" list to select records based on what was the best example of that: Remember that Reveille was the best Deerhoof record, and remember they were one of the best bands this decade had to offer. Also, I think a lot of unassuming singer-songwriter records tend to hold up rather well. Again: The best Mountain Goats record was All Hail West Texas. Hopefully a lot of Animal Collective records, with their individual style, will coexist with each other without cancelling the others out.

As for cinema: I guess now would be the time to campaign for Punch-Drunk Love as a better film than There Will Be Blood.

My official stance remains that canons are useless, but the idea of best-of-the-decade lists is interesting as a corrective to the weird trends of fashion. But those trends still dictate nostalgia, and that's what we've got to be on guard against.

I read, in an interview with Renee French (maybe this one with Tom Spurgeon? That's got other bits to recommend it) that she doesn't think of herself as good with comics pacing, and that's why her current approach does the thing a couple Chester Brown books do, of having only a couple panels to a page. But, looking at this Marbles In My Underpants collection of her early work, I find a couple comics that I think are impeccably paced, as an accumulation of horrors and force.

These are comics drawn in Renee's old style, marked not just by the presence of a six-panel grid, but by being in stark black and white. Currently, she draws using black colored pencil, rather than ink, and it allows for more shading and tone. It feels like her drawing got softer, from the harsh voids of crosshatched black, around the same time her stories got a little friendlier. They also got quieter, with a few silent comics giving way to comics where what dialogue that is available is not present in word balloons.

(She also has a style of plain tiny, simplified line drawings on display in her book Micrographica and a minicomic I saw the last time I went to Atomic Books. And Corny's Fetish, which closes Marbles In My Underpants, uses greytones in addition to line drawings.) (Both tiny line-drawings and gorgeous pieces of shaded pencil work are on display at Renee's blog.

But those stories done in plain black and white have their own momentum to them. I am particularly fond of the serial "Silktown" and the short "Mitch And The Mole." These comics are all over the place in terms of their plotting, weird cascades of cruelty and fetishism that keep the reader off-balance, with this sort of detached tone- It's empathetic for some characters, but there's enough details that make you think "what the hell is going on here" both in the strange distance of the dialogue and little details to panel composition, like a loaf of bread leaning against the outside of a bathtub, followed by a panel showing the table with a jar of peanut butter on it on the bathtub's opposite side. "Mitch And The Mole" sort of wavers its grid- it's there as a standard, but the panels adjacent to each other are not the same size, and what panel is bigger than the other see-saws from right-to-left with each tier. Um, not consistently, but the overall effect aids in the disorientation.

But "Silktown" is the comic I really wanted to talk about. It pretty much opens the book, and throws down a tough gauntlet to get past of fairly shocking material. Everything about this comic feels horrific, and each scene plays out fairly slowly. Some are scenes of conversation, with little details lingered on- a chocolate eclair, a dangling chain to turn on a lightbulb- while others are scenes of fast-paced violence, but the drawings freeze them and linger on them- reaction shots of people in pain or suffering trauma. It's beautiful to look at, for its textures, but its textures are also repellent, sweating and boiling on the page. It feels like a Richard Corben comic if Richard Corben were a woman, drawing David Lynch-style suburbia rather than barbarian worlds. It also kind of feels like Brian Chippendale's Maggots, actually, in terms of how it dedicates equal amounts of interest to acts of violence and more common movement. (Also cock.) But there's more depth of field here, and that allows for more shifts in the vistas being depicted.

Marbles In My Underpants rules. It's not a complete overview of the comics done in this style, and some of the selections I would replace, and it's out of print, and the cover makes it look like it contains some kind of Slave-Labor-style goth comics, but if you see it, get it. It's got other comics- like The Ninth Gland, which is pretty great too, despite having a kind of broken pace that does make it hard to read- from later in her career, so you can see how her artistry shifts, and see that the things that I highlight about "Silktown" aren't even really what makes her a compelling artist.

More best-of-2008 listmaking mania:

Best comics:

I really didn't read very many comics this year. I didn't read anything from Japan (besides Hanakuma's Tokyo Zombie which was mediocre) or Europe. There were a lot of comics I would have liked to read if money were no issue. The Rory Hayes collection, Where Demented Wented, looked particularly appealing: Outsider horror comics including a porn comic drawn before the cartoonist lost his virginity? Sounds great! On the other side of the coin is Lynda Barry's What It Is, which I am strongly considering buying my mom for Christmas. Then there's Kramers Ergot 7, which is the book I would most want for Christmas.`But there are still some critical standards at work, as there are still a lot of comics I read and didn't like at all, and even more that I know my interests enough to know probably would not crack a list.

For me, the best comics of 2008 were written and drawn by Dash Shaw. His Bottomless Belly Button graphic novel was astounding, mining similar territory as a number of indie movies, but with more technical skill and greater emotional resonance. I don't feel the need to mention Margot At The Wedding on a best films list because of the superiority of The Bottomless Belly Button. If you kind of like comics, but haven't read it, do so. As far as "graphic novels" go, it's the book to beat. The fact that it was produced by someone just out of college is deeply inspiring. Meanwhile, Bodyworld was a webcomic I read every week, as it went online. A new type of serialization for a comics culture where solo-artist anthologies aren't really economically feasible, that also works for a diffuse community: In the absence of talking about comics at a comic book store, to tell my animator friends about how good this comic is over AIM, e-mails, and blogs, is quite fitting. Put them at the number one and two slots of a list. I didn't read his short story contributions to Mome or Meathaus, or his Bottomless zine Picturebox put out. (Actually, I think I read a Mome story or two, but I didn't spend much time with them.) I did read his Cold Heat minicomic, and while it was cool as a display of another format for him to play with, it still didn't display the strengths of Cold Heat that I'm really into that I will have to wait until next year to read and talk about.

Kevin Huizenga put out two of the best comic book pamphlets I read this year. Ganges 2 I talked about when it came out, but Fight Or Run is a really weird and fun little book, about nothing but formalism as fodder for laughs. I am astounded at how much better that stuff reads in a collection than scattered in little segments elsewhere. It almost argues for the death of the single-artist anthology, to have a guy like Huizenga working for a slew of different publishers, putting out books as focused suites of work. I didn't like Or Else 5 very much at all- I thought the pacing of the centerpiece story was really off, and the other material only intermittently worked for me.

The two best superhero comics would be All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely and Omega The Unknown by Jonathan Lethem and Farel Dalrymple with Paul Hornschemeier and Gary Panter. All-Star Superman is not really my favorite Morrison comic, but the issues that came out this year were really solid and entertaining, and a lot of the problems of reading a serialized comic with ads has been fixed by subsequent collection. Hey, speaking of which, maybe they actually give Gary Panter a drawing credit in the collection of Omega The Unknown? Just fun comics to read as they come out. (I also liked the issues of Casanova that came out this year, although I had some complaints about the ending, and only three came out.) That Gary Panter cover burned this kind of disposable intensity, and the near-wordless final issue was an amazing coda that felt near-otherworldly to read. Dreamy comics have a certain pull to them.

Taking up a number seven spot, as well as being the best of its format, would be the Core Of Caligula minicomic by CF. What a compelling thing that was, and really dense for its short size, enough to be satisfying. It's odd worldview and seeming spirituality make it not seem slight.

Speaking of Panter and minicomics, I would've liked to read the $15 8-page Jimbo minicomic that came out this year, too, by the way, or the Dal-Tokyo collection that was slated to come out but got delayed either until next year or is off the Fantagraphic schedule completely. That big monograph was pretty cool, although not a comic. The Shary Boyle and Ben Jones artbooks that came out this year are also probably pretty good. None of these comics listed are reprints of older material, but classic comic strips are really interesting to me, and I liked Heavy Liquid and Scud The Disposable Assassin both the last time I read them. (I actually really want that Scud collection. Talk all the shit you want about people making comics to get into Hollywood, but The Sarah Silverman Program rules, and Rob Schrab will never be allowed to actually make movies like those comics, which are such a perfect crystallization of 1990s culture currents that it's a shame he had to wrap it up this year in a supposedly pretty lackluster fashion.)

Top three film of the year, in order, despite appealing to me for completely different reasons: Synecdoche New York, Wall-E, and The Dark Knight. Would've liked to have seen Rachel Getting Married, Wendy And Lucy, Burn After Reading, The Wrestler, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, a half-dozen mainstream comedies, etc. but that's what DVD releases and the last weeks of the year are for. The possibility that any of those films are as ambitious as the films in my top three is so slim that I have no problem saying those were the best of the year. (Although My Winnipeg might be, and I want to see that too.) Synecdoche, New York is pretty much what I want movies and art to be, just a completely moving/devastating experience, a smart person going further and getting near the top of their game, which happens to be the outer reaches of what most people would find pleasurable. Wall-E is amazing filmmaking, with great animation, and is deeply inspiring to me as someone who studied those things in school, as well as something saying so many things I believe in and agree with in a language children can understand. The Dark Knight has an incredibly forceful and tense middle that is magnetic to watch, thinks in ways the comics it's based on never got around to, and is a fascinating document of what a blockbuster action movie in this modern era is.

Cool bands to see if they come to your town, whose split cassette I would've liked to buy if I had money on me:

Skoal Kodiak
Knife World

Unreleased song to find on Youtube and blow your mind:

Ol' Dirty Bastard's version of Build Me Up Buttercup. Sure, it's excerpted for a Rhymefest song, but this has ODB rapping verses

Cool tape by a cartoonist that works like a comic:

Anti-Matter Alma Mater by Matthew Thurber. From his "book-on-tape" label Potlatch, I Gather, comes this radio-play style soundtrack to an art installation I found really compelling.

I tracked down a copy of Powell And Pressburger's A Matter Of Life And Death. I love a handful of Michael Powell movies, and got really obsessed with seeing more of them earlier this year, and this was the one classic that was unavailable on DVD. Sammy Harkham loves it, and his post about it is fairly exciting. I am really grateful for that blog entry I linked to, because I feel like it gave me some reference point and grounding about what, specifically, was good and compelling about the film. I kind of feel like it falls apart as it goes on. The ending trial in heaven is one of the most ridiculous things I've seen, in a way that I can only feel really conflicted about at this time of my life.

I also saw Orson Welles' Chimes At Midnight at the Baltimore library fairly recently, shown on rare VHS because the film print was too damaged. That was also fairly disappointing: The bad audio, along with the fast-paced Shakespeare dialogue, made for a tricky combination, and I am not that familiar with the plays in question to know exactly what Welles was doing here.

And yet, both of these films are worth seeing, should they come your way. Until then, why not watch the Orson Welles movies The Trial and F For Fake, and Michael Powell's Peeping Tom and Black Narcissus?

My friend Amber Smith's work was shown as part of the Olympia Film Festival this year, as part of a program that someone reviewed on their blog. I assume it is our mutual friend Joel Brazzel who is made to look like an asshole in said review. I think that Amber's work is amazing. I brought it to the attention of curator Bridget Irish, and more recently showed the work that was shown at the festival to a Baltimore audience that did not appreciate it as much as the reviewer I link to. The Baltimore screening depressed me and make me think said audience was stupid and wrong, and I am happy to post this link to a positive review. I should also give credit where it's due to Kendra for finding this review.

I've written about Dash Shaw's Bodyworld webcomic a few times by this point. But I would just like to link to this animation he did to promote it, now that a pretty big plot point has been revealed in the course of its serialization. Pantheon is putting it out as a book next year, but I would recommend reading it at his site. But that animation is worth noting as its own piece of work, for being really well-done.

I loved Synecdoche, New York, but that's not really surprising by now. Every Charlie Kaufman-written movie (besides Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind) has been increasingly more elaborate and affecting than that which came before it, and this, for all its trickiness, ends up being pretty devastating. I have no insights to it that wouldn't be better off if you had them instead. Really great, very dark, brutally so, and after only a short while I was the only person laughing.

My single complaint is the score, which in trying to emotionally engage, only distracts: The other aspects of the movie's artifice are more integrated, this is plainly a convention that could've been done without. It's by Jon Brion, but it's not as unconventional as his good scores tend to be. It's sap, and most of the time it just serves to obscure dialogue.

It is late enough in the year for "best-of" lists to start coming into being. I only feel confident talking about records, thanks to leaks serving as an equalizer: There are any number of movies and comics that I have yet so see and judge.

Also, I kind of think it wasn't that great of a year for music. This could just be because of the way the music press works. The three records I am going to say were the "best" are all things that received no real reviews.

Best electronic record: Max Tundra, Parallax Error Beheads You. You know that story about the pottery class that was split into two groups? The one group was told to make a large amount of pots, and the other was told to make one perfect pot. The first group ended up making the better pots as they kept on working and learned from their mistakes. Max Tundra is almost the opposite of that: He has worked for six years making this record in keeping with his weird perfectionist tendencies. I guess he kept his game sharp doing remixes, though, because this album is amazing. Meticulously composed pop music filled with many moving parts, clicking into place.

Best noise record: Black Pus 4, All Aboard The Magic Pus. Only available as a CD-R still, as the vinyl release has not yet come into being. Some noise dude was telling me this isn't a noise record, and that Brian Chippendale refers to it as his pop record. This is in some ways true, songs are clearly distinguishable from each other. But only certain songs really register as pop songs, the whole thing is still pretty abrasive, and certain songs use pop song structures to freak out all over where the chorus would be. It's just restrained enough to constitute a step forward, and that on its own would be really exciting even before getting to the fact that the closing track was one of the songs I listened to obsessively.

Best indie-pop record: Nana Grizol, Love It Love It. This dude Theo was touring with the Elephant 6 Holiday Surprise. When the encore came, there was some confusion, and I had to tell him that some of his songs were worthy enough to fit into an encore setting. Which is quite the compliment, when you consider that other people on that tour who had written songs that could be performed for an encore included Julian Koster of The Music Tapes (and Chocolate USA, and while we were probably never going to hear "All Jets Are Gonna Fall Today," "Song For The Death Of Parents" seemed like it should've been a shoo-in), as well as Will Cullen Hart and Bill Doss of The Olivia Tremor Control (and The Circulatory System and The Sunshine Fix respectively). He ended up playing songs, but ones not on the album or the preceding EP. On those records are indie-pop songs of a certain nineties variety, and a youthful openness which you would think would find an audience I would find distasteful. The record certainly has awful twee album art. But, oh shit, "Tambourine-N-Thyme" would be the other song to be incredibly resonant in a way that led to many repeated listens, with its gorgeous horn parts in the place of Black Pus' abrasive keyboards. The other songs keep that strength, and while there's the occasional near-cringe-inducing line, there is still so much openness and positivity on this record that has me holding it close.

There were other records this year but they were just cool records. These include Thee Oh Sees The Master's Bedroom Is Worth Spending A Night In (garage-punk record of the year, five times better than that No Age album), Evangelista's Hello Voyager, Excepter's Debt Dept., and any number of albums made by bands I like because of albums that came out before this year that their new records pale in comparison to. See: Why?, Gang Gang Dance, The Lexie Mountain Boys, Beach House, Matmos, Silver Jews, etc. Those are the ones that weren't super-bleak disappointments.

My grandfather is dying. He has Parkinson's, and several moves have been made to accommodate him. For a while, he was the sort of old man who walked a great many places: Up to the gas station every day to buy a copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer, or to the library further down the street. Or to the lake for fishing. By the time I was in high school he didn't walk around so well, using a walker to support him, not very often going beyond his yard.

Past that point, as I went on to college, my grandparents sold their house, probably for a decent amount of money, considering the neighborhood they lived in: Near that lake, a short walk from a booming downtown. He was in a Rascal scooter, he couldn't climb the stairs, and so they were moving to an apartment complex with elevators. Pretty much any kind of walking was impossible, but I guess the little bit of movement between a bed and the scooter was manageable. Then that was left, as my grandmother couldn't take care of him on her own, so into my aunt's house they went.

According to my grandmother, after each move he deteriorated, partly due to the shock of the new surroundings. The last time I saw him was supposedly a good day. There was another person, from outside the family, who came to take care of him, to carry him into the shower and wash him. He was slumped in a chair, tired, bothered by the wind and cold, and seeming pretty much to have no bones.

Tomorrow he's moving into a hospice. I hope he lives to see Thanksgiving, so I can see him one last time, but I do not expect him to make it to Christmas, and even my grandmother- who is pretty much the salt of the earth, and sort of classically optimistic and not really given to talking about things that are upsetting- halfway doesn't expect him to see me come to visit on Thanksgiving.

My grandfather is like a lot of old people in some sad ways: Afraid of teenagers he saw walking the street and generally politically conservative. These are the sort of things that feel like they fade into dementia, since they're based on sort of inarticulate fears. But that is not what the thing itself is, not what I see on his face or hear in his voice in these final fading moments. What is there instead is this love, for me and my grandmother and his two children, that's huge and deeply sad for him as he has the very real feeling of dying and losing these people. There is this cry he has for my grandmother pretty much every time she walks out of his sightline, which my grandmother explained to me with something almost cynical. "He's calling for you," I said, and she responded "he does that every time I leave the room," in this tone like she had to ignore it in order to even kind of function, to leave the room to order a pizza. The new town she finds herself in is pretty much unknown to her. She doesn't have the autonomy to leave the house to run errands like she did in the apartment. She doesn't leave the house, but every time she leaves his side he says her name as a pleading question.

He is maybe the grandparent I am the least close to. On my mom's side, I have these Jewish grandparents, that are people with great senses of humor and general easygoing natures. My paternal grandmother, as mentioned, is incredibly nice and has been the one most likely to spoil me, in the various meager ways someone like me could be spoiled as a kid: Water ice in the summer and a few bucks for comic books when I was a kid. Fresh fruit brought to me. My grandfather fits into a certain stoic mold, and while it's true I could've gone fishing with him it's true I never really got the appeal of such a thing. And for the fact he is so unemotional it is his unconditional love that bowls me over the most, that freaked me out real hard on the phone in the summer of 2005, when I was living a life that felt like shambles in Olympia, Washington. Talking to him a couple hours ago he said he thought about me all the time, and then put my grandmother back on the phone. He is collapsing, he cannot follow the train of thought that makes up a conversation, and all there is is love.

I hope he is not afraid of death.

Lynda Barry's novel Cruddy is a fine piece of work, some of the same subject matter tread by Charles Burns' Black Hole pitched through a distinctive prose voice that reads like her drawings but used to describe a world darker than her drawings themselves could convey.

Lynda went to the same college as Burns, as well as Matt Groening. Some apocryphal anecdotes have Gary Panter having gone to college with either of the latter men, but those tales never mention the college in question, because Panter didn't attend The Evergreen State College. I don't think the four of them have ever really been brought into loose conflation, but I would like to do that now, and cite how exciting they all were, in their own way, particularly at a not-particularly exciting time for culture, the 1980s, and all work in their own way to articulate a very large sense of anxieties. There are no real commonalities shared by all of them, but certain things each have in common with each other in way or another at one point or another. Taken as a single entity, they pretty much define post-underground comics as a thing infinitely more interesting than what came before. (While Burns is easily the least interesting of them, his work as a variation on some of the same thought processes, in a way more classically refined, presents some food for thought.)

And Cruddy is a novel, a piece of prose, with its illustrations not really particularly of interest, but of a piece with a cartoonist's worldview, the same way that The Simpsons articulates things in a different way than Life In Hell did. I haven't finished it yet, but still, I can't think of a book that draws its characters so vividly and recognizably, but still depicts them fantastically. Her new book, What It Is, has a completely different feeling to it, another set of strengths, but the point stands: What a consciousness that lady has.

The whole idea of an automakers bailout is straight garbage, especially if it comes without a requirement to lower auto-emissions. Obviously, job loss is damaging, but there are reasons why industries collapse in catastrophic times. I believe firmly in the idea that America needs a second New Deal, which means the actual creation of new jobs, to get people through these times: Put the manufacturing industry to work on improved public transit and infrastructure, things that can run on alternative fuels, something to actually move forward from a collapsed automobile industry into a world where streets don't need to be perennially repaved to create larger roads to accommodate larger cars and greater congestion. That this is the first real thing Democrats have pushed since Tuesday's election combines with the fact that gay-marriage-banning initiatives were largely pushed through by the same African-Americans that got Obama elected to really take the edge off a lot of the feelings of progress that led to ecstatic street freak-outs.

This interview with Scott Adsit went up at The AV Club last week, and made me interested in seeing more episodes of the Adult Swim show Moral Orel. This was a show I was excited about when it started, due to Dino Stamatopoulos' comedy-writing history. It ended up not being as good as I would want it to, and watching Adult Swim programming online was always sort of a dicey proposition with how things would go on-and-offline at will. Now, it was being canceled for being bleak, depressing, and not fitting with the rest of the Adult Swim content. Sounds great.

I ended up catching a new episode premiere last night. It was pretty great.

The argument that the show is not anti-religion, but is just a satire of religious hypocrisy, never held any water with me, though. This is clear more than ever now that it is so bleak. It's actively nihilistic, people are horrible to each other. It's not without empathy, but I never get the impression that the character's main problem is their hypocritical approach to religion.

But the episode I saw last night? Great. Here are some insane reference points for this show: Chris Ware comics. Lynda Barry's novel Cruddy. The Wire. Wonder Showzen. Early seasons of The Simpsons. Chris Ware for the way bleakness is being presented passed down from generation to generation. Cruddy for similar reasons, but with the addition of the real threat of violence. The Wire... again, bleakness, but also for being a TV show that really makes you feel empathy. Wonder Showzen for the general presentational parody approach that accentuates the void of its worldview. And The Simpsons for how it takes that and filters it into a more narrative form using the family. I don't know, it really struck me as a piece of work. Watching other episodes from the season online this afternoon were not quite as strong, but still gave me the impression that watching all of it, in order and in big chunks, would really be quite the thing to bring on a dark place.

The way that Mountain Goats songs are used works really well- I have done the thing in the past where I listened to that stuff obsessively, and it's not at all uncommon. This actually feels like it's earning its music choices, and not just using it as indie-culture referents the way that a live-action comedy about teenagers and twenty-somethings would. The songs are used to really devastating effect, because they're actually coming from a real place of identification and empathy. I really hope the third season gets a DVD release.

Tonight has been the opposite of four years ago. Then there was sadness, tonight was this sort of ecstatic joy the likes of which I've never known: Parading through Baltimore, sort of being in front of said parade due to my habit of running up and high-fiving any black people on the street. From the H+H warehouse space across the street from my house, to the Washington Monument, up Charles Street, turning left on North Street and circling down Maryland to the monument again, where this time, there were a great many people, all excited. Two cop cars sat at the ready, but there was no property damage, not even very much drinking.

So happy, so free of cynicism or racial tension. Hope: Sure. I have been on the streets of Baltimore for two hours, chatting intermittently, and just thinking, this is not the end of it. The good guys won, and now I think we can be more idealistic, safely. I feel like cultural transitions like more bike-riding will have more cultural impact now. We can actually move towards the future at high speeds.

America elected a black president, you guys. We will never hear the name Sarah Palin again. We are improving as a culture. And, if you live in a city like I do, with a large black population, as well as a large college-educated one, the mood is one of recognition of these facts in a unanimously positive way. "Yes we can" bleeds into "Yeah we did." Cries of "fuck yes" fill the street. A group of thirty-plus people, applauding a television speech. A larger group at the foot of a monument. And the larger promise exists that we can be a better people still.

Last night I made my stand-up comedy debut in this Baltimore rock club, The Hexagon. I went on first, because I was planning on leaving early to go see Skeletons play in another neighborhood. I stuck around because a few of my friends were also to be telling jokes, and then by that point the appeal of getting paid a few dollar induced me to stay on for longer still.

Most of the comedians were Baltimore locals, that I would largely associate with a music scene. One performer who did pretty well was a playwright. The people who went on last were actual touring comedians from southern Maryland, who received the blankest reactions. It's not even that they were the worst: Most of the people on the bill were doing ironic/conceptual comedy of the "The whole idea of telling a joke or doing a bit seems stupid to me" school. I talked briefly to them afterwards- the headliner, Will Carey, told me I was "out there," and that he usually performed for rednecks. I really wanted to talk to the two of them at length, actually, because I just felt so much empathy for them, but I didn't want it to seem condescending. They probably were used to being in situations where they told jokes that were "too hip for the room," and here they were in a room that was too hip for them- One guy was wearing a Pizza Hut t-shirt, the other was wearing a The Starting Line hoodie. When the dude in the Pizza Hut t-shirt (Brian Preston) told a joke about how he wanted to be a writer for Dane Cook, and the first thing he wanted to write for him was a suicide note, I thought of L.A. comedians I've seen on Youtube doing anti-Dane-Cook material that went over really well, even as it seemed really weird and inside, and here it was playing to a crowd not engaged in that culture to really have processed it and come to conclusions. As someone who is a comedy nerd, but was performing pretty much on a lark, as a dabbler, to see people who are committed to the idea of it doing so poorly where I did pretty well felt pretty bad. I wanted to talk to them about Aspecialthing.com, maybe point out the Louis C.K. interview where the advice was given to have the confidence to not look down ever. Or ask if they heard the Louis C.K. set where he was opening for Yo La Tengo at a Hanukkah show at Maxwell's where he bombed real hard.

I didn't feel like I was performing for my friends, really. I felt like I was performing for acquaintances, because I don't really feel like I have that many close friends here, and even though I was glad that certain people came specifically to see me, it still felt good primarily to get dark and weird in front of that kind of audience, as it afforded me an opportunity to be a real person to some degree or another.

Oh, and after the house took it's cut, the money was split so that my cut was five dollars, which I think is also what the people travelling got. But these headliners also said that this was the best show of their tour- Maybe it was good for them to have an audience that was just laughing at their smart/weird material, and not responding very well at all to the gratuitous/desperate/casual swearing. But at the same time, "don't try so hard" is a lesson I would never want to teach anyone, probably.

The new Marnie Stern album is getting more attention than the last one, which is probably for the best: That first record ruled, total audience-builder type stuff. I am getting a vague sense, maybe, from the way people are reacting- dudes with blogs, mostly- of this sort of "Oh, man, I love her" borderline uncritical appraisal. Not in a prurient way, more like the way that Margaret Cho and Ellen Degeneres have really uncritical fanbases at this point. But in Marnie's case, it would be made up of straight dudes. I don't know for sure how accurate these impressions are.

It's pretty awesome at first- the first three songs have this sense of dynamics that I don't think anything on In Advance Of The Broken Arm had. There's this feeling of things being built, structures being erected. Sometimes the dynamics are kind of annoying, or simplistic, but then when that gives way to something else, they're some of the most thrilling moments of recorded music this year. It gets pretty exhilarating.

Later on, things start to feel- I don't know, eighties-ish? The songs sort of lose that initial dynamic quality, even as they're filled with more moving parts than ever. It's still a part of the same unifying impulse. It's sort of like the variations on Steven Millhauser short stories- The first few songs build impossible cities, and then the middle section sculpt incredibly detailed miniatures.

Things start to come together again towards the end. On the whole Zach Hill's drumming is more integrated into the songs this go-round, even as the drum sound in the middle songs starts to boom in a mildly off-putting way.

Oh, and even though it's probably not my favorite song, the lyric "I'm like a raging animation/I wonder what it's like to be one" is pretty awesome, especially for animation nerds. I like how the second line seems to imply "I wonder what it's like to be a raging animation" but the first line states implicitly that she already knows what that's like experientially. Rather, she's wondering what it's like to "be one"- a single thing, rather than a collection of tiny drawings or photographs ordered together. I think it's a pretty great statement, if that's what it's hinting at.

For those who haven't heard it, I should point out that The New Bloods' The Secret Life album is pretty great, maybe the best debut album by a band this year. Live, some of the dynamics are lost and the songs start to blur into each other, but the record itself goes from strength to strength. When I saw them, a friend said "Yeah, I'm not into them- They're just ripping off The Raincoats."

Later on, I asked that friend if he had heard anything by The Raincoats after their first record, namely, their second album, Odyshape, which I had come into possession of. He had not, which is fair enough: They're a band whose entire catalog is out of print. Odyshape is a really weird record. I pretty much don't get it, actually. Part of it could be the CD remaster not being the best: That generally explains why the drums sound recorded from a ditch, and why the other instruments sound likewise isolated from each other. That also seems deliberate, with the way the melodies stop and start, rising and falling, generally travelling through space, on song after song. Not a crowd-pleaser in the bunch. Y Pants would almost be a comparison point, but sensory deprivation chambers would be a better one. It's really strange, but completely compelling: What possessed them? Does the second Slits record a lot of people hate sound like this? (Probably not, since The Raincoats' self-titled debut is approximately three times better than Cut.) Is it possible they got worse at playing their instruments after their first album, even as they were getting more ambitious? A really odd record.

They made other records after this, but I haven't heard them.

The New Bloods, while fine, will probably never make a record as fucked-up as this one. It's good for records like Odyshape to exist, to throw the distinctiveness of a band like The Raincoats into relief and allow for there to be variations that exist that need not get branded a rip-off.

I did not go to Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland. I did, however, go to Atomic Books in Baltimore and pick up this comic called "Swell #1: Open Faced Sandwich," by Juliacks. Normally my comics posts are just me singing the praises of stuff Picturebox put out, but this will be a slight change from that.

First off: Presentationally, this comic is sick as hell. It's 11 by 11, and the version I have has two-color silkscreened covers, which are really gorgeous. More than their aesthetic beauty, there's this charge I get from silkscreened cover comics: It's an incredibly laborious process, and then it's just put out there, for cheap. (This cost five dollars, there are also versions without silkscreen covers that cost $2, which is still a great bargain for the size.) It just feels so open. These comics will inevitably get looked at more than they get bought, flipped through at a convention and retain some finger-oil.The copy I have isn't immaculately printed, there is a little bit of bleed on the blue at the outer edge, which is completely understandable.

The rest of the book follows suit, even though it's black and white xerox, it's just filled with mark-making, and really thought-out and overwrought page composition. It gives off a feeling of passion, of emotion, through the book format. Sometimes it's not intuitively readable, but there's something being communicated.

The thing I've sort of attached myself to about comics, and the idea of cartooning, is that it's writing and it's drawing, each inform the other. This becomes evident with stuff like this, where the lettering is really intense and a big part of the page design, but there's also definitions at work. "Artist" is a pretty broad category, that a lot of people identify themselves as. Identifying as a "writer" is conscribing oneself to a more specialized field. Now, there are distinctions that have sort of emerged- of "literary" comics that tend to work like short stories or movies. In these, a cartoonist is a writer who's using a visual language. There are also "art comics," which is a term usually assigned to artists doing comics, or books, as part of their overall multimedia assault: A comic that could be placed into an art installation. Juliacks is firmly in the latter group, as she does performances and installations based around her comics and the themes contained herein.

I am a writer, as are a handful of my friends. I am also about Juliacks' age. One thing I have talked to some of my friends about in writing is the issue of having things happen, making writing that people want to read for the story being told, rather than the pleasure of simply experiencing the language. The writing becomes closer to visual art in something like this, I think, in how one engages it, and maybe in its emotional effects, different from something with tighter story structure. The thing about Swell: Open Faced Sandwich (which Juliacks says is just part one of a three-part graphic novel) is that there's no real arc to it: Things happen, kind of, but it's all pitched at this single level, of just trying to communicate a feeling. It radiates sincerity, and energy, but there's no pace to it at all as a thing that you read. Compare this to Anders Nilsen's The End, with its stripped down drawings and narration that give way to abstractions that communicate a very pure feeling, or to the way Gary Panter switches up his drawing style in Jimbo: Adventures In Paradise so that by the time you feel like you've come to the end of a long journey. Swell is art-comics as a really cool thing that, through it's nonstop ecstatic sadness, ends up just giving you more of a feeling for the artist making it rather than the emotions the story is ostensibly meant to convey. (The story is about a girl who dies, told from the perspective of her friend. The characters are teenagers, I think.)

Juliacks will probably get better. She is apparently working on a drawing collaboration with Matthew Thurber, who I think is an awesome cartoonist: He shares a love for mark-making, patterns, and psychedelic effects with Juliacks, but his stories are funnier, more fantastical, and actually just very recently got a lot more readable as traditional comics. Meanwhile, she's being championed by Austin English, who is much less talented at drawing, and also tries just to communicate feeling by crappy drawing and using crayons. Both of these people are probably more interested in art-comics of a recent vintage than the history of sequential art as a whole, which is maybe a weakness. Most of the "art comics" people I like (the Picturebox dudes) are pretty well-versed and immersed in mainstream comics and are just able to turn it inside out and disregard whatever. In some ways there's more freedom and coolness in ignorance, and I don't know if you actually need to know about that stuff to make good comics. It could just be a question of youth. My writer friends and I have read all sorts of books, and tie our inability to tell stories to our inability to really self-direct and control our own lives.

Oh, and since this post immediately follows one about the political apathy of Baltimore art kids, I must applaud the fact that this comic has a sticker on its inside cover giving out her website and saying "please vote!" Again, if I am going to draw a parallel between that level of political engagement and the emotional engagement and empathy that leads to creating strong work, that sticker feels sincere in the same way the printmaking and patterns all do. You could do worse things with your money than support this lady.

Now would be a good time to talk about Closed Caption Comics 7, but it's hard to identify all the artists, and I would like to see more of most of their work. Noel Freibert's comics seem pretty stupid though.

I thought it was kind of odd when I heard that Brian Chippendale started a "Noise For Obama" website. I suppose that having gone to a liberal arts school in the Pacific Northwest, where the music community is fairly notoriously politically engaged, made me take certain people's political positions for granted. Now I live in Baltimore, am somewhat engaged in an arts/music scene, and haven't heard anyone talk about politics the whole time I've been here, despite sort of freaking out about the economy and being willing to talk to people about it.

But I just learned that the majority of these people- self-proclaimed "artists" are actually very much unengaged. Waiting until 2012 and the apocalypse. Not voting in the interim. Engaged enough in conspiracy theories to think that things could happen to make Baltimore devolve into race riots due to issues related to Obama's candidacy, like election defrauding. I'm sure all of these people admire Brian Chippendale a ton though. But I guess you don't actually learn things when you go to art school.

I went to a liberal arts college, where, in addition to having liberal politics taken for granted and having arguments about Palestine shoved down my throat, I also studied American history and economics for a year. By the standards of Olympia, I'm borderline apolitical, inasmuch as I didn't attend protests. But I still knew the issues enough to be engaged with them enough to talk about them, to write satire or freak out.

The streets of Baltimore are flooded with pro-Obama sentiment. Some random dude asked me who I was voting for outside on my front sidewalk. Maryland will surely go towards Obama. But a lot of the reasoning behind this seems largely to do with identity politics. To learn that, outside of that group, the people that you would think of as being smart and forward-thinking are just all about apocalyptic thinking (WHICH I AM COMPLETELY GUILTY OF AND INTERESTED IN) to the exclusion of moderation seems way more problematic than the Olympia activists who were interested in anarchist thinking who didn't vote because of it. Because I never respected or interacted with the latter group.

So, anyway, Noise For Obama. If you click past the portrait of Obama drawn by Chippendale, you'll find artist statements, and Chippendale's is as cogent as you would expect from a dude engaged enough in the world to actually make affecting work.

I don't know how politically engaged Marnie Stern is, although I linked to the Kill Rock Stars blog as well, and her album came out today, a little less than a month before election day, and I will buy it tomorrow.

Check it out: A negative review of me and a video I made! I would warn you about spoilers but to a certain extent the description of what happens is inaccurate. She also gets the title of the piece wrong. I am described as nerdy-looking, which is not inaccurate, but the reviewer doesn't make the connection that I am the person she is describing thusly. I am not going to respond to any of her actual critiques.

I have spent the last three days living in Baltimore, Maryland. I've moved into a house where a few nice people live, and find myself immersed in their set of friends incidentally. They are all art/music people who you might have heard about from the internet or print publications if that is something you are invested in. I bought a cat from the pound.

I also just received a press release for this Tollbooth Gallery show where a lot of the things I wrote about myself, some of which were jokes.

All of these are kind of weird interesting things that might lead to insights in the future, but at this point in time I have none. If you were thinking about getting into music from Baltimore, you can have my endorsement that the people involved are probably nice. I haven't met any of the Closed Caption Comics folks, but maybe I will if I go to SPX in Bethesda.

The latest figure to go from me not knowing who they are to hearing a bunch of things about them in a short period of time would be Tiffany Anders. She sings "Heartbeat" on Mike Watt's album Ball-Hog Or Tugboat, put out two records on Up, one of which was produced by PJ Harvey, and is the sister of director Allison Anders, who she now runs a festival of music films with. I share this with you in the thought that you didn't know who she was either, but now, in contemplating all that, are surprised that you didn't.

On a similar note: Do people know who Etger Keret is? This Israeli short story writer, whose book comes with Miranda July blurbs, who directed a film called Jellyfish, as well as being involved with Wristcutters: A Love Story, a film based on a short story that he also adapted into a graphic novel called Pizzeria Kamikaze, in collaboration with Asaf Hanuka, that was originally serialized in the comic book Bipolar? I've known about him since those issues of Bipolar came out, but I only read the first two of those, but it seems like I should pursue him further on the basis of his investigation of so many different mediums.

That Mike Watt album is kind of crazy, by the way. He mostly just plays bass for a group of alternative rock superstars. He wrote most of the songs, but the covers that are present are pretty notable- Sonic Youth's "Tuff Gnarl" featuring Carla Bozulich's vocals with most of Sonic Youth backing her up, Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain" with J. Mascis doing the guitar solo. Until a week ago, this is a record I only knew for the humorous inclusion of a Kathleen Hanna answering machine message where she talks about how she doesn't want to be on the record with a bunch of alternative rock superstar dudes.

Isn't it weird the way you can stack the deck to try to generate some noise for yourself and still be under the radar, while some Youtube celebrity can become a ubiquitous point of reference? Not like any of these things are totally transcendent and amazing (to the best of my knowledge thus far), but they're all interesting enough- maybe they're a little generic, but there's plenty of generic things that have made a blip on the collective consciousness with less effort.

I am leaving Olympia, Washington in three days. This is a short enough period of time that I can be relatively assured of the fact that every time I see someone, it will probably be the last time, and I can then tell them that this is then their last chance to either jump my bones or tell me that they hope my plane crashes. I have lived in Olympia for five years, which is long enough to predict with utter certainty what everyone will choose: To look stunned, and then walk away.

What I will miss most about Olympia is the Grocery Outlet. This is a store that only exists because the town is economically depressed, with a great many people on food stamps. But because of Olympia's large hippie population, organic foods and granola sometimes find their way to the shelves at a discounted price, where they are sure to be consumed. It is only through this that I ever ended up eating Seeds Of Change pasta sauce, which is delicious. There's also varieties of utter garbage for sale, sometimes with amusing things about the packaging: A drink called Ayds, a cereal called Crispy Hexagons. With its inconsistent stock, it pretty much stopped me from getting any sort of brand loyalty or keeping an eating habit up for an extended period of time: I've stopped making pancakes now that they've stopped selling pure maple syrup in glass bottles. It dictated my free will, the same way Olympia as a whole did during the time I lived there.

It was the kind of awful place that seemed to highlight the magic of Olympia even more. Seeing music being performed by the person who sells you your frozen consumables is a hell of a thing. Even if the music isn't that good, it is at least something going on in their lives, and so you don't have to be depressed every time you go into the grocery store, like I did once I saw that guy who was in my first class at college working at Safeway after he received his B.A.

The place where most people of the people I still know in Olympia congregate, the Capitol Theater, home of the Olympia Film Society, is pretty much the opposite of that. It's a volunteer-run organization, and the few paid positions don't offer that high of a wage. Everyone that is there is so for the love of it, for the thing they think it could be but almost never is. It's too financially struggling to show independent and foreign films all the time, and so shows a lot of second-run Hollywood movies, that the volunteer staff appreciates the chance to see for free even as they lament the downturn. There's not the same surprise when you see the people who volunteer there doing interesting things, it's half-expected, and if no one did anything you would maybe suspect them of being a kind of hipster hanger-on, a creature of habit with no real ambition besides being where the cool kids congregate. (At least of the twenty-and-thirty-somethings: The children and senior citizens are one of the few things that make you feel like you are actually, thank god, in a wider community, where there are people not your immediate peers that nonetheless share interests with you, which is nice in a sometimes oppressively small town.)

Obviously there is a handful of people that I will actually miss, but I take it for granted that they'll move on to bigger and better things: That one day, using Grocery Outlet as a metonym for Olympia, they'll go down the street and a bunch of the things that they knew would never last will be gone, and the few things they can get there will no longer seem appealing- can't be used in a recipe without the missing ingredients- and their habits will change and everyone will be scattered to the wind. All of these people- and even the ones that I will not actually miss except as symbols of Olympia are free to take refuge in my home, wherever that will be, if our lives cross paths on travels. That is actually a thing I am really excited about, maybe moreso than I am about the general idea and act of moving.

This new version of Firefox is bullshit. I am particularly mad at the way it organizes my browsing history, and then displays it in a pop-up menu rather than a sidebar. This is made worse by the way URLs are saved: These are things that I use instead of bookmarks, people, and when thinking "Okay maybe I'll add bookmarks" I end up dealing with another pop-up menu, as opposed to a sidebar and just becoming disgusted. I would never have updated except for the fact that some sites pretty much stopped working in terms of showing content: For example, pages on the Village Voice were all sidebar links and no articles. That is still less inconvenient than what I now have to put up with.

"Did you ever see The Holy Mountain on ice?"

I'm not certain that is the lyric that opens the last track on the new Max Tundra record, Parallax Error Beheads You, but that's how I heard it, as I listened to it for the first time, thinking that if it isn't the best record of the year (which it might very well be) it is definitely the record that Alex Tripp and I would listen to three times a day, as we were working on frenzied animation, if we were still living together. I'm already associating it with hypothetical good times. It's inspiring music.

Maybe the new Marnie Stern record will kick its ass for sheer inspirational force.

It's like glitchy, video-game music, with a lot of live samples, drum machine rhythms, kind of intricate compositions making all the disparate parts flow together, sissy-English-boy vocals on top sometimes. His "Some Best Friend You Turned Out To Be" was all instrumental, and I stole the first track, Cakes, for a video which is probably going to be showing at Tacoma's Tollbooth Gallery for a month starting on the seventeenth of September. I really like that record. His second album, Mastered By The Guy At The Exchange, I did not like as much, but I was really obsessed with trying to hear it after I heard about it, from a really positive Pitchfork review that mentioned there was a song called "Gondry" urging the director to do a video for him- Gondry's letter in response can be found in the booklet accompanying the Works Of Michel Gondry DVD. (This was before Human Nature had even come out, I think- certainly before everyone in the world knew what a genius the dude was. Before those White Stripes videos, even, maybe?) This record kind of integrates both of those records into a whole, and an awesome whole it is.

In getting ready to move across the country to Baltimore, I've been packing up all of my books, and getting new ones to read from the library.

One, Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine came recommended by a friend, who read it in a burst, feeling that her thoughts had been captured on paper. While I was reading it, I learned another friend of mine felt the same way about it. When I began reading it, it was kind of irritating. If I had stumbled across it blindly, I could imagine throwing it against a wall in frustration. It's all minutiae, with no plot development. It's all digressions based around a vivid engagement with the materials of the world. I can imagine why my friends felt so drawn to it, can hear little bits of it in their voices. But, early on, when there's footnotes talking about the way plastic straws float in cans of soda to supplement a man body of text talking about an affection for straws that bend, I kept thinking "Oh my god, it's just going to go on like this." I think the climax of the book would be a list of reoccuring thoughts, arranged by how many times they are thought per year. It's kind of a cool book, consisting almost entirely of the sort of minute observation that would make someone's attention perk up in another book. It reads like consciousness, and while at first I was just viewing it as an argument against ever trying to write a book while on the influence of cocaine, lest you become as relentlessly focused on nothing in particular as Nicholson Baker is here.

It seems important though, as a sort of time capsule, a footnote to all the books written during the eighties that were too caught up in narrative to actually characterize the nostalgia for childhood that haunts people incidentally. It's really concerned with material things, and how those effect us. I was thinking of it in the same way people take a lot of visual art, in that I was wondering if there was some kind of critique inherent: It's about the way products and advertising surround our thoughts, and the occasional bits of beauty that emerge in a man-made world. I don't know if it feels damaged by it or not, that would sort of be reading in a moral dimension that might not really be intended. I wouldn't mind having it on my shelves at some point in the future.

On the complete opposite side of the spectrum, I read Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away. It had a focus on narrative as well as morality, and I really loved it. I checked it out from the library along with a copy of the Dreyer film Ordet, and got pretty excited by the idea of religious art. It was really compelling for how the central character primarily denied the whole idea of even having a consciousness, and seemed determined to not have anything in the world inflict itself upon him.

I just put on this Akron/Family CD-R, Franny And The Portal, that opens with a song with the refrain "Because I am not my thoughts."