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.