Music of Autumn 2012

I haven't been writing much about music lately. Partly this is because of the difficulty of doing so in a remotely interesting way, but it's also really easy to think it doesn't matter at all. I have pretty much no readership, and in a world where it seems like most music writing is tied to "personal brand" or "curating," it feels like a cool record label agreeing to release something is more of an endorsement than I could ever provide. This sort of defeatist attitude, like most defeatist attitudes these days, cedes a lot of power to people with money, so it's time to get back on the horse. Also, keeping on top of what every cool record label puts out is for record collecting nerds with Asperger's, and "personal brands" are for assholes.

That said: The Editions Mego imprint Spectrum Spools is on top of a sizable portion of the chunk of underground in which my friends reside. Their focus is more on music made with synthesizers than my own instincts lean, but hey, I get it, guitar music is on the way out. Meanwhile, Editions Mego itself put out a new record by Fenn O'Berg, called In Hell, which sidesteps the analog synths in favor of milking the laptop for some gorgeous and subtle music. I don't know how to talk about that if you're not familiar with the Mego label- Its proprietor, Peter Rehberg, plays in this trio alongside Christian Fennesz and Jim O'Rourke, and the beauty I refer to is not of a classical variety but in relation to other abstractions that don't show reflect light so cleanly.

A few years ago, Lazy Magnet released an album with the name "Is Music Even Good." Upon hearing the title, I was immediately won over. When I heard the record, I was blown away: Its constant genre switching appealed to some sort of engrained conception of music instilled by a childhood love of Ween and other goofballs, but was being made by a dude submerged in the noise scene, without finding any champions amongst the set that views that sort of weirdness the summit of all art. Not enough time changes for the Mike Patton crowd, I suppose. This could be due to the fact that Lazy Magnet is not a band, but a solo project, or really an umbrella term for the work done by one Jeremy Harris. Things never get too technical, or session-musician-y. Since moving to Baltimore, I've seen him perform a few times: A few sets were performed with a rock band, but the dominant mode for his song composition as of late has been on electronic equipment (drum machines, sequencers, MIDI). I believe the same equipment is used in his band Meager Sunlight, a duo with his partner, who also shows up on his new release, Crystal Cassette, to do some vocals. They hover along the synth-pop axis, vocals are deadpan, cold, fashionable at this point in time, but because of his past I tend to view these things as "songs," first and foremost, rather than as a set of sound and signifiers- One time I played Is Music Even Good for a friend and heard it through their ears, where the switching of genres, the weirdnesses where a country song would be distorted into clipping noise, these bits of structure were there in place of traditional songwriting chops, and the overall effect was not that of a "mixtape" of songs that were strong examples of their respective elements, so much as a collage that gave the overall effect of a goof. I do not mind these things, at all, but in working within a more defined palette over the length of an album you get to hear a single aesthetic tamed into multiple songs and maybe get more of an appreciation for what he's doing. There's a Meager Sunlight record forthcoming on Spectrum Spools, as well as a Lazy Magnet due out on Bathetic in the months to come. Just the other day there was a Twitter conversation between Bathetic and Jeremy about making a country record, which is also promising. This tape is on Night People, who put out little comps on Mediafire so you can check out songs from pretty much all their releases of a given time period. I'm listening to the latest compilation right now, so I can also add this little micro-review: I like the drum sound on this Peak Twins track.

Happy Jawbone Family Band have a new cassette, The Silk Pistol, available on Night People as well. It's also available for streaming/download on their Bandcamp page, so while I wait for a replacement copy (I got a bad dub) I gave it a listen. I like this band: Their first LP "Hotel Double Tragedy" I first heard on a Sunday morning, when it felt really appropriate to the slightly rainy weather outside. I was not hungover, I don't believe, but certainly other people could've been, and this would be as soothing as a good Amps For Christ record in such circumstances. Was it a Sunday afternoon when I downloaded and listened to all those Jackie-O Motherfucker records a few weeks ago? Yes it was! I don't know how you spend your Sundays (church?), but now you know how I spend mine. Anyway, Happy Jawbone Family Band's music seems like mid-90s Elephant 6's dream of the sixties, this-copy-of-a-copy effect not a watering down so much as it is a distortion into clouds of fuzz and cotton. Their 2011 LP, "Okay Midnight, You Win," recorded by a real producer loses this home-recorded charm and loses a certain essence. This music seems like collapsing, falling down. Maybe partly this effect is that while some instruments are playing wandering leads, others chime in with chords, tones? I know nothing about music composition and cannot really tell what is listening within a piece of music. I can, however, tell when someone is making a joke, and these folks do that on occasion, with the Christmas album on their Bandcamp bringing that element more to the fore. These are charming qualities for a band to have.

Jokes are aplenty on the Angels USA - VH1 Drunk cassette put out on Hundebiss a few months back. It is a sci-fi radio play where the only songs are jingles for flavors of chips- There is a chip implanted in your head that allows you to download flavors. The science-fiction vibe of the plot is abetted by the cold electronic ambiences that are basically this band's stock in trade these days, although the jingles throw in some guitar strums for variety. The jokes are great, actually laugh out loud funny rather than the "I appreciate your light-hearted nature" reaction I have to Happy Jawbone Family Band. One unintended bit of weirdness is that (at least on my tape) the first side is mastered much quieter than the second and needs to be turned way up. The other issue of course is the attention span of a listener- I have become distracted and missed some laste-in-the-tape plot twists. Oh yeah: even though each release lists band membership under different shifting aliases, Angels USA is the same band as Angels In America, aka Miami Angels In America, whose Allergic To Latex cassette I have previously held up as their best work. It still is, but this is an nice insight into their world, deepening an appreciation of the personalities at work for those who haven't hung out with them extensively. I have hung out with them only a little, and so these inside jokes were unknown to me. Nice packaging too.

Esra of Angels USA also recently made a movie with Carlos Gonzalez of Russian Tsarlag, and while there is probably no way you can see that unless you are friends or friends of friends with the involved parties, Carlos has also released three records so far this year, the best of which was probably Midnight At Mary's House, which is also the one with the most copies pressed of it. It's now unavailable from the label, Not Not Fun, but maybe copies can still be found at retail outlets that reliably order Not Not Fun releases even though they are not all commercially viable- one of these would be Baltimore, Maryland's very own The Sound Garden. Ah, but what does it sound like? It is some late night music, not emoting its despair, but speaking of its aloneness- there is an on-record request to be sent old horror movies, and if you haven't watched The Abominable Doctor Phibes in the hours between midnight and dawn then you should: It's a great movie and to do so would put you closer to understanding one of contemporary America's most interesting artists. "Colors are fading fast," the man croons, and surely this is true, away from the day-glo of the internet.

Other listening I recommend: The Mike McGonigal curated compilations of gospel music issued by Tompkins Square, James Blackshaw's Love Is The Plan, The Plan Is Death, Charles Mingus, the two Mount Eerie LPs from this year along with 2008's Lost Wisdom. Yes, it is after midnight now, and these things, these things, this is where I'm at these days- The Mount Eerie stuff and the Russian Tsarlag stuff is maybe of a similar emotional tone, coming from geographic opposites of the USA, the northwest and the southeast, the crispness of the mountain air versus the sludge of the swamp, the moleskine versus the VHS tape.

"the Garo tribute issue"

There was a small controversy a few months back on The Comics Journal website, a website where I am not registered to comment, at least in part because I find their controversies largely uninteresting. It concerned the Kickstarter page for a book that was trying to find funding so it could be printed and released. It's out now, but I'm not sure anyone has reviewed it, which is a perfect place for someone like me, a not-particularly-strong reviewer, to come in and say something insightful.

The book is issue 7 of Secret Prison, generally published as a free tabloid newspaper in the manner of Smoke Signal or Paper Rodeo. Issue 3 had some good comics in it, but by and large, one page comics are not the best way for unknown cartoonists to make an impression. This issue is, indeed, a book, squarebound, and every cartoonist gets a few pages to have their voice be a distinct thing. It is a "tribute" to Garo, but moreso the idea of Garo than Garo itself: Garo is an anthology of manga that began publishing in Japan in the sixties. I have never seen a copy, and even if I had, I would not be able to read it. I would wager most of the participating cartoonists never read an issue. (Besides the translated reprint) But whatever: That's a red herring, despite some contextual essays trying to explain what Garo is. (Probably as a response to the stupid fake controversy. Fake controversy, fake tribute, fake manga.)

The idea, actually, is that there are American cartoonists functioning today who are influenced by comics from Japan who are making work that nonetheless still has a sensibility closer to that found in SPX than what you would find in the sketchbook of the average Otakon attendee. The comics are pretty great, the cartoonists get a chance to impress when given the length of a story to tell a story. A lot of these cartoonists have appeared in Thickness or Sock, but watching them draw non-porno comics gives a better sense of what they do. There's still more penises in this comic than would be in manga, though.

The problem is the editorial decision to tell these people to do comics that read right to left. For someone whose pages are generally pretty chaotic, free-flowing things, like Mickey Zacchilli, this is a problem. Honestly, it's a problem for everyone, it's a contrived conceit. I don't really like reading manga right-to-left: It's how the work was originally drawn, but this idea of "authenticity" seems like the romance of kids. The inside cover cites a list of work, available in English, related to Garo and alternative manga, and, if I am correct, most of those books cited are "flipped," to read left-to-right, because Drawn And Quarterly, along with Pantheon, when they publish most Osamu Tezuka comics, considers that the way that appeals to the adult readers of the work they're publishing.

It's also a problem for reading the text-only essays, in that, when flipping a page (from right to left) it is unclear which page of an all-text spread the reader should begin with. But who cares! That was my point when writing this review, that I wanted to point out that the comics were good. The pages are large- again, closer to the unfolded newspaper page of the previous issues of Secret Prison than that of a collected manga volume (again, the influences are really mixed and matched all over the place here) which is obviously flattering to artwork in a way that manga's expanded pagecount is more flattering to storytelling than the format found in previous Secret Prisons.

Anyway, Ryan Cecil Smith's stuff is fun action-adventure comics, Noel Freibert's comic is sort of based in horror but is more interested in the creepiness of anti-social behavior than anything else, Angie Wang tells a delicate short story, Mickey Z goes for the fury of mark-making and not giving a shit, Chuck Forsman turns his attention to masturbating teens, Katie Skelly makes a comic that's pretty wack. People do what they do. Well, Tom Hart does an adaptation of someone else's work. In general, the art looks good. No one story is earth-shattering the way Tsuge's Screw-Style is but there's an homage to that comic which seems like it's heart is in the right place.

The Small Dog Other

My buddy Brian Blomerth recently completed his first full-length comic, The Small Dog Other, and it is available for purchase on his website. This follows numerous zines of his art, album covers, etc. Due to his color sense and presence in the noise scene, playing a Game Boy under the name Narwhalz Of Sound, it was easy, maybe even instinctive, to label him a Paper Rad rip-off. Some of you might even be thinking that now, if you followed the link and noted the presence of animated gifs. But after a few waves of Ben Jones rip-offs aping the "stoner sitcom" style, seeing Blomerth's comic completed places him in a lineage of underground comics, thanks to the use of some obvious reference points, from its title's reference to The East Village Other, to the violent and sexually explicit content. Brian is completely disinterested in pot, and here, he even seems disinterested in humor, besides a general "funny drawings/funny animals" style. Nothing is mellow, the credo is "Bad drugs or none at all," and psychedelia is a venue for crazy layouts, the same way it would be for Jim Starlin, rather than the internal revelations of Moebius.

I lived with Brian as he initially undertook the task of drawing a real comic. I could be wrong, but I think absolutely none of those pages appear here. There is probably as many pages found here that ended up in the garbage, not up to his standards, dismissed as "too Juxtapoz." References to Ziggy and the Challenger disaster are gone, and what is left is an underground comic that seems like it is about the sixties: Bikers and hippies in Las Vegas, versus the cops. And all of these characters are drawn as dogs, which in this context doesn't read as an alternative to Garfield so much as a reflection of the Floyd Gottfredson/Carl Barks influence on Robert Crumb. The comic is an orgy of nihilistic violence, with occasional interruptions for sex. Brian's sense of verbal humor, rooted in contemporary reference, the sort of puns that make up the bulk of his Twitter feed, is absent, in favor of this primal stew: Sixties culture carrying over into a future where destructiveness is the natural state of being, as well as civilization's endpoint.

The early pages, previously published in color, in a smaller edition, before the switch to a rapidograph, have thicker lines and more chaotic layouts. The drawing is consistently strong. The storytelling is mostly clear, although the "twist," the major plot point that leads to the destruction of Las Vegas, is not really explained in any way, besides its place in the overall logic of "fuck it." Spoiler warning: Everyone dies. It's a pretty great comic, a steal at the $7 price: The dimensions are equivalent to one of Fantagraphics' Ignatz books, there's fifty-two pages, and he self-published it in an edition of 250. And then burned one of those copies for the sake of a Youtube commercial. Anyone interested in sixties undergrounds or contemporary "transgressive" work vaguely in that tradition should be aware of this book because it pisses all over the bulk of that stuff.

He also has copies of a Narwhalz cassette, Future Vegas, for sale, but I can't recommend that, even though I have liked a handful of previous Narwhalz releases, I find this particular tape too harsh and abrasive. It is possible that to some people this description might constitute a recommendation, and I will accept that.

How Geniuses Party

It is hard to explain how mind-melting Masaaki Yuasa's Mind Game was to me and my group of friends back in 2005. This is largely because of the fact that while the other things that constituted our personal canon back in those days- Paper Rad, those Animal Collective records, Trapped In The Closet- passed into the larger consciousness of taste-makers, Yuasa's film seemingly just received the praise of a few critics. Partly this is because it was never really that available: It had a screening at a museum, but then was passed about on torrents, and DVD-Rs sent in the mail.

His most recent series, The Tatami Galaxy, is available as streaming video via Funimation, a partner site with Hulu, but the earlier work has been difficult to keep up with: His first series, Kemonozume, was sent to me on a DVD-R after its serialization was completed; but at the time that his supposed masterpiece Kaiba was coming out, my computer was not powerful enough to track it down. I was just able to do that recently, when cartoonist Brandon Graham tweeted a link to a Youtube video of the first episode, uploaded by an account that had only edited 4 of the 12 episodes in the series, only the first two of which were subtitled, and one of these pages had a YouTube commenter making reference to a torrent site specifically set up for anime, which I then had to register with in order to search. Obviously, this kind of search is nothing compared to pre-internet zine/video store/mail-order culture, but in a world of memes that become ubiquitous within a week, the discussion of things incapable of going viral is a very hard conversation to have.

Kaiba is a weird thing to describe the look of: Its character designs are based on Tezuka, its background textures have a computer-aided lushness that is still basically a subtle effect, contrasted to the feature Mind Game, which has a balls-to-the-wall shifting of styles almost analogous to Gary Panter (even though the actual closest parallel in terms of character design would probably be Seth Fisher). Meanwhile, the story being told in Kaiba is a weird sci-fi thing maybe more like something out of Heavy Metal magazine, but everyone who has seen the whole thing (I'm at the halfway point currently) says it is heartbreakingly sad.

There is what seems to be a heavy Moebius influence in Yuasa's short "Happy Machine," which is a contribution to an anthology film, called Genius Party, which, despite the promise of its title, I found to be pretty disappointing aside from the Yuasa piece: It is all about as unwatchable as I traditionally find anime to be. It is worth noting Yuasa's stated influences, annotated on his wikipedia page, draw from a deep well of world animation, placing him into that stream, while his adeptness at strange computer effects, interpolating live-action video, fits him comfortably with experimenters the world over.

I found a torrent for Genius Party on The Pirate Bay, which I've been hitting up recently to find British comedy, which seems equally as strange to talk about in a real-world context. Trying to describe the conceptual precepts behind something like Garth Marenghi's Darkplace is another one of those things that can only be deeply frustrating, but much of what I've been taking in is so dry, dark, or awkward that I find it hard to even describe to myself, to locate where the jokes are: Watching The Thick Of It, I don't even feel like I'm watching a comedy so much as I am watching a drama where I'm not invested in the characters' lives because they're all thoroughly unlikable. At least this condition can be explained away by citing its setting, the world of politics; the milieu of Nathan Barley is something faintly recognizable but to the best of my knowledge having no real-world corollary.

One of the few British comedies I've seen recently to make it to the laughter centers of my lizard brain without getting lost in a fog of cognitive dissonance is Lizzie And Sarah, a pilot too dark to be made into a series. I loved it. Written and directed by two women, (Julia Davis and Jessica Hynes) who each play dual roles, as elderly women in miserable marriages and teenage girls, there is a certain free-wheeling quality to its plotting that makes one wonder where future episodes would go, even as it stands alone as a work in itself brilliantly.

(I've also been watching Peep Show, which is similarly based on reasonably recognizable character types, and very enjoyable, but I feel like everyone knows about that already: It's available on Netflix streaming, which is how everyone finds out about poorly-made documentaries, and surely the site's mathematical algorithim has recommended it to everyone who's rated Seinfeld/Curb Your Enthusiasm/the original version of The Office five stars, which is to say, everyone.)

Every Creek That Rises Must Preserve

I've been neglecting this blog lately. Rumblings are afoot for a new comics blog, instigated by a few of the Closed Captioned Comickers, which I will be participating in, as yet unnamed. I think the idea of writing for a blog strictly about comics will be freeing, and I am saving all my thoughts on comics until that gets underway.

So, for today, film. And music. (In the future, all at once, together, forever.)

One of the great things about film, or photography, really, is its sense of place. Beasts Of The Southern Wild, the first feature film of Ben Zeitlin, is shot in Louisiana, and it is recognizable, to me, as the same part of the country where Walter Hill's Southern Comfort was set. While that film, released in 1981, allegorized the Vietnam war, Zeitlin's film, coming out this Summer, feels at least in part like an exploration of issues raised by Hurricane Katrina. Which is to say that I think it is about America in the 21st century. Not in a political way, or a didactic way, but in a mythic way, because it takes place in the realm of myth. It's an American myth the same way that superheroes are the myth of 20th century America, or the cowboy was the myth of the 19th century. This is the story we're telling ourselves about what is happening now, and the failures of Katrina are as foundational as the factory or the frontier was.

The protagonist of the film is a 6-year-old black girl named Hushpuppy, whose father is dying. She is lively, chaotic, natural. I am reminded of David Gordon Green's George Washington, although this film's rhythms are less built on cutting between scenes, and more of an observational stillness and drift. What we see is beautiful, set in its swamplands, and the land on the other side of the levee, of urban civilization, is pointed out as ugly. We are present in the land of folktale, tradition, jazz as folk music. The soundtrack is gorgeous and evocative, and when it comes time to depict a rainstorm, the sound's mixing of water against the scrap that makes up improvised roof shacks comes through with presence, resonance. Afterwards, once the waters have risen, the beauty in the desolation comes through enough to see its world as still being worth fighting for, against the encroaching of civilization's standards.

Honestly, once the film leaves this society, for the land of interiors and tighter spaces, it loses a little something, certain bits of charm. The narrative voice, observing the refuge, the hospital, is still sharp and funny; but the cinematography, without bits of grime to dwell on, in the name of forward narrative momentum, loses a bit of its life.

But that's the story we are being told, one of a dying father, and that is what I'm arguing is the story we need to tell ourselves. If memory serves, one of the first sentiments spoken after the film's title card is that all animals are made of meat. Later we are told that everybody's daddy dies. These are the films truisms, and its parental advice: "Don't cry," and "smile," when taken in conjunction with these ideas lays out the sort of worldview we need as human animals bearing this weight, and also points to the tonal quality of the film, as laid out in its photography of wide vistas, its stillness. This is a film to usher you into the animal world, about a girl learning to navigate the world via talking to animals. This is the apocalypse that is coming; one that already happened, back in 2005.

The music I meant to talk about when I started writing about the film is that of the rap group Death Grips, their loops, their collapses, their noise. The lyrics that are this abstraction of all that is guttural, super-aggressive, but mostly just fucked-up. Thinking about rap music as an extension of oral storytelling traditions, or "the dozens," and the world we're living in.

Obviously all of these things have racial implications that are going to be problematic for some people. The point I am trying to make, essentially, is to invoke the phrase "post-racial" to describe a time, forthcoming, where we will all be the neglected citizens of the city of New Orleans, due to a class structure that wishes for us to be slaves. And then to take this mythology of the wild, of communing with nature- sort of a stereotype, but we are able to use it as an archetype, or a totem, as some kind of navigational tool. Whereby we all see ourselves as six-year-old black girls (sort of the ultimate disenfranchised figure) and learn to cope with a natural and indifferent world and are then able to look into the beast's eyes and see it as something we can coexist peacefully with, against civilization.

"Strong Female Characters"

Does it seem too much like Andy Rooney, shaking his head at popular music, for me to say that I do not understand the popularity of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo? There is a disconnect between the imagined audience in my mind and the wish-fulfillment element to its 1990s-extreme protagonist described as being "different in every way" by supporting characters. You would think that the audience inclined towards the titillation of rape exploitation and revenge would be rather small, as well, but you look at the numbers and see that all these traits I associate with modern superhero comics' constantly shrinking audience are there in this current popular fiction.

I saw the David Fincher version on DVD the other night, knowing well enough what I was getting into: It's the third iteration of a story I had already dismissed as uninteresting from the initial synopsis, but somehow David Fincher has made an impression on me as being "worth paying attention to" enough that I felt okay with doing the dollar-rental from a vending machine at the supermarket. (To me, that feels like even less of an investment of energy than watching something instantly on Netflix, because it's more of a concession to popular taste.)

The next day, as I went to return the DVD, I found that the vending machine kiosk was defunct, and so convinced was I that this was a conspiracy to extort money from me I vowed to never use said vending machine again, and to reinstate my Netflix account. I canceled Netflix a few months ago. I chose DVDs over streaming during the price-raising debacle, and shortly afterward found that, while I could fill my queue up with movies I want to see eventually until the end of time, picking out something I was excited to watch in the immediate future felt impossible, as the things I was most excited about were movies I was hearing about that were neither on DVD yet nor in Baltimore theaters- Movies like Margaret, We Need To Talk About Kevin, and Miss Bala, which just became available on DVD and was immediately placed at the top of my reinstated queue.

Miss Bala, despite having a premise that seems like it belongs to an exploitation movie, is never as repulsive as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. One of the reasons it's able to avoid certain traps, actually, is by featuring a passive protagonist, and feeling consciously political, rather than simply having some kind of up-with-people "strong female character" who gets to enact vengeance. No, it is about being a body, buffeted by forces beyond its control. The way that it is shot, with one odd composition after another, necessitating long takes because a viewer cannot immediately parse what it is looking at, and where the people are situated in relation to each other is a mystery until they move.

Miss Bala is about a woman who lives in poverty in mexico, who sees a way out by entering a beauty contest. She is then swept up in a conflict between drug lords and the DEA. She stands not for all women, but for all civilians, in a wartorn and politicized landscape. It is about being a victim, and feeling empathy with people in situations beyond their control, rather than playing into a wish-fulfillment idea where people "take action," as the action depicted is psychotic and unknowable. It is not an action movie, although it contains action, or rather, violence, and the tension comes in watching this woman run past people shooting at each other from behind barricades of cars, or curdling in the fetal position in the front seat of a car as its windshield is shot out. It is never "thrilling," never cathartic, it is always tense. The bits that are thrilling are the brief moments where the woman is able to be by herself, and see herself as pretty and possibly possessing a future she can direct herself. The film basically shuns voyeurism, and it is in these moments where the viewer gets to take the lead in as an actress, as a physical body as something other than a stand-in for their own potential victimization. It feels feminist for real, is what I'm saying, and in doing so functions as a challenge to presumptions about action narrative and heroism in so many ways that it is not likely duplicated anytime soon.

Thus far this year much of the new music I've been listening to has either been made by friends, friends of friends, or people that seem like they could be friends were we coexisting in closer space. Later on I'll hear the newest work by aging composers, or rappers who rap about selling coke (do those still exist?), or women who insist on glamor in their self-presentation.

Right now I am happy for my friend Ed Schrader, whose LP with his band, just came out on Load Records. It is called "Jazz Mind" despite my argument that it should be called "Why Are You Doing This To Me?" I made that argument when we were washing dishes together, possibly listening to syndicated 1970s episodes of Casey Kasem's Top 40. I don't know how much is talking out of school when it comes to alluding to previous personal conversations, so I will say nothing of them and instead focus on the record that exists as if I were coming to it as a stranger, and so I will not air my grievance that I am not listed in the liner notes list of thank you's, which I am positively infuriated about.

All joking aside, Jazz Mind is a good record, alive with personality and charm, but also completely listenable and possessing real songs. Some of them sound like early eighties REM, some are punk stompers, vaguely comparable to Swans, only they're shorter than even an average pop song's length, rather than extended into a bleak abyss. I use the term "stompers," rather than "rockers," I guess due to the instrumentation, which for Ed is a single floor tom, although the other half of the Music Beat, bassist Devlin Rice, rolls along melodically at all times, excepting the a capella "Air Show." The record's arrangements are also enlivened on occasion by the presence of the guitar from No Age, as well as the occasional embellishments of Matmos.

Ed's Welcome To The Roman Empire cassette on Fan Death Records, credited just to himself, without his Music Beat, is something else. (There are other musicians heard playing, but they are uncredited, and none of them are Devlin, the guy from No Age, or the Matmos folks.) The best reference point I can come up with, actually, is to call it "based," in the manner of rapper Lil B. But while Lil B lets out so much, so un-self-consciously, that he becomes super relatable and human, Ed's self-consciousness (which manifests itself in things that are more obviously jokes, with punchlines) leads to a willingness to be mediated that means that listening to an Ed Schrader record seems deliberately framed in such a way as to present a picture of the artist as raving madman. It feels like id, ego, and superego all sort of battling it out in front of you, to create a portrait of modern man sort of tearing himself apart. That his comedy generally comes in the form of impersonations, of David Bowie, of Rush Limbaugh, of Michael Moore, of his friend's family, of his own family, seems like a way of sorting all of the different drives into something that makes sense, that is somewhat linear. Sometimes it is the funniest thing ever and sometimes it's just baffling. Obviously, the urge to want to edit the work of really prolific people down into something digestible makes sense, certainly economically, but for those who know Ed personally these deliberately sculpted records seem like there's something missing. The records are compelling, but they're not BOTTOMLESSLY compelling, the way a constant stream would be. (I suppose watching an actual constant stream, burbling along, wouldn't be bottomlessly compelling either. I am thinking, instead, of a burning fire.) Hopefully someone else will express interest in putting out a tape of Ed Schrader's pre-music-beat material, where the line between joke and song is blurrier, and the the line between funny joke and unfunny joke is blurred as well, because sometimes those unfunny jokes work perfectly well as songs. "H1N1, running the country, H1N1, we're all gonna' die!"

The two Lil B mixtapes out so far this year, White Flame and God's Father, are both great. No longer in the sort of like conscious rap positive mindset of the majority of his 2011 output, they are both blessedly all over the place, with White Flame making such noteworthy moves as "rapping over a MIDI version of Prince's I Would Die 4 U about how nerds are people" and having a song called "Poppin V" about Viagra, which refers to them as "grampa pills." (I'm also excited about his only-on-Youtube so far songs "Put That Pussy On My Face" and "Ima Eat Her Ass," which are hopefully being saved for a sequel to last year's Bitch Mob Volume One: Respect The Bitch.) God's Father has a brief skit taking place in a pet store that leads into a song about bullying. God's Father, though, by and large seems like a variation on the idea of "New York rap," sometimes more so than others, but the whole thing is cohesive enough. While rapping over a loop of an old soul song is sort of a commonplace rap move, Lil B is more likely to take a loop of an Imogen Heap song and sort of rap, sort of just do spoken word over it, or do just spoken word over ambient instrumentals. God's Father presents a context that sort of allows for these things to be united and bleed into each other. It's two hours long though. White Flame is only an hour and fifteen minutes, and is more of a party record. Both parties and interior worlds of emotion allow a lot of freedom to do whatever, though, so these are broad categories. I have over fifteen hours of Lil B's music on my computer, and some of it is better than others, but all of it is free, and I think Lil B gets the same thing that the Sun City Girls get: That it is totally acceptable to put out crap sometimes, or even most of the time, and you don't have to try to prove yourself.

Lil Ugly Mane's Mista Thug Isolation is not based at all, neither in the sense of overriding positivity or "I can do whatever" freedom. It is intensely focused, a "project," one among many for the brain behind it, but as of this tape it is no longer a highly-specific genre pastiche of Memphis rap. Instead, Lil Ugly Mane takes this cultural moment where rap is open to weirdness and samples obscure industrial records to see if anyone can place the reference. The rapping is on-point, no longer chant-based, being both more technically precise than many of its reference points and also home to some pretty funny jokes. The song for the ladies is named after a William Gibson novel. "I've got ballin' on my mind, Kareem-Abdulla Oblongata," to write down something which scans much smoother heard out loud. This is easily the most catchy and compulsively listenable music to be made by someone I've lived with.

I have also been repeatedly listening to the Grimes LP, Visions. It is actually very similar to Lil Ugly Mane, enough so to be considered its opposite: Both are perversions of certain strains of R&B, but whereas Lil Ugly Mane pitches down the vocals to sound evil, tough, frightening, and more like a certain idea of black masculinity, (perhaps this seems racist but I think it is fine, although it's worth noting that Lil Ugly Mane is pretty clearly operating in a space free of moral judgments) Grimes pitch-shifts the vocals up into this weird ghostliness, that seems delicate and terrified of its own ethereality. "Self" gets rhymed with "health," bodies are longed for, both for the presence of other people and to be reminded of ones own nature. It seems like singularity anxiety, the idea that "you" could just exist on a hard drive somewhere, like an mp3, and then longing for the sensuality of R&B, but still knowing that stuff to be a cultural construct. I don't know if you have read this interview with the poet Tricia Lockwood about Twitter but the fact that she talks a lot about Aaliyah, and deconstructs this tweet: " YO AALIYAH DONT FILL UP ON ALL DAT BREAD GIRL…..GOT A BIG MEAL COMING WHEN WE LAND Really makes ya think. Eat the bread everyone. Namaste." makes me think about the fact that the health/self rhyme cited above does not actually exist, it is in fact me misremembering, stemming from the line "I need someone to look into my eyes and tell me girl you've got to watch out for your health." (Maybe that interview is essential to understanding what I'm talking about when considering those lines as responses to each other, if you don't intuitively get it.) Aaliyah seems like a valid reference point, so does Aphex Twin, so does Twitter, or just omnipresent technology in general. It feels really human to me, and sounds pretty good- I haven't seen this lady live, most recent Baltimore show was canceled, but it seems like it could be interesting to take this thing that I am at the moment considering small and private and put it into that context of dance-party social-ritual.

There is more music I could write about, if I knew how to write about it: I met this guy Female in passing, and his record A Grounded Mound/Widespread Telepathy, available at the Free Music Archive I have listened to a few times. Sort of cold electronic pop music, with detached vocals. The Human Teenager LP on Spectrum Spools is also pretty good, although not necessarily worth the twenty dollars for the vinyl release- probably worth the cost of an Amazon download though. I did, however buy the Keith Fullerton Whitman Mego LP, Generators, which contains recordings of two live sets, although I might prefer the Generator cassette issued in 2010, which is direct from synth recordings, and is both more minimal and more varied. I have been waiting for the new Angels In America cassette on Night People to arrive in my mailbox since it was made available, but cannot weigh in on it yet at the present moment.

Probably the thing farthest afield from my social circle would be the latest Mouse On Mars record, Parastrophics, which I do enjoy and consider to be a good record, but is very much techno, to a degree that it seems almost useless to listen to while simply sitting around thinking: It is intellectually engaged enough to be listened to, and danceable enough to be on in the background while moving in physical space, but not the sort of direct-to-soul thing that can be used to guide for inner journeys. But hopefully the months to come will give me enough opportunity to hear it in its proper context for me to consider it for a theoretically "best of 2012" list, which I mention only because I think it is funny that I have been neglecting this blog so much that my last post was a "2011 in review" post.

2011 has turned into 2012 on the Julian Calendar, and as we have less than a year until The End Of The Way Things Are, people take stock of 2011, the last full year we will have, and attempt to simplify it into list form, even as the nature of current economic structures means that there has been too much to appraise. Many contenders for the best films of last year (The Last Year) have not even been made available in most markets as of yet.

It is funny to reread a work like The Invisibles, and see its pre-millennial vision of the coming end, set in the year we find ourselves now living in: Virtual reality figured prominently. The Invisibles was famously appropriated by The Matrix, along with much of other "cyberpunk," and while 2011 was the year Grant Morrison really planted his flag firmly in the ground of irrelevance (ground he's been travelling on since 2004-2005 but now the flag is planted so as to be visible to all watchers, whereas before he could only be seen by following at close range in a way that led to a loss of objectivity), that work remains interesting as what might be the last work of future-prediction we have, as the movement of information technology erodes narrative structure and creates a world where predictions seem enfeebled. Having moved to setting his stories in the present years ago, this is the year where the newest William Gibson book is an essay collection.

With the future abbreviated, what's noo in the noosphere? What are the ideas on display in the best narrative work of 2011?

One of the best comics of the year would be the anthology Kramers Ergot 8, introduced by an Ian Svenonius essay that implicates all of western culture as possessing the values of camp as a form of surrender to dystopia, perpetrated by Capitalist powers that be. It is describing the same world that Gary Panter describes in the Jimbo strip the immediately follows and begins the book's comics portion: A world where any pleasures are made available by way of a force that remains sinister in its offer of a panacea. The tone is thus set for an exploration of darkness in the modern era. When Kevin Huizenga then redraws an old sci-fi comic, with a happy ending that feels bizarre and unearned, the reader is left waiting for a twist that never comes, and making one think of what could have possessed the story's original author to create something so narratively unsatisfying.
Most everyone's comics are great, with the exception of some 1970s Penthouse reprints. Ben Jones' comic reads like the "comic strip about being a man" promised to be included in the Men's Group/Black Math book now seemingly abandoned. It's maybe the most hopeful and positive thing in the book, even as the last word it has you read is "racism." Men are dogs, but dogs have qualities superior to that of men enough to be a spirit animal/totem of evolution against the rest of human nature. If that seems complicated or contradictory then maybe you are not familiar with the similarly loaded contradictory exploration of cultural flotsam that makes up the bulk of Ben's work, that considers things as symbols but interprets them differently than the narratives we generally tell/sell ourselves. In its understanding of humanity's true needs, it points a way out of the trap.

One of the other best things of the year has been Jacob Berendes' Mothers' News, a free newspaper from Providence, Rhode Island, which introduced a comics page this year that runs the work of many artists Kramers Ergot also publishes. In the same way that Svenonius' essay needs to be taken as inhabiting the same place as the comics that follow, the comics in Mothers' News can be read as an extension of the Mothers' News voice, which isn't coldly intellectual, but friendly and almost inside-jokey, assuming shared values, which are then articulated brilliantly and inspirationally. Mothers' News is free to readers, financed by advertising, and offered for trade to other producers of things. Mothers' News was around in 2010, but 2011 both signalled an expansion of its scope as a number of imitators from other cities offered their own versions which have not been as inviting and charming. Berendes posted his own top ten list, that ends with an endorsement of bad shows. Bad shows are sort of the lifeblood of noise, and this points to a conclusion that bad experiences are the lifeblood of life. These are the dynamics which we live with, as we go out into the night, away from the mediated "I expect to like this" of consumer culture.

In some ways this a major part of the Occupy movement, or of protest in general: Not the statements and suggestions of reforms that people who "support" the movement but do not actually physically occupy public spaces, but in the act itself of choosing to live in a tent, temporarily or indefinitely, in the name of building a community with the people around you that seems real, vibrant and uninsulated. This has been the major story of 2011, the narrative of reality, of revolution as a thing inside consciousness being made manifest in a way that looks a lot like hanging out. (Although congratulations to those who took the story of the year to be corporate death-throes offering up new panaceas, because that definitely also happened.)

Matthew Thurber was there, at Occupy Wall Street, drawing comics about it, trying to make more directly political artwork, as his 1-800-Mice comic was completed and published as a book. His addressing of politics is an understanding of the way in which the internet is an addictive substance, supplanting real world identities, and what it means for the future of humanity to have our minds confined to satellites as our bodies threatened to be drowned underneath melting ice caps. His strip, found both at his publisher's website and in issues of Mothers' News, is hysterical political cartooning. Meanwhile he has a typeset zine, Are Snakes Necessary, soliciting science fiction movies on VHS to be reviewed.

The other relevant the-internet-is-politics, the-world-is-science-fiction, fiction-is-journalism would be the BBC TV program Black Mirror produced by Charlie Brooker. The first episode is the one that will live in infamy, as its shockingly transgressive black-humor premise plays out as horrific drama, about and the mainstream media's inefficacy in the face of the internet, even as the internet itself is a Pandora's Box exploiting the worst aspects of our nature. Each of its episodes point towards technology not saving us, but will simply pander to the worst aspects of ourselves, including our willingness to be commodified as we obliviously destroy the world. The second episode is considerably weaker but still feels like a potential future, even as it obliquely retells Brooker's biography as malcontent-turned-celebrity. The first episode feels fresh and prescient today, the day after the internet's protest of SOPA, which was seemingly quite effective, in spite of the fact that TV news, being owned by SOPA-supporting-corporations, did not cover the law in any substantial way. That SOPA as a law is not actually as horrifying as bits of legislation like the recent NDAA, but does effect the internet, America's current favorite narcotic panacea, which is why there such an outroar ensued from powerful organizations acting out of self-interest, points to episode two's potential future as being extraordinarily likely to come to pass. Perhaps I should summarize the stories to explain what I'm talking about, but, hey, that's what its no-longer-blacked-out Wikipedia page is for.

My favorite TV show of the year, however, was PFFR's The Heart, She Holler, similarly a horror-comedy but being much more of an actual comedy. Serialized over the course of a week in soap-opera style, but with twelve-minute-long episodes as Adult Swim allows, it was a Twin Peaks riff with lots of jokes, even as its creators' stated intent was to make a show where the jokes were nightmares. I loved it. I laughed a lot, and took more delight in its transgressions and weirdnesses than I did anyone else's. While I enjoyed new episodes of Louie and Parks And Recreation as much as anyone else, this felt more genuinely "new," even as its rural setting and VHS tapes might make it seem like a period piece in comparison. Such is the nature of nightmares.

Norm MacDonald's "Me Doing Standup" was a really funny investigation of all sorts of dark recesses of the human mind that was better than any other standup comedy I saw, and the seriousness of its themes was comparable to any other work of art you might name. As I write this, I realize that the high point of the set, where he talks about how he would commit a murder, is comparable to the Dash Shaw/Frank Santoro riff on To Catch A Predator in Kramers Ergot 8. Norm is funnier.

I don't even know what to say about movies, besides that I think 2011 was a particularly bad year for them. Martha Marcy May Marlene was my favorite American movie of the year, that I have seen at this point in time. It's notable that it's also a horror movie, of sorts, filled with a tension that builds and offers no catharsis, filled with the mind's anxieties. In foreign films, I appreciated Certified Copy's mix of intellectual gamesmanship and emotional brutality, and Poetry's observational grace that genuinely felt like poetry. I thought Hanna was far superior to Drive in all the ways that they were similar, and Drive to be inferior to all the movies it was ripping off in the ways it was different. Carey Mulligan is a good actress though, both in Drive and in Shame, which is actually a good movie in general. I was pretty into the second half of The Future. I liked 13 Assassins, Tabloid, and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. There are lots of movies I would like to see but haven't yet and don't know when I'll get a chance to, including Margaret, Kill List, Miss Bala, A Separation, 3, and We Need To Talk About Kevin. I will probably see A Dangerous Method within the coming week.

Other comics that are good and interesting would be Michael Deforge's Ant Comic. I really like the use of one-page comics, serialized over time, to tell the story of a society- Another example of this would be Mat Brinkman's Multi-Force, Brian Chippendale's Puke Force, or Matt Thurber's Infomaniacs. It really feels like the comics form for modern society- like looking at a RSS feed or something. It feels like that's as contemporary a storytelling method as you can get. The bright, built for computer monitors color scheme is beautiful as well, although I look forward to the print collection I assume to be forthcoming. I wrote a blog entry all about Ganges 4 when it came out, and even though I also had written about many of the records I wrote about on my "best records of 2011" list, I will refrain from repeating myself here, save to say that that comic is indeed one of the best. I feel like an asshole for not having read the latest issue of Love And Rockets and trying to make a "best of the year" list. Both Olivier Schrauwen's The Man Who Grew His Beard and Winshluss' Pinocchio are beautifully colored Franco-Belgian comics that feel light years ahead of the sort of stuff would run in A Suivre or Metal Hurlant. Beautifully colored comics feels like a new idea to me, still, something to work out going into the future. It's not a new idea so much as the sloughing off an old one, that associated good comics with an integrity that necessitated black and white printing for economic reasons. Conor Stechschulte gave me a copy of his largely black and white, but printed on a risograph machine, The Amateurs on New Year's Eve and that's a pretty great comic, containing a horror atmosphere but some of the best action sequences I've seen recently.

Ending this year-in-review with a list of the satisfying distractions from the state of the way things are might seem like a deviation from my original intent of discussing the concepts highlighting this year, if I hadn't had it as my thesis that these distractions are the stuff of living in the modern age, the balm to distract from a horrifying political situation where power is consolidated and civil rights are eradicated. It's worth noting that cinema is bad because of how much money is needed to make a movie, and that comics seem a little more hopeful because of their comparative lack of overhead. I wish I knew more about literature to discuss books released in the past year, but the fact remains that publishing is a slow-moving beast, kind of dying, that sort of contents itself with the fact that books will remain in existence indefinitely, after a crash of digital technology. So if anything truly great came out this year I will read it in the sunlight in the years to come.

It is approaching the end of the year, and people are making their lists of top albums, as the cycle of leaks and hype presupposes that very little of interest will come to light in the last days that is not a prelude of grander things to come. I have made my own private list of notable records, culled from an iTunes playlist and a look at my shelves, to try to preempt any word from an official organ. It's a reminder that my world and the world outside are a venn diagram with little overlap, and that is fine: I have listened to plenty of music this year, about as much as I would have in any other given year, probably, and been satisfied. Music fills the needs of its listeners, and while if there were any true masterpieces of deep meaning I must have missed them, all the discussion I've heard suggests that everyone else missed it too. And maybe it would be tricky to be too invested now that I am not sixteen anymore. So, what sounded good and interesting enough to warrant mentioning as a highlight, what said something in its essence I found sympathetic?

Early in the year I was naming Micachu And The Shapes collaboration with the London Sinfonietta as the record of 2011, but lacking in any kind of critical acumen or knowledge of music theory, or substantial readership, I was not really able to whip up the cascade of verbiage needed to alter discourse in any way. Now it is December and that record remains as unheralded as it did on it was on its release. Let me restate: I think that record sounds awesome, really sonically rich. I also think that more than any other record, it is a testament to how music works, as a series of collaborations both between peers and across genres, beyond time. Micachu and the Shapes are a band whose song forms on their first records seemed sort of indebted to a certain strand of artsy post-punk, with Kleenex being maybe the best reference point, who had their debut produced by Matthew Herbert and earned enough notice from the British music press to be a in a position to be offered the opportunity to collaborate with a classical ensemble specializing in contemporary works. Some new instruments are built, and the music written seems sort of indebted to DJ Screw's playing records at slowed down speeds, the wobbly depth of a sound slowed down being mimicked by string sections phasing in classical minimalism. That's the record itself, but it comes with a download code for an mp3 mixtape, where the classical concert is sampled and sped up, and a drum sound is added to make it suitable for friends of Mica's in the UK grime scene to rap over. This kind of bricolage is the sort of polyamorous relationship with music that obsessive listeners have, actually given a narrative to make connections deeper than a DJ's analysis of BPM. I can make no great vouchers for the ending mixtape, but then, that's not presented as the end result. It's a bonus, the next step in an ongoing recapitulation. Number one record of the year, in my book, narrated as ever by a contrarian.

The best songs, presented clearly and with no abstractions, would go to Bill Callahan's Apocalypse. My favorite record he's made under his own name, since dropping the Smog moniker, coinciding with a loaded enough title to make people take notice. "Apocalypse, eh?" I am aligned very much with Smog, its distance and its black humor, the sort of traits that lead to me finding someone on Twitter calling Callahan "the patron saint of bad boyfriends" but on the work released under the man's own name these traits have aged into something like grace, no longer surly but rueful. This seems like a moment where the aesthetic prettying-up of arrangements since the lo-fi days of Julius Caesar and the slowly warming tone seem to have aligned without slipping into tedium. Not like that hasn't happened before- certain songs on Red Apple Falls and Knock Knock were pretty lovely- but here that tone is sustained, without hints of darkness. Top record number two.

Top album number three was made by Baltimore locals Sejayno and released onto the internet with no one noticing. Like, I wonder how many people first heard of it close to the artists only heard of it when I tweeted a link. Of course they have released physical material with no one noticing so this is the more eco-friendly option. It's called I-95 and is a concept record about the east coast highway as devil's corridor moving from power center to power center. One of these songs is going to show up in the next year on Salamander Wool's LP for Ehse Records, "Solar Solipsis," and while that is a good record it is less beguiling than this one. This is the best record made by anyone I know, the one I feel closest too, because while it is very weird the songs are recognizable as such, vehicles of personality containing much humor. While Twig Harper's Hanson Records CD is my favorite thing that he's done, it is deliberately alien and anti-ego: A horror movie soundtrack to aliens abducting and experimenting on your consciousness. Which is visceral and thrilling and even cathartic, necessary. I would put it above any other record of its type, actually, a wide category of noise that encompasses drone and new age. I would put this psychedelic record trying to peel the top off your school over anyone working to move your heart, is what I'm trying to say, at top album number four.

The U.S. Girls On Kraak record is something that just came to my attention late in the year and I have listened to lots. Pop songs that really pop, including covers of disparate genres: It is so important to me to hear DIFFERENT SOUNDS on a record. While we all complain about the loudness wars negation of classic dynamics, there is something so undynamic about the classical band formation reliance on the same arrangement. Maybe it's notable that the first bands I got into were things like They Might Be Giants, Ween, and Beck, and that I tend to prefer albums to live shows because they can contain more easily contain more sounds. While I adore this Brute Heart record "Lonely Hunter" and its band setup of bass, drums, and viola, there is a moment where interest begins to lag and the song that contains a piano constitutes a highlight. We are now in the realm of records without numerical ranking: I like both of these records quite a bit. I will continue to name the records that call out to be named, to be selected as worthy of discussion in this dialogue of "albums of the year."

For instance, Alvarius B's Baroque Primitiva. Even though it turns out it's mostly Ennio Morricone covers and I guess a record that is mostly covers isn't especially notable. Although it's the cover of "God Only Knows" that ends up being the most notable song, its homemade arrangement giving away to tape-splice psych, removing a phrase and becoming this dark mirror that is somehow essential to the whole thing, some kind of gnostic revelation shedding new light on the eternal. The rest of the record remains of a piece with that moment, building to it in a way that necessitates a cover of a Nancy Sinatra song, the same James Bond theme that shows up in noted Sun City Girls admirer Matthew Thurber's 1-800-Mice: "You only live twice, or so it seems, one life for yourself, and one for your dreams."

Big Blood remain one of my favorite bands, and they continue to put up the majority of their releases at Free Music Archive. I didn't know that would be the case for their LP Big Blood and The Wicked Hex when it was made available from a Greek label, and so I made the costly move of ordering it from Europe. I have no regrets. It arrived the day before I went to the Voice Of The Valley festival in West Virginia. Something appropriate about America and Appalachia and the whole elemental thing to be found in these songs, by and large their longest, made into mantras. Respect is due also to Angels In America, who performed at Voice Of The Valley and have made their records available at the Free Music Archive as well.

I should maybe take this moment to highlight Voice Of The Valley as probably the best thing I did this year, as a change of pace, escaping from a hurricane that hit the east coast to hang out camping with a large chunk of Baltimore, a good mixture of people I see all the time and people I wish I got to see more, as well as strangers, and a good ratio of chats around a campfire to ecstatic dance parties to general silenced vibing. The music was frequently stellar, lots of live sets by people who are maybe not as good recorded (or at least don't make what I look for in a record enough to listen obsessively) but killed it live: Telecult Powers, Container, Unicorn Hard-On, Bee Mask, Bleakend At Bernies, Needle Gun. Other good shows/good decisions/nice changes of pace would be going to a large club and paying over twenty bucks to see Swans with Richard Bishop opening, and going down to DC to see The Raincoats with Grass Widow and an Ian Svenonius band whose name I didn't catch open. One of the highpoints of the going to see shows at the houses of people I'm friends with would be what happened yesterday, when I saw a tour of Scream Mask and Timeghost down from Providence.

Other records I would be foolish not to mention would be the solo releases of the folks whose duet constitutes the song from the Sejayno record that will appear on the forthcoming Salamander Wool record. That is some contorted and awful grammar, my apologies to the English language. Those people would be Carson and Natalie, Salamander Wool himself and Weyes Blood.
Carson's tape, Espionage Briefcase, is an hour's worth of mostly techno, slash folk music. It's like Eastern Europes infatuation with American club culture turned into a descendant of Baltic folk music a weird and alienated American could connect with, pumping out of a car's tape deck and who knows where that car and its tape deck were manufactured? LOVE DEM GUN SOUNDS. Weyes Blood's The Outside Room LP is a real "on the other hand," the sort of dream-pop folk songs which despite Natalie's former cohabitation and tour with Nautical Almanac actually reminded me on my most recent listen of the first Beach House record. But the songs are longer and less poppy and have way more lyrics. Less commercial but still immediate enough that I am sure it has sold out of its limited pressing at this point. Weyes Blood also issued a split cassette with Angels In America, not available on the Free Music Archive but downloadable from the Northern Spy website for four bucks. That's worthwhile, I kind of loved it.

The best records in the abstract camp to be made by widely known quantities were those made by Tim Hecker and Eric Copeland. Ravedeath, 1972 and Waco Taco Combo respectively. I don't have anything to say about those records that don't say anything (in terms of lyrics at least) that have nonetheless generated plenty of discussion despite music writers' bias toward language. They were good: Waco Taco Combo notable for being better than the Alien In A Garbage Dump material. The Whorehouse Blues seven-inch was good too: I hate seven-inches but I like mp3s okay.

I didn't buy all of this music but I bought a lot of it, and I also bought a lot of music that was not as good as these records were. Mostly from musicians who played incredible live shows or people who've made good work in the past. Support the economy of music and art, participate in the commerce of the uncommercial, because it is the uncommercial that is the least likely to be used to soundtrack a commercial, which is what I suspect is the primary income stream for much of the clutter.

That intelligence leads to alienation is a tale often told in our culture, in no small part by people congratulating themselves for their lack of interpersonal skills. Certainly, trying to communicate ideas that have been thought through to a greater degree than is expected in a world of memes and accepted narratives is not going to be rewarding the speaker with increased social capital. And to let such thoughts go unshared can lead to increased solipsism as, without communication's linearity, thoughts are allowed to move in circular patterns. The mind can be a pretty lonely place to travel through for any of us.

The thing is, consciousness, and its kin, the self and self-consciousness, are pretty common experiences to anyone with a brain, no matter how much mental firepower one has. Issue 4 of Kevin Huizenga's Ganges breaks through all sorts of accepted narratives, by being a guide through these most lonesome of territories, one's own mind, and it is capable of being a guide for all of us because of just how fucking smart it is, how next-level breakthrough the storytelling is. It's a comic book about not being able to sleep, its protagonist is a bookish everyman, and its cartoons and diagrams move through in a way that feels funny, true, and helpful. It helps in the way any fiction helps, by being human and communicating a shared experience.

The possible high point of the issue might be a sequence about trying to read a boring book to fall asleep. Excerpts of the text appear in captions as Glenn Ganges is shown wrestling with its syntax, attempting to sort it into something sensible. It ends in the spiral of failure, the shape unnavigable thought ends up in, but the sequence reads as a pastiche as effectively as the bit explaining video game plot mechanics found in 2008's Ganges 2, which is a weird bit of equivalency: That something about confronting logic and the brain and heavy thought-exercise reads like the same person describing effortless fun. The joy comes, essentially, from the communication not of an experience, but of the spirit of the creator, the spirit of the seeker's search: The same way that a vigorous conversation can be recalled as an enjoyable bit of camaraderie even as the specifics of what was being discussed fade in memory. Both the restless motion of video games and the sludge of reading philosophy go through the same Kevin Huizenga filter, and in the end it is Huizenga- probably one of the best cartoonists working today- the reader is enjoying the company of.

Of course, the other thing that unites the two sequences is that it's one of the few times where the eight-panel grid is deployed, a bit of rigid pacing that makes things more straightforward, a bit of 4/4 drumbeat in a comic of jazz phrasing capturing the modulations of thought.

Maybe it sounds like I am discussing David Foster Wallace or something, certain intentions of explaining the joy of transcendent boredom in The Pale King, or his continual insistence on attempting to capture a brain's recursive thought processes. Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine is probably a better comparison point in the world of literature, if for no other reason than how easy to read it is. It's sense of humor, actually, is like certain tracks on the last record by The Books, The Way Out, which in their collage cut-ups of new-age self-meditation records played out like a version of the same that was more aligned with psychedelia, and as such was more helpful as a guide to the mind than its humorless source material would be.

My citation of all these reference points, I think, points to my failure, or maybe it's just the failure of criticism in general, to not create a work that stands on its own. So all I can do is point to the thing itself, Ganges 4, as a great self-contained object. This sort of high-minded, formally playful thing is probably not for everyone, but it works well enough that it seems like it would be for anyone interested in the idea of it; anyone who can relate to the idea of being kept up at night by a restless brain, which I would assume to be pretty much anyone I would ever attempt to communicate with.

In the past few weeks, I've been spending time down by Baltimore's McKeldin Fountain, as part of the Occupy Baltimore movement, in solidarity with New York City's Occupy Wall Street group. One rallying cry is "We Are The 99%," referring to the statistically proven fact that 1% of Americans control a majority of the wealth in the country. What's funny is how often we, as Americans, are split into groups, at odds with each other. This is a big part of politics, obviously. These groups are also being depicted as being relatively close in size to one another, which is why it's important that everyone vote, and represent for their half, to get the edge over the other half. The idea of a group that identifies itself as a mass of people, united by shared suffering and empathy for each other, is sort of a radical idea. What's funny is this conservative backlash on the internet, of people saying "I'm the 53%," which I believe refers to people paying federal income taxes? Their point is they don't complain about things, they just work hard, despite maybe having terrible lives. The important thing is they're positioning themselves as a majority that wins. Society as it stands is working out for them well enough to not want sweeping reforms, and their slight-majority threshold ensures that reforms won't be coming anytime soon, despite the undisputed fact that were reforms to come, they and many other people would benefit.

When I've been home, I've been watching a lot of Seinfeld. I've watched the first three seasons, courtesy of a loaned box set. One trope I am catching now that I never previously took note of is how often sports are talked about, specifically baseball, as a topic for male bonding and social activity. Seinfeld doesn't have anything to do with the class struggle, but it might help explain to you why I was thinking about sports, and why they're such a good metaphor for the way these things work.

Professional athletes make up a very slim group of people in this country. Obviously, to be a professional athlete means being in better physical condition than, oh, 90% of the populace. However, other people still play sports. They do it because it's fun, and healthy, and you do it with your friends and it makes you feel like you're part of a larger community. Not everyone does it. I don't do it, although if someone were to organize a game for people at my low level of athleticism I might take part. That would be a nice, small, human community I could be interested in. Obviously, pick-up games occur with some regularity, I don't hear about them, maybe I would be outclassed, whatever. Hooray for those who get together in backyards or in school parking lots to take care of themselves in a way they find enjoyable.

What's off-putting to me is the idea of sports as a thing you follow, like politics, a set of stats and people to find solidarity with, to root for and against. It's against the very idea of "sport" as game at the root of the definition, the same way party politics counter the idea of democracy in a very real way. People love to support their team, though, don't they? Talk radio and news coverage, is all about professional sports, this thing with lots of money behind it.

Particularly germane to this, actually, is a thing I heard (from Occupy-Baltimore-supporter, and my idea of a semi-successful person, Dan Deacon) about how the Yankees operate, as a professional sports team. There are salary caps in baseball. If you pay a player more than that, you get fined. The Yankees, in order to fairly artificially cultivate their image as winners, pay more than what the league allows, with the knowledge that they can just pay the fines and go on with it. People still root for The Yankees, despite this essential illegality, because they like the idea of winners. Obviously, "fuck the Yankees" is a proper response to this, it makes sense that you would then just root for anyone else, even if they don't have anything in common with you, people root for their local team even though it's probably just a collection of mercenaries from elsewhere. That's a thing people do, but it doesn't really make sense to me.

"We are the 99%" is being mocked by people who see the game being played on a human level and think that looks awkward, when what they are seeing is people doing something healthy.

I didn't attend the Small Press Expo this year, due in part to former travel companion Adam Boysen having left Baltimore for the west coast, but the very passing of the event means that comic book Oscar season is upon us, to use a phrase coined by Mothers News.

The book I am most excited to read is the collection of Matthew Thurber's 1-800-Mice, wrapping up using material previously unpublished. I haven't heard anything about the new material: For the past few years, Jog would write about the show, or someone at Comics Comics, but now that Dan Nadel is the new online editor of The Comics Journal, the fear of "conflict of interest" delays such coverage. The same effect from those former stalwarts applies further, nowadays, to books published by Fantagraphics. That consolidation of power effects a huge chunk of discussion about the comics I would want to read, so all I'm getting our Twitter chirps about how the new Love And Rockets is one of the best comics ever. (Adam Boysen was also the roommate who kept on top of purchasing everything the Hernandez brothers did, so I will have to wait some time to confirm this firsthand.)

I find myself still reading comics of note, one of which is an Eleanor Davis short story in the final issue of Mome. It is a bit of science fiction that feels very contemporary, in a way that seems difficult at this point in time, with communications technology so developed and advanced that telling stories taking place in the modern era functions as science fiction in a certain way. That would be the tactic explored in the last few William Gibson novels, for instance. Other authors attempting to talk about modern communications technology, Youtube videos and G-chat and such, tend to just tell stories dealing with their semi-autobiographical protagonists confrontation with depression and inertia. Miranda July's new film The Future works that territory before moving into magic realism. I was thinking that maybe this strategy emerges because we are living in a science-fictional world, but without any of the narrative thrust of adventure instilled by those pulp narratives. "In a society that has abolished all adventure, the only adventure left is to abolish that society," goes the May 1968 graffiti, but that is not the life being lived by those with iPhones. Davis tells a tale probably familiar to anyone who has traveled back and forth between one of America's metropolitan centers and its more rural areas, but extrapolates it into the future, largely through use of language and semi-psychedelic coloring that looks like it was done using colored pencil. I thought it was great, and am now interested in reading her comics for kids published by major publishing houses that will inevitably share none of this story's concerns but may still succeed on their own merits.

There's ideas in that last paragraph I meant to write in a letter to Matthew Thurber, actually, in response to these Smell Temple posts he's been putting up his blogs, photos of typewritten reviews of science-fiction films, but maybe this post will show up in his Google Alerts. (I would hope he wouldn't have Google alerts but they are a thing that people have.)

Not quite a comic book is Michael Kupperman's Mark Twain's Autobiography: 1910-2010, which develops a tendency towards prose that's been present in recent issues of Tales Designed To Thrizzle, but expanded to book length loses a lot of the dadaist chops that made them what they were. The premise takes it to a lot of territory previously covered by Kupperman, as well as noted admirers like John Hodgman. There's a certain degree of diminished returns for me but certainly I still got a few laughs out of it. He's using the same constellations of humor, but it's not like I do not appreciate a good gaze at the night sky. Have I mentioned before that I don't really like his use of color, and prefer him in black and white or monochome? The book is filled with illustrations and some chapters are comics, all done only with tones of blue, but it's also all drawn in one simplified style, rather than the crazy engraving style look or photorealism that Kupperman sometimes uses for particular effects. Without the appropriation of tropes of 1950s comic books or educational films that marks a good portion of his art, the book could be more accessible to a general audience, one that would be prepared for the humor from Conan O'Brien and Will Ferrell. More of a gag gift than something for a dedicated audience, but the Scott Dikkers gag book You Are Worthless is one of my favorite bits of humor writing, so that's not a completely ignoble goal.

Olivier Schrauwen's The Man Who Grew His Beard is a collection of gorgeously colored comics. Like Brecht Evens, Schrauwen is a Belgian whose sense of color is superior to anyone making comics in North America. It feels handmade, even when computers are utilized, and while Schrauwen is known for utilizing the style of Winsor McKay, all the comics here feel really contemporary. Reading it, I was reminded of the imagery one comes across on 50 Watts, while certain aspects of it reminded me of Steven Millhauser's short stories, to name another fantasist who McKay has influenced. Also like Millhauser, there is a certain familiarity to the structures being utilized- while Millhauser repeats himself, Schrauwen tells the tale of one using his imagination to escape a mundane reality that will be familiar to those who've seen Brazil, or the works of Dennis Potter. But the psychedelia of the drawing goes beyond, and sells the idea thoroughly. It looks phenomenal, and I imagine I will return to it frequently.

Anders Nilsen's Big Questions has been collected, and I bought the deluxe hardcover from Amazon, which I would advise against. The Amazon discount puts it at the cost of buying the paperback from a local store, and the added appendix I was so excited ends up being fairly slight. Support your local retailer! Especially if they are the sort of the place that carried Big Questions as it was being serialized. I followed the serialization until the point where it seemed like an ending was no longer in sight, and the cost of individual issues continued to rise. As someone who read the individual issues, I have a slight quibble with the reformatting: I wish the white-on-black spirograph image found on page 234 was not there, and that the scene that plays out over a page turn on 235-236 was maintained as a spread as it was in the serialization, where it worked beautifully as a continuation to the preceding scene. But the book is good, displaying a completely separate set of strengths on display in Nilsen's monologue comics, the ability to draw the shit out of a scene. Setting, layout, action sequences... The storytelling is top-shelf, totally on a par with any Providence dudes you would name if you agreed with me that those guys are great visual storytellers. I also am reminded of Geof Darrow, if Darrow was less into gore and more into open fields. Total visual poetry. Don't read it too fast. Also I am pretty certain that Nilsen draws these super-detailed backgrounds over and over again, even when he could easily do things animation cel style. People are saying nice things about this book all over the place, including the New York Times, which isn't going to talk about the stupid minutiae that I am half-ashamed of noticing. When this book was coming out I was convinced it would be the next Black Hole and everyone would read it when it was collected and that still seems pretty possible, but it might be too quiet and epic for that sort of ubiquitousness in folks' consciousness, which is to its credit.

Oh yes, there's also a new Optic Nerve out. The last issue came out when I was in college, and I read it although my consciousness was already moving in an "Adrian Tomine is kind of lame" direction. It is interesting how the shift in general comic folks' consciousness has moved in a way to effect him, as a cartoonist. The whole idea of black-and-white comics as indicator of "alternative," arising out of budgetary constraints has sort of changed- That was how Love And Rockets were printed, that was how Eightball was printed, and Tomine's general style of "realistic" drawing fell into the same type of idiom. Now, with so many older comics back in print, half of the comic is drawn in this Popeye-influenced style that is also reminiscent of Sammy Harkham, Jordan Crane, Chuck Forsman, etc. It's a lot looser. And then the other half is in full-color because its a reworking of a strip from Kramers Ergot 7. (The first half is in 1/4 full color, in emulation of Sunday strips in the cycle of newspaper comics.) It is cool, an interesting progression, even if these days I am sort of neutral on the content. I am fairly certain that "Hortisculpture" is a better comic that Shortcomings was, and not just because it is more self-consciously a comic than something that could just as easily be an indie movie. Shortcomings was serialized over the course of my going to college, and when I first read Sleepwalk and Other Stories I was in high school and had not yet read Raymond Carver. Sometimes I think people are not served by being prolific, by having their voice out there too often, a readership can become over-familiar; in other cases a lack of output just reminds the audience of how much time has passed. The comics I am the most excited about are those I have not yet read.

Halfway through another year where online music magazines are talking about the best of the year thus far and posting lists of neglected records which are not that neglected in that they received some coverage from online music magazines, my little corner of the world is as small as the corner record store where local yokels peddle their wares. The store I am talking about is The True Vine in Hampden, Baltimore, where the records coming out from Baltimore acts that receive coverage are unlikely to be ordered by proprietor Jason Willett, unless those bands place copies on consignment when they are not on tour. This laissez-faire attitude still wins the respect of local musicians, most of whom would probably still consider The True Vine their favorite local record store, despite/because of this indifference. Here are the records my smallish segment has produced thus far.

The Angels In America Narrow Road To The Interior LP alternates between being stripped down and hollowed out. There's plenty of space, which sometimes translates to too much reverb, but mostly just means a particular mood being conveyed: You have to give it more space and solitude than you do your more common in-the-red mastering jobs. Loose structures of song-husks, as lyrics discuss topics like burning your money, walking in the woods, and the appeal of being beaten up by women, and soundscapes try to convey the same elusive truth. If you have heard and liked the ballads on the proper, song-based Magik Markers LPs you will understand what's happening here, if you can intuit the correlative difference between live drums and drum machine and electric guitar vs pure electronics. Not everyone can but come on. Available on LP, CD, and as pay-what-thou-wilt mp3 download. Weyes Blood and Angels In America also have a limited-to-100 split cassette release on Northern Spy you can download the mp3s of for $4 but I haven't made the plunge yet because I keep thinking one of those 100 tapes will be made available to me at some point in the coming months.

The Weyes Blood LP on Not Not Fun, (probably still available but if you google it the first result is a mediafire link) The Outside Room, is pretty killer, which I was not expecting at all- In the time concurrent with the record being recorded, live performances were based around loops which did not always align and tended to abstract away from the idea of the song, with occasionally a tune or two coming in clear enough for me to stand behind it. Her live shows now are totally great, actually, but all of that is incidental to the fact that this record is a pretty perfect bit of atmosphere. Nico is probably the easiest point of comparison, and "sad" is the easiest emotional descriptor. But "sad" is obviously a lax term, especially when we are talking about music, so keep "Nico" in quotations as well. This is the kind of record that you put on at the record store on a Sunday afternoon and sell three copies. I like records more than live shows anyway, and records like these are a good communicator of that concept.

The Daniel Higgs cassette Ultraterrestrial Harvest Hymns contains lots of organ improvisations, run through with occasional tape distortion. Or at least it did when I heard it- My playing of it caused a tape player to break. I have others but have been wary. His collaboration with The Skull Defekts is great, both on the record Peer Amid and even moreso live, where they played material that I think will be on a followup LP. Live the feeling is that of watching The Fall as psych-rock band, with Mark E Smith's drunken nonsense being replaced with Higgs' clarity of sense in the presence of multiple realities overlapping. The record with the Skull Defekts is on Thrill Jockey, just like last year's Clairaudience Fellowship collaboration with Twig Harper.

Twig Harper's self-titled solo CD on Hanson Records is maybe my favorite recorded material I've heard of his. Starting off with the initial shock of the first sound you hear being that of an acoustic guitar, things start to make more sense as that instrument never gets around to playing a melody, but instead gets melted in with a melange of other electronics. A piano later makes a similar appearance, maybe out of tune, maybe all these instruments are out of tune, but they remain recognizable ingredients, keeping the whole thing processable as "horror movie soundtrack." The film in question would be that of aliens flying about in a space ship with human being on the operating table, but all of this is occurring within the bounds of the mind, and any violence that might be enacted is a liberating act being misunderstood by the body. Psychedelic agenda in effect: If you hear this music and your head thinks "haunted house," your mind is the haunted house, being exorcised of all sorts of ghosts of former tenants.

The new Sejayno record, Interstate 95, is currently only available for download, although the concept I heard awhile back was that the album was going to be turned into a playable Myst-style adventure game you click your way around, with the songs maybe being pressed to vinyl or not. Ideally that conceptual framework gives you hint of what's going on, in this concept album- which is about I-95, the highway that runs the length of America's east coast, being the "devil's corridor," told in terms of an art handler/drug courier making the voyage from Providence to Miami and back and having adventures along the way. This rules, obviously, these goofball parameters should give you an idea of what to expect, obviously this whole thing is an assault on expectations with a lot of laughs if you are tuned in enough to be accepting of a thing too stoned to be called surreal and too esoteric to be characterized using such common drug parlance as "stoned."

Records to come out this year that I had to pick up at Fells Point's The Sound Garden because the people that made them do not live in Baltimore include Micachu And The Shapes' Chopped And Screwed, Terror Bird's Human Culture, and Alvarius B's Baroque Primitiva. The record most widely enjoyed by people I talk to in conversation would probably be that Bill Callahan Apocalypse record. I'm leaving the house now, to go see Jason Willett perform with his fairly amazing improv band Leprechaun Catering.

I received a review copy of Jaakko Pallasvuo "PYYTÄJÄT," sent from Finland, and am please to announce that it is pretty damn good, worthy of your attentions if you are one who has thought about ordering comics from Finland. (I have!) The hand-lettering is in Finnish, but the dialogue is translated at the bottom of the page, in a closed-captioning effect which might not always be effective, but is in this case: The story beng told has an oblique tone of uncertainty to it, at first, and that removed distance contributes to the book's sense of mystery. Turning the page from the first to the second page, one wonders how the narrative connects, reading on, one questions the motives of characters as they being to say things that seem like lies. By the end, threads have converged, with things that initially might have seemed like jokes being developed into character depth by the end.

The comic I was most reminded of, (aside from general "this is like a European art film" sentiments) was the Ed Brubaker and Jason Lutes collaboration, The Fall, that ran in Dark Horse Presents and was later collected in a similar format by Drawn And Quarterly. Pallasvuo's drawing style, with its rough pencil line and figurework and absence of panel borders, pretty far from Lutes' polished inks- But each make their pages dense with panels, and The Fall initially withheld knowledge of the characters' pasts in favor of showing human behavior in a cryptic context. The Fall was a crime story, and had more noticeable plot forward movement, but the amount of density here stops the book from feeling slight, and makes the book read at a deliberately slow rate that allows me to be reminded of stories that were much longer. Meanwhile, the drawing is able to capture its setting, woods and a river, and natural phenomena, like light and the blur of speed ably, while still seeming of a piece with its depiction of humans and their structures as flat and childlike, reduced to iconography and texture.

The format is great: A one-shot comic, with dimensions comparable to a coloring book or a small newspaper, with endpapers depicting trees and the endpapers listing other works the publisher has handled, including translations of Americans such as Gary Panter and Jeffrey Brown, and Europeans like Ruppert and Mulot and Joann Sfar, as well as other Finnish cartoonists whose work has been translated by American publishers. The publishers' multi-cultural attitude is much appreciated, as in reading the comic in question I learned Finnish swears, which I'm pretty happy with.

A few weeks ago DC Comics sent out a press release announcing that all of their comics would be relaunched with new first issues and that this would allow for something fresh and accessible to the masses of contemporary culture. A week or two after that, the writers and artists that would be behind the coming avalanche of product were announced, along with images displaying what the art would look like, and those paying attention learned that the idea of "contemporary" that a 2011 comics company is willing to put out there looks exactly like things that were popular in the 1990s. Popular comics-wise, at least, at a moment when comics were at a low ebb in terms of their cultural currency: The drawing style I'm talking about would be made most manifest outside of comics in Todd McFarlane doing album art for the band KoRn and directing one of their music videos. If the visual gleam of this crosshatched surface had a sonic equivalent, it would be nu-metal, essentially, and that is the house style, mandated from the higher-ups, for DC comics come mid-2011: Drawings that look like they come from a Disturbed CD.

The original announcement of restarted numbering came part and parcel with the idea that these comics will be available digitally the same day that the physical copies are on sale, a concession to ideas of the digital world. What's strange, then, is the disinterest these comics have towards the way that the online world is oriented towards visual culture: Look at tumblr, flickr- all these tools that people use to keep track of what floats their boat, visually. A big part of this stream is photography, and that isn't necessarily germane to a comics discussion, but shit: There are plenty of people who draw, or design, and these people's sense of aesthetics is miles away from the product that DC hopes to charge money for an audience to look at.

The reason for this, probably, is because that anyone who learns how to draw comics via reading comics is also going to learn a lot of history, and for this generation of cartoonists, that means knowing that working in the labor mines of the mainstream is not a worthwhile way to spend away the vitality of your youth. Anyone looking at Jack Kirby drawings (as drawings, as comics, and not just a vehicle for certain characters beloved by fan culture) is going to learn that Jack Kirby's career arc is not one to emulate: It involves working pretty much until you die, with diminishing commercial success. Any prospective penciller that might not know these things, and be closer to the "fan" mentality that would be interested in drawing characters from their youth, probably grew up on manga, and would have a drawing style completely repugnant to the companies signing the checks. So the people the companies find to make things look "new" are those that have already been employed by the industry, for the past 15 years or more: The artist chosen to draw the flagship comic that kicks off the whole initiative, Jim Lee, is in his mid-forties.

So, that's the upside. The past is dying, and the mistakes prior generations made have been learned from by the children of the future. However, just because the best and brightest of those making art have learned where the action isn't, doesn't mean that the average consumer has, and mainstream superhero comics remain a major revenue stream for comic book stores, places I would assign cultural value to. I would like it if the people willing to pay for high-production-value color printing offered that service to people willing to use it in an interesting way, but that is not the case, and the fact that things look different printed on paper than they do on a computer screen will probably be lost to the generation after this one. Plenty of comics with meager virtues to their art, worth learning from, can currently be found at comic book shops across this great land, sold for dirt cheap because most people aren't interested. Connoisseurs of bottom-feeder culture have the quarter bins of comic book stores the same way they have the one-and-two-dollar bins of record stores, but that only lasts as long as either remain open, powered by a stream of things with actual profit margins.

The downside to a major publisher dying is the death of print, and comic book stores, and the continuance of landfills in the face of everything else.