An all spin doctors and hootie and the blowfish radio station. Can we do this with last.fm somehow?

Anyway, here’s some music to get you through the day or push you over the edge as the case may be.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNLi6feWa3s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG74eVb6V10

Did anyone check out this discussion on the comics journal. This is exactly what puts me off of the american indie scene. I mean, in the first 5 minutes they’re namedropping rick moody. Isn’t he like the east coast version of ward churchill? Give me a break.

This is a very personal review post for me. As I’ve mentioned previously, over the course of the year my taste in music has changed radically. Before I get into this though I just want to warn you that I say some harsh things below and I wouldn’t want anybody to think that it’s somehow directed at them. The venom primarily comes from what I consider some of my own failures and chagrin these many years on at having ever been into something which was ultimately unrewarding.

Anyway, about a year ago it seemed I was losing interest in music in general. I’ve never been die hard about buying the latest albums and primarily got into stuff through friends, but the orbit of my interest I’d say was very much within various alternative music scenes. As I inevitably found myself wanting to be free of all of that dead weight I mistook it as a loss of interest. However, I think I had to go through that period of doubt to bring into closer alignment what I say I like with what I actually like. You don’t really notice it when you’re following what’s in your heart, in a way that’s partially invisible to you (because, obviously why would you be doing anything else).

So I guess that’s it, music stopped being a chore. And for me, that’s what the whole indie music scene is. To be as up front as possible, I’ve got a mountain of resentment for the entire indie music scene but I don’t think it necessarily prevents me from giving an honest take. For all of the crap that people talk about major labels, corporate music, and greed it’s actually indie music which is the most commodified form of entertainment ever. It’s all about what you buy. Let’s face it, as far as music goes some adolescent kid taking piano lessons is infinitely more credible than the most happening indie music doofus. Ultimately what counts for credentials for indie music, basically knowledge of a bunch of tiresome people and branding and the nerve to want to serve yourself up a bunch of sterile listening experiences.

Anyway, this all coincided with a growing interest in anime. So right around the time I was checking out Eric Johnson videos on youtube I was reading Sumomomo Momomo in yen plus (the yen press anthology). I really felt it listening to the song ‘SRV’, playing guitar like that and the characters in the pages of Sumomomo Momomo didn’t necessarily have to be separate.

Manga Review

Sumomomo Momomo Vol. 2 (Shinobu Ohtaka): To me, the cover of the second volume of Sumomomo Momomo is one of the most deeply moving images I’ve ever seen. It is a picture of Momoko, the female lead, smiling. Her’s is a face of pure happiness and joy, and everything that is good in humanity and the world…basically everything that’s missing in my own life.

The plot of this manga is as follows. Momoko and Koushi are heirs to leaders of two martial arts clans whose parents arrange their marriage. While Momoko is a very strong martial artist and eager to wed, Koushi can’t stand martial arts or martial artists, has no interest in marrying Momoko, and just wants to do good in school and become a lawyer. Koushi becomes the target of an assassination plot and Momoko must use her skill’s to not only protect him but to woo him as well.

Instead of a regular review I thought I’d share some of my favorite panels. bwahaha.

What's Momoko Doing?!

Miyamoto deciding maybe she doesn't want to kill Koushi.

The class rep! Just after Koushi tells her that she's his best friend

Album Review

Venus Isle (Eric Johnson): If you listen to rock radio you may have heard the song ‘Cliffs of Dover’ by Eric Johnson which appears on his album ‘Ah Via Musicom’ which precedes the album I’m talking about ‘Venus Isle.’ This album was released in 1996. It was one of those years in the making projects due to Johnson allegedly being quite a perfectionist in the studio. In recent interviews I’ve seen he seems to have some measure of regret about losing the sense of fun in music and piecing songs together. Notwithstanding there are some great tracks on Venus Isle. Not only is there some great guitar tone and playing but Johnson has a pretty unique rock voice. My favorite tracks are ‘SRV’ and ‘When the Sun Meets the Sky’ which I’d recommend anybody to check out.

You can find the latter track on youtube. I think this song has the single greatest “yeah” in all of music which you can hear at about 1:19.

Like I said above, I was getting into some of the songs on Venus Isle and Sumomomo Momomo at the same time, and I think they’ll be forever linked in my thoughts. I can’t hear ‘SRV’ without thinking of Momoko’s face, or try to learn ‘When the Sun Meets the Sky’ without in some way imagining who I’m really wanting to play it for.

Darren and I were able to record the fourth rs podcast. We discuss Moon and Final Fantasy VII Advent Children. Talk about comics a little bit at the end. I think we are still searching for a tone. I feel like I talk too much sometimes. Anyway, hope you enjoy it.

Thanks for listening! (Strong Language Advisory)

As usual, my end of the year musings are pretty much exclusively dominated by what happened in the past 6 weeks, making my impression of 2008 be that of a pretty stressful year.  Forcing myself to look back with a little bit wider lens, though, I think it was actually pretty good.  Ross already mentioned that it’s been a good year for movies, but it’s been pretty sweet on a bunch of other fronts, too.  Here’s some stuff just off the top of my head.  These don’t occupy any order other than they’re what’s on my mind.

Best Music

This year was pretty heavily December-ended with my end-of-November birthday and Christmas supplying most of my year’s musical acquisitions.  Lindsay Anderson’s If,  wherein L’Altra’s chanteuse cuts a solo album and it’s pretty sweet. Beach House’s Devotion I got for Christmas and is on heavy rotation at the moment. Dreamy and intense.  And even though it didn’t come out this year, Bibio’s Hand Cranked is like the best album ever made.

Best Movies

Punisher: War Zone – ridiculously severe and surprisingly filigreed shoot-em-up.

Dark Knight riff trax – ANYBODY WANNA GO TO SHAKEY’S?

Best Video Games

I think I missed every important video game release this year due to outdated equipment.  Didn’t play anything old I found especially memorable, either.  I think my 2008 videogaming experience can be summed up by me playing through phantasy star I and II on game boy advance, hating every minute of it, but just finishing it because I started it.

Best Gaming

It’s been a banner year for roleplaying since Ross started 2 new games, I ended 2, and a few others have had significant streaks of riveting storyline.  It even spurred me to write and submit a few short stories.

Best Movie Night

I think both Ross and I had visions of some Ultimate Movie NIght where it would be me, Ross, Dan, Mark, Rob, and Andrey.  We even had a list of “ringers” all lined up and ready to go, but alas it wasn’t to be as everyone’s post-Christmas schedules were just too divergent.  Nevertheless, there were several memorable movie nights this year, including I think the Avatar run (? was that this year?), and the He-Man/She-Ra specials.

Best Science

Mark hit the big time this year [link updated], and Chu laid down a monster Applied Optics paper.

Best Books

Devoured a shitload of Delany and a bunch of Conan comics, too.  Have to say I’m still pretty into them both, though I think I’ve basically plumbed the depths of both of these wells at this point.  But I’m looking foward to reading Delany and Howard Chaykin’s comic Empire: A Visual Novel which I got for Christmas.

Best Future

Also giving a lot of thought to what 2009 will hold, of course.  Basically invested the whole of my being in the NSF fellowship application I have in, and will probably end up dying if I don’t get it.  Leaving the professional stuff aside, I think the thing I look forward to most is Darren’s triumphant return to movie night.

So what have you guys been into this year?  What are you looking forward to in the future?

Junot Díaz is not one of those stumbling, mumbling writers who you’ll listen to in an interview and think, “What the hell? How’d he get so damn eloquent in print?”  Díaz, author of the short story collection Drown and last year’s ass-kicking (this is a term Díaz would appreciate), Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao kills in interview format.  After hearing him over the radio, regaling a San Francisco crowd on growing up Dominican American in New Jersey, on the comics, fantasy and sci-fi he devoured as a kid, and on the apparently more “serious” literature he discovered later, I knew I had to check out this guy’s writing.  Oscar Wao, Díaz’s debut novel, doesn’t disappoint.  Like most good fiction, simply summarizing its plot only goes a short way toward capturing its particular importance or appeal – think about how unimpressive Don Quijote would seem if you reduced it to the mad knight’s travel schedule. 

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Mark’s recent flurry of posting has really energized me to actually write some of the things I’ve been meaning to write about forever. First up is a totally sublime song from Antony and the Johnsons called “The Lake.” The song itself is amazing (lyrics from a poem of the same name by Poe here), but on top of that the video (not sure if this is official or what) has this Disney’s Robin Hood thing that I frankly find irresistable. Alas, no Alan-a-Dale, but I’ll take what I can get.

more below the cut.

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So, if you examined that picture carefully then you will probably be wondering if these are indeed the greatest stories ever told, as well you might…the jury (or juror) is still out, I haven’t finished reading the book.

The weather is growing mild and I’m in the mood for music. Here’s Sebastien Roux’s July Rain:

more below the cut.

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Jennifer de Guzman, in a response to her post in Comics World News, links to a post on the blog Whereof One Can Speak that asks if you put in enough latin, does it count as criticism?

I basically agree with a lot of what Jennifer has to say about comics sort of finally becoming a medium that’s accorded critical respect, and with that respect will come a canon, a defining body of tropes, and attendant analysis of important (and unimportant) works. But I have to say one of the biggest pet peeves I have is the “kids today” criticism. Normally this line of attack asserts that somehow kids today are fundamentally inferior in some way to their forefathers, usually in the area of manners or education. Here, though, I’m talking about the idea that somehow creators of comics are somehow different in some important way from creators in other media. de Guzman repeats Paul Pope’s (hottest man in comics) lament that “I often wonder why we don’t see more literary quality in the comics being published today.” It’s like…are you for real? I often wonder why we don’t see more literary quality in movies today. Hell, I often wonder (maybe especially) why we don’t see more literary quality in LITERATURE today. The idea that somehow comics are underperforming because there weren’t 30 ABC’s last year seems to me to be a ridiculous metric. I also want to highlight what strikes me as a sort of unfortunately elitist comment that the superhero comic is the genre that prevents the medium from being taken seriously. I’m not sure exactly how to respond to the statement other than to just state that it has zero merit. There is no genre that is so suffused with crap that it cannot be taken seriously. And if someone wants to write off comics because they once read a shitty Flash issue they just aren’t worth talking to in the first place. Their opinion quite literally doesn’t matter.

Katharine F. of Whereof… then goes on to assert, without evidence, that a lot of comics writers start de novo, with no conception of what came before them. I mean first I question the assumption. How likely is it for someone to decide to write a comic without ever having read one? Second, it presumes some scholarly studiousness on the part of creators of every other type of art. I’m sure every author or aspiring author has read at least one other book. But have they really spanned the canon of literary works? Is every author an expert in structuralist critiques, or have they even slogged through The Decameron? Or would anyone suggest that this be a requirement? Furthermore, I think it’s frankly critical egotism to suggest that somehow a creator needs to have some literary or intellectual basis in which to fertilize their creation. Certainly I think I would agree that critical philosophies can promote creation and even encourage more interesting artistic conversation, they can provide the language by which artists encode meaning into their works. But there also exist universal symbols which require no medium-specific backlog of critical or creative work to namecheck or subvert in order to utilize.

I guess all I’m really trying to say is that comics is a medium, not a genre, and it has to be viewed in that light. I think it’s uncontroversial that the genre of rom-coms doesn’t generate very many lasting works of critical significance, to go with just one example. But one wouldn’t use it as an indictment of the medium of film. One really wouldn’t use the crappy rom-coms (shallow hal) as an indictment against the amazing ones (just like heaven). And furthermore, to continue with the analogy of film and comics (both combining visual and textual artistry), artists worked dutifully for the first 60 years of cinema’s existence creating great and lasting artistic works before anyone thought seriously about devoting any thought to studying them. Some of the greatest filmmakers, such as Buñuel, even (gasp!) started de novo. That comics have taken this long to really start emerging as a field into which creative people are putting their energy I think has more to do with pecuniary reasons than anything else. And in any case I don’t think the lack of a body of critical work is really a defining or causative factor in the supposed literariness (or lack thereof) within the medium.

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. No excuse, really. I’ve been sick for about 2 weeks, but in some ways that should have meant that I’d have more time to post since I wasn’t doing much else. I submitted a manuscript to Optics Letters just before break, and I submitted a short sci-fi story to Strange Horizons a few days ago, so that’s where most of my writing energy has been going lately. As usual I have a backlog of posts in my head that I have to find the motivation to write down, but until then: comic author/artist Brandon Graham posted a link to an archive of old Nintendo Power Howard & Nester strips. I actually remember a lot of these strips from my days as a loyal Nintendo Power subscriber. I think we were all pretty much total fanatics during that time period. I vaguely remember Rob having the Nintendo Power “Crystalis” world map poster on his wall in his room, and my Nintendo Power Ninja Gaiden and Final Fantasy strategy guides were well thumbed and dog-eared before I had beaten the games enough times to have memorized everything. I also remember in each NP issue they’d have a letters column, where they’d publish not just the letters, but also envelopes where kids would draw all of these really intricate Mega Man- and Mario-themed scenes covering the front face of the envelope. It’s one of my many childhood regrets that I never spent the time to do up an envelope to mail in and get published. I still have a bunch of issues laying around at home. If I can remember, I’ll dig some out and scan some of the ads.