Everybody's talking 'bout the stormy weather And what's a man do to but work out whether it's true? Looking for a man with a focus and a temper Who can o...moreEverybody's talking 'bout the stormy weather And what's a man do to but work out whether it's true? Looking for a man with a focus and a temper Who can open up a map and see between one and two
Time to get it Before you let it Get to you
Here he comes now Stick to your guns And let him through
Everybody's coming from the winter vacation Taking in the sun in a exaltation to you You come running in on platform shoes With Marshall stacks To at least just give us a clue Ah, here it comes I know it's someone I knew
Teenage riot in a public station Gonna fight and tear it up in a hypernation for you
Now I see it I think I'll leave it out of the way Now I come near you And it's not clear why you fade away
Looking for a ride to your secret location Where the kids are setting up a free-speed nation, for you Got a foghorn and a drum and a hammer that's rockin' And a cord and a pedal and a lock, that'll do me for now
It better work out I hope it works out my way 'Cause it's getting kind of quiet in my city's head Takes a teen age riot to get me out of bed right now
You better look it We're gonna shake it Up to him
He acts the hero We paint a zero On his hand
We know it's down We know it's bound too loose Everybody's sound is round it Everybody wants to be proud to choose So who's to take the blame for the stormy weather You're never gonna stop all the teenage leather and booze
It's time to go round A one man showdown Teach us how to fail
We're off the streets now And back on the road On the riot trail(less)
"Lovecraft's is not a fiction of carefully structured plot so much as of ineluctable unfolding: it is a literatu...morefrom the China Miéville introduction:
"Lovecraft's is not a fiction of carefully structured plot so much as of ineluctable unfolding: it is a literature of the inevitability of weird. "'My reason for writing stories,' Lovecraft says, 'is to give myself the satisfaction of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy...' Story is not the point: the point is wonder, which for Lovecraft goes hand in hand with horror, because, he claims, 'fear is our deepest and strongest emotion.' "He believes this because in his 'mechanical materialist' vision, humans mean nothing. The wonder of the vastness is inextricable from the horror of our own pointlessness. '[A]ll my tales,' he once wrote, 'are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.' Paradoxically, it is precisely this bleak atheist awe that makes Lovecraft a kid of bad-son heir to a religious visionary tradition, an ecstatic tradition, which in distinction to the everyday separation of matter and spirit, locates the holy in the everyday. Lovecraft, too, sees the awesome as immanent in the quotidian, but there is little ecstasy here: his is a bad numinous."(less)
Slumberland is probably the most intensely racialized book i've read in a while. It hits it from a multitude of angles - self-loathing, self-deprecati...moreSlumberland is probably the most intensely racialized book i've read in a while. It hits it from a multitude of angles - self-loathing, self-deprecating, self-mythologizing...
"There are many similarities between Germans and blacks. The nouns themselves are loaded with so much historical baggage it's impossible for anyone to be indifferent to the simple mention of either group. We're two insightful people looking for reasons to love ourselves; and let's not forget we both love pork and wear sandals with socks."
This is a funny book. Beatty is hyper, a master of quick wit, pointed asides, unreliable narrator, always trash-talking, bullshitting. So many references and digressions, you won't/can't/don't! catch them all. & you'll consistently ask which are lies and which are truths.* the answer, of course, is all.
Plot points: Berlin, before & after the fall of the wall. Blackness, passé and/or freedom. Phonographic Memory. Jukebox Sommelier. The perfect beat. The search for Charles Stone a/k/a The Schwa.
"A beat so perfect as to render musical labels null and void. A melody so transcendental that blackness has officially been declared passé. Finally, us colored folk will be looked upon with blithe indifference, not erotized pity or the disgust of Freudian projection. It's what we've claimed we always wanted, isn't it? To be judged 'not by the color of our skins, but by the content of our character'? Dude, but what we threw down was the content not of character, but out of character. It just happened to be of indeterminate blackness and funkier than a motherfucker."
*(is Sun Ra really truly completely ignored in Ken Burn's Jazz? that's crazy!)
I've got terrible amnesia when it comes to books, even books i loved, like White Boy Shuffle. Was it as dense and delirious, exhilarating and full of shit as this book?
My favorite bits: at the end of Part 3 ("The Souls of Black Volk") where the narrator (a/k/a DJ Darky, a/k/a Ferguson Sowell) plays three "life-altering" gigs, DJ'ing 1) a neo-nazi (white laces=white power?) skinhead rally - "It's the hate that's important. It doesn't matter who does the hating, but who you hate." - 2) an annual Afro-German gathering in the Black Forest - "When we get to the Black Forest, we won't be able to see the n------ for the trees." - 3) a barely attended gig at the Free University - "What if you had a concert and nobody came?"
I finished this yesterday and then slept on it (literally, book under pillow, princess & the pea style, & now my head hurts).
At gig #2, pg. 180:
""I need to know what is happening to me. Why do I feel so unsecure? Afraid, and yet not frightened." The room rumbled with agreement. Overcome with German inquisitiveness and black paranoia, these sons and daughters of Hegel and Queen Nefertiti wanted an answer. I wanted to tell them that the Schwa's music leans heavily on semitone, that tiny musical interval that's a half step between harmony and noise, for a reason. He wants to show us that the best parts of life are temporal semitone, those nanoseconds between ecstasy and panic that if we could we'd string together in a sensate harmony. If only we could be Wile E. Coyote walking on air for those precious few moments before the bittersweet realization he's walking on air. Before falling to earth with a pitiful wave of the hand and a puff of smoke. I didn't say any of that because I didn't know the German word for semitone or if my audience knew who Bugs Bunny was. I simply said, "What is happening is that you've been turnt out, baby." The Schwa turns us all out sooner or later." (less)
a massive brick of cartooning, shattering the staid glass window panes of other so-called graphic novels with its "exhuberance" & its visual swagg...morea massive brick of cartooning, shattering the staid glass window panes of other so-called graphic novels with its "exhuberance" & its visual swagger -- using maps, rebuses & secretcodes to detail the tale of a family, where no one resembles another*, impacted by the divorce of the parents after forty years of marriage.
It's almost overwhelming, but I totally ignored one of the caveats of this graphic novel and read all three parts all 700 odd pages straight through early Friday morning.
But the other caveat, repeated on both spine & 1st page, really should not be ignored (at yr peril!) this is a comic that is definitely NOT FOR CHILDREN).
*& why one son is drawn with a froghead is eventually, poetically explained, no worries.
"...We're getting famous, they say, but we're still rebels. The way of Ulises Lima, they say, Ulises Lima's tracer fire...Mexican kids staring out at...more"...We're getting famous, they say, but we're still rebels. The way of Ulises Lima, they say, Ulises Lima's tracer fire...Mexican kids staring out at him from photos or from hell, holding their electric guitars as if they were brandishing weapons or freezing to death." - Death of Ulises
an incandescent collection of scattered gems from Bolaño: the best zombie movie treatment ever written (The Colonel's Son), the exegesis of a photograph (Labyrinth), the Vagaries of the Literature of Doom ("One must reread Borges"), Beach, and three visits with the shades of Belano & Lima.
a rough diamond, this path of grieving, seeking escape, understanding, illumination. to forget & to remember. to be haunted by & spirited on a...morea rough diamond, this path of grieving, seeking escape, understanding, illumination. to forget & to remember. to be haunted by & spirited on a journey towards something, some end.
"This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds. To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance. A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky. Rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain."
a map of the soul, of heartbreak, of the world always never ending.
"I'm not a prophet or a stone age man Just a mortal with the potential of a superman I'm living on I'm tethered to the logic of Homo Sapien Can't take my eyes from the great salvation Of bullshit faith If I don't explain what you ought to know You can tell me all about it On, the next Bardo I'm sinking in the quicksand of my thought And I ain't got the power anymore"
it's brave and honest and true, a tale of a hard travel to sacred places, without and within. (less)
Milton Glaser, from the prefacing interview with Peter Mayer:
"When you look at a Vermeer and read in an art history book that the reason the work is s...moreMilton Glaser, from the prefacing interview with Peter Mayer:
"When you look at a Vermeer and read in an art history book that the reason the work is successful is the compositional balance of yellow and blue, you are being informed of nothing. The reason you are responsive to a Vermeer is because he has moved your mind. Cézanne showed us that in a bowl of apples, and every artist does this same thing in his own way."
"The fact is we develop immunity to experience, because we have to, because if we responded to everything in life, we could not tolerate it. Most of our lives we spend deflecting most of the information we recieve. You go out in the street and you are besieged just by what your sight, your hearing, your mind encounter. People stop paying attention; they revert to cruise control. Every once in a while something will happen, like somebody dies, or you have an accident, or you see a great painting, and you realize that you are living in a semiconscious state. In fact, that may be the only way humans can cope with the complexity of life.
"What paintings do, and what theater does, and what poetry does, is to penetrate people's immunity and to embrace the puzzles to be solved. That's what I mean by the phrase 'moving the mind'"(less)
"Composer" is a word which here means "a person who sits in a room, muttering and humming and figuring out what notes the orchestra is going to play." This is called composing. But last night, the Composer was not muttering. He was not humming. He was not moving, or even breathing.
This is called decomposing."
Nicely illustrated by Carson Ellis. Comes with an audio CD (reading + music) too!(less)
this book is the first release from Minx, which is the dc comics graphic novel imprint aimed at teenage girl readers. so, yeah, i'm kinda outside the...more this book is the first release from Minx, which is the dc comics graphic novel imprint aimed at teenage girl readers. so, yeah, i'm kinda outside the demographic for that -- and judging by the previews for future titles in the back, probably will remain so. (the only other one which holds any interest for me is "Good as Lily" by Derek Kirk Kim & Jesse Hamm).
anyway, this wasn't bad. and it's actually not too heavy handed in it's exploration of things like terror(ism) & art & identity, which is nice. the author apparently is an accredited teen fiction author, but i betray my lack of knowledge by not completely recognizing her name. the draw for me though, is Jim Rugg. He's good cartoonist. His work here totally reminds me of a mix of Shade era-Bachalo (it's the noses) and Farel Dalrymple. His character work totally makes the whole book worth checking out.
I was really digging this audiobook at the beginning, particularly chapter 3 which focuses on the impact of Chapelle's Show. As it went on, some bits...moreI was really digging this audiobook at the beginning, particularly chapter 3 which focuses on the impact of Chapelle's Show. As it went on, some bits resonated, others didn't (for me, personally).
(My other favorite bit is a great postscript to Chapter 6, exploring the etymology of "M-therf-cker". It blew my mind).
If you're at all interested in the state of "blackness" in post-Obama America, this is a pretty good survey of the multiplicity of perspectives inherent in any consideration of what that word "blackness" or "post-blackness" might even mean.(less)
warren's so good at what he does that it is incredibly subtle here, in these 8 nine panel 16 page short crime stories about a cop actually trying to d...more warren's so good at what he does that it is incredibly subtle here, in these 8 nine panel 16 page short crime stories about a cop actually trying to do his job in an abandoned, blighted urban environment. you could be distracted by the recurrent ellisisms, (tough, damaged protagonists, extemely f-cked up social mores, cigarettes, heavy drinking) but (and honestly, if anything is an ellisism, this is too), there is a beating, loving heart vibrating at the center of this morass. detective fell wants to save the world from itself, and so should you.(less)
"...you will drift like a blind man between the worlds, not knowing if you are dead or alive, or if the the unseen world exists, or if you're dreaming...more"...you will drift like a blind man between the worlds, not knowing if you are dead or alive, or if the the unseen world exists, or if you're dreaming..." - pg. 16
"Dreaming was easy, he thought. Being dreamed was the problem." pg. 225
"Because I have lost my way, I am hostage to all that floats between the worlds. Including you." pg. 130
"Things are not as they appear. Nor are they otherwise. ~ Lankavatran Sutra~ " pg. 7
"You've cracked wide open.." "That's what happens when a crack lets in too much light..." pg. 267(less)
I find I like it when creators shift the playing field in a dramatic way, upsetting what had become the serial formula (drag) of the story, throwing o...moreI find I like it when creators shift the playing field in a dramatic way, upsetting what had become the serial formula (drag) of the story, throwing out old central characters and focusing on new & unknown, leaping past exposition, jumping straight into the thick of where you thought things might go without boring you with telling you every inch of the route to getting there.
It's why "Epitaph One" is the best episode of Dollhouse. & It's why this volume of 20th Century Boys has me reinvigorated to see what else is to come.
"If not for your noisy tambourine, I would not have seen you. Your green skirt looked terrible but that leather jacket makes you jus...moreA few of my faves:
"If not for your noisy tambourine, I would not have seen you. Your green skirt looked terrible but that leather jacket makes you just look right."
"Your nose started bleeding...I was the girl who handed you a handkerchief...I thought you were bloody lovely."
"Phoenix w/ Crutches...I would love to carry you around piggy back until you can walk again..."
"Freckles and Bruises...How did you get those bruises? I wouldn't let anything happen to you. You were reading some book and taking notes. I read a book once."
"asked myself why the letter 'n' all night long, then you were gone before i got a chance to ask. also, i saved you a piece of cake. do you always sit in a circle of asian girls? and sit at the top of the stairs so everyone gets a crush on you when they get to the roof?"
At first glance, I didn't think this was a comic I wanted to read despite the good word from people I trust. I'd always found BKV's previous comics pa...moreAt first glance, I didn't think this was a comic I wanted to read despite the good word from people I trust. I'd always found BKV's previous comics passably entertaining but way overhyped. I was turned off by the lack of distinct, delineated backgrounds in the art. & irritated by the hand-scrawled style narrative lettering.
That said, there's an argument to be made that the lack of detailed backgrounds successfully foregrounds the characters (three against the world). The story is driven less by dizzying high concept & world-building, than by the layered complications and individual motivations rising from social interaction. Absent narrative tricks and false cleverness, the story remains content to explore its emotional truths, and seems confident to develop its context at its own pace. That baby-lettering aside, I'll probably be along for the ride.(less)
O.K., granted the five-star rating is possibly more for the show than just simply the book, but this is a great tie-in, delving into not just the hist...moreO.K., granted the five-star rating is possibly more for the show than just simply the book, but this is a great tie-in, delving into not just the history, but the grand, very human themes Milch and his cohorts wrestled with in three seasons of the best television you might ever see. Milch is clearly a genius, which is not a word I throw around lightly, and the saddest thing is that john from cincinnati will probably never merit a book like this.(less)
Very quick read, good Celtic-cycle myth-based fantasy (the arthurian elements don't really take hold til the 2nd book), & of course only 1/3 of th...moreVery quick read, good Celtic-cycle myth-based fantasy (the arthurian elements don't really take hold til the 2nd book), & of course only 1/3 of the story in good fantasy trilogy fashion.
I was lured to this book by it's cover colors, and a recognition that it referenced many of the same Celtic myth elements Grant Morrison did in SEVEN SOLDIERS.
(This one's like a Lev Grossman remix of THE BLACK CAULDRON than a Grant Morisson tale, tho').
The treatment of women, one character in particular, in this book, strikes me as dubious and unfortunate. In context, I understand the brutality of the final chapters, to enhance the depiction of destructive, absolute loathing and evil. But it's cliché, a bunk move that you see many writers of speculative fiction & superhero comics choose not only to make 'fairy tales' adult, but to seek definition to female characters.
Male characters in heroic fiction are rarely defined through brutal degradation.
Marion Zimmer Bradley blurbed the series though, so maybe trust her more than me?(less)
Oversized edition is pretty nice. Sewn binding so it won't fall apart like the trades (two of which are collected in each hardcover "Library Edition"...moreOversized edition is pretty nice. Sewn binding so it won't fall apart like the trades (two of which are collected in each hardcover "Library Edition" it seems). Interesting to see on the reread how different early Hellboy (scripted by John Bryne) is from the Hellboy we've all grown to know & love. I like how Seed of Destruction is dedicated to both Jack Kirby & H.P. Lovecraft - Mignola wearing his influences nakedly.(less)
"Juggling is a language-- dramatic, poetic, humorous, theatrical. It participates in the mysteries of gravity and the cosmos." pg. 94
"A clown is a poe...more"Juggling is a language-- dramatic, poetic, humorous, theatrical. It participates in the mysteries of gravity and the cosmos." pg. 94
"A clown is a poet in space," André interrupted. "Do you know who said that?" "I don't." "That was your compatriot, Henry Miller. A clown is une bête de la scène. He doesn't know the rules, so he makes them up as he goes. Every moment is an adventure, a new life-- the present instant! Always the present! Like an animal." pg. 209
"Acrobats tend to be pretty easygoing, which is about right, since they have to take risks. Or think of contortionists. The ones I know all tend to be pretty hard on themselves, which in a way is good, since you success as a contortionist is totally determined by how hard you're willing to push yourself." "So what are clowns?" Georges mulled it over for a second and said, "I'm hesitating, because my instinct is to say that clowns are sensitive. But that's not quite right. Or it doesn't do them justice. 'Passionate' is probably a better word. Real clowns are passionate." Out of curiosity, I asked Georges what he was studying. "I'm a juggler," he replied, before adding wryly, "We tend to be heady." pg. 213-214.
"Don't you ever worry about it?" I asked Jérôme after one of my own mistakes. A wry smile spread across his face. "Worry about what?" "About the balls falling." He recoiled in mock surprise. "But of course they're going to fall. You couldn't juggle if they didn't." pg. 105
"You don't find your passions. They find you." p. 95 (less)
You know what, I expected this to be to be terrible & it wasn't. Wolverine's son Daken (okay, the name remains terrible) is like one of those rich...moreYou know what, I expected this to be to be terrible & it wasn't. Wolverine's son Daken (okay, the name remains terrible) is like one of those rich pricks cut loose from a WB show, homicidal & metrosexual, who thinks he is smarter & cooler than anyone else alive. I gotta say, it's kinda interesting to see someone like this at conceited & amoral & self-proclaimed Machiavellian play in the fields of Marvel.(less)
say what you will about Alex Ross and his artwork -- static, photorealistic renditions that seek to elevate yet typically drain the life from sequenti...moresay what you will about Alex Ross and his artwork -- static, photorealistic renditions that seek to elevate yet typically drain the life from sequential work -- the man loves what he loves & lots of comics fans love what he does. The preparatory work contained in this volume holds a lot more dynamism than his finished art. Plus the man is a fount of ideas, yes, mostly based on silver aged characterizations dating from his youth, but not all bad. The Batwoman design that J.H. Williams III has been successfully depicting in an acclaimed run for Detective Comics turns out to be a re-purposed Ross design for a reborn Barbara Gordon/Batgirl. There's a great silver & red design for the Atom that actually (& fittingly for a bleeding-edge science-based hero) looks ultramodern. & his casting of Grant Morrison for a potential redesign of Superman villain Brainiac, well, that's just brilliant.(less)
"Was it difficult to fit everything from the book in a graphic novel? Were there parts that had to be excised that yo...morefrom an interview w/Ron Wimberly:
"Was it difficult to fit everything from the book in a graphic novel? Were there parts that had to be excised that you wish you could have kept?
I look at the process of adapting a large text into a graphic work like distillation. You won't fit everything in, but one must try to capture the spirit of the work. The spirit of literature is poetry. Poetry suggests. It's the Impressionism of literature. So I approached it like that. Things are lost, but you can always read Bradbury's original to taste the angel's share.
The audience will never see my original adaptation. It embodied this philosophy, but what I've delivered here hopefully still expresses this way of thinking."
"...a pastiche of American cowboy fiction carried across thirteen chronological vignettes, following long-nosed Gus, oval-headed Gratt, and broccoli-haired Clem as they ride, shoot, and love their way across the Old West. Blain especially delights in the love; his frequent jest is to undercut his outlaws’ tough-guy attributes by blasting through their two-fisted exploits in narrative fragments and then lingering for pages on romantic anxiety—long trawls through dancehalls looking for dates, heated notes written to an indecisive fancy, and passionate frolics with a pretty mistress, accompanied by an imagined broccoli-haired cyclops looming on the horizon with a spotlight-beam eye of aching guilt..." - JM
"...Gus And His Gang employs a really gestural, expressive art style–similar to the kind of high-energy, fast style of fellow Frenchmen Joann Sfar and Manu Larcenet. What looks at first to be rushed or even sloppy, reveals itself to be well-planned, well-executed storytelling, without a lot of the fussiness that often gets in the way with lesser storytellers. You can almost FEEL the artist making his brush strokes and pen lines on the paper, you imagine him bent across his drawing board, making decisions, deciding when a panel is done, how much nuance is enough…
"...But I think maybe my favorite thing about Gus & His Gang, or at least the thing I find myself thinking about the most, is the colors. The palette the colorist uses is just crazy, all these bright colors from all over the spectrum. He goes from super bright, almost magenta shades to electric blues, but it’s never noisy, everything always makes sense. And the pages are so BRIGHT. He’s also not afraid to just leave a background totally white–the pages seem to breathe, everything seems so airy. It might even undermine the overall sense of danger that most “Wild West” stories have, but I guess I don’t mind much." - DH
"...Stories about characters deciding this or deciding that-- those are fun. When you read them, you get to pretend to believe fun things like “You create who you are. You’re in charge of how you respond to conflicts. You decide your destiny.” But it’s pretty relieving, something like GUS AND HIS GANG. Sometimes, you don't get to decide how your brain works, or control every last thought; sometimes, you just enjoy the ride. That doesn’t seem like such a bad thing to me for a comic book to be about." - AK(less)
more hand-drawn design goodness from the author of Hand Job. Noah Butkus, Robin Cameron, Deanne Cheuk, Mario Hugo, Damien Correll, Ray Fenwick, Dan Fu...moremore hand-drawn design goodness from the author of Hand Job. Noah Butkus, Robin Cameron, Deanne Cheuk, Mario Hugo, Damien Correll, Ray Fenwick, Dan Funderburgh, Kirk Hiatt, Luke Ramsey, etc. etc. Crack for yr eyes!
"I prefer the man to the artist. Cézanne was not an artist, but Manet was. If you follow me." - Braque (epigraph)
"Georges Braque is the third man of m...more"I prefer the man to the artist. Cézanne was not an artist, but Manet was. If you follow me." - Braque (epigraph)
"Georges Braque is the third man of modern art. Picasso has an image, a person, a legend. Matisse too. Braque seems immune to such treatment, unclassified. His work is his own, 'a new continent bearing no other name than that of its creator'." p. 270
"Georges Braque followed no one, he insisted, except perhaps Cézanne. Braque le solitaire was not a joiner. When others joined him, it was time to move on." p. 225
"Braque, you said to me, once, a long time ago, meeting me out walking with a girl whose beauty one would call classical, that found very pretty: 'In love you haven't yet detached yourself enough from the masters.' In any case I can still say to you today: I love you, you see that I still cannot detach myself." - Picasso, pg. 259
"His final palette:
raw umber burnt umber raw sienna burnt sienna yellow ochre lamp black vine black bone black ultramarine orange-yellow antimony yellow" p. 279
"One must not imitate what one wishes to create." p.282
![The Composer Is Dead [With CD (Audio)]](http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348502404s/6315826.jpg "The Composer Is Dead [With CD (Audio)]")
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