Those That Stay Always Got Somethin Ta Say
Home is a place that I can sit.
Home is a place where I can trip and catch myself in darkness,
Home is a place you love to find,
And the unkind will hurt you, but the
Home will not desert you.
When we roam the palace dome,
We always find some other tomes
To enliven all our cell phones, I mean atoms.
Our cell phones are atoms vibrating in this dome.
#127:
To Every Cartoonist I Know:
Breathing Dance of Ink
Makes Doodles Into Drawings,
Noble Yard Sculptors.
Quick Hit
Vaguely interesting comics comics post shed this gem of an interview. Gary Kuntz, the producer and sound editor behind American Graffiti, Star Wars: A New Hope, and Empire Strikes Back talks about his contributions to the Star Wars movies, emphasizes a collective approach to making a movie, and reveals that George Lucas is a money-grubbing pig. Lots of great film-making anecdotes throughout.
Keep reading down to the bottom of the comments thread for Tom Scioli’s exhaustive run-down of Lucas and Kirby influences, if you’re into pop culture conspiracy theories.
Mo’ Ye!
Unless you’ve been following Kanye WEst every friday, you’ve been missing a treasure trove of new material. Already ten new songs have surfaced, whether through his weekly downloads on twitter
The latest one is pretty big. Five guest stars, and almost seven minutes of on-point flows from a bottomless pit of guest stars.
Thematically, the song hits one of the most annoying notes in hip hop: self loathing over one’s own extravagance. It’s the kind of quality Lil Wayne reaches for when he wants to get poignant, in the form of: rappers repeating “fucking ridiculous” disapprovingly after cataloging their expensive nights. The beat is appropriately downtempo and tragic to almost lure you into their tragedy. The accompanying picture even manages to make a gorgeous supermodel look trashy and unappealing:
Thankfully, the flows in the song more than shore up any weaknesses it might have. From Jay-Z’s one line diatribe against critics (“Would you rather be underpaid or overrated?”) he recalls battle rap days of yore. More than that, every MC sounds hungry, like it’s a heated freestyle night when five people are competing for their voices to be heard. It’s the kind of lively, extended jam that rap doesn’t get enough of since Kanye West’s remix of Talib Kweli’s Get By. Its the kind of hungry flows that makes you think they’re more appalled by the decadence in their rap verse instead of their hotel room. And this is their penance.
Dance Hall Correspondence
Baths: Cerulean
This is an album that feels out of place, or at the very least, like it’s traveling. The beats bang with a composed wonk, the bass rattles in the mid to low end range that keeps hip hop heads bumping, and then an alto voice takes over the mic and passionately sings love songs.
Re-energized
It was Seven Soldiers that got me into this game, so, okay, this might get me back to playing again. Not necessarily great comics, but damn interesting ones that demand close reading and keeping track of themes:
Batman #700
(Kinda big spoilers for Mozzle’s Batman issues and Superman/Batman Annual 4, if you care about that kind of thing)
Some Recent Vertigo Comics
Vertigo’s getting pretty interesting these days, too. I, Zombie has some good Allred art (looking like he used a brush and ink for a lot of its blacks, as well as sporting a much heavier usage of shadows and dynamic lighting to make the comic pop even more, although I maybe should be praising Laura here. On that note, the blurriness of her colors from X-Statix Presents Dead Girl and some of the Madman comics is thankfully gone here, too). The plot is even great, tying together lots of folktales but not being as self consciously clever as Fables, and has already set up a love triangle between a zombie, ghost, and werewolf without making it seem forced.
There’s even open talk of the gay subtext inherent in lots of werewolf comics, with the werewolf chided for his monthly “secret plans” as being an actual gay lover. He, of course, remarks that he wishes that were the case, and that little line quickly casts the entirety of the reading of homoeroticism into werewolf stories as wish fulfillment, a scathing, but intriguing, critique.
Big Boi
There’s some label trouble with Big Boi’s new album, Sir Luscious Left Foot Saves The Day: Big Boi said in an interview that it was just him wanting to get all of the elements of the project in line, and, judging by the incredible range of guest stars on the album released so far, his story checks out. Just the slow and steady cultivation of a pop behemoth, an artist seen in the public eye, which is the most interesting thing about the album’s release. Compare this to the more recent example of Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreaks being slowly leaked, just exploding from listening parties to leaked copies the days after, and it’s clear how albums are made these days: In the public eye.
With a completely transparent process, the entire process becomes part of the enjoyment: and compared to Kanye West just beginning to share too much of himself and his music on TV, Big Boi has taken the lesson of multiple leaks, in between mixing and mastering, and given a remarkably conservative album: his neo-classic confidence compared to Kanye West’s genre smashing catharsis. With a range of leaks (that may or may not make it onto the album) either sampling literally from the past (“Royal Flush” and “Shine Blockas“) or made with synthesizers and vocoders from the past (“Fo Yo Sorrows” and “Shutterbug“), the album stakes up an aesthetic of playful manipulation moreso than any other hip hop album lately: it’s no accident that it’s also one of the funnest around.
Big and Little Things
Detective Comics #859
There’s a lot to like in this issue, most of which (I think) is the fault of Williams III. Most of these are small details: the simple motif of the ring in the first part of the flashback. It begins the issue as the pride of the navy, every fellow sailor exclaiming its beauty in jubilant glee (no one ever said this comic was subtle), in short: Kate as the favored. To compliment the favor, Williams III has the army dress when half naked moment, eroticizing the encounter for Kate (which, as we’ve already seen, has been a source of tension before in this book). Read the rest of this entry »
Reed Richards was yelling at me after my last post:
Dude was right. And so I’m back. I’d like to say it’s for good, but lord knows I can’t keep a blogger’s promise to save my wordpress account password, so, let’s just see where it goes. At the very least, I’m back into reading comics regularly. Could writing about them be far behind? Read the rest of this entry »
Psychopomp & Circumstance 