free and cheap comics

I reviewed almost all of this year’s Free Comic Book Day comics over at Salon (gotta watch an ad if you’re not a subscriber). And if you shell out another 50 cents, you can probably pick up DC Universe 0, which I annotated over at The Savage Critic(s).

still here

Like GLaDOS sings, I’m still alive. (And thinking about teaching myself that song on the ukulele.) I took another trip to NYC, I went to New York Comic-Con and two very different seders, I came home, I read fiction I’d sort of written in front of an audience, I delivered “remarks” at a party, I went to Stumptown Comics Fest, I’ve been cranking away on a couple of work-related things and updating Circle the Globe and Mincing Up the Morning and occasionally posting to The Savage Critic(s) and doing my weekly radio show for Shouting Fire.

Where, if you’d been listening this week, you’d have heard:

• Aram Saroyan: Crickets (theme)
• Eno/Moebius/Roedelius: The Belldog
• Superchunk remixed by Mark Robinson: Eastern Terminal
• Arthur Russell: Get Around to It
• Laila France: David Hamilton
• Einstürzende Neubauten: NNNAAAMMM
• Mecca Normal: Water Cuts My Hands
• Little Richard: Brown Sugar
• Ida: Worried Mind Blues
• Can: The Million Game
• Carl Harvey: Guitar Inferno
• Maybe It’s Reno: Feathers and Wings

Plus: both parents and in-laws visiting! Also: learning the difference between activity and productivity! And: planning out the summer!

My friends, if you’re thinking I might be missing you right now, you are almost certainly right.

another nomination

Looks like Reading Comics got nominated for an Eagle Award, too!

swift looping page cadets

The good news of the day: Reading Comics has been nominated for an Eisner Award!

I spent the weekend at the Experience Music Project Pop Conference up in Seattle. My own talk (on “The Ballad of the Green Berets” and its bizarre 20-year trail through history and subsequent near-total disappearance) went well, I think, although I ended up feeling like it was… kind of low-stakes for me, at least compared to the papers I liked best. (“What would be high-stakes for you?” my friend Sarah asked me when I told her that. Good question.)

Highlights of the parts of the conference I saw:

*Jody Rosen on Eva Tanguay, one of the biggest American pop stars of the 1905-1920 period, and now largely forgotten, in part because she made only one recording. He quoted part of Aleister Crowley’s hilarious encomium to her (it’s about a third of the way down here, and worth looking at…). Memorable line from Rosen: “Eva Tanguay and Johnny Rotten actually had quite a bit in common, the main difference being that Eva Tanguay was way more punk rock.”

*Robert Christgau (in the context of explaining why he really likes John Mayer!) zinging the practice of, and I think I’m paraphrasing, “finding hegemony at the end of every road to pleasure”—a problem with a bunch of presentations I saw over the weekend. (Generally the kind that end “In this paper, I have shown…”)

*Greil Marcus on the “I’m Not There” tribute concert: “Most of the performers acted as if these songs liked them.” (He also played the first couple of minutes of the Roots’ “Masters of War,” sung to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner”—specifically Jimi Hendrix’s version.)

*Gayle Wald on a 1969-1973 NYC Channel 13 show called “Soul!,” which had live performances by most of the major soul performers of its day, but also free-jazz types, discussions with black intellectuals, poetry readings… I mean, Ashford & Simpson and Amiri Baraka and Max Roach: this is my kind of show. Apparently it will never appear on DVD thanks to contract hell, and the only way to watch it is to go to the Library of Congress. Anybody happen to know if there exist any bootlegs in circulation?

*And the best thing I saw, Daphne Carr’s “Getting Closer: Extreme Loudness and the Body in Pain/Pleasure,” which she delivered with a hood pulled over her head, and which violated my “in this paper…” rule right off and got away with it. I was told that the papers after hers were really good too, but I had to leave after that because I didn’t want anything to take it out of my head.

popped up pasted out

The big news is that the Dark Beloved Cloud Singles Club is back in action—there’s a very nice review of the two new discs at the Chattanooga Pulse. And if you’d like to hear some dbc music, I direct you to the Dark Beloved Cloud Muxtape!

My review of Nancy Goldstein’s Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist is up at the New York Times Book Review.

I’m still doing a lot of comics reviewing over at The Savage Critic(s), including this April 1 post.

recorder grot (rallying)

It’s surprisingly nice to know that I can still go to a grimy little basement in NYC—in this case Cake Shop—to see a band play—in this case Ida—and run into Jenny Toomey. 1992 forever!

My review of David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague is up at the Boston Phoenix.

project omniherbivore: kiwano

Lisa and Sterling and I took a little trip to the Oregon coast a couple of days ago—to the seaside town of Seaside, where I ended up wandering into The Seaside Candyman, one of many salt-water-taffy stores lining its two major streets. The distinction of this one is that they have “The Candy Man,” the song, playing on a continuous loop. Loudly. All day. The two employees had smiles frozen onto their faces. They also have 170 flavors of salt water taffy, all of which taste… more or less the same.

But that’s not something I hadn’t eaten before. For that, we turn to our trip home, at which we stopped at the mighty Uwajimaya, an Asian superstore (which also has a branch in Seattle). They actually had a number of vegetables I was unfamiliar with, most of them roots I wasn’t sure how to prepare, but the fruit section included a kiwano. It was a little pricey, but really pretty—bright orange and covered in spikes, with near-fluorescent green seeds on the inside. A lot of the links I’ve found for it online give it a bad rap, but I thought it was delicious—Lisa said it reminded her of passionfruit in both taste and consistency, and I’d add that it’s a little like a sweet cucumber. A very messy fruit, but worth eating.

revelations, condiment stations

Time to reveal another secret project, I think: Mincing Up the Morning, which I’ve been doing for close to two months now and originally figured I’d keep secret while I figured out if I liked doing it enough to keep going. I do, so now you get to know about it. It’s a daily blog where I post a couple of videos by musicians whose birthday is that day. I recommend digging through the archives for the Betty Hutton, Mark E. Smith and George Harrison videos, for starters.

I’m still linkblogging up a storm at Circle the Globe—I’d integrate that stuff into Lacunae if there were an easy way to do it, and I may eventually give up on Movable Type and just go for Tumblr here.

Recently posted elsewhere: my interview with Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley about Trinity, and my interview with Stephen Malkmus about being Stephen Malkmus.

And me? What have I been doing? Putting my house in order, in the most literal sense as well as the Ruth Fisher sense. Tonight we went to Nhut Quang, the new-ish vegan Vietnamese restaurant out on 82nd St., and had tasty cheap noodles and fake chicken with lemongrass.

Oh, fine. And playing way, way, way too much Scrabulous.

equal nights

My, February went by quickly. I haven’t been posting here a lot, but I’ve been doing a whole lot of linkblogging over at Circle the Globe. Still, I feel a little self-conscious that Dave Sim has already revealed two of his secret projects and I haven’t revealed any.

Well, here’s one: I’m going to be DJing at Shouting Fire, beginning this week. Just an hourlong weekly show, called “Crickets” after an Aram Saroyan poem—although, actually, not that one. I’m still fumbling with how best to assemble my shows on the computer, but it’s good to be doing this stuff again.

Oh, yes, and there was that cover story in Billboard a few weeks ago, about Starbucks and its entertainment division. It doesn’t seem to be online, but it was a lot of fun to write.

More news soon, I suspect.

another hit-and-run update

There’s actually sort of a lot going on, but most of it falls into one secret-project category or another. But a few notes:

This coming Saturday, Feb. 23, I’ll be at WonderCon in San Francisco, giving a talk called “The Senses-Shattering Return of the Novel of Ideas!” at the Comic Arts Conference.

Tom Spurgeon over at the Comics Reporter has posted a long interview with me.

If you write large things, and you use a Macintosh, I can heartily endorse Scrivener. Thanks to everyone who recommended it.

At the current rate of expansion, I will be writing every blog on the Internet by mid-October 2011.