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posted by Gardner at 5:46 PM |

SPEAKER | CyberBlogoSpheroTron

Thanks to 103.1, I've started listening to LA radio again, but most of my exposure to new music these days comes from music blogs--sites like FluxBlog, PopNose, Said the Gramophone and Stereogum that post MP3s and commentary on a wide range of music. It's a combination of radio and music journalism that, in terms of exposing listeners to good new music, is better than either. Even the best print music reviews and criticism don't allow you to actually hear the music; and most radio provides neither context nor the taste and POV of an individual music fan. Of course, there are obvious copyright issues with musicblogging, most musicbloggers are conscientious of those issues and are careful not to turn their blogs into one-stop-shopping quasi-SoulSeek archives. Furthermore, the best musicblogs use the MP3s as a jumping-off point for discussion of the music or artists, or at least as a way to alert people to good music they might not hear otherwise. It's called salesmanship, and it works, and more labels and artists would do well to learn from the best musicblogs.

Today's MP3s are all from artists that I first heard and read about on musicblogs. If you're wondering whether the "first-hit-is-free" model actually works, take note: these are all from artists whose musicblogged samples I liked well enough to purchase the album.

(Also: See this post on The Tofu Hut for an eloquent defense of musicblogging.)

"Jesus Walks" by Kanye West
West is one of Jay-Z's fave producers (c.f. Hov's declaration "Kanye, you a genius!" on The Black Album's "Lucifer"), and his first solo album The College Dropout is his debut as an MC. For a producer, he's a suprisingly good rapper, and for one of Jigga's pals, he's surprisingly "conscious," too, in that Arrested Development/De La Soul kinda way. But he doesn't let his lyrical aspirations get in the way of his beats, nor does he lose his sense of humor: "Always said if I rapped I'd say something significant / But now I'm rappin' 'bout money, hoes and rims again."

"Jesus Walks" is a Christian call to arms with a pounding, implacable march beat, aided by a sample of "Walk with Me" by the ARC Choir, a Harlem choral group composed of recovering drug addicts. Obviously, the subject matter ain't for everyone, but you don't have to be a Bible-thumper to get caught up in the huge, undeniable stomp of the beat. Nor is this a bit of Passion-esque literalism; it's about the search for redemption, wherever you can find it:

I ain't here to argue about his facial features
Or here to create atheists into believers
I'm just trying to say the way school needs teachers
The way Kathy Lee needed Regis
That's the way I need Jesus

"Dreams" by TV on the Radio
TV on the Radio first came to my attention via their brilliant doo-wop cover of the Pixies' "Mr. Grieves," from their 2003 EP Young Liars. "Dreams" is from their new album Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes. TV on the Radio are from the same Brooklyn circles as the Liars and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but they're not making garagey noise or disco-punk; the focus here is on singer Tunde Adebimpe, who has both some serious pipes and the willingness to take risks with them (I reiterate: a doo-wop cover of a Pixies song that doesn't come off as a joke). On "Dreams," the band backs up his crooning with churning, throbbing, slow-burning low-end noise; it's both mystical and menacing, befitting a song that turns a relationship-gone-sour into something apocalyptic: "You were my favorite moment / Of our dead century."

"The Rat" by The Walkmen
The Walkmen rose out of the ashes of 90s alt-rock footnote Jonathan Fire*Eater (a little JF*E for you: "When the Curtain Calls for You," from Wolf Songs for Lambs and, um, the Dead Man on Campus soundtrack) and are making a minor splash with their second album, Bows & Arrows. They have a little of that Strokes-y New York vibe, but there's nothing self-consciously cool about the desperation and frustration of "The Rat;" singer Hamilton Leithauser sounds like he's trying to claw his way out of a padded room. Or a Brooklyn club. Either way. Meanwhile, the band have made an art of the drone, wringing endless variations on texture out of the same handful of notes. Their secret weapon is organist Walter Martin; I've always thought that an organ instantly improves any song, and Martin gives the songs on Bows & Arrows an appropriately tense horror-movie vibe.

"Ding Dong" by Nellie McKay
From the 19-year-old supergirl's debut (double!-)album Get Away from Me. McKay (pronounced "muh-KYE") reminds me of the voraciously intelligent kids in Spellbound, particularly the precocious, wise-cracking Emily, except that instead of etymology, she absorbs musical history. Except she skipped everything from Elvis through Eminem. The result is an album that melds supper-club jazz with hip-hop energy and takes listeners on a crazed tour of a musical prodigy's brain; she's a bit like a less-tortured Fiona Apple. McKay doesn't yet have the experience and wisdom to back up her talent and energy, but Get Away from Me is still full of delights. Particularly "Ding Dong," which starts out as a diary entry about her cat's death, segues into Dylan-esque stream-of-consciousness surrealism, and becomes a showcase for McKay's ability to convey shifting personalities with her voice. And it's all set to a sunny, bouncy pop track that could be on the soundtrack to a Doris Day movie from the sixties. McKay is playing the Knitting Factory in Hollywood on March 29, and I'm greatly looking forward to it; I get the feeling she puts on a hell of a live show.

I would've included some Scissor Sisters, Fiery Furnaces and Franz Ferdinand mp3s, but they get enough ink on the CyberBlogoSpheroTron as it is; I think you get your blogging license revoked now if you don't gush over Franz Ferdinand. But anyway. If you like these samples, I strongly urge you to check out the albums they came from--they're all well worth your time and money.

Next Monday: A look back at Living Colour.

(MP3 disclaimer: All MP3s offered on this site are for evaluation purposes only--i.e. download them, listen to them, decide whether you would like to purchase the music from a friendly retailer, and then delete them. All MP3s will be available for one week after they are posted. If you are an artist or represent an artist or label whose music appears here, and you would like your music removed, just let me know.)
posted by Gardner at 12:38 AM |

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay author Michael Chabon offers a fascinating review of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy at The New York Review of Books. He also suggests that there is a proper fourth volume in the series, The Book of Dust, in the works.

Thanks to my daddy for the heads-up.
posted by Gardner at 10:31 PM |

MICROFICTION | Grey

The others don't like me. Maybe that's not true. Maybe it's that they don't understand me. Winter, Monk, Nico, the Royal Family--they all stumbled into this life. Winter has his cute little Halloween story, Monk has his bitter drunken rants about whatever godforsaken peat bog he grew up in. King discovered the truth when one of her alternates, distraught upon learning of Courtney Love's suicide, killed herself, and now she's worshipped as the pop god Jenny Rex on half-a-dozen parallels. I know Black and White like me--they sort of have to--but they don't understand. I was born for this. They weren't.

Maybe that's why I'm having trouble remembering my name. Maybe that's why I haven't talked to any of them for six months.

Let's get a few things clear, here at the beginning, so maybe this can be a beneficial relationship for both of us. I've forgotten my real name; all I know is that my friends, if that is what they are, call me Grey. Or called me Grey, more accurately. I go by another name, as well, but I don't wish to speak of it now. You are you, whoever you are, reading this years from now, I imagine, after whatever happens to me happens. Maybe Black and White find me and bring me back in, and then we'll all have a good laugh. Maybe I'm captured and killed for what I've done. I'm sure there'll be some laughter then too.

Actually, I'm sure both of these things, and more, will happen. The question is which one I'll remember.

So now you have my name, of a sort, but not what I am. If you, as I suspect, are some average person in some average future who has just stumbled across this book, then I also suspect you would be surprised to learn that there are worlds beyond your own--parallel worlds. I'm sure Winter could explain the physics, if he were here. But there are parallel worlds, and there are a very few people who can move between these worlds. Most of these people, myself included, are employed by an agency whose remit is to patrol the borders between the worlds and to investigate incursions from one parallel into another. Lately our jobs have been getting harder; the borders are not as strong as they once were. Six months ago this agency sent me on a mission, the details of which I was strongly encouraged to forget. I'm afraid that soon I will forget that I was even sent on this mission. And I am afraid to even imagine what I will have become by then.

As my memories of the recent past have deteriorated, I have thought more and more about my childhood, and specifically my father. What I remember about my father is that he looked a lot like the person I now see in the mirror, on the rare occasion I see a mirror. I remember people called him "Grey" too; it must be our family name. He was tall and rich, always dressed in an immaculate suit; I never knew the proper phrase for what he looked like until I came to Winter's world. He looked like a movie star. Errol Flynn, perhaps.

My father taught me a great many things, that I remember. He taught me etiquette, how to function in polite society, and languages--our house was always home to emissaries from far-off lands, all of them close personal friends of my father's. Many of them spoke languages I never heard again until I learned to jump between worlds and became familiar with the tongues of Winter's world. He taught me literature and science, how to fence and how to ride.

Most importantly, he taught me to kill.

He gave me my first gun on my tenth birthday. It was called a Luger, he said, a thing from another time and place. He spent three years teaching me to shoot. The mechanics of aiming and firing came easily, and I was a better shot than even him; but the psychological distancing of myself from the act of killing, which my father called "focus" and which I still, though just barely, am able to call "insanity," came more slowly. But it came nonetheless.

When I turned thirteen my father revealed what I had suspected for some time: that he was able to travel between parallel worlds. He conjured up a spinner, the first I had ever seen, and took me through it. It felt like dying. It felt like I'd been waiting my whole life to feel that way.

We came out of the spinner in a room that looked just like the one we had left. A boy who looked just like me--who, I realized on some intuitive level, was me--ran into the room to investigate the noise. He saw me and froze. My father told me to shoot the boy, and before I could think of a reason not to, I had done it. I could feel two bullets tear through my chest just as they tore through his, but I lived while he lay on the floor dying.

My father gave me a syringe and a small vial and told me to collect some of the blood that was pouring out of the boy's chest. He said this would let me create spinners and jump between worlds on my own. As I bent down next to the boy to collect the blood, the last of the his life passed from his body. As he died, I felt for the second time in less than a minute the sensation of dying. I knew then it was something I wanted to feel again.

I still keep the vial with me, but hidden, so no one will know who I really am. I keep it hidden well. I’m not even sure I know where it is, now.

posted by Gardner at 1:06 AM |

posted by Gardner at 12:39 AM |

SPINE | Notes toward a Better Superhero, Part 3

In Part 1 we discussed what superhero comics are and how they can be improved; in Part 2 we talked about specific ways the form of superhero comics can improve. In Part 3, we'll talk about the content of superhero comics.

If you've decided, as I have, that Story is the most important aspect of any attempt to improve superhero comics, then the obvious followup question is "What kind of stories?" Traditional superhero comics have two kinds of stories: origin stories, in which our hero suffers his trauma, gains his powers, and makes the fateful decision to put on a costume and fight crime. As hokey and jury-rigged as many of these origins are, at least they're stories. They have beginnings (Peter Parker is a nerdy high-school loser), inciting incidents (Peter is bitten by an irradiated spider), middles (Peter discovers his powers, becomes a wrestler, inadvertently contributes to the death of his uncle) and ends (Peter realizes "with great power comes great responsibility," decides to use his powers for good). It's no surprise, then, that when filmmakers adapt a superhero comic to the screen, they usually adapt the origin story. You may notice, however, that in the films, the villain is frequently ntegral to the hero's origin (in Tim Burton's Batman, the Joker's alter ego Jack Napier killed Bruce Wayne's parents) and is usually killed at the end of the film. A neat little story arc like that isn't often found in the comics. The Joker still torments Batman every few months, and Batman still agonizes over whether he should kill the Clown Prince of Crime and end it all for good. He doesn't, of course, and the Joker returns to bedevil him again. This is the second type of traditional superhero story: Supervillain concocts a plan to rule the world/rob a bank/kill Superhero/etc., Superhero fights Supervillain, and after a few twists and turns, Superhero wins. This is a perfectly good story format, on its own. But when you string hundreds of such stories together over the course of decades, with no end in sight, you don't get a story. You get a perpetual motion machine.

The writers and artists who have seen this problem and tried to overcome it have usually gone the route of making superheroes more "realistic." (Which can itself be done in at least two different ways; see Part 1.) But, as Zed at MemeMachineGo! points out, this usually results in one of two outcomes. Either the superheroes try to take over the world to make it better (The Authority in Coup D'etat) or they get co-opted and broken down by the government (Watchmen). Superheroes and realism have a very tenuous relationship, because superheroes are inherently unrealistic. I know you're immediately thinking "spandex," but forget that--if superheroes really did exist, they probably would wear spandex, because that's what superheroes have worn in sixty years' worth of comic books--it's the powers. Most superpowers are based on ridiculously bad science. Try to wrap your mind around how you would "realistically" depict Plastic Man's powers, and see how far you get. And there's the problem, which Alan Moore tackled in Watchmen, of how the world's political power structure would completely change if even one superpowered person existed. Now, imagine that hundreds of superheroes existed, and the most powerful of them joined up to form a Justice League, and they set up a base on the moon. It's a wonder that the US government--any government--even exists in the DC Universe, much less acts a lot like the real US government.

Superhero comics exist on a continuum, with pure stark realism at one end and insane acid-fuelled fantasy at the other. Most modern superhero comics lie in the middle of this continuum--the conventions of the superhero genre are taken for granted and either not explained or slyly winked at, but the characters act like real people and live in a world that largely resembles the real world. Near the "realism" end of the continuum is something like Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan's Demo (published by AiT/Planet Lar), a series about superpowers in the "real world." No costumes, no codenames, just "real" people dealing with superpowers. Over on the opposite "fantasy" end are books like Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart's upcoming series Seaguy, which embraces all the ludicrous superhero tropes and uses them to tell a completely fantastic, yet internally consistent story (I'm assuming Seaguy will fit that description, but based on Morrison's past work, I think it will). Most attempts to improve superheroes--and usually that implies deconstructing them--veer toward one of these two ends of the continuum. But on one end you have superhero books with no superheroes--which aren't really superhero books at all--and on the other you have "superhero" books, which are more about superhero comics than about characters who are superheroes. What I'm trying to do in these little essaylets is find a way to tell superhero stories without relying on all the cheats and inconsistencies and ludicrosities (in both the Faulknerian sense and in my own made-up sense) that have plagued superhero comics to this day.

And, of course, that brings us back around to the old question: What is a superhero? What requirements does a story have to meet to be considered a superhero story? Obviously, the character(s) has/have to have superpowers. (And I already hear you screaming that Batman doesn't have superpowers. True. But his intelligence, his physical perfection, his martial arts skills, his vast wealth and arsenal, and, most importantly, his near-psychotic hatred of crime--these all add up to equal something very much like a superpower. Which, in combination with various other elements of the Batman mythos, makes him a superhero.) But is it enough for a story to be about a person with superpowers? As I said above with regard to Demo, I think not. Look at two of M. Night Shyamalan's films, for example. The Sixth Sense is about a person with a superpower--the ability to see and speak with the dead--but it is emphatically not a superhero story. It is, in fact, cloaked in the trappings of the horror genre. But Shyamalan's Unbreakable, which in tone, setting, themes and lead actor greatly resembles The Sixth Sense, is a superhero story. And it's not just because Bruce Willis's character has a superpower. It's because Shyamalan builds those superhero tropes into the film, however subtly. Willis's character has the trauma (two traumas, actually--his strained relationship with his wife and the train wreck), he has a costume (of sorts--his security jacket), and he has a supervillain (Sam Jackson's Mr. Glass). Willis even goes out and fights crime.

So are those tropes necessary for a story to be classified a "superhero" story? To some degree, I think so. And that's what we'll talk about in NtaBS Part 4, in two weeks. As usual, this thing is proving to be more daunting than I thought when I sat down to write it. Next week I'll take a break from superheroes to talk about two recent books by Paul Hornschemeier, the graphic novel Mother, Come Home and the one-man anthology My Love Is Dead, Long Live My Love, aka Forlorn Funnies #5.
posted by Gardner at 12:13 AM |

SPEAKER | Pabst Blue Ribbon!

Today, for no reason at all, is David Lynch Day here at the GLFC. (All right, there are reasons, but they've got nothin' to do with nothin'. Reason #1: March's GLFC mix-CD theme, per James, is "Songs You Were Listening to in the Year ____." I'm considering making 1997 the year for my mix. In the summer of 1997, I was working the night shift in the Wal-Mart SuperCenter bakery, frying up donuts. I had a couple of mixtapes full of loud, angry music to get me through my shift; two of the selections on those tapes were Nine Inch Nails' "The Perfect Drug" and Marilyn Manson's cover of "I Put a Spell on You." These songs both came from the soundtrack to Lynch's 1997 film Lost Highway. Reason #2: Yesterday I started reading David Foster Wallace's Everything and More, a treatise on the mathematics of infinity. One of my favorite essays in Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is "David Lynch Keeps His Head," a piece originally written for Premiere magazine that focuses, in part, on the filming of Lost Highway. See? Nothin' to do with nothin'.)

So, anyway. David Lynch. In terms of music, Lynch's films usually have two distinct sounds fighting/complementing each other. One of those sounds is the goth-noir avant-jazz and ambient industrial throbbing of composer Angelo Badalamenti. The other is pop cheese, usually of a 50s-60s vintage. The result of throwing these two strains of music together is that the Badalamenti stuff starts to sound normal, while the pop songs take on a disturbing, otherworldly quality; all the creepy subtext in the songs comes to the fore, and they start to sound alien, like they were written by that backwards-talking dwarf in Twin Peaks. Lynch does for these old chestnuts what he did for suburbia in Blue Velvet: not revealing the sordid horrific underbelly below the banal surface, but showing that the horror lies in the banality itself.

"In Dreams" by Roy Orbison
Lip-synced by Dean Stockwell, using a mechanic's lamp as a microphone, in Blue Velvet. The fact that I heard this song for the first time while watching Dean Stockwell sing it into a lamp means that I can never hear the song without thinking of that scene, and of the wrongness that pervades that scene, and so whatever pure intentions Orbison had when writing and singing "In Dreams" are distorted and perverted by just how goddamn creepy the line "The candy-colored clown they call the sandman / comes into my room every night" really is.



"Llorando" by Rebekah del Rio
More Orbison, this one a Spanish-language cover of "Crying" performed a capella by Rebekah del Rio in Mulholland Drive. Del Rio's performance of "Llorando" is the second-most riveting part of the movie for me (you can probably guess the first). By turning a familiar song into something literally foreign, Lynch and del Rio make you focus on her voice and not the words, so instead of hearing her describe longing, you hear her embody longing. And of course there's that Lynchian twist--in the film, del Rio isn't singing the song live; she's lip-syncing (that again!) to a recording of herself singing. What does that mean? Who knows! It adds another layer of artifice: it's a film of a performance of a recording, instead of a film of a performance. It adds one more layer of distance between the audience and the performer; it becomes less about a woman singing a beautiful song and more about the performance, about the context in which the performance happens. It invites you to question just what is really happening and what is imagined, just like the rest of Mulholland Drive.



"In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)" by the Pixies
A cover of a Lynch-written song from Eraserhead, which I haven't seen (bad, bad Gardner). This is from the album The Pixies, which comprises some of the band's earliest demos. This is one of my favorite Pixies songs, because it's such a perfect example of their energy and particular brand of insanity: it's just a minute and a half of Skilsaw guitars, machine-gun drums and Black Francis screaming the same line over and over until his vocal cords snap.

For more info on Eraserhead and the Lady in the Radiator, I refer you to this article:

As Lynch pulled himelf out of his personal gloom, a little light penetrated the world of ERASERHEAD. "One day I was just sitting in the food room, and I just drew this little lady, and little foetuses were falling out of her," said Lynch. "And I thought she would live in the radiator, where it’s nice and warm, and this would be a real comfort for Henry. So I went running into this set, which was just across the hall, and I looked at the radiator, and lo and behold!, there was this little square in it. It was perfect. And not only that. We had shot scenes with Henry looking at the radiator two times; there was nothing extra we had to shoot. It fit in perfectly."



"Red Bats with Teeth" by Angelo Badalamenti
From the aforementioned Lost Highway soundtrack. Bill Pullman, as a jazz saxophonist, plays this in a club, and it's included here because I like DFW's description of the scene, from the aforementioned "D. Lynch Keeps His Head:"

...there are also some scenes of Pullman looking very natty and East Village in all-black and jamming on his tenor sax in front of a packed dance floor (only in a David Lynch movie would people dance ecstatically to abstract jazz)...



"Mysteries of Love" by Julee Cruise
From Blue Velvet and Cruise's album Floating into the Night, co-written by Lynch and Badalamenti. Cruise popped up occasionally on the Twin Peaks soundtrack, and even appeared in at least one episode (Floating into the Night also includes "Falling," a version of the Twin Peaks theme with vocals).

Speaking of banal, check out Lynch's lyrics:

Sometimes a wind blows
and you and I
float
in love
and kiss
forever
in a darkness
and the mysteries
of love
come clear
and dance
in light
in you
in me
and show
that we
are Love

Sometimes a wind blows
and the mysteries of Love
come clear

If I was still editing a high-school lit mag, that would totally get published. But with Cruise's impossibly light voice singing those lyrics over Badalamenti's massive synth pile-up, it comes close to profundity. I hate to call someone's voice "angelic," but Cruise just isn't human here.

(FYI: DFW says "Mysteries of Love" is "one of the great make-out tunes of all time," so good luck and godspeed, kids.)



An Embarrassment of Riches (har har): Forksclovetofu, curator of The Tofu Hut, has graciously allowed me to participate in his mix-CD reviewing experiment, and the results are up right here (if that direct link takes you to a post about Annie Ross, scroll down a bit until you see the header "Sunday, March 07, 2004" and a picture of Jay Sherman, who looks kinda like me without a beard). Essentially, Forksclovetofu made a mix-CD called "MUSIC I HAVE LISTENED TO AT THE GYM THAT I WOULD BE ASHAMED TO LET OTHER PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT," sent it to me, and I wrote up a review which he has now published on his blog. Go check it out. And check out The Tofu Hut every day, because he posts some amazing MP3s there on a daily basis, usually obscure and very cool jazz, blues and folk stuff, with links and annotations galore. And if you clicked over to here from the Hut, thanks for stopping by. Make yourself at home.

(MP3 disclaimer: All MP3s offered on this site are for evaluation purposes only--i.e. download them, listen to them, decide whether you would like to purchase the music from a friendly retailer, and then delete them. All MP3s will be available for one week after they are posted. If you are an artist or represent an artist or label whose music appears here, and you would like your music removed, just let me know.)
posted by Gardner at 12:34 AM |

Sign of the Apocalypse #1,497: Three-Headed Frog


posted by Gardner at 2:00 AM |

MICROFICTION | Who would've thought that a boy like me could come to this

"You were at the Red House Bar and Grill last night, Josh?"

"Yeah. 'Bar and Microwave,' we call it."

"Funny. You go there a lot?"

"Yeah."

"Every night? Every weekend?"

"Every Wednesday. For karaoke."

"Karaoke. You ever do karaoke, Daryl?"

"Nah. I get stage fright."

"Yeah, right. Don't let that placid exterior fool you, Josh--my partner here loves the stage. He's a fiend for musical theater. You were the lead in the department production of Jesus Christ Superstar last year, weren't you, Daryl?"

"Sure, Nick."

"Now, Josh, you know why you're here, right?"

"The--that guy that got killed."

"That's right. A Mr. Harold Roosevelt Jenkins, stabbed to death outside the Red House Bar and Microwave last night. Daryl and I were just hoping you, since you were there, might have seen something."

"Did you see anything, Josh?"

"Like what?"

"You tell us."

"What--you think I did this?"

"Come on, Josh."

"You know how many times we hear that?"

"Everybody we bring in here says that."

"Everybody. 'You think I did this?'"

"We're just asking if you saw anything."

"Like if you saw Mr. Jenkins get stabbed."

"Or if you saw somebody there who maybe had too much to drink, got in a fight with Mr. Jenkins, that sort of thing."

"That's it."

"So, Josh--did you see anything?"

"I don't know. I mean, there were a lot of people there. Everybody likes Tony."

"Tony?"

"He hosts karaoke on Wednesdays. He's got a better selection than Pearl. She hosts Mondays."

"Better selection?"

"He gets newer stuff. Updates it more often. He takes requests."

"You ever request anything?"

"Sure. All the time. He always gets whatever I want."

"What's something you requested?"

"Um...'Sister Christian?' You know that?"

"Sure. Night Ranger."

"Classic."

"That one of your favorites, Josh?"

"Yeah. Totally."

"Did Mr. Jenkins sing anything last night?"

"Yeah, he got up there a couple of times."

"What'd he sing?"

"Oh, man...I don't know..."

"Try to remember."

"I think...I think he sang some Cheap Trick, maybe?"

"'I Want You to Want Me?'"

"No, the other one--"

"'Dream Police?'"

"'Surrender.' That's it. He sang 'Surrender'--"

"That's a hard one. That Robin Zander, he's got a high voice, y'know?"

"Yeah, he couldn't quite hit all the notes. I mean, I'm not one to talk..."

"I bet you're pretty good."

"I'm all right. You do it long enough, you get better."

"Was 'Surrender' all Mr. Jenkins sang?"

"No, he did a couple others. That Coldplay song--'The Scientist.' He really fucked that one up."

"I bet it's hard to listen to some people."

"Sure."

"I mean, if they just can't sing, you just want them to get off the stage, right?"

"Some people are better than others."

"Some people are a lot better than others, right?"

"Sure. But everybody's just there to have fun."

"Did Mr. Jenkins sing anything else?"

"Yeah, he did one more. Um...'I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight." By Cutting Crew."

"Whoa! Spooky!"

"That's downright eerie."

"Eerily prescient."

"I bet he didn't think that was gonna come true when he picked the song, huh?"

"I guess not."

"That's a good song, though."

"It's a great song."

"I haven't heard it in a while."

"A long while."

"You remember how it goes, Daryl?"

"Oh, jeez, man, I just remember the chorus. How 'bout you, Josh? You know the words?"

"Sure. I mean, it helps to have them right in front of you."

"You want to give us a verse or two?"

"What?"

"Just kidding. Did you sing last night?"

"Of course."

"What'd you sing? 'Sister Christian?'"

"No, I don't like to repeat songs."

"You must've gone through the whole book by now."

"Just about."

"What'd you sing?"

"I did, uh..."In the Midnight Hour" first."

"Wilson Pickett."

"Wicket Wilson Pickett. Nice."

"You got good taste, Josh."

"Thanks."

"That's not all you sang, right?"

"No, I did a couple more. Guns 'n Roses. 'Paradise City.'"

"Man, you don't mess around."

"You go right to the hard stuff."

"What else?"

"'Kiss,' by Prince. That was the last one."

"You are a brave man, Josh."

"Prince Rogers Nelson. Not many people can pull that off."

"You must be damn good. C'mon, you gotta be, right?"

"Like I said, man, you just do it long enough and you get better."

"So is that all you sang?"

"Yeah."

"You sure?"

"Mm-hmm."

"Cuz I think you sang one more."

"I think you did too."

"We talked to Tony, Josh. He said you sang four songs last night."

"I don't--"

"You know what he said your fourth song was?"

"He said it was "I Just Died in Your Arms.'"

"The same song Mr. Harold Jenkins sang."

"Now, I thought that wasn't allowed? I thought you weren't supposed to sing a song that somebody else already sang?"

"So who sang it first, Josh? You or Mr. Jenkins?"

"I don't remember singing that..."

"Come on, Josh. Tony says you sing it every week. Says it's your favorite song."

"It's not my favorite--"

"Who sang it first, Josh?"

"I don't remember..."

"Yes you do."

"I had a lot to drink last night."

"Look at me, Josh. I'm not accusing you of anything, okay? I just want to know who sang the song first."

"I...I think I did."

"Okay. There you go. You do remember."

"I don't know what difference that makes."

"How'd Mr. Jenkins do?"

"What?"

"How'd he sing the song? Was he good?"

"I don't know."

"Don't give me that, Josh. You go to karaoke every week. You know you're good. You can tell when other people are good singers."

"Saying he sucked doesn't mean you killed him, Josh."

"He...he didn't suck. I mean, he did when he sang the Coldplay song, but not when he did 'I Just Died in Your Arms.' He was good."

"How good?"

"Really good."

"Like just-like-the-record good?"

"Better."

"Wow! That must've...but he wasn't as good as you, right? I mean, that's your song. You probably knocked it out of the park."

"Kicked his ass."

"He may be Sammy Hagar, but you're David Lee Roth."

"Sure."

"Sure? They must've gone crazy for you, if you sang it better than Mr. Jenkins, right? That must be a good feeling."

"Almost like being a real rock star."

"Is that what it's like, Josh? I don't know; I can't get on stage without just about wetting my pants. Daryl here lives for that kind of stuff, but not me, you know? I don't know what it's like to be so good at something that everybody's clapping for me, cheering, telling me how good I am; that's gotta feel great. I'd love to know what that feels like. To be that good at something. Even if it's just singing somebody else's song. Can you tell me how that feels, Josh?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?"

"How can you not know? You're the best at this! It's what you do!"

"You showed Harold Jenkins how good you were, didn't you?"

"Josh, you gonna answer the question?"

"Come on, Josh. I just wanna know what it's like."

"Just tell us. We're cops, man; we don't get a chance to be stars."

"Just tell me, Josh."

"I don't know!"

"Why not?"

"Because he sang it better than I did, all right? He...fucking...that was my song..."

"And that's why you stabbed him?"

"..."

"You stabbed him because he sang some awful piece of shit 80s song better than you."

"It's not a piece of shit! That's my song!"

"And Harold Jenkins made it his song."

"He knew the fucking rules! Tony never should've let him sing it! He knew that was my song! He sang it so fucking well...It was like being right there at a concert..."

"Was that your knife you used?"

"It was my pocketknife...I got it for graduation...I can't believe I stabbed somebody with my pocketknife..."

"Why didn't you kill Tony too?"

"What?"

"I mean, he's the one who really broke the rules, right?"

"Yeah, but...I don't want Pearl to take over Wednesdays."

© 2004 Gardner Linn
posted by Gardner at 12:04 AM |

If you're at all interested in comics, or writing in general, you should go read the Alan Moore interview at Alan David Doane's blog. Moore is the writer of From Hell, Watchmen, and countless other brilliant comics, as well as the novel Voice of the Fire. He has also apparently requested that his name be removed from the credits of Constantine, the film based on John Constantine, a character he created in DC's Swamp Thing series in the 80s, and who has starred in the series Hellblazer for over a decade now.

(Update 3/5/04: Apparently not.)
posted by Gardner at 3:13 AM |

posted by Gardner at 2:46 AM |

SPINE | A Finer World

Coup D'etat: Sleeper #1 by Ed Brubaker & Jim Lee
Coup D'etat: Stormwatch Team Achilles #2 by Micah Ian Wright & Carlos D'Anda
Coup D'etat: Wildcats Version 3.0 #3 by Joe Casey, Ale Garza & Trevor Scott
Coup D'etat: The Authority #4 by Robbie Morrison, Whilce Portacio & Trevor Scott
Published by DC/Wildstorm

Universe-spanning crossovers are a much-maligned staple of superhero comics, and for good reason: they're usually bald-faced money-grubs whose sole purpose is to get fanboys who may read only Batman or Superman to buy fifteen other comics in order to read "the whole story." That's bad enough. But from a storytelling perspective, crossovers are almost useless. In the Marvel and DC universes, real change can never occur. Any character who can still be milked for licensing money can't die or change dramatically (Aquaman died in 2002's DC crossover "Our Worlds at War;" he already has a new monthly series). It's almost impossible for a crossover to have long-range repercussions on an entire line of comics. Even Crisis on Infinite Earths, which "rebooted" the entire DC universe in 1986, was being undermined almost from the start, largely by superhero trickster-god Grant Morrison. Superhero universes always trend toward order; no matter what changes you put major characters through, they will always revert to their original status quo given enough time.

That's why Coup D'etat, the recent Wildstorm Universe crossover, has the potential to be the start of something very interesting, despite its flaws. Wildstorm is a relatively new universe (it started with Jim Lee's WildC.A.T.s #1 in 1992), and, for reasons that I'll get into in a later essay, is the first postmodern universe in superhero history. It's small--currently comprising only four monthly titles (Sleeper, Stormwatch: Team Achilles, Wildcats Version 3.0 and The Authority) and the sporadically-published Planetary, which really exists on the fringes of the universe anyway--and the titles' connections are built-in, instead of corporate-mandated. And because Wildstorm characters aren't internationally-recognized icons, the writers have more leeway in what they can do to the characters. They can actually tell stories.

Coup D'etat begins when Tao, the brilliant, inhuman leader of an international criminal syndicate, manipulates the US government into ripping a hole in the Bleed, the metaphysical space between parallel universes. This results in an alien ship crashing to earth and destroying Florida. In steps The Authority, the earth's premiere superheroes; after saving the earth on various occasions from A) insane terrorists, B) invaders from a parallel world, C) depraved Avengers analogues, and D) God, and receiving for their troubles only an assassination attempt from the G8 leaders, who are rightly scared to death of a bunch of leftist troublemakers with godlike powers who ride around in the Bleed in a city-sized spaceship, they decide they've had enough. At the end of Coup D'etat: Sleeper, The Authority declare themselves the new rulers of America.

And that's it, really. The Stormwatch and Wildcats chapters show how those characters react to The Authority's coup. Stormwatch, a UN-backed military team tasked with bringing down rogue superpowered beings, sever their ties to the UN and go on the run, planning to remove The Authority from power. Jack Marlowe, the android CEO of the Halo Corporation (according to writer Joe Casey, Halo is the superhero in Wildcats), has a little talk with The Authority in which he warns them that what they're doing is simply "acting out old paradigms." In the final Coup issue, The Authority assassinate the President, suspend democracy and formalize their new status as the world's one superpower.

So in terms of plot, Coup D'etat is pretty light. There are certainly none of the big superhero throwdowns that are the raison d'etre of most crossovers. In fact, a good portion of the Wildcats chapter is given over to meta-commentary on the old rules of superhero crossovers, as we see in Jack Marlowe's speech to his old superhero partner Cole Cash, who wants to blow up The Authority's ship with a "negative gamma-particle bomb": "I understand your rationale. We were both born of that world. It was all we knew for so long. I also know that you've spent inordinate amounts of time clinging to those old-world notions of heroism and violence. Those things are not so interconnected as you would like to believe. Your efforts to engage The Authority will only prolong a way of life that I'm convinced we can rise above." Casey might as well be speaking directly to fans who demand more kick-splode in their superhero comics. Wildcats, Sleeper and Stormwatch are steps, however small, toward a new kind of superhero comic; The Authority is one of the last bastions of old-school spandex violence. In Coup, The Authority are cast as the villains, a role that their creator Warren Ellis has claimed for years they were always meant to play. Even in Ellis's first Authority stories from 1999, which recast Justice League-style superheroism on a larger scale than has even been attempted, there were moments that showed The Authority's by-any-means-necessary methods weren't exactly "heroic," as superhero comics have usually defined the term; note The Midnighter's gleefully psychotic smile when he destroys Gamorra in The Authority #4.

But in casting The Authority as their villains, the Coup writers have erred in making them one-dimensional. This is most apparent in the Stormwatch chapter. Micah Wright has a talent for writing believable military group dynamics, and his political satire is often funny, but his parody of George W. Bush (under Wright's direction, Wildstorm's fictional president Patrick Kent spouts inanities like "They're wrong! And America will show them wronger still!") is so broad that it's working against the story rather than with it. And he writes The Authority as idiots and lunatics. Upon seeing a superpowered terrorist whom Stormwatch C.O. Ben Santini executed, Midnighter says "He was probably just some innocent kid born with superpowers. This is a message for us. This proves Santini's a dangerous psychotic. This proves what we're doing is right." Now, I know Midnighter likes to dress up in leather and beat up people for fun, but that doesn't mean he has to jump to conclusions so fast. And at the end of the issue, the entire Authority discover Baron Chaos, a very funny Doctor Doom parody whom Santini also shot and left for dead. They immediately take this as another sign that Santini is evil and dangerous; Authority leader Jack Hawksmoor actually says "Woe betide anyone who disputes that with me." Woe betide? While turning The Authority into such one-note villains provides some humor, it ultimately does a disservice to the larger aims of Coup.

In the final chapter, Robbie Morrison lets us see things from The Authority's side, and what we see are doubts. Hawksmoor wonders what their first leader, the late Jenny Sparks, would think of the coup; Swift questions "Since when did we become about compromise?" And on the final page of the series, the Midnighter looks directly at the reader and says "That was the easy part. What the fuck do we do now?" It's a question that has both internal and external consequences for the four Wildstorm series. Because of The Authority's coup, each series has a new status quo, and they have more potential to go somewhere interesting than your average superhero comic. But in a larger sense, Morrison and the other writers are asking where superhero comics can go after The Authority; once a superhero team kills God, once you can say "fuck" in a superhero comic, once you can out your Batman and Superman analogues (Midnighter and Apollo) as gay lovers, once your superteam stages a coup and takes over the US, where can you go? What else can you do? Is there still life left in the superhero comic book? The Wildstorm books are attempting to answer these questions monthly, and hopefully next week I'll get back to my ongoing attempt to answer those same questions.
posted by Gardner at 4:34 AM |

It's called Rome for a reason

This story is funny for obvious reasons, but it's even funnier for me because it happened at the movie theatre I most frequently visited in high school. I always knew it was evil.

Link via Stereogum.
posted by Gardner at 4:16 AM |

SPEAKER | To a guy in Kentucky, I'm Mr. Unlucky

I love mix tapes. I love making them, and I love receiving them. My gigantic iTunes library exists for the sole purpose of making mix CDs to give to other people. We're a long way from declaring the album dead, but the personal mix CD, aided by the MP3/Napster/SoulSeek/iTunes revolution, is becoming a legitimate art form. It may very well be to the early 00s what the 45 was to the fifties, the album to the 60s and 70s, and the music video to the 80s and 90s: the format that shapes the content. For better or worse, it involves the listener in the creation of the art; on a good mix CD, song selection and sequence are just as important as the quality of the individual songs. It has a lot in common with sampling and DJing, and when CDs are too expensive, corporate radio forces the same 20 songs down your throat, and the technology exists to make it possible to own almost any song you want within seconds, there shouldn't be any surprise that personal mixes are becoming an increasingly important force in music.

The best mix tape I've ever heard was a gift from a friend of mine nearly six years ago. It was actually two tapes, each 110 minutes long and filled end to end, named "Gardner's Garnish of Sound #1 & 2." "Eclectic" doesn't begin to describe the song choices; Nina Simone is followed by Everclear, who are in turn followed by Yma Sumac. These tapes have largely informed my musical taste; at least two of the songs I consider my all-time favorites (Jeff Buckley's "Last Goodbye" and The Stone Roses' "I Wanna Be Adored") I first heard on "GGoS." Over the past six years I've listened to these tapes more than anything else in my music collection. Soon after receiving them, I spent a summer in Tanzania, and I took them along. Each song brings back memories of specific places and times: The Pixies' "Motorway to Roswell" is the soundtrack of my next-to-last day on Kilimanjaro, hiking from Kibo down to Horombo after a failed summit attempt, Black Francis wailing "Last night, he could not make it" in my freezing ears. When I first moved to LA and found myself working a horrible temp job in the hinterland of Torrance, I listened to the tapes every day on the commute to remind myself that things were better before, and would get better again.

I've lost "GGoS" #2. It's gone. Probably somewhere in the bowels of my car. But I still have the case with the tracklisting. "GGoS" #1 is on its last legs. I'm trying to recreate the tapes in digital format, which is proving to be somewhat difficult. SoulSeek helped, as did iTunes, but some of the stuff is just too obscure. Of the tracks I've been able to find so far, here are a few of the best:

"Jack's Lament" by Danny Elfman
From the soundtrack to The Nightmare before Christmas. Elfman, Tim Burton's favorite composer, as well as the composer of the theme to The Simpsons and frontman of New Wave band Oingo Boingo, wrote the music and lyrics and provides the voice of Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town. Jack, though a "master of fright," has grown tired of the Halloween routine, and this is his "there's something more for me out there" song. Oddly touching, with clever lyrics: "And since I am dead / I can take off my head / to recite Shakespearean quotations." Despite the specificity of Jack's situation, this song should perfect sense to anyone who's ever wondered what they might find away from home.

"Play Dead" by Bjork & David Arnold
Theme song to the 1993 film The Young Americans, directed by Danny Cannon and starring Harvey Keitel. Arnold wrote the score for this London-set cop movie and provided the musical setting that Bjork plays in here. Arnold has scored the last few James Bond movies (and produced a very interesting album of covers of Bond themes), and you can hear that combination of spy-movie cool and orchestral pomp in "Play Dead." Bjork takes up Arnold's challenge and gives one of her most intense vocal performances; the song's power comes from the tension between her intimate lyrics and the over-the-top grandiosity of the vocals and music.

"Vetchera I Rado" by The Bulgarian Women's Choir
From the BWC's album Tour '93. A choral a capella version of, I believe, an arrangement of a Bulgarian folk song by composer Philip Koutev. I don't really know anything else about this song or what the words translate to in English, but it's a beautiful piece, and the brief detour into dissonance makes the harmony that much more compelling.

There are still a few songs on "GGoS" I haven't been able to find without resorting to hunting CD stores; if anyone has MP3s of the following they'd like to send my way, I'd be forever in your debt:

"Wanda's Whorehouse" from "Screens" by Phillip Glass & Faday Musa Suso
"Who'll Sop My Gravy" by Jas. Mathus & His Knock-Down Society
"There Is No Other Way" from Pacific Overtures by Stephen Sondheim
"Vissi D'arte" from Tosca by Eileen Farrell
"Little Impulse" from The Piano score by Michael Nyman
The studio version of "For Love or Money" by Joni Mitchell
"Your Whole Life" and "Soul Station" from the Bodies, Rest & Motion score by Michael Convertino
"Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas, read by the poet (I assume) (Update 3/4/04: Well, hmm. I just discovered I do own a recording of Dylan Thomas reading "Fern Hill," but it's not the same as the one from GGOS. But it'll do in a pinch.)
"Gullharpan" by Lena Willemark & Ale Moller
"Tanha Tanha Yuhan Pe Jeena" from Ranjeela (A Bollywood soundtrack, presumably)
"Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps (Quizas Quizas Quizas)" by Doris Day
The Wonder Woman theme song (Found! Link via Largehearted Boy)
The old Slinky commercial jingle ("What walks down stairs," etc.)
The old Mr. Clean commercial jingle
A Chinese song whose name whose name isn't on the tracklisting; and since I've lost the tape, I couldn't even attempt to phonetically spell out the lyrics. I think it's either a folk song or a standard, though, as I'm pretty sure I heard it performed live in Xi'an four years ago.

(MP3 disclaimer: All MP3s offered on this site are for evaluation purposes only--i.e. download them, listen to them, decide whether you would like to purchase the music from a friendly retailer, and then delete them. All MP3s will be available for one week after they are posted. If you are an artist or represent an artist or label whose music appears here, and you would like your music removed, just let me know.)
posted by Gardner at 4:45 AM |