speaking of comics, i nearly let the big day pass me by without remembering. new sandman is tomorrow! i have to really try not to go hyper-nerd on this one.
however, if i swing by golden apple comics after work tomorrow and they don’t have any copies left, i’m going to stab someone with my compass and strangle them with my rainbow suspenders.
understanding comics – scott mccloud – 5 stars
some people at work take smoke breaks. i take book review breaks. they have no idea the depths of nerdiness concealed beneath this stylish exterior.
and what’s more, it’s a book review on a comic book! a comic book about comics! yikes.
well here is the problem with this book then. it’s in comic book form, which is scary to non-comics readers — despite the fact that the book itself is an academic albeit creatively expressed explanation/validation of comics as a medium. so if you can bear to read this one comic, you might find yourself appreciating the potential of all the other comics out there, and be more open. if you can just clear that first hurdle.
because the book is definitely enjoyable, readable, engaging, and insightful, and deals with a visual medium you might not think about in a critical way. i thought this book was excellent and i’d recommend it to anyone, not just comics readers, who is at all interested in art or literature. yes, i still maintain that comics falls into those categories.
and if you already read comics, you have no excuse not to read this book. it’s fun, won’t take long to get through, and pretty enlightening. plus it might open your eyes to some nuances you hadn’t really thought to notice before, making comics even better.
either way, very worth the time and a great addition to my bookshelf. the person who gave me this book must be a very cool person indeed.
uh oh, it’s the pay day song! but let me be honest with you. i haven’t really been floored by anything the last couple weeks. i’m mostly looking forward to a new hey mercedes album, and half-heartedly listening to some hip hop stuff spencer told me to check out. it’s good, for sure, but i don’t think i’m in a hip hop phase this month, so it’s not really getting to me. i still might check out the prefuse show next month though just because it’d be a nice change of pace i imagine.
so since i’m being honest, i’ll tell you that i actually do like this song, even if it is about doing cough syrup. it’s a fun song. i like nintendo beats. and apparently this guy works for cartoon network, specifically adult swim? and he was featured in episodes of aqua teen hunger force and others, in which he rapped as a cartoon character? sounds good to me.
[now hearing this: selections from the d-plan remix album, which i suggest you give at least a trial listen (you can stream it from their site start to finish or at least download the superpowers remix that uses the guitar lick from that song ‘oh la la’ from rushmore, which made a nice end product, i’d say.]
what a great weekend! see, this is why i have no regret being done with college. i’m fairly certain that i’m having just as much, but probably actually more fun now than i ever have. all these people that are all afraid of graduating and leaving the safe haven of education and irresponsibility must just be doing it wrong.
friday night we went to a party for a girl twice removed from me and full of people i personally didn’t know at all. and i didn’t drive. so it was a ticket to act like a clown, which i did, but had a great time of it. i was talking all kinds of shit against these guys we beat in foosball twice in a row and i think they didn’t realize i was just being a jerk as a joke. i mean, who sincerely has foosball bravado? oh well. then later some girls we were talking to were complaining of some guy that kept bothering them, and when he came back and told us his name was hal i kept pretending i misheard him and calling him pal the whole rest of the night. i get so clever sometimes, i don’t know where it comes from. at least i didn’t make fun of the girl with one leg like my roommate did. or the french people at the party, like our driver/friend did. i stuck with harassing good old pal. (although saying, “well, at least the one she has is pretty nice” is about as funny as it is offensive).
last night at josh’s birthday was equally great. everyone seemed fun and friendly and for some reason girls were talking to me and putting their arms around me and i think that was the most action i’ve got in several months. i’m such a slut. i might have had a chance with one of them if she didn’t disappear hours before the party ended — i found out later from josh she had just passed out upstairs in one of the hostess’s beds. if only i were more thourough in my search and less thourough in my ethics. maybe next time.
tonight is the conan o’brien 10th anniversary sunday sunday sundae party here at our place. come enjoy the only bright light of late night during prime time, and bring a sundae topping. we’ll have heaps of vanilla ice cream and the rest is up to our bevy of guests. i hope someone brings brownie bits, that’d be fucking sweet.
work has been nonstop busy all week, so i’ve had no time at all to read blogs. hopefully all of you are still alive and kicking (it?). i hope to catch up over the weekend or something.
but with the long and jampacked workdays all i’ve wanted to do is come home and chill, hence i have logged many netflix in the past 10 days. here are some highlights in brief, because conan is on and i can’t spend too long doing this because i have to get to bed at a decent time.
brazil – 2 stars
“oooo, terry gilliam is so great and imaginative and underappreciated, it’s so terrible none of his movies make it big so he can do more of the brilliant work he deserves to.” i mean, i know there are people that think that, but hell if i understand them. it was certainly different, but also sort of boring and long, really. let the comments fly all you want. i prefer jerry bruckheimer films.
audition – 3 stars
if you’ve never seen a takashi miike film, as i never had, then you don’t realize what you’re in for even when people tell you or you read about how fucked up they get. so i didn’t know i’d be squeezing a pillow and yelling ‘oh my god!’ out loud by myself on the couch in response to the most graphic scenes. but you know, once i got through it, the movie was actually really good. built up and carried through.
rosemary’s baby – 4 stars
great! screw the pianist, this film i have to thank ol’ roman for. the shots were terriffic and the rising tension all the way through had me fixated. a classic i’d gone far too long without seeing. and i never knew mia farrow was so adorable until this movie. or so weird looking until i saw her cut her hair off in this movie.
[now hearing this: some cex mp3’s i’m test driving.]
the brothers karamazov – fyodor dostoevsky – 3 stars
the worst time to undertake an ambitious reading project is the last month of your college life as you know it. the last month in the house you lived in through graduation and on into the summer of your first year as an adult. maybe that’s why i read this book over two whole months instead of three or four weeks. maybe that’s why i didn’t terribly enjoy the whole first half of meandering exposition, no matter how well-written and composed. perhaps it is no coincidence that having time to myself in a new apartment and suddenly zipping through the final third of this 780 page tome occurred in tandem; or perhaps the real action doesn’t start until well into the story and that’s when it gets more like a cliffhanger and less like grass growing on a hill. i did like it though. dostoevsky is skillful and the characters were certainly developed well in those hundreds upon hundreds of pages. how am i to really judge, though, since by the time i had finished it i could hardly remember the beginning. that said, i still think it’s one of the better books i’ve read about dumptrucks.
having finally had a leisurely afternoon to fully realize it, i must declare that i have a crush on harper’s magazine. not only do they have a column featuring probably the funniest thing from the whole weekend: “cards used in puttanopoly, an italian board game in which players are prostitutes trying to survive life on the streets”, the best by far which was “They find your skeleton in the forest. You lose all your money and the game,**” but also a curious article on the real role of compulsory education being to homogenize and sedate minds instead of inspire achievement and foster intellect. Here’s a fun quote to tempt you to read the article yourself and teach your kids (assuming you ever have any) not to fall prey to the machine.
“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much large class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
–Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, to NY City School Teachers Assoc., 1909
for a six page article, i found it very thought-provoking, and it made me wonder how i would have turned out had i not escaped to a specialty school for promising young nerds instead of completing a full, normal public high school track. i know some of my early nihilist tendencies which later abated to simple thoughtful independence of opinion really took hold thanks to some challenging and unique teachers i’ve had, all due to my ‘honors’ status. i’d like to think that no matter what, my literary tastes would have kept me at least informed and intelligent, and led me to my own questioning and considering instead of nodding and accepting. though i am very grateful to have received a jump start from some respected minds who had something to offer.
sometimes i feel like i should teach some day just in hopes that i could break a few people out of the track to plainness. of course, trying to change peoples’ lives seems to be frowned upon by the school system, so perhaps i’ll just start a cult. or a book club. wouldn’t that be neat!
[now hearing this: soundtrak – ‘available memory’. opened for hey mercedes, were pretty good, and are downloadable here.]
**footnote: the original read, “your skeleton is found in the woods…”, but we all agreed that forest sounded funnier. it’s all translation anyway, you know?
whoa, weekend snuck up on me there. busy week and busy weekend. thursday i broke the 8pm mark for the first time at a company notorious for people working late, then ended up going for gusto and just working all the way until 11. that’s a 14 hour day man. wacky.
so in the wake of that i set out for a dynamite weekend which i think panned out great. hey mercedes played the troubadour friday night and as always i loved seeing them. they played a lot of new stuff which all sounded pretty tight to me; i’m looking forward to hearing the songs in their polished form in october. took off early during sensefield to go to jen’s party after taking joe home, got some alcohol and stayed up til 4:30 partying with those guys. we talked about hearing people in the next room having sex and for those who especially like that there should be a raido station called KSEX that just plays muffled sex sounds. stayed up just as late last night only with a different crew since spencer was up from orange county — we talked about how much we hated each other while we played nba street. a very friend-filled weekend i am satisfied wrapping up with some reading and relaxing. simple and sweet.
[now hearing this: prefuse 73 because i desperatly need to be cool and/or i just willingly accept recommendations from friends with good taste.]
don’t worry, i’m home safe from my whirlwind weekend. it was kind of tough to go back to work, but really that was the only drawback of the whole fabulous thing. i sure didn’t mind working a half day on friday. i didn’t even mind that after our delicious in-n-out in kettleman city, california on the way up, the van wouldn’t start. that was somehow surmounted by deciding to push it out for easier tow-truck access and it miraculously starting at a shot-in-the-dark ignition attempt while rolling across the parking lot. victorious.
as a matter of fact it was nothing but goodness all weekend. great to see dom, great to be in san francisco. his roommates seem really cool and his neighborhood is great. i’m happy for him, i think he’s going to enjoy himself.
plus i got to go to the original amoeba music, which is walking distance from his place. nice. it is equally eye-popping, although probably smaller — however i did find two cds i wanted both at unbelievable prices. and if a quarter of the album weren’t available already on their website, i’d have put up some bishop allen for the pay day song because it’s a pretty good disc. but you can just go there and get ‘busted heart’ yourself, and i can share something else. everybody wins.
so after a weekend of beer and football (go trojans?) and bars and eating, i came home sunday night to tackle the rest of the book i’ve been reading for entirely too long. finished it monday afternoon — expect a review tomorrow — with plenty of time to prepare for our first barbeque here in the new apartment. or rather, on its roof, since we don’t have a nice huge front porch like the good old robot house. we certainly made due though and as the sun went down we had a grand time in honor of laborers the world over. and meat. must honor meat.
a really cool and smiling girl even came over and sat on our couch, which i was excited about… but i won’t jinx it. i get all jittery at phone messages from people in converse, that’s all i’m saying. good jittery.
in summary it was a great three and a half days. i’m in a good mood and just sitting here rocking in the aftermath, so i’m even willing to pick a pay day song that may be corny in its subject, sure, but awfully fun to turn the dial up for. i know you can get this song from their site too, but just in case it never even occurred to you, i’ll save you the trouble and let you get stacy’s mom right here. that’s one catchy chorus, man.
[now hearing this: bishop allen – charm school.]
now at least 11 people are willing to publicly admit to knowing who i am under the scrutinizing gaze of the circle of internet dorks in which they are included. i feel vindicated.
talking about that too much is tacky though (not that you shouldn’t still be my friendster, i have so much love to give!), so i will tangent to this: don’t expect anything more until later this weekend cause i’m a-going to san francisco. our old roommate and good buddy dom has to prove to us that he will be okay in his new life up there by hosting us for a labor day weekend of fun. then we’ll be back to LA in time monday to have a holiday barbeque. the perfect weekend, perhaps? especially if we succeed in our mission of seducing his new female roommates. rarr.
i fucking love road trips. where’s my jerky?
[now hearing this: the famous road mix. soon, anyway.]