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Saturday, January 01, 2005 ( 1/01/2005 01:01:00 PM ) Bill S. EQUAL TIME FOR CANINE BLOGGING! – I'm still in the middle of deadlining (though my wifely collaborator and I did just finish one of the aforementioned projects – the penultimate 100th chapter of an ongoing romantic serial, "Measure By Measure," which we've been producing for the size acceptance online site, Dimensions). So here's another stopgap animal photo, this time of our dawg Dusty contemplating the holidays:  Later! # | Friday, December 31, 2004 ( 12/31/2004 10:00:00 AM ) Bill S. THE CAT IS THE WORD – Still enmeshed in deadlining, but as a Friday stopgap, here's a pic of our kitten Savannah displaying her logophilia. . .  Yes, I know the eyes are Village of the Damned scary. . . # | Thursday, December 30, 2004 ( 12/30/2004 12:40:00 PM ) Bill S. "IT WAS A VERY _______ YEAR. . ." – Got a couple hella writing deadlines that are currently staring me down, so blogging is likely to be light over the next few days. In the meantime, why not check out the many and sundry year end lists that're popping up in the pop culture blogosphere (just finished reading Johnny Bacardi's comics list and it's a plenty fine blend of American material), and, if you've got a fast enough connection and the space to save it (I had to do it on my work computer), take a listen to BeaucoupKevin's set of 2004 tracks – which is nowhere close to what I'd put together if I had the wherewithal to make such a set available (Kevin's much more into Domino Dancing than me), but still jam-packed with boss tracks. And, if you haven't broken your bank account this holiday season, why not consider giving some money to the Red Cross? If I don't see you in the meantime, have a Happy New Year. . . # | Wednesday, December 29, 2004 ( 12/29/2004 01:23:00 PM ) Bill S. THE IDES OF DECEMBER – I'm late in plugging it, but BeaucoupKevin has a cool contest (35 words or less – surely you can come up with thirty-five words!) with the prize being the Oni graphic novel, Julius, a modernization of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" set in the London underworld. (Haven't read this 'un myself yet, but I bet this adaptation is more enjoyable than the Marlon Brando version. . .) Kevin's contest still has a little over a day to go, so why not check it out? # | ( 12/29/2004 01:04:00 PM ) Bill S.  "NOT ONE MILO STONE. . .BUT TWO!" – The first issue of Atokema's Hero Squared is described on its cover as an "X-tra Sized Special" because, as a footnote explains near the bottom, "An X on the cover never hurts!" A comic superhero series, the Keith Giffen/J.M. DeMatteis creation concerns a stalwart supertype named Captain Valor, who is forced to flee his universe after a villain named Caliginous lays waste to it. Entering a parallel universe, he goes in search of his counterpart, but unfortunately for him (and the universe) this turns out to be an out-of-work-and-out-of-shape mope named Milo Stone.Much of the humor in the first issue is carried through extended dialog sequences – first between would-be filmmaker Milo and his writer/videostore clerk friend Blaine, then with Milo and his superhero doppelganger. At its best, the dialog has a Kevin Smith (when he's firing on all cylinders) quality. I also liked the interplay between the villain Caliginous (who goes by "Lord Caliginous" but later is revealed to be a lay-dee!) and her dimwitted toady Sloat, which is more flagrantly silly. (Sloat, we learn, makes a point of using a new, randomly chosen word every day – and the two stop the action to discuss the word of the day.) Joe Abraham's art strikes me as more effective in the book’s banter sequences than in the action scenes, but it’s engaging throughout – and nicely sweetened by Matt Nelson’s candy color scheme. (When did it become standard that the only time you're allowed to be bright in genre comics is when you're doing comedy?) Because I'd never paid attention to Giffen & DeMatteis' superhero collaboration for DC (Formerly Known As the Justice League), I was pleasantly surprised to find this book so diverting. My primary experience with recent Keith Giffen work has been his controversial Americanization of Battle Royale, quite a different kind of scriptwork altogether, while the last DeMatteis comic that I can recall reading was his work on The Spectre. Reading issue one of Hero Squared, though, has me wondering what I've missed on the Justice League series – and looking forward to issue #2. . . # | Tuesday, December 28, 2004 ( 12/28/2004 01:43:00 PM ) Bill S. BY DAY, A SIMPLE COMICS CRITIQUER AND WEBLOGGER; BY NIGHT. . . – So I received a simple holiday postcard in the mail today from the folks at Fantagraphics – a cute holiday graphic by Jordan Crane – and it's been addressed to me via an address label. I can get behind that, but then I notice that my label is covering another label that sez "BUTTMAN" at the top of its addy. What I wanna know is: should I feel insulted? # | Monday, December 27, 2004 ( 12/27/2004 09:45:00 AM ) Bill S.  "THE WHOLE SKYLINE IS HAUNTED FOR HIM" – I recently received a copy of Ira Glass & Chris Ware's Lost Buildings as a premium for donating to our local National Public Radio station (WGLT): a 96-page book w./ DVD package, it contains a "This American Life" segment that Ware did in collaboration with that show's host and radio essayist, Glass, as part of a live show of public readings. "Buildings" was the only segment done as a slideshow – with Glass reading his story and Ware providing a series of illustrations illuminating the material that were projected on a large screen behind Glass. The DVD version basically consists of Glass in voiceover, with Ware's color illos appearing at apt points throughout the twenty-minute story and a totally black screen in spots where no image is required. "This was designed as a slideshow, not a movie," the DVD warns as the outset, and the approach really does come close to approximating that medium."Buildings" tells the story of Tim Samuelson, a Chicagoan who develops a lifelong fascination with buildings that were created during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It's an obsession that began in Armstrong Elementary School, itself an old construction that captures his attention more than his schoolwork (an early report card, we're told, contains a note from the teacher indicating that he "dreams" in class), then moves onto other buildings in the Windy City. As he goes further into it, youjng Tim gains an awareness of Louis Sullivan, the architect responsible for many of the building designs, and a mentor in the person of would-be preservationist Richard Nickel, who both photographs and salvages pieces of these great buildings as they're demolished to make way for glass and steel high-rises. It's a melancholy story – the destruction of a once-vital part of the cityscape, the replacement of works that were ornate and beautiful with sterile glass and girder constructions – and you can see why Ware would be attracted to it. Sullivan buildings were awash with the interestingly etched trims and elaborate cornices, constructed with sweeping arches and delicate seeming ironwork. As he demonstrated in Jimmy Corrigan (most particularly in the flashback scenes to an earlier Chicago), Ware himself has an abiding appreciation for this largely demolished piece of architectural history, and he brings it to bare in his recreations of these great lost buildings.  His artwork appears in various sizes across the screen as Glass narrates: the first images we see are tiny panels of young Samuelson as a boy in school, looking at the details of the room around him. (Purportedly, if you play the DVD in your computer, you can magnify the images with QuickTime, but I couldn't get this feature to work on my ancient Gateway.) Young Tim grows more intrigued by the details of these buildings, to the point of skipping school to go exploring in the city and convincing his mother to take him to a cartoon feature that he doesn't really want to see just so he can experience the insides of the Sullivan-designed Garrick Theater. Ware's renderings of the buildings themselves more typically take up the full vertical line of the screen, sometimes with inlayed panels showing off details. Compositionally and visually, the approach is similar to Corrigan: even the young Tim has visual echoes of the young Jimmy.Midway into the narrative, the young boy Samuelson visits the office of Bauhaus designer Mies van der Rohe, a sequence that is presented with quickly flashed images that create a simple kind of animation. Ware draws this in a more cartoony style, with the designer presented as a parody of Mister Magoo (though Glass' narration doesn't tell us, the 96-page book of photos accompanying the DVD, indicates that the movie Samuelson used as a pretext for visiting the Garrick Theater was Mister Magoo and the 1001 Arabian Nights). I'm guessing that the projectionists showing this during its live performances had a devil of a time getting the images to flash properly. Samuelson's story concludes on a tragic note with Nickels, his teacher and friend, growing more depressed over the diminishing number of extant Sullivan buildings and ultimately perishing while trying to salvage a piece of the old Chicago Stock Exchange. Today, we're told, Samuelson works for the city of Chicago as a cultural historian and preservationist. He still has difficulty entering the building that's been erected over the site where his friend died.  Lost Buildings is a small story compared to Ware's more ambitious comics, but it's clearly of a piece with the cartoonist's other works – elegantly illustrated and evocative. The book and DVD are presently only available to public radio donators (a noble breed, every one of us), though I wouldn't be surprised to see copies of it showing up on eBay soon. I can't imagine many of Ware's admirers wanting to be without a copy . . . nor should they be.# | Sunday, December 26, 2004 ( 12/26/2004 05:36:00 PM ) Bill S. "I BEG TO DREAM AND DIFFER FROM THE HOLLOW LIES" – I'd been meaning to buy it for weeks, but it wasn't 'til Stephen King declared in Entertainment Weekly that Green Day's American Idiot (Reprise) was album of the year that I got off my duff and actually checked the thing out. Though I've enjoyed the group's albums in the past (thought the last 'un, Shenanigans, was a bit slight, though), reading King's assertion brought out the competitive music geek in me. Album of the Year? We'll see about that, Steve-o. . . Two weeks and an uncounted number of re-plays later, I don't feel so pugnaciously contrary. Idiot is a damn fine disc, filled with songs that rage between the band's trademark Cali punk snottiness and a surprisingly well-earned tenderness. Green Day has played with mock sentiment in the past – they got a hit out an ironic ballad, after all – but now they've taken of the ironic quote marks. Idiot is being ballyhooed as a punk concept album, but true to the band’s stripped down ethos, the album's "concept," for what it's worth seems pretty minimalist. (At times, I was surprisingly reminded of Bowie's vaguely connected Rise And Fall of Ziggy Stardust And the Spiders from Mars, an album I've loved for decades now without once caring about its "story.") I suspect that the concept album concept provided Billie Joe Armstrong and the boys enough protective cover to try out that sincerity thing, though. But whether you actually spend time trying to parse the disc's spare storyline – which somehow centers around a self-named "Jesus of Suburbia," who runs away to the city to meet-or-become a more militant figure named "Saint Jimmy" and then falls in love with an unnamed rebel grrl – doesn't much matter. The disc is bursting with so much creative musical pop-punkery it makes International Superhits, the band's 21-track Best-Of collection from 2001, seem paltry. Heck, the disc's two nine-minute "suites" ("Jesus of Suburbian" and "Homecoming") contain enough melodic hookiness to bust the seams of your average blink-182 set. Some fans of the band, the ones who came in when the boys were primarily peddling suburban adolescent alienation, will take issue with the disc's regular political references. It never ceases to amaze me that when a rocker known for expressing young guy sentiments in the realm of romance or social mores turns to politics with a similar overblown attitude, he suddenly is accused or either abandoning or pandering to his audience (sometimes simultaneously). Lead songwriter Billie Joe Armstrong may toss a "Zieg Heil" at "President Gasman" in the oy!-chant "Holiday," but when he does, it's as much to remind us of the Sex Pistols' even-more-brimming-with-pissedness "Holidays in the Sun" as it is to reflect his hero's sense of political alienation. You want nuanced analysis in your music, you don't go lookin' for it in an album with a heart-shaped hand grenade on the cover. And if you don't wanna hear lyrics that'll occasionally piss you off, then what're you doin' listening to these (or any) punks? As for the music itself, for all that the disc keeps returning to the swooshing chordery of classic punk, there's a surprising sense of variety to the sound. Lead singer Billie Joe still sounds as if he's sometimes having difficulty reading the lyrics off his hand-scrawled notes – particularly on the slow songs – but he's also capable of art-i-cul-a-ting (as in "Boulevard of Broken Dreams") adolescent self-pity with heart-felt empathy and succinct specificity. If you believe that Male American Adolescence is a phase of life that most of us guys keep a foot in 'til at least our fifties (any day now, I'm expecting to become mature), you can appreciate the sentiments of "Novacaine" or "Wake Me Up When September Ends," which brazenly references both the well-worn standard, "September Song," and the American ongoing posttraumatic replay of 9/11. Basically, American Idiot is all over the punk map (is that Tenpole Tudor I hear in "Are We the Waiting"?) Though it opens on a fairly family pop-punk sound with the title song, soon the band is throwing in more adventurous art punk noise alongside equal doses of harmonic sweetness. In "Extraordinary Girl," the band even recalls the psychedelic tributes of Mondo Bizarro-era Ramones. By the time, Billie Joe is recalling his lost girlfriend "Whatsername" over a dance rock bassline that could've come out of Boston, Ma. in 1977, you know that these guys have musically grown in ways that "Longview" never hinted. Album of the year? Well, to be honest, I suspect that the out-of-left-field factor is abetting that assessment (as in: who the hell expected Green Day to be so darn good on a Concept Album, fergawdsake?) but perhaps I'm just being cynical. I do know that the disc contains moments that make me stand up and take notice – the rocket sled guitar on "Letter Bomb," for instance – and that these moments aren't the same each time I play it. Perhaps the closest comparison I can make is to the underheard minor Buzzcocks' classic A Different Kind of Tension (the title is echoed in the chorus to "American Idiot") in the flailing and ultimately poignant way both groups focus on an aching disappointment that neither ever really expected to feel. Perhaps the element of surprise is as much on Billie Joe as it is the rest of us. . . # | |
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