* Congratulations to longtime pal of the blog Craig Thompson for completing Habibi! What the world needs now is a 700-page twee-Islamic fantasy epic, and I mean that sincerely.

* Whoa–hot on the heels of the triumphant new Fort Thunder-reuniting issue of Monster, PictureBox is releasing a new Mat Brinkman art book called Heads, 44.

* And speaking of Brinkman, he has an art show called Phatansmatgoria opening at The Hole in NYC on Saturday, September 18–New York Comic Con weekend, if you’re in town and not too busy. (Via the indispensable Monster Brains.)

* And speaking of NYC art show openings, the Adam Baumgold Gallery is holding one for Chris Ware and The ACME Novelty Library #20 tomorrow! Razzafrazzin’ short notice… (Via Peggy Burns.)

* And speaking of art shows generally, I’m catching a pleasantly Barkerian vibe from these Jess Fink pieces for an art show called Monsterbation.

* And speaking of art still more generally, Mishka NYC is selling a boatload of reasonably priced Johnny Ryan art. Love the Ground Zero Bossk.

* Jeffrey Brown’s new cat book, Cats Are Weird, is out! Exclamation point merited, as I really liked the last one.

* This morning when the new Hark, a Vagrant! strips popped up in my Google Reader I looked at them and thought to myself “Wow, Kate Beaton has really turned some kind of corner with her inking, this stuff looks sick.” But it turns out it was actually Rebecca Clements drawing in the style of Kate Beaton. Ladies, this was a worthwhile experiment.

* These teasers for the upcoming “No Way Out” storyline in The Walking Dead make it look like the story will be about exactly what I wanted it to be about.

* Matt Seneca reviews the latest issue of retailer Desert Island’s house anthology Smoke Signals, of which I have shamefully seen not a single issue.

* Filing this away for when I finally catch the season premiere (there was a DVR mishap): 11 Reasons Why Ben Morse Loves Gossip Girl Right Now.

* This is strangely fascinating to me: Paranormal Activity is spawning a direct-to-Japan(!) sequel called Paranormal Activity: Tokyo Night. I mean, why not, A, and B, does this sort of thing happen often and I just haven’t noticed it before?

The issue that has made my blog even more of a pain to load than usual for the past week or so has been fixed. If your attempts to visit the main page have been greeted with ten minutes of browser-crushing load-time, your troubles are over–things ought to have gone from “unbearable” back down to “merely unpleasant” now. (Comments are still the usual disaster area. Just be patient and let it do its thing for a few minutes and I assure you that the comment you just wrote that looked like it didn’t get posted did, in fact, get posted.)

Again, I hate metablogging, but I wanted to let anyone who’s stayed away for the past few days know that it’s safe to come back, and to repeat my promise that concrete steps are being taken to greatly improve the Attentiondeficitdisorderly experience. Thank you for your support.

* Today sees the release of the new album Barking from my favorite band, Underworld. To celebrate, why not watch the “haha, that’s a great idea”-inducing video for the album’s highlight, “Always Loved a Film,” and then buy the whole thing for a measly $3.99 by entering the code PICKDEAL? (Via Andy Khouri.)

* Today on Robot 6: Read a new Dave Kiersh comic for free, then buy it for eight bucks. Kiersh is your undiscovered favorite cartoonist. He’s like the emotional content of an M83 single in comics form.

* The annual Small Press Expo was held in Bethesda, Maryland this past weekend; it’s one of my favorite comic cons, I tend to like it more every year, but this year I was kept from attending by entirely pleasant exigent circumstances so I’m jonesing for good in-depth con reports. So far the best of the bunch comes from Barry and Leon at Secret Acres; it features a game of “guess the prominent critic” that had me laughing out loud. I also enjoyed this effusive, personal report from Rob McMonigal. Unfortunately it sounds like my much hoped for Critics Roundtable Smackdown never materialized. If and when I’m able to participate in one of these again I promise you I’ll son everyone else so hard they’ll call it Father’s Day. (Not true)

* Jeepers creepers, comics sales flatlined in August. In the comment thread Marc-Oliver Frisch points out that basically all of DC Comics’ heavy hitters missed the month entirely, but even still; and that’s its own problem right there, too.

* Tom Spurgeon points out that you can buy a boatload of great individual-issue comic books via Drawn & Quarterly’s big sale. Every year I’m tempted anew to run the table on Chester Brown’s Underwater and every year I wimp out for one reason or another.

* Here’s a really solid, really focused, process- and influence-oriented interview of the great cartoonist Jason by Tim O’Shea.

* Do you want to read William S. Burroughs writing about Led Zeppelin and interviewing, in his own unique way, Jimmy Page? Of course you do. As with everything Burroughs wrote it’s even better when you imagine him saying it in that rustling-mausoleum-door voice of his:

The Led Zeppelin show depends heavily on volume, repetition and drums. It bears some resemblance to the trance music found in Morocco, which is magical in origin and purpose–that is, concerned with the evocation and control of spiritual forces. In Morocco, musicians are also magicians. Gnaoua music is used to drive out evil spirits. The music of Joujouka evokes the God Pan, Pan God of Panic, representing the real magical forces that sweep away the spurious. It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts–music, painting and writing–is magical and evocative; and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result. In the Led Zeppelin concert, the result aimed at would seem to be the creation of energy in the performers and in the audience. For such magic to succeed, it must tap the sources of magical energy, and this can be dangerous.

That is like porn to me.

* The Mindless Ones’ review thereof reminds me: I’ve been meaning to say that Batman & Robin #14 from Grant Morrison and Frazer Irving is the single best Batman issue I’ve ever read. I mean, this thing simply could not be more of what I’m looking for from Batman comics.

* Nitsuh Abebe’s review of the new self-titled Interpol album for Pitchfork makes for a useful counterpoint to my own in that we basically agree on everything except whether or not it all works.

* Damn–now that’s how you pan a comic book.

* Real Life Horror #1: I don’t think I realized the extent to which other countries are pursuing legal action against the United States’ torture policies. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

* Real Life Horror #2: The government may do the kindness of filing criminal charges against American citizen/probable terrorist fuckwit Anwar al-Awlaki before assassinating him, or it may not. Who knows? This element of edge-of-your-seat suspense is part of the fun of living in America today.

* Real Life Horror #3: Discover Blog del Narco, a ground-level no-nonsense chronicler of the prohibition- and human-depravity-fueled drug war currently ravaging Mexico. The picture that accompanies this post made my heart crumple; not safe for people who have a really hard time with cruelty. (Via Spencer Ackerman.)

* More Silver Surfer art from Frank Santoro.

* I’m straight-up impressed by the design of this Bryan Hitch Spider-Man cover. Swirly!

* I’m digging the oddly ethereal kaiju art of Sean Edward. (Via Monster Brains.)

* I have no brief with Robert Rodriguez’s Machete–the trailers look fun, most Rodriguez movies have struck me as inert collections of things that work better as pullquotes from your description of the movie to your friends than as parts of a movie proper, I’ll see it if and when I work through the long list of other more interesting movies I’ve negelected–but this promotional photograph of star Michelle Rodriguez nonetheless felt like something I needed to bring to your attention.

Interpol

Interpol

Matador, September 7, 2010

Buy it from Matador

Buy it from Amazon.com

One of my favorite parts of my favorite Martin Scorsese movie Casino is this tremendous line reading from Sharon Stone. DeNiro, playing her casino-boss husband, just had her lowlife pimp ex-boyfriend beat up in front of her and she’s completely devastated, as well as fucked up on painkillers. She murmurs something DeNiro doesn’t catch, and when she repeats it she starts by saying “I said…” But God, the way she says it!

Those two words are so fraught with sadness and contempt that it’s like she can barely hold the parts of her mouth and throat necessary to say them together long enough to get them out. If you’ve ever gotten really, really, really low when someone you love has caused you unbearable pain or vice versa, maybe you’ve heard that sound before. Here, hear it again:

Man oh man how I love how Interpol’s Paul Banks delivers the first line of this song, the lead single from his band’s fourth, self-titled album. He plays with the vibrato in the last word of the phrase “All that I see” as self-consciously as anyone this side of Bryan Ferry, but instead of arch artifice it’s a sound of despair and disgust. This makes it a fitting metonymy for the whole record, a veritable concept album about how Interpol hates Interpol even more than you probably do. Unlike a lot of folks I’m unhesitatingly happy with this approach and pleased with the result.

Interpol has always been very good at sonically conjuring up huge spaces. On this album and its divisive, derided (even by the band itself, it seems) predecessor, the (understandably!) underrated Our Love to Admire, they then take the defiant/ill-conceived (take yer pick) step of making these spaces unpleasant to inhabit. So you get that Ennio Morricone by way of Joy Division reverbed guitar from Daniel Kessler echoing out in all directions, bouncing off the walls provided by drummer Sam Fogarino and bassist Carlos D–but then Paul Banks comes in with his strident vocals and those short, repetitive, harsh riffs that sound like missing sections of that car-alarm sequence we all have memorized. In the past this trick often took a back seat to the more traditionally pleasant-sounding and hooky post-punk instrumentation and melodies of their single-ready up-tempo songs, your “Evil”s and “Slow Hands”es and “PDA”s and even “The Heinrich Maneuver”s and what have you. (Frankly, in the context of the more readily appealing material on the band’s debut Turn on the Bright Lights, for example, songs that didn’t take off in that way–“Stella Was a Diver and She Was Always Down,” even the revered “Obstacle 1”–had a tendency to get on my nerves after a while.)

Here, however, the peppiest track is also arguably the most strident of the bunch: “Barricade” uses that trademark klaxon-like guitar sound to literally evoke the authorities walling off an area, and Banks shouts about it at the vocal-cord-straining top of his register. “Try It On” is maybe the one cathartic moment on the record–that is, it would be, if it weren’t these uncertain falsetto voices repeating the title phrase over and over, which then degenerate into hoarse shouting of same. And structurally, the song’s basically a long verse followed by a long chorus and then that’s it, like some Franz Kafka version of “Don’t Stop Believin’.” There’s nothing to get behind here like the anthems of their first two records. The good times done rolled away.

There’s something deceptive about calling out individual tracks on this album–as with Our Love to Admire I think it’s best experienced as an album, an extended stay in a place inhabited by people who at first made music that reflected unhappiness and increasingly came to embody it, specifically unhappiness with themselves. Indeed it’s tough to talk about Interpol without calling back to Banks’s excoriating This Is Hardcore-like self-satire of his own excesses on Our Love, like “No I in Threesome” and “Rest My Chemistry” and so on. That’s the context needed to understand why the lyrics that appear like briefly solid ghosts amid this album’s sonic tomb–“I’m a good guy,” “The winter will be wonderful,” “Always thought you had great style, and style is worthwhile”–ring so horribly false.

But this is not to say that individual songs don’t contain memorable stylistic flourishes. I was really struck by the guitar curlicue/drum groove of “Safe Without,” echoed by a similarly structured piano-and-percussion loop on “Try It On,” which then shows up again in “All of the Ways.” “Lights,” the hands-down standout, makes the band’s best use yet of that low, ominous piano, and adds a relative rarity, high sustained guitar notes, into the mix as well. Throughout the record there’s an increased presence of backing vocals–I don’t wanna say “harmonies”–and a tendency to record Fogarino like he’s drumming for a completely different band you can hear from a radio playing down the hall. And you’re gonna remember album closer “The Undoing,” which flirts with major-key uplift before drifting off into something like a morose incantation, and which when coupled with the cover art and the departure of iconic bassist Carlos D following the recording of this record is a pretty clear summation of Interpol‘s theme. I don’t think you’d wanna live here, but it’s a fascinating place to visit, especially in light of how easily the band could have jumped from second-album songs like “Evil” and “Not Even Jail” into making arena-filling crowdpleasers for the rest of its existence. These songs could fill an arena, but they’d make it feel empty and lonely even if it were packed to the rafters.

God bless America
Land that I love
Stand beside her
And guide her
Through the night with a light from above
From the mountains
To the prairies
To the oceans
White with foam
God bless America
My home sweet home

—–
As he followed her inside Mother Abagail’s house he thought it would be better, much better, if they did break down and spread. Postpone organization as long as possible. It was organization that always seemed to cause the problems. When the cells began to clump together and grow dark. You didn’t have to give the cops guns until the cops couldn’t remember the names…the faces…

Fran lit a kerosene lamp and it made a soft yellow glow. Peter looked up at them quietly, already sleepy. He had played hard. Fran slipped him into a nightshirt.

All any of us can buy is time, Stu thought. Peter’s lifetime, his children’s lifetimes, maybe the lifetimes of my great-grandchildren. Until the year 2100, maybe, surely no longer than that. Maybe not that long. Time enough for poor old Mother Earth to recycle herself a little. A season of rest.

“What?” she asked, and he realized he had murmured it aloud.

“A season of rest,” he repeated.

“What does that mean?”

“Everything,” he said, and took her hand.

Looking down at Peter he thought: Maybe if we tell him what happened, he’ll tell his own children. Warn them. Dear children, the toys are death–they’re flashburns and radiation sickness, and black, choking plague. These toys are dangerous; the devil in men’s brains guided the hands of God when they were made. Don’t play with these toys, dear children, please, not ever. Not ever again. Please…please learn the lesson. Let this empty world be your copybook.

“Frannie,” he said, and turned her around so he could look into her eyes.

“What, Stuart?”

“Do you think…do you think people ever learn anything?”

She opened her mouth to speak, hesitated, fell silent. The kerosene lamp flickered. Her eyes seemed very blue.

“I don’t know,” she said at last. She seemed unpleased with her answer; she struggled to say something more; to illuminate her first response; and could only say it again:

I don’t know.

–Stephen King, The Stand

Enough people have written to me about Alan Moore’s recent interview at a prominent comics site–mostly because I guess I’m known for taking issue with what he says such interviews, specifically the parts where Moore takes swipes at “comics” or “Hollywood” in one breath while admitting he doesn’t actually have any recent experience with them in the next–that I feel I ought to say something about it. I was hesitant to bring it up at all (and I’m not linking to it; you can find it if you really want to) because I think that in general I’m done with rewarding Moore-baiting of this sort. He’s a fascinating man and a prodigious talent, and there are surely more interesting topics that could be explored than the fact that he doesn’t like the process by which movies have been made of his works and doesn’t like the companies that have facilitated this. But needs must, so…

I’m glad he used the phrase “mainstream comics industry” in his dismissal thereof, even if only once, because it makes his wave-of-the-hand dismissal of comics a lot easier to understand. I see where Moore’s coming from: Burned by his experiences with the “mainstream” comics industry (I hate using the term “mainstream” to refer to the mostly-superhero publishers, but okay, I know what he means), he’s walking away, flipping the bird as he goes. Even if I think (say) Grant Morrison is a “top-flight talent,” I’m totally okay with Alan Moore not thinking any such talent exists in the biz and not caring to find out otherwise, even if it’s based on no actual experience with Morrison’s or anyone else’s recent work. Is it unfortunate that Alan Moore will never know the joys of All Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder? Sure, but if you did a Google search for unfortunate things, that would be on the 1 billionth page of results.

So yeah, the one-time emergence of this distinction makes this all a lot less depressing than the idea that Alan Moore (Alan Moore!) adamantly refuses to acknowledge the existence of Kevin Huizenga or whoever. That’s what frustrates me: His bad experiences with comics have pushed him away from the medium entirely, even the good, smart stuff. He’s said as much to friends of mine. But you know, that’s fine too in the long run, I understand how things like that happen. I walked away from majoring in theater because I thought the theater kids were pretentious douchebags to the point, where film studies was the LESS pretentious choice. What has always bothered me in the past is that Moore rarely if ever tempers his big sweeping public statements about comics to allow for any of this. “I’ve had so many bad experiences that I don’t read comics anymore” seems like a less objectionable, more true thing for him to say than “I don’t read comics anymore because the comics industry has nothing worth reading.”

I think there are three reasons why he says it the way he says it. First, he’s angry at the deal DC doled him, and anger impedes accuracy. Second, he is indeed Alan Moore, an artist who enjoys making sweeping pronouncements about everything from superheroes to Freemasonry, so it makes sense comics would get that same treatment. Finally, I think he prefers to present his departure from comics in a way that makes him seem more in charge of his choice than “I’m so angry and hurt by the behavior of my colleagues that I’m walking away from the whole megillah” does. Add it all up and you get the get-off-my-lawn shit-talking formulation that pisses people off.

All that being said, this is all such small beer compared to the issue of his treatment by DC. You could say that it’s a shame for him to let business and rights disputes get in the way of his relationships with friends and colleagues he’s had for decades. But by the same token I think he has a reasonable expectation for his friends of decades not to do the same in the opposite direction. What I worry about regarding my repeated statements that Alan Moore has a typical old-fart get-off-my-lawn mentality with regards to vital pop-culture industries with which he has admitted not actually engaging is that people lose sight of the fact that he has been dealt with shoddily, multiple times over the course of over two decades, by a company for which he a) made a fortune, and b) created their single most acclaimed work and several other Top 10 all-timers. In the grand scheme of things, the inability of a major publisher to deal with their historically most important creator in anything close to a mutually satisfactory fashion is a lot more baffling and upsetting to me than Alan Moore pissing on the work of Brian Bendis and Geoff Johns sight unseen or believing friends dealing with family illnesses are being squeezed to get back at him.

For more on this, see Tom Spurgeon and Chris Butcher.

* Fantagraphics has acquired William S. Burroughs’s long-lost graphic novel Ah Pook Is Here, a collaboration with artist Malcolm McNeil. I think I speak for everyone when I say SMASH THE CONTROL IMAGES SMASH THE CONTROL MACHINE

* Also on Robot 6 today: Mint Lisa Hanawalt SPX badges;

* Mint Marvel Minimates cosplay;

* and, regardless of whatever else about the project is mint or not, mint Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark set design.

* The crack team of Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman are going to turn Stephen King’s Dark Tower series into a movie, then a TV series, then another movie, then another TV series, and presumably so on until it’s all done. As longtime Attentiondeficitdisorderly readers can no doubt guess, I have deeply mixed feelings about this. The idea of The Dark Tower is one of the best things King has ever done; glimpsing it from afar via the various, relatively low-key references and connections to it in his work prior to the mid-’90s was absolutely thrilling; the original version of The Gunslinger is probably his best pure prose; here and there throughout the series he does fallen-world post-apocalyptic science-and-sorcery as well as anyone has ever done it; everything else is 100% pure garbage, the worst things I’ve ever read by him, among the worst things I’ve ever read by anyone, powerfully awful enough to almost destroy my interest in reading anything by him again. Also, y’know, Howard/Godsman. But who knows, maybe the bullshit will get lost in translation and you’ll be left with the fairly compelling genre mash-up weirdness that’s the novels’ skeleton.

* Quote of the day #1 comes from Brigid Alverson: “I would ask them to redesign the original to include Wonder Woman, rather than giving the girls their own logo. But then, if I start thinking about it real hard I’ll start worrying about other causes like pay equity or health care and education for girls in developing countries, and I just get all distracted.”

* Quote of the day #2 comes from Tom Spurgeon: “Every day I grow more suspicious that this particular game hasn’t already been lost, and that the comics industry has completed its transformation into an industry that has given up on every modest means of making money independently for the dubious honor of generating the occasional flash flood of money for others, hundreds of people sustained by the hope, no matter how impractical, that they will be one of the lucky, tiny few allowed to benefit.”

* Quote of the day #3 comes from Josh Marshall, on the Real Life Horror tip: “This is the standard approach of race haters and demagogues. They keep stirring the pot, churning out demonizing rhetoric and hate speech. Then some marginal figure does something nuts and suddenly … oh, wait, I didn’t mean burn Korans. Where’d you get that idea from? We were just saying that Islam is a violent, anti-American religion and that American Muslims should stop building their mosques and focus on apologizing for 9/11 and maybe get out of America. But burn the Koran? No way.”

* More Real Life Horror: Congratulations to President Obama for winning for the United States government the right to kidnap, imprison, torture, and murder people with impunity. Thank goodness he and his relative decorum and presumably shamefaced public silence on these issues will never be replaced by anyone whose party and supporters unapologetically endorse and full-heartedly embrace the use of these powers against anyone deemed an enemy, or else we’d be in real trouble someday!

* Let’s end things on a cheerier note: Matthew Perpetua’s interview with Greg Milner continues, touching this time on the Loudness War between New York radio stations Z-100 and WPLJ. Many Morning Zoo DJs died to bring us this information.

A Sunny Day in Glasgow

“Drink drank drunk”

from Autumn, again

self-released, August 20, 2010

Download the song here

Download the album when it comes out on October 19 here

The strongest moments in A Sunny Day in Glasgow’s songs usually don’t come right away. They tend to emerge at some point deeper into the track at hand–an insistent beat, a plinky-plunky string-instrument hook, a vocal line given sudden luminous solidity after a few minutes of amorphousness. “Drink drank drunk” does it backwards. “When you say I’m alright / this happens all the time / when you stay out all night / without you I’ll just die” is how it begins, the vocals unusually firm and clear as a bell. Then, as a toe-tapping beat kicks in, “When you stop, I’ll stop, okay,” repeated four times, mantra-like, the “‘kay” splitting off into high-pitched harmony each time. And then? Blam! Swirly, buzzy, happy wall-of-sound in the mighty Sunny Day in Glasgow manner, getting progressively more swirly and buzzy and happy for the duration of the song until it sort of tinkles and shudders to a close. The only truly decipherable lyrics after everything kicks in are a semi-triumphant-sounding “Hold my head / I can’t find the keys to my house / I’m never going home again.” If we are to take the song’s conjugated title as a roadmap, that opening section is first a reason to drink, and then a quick four-shot montage sequence of the singer and someone else egging themselves on into inebriation, a state that the rest of the song evokes to a nicety. Which is a rare thing, actually. I’ve heard plenty of music that sounds like being stoned or tripping, but capturing that headlong jovial buzz a night of low-impact yet still purposeful drinking gives you, until you finally stumble into bed and swing out into sleep? That’s quite a feat, and hangover-free.

Can you tell which is which? Note: In some cases this may be a trick question!

Aphex Twin

Archive

Arclight

Ash

Autechre

Bastion

Bishop

Blink

Blur

Boom Boom

Boyzone

Cable

Caliban

Cannonball

Chamber

Edwyn Collins

Graham Coxon

Graydon Creed

Curve

Cyber

Damask

Dark Beast

Domino

Donald Pierce

Dubstar

Elastica

Electronic

EMF

Empirion

Fatboy Slim

Fluke

Gambit

Gamesmaster

Gay Dad

Gene

Goldie

Cameron Hodge

Husk

Idlewild

KLF

Leftfield

Legion

Lush

Mansun

Massive Attack

Menswear

MLF

Nasty Boys

Oasis

Orbital

Pale Riders

Phalanx

Photek

Pipeline

Placebo

Prodigy

Pulp

Radiohead

Rictor

Ride

Senser

Shamen

Shatterstar

Skin

Sleeper

Space

Squarepusher

Strong Guy

Stryfe

Suede

Sugar Man

Tricky

Underworld

Verve

Westlife

Wild Child

(additional nerdery courtesy of Matthew Perpetua)

* You bastards who are going to SPX this year will have dibs on the debut of ACME Novelty Library #20. Choke on it.

* I have not made a secret of my enthusiasm for Stephen Frears’s upcoming film of Posy Simmonds’s graphic novel Tamara Drewe, but wouldja believe that until I saw the new trailer below I hadn’t even noticed that the guy who played Evil Christopher Hitchens in Speed Racer was in it? Something must have been distracting me; I’ve no clue what it could be.

Yep, totally at a loss.

* The Missus and I have done a decent amount of biking near our suburban home recently, and the trip to the bike path usually involves coming or going along a very busy stretch of thoroughfare. This has made us hyper-aware of the difficulty, if not outright danger, posed to non-car travelers along such roads, whether bikers or pedestrians. That’s why this Matthew Yglesias post on ergonomic crosswalks and the need to psychologically recalibrate our conception of who owns the roadway brought a big smile to my face.

* The Economist profiles Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget. I still haven’t read the damn thing, but as I’ve said before, a cursory flipthrough delivered at least one mental paradigm shift for me, so it’s on the list. (Via Marc Hogan.)

* So too is Greg Milner’s Perfecting Sound Forever, if Milner’s interview with Matthew Perpetua is any indication. Fascinating stuff about the making of the sound of recorded music, from Steely Dan to Steve Albini, Mutt Lange to James Murphy.

* Sexy gothy vampirey stuff generally isn’t my thing–True Blood is sexy, gothy, and vampirey, but rarely all at once–but I stumbled across this piece called “The Turning” by Randis courtesy of my pal Lontra Phoenix and found it to be pretty hot stuff.

* The “deal with it” meme has reached its zenith. Shit, memes in general have reached their zenith. (Via Douglas E. Sherwood.)

* Rest in peace, Glenn Shadix. My wife and I have spent years, literally years, wondering aloud why Glenn Shadix in general and Otho from Beetlejuice in particular aren’t iconic. “I was one of New York’s leading experts in the paranormal…till the bottom dropped out in ’72.”

* Finally, take the time to soak in the despair of “Instructions for visiting the American Wilderness” by Thomas Blair over at the Awl. If you’ve ever had the suspicion that abandoned, for-sale, uncompleted exurban architecture and infrastructure are the telltale black buboes on the American body politic, this is basically “bring out your dead.” (Via Maura Johnston.)

* First things first: Don’t miss the morning edition of today’s Carnival!

* Also, for a few hours I had all the videos from my 80 Great Tracks from the 1990s list behind a jump, until I discovered that you can’t actually access the “after the jump” part of the post anymore. Sigh. Back into the main body they go; my apologies if this has the same deleterious effect on your browsing as it does on mine. I don’t like to metablog, but I want to assure my long-suffering readers and commenters that steps are being taken to drastically improve your Attentiondeficitdisorderly experience.

* Hey look, it’s a website and teaser trailer for Dash Shaw’s next animation project, The Ruined Cast. Shaw’s collaborators on this one include John Cameron Mitchell and Frank Santoro. For real. (Via Eric Reynolds.)

“The Ruined Cast” / Dash Shaw – demo teaser from Howard Gertler on Vimeo.

* Today on Robot 6: Download Jim Rugg’s Rambo 3.5 for free!

* Even though I have no brief with either of the two films it’s nominally about, I love this Matt Zoller Seitz piece on why we need more “adult” movies–movies that can’t be fully understood or enjoyed by children or the childish, as he puts it; “movies that let you spend time with morally compromised characters and that sort of hang back a bit directorially, letting the scenes and situations breathe, and mostly resisting the urge to tell you what the movie thinks of anyone, preferring instead to simply present the characters and let you feel however you want to feel.” I have to say, between this and his earlier, infamous “superheroes suck!” piece (Peter David notwithstanding), becoming a bit of an aesthetic scold is a good look for Seitz, much more so than it’s been for Roger Ebert, say. (Ebert’s been there for decades, of course.) I feel like there’s a connection to be made here between the mainstreaming of nerd culture and subsequent militant embrace of its most simplistic and bankrupt aspects and the way the recent acceptance of genre by comics’ smart set seems to have severely curtailed the discussion of non-genre work, but that’s probably poorly thought-through overreach and I know several smart people who tell me I’m just plain wrong about that anyway.

* Adam Lambert makes out with the Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears while Katy Perry films it, and Judith Light makes a cameo. If that fails to sell you on watching this video, I give up. (Hat tip: Matthew Perpetua.)

* These long weekends have been bizarrely link-rich as of late, so rather than make this evening’s regularly scheduled Carnival more like a Disney Theme Park, I figured I’d throw an A.M. edition together. Great day in the morning!

* I did keep busy over the weekend–be sure to check out my list of 80 Great Tracks from the 1990s That Aren’t on Pitchfork’s Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s List.

* Well I’ll be a monkey’s uncle: Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Tree, the…thematic sequel, I guess? to his ’70s horror masterpiece The Wicker Man, is actually happening, and this teaser trailer is the proof. Nearly impossible to say for sure with a few lines of dialogue and five seconds of footage, but dare I say it actually seems good? (Via Bloody Disgusting.)

* whoa: “Right Thing the Wrong Way: The Story of Highwater Books”, an art show based on Tom Devlin’s late great publishing imprint and featuring work by Jeff Zekaj, Megan Kelso, Brian Ralph, Ron Rege Jr., Marc Bell, Greg Cook, Jordan Crane, and Kurt Wolfgang, coming soon to Boston’s Fourth Wall Project. I’m actually tempted to drive up there for this.

* Brian Chippendale’s If ‘n Oof is almost here!

* Recently on Robot 6: Ron Rege Jr.’s Yeast Hoist now available in convenient webcomic and beer formats;

* Chris Arrant talks to Paul Pope about THB and Battling Boy–one thing I like a lot about Paul is how candid he is regarding behind-the-scenes goings-on;

*and Chris Arrant also notes delays in Grant Morrison’s work for DC. It has to be a concern for the publisher that, for all intents and purposes, two guys drive their entire line. I’d be more worried about any hiccups in Geoff Johns’s schedule, given just how much of the line he holds down singlehandedly, how much the rest of the line revolves around the stories and events he cooks up, and the fact that he just got a major desk-job promotion that surely takes time away from his comics writing.

* Ooh, I really like the looks of this new stuff from the great John Hankiewicz

* Christ Almighty, Josh Simmons.

* Oh dear, I don’t much like the looks of this drawing called “meeting” by Renee French. Who or what is meeting who or what?

* Either it has disappeared from his blog or I bookmarked a bogus link, but regardless, a young Jason drew U2;

* Frank Santoro muses at length on inking and coloring in comics, and asks why the former is necessarily the basic stuff of drawing comics as opposed to the latter. He also posts some lovely looking work by Manuele Fior.

* Ben Morse of The Cool Kids Table takes a whack at my personal comics pinata: ’90s mutatnts with vague energy powers. I don’t think I realized just how vague they got–like, to the point of going for a year or two without even being introduced or explained–until I read Ben’s piece. “[Cable’s] powers would be incorporated into the character in a major way as time went on, but if you had said he was a super-fast typer or something, it wouldn’t have changed his first two dozen appearances.”

* I’ve been watching The Young & the Restless lately, and I’m so hugely thrilled by the density and byzantine complexity of the relationship drama on that show I can hardly tell you. To me it’s delivering in practice what serialized comic books are supposed to be delivering in theory. With that in mind I endorse Douglas Wolk’s call for more weekly comics, but without a lot of optimism. Of the bonafide weekly comics we’ve seen over the past several years, two have been among the worst comics I’ve ever read, and moreover I just don’t know if they’ll ever contain anything nearly as entertaining as Victor Newman.

* Over the weekend I saw several people on Tumblr lose they shit over this four-part essay on 28 Days Later and the allegorical difference between slow zombies and fast zombies by Christian Thorne. Longtime readers of this blog will be unsurprised to learn that I wasn’t quite as impressed, given how ruthlessly allegorical all readings of horror movies by non-aficionados have become and how inured (if not actively hostile) I am to them. Like most such readings, Thorne’s overreaches in some areas and elides complicating details in others. Meanwhile, the prestige of his trick here, in terms of the complexity of 28 Days Later, is sort of no-duh stuff if you ask me–certainly if you’ve ever seen any of the countless films well and truly referenced by the ending of that film, not to mention the similar audience-sympathy shenanigans of The Wicker Man. But I still think it’s worth your time, if only because, for me at least, the fast zombie is the enduring stuff of nightmares. Seriously, I had one this weekend! The more information I can get on why they bother me so much, the better, even if I’m reasonably sure it has nothing to do with a craving for the Strong Leader. (Given my history you don’t need to look as far afield as my affection for Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake for evidence of that!) (Via Mike Barthel, among others.)

* Andy Khouri has been creating cool little grids of album art for various astutely art-directed artists’ complete works. Here’s New Order, and here’s Bjork, and I’m told there are more to come. I saw this done with the Smiths and Morrissey once; talk about a guy with a well-formed aesthetic.

* Finally, Rob McMonigal reviews seven Matt Wiegle minicomics, including my own collaboration with Matt (and Matt Rota and Josiah Leighton), Murder. He says nice things, which will help me get through the day.

I enjoyed Pitchfork’s list of the Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s. The decision to limit the list to one song per artist opened things up to tons of songs, probably even whole genres, that would have been excluded if folks like Bjork and Beck and Radiohead each had five songs a piece or what have you; moreover it started a whole different set of discussions than “‘Let Down’ should have been ranked higher than ‘Creep,'” which is probably what you’d have gotten otherwise. Still, as with any exercise of this sort, there are bound to be lacunae, oversights, goofs, choices you’d have made differently, artists you’d have better represented, and of course outright crimes against all that is holy. LOL srsly the closest thing I have to a substantive philosophical criticism of the list is that in the end, the voters admittedly went with comfort for their #1; given that the list has frequently been positioned as a statement about indie music today, read into that what you will. In my case, seeing the #1 vote-getter (no spoilers here!) simply reminded me that my 1990s were different from those of a lot of other critics–less “indie rock,” more “alternative,” electronic, heavy, and industrial.

So in the interest of showing my ’90s off a bit, here, in alphabetical order by artist, are 80 wonderful songs from that wonderful decade for music that didn’t make Pitchfork’s cut. I applied three rules in making this list:

1) Like Pitchfork, I limited myself to one song per artist.

2) If an artist made Pitchfork’s Top 200 list, I couldn’t use them–in other words, I wasn’t adjudicating whether “Donkey Rhubarb” would have been a better pick than “Windowlicker.” (Although it is.)

3) Pitchfork very helpfully and very smartly included two or three “see also” suggestions with every entry, in order to give relevant sounds/scenes/artists that much more props. I didn’t let this rule out artists who were thus listed, but I did let it rule out the individual songs that were cited. As a practical matter this meant that several songs which all things being equal I’d have included on any Top Whatever List didn’t end up making it in, because the song Pitchfork had suggested as a “see also” was so clearly the right choice–“Stars” by Hum, “Gett Off” by Prince, “Woo-Hah!! Got You All in Check” by Busta Rhymes, “Jump Around” by House of Pain, and “Unsung” by Helmet all come to mind. But more often than not I had the leeway I wanted.

So there you have it. There was a lot of great music made in the days of my youth; here’s some of it, in convenient video form. I hope you enjoy!

Click here to see the videos…