* Your quote of the day comes from Grant Morrison:

Of course, the floor soon opened up for a lengthy fan Q&A where the first question drew out “Grant Morrison: Fiction Theorist” as a young man asked how old characters like Bruce Wayne and the various Robins were supposed to be. “It doesn’t matter. You must understand these people aren’t real,” Morrison said to laughter. “Batman is a mythical figure. I’m being funny, but I’m not being funny. They don’t live in the real world. It’s like this theory I’ve been developing – you know what they always say about kids? That kids can’t distinguish between fantasy and reality. And that’s actually bullshit. When a kid’s watching ‘The Little Mermaid,’ the kids knows that those crabs that are singing and talking aren’t really like the crabs on the beach that don’t talk. A kid really knows the difference.

“Then you’ve got an adult, and adults can not tell the difference between fantasy and reality. You bring them fantasy, and the first thing they say is ‘How did he get that way? Why does he dress like that? How did that happen?’ It’s not real. And beyond that, when you’re dealing with characters, they exist on paper. They’re real in that context. I always say they’re much more real than we are because they have much longer lives and more people know about them. But we get people reading superhero comics and going, ‘How does that power work? And why does Scott Summers shoot those beams? And what’s the size of that?’ It’s not real! There is no science. The science is the science of ‘Anything can happen in fiction and paper’ and we can do anything.

“We’ve already got the real world. Why would you want fiction to be like the real world? Fiction can do anything, so why do people always want to say, ‘Let’s ground this’ or ‘Let’s make this realistic.’ You can’t make it realistic because it’s not. So basically Batman is 75 years old, and Robin is 74 years old. They don’t grow old because they’re different from us. They’re paper people.”

* Douglas Wolk talks to Gary Groth about Fantagraphics reprinting the complete Floyd Gottfredson Mickey Mouse.

* The Infinity Gauntlet is gonna be in a Marvel movie, Thor most likely.

* Marvel Studios now has the rights to the Punisher.

* Jeff Parker talks Red Hulk. I’ll give it a shot.

* In non-Con news:

* Frank Santoro waxes rhapsodic about Matt Kindt’s Revolver.

* Every time someone from one of the big publishers chides someone for analyzing publicly available sales numbers because they’re supposedly wildly inaccurate, I think “Okay–release the real numbers, then.”

* Someone got stabbed in the eye with a pen over a seat in Hall H. People, nothing you can see in Hall H is worth stabbing anyone in the eye with a pen over, and I say that as someone who saw the sneak preview of the Lost pilot in Hall H.

* Over at Robot 6 I interviewed Chester 5000 XYV‘s Jess Fink and Incredible Change-Bots Two‘s Jeffrey Brown about their upcoming Top Shelf releases.

* I also posted a one-page preview of Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. III: Century #2 – 1969.

* Wow: Fantagraphics and Disney are teaming up to release the complete Floyd Gottfredson Mickey Mouse comics. Given Disney’s relationships with both Boom and Marvel I’m a little surprised, but only a little. I imagine that if you walk into a conference room with an armful of the Complete Peanuts, Dennis the Menace, Popeye, Krazy & Ignatz, etc., you probably walk back out with a handful of contracts.

* Congratulations to Tom Spurgeon for his much-deserved Eisner Award win last night. Glad to see Joe Sacco pick up a trophy, too.

* Spurge’s reports from the floor continue to be very comics-focused and very entertaining. For the second time he notes bad news for Fantagraphics, this time that they were shut out at the Eisners, which Fantagraphics does not ever deserve to be.

* The women of Drawn & Quarterly. That’s quite a line-up to field.

* Mark Ruffalo is Bruce Banner and Jeremy Renner is Hawkeye in the upcoming Avengers movie. It’s a strong cast, certainly. I have to say, it’s feeling really good to have been a Renner fan since Dahmer these days.

* Here’s a trailer for the long-gestating DC MMORPG. It’s a post-apocalyptic scene in which the few surviving villains, led by Lex Luthor, basically wipe the floor with the few surviving heroes, led by Superman. I understand that a six-minute vignette in which Deathstroke strings Batman up with Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth and beats him with a baseball bat until a jealous Joker blows them both up with a rocket launcher, followed by Lex Luthor stabbing Superman to death after the Man of Steel was poisoned by the kryptonite-booby-trapped corpse of Wonder Woman, isn’t going to ameliorate a lot of people’s concerns about where DC is today, aesthetically. That said, really impressive sense of scale, action choreography, stakes, and even lighting with this thing. If you like your superheroes hilariously grim and gritty, or just wanna see what a big giant rumble with the iconic characters might look like in a semi-realistic setting, check it out.

* The red-band trailer for Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse spinoff Machete is almost Crank-level crazy. (Via Topless Robot.)

* I am not at all sold on the Thunderbolt Ross Red Hulk as a concept even when Jeph Loeb isn’t writing him, but Gabriel Hardman sure can draw the shit out of him and just about everything else (Atlas #3 was really somethin’), and I’ve got some faith in Jeff Parker, so I’ll check out the team’s newly announced Hulk run with the character.

* Emma Frost cosplayer hates Tom Neely.

* Darkseid cosplayer killed Jim Lee.

* In non-Con news:

* Matt Zoller Seitz gives Salt a rave review, and suddenly I’m interested in Salt.

* My interview with Strange Tales II editor Jody LeHeup is up at Marvel.com. Sample quote:

Marvel.com: How similar was the project to something like the Bizarro books that DC did a while ago?

Jody LeHeup: It’s very similar, but there are some very important differences. In that book, there were no writer/artist stories for some reason. For example, I remember looking at that book-which I enjoyed very much by the way-and wondering why Jaime Hernandez, for example, didn’t write the story he drew. And it was like that throughout. In STRANGE TALES the opposite is true. Most contributors are writer/artists, which I think makes for a different kind of story experience. The other difference is that there is a lot of young and new talent mixed in with the veterans of indie comics. So there’s this exuberance or vitality to the STRANGE TALES stories that I’m very proud of.

Also, Benjamin Marra, Sheldon Vella, and Ty Templeton have been added to the line-up.

* Grant Morrison is launching a new ongoing series called Batman Inc. This will see Bruce Wayne “franchise” Batman out to a bunch of people. That’s pretty rad.

* Morrison’s also writing an independent film called Sinatoro. It looks neat. “Rad,” “neat,” yes, I’m very insightful today.

* Joss Whedon is directing the Avengers movie. Unless something in my life radically changes between now and then, this will be the first Joss Whedon thing I’ve ever watched.

* Ben Jones designed an ice cream truck!

* Tom Devlin ships Kristen Bell and Taylor Kitsch. “Your show gets cancelled, you do a guest spot on a show that everyone stopped watching about the time you show up and, whammo, you’re gone. See ya later, Ex-Oh-Ex-Oh. Man, Jessica Alba would have a crazy crowd at this thing. Keep her away from that John Byrne. Ha. Is he even still alive?” Glorious.

* Your quote of the day comes from Tom Spurgeon:

I heard some complaints from fellow comics reporters that there wasn’t more media coverage of comics from people at the show. I don’t know, maybe this obnoxious to say out loud, but it seems to me if you’re media and you don’t think there’s enough coverage of comics, maybe just do more coverage of comics?

* In non-Con news:

* I was really hoping this would happen: Dan Nadel reviews Blaise Larmee’s Young Lions. It’s a fine comic, which Dan addresses; it arises from a mindset in which, intentionally or not, the discussion and aura surrounding art/artists/making art has a place of primacy over actual works of art/actually making art, which Dan also addresses. Somehow I feel like this Nate Patrin piece on music critics talking about Pitchfork reviews of music instead of the music being reviewed is relevant here.

* PictureBox has announced the winners of its Thor Know Prize contest. Here’s Jim Rugg’s submission:

* I’m serious, Zack Smith is fucking killing me. Idea machine.

* The next time you’re tempted to dismiss Direct Market comics as a cultural irrelevancy because the most popular only sell like 125K copies, think of indie rock. Way more people bought Siege #1 than LCD Soundsystem’s last record.

* Can you imagine anything more horrible than deciding who is and isn’t a real pop music fan?

A Sunny Day in Glasgow

Nitetime Rainbows

Mis Ojos Discos, March 2010

Buy it from Mis Ojos Discos

Buy it from Amazon.com

Oh man, I love that this happened. I hit play to listen to “Nitetime Rainbows,” the lead and title track for this EP (extracted from last year’s pretty colossal full-length Ashes Grammar). Immediately there’s this sonic…vista, I guess you’d call it. Alternating between high soaring notes and low humming notes, held and stretched via god-knows-what heavily processed instrument, creating this beautifully vast and glowing space in my head. And I think to myself, “Wow, this sounds like what the Rainbow Bridge level in Mario Kart would sound like if you were standing there on the starting line.” Only then do I remember that hey, this song has the word “Rainbows” in the title.

That opening section is so strong, the portrait it paints so clear and complete, that the rest of the song still feels like the slow unraveling of potential contained within the introduction. That’s the intelligence of Ben Daniels’ and Josh Meakim’s songwriting at work. Structurally, “Nitetime Rainbows” is a series of interlocking but still discrete sections, shifting from one to the other with each new instrument introduced–a Byrds-style guitar line; a beat that sounds like you’re hearing it from several houses over; ethereal chirping wordless vocals–or each element dropped–the whole jangly schmear pretty much eliminated in favor of the distant-sounding bassline from the intro, with only an echoing whirr to accompany it–or each melodic shift up or down. At long last almost everything stops for just a beat or two, until the vocals return at their clearest yet, and an insistent dunk-dunk-dunk rhythm grounds everything in a way that feels sure and certain–to quote The House Next Door, a retrospectively inevitable destination. The finish line!

What I like about this EP is the way the rest of it reflects what’s going on in the title track. “Daytime Rainbows” and its doo-doo-doing vocals and sunny guitar feels like what the title implies–a looser, freer, brighter answer to the “Nitetime” version. “So Bloody, So Tight” takes the rhythmical chiming of “Nitetime”‘s guitars off into a synthier direction, which “Pianos Lessons” follows up on even more directly, its Krautrock repetition depicting what the Rainbow Bridge might be like for the drivers.

A trio of “Nitetime Rainbows” remixes closes out the EP, beginning with the Buddy System remix, which shuffles around the original’s constituent parts. Benoit Pioulard’s impossibly huge-sounding “Acid Wash Edit” blows out the original intro into gigantic, distorted rumblings, feeding into solar-wind gusting and whistling. Finally, Ezekiel Honing’s remix strips away all the lushness and fullness, reducing it to an eerily disjointed succession of sporadic handclaps, breathing sounds, a heartbeat, a repeated two-note riff, a hum like some ancient machine, and eventually a mournful acoustic-guitar strum. It’s the “Nitetime” to Pilouard’s all-“Rainbows” remix–the starfield surrounding the Rainbow Bridge.

Does it all sound very Court of the Crimson King, very Roger Dean? It ought to. It’s spectacle, not through prog virtuosity but through sheer sonic architecture–meaning both size and structure. It’s big, big music, of the sort that invites whatever worldbuilding the psychedelic part of your brain is capable of. Since Nintendo has been my mind-alterer of choice for the past year or so, that’s what I see: a ribbon of light winding its way through space. Double rainbows all the way across the sky, folks. So intense! And isn’t wonderful that music can do that?

* Comic-Con International 2010 opened up yesterday in San Diego and had its first full day today. A ton of news and news-esque substances come out of the show every year. To follow it all I’d recommend clicking here for Comic Book Resources’ complete coverage and here for Robot 6’s slightly more curated and comics-centric coverage and here for Spinoff’s movie and TV-centric coverage. Those are the sites I’m following, and of course I’m writing for Robot 6 as well.

* So far Tom Spurgeon has reported a ton of actual news about good comics right from the show floor, which is astonishing in its way. The wording’s unclear, but for me the big news from that report is that (I think) Jordan Crane’s one-man anthology series from Fantagraphics Uptight is ending after its next issue.

* Strange Tales II is on the way from Marvel, featuring Los Bros Hernandez, Harvey Pekar, Frank Santoro, Rafael Grampa, Jillian Tamaki, Kate Beaton, Jon Vermilyea and many more.

* DC Comics may move to Los Angeles. I hope they make the decision soon so that the employees aren’t left wondering for another year or so.

* Fred Van Lente is writing a new Power Man & Iron Fist book. The Power Man in question isn’t Luke Cage, but still, a new Iron Fist ongoing is fine by me.

* Is there anything lovelier in all of comicdom than a fully-stocked Fantagraphics convention table?

* I just love these screenshots from the freshly announced Marvel Super Hero Squad: The Infinity Gauntlet videogame. I’d read a comic that looked like this.

* Now Tom Devlin is writing in-character Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie/Alexis Bledel as Rory Gilmore femmeslash as part of his previously established Edward Cullent/Michael Cera-verse. Peggy, is there something we need to be told here?

* In “sort of interesting things that might eventually happen one day” news, maybe They’ve cast Brad Pitt in the movie They might make of Max Brook’s World War Z and maybe They’ll make a movie out of Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson’s Astro City.

* Wow, someone in the Green Lantern art department sure loves the “Bodies” exhibit.

* BREAKING: Major studio manages to assemble two minutes of reasonably entertaining footage from two-hour science-fiction-fantasy-action-CGI blockbuster with teal-and-orange color scheme.

* hahahahahaha

* In non-Con news:

* Good for Alan Moore for rejecting DC’s offer to give him back the rights to Watchmen if he agreed to sequels and prequels. I’m with Steve Ditko on this sort of thing: A is A. Either the book rightfully belongs to Moore, in which case you should give it back to him yesterday no strings attached, or it doesn’t, in which case who cares. But clearly someone does care enough to feel bad about the current state of affairs, which is an indication that, well, A is A.

* Tons and tons of Scott Pilgrim music is on the way.

* Ron Rege Jr./Marc Bell jam piece!

* Does Dave Kiersh draw the sessiest ladies in comics?

* Scott Tobias’s New Cult Canon series at the Onion A.V. Club tackles American History X. I admit I did a Find for “curb” immediately upon opening the page.

* Finally, here are paintings of Wonder Woman masturbating and Spider-Man preparing to make love to Cicciolina, by Giuseppe Veneziano. “Cicciolina, Cicciolina, Cicciolina per l’Italia!” (Via Spurge.)

Janelle Monae

The ArchAndroid

Atlantic, May 2010

Buy it from Amazon.com

Here’s something I should like, right? Science fiction you can dance to! The ArchAndroid is part of an ambitious concept multi-album project inspired by Fritz Lang and involving outfits out of Klaus Nomi’s wardrobe, channeled through the idiom of contemporary R&B yet looking and sounding like basically nothing on the radio, sung by a woman with enough confidence to make even her deal with Diddy sound like “I say frog, Puffy jumps.” I stuck this record on expecting to celebrate my way through it.

But something happened on the way to Metropolis. Making my way through The ArchAndroid–which I’ve now studiously done several times, convinced I must be getting something wrong–wasn’t the Ziggy Stardust Meets the Mothership dance party of my dreams, it was an endurance test. Right up front, a big part of that’s Janelle Monae’s voice, strident and sharp any time she goes for the big loud sound, which is often. Vocals play the same role in pop music for me that a cursory flip-through of the art alone does for comics: If my ear/eye bounces off or glazes over, then to heck with it, life’s too short. That was hard to get around. So too was the lack of simple, solid melodies, hooks, or grooves. It was as if Monae didn’t trust the basic stuff of pop songwriting as a sufficient demonstration of the breadth of her interests.

And that points to the big problem with The ArchAndroid: It’s practically a case study for the perils of the maximalist aesthetic. Monae slides song into song, collides genre into genre, and just keeps adding adding adding adding adding in a fashion that creaks and growns with its effort to be Intelligent And Entertaining!!!, ultimately revealing her to be a jack of all trades but master of none. So I’m taking The ArchAndroid song by song below, an approach practically demanded by the sheer volume of stuff inside….

* “Suite II Overture”–A melodically inert orchestral introduction that serves no purpose other than to say “Look, it’s an orchestral introduction”

* “Dance or Die”–That “BadabadabadabadabadabadaBA” emceeing wears out its welcome within the first verse; Saul Williams, who knows from overlong draggy albums, is much more flattered by the pummeling production Trent Reznor lent the first few songs on Williams’s own Bowie-indebted album The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust! than he is by this boho dinner-party hip-hop.

* “Faster”–What if you hurried “You Can’t Hurry Love”?

* “Locked Inside”–Here’s where the sharp vocals really started throwing me. A perfectly pleasant chorus, and I like the MJ bridge quite a bit, but we’ve heard that a million times. Britney Spears did it! Meanwhile the verses’ real estate is just squandered.

* “Sir Greendown”–Very mellow.

* “Cold War”–“Hey Ya”‘s rhythm with “B.O.B.”‘s drum sound. That’s definitely not a complaint. For the first time, the album conveys urgency without edging into stridency. Not a knockout, but the strongest so far.

* “Tightrope”–Very tough to argue with this one. But, well, okay. That opening “whoa!” is a little much–I’m guessing that how you feel about that will determine how you feel about the whole album. As an funkateer of some 12 years’ experience I was very excited by that horn section–it’s a horn section!–but calling attention to its funkiness by just straight-out calling it funky should be my job, not Monae’s. And whoop, here comes more maximalism–funny voices for the backup vocals, a goddamn ukelele. Edit!

* “Neon Gumbo”–The “played backwards” portion of the album. Prince by numbers.

* “Oh, Maker”–AM-radio chamber pop with a beat and a melodically meandering chorus, fade, some synth-psychedelia at the end.

* “Come Alive (The War of the Roses)”–Sounds like an outtake from I’m Breathless: Music From and Inspired by the Film ‘Dick Tracy’. And not like “Vogue” or one of the Sondheim songs, either. Then there’s some screaming.

* “Mushrooms & Roses”–Lenny Kravitzian psychedelic slow jam with “Hurdy Gurdy Man” vox. For people who wished The Love Below were even longer, I guess.

* “Suite III Overture”–Mostly a piano/orchestral cover of the previous song. I prefer it! Then it winds off into a Disney/exotica thing.

* “Neon Valley Street”–Is that a mellotron? I hope so. I dig the laid-back big beat and comparatively restrained vocals here. This also reminds me of Kravitz, specifically * “Sugar” from Are You Gonna Go My Way? Again, that’s not a complaint. The chorus’s repetition of “May this song reach your heart” leaves me kind of cold, though. I think the Andre 3000 distorted-vox rap section is fun.

* “Make the Bus”–Note salad from Of Montreal. It’s goofy!!! Zany!!!

* “Wondaland”–This is cute and has a great chorus. I keep hoping she’s saying “because she left her underpants.” An underwater feel to it. Let’s throw an Alleluia in there for no reason.

* “57821”–Parsely Sage Rosemary and Yawn. The chorus harmonies are lovely though, nice echoey production you don’t normally hear on this sort of thing.

* “Say You’ll Go”–1997 dinner-party music.

* “BeBopByeYa”–1961 dinner-party music.

Trust me, no one hates that this brought out the dismissive snark in me more than I do. It doesn’t even really deserve it! Whatever she lacks in execution, Monae’s ambition is praiseworthy, and provided she doesn’t let the plaudits she’s earned for this record go to her head, there’s every reason to believe that an artist of her obvious ravenous intelligence will learn to write stronger melodies–learn to relax and rely on stronger melodies, that is to say, learn to get out of her own way and edit a bit. But what happened here is that her whirlwind sci-fi tour of a million pop traditions just left me trying to find 18 ways to say I’m unimpressed.

* I have been writing a lot of reviews of all sorts of things over the past week or so and some of my posts may have slipped past you if for some reason you weren’t paying rapt attention to my every move. Here’s what’s been going on:

COMICS:

* The Troll King by Kolbeinn Karlsson

* Mome Vols. 17-19 by various

* Batman R.I.P. by Grant Morrison, Tony S. Daniel, and Lee Garbett

* King-Cat #69 by John Porcellino

MUSIC:

* Head First by Goldfrapp

* “Karaoke” by Drake (from Thank Me Later)

* Disconnect from Desire by School of Seven Bells

* Night Work by Scissor Sisters

* “Always Loved a Film” by Underworld (from Barking)

* MOON8 by Brad Smith

* “Crying for Us and Them” by Phil RetroSpector (from Mashed in Plastic)

MOVIES:

* Mullholland Drive by David Lynch

* And I also have a new comic up, in collaboration with artist Matt Rota, called “No.”

* Heidi MacDonald notes the location of the small-press area at San Diego.

* Speaking of San Diego, which I’ll be doing a lot, I’d imagine going and not seeing a Comic Relief booth would hit me pretty hard.

* Zack Snyder has begun working on the screenplay for Frank Miller’s 300 prequel Xerxes.

* Ooh, look, a Tim Hensley blacklight poster! (Via Flog.)

* Help PictureBox fix the Thor movie!

* Tom Devlin writes Twilight/Scott Pilgrim slashfic, for some reason.

* It’s been way too long since I’ve posted a picture of Kate Winslet for no reason. Well, other than the obvious reason. (Via Jason Adams.)

Brad Smith

MOON8

self-released, March 2010

Download it or listen to it on YouTube here

Phil RetroSpector

“Crying for Us and Them”

from Mashed in Plastic: The David Lynch Mash-Up Album (bonus track)

1086 Productions, November 2008

Download it here

Download the whole album here

I came to The Dark Side of the Moon late. Not until I was a junior in college, if I recall correctly, did countless comparisons with OK Computer finally prompt me to pick up a copy. So I have no smoky adolescent memories of listening the record in stoned and reverent awe in someone’s parents’ basement. Nor in someone’s dorm room, for that matter–by the time I got around to Dark Side I expect most of my running buddies had long since made their peace with the record. If you wanna talk about chemically enhanced communal journeys deep into the heart of Kool Keith’s Sex Style, I’m your guy, but my experience with Pink Floyd’s career-defining record has been mostly solitary, mostly sober, and mostly grown-up.

Indeed, the older I get, the more I listen to it, and the more it clicks with me. This is an album about the passage of time, the fear of failure, the drive to succeed, armchair warriors, mental illness, and death–about, in other words, my life over the past few years. And it’s not just that “The Great Gig in the Sky” sounds very different when you’ve gone through three consecutive miscarriages, though I promise it does, it’s that with age I can appreciate not just the relentlessly bleak lyrics but the intelligence of the music in which they’re packaged. One of the last great flourishings of true psychedelia–not a cheesy retro formless paisley swirl, but an overwhelming, all-encompassing onslaught of aural information–The Dark Side of the Moon‘s sound seems inexhaustible. Layer upon layer of studio wizardry and improvisatory instrumental prowess surround (mostly) simple rhythms, almost childlike melodies, and of course the disarmingly direct lyrics, cushioning the blow and making the darkness almost comforting. It’s an album to cling to, and that clings to you.

Lately I’ve listened a lot to a pair of Internet-based projects that run Dark Side through the prism of very of-the-moment musical…well, trends, you could call them, or gimmicks, or even parlor tricks given their inherently playful nature. Created first as a hobby and then as a birthday present, Brad Smith’s MOON8 is a chiptunes cover of The Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety. Smith transforms the Floyd’s lush, atmospheric, (ah, the hell with it) Floydian approach into the squeaky, squelchy sound of an 8-bit Nintendo-game soundtrack. This is really really easy to appreciate on a Tumblr-meme level, of course: Pink Floyd is awesome, Nintendo games are awesome, making Pink Floyd sound like a Nintendo game is a veritable double-rainbow of awesome. One level up, and (as Smith points out) it’s a fun way to extrapolate the coincidental similarity between old game soundtracks and the proto-programming loops of “On the Run.” One level past that, and it’s a clever blend of two traditionally communal experiences: Playing video games with your friends as a kid, and listening to Dark Side in a group–in Smith’s case, with his family. One level past that, and it’s a juxtaposition of the nostalgia of your childhood (Nintendo) with the nostalgia of your adolescence or young adulthood (discovering Floyd), which in all likelihood was a recapitulation of your parents’ adolescence or young adulthood (the original audience for Floyd).

None of that would matter, however, if the music didn’t end up being so surprisingly interesting. “I like the challenge of making something large fit into a small space,” Smith told Wired. “How much expression can you get from just the three oscillators of the NES?” Certainly a big part of the pleasure of MOON8 is discovering how your favorite sounds from the original album are going to be translated into the music of Mario and company, from the power-up and coin sounds that become the cash-register noises at the beginning of “Money” to the explosions and lasers (sorry, it’s hard not to hear it that way) that replace the big epic backing vocals on “Us and Them.” But reducing peak-of-their-powers David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Roger Waters, and Richard Wright to whatever you can fit into the rudimentary tools of the FamiTracker reveals as much as it replaces. “Breathe” becomes a cheeky, bouncy pseudo-funk track halfway between the Head Hunters version of Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man” and the underground music from Super Mario Bros.; “Time” starts like a quest and ends like a losing battle. With so few distractions, the singsongy quality of Dark Side‘s simple melodies–as simple and timeless as “Ring Around the Rosey”–comes through, unveiling a heretofore hidden aspect of the original album’s power.

“Crying for Us and Them” is in a way a similar process of addition through subtraction, coupled with addition through plain-old addition. Created by Phil RetroSpector for Mashed in Plastic, an all-mash-up David Lynch tribute album, it combines David Ari Leon’s piano-only cover of “Us and Them” (from one of those countless “Piano Tribute to…” cash-in albums) with Rebekah Del Rio’s gutwrenching Spanish-language a cappella cover of Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” “Llorando,” from Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. Once again, this is some wheels-within-wheels stuff: A cover that translates a song from one musical idiom to another, coupled with a cover that translates another song from one language to another, combined to create a new song, which is itself a tribute to the pivotal scene in a movie preoccupied with doubles, shifting identities, personal re-creation, and the flimsy boundary between the real and the unreal. And oh, right, there are the original lyrics to “Us and Them”: “And who knows which is which and who is who?”

But here, again, beyond the conceptual hijinx, something interesting is being revealed about the music. Lyrically, “Us and Them” is a song about conflict, about the powerful fucking over the powerless, in no uncertain terms. “‘Forward!’ they cried from the rear, and the front rank died”–as blunt and angry a description of war as you’re likely to find, especially considering that given Waters’ history the war he likely had in mind was the Good War itself, World War II. But musically, isn’t it romantic? That gentle groove, that crooning saxophone, that piano like an inviting breeze…the first time I heard this song, off one of my dad’s LPs back in middle school, I put it on a mix for the girl I liked, thinking it’d be a great song to make out to. In that regard it’s probably the clearest articulation of Dark Side‘s project of using warm, intoxicating music to say awful things. “Crying for Us and Them” takes advantage of Leon’s bare, pretty arrangement to reinvent “Us and Them” as a love song for real, only it’s now layered with the vocals of perhaps the most devastating lost love song ever recorded. A personal apocalypse on par with any of the Big Questions tackled by Dark Side–one just as tied to adult failure and regret. I was alright for a while, but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.

* Even though there’s nothing more depressing than the phrase “Buenaventura Press Gone Out of Business Sale,” I’m glad Alvin will be at San Diego, and it sounds like he’s bringing quite a treasure trove with him.

* Dan Nadel reports that Ben Jones is in Los Angeles to work on his Adult Swim show, which is great news because I thought its defeat in that online contest meant it was dunzo.

* Every so often the Internet collectively decides that an interview with a celebrity between whose brain and mouth, to paraphrase Hesh Rabkin, exists no interlocutor is worth your time. Once again the Internet is totally right–you really oughta read Dan Fierman’s interview with Bill Murray in GQ. Did I mention it features a portrait of Murray by Daniel Clowes? (Via Tucker Stone.)

* Vacon Sartirani’s “Mickey Mouse Against the Worms” is fucking me up.

* I give you Orko by Adam Kropinak. I think my favorite part of this is the faded, barely visible O on his cloak, like it’s some ancient rune the meaning of which is lost to time.

* Now that I’ve finally seen Mulholland Drive, it’s time to gorge myself on all the writing about the movie I’d avoided for lo these past nine years. Here’s Matt Zoller Seitz. Here’s Salon’s guide/FAQ kinda thing. Here’s Michael Joshua Rowin and Michael Koresky from Reverse Shot.

* And here’s Robyn wrecking shop on Letterman with “Dancing on My Own,” one of the best songs of the year. “I’m in the corner, watching you kiss her.” (Via Pitchfork.)

Here are some thoughts on David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. I really don’t want you to read them unless you’ve seen the movie. Probably best if you’ve seen Lost Highway and Twin Peaks as well.

* I can’t imagine this is a novel observation, but this movie is basically the Rosetta Stone for Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job. From the opening jitterbug sequence and its swing dancers crudely superimposed over a flat neon pink greenscreen background, to an illicit sexual romance in a huge and soulless Los Angeles mansion, to tiny little people emerging out of nowhere, to its overall positioning of uncomfortable material on the precipice between comedy and horror. Tim and Eric have talked about Lynch’s influence in the past, and they’ve cast Ray Wise so it’s not like it’s some big secret, but having now seen this film specifically, I see just how direct that influence is.

* I got into this a bit with Matt Maxwell on Twitter, but this sure seems like an anti-love letter to Los Angeles, doesn’t it? I know that’s a facile reading. I’ve long defended Lynch against detractors who claim things like Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks are cheap sophomoric “look, suburbia/small-town America is FUCKED UP!” posturing, so I want to make it clear that I don’t think this is a similar case only it’s L.A. that’s eeeeevil this time. Still, in Twin Peaks in particular there is clearly much that both the characters we see as trustworthy moral arbiters, and by implication Lynch and Mark Frost, see as good and worth preserving in their small town. I don’t get that at all in Mulholland Drive The only people who seem happy with Los Angeles in this movie are either naive dupes or amoral assholes, or worse, of course.

* And there are additional cues, if not clues, that there’s something wrong with this place. The elderly couple who escort Betty from the airport and wish her luck are revealed almost right away as…not…right. Their glee over Betty’s arrival comes across like Minnie and Roman Castevet happily welcoming Rosemary into the Bamford. And the man behind the diner^…”There’s a man. In back of this place. He’s the one who’s doing it.” Given what happens at the end of the film, he’s like the black beating heart of the city, the font from which the rest of the monstrousness springs. And he’s right there behind the Winkie’s. Say what you will about Glastonbury Grove and the Black Lodge, but they weren’t right behind the Double R.^^

* To use a favorite expression of mine, one thing that really struck me is how my experience with Lynch’s past work–not to mention my own generic preoccupations–had me looking at hoofprints and thinking of zebras. Once you’ve seen Twin Peaks, Fire Walk with Me, and Lost Highway, it’s so tempting to see the elderly couple, the man behind the diner, and of course the Cowboy as agents of the supernatural, corrupting and destroying the innocent and surrounded by doppelgangers like a rock thrown into a pond is surrounded by ripples. After all, seeing Lost Highway‘s Mystery Man as a descendent of BOB, the Man from Another Place, the Giant, and Mrs. Tremond and her grandson, if not an actual resident of the Black Lodge appearing in an unofficial Twin Peaks sequel, is just as valid an interpretation of the events of that film as any other. So too, I thought, here.

* But! Once I did a little googling and came across the theory that the final fifth or so of Mulholland Drive is the terrible reality Diane attempted to mentally escape with the fantasy/dream that constitutes the rest of the movie, constructed Wizard of Oz^^^ style as her mind’s remix of the truth, it all clicked. No need for the Lodge. Unless of course imagination is the fifth dimension, Batman R.I.P. style. ^^^^

* No need either for other elaborate theories. One that I quickly came up with and then discarded was that somehow Diane too was suffering from amnesia, and Coco and everyone else were for some reason playing along with her delusion. Another was that Betty was a performance by Diane, concocted to further torment Camilla. She is a great actress, after all.

* A couple days later, the part I can’t get out of my head is how long it takes Adam and Camilla to announce their engagement in front of Diane. The pause between each phrase, the giggling, the meaningful glances…it’s just unbearably awful. What a fucking scene.

* The movie’s great achievement as a narrative, I would say, is in getting you to not only prefer the portion that isn’t “real,” but to make it feel more real to you than the reality. In discussing the film with my wife immediately afterwards, she said that compared to Lost Highway, the characters after the dividing line were far less fleshed out. And this is true, even though when you take a step back and look at it, their behavior was far more “realistic” than that of the Nancy Drew noir characters. But you end up believing the lie more than the truth. I’ve read some people who argue that this trick takes advantage of the simple fact that we’re fondest of those we’re introduced to first. The Psycho trick, in other words. It’s smart filmmaking.

* The Winkie’s dream sequence: As good as I’d heard. And by good I mean I reacted by saying “Ohhhhh, no, that’s no good,” and then rewinding it on behest of my wife to subject ourselves to it again. I remember doing that one time before: with the first subliminal flash of that face in The Exorcist.

* Also as good as I’d heard, better even: the sex scene. Lynch’s sweetest and not coincidentally his hottest. Just another explosion, another sense to inundate and overload.

* Submitted: The ending of this movie would have been the only other acceptable ending for The Blair Witch Project.

* This is horror, to me. This is the horror I want. Shining black and awful and unbearable, like a crack in the world that should never have been opened. Magnificent.

^ By the way, a filthy hirsute homeless man who reappears at the end of the movie to take possession of a sinister magic box that transports the person who opens it to another plane of reality? I can’t be the only person who thought of Hellraiser, can I?

^^^^ Lynch’s influence on Grant Morrison’s Batman work and Final Crisis is clearer to me than ever as well. And not just in the general “it’s creepy, it’s weird, it doesn’t make sense” way — the specifics, the preoccupation with shifting identities and doppelgangers, the conception of evil as a corrupting hole in the world.

Underworld

“Always Loved a Film”

from Barking

Listen to it on Pete Tong’s July 16, 2010 radio show (cue it up to 33:40 or so)

Pre-order it from Amazon.com

Boom-BAP boom-BAP boom-BAP boom-SSSLAP –man, I’m really into this beat, how they drag out and delay that fourth clap. It makes it sound tangible and physical and stretchy, giving the song’s bouncy pace a real push and pull. And this is one of the song-iest dance tracks Underworld have done in years: intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, fade. The song starts by repeating the words “the rhythm” over and over! The bridge features a passionately strummed acoustic guitar and the phrase “And I don’t know if I love you more than the way you used to love me”! The chorus is just the repetition of the words “Heaven” and “Can you feel it?”! Certain lyrics rhyme! Perhaps credit goes to the production team of Mark Knight and D. Ramirez, who’ve previously worked with the band and are among several more straightforward acts drafted to spice up the songs on Underworld’s upcoming, collaboration-driven album Barking. But Karl Hyde and Rick Smith have been working together for 30 years, fully a third of which was spent in pop bands, and over the past few years the huge widescreen sound for which they’ve become known has increasingly incorporated their old tricks–less panoramic, a more concise structure, an emphasis on the immediate oomph of the sounds. There’s still a tension between the minor-key music and the heaven-in-a-moment-lyrics, lest you think this is just pandering. But regardless, I’m just as happy to have an Underworld song with a chorus you can sing along to on the first listen as I am to have one made for staring out the window of a train and watching the world blur.

Here’s a new comic I wrote and Matt Rota drew for our Cage Variations project called “No.” This is maybe the most varied of the variations. I hope you like it.

And here you can find some drawings from another Variation, “I Was There and in Some Ways I Still Am.”

* Comic-Con is delaying its decision on whether to stay in San Diego or move to Los Angeles or Anaheim until after this year’s show. (Ha, “Schrodingers Comic-Con”!)

* Today on Robot 6: C.B. Cebulski gets a promotion;

* Tom Brevoort mulls bringing back the split book;

* The announcement I’d love to hear in San Diego this week;

* and Johnny Ryan reveals the cover for Prison Pit Book 3.

* Matt Rota draws Deadman.

* Anders Nilsen draws Dennis Hopper.

* Renee French draws this charming young fellow.

* Dennis Culver keeps drawing Batman villains!

* These gig posters for fictional bands from Scott Pilgrim are pretty terrif. Here’s Hellen Jo’s.

* Kevin Huizenga presents the real cover for The Wild Kingdom.

* Might Kenneth Branagh’s Asgard be pretty interesting after all?

* Go buy stuff from the great Geoff Grogan. Especially Look Out! Monsters, that thing’s really special.

* I like this bit from this Ken Parille post on R. Crumb’s Genesis: “The wonder of Crumb’s Genesis is not the unknowable wonder of God’s ways but of people’s actions as the bible recounts them.”

* Hey, neat, Tom Neely is sharing a table in San Diego with my Partyka chum Shawn Cheng.

* There’s something really fitting about Theo Ellsworth drawing with Craig Thompson.

* I realize that “what Tom said” might as well be the name of my blog nine times out of ten, but what Tom said.

* I don’t know what this Lake Mungo movie Jason Adams is talking about is about, but it’s apparently a first-person horror mockumentary involving a lake, and I’m interested because lakes are frightening.

* Man it’s bizarre that they’re putting a crucial epilogue for Lost into the DVD release instead of into the finale as it aired. Spoilers at the link.

* It didn’t occur to me until I read this Graeme McMillan post on Will Smith’s upcoming vampire movie that Smith by rights should already have had a vampire movie under his belt, I Am Legend, and had that film stuck to its source material it would have anticipated the zeitgeist rather than felt like a belated jump aboard the zombie-apocalypse train.

* Zak Smith explains how he tries to cram every last nook and cranny of his D&D stories with something memorable, transformative, or both. Wouldn’t you like to see comparable adventure comics do the same? Couldn’t you rattle off the names of several that really coulda used Zach’s advice off the top of your head?

* 28 essays on Prince’s song “Purple Rain” by the same guy? Sure, I’ll eat it. (Via Douglas Wolk.)

* The Republican Party’s repeated intimations of militarization have disturbing implications.

* Will nothing ever live up to Jason Overby’s exacting standards?

* Remember that bit in The Fellowship of the Ring in the Mines of Moria, after they defeat the cave troll, where they run into the big hall and they get totally surrounded by like hundreds and hundreds of goblins, but then the Balrog roars all the way at the other end of the hall, and the goblins freak out and run away because they don’t wanna be anywhere near that place anymore, and Gimli laughs all cocky and brash because he thinks they were scared of him? Yeah, me too.

Scissor Sisters

Night Work

Downtown, June 2010

Buy it from Amazon.com

Ta-Dah, the Scissor Sisters’ second album, was the easy way out. Following the success of their self-titled debut and its inventive, irreverent pastiche of various and sundry ’70s pop and rock sounds–from mid-period Roxy Music luxe balladry to Elton John boogie to its masterstroke, a disco-fied Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Bee Gees-referencing cover of Pink Floyd’s sacrosanct “Comfortably Numb”–the group…churned out another album based on various and sundry ’70s pop and rock sounds. Only this time, gone was much of the inventiveness and irreverence. While the previous outing danced merrily along that fine line between subversion and celebration that powered the first four or five Roxy records, Ta-Dah was pretty much straightforward Eltonisms all the way. The attempts to juxtapose the happy and sad sides of the bacchanalian life they were chronicling felt obvious and forced: I don’t care if they got a huge smash out of it in England, doing a song about not wanting to dance, calling it “I Don’t Feel Like Dancing,” and basing it on an extremely danceable riff on Leo Sayer’s “You Make Me Feel Like Dancin'” is cheap-seat stuff. By album’s end, the would-be anthem “Everybody Wants the Same Thing,” the lyrics felt like a Rent outtake. There was still stuff to enjoy–the bass strut and huge middle-eight of “Paul McCartney” and the touching and tender love confession of “Might Tell You Tonight” taking top honors–but in the main this was dictionary-definition diminishing returns.

So that’s Ta-Dah. Here, in the words of frontman Jake Shears, is Night Work:

Well, I had a moment. I was at a sex party in Mannheim, I was on the dancefloor. It was six o’clock in the morning. I was wearing a little rubber wrestling singlet. I was having a great time. There was a cloud in the room, this cloud of man sweat, cigarettes, spilled booze, shit because people were getting fisted, and poppers. And piss! It was disgusting… The most vile place I’ve ever been. And I was dancing, and the DJs put on ‘Walk The Night’ by the Skatt Brothers. It’s one of my favourites. It was one of those revelatory moments for me when I realised what I wanted the album to sound like and how I wanted it to make me feel. Am I rambling? But that was the defining moment. My vision! My vision happened very clearly in that moment.

Sold! With that core concept in mind, Night Work is the sound of a reinvigorated band with balls to spare. Literally, at that: This is the sort of record I haven’t heard in a long, long time in that almost every song is a sort of double entendre where maybe it’s maybe not really about fucking but probably yeah, it probably is. There’s a song called “Harder You Get” that includes the lyric “Don’t point that thing at me unless you plan to shoot.” There’s a song called “Skin This Cat,” sung by Ana Matronic about the million ways she would like a gentleman friend to do so, in a tone that suggests she’s not talking about her Tonkinese. There’s a song called “Whole New Way” about finding a whole new way to love you that involves not being able to see your eyes and sneaking up from behind–and it bleeps and squelches sassily along like “Monkey” by George Michael to boot. I’d say “Do I need to draw you a picture here?”, but thanks to the album cover, it’s extra unnecessary.

To me, though, the ’80s-style wink-wink nudge-nudge smut is a lot of fun, but where the album really clicks is on the level of urgency. Its opening, title track barrels out of the gate with pulsing strings, strutting electric guitar, a relentless bam-bam-bam-bam beat and chirping high-pitched vocals that practically kick your face in with their manic intensity by the time the chorus comes around: “NIGHT! WORK! GOTTA DO THE NIGHT WORK! WEEKDAY NINE TO FIVE SHIFT IS OVER!” “Harder You Get” and “Running Out” provide a similar one-two punch pummeling later in the album, the former with a head-banging riff/chanted chorus combo and the latter with a breathless, jagged pace reminiscent of Devo at their tightest. There’s an overall willingness to go for it here that was sorely lacking on their last album, whether that means recruiting Sir Ian McKellen for a Vincent Price-style spoken-word monologue about “sexual gladiators” or bucking the wishes of both the label and the majority of the band itself to put a photo of a dude’s ass on the album cover.

Which leads to an important note: Both of the men involved in that picture–photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and dancer Peter Reed–died of AIDS. The menace lurking beneath the surface of Night Work is far less facile than, say, putting the words “we were born to die” on top of a jaunty Tin Pan Alley tune in Ta-Dah‘s “Intermission”–it’s more a subtle but repeated admonition that the bad comes with the good. “Remember this is what you asked for,” Shears warns on “Night Work”; “Stop crying like a child / You got what you want,” he says, repeating the sentiment, in “Harder You Get”; there’s a song called “Sex and Violence” that makes pretty much the same case Jane’s Addiction made on “Ted, Just Admit It…”. But the difference is that Shears and company ultimately come down on the side that it’s all worth it. The album ends with a quartet of very straightforward synth-heavy dance tunes, all four of which are tributes to love and a high-life so intense as to be transformative. You need a little danger to get there, and that’s reflected on Night Work from top to…well, you know.

Recently I accidentally deleted at least two perfectly legit comments that I know of, and possibly more that I don’t. What’s going on is that the blog has been absolutely inundated by spam, and the creaky interface has made it difficult to impossible to prevent, which means I end up deleting literally dozens of spam comments in big purges throughout the day. I’ve accidentally caught a couple of for-real comments in these purges. I apologize to their authors, and to anyone who’s tried to or actually commented around here lately. I promise it was an accident–I’ve never deleted a single comment on this blog for content reasons.