Gang Gang Dance – Sacer

Because we absolutely, positively need more art-pop that sounds like T’Pau’s “Heart and Soul.” It took me forever to place what I was hearing in this standout track from Gang Gang Dance’s engrossing, energetic new album Eye Contact but even before I struck upon what I think is the most direct influence, this song’s project of rehabilitating big sky’s-the-limit mostly English alternative pop sounds from the ’80s had my full support. Everything about it makes me feel like I’m sitting in some teenage bedroom I never had, playing it at full volume and sharing some secret delirious joy with myself. That stop-start beat, with its synth stabs and big flat reverbbing drums, is just made to dance to in your mirror, awkward and uncaring, while Lizzi Bougatsos’ vocals run the impenenetrability of Liz Fraser (another icon of rhapsodic interiority) through a strange Bollywood filter. Which works perfectly, because to me the appeal of all the Big ’80s bands was just how far away their world felt from mine, like these were transmissions of heartache and happiness and emotions too intense to filter down to me as anything but pure excitement, in a secret language of adult glamour I was lucky enough to understand for three or four minutes at a time.

Cindy and Biscuit
Dan White, writer/artist
Milk the Cat, 2011
24 pages
£2.50
Buy it from Milk the Cat

What a pleasant surprise this turned out to be. Created by Dan White, aka The Beast Must Die from the Mindless Ones blog, Cindy and Biscuit has a look that at first glance might tempt you into thinking it’s one of those try-too-hard “bang! pow! comics aren’t just for grown-ups anymore!” all-ages things that grown-ups on the Internet really like — but only at the very first and most cursory glance. Take a closer look at that cover: It’s not just a spunky-lookin’ little girl and her plucky canine companion, it’s also a mountain of skulls and a board with a nail through it. Things never get quite that grim inside, but it still comes as something as a shock when our dynamic duo spots an alien landing crew and, instead of having some zany spooky adventure, Cindy leaps through the air and brings her board down on an alien’s head with full force, shattering the helmet into tiny safety-glass fragments and smashing the head to a pancake with a KKRUNNT! (Great sound effect, by the way.) That’s the moment where it becomes apparent that White will be bringing to the surface all of the unpleasantly unrestrained id lurking beneath fondly remembered all-ages entertainments from Calvin & Hobbes to Bone. In addition to going Game of Thrones on those aliens, the three stories collected here see Cindy stumbling across a savage, slavering werewolf only to be patted on the head by the beast, who’s seemingly acknowledging a kindred spirit, and recounting a dream in which she floats to the Moon and tosses a rock at the Earth, blowing it up. White realizes that the danger we crave as kids is a projection of the dangerous sensations called up by our own anger and frustration with a world we’re quickly learning is unfair. The best thing about Cindy and Biscuit, though, is that it really could be an all-ages comic, and an excellent one at that. White’s thick line has a candy-like quality to it, wavy and chunky and almost chewy, and which gives his rather impeccable action shots real heft and momentum. He draws Cindy as a bounding presence whose feet stay a solid foot and a half in the air when she runs, but she doesn’t come across as weightless or effortless, but rather as a physical thing that’s got so much energy behind her she’s propelling herself off the ground. Biscuit’s a good design too, like an arrow in dog form. It’s solid enough in terms of figurework and depiction of action to put me in mind of a less claustrophobic Brian Ralph, while the use of a genuinely fun adventure-comic look and tone to say something melancholy about youth is reminiscent of sweet-and-sour “new action” books from Street Angel to Cold Heat. It’s easy to imagine a big color collection of these with a few more uncompromising little stories added in really knocking people for a loop. It’s well worth a look as is — an intriguing array of visuals and ideas from a talented off-the-radar cartoonist.

SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS – if you haven’t read the books, you can still read this . Crossposted from the spoilery edition at All Leather Must Be Boiled.

* That was tough to watch. Who knew? Maybe months of anticipating what would happen in this episode were enough to recreate a week of wondering what would happen in this episode. By that final scene my pulse was racing, and I had that elevator-dropped-out feeling in my stomach I’d grown familiar with from The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, and Lost, shows that at one point or another had me convinced that anyone, literally anyone, might not make it to the end of a given episode. Only this time, I knew, and still got that feeling.

* It was the show’s best scene as filmmaking, certainly. Sweeping camera movements to create a sense of immersion and environment, intelligent sound design that highlighted or dropped this or that element to hyperfocus our attention, terrific performances from Sophie Turner and Maisie Williams and Sean Bean. Even little details, like how Joffrey was framed when he ordered the execution, or the way Ser Ilyn Payne just materialized out of nowhere, slapped on his mask, and brought the sword down, delivered.

* You’re primed to think the big question is “Will Ned sacrifice his honor or die?”, not “Will Ned sacrifice his honor and die?” The misdirection goes well beyond “they’ll never kill the main character…will they?” and into how the whole back half of the season/book is constructed.

* Jeez, the Hound is huge. Did you see him holding Ned on the steps when Ned got beaned by the crowd? He towered over Sean Bean.

* And speaking of sound design, the sounds from Drogo’s tent…woof, that was good stuff. I actually think this was a more frightening way to approach it than the scary shadows of the book. It’s actually more of a challenge to make a tent feel like a mouth into hell in broad daylight, but those horrible bellows and screams were more than enough. I wouldn’t have gone in there.

* I’m glad to see Varys’s motives being revealed and treated as sincere. Even Ned seems to get that. Conleth Hill was especially good in that scene, every bit the practiced liar finally letting his guard down and delivering some real talk.

* Michelle Fairley continues to improve as Catelyn. Her anger and frustration with Walder Frey’s pettiness and her tears of joy upon seeing Robb return from battle were her two most human displays in the whole series. Catelyn’s our main character now, for all intents and purposes, and this episode made me a lot more optimistic about that prospect.

* Tyrion’s sleepover party with Bronn and Shae was a blast. You’ve got to hand it to Jerome Flynn and Sibel Kikelli, who took two characters we barely know, including one we just met, sat them alongside a main character played by a beloved actor, and made it feel like yeah, absolutely these three people would stay up into the wee hours drinking and goofing around together. I’m a softie, so I’m happy anytime characters in fiction about how hard the world is manage to respect and befriend one another.

* Just a lot of fine moments sprinkled throughout the whole episode, actually. Sticking Tyrion on the dolly for that shot as he comes to was inspired, just as discombobulating as you’d imagine it was for Tyrion. Maester Aemon comes out of nowhere to reveal that he’s one of the most important people in the world. Jon’s fellow grunts flip out over his sword like the teenage boys they are, while Rast and his fellow raper sit in the corner glowering. It was a really, really good hour of television, good enough to get me too keyed up to sleep properly.

* I’ve long said it’s a mug’s game for people like me to try to speak for viewers who’ve never read the books, but I do wonder what they made of this episode’s two major battles taking place off-screen. Since I’ve been following the production of the show from day one, I was aware that budget limitations constrained them from going too crazy in the battle department, but I did expect that they’d get at least one in before the season was over, and it stood to reason that Tyrion riding into battle at the front of a horde of screaming tribesmen was going to be the one. Instead he got clocked on the head and slept through the battle. While this was certainly true to the material’s penchant for puncturing the glory balloon and letting all the air seep out, it also felt like what it was — a way to save money. Ditto Robb’s victory in the Whispering Wood, despite it being presented in much the same off-screen way it was in the book. Since the show isn’t wedded to the book’s POV-character structure, it’s show itself to be perfectly capable of showing us what was going on when our POVs were elsewhere. Robb Stark’s direwolf-aided sneak attack on Jaime Lannister would be a logical choice in that regard, you’d think. It’s a testament to the filmmakers that this episode felt as epic and portentous as it did even though both battles were presented as a fait accompli.

* And boy, there’s nothing quite like feeling disappointed about the lack of battle scenes to make you question if you’ve truly internalized A Song of Ice and Fire’s anti-war message as much as you’d thought. I think I’m okay with my desire to see a good battle scene despite my growing (and ASoIaF-aided!) pacifism — after all, it is okay to enjoy things in art you’d never enjoy in real life. Certainly someone as apt to freak out over animal cruelty as I am had to come to grips with that fact if I were to watch the show at all. But more than that — and here I credit Maureen Ryan, who’s been something of a killjoy about the show, for the insight — A Song of Ice and Fire is a series about war, and it’s tough to be about war without showing war. I still think the message gets through thanks to all the other horrible killings we’ve seen, but seasons down the line, things like Septon Meribald’s monologue about broken men are going to have less of an impact if we’ve never seen why men might break. Or maybe I just want some exciting and thrilling carnage. Maybe it’s both.

Prison for Bitches
Ryan Sands, Hellen Jo, Calivn Wong, Anthony Ha, Makkinoso, Gea, Sophia Foster-Dimino, Chris Kuzma, Johnny Ryan, Sophie Yanow, Chris “Elio” Eliopoulos, Michael Kupperman, Adam Bronson, An Nguyen, Mickey Zacchilli, Lisa Hanawalt, Anthony Wu, Evan Hadyen, Leslie Predy, Monika Uchiyama, y16o, Ryan Germick, Saicoink, Angie Wang, Tony Tulathimutte, Andre Syzmanowicz, Raymond Sohn, Michael DeForge, Mia Shwartz, Patrick Kyle, Derek Yu, Jordyn Bochon, Seibei, Ginette Lapalme, Nick Gazin, Harvey James, Zejian Shen, Robert Dayton, Aaron Mew, writers/artists
Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge, editors
self-published, 2010
64 pages
$12
Buy it and see an extensive preview at PrisonForBitches.com

The wonderful thing about recruiting a galaxy of underground comics and illustration stars to make a Lady Gaga fanzine is that no matter what kind of extravagant weirdness they concoct, there’s a better-than-even chance that at any moment the Lady herself could come along and comfortably out-weird them all. Nearly to a piece, the art, comics, photography, interviews, and essays assembled here by the Thickness team of Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge appear to have been created with a healthy appreciation for their own potential obsolescence in mind, and admiration and awe for the relentlessly and exuberantly creative young woman who’d make it happen. How else to explain the number of contributions that portray Gaga as godlike? In the hands of the Prison for Bitches team, Gaga is a queen seated on a giant telephone throwing trinkets to the huddled masses (Foster-Dimino); a vision appearing in dreams to espouse Anarcho-Gagaism to her supplicants (Yanow); a Big Brother-style disembodied head whose kohl-rimmed eyes stare at the viewer with a totalitarian sex-death gaze like something out of Metropolis (Kupperman); a She-Ra/ELA-esque figure riding through space atop a crystalline Battle-cat (Hayden); a Ray-Ban-wearing Baphomet (Predy); a giant sea goddess towering over the bodies of the drowned (Wang); an empress who lives to be 110 years old (DeForge); a severed head whose tongue, hair, and blood vessels are Cthulhoid tentacles (Aaron Mew). She is seen as supernatural, both a Delphic oracle of fabulousness and a Ring-claiming Galadriel proclaiming “All shall love me and despair.”

On the “love me” point, only a handful of the contributors work with the fact that she’s a very attractive person, but they’re among my favorites: André Syzmanowicz lovingly depicts the curves of her stomach, her breasts, her armpits, even as a werewolf creature gropes her from behind; a strip from Robert Dayton sees an ostensible fan complain about her mediocre music and ripped-off style, finally responding to the question “What do you like about her then?” with “Her navel—I want to lick her navel”; and right between the staples in the centerfold spread that anchors the book’s central full-color section, Mickey Zacchilli sticks the singer’s famously fit rear end.

Still other contributors take advantage of Gaga’s graphic potential for maximum maximalist imagemaking — artist after artist (Jo, Wang, Gazin, Yu, Bochon, Foster-Dimino) have a ton of fun with her hair, culminating in a spectacular caricature of her Coke-can curlers from the “Telephone” video by Harvey James. An Nguyen and the team of Hellen Jo & Calvin Wong provide concert reportage, the former with photos of her cosplaying fans, the latter with comics about the on- and off-stage spectacle of the concert experience.

A trio of prose pieces appear in what seems like ascending order of skepticism; in descending order, Adam Bronson has a funny piece that uses Deleuze and Hegel to analyze the relative potential of Gaga’s “Let’s Dance” and Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” to provoke violence in Filipino karaoke bars; Anthony Ha interviews Vanessa Grigoriadis, author of New York magazine’s seminal profile of Gaga’s origins and rise to fame, that’s best summed up by its title – “I’m a Total Fan of Hers, I Just Am Not a Huge Fan of Her Music”; editor Sands kicks the whole thing off with an utterly sincere and descriptively, persuasively argued “UNDISPUTED TOP 5 LADY GAGA SONGS,” featuring genuine gems like “[‘Alejandro’] sounds like ABBA’s ‘Fernando’ rubbing lotion all over Ace of Base’s ‘Don’t Turn Around’ while bathing nude on ‘La Isla Bonita'” and “[‘So Happy I Could Die’ is] really just a simple song about being convinced you are the hottest and most desirable person on the earth, and that this can be the best of all possible worlds if we allow ourselves the pleasure.” Taken in tandem, they’re like a debate between different modes of Gaga fandom, from arch irony to measured respect for a pop-culture needle-mover to downright love for someone who makes awesome songs to dance to.

The whole zine works like this, basically. Whatever it is you get out of Gaga — a pop-art deity, a gorgeous girl, an eye-inspiring spectacle, a thinkpiece generator, a hitmaker — by all means share that fun with a world that doesn’t have enough of it. This book is a snapshot of the Gaga conversation, post-“Telephone” video 2010; it’s a testament to the contributors and their subject alike that even now that the specifics of that conversation have now been rendered moot by an album full of pinball music and Clarence Clemons sax solos with a cover that reads “BORN THIS WAY” over a picture of the artist as a motorcycle with a human head, I’d love to hear them have it all over again. Prison for Bitches is a Little Monster must-have for any Gaga fan.

King Crimson- Lark's Tongues in Aspic Part !!

I’m a sucker for supervillain team-ups, but I’m particular about them as well. Conventional wisdom holds that supervillains’ villainy will always undermine their collaboration in the end: Megalomaniacal master-planner types will spend as much time maneuvering against one another as against their mutual enemies, the more dignified types will clash with the real wild ones, and before long the team-up’s either in pieces or at each other’s throats. Fie, I say. Reality is little more than a constant stream of examples of horrible people working together quite effectively to advance their agendas, and I see no reason to believe that evil men and women of sufficient means and motivation couldn’t pool their resources and crush the resistance of their do-gooding rivals, scattering broken Avengers across the Eastern seaboard and erecting enormous matching statues of Doctor Doom in New York Harbor and Magneto in the San Francisco Bay.

This is the feeling I get when I listen to this live version of a ’70s King Crimson instrumental, performed by the band’s “double trio” incarnation twenty-odd years later. Robert Fripp’s the mad scientist in this model, bespectacled and seated quietly on a stool as he makes his guitar sound like it’s actually capable of biting your head off with those first few notes. His fellow avant-guitar legend and collaborator-with-everyone-interesting Adrian Belew is a jaunty Joker-like presence by comparison, bouncing around as he draws out soaring, piercing sounds from his instrument. Two drummers pound away, laying down a suppressing fire of time-signature changes, percussive miscellany, and ear-smacking loudness; they include math-rock monster Bill Bruford (late of Yes) and session guy Pat Mastelotto (late of everyone from Mr. Mister to …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead – he’s kind of like the jobber who gets tapped by one of the big boys and surpasses everyone’s expectations) . Every good supervillain team needs a bald guy, so there’s Tony Levin, supplying the low end for one of the band’s bass-heaviest compositions, and teaming up with Trey Gunn, who compliments Fripp’s already science-fictional-sounding Frippertronics by playing instruments with names like the Warr Guitar and the Chapman Stick. The song itself is like an assault — impossibly loud from the start, like many King Crimson tracks it relies on repetition, crescendo, and melodic lines that rise ever higher in pitch to create the impression that it’s somehow getting louder and more urgent still. The constant rhythmical shifts, nearly impossible to predict unless you’ve heard the song a million times, make the riffs feel like they’re jumping out of the grooves to try to get to you as fast as they can. It’s just a sinister, angry-sounding song, and it ends with the band basically burning it to the ground, the sonic ashes a monument to their triumph. Everyone worked together to make something awful and awe-ful.

Thickness #1
Katie Skelly, Jonny Negron, Zejian Shen, Derek Ballard, True Chubbo, writers/artists
Ryan Sands and Michael DeForge, editors
self-published, May 2011
48 pages
$12
Buy it from the Thickness website

The great altcomix fuckfest continues! Of the recent releases I’ve read that pass smut through the same art-comics filter that science fiction, fantasy, action, and horror have all recently traversed, Thickness is the book that seems most concerned with creating out-and-out pornography. Chalk that up primarily to the anthology’s centerpiece and unquestionable standout, “Grandaddy Purple, Erotic Gameshow,” by cover artist Jonny Negron. “Dreamlike” is an adjective that gets tossed around a lot, by me not least of all, but that’s absolutely the right way to describe the plot of this thing, which starts with two sinister gangster-type figures falling victim to a rooftop assassination, then follows the assassin as he’s rewarded with a Let’s Make a Deal selection of prizes hidden behind three numbered doors, then shows him claiming his prize — a beautiful woman — in explicit detail, and ends with his post-climax black-widow murder. Negron can’t seem to contain his glee during the sex scene: The woman shouts out no-fuckin’-around, let’s-have-fun-with-our-bathing-suit-area exclamations like “Mmm, let’s see how much I can fit in my mouth!” and “Fuck! We’re goin’ to have fun with this cock!”, while Negron frequently breaks down his large panels into sub-grids of as many as nine, 10, or 11 panels, using the layout language of Acme Novelty Library to cram in as many of the deliciously dirty details of the characters’ liaison as possible before running out of room on the page. To quote Maude Lebowski, sex in Negron’s hands is a zesty enterprise. But it’s just one of the arrows in his quiver: His story also features angular artificial environments and M.U.S.C.L.E.S.-style character designs that, when combined with his women’s King magazine physiques and his bad guys’ skinny-suit-and-shades-sporting comportment, makes him come across like a happy marriage of Yuichi Yokoyama and Benjamin Marra. His depiction of action is really a marvel, too: It can be dynamically staged as all get-out, but then he does something off-kilter, like showing a falling man’s impact with the floor and his subsequent post-mortem prostration in a fashion that totally flattens the moment, calls attention to its ludicrousness, and yet somehow makes it feel all the more brutal and unpleasant for that. Ditto the final image, which I won’t spoil.

By comparison the other contributions can’t help but feel slight. Katie Skelly’s “cute-sexy floppy-eared lady has sex with plants in a sci-fi paradise that suggests Vaughan Bode mated with Georgia O’Keefe” entry “Breeding Season” is covering well-worn territory for SF erotica, though her thick rounded inks are nice to look at and she has a knack for capturing certain visual details that entice, like the gap between the fabric of the heroine’s suspender-like bathing suit and her breast and torso when viewed from the side. Zejian Shen’s “Pearl Divers” wrings an amusing dual joke out of its title’s double entendre by anthorpomorphizing both the oysters captured by the titular fisherwomen and their clitorises as they celebrate their catch with some beachside tribadism. Derek Ballard’s “Trap Shadez” is another sci-fi story whose sexual content is actually relatively minimal; for my taste it overelies on angular ’80s-tinged figurework and design that can’t quite overcome storytelling that’s deliberately but still unsuccessfully unclear. The True Chubbo comic that closes out the collection is a solid example of that strip’s unusual charm (it’s more charming than funny), wherein the love between creators Ray Sohn and his anonymous wife comes through all the clearer the worse their ridiculously violent sexual violations of one another get. Sands and DeForge’s high-quality production, including risograph printing that gives each story a fitting primary color ink, certainly elevates each contributor — the murky purple selected for Negron makes that particular freakout even seedier, somehow. He’s worth the price of admission all by himself, and hey, a home run after four singles still puts a lot of runs on the scoreboard.

“THERE IS A FREEDOM IN VIOLENCE THAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND! AND LIKE I’VE NEVER FELT BEFOOOOOOORRRRRRRREE!!!!!” And with that top-of-her-lungs chant from singer/songwriter Merrill Garbus…it’s samba time! For all of about twenty seconds, that is, before “Riotriot” resumes the twitchy, nervous-sounding, quiet minor key groove it occupies for the bulk of its duration. I don’t want to give the impression that the song isn’t interesting up until that dramatic point — not at all. Something about its timid swing and Garbus’s hushed vocals suggests that it’s being delivered on tiptoes, looking over her shoulder to see if anyone’s listening. And that’s fitting given that Garbus is singing about seeing a riot cop in action from her window and having a sexual fantasy about him. But deep into the song things start getting a little buzzier, a little crackier and more urgent, and Garbus’s vocals start crescendoing, and then BLAM! this huge, huge moment hidden like an Easter egg at the 2:47 mark. Garbus does this sort of thing on all three of the highlight tracks from Tune-Yards’ excellent second album Whokill: there’s also the ecstatic horn section that comes from out of nowhere in “Bizness,” and the sections that involves shouting “MY MAN LIKES ME FROM BEHIND!” (every word delivered like a punch) and gorgeous woo-ooh-ooh high notes respectively in “Powa,” I feel rewarded by songs like that — it feels like their creators did something extra to make each part interesting and unpredictable, and gave me a payoff for sticking around that a traditional verse-chorus-repeat structure just wouldn’t deliver. I suppose it’s the same sort of thing I like about “Liar”‘s genuinely dangerous-sounding transitions between rest and aggression, “End Come Too Soon”‘s magnificently miserable ending, “Long Distance Runaround”‘s flipped switch between jaunty piano piece and forward-leaning math-funk. And though I hate to be the guy who takes something he likes and then says “unlike all that other shit,” fuck it: Surely Garbus’s attention to things like dynamics and song structure are what help put Tune-Yards head and shoulders above so much of indie rock’s unimaginative, amorphously strummed same-iness, where within fifteen seconds you’ve heard every trick up a given song’s sleeve, while her ability to take a sentiment as disturbing as finding freedom in violence and slam convincingly it into a “Fool in the Rain”-style party interlude is roughly twelve bajillion times more interesting, entertaining, insightful, and listenable a treatment of violence in art than some trollish shithead putting out two albums’ worth of rape jokes and daring you not to get them.

Sock
Chris Day, Conor Stechschulte, Mr. Freibert, Matthew Thurber, Neal Reinalda, Molly O’Connell, Emily Johnson, C.F., Zach Hazard Vaupen, Sam Gaskin, Ben Stiegler, Erin Womack, writers/artists
Conor Stechschulte, editor
Crepuscular Archives, May 2011
40 pages
$6
Buy it from Closed Caption Comics

In which the Closed Caption Comics crew and selected associates get freaky. Billed on the cover as a collection of “ADULT STORIES AND IMAGERY,” Sock proceeds in the mighty CCC manner, albeit a pornographic variant thereof. Editor Conor Stechschulte and Noel Freibert go in their customary horror direction, with Stechschulte employing a less dense than usual style for an Evil Dead referencing story of a woman sliding down a hill while being taken advantage of by the flora, and Freibert using his customary in-your-face explicit dialogue (“I’m just experimenting with the corpses, running tests”) and gutterless panel layouts for a “straight forward sex-death comic” that relies equally on puns (holes, bones, and boxes figure prominently) and dream logic to conflate the two impulses. The flipside to their ugliness is elegance, and here’ it’s provided by Chris Day’s almost rebus-like typography and decontextualized presentation of sexual imagery (a whip, a boot, a big black circle, the legs and crotch of a woman in black underwear and garters); one of C.F.’s always convincingly delivered portraits of women in bondage, all thin lines, bound breasts, tile floors, and lovingly delineated spit; and a wordless, benday-day dotted strip from Erin Womack, which convincingly uses corn cobs and ropes and fountains in tandem with drawings of figures in embrace and ecstasy as stand-ins for the more explicit stuff found elsewhere in the anthology. Zach Hazard Vaupen even gets a good gag strip out of the idea of anal sex, which you’d think would be impossible in our assfucking-fatigued society. None of this is a turn-on per se — erotica it may be, but pornography, then, not so much. However, its most effective contributions earn that honor by coming across as genuine transmissions from artists about what they consider sexy, from Day and Womack and C.F.’s poetically understated images to a simple, funny pin-up from Neal Reinalda that simply puts a photo of Nicki Minaj and her cartoonish physique back(side)-to-back with a drawing of Jessica Rabbit. A wise woman once asked, “What do you consider fun?”; when it works, Sock answers.

SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS – If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from the spoilery edition at All Leather Must Be Boiled.

* Goodness, but George R.R. Martin sure carved himself a big slice of cake by choosing (?) to handle this episode! He said on his blog that the material with Tyrion and Bronn and Shagga early on was a holdover from a previous episode written by the showrunners that was moved here during editing, but that aside, he still had to handle the massacre of all the Winterfell staff in King’s Landing; Syrio’s standoff and Arya’s escape; Sansa’s capture and attempts to ingratiate herself with/blackmail by the Lannisters; Barristan’s firing; the Dothraki raid on the Lamb People, Dany’s defense of their women, Drogo’s wounding, and the introduction of Mirri Maz Duur; Jon’s insubordination against Thorne, the wight attack, burning his hand while saving the Lord Commander, finding out about Robert and Ned; Tyrion’s arrival at Camp Lannister with the tribesmen and their subsequent arrangement with Tywin; the scenes with Varys and Ned; Catelyn’s rejection by Lysa; some Bran business; and Robb’s entire march to war. That is a lot of ground to cover. I don’t really wanna use the word seamless, but, well, there you have it.

* The bloody business at the beginning was quite effectively staged. After the on-screen gore of the initial sneak attack on unarmed Northmen by the Lannister goons, the rest is all implied, which somehow makes it even worse by making the viewer complicit with the deaths we don’t see — since we don’t see them, only infer them, we’re the ones cutting the throats of Syrio Forel and Septa Mordane. And the scene in which Arya flees from Syrio’s standoff only to stop short as she hears the screams and sees the shadows of the combat raging what had been her home that very morning was somehow the most brutal bit of all. You can’t go home again.

* Good for the show for giving Septa Mordane a moment of bravery. In the book she’s just a foolish old woman with a bug up her ass — you imagine this coming to her as a total shock to her conception of proper behavior, an affront to her sensibilities. Here she seems like someone who knows how the world works, knows what’s happening and what’s about to happen, and faces it anyway. I like this Septa Mordane better!

* I didn’t see this coming: The Stark daughters’ most unpleasant actions during the downfall of their father were both significantly altered. Arya’s killing of the stableboy was changed from a clumsy but still deliberate act to an accident, and Sansa didn’t narc on her father’s plans to send her back to Winterfell. I actually don’t think I have a problem with either of these. In Arya’s case, for both her and the stableboy I think the outcome is pretty much the same. In Sansa’s, I think the audience would have had a really, really hard time not just forgiving her, but even watching her scenes from then on out. (I worried about that before the show premiered.) But moreover, I couldn’t figure out how the timing would have worked out. The way it’s all conveyed in the show, it seems clear that Cersei springs into action the moment Ned tells her he knows about her and Jaime and warns her to leave before Robert returns. Sansa’s snitching would have been not just unnecessary but confusing unless the show took time it probably didn’t have to explain the precise timing. Heck, I just read through the relevant chapters and even in the book I can’t quite understand why the Lannisters saw Sansa spilling the beans as the just-in-the-nick-of-time intervention that saved their collective bacon, what with Ned going directly to Cersei and Littlefinger’s susbequent doublecross.

* Zombies need a pop-cultural season of rest worse than any other monster, so kudos to the show for figuring out a way to still make one unpleasant and uncanny and dangerous. I’m glad he was fast, and I’m glad that he moved a bit like an automaton, a terminator. Jon’s lamp toss was well-played as well.

* You’re going to lose some of the visual impact of the younger characters by aging them up, and that’s certainly true of Robb, who seems young but not a high-school sophomore suddenly placed in charge of a war. But his physical appearance still manages to work in his favor, with actor Richard Madden’s big brown eyes constantly widened with emotion — fear, anger, uncertainty, grief, whatever. He looks like someone who’s new to all this, doing his best but still very very new to it.

* Greatjon’s fingers — great stuff. That was the “What do you mean I’m funny?” of Game of Thrones.

* Every once in a while, the Monty Python-ness of it all hits me in an amusing way. The Greatjon sounds like one of John Cleese’s broader accents, while Shagga looks like Tim the Enchanter. And obviously, the Holy Grail rule of being able to tell who the King is because “he’s the only one who hasn’t got shit all over him” is very much in effect.

* It’s unfortunate that we haven’t seen enough of the Westerosi way of war yet to realize that the depredations of the Dothraki aren’t a mark of their intrinsic savagery, but a mark of everyone’s intrinsic savagery. Generally speaking, that’s a problem the show is going to have throughout due to its decision to sort of half-ass its depiction of Dothraki culture relative to Westerosi culture. These kids of comparisons are just gonna be harder to make when one of the two cultures being compared is more sketched than drawn.

* Michelle Fairley as Catelyn….aaallllllmost won me over in this episode. It had to be her turn for the hardass that did it, I guess. The performance is still too one-note and Catelyn’s still too mother-hen, but being a mother hen by urging your chicks to launch themselves at bigger meaner birds is finally the complicating character trait that TV-Catelyn needed.

* I didn’t doubt Varys’s sincerity about serving the realm because “someone has to.” That really sounds about right.

* I have to admit, I get a kick out of Tywin’s acceptance of the tribesmen. Even though I knew better, I still expected him to reject these savages out of hand, but one of the things that make Tywin such an effective leader is that he’ll act against type if the means are justified by the ends. In this case, as pathetic as he finds Tyrion and loathsome as he probably finds his low-born new friends, he also recognizes effective (and useful) warriors when he sees them, and I don’t doubt that his compliments to their prowess are sincere as well.

* This episode had some of the show’s strongest images so far. Winterfell’s entire flock of ravens being sent out to all the bannerman was beautifully done, and something I wouldn’t have thought to show at all, sort of like how the lighting of the beacons in The Return of the King went from a throwaway event to one of the most talked-about sequences in the whole series of films because Peter Jackson came up with an interesting way to shoot it — well, because he chose to shoot it at all. But I think my favorite image was of Sansa kneeling before the throne, her sleeves and gown pooling down around her like silk chains. She looked sad and little and deflated. And that was a nice little visual pun right at the end, closing an episode called “The Pointy End” by having one of the points of the Iron Throne slowly swallow the screen.

* Rickon’s scene was sad and creepy. It reminded me of Newt at the beginning of Aliens: “It won’t make any difference.”

Too Dark to See
Julia Gfrörer, writer/artist
Thuban Press, May 2011
32 pages
$5
Buy it from Julia Gfrörer
Buy it from Sparkplug

“I just need your cum. Give it to me and I’ll go away.” Well, hello, sailor! In the vanguard of a burgeoning mini-movement of alternative comics dealing frankly and explicitly with/in sex, Too Dark to See centers on a liaison between a sleepy (or possibly sleeping) young man and a spectral shadow woman, the bluntly transactional nature of which is no doubt hot to some, cold to others. It’s tough to figure out how to feel about it, actually, and that’s what makes it a fine catalyst for the story, which is primarily about the real live human couple of which the guy is a part. His girlfriend, our protagonist through the bulk of the story, is introduced to us as either she or he (it’s not clear who; I’m not sure it matters) says “No one has ever loved anyone more than I love you” as they embrace in bed, but before long she’s being cuckolded by a shadow creature. We next see her sitting on the toilet, naked from the waist down, awkwardly asking the guy if he remembers jerking off in his sleep. She’s at a disadvantage throughout: She thinks her boyfriend might be cheating on her and her suspicion is greeted with angry dismissal, she fails to pick up on cues he thinks are screamingly obvious and interrupts him as he works on writing “the first good idea I’ve had in ages,” she suspects a customer at the coffee shop where she works of coming in solely to judge her, she’s worried about a black spot that could be an STD but which we can gather from our experience with the shadow person is likely something far more sinister, she self-mutilates, she struggles to even be heard at one point while lying under the covers when her boyfriend returns after storming off, and even supernatural entities make fun of her. Factor in Gfrörer’s shaky, wiry line, really perfect for capturing both the undermployed bohemian demimonde and the veal-calf physicality of young skinny naked people, and the feeling that emerges is one of almost overwhelming vulnerability — a woman who feels at the mercy of love, sex, money, class, and her own body, to the point where the addition of dark forces from beyond feels not just appropriate but almost inevitable. It’s an ugly feeling, and it takes a special sort of beauty to capture it as well as this disarming little comic does.

Wonderful though the trimmed-down video version may be, I’m posting the full-length album version of this song instead. It’s in this version, with its leisurely intro and extra lines and lacerating instrumental section before the third verse, that you get the full effect. It’s a different feeling than the usual “quite verse/LOUD CHORUS/quiet verse” altrock model, mind you; it’s not so binary, so on/off. Each time the loping groove nears the end of a verse, it kind of shakes out and tightens up and only then turns up the volume — it grows into the loud chorus, and you feel that potential contained within the rest of the song. Overall it radiates a sense of lazy coiled menace, like a big dangerous animal dozing in warm weather that suddenly opens its eye when you get too close. I like a song that can surprise you like that, a song that does its thing for a while but eventually says “alright, fuck it” and rears up and punches you right in the face.

Open Country #1
Michael DeForge, writer/artist
self-published, May 2011
16 pages
Read some preview pages, and buy it eventually, I’d imagine, at Michael DeForge’s website

I think there’s a greatest-hits compilation called A Young Person’s Guide to King Crimson? That’s sort of what this is for Michael DeForge. Nearly all his themes can be heard here: deadpan slice-of-life dialogue juxtaposed with extravagantly odd SFF concepts; deconstructed, dismantled, dismembered, disfigured human bodies and faces, like cubism reimagined as body horror; friendship depicted primarily as a venue for venting ideas and concerns at one another rather than real emotional interaction; uncomfortably accurate and funny lampooning of the disconnect between lofty art-school philosophizing and post-graduation economic reality; visually spectacular treatment of altered states shared by two people; creepy horror slowly oozing out of and eventually overwhelming previously established ideas. Conspicuously absent are the full-fledged rubble-strewn wastelands of the sort seen in Lose #3, but in their place there’s a conversation about such post-apocalyptic landscapes. It comes in the context of an interview with the visual artist whose work is the catalyst for the comic. She works in the medium of psychic projection, said by our leading man to be the province of the educated and access-granted elite: “Sometimes I wish I had actually stayed in art school so I could have learned how to do that sort of thing. There are so many techinques that I don’t have the time or resources to learn on my own…psychic projection, silkscreening, linocuts, darkroom photography–all that stuff.” Our hero tries to bone up on the form by watching an interview with the artist (whom we first see as she projects an avatar of herself that’s gigantic, nude, impaled in a field of debris, and begging for help) on YouTube: “[Do you] really believe that? That there’s ‘nothing left to build on?'” asks her interviewer. “Your imagery is so preoccupied with debris, clutter, refuse…'” This might as well be an interview with DeForge himself. And like a good interview, Open Country #1 is a great thing to hand someone who wants to see what’s up with the artist in question.

Wild Beasts – “End Come Too Soon”

The lyrics to this song really couldn’t be simpler. With haiku-like precision, Hayden Thorpe’s falsetto sketches a succession of rapturous nights with a lover, all of which head inexorably to the same conclusion: the end, come too soon. That premature end — the ends of things we wish would never end are always premature — ends up overshadowing all that came before, so that where Thorpe started by singing of “blessed” and “divine” nights, he ends by saying “your skin looked waxen in the fading light.” Loss, whether through death or separation, colors everything in the same dreary gray. Once that point is reached, the music’s gently pulsing beat and cooing backing vocals take a break, as do the high plucked guitar notes and endlessly cycling piano, giving way to ambiguous electronic tones. It’s as if the band collectively pauses, draws a breath, and then lets it all out in an enormous wave of grief embodied by Thorpe’s wordless, repetitive cry, the highest and loudest notes he hits in the whole song, sung over and over again. He ends by repeating the title phrase over and over and over as well, eventually just shortening it to “too soon, too soon, too soon,” like it’s all he can think to say. As the finale of the band’s astonishingly cerebral, subtle, sensual, and controlled new album Smother, it’s an overwhelming moment of anti-catharsis, and it gets my vote for song of the year so far.

SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS – If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from the spoilery edition at All Leather Must Be Boiled.

* Charles Dance as Tywin Lannister brings a certain steely intensity to the role, which granted isn’t super-tough when you’re introduced as you butcher a stag. (I’d bust the show’s chops for laying the symbolism on a little thick, but as a Law & Order judge might have said to George R.R. Martin when he kicked things off with a stag and direwolf killing each other, “You opened the door, counselor.”) As far as new scenes go it was a fine one in that it allowed Tywin to advance an alternate system of morality to the one espoused by Ned: Since your house is all that will last, it’s all that matters. It also enabled Nikolaj Coster-Waldau to make Jaime look like a frightened, wide-eyed little boy around dear old dad, which did more to convey the man’s menace than skinning a dead animal did.

* It’s a shame that the “sexposition” technique the show uses to convey backstory while someone gets their tits out has worn out its welcome by now, because Littlefinger’s turn with this technique was its best and most appropriate use so far. If anyone is in a position to coach people on how to lie for a living, it’s Littlefinger. And even if you strip away the extra layers of meaning, his little walk-through of the thought process by which johns delude themselves into think they’re the one who finally showed this whore the time of her life was simply a well-done bit of writing on the subject.

* Moreover, the filmmakers cleverly set up some echoes of American Psycho’s similarly staged threesome (“Play with her arse” is the new “don’t just look at it, eat it”) to convey the idea that Littlefinger is concealing something vicious under his mask of smarm. Littlefinger unnerves me more and more the more I think about him, so the flat beady-eyed way he said he wanted “Oh, everything” got under my skin.

* And on a practical level, I feel like his monologue sold me on the apparent age difference forced by the casting of TV-Petyr and TV-Catelyn-and-Lysa versus how those women were portrayed in the books. I buy Littlefinger as a just-into-puberty kid when he first fell for Catelyn, who by then was an older teen.

* You know, I’m a bit surprised that Robert’s fatal run-in with the boar was kept off screen. I thought they might show it, because I could think of some fun and dramatic ways to stage it. Perhaps it was best to keep it off screen, though, since that’s how most of our major players experienced it.

* Wow, Ser Barristan’s life is really not working out the way he thought it would, is it?

* It occurred to me in thinking about the Dothraki in light of the many complaints about their portrayal here that they and all the other “foreign” (i.e. non-Westerosi) cultures in the series have the disadvantage of archaiac and idiomatically different speech patterns above and beyond any other problems they have. It’s hard to think of anyone from across the Narrow Sea as a normal person when they talk funny, you know? So Khal Drogo’s little “let’s braid each other’s hair and talk about invading Westeros” chat with Daenerys went a long way toward humanizing him. He wasn’t quite speaking regular conversational English (via subtitles), but he was given the opportunity to banter and smile and be warm and even correct his wife’s linguistic muff-up. It reminded me a bit of the scene several episodes ago when Dany’s handmaiden and bodyguard sat around jawing with Jorah. It made them feel like people rather than props.

* I’d imagine that for some people, Drogo’s big declaration of war came off a bit too much like a locker room pep talk, but I bought it. It looked and felt like a guy fanning the flames of his own perfectly understandable anger about someone picking on his special lady in order to psych himself into doing something extravagantly dangerous, dangerous enough to feel commensurate with the underlying anger. (Loved the gratitude on Dany’s face, too.)

* Some funky shooting here and there in this episode, no? I didn’t think that POV shot of Cersei approaching Ned and looking down at him with the sun behind her worked. I was a bit more favorably disposed toward the tight close-ups during the wine merchant scene.

* As everyone I’ve read about this episode has said, the Wall scenes trod familiar territory: Jon is simultaneously arrogant and self-pitying until someone points out how good he really has it. Honestly, Jon simply has less to do during the first book than any of the other main characters, so the filmmakers are up against it if they want to keep showing him to us. That said, man, the Wall is well cast. Thorne, Sam, the Old Bear, and Maester Aemon look and act pretty much exactly how they ought to.

* I said this last week, and if anything it was even truer this week: Seeing Sean Bean hobble around with a cane and stooped shoulders and a pained look on his face amid more vital characters ranging from Renly to Joffrey shouts “This dude’s in serious trouble” a lot louder than simple prose could.

* I wonder: If Ned had gone along with Littlefinger’s suggestion to back Joffrey with an eye toward installing Renly eventually, would Littlefinger still have betrayed him?

* It was nice to see the Hound in action in full regalia, however briefly. Without his menacing origin-story speech to Sansa to go on (in the show it was delivered by Littlefinger instead), I’m not sure that viewers will get the message that the Hound’s the scariest motherfucker in King’s Landing.

* Ned’s long walk toward the Iron Throne, his forces arrayed against Cersei’s, was wonderfully done — it looked for all the world like the making of a stand-off, and then surprise! It’s a massacre.

SF #1
Ryan Cecil Smith, writer/artist
Closed Caption Comics, May 2011
36 pages
$5
Buy it from Ryan Cecil Smith

I know, I know, “Physician, heal thyself,” but I was skeptical of the need for another altcomix take on space opera. Closed Caption Comics member Ryan Cecil Smith is at his best when he’s riding his preoccupations into uncharted territory, be it his high-camp horror-manga riff Two Eyes of the Beautiful or his wild “bicycling action as you like it!” adventure “Koshien: Impossible.” But anthorpomorphic alien races, laser guns, intergalactic law enforcement agencies, worldbuilding, and knowingly arch dialogue are a commonplace even in revisionist circles. Would Smith bring enough new ingredients to the table to get me to eat it? I needn’t have worried. Taking advantage of a larger trim size and pretty high quality printing for a minicomic, SF gives Smith an expansive canvas on which to deploy a take on sci-fi swashbuckling that’s…quietly silly, if that’s even possible. His line feels light and frothy here, a fluid thing that flows along with the propulsive action sequences (a shootout in a hospital is particularly bombastically staged) and the charming character designs (aliens variously evoke the creature-people of Lewis Trondheim, James Kochalka, and Chris Wright, while our hero Ace of the Space Fleet Scientific Foundation Special Forces has a giant mountain of hair that wouldn’t look out of place in Dragonball-Z, a demeanor akin to one of Naoki Urasawa’s indefatigable ultra-awesome do-gooder detectives, and a laser gun that would give that dude from Berserk and his sword a run for their collective money on any Freudian analyst’s couch.) Zipatone-style shading gives the art dimension while obviating the need for Smith to vary his lineweight overmuch and thus lose some of its elegance. And as simplistic as it is, the story even manages to be engaging, with its tale of a boy orphaned by terrorist space pirates and taken under the wing of the galaxy’s greatest gang of good guys — if I didn’t have this exact fantasy while in grade school, I had one so similar that it hardly makes a difference. Surely the mark of a successful exercise in genre is that whatever pleasure the reader derives from seeing generic tropes exploited or subverted places second behind simply wanting to see what happens next. That’s where I’m at with this one.

Mister Wonderful
Daniel Clowes, writer/artist
Pantheon, April 2011
80 pages, hardcover
$19.95
Buy it from Amazon.com

Oddly enough for a book that numbers among his most accessible — brief, funny, light, with an ending that doesn’t make you want to throw yourself out a window — Mister Wonderful really works best if you’ve read enough Daniel Clowes to realize just how different it is. When you’ve met Andy the Death-Ray and Wilson, our main character Marshall seems like a pussycat even at his most judgmental or self-lacerating. When you’ve experienced the bleak, paranoid claustrophobia of Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron or David Boring, or for that matter the misanthropic rant-based humor of “Sports” or “Art School Confidential,” a rom-com/comedy of discomfort mash-up feels all the more sunny and breezy even at its blackest. When you’ve read comics assembled from individual strips drawn in a multiplicity of styles like Ice Haven or The Death-Ray or Wilson, both Mister Wonderful‘s original “Tune in next week, same Clowes-time, same Clowes-channel!” incarnation as a serialized strip in The New York Times Magazine and its re-cut, re-edited, expanded, much less punchline and cliffhanger dependent reincarnation here come across like a study in stylistic and storytelling economy. When you’ve seen how much mileage Clowes gets out of the cramped feel of his pages and the studied ugliness of their contents — even at their prettiest his comics have the uncomfortable, slightly awkward feeling of wearing a suit that’s a size or two too small — watching him blow out images to sprawl across both pages of a loooooong horizontal spread is a glorious thing indeed, infusing the images so selected with emotional power, whatever emotion it happens to be at the time. And when you’ve seen Ghost World‘s seemingly optimistic yet decidedly ambiguous ending, Mister Wonderful‘s denouement becomes all the more notable, both for its similarities (a bench figures prominently in both) and its differences (Ghost World‘s bench is empty, Mister Wonderful occupied and shared). It’s the differences that make all the difference.

Click here for an interview I conducted with Clowes about the book.

Friendly Fires
“Hawaiian Air”
from Pala
XL, May 2011
Download it from Amazon.com

I’m not a lyrics person, not up front anyway — my initial experiences with a song are almost always going to be solely music-based, perhaps with an assist from the song title. So when I arrived at this standout track off the second album from the shiny-sounding English dance/rock group Friendly Fires, saw the title, heard the galloping beat and the soaring synth wash during the chorus and that little birdlike noise that keeps repeating, I figured “Okay, cool, it’s a song about being in Hawaii and being awed and amazed by the beauty of it all.” Everyone loves a good “transformed by the beauty of my vacation destination” song (what’s up, “Tahitian Moon”?) especially one with as openly hedonistic a beat as this one, so hey, no problems here. Then I finally listened to the record enough to pay attention to those lyrics, and lo and behold, singer Ed McFarlane never gets off the plane. He’s not singing about the water and the volcanos and the trees and the hula and such, he’s singing about feeling someone’s knees in his back and getting stuck in his seat due to turbulence and “watching a film with at talking dog.” The “Hawaiian Air” of the title isn’t the oxygen, it’s the airline. The realization made me chuckle, but beyond the lulz, what a warm, humble, relatable thing to write a big, soaring, epic-sounding dance track about. McFarlane’s voice already manages to pull off the trick of being simultaneously ultra-(R/r)omantic and also really intimate and friendly-sounding; this song doubles down on his preexisting appeal. A real treat.

Closed Caption Comics #9
Pete Razon, Lane Milburn, Conor Stechschulte, Mr. Noel Freibert, Ryan Cecil Smith, Chris Day, Erin Womack, Andrew Neyer, Mollie Goldstrom, Molly O’Connell, Zach Hazard Vaupen, writers/artists
Closed Caption Comics, December 2010
192 pages
$20
Buy it and see preview pages from every contributor at Closed Caption Comics

My favorite thing about the men and women of Closed Caption Comics is how much about their ways of drawing I just don’t get. I don’t get how Lane Milburn builds these beefy sci-fi-fantasy-horror creatures and warriors out of crosshatching and cleverly chosen angles and a line thick enough to look like it was drawn with a Crayola marker held in a fist. I don’t get how Conor Stechschulte creates his black images and blacker stories with lines piled upon wispy lines. I don’t get the thought process behind Mr. Freibert’s scraggly uniform-line-weight EC pastiches, with their abstract-lettering (???) interludes and endings that aren’t so much the usual O. Henry-by-way-of-the-Cryptkeeper twists but just the most ludicrously dark way the story could go. I don’t get Chris Day’s blend of chopped-up images, geometric shapes, block printing, and murky visual noise, and how it somehow fits so well with an elliptical tone poem about how The ’60s as a cultural force (from Marilyn to Manson) were a Satanic plot. I don’t get Andrew Neyer’s lightly penciled cross between a children’s storybook and a lo-fi Yuichi Yokoyama comic, its gutterless panel grids producing cross-image tangents that can be read as pure imagemaking in a way that belies his childlike character designs. I don’t get Molly O’Connell’s crazily ornate yet somehow messy figurework, her people who look like they were built out of tiny feathers. I don’t get how Zach Hazard Vaupen’s stuff doesn’t so much spot blacks as pour and smear them all over everything, reducing legibility but somehow increasing communicative power. Even the things I do think I can understand, like Ryan Cecil Smith’s cartoony parable, Mollie Goldstrom’s staggeringly detailed exploration of snowfall, Stechschulte’s painstakingly photorealistic drawings of a forest, Erin Womack’s elegantly iconographic tale of mystical violence, or Pete Razon’s knockout cover (which couldn’t speak more directly to me if it could literally talk), feel as though they emerged from a thoughtspace I could never quite access on my own, even if I recognize their results. That’s why I keep coming back to what they put out every time I see their table at a show, snapping up minicomics and eyeing their more expensive objects enviously. I don’t know where they’ll take me, but I know I’ll want to go there.

Prog rock is lambasted for its bombast and excess, but at its best restraint is its true hallmark, along with an ability to lock into a groove and do it to death as much as any of the funk bands that were the monsters of prog’s contemporaries during their mutual heyday. One of my all-time favorite classic-rock radio jams — it counts as one, since like “Sgt. Pepper’s (Reprise)/A Day in the Life” or “Time/Breathe (Reprise)” or what have you its two halves segue together and are never played separately — the combo better known simply as “Long Distance Runaround” puts both qualities on ample display. The first half is all about holding back: After faking us out with a squiggly guitar filigree and rhythm-section churn, the song settles down into a main section characterized by a softly jaunty keyboard part, complemented by the broken-up phrases and clipped delivery of Jon Anderson’s vocals and a joint guitar/bass line from Steve Howe and Chris Squire that drops in a few notes every so often and then cuts off almost as soon as it begins. It’s a restrained approach well suited to Anderson’s lyrics, which sing of the frustration of opportunities squandered and expectations never met, and it creates a refreshing amount of space around each instrument, if that makes sense — you feel present in a room with various musicians contributing every so often, then holding back, content to let things linger in the air. Lyrically, the second half of the song may consist only of nonsense — the taxonomic name of a fish chanted as though it contained the secrets of the universe — but the instrumentation seems to house all the angst lurking beneath the pinched and placid surface of the first half. Essentially a drum and bass duet with Squire overdubbing a rather extraordinary range of approaches to his instrument and future King Crimson behemoth Bill Bruford providing a tight percussion backdrop, it seizes a 7/4 rhythm and exploits it, introducing new and increasingly menacing bass elements every few turns of the screw. It’s difficult for me to hear it and not nod my head along, leaning into the music as it barrels forward.

I’ve probably listened to this song more often after catching it by chance while flipping around my car radio presets than on my iPod, and in that context it shines even brighter, I’d say. Music on the radio often comes through as a wall of noise, filling every available sonic space, sounding emitted rather than performed and recorded. “Long Distance Runaround”‘s dynamics give my ears empty spaces to dart into, and I can “see” the rest of the music from that vantage point as it plays, instead of merely sitting there and letting it blast over me.

SPOILERS FOR THE SHOW, NO SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS — If you haven’t read the books, you can still read this. Crossposted from the spoilery edition at All Leather Must Be Boiled.

*The entire Tyrion trial sequence, from jail cell to exit, was really well done. It was also perhaps the single most faithful-to-the-book sequence in the series so far. The backs and forths, the mind games, Tyrion’s desperate scramble to stay one mental step ahead of his captors while not looking desperate — that’s all straight from the book. The sequence has a forward momentum all its own, one step after another, one maneuver leading to the next, leading eventually to mortal combat and a man’s death. The filmmakers really let that momentum carry the scene, so that you barely notice the moment when wordplay and medieval legal wrangling slip into the kind of situation where a man gets stabbed through the collarbone and tossed out a trapdoor to oblivion. Now that I think of it, that’s sort of the magic trick of the whole series: Beneath words and codes, blood.

* I think what’s undoing the Dothraki material is scale more than anything else. Their Savage Other-ness would seem a lot less shabby and boilerplate if they weren’t just a couple dozen random half-naked brown people in some tents, but the vast horde of the books, in their city of art and architecture pillaged from a hundred cultures they smashed, with their dozens of old widowed queens presiding over a ritual conducted at the intersection of a mountain and a lake instead of in someone’s barbecue pit. Even the shittiest, most venal or brutal Westerosi — and we’ve met several contenders — takes on a certain grandeur by virtue of living in these massive, beautifully designed castles and keeps, surrounded by disciplined-looking troops by the score. The Dothraki just look like a bunch of topless dolts by comparison, every bit the primitive savages Viserys constantly mocks them as. Intellectually we can see that eating a horse’s heart really isn’t any more savage than the notion of trial by combat, but the visuals are constantly telling us otherwise.

* That said, the material in Vaes Dothrak still worked for me here, on the strength of the performances, especially Harry Lloyd as Viserys. He has arguably the least sympathetic character in the show on his hands — well, him and Joffrey — but in a handful of lines with Ser Jorah Mormont in Dany’s tent, he makes us realize why he’s so awful. He was crushed by the weight of great expectations before he even began to live. At this point he’s realized just as Dany did a couple weeks ago that he’ll never be a true king, but acting as though he will be is all he knows. Worse, it’s all he has.

* That same exchange gives Mormont a line that sums him up pretty neatly. “And yet here you stand,” Viserys spits at him as the knight blocks his king despite professing that loyalty means everything to him. “And yet here I stand,” Mormont replies, throwing the words back in Viserys’s face, revealing that this is a man who feels the pull of honor intensely, but other things even more so. That’s how he gets into trouble.

* As for Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys, Alan Sepinwall gave me a real “in” to her performance when he noted that the heart-eating ritual revealed not just the Dothraki’s love for Dany, but Dany’s love for the Dothraki. That’s when I recognized Dany’s assimilation into the khalasar as being of a piece with any teenager’s induction into a group of weirdoes that allow her to be stronger and freer than her constricting family. Viserys might as well be watching in horror as Dany performs as Janet during “Touch-a Touch-a Touch Me” at a midnight performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

* The metallic clank of Viserys’s head hitting the floor gets my vote for best foley art of the show so far.

* Tonks laid it on a little thick in her debut as the wildling woman Osha, but Stephen Don as the wildlings’ ringleader sold that scene by doing the opposite. His menace was in how matter-of-fact he was about it. He didn’t seem like some bwa-ha-ha villain, but just a desperate guy willing to do what it takes to survive. His icy blue eyes didn’t hurt either.

* Robert punching Cersei–woof, that was nasty, and it really toyed with the audience’s sympathies. After all, we all hate her, we all wanted her to shut her lying mouth too. So they gave us what we wanted, only for us to discover we didn’t want it at all. Moreover it conveyed just how dissolute Robert has become. When a man like that is the best hope for keeping the kingdom together…yikes.

* This episode surprised me with just how much impact on the story the physicality of a performance can have even when you’re already familiar with that story’s basic contours via a medium where performance isn’t a factor. Mark Addy’s watery-eyed, burst-blood-vessel ruddiness and penchant for raising his voice in anger over the least inconvenience or slight, for example, does more to sell King Robert’s physical and moral downfall than prose can, while seeing Sansa sneer at Septa Mordane anchors that character in the kinds of sullen, spoiled teenagers we all know and love in a way that simply reading about her petulance and delusions can’t equal. (In fact, contra Todd Van Der Werff, I find Sansa a lot more palatable here than in the books. Here she’s the kind of kid I understand; there her short-sighted idiocy is so overpowering that it’s difficult to recognize.) And most importantly, the results of Ned’s wounding at the hands of Jaime and his men — the sheen of sweat he exudes on his sickbed, his limp, the way Sean Bean plays him with every move and step an evident labor — demonstrate the way King’s Landing has already beaten and broken him down. In the books, without seeing him, it’s difficult to separate his post-injury weakness from the vital man of the North we’d spent all our time with. Here, the break is obvious, and meaningful.

* Renly’s “Jesus Christ, enough is enough” freakout at Robert over the Good Old Days was another fine addition by the writers, fleshing him out as an alternative to Robert’s sordid macho bluster, to the Lannisters’ cold cunning, and to the Targaryen’s high madness. In his interview with Westeros.org, actor Gethin Anthony said that the key word for his creation of Renly’s character was “enlightened”; in scenes like this it’s easy to see how important that is to Renly’s self-conception.

* This isn’t to sell her short at all, I think she’s been doing good work, but I haven’t seen Maisie Williams as Arya in the revelatory light that many viewers seem to see her — but she played her mounting irritation with Syrio as he whacked her and taunted her until she could take no more beautifully. Chills from “There is only one God — and his name is Death,” too.