Author Archive

I had a leftover check from Christmas which I had forgotten about, and went shopping at Forbidden Planet in Union Square on Wednesday. I had quite a little shopping spree…

First and foremost, I bought It’s A Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken by Seth, and it is likely one of the finest comics that I have ever read.

It has a quiet, graceful quality that I can’t quite describe in words – every aspect of its presentation, from the beautiful, understated cartooning to the dialogue to the narrative flow of the story broken down into six chapters reveals Seth to be a true master of the form.

The story is about Seth’s decade-long search for the art and history of a painfully obscure cartoonist from the 50s named Kalo. I know that it sounds like awfully dull subject matter to base a full-length work, but it is only the narrative structure upon which Seth ponders his life, his inability to cope with other people, his love of the old and disdain for the new, and his personal relationship to the history of cartooning.

There are several bits of the story, particularly when Seth speaks of his lovelife and his relationships with others when I feel a strong sense of relation to what he is writing, and I can certainly connect with people who are prone to obsessing over obscurities to the point of excluding regular life.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is looking for comics of the highest caliber of quality – It’s A Good Life… has already become a deeply personal favorite of mine.

I also got My New Filing Technique Is Unstoppable by David Rees which is fucking hilarious – a comic made entirely from clip art, with a story about a horrible company who are having some very…severe problems with filing. The dialogue is overflowing with comically unneccessary swearing… It’s well worth $6. I showed it to a few friends of mine, and they loved it too – enough to want to rush over and buy their own copies. High quality stuff, indeed.

In addition to that, I picked up Palestine by Joe Sacco and two mini-comics called Love Eats Brain by Dash Shaw. I haven’t read through much of either of them just yet, but Palestine looks especially good, the bits I have read.

Oh yeah, and I also picked up the newest issue of Uncanny X-Men by Joe Casey, because I am a masochist sometimes.

Some upcoming shows I’ll be attending:

Clinic at The Bowery Ballroom

Guided By Voices at The Warsaw

The Danielson Famile at The Knitting Factory

David Cross and Todd Barry at Maxwell’s

And maybe, just maybe, Blonde Redhead and Calla at the Warsaw. Depends on whether or not I can see it for free, really.

All of this does not change the fact that I will not be seeing Avey Tare & Panda Bear at Brownie’s Thursday night. Which really makes me quite sad. I’ve been wanting to see them very, very badly for quite a while now.

Last night, I saw The New Pornographers play at The Warsaw, a new venue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The show was so much fun – the audience was one of the coolest, cutest crowds I’ve ever been in, most everyone was singing and dancing along, and the opening acts, Matt Pond PA and The Frames, had a really warm reception as well. The New Pornographers were in fine form, playing more or less the same set as when I saw them at The Bowery Ballroom a couple months back, but added a couple extra covers and another new song. The best part of the show was that for the final third of the show, the band starting inviting the audience on stage – starting first with two impossibly cute couples slowdancing to the beginning of The Fake Headlines, but then perfectly switching into a more rocking slam dance when the song started to rock in the middle. The first set ended with an amazing version of Letter From An Occupant with about 20 people on stage dancing along, the rest of the room singing along. For the encore, they played five more songs, all of them very upbeat dance numbers, with more and more people getting onstage to bop around and act goofy. Yes, I was among them for the final two numbers, concluding with one of my personal favorites, Centre For Holy Wars. I wish every night could be as fun as that – Carl Newman said something about it being one of the best shows that he’d ever played, one of the best crowds he’s ever played to. I have trouble imagining crowds getting any better than that.

I know most of my blog readership is located in the UK, and to them I say this: The New Pornographers will be releasing their debut LP Mass Romantic on Matador Europe in March. Go see them when they come to the UK to tour. Please.

By the way, that was my first time at the Warsaw. It’s a great hall – it’s pretty large (larger than Bowery Ballroom and Irving Plaza, but not as big as Roseland), and it’s a bit like a cross between a VFW/wedding reception hall and a small high school auditorium. Pretty good sound, very pleasant ambience, high ceilings, low stage, great clientele of bands coming to play there (Le Tigre, Guided By Voices, Blonde Redhead, etc…) – the only problem is that it’s in a lousy place as far as commuting via subway goes. I had to get from there to Prospect Heights where I was staying last night, and it took about an hour and a half, between walking quite a ways to an L train stop that was running properly (Lorimer!), and then having to make several connections looping all the way around Brooklyn to Manhattan to back through Brooklyn where I was headed. Agh. If I was living where I used to in Brooklyn, it would have been similarly difficult – I really wish a better intra-Brooklyn subway line existed, something that could connect DUMBO/Brooklyn Heights to Williamsburg/Greenpoint to Park Slope/Prospect Heights….

Welcome to the All-New, All Different Fluxblog. It’s been about four months since I gave up on my previous blog, and I’m being pulled out of retirement mostly because enough people have asked me to start a new one to justify actually doing it, but also because I’m getting a little antsy waiting for Tom to give me one of the Barbelith Collective blogs that he promised me. My plan for that blog (and I should note that I will ditch this one as soon as I eventually get that one) was to be more link/commentary based, and not at all a personal diary like the old blog. So you can expect this blog to be something like that.

Since virtually everyone who would be reading this blog would be coming from Barbelith, I will be treating this blog as though it was bonus content which in some way complimented whatever it is I am posting about there. Special links, commentary, music recommendations, petty gossip – this is the sort of thing you can look foward to seeing here on the new Fluxblog over the coming weeks. It’s like this: if you like my prolific postings on Barbelith, here’s where you can come to get a little bit more. Though I can’t imagine anyone wanting to read MORE of me, because I never do shut up over there.