Culture

What can I say?

“Listen… There’s another national anthem playing, Not the one you cheer At the ball park.” “We’re the other national anthem, folks, The ones that can’t get in To the ball park.” Available from iTunes, happily enough.

The song entitled “Going Through The Motions” on the new Aimee Mann live album (original) is not the song sung by Sarah Michelle Gellar on Buffy during the musical episode. So don’t get your hopes up like I did.

I overheard the best conversation ever at my comic book store today. Two teenage girls were sitting around provoking the guy who runs the place, who was sitting around being amused. Teenager one picks up a copy of Transmetropolitan. “Hey,” she says, “Is this guy a metrosexual?” She’s pointing at the cover, which is of course Spider Jerusalem. “No,” says the comic book guy. “He’s completely not metrosexual.” “Then why is he carrying a man bag?” ...

It appears to be the case that Jandek played at a festival in Glasgow yesterday. Whoa. (Thanks for the pointer, Chris!)

Eric Raymond flips allll the way over into the cult of tradition with a resounding thud (original): “A deadly genius is a talent so impressive that he can break and remake all the rules of the form, and seduce others into trying to emulate his disruptive brilliance — even when those followers lack the raw ability or grounding to make art in the new idiom the the genius has defined.” He then goes on to explain that Picasso, Coltrane, Joyce, Schoenberg, and Brancusi killed their respective fields by being so brilliant. For bonus points, he posits that the problem was caused by the death of the patronage system. You see, once artists were permitted to do whatever they liked, some of them produced deadly work. ...

Boston mob movie trend juggernaut: The Boondock Saints, Snitch, Southie, Mystic River, and The Departed. It’s a small juggernaut.

The Barry Hughart pages (original) are small yet worthy of study; for those who don’t wish to study, well, the original draft of Bridge of Birds is here (original). There, that was easy. (Via Kip.)

I saw Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow again today, and my adoration of Polly Perkins is confirmed. And here’s why. (Spoilers, of course.) First and foremost, she is a woman who stands on her own two feet. Her career is important to her and by all evidence she’s pretty good at it. On second viewing, the triangle created by the skills of Polly, Dex, and Joe is fairly obvious: Polly notices, Dex analyzes, and Joe acts. Time and time again, Polly’s the one who notices things first. She makes contact with Doctor Jennings. She finds the scrap of map that Dex left behind. She figures out that the staff is important. She realizes the purpose of the rocketship. ...

It occurred to me this weekend, while I was contemplating buying a dozen Powers graphic novels, that we’re probably not more than five years away from solving the comics life span conundrum. (Namely, the vast mass of the history of comics is not available for reading; you can’t go back and check out Grant Morrison’s early Marvel Universe work, for example.) But let’s say we live in a world in which all comic book pages exist in digital form, which is a world we may well live in already if that’s a useful step in the printing process. So DC puts up a web page, which allows you to select a comic book title and a range of issues within that title. Click “Buy” and the pages of those issues are assembled into a single file and sent off to the print on demand printer. ...