Wolverines!
Webcartoonist David Willis is surprised when his Transformers Fan Club email list coughs up a bloody shirt. Red Fridays, folks: feel the magic.
Don’t let those Sunday afternoons.
The things that happen when you’re altogether elsewhere: back in June, “somewhere in northwestern Europe,” Jane Siberry changed her name to Issa. (Metafilter reacted, including the Jar-Jar joke you’d expect, and a wry lick at Siberry’s second album, which, thinking about it, you probably also would have expected.) As I’m typing this, she’s workshopping new material in Vancouver; there’ll be a tour of the Antipodes early next year. (I did hear about how she was selling everything but her guitar, thanks; apparently, I fell into a very narrow window the last time I checked up on her.)
I’m not so much mentioning this to comment on name-changes in general, or this one in specific; I know from design that surface is important, and I know from magic that names matter, but in the end a rose is still a song is still a rose, right? You either know her already and love her, or you’ve never heard of her, or she just isn’t right for you, not now, not at the current juncture, and what do you care what I think about what name I have to look for on the lists of upcoming concerts? —But if at this current juncture you think she just isn’t right to you because of maybe the whimsy, or the quirk, can I just point out that seeing her live is as close as I ever want to get to church, these days? “I didn’t know we could do that,” says Dana Whitaker, in the sort of deeply embedded pop-culture reference I specialize in, when I bother to specialize in anything; when I forget we can do that, something usually reminds me. —She reminds me, as often as not. Whatever her name might be.
Mostly I’m mentioning it because it’s what I learned on my way to pointing out that Child, the third disc of her New York concerts from back about the turn of the century, is pretty much a must for the playlists of the sort of people who make playlists of holiday music but not until after Thanksgiving. It’s available from her online store, for whatever price you’d want to pay, and for a while there, you’ll be as close to church as you’d want to be. And if I have to explain what I mean by that, well. Go listen to “Hockey,” instead. Smile as she calls the band home, one by one. “Rosie…”
Get away get away get away get away
Get away get away get away get away
Break away, break away
Yeah. It’s a lot like that.
Well the way that song came to be written is, that I was watching a friend’s trailer down in Oklahoma. He lived in this trailer way out in the woods. Land is really cheap in Oklahoma, especially in the rural area. He’d had a trailer out there for just about forever and built a wood acroutements around the trailer, like he had a porch out front with a porch swing. So anyway, he was gone off overseas on some kind of journey and he left me there to watch the place. There was nothing to do. The TV reception was real bad and he didn’t have any books I wanted to read, but he had a video tape of the Marriage of Figaro, the entire opera by Mozart. So I spent days just watching the Marriage of Figaro over and over again and I didn’t talk to anybody for a long time, I was out there all by myself with no telephone. I would get kind of drowsy and you know how when you are by yourself for a long time, you’ll think I’m crazy, but the voices of your memory and your dream world start to become louder and louder. I think that is why people get a little nutty when they live off by themselves for a long time. But anyway I woke up one day out there in the trailer and I was kind of like living in this Marriage of Figaro universe, only I was still playing folk songs: I was playing Woody Guthrie songs to myself. So I went out and sat on that porch swing and started swaying back and forth and kinda fell in this trance. I had my old crummy classical guitar out there and was playing along. That melody came to me. First it was that melody that walks up the scale. so I don’t know it was kind of an impressionist mix match and I hear that other melody going along with it right at the same time. It all kind of… well, the combination of the mosquitoes, locusts all around, bees around the sound of the porch swing creaking, all that mixed together and having been immersed in the Marriage of Figaro for a few days. That is kind of where that song came from. It took me a long time to figure out what it was gonna be about.
—Dave Carter (with Tracy Grammer)
Oh, hell yes.
I’m sure I’ll find something to be disappointed about in the morning.
In the meanwhile, I’m enjoying this entirely too much. (—This one, on the other hand, is a wee bit too much on the triumphalist side for my delicate sensibilities.)
“...until the white thread of dawn appear to you distinct from its black thread...”
I see that David Cunningham, the crypto-Christianist hack who brought us The Path to 9/11, is on his way to Romania, where he’ll be directing The Dark is Rising. —Walden Media hopes to launch another kid-flick franchise to follow the success of its Narnia adaptations.
Sigh.
If he doesn’t mangle the book(s) beyond all recognition, he will at the very least be forced to acknowledge Cooper’s bracingly grim morality: the Light, in the end, is in its purity and extremity as inhumane as the Dark, dragons and nemeses locked in an abyssal conflict largely invisible to us of the track. We can no more directly identify with the Light than we can wholly condemn those who succumb to the Dark. It’s one of those Important Lessons a kid really ought to learn. (Even if I did stay up late on my eleventh birthday. Just in case.) —Heck, maybe Cunningham himself will learn something, wrestling with the material. One can hope.
And even if he doesn’t, and even if he does mangle the book(s) beyond all recognition, at least those books will get into more kids’ hands. So there’s that, I suppose. —Whichever; I’ve got a sex scene to rewrite and a long-overdue boar hunt to choreograph, and a comics convention to attend. Bygones.
“It’s a terrific view,” Jane said. “Worth the climb. But the wind’s made my eyes water.”
“It must blow like anything up here,” said Simon. “Look at the way those trees are all bent inland.”
Bran was gazing puzzled at a small blue-green stone in the palm of his hand. “Found this in my pocket,” he said to Jane. “You want it, Jenny-oh?”
Barney said, gazing up over the hill, “I heard music! Listen—no, it’s gone. Must have been the wind in the trees.”
“I think it’s time we were starting out,” Will said. “We’ve got a long way to go.”
You cannot fully understand Colin Meloy’s art unless you know that he is white.
Oh, yes: from the Hans Christian Kalevala murder-ballad that falls into the chilliest lullaby I’ve heard in a good long while, to the endless sloppy drunken jam-band encore we finally (cheerfully) walked out on (“Wooden Ships on the Water,” Jenn informs me; my education is lacking in some odd respects)—the piercing cry of “Sing O muse of the passion of the pistol!” over a fleshy Talking Heads vamp—the majesty of the Crane Wife herself, with that syncopated oceanic lurch of the band in the chorus that shakes the foundations out from under your moving feet—oh, yes. It’s going to be a good one.
The golden age of analog sci-fi.
Matt Zoller Seitz on the awful, awful Trek cosmetic.
Location, location, location.
I was wondering what Pitchfork had to say about the new Mountain Goats, so I went to my browser bar and started typing—
On my way to somewhere else.
Oh, hey, Tim Powers has a new book out.
No, wait, I’m sorry. It’s pretty much exactly the size of a walnut.
Back in March, I committed one of Roy Edroso’s cardinal sins: I snarked off on Harvey C. Mansfield’s Manliness, having only read a couple of the lit world’s equivalents of the trailer. Sorry, Roy. —Well, I still haven’t read it (see life, shortness thereof), but Martha C. Nussbaum has, and oh my dear sweet Lord. (Via; via.)
Nincsen rózsa tövis nélkül...
How should one celebrate a sudden vault onto the New York Times bestseller list? —Why, with art by Alan Davis and dialogue by Chris Claremont!
Suddenly, and for the first time in my life, I have been struck with an overwhelming urge to go to Burning Man.
Hacks of Mordegon.
Will John Crowley SAVE fantasy? Or DESTROY it?
When opportunity knocks your house down.
Ah, you’ve probably seen Aasif Mandvi on the Daily Show already. Go, see it again.
Teh best zine evar
is now a book.
Twa conversations.
Momus talks with the pink paper; Hope Larson talks with her house.
