Three Imaginary Girls - Book Review

TIG wraps up the year with the Best Music Writing tour

Imaginary Nicky — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 16:30:42 +0000

There is a feeling of neurotic helplessness I sometimes suffer from; when I realize I live in a world where I have the freedom to make infinite choices over what music I listen to, what gigs I attend and what literature I choose to delve into. There is such an overload of witty, critical music journalism that I find myself frozen in indecision – is it best to skim over everything via twitter, trawl through my RSS feed, or simply spin around in circles at the local bookstore and randomly pluck a glossy magazine from the shelves; at the expense of all the zines, blogposts, podcasts and other potential gems floating around the internet?

Here's a book that will make the decision making a little easier - now in it’s eleventh year, Best Music Writing 2010 presents a knowledgable yet accessible array of thinking that represents a diverse range of recording artists from Michael Jackson to burlesque’s elusive Eva Tanguay. Likewise, the writers included within range from musicians, scholars, and roadies to self-confessed superfans. Filled with rich prose, music scholars and geeks alike wax lyrical and share personal stories of how music has shaped their lives; as The Stranger’s Sean Nelson details in his contribution, “Let’s (Not) Get It On”: “Still, for those who are attuned to it, pop music is more than just the background noise of our development. In an indirect but essential way, it teaches us how to live, by offering codes that we’re free to decipher as we choose.”

Far from being the ramblings of an idiot savant, buried in liner notes and arguing long redundant Blur vs. Oasis-style fanwars, those published here use music as a means to examine a broader view of our society – music is the yardstick by which we can measure standings in current events, language, technology and self-expression. Anyone who dismisses pop music and culture as frivolous should read on – BMW2010 addresses such pivotal music issues as royalties, music as an avenue for feminism, marketing personas and more. It examines how our use of technology has shaped the way that we communicate, and how musicians are changing their view of success to adapt to a post-napster music market.

Guest Editor Ann Powers opens the book with a powerful introduction that (forgive the pun) strikes a chord in the reader and emphasizes the fact that although the world of criticism and analysis is often thought of as exclusive, music is still an inclusive, uniting force: "Music itself is a call that demands response. It organizes desire, sorrow, and joy into a form both primal - the ear is the first sense organ to begin working when we are in the womb - and intensely communal; in every known culture, some form of music has been a constant in everyday life. Making music or listening to it is a part of how we grow; sharing music is what helps us create community. You don't have to be a musician, or even a major music geek, to exist within that realm".

I don't usually agree with most "Best of" lists, and I would not expect to be enamoured with every piece in this book, either - but the call for submissions included "essays, profiles, news articles, interviews, creative non-fiction, book reviews, long-format reviews, charticles and other creative blends of language and image, blog posts, tweets, and other thoughtful and well-written work on music and music culture" - resulting in a diverse and at times truly amazing array of responses to music. I normally wouldn't blink twice at an article about The Gossip either, but Michelle Tea's writing is so accessible that by the end of the chapter, I find myself looking up Music for Men on YouTube. How could you not giggle at Beth Ditto's shenannigans during Paris Fashion Week: "After breakfast, the wearing of socks throughout the Westin continues. "We're adults!" Beth hoots, waggling her feet. "We're punk!" She references her friend the Portland zinester Nicole J. Georges, who holds punk as a trapdoor that lets you escape any breach of good conduct or manners. "We're punk!" Beth explains to strangers as we board the elevator and return to our rooms for a nap before the Nina Ricci show that night."

One of my favourite pieces is Tim Quirk's My Hilarious Warner Bros. Royalty Statement, in which our hero battles against The Man in an attempt to find out simply how his defunct band is generating revenue for the company. I cannot help but think of Vonnegut's dark humour when reading Quirk's lament: "People in the record industry are very good at making bands believe they deserve the hundreds of thousands (or sometimes millions) of dollars labels advance the musicians when they're first signed, and even better at convincing those same musicians it's the bands' fault when those advances aren't recouped (the last thing $10,000-Is-Nothing-Man yelled at me before he hung up was, "Too Much Joy never earned us shit!" as though that fact somehow negated their obligation to account honestly). I don't want to live in $10,000-Is-Nothing-Man's world. But I do. We all do. We have no choice".

My other favourite would have to be Phil Ochs Greatest Hits, penned by TIG's very own Chris Estey. Again, I'm no fan of the artist, but the sentiment-driven prose is beautiful to read. This unique track-by-track analysis of the record also doubles as a gritty, moving autobiography of the writer himself, who makes the wry free-writing within crystalize into something quite moving: "He touches a live battery on his little brother's tongue while they listen to the descending third side of Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Everyone who lives in a trailer court loves to hear songs about paradise going rotten for the lucky few. They plan a suicide pact in the woods behind the trailer court to John Denver songs about reincarnation in the mountains in a sad voice he had borrowed."

This book resonates with me, and I know I will be returning to it throughout the new year. BMW2010 is the perfect gift for your very own Rob Gordon – but why make do with the book alone when you could join a few of the writers for a night of unabashed dialogue, discussion, and readings from the book? Perfect for shaking that post-Christmas lull, we at Three Imaginary Girls are super excited to have Seattle writers Chris Estey and Sean Nelson included in the lineup for this year's reading - hope to see you there!

Best Music Writing 2010 – Seattle reading with Ann Powers, Chris Estey and Sean Nelson:

Tuesday December 28, 7:00pm - 8:30pm

Elliott Bay Bookstore

1521 Tenth Avenue

Seattle, WAThere is a feeling of neurotic helplessness I sometimes suffer from; when I realize I live in a world where I have the freedom to make infinite choices over what music I listen to, what gigs I attend and what literature I choose to delve into. There is such an overload of witty, critical music journalism that I find myself frozen in indecision – is it best to skim over everything via twitter, trawl through my RSS feed, or simply spin around in circles at the local bookstore and randomly pluck a glossy magazine from the shelves; at the expense of all the zines, tweets, blogposts, podcasts and other potential gems floating around the internet?

Now in it’s eleventh year, Best Music Writing 2010 presents a knowledgable yet accessible array of thinking that represents a diverse range of recording artists from Michael Jackson to burlesque’s elusive Eva Tanguay. Likewise, the writers included within range from musicians, scholars, and superfans. Filled with rich prose, music scholars and geeks alike wax lyrical and share personal stories of how music has shaped their lives; as The Stranger’s Sean Nelson details in his contribution, “Let’s (Not) Get It On”:

“Still, for those who are attuned to it, pop music is more than just the background noise of our development. In an indirect but essential way, it teaches us how to live, by offering codes that we’re free to decipher as we choose.”

Far from being obsessed fans, buried in liner notes and arguing long redundant Blur vs. Oasis-style fanwars, those published here use music as a means to examine a broader view of our society – music is the yardstick by which we can measure standings in current events, language, technology and self-expression.

Anyone who dismisses pop music and culture as frivolous should read on – BMW2010 addresses such pivotal music issues as marketing, royalties, music as an avenue for feminism, marketing personas and more. It examines how our use of technology has shaped the way that we communicate, and how musicians are changing their view of success to adapt to a post-napster music market.

Resonates

An enthusiasm that is infectious

Where is the music industry headed? Feminism, marketing

Issues addressed in the music industry include royalty runarounds by Time Warner, what exactly is indie and the impact social networking is having on music and music journalism.

I normally wouldn't blink twice at an article about The Gossip, I'd usually just turn the page - but the writing at work here is so accessible and masterful that by the end of the chapter, I find myself looking up videos on YouTube. Musicians are people too.

If you'd ever wondered what a record store guy or the superfan in the front row was thinking, pick up this book.

Personal favourites would have to be The Gossip, Twitter and Timothy Quirk

Best Music writing 2010 is the perfect gift for your very own Rob Gordon – but why make do with the book alone when you and your favourite music geeks could join us for a night of unabashed dialogue, discussion, and readings from the book? Perfect for shaking that post-Christmas lull, we at Three Imaginary Girls are super excited to have our own Chris Estley included in the lineup for this year's reading - hope to see you there!

Best Music Writing 2010 – Seattle reading with Ann Powers, Chris Estley and Sean Nelson:

Tuesday, December 28 · 7:00pm - 8:30pm

Elliott Bay Bookstore

1521 Tenth Avenue

Resonates

An enthusiasm that is infectious

Where is the music industry headed? Feminism, marketing

Issues addressed in the music industry include royalty runarounds by Time Warner, what exactly is indie and the impact social networking is having on music and music journalism.

If you'd ever wondered what a record store guy or the superfan in the front row was thinking, pick up this book.

Personal favourites would have to be The Gossip, Twitter and Timothy Quirk

Best Music Writing 2010 – Seattle reading with Ann Powers, Chris Estley and Sean Nelson:

Tuesday, December 28 · 7:00pm - 8:30pm

Elliott Bay Bookstore

1521 Tenth Avenue

Seattle, WA

{On Tuesday, December 28 from 7:00pm - 8:30pm, get yourself to Elliott Bay Bookstore in Capitol Hill for a Seattle reading of the book Best Music Writing 2010 with Ann Powers, Chris Estey and Sean Nelson}

Guest Editor Ann Powers opens the book with a powerful introduction that (forgive the pun) strikes a chord in the reader and emphasizes the fact that although the world of criticism and analysis is often thought of as exclusive, music is still an inclusive, uniting force:

"Music itself is a call that demands response. It organizes desire, sorrow, and joy into a form both primal - the ear is the first sense organ to begin working when we are in the womb - and intensely communal; in every known culture, some form of music has been a constant in everyday life. Making music or listening to it is a part of how we grow; sharing music is what helps us create community. You don't have to be a musician, or even a major music geek, to exist within that realm".

Best Music Writing 2010

Seattle reading with Ann Powers, Chris Estey and Sean Nelson

Elliott Bay Bookstore

1521 Tenth Avenue

Tuesday, December 28
7:00pm - 8:30pm

Deep Focus: Books on They Live and Death Wish give you lots to think about and geek out on

Chris Estey — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 18:32:42 +0000

Deep Focus is a new line of small but richly rewarding studies, the first one about a favorite film by a great writer, Christopher Sorrentino. They're cheap and hot little books perfect for reading at the bus stop, before a movie or concert, and especially along with a DVD of the flick being playfully examined. It's an exciting new attempt at film studies. And the fact that the first two authors are superb essayists and worth reading over and over, and the films are the kind you have to own and watch again and again, means Deep Focus has scored with the perfect $13.95 each gift this season for film and modern literature fans.

Jonathan Lethem's They Live is the first volume in the series, and the media-massaged author of novels The Fortress of Solitude and Chronic City scribes a scene by scene, anarchist polemic via extended hobo punch out, delineation of the Reagan-era, rabble-rousing science fiction/horror classic by John Carpenter. (Carpenter is a dependable guy for shockingly intelligent genre films, from the original Assault on Precinct 13 to Escape from New York and Los Angeles to Vampires.) While dismissed by some as over-the-top B-movie shrill political paranoia, very few people who have seen it have ever gotten over the scene where wrestling star "Rowdy" Roddy Piper first discovers the ugliness of the alien race attempting holding us in submission to consumerism and resigned to the 9 to 5 world. It's everywhere and in everything, even makes the homeless bow to it, dispossessing all of us on a gratingly precise regularity, and like most great SF They Live is a timeless explanation for how the future is shaping the present. Like how the pernicious and opnely known but accepted MK-ULTRA program tried to create disassociation in people by the CIA back in the 1960s, so that mind control kills off the host in the personality of those they've experimented on, our created "core" values of greed and fear are against us. They Live is extremely (and to some, comically) blunt about how we are more programmed than we'll ever know, unless we dream something new in a very direct and violent way (symbolized by one of the most awesome one-on-one brawls in an alleyway in They Live than you'll ever find in another movie).

Frequent magazine freelancer Lethem is a practiced and extraordinary pop culture critic, combining riffs on the rhythms of revolution in James Brown and the uncanny-everyday unveiling of Edgar Allan Poe behind genre by reports set to the exact pace of the movie. You can literally read this book while watching the film, page by page and scene by scene, as he's timed his assertions to each explosion of imagery or plot development at the minutes noted. The entire origin story of satirical science fiction (from The Time Machine to Idiocracy) is also described, as Lethem remarks on the film's funniest bits (such as the then-standard bearers Siskel & Ebert being alien agents for conformity on the almost entirely corrupted television medium). He also finds some quotes to back up his claims of They Live being the most powerful kind of subversion in entertainment, such as G.K. Chesterton's observation that people "should resistance injustice, something more is necessary that they should think injustice unpleasant. They must think injustice absurd, above all, they must think it startling. They must retain a violence of a virgin astonishment."

This tightly ties in conceptually with the second book in the Deep Focus series, Death Wish, a Michael Winter 70s thriller which is all about injustice and violence and like Carpenter's They Live, wasn't particularly respected by mainstream liberal critics at the time of its release. Death Wish is often thought of as a guilty pleasure by smart film fans, being the Godfather of all contemporary vengeance films. (Man lives with woman in paradise; paradise is lost by the violence of hoodlums; man obliterates the evil that caused the damage, and these days goes even further by blowing everything up within two hours.) But writer Christopher Sorrentino (novelist, Harper's, McSweeney's) rebels against the grumpy ruminations of critic Vincent Canby regarding by explainging the reasons why its simple plot and one-dimensional characterizations have made it part of the essential American cult canon. A lot of this has to do with Charles Bronson, and his fierce performance, but also the universal unconditional truth of an eye for an eye, which historians say is the beginning of civilization (and well, probably the end of the world, too). Still can't get over the fact that Jeff Goldblum was the rapist bad guy in this movie, but even he is convincingly creepy with the kind of loathsome Me Decade-spawned animalism that Americans of the time projected into the New York City "wilderness."

I have a library full of music books but don't buy that many books of film criticism because there's often little zest for ideas or language; movie reviews are often just synopses and studied opinion, or tautological exposition. And the writers rarely feast on the imagery and milieus around a film to assimilate and even illuminate its point of view. Most film critics try to ethically run before they can morally crawl. That's why these two endlessly entertaining and inspiring films have passed under their wire, and get plopped into our players more than the big, cinematic "good for us" exercises in polemics. There are my own personal examples of course of film critics who rise above (Pauline Kael, Robin Wood, Kathy Fennessy, and yes, current Ebert), but I do look forward to the future when my library will be well stocked with titles as fun, fetching, and fearless as these first two Deep Focus ones.

Reality heightened with noir style in three mind-bending new titles from Fantagraphics

Chris Estey — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 22:37:06 +0000

abandonedcars.jpg

For those who were thrilled by the tribute to film noir at this year's Seattle International Film Festival, and are craving that same sexy, dark psychosis in some graphic novels, locally-based/internationally renowned publisher Fantagraphics recently put out three books to cooly creep out your summer.

Abandoned Cars: Stories by Tim Lane was released last year in a beautiful hardcover, but now is available in a more affordable but just as high quality trade paperback. Tapping into the madness of American mythology, road stories, tall tales, hobo code, rock and roll lyrics, urban madness, rural sickness, these stories of losers, goners, and low-rent thugs has brilliant homage-design, dense text, and the nervous energy or dread of a True Blood on HBO (only with psychic, not fantasy, vampires), or a "John Wayne Gacy, Jr." from Sufjan Stevens in song. A couple hundred packed pages of not so quietly but very mordantly funny desperation.

West Coast Blues by Jacques Tardi and Jean-Patrick Manchette might look a little familiar to people familiar with the periodical Heavy Metal (the long-running genre-serial magazine of weirdness begun first in Europe), because French illustrator Tardi was often reprinted there. But the musical inspiration for West Coast Blues is pure cool jazz, its shrewd but who-gives-a-fuck protagonist an addict of players like Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, and other guys perfect for setting a soundtrack lush with baritone sax and sudden brawls. George Gerfaut is an ordinary guy (who just likes to get a buzz on pills and bourbon and drive fast) who gets a hit placed on him after he helps someone out who owed the wrong "made" man. His strange half-beatnik/half-businessman lifestyle is thrown into violent chaos, by comics-reading musclemen who have decided to play a killing game with the wrong nihilist. He's willing to go into hiding to draw out his revenge, and it's in these strange windings of the plot that Manchette (author of ten brilliant noir novels, including this one) keeps you burning through the pages. The black and white artwork is expansive and uses an oscillation of detail (often stark, especially when someone's getting their face blown off) which makes it addictive to stare at. This is my favorite book by Tardi, who I hope adapts more of Manchette's work; if you love Chandler or the mood of Elvis Costello's "Watching The Detectives" this is your graphic novel.

King Of The Flies by Mezzo and Pirus is the biggest and boldest of these three books; like Abandoned Cars it is short stories, but it is actually a segmented novel as cohesive cumulatively as West Coast Blues. The German translation (subtitled 1. Hallorave) is gloriously colored and though the artwork is disturbing and seductive in the best band flyer way, it really helps keep its paranoid saga of violent raves, Jarvis Cocker obsession, pills, confused teenagers, alcoholically demented fathers, pills, enormous bug masks, atomic fears, pills, hubris-distorted redneck greasers, and more pills spinning in your head long after you read it. Sort of like if Richard Lanklater (Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly) filmed a script co-written by Davids Lynch and Cronenberg, or the comic version of an LCD Soundsystem mock opera. Damaged but delightfully compelling, and two more volumes are set to be released by the amazing Fantagraphics.

The punk rock life and unsolved death of the mastermind behind "New Wave Theatre" is extraordinary reading

Chris Estey — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 08:21:31 +0000

Have you ever seen Eraserhead? In David Lynch's first B&W Surrealist mind-hump of a movie, there is scene with a little song the "Lady in the Radiator" sings in which the only lyrics are: "In heaven, everything is fine." It is a supremely affecting and menacing moment in an art film filled with them.

Josh Frank, co-author of Fool The World, The Oral History of a Band Called The Pixies, was a Twin Peaks fan growing up in suburban Potomac, Maryland when he first saw that perverse pageantry. He would later come to find out the otherworldly, upsetting tune was written by Peter Ivers, an experimental-pop musician and the catalyst-center of an early experiment in cable television's desire to blend challenging new rock music, insurgent comedy, and arty weirdness into a show called New Wave Theatre.

That show featured bands like the Dead Kennedys and Fear, among many others, and lived up to the strangeness of the movie Ivers wrote the song for, as well as his classically bizarre LPs Knight of the Blue Communion (1969), Terminal Love (1974), and others. Full of stark imagery mixed with improvisational madness, Ivers' own music was simply another element of this proto-punk Renaissance Man's adventures in acting, humor, TV scores (for Roger Corman flicks and even Starsky & Hutch), but most of all, his New Wave Theatre, which was a thinly veiled look at the real Los Angeles underground shot out on channels like USA to the heartland of America, rattling the minds of its children. It thrilled John Belushi and Harold Ramis, whose lives would be entwined with Ivers' own, as driven to excessive creativity as the former but with an ambitious heart to entertain wide-scale too like the latter. As status-quo karmic payback (if you believe in crap like that) Ivers was found gruesomely beaten to death in his art studio-loft-music space on March 3, 1983.

In Heaven Everything Is Fine is an excellent oral history constructed by Frank (also known for The Jonathan Richman Musical) and co-authored by novelist Charlie Buckholt. It has to wade through the morbid realms of the druggies and dangerous thugs who populated Ivers' private life to try and make sense of his cruelly brutal death, which shows what people who were creating on the margins of society were doing to dream and get by before MTV and the Internet told them what was acceptably "cool." I remember finding New Wave Theatre pretty annoying, personally, because it pushed a sloppy, weaning humanism at the same time it let me see my favorite first wave hardcore bands. Ivers had a tendency to "challenge" his guests and ask them "probing" questions, but unlike same-period comedians such as Andy Kaufman (who let you guess why he wanted to wrestle women so feverishly), the post-hippie ideology crammed against the liberating musical aesthetics. Still, Ivers' mysteriously ambivalent social sexuality, commitment to sweeping away apathy, and building community in strangeness, were essential to the cause of alternative culture. If not for the meddling and probably malicious over-control of a creative partner named David Jove, Ivers may have lived longer to antagonize consumer society into the new century. Or would have ended up a casualty like Klaus Nomi or Kaufman himself. Hard to say.

Still, In Heaven Everything Is Fine is an alternately inspiring and toe-curdling tale of one of the sweet, strong, idealistic personalities of someone who brought many people together to do something wild and wonderful in a world of commercial conformism. LA was rocked hard by Ivers, and even those who shared his need to shock and awaken his audience (whoever that may be, bored hipsters and dead-eyed mall kids alike awake at 3 AM vegging out to the demon box) felt the need to spar with him. From history-clearing interviews with Lampoon writer Doug Kenney to shit-stirring rants from members of Angry Samoans, Devo, and others make this an irradiating glimpse into the punched up, often painful beginnings of a world that makes a lot of what you see and hear at venues or in modern alt-weeklies/blogs or in current music at all possible.

New Bomb Turks frontman writes essential tome on punk from 1988-2001

Chris Estey — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 14:26:18 +0000

"We've always been of the mind that it's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to ask for permission." --Eddie Spaghetti, The Supersuckers.

So begins We Never Learn: The Gunk Punk Undergut: 1988-2001 by Eric Davidson, whose name you may have seen on by-lines for succinct, sucker-punching articles in Village Voice media papers and on features in CMJ, and elsewhere. Or you may know him as a member of New Bomb Turks, one of the bands that kept underground, garage-fumed punk rock alive through the 90s pop punk boom-bust.

Davidson has spent years putting together this over-300 page Bible of the fecund underbelly of three chord, deviant American independent rawk, beginning with the death throes of 80s hardcore as bands like The Cynics and Death Of Samantha pushed noise from "loud, fast rules" to "loud, lo-fi blues." Remember walking into Fallout Records on Olive and seeing vinyl kept alive by bands like the Raunch Hands, Didjits, A-Bones, and Devil Dogs (among all the zines and comix and gnarly t-shirts)? Or when you went in to get the new Spinanes or Built To Spill CDs at the Sub Pop Mega Mart and saw Sub Pop and other labels releasing and distributing rare and obscure scuzzy sounds from Thee Headcoats, Dwarves, and Oblivians? "We Never Learn" comes with a paralyzing free CD sample of this no sell-out, no-surrender punk to soundtrack the history Davidson tells.

And Davidson tells this history with a ton of laughs and love, with more insider shit-talk and acid humor than earlier-era American Hardcore due to his well-honed scribing talents. It happily makes a link from the national garage punk scene to the crossover grunge bands that were always a part of the cesspool that spawned alternative and its nasty little backyard noise brothers and sisters. Any given week these days you can go to Georgetown and hear bands influenced by the ones he tells crazy anecdote after anecdote about, tracking how groups like Rocket From The Crypt scraped through the mainstream, as the Mummies influenced new swarms of basement and club creatures like the Rip-Offs. The garage punk scene bubbled up into major label status every now and again, labels like Epitaph scrambled to sign up New Bomb Turks and other gristly gangs to beef up their street cred, and Davidson doesn't hesitate to explain how awry those plans often went.

But stories like the one about smiling Seattle transplant Tim Hayes (from Austin's original Whore Moans and who owned Fallout after long time supporter Russ gave it up) -- who rigorously chases down a gutter-punk shoplifter from a record store, through alleys and on to curbs, who then poops his pants and finally gives up the Butthole Surfers (?!) t-shirt he kyped -- make this narrative a treasure trove of goon gossip and forgotten tales. Who were all those bands from the Sub Pop singles club, on the back of Seattle magazines like Fizz and Tablet, who are all over the same compilations you treasure for the early White Stripes tracks? They're in We Never Learn.

"We've always been of the mind that it's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to ask for permission." --Eddie Spaghetti, The Supersuckers.

Punk comics Love & Rockets creator will be at Emerald City Con this weekend

Chris Estey — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:28:37 +0000

This weekend (Saturday and Sunday, March 13 and 14) Seattle area comics fans have a big old funny book hootenanny to party at inside the Washington State Convention Center. There are some panels and huge rooms full of comics and toys being sold. Also, dealers of another kind: I found the bootleg soundtrack to the Aussie skinhead flick Romper Stomper there last year! Right before a dark cloud of Suicide Girls turned a long table's corner and crashed into a swarm of Star Wars Storm Troopers. I am not making any of this up. It was freaking awesome-possum.

Last year one half of the Love & Rockets duo Jaime Hernandez graciously held down the fort at his publisher Fantagraphics' table, signing books and demurely chatting with fans and pals. Love & Rockets was a next level title in the 80s that put Seattle-based Fanta on the map and changed the entire world of both mainstream and alternative comics, which had been a little dry creatively since the 70s.

Jaime's brother Gilbert is here for the 2010 convention, and will be attending an ECCC after party and kick off for his exhibit at the Fantagraphics store in Georgetown, as well as publication of the 25th volume in the collected L&R series, High Soft Lisp. be careful though: Gilbert is a brooding vicious brute of a man, the Hyde to his brother's Jekyll. His idea of a good time is pouring beer on the floor of a punk club just to see kids slide around and fall down. No, seriously, he's actually a wonderful cartoonist and true punk art pioneer, and actually is very genial to everyone who approaches him.

He and his artist and musician brothers (the latter in legendary Dr. Know, you might have seen their patches at Singles Going Steady) are incredibly well respect in and out of the Mexican punk and urban communities. When I taped an interview with Barfly for The Saturday Knights for a bio a few years ago, the hip-hop genius couldn't stop giving loving props to the Southern California underground comics-saviors.

And oh yeah, Leonard Nimoy is there, and Stan Lee, and Thomas Jane, and Wil Wheaton, and a bunch of other media people who are comics-like I suppose. But the lines to get autographs from them won't be as long as the one for Fantagraphics, because this world is about as fair as the three strikes law.

The three books I would currently recommend you picking up from the Fantagraphics table (besides High Soft Lisp), which are pretty much comics as rock and roll and rock and roll as comics, are these:

Newave: The Underground Mini-Comix of the 1980s. Lots of strange stories and fantastical doodling, with history and observations from Michael Dowers (gee, that last name sounds familiar), and the late comics-catalyst-librarian Clay Geerdes about the revolution in DIY underground publishing that spurted up in the Reagan years. Mini-comix were usually subconscious transgressive sexual and political rants in which their small press runs and limited audience would allow the artists to express whatever the hell their odd Ids whimmed. This is a squat but very thick tome of pure punk-era ink spazzery. This was the milieu that spawned creators like Daniel Clowes but also was a freak magnet for zine scribes and cultural marginals.

Hotwire Comics #3. At first neglected by the indie nabobs who love the more literary Mome and Top Shelf and Drawn & Quarterly titles, Hotwire is RAW and Weirdo Comix (in the 80s) veteran Glenn Head's huge, beautiful, multi-artist anthology which has been praised by Boing Boing, Greil Marcus, and others. It is one of the few comics collections that unites the psychedelic extrapolations of the 60s with the aforementioned 80s society attack-back, in unholy visions for a new generation of art-damaged delinquents. (This as well is not a book for the kids, unless your plan is harvesting sociopaths.) The stories (from Michael Tales Designed To Thrizzle Kupperman to Johnny Angry Youth Comix Ryan and much more) run from somewhat surrealist biographical narratives to all out war on the senses, sometimes within the same big, full-page script; the art is detailed and enervated and colored boldly. Head's doing a great job with this fresh title.

Portable Grindhouse: The Lost Art Of The VHS Box. Collected by editor Jacques Boyreau, this is not comics but a great way for Fantagraphics to jolt another aesthetically provocative statement into the world of pop culture publishing. It's also beautiful, even when the VCR tape cover art is astonishingly primitive and stoopid. Paintings and photos on the fronts and backs of Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity, The Legend Of The Wolf Woman, and a Gary Coleman home safety instructional video are represented. If you're not much into the narrative form of comics, it's art books like this that will probably keep you at the Fantagraphics table for hours.

When you're not waiting to meet Spock, that is.

Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk

Chris Estey — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:53:18 +0000

When author Tony DuShane was a nervous young man struggling with being a Jehovah's Witness, his extremely religious father lost his mind and punched five holes in the wall above their living room couch. To hide these examples of his dad's breaking point, the already-disfellowshipped teenager plastered an Einsterzende Neubauten poster over the damage.

This is one of the minor scenes in a very funny, but also very mood-rattling novel by DuShane, whose "Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk" came out from Soft Skull Press on February 2nd. It's marketed as fiction, but due to the author's own past and the curiosity those of us outside the cult have about the goings-on of all those extremely well-dressed young men and women who thrust crappy end-of-the-world literature at us downtown, it probably wouldn't hurt to consider it memoir.

Beat-inspired landmark rock critic Lester Bangs wrote a nightmarish song about growing up as a JW and seeing a family member burned up in a fire ("There's A Man In There" from his short-lived band Birdland), mixing up the apocalyptic images in his head. When you consider that Patti Smith went door to door with Watchtowers before she embraced Baudelaire and Jagger and Burroughs as her scripture, and how much Pere Ubu's David Thomas uses his background in the very American religion to write blackly comedic mini-operas to paradise lost and everything falling apart, critical thinking punks should dig into "Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk" at least for the dirt.

And it's here: Due to never claiming citizenship with anywhere but heaven itself, many JWs were slaughtered in Malawai because church elders forbid them to buy citizenship cards. The manipulations and bribes with the Mexican government at that time (the 1970s) were a turning point for realizing just how much this organized religion prizes property and power above the lives of its members (just like pretty much all the others).

But it's the condemnation of popular culture and its rebel baby rock and roll, the ever-enforced weird sexual repressions, and constant domineering by elders in the church locally that fuels the ferocious confessions of DuShane's narrator. As helping a drunken bridesmaid get through her wedding becomes more transgressive than physical abuse elsewhere in the congregation. As the protagonist describes the psychic murder of his mother by his father's justification of the sociopathic actions of the church elders.

Somehow, DuShane adroitly lets us into this veiled world but also makes the awkward longings and petty punishments relatable for anyone who's craved both familial and community acceptance but wanted personal freedom, too.

The new issue of Rolling Stone has an excellent article on the Dahn Yoga cult which originated in Korea but has mad money connections and political power here, reprising the 80s invasion of the Moonies into right wing Christian fundamentalist organizations. In other words, this is a great book to laugh and cry to, but also to get some background so you know why Pat Robertson sounds like a berserk reptile from the planet Fuckhead.

Imaginary wishlist: Great reads of 2009

Chris Estey — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 18:10:27 +0000

2009 was an excellent year for book lovers, even if publishers became as entrenched about withering economic changes as much as the cowering music industry. And as May '68 prophet of speed Paul Virilio was quoted in a 2002 interview, "If there is one place where you're scared, it's a bunker."

Great literature and thrilling reads (and mixtures of both) still made it into the margins of the marketplace, where the best stuff always sticks. Even a couple of lofty but subversive tomes with hefty price tags bobbled up into the mainstream, the perfect gifts to impress print-stubborn smart uncles and shrewd aunts during the holidays. But if you've been famished yourself for some tasty writing, be it scholarly or humorous or woven through excellent art and design, what follows is a short list of lit I personally endorse. Take it with you to an independent like Elliot Bay Bookstore, Third Place, University Bookstore, or any other fine vendor in the Pacific NW or elsewhere.

A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors (Belknap/Harvard), if you can afford its over-$40 price tag, is probably the one book you want to buy for yourself this season. A thousand page-thick cultural-theorist documentation of the United States, It is well worth every penny, with essays by Marcus on Moby-Dick, NPR's beloved Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood's painting American Gothic, dazzling pop critic Douglas Wolk on Superman, EMP Pop Conference philosophical agitator Joshua Clover on Bob Dylan, and so much more. The Vowell analysis of the society surrounding the times and photographic sensibility that went into the painting of that famously dour farming couple is great journalism, while fans of Brian Eno should be forced to read David A. Mindell's history of Cybernetics to understand where his Oblique Strategies evolved from. Low Life author Luc Sante on the invention of the blues (where he can pretty much trace it to a few dudes, sort of), and some other pieces have seen light before, but it's a thrill to have them all coffee table booking it in a volume as big as a coffee table. Just add legs. An give yourself a year of spare time to wallow in all this goodness.

The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book: Two Stories by Joe Daly is a great follow up to also Fantagraphics-published Scrublands, and proof that the Seattle publisher will travel the world, even going so far as South Africa, to help bring the best artists to the graphic novel scene. Druggy noir vividly told, Red Monkey is like watching Jim Rockford take a monster bong-hit before getting bashed in the jaw by some muscle of a rich guy in a bar bathroom. "The Leaking Cello Case" and "John Wesley Harding" are both contenders for short graphic fiction of the year, with pellucid plotting distorted by strange times and scary surprises. The artwork is like the more story-based finely crafted alternative comics of the 90s, and the sense of distorted place and identity as creative as fiction by Thomas Pynchon. If that seems lofty, start here and wait for Daly to one day unveil his Gravity's Rainbow.

Life With Sudden Death (Counterpoint) by Michael Downing is my favorite non-music, non-comics memoir of the year. It's a fascinating tale of unintended medical torture and the weird indifference of the universe told by an author living with a condition that can cease his existence at any time. At age 45, a scrap of his DNA came up as a mutation, though Downing was feeling just fine and in proper shape. This begins a search into the genetic curse of his lineage, and a complicated series of relationships with doctors who feel compelled to solve this mystery. In terms of telling a tale of our time, the information on his insurance company alone is enough to put anyone on the side of reform. "I was repeatedly told that everything possible was being done for my own good, and yet I seemed to be the only person involved in the project who was not prospering." It's this central view of mordant acceptance that makes the title of this book a story we could all relate to, even if it's horribly peculiar.

How To Be Inappropriate by Daniel Nester is my choice for humorous essay collection of the year, starring a writer unafraid to put himself in tawdry, humiliating positions to be able to personally describe them and the feelings created by them. Another sharp creative non-fiction release from Soft Skull, this is a breeze of a read, rhapsodizing on the Bon Jovi-made-famous "talk box" (think "Livin' On A Prayer"), Christians who consciously adore their own kitsch, a "fartspotter's guide to passings of the wind," a query into the footlicking fetish and his wife's hilariously inimical response to it, and what happened when Gene Simmons of KISS was interviewed by NPR's Terry Gross (in the form of a robot), and the failure that was his own rock band, Fear Itself. There's a lot of fucking up here, but keenly makes lemon-grenades out of lemon peelings, or something.

Vagabond Holes

Chris Estey — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:19:47 +0000

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A couple of years ago Domino Records reissued five glorious double-disc treatments of The Triffids' obscure oeuvre, little known jewels from the one band every Australian post-punk music fan has heard of, and most haven't heard. Till then, it was hard to procure the less than a half dozen albums and smattering of EPs the group had painfully crafted for their similarly literate and pub-loving fans. Even Born Sandy Devotional, their most cohesive full-length and the one that gets slid in lists with monumental guitar-driven 80s rock as much as Crazy Rhythms, Porcupine, or Let It Be, languished in unlicensed limbo seemingly forever.

Such was the luck or theodicy-thwarted fate of Dave McComb, astonishing lyricist for and leader of the underground-endeared band, who passed away just over 35 in 1999, after using up two hearts, one given and one planted into him. McComb's voice reminds one of Ian McCulloch, with that handsome wavering tone of eternal Donnie Darko nocturnal rock. McComb often credited countryman Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds for inspiration into Scripture and sad blues songs as well as punk rock squall and drunken chaos, but besides heavy use of bass guitar, the mystery vibes of pre-Goth dance-driven Brit rock infuse immortal pleasures like "Jesus Calling," "Property Is Condemned," and "Bottle Of Love." If you dig your early alternative rock-era grooves moody and roots-mighty, lyrically mysterious but melodically twangy, The Triffids are the brother you never had.

Edited by Chris Coughran and Niall Lucy, the elegantly designed and printed Vagabond Holes is a near 400 page Bible of all things Triffids, touching on McComb's troubled youth and religious rebellion, and the relationships with the rest of his inspired band-mates. It does not claim to be a coherent narrative, but features awestruck and acerbic gospels from friends and fans Martyn P. Casey, Robert Forster, Steve Kilbey, Mick Harvey, Cave himself, and Pink Flag 33 1/3 author Wilson Neate. Among many others. It is exactly the type of book you would want produced on all your other beloved smart yet soulful guy and gal favorites, from Magnetic Fields to Neko Case.

Along with the gorgeously illustrated and fannish history Freemantle is putting out a generous volume of McComb's poetry, Beautiful Waste, by the same editors, with an extraordinary introduction by academic John Kinsella. Since discovering the Domino re-releases, McComb has become one of my very favorite lyricists in rock music, but I didn't expect him to be branded on my heart as one of my favorite poets too. McComb is a lot smarter than your usual pop music wordsmith, but don't let his multi-layered expositions keep you from trying to get into his worldview. The poetry book might be a great introduction to the man's intricate observations and wordplay before you even investigate his biography. But don't put off purchasing Vagabond Holes or the CDs for long, as a densely-designed world of miraculously made underground music awaits you.

Live Nude Elf: A Carrie Bradshaw for malcontents and the elvish

Chris Estey — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 03:02:50 +0000

She's a young woman in the big city writing a column about sex. She learns a lot with her friends, goes through scandalous relationships and ambivalent infatuations, learns to love what she thought she hates and vice versa, and confounds her own presumptions along this path.

No, it's not Sex in the City, it's sex in the city.

"Reverend" Jen Miller holds her own in the gnarly Lower East Side, engaged professionally in the competitive art scene in a variety of confrontative performing capacities, and also happened to found ASS Magazine. Oh yeah, she's also the curator at a Troll Museum.

So no prissy ladies and guys named "Big" get written about in her work memoir, Live Nude Elf, just out from Soft Skull Press. It's a collection of scribed "sexperiments" that has all the drama and humor of an adult TV show but involves being tied to a cross in the middle of a crowded orgy and visiting an opium den. Adult babies, Tantric immersion, and regular heartbreak are part of the curriculum, all begun when Miller began as a live nude girl at "Wiggles" (hence the title, but it's not the last time she drops clothes in public in this book).

Miller falls in love just like anybody else, despite knowing bisexual performance artists who make jars of condiments their love objects, and it's in her surprise in discovery of new feelings in experiencing both the weird and universal that allows Live Nude Elf to transcend Bad Girl manifestos or kinky sex manuals. As accomplished as she is in the underground, she brings a thinking-sweetness and hesitant-openness to these experiences that seems, well, naked. So Live Nude Elf is a joy to read for both acolyte and expert of amore, as well as the average fan of autobiography.

No, it's not Sex in the City, it's sex in the city.

McSweeney's New Fiction at Bumbershoot

Chelsea Werner — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 03:48:14 +0000

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This panel was of great interest to me since getting fiction published through McSweeney’s would be a dream come true, so even just hearing this authors, all first-time published fiction writers, talk about the experience of having Eli Horowirtz, McSweeny’s editor, work with them on their novels was a treat.

Bill Cutter, author of “Fever Chart,” claimed that he unflinchingly did pretty much everything Eli told him to. Meanwhile Jessica Anthony said that when editing a particular passage of her book, “The Convalescence,” Eli had her write six different versions and on the seventh she told him that this was her final draft (it was also the original text, before she had changed anything) and he responded that she nailed it. James Hannaham’s book “God Says No,” described the liberating feeling of cutting the first five chapters of his novel before even sending it into the Dave Eggers founded publishing house for consideration.

The panel included readings from each author, all whom seem to place their eccentric characters in absurd situations. A near midget shitting in a bucket and slinging meat from a broken down bus in Virgina, a man fresh from the psych ward cultivating a pimple as an excuse to make conversation with a bartender, or a latent homosexual unwittingly picking up a lactose intolerant lady of the night and trying to buy her ice cream, are some examples of what their books had to offer.

What was most interesting however was the banter between these three authors whose only connection to one another was that they had all recently been published by McSweeney’s. Cutter’s statement that he doesn’t give a fuck about the story, “I just like the sentences. The editor makes the story,” was met by a skeptical expression on Hannaham’s face. Though both men agreed when Jessica Anthony referred to her endeavor in a career around fiction writing saying that it came down to either becoming a writer or a felon. It would seem these three had no choice. That writing was something they were driven to do. Whether they have to turn off all the lights and get inside themselves in order to get the words on the page or dance around to Queen’s “Tie Your Mother Down,” they seem to agree that the writer is always working, whether or not they are in front of their computers.

Our Noise: The Story Of Merge Records to be released September 22nd

Chris Estey — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:30:48 +0000

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Warning: This is an ecstatic early plug for the upcoming fan-dream book, Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, the Indie Label that Got Big and Stayed Small.

As Magnet magazine is quoted, "[Merge] might be responsible for more indie-rock classics than any other label in the past two decades." David Byrne considers their survival "kind of amazing these days." NPR asserts they're "one of the top independent labels in the world." In Our Noise author John Cook shows the letter that Glitterhouse sent to Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance (in Superchunk, of course, and who started the label) originally sent turning down European distribution (it's hilarious, considering what Merge would achieve); to the later days when Mac feels giddy and weird hanging out near Dr. Dre and Springsteen at Coachella.

All I know is that where stacks of my favorite records have drifted into corners of my apartment, there are piles that specifically look like a shuffled Merge release history. Superchunk, Neutral Milk Hotel, Magnetic Fields, Spoon, and so many others are endlessly downloaded into my iPod, drunkenly grabbed on melancholy work nights, and burned into mix CDs for comrades that I need them close by whenever.

And now there's a luscious fat trade paperback tribute book from Algonquin that has a ton of art, photos, obscure record covers, scraps of visual history, and a lot of really cool and funny anecdotes and observations of the label throughout its two decade lifetime. Chapters include "Death Chick and The Cave Man: 1987-1989," "Signals That Sound In The Dark: Neutral Milk Hotel," "The Book of Love: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields," "The Decline of Country and Western Civilization: Lambchop," all kicked off by an outrageous drool-intro by Ryan Adams.

Label fan books have been declining since print has been "dying," though Brian J. Barr recently left his position as music editor at the Seattle Weekly to scribe one for Sub Pop (!), though high quality ones have never been ubiquitous in the first place. Cook, who is a reporter with Gawker Media, is a lucky man, who had a truly legendary label to chronicle, and his editing of oral histories from excellent convesationalists involved with or on the label is superb.

Which raises the question, what label would you like to write and/or design an extensive fan book for?

Warning: This is an ecstatic early plug for the upcoming fan-dream book, Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, the Indie Label that Got Big and Stayed Small.

Audio Oasis: An Imaginary Treatise on Sound

Chris Estey — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 16:50:27 +0000

You know Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, Dan Deacon and other great indie innovators are getting textural and contextual inspiration from somewhere other than what's reviewed in Rolling Stone or Pitchfork, but where? In The Blink Of An Ear, written by Seth Kim-Cohen, subtitled Toward A Non-Cochlear Sound, might put you on their same journey outside the boundaries.

A cochlea is a the snail-shaped inner ear which receives sound, and this book is all about how we receive sound and what we do with it in our minds. The music business is an industry built on sound, but there are many people who build sound from industry for a livelihood and legend. Kim-Cohen is the Director and Assistant Professor of Art and Theory at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, has taught art history at Yale and the Pratt Institute, and has had many art showings in places like Tate Modern and the ICA in London.

Why is an academic and artist like this of interest to the music fan? Well, alternative rock has its roots in the art school scene -- the Sex Pistols and Talking Heads and Superchunk who have all done songs about the milieu, and bands like Wire and Gang of Four and many others would have never existed without it. That's where they formed (in their physical lives), but it wasn't just a location these young, potentially innovative people obsessed with change and culture came to, it's where a Brian Eno would teach the mutual joys of ambient noise and doo-wop, as recently described in the Wire Pink Flag 33 1/3. It's where ideas met sound, and that's Kim-Cohen's living and playground.

Speaking of those books, In The Blink Of An Ear is published by the 33 1/3 publisher Continuum, and though my knowledge of Alvin Lucier and La Monte Young has been mostly strained in conversations with underground cassette fans and Velvet Underground obsessives, I was engrossed by the stories of breakthroughs of dogged sound experimenters Cage and Fowler, whose works are analyzed along with those of Muddy Waters and Bob Dylan. The author spends a lucent chapter circuitously studying every note that went into the song "Like A Rolling Stone" by Bob Dylan, from the jarring changes of a tune semi-spontaneously crafted in the studio shortly after its creation (something rarely done these days), and how that's juxtaposed with the specifically lo-fi works of Pavement, Sebadoh, and Guided By Voices.

Kim-Cohen has been studying sound professionally for a long time, yet never hesitates to admit that he might not know the possibly flexuous intentions of the artist he discusses, but brings that in for discussion as well. His writing on the gritty expression in the noise-pop of the Silver Jews is as spunky as anything on P4k.

Aligning his reviews of sound with texts by Derrida, Lyotard, and other post-modernist philosophers, avant-garde performance seems a strange twin with pop culture in its evolution. Again, my favorite example of this is how he assays "Like A Rolling Stone," where the opening kick drum and snare blast is an "opening onto the past and into the future." The story of an accuser who both casts his subject as "invisible now" yet has "no secrets to conceal" is a "semantic fabric" made by an artist who was aware he was becoming an author of real history.

Kim-Cohen even contacts Greil Marcus, who wrote a whole unshakable tome on the sociological and artistic of this one song himself (and it's really good! And this book even adds to it!), to debate the existence of the tape splice he hears at the start of the fourth verse which Marcus doesn't mention. I won't elaborate on that drama, but Kin-Cohen has scrutinized the pacing of the song so well he can sense the nerves of the players backing Dylan and exactly when they knew they had it in the bag enough to back off a little.

There will probably never be a 33 1/3 series for the sort of Seattle music fans who guzzle the noise at the Decibel festival and other music-expanding events, but at least Continuum has hired a sagacious and savvy author to craft an anthology of works that has me running to one of our favorite record stores, Wall Of Sound, to plunder some phonics I've missed. Bravo!

Michael Muhammad Knight is the Muslim punk Salinger

Chris Estey — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 13:16:36 +0000

A Shi'ite skinhead and his female punk-hippie partner in crime abduct a movie star to threaten Hollywood into making films in which Muslims don't all appear to be bearded, blood-thirsty terrorist meat puppets. "Just one movie where we're not these two-dimensional Al-Qaeda stereotypes," the Amazing Ayyub insists, keeping Matt Damon for ransom. The actor negotiates for reason with the kidnappers, though, trying to convince them they have played into the media and government's hands by using antagonistic force.

Michael Muhammed Knight is the author of this story, titled Osama Van Halen, which is just out from Soft Skull Press. It's Knight's most elegantly provocative book, mixing the surreal elements of his own marginalized life (son of a paranoid schizophrenic and white supremacist, the most prominent literary voice for American Muslim punks) with a newfound venom for the plastic consumer's prison around us.

Knight first made an impression with The Taqwacores, a short novel about extreme progressive young men and women living in a Muslim-punk group house in New York, mixing up this generation's embittered iconoclasts with those of fierce hope-based faith in the same raging gutters. "Sex, dope, and religion" was enough of a combination to get Knight praised highly everywhere from Maximum Rocknroll to Newsweek ("A manifesto for the Muslim punk movement"), and also gotten his work set upon by the hounds of censorship.

That first novel inspired Knight to write his memoir "Impossible Man," where he explicitly showed how his violent redneck upbringing squeezed him into provoking authority, and submitting to a higher love. His writing is as thoughtful as his lifestyle has been tenacious, which has led him to be both poet and teacher of the underground.

Soft Skull has published all these books, and they're all outstanding in their own ways. Knight knows New York, Hip-Hop, punk rock, the Sufi faith, riot grrrls, and other mystical spaces enough that the Taqwacores is going to be a movie soon, and I can't imagine Osama Van Halen won't be soon to follow, perhaps starring Matt Damon himself (hint, suggestion).

Sound Unbound

Chris Estey — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 04:18:24 +0000

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This is a thick, encyclopedic collection of essays about aesthetics, by people who have a tendency to take structural forms (pop songs, soul music, genre literature, rock criticism, etc.) and mutate them into new forms of media.

From textbook-style packaging and accompanying CD, it may seem like a dry read, but it isn't. This is probably the most useful music journalism manifesto since Re/Search published its Industrial Handbook or Tape Delay came out in the mid-80s (with its writings by and interviews with Cave, Galas, etc.).

That's not to say everything in here makes total sense to the average reader. Author Jonathan Lethem does an avant-text loop of popular culture quotes that reminds me of similar experiments from the past few decades, but I don't find "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism Mosaic" very satisfying for either instruction or entertainment. And certainly not more compelling than what Stewart Home and the Neoists wrote using the same ideology and technique in the late 80s. I didn't particularly need another interview with Moby either.

Here's a thought: Why did Leonard Cohen change from acoustic guitars to Casio keyboards for the "Various Positions" records and every album thereafter? As far as I know, no one has really discussed that at length with him, who like Tom Waits changed his entire style in context so that his content wouldn't be outdated. All of Moby's artistic decisions have been backed up by the milieu (whether in sales or by critical consensus), but Cohen's is always seen as tacky (due to him using cheap technology? That can't be it, can it? Because classicism by noise-fetishists would suck -- unless of course, it always does come down to what gear you can afford, and how few 'ordinary' people actually listen to your music). And both have genre (hardcore and folk) backgrounds.

But that's criticizing something for what it isn't, and what this book is, is great. Cyberpunk novelist and "dead media researcher" Bruce Sterling does a remarkable job at discussing the merits of communicative forms that are archaic, and yet have tumescent value to the artist. (For example, the quipu, that was once "the nervous system of a major civilization," the Incas, and it was a very simple-seeming but extremely efficient "knot system" of historical record, a computer and calculator and day planner made out of colored threads.)

Sterling reminds us that cinema was a combination of a whole bunch of so-called "failed technologies" (such as Edison's kinetoscope, but also including the tachyscope, the vitagraph, the cinematographe, et al) as well as how "talkies" were not the only films in which people spoke (it just happened to become the popular form, for reasons of marketing and luck).

Dick Hebridge, who wrote one of the very best books about the roots of punk style and millennial fashion, "Subculture," contributes a brilliant meditation on dystopia as well, while one of my very favorite writers, Erik Davis (whose Led Zep 33 1/3 is head and shoulders above most of the other volumes in the series, and never fails to make every issue of Arthur Magazine a transcendent experience) examines the dense spiritual terrain between polyrhythm, technology and race: he knows heavy anthropological shit about the beliefs and practices of primitive cultures and what kind of future our own ideologies and art-forms will lead to, not to mention chatting up good stuff about funky cosmic music a couple decades ago, and his contribution could be considered the centerpiece of an already excellent book.

Simon Reynolds (whose book Blissed Out about rock and techno and spirituality broke the news about Nick Cave's fixation on the Bible, and the secret Situationism of many of your favorite underground artists) has a wonderful accompaniment to Davis's piece called "Renegade Academia."

From there, Brian Eno studies time and sound (and as I've always said, anything you can read of Eno will teach you at least one thing you've never even thought about before) through the history of bells, and Chuck D, Saul Williams, and Daniel Bernard Roumain take a more kinesthetic approach, keeping the text alive and crisp, and other writers like Joseph Lanza focus on the real reason misperceived "E-Z Listening" music was so compelling and collectable for "hi-fi" owners back in the days of early space age bachelor pads and swinging wreck rooms.

If the EMP Pop Con was strictly about dropping sound science, it would be in the form of this book. So buy it with Listen Again, the great new tome of Pop Con collected papers/presentations, and Brian Coleman's Check the Technique from last year, an update of his roots-of-rap Rakim Told Me, for the whole smear. That's a whole lot of great reading about listening, and as Mr. Davis might say, a whole lotta love.

Encyclopedia broadside of future thought about the present, and prescient thoughts about the future of music and, um, the future.

Mome Vol. 11, Summer 2008

Chris Estey — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 20:30:16 +0000

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I have reviewed MOME for Three Imaginary Girls before, and usually a music website is perfectly satisfied with one plug for a comics title. But MOME is the flagship anthology of worldwide graphic arts juggernaut Fantagraphics. What kind of comics company is Fanta, you probably already know? The kind that shares space with Georgetown Records in ripping roiling (da dum) Georgetown and the two fannish crowds to both blend together seamlessly. It's the funny pages factory (I'm being a dolt on purpose by the way, we indie rock comics fans have ass-hats stuffed with irony, imagine that) where Mark Arm would do manual labor around if Sub Pop got sleepy or had no openings when he came back from tour with the 'honey (do Mudhoney call themselves that? Does anyone? I rather like it). And rumor has that he does.

Volume 11, Summer 2008 of MOME is a big improvement over some recent issues, wherein some of their regulars petered out in the inspiration department. The main reason I am raving about it now (if Books had ratings on TIG this would be an "8") is the first-time American publication of German cartoonist Killoffer (single cool name, like Stephen M. and Mister Rogers Nelson) whose very cool cover and wickedly disturbing lead story, "Einmal Ist Keinmal" (something like Teutonic for "Once Is Never," sort of Cure-ish don't you think?) is a real find and worth the paltry fifteen bucks for this edition alone. You ever read Heavy Metal and wonder what it would be like with some subtlety? Or seen a savage paranoid film noir and wonder what it would look like with great expressive pseudo-Art Deco-style uses of B&W drawings. Yes.

The sweetness and hotness in this thick issue continues with Nate Neal's "The 5 Cosmic Do Dats" which uses archetypal underground comics imagery, later "Eightball" style chunks of small stories blending into one visionary novella, and Dada slapstick humor to drive a very important spiritual point home (which has nothing to do with any sort of spiritual laws you can find in a street-corner comics pamphlet). A stunning first story from Neal, whose art may not be that refined but it certainly doesn't lack for fun or creativity.

Also present is Al Columbia's grotesque ode to either murder or really ambitious suicide "5"45 AM" (which due to its way of telling a story is one of my favorite graphic fictions of the year, as simple as the story may be), a very cool and inventive series of single panel action comic called "The 10,000 Rescues" by Eleanor Davis which would make for some astonishing animation, the continuation of Kurt Wolfgang's boring-story but really sweetly drawn end-of-the-world fantasy "Nothing Eve," and the incredibly well-written but not-very-inspiringly illustrated "Million Year Boom" by Tom Kaczynski.

There's a lot of other gems too, pure pleasure and mixed, but I want to clarify something as I wrap this up: Now comics are being made that shouldn't just be tried out as comics, but as to the reader's own regular literary preferences. In other words, MOME is graphic fiction and illustration for those who are already into McSweeney's and such. This may require a new viewpoint on the casual reader's part, to realize that dancing about architecture -- that is, a dialogue between aesthetics in form -- is a valid thing that has already been happening a while, and all you have to do is know where to begin. If you like oblique modern and post-modern fiction, and really enjoy avant-cartoon illustration, MOME is a perfect sampler. And it has enough great stuff to keep geezers like me buying it as well.

MOME is graphic fiction and illustration for those who are already into McSweeney's and such.

"Yeti #3"

Chris Estey — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 08:00:00 +0000

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A recurring conversation I've had with many people in the past few years has been, "Hey, where the hell's the new "Yeti?" We were speaking of a book-fat, music-oriented journal published by longtime Seattle resident and freelance writer Mike McGonigal. The comics-friendly, arts-investigative journal — with its elegant, edifying, and consistently-surprising presence — has been missed. As people have started reading magazines less and browsing the internet more, we feared "Yeti" had gone the way of a quite a few excellent, underground-culture-savvy, independent publications.

But McGonigal is tenacious and talented, as anyone who read his old zine Chemical Imbalance knows, so it was only matter of time before he settled down comfortably enough in Portland and produced another "Yeti."

Inside the near-250 pages of this long-awaited issue are the usual rock and roll goods, including casual, enthusiastic, intelligent interviews with critics' favorites like Neko Case, Schneider TM, Damon & Naomi, and Devendra Banhart. But for me, it's easily the best mag I've read recently for its other features: Jeffrey Brown comics, R.J. Smith on African-American crime scene reporting in the 40s (wow!), spot illustrations by geniuses like Jordan Crane, a pretty good William Burroughs interview, a really funny Internet scam called "You Can't Hurry Good Pizza," a heart-wrenching portrait of dyke poet Eileen Myles by very vulnerable and revealing fan Nate Lippens, Erik Davis' shrewd analysis of and reporting on West Coast art and spiritual collage, and McGonigal's own fascinating interview with an AWOL marine, which he admits may be untrustworthy, but is compelling nonetheless.

Despite its deceptive visual simplicity (though lovely in and of itself), the writing and art throughout are consistently interesting and often superior to what you find in magazines with twice the circulation and a couple dozen times the editorial staff. The CD included, with rare treats from the likes of The Dead Science, Jolie Holland, Postal Service, Birdbrain, and Colin Meloy, is worth the twelve bucks itself. Here's to "Yeti" #4, hopefully out a lot sooner than this one!

Rock & Roll Archaeologist

Chris Estey — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 08:00:00 +0000

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{Sasquatch Books}

Peter Blecha is a native of Seattle and is primarily responsible for collecting the "artifacts" for the museum portion of the controversial and certainly underappreciated Experience Music Project. I don't think he would ever call them "artifacts", though; he would call them all "treasure." Treasure he's sold and still helps archive.

Sure, yes, the EMP's an unfortunate thing to behold from the outside and stuffed into the angular architecture with doughy bedazzled tourists with no etiquette, but it serves many useful purposes (my favorite being the yearly Pop Conference). Blecha is one of us, a mad collector of sounds and secret histories, and his personal obsession has led the EMP to have a superb sampling of rare and noteworthy popular music culture. And Saint Kurdt's Strat.

Like any passionate rock fan, Blecha started out as a regionalist, often getting his 45s directly from bands he saw perform in the early 60s. His collecting mania grew so intense he rejected the academic life and spent all his time playing, selling, and investigating rock music. In "Rock & Roll Archaeologist" Blecha gives some bizarre accounts of the government's persecution of the performers of "Louie, Louie," confidently negotiates with big record company bosses to acquire bargaining power, sniffs out the most obscure memorabilia, converses with Jimi Hendrix's dad, finds the first bass guitar, and goes toe to toe with Courtney Love to nail the Cobain action (that last challenge in itself could warrant its own book probably).

Admittedly, much of this is somewhat dry and confusing to someone like me, whose own collecting bug is fairly cheap and eclectic. I'm usually more interested in the idiosyncratic cravings of nerdier specialists like blues 78s collector and underground cartoonist Robert Crumb, whose tastes seem kinkier. Blecha loves the big picture, and so things like Clapton's "Layla" guitar is going to do more for him than it would for me (okay, it's kind of cool to imagine him playing that coda on it).

I may not have any revelatory insights into why he and others strive to own so much, but he does convince us that his own affliction has reaped rewards for his community. Without guys like Blecha, I wouldn't have the rock anthology the EMP put out that has great and quickly forgotten New Wave band X-15's amazing "I Want To Be Vaporized" on it, sparing me the fifty bucks for the original Seattle Syndrome compilation. Now if only Paul Allen would sink his big bucks into a nice re-issues label for other great songs still unreleased... Long may the hoarders hoard and trade amongst us mortals with less severe appetites.

Blecha is one of us, a mad collector of sounds and secret histories, and his personal obsession has led the EMP to have a superb sampling of rare and noteworthy popular music culture.

Spiral-Bound

Chris Estey — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 08:00:00 +0000

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{Top Shelf Productions}

Animal crackers are the characters in this beautiful, sad, and terrifically drawn B&W graphic novel about infatuation, secrecy, utopian dreams, and fears of the unknown. To say "Spiral-Bound" would be an excellent choice as a gift for a comics-friendly kid you know is true, but the adorability of the cast and the profundity will pull in anyone literate and sensitive enough to enjoy its adept storytelling.

The world Aaron Renier creates is a coy, cartoon version of a Borges thought maze, where a charming village symbolizes eternity. Aesthetics is at the center of this world, as a dialect for truth and survival. Sculpture is the art form of choice for chief protagonist Turnip the elephant, though his father is wary of his training due to the dire previous history of their town. Turnip's pal Stucky is a talented and emotionally generous little scrapper of a dog, but is playing with fire by building a submarine.

The underground newspaper Ana the Rabbit is working for is a wish-fulfillment fantasy for zine and comics kids, with tunnel and portals all over the city, and Ana's destiny unfurls as the story becomes more dramatic. Oddly, these characters all remind me of friends I have, and I imagine they could be idealized animal versions of the author/artist's own social life.

It's hard to believe that "Spiral-Bound" is Renier's first graphic novel, as it is as well thought out and affecting as anything by Craig Thompson or John Porcellino, two of the best in the field. Even though it may not have the direct verisimilitude due to its anthropomorphic and mythic quality, it has the depth of human insight as "Blankets" and the naïve charm of "King Cat" comics, and would be especially good for neophytes who love fantasy or children's books and want to experience an alternative comic with heart and something to say. Highly recommended.

Animal crackers are the characters in this beautiful, sad, and terrifically drawn B&W graphic novel about infatuation, secrecy, utopian dreams, and fears of the unknown.

The King

Chris Estey — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 08:00:00 +0000

king05dec.jpg

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{Top Shelf Productions}

Remember me? I used to live for music. Remember me? I brought your groceries in. — Leonard Cohen, "First We Take Manhattan"

"The King" is, on the surface, simply an engrossing 250 page graphic novel about how Elvis Presley became, in the minds of many people, a God of Song, and whether or not the ubiquitous Elvis sightings a few years ago had a basis in fact. This God drinks and drugs and orgies with the best of the gods, but there is a deeper heartache to be found in the mission he needs to accomplish.

As the story unfolds, in unpretentious but effective cartooning with a delicate blue shading, the plot's loping shadow crosses many psychic landmarks in our popular culture, such as events which turn entertainment into meaning for the masses, and music itself into a mystery religion. Events such as the passing of Presley, and his relationship with thuggish apostles upon whom he bestowed grace with the presence of his evolutionary talent — as well as others he unexpectedly touched, who all brought something they needed in their souls to him.

More than that, in an intriguing twist, it also analyzes the oft-considered parasitic nature between entertainment journalism and celebrity performers by asserting that these are deliberate relationships, to the benefit of the artist as well as the reporter. The entire book is based around a burned-out tabloid writer named Paul Erfurt who has somehow climbed the journalistic ladder only to stall and stagger after struggles with a bad marriage and his own feelings of inadequacy. Or are those the real reasons he hasn't kept going with the success he found as an "Elvis reporter" back in the 80s? Had his muse dissipated, and he needed others with obsessions he enflamed in the world, to draw him back into participating with it?

By seeing tabloid "journalists" as creative types who need some sort of muse, Koslowski strains our sympathy factor — that shit at every newsstand doesn't seem to be inspired by anything but moneymaking. That's one of the main problems with the book, which is paced superbly like a noir thriller and illustrated with well written (if broad) and perfectly caricaturized characters — the protagonist's redemption doesn't seem much worth the effort. Much like other good classic noir, full of moral failures and spiritual fuck-ups, here they come in the roles of a suspicious entourage made up of a psycho, a stripper, a gambling addict, and a religious exploiter who have all been assisted by someone who is either lying or fucking up reality for himself, with the rest of us caught up in it. Hey, not unlike the culture of celebrity itself.

And yet that sort of judgment is against what's really at the heart of "The King" - this isn't merely about a person who had single-handedly transformed popular culture devising a conspiracy to live on differently, but how we all, in our small, wretched lives, need something greater, more magnificent than ourselves to cling to and shine by. The sad but brilliant truth is that when Erfurt actually chooses to tell the story he was born to tell, or inasmuch of it that he chooses to reveal, he goes back to the lurid devices of consumer reporting to deliver it. Like they say about the codes of the Bavarian Illuminati, the Truth doesn't even bother to hide between the lines.

"The King" is, on the surface, simply an engrossing 250 page graphic novel about how Elvis Presley became, in the minds of many people, a God of Song, and whether or not the ubiquitous Elvis sightings a few years ago had a basis in fact.