The Village Voice throws some cold water on the idea that the new r.e.m. album might be good

George Saunders prefers the descriptor "comic" to "satire":

"Satire always -- to me anyway -- implies that the writer knows something and is trying to bludgeon the dullard reader with it," he said. "But comic implies a more joyful approach -- like you're just trying to distill some of the crazy beautifulness of life into your story."

Here is recent Saunders from the New Yorker on "washboarding" as torture

Last week's New Yorker also had an article on Lenny Dykstra, the kind of baseball player who could convince you to like baseball when you were a kid. I remember being very sad when he was traded to Philadelphia. for Juan Samuel, why oh why?

Of course, Dykstra doesn't really seem to be that great a human being.

Here's an interview with She & Him

Here's an interview with Stephen Malkmus

There are a bunch of Malkmus video clip interviews at Snow Ghost Youtube

The Village Voice reviewed Mountain Goats at Webster Hall. Not really into the drums, it seems.

John Darnielle talks a bit about his upcoming book

Chris Ware writes in Publishers Weekly about Rodolphe Töpffer, who invented the graphic novel

The free Matador download sampler has some pretty good stuff on it
including a new Shearwater song

Larry Norman, r.i.p.


I didn't realize that Adrian Tomine had an official website

Daniel Handler didn't realize that he was a book cover model until recently

Daniel Clowes' Mr. Wonderful is now completed

and there's a new Sunday Times Magazine graphic novel started, by Jason (.pdf)

We saw Persepolis today and I thought it was pretty wonderful. The tone and character of the graphic memoir was certainly well-transferred to the screen. The narrative may be a bit rambling for those who haven't seen the book; there isn't really a clean conclusion. Both the books and the movie are really worthwhile; if I was going to add this to my ranking of 2007 movies, it would be close to the top, and would probably be the movie I'd most readily recommend.

IMDB
Metacritic

Here's an interview with Adrian Tomine, who also has some illustrations (including the cover) in the week's NY Times Magazine

The Believer put up the full text of an interview with Marjane Satrapi from a while ago

Douglas Wolk writes up Robyn Hitchcock for emusic

Yesterday we went to BAM to see the Sufjan Stevens show. The first part was the multimedia BQE experience...an orchestral work composed by SS, presented with video footage and five hula hoopers. The hoopers had a costume change. The hoops were on sale for $40. SS didn't want to leave the hoops/BQE connection up to the minds of the audience...he published an essay about the connection in the program and online.

I saw this article a few days ago:
The Lamest Pop-Classical Crossovers in Music History
although I wonder: what are the "great" pop-classical crossovers?

Anyway, the SS composition was amusing in parts in conjunction with the overall presentation, but not really memorable. Parts of it were just too loud.

We saw the Elvis Costello orchestral thing at BAM a few years ago, so it's an obvious point for comparison. I think the Elvis Costello piece was probably a bit more boring overall, but probably a bit more tasteful. I don't need to hear either of those orchestral pieces again, but they were good excuses to see each artist in the BAM space.

After an intermission, SS played the hits. His "band" proper was pared down a bit from the last times I'd seen him, but of course it was augmented by the orchestra. I didn't think the set choices and arrangements were particularly great, although I like the songs. Again, bits were just too loud, in an out of place way. While a couple horns complemented the songs before, a bigger brass section was pretty much unnecessary and counterproductive. There were also irritating "banging on the piano" moments during intros and outros that didn't add much. When SS does noise, it doesn't really work. I also think his arrangements of late (e.g. the ring them bells cover on the I'm Not There soundtrack) are a bit too much and need paring back. I think Ring The Bells may be my least favorite song on that soundtrack.

It's nice that BAM kept the cheap (balcony) tickets decently priced on these shows...$20 was about right for this show. They probably could have charged more but didn't...I feel better about the price for this show than $50 for football fields away from the White Stripes at MSG.

The NY Times saw the BQE

"CDs — who knows if you're going to be able to play a CD in 20 or 30 years? Come the apocalypse, they'll certainly be useless. Maybe people in millennia to come will find all these CDs embedded in clay and they'll think they're part of some big spinal column. They'll think they're vertebrae. 'We've found a lot of these things and we're constructing our idea of what kind of beast it was that had these in their back, rows of Doobie Brothers and Michael Jackson and Celine Dion CDs, making up some kind of spine.'

"Whereas vinyl, I'm figuring that any smart mind from the future or from another galaxy — or both — will be able to figure out, 'OK, this is some sort of rotating tablet. Let's put it on a wheel.' Somebody smart would drop a pin in there and could listen to it. Of course, they might accidentally play it backwards."

Amusing quotes from Robyn Hitchcock

Here's a Fiery Furnaces interview

If anything, you’re one of the few groups trying to escape the confines of a traditional rock band.
MF: We don’t try hard enough. We don’t have the solution to the rock problem of four people in a van coming to play in a club. We rearrange our songs in concert, but we still just go up and play. That’s not very interesting.

Stream S Malkmus's take on Ballad of a Thin Man
I don't think I necessarily agree with the entire commentary (I'm fine with the Cat Power song) but overall it's a good writeup.

The video for Marissa Nadler's Bird on Your Grave

Chris Ware designed Sundays with Walt and Skeezix, a Gasoline Alley collection

For lack of a better analogy, some writers tell stories and other writers write -- that is, they try to capture the texture and feeling of life within the limited means of their literary tools, and the story lives somewhere within. To my mind, King was really the first real "writer" in the comics, and its in these vista-filling sunday pages that he allows himself to write most eloquently. How many other cartoonists would dare make the colors of autumn the subject of their work? How lucky were the readers who received these temporary observations of life on their doorsteps every week; it seems almost inconceivable now that strips trading on such tenderness appeared in common newspapers.Which is not to say that Gasoline Alley is not funny.

A common complaint about we cartoonists writing about and citing our forebears' influence is that we highlight "sensitive" qualities in strips that others see as negligible (i.e. the deep empathy of Peanuts, for example.) In our defense, we're only picking out elements and tones that might not be otherwise immediately obvious. That's only because we really love what we're reading and writing about, and worry that these feelings might be lost in the visual translation. Here, however, there is no translation; this is how King's pages -- and Walt and Skeezix -- were always meant to be seen, read ... and felt.

Chris Ware also designed a poster for the The Savages movie (Laura Linney/Philip Seymour Hoffman)

Here's a NY Times article on the Sweeney Todd adaptation

This week's George Saunders from the Guardian

I like this Chris Silas Neal illustration for the NY Times review of new Tom Perotta book

Interview with Marjane Satrapi

World indie rock music

Quentin Blake might cover a vacant building with a picture
This MIT paper interview with Wes Anderson is a bit more informative than some other interviews

TT: A couple of your movies have several songs by the same artist. Do you get into the mood of one musician or do you find a piece that fits more?

WA: Part of what music can do is help the movie form its identity and give it coherence or cohesion. In the case of this, I think the sound of the movie is really the music of Satijit Ray, who was a director who composed the music for his own films, and that’s one thing we really wanted to embrace with our movie, and it was very well suited for our movie. Much of the sound of the movie comes from Ray’s music.

But also these Kinks songs — we had a sequence in the beginning, middle, and end and they were all connected — and it just sort of revealed itself that these songs all from one record by the Kinks seemed to fit. And those are songs written by brothers so there were links that we liked. Mainly, it was just when we put the music in those scenes, the scenes seemed finish.

TT: Your next movie is going to be an adaptation of the book The Fantastic Mr. Fox, by Roald Dahl, and I was wondering why you chose to do that?

WA: It’s just a book I’ve always loved, and I liked the idea of doing some stop motion animation. I started talking about it with Noah Baumbach [director of “Squid and the Whale”] and we quickly figured out a way we could make a script of it because it’s a very short book. There’s not that much material there so we had to expand it and we had to make up our own version and try to see if we could follow Roald Dahl’s lead and try to write a movie that we hoped he would like.

Here's an interview with Jeffrey Lewis

Here's a Spoon article

Here's an interview with Adrian Tomine

There's a little info on the Mysteries of Pittsburgh movie in this article about Peter Sarsagaard

I found this Randall of Nazareth song (Drag City) intriguing; not too much other information so far

George Saunders on the news:

Like most Americans, I've experienced, over my lifetime, a steady downward spiral in the way I get my news.

Another interview with Lethem about Omega

And a preview...

The full text of a new Adrian Tomine interview from The Believer is now online

Second best birthday present this year was a copy of The Wall by Peter Sis. It's perfect for someone like me. Not sure about how much mass kid appeal there is for a Cold War quasi graphic memoir/journal/picture book. It's in the regular picture book format...the cover image you see online is a bit misleading as it makes the dust jacket not look quite so much like a dust jacket. I wonder if a more grownup looking format (smaller, softcover) would actually have more appeal... and reach a bigger audience.

I haven't read too many books to kids so far this year. Typically slow start and cleanup/tech fixing to be done. Did the Diary of a Worm and Diary of a Spider combo, which was well received. (Need to get Diary of a Fly) Also a few back to school books, pretty well mixed into the goodreads right now. I managed to read Fireboat and The Man Who Walked Between the Towers out loud this year for the first time. I liked them enough for what they were when they came out, but this was the first year I felt ready to really present them. Man Between the Towers led me to this video, which I transferred using zamzar (presented at a work conference last spring despite its questionable legality...but is useful). It's a nice Ric Burns clip. There's also an animated version of Man Between the Towers narrated by Jake Gyllenhaal.

Also goodreads noticers will have noticed a bunch of recent comic book reading. Identity Crisis certainly the best I've read in a while. Justice league but not for kids. So for me, basically.

I also got a new computer and portable music listening device so the emusic subscription is proving useful and I'm listening to more music on the commute than I had in a while. I'm liking the new Okkervil River well enough. Also the new Caribou is good, and I recently added the Oakley Hall and Beirut so I guess I'll have opinions on those later.

I rewatched the first two years of Veronica Mars over the last month. It held up pretty well to repeat viewing, and M. enjoyed watching it for the first time. I didn't really pay attention to the show when it was on tv, so I guess I'll pick up the suposedly-not-as-good final season when it comes out.

In other news, a 7 year old came into school today with a Tupac patch pinned to his backpack in the style of Kurt Cobain mourners circa 1994.

Daniel Clowes's Mr. Wonderful is now online in The Funny Pages ... pdf

Another article about Peter Sis's new graphic novel reminds me that I really should try to get hold of the actual book.

Get Him Eat Him did a Daytrotter session with an Elvis Costello cover

The Belle and Sebastian guy is doing some kind of movie musical and is soliciting vocals from internetters. There are a couple instrumental tracks for download, which are kind of pleasant anyway.

Craig Thompson has a blog:
Doot Doot Garden Blog
where I found out that people have tattoos of Blankets scenes etc. Which is sort of "of course" in 2007, but still a bit odd to me.

Paul Auster talks a bit about his new film here.

Watch an edited NASL (that's North American Soccer League) game here, complete with commercial interruptions...Shep Messing likes smokeless tobacco while he's keeping goal. Anything with Shep Messing is funny...

That field is pretty disgusting, with the colored penalty areas and soccer ball center circle...

Yesterday's soccer...David Beckham got injured and Chris Klein scored on a bicycle kick.
Glad we saw that great game against Beckham a few weeks ago. Sounds like he's done for this season.

The NY Times visits the new Music Hall of Williamsburg...indie rock isn't pretending to not be upper middle class anymore, I guess.

Daniel Clowes talks to the NY Times, and reveals he's going to do a Funny Pages serial:

called, as of this morning, “Mister Wonderful.”

Also,

Whose books are generally shelved next to yours in bookstores? How does it feel to be sitting between them?

If one of my books should have the good fortune to be found in a “real” bookstore, it’s usually stuck in some indifferently assembled “graphic novel” section along with the “How To Draw Manga” books. This is a dubious advance from the days when the occasional mis-ordered copy of “Ghost World” would sit amid “Dilbert” and “Mad Libs” in the humor section. Occasionally (i.e. once) I’ve found myself between Cheever and Coetzee in Fiction, and more often in some baffling and idiosyncratic “youth culture” section along with the books of autopsy photos and prison tattoos.

also, in the NY Times, an appreciation of Jack Kirby

Peter Sis has written a graphic memoir...I'm excited for this...

Here's an article on "greatest hits"/best-of albums

Waldo is back and going into paperback...I guess that scandal finally blew over. He's getting promoted at minor league baseball games this summer. Can you spot him in the above photo?


Fantagraphics is putting out fancy hardcover versions of Palestine (Sacco) and Ghost World (Clowes)

Here's a big article about upcoming kidlit series
Sweet Valley High is getting email and cellphones, etc.

This article points out that YA literature is more diverse now than before

Neil Young is somehow involved in making a Greendale graphic novel

here's a video thing promoting the Lemony Snicket paperback editions

here's an update on the Folklore band's next projects

here's an article on the Royal Art Lodge

a little interview with Alison Bechdel

There's a skeletal website up for the Persepolis movie...
which will not be seen at the Bangkok International Film Festival after intervention by the Iranian government.

Neil Gaiman has a page up from the Coraline graphic novel