A Short Observation I Have No Other Home For

It occurs to me that Homer’s classic epithet “Rosy Fingered Dawn” also works as a complete sentence.

The Funk of Forty Thousand Years

As some of you in the know may have discovered – and I hope this isn’t a shock to you – Michael Jackson is dead.

Throughout this weekend, may people have struggled to know how to react to the passing of a controversial, talented, freakish and probably pedorasting figure, but there has been one reaction that has been wonderfully uncomplicated: his music, especially the “Thriller” album, have been played everywhere, all the time, and people are dancing their asses off.

It’s hard to think of a better memorial than people around the world started spontaneously singing and dancing joyously to the deceased work. It’s been amazing and I hope it keeps up. It struck me today: we have “Thriller”-era Michael Jackson back.

In life, for the past few decades it’s been impossible to unconditionally love Michael Jackson the figure unconditionally, the great things he did were in the past, and his present was occupied by the ghoulish freak he’d become, an acid-trip Batman villian who was widely believed to molest children. Now the is no “present” for Michael Jackson; both the Guy Who Made Thriller and Wacko Jacko are in the past. We can view both at greater remove and seperate the two from each other now that they no longer share a living body. This sounds totally macabre and in some ways it is, but on the other hand, 80s Michael Jackson is a massive presence in our lives again; he is freed from his older creepier doppelganger; a legend who bought joy to people around the world is back, and in no way can that be a bad thing.

No Longer Daily

I’m souring on the daily posts. I miss them too often for the title to be relevant and the format leads me to crank out half-assed bullshit more frequently than I would like. I will still post frequently – I don’t plan on completely slacking off in my sacred duty of giving you things to waste time with at work – but I’m no longer maintaining the charade that this is “A Daily Blog”.

I may as well also use this space to mourn the apparent loss of Ben’s summary blog, which fed my narcissism, and was more worthwhile than my blog was on a frustratingly regular basis. Whatitbeviolets, we will miss your incredibly niche criticism. If you’re interested in more of Ben’s metabloggery, his comments on “IamJustGoingToSayShit” are frequently pretty funny.

Mike Allred Illustrates the Book of Mormon

I apologize for the poor quality of some of my recent entries. Hopefully this one will be better.

Mike Allred is one of my top two favorite comic book artists, but what is so wonderful about his work doesn’t immediately jump out at you the way some artists might. He certainly knows how to draw a compelling action sequence and has a fantastic sense of composition, but that’s not the most notable thing about his work to me, nor is his also impressive ability to give his boldly-drawn characters a surprising depth of expression. What I like most about Allred is the delicate balance he is able to strike between undercutting his subject matter and wholeheartedly embracing it.

Allred’s deeply retro style has a rare type of ironic distance that doesn’t sneer at or denigrate the things it points to. He creates images that celebrate the innocence and over-the-top elements of sixties pulp while acknowledging the ridiculousness and frequently undermining the innocence. He mines incongruity exquisitely, from the matter-of-fact way his characters plunge their way into giant robot fights to his unflinching portrayal of gore (almost exclusively in “X-Force”/”X-Statix”) out of sorts with his Saturday-morning-cartoon-like aesthetic.

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So it is  extremely strange to read someone I’ve come to know and love for his loving irony and gleeful irreverence doing a completely unironic and completely reverent take on the Book of Mormon (which it should be noted from the outset, I find silly from what I know about it).

The two volumes of Mike Allred’s “The Golden Plates: The Book of Mormon in Pictures and Word” that I have cover what seem like loose Exodus/Leviticus parallels. Very little of the highlights included here are in this comic which was a little disappointing given that I was hoping to see Allred’s retro sci-fi kookiness mixed with standard-issue religious kookiness.

As a piece of technical work, “The Golden Plates” first volume is the same level as anything Allred has done, the story flows well, the action reads well and he gets a lot of cool looking images and sequences out of the material. The work tends to be sort of text-heavy in places, slowing down the action. I have a feeling that this may be due largely to the fact that Allred got bored of drawing a bunch of dudes hanging around in the desert.

Like I said, there are a number of fun sequences including a number of sword-and-sandals fights (most notably one where God gives Nephi the prophet/protagonist temporary super strength). There is also a beautifully illustrated version of a Garden of Eden type story in which people happily eat from a majestic tree of life whose fruits are pure glowing white. They happily indulge their passion until they realize that the is a nearby city full of people laughing at them and become ashamed. It’s a lovely little anti-repression parable.

Allred seems to have put the most effort into his rendering of heavenly figures. Angels are pure white beings who always have a sense of motion to them an occasionally define the edges of the panels in a way that woks to set them on another plane from the human characters. Jesus always looms large in the panel, the pacing of the comic slows down drastically in any scene in which he appears (not all that many, he isn’t a character so much as a prophesied series of events) he is always centered and every beard hair in meticulously drawn so that he may soak in his majesty and movie-star good looks.

This to me, gets at the heart of what left me a little cold about this comic. Allred is a good enough artist that he can effectively convey majesty, but it isn’t really his forte. I know that Allred wasn’t going to approach this material at the same campy remove he approaches a lot of his work but I was hoping for something a little jauntier, a Davey & Goliath/Veggietales type thing maybe, or even the fast-paced sermonizing of Jack Chick.

Which isn’t to say their aren’t moments of unintentional camp. Any comic that in the space of four pages has Jesus curing the sick in front of a Mayan temple, an angel looking on disapprovingly at a tribe of cannibal savages while our protagonist weeps that these people are his descendants and Christopher Colombus discovering America can’t be said to be a fully unsilly book. The crowning image in the book has to be the full-page splash of a naked Satan (refered to as “the great whore” and “the great mother of all abominations” in the text and depicted as male by Allred) greedily humping a glowing planet Earth. Still it’s very much the kind of book were as I read through I would find myself arrested by Allred’s character designs for Ceasar’s Palace looking Roman centurians and then immediately disappointed because while in a regular Allred comic the centurians would be about to jump on hoverbikes and start fighting dinosaurs or some such thing, here they are just standing around looking smug about getting ready to crucify Jesus.

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I really only reviewed the first volume here. The third volume (I couldn’t find the second) is pretty boring and doesn’t even have particularly good artwork as Mike Allred and his wife Laura (who does the coloring) seem to have tried to make his artwork less flat and more textured, which is antithetical to his style, and put some sort of computer filtering on it which undones the defining crispness of his line work. There is less of a narrative and the only new imagery introduced is a long boring allegory about olive trees (the moral is that Jews are neat, which is a very common moral in Book of Mormon if these excerpts are at all representative. By the way, the phrase “out of the mouths of the Jews” used as an appeal to authenticity, might be my favorite phrase in these books.)

So, I lied about being able to cover this briefly. I had a lot to write about even without trying to untangle the confusing racial/historical/geographical stuff (which I didn’t write about mainly because I’m not sure I read it right, I think the story is that the first Mormons were a group of exiled Isrealis living in Central America who gradually turned into pagan Native American cannibals over the course of generations).

I’ll cover “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 1910″ and “Incognegro” soon.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is in Theaters Now…

… and I despair. I had a violently negative reaction the first movie on a level that I don’t think I’ve felt in years* but almost everyone around me seemed to think that it was, if not a good movie, than at least an acceptable. Transformers was frustatingly attack proof in that I could rattle off the offending things about the movie – the abysmal nonsensical abortive plot, the good hour of screentime wasted on Shia LeBeouf’s unfunny sub-American Pie teen “antics”, the prescence of Shia LeBeouf, the racism, the fact that that a feature length movie about giant robots had maybe ten minutes that elicited an “Giant Robots! Cool!” reaction from me, the hacker subplot which wasted another twenty or so minutes with implausible non-plot relevant gibberish and then abruptly disappeared from the movie, as if the scriptwriters had decided to delete that plotline but forgot a few scenes, the shitty character designs that make the Transformers look half-shredded, Megan Fox’s mannequin like performance, the disturbing leering the movie exhibits towards her** – and most people will respond along the lines of “yeah, well?”

I am not a fan of the Transformers toys/cartoon/whatever particularly. I can’t easily name any of them other than Optimus Prime and Starscream and I have no idea what Starscream looks like. I’m not approaching this as a jilted fan who feels that Micheal Bay has raped my childhood memories. I’m approaching this as someone who generally likes summer blockbuster action movies that cater to nerdy fans and someone who likes the idea of giant robots hitting each other. I loved “Iron Man”, hell I even like the crappy-CGI children’s show “Beast Wars” so it’s not as if I’m averse to the genre. But “Transformers” felt like a waste of time and money to the extent that I was angry that I saw it but almost no one else seemed to feel that way, and knowing that there is now a sequel which lots of people I know and respect their tastes will go to see and enjoy makes me feel somewhat insane, as if either I or everyone I know has lost the ability to perceive things accurately. Help me.

* I used to be driven into rages by romantic comedies as a pre-teen and teenager, for what I think might accurately be called political reasons: I hated them for peddling a false unattainable unrealistic and (to me) undesirable vision of love that I saw as destructive to actual human relationships. There was probably a degree of angry gender/sexuality politics in there too, but I don’t want to give my 11-to-16 year old self too much credit, although in retrospect I’m shocked at what a precocious little bitter crank I was. (I’ve since mellowed out on romantic comedies, accepting that a few of them are okay, that no one really believes that shit anyway, and that there are many things that I’ll never be able to relate to and this is one of them).

**The leeriness towards Megan Fox in the first Transformers movie was actually sort of entertaining in a “WTF, do they realize how weird this is?” way. Bumblebee (one of the Transformers I can name if I think about it for a while) was driven to get LeBeouf and Fox to have sex either inside of him or on top of him and if I remember correctly, the final shot of the movie is him more-or-less realizing this dream, with Optimus Prime looking on for added robot voyeurism. The idea that robots come to earth and then disguise themselves as cars in the hopes of getting their strange human sex kicks is one of the few entertaining things I got from Transformers.

Summer

Tonight is an intensely Minnesota Summer night. For those of you who have never spent a summer here, imagine being constantly, unavoidably swaddled in three or four down comforters and you’ll get a sense of what the air is like.

Despite any clear ubiquitous summer jams as yet, I’m fully embracing this. Anyone who wants to go out for icy cocktails right fucking now, call me. We may have miserable weather 10-11 months of the year, but at least this slate of miserable weather comes with overtones of condoning irresponsible behavior and grilling.

I’ll end this slight post with one of my favorite recent summer songs:

I Am Sick and Not Thinking Very Clearly. Here is My Assesment of the 20th Century.

10. The 00s (edit: as in 1900-1909)

9. The 10s

8. The 90s

7. The 50s

6. The 30s

5. The 40s

4. The 60s

3. The 80s

2. The 20s

1. The 70s

This is mostly an American pop-culture judgement. I considered facotring in quality of life but that got me thinking about depressing things and I can’t deal with that right now. I also considered factoring in the rest of the world but that got complicated, and also depressing given all the world wars.

My Favorite Imaginary Cover Songs

I am enough of a music nerd that sometimes I imagine what songs would sound like if songs were covered by other artists and then get really hung up on how much I like the imaginary songs that exist only in my head. Is this a surpise to anyone?

Here are a few of my favorite imaginary songs:

Lilly Allen – 500 Channels

I truly believe that in their heart of hearts, the squat-dwelling, cop-hating, crack-smoking anarchist band Choking Victim really just wants to write catchy pop songs. At the heart of pretty much every blisteringly paced anguished shriek filled song they’ve written, there is an eminently hummable tune. I feel like not enouh people notice this about Choking Victim (or know who the hell they are) and to me Lilly Allen is the perfect person to bring out this side of Choking Victim. Her bouncily cynical ouvre would be a great complement to Choking Victim’s bitter angry humor. “500 Channels” in particular, is a fantastic fit. Lyrics like “To you and yours, the Pepsi generation, and when you’re discontent, you change the TV station” and “When there’s no enemies I sit and stare at the TV” wouldnt be out of place in a Lilly Allen song (particularly her new album) and”500 Channels” contians the fewest references to squats scabies and violent revolution (which it is hard to imagine pampered-daughter-of-a-celebrity Lilly Allen singing about convincingly) of any Choking Victim songs.  The one downside of this imaginary bouncy anarchist anthem is that the bombastic simplcity of Allen’s usual production would inevitably smooth over the fast paced agressive complexity of Choking Victim: it’s hard to imagine a Lilly Allen song with a blistering bass solo.

Korn - Get Ur Freak On (feat. Missy Elliot)

Maybe it’s just me being an apologist for my 13 year old self, but I’ve always felt that there was a kernel of goodness in Korn (I just realized that pun existed right after I typed it. Whatever, I’ll leave it in. Pun everybody!). They were innovative, and 90% of their innovations were pure shit but… Well anyway, I always imagined that they would work best as the house band for hip-hop artists in the same way that the Roots, The Brand New Heavies and The Dungeon Family are. The song I think they’d be best suited to: Missy Elliot’s “Get Ur Freak On”. Perhaps it’s because both Korn and Elliot had major 90′s hits with “Freak” in the title but I really think this would work. Imagine Timbaland’s syncopated sitar beat banged out on Fieldy’s bass-as-percussion-instrument, Munky and Head’s spooky guitars adding to the atmosphere of the song, David’s funky, proficient, subtly complicated drumming providing the backbeat, and yes, John Davis’ patented, trying-too-hard angsty growl delivering the “Get your freak on” hook and covering other hypeman duties (yes I still know the names of every member of Korn, I’ve also retained the names of every member of N*Sync and which one of them corresponds to which letter of their band name. To defend my middle school self’s honor I should point out that I was also way into Bad Brains and Operation Ivy at the time, although it takes a lot more effort for me to name the rosters of either of those bands).

Bad Brains – The Isrealites

Unlike the other entries on this list, I can’t entirely picture what this would sound like, other than pure awesomeness. Bad Brains are known for combining break-neck paced punk/hardcore with reverent reggae and dub influences, so I imagine that their take on this uptempo reggae classic by Desmond Dekker would be a glorious mixture of the original song pushed to the limits of how punk it could sound, combined with lush slow choruses and possibly some vocal noodling by HR. I’m sort of surprised, in fact, that as far as I know Bad Brains haven’t covered this; it seems to natural to them right down to it’s references to Babylonian captivity. Some day, someone is going to discover a rare Bad Brains studio session with this song on it. And that day will be a glorious day for humanity.

Old, Poignant T-Pain – Must I Paint You a Picture?

In the comments of an earlier post, Oliver posited a future inhabited by a T-Pain who is no longer just about buying people dranks and makin’ it rain. Having shed his autotune, T-Pain sits back and contemplates his morality and his place in the universe, doing a series of heartfelt covers a la late period Johnny Cash. Really I’d be into anything produced by Old, Poignant T-Pain, but for some reason I graviated towards him covering Billy Bragg, a man who taught us that strong men also cry. No matter how low the girls get, no matter how much money you have in the bank, even in your mansion in Wiscanson, no one is immune from the trials and tribulations of life.

Neat Things This Week

I am planning on doing a lot of hardcore blog writing this week but I’m also planning on editing a video or two, writing a comic book and doing a whole lot of other things so who knows how that will turn out. Anyway, this is one of those posts where I talk about cool Twin Cities things done by me and people I know, thus alienating my non-Twin-Cities readers.

Tuesday 9:00pm at the Riverview Theater: 48 Film Project, Group B, featuring my team’s video.

I’m going to write a lot more about the 48 Hour Film Project soon, but for now I’ll say it was a wonderful revalelatory experinece that was somewhere between writing a really inteesting term paper, and a two-day bender in terms of what it felt like. The film exceeded my expectations and my cast and crew demonstated an intimating amount of talent during the shoot. As soon as I am legally able I’ll post our video in HD.

Also, for my San Fransisco reader(s?), there’s a 48HFP screening going on the exact same time in San Fransisco, but I’m not associated with that, so I don’t know why you’d be interested.

Wednesday 9:30pm (doors) at the Fine Line Music Cafe, no cover: Muja Messiah, St. Paul Slim and M.Anifest

It’s a free show featuring three of the Twin Cities up and coming rappers. Well worth going to if you like Twin Cities hip hop or hip hop in general. I’m not all that familiar with any of them, except M.Anifest. (He went to my college, I have his first CD, I’ve seen him live, he sort of recognized me after the show I saw him at and he’s good friends with at least one of my good friends).

M.Anifest is a rapper from Ghana with incredible stage presence and a fantastic flow. I’m not sure to categorize his style other than to say he has a similar accent to other Ghanian rappers, which should hardly be surprising, his delivery is more melodic than most, and when he and Muja Messiah remixes “Paper Planes” he totally belongs on the track. My only criticism of him is that his production is frequently weak compared to his rapping, but that seems to be improving based on the songs I’ve heard that aren’t on his debut album.

I heard of Muja Messiah for the first time today and I’m really confused about why. He’s innovative, his flow is killer and he’s apparently friends with Slug, one of the two most famous Twin Cities rappers. He reminds me a little of Ghostface Killah, albiet a much less nasily and a lot more relaxed.

St. Paul Slim is more thugged-out than most rappers around here and he manages the impressive feat. of seeming like someone who has street cred despite his association with textbook-case white rapper Prof. He flows like Jay-Z but tneds to sound a lot humbler and a lot angrier.

Coming Soon

I’ve been wrapped up in preparations fro the 48 Hour Film Project, so I’ve had a few posts that have been on the back burner. Here’s what’s coming next week:

The film we will have been made this weekend.

Comic reviews. Since the poll left them in a three way tie, with “The Golden Plates”, “Incognergo” and “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 1910″ all getting three votes (including Erin’s in-the-comments vote for “The Golden Plates” – I’m pretty sure her official vote in the poll was “I never read your comics posts anyway”) I will be writing about all three of them. Well, at least I eliminated Batman and Robin #1 (short review: it’s very good, but there are better Batman stories and better Morrison/Quitely collaborations).

Book reviews. I read/listened to two books by Sarah Vowell in three days this week, which is probably an indication that I enjoy her work, and that I should write about it.

Write-ups of musical covers that don’t exist.

In closing, this happened recently and it was awesome.