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The Album Knockoff Project has beat me to the punch. Groovy.

So that's what I've been doing wrong! Man, I really need to...

Courtesy of Engrish.com, a fine bunch of folks.

Quiet day at the shop. \/\/007. I did read the upcoming Formerly Known As The Justice League and it's a real hoot. The Giffen-DeMatteis JLI/A stuff was what I grew up reading, and it's good to see that they've not lost their touch. I hate to point to Wizard, but there's a revealing interview with Giffen in there wherein he talks about wanting to put in bestiality jokes but JM DeMatteis kept ripping it out. Makes you wonder.

Gravy Train sounds like Le Tigre without the art-school leanings and with a serious knowledge of rap cliche. I like them quite a bit from the samples on the site and will probably hustle down to Newbury Comics at lunch to see if they have their records...and the girls are way way hot.

(Thanks to Lynn for pointing them out to me. Way cool.)

Read Mantooth. I will repeat this until everyone on the planet has embraced it.

Or you can Buy me a spacesuit.

Oh, dear. (I have no clue if that is work safe at all.)

Oh, and speaking of electropop, new Ladytron tracks that show massive goodness and it sounds like they've gotten their eyebrows fixed so the arch is less permanent.

When I heard the first few tracks that Client had put online, I was unimpressed. Now, however, I am really digging their newer material. While not quite as abrasive as Adult., they manage to sound a bit rough and tumble without losing a nice pop shine. Think Fischerspooner sans artifice.

Mr. Fraction pointed this out in his blog. "Scripted" mobs are the new performance art. Brilliant.

Pop Gun War is beautiful, lyrical, and quite surreal. I adore this book.

Planetary / Batman came out and I laughed and I laughed and I laughed. It suffered from the Ellis Syndrome, but the last page made it all worth it.

Sex was weird in the forties.

Reprinted without permission from Penny Arcade. If anyone there has issues, yell at me. This strip hits a little too close to home for my liking.

Buy this.

So, Lynn and I went to go see The Hulk and it far surpassed my expectations. The draft of the script I was given was good, but the rewrites after that really added to the characters of Bruce, Betty, et al. Performances were great - I especially loved Sam Elliot as "Thunderbolt" Ross. I was very impressed, all in all. Lots of neat editing tricks like the comic-panel split screens just added to the movie instead of looking like Ang Lee was bored.

Scientology, anyone?

High Bandwidth Babies. (Seriously. It's a video.)

I love Cowboy Bebop. I love Ein most of all.

Her life is an Underworld song.

I've read this week's Vertigo debut for The Losers and it's like "What if Brian Wood's The Couriers had made sweet love to 100 Bullets without protection?" I like this book a lot. Give them a few more issues and we'll see if it comes near Adoration Level: Pie, my personal measurement for something's goodness.

(By the way, if you've not read The Couriers, you're missing the equivalent of the final chase scene in Reloaded cranked to 11. Wow.)

Courtesy of Found.

Found on Boston.com's Personals site. Would you want this to represent you? Really, people!

Well, they slapped down on our cable and we've been reduced to the basic package, which cuts out most of the interesting stuff, but leaves Discover and TLC, so I'm OK with it. However, sometimes, rarely, I miss the Food Channel. Bobby Flay, though? Never.

God Bless Genitallica. They sound like a Mexican Bosstones to my untrained ear. Saw them on the variety show that's on after Sabado Gigante, which is the greatest show that mankind has ever produced. Don Francisco, I love you. If I were a woman, I would let you take me all night.

So, you can see me on the Pet Shop Boys DVD Montage during "Always On My Mind." It's sort of weird. My little head bopping, singing along.

Kristin identified me by my ears, which she claims are distinctive.

I neglected to mention that I'm now the proud father of about 20 Sea Monkeys who seem to be very happy with their life so far. I'm thinking about getting several more of the kits just so I can have an army of brine shrimp at the ready.

Bessie, fetch my rifle! Kraftwerk is startin' to get uppity. Despite the snarky nature of this article, I'm glad to see they're putting something out. I do love the Kraftwerk.

I am very happy with the shiny "new" translation of The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne I found at Goodwill recently. I'm 40 pages into it and it's impressive. The copy I've got is an Advance Reader's Edition (which crop up a lot in the Boston area,) so it doesn't have the introduction by Caleb Carr, who wrote my favorite historical crime novel that's not From Hell. (On the subject of Carr: this link takes you to a very, very bad fanpage and I am not responsible for your eyes melting, but it's the only one I can find.)

Pitch a movie and see if you can be a big-time producer!

I had a weird dream last night. I was in an episode of ER and dropping the medical science with the best of them. Right at the climax, I woke up suddenly, shaking Kristin and asking if I was on call this morning. I hate it when dreams intrude into real life. I'm fine with those sorts of things being tucked away.

I'm not seeing The Hulk until tomorrow at the earliest, so nobody tell me anything, even if I read the script ages ago.

My backpack's got jets!

(That'll be a bit of a download. Courtesy of MC Chris, who has many more excellent songs on his site.)

REACH OUT, TOUCH FAITH!

I got a new bag.

I'm such an otaku sometimes.

Dan does amuse me on occasion. After I told him I'd not be buying a home machine for a while, I got this message

*** eXpress message received from Koyaanisqatsi at 14:07 ***
>Vinnie still outside with a Louisville Slugger?

A long time ago, I made Underworld wallpapers, inspired by their sublime record Beaucoup Fish. They're 1024 x 768 and sometimes a bit big. You'll like them anyway. Click on the one you like. Or the two. Or whatever.

Click.

Swiped from Warren Ellis and well worth it...

OOK. Die all humans DIE!

Best. Zine. Ever. No, really.

I got the new David Gahan record a couple of weeks ago and ended up scribbling down notes while I listened to it, which is just plain awful and pretentious of me, ain't it?

Of all the turds in the toilet that is Depeche Mode's state of late, this Paper Monsters record looked to be the smelliest. Dave's never really been a huge musical force within the band (and even bitched to NME about not having a bigger part in how songs were written and developed). The opener didn't do anything to dissuade me from this view - "Dirty Sticky Floors" sounds, well, awful. A dirge-rock number (imagine "The Dead Of Night" off of Exciter minus the singalong chorus bit), it induced me to size up the contents of the cutlery drawer, hoping to find something to rip out the relevent veins and take me away from it. It ends, blissfully, and then something happens.

There's electronic noises. They're soft. They're quiet. Hi, little guys. I'm your new daddy. "Hold On" is a really nice piece of work - minimal enough to focus on the fact that yes, Gahan can sing a tune quite well, while cradling you in its loving arms. It's followed by an even nicer little ditty called "A Little Piece" that makes your hopes rise. Too bad they're about to get their brains bashed out like a baby dropped into an empty swimming pool.

Cliche alert - there's a song about boozing and it says nothing that hasn't been said a thousand times. I can only think of one song that makes drinking sound as fun as it actually can be ("Tubthumping") and it's shit like this that ruins alcohol's good name in the communities that haven't been pushed onto reservations. Christ, Dave. Yeah, you got shitfaced - poorly, I might add. We know that. Thank you, next topic.

And when the next topic is an even more awful track called "Black and Blue Again" that is basically a repeat of "Dirty Sticky Floors" with a button labeled "More Dirge" being slapped a little more often.

The album shows signs of turning itself around in the next two songs (both of which lacking heavy guitar parts, not at all coincidentally, I suspect) "Stay" and "I Need You." In "Stay," she's walking out the door, having obviously gotten tired of his drinking and caterwauling. He's tenderly asking her to come back. "I Need You" is an interesting inversion of things done by Depeche Mode in the past - it harkens to "I Feel Loved" dubbed-out a bit with a refrain that catches the listener unaware - "You'll always need me more; I need you." May well be the best track on the album, that one.

I'm a sucker for strings and beats put together, so I actually like "Bitter Apple" more than it deserves. As fruit metaphors are as dead as Peter Cetera's career, this one should be long past its sell date. I wish this had been instrumental, really.

The penultimate "Hidden Houses" irks the hell out of me. Dave's voice is spot on, the lyrics are better than anticipated, but the awful backing and the inappropriate WALL OF FEEDBACKKCKCKCKBBBAAABBCC make me wince in pain.

Finally, you hit "Goodbye" (really original, Dave) and it's basically "Dream On" in the chorus, scary-white-guy-wants-to-fuck-you love shit on the verse bits.

"Disappointing" is the word that sums up my feelings on both Paper Monsters and Martin Gore's "Counterfeit2." (Don't talk to me about Recoil. Great sounds, bad end result on the last couple releases.) Depeche Mode were my favorite band for a long time, but the solo releases seem determined to prove that as of Exciter, they are no longer relevant, and that depresses me.

You need the new album by The Cinematic Orchestra because J. Swinscoe's put together a thing of beauty this time. An alternate soundtrack to Dziga Vertov's Man With A Movie Camera, this is the sort of record you've been waiting to hear for ages and just didn't know it. Spy-jazz, deep groove, and an uncanny sense of melody gel to form a cohesive whole that, while you may have heard TCO before, you've never heard this.

Powers does not feature monkey ass this time, but the new Noble Causes book, Extended Family, brings together a wide variety of comics writers and artists with Jay Farber's soap-opera-with-tights and pulls it off nicely. Of some note is the fine art in one tale by Mitchell Breitweiser, who did a very nice sketch of Krypto for me a few months back at the big dumb Boston comics and sci-fi con.

Monday, June 30, 2003

Sunday, June 29, 2003

Friday, June 27, 2003

Thursday, June 26, 2003

Wednesday, June 25, 2003

Tuesday, June 24, 2003

Monday, June 23, 2003

Sunday, June 22, 2003

Friday, June 20, 2003

Thursday, June 19, 2003

Wednesday, June 18, 2003

Tuesday, June 17, 2003

Monday, June 16, 2003

Saturday, June 14, 2003

Friday, June 13, 2003

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