Here’s the fun I promised – an hour-long deep ambient mix originally done for my friend Darby, but outside of a few glitches – the Insanity Sect track’s mp3 was a bit corrupted so there’s a thirty second stretch where you’ll get a few clicks and one crossfade makes my teeth grind a bit – I’m pretty darn happy with it and decided to give it out to you nice people. This was done with the excellent KraMixer DJ software.

Right click here to download a 68mb, 160kbps mp3 of the completed mix.

Here’s the tracks that I put into this:

• “Modifie” by Biosphere.
  
• “African Virus (Electronic Sonata With A Cold Loved By Nature) Part VI” by Pete Namlook and Bill Laswell.
  
• “Angel Tech” by Pete Namlook and Bill Laswell.
  
• “Late Night” by Insanity Sect.
  
• “The Calling” (Ambient Mix) by A Positive Life.
  
• “F For Fake” by Beach Flea.
  
• “Behind The Sun” (Deep Ambient Mix) by The Starseeds.
  
• “Blush Response” by Vangelis.

The always excellent John Rogers points us over to this blog entry in which the following passage occurs:

It has been said that the public perceives Republicans as the Daddy party and Democrats as the Mommy party. In terms of fiscal responsibility, that needs to change. Democrats should be seen as the Parent party while Republicans should be viewed as the Drunken Student On Spring Break With His Daddy�s Credit Card party.

President Bush recently submitted his fourth budget. The administration projects a unified budget deficit of $427 billion for FY 2005. With a projected Social Security surplus of about $167 billion, President Bush is running an on-budget deficit of $594 billion this year alone.

For everyone who supports an “ownership society” and thinks of Democrats as being “tax and spend” liberals, this should be an eye-opening read. Most of the people who read this blog are aware of this, but having the numbers laid out should help bolster your arguments.

Sorry about all the non-funny stuff today. It’s Monday. Tomorrow, I’ll provide something amusing.

The good:

The Iraqi elections went ahead, the counting is happening, and outside of a few incidents here and there, nobody was hurt or killed because they tried to enjoy the US-enforced democratic ideal. Nice to see they’re counting by hand instead of trusting in Diebold, eh? Let’s hope that there’s a genuine effort to let them lead their own country and that diplomatic relations proceed properly. Condi’s was on Face The Nation yesterday, warning that “The insurgency is not going to go away as a result of today,” which is going to justify our being there for the next decade or so, I’m sure.

The bad:

We’ve managed to lose $9 billion that had been handed off to the Coalition Provisional Authority. One ministry had 8,206 guards on the payroll while there were only 602 physical bodies to show the auditors. Of course, Paul Bremer’s saying that the findings are a load of hooey and that there’s no way that good accounting practices could have been put in place during that troubled time. I wonder if he said that over his videophone from his gold-lined hoverpool.

John Byrne In “Bitter Irony, Oh I Writhe On Thine Horns” Shocker!

Was it enough that this past-his-prime hack said the following about Jessica Alba as Sue Storm?

Personal prejudice: Hispanic and Latino women with blond hair look like hookers¹ to me, no matter how clean or “cute” they are. Somehow those skin tones that look so good with dark, dark hair just don’t work for me with lighter shades.

No, of course it wasn’t! Why should he just make a racist statement and let it lie fallow? Friends, this is where I bring up this passage from the lastest volume of Back Issue:

This, unexpectedly, ties in with an old controversy about Storm. Just how “black” does she look? Storm has been criticized for having Caucasian features. Certainly she has white, or as Claremont says, silver hair, and it’s naturally straight. And then there are those large blue eyes.

John Byrne has no patience with this argument: “I think it’s kind of racist to say she’s white-looking when you consider the range of features that black people and everybody else have. She doesn’t look as if she’s from sub-Saharan Africa, but according to Chris and Dave she’s not. So why should she? She was born in Harlem, for crying out loud.²

Ah, John “Hero” Byrne. Master of cognitive dissonance.

¹Emphasis is my own.

²Again with the emphasis.

Pocket Reviews! That’s right, reviews so brief you are able to tell me to go to hell even faster! 20 words or less!

We3 #3

You’re reading this anyway, right? Morrison kicks the crap out of you and then hands you a lolly. Quitely owns.¹

JLA Classified #3

Metacommentary on heroes that kill, blood-thirsty supergorillas, tiny universes, and yet another Morrison Batman moment. Supercompressed storytelling.

The Amazing Joy Buzzards #1

Fresh, funky indie-rock-band-meets-Doc-Savage action. Glorious art and sly scripting make this one to watch.

Planetary #22

Another pop-culture homage. Clever bit about the bullets, though. Snow proves he’s a bastard again.

Sleeper: Season Two #8

Miss Misery is t3h h0tt. Nrom nrom nrom. Progress in the plot after a few wheel-spinning issues.

Back Issue #8

My favorite comics magazine, despite itself. Black Heroes of the 70s and 80s are the focus of this issue.

¹For a more lengthy analysis, check out this and this from the ever-brilliant Ian Brill.

File Under: More Baby Blogging

I give you Josh’s fresh-from-the-oven¹ daughter Svea, as captured by his cameraphone! I’ve got other photos of her, but she’s A) bright red and B) screaming about her distaste with the lighting and sound qualities of the room she’s found herself in compared to the comfortable place known as wombspace, so I went with this one, which only shows a hint of the cuteness to come but manages to emphasize her fine taste in pink headwear.

¹No, I will never call his lovely wife Kathleen “the oven” to her face. I like my jaw right where it is.

In the first decade after Wal-Mart arrived in Iowa, the state lost 555 grocery stores, 298 hardware stores, 293 building supply stores, 161 variety stores, 158 women’s apparel stores, 153 shoe stores, 116 drugstores, and 111 men’s and boys’ apparel stores.¹

All else being equal, U.S. counties where new Wal-Mart stores were built between 1987 and 1998 experienced higher poverty rates than other U.S. counties.²

Find out more here and learn why Wal-Mart’s running new ads and building new web sites focusing on how they’re not community-destroying, soulless bastards that are building stores on Indian burial grounds³ and directly next to important historical sites in Mexico.

(Thanks to Ryan in NYC for reminding me how much I despise Sam Walton’s legacy.)

¹Source: Iowa State University Study.

³Didn’t they see Poltergeist?

I give you Lex Luthor, Billionaire Supervillain Pimp.

Some brief points before I’m busy with work all day and unable to post massive polemics against anyone else in the comic book business.

• Dateline: Blog Drama. Don’t put “I Hate Liberals” on your blog and expect to be respected when you visit my site. It’s rather like trying to wear your Klan hood while attending an NAACP meeting and then saying “Wait…I’m open minded! Really!”
• The latest issue of The Comics Journal features a gorgeous full-color ad from this publishing outfit called Arcana. This ad tells you about their book Kade, featuring, I dunno, what looks like A Barbarian On The Edge. Anyway, the ad talks about how badass Kade is and then says Cover By Humberto Ramos in big letters. If I were the actual creators of this book (writer Sean O’Malley and artist Allan Otereo,) I’d be furious.
• An offer seems to be in the pipeline – I may be paid to edit something in the near future. This really would be quite ideal, as I’m an angry, maladjusted, closeminded liberal with nothing better to do.

So, that Erasure album? It’s very nice, but I wish Vince would get some new synth sounds and that Andy would write lyrics on stuff besides mushy, mushy, mushy love. A lot of the songs sound very similar because they are very similar. However, “Breathe” is a real charmer, and “All This Time Still Falling Out Of Love” has enough cleverness after the initial verse to keep me interested. Not the epic that their eponymous release was but not as widely varying in quality as Cowboy. A solid 7, good for people who like their pop a bit more synthetic. This won’t win the band any new fans, but doesn’t embarrass the current lot for their devotion.

As promised, here’s some commentary on Wanted, the started-off-with-a-glimmer-of-promise-but-pulled-an-Identity Crisis miniseries by Mark “Rape!” Millar and JG Jones. The first issue of this series stars off well enough with a distinct Fight Club vibe¹ and the revelation that our loser, cuckolded protagonist Eminem Wesley is actually the super-deadly son of the super-deadly supervillain who went by the stunningly original moniker of The Killer² before his untimely demise. After Halle Berry Catwoman The Cat abducts him and introduces him to the world of the super-villain syndicate³ that killed all the heroes in 1986, she gives him an offer – he can either become one of the bad guys who live the life fantastic⁴ or one of the cattle they rule.

This is when the story starts to slide – why should you care about a person who’s going to become a murderous son of a bitch who has every shred of decency beat out of him in a montage of “horrifying” and “shocking” images? Millar can’t really bother with a reason for that, but as I was locked in with a subscription at the shop, I read each issue as it came out, wondering why I was bothering after each time. Characters that are pastiches of DC Comics villains keep showing up, including a Clayface analog made of feces⁵, and some stuff about warring factions of these bastards serves as some nominal story, but any concern about events fails to materialize and when Wesley slaughters a bunch of very bad people, it manages to exude nothing resembling real excitement for the reader.

The following is a spoiler for the final issue. Do not read it if you want to be surprised by this book when you buy the trade paperback on a half priced rack in the near future.

This all continues until the big reveal in issue 5, wherein The Killer shows up to say “Wesley, son, I am your father and I have been behind all of this and now you must kill me because I am an old man and losing my mad skills and I’d rather be killed by you than some other shithead,” or something similar. Whoever didn’t see the return of the man assumed dead in issue #1, raise their hands now. OK, just go to Millarworld and declare Mark Millar a genius.

After Wesley offs his old man, our author then swipes from The Matrix with a whole monologue about how you (the readers) are all living lives that aren’t worth having, you’re consumers, the comic you’re holding is entertainment for the cattle that is the general populace, etc, etc, etc. Then there’s a shot of Eminem Wesley, nude, screaming “THIS IS MY FACE WHEN I FUCK YOU IN THE ASS.”⁶ The end.

Oh, please.

Anal buggery is a recurring theme with this man’s work and it’s frightening that you can take the final world balloon and apply it to other panels from comics he’s written with very little effort. While I may like The Ultimates and enjoyed his Authority quite a large amount, I think it’s obvious at this point that Mark Millar only has shock and more shock in his retinue of storytelling devices on creator-owned properties.

Is there anything to recommend this book? Well, JG Jones depicts each turn of events with better-than-it-deserves precision until the last issue, when there’s a perceptable dive in quality. That’s something. Some of the character designs are pretty fun – The Cat has a neat enough costume, for instance – but for what Top Cow is going to expect for you to pay for the trade paperback when it comes out, don’t bother just for some pretty pictures. Grant Morrison used Jones to much better effect on the mindblowing Marvel Boy, which you may or may not be able to have your LCS order from Marvel, based on the whims of their reprint department.

In completely unrelated news, Doug does us all the favor of letting me know about a brand new film from Hong Kong Comedic Genius Happy Monkey Ha Ha Talent Stephen Chow that looks to match the high levels of the unjustly-brutalized-by-Miramax Shaolin Soccer.

¹As evidence for my complete lack of critical ability, I should point out that the similarity to one of my favorite movies wasn’t obvious to me until someone said “Well, that was a bit like a certain blockbuster with Brad Pitt and Edward Norton.”

⁶Rape.

Don’t tell me right-wingers are open-minded.

Thanks to L for pointing that image out.

So, new music came out this week. The latest releases from Erasure and The Chemical Brothers were procured and each has been given a thorough going-over by our research department here. Both records were tested in two ways: the album in its original CD format, played over my Panasonic SL-SX420 portable disc player with Philips SBC HN060 noise-reducing earphones or through 256kbps MP3s played from iTunes on my work Mac with Grado SR-60 headphones. This is how I listen to most music now, so I believe this is a fair assessment the material reviewed herein. I may well be taking the piss with this long-winded introduction, but I know how much the technophiles get slick when they see things like brand names and model numbers and I aim to please.

Since I just gave it a fresh listen, let’s go over the latest from Tom and Ed, The Chemical Brothers. As always with the duo, the production is impeccable on each track on the album, with only a few dipping below expected levels of quality while still providing above-the-bar listening enjoyment. Opener “Galvanize” uses guest vocalist Q-Tip perfectly, his nasal delivery a great counterpoint to the giant synth stabs and middle-eastern flavored strings that are dropped at just the right spots on the jacking beat that recalls Basement Jaxx’s harder moments. “The Boxer” follows with Tim Burgess doing what sounds like a Steve Miller impression over glitchy drums and a huge wash coming from a particularly odious-sounding synthesizer. “Believe” is Chemicals In Massive Drug-Friendly Party Tune Mode with a not-entirely appropriate sounding vocal from Kele Okereke, whom I’ve never heard of nor do I plan on seeking out without a good pair of earplugs in my hand.

The unexpected happens with “Hold Tight London,” where Anna Lynne from nu-country outfit Trespassers William has her lilting voice processed over a trance-tastic beat, creating a sound that reminds me of what I like about early vocal-heavy Delerium without any of the cheese their later material carries in a giant refrigerated case. The best moment of the record and a track I plan on sticking on at least one burned CD for friends. “Come Inside” sounds like it belongs on Dig Your Own Hole, which is not a bad thing at all. Continuing the “Hey, it sounds like an older record” theme, “The Big Jump” could slide into Exit Planet Dust without ruffling any feathers at all.

Recalling Eminem’s “Mosh,” “Left Right” features Anwar Superstar in an inspiration, fist-pumping call to arms. This is the track where the hip-hop scene that inspired the duo is most at the fore with incredibly intelligent beats never getting in the way of Mos Def’s brother’s rallying vocals. “Close Your Eyes” sounds, oddly enough, like a Beach Boys tune mashed up with the Mamas and the Papas with Aphex Twin providing ambient noises. This featured newcomers The Magic Numbers, who may well explode soon.

“Shake Break Bounce” is obviously meant to be the backing for a new Justin Timberlake track. This is not intended to be an insult. It’s got some nice guitar, shuffles right along, but it seems to miss a central element that is not quite handled by the title sample. “Marvo Ging” has a sitar and it loops well enough, but it does little for me, just like their other attempts to recreate the Beatles epic “Tomorrow Never Knows.” Guys, please, stop trying to do this.

The finale “Surface To Air” is going to have to be the closing theme for some sort of very inspirational, upbeat movie in the near future. Genius production, frankly, with a purring bassline and melodic elements that make me see stars.

I’ll do the Erasure album tonight or tomorrow, plus I owe a review of Wanted to Christopher Butcher, who gets really bitchy when I don’t do what he demands.

“The monkey family flaming chainsaw juggling act…somehow it’s gone horribly

wrong!”

Click and get a preview of the best thing DC’s going to put out this year that isn’t by Grant Morrison.

File Under: Baby Blogging

In the field of children-that-are-not-my-own-but-can-expect-to-be-spoiled, we have a new member! Josh’s daughter Svea was born yesterday afternoon and she’s a whopper – 10 pounds, 4oz, 20 inches long. Congratulations to Josh and Kathleen.

In related news, here’s a new picture of HighSchoolGirlfriendJenn’s daughter, Lily, who has opted to go with the Fremen eye kit so you know she’s down with the spice¹:

¹This reference may well be too nerdy for you, dear reader.

On the subway platform today, I saw a woman reading this book.

My internet-damaged mind went to spam I’ve received featuring lonely farmgirls.

The New Mainstream or “Art Comix Snobs versus Spandex Junkies: Morons, the lot of them!”

A few days ago, I commented a bit on AIT/PlanetLAR and how they publish interesting comics. Chris Butcher and John Jakala both linked to a series of posts in which George Gebhardt, a writer for SilverBulletComics.com says that any time he sees “alternative” he thinks “crap,” which is one of the most kneejerk, stupid comments I’ve seen on the internet and I’ve been online since 1991. Of course, there’s an immediate response equating superhero comics to “gateway drugs” so people can get grow up and “try the good stuff” from companies like Fantagraphics and Drawn and Quarterly.

Now, I want to know where Larry Young’s little publishing outfit falls into these narrow worldviews. He’s making comics that aren’t exactly art in the narrow, alternative snob sense. He’s making comics that aren’t superhero tales (outside of his own Planet Of The Capes, which I thought was a failure, but a noble one) that most Marvel and DC people want. He’s publishing high-octane action, surreal comedy, and a glorious real-life romance. Who the hell is he publishing for, anyway?

Someone like me, I guess. I’m the sort of person who enjoys a great Superman story just as much as he likes Jimmy Corrigan. I look at comics as a medium with an infinite amount of diversity. I think it’s ludicrous and stupid to think that the genre of comics that you read are the only comics that are worth reading. There’s levels of quality in everything. There’s crap black and white indie material just like there’s crap spandex and capes books. You can’t tell me that Grant Morrison is on the same level as Rob Liefeld when it comes to creativity because they both work on superheroes and you can’t pretend that Chris Ware and Dan Clowes are offering the same sort of nuance and texture as the majority of the minicomics or self-published books. Don’t pretend that Batman: Year One is as easy to dismiss as Batman: Knightfall because they’re both comics about Batman. Don’t pretend that because you don’t sell as much of Black Hole or Stray Bullets as Ultimate Spider-Man that they’re “crap” comics.

Celebrate guys like Larry Young, who are boldly creating a middle road that hopefully will bridge the gap. Celebrate books like Street Angel, which defies categorization. Celebrate quality, non-genre specific publishing that’s aimed at people who aren’t narrowly focused in their little cliques, masturbating over Hawkman’s overly complex continuity or Adrian Tomine’s illustrations in ReadyMade Magazine. It’s not all Naughty Nurse Novels versus Great Works Of Self-Expression, despite what people like Warren Ellis¹ want to tell you.

¹Currently writing two stories set in the Ultimate Marvel Universe.

On the way into work today, a piece of ice fell off one of the nearby buildings, fell fifteen or twenty stories, and whacked me in the shoulder.

I can take a hint. Next time, I’ll shovel.