Okay, it has nothing to do with comics, but wow, what a great performance. We’re talking me watching on an iPhone at a Payless Shoe Store and getting a tear in my eye. Seriously. Janelle Monáe. Janelle Monáe. Janelle Monáe. Damn…
Anyway, I was talking to our friend Matt yesterday about death music (note change of subject, since the above video is 100% LIFE) and he volunteered Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song” before I could, but that one is definitely on the list. Got me thinking again about my own short list of death songs.
By “death songs” I don’t mean songs with lyrics about death, or music with a morbid style. I mean music that takes you right to edge of what-it-is-to-die. Existentially transportive songs, if that makes any sense.
On my list:
“River Man” by Nick Drake
“Pyramind Song” by Radiohead
“Meeting Across the River” by Bruce Springsteen
“Wayfaring Stranger” The Charlie Haden Quartet West
“Old Man” by Randy Newman
Chopin’s Nocturne in C Sharp Minor (personal connection there)
Purcell’s “Man that is Born” from the Funeral for Queen Mary
The theme for NPR’s “Selected Shorts.” Not sure why.
I’m even okay with the ’60s Batman-style sound effects! Thanks, everyone I’ve ever known for telling me about this as soon as I got home.
Oh, and hey, as long as it’s Random Friday, I’ve got a question: I’m dying to find a reeeeeally old music video from the ’80s—maybe even pre-MTV. It had a funky, electronic song (possibly no words) with black and white, photocopy-style animation. There was a recurring assembly line motif with hamburgers and hands and that creepy masonic eye/pyramid thing. Really cool and jerky, almost like it was made by a robot Terry Gilliam. Does anyone remember this video? I’d love to find it out there somewhere but I don’t know anything about the director or even the musician(s) involved.
As some of you might have guessed, based on past blog entries, music is very important to our whole family. Sky is going to Coachella this year with a friend of ours and I’m envious, but after Italy, I’m going to be too eager to get back to work on the book, so I’ve got to miss it yet again.
I love that my daughter has been listening to bands like Passion Pit, Hot Chip, and Vampire Weekend* (all at Coachella) while simultaneously getting into Bob Dylan and Bob Marley, on LP no less—and that I had nothing to do with those last two. Well, any of them technically, (though I did discover Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros before her).
I used music constantly while working on the first draft of the layouts for the new book. I had several different playlists for different kinds of scenes and I’d go for long walks trying to imagine sequences, while letting the music sustain the mood I was going for.
Recently though, I mentioned this to my Mom over the phone and she said she hoped I took the headphones off once in a while to listen to the sounds around me too. (Which is both reasonable, and exactly the kind of thing you count on a Mom to say.)
Funny thing is, though, I’ve discovered that music actually distracts me during those walks now that I’ve entered the rewriting stage of the layouts. Keeping a sustained mood through music actually makes it harder to step back and consider the structure of a scene or set of scenes in my head, and how to change them for the better, or to implement the suggestions of my panel of “kibitzers.”
That trance I needed to put myself in while conceiving sequences would now prevent me from evaluating those scenes objectively. More proof, if any was needed, that we need to appeal to different aspects of our creative personality at different stages of the creative process.
Hm. This post is like a Simpsons episode. One thing leads to another and…
Uh.
See you Monday!
*Pop Quiz: If I added Peter Gabriel’s name to those three band names and asked you which of the four was not like the others, which would you pick and why?
Belated Happy Birthday to Ivy! We went to Disneyland for her birthday on Tuesday after a very full day of work Monday, and yesterday was a lot printing and mailing, so I didn’t get much blogging, tweeting, or, um… facing… in this week.
Round One of the “rough draft” for the graphic novel is done! I’ll be working on revisions/rewrites for the next couple of months and then, starting in March, I’ll be doing finished art for two years. The book is currently at a whopping 461 pages, but I’m hoping it’ll get shorter in revisions. (Note that my “rough draft” is basically just a rough sketched-out version of what the finished book will look like, all captions and balloons in).
Fun fact: My roughs are done forty pages at a time in a single photoshop document so I can slide panels back and forth and think of the flow more organically and not let the page dictate pacing too much. They’re really big files!
The whole family is getting into the Avett Brothers this year.
Winter and I finally finished watching Deathnote on DVD. All the kids in anime club were yelling at her to finish it already so they could talk about it. That is one crazy show! (And oh, man, that opening theme and animation for Season 2…)
Still loving Mad Men.
The preview for Iron Man 2 makes me feel 14 years old again. In a good way.
Best comic of the year? For me, probably Asterios Polyp, but now that I have a bit of free time, I need to read a few more contenders.
Creatively, I thought 2009 was a great year for comics, music, and movies. Financially, though, it sucked donkey balls for a lot of people in our community. Let’s hope ‘10 is better.
I couldn’t even tell you the lyrics to a lot of my favorite songs. I usually fall in love with the music itself, even if the lyrics are a muddled blur.
But there are a few songs I love for the lyrics. Below are fragments from some of my favorites. I’d be curious to know how many of you recognize them (without Googling of course) and I’d love to hear some of yours.
1
Hair blowing in the hot wind
Time hanging from a clothespin
There’s no sorrow that the sun’s not gonna heal
2
Bowel shaking earthquakes of doubt and remorse
Assail him, impale him, with monster truck force
3
Shooby Doo, rock steady crew
Find him an octoped ingenue
4
I killed my dinner with karate
Kick ‘em in the face, taste the body;
Shallow work is the work that I do.
5
Socrates and Milhous Nixon
Both went the same way—through the kitchen
6
I nuked another Grandma’s Apple Pie
and hung my head in shame
7
‘Cause this guy don’t dance
And word’s been passed, this is our last chance
8
He looks up from World War Two
Then you catch him catching you
…catching his eye.
9
They said you were hot stuff
And that’s what Baby’s been reduced to…
10
Everybody got their Black & Decker
Blood and fettucine everywhere
11
You can call me Aaron Burr
From the way I’m droppin Hamiltons
12
And you couldn’t see a city
On that marbled bowling ball
Or a forest or a highway
Or me here least of all
13
You can raise welts
Like nobody else
14
Write your letters in the sand
For the day I’ll take your hand
In the land that our grand-children knew
One of my favorite This American Life segments: David Rakoff’s heartbreaking “Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace,” Act Three of Episode 389 - Frenemies. If you agree with me that TAL is one of the best shows ever on radio, consider a donation.
Had a surprisingly good time watching Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Probably helped to be sitting between two kids who were laughing at all the genuinely smart and/or bizarre gags. Way better movie than it needed to be to fill it’s demographic slot.
Whole family is enjoying Glee and rooting for it to get better already.
“Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” by Das Racist/Wallpaper. Find it. Listen to it. Hate me forever for making you do it.
Yesterday, some cartoonists I know expressed sadness over Michael Jackson, which I understand. Personally, I thought it was a sad ending to a sad ending. But others were baffled by how anyone could sympathize with anyone accused (and presumed guilty) of such horrible things.
Fortunately Adobe just released a new Photoshop filter for just such occasions (screenshot above). I like to work in grayscale and RGB myself, but some out there might find it useful.
[Hypocrisy disclaimer: Anyone wanting to knock me off of my high horse can just point out my own rant about Fredric Wertham on that audio interview the other day. Guess we all do it from time to time.]
So, no sooner do I post about my search for some Shawn Cheng comics you could read online, when Shawn contacts me and graciously offers to put all of his great mini The Would-Be Bridegrooms online in a great click-through format. Read it, thank him, buy things. All is right with the world.
And as long as I’m following up on earlier posts, y’gotta love this miniature masterpiece by Mr. Turner. Though y’gotta read it TWICE to know why.
Oh, and Bryan Lee O’Malley is offering his full third Kupek album for free. (I thought it was great, but don’t tell him; we don’t want him to stop making comics.)
So, yeah. Good stuff this week! Way to go, The Internet.
Been enjoying a relatively new band called The Mummers, especially the songs “March of the Dawn” and “Lorca and the Orange Tree,” though it’s a guilty pleasure since they’re pretty much just pushing my musical buttons over and over. The lead singer, Raissa Khan-Panni, sounds maybe a bit too Björk-y on some tracks, but she has a great voice nonetheless and the arrangements are huge and rich and irresistible (to me, at least). Good speakers recommended for those wonderful bass notes.
Maybe I’m imagining things, but I think there’s something going on inside of a bunch of the songs I’ve been listening to lately with female lead vocalists. The arrangements behind them are getting increasingly robust and deep, while the voices up front are becoming more elfin and/or breathy, and maybe because of the syncopation, there’s less a sense of back-up than of counterpoint, which sets up a pretty dramatic masculine/feminine interplay (or Butch/Femme if you prefer) that’s practically NSFW. The Bird and the Bee’s incredible song “Man” is the purest example I’ve found, but I hear traces of it in The Ting Tings, Jem, Bat for Lashes (”Horse and I”), Bitter:Sweet (”The Mating Game”), and Anya Marina (”Miss Halfway”).
I remember feeling like I was hearing something new the first time I heard The Cardigans’ “Lovefool” Maybe it was this.
Thanks to kbeilz for recommending The Mummers after hearing I was enjoying Jesca Hoop’s “Seed of Wonder.” Feel free to recommend some of your favorites, similar or not.
I promise, back to comics on Monday. I just really, really love music.
Do comics artists have musical twins? I think some do. For example, I’d say that Craig Thompson is the Sufjan Stevens of comics. Midwestern roots, struggles with faith, gorgeous compositions, a bit weepy… They even look similar (in fact, I was googling to make sure I was spelling both of their names correctly and came across this).
Others I’ve been toying with (or that have been suggested by others):
Some need two or more to match. I think that Bryan Lee O’Malley is a combination of Pizzicato Five and Go! Team, or maybe the Ting Tings, and Chris Waremight be our Radiohead, but you’d have to throw in some difficult turn-of-the-century composer like Charles Ives to really make it work.
My favorite suggestion so far was when Sky said that Ryan North oughtta be the Ramones because “the only thing that ever changes is the words.” I love my kids.
This whole thing started because of a now-defunct thread on the Comics Journal Message board on this same topic years ago. Someone had suggested that I could be the Raymond Scott of comics which I liked, but another poster logged in to say that I wasn’t good enough to be R.S. and was, in fact, the Thomas Dolby of comics. I objected, said that despite liking Dolby, I wanted to be the Raymond Scott of comics, to which my tormenter replied “make better comics then.” In the end, it was agreed that I could be upgraded to the Herbie Hancock of comics until further notice, which I thought was fair enough.
I couldn’t even tell you the lyrics to a lot of my favorite songs. I usually fall in love with the music itself, even if the lyrics are a muddled blur.
July 22-25, 2010
