Andrew Mueller, I Wouldn’t Start From Here: The 21st Century and Where It All Went Wrong (U.S. edition, 2009, Soft Skull) purchase from Amazon
I Wouldn’t Start From Here is aptly titled, because you should skip Robert Young Pelton’s introduction. It’s a rant on how Americans need to read this book because we are all so lame and hate foreigners. Pelton has all the charm of someone who bought a copy of Let’s Go Thailand and a backpack the summer before law school, and now wants everyone to know how worldly he is because he smoked dope with a bunch of Canadians at a hostel on the Khe Sahn Road. Well, if Americans hate funny things so much, why did we elect as our president a self-described “skinny kid with a funny name,” the son of a Kenyan, with a grandmother and half-siblings who live in a more-or-less traditional Kenyan village?
And yes, Robert Young Pelton had to know about the election when the introduction went to press, because Andrew Mueller writes about the revelry of November 4, 2008 for this edition. (The book was originally published in 2007 in Australia.) So skip his introduction, unless you are an American who believes that you are superior to all other Americans because you sometimes read the news on Guardian.co.uk. (more…)
Okay, so the title triggers unbidden memories of a song most of us would rather forget — and may create the impression that the book is about a format whose time came and went 20 years ago — but trust me, if you consider yourself any kind of music geek, you need to get your hands on a copy of Travis Elborough’s The Vinyl Countdown: The Album from LP to iPod and Back Again. I went in expecting a book-length defense of vinyl, but Elborough’s really up to something different here: Over the course of the book’s 480 pages, he leads the reader back through the history of the long player itself — from 78 to 33 to 8 (track) and onward, all delivered from a chatty first-person perspective and dotted through with various footnotes, personal anecdotes, and observations. If that seems like a lot of paper for a single subject, it is — but Elborough takes an impressively wide approach, beginning by circling around the hows and whys of the long player’s creation and finishing right around the time Axl started crawling up his own ass for Chinese Democracy.
It can be a bit of a slog, but it’s fascinating stuff; you could devote an entire book, for instance, to the “speed wars” that erupted when Columbia debuted the 33 1/3 LP in 1948. Elborough kicks things off with a description of the press demonstration at which Columbia president Edward Wallerstein stood next to an eight-foot stack of 78s, holding an armload of 33s, and proceeded to stun the assembled journalists into silence by contrasting the older format’s four-minutes-a-side limit with his company’s new “Revolutionary Disk Marvel,” capable of playing an entire 22-minute symphony without making the listener get up off his ass to flip it over. This introductory section is filled with fascinating tidbits about the 33’s first few unsteady steps, but it’s just a primer — before long, Elborough is off and running with in-depth looks at what the LP meant for everyone from the avid music collector (the expanded time limits of the new format made building a personal library much more affordable) to Frank Sinatra (no LP, no concept album — and no In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning). (more…)
I sometimes think that the exaggerated esteem afforded Jack Kirby’s body of work ultimately does him no favors. Kirby, of course, was a gaddam genius — creating (or co-creating, depending on how much credence you feel like granting Stan Lee on any given day) most of Marvel Comics’ most iconic characters, defining the visual vocabulary of graphic storytelling, and mastering just about every conceivable genre within comics, including a few that he invented himself. But there’s a tendency among Kirby fans to treat every dot, every scribble, as a legacy for the ages.
This view of Kirby, as the lone Promethean wizard creating worlds from whole cloth, began even in his lifetime — encouraged, no doubt, by the man’s unprecedented creative control over his latter-day projects. Rather than the assembly-line system of most comics, where the different jobs of putting a book together were coordinated from the central location of the publisher, Jack Kirby’s 1970s Marvel work found Kirby himself wearing all the hats. He was both writer and penciller; inks and lettering were both done by assistants (usually Mike Royer), in Kirby’s own studio and under his supervision — making him his own editor, in title and in practice. In the letter-to-the-editor pages reproduced in the Devil Dinosaur Omnibus — the first reprinting of the comic’s original 9-issue run from 1978 — the address given for correspondence is a PO box in Kirby’s California hometown, rather than, as in Marvel’s other books, the publisher’s New York City offices. Think about that: Kirby didn’t even trust Marvel to forward his mail. That’s the level of sovereignty that he, alone of all comics creators, was afforded. No wonder they called him “The King.” (more…)
It’s hard to believe (for those of us who lived it, anyway) that it’s been fifteen years since Kurt Cobain committed suicide. On April 5th, 1994, the Seattle native left the world with the same cold-water shock his band Nirvana had on the world when the album Nevermind broke in 1991.
But to a larger degree, Cobain’s death has become a coda-like representation in our pop culture vernacular as the beginning of the end for the “grunge” era in Seattle. Greg Prato’s new book Grunge is Dead: The Oral History of Seattle Rock Music disagrees. The book attempts to set this (and gads of other misnomers perpetuated by “so-called experts, who didn’t show up until the ‘90s, as Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament has said) straight.
Prato’s nearly 500-page digest does what no other documentary on the subject has before—it leaves the reflection to those who lived it, in their own words, without a filter. To that end, this is a truly great oral history. (more…)
First things first: Buffy the Vampire Slayer — the movie with Luke Perry and Kristy Swanson — had its moments, but ultimately sucked. When Buffy the Vampire Slayer made its debut as a TV series in 1997, it was the best thing to happen to TV until, well, Ronald Moore and David Eick’s “reimagined” version of Battlestar Galactica in 2003. It’s not hard to see why. Both series took stock fantasy/sci-fi narratives (i.e., vampires wreaking havoc on a community or humans trying to escape a relentless robotic enemy in space) and turned them on their heads to spotlight characters and stories where identity, morality, sexuality, gender, race and class were in flux. In the case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the growth of the main characters was often spurred by the introduction of someone new. For the bookish Willow Rosenberg (as played by Alyson Hannigan), her character really started getting interesting when Joss Whedon — the show’s creator — paired her with Tara Maclay (Amber Benson), who, at first, was just a member of a Wicca group that Willow joined in college. Later, it becomes clear that Willow and Tara were pretty much soulmates and the two become a couple until Tara’s death by a stray bullet.
While the character Benson played on Buffy was mostly relegated to walk-ons in future episodes after her untimely death, Amber Benson went on to direct films, create an animated drama for the BBC, co-authored two novels, and now flies solo as the author of a new novel, Death’s Daughter. (more…)
There was a period of time during junior high and high school when I was convinced music wouldn’t be a part of my life. I couldn’t afford to get a guitar or a keyboard, I didn’t have the outsize personality the other rock kids had, and I found it terribly difficult to put across my ambitions to even the few people I entrusted with my goals. I focused more on the possibility of going into comics. Just as some of my earliest recollections are of songs, I also have an undiminished affinity for Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang. In those high school years my attention was fixed on the artist Al Williamson, whose superrealistic, detailed style was so perfect in the notorious EC science-fiction comics of the late ’50s and early ’60s. In my mind, his work on Marvel’s adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back and his subsequent work on the Star Wars newspaper strip are the epitome of great comic book art.
In the past month I’ve been rooting through the boxes in my attic, looking at the stuff I’ve squirreled away up there over the years. I came upon a small cache of drawings, paintings, and such, gave them a once-over, and decided maybe it was a good idea to bring them downstairs and get some quality scans together, just to have a decent record of their existence. I doodle from time to time, but my dreams of being in the business of comics are long gone. This is partly due to the quality of what’s out there, specifically the writing. In the past two decades Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and Frank Miller have made that once unimaginable leap from the “funny books” to honest-to-God literature, and they didn’t even have to change their addresses. With the often funny but deeply felt Bone saga, Jeff Smith made a brilliant epic out of something that might have been relegated to a goofy kids’-comic limbo at one time. And then there’s Jon J. Muth’s insanely awesome adaptation of Fritz Lang’s M. Each example not only deserves space on the snootiest of bookshelves, but some deserve to kick a few warhorses off those shelves just for breathing room.
Thank God for Ted Nugent. Seriously. The guy is a true patriot, and he has strong notions about America and what makes her great, which he lays out in his new(ish) book Ted, White, and Blue: The Nugent Manifesto (Regnery Publishing). By articulating his proudly conservative beliefs, he has done a great service to all patriots, no matter what their political persuasion. This is a book that everyone who loves America needs to read — even liberals. Especially liberals.
Because Ted Nugent is a brave man. Ted says exactly what’s on his mind, and that takes courage. Conservative commentators are often taken to task for substituting canned talking points for critical thought. Well, I’m here to tell you, people: Ted Nugent is not using canned talking points as a substitute for anything. When he trots out a well-worn anecdote or turn of phrase — spotted owls, “take the next boat to Cuba,” welfare = racism, love it or leave it, “more guns equal less crime,” and on and on — he leaves no box unchecked, and he’s 100 percent sincere about all of it.
As a culture, Americans may not have the most difficulty absorbing death — we don’t have any widows throwing themselves on burning pyres, after all — but we certainly aren’t the most well-adjusted people when it comes to contemplating the end of the end. And although we aren’t the only country to enact laws forbidding assisted suicide — I’m reasonably certain it’s illegal in most countries — we have devoted a substantial amount of public discussion to the subject, and as Jack Kevorkian could tell you, it makes a lot of people awfully uncomfortable.
It’s into this climate that Jack West releases The Last Goodnights: Assisting My Parents with Their Suicides, a memoir of his experiences with the planned deaths of his terminally ill parents. About 10 years ago, in a spectacularly painful convergence of shitty luck, West’s father and mother both discovered they were approaching death — and in a bit of even shittier luck, they both asked West to help them arrange their final exits. It’s an incredible story, but it’s true, and whatever your feelings about helping someone die, The Last Goodnights adds something valuable to the conversation.
West’s father, a prominent psychiatrist and UCLA faculty member who has his own Wikipedia entry and whose death made the obituary papers in the Los Angeles and New York Times, was a larger-than-life figure — he sparred with Scientologists, marched with Martin Luther King, examined Patty Hearst, and was one of the first American doctors to bring attention to the treatment of South African prisoners under apartheid — and from West’s loving-yet-unvarnished description of “Jolly’s” life, it isn’t hard to understand why he’d want to end it on his own terms, especially after being diagnosed with late-stage cancer.
Not long after agreeing to help his father end his own life, West learns that his mother has similar plans; she’s suffering from emphysema, mid-stage Alzheimer’s, and other ailments, and makes it known that she wants to make this decision while she’s still capable of making any at all. (more…)
My primary brief, with How Bad Can It Be?, is to look at media product that for whatever reason—an unpromising premise, a poisoned reputation, a creator’s track record—gives me no reason to expect that it’ll be any good, and to try to give that work the benefit of the doubt. But occasionally, something comes along that, on paper at least, should work. The question then becomes, “What went wrong?” Such is the case with Paul Pope’s Batman: Year 100 (DC Comics).
The Batman, of course, is a hugely iconic property, and it’s easy to see why. Through all the various artistic takes and interpretations he remains a strangely inspirational figure; he’s One Man making A Difference, overcoming the trauma of his origins to recast himself as a protector of the weak, with no powers but his own indomitable will. For all that he is a terrifying badass, the Batman is perhaps the most lovable of superheroes, and his hard-edged altruism has proved a durable storytelling engine.
And Paul Pope? He’s your genuine comics rock star. From his earliest small-press works like THB and Escapo to more polished recent productions like Heavy Liquid and 100%, Pope has trafficked in SF adventure with an art-house sensibility. It’s bracing stuff—blazingly paced and compulsively readable, justifying the self-bestowed nickname “Pulphope,” shot through with smart speculative elements and moments of aching tenderness. And it’s all rendered in a kinetic, swaggering line, crackling with energy.
So when DC Comics announced that Pope would write and draw a four-issue miniseries re-imagining the Batman in a near-future setting—2038, to be precise, 100 years after his debut in Detective Comics—it seemed like an aesthetic sure bet. (more…)
To say that I’m not a foodie would be an act of extremely polite understatement. I spent much of my 20s subsisting on Top Ramen, corned beef hash, and pasta, and like my colleague Jon Cummings, I probably ate my first salad sometime around the age of 27. As for oysters, well…my only experience with the raw variety came in a Nashville restaurant about 10 years ago, and although it didn’t end as terribly as eating raw seafood in Tennessee probably can, it wasn’t all that pleasant, either — kind of like swallowing phlegm with Tobasco sauce.
As a reader, though, I’m easily persuaded by good writing; I’ve come away from impassioned defenses of music I know I hate (see: Floyd, Pink) feeling like I might actually be able to enjoy the stuff, simply because I enjoyed reading about it. My eighth-grade English teacher would probably disagree — and wave a goddamn sentence diagram at me, too — but I think that kind of contagious enthusiasm for one’s subject might be the most important asset a writer can have.
Robb Walsh, the author of Sex, Death and Oysters: A Half-Shell Lover’s World Tour, has that enthusiasm; simply put, the man loves oysters, and I mean L-O-V-E-S them — enough to spend five years traveling the globe in pursuit of what it is that differentiates one region’s fruits de mer from another’s. Walsh is the restaurant critic for the Houston Press, so he naturally begins his journey by shucking through the oyster bars in and around Galveston Bay (and vigorously fighting the widespread belief that Southern oysters will kill you, especially when eaten in moths without an R). From there, it’s off to Florida, where oystermen still farm their crop with old-fasioned tongs — and from there, Walsh goes all over the world, testing claims to half-shell greatness in the United Kingdom, France, Canada, the American Northwest, and anywhere else oysters are grown, often dragging his teenage daughters and girlfriend (turned fiancee, turned pregnant second wife) along with him. (more…)
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Andrew Mueller, I Wouldn’t Start From Here: The 21st Century and Where It All Went Wrong (U.S. edition, 2009, Soft Skull)
Travis Elborough – The Vinyl Countdown: The Album from LP to iPod and Back Again (2009, Soft Skull)
It’s hard to believe (for those of us who lived it, anyway) that it’s been fifteen years since Kurt Cobain committed suicide. On April 5th, 1994, the Seattle native left the world with the same cold-water shock his band Nirvana had on the world when the album 
First things first: Buffy the Vampire Slayer — the movie with Luke Perry and Kristy Swanson — had its moments, but ultimately sucked. When Buffy the Vampire Slayer made its debut as a TV series in 1997, it was the best thing to happen to TV until, well, Ronald Moore and David Eick’s “reimagined” version of Battlestar Galactica in 2003. It’s not hard to see why. Both series took stock fantasy/sci-fi narratives (i.e., vampires wreaking havoc on a community or humans trying to escape a relentless robotic enemy in space) and turned them on their heads to spotlight characters and stories where identity, morality, sexuality, gender, race and class were in flux. In the case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the growth of the main characters was often spurred by the introduction of someone new. For the bookish Willow Rosenberg (as played by 
In the past month I’ve been rooting through the boxes in my attic, looking at the stuff I’ve squirreled away up there over the years. I came upon a small cache of drawings, paintings, and such, gave them a once-over, and decided maybe it was a good idea to bring them downstairs and get some quality scans together, just to have a decent record of their existence. I doodle from time to time, but my dreams of being in the business of comics are long gone. This is partly due to the quality of what’s out there, specifically the writing. In the past two decades Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and Frank Miller have made that once unimaginable leap from the “funny books” to honest-to-God literature, and they didn’t even have to change their addresses. With the often funny but deeply felt 
. Each example not only deserves space on the snootiest of bookshelves, but some deserve to kick a few warhorses off those shelves just for breathing room.
John West – The Last Goodnights: Assisting My Parents with Their Suicides (2009, Counterpoint)
Robb Walsh – Sex, Death and Oysters: A Half-Shell Lover’s World Tour (2009, Counterpoint)