At the Emerald City Comic-Con, right after I got word that it was okay to announce my comic adaption of The Anti-War Museum of Tuscaloosa, Alabama for the Nightmares of the Macabre series, I was interviewed by two purveyors of awesome, Shannon and Matt of the Seattle Geekly!
You can find my interview here. It’s filled with enthusiastic excitement of jubilant… well, okay, I’m a little hyper and excited. But why not?
My friend Eric has a book out today, The Shield, and it features the DC Debut of another accomplished friend guy I know will be stomping the masthead with a boot all over in the next few years, Brandon Jerwa. Maybe that’s a crappy metaphor. I conjure the image of a dragon kick and Dan DiDio with that. I more mean he’s gonna leave footprints… in a metaphorical sense of… AH HELL, his work rocks. Read it!
The pair, who I have already talked up because of WIDE AWAKE (coming soon to a theater near you, methinks) are now in charge of a brand new comic, so get out there and get some. If the above preview doesn’t sell you, or if you’re too lazy to read said preview, check out this one page. That was enough to sell me on the book, knowledge of the writer regardless. Haven’t seen the sheer joy of flying done like that in a comic in some time, and the dude is just using gravity.
Also, if you’re still up and about, there’s a signing at Olympic today, so get on, kids! Git!
1) Hot gal. Cold weather. You do the math.
2) If you’ve read the graphic novel, you don’t even need number two.
3) Check out the graphic novel. See 2.
4) The movie is the responsibility of Greg Rucka, my favorite working comics writer today. And I read way too many comics, kids. I’ve spent more time reading comics than you’ve slept. Or rather, I’ve slept more than you’ve lived. One of the two. Shit.
5) This.
6) If you don’t go, you won’t have the indie cred of having been there for the first movie, before they make the Queen and Country, Atticus Kodiak, and the Drama spin-off movies. Like, remember that guy who went to Dogma and was like, “What’s Clerks?” Yeah. Fuck that guy! Don’t be that guy!
7) Tom Skerrit’s moustache alone can solve any existential quandary. And he’s a TERTIARY CHARACTER IN THIS FILM.
8 ) There are no Transformers, no GI Joe characters, and no fucking blue Ferngully Avatar characters in here. Just woman vs. nature and a bunch of assholes who need to be stomped. Fuck yeah. And I don’t want to spoil anything… but ASSHOLES GET STOMPED!
9) Because lists suck, and I will write more lists if I get the impression everyone, and I mean every single person I know, did not go and see the flick twice.
10) If you go, everyone will get universal health care. Shit you not. I guarantee it in blood. I asked the magic 8-ball, and it’s never been wrong.*
*timeframe for this not guaranteed.
It opens this Friday, suckers, and I couldn’t be more excited. GO!
Welcome to 1996. I’ve just gotten my first CD player, and I spend most of my weekends when I should be getting ready for school on Monday listening to 120 Minutes, with Matt Pinfield, learning all there is to know about my generation of music.
Then this little piece of shit country sounding band comes on, sounds a little like the Gin Blossoms, but with a little more ass kicking, and more importantly, a reference to Jean-Luc Picard:
Then, one day, looking around Tower Records, I find the album for six fucking bucks. Score. Enter another of my favorite songs of all time. The lyrics are pretty key in most of their songs to the appeal:
Cut to today, six or eight albums later, and a new name (Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers), and we have one Neal, surprised that they’re a relatively obscure band while shit like Lady Gaga pervades.
In other words, if you don’t pick up an album by either The Refreshments or Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers, I fear you will never be inspired by any muse ever again. Plus, you’ll get gonorrhea.
So do. Here’s one more reason why, and probably the best way I can express how inadequate I often feel in the face of telling Kristen I love her:
Or, for those of you less romantic, more into awesome lyrics. This is effectively Bitch’s Theme, if there’s ever a Hal movie:
Thank you to several folks for pointing out the fact that my Sarah Palin book is the number ten hot book for Wizard Magazine this month. This is the first time I am aware of that something I’ve been working on has been mentioned in Wizard in quite some time, since the SH was profiled back in the Loeb/MacGuinness run.
I’ve decided to not speak to my thoughts about Star Trek at all, given that it’s controversial, given that it doesn’t really matter, and given that I’m much more obsessed with the nuance and minutae of another piece of material.
It’s a bad time to be talking about it right now, given that I’m fighting some fucking gnarly food poisoning, but because of it I can’t sleep, so why not?
In short, I’ve been a Green Day fan since they saved my fucking life. Sounds like a joke, sounds like a cliche, but I don’t give a solid shit. They did. Artists can do that, and some artists can do it in a heartbeat, and Green Day have always been that band for me. You can make your valid and sound arguments that they took money for their work (and there’s still something to be said for money not being a motivating factor, despite the aging rational punk inside of me sneering at Johnny Rotten’s butter commercial compared to Sid’s lonely grave). You can make the argument that if one goes from three minutes or less to mostly five (as 21st is) and forsake the grinding guitars in favor of piano ballads, you’re a differing genre and thusly contradictory in some fashion. I’ve heard all of the arguments.
I used to fight them when I was a kid, I mean, I really did. I used to stand by DIY and fucking punk vs. poseur and it was a hill I would have been proud to die on. I don’t know if it was my violent, irrational, visceral reaction to grunge, a bias I’ve since gotten over, or maybe it was because punk broke for the second time (third if you count the hardcore period) in the early nineties just as I was on the cusp of the apotheosis of my relative dysfunctions, but Green Day came at just the right time for me.
I wrote some of my first poems to Dookie. I used to walk streets in the early morning with nothing but a tape recorder with the volume turned low blaring Basket Case. It used to get me complaints from my customers, though I kept it quiet. A few understood.
I wanted to kill myself that year, which is something I don’t really admit to hardly anyone, because then I sound like a fucking emo kid, but it’s true. I tried once. Didn’t work out. I didn’t even get to the implement, and it’s not a good story for public consumption outside of, say, stuff I’ll write later.
David Byrne says: I’ll tell you later!
Dookie was the first tape I ever played so much that it skipped. People laugh when I tell them that. They don’t realize that if you play tapes enough, they will fucking skip.
At any rate, Welcome to Paradise, a song about wanting to leave home, She, a song about a woman who seeks to find fault in argument and sow chaos, Fuck Off and Die, a song about being sick of people, they all made sense at the time. I remember being 23, which is about how old the members of the band were when they wrote that album, and thinking, shit. Look where they were, and look where I am. I was ashamed and humbled. People look at Orson Welles and think that. I look at Green Day.
Insomniac comforted me in a very angry period. Nimrod brought me peace after a bad breakup, and helped me acknowledge that the rigid structured set of things I thought made a thing a thing (in this case, punk) could be annihilated and still survive if the spirit was strong. Warning helped me cope with another bad breakup (with the woman I’m still with today). And then, there was a long silence. Billie Joe got arrested for a DUI. I thought the old constant was something I’d have to reminisce on. I was dealing with Bush and the fucking war and all of the awful things that made me leave college a week before I would have graduated.
Then American Idiot.
To this day, it’s my dream project. I wrote a script based around it, a kind of new Tommy, and I would quite literally kill most any of you for the shot to have it made. It’s that close to my heart. I am a man with ten thousand songs in my damned music player, and a rack full of CDs fine and foul that would probably change your life. And if you don’t have a rack like that you could share with me as well, then shame on you. That’s the only place where I think it’s fair to keep music elite.
I considered it then, and I still consider it the finest piece of rock music pressed to plastic. And now vinyl, apparently. Fuckin’ kids.
So, 21st.
The new album hit me at a convergence of bankruptcy, artistic success, and most importantly, going from a neighbor who pounded the walls and made me turn off my bass, to my new house, where the rad lady next door characterized herself as “loud people.” So I upped the bass to human enjoyment levels, and the first full album I listened to in my new monitor womb was an album I waited five years for.
There is only one song on it that’s even remotely average, and of course, that’s the one they’re playing on the radio, just like they did with American Idiot.
There’s one song that’s only above average, and that’s Christian’s Inferno. But it grows on my every time I hear it, because it’s an important part of the narrative.
The narrative in this album is much, much thinner and vague than American Idiot. But that’s fine, because though it’s billed as a rock opera, the album is really just more of an album with interconnected thematics. There are characters, but it’s not like American Idiot, where there was a clear beginning, middle, end, and connecting tissue that my mind was able to instantly string into a beautiful story.
Instead, it’s a mallet that hits you in the head repeatedly with blue collar working class post-modern apathy, angst, and hope, often all in the same song. And usually the way Jesus intended it, with three chords and a fucking chorus that the most lowly working class man or woman could hit.
See, I don’t truck with the idea that Beethoven is the highest art. I can understand the beauty of the music, and I love it myself, but I like bringing it down and keeping it high. Meaning, I think Issa and Basho had a point when they point out the most zen fucking thing on Earth is farting and cleaning outhouses, and a poet’s job is to make that thankless task beautiful and have a point.
Green Day swings it.
I don’t know where it stands in terms of American Idiot, but I know it’s easily number 2 all-time right now. It may become number one as the broader points come to root in my subconscious and I can see the work of the lyrics more instead of getting caught in the music.
Most albums have good music and shitty lyrics at least half the time. Really, most all artists suffer from that. I can’t think of many examples. Usually, one outweighs the other enough to be forgiven, though. My absolute faves rock both, because unlike most, I pay damned close attention to the lyrics with the ear of a guy who’s written a fuckton of poetry.
Good at both, generally, almost always: Rancid, Green Day, Bad Religion, Roger Clyne, Regina Spektor
There are many other bands I listen to, but the above have a fucking ear for the verse.
I think, if American Idiot is my favorite album, I would have to say that 21st has the best lyrics I’ve ever read on an album. Top to bottom. Much thought, time, revision, and care went into it, beyond Know Your Enemy. That track relies more on the creativity with transposing matching verses, which works to a degree, but it’s about average.
Some of the lyrics flat out make you cry if you listen through with an honest heart, the first time. At very least, if you’re not a pussy like me, you’ll get gooseflesh.
I honestly expected to be disappointed, because there’s sure as shit no way to find the concordance of the last album in my life again.
I do, however, have a mischievous little narrative flow in my head for this one. As I listen, I’ll see what develops. If the title track isn’t a cynical Shakespeare style muse about to introduce a tragic drama, I don’t know what is.
My inkling is that it’s a story of the father becoming the son. It’s about the class of ‘13, but it starts out telling how a guy was born into Nixon and moves into the story of a couple of kids born into Bush.
But either way, if you can listen to Before the Lobotomy without busting up a little inside, I pity your cemented heart. Go here and read along.
I have broader commentary and longer thoughts, but my stomach is no longer upset, and I’m either preaching to the converted or being considered an aping sellout, so meh. Point being, if there’s a lesson I can pass along from these thoughts, it’s to fuck what you heard, it’s to not give a shit about what the fuck internet message boards say. Give this one a shot, you won’t regret it.
I’m a little late to the party on this one, though I was there for the beginning of it. I just forgot I’d be on a plane and everything, so I hadn’t had a chance to post this yet.
My friends Eric Trautmann and Brandon Jerwa introduced me to Wide Awake in its initial stages, and since then I’ve eagerly awaited the culmination and where the comic would go. The concept (which I won’t spoil for you, you have to read the story) is an awesome one, and Amanda is a character I already want to knuckle into and visit with weekly.
I thought it’d be a regular comic book series, but Eric and Brandon are actually going in a novel direction, a direction that I want to experiment in myself, so I’m watching (and hoping) their project goes really, really well. I’m one of those guys that can read something on the internet or on the computer and enjoy it, as well as buy a regular copy, and I do believe it’s where we’re headed, kicking or screaming or not.
To that end, Wide Awake, their concept, is being developed as a weekly project, starting up soon, whereby you get six pages of story a week for free, and then, in a year, if you dig the story, they go from there, evolve it, transmute it, use a little alchemy and find a happy medium. It just sounds like an awesome concept, and if you can bookmark a webcomic every day (as I know most of you do), imagine a free comic every week. Warren Ellis succeeded in his attempt, and it’s my hope that Eric and Brandon will surpass his ingenuity and bring the world to its damned knees, becuase this is the kind of serialized storytelling I miss. I mean, just crack open the paper and read Garfield to see how low the weekly awesome has fallen.
We need more weekly awesome, and I think it’s here. Newsarama agrees.
Get a cool wallpaper, here diminished by my smallor-izing and stealing of it, at the website:
And if you can’t do any of that, then please, any time you see someone misspell the name Trautmann or Jerwa, stab them in the face. That’s completely ancillary, of course. I just see they do the same thing with Eric’s name in print as they do with mine.
I am not Niel Baily. Nor is Eric a Trout-Man, from what I can ascertain. At least… I hope?
But even if he does have gills I am unaware of, these boys can write, so hit it up!
