Month: July 2012

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Word Synaesthesia, What You Do To Me

This week’s Time piece is an essay inspired – if that’s the right word – by seeing Safety Not Guaranteed last week and watching trailers for Ruby Sparks and Lola Vs beforehand, with each film seeming curiously like the others. It was one of those things that just killed me to write; I ended up starting over and trying to find what I was trying to say more than once (I almost ran one of the abandoned versions here, but then thought better of it; there’s only so much of my dirty writing laundry that I can expect other people to want to see, after all), and only realized after a number of hours that what I was thinking about as the middle of my piece was actually my end point.

Along the way, it made me realize a couple of things about the way I write things. Firstly, and frustratingly, I can’t redraft; I have to start over, and rewrite from the beginning, even if all I’m doing is rewriting things that worked the first time around until I get to the problem parts. I have no idea why this is the case, but it is; cutting and pasting things into a different order or working around them just doesn’t work for me, my brain doesn’t hold the information the same way. Secondly, and more interestingly to me, I think of essay structure as song structure. The part I ended up pushing to the end of the essay? I found myself thinking of it as “the bridge” at one point, and then as “the coda.” I constantly worry about the rhythm of what I write, too. Maybe I’m a frustrated song writer and I didn’t know it.

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Years Of Art School, Me

In lieu of new content – I’m trying to wrap up enough work so that I have all of July 4th to myself – here are some portraits I did about a decade ago for a friend’s book project. I hadn’t thought about these for quite some time, and then got an email the other day asking if they could be used in a reissue of said project. Nostalgia!

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And This Was The Day Job, June 2012

It’s invoice time, which means I have to go back through everything I’ve written for money in the last month, counting up what I did and where it is and then asking people for said money. But, in the process of coming up with that list this month, I thought I’d share with you what I got up to last month, in terms of output:

Newsarama:
64 blog posts
3 Top 10 features
Contributions to another 3 Top 10 features
1 news story that never saw print for some mysterious reason

Digital Trends:
44 news stories

SpinOff Online:
18 op-ed pieces

Comics Alliance:
42 news stories

Robot 6:
4 op-ed pieces

Time Entertainment:
4 longform essays

Maybe it’s just me, but that feels like a lot of stuff for a month. If nothing else, it’s having to write anywhere between, say, 200 and 2000 words on 183 different subjects. Yes, there’s a lot of overlap (and a little repetition) in those subjects, but still. I am a little bit in awe of myself, and also finally giving me a break for (a) constantly feeling overwhelmed and (b) slacking off on this here blog when I do.

(For those wondering about word counts, it’s at least 19,800 for Digital Trends, where stories have to be above 450 words, and I’d guess somewhere in the region of 6,000 words for the Time pieces, which tend to even out somewhere in the region of 1,500 words all told. You’ve got me for however many words I write on average for the other outlets, though.)

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Recently Read, Prose (7/2/12)

As you can see, I’m continuing with my Star Trek and Greg Rucka reading habits. Critical Space is a weird, fascinating read because it’s a novel that changes the Kodiak series from one thing into another, and also the format of Rucka’s novels, as well; I have to doubleback and read Shooting At Midnight again to see if he actually started it there. Fistful of Rain, meanwhile, I just loved for the Portland-ness of it all (This is maybe the third time I’ve read it, and each time I feel like I recognize a little more of the city). As far as the Trek novel goes, it’s fun enough but has a truly ridiculous ending that reads as if it is missing a chapter or two somewhere along the way. As far as cliffhangers go, though, it’s pretty fun.

Next up on the bedside table: Alan Bennert’s Time and Chance, a recommendation from none other than comics’ own Kurt Busiek, and the Shooting At Midnight that’s waiting for me at the library.

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I Wanna Be Free

Here’s David Brothers writing about the Internet’s perception of him as “a negative guy”:

I went all in with comics journo and I realized a while back that that was a mistake. I got into news, covering conventions, interviews, and all this other smokescreen stuff when all I really wanted to do is have a place to talk about these stupid, amazing comics. I’m trying to correct my course now, I’ve been trying to correct my course, because I realize that doing all of that brought me dangerously close to burning out, and then I burned out anyway.

I understand why people like to see hit pieces over gushing. There’s a thrill in seeing something get taken apart, and it turns out that the same mind that makes me good at gushing also makes me pretty good at hit pieces. But I hate the fact that this short attention span-having internet looks at me like I’m that dude when I’ve worked so hard to not be seen as that guy. I hate that guy. But it is what it is, and here we are.

I have a personal troll over at Newsarama. Seriously; someone created a comment account called “The Anti-Graemator” (or something really similar; I can’t be bothered to check, but I’m pretty sure that’s right) that exists purely to comment after articles about how I suck. It was a weird discovery, that one, and even now I can’t quite believe someone was that upset/bored/a combination of the two to actually do it, but it’s also good in a way because it’s a reminder that there will always, always be people on the Internet who don’t care what you write because they know what they think of you and that’s the narrative they keep in their heads. Content is less important than perception, for a lot of people, even people who should know better. I don’t know if it’s really the “short attention span-having Internet,” or whether it’s the selfishness and self-centeredness of the audience as a whole these days, but still. It’s amusing, depressing and exhausting, all at once. I’m not sure how to react to it, sometimes, and so I find myself ignoring it and keeping on keeping on. One day, I think, maybe they’ll see something that so obviously contradicts their construction of “who I am” that they’ll start to look past the prejudice.

Ah, misplaced optimism. What would I do without you?

(David is, it’s worth pointing out, not a “negative guy” at all; another short-sightedness of the mass audience is to confuse “This is bad, I have problems with it and here’s why” with “I hate that thing you like, I hate everything.” But you knew that already, right?)

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366 Songs 167: Teardrop


Yes, it’s the theme song to House, in its instrumental form, with the lovely, fragile music falling and climbing as piano chords interfere, crashing heavily and providing some structure to the whole thing. But without the vocals from Liz Frazer, this is just a pretty tune that hints at foreboding; what makes “Teardrop” so wonderful are the words, for me.

“Love/Love is a verb/Love is a doing word,” she sings at the start, the most direct lyrics in a song full of hint and tease. We can guess from the lyric and delivery that “It’s tumbling down” isn’t something good, sure, but what exactly does “Teardrop on the fire/Of a confession/Fearless on my breath” mean, exactly? The same with “Water is my eye/Most faithful mirror.” It’s all emotional echolalia, in a way; words coming out, repeated, and they all mean something but that meaning isn’t clear. That adds to the weight of the song, though; the idea of tragedy that you not only can’t prevent (“It’s tumbling down!”), but can’t even grasp fully.

That most people now – myself included – can’t hear the start of the song without thinking of House is a shame. It deserves better.

Here’s a really nice cover version, to send you on your way, from Jose Gonzalez:

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366 Songs 166: Bug Powder Dust

As far as I’m concerned, this remains one of the greatest rap tracks ever recorded: Justin Warfield’s hilarious, pop-culture-reference filled rap (“Top of the Pops, like the Lulu show/I take a walk on Abbey Road/With my shoes off, so”) in a track with such an insanely unforgiving bass sample (from this free jazz song, which makes me think of little as much as the jingles that played between sketches on Sesame Street), topped with the William S. Burroughs inspired title? Seriously, how anyone could resist, I have no idea.

After this song, both Warfield and Bomb The Bass kind of disappeared, as if their jobs were done. The BTB album that followed this track, Clear, was a great one with all manner of guests (including novelist Will Self) and a sound that sounded like dirtier trip-hop, but the next album didn’t appear for another thirteen years, and with a significantly different sound. Warfield, too, put out an album that followed this (with early remixed by David Holmes, of all people) before disappearing from view and reappearing as the lead singer of She Wants Revenge, sounding like this:

Let’s just say that “Bug Powder Dust” may have broken everyone involved, shall we?