What was the first concert you ever went to? What was the best concert you ever want to?
Oh man, this is a tough one. I think my first concert experience was when my dad drove us out to the desert behind the Silver Bowl to listen to the audio bleed from the US concert from their Zoo TV tour. Which, according to the internet, would’ve been in November of 1992. It was a kind of a magic experience, sitting in the back of my dad’s Bronco, listening to the songs echo across the desert at night. This was Achtung Baby-era, before U2 had completely crawled up their own collective ass to fester and die.
The first “real” concert is a little trickier to pin down. I’m thinking it was this Pearl Jam show from 1993, where a group of us drove from the Las Vegas desert to the California desert to see them on an old polo grounds. I remember a dude asked me if I had any “papers” and I was really confused because I was/still am a huge square.
Best concert ever was probably seeing the Flaming Lips at the tail end of their Soft Bulletin tour (again, way before they started their long trek into the Inner Asshole) at the El Rey Theater in Hollywood. At the time, the schtick of people in animal costumes and confetti cannons and fake blood and psychedelic rear projections came across as fresh and charming and heartfelt, like a shoestring-budget Pink Floyd show. They also had this thing where they were renting out these portable FM radios that were tied to the soundboard and were supposed to play the higher registered sounds that weren’t being produced over the PA and it sounded incredible. I left the theater just feeling so happy and positive. It was an experience that stuck with me, and not just because I was covered in confetti for days.
I remember seeing them at the Hollywood Bowl a year or two after on Cake’s Unlimited Sunshine Tour and feeling like it had sort of become a gimmick instead of a fun thing. And now? Well, I don’t think I’ll be seeing them any time soon.
Runner up would be seeing Elliot Smith on his Figure 8 tour. Grandaddy opened for them in support of The Sophtware Slump and they were really good. Smith was a little spacey, and, according to this report, it was mainly due to the audience being a bunch of dicks, which is typical for a Vegas crowd. It was at The Sanctuary (RIP), so it was an intimate space, so seeing him there, like 10 feet in front of you, laughing and smiling between songs or when his bass player would try and fail to land a harmony, it was really nice.
BONUS ANSWER: The worst concert I have ever attended – HANDS DOWN – was a Grateful Dead show, again at the Silver Bowl. Like I said, I’m a straight-edge-type who is terrified of drinking/drugs/dirty hippies, but at the time, I was hanging out with stoners who talked me into going, and I thought, “What the heck? Maybe I’m a Deadhead deep down inside.” The mixture of outdoor concert + Las Vegas summer + terrible music (they had like a 10-minute drum solo!) + 90s hippie kids + not being on drugs was the perfect storm of awful. The parking lot was hilarious, though. Best brownies I’ve ever had.
Note: Dylan is awesome.
Second Note: I saw Elliott Smith on the UK leg of the Figure 8 tour, and he was fucking spectacular. Quasi and… someone else…? were supporting, and it was a grand show.
Marvel has adopted a similar tactic lately when it comes to some of their event books. Yesterday, they asked us to set our orders for all four issues of their Thor and Loki Original Sin tie in. The first issue ships in July, while the last ships in September. They did something similar with the Hulk vs. Iron Man tie in, and will be doing the same for the Death of Wolverine series. Rapid shipping books without the luxury of order adjustment. This is a nightmare. Not only does it circumvent the final order cut-off system, which helps retailers reflect a book’s actual readership in their orders, but it takes the old system, and makes it worse. At least back then if there was a four issue mini-series solicited, you would be able to adjust your numbers according to a wider range of sales data. You didn’t have to set your numbers all at once, you could stagger the decision making, take a look at where your customer base is drifting, determine if they were even into the event, and maybe have enough time to save yourself for ordering way to much or too little on the final issues.
This is odd, and the first I’d heard of it. Does anyone have any more information about why final orders for September books have to be in so early in these cases? Are there production issues a la DC’s lenticular covers?
It’s the genetically modified fruit from Australia that could turn East African nations into life-saving banana republics.
Queensland University of Technology (QUT) researchers have engineered bananas grown in far north Queensland to increase the levels of beta-carotene, which is converted to vitamin A in the body.
The goal, they say, is to stop thousands of children in Uganda and the surrounding countries from going blind and dying from vitamin A deficiency.
And now they’ve successfully bent the banana genome, it’s being tested on humans for the first time.
Top 400 Comics Actual–May 2014
Top 400 Comics Actual–May 2014
Warning. This is very wonk-ish. I was going to say “wonky,” but that’s already a word.
Anyway: ICv2 has the latest Diamond sales chart + estimated sales numbers up, for May 2014. As it says on the site, “Sales Estimates for May Based on Diamond Indexes and Publisher Title Data.”
We’ve heard before from creators and publishers that these estimates are usually off from the reality, and significantly lower than the actual numbers, but this is one of the first times where we can compare the estimates with actual numbers… or, at least, almost actual numbers.
ICv2 estimate that Trees #1, by Warren Ellis and Jason Howard, sold 31,926 copies. However, in his recent Orbital Operations newsletter, Ellis wrote that “we sold around 44,000 copies of TREES #1.” So does that mean that ICv2 is under-estimating sales by 10K or so?
Probably not. The ICv2 numbers are for North America only, for a start; they’re also not including re-orders, to the best of my knowledge, and I’m pretty sure that Ellis is including both re-orders and international sales. But then again, so will publishers when making decisions about the profitability of books and whether or not to cancel them etc.
Maybe something to bear in mind next time ICv2 says that a book’s selling 18,000 and people – myself included! – start thinking “Cancellation! Cancellation!”
What we have is a new set of middlemen, the crowdfunding services, who skim off a percentage of each successfully funded project. Their genius is to make the big feel small, where you’re both individually valued and a part of a cosy digital island of like-minded people, but in many ways perform the same function of a label: a facilitator for culture. They’re not merely a cog – Kickstarter carefully selects the projects it allows – but this isn’t a total revolution yet, infrastructure-wise.
More conceptually, the problem is that a crowd tends to know what it wants. A campaign that brings a massive band to a small town is true democracy, and hugely heartening – but these and crowdfunding projects tend to work most effectively when you’re preaching to the choir, where fandom can be leveraged. For a project whose worth to the potential funder is less immediately demonstrable – and where fandom can’t fill that gap – it can be tricky.
That precedent is well illustrated in Jennie Livingstone’s celebrated 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning. Shot in the mid-to-late ’80s, the film explores New York’s “ballroom” scene, a subculture that allows LGBT people in major American cities — especially disadvantaged gay or trans people of color — to forge together under new identities.
The kids on the ballroom scene form houses under house mothers, and often take on new identities that may include the house name as their new surnames. Within these houses they compete in dance and drag contests at specially organized balls. The scene still exists to this day, but it enjoyed its peak in the ’70s and ’80s.
Pepper LaBeija, a New York drag queen and the mother of House of LaBeija, observed in the documentary, “When someone has rejection from their mother and father, their family … they search for someone to fill that void. … I’ve had kids come to me and latch hold to me like I’m their mother or like I’m their father.”
This is how the ballroom scene emerged. Kids rejected by their families sought out new families and new communities with other outcasts, other exiles, other orphans. These houses became their families. Ballroom became their community. The ballroom scene is just one of the many ways in which LGBT people have created their own support networks, united by their common fears and dreams.
That is the fantasy that the X-Men represents.
Andrew Wheeler over at Comics Alliance writes his first part of his LGBT reading of the X-men, with House of Xavier: How The X-men Represent Queer Togetherness. (via kierongillen)
This is great. Go, read. (Also, it ties in with something Rachel – from rachelandmiles – and I were talking about last week, about the metaphor behind the X-Men and its limits, which is something I hope she has time/brain space to expound on publicly sometime, because as you might expect, it’s fascinating.)
This case is not only crucially important in that it will force the court to clarify its own “true threats” doctrine and finally apply it to social media to determine whether—as Justice Stephen Breyer has suggested—the whole world is a crowded theater. But perhaps it’s even more important in pushing the conversation about law enforcement, prosecution, and threats to include a much more sophisticated understanding of the ways in which the Internet is not just a rally or a letter.
Is the lack of coverage of upcoming X-Men happenings at recent comic conventions part of that “We hate X-Men/Fantastic Four because FOX” thing Marvel’s got going on? We’ve heard about Avenger stuff going into summer of next year, but rarely is there ever a scrap of X-news these days. I think you guys should get over the inane movie tribalism. You can still sell the comics to the comic book readers instead of being brats. It’s like company-wide Alan Moorism. You guys signed the contract…right?
Okay, I will let your paranoid conspiratorial cuckoo crazy speak for some of the other crazy in my ask box.
do you think that I would waste my time writing the X-Men EVERY SINGLE DAY if my publisher wasn’t interested in the X-Men? if I thought I was writing into a publishing vacuum where my publisher didn’t care?
do you think that my publisher would put, not to be bragging, but one of their franchise players on the X-Men if they were not interested in making the X-Men as interesting and commercially successful as possible?
do you think I would be allowed to team up with the very best artists in mainstream comics on the X-Men if the publisher wasn’t interested in the X-Men?
just because Marvel announced an avengers related announcement that’s ready to be announced doesn’t mean that there isn’t stuff coming down the pike for X-Men that will blow your mind. very clearly what is going to happen in the last will and testament of Charles Xavier is about to blow the doors off of the X-Men franchise in a very exciting way. and when we are ready to pull the PR trigger we will pull the PR trigger.
it is truly amazing to me that no matter how much online gossip that you find out ends up being completely not true or warped to the point of not true that some of you guys STILL just flat out believe whatever you read.
look at the facts.