What It Is: 8/31/09

What I’m reading: Moby Dick, The Jew of New York, and The Muppet Show: Meet the Muppets, by Roger Langridge.

What I’m listening to: The Flat Earth, by Thomas Dolby, and the soundtrack to Stop Making Sense.

What I’m watching: A documentary on Faubourg Tremé, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, and The Last Dragon. With Bruce Leroy.

What I’m drinking: Plymouth & Q Tonic.

What Rufus is up to: Meeting a 14-month-old Newfoundland who was almost twice as large as him.

Where I’m going: Nowhere in particular, holiday weekend be darned!

What I’m happy about: I found the Pilot G-2 0.5mm retractable, a replacement pen for the occasionally-exploding Pilot Precise 0.5mm pens that were my standard. I’m happy to report that gel ink makes the rolling-ball pen flow pretty smoothly. One of the problems I have with writing longhand is that most pens tend to scrape and, well, move too slowly on the paper to keep up. Yes, I have problems.

What I’m sad about: Chef Central has apparently stopped making my favorite coffee, so I have to start trying out new whole bean options.

What I’m worried about: Having to fix my iMac after running Drive Genius 2 on it rendered it unbootable.

What I’m pondering: Taking a week or two off from my regular features and only posting intermittently. In fact, that’s just what I’m gonna do. I’ll post some Unrequired Reading at the end of the week, but don’t expect many posts for a little while, okay?

Hell is for trolls?

I was enjoying this A.V. Club Patton Oswalt interview about his new movie, Big Fan, enough from the outset, but he won my heart with this riff about internet commenters:

AVC: You yourself are not a sports fan. Is that right?

PO: No. But nowadays—and I don’t want to make some dopey cultural statement here—everyone can be, just by existing in society, a nerd like Paul Aufiero, because we all have a ship that we follow. Even if it’s other people, like on MySpace pages, we’re just as collective of enthusiasts now. That seems to be the world we’re in. In a way, Paul seems like he’s almost this old-school enthusiast, because it’s not the Internet or the Twittering or the text-messaging. It is just flat-out, “I will go and worship this team in my own quiet way.” Which is a very real way, but it’s almost a form that’s dying out now. Rob sees that type of fan sort of flickering a little bit.

AVC: Though you could say that he does create this “Paul from Staten Island” persona for the radio that’s related to him, but anonymous. In that sense, it’s like an Internet persona.

PO: Oh, totally. There’s something kind of beautiful about that pure love of things. Like, “I’ll show that I love the thing I love by hating everything else.” Yeah, I’m not a sports fan, but I certainly am good to ask about film and food and literature and comic books, so there’s certainly a big part of that guy in me. And you know, look at the comment threads on The A.V. Club. [Laughs.] Full of delightful little Paul Aufieros. They either want to say how much they love this thing that is being written about, which I always think is beautiful, or what I think is even more beautiful, they have to make sure that the world knows that, under their pseudonym, they hate this thing. They think, “I’ve got to go on record.” In their minds, there will be an afterlife where they’re presented with an inventory of everything they could have commented on, and are asked, “Did you step up and make your voice heard?” Maybe there’s like a weird commenter’s nirvana. Is there anything different if you go into every comment thread to say that something sucks? How is that different from a guy who goes to church every single week and praises God and rebukes Satan? There’s some weird afterlife that they’re doing time for.

AVC: They have to make their stand on every little thing.

PO: Exactly. “I want to be able to get into commenter’s paradise.” [Affecting voice of God.] “Well, Dr.WhoFan07, there was a blog written in 2004 which stated that Tom Baker was not the best Dr. Who, and you did not get on the comment thread to say what a shithead the writer was. So because of that, you are denied access forever!”

Classic Comics Criticism: Langridge Barrier

In honor of the trade paperback release of the most entertaining all-ages comic I’ve read in forever, The Muppet Show: Meet the Muppets (as well as the 2nd ish of The Muppet Show: The Treasure of Peg-Leg Wilson), this week’s Classic Comics Criticism celebrates Muppets writer/artist Roger Langridge!

This is a review I’m kinda proud of. As I mentioned in a few weeks back, I actually got a message from one of the Langridges (Roger, as I recall) about how happy they were to find out that someone actually “got it”. I think this led to my receiving a bunch of Rogers’ mini-comics (like this one) later on, which I’m sure survived my last move in 2003.

If you’re trying to get kids into comics and you were a fan of The Muppet Show, you’ll do just fine by starting ’em off with Roger’s Muppet book. Zoot Suite? Wait till they’re a little older.

* * *

Zoot! Suite • Roger and Andrew Langridge • Fantagraphics Books

Is there something perverse about waiting for the conclusion of a story based on Zeno’s Paradox? If so, then label me a pervert. The story in question, “The Journey Halfway,” from the Langridge Brothers’ Zoot!, began as a relatively light jab at the Kafkaesque workings of the DMV. Over the course of six issues, as Zoot! grew increasingly bizarre (and, one presumes, unsaleable), the story evolved into a traipse through Beckett’s theater, then launched into a near-death experience culled out of Finnegans Wake. And then Zoot! was canceled.

I held out a minor hope that there would be a wrap-up of some kind, a final installment of the Langridge Bros.’ criminally underappreciated comic. That idle optimism faded just around the time the brothers’ work began appearing in various comics from DC. I wrote off Zoot! and “The Journey Halfway” as another casualty of the comics marketplace, buried in the graveyard with Puma Blues and Big Numbers.

Coming across Zoot! Suite, then, was like Hanukkah in March for me. This 80-page collection includes several short humor strips from Zoot! and a previously unpublished coda of sorts, but its main attraction is the “conclusion” to “The Journey Halfway.” After four long years, would Mr. Bodkin at last find out what had become of his impounded and possibly demolished car? Would the meaning of his unnamed friend’s Joycean trip to the afterlife be made clear/ Would the actor playing the lead in Waiting for Godot ever show up at the theater?

Ultimately, of course, no questions are answered. Though Bodkin and his friend seek a shortcut home (through a graveyard, naturally), they never get more than halfway. Despite this pre-set limitation — Bodkin’s friend describes the paradox on the second page of the story — Andrew Langridge (the writer) manages to make this odd story work remarkably well by playing off the absurdity of the premise. The brothers’ work in Art D’Ecco achieved the same trick, beginning with absurdist humor and somehow bringing on authentic, if existential, human feeling.

This is a difficult feat, not only given the logical premises of the story, but also because of Roger Langridge’s strange artwork. It would seem that his cartoonish, at times Muppet-like figures would be suited for the collection’s gag strips but not its 50-page serial. Somehow, Roger manages a full range of expression with these seemingly limited figures, while managing to play up their physical appearance for several sight-gags. Further, with its mixture of tones and ross-hatchings, Zoot! Suite‘s artwork gives its ludicrous figures weight, bringing them into a more arresting visual context.

Besides concluding “The Journey Halfway,” Zoot! Suite also has another previously unpublished work by the Langridges. “I Dreamt I Was In Heaven,” which closes out the book, is a double treat, albeit a befuddling one. Visually, it ties together each of the strange (and, one presumes, unsaleable) cover illustrations for Zoot!. A “roving eye” carries the reader from one absurd setting to the next. For someone who bought the whole run off the shelf, it’s a nice, asbsurdist form of nostalgia, but it would be completely baffling for the (ha-ha) new reader who decides to give this strange comic a shot. Forget I wrote that.

The written story doesn’t pertain in the slightest to the visual one. Instead, it relates the narrator’s dream about an “entrance exam” to get into heaven. The prose is quite graceful and the overall story, in its meandering way, is a delight. In all, the collection showcases bizarre humor (“A Dictionary of Oubliettes” is one of the strangest joke ideas in history) and apparent existential dread via cartooning that would make E.C. Segar proud. While several other strips from Zoot! should have been included (“The Answer,” and “Short Story,” to name a pair), Zoot! Suite comprises a fine survey of a fantastically inventive comic that no one ever read.

Now if they could just get to work wrapping up “The Derek Seals Story” . . .

–Gil Roth, originally published in The Comics Journal #204, May, 1998

Musical Oldth

When I was in college (of course), my pal Mark & I talked about launching some sorta alt-culture ‘zine. Our only condition was that it would have nothing to do with music, because we could hold our own in just about any other field, but alt-music is the one field where you’ll always get demolished by someone who’s more “indie” than you. It was the early ’90’s, and people cared about that stuff then; get over it.

Nowadays, I need the occasional reminder that I’m old (38), out of touch, and otherwise unhip. Contemporary music is a great way to demolish any of my illusions that I can keep up with the kids. In that vein, I was happy that Pitchfork published its list of the top 500 tracks of the decade.

Since Matlock was just about to start, I skipped to the top 20, where I discovered that . . . I’m old, out of touch and otherwise unhip!

So, for your entertainment & edification, let’s count down Pitchfork’s top 20 tracks of the decade in terms of whether or not I ever heard them!

SONGS I HAVE NEVER EVER HEARD

20. The Walkmen – “The Rat”

19. R. Kelly – “Ignition (Remix)”

18. Hercules and Love Affair – “Blind”

17. Annie – “Heartbeat”

16. The Rapture – “House of Jealous Lovers”

15. The Knife – “Heartbeats”

13. LCD Soundsystem – “Losing My Edge”

9. Animal Collective – “My Girls”

8. Radiohead – “Idioteque”

6. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – “Maps”

5. Daft Punk – “One More Time”

2. LCD Soundsystem – “All My Friends”

SONGS I HAVE HEARD (WITH MY HEARING AID)

14. Jay-Z – “99 Problems”

12. OutKast – “Hey Ya!”

11. Gnarls Barkley – “Crazy”

10. Arcade Fire – “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)”

7. Missy Elliott – “Get Ur Freak On”

4. Beyoncé [ft. Jay-Z] – “Crazy in Love”

3. M.I.A. [ft. Bun B and Rich Boy] – “Paper Planes (Diplo Remix)”

1. OutKast – “B.O.B.”

Weirdly enough, almost all the music that I do know from that list is by black artists, while almost every 0-fer was from white artists. This leads me to conclude that

  1. I’m racist,
  2. “YEAH!” by Usher, Lil’ Jon and Ludacris should’ve been somewhere in the top 100, and
  3. whitey made some shitty music this decade.

For what it’s worth, I’ve never even heard of the following bands from the list:

  1. The Walkmen
  2. Hercules and Love Affair
  3. Annie
  4. The Rapture
  5. The Knife
  6. Animal Collective

The only reason I know LCD Soundsystem is because Slate suckered me into buying their music. I hated their record so much I went back to check if the article was originally published on April Fools Day. If these other artists are anything like that, then I understand why the recording industry is collapsing.

I only know Arcade Fire because Robert Wilonsky mentioned that their song is used in the first trailer for Where The Wild Things Are. It turned out that I had one of their albums (Funeral) in my iTunes library, and I think it’s pretty good.

Oh, and I think “Hey Ya!” and “Crazy” should have been #1 and #2.