Comics, Books, Oregon, Features, and More!

Lots of good comics out today, although I’m a little pissed that a copy of Love and Rockets Vol. 2 #10 didn’t show up in my subscription box. I thought I added that to my list? Hmm….Anyways….I did get Demo #7, 100 Bullets #50, Bone #55 (the big finale!), Y: the Last Man #23, Love Fights #10, and PVP #7. I’ll write a little bit about some of that, along with Blankets, which I recently finished.

I’m off to Oregon on Friday for Lindsay’s graduation. It’ll be nice to hang out in Eugene for a couple of days, and miss out on a couple of days of work. Especially nice since work has been super-busy lately. Always a perfect time to take a couple days off, although I feel a bit bad about leaving my co-workers to fend for themselves!

This week’s Bohemian has a really interesting article about Santa Rosa author Robert Heinberg’s new book, The Party’s Over, which is about an idea called “peak oil theory” that’s gaining some attention since it was formed in the 70s (if I’m not mistaken). Sounds like a really interesting book, and I was thinking about picking it up at Border’s tonight (went there with Michelle for a few this evening). I couldn’t find it, unfortunately, but that may be a good thing. I’d probably end up reading it ont he way to Oregon and getting even less reading of Love in the Time of Cholera done. I’m slacking on that book. I took about a week off reading it to read my huge stacks of comics from Mile High from last week. But I will probably end up picking up either that book or The End of Oil, a similar book I saw at Borders that was a bit too expensive for an impulse purchase.

I’m thinking about adding a new feture or two to this website: one would be a monthly mixtape, a downloadable playlist of 8-12 or so MP3s that would rotate every month. Sometimes it would be a themed mix, sometimes, just what I happen to be listening to at the time. The other feature would be a weekly wallpaper graphic. I’ve got a serious backlog of fun desktops I’ve made, and I’m always looking for a good graphic to use to make a new one, so maybe I should give myself a public outlet for that. That way all 3 of my readers could download them. Har Har….

More later….

Note to Self

I’m on Day 8 of ….something. i don’t want to talk about it. So I won’t. But I did want to note that something different was going on, more for myself than any of you. So forget all that.

I spent the morning feeling like shit, for some reason. I felt hungry, vaguely sick-ish (but not nauseous), and most of all tired, and had to wade my way through a stack of work left over by the co-worker who’s gone off to Dallas for a week, a stack of my own work to catch up on, and oh yeah, an unexpected (but welcome) trans-atlantic call. What an odd, surreal morning. For many reasons.

I downloaded a lot of music this weekend. Yes, yes, tsk tsk, I know. Spare me the lecture. I got some Mokira, a little Jeremy Enigk, a tad of Jacques Dutronc, a handful of Storm & Stress, a tidbit of Tujiko Noriko, and a little something by Eu, which is one of my favorites of the batch. And I finally replaced my copy of Operation Ivy’s Enegry/Hectic! This is the one album that I can truly say changed my life. It got me interested in music, and clued me into the fact that music existed outside the realms of commercial radio and chain record stores, along with the Specials’ first album, and a tape by a local band called CFB. Those were the first things that made me investigate music that wasn’t being pushed in front of me by other forces, and inspired me to make music of my own. So it’s great to have that influence back in my possession.

Finally made it out to the flea market on 116 on Sunday, with Keith and Michelle and Anthony. I picked up the Car’s Candy-O on vinyl, and a couple of books I used to check out of the library repeatedly when I was in second grade. They’re books of spaceship illustrations and such, made to look somewhat like encyclopedias, with fake “history” and blueprints for each ship and the different scenes they’re in. Pretty cool stuff for a 7 year-old, and kinda nice to have around for nostalgia purposes.

Anyways….that’s about all the excitement in my life right now. More later, perhaps….

Eternal Sunshine

I’ve been excited about this movie for about as long as I’ve known about it. Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, a serious Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Elijah Wood, Mark Ruffalo….How much better can it get? Answer: not much. The story was incredible, the visual style was brilliant, the performances were excellent, the music was beautiful. I don’t think there was anything in this movie that didn’t work for me. I’m trying to find the soundtrack on Soulseek right now, mainly for the new Beck song from the ending. His voice is just getting better and more assured with every release, and this one is so moody and memorable.

The premise behind the movie (that there is a pseudo-medical procedure that can erase the memory of certain people or events from your mind, while leaving the rest of your memories intact) ties in really well with the book I just finished, Godel, Escher & Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. The book deals a lot with the various levels of abstraction in the brain, and how the “mind” relates to the brain’s physical substrate of neurons and electrical charges. There is some consideration of how concepts and memories in our mind relate to the physical structures of the brain itself….like, can you point to a specific neuron, or group of neurons, and say “this neuron here represents this specific memory or idea”? food for thought, about thought.

Anyways….so Cerebus is over. I haven’t been following the series since Guys, several years ago, so I’ve missed almost the entire final third of the series, but the ending still struck me as oddly appropriate. It’s somewhat open to interpretation, I suppose, but it does seem to relate to the general themes that have consumed Dave Sim lately.

I’ve also finally managed to pick up THB #4, and a handful of the Maxx issues I was missing. I still need THB #2, and the Maxx #’s 29, 30, and 35, to have both complete series’. But I’m much closer!

Looks like band practice is happening later today. Once Joey gets back from rehearsal, it’ll be time to rock out. We don’t do this often enough. Ah well….we do what we can.

More later….

DIY Binding

Here’s a cool little tutorial on binding aimed at self-published comics, everything from stapling to perfect bound covers. This makes me want to put together a book of some sort, just so I can bind it! Maybe when Joey and I get our shit together, we can bind our lyric books like this…

More later….

Stop Playing With Your Organ, You Lush!!

Played a last minute Car Stereo Destroys Michael Bolton Tape show on Sunday night (also, coincidentally my birthday). It went…well, OK to Good to Bad, I think. We ended up playing a lot later than we expected (after we were the last ones to find out people thought we were playing this show), and our set got cut really short. So the upshot is, after waiting behind a table with our laptops while two other bands played, we ended up getting cut short by another band after about 15 minutes into our set. And some drunk asshole who owned the house the party was at decided to start playing the organ in the room DURING OUR SET. Because, y’know, we didn’t go out of our way to play this show at your party or anything. We didn’t haul our gear up your damn hill and into your house to, y’know, maybe try to entertain some people or anything. And y’know, we don’t really need to be respected as performers, I mean, shit, we’re only staring at screens and twiddling some knobs, right?

Asshat.

Anyways…I got a copy of GTA:Vice City from Emily (Yay!), and ended up playing around with the tank cheat most of the weekend. Great way to rid yourself of the frustrations of a show like that. Shotting spree in the mall, running over the FBI with a tank….ah, this is the life. Also got a portable CD player from the folks, so I can finally listen to music on my lunch break again.

I finished reading the DaVinci Code on Monday, too. My boss loaned it to me a couple weeks ago, and i finally read through the last third of it yesterday. It’s a really interesting book, a pretty commercial mystery/thriller genre piece, but it bases it’s story on lots of history/symbology/conspiracy theory ideas surrounding Leonardo DaVinci, the Last Supper and the Holy Grail legend. It’s one of those books that gets you searching the internet to fact-check it, and finding some pretty astonishing facts. Definitely food for thought. And a pretty tight little plot, that stretches plausibility a few times, but keeps you on your toes and sucked into the story. Now that I’m finished, that, I’ve had a chance to start reading Thomas Pynchon’s V again. I got about a third of the way through it two years ago, then had to return it to the JC library at the end of the semester. I figured I’d just start again from the beginning, since I can’t remember enough to pick up halfway through. But I love Pynchon, and his writing is worth re-reading anyday.

Hmm…more later I suppose.