art/music/lit/comix/games/etc.

Love and Rockets

The Hernandez brothers have always been some of my favorite comic creators. I think that Love and Rockets has to be in the top five of all time greatest comics ever. I find the characters to be so powerful and real feeling—despite the absurd situations and fantastic quality of what they go through—such that I get goosebumps reading it. That's true for both Jaime and Gilbert, I must say—it's amazing to me that the two brothers each have put out such a consistently high quality of material over the years.

So I was excited to find a video interview of Jaime posted online at KCET's web site. He comes across as a laid back guy, gracious and probably fun to have a beer with. Although maybe I'm biased.

There are some other folks profiled there too, but I'm not as excited about them 'cause I don't know as much about them, 'cause I'm a schmo...sorry other comics creators.

Pulp Fiction, as performed by the King's Men. This was my favorite passage:

J: Speak 'What' again! Thou cur, cry 'What' again!
I dare thee utter 'What' again but once!
I dare thee twice and spit upon thy name!
Now, paint for me a portraiture in words,
If thou hast any in thy head but 'What',
Of Marsellus Wallace!
B: He is dark.
J: Aye, and what more?
B: His head is shaven bald.
J: Has he the semblance of a harlot?
B: What?
JULES strikes and BRETT cries out
J: Has he the semblance of a harlot?
B: Nay!
J: Then why didst thou attempt to bed him thus?

Thank you again Boing Boing.

I'm not sure what exactly is going on here, but check it out: Breaking Free

BoingBoing, fount of all things wonderful and strange on the interweb, alerted me to this great short story set in the context of a Wikipedia sort of discussion, but involving a future scenario where time travel is possible. Hilarity ensues.

After a humiliating evening last night of getting my butt whooped many times by my friend Jon and some other chess jockeys at Fat Cat, I found an article that puts things into perspective. It suggests that the sort of highly challenging experiences of sweating through the really difficult stuff when learning are what actually produce real breakthroughs.

So take that chess masters! I feel WAY better now knowing that I am the one who was truly learning something last night while you guys were just pitifully going through the motions. That makes me feel really, really a lot better. Totally a lot better. Seriously.

I've decided to do it, because apparently I don't have enough to do this month.

Updates to follow.

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.

—Bertrand Russell.

Gothamist interviews Alex Ross today, the author of the book The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. My friend Steve gave me a copy last December, and I tore through it excitedly. While, as Mr. Ross states himself, there is much missing from this book in terms of the music history of the 20th century, it was an illuminating and educational history of what one might call "European art music" (although much of the book was set in the United States) during this past 100 years.

One thing I particularly enjoyed about the book was its attempt to frame composers' musical choices as a function of their sub-culture and societal and political influences. This is a perspective which I think is frequently missing from music education in this country, where the strategy is often a combination of strictly technical concepts and "pure" aesthetic analysis. As Mr. Ross demonstrates in his book, this strategy leaves out a lot of important background on why famous composers have made some of the musical choices that they've made. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in music in the least; the writing is compelling and I found myself unable to put the book down once I began.