If you’re looking for something to light your fire, here’s a decent place to start.

I used to spend a ton of time making big, long lists of my favorite everything – books, music, movies, etc. – and I took great joy in keeping those lists up-to-date. If you poke around on this site, you can find remnants of all that.

Anyway, in 2011, I was passionate about a few things. Here are some of them.

Mickey Newbury
Newbury’s 1969 album, Looks Like Rain is what I listened to more often than not all year. An American Trilogy is actually a set of 3 albums (with a bonus disk) reissued together. I got them on vinyl and they rarely left my turntable. You won’t find much of this on Spotify, otherwise I’d include a link. Here it is at iTunes, though. Get the first track (“Wrote A Song A Song/Angeline”) and if you like that, keep going.

Miles Davis Quintet – Live in Europe 1967: The Bootleg Series Vol. 1
This was the greatest band of all time. These live tracks are amazing. I don’t know if this is the record that could convert someone to Miles Davis-ism, (Try In a Silent Way or Files de Kilimanjaro for that.) but it’s one more reason my son would be named Miles Matthew.

James Blake
James Blake put out a handful of EPs and his self-titled LP came out right at the beginning of the year. Of everything that seemed really new to me this year, Blake’s music is what stuck. Some call it dubstep, I call it gospel for the internet generation. (Dude puts on a shockingly good live show, too.)

How to Dress Well continued to amaze me, even after I found out he’s a goofy, Robert Crumb-looking mo/fo. Heck, that might make me respect him even more. You’d be hard pressed to find something more arresting than “Suicide Dream 2 (Orchestral Version).”

Cities Aviv is the best hip-hop music I heard this year, by a long shot. Here’s a link.

I wrote about some other music I liked in 2011 for The Agit Reader.

I do a poor job keeping up with it, but I do update my Goodreads profile on occasion.

I read the Steve Jobs biography really quickly and liked it. It’s not brilliant writing, but Isaacson had an amazing subject.

I loveloveloved Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, one of the longer entries in the 33 1/3 series. I learned a lot from it about how taste and our measures of high, low, good, and bad culture came about. It’s one of those rare books that had me questioning myself a lot as I read. I love those. Here’s a paragraph – about one of the problems with critiquing music – that I highlighted:

In daily life, music is usually part of other activities, from dancing to housework to sex to gossip to dinner. In critical discourse it’s as if the only action going on when music is playing is the activity of evaluation music. The question becomes, “Is this good music to listen to while you’re making aesthetic judgements?” … Part of the reason for the recent backlash against indie rock, I suspect, is a weariness with how much of it seems to be mainly music to judge music by. Celine Dion, on the other hand, is lousy music to make aesthetic judgements to, but might be excellent for having a first kiss, or burying your grandma, or breaking down in tears.

In case you didn’t get it from the title, this book is about Celine Dion. And it’s brilliant.

Steven Pressfield (“The War of Art”) out out another great, little book. It’s called Do the Work and you shouldn’t read it if you’ve been satisfied with sitting on your ass thus far.

The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach, was the most fun I had reading fiction, I think. It’s about baseball and college and stuff.

I think I have to agree with Esquire, though, that The Submission, by Amy Waldman, was the best piece of fiction I read this year. It was satisfying in every way. It had a ton of moments that were inevitable but wholly surprising. That’s about the best thing I can say about a book. (If you’re gonna go look for it on Amazon, I apologize for all the smutty pictures you’re about to see. Kinda funny, though, right?)

Mark Bittman’s Kitchen Express cookbook came out this year, too, didn’t it? That’s about the best cookbook ever. It’s not comprehensive, but it’s fun, encourages creativity (and actual cooking) and is full of stuff I love to eat.

I read a lot of Manga in the middle of the year. My favorites were Ôoku: The Inner Chambers, by Fumi Yoshinaga (a woman, FYI) and Bakuman, from the people who brought you the world-wide smash Death Note.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention Stephen Sondheim’s collections of lyrics (as well as “comments, principles, heresies, grudges, whines, and anecdotes.) This may be the closest we get to a memoir from The Man, and if you’re involved in any sort of writing I bet you’d really enjoy these. And if you’re involved in any sort of theatre-making, you’d best not to admit to me that you’re not going to read these books. They are AMAZING.

Movies? I didn’t really go to the movies this year. I did get the Criterion Collection release of In the Night of the Hunter, and that’s really worthwhile tribute to a great true classic.

Other that, let me just mention a few other random things: Tomas Transtromer, CM Punk, Shadow of the Colossus, Vanilla Cedarwood, Rajon Rondo, and A Few Acres of Snow.

Related posts:

1. 8 Songs to Delight You
2. 2011-09-04 Tweets last week.

Kevin Huizenga is one of my 3 favorite makers of comics these days. His methods mix accessible pictures, science, philosophy, history, and autobiography all together in a form much like David (Reality Hunger) Shields describes here:

The lyric essay asks what happens when an essay begins to behave less like an essay and more like a poem. What happens when an essayist starts imagining things, making things up, filling in blank spaces, or leaving the blanks blank? What happens when statistics, reportage, and observation in an essay are abandoned for image, emotion, expressive transformation? There are now questions being asked of facts that were never asked before. What, we ask, is a fact these days? What’s a lie, for that matter? What constitutes an “essay,” a “story,” a “poem”? What, even, is “experience”? For years writers have been responding to this slippage of facts in a variety of ways–from the fragmentary forms of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry that try to mimic this loss to the narrative-driven attempts by novelists and memoirists to smooth over the gaps. The lyric essay, on the other hand, inherits from the principal strands of nonfiction the makings of its own hybrid version of the form. It takes the subjectivity of the personal essay and the objectivity of the public essay and conflates them into a literary form that relies on both art and fact, on imagination and observation, rumination and argumentation, human faith and human perception.

Huizenga augments his story-telling by using an alter ego, Glenn Ganges, as a stand-in for himself. Glenn’s life has been unfolding over the course of Huizenga’s stories the past few years, but rather than getting a grand narrative, we’re seeing a disparate set of moments in his mind. Whether Glenn “is” Huizenga matters not very much at all, he’s just there to give us a way in. And yet, because we have such a need for closure (to see parts of things as a whole) we form a real attachment to Huizenga’s characters, whether or not we think they represent the real person or and despite our doubts about it. (In fact, they might not even all be the same Glenn Ganges, but that’s another story.)

So … maybe you find this interesting and maybe you should sample Mr. Huizenga’s work. There’s a great example online at What Things Do. Check it out.

Related posts:

1. Essential Reading: Kevin Huizenga
2. Jeffrey Brown in The Comics Journal
3. GOOD Magazine on Graphic Novels

Douglas Wolk does Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, explaining “what beauty is, what art is, and why people like stuff” … in 5 minutes … with pictures of Wolverine.

All hail.

No related posts.

Everyday I walk by this mural, which reminds me of Ezra Jack Keats.

There’s lots of good coffee here. I’m particularly enjoying Spruce Street Espresso:

… and the Chapterhouse.

I had a great lunch at a place called Supper. Check out this bib lettuce and herbs salad:

And we’re about 6 blocks from Whole Foods, so thank goodness for that.

There’s a real comic shop with a ton of very tempting back issues. About 30 feet from the theater. Bravo.

So, it’s not all bad.

Related posts:

1. Lovely on Milwaukee
2. Sane Eating in Columbus: Part 2
3. Getting to Know Philly a lil Bit

But just a little bit.

The first time I visited Philadelphia, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. (Actually, it was the second time I’d been here, but I was only 12 years old for the first trip, and all I remember is the homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk as people walked over and around him. I have no idea what part of town we visited, we didn’t even see the Liberty Bell up close, as far as I recall.)

We were visiting a dear friend, and though she took us to nice places (including a coffee shop we now pass everyday) it was the dead of a very bitter winter, and no one was on the streets, and it just looked like a desolate kind of urban wasteland. Despite my best efforts, I was not impressed.

Well, this time around it’s quite different. We’re staying in a great area, and we cross through several others on our way from “home” to the theatre each day. So, I’m getting to see stuff and make sense of my very simple questions, like “Where do people actually live around here? Where do they spend their time?”

My primary issue, of course, is finding a decent coffee shop. Actually, let’s be honest, my primary issue is finding at least one of the best coffee shops in town. Lucky for me, I got a great recommendation from a local – RJD2 (whose new album, The Colossus, came out today). Spruce Street Espresso, as he told me it would be, is definitely the place. I knew I was in good hand as soon as I saw the Counter Culture logo on the door. To give you an idea … my favorite coffee place in Columbus, Luck Bros just became an authorized Counter Culture dealer, the first in Ohio, in fact. So, when I walked in and saw this …

… as was understandably relieved and excited.

So, today, after dragging myself out of bed, and through the shower and the kitchen a little bit, I packed a small bag of books and walked slowly but happily to Spruce & 11th. I spent a couple of hours sitting outside, chair-hopping and chasing the sun around the corner of the building. (I was reading Shostakovich’s Testimony, in case you’re interested. Yes, it’s for a future project, and no, I won’t talk about it.) Wonderful.

Then I pulled out the ol’ iPhone, typed in “book store,” and head towards South Street. Sean had already let me know that South Street was a retail paradise, and in fact it seems to be a hub of big chains (like Whole Foods) as well as local sellers. Atlantic Books was the first sizable book store I came across, so I stopped in. Of course, I always have a few things in mind, but I was willing to let the purveyors guide me as well. I walked out with a Solzhenitsyn tome that was an employee pick (vaguely related to the afore-un-mentioned project) as well as the first part of Cormac McCarthy’s Border-Trilogy, (I just read The Road, which is an absolute masterpiece.) as recommended by my dad. They also had this cute little book called eat.shop Philadelphia. It’s one of series. No, they haven’t made it to Columbus yet, but Bustown would be a great choice, it’s all about unique and local.

Okay. Coffee – found it. Books – accomplished. Next on the list? Comics. iPhone says … Atomic Comics, about 4 blocks away. Well … I don’t know if it was a name-change or just didn’t pop-up on the phone, but I came across Showcase Comics. Their window display included Crumb and Alan Moore as well as some new-ish super-hero stuff, so I jumped in.

It was glorious. They had a HUGE selection of trades, tons of good manga and a back wall of shelves of indie books of every shape and size. Did you know there’s a new Paul Hornschemeier collection? I didn’t, but boy that’s exciting. In the end, though, I didn’t get it. It was kind of expensive, and there was so much else I was dying for. They appeared to have every volume of the minx books (DC comics for teenage girls), of which I intend to collect every volume. (I know it seems counter-intuitive, but the editors did a great job of picking real-live talent and letting them do what they wanted with the stories.) I also grabbed a few issues ofWednesday Comics, which I’ve heard so much about and never seen. Blah blah blah … I bought some comics. Some are really good, and the Ultimate Avengers are horrible.

After that it was back to the homestead, back into the never-ending tech rehearsals. I’m getting to like Philly, though. I can finally see the map in my head, and see where the living is done. It’s nice.

Related posts:

1. Two Lil Movies

Jeff Lemire, creator of the fantastically melancholy Essex County dropped a list of his faves for ’09. If you can’t trust a comic auteur of his skill, you can’t trust anybody for this.

(Relevant question: Can you name a great artist in any medium who has/had horrible taste in art from that same medium?)

Related posts:

1. Teen Titans: Year One #1
2. Jeff Lemire covers Top Shelf’s ‘08 Sampler
3. Jeffrey Brown in The Comics Journal

I read several rotten comics tonight. Urgh. Dark Avengers!? Unbelievable.

Secret Wars II? Horrible.

Related posts:

1. Jeffrey Brown in The Comics Journal
2. AVENGERS ASSEMBLE!!!
3. The Avengers suck / I love the Avengers

Related posts:

1. Jul 23, 2008
2. Jul 21, 2008
3. Jul 19, 2008

Daybreak started out as a big mystery to me. I picked-up the second issue, recognized that the art was obviously my style, and so I bought it, at the same time ordering the firs issue. I waited till I had both to read them, and I was glad for it. These two issues have left me ready for more.

Brian Ralph lives in Baltimore, Maryland with his wife, Megan, and their son, Miles. (That’s what I want to name my son.) (Someday.)

Ralph posts various illustrations on a blog he shares with 12 other talented people. Daybreak, which has had two physically published issues, is a story he’s been posting in pieces. Those two issues get you through part 38, which ends with a cliffhanger. If you dig through the blog (seriously, guys, a little navigation help, please), you’ll find he’s up to #53 thus far.

So, it’s a zombie story, it seems. I don’t think we’ve actually seen a zombie in the story thus far, but it has all the conventions of a post-zombie-wave story. It’s interesting, too, that while zombies are all the rage with the the big, action-focused publishers (everyone from Avatar to Marvel to IDW has at least one zombie book on their roster.) there are also these very unconventional genre stories from much, much smaller houses.

Daybreak is distributed by Bodega, and Fantagraphics published by favorite recent zombie story, The Living and the Dead, by Norwegian uber-talent Jason.

Jason’s book was distinguished not only by his unique techniques, but also by its complete silence. Daybreak is highly unusual for the genre as well. First of all, it’s drawn by Brian Ralph, who’s illustrations are very friendly. Like Kevin H., he often represents entire faces, even writ large, with 4 or 5 well-placed lines. The book is monochromatic as well. The ink’s not black, I don’t think, it’s sort of a dark brown.

The most distinguishing characteristic of this very unusual zombie story is, though, that it’s entirely from a first-person perspective. That’s right, you’re in the story. Each panel represents the view through your eyes. The characters talk to you, but apparently you don’t say anything.

This allows for all sorts of fun. Characters zip in and out panels, sometimes the action gets chaotic and all you see are falling boxes or rocks. There’s a dog in the book, and occasionally he sticks his snout right in your face, filling the panel.

The effect, thankfully, really works. I went from curious to just plain creeped-out in about 10 pages. I also got really attached to my one-armed companion and maybe even moreso to that dog, who pops in and out of the story “lik a bad penny”, as is said in the book.

It’s great to see how Ralph’s doing more with less here. Like the great low-budget time travel movie Primer, Ralph creates an effective genre book without the splashier, flashier trappings you’d expect. He pushes the limits of his creativity and story-telling abilities, and the result is an engrossing comic and, in its first-person technique, a definitive example of something comics can do better than a most other forms.

Related posts:

1. Essential Reading: Kevin Huizenga
2. Essential Reading: The Surrogates
3. Stuff I Haven’t Been Reading

Isaac Butler’s diablog response to my Essential Reading post on Kevin Huizenga’s work is right here.

In it he details not only some of the reasons he digs Kevin H., but also the one major shortcoming he finds in Huizenga’s work. A couple of quotations from his post sum it up nicely.

What happens in one issue has only cursory bearing on another. Glenn Ganges is in many ways like a bulletin board that Huizenga uses to pin whatever he wants to talk about to.

…

I’m unsure what the stakes are within Huizenga’s world, and I’m unsure what my relationship to his characters are supposed to be.

Isaac then asks…

Is it wrong for me to have this quibble while enjoying rather profoundly each individual Huizenga story? … Should I just relax and quit my bitching and enjoy the riches that are there? Do you think Huizenga is deliberately playing with how character is represented in narrative? Do you think I’ve totally got my head up my ass here? And weren’t we supposed to talk about Ganges #2 which Douglas Wolk called “the kind of thing I want to hand to people who ask ‘what kind of comics do you like?’”

So, in order … No, maybe, sometimes, kind of, and yes we were.

By which I mean …
No, we all want more, right? I think you covered it pretty well here.

Maybe we’d all enjoy stuff more if we stop looking for fault. But that’s hard when you’re in the art business and used to questioning reality, right?

I do think that Huizenga deliberately plays around with the rules of narrative sometimes. After all, his stories rarely end-up being about what they seemed to be about at the beginning. He’s liable to give pages upon pages over to what would otherwise be a tiny moment, giving that moment twice as much weight as the rest of the story. (As in “The Moon Rose” in Or Else #2.)

Wolk uses the term “gradual narrative” to talk about the Glenn Ganges stories. I think he’s alluding to the fact that the stories are so rarely really about Glenn & Wendy, so only with a lot of diligent reading and after-thought can we piece together the story of Glenn & Wendy’s lives. We learn much more about the world around them than we do about their stories. Sometimes this seems deliberate, and sometimes Huizenga does seem to be using Glenn as a vessel to talk about whatever’s on his mind. (Or, maybe he’s just a tease. Check out the last page of Ganges #2. Who is fuck is Uncle Louis? That seems like a detail he threw in just to be ridiculous.)
Would you like Huizenga’s oeuvre better if it were a whole bunch of stories about people with different names, but similar faces and lives? Abe Abbot, Brian Billingsly, Carl Compastner, Dave Diggler … and so on?

So, no, your head is definitely not up your ass. Maybe Huizenga’s just not interested in writing the book you wanna read. Or put it this way … Wouldn’t we all like to know a little bit more about that Godot? Sure, but that’s not the play Beckett wanted to write.

Ganges #2
Ganges #2 is all about video games, kinda.

The first “story” appears to be basically an exercise in abstraction and riffing on a couple of basic elements who happen to have appeared in several of Kevin H.’s previous books. What starts out quite clearly as a Tekken-style fighting game in comic form becomes a competition to see which character can produce the most complex and impressive variations.





The art is beautiful to look at, and in the end the white one wins. Sweet

As it turns out, Glenn Ganges was playing the black one, and he lost. Thus the theme of video games takes us into the only other story in the comic, “Pulverize”. And, as is Kevin H.’s way, he uses this theme to draw us into a personal story about his time in the dot com boom, a bit of history about video games, some ruminations of the nature of video games and the effects they have on the players, and commentary about on-the-job relationships. We also meet Bob Bilson, who already returned for one panel in Ganges #1, and who is exactly the type of lovable loser that Huizenga loves to spend time thinking about and giving his due.





Check out Huizenga/Glenn exploring the nature of video games – “Underneath, it’s just dots shooting at dots” – and at the same time using it as justification for his fixation. While, at the same time, Huizenga inserts a sly assessment of the effect these video games are having on Glenn & Wendy’s relationship by never letting us see Wendy’s face in the whole story (or even on the back cover).





(Hey, what’s this snazzy shirt Glenn’s wearing? I don’t think you could get away with this in real life. Could you? Note how it matches his long-sleeve t-shirt, shown above.)

What’s great about this issue is the way Kevin H. manages to do all the things he loves – he mixes in some fiction, tells a good story, gets in a lot of commentary, uses the comics form to his best advantage, breaks out of the panels, and shines some light on an unexpected hero – and yet it doesn’t feel forced. It all fits in one long form and it flows in a completely natural way. The symbolism of the images gets layered as the story gets longer, and it takes all of the foundation he’s spent 19 pages laying out to create that incredibly moving ending.

If you had told me I’d read a comic book about video games and that something that occurred in the game would be the key emotional moment of a brilliant story, I’d have laughed in your face and suggested you stop reading Super Mario Adventures.

And maybe that’s the best way to sum up what’s great about Kevin Huizenga’s work: No matter what you get from it – a history lesson, a lesson in empathy, or a great story – it never happens in anything like an expected way. He always comes in through the side door. Remarkable.

Related posts:

1. Essential Reading: Kevin Huizenga