shaking like a willow or a daffodil

Things I’ve done in the past month:

*Reviewed the Canadian hardcore band Fucked Up’s Couple Tracks over at Pitchfork

*Wrote a couple of pieces over at Thought Catalog, on The Magnetic Fields’ Realism and Spider-Man’s search for a father substitute (and also covered a Magnetic Fields show for Vulture)

*Visited New York City and had a whole lot of meetings with people and saw Saffire, not the “uppity blues women” Saffire but the “awesome very young women who blew the roof off the Willie Mae Rock Camp benefit” Saffire

*Wrote a bunch of pieces for Techland, including an ongoing weekly column on comics that’s going by the name “Emanata”: on The Question #37, on DMZ, on DC’s new top dogs (plus an interview with them), on Kick-Ass, on the sources of Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, and on Batman and Robin. And I wrote my first-ever piece in Time proper: a very, very short blurb on the excellent new Joanna Newsom album.

*Interviewed the great Kevin O’Neill at length over at The Comics Journal

*Saw Richard Thompson play a two-set show here in Portland that was being recorded for a live album: one set of unreleased new material, one of old faves—his songwriting’s in steep decline (I was kind of boggled that he wrote a song about Burning Man, and wondered if he’d actually been there), but his guitar playing is actually still getting even better; if there are 24-year-old guitarists who are even vaguely in his neighborhood I’d love to know about them

*Discovered that chatroulette is much, much more fun if you do it with a) friends and b) multiple singing puppets

I’ll keep up more if you keep up more, how’s about that?

a strong beat to step to

It’s hard to post something without spilling the beans when there are beans to be spilled. But the good news is that I’ve joined the team over at Time’s Techland blog—I’ll be writing about comics for them! My first piece for them just went up today: it’s on “Wizzywig” and “Footnotes in Gaza.”

Other recent links with my name attached to them: I wrote about Rakim for Hilobrow, Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary for Barnes & Noble, Siege for the Savage Critic, and a bunch of stuff for eMusic, like this piece on Loveless and its antecedents.

Also, I’ll be in this book, and maybe another one…!

At some point, I plan to develop an interior life, too. My new year’s resolution of drinking three glasses of wine a week (this represents a drastic increase, not a decrease) might help with that, I’m thinking.

out of the demo, into the fully functional licensed version

Happy birthday to me! So far I’ve been celebrating in the traditional way: vegetarian dim sum, karaoke, fruit salad, and being interviewed at length about The Invincible Iron Man by Tom Spurgeon. Can’t beat that. I am brewing up some interesting plans for the year and the decade, some of which will be made public before too long.

ten manifestations of culture that got me through the 2000s

For those of you who’ve asked for a list of some kind:

The iPhone

M.I.A./Diplo: Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1

Arrested Development

Alison Bechdel: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

The New Pornographers: Mass Romantic

Katamari Damacy

David B.: Epileptic

“The Beast”

Grant Morrison et al.: Seven Soldiers of Victory

Kelly Link: “Catskin” (in Magic for Beginners)

And now: ONWARD!!

same riff, no apostrophe

The most successful thing I’ve helped introduce into the kid’s life recently: a pair of Mollie Katzen cookbooks, “Pretend Soup” and “Salad People,” which are set up so that small children can do most of the cooking themselves and occasionally ask a grown-up to serve as their sous-chef. He made miso-almond dipping sauce (to go with raw vegetables) and popovers for dinner this weekend. They were delicious, and he was very proud of himself.

Otherwise: just luxuriating in the end-of-year slowdown, taking care of some tasks that have been waiting to get done for a while, slowly reading through the San Francisco Panorama, prepping a couple of projects that might go live in the new year, and listening to an enormous number of old instrumental soul hits for a secret project. The days are a little too short and dim to be merry and bright at the moment, but I’m working on it.

more activity updates

Over at the Significant Objects project, I’ve written a short-short story about a travel hair dryer. Go have a look! You can even bid to win the early-’80s-model Conair dryer itself on eBay!

Otherwise: I’ve been writing about comics a lot lately. I did a roundup of some good ones over at the New York Times Book Review last weekend, and picked some of my favorites of this year for the Barnes & Noble Review.

And I wrote the liner notes for the excellent Daptone Gold compilation of music from the Brooklyn soul collective Daptone!

Also, I apparently have a (tiny) record review (of the Annie album) in the San Francisco Panorama, although I haven’t seen it yet…

Kant's "Critique of Aesthetic Judgement": Drastically Abridged Awesome Version

My 5-minute lecture from Ignite Portland 7 last week, for your amusement.

the active life

First up, my fabulous spouse Lisa Gidley has a new small-scale photo blog, Now It’s In Your Hands. Those of you who like Polaroids should have a look. Those of you who happen to have large amounts of Polaroid film you’re not using should send it to her.

Over at Carrie Brownstein’s “Monitor Mix” blog at NPR, I wrote a little rant called “The Death of Mistakes Means the Death of Rock,” and I’m very flattered by the number of responses it’s gotten so far.

And I’ve done a couple of reviews for the Barnes & Noble Review: Dino Buzzati’s curious 1969 comics experiment Poem Strip and R. Sikoryak’s sly retrospective Masterpiece Comics.

Also, I wrote two chapters of Rolling Stone’s new book Michael (on Michael Jackson): one about his touring career, one about his significance as a dancer. (Haven’t even seen the finished book yet, but I’ve heard it’s out.)

sure you got a chick

One of the things I’m obligated to do by virtue of what I do for a living is keeping an eye on my own taste—noticing what I like and what I don’t like, in general. Over the last week or so, as people start to nudge me about various end-of-year music things, I’ve been noticing that there’s a lot of very popular (or very “semipopular,” as Xgau puts it) new music that rolls right off me: I don’t like it and I don’t actively dislike it, I just barely even notice it when it’s playing. But there’s also a lot of older music that has been totally knocking me flat, some in idioms I didn’t pay much attention to even ten years ago (that new Franco collection is just incredible), some that I would’ve passed over as second- or third-tier a while back.

I mean, in some sense I know that the Pointer Sisters’ 1975 album Steppin’ isn’t as special as… a lot of other things, but I picked up a battered copy of the LP at Everyday Music for a few dollars, and I’ve been wanting to listen to it every day. (Here’s its staggeringly great opening track “How Long,” an R&B #1 that I swear I have never heard on the radio, and absorbed only via Salt-n-Pepa’s “Chick on the Side”:)

Now, naturally, my job is to figure out why I adore “How Long”—which I heard for the first time last week, so I can’t really say I’ve got a longstanding or situational attachment to it—and can’t bring myself to care in more than a theoretical way about “Wasted” or “Fireflies,” let alone the albums they belong to. I’ve got a vague theory; now I have to figure out what would disprove it.

a thing I've come to love about Portland

The local food cart scene, which is halfway between restaurant culture and street food culture. At some point, somebody in Portland realized that an empty lot could be filled with a bunch of trailers, each of which could be a mini-restaurant, serving a very limited menu with very limited seating for relatively low prices. There are a few downtown spots that have had a block full of food carts since we’ve been in town, like SW 5th between Oak and Stark, but for some reason they’ve been proliferating like crazy this year. Most are essentially lunch-focused, but some are open for dinner, and the new cart area at SE 12th and Hawthorne specializes in late-night food—a couple of its carts don’t even open until 8 PM.

Now there’s a blog devoted to them; Lisa and I have been checking out some of the newer ones. Enthusiastic thumbs-ups to Wolf & Bear’s (Iranian breakfast sandwiches!!) and The Ruby Dragon (Ethiopian/Indian-inspired vegan food!). Apparently there’s a new cart, Mum’s Kitchen, that serves not just Indian food but South African-style Indian food. I’ll report back when I’ve gotten to try it.