The Error Is In The Text: Material #1.

Ales Kot was kind to me at NYCC 2014. I believe that experience influences this review.

Mr. Kot has said he could write his new comic, Material, forever. I bought the first issue. I won't buy the second.

It's not that I want my money back, I felt entertained for a long enough duration of time that satisfies my desire for "THINGS THAT I MAY NOT HAVE SEEN" though a large amount of that entertainment was at the issue's expense.

It is my opinion that Mr. Kot's copious footnotes work against him, except in two instances that require the reader to know that footnotes exist and are to be expected. The footnotes condescend to the reader more often than they illuminate. (Throw 'em in the back, properly annotated, Mr. Kot, and you'll achieve your aims.) I'd argue they're not even footnotes, as there's no markers for them in the word balloons. It does not read as Mr. Kot being helpful or showing his work, it reads as Mr. Kot telling you he's very intelligent.

Wil Tempest's pencils in this issue are rough in the way that makes him the target of jokes, and deservedly so.* It is a terrible introduction to his work, and I heard this from people who have seen his art before and like him. His use of color and panel composition makes up for it. Mr. Tempest knows when to use a secondary color to highlight a particular character and to maintain the reader's eye. Which is good, because his backgrounds are abysmal. To be more charitable, Mr. Tempest has a strong grasp of storytelling, which is done no favors by his shoddy pencils.

There are four plots in Material, two of them worth following, and one of those is only if you squint.

-I'm from Chicago. The Horman Square story will probably be handled with care. It's also there that the most egregious "you have got to be fucking kidding me" footnote** appears. It concerns the abuse of a protestor.

-True to Wild Children, there is an incurious professor on a pedestal, ripe for an Ales Kot monologue to knock him off. His interlocutor this time around is a stretch even within the writer's bibliography.

-There is a plot which appears to be an excuse for Mr. Kot to tell the reader that he has seen 8 1/2 and Contempt.*** It contains a scene so flimsy it must be lampshaded. Watch 8 1/2 instead. ****, *****, ******, ********, *********

-The Guantanamo Bay plot resonated with me. It suggests a problem that is difficult to talk about and the dangers to the problem's resolution many. It is the strongest of the plots and the one that involves actual characters and not ambulatory vehicles for Mr. Kot's monologues.

I don't have much to say about the Material #1 that I haven't said about Wild Children. Mr. Kot remains precocious and reaches beyond his grasp. To finish the Warren Ellis line, good, that's how you grow.

There is an essay by Fiona Duncan in the back which earnestly extols the virtues of Franco Berardi (don't worry, the Wikipedia link is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco_Berardi) while unintentionally highlighting the low quality ********** of Mr. Tempest's pencils. In praise of the comic she's writing in, she says, "The students, save for the one who walk outs, are a sketchy mess." (The error is in the text, I've reproduced it.) Which is true for precisely one panel. Of the four panels the character is in, two of them that character is just as sketchy as the other students, he's merely colored brown and not that shade of light blue. In the third, he differs from the other students because he gets dots for eyes and a smiley face. *********** In the fourth, he gets a head shot.************ (I grabbed the first two pages from the CBR preview.)





I could argue, were I inclined*************, that the choice to be a sketchy mess was specifically chosen to non-verbally reinforce the professor's bored, jaundiced perspective and the student slowly making themselves known as a distinct person.************** I could also argue that Mr. Tempest's work is just as bad elsewhere in the comic and it detracts from the effectiveness of the story, which I do not believe can stand many more of these choices. His use of a different style, in a purple background, presumably to highlight lingering traumas is effective. He's better than this. So is Mr. Kot.

Perhaps something will come of Material, but I'm not optimistic. It is difficult to recommend this comic without massive qualifications. If you've taken an intro to film class, you're probably familiar enough with Mr. Kot's references to seek out other works by those authors you haven't already consumed. Buy those. If you still feel compelled to spend money on this comic, don't. Instead, donate to a local Narcotics Anonymous chapter. Or Southern Poverty Law Center. Or any organization that works with prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to get them reacclimated. Or any of the many charities doing great work on Chicago's south and west sides.

I believe Mr. Kot is sincere, which makes this review difficult. If Material #1 was a cynical exercise at our expense, I could be more dismissive. There is simply too much crammed into this comic to make it feel disingenuous. I feel compelled to write this not merely because of my inescapable ego, but because the comic required a reaction. We need authors like Mr. Kot and Mr. Tempest. We don't need Material. You don't, either. *************





*See also: "I spent more time on this comic than Wil Tempest did" -Anonymous reviewer

** See also: telling you to Google something is not worthy of a fucking footnote it actively insults the reader's intelligence not to mention, putting Horman Square in a footnote is redundant when the writer introduces the place in the very next panel

*** See also: He could have put it in a footnote

**** See also: Fuck this, I'm gonna read the Flash, there's a talking gorilla there with more personality than every single one of the characters in this particular plot without exception

***** See also: Plus, the guy who is drawing the gorilla is a goddamned professional that understands human faces and was paid well for his work (hyper capitalism!)

****** See also: hyper capitalism is my new safeword

******* See also: That and YOLO

******** See also: And Shelley

********* See also: I'm commenting on the text /within the text/? I'm being metatextual! HOW NOVEL

********** See also: I HAVE READ ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE DO I GET A PRIZE

*********** See also: Footnote #1

************ See also: Quake II, I guess

************* See also: But I'm not!

************** See also: Actually, wait. This is a good storytelling shoring up either an inability to make a drawing of a human being look convincing or laziness or a deadline

*************** See also: Do you see how distracting and unhelpful this is now

What's Keeping Me From Sinking

"The Disposable Culture might offer many things, but stability and longevity are not among them. I fear for the "fully digital" push--because one war, one bomb, one EMP, one earthquake, and it all can go away. Marketing idiots and future-philes want us to teeter on the edge of another Dark Age, to embrace the possibility of losing all of what makes our culture tick, all for convenience. But what happens when something goes wrong, as things inevitably do? Everything "virtual" disappears, maybe forever.

No thanks. I'll stick with printed paper and physical discs. Because this push for pretend possessions has no appeal to me, and I think it's more dangerous than we are led to think. There are points where marketing and the drive for profit winds up hurting the companies, the culture, it's trying to serve, and I think this is getting awfully close. Maybe conceptualizing future war or disaster is a little bleak, but a quick look back at history tells us war and disaster is about as common, and certain, as rain and sunrise. "

I ended up seeing something very late last night on Kotaku (see above) about how this person was fed up with what he/she referred to as "the disposable culture" videogame people had found themselves in. This person also spoke somewhat hysterically about how "one EMP or earthquake" could lead us to a new Dark Ages, and oddly enough, that if this disposable culture went to its logical conclusion by everybody purchasing more digital pieces of media, those pieces of media will be beholden to the people who'se service they're on and when that service goes under, historians will be lost as to find those media.

This person holds on to their NESs and a couple games, confident they'll be able to play them in continuing years, but the plebs who buy things on digital services can't count on that.

This person is wrong, of course. Most of the catalogs of any digital storefronts are the same, with a couple oddly timed releases here and there. Quick: Name something that Steam won't get if Good Old Games goes under. This person is also wrong about the decay of systems. I'm not sure the half life of a Sega Genesis is anything to bank on in 2020. Or a PlayStation, for that matter. And! That's assuming TVs still have the same kinds of audio/video/etc plugs in those years.

He's right in that we're going to have to pay for it again, (or not, if we go to...unauthorized digital services, to employ a euphemism.) but those digital storefronts will be purchased or acquired by others starting up.

What's the shelf life of books? This isn't a joke. Finely bound books might have a better chance of survival, but I'm pretty sure my wall of paperbacks is going to survive into 2030.

But that's not the point. What is the point is the idea of backwards compatibility and a universal file type for information. Your computer may not play .m4a files, but it sure as hell will play mp3s. Your computer may not be able to read a .doc file, but it will be able to read a .txt file. Do we have that going forward? That's what I hope we have. Because: if we're ever living in some crazy Fahrenheit 451 scenario, the entire works of Western literature, or at least three books by Dickens, can fit on a 1 TB external harddrive. (That's a joke, kids. Dickens was paid by the word so his stories are exhaustively long.)

Even if we don't have that now, look back at OINK. That was a place that had almost any piece of music you could have ever wanted, with more constantly being revealed and provided by music obsessives. Yes, OINK was shut down, but it's hard to believe OINK hasn't been entirely reconstituted elsewhere, even if it's a collective of other trackers. Somewhere in the world, there are at least hundred people who have every book ever digitized, because they literally can't stop.

It's those people that will keep books/music/video games/movies going and spreading. The obscure stuff will fade, but obscure stuff always does. Yes, everything virtual eventually disappears, but so does everything tangible. My bookshelf of books I haven't read three feet high shows that I'm unlikely to ever prefer the digital version of something, but I recognize it has an incredible value who'se upside is constantly growing.

I was going to leave a cool ending here, but I just saw that one of my friends had iTunes delete everything off of his iPod touch on Twitter. I want to leave that hanging in the air instead.




Clash covers are usually good. Here's an unusually good cover of Straight To Hell by the Menzingers. There ain't no need for youuuuuuuuuuu....

Kraken: Examined The Day After I Read It So Maybe I'll Be Embarrassed Later?

I finally tore into Kraken by China Mieville on the flight back from LaGuardia and it's, honestly a very China Mieville-y book. It's basically a Cthulu story, with Mieville bits thrown in. Two of the characters run around with a working phaser and Star Trek quips and while I'm not going to reveal the ending, if you read Kraken with the understanding that Mieville is very much a Marxist author, you can figure out an important trope that he counts on again and again within the book. It'll ruin a couple surprises, but not the last couple ones.

But the Marxism is secondary at least, to the point of this update, which is: I think the book is fantastic, I got a paperback copy in Munich, after I took part in an anti-fascist demonstration and it's worth buying whenever it comes out in the States, but....

The ending. Fucking hell. That ending.

Okay, past here are spoilers.

As in, the book is cool, the deeper it goes into it, the more I wanted to turn the next page to see what happened and the things that end up happening are epic and brilliant. Spoilers actually past here.

I could talk about the characters, but I'm going to be vague, one, because I have a limited amount of time and two, I'm not sure Kraken has come out in the States. ANYWAY.

Now, there's a loose coalition of good guys, fighting bad guys (ancient lurking evils) by the end. Who would have thought? But, to win the day, night and life on Earth forever after, the hero has to fight with a would-be reality author to rewrite reality for the entire goddamn world if not the universe to prevent apocalypse, bringing existence and counter-existence into play, in a battle of who'se pen is fastest and who has more power. It's sweeping, it involves the Big Bad at the end who has Minions and unseen tentacles. It's pretty trippy and sick.

But it's a fakeout. There's another Bad, a smaller, more insidious Bad, that lurked under the noise of the book and the deafening screams of London in the baudy, visceral throes of Apocalypse and it turns out, this Bad wants to use a time-Molotov to erase evolution and the hero has to beam himself back to the first scene in the book to prevent this from happening and honestly, it doesn't really matter what happens after that. Something is erased, but, my issue is not with that, my issue is that...man, that was a final twist that didn't out-twist the huge crescendo.

It wasn't a bigger twist. The stakes weren't higher and it didn't seem more important. And I don't think Mieville is pulling a Tolkien (remember, there's a much, much smaller Bad that's defeated in the Shire), because it wasn't liked Mieville lured me into a false sense of security. There was a huge fight and the the hero realizes, oh shit, something else is up and goes off to that. It was always meant to leave me breathless. Alternatively, the finger never left my throat.

Put simply, you go from one of the foremost creatures in the history of the magic world absorbing the power of the gigantic monster squid to insert itself as the arbiter of magic for eternity...a guy with a grudge against evolution and a homemade time incendiary? I found myself going OH SHIT YES OH SHIT YES OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIT WAIT WHY DOES HE HAVE THE WHAT AND OH, WELL, OKAY, I GUESS?

Spoilers finished.

Kraken, I think, went for just one more trick and it simply wasn't more impressive than the one it followed. Then again, when you have doomsday cults of all stripes and perspectives, a range of assassins that are colored in neon and any other hue you can think of and guys running around like Kirk and Spock on Star Trek (not to mention, somehow working in phasers actually working and magical teleportation into the story) trying to stay one step ahead of the doomsday cults and assassins, holding apocalypse back, you've probably already won.

Kraken was a page turner, and like The City and The City before it, I look forward to reading it again. Also, I finally finished 2666 last week, too. That, I promise you, will be a story for another time.

Say, Monday?

Again, time is limited, so I went for the first British artist I could think of and it ended up being the Pipettes. This is the sole Pipettes song played by Kieron Gillen at Thought Bubble 2010, if I recall correctly and dancing to it felt like I had finally done something right. To approximate the experience: Listen to it once on a normal volume and listen to it again cranked up. When you hear it cranked up, that soaring vocal track becomes sublime.

I Just Don't Want To Feel Like I'm Burning

Burning love.

First, it's not about setting fire to love. Which, since it's me, you could reasonably expect. Burning Love is a band. Burning love is a lyric, with "a hunk of" before it. Burning love is something I've never felt. But I've felt on fire and never had the words for it. It took Matt Fraction (writer of the Immortal Iron Fist, the Invincible Iron Man) to admit that he was an alcoholic and went into rehab before the phrase made any sense. Mr. Fraction, in the back of Casanova, has run interviews and intruiging backmatter and in number four, I think, he had an interview with Mike Doughty (Soul Coughing singer, now independent artist) where Mr. Fraction said Mr. Doughty was his sponsor through Alcoholics Anonymous.

There's three times Mr. Fraction uses the words fire or burning, but there's the one that's relevant: I went into recovery because I didn't want to feel like I was on fire all the time. When I first read that, I knew it was important, even without truly understanding the phrase. It was last night, going out kids for drinking, walking in Piazza Navona, that I finally understood what burning was.

Burning love is a love so powerful, so immediate, so visceral that it's all-consuming and globally encompassing in its personal scope. And immediately, I knew why Chris Colohan (Left For Dead/Cursed/the Swarm vocalist) named his new project Burning Love. It's the manifestation of an obsession, consumptive desire. It has little to do with love and lot more to do with burning.

As for 2666, I think I understand just how committed Bolano is to breaking the reader's face in the murder and rape in Juarez. (Read this article, then try not to cry. Then, watch this report and wait for the last thing the reporter says. In the six hours we spent there, there were seven murders.) I thought I was finally closing in on the end of the chapter and I found out I had another 50 pages left to go. I just want to throw the book to the floor and never look at it again, but it's important to see this fucker through.

There's sly little moment in the book, where there's a character with an announcement to make, in front of a bunch of exasperated journalists who are all thinking the same thing: Stop giving us fucking preamble and give us the name of the killer/rapist. Given that it's been 250 pages of brutal rape and it's not over yet, it's not hard to see this as Bolano's way of saying to the reader, I know how you feel.

Which means: He knows it and he wants to make certain we are as horrified and exhausted by the killings and murder that have become routine in the city and its real life equivalent. No, you don't get to get out because you're tired of it, I see the text saying. I'm not sure if that's brave, stupid or hardheaded. But I can tell: Bolano is enraged and consumed by the senseless and unending murder of the women, violated and humiliated before their death.

He burns about it and writes it the same way. It will hurt you, if you let it. One of the fiercer female characters (who is a forward thinking Mexican congresswoman) is hopelessly homophobic, and hopes, painfully, that her only son will never come back to Mexico, as it's no good for him.

For a person that tries to manage the country: That's just cold.




There's little to nothing to do with the post except that the song is morose. It's a song off the new Kanye West disc. I mean, Kanye's a guy that pretty often talks about girls like they're a renewable resource, but even he comments here, with more than a bit of sorrow: american apparel girl in just tights/ she told the director she just wants to get into school/ the director said/ take them glasses off/and get in the pool.

Oh and the Raekwon verse at the end is a wizened, resourceful look back over the hinted-at guitar solo, keys and thunder in the distance drums.

Announcing A Theory of 2666.

I was talking with a couple kids about snap decisions on the way back from St. Peter's yesterday (a monument that took over 120 years to build) and I ended up dispensing sage advice to the effect of "sometimes, the only way you're going to do something is to say you're doing something gigantic and then start doing it before you can stop and think better of it."

In that vein, I'm announcing A Theory of 2666, publishing every Wednesday. As I mentioned before, I brought Robert Bolano's 2666 with me on the trip, but I also brought the classic of modern philosophy and ubiquitous judicial citation, A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. I got about 90 pages through A Theory of Justice before putting it down for something that would fit more easily into a satchel and I never got back around to picking it up again. I'm intimidated by 2666 (It is supposedly a rejuvenation of the Latin American literary genre and I've read an entire one book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez), as I've mentioned before and used that as an excuse to let it sit on the shelf or on the dresser. No longer.

I'm reading both, starting now. Well, I'm switching between the two, this week it's 2666, next week it's A Theory of Justice.

I'm only 35 pages into 2666, and already, there's a love triangle that must collapse at the worst possible time, a strange and reclusive author with no pictures that inspired four main characters, one of those characters, as a reader, I expect to die. But, what's most surprising to me is a sentence, starting four lines from the top of page 18 that ends near the bottom on page 22. Now, in terms of width and height, 2666 is 8x5, which seems normal to me.

5 pages without a fucking period or, more crucially, a paragraph break. First things first: If you can construct a sentence like that and have it work, as it does in 2666, my hat's off to you. You're unreal at what you do. But as a reader on a bus or between classes, it's a display of virtuosity that is infuriating. Well, aggravating. As a person that plays with words, I'm humbled and immediately aware I am watching a person who has truly mastered the written word. Comparatively, I play with blocks. Legos, if I'm lucky. As a person that has to read it and does so in a world where I have to negotiate other human beings and the bookmark slips, I pray, feverishly, for a paragraph break or period or a chink in the armor of the paragraph to save my place.

There is no such solace. Then again, I'm reading 2666, not some trashy Chandler ripoff. The message I take from 2666 is that I need to up my reading game. If not that, then, at least understand this is the terrain I am getting myself into now. I am getting into books that more is expected of me. Oh! I like 2666. I mean, it's challenging reading, but I enjoy the time I spend with it. How did I not get to that?

I can get to that next week! Two weeks! See you Friday.




Today's song is Far's Mother Mary, as covered by Thursday at Hellfest, with the aid of Far's singer. One of the things I have a weak spot for at shows is male camaraderie and this video is saturated with it, a five minute piece of bro-ing out onstage overflowing with emotion. Yes, this is what I love and hardly often get. The song is about how we're gonna die and the only way we're gonna be remembered is for what we do, in what media we leave behind, which has a thematic simliarity to 2666, as there are four main characters chasing a reclusive author, whom they only know about through media.

I would say I planned it, but I didn't.

The Stranger And The Traveling And Finally, Music!

The Stranger

SPOILERS. You've been warned.




I finished the Stranger on Monday. It's written in a pretty matter of fact style until the killing happens and then it goes into a more passionate style. It's a bit of unreliable narrator but also nailing understatement. The narrator feels more often than he lets on, which is used to great effect in the beginning of the book when he's watching his so called friend basically entrap and beat up and ex-girlfriend for some imagined crime.

There's a trial and every action that we've seen through the narrator's eyes is warped and twisted by the public and everyone outside him. That maybe, he just doesn't have the words or doesn't feel that badly about his mother's death at the beginning of the novel, as the two people didn't speak for the last 10 years of the mother's life. By the end, the narrator is screaming at a priest about God just before he dies and refuses to accept any kind of last rites or acknowledge divinity on the ledge before his own death.

It's also under 150 pages, which, at least the edition I have, makes it an infuriating size. It's tantalizingly close, almost at the point where it can be stuck in a back pocket, but it's just a little too big to transport that way. He's simply a depressing author to read at the moment. Maybe it's a product of where physical I am. Or, it could be where I am mentally.

Where I am mentally is acclimating to the new place. Classes will help that, give the weeks some definition, but without a working alarm clock, I'm in a kind of "I get up when I get up" schedule, which, considering I have to wake up today to see the Coliseum neither earlier nor later than I'm used to, but instead right in that middle that I haven't hit yet, my life feels like a crapshoot. I walked last night listening to the Chrono Cross soundtrack, in an attempt to do something with my insomnia, and while it was interesting going back and reliving those memories, it made me wonder, ought I to be listening to music I already have a powerful attachment to and visual of when I'm in Rome, or should I be doing everything new, straight?

It's something to chew on. The crapshoot, somehow, remains fun thus far.


Since I didn't put a song when I posted this originally and that was an oversight, I'll fix it post-facto. The corretto (Italian for generic alcohol put in coffee to "correct' it) for this post, is a silly AMV for Reel Big Fish's Hungry Like the Wolf cover to Lupin the III, which is not just a great pairing, but a great way to offset the dead serious Camus. So! Lupin the III and Camus. A match made in, well, here. Enjoy.

The City & The City And Sleeping I Swear

New feature, which hopefully, will appear every week on Wednesday. In my attempt to get a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule going, I'm dedicating Wednesday to some piece of media I'm finished with, digesting or still trying to figure out.

I read two books since I left for Rome. The first is China Mieville's The City & The City with the second being Camus' (which I learned recently is pronounce Cam-Ooooooh) the Stranger. I'll talk about it more on Friday.

SPOILERS for The City & The City, obviously, follow.



The City & The City

I liked it a lot, despite the fact that I couldn't fully visualize the conceit of the setting, that two cities share the same real estate, but none of the same laws. I think because it focused more on being a detective story than something more science fiction y, I was able to follow it was easier for me to swallow.

Also, I am compelled to admit I was pleasantly surprised by the lack of insider betrayals on the police force. I was waiting, the entire goddamn time for either the partner from Ul Qora to be secretly informing on him for the bad guys or for the female cop back in Besz that he was flirting with to fill that role.

Of course, it ended up being the least likely person (as it always is, and often should be) so, I was still surprised. The detective himself wasn't particularly memorable, he could have just as easily been called Damn The Rules, Lives In A Shitty Apartment, Lawful Good Detective A and that would have covered just about everything. But that's only if you consider strict adherence to a traditional good guy style to be a bad thing.

I haven't read a detective/crime story (that wasn't in a comic) in a while, so in addition to being worth the money on its own, it's a nice preparation for whatever the hell 2666 is bringing my way. Seriously. The thing is a behemoth. I think I put it in my drawer just so I didn't have to be intimidated by its sheer weight and surprising height.

Anyway. Back to The City & The City. The premise is interesting. There's a murder and then it goes out of jurisdiction is a pretty uniform plot, but in a city where there are two populations that literally cannot look at each other, it makes the tension and distrust between those two cities, a lot more pronounced. And, it makes finding and collating evidence, the process of justice, even harder.

The details (like that the Besz cops are still on dial up) are a nice reminder of how not far in the future the story is set. Hell, some of it even involves a college! So yes. I like it and I'd even recommend it to my mother or father. That might not be a compliment for some people, but I think it's a testament to how solidly the story is written.

This song has little and I'd argue nothing to do with the book, but it's what I've been listening to since I could sit down at the internet. I don't know what it's about, but the chorus is to kill for. Enjoy.