bubble soul

Amazing how multiple projects seem to get done at the same time—today’s batch included the big damn thing I’ve been tweaking for about a month now, and now there is a tall, relaxing pile of comic books awaiting me.

The biggest change in my life over the last month or so has been the introduction of regular doses of caffeine into it. I’d resisted the call of caffeine ever since college: at first it was probably a way of differentiating myself from my family, then I wanted to prove I could do whatever it was I was doing without “artificial stimulants” (and probably wasn’t mentally present for a lot of college because I was like totally straightedge and stuff), then I wanted to be the guy who drank juice in the morning instead of coffee (I can’t tell you how many Tropicana pints I sucked down en route to the subway in the mid-’90s), and then… I just never got into the habit. Every time I thought about it, I remembered the caffeine spider webs, and thought better of it. I wasn’t militant or anything—I’d drink the occasional Coke or Thai iced tea, and even tried coffee once or twice—but I found that it made me jittery and twitchy and even more judgmental than usual, which is saying something.

But a couple of years ago, when I was finishing Book #2, a trusted advisor suggested that a little green tea might not be so bad for me. I’ve flirted with it a few times—the occasional chai and so on—but for the last few weeks I’ve been careful to drink it almost every day. (I’ve also been careful to take at least one day off a week.) Surprise: I feel slightly but perceptibly more awake and alert. And only a little bit more jittery/twitchy/judgmental than normal.

YES I AM A CAFFEINE JUNKIE NOW; PITY ME.

hiding their nightingale

When I first saw the Inner Space’s soundtrack to Agilok & Blubbo in a record store a few months ago, I had a wave of excitement: an album I’d never heard by the band that turned into Can! And then I thought: no, this has to be a reissue, and if it were any good I’d already have heard it, right?; completism is the same thing that made me buy Out of Reach; life’s too short.

I left it on the shelf, and then found myself wishing I’d bought it—it was from 1968, just slightly before they recorded Delay and Monster Movie, and I’d never even heard of it before. I looked it up online, and discovered that it wasn’t a reissue, but a soundtrack that hadn’t been released at the time. So the next time I saw it, I bought it.

It’s interesting, because it’s audibly the work of the band that would make great records a few months later. (Jaki Liebezeit always sounds like himself.) It’s also terrible: half-in-the-bag psychedelic doodling with a recurring instrumental motif of the melody best known as “nanny nanny boo boo.” Also, somebody is playing flute, although it’s not clear from the liner notes whether it’s Irmin Schmidt or David Johnson, who seems to have left the band shortly after the recording. I’m sorry, but flute is impermissible in this context. I should’ve trusted my second impulse.

a wall both wider and more porous

Took me way too long, but I’ve finally updated the “things I’ve written lately” section over in the left column—now with links to my reviews of two of my favorite books of this year—Carol Tyler’s You’ll Never Know: A Good and Decent Man and Emmanuel Guibert’s The Photographer—as well as a whole lot of albums I’ve written about at Pitchfork, and a few other surprises.

I’ve been off in New York for the past couple of weeks—attending conferences and seeing friends and eating a lot of excellent Indian food, although the meal I had across the street from MoCCA was probably even better than the one I went out to Floral Park for. And now I’m back, and have a lot of things to tell you all about. But not tonight.

sketchbook #18: Jesse Reklaw

The wildly gifted Jesse Reklaw is the man behind the long-running dream comic Slow Wave; he’s also been publishing a fascinating diary comic called Ten Thousand Things to Do. There’s a really interesting discussion of the economic crush of being an artist over at a recent diary comic at his Flickr site.

And then, sometimes, he does really goofy stuff:

sketchbook #17: Meredith Gran

My. That certainly was a month, wasn’t it? Someday the whole story will be told, and everyone will go home with makeup streaked down their cheeks and drink bitter lemon with quinine straight out of the bottle.

I’ve been publishing a lot of stuff here and there, and I’ll get to that soon enough, but first of all I think a picture is appropriate.

Meredith Gran of “Octopus Pie” fame drew this one in the sketchbook at Emerald City Comic-Con last month—a very nice use of the grid, and an accurate portrait of my state of mind. Volume 3 of Octopus Pie, “An Interstate Oasis,” is out now, and handsome indeed.

let's just call it "Powell's Win"

I’m still cleaning up the sidebar here, but I’d like to point out that the Amazon links to buy my books that lived here before have been replaced by a link to the mighty Powell’s Books. Which lets me support a local business that I like a lot, too.

another dime

I’ve got a piece about the “Celestial Jukebox” up at the Portfolio site.

as in a blender

Word’s gotten around that Blender magazine has shut down—the April issue that recently came out will be its last. I’m really going to miss writing for them. I was involved with this incarnation of Blender pretty much from the get-go—when it started up, they called me up and asked me if I could fill a chair in the office for a week, which became two weeks, then four, then six, and even after I left the office I kept writing for them right up to the end.

Blender took a certain amount of guff for its in-your-face graphics and bite-sized copy. The thing is, it had really good, densely packed, thoughtful, funny bite-sized copy—especially in the Rob Tannenbaum era. Tannenbaum’s my favorite kind of editor, the kind who has a hunting falcon’s eye for flawed or flabby writing and will do whatever it takes to make it right, or rather to make me get it right; his breakdown of what each half-star of the magazine’s five-star rating system meant has been a useful tool to me in contexts that don’t even have to do with music. I particularly liked working on the “Back Catalogue” features—overviews of particular artists’ entire catalogues, with short reviews of every album they’d ever released. Thanks to those, I now know a lot more about the Beach Boys, Elvis Costello, New Order/Joy Division, Creedence Clearwater Revival/John Fogerty, Aretha Franklin, Sonic Youth, the Clash, the Byrds, the Cure, Nirvana/the Foo Fighters, ABBA, David Bowie, and above all Bob Dylan, on whose catalogue I spent three months of unforgettable total immersion.

Blender was about music as a source of pleasure—not status or cultural power or part of a lifestyle, but limitless fascination and enjoyment, which was its editors’ attitude, too. The point of Blender’s design was to make it a pleasure to read, page-for-page, and that’s what it was for me every month. I hope I get to work on another project like it sometime.

doors that slam

I wouldn’t have guessed that I’d ever get to see the Homosexuals play live, but there they were last night at East End. Well, “they”: Bruno “Wizard” McQuillan backed up by a much younger band. Who, to their credit, were tough and agile enough to navigate the songs’ constant abrupt turns. Even so, it was weird to hear e.g. “Soft South Africans” and “Hearts in Exile” played as straightforward punk rock songs. (And weirder still to hear some of those songs open up for jamming: I would also not have expected “Walk Before Imitate —> Drums/Space.”) The set list was basically most of The Homosexuals’ Record, with a few choice additions—one or two new songs, “You’re Not Moving the Way You’re Supposed To,” etc.

To paraphrase a poster that one sees a lot around Portland, the same traits that make for a monumentally annoying conversationalist also make for a terrific punk frontman, notably semi-coherent peace-and-love speechifying and a habit of inserting a falsetto “wooooooo!” into conversation every half-minute. The show had one of the worst encores I’ve ever seen (Bruno sitting behind the drum kit, interminably attempting to demonstrate how a reggae beat should be played correctly, then grabbing a guitar and making up a couple of songs on the spot, then playing a few more drum solos), but I still walked out glowing from how much fun the main set was, and how good it was to hear those songs in a live setting.

two endorsements

Both in Portland; the first one’s for food. Portobello Vegan Trattoria, people. 2001 SE 11th Ave. Do not sleep on it. It’s the same building as Cellar Door Coffee Roasters—actually, it’s the same space, just a different identity in the evenings. Incredibly good bread and olive oil and pumpkin cappellacci and squash “spaghetti” and roasted Brussels sprouts and… everything. And very reasonably priced. And a very, very patient waitstaff. And our table was right next to a coffee table with Sara Varon’s Sweaterweather and a Little Nemo collection and an old Duplex Planet Illustrated comic book on it. Plus the Mountain Goats and Neutral Milk Hotel on the stereo system. The first Neutral Milk Hotel record. My. Kind. Of. Place.

The other one is something that is just so… Portlandy… I feel obligated to point it out: Nationale, at 2730 E. Burnside, a tiny little store that sells Stuff the Proprietor Likes, mostly of the design-intensive variety. Art, textiles, French candy, a handful of beat-up old LPs, tiny Rhodia notebooks, fancy dishes, the Marriage Records catalogue, etc. Recommended by Craig Thompson, no less! (On the stereo system there: Smog’s “Bathysphere.”)