Hi. I'm Douglas. I'm a freelance journalist and critic; I write about music, comic books and other things for the New York Times, Blender, the Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, Rolling Stone, Salon.com, and a bunch of other places. My most recent book is Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, published in 2007 by Da Capo Press. My short book about a performance by James Brown in Harlem during the Cuban missile crisis, Live at the Apollo, was published in 2004 by Continuum Books. In 2002-2003, I was a Mid-Career Fellow with the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University.

I'm married to the amazing photographer Lisa Gidley. (The wedding was August 5, 2001. You can also read what the New York Times had to say about it.) We live with our son Sterling and our cat, the sassy American shorthair Edie Blues Explosion Gidley, in Portland, Oregon, and also spend a lot of time in Queens, New York.

Dark Beloved Cloud is the record label I've run since 1992.

I've played with a handful of bands, notably The Media, Dymaxion, Crowns on 45, the 801, Customer Service, Forget, and Lovefish. (I play bass, mostly, though sometimes I sing or play percussion or guitar or computer, and lately I've been playing a lot of ukulele.) I generally think of myself as a non-musician with good ears who keeps ending up in bands. Need one of those?

I look like this:

(Thanks, Lisa, for the photo.)

 

I like getting mail from people. If you want to send the electronic kind, you can address it to douglas at lacunae dot com and it'll get to me. Need a physical address? Ask!