Greetings, friends! I’ve seen neither hide nor hair of gorjus since he left us a message last week saying he was going to investigate rumors of a huge cache of polaroid film for sale at a flea market in Simpson County. We had one more call from him, but all I could hear on the message was a kind of wet thudding noise and the sound of someone trying to start a chainsaw. So I guess maybe his phone was messed up.
In the meantime, please enjoy these links and/or brief commentaries:
*Writer Colleen Kane has moved to Baton Rouge and has started a couple of blogs, including Abandoned Baton Rouge, a nifty photo-blog that seeks to answer the enduring question, “At what point does midcentury modernity decay into Southern Gothic?” You can read her other musings about her transplantedness here.
*Speaking of the mid-mod, Contessa alerted me to the Erwin House website; it recounts the story of one ugly duckling domicile’s transformation into a beautiful creature of steel and glass asymmetry.
*Obligatory Mountain Goats link: MG fans will recall that when The Sunset Tree came out, John Darnielle also released the demos for that album on vinyl in a special numbered limited edition called Come, Come to the Sunset Tree; each of 1,000 copies was hand-decorated by Darnielle himself in a variety of styles. I wrote about my lucky #13 here, and now MG fan Missy Mazzaferro has begun compiling images of the different versions on Flickr. Only a handful are collected so far, but you can already see different each copy is from the next. You got one? Take a photo and submit it to Missy, won’t you?
*Matt Fraction and Fabio Moon’s Casanova #13, out last week, contains surely the best adventure comic funeral of all time. It would be worthwhile even if it only served to mock the emptiness—no, cheapness—of the typical superhero “death,” which it does beautifully: Everyone simply assumes that since Ruby S can come back, she will, that her death will have been both momentarily exciting and utterly meaningless—not unlike that of another cast member. Except that Fraction’s rendering of, in particular, Ruby B’s desire for her sorta-sister to come back is so heartbreaking that it makes these sorts of allegorical meta-readings seem kind of cold-hearted. Friends: School of Comics currently has the hardback collection of the first volume, Luxuria, marked 1/3 off for clearance. Just go buy it. The second volume is even better (so far—one issue to go!), but you’ve gotta start somewhere.
*How did I not know that The Gossip have a new live CD coming out next week? After the Spanish Moon experience chronicled here and here, I will be purchasing it forthwith. Or posthaste. Whatever.
*Friend of the blog Jacqueline Bach is editing a special issue of Academic Exchange Quarterly on popular culture and pedagogy. Academic sorts with interests along those lines—I know there are a lot of you—should follow that link and submit an essay.
*Sometimes Achewood is just kind of agreeably weird. And sometimes . . . it’s like it is today.
Hey, thanks for the linky love—I think that’s the best description of Abandoned Baton Rouge I’ve ever heard!
xxoo
ck