In the Hood
This week we added longtime commenter Richard Cook to our blogging roster. Richard started off the week by sneering efficiently at the new Spider Woman motion comic.
I followed that up by sneering at all editorial cartoonists and particularly Jules Feiffer.
Vom Marlowe, not to be outdone, sneered at Supergirl.
Kinukitty — a beacon of sunshine and light — broke the streak by speaking with affection and kindness of the manga yaoi Prince Charming.
Perhaps inspired by such cheeriness, Vom Marlowe came back to post about her love of manga how-to books, and of ink.
And finally Suat finished up the week with the second part of his essay on Benoît Peeters’ and François Schuiten’s Philosophical Cities series. The first part was on The Great Wall of Samaris, if you missed it. The second part focuses on Fever in Urbicand.
This week’s music download with folk and bluegrass and German vampire music and Thai pop and whatnot is here
And if you missed it, last week’s music download filled with cheesy contemporary country and other songs of heartbreak is here. Get it before Mediafire decides to randomly delete it.
Over the River and Through the Hood
At Splice Today, I have a long review of Carl Wilson’s “Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste,” his book for 33 1/3 about trying to love Celine Dion.
Wilson’s book, then, turns out to not really be a polemic in the rockist/popist internecine war. Instead, it’s a statement of faith—though of faith in what isn’t entirely clear. Democracy, perhaps? Art? Celine herself? Terry Eagleton comments in Reason, Faith, and Revolution that “certain of our commitments are constitutive of who we are, we cannot alter them without what Christianity traditionally calls a conversion, which involves a lot more than just swapping one opinion for another.” Wilson seems to be almost inverting this, proposing, or hoping, that if we can but treat our opinions as constitutive of whom we are, we can experience a conversion merely by changing them.
At the Chicago Reader I review Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book Bright-Sided.
The left is in love with false consciousness. Ever since Karl Marx called religion an opiate, progressives have been pulling on their muckraking boots, breaking out the bullhorns, and shouting “Wake up!” at the supposedly somnolent masses. While the paranoid right tends to see its enemies as corrupt conspirators, the left prefers to assume its opponents are merely dim bulbs, just one well-argued monograph away from enlightenment.
I review the Numero Group’s great 70s-80s collection of male singer-songwriter folk, Wayfaring Strangers: Lonesome Heroes over at Metropulse.
Beyond the Valley of the Hood
Some random, not necessarily timely links from around the comics blogosphere:
Mark Andrew on the Haney/Aparo Brave and Bold run.
Jones, one of the Jones boys on continuity ( and more here.)
Robert Stanley Martin makes the case that Julius Schwartz was the one really responsible for Alan Moore’s Superman story, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow.
I’m still holding out for Tucker to actually smear feces on Kramer’s Ergot 7, but till then, this is quite entertaining.
And hey, here’s something random: a Thai pop video!
Update: Not that anyone actually cares but me, but the singer in this video is Pamela Bowden. She seems to have gotten her start in the 90s doing dance-pop, and then moved into a more ballady style called loog thung, I think. I think this song is off her album E-nang Dance volume 1, maybe? There are a bunch of youtube videos of her performing, but hardly any information in English that I could track down anyway. I found a website which seemed to be selling her music and ordered some…we’ll see if it ever arrives.
I love this song though.
Update 2: She’s native Thai, apparently, but of Australian descent, according to one YouTube commenter.