best of list – Page 2

FAVORITE POSTS: I DONE BEEN TAGGED

Monday, January 14, 2008

I ~~usually~~ almost always ignore these things, but Tim tagged me, and I really like Tim and don’t want to let him down, and lord knows I don’t have any NEW content, so:

Go back through your archives and post the links to your five favorite blog posts that you’ve written. But there is a catch:
Link 1 must be about family.
Link 2 must be about friends.
Link 3 must be about yourself, who you are… what you’re all about.
Link 4 must be about something you love.
Link 5 can be about anything you choose.

Post your five links and then tag five other people.

These aren’t my “all-time” favorites, but they’re some decent ones. Here goes:

	FAMILY: A TIME MACHINE STUCK ON REPEAT Tuesday, July 4th, 2006 My grandmother’s 80th birthday. A trip to Salem, Ohio. Family slides, deja vu, and memories of things that never happened. Moments flickered on the edges of my sight that never happened. A life that was never lived. It was something like the opposite of deja vu: what I was seeing in front of me triggered memories that had never existed.
	FRIENDS: CAT POWER OUTAGE Sunday, October 16th, 2005 My buddy Nathaniel, who was going to UVA at the time, tells a great story about going to see Chan Marshall live in Charlottesville, Virginia. A few minutes later, she muttered something about the KKK, claimed she felt “this weird energy,” and literally RAN off stage.
	MYSELF: IT’S JUST A SERIES OF GAG STRIPS WRITTEN IN A SECRET CODE Saturday, June 24th, 2006 The first post where I tried to articulate my thought that an artist’s job is to create his own “secret code.” People talk about voice and style, and I have no clue what they’re talking about. “Find your voice!” they say. Screw that. I’m working on my secret code. Other related posts: THESE CODED DRAWINGS ARE REALLY MY JOURNALS MORE THOUGHTS ON MAKING A MOUNTAIN OUT OF GAG STRIPS
	SOMETHING I LOVE: DRAWING THAT SIGNIFICANT OTHER (SCENES OF DOMESTIC BLISS) Monday, October 1st, 2007 I really love drawing my wife. She’s the perfect model: she’s beautiful, she doesn’t complain, and she’s always around. This post has examples of other cartoonists drawing their significant others. More drawings of my wife:
	ANYTHING I WANT: PROCESS: MY COVER FOR HAWKLINE’S UPCOMING EP, “SHIPWRECK” Friday, July 27th, 2007 This was a really fun project to work on, and I think it gives a really accurate, honest portrait of how I work. I tend to look at everything through the medium of collage: all we’re really doing with art is taking things that we’ve seen and making something we can call our own. Borrowing. Stealing. Mixing. We take the words we know and put them into sentences. We take the notes we know and put them into melodies. We take the experiences we have and shape them into stories.

Okay, I spent way too much time on that. This trip down memory lane is over (thank God). I guess I’ll tag Mark, Maureen, Darby, James, and Adam.

MY READING YEAR, 2007

Saturday, January 12, 2008

10 good books that I read this year:

The Road
by Cormac McCarthy

My reaction was similar to James Kochalka’s.

Harry Potter 7
by J.K. Rowling

Always a fan of the movies, this year I let go of my HP snobbery, looked past the clunky prose, and let myself fall into the dream..

The Early Comic Strip
by David Kunzle

A long-out-of print collection of ancient precursors to the comic strip that I got my hands on through interlibrary loan.

Posts about the book:

Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow
by Anders Nilsen

Maybe my favorite book last year by my favorite contemporary cartoonist. My “review.”

The Political Brain
by Drew Westen

A book that got me interested in politics again.

My mindmap of the book.

Secret Knowledge
by David Hockney

A book about the use of optics in painting from the 1400s on, which changed a lot of my ideas about perspective, realism, comics, and collage.

King-Cat Classix
by John Porcellino

A retrospective collection of Porcellino’s King-Cat mini-comics. I also read his Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man and Perfect Example. Those clean, Zen lines!

The Gospel According to Jesus
by Stephen Mitchell

Reminded me how much I love the teachings of Jesus and how much I hate contemporary Christianity. A lovely book.

Saul Steinberg: Illuminations
by Joel Smith

This was the catalog of a gallery show we saw while we were on our honeymoon, and it kick-started the Year of Steinberg, in which I became obsessed with his work.

Posts about Steinberg from this year:

The Braindead Megaphone
by George Saunders

A collection of essays from my favorite living fiction writer. We got to meet Mr. Saunders twice this year: once at Oberlin College and once at the Texas Book Festival.

MY READING YEAR, 2006

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

10 great books I read, in descending order:

Soccer In Sun and Shadow
by Eduardo Galeano

The ultimate bathroom reading. Short, smart, prose-poem chapters about soccer. Picked it up because Barry Yourgrau (another good bathroom read) recommended it. Became an instant fan.

Making Comics
by Scott McCloud

Not as good as Understanding Comics, but way better than Reinventing Comics. Any McCloud release is an event. Thrilled to see a chapter on world-building in there. Will make a good textbook someday.

Six Memos For The Next Millennium
by Italo Calvino

Intended as lectures, Calvino died before he could give them. The first five, Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity, were written. The sixth, Consistency, was not. A hell of a collection of last words from a hell of a writer.

Beautiful Evidence
by Edward Tufte

The fourth of Tufte’s books, contains his devastating pamphlet on Powerpoint, which should be required reading for everyone. Come to think of it, all of his books should be required reading — in the age of pictures and words, they could take the place of freshmam composition…

The Rabbi’s Cat
by Joann Sfar

The Rabbi’s cat swallows a parrot and announces his ambition to learn the Torah. Loose, wonderful drawings, a no-nonsense structure, and a great story. Didn’t get to read Sfar’s Vampire Loves, but that looks excellent too.

Mother Night
by Kurt Vonnegut

Gallows humor, anyone? Picked this up because I read that it was Etgar Keret’s favorite Vonnegut. Devoured it in one sitting during a sunny afternoon on our balcony.

Curses
by Kevin Huizenga

I haven’t actually put my hands on the Curses collection (it’s on the xmas list), but when I was at Quimby’s in Chicago, I bought every Huizenga comic they had, and after that, ordered everything available through USS Catastrophe (including his great booklet for the Center for Cartoon Studies). Along with the stuff available online, I’ve read a good bit of what’s gonna be in the book. His blog is great, too.

Consider The Lobster
by David Foster Wallace

“I don’t know a whole lot about non-fiction journalism, but the way i think about [it] in terms of what I can do is: I think of it as a service industry. Essays like this are occasions to watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lifes…”

Brilliant dude, brilliant essays. Still haven’t read a bit of his fiction.

Fun Home
by Alison Bechdel

A story that couldn’t be told in any other form than a comic book. I loved meeting Alison, and her Powerpoint presentation about the “making of” made the book seem even more brilliant. Best book published this year, hands down.

Cruddy
by Lynda Barry

Next to getting married, meeting Lynda Barry and hearing her read from Cruddy was probably the event of my year. To me, Lynda is the perfect model of a writer and an artist. This book is just too cool for words.

MY LISTENING YEAR, 2006

Tuesday, December 5, 2006

Just me riffing on John Porcellino:

Special treat: an updated page of every Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour show.

FAVORITE SONGS OF 2005

Thursday, December 1, 2005

10 bands that wrote good songs that sounded good to me this year. Some with legal MP3s, some with videos.

$A River Ain\'t Too Much to Love$ Smog – “I feel like the mother of the world” [VIDEO] | [MP3]

…with two children.

Bill Callahan’s songs are the sound of home–the landscape that haunts my head. He recorded it in a new city, with his back to Chicago–and I listened to it in a new city, with my back to Chicago.

Andrew Bird – “A nervous tic motion of the head” [MP3]

Somebody should make another spaghetti western, so Andrew Bird could score it. On stage this song becomes epic–toes tapping pedals, looped violins, and that whistle. That whistle!

Feist – “Mushaboom” [ITUNES]

collect the pieces / one by one / guess that’s how / the future’s done
i got a man / to stick it out / and make a home / from a rented house

Sheer domestic bliss.

The National – “Abel/All The Wine” [VIDEO | MP3]

Abel, come on, give me the keys, man | I’m a perfect piece of ass

Good guitars, good singer, good songs–it ain’t brain surgery, folks. These songs follow each other on the album, so it’s best to just listen to them both.

Crooked Fingers – “Sleep All Summer” [WEBSITE]