I know I promised a huge announcement, but it will have to wait until tomorrow night at about 11 p.m. There are still some people I want to tell, either through an email or a telephone call if that is possible, and I have not yet had the time or the resources to reach them. I suppose once I make the announcement, it will all seem a little anticlimactic because it really isn't that big of a deal. I just don't want some of my closer friends to have to read it on my web site before they hear it from me. And like I said, Rudy is not pregnant.
Matt K.
Some of you have been wondering about that half-spoken half-whispered half-laughing intro to the Frank Zappa song "Watermelon in Easter Hay" that I posted on Easter Sunday. I guess I should have put some more info about that since it kind of sets the tone for the peace and makes me both laugh and cry (or both) at the same time. I don't know why. It really is pretty juvenile in a serious "Bill and Ted" kind of way. Anyway, make fun of me, and Frank (or both!) all you want but here is what Zappa is saying in the intro. He is playing the role of the Central Scrutinizer.
This is the CENTRAL SCRUTINIZER...Joe has just worked himself into an imaginary frenzy during the fade-out of his imaginary song...He begins to feel depressed now. He knows the end is near. He has realized at last that imaginary guitar notes and imaginary vocals exist only in the imagination of the Imaginer ...and ... ultimately, who gives a fuck anyway... Who gives a fuck anyway? So he goes back to his ugly little room and quietly dreams his last imaginary guitar solo...
I feel like that sometimes with "Spudd 64." Just replace "imaginary guitar notes" with "imaginary comic book" and there you go. Because, really, who gives a fuck anyway? That part is accurate after all. Always accurate.
I have a pretty huge announcement to make but it will happen tomorrow evening sometime. There are a few people I want to tell first, rather than have them read about it on this web site. And no, we are not having a kid.
Matt K.
Oh yeah, almost forgot. Today is Easter Sunday. I am sharing this piece with you, a wonderful instrumental by the one and only Frank Zappa. It is called "Watermelon in Easter Hay." The title, certainly, is appropriate, but the meaning of the music goes deeper than that. I can't listen to this piece without experiencing a deep and sweet sense of sadness. I always cast my mind back over the years and remember friends long gone, moments of happiness and moments of terrible failure, stories I've told or even been a part of...I think you know what I mean. For those reasons, and others more personal, I don't listen to this song very often precisely because it has such an emotional impact. I keep it locked away like fine wine and sample just a bit of it when the occasion is proper. Now that so much is in transition and I can sense my life crossing one of those invisible boundaries between one country and the next I think it is time to listen to the song once or thrice and revisit those memories. Maybe you can too.
But don't take any of this too seriously. After all, this song is from the same album that contains "Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?" and "Keep It Greasey."
Watermelon in Easter Hay -- Frank Zappa
Matt K.
I fixed the damnable typos from yesterdays entry. I think I was just typing way too fast because I felt guilty about putting up such a big entry while I should have been working on homework. I really hate typos. It always makes one look like an idiot. I really can spell, you know.
Anyway, read parts of yesterday's entry again if there was something that didn't make sense. I changed a "what" to "that," a "single" to "signal," a "fare" to "far," and a "mw" to "me." Now it is as it should be.
Back to the homework.
Matt K.
I graduate one month from yesterday. Thank God. I am now officially sick of graduate school. There is still so much work to do to wrap up my practicum, complete my workshop, and conclude my last class. In addition, I am working as a library sub (which I do enjoy) and interviewing for a few positions which is grueling and requires a lot of prep work. I never ever thought I would see the day where a busy and demanding full-time job would seem like a vacation in paradise, but I am there now.
So that explains the lack of updates, emails, phone calls, and the like. I will still be quite busy for the remainder of April, so you might not see a whole lot going on here or be able to spend a lot of quality time with me until May, but I'll do my best to make it up to all of you.
Since I haven't been able to post many MP3s I've decided that I am going to try and put up at least one full playlist a week. I really had a blast doing that list for Astro Boy so I thought I would try it again. And as always, there is a story to go with it if you have the time.
While I was not born there, I spent the majority of my childhood in a small town in northeastern Ohio. As I have mentioned many times before, I loved books from a very early age. I was always enamored with fantasy and some science fiction, the more bizarre the better. I was fortunate in that my parents supported my reading addiction and were always happy to take me to a bookstore or buy me a paperback when I wanted one.
I'm not sure if it is still there, but in my youth there was an immense used bookstore in Elyria named, appropriately enough, Booksellers. It was very similar to Half Price Books in that it bought used books from customers and resold them. I believe they had some new stuff as well, but these were typically remainders and the like. The store sat in an enormous building similar to a grocery store in construction. Even though there were probably hundreds of thousands of books, there were still wide aisles and lots of room for the dust to gather. I loved it. I think it is there that my love for the smell of dusty old paperbacks developed, which is a trait I am certain I share with many other booklovers.
My parents enjoyed the trips to Booksellers as much as I did, so I can recall heading there often, even at the early age of 6 or 7. By the time I was 10 years old, I was reading very heavily on my own and since the paperbacks were all half off the cover price, I could easily afford to buy several on my meager allowance. After all, this was the late 1970s and many of the fantasy and science fiction paperbacks I was digging through were printed in the 50s and 60s with cover prices of .45 to .95 cents. Good stuff. Heaven for a little weirdo like me!
My love affair with Booksellers continued all through junior high and high school, and as soon as I earned a driver's license I went there at least once a week. My favorite pastime was to spend hours in the fantasy and sci fi paperback section, which was exceptionally large, and simply look at every single book on the shelf. I would carefully select the ones with the coolest covers that sounded the strangest and most challenging, carefully inspect the spines to make sure the book was in readable condition, and make a little stack to buy. I read so many books back then.
Now that there is some light at the end of my graduate school tunnel and I have decided to make a concerted effort to spend more time reading challenging fiction, my mind has drifted back to those jaunts. Since it has been nearly two years since I had the time or the drive to read anything beyond graduate school material, I decided it would be best if I simply followed my heart and read whatever I wanted to read rather than to embark on some carefully proscribed plan. Some of the first titles I thought of were books I had read, or seen, nearly 29 years at Booksellers. Imagine my tremendous sadness when I realized that many of them were out of print and the few that remained now sported absolutely dreadfully dull new covers! We all know the dangers of the book, the cover, and the judging, but still. As a young reader, quite often it was the cover that caught my eye, and I still think of those covers as treasure maps leading me to some of the most incredible journeys of my young life. I decided to see if I could find a few of them online and share them with you, as well as the new and modern monstrosities which currently disguise the wonders still contained within. Many of these covers were from Ballantine, a publisher which attempted to cash in on the popularity of Tolkien's books in the 1960s and 1970s by finding and publishing as much fantasy as they could. At that time, it seems, there was very little fantasy being published outside of the British Isles, and much of what Ballantine put out was from the early part of the 20th century. There were titles from notables such as Lord Dunsany, William Morris, George MacDonald, and Mervyn Peake. While we are fortunate that much of this material is still in print, and perhaps even more widely available than before, I long for the days of those beautiful covers and the dreamlike afternoons spent sitting crosslegged on the tattered carpet of Booksellers feverishly reading back cover after back cover and trying to decide how best to spend my $2.00. Here are some of my favorite covers, from some of my favorite books, and the awful new printings to show you what we are missing.
First is E.R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros, an almost ludicrously manly and heroic epic concerning the war between Lords Goldry Bluszco, Juss, Brandoch Daha, and Spitfire of the Kingdom of Demonland and their mortal enemies King Gorice Xii and the hordes of Witchland. All on the planet Mercury. Really. Here is the cover of the version I read.
And here, sadly, is the cover for the new printing. How dull!
So very very sad. Next, a title I am currently re-reading at this very moment, David Lindsay's towering A Voyage to Arcturus. Written in 1920, this is a very peculiar tale, more of a gnostic fantasy than a science fiction story. It concerns a man from earth named Maskull who, with his companions Nightspore and Krag, journeys to the planet Tormance which orbits the double star Arcturus. There, in a sort of Pilgrim's Progress across a landscape more imaginatively bizarre than anything I have read before or since, he meets a host of beings who share their view of the universe. Each of them is wrong, yet their narratives bear clues to the reality of this flawed universe, the product of Crystalman, and the nature of the true universe, called Muspel, where dwells the true higher god Surtur. Absolutely amazing and riveting stuff, even though Lindsay's language can be rough going at times. I highly recommend it. Here is the cover of the paperback that I read, an image of Maskull and the woman Oceaxe riding a flying beast called a shrowk.
And here is the new edition. God, I HATE this cover. It doesn't even look like Maskull, who has a beard! Ugh.
This book, as well as a few others on this list, are actually in the public domain. This is a pipedream at the moment, but when I finish a few more of my "Spudd 64" projects, I am going to begin an adaptation of this book to comics. It will probably take me my entire life and interest no one, but I am so fascinated by Lindsay's take on the gnostic concepts of the universe, gender, pain and pleasure, and the universe that I almost feel a compulsion to do it. So Leighton Connor, I am going to be leaning heavily on you for assistance in adapting this complex book to a sequential narrative. Okay?
I never read Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn until after I saw the animated feature, but I enjoyed it a great deal more. I probably would have initially written something like this off as a silly piece of fluff since it was all about a unicorn, but there was a depth and a sadness to the book that really affected me. Here is the cover of the paperback that I read.
And here is the ultra-sickening reprint. Blech.
George MacDonald's Phantastes is a book whose true meaning escaped me at the time. I came to MacDonald more through reading of his influence on other fantasy writers, and I think perhaps I was not quite ready for the challenge. This is a novel I am eager to re-read since my recollections of my original experience with it are dim and not entirely good. Still, the cover bears looking at.
And here is the new printing. Not entirely sucktacular, but it lacks the charm of the original.
While I am not an enormous fan of the writing of H.P. Lovecraft, his fiction can be visionary and surreal at times. Certainly it is plagued with a few too many "things that should not be" but his only true novel, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath was suitably bizarre and quite entrancing for me as a youth. Fortunately, this is the cover I was able to snag.
And here is the God-awful, overly gothic reprint cover. This almost makes me angry, it is so contrary to the tone of the book.
As a little bonus, I don't even think this collection is in print any more (even though the contents are readily available in other editions) but I remember buying this when I was young without even reading the back cover simply because I thought it was one of the coolest images I had ever seen.
William Hope Hodgson is a writer whose prose presents some serious complications. Saddled with an almost unbearable tendency to crush the language under verbosity and near-ridiculous attempts at formal speech, Hodgson's imagination nonetheless seethed with a particularly visceral sense of dread and mystery. His The House on the Borderland is a quite Lovecraftian tale from 1908 concerning a decaying mansion in the Irish highlands that sits on the edge of another universe. What begins with an elderly man investigating the house and the vast cyclopean caverns beneath becomes a mindbending journey across aeons of time and through other dimensions as well. The sanity and reliability of the narrator are nearly always in question and even though the prose is laborious at times, there are some truly unsettling passages within. I particularly like this cover by the ever-amazing Ian Miller.
And seriously, look at this cover to the reprint. Given that you, the visitor to my site who has not even read the book, already know about Hodgson's tale, how could anyone have ever thought this cover was a good idea?
And now we come to William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land. This particular book has been in and out of print for many years and took me quite some time to find as a young man back in the 1980s. Admittedly, the writing is at best clumsy and laughable and at worst absolutely wretched. A wonderful concept almost completely sabotaged by a lack of ability. But the concept! Even in the bumbling hands of a writer like Hodgson there are moments of terror and strangeness so intense that they resonate with me to this day. The Night Land is the tale of a future so far removed from our own time that years become meaningless. Billions of years hence, the earth has stopped rotating and the sun has nearly gone out. The land is shrouded in darkness and cold, no stars shine in the sky, and the moon has long since abandoned us. The remnants of humanity now live, terrified, in an almost unimaginably vast metal pyramid called the Last Redoubt. Surrounded by a guttering ring of light called the Earth Current, the population huddles within waiting for the final darkness and the end. The Last Redoubt is surrounded by watching monsters so huge, so vast that their movements are only detectable across the centuries. They hunch in the blackness and wait for the Earth Current to die to they may finally destroy the Redoubt and all life within. The book concerns an unnamed man who detects a signal from another previously unknown Redoubt and must journey alone across the Night Land to find it and rescue its remaining inhabitants. His journey as well as the wonders and terrors he experiences in the Night Land are the products of an imagination which has not been seen since. Hodgson fills the Night Land with places like the House of Silence, the Plain of Blue Fire, the Giants' Kilns, the Place Where the Silent Ones Kill, the Country of the Great Laughter (a black and evil place which constantly echoes with the frightening laughter of vast and unseen beings), Where the Silent Ones Walk, and the Headlands From Which Strange Things Peer. Additionally, the land is populated with huge and horrific beings like the Thing That Nods and the Four Watchers as well as monstrous Abhumans and Silent Ones. Dread abounds on nearly every page.
When I was finally able to find a copy, it had been split into two volumes with the following covers, which I loved and thought fit the work very well.
Thankfully, the book remains in print and widely available, although the cover is less than thrilling. While not awful, it simply does not convey the sense of the grotesque and unknown the way the old paperback covers did. Take a look.
There is an interesting fan site devoted to The Night Land here and I recommend checking it out. Even though it is an unofficial fan site, there is quite a bit of interesting and well written information there as well as some effective artwork. The site is mercifully free of the kind of hackneyed fan fiction and slavering adoration that mar so many other fan sites. Additionally, if you plan on reading the book at all, this might be a good place to begin your inquiry. As I mentioned, it is not an easy read and many turn aside before completing the journey.
To cap this all off, and celebrate these almost forgotten books of my youth, here is a playlist of hopelessly pretentious prog rock, the music of my youth. My mother and father had a vast collection of vinyl, and the first music I remember hearing was from the prog rock supergroup Yes. I listened to this stuff all through high school and in my head these songs will always be the soundtrack for my trips to Booksellers and my journeys through these stories. Here is a carefully selected and sequence list of my personal favorites. This playlist actually does contain 2 songs from after 1995, but I felt that these pieces so closely fit the feel of the other stuff that they were a seamless match. And if you're Charley D., you can listen to it and imagine "nightmare armies clashing on spectral shores" and laugh at me. As before, this playlist can be downloaded individually or you can download the whole thing and fit it on a single CD since it is 76 minutes and 25 seconds long. Enjoy.
01. Traccia III -- Banco
02. In the Land of Grey and Pink -- Caravan
03. Eleventh Earl of Mar -- Genesis
04. Hocus Pocus -- Focus
05. Die Vierte Kuss -- Ash Ra Tempel
06. Man of Spells -- Tony Banks
07. Paper Sun -- Traffic
08. Siberian Khatru -- Yes
09. Sailship -- Wizardzz
10. Ritorno Al Nulla -- Le Orme
11. Radian -- Air
12. Unquiet Slumbers for the Sleepers... -- Genesis
13. ...In That Quiet Earth -- Genesis
14. In the Court of the Crimson King (including the Return of the Firewitch and the Dance of the Puppets) -- King Crimson
See, isn't is fun getting to know me? Now, back to the homework I go.
Matt K.
Today is another special today because today is Astro Boy's birthday!
As the tale goes, Astro Boy was created on April 7, 2003, by the Japanese scientist Dr. Tenma. His young son Tobio had been killed in a hovercar accident, and to cope with his grief he creates a robot to act as his own child. Of course, Dr. Tenma is slightly unhinged by the loss of his son and the somewhat dubious ethical nature of creating a new one, so after realizing that Astro Boy will never grow up or age, he flies into a rage and rejects him. Poor Astro Boy is sold to a robot circus. There he is found by Professor Ochanomizu, called Professor Packadermus J. Elefun in some versions, who takes pity on him and saves him from the cruel robot circus. Eventually, Astro finds a new family complete with a robot sister named Uran. Here she is...
And of course he has all sorts of adventures meeting aliens and battling other robots. Here are some of my favorite Astro Boy covers, showing what some the stories are like as well as lots and lots of the crazy awesome robots. And for the Panel guys, I included a cover showing the machine guns in his butt. It is the fifth one down, check it out!
Cool, huh? Astro Boy was actually created by the "God of Manga," Osamu Tezuka in 1951. Here is a picture of Tezuka...
Astro Boy was initially called Tetsuwan Atom, roughly translated as Mighty Atom or Iron-Arm Atom. A long and somewhat complicated publication and animation history followed, with Astro's adventures being chronicled all over the globe, in various forms, and under different titles. Astro's popularity continued to grow, and for a time he was as popular as the Disney characters in parts of Asia. And even today, he's STILL keeping it real. See?
Fistful of cash. You know how we do it.
Several years ago, Dark Horse Comics began a comprehensive reprinting of the complete Astro Boy manga, all newly translated by Frederik L. Schodt. In 23 affordable pocket-sized black and white volumes, the series collected every single Astro Boy story Tezuka had ever printed. That's nearly 5000 pages of comics! What made this reprint so special was that for the first time in English, readers could experience the Astro Boy stories in Tezuka's preferred order, roughly following the chronology of Astro's life. Therefore, the very first published Astro Boy story which originally appeared in 1951 does not appear until volume 15 of this collection to give the entire narrative a better flow. Additionally, many of the stories in these volumes have never before been available in English, making this a real treat for fans of Astro Boy.
So you might be asking yourself what Rudy asked me this morning as I was typing this. Why do I like Astro Boy so much? I mean, I never really watched Astro Boy cartoons as a kid and I never had a chance to read any of the manga or the American versions of the comics. In fact, I really didn't know a whole lot about Astro Boy until I was in my early thirties. So why do I like it so much? The simple explanations are great art, fantastic all-ages adventure stories, and of course lots and lots and lots of robots! The more complex explanation is that Tezuka used Astro Boy as well as his other manga like "Buddha" and "Phoenix" to address some very real and fundamental issues of human nature. Rather than simply being a comic about robots smashing each other, Astro Boy's truer themes are those of what it means to be truly human and how we must all strive to live in peace with one another and work toward a better world. Astro Boy never fights for the sake of fighting, but struggles only to bridge misunderstandings and find peaceful solutions to complicated problems. Navigating these tricky themes and finding ways to include them in a comic which, at the time, was heavily geared toward young male readers who wanted a steady diet of adventure and action is no mean feat, but Tezuka succeeded brilliantly. I realize that much of my love for the adventures of Astro Boy are somewhat childish and naive, and of course I am aware of the escapism inherent in reading such tales. There is something about Astro Boy which has always made me really happy, made me feel better, and given me the kind of silly hope that can hold a candle against a darker world. I know this may read as foolish and ridiculous, but it's true.
So, in honor of today being Astro's birthday, I am giving you a whole downloadable playlist of MP3s celebrating him! Each and every one of these songs makes me think of little Astro. Some will be obvious from the title alone, some may be a little less obvious unless you are familiar with the comics. A few of the instrumental pieces have neither a title nor lyrics that will immediately call to mind Astro Boy, but in those cases the music itself simply makes me thing of the comics. I will warn you ahead of time that an awful lot of these MP3s are electronic music, some with pretty dancy beats, and much of it is quite poppy. I like it all, and I hope that you will too, or at least you will find something you like in the playlist. The whole thing is 75 minutes and 11 seconds long (even with the bonus track), so it fits on one CD. So right click, save-as, listen, and think of Astro Boy...
01. Astro Boy Opening Theme
02. M83 -- Cyborg
03. Yu Miyake -- Wanda Wanda
04. Devo -- Post Post-Modern Man
05. Men At Work -- Helpless Automaton
06. Daft Punk vs. Edwin Starr vs. Breakwater -- Robot Wars (Release the Beast)
07. Uran's Theme
08. Stereolab -- Miss Modular
09. Mouse on Mars -- Schlecktron
10. Kid Koala -- Roboshuffle
11. Neil Young -- Computer Age
12. Kraftwerk -- Computer Love
13. Rellik -- Dreaming on Distant Shores
14. The Go! Team -- We Just Won't Be Defeated
15. Daft Punk -- Human After All
16. Brian Eno -- How Many Worlds
17. The Buggles -- Astro Boy (And the Proles on Parade)
18. Astro Boy Closing Theme
BONUS TRACK! General Elektriks -- Techno Kid
See you all tomorrow.
Matt K.
I guess April will be almost as busy as March was for me, but only almost. Even though the practicum is concluded I might actually be spending more hours at the library since I am now working as a sub. Which is good because it pays pretty well and is the next step toward becoming a librarian. There are some openings in the system and I have several resumes and applications out, so hopefully I will land a full time position right around graduation.
Everything, and I mean everything, should calm down a great deal after May 13th. On that Saturday, I earn my master's degree
and I will have a table at Columbus' own S.P.A.C.E. show. So by then, all my schoolwork, the new issue of "Spudd 64," and all the reprints of previous issues will be done. I am looking forward to Sunday, May 14th quite a bit.
There is some new art for you to look at over on the "Spudd 64, issue #4"page. Scroll down to "Hassan's Tale" and take a look at page 5. Pages 6, 7, and 8 will follow in a day or two. I am also working on a short piece for the new Panel anthology. This anthology is entitled "Luck" and my piece is called "One in a Gazillion." You can see the first page of that here (you might have to scroll down a bit) but I will be adding those pages to my site here as well when the story is complete.
I haven't had a chance to post as much music as I would have liked lately, but I don't plan on giving it up anytime soon. I finally tracked down Daniel Lanois' new album "Belladonna." I've heard an awful lot about this album and was very curious. Like many people, I first heard of Daniel Lanois way back when he worked with Brian Eno on some dreadful U2 albums. In 1989, he debuted his "Acadie" album and I think every single person I knew in college bought it. And played it. Incessantly. I heard all the comparisons to Brian Eno but was totally mystified by them when I listened to "Acadie" because it sounded like a lot of that singer-songwriter stuff that I have always personally loathed. I guess I kind of wrote Lanois off because of that even though his name has surfaced here and there through the years and slightly re-kindled the curiosity. "Belladonna" is a mostly-ambient, fully instrumental album that more closely resembles what I was hoping to hear on "Acadie" way back in the day, so I decided to give it a try. While there is a lot on this album that Brian Eno or Harold Budd have already done, and in some cases done more intriguingly, there are still some interesting tracks. Portions of it call to mind Neil Young's excellent soundtrack for the film "Dead Man." So today I give you not one but three tracks from the CD. Enjoy.
Daniel Lanois -- Two Worlds
Daniel Lanois -- Oaxaca
Daniel Lanois -- Todos Santos
I'll have some more art to share tomorrow and another birthday wish as well as more tunes. Until then...
Matt K.
First, and most importantly, I would like to wish a very happy birthday to my dear and distant brother Josh. He is currently laboring away at some hospital connected with Harvard doing microbiology and all sorts of other incredibly complicated medical science that is really just too complicated for me to even understand. I don't get to see him much at all, and I think it has actually been well over 2 years since I saw him last, but nonetheless he is and always will be my brother and I love him dearly. So happy birthday, Josh! Make a retarded face and smoke a blizzy for me.
I had some other news but none of it is really as important as my brother's birthday so I'll post some of that tomorrow. See ya!
Matt K.