G-Moz

Yesterday was quite the day:

I woke up at about 6AM to the following three sensations–intense rippling pains centered in the area between my bicep and tricep, the bi-point-five-cep, ; the incredible urge that there was a revolution in my stomach and one side was seeking refuge in my anus, while the other sought retreat out of my mouth. With the pleasantness of feeling intense nausea, imminent ass-blasting takeoff, and horrible pain (all on only a few hours of sleep) in the uncomfortable hours of the morning, I rushed to the bathroom and vivisected myself. It was horrifying. It must have sounded like a wounded wolf eating the dead flesh off of its wound in a delirious state–simply horrifying. After that bathroom brawl, I quickly returned to bed and woke up my girlfriend with the urgent realization that I was having a heart-attack, and that my stomach was in shambles. Immediately, my instincts to call my parents kicked in and before I knew it, my mother and my pops were shouting into my ear, demanding doctor visits and hospital visits and head examinations–that one was for eating the sandwich from 7-11 the night prior, Satan’s Sandwich as it will now be called. Anyways, this is all important because that morning, I had planned on attending the Grant Morrison signing at Midtown Comics in the city. This event was, for me, more important than my birthday. Who knows when another opportunity to meet one of my favorite writers, probably the most influential upon me, would arise? What if I died without ever getting to thank Grant for solidifying my love for DC and Batman and what if I never got to shake the hands that wrote The Invisibles and Seaguy and Joe The Barbarian? What kind of geek would I be? So, bearing the Summertime staleness that envelops most of the city, I trekked to go meet Grant fucking Morrison. Oh, he was there for his newly released book,Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human, which I picked up and cannot wait to read. Fanboy-inside-me-aside, this book seems to be a thoroughly insightful history of comics, along with a philosophical/sociological/autobiographical slant–perfection. Arriving at the store, my group of three (myself, a friend, and my girlfriend) quickly purchased the books and then proceeded to the long line formed around the back of the store–we got three of the last four guaranteed tickets. Damn, son. The wait was just over an hour and I don’t recall much of it as I was in a complete daze, attempting to keep composure and lucidity as my stomach bubbled and my arm troubled. Thankfully, as I ascended the stairs back into the store, as the line only allowed groups of ten to enter at a time, everything went white. It was awesome. Adrenaline replaced hurt and serenity replaced crankiness. It sounds strange but just knowing that I would get to meet somebody so influential was uplifting and almost overwhelming. It all went smoothly, I got my book and another signed and I had a quick exchange with the man. He was honestly the most like-able person I have ever met–he just oozed genuineness and sincerity. I’ve always been told to never “meet my idols” or whatever the fuck it is people say with a facetious wisdom, but I’m amending that aphorism–“Meet Grant Morrison, he is a really cool guy.” Also, here are the pictures that my gf and I took with him. I wanted to put them up just because of how hilariously horrible and refrigerator-shaped I look (I am not that fucking big and that shirt is quite loose on me in real life). I truly look like trash but I really love the picture. My gf’s is awesome because she almost got a smile out of him and because of the fact that she began to get panicked/excited before she spoke to him. That shit is cute!

Music, part 1

Neon songbirds and ghettoblasters

Way back in the Spring of 2007*, I was a budding freshman at a University that functioned about as well as the train that ran parallel to the campus–that is to say, on any given day, at any given whim, a two hour delay and multiple track fires, coupled with the oft-occurring suicide, would surprise you with a punch to the dick that was sure to ruin your day. Not a sack-tap or a nut-bump either–a fucking rocket-fueled George Foreman haymaker that was sure to force a  secession of your testicles from your sack-piece leaving behind what can only be referred to as a sad fruit roll-up. Anyways, I was at this University and I was miserable due to a plethora of reasons–women and aimlessness being at the top of the cringe-worthy list–but I had my awesome roommate, my books, and my music. At this point in my musical-taste timeline, I was jamming out to a shit-ton of depressing music from the Indie and Alt Rock and underground hip-hop scenes. Actually, I would listen to anything that had a certain melancholy quality about it or some down-tempo music that could be played in a somber atmosphere. Essentially, this was my Bright Eyes and Atmosphere discovery period, prior to the former’s departure from being an overemotional adolescent with a guitar and prior to the latter’s departure from clever, self-introspective lyrical poetry, and I fucking loved it. I began to listen to the stories that artists, real artists, told to the backing of sweet melodies. I wanted to empathize with all that I heard and I wanted a symbiotic exchange to occur with the songs I would listen to through my Apple gear–I would give my time and my ears and my mind and I would expect to learn something new about myself and my emotions and my life through these songs. Because that’s what good stories should do, make you feel something and possibly impart you with some formerly unknown knowledge. Anyways, since this is a four-part blog post, I’m going to save more of my thoughts on my musical evolution and how I came to truly love actual, real artists and how I came to despise all that vapid bullshit you hear on the radio all across this mainstreamed, “one size fits all”  land. Oh, so way back in the Spring of 2007 I was browsing the internet for one thing or another when all of a sudden I stumbled across this strange Myspace page. There was some strange picture of a dude dressed like a mushroom-trippin’ German Hansel-boy. Like, suspenders and that strange hat with the feather jutting from the groove. Before I had time to say, “Was?!” a song began to play off of the embedded player. I shit you not, my heart began to beat furiously and my mind fell into a lull. The short hairs located all throughout my body began to dance like one of those heavily medicated inflatable gas station novelties and my body had entered into some sort of bliss mode that was yet unknown to me. It was truly beautiful and fucking epic. There were only two or three songs on the site at the time but they literally infested my heart and soul on that day. Eventually, the duo, Casey James being the singer and ukulele-ist while DJ Staypuft played the gameboy (that’s right, a motherfucking gameboy programmed with all sorts of digitizedvideo-game inspired noises), released an EP. If I were a pious man, I would have wept at the beauty of the lord’s resurrection in the form of binary that coalesced into an mp3 album. The eponymous release featured six songs that became a paramount source of inspiration for my writings. Their sound is literally undefinable. Stereogum once featured them on a small side-bar about odd gems a few years back and described them as. ” Bright Eyes meets a circus.” That description has some merit as Casey’s voice is a bit gnarled and untrained and his emotion burst forth in somewhat shrill vocal notes–not completely dissimilar to Conor Oberst’s. However, there’s also this melancholic presence as Casey sings about a waitress who just dreams of escaping her shitty blue-collar job or a bunch of lovers getting high and attempting to keep each other safe whilst still maintaining a successful relationship. There’s this very real sense that Casey’s world is infested with issues that get fused with beautiful and crazy imaginary scenes of circus animals performing and neon lights blinking–issues that can be dealt with by the tipping a small necked of a 40 oz into the mouth. The lyrics are poetically haunting and yet indecipherable at the same time–I still can’t tell you all of the lyrics to Jane’s Castle in Spain due to the sheer amount of digital samples that form the melodies to all of the songs and Casey’s tendency to slur certain words together like Julian Casablancas on The Strokes first album (great album). I would break down each and every song and give you my take on them but I fear that may lead to a lengthy dissertation-sized write-out. There’s this scene from Paul Pope’s 100% that involves this avante-garde artist showing his magnum opus to this chick (or sister–I need to reread that one). They walk into his pad and there are hundreds of tea-kettles, of every variety, littered about and ready to perform their task of boiling water. The girl is completely baffled as to what the piece may be until he hits some switch, or they just naturally go off after being boiled prior, and each pot releases its own ‘”I’m ready” noise. As each kettle is completely unique and distinct, they all release a different pitched sound, or note, but they’re all going off in unison. On their own, each kettle would be a cacophonous annoyance but together, they form a cacophony of harmony–an organized chaos of sorts. That’s what this EP stands as–a cacophony of sound where each and every part compliments the others so well that it becomes something harmonious and raw. Please, check out their music and especially CJ’s personal website that has all of his music available for download: http://www.caseyjamesbasichis.com/

Also, in case the site is giving you trouble or if you’re just super excited to hear the magical awesomeness, here:  http://www.mediafire.com/?r85xlm3slm9x9l2 Even the album art is great.

p.s.–Casey James actually works as a composer for Adventure Time. This dude is truly awesome.

*I’m not exactly sure when I stumbled across their myspace website but I’m fairly certain I had ripped two songs of theirs off the player by the Summer of 2007

Edit: Clearly my blogging skills were lacking when I first posted it but there is now a direct clicky link to the entire EP. In essence, GREAT free music with minimal effort.

I lost my watch

Okay.  I started this blog in an attempt to sway my mind from the overhanging influences and pressures of nicotine withdrawal as well as an outlet for writing–as the best practice for writing seems to be writing consistently and consecutively. Regardless, I managed to quit smoking, picture that scene from the first Blade movie where Whistler forces Blade to go cold turkey from the wacky hemoglobin and you wouldn’t be too far off, and I quit attending to this blog. In an attempt to atone, I’m back…with even more fucking gusto! So, at the top of my mental list of written discussion pieces is a question: What time is it?

 

"This horse has poo-brain, man"

If you answered Adventure Time! in a Yeti-like war cry, then you deserve a bro-fist and my friendship. For the uninformed, Adventure Time was an animated short created by Pendleton Ward, a mathematically awesome crazy man with a beard, in 2008. Originally pitched to Nickelodeon as a series, the failed pilot made its rounds on the internet and amused both child and stoner alike. Thanks to the Gods of Awesomeness, Cartoon Network adopted the show last year and is currently propagating 11-minute episodes every Monday at 8 PM eastern time–it’s deep into its second season currently. To give a completely lacking and soulless description of the show; 13-year-old Finn and his magical dog Jake inhabit the Land of OoO and spend their time rescuing princesses from a strangely pathetic ice-King, the Ice King (crazy, I know), helping overgrown slugs find love, hanging out in their tree fort complex, battling angsty vampires, hanging out with Rainicorns (that’s a unicorn and rainbow amalgamation), dancing to auto-tuned songs, etc. As a good friend of mine put it, “it’s basically Dungeons & Dragons [on acid and] in cartoon form.” My take is that it’s every fantasy trope thrown into a blender with some of the best humor, of the subversive and the fart variety, seasoned tastily with music more fun, genuine, and catchy than anything you’d hear on the radio, and sprinkled with crystallized retro-ness and all your favorite childhood memories. This series is literally the best thing on television currently and it truly saddens me that some of my friends would prefer to waste their mental apparatuses on watching morally reprehensible reality shows based in New Jer- *KRAKOW* ::gets struck by lightning::  Phew–had some potions on my persons! Anyways, I feel bad for my creatively bankrupt friends but if a show where a kid wearing an absurdly awesome bear-like hat attempts to battle a massive soul-sucking vampire lord, who is transforming into something out of Lovecraft lore, by using his angsty vampire daughter’s beat-boxed song about her lamentations over her father eating her French fries and then not apologizing, only to stab the giant monster during a moment of amends and weakness in his massive Shuma-Gorath-like eye while screaming Xena’s famous cunnilingus-miming war cry with his trusty sword that he keeps in his ever-expansive book-bag, then clearly nothing on Earth is more interesting than a bunch of cancer-irradiated idiots. By the way, that entire scene occurs within a span of two minutes and ends with Jake, Finns amorphous magical dog and best-bro, appearing in Finn’s tiny shirt pocket only to roll onto his stomach and fart upwards. Essentially, the show combines everything that is fun and awesome about cartoons and the adventure/fantasy genres with an incredibly clever lexicon(the catchphrases, including “mathematical” and “rhombus,” are hilarious); gorgeous and fluid animation in HD (animation Godfather, Hayao Miyazaki, was cited as an inspiration for the beauty of the locales and the animation); crazy fun quests in a world that seems random from the outset but is actually well thought out and abides by its own rules, which the viewer catches onto as they watch; an endearing underlying story about two best bros that never even attempts to get moral or preachy; some of the best music to have ever come out of a tv show; the most sublime voice-acting out there that honestly compares favorably with Futurama, especially since John Dimaggio (Bender) supplies Jake with his voice; and most satisfying, a hearkening back to the tv I used to watch as a wide-eyed child, when cartoons were actually good and abundant. I’m not sure if I made complete sense but if there’s one thing that I want just one person to get out of this post, please watch Adventure Time on Cartoon Network on Monday nights–if you have a heart and a soul, and if you were once a child, then there’s no reason that Adventure Time shouldn’t gain some ownership of your heart by hilariously plunging through it with a magical sword made of candy.

LINKS : A wonderfully beatbox-ed version of a happy meal: http://www.mediafire.com/?fayfse541hy66ao (Why won’t WordPress allow my link to appear as an actual link? Not cool, man.)

The acoustic and highly talented ukulele version of the AT song, in full: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX780yzTKzQ&feature=related

Homies for life.

Jesus With a Laser Gun

(If only the Bible was half as cool as this)

A little while back, I was feeling a bit bummed about life for a bevy of stereotypical reasons (wistfulness; aimlessness; restlessness; bored-ness; etc). Being a massive comic book geek and an avid art lover, of the fun and nuanced variety, a friend of mine lent me a massive hunk of graphic novel with the simple utterance, ”read this.” This bible of a book had a glossy finish and a simple, yet beautifully cartoon-y cover focusing on a vending machine with a broken-hearted robot fleshed out in yellow. Upon arriving at my house that night, I eagerly opened up the Scud: The Disposable Assassin bible, actually titled Scud: The Whole Shebang, only to be greeted with a pre-work insert written by Rob Schrab’s, the artist and creator, lover/soul-mate Kate Freund. In a single page, this clearly wonderful woman laid out the entire back-story surrounding the creation of Scud and put to print the most heartfelt and inspiring insert I’ve ever read. To summarize, Schrab created this character, Scud, after a failed relationship shook his foundation a bit. Setting out to realize Scud’s story, Schrab worked on each and every page of words and pictures for about an average of twelve hours per finished page. Out of some sort of artistic, epiphanic catharsis came a 24-issue story that allowed Schrab to spill his guts and mold them into something fucking magnificent. Honestly, the grey-scale art that Schrab has created is fucking magnificent. The entire story looks like a cartoon-in-motion. Everything is fluid and hectic and the detail is impeccable. The art is, in one word, sexy. In terms of the story, it’s a hectic and tumultuous ride through a world where evil corporations run by a dark-arts-loving Ben Franklin share the page with the mafia as well as a major assassin-for-hire business. Serving as your guide in this world is the Heart Breaker Series 1373 model assassin known only as Scud. Scud is the last in a line of cancelled assassins who gets hired (re: bought at a vending machine) to kill a giant squid-electrical plug monstrosity named Jeff. Upon finding Jeff, Scud begins to use his skills in an attempt to dismantle the strange, Venom-like creature until he happens to catch his own reflection in a bathroom mirror. Upon observing something creeping from his backside, he notices a warning note that vows that he, Scud, will self-destruct upon killing his intended target. Scud immediately decides that killing an unknown creature and self-destructing are out of the question and begins his quest to fund Jeff’s hospital bill in order to maintain Jeff’s health, which also means Scud’s health. Past the introductory issue, Scud begins to travel the universe causing trouble and amending what little wrongs he can in the process with his robot assassin skills. He befriends the mafia; gets attacked by zombified dinosaurs; gets entered in the galactic Strongman competition; and eventually, finds a lover in the form of human assassin sent to kill him–Sussudio. Also, he gets a sidekick who happens to be an adolescent compartmentalized storage unit made of zippers and fabric and buttons and Mickey Mouse hands. That makes no sense at all but upon reading the comic, Drywall becomes a fan-favourite with the saddest story in town. It was super hard to suppress my single man-tear as I read Drywall’s origin story and that single tangential story about a lovable sidekick hit me harder than Scud’s sappy moments–not that those weren’t great, it’s just something about that little bugger that makes me want to compartmentalize my heart. Anyways, this comic’s story is made even more interesting by the fact that Schrab took a break with the comic that lasted a decade, from 1998-2008, but he triumphantly returned to Scud’s side in order to finish the comic in epic fashion. The last four issues are quite bizarre but they really do expose more of the world that Scud inhabits than any others and reveal the big picture, so to speak. Not only that, but the love story implodes and then explodes in that last arc and the ending is fucking grande. Scud is a tale about every guy who has ever had his heart broken and wanted to turn into a stoic, steel assassin with a death-wish. Scud is also a tale about realizing that just because you were manufactured a certain way, doesn’t mean you can’t carve your own path out in life and do nasty things with a girl with a robot fetish. Please, go out and buy Scud: The Whole Shebang. Fuck it, you don’t even have to move…. http://www.amazon.com/Scud-Whole-Shebang-Rob-Schrab/dp/1582406855/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1296759464&sr=8-1

P.S.-I Plan on updating more frequently and in some kind of coherent manner. Stay tuned!

P.P.S.-16 days sans cigarettes. Fuck yeah.

Sex, Drugs, and Drum ‘n’ Bass

So, my original plan to use this blog as some sort of cathartic release in order to ease the shittyness of withdrawal (from cigarettes, not crack!) proved quite hard. I really wanted to commit to updating and upgrading the blog but then I realized that I was far too spaced out or agitated or absent-minded to even log onto the blog. Instead, I found solace in a little show called SKINS. Not that crap MTV show that features awkward acting and even more awkward censorship, but the original and brilliant British show. I literally watched all four series, or seasons, the past week–only perk of withdrawing seems to be a lack of cabin fever. I sequestered myself from society and blazed through this quirky; hyperbolically realistic; ingenious show. The basic premise: a bunch of high-schoolers, sophomores for season one and then seniors in two, deal with life in Bristol, England. The reason that this show stands out from the overpopulated and trite shmorghasbhord  schmoregasbored smorgasbord (you try spelling that word off the cuff) of teen dramedies that permeate television globally is because of the actors and writers. The actors and even the writers are authentically aged, with the mean age of the writing team being twenty-one according to the wikipedia gods, and it truly shows in the series. It’s fucking snappy and witty and heartbreaking and triumphant and ephemeral and every emotion on the teenage scale. Aside from all of that, the characters that the show follows are relevant and identifiable, regardless of them being an ocean away. You’ve got your alpha male, head-of-the-posse, suave douchebag type, Tony. You’ve got his best friend, Sid, a loyal and good-natured fuck-up who’s trying to get laid whilst also juggling being in love with Tony’s girlfriend, Michelle. There’s a drug addict who has to deal with a miserable past filled with abandonment and death; a well-off, academic musician whose struggles rest on her relationship with her father; an anorexic girl whose mind hinges on sanity at times; that dude from Slumdog Millionaire and his gay best friend. In between dealing with personal and real world issues, the gang gets fucked up on all types of drugs, mostly MDMA and spliffs, and has lots of sex with each other. Each episode focuses on a single character and generally fleshes the eponymous character out considerably but there’s never a lack of group interaction in any given episode. I can honestly write my dissertation on SKINS, and I’d probably blow your mind with the amount of in-depth thought I’ve given to a foreign television show, but I’m going to keep this short and sexy: SKINS is about sex, drugs, subdural hematomas, death, but most importantly, those myopic and ephemeral years known as adolescence. Please, if you happen to read this blog and trust me as a human being with great tasteicals, stream or download or watch  the British SKINS.

Here’s some real dance-y shit that happens to be the theme from SKINS:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/mm7af6kv6wmg2r3/Fat%20Segal.mp3   (Copy and Paste like you in grade-school!)

Next Time: SCUD (Seriously)