Waydown #16.12.09

Well, not all of a year but most of it.  But at least it's here.


Writing Process: “Write drunk, edit sober” was mis-attributed to Hemingway but it’s still advice I’ve taken.  (And I think it was Arnett who posted that on Facebook, and if that was the case and he’s reading this, I very much appreciate it, my friend.) 

I like writing drafts, and I even like editing (where the real writing work is), but I don't often care to edit my own stuff.  My work-around: I write my draft one day, as much as I can get out, even if it's not a lot (though it's usually more than I thought it would be) and even if it's not great (though sometimes it's better than I remembered it being), then I sleep on it and edit the next day.  When I edit, it's like I'm looking at it fresh, I've had the time between writings to let it roll around in my head (though I usually don't think much about it once I get it out), and I can be more critical about it, even making drastic cuts that I hadn't thought I would take from the writing.  And with giving it that much effort, I can be more confident in knowing that I got out what I wanted to get out.  That way I also don't sweat it if I was in some less-than-ideal state when I wrote it (tired, drunk, hung over, distracted, frustrated, etc.), as long as I work it out in the edit.  This has gone really well for me lately.  I've probably been writing like this for years but didn't realize that I was actually consciously doing it until recently.  Usually I'd wait until the next day just because I ran out of time to edit.  I might have even thought I was lazy for letting it go for so long once I started.  Of course this is for when I can afford the time to do it like this, but generally my writing isn't so urgent that when I'm writing something that matters so much that I have to get it written and sent in the same sitting.

REVIEWS

Unknown Pleasures by Peter Hook.  I’ve been an obsessive New Order fan since high school (a bit before they released Republic or so) but I didn’t get into Joy Division as much.  In the mid-’90s there was a Joy Division best-of released and I picked it up, just because there was a connection to New Order.  I didn’t even know about Ian Curtis and the legend of his suicide until I read the liner notes of that CD.  But I couldn’t get into the music then.  There were a few tracks that were okay -- “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” “Dead Souls” (more because Nine Inch Nails covered it) -- but I took a pass on it.  I was okay with that for a while but of course there was a furor about Joy Division in circles around me and what I read, possibly even a bigger deal than New Order, which was crazy to me, so I was drawn back to them.  Then one weekday night I was rummaging through a used-CD store and came up upon the Heart and Soul box set.  At $30 I figured I could take a chance on it, and since it was everything Joy Division had ever done, I could definitively decide that I didn’t want to go anywhere with them and their music and move on.  Yet I put the discs on and was instantly drawn in.  Pretty quickly, I got it.  I even got how they could be separated from New Order (even if not revered more than my favored band, but in their way they were a really different thing).  It might have happened so swiftly because I’d already had a primer, but regardless I was in, and have been since.

You already know I get obsessive about rock biographies and anything having to do with New Order is an easy sell for me.  Books are always my favorite thing to ask for for Christmas, especially since I can let it go if I don’t get one I wanted (since I have so much else to read already).  Peter Hook put out his Joy Division book and I figured it would be worth a look, if to provide a context New Order if nothing else.  I thought I could pass on it for a while but somehow I knew I’d get to it sooner rather than later.  I was saving it for a lengthy flight to India but when that trip didn’t happen I shuttled the book to the back in favor of whatever else (which, unfortunately, turned out to be the ultrametabolism one).  Then our honeymoon trip to Europe came up and I took that to be the ideal time to finally get to the book.  I had other things in mind to do on the long trip over there but it’s always a good idea to have a book ready just in case.  I concerned myself with other things on the ride over, and we were busy enough when we were in London and Paris, but on the way back I decided I might as well get to it.  If I wasn’t going to read it there was no point in having taken it along, and since everything that went into our luggage had to count, I didn’t want to waste it.  Besides, I could just read a bit of it and if it didn’t grab me then I could put it off and no love lost.  As it turns out, it grabbed me immediately (even from when I did a quick survey and went over the acknowledgements in the back (which includes a mention of New Order's demise  -- just enough to set the tone of what I was about to read)) and it was hard to get out.  Between the rest of that ride (which, for when I began, was only from London to Scotland), then the ride back to London, and the flight back to the States, I read the main body (the two last chapters, mostly ephemera, I couldn’t get to right away, so couldn’t officially finish it for a while yet).  Three sittings might not seem like much but that’s lightning fast for me.  (Maybe the last time I read that much that quickly was Misery in high school and Count Zero in college.)  Absolutely the best book I’ve read since Kavalier & Clay (even if it’s an utterly different genre) and the best biography I’ve read.  Absolutely dazzling, in its own often morose way.

It’s Hook, bass player and founding member of both New Order and Joy Division, telling the Joy Division story as best he can.  Of course it’s limited to how much he can remember but he recounts a whole lot of it and a great many details.  It’s also his side of the whole thing, which could be suspicious since he has only contempt for his former band-mates now, but if you’re going to get only that part, at least it’s as believable as anything and it’s a satisfying, easy read.  He just tries to remember as much as he can and put it all in story form and in order, all very conversationally, just like he was sitting at a table with you and talking out the whole thing.  Either he’s a very clear writer or he had a capable editor who whipped it all into a good shape, but he got a fantastic manuscript out of it.  He doesn’t shy from naming names and taking grudges out on those who crossed him in the past, but surely those bad bands have long since broken to nothing and that singer from Simply Red probably doesn’t care.  He has a lot of positive things to say too, and all of it reads as honest as it can be.  The only revenge (heh) he could be using this for would be against the current New Order, but he’s as complimentary to them, particularly “Barney,” as he would be if they were still on good terms, and since that lawsuit had already been settled, this could be taken as him just putting his story out because he had nothing to lose rather than picking a bone with those who pissed him off.  It’s not even so much his own life story.  It could have been, and he gets into a little bit of his own pre-band life, but really, as he tells it, his life was pretty much his band(s), so there’s not much to go into besides that and his personal details don't contribute much.  That he only gives passing mention to one love, and assuming the groupies (such as they were, surely) weren’t worth a note (if there were so many to mention), it could be that he’s downplaying that part of his life (especially since that love is not his ex-wife) or he knows that, like the rest of his life, it’s not much that anyone wants to read.  He’s under no illusions: He know that people are reading this to know about the band, not so much him.

He knows that most people are reading it for Ian Curtis.  He definitely hones in on that element, though no more than the rest of it.  He and Barney are center-stage for most of the first half, then Curtis enters the picture and it becomes about the three of them, which is fair since so much of that band was Curtis anyway.  Hook gives his perspective on his band-mate as honestly as anything else, painting him as a normal guy much more than the goth legend he’s been made into since his death.  He concedes the deification, and even notes how Curtis’ widow portrayed him in her book, but Hook knew him only as his mate, a good friend in his band, and knew more than anyone the goofy, charming side that any person has but no one can appreciate in the myth that Curtis has been made into in the time since.  Hook is aware of this as well, giving all involved a much deeper human element than they’ve been seen as having in anything so far.  He acknowledges all of that, even which portrayal was more accurate between the 24-Hour Party People and Control films (he picks the former).  He knows that a lot of readers will get it to get more information on Curtis, and he gives it.  It may not play into what they already know, but Hook had a view on him more separate, different, unique, personal, and closer than anyone had other than literally two or three others.  Unfortunately but sadly predictable, it offers no more light on Curtis’ suicide or his reason for it.  Even when you know it's coming, his passing as described and in its context is still shocking and utterly stirring, and Hook, writing from his heart, is elegant but direct and unflinching about his experience living through it.

Depending on how you come to it, this could be setting up the New Order book or it could be the high point in what he has to say about having a life in music.  In his life with Joy Division, it was hard but he probably had higher points and maybe he was happier.  The New Order book (which has been out for two months from when I'm posting this) will inevitably be harsher and pissier, and possibly less informative since he succumbed to the same thing that makes rock biographies oddly and irritatingly incomplete when they cover the time that the band were at their height: the wholesale loss of memory due to copious amounts of drugs.  The time when they become a successful band was an easier time but it’s also beyond the rich time that they mine for so much of the genius works that they create, and by that time they’re just living through it and seeing their best times only in hindsight, when it was about the music, they say, and they did it because they wanted to, not because they had to, and it’s that post-(relative) peak that isn’t as thrilling a read.  It happens to all of them.  But there can still be redemption, since obviously they lived through it well enough to write about it, and it can make for a story, even if it’s not as much about the rock n’ roll (the concept or the lifestyle).  It’s not often that artists get two significant stories to tell, and even less that they feel the need to make a book about those.  We should be thankful.  Even if I read this book in anticipation for the New Order book (which hopefully I'll get for Christmas), I concede that this could be the real high point.  Though it will be fun to see what kind of shit Hook feels he needs to start in that one.

Nemesis (Marvel/Icon).  Say what you will but I’m usually not impressed by flashy new artists.  There’s something to be said for the exuberance of seeing a young, bright talent breaking new ground but it’s not often that there’s something exciting and genuinely new brought to the form.  This is no different from times past, as looking back it’s just as rare to see anyone bringing anything new to comics since Kirby or at least Moebius, but it’s good to see a new artist doing work you look forward to.  I saw Steve McNiven’s work first on Civil War, as everyone else did, but he hasn’t turned in a large volume of work since then to truly plant his name in the industry.  Mostly he seems known to make a big splash on a new series, starting with a new #1, of course, then needing a fill-in artist or even of the book by #3.  If this is Marvel’s plan, as they've done it repeatedly, it sucks, though it’s not like they’ve ever done anything cheap to get eyes on and dollars to the first issue of a new series, to the possible short-sighted exclusion of the rest.  There’s no point in even considering that McNiven could hold up a new series, and even in collected form you get him for such a limited amount of time that it’s jarring and disappointing when the next artist comes in.  But if he could do an entire series, start to finish, no matter how long, that could be an event to behold.  He finally got that, collaborating with Mark Millar (as if Millar would ever leave any decent artist from the offer of a new creator-owned property).  They still didn’t get far away from Marvel, but at least Marvel have been capable with building their own Image line with their Icon imprint.  McNiven might be a lot of flash and just another hyper-detailed young artist but there’s something about his work that always had me paging through the new issue of Civil War (whenever they eventually came out).  Call it a guilty pleasure, but there’s not many other artists from the last 10 years that I would say I have an interest in going out of the way for.  An entire book drawn by McNiven was an easy sell (especially when I found it in a half-off bin).  Millar is usually a decent writer, even if he’ll let a twist go way too far or when he writes to have the best chance of getting the property made into a movie.  If it’s still a good comic, and he’s written a fair share of them, then all is forgiven.

Unfortunately, Nemesis, story-wise, falls on the under side of the average, and even the McNiven art, which also isn't his best, isn’t enough to bring it back up.  It’s not a bad concept, and it keeps a reader guessing through a break-neck pace, but when it scrabbles to explain itself with a twist that makes no sense and is completely unconnected to what has come before -- breaking the contract between writer and reader by making a plot surprise that could not be guessed -- the rest of it feels like time wasted on a story that doesn’t pay off.  To pile it on, McNiven’s art isn’t an attraction either, as a style that has looked smooth and sexy before looks rough and slap-dashed, probably with pencils that went straight to production, without the Marvel-approved inks that could solidify it to its inherent glory, and with a popping superhero color palette that never works over direct pencils.  The layouts are solid, though, which makes it even more frustrating that they couldn’t polish the art to bring it up to what we would expect from McNiven.  And the main character has a great character design, even if there are no other superheroes in the story, which seems a waste in what could be a superhero story, and a waste of seeing what McNiven could do with other characters, even if they're not established heroes.  It’s a story idea that could fly but Millar is more interested in pulling a twist -- any twist -- at the end than producing a satisfying read that carries to the end.  It’s a grand opportunity wasted but maybe they’ll come up with something better in the movie (assuming McNiven doesn't have the time to do a sequel before the first issue of another series).

Umbrella Academy: Dallas (Dark Horse).  It was easy for me to get on the second book in this series after being so surprised -- heck, shocked, but pleasantly -- by the first one.  There was no guarantee that Way & Ba could turn out as great a book as they had done but it was a better than average chance, and it would be interesting to see what they could come up with and where they would take the characters, at the very least.  Unfortunately, and unfortunately to throw a music analogy out there, after Way’s smash debut album, this one is the sophomore slump (and I have no idea how that compares to his band’s artistic arc).  He might have spent his entire life writing the first one then was out at sea to come up with where the rest of it would go, never thinking he’d have the chance so not bothering to think too hard about the sequels.  It’s a mess of barely-connected ideas, which don’t always need to be clever but could at least be fun and they mostly end up falling flat.  Smash-cuts aren’t so effective in comics and there’s no sense of juxtaposition to all the parts he switches between.  Even the title barely connects to anything, since it’s only a minor part of one of the various threads that winds listlessly through it.  The art doesn’t do much either, as it’s still as solid before but there are fewer electrifying places that Ba is allowed to take it.  It’s a disappointing follow-up but it’s a testament to the strength of the characters in the book that it’s excruciating to see their creator not doing anything worthy of them.  There’s hope, though, as they state in the afterword that they have more stories planned, so this hiccup could be forgiven with a sturdy next chapter, or that this nosedive will make more sense in the context of the rest of the overall series.  There have been plenty of bands that have turned in a stellar third album after a bad second one, maybe even one better than the first.  If the book (whether the first one in the series or the entire thing) can pull off the miracle of being not only good but great, maybe they could do the same with the next parts (still to be put on the schedule, sadly).

Daredevil: Father (Marvel).  One of the hardest tasks as an editor must be editing work done by your boss. (It seems like it would be a conflict of interests but Marvel has done it for decades.)  Even worse when that boss is also basically the head of the company.  Even worse when the boss isn't suited in one of the tasks essential to the project.  Even worse when the project is bad from the first page.  But it shows bravery to do it (the editing, that is), and the project probably sold well.  Joe Quesada heads out on his big, personal story -- a Daredevil one.  The big squabble in the '90s in comics was artists writing their own stories.  Never again being a Byrne, Starlin, or Miller, artists wanted full control of the story, they wanted to write what they drew, and they could come up with an idea for a story so, hey, that must mean they're a writer, right?  But there were so many bad ones, greatly overwhelming the very few good ones (which don't even come to my memory at the moment).  My conclusion was that if they could write -- independent of their abilities as an artist (or personality) -- then they could be a writer.  But the ones from that new breed were few and far between.  And from that greater batch came Quesada.  Being the head cheese at Marvel doesn't show that he has evolved as a writer or that he's capable of doing the job.  But he's the boss so he can do what he likes.  It's a shame he had to abuse that privilege, and make an editor go through it, essentially taking a bullet for him.

So he feels the need to make his grand, personal statement with a Daredevil, which isn't a surprise given the work he did on the character with Kevin Smith, and presumably the story he wants to tell works with that character.  Oh, but what a story that is.  It's basically three stories, none of them actual whole stories, crammed together, and a through-line that jerks into ridiculous twists and a finale that would be lucky to be forgettable.  Then there's the new superhero team that Quesada somehow thought would fly (whether minorities or not).  Even being the head of all stories at Marvel, Quesada couldn't bring those characters back as more than footnotes.  There are so many stat pages that it's bewildering how much original art Quesada actually did in the first place.  Copying images is a far less effective technique when it seems more like the artist is trying to dodge drawing more pages.  Then there's reconciling DD's alter ego with where it was in the ongoing series' continuity, which places it at a very specific point in time and could be confusing if the reader isn't up on what's going on elsewhere (a period which did not go on for very long, relative to the characters).  Then Quesada's art isn't even great.  He's been a good and influential artist over the years (I even bought one of his art books) but some of his worst-ever art is in this story.  His body proportions reach Liefeld-levels of ridiculousness, most of them centered on DD, which makes it only more noticeable and ill-advised.  It's really the artist/writer off the leash, and only bringing bad from it.  The worst part (above a lot of very bad parts) is that it doesn't even seem very personal.  What was Quesada trying to say about the state of fatherhood?  Whatever is taken from it, if you can find anything, is contrived and injected as an alien form into the story.  It builds for a last page which would be memorable if it didn't seem to be from a different story.  Quesada has frequently been an exciting, innovative artist over the years.  It's rare that he does a new, whole project, and it's too bad that he had to throw away all that time and energy and goodwill with a bad project.  All he had to do was get a good writer to at least corral it, and he'd have had a pick of any of them at the time (though hopefully he'd avoid Smith just so he could get it published eventually).  But with poor intention, bad art, and even worse writing, this book is one of the worst Daredevil projects ever.  It's a shame that all the editing couldn't save it, but editors get all the blame when it's bad and none of the credit when it's good, so we'll try to avoid doing that this time.  Then again, the first job of an editor is to take a bad story in a better direction.  Hopefully they at least got to keep their job after having to do this.  At least they got to be in the good graces of their boss.

This is a book I took on numerous airline flights over the years and never had a chance to read but took with me in the hope that I eventually would.  I finally got to it.  I rather wish I hadn't.  Now this has to go into my collection.  Grrr, Marvel.

(And there was a time when I could consider Quasada my boss for a short period.  Unfortunately, after this that may not ever happen again.  But if I had a connection to him and had read this, I would have told him that we need to start again and make something better, worthy of his art and of the time for anyone reading it.)

New Avengers: Sentry (Marvel).  I had read the first New Avengers trade and actually liked it.  I wasn’t completely sold on Bendis doing straight superhero work (mostly because I just didn’t get his Ultimate Spider-Man opus) but he had a grasp on the Avengers (though since he had done so much leading up to that, he really should have).  Finch was an even harder sell, but once I got over my distaste for the early-Image style in general, I could see that the guy has a hand for composition and a straightforward style, even when his work isn't dirtied-up additionally by poor inkers, and he has an eye for interesting new interpretations of the characters.  Bendis set up a decent story for that one, less a tale and more of a brew of interacting, often-clashing personalities and a bunch of superheroes for Finch to draw.  It worked.  I was interested in more but by the time I got to it the series had gone on for a while and I’d be buried trying to get back into it.  Bendis also couldn’t stay with those high-caliber artists, such is the curse of these new-jack guys who learned their style before figuring out how to meet deadlines and turn around more than just a few issues at a time, but at least they could usually (but not always) make it through an arc (and credit to the editors for keeping any of it on track).  Even if I didn't love Nemesis, I was still taken by McNiven's style and his older work was new to me.  Even better, Marvel wouldn't let his work be so rough so he at least had an inker (or inkers, knowing the deadlines) to buff it out on the mainstream stuff.  And again it works.  Bendis doesn't waste any time waiting for a crossover to connect with and he doesn't flinch from putting the screws to as many characters as he can.  After the initial splash of the first story line, this is where the real mettle of the creators comes out.  He may have trotted out Sentry just so he could finish off that character, and he still didn't have an interest in putting Luke Cage in a costume, but he added a new edge to Spider-Woman (soon to be exploited explosively) and he has such a grasp on Cap that it's a shame he hadn't gotten to do his own 30-something issues with him (yet).  The writer and artist push out the monthly issues and it may not be the best work by them, and it may only be work-for-hire that they can keep a distance from, but it still comes out as a satisfying story featuring well-considered characters who are written as well here as anywhere else (outside of classic runs).

House of M: Masters of Evil (Marvel).  I don’t make a secret of loving superhero comics.  If I’m going to read comics, a lot of times I just want to read stuff with superheroes in it.  I’m all for high art and pushing the boundaries and exploring the medium for more than superhero trappings, but sometimes I just want to get down to the straight-forward superhero stuff that I’ve loved for maybe longer than what I’ve discovered from the format.  And sometimes I don’t care how it connects to the greater continuity, from something that happened years ago outside of anything that’s happened now or since.  And for something in the tradition of Suicide Squad, a story centered around a team of super-villains is an easy sell to me.  This was a “House of M” tie-in.  I didn’t read “House of M” when it came out, I still haven’t, I never read any of the other crossovers, and if this story didn’t include explanation enough to get what it was to understand this story's context, it didn’t affect me when I read it.  It’s a team of super-villains, about as straight-forward as you can get.  They’re not even working against a hero, at least not one that’s easily recognizable or necessary to lead the story, or one that’s morally more superior than the bad guys.  It’s all ably done, in plotting, script, and art, but it’s a bit of puff, an unnecessary piece hanging on to a larger, past event, and it’s too easy to forget once it’s done.  At the time it might have made a decent meal but it passes through quickly, especially now.  There’s no encouragement to read more of “House of M” but, out of all their great characters, heroic and villains, it would be great if Marvel did more stories starring bad guys (especially if they make them good).

Uncanny Avengers: The Red Shadow (Marvel).  It seemed like such a ridiculous idea at the time: some X-Men join the Avengers.  Wolverine was already silly enough as a member of the Avengers but we had gotten used to that and maybe it worked after a while.  Scarlet Witch was always more of an Avenger than of the mutant world, so that was never a big deal.  But Rogue, part of the backbone of the X-Men?  Then Havok, who wasn’t ever really much of an X-Man, and always seemed to exist more as a tangent to Cyclops’ and the X-Men’s story than his own?  Then Cap and Thor in there too -- it was such a weird mish-mash of characters but at least they had some big names, so they could have done worse.  And you’d have to buy in on anything that Cassaday was going to draw, not just for his art but the fact that Marvel thought enough about the idea that they would put such a big gun in the mix, especially when paired with a writer who seemed so fresh.  Remender had some acclaim for writing but for Marvel he only really had one big thing at the time, and that was an ancillary X-Men thing -- maybe selling automatically because it was X-Men- (and Wolverine-)related rather than being good -- but he had something that made them want to put him on a big flagship book with an attention-getting premise.  The characters and the art would be enough to sell it but if they really wanted it to have legs it needed a bit more than that.  The main idea was to bridge the Avengers and the X-Men, which had never been necessary in years past when there seemed to be some fortune in purposely keeping them separate (except for big-sell crossovers), but Marvel apparently saw capital in blending their worlds, maybe to the point of an uneasy fusion where every hero ended up being an Avenger at one point.  It seemed like a silly idea just outside of being outright bad, but Marvel has rarely shied from doing something just because it began with an ill-advised proposition.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it's the entire '90s.  The book also throws in a ludicrous plot for the mastermind villain, one that might not be so bad if it wasn’t thrown in with such a precarious set-up.  But for all the ridiculousness, it’s not a bad story and they've kept going with the Avengers/X-Men mash-up long enough that it seems silly now that it seemed so silly in the first place.  But it didn’t all work by the force of the story, which is not extraordinary.  This could as easily have been a lull point between more monumental story arcs.  At least Bendis would have made it consistent with what it connected to.  The biggest problem is the art.  Not because the art is bad -- it’s predictably fantastic, by the great talent of Cassaday.  But it’s running at such a different speed than the story and the characters, it just leaves the rest buried in dust.  It’s also the most uninspired Cassaday art probably ever, showing that he couldn’t pull anything more out of the plot so he just put down characters doing stuff then forgot about it.  It’s a crime to waste such a talent (especially since he didn’t engage in so much output again.  It would be a sin if this was the book that stopped him from doing ongoings forever more).  For the time Cassaday spent doing this, he could have been paired with a writer with more of a drive and an editor with more of a vision.  As it is, the whole thing plays out like they’re trying yet again to make a big deal out of Havok, which, to be fair, actually does happen, even if it meant forsaking better elements for too narrow a focus.  If the idea was to develop Havok as the character he deserves to be they could say they did that, until no one else decided to pick him up and do anything with him after that.  So now the book exists not as something to be noted fondly but rather as a historical record of when Marvel swirled their universe once again.  Until the next ridiculous thing, which has more or less even odds of working out.

Catwoman: When In Rome (DC).  I’ve always been a sucker for Loeb/Sale collaborations -- much more for the Sale art than the Loeb writing, though I admire Loeb for knowing the limits of his abilities and letting the art be the star.  It’s irksome that Loeb still rides those coattails to the acclaim these books always get but if he facilitated it all coming together, there are worse things than getting a story too weak to properly service the art -- at least the art gets out.  After all their splendid Batman work, this comes as the least of the pair's bunch.  It’s still great Sale art but with only a pinch of Batman to anchor it, it’s just a bunch of less-interesting characters.  Catwoman doesn't have to be rely on being sexy to be a character worth looking at it but it’s a spice that is frustrating when wasted.  Sale reaches a few notes of making her visually appealing in an obvious way but mostly focuses elsewhere and doesn’t give much other visual flare to the character.  She’s also consistently inconsistent, which is usually a mark of Sale’s art and part of the excitement of it, but with her base image being so all over the place, it marks a lack of visual stability and not every panel stands up as its own work of art without context.  The rest of the characters can’t make up for it, not limited to just a constantly-changing and ugly Riddler, and the story doesn’t give them much either.  But this isn’t to say that it’s a bad book.  It just can’t stand anywhere near the hallmarks that Sale and, yes, Loeb created with their Batman stuff.  They ventured out without relying on the crutch of that character but it also handicapped them and left them out too far.  It also doesn’t match up to their Marvel books, even with the nauseating sentimentality of those.  But there’s some nice graphic design to pull it together and the coloring looks great in the format.  If you found it for half-off like I did, you could do much worse (which would be the first Batman & Robin the Boy Wonder hardcover).

Top Albums Of 2015 (In This Order):
10. Currents- Tame Impala
9. Star Wars- Wilco 
8. Chasing Yesterday- Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds
7. Sound & Color- Alabama Shakes
6. Music Complete- New Order
5. No Cities to Love- Sleater-Kinney 
4. Viet Cong- Viet Cong
3. I Love You, Honeybear- Father John Misty*
2. To Pimp a Butterfly- Kendrick Lamar*
1. Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit- Courtney Barnett
(* To be fair, I got into these in '2016.)

My Top Replacements Songs Of All Time (In This Order):

20. "Answering Machine"
19. "Waitress in the Sky"
18. "I.O.U."
17. "Left of the Dial"
16. "Unsatisfied"
15. "Fuck School"
14. "Favorite Thing"
13. "Portland"
12. "Birthday Gal"
11. "Androgynous"
10. "Achin' To Be"
9. "Kids Don't Follow"
8. "They're Blind"
7. "The Ledge"
6. "Another Girl, Another Planet" (cover)
5. "Talent Show"
4. "Alex Chilton"
3. "I'll Be You"
2. "Bastards of Young"
1. "Can't Hardly Wait" (any version)

RAVES

My Chromebook.  I had a gig last year that wouldn’t let us have e-mail and Internet on the company computers but they had wi-fi.  My laptop had seen better days (bought used so it was already on its road toward the end) and it was too much for what I needed even when it was at its best (as well as being big enough to take up more desk than I wanted to give it).  I had bought a new heavy-duty laptop to replace my desktop computer just the year before so I knew what I was looking for when I went poking around for a light-weight thing.  I didn’t need anything for video games or watching shows or even holding music, just something to check e-mail and write on.  I found Chromebooks, which are super-stripped-down laptops that pretty much just exist to run a browser (and of course it’s Chrome, which I would have picked anyway).  Everything is on the cloud.  I don’t think it even has a hard-drive.  But it’s minimal, easy, quick, and everything I need it for.  I even found it’s not bad for watching shows and videos and such if I want to (we used it to watch Kimmy Schmidt in Europe when we were avoiding figuring out their TV).  It’s basically a cheap iPad but with a good keyboard attached (and, even better, it’s not Apple).  Once that job got done it became my main work-tool, as I could take it with me wherever I went and as long as I could get a wi-fi signal, it would work as well as any bigger laptop I could lug around.  I don’t write at home, so only rarely do I do that with the big laptop, so most of what I’ve written in the last year has been done on the Chromebook.  And it was about $150 (on Amazon, and maybe with Groupon or something and/or it might have been a refurbished model, but I know they’re not much more expensive than that).  So if it got broken or crapped out or got stolen, I’d be out less than a couple hundred bucks, and since everything is on the cloud, I wouldn’t lose any work, and entry into it is automatically password-protected so a thief wouldn’t get any of my stuff either.  It’s so cheap that it may not last long (though it's going strong after a year and a half of heavy use) but I’m so pleased with it and it’s so great and cheap that I wouldn’t even mind so much if I had to buy a new one every year.  Just for its ease and flexibility of use I would recommend it to anyone.  It’s as useful as anything by Apple and a fraction of the cost (and, best of all, not Apple).  I don't know why everyone doesn't already have one of these (or has an iWhatever instead).

That said…. Turning the wi-fi off.  I’ve had a few times over the past few months, particularly the flight to and from Europe, that I wasn’t sure about the state of the wi-fi and if I’d be able to use my computer during that time.  Well, of course I could use my computer.  I’m usually using it to write anyway, and I don’t need the wi-fi for that.  I figured I’d suffer through it but then came to realize that I didn't really need the wi-fi in the first place and might even be better off without the distraction.  Generally I just want to sit and write, and I don’t need the wi-fi to do that (especially since I can get that with my phone, and I can usually get a signal for that and it’s good enough).  Sometimes I just need to get some writing done.  I’ve been reading studies about multi-tasking and how it’s horrible for productivity, and I have to agree.  I can get so much more done when I can just sit down and focus on one task and just get that done without having all the other things on the periphery.  I just get more done.  (And if you think you're the one who can multi-task well, you're one of the ones who does it worst.)  So now I almost purposely go to places where I won’t need to use the wi-fi, like a favorite coffee-shop that I couldn't work at after they closed up the electrical outlets.  Problem solved -- I don’t need it.  So now my laptop has even more versatility, since I can take it literally anywhere with me and I don’t have to worry about connecting to the Internet.  I can just get my writing done.

Yoga.  My littlest brother was a muscle-head a few years ago, as dedicated to working out as anyone I've seen.  On a goof out of boredom when he was cruising some YouTube videos, he tried out some yoga and found he loved it and recommended it to me.  I thought he was crazy -- I’ve seen it done and I never thought it was my bag.  But my 24-Hour Fitness had some classes (not a lot but at least a few a week) and, on my own goof, I tried one out.  And loved it.  It’s a work-out both physically and mentally which is perfect for me, or anyone, really.  I push myself as hard as I can when I work out so pulling it way back physically is a challenge and also a great exercise.  The mental aspect is great for me as well, even though my anxiety is helped when I'm able to work out regularly; it helps rewire my brain so that maybe I can avoid them in the future (and boggles my mind at the thought of the kind of good it could have done me when I’ve gone through those times).  I’d recommend it to anyone, those who work out or don't (though if you don’t, you really ought to get some kind of exercise).  This is also currently as close as I get to meditation, which is still a level beyond me.  Maybe one day.

Cashews.  I’ve had a thing with cashews lately.  I like to eat nuts because they’re healthy and they’re always at the store and they don’t go bad and if you eat enough you’ll hate food for a while, so they’re great for a snack at work.  I try to avoid peanuts because they’re actually not great for you and I get burnt-out on almonds too easily, then I’ve realized that my favorite part of the deluxe mixed nuts packs is the cashews, so I just get bags of those now.  And they’re great.  They don’t even need salt so I can stay away from that too.  I love when I have nuts in my mouth -- WHAT?  (UPDATE: I kinda got over cashews.  But my taste for certain foods usually comes and goes anyway.  One day again I’ll probably love having nuts in my mouth -- WHAT?)

Shuffle mode.  If you know me, you know I agonize over decisions.  It’s where most, if not all, of my anxiety comes from.  Fear over making the wrong decision can paralyze me like crazy.  Even deciding what to listen to can freeze me.  A few months ago I started a thing where I put the iPod I listen to on the way to work on shuffle.  Still the albums I want to listen to, but I don’t have to pick which ones or in which order.  It stays within a playlist, so I can rotate stuff in and out, and I can put on mellow stuff for the morning then faster stuff for the drive home, but I don’t have to concern myself of what to listen to next.  A great side-effect is that it takes these songs out of the context of the album that I'm so familiar with and I’m listening to some of them in a fresh way, some like they’re new.  On the iPod I use while I’m working and the one I use while I’m cooking dinner, if I;m just using them as background music, I’ll put the albums on order, so I can still get into the groove of an album like I’m used to but I don’t have to pick the next one.  It’s usually not a big deal when I'm with someone so I’ll let them decide.  I’m just trying to figure out how to take decisions out of my life (what to eat, what to wear, what to cook, what to do) so I can free my brain for the bigger choices.  At least there’s one thing I can let someone else choose for me.

Keyboard hotkeys.  I dreaded using a track-pad when I got my first laptop but Boring (from whose wife’s brother I was buying it) told me I’d get used to it.  Instead, I got a mouse (and I’ve gone through a number of them, usually travel-size since it’s easier to get around with them).  That’s worked well enough but recently I had a crowded desk and I wasn’t navigating around different areas in different browsers, and for the writing I was doing there wasn’t much I needed to do with my cursor but it's always nice when it's easier.  Along the way, I don’t even remember how, maybe completely on accident, I discovered some great hotkeys:
CTRL + Arrows = Jump word-to-word instead of space-to-space.  Useful for having the cursor get around a line quickly (like when you want it to keep up with where you're reading), with more accuracy than a mouse can give.  Up/down jumps from paragraph to paragraph.
SHIFT + Arrows = Highlight what your cursor goes over.  Useful for covering words you’ll delete or cut/copy n’ paste.  Up/down can highlight a whole line.
CTRL + SHIFT + Arrows = Quickly highlight blocks of words.  Of course you have to put them together.  I probably use this one most of all.
ALT + Up/Down Arrows = Jump page-to-page.  I haven’t used that a lot yet but now that I’ve tried it, I might from now on.
These might be common knowledge but it’s not the first time it’s taken me a while to discover something everyone else knew.  Whatever, I’ve been able to retain control over my cursor, and these work like a charm for getting around a text document (in Google Docs, of course).  But, to be fair to say, I am using the track-pad more often.

Pomodoro Technique/my version of the Pomodoro Technique.  I discovered this work process a while ago and it blew my mind: do 25 minutes of focused work with no distractions, then break for 5 minutes and do whatever you want, then 25 minutes of work again, then 5 minutes of a break, then after 5 or so of those cycles take a 15-minute break.  It’s a great idea, and one that could work for many folks, but everyone has their own process that works for them.  For me, I get into a zone and sometimes I have a flow that could go longer than 25 minutes and I suffer more from breaking it.  And sometimes I can’t even start whatever I want to do and stop in 5 minutes.  And just keeping track of it can be exhausting (though there are phone apps that help).  Eventually this just became an excuse for me to take breaks when I didn’t need to and it broke up my work-flow when I knew it wasn’t helping.  So I went back to my usual process: Listen to a whole album (as I listen to music as I work), then take a break once that’s done.  I usually have no choice since I have to pee after that time anyway.  Maybe I’m trying to be more permissive in allowing myself to stop, which I need to do more of when I work (that zone can be a deep place that’s hard to get back out of), but I know what works for me (well, most of time).  Generally I just need something that will keep me on track to take my lunch at a reasonable time but maybe I’ll come across an app for that eventually.


My Marvel Heroic RPG online game is still going, stronger than ever:
http://rpol.net/game.cgi?gi=65044&date=1479915241
I also posted a video with the fundamentals of playing, so anyone who is interested but has never played before, whether MHR or any role-playing game, can watch it and you'll have enough to get up to running and join us:
https://youtu.be/3hOxZQ9hnl4

Something that's been bugging me lately: one of Stephen King's rules of writing is to never use a thesaurus.  I live by my thesaurus.  It's gotten me out of more than one jam (just writing this zine alone).  I just don't see how it's sound advice.  It's there, I use it.  Everyone has their own thing that works for them, and mine is using a thesaurus, S. King be damned (as much as I admire him.  Enough to respect his rule even when I want to dispute it vehemently).  I just hate the thought that I'm doing something wrong.  But it feels so right.

Did the pictures in my last zine get dropped out?  I've no idea why, especially since the ones from the one before didn't.  Grrr.  Well, I have to let it go, I guess.  Just when I start figuring out the tricks around HTML, it finds another way to be irritate me.  Oh well.

I've got a few things to get a head-start on the next one again.  Anymore I'm just dropping in reviews and a lists and that doesn't take much more of an effort other than just writing it out.  So I'll have something, hopefully not taking too long.  Maybe by then I'll even have finished Moby-Dick (even though I haven't picked it up again since the last time I mentioned it).

Waydown #15.12.31

And another one. As much effort as any of them, no matter how much content, and right up against the deadline (even if it was one I gave myself, for the end of the year, meaning I at least got one zine out in 2015. You can say this one took me an entire year). Shouldn't be a surprise by now.

Earlier in the year, after I finished the Ultrametabolism (text)book, I made a pointed decision to get back into reading comics. It's been longer than I care to admit that I've dedicated time regularly to just reading comics. There used to be eras when I had chunks of time devoted to reading comics, in addition to books and online articles and old newspapers and whatever else I was into, but those days are in much shorter supply now. I'm taking time before bed, usually erratic on my schedule so I have to stay flexible with it, time I usually spend chipping away at novels, and give it to comics. I'm getting through a lot of stuff (though not as much as back in the day). Of course I have stacks and boxes and shelves and crates full of stuff to read, and I'm even buying more stuff every week from the shop (though, luckily, again, not nearly as much as back when), so I never have a lack of material. I don't know if I could get through all this stuff before I die of the oldest age, but I'm enjoying giving it a shot.

REVIEWS

Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety by Daniel Smith (audiobook). When I was having anxiety problems in the '90s, I devoured as much literature on the subject as I could get my hands on. Not only was I fascinated by my disorder but I hoped that maybe something I could find, a snippet in one of those books, would be the key to unlocking and solving what I had. I never found it but I had some comfort that what I was suffering from had been documented and there were others who had what I had (to whatever degree). Even still, these years later and even when I'm not suffering from the condition, I'm still fascinated by the subject and I read what I can get when I come across it. I had a choice of books to download and I found this one, and just having "anxiety" in the subtitle was enough for me to check it out. Something that was good enough to get published I figured would at least be entertaining if not informative. This is a guy's account on his life with anxiety disorder. He's not a celebrity and he's no one who may have any impact beyond this book (which came out in 2012). It's really just about his life, which isn't any more remarkable than anyone else's. Much of his anxiety seems to go back to the experience of his losing his virginity, which is built up to be by far the most significant event in history, his or the world's, then when it's revealed it's really no more amazing than anyone else's. It's never explained why it caused him a lifetime of anxiety; it's rare you can get an explanation for your panic anyway, that's kinda the point, but there never becomes any resolution to his story, just that he kept on living. I find an interest in reading anyone's story, but there's not much in the way of anything extraordinary in this, and it's not told with any particular flourish that would make it a thrilling or particularly insightful read. It's just a story. I'm sure there's a great memoir about someone with anxiety disorders but this isn't it. If I can find a real good one, of course I'll read it, even if that element is a minor part of it. The audiobook version doesn’t add anything. It would probably have been harder to get through if I had to read it in print, though it’s written conversationally enough that it may have just been the material that would be the chore, not the way it was written.

Zero History by William Gibson (audiobook).  Gibson writes another lame book that isn't cyberpunk.  Not that he has to keep churning out cyberpunk stuff (and even that didn't help, since the three books after the Sprawl trilogy were nearly as bad as the ones taking place in the modern day), but it would be good if he could just find some kind of genre that gives his writing some life again.  This book is about as lifeless as it could be.  Looking at it another way, writing this boringly takes talent.  Is Gibson purposely torturing us so we'll leave him alone?  The trilogy this book is a part of is so bad it feels like it was done on purpose.  These books could have been his Heavy Metal Music, but we have to spend much more time with them and they get painful.  Unfortunately, his cyberpunk books are such beacons in the sci-fi genre that he still stands as an icon and that's hard to shake.  His newer books are as boring as much as he's undoubtedly bored writing them.  If he has no interest, why does he keep doing them?  Let him write screenplays, where he can maybe start a decent project or contribute some usable ideas, and let what scripts he writes for them get steamrolled by a headstrong director, but he'd get paid, if he's only turning in writing for a check anyway, and not writing awful books.  Maybe he needs a new genre.  He could have some luck in a Victorian setting.  Or a Western, just to confound expectations.  But, just anything else.  It couldn't be worse than what he's done post-Sprawl.  For as bad as so many of these newer books are, there's still a spark in there, buried deeply, almost crushed out, that shows that there still might be hope.  Maybe why I keep reading them (unless I just received them as gifts before I realized how bad they all are).  There might be hope, but a pay-off isn't in these books.  If he's not going to do cyberpunk then let him do modern-day stuff that reads like it's somewhere in the future.  Maybe it wouldn't even be that prescient, just that we're conditioned to expect it in a Gibson book, as he pretty clearly read the future in Neuromancer, even if it's clear now that his hitting on that was just luck.  Maybe anyone else could have done it but at least then it might have happened to a writer who could ride it for more books and a view of an interesting future but instead of crashing into mediocrity like Gibson did.  It's hard to imagine these newer books gaining any kind of meaning in the future, since some of the events and technology he tried to foresee are now laughably dated.  It's not as funny how much time is wasted trying to get through these books.

This novel has just one moment: He strikes on one interesting character and it seems there might be some kind of redemption for the book but too shortly after that the book is over and it's all done and the character is wasted.  It speaks of poor pacing and also the carelessness of tossing away a glimpse of how the rest of it could have been worthwhile but didn't want to bother with it.  It ends abruptly, like it wants to continue, or since it spent its big hit of action it can’t go on and just kills itself.  A character from the previous book is the main character in this one, and the closer we get to her, the more annoying she becomes.  It's an attempt at development that goes nowhere; she's a sop of character that was just interesting enough to keep the previous book going but here becomes boring and her B-story, introduced late, to flesh her out, adds nothing.   The almost-interesting character, introduced late, is a tease that nothing resolves, even worse in the last book of the series, leaving no reason to continue since it’s doubtful it could have any quality or use except to resolve threads, if they were interesting enough that there’s any urgency to keep going with them in the first place.  That abrupt ending becomes a mercy killing.

The audiobook reading is just as dull as the story.  The narrator has a good voice but one that would be better used playing off other actors in some kind of performance rather than a lull that just keeps going and going and going (though blame the material).  It’s such a dull book, the sound of the narrator's rumbling voice makes it too easy to fall asleep (not his fault since a more peppy voice would betray the tone so blame the audiobook casting director... and the book... and the writer).

(Gibson has released only one novel since this one, so very happily I should be able to stay away from his writing for a while (though I'm forever tempted to go back and re-read the Sprawl series).)

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (audiobook).  I got this book, at least once, years ago, recommended by a friend who knew I was into William Gibson books and cyberpunk fiction (though he came to it more from a sci-fi and literate angle).  It’s a bit of a tome (at least for me and my turtle-like reading pace) and I cracked it open but just couldn’t stay in it.  It’s a great read, and it’s a sumptuous pit to fall into, but it’s also dense, and spending time with it but never seeming to take a good chunk out of it can be discouraging.  Though that also left more to savor, even if, or especially since, it could take me years to get through.  And it would have if I had been reading it.  I’d probably still be on it now if I was.  Luckily, there’s an audiobook of it that someone just so happened to put up on paperbackswap.com (that site can’t always be counted on to have the best stuff, but with some patience it sometimes comes up).  So listening to it helped me get through it, and it didn’t even take long after that, even though it was no less dense.

It’s certainly cyberpunk, though a later generation.  Not that it had any more updated technology than Neuromancer -- it may have even gone backwards a few years (though no less prescient, for being released pre-Internet), from a Gibson antecedent who acknowledges the wonder of tech but doesn’t get off on it.  It’s still a story that takes place in a world, though one constructed around presumed technological leaps.  It gets pretty close but doesn’t suffer from not getting it right.  It’s foremost an adventure story, which it’s more interested in being than a guess at the future.  And while that brand of sci-fi is usually so self-serious, this one takes a few pokes at the gas-baggery of the work that came before it and actually has fun with it.  That in itself is its own revolution.  The characters are fun, the world is rich, the details are a hoot.  And there’s plenty of it -- lots to get lost in for however long it takes you to get through it.  The writing is heavy and sturdy but the story moves quickly, a tricky combination for most writers outside of Chandler.  If it wasn’t for needing the past cyberpunk work to use as a jumping point, this could have been the pioneer that Neuromancer was.  But as it is, it’s more fabric for the tapestry of a genre that got stunted because we’re living in it now (though with less chrome than they thought we’d have everywhere).  Stephenson didn’t get as much acclaim for his books after this, maybe because he veered away from sci-fi, though hopefully he was able to continue writing quality material, something Gibson wasn’t able to do when he went away from it.  I’d be a lot more likely to read more of Stephenson’s further work (even after -- especially after -- reading way too much of the crap that Gibson did later).

It’s So Easy by Duff McKagan.  Of all the members of Guns n' Roses, Duff was maybe the least-sleazy one, the one you might actually most want to hang out with, the one most deserving of a comeback.  He was a drunk after all, not quite as much known to be into the hard drugs as the others were.  He was also the one who seemed to do the best after the best-known version of GnR broke apart, or at least he ended up having the most inspiring post-GnR story.  His story, beyond being a rock star, isn't the most exciting to read but it's not a slog either, and McKagan, without a ghost-rider (at least not that it credits one) isn't a bad writer.  That he did so well on his own after GnR is worth a chance to read his his tale.  He has stories, and he pulls off the amazing stunt that some of the best ones are those that came from cleaning up.  He probably doesn't remember the really good ones from the GnR days, and the most notable ones from that period Slash covered in his book anyway.  It's always a shame that the best parts of their histories, the parts where they're often at the heights of their popularity and maybe creativity, are the parts that don't get into the books, since that's usually the times when they're the most drunk or high or working a lot (more likely all three).  Duff tries to get as many stories as he can into the pages though it's not so much all about his life as it is his triumphant over drugs, alcohol, and being a rock star.  Luckily it's the most interesting thing anyway.  His stories are intense, due either to the great intensity of what happened or the fact that he wasn't so messed up that he can't remember a lot of the worst parts.  He had a life that was still interesting even in sobriety, due to what he did to straighten himself out and to make a stable life for himself, much due to some really clever financial moves he made early on.  It used to be the most fascinating thing to see how much money rock stars could burn through but now it's more interesting to get tips from rock stars who were smart and did it right, even if it was only an accident or from just one good advisement to do something in consideration of, maybe, if they make it, the future.  Of course there are some well-worn stories that overlap with the other GnR biographies but if you're not reading all of them then they aren't a bother, though it can be interesting to see the same stories from different points of view (or also, from a common one.  And usually about Axl).  Like most autobiographies, it ends well and shows how even going through all those dark depths can lead to the most positive parts of your life (good enough to write a book from, at least).  It works best when they don't leave you there.  Most of it feels like an after-note of the rock-star days, so the next book would be only an after-note to that, but Duff is still a pretty good chap with which to ride along.

Before the Chop by Henry Rollins.  Rollins writes a column for the L.A. Weekly, the local alt newspaper that I read anyway, one of the great benefits of living in L.A.  This book is a compilation of the first year of his column, in their original form.  Apparently Rollins has free reign to write whatever he wants, and he does.  It's in the music section of the paper but it usually goes well beyond that.  He goes from politics to old entries from his own journal, to stories of being on the road, new and old, and complaining about having to stay at home.  Usually there's a thread of music going through it, and sometimes he's just yammering on again about Iggy Pop and David Bowie.  It's interesting writing from a veteran who has been to some interesting places, physical or otherwise.  It's not dependent on being a fan of his and his music, but it helps if you agree with his open-minded world view (or at least having an open mind about it).  His views aren't so different from the average Gen X music fan, who is also the target audience for the Weekly, so it never gets weird or too disagreeable.  He doesn't include as many tales from his rock n' roll past as you might like, if that's what you know him from, though those stories have already gotten out in non-digest form in other places.  This book has columns concurrent with world events, some of them very recent to the publication of the article, which is interesting but is lost in a book some years after the fact.  Some of it won't age well but there are some bits, most especially about the music, that could be timeless, what Rollins would have written years ago as well as now, the same as a reader could accept it.  He cycles through a lot of bands, leaning toward less-known ones, but those in obscurity would be the same mentioned by anyone else, and ideally good enough that their music could be discovered later.  As a book it may not be the best testament of Rollins's writing, and he's written better stuff that will hold up after time, especially his poetry (which is not included in any column).  The columns as they appear in the newspaper might actually be better because they had the benefit of another set of eyes and editing for content (just to bring it into focus) and copy (Rollins isn't best on the technical stuff -- italicizing song titles and putting album titles in quotes being the most glaring examples).  But a case could be made for the raw material being the purest form, straight from the man's mouth/pen/fingers.  Since it would be a Herculean task to get those columns from the original print (though they're also on his and the Weekly's websites), getting this book (and the second one, with the second year of columns, out now) is a concise collection of his serialized writing.  It's comforting to know that there is a voice on your side (if his voice is, indeed, on your side).  And it probably wouldn't hurt to love music as much as he does, which is a gigantic amount.

The Bedwetter by Sarah Silverman (audiobook).  I never had a thing for Sarah Silverman but apparently I thought enough of her to get her autobiography.  She’s only mimicking the working-blue comedian, and I’ve already been a fan of potty-mouth girls elsewhere.  But her shtick works well enough and she has better lines than most, if only for shock value (the amount of shock proportionate to how cute she is saying it).  It doesn’t seem to take much for a person with any kind of fame to put out a book -- not a recent thing -- and one written by a comedian is an easier sell, just because someone funny will have a better chance at writing something funny.  This one has a lot more distance between punchlines than a stand-up set, but it’s not only about being funny.  A story about a comedian’s life doesn’t guarantee it’s one worth reading, and Silverman’s was just as extraordinary (or not) as any.  Shining a light on her past might or might not expose where her famously filthy mouth comes from, but getting that knowledge, if it’s possible at all, doesn’t contribute much to the shtick.  This isn’t even necessarily for the super-fans, however many of them there are, but Silverman parlayed whatever fame she has into a book deal, just like anyone would.  It’s as good as any -- better than Dratch’s, at least.  There is one bit, though, that stuck out to me and is actually worth getting through the rest of it (it’s pretty quick anyway): She gives advice that for whatever gives you a moment of pleasure and could be abused -- weed (for her), food, drugs, sex -- she says to “Make it a treat.”  Taking less advantage of a thrill makes the fewer times you do it more special -- a treat.  Of course she talks about it more than that but that’s the gist of it, and it’s a pretty good one.  It’s that kind of knowledge, even just a nugget, that you read anything for.  Wisdom comes from the most unlikely places.  Sometimes it’s even funny.

Ultrametabolism by Mark Hyman.  If you’re thinking of reading this book, I’ll save you a gigantic amount of time: Don’t eat processed food.  That’s the entire thing.  You really don’t have to read a thing in it to get to that bottom line, which is every single thing that the book is trying to tell you.  The book goes on for a while about the science behind it, and it explains it in pretty conversant terms so it’s as easy to understand as it could be, and there are interactive tests and a load of recipes (that it can’t make more interesting, no matter how much it says they’re great), but it all comes back to the same bottom thing.  It’s a great lesson but you don’t really need to read the entire book for it.  It’s interesting enough if you need background on changing a really big life habit.  When I started working out, I got a trainer and told him I knew I need to work on my eating habits if I was going to get what I wanted out of my exercise (which was really just some weight-loss and general health).  What he told me came straight from the book (which was easy since it was really just Don’t eat processed food).  No bread (except for the kind that crumbles when bent); no cereal -- even Grape-Nuts; NO PROCESSED FOOD.  It took me a while to get any further knowledge from the book and I’m not sure if it expanded much beyond the short parts of sessions with the trainer when we chatted about food.  I absorbed the knowledge and I was aware of the way I was eating but it maybe didn't change me that much, beyond giving up cereal, which I did before I even started reading it.  I certainly didn’t cook up any of the recipes.  But I’m aware of it, and I know it’s the way to go (it should really just be common knowledge, that all those chemicals and all the junk in everyday food (“food”) isn’t good for you).  If I make the commitment to changing myself on that fundamental level -- and there’s a chance I might -- I’ll go back to this book.  I may not be putting all that into action now but I’m aware of it, and that could be the first step.  Also realize this is pretty much a textbook, which can be unpalatable to read, though there is some anecdotal evidence that is interesting, if everything in the book can really be that life-changing.  As it is, the biggest impact that this book had on me so far was that it took a long time to read.

Serial (the first one).  This podcast seemed to instantly spread like wildfire.  When you get down to it, it's easy to see why.  It's an interesting story and it's easy to access, even if you're not a regular listener of podcasts (like me).  The novelty of this one is that they produced and released it in real-time, so listeners could listen to it with some kind of immediacy, even if it was negligible if listened to any time after it aired (which is probably for most people).  The story in this podcast was but fairly pedestrian by Internet standards, where you can any other story in the known world.  With the way unexplainable stuff keeps happening and gets more explainable, and how it's reported, usually immediately, there wasn't much reason for this show to get the acclaim it did.  Unless it was just because it was an engrossing story, and everyone listened and got into it because everyone else did, and by the time they found out it was just another story they were already deep into it, and might as well go to the end.  It's not a bad strategy, or just how it worked out, but it could be easily duplicated.  Their process is what makes the experience stand out, even if the story itself makes it just an extended This American Life episode, and listening to it at any time after it was released makes it exactly like any other podcast.  Maybe there was a hope that its notoriety and immediacy (relatively) could affect the outcome, that some kind of public outcry could change the situation of the guy and his situation which is the heart of the whole thing, but that's almost ridiculous to consider, especially when opinion about his accusations seemed to be divided and galvanizing at best, muddied beyond comprehension at worst.  And if anything along those lines could happen, it would happen after the show was done and aired, so the outcome wouldn't be part of the ongoing case.  It's hard to say if it was even presented as well as it could be, to motivate anyone to speak up about it, if that was even a possibility in the first place.  So it becomes a human interest piece, something to look at like in a museum, since it would be rude to say it's entertainment when a man's life hangs in the balance.  But it's an interesting look a situation.  And hope that the right thing happened, even if the evidence makes that questionable.  (As I'm posting this they're releasing the new series, and though so far it's also an interesting story, my opinions on that one reflect this one.)

Marvel Zombies 2 (Marvel).  Was this a big franchise for Marvel Comics?  They kept doing sequels from the first one, not just continuations but actual sequels, one event piled on top of the first one, going as far as the sales momentum would take it.  From at least one side there was interest in it.  Or maybe it was because they knew where Kirkman's star was going and they were just trying to keep him in their sandbox.  He took off with the idea for zombies after this with The Walking Dead, but first he did it with superheroes thrown in, a decent idea though a predictable one seeing who came up with it, and one that you would think couldn't be taken too far.  The covers were more striking then the stories, but it made its mark.  Kirkman didn't lift ideas from the Marvel series to the stories he owned, and he even came up with some good, independent ideas that he left with Marvel (at least one that formed what could be a foundation that other zombie stories could be built on, that zombies could be clear-headed until they need to feed).  The whole thing went overboard almost from the start but it worked as well as it did because Kirkman could work both genres well, and being too much was part of the fun.  The first series had a lot of ideas and generally struck a satisfying balance between both genres.  The second one works exactly like the worst kind of sequel: a rehash of the first part, trying to use what made that work and stretching it out as far as it can go.  Where the first series had some fun, fresh ideas and takes on zombies, the second has none.  It's a continuation that could have been done just as easily, or maybe even better, as an annual or one-shot.  It doesn't even do well in the best parts, when it tries to deviate from the biggest-possible picture, which the first story was all about, instead going smaller and losing a sense of grandeur and danger in the process.  Kirkman deals in decompressed stories, which can be fine, and it doesn't lack value if you're reading it all at once, since it just becomes a quick read, but getting to this as individual issues a month apart would have been frustrating.  But this is a general complaint about the way Marvel did stories a few years ago and maybe denser storytelling has worked its way back more recently.  But complaints about the story don't go far since Sean Phillips drew every panel.  It doesn't matter if an artist is doing decompressed storytelling or a story that has more words, as long as it's good art, as far as art goes.  There are enough complaints about a comic only being worth looking at because of the art, but it's always worth seeing Phillips interpreting a story, good or bad.  This story isn't the best use of his talents, as he doesn't shine as well doing straight superhero stuff and action scenes, but to see him drawing anything is treat, and seeing his style over superheroes -- so alien to each other -- is at times a thrill.  It only goes as far as these two series so it wisely doesn't wear out its welcome (each to the other).  For where Phillips's talents lie, it's a shame he wasn't able to draw a more human story, even one with zombies (but surely there was negotiation to get him on The Walking Dead before Adlard, and either artist could have worked just fine).  The first series went through the most popular Marvel characters, and did it quickly as is part of the point it makes about super-powered people suddenly being turned into zombies and their hunger destroying their world (then universe).  That worked well enough, then should have ended there to cap off what was a fun one-off idea.  It even had a great ending, that worked as an ending better than as a cliffhanger.  But they dragged it further, then had to start getting to the more obscure characters.  This second series was a follow-up, establishing a stable team then seeing what they do, but they had to keep digging for characters since they went through so many so quickly, probably without a thought that they would have to keep it going.  Kirkman trots out some of his beloved '90s X-Men duds (only to utterly destroy them as brutally as possible).  The status quo is even more of a mess when it ends but it's left open to keep it going, as it has to be.  The sequels kept going after this and kept getting more obscure, which might be fun for the real-life Marvel zombies but doesn't have much appeal for more casual readers.  The ongoing story had to keep going to undiscovered  or long-dormant (for a reason) corners of the universe to wreak havoc and turn everything into zombies, but being willfully, though necessarily, obscure, doesn't get me going.  As it is, I only borrowed this trade so that's as far as my interest goes.  The ones after this didn't have Kirkman writing or Phillips drawing, which is just as well.  It's an idea that Marvel, with or without the original creators, stretched out farther than it needed to, deeper into the continuity of the universe rather than a theme about anything or even a thrilling or scary horror story.  Just more superheroes doing silly things, in this case eating their friends' brains -- not extraordinary.

All-Star Batman & Robin the Boy Wonder (DC).  Never ask: How bad could it be?  Or if you’re going to ask it, don’t go ahead with it just to see.  I’ve spent way too much time with too much awful stuff that I should have known better about.  I’m sure there have been a few things that weren’t as bad as I may have thought and surely there were some surprises but off the top of my head I can’t think of even one that covered the divide between expectation and execution, with both at either extreme.  Yet my loyalty holds out for some creators and I think that at least there will be a germ of something even resembling a spark of the greatness they once had, even if they’re volumes of pages past their prime.  I still have that loyalty for the work of Frank Miller, whose stuff I’ve loved so hard and for so long that I’ll take even an echo of a whisper of a bad photocopy of the memory of his past heights.  And I’ll admit it: I hold out a hope that he has one more great work in him.  This is the hope for so many other creators but, again, I can’t think of even one creator who hit the lows after the highs and still had any height left in them.  Yet I had to find out for myself.  And a half-off hardcover can help.  It wasn’t the Jim Lee art that enticed me -- I like his early X-Men stuff in my earlier years but haven’t cared a bit for any of his stuff since the early days of Image, when I was hoping that his stuff could only get better -- but it kept me away only because it too easily could be only more Jim Lee-by-numbers, and a monumental project not because his work is so great but because he did it.  And it’s exactly the most predictable Jim Lee work, as any of his stuff has been since he didn’t have to work with any effort.  The guy’s stuff is never bad on its own but the fact that it’s so formulaic and exactly like anything else he’s drawn since X-Men makes it awful.  Even his legion of clones have had a share of creative evolution.   But he tells the story, and that’s as great an expectation as we have any right to have.  It’s the story that makes you realize the book you’re holding is the worst kind of crap.  It’s Miller all right, but with all reasonable restraint thrown away like it never existed and his id running wild.  It’s a Batman like you’ve never seen, or ever wanted to see.  It’s Batman as such an asshole that he could only be written by someone who has such a quick and easy access to the personality of an asshole that maybe he is one and all this is coming easy to him.  It could be Miller trying to be provocative and taking it so far that it’s not the least bit palatable.  Misogynistic doesn't equal tough guy.  Fucking a slutty chick on the roof of a building in the rain doesn't equal sexy.  If the book is a satire it’s one so self-serving that it’s hollow.  If it’s meant to be funny, this kind of humor doesn’t work (one of the reasons there aren’t a lot of comedies about white supremacists).  It’s just bad.  And it’s been a while since this came out (happily the rest got delayed into oblivion) so the jokes have been made and all of this is fairly common knowledge, but I’m here to tell you, as a past, near-obsessive Miller fan (enough that I saw the The Spirit movie in the theater) that this stands as Miller’s worst work and a shame that it’s the last, big-time thing he produced.  (When I originally wrote this, in late August, Dark Knight 3: The Master Race (good lord, that title) had just been announced.  As I originally wrote: "Oh, my dear sweet lord.  How hard does he have to hit the bottom to bounce back up?" Now, as of this writing, the first issue has been released, to mixed reviews, as far as I can tell. That's usually not a good sign. Yet I'll probably get around to it.)

Modern Masters Volume 7: John Byrne (TwoMorrows).  I get a couple of these books every year at the San Diego comic con -- my one consistent purchase -- so I’ve gotten around to a lot of the artists they have featured, and now I’m even starting to read them (though this one was because I was stranded the day after I was at the con with some extra time and a dead phone).  Normally I would want to read the material that these creators make rather than reading about the creators themselves -- they’re usually just as boring as anyone else -- and like I said about the Michael Golden book, these books are at best a sub-Comics Journal interview and a quick survey of their total work.  But John Byrne is a classic creator, and one whose work I’ve gone back to lately, especially as I’ve rediscovered some of the creators whose work I loved when I was a kid (starting with Mike Zeck’s stuff and taking off from there).  Byrne is an obvious choice for these books but one volume is so limiting.  There might not be a creator besides Jack Kirby who has done more pages, and a lot of those pages I was a big fan of.  I wasn’t into X-Men at the time he was doing that book, and I’ve already gone on about how I didn’t like his Fantastic Four, but I’ve gone back to those over time.  Years later he did my favorite Avengers run, maybe ever, on West Coast Avengers, and I always loved his Superman work, in a time that I should have had no interest in Superman at all.  This book’s spotlight gets to him in only the quickest of glimpses, since there are only so many pages in the regular format, and there has to be a balance with the art, so nearly every project covered gets a moment at best and never with much depth.  The X-Men stuff gets a bit more coverage, then a bit of the behind-the-scenes with the Superman work (the biggest heartbreak: that whole reinvention of Superman was just another gig to him, nothing more than some work), for some reason disproportionately a lot (relatively) about the Demon series he did (or planned to do), then a lot of his work gets at least a line but still entire swaths of his career that are overlooked.  There’s even time given to allowing Byrne to defend himself from charges of being a real jerk over the years, which is unnecessary in a book like this but is also a thing that sets it apart from the usual overview and interview.  The book tries to get to Byrne as a person rather than as purely a creator, but that’s also a bit of a misstep since those sections of his background, which go on for a while, and trying to really get to know him, could have been better used by more art, of which there seems to be featured only a relative skimming of a skimming.  A real art-book would better serve the man’s work, and there have surely been better interviews.  But this book, in the series showcasing renowned comics artists, new and old, fits just fine among the others.  Maybe it’s just awkward that they can’t fit the legends into just one book and might work better for the artists who haven’t spent a career churning out a steady and voluminous amount of pages.   I have the Romita and Garcia-Lopez books, too, two fellows who have also done a ton of work over the years, and I’ll probably say the same thing about them, though I’m looking forward to getting to those no less for it.

I finally started that Marvel Heroic Role-Playing Game campaign. It's been in my head since I first got it a few years ago (thanks to Griesbach), and after playing it a few times, an adventure online that didn't finish, and an in-person group that didn't get off the ground earlier this year, I finally gave in and just started my own game online (on the same site as that unfinished adventure).  It started with an idea to get friends into it, who would be more tolerant of a game with other new and inexperienced players and crazy story ideas, and I had one or two mates who have played the game, and I figured I could get four or five people, which would be enough.  But getting anyone to be interested, then actually getting them to sign up on the message boards site, then getting them to contribute, didn’t turn up much, and from the e-mail that went out to about 40 people, all of which are friends, some of which are comics-fan/zine buddies that are probably reading this, I was left with pretty much those one or two mates that I knew I could count on originally.  It wasn't enough to really get the game going, at least not for what I had in mind (and having such a small group doesn't usually motivate anyone to keep it going).  So I decided to start another game, open to players who knew the game and were already on the site, and that instantly had a half-dozen players who were in.  I didn't have a story idea for that spin-off game except for including it in the same campaign.  Switching players & heroes between the games could be fun.  But since the balance between games was so lopsided, I appointed the game with the guys from the site as the main game, and added the players/friends from the formerly-main game to the other.  Now there was a good amount of players in the now-main game, and I used my original adventure plans for that one.  It took a while to get it going, to get the hero backgrounds and how they fit in with the adventure together, and just to put everything in place, and it was a lot of work (luckily I wasn't working at the time), but once it got going it was pretty smooth and often not always a lot of effort.  There's still a lot of work being the Watcher (the one who controls everything that isn't a player character) but I'm digging it.  Along the way we've lost a few players but I'm planning to open it to new players (my next project after I post this zine) and hopefully some of my friends will show some interest and follow through on joining.  I could go into detail on what is happening in the game -- it's some fun superhero stuff, firmly set in the straight-up Marvel Universe and using those characters, as many as I can stuff in -- but it all changes so quickly, with players & heroes rotating in and out and so much going on in the context of the story.  It's a good time.  If you're reading this and you're interesting in joining (you pretty much just have to sign up on the site -- it's free -- and ask to join the game -- I'll automatically add you since I know you already), check it out:
The Amazing Avengers (Marvel Heroic RPG)
At least take a read-through of it, since it's a fun superhero romp (and I can explain the game mechanics with a quick phone call).
(This is the same game I was talking about in my zine a few years ago.  This is how I've finally gotten a consistent, ongoing game going (and how long it's taken me).  The idea about how the campaign would start has changed, though I might use it later on in this campaign (it's much more minor than what I went with).  I've been building up a lot of ideas for this for a while and I intend to keep it going for as long as I feasibly can.)


Best Albums of 2014:
10. 1989- Taylor Swift
9. Transgender Dysphoria Blues- Against Me!
8. Turn Blue- the Black Keys
7. The Voyager- Jenny Lewis
6. 1000 Forms Of Fear- Sia
5. Morning Phase- Beck
4. Here And Nowhere Else- Cloud Nothings
3. Do To The Beast- the Afghan Whigs
2. Lost in the Dream- the War on Drugs
1. They Want My Soul- Spoon

My Top Catherine Wheel Songs Of All Time (In This Order):
20.“Kill Rhythym”
19. “Thunderbird”
18. “I Want To Touch You”
17. “Wish You Were Here” (Pink Floyd cover)
16. “Harder Than I Am”
15. “God Inside My Head”
14. “Judy Staring At The Sun”
13. “Here Comes The Fat Controller”
12. “Waydown”
11. “Salt”
10. “Show Me Mary”
9. “Black Metallic”
8. “Broken Nose”
7. “Sparks Are Gonna Fly”
6. “The Nude”
5. “Hole”
4. “Intravenous”
3. “Delicious”
2. “Strange Fruit”
1. “Crank”

RAVES

Blue Apron. I started cooking regularly, and meals beyond easy protein-grain-frozen vegetable, mostly from the fact that for a while I get home first and there's no reason I shouldn't make some kind of dinner that takes effort.  We started getting Blue Apron and really like it.  They send you a box of ingredients for three meals, everything you need in it including an easy-to-follow recipe (that is also free on their site), and you make it.  They do only minimal prep, pretty much only gathering the stuff and mixing spices, and all the rest is up to you.  Chopping vegetables is the biggest chore but none of the preparation is ever tricky.  The recipes are never complex, always something that some with even minimal competence in the kitchen (which means me) can put together.  The biggest problem is that a recipe that says will be ready in 20-30 minutes will always take at least an hour.  But if you have that time, it makes some great meals.  Usually near-restaurant quality, though stuff you wouldn't think to order on a night out.  We haven't had a bad meal; the only ones that were challenging to get through were the ones I over-salted (it directs you to add salt n' pepper at every step so it's easy to go too far). (Then the night I originally wrote that we had a chicken tortilla soup that wasn't all that great.)  Out of three for a week, you get one that's seafood, the other two usually some common protein; the only choice is a comparable set of three vegetarian meals that you can mix n' match in a limited capacity, and even those have been good, though not always big portions.  Most of the meals are just enough for two people -- we rarely have leftovers but just as rarely ever feel like we haven't had enough.  Each meal is for two people (I think there's a family option but you'd have to look).  $60 for the week, which breaks down to about $10 each person each dinner, which is better than restaurants, especially since you don't have to go to out, even if you have to make it.  They have a recommendation deal where a friend can get a week free, so if you're interested in trying it, let me know.

Text-to-speech.  I got a Samsung Gear smartwatch before Christmas last year but it was fairly useless to me.  I was going to use it track my sleep but the app I used and the watch didn't work together (despite, months later, saying they do, and, at the time of this writing, still don't, at least not in a fashion easy enough for me to use).  The first -- and, for a long while, only -- time I took the Gear out and played around with it, though, it changed my life.  Not the device itself but something I found, and not even through something I could do but accidentally somewhere along the way.  I was checking out how to read stuff on it and it didn't work like that at all, the pain that it would take to word characters that small, but it set up an app on my phone to read articles out loud to me.  I've always thought that if I could have text read to me, I could get through so much more that I've intended to read.  So much I could do.  I started poking around and it turns out there's an app, for free, that does exactly that, called @Voice Aloud Reader (for Android).  If it's text, it will read it aloud.  You just need the words in a text file.  It absolutely blew my mind.  And it reads it pretty well too.  It's a British voice (you can load up other dialects but that one works the best) but it does pretty well with inflections and emphasis in getting the words right.  It's basically a robot reading it to you but what would you expect?  There have been articles and Weeklys and magazines that I've been stockpiling for years and I'm finally getting to them (and, at this writing, have gotten through most, including the stack of Weeklys a few feet high).  For a while I was copy-n'-pasting into a document and opening it to read in Drive but now I just open it directly from the article, usually saved to Pocket to read later.  I use it while I'm at work, best when I'm on uninteresting tasks (which is most of them) and I plow through reading material.  They're old articles and I'm just getting through them so I don't usually have to pay so much attention so it's okay if the reader doesn't get it exactly right.  It works well enough, maybe better.  And apparently it's been around for a while.  It wasn't until later that I found a direct text-to-speech reader already within a few of my apps that do this already, I just never knew.  Even if I had known, I probably would have thought it was too good to be true and the thing wouldn't work as well as I wanted it to. I was wrong.  And now I have it.  I'm reaching an incredible velocity of efficiency in getting through ridiculous stacks of intended reading material and ingesting an incredible amount of knowledge.  I'm reading so much and so much better that I'm tempted to take a college class, just because I could get through the assigned reading so much better and faster.

Conversely I went back to using speech-to-text as well.  I was going to say how I was using it to be so much more productive in writing, and as a contrast to the text-to-speech, but I've already gotten past using it (again).  It could be so useful but it's not quite where it's essential to my efficiency.  It still mixes up and mangles enough words that I spend almost more time editing what I dictated than I would have spent just typing it out.  Though I still use it for text messages and maybe some notes -- much shorter, less crucial passages.  I still have hope for it.  The article I just read (using @Voice Aloud Reader, natch) says that speech-to-text is at about 95% correct, which means it misses about 1 in 20 words.  That's still not so reliable.  But 99% is 1 in 100 words and I could live with that.  That isn't just a 4% increase in quality, which is mostly negligible, but it's the chasm between those two that makes the biggest difference.  I'm holding out for it to happen.  With the way these things go, it probably won't be long.


No problems with HTML this time. Wow.

And that's another one.  Still plenty of stuff to write about.  I took out a few things because I had enough in this one and I can get a head-start on the next one with the extra stuff.  Right now I'm reading (listening to) Moby-Dick, and that could take who-knows-how-long, so I may not have a lot of book reviews for a while. But plenty of comics, and whatever else I come up with. You know the drill. I'm not trying to confuse anyone with this.