what I'm wanting

what I'm whating

Music:

Dream Theater--Black Clouds & Silver Linings

Scale the Summit--Carving Desert Canyons

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds--Abattoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus

Elvis Costello--Secret, Profane, and Sugarcane

The Mars Volta--Octahedron

Books & Comics:

'The Areas of My Expertise' by John Hodgman

'American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House' by Jon Meacham

'The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World 1788--1800' by Jay Winik

'Stel' by Moebius

Movies:

Election

This is Spinal Tap

The Evil Dead

What I'm looking forward to:

'Asterios Polyp' by David Mazzucchelli

'Parker: The Hunter' by Darwyn Cooke

'R. Crumb's Book of Genesis'

96-page Frank project by Jim Woodring

'The Marquis: Inferno' by Guy Davis

Acme Novelty Library #20 by Chris Ware

The Brothers Bloom

Moon

A Serious Man

Doctor Who specials

Porcupine Tree--The Incident

a moment of clarity

I was sitting here listening to the new Mastodon album and suddenly had an epiphany regarding the two comic stories I'm kind of simultaneously working out in my brain (and on the page)...I came up with a way to connect them together to make one larger, and considerably stranger, story. And when I came up with the connective tissue for all this it happened to tie into a short story I was fiddling around with several years ago. So I somehow, in one instant, tied three incomplete stories together.

Needless to say, I really like the new Mastodon album.

My soundtrack for the last two weeks

The odd man out being the first one, Steven Wilson's Insurgentes album, which has significantly less double bass and electronic voice than the Death and Cynic albums, respectively. But all are the real goods.

Also, what has Dax been listening to lately?

"Ignore the bleached remains of former expeditions..."

My good pals Storm the Castle! have released their EP, The History of Doomed Expeditions Vol. 1.

I can't recommend it enough.

You can order it here

"Who is this great burdensome slavering dog-thing that mediocres my every thought???"

Really like the new Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds album.

No art from me today. But to stay on topic, here's a nice Nick Cave drawing by Eugene Smith (http://monstercake.blogspot.com/):

Zawinul

Joe Zawinul passed away this Tuesday. He was seventy-five.

Zawinul co-founded the fusion band Weather Report (with Wayne Shorter) and their album "Heavy Weather" is one of my favorite jazz albums of all time.

He was one of the first to include synthesizers in jazz recording, and worked with Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis, among others.

His most famous song is "Birdland", which amazingly was a radio hit when it came out (people in the 70's knew some stuff, it seems).