This is the year I stop thanking the wrong God for all of my victories, and start thanking that new God that I read about. This is the year that I stop being such a ball hog, and become a ball suckling pig.
We’re talking about comics this week. I read enough of them, and it seemed like this trifecta of books made sense — there’s a loose “pulp adventure” theme that works, even as their tones vary wildly, from gritty procedurals to polar adventure. Some of that makes each of these notable, however, is the way that their tones shift within the same work. Body horror sits beside a sense of wonder; comedic barfights give way to grief. That these works can […]
There’s a phone number on the back cover of the latest issue of Gigantic; dial it and you’ll be given an archetypally robotic list of authors’ names to choose from. Select one from there, and one of the authors featured in the issue will provide a pre-recorded message — Mitchell S. Jackson delving into some of the nicknames and slang used in his contribution to this issue. The theme of Gigantic‘s fifth issue is “Talk,” and it suffuses its pages, from snippets […]
BATTING .500 TEAM OF THE YEAR: North Korea. They conducted their third underground nuclear test, sure, but without the seasoned tutelage they’d come to know and love from Kim Jong-Il, 2013 was doomed to be a rebuilding year for the scrappy upstarts from the Paris of Totalitarianism. Like so many other countries this year, they let their guard down and let VICE take over the entire nation. Akin to the too-young Los Angeles Clippers, time will tell whether this nation […]
Last year, I read Percival Everett’s Assumption — the first of his books I’d encounter, after reading glowing recommendations from a number of smart readers. It’s still inside my head: it begins like a traditional procedural, and then grows stranger and stranger as Everett keeps revealing that certain things we might have taken for granted are, in fact, not present at all. The whole thing led to a strange, haunting ending (or series of endings) — tightly controlled, and ominous in […]
The first zines I read were about music, and were invaluable in pointing me towards a lot of the bands and music that have become essential to me over the years. The three zines covered here are, in their own way, a return to basics for me — three zines where the primary focus was music, even as each of them has their own thematic and aesthetic concerns as well.
Once I purchased a miniature notepad whose cover is embossed with the words “A List of Things I Will Eventually Do In Specific Order.” It’s a hip-looking organizational tool, yet I have filled only the first page. Still, despite repeat evidence that I’m not stellar at following through on list-making, in my mind I continue scrawling on those brown post-consumer sheets of paper. Metaphorically, I have covered them with vows of self-discipline, all composed in the prose style of pioneering […]
By age 20, Mike Tyson was not only boxing’s heavyweight champion, but the most dominant athlete of the 1980s. Not even the massive egos and grand stamina of Michael Jordan, Carl Lewis, or Rickey Henderson could deliver such a claim. He made his modest fighting height of 5’10” into a net positive, by employing a “peek-a-boo” technique of ducking extremely low in order to block opponents’ punches, and in his prime delivered his blows the way a typhoon delivers hydration: […]