What the title says. Made these as sort of a detour from narrative Nowhere Band strips, but they don’t really belong over there. So here they are. Will probably do more at some point….
All posts by keithpille
DAVID BOWIE IS__ A BIT OF AN INTERPRETIVE MUDDLE, BUT PRETTY WORTHWHILE IN THE END IF YOU’RE INTO THAT SORT OF THING
This was originally written as a paper for an art history class in curation.
Last year, my birthday fell shortly before David Bowie Is, the “first retrospective of the extraordinary career of David Bowie,” closed its run at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. My wife surprised me with tickets to the long-sold-out show. We packed for a crash road trip, hopped into the car, and drove from Minneapolis to Chicago, listening our way with mounting excitement through the entire Bowie oeuvre during the 10-hour trip.
Viewing the exhibit was an overwhelming rush; the line to enter the museum had stretched around the block. The show was designed to hit attendees through multiple senses – as one walked through the space looking at objects, a location-sensitive headset would blast music or interview clips related to the object under view. The crowd itself – packed into the galleries as tightly as the fire marshals would allow – provided a constant buzz of energy as several rooms full of Bowie superfans communed with artifacts connected with the great man.
We left the exhibit exhausted and happily dazed. But on the drive back to Minneapolis, questions started to bubble up as we talked it over. What had we learned in that exhibit? It didn’t really seem like we’d gotten much in the way of new information. The experience had been intense and fun, but had there been an intellectual point? Had the whole thing really been an enjoyable but ultimately empty wallow in pop idolatry? As months passed and the undigested bolus of David Bowie Is lingered in my head, a slow, slinking surety settled in that it had all been a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
The Many Cars of Keith Pille
(this is an updated version of a piece I originally wrote in 2004; it was updated again in September of 2016. Hopefully it will not need to be updated yet again for a while)
1. 1978 Dodge Warlock pickup
Period of use: December 1990- early 1991
Comments: customized for racing on the dirt tracks of rural Oklahoma; idled at 35 mph, requiring constant use of the brakes while driving. Famous throughout Blair, Nebraska for glasspack mufflers which allowed the truck to be heard over a mile away and for gas mileage below 10 mpg. Lacked rearview mirrors of any sort.
Eventual fate: sold due to constant mechanical problems of varying magnitude, shortly before a massive systemwide collapse left it looking like Sheriff Buford T. Justice’s car at the end of Smokey and the Bandit.
2. 1982 AMC Spirit
Period of Use: early 1991- March 1993
Comments: one of the curiously large “compacts” of the early 80s. Much-beloved and far more reliable than the truck, although hardly free of mechanical trouble (the driveshaft fell off during one drive to Omaha; the clutch burned out on a country road). At one point my father installed a dashboard 8-track, against which I railed vigorously.
Eventual fate: retired from service after chunk of transmission housing broke off and fell into clutch assembly.
I’m A Punk Rocker Yes I Am | A Meander
As I write this, I’m about halfway through a master’s program in art history. And for the most part, I like it a lot. I like being exposed to new art and new ways of thinking and being able to get into deep discussions with smart people about works of art and lesser-known artists.
There is a side of it I don’t like, though – one that doesn’t come up in class too often, but dominates when I’m talking to people outside the program about it. If I mention that I’m studying art history, people naturally seem to want to jump to talking about classifications. Is Van Gogh impressionist or post-impressionist? Is Frank Gehry a deconstructionist architect?
I know there’s some value to that kind of discussion, but I think it’s minimal. It’s more interesting to talk about Frank Gehry’s architecture itself than whether it fits into an arbitrary category (a category made up, in this case, retroactively for a museum exhibit, borrowing a really unrelated term from lit theory). And more importantly, these discussions remind me of another ongoing argument that’s been annoying me for years: is Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades” a punk song?
Rough Mixes of Vandalized Husker Du Songs
So, the desire to transform Husker Du songs in weird acoustic ways just seems to be this year’s obsession (see the last post, ferinstance). As threatened there, I’ve gone further down this road. Here are rough mixes of ganked-up versions of Celebrated Summer (yeah, again, but with more thought into the arrangement on this one) and Powerline. These mixes aren’t final at all, but they’re good representations of works in progress. There will probably be more of these, and for that I apologize.
Maybe my apology should take the form of an acoustic cover of I Apologize.
Celebrated Summer
Powerline
Celebrated Summer
A while ago, I gave one of my favorite Husker Du songs the Leo Kottke treatment:
I might end up doing some more of these. God knows I know a lot of Husker songs.
A Walk Through the Process of Creating Nowhere Band
A couple of friends have asked me about the nuts and bolts of how I put a Nowhere Band strip together; I’m in kind of a dead spot as I recover from a vacation and wait for class to start, so I thought now would be a good time to do a quick walkthrough of the process. So (click on all pictures to embiggen):
STEP 1 : SCRIPT
Naturally, I start with a script. Actually, that’s not true. I start with a vague idea that gets jotted down in a notebook or a google doc, and then fluffed out to a badly-written paragraph with chunks of dialogue embedded, and then on to a full-on script.
My scripts are pretty minimal (and casual as far as spelling and grammar and those niceties), since I’m just writing for myself and I’ve already internalized all kinds of strip conventions about locations, expressions, gestures, and such. At this point, it’d be really weird to write a script for someone else to draw. I should try it some time.
The hardest thing in the script stage is making sure lines of dialogue don’t get too long to fit gracefully into balloons. I can get pretty wordy – I still basically think of myself as a writer who sort of knows how to draw – so this is a challenge.
STEP 2 : REDLINE
This is the worst step; in any sort of creative work, the hardest part is sitting down and facing a blank piece of paper, and that’s what’s going on here. Everything after this point is basically a form of editing and refinement, cleaning up or enhancing something that already exists. Here, I’m wrestling something into existence. Mornings when I wake up and have to go downstairs and do redlines are the times I’m most tempted to sleep in or volunteer to walk the dog on Rebecca’s day of the rotation.
Anyway: I start out by laying out the panel grid in red pencil (doing this stage in red makes it easy to remove all of this rough early work in Photoshop once the strip’s scanned). The script’ll tell me how many panels I need (I try to keep it around 5, give or take a couple, but different strips need different lengths). Relative panel size usually comes down to a function of how much dialog is in a given panel (remember, I get wordy), how big a thing or space needs to be shown, or how many characters appear.
Continue reading A Walk Through the Process of Creating Nowhere Band
Rumours
This is one of the first long-form comics I ever drew, back when I was pretty clearly just beginning to learn how to draw. It’s an adaption of an excellent essay / short story by Twin Cities music writer Jim Walsh, who was nice enough to let me take his words out for a spin. Resurrected because Fleetwood Mac seems to be having some kind of goddamned renaissance.
All This Sounds Past
The other night, while cooking dinner, I listened to the Replacements’ Tim. It’s one of those weird cases where Tim’s been one of my favorite albums for decades, but between the march of time, the constant ingress of new music, and my slow disengagement from the practice of listening to albums straight through, it’s actually been years since I’d listened to the whole thing straight through.
Now, I can’t claim to be unique in being a middle-aged white guy in south Minneapolis who has Tim in his Pantheon of Great Albums. The conventional wisdom with the Replacements has always been that the 3-album sequence of Let It Be, Tim, and Pleased to Meet Me represent the band’s apex. I never quiiiite agreed with that (I think Hootenanny’s more fun than Let It Be), but it’s definitely been a settled matter in my head for a very long time that Tim was one of the best albums by one of my all-time favorite bands.
So it was really weird to be cutting vegetables, drinking a beer, and thinking that Tim actually kind of drags in a lot of spots. There are great songs, for sure, and the album works really well as Bob Stinson’s last stand. Buuuut. “Hold My Life” never really did sit well with me as the rockin’ opener to a rockin’ album. And the production here is terrible all the way through, even if a Ramone was doing the production.
And hey- isn’t “Here Comes a Regular,” while an undeniably great song, kind of self-pitying? Westerberg’s singing this elegy to his own life, when the Replacements were notoriously self-sabotaging. That’s… it’s not the end of the world, it doesn’t ruin the song, but it does really color the whole Replacements thing. Self-destruction isn’t as fun when paired with self-pity.
So as my spaghetti sauce simmered, I recognized that, at least in this case, you can’t really go home again to music that you loved when you were younger. Listening to Tim as a 39-year-old homeowning cartoonist just inevitably creates different associations than approaching the album as a 25-year-old bass player in a shitty apartment in St. Paul who’s convinced that music semistardom is right around the corner as soon as the correct mix of onstage drunkenness and energy gets worked out. I still do love Tim in particular and the Replacements in general, but it’s changed.
I’ve long believed (this is the one useful thing that I got out of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) that art actually happens at the intersection of the work and the person experiencing it. If I’m a different person now than I was 15 years ago (and I’m pretty comfortable making that statement) then there’s a different thing going on when the person interacts with the work.
I don’t know. I try not to view everything through the lens of the past. But then again, as we get older, past is one thing we steadily have more of.
Longevity and Comics and Who the Hell Knows What Else
OK.
I’ve been talking on and on all summer about wrapping up Nowhere Band this year. The idea was pretty simple: I’m turning 40 at the end of the year, and on some level it felt weird to me to think about continuing to do a strip about dudes in a band after I’d turned 40. Especially since it’s been a good 3 years since I’ve had an active band going. There was a bunch of burnout involved as well, much of it centered around a bunch of rules I’ve imposed on myself.
But now that I’ve thought things over and life has calmed down a bit, I think I’m going to keep the strip going. Part of what convinced me was the abrupt realization that some of my favorite comics are Jaime Hernandez’ ongoing run; he obviously didn’t feel weird about making comics about aging punks as he whizzed past 40, so why should I? Also, I recognized that lots of the things that were bothering me were completely self-inflicted. Tired of fighting with Photoshop in the coloring stage? You can always go back to black and white for a while. Feeling pressed by self-imposed posting deadlines? Who gives a shit? It’ll come out when it comes out. Don’t want every story to center on the band? Fine, they all have outside lives, tell some stories there.
The truth is that I do love the strip. Somehow, sneakily, it seems to have become my life’s work. I can live with that. I didn’t mean for it to be when I started out… but at least for now it feels like that’s where things are. I guess that gives some shape to my 20s- I wasn’t wasting my time in half-assed bands, I was gathering material. You always wish more people read a strip when you put this much work into it, but I love the readers that I have. people whose tastes and worldviews I respect tell me they like it; that means a ton to me.
So I think I’m going to keep going. I might structure things so that stories or even sections of life have clear starts and ends, but that’s the sort of thing that’s easy to say you’re going to do and then forget. So we’ll see. And I’m sure that there will be breaks and hiatuses at points as I work on prose stuff or other comics. But for the time being, Nowhere Band’s going to chug on. Even if (gasp) the Awesome Boys don’t, necessarily.
The Doctor Is In
Here’s a comic strip I worked up, kind of a prototype for a thing I might pursue after I finish Nowhere Band (which should be some time this year, unless I change my mind). I think this thing would mutate a little more if it actually went into production, but if nothing else I’ve got a pretty big google doc full of script ideas…
And yeah, inspired by Charles Schulz, of course.
Updated: I did indeed change my mind.
Catonia Lends a Hand
I don’t even know why I did this, but I did this:
Me on Slate on Tom Robbins
I’ll probably write a bit more about this later, but I wanted to note that I’ve got a longish essay up over on Slate about my younger infatuation and then partial disillusionment with the work of Tom Robbins. I like the piece a lot, and I’ve wound up having a bunch of interesting conversations about it on Twitter and that other, shittier, social media platform.
Publisher’s Statement from Chain-Fighting Prospectus #1
Publisher’s Statement, from Chain-Fighting Prospectus #1
by Roger Ehrman, Publisher*
I’m sure we all have a few cherished memories from the glorious days of chain-fighting in our youth. For me, it’s something of a toss-up between two extremes. On one hand, there’s the big-league memory of the day in 1963 when prohibitive underdog Joe Oberg stared into the cameras and guaranteed a victory over Tiny Wallace, and then broke out all of the champ’s teeth on the second swing of his anchor-chain. Stirring, indeed, but equally golden in my mind are all of the Sunday afternoons when I went with my father out behind the Amoco on the outskirts of Mason City to watch the amateur chain-fights; certainly not as glamorous, but it taught this young man a great many lessons on how a man faces pain. And in that light, I think I can be forgiven for waxing a bit sentimental.
There are those who say that chain-fighting has fallen from those hallowed days, that the cable TV deal and the Snap-On Tools sponsorship have robbed the sport of something essential. These purists are certainly entitled to their opinions, but I feel that they are missing the point. Chain-fighting is about two men, eight feet of linked metal, and the raw will to compete; nothing more, nothing less, and no TV deal will change that.
Chain-fighting is as vital and energetic today as it ever has been. Indeed, I would argue that chain-fighting is poised to enter a new, golden age as we begin the Twenty-First Century. Witness the revolution sweeping the sport in the wake of Magnus Thorsson’s groundbreaking two-handed swing technique. Or the team at Stanford investigating the introduction of ringside epidurals. Or the wave of exciting new chain materials– including ceramics– coming out of Japan, truly stretching the boundaries of what chain-fighting is and can be. I am firmly convinced that, for those of us in the happy fraternity of link-swingers, the road ahead has never been brighter.
Continue reading Publisher’s Statement from Chain-Fighting Prospectus #1
America’s Next Top Novelist
The comic project I did back in 2007 immediately before starting Nowhere Band. I think this was a good script, but my art skillz were clearly still a work in progress. Note that I borrowed a couple of character designs for NWB.
Bleeding Edge Has Been Keeping Me Up At Night
After powering through Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon’s latest work, I keep finding myself having trouble getting to sleep because big chunks of my brain were still engaged with analyzing the book. And it’s great to be so caught up in a book, but the lack of sleep is becoming a pretty big bummer. So I thought I’d try to capture some of this in writing in the hope of getting some goddamned rest.
This isn’t by any means an attempt to put together a coherent analysis; coherent analysis of Pynchon is a mug’s game, especially when you’re going on only one read-through. But a bunch of things jumped out at me, and they’re all similar enough to suggest a kind of overarching intentional pattern.
More than anything else, Bleeding Edge seems to me to be about disappointment. Disappointment in the way the United States has reacted and changed since September 11, and disappointment in the slow but steady shittification of the Internet (and there’s an enormous amount of overlap between these two disappointments; we’ll get to this later, but in the meantime ask Edward Snowden). I might be projecting my own shit onto the book here, but I don’t think so (of course, you never do).
Continue reading Bleeding Edge Has Been Keeping Me Up At Night
BULLETIN: ENGLISH DEPARTMENT COURSE ADDITIONS FOR SPRING SEMESTER
In response to requests from recent graduates who felt that their studies here did not properly prepare them for the realities of the working world for writers in the current market, the Department of English is pleased to announce the following slate of new classes for the Spring semester (registration preference will be given to seniors nearing graduation):
ENGL 304: TV RECAPS
(optional lab: ENGL 305, Snarky TV Livetweeting)
Episode-by-episode recaps of popular television shows are one of the hottest – some would say the only – growth sectors for young writers entering the market. In this class, students will receive hands-on instruction in the delicate art of writing 1500-word recaps of TV episodes to post to entertainment websites to attract search engines and spur long, heated discussions in the comments. Special attention will be paid to identifying and coining derisive nicknames for “good” and “bad” characters on reality shows, and to working up witty in-text rejoinders to things said onscreen.
In the optional lab, students will gain practice tweeting sarcastic responses to TV shows as they air, with emphasis on making up catch hashtags. #RequiredTextDuckDynasty
Continue reading BULLETIN: ENGLISH DEPARTMENT COURSE ADDITIONS FOR SPRING SEMESTER
The Very First Cartoon I Ever Drew
Drawn at age 30, right after the cartooning bug bit me. I guess my pencil and ink craft has gotten better, but I’m not sure my writing has.
This strip does accurately portray my feelings about the jerky industry.
The Bust-Up: The Clash
In this periodic feature, I’ll take a look at the endings of bands with interesting flameout stories.
The more I learn about the Clash, the more convinced I am that their implosion is a lot like the reentry burnup of the space shuttle Columbia– the fiery, visible disaster was just the inevitable result of seemingly innocuous events that happened quite a while before.
In the case of Columbia, a chunk of foam insulation broke off of the shuttle’s external fuel tank during launch and smacked into the ceramic tiles that comprised the craft’s heat shield. These “foam strikes” were common events during shuttle launches, and were considered no big deal. Columbia made it into space and spent 2 weeks in orbit conducting business as usual. Then, as the shuttle broke orbit and glided through the atmosphere at Mach 24, the heat shield failed where the foam had struck. At the speed the shuttle was travelling, this was fatal; the craft wrenched itself to pieces, and the wreckage burned itself down to the ground.
And so, the Clash. I think they were pretty much cooked the second they signed their contract with CBS. Mark Perry of the fanzine Sniffin’ Glue famously said that “Punk died the day the Clash signed to CBS;” I’ve never agreed with that sentiment, but I do think that the signing of that particular contract started a countdown that led, more or less inevitably, to a rump version of the band releasing a farewell album so terrible that polite society has chosen to pretend it doesn’t exist.
I’m Great at Missing Things
…so it took me a mere 4 years to stumble across this i09 post (by Greame McMillan, who I have thought was awesome for a long time) praising my McSweeney’s COBRA stuff. Which just hits me as funny because this is turning into a trend, my finding stuff like this months or years later. Awesome to stumble across now – it’s been a rough day, so it’s a good time to come across something positive – but it’s weird to me how great I am at missing things.
It Ain’t Easy (in the Country)
As part of a group remake of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, I have committed some pretty serious crimes against Bowie:
In my defense, a) It Ain’t Easy is easily the worst song on the album (Bowie’s version only works because he’s got Mick Ronson there to save the day), and I basically had to destroy the village to save it; b) Bowie didn’t write the damned thing anyway (which really shows in the lyrics, which are pretty Zeppelin); and c) I actually think my guitar parts are pretty cool.
This alternate version from the same challenge is also pretty excellent.
Kirk and Picard were both on the hook for a bunch of these…
UNITED FEDERATION OF PLANETS
FORM TST-6- TEMPORAL DISPLACEMENT IMPACT ASSESSMENT (PAST)
for temporal displacements to the future, file form TST-7a
Filing officer information
Name:
Rank:
Starfleet ID:
Duty vessel:
Stardate of initial temporal displacement:
Stardate temporally displaced to:
Stardate returned to, if applicable:
Displacement involved (circle appropriate): ship / crew / both
Displacement was (circle appropriate): accidental / intentional
Number of Starfleet personnel displaced:
Number deceased while displaced:
Number of non-Starfleet individuals displaced:
Number deceased while displaced:
Answer these questions as completely as possible:
1. List all past-resident individuals encountered during displacement (using red pen, circle names of all past-resident individuals killed during displacement):
2. Using a 1-6 scale (1 unimportant, 6 critical), rank all individuals listed in question 1 in terms of their importance to known history:
3. Describe, in as much detail as possible, all interactions with past-resident individuals during displacement (attach additional sheets if needed):
4. Was any knowledge of future events or technology imparted to past-resident individuals during displacement?
If yes, list future events or technology discussed:
5. Were any present-resident individuals left behind in the past?
If yes, list their names and (if relevant) Starfleet IDs:
6. Were any past-resident individuals brought forward to the present?
If yes, provide as much identification data as possible:
7. Were any physical technological artifacts from the present left behind in the past?
If yes, list:
8. In your professional opinion, is it likely that a branching timeline was created by this displacement?
If yes, is it likely that this timeline is dystopian?
9. Rank, on a scale of 0-6 (0 is minimal, 6 is severe), your impact on the course of known history during the displacement:
THANK YOU FOR YOUR COMPLIANCE WITH STARFLEET TEMPORAL DISPLACEMENT REGULATIONS. YOU WILL BE CONTACTED FOR FURTHER DEBRIEFING WITHIN 10 BUSINESS DAYS OF SUBMISSION OF THIS FORM.
The Best Idea I’ve Ever Had
SCENE: A strip club on ladies’ night. Music’s booming, hunks are prancing around onstage in the standard Chippendales collar-cuffs thing. In the crowd, towards the back, we see a woman who is clearly some sort of arms dealer or terrorist or something terrible, here to conduct some business while taking in the show.
Camera swings back from her to the stage, focusing on one dancer in particular. The music shifts subtly – why, what is that familiar theme it’s moving around?
Suddenly, the dancer in question raises his hands to his neck AND RIPS OFF HIS LATEX CHEST TO REVEAL A TUXEDO UNDERNEATH (which is connected to the collar and cuffs of course) AND OH SHIT THAT’S THE JAMES BOND THEME THAT’S PLAYING AND THEN BOND PULLS HIS GUN AND MOWS DOWN THE BADDIES AND GOD DAMN WHAT AN IDEA.
Eschaton (and me) in Outside Magazine
So, it turns out that last year I figured fairly prominently in an Outside Magazine article about the semifictional game Eschaton (and my adaptation of it). I remember talking to the reporter, but thought that no story ever came of it; it was a big, awesome surprise to stumble across the story yesterday.
So, yeah. That happened, and is/was pretty cool.
Disasters and Recoveries and Education and the Return of Nowhere Band
Let’s start with the executive summary: After being in creative exile, more or less, for the past 4 months, I started work this morning on bringing back my old rock strip Nowhere Band. The new volume will, somewhat recursively, follow the Awesome Boys as they try to get their band back together after a long hiatus and deal with the fact that they’re now edging into being older than their musical peers. First new strip should go up some time next week. It should be funny and human. I’m stoked.
Continue reading Disasters and Recoveries and Education and the Return of Nowhere Band
Multidimensional Calculus
Another drawing of a photo of a sculpture.
Why So Quiet?
Well, it’s simple… since I work for a university, I recently became eligible for free tuition for grad-level classes, so a couple of months ago I started a master’s program in software. Which I’m sure will pay off in the long run, but in the short term it’s kind of meant tossing a hand grenade into my life as I knew it. Work on EYEBALL continues, but at a drastically-reduced pace; I don’t know that I’ll finish more than 4 or 5 pages this semester (although then it’ll pick up over the summer, at least for a while).
Stuff’s still happening, though. Before the coursework shit really started hitting the fan, I had time to work something up for Andrew Weiss’ Ultimate Powers Jam, and I’m actually happier with it than I am with pretty much any creative thing I’ve done for the past year. So there’s that.
In the meantime, yeah. I’m still around, and still working on comics at a snail’s pace. When I’m not fighting with Python.
History Is Hilarious – The Ol’ Fez Switcheroo
I’m about halfway through Barbara Tuchman’s exceedingly excellent The Guns of August; World War I had always been a gap in my 20th century history, and I’ve always heard good things about the book. I’m really happy to say that it justifies the hype. It’s fascinating and – weirdly – hilarious. The more I read, the stronger my impression that Europe in 1914 was under the collective rule of one of the biggest gang of boobs in history, and that if World War I didn’t have such a horrible body count associated with it, it would rank as one of the great comedic acts of mankind.
Consider the case of the German battleship Goeben and her companion, the cruiser Breslau.
At the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, Goeben and Breslau were stationed in the Mediterranean. Shit hits the fan. War breaks out. Because of a network of pacts, you abruptly have a situation where noted world powerhouse Serbia is allied with Russia who’s allied with France who’s allied with England, opposing Austria-Hungary and their allies the Germans. The Ottoman Empire is neutral as things start out. They don’t like the Russians much, but they have a longstanding relationship with England, and there are a lot of German sympathizers in the Turkish military. They could go either way. And they’re strategically important, since all of the good warm-water ports supplying Russia depend on shipping traffic through the Dardanelles.
So. The Ottomans, a crucial swing state that could go either way. What do the British do to win them over? They seize a couple of completed battleships that they’d been building for the Ottomans. Ace diplomacy there.
Continue reading History Is Hilarious – The Ol’ Fez Switcheroo
The Awesome Boys: Sub Cauda EP
So, yeah. After working on it for most of 2012, I’ve finished and put out an EP on behalf of my fictional band, the Awesome Boys. It’s pretty good stuff, I think; if nothing else, it’s a good approximation of what the inside of my head sounds like, processed into something catchy and entertaining.
In an email to a local rock writer, I described the album thusly:
It’s always hard to come up with a description of your own music, but I guess I’d call Sub Cauda “ambitious garage rock.” There’s a lot of guitar and weird noises coaxed out of a Kaossilator. You could maybe say it’s music that draws equally from the Flaming Lips and Guided By Voices. Or probably not. But that’s a start, I guess.
That’s probably as good of a description as I can do. Anyway, go check it out! The whole thing is free to stream or download on my Awesome Boys site; or if you prefer SoundCloud, 5 of the 6 songs (minus a pretty rad Bowie cover) are streaming over there.
David Bowie: Speed of Life
Today’s great music: the opening track of Bowie’s best album, where he and Brian Eno bring some sounds back from the future.
Cab Calloway: Who’s Yehoodi?
Today’s great music: this song makes absolutely zero sense, but it’s a riot anyway.
Jack White: Love Is Blindness
Today’s great music: I’m pretty tired of U2 at this point, but Jack White injects a hell of a lot of life into this one. I actually remember “Love Is Blindness” being a lot better when U2 was doing it live than on the album, because they’d let the Edge off his chain for a few minutes of anarchy at the end.
Louis Armstrong: Mack the Knife
Today’s great music: Louis Armstrong being suave as hell singing “Mack the Knife.” Check out the scar tissue on his upper lip from his unorthodox trumpet technique.
The Buzzcocks: What Do I Get?
So, we’re going to try something here: For the next month or so, I’ll use this space to curate some great music. Because after working in art museums for 10 years, I have curation envy. Today’s entry: a live version of the Buzzcocks’ asskicker “What Do I Get?”
Reviews You Would Not Want to See After Renting Out Your Apartment on AirBnB.com
Steve: The place was great! Spacious and sunny, just like the listing said. And the location couldn’t be beat! My wife and I were also really impressed with the strength of the bedframe, and the decorative headboard offers a very convenient number of latch-point options for restraints. Highly recommended.
Emily: It was nice to stay in a place with a full kitchen and easy subway access. The garbage disposal really goes above and beyond the call of duty. But most of all, we appreciated the way the locks and doors took a lot of abuse but stood strong! Also, police response in the neighborhood was superb.
Luther: The living room was in fact as large as it looks in the pictures in the listing. Easily offered plenty of room for both a hardcore band and a mosh pit. The band’s equipment tested the apartment’s electrical system, but fortunately the building’s breaker box is easily accessible and no problem to bypass. GREAT PLACE! Would totally stay there again!
Annie Q: Before we showed up, I was totally worried about being kept up by noise from the street, and by the logistics of getting the keys to the place. But none of those wound up being a problem, and the apartment was fantastic. My only complaint was with the bathroom- the bathtub was a little small, and it was a real stretch to fit 3 of us in there. But we managed… the bubbly sure helped! 😉
Mike: Boy, their cat was a real trouper.
An Ancient Comic: Pacmania
Just remembered this one, which I originally drew in 2007 (clicking on them should embiggen):
Receding Wave
Taken at Split Rock state park, which is hella scenic.
New project, page 1
So, here’s what I’ve been working on. This is the inked (but not colored or lettered) first page of a graphic novel I’m setting out on. This should be a pretty big project, and I’m actually not sure what my endgame will be as far as getting it out into the world- I want to have a big chunk of pages put together before I start thinking about whether or not to run it serially online, for instance.
The project is (temporarily) called Eyeball, and it’s about spyplanes in the early 60s. Or about not getting too lost in your job, depending on which way you want to look at it.
This one’s been gestating for quite a while; I wrote out the original plot and started scripting in 2006. I was really excited about the project, but eventually bailed because 1) I didn’t think I could draw well enough to do it justice, and 2) the thought of doing all of the visual research to get the look and feel right for a story set in 1960 just scared the piss out of me. But now I’m 6 years better at drawing (I still think it’ll be a challenge, but it’s actually possible this time) and, well, Mad Men has gone and done me the favor of researching what things looked like in 1960.
So we’ll see where this goes.
X-2
The X-2 suffers a landing mishap… which is apparently investigated by a ’76 British punk band.
X-1
A drawing of the Bell X-1, the first plane to break the sound barrier*. First flight in 1946. Design inspired by a rifle bullet because that was the only thing anyone could think of in 1945 that was supersonic.
*a German pilot claimed to have broken the sound barrier while diving in a Me-262 in 1945, but nobody really takes the claim seriously.
I’ll be drawing a lot of planes in the near future, as a warmup for the next biggish project.
Rockefeller Center
Another drawing done with my new Wacom tablet, using a picture I took as a guide.
OTTO is on indefinite hiatus
So, this is one mid-level-upsetting part of a larger, extremely upsetting situation: I’m stopping production on Otto, Protector of the North Woods. Or, more accurately, I stopped a week ago and won’t be starting up again.
What’s the deal? Well, frankly, the deal’s a pretty severe bummer. Some really, really tragic shit happened in my family last week. Bad enough that I’m still reeling from it, and probably will be for a while. At this point, I’m not really capable of creative work. But even after this upset eventually eases, the upcoming Otto storyline is largely about depression and suicide (in some ways, the whole strip is), and that’s not an area of my brain that I think would be healthy to spend a lot of time in right now.
I don’t know if the strip will eventually be revived or not. I know that eventually I’ll pick back up with some sort of creative work, but at this point I have no idea what that’ll be. Keep an eye on this space, I guess, if you’re the sort who cares.
Wall of Sound II
A drawing of a photograph of a sculpture.
Heroes (rough mix)
Heroes– wherein I take the David Bowie classic to strange (and terrible) places with my Kaosillator.
This is a very rough draft mix; I’ll probably need to bring some things up, take some things out, and add some tracks. But it’s too weird and to large in my mind not to put it out somewhere.
Like the American single version, I cut out two of the opening verses, but a different two than the ones Bowie cut– I think this one makes the narrative of the song a little clearer.
Eschaton Lite
This was originally housed on a side page of my Nowhere Band site; I realized recently that it makes a lot more sense for it to live here.
THE RULES OF ESCHATON LITE
rev 1.4, 2.9.23
GOAL
The purpose of this document is to produce a playable version of the game Eschaton as presented in Infinite Jest. As we’re making several departures/simplifications from the version laid out by David Foster Wallace, we’ll call this version Eschaton Lite.
Eschaton Lite simulates a Cold War nuclear exchange, using tennis balls thrown around on a large gamespace representing a polar-projection map of the Northern Hemisphere. Blocs made up of nation-states and treaty groups will flex their nuclear muscles at each other over a strategic prize, and all hell will inevitably break loose.
(for those who care, the departures from the full Wallace version of Eschaton are as follows: Wallace Eschaton is played on a space consisting of 6 tennis courts, arranged 3×2, and missile launches are conducted by lobbing the balls with tennis racquets; Lite’s space will generally be smaller, and balls can be thrown rather than racquet-lobbed. Additionally, Wallace Eschaton calls for heavy use of computers both before and during play; Eschaton Lite will put pre-game decisions at the Ump’s discretion and use a combination of Ump discretion and pencil-and-paper for in-game computing).
For purpose of example, this document will refer to a game scenario set in 1984, wherein the US, NATO, USSR, Warsaw Pact, and Israel will deal with a crisis in East Berlin.
The Replacements doing T. Rex
I think this is a case where it’s good that I didn’t hear about this back during my peak years of Replacements superfandom… I didn’t really properly appreciate T. Rex back then.
Wall of Sound
Hunter High Life
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the state of Wisconsin in one image.
The Gateway
This is actually the mouth of the Temperance River, flowing out to Lake Superior. The river was insanely high because of recent flooding, and was raging like I’ve never seen it.
The Twins
I think they look related.
SAVE YOUR EYES WEAR GOGGLES
Lots of good advice here. From a very old machine shop at Soudan Underground Mine State Park.
The Marshal Zhukov
An idea I co-developed with Chad Cook. You’d better believe that if I ever somehow get to fuck-you money status, I’ll be buying an old Charger and making this happen.
Woman of Mystery
Taken at Franconia Sculpture Park, which is rad.
Civil War Ninjas
(this originally ran on a now-defunct site called Modern Humorist)
by Keith Pille
Feedback on Midterm Paper
US History, 10th Grade
Richard:
I find it very painful to say this, but your midterm project is unsatisfactory in virtually every way an academic paper can be. I can only hope that this is a one-time occurrence and not a sign of deeper problems that could compromise what promises to be a fine scholarly career.
I must say that it was rather unorthodox to open your paper with what I can only characterize as a personal attack on me and my so-called “revisionist history.” While I grant you it is academically healthy to question the veracity of the information you are given in your textbooks, it is hardly constructive to couple your claims with crude statements about my family life, moral character, and mental capacities. I did my best to prevent my evaluation of your work from being colored by your opening remarks. Continue reading Civil War Ninjas
Derailleur- Lovers
Video for a song my band did, which isn’t about the love between a cat and his scratcher but might as well be.
A Bad Day to Be A Sturgeon
This is an essay I wrote in 2005 for American Nerd, a now-defunct web magazine I used to run.
1.
Some fish are beautiful works of natural engineering. Northern pike, for instance, are streamlined and powerful-looking and possess the same sort of deadly grace as a fighter jet. Or look at trout; for a hiker, there are few treats greater than hiking next to a clear, swiftly-moving stream and spotting a school of trout hovering in formation. You can almost convince yourself that the piscine evolutionary process includes an aesthetic clause, some hidden set of criteria that weights grace and beauty as highly as survival and reproduction.
The lake sturgeon is proof that this is a hollow conceit. There are uglier things in the world than the sturgeon, but not too many. Long, thin, and rubbery, an individual sturgeon looks like a beefed-up seagoing vacuum hose with a few perfunctory fins, an impression furthered by the limp sucker mouth hanging down from the bottom of the fish’s head. The bottom of the fish is your standard fishbelly white; the top is a dark brownish-green that wouldn’t be at all out of place in a diaper. A set of whiskers (barbels if you want to be scientific about it) represents the sturgeon’s only attempt to snazz it up, and, well, barbels as an accessory don’t even look that great on catfish.
Lake sturgeon, to put it bluntly, don’t look like something you’d want to eat, much less go to any effort to catch. If anything, they look like they’d be useful for scaring children or maybe leaving in someone’s bed if you wanted to send a particularly emphatic message.
It’s hard to believe, then, that the sturgeon is capable of inducing mass hysteria (well, maybe if a giant one rose out of Lake Michigan and started menacing the city of Green Bay). But that’s the case. Every five years, Eastern Wisconsin’s brief sturgeon-spearing season drums up enough excitement to cover the lakes with flash towns of ice-fishing shanties, each one full of normally-rational adults willing to stare for hours into dark water with a spear in hand, hoping for the chance to impale a butt-ugly fish.