THE KRAKEN BUSTERS is a new podcast project I have going, telling the story of the somehow-mostly-forgotten conflict between the United States and an ocean full of angry sea monsters just after World War 2.
If you like Mike Duncan and Dan Carlin but wish their work had more giant squids and octopi, well, this is the show for you.
New episodes come out weekly. You can find the show at all of the usual podcast outlets, or stream it directly from the site.
Every morning, I get up, consult the twitter feed of the Iowa City Police Log, and draw a one-panel cartoon based on it. This started out as a get-through-the-winter whim and has turned into a get-through-a-pandemic-hellscape coping mechanism. The resulting comics get posted to a Twitter thread and to my Instagram feed, in both cases paired with their inciting Police Log entry.
People seem to be pretty into these, which is great! TPT, Minnesota’s Public Television station, even did a short piece on them, where I talk about my process, my motivations, and the sort-of-intentional larger political point of the strips in an era where we as a society are rethinking the way police departments should be constituted. They also put KEITH PILLE – CARTOONIST on the screen, so I guess despite endless questions about my artistic identity, now I know: I’m a cartoonist.
So I recorded an EP of acoustic country covers of Clash songs (technically Clash and Clash-associated songs, since two of them are songs the Clash themselves were covering). I’m really proud of it. I’d like you to take a listen at one of the links above, and if you feel like downloading the MP3s, please feel free.
I started out the year planning on recording an Awesome Boys* album, but the plan was for it to be all noise rock, continuing the sound of the EP I recorded in 2019. But as the work started on that in February, I realized that my musical mood was shifting back towards country-rock (no doubt affected by all the time talking about Uncle Tupelo for We’ve Been Had). And then the pandemic hit, and the world full-on caught on fire, and I just couldn’t escape the feeling that we were living in Strummer Times. And that was just when the pandemic kicked off; in May, when Minneapolis burst into flames after a police killing and took the rest of the country with it, it seemed even more applicable. The first verse of “Know Your Rights” could be about George Floyd, for fuck’s sake. So the idea of an EP of country-style Clash covers gained a foothold in my brain and just kept taking up more and more space.
Uncharacteristically for me, I spent about a month rehearsing and working out arrangements for the songs I picked (my neighbor must have gotten so tired of hearing me work on “Straight to Hell” on my front porch). And I decided early on that I’d need to edit some of the lyrics. Which felt sacrilegious, given that Joe Strummer was a towering figure and I’m just a guy, but some of the words are so specific to his life and outlook that they didn’t work for me. Or, in the case of the second verse of “Know Your Rights,” the dystopian situation described by the Clash in 1982 is actually too supportive and generous to sound bad in the dystopian situation of 2020.
I spent about a week in early July recording basic tracks in my home studio setup, and then another few weeks mixing. My starting point for the target sound was the way Peter Buck produced Uncle Tupelo on March 16-20, 1992, but I wound up wandering a bit from that, especially because covid quarantine meant that I had to do all of this myself instead of being able to organically have a band vibe develop.
For cover art, my wife, Rebecca Collins, is a great collage artist who had recently started exploring punk-aesthetic collages. So it seemed like a natural thing to ask her to make a cover. We talked a bunch about what I wanted it to evoke: the Midwest, menace, humor, death. her results speak for themselves; and now we own several cut-up vintage copies of Guns and Ammo.
So, yeah. Check it out, and I hope you like it! Some day when live music is a thing again, I’d love to perform these live.
*You might point out that it’s confusing and stupid for me to record music in the real world and attribute it to The Awesome Boys when that’s the name of the fake band in my old webcomic that I always insisted wasn’t autobiographical. And you’d probably be right. But it seemed funny in 2011 and at this point I’m just kind of used to it.
…is a free newsletter I’m starting as a birthday gift to myself. Each installment will be a short-to-medium thought about art, working with a very broad definition of art: visual arts, comics, movies, music, literature, god knows what else; and covering both appreciating art, art history, art theory, making art, all that. Sometimes focusing on individual works of art or artists; sometimes wandering all over the place. I can’t promise structure or high-quality copy-editing, but I can promise fun (and a bare minimum of one post a month). And although I hope this’ll still be fun and interesting for my pals from the world of academic art history, I want to aim this more at people who like to appreciate art and culture but haven’t spent a bunch of time in seminars talking theory.
SO SIGN UP OVER AT SUBSTACK! I’m in the process of working through my mountain of ideas for posts, and I’ll start sending them out once there’s a moderately-sized pool of subscribers.
SOME TOPIC IDEAS THAT MIGHT MAKE IT INTO THE NEWSLETTER:
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.
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.
…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.
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.
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.
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
