I'm pleased to announce that I've finally finished the second issue of my comic book, Watching Days Become Years. It's 48 pages long, and will be published by Sparkplug Comic Books sometime in the first third of 2005 (I'll post the exact details when we know them). Here's a preview of the cover...


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Rainy tonight, rainy last few days - I’m listening to Sonic Youth’s nyc ghosts & flowers for the first time in a couple of years. It’s really sounding great on a night like this. A perfect rainy night album - drowning out the raindrops, car splashes and occasional bursts of thunder, with plinky guitars, scorching feedback squalls - and fucked up semi-beat lyrics. It’s creepy that I’ve yet to pick up their 2004 release (first one I‘ve skipped in a long time), was burned out again after Murray Street, but now I’m wondering why. I should probably pick it up - probably will now. Of course, these days so much music hits the shelves, who can even pretend to keep up & keep informed - who can hear more than a fraction of the new releases. It gets more difficult every year to decide what to spend ones limited time & money on/with. Looking over the hundreds of year end best of lists is endlessly intimidating. Wish I could hear it all - have the time to check it all out. Even the records I’ve really liked this year, I feel like I haven’t been able to spend enough time with them, swept along the avalanche of my interests - still trying to catch up with last century’s news. My subjective year end list will forthcoming shortly - and looks to be surprisingly un-jazzy. 6:58 PM >>> 0 comments

I don’t quite understand how this DVD can be so inexpensive (less than ten U.S.D.). Paris, Texas is one of my favorite movies - I’m very happy it has finally been released on R1 DVD, in a high quality transfer, including Wim Wenders commentary (which I’ll probably never listen to, but still...) and twenty minutes of deleted scenes (which I may not watch). This was one of the key movies in my life. When I first watched it in the early 90s (cropped, no doubt) on a cable TV broadcast, it helped to open my eyes to a whole ‘nother way of looking at cinema - helped to open my eyes to wanting a lot more out of motion pictures. And it still holds up. Certainly, this is the role of Harry Dean Stanton’s lifetime - I’m sure he has never been better (even in Repo Man). But the true star is the look of the picture... especially throughout the first half - it’s one of the most beautifully photographed movies I’ve ever seen. Those shots in the desert - the shots of Los Angeles - the freeways - even coming into the nightmare of Houston never looked better. I’ve got my fingers crossed that in 2005 we’ll finally see some more of Wenders key films make it out onto DVD, including The State of Things, Kings of the Road, Alice in the Cities and a R1 release of the uncut 5hr version of Until The End of the World. 1:04 AM >>> 0 comments

As far as I know, Wong Kar Wai’s latest film, 2046, doesn’t even have a scheduled US release date yet, however - it’s already been released in a fantastic all-region transfer (with English subs) from Mei Ah, which I’m very happy to have just watched. 2046 was pretty much my most anticipated release for the year, considering if I had to pick a favorite movie, I’d probably pick Wong Kar Wai’s last film, In the Mood For Love (which may have knocked his Chungking Express out of that most coveted spot). I’m not going to spoil it for ya, but if you liked those movies at least half as much as I did, you’ll definitely want to track down this DVD. 2046 to some extent has it’s own unique flavor, but it essentially picks up where In the Mood left off. Perhaps it’s somewhat slightly less lush, but it’s also less claustrophobic, and even has a few (welcome) flashes of humor. It's also a more complicated picture. Here, the focus is all on Tony Leung, moving through life somewhat empty now (after whispering his secrets away), drifting through a series of relationships - either without letting himself get too involved, or simply incapable of getting too involved. Again, the images, photography, editing, repetition, sets, costumes and actors all combine to create a truly perfect example of cinema as poetry. Another extremely mesmerizing two hours that comes very close to reaching the same heights as it's prequel. 11:29 PM >>> 0 comments

I finally got the chance to see Abbas Kiarostami’s 2002 film Ten tonight, having picked up the recently released R1 DVD over the weekend. Kiarostami has been one of my favorite filmmakers since I first saw Where is the Friends Home? in the mid-90s. It’s frustrating how difficult it still is to get to see his movies in this country - even after the “success” of Taste of Cherry and The Wind Will Carry Us. I believe Through The Olive Trees was released on VHS, but I was never able to track it down (which I mention here to show my continuing frustration). I wasn’t sure Ten was ever going to make it out in R1, and was even considering ordering the expensive French DVD, so this release is much welcome and hopefully a sign of more to come in 2005 (check out the filmography in the liner notes). Actually Ten is quite a bit different than the other Kiarostami films I’ve seen, it’s actually quite a bit more minimalist than any of the others, which is amazing considering his natural approach is already pretty much, keep it as simple as possible. Here, the whole 90 minute picture is shot on digital video inside a car in long takes, with very few edits. There’s ten numbered scenes as a woman drives around town, giving rides to people and having conversations, with her son (a few times), her sister (twice), and a few strangers. Mostly the camera is focused on their faces (from a dashboard type angle) - we only catch brief glimpses of the city racing by, behind their heads. The film has a very documentary feel, to the extent that you wonder if some of the participants even knew they were being filmed. There’s also an 83 minute “legitimate” documentary on Ten, shot by Kiarostami included on the DVD that I expect explains how the film was actually made (which I’ll probably watch tomorrow night, and have all my questions answered). The main thing here is that somehow Kiarostami has delivered 90 minutes of cinema that is unlike any other movies you can see anywhere else - found a truly original approach to showing & telling his tale of a divorced & remarried Iranian woman and her relationship to her son, to her family and to society - and though the movie, we can see that society, that really, we could see no other way. 11:40 PM >>> 0 comments

Here's the trailer for Terrence Malick's The New World, which apparently isn't scheduled to be released until November 2005(!?!). Anyhow, the trailer looks beautiful. Cannot fucking wait. 7:06 PM >>> 0 comments

I’ve been listening a lot to the latest DJ Krush CD Jaku. It’s actually the first of his records I’ve ever owned, which is surprising as he has released a ton over at least the last ten years. I’m liking it A LOT. The feel is pretty mid-tempo to laid-back, but with a definite intensity at all times. Every piece seems to fit together perfectly. The somewhat slippy beats mix are often mixed with traditional Japanese acoustic instruments - I particularly like they way they utilize the shakuhachi. Perhaps to switch things up a bit, there’s also two vocal tracks featuring Def-Jux “stars” Mr. Lif (whose I Phantom was one of my favorites from 2002) and Aesop Rock. Krush manages to use each in a way I‘ve never quite heard them sound before, burying them a bit more than usual under the mix, but it works. There’s almost a soundtrack quality to a lot of the tracks, there’s a creepy feeling in there - some kinda monster from outer-space. But the ultimate highlights for me are the short instrumental tracks Road to Nowhere and Song 2 that seem to embrace repetition and truly get my head bobbin the most. Will be picking up more of the back catalog soon. 10:05 PM >>> 0 comments

Nouvelle Vague offers a CD full of quirky, bossa nova-ish, somewhat lounge versions of thirteen, punk, post-punk and new wave semi-classics. It’s a great concept. They’ve peeled off what might seem like the essential aspects of each song (most everything aggressive & loud), and recast them in much more straightforward and placid musical settings (with only soft, lovely, female vocalists) that, among other things, helps to highlight some great songwriting. On the one hand, they’re turning these songs into “easy listening,” but on the other hand, they reveal new beauty and humor that was sometimes hidden in the originals, and for the most part have created a CD that is engaging and quite a lot of fun. The funniest track of all must be the Dead Kennedy’s classic “Too Drunk to Fuck,” which is so much more hilarious than even the original. P.I.L.’s “Thjs in Not a Love Song,” and the Clash’s “Guns of Brixton” also fare very extremely well. They even breathe some life back into “Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division, letting us hear this music again with new ears, and their version of The Undertones “Teenage Kicks” is simply perfection. The final track, a cover of the Specials “Friday Night Saturday Morning” is an especially wonderful way to close out the album - a funny, gorgeous dream of an album that I expect to be listening to quite a lot of over the coming months. 7:45 PM >>> 0 comments

Notre Musique is the new film by Jean-Luc Godard. If you’ve seen any of his films since the end of the 60s you probably know what to expect - a challenging essay-like film that makes little conventional sense, is willfully obtuse, overly intellectual (or at least often over my head), and occasionally beautiful. Notre Musique (Our Music) is reportedly a meditation on human violence and opens with a ten minute segment of overly familiar images of war, the same old documentary footage we’ve seen so much of that the impact of the images, the horror of the images has almost been drained, mixed also (strangely) with footage from some war films. The bulk of the film (sixty plus minutes) takes place in Sarajevo, once war torn but now life goes on - the city is being rebuilt, the airplanes are landing carrying Godard to town to give a lecture on the way images can be combined with text. And/Or a young Israeli woman has come to town to interview some people and has a lengthy discussion with a Palestinian. It’s slightly weird that though this section of the film is set in Sarajevo, it mostly seems to be focused on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The woman does mention that she came there to see how peace can be achieved where it seemed impossible. Street scenes filmed in this section are especially wonderful to look at - magnificent images. The final ten minutes of the movie take place in a sort of garden of Eden / Heaven and somewhat reminds one unfortunately of similar scenes from The Loss of Sexual Innocence, the truly awful film by Mike Figgis. I left the theater after Notre Musique feeling predominately confused and lost (“what the fuck was all that going on about, anyway?”) which may not be a bad thing in this day and age. 9:51 AM >>> 0 comments

I feel kind of stupid because I didn’t know that Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls was an unfinished book. It was weird when all of a sudden large chunks of the story started going missing (only explained by a footnote). It was disappointing as the book slowly unraveled. This sort of works with Kafka, but here, the book slowly bleed to death in a most disappointing fashion once the second volume was reached. If I’d stopped reading at the end of volume one, I wouldn’t have been completely satisfied, but I would have been content - with some amusing characters, funny scenes and perhaps some insight into Russia of the early 1800’s - but I kept plugging on through the diminishing returns of volume two. I turned the last page, soul dead as well. Frustrating experience. 9:12 PM >>> 0 comments