Archives for October, 2009

Punishment:

Now, what exactly is the tragedy when something like this happens? Is it the hard work that went into the penciling being lost forever, right when I was feeling that I was getting back into it? Is it the hour or so of time that is now lost and wasted? Is it the loss of paper, something I’m already starting to reuse the backs of old comics for? Is it the waste of liquid that is now all over the floor and makes my room smell like mildew-y coffee-substitute?

I don’t know, some sort of mix, I assume. Still, this, coupled with the either missing or never-done page 52, I am getting my first taste of setbacks in a project I already know I’m committing two years to.

Bright sides? I shouldn’t have been drinking that mildew-y coffee-substitute anyways, and now maybe the redrawn page will be better?

I don’t know. Also, I still haven’t found that missing pen.

ANYWAYS,

Here’s something that is NOT a drag. A little bit of a song, some sort of bizarre surf demon trance.

Spooks

It’s called Spooks, but that title is sort of a placeholder.

But hey, I’m starting to think more seriously at what Album #5 (so many!) is going to be like!

Which means, of course, “David Robert Jones 4 Life.”

Sorry I spend so much (all) of my time blogging here about David Bowie, but the man is fresh on my mind. I do owe a lot of my personal and intellectual freedom to the man. That freedom to be yourself, and all. In high school, you know (when I was in it, the way I wrote that, you’d think I’m IN high school. i just got my COLLEGE ALUMNI ID CARD for goodness’ sake). Anyways, there’s no one to look up to to put up a fight for. Like when I grew my hair out (and wore fur coats and petticoats for shirts), and kids threw me into lockers, it’s easy to think yourself friendless. But then you have the age-old moment of staring at a picture of Ziggy Stardust and knowing it’s all okay.

HA! That is the funniest thing I have ever written.

Anyways, I had a point to all this. Recently a tape reel went up on eBay, declaring itself recorded on August 13th, 1974 at Sigma Sound Studios, and also declaring itself to be a recording of a rehearsal by David Bowie. (all images and audio files are hosted and found by the lovely people at The Illustrated DB Discography)

Now, all the song titles check out in Bowie lore. Young Americans and After Today we all know, of course. I Am A Lazer is a song Bowie wrote for Ava Cherry, one of his backup singers he was a little involved with. Shilling The Rubes is an exciting name to see as it’s long been known to be a working title of Young Americans, the album.

But still, too good to be true, right? Yes and no.

The no, first. Snippets were then culled from the reel. And they are so 100% and Fantastically real that it’s chilling! The glimpse into the working world of DB is astounding to have, not to mention the fact that the songs themselves sound INCREDIBLE. Shilling The Rubes in particular sounds like the beginnings of a great lost-classic-type of song. Here are the snippets (again, hosted by the DB discog site):

I Am A Lazer
Shilling the Rubes
Young Americans
After Today

It certainly is not every day when we get to hear songs culled from the Bowie archives that aren’t intended to ever see the light of day, let alone when we encounter songs we didn’t even knew he wrote!

So, like I said earlier, there is a part of this that’s too good to be true. Before the auction could take place, and before a supposed second reel could be put up for sale, word is that Bowie’s lawyers got involved and asked for the reels to be returned. It looks like these minute-snippets are all we’re going to get, unless some divining angel intervenes.

Who knows, though! We did get those Trident ‘72 sessions last year, and the recent Space Oddity 40th Anniversary edition had some unreleased jams on it (the whole set sounds incredible, by the way. Hearing “Conversation Piece,” one of the top five, in a new stereo mix, was totally mind-blowing).

But still, we got what we got, and what we got is terribly exciting!

Mine is in grey.

And missing somewhere in my apartment.

Occasionally I still check BowieNet, David Bowie’s official website. Over the many years since Reality, his last album, and in the light of his increasing doing-nothing (of which I can not fault him for, the man has done more than 10 of us non-superhumans put together), I’ve let my subscription lapse.

It’s a shame that I’ve had to do so, but honestly, the only thing it could do for me now is give me the chance to win some contests. I’m mildly interested in having a signed t-shirt he looked at once (not interested), but really. It’s 60 dollars spent better elsewhere.

Anyways, the point is that it’s “hours…”’s 10th birthday. The last album of Bowie’s 90s period, and as such, is often similarly derided as every other 90s album. I, of course, don’t really buy into it. I love all the 90s albums, with Buddha of Suburbia being one of my favorites (and an oft-forgotten gem), and 1. Outside and Earthling being some daring and exciting pieces of music. Bowie was truly making music for himself in those years, after the previous decade of playing to the masses. Nile Rodgers said of the recording sessions for Black Tie White Noise that Bowie was, much to Rodgers’ chagrin, uninterested in bettering their previous collaboration, Let’s Dance. While one could read that as laziness on Bowie’s part, the resulting decade’s output really shows it as independence, a willingness to make music that he would want to listen to himself.

But everyone says “hours…”, the final Bowie album of the 90s is boring, a misstep, an in-between piece of music. I will agree with the latter in this. It’s certainly an album that finds Bowie changing where he wants to go with his music. The daring collaborations with Reeves Gabrels that Outside and Earthling birthed are clearly of waning interest to him. Now, I doubt it was so clear a decision (”oh, Reeves, I just don’t want to be edgy anymore”). Certainly there is still much avant-noodling sprinkling this album, and of course, it’s history is also a little unique.

Most of the songs on hours… (from now on I’m dropping the ellipsis) started as songs that were written for the soundtrack of a video game, namely Omikron: The Nomad Soul, which I’ve never played or been able to, but it’s certainly an interesting concept for a game (inhabiting different characters dimensions, a melding of action/puzzle/fighting), and it also certainly fits with Bowie’s pro-technology stance of the 90s as well, what with his pioneering use of the internet.

I don’t know exactly why DB got involved with the game, but he makes appearances in it, and does the soundtrack. A few of the songs on Hours, “New Angels of Promise,” “The Dreamers,” come from it. As such, they’re a little more strangely composed than the other songs. They have the feeling of being written for aliens, which is fine, because they were (plus, writing songs for aliens is nothing new for the man).

The fact that these songs are alien though, makes them not mesh with the earlier songs on the album. These form a bit of a theme, which was oft-discussed at the time of its release. For the first time, everyone said, Bowie is looking back on his life! As

Anyways, it’s true. The earlier songs are imbued with a sense of loss, a loss yet to come, but still felt. It’s aging, through and through. It’s like DB’s running to catch up with the future is finally catching up with him, and the realization of this gives him pause.

Hours (at least the non-Omikron songs) is Bowie making an album not only just for himself again, or for the kids, or for the masses, or for experimentation’s sake. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with any of those options, but honestly, it must have been tiring to keep making albums ahead of a curve no one knew was coming yet. Like he says, “I’m dreaming my life away.” It seems like an apt phrase for Bowie’s 90s output (hell, for his entire output). Hours seems like one of the first times that Bowie was writing about himself, unfettered with character.

The thing about Hours is that it’s full up with a lot of great songs. Very nice songs, nicely written, nicely performed. While it seems like Bowie and his new band (the beginnings of the band he would continue to perform with for his next 2-3 albums) are trying to find their feet in this new Bowie-as-Bowie world, it’s fun to go on the ride with them. And Bowie’s lyrics, touching on age, can be moving, as is his delivery, stunning as usual. They aren’t as up close and personal as his next album Heathen’s are yet, the cards are still a little close to the chest.

In a way, that makes it a lot like R.E.M.’s Lifes Rich Pageant, where Michael Stipe’s vocals are finally turned up in the mix, but his lyrics are still in the fog. It’s an interesting midsection, a slice of almost-there. More appropriately as a comparison, even, would be to Bowie’s own Lodger, the other misunderstood runt of Bowie’s mega-litter. Lodger was also caught in both the middle and the end of a phase of his career. He had stretched the compositional anti-formulas of Low and “Heroes” too thin over a batch of songs that might have been better served cut as straight pop-songs.

But still, despite this, take a fully-realized pop song like Thursday’s Child, with it’s touching singalong chorus, or the growing-up feel of Seven, or the adult-contempo-yet-no-less-touching pop of Survive. They’re all golden! Even the experiment of the fan-written lyrics in What’s Really Happening isn’t a total dud. It’s a cybersong, through and through. There’s nothing as easily-digestible or as easily made into an anthem as “Rebel, Rebel,” but the subject matter on Hours is more adult, more difficult (or just inappropriate) to really throw your arms in the air for.

Yet still, despite the chilling cover of 1999 Bowie holding the exhausted (or dead?) 1997 Bowie in his arms, it’s really Heathen, the next album, that is the true beginning of the next phase of Bowie’s music, where his goals, his emotions, his latter-period vision, truly came in to focus. But Hours remains as a completely enjoyable and exciting album, one that makes little demands of its listeners. Such a thing is never a bad thing in music. I’m a staunch believer in “harmless without being pointless.” Sometimes, a melody is enough.

It’s just still and always (until it isn’t) a shame we haven’t heard anything from him since 2003’s (!!!) Reality.

Hours… 10 years old.

Thursday’s Child:

Survive:

Something In The Air from Omikron:

So, now it is time for an update on Birds & Wolves!

To be brought up to speed, B&W (Bee an’ Dubz? No thanks you) is the book I am working on right now, which is looking to be something of a 400-page epic.

The way I came to that estimate is: seeing as the first chapter came out to be around 40 pages, and there are 10 chapters in this book, that should be around 400. It’s a total estimate, though. I don’t know if every chapter will be the same amount of pages. And as I work on it more, you know, maybe there’ll be only nine chapters? No, I don’t know, that’s giving too much (nothing) away.

So, the biggest problem that I face in my day-to-day-i-am-working-on-this-book is “how do I explain it?” Like, what’s a good snappy one or two sentence description that encapsulates everything it will be while also sounding really interesting? From a purely dollaz point of view, I need a good sentence so if someone google searched “Birds & Wolves” on google and found Chapter One on Lulu, they’d read it and say “sounds interesting,” ka-ching! But of course, there is more to it than that. I need that sentence so I can guide myself along, too! Working on a book of this magnitude is a long and arduous process, one I know next-to-nothing about. But I enjoy doing it.

Anyways, it’s about death, seeing your mortality for the first time. Obviously more happens than that. The lead character, Arden, is emotionally bruised on a day-to-day basis by his gf. He has dreams of a forest, with a Cat that goads him into sticking it out. He remembers an old friend from high school, one who was very important to him.

I mean, technically, it’s the first sentence that encapsulates. I don’t know. Here’s the thing: at one point in my tenure at SAIC, someone said comics with people are boring and that’s why people draw animals (actually, i think i totally made up that they said it was boring, it’s just the gist i got from it). Well, there are few animals in my comic! Does that make it boring? No! It doesn’t. But I worry about writing a melodramatic comic book.

I guess it’s a familial thing. My dad writes screenplays that are dramas about people. People don’t buy screenplays about people. I’m just worried that people don’t buy comics about people, either (this is not true— Jimmy Corrigan is a person, but I can’t draw as flashy as Chris Ware can [bad example?]).

Well, no matter. All that whining masks an important milestone: I penciled page 60 today!!! That’s huge! It’s of course the longest thing I’ve done. But still, a good number. I’m excited about that.

Now, some samples of pages I’ve been working on. I’m afraid they’re all lousy Photobooth pictures, but that’s the best I can do right now.

The page I’m working on this moment (note the whited-out wine stain):

Some other select Chapter 2 (Birds) Pages:

Stay tuned for other things. Hopefully soon I’ll go downtown and scan some things, and I can show you all some high-quality ANYTHING.

Love,
Ian

P.S. what if i changed my name to Neon? jk.

I have forgotten to mention!

I will be participating in Challenger Comic’s 24 hour Comic Book Day extravaganza this weekend, starting Saturday at 11AM. Boy howdy! That’ll be some crazy stuff no doubt. My friend Joey Jacks is also participating, so that should make it that much more pleasant!

Since I’m forgoing the Fever Ray concert to do this, I’ve got to make my comic simply the best. Missing Fever Ray is my impetus for greatness. I won’t disappoint you or myself! Anyways, reason to get excited, yes it is.

Here’s their info about it. I don’t know if you can come hang out and egg us on, but you certainly should try! Who knows what will happen!!!!

Over the summer I played A show. I think it was one, I don’t think I played any more than that. Anyways, it was a fun show! I played some songs I’ve never played before (which i try to do at every show), and some covers (that always seem to sneak in). Soon I’ll put up the most recent show I played, but I have to find the DV tape first. :D

Anyways, there’s much more on my channel, so do take a look!