I finally picked up the collected trade paperback of Warren Ellis’ Black Summer, only to discover that my American Prospect cover story from last year, which discussed Black Summer as part of the trend of post-9/11 politicized comics, is quoted on the back cover. As a longtime and, let’s just say highly committed fan of […]

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Remember waaaay back when I did that vlog interview with Doug Wolk about his fantastic book Reading Comics?  Well, we actually had a pretty long and (I thought) interesting conversation, only a few minutes of which ultimately made it into that vlog.  And with Reading Comics having picked up an Eisner over the summer, it […]

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Fleeting thought spurred by anticipation of Built to Spill doing Perfect from Now On at 9:30 Club tomorrow: This apparent trend of long-running indie bands performing classic albums in their entirety (Mission of Burma doing Vs. at Black Cat a while back was stellar) is presumably partly a function of a new generation discovering seminal […]

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A commenter over at Spencer’s notes a fun fact I was heretofore unaware of: Guitarist Robert Quine of the Voidoids was actually the nephew of legendary philosopher W.V.O. Quine. Possibly less fun, but still sort of entertaining factoids for you all: David Berman of the Silver Jews is, as I may have mentioned here previously, […]

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Apparently some folks I know slightly have been working on a new film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Harrison Bergeron.” I have mixed feelings about this: On the one hand, I’m a fan of original story, and I even have a soft spot for the 1995 Showtime version. The latter deviated massively from Vonnegut’s […]

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I found myself this weekend in one of those perennial conversations about which contemporary bands are likely to hold up over time: Which albums of the past five years, say, are we still going to be listening to a decade out? But as I was mulling this a little later, I was suddenly struck by […]

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A quick tip for iPhone wielders, because I’m finding this pretty handy.  If you’re like me, there are various different places where events you might want to attend are stored. You’ve got your own calendar on the phone, which is probably the one that reminds you what you’re actually planning to do day to day.  […]

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Speaking of The Dark Knight, I’ve already had a couple requests for a “FISA analyisis” of the movie (believe it or not), and since Ezra’s already brought it up, I suppose I’m due to throw in my two cents.  Rest of the post below the fold in in the unlikely event that someone reading this […]

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Harrison Hoffman at CNET thinks that the sudden elevation of The Dark Knight to the top film at IMDB illustrates a hole in the “wisdom of crowds” model. I think this is a bit off. For one, if we’re taking “the wisdom of crowds” to mean the bundle of concepts articulated in James Surowiecki’s book, […]

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