It's friday night, late, and we're listening to Pink Floyd. And not even the "good" records, we're listening to The Wall and The Final Cut. Remind me again what separates this from the Arcade Fire and a few other contemporary bands other than some dated guitar tones. There's a lot here to listen to, again.
We're in the windy city for a wedding tonight, to be held on the 100th floor of the 16th tallest building in the world. Live feeds from the John Hancock Center are here. The brochure about the Hancock Observatory says that the 360 degree views span up to 80 miles and four states. Crazy.
Rose and I are in Chicago and I just played her the Sean Kingston song "Beautiful Girls." I heard this in Atlanta a month ago and assumed it would be a hit and now i can't get away from it and it's destroying my brain. Stop this song before it kills again.
Picked up Douglas Wolk's Reading Comics the other day and I just finished it.
It's pretty much the best book on comics I've read since, probably, Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes. Both books are very personal takes on comic books and their importance to our cultural history. Wolk spends a good degree of the beginning of the book making a stand that calling comics anything other than comics (i.e. graphic novels, illustrated novella, what-have-you) is a classist evasion. In other words, if you like a comic book, and you're an intelligent, cultured, classy type, it can't possibly BE a comic book -- it's a graphic novel.
Good point.
He also does some deep dives on creators who have done interesting work, although the bulk of the authors he tackles are very well established and have been around for a while (a point he notes several times, with the caveat that comics take a long time to create, so it takes a while for a body of work to develop). I would love to see his take on Ed Brubaker, Brian Michael Bendis, Garth Ennis and the rest of the "new" guys.
