More media

Mixed media today - some comics, some books, some movies, some music - all kinds of stuff that's flopping around my brain...

We start with the outstanding Superman / Batman: Absolute Power from a few years ago. I've reviewed it before, but I'll throw it back out there. This is an excellent volume and a great continuation of the Superman/Batman run. It is, however, only for readers out there who are conversant with the DC universe, because any newbies are going to miss a lot of this storyline. The writers aren't writing for the uninitiated here, but it's excellent.

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That excellence contrasts pretty dramatically with the crap that continues to be the Nightwing series. This volume - Renegade - sees Nightwing continue to flit from topic to topic and life to life as the every new writer (I'm hoping they're new writers, because if not, it's so random that it feels new every few months) seems to want to take Nightwing into an entirely different direction. Over the course of his time in Bludhaven, Nightwing has been a good cop, a mob guy, a dirty cop, and now a super bad guy. The total lack of consistent direction for Dickie continues apace.

In this volume we get Dick taking on an apprentice - Deathstroke's daughter - as he tries to prove to Deathstroke (apparently the guy he was working toward the whole time - which makes most of the previous volume seem pointless) that he's really not a good guy anymore. When read as a broken-up monthly, this storyline might have worked, in the full collection, however, the story seems to move much too quickly as Nightwing seemingly gets Deathstroke's trust too quickly, turns Deathstroke's daughter against Deathstroke (sorry, um, spolier just before this note) way too quickly.

And somehow we're supposed to believe that Batman isn't going to step in when his oldest apprentice apparently goes off the reservation.

All crap. Continued crap.

And then we get a seemingly random issue that is somehow in the middle of Infinite Crisis before Batman finally shows up.

Seriously they should have let him die rather than continue to subject the character to this randomly horrible, directionless story telling.

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Grizzly Man is an interesting film. It is, on its surface, a pretty simple documentary about a man who spent thirteen summers living the the grizzly bears in an Alaskan national park and was eventually killed by the giants that he claimed to have been guarding / protecting.

The film is, however, a much more nuanced portrait of a man who found himself more comfortable in the world of the bears instead of the world of the people. The view of Timothy Treadwell that we get wanders among the extremes of self-appointed eco-warrior, bi-polar social misfit, filmmaker and artist, pleasant drifter, and mentally challenged, emotionally stunted young man, never quite settling on any one aspect of Treadwell's character.

He was all of those, and in the end, we see him as we choose to see him. Treadwell was a grey enough man following a nebulous enough goal with a debatable purpose that our view of Treadwell is ultimately a reflection on ourselves. He is the ultimate blank slate, capable of accepting anything we cast at him without being able to refute any of our choices. As such, I have my only one gripe about the film: that Werner Herzog's narration doesn't allow for things to be quite as blank as I might like it to be. As narrator, Herzog interjects his opinion in a number of places where I wish he would have left things up to the viewer to interpret.

The film isn't prefect, far from it - it drags a bit toward the middle of the film. It is, however, a revealing portrait of a man attempting to find his way in whatever world he has chosen for himself.

And it doesn't hurt that there's a great soundtrack by Richard Thompson, Jim O'Rourke, and some other people I've not really heard of.

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Seven Swans by Sufjan Stevens was a bit of a surprise for me after my first foray into his music with Illinoise. Where Illinoise was rambling and gorgeous and all over the place - up-tempo numbers alternating with slower songs, Seven Swans is much calmer, much more focused. According to a number of the reviews that I've read, the album is about Sufjan's christianity, but I'll admit that I didn't get that from my listenings. I just got a very pretty album that's much lower key than the other work that I know from the artist.

It's a gorgeous album, but as it's so much calmer than the other work that I enjoyed so much, I didn't like this one quite as much. Good stuff, just didn't hit me quite the same way.

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At the recommendation of a coworked, I headed into the oeuvre of The Black Keys. I'd heard one of their songs, dug it, and proceeded to check out five of their discs from the library. So far, I've worked my way through three of the discs and have two more to go.

Their debut was The Big Come Up and must've been one hell of a debut shot for anybody who heard it three years ago when it dropped. It's no surprise, however, that the Keys have become tied to the White Stripes - another guitar/drum duo that had (at first, at least) a similar lo-fi sound - but The Big Come Up isn't of the same core as Jack White's pair. The Big Come Up is electric blues echoing ZZ Top's earliest work - minus the Texas swing element - and tying in much more tightly to the old brokedown blues men of the Mississippi Delta than anything that's been popular with the Rolling Stone crowd in the past couple of decades.

This album is total swamp and fuzz, full and rich all the way through and just dripping with the blues. Toward the end of the album, the occasional classic rock riff begins to fade to the surface, but the growl of the words never moves into the sort of self-parody that classic rock modernists throw down with a wink. Instead, this is the work of two guys who were looking to do nothing more than play the blues on a stratocaster and finish up the third set as a hell of a bar band. It's not a remorseful album or a sad one. It's the blues played with amazing energy. Hell of a start...

The other disc of theirs that I've enjoyed was Chulahoma, a six-song EP of Junior Kimbrough covers. Again the paid rocks the blues in the dirtiest of ways. The covers are not simple, traditional blues covers but rather opportunities for the Keys to take songs that they've clearly loved and heard thousands of times and make them their own. Instead of repeating the exact same riffs, the guitars use them as starting points from which to add new tones and notes. It's a great tribute without ever being fawning, reverent without being imitative.

Magic Potion is the final Black Keys release that I've gotten through, and it's the one I enjoyed the least. It's not a bad album, it just isn't quite as bluesy and muddy as the other two that I enjoyed so much. This one leans a little more modern, a little more classic rock than the others. As we first listened to the album a couple of weeks ago in the car, the girl commented that it sounded like they were trying to be Jimi Hendrix in one song and Pink Floyd in another, and I hear those same echoes.

As their first album on a major label - Nonesuch, home to Wilco, doncha know - this is an album that ran a huge risk for the Keys. So many groups misstep on their attempts to move popularity from devoted following to wider scale - or at least lose the love of their first fans because they've "sold out". Typically, the difficulty comes from the fans as it's hard to let other people into the party, to become one of millions of fans rather than one of the throusands.

Certainly, the Black Keys have suffered some from that, but this forst major label release isn't anything to scoff at. It is the continuing outstanding work of a pair of diehard modern bluesmen. It's not quite the same as what they'd done before (at least not the part of their work that I've heard so far), but anyone who doesn't change might as well shut it down.

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Thanks to LaLa, I got an album that I've been wanting for a long while: Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash. I'd first heard the album a few years ago and haven't been willing to drop the dozen bucks it'd've taken to get it back, but at $1.75 from LaLa, it was certainly worth a try. I ended up with the expanded edition adding in a half dozen extra tracks that didn't make the original album - for good reason.

The core of the album is a great, punk growl thrown together with celtic instruments and bit of whiskey soacking the whole thing. The Pogues brought together tales of celtic heroes like Cuchulainn and Turkish wars and played them at tempos ranging from pounding to dragging, giving the impression that the boys were playing an entire night in the pub in one sitting - starting off throwing down quick and rollicking and ending the evening at a drag pace, sending you off into the streets ready for a drunken stumble home.

Great album...certainly worth the $1.75...

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Bit of a disappointment with the next one - Live in Austin, TX from Richard Thompson. I've seen Thompson live a half dozen times - coming up next month again - and he's one of the most reliable, impressive live performers I've seen. Each time he brings out a few new or rare songs that he's not played before, often topical songs ("Dad's Gonna Kill Me" about Baghdad's troubles being the latest) that never make their way onto his albums. He's a masterful performer whose skills show most clearly when he's playing in front of an audience. And the recording shown here is a solid performance from Thompson, but it's lacking those rarities that I enjoy so much. Instead, it's a solid show from a great performer. To catch a glimpse, head over to YouTube.

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Gotta love college, right? College parties to me sound like Johnny Socko. Ska punk out of Bloomington complete with weird costumes and loads of good times. Sure, there's the minor weirdness that my sister turned out to be friends with the band, but that's neither here nor there. A while back I loaned out my copy of their first album, Bovaquarium, to a friend and it never came back.

That's what I get for not writing things down.

Stupid friends.

Well, thanks to the wonders of LaLa (have I mentioned their website before, eh?), the joys of songs like "This is Your Vasectomy" and "Uvula Mantainenance" are mine again. Sure, the band probably got better and more...um...professional as their career went onward, but they never got more fun than they they were on this first album. And it's good to have it around again.