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From The Beginning: Dr. Seuss – McElligot’s Pool (Book #5)

November 30, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]Today is the fifth installment of my “From The Beginning” read of Dr. Seuss’s entire bibliography. Last week I reviewed the slightly odd, lesser-known Horton book Horton Hatches the Egg.

Dr. Seuss followed Horton with another silly rhyming tale, recycling Marco the protagonist of And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street and his wild imagination. However, this time around Marco didn’t seem to capture my toddler’s imagination.

McElligot’s Pool (1947) – Dr. Seuss

CK Says: – Consider it

Reading Time: 5-8 minutes

Gender Diversity: Marco and the farmer are male; some fisher are gendered as male. The one named women is out hanging her clothes (as most of Seuss’s early women are)

Ethnic Diversity: None

Challenging Language: pasture, croquet, connecting, whoofing, friskers, kangaroo, gristle, acrobat, thrashing

Themes to Discuss: imagination, littering, evolution

McElligot’s Pool reunites us with Marco, the imaginative star of Seuss’s debut And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. On this occasion he’s not walking down a busy city street, but sitting at a fishing hole out in the country. His vivid imagination is not only intact, but it has grown.

That means the same is true for Marco’s author, Dr. Seuss. His fifth book is the first to dive deeply into his fanciful world of ridiculous made up animals – here represented in meter by all the unusual fish that Marco can possibly dream up.

mcelligots-pool-dr-seuss-rooster-fish McElligot’s Pool is a really just an overgrown puddle, a hole-in-the-ground filled with water and people’s junk. A local farmer says Marco couldn’t possible catch a fish there even if he fished for fifty years! Even without the junk, I’m not sure that any fish would want to live there.

Marco is undeterred, imagining the pool as an underground river that runs out under his little town to the sea beyond. And, while there might not be any interesting fish in McElligot’s Pool, the sea is full of them! He starts out picturing real (or, at least, realistic) fish he might catch, but escalates quickly to picturing rooster fish, cow fish, downhill skiing fish and people fish. (It’s pretty gruesome to imagine catching some of them with a hook!)

All of those fish are the reason Marco keeps fishing, even if they might not really exist to be caught.

Seuss feints in the direction of an environmentalist tale with the initial focus on all the junk littering the pool, but the theme doesn’t linger after its initial mention. Once the underground river flows out to the sea, the story is like an underwater adaptation of Mulberry Street fueled by extra imagination.

mcelligots-pool-dr-seuss-pg-32 I found the book full of silly fish to be charming, but from the first read the toddler had found it to be boring. I wasn’t sure why at first. It has colorful illustrations and zippy, easy-to-read language. After negotiating with her to read it a few more times, I think her disinterest is the result of McElligot’s Pool lacking the progression of Mulberry Street. Though the fish do get slightly bigger and more unusual as the story continues, there isn’t a clear “this replaces that” theme nor a sense of reaching a destination. It’s just a list of silly fish.

What interested toddler does have in the book are certainly the illustrations. This book features a fuller range of colors than the last few – delicate watercolors rather than the bold color fills of Mullberry or the flash of red in 500 Hats and King’s Stilts. The fish themselves are quite delightful. Seuss pushes each of Marco’s fanciful concepts as far as possible. Some of them definitely elicit a chuckle from me on re-read, especially the saw fish who can’t get around on his own because he’s poorly balanced and the skiing fish because why would a fish need to ski underwater?!

McElligot’s Pool is a silly book to borrow from a library to spur your child’s imagination, or perhaps a fun read to get them excited about a visit the aquarium, but it’s not a Seuss classic you must own.

35-for-35: 2015 – “I Need Never Get Old” by Nathaniel Rateliff and The Night Sweats

November 30, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]”Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

I love that quote, often attributed to Elvis Costello but actually the words of actor Martin Mull. He was simply paraphrasing sentiments like this one, from The New Republic in 1918:

Strictly considered, writing about music is as illogical as singing about economics. All the other arts can be talked about in the terms of ordinary life and experience.

I like Mull’s quote better. I don’t think writing about music is illogical, but I do think it is like using art to describe other art. There is an art to finding an adjective to describe a song, a riff, or a voice – waves of sound that speak their own descriptions. I wouldn’t have endeavored to write about music for 30 days straight this month if I didn’t feel that way.

What I do think can be illogical is the taxonomy of music. Litanies of labels and galaxies of genres. They’re used to so careful contain the sound of an artist, but what happens when they write a song that doesn’t fit into the container. When a punk band unplugs, are they immediately folk-punk? When Lady Gaga sings with a Southern accent, is she country?

I sometimes wonder if artists reflect on this stuff as they read what’s written about their work. I probably would. One artist I’ve been wondering about in specific is Nathaniel Rateliff and The Night Sweats. They were one of the “Country” artists I was introduced to in the series of song summits a year ago that lead to Smash Fantastic playing tunes like their “S.O.B.” and Eric Church’s “Springsteen.”

I understood why Country fans would listen to “S.O.B.” There’s no doubt that it has a raw, throw-back country vibe with its handclaps and walking bass line. That’s not what I heard. Country isn’t one of my major influences and when I heard the song, I immediately thought, “That sounds like Motown.”

I initially wrote it off, thinking perhaps there was just something about the combination of the bassline and the horns that evoked a certain Motown hit for me. Then I heard the entire Nathaniel Rateliff and The Night Sweats LP.

It’s not Country. It’s Motown and Stax Records. It’s The Isley Brothers. It’s Otis Redding. It’s Sam Cooke.

Nathaniel Rateliff and The Night Sweats is one of those “every song is amazing” albums that I cherish and listen to on repeat forever. The first tune – “I Need Never Get Old” – might be the best indication of that, but I could have picked any song on the album.

It’s not just that it sounds a lot like The Isley Brothers. It sounds like some specific Isley Brothers song that you’re sure you’ve heard before and loved. It’s aural déjà vu, a sound that can create the memory of having heard it before.

I always try to take note of these songs when I first hear them. It’s like writing down your dreams as soon as you wake up when the details are still vivid. Over time and repeated listens you will subconsciously normalize this special act of déjà vu as just sounding like itself. Sometimes I find little lists of song names scribbled on a piece of paper, my solitaire version of musical $64,000 Pyramid where I try to define a song by all of the little references I hear inside of it.

The entirety of Nathaniel Rateliff and The Night Sweats produces that feeling for me.

That makes me wonder: how did Rateliff get filed with Country? The record was released by Stax Records and it absolutely has a classic Stax sound, which was the sound of 60s R&B and Soul.

The truth is that in our illogical modern taxonomy of music, there is no poplar modern analog to those genres. If you write an amazing, earth-shaking album of classic Stax-style tunes in 2015 you’ve got two choices: have close to nobody hear it, or promote it to Country radio because all those real instruments you’re playing will be appreciated there and rack up over 30 million YouTube views in your first year-and-a-half as a big label band.

You should probably choose the latter, because any words that are used to describe your music are just a dance about architecture – one imperfect undefinable art describing another.

From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Team 7: Objective: Hell (1995) #1-3

November 29, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]This month of reading WildStorm from the beginning has frequently defied my expectations, with my enjoyment of the contents nearly reversed from what I expected.

team-7-v2-03-pinup Team 7: Objective hell tops that list of unexpected outcomes. It’s a riveting, gorgeous, well-written book that merges military themes with superhero powers. There are a few tiny nods to the future of these characters, particularly for Slayton/Backlash, but otherwise this series hardly acknowledges the wider WildStorm Universe and the future it holds in store.

Chuck Dixon shines here even more than on the original limited series. Past needing to introduce his massive cast and take them through multiple missions, this series has both more action and better character moments. No one gets the sort of monologue or grandstanding they did in the first series. It’s all tiny beats that tell us more about the team – particularly Slayton’s temper and the babyfaced Cash’s rise to leadership before an eventual fall from their graces.

Every page of this book looks damned great. The covers truly don’t do justice to the interior pages.

Chris Warner spares no detail in illustrating the jungle environs of Nicaragua and Cambodia. A gang of multiple inkers introduce some variation but fill every page with plenty of contrast for colorist Monica Bennett to make pop with rich greens, golden flesh tones, and Team 7’s red war paint.

The long-haired, well-muscled men of Team 7 have a certain mercurial hint of motion that’s reminiscent of issue #1’s cover artist, the legendary Barry Windsor Smith. The members who we don’t know in the present day stand out the most, with Caitlin Fairchild’s father clearly modeled on Iggy Pop and Grunge’s father Chang drawn more distinctly as an Asian than on the prior outing.

The inspiration for this story seems near to that of The Divine, an OGN I reviewed last year. The difference is that while The Divine was about child soldiers in an eternal war, Objective Hell is about a small bubble of peace that Team 7 is forced to disrupt for the greater good.

Was a greater good achieved? There’s no question that removing low-yield nukes from the grasping Khmer Rouge is a positive, but the open psychic warfare between US and Russian forces signaled a new front of the Cold War that Team 7 found themselves alone to defend. While they escape with only one serious casualty this time, it helps to frame their later choice to splinter and become mercenaries. As long as the specter of their reassembling as a team exists in the world, the US Government will find some threat that demands their intervention … but does their existence also escalate the seriousness of the threats?

Team 7: Objective Hell doesn’t hold those answers or very many keys to the big questions we’ve been asking about Backlash, Grifter, Dane, Lynch, and Cray, but it is a superior WildStorm offering that makes me wish we had an ongoing comic to add more past missions to Team 7’s published history.

Want a recap? Keep reading for a summary of how these soldiers became super. Here’s the schedule for the rest of this month’s WildStorm re-read. Tomorrow is the main event! WildStorm Rising! Let’s get ready to cross over, baby!

Need the issues? This series has not been collected, so you’ll need to grab the singles – try eBay or Amazon. Since further series hit these same issue numbers, be sure to match your purchase to the cover images in this post. [Read more…] about From The Beginning: WildStorm Universe – Team 7: Objective: Hell (1995) #1-3

35-for-35: 2014 – “Unconditional Love” by Against Me!

November 29, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]I’m not sure that I’m capable of unconditional love, because I don’t believe it really exists.

How can you even define what it means to love someone or something “no matter what?” The variable of “what” in that statement only includes the changes you can conceive of in the present day. It’s a statement that you could love something’s status quo forever, and maybe also anything within a few degrees of difference.

I know this is a silly measuring stick but I always try to define this sort of unwavering commitment via musical fandom. Sixteen years ago this week I lamented that Ani DiFranco websites were shutting down left and right, and I couldn’t understand why anyone would quit her. I was in my sixth year of listening to her, but some of those fans were in their twelfth. At the time, I said:

I don’t expect her to reproduce the same album over and over, and i don’t expect her to stay the same. The people shutting down their website’s now might not have expected her to do either of those things, but i suppose on some level they were hoping she would.

Now I’m in my twentieth year, and Ani’s new albums barely register with me and I no longer see her shows. She’s not too different and I’m not too different, but the two of us have each changed by enough degrees that love has turned into like. I Now I’m just loving the old her, and that’s not love. It’s nostaglia. The new her can’t change that, and I still have affection for her, but it’s not the same love I had before.

I think the same holds true for anything you love – not just always-changing things like musicians or family members, but static things like a song, a board game, or a statue. That’s because one side of that loving equation can change: you. So, even if you love something unconditionally now, you can’t predict all the future conditions.

That’s how Against Me!’s beautiful, rambling, three-chord “Unconditional Love” resonates with me. It’s off of Transgender Dysphoria Blues, the band’s first release since lead singer Laura Jane Grace came out as a transgender woman. That’s a pretty big change in conditions – one that most people don’t account for when they express their unconditional love. It’s a change that finds a lot of people reaching out for the unconditional love they were promised and finding a void in its place.

Laura knows that. She understands the fundamental lie of love. Unconditional love isn’t really about the future, it’s about the present.

35-for-35: 2013 – “Don’t Lie” by Vampire Weekend

November 29, 2016 by krisis

[Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug][/Patreon-Nov16-Post-Bug]I’ll always associate our friends The Crutchleys with being pregnant with EV because of two reasons

vampire-weekend-modern-vampires-of-the-city The first reason, and the most obvious, is that they visited our house to play Catan (which we bought for the occasion!) just a few hours before E went into labor. I’ll never be able to think of EV’s birth without thinking at least a little bit about The Crutchleys, Catan, and eating an entire Domino’s pizza all by myself in installments between E’s contractions the next morning.

The other reason is Modern Vampires of the City.

Two months earlier, we were paying The Crutchleys a visit in May for an evening of chat and games in May just after the LP was released. When the discussion turned to music, P said, “Oh, have you heard the new Vampire Weekend?”

I might have shrugged my shoulders in response. I liked the band’s second effort Contra well enough, but I had never had a particular epiphany with them like many of my friends did. Yes, they had an awesome vocabulary and plenty of baroque flourishes, plus an obvious affinity for Paul Simon. It was just that none of their songs really stuck to me.

(Also, I do give a fuck about the Oxford Comma.)

There was something different about Modern Vampires of the City from the opening notes and typewriter percussion of “Obvious Bicycle.” Vampire Weekend transformed from crafting baroque confection with endless streams of melody rocketing in all directions like silly string to wringing emotion from subtle veins of countermelody marbled through each of their songs.

That night, “Don’t Lie” stuck to me. I couldn’t remember the last time I heard something so beautiful and tragic, from the initial sigh of organ like the slow exhalation of breath, to the clipped heartbeat of massive-sounding kick and snare, to the elegiac slow surf guitar out of the outro, but nothing more than the chorus:

I want to know, does it bother you?
The low click of a ticking clock
There’s a lifetime right in front of you
And everyone I know

I feel that chorus thrumming in my cells. I’ve always held a nearly visceral terror of the click of a ticking clock, time made tangible as sound as it slips away never to be grasped again. One of my primary concerns during our pregnancy was time. How was I going to get by with so much less time?

Later in the song, that chorus transforms:

I want to know, does it bother you?
The low click of a ticking clock
There’s a headstone right in front of you
And everyone I know

Those are the dual truths of time, laid bare in a pair of chorus. Everyone you know has both a lifetime and tombstone in front of them, but the great Rorschach test of life is asking someone which one they see when they hear the ticking of a clock.