Author: Marc Weidenbaum

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media.

▰ Love when a new game console is unironically referred to as a “game-changer”

▰ Listened to Lyle Lovett’s third album, Lyle Lovett and His Large Band (1989), for the first time in a long time, straight through, and (1) it really holds up and (2) in retrospect it was tailor-made for Gen X listeners raised on Schoolhouse Rock.

▰ Ah, dang. RIP, Jim Kimball, drummer with Mule, a band whose self-titled debut album I was heavily addicted to for much of 1993, the year it came out. He was half of the duo that went by the Denison/Kimball Trio. Also played with Jesus Lizard and Laughing Hyenas. A powerhouse. I think I only saw him live once, with Mule in 1995.

▰ When a maker of fancy stereo consoles for the retro-modern living room provides a list of recommended ambient albums: wrensilva.com.

▰ I pick an Oblique Strategies card at random every morning. Been a while since I got this banger.

▰ Something special about Craigslist ads for photography equipment in which the photos of the equipment are out of focus

▰ I finished reading five graphic novels this week. My favorite of the bunch was The Knives, which is in the long-running Criminal series by writer Ed Brubaker and illustrator Sean Phillips. The Knives is one of the best from them in a while. If you’re not familiar with Criminal, it’s a fantastic modern noir that never flinches — never forgets that the nature of the sublime in noir is that sometimes the violence comes to the surface, that it’s not all shadows and cigarettes — and that often has elements of comics creation as part of its stories, as this volume does. ▰ The Authority is one of my favorite superhero subjects, and I was happy to see there is a new collection about the Authority figure (so to speak) Jenny Sparks, titled simply Jenny Sparks, written by Tom King and drawn by Jeff Spokes. I came for King, who has a well-deserved reputation for cerebral superhero tales, and stayed for Spokes, who broke the page into stark panels and did well by King’s penchant for repetition. It was perfect that I started reading this book the same day I got the Oblique Strategies card “Repetition is a form of change.” Could any statement better sum up genre fiction to those who read it over and over? My favorite moment in Jenny Sparks was a toss-away one, when Sparks complains that fellow Authority member Jack Hawksmoor (who doesn’t appear in this series) talks too much about his intimate relationship with urban sewer systems (if you know the Hawksmoor character, then you get it). ▰ I had started watching Butterfly, the new TV series starring Daniel Dae Kim and Reina Hardesty, and then came to understand it was based on comic books, so I paused the series and read the collected volume. ▰ Having read the first two volumes in DC Comics’ Absolute Universe series of alternate versions of classic heroes, I picked up the third, Absolute Superman. Absolute Wonder Woman remains the one in this series that I recommend. Relative to Absolute Superman, one thing the Wonder Woman volume did was to not foreground the origin story. ▰ I subscribe to the Marvel digital subscription service, Marvel Unlimited, so I read most current Marvel graphic novels an issue/month at a time, and check them off when I complete the final issue contained, as with The Ultimates: Volume 2: All Power to the People. Tracking this is more complicated than it may seem, but if there’s one thing I’m pretty good at, it’s systems.