Mark Lanegan & Duke Garwood - Pentecostal (Black Pudding album)

David Foster Wallace on Voting

“If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.”

- David Foster Wallace, "Up Simba!" Rolling Stone 2000

Thanks to  Logan Lockner at Paste Magazine for publishing a great list of DFW quotes here last week on what would have been the late Mr. Wallace's 51st birthday (2/21/13)

image courtesy of theatlanticwire

Lineup for Metallica's Orion Fest is a lot of Great bands...

... and Metallica, rise against and RHCP to balance out the good with some blah. But hey, it's their fest, right? Congrats to FIDLAR - really cool that they're on it.

Joy Division Live

My god, what year do you think this footage is from? Youtube truly has EVERYTHING on it Watching/hearing this sends chills down my spine. Words simply cannot express just how important I feel that Joy Division was to music and, subsequently, on comics (80's*/early 90's Vertigo stuff has Joy Division just dripping from it, as if the authors/artists were listening to their music at the time and acted as transducers, turning the sound of Joy Division into their words pictures. I've always thought the same could be said of much of The Smiths' music).

..............

* I should clarify that what I am perhaps clumsily referring to here is the fact that although Vertigo did not come into being until 1993 there were precursors at DC that would later be "re-branded" as Vertigo books, ie Alan Moore's Swamp Thing or even V for Vendetta which although published under the Vertigo banner for some time now, originally began as a serial in the pages of Warrior circa the early 80's.

Joss Whedon Accepting An Award at the James Dublin Int. Film Festival

This was just before A screening of Whedon's latest film, an adaptation of Shakespeare's "Much To Do About Nothing". According to aintitcoolnews, during the Q&A part of these proceedings someone in the crowd asked Mr. Whedon about Avengers 2, to which part of his response was, "Death, death and more death". Now - it would be easy to interpret this as the killing of characters, but also as ainitcool points out this is also possibly a reference to Death, as in the female embodiment of it that Thanos tries soooo hard to impress in The Infinity Gauntlet. How hard does he try to impress Death? By killing a very large percent of the galactic population. Might this be what the after-credits appearance of Thanos in the Avengers, the forthcoming Guardians of the Galaxy, and perhaps even the sequel to Thor, thus far titled Thor: The Dark World all be leading towards?

One can hope. After watching Whedon's Avengers film I dug out my old Infinity Gauntlet comics and started reading them for the first time in over twenty years. The concept is great but the execution... not so much. Hence the rabid anticipation fans have in seeing this adapted into the Marvel Movie Verse - it can be updated, streamlined and improved upon to no end (let's start with no Adam Warlock, shall we? A large part of Infinity Gauntlet's problem is it reeks of being a kickstarter series to launch what ended up being a pretty short-lived Adam Warlock series).

Frightened Rabbit - Backyard Skulls

Again, breaking my prejudice against videos featuring the band "playing" the music - at least in this case they were slick and did the school dance setting. That helped a lot. I don't know a lot of this band's material but what I know I like. Also working in the band's favor, A) their from Scotland so that's always a plus in my book and B) they remind me at times of that Pulp-era Brit indie rock.

PJ Harvey - Big Exit Live! 2001

Ah, the bombastic opening track from my favorite PJ Harvey record (that I know - I still don't have them all). There is such a tone that runs over this record; it's a little bit Nick Cave (that's probably more due to Mick Harvey's presence on this record and less to do with the fact that Polly Jean and Mr. Cave were at one time an item) and a little Radio Head (which is accented by not entirely because of Thom Yorke's presence on three tracks). It's also claustrophobic and quiet and a little bit hopeless and violent, as if just months before 9/11 Ms. Harvey was channeling the new Zeitgeist of fear and aggression that would be coming down the pipes and never quite leaving us here in the States. Listening to this record is a very specific mindset. It's fun and creatively-inspiring in the right moments but perhaps a bit bleak and haunting at others.