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Some Bad Ideas
By the way, the American election is over, and I WON! (By "I won" I mean the fucking VACs came out right on only the second count and it was because they fucking PUT ME IN CHARGE it is not that I am incompetent, early voting election board people, it's that you have no fucking idea how to count things, which let me tell you, is really fucking reassuring.)
Things that are bad ideas:
1. The design of Maryland's voting machines and procedures.
2. Coming home from working the election and immediately mainlining S4 of The Thick of It. (what it's done to my vocabulary alone...)
3. Going into the Magic Room of Free Comics while sleep-deprived and in need of brain candy (I count myself lucky I only came out with one boxful of trades.)
4. Reading the first Phonogram trade while in the middle of writing a Thick of It urban fantasy AU (especially when one has a known weakness for New Labour spin doctors in pop band AUs. And generally really likes angry Scottish music.)
Anyway, Phonogram: Rue Britannia. I hated all the characters (except possibly Kid-with-knife), and unlike, say, TToI, they were hateable in really boring ways, but I had to keep reading anyway because I wanted to know what happens next, which I think means it did what it was supposed to do, even if the final confrontation was kind of disappointing.
It's made me all full of thinky thoughts about what music means, what being a fan means, and the ways in which I do fandom (and music) that are different from what stories like Phonogram's assume it will be. Mostly, that I am in some ways culturally unstuck in time - e.g. the fact that I'm reading & writing about the first Phonogram trade in 2012 - which means that I've never really experienced a music genre as something linked to a specific, objective time period, which is something Phonogram takes so much for granted that it builds a plot and a magic system around it without ever really examining it.
The music itself, yes, comes out of a time and a place, but not the experience of listening to it or of being a fan of it. I think I'd always sort of understood that this was part of how I do music fandom wrong, but Phonogram really made me think in new ways about how music(/culture) and memory and time and age and identity interact for people both inside the "music fan" culture and outside it.
It also made me really want to take the music/magic system it builds - which is really, really interesting - and actually explore it as something other than a way of analyzing the sterile interior lives of aging scenesters. Maybe the later trades in the series do that! I hope so.
(It also kind of wants me to take the nihilistic, alienated music culture explored in the book - with all its sex, narcissism, selling out and buying in, pretension and pointless status markers, art as salvation and art as destruction - and write a similar graphic novel applying it to knitting culture instead of indypop. That probably belongs on the "bad ideas" list, though.)
I also went through and made myself a playlist of music based on the glossary in Phonogram (because I finally have all my music storted! Did I mention?) and apparently it's not just Radiohead where I have this problem where the music goes in one ear, turns into static, and comes out the other - I have the same problem with most of Oasis, Blur, and the Clash. (it's not Britpop in general though, I already had Joy Division and Catatonia and Belle and Sebastian on my all-time favorites list.) I was tempted to go through the glossary and do my own version of what each entry is really about, but I decided to spare everybody. :P
I really liked the art, the book is definitely as good and as interestingly different as everybody was saying back in 2006, and the writer (some guy named Kieron Gillen) is probably worth keeping an eye on, at least if he's learned to write better endings. :P
Now, only 24 more trades in the box to go through and review! :D And a Big Bang draft to finally get out to artists and betas! And NaNo! And all that other stuff!
Things that are bad ideas:
1. The design of Maryland's voting machines and procedures.
2. Coming home from working the election and immediately mainlining S4 of The Thick of It. (what it's done to my vocabulary alone...)
3. Going into the Magic Room of Free Comics while sleep-deprived and in need of brain candy (I count myself lucky I only came out with one boxful of trades.)
4. Reading the first Phonogram trade while in the middle of writing a Thick of It urban fantasy AU (especially when one has a known weakness for New Labour spin doctors in pop band AUs. And generally really likes angry Scottish music.)
Anyway, Phonogram: Rue Britannia. I hated all the characters (except possibly Kid-with-knife), and unlike, say, TToI, they were hateable in really boring ways, but I had to keep reading anyway because I wanted to know what happens next, which I think means it did what it was supposed to do, even if the final confrontation was kind of disappointing.
It's made me all full of thinky thoughts about what music means, what being a fan means, and the ways in which I do fandom (and music) that are different from what stories like Phonogram's assume it will be. Mostly, that I am in some ways culturally unstuck in time - e.g. the fact that I'm reading & writing about the first Phonogram trade in 2012 - which means that I've never really experienced a music genre as something linked to a specific, objective time period, which is something Phonogram takes so much for granted that it builds a plot and a magic system around it without ever really examining it.
The music itself, yes, comes out of a time and a place, but not the experience of listening to it or of being a fan of it. I think I'd always sort of understood that this was part of how I do music fandom wrong, but Phonogram really made me think in new ways about how music(/culture) and memory and time and age and identity interact for people both inside the "music fan" culture and outside it.
It also made me really want to take the music/magic system it builds - which is really, really interesting - and actually explore it as something other than a way of analyzing the sterile interior lives of aging scenesters. Maybe the later trades in the series do that! I hope so.
(It also kind of wants me to take the nihilistic, alienated music culture explored in the book - with all its sex, narcissism, selling out and buying in, pretension and pointless status markers, art as salvation and art as destruction - and write a similar graphic novel applying it to knitting culture instead of indypop. That probably belongs on the "bad ideas" list, though.)
I also went through and made myself a playlist of music based on the glossary in Phonogram (because I finally have all my music storted! Did I mention?) and apparently it's not just Radiohead where I have this problem where the music goes in one ear, turns into static, and comes out the other - I have the same problem with most of Oasis, Blur, and the Clash. (it's not Britpop in general though, I already had Joy Division and Catatonia and Belle and Sebastian on my all-time favorites list.) I was tempted to go through the glossary and do my own version of what each entry is really about, but I decided to spare everybody. :P
I really liked the art, the book is definitely as good and as interestingly different as everybody was saying back in 2006, and the writer (some guy named Kieron Gillen) is probably worth keeping an eye on, at least if he's learned to write better endings. :P
Now, only 24 more trades in the box to go through and review! :D And a Big Bang draft to finally get out to artists and betas! And NaNo! And all that other stuff!
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It's rather gorgeous.
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...I would love to see him draw a Torchwood comic.
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...is much, much more interesting if you read the second trade FIRST, as I did.
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ETA: Having just rewatched that video, I find that the meta-mock-because-love vibe really sums up my impression of the trade... yes, there are bad points, but there's the sheer joy of the dance.
That's in the Rules of the thing, after all.
1: You must dance.
2: [insert something arcane and specific about boy bands/Britpop]
3: No magic.
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I knew of Kieron Gillen from this comic, and (in a very vague way) as a friend of friends from online music writing blogospheres. And now dude is SUDDENLY EVERYWHERE.
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And when everybody started getting excited about JiM I was like "Kieron Gillen! I know I have heard of him before! And it's not just because I always think for a second that they're talking about Karen Gillan! ... oh yeah, Phonogram, I keep meaning to finally read that."
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