Tagged!

June 19

The music meme is making its way around the blogosphere: Renegade Evolution tagged Natalia Antonova tagged Parallel Sidewalk tagged moi with the following:

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring summer. Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they’re listening to.

Parallel added:

I think she should include notes on what she listens to while working, like Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan do

I don’t typically listen to music while I work, but I listen to a ton of music at the gym in the morning while gearing up to work. What I play sets the tone for what I write that day, and as a result I closely associate certain songs with certain projects.

Right now:

Coldplay: Viva La Vida. Yeah, I know, it’s Coldplay, but this song could be a rock opera.
Delerium: Consensual Worlds. Minute 5:25 through 6:43 is a musical analog for AIR #1.
Imogen Heap: Hide and Seek. Sad for sad moments.
Iggy Pop: The Passenger. This is one of my personal anthems.
Wolfsheim: The Sparrows and the Nightingales. German gothpop.
Dead Can Dance: Ullysses. This is a good song for transitional moments.
Massive Attack: Teardrop. You’ve heard a sample of this song if you’ve heard the House theme music.

I tag Aziz, Fatima, and Borbor-Chan. It’s not seven but it’ll do for now.

There Is More I Want To Say

June 10

It rained, but what else is new.

On the bus there was a man who smiled a certain way. In profile he looked like a Norman lord: monkish blond hair and a dusky beard; a slim, straight nose, as on a tomb effigy. He wore khakis and leather shoes, but this didn’t matter. For ten minutes he had another history: he had seen a few battles but preferred books; a second son maybe, destined for the Church but handed a sword and a title upon the death of an elder brother. It didn’t help that next to him was a man with a hood pulled up around his face, who wore a similarly medieval expression--ascetic yes, but lit by some harsh beautiful idea. An unwilling vassal, let’s say, called off the land to fight for his liege. Our lord has read books, as we know, and perhaps he has cultivated shocking ideas about equality--he is traveling with his men, spattered by the same grit and rain, something his older brother would never have done. This is why he smiles.

There was a sun-break (this is what we have instead of ‘sun’ here) in the late afternoon. Over the hill there were swallows--the kind with blue-grey backs and orange bellies--darting along the street, up and down. Catching insects while the light was good. They are so polite about avoiding you, coming to within six inches of your shoulder and veering away, singing the whole time. It made me want to thank someone who was kind to me when I was being particularly unbearable--someone I’d already thanked, and for whom more thanks would stray into impropriety. It’s an awful burden for someone who turns things inside-out for a living to have to be proper. So instead I stood on the hill gilded terrace by terrace in half an hour of light, near a corner garden, and wondered how there could be swallows and damask-roses at a time like this. That is a kind of thanks. 

I Have So Arrived

April 30

Jason Aaron, writer of the excellent and much-admired Vertigo series SCALPED, has with Brians Wood and Azzarello (DMZ, 100 Bullets, and a host of other stuff...if you’re coming from the comics side you know them well) offered me my own forum on their consolidated Virtual Machine of Power, Standard Attrition. That’s right. You don’t really write comics until you’ve got one of these babies. I am so pumped to be knocking around the internet with these guys, all of whom are well on their way to being cult legends.

Where the internet is concerned, I have now achieved market saturation. You can’t hide from me. I m in ur blogz, writing ur content. If you’re literary, I’ve cornered you at RedRoom. If you’re a hipster, I’ll get you at Standard Attrition. If you’re Muslim, I yak at you on TalkIslam, if you’re conservative I’ve probably fought with you on Dean’s World, and if you’re here...you probably know me.

I sometimes don’t know when to be a respectable print maven and when to be 25 and living in a world of unstuck content, the meme-driven Gen Why interculture, the New Society, whatever you want to call it. Today I’m the latter. The revolution will be podcast. \m/.