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.

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/. 

Swamped

February 08

I haven’t disappeared; I’ve just been buried under a bunch of different deadlines. But check out my KUOW interview tomorrow (link in news/events, above). It’s the first interview I’ve done for a western media outlet, geared toward a largely non-Muslim audience, in which the focus is on my religion. (That was an awkward sentence, structurally speaking, but my brain is pretty fried.) I thought I’d be uncomfortable discussing personal spirituality on American radio, but the host of Sound Focus was very intelligent and hip and we had a fun conversation. Whew.

Around the internets: Eteraz is back from his contemplative hiatus, Baraka B talks about caucusing for Obama, Aziz of City of Brass is inspired by something I said in an email that was funnier than I thought, and the ever-scintillating Th.abe.t is blogging regularly again.

This year I was privileged enough to be one of about a dozen new writers nominated for the Sirenland Fellowship, the perk of which is a week-long master class at a gorgeous hotel on a Mediterranean hillside in Italy. I didn’t win (there goes my spring tan), but the guy who did, Said Sayrafiezadeh, is an amazingly talented NYC playwright, and his forthcoming book should be worth reading. It’s really cool to be at a point in my career where even losing sounds like bragging, nya ha ha. 

Now, off to finish Issue Something of a Something DC miniseries, Issue Something Else of a Something Vertigo series, and Chapter 11 of Butterfly Mosque.