I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: SONIC YOUTH -SYR 1 Anagrama (1997).

After Washing Machine, Sonic Youth began recording a series of EPs (that gradually grew into longer discs) in which they explored their improvisation/longer piece needs.

And so SYR1 was released.

It contains for tracks and runs about 25 minute.  It’s not simply guitar feedback or waves of distortion.  Rather it is songs built around themes which are followed to their logical ends.

Thee EPs aren’t for everyone. There’s no lyrics, there’s no choruses.  It’s sort of like how the end of “The Diamond Sea” was a chance for SY to let loose and see what happened. I can’t even say that the songs and motifs are necessarily memorable (although I’m led to believe that some have cropped up on the proper albums).  I don’t listen to these a lot, but they are fun to put on from time to time, if you’re in an avant garde mood.

[READ August 9, 2009] Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life

I had read this book a few years ago.  But I had read it in bits and pieces over several weeks, and so I didn’t feel like I had a real grasp of the story.  This is especially true because the story begins simply enough and then turns into a wild hallucinogenic story that is very funny, very very funny, in fact, but also incredibly surreal.

When I was at BEA in New York this year I ran into the guy from Oni Press who told me that they are making a film of Scott Pilgrim, which is pretty fantastic.  I’m rather looking forward to seeing it.  But because there are so many interesting visual things going on in th graphic novel, I can’t help but wonder how they will transform them.  And also, Book 6 of this series may be written with a different ending from the film, so that should be fun, too.

But speaking of the visuals….

O’Malley’s style is utterly fascinating.  When I first started reading, I felt like the artwork was “sloppy” in that sort of stylized sloppiness that people take some time to achieve.  (I think mostly this is because of the character’s eyes.  They are a refined sort of manga but the pupils are so large that i found it disconcerting.)  But when reading it through this time, I realized not only is it not sloppy, it is meticulously designed in a very cool way.  Take Scott’s hair, which is commented about through the series.  I’m not going to go and spout on about how long he must have spent getting his hair just right, but clearly there was effort and planning in the length and style, even if it is primarily drawn with a  few broad triangles.

In fact, maybe the weird thing about the artwork is the large, thick lines.  It is not the thin shaded style of so many comics.  And the more I’ve read the series, the more I like the style (although there are a lot of characters, and some of them look vaguely alike, and it is in black and white, so in some scenes it’s hard to tell who is who).

Okay, so onto the story.

It starts of simply enough, Scott Pilgrim is a 23-year old bassist in a crappy band called Sex Bob-omb (I can’t decide how to pronounce this: Sex Bob OM?  Sex Bob OMB? Sex Bob O.M.B?  Doesn’t really matter and will be cleared up in the film, obviously).  I enjoyed that at their first practice, O’Malley includes the chords (and tablature) to show how simple the song is.  Scott’s bandmates are Kim (a girl he dated briefly in high school, but which he won’t acknowledge (the dating)), and Steven Stills.  Stills is roommates with “young Neil” (yes, its that kind of story.)

As the story opens, Scott reveals that he has started dating Knives Chu a 17 year old high school girl(!).  They haven’t even kissed yet but he is enjoying the stress-free dating (his previous girlfriend dumped him in a big way and he still isn’t over it).

Knives is a naive young thing and she immediately falls for Scott and thinks his band is amazing.

But Scott winds up having this dream about a beautiful girl.  And then he starts receiving death threats.  And a couple days later he sees the girl (whose name is Ramona).  It turns out that she delivers for amazon.ca (that was my first indication that the book was set in Canada!)  So, he does what anyone would do…he orders a CD and waits for her to show up.

When she delivers his disc, he asks her out.

And then we learn what the death threats are all about.  For you see, Ramona has had seven boyfriends in her lifetime, and in order for Scott to date her, he must destroy all seven of them.  He must also break up with poor Knives, who you know won’t take it very well.

And then things get pretty weird.

Superpowers show up to challenge Scott, and a fight sequences breaks out.  The story goes from cute and funny to super-powerful and wild.

Ramona’s first boyfriend is a guy she dated for a few days in Grade 7.  And they fight at Sex Bob-omb’s first gig (following Crash and the Boys whose final song renders the audience unconscious.  When the fight is over (and I’m not giving anything away by saying that Scott wins, because hey there’s several volumes after this), residue of video game fighting is left over.

It’s a great story, and a fun series.