I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: FANTASTIC NEGRITO-“Lost in a Crowd” (TINY DESK CONTEST WINNER 2015).

Fantastic Negrito won this year’s Tiny Desk Concert contest.  About 7,000 people submitted entries and Negrito was chosen.

On the surface this song is pretty simple–a basic blues riff and some simple percussion, but man there’s some gritty power and conviction in this performance.  The way he sings “rage” in a late verse is really great.  I also really like the way the chorus is so very different–it really changes the dynamic of the stomping verses.

A couple other things I like about this song: the drums appear to be done on a box, but they sound great and there’s a super cool piercing sound he gets when he claps.  This was a really good song and I’m looking forward to his upcoming Tiny Desk Concert.

[READ: January 19, 2015] Chew: Volume Five

I had been enjoying Chew so much that I’m shocked that I not only forgot about it but forgot about it for over three years!  This is the trouble with annual publications.  I’ve decided to try to find all of the series that I forgot about, so if you can think of something I’ve ignored for a while, let me know.

The good thing is that there have been four more books published since I last read them, so I get to indulge in four whole books rather than just one at at time.

As this book opens we learn that Tony Chu’s boss is super happy because he finally got rid of Tony Chu–his most hated agent.  That’s right Tony Chu is now a traffic cop and his partner, Colby, has been transferred to the USDA–and his partner is a lion.  If this whole USDA/FDA business seems weird, it is, and you need to get caught up on the series and the poultry ban.

How Chu is supposed to use his cibopathic powers (meaning he can see the history of anything he eats) in traffic duty is beyond us (until he actually manages to! and makes a big arrest).

As chapter 2 opens we see that Mason Savoy, a guy who Tony used to work with has kidnapped Tony’s daughter Olive Chu.  Olive is pissed (most of the time anyway) and in no mood to help Mason.  But an incident with a coffee cup reveals that Olive is not cibopathic exactly.  She can do what her father can do just by smell–and she is even better at it.

In the meantime, Tony has been kidnapped by a creepy guy who wants to write a book about the sex lives of dead baseball players (everyone would line up to read that). So he imagines getting Tony to, you know, take a bite out of a few of them and earn their history (I forgot how disgusting this series is).

Back at the USDA, Colby’s boss, a gray haired woman with a bun gives him holy hell–until he agrees to sleep with her, and then things start to change for him.

Mason eventually gets Olive to realize that whatever she eats, she becomes (meaning she can ingest the powers that other possess)–which makes her choices of what she eats rather intriguing.

By the end of the book, it is up to Tony’s girlfriend Amelia Mintz to figure out where Tony is and to recuse him.

The final page brings back a much beloved character who will feature prominently, it seems, in book six (but some things must be doled out patiently).

It was so much fun to get back in this revolting world and to revisit Rob Guillory’s bizarre drawing style–which I find disturbing and compelling at the same time.