I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: ZOLA JESUS-Tiny Desk Concert #421 (February 23, 2015).

I didn’t know Zola Jesus before this Tiny Desk show.  I’d heard the name but didn’t know that it was the “group” formed by Nika Roza Danilova.

This show is practically a capella.  It is just Nika and Daniel Walter Eaton on trombone.  Yes, trombone.  He works as a punctuation to her voice (which is powerful and really impressive).

She evidently normally plays with a much bigger band, and often with a lot of electronics.  So this really showcases the quality of her voice.

She sings three songs (in just 9 minutes): “Ego,” Hunger” and “Nail.”  “Nail” is probably the catchiest song of the three.

I can’t say much more about them, except that a trombone is certainly an unusual accompaniment and her voice is tremendous.  Check it out.

[READ: January 6, 2015] Moon Knight

This book collects the Moon Knight series issues 1-6.  I had never heard of Moon Knight before although apparently he is an old character resurrected by Ellis.

The story is a fairly simple (supernatural) one.  Marc Spector, a mercenary, was killed in Egypt under the statue of Khonshu, the moon god.  Spector was resurrected (or something) in the guise of the moon god.  According to the introduction of the book, “he wore [the god’s] aspect to fight crime for his own redemption. He went completely insane, and disappeared.”

This is what happened next.

So Moon Knight dressed all in white with a white mask and a white moon emblem.  He says that he dresses this way so his enemies see him coming.

Each of the 6 books is a story unto itself with Moon Knight fighting someone who kills at night.  In the first, he finds a former agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (which makes me wonder if he will appear on the TV show eventually–he would be quite striking) who has been killing people to use their parts for his own body.

I loved the way book 2 “Sniper” was set up.  There are eight victim of the sniper and we follow their stories in the eight panels on the page until one by one they simply go white.  The third story “Box” is about fighting ghosts (I loved the way he dealt with that), although I found the actual story line to be rather confusing.

In Book 4 “Sleep” I loved that the opening scene is at Odin Burger.  This was a weird 0ne in which a man’s dreams were infecting people at a sleep clinic.  It is quite amazing.  Book 5 “Scarlet” is a simple story of rescuing a kidnapped girl.  The whole story is basically just Moon Knight killing the bad guys in different ways as he gets to her.  It must have been very fun to draw.

The final book returns us to the beginning.  In the opening scenes we saw Moon Knight helping out the police.  But in this book, a disgruntled cop decides that he is going to find out Moon Knights’s secret and take him out.

Of course we do meet Khonshu (what a creepy character he is!)  I loved the art work and Ellis is really a master of the short story like this.  I hope to find more volumes of this series.