I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: JOE HENRY-Tiny Desk Concert #176 (November 21, 2011).

I had never heard of Joe Henry, so imagine my surprise to find out that he was releasing his 12th album in 2011.  For this Tiny Desk, it’s just him at a stool playing his guitar.  He has a very easy vibe, telling stories between songs and playing them with very little fuss.

He opens the show by saying this is, “not exactly like Woody Guthrie playing for the union members but you are working people.”

He plays four songs, “Sticks and Stones,” After the War,” “Odetta” and “Piano Furnace.”

Between the first two songs, he says he first became aware of Tiny Desk Concerts when his friend Vic Chesnutt was on the show (amusingly, he was the second person on the show).  He says he has a song on his new record about Chesnutt (Chesnutt had recently died).  He doesn’t play it though.  At first it seems like he might not be allowed to play it, but then it seems like maybe he just doesn’t get to it.

Rather he plays “After the War” where his guitar sounds like it has an incredible echo on it.  That echo is also present on the third song.  After which Bob asks him about his guitar.

Joe says he’s had the guitar for 6 years.  But the guitar dates back to 1932.  He says that he heard things differently with this guitar.  It’s got a smaller body and was actually sold as a budget guitar by Gibson (for $19 in 1932).  He also jokes that it’s black and looks a bit like a World Wrestling Federation belt.

Then someone asks him about Sam Phillips.  Joe says he sold her husband a guitar about 20 years ago.  She and her husband have split and Sam got the guitar and has been playing only that guitar for the last 20 years.  He says that he loves that she doesn’t plug in her guitar.  She plays into a microphone where you can hear the whole guitar and which makes the other players lean in to hear her.

I love the chords he plays in the final song, “Piano Furnace,” even if I don’t know what the song is about.  Henry’s voice is familiar.  I think he sounds a bit like a number of different singers.  And overall, nothing really stands out in his performance, except that everything sounds great and hiss songwriting is really solid.  That’s not a bad thing.

[READ: December 20, 2015] Happiness is a Squishy Cephalopod

Mark Tatulli is the author of the Desmond books.  I liked the stories, but I didn’t love the drawing style so much.  Imagine my surprise to find out that Tatulli has been drawing comics featuring this little boy Liō since 2006 (going forward, I’m leaving off that line over the o, because it’s a real pain).

And even more surprising is that I like the drawing style in the comic quite a bit–it is slightly refined over the Desmond books and is all the better for it.

I am also really surprised to find out that this strip appeared in newspapers across the country.  I’ve certainly never heard of it (but then I don’t read newspapers anymore, either).

So Lio is strip about a boy named Lio.  Lio is a dark, dark kid.  He has a pet squid, he loves monsters and he’s delighted by chaos.

This is the first collection of Lio strips.  And it covers the date range from May 15, 2006 – Feb 23, 2007 with one extra strip at the end.

There’s not a lot of words in the strip, which makes them easily transported to other languages.  A simple panel strip of him playing The Game of Life against The Grim Reaper is very funny and really sets the tone of the strip.

Some naughty things that Lio does in the early strips: He learns ventriloquism to hilarious effect; he makes a robotic scary scarecrow; he makes a zip line across his room; he writes words in sunblock on sleeping people at the beach; he gives a hunter a trick shotgun (it says “BANG”); he drops a steak on a fishing line into the Society for Vegans room (to shrieks and screams).

In some meta jokes, Lio’s spider wraps up Babe the Pig; he tries to lure in ET for experimentation; he climbs through an MC Escher print.  There’s also some very funny jokes that play with the conventions of comic strips. He hammers something with the sound effect “squish squish.”  When he looks over, the sound effects guys has the sounds all mixed up.

In some of the more surreal jokes, death comes over to play cards with a mummy, a skeleton and Lio.  He teaches woodland creatures self-defense; giant mice watch him in a game of Mousetrap; frogs laugh at hm when he tries to reach cookies with his tongue; and his pets have painted a mustache on him and a shirt that says “I’m with stupid” pointing to his face.

And he doesn’t always win. he gets pepper sprayed by a girl when he shows off his vampire teeth;  he gets hit with a football from an inflatable guy on a lawn; he also slips on a banana peel thrown by the monkeys in the primate house.

He starts messing with other comic about 50 pages in to this book.  Its hilarious.  The first one has him selling a periscope that goes up through the other strips on the page (it breaks up the word search, crashes through the Boondocks’ parody Brothers Watching Television (with them saying “Yo, something busted our TV, ya heard?”  In another one, he walks in on the sound stage for Mary Worth and is embarrassed by their dialogue.  He tries to capture Garfield;  he traps a kids from The Family Circus and frightens Mark Trail with mice.  Lio also walks past a tree that spits out a kite and then Charlie Brown’s shirt

I loved the giant snakes in a garbage can joke and the terrible pun of the Cow Poke action figure which shows Lio holding his eye.

I assume the Boondocks stopped this year because in a Sunday strip he has the Boondocks moving and Lio bringing his stuff in.  One of the Boondocks’ kids says, “There goes the hood.”

As the book draws to a close, we first meet the girl with whom he falls in love. She pops his balloon and then burns his heart (the one floating above his head).

I haven’t laughed so hard at a newspaper strip in a long time, and I look forward to reading the rest of the collections.