I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: HOSPITAL SHIPS-Tiny Desk Concert #177 (November 23, 2011).

Hospital Ships is a band created by Jordan Geiger, who was in the band Shearwater, among others. In 2011 he released his second album as Hospital Ships.  The blurb describes the album as “packed with poppy folk songs and brash rockers enhanced with instrumental flourishes and bursts of guitar feedback,” but for this recording, they strip everything down to the basics: a guitar, banjo, ukulele and a drum with a towel over it to muffle the sound.

Geiger has a rather high-pitched, delicate, almost talking-singing voice and his songs are rather pretty.  The band plays 3 songs in just over ten minutes.  The first one, “Phantom Limb,” (once my lover, now my friend, you are my phantom limb) has a recurring motif of them saying/singing “ha ha” which is rather catchy.

“Carry On,” features a four-letter word (technically a seven letter word), which might be one of the first times on a Tiny Desk Concert that such a word is uttered.  It’s especially funny given how sweet the band sounds.  The sentiment of the song is nice though: “To all the women I’ve loved, When I was with you I would say I was better off….  And when I’m gone, carry on, carry on.”  There were harmonies in the first song, but they are more prominent in this one (three part) and are quite nice.  The banjo player also does a whistling solo.

“Let Me In” made me laugh because he uses the word baby a lot (which Ben Folds said in his Tiny Desk that he has never said in real life, so why would he put in it a song?).  But this song is very gentle and sweet–just Geiger on his guitar singing “baby, let me in.”

Geiger’s voice reminds me of a few different people–Ben Gibbard from Death Cab for Cutie especially on the final track; perhaps the Mountain Goats or the Weakerthans.  And his songwriting is very good.

[READ: December 26, 2015] Silent But Deadly

I really enjoyed the first Liō collection, and was pretty excited that I could find the second collection so quickly (my library doesn’t have any more collections for some reason, so I’ll have to track the rest down elsewhere).  This book collects the strips from February 25, 2007 – December 2, 2007.

Not much has changed from that book to this one, but I think Tatulli’s comic chops have gotten even better.

The strip won me over immediately with the first one in the book. Lio draws a monster and it comes to life.  He looks at the marker and it says “magic marker” and he gets a big grin and goes back to work.  So simple yet so funny.

It is that big grin–wide open-mouthed just unfettered mischievous delight that occurs in nearly every strip.

Most of the strips invert convention, usually through supernatural (and violent, but newspaper comic strip violent) means.  He feeds ducks super vita-grow and they eat hunters.  A happy meal is happy because it consumes him–that sort of thing.

Lio has a dad (unnamed) who is goofy looking (ans might be drunk, but who can tell).  Lio plays pranks on him but none of them are terribly mean.  Like the one where his raft in the ocean looks like a shark’s mouth–and he is in it.

But there are also some wonderfully hilarious jokes like the porta-potty that is actually a cage taking him to “the land of the kids who didn’t wash their hands.”  I also loved the one where King Kong drops his (giant) wallet.  And the one with “Gruff Construction Co” showing a sign saying Coming Soon and all it is is the beautiful woods (seen with deer and bunnies) chopped down to stumps.  Sometimes a very simple twist on a common phrase makes for a great joke–like “students must change for gym.”

There’s still more jokes about other comic strips–Tatulli is not afraid to mock everyone he can think of. A particular favorite is one where Lio is in a grave yard putting flowers on Foxtrot, Bloom County, The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes awhile outside the gate walk Dennis the Menace, Dagwood, Hagar and Nancy (perfect likenesses too).  There’s one where he has Lio twist the words in a “production” of For Worser or for Best (by Joann Lynstone) (I wonder if that means he likes the strip or not).  And another where Charlie Brown sees that Lio is selling antidepressants and runs over to his booth instead of Lucy’s.  And there are several jokes involving The Lockhorns.

There are hardly any words in the strips.  It’s mostly visual with some words on signs or objects.  Occasionally people will talk but most of the sounds are laughter or screams.

There are some recurring jokes like the “undead bunnies.”

The strips don’t have dates on them, so it’s not always obvious when the strips are from in the calendar, but he does go to summer camp, there are a bunch of Halloween strips (which only vary from the regular strips by virtue of including a jack o’ lantern. And of course a return to school strip that shows just what he did that summer.

Aside from the school bullies the only other recurring character is a little girl with long bangs who is very very wicked.  Lio loves her and she hates him for it.  Its a very sweet romance.  (She will get a name in later books).

There’s a brief forward by Wiley Miller the creator of Non Sequitur in which he raves about the strip being very funny. And he is right.

For ease of searching, I include: Lio.