I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: ANI DIFRANCO-Tiny Desk Concert #669 (November 8, 2017).

Back in the day, I really liked Ani DiFranco.  I saw here live a few times.  I loved her whole indie thing (all her music on her own label) and her politics.  Plus her songs were interesting and catchy.  And then, some time around 2000 I lost interest in her music.

I didn’t really like the new jazzy/funky/extended sound that she was playing with.

This Concert has two newish songs and one old song (it’s great to hear the old song again).

For her Tiny Desk debut, DiFranco brought a hell of a backing band, with drummer Terence Higgins and singer/violinist Jenny Scheinman joined by none other than Ivan Neville on keyboards.

I felt that her song writing style didn’t really lend itself to jazzy funky style. And I still feel that way.  The blurb notes that the band lends a slithery underpinning of funk to three songs that stretch across much of DiFranco’s career.  And Opening with “Dithering,” from 2014’s Allergic To Water, that is true.  But one of the things I loved about her music was her excellent guitar playing.  And on “Dithering,” all of the action of the song comes from the funky keys (and it’s a great groovy funky song), but I find that he singing style doesn’t quite work with the music.  Her voice still sounds terrific, though and Scheinman’s backing vocals are terrific.

Even if I still don’t love her new songs, I’m glad she’s still doing her own thing:

But she’s also kept her core values intact, from her outspoken commitment to progressive social causes to her strenuously maintained independence from the machinery of the music industry.   DiFranco introduces “Play God” (from this year’s Binary) with a monologue about reproductive rights and gender relations.

And it’s fantastic–pointed and thoughtful with just enough edge.  Musically, the song brings back some of her fingerpicking style and I do like Neville’s funky keys.  In fact the funkiness of this song feels natural.  And lyrically it’s great too.

She and her band close with 1998’s “Swan Dive,” which she calls “an early attempt at a happy song.”  I get a kick out of how she gets another guitar change and says “I never play a guitar twice.”  This song showcase what I loved (and love) about her songs–a complex and interesting guitar/rhythmic/percussive pattern that she does by herself.  The additional musicians add more fill, which sounds nice–the gentle keys and the slow violin (which also makes some great noisy sounds) as well as the way the drums kick in for the chorus.  It all works great.

It’s been about fifteen years since I really listened to her and I’m glad she’s still rocking to her own beat.

[READ: May 1, 2017] Pretty Deadly 1

I love Kelly DeConnick’s work with the Marvel Universe.  So I was pretty excited to read this story which is her own creation.

When I went to log this book on Goodreads, it said that this book marries the magical realism of Sandman with the western brutality of Preacher.  And I found that uncanny because as I was reading it I thought that the style of elliptical writing and even the placement of the text boxes in relation to the pictures was very much like Sandman. But the brutality of the art and the setting reminded me of Preacher. Clearly I was onto something.

I loved Sandman. I liked Preacher (never actually finished it, though), and I fear that this book is more Preacher than Sandman for me.

It begins very confusingly with a butterfly talking to a dead rabbit.  They are telling each other stories and they tell the story of when they met (which appears to be when the rabbit was shot and killed).

The story the rabbit tells is of Sissy a young girl with a vulture head on her own head.  Sissy tells a fantastically rhyming story of a man who loved a woman so much that he locked her away so no one else could behold her.  Eventually she died alone and feeling unloved.  But she was also pregnant and the baby was born as she died.  And death kept her.

Then there’s the story of Alice.  Alice tracks down Johnny who is currently with a prostitute–you see a lot in this comic!  She wants a piece of paper that he has.  It turns out that he gave it to the girl who told the story.

The next sections are chock of full of violence.  The drawing and artwork are beautifully grotesque.  A man gets his eye sliced up, there’s blood everywhere and there are gun blasts.  The art is as I say beautiful and yet I have no idea what’s going on through most of the pictures.  Some people get killed and some people do not.

About midway through the story the daughter who was born of death comes to the earth.  She’s a wonderfully drawn character.  Her face is sort of a skull but not exactly and everything about her is elongated and very cool.  She’s sexy in a very strange way and she is of course, brutal.  Her name is Ginny.  And she is out for revenge.

By the end of the book I really had no idea what happened.

Frankly I didn’t enjoy this story all that much, although I did enjoy the artwork.  It got to the point where I stopped trying to digest the word balloons and just sort of used them to guide the pictures along.  That made it more enjoyable.

I was under the impression that there were many volumes of this series, but I see that as of right now there are only two.  So I will read the second one just to see if I can make heads or tails of it.  Plus the artwork is really great.