“You can’t just let them fucking take over”: The Mat Wakeham interview @ The Comics Journal
KeinerMachtsBesser.de
500 dogs barking: Autofiction in and out of Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Dog Days by Zachary Garrett @ The Comics Journal
Green Milk from the Planet Orange [Discography] via r/ctebcm/
How Walking Shaped Simone and Hélène de Beauvoir’s Art and Thought by Annabel Abbs via Arts & Letters Daily
Elizabeth Goodspeed on what happens when we treat the past like a stock library @ It’s Nice That
Material Reading
With the Blogroll Review category as dried up as the reservoirs in Chinatown let me offer at least an occasional round-up of new sources that stand under the feuilleton umbrella waiting for the rain to come. This is one is of literary magazines.
Orion Magazin – Nature, Culture & Place — There is a print magazine, but shipping would ruin me financially, so I browse the online offerings. Essays, reviews, some poetry and the occasional short story. There are paywalls but you have to click a lot of links to drive into one of those.
Salmagundi Magazine – I don’t know where Skidmore is, but its college has this great quarterly. They know that people have no money (not even quarter-ly) so everything is free. You might want to start with a fabulous piece on Bees by Lauren K. Watel.
Literary Matters – Presented by The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers Literary Matters is an online-only collection of poems, reviews, and all matters literature.
Current – They have server-problems at the moment but when they are up and running they have good stuff, like this link-love-list of their favorite essays of 2024 from other small magazines. In case you need even more reading material.
The Literary Saloon – Finally a blog. News and more about the literary world. as if the main project – “complete review” – wasn’t ambitious enough. The Saloon offers daily fragments into the global literary complex.
Rock nach Math
Last year my music vocabulary got enriched by two new styles. One is Baile Funk about which I will talk a bit more in an upcoming post (try some samples here). The other is Math Rock.
Now let me preface the next few paragraphs by telling you that I have a hard time writing (or even reading) about music and especially about styles. I prefer the german word “Musikrichtung” (“music direction”) because I use genres and labels for exactly this. Knowing where to head to get tracks and mixes that sound similar to something I previously heard and enjoyed.
Thanks to the CTEBCM (Can this even be called Music) subreddit and my willingness to open random YouTube- and Bandcamp-links the first conscious contact was made via Goodhost’s “Attacks” album. A visit to Wikipedia and a deep dive into Bandcamp’s catalogue later and suddenly I had a nice collection of new music.
It’s quite melodic, heavy on the softly-played guitar (there is even a certain guitar-style I associate with the genre) and comes with or without vocals. The latter has often jazz-like qualities.
I wanted to end on a videogame/math core (math core is math rock’s angrier brother) mash up EP I once enjoyed way too much, but of course it’s nowhere to be found. Fecking Bahamas, a blog dedicated to all things Math Rock, has the next best thing, though, 16 records that could have been video game soundtracks.