I like sad raps a lot, so it should come as no surprise that I spent a fair few years feeling like Joe Budden was one of the nicest rappers out. I’ve fallen off the train these days, but I happened to hear the version of “Ventilation” from Mood Muzik Third on shuffle and it all came flooding back. You can stream the entire record here:

“I got another side I never showed to you/ The side where everybody is disposable/ See relationships are never a threat/ ’cause I’ll erase the history and act like we never met”

Mood Muzik Third is the brainchild of producer Ill Poetic. He merged the acapellas from Budden’s Mood Muzik 3 — the third in a series of mixtapes about feeling bad — and musical elements from Portishead’s album Third, and I assume other assorted Portishead songs here and there. I wasn’t particularly familiar with Budden when I heard this album, though I think I’d heard a guest spot here and there on a Fabolous tape or something. I didn’t know Portishead at all, and still don’t, really. But I like this album a lot.

It works because the music and the lyrics are right in line. The music is deep and bassy, and even a traditional-sounding joint like “All of Me” gives way to something that sounds just a little bit darker than you’d think, with chopped vocal and drum samples and Budden’s voice sitting on top of the beat, sounding just ever-so-slightly distant. “All of Me” doubles back in on itself to the point where the vocal samples are just sounds instead of words and Budden’s anger and frustration with himself and others stands out even more than it normally would.

Budden doesn’t really do the sad-sack confessional joints that come with most sad raps. Self-loathing is common, as is self-pity, but Budden ups the ante to self-hate. There’s an idea in most of these songs that Budden orbits around and sometimes tackles explicitly. The idea is that the Joe Budden of today crawled out of the carcass of Joe Budden from yesterday. Yesterday’s Budden was a bastard. Today’s Budden is trying to be something different, but knows that he has bastard tendencies.

“Some niggas wanted to kill me/ Got locked up and never found me/ So my goal is to catch a charge in that same county/ Picture me getting bumped for a silly hand-off/ The bullpen’s fucked up, just ask Willie Randolph/ See, I could pop a few nickel-plated Glocks, too/ It’s easier to kill niggas than it is not to”

But what makes the lyrics work is that Budden is a reforming bastard with savage lyrics. He consistently puts himself and others on blast, but does it in a way that makes you want to dig deeper. The similies and metaphors click intellectually, and as you mull them over, you realize they click emotionally, too. Mood Muzik Third is about being disappointed and frustrated because you’re being held back from what you could be. There’s an ideal, and then there is you, down here with the rest of us.

You can feel the hate in these bars from “Dear Diary”:

I was one long line away from the Tetris
She sent me the L, that sent me to hell
To the point where I was ignoring my son
I don’t see him, don’t talk to him
I don’t greet him, don’t walk with him
But I pay for him like he’s an object
No matter how right I am in court I can’t object
Dear Diary, how could she deny me?
How she go to bed without it fucking with her psyche?
Is she wrong using him so I can come back?
Or am I wrong for wishing I could get my come back?

There’s no bragging in these joints, no hope that things are getting better. It’s about how Budden feels, and Budden feels bad, jack. It’s catharsis on wax, and I figure that’s why I took to it like I did. He has that perfect combo of talent and subject matter to draw me in, and Ill Poetic’s laced the Portishead samples and beats to perfectly fit Budden’s style.

“Saying ‘Jump Off dont sound right’/ Is blashphemous, down right/I astound mics/ Music is just what feelings sound like”

Hey, hey, hey. It’s a pretty light week, mainly due to there being no issue of Shonen Jump, meaning that Gaijin Dan is powerless from lack of manga. So we’ve got me, Space Jawa, Jody and Matlock.

Strangely enough, Injustice has the most panel entries this week. Yeah, go figure. It’s an interesting issue because writing-wise, it’s really well-done. It’s a touching story about Superman telling Catwoman about Nightwing’s freak death in hopes that she’d be able to comfort Batman. The problem is the art by David Yardin.

Now, for the first half of the issue, Yardin’s art is rather good. Not fantastic, but it looks nice for the most part. You have to remember, though, that this is a weekly comic and even with multiple artists, the deadlines have to be frustrating. Somewhere around the halfway mark, that really starts to kick in and we get some… questionable art.

Dennis Farrell wrote a fun little article at Something Awful about some of the art, where Matlock and I both get namedropped. If you haven’t seen BATFACE yet, be warned.

Now let’s get started, beginning with one of my favorite sequences from this week. Hickman’s Avengers double-run is so great so far.

Avengers #11
Jonathan Hickman and Mike Deodato

Batman #20
Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, James Tynion IV and Alex Maleev

Batman and Red Hood #20
Peter J. Tomasi, Patrick Gleason and Cliff Richards

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The Following, created by Scream writer Kevin Williamson, is easily the least defensible show I watch at the moment. It’s trashy, violent, occasionally disgusting, and occasionally forgets about the main gimmick of the big bad guy. But in a way, that’s a strength unto itself. Things happen, and keep happening, on The Following. The usual way I describe the show is that it’s willing to “go there” several times an episode. The exact location of “there” varies from episode to episode, but in a show featuring people getting shot with spear guns, serial killer threesomes, two separate love triangles with one woman, one serial killer telling another serial killer “You’re crazy!” and meaning it, and Kevin Bacon straight-up murdering a couple dozen people.

The series feels like a Batman pitch in a lot of ways. Ryan Hardy, a retired FBI agent, is an alcoholic and burnt out. Years ago, he captured Joe Carroll, a serial killer, professor, and novelist with an Edgar Allen Poe fetish. Carroll went to jail, Hardy wrote a book, Carroll languished in jail, Hardy had a brief relationship with Carroll’s ex-wife Claire, and life went on. The series kicks off when Carroll escapes from jail a short time before his execution, murders a lady he considered unfinished business, gets captured again, and then sets about unveiling his “sequel.”

You see, while he was locked up, Carroll met a few fellow travelers that he quickly turned into minions. Imagine a serial killer sleeper cell full of people with specific instructions who are hiding in plain sight and utterly, terminally dedicated to the worship of Joe Carroll and death. He bestows his adoration of Poe upon them, and they take to the streets in Poe masks, with Poe-themed crimes, or with Poe’s work on their lips. Carroll wants Hardy — dead, alive, or in his bed, I’m not sure which — and his followers want to show their lord and master how dedicated they are. Hardy and Claire want to both stop Carroll and retrieve Joey, Claire and Carroll’s son. I want to see what comes out of this meat grinder.

The glue that kept the show together for me was Emma, who was played to the hilt by Valorie Curry. She’s by far the most interesting part of the show on almost every level. Ryan Hardy is depthless, and every attempt at giving him depth was more bathos than pathos as a general rule. Joe Carroll ranges from tedious to incredibly tedious on average, though he has his moments. Kevin Bacon and James Purefoy, who play Hardy and Carroll, are talented, and perform well, but don’t have much to work with that you haven’t seen before. Claire, played by the fantastic Natalie Zea, is crucial, and I think a solid #2 for the show.

Emma has a lot going on. She’s part of a surprise love triangle between herself, her boyfriend Jacob, and her boyfriend’s accidental boyfriend Paul. (They had to pretend to be gay for a couple years so Carroll could spy on Claire. Paul was and is gay. Jacob was not, but might be bisexual now.) She’s in love with Carroll, the prototypical powerful male mentor. She doesn’t hate Claire, which I thought was a nice touch, but that doesn’t mean she’s totally fine with Claire being in the picture, either.

But what really clicked for me was that Emma is both ruthless and intelligent. She’ll cut you open from ear to ear if you give her a chance, but she also knows when to cut her losses and run. She struggles with her love, but she knows what she has to do. She has dueling commitments, and the bulk of her drama derives from how those commitments conflict with each other. When she finally chooses, it’s cold-blooded and sad, but appropriate and logical.

Claire, on the other hand, has one goal: her ex-husband does not get to ruin her son like he ruined their marriage. Everything she does in the show can be traced back to that motivation. Zea is a solid enough actress that you believe it, especially when she does something unbelievable. We’re privy to the thoughts of Hardy, Carroll, and Emma, by virtue of their mountains of screentime. But Claire is often left to react to what the other characters do, instead of doing things on her own, so she remains a slight cipher until she picks up a gun and makes a decision.

That makes her exciting in a way that Ryan Hardy, who is all Guilt and Shame and Anger, is definitively not. We know how Hardy’s story plays out, but Claire? She’s in a position to do something new and different, and she does. Repeatedly. The gun, the knife, the fight in the hallway, the screams, the submission, the betrayals — she works. Claire & Joey vs The World plays better, and more honestly, than Hardy vs Carroll ever could. Their conflict is a game of wits, a conflict between two men who are determined to prove that their way is the right way. Hers is simple: “Not my son.”

Carroll wants his family back, Joey and Claire included. He wants to live with them in his serial killer paradise, and he wants Ryan Hardy to die or submit to him. He’s playing the “I’m smarter than you, de-tec-tive” game, in addition to fetishizing death and murder. He’s a cult leader, and full of that pompous swagger that makes these dudes so boring. He’s all about how important he is, how remarkable his ideas are, when the opposite is true. It’s not Carroll that matters. Carroll is tedious. He wants sex and power, but he dresses it up with words like “family” and “literary” and pretensions of following in Poe’s footsteps. His big hideout is a light house. Why? ’cause his hero wrote a story about one.

His big revenge plan is not a scheme or outline. It is a novel, that he is writing, about exactly what’s going to happen. He is, when you break it down, writing fanfic about himself and Ryan Hardy with a smug omniscient narrator telling the tale. At one point, Hardy gets a copy of the manuscript and begins reading aloud… a passage about him finding the manuscript and reading it aloud!

Tedious.

Hardy’s not much better. Kevin Bacon plays him well, but believing in Ryan Hardy means believing in a whole bunch of nonsense. He’s retired FBI, and deputized at one point in the series, but not before he catches five or six bodies. By the end of the season, he’s killed so many cult members that the cult has to kill a bunch of people semi-offscreen just to balance the scales for the viewers. He’s an old and tired character type, and the writers refrain from doing anything new with him. The revelation of his sad past is more of an eye-roller than tear-jerker, and by the time he gets to the point where he tortures and then murders a defenseless cult member… well. You’ve probably already checked out by that point.

The Following succeeds when it’s indulging in spectacle (spear guns, threesomes, gaping throat wounds) and well-executed emotional content (Emma and Joey’s relationship, Claire and Emma, Emma/Paul/Jacob). Those parts range from good to great, and satisfy on a very basic sex/violence level. But when the series tries to do anything with Edgar Allen Poe, or Hardy and Carroll’s motivation, it stumbles. There’s not enough to Carroll or Hardy. They’re both sad old men who don’t see people as humans so much as tools.

Hardy is presented as the one man that can stop Carroll, both by Carroll and the show itself, and that isn’t right at all. Hardy is nothing. He’s just a dude, an object of Carroll’s affections and the object of his obsession. But Carroll wants him, and that works to shine a spotlight on him. But just outside of that spotlight, where Emma and Claire live, is where the real action happens. That’s where the heart of the series is, but The Following is so in love with the idea of clever twists and two men battling each other for pride and justice that it misses the mark.

The season finale was the worst episode of TV I’d seen in a while, though the weird and worthless incest double bluff episodes of Sword Art Online I saw this weekend actually beat it. It’s everything that’s awful about The Following, and precious little of the good. Ryan Hardy goes full heel, Joe Carroll becomes even more insufferable, and the focus is on the spectacle and the boring conflict between the men. It makes sense, since that’s where the story was headed anyway, but it feels so empty and tired, like reruns of a story you already know well.

The supporting cast shines, though. I really liked the experience of watching The Following, especially when chatting with #TeamBeloved member David Wolkin and my friend Keri, but I can’t say as I’ll watch it again. Season two might get a glance or three, just to see if it turns into The Following: Emma & Claire, but I don’t have high hopes.

Eight songs here, which should play in random order. The list:
-Curren$y – Armoire feat. Young Roddy & Trademark – The Stoned Immaculate
-Aesop Rock – Getaway Car feat. Cage, Breeze Brewin – None Shall Pass
-B-Rock & The Bizz – My Baby Daddy
-Angel Haze – Realest – Reservation
-Copywrite – Light’s Out feat. Catalyst – The Jerk
-Johnson & Jonson – Hold On John – Johnson & Jonson
-The Alchemist – Flight Confirmation feat. Danny Brown & Schoolboy Q – Russian Roulette
-Joell Ortiz – Nissan, Honda, Chevy

I spend a lot of time listening to the same ol’ songs. I have a little iPod Nano I use for music, an eight gig joint, and I tend to keep it stocked with favorites, albums I want to revisit, and new mixtapes or albums. The downside is that after a day or two, I realized I know everything on the iPod by heart, so if my mood changes and I want to hear a certain sound, my choice is to either listen to something hot that I’ve temporarily played out or to just deal with it.

So I changed things up. I made a smart playlist in iTunes, told it to populate randomly, and gave it a size limit of five gigs, so I could still have a few favorites loaded up. I’ve got something like sixteen thousand songs, but only a fraction of that stays in heavy rotation. This is a way to correct my course and rediscover things I forgot.

This mixtape is a semi-random selection of eight songs from my 5 GB playlist. I pretty much flicked down the iTunes list and grabbed the first ten songs that caught my eye, and then pared it down to remove dupes. It’s tilted highly in favor of rap (no surprise), but also toward the past five years, which was a legitimate surprise. I don’t listen to a lot of ’80s rap, but I love joints from the ’90s and early ’00s. That’s not represented here, I don’t think. I am pleased at the diversity of styles, prestige, and content here, though.

Aesop Rock’s “Getaway Car” has one of my most favorite beats ever, and Aes Riggedy Rock, Cage, and Breeze Brewin go in so hard, and the Camp Lo sample is disgusting. It’s ugly, a mean mug of a sample that’s just the best thing ever this morning. I’ll show up for Breeze anyway, but it’s lovely this song is so ill in general.

“My Baby Daddy” was the jam when I was a kid. I guess I was 14 or 15, but that song goes now just as much as it did then. Maybe you had to be there, like with “Ya mama smokes crack rock!” “Mama, please stop, ’cause they pickin’ on me!” Be careful out there, tho — a lot of people think it was JT Money (including my iTunes, for some reason), because of his single “Who Dat.” “My Baby Daddy”‘s music video is super ’90s too.

Here’s the answer song from Anquette:

I always liked answer or sequel songs. “No Scrubs” vs “No Pigeons,” or how Beanie Sigel’s “In The Club” came out of Jay-Z’s “Do It Again.”

Copy’s “Light’s Out,” featuring Catalyst, has one of my favorite aspects of rap music: when the beat drops out at the end and the rapper just keeps going. Copywrite is nice — “if it ain’t MHz or Weathermen it’s a piece of shit!” — but Catalyst getting those extra few seconds is spectacular. I know it’s calculated or whatever, but it feels like just unbridled creativity spilling out. It makes the raps better, even if they’re just aight, and I’ll never stop loving it. I react to it like I reacted to Canibus kicking 100 bars in a row.

Johnson & Jonson (bka Blu & Mainframe)’s “Hold On John” actually has an iller sample than “Getaway Car.” It’s a perfect pairing of sample, tone, and subject matter. It should go without saying, but Joell Ortiz can spit, too.

True story: I had this big plan this year to go full freelance. I’ve been doing freelance since 2003, and it’s mostly been a side gig to a day job, or a way to help pay my student loans. It’s never been enough to live on, and I’m starting to feel like I might have missed that window, thanks to a combination of bad timing, comfort, and… probably pride. Definitely pride.

ComicsAlliance closing caught me by surprise, because it’s one of a couple things I took entirely for granted when drafting this big plan. I sort of assumed that the site, and the money, would be there while I looked for more. I placed a few singular pieces elsewhere around the internet (I placed five pieces at four outlets that were new to me), but nobody’s biting for what I’m best at or a regular gig. And now CA is gone, so I don’t even have the homebase I was hoping to hang onto while I tried to branch out.

I’m pretty discouraged. I hadn’t realized quite how much until late last week, long after the praise online had died down and I had a chance to think about it. I utterly hate when plans bend and warp, especially when I felt like I had a chance to hit the mark. On top of that, I apparently alienated a few close friends by writing about comics, the money was never great (it was more than welcome, don’t get me wrong — I’m still very grateful for the chance and the checks), and my difficulty elsewhere has me thinking like… “Is it worth it?”

I dunno. I’m still processing. I think I was too ambitious, maybe, but also too focused, in terms of what I can write about. But I’ve spent enough of my time feeling bad. Now it’s time to do something else.

Once a week, for as long as I can hold out (months, looking at what I’ve got banked and planned), I’m going to post a new piece at stories.iamdavidbrothers.com. I’m thinking of alternating fiction and non-fiction, but don’t hold me to it. The first story’s about Karen. I hope you dig it and come back on Friday for the next one.

Thanks for reading.

The Following‘s first season ended last week. I’ll have a longer post later, I think, but here’s a short review of the last episode:

Open thread. What’re you reading/watching/hearing/enjoying?

Great week for me. I just became an uncle for the first time, welcoming Jack Walter Jasper into the world. I don’t want to jinx it, but I’m hoping one day his apathy inadvertently causes my death and drives him to be selfless out of guilt. Then I know I’ve succeeded as an uncle.

I’m helped out by Gaijin Dan, Space Jawa and Matlock. The other regular contributors are off starting their own group, ThWiP East.

Here are some panels. One of them includes an amalgam of Dr. Doom, Loki, Ultron and Red Skull. Another shows how silly Batman looks without black eye makeup under his mask.

Age of Ultron #7
Brian Michael Bendis, Brandon Peterson and Carlos Pacheco

Animal Man #20
Jeff Lemire, John Paul Leon and Timothy Green II

Aquaman #19
Geoff Johns and Paul Pelletier

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While we’re just about to finally get that Lobo DLC for Injustice: Gods Among Us, Netherrealm Studios just released confirmation that the second character on that list will be none other than Batgirl. Because the game needed more Batman characters. Regardless, this only supports a rumored list of downloadable characters that’s been making the rounds. I’ll continue these updates for each official reveal. Even if the rumored fourth named isn’t even a DC comic character.

BATGIRL

Alias: Barbara Gordon, Oracle
First Appearance: Detective Comics #359 (1967)
Powers: Skilled martial artist and acrobat, super intelligent, world’s greatest hacker
Other Media: A lot of Batman cartoons, the 60’s Batman show and also that one movie that killed Alicia Silverstone’s career

The original, original Batgirl was Betty Kane. Back in the early 60’s, writers decided to fight the claim that Batman and Robin were gay by introducing Batwoman and Bat-Girl. Betty and her aunt Kathy had a thing for Batman and Robin, so they started fighting crime for the sake of tapping that Bat-ass. They made a handful of appearances, but faded into obscurity. Betty came back eventually and found a new identity as Flamebird (much like Nightwing, Flamebird is a name of an old Kryptonian superhero). She was recently seen fighting crime along with the current Batwoman, her cousin Kate Kane. The two had a falling out and Flamebird went off to patrol the streets alone. She received a grave injury and was last seen hospitalized.

Barbara Gordon was the adopted daughter of Commissioner Gordon. A librarian during the day, she felt the need to do something to help her father and ultimately do good. Despite Batman trying to shut her down, she refused to give up her persona as Batgirl. She became a huge hit, due to being a more independent female role model and was popular enough to become a major character in the final season of the 60’s Batman show. A season that occurred a year after her debut.

Batgirl mostly teamed up with Robin and Supergirl, having a romantic relationship with the former. In the late-80’s, writer Alan Moore changed the Batgirl game with his Joker-centric story Killing Joke, where the Joker decided to prove a point by screwing up Commissioner Gordon’s life so hard that he’d make him snap. This included Joker shooting Barbara in the stomach, which shattered her spine. He removed Barbara’s clothes and snapped photos in order to torture her father more, though it’s been insisted by the author that Joker didn’t go further with her. The comic ended with a meaningful scene that involved Batman and Joker laughing together as Batman took Joker into custody. Barbara – paralyzed from the gunshot – wasn’t really pleased with that. Guess you just had to be there.

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It took me a few weeks to work my way through Tomb Raider, the Lara Croft reboot written by Rhianna Pratchett and creative directed by Noah Hughes. I liked it quite a bit, and ended the game somewhere around 81% completion. I think it has the best platforming gameplay since Uncharted 2, and the best sense of spectacle since Uncharted 3. The platforming action/adventure genre is one I like more than just about anything else, though I need a final ruling on whether or not the NBA 2k series is a genre unto itself. I never played a lot of Tomb Raider as a kid, though I wore the original PS1 demo out. But you know, Lara Croft is an institution. She’s like The Simpsons or James Bond. Even if you never watched the show or the movies, you know the deal, and probably think of them at least a little fondly.

I was surprised, but pleased, to see that Tomb Raider‘s tone is dark and desperate, with occasional outbursts of violence. Lara’s proficient with her pistol, rifle, shotgun, and bow, and she uses them to kill. I preferred the bow, feeling that it fit more with the survival-oriented story, and used melee attacks for when things got too close and hectic. I liked the bow because it felt more skillful than the guns. You can spray and pray with any of the weapons. You just look and tap R1 and hope for the best. But it’s not that easy with the bow, especially when taking on multiple dudes at once. When you get into a groove, it’s all about timing, position, and clever use of cover. I liked walking that line when I could, though I definitely relented a few times and used the shotgun for close-range combat.

Camilla Luddington’s performance as Lara was pretty good, too. I’m less keen on the turn toward cliché hardness the character takes toward the end of the game, after yet another dude sacrifices his life for her, but she absolutely sold the lost, wet, and cornered take on the character that is the main thrust of the game. She’s quiet when she needs to be, hard when she needs to be, and I like how she evolved over the course of the game in a general sense. She sounds appropriate for the character and story. That sounds more clinical and less enthusiastic than I want it to, but I mean it. She works, and works well. I hope she sticks around.

My only real problem with the game, outside of the unavoidable “Hey! This is a video game!” plot and gameplay elements, is that the death sequences that play when Lara dies in certain situations actually greatly detract from the experience.

The violence when in combat is on par for most games these days. Headshots kill and blood sprays, but you aren’t exactly dismembering or eviscerating people, nine times out of ten. Some of the context-sensitive kills are rough — better to call them executions, honestly — but they’re here and then they’re gone. They’re a blip in your experience, a speed bump on the way to getting Lara to return her bow to her back to signal that you can safely explore again.

The death sequences for Lara, though. Now those stick around. The game dwells on them, and if you die a lot early on — I did! I died often enough to get so good at the game I rarely died at all by the end — then they quickly turn from horrific to tedious. But even horrific feels like too much. Lara doesn’t just die from a bump on the head when she falls in water. She gets bumped, blood floats in the water, and she slumps. She doesn’t get stabbed and die. She gets stabbed and is then lifted into the air on a spear, where she shakes a little. Wolves go for her throat as she struggles, arrows pierce her neck and thigh in quick succession, the screen goes fuzzy and fades as you’re choked to death, and Lara gets a spike through the neck as she fights for her life before dying.

This supercut has a lot of the deaths:

It’s a little misleading in and of itself, because the deaths make sense in context. The game’s not a non-stop slideshow of trauma, so much as a showcase for occasional explosions of trauma when you screw up. I didn’t see most of these, but I did see a few of them a lot of times.

The fatalities are too much for me. They’re not too much because they’re offensive, though I do think they tend to be more gross than dumb. They’re too much because the game already does a great job of positioning Lara as someone who is cornered and almost drowning under the tension. The stealth sections, for example, are legitimately tense, because you have to do them without the creature comforts of a Soliton Radar. It’s just you, your guts, and your quiet prayers that you can make it through quickly enough to not get caught.

The tension is actually somewhat lessened in the combat segments, of all places, but it shines in the scripted platforming sequences. Every instance of Lara running away from explosions, sprinting toward a rapidly-decreasing window of opportunity, or taking a leap of faith across a gorge are fantastic. You have some measure of control in these segments, and I really enjoyed gunning it down hallways or trying to figure out the best way to make a jump while something unlikely was chasing me. While the chase sequences used an implicit, though sometimes absent, time limit to generate tension, the platforming sections generated tension by simply being a do-or-die scenario.

That balance really worked for me, even though I can recognize that the chases tended to be repetitive (Lara escapes a lot of crumbling or exploding structures) and the platforming fundamentally basic. The execution was good enough that simply exploring felt like a worthwhile endeavor. There’s a lot to say for a familiar thing being executed well.

The thing about the fatalities is that they feel like icing on a steak. They feel out of place within the greater context of Tomb Raider, and awkwardly vicious on a smaller level. They go much further than the rest of the game does when it comes to violence, and more than anything else, they feel like a punishment that’s out of proportion to the sin. They don’t add to the Tomb Raider experience for me, either. The tension is already there and properly effective, but the fatalities tip the balance from The Descent toward a cheap direct-to-dvd slasher movie. I’m really interested in seeing how developers portray violence in games, and how that affects the entire experience. Jacking up the tension without going fully exploitative is a tough row to hoe, and Tomb Raider manages to strike a pretty solid balance, but doesn’t quite stick the landing.

Recently, I finished up taking Improv 401 at the Upright Citizens Brigade Training Center. Before I try it again (I passed, but I need more polish before I can move on), I’m going to switch into Sketch Writing 201. Anyway, during my year-plus of improv study, I’ve met a lot of interesting people. My 401 class was definitely one of the more interesting collections of personalities I’ve crossed swords with. I thought I might as well showcase some of their stuff.

To start off, there’s the ever-so-loveable Jeremy Pinsly, a guy I worked with in both Improv 301 and 401. A man whose optimism is outright contagious, Jeremy currently hosts a biweekly show in New York City called Tuesday Night Comedy at Slightly Oliver. One of these days I swear I will go see it! In the meantime, here’s a snippet of Jeremy’s own stand-up.

Next up is the wonderful Amy Kersten, who writes/produces/stars in a web series called Hot Mess, which is about… actually, the fact that the site is currently under maintenance on the day I link to it is pretty much what the series is about. But really, it’s about humorously disastrous personal stories sent in by viewers being turned into skits. In the meantime, Amy has been releasing an inspired weekly series called Coat Tales. Months back, she worked as a coat-check girl at an unnamed bar. To keep from stabbing herself with rusty scissors, she coped with the job by sneaking off into the closet to film herself trying on various coats while telling stories of the kind of bullshit she’s had to go through. Here’s the latest episode.

Episodes 1 and 2 can be found here and here.

Then there’s the valedictorian of Improv 401, Ted White. When not carrying the rest of our sorry asses, he was hanging out with his own indy improv team Tokyo Boom Boom. And he still does! When not performing shows, they’ve been releasing some skits online, including this new one where Ted promotes a party bus… under unfortunate consequences.

Finally, there’s Greg Stees. I THOUGHT he was my friend, but then he had the audacity to go move to LA. The cad. Anyway, I might as well show off some of his funny (and I say that begrudgingly) material, such as this clip where he appears to be playing me in ten years.

Oh yeah, we also had Kaitlin Monte, a former Miss New York who hosts trivia shows for NBC and spends much of her time and effort promoting anti-bullying, but there’s nothing especially unique or notable about that, now is there?

All good folks, except Greg. Now when NYC does its annual 72-hour non-stop improv marathon in two months, these guys will have to let me crash on their couches. Except Greg.

There’s this story I’ve been telling for years about how Frank Miller, specifically his comic Sin City: The Big Fat Kill #5, was the bullet that got me into crime fiction in a big way. It’s a tipping point for me, and I feel like there’s a definite shift in my tastes from pre-BFK to post-BFK. I’ve said it here on 4l!, I’m pretty sure I said it on ComicsAlliance, and I’ve definitely poorly told the story in person to a bunch of people about how that comic blew my mind in the way that you do when you like something too much and can’t decide what to say. It’s a big comic for me, maybe The Comic, in a way that most comics are not. I can trace a lot of the grimy crime stuff I like to things from that book easy as pie.

I was talking with friends about novels a little bit ago — forty-five minutes ago, if we’re being perfectly honest with each other. (We are — I am.) We talked about what our parents read when we were kids, what we read ourselves, the stuff of theirs that we read… just sort of a nice conversation. “Here’s some stuff. Let’s react to each other and see where this goes.” John Sanford, James Patterson, Anne Rice. I didn’t get to mention Eric van Lustbader and Tom Clancy, but I sure was thinking it. A name pops into my head: Kay Scarpetta.

Was she a writer? A character? Probably a character. I haven’t read any of these books since the ’90s, so it’s no wonder they’re a little fuzzy.

I googled her. Created by Patricia Cornwell in 1990, Kay Scarpetta was a Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, VA for a while, and I believe that’s where I found her. Around ’94, I was living in the Hampton Roads area and ten-going-on-eleven, so reading about places that were nearby — nobody ever wrote about Small Towne, GA, where home still is — was cool. Very cool. I ate those books up, alongside the Pattersons and Sanfords and such.

Wait, I read those Scarpetta books around ’94? Maybe ’95 at the outside? I couldn’t have gotten Big Fat Kill from my uncle until 1996, 1997, when I was just barely a teenager. That doesn’t make any sense. But I definitely read those novels first and Big Fat Kill later…

As it turns out, I got my interest in crime from my mother. Frank Miller was where it crystalized, I guess, but mom came first. My life? A lie.

Here’s a brief list of other things my mother gave me:
-The Roots
-Erykah Badu
-Meshell Ndegeocello
-Sade
-No Doubt
-Probably Fight Club
-Definitely The Jackson 5 (we used to sing “ABC”)
-my temper.

Eight songs here, which should play in random order. The list:
-The Smiths – Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now
-The Verve – The Drugs Don’t Work
-The Verve – Bitter Sweet Symphony
-Joy Division – Love Will Tear Us Apart
-The Smith – There Is A Light That Never Goes Out
-The Stone Roses – Fools Gold
-Blur – Trimm Tabb
-Blur – Under the Westway

My friend Amy hooked me up with a playlist she called “Madchester and Manchester.” You can listen to it here if you have Spotify. I was going to embed it here, but it turns out you need Spotify to hear the songs, so… I did a lot of extra legwork and turned the tracks I like best (plus two more) into an 8tracks mix.

I say I like britpop, but what I really mean is “I like Damon Albarn-led or -related projects, like Blur, Gorillaz, and so on.” Albarn’s work has been the main way I’ve experienced britpop, even down to it being the lens through which I learn about britpop history. Oasis exists in relation to Blur. I was introduced to Justine Frischmann not through Elastica but via “Oh, she’s Damon Albarn’s girlfriend, some songs are probably about her, and the best Blur albums are post-breakup.” It’s not that I’m a superfan — I own a lot of his stuff and I figure his name is enough to get me onboard, but I wouldn’t say I’m obsessive about it — so much as I’m ignorant of the context. I wasn’t there, I was a kid when all of it was going on, and frankly, there ain’t a lot of young black kids in Small Towne, GA listening to The Smiths or whatever. I didn’t even hear an entire Beatles song, and recognize that it was The Beatles, until high school.

So I reached out to a few friends who’d know. Amy hooked me up weeks ago, and it took me forever to listen for stupid reasons. (I wanted time to be able to really listen to figure out what I liked, which is typical of me.) I got Ron Richards to kick me a lot of album recommendations in a few different genres, too, since we have so little overlap in taste.

I’m trying to broaden my horizons, and the best way I know how to do that is to do something new and then see how it makes me feel. In this case, I took Amy’s playlist and listened to it a few times on shuffle while walking around the city and commuting home. After an hour or so, I started starring whichever songs caught my ear for whatever reason. Maybe I liked the melody, maybe I liked a particular line, or maybe I liked something more ephemeral.

Whichever way it is, the star means I need to pay attention, and paying attention means either checking out more songs from the album the song originates from or asking friends what else sounds similar.

I don’t really have an endpoint for this. I just wanna know more, and spider-webbing my way to more seems good enough to me.

Thanks Amy. Sorry it took so long.

The two songs I added to round out the mix are a couple Blur joints I like a lot. The only Blur album I don’t own/haven’t heard is The Great Escape, I think. I passed it over when I was heavy into Blur, by accident maybe, and haven’t had a chance to go back yet. Which is weird of me, but hey.

–I wrote about Frank Quitely & Mark Millar’s Jupiter’s Legacy. It’s soft like baby butts, but also the best comic Millar’s written in recent memory.

–I wrote about Ananth Paragariya and Yuko Ota’s Johnny Wander. I like it a lot. Website.

ComicsAlliance is closed. To my knowledge, it wasn’t because of hits or performance or controversy. It didn’t fit, or something. Dunno. Either way, I spilled 477,770 words on 317 posts over about three and a half years.

-I watched Matthew Vaughan’s Kick-Ass finally, the adaptation of the odious Millar/JRjr comic. It was eleventy times better than the comic, but still pretty dumb. It’s like they intentionally shied away from making a good movie in favor of a weird quirky… thing. Hit-Girl was the most interesting part, and they botched every single action scene with her, including the big introduction where she rescues Kick-Ass.

It’s weird. It wanted to be an action movie, but the action was shot poorly almost as a general rule. The hallway run toward the end had so many good parts, like Hit-Girl dodging bullets, but it was delivered in the laziest, stupidest-looking way. Why cut every time someone moves an arm? I mean, maybe it was because they needed a stuntman (stunt-girl?) for Hit-Girl, but people have been using stuntmen for decades without it look like crap.

Anyway. The trailer for Kick-Ass 2 was funny, but ehhhh. Figure I’m good.

Open thread. What’re you reading/watching/hearing/enjoying?