How 'Fixing Everything' Will Break the Universe: Parallel Realities, Probability Engines & Family Values in Jonathan Hickman's Fantastic Four

Having found at the Emerald City ComiCon the last remaining issues of Jonathan Hickman's Jack Kirby-loving, time hopping, multiple-universe, science/ethics/society/family? tale that is his run on Fantastic Four I finally got to do the last of the reading. And boy-golly, what we have here is a piece of fiction that not only pays homage to the traditions withing comic/pulp writing, but knows it's contemporary literature and cinema enough to inherit their best qualities and discard the soul-less sensationalism and bombast of our times. Somehow, he's crafted a 'family' tale that crosses generations, worlds, eras, realities, time, potentiality, and the cosmos ...ha, what comes to mind for me is Terrance Malick. Yeah, really. This thing may very well end up being the "Tree of Life" for the Marvel Universe. For me, as a guy who's not given a damn about most anything published by Marvel since Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men of some years ago, this imagining by Hickman of Marvel's 'World's Greatest Comics Magazine' seriously comes as a nice surprise.

Link to Marvel Comics Jonathan Hickman "Fantastic Four" - Vol.1

Link to Marvel Comics Jonathan Hickman "Fantastic Four" - Vol.2

Link to Marvel Comics Jonathan Hickman "Fantastic Four" - Vol.3

Link to Marvel Comics Jonathan Hickman "Fantastic Four" - Vol.4

Jonathan Hickman, who went straight from political indie comics like "Nightly News" is now writing a lengthy, multilayered, cross-time tale that begins with a probability engine called The Bridge created by Reed Richards that samples from various parallel universes, outcomes different from our own, designing at getting at compiling a 'ideal' reality (read; imminent disaster). ...after which, it then goes all cosmic. The only real criticism here is that the book was far from needing the gimmick that Marvel chose to conclude the first chapter of the many-year tale with. For such an inventive, sincere adventurous penning of a long standing comic book franchise, to end the chapter with the most-cliche-of-the-cliche, was confounding. I'm holding out hope that Hickman's going to go all pseudo-meta on us with this and reveal later some reversal of the expected that's a smart wink-wink/nudge-nudge as the traditions of this storytelling cliche and resolve it in ways totally unread/seen for the form. The book is that good, and deserves as much. Don't give a damn about comics? Unfortunate, because you're missing out on the rare exceptional storytelling reinvention of the pulp form like this and some of the better explorations of 'high concepts' to be had in all of sci-fi.

Nick Cave's "Meet Me at the Center of the Earth" Exhibit & Performances at SAM : Mar 10 - Jun 5

Visual/performance artist Nick Cave's Soundsuits finally arrive in Seattle as a full exhibit at SAM! A mindboggling composite of household, clothing arts, organic and post-consumer waste objects into total EXTRATERRESTRIAL bright, bold, surreal, assemblages of anthropomorphic forms. Seriously, it's as though peoples from another world thought to create 'clothes' as to better fit in with the populace here on earth. These are vibrant, aural, textural, otherworldly constructs by this US performance artist where the 'Sound' aspect of the 'Soundsuits', was a unexpected bi-product discovered in his wearing/performing in the early incarnation of these pieces. Finally here for a complete exhibit after showing at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco in 2009 to stellar reviews. We got a smaller exhibit of his work at SAM last year (4 pieces) but this is now the complete 'Meet Me at the Center of the Earth' exhibit. Have I said 'Finally!' enough?

Link to official Nick Cave site

Link to SAM "Meet Me at the Center of the Earth" Nick Cave exhibit site

How to Beat the Arrangement: Sephirothic Magick, Wicked Slingshots & Torah Studies in Adam Levin's The Instuctions

Where do I begin with this one? First of all, you'll have to excuse the run-on sentences and use of all caps that's invariably to come of my attempt. "The Instructions" is sprawling in almost a David Foster Wallace (or the over-long Pynchon/Delillo books) kind of way, and I mean that more in the sense of it's style, rather than content or form. It's subjects are Junior High/High School kids set in outer Chicago suburbs, their cultural origins are of Yiddish/Jewish/Scholarly leaning, the Torah figures largely and you learn how to make various weapons to defend yourself from persecution and the assaults of others... including how to apply the Sephiroth in the arrangement of it's 'sphere's phonetically to create a telepathic weapon. So yeah. Does that help? Ok, let's try again, Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee is a Junior High School kid who's been shuffled across the greater Chicago Jewish school system, not because he's a poor learner, the kid's frickin' BRILLIANT but instead because of that very factor, his brilliance, he's managed to influence others to the extend that his elders and even the Rabi who instructs him in after-school Torah study, is concerned about his ability to lead and the strength of his convictions and what end that may effect the local Jewish youth if unguided by their intents. So, of course this system 'the arrangement' as the kids know it, in it's attempt to guide this young protege' does little more than constrain, discipline, dogmatically oppress and manipulate him into situations of acquiescing their superiority and that he should submit to tradition and be humble in his reading of the scholars and study of Torah. Yeah, a A+, inventive, inquisitive, curious, charismatic, Torah-obsessed, young man who sees himself as a Israelite Warrior, caught in the school system, expelled multiple times, placed in a program for the learning-impaired, (ie; AAD/ADHD 'trouble kids'), set back 2 grades when he should be forwarded 5 due to his intellectual competence... what's gonna happen here? Of course: He wants to DAMAGE THE ARRANGEMENT. Of course: HE'S GOING TO USE HIS TORAH-BASED PHILOSOPHY TO FORM A VARIABLE OF HIS OWN. Of course: HE'S GOING TO LEAD THESE KIDS BASED ON THAT PHILOSOPHY. Of course, the modern world is going to label him A TERRORIST...and for as goddamn delusional as he seems sometimes, and for as much as I'm not a fan of Dogma (judea christian, jewish, muslim, you name it) - his sense of logic and justice are often infallible. And after having been a pivotal figure in the lives of kids spanning three High School systems, of course he becomes the very leader THE ARRANGEMENT has been doing their damndest to prevent him from becoming. And this book is a documentation of that process. As the 'Instructions' he's recorded for his brothers, friends and fellow Israelites for their DAMAGE on THE ARRANGEMENT, or as he sees it; Scripture. 1300 Pages of it. Depicting the events of 4 days. And the disastrous and revelatory conclusion of one brilliant fictional kid's battle for justice and freedom within an arrangement that only allows/desires it's participants a set degree of both. By the end it's language infected my mind and I felt divided about the length/need for this degree of hyper-exposition in plumbing the psyche of the protagonist and his world... but I couldn't imagine it otherwise... but yeah, don't just listen to me, consider what these fine establishments had to say on the subject:

Link to The Village Voice review of "The Instructions"

Link to The New York Times review of "The Instructions"

Link to The Washington Post review of "The Instructions"

Link to The London Observer review of "The Instructions"

Link to The San Francisco Chronicle review of "The Instructions"

SWANS new album "My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope in the Sky" & Godspeed! You Black Emperor - US Tours: Feb 17 - Mar 29

So, what happens when you have a series of pretty much genre-creating postrock albums, tour with Rachel's and Labradford in the late 90's/00's have some great shows at the Crocodile in Seattle, release a new album in '03 and tour for it in usamerica, wherein you're detained by Homeland Security because some yokels in Oklahoma think you're 'terrorists', you then release a bunch of cryptic political statements via the interwebs and don't release a new album or return to the US in over 7 years? Well, guess we'll find out this month when they come to town! As a definitive progenitor of a sound that has since been overplayed by the post-rock copyists of this past decade, I'm not quite sure what they themselves are going to bring to transcend that, but have powerful curiosity and anticipation of new material and hopefully a new album in the works.

Even moreso potentially stunning of a return, Michael Gira's defining heavy, heavy, heavy, rock band of the 80's/90's, SWANS is back on tour, after a 14 year hiatus in which Gira led his acoustic folk wanderings of the Angels of Light, he's reformed the band with a hybrid of the original lineup and a expanded percussion section from 'Angels. Again, the initial response is one of hesitation/curiosity on my part, as SWANS truly were a one-of-a-kind monolithic sonic icon in their time, producing the heaviest, body-crushing onslaughts of electrified sound any rock band in history had ever produced. Really, the hyperbole applies, their performances of the 80's are legendarily abusive/transcendent and earned them the comical 'loudest band in the world' tag for many years running. To my ears, it's their recordings of a bit later, when Gira began to infuse that weight, with more elaborate orchestrations that referenced the work of his NYC post-punk cohort Glenn Branca along with passages of acoustic songwriting that were clearly influenced by older american folk traditions - where it all came together for me. Ending with the 1997 world tour documented on their "Swans are Dead" live double album. To see them back together now, not as a nostalgic b.s. 'reunion' as Gira refutes this reforming is, is curious. I expect them to utterly destroy the last bit of hesitation I have concerning the potential relevance of his project playing live again, some 14 years later, or at least that's the hope formed from the incomparable shows I've seen by SWANS in the past. February! It's going to be heavy!
Photo credit: Jeremy Küng

Link to Showbox venue Godspeed! site

Link to official Godspeed! You Black Emperor site

Link to Neumos venue SWANS site

Link to official SWANS site

"Nuremberg" & "Shoah" : Defining Documentaries of the Past Century at Landmark & IFC Feb 4 - May 13

Two of the most significant Holocaust and post-Holocaust documentaries ever produced, both re-released by IFC & Landmark Theatres and screening in cities across the US in the coming month! Suppressed by the US War Department in it's 1947 release, the english subtitled print never completed, the film never shown in domestic theatres. "Nuremberg" is a defining, unseen document of the most significant trial in modern history, one which established our current definitions of war vs. crime, the objectives of the military industrial complex, and culpability, both 'theirs' and 'ours' in these world-changing events. "Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today depicts the most famous courtroom drama in modern times, and the first to make extensive use of film as evidence. It was also the first trial to be extensively documented, aurally and visually. All of the proceedings, which lasted for nearly 11 months, were recorded. And though the trial was filmed while it was happening, strict limits were placed on the Army Signal Corps cameramen by the Office of Criminal Counsel. In the end, they were permitted to film only about 25 hours over the entire course of the trial. This was to prove a great impediment for writer/director Stuart Schulberg, and his editor Joseph Zigman, when they were engaged to make the official film about the trial, in 1946, shortly after its conclusion."
Next, but no less significant for it having been seen by a (somewhat) larger audience, the daunting, yet essential collection of postwar accounts by Holocaust survivors and Reich supporters that is the sprawling, humanistic, crushingly empathetic, aesthetically rigorous work that is Claude Lanzmann's "Shoah". Don't be daunted b y it's 9 1/2 hour duration, this is not only essential viewing, but also deeply rich and descriptive of life lived through the era depicted, but also the landscapes, places, minds and hearts, defined, destroyed, erased, changed by the incommunicable that took place on earth under a regime comprised of *people*, which is the point of insight into this dark historic labyrinth that Lanzmann never let's us forget. Excellent article in the January/February edition of Film Comment thanks to Kent Jones, assessing the Godard vs. Lanzmann vs. Adorno stances for those that wish to read further. From the IFC site: "Twelve years in the making, "Shoah" is Claude Lanzmann’s monumental epic on the Holocaust featuring interviews with survivors, bystanders and perpetrators in 14 countries. The film does not contain any historical footage but rather features interviews which seek to ‘‘reincarnate’’ the Jewish tragedy and also visits places where the crimes took place. Growing out of Lanzmann’s concern that the genocide perpetrated only 40 years earlier was already retreating into the mists of time, and that the atrocity was becoming sanitized as History, his massive achievement-at once epic and intimate, immediate and definitive-is a triumph of form and content that reveals hidden truths while rewriting the rules of documentary filmmaking. "Shoah" remains nothing less than essential."

Link to "Nuremberg: It's Lesson for Today" site

Link to Landmark Theatre's "Nuremberg: It's Lesson for Today" site

Link to IFC's "Shoah" site

Link to Film Comment's Jan/Feb Issue "Shoah" article

Ólafur Arnalds & Ensemble with Barn Owl and Others - US Tour : Jan 24 - Feb 4

Fans of Max Richter, Hauschka, Johann Johannsson and Neo-Classical Composition take note! Icelandic composer Olafur Arnalds is touring the US with a string ensemble and backing musicians this early winter. The west coast aspect of the tour doesn't include Portland, Vancouver or Seattle dates, so... I will be traveling to San Francisco for this one! Safe to say, that fans of the kind of cinematic, somber, minimalist/sublime sound heard at this past year's Johann Johannson performance at Triple Door, this is very much 'your thing' as Arnalds work is exactly the form of neo-classicism one would expect of the names mentioned above, with many of his own flourishes, these often being electronic, ambient... or in the case of his most recent work... Metal. Ha. Should be gorgeous and memorable and the San Francisco show in particular with their tour-mates Barn Owl, is in the lushly gaudy classic theatre setting of the Great American Music Hall.

Link to official Olafur Arnads tour site

Link to Erased Tapes Olafur Arnalds site

Ryoji Ikeda "Datamatics" Multimedia Performance: Feb 3 - Vancouver

Ryoji Ikeda the audio-visual maestro who in the late 20th Century redefined the parameters of what digital sound art could be with his "Matrix" series along with simultaneous collaborative performance-based work for Osaka based multi-media group Dumb Type. This couple year span being particularly memorable as they toured the world bringing their ultra-visceral explorations of perception, time, memory, sight, sound and the body to stunned and enrapt audiences (really, the hyperbole here is diminished, the shows were blinding) - is back in North America. A rare thing, as he's only performed in the states some half-dozen times in the last decade, either limited to San Francisco, New York or Chicago each time. His last Northwest shows were as far back as 2002 at Seattle's On the Boards. So take note! Ikeda presents his new work "Datamatics" in Vancouver as part of the Push Festival. Most, most certainly worth a trip across the border!

Link to Push Festival "Datamatics" Performance site

Link to Ryoji Ikeda official site

"Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary" at MoCA LA / Performances of Major Works at RedCat Theatre: Nov 6 - Feb 4

A defining artistic and scientific voice of the past Century; architect, mathematician and composer Iannis Xenakis exhibit at MoCA is in it's closing month. As with the opening month, nights of performances of his major electro-acoustic/orchestral/magnetic tape pieces are being hosted in the prime setting of the RedCat Theatre. Even for Xenakis being a defining voice in modern composition and architecture in the 20th Century, it's still a exceedingly rare thing to get to see these works performed, as they are 'unkind' in the most visionary sense, and even with decades passing, have lost none of their sensorial attack and genuine unearthly qualities. Truly not to be missed! Any of you anywhere near LA should note that this is road-trip worthy, both for it's rarity, historic cultural import and the visceral modern intensity of the work. The MoCA exhibit also featuring architectural plans and scores. As among other architectural achievements in his time, Xenakis studied and worked under Le Corbusier, their most noted construction being the Philips Pavilion for the 1958 World's Fair - significantly with a audio-visual interior scape composed by Edgard Varèse and experimental film by Le Corbusier as the world's first completely electronic composition and 'music video'; the renowned "Poème Électronique".

Link to MoCA 'Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary' Exhibit site

Link to RedCat Theatre Xenakis Performance Calendar site

:::: FILMS OF 2010 ::::

TOP FILMS OF 2010 IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER
--------------------------------------------------------
Apichatpong Weerasethakul "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" (Thailand)
Sion Sono "Love Exposure" (Japan)
Tsai Ming-Liang "Visage" (Taiwan)
Gaspar Noe "Enter the Void" (France)
Claire Denis "White Material" (France)
Corneliu Porumboiu "Police, Adjective" (Romania)
Bong Joon-Ho "Mother" (South Korea)
Lu Chuan "City of Life and Death" (China)
Banksy & Shepard Fairey "Exit Through the Gift Shop" (USA)
Gideon Koppel "Sleeps Furiously" (UK)
Olivier Assayas "Carlos" (France)
Philippe Grandreiux "Un Lac" (France)
Jai Zhang-Ke "I Wish I Knew" (China)
Anand Tucker/ James Marsh/ Julian Jarrold "Red Riding Trilogy" (UK)
Anoch Suwichakornpong "Mundane History" (Thailand)

Looking outside the expected sources, finding new record labels and film distributors, making connections
between author, director and soundtrack that were previously inconceivable. Some of these combinations
generated exciting, unexpected new hybrids of styles, genres and form. The most vibrant of these
unexpected convergences being the work of French director Gaspar Noe's (visionary, yet flawed)
piece of psychedelic-pathos, "Enter the Void" (with soundtrack by Thomas Bangalter) an immersive,
mind-altering, multi-sensory, hyperkinetic, drugged-up Tokyo death fugue. Though there were other works
that achieved in more consistent, fully realized, qualitative ways, Noe's film stuck in the craw and refused to
be dismissed. Other directors further established themselves with their finest work yet, Weerasethakul, Sion
Sono and an unexpected historic drama from Assayas.

As it has for the past few decades, Scarecrow Video played an invaluable role as a resource for moving pictures
from around the globe, especially considerable for those of us enabled by all-zone/region Blu-Ray players.
This year's Seattle International Film Festival hosted only one or two of the films listed below, as opposed
to previous years, where SIFF dominated the field, screening most of the best films of the year during the
course of the festival. With indie cinemas closing around the nation, it was that much more important to
support the local theater opportunities such as the SIFF Cinema, the Landmark Theatre chain, the Grand
Illusion Cinema and the paramount indie screen in Seattle, the Northwest Film Forum. Many of the best films
seen this year, when they did come to the theater, had runs that lasted no more than a week. Others were
never to return to the cinema again or even as a domestic DVD release. By example, one of the single finest
films of this decade, the Cannes Palme d'Or award-winning "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past
Lives", which played in international film festivals around the country, still has yet to get a proper theatrical
run or even a DVD/online release (with rumors of it not appearing until as late as spring 2011). Again proving
the wisdom of getting out there, seeing the city and prioritizing the art/music/film that we're fortunate to have
in our urban cultural crossroads.

Lastly, the unseen films by a few directors of note that never made it over here distributed stateside or even
made a less-desirable appearance as an online release. I suspect a number of these would have made the
list, if I actually had a chance to see them:

Cristi Puiu "Aurora" (Romania)
Sergei Loznitsa "My Joy" (Russia)
Lee Chang-Dong "Poetry" (China)
Mohammad Rasoulof "White Meadows" (Iran)
James Benning "Ruhr" (United States)
Jerzy Skolimowski "Essential Killing" (Poland)
Sophie Fiennes "Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow" (UK)
Tetsuya Nakashima "Confessions" (Japan)
Anh Hung-Tran "Norwegian Wood" (Taiwan/Japan)
Koji Wakamatsu "Caterpillar" (Japan)
Tsui Hark "Detective Dee & The Mystery of the Phantom Flame" (China)

:::: ALBUMS OF 2010 ::::

TOP ALBUMS OF 2010 IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER
----------------------------------------------------------
Thomas Koner "Nunatak Gongamur/Teimo/Permanfrost" (Type)
Supersilent "10" (Rune Grammofon)
Jesu "Heart Ache & Dethroned" (Hydrahead)
Boris "Japanese Heavy Rock Hits Vol.1-4" (Southern Lord)
Max Richter "Infra" (Fat Cat)
Rafael Irisarri "The North Bend" (Room40)
Nils Frahm "Wintermusik" (Erased Tapes)
Ultralyd "Inertiadrome" (Rune Grammofon)
Ryuichi Sakamoto "Playing the Piano" (Decca Classical)
Cloudland Canyon "Fin Eaves" (Holy Mountain)
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma "Love Is A Stream" (Type)
Pan Sonic "Gravitoni" (Blast First)
Einstürzende Neubauten "Strategies Against Architecture IV" (Mute)
SWANS "My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope in the Sky" (Young God")
Kouhei Matsunaga "Self VA/3 Telepathics/Processing the Dead Minotaur" (Important)
Ben Frost "By The Throat" (Bedroom Community)
Johann Johannsson "...And in the Endless Pause Came the Sound of Bees" (Type)
Frank Bretschneider "Exp." (Raster-Noton)
Various Artists "Tradi-Mods vs. Rockers" (Crammed Discs)
Thomas Bangalter/Various "Enter the Void - Soundtrack" (Roulé France)

Continuing from the films list above... like cinema, the year in sounds there was the curious repeat theme;
2010 was again a year for diggers. Wherein, many of the great recordings of the year appeared from
otherwise unknown origins and artists that some years ago were just establishing themselves, often under
other monikers. That much more reason to 'keep the ears to the ground' as it were and be that much more
looking out for the new and unheard.

There were many works that took the ears to exciting places, and that did so in distinct, expressive and
adventurous ways. Particularly at the strange crossroads where modern classical, lo-fi folk, musique
concrete, improv, metal, ambient, 'noise' and avant jazz traditions are all meeting as hypermodern, as-yet
unnamed genre mutations. Ultralyd's most recent album, "Inertiadrome", stands as a good example, as does
the disorienting fusion of hip-hop, noise and electronic minimalism that was Kouhei Matsunaga's trilogy of
albums. Perhaps the most hyper-hybrid of them all was the giddy fusion of western indie rock and electronic
sounds meets amped-up African world music in the "Tradi-Mods vs. Rockers" compilation.

Live sonic adventures were heard around the Northwest, with Decibel Festival offering some of the best
electronic performances of the year (Ben Frost, Pantha Du Prince, Fennesz) and Triple Door hosting the
chamber symphony and electronic night that was Johann Johannsson and Rafael Anton Irisarri Trio. There
were astounding metal shows this year, including Boris, Nadja, Wolves in the Throne Room, Shrinebuilder
and Neurosis, and many fine things heard in Earshot Jazz Fest including the Paul D. Miller Ensemble and
the sublime piano minimalism of Ryuichi Sakamoto.