Monday Morning Commute: I Stab You With Love

The wonderful thing about having to write a weekly column where I tell you everything I’m doing is that I’m terribly boring, and typically doing nothing. I pretend that I’m up to something fantastic, when in general it’s just the usual. Too much late-night eating, happy days with the girlfriend, homework and caffeine. That’s about it, yo. But naw, I’m seriously super exciting. I scale mountains of amazement, and look down upon you peons and just chuckle. Deep belly laughs of condescension. I have a kind of sick desperation in my laugh.

Monday Morning Commute. Every Monday I’m going to detail the various things I’m either currently or will be watching, reading, playing, and listening to in the next seven days. It’s Monday. You’ve got a long week of school, work, or compulsive masturbation to get through. Tell me the arts that you’re indulging in, to stave off suicide.

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Watching / Mad Men Season Three
Mad Men is the sort of show that makes me ache with amazement. It’s so fucking good, at such a consistent basis that it blows my mind. I reserve the phrase “brilliant”, since it, like every other word in the English language has been devalued to a point of emptiness. But here’s a penny lobbed into the bucket of hyperbole: Mad Men is brilliant.

It’s a brilliant character-driven drama.
It’s a brilliant examination of the American Dream.
It’s a brilliant study on the monotony of existence.
It’s brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

I’ve been powering through the third season with my lady, and it’s like intellectual crack. This shit is dense. It’s subtle to a point. It doesn’t hold your hand. There’s a certain silence that pervades every episode. The music in it is sparse, the most powerful scenes often involving no dialogue at all.

It’s the summer time, and all the wonderful network television shows are off the air. Catch up on this show. You owe it to yourself.

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I’m pretty sure that I’m losing my mind. I’ve become eerily disconnected from time and space. More than once in the last month I’ve completely forgotten what time of the year it was. To the point where, momentarily, I had to stop and ask myself “Wait, what month am I in? Has summer came, or gone? Oh, I’m in the middle of summer?…I see.”

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Reading / Joe the Barbarian
I can’t get enough of Joe the Barbarian. I swallowed my nausea at the concept of reading anything when I didn’t have to yesterday, and dove into the past two issues of Joe. Do you see what graduate school has done to me? I used to love reading, and now it’s become laborious. Frak, fudge, fuck, et cetera.

There’s a certain wonder in Joe the Barbarian that makes the entire exercise so fucking enjoyable. There’s a hook involved that I won’t spoil, but watching Joe trudge through a fantastical world is just so fucking pretty. The artwork by Sean Murphy is grandiose. Splash pages of epic battle, and slower more muted emotional scenes.

I’ve always loved Grant Morrison. God damn insane. Like a fox. Or something. But his ability to write an emotional about a teenage kid really slugs me in the gut. I didn’t think he had it in him.

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What are you guys up to / enjoying / creaming to?