Monday Morning Commute: rocket-burns and moonshine dreams
Welcome to the MONDAY MORNING COMMUTE! This is the feature I use as an excuse to showcase the various debris that’ll be keeping my brain-bone lubricated so as to avoid jamming up at the hands of the workweek. Some Mondays, I write a little story beforehand as a creative writing exercise and preface the post with it. On other Mondays, I start the post by jotting down an amusing anecdote
And then there’re those Mondays when I’m so tired that my eyes are burning and I don’t have any goddamn coffee filters so kickstarting my creativity with a caffeine-defibrillator isn’t an option and all I want to do is pass out and wake up in 2013 so that I can laugh at all those fucking doomsayers and tell them that their apocalypse wasn’t even worth being awake for.
Guess what kind of Monday today is.
Quit’yer dinkin’ around, let’s do this.
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Listenin’ To/Charlie Day & Glenn Howerton on WTF
God, what a hastily-thrown together MS Paint job that above picture is, huh? My apologies. If I had more time, I’m sure I would’ve toiled more than necessary to make sure that the OL faithful were blessed with the perfect representation of my listening to Charlie Day & Glenn Howerton on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. But the fact of the matter is that I’m sweaty and smelly, and all I want to do is finish this thing so I can shower. Ugh.
In any case, two of the masterminds behind It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia stopped in to Maron’s garage for a chat. From what I’ve gathered, the conversation tackles the topics of how the gang met (in real life), some of the formative antics of the show, and even the lengths to which Rob McElhenney went to make sure that Mac got big laughs this season.
See what I did with that link? Yeah, I’m shameless.
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Finally Bathin’ In/A Dramatic Turn of Events (Dream Theater)
Tomorrow sees the release of A Dramatic Turn of Events, Dream Theater’s first album since Mike Portnoy’s abrupt departure a year ago. With the exception of the On the Backs of Angels (the first single, posted above), I’ve managed to remain wholly chaste. Which is fairly incredible, because Dream Theater is my all-time favorite band and I haven’t looked forward to an album of theirs this long in years.
Other obstacles in my path have been a leak that sprung weeks ago, a live-stream of the album, and friends willing to tell me about just mindblowing the tracks are. But I’ve been faithful to my abstinence pledge, and tomorrow I’m going get my cherry popped.
And unlike your prom date, I’m not even going to need a sixer of wine-coolers.
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Losin’ My Mind Over/CASANOVA: Avarita
Every now and then I start to question whether or not I’m still in love with comics. Blah, reboot! Blah, why does every female character sport a DOUBLE-DEE rack? Blah, same fuggin’ stories over and over!
And just when it starts to seem like I’m going to proclaim narrative allegiance to another medium, something special drops in my lap to dissuade me. To make me sit down for hours, reading and re-reading dialogue. Inspecting each panel. Picking up the book immediately after putting it down.
This week, the reassuring hand on my shoulder is the first issue of Casanova: Avarita. The book picks up where the last storyline, Gula, left off – Casanova Quinn is now living in a splinter reality, hoping to atone for all the sins he committed in his home-reality. But now the problem is that atoning for his sins means traveling to different realities so that he can destroy them.
Yes, he is destroying entire universes. And, as the book states, spatiotemporal holocaust ensues. It’s magnificent.
Matt Fraction and Gabriel Ba have successfully brought back Casanova, a comic that contains more ideas in a single issue than most can hope for in an entire volume. It’s espionage and sci-fi and action and philosophy, all conveyed through beautiful art.
In a couple of words, it’s fucking awesome.
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So that’s my week.
What type of hijinks are you filling your life with?