Author: WillJang

When you are bored enough, you find the most interesting things on the Internet. For me it was a couple of comics, specifically those by a man named Brandon Graham. By no means am I a comic book nerd. I say this not as a reluctance to be a comic book nerd, but rather because it would be an insult to those who actually are truly comic lovers. Prior to my discovery of Brandon Graham, the only things I had read were Alan Moore’s “Watchmen” and “V for Vendetta” both of which were both very good reads. However, these two comics or ‘graphic novels’ were narratively driven and the art wasn’t exactly eye popping.
Off of these two books alone, I realized just how inventive the comic format was. I became fascinated by the storytelling possibilities that the medium offered. However, I never fully invested my time into comics because I found it to be a daunting task – like jumping into a show that has six seasons worth of episodes that you need to catch up on. (Not a great analogy because a TV show, being quite the passive form of entertainment, is far less daunting than actually buying and reading all those comic books). So for the most part I reservedmyself to reading graphic novels or completed collections, just to make my life easier.

Reading Graham’s “Multiple Warheads” is the first comic I have read in a long time, and it was awesome. Not so much because of the story, but the art, was just so pretty. His art is like a mash up of graffiti, manga, and Tin Tin. 

Here is one of his panels.

Just looking at this makes me wish I never stopped drawing.
I suppose there is no real point to this post other than me wanting to share this others.
The comic book is a truly interesting medium, and I for one, a recently declared English major, would not mind writing stories and working alongside an artist to make a comic.

Here is an interview of Brandon Graham to close it off.

This week, I was planning on going to see “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”. Ignorantly, I did not consider how many people would want to go see a movie that the state would only play twice this year. So I ended up just watching another movie with my friends instead.

However, although I was unable to go to the screening with my friends and have, what I would assume, a fucking blast, the fact that the state has these interesting screenings got me thinking – how fucking awesome is it that we have theaters like the State and Michigan on campus. To a certain degree I have been taking them for granted.

Not only will they be playing movies like “Birdman” and “Interstellar”, two upcoming movies that I really wish to see – they also have special screenings such as the “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” as well as the current series of Studio Ghibli films. On top of this they are doing a speaker series as well.

This isn’t really what I want to talk about but…I don’t know, it was just a cool (epiphany? – of incredibly low merit).

Instead, I want to talk about the new Foxygen record, because it is just too fun.

I never thought Sam France (Foxygen’s front man) was a particularly great singer in the sense that all the talent shows and vines (or instagram videos – I don’t know what the fuck they are I don’t use them) of people singing suggest as ‘good’ singing. Rather, France’s singing was far more stylized, evoking the voices of his influences throughout the bands songs, switching with such vigor that some songs make you feel tired as it reaches the end.

I was first introduced to the band through their album “Take the Kids Off Broadway” which got me hooked right away, because they sounded like they had so much fun recording it. Of course, this also made me have fun listening to it. It featured great songs like: “Make it Known”, “Take the Kids Off Broadway”, “Middle School Dance (Song for Richard Swift)”, and “Waitin’ 4 U”.

Then came their far more successful album, “We are The 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic”. A fucking mouthful of a title. I’ll be honest, I love every single song on this album, it is one of the few albums were I am not bored throughout the whole play through. There is no moment where I feel like skipping or just not listening to. To a lesser extent, I felt the same way about their last album as well. But to be fair, both of these albums were short, ‘Broadway’ being seven songs long and ‘Peace and Magic’ clocking in at nine songs. But honestly, who cares, they are awesome records.

Actually maybe they cared, or other people pressured them? Theories…all theories. But their new album, “…And Star Power” has 24 songs making it a double album with 82 minutes of material.

Do I love all the songs on this new album? No. But for some reason, this album works for me best when I have the time to listen to the whole thing, instead of just picking songs here and there – which I could do for their last album. Some songs on this album that I would probably not enjoy as much were I to listen them on their own, sound so much better when I listen to them in conjunction with the songs before and after it.

Is this a good thing? I don’t know because by all means I am no music expert. I mean I quit violin when I was young and I never really got into the whole high school band life. Ask me about notes and musical theory now; I won’t know a fucking thing. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t know what I like.

I like this new album. Certainly not as much as the previous two, but I like it in its own way. It is quite different in terms of the influences and there are more noise pieces in this album – pieces that I normally don’t like that much. But the songs “Cold Winter/Freedom” and “Can’t Contextualize My Mind” are pretty fucking cool, and it comes back to the same word…it is fun (and kind of terrifying regarding the former – that adolescent voice of France pretending to have a radio channel is edgy and scary to a certain extent).

Speaking of fun, I only recently found out, but it turns out Foxygen released, as a free download, their recordings that were not studio albums. The core duo of Foxygen, Sam France and Jonathon Rado, met in (middle school) I think. So they messed around and recorded a bunch of stuff before they were a band with a studio record.

(here are the links to the downloads if you want to check it out)

Jurassic Explosion Philippic
(They recorded this one ^ when they were 15 apparently)

Kill Art and Ghettoplastikk!

(they posted it themselves, it isn’t illegal)

I can’t say this band is for everyone but check it out, you might be surprised by how much you like them, or maybe you will just find a couple of hidden gems and take away a couple of songs you really like. Maybe San Francisco?

Nothing seems really real until I see time have its way with it.

There was a moment, this past summer, where I was walking around in Seoul. In front of me was a large shopping mall, and it looked like the most alien thing ever. Essentially the shape of a large box, the shopping mall also had a long stairway leading up to the railway station that was in the middle of the mall.

It was almost depressing. It was a kind of feeling that I can only describe as the same feeling I get when I stare too long at a linoleum floor. There is just something inexplicably revolting.

But that doesn’t really describe how I felt in the most lucid manner. So let me provide a counterexample.

When I am at my apartment in Ann Arbor, and I see dishes that are drying in the rack, or a pile of newspapers strewn about, or an old book that I had been reading on the side for the past week, a sense of familiarity arises because I have lived with these items for a good chunk of time. But this feeling of familiarity doesn’t attribute itself to everything that looks old. If I were to go into an antique shop and see an old coffee table for sale, despite the fact that it is an antique, it is still alien to me, because I myself did not live with it.

In that sense, that is why the shopping mall was off-putting for me. To be honest there may be many other factors…but I won’t go into them.

But this does not mean that I hate that which is new and unfamiliar. There is some part of me that wants to take that which is strange, and make it my own. In fact, in the long run, comfort through familiarity is indeed what I prefer. But consciously, there is a part of me that yearns for the weird.

A shopping mall is not one of those things. It was just an example for the sake of starting this post. Cause…fuck shopping malls. No amount of time will make me like those fucking things.

I can never really convince myself that I am an intrinsic reader. This is partly due to my history with literature. I don’t really have one. In fact, the earliest record of my interaction with literature or rather, picture books to be more precise, is of me when I was a very small boy, about 3 years old, flipping through books, illiterate, thus making up stories of my own.
I didn’t really read that much later on either. I never got swept into the whole obsession with easily consumable series books. In fact I remember disliking the first Harry Potter book, one that I didn’t even read upon its release but rather quite later. Even in high school I didn’t read that often.
It wasn’t until the summer after graduating from high school that I suddenly gained an interest in literature AND I STILL HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA WHY.
This got me thinking, or rather, looking for an explanation. Which brought me to the realization, that the one form of narrative that was constantly a part of my life, was, and still is, film, the marvel of cinema.
It was through film that I learned how to speak English after moving to America from Korea. More importantly however, the medium influenced my style of writing to some degree or at least that what other people have suggested. It is hard to really say what my writing style is like, what it resembles, unless I am specifically and consciously trying to replicate a particular style that I found that I love. I could be trying to write something like the dialogue of Quentin Tarantino or trying to write a description of the beautiful shots of a P.T. Anderson or Stanley Kubrick film. Maybe I am thinking about the striking visuals of “Baraka” and trying to capture it in words.
Maybe I can tell I have a visual background because that is what I think about, visuals, images, etc. I think about the waterfall I slept next to when I went camping, the stars that dotted the night island sky.
Ephemeral images.
Often, such things influence me. Little images, patterns, or a phrase, never full ideas or concepts, inspire me.
But like I said, now that I am interested in literature (honestly for the first time in my entire life), my views have altered, and without a doubt, my writing style has changed. All thanks to the novels in recent memory, novels such as, “A Clockwork Orange”, “The Trial”, “The Master and Margarita”, “Gravity’s Rainbow”, “Pastoralia”, “Cat’s Cradle”, and etc. All of these novels I recommend (well “Pastoralia” is a collection of short stories, one of the short stories being called Pastoralia). There is a joy and excitement of exploring the medium that I will most likely continue to study. It is exciting and my film adoring background is certainly casting a different light on everything.
This whole piece is incredibly muddled and awful. Although all my past posts have been for me as well, I will explicitly say that this post was definitely for me.
I just needed to sort this through.