“It’s my belief that history is a wheel.
‘Inconstancy is my very essence,’ says the wheel.
‘Rise up on my spokes if you like,
but don’t complain when you’re cast back down into the depths.
Good times pass away, but then so do the bad.
Mutability is our tragedy, but it’s also our hope.
The worst of times, like the best,
are always passing away.”

-- Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy; from 24 Hour Party People, written by Frank Cottrell Boyce, directed by Michael Winterbottom

Wise words from a street philosopher.

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I finished yesterday what I hope to be the final draft of my third of First Time, actually missing Keka Shoot Day 3 in the process. Shooting is slated to begin on the 16th, though casting hasn’t been locked yet. So things are moving on that front. More when I know more.

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Another thing I realized about Reloaded: I really, REALLY miss the gunfights. The last great arc had guns blazing, and Reloaded was mostly martial arts, and slow martial arts at that. And I never thought I’d say this, but the fight sequences are too long. They don’t end on a proper note, because usually the climax had already been reached a few minutes ago.

But enough about that.

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There’s obviously lots of things to catch up on, but I wanted to say that I’ve been enjoying DJ Shadow’s work recently. I’ve been a fan since UNKLE, of which he’s one half (the other being James Lavelle). There was a considerable gap between Endtroducing… and The Private Press, his latest album, and the first single sported a video directed by Wong Kar Wai. About a week ago I was driving home and listening to a great song, I don’t remember the name but it’s the ninth track on Pre-Emptive Strike. When I got home, the song wasn’t done yet, so I just sat in the car with the lights off and waited for the song to finish. It was that good. And when was the last time you ever did that?

More recently, though, I’ve been listening to Weezer’s Blue album, their first. It’s one of the most perfect albums ever made, in my opinion, one of those rare times that every single track is great, like Pearl Jam’s Ten or Elliott Smith’s X/O and Either/Or, or REM’s Automatic For The People, or Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream (yes, I like Silverfuck). I hadn’t heard it in several years, and Neva’d never heard it, so I borrowed it from Chris and when I played it in the car, I was glad to see that I still had most of the lyrics memorized. Even though I hadn’t heard most of these songs in a while, they had such an effect on me when they first came out that they’d basically emblazoned themselves into the neurons of my memory, and it was like an old friend coming by for a visit: you haven’t seen them in some time but everything’s familiar: how they move and speak, gestures and looks, scents and figures of speech. I hope it didn’t bother Neva too much that I was singing almost every track. But on the way home, alone, it was worse. I was actually singing my heart out on “Say It Ain’t So,” at full blast, to the point that I was a little exhausted when I got home. And “Only In Dreams” can still bring a tear to my eye.

I really wish I knew how to play some instrument.

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For you Neil Gaiman fans, you can click here to read the short short stories he wrote for Tori Amos’s Strange Little Girls Tourbook.

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Please read this. It’s a special piece by one of my favorite columnists, Steven Grant. It’s not new, but I was thinking about it recently and decided to link it. He asked readers to send several postcards with no text and weird landscapes, and made a story that linked everything. And it works pretty well, I think. The order of postcards in the story is the order in which they arrived. He’s one of those people who still tries to create something new in comics, challenging further the convenient definitions we have for it. Amazing.

And here is the website poem generator. Put in a URL, it’ll make a “poem” out of its contents. Thus, for your amusement and delectation:

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