TMBG as awakening

It’s hard for me to remember a time when my CD collection was manageable, much less merely budding, but there was such a point in my life, when I was just beginning to develop some tastes of my own. I very deliberately set out to build a wide-ranging music collection, but I found myself wanting something different still. Having a couple of Dr. Demento collections, I’d become acquainted with They Might Be Giants on the basis of their bigger hits – both of them. I thought that I wanted more, but I was sort of trepidatious. Every time that I thought about getting one of their albums, I felt all twittery. Maybe it was because I didn’t know where to start, or because so many of the album covers looked so bizarre that I was afraid of what might be in them.
In the spring of my junior year of high school, I went to Mardi Gras in Shreveport with some friends. Going to Mardi Gras in Shreveport is sort of like getting Mardi Gras Lite. You don’t have to travel as far, but you get the same festival atmosphere and parade, with less booze and few if any nipples. This is regarded by some as a plus.
As we wandered around Shreveport taking things in, we wandered into a Wherehouse Music store that was going out of business. We wandered around for awhile, marveling at the clearance prices, when I saw a They Might Be Giants anthology. I was excited, but strapped for cash. I went to the front to negotiate a little in light of the clearance. The boy at the desk looked around furtively. “I tell you what,” he said. “You pick up any other two CDs used, and I’ll give that to you.” He explained his actions. “When this place goes down, all of this is getting smashed up with it. I’d rather see it go out of here in peoples’ hands.” I took the opportunity to get a couple of albums I’d never pay full price for – the Pokémon the Movie 2000 soundtrack for a “Weird Al” Yankovic rarity, and the Madonna/Dick Tracy album I’m Breathless, for the Stephen Sondheim music. I left the store proud, eager, and deeply moved by kindness.
The day went on to include The Olive Garden, enough gold beads to perfect my Mr. T impersonation, and the drunkest person that my young eyes had seen since being propositioned by that middle-aged housewife at the Branford Marsalis afterparty. As manic and fun as the whole thing was, I was most looking forward to getting home and popping in my new prize. It was hellishly late when we got back, so I only had time to listen to a bit. First was “Birdhouse in Your Soul,” a piece from the perspective of a nightlight and a delightfully convoluted confession of love. The next song was far more rock-and-roll, more driving, than what I thought the Giants were about. I was impressed. Then came the lyrics.
Make a hole with a gun perpendicular to the name of this town on a desktop globe; exit wound in a foreign nation showing the home of the one this was written for
I was tired enough that I had to go back a few times before I realized that the girl in question was on the other side of the world. I wasn’t too tired to appreciate that it was a strikingly beautiful way to say something that’s almost impossibly clichéd. The lyrical variety kept going, from singing about President James K. Polk to setting Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” to a painfully upbeat melody. This was exactly what I’d found lacking pop, what drew me to “Weird Al” and Livingston Taylor.
The stylistic trappings were as wildly varied as the lyrics. They went from 80’s synth-pop to punk to rock and roll to acoustic folkiness in a heartbeat, from absurd minimalism to richly layered, perfectly crafted arrangements. I was hooked. I had found the sound that I had been searching for, or at least a huge facet of it. I had learned the fullest extent of pop songcraft, and how much artistry could be contained therein. From that day forward, I would accept nothing less than this. I eventually learned that there is a world of music like this – if not in depth, at least in spirit – and I began to delve even further. But discovering TMBG was a revelatory where I learned everything that I wanted from music but didn’t know to ask for. From there, I learned to pick apart what they were doing beyond “fun,” and I developed ears for really listening to an arrangements, but to this day I feel that I owe the bulk of my musical appreciation to the Giants. It was the beginning of a beautiful obsession with musical possibility.

Revisiting a classic – (Assignment for 01.23.2008)

The impact of Alan Moore’s Watchmen was as widespread as it was deeply felt. Moore completely changed the comics industry with his dark subject matter and fully fleshed-out psychological profiles of troubled antiheroes. However, he also affected the way the literary world views comics. Watchmen famously made Time magazine’s list of 100 best novels. It nudged open the door into“real world” acclaim through which few comics before it had escaped, paving the way for efforts such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World.
It was through the efforts of Edward Blake that the United States won the Vietnam War, but those who know him know him to be a womanizing, near-fascist alcoholic who enjoys the pain that he inflicts on others. After his death, a similar figure named Rorschach begins to investigate the possibility of murder. Rorschach is an emotionally scarred, right-wing sadist who thinks nothing of wandering into bars and breaking the fingers of random patrons until someone is terrified enough to answer his questions.
Also affected by the death is Laurie Juspecyk, a young woman who harbors bitterness over Blake’s history with her mother. While Laurie deals with Blake’s death, she finds herself leaning on two different men for emotional support – Dr. Manhattan, a god-like being who exists at every point in time simultaneously, but is crippled by a powerful sense of determinism, and Dan Dreiberg, a man who quietly slipped into impotent obscurity when masked adventuring was outlawed. Apart from Blake’s exploits, the only hero to make something of themself in the new world is Adrian Veidt, the world’s smartest man, who runs a massive international corporation. As Rorschach begins to uncover a possible conspiracy against the “masks,” they find that they must sort through old scars in order to face the challenge before them.
The whole group of heroes lives in the shadow of the generation that came before them, and of the Cold War – Dr. Manhattan’s presence in the U.S. has escalated tensions far beyond anything in our own history.
Moore breaks a number of comic-book conventions in Watchmen. Most notably, he forces the reader to ponder what sort of person would decide to fight crime in tights as a hobby, whether we would trust that sort of person with our safety, and where their authority comes from. Moore’s super-heroes are morally ambiguous, with complex motives and questionable methods in their search for justice.
However, Moore’s real strength lies with complexity, rather than merely breaking tradition. The story winds around and over itself with a convoluted interwoven-ness reminiscent of Joyce’s Ulysses. The story itself, combined with Dave Gibbons’s intricate art, provides a unique experience that utilizes the comics medium to its full potential in a way that few books do. The number of ubiquitous visual and conceptual motifs is almost unprecedented. Watchmen is a work meant to be re-read rather than read, and its careful craft has shown it to be a landmark work for both comics and literature as a whole.

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