Zine: Put A Egg On It! #2

Put A Egg On It! (yes, with the grammatical error) is a highly recommended food zine of personal essays, with clean layout (entirely full color!), great writing and editing, and empathetic stories.

PAEOI! has a non-snobby approach to food, combining personal experiences with comestibles (eating, preparing, etc.) in thoughtful prose.

Elizabeth Pearce writes about heartbreak, depressions, and not cooking in “Spoon Feeding”. She was deeply in (food-centric) love and then it ended: “For two days, I lived on iced coffee. Then, I graduated to cottage cheese, peanut butter and egg salad, each eaten with a spoon while sitting on the sofa watching bad TV.” She knows that one day she’ll want to tear up the kitchen again, just not now. But, scrapping hummus into a bowl and cutting up some vegetables for a group meeting is a promising start.

In “Anti-Depressant Stew”, Max Blagg provides an unstructured recipe for a root vegetable and chorizo one pot wonder to help you survive that bleak time between Thanksgiving and Xmas. (As someone who always suffers from the holiday blahs, I will start this some Saturday afternoon, and tuck into it as the sun sets at 4:30PM.

Paul Gerard’s “Tattoo Cook” looks back at NYC kitchens of the early ‘80s, in the same vein as Kitchen Confidential. These were they years when you started off as a dishwasher and if you were smart, lucky, and kept your damn mouth shut, could eventually work up the ranks in the kitchen: “This was not for the weak. had I told one of my chefs that I had a passion for local seasonal ingredients he’d look at me like I was a complete moron, ask me “What the fuck else would you use, dildo”, and make me clean the grease trap for clogging his brain with bullshit.”

The photos in PAEOI are not fancy, posed, studio shots, but instead of real people enjoying meals together (often consuming food mentioned in the essays), food trucks, and regional food oddities (including a loving paean to the Taylor Pork Roll). Helpful cooking tips fill the nooks.

With more food zines shifting completely to the web to be more timely, or just disappearing completely (Peko Peko), it’s great to find a new print food zine with so much promise. You want to read this if you’re a foodie or not.

You should read Put A Egg On It! simply because you have to eat.

Available from the Put A Egg On It store. (Note: Yes, it is a bit pricey for the size, but it is entirely full color, offset printing, and heavy paper.)

Of Interest (Geek): 08.28.2010

+ Nifty gift for your (baking) chemistry geek: Science Lab Cookie Cutters! Includes a beaker, Erlenmeyer flask, atom, and test tube. Also check out the Periodic Table done in cookie form!

+ If I lived near Brooklyn, I would be scanning the materials at the Reanimation Library for my zines. This private library collects outdated and discarded books from thrift stores, libraries, trash piles and makes them available for makers, crafters, designers, writers, etc. The collection includes old technical manuals (Home Appliance Servicing), religious tracts (Life - How Did it Get Here? By Evolution or by Creation? by the Watchtower Foundation), textbooks (Engineering Drawing), pamphlets, repair guides, and much more. This is a much needed archive - public libraries don’t have the need or the room for outdated materials such as these - but they still have value.

+ Recently stumbled upon GROK, a free PDF zine produced by the writers of the Alert Nerd blog. I’ve read three of the six available issues, and they are full of solid writing and geek humor. Worth a download.

Zine: Slice Harvester #1

As mentioned previously on this blog, I am fairly lactose intolerant, which means that I can’t easily enjoy one of mankind’s most perfect creations, the cheese pizza slice. When I do indulge, I have to make sure to chew a few Lactaid tablets and be careful not to overdo it (as in not eat an entire pie by myself, as I have been known to do). So when I do decide to eat pizza, it has to be damn good pizza.

Un/fortunately, I live in Philadelphia, and there is a dearth of decent slices in this town, a lack of slices with tasty sauce that aren’t smothered in cheap cheese, that come out of the oven with a thin (but not too thin) crust still dusted with cornmeal, strong enough to support the weight of the slice, but not so thick that chewing is a chore. The sad fact is, any mediocre slice of NYC pizza is better than a Philadelphia slice. I stand by this assertion. It could be the water, it could be the many years of crust built up in some of those ovens, it could be the latitude - all I know is that NYC slices are worth taking Lactaid.

Colin’s goal with SLICE HARVESTER (the blog and zine) is simple. From his mission statement:

“I am going to eat a slice of pizza at every pizzeria in New York City. I'm going by neighborhood, starting in Manhattan, getting a plain slice at every place. I am fucking sick of the current trend in Pizza Journalism that's all about fucking artichoke guacamole tahini pizza on rice dough. That shit isn't pizza. Sorry.”

The reviews in SLICE HARVESTER include as much detail about the pizza joint, the trip with friends to get the slice, and weird rambling, semi-on topic tangents as they do about the slice itself. If Colin wasn’t such an entertaining writer, it would feel horribly forced and not work at all. Go over and read the review for Mt. Carmel Pizzeria for a great example of an off-topic, tangential review that works.

It’s also difficult to write a review of the same food item over and over and stay fresh and interesting, but Colin succeeds. Here some ways he describes sauce from places reviewed in Issue #1:

“The sauce was adequately sweet, but still retained a fair amount of the natural tartness and tang of the tomatoes.”

“The sauce was a horrid mess, though. Tasted way more like jar red marinara than pizza sauce, if that makes sense. It was super salty and garlicky in a really unpleasant way, which made it way overpowering, so I couldn’t even taste the cheese.”

“But the sauce was really what made this slice. It was sweet in this really natural way, like fresh, homegrown tomatoes right off the vine.”

“The sauce tasted heavily of garlic powder and tasted like it was sweetened with corn syrup.”

“And the sauce was weirdly sweet. It was in a way that you totally don’t notice at first, but then it has this shitty aftertaste.”

SLICE HARVESTER may one case where the blog format may be preferable to the zine format, if only for timeliness. The blog is updated frequently, and is tagged by locations, so you can easily find all the slices in east Midtown. Plus, there’s lovely photos of the slices! I’ll be using this as a guide for some of my visits to NYC this fall.

Available for $3 from Slice Harvester Headquarters, 442D Lorimer St #230, Brooklyn, NY 11206 or via Paypal to sliceharvester@gmail.com. Issue #2 is now available as well. Blog: www.sliceharvester.com.

Pick Me!

The Shelter Pet Project.  Please Adopt!

Read Comics in Public on 8/28/2010!

Show your love of the sequential art medium on Saturday, August 28, 2010 and READ COMICS IN PUBLIC!

Read Comics in Public Day was an event organized on a whim by Brian Heater and Sarah Morean of The Daily Cross Hatch, a blog dedicated to independent, small press, self published, and minicomics (a blog you really should be reading). It’s a chance to publicly show your love of sequential art in all forms by letting your ink flag fly in the open.

If you’re unsure how to Read Comics in Public, two instructional posters are available - one for stores and one for libraries.

So grab some comics (floppies, bound collections, original graphic novels, minicomics, newspaper strip collections), stake out a prime public location (park, coffee shop, bar), and settle in for an hour or two, and proudly display your choice of reading material.

Panel from the READ COMICS IN PUBLIC DAY poster by Robert Sergel.

Zine: New Issues! Xerography Debt and Zine World

Xerography Debt #27 / The Review Zine with Perzine Tendencies
Xerography Debt celebrates its 11th year of publishing this October! This valuable resource continues to produce excellent issues, despite basement floods, babies, moving, job hell, and getting sued over its original name. The just released Issue #27 features not only the expected eloquent long-form narrative zine reviews, but informative articles about zine culture. I especially appreciated the “Where Are They Now” feature, spotlighting zine publishers who have left the milieu. Jeff Somers continues his examination of what zine reviews really mean, and Japanese zine publisher Gianni Simone write a eulogy (?) for ARTE POSTALE!, a long-running mail art resource. Although I’ve been immersed in zines for many, many years, I always find at least one or two new titles of interest in every issue of Xerography Debt.

Available for $3 from Microcosm Publishing, 222 S. Rogers St., Bloomington IN 47404

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Zine World #29 / A Reader’s Guide to the Underground Press
Another crucial “pathfinder” (to use the library term) to the zine culture, the latest issue of Zine World is packed with brief reviews, classifieds, zine resource listings, and articles. A few months ago, there was a discussion on the We Make Zines forum about the use of the term “zinester” - pro or con? Craven Rock (publisher of Eaves of Ass), the original poster, analyzes the replies, and comes to some smart conclusions. Nicole Introvert (publisher of Introvert, and an organizer of the Richmond Zine Fest) contributes “Everything You Wanted to Know About a Zine Fest (But Were Afraid to Ask)”, a very helpful article with tips about attending and tabling at zine fests. I’d just like to repeat one piece of her advice: SMALL BILLS. (Both for shoppers and sellers.) I’ve already got my copy of ZW #29 all marked up with zines I want to purchase or trade for. This issue also includes little snippets from reviewed zines, and zine covers mixed in the layout.

Available for $4 from Jerianne, PO Box 330156, Murfreesboro TN 37133. Online ordering information here.

Stack of trades generated from latest XD and ZW, with paws.

Bored to Death: Emmy winner!

Congratulations to Tom Barham, Marci Ichimura, Dean Haspiel, and Anthony Santoro for winning the Creative Arts Emmy for the opening titles of BORED TO DEATH.

Cheap Comics (for a good cause)

One of my favorite indie/small press comics anthologies of last year was SIDE B: The Music Lovers’ Comic Anthology, a diverse collection of artists drawing and writing about the songs, bands, and sounds they love. (Read my review here.) This was a followup to one of my favorite anthologies of 2007, SIDE A: The Music Lovers’ Graphic Novel. Both books are published by Poseur Ink Press out of San Diego, CA, and are very high quality with good printing and nice design.

Unfortunately, Rachel and Mike of Poseur Ink have run into a little bit of financial difficulty and also need some additional space quickly, so they are running a liquidation sale on the anthologies, as well as other items in their store. SIDE A is now just a mere $5, and SIDE B is now $11.99. Selected shirts are marked down to a fiver as well.

SIDE A and SIDE B have my highest recommendation! Buy a set of them and give ‘em to a music/comic loving friend as a gift - they are very “accessible” comics for non-comics readers.

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In other markdowns, Matthew Reidsma is selling his chunky book of daily diary comics, High Maintenance Machine: Volume One, for only $10 (half-price). This is a great collection of diary comics featuring Matt, wife Wendy, and cats Montana and Elmer (R.I.P., little fellow). It’s a fun read, and interesting to see Matt’s drawing style develop over the course of the years.

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Finally, a cheap deal at Amazon too good to pass up: John Porcellino’s adaptation Thoreau at Walden for a dirt, dirt cheap $2.15. Yeah, you read that right: $2.15. John Porcellino’s is the artist of the long running King-Cat Comics and Stories minicomic, which was collected into another of my favorites of 2009, Map of My Heart.

Yes, Hipster Kitteh is not-so-silently judging you.

Source: I Can Has Cheezburger, where else?

Mold-A-Rama! (The fun kind of mold!)

In the short-lived (but brilliant) television series Wonderfalls, formerly inanimate objects spoke to the lead character, Jaye Tyler, including a misshapen wax lion from the Mold-A-Rama machine in the gift shop where she works.

Once common, Mold-A-Rama machines are now very hard to find. There are three at the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit: Rosa Parks’ bus, the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile, and Abraham Lincoln. The Mold-A-Mania site catalogs Mold-A-Rama scupltures, and maintains a list of current machines. (There’s NONE anywhere near me! How sad!)

Behold, the birth of a Weinermobile:

Scott Pilgrim trailer in panel form.

(Wonder if someone will try to recreate the entire movie this way when the DVD is released.)

Seq. Art: CBGB

CBGB / Various Artists and Writers
(4 issue miniseries / Boom!)

CBGB OMFUG exists no more as a location (RIP, October 15, 2006), but lives on as a brand, evidenced by the wide array of merchandise available, from the classic t-shirts to guitar straps and underwear. Hopefully the heirs of Hilly Kristal are benefiting from sales.

I was somewhat hesitant to pick up CBGB #1 from Boom! Studios, the first of a four part miniseries, not knowing what to expect. Would it be just a gimmick comic (like the many sub-par series written by actors), or a poorly written, inaccurate history (like many rock’n’roll comics)?

It was neither. In fact, CBGB #1 is actually very, very good, starting with the awesome cover by Jaime Hernandez, which could be mistaken for a lost Love and Rockets cover. Issue #1 features two superb stories from a few of my favorite writers and artists.

“A NYC Punk Carol” was written by Kieron Gillen (of the amazing PHONOGRAM*) and drawn by Marc Ellerby, who did one of my favorite books of the past few years, Love the Way You Love. It’s crash course in CBGB history, featuring a frustrated musician and three wise ghosts of punk rock past. “The Helsinki Syndrome” is a story about finding out that you didn’t know your recluse uncle very well at all, written by Sam Humphries, with art by Rob G.

Hopefully, the remaining three issues of CBGB will follow the same format of a few short stories, united by the great late venue. Recommended for indie comic and music history fans.

"A NYC Punk Carol". Words: Kieron Gillen, Art: Marc Ellerby

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*You NEED both Phonogram collections, Rue Britannia and The Singles Club, both drawn by the amazing Jamie McKelvie.

Things that aren't there anymore.

SEPTA (or South Eastern Pennsylvania Transit System) has been plagued with more FAILs than usual the past few weeks. Something about the heat and the tracks, and exploding transformers, and signal problems... there's always some reason the trains are running late during the afternoon rush hour.

While waiting around yet again, I started to take a long, hard look at the SEPTA signage. I never realized just how outdated it was until now. JC Penney hasn't been in that location for more than eight years!

(From left: Lord & Taylor, closed 2006; JC Penney, closed 2002; Strawbridge's, closed 2006. Click photo to embiggen.)

Sure, entirely new signs may be expensive, but how about just running some labels through the printer and slapping them on there to update those listings?

Seq. Art: To Teach: the journey, in comics

To Teach: the journey, in comics / William Ayers and Ryan Alexander-Tanner

During my elementary and junior high* school years, I was subjected to terrible, useless, completely disinterested teachers.

There was the 8th grade civics “teacher” whose entire routine was distributing mimeographed notesheets, which we would copy into our notebooks and return. She also threatened a painfully shy girl, backbrace-wearing girl - loudly, during class - with a failing grade because she didn’t raise her hand enough. Or the English “teacher” who threatened to fail me on a test because I sneezed/coughed during it, and he thought I was cheating. Or a science “teacher” who humiliated a friend of mine for only fitting three words on a line of her notebook (she had large handwriting). There were many teachers who called students stupid and useless to their faces. That’s what I remember about those teachers: threats, humiliation, tedium, boredom, and more threats. It may have been the 70s and early 80s, but I never encountered one open minded teacher. (At least all this happened well before the implementation of annual standardized testing, and state standards, and “No Child Left Behind”.)

I did not have one decent, encouraging, halfway-human teacher between 1st and 8th grades. I attended public school in a district notorious for “backroom hires”, bribes, and nepotism, resulting in lousy teachers. Apparently, it had been that way for many years - my mom remembers that there was one guy at her father’s social club who was the “man to see” if you wanted a job with the school district, and had the requisite payment. So, it is no surprise that my elementary and junior high years - the most impressionable and malleable years of a kid’s life - were miserably uninspired.

Things improved a little bit upon entering a parochial high school, staffed by teachers (mostly lay) who actually cared (or at least put on a good show) about educating their students. They were horribly underpaid in relation to the public school teachers in town, and many of them had to leave the school because they just couldn’t survive on a pittance. When the diocese had to cut the budget, lay teachers were the first to get the ax, leaving elderly, senile nuns. (The high school I attended closed its doors a few years ago for good.)

All of these unpleasant school memories flooded back while reading To Teach: the journey, in comics, an adaptation of a book by William Ayers**, illustrated by Ryan Alexander-Tanner.

My K-8 experience was entirely passive. Sit still, be quiet, memorize things and give it back when asked. I cannot remember one single topic that included active involvement in learning. Even for school plays and assemblies, one of the assignments was to copy down all of the words to the songs in notebooks. (Thinking back at all the rote copying I did K-8, I now wonder if there was a mimeograph shortage.)

Would my life be different if I had attended a school where students were viewed not as a burden to the teacher, but as equal partners in their education? If instead of just using boring textbooks, alternative, ancillary primary source materials were also included? Or if more writing and creative thinking were encouraged, even something as simple as “writing one complete sentence about the afternoon in the park”, to use an example from the book? Ayers cites other teachers doing creative, challenging projects with their students, such as the 4th grade teacher whose class has to decide a year-long research project (such as “whales” or “paper”), that the teacher knows nothing about as well - the teacher learns along with the students.

In my entire life, from childhood to now, I never considered becoming a teacher. Did I not consider teaching because it seemed like such an unenjoyable job, a hideous burden, something to slog through for 30 years so you could collect a fat pension (in the public school case)? Or, was I discouraged from teaching because the creative, engaging educators in parochial high school were so poorly paid, and the administration valued their work and worth so little, they would rather cut them loose and lose their talents than try to pay them a living wage? The two examples of educators I was exposed to were “put in no work, don’t engage, respect, or challenge the students and be handsomely rewarded” (public school), and “give your heart, your talent, your entire self, and be poorly paid and eventually laid off” (parochial school).

I enjoy reading comics and zines about topics and fields that I know absolutely nothing about, and teaching is one of those fields. I’m certainly not about to quit my job, go back to school for a teaching degree, and start a radically new career just from reading To Teach.

However, reading To Teach did get me thinking about my incredibly flawed pre-college educational experiences. Learning needs to be active, not passive. No, not every single day of school can be “fun”, nor should it be, but hopefully kids today are being engaged more than the kids of Generation X were.

Ryan Alexander-Tanner has done an admirable job with the Ayers’ challenging source material, drawing in bold black and white panels. This is a verbose comic due to the subject matter, but the text never overwhelms the panels. The art is crisp, clean, and moves well. It’s also interesting that Ayers himself is drawn rather “blank” and plain, while his students have more detail, symbolizing he is as much as a blank slate, learning from his students.

As it should be.

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* My education was broken into elementary school (K-6th), junior high school (7th-9th), and high school (10th-12th, although I left public school in 8th grade and started parochial high school in 9th grade). It doesn’t seem as if many school districts break things up like this anymore, but do K-8 and then 9-12.
** Yes, the same William (Bill) Ayers who helped found the Weather Underground. Discussion of his radical political views seems to have blocked out all of his research, writing, and first-hand experience with education reform and social justice-based teaching methods.

Juxtaposition.

Spotted in the vitamin aisle at a Wal-Mart. Are they trying to send a no-so subliminal message here?

Maybe so, because below them was this pairing (slightly blurry cameraphone):

Announcing Machine of Death

In early 2008, there was a amusing story entitled “Flaming Marshmallows and other Deaths” by Camille Alexia on Escape Pod, a science fiction podcast. It was from a forthcoming anthology titled Machine of Death, where all the stories centered on a mysterious machine that foretold how you would die, but not where or when.

I eagerly awaited publication of Machine of Death. I was extra excited when they announced that small press comic artists would be illustrating each of the stories, including some of my favorites like Jesse Reklaw, Kate Beaton, Jeffrey Brown, and Kevin McShane.

Time passed. And passed. And passed.

Of course, since it was being self-published, money and time were major concerns for the editors Ryan North, Matthew Bennardo, and David Malki. I completely understand and emphasize. If it never made it to print, I hoped they would at least publish the stories and illustrations online.

Suddenly this week a (1) appeared next to Machine of Death in my feed reader.

Huzzah! Machine of Death will be released in October by Bearstache Books, a division of Wondermark Enterprises (the people who do all those great comics using old illustrations and etchings, updated with a modern script).

Seq. Art.: Tim Fish & Ursula Murray Husted

Love Is The Reason / Tim Fish

Tim Fish’s newspaper comic A Cavalcade of Boys, chronicles the daily lives of four gay men, including work, relationships, and personal demons. Love Is The Reason collects strips from between 2007 and 2008, and includes a lot of original material that ties everything together nicely while further developing the characters of Michael, Aubrey, Chase, and Tighe (who also appeared in the previously reviewed Strugglers). This is a strong collection with great B&W art that never becomes soapy or maudlin - the problems are real and relatable. Looking forward to seeing Tim Fish again at SPX 2010 and letting him drain my wallet more. You can also find one of Tim’s stories in issue #2 of this year’s anthology comic Nation X (Marvel).

Drawing on Yourself / Ursula Murray Husted

Drawing on Yourself may be the first comic I’ve read with PhD students as characters, which makes sense since the creator is a PhD student. This short story combines literature, cyberstalking, the strange liminal state of graduate school, tattoos, and road trips in a well-plotted 64 page package. The art is unpolished with lots of shading, giving it a raw quality and reflecting exactly how grad school makes you feel at times. (You think it’s the Army’s job to tear you apart and build you back up? Try grad school. Except they don’t bother to build you back up when they’re finished with you.)

I especially like her exterior panels, like this one:

But her detail work is also good, such as this diner table:

The complete Drawing on Yourself is available to read online, if you don’t want to purchase a copy. (However, if you do read it online, how about sending Ursula a few bucks?)

Preview: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Last week I had the good luck to see an advanced screening of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, two weeks before release. To channel Knives Chau (the 17-year-old version):

OMG IT WAS

AWESOME!!!1!1!!

Co-writers Edgar Wright (also director) and Michael Bacall did an admirable job of condensing over 1200 pages of comics into a breezy, flowing, not disjointed, 2 hour movie. This was a passion project for Edgar Wright - in interviews from Comic-Con he mentioned working on it for the past five years, as each of the books came out. The editing - both of the film and of the epic story - was very well done.

Yes, there are large chunks of the original comic story excised, including most of the high school flashback sequences, and people associated with them. Each of the battles against an Evil Ex has been compressed somewhat, and does not always follow the exact same action as the comic (alas, no Honest Ed’s). People who love the books (like the group of teenagers sitting behind me quoting lines from the series until the movie started) are likely going to be angry “this” or “that” or “the other thing” is missing from the movie. (And to be honest, a sequence that contained one my favorite panels in the entire series didn’t make the cut. Spoiler alert: Scroll down to the very bottom of this post to see it.) However, that’s always the case when a much adored book or series is adapted to the screen (e.g., Watchmen, the Harry Potter series, the Bourne novels). So, SP fans expecting a carbon copy of the comic are bound to be disappointed. Those who understand the challenges of adapting comics to film and are willing to let the director tell Bryan Lee O’Malley’s story in his own way will be much rewarded.

I actually am a bit envious of people seeing Scott Pilgrim vs. The World who haven’t read any of the comics. Not only can they enjoy the film without mentally comparing “what’s missing”, if they decide to start reading the books, they have an awesome experience waiting for them, almost like reading a “director’s cut”.

Honestly, I had my doubts about Michael Cera playing Scott Pilgrim from the moment he was cast. He just didn’t seem ADHD enough to play the scattered Scott, who is far less emo than Cera’s persona. However, it did work, and at times I actually forgot that I was watching the same mopey, wimpy kid from Juno, Superbad, and Arrested Development. The rest of the roles are also perfectly cast. Standouts include Alison Pill as the snarky, sarcastic, long-suffering Kim Pine; Kieran Culkin as gay BFF and (non-sexual) sharer of Scott’s bed; Oscar nominee Anna Kendrick in a small role as the wise Stacey Pilgrim; and of course modern day scream queen Mary Elizabeth Winstead as heroine Ramona Flowers.

Toronto is put to excellent use in the film, as it had been in the comics. I missed Toronto so much while watching this! I was a Torontoian for too brief of a time, and have thought about moving back. (Although, I always wondered - especially after the completing the nearly three year immigration process to move to Canada legally - how did Ramona (an American) land a job with Amazon.ca so easily?) The soundtrack is also quite fun, with original contributions from Beck and Metric, plus select songs from T. Rex, the Rolling Stones, and Plumtree (originators of the song “Scott Pilgrim”).

Here’s what I Twittered immediately after the preview:

(MSM = Mainstream media)

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is probably going to meet the same fate the excellent Kick-Ass did earlier this year. Comic book readers, geeks, gamers, and their ilk will see it, love it, and tell their friends... who likely were already planning to see it, anyway.

The mainstream (as in not web-based, but more traditionally print) media will likely say that the movie needs a huge dose of Ritalin, is too frenetic, and an example of the deteriorating attention spans of this country’s youth. The first week it opens, it will likely land around the middle of the Top 10 list, and then fall further each week. It’s opening on a rough day - 8/13 - against the testosterone-fest The Expendables (which I actually want to see), and the castrating Eat Pray Love (which, if it was a choice between watching that movie and eating spoiled potato salad, bring me my spork and barf bucket). I do plan on seeing Scott Pilgrim again during its first week, because I want to support not only Edgar Wright, but also the creator of the entire universe, Bryan Lee O’Malley.

Until 8/13, amuse yourself with some Scott Pilgrim related fun!

Awesome cool SP tributes:

Hey Pais: Scott Pilgrim Costumes by Paisley Cat

A Life Like Scott Pilgrim by Liz Prince

Mashup: Google map, photos, and panels from Scott Pilgrim’s Toronto by Ben Spiegel at Sleep is for the Weak, and a interview with Spiegel.

A Scott Pilgrimage: a photo essay of the Toronto locations in specific panels.

Spoiler Alert: Finally, this is my favorite scene from the comic that didn’t make it into the film, from Scott Pilgrim Gets it Together (aka Book 4). I was so hoping that Edgar Wright would somehow be able to pull of this incredibly strange, fantastic arrangement of Scott hopping in Ramona’s bag for protection.

Of Interest: 08.01.2010

The long form print magazine article is slowly disappearing, and I’m sad to see it go. Kevin Kelly has compiled a list of The Best Magazine Articles Ever, chosen by suggestions submitted via his blog. Lots of great, long form journalism here, ranging from “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush, published in The Atlantic in 1945 (and required reading by any information science student), to Susan Sontag’s often quoted “Notes on Camp”, to Katie Hafner’s “The Epic Saga of the WELL”, one of my favorites. The majority of these are available online, and I plan on creating my own print version of the best using Zinepal (which has nothing to do with “zines” in the classic sense).

Some of the items featured on the Crap At My Parents’ House blog will give you nightmares. It just makes me thankful my mom never, ever got into any sort of “collectible”, like ceramic figurines or angels or something like that.

If you’re truly into a crafty, sustainable lifestyle, you must use this Artisanal Pencil Sharpening service located in the lovely Hudson Valley, NY. Your pencils will be carefully whittled into sharp points with the greatest of care, and the shavings returned to you with the finished product. Erudite, smug, Prius-driving, localvores wouldn’t settle for anything less!

Your time suck for the next day, week month... Trailers from Hell, a site with nearly 500 movie trailers spanning years, genres, and levels of movie quality (from Citizen Kane and Gaslight to Salo and Raw Meat. What sets this apart from just a trailer site is that noted directors provide commentary on each trailer, including Edgar Wright, Allison Anders, Lloyd Kaufman, Neil Labute, and many more. How did I not know about this site until now?