If nobody hears us, then how will they know who to blame?

For the last three days I've been listening almost non stop to Zak Sally's Fear of Song. If you don't have a copy, you should get one. For you collector weirdos out there, it's all handmade, signed, numbered (edition of 900). For those of you who just like amazing music, it's, well, fantastic. It sounds like Fugazi, if you weren't cowering just a little bit out of fear that Ian and/or Guy were going to yell at you and pay you to leave. Like they were your friends. Your noisy, slightly vulnerable friends.

Ok, second plug. Francoise Mouly is giving a (I think/hope) free lecture Thursday night at Columbia College Chicago. From their website:

When: Thursday, February 18, 6:30 pm
Location: Hokin Auditorium, Rm. 109, 623 S. Wabash Ave
A reception will take place immediately after the event in the A+D Gallery.
Françoise Mouly (born 1955) is a Paris-born French artist and designer best known for her work with RAW, a showcase publication for cutting edge comic art (edited by Mouly and her husband, Art Spiegelman), and as art editor of The New Yorker, a position she has held since 1993. In 2008, she launched Toon Books, a series of hardcover comics for children.

I'm going to be there. Ivan B. will be there. Should be a blast, but more importantly, I'm going to try to do a short (5-10m) interview with her about John P., and of course, in my fantasy of fantasies, we'll see a King Cat NY'er cover before year's end. Highly unlikely, but without dreams and fantasies.......

The interview with Ivan yesterday was a real treat. I've been a fan of his work for years, and it was great to see a) what a fan he is himself, and then at the same time b) how lucky he believes he is to be able to do the work that he does. Hopefully I'll post clips tomorrow of that one.

Today's clip is from the chat with Zak in the La Mano HQ. We were talking about how John has gotten back into doing some distro stuff via Spit and a Half, and how I was ordering some King Cats for the shop from him, when he kind of casually mentioned distributing for La Mano. I pointed out that as a comics shop, we'd love to carry it, which elicited the following response from Zak:

What's happening the rest of this week. First off, there's the Jeffrey Brown interview. I've been friendly with Jeff since I met him at the 2002 or 2003 SPX in San Francisco, and over the years we've traded a few letters/emails, etc. He designed a couple of bookmarks for Kilgore -- which we turned into shirts -- and has generally just been a great guy. I'm pretty excited to interview him to get the perspective of someone younger than John who's more directly influenced by him. Zak/Mr. Mike/Joe C. are all friends/contemporaries of Johns, and Ivan is in the colleague/friend category, whereas I think Jeff will be more straight up fan.

Then there's the Francoise Mouly lecture tomorrow which should be fun, and then there's the ongoing battle of transferring tape -- WHICH I'VE STARTED WINNING!!!!

That's right, after two grueling weeks of trying to figure out this god damn tape transfer problem -- where the audio would jump out of sync with the video during transfer, rendering footage unusable -- I feel I've gotten at least a patch job figured out.

Oh, and I had a dream two nights ago that Los Bros Hernandez were making fun of me for not getting interns. We were hanging out in the 'Hernandez Bros Compound' on all these weird 60's lounge chairs and couches -- really LOUNGING, splayed across the furniture -- when they kept repeating, 'you don't have ANY interns?!? You need like three or four, at LEAST!'

Til tomorrow, or the day after. Or the one after that....

PS -- Couldn't help but use one of Zak's lyrics (from the song 'Corpsegrinder') as the title. All rights reserved or something.