– It is only fair to start off with something relatively self-serving and promotional, so please check out my pal Josh Dean’s Kickstarter effort for an independent comic book series he’s been developing. It looks like a great read filled with two of my favorite subjects, time travel and moral ambiguity, plus my wife and I made the fundraising video.
– AV Club shares the delightful news that Hulu will be piping the new seasons of The Thick of It and Misfits to the States simultaneously with their BBC airings. I’d say those are two of the best shows going right now, although the latter is coming off a massive cast purge that will probably affect the purity and essence of its natural fluids.
– I always enjoy Harry Knowles’ rundowns of monthly DVD and Blu-Ray releases, more than most of the other content on that site and more than looking at an unguided list of the same titles. I always come away with at least a couple films that wouldn’t have made my to-do list without his enthusiastic anecdotes.
– Cartoon Brew points out a genuinely exciting new blog from Terry Gilliam’s daughter sharing handwritten notes and drawings from his personal archive. Geez, it looks great.
– Bill Doss was an amazing talent, had an amazing voice, and had his hands in nearly every outlet of the massively important and influential Elephant 6 collective, which surely wouldn’t exist without him. The Internet has done a fine job of eulogizing him, but I would especially point to his friend and bandmate Robert Schneider’s to-the-point remembrance (and the forum response around it) and Spin’s “legacy in 15 tracks.” The first song in my mind on seeing the news was his contribution to the tastemaking Heroes and Villains: The Powerpuff Girls Soundtrack, partially because I think it’s the only time he used his own name, but mostly because it’s such a ridiculously good song. He was such a prolific collaborator that it’s impossible to draw a fence around all of his work; for example, I didn’t know until looking him up what a big part of the recent Apples in Stereo resurgence he had been. You could spend countless hours following his trail through high-grade independent pop music, which I can tell you is a great way to pass the time. Anyway, he will be missed.
– Today in streams in freebies: The excellent Yeasayer are streaming their new album Fragrant World via a web-wide “scavenger hunt” guided by their Twitter account, which will surely culminate in a few days in a regular old album stream on some magazine’s website, which is where I’ll lazily check in with it. I am looking forward to that album, though.
Remote Controlled Quicksand 