Friday, January 22, 2010

200920082007:Selected Older Features:

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Monday, July 20, 2009

From LocalCut.com, July 21, 2009

“It’s like we had to sit through a Decemberists concert to get to a Decemberists concert.”

That’s how one person in the crowd described the band’s July 19 concert at McMenamins Edgefield. And he was dead on.

The Decemberists took the stage as part of the Edgefield’s “Concerts on the Lawn” series, performing an early evening show with Andrew Bird and Blind Pilot to a crowd of several thousand people. The band started off by playing its new album The Hazards of Love from start to finish, then briefly left the stage before returning for a second set drawn from throughout the group’s back catalog.

The two sets drew a line under the problem with the band’s new prog folktale (progtale?) direction: It’s no fun.

For all their strengths, the band’s two most recent albums (Hazards and 2006’s The Crane Wife) take themselves very seriously. The albums are darker and more somber than the band’s previous releases, but they’re darker by default, not design. It’s not as though the songs aren’t going to some new morbid place — Colin Meloy’s always had his morbid streak.

Take the songs the group played in the second set. Between “Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect” at the start and “I Was Meant For The Stage” at the end, Meloy dedicated “The Bachelor and the Bride” (about an impatient rapist bridegroom) to all the summer newlyweds, and also played “We Both Go Down Together” (about a mutual suicide) and “O, Valencia” (Romeo and Juliet-esque lovers, one of whom dies tragically). Decemberists albums have always been rife with death, tragedy and disillusionment— in amongst the joy and the humor the distorted ballads of Crane Wife and Hazards lack.

It really was like seeing two different bands: The Very Serious Decemberists, indeed playing epic prog songs back to back with no pause for banter or interacting with the audience, followed by Our Old Buddies the Decemberists. In the second set, Colin Meloy performed “Dracula’s Daughter,” the song he calls “the worst song I ever wrote,” before telling us about how, upon composing it, he spilled his glass of absinthe, dropped his quill pen on the floor, heard his parrot squawk, “and God in Heaven shed a single tear.” The Decemberists of yore were a great time to see live, silly and relaxed, and the band played that second set like nothing had changed.

The Decemberists are a band that elevates pop music. That’s the group’s genius, given to them by God, fate or the Great Magnet. The group takes a genre that too easily slides towards the lowest common denominator, and infuses it with sophistication, education and wit. So seeing them play an entire album’s worth of songs with only a scattering of catchy, memorable hooks isn’t just disappointing—it’s like using that proverbial gift horse to plow a field. Sure, you can if you want to. But that’s not what it’s there for.

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Wednesday, July 15, 2009

From Willamette Week, July 14, 2009

In 2008, local theme-metal act Dagger of the Mind faced a dilemma likely unprecedented in the whole history of rock ’n’ roll: Stay a band—or become a metal theater group? “We agonized over it,” says frontman Jason Simms (known as Lord Simms, Liege of Albuquerque, onstage). But in the end, Dagger of the Mind became the Metal Shakespeare Company.

Besides the name, not much actually changed. Simms’ band has always bridged the gap between music and theater, so declaring themselves a Shakespeare troupe was, honestly, just a formality.

In concert, the four-piece Metal Shakespeare Company takes the stage in Elizabethan garb, delivers stage banter in “Fakespearian” dialects and sings scenes from the bard’s works while playing power metal. Simms (an ex-WW freelancer) formed the group in 2005 as an English student at Lewis Clark College. He wanted to be in a band that sounded like Iron Maiden, but he also wanted metal-snubbing Portland scenesters to come to his shows. A gimmick was clearly in order. The group’s Shakespeare shtick has proven extremely popular in circles both high (a performance at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland last year earned them a mention in The New York Times) and low (Simms reports the group can no longer play house shows “because we break houses”—or, rather, the crowd does).

To Simms, power metal and Shakespeare go together like peanut butter—and more peanut butter. He quotes the line in Macbeth that describes a Caesarian section: “From his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d.” “That’s about the most metal way to describe it,” Simms says. Metal and theater are “all about the victory of warriors and stuff like that,” and the two share similar visuals. “If you look at old Maiden videos, they’re wearing tights and high-tops just like we do.”

The group’s new name underscores what it’s about, Simms says. “If you’re in Boise and you see a flier for ‘The Metal Shakespeare Company,’ you don’t know what that is,” he says. “But you know you’re getting two things: metal and Shakespeare.” It’s a unique combination. “We could be the only metal Shakespeare company in the world!” he says, summing up the logic of the name change. “Why are we trying to be a band?”

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Thursday, February 26, 2009

From Comic Book Resources, February 26, 2009

It’s not an easy time for the publishing world. Magazines, newspapers and major book chains are all getting kicked in the teeth by the international economic crisis — as is the comics industry. So it’s odd to find a comics-focused magazine that’s going under not because of financial failure, but because of business success.

But that’s exactly the fate of "Comic Foundry," whose founder Tim Leong is having to discontinue the magazine because his burgeoning career no longer allows him the time to publish it. CBR News caught up with New York City’s Leong and his senior editor, Portland’s Laura Hudson, for a post-mortem on the acclaimed but short-lived comics lifestyle magazine.

"Comic Foundry" started publishing in September 2007, and released five quarterly issues; the final edition shipped last Wednesday. The magazine grew out of the "Comic Foundry" the website, which Leong started in 2005. In its original iteration, "Comic Foundry" was intended as an educational resource for aspiring comics creators. It featured a forum, a job board, and weekly articles and interviews. The articles were only intended to boost traffic — but they soon turned into the site’s biggest draw, necessitating some changes.

“After a year or so, we repurposed the site to be more of an online magazine, and scrapped the educational element,” Leong told CBR. “We did that for eight months until we decided it was time to take 'Comic Foundry' to print.”

Leong and his staff of contributors saw a demographic of comics readers who weren’t being served by the two leading industry magazines. Wizard covers mainstream superheroes, and The Comics Journal caters to indie and small press aficionados — so what about the people in the middle? People like Leong himself?

“I didn’t just read ‘Batman’ — I read indie books and manga too,” Leong said. “I basically wanted to create a magazine I’d be excited to read,” something he describes as Entertainment Weekly-meets-Wired, but about comics.

Leong also felt like there was a hole in comics coverage itself, and designed "Comic Foundry" to fill it. “We didn’t just want to talk about what was going on in the books,” Leong said. “We also focused on how comics affect our everyday lives — through fashion, dating, drinking, decoration, etc. It might seem like a stretch, but it worked.”

Indeed, "Comic Foundry" ended up with 2008 Eisner Award nomination for Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism, alongside established industry news sources like The Comics Journal and The Comics Reporter.

What ended up doing the magazine in was a piece of good news — Leong’s promotion to Design Director of men’s lifestyle magazine Complex. The promotion set "Comic Foundry", Leong’s labor of love, against the career he’d been building for the last decade. “My work responsibilities were just too great for me to be able to spend significant amounts of time elsewhere,” Leong said. “My philosophy is that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. And I couldn’t live with the idea of putting out an issue without [having] 100 percent attention and concentration behind it.”

"Comic Foundry’s" senior editor Laura Hudson agrees with Leong’s decision to discontinue publishing. “I’ve had people ask me if I’m upset with Tim for leaving CF,” she told CBR. “But there’s really nothing else that he could do given his position. He works ludicrous hours for his day job before CF even comes into the picture, and he was sleeping two or three hours a night for way too long.”

Leong is aware that he and Hudson may be getting out while the getting’s good. “Financially, we were doing well... we were in the black every issue, and our circulation went up every issue,” he said.

But with the magazine business — and the comics direct market — in the state they are, that was unlikely to last.

“I’m sure even if we did everything right, sales, subscriptions and advertising would be down — a magazine’s three core sources of revenue,” Leong said. Plus, he points out, paper costs have risen and the price of shipping is a factor — as is Diamond Comic Distributors’ recently instituted time limit on periodical orders, by which retailers now have only a 60-day window after each new issue is released to order or reorder it. “That might sound like a lot, but when your magazine is a quarterly publication, you need all the time you can get.”

The end of "Comic Foundry" may be, as Leong and Hudson say, a necessary decision. But that doesn’t mean they’re happy about it. “I’m incredibly sad to see CF go,” Leong said. “I’ve had a pretty great life that’s been rife with a lot of success, and CF folding just makes me feel like a giant failure. I feel like I’ve let down our amazing readers, the dedicated contributors and, in a way, the industry.”

Hudson seems to feel the same way. “There was a reason that Tim and I poured so much of our lives into 'Comic Foundry,'” she said. “And it was because it really was the magazine we’d always wanted. It wasn’t out there, so we made it.”

She’s also unhappy about the timing. “We were really only [now] hitting our stride and building a readership, and I think we could have done a lot more if we’d had the resources and time to keep it going,” Hudson said.

Still, Tim Leong doesn’t regret his choice to put "Comic Foundry" to bed. “I feel quite horrible about it,” Leong said, “and it’s a sucky decision. But at the end of the day I stand by it.”

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Wednesday, January 28, 2009

From Willamette Week, January 28

On Friday, Jan. 16, the recession hit our comics industry.

In comics, Marvel and D.C. may be the “Big Two,” but Diamond Comic Distributors Inc. is the Big One, the exclusive comic store distributor of monthly series from Marvel, D.C., Dark Horse, Image and others. If a comic isn’t in Previews, the monthly catalog Diamond sends to stores all over the country, that comic likely won’t be in those stores.

So when Maryland-based Diamond announced changes to its system that will make it harder for comics by unproven creators or companies to get widespread distribution, dozens of small publishers had to figure out a new way to get their books into the hands of the public. Depending on whom you talk to in Portland’s comics industry, it’s either business as usual, a blessing in disguise or, as industry website ICv2.com put it, “the death of independent comics.”

The cause of the hubbub is Diamond’s order benchmark, the minimum dollar amount it must receive in orders from comic stores to bother selling a publisher’s product. The benchmark was set at $1,500 per item in 2005; as made public Jan. 16th, it will go up to $2,500 in February. That’s a wholesale figure; it means that every product has to make around $6,250 in actual sales, moving about 2,000 issues of a $2.99 comic or 400 copies of a $14.99 graphic novel.

An order amount of $2,500 might not sound like much, but there are months when the bottom performers in Diamond’s Top 300 Comics ranking don’t make that. And the Top 300 list covers only a tiny portion of the industry.

The reaction to the benchmark hike from the comics blogosphere was quick and loud: “I’m fucked,” Dan Nadel, publisher of Brooklyn art-comics line PictureBox, told the Comics Reporter blog. AdHouse Books publisher Chris Pitzer declared, “Comics are dead, long live OGNs”—referring to original graphic novels, long comics bound as books.

Hype aside, local industry leaders say they’re unscathed.

“It won’t really affect us or our friends at [Milwaukie publisher] Dark Horse,” says Jim Valentino, Portland-based publisher of the Image Comics imprint Shadowline. Likewise, Oni Press publisher Joe Nozemack tells WW that Oni’s books sell well above the benchmark. And while Chris Staros, co-publisher of Top Shelf Productions, wouldn’t comment on the hike, he estimates only a third of the company’s business comes from shops served by Diamond.

But the Diamond changes are already affecting the region’s newest publisher.

“We kind of fall into that beige area where some of our titles sell below the benchmark, and then some of them don’t,” says Darren Davis, president of Bluewater Publishing. Bluewater has watched its numbers steadily decrease since the company’s first book, 10th Muse, debuted at No. 6 in Diamond’s monthly sales in 2000. “We sold 100,000-some-odd copies,” Davis says, “and now [we’re] struggling to just get 1,000 copies.”

Local writer Joshua Williamson is safe—barely. “If this had happened three years ago, I know for a fact I wouldn’t be where I am today,” he says. Williamson has several books with Shadowline, but the one that got him his big break was published by Atlanta’s Desperado Publishing, and didn’t sell enough to meet the new minimum.

There’s no straightforward way into the industry for new creators. Talent “trickles up,” with self-publishing and small press working as farm leagues for publishers further up the ladder. And you have to climb if you want to eat.

“Very few people actually do earn a living from independent comics,” says Steve Lieber of Periscope Studios, Portland’s renowned comics-art studio. For indie artists, he says, “this represents an opportunity to go from losing a lot of money to losing a little bit more money.”

Many comic stores aren’t friendly to indie titles, but some, like Floating World Comics in Chinatown, specialize in them. PictureBox, the “fucked” publisher mentioned earlier, is one of store owner Jason Leivian’s favorites.

“I know it’s going to affect my store,” Leivian says, “especially if they cut some of the more avant-garde selections.” He knows he’ll still be able to get the books from smaller distributors, but that’s an expensive monthly hassle that many shops just won’t bother with.

Over at Bluewater Publishing, Davis sees the increase as an opportunity for indie comics to find a distribution method that suits them. He’s already made arrangements to distribute his issues through Haven, one of at least a few companies who are already retooling their business to serve the market Diamond is no longer covering.

Davis says he worries about his business twice a month—when he sees the last month’s sales figures, and when he sees the new issue of Previews. But he thinks it won’t take publishers long to figure out a solution.

“It’s going to be two to three months,” he says. The rest of the Portland industry is hoping he’s right.

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Monday, January 26, 2009

From WWire, January 26, 2009

You know the intersection of Northwest 5th Avenue and Couch Street? The corner with Floating World Comics, Ground Kontrol, Backspace and Compound? I always call that spot Geektopia. Then again, given Portland's outsized pull on the the national comics community, maybe I should expand that term to cover the whole city. We’ve got another nationally-known independent comics company in the metro area now, and last week an out-of-town comics couple came to PDX to get married. At Ground Kontrol.

The staff at Old Town’s ‘barcade’ report being surprised when what they thought was just a reception turned out to be an actual wedding, between Seattle comics creators Michael Avon Oeming and Taki Soma. Oeming created was a series artist on Bulletproof Monk (made into a Chow Yun-Fat flick in 2003) and collaborates with our own Brian Michael Bendis on the acclaimed cops-and-capes series Powers, while Soma does the weekly webcomic You’ll Never Die. Bendis (Secret Invasion, Ultimate Spider-Man) served as Oeming’s best man, and his wife, Alisa, was Soma’s maid of honor, while Kentucky artist/writer David Mack (Kabuki) got himself ordained to officiate the ceremony.

The modest guest list was a who’s who of the local and national comics industry, including Dark Horse VP David Scroggy and editor Diana Shutz; Mike and Laura Allred; and Oeming collaborators Ivan Brandon and Bryan J. L. Glass (who flew in from NYC and Pennsylvania, respectively). Adding to the Portland quotient was the catering: Voodoo Doughnuts, Escape from New York pizza, and a cake shaped like a spaceship from classic arcade game Space Invaders. “Taki and Oeming loved it!” Mack reported on his message board.

The newlyweds are collaborating on a new comic called Rapture, due out in April from Dark Horse. No word yet on whether the couple will be changing their surname to “Soemaing.” But wouldn’t that be great?

WW has also learned that well-known indy comics publisher Bluewater Productions relocated from Bellingham to the ‘Couve in December. Bluewater brings the roster of major independent comic publishers in the metro area up to five, joining Dark Horse, Oni Press, Top Shelf and Image Comics imprint Shadowline.

Darren G. Davis, Bluewater’s president, says part of the reason to bring the company to Vancouver was personal (his father lives in Portland), and part was professional. “[Bluewater] needed to be near some airport,” he says. “Like, an airport that wasn’t an hour and a half away.”

Bluewater, publisher of the acclaimed series 10th Muse and a line of works based on the films of Ray Harryhausen (the stop-motion animator responsible for Clash of the Titans), hasn’t just moved to the area. They’ve also embraced some very Portland ideals—keeping it local and making it sustainable. This week Bluewater announced that Tigard’s B&B Print Source will be taking over the printing for their publishing line, and making it 100% green too.

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Wednesday, December 10, 2008

From LocalCut, December 10, 2008

There’s this thing Portland does, this trick it plays on you at times, where you go to what you think is a rock show only to find yourself in the midst of something else entirely. Something older, more refined, cultured, and respectable, lurking under a thin veneer of the contemporary pop zeitgeist. It’s like your first time at a Vagabond Opera show, when you’re really starting to get into the neo-cabaret of it all—and then the lady vocalist starts singing a completely-straightforward rendition of Bizet’s opera Carmen and half the crowd looks stunned.

The Portland Cello Project’s “Holiday Sweater Spectacular” at the Aladdin Theater on Friday, Dec. 5, was like that for me. I have PCP’s (excellent) album and I’m well-aware of the group’s conceit: The massed ranks of Portland pop cellists, combining their powers and coming up with arrangements for the music of other local bands, famous classical songs, and video game themes. But I still wasn’t quite prepared to see the PCP for the first time. Some part of me really was expecting a rock show—just a rock show with a hell of a lot of cello.

And that’s not what I got. Instead, the “Holiday Sweater Spectacular” was organized like a traditional concert—the kind you don formal wear and go see in a concert hall. (Although in this case, the sartorial theme was horrible tacky holiday sweaters. And if you came so attired, you got three free downloads of exclusive, unreleased PCP songs.) There were programs and an intermission and everything, as well as Weinland frontman Adam Shearer bound up in Christmas lights as the MC.

The program featured PCP’s signature eclectic variety, best exampled when the musicians followed up four selections from Modest Mussorgsky’s piano suite “Pictures at an Exhibition” with the theme from the video game phenomenon Halo. Also in keeping with the PCP’s guiding “all music is created equal, as long as it’s awesome” philosophy were a cello concerto, Tears for Fears’ “Mad World,” Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You,” numerous songs by local artists—and a flat-out show-stopping performance of R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly” by Dave Depper of Loch Lomond and Norfolk & Western, dedicated to his now-wife Joan Hiller. (Somebody get that man in front of a microphone more often! Good God!)

The bill also featured a slew of top-notch local guest musicians, from Loch Lomond frontman Ritchie Young and his uncanny falsetto to Jenny Conlee of the Decemberists on Hammond organ. The night ended with four selections sung by Mirah, accompanied by TBA festival’s Flash Choir. And then it was over, leaving us with the feeling that we just got conned into going to a cultural event when we thought we were going to a rock show.

And that’s a neat trick, Portland.

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Brandon Seifert is a freelance print journalist and photographer based in Portland, Oregon. He's written for Portland's Pulitzer-winning alt-weekly Willamette Week, Performer Magazine, Alaska's three major papers, and several websites.

View his photo portfolio.

View his freelance resumé.

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