Alex Claw

Who doesn’t love a redhead with mind powers?

Not me that’s for damn sure.

Laura Marling – A Creature I Don’t Know

Alrighty.

I think it was NPR’s All Songs Considered podcast that first shoved me in the direction of Laura Marling. Listening to only ninety seconds of her song “Devil’s Spoke” from the album “I Speak Because I Can” was more than enough time to cause me to consume all her recordings and albums. To say the least, I’m a fan.

The album “A Creature I Don’t Know” doesn’t disappoint. It’s mostly a girl and a guitar, folk music at it’s core, but combined with Laura Marling’s voice it rises up to something entrancing. A powerful voice combined with great guitar playing and in some songs a building up of instruments, sort of sucks you into these dark murky worlds of love, family, and loss.

The album begins with a song that has a bigger and expanded sound, The Muse, tap additional instruments and pianos to start off the album in the right kind of way. Then we move toward the more stripped down songs of I Was A Card, Don’t Ask Me Why and Salinas, where her voice carries the day.

The Beast, Night After Night, My Friends, Rest in Bed, and Sophia shift into a darker tones and slower melodies. It’s the heart and center of the album, filled with loss love and pain. Although, My Friends, has a more faster and upbeat tone, like a small pick me up after The Beast and Night After Night, then back into the dark with Rest in Bed and Sophia.

All My Rage is one of those songs, like Darkness Descends in “I Speak Because I Can”, where the music seems more upbeat and fast, but with all these dark undertones to it. I love Darkness Descends and I love this song too. The song also acts like a pallet cleanser, relatively upbeat compared to the songs that come before it. Plus the song has one of those lines that I just love.

“Cover me up, I’m pale as night
With a mind so dark and skin so white”

I don’t know why, but I love those lines.

Overall, it’s a damned fine album. By my count, I do believe I’ve listened to it about a dozen times and I’m still loving it.

Last Man

By: Alex Claw

I walk the skeletal shores of a dead ocean. The sun is a bloated red smear bleeding into the sky.

It’s the last days of planet Earth and I’m the last man on it.

I have lived billions of years. I have seen the rise and fall of a hundred thousand empires. I have seen stars brought to life and killed. I have seen planets destroyed and witnessed great interstellar wars. I was there when mankind went extinct.

I have only one regret. I should have gone out with Judy that one night. I bet I could have gotten laid.

To be honest, it’s been a weird couple of months.

There’s been a battle for change and all that good stuff going on behind the scenes over here. Not big changes, just, y’know, the smallish life changing changes that have to be made so that a certain individual doesn’t succumb to the siren call of laziness. The battle is on going, but so far so good.

It began one sweltering July evening, while I sat hunched over my computer trying desperately to not fall asleep while drawing an All Manner of Bad update. You see, when one wakes up at five in the morning and sixteen hours later tries to complete an update for the following day, things get a little on the physically exhausted side.

Then in one of those Eureka! moments, I thought to myself: “Perhaps drawing when you wake up would be better than drawing after a loooong day at the day job”, it took a few moments to realize that yes, indeed, drawing when waking up would be far better than drawing when completely exhausted.

So began Vampire Hours. Instead of crawling out of bed at five in the morning, I began crawling out of bed at ten in the evening.

You’d be surprised how much energy you have in the wee hours of the night, while the world slumbers and snores away. I wake up and go about my normal routine, drawing, writing, and reading. It began to reflect in the fact that for nearly two months I haven’t missed an All Manner of Bad update and I’ve only missed one Zombie Roosevelt update. Plus, there was the continued blogging and sketching (which reminds me I have to get back on that).

Now that things are moving along a bit more smoothly, productivity wise. The new change that’s been going on is adding more productivity. I’ve been jotting down the things I’ve been doing lately and discovered to my semi horror that the weekdays are the only days I’m drawing or writing. In addition, I usually take Mondays off and sleep through Wednesdays. Which means that only three days and a hurried Sunday evening draw session are the only days where anything gets done. I’ve got the time and the knowledge of what needs to be done, now I just have to saddle up and ride off into that sunset.

Change is once again the big word for this last quarter of the year. There’s a lot that still has to change, not only in what I’m doing artistically, but also in the, y’know, real world stuff. There’s always that big cloud of worry that floats overhead of Health, Finances, Relationships, etc. etc.

As they say, the best time to tackle problems is right now…

Smallish Goals for the last Quarter of 2011
Draw a page a weekday (All Manner of Bad or Zombie Roosevelt)
Write two pages (physical pages) a day for the Novel.

This was inspired from watching far too many episodes of the Spectacular Spider-man cartoon.

Gwen Stacy has to be one of the saddest characters to ever come be included in any reboot. She’s basically fated to die. Her bright and shining moment was when her neck snapped after being tossed off that bridge.

When she comes onto the screen, I get that sense of sad dread for her. She’s gonna die, no matter what. It’s her role. In every comic, movie, show, etc. She’s the one pure hearted gal that’s going to be sacrificed. Sad really.