I’ve updated the right sidebar, so now you get to see some new stuff I’ve been reading/watching/listening too lately.  When I went to the new WordPress system all that got tucked away into a set of formatting templates and I’ve had to set aside some time to figure them out and play around a bit.  I want to take the Terror Alert panel back to the cartoon series I’d planned for it…but I have so much on my plate now as it is…

Atrios said (jokingly but still angrily) that Eric Boehlert’s Lapdogs made him want to shoot someone in the face.  He even suggested Boehlert use that quote on the bookjacket.

Lapdogs made me want to shoot someone in the face -Atrios

I’ll just say that if you don’t want to get royally pissed off all over again about the way the Mainstream News Media has been kissing George Bush’s and the Republican Party’s ass for the past five years, you probably don’t want to read Lapdogs.  The Swift Boat Veterans.  Bush’s National Guard Service.  Embedded Reporting in Iraq. The Downing Street Memo. The media looking the other way again and again at republican corruption.  It’s all there and more.  

You I Love is a sweet, quirky and very sexy same sex romance.  If you’re like me and starving for stories like this be careful of this one though.  The lovers in question are really put through the ringer by the parents of one of them and you literally don’t know until the very last frames whether or not they’ll overcome and endure.  I almost threw a chair at the TV set.  But it ends happily.

The last of Yun Kouga’s legendary "Boy’s Love" maga series Earthian translated into English is finally here.  Volume 3 of the series, like the previous two, collects several issues into one lovingly bound volume.  Begun in 1987, and produced over a period of years, Earthian is a lushly illustrated, very, very romantic tale of two angels sent to earth to stand in judgment over the human race.  But it’s not what you think.  The angels are actually an advanced alien race that live on a distant world named Eden.  Self imposed guardians of the few habitable worlds of the galaxy, their race is slowly dying…victimized by their own vastly superior technologies, and their rigid social order.  Few children are born, and those that are different are completely ostracized by their parents and treated with suspicion by the majority on the one hand, yet carefully cared for by the governmenton the other, because children are so rare. 

Once such is Chihaya, a young angel unusual for both his black hair and startling black feathered wings.  Chihaya takes a fondness to the Earthian, and volunteers to count their pluses, to spare them from extermination.  He is paired with a counter of negatives, Kagetsuya.  The team is sent to Earth, and as the series progresses, they begin to fall in love.  But the race of angels is dying, and homosexuality is punishable by death.  Their dangerous relationship progresses against a backdrop of cutthroat intrigues among the other angels for power, fallen angels condemned forever to live on Earth, the sudden appearance on earth of a race of black winged angels, and a mysterious cancer that begins to kill the angels on their home world, and as Chihaya and Kegetsuya can finally no longer deny their love for one another, the verdict comes down…the Earthian must be exterminated.

If you don’t like stories that are light on action, thick with romance, and loaded with androgynously beautiful long haired (and I mean…really…really long haired) males you probably want to stay away from this one.  Manga like this is mostly directed towards a female audience, but some of us gay guys like a little romance in our lives too and that’s your cup of tea Earthian is one you won’t want to put down.  It is simply stunning, for the richness of its artwork, its storyline and its characters.  There are some color inserts scattered throughout this collection, I don’t know if they were in the originals or not, but they are absolutely beautiful. 

The cheesy anime that was done on this series did not do it any kind of justice at all.  But then…the anime they did on Gravitation didn’t do That series justice either.

Chihaya

Finally, I was wandering around iTunes a couple weeks ago and found the Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: Jimi Hendrix lp.  If the only version of Hendrix playing Voodoo Child is the one you’ve heard on the "Best Of" collections then you need to hear this one.  Jack Cassady does bass and Hendrix just electrifies the room he’s playing to.  It’s an amazing performance.

That’s all for now…gotta go back to working on the cartoon…