How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less (Vertigo, $24.99) is American Jew Sarah Glidden's travelogue about her "Birthright Israel" tour of the country. Religiously nonobservant and sympathetic to Palestinians at the start, Glidden has an emotional trip, trying to separate one person's truth from another's, while being rushed from one site to another. Glidden's watercolor art is easy to read and perfect for her story. This is one of the best graphic stories of 2010.

The Economist 2011 Wall Calendar ($14.99, www.economist.com/calendar) is by Kevin 'Kal' Kallaugher, the former Baltimore Sun cartoonist. Kal has been creating cartoons for The Economist since 1978 and for this calendar, he paints a monthly mashup of events and caricatures, based on notable dates. April 2011 has a hockey rink (30th, Ice Hockey World Championship begins) with a goalie labelled "IRS" and dressed in the American flag (15th, Income Tax Day) getting ready while a poker player skates over to shoot a pile of chips at him (24th, World Poker Championship). Meanwhile the American Civil War (12th) breaks out across the rink while the Easter Bunny (24th) flees from it. Add in Clint Eastwood, Fidel Castro, Shakespeare, Chernobyl, and tapirs and it's a jam-packed month.

Jim Lee has had an interesting career path—he was the hot Marvel artist, illustrating the all-time best-selling X-Men reboot of 1991, then jumping ship to join Image Comics with his Wildstorm Studio, then selling Wildstorm to DC Comics and finally earlier this year, becoming a co-publisher of DC. Icons: The DC Comics and Wildstorm Art of Jim Lee (Titan, $39.95) covers only the latter two-thirds of that career, but it is a stunning oversize book. Chapters cover storylines and characters like Batman, DC Heroes, WildC.A.T.S. and DC Universe Online (D.C.'s largescale videogame that Lee was instrumental in designing). The book includes pencils, finished art, sketches, and collectibles with Lee's commentary on the piece. For fans of Lee or superheroes, this is an excellent book at a reasonable price.

Darwyn Cooke continues to thrill readers with his adaptation of Donald Westlake's antihero stories in Richard Stark's Parker Book Two: The Outfit (IDW, $24.99). The Outfit, having been outfoxed by Parker in Book One, sends a hitman to Florida, but Parker turns him. He then declares war on the mob, and has his criminal colleagues steal as much as they can from bookmaking and other illegal activities. Cooke daringly draws the other criminals jobs in a variety of styles including using Westlake's prose with illustrations, a style based on UPA cartoons and one based on 1960s magazine illustrations. This is another great graphic story of 2010.

Maira Kalman was just in town talking about her book And The Pursuit of Happiness (Penguin, $29.95) a collection of 12 illustrated essays she did for the New York Times website. Each month Kalman picks an aspect of America to riff on, beginning with President Obama's inauguration (a painting of a tree goes with the text "Hallelujah for the hope of a new world. And the Japanese Pagoda tree, oblivious to all the fuss, vaguely remembers that it is also known as the Chinese Scholar tree, which flowers profusely in late summer offering to the lucky person standing under it a fragrant dappled refuge from the noonday sun."), while also stopping at Washington's Mount Vernon, the Pentagon, a Lincolniana collection in Philadelphia, Jefferson's Monticello, and places in New York City. I loved these naive wise pieces when they were in the paper, and I'm glad I could buy a collection of them. You should too.

Voice-Over Voice Actor: What It's Like Behind the Mic by Yuri Lowenthal and Tara Platt (Bug Bot Press, $19.95) may be a good gift for a teen hooked on animation or cosplay. The married authors have provided voices for animation, video games, and commercials and give what appears to be good information on how the processes and industry work. They also get anecdotes from others in the business, including Wil Wheaton, who notes, "I'm never going to be the guy who can do interesting character voices, but I am the guy who can create interesting characters using only his voice." If facial warm-ups, demos, and "Just gimme a couple more, wild" make you curious, consider checking out this book. I have no interest at all in being a voice actor, but I'm finding the book charming. It's also got cute comic strip illustrations by Jerzy Drozd and an extensive website.

The Peanuts Collection: Treasures from the World’s Most Beloved Comic Strip (Little, Brown, $35) by noted Peanuts collector Nat Gertler is one of those books with faux ephemera reproduced and tucked into pouches that have proliferated recently. As an ephemera fiend, I love it. Gertler, working with the Schulz Museum and United Media, broke the book down as two-page chapters on major topics such as Charles M. Schulz, Charlie Brown, halloween, Advertising, and Unrequited Love. He then chose sketches, or book covers, or toys etc. to illustrate the page of text he wrote on the topic. While I'd rather have an original set of Dolly Madison's Peanuts trading cards from 1983, the pouchful of reprints on page 41 (for Sports) is a neat stand-in. You also get a reprint of A Scrapbook About Your Falcon, "the most expensive Peanuts book ever created. This 12 page booklet was sent out for free, but only to folks who had plunked the down the price for a new Ford Falcon, circa 1963." The book's obviously a great deal since now you don't have to buy a car to get the booklet.

Rick Meyerowitz's Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made The National Lampoon Insanely Great (Abrams, $40) is a book we needed, needed because we had forgotten. What had we forgotten? We'd forgotten how the Lampoon positively reshaped American humor, before it faded and became a lampoon of itself as a brand stuck on films. For a decade, it was the only game in town, taking up MAD's post-Watergate slack. It's great to have chapters on Bruce McCall and Stan Mack or pieces like Russ Heath's "Il Showdown A Rio Jawbone," in which two gunfighters curse each other in Italian with appropriate hand gestures until only one's left standing, or a selection of cartoons by the twisted CharlesRodrigues, or "Tintin In Lebanon" by Fred Graver and Cliff Jew... This is another gorgeous book, a must-have for fans of comic art, and there's enough in it to hold your attention for a month.

A specialized book may be of interest since the area has two library schools and lots of budding comics collections—Graphic Novels and Comics in Libraries and Archives: Essays on Readers, Research, History and Cataloging edited by Robert G. Weiner (McFarland, $45) is a good introduction to the various possibilities of comics in libraries. Weiner's included a piece on America's largest comic book collection, "Comic Art Collection at Michigan State University Libraries" by my friend Randy Scott, the librarian there (and to whom I send my castoffs and duplicates), but keep in mind that the Library of Congress collection is here in town if you're doing work on older comics. The Library claims to be the largest, but is probably in the top 10 of collections.

Local publisher Joe Procopio's Lost Art Books has just released its third title, The Lost Art of Frederick Richardson. Richardson was a late 19th/early 20th century newspaper cartoonist with a style reminiscent of Winsor McCay. He migrated into children's books, and his work there should appeal to fans of the early Oz books. A certain amount of historic knowledge may be helpful to translate full-page cartoons like 'The Peace Quest' in which a leaky Spanish Ark of State sails towards the US with sails of subterfuge and deception driving it, but one can always enjoy the pretty pictures. (That cartoon would refer to the run-up to the Spanish-American War of 1898 presumably).

Wrapping up, recent books from local cartoonists that I'd recommend are The Brewermaster's Castle ($4, order from mattdembicki(at)gmail(dot)com) by Matt Dembicki and Andrew Cohen about the Heurich mansion on Dupont Circle, Richard Thompson's latest Cul de Sac comic strip collectionShapes and Colors (Andrews McMeel, $12.99) and Nick Galifianankis' collection of his Washington Post cartoons, If You Loved Me, You'd Think This Was Cute: Uncomfortably True Cartoons About You (Andrews McMeel, $12.99).

The exhibit brings together 57 paintings and drawings for the first time ever, such as Shadow Artist (seen above) and Boy on High Dive (seen below), which normally hangs on Spielberg’s office wall.

Accompanying the exhibit is a 12-minute film about Rockwell’s work, which includes interviews with both Lucas and Spielberg. In addition, the museum will be screening a series of classic American films throughout the summer, including Mr. Deeds Goes to Town on Thursday, July 8, at 6:30 p.m. Currently, there are no plans to screen either Howard the Duck or Hook.

The exhibition runs through January 2, 2011 at The Smithsonian American Art Museum, 8th and F Streets, N.W. Free. (202) 633-7970.

Morning, folks!

Those who've spent substantial portions of their intellectual lives poring over Alexis de Tocqueville—i.e. New York Times columnists, Tea Partiers, and anybody who wishes to reinforce any political argument ever—might benefit from the insights of a new biography, discussing the limits of Tocqueville’s research and what a difficult time he had getting laid in the New World. French aristocrat strikes out with American women on road trip, is forced to channel sexual frustration into 1,000-page tome to be cited by every armchair sociologist for next two centuries. Only in America!

America! Where the ideal of social mobility is canonized in animated children’s films, and then applied to the narratives of Pulitzer-prizewinning authors!

America! Where laconic country musicians are considered as essential to the literary canon as said authors!

America! Where the spirit of ingenuity begets video games you control with your mind!

America! Where everyone’s a critic, and every critic is a critic of everyone being a critic—except for this critic, who is a critic of critics who criticize amateur critics as harmful to criticism, and says as much in this essay—of which I am critical!

Perhaps Tocqueville has something to say about the decline of professional criticism. Take it, Lexie!

The nearer men are to a common level of uniformity, the less are they inclined to believe blindly in any man or any class. But they are readier to trust the mass, and public opinion becomes more and more the mistress of the world.

That guy was so horny and right. Anyway, what use are professional critics anyway if they’re going to go and say The Black Eyed Peas are the No. 1 reason to be excited about rock and roll? Yeesh.

That’s enough democratic irascibility from me. Have a good Monday!

What's more American than air guitar?

Nothing, apparently. On entering the 9:30 Club on Friday, it wasn't immediately clear whether the venue was hosting the U.S. Air Guitar Championship or a political convention. Bunting hung from the balcony, "God Bless America" and other patriotic standards blasted from the PA, and a cache of red-white-and-blue balloons cascaded from the rafters as the event began.

It was an election, of sorts. Some of the competitors even had delegations–most noticeably Sanjar the Destroyer, whose supporters wore white-and-black tees reading "STD: Sexually Transmitted Destruction"; and hometown favorite The Shred (i.e. Lance Kasten), the 47-year-old construction worker whose ankle-breaking plunge from atop an amp stack at last year's finals aptly summed up the straight-faced absurdity of this new American pastime.

The contestants effectively transformed the act of air-shredding–previously the dominion of amateurs unable to appreciate a guitar solo privately–into performance art. The absence of actual guitars (and the need to actually play them) freed them up to focus on physical stunts and prop gags. These elements, more than technical verisimilitude, appeared to be the keys to the craft. As it turns out, competitive air-guitar routines are less like rock 'n' roll solos and more like floor exercises. On cocaine.

Somewhere, Jack Black was grinning cartoonishly.

Veteran and pantomime extraordinaire William Ocean took the crown, though the competition seemed tantamount to the spectacle. The evaluations of the half-drunk judges–former champion Hot Lixx Hulahan, WaPo sportswriter Mike Wise, and "Daily Show" correspondent Jason Jones — were somewhat arbitrary. ("If you show us what's under there, I'll give you extra points," Jones told one kilt-wearing competitor, prompting him to give the audience a full-frontal. "Just kidding," Jones said afterward.) Jones showed up late "smelling of beer and sadness," as the USAG's official liveblog put it, but still held a comedy edge on Hulahan, who mostly stuck to technical criticism, and Wise, who mostly stuck to dated cultural references (e.g. "It's on like Donkey Kong!" and "You guys remember Austin Powers? She looks like one of the femmebots...on steroids!").

The bill was 25 air-guitarists long, and things did get a little redundant, creativity notwithstanding. But it certainly never approached "dull." The event had a strange quality of being completely over-the-top and yet almost completely irony-free. One could imagine these men and women up late at night in their dens, painstakingly stitching together garish spandex superhero suits, choreographing moves, rehearsing spins and split-kicks. Not because they're gifted musicians, or naturally athletic, or good-looking; but because they knew if they put in the time then they too could be rock gods, if only for a few moments.

And what could be more American than that?

Photo courtesy of Flickr user brianmka.

Two things about Son Volt’s new album, American Central Dust, to start: First, there’s little here Son Volt hasn't shown us before. Second, it’s one of the best albums I’ve heard this year.

The record finds Jay Farrar back on the road, searching for meaning beneath America’s fingernails. He gives us grainy portraits of Rust-Belt Americans, portrayed with such reverence that one might imagine Farrar as a candidate for elective office were his paeans not so genuine (and irreligious). And Son Volt, which rose (like Uncle Tupelo before it) from the dust of troubadours, describes the land in the same terms as its forebears, and often from the same perspective: the seat of a moving vehicle, with America whizzing past the window.

It’s a seat the band has occupied since it first hit the road with Trace, in 1995. In American Central Dust, however, something’s different: The view from the car window is grim: “plastic bags fly from trees, proximos of cavalier progress / memories and landscapes in triage, disappearing averages, permanent changes.” They find the cities they love—Reno, San Antonio, Nuevo Laredo—“bleeding, but stubbornly shining.” Accordingly, the enthusiasm of Trace is gone; nothing on American Central Dust approaches the invincibility of “Live Free” or the exuberance of “Route.” Instead, Farrar gropes wearily for solidarity in this modern wasteland; for others—mechanics, drifters, dreamers, even Keith Richards—who, “like Leadbelly said, ain’t got no use for the bourgeois town.” The devil-daring attitude that Farrar set out with at the beginning of his road trip has dimmed. His original travel companions are gone, and the road is strange and put upon by unwelcome signs of change. One senses that Farrar's search has shifted from a quest for truth to a quest for the places where he used to seek it. His gas gauge ticking toward empty, Farrar will settle for a few familiar faces amid the ruins of the America he once knew. (So much for No Depression.)

But while American Central Dust is an extremely dark album, it is also a remarkably good one. Tragedy makes for good art, after all, and Farrar is right on cue with his devastating, axiomatic lyrics, uttered in that unceremonious baritone. The record has been panned for being the same, tired alt.-country rock Son Volt has tread for a decade and a half, executed tiredly. Critics point to Wilco’s acclaimed forays into electro-pop and experimental noise, and ask why Farrar’s lyrics and musicianship hasn’t evolved like former Uncle Tupelo bandmate Jeff Tweedy’s has. Tweedy doesn’t sing about the road anymore; his recent material—which has included ballads to his wife and a retrospective of his band’s sonic journey—bespeaks a man who has moved on from the road, both mentally and musically.

What critics who persist in measuring Farrar against Tweedy don’t understand is that as wonderful as Wilco’s transformation has been, it was never Son Volt’s job to change; it’s Son Volt’s job to stay the same while everything else changes—to remind us of how America used to be, and how we used to describe it. Let Wilco play with dissonance and smuggle out insight in riddles (what the hell are spiders doing filling out tax returns?), and let Son Volt celebrate the Old, Weird America with three chords and the truth. There's room for both, and we need both.

For his part, Farrar makes it clear in American Central Dust that he has no plans to renounce the road, no matter how many Wal-Marts they build alongside it. “Roll on with the dreamers / believers in the steel-eyed soul,” he sings on “Roll On,” a sedate but resolute tune that serves as the album’s thesis. Son Volt's America might crumble to dust; but to that dust, the band will always return.

Vanderslice is a talented musician who, with the help of other talented musicians, performed a repertoire rich with rollicking, smartly arranged pop-rock songs. Between songs he kept it light and affable, complimenting a blueberry pie an audience member had baked for the band and asking to check out some guy in the front row’s camera. But there was no upstaging Matsson, whose stage presence combined the quirk of a street mime with the brimstone of a tent revivalist to create something weird and very moving.

Matsson's moniker is farce; the man is exceptionally short, his Swedish blood notwithstanding. I would put him at 5'5", tops. He wore a pale-blue collared button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up high. His visage was youthful and almost Elven: high cheekbones, dark playful eyes, a fastidious little mustache clinging to his upper lip, and a carefully sculpted duck's-ass coiffuer. At first glance, Matsson appeared less a towering titan than an ex-jockey on his way to audition for Grease.

In the song "The Gardener," Matsson hinted at the origin of his superlative stage name:

I know the runner's going to tell you
There ain't no cowboy in my hair
So now he's buried by the daisies
So I could stay the tallest man in your eyes, babe

Here, size is not a measure of dimensions but of presence; and in this regard, Matsson looms large indeed. His masterful guitar-playing would be spectacle enough, but Matsson was not content to merely sit back and croon. He would march around the stage, kneel as if praying, scoop with his guitar neck as if seining a tidal pool for minnows, and gaze at individual audience members for many moments at a time as if to transmit, telekinetically, some urgent message. (This made his guitar work all the more impressive. Matsson’s compositions are extremely technical: He switched into a new tuning after—and sometimes during—most songs. That he was so precise in his finger-picking amid his theatrics was uncanny. Even the tuning was made into a droll exhibition.)

When Matsson did speak, he did so sparingly and never comprehensibly. Sometimes he would approach the mic as if to speak and then back away, like a rodent poking suspiciously at a crust of bread—an affected shyness that seemed to parody the persona that one might, on first glance, presume him to have. Then he’d start picking a bright riff and unleash a nose-full-of-brambles Delta bray, as if suddenly cohabitated by the ghosts of Mississippi John Hurt and Howlin’ Wolf. Never judge a diminutive Swedish folkie by its cover—or stature.

That brings us back to Pug and the question of folk’s inheritance. In the interest of appeasing those who might have shared my friend’s complaint, let me be clear: Folk is not a homogeneous genre. In the strictest sense, it doesn’t even have a defining sound; it needs only to be rooted in the tradition of the common people of a certain land or region. For reasons Alexis de Tocqueville might be more apt than I to explain, American folk—especially that of the 20th Century—has been heavily influenced by politics. Folk music has been vehicle for describing the plight of the common man in all its forms. But in democratic conditions, this exercise takes on new meaning: describing the plight of the common man, where it once meant merely taking ownership of one's lot, now implies a call for change. This seems to be the strain of American folk Pug has tapped into with Nation of Heat.

But there is another strain of folk, one that is tied to the land and the yeoman (both of which Tocqueville described as meticulously as Americans' political tendencies). This is where Matsson stakes his claim. His lyrics are more backwoods, full of landscapes, seasons, flora and fauna (moles, snakes, foxes, eagles—even a unicorn!), and the elements. His characters are dreamers, and his descriptions of love and loss and playfulness and unease are rooted firmly in the rural aesthetic. Consider:

I’m gonna float up in the ceiling
I built a levee of the stars
And in my field of tired horses
I built a freeway through this farce
Well if I ever get that slumber
I’ll be that mole deep in the ground
And I won’t be found

These are the sort of lyrics that are littered all over The Tallest Man on Earth’s debut LP, Shallow Grave. If Pug's folk is the poetry of association, Matsson’s is the poetry of remove.

Ironically, the highlight of his performance Tuesday (aside from an arresting cover of the Irish folk standard “Moonshiner”) was probably the song with the most political imagery: an upbeat strummer called “The King of Spain”:

…I wear my boots of Spanish leather
Oh, while I’m tightening my crown
I’ll disappear in some Flamenco
Perhaps I’ll reach the other side
Why are you stamping my illusion
Just ’cause I stole some eagle’s wings
Because you named me as your lover
Like all I could be anything
Well, if you reinvent my name
Well, if you redirect my day
I wanna be the king of Spain

The song is a celebration of masquerade and ambition: an appropriate choice for the undersized Swede to belt out at the conclusion of a show during which he transformed from a droll little sideshow to the tallest man in our eyes.

Here's Matsson performing elsewhere: