Rich Mintz  

I finally watched the Grand Rapids lip dub video all the way through tonight — all 9 minutes of it, the one with the wedding party and the marching band and the burning bridge and the helicopter.  It starts a little slow — the first 3 minutes or so — but it picks up, and it’s definitely worth watching all the way through.  If you’re a fan of for small-city pride — and I am, as you probably already know — this will scratch your itch.

Still have a soft spot for the UQAM lip dub, though. Man, that’s good YouTube.

Urban walkability is a chicken-and-egg problem. In many cities, municipalities and businesses don’t invest in relatively cheap promoters of pleasant walkability (better sidewalks, street furniture, pedestrian-oriented displays — nevermind things like zoning changes and parking reconfiguration that require political will) because there’s a perception that “nobody walks.” And people are disinclined to walk because there’s a perception that “walking is unpleasant.”

Which is why I’m always excited to see signage like this in American cities, in urban cores and near transit stations and so forth. (This photo courtesy of John Massengale.)

Actually, that’s London, which isn’t an American city, and of course they do it better than we do, but increasingly it’s showing up here, too. Like in this photo — you can see a large, easy-to-use city map on the oblique (left-facing) side of the kiosk at right, which are placed all around the central core of …

… Montreal. Doh! But I swear, Americans are catching up, at their typical slow-but-steady pace. And the quality is improving. WMATA just announced that they’re improving their walk maps in Metro stations. A sample (click map image to enlarge; download full map, 2.7 MB PDF):

That map’s too busy, but it’s a lot better than the current iteration. We need more of this — this sort of thing is part of the evidence people need that changing their longstanding behavior is a rational thing to consider.

Symposium Books delivered my order in five days, so now I have a ton of new graphic novels and plain-old reproduced comic books to enjoy. I’m starting with Julie Doucet, because I like the stuff of hers I already own….

…but I had no idea she was so … you know, graphic. Doucet’s subject matter in this book is more freewheeling with regard to sex, sexuality, gender, fear, and the unconscious than you normally see even among “experimental” cartoonists. In virtually every panel (indeed, in everything of hers I’ve ever seen), she draws herself, or some alternate version of herself, and in very few of them do things seem to be going well for her.

Below I’ve provided links to three panels which, believe it or not, are among the three least edgy panels in the book. Don’t click if you’re not a fan of the names of body parts, anthropomorphized plucked chickens, or the F word. (I was careful! Because I’m a nice guy, Julie is fully clothed in all these, and I spared you “male Julie copulating with female Julie,” “body part, yes the one you’re thinking of, severed by a jackknife,” and so forth.)

Julie in the kitchen after a long night (warning: contains expletives you can’t say on TV)

Julie and her woodland friends (warning: contains creepy-looking beaver-type creature with a coffee pot)

Julie concerned about her anatomy (warning: refers to a body part that rhymes with “Regina”)

All duplicated without permission, and deliberately (yeah, right) blurry so that you’ll run out and buy buy buy and make Julie Doucet a rich woman. Here’s a link to all the Julie Doucet you can possibly want to see in one place.

After coming across Paul Moves Out in the massive graphic novels section at Symposium Books in Providence — populated largely by remainders, so the prices are right — I’ve fallen in love with Michel Rabagliati’s gentle drawing style, and I’m in the process of ordering everything else he has that’s in print (which appears to be at least three more “Paul” novels of like size).

This one is the story of a young graphic designer from Montreal in the early 1980s, a time of promise and hope (remember the early 1980s, when I was only a few years younger than Paul) — going to school, first love, first apartment. It’s more than a little arch (despite the deceptively simple happy-face panels), encompassing Adult Themes (or at least Young Adult Themes) as well as lots of detail-filled daily life in Montreal, a city I’ve visited half a dozen times. (There were a few locations in this story that even I recognized.) In many ways it reminds me of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, but with a measure of darkness leached out of it.

I’ve mostly avoided graphic novels in the past because they’ve typically either seemed intolerably preachy or schmaltzy (remember Maus?) or required a concordance to keep the backstory straight (remember, you know, anything ever published with a superhero or an orc in it?). The Boon Companion’s been pushing me to read The Sandman for about three years, and it’s sitting right here behind me. Maybe if I start with something gentle and visually rich like this, I can graduate to the harder stuff.

This, and a lot more like it, is published by Montreal-based Drawn & Quarterly Books.

The BIXI bike share program that’s been so successful in Montreal has begun taking hold in other cities; the first expansion city is Minneapolis.

I’ve used the BIXI bikes myself, and I think this is a great implementation of bike share: well-designed bikes, easy-to-understand rental system, pricing that’s advantageous for heavy users, hardy infrastructure.

Photo credit: yours truly