Stuff We Like This Week: September 11 Edition

Stuff We Like This Week: September 11 Edition

Sep 11

In an effort to combat our occasional…okay, okay, near-constant negativity, we give you a regular feature full of nothing but love — Stuff We Like This Week. Appearing every Friday, SWLTW will recap the things that have set our little nerdly hearts aflame within the past seven days.

Matt: This week, I like the Beatles.

Okay, so EVERY WEEK I like the Beatles. But this week saw the release of the new remastered stereo and mono albums, and I’m slowly but surely rediscovering these classics all over again. As I’ve surely mentioned before, I’m a Beatles geek along with a comics geek, movie geek, TV geek, and everything else geek, so I’ve got the arcane trivia and minor details all screened onto the deeper recesses of my brain.

The new versions don’t really revolutionize these records; it’s more like someone took a bottle of Windex and wiped a layer or two of crud off the sound. It’s not that there’s stuff you’ve never heard before; you’ve just never heard it this clearly, or this well. And diving into the mono material is a truly new experience for me; I’ve never really spent much time with the mono versions of these records, even though I could probably have bootlegged them at some point over the past few years through the magic of the internet. So these mono versions, considered by most to be the more “definitive” versions of most Beatles albums, are really tripping my trigger. The sound is condensed into the center of my head and continually hammers at the outside of my brain. It feels good.

Jeff: I use Heavyink to get a handful of books that my shop doesn’t order or orders really light on, and I’ve been letting those packages accumulate without being read for awhile, sadly. As a result, the stuff I like this week is likely to be some stuff I’ve liked before — Jersey Gods, Atomic Robo and Northlanders. The Shield Maidens is probably the best arc in Northlanders since Sven The Returned, and a solid followup to Vasilis Lolos’s beautifully drawn issue prior. And the most recent issue, which comes back to an aged Sven, is a welcome reunion. Robo’s misadventures with Carl Sagan are hilarious. Jersey Gods is maybe (other than Zorro) the book I look most forward to each month, and I think it’s getting better with each issue.

Also, go Steelers.

Sarah: Supernatural returned awesomely this week. I was a little cranky after last season’s finale because it seemed to reinforce the “Dean is always right and will now be able to act like a high-horsey ass for the next 10 billion episodes” and “dang wimmin, ya just can’t trust ’em!” elements that occasionally plague the show. But last night’s season premiere neatly slapped together plenty of other elements — the ones that make this series so addictive and good. I love that Rob Benedict’s prophet/author-of-Sam/Dean-novels is being established as a continuing thing rather than a funny throwaway, especially if it means we get to see more Sam/Dean fangirls. I love that the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been and that we seem to have a clear direction for the season. And I love that Castiel continues to kick ass and be so goddamn hot.

I do not love Dean’s attitude, but that’s a conversation we can have some other time.