It’s New Years Eve on a closing decade and we’re feeling a certain obligation, though not because of any clamoring demand to, to….. We’ve never liked top-ten lists,- year-end lists, best-of-the-decade lists, that sort of thing. And for all the usual reasons. Now, as the old song goes, everybody’s doin’ it. …

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Like much of Nick Hornby’s work, Juliet, Naked is not a book about love in the traditional sense. It’s a book for those of us who are obsessively in love with music, so much in love that it defines us when so little else does. We identify with someone’s art, and…

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The Rabbit, nose a wiggle, is aghast that Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice hasn’t been included in any “Best Of” year-end lists he’s seen. It’s Thomas Pynchon for Carrot’s sake! Full disclosure: The author has been at the top of the Rabbit’s living-writer list since the dumb bunny first read Gravity’s…

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On your toes now and no sleep walking! You don’t venture into the English village of  Land’s End  in which everyone suffers from narcolepsy with your eyes closed! Especially when that nightmare of nightmares, the stereotypically insidious and ethnically evil Dr. Fu Manchu is  tearing open someone’s bowels just beyond your…

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In the beginning, Robert Crumb’s work was all parody and cartoonish variation. Over the decades, he has breathed form into his illustration, bringing detail and something, at times, approaching realism while maintaining his characteristic style prickly-male legs and ponderous female thighs. The Book of Genesis Illustrated is his longest, most ambitious creation…

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Jeanette Winterson‘s review in the New York Times of Joan Schenkar’s biography, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith draws a connection between not only Highsmith’s plot sequencing and the six-panel comic but Highsmith’s–and her characters’–personalities as well. Highsmith, who died in 1995, wrote Strangers…

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The best thing about The Best American Series’ The Best American Comics is that it reminds us of comics we enjoyed a couple years ago. Anyone who stays half-way current  with alternative comics and graphic novels will have seen a good portion of what’s in each edition of this four-year…

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The Rabbit was slow to come to Jon Hassell‘s Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street. The music certainly caught the attention of our floppy ears on first preview. But it was months past the February (’09) release date when we finally gave it serious airing–I’m…

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Disfarmer is Bill Frisell’s Pictures At An Exhibition, a series of 26 short, impressionistic pieces inspired by the photos of Mike Disfarmer (1884-1959), an Arkansas photographer who captured both place and time in his starkly-lit portraits.  Disfarmer’s revealing black-and-white portraits of country and small-town folk, posed without background, are perfectly reflected…

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Viewing the original of C.G. Jung’s The Red Book may be more affordable–if not as convenient for some– than buying a copy. With computer and refrigerator repairs forcing the Rabbit towards the almighty credit limit (oh, the cruelties of the Technological Vortex!), it’s unlikely I’ll be purchasing the facsimile edition released…

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