Pitchfork

Photo by Francis Chung

This May, two very distinct strains of nerdery will intersect when (former?) Silver Jews frontman David Berman releases a book of cartoons. Drag City will release the book, and they've announced its title on their website: The Portable February. So Berman's not taking over The New Warriors or anything like that yet, but we can dream.

Last month, Berman announced on the Drag City message board that he was dissolving the Silver Jews. And on January 31, the band played its final show in Tennessee's Cumberland Caverns, an actual cave. So now he's got more free time to devote to other projects. In his retirement blog post, Berman had this to say: "I guess I am moving over to another category. Screenwriting or Muckraking." Or cartooning?

We don't know anything about The Portable February's subject matter yet, but Berman's already gotten cracking on the muckraking side of things. As previously reported, on the same night as he announced his band's breakup, Berman write a post called "My Father, My Attack Dog," a confessional polemic about his father, who, it turns out, is the right-wing lobbyist Rick Berman. In that post, the younger Berman had this to say about the elder: ""My father is a despicable man. My father is a sort of human molestor. An exploiter. A scoundrel. A world historical motherfucking son of a bitch. (sorry grandma)."

He went on to loosely but stridently describe Rick Berman's efforts to bust unions and keep minimum wage from going up and his own failed efforts to convince his father to retire. "This winter I decided that the SJs were too small of a force to ever come close to undoing a millionth of all the harm he has caused," the younger Berman wrote. "We've been 'estranged' for over three years."

Last week, Mother Jones magazine's David Schulman took David Berman's lead and ran this article about the elder Berman, who heads the Berman and Company firm: "The one-time labor lawyer presides over a constellation of industry-backed front groups, which specialize in countering activist campaigns targeting smoking, drunk driving, junk food, mercury in fish, and other consumer issues."

Schulman even managed to get a statement from Rick Berman about David: "I love my son and am proud of his accomplishments. Any disagreement we might have is a personal matter and, though I can't speak for David, should be dealt with privately. I hope that the media will respect our family's privacy." By the looks of things, David may not share that hope.