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Saturday, August 27 ( 8/27/2005 08:33:00 AM ) Bill BOOM! ZEET! – Received a couple of Boom! Studio comics for review this week (these guys've been busy lately!): What Were They Thinking? and the second ish of Hero Squared. The former is a Keith Giffen & Mike Leib collaboration where the two "go nuts and rewrite an old Wally Wood war comic" from the 1950's, while the latter is the bridge ep in Giffen & J.M. DeMatteis' enjoyable superhero multiversal goof. Of the two works, Squared is the more successful – I suspect that writing collaborators Giffen & DeMatteis have worked together long enough to keep each other from wandering astray – while Thinking strives so huffily to be wacky and edgy that you can't help feeling sorry for all concerned, especially poor dead Wally Wood whose solid pro work is being "remixed." If you're gonna go all What's Up, Tiger Lily? on a comics great like Woody, you should at least be as funny as the artist himself could be. In Thinking, Giffen & Leb maintain the look on an old fifties comic (right down to the yellowed pages), but their humor's more circa P.J. O'Rourke era NatLamp. Considering the fact that this kinda stuff can be found all over the Internet (bloggers like Tim O'Neil and Jim Treacher have quite effectively played the comics remix game), you'd think that we could get more than a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" piece where Wood's squad of preternaturally clean & manly soldiers turn out to be (wait for it) a bunch of girlymen. Trotting out a series of obvious butt puns, our remixers then start feigning outrage over their own conceit – a stale ploy if there ever was one, but all too typical of this weak concoction. In contrast, Squared bases its humor on character and is all the more successful for it. Issue #2 (or 3, if you count the unnumbered "Special Edition" which preceded this three-issue mini-series) is primarily devoted to filling in the history that led to straight-laced superhero Captain Valor showing up in an alternate universe, being pursued by his vengeance-seeking former girlfriend Caliginous. Giffen & DeMatteis have fun with this exposition-heavy entry by having both Valor and Caliginous tell their version of the story to the alternate universe version of their ex-lover: the only details which remain the same are Valor's propensity for campy superheroic dialog and villainous lackey Sloat’s comic obsequiousness. Artist Jon Abraham (with the aid of Mark Badger & Shannon Denton) loosens up considerably during the flashback sequences, which both emphasizes the "comic book" nature of these scenes (as opposed to the "realistic" world that purports to be the book's prime setting) and the unreliability of both versions. It's a nice touch, and I also chortled at the plethora of Don Martin-esque sound effects included during the fight sequences. (Perhaps if Thinking had included a few "Boom! Zeet!s" in its panels, the book would've been more risible?) Still, the meat of this book is the romantic quadrangle between the seemingly upright Captain Valor, his slacker doppelganger Milo, Caliginous and her real world counterpart Stephie. It's a set-up rich enough to fuel a mini-series twice as long as this, and while half of me is eager to get to the final entry to see how the writers untangle things, another wishes they'd keep things messy, just so we could watch this divertingly chatty foursome bounce off each other a little longer. . . # | Friday, August 26 ( 8/26/2005 04:31:00 PM ) Bill FRIDAY PET PIC – Here's Ziggy Stardust hoggin' the camera for this weekend's pet pic. If you look closely into his blue eye, you can see a tiny spec of brown just below the pupil.  # | ( 8/26/2005 02:07:00 PM ) Bill CHEER UP, SLEEPY JEAN – Man, if this recent study suggesting a possible link 'tween daydreaming and Alzheimer's is on the money, then I am well and truly screwed. . . # | Wednesday, August 24 ( 8/24/2005 09:15:00 AM ) Bill "AND I'D LOVE TO BE WITH YOU/IF ONLY I COULD" – From good ol' Johnny Bacardi, comes this fun pop music meme which works thus: A.) Go to http://www.musicoutfitters.com; B.) Enter the year you graduated from high school in the search function; C.) Bold the songs you like, strike through the ones you hate and underline your favorite. Do nothing to the ones you don't remember (or don't care about). And so, from the year 1968: 1. Hey Jude, The BeatlesNever was a big fan of the Beatles' "Hey Jude," but the fact it beat out "Honey," one of the most appallingly bathetic tracks ever placed on wax, does my heart good. Back when I was eighteen, I probably wouldn't have bolded as many sexy soulful ballads (yeah, to the Ice Man!) as I do today, and I know I would've been snobbier when it came to opening myself up to the simple dumb pleasures of Buddha Records' bubble-gummers. But I'm surprised by how many of my favorite tracks have held up for me over the years. Those were the days, my friend. . . # | Tuesday, August 23 ( 8/23/2005 04:28:00 PM ) Bill FAREWELL TO THE FISHERS – It probably sounds dorky, but, two days after its end, I'm still processing the fact that Six Feet Under has left us. Ain't a lotta teleseries that leave that large a gap when they end – for me at least, the best shows are more often cut down before they can fulfill all of their initial promise (e.g., Showtime's Dead Like Me, which was about a half a season away from opening up its packages) or cancelled after the series has already run its course (yes, I'm talkin' at you, Buffy Summers!) – but when they do, they remind us just how close we can feel to a buncha made-up teevee figures. For me, Six Feet was one of those shows. When the series debuted, five seasons ago, I wouldn't have guessed this. If you'd told me that a cable show created by Alan Ball, the man responsible for the overpraised American Beauty (a movie more facile than profound), would be able to work this kind of magic, I wouldn't have believed you. The show's premiere ep – with its interstitial mock commercials for funerary products regularly disrupting story flow – wasn't the most promising opener either. Watching Frances Conroy's Ruth Fisher shrilly react to husband Nathaniel's death was an especially grueling touch. Could they make this harridan more unappealing? I wondered. Yet something happened fairly quickly with this show. Initially brought to the series by the promise of its mordant humor (a promise the show's writers kept through all five seasons), I found myself quickly caring for all the Fishers – even Ruth and her uptight log cabin son, David (Michael C. Hall), who in the first episodes seemed to exist mainly to provide a foil for Peter Krause's more free-wheeling Left Coast bro Nate. As we watched 'em all attempt to reach beyond the confines of their funeral parlor home, to make connections that more times than not, they sabotaged themselves – they became more and more identifiable. The easy funeral jokes of the show's premiere turned out to be masking so much more. Though set in a world of artifice (more than one episode hinged on the way the family biz worked to cover up death's grim realities), Under was relentless when it came to detailing the myriad ways its characters could fuck things up – whether it was Lauren Ambrose's youthfully self-entitled artiste Claire honing in on the most destructive boy in the room, Nate turning away from the emotional demands of every woman who falls for him, David fag-bashing himself or Ruth just being Ruth. Death is easy, a two- or three-minute opening punch line; it's living in the aftermath of death that's the struggle. Which is the main reason why the show's prodigal son Nate couldn't die in the series' last episode – but had to pass on two eps earlier. Having opened the series with family grief, the writers wanted us to experience that same sense of mourning with a character we'd gotten to know and like, even when he disappointed the hell out of us. Over the course of its run, Ball and his writers didn't always successfully negotiate the shifts between dark, sometimes broad humor (e.g., Ruth's fling with a self-help group) and all-American psychodrama. But even when you saw the show's creators shoving one of their characters toward a dead end, it somehow seemed consistent with the world they inhabit. Even at its best, Under regularly reminded us, life is messy in ways most teevee is incapable of acknowledging – and, what is more, it ain't no how permanent. . . # | Monday, August 22 ( 8/22/2005 01:31:00 PM ) Bill A THOUSAND FOUNTAINS – Caught the cable premiere of Stephen Spielberg's The Terminal on HBO over the weekend: one of those movies that appears to be bring out the snark in plenty of critics (I suspect if Spielberg hadn't been the one directing it, some of 'em would've been more kindly disposed toward this mild comedy). Watching Tom Hanks play a generically Slavic European bureaucratically stranded in an NYC airport, I was occasionally reminded of Jerzy Skolimowski's superior 1980's drama, Moonlighting (not to be confused with the later teevee series), in the way its working class hero is forced to utilize his ingenuity to work around a system that'd much rather officially pretend that he doesn't even exist. Skolimowski, who centered his movie on a group of illegal Polish immigrants working on a London apartment building while their homeland was erupting in turmoil, had more specific political concerns (his hero, played by Jeremy Irons, is the only one of the group to speak English – and he uses that fact to control the flow of information going to his crew), while Spielberg seems mainly focused on celebrating the humanity of "outsider" service workers. Not a bad thing to base a movie on, though whether the material is enough to support a two-hour film probably depends on your willingness to tolerate heapin' globs of calculatedly old-fashioned movie whimsy. For me, where the movie flags is during its focus-shifting romantic subplot with Catherine Zeta-Jones' flight attendant. Unlike Hanks' immersive performance, there never was a moment in the film where I wasn't aware I was watching Miz Catharine Zeta-Jones. When she notes, at one point, that her character is age thirty-seven, and Hanks' Victor responds that he "was once" that age, some nasty little Graham Norton-y voice in the back of my head cracked, "If he can still remember being thirty-seven, Catherine, he's too young for you!" I wound up accepting the movie, though – as much on the strength of its final scenes (where we get to watch Victor as he rapturously listens to jazz great Benny Golsen, playing "Killer Joe" in a Ramada Inn lounge: let's hear it for American Jazz! U!S!A! U!S!A!) as on its comedic moments. But after viewing this willfully sentimental exercise, I'm not gonna buy the critical line from anyone that the ending to Spielberg's War of the Worlds is deliberately meant to be unrealistic or ironic. I think Spielberg wants to buy that ending as much as he wants his audience to. . . # | ( 8/22/2005 11:28:00 AM ) Bill INDEEDY – 'Bout time somebody did this: lefty Jesse Taylor adopts the hip rhetorical blogstyle. . . # | Sunday, August 21 ( 8/21/2005 03:41:00 PM ) Bill "A BIT O' NOSTALGIA FOR THE OLD FOLKS" – So we're driving to Menard's this Sunday afternoon, looking to get the kinda stuff you buy on weekends at a DIY supercenter, when we pass an abandoned corner gas station on Veteran's Parkway. The place used to be a British Petroleum station, and it closed over a year ago, so it has the forlorn look most abandoned businesses share. But the thing that strikes us is the fact that the sign advertising gas prices still has some of its numbers up. Where the prices of Unleaded and Premium once proudly announced themselves to the Bloomington-Normal beltline traffic, now they trail off by only showing a dollar sign and the first dollar number. But the thing is: that dollar number is a one! That vacant BP station serves as a sad reminder of the seemingly irretrievable day when gas went for less than two bucks a gallon. . . UPDATED: Corrected to take into account my propensity to mentally collapse time. # | ( 8/21/2005 10:44:00 AM ) Bill "I'M WORKING ON IT!" – Reading the debut issue of BOOM! Studio's G.I. Spy, a new mini-series following the exploits of a wisecracking American secret agent and his sexy British counterpart during W.W.II, got me reflecting on the pernicious effect that the movie James Bond has had on the pulpy spy story. As written by Andrew Cosby & illustrated by Matt Haley, Spy is a jaunty fast-moving adventure set "somewhere in the Belgian Congo" during 1939. Our hero, Jack Shepherd, has been sent on his first mission after receiving four weeks of abbreviated spy training ("That's the government for you," he muses as he parachutes into his mission. "They spend four years developing magnetic combat boots . . . and four weeks training the guy who's gonna wear 'em.") He's received his assignment as an army spy because a personality inventory that he's taken states that the same qualities which make him "a terrible soldier also make me the perfect spy." Though we’re not told this, I'm guessin' the fact that Jack cheated on his personality test was one of the factors in showing his superiors he's the right guy for the job. What he lacks in thoughtfulness, he makes up in recklessness; he's not the kind of agent to spend a lot of time skulking about but instead charges into scene ahead of his reluctant partner Kaitlin Hunter. The first issue, after a teasing prologue set in Antarctica, basically follows Jack's lead, moving rapidly from action scene to action without giving us much breathing room to learn why we running around so frenetically. All we know by the end of the 21-pages is that it all somehow is connected to Nazi super-science and a uranium mine. Cosby & Haley have a lot of fun with their material, making their premiere read like the opening act of Indiana Jones And the Temple of Doom: though you barely have a clue as to why anything's happening, you're pulled along by sheer story velocity. Our hero Jack Shepherd is so new to the spy game that we're given several jokes at his expense. After parachuting in on a fancy ball rendezvous, for instance, we see that the tuxedoed hero is still wearing his mud-stained combat boots, a sly riff on all those moments that James Bond improbably showed up in dapper dress after stripping out of a wetsuit. Couldn't help being bothered by another Bondian aspect of the story, though, (which is where my thoughts about "pernicious" influences arose): a running joke Jack makes about needing to spiff up his snappy banter when facing the enemy. The thing is (to quote A. Monk): movie spies during World War II weren't generally engaging in that kinda punning patter. That form of self-consciously sly behavior came in the 60's with the second Bond flick, From Russia With Love, (Dr. No, the first movie Bond adventure, featured a somewhat more serious version of the character) to be quickly picked up in teleseries like Man from U.N.C.L.E. and I Spy and in imitation movie series like Matt Helm. Connery, when once asked where he got his version of James Bond, is supposed to have asserted that he modeled the character after Cary Grant. But when Grant played a government agent back in the forties (see Grant's post-war 1946 turn in Hitchcock's Notorious, a movie that Jack Shepherd couldn't yet have seen), he was more hard-nosed than flip. Most likely, the Grant that Connery was referring to was the dapper fifties era version of To Catch A Thief or North By Northwest. So Jack, when he laments his weak talents when it comes down to in-fight banter, is behaving anachronistically. A small point, to be sure, in a series where the goose-steppers are guarding their base with futuristic robotic tank suits, but for some reason it bugged me: not enough to ruin my enjoyment of this slickly lightweight entertainment, just enough to set off a loud mental clunk! every time Cosby made a variation on the joke. . . # | Saturday, August 20 ( 8/20/2005 05:49:00 PM ) Bill GIVE HER ENOUGH ROPE – For our weekend Pet Pic, here's Cedar keeping an eye on a rope toy that has since vanished into that dimension on the other side of the bedroom wall . . .  # | Thursday, August 18 ( 8/18/2005 10:35:00 PM ) Bill A NOTE TO BRAVO – Dear Network That Isn't A & E: Bad enough that you subject us to Donald Frigging Trump providing grooming tips to a fired Apprentice contestant on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. But sticking five other "reality show" players in the season debut of Celebrity Poker Showdown is appalling, plain and simple. We watch these card games to see actual celebs expose themselves at the poker table – but where's the new in watching a quintet of reality show bozos expose their seamy underbellies? Is putting the obnoxiously nattering Jonny Fairplay on-screen designed to nudge me into wistfully anticipating Howie Mandel in next week's show? I'm not buyin' it. . . # | Wednesday, August 17 ( 8/17/2005 03:30:00 PM ) Bill DIDN'T KIM THOMPSON QUOTE THIS SONG IN THE FINAL ISH OF AMAZING HEROES? - Pulled out a CD that I hadn't played in ages today, Deborah Harry's Def, Dumb & Blonde (Sire) and in so doing rediscovered a song I hadn't thought about in way too long, the pop-punkish: I see this album, which was originally released back in 1989 and has been criminally out-of-print for years, has been reissued this summer. To my ears, it's the best of the New Yawk Rocker's solo albums – and, for that matter, it cuts the revamped Blondie's last pop release to ribbons, too. Looks like this 'un is slipping back into personal rotation for the rest of the summer. . . # | ( 8/17/2005 01:36:00 PM ) Bill  LOTS OF LU – Been reading the first three volumes of Dark Horse's reprints of Little Lulu for a Comics Journal review, and I'm wholeheartedly enjoying it. I remember first occasionally reading Lulu back in the 50's. But as a young boy reader, I know I was put off by the plotlines pitting our heroine against Tubby and the rest of the all boys' club. When I grew older and heard comic fans sing the praises of John Stanley & Irving Tripp's long-running series, the only reprint option available was a series of high-priced boxed sets. These Dark Horse books are really my first exposure as an adult to a sizable selection from the life and times of Lulu Moppet.I'm saving most of the heavy lifting for Dirk, but I do think it's apt here to note that these Dark Horse collections contain some darn good comics – with beaucoup laffs and wonderfully clear-eyed characterization, to boot. Plus, reading these $9.95 reprints of five issues per book really reminds you what a storytelling value these old dime funnybooks provided: 31 pages of solid story per issue told in a four-tier page structure that's packed full of comic action. Consider the present-day mainstream "serious" superhero titles ostensibly aimed at an older readership that can be read and forgotten in practically no time at all – and Lulu looks even more remarkable. . . # | Tuesday, August 16 ( 8/16/2005 06:29:00 PM ) Bill LOOK WHAT THEY’VE DONE TO MY SONG, MA. . . – Mid-August, and it's once more time for yours truly to partake of the dust 'n' mildew fest known as volunteer sorting for our local campus NPR station's "Recycled Music Sale." As I've noted in the past, digging through other people's musical cast-offs can be loads of fun if you're the right kinda musical snob ("Another copy of Christopher Cross! Hah!") and this year was no exception. Only thing that differentiated this year's Recycled Sale from previous outings is the bigger number of CDs being offered. When I first started signing up to help, eight years ago, there was only a small table of compact discs – the big selling point was the used vinyl. Now the discs take up a long row of tables. A good number of the unsorted CDs were by groups totally unfamiliar to me – and to anyone but the group's immediate circle of friends and family, I suspect – which sometimes made 'em hard to categorize. My sense is that the shift from vinyl to CD inspired a major increase in the number of indy and vanity discs over the past few years. Where limited-press LPs were largely devoted to school bands, the relative cheapness of CD production has resulted in a boom of self-produced, self-distributed albums. Most of this stuff is probably as listenable as that marching band album your parents were coerced into buying back when you were in high school, but for all one knows there could be a wealth of great music within these home-grown mini-platters. Who has the time and resources to find out, though? # | ( 8/16/2005 09:46:00 AM ) Bill NO, NO, NO, I THANK YOU! – This summer's drinking game: take a sip every time Kyra Sedgwick sez "Thank yew!" on The Closer. Take a deep quaff when she does it in that sing-songy pitch which simultaneously sez fuck-you and you-better-have-this-done-by-the-time-I-get-back. . . # | Monday, August 15 ( 8/15/2005 02:52:00 PM ) Bill  "OTHER GUYS IMITATE US/BUT THE ORIGINAL IS STILL THE GREATEST!" – Released to cash in the big summer movie release, The Best of the Fantastic Four, Volume One (Marvel) provides an inadvertent object lesson in the decline of "The World's Greatest Comic Magazine." Of its fifteen selections, six come from the Lee-&-Kirby years (1961 – 70), while six more encompass '71 – '84 (half of which prove to be works by John Byrne). From there, it's a gap of 18 years before we get our next entry, a character study of the Thing by Karl Kesel & Stuart Immonen. Wo' happened in the intervening years of monthly FFs? Not much, apparently.Let's get this out of the way first: a true "Best Of" collection would stick to the two guys who gave us the First Family of the Marvel Universe (no, I'm not gonna venture into the Who Created What controversy) and skip the second-hand news. As fine as some of the latter day entries may be (Byrne's hammy exposition-heavy scripts, it should be noted, have not aged well), they can't come close to matching the energy, inventiveness and sheer joy of storytelling that Stan the Man and King Kirby created with seeming ease. Take the two-part "Battle of the Baxter Building" storyline from '65 (FF #39-40: as the story opens, our foursome has lost their powers, only to learn that Doctor Doom (to further connect to the movie, the Latverian shows up in five of the collection's stories – including an origin tale from the first FF Annual) has taken over their ultra-high-tech headquarters. They enlist the aid of Daredevil, arguably the weakest of the mainstream Marvel superheroes, to get back into the trap-laden building where scientist Reed Richards can restore their powers. Even though I'd read this story years ago – and obviously knew our merry band would triumph – the story's told with so much conviction that as I re-read it I was once more caught up in the characters' plight. Even at their weakest (e.g., the 100th issue offering, "Long Journey Home," which is less a story and more an excuse to parade as many recognizable villains in a celebratory issue as possible), the Stan & Jack team are unmatched. As if to underscore this point, the first story in the collection that's crafted by a new team (Archie Goodwin & John Buscema) is such a weak emulation that we never once accept its premise (Doc Doom takes on the leadership mantle after team leader Reed is overcome by a alien villain called the Over-Mind). Both Goodwin and Buscema are undeniably talented comics craftsmen, but they're unable to breathe any life into their story. Even the much-vaunted Byrne "revitalization" (repped by a Marvel Two-in-One solo outing starring the Thing – the first of four selections focusing on Ben Grimm to the exclusion of the other three regulars – and two stories from the regular title) is but a weak spark compared to the roaring sense of fun that the best FF adventures engendered. Which may be why the most successful seventies era stories are the deliberately goofy ones: Roy Thomas & George Perez's Impossible Man romp from FF #116 (featuring good-natured caricatures of the Marvel Bullpen from that time) and Barry Windsor-Smith's Thing vs. Human Torch practical joke war from Marvel Fanfare #15. As big as the stakes may sometimes be in the early Fantastic Fours (Hey, that guy's gonna gobble up the whole damn planet!), there's a good-natured light-heartedness to the whole proceedings that comes across simply by virtue of Kirby's unapologetic comic-book-ness. Attempts at treating the characters more seriously – whether by Byrne or the more recent writers and artists – can't help but miss the mark because, at root, the Fantastic Four aren't meant to be taken fully seriously. If they were, they'd have a more portentous name. Like X-Men, say. When we get to the most recent offerings, the only one that comes close to approximating the old stuff is Mark Waid & Mike Wieringo's maiden effort "Inside Out," which cleverly tackles the question of "How do we sell the faltering Fantastic Four?" by making this their story. Told from the PoV of a freaked-out public relations man, the story is packed with the kind of kitchen sink details (like what is the sound of Mister Fantastic stretching?) that feel like something Stan or Jack might've nonchalantly tossed out. Though less a story than an extended sales pitch, it still comes across as twenty times more entertaining than Best of's final entry, "Wolf At the Door," the concluding chapter of a four-part serial built on an idea (the once-wealthy super-family is now broke!) that would've been good for five or eight panels and the status of minor plot complication back in the old days. Though he may not be as inventive as the old guys, Waid understands an essential aspect of these old stories: you can't be stingy with the ideas. Introspection? That's all right for a few panels (or, perhaps, a Thing solo adventure – like Karl Kesel's "Remembrances of Things Past.") But when you're telling the adventures of Marvel's first and foremost super-hero team, you just can't stint on the Fantastic. . . # | Saturday, August 13 ( 8/13/2005 11:24:00 PM ) Bill YE WEEKEND PET PIC – So, anyway, I pull out the Canon ZR60 digital video camcorder this afternoon to take some pics of the ferrets, since we've just discovered that they go really bozo with an cheerleader's pompom in the room. But for some reason I'm unable to get the camera part of the Canon to work. Whenever I switch the camcorder up to "camera" mode, I get nothing but a blank screen on the LCD – and, yes, I did remember to take the lens cap off, thanx for asking. But I can still get the VCR mode to play, so while I'm learning this fact, I discover this shot of Willow just as she's apparently making ready to lunge at the camera. . .  That big gray lump at the top of the pic, incidentally, is Stormy Cat. # | ( 8/13/2005 09:03:00 AM ) Bill  WHEN YOU'RE A PUFF, YOU'RE A PUFF ALL THE WAY – (My third smoke-related posting this week – what's up with that?) The leggy femmes who primarily populate Kirsten Baldock & Fabio Moon's Smoke And Guns (AiT/Planet Lar) are all of a piece: pistol-packin' cigarette girls who dress in fetishized girlie costumes (French maid, nurse, cheerleader) to peddle their wares on the street. It's Baldock's amusing conceit to treat these hard-boiled dames like gang members in a 50's juvenile delinquent flick (or Walter Hill's later midnight movie stylization, The Warriors), with each gang holding onto their particular parcel of NYC turf with tooth and heavily polished nail. Naturally, one of the members of the Grand Avenue Puffs, a bleach blond troublemaker named Scarlett, chafes at the imposed boundaries and starts venturing out into rival territory run by the Broadway Belles, initiating a full-blown gang war as she does. Much gunplay ensues.Not a premise to be taken all that seriously on the face of things, though neither Baldock nor Moon muck things up by engaging in any obvious winking. Their improbably skillful gaggle of gun-totin' gamines takes the bizness of shilling cancer sticks seriously. The Puffs' boss, a blowsy ol' dame named Peaches (who looks exactly like you'd expect her to look), attempts to run a tight ship, but the overly ambitious Scarlett keeps stirring things up. In a futile attempt to quiet things down, she suspends the girl for three weeks, so Scarlett takes a job waitressing a private party across town and winds up passing out drunk at the soiree. When our anti-heroine comes to, she has to make her way back to her home territory by herself, making a whole lotta new acquaintances along the way. Moon's black-&-white brushwork – packed with slender young women and seedy male customers – is suitably both gritty and sexy, though occasionally you can see him faltering in some of the more chaotic action sequences. He's especially good at capturing the flirtatious give-and-take between Scarlett and her smokers ("Guy can't even look at a dame like you without losing money," one barfly jokes), as well as the intriguing, if underdeveloped, relationship between Scarlett and Annie. (I especially liked a scene where the two try out guns, wondering if one pistol is "too fat" to fit into a holster.) At times, the latter is rendered a smidgeon more cartoony than her peer (especially around the nose), but that's a minor plaint. Smoke And Guns may be nonsense, but it's energetic, well-mounted nonsense. If at times Baldock's high concept seems to overpower most everything else (by the end, we know as much about Scarlett's character as we learn in the first five pages of the book), the concept is rich enough to sustain a graphic novel. With so much pop media overly concerned these days about inadvertently giving the message that smoking is glamorous, it occurs to me that just about the only place you can tell a story like this nowadays without running up against financial backer opposition is in the small-press comics format. Whether that's a positive or a negative thing, I'll leave for someone else to decide. All I know is after decades of watching old b-&-w movies showing tough broads placing coffin nails 'tween their lipsticked lips, the image still provides its own kicky thrill, one that a multitude of well-meaning warning mongers can't dispel . . . # | Friday, August 12 ( 8/12/2005 10:21:00 AM ) Bill "STILL IT BEGINZ-A!" – Maybe I'm still pissed at him for doing a historical appreciation of the Go-Betweens that antic-climactically ended with an oh, yeah, the new album's pretty good, too (belated thanx to Ben Varkentine to cuing me to its presence), but NPR's rock historian Ed Ward definitely dropped the ball yesterday in a Fresh Air sound piece on famed rock producer Jack Nitzsche. Noting his work with the divine Jackie De Shannon, Ward claimed that Nitzsche's production job on "Needles And Pins" (first heard as a single but also available on Jackie's 1964 Breakin' It Up On the Beatles Tour album) was superior to the Dave Clark Five's hit single of the song. Now, I'll agree that the De Shannon original (co-written by Sony Bono – just to show the guy could write a song that wasn't thoroughly dopey) is better than the Brit Beat hit that was made of it. (Peaked at number 16 on the U.S. charts, according to Parke Puterbaugh.) But the Mersey Beat band which brung it there was not the DC5, but Liverpool's second most famous group, the Searchers. Confusing the Searchers with the Dave Clark Five is kinda like confusing the Byrds with Gary Lewis & the Playboys – something that's just not done if you're a rock historian. . . # | ( 8/12/2005 09:50:00 AM ) Bill "YOU'VE MADE YOUR MONEY, NOW WATCH THE MONEY GROW!" – Puffy AmiYumi doing a cover of Jellyfish's "Joining A Fan Club?" Yup. Won't dislodge the original track (one of the best moments from the band's Spilt Milk), but it's still plenty fun. Wish Andy Sturmer were doing more than frittering his considerable talent on these J-Pop cuties, though. . . # | Thursday, August 11 ( 8/11/2005 04:37:00 PM ) Bill "DRUGS SELL THEMSELVES, BISCUIT!" – Showtime's new half-hour sitdramedy, Weeds, opens on a calculatedly quaint note: Malvina Reynolds' Eisenhower Era folkie rant against ticky-tacky "Little Boxes" playing over a collage of peaceful suburban images. An obvious joke (at least if you're a Baby Boomer with memories of Pete Seeger's 1964 modest folk-pop hit version of the song), but the series works overtime to go beyond the mere suburban conformity that Reynolds' old song decries. It tells the story of Nancy Botwin (Mary Louse-Parker, modulating the staccato delivery she utilized on The West Wing into a more hesitating cadence), a recent widow living in the well-to-do burg of Agresta. Nancy's late hubby has left his stay-at-home housewife penniless (at one point we're told they spent all their savings on a new kitchen, but at least "it turned out gorgeous.") So to keep herself and her kids in the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed, she's begun selling marijuana to her friends and neighbors. It's a familiar satiric conceit – clean-cut middle-classers turn to crime to maintain their familiar bourgeois comforts (it fueled, for example, the 70's era Jane Fonda/George Segal comedy Fun with Dick And Jane) – and if that was all that creator Jenji Kohan were up to in the show, the results'd be good for maybe three episodes at most. Thankfully, the half-hour series aims a bit wider than that. In her capacity as active PTA mother (and head of – irony alert! – Agresta Elementary School's Healthy Children's Committee), Nancy connects to a variety of upright citizens: most notably, Kevin Nealon's doper city councilman Doug (I laughed out loud at the shot of him tokin' in his car to Nelly McKay) and Elizabeth Perkins' neurotic bitch queen Celia (you can see elements of Megan Mullally's character from Will And Grace – a show that Kohan has written for – in Celia, though cable allows her to be a whole lot witchier). The latter is the kind of control freak parent who sees every one of her kids' transgressions (real or imagined) as a reflection on her, so she ham-fistedly attempts to spy on her teenaged daughter with a camera imbedded in a stuffed animal – and browbeats her pudgy younger girl into losing weight. Celia's borderline abusive parenting is contrasted with Nancy's more open and supportive relationship with her two sons, Silas and Shane. Though she may be dishonest with them in regards to her moneymaking practices (at one point telling her kids she's going out to a meeting of the Neighborhood Watch), in all else she's open and aboveboard. As a later day folkie once noted: "To live outside the law, you must be honest." And within the strictures of her suburban outlaw life, Nancy struggles to remain true. She insists that her pot is only sold to those old enough to handle it – and gets profoundly distressed when she learns the teenaged son of good customer Doug is selling the stuff to school kids. (How she winds up putting an end to this practice is one of the first ep's funnier subplots.) One of the show's conflicts, then, is between our heroine's desire to be a decent protective mother and the inevitable ways her newly chosen profession puts her in contact with a variety of dubious sorts. In the first episode at least, the fishiest figures turn out to be the ones living on Respectable Street. The black family on the other side of the tracks (led by Heylia James – note the variation on Perkins' character's first name – played by the comically matriarchal Tonye Patano) who supply Nancy with her weed comes across as much more mutually supportive and friendly. If the show's half-hour premiere packs perhaps more plot detail and characters than can comfortably fit into the confines of a 31-minute episode, the actors are appealing enough to keep you watching. Unlike the dead-end "edgy" sitcoms that premiered last week on fx, Starved and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, you can actually see yourself willingly spending more time with these folks. Weeds has its share of good tasteless jokes (there's a bit in the premiere featuring a tennis racket that matches anything the fx-ers could've manufactrued), but it never loses sight of its characters' humanity. Listening to Nancy half-mockingly/half nervously call herself a "punk-ass bitch" in Heylia's kitchen or watching Perkins as she tries to persuade Nancy to put a large stuffed animal/camera in son Silas' bedroom, you want to see what these entertainingly flawed women'll do next. As for the series' "controversial" pot-line (which Showtime, naturally, is emphasizing in the interests of maximizing publicity – and perhaps garnering some printable rants by the predictable knee-jerks), I can't see anyone who watches cable series regularly getting floored by the material (we Sopranos and Six Feet Under fans have seen series regulars engage in far riskier behaviors). Comedy has its roots in transgressive behaviors, after all. (Lest we forget, W.C. Fields was filming comedies that referred to drink while Prohibition was still in effect.) The big question isn't whether the series should be tackling this topic, but if it's funny tacking the topic. Judging from its debut, I'd say that Weeds has the potential to be very funny indeed. . . # | Wednesday, August 10 ( 8/10/2005 11:33:00 AM ) Bill "SMOKE, SMOKE, SMOKE THAT CIGARETTE!" – Lots of discussion in the blogosphere this week about smoking and the dangers thereof: with writers like Mark Evanier quoting or pointing readers to Keith Olbermann’s well-wrought piece on the death of Peter Jennings – and others like Steve Gerber telling non-smokers to shut the hell up, we smokers'll quit when and if we wanna quit. Outside of a short experimental phase in college that lasted about as long as it took me to realize that cigarettes would seriously cut into my book and music buying money (one of the few sensible economic decisions I’ve ever made in my life), I've not been a consumer of tobacco smoke. Good thing, too, since I've realized as I get older that I really don't respond well to it. Put me in a room packed with smokers for any extended length of time and my throat gets sore – and I develop a splitting headache. Tobacco industry apologists may assert with all the vigor they can muster that the dangers of second-hand smoke are overestimated. All I know is second-hand smoke makes me feel like shit. Back in the early 80's, I used to be part of a group of music geeks who rode up to Schaumberg in a record store van to see groups perform in a smoky club called B'Ginnings. The trip up took two hours, and we'd be loaded in the back the whole time with smokes and twelve-packs. For the longest time, I thought the reason I was waking up, feeling like crap was the brew. But when I stopped drinking, I found I was feeling just as bad only much sooner. Turned out the Miller Lite had been numbing me to the effects of being shut in a poorly ventilated metal box with a bunch of nicotine fiends. Still, if folks keep their habit away form my general proximity, I'm personally not gonna give 'em a lot of grief, even if I'm tempted to. My mother-in-law lived upstairs with us for close to two years: a hard-core smoker who needed to be on oxygen 24/7, she continued to smoke her generic cigarettes until the day she went into the hospital for the last time. Years of replacing oxygen with tobacco smoke had given her paper-thin flesh a grayish tinge. The first sign we had she was waking up in the morning was the sound of upstairs hacking. We didn't want her smoking in the house, but, considering her age, didn't feel like we could totally prohibit her habit either. As a weak-assed compromise, we set up a place on our screened-in back porch where she could smoke: some days, the lure of cigarettes was the only thing that would get her downstairs. It drove her daughter Becky crazy: this elderly woman with a nasal canulla draped around her neck – who suffered from regular bouts of emphysema and who had to take shots from a Nebulizer several times a day just to kick-start her lungs – hobbling downstairs for another dose of the poison which had such a heavy hand in her ill health. It's one thing to state that everybody has a right to do what they want with their bodies. It's another to live with someone you love, who displays the too-harsh results of doing what they want. Listening daily to the disheartening rattle of someone who can barely catch a breath, you can't help wishing you'd been around to shake some sense into 'em forty years earlier. . . # | Tuesday, August 9 ( 8/09/2005 09:00:00 AM ) Bill "YOU'RE NOTHING BUT A PACK OF CARDS!" – Haven't mentioned it for a while, but longtime visitors to this web log may remember that I'm member of a monthly Unitarian men's poker group: six to eight geezerly UU's playing a friendly game at each other's houses. I'm one of the younger members of the gang – over time, we’ve lost two players to the ravages of time and age – and it's probably the most guy-like thing that I consistently do. The game rotates through several members' homes, and last night was my turn to host. Not a lot of drinkers in our group, so hosting basically involves making decaf coffee and providing snacks and pop (club soda, mainly). We have a fold-out poker tabletop that we got at Big Lots for, like, $29.95. With the growing popularity of Texas Hold 'Em, you can get all sorts of poker accoutrements these days, but we stopped at the tabletop. Basically, each player buys a ten-buck stake of chips (part of the preparation process involves setting up eight piles of chips): dimes and quarter chips with a three-raise limit. This makes it an easy game to play without working a hardship on yourself. There've been a few games when I had to buy a couple of more dollars worth of chips to keep going, but the most I've ever lost was about $13.00. Last night, I came into the game with $10.00 and left with $10.05. Big winnings. Wife Becky sez she likes the fact that I play in this monthly game. As someone who ranks high on the Introvert scale in the Meyers-Briggs Personality Inventory, I'm not a big one for group stuff. Outside of commenting on the game itself, we don't do a lot of additional talking – a little bit of town 'n' church talk, a mild amount of Bush bashing – so it probably suits my temperament. In any event, I've been part of the poker group for more than five years now and, barring any unforeseen changes in my life or the group, hope to be part of the same bunch of guys five years from now and beyond. . . # | Monday, August 8 ( 8/08/2005 02:20:00 PM ) Bill WHO DOESN'T LOVE A GOOD SALE? – If I had more scratch, I know I'd be headin' over to Comic Book Galaxy's midsummer comic book sale: some choice titles (a shrinkwrapped copy of James Kolchalka's most recent CD release is what first caught my eye) to be had there. . . # | ( 8/08/2005 02:11:00 PM ) Bill BUT WILL WE GET AN OPENING DEATH NEXT WEEK? – Okay, so Six Feet Under violated its own once-rigid structural rules by not opening this week's ep with a thematically resonant fatality: let's accept that the previous week's hour-long death scene made such a moment redundant, particularly when it's established that Fisher & Diaz Funeral Home is distinctly not performing any other funerals in the wake of its second Nathaniel Fisher demise. As for the episode itself, while missing much of the mordant humor that characterizes so many of my favorite entries (Claire's flashback featuring a stoned Nate mourning the death of Kurt Cobain was a nice touch, though), it did a particularly masterful job delineating the emotional bondings and pitfalls that so often accompany a death in the family. The pissed-off outbursts and hurt feelings arising from nothing at all, the surprising moments when the person you least expect provides an ounce of strength and support, the not-so-surprising moments when the person you expect to hold it together doesn't: all of it was beautifully acted and written. It makes sense that Nate, the character who from the beginning had the most issues with the hermetic artificiality of modern funeral services, would have one that stripped away as much distancing ritual as possible. (Though even there, betrayed widow Brenda winds up sniping at Nate's ghost about his choice for a reading.) Though its concluding season has been spottier than its peak run (which I'd definitively argue is the series' second season - or mebbe its third), as we head for the series' final two shows, I know I'm already starting to miss every member of this intensely fucked-up & frustrating extended middle American family. . . # | Sunday, August 7 ( 8/07/2005 12:01:00 PM ) Bill PHOTOBUCKETING – Just a test pic of dawgs Ziggy Stardust and Cedar as this blogger gives the former a brushing.  # | ( 8/07/2005 08:48:00 AM ) Bill BETTER HIM THAN ME – Wilson Barbers actually sits through the first "full-figured reality beauty pageant": Mo'Nique's Fat Chance # | Friday, August 5 ( 8/05/2005 02:29:00 PM ) Bill PISS, VOMIT & OTHER CHUNKS OF COMEDY GOLD – Turned out to be Bad Taste Night over at Gadabout Central last night: watched the extended version of Bad Santa on Starz On-Demand, plus the two debut eps of fx's new "edgy" sitcoms, Starved and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. In the end, it's the boozy Santa who won the night – and by a wide margin. I'm not entirely sure why this is, though one of my theories revolves around the idea that bad taste and ironic sitcom self-mockery too frequently cancel each other out. Bad [or Badder, as the DVD release had it] Santa doesn't traffic in any Seinfeld-ian self-awareness: it's a loud and abrasive one-joke movie that repeats itself way too many times (its title hero is shown pissing himself twice in his Santa suit) and made me laff much more often than I expected it to. It's not just that Billy Bob Thornton is a stitch as the reprobate alky safe-cracker who makes his living dressing as Santa one month a year so he can rob the shopping malls that hire him (though he is); it's the John Waters-ian gusto with which director Terry Zwigoff (a long way from Crumb or Ghost World, but very close to R. Crumb's lumpen prole drunkard Bo Bo Bolinski) attacks the material. In contrast, the makers of both Starved and Philadelphia seem too concerned with establishing their coolness cred than actually telling jokes. While both series revolve around a quartet of egocentric urbanites, it's Eric Schaeffer's Starved that has the more original premise (Philly is essentially a younger Friends blended with Cheers). His foursome first meets via an eating disorders group called Belt Tighteners and maintains coffee shop contact with each other outside the group. As someone who has more than a passing familiarity with addiction groups, I can attest to the fact that there's plenty of mordant comedy to be found in the rationalizations and neurotic behaviors of self-loathing addicts. But Schaeffer blows it in the outset by making his self-help group so cartoonish it keeps the comic focus away from its members' actions. His Belt Tighteners, we're told at the outset, is unlike your typical twelve-step program in that it primarily works through humiliation and shame (whenever a member confesses going off the wagon, the rest of the group chants, "It's Not Okay!”) So when bulimic cop Adam (Sterling K. Brown) harasses a Chinese restaurant deliveryman so he can confiscate a bag of his goods and afterwards proceeds to upchuck his meal on a sleeping homeless person, the pay-off scene where he's threatened with expulsion from the group has no comic impact. We already know that what Adam did is "Not Okay;" we watched him do it, after all. What we need to see is Adam squirming as he confesses his appalling deed in public – or a response from the group that's more comically dissonant than the one we've already been primed to expect. Schaeffer (who wrote and directed the opening episode, along with starring as the snobbish anorectic commodities broker Sam) occasionally comes up with a bright joke at the expense of his characters. A running joke in the first ep about Sam's obsession with the actress in a teevee ad for "Godiva Chocolate Muffins" makes some obvious but funny points about the commodification of food and sex in our culture – while a discussion between the foursome about whether a 5'9", 140-pound girl is "fat" is brightly piggish. "There's no way of knowing 'til you see 'em in pants," Adam definitively declares, and the joke is in the sureness with which he makes that pronouncement. The problem is, after a half hour with this group (Laura Benanti's bisexual singer and Del Pentecost's overeating fat writer, included), I wasn't sufficiently concerned about any of their travails to either cringe at or relish their inevitable humiliations. Though they'd been driven to a self-help group, we're not sure why since none of 'em appear to be seriously distressed by their behaviors. Unlike Billy Bob's piss-stained Kringle, I never once saw the humanity in this pathetic quartet of narcissistic urbanites (or in Philadelphia's clump of even more vacuous twenty-somethings). Which ultimately made both shows' sitcomishly "offensive" moments much less funny – or shocking – than they should've been. # | Thursday, August 4 ( 8/04/2005 01:05:00 PM ) Bill  "AND I FEEL LIKE A BEETLE ON ITS BACK!" – It sez something about the pop music dialectic – at least as it's applied in the U.S. of A. – that it took so long for Gang of Four's Entertainment (Warner Bros./Rhino) to appear on compact disc. For the longest time, the only CDs featuring this Brit band were a one-disc WB retrospective – and a two-disc Rhino anthology. Both featured tracks from the band's debut release, of course, but in both cases, the package was sweetened by the inclusion of later, more openly danceriffic cuts (e.g., "I Love A Man in A Uniform.") It took the success of GoF-influenced popsters like Franz Ferdinand, I suspect, to pave the way for the re-release of this indispensable early 80's artyfact.The Gang, originally a quartet, rose from the same British DiY scene, which also produced another great confluence of leftist quasi-musicians, the Mekons. The two groups shared the same indy label for their first singles (Fast Records, which also had the Human League in an artier incarnation) and angry political bent. GoF even name-check the Mekons in their debut album’s liner notes. But where the latter tempered their political righteousness with literary humor and a love of rock & country dynamics (even a punky classic like "Never Been in A Riot" is at heart a big nosethumb at the Clash), the Gang of Four were more unrelenting – and never more than on this premiere album. A few bars into opening track, "Ether," with Dave Allen's throbbing bass, Andy Gill's chaotic sputtering guitars and hectoring overlapping chant vocals by Gill and Jon King, and you either turned off on the band's impassioned herky-jerky post-punk sound and overly analytical lyrics – or just started spasmodically dancing. Many of the best GoF songs took the minimalist strictures of dub & punk music and selectively enforced them in the most confounding ways possible: in more than one track, guitarist Gill deliberately backs away from doing a guitar solo, sometimes trailing off to let the bass and drums do the work, sometimes simply relying on dissonant feedback ("I Found That Essence Rare," "Anthrax") Gang of Four weren't the only band to create such rock noise in the late seventies/early eighties (Richard Hell & the Voidoids immediately come to mind); they were just the best, in large part due to their wondrous rhythm section. For me, the track that let me know I'd forever love this album was its fourth, "Damaged Goods," an anti-love, anti-capitalism song with one of the meanest, most insistent choruses in art-pop history ("Your kiss so sweet, your sweat so sour/Sometimes I'm thinking that I love you, but I know it's only lust!") and a startlingly searing guitar line. Back in 1980, when the majority of Americans still wasn't sure about embracing the cartoon punkery of the Ramones (and isn't it a moment right out of Entertainment to realize that "Blitzkrieg Bop" is currently being used for a Diet Pepsi commercial?), the idea of dancing to a bunch of confrontational Marxists who could insert the phrase "bourgeois state" into a song with a straight face was a pretty difficult one for many rock fans. As a result, Gang of Four never came close to matching the same level of popular success that a political band like the Clash achieved, in part because they were more willfully academic. But if their lyrical approach limited their audience, it also meant that the band would never write a song as trivial as the Clash's most patent anti-consumerist tract, "Coca Cola," either. And, besides, there's always that set of great dance beats. Gotta admit, though, that as happy as I am to finally have a copy of this album on disc (Rhino's repackaging also includes the group's follow-up EP, Yellow, which contains the atypically straightforward early (1978) Fast single, "Armalite Rifle"), I'm thinking that I won't pull it out as frequently as I do my favorite Mekons discs: at times, listening to the boys is like getting into a conversation with one of those irritating co-workers who is so concerned with being right that they don't bother filtering whether what they're telling you is obvious or profound. Sometimes you're in the mood for it; sometimes you're not. Too, for all their acknowledgement of the plight of the average men and women (e.g. "It's Her Factory"), the Gang just ain't as humane as Jon Lanford and his crew of boozy socialists. I will note, however, that recently watching G.W. Bush on the teevee introducing "screw-you" U.N. ambassador appointee John Bolton to the American people couldn't help putting me in the mood to hear the band's written-history-is-bunk tune/tract "Not Great Men." Not sure I like the idea that this 25-year-old musical yowl still has so much current relevance, though. . . # | | |
