Pop Culture Gadabout

Pop Culture Gadabout

( 5/18/2008 09:25:00 AM ) Bill S.

WEEKEND PET PIC: Too bad you can't hear the "let me out, Dad!" whine coming out of Ziggy Stardust's mouth as he jealously watches Bill & Becky standing outside the house, taking pictures of the landscape. It's truly a piteous sound.

THE USUAL NOTE: For more cool pics of companion animals, please check out Modulator's "Friday Ark."

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( 5/17/2008 01:24:00 PM ) Bill S.

IN WHICH A MOCK EDWARDIAN NARRATIVE STYLE IS DEPLOYED: As in insouciantly entertaining as his twice weekly Internet comics may be, there's something extra satisfying about reading (or re-reading) David Malki's "Wondermark" strips on good ol' pulpy paper. Perhaps the visually anachronistic nature of his cartoonwork - a collage of repurposed 19th century illustrations - makes it best suited for bound paper. The new collection of Malki stripwork, Beards of Our Forefathers (Dark Horse Press) is certainly well-served by its hardbound packaging.

Malki's biggest jape - using Edwardian imagery in the service of absurdist 21st century tomfoolery - is nothing new, of course. Terry Gilliam was doing something very like it, after all, for Marty Feldman and Monty Python back in the 1960's. (There's even a Pythonesque "apology" joke imbedded within the collection.) But when the initial connection between image and dialog could've only come from some strange synaptic leaps in the cartoonist's brain - a strip featuring three young maidens in "poetic" dance poses is service of a fraudulent hangover cure, for instance ("I'm going to hurl all over your shoes in about three seconds," one promises) - the results can still be potently risible.

To be sure, the demands of regular stripwork mean that the cartoonist will occasionally stoop to the obvious - as when a quartet of turbaned types from some doubtlessly rousing adventure yarn are put to the service of silly terrorist jokes. But, in general, Malki displays a ripe sense of grim whimsy. I'm still "patronizingly chuckling" (to use a term from the cartoonist's afterword) over his cat with a blog strip. ("It's not even wordpress or blogger, it's some crap like xanga," the cartoonist notes in his final punchline.) In many of the darker strips, Malki contrasts his found art's sentimental imagery with a mordant sense of comic despair, as when a young boy describes his depressing plans for adulthood ("First I'll flunk out of college, then I'll marry too young," he begins) to the title "In Which Marvin Is All Set." Occasionally, Malki just indulges in just plain goofiness: perching a tiny triceratops on the barrel of a soldier's rifle, for instance.

In addition to his strips, Malki includes text giving the faux background story behind several colorized entries, a variety of silly features (like an "Ironic Facial Hair Citation" you can hand out to hirsute acquaintances - if you don't mind cutting up the book, that is), plus an original eight-page comic of murder and deceit entitled, aptly enough, "Treachery!" Beards also includes some "Abandoned Efforts" and four guest strips, all of which illustrate just how difficult this whole repurposing business can truly be.

If I have any plaints about the current packaging, they rest in the layout of Malki's strips, which typically rest two to a page. The jokes in "Wondermark" follow a set format: humorous title (e.g., "In Which Cancer Is Faked"), one-tiered strip plus a capper one-liner beneath the strip. But as Malki has arranged his book, the lower level strips' titles (which typically would appear at the top of your browser in a web comic) are placed off to the side under the comic - disrupting the flow.

But that's a niggling gripe, and a small price to pay for the privilege of being able to shelve Beards of Our Forefathers between a hardbound copy of V for Vendetta and your "DC Archives" of Wonder Woman, right?

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( 5/16/2008 07:17:00 AM ) Bill S.

WILL ELDER: I was two or three years too young to have experienced EC comics when they first came out, though I still remember reading a battered copy of one of the crime comics (the one where a mousy librarian is freak out about a serial killer) owned by a boyhood friend's older brother. But thanks to Ballantine Books' early paperback reprints of the 10-cent MAD comics (The MAD Reader, MAD Strikes Back, etc.), I quickly fell for the work of Will Elder, the hardest drawing gagman in the comics biz. To read an Elder MAD comic was to get sucked into a cyclone of sight gags, of extraneous eyeball kicks that may have occasionally come close to derailing scripter Harvey Kurtzman's sharply satiric takedowns of pop culture ("Starchie," "Ping Pong," "Dragged Net," etc.) but kept you coming back to see what other little jokes you missed the first – or fiftieth – time through. The comic's other regulars may've been slicker (Wally Wood was definitely sexier, Jack Davis was more immediately commercial), but to a pre-teen reader, Elder was MAD comics.

Elder would find later comfortable success, still collaborating with Kurtzman on Playboy's "Little Annie Fanny" comics, and while I can't begrudge either man's making a good living after several commercially unsuccessful attempts at bringing the MAD comics formula into a more grown-up mag edition (Trump, Humbug, Help!), the fact remains that "Fanny" was just not as kicky those funky ol' MADs. A few years back, I had the pleasure of reviewing The Mad Playboy of Art, a biographical tribute to Elder featuring a hefty selection of rarely seen Elder work from the period between MAD and Playboy, and it couldn't help but make you wish that Willie and Harve had never gotten lured into the Playboy Mansion. Still, Elder's style, even toned down to meet the demands of Playboy's pricey color reproductions, remained purest funnybook.

R.I.P. Villie Elder.

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( 5/14/2008 07:17:00 AM ) Bill S.

STIMULATED: Got our economic stimulus money direct-deposited yesterday: for the record, it's all going toward paying off a piece of the money we owe for getting that carpeting installed in the old house . . .

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( 5/14/2008 06:15:00 AM ) Bill S.

"SHE MADE YOU SOME KIND OF LAUGHINGSTOCK BECAUSE YOU DANCE TO DISCO AND YOU DON'T LIKE ROCK." For this week's mid-week music vid, let's return to the opening track for what's arguably the Pet Shop Boys' greatest album (Very, a.k.a. The Manhole Cover Album), "Can You Forgive Her?"

(It was either this 'un or their great cover of the Village People's "Go West," but the only version I could find looked too fuzzy.)

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( 5/13/2008 10:13:00 PM ) Bill S.

"LET'S START THIS GAME OFF WITH 'ABANG!'" A Scrabble query from tonight's episode of N.C.I.S.: are we supposed to accept that geeky writer and Scrabble player McGee doesn't know "QI" is an acceptable word (one of the big three "Q" words that don't have a "U," the other two being "QAT" and "QAID")? And didn't that square Ziva placed her "Q" on look too light blue-ish to be a Triple Letter Score? If it's a Double, than using the letter two ways'll only give the woman 42 points, not - as our Mossad agent asserts - 62.

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( 5/12/2008 06:06:00 PM ) Bill S.

"AND THIS BIRD YOU CANNOT TAME." Ages after I caught the first film House of 1,000 Corpses, I picked up a copy of its sequel, The Devil's Rejects, from the $7.50 DVD shelves at Wal-Mart. I'd been told by more than one modern horror buff that the movie was a quantum improvement over the first film, and I wanted to see what a "good" Rob Zombie horror flick was like.

Perhaps it was the circs in which I wound up watching the thing (two-thirds in, the DVD seized up, and I couldn't get to the movie's big showdown with vengeful Texas sheriff William Forsythe until after I went out and bought some DVD repair goop), but I never got caught up in the writer/director's horror vision. Rejects, which basically focuses on the first flick's family of demented serial killers as they run from the law, is a more solid movie-as-movie - the distracting visual trickery is kept to a minimum - but I may have actually preferred House for its throw-everything-into-the-visual-stew approach.

It's also possible that I've become jaded in ways that keep me from appreciating the movie's horrific impact. Though the DVD box promises "one of the most depraved and terrifying showdowns in cinematic history," I found myself going eh! during the flick's protracted torture climax. I appreciated the way that Zombie momentarily messed with our sympathies during the sequence where Sheri Moon Zombie's Baby gets chased through the woods by an axe-wielding Sheriff Wydell - goes to show that as long as you show a pretty gal in serious peril, it doesn't even matter if she's a murderous psycho bitch: we're conditioned to root for her. But Rejects' big Bonnie & Clyde/Butch & Sundance finish left me cold - and not just because I'm bored with Skynyrd's "Free Bird."

There are some decent moments in the flick: both unsettling (the centerpiece hostage sequence wherein our movie's psychotic trio terrorize a country-and-western band) and comic (a sequence with a self-satisfied movie expert who points out that all pseudonyms used by the movie's killers are from Marx Brothers movies, a blithely foul-mouthed scene at a chicken ranch). But in the end, the movie proved a little too straightforward for me. I missed the "what the hell" moments of the original (the Dr. Satan subplot, for instance) and I didn't get near enough of Sid Haig's demented clown shtick to suit me. I know I'm in the minority on this 'un, but it still felt like Zombie the director held himself back just a trace too much on this 'un.

I know, I know: never satisfied . . .

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( 5/11/2008 08:18:00 AM ) Bill S.

"WE'RE ALWAYS GLAD TO HAVE KIN STAYIN' IN OUR HOME." "Based on a true story," Shawn Granger's Family Bones (King Tractor Press) recounts one teenage boy's horrendous summer in the American heartland. Dumped with his grandparents by his bickering parents, young would-be punk Sean is quickly shunted off to an aunt and uncle's farm after his grandfather gets hospitalized in a hunting accident. "Staying with your Aunt Faye and Uncle Ray will be like a vacation," our hero's kindly grandma tells him, but this couldn't be further from the truth.

His first day there, Sean's ordered by his mean-ass Uncle Ray to begin clearing rocks out of the fields. When the young boy reflexively mouths back, he suddenly finds himself on the ground, eating dirt. "I don't care if yer a Jew," his uncle declares, "yer gonna pick up these rocks."

Sean's Uncle Ray proves to be a tyrannical wife-beater who also is involved in something shady. Though we're not quite sure what this entails by the end of the first volume of this two-part black-and-white graphic novel series (all Sean knows for certain is it involves "funny business with some cows"), it's clear that Ray is not to be trifled with. After farmhand Robert makes some vague ultimatums demanding the money he's owed, the man disappears. Though battered Aunt Faye says the hand has "moved on," we've already been cued to disbelieve this.

True crime aficionados are already ahead of the rest of us once they've read the last name on the mailbox in chapter two. Sean's relatives are Ray and Faye Copeland, the oldest American serial killers ever to be sentenced to death row. Our young punk protagonist's summer away from home will definitely be more than a simple character-building experience.

All is not entirely Dickensian mistreatment down on the farm, however. Left on his own to plow the fields, our strapping young hero connects up with a rural beauty named Wendy. The awkwardly adolescent romantic interludes with Wendy are perhaps meant to show the flipside of the prairie heartland, but they also prove fraught with their own perils: Sean accidentally hits the girl with a brick that's unearthed by his tractor; a fishing trip concludes with a hook getting caught in the crotch of Sean's jeans; a trip into town turns into the inevitable confrontation with townies. If Sean's brutish relative doesn't do him in, his city boy ways could.

Originally serialized in comic book form, the material in Volume One essentially covers five issues worth of prolonged build-up. The digest sized paperback includes the covers to each ish, though at least one of these - issue four's image of a nekkid Sean and Wendy being frighteningly confronted by his weapon wielding relatives - doesn't reflect anything that happens in the first volume at least. (Perhaps in the concluding Volume Two?) As with Granger's other recently published GN collection, Innocent, the art chores are parceled out to different artists on a chapter by chapter basis (though Pablo Augusti Lordi is given both chapters four and five), with one of the players from Innocent, Manny Abeleda, showing up to illustrate chapter three. Seeing the number of diverse hands on the art front, I initially wondered if it would prove disruptive for this more sustained storyline, but that didn't prove to be the case. All four of the book's main artists do an efficient job capturing Bones' hardscrabble rural world, even if Sean's girl Wendy looks too pristine to be true.

At times, Granger's preparations for the concluding second volume seem a little too protracted - Sean and Wendy's fishing expedition takes up sixteen pages of story - though I suspect the story is better served by its paperback packaging than it was as a monthly comic. This is the kind of work where you quickly know that something's terribly wrong, though the full nature of that wrongness is more deliberately doled out in bits and pieces. If Volume Two is where it all hits the fan, Granger and his collaborators have done enough to get this reader happily anticipating the moment Sean learns the awful truth about Aunt Faye and Uncle Ray.

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( 5/08/2008 10:09:00 PM ) Bill S.

DIVA DOWN: So we're watching tonight's episode of C.S.I., the one crafted by the creators of Two and A Half Men, and about halfway in, we can't help thinking that the details surrounding sitcom harridan Annabelle Bundt's (Katey Saal) on-set activities sure sound awfully familiar. So we look up the script's co-writer Chuck Lorre on IMDB and see that he had extensive experience writing for Roseanne, Grace Under Fire and Cybil. Get the feeling that the guy's been waiting years do to this script?

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( 5/07/2008 03:16:00 PM ) Bill S.

IN THE WORDS OF TEMPERENCE BRENNAN, "I DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS!" Noted today as I was talking to two pre-teens about the new "Grand Theft Auto" game: "It's the first one where you get to be a Mexican!"

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( 5/07/2008 08:51:00 AM ) Bill S.

SO THAT MAKES TWO FREE COMIC BOOK DAY BOOKS! Yesterday, I received an envelope in the mail that had been forwarded from our old Central Illinois address. It turned out to be a small packet of three review comics from a new comics line entitled ~~Rebel~~ Radical Comics: two titles and a FCBD sampler. The forwarding delay kept me from reviewing the latter on Free Comic Book Day weekend, but it also got me wondering if there were any other possible review books that've gotten mired in the move. When I was receiving DC review materials, for instance, they never managed to get my street address, just the fact that I lived in Normal, Illinois - the shipping company (DHL, if memory serves) simply got accustomed to delivering Bill Sherman packages to my address. I sent more than one email to the address attached to the books' press releases, but it was to no avail. Goes without saying that I haven't seen a DC review book in the six months since I've moved to Arizona.

So, hey, all you comic p.r. folk lookin' for a good bloggish review, if you wanna assure yourselves that your material will be sent to the right address, please email yours truly at popculturegadaboutATyahoo.com. I'll send you my current address, so the books you send won't be all battered and torn in the grueling process of post office forwarding. (You don't wanna know what my last few contributor's copies of The Comics Journal have looked like.) And DC, if you're still shipping books to that dead Normal address - STOP IT!

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( 5/07/2008 07:17:00 AM ) Bill S.

MID-WEEK MUSIC VID: Here's an evocative video for the title song from the New Pornographers' Challengers. To the best of my knowledge this song hasn't yet shown up on the soundtrack for a get-yer-degree-online commercial.

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( 5/06/2008 04:32:00 PM ) Bill S.

"THE AFTERNOON WAS DYING; THERE WAS PURPLE AT ITS FEET." When it comes to the Go-Betweens, it has never been precisely clear where the band's two singer/songwriters, Robert Forster & Grant McLennan, began and ended. As with many great bands, a big key to the Brisbane art poppers' success was in the way the 'Tweens' two major creative forces jostled against each other. So when McLennan passed away from an unexpected heart attack in 2006, fans of the band who had already experienced what it was like when the group temporarily disbanded in the nineties understandably mourned. Though both artists had produced their share of well-reviewed solo discs in the years before the trio of great albums (Friends of Rachel Worth; Bright Yellow, Bright Orange; and Oceans Apart) released by the revitalized revamped Go-Betweens, as a rock band, they remained something special: pop heroes in some alternate universe where the VU's Loaded went platinum the first year of its release.

Two years after McLennan's death (has it been three years since Oceans Apart already?), his surviving band partner has picked up the pieces, bringing bassist Adele Pickvance and drummer Glenn Thompson from the group's final configuration with him. Forster's first post-post-Go-Betweens album, The Evangelist (Yep Roc), is exactly what you'd expect it to be: a mourning eulogy for McLennan ("There was melody, there was harmony, there was sweet Sherrie, but it was melody he loved most of all.") and a continuation of the tuneful blend of journaling and storytelling that Forster has developed over the years. Yes, it's not the Go-Betweens, but for lovers of Forster's moaningly articulate expressiveness, it's still pretty darn fine.

Three of the disc's ten tracks turn out to be posthumous songwriting collaborations with McLennan, and none-too-surprisingly, they're among the most instantly accessible cuts on Evangelist. Though in practice the dichotomy didn't always hold, McLennan's voice was frequently the more overtly poppy of the duo, where Forster was the band's moody boho. You can really hear the ghost of Grant in the jaunty mandolin-driven "Let Your Light In, Babe," and even more hauntingly in Forster's Kinks-y tribute to his former bandmate, "It Ain't Easy." The third McLennan-touched track, "Demon Days" even hearkens back to the chamber folk sound (courtesy cellist Audrey Riley) of pre-breakup Go-Betweens discs like Tallulah and 16 Lover's Lane.

Which is not to slight any of Forster's solo creations since they also have their highpoints. Among these: the rockin' story song "Pandanus," with its unironic lyrical callback to Scott McKenzie's "San Francisco;" "Don't Touch Anything," which sounds like something Rolling Thunder Dylan might've concocted and the sparely melancholy album opener "If It Rains." That last track admittedly had me nervous the first time I started playing this disc. Compared to an immediate attention grabber like Oceans Apart's rousing "Here Comes A City," the low-key "Rains" is almost too modest for its own good. But once Forster and his partners started picking up the pace, I was able to skip back and appreciate the opener's Sweet Jane-y charms.

Forster's bandmates are also happily given room to make themselves felt. In "Did She Overtake You," for instance, bassist/background vocalist Pickvance provides the grounding for Forster's story of a doomed uneven relationship, while "Let Your Light In, Babe" shows Thompson drumming with the single-minded enthusiasm of a full-blown power-popper. (In the latter track, fiddler Gill Morley makes the Grant tribute even sprightlier.) The Go-Betweens may be gone for good, but it's clear that Forster and his cohorts still have some moody pop music in 'em.

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( 5/05/2008 07:05:00 AM ) Bill S.

SNIDEY BUTT: Caught last week's episode of Boston Legal over the weekend, and while I thought they overdid the "moving to Wednesday" jokes in the beginning (did 'em the week before – why do 'em again?), I dug the plotline where Candace Bergen's Shirley attempted to sue the DNC for its dubious practice of letting delegates vote against a candidate their state primary selected as top choice. Alan Shore's big concluding speech was not just in character, for me it was one of those head-nodding moments we just don't get as consistently from the show anymore. (Very funny parody of Wolf Blitzer in this ep, too.) Still, watching the episode's comically callow Massachusetts delegate Mitchy, I can't help thinking back to 1968 and realizing that the then twelve-year-old Kelley was probably a bit too young to have experienced the righteous pleasure of Keeping Clean with Gene. But I remember . . .

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( 5/04/2008 02:22:00 PM ) Bill S.

WEEKEND PET PIC: The men don't know, but the little girls understand. Here's Kyan Pup, waiting to be let in through the back door.

THE USUAL NOTE: For more cool pics of companion animals, please check out Modulator's "Friday Ark."

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( 5/04/2008 09:30:00 AM ) Bill S.

"YOU MESMERISED THE MESMERISER!" Because I currently live some two hours from the nearest comic book store in Tucson, this year's Free Comic Book Day proved a pretty spare occasion for me. The only title I was privy to was a sampler sent by Tom Pomplun, editor and publisher of the Graphic Classics series. A 64-page set of black-and-white graphic adaptations, the floppy contains works by Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Conan Doyle and Mary Shelley. Like the larger trade paperback collections that the sampler serves to promote, the collection works to demonstrate just how difficult a good comic adaptation of "classic" literature can be. Too tight an allegiance to the original written work, and you don't have comics, but an illustrated Reader's Digest abridgement, yet wander too far from the material and you run the risk of losing the writer's voice.

The five works included in the FCBD set display the varying success even good solid professional writers and artists can achieve in this arena. The sampler opens with a cover story adaptation of Poe's "The Black Cat" written by Rod Lott and illustrated by Gerry Alanguilan. Told in first person by its murderer/madman, it's a tempting story to overwrite, but Lott proves sparing with his narration, letting his artist carry the big shock scenes. (There's a half page panel of our wild-eyed protagonist strangling his wife that looks like it could have come off the cover of EC's Shock Supenstories.) The results effectively capture Poe's words and story without being overly beholden to the former.

On the other side, however, rests Antonella Caputo and Anne Timmons' adaptation of Mary Shelley's romance "The Dream," which is so stuffed with the original work's florid narration that it overwhelms the comic. Timmons' art sweetly captures the air of 19th century romance (in more than one panel it reminds me of a more detailed Trina Robbins), but Caputo's unrestrained reliance on boxed narration ultimately proves too much.

Alex Burrows and Simon Ganes' adaptation of Conan Doyle's "John Barrington Cowles" rests somewhere in between the Poe and Shelley tales. Though Burrows relies heavily on Doyle's own words, he knows when to let a simple silent panel suffice. I wasn't familiar with Doyle's tale of a literally mesmerizing young woman, but the Graphic Classics made me want to track it down. A big key to this 'un lies in Ganes' stylized art, which at times reminds me of Alex Nino. It neatly captures its sadistic heroine in all her seductively whip-wielding glory, even if the comic's ending comes across curiously flat.

All three of these pieces are about the length of your usual single-story comic book (good value for the money, eh?) To round out the book, Pomplun includes two shorter pieces. Of these, Milton Knight's adaptation of the Lord Dunsany poem, "A Narrow Escape," proves the purest comic. Tossing out most of the poem altogether, Knight retells its comic vignette with pure cartoony vigor. I fell in love with Knight's style back when he was writing and penning a sexy black-and-white funny animal comic for Fantagraphics entitled Hugo, and I'm always cheered to see fresh work by the man. Possessed of a Fleischer-esque visual sensibility, Knight's work is about as far from the strictures of mainstream "Classic Comics" storytelling as you can get, but he still manages to remain true to Dunsany's characteristically sardonic tone. His place at the end of the sampler makes you wish that the rest of the comic book's adapters had just a little more of his audacity. Still, I see from the credits at the end of this sampler that Knight's work appears in eight of the paperback collections themselves, so it's clear publisher Pomplun knows when he's got a good thing.

As a sample of its wears, the Graphic Classics floppy generally does the trick: it provides a fair sense of the line's material and approach - from the occasional stodgy retelling to more free-wheeling fare - and hopefully piques the interests of more than a few lit lovers out there. If you came to Free Comic Book Day looking to see the potential and diversity in the artform, chances are you appreciated this little giveaway. If you came looking to see what Marvel's offered to tie into the new Iron Man flick, you probably didn't even pick this comic off the freebie table in the first place.

All in all, not a bad Free Comic Book Day for yours truly . . .

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( 5/01/2008 10:27:00 PM ) Bill S.

"THIS IS NO TIME TO MOCK THE PARANORMAL, LITTLE PAL!" Creatures of the great black-and-white comic book boom of the 1980's, heroes in a trio of comic adventure videogames, Steve Purcell's Sam & Max: Freelance Police perhaps had their greatest mainstream mass moment in 1997 as a Fox Kids' animated TV series. Though only lasting one season, the series sits with other classic short-lived samples of kid-vid wackiness like The Completely Mental Misadventures of Ed Grimley as a stellar example of great boneheaded programming decisions. A loud and frenetic absurdist funny animal series crammed with jokes aimed miles above the heads of its prime target audience? Why didn't this do as well as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles again?

But Sam & Max's status as best-selling videogame heroes has happily helped both the comics from whence they came (recently reprinted in a spiffy new paperback collection) and their too-soon-snuffed animated teleseries. Those merry pop culture obsessives at Shout Factory (also responsible for the release of the collected SCTV - as well as such lesser lights as The Super Mario Bros. Super Show) have released a three-DVD set collection of the complete animated series. All fourteen shows are featured on the set's first two discs, with an "Exclusive Hyperkinetic Bonus Disc" featuring all the extraneous bonus disc brouhaha (including a Comic-Con set monologue with series creator Steve Purcell). I slept through the cartoon series during its original Fox Kids broadcast - though I was aware of the b-&-w comics - so I'm happy to have the chance to experience this inspired silliness for the first time.

For those unfamiliar with the characters, Sam and Max are a funny animal duo comprised of a trench coat wearing dog who delivers his patently ridiculous dialog with deadpan earnestness ("A world of roach-like leviathans lumbering through a gargantuan city-state!") and a willfully childlike hyperactive "rabbit-thing" with a love of pointless destruction. The twosome works in the vermin-infested big city as "freelance police," answering to the beck and call of an unseen Commissioner whenever big danger threatens the city. Abetting them is a redheaded girl genius named Geek (created for the show as a sop to the kiddies), who mainly serves to provide our heroes with elaborate Q-styled gadgets.

Our heroes' adventures range from basic comic book hero parody (as with a giant-headed intergalactic villain named Lactose the Intolerant) to more out-there fare like an episode where our duo are drafted into acting as marriage counselors for the Olympian gods ("Zeus, you're blocking!") after the Roman deities' marital discord wreaks climactic havoc on Earth. In "It's Dangly Deever Time," the star of an old Howdy Doody styled puppet show crawls out of the teevee from rerun perpetuity, bringing evil versions of a variety of recognizable Golden Age of Television kid show icons with him. Though Purcell and his fellow scripters significantly toned down the violence of the original comics, they definitely worked to maintain the absurdist flair of the Sam & Max universe. "My mandate," Purcell states at one point during his Comic-Con interview, "was keeping the weirdness quotient up to snuff." In this, he arguably succeeded.

The 'toon's writers also managed to sneak in jokes that probably were beyond the ken of the younger Fox Kids audience members. In a prison-set Christmas episode, for instance, we see a "Do Not Open Until Christmas" label covering Max's derriere as he stoops to pick up a conveniently placed bar of soap off the floor. In a sequence set outside the city sewers, Max jubilantly describes all the baby alligators he saw down below. "They're buoyant and log-shaped," Sam states, "but I don't think they're alligators."

As with the comics, the tone in Sam & Max is noisy and ultra-frenetic, yet also oddly sweet at times. Still, this is not a show to watch if you're worried about waking anybody in the house. I view a lot of my review discs on Saturday mornings while my loving spouse is still asleep, so if I have any one criticism of Shout's DVD set, it's with the absence of subtitles or closed captioning. So there I was, sitting in the living room, torn between my desire to hear all the choice lines and my wish to let my wife sleep late on the weekend.

Guess which need ultimately won out?

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( 4/30/2008 06:28:00 AM ) Bill S.

MID-WEEK MUSIC VID: Let's watch the New Zealand pop-rock band, the Chills, push a big fake rock around in their video for "Heavenly Pop Hit":

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( 4/27/2008 07:51:00 AM ) Bill S.

WEEKEND PET PIC: Here's Kyan Pup, the plant crusher, keeping our recently seeded backyard garden from getting anywhere . . .

THE USUAL NOTE: For more cool pics of companion animals, please check out Modulator's "Friday Ark."

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( 4/26/2008 04:33:00 PM ) Bill S.

"I FEEL CRAZY, AND EVERYONE SEZ IT!" Recently, I received two review discs on the same day in the mail: not an unusual event for full-time professional music critics, one suspects, but rare enough for this humble blogger to take note of the fact. The two releases, Everclear's cover collection The Vegas Years and Robert Forster's The Evangelist, were both by artists who I typically enjoy, but I've gotta admit when I saw the former disc, I was torn between two feelings: a mild sense of disappointment that Art Alexakis wasn't singing any of his own tailor-made songs versus my knowledge that it most likely wouldn't take as long for me to get a handle on this Everclear disc as it would the collection of all-original tracks by former Go-Between Forster. Though I suspect the Forster disc will be the one I'll return to over the long haul, Vegas Years proved to be the one I played first.

With covers collections, the central questions are fairly obvious ones. Do the remakes do justice to or expand our understanding of the original tracks? Does the artist's choice of songs tell us something about them? Is the full set a legitimate addition to the artist's discography (as with any of Bryan Ferry's remake/remodels) or just a diverting placeholder (cf. the Ramones' Acid Eaters)? Cover songs are primarily established entities: if you're coming to Vegas Years hearing "This Land Is Your Land" - or even "Our Lips Are Sealed" - for the first time, you probably need to rethink that career as a high-paid pop music critic. To be sure, every decent remake disc has at least one good obscurity (in this disc's case, it's Little Jimmy Dickens' "Night Train to Memphis"), but since one of the themes of a set like this is "These are the songs I useta hear on the radio," the more arcane selections are usually in the minority.

Most of the material on Vegas Years has been previously released on import anthologies or singles B-sides, though the only one familiar to me was the band's remake of "The Boys Are Back in Town," which appeared on the best-of anthology, Ten Years Gone. The collection covers the breadth of Everclear's career, which means that both versions of the band - which underwent major personnel changes after 2003's Slow Motion Daydream - are repped in this collection. The remake of "This Land Is Your Land," for instance, was an early single released by Everclear 2.0.

Singer/guitarist Alexakis remains the constant, of course. As a vocalist, he is no match for a malleable pop-rock singer like Cheap Trick's Robin Zander (repped here by a charging version of "Southern Girls"), while his cover of "Brown Eyed Girl" (heard on this set in a live track instead of Learning How to Smile's studio version) still comes across more fannish than soulful. But his voice is snugly suited to a slab of Pacific garage rock like Paul Revere and the Raiders' "Kicks" (the "Heroin Girl" of its day) or the folkie stylings of Woody Guthrie.

Many of the songs here are reworked to fit the basic Everclear template: plenty of grungy guitarwork, the occasional well-placed acoustic string instrument (cf. the mandolin appearance on "This Land"), lots of insistent hard-rock drumming. The most striking reinvention is perhaps a remake of Yaz's "Bad Connection," an underrated cut from the British synth band's first album. In this instance, the band (Version 1.0) is clearly having such a good time pushing Vince Clarke's synthesizer burbles into pop-punk that you share their sense of glee. It's perhaps the one clear case on the album where Art's vocals prove more apt than original deep-throated mama Alison Moyet, who always seemed too earthy for this lightweight li'l pop tune.

So do the boys do ultimately justice to their chosen covers?

In general, yes, though I've never been much enamored with their off-rhythm take on Thin Lizzy, while their version of "Sealed" won't make you forget either the Go-Go's or Fun Boy Three. In a couple of cases, the band's tempo shifts remind us what made the originals sound so good in the first place: a sped-up remake of "Southern Girls" swaps the original's poppy sexiness for simple acceleration, while their slow-down "American Girl" mainly shows what a power-pop classic Tom Petty's version was. Still, the tracks remain amusing, even if I suspect that many of Alexakis' fans - the ones attracted to his psychodramatic originals, the drugs and shattered marriage and absent father songs - will come away disappointed. As a Baby Boomer, I recall originally feeling a similar sense of discontent over John Lennon's Rock 'N' Roll, but over the years I've learned to appreciate that disc's modest charms.

Does Vegas Years' song selection tell us anything about the group? Not much really, though the inclusion of two teevee theme songs ("Land of the Lost" and just-in-time-for-the-movie "Speed Racer") lets us know what Art was watching as a boy on Saturday mornings. Perhaps that's sufficient for this diverting placeholder of an album.

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( 4/24/2008 05:52:00 AM ) Bill S.

"WE'RE HAUNTING OURSELVES!" Recently was given a DVD of Nacho Cerda's The Abandoned - one of eight "After Dark Horrorfest" flicks I've been seeing on the budget racks of Wal-Mart and Target - by an acquaintance who knew I was curious about this festival of low-budget horror films. Purportedly voted "fan favorite" at the 2006 Horrorfest, the flick wasn't all that impressive to my benefactor, who pronounced it "pretty suspenseful but not all that scary." After viewing it for myself this weekend, I'd revise that one-line critique to "nicely moody but still not all that scary."

The movie concerns an unlikeable Russian-born American businesswoman (Anastasia Hille) who returns to the motherland to get some answers about her past. Her journey takes her to a ruined old isolated farmhouse where she meets a man claiming to be her twin brother. Before too long, both sibs are being haunted by blank-eyed zombie doppelgangers of themselves - and the ghost of their inexplicably powerful dead dad.

Small cast, isolated setting: I'm tempted to describe the flick as a blend of the original Carnival of Souls (there's even a car going off a bridge) and the second Evil Dead, only Abandoned isn't half as effective as either of these drive-in classics. Perhaps it'd work better shown late-nite in the middle of a full-blown horror festival, but, running it through the DVD player on a weekend morning, I felt rather distant from the goings-on. The flick has atmosphere to spare - and a great, desiccated haunted house. But I never really doubted that the movie was headed for its downbeat ending, and I also never felt any dread over our hard-edged heroine's inevitable fate.

Still, viewing the promos for the seven other offerings in the "After Dark" series, I find my curiosity piqued about other entries in the series (Takishi Shimizu's Reincarnation, for instance - if only because it looks like it builds on Grudge 2's show biz setting). Each one's going for only $7.50 at Wally World, so you can bet I'll trying out a few more over the next month or so . . .

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( 4/23/2008 07:21:00 AM ) Bill S.

MID-WEEK MUSIC VID: Somehow missed the news when it happened, so I didn't learn that one half of the Go-Betweens' singing/songwriting partnership, Grant McLennan, had passed on until I received a promo email for other half Robert Forster's new solo album, The Evangelist (review to soon follow). Let's look back to one of Grant's greatest songs, from 1988's 16 Lovers Lane, "Streets of Your Town":

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( 4/23/2008 06:39:00 AM ) Bill S.

PROBABLY THAT I'M A BAD AMERICAN . . . What does it say that I recorded but still haven't watched Jon Stewart's Daily Show interview with Barack Obama - but I stayed up last night to catch Jon's one-on-one with John Waters?

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( 4/21/2008 05:17:00 PM ) Bill S.

A GEEZER SNIPING ABOUT CELL PHONES: As someone who generally works with low-income clients who typically live out in the middle of nowhere, who don't have a house phone and who seem to change their cell phone services monthly, I long for the days when a household kept the same phone number forever. I had this thought today (not for the first time) while driving through the Arizona desert and realizing that the number I had for a client in my phone's contact list was not their absolute very newest one . . .

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( 4/20/2008 11:24:00 AM ) Bill S.

"MONSTER OR NOT . . .TIMMONS IS A REPUBLICAN." Back in the mid-seventies, when Jimmy Carter was running against Gerald Ford for the U.S. presidency, director John Frankenheimer was filming Black Sunday, the movie based on Thomas Harris' novel about a terrorist attempt to assassinate the president at the Super Bowl. Because the flick was made during the campaign season and scheduled to be released after the election, Frankenheimer shot separate sequences featuring look-alike versions of each candidate as the standing president. When the movie came out in the first year of the Carter presidency, I remember one critic wondering if the moviemakers had been wishing that former college football hero Ford had won the election. His presence at the Super Bowl would’ve made more story sense.

I've been thinking about that troubled movie production while reading the first three issues of IDW's new horror series Snaked. A robustly grotesque political nightmare, Snaked is set in a near-future America where Hillary Clinton has already been elected president. Reading it, I found myself channeling that long-ago movie critic and wondering if scriptwriter Clifford Meth was praying that Barack Obama just would go away: not for any political reasons, but because an Obama presidency would really ruin his story.

Snaked tells the tale of William "Bill" Timmons, a GSA auditor assigned in 2001 to dig into the finances of the nascent Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. As issue #1 opens, it's September 10th, 2001, (yes, the date is significant) and we're in a psych hospital with a former "special consultant" to the Clintons named Morgenstern. Timmons, we learn, is being held in maximum security at the Pentagon, but the first time we see him, it's a month earlier on Riker's Island. Lying on a bunk with a copy of William F. Buckley's Up from Liberalism in his hand, he's sharing a cell with an obnoxiously loquacious prisoner. When said blabbermouth prisoner makes reference to the reason Timmons is behind bars, he stirs his cellmate's wrath with fatal consequences.

Timmons, it turns out, is a member of a tribe called the Nechashim: snake people who live in hiding from ordinary humanity. Though once worshipped in Egypt and India, they've moved to America where they can get get lost in the crowd, molting every eleven years and occasionally dropping their disguise to snack on a human body part. "Americans are too preoccupied to notice us," Timmons' grandfather tells him at one point during a childhood flashback, "too busy hating their jobs and praying they won't lost them." For reasons that are revealed at the end of the third issue, though, certain members of the government are aware of the Nechashims' existence and plan to use Timmons as the fall guy in a serpentine plot that somehow involves the real reasons behind 9/11 as well as an assassination attempt on President Bush and the ultimate election of Hillary to the White House. "There's no winning with politicians," Timmons' ultra-violent absentee father tells him during their first reunion. "They'll turn on you every time."

Author Meth structures Snaked as a series of flashbacks that force the reader to pay attention, as they reveal the facts behind a nonstop series of personal and political betrayals that push our anti-hero into taking grisly vengeance. Nobody in the story is what he or she first appears to be - and it's a toss-up as to who will ultimately turn out to be the snakiest character in the story. Each of the first three issues contains at least one good act of appalling violence to keep the horror heads reading. (Worked for me!) But with one notable exception, we don't feel bad for any of the victims. All of the adult characters – even one we're told is "dumb as a bag of hammers" - are too duplicitous to engage our sympathies.

British artist Rufus Dayglo has a thick brush style that is clear enough to depict the story's violence without getting too clinical about it. (When you consider that one of these acts involves a prisoner's castration, perhaps we can be grateful the guy didn't go all S. Clay Wilson on us.) His work shares some of the same expressionistic tendencies as Australian artist Ashley Wood (the two have even worked together on a Tank Girl comic), though, in general, I find Dayglo's art more immediately accessible. While he's not averse to sticking a map of the constellations in the sky background or deconstructing several characters' faces into little more than outlines during a foreshadowing dream sequence, such visual antics do not disrupt the flow of Meth's deeply cynical, serpentine horror tale.

Snaked has reportedly been optioned as a movie, with an IDW trade paperback collecting the full five-part story set for July '08. Just in time for the Democratic and Republican conventions, though whether this proves to be propitious scheduling is something only the gods of American politics know for certain. Me, I find Meth & Dayglo's free-wheeling horror comic plenty entertaining even without the "real-life" political trimmings.

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( 4/19/2008 05:13:00 PM ) Bill S.

WEEKEND PET PIC: What's Kyan seeing as he looks out the front window? One of the neighborhood's feral felines? A road runner with a lizard in its beak? Or perhaps just one of our neighbors, walking their dog and/or little one down the dirt lane? Whatever it is, it must be fascinating . . .

THE USUAL NOTE: For more cool pics of companion animals, please check out Modulator's "Friday Ark."

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( 4/18/2008 05:26:00 PM ) Bill S.

IN SENSURROUND! So my old Central Illinois stomping grounds experienced a 5.2 earthquake thanx to the New Madrid fault today. I remember a decent-sized quake hitting the region back when I was in college at Illinois State: I was living on the 8th floor of Wright Hall, and I was wakened by the 5.3 quake. I remember the feeling of the buildings swaying, and in my half-drowsy/half hungover state (this was my first year away from home, after all) thinking that the winds were really shaking the building pretty good. It was only later that I learned that we'd experienced an event that West Coast residents would've probably shrugged off as just another plate rattler.

Reading of today's quake - and thinking about the Midwest winter we missed this year - I'm tempted to write that it looks like we got outta Illinois at the right time. But I know every region has its risks. I'm told, for example, that Safford AZ's hot springs hint at the possibility of volcanic action some day in the future. And there are some who claim that the area's big mountain, Mt. Graham, isn't a mountain at all but a dormant volcano. But perhaps that just apolocalyptic wishful thinking.

In any event, I couldn't help wondering how our old house back in Normal IL did today. Still haven't fully let got of the place, I guess . . .

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( 4/17/2008 06:00:00 AM ) Bill S.

THE APOCALYPTIC JUKEBOX: Watching this week's Criminals Minds ep, it occurred to me: Johnny Cash's "The Man Comes Around" has replaced George Thorogood's "Bad to the Bone" as the go-to soundtrack song for foreshadowing dire doin's ahead. To my eyes-and-ears, the best use of each was in the openings of Dawn of the Dead 2.0 and John Carpenter's Christine, respectively.

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( 4/16/2008 06:56:00 AM ) Bill S.

MID-WEEK MUSIC VID: Hey, let's check out a video of that Cure song, "Love Cats"!

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( 4/16/2008 02:26:00 AM ) Bill S.

"CATCHIN' SOME SUN/WE CAN'T GO WRONG." N.C.I.S. makes its play for a Genesis Award with an entry centered on Pauley Perrette's lab tech Abby Sciuto as she attempts to clear a drug-sniffing dog accused of mauling its handler. We all know that – her predilection for speed metal in the lab aside – our Abs is just a big ol' softie, but I'm not sure I accepted all the animal themed music they had her playing in the episode. Okay, The Cure's "Love Cats" is a cool track and believable for the demi-goth girl besides. But Nellie McKay's "The Dog Song"? Nope, don't buy it, not even ironically . . .

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( 4/15/2008 09:33:00 AM ) Bill S.

"WE'D BE MUCH BETTER OFF WITHOUT THE SINS OF MAN STINKING UP THE AIR!" The title hero to the first volume of Shawn Granger's Innocent (King Tractor Press) is not very prominent on either of the variant covers of his first paperback collection. The first, depicted by Kerem Beyit, features the series' secondary character Charles in portrait center as he battles a giant reptilian demon. It's not bad, but newcomers to the series might understandably come to the mistaken conclusion that this hulking baldie is the title Innocent, rather than his second-in-command. So where's our angel demi-hero, brandishing his terrible swift sword? Down near the bottom right corner.

Innocent's second "special edition" cover, is even more indistinct. This 'un, a Tony DeZuniga penciled piece, placed a generic big-breasted sorceress in center, with our hero hiding behind her, obscured by the title lettering. I'm not automatically averse to this visual tactic - I like big breasts as much as the next straight fanboy - but I can't help wishing that DeZuniga had more clearly illustrated the book's hero. It's not as if this big-boobed sorceress had appeared anywhere inside the book.

The Filipino artist is nowhere to be seen in the book's interior, which features five stories illustrated by a quintet of little-known artists. Too bad, since I would've like to have seen DeZuniga's sturdy brand of professionalism on at least one of these tales of death and retribution. As it is, the inconsistent artwork isn't bad by the standards of indy b-and-w pulp comics, though to my eyes the sturdiest and most easily scannable work is Mannie Abeleda's on "Innocent And the Call Girl."

Four of the Granger-scripted tales originally debuted as web comics, though one (presumably the open-ended final piece, "The Sword") is new to this manga-pb-sized print edition. Each piece centers on Innocent, a one-eyed hit angel who seeks violent retribution on killers who might otherwise have gotten away with murder. He's assisted by the big-boned sociopath Charles, who at times reminds me of the twitchy weirdoes Pruitt Taylor Vince often plays, though his interaction with Innocent has more than a whiff of Ben Affleck & Matt Damon's bantering in Kevin Smith's Dogma. "Do you know if someday I'll do something bad enough to be on your list?" David asks the angel in the first story's opener. "Probably," Innocent replies. Now there's a stern employer.

Though a few of these entries are played relatively straight (e.g., an overly-convoluted tale of murder on the police force), my favorite pieces are the ones that spice the dire deeds with goofy little details. Thus, in "Call Girl," our story's potential hooker victim is hung upside-down by an improbably huge hotel room full of robed "grey men," who grow more powerful by smashing themselves on the crotch with a wooden mallet. (Yowtch!) In "David Goes Home," the twosome visits David's little old lady mother, who assumes that the duo is a gay couple. ("You people are peculiar about your clothes.") As the threesome continues their little dinner get-together, Innocent has to slip out of the house to deal with a murderous female demon living next door. The panel depicting the horned creature's severed head put me in mind of Rei Mikamoto's over-the-top horror manga series, Reiko, the Zombie Shop. Unfortunately, there are no tease-y schoolgirl outfits to be seen in the entire book, though Granger includes a joke about 'em in the hooker story.

Bet it would've made a cool DeZuniga cover . . .

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( 4/15/2008 09:09:00 AM ) Bill S.

SATELLITE DISH OF LOVE: If I've been quieter than usual these past few days, it's mainly because I've been spending too much of my free time learning how to navigate through our new DirectTV equipment. This is our first experience with a satellite dish: in the past, it's been telecable all the way, but the one system that reaches beyond the Safford city limits doesn't offer many of the channels that we prefer (BBC America, Bravo, VS for the Professional Bull Riding*), we dropped the cable package after our introductory six months package lapsed. (Man, we've been down here six months already?) We checked out the two big-name satellite systems and went with DirectTV – and not just because Dish Network has crappy commercials, either (though they do). Kept our cable hook-up for phone and Internet, though, so it's not as if we're abandoning our first service provider altogether.

The guy came and installed the new dish later Saturday afternoon. Subsequently, I spent my day of rest getting to know our new remote (hey, it's color coded!); putting together a Favorites list that skips through religion (no BYU!), sports and Pay-Per-View channels; and trying out the DVR so we could set it up for Wire in the Blood later that night. Caught two eps of Torchwood on Saturday, though it looks like we're gonna have to wait for reruns to get the whole back story on James Marster's guest-starring villain . . .

*A favorite of the wife's.

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( 4/12/2008 11:49:00 AM ) Bill S.

WEEKEND PET PIC: Here's Savannah Cat, trying to coax her lazy-ass older brother Stormy to Play With Me, Peewee, Play With Me! It's a futile gesture.

THE USUAL NOTE: For more cool pics of companion animals, please check out Modulator's "Friday Ark."

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( 4/12/2008 07:12:00 AM ) Bill S.

"ALWAYS RAMBUNCTIOUS!" It speaks to the series' immense popularity that Masashi Kishimoto's Naruto is currently the one manga series available in the children's book section of my local Wal-Mart Superstore. Though the chain megalo-mart has experimented with manga paperbacks in the past (as with a much publicized deal a few years back with Tokyopop), the nine-tailed fox boy is the only one you see these days on most Wal-Mart book racks. The teen-rated books move, too. Watching the shelves at Wally World over the past three months, Viz's recent "Naruto Blitz" has seen some decent buyer action.

Picked up the first volume in the series' new arc recently, Volume 28, "Homecoming," which is set two years after the first series concluded. Our hero Uzumaki Naruto is returning to the village of Konahagakure after extensive training under Lord Jiraiya. Though grown significantly taller, he still retains his foxlike face and boisterous manner, not to mention his love or ramen noodles. Jiraiya has brought our boy back to work with his old Master Kakashi, since the former is going undercover to check up on the latest threat to the Village, a mysterious group called the Akatsuki.

Much of the new volume is devoted to playing catch-up with series' regulars. We learn, for instance, that the once weak-link girlie teammate Sakura has become a formidable ninja healer under the tutelage of the newest Hokage, the impressively breasted Lady Tsunade. Former Naruto rival, Gaara of the Desert, has become a village protector and is the first to fend off an attack by the Akatsuki. Of all the young characters, he is the one to which Naruto feels the closest kinship. Where our hero has a nine-tailed fox demon residing within him, Gaara's body is home to a one-tailed monstrosity. "We're carrying monsters inside our bodies," Naruto notes. "And that's what they want! Our monsters!"

Significantly absent from the new volume, though, is Naruto & Sakura's former teammate Sasuke, who remains in the clutches of the wicked ninja Orochimaru. Sasuke doesn't make an appearance in "Homecoming" - though we get a hand-wringing moment where Naruto & Sakura worry about him - but he still remains a major story presence.

Elsewhere, Kishimoto provides the usual bewildering blend of backroom alliances and double dealings: not as much fun as the bizarre chakra battles that provide the series' big action moments, but I suppose they're necessary. This book out, Gaara battles a nefarious ninja named Deidara who sends out clay creatures as weapons. "True art is revolutionary, incendiary," the gloating villain proclaims just before letting loose an explosive clay bird. The resulting fight scenes are both dynamic and engagingly outlandish: entertaining action comics, in other words, that at times resemble a warped marriage between Steve Ditko and Moebius.

But the heart of the series remains our title protagonist. Though less childishly egocentric than the boy we first saw in the series - his concern for others is more upfront and consistent - he still retains enough of his core impulsivity and competitiveness to keep him an appealingly fallible figure to his readers. As a hero, he is enough of a goof to hold onto his sizable fan base.

Still, as a sign of just how much our young man - and this series - has grown, Mishimoto provides us with a revealing moment in the book's first chapter. Entering the village, Naruto comes upon some a younger would-be ninja who demonstrates his mastery of what used to our hero's sole trick: the creation of a buxom "ninja centerfold" doppelganger. "I'm not a kid anymore," Naruto responds to this display. "You gotta work on other jutsu, too!" Early in the series, Mishimoto would've followed this creation with a comic panel depicting some nearby horny witness ejaculating blood from his nose, but he avoids that gag this time. Mishimoto and his assistants are too busy working on their own storytelling jutsu to fall back on the same ol' jokes.

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( 4/11/2008 07:26:00 AM ) Bill S.

A GAS GAS GAS: Reading pans of Martin Scorcese's current Rolling Stones concert flick (as well as some of the "Baby Boomers Suck" pieces being written as correlatives), I tried to imagine the last time Mick and the Boys truly mattered to me. The answer turns out to be a fairly standard one. I'm not one to worship at the temple of Exiles on Main Street (though I've always admired that album's carnie packaging): to my ears, the band's last truly solid set is 1969's Let It Bleed. Though capable of still cranking out a rousing track or two ("Shattered," say, of "Undercover of the Night"), their days as purveyors of wham-o long-players are long in the past. The late seventies Stones, with their aura of rock royalty privilege and who-gives-a-fuck attitude, are part of the reason punk rock came into being.

Still, a couple of weeks ago, I had to drive two clients to Casa Grande, a trip that took something like two-and-a-half hours, and I brought a copy of Singles Collection: The London Years with me for the trip. Played all three discs all the way (up thru "Wild Horses" and "Brown Sugar") and I'm glad I did. (My passengers, though over twenty years younger than yours truly, dug it, too.) There really was a time when the Stones were the World's Greatest Rock 'N' Roll Band.

Think I'll take Bleed in the car to work this a.m.

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( 4/09/2008 06:32:00 AM ) Bill S.

APRÉS WEDNESDAY: Wednesday Week frontwoman, Kristi Callan, meanwhile, writes to tell me that she's currently part of a all-women country band called Dime Box. Reportedly, they include the occasional Wednesday Week song in their set: been trying to figure out which cuts from the first album would make the best transition to c-&-w. Music p.r. man supreme Cary Baker, meanwhile, (I like that he calls his p.r. firm Conqueroo, after John the Conqueroo) sends me news that former Week bassist Heidi Rodewald is currently making it big on Broadway, composing the music for Passing Strange. So there is life after alt-rock!

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( 4/09/2008 06:15:00 AM ) Bill S.

MID-WEEK MUSIC VID: This 'un seemed particularly apt this week: Spitting Image's reworking of the Madness classic "Our House":

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( 4/07/2008 04:29:00 PM ) Bill S.

THAT OLD HOUSE: This morning I received a call from my realtor telling me that closing on our old home back in Normal, Illinois, had finally taken place. It should've been a moment of relief and celebration, but the past two weeks have been so up and down - and ultimately down - that I mainly feel depressed and exhausted. We knew we weren't going to make any money on the home: after seeing a decent offer fall through two months ago, we just wanted to get out from under a monthly mortgage payment.

But the last few weeks had been so full of stress that I was starting to get a clenching feeling every time I saw a 309 number on my cell phone. One day it was my realtor calling to tell me that some birds had gotten into the attic and ultimately into the house, shitting all over the place. Two days later, it was my realtor telling us that FHA wanted all the outside window sills repainted before they'd approve the buyers' loan. Last weekend, it was my realtor telling me that a panel of our backyard fence had mysteriously disappeared. We've been away from the house for over six months now, and the little craft-style bungalow that once served as a comfortable nest for my wife and me and our pets had devolved into a repository of never-ending bad news.

It looked like we still might escape unscathed until today, though: no real profit, but no real loss either. A little over a week ago, Jimmy our Coldwell realtor phoned to tell me that the papers had been all drawn up. "Guess how much you're gonna have to pay?" he said, dropping the sum of two thousand dollars over the phone line. When I told him that we didn't have that money at the ready, he laughed and told me that he was only joking. "Actually," the funny guy added, "you'll be getting a whopping $350."

Three-fifty for a house sale: we laughed at the paltriness of this sum, but also counted ourselves lucky that we wouldn't be paying anything. Over the past week, though, we watched that sum drop down from afar (thanx to FHA and the bird poop) to about $95. And then I get that call today from my realtor telling me that a cost had been left off the estimate. Early in the process, we had new carpeting put into the home at a cost of $3449. This was supposed to have been included within the costs, but apparently it hadn't been. So now, though we've sold the old homestead, we still have several months' worth of payments left to go. Once more into the loss column.

I know at some point we'll be done with all this for good, but we really were hoping that time would come sooner instead of later. Not to be, though. It'll be a long time before I'll be able to watch one of those put-yer-home-in-our-hands real estate ads on television without uncontrollably grinding my teeth . . .

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( 4/06/2008 09:15:00 AM ) Bill S.

CHARLTON CHEWS: There was a time when if you wanted to see a Hollywood sci-fi movie, you had to put up with Charlton Heston: Planet of the Apes, Beneath the Planet, Soylent Green, Omega Man. They all featured this magnificent hambone, and it's difficult to imagine any of these movies without him (Tim Burton tried, of course, with his flaccid remake of the first Apes flick.) His histrionic acting style was in an easily identifiable class by itself. Going through a recently released boxed set of Sam and Max: Free-lance Police cartoons, for instance, one of the first impersonations to pop out at me was a Heston-esque refrigerator repairman. To my eyes, though, the best Heston performances were as the villainous Cardinal Richelieu, in Richard Lester's two Musketeer films: a role in which he sinuously played against type and was all the better for it.

More recently, of course, Heston was known primarily as a loudly vociferous gun rights spokesman, a role for which he was ridiculed even more than his over-the-top acting moments. I usually went out of my way to avoid Heston's words in this arena – much as I do most actors, whether they lean either left or right – but whenever I did comes across his talking head, I couldn't help but feel saddened by it. I'd much rather think of him as a champion of great American comic strips, Walt Kelly's "Pogo" and Stan Lynde's "Rick O'Shay," than the cold dead hands guy.

R.I.P., Chuck.

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Pop cultural criticism - plus the occasional egocentric socio/political commentary by Bill Sherman (popculturegadabout AT yahoo.com) - now with hexa .. . hexa . . . hexachloraphine!