| Pop Culture Gadabout | ||
|
Saturday, April 12, 2003 ( 4/12/2003 02:33:00 PM ) Bill S. “WATCHING THE WIDE WORLD, RIDIN’ AND HIDIN’ OUT” – Wulp, Friday’s Ed season-ender concluded on a note that regular visitors’d been expecting: with our hero’s realization that in the time he’d spent striving to woo the unattainable idealized girl of his dreams, he’d fallen in love with the real thing. At this writing (at least according to Entertainment Weekly), the fate of NBC’s beleaguered dramedy is unclear. But if this was the final ep, then I’d say the series has gone out at precisely the point it was meant to end. Would've liked to've seen Dave Grohl sit in on drums with the Warren Cheswick Experience, though. . . # | ( 4/12/2003 08:49:00 AM ) Bill S. THOSE DAMN LIBERAL COMIC BOOKS – Both Dave Hill and Dirk Deppey (links on the right) referred me to a fairly loud piece by Kevin Parrott on anti-war talk among the mainstream comics community, the gist of which is “Why should we take what these long-underwear guys have to say seriously, anyway?” Forget the cheesy ad hominem approach – it’s inextricable from the war debate these days. (Though I thought the Bush Administration had worked to frame the war in Good/Evil terms – so why shouldn’t superhero writers be asked about it?) But I have to wonder about the extreme intolerance among so many right-leaning writers when they detect even the teeniest whiff of leftie sentiment from pop culture people. As an American, I’ve grown up reading and watching all manner of right-rooted escapism, and (aside from a period in my life when I was generally pissed about everything) it hasn’t ruined my enjoyment of, say, stories that fetishize vigilantism and amoral expediency at the expense of all other values. The entire comic book superhero subgenre is built on a set of Manichean premises which (as comics like Judge Dredd have both satirized and celebrated) taken to extremes lead to fascism. Yet some comic book writer suggests that peace may just be a good thing, and it’s like the guy’s just vomited into Auntie Belle’s coffin during visitation. Another one fumble-fingers through a Captain America story about the roots of terrorism, and immediately it’s a symptom of a vast conspiracy of Liberal Moral Equivalency that’s pervasive throughout the entire field. It’s hyperbolic, dishonest and reflective of a desire to stifle debate by hammering even the most tentative liberal comment with a rhetorical bludgeon. Take this repeated example from Parrott in support of boycotting them nasty lefty thoughts: “If I buy a comic, and the villain group is a subliterate fascist warmongering pig Zionist cabal trying to take over the world by supporting US involvement in Iraq and brainwashing the mindless American sheep to go along with it, what then?” Sounds pretty appalling, Kevin, but I must’ve missed that book. Which title was it in, again? Nightwing? Look, I’m all for people buying what they want and ignoring the rest. But the ham-fisted efforts of political ideologues to “warn” the rest of their little cabal of true-believers about dangerous Different Thoughts grow old after a while. For Parrott to frame it as a little guy tilting against the Big Media Monolith is more than a bit disingenuous: both right and left-leaning groups have their own active pipelines totally devoted to warning the likeminded about media-disseminated Bad Thoughts. (Heck, alarmist shills like Michael Medved have built a career around such fabricated jeremiads.) To pretend that these group-think efforts have no impact on studios, networks or publishers is to deny their very reason for flourishing existence. When a writer like Kurt Busiek talks about fear of economic reprisal, he isn't describing some lone kid not buying his book. His concern lies in the kind of orchestrated mob reactions that lead to the burning of a group’s CDs – or the decisionmaking that results in the removal of a movie showing from a scheduled event simply because the man in charge doesn’t like the politics of the actors featured in it. When you’re talking about comic books, it’s likely that you’ve moved into an audience too small for the professional alarmists (the number of p.o.ed listeners who phoned their radio stations to protest the playing of Dixie Chicks tunes probably outnumbers the full total of last week’s comic shop customers). But in these strident times, I can’t blame anyone who toils in the fields of pop culture for worrying that their tiny little political statements will get them labeled Enemies of the State by the snap-draw reactives. UPDATE: Both Jim Treacher (in the Comments below) and Parrott himself take issue with my characterizing his “Charlie McCarthyism” blog entry as “right-leaning.” As this is the only piece of his that I can recall reading, it’s more than possible that I’ve misread the guy (though I would contend that there’s a difference between being “right-leaning” and “right-wing”); my primary reaction rose from Parrott's exaggerated example – which to this reader seemed quite consistent with the rhetorical stance being regularly taken by those eager to de-legitimize their opponents by putting more extreme arguments in their mouths than the ones they actually made. It’s an approach made by folks on both right and left, of course, but the example crafted and reiterated by Parrott seemed to rep a conservative bias. Parrott asks in his first response post if I “hallucinated” my reading of his piece. That’s possible, too, as I read his article and wrote my response during breaks in income tax preparation – an activity that’s been known to induce all sorts of alternative perceptions in the mind of yours truly. I’d love to hear from any other readers as to how off-base I’ve been on this. # | Friday, April 11, 2003 ( 4/11/2003 08:53:00 AM ) Bill S. “MAMA SAID THERE’D BE . . .” – The three high-schoolers who comprise Tina and the Tiaras exemplify an era of 60’s pop singers: girl groups who typically went by names like the Chiffons or Chantels, Shangri-Las or Supremes. The sound of pre-feminist teengirls singing somebody else’s hopes and dreams – it’s a moment in pop history that’s neatly captured in J. Torres & Scott Chantler’s charm-packed graphic novel Days Like This (Oni Press). Set in the early 60’s (we see one character, a songwriter named Karen Prince – the name recalls Carole King, but there’s also a trace of Wonder Woman in it – looking for Suites 1958–1964 in the Brill-like Harmony Plaza), the book charts the early days of the Tiaras, the young teenaged songwriter who’ll compose their hits and the neophyte woman record mogul who discovers the group. Primary focus is on lead singer Christina, a fourteen-year girl who we first meet singing along to a 45 in preparation for a high school talent show. As with mentor Anna Solomon, Tina has to contend with male scorn and resistance toward her talents. In the case of the girl singer, this opposition comes from her hard-working father Luther, who couples wounded pride with an honest Christian fear that his daughter will be corrupted by this rock ‘n’ roll world. (“Have you heard about this Little Richard character?” he demands at one point. “The man who wears makeup? Only man I know wears makeup is a clown!”) In Anna’s case, it’s from the disdainful reaction of her peers in the music business. Starting her own record label with the money she’s gotten in a divorce settlement from her ex-husband Abe, Anna is disparagingly called a “housewife” by her wormy former brother-in-law Ben. “How things would be different if we housewives ran the country,” she says at one point to Tina’s supportive mother. Days (the title is taken from a Shirelles hit – as are the chapter headings) excels at capturing the feel of its era: artist Scott Chantler is especially adept at conveying the styles of the day, while his concise black-and-white ink work also conveys the period feel. Scripter Torres’ main interest is in capturing the first steps of artist confidence. Unlike most traditional show biz stories, we don’t see the artists’ decline, just the moments of naive enthusiasm and joy at discovering your own voice. As delightful as many of the book’s characters are, they remain secondary to the book’s foremost concern: the nascent awareness that sisters can do it for themselves. There aren’t a lot of comic books devoted to oldies-but-goodies rock ‘n’ roll, let alone an era that's frequently marginalized for its pop lightness. If I have any complaint about Days, it lies in my wish that we’d gotten at least one good look inside the recording process (we primarily learn about it second-hand as Tina describes it to her younger brother); more panels are devoted to the Tiaras trying on matching dresses than to actually making their first hit record. But that’s just the pop lover in me grousing. Taken on its own sparkling terms, Days Like This reminds us of this one incontrovertible pop culture truism: that even something as seemingly lightweight and inconsequential as a teen-beat single can be a major breakthrough for those who created it. # | Thursday, April 10, 2003 ( 4/10/2003 02:36:00 PM ) Bill S. A BOON TO BLOGGERS EVERYWHERE – It’s the Apathetic Online Journal Entry Generator! # | ( 4/10/2003 11:15:00 AM ) Bill S. “GOIN’ DOWN TO SOUTH PARK/GONNA HAVE MYSELF A TIME” – I read that since Baghdad appears to’ve been wrested from the hands of the Saddam regime and since I took a stand questioning this war, I’m now supposed to be depressed over the sight of Iraqis cheering President Bush and gleefully toppling big statues of Hussein. Only problem is: watching these images on television, seeing these victims of an oppressive dictatorship experience that first flush of just being able to say what previously was unsayable, I don’t feel bummed at all. It’s a wonderful sight, plain and simple. So am I a half-assed anti-warmonger for feeling this way? Or (could it be?) that the those writers trying to tar everyone who’s questioned the war with the same brush are a bunch of nuance-free jackasses with an ideological stake in presuming that everyone they disagree with thinks exactly the same? # | ( 4/10/2003 09:09:00 AM ) Bill S. MAGICAL THINKING AND LOSS – A funny posting in Eric Alterman’s MSNBC blog Altercation, pertaining to a rocker I was recently considering, Lou Reed: one of those pieces that considers the ridiculous degree of power that we sometimes confer on our celebrities. . . # | ( 4/10/2003 07:43:00 AM ) Bill S. “I HATE THIS TOWN!” – Leave it to the lads from South Park to put all these months of emotion-laden anti- vs. pro-war debate into context. Last night’s 100th ep (it’ll be rerun in perpetuity, so don’t worry if you missed it) tackled the topic in the show’s inimitable fashion. In it, the town’s adult population gets swept up in war demonstration fever, splitting right down the middle between those who oppose the war and those who favor it. (None of the grown-ups on this series ever do anything in half-measures – much to the consternation of the show’s young boy foursome.) In the midst of the escalating ideological conflict, 3rd grade teacher Mr. Garrison assigns his class a report topic: What Would the Founding Fathers Think of This War? To avoid any serious research, one of our heroes, immoral central Eric Cartman, tries to induce a flashback to the First Continental Congress. He succeeds and finds himself in a setting out of the movie 1776. (Hey, we all knew SPark writers Trey & Matt were musical buffs!) There, Eric discovers our ancestors are also engaged in war debate, only this time the anti-war faction is comprised of those conservatives who don’t want to sever our ties with Britain. It takes wise ol’ Ben Franklin to put it all in soothing perspective. We need both sides, he opines – the pro-war side to keep the rest of the world from pushing us around; the anti-war side to keep ‘em from hating us all. This way, Franklin notes, we can have our cake and eat it, too! A profoundly cynical view of American democracy, but like much of this show, it has its element of truth. (For all the intensity of the debate, after all, our leaders've pretty much done what they intended to do all along.) Eric takes his lesson back to the good citizens of South Park – where war polarization has merged with pro-rock and pro-country divisiveness – and a bloody violent riot is in progress (not unusual for these hearty mountain towners). His words bring the community once more together, just in time for a big 100th Episode Gala Celebration where all the show’s characters and guest celeb victims (even Sally Struthers) stand and hold hands. Watching from the sidelines, two of our young heroes have only one thing to say in conclusion: “I hate this town!” # | Wednesday, April 09, 2003 ( 4/09/2003 02:23:00 PM ) Bill S. “GOD IS A CONCEPT BY WHICH WE MEASURE OUR PAIN” – It figures that the morning my wife Becky and I attend the Impact Arthritis 2003 Conference, it’d be rainy and cold: nasty weather is inextricable from the Arthritis Experience. Sponsored by the Central Illinois Chapter of the Arthritis Foundation, the daylong conference features presentations by area rheumatologists and orthopedic surgeons, though wandering through the booths beforehand, you also find reps of more alternative medical approaches – plus: booths for hospitals and insurance companies, nutritional supplements and assisted living facilities, portable spas and adjustable beds. At my seat there’s a Holiday Inn pad and a pen with Zoloft printed on its side. Yup, I think as I wander through the displays, I’m in ElderLand, alright. My fellow attendees are, by large, a pretty gray bunch. Looking around the conference room, I find myself wondering how many are themselves feeling twinges and pains as they sit on the hard padded metal chairs. The conference is scheduled to last from 8:15 – 4:00, and I try to guess how many’ll be making it to the end. Me, I’m unsure how many hours of medical jargon I’ll be able to assimilate. My geezer tallying isn’t entirely fair, of course. An estimated one in three Americans suffers from some sort of arthritis, children included. Still, it’s clear that a goodly amount of the day’s money and resources are directed toward the growing elder population. The presenters, remaining mindful of its audience, regularly provide breaks for us to stretch. The day’s presentations alternate between dense medical overviews and gung-ho inspirational talks. I’m most interested in a presentation on fibromyalgia – a syndrome Becky suffers, which is characterized by widespread pain and stiffness around multiple “touchpoints” – but I pick up snippets from the other workshops, too. A lot of alien-sounding medications (methotexate, enbrel, humira) are repeatedly mentioned: some of the more recent ‘uns (entenercept, for example) can cost up to $10,000 a year. “We have to care for patients differently based on insurance status,” one physician presenter notes. How fucked up is that? the pissed-off leftist in me mentally shouts back, while the middle-class professional ticks off my family PPO fee schedule. Clearly, we could have it so much worse. One sign of the times: most of the speakers pull in war imagery as a part of their presentations. So a discussion of “auto-immunity” (where your immune system starts mistaking your own cells for viral agents), for instance, gets referred to as “friendly fire” by one presenter. No one in the room seems to take offense at the metaphor. When you’re in pain most of the time, it’s your own private kind of war. As with most medical conditions severe enough to merit its own foundation, most arthritic conditions are managed, not cured. (In the case of fibromyalgia, they don’t even know its etiology.) As a kid, I recall kinds of TV and movie comic oldsters, complaining about their “rheumatizz.” But for the visitors to this conference, that’s the kind of joke that frequently is accompanied by a sharp grimace. By mid-afternoon, listening to a panel on osteoporosis, I’ve finally reached personal saturation. It isn’t just the many Powerpoint x-rays of malformed bones and cartilage or the polysyllabic medical phrases. By and large, the doctors at this conference have been decent presenters (not a case of flopsweat the entire day), but there’s a point where the material just plain wears me down. Take Control, the AF logo says. We can help. Yet control can be tenuous when we’re talking about our bodies screwing with us. During lunch, we chat with other conference attendees. Some are quite well-versed in Arthritis Speak, we discover; others seem just glad to see their doctors in a setting outside the office. It’s a sign of their physicians’ commitment just to show up, even if they don’t have much that’s new to say. By the time my wife and I leave, it’s stopped raining at least. Ahead of us walks a stooped old woman in a well-worn winter coat, pushing a wheeled walker. I wonder what level of care she’s been receiving, just what her “insurance status” is. And I’m guessing I already know the answer to that question. # | ( 4/09/2003 05:51:00 AM ) Bill S. LUCK & PLUCK – In the forties, if you had an adventurer gambler for a hero, you made him sophisticated. Take Cary Grant in 1943’s Mr. Lucky: debonair owner of a gambling ship, snappy dresser, master of his own fate. In the early days of television this image still held via a Peter Gunn-inspired teevee series based on the Grant flick (best recalled today as the source of a great Henry Mancini theme song). I thought of both the movie and its small-screen offspring last night while watching John Corbett in the new fx series Lucky. A half-hour dramedy, the show follows Las Vegan denizen Mike “Lucky” Linkletter: one time winner of a million dollar Pro Poker Championship, now a scrabbling hustler struggling to manage his gambling addiction. One year after his big win, we see him wheedling bonus money from his boss at a used car dealership. His life has gone downhill in a big way, and his late wife’s parents are coming into town expecting the money that he borrowed from them for her funeral. The debut’s core issue is whether he’ll be able to raise the dough without returning to his bettin' ways. Naturally, the whole world conspires against this. A set-up like this – likable low-life amidst a world of even more colorful marginal types – is thoroughly dependent on its actors. As a lead, Corbett has an earnest everyguy quality that’s a universe away from Cary Grant. It helps you root for him once he starts sweating, but it works against him every time his character starts doing recovery speak. (In one of the series' subplots, he takes on sponsorship of an attractive blond Gamblers Anonymous member, and we know that this’ll lead to trouble down the pike.) Fortunately, he’s surrounded by some great character actors: every-ready scumwad Dan Hedaya, playing a mob loan shark, plus Seymour Cassel as a chain-smoking ravaged gambler nicknamed The Trake (for obvious reasons). Billy Gardell and Craig Robinson play Linkletter’s two grifter buds with snap and glee. A scene where Gardell’s Vinny stages a series of fake auto accidents to raise the funeral money is laugh-out-loud funny for its matter-of-fact duplicitousness. Writers Mark & Robb Cullen have a knack for quirky hardboiled dialog and action that’ll serve this show well if they can sustain it. (Best moment: when Hedaya’s Joe holds Lucky so he can read the funnies on a paper that our hero is using to staunch a bleeding head wound.) Lucky is running in the spot vacated by The Shield, but whether the net’s audience will be able to accommodate the shift from James Ellroy-ish views of life on the street to Elmore Leonard remains to be seen. On the basis of his well-paced debut, I know I’m willing to follow Lucky Linkletter’s travails. The guy may not be suave, but he’s still entertaining. # | Tuesday, April 08, 2003 ( 4/08/2003 03:59:00 PM ) Bill S.  PROSIT NEUJAHR! – Regular visitors to this blog may recall that, in addition to the usual fare reviewed, I also collect fat-themed ephemera. Of these, the largest number of items are comic postcards, most of which were produced in the early to mid-twentieth century. Several artists regularly tackled this theme: among the most sought is German illustrator Arthur Thiele, better known among postcard collectors for painted fantasy and animal cards, as well as humorous slice-of-life imagery from WWI-era Germany. In the twenties, he produced a series of fat-themed cards – many set at the beach, of course, but just as often focused on the comic contrast between a super-sized femme and an averaged size swain.Managed to pick up a pair (both possessing the headline “Prosit Neujahr!” – which I think means “Happy New Year!”) via online auction this month. They just arrived in the mail today in near mint condition, so, yeah, I'm feelin' that collector's need to brag right now. My recent acquisitions can be viewed here, along with eight other Thiele cards that are in the mighty Gadabout Collection. Even if you’re not into the subject matter, Thiele’s worth checking out as a masterful comic illustrator. # | Monday, April 07, 2003 ( 4/07/2003 09:35:00 AM ) Bill S. RIDIN’ THAT MONEY TRAIN – Two of basic cable’s short-run teleseries finished their second seasons over the last week. Haven’t seen The Dead Zone outing yet (though, from the previews, it appears to somewhat mirror the book and movie), but I did get to view The Shield’s season finish. It strikes me that the finale’s big moment – the successful completion of the money train heist by anti-cop Vic Mackey and his boys – is meant to crystallize the moment that these “different kinds of cops” switch over to the dark side. Every action that they’ve taken in the past was either reactive (Vic’s murder of the undercover cop) or “justifiable” as a shortcut around repressive bureaucratic procedure. The money train robbery was first and foremost initiated out of a desire for personal gain. I’m anticipating a Sierra Madre-style falling out within Vic’s crew in Season Three. . . # | Sunday, April 06, 2003 ( 4/06/2003 10:23:00 AM ) Bill S. “YOU’VE GOTTA LIVE YOUR LIFE AS THOUGH YOU’RE NUMBER ONE” – Spring can be a season of sudden profound changes, and this week – with temps dropping into snow coldness and flashes of chilling rain making it unclear if the clothes you put on in the a.m. will still by apt by evening – let’s visit my third personal spring disc, Lou Reed’s Transformer. His second solo release since the break-up of the Velvet Underground, it is also the most thoroughly pop album that Lou would ever release – thanks in part to producer David Bowie, smack dab in his Ziggy Stardust persona. Purists may grouse at the results (even Reed himself has sniped about the recording experience over the years,) but in the end the release has held up better than many of his more serious works. It also, of course, yielded Lou's big pop hit, “Walk On The Wild Side.” I first heard Transformer when I was in grad school, back in ’72. One of my buddies was a big Velvets fan, and though he’d proselytizingly played ‘em for me, I wouldn’t really get into the group until Transformer provided me a gateway. To a Midwestern liberal arts collegian in his early twenties, Reed’s record echoed everything I thought I knew about the big bad city – and taught me quite a few things I didn’t know. I immediately honed into this album, initially thanks to Mick Ronson’s guitar. Listening to him slash through album opener “Vicious,” I was ready to follow Lou into even the darkest of lyrical territories. The rest of the disc isn’t as sonically edgy, but the sounds and settings that Bowie & Ronson worked up for each are strikingly appropriate. In addition to its opener and the much-heard hit, Transformer contains other beautiful rock tunes: mournful “Perfect Day” (well-covered by Kirsty Macoll & Evan Dando in the nineties,) which sounds lush and romantic ‘til you realize that the song’s about a lover being brutalized by his partner; “Wild Side” counterpart “Hangin’ Round,” which serves up another cast of street types (“Jeanie was a spoiled young brat/She thought she had it all/She smoked mentholated cigarettes/And had sex in the hall,”) only this time from the POV of someone who’s given it all up; “Satellite of Love,” with its sparkling background vocal flourishes and hints of Bowie-esque space odditude; “Wagon Wheel,” which breaks its rockin’ flow with a solemn lyrical bridge that anticipates the grimmer sounds and themes of Reed’s Berlin; plus the anthemic “I’m So Free.” And then there’s “Wild Side.” Reed himself has said that the song’s hit status was a fluke, but it’s a just fluke. Building from a riff on the Staple Singers’ soul hit, “I’ll Take You There,” the song captures the feel of outsider hope and promise better than anything to come out of the early seventies. It may’ve been a novelty hit (you can almost hear singles buyers giggling at their bravery over the song’s chorus ref to “colored girls,”) but it also captures one of Reed’s great strengths: his reportorial skills in the midst of a colorfully chaotic milieu. (Which show up full flower in 1989’s exemplary New York.) Herbie Flowers’ jazzy arrangement (love that fading sax at the end) is inextricably bound to the song; catch two notes of the opening bass-line and you immediately recognize “Wild Side.” Transformer is by no means a pristine album (for that you’d probably have to go back to the Velvets and Loaded). Some of the lyrics can be clunkier than usual for this notoriously discursive songwriter, while there are some cuts where you wish Bowie’d cracked the whip harder on Reed the Vocalist (those half-hearted “whoos” on “Andy’s Chest,” for instance). And that harrumphing tuba in half-serious gay pride song “Make Up” is just too camp to work as more than a fleeting joke. Per the period, Reed sometimes plays dress-up (the back cover features photos of our man both in drag and rough trade pose), but he can’t quite refrain from winking at the audience as he does it. For all his skills as a musical monologist, Reed doesn’t commit to his roles in this disc as strongly as, say, Bowie does in Ziggy Stardust. It may undermine his effects, but it also adds a sparkle to Transformer that Bowie can’t capture in his sludgier dramatic moments. New York pop for a naively jaded audience: spring’s not just about the bloomin' flowers, you know. # | ( 4/06/2003 10:19:00 AM ) Bill S. A FEW WORDS FROM MOXY FRUVOUS – Don’t usually do the reprint song lyrics thing, but this a.m. I was playing an old disc by Canadian folk-rock songsters Moxy Fruvous (Bargainville), and I rediscovered this germane song from 1993: Copyright © 1993 Warner Music Canada Ltd and pasted from the Moxy Fruvous web page. # | |
|
|
