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Saturday, November 13, 2004 ( 11/13/2004 02:35:00 PM ) Bill S.  "LOOKING FOR THE ANIMAL BEHIND YOUR EYES" – (The Gadabout Challenge: Let's see if I can complete the following review without once using the word "eccentric" or referring to the M.I.A. Syd Barrett, shall we?)Can't help noting that Spooked (Yep Roc) is about an apt a title for a Robyn Hitchcock album as you could ask for. With his penchant for willfully eccen. . . strange lyrics about the natural (think "Bass," "Insect Mother") and supernatural (think "My Wife And My Dead Wife"), not to mention his more dadaist psychedelic conceits, the once and future Soft Boy has long trafficked in pop that, if not spooky, can often be lyrically disorienting. His newest release, a musical collaboration with folk country artists Gillian Welch & David Rawlings (with a couple guest visits by cult perennial and bassist Joey Stampinato), is in the subdued predominately acoustic mode of earlier releases like I Often Dream of Trains or the Eye demos. And though I personally prefer Hitchcock when he's playing with a full contingent like the Soft Boys or the Egyptians, the disc still has its moments of Hitchcockian splendor. Among these, I'd count his lilting opening ode to "Television" (not the Dave Edmunds/Nick Lowe song, though it shares a similar theme); the sitar-inflected "Everybody Needs Love" (which sounds just as Summer of Lovey as you'd expected it to); the enjoyably dark "Creeped Out" (with its sparse electric guitarwork hovering in the distant background for most of the cut); and the lightly jazzy "Full Moon in My Soul" (neat bit of backwards guitar snuck into this 'un). No Hitchcock release would be complete without lyrical refs to wildlife, of course – "We're Gonna Live in the Trees" has him re-imagining himself as a bird, while the folky finale "Flanagan's Song" evokes images of flocking ravens and tiny frogs – but, in general, the focus is more mournfully wistful than madcap. "The party's over; the drugs have taken themselves," he sings in "Song." Between this and his sweetly doleful cover of Dylan's "Tryin' To Get To Heaven" (smart slivers of harmony from Gillian Welch on this cut), there are hints of a growing maturity on Spooked that may be at odds with the throwaway wackiness that's long been a ready part of his arsenal (spoken track "Welcome to Earth" is noticeably flat, while "English Girl" holds its tossed-off rhymes to undue listener scrutiny). But with Welch & Rawlings providing tidy support on tracks like the dobro-driven "If You Know," Spooked has enough doses of Syd Bar. . . weirdo lyricism to satisfy longtime admirers of the nasally British songwriter. A fine, if slightly tentative, Robyn Hitchcock release, in other words, that promises more in the years to come. Shine on, you crazy eccentric, you. . . # | Friday, November 12, 2004 ( 11/12/2004 09:22:00 AM ) Bill S. KNOW YOUR COMPANION ANIMALS – Not that Mark Millar or Frank Cho are likely to see it here or anything, but this is what a "Pekinese" looks like. . . # | ( 11/12/2004 06:03:00 AM ) Bill S. AND HE'S ALSO STARTING A COMIC BOOK CLUB AT HARBOR SCHOOL – After last week's season opener piss-and-moan-fest, it's nice to see Fox's The O.C. returning to its Celebration of Privileged Fanboyishness. Last night's opening sequence featured a moment where our man Seth Cohen (Adam Brody) waved a copy of Identity Crisis #1 before his buddy Ryan and said, "Before you read this, let me tell you the difference between Plastic Man and Elongated Man." Too bad they didn't show us that mini-lecture. ("Okay, so Plastic Man is the wacky stretchable superhero, while Elongated Man is the whimsical one whose wife gets raped and murdered. . .") Next week: Seth explains all that what-the-hell magic stuff from Avengers Disassembled – plus why poor old Agatha Harkness was given the Ma Bates treatement. # | Thursday, November 11, 2004 ( 11/11/2004 01:13:00 PM ) Bill S.  "IT'S NOT AS EVIL AS I THOUGHT IT MIGHT BE" – In cartoon shorthand, whenever you want to visually convey that someone is megalomaniacally nuts, all you need to do is dress him in a Napoleon outfit. Rob Osborne's 1000 Steps to World Domination (AiT/Planet Lar), a 136-page graphic novel musing on life in Struggling Artists Town, opens with a cover shot of our artist hero with his hands in his coat – and closes with a full-panel page of our would-be world conqueror as he’s taking out the garbage in his Napoleon suit. In the gap between these two images, Osborne's graphic novel finds much of its humor.Between those apt images are a series of one- and two-page comic snapshots and eccentric success fantasies typically couched in the metaphor of World Domination. Our hero Rob, stuck in a crappy job and spending his spare time doing comics in his studio, announces to one of his snoozing dogs that he's "going to take over the world." And though he frequently draws strips imagining himself as a hard-assed conqueror (e.g., a set of sequences featuring our hero in hand-to-hand combat with a black-masked assailant), he's just as likely to show himself being berated by a derisive monkey or as the tortoise in a re-enactment of his race with the hare. "I don't really want to rule the world," Rob tells his freckle-faced wife at one point. "What I really want is control." Yeah, well, sometimes control is almost as difficult a goal as world domination. Flitting between dreams of artistic grandeur and more rueful ruminations on the daily work grind, 1000 Steps tells a recognizable story: the struggles of the young artist as they prepare to head on the "Less Traveled" road of supporting themselves through their art. Osborne takes on a variety of personas from within his studio – dressing in a suit or eye patch, periodically imagining himself as a frustrated alien stuck doing anal probes instead of invading the earth. ("I didn't sign up for this," he sighs.) But for all his fantasizing, the cartoonist's plight is a familiar one. If his strips have more than a smidgeon of Kochalka, even down to the way the cartoon diarist paces his jokes (as when our hero follows two different elevated self-statements with panels of his dog licking his crotch), you never get the sense that Osborne is looking at any other life but his own. At times, I'll admit, Osborne's self-mocking conceit gets a trace repetitious: I could've done, for instance without the series of pages portentously quoting Sun Tzu on "The War of Art." (They seem more designed to demonstrate his clear facility with pen and ink than to add anything to the story.) But then the cartoonist follows this series with a answering machine message from his father ("I'm on my 875th step toward world domination. What step are you on?") that comically slaps our would-be world beater. Megalomaniacal? Hard to be too megalo when there still are vet bills to pay. . . (UPDATE: The above has been corrected so the Sketchbook Diaries cartoonist no longer reads like he's the Night Stalker.) # | ( 11/11/2004 08:58:00 AM ) Bill S. JINKIES – Picked up a copy of DC's first Scooby Doo Digest ("You Meddling Kids") the other day because my ol' FA buddy Ned Sonntag is credited with doing the pencils on the collection's first story ("Scooby in the Booby Hatch") – and is also apparently responsible for uncredited artwork on a second work in the collection ("The Roswell Riddle"). Spent some time last night trying to figure out where Ned's art was hiding 'neath credited artist Ernie Colon's finished "Roswell" work (in "Booby Hatch," inker Gary Fields remains true to Sonntag's sense of human proportion) and the best I could come up with was the depiction of a zaftig villainess in stretch pants, an alien I'm betting Colon transformed into a more dumbed-down design and a miner's lantern that contains one of Sonntag's distinctly wavery shadows. The history of commercial comics is packed with these kinds of who-did-what puzzles, but this is the first time I've actually played that game. And just for the record, I think that the best comic book take on Scoob 'n' the Gang is the Mark Evanier/Dan Spiegle version done for Gold Key and Marvel. . . # | ( 11/11/2004 08:12:00 AM ) Bill S. HOT PLATE HEAVEN IN THE GREEN HOTEL – Listened to a disc on the way into work that I hadn't paid attention to in some time: Frank Zappa's Broadway the Hard Way, one of a seemingly endless stream of concert albums that the man released during the eighties. I'm not a big admirer of Zappa's output during this phase of his long career as a rock 'n' roll smartass – too many of his sneers are pale echoes of earlier better work, while his musical jokes are more obvious than they need to be – but listening to the man rail against the moral hypocrisy of the Reagan Era and its evangelical panderings carries a familiar frisson. Back in the 80's, Zappa dusted off an old anti-Nixon song to couple with a larger anti-Republican diatribe, "When the Lie's So Big." If the ex-Mother were still alive today, I wager he'd be rewriting "Lie's" to fit the present regime. . . # | ( 11/11/2004 05:56:00 AM ) Bill S. "HE'S BLEEDING DEMISED!" – So we're watching C.S.I.: New York last night, and we're in the last three minutes of the program, and Gary Sinise is giving us the solution to the big mystery – and suddenly CBS News cuts in to tell us that the formerly comatose Yasser Arafat's dead. As they air their cheesy little pre-filmed obit, I find myself turning into one of the willful know-nothings, saying, "What, they couldn't wait 'til the show was over?" I mean, it's not as if Arafat is gonna be less dead in five minutes, and we know this same stuff will be covered on the 10:00 (Central Standard Time) news immediately following C.S.I., anyway. Too, the news is no surprise, since the man's been on death's door for days (and was once already, incorrectly, pronounced dead). So I wonder: is there some kind of fiscal incentive to airing this story as part of the national broadcast instead of handing it off to the local affiliates? Perhaps this was only an issue in my particular time zone? UPDATE: As Cap'n Spaulding notes in the Comments section, CBS is rebroadcasting the episode Friday night in the late, unlamented Dr. Vegas timeslot ("If you missed any part of C.S.I.: New York," the network promos noted last night) and has apologized for the act of an "overly aggressive" news producer. # | Wednesday, November 10, 2004 ( 11/10/2004 09:39:00 AM ) Bill S. PRO-MO – One thing I was gonna mention in my Curse of Frankenstein posting but forgot to include: the DVD set includes the movie's original 1957 trailer – and one of the cool things about it is the way that the promo's crafters go out of their way to avoid showing Chris Lee's face. At several points when Lee shambles into view, judiciously placed lettering is used to block his facial features. These days, of course, every monster-mad kid knows what the creature looks like, but when the flick was first released, Hammer definitely played coy with Leakey's makeup design. You'd never see that in these days of tell-all movie promos. . . # | Tuesday, November 09, 2004 ( 11/09/2004 04:21:00 PM ) Bill S.  "THE BIRDS DIDN'T WASTE MUCH TIME, DID THEY?" – A few months back, I revisited one of the great early Hammer horror pics, Horror of Dracula, thanx to a Warner Bros. DVD reissue. Last weekend, I took a step further back to the Hammer release that sparked the studio's successful run of low-budget blood-and-thunder gothics, 1957's Curse of Frankenstein.I was happily surprised in my viewing of the WB DVD: my first experience viewing this seminal film was an airing about ten years ago on Cinemax. The copy that the cable net had showed was so faded that the full-color film looked like the sepia opening to Wizard of Oz. The 2002 Warner Home Video reissue is much more vibrantly colored. This is no small selling point. When Curse first debuted, the primary pallet for horror flicks was black-and-white: the moment Baron Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) first nonchalantly wipes the blood off his hand and onto his lab jacket is a touchstone in the evolution of horror cinema. That small bit of business (should we credit Cushing, screenwriter Jimmy Sangster or director Terence Fisher?) changed the movie landscape forever. . . To be sure, the shift from b-&-w to color isn't the only thing that separates Curse from its predecessors. Scripter Sangster took a substantively different approach to Mary Shelley's gothic novel than the makers of the Universal Frankenstein. Where the thirties era take on the book's protagonist was to treat young Baron Frankenstein as an obsessed but ultimately decent guy, Cushing & Fisher's antiheroic Victor Frankenstein is a ruthless bastard from the outset. He pushes an elder professor off a balcony so he can steal the guy's brain (only to have it damaged when an ambivalent assistant wrestles him for its glass container); he's shtupping the maid (Valerie Gaunt) even as his fiancée (Hazel Court) is under the same roof; and, after his creation goes on the inevitable murderous rampage through the Swiss forests, he revives the monster a second time even though the creature's been shot in the head. Tampering in God's domain? Hell, this guy is tromping through the flowers in heavy boots! Victor's monster (Christopher Lee) is nothing at all like the flat-headed Karloff version that'd been designed by Jack Pierce for the earlier Frankenstein. Universal Studios, which had trademarked the makeup designs of all their creatures, was not about let a bunch of upstart Britishers use their look, though seven years later Hammer would bring a version of the standard model to the series in Evil of Frankenstein. The Hammer model (designed by Phil Leakey), scarred and white-faced with disheveled black hair, looks more like a maimed mime than anything. At one point in close-up, you can see a spot on his neck where it looks as if either the rot is seeping in or the makeup is peeling up. Unlike the Karloff version, Lee's creature is given little to do except suffer under the chains of his creator. (It wouldn't be 'til Horror of Dracula that this imposing horror film actor would really be allowed to strut his stuff.) When he escapes, there's no time wasted in establishing any empathy for the brain-damaged creature, though two brief moments – one involving a young child by the river, the second concerning a blind peasant – appear deliberately designed to confound our expectations by recalling similar moments from the James Whale Frankenstein flicks. By today's standards, Curse of Frankenstein is pretty restrained: its primary redness is found in bottled body parts, while most of its killings occur off-screen. The dialog can be talky, even down to repeating basic plot points (as when Victor blames his colleague Paul on two separate occasions for the creature's mental failings), while future Corman scream queen Court is never given enough to do. Yet Cushing is so marvelous in his first full movie villain role, and the movie is presented with such whole-hearted (screw post-modern irony!) commitment that you go along with it even as you note its peeling makeup. Hammer Studios would produce better horrorflix in the years to come, but none was ever so groundbreaking. . . # | Sunday, November 07, 2004 ( 11/07/2004 08:20:00 AM ) Bill S. "COME AS YOU ARE, AS YOU WERE, AS I WANT YOU TO BE" – No, I don't have a gun, but I do have a fresh round of weekend bullet points:
(Background Music for This Round of Bullet Points: None; I'm trying to keep from disturbing my still-sleeping wife.) # | |
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