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Saturday, August 13, 2005 ( 8/13/2005 09:24:00 PM ) Bill S. YE WEEKEND PET PIC – So, anyway, I pull out the Canon ZR60 digital video camcorder this afternoon to take some pics of the ferrets, since we've just discovered that they go really bozo with an cheerleader's pompom in the room. But for some reason I'm unable to get the camera part of the Canon to work. Whenever I switch the camcorder up to "camera" mode, I get nothing but a blank screen on the LCD – and, yes, I did remember to take the lens cap off, thanx for asking. But I can still get the VCR mode to play, so while I'm learning this fact, I discover this shot of Willow just as she's apparently making ready to lunge at the camera. . .  That big gray lump at the top of the pic, incidentally, is Stormy Cat. # | ( 8/13/2005 07:03:00 AM ) Bill S.  WHEN YOU'RE A PUFF, YOU'RE A PUFF ALL THE WAY – (My third smoke-related posting this week – what's up with that?) The leggy femmes who primarily populate Kirsten Baldock & Fabio Moon's Smoke And Guns (AiT/Planet Lar) are all of a piece: pistol-packin' cigarette girls who dress in fetishized girlie costumes (French maid, nurse, cheerleader) to peddle their wares on the street. It's Baldock's amusing conceit to treat these hard-boiled dames like gang members in a 50's juvenile delinquent flick (or Walter Hill's later midnight movie stylization, The Warriors), with each gang holding onto their particular parcel of NYC turf with tooth and heavily polished nail. Naturally, one of the members of the Grand Avenue Puffs, a bleach blond troublemaker named Scarlett, chafes at the imposed boundaries and starts venturing out into rival territory run by the Broadway Belles, initiating a full-blown gang war as she does. Much gunplay ensues.Not a premise to be taken all that seriously on the face of things, though neither Baldock nor Moon muck things up by engaging in any obvious winking. Their improbably skillful gaggle of gun-totin' gamines takes the bizness of shilling cancer sticks seriously. The Puffs' boss, a blowsy ol' dame named Peaches (who looks exactly like you'd expect her to look), attempts to run a tight ship, but the overly ambitious Scarlett keeps stirring things up. In a futile attempt to quiet things down, she suspends the girl for three weeks, so Scarlett takes a job waitressing a private party across town and winds up passing out drunk at the soiree. When our anti-heroine comes to, she has to make her way back to her home territory by herself, making a whole lotta new acquaintances along the way. Moon's black-&-white brushwork – packed with slender young women and seedy male customers – is suitably both gritty and sexy, though occasionally you can see him faltering in some of the more chaotic action sequences. He's especially good at capturing the flirtatious give-and-take between Scarlett and her smokers ("Guy can't even look at a dame like you without losing money," one barfly jokes), as well as the intriguing, if underdeveloped, relationship between Scarlett and Annie. (I especially liked a scene where the two try out guns, wondering if one pistol is "too fat" to fit into a holster.) At times, the latter is rendered a smidgeon more cartoony than her peer (especially around the nose), but that's a minor plaint. Smoke And Guns may be nonsense, but it's energetic, well-mounted nonsense. If at times Baldock's high concept seems to overpower most everything else (by the end, we know as much about Scarlett's character as we learn in the first five pages of the book), the concept is rich enough to sustain a graphic novel. With so much pop media overly concerned these days about inadvertently giving the message that smoking is glamorous, it occurs to me that just about the only place you can tell a story like this nowadays without running up against financial backer opposition is in the small-press comics format. Whether that's a positive or a negative thing, I'll leave for someone else to decide. All I know is after decades of watching old b-&-w movies showing tough broads placing coffin nails 'tween their lipsticked lips, the image still provides its own kicky thrill, one that a multitude of well-meaning warning mongers can't dispel . . . # | Friday, August 12, 2005 ( 8/12/2005 08:21:00 AM ) Bill S. "STILL IT BEGINZ-A!" – Maybe I'm still pissed at him for doing a historical appreciation of the Go-Betweens that antic-climactically ended with an oh, yeah, the new album's pretty good, too (belated thanx to Ben Varkentine to cuing me to its presence), but NPR's rock historian Ed Ward definitely dropped the ball yesterday in a Fresh Air sound piece on famed rock producer Jack Nitzsche. Noting his work with the divine Jackie De Shannon, Ward claimed that Nitzsche's production job on "Needles And Pins" (first heard as a single but also available on Jackie's 1964 Breakin' It Up On the Beatles Tour album) was superior to the Dave Clark Five's hit single of the song. Now, I'll agree that the De Shannon original (co-written by Sony Bono – just to show the guy could write a song that wasn't thoroughly dopey) is better than the Brit Beat hit that was made of it. (Peaked at number 16 on the U.S. charts, according to Parke Puterbaugh.) But the Mersey Beat band which brung it there was not the DC5, but Liverpool's second most famous group, the Searchers. Confusing the Searchers with the Dave Clark Five is kinda like confusing the Byrds with Gary Lewis & the Playboys – something that's just not done if you're a rock historian. . . # | ( 8/12/2005 07:50:00 AM ) Bill S. "YOU'VE MADE YOUR MONEY, NOW WATCH THE MONEY GROW!" – Puffy AmiYumi doing a cover of Jellyfish's "Joining A Fan Club?" Yup. Won't dislodge the original track (one of the best moments from the band's Spilt Milk), but it's still plenty fun. Wish Andy Sturmer were doing more than frittering his considerable talent on these J-Pop cuties, though. . . # | Thursday, August 11, 2005 ( 8/11/2005 02:37:00 PM ) Bill S. "DRUGS SELL THEMSELVES, BISCUIT!" – Showtime's new half-hour sitdramedy, Weeds, opens on a calculatedly quaint note: Malvina Reynolds' Eisenhower Era folkie rant against ticky-tacky "Little Boxes" playing over a collage of peaceful suburban images. An obvious joke (at least if you're a Baby Boomer with memories of Pete Seeger's 1964 modest folk-pop hit version of the song), but the series works overtime to go beyond the mere suburban conformity that Reynolds' old song decries. It tells the story of Nancy Botwin (Mary Louse-Parker, modulating the staccato delivery she utilized on The West Wing into a more hesitating cadence), a recent widow living in the well-to-do burg of Agresta. Nancy's late hubby has left his stay-at-home housewife penniless (at one point we're told they spent all their savings on a new kitchen, but at least "it turned out gorgeous.") So to keep herself and her kids in the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed, she's begun selling marijuana to her friends and neighbors. It's a familiar satiric conceit – clean-cut middle-classers turn to crime to maintain their familiar bourgeois comforts (it fueled, for example, the 70's era Jane Fonda/George Segal comedy Fun with Dick And Jane) – and if that was all that creator Jenji Kohan were up to in the show, the results'd be good for maybe three episodes at most. Thankfully, the half-hour series aims a bit wider than that. In her capacity as active PTA mother (and head of – irony alert! – Agresta Elementary School's Healthy Children's Committee), Nancy connects to a variety of upright citizens: most notably, Kevin Nealon's doper city councilman Doug (I laughed out loud at the shot of him tokin' in his car to Nelly McKay) and Elizabeth Perkins' neurotic bitch queen Celia (you can see elements of Megan Mullally's character from Will And Grace – a show that Kohan has written for – in Celia, though cable allows her to be a whole lot witchier). The latter is the kind of control freak parent who sees every one of her kids' transgressions (real or imagined) as a reflection on her, so she ham-fistedly attempts to spy on her teenaged daughter with a camera imbedded in a stuffed animal – and browbeats her pudgy younger girl into losing weight. Celia's borderline abusive parenting is contrasted with Nancy's more open and supportive relationship with her two sons, Silas and Shane. Though she may be dishonest with them in regards to her moneymaking practices (at one point telling her kids she's going out to a meeting of the Neighborhood Watch), in all else she's open and aboveboard. As a later day folkie once noted: "To live outside the law, you must be honest." And within the strictures of her suburban outlaw life, Nancy struggles to remain true. She insists that her pot is only sold to those old enough to handle it – and gets profoundly distressed when she learns the teenaged son of good customer Doug is selling the stuff to school kids. (How she winds up putting an end to this practice is one of the first ep's funnier subplots.) One of the show's conflicts, then, is between our heroine's desire to be a decent protective mother and the inevitable ways her newly chosen profession puts her in contact with a variety of dubious sorts. In the first episode at least, the fishiest figures turn out to be the ones living on Respectable Street. The black family on the other side of the tracks (led by Heylia James – note the variation on Perkins' character's first name – played by the comically matriarchal Tonye Patano) who supply Nancy with her weed comes across as much more mutually supportive and friendly. If the show's half-hour premiere packs perhaps more plot detail and characters than can comfortably fit into the confines of a 31-minute episode, the actors are appealing enough to keep you watching. Unlike the dead-end "edgy" sitcoms that premiered last week on fx, Starved and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, you can actually see yourself willingly spending more time with these folks. Weeds has its share of good tasteless jokes (there's a bit in the premiere featuring a tennis racket that matches anything the fx-ers could've manufactrued), but it never loses sight of its characters' humanity. Listening to Nancy half-mockingly/half nervously call herself a "punk-ass bitch" in Heylia's kitchen or watching Perkins as she tries to persuade Nancy to put a large stuffed animal/camera in son Silas' bedroom, you want to see what these entertainingly flawed women'll do next. As for the series' "controversial" pot-line (which Showtime, naturally, is emphasizing in the interests of maximizing publicity – and perhaps garnering some printable rants by the predictable knee-jerks), I can't see anyone who watches cable series regularly getting floored by the material (we Sopranos and Six Feet Under fans have seen series regulars engage in far riskier behaviors). Comedy has its roots in transgressive behaviors, after all. (Lest we forget, W.C. Fields was filming comedies that referred to drink while Prohibition was still in effect.) The big question isn't whether the series should be tackling this topic, but if it's funny tacking the topic. Judging from its debut, I'd say that Weeds has the potential to be very funny indeed. . . # | Wednesday, August 10, 2005 ( 8/10/2005 09:33:00 AM ) Bill S. "SMOKE, SMOKE, SMOKE THAT CIGARETTE!" – Lots of discussion in the blogosphere this week about smoking and the dangers thereof: with writers like Mark Evanier quoting or pointing readers to Keith Olbermann’s well-wrought piece on the death of Peter Jennings – and others like Steve Gerber telling non-smokers to shut the hell up, we smokers'll quit when and if we wanna quit. Outside of a short experimental phase in college that lasted about as long as it took me to realize that cigarettes would seriously cut into my book and music buying money (one of the few sensible economic decisions I’ve ever made in my life), I've not been a consumer of tobacco smoke. Good thing, too, since I've realized as I get older that I really don't respond well to it. Put me in a room packed with smokers for any extended length of time and my throat gets sore – and I develop a splitting headache. Tobacco industry apologists may assert with all the vigor they can muster that the dangers of second-hand smoke are overestimated. All I know is second-hand smoke makes me feel like shit. Back in the early 80's, I used to be part of a group of music geeks who rode up to Schaumberg in a record store van to see groups perform in a smoky club called B'Ginnings. The trip up took two hours, and we'd be loaded in the back the whole time with smokes and twelve-packs. For the longest time, I thought the reason I was waking up, feeling like crap was the brew. But when I stopped drinking, I found I was feeling just as bad only much sooner. Turned out the Miller Lite had been numbing me to the effects of being shut in a poorly ventilated metal box with a bunch of nicotine fiends. Still, if folks keep their habit away form my general proximity, I'm personally not gonna give 'em a lot of grief, even if I'm tempted to. My mother-in-law lived upstairs with us for close to two years: a hard-core smoker who needed to be on oxygen 24/7, she continued to smoke her generic cigarettes until the day she went into the hospital for the last time. Years of replacing oxygen with tobacco smoke had given her paper-thin flesh a grayish tinge. The first sign we had she was waking up in the morning was the sound of upstairs hacking. We didn't want her smoking in the house, but, considering her age, didn't feel like we could totally prohibit her habit either. As a weak-assed compromise, we set up a place on our screened-in back porch where she could smoke: some days, the lure of cigarettes was the only thing that would get her downstairs. It drove her daughter Becky crazy: this elderly woman with a nasal canulla draped around her neck – who suffered from regular bouts of emphysema and who had to take shots from a Nebulizer several times a day just to kick-start her lungs – hobbling downstairs for another dose of the poison which had such a heavy hand in her ill health. It's one thing to state that everybody has a right to do what they want with their bodies. It's another to live with someone you love, who displays the too-harsh results of doing what they want. Listening daily to the disheartening rattle of someone who can barely catch a breath, you can't help wishing you'd been around to shake some sense into 'em forty years earlier. . . # | Tuesday, August 09, 2005 ( 8/09/2005 07:00:00 AM ) Bill S. "YOU'RE NOTHING BUT A PACK OF CARDS!" – Haven't mentioned it for a while, but longtime visitors to this web log may remember that I'm member of a monthly Unitarian men's poker group: six to eight geezerly UU's playing a friendly game at each other's houses. I'm one of the younger members of the gang – over time, we’ve lost two players to the ravages of time and age – and it's probably the most guy-like thing that I consistently do. The game rotates through several members' homes, and last night was my turn to host. Not a lot of drinkers in our group, so hosting basically involves making decaf coffee and providing snacks and pop (club soda, mainly). We have a fold-out poker tabletop that we got at Big Lots for, like, $29.95. With the growing popularity of Texas Hold 'Em, you can get all sorts of poker accoutrements these days, but we stopped at the tabletop. Basically, each player buys a ten-buck stake of chips (part of the preparation process involves setting up eight piles of chips): dimes and quarter chips with a three-raise limit. This makes it an easy game to play without working a hardship on yourself. There've been a few games when I had to buy a couple of more dollars worth of chips to keep going, but the most I've ever lost was about $13.00. Last night, I came into the game with $10.00 and left with $10.05. Big winnings. Wife Becky sez she likes the fact that I play in this monthly game. As someone who ranks high on the Introvert scale in the Meyers-Briggs Personality Inventory, I'm not a big one for group stuff. Outside of commenting on the game itself, we don't do a lot of additional talking – a little bit of town 'n' church talk, a mild amount of Bush bashing – so it probably suits my temperament. In any event, I've been part of the poker group for more than five years now and, barring any unforeseen changes in my life or the group, hope to be part of the same bunch of guys five years from now and beyond. . . # | Monday, August 08, 2005 ( 8/08/2005 12:20:00 PM ) Bill S. WHO DOESN'T LOVE A GOOD SALE? – If I had more scratch, I know I'd be headin' over to Comic Book Galaxy's midsummer comic book sale: some choice titles (a shrinkwrapped copy of James Kolchalka's most recent CD release is what first caught my eye) to be had there. . . # | ( 8/08/2005 12:11:00 PM ) Bill S. BUT WILL WE GET AN OPENING DEATH NEXT WEEK? – Okay, so Six Feet Under violated its own once-rigid structural rules by not opening this week's ep with a thematically resonant fatality: let's accept that the previous week's hour-long death scene made such a moment redundant, particularly when it's established that Fisher & Diaz Funeral Home is distinctly not performing any other funerals in the wake of its second Nathaniel Fisher demise. As for the episode itself, while missing much of the mordant humor that characterizes so many of my favorite entries (Claire's flashback featuring a stoned Nate mourning the death of Kurt Cobain was a nice touch, though), it did a particularly masterful job delineating the emotional bondings and pitfalls that so often accompany a death in the family. The pissed-off outbursts and hurt feelings arising from nothing at all, the surprising moments when the person you least expect provides an ounce of strength and support, the not-so-surprising moments when the person you expect to hold it together doesn't: all of it was beautifully acted and written. It makes sense that Nate, the character who from the beginning had the most issues with the hermetic artificiality of modern funeral services, would have one that stripped away as much distancing ritual as possible. (Though even there, betrayed widow Brenda winds up sniping at Nate's ghost about his choice for a reading.) Though its concluding season has been spottier than its peak run (which I'd definitively argue is the series' second season - or mebbe its third), as we head for the series' final two shows, I know I'm already starting to miss every member of this intensely fucked-up & frustrating extended middle American family. . . # | Sunday, August 07, 2005 ( 8/07/2005 10:01:00 AM ) Bill S. PHOTOBUCKETING – Just a test pic of dawgs Ziggy Stardust and Cedar as this blogger gives the former a brushing.  # | ( 8/07/2005 06:48:00 AM ) Bill S. BETTER HIM THAN ME – Wilson Barbers actually sits through the first "full-figured reality beauty pageant": Mo'Nique's Fat Chance # | |
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