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Saturday, April 12, 2008 ( 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." # | ( 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. # | Friday, April 11, 2008 ( 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. # | Wednesday, April 09, 2008 ( 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! # | ( 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": # | Monday, April 07, 2008 ( 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 . . . # | Sunday, April 06, 2008 ( 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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