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Thursday, May 08, 2008 ( 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? # | Wednesday, May 07, 2008 ( 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!" # | ( 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 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! # | ( 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. # | Tuesday, May 06, 2008 ( 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. # | Monday, May 05, 2008 ( 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 . . . # | Sunday, May 04, 2008 ( 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." # | ( 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 . . . Labels: classics illustrated # | |
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