Pop Culture Gadabout
Saturday, September 09, 2006
      ( 9/09/2006 02:09:00 PM ) Bill S.  


WEEKEND BARREL PIC – It's a busy weekend, but that won't stop me from posting a second Kyan barrel pic:


THE USUAL NOTE: If you wanna see more dogg blogging, check out the weekly "Carnival of the Dogs" at Mickey's Musings. And for a broader array of companion animals, there's Modulator's "Friday Ark."
# |



Friday, September 08, 2006
      ( 9/08/2006 12:58:00 PM ) Bill S.  


W & W – From newly discovered blog, The Horn Section: a consideration of Wheeler & Woolsey's Diplomaniacs that's posted under the ongoing blog title, "Why The Hell Isn't This on DVD?" Haven't yet seen this 'un, but it sounds like I've been missing a choice bit of Thirties Pre-Code Comedy. (Thanks, Aaron, for pointing it out!)
# |

      ( 9/08/2006 09:40:00 AM ) Bill S.  


THE FIFTEEN-MINUTE COMIC – Best of Jellyfish is playin' on the Sony boom box; a small pile of mainstream comics are waitin' to be reviewed, the dogs are sittin' in the study with leather chew rolls in their maws; I'm runnin' out of apostrophes – so let's just haul out some snapshot reviews:
  • All-Star Superman #5 (DC): The Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely take on Superman continues with a more broadly comic episode, featuring our hero in Clark Kent guise throughout the entire ish. Biggest joke here is on eyebrow-less Lex Luthor, who Morrison presents as so habitually self-congratulatory that he can't even conceive that the big alien lug he so detests is the reporter who's come to Stryker's Island to interview him. (Confronted with the strapping former farm boy, Luthor condescendingly concludes that Kent's physique is flabby, an image Quitely reinforces through Kent's sumissive posture.) It's like a variation on all those haunted house comedies (or Porky & Sylvester toons) where the straight man/pig is so blithely sure he knows what's going on, he never once sees the grasping hands reaching for his neck. I accepted the joke, though I've gotta admit it was touch-&-go in a few places (most specifically, when super-genius Lex is unable to recognize where the ultra-gorged Parasite is getting all his stolen power). Still, this remains the most fun Superman comic in years – too bad we've only got seven more issues of it.

  • Batman #656-6 (DC): "If there's one thing I hate," Grant Morrison's (please don't overload your beautiful mind, Grant!) Batman asserts as he battles an army of ninja Man-Bats, "it's art with no content." To nail the point, Morrison (and the increasingly Jack Davis-like Andy Kubert) place the fight in the midst of a pop art show, where large mounted Lichtenstein parodies comment on the story action. ("Look, up in the sky!" one painting notes from the corner of a panel, just before a second wave of Man-Bats prepares to swoop down on our hero.) It's an amusing joke, but, unfortunately, Morrison doesn't give us much more in the first two issues of his Bat run. Perhaps it's a matter of perspective: where All-Star Superman takes the character back to carefully cherry-picked parts of his history, Batman is still enmeshed in present-day Batman continuity. A few nice touches – I liked how Alfred has to keep reminding Bruce Wayne to ixnay on the owlgray when he's in playboy millionaire guise – but the primary plotline featuring Talia, that army of Man-Bats and a boy who may or may not be the Caped Crusader’s son, seems a tad musty.

  • Justice League of America #1 (DC): Like the first two issues of The Boys, this 'un concentrates on Getting The Band Back Together – and, if the results aren't as much fun as the first Blues Brothers movie, well, Brad Meltzer & Ed Benes do manage to get me caring about a character who has pretty much been a cipher to me in the past: namely, Red Tornado, whose resurrection for fifth (or sixth?) time is actually conveyed with a trace of poignancy. Second-best moment: when Green Arrow falsely assumed he's been asked into the reforming group, only to learn that he's not the one being sought. Haven't felt so bad for the character since Kevin Smith got his politically unsympathetic mitts on ol' Oliver.

  • The Trials of Shazam! #1 (DC): Maybe my affection for the old Fawcett Captain Marvel is coloring my perspective, but I'm not sure I accept the assertion being made by more than one comics blogospherian that the original model doesn't play with presentday comics readers. The success of young kids' manga – which often traffics in a comparable blend of whimsy and cartoonishness – argues against this. Perhaps it's a fairer point to state that the old Fred MacMurray-inspired Cap has no place in the current DCU, where even an once sparkly show biz confection like Zatanna has her own dark secrets. But he's there, and we've gotta deal with him there, and I'll admit that scripter Judd Winick does a decent job justifying his presence. I'm pretty cool toward artist Howard Porter's painterly style – which seems to work overtime, trying to convince us this is not your grandaddy’s Cap'n. And didn't he get the memo that Zatanna (per Benes' Jim Lee affected JLA) has serious cleavage now?
Even More Briefly Noted:
  • The Boys #2 (WildStorm): Ennis & Roberston conclude their two-part intro to our gang of superhero hunters, though aside from a suitably appalling moment featuring Butcher's dog Terror and a ravaged shitzu, there's little in this 2nd issue to satisfy Ennis fans' taste for over-the-top violence. Mebbe next time?

  • Hero Squared #2 (Boom!): Not as solid as the previous shrink issue, though the Marvel pastiche pages crafted by "Kooky" Keith Giffen, "Jaunty" J.M. DeMatteis & "Joltin'" Jon Abraham are kicky. Next issue promises "Less Talking, More Hitting," but, since I like the tawking, I'm not sure if this is a cause for celebration or not.

  • X Isle #2 (Boom!): If I don't see silhouettes popping up at the bottom of the panels, making with the snark and alluding to The Killer Shrews, by the third issue, I'm gonna be sorely disappointed.
# |



Thursday, September 07, 2006
      ( 9/07/2006 03:39:00 PM ) Bill S.  


"THE WORLD IS NOT BEAUTIFUL; THEREFORE, IT IS." – Me, I've gotta wonder what Tokyopop is specifically talking about when they refer to "the beauty in life's imperfections," but this contest over at ADD's blog for what looks to be T-Pop’s new line of teen fantasy novels is worth noting . . .
# |

      ( 9/07/2006 02:34:00 PM ) Bill S.  


"SUMMER IT'S GONE, AND I DON'T KNOW" – Time was summertime used to be the suckiest season for teevee viewers. But ever since teevee execs realized that plenty of us lazyass Americans didn't want to leave the house at night even when it's still light outside (Man, I've already taken off my shoes! And, besides, there are mosquitoes with West Nile out there!), that dire situation has happily changed. With new packages of original programming popping up to fill the basic cable dog days, there plenty of stuff equal to (and some cases, superior to) the fare offering during the prime television season. In many cases, the compact nature of the summer bloc (12-13 eps to the traditional 22) works to these show's benefit: less filler, more great taste. And now that summer has unofficially passed with the Labor Day Weekend, let's consider five series that I found indispensable this year.
  • Deadwood (HBO): Man, will I miss this show, though it's a miracle even HBO allowed it to stay on for as long as it did. I'd argue that the series' third and final season was its strongest to date – which is really saying something: tough and poetic and surprising and heartbreakingly human. Where many westerns purport to show us how the wild west was tamed, Deadwood actually gets a the story by detailing the awkward and rocky process of community building, showing us characters who more traditionally would've been shoved into the villain role as vital components of the "civilizing" process. Bonus points for the best written dialog and use of canny character actors on television. Oh yeah, and Ian McShane was fuckin' robbed by Emmy once again . . .

  • Eureka (Sci-Fi): Hard to follow David Milch's creation with anything of comparable stature, so let's not even try – and instead take note of an utterly frivolous sci-fi comedy set in a mythical Pacific Northwestern small town packed with mad brainiacs. As the regular guy sheriff dropped into Eureka to keep things orderly, Colin Ferguson has an appealing way with a quip – plus any show which gives Matt Frewer free range to chaw the scenery is okay by me. To this viewer, much more fun than the sturm & drang of Battlestar Galactica, but then you probably disagree, right? I like that they paired it up with reruns of Dead Like Me, too.

  • Life on Mars (BBC America): We know hero Sam Tyler won't make it out of 1973 by the end of the season (hey, what about that kidnapped ex-?) But our hero's plight – smart modern cop stuck in an era when even the chase music was tacky – is colored with enough comedy and angst to make me wanna sit though another season of his travails. Points go to the rest of the cast (snarly Philip Glenister, in particular), playing Sam's (possibly imaginary) peers without a trace of winking condescension. Great use of Sweet and Alex Harvey songs on the soundtrack, too – the most left field delight of the summer season.

  • Psych (USA): And then there's Psych, which plays to the already established comedy/mystery audience USA built with Monk (which has all but abandoned mystery in favor of one or two admittedly-funny comic set-pieces per episode). Lightweight fun, with great interplay between James Roday's fake psychic Shawn and his foil Gus (Dulé Hill). Thumbs up for setting the season's last mystery at a comic book con: if the nerd jokes were obvious, many of the pop culture ones weren't – and, unlike his recent appearance on Bill Shatner's Comedy Central Roast, George Takei was actually funny!

  • Weeds (Showtime): When you consider that Showtime's last half-hour sitcom was Fat Actress, Weeds' accomplishment is, well, like following Arliss with The Larry Sanders Show. Second season of this pot-dealing housewife series started in mid-August and has already taken two startling but believable plot turns. The key is Mary Louise Parker's believably frazzled bourgeois dope peddler: as appealing and exasperating a sitcom lead as you could hope to find. Both generous and appropriately mean-spirited when it needs to be, Weeds is not just the best cable sitcom currently running, it's one of the best, period. How good is this comedy? Good enough to make Kevin frickin' Nealon a comedian!
(Nearly added to the above list, but left off due to sheer impulsiveness on my part: TNT's The Closer and BBC America's Hex.)

Summer also had its share of total suckiness, of course, but I tried to steer clear of it, focusing on House and The Wire reruns when the going got really bad. I honestly wanted to like ABC Family's Three Moons Over Milford – we could do with a decent whimsical small-town dramedy, I thought – but the show's writing and acting proved so far from convincing, it was like watching the community theater troupe from Waiting for Guffman put on their own syndicated series. Caught five minutes of Sci-Fi's Who Wants to Be A Superhero while recording the 11:05 showing of Eureka one night – and found just that small dose excruciating. Has any man pissed on his legacy as thoroughly as Stan Lee? Watching "The Man" ask the self-titled Fat Mama if her plus-sized self made an appropriate role model for the kids, I could only sigh and think back to Tracy Turnblad's Council interview in the movie Hairspray, where a variation on the same question was put in the mouth of Amber Van Tussle, the movie's spoiled brat teenaged bitch. Just damn sad, sez I, sadder than the end of summer . . .
# |

      ( 9/07/2006 04:40:00 AM ) Bill S.  


NETWORK PRACTICES – While I don't consider it kosher to comment on a telemovie that I haven't seen (and don't really plan on watching, for that matter), I do find it telling that ABC – after letting a bunch of conservapundits into an advanced screening of The Path to 9/11 – refused to offer the same courtesy to Bill Clinton or any other Clinton Administration officials who are reportedly targeted in the flick.
# |

      ( 9/07/2006 04:14:00 AM ) Bill S.  


A DONATION PLEA – Though everybody else in the comics blogosphere has already written about it, I figured it can't hurt to add mention of comic artist Lea Hernandez's devastating house fire here. Donations through PayPal (to divalea@gmail.com) to help Lea and her family get through this have been set up, while Lea herself has written about the aftershock on her LiveJournal blog, Dangerous Beauty. And, while you're thinking about it, why not do a double-check on your smoke detector batteries?
# |



Wednesday, September 06, 2006
      ( 9/06/2006 02:38:00 PM ) Bill S.  


BOTTOMS UP – A question from last night's season premiere: okay, we accepted young Matt's temporary(?) conversion into a skin-headed gay basher in last season's nip/tuck, but isn't Christian Troy a little bit old to start in with the adolescent homosexual panic? (I liked how writer/director Ryan Murphy messed w./ the character's long-established positional preference, though. . .)
# |

      ( 9/06/2006 07:27:00 AM ) Bill S.  


ONE LESS ANIMAL ON THE PLANET – I'm mainly with Sean when it comes to considering the cut-short life and works of "Croc Hunter" Steve Irwin – though I personally found his Animal Planet show and persona quickly grew wearisome. If a good chunk of his teevee shtick was nothing more than an updating of the big top putting-yer-head-in-a-lion's-mouth act, he surrounded it with enough edumacation to make the sugar go down. Wonder which cable net'll first be showing that goofy movie of his?
# |



Tuesday, September 05, 2006
      ( 9/05/2006 01:51:00 PM ) Bill S.  


"BUT YOU'RE NOT EVEN SURE WHAT IT IS" – To go alongside the recent release of Modern Times, here's a YouTube vid from Have Mercy's deservedly best-known track:


# |

      ( 9/05/2006 11:55:00 AM ) Bill S.  


TUMBLIN' & ROLLIN' – Though I've very much enjoyed the two Bob Dylan studio releases that preceded his newest, Modern Times, neither one of 'em really managed to grab me by the ears and shout, "Pay attention, Bub!" the way my favorite Dylan elpees did. Yet listening to his latest disc, I found myself getting pulled into the music in a way I haven't been since – oh, Blood on the Tracks, maybe? Stylistically, it doesn't sound much different from Time Out of Mind or Love And Theft: our man's still singing his blend of country blues, old-styled r-&-r and Tin Pan Alley in the leisurely croak he's adopted in his later years, while his band largely stays dutifully behind him. The secret lies in the words – of which there are once more many – which Dylan slings onto his basic musical constructions with dogged faith in his audience's willingness to follow 'em wherever they might circuitously lead. Results: a freakin' great Dylan album!
# |



Monday, September 04, 2006
      ( 9/04/2006 08:16:00 AM ) Bill S.  


SIXTY MINUTE MANGA – (This Month's Episode: School is in.)

Blame Jog (of the Blog fame) for this 'un. It was his review that sparked my interest in Kazuo Umezu's The Drifting Classroom (Viz Signature), a "Mature" horror manga originally (as the helpful selected bibliography tells us in the back of the book) run in 1972-4. Like Tokyopop's Dragon Head, Umezu's series tells the story of a group of schoolchildren who suddenly and inexplicably find themselves trapped in a space far from home. But while Mochizuki's Dragon Head works hard at deliberately conveying a believable sense of doom and dread, Classroom bounds into energetic outlandish melodrama. This difference in approach is suited to the ages of each series' leads: where the hero of Dragon is a teenager, Umezu's Sho is a somewhat hyperactive sixth grader. But my suspicion, based on just one volume of this series, is that Umezu is by nature a much louder cartoonist than Mochizuki.

The first book opens with a series of boisterous arguments between our hero Sho Takamatsu and his overly serious mother: Sho rushes off to school with the fight (in part spurred by the fact that his mother has tossed away a drawer full of childish toys) unresolved. "If it weren't for what happened next," Sho tells us in narration, "the whole fight would have been quickly forgotten . . . just another part of our daily lives." But, instead, catastrophe strikes. With a large sonic boom, the entire Yamoto Elementary School grounds disappear, leaving nothing but a large gaping hole. (We're shown this from the perspective of one of Sho's schoolmates, who is late for class.) Sho, the rest of the student body and their teachers have likewise disappeared with the school, gone to who-knows-where, an object lesson in why you should never leave your loved ones on a harsh note.

Yamoto Elementary has, mysteriously, shifted to a dark and desolate alien landscape. Cut off from family and the rest of the outside world, Sho and his classmates are on the verge of panicking. Their adult teachers don't seem to be faring much better, struggling to maintain order over a group of children that run the gamut from first through sixth grade. In one memorable moment, a teacher grabs his own son and cuts him on the arm with a piece of broken glass in order to shock a group of freaked-out kids into calming down. When once the lines 'tween teacher and student were more routinely friendly and forgiving (just before the catastrophe, we see the sixth grade teacher excuse those students who didn't bring their lunch money to class), the school setting has immediately become more polarized.

To make matters worse, our unwilling castaways seem to be stranded inside the school: when one of the students makes a dash across the foreboding landscape, he collapses just out of sight and doesn't appear to get up. There's only a limited amount of food since lunches are delivered daily, and Sho – who raced to school after an unresolved fight with his mother, remember – didn't even have breakfast. Desperate to reach his mom, he attempts to reach her by phone (a thought that doesn't appear to have occurred to any of the adults yet); he runrunruns to the teacher's lounge but to no avail since the phones are out of order. To keep the rest of the school from panicking, Sho's teacher convinces him to act as if he was able to get through to his mother. But the rest of his classmates don't buy it, in part because reluctant liar Sho does such a poor job lying. In this you can see the seeds of a conflict between students and teachers already brewing: the adults are willing to say and do anything to maintain even the semblance of order – even if it doesn't really help the situation – even if it's at the expense of one or more of their charges.

While the American publication is rated for a "Mature" audience, Umezu's art is beautifully keyed into capturing a pre-teen point-of-view. Though relatively realistic in his figures, cartoonish expressions and physical movements are largely the order of the day. Even during the violent moments (and there are several of 'em), I found myself thinking of the sardonic horror art of Jack Davis & Johnny Craig. (There's a two-page panel of the school principal holding his bleeding head that looks like it could've been a cover to The Vault of Horror.) Just the sort of comics that a sixth grader like Sho would've dug, I bet . . .

A promising horror series, methinks: between this and Monster, Viz's older readers Signature series looks to be one to watch . . .

NOTE: This entry was originally supposed to be about Atsushi Kaneko's Bambi And Her Pink Gun, but as I note down below, that ultra-vi comic hitgirl series has reportedly been snuffed by its American publisher DMP after a mere two volumes . . .

Labels:

# |



Sunday, September 03, 2006
      ( 9/03/2006 08:50:00 AM ) Bill S.  


LABOR DAY WEEKEND PET PIC – A Kyan Pup head shot:



NOTE: If you wanna see more dogg blogging, check out the weekly "Carnival of the Dogs" at Mickey's Musings. And for a broader array of companion animals, there's Modulator's "Friday Ark."
# |

      ( 9/03/2006 06:24:00 AM ) Bill S.  


"A PSYCHIC FREAK-OUT IN TRANS-ETHERIC VISION" – Some flicks – as most devotees of psychotronic cinema know and love – are so removed from mundane constraints like competent moviemaking that to watch 'em is like hotwiring yourself into someone's 18th nervous breakdown. One such inadvertent postcard from the edge is the 1972 horror sexfilm, Psyched by the 4D Witch, a startling piece of cut-&-paste psychedelic ineptitude that can presently be seen as the bottom half of a DVD double bill with Herschel Gordon Lewis & William Rebane's MST3000 fodder Monster A-Go Go courtesy the obsessive cheeseheads at Something Weird Video. The sole feature credited to the clearly pseudonymous Victor Luminera, Psyched tells the non-story of a pimply-nosed junior college student named Cindy (Margo), who accidentally conjures up the spirit of a vengeful witch named Abigail (the delightfully named Esoterica) by basically sitting on the floor of her apartment nekkid and waving a couple candles around.

Abigail, who was once put to death in Salem for engaging in "sexual witchcraft," utilizes Cindy as a vessel for her own gratification. Inhabiting the fourth dimension with a "host of astral demons" who look like they wandered in from a Kenneth Anger short, the witch prods the virginal (so virginal, she’s never even had an orgasm while masturbating) Cindy into a series of sexual fantasy adventures that grow progressively more debauched (her mystic incantation: "Let's fantasy fuck now!") Duped Cindy agrees to indulge in these dream adventures because Abigail assures her she'll remain pure (our heroine's response – "I'll still remain a virgin for my daddy!" – is profoundly disturbing), but it soon becomes clear that these sexual adventures are also having an effect on the real world. Her best friend Jan (Sandra Lane), forced to copulate with a snake on the astral plane [insert not-so-topical joke here] while Cindy helplessly watches, ends up in a coma. When our heroine fights back against the mind-controlling sorceress, Abigail retaliates by turning the girl's brother Mark (Tom Yerian) into a "sex vampire" with awkwardly protruding fangs.

Told entirely in voiceover by a trio of non-actors (poor Margo stumbles over her lines more than once), Psyched combines city travelogue footage, scenes from soft-core sex flick (all you see are head shots of characters in the throes of poorly acted sexual ecstasy and a lotta bare breasts) with shots and overlays that look like a student attempt at recreating a sixties era underground feature. Sinisterly masked creatures regularly loom into the camera like they were auditioning for the orgy scenes in Eyes Wide Shut; a snake puppet bobbles in and out of the frame; scratched film and solarized light shows are used to suggest sexual arousal and mind-blowing climax – all very faux trippy. (More than one character makes reference to this being "just like an LSD trip.") Stock classical music like "Bolero" and "Night on Bald Mountain" is frequently used to clumsily ratchet up the drama – at one point, we hear ominous orchestration as the camera shows a dog watching ducks in a pond – like some Music Appreciation Class from Hell. Even cooler is the movie's garagey theme song, which gets repeated so often that it's impossible to get out of your head afterwards. (Why haven't the Cramps ever recorded this baby?)

Like H.G. Lewis' Jimmy, the Boy Wonder, Victor Luminera's masterwork appears to have been sloppily pasted together from several uncompleted movies: the tacked-on "sex vampire" subplot in the film's final third has no real connection to what we've seen before – and is so poorly night-filmed that we can barely see what's taking place, anyway. The voiceover dialog used to limply tie things together is hysterically clunky ("My heart pounded even faster as I watched what ensued," chirpy voiced Cindy tells us as her sex vamp brother starts foaming at the mouth) and the music so raggedly inserted that it often cuts off mid-note. "Could this really be happening?" a voiceover asks in full Shatnerian mode. "Or is it all a nightmare . . . I'm dreaming?" I'm guessing the movie theater audience had pretty much the same question back in 1972 . . .

Astral slut Cindy ultimately escapes the 4D Witch (or does she?) by experiencing a "real flesh-and-blood climax" (or does she?) at hands of her best friend's psychiatrist father, who perishes (or, etc.?) as the two come together (or do they?) Lady Chatterley-style. "If my daddy could only see me now!" Cindy squeaks in voiceover, making us all really wonder about the never-seen old man. The movie ends with an ominous warning from Abby. The etheric dimension is real, she states, and you out there in the audience might be her next victim. "Not me," most of the audience thinks, "I've had an orgasm once!"

UPDATE: Psyched fan Aaron Neathery, writing in email about Something Weird's decision to release the film beneath Monster A-Go Go, sez:
I find it amazing that something so off the wall and unique takes a backseat to Bill "Giant Spider Invasion" Rebane's nearly unwatchable Monster A-Go Go on the SW DVD. The big question in my mind is whether or not a film can be deemed inept if the filmmakers weren't trying to achieve "ept" in the first place. PBT4DW knows no laws of filmmaking and seems perfectly happy with that.
Considering that SWV got its company name from a Herschel Gordon Lewis film, it's not surprising to see 'em pushing A-Go Go up front, even if Lewis' involvement in the film was reportedly rather limited. Me, I'm glad to see Something Weird packed its DVD with so much psychotronic goodness: in addition to the two features, there are three horror shorts of plus a gallery of drive-in movie trailers. I can only hope those Fangoria readers who bought the disc to complete their collection of Lewis marginalia had their minds totally blown by the 4D Witch . . .
# |



Pop cultural criticism - plus the occasional egocentric socio/political commentary by Bill Sherman (popculturegadabout AT yahoo.com).



On Sale Now!
Measure by Measure:



A Romantic Romp with the Fat and Fabulous
By Rebecca Fox & William Sherman

(Available through Amazon)

Measure by Measure Web Page







Ask for These Fine Cultural Blogs & Journals by Name!

aaronneathery.com News
Aaron Neathery

American Sideshow Blow-Off
Marc Hartzman

Arf Lovers
Craig Yoe

Attentiondeficitdisorderly
Sean T. Collins

Barbers Blog
Wilson Barbers

The Bastard Machine
Tim Goodman

The Beat
Heidi MacDonald

BeaucoupKevin
Kevin Church

Big Fat Blog
Paul McAleer

Big Mouth Types Again
Evan Dorkin

Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog
Laura "Tegan" Gjovaag

Blog This, Pal!
Gordon Dymowski

Bookgasm
Rod Lott

Cartoon Brew
Amid Amidi & Jerry Beck

Cartoon Web Log!
Daryl Cagle

Clea's Cave
Juana Moore-Overmyer

Collected Editions

The Comics Curmudgeon
Josh Fruhlinger

The Comics Reporter
Tom Spurgeon

Comics.212
Christopher Butcher

Comics Waiting Room
Marc Mason

Comics Worth Reading
Johanna Draper Carlson

a dragon dancing with the Buddha
Ben Varkentine

Egon

Electromatic Radio
Matt Appleyard Aaron Neathery

Estoreal
RAB

Eye of the Goof
Mr. Bali Hai

Fred Sez
Fred Hembeck

Greenbriar Picture Shows
John McElwee

The Groovy Age of Horror
Curt Purcell

The Hooded Utilitarian
Noah Berlatsky

Hooray for Captain Spaulding
Daniel Frank

The Horn Section
Hal

The House Next Door
Matt Zoller Seitz

Howling Curmudgeons
Greg Morrow & Friends

The Hurting
Tim O'Neil

I Am A Child of Television
Brent McKee

I Am NOT the Beastmaster
Marc Singer

In Sequence
Teresa Ortega

Innocent Bystander
Gary Sassaman

Irresponsible Pictures
Pata

Jog - The Blog
Joe McCulloch

The Johnny Bacardi Show
David Allen Jones

Journalista
Dirk Deppey

King's Chronicles
Paul Dini

Let's You And Him Fight
One of the Jones Boys

Mah Two Cents
Tony Collett

Metrokitty
Kitty

Michael's Movie Palace
Michael

Nat's TV
Nat Gertler

Ned Sonntag

Neilalien

News from ME
Mark Evanier

No Rock&Roll Fun
Simon B

Omega Channel
Matt Bradshaw

Pen-Elayne on the Web
Elayne Riggs

PeterDavid.net
Peter David

(postmodernbarney.com)
Dorian White

Progressive Ruin
Mike Sterling

Punk Rock Graffiti
Cindy Johnson & Autumn Meredith

Revoltin' Developments
Ken Cuperus

Rhinoplastique
Marc Bernardin

Scrubbles
Matt Hinrichs

Self-Styled Siren
Campaspe

Spatula Forum
Nik Dirga

Tales from the Longbox
Chris Mosby

TangognaT

The Third Banana
Aaron Neathery & Friends

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear
Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.

Toner Mishap
B2 et al

Trusty Plinko Stick
Bill Doughty

TV Barn
Aaron Barnhart et al

Unqualified Offerings
Jim Henley

Various And Sundry
Augie De Blieck

Video WatchBlog
Tim Lucas

When Fangirls Attack
Kalinara & Ragnell

X-Ray Spex
Will Pfeifer

Yet Another Comics Blog
Dave Carter



A Brief Political Disclaimer:

If this blog does not discuss a specific political issue or event, it is not because this writer finds said event politically inconvenient to acknowledge - it's simply because he's scatterbrained and irresponsible.




My Token List of Poli-Blogs:

Alicublog
Roy Edroso

Eschaton
Atrios

Firedoglake
Jane Hamsher

James Wolcott

Lance Mannion

The Moderate Voice
Joe Gandelman

Modulator
Steve

Pandagon
Amanda Marcotte & Friends

The Sideshow
Avedon Carol

Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo
Skippy

Talking Points Memo
Joshua Micah Marshall

This Modern World
Tom Tomorrow

Welcome to Shakesville
Melissa McEwan & Friends



Blogcritics: news and reviews
Site Feed



Powered by Blogger



Twittering:
    follow me on Twitter