| Pop Culture Gadabout | ||
|
Saturday, September 19, 2009 ( 9/19/2009 09:00:00 PM ) Bill S. WEEKEND PET PIC: Standing outside in the backyard, I was able to get a quick shot of Xander cat, scratching at the sliding glass door and asking to be let out. Yeah, that's a bit of me in the reflection.  THE USUAL NOTE: For more cool pics of companion animals, please check out Modulator's "Friday Ark." # | Thursday, September 17, 2009 ( 9/17/2009 07:25:00 AM ) Bill S.  "ROCKABILLY GUYS MAY BE INSANE, BUT ROCKABILLY GUYS DON'T EAT BRAINS." In Laughin' and Cryin' with the Reverend Horton Heat (Yep Roc), the big emphasis is on the first apostrophized gerund. Primarily comprised of comic monologues sung from a "rural point of view," the Texas trio's latest release largely skips the harder rockin' moves that characterized earlier tracks like "400 Bucks" and "Wiggle Stick" in favor of energized Texas swing and rockabilly. If occasionally "Reverend" Jim Heath's jovial evocations of Texas livin' go for the too-easy target (e.g., the beer belly growing hubby of "Beer Holder" or the henpecked prole of "Just Let Me Hold My Paycheck"), the band's gleeful yee-haw playin' still carries the day.And, let me add, there are plenty of genuinely funny moments on this disc: whether it's the Reverend hipping Hollywood to the fact that there "Ain't No Saguaro in Texas" (as this AZ res can tell you, that particular cactus is native to the Sonoran desert) to a sprightly Tex-Mex polka or mock sermonizing that "God Doesn't Work in Vegas" with a rockabilly hiccup calculated to make us think of the King, the jokes generally work. The only total dud on the disc is the ploddingly mawkish ballad, "Aw, the Humanity," wherein an over-emotive Heath stretches his metaphorical comparison of a busted romance to the Hindenberg disaster to the snapping point. Bet that song gets the boozed-up paying attention when it's played live in the clubs, though. A couple of tracks overplay to yahoo sensitivities -- "Rural Point of View" knocks down a bunch of straw city folk for their gun-controllin', hybrid drivin' ways, while the barnstormin' "Death Metal Guys" contrasts rockabilly cats with death metal poseurs -- but only the latter produces any real chuckles. Better are Heath's comic laments, the country boogie "Crazy Ex-Boyfriend" and "Please Don't Take That Baby to the Liquor Store," which mine their material in comically convincing fashion. Elsewhere, the boys tackle Ernest Tubb's engagingly campy paean to the Lone Star State (note drummer Paul Simmons' shout-out to his home state of Tennessee), cover a swell Chet Atkins instrumental and assay an instrumental tribute to Santo and Johnny's "Sleepwalk." The last two may not contain any jokes, but -- as with their earlier instrumental work (think "Big Sky") -- agreeably display the band's rock solid sonic proficiency. Heath does slip a purely serious lyrical track onto the set (gotta get some of that Cryin' in somewhere), though: the hard-luck lament "River Run Dry," which happily conjures up memories of cow-punkers like Jason and the Scorchers. While the disc's more countrified sound as a whole may prove disappointing to fans who favor their kick-ass side, "River" demonstrates the guys have still got in it in 'em to keep on a-laughin' and a-cryin' through the rock 'n' roll wreckage. # | Wednesday, September 16, 2009 ( 9/16/2009 06:50:00 AM ) Bill S. "SOME BITCHIN' PROOF" An obvious choice this week, but, hey, it's a great song and the recently deceased Jim Carroll deserves to be remembered for it: # | Monday, September 14, 2009 ( 9/14/2009 07:34:00 AM ) Bill S.  CIGARETTE STAMPS AND OTHER CLUES: Picked up a copy of Stephen King's The Colorado Kid for a buck-&-a-quarter at a Dollar General the other day. Though I knew that this book received its share of pans when it first came out, I like King's writing voice enough that I figured it was worth the small expenditure. The 184-page 2005 Hard Case paperback proved a zippy read, and, while I can see why many fans disliked it, I still enjoy the man's way of telling a story enough to feel I got my money's worth.The book's packaging, I suspect, is largely to blame for the fannish hostility. Looking at the cover -- a sultry dame with her shapely gams crossed, gazing out a the reader provocatively -- and you expect a hardboiled piece of pulp comparable to the reissues that that Hard Case has made its stock in trade. But that "dame" proves to be a much less dangerous young girl reporter in the book, attentively listening as two small-town newspapermen school her in the nature of human mystery. (The only other lady in the case proves to be plump, so you know she ain't the one on the cover.) The mystery itself -- a young husband found dead on the wharf of a tiny Maine island -- has its share of small solutions, but its core questions are never resolved. If this story had appeared in one of King's short novel collections (Four Past Midnight, say), between two more straightforward examples of King-work, I suspect it might've gone over better: a dollop of more realistic storytelling in between the gothic thrills. But on its own, the story's slight ruminations on the connections to journalism to reality, on the differences between manufactured and real-life mysteries, prove insufficient to support its agreeably pulpish veneer. Every time I'd put the book down and look at its evocative cover, I'd think, "Lady, you've walked into the wrong joint." The old Fawcett hardboiled writers -- John D. MacDonald, Donald Hamilton, et al -- would've given their loyal readers much more to chew on. Labels: pulp fiction # |Sunday, September 13, 2009 ( 9/13/2009 11:26:00 AM ) Bill S.  "IT'S THEM BLOOMING 'OOLIGANS AGAIN!" The hapless lead of Frederick Burr Opper's classic newspaper strip, "Happy Hooligan," is a clownish figure: dressed in patched-up beggar's clothing, a soup can impossibly perched on his large melon head, he's the first great comic strip sad sack. Created in 1900, Opper's "Hooligan" was a popular feature in Hearst papers until the strip's demise in the thirties, though the figure has occasionally cameo-ed in later artists' works. Jules Feiffer, during the Ford Administration, drew the then-president in Hooligan garb right down to the soup can on his bald noggin.Issued as a part of NBM's "Forever Nuts" series of classic screwball strip collections, Happy Hooligan features a selection of Sunday strips circa 1902-13. Unlike the series' Bringing Up Father collection, the book doesn't contain a complete year-plus run -- perhaps because the strip's greater age (the first "Hooligan"s predate "Father" by a decade) makes it more difficult to complete. Opper's early strips were restricted to Sundays, so the entries here are in full or two-color form, depending on the source newspaper. The Sunday strips -- at least in the period repped here -- held to a fairly rigid formula. Our hero Happy is a goodhearted stumblebum whose intentions are regularly misread by the world around him. Attempting to help a city official place a wreath on a statue of George Washington, for instance, he tips the statue onto one of Opper's oversized coppers, who responds by clubbing him on the head and flattening his undislodged tin can chapeau. "The city ain't safe while you're loose," the officer states as the fuming official threatens to have our unlucky hero jailed. Happy's tramp appearance and low-class status contribute to his role as a steady scapegoat, though, to be sure, his clumsiness and clownish air of obliviousness also work in his disfavor. If there's a large rock on the ground, he'll stumble over it; if he's given a shovel or a board, you known he'll turn around without checking to see if there's anyone in the vicinity he might whack on the head. Part of the fun of many of Opper's entries resides in trying to anticipate in the first half of the two-tiered strip just how our hero is gonna get in trouble. "I can see big bunches of trouble coming," brother hobo Gloomy Gus says at one point, and the pessimistic sibling's predictions usually prove spot on. Opper's protagonist, then, proves a precursor to such misunderstood movie comic underdogs as Chaplin's Tramp, Laurel & Hardy, and The Three Stooges. (Our man even speaks in an NYC accent reminiscent of the Howard/Fine team.) As the series progressed, Opper added two siblings to the cast: the aforementioned Gus and an improbable British brother named Montmorency. The latter was as frequently misjudged and mishandled as Happy, though the shiftless Gus usually came out on top for ironic contrast. When the trio take a trip to England, Opper milks weeks of comedy from their unsuccessful attempts to see the King of England. In one particularly screwy Sunday, all three enter the palace, asking a royal guardsman to see the king, and are attacked by a gorilla who's been hiding behind a life-sized portrait of Richard III. Who knew that Buckingham Palace used 'em as bouncers? Also part of the strip were three nephews who often served as a comic chorus ("Uncle Happy's hoited!" they chant on more than once occasion) and an unlikely love interest named Suzanne. Happy would later marry this statuesque beauty, but at this point in the series, we see him unsuccessfully trying to win over a disapproving guardian -- and squashing one of Suzanne's hats during a disastrous picnic. Still, the bulk of the cartoons here have little to do with romance and more to do with our hobo hero's ill-fated attempts at being a Samaritan or (occasionally) holding down a job. The stinging joke imbedded in the series -- as it often is in slapstick of this ilk -- is the ease with which the authorities jump to the worst possible conclusions about Happy's mishaps. During the trio's tramp through Europe, for instance, the Swiss police even accuse Happy and Montmorency of "trying to steal a mountain," Opper taking the authoritarian tendency to exaggerate their culprit's misdeeds to a comically outlandish level. As a pioneering cartoonist, the prolific Opper is frequently credited with establishing many of the conventions of comics storytelling (he was, for example, the first cartoonist to consistently utilize word balloons, though he didn't invent them). His art is energetic and goofily expressive, while his precise handling of the mechanics of slapstick would later prove a major influence on cartoonists like Rube Goldberg. NBM's scans of these old, old strips are clean and crisp -- with the exception of a poorly cropped offering from 1912 -- and the "Forever Nuts" book does this rarely seen comic strip proud. It's a good read, not just for students of early comic art, but for lovers of an enjoyably rough-hewn, low-brow American brand of humor. Labels: classic comic strips # | |
|
|
