The world of animation, past and present

I've been meaning to put up a link to Jennifer Lerew's blog for a few months now. She's a story artist for animated films working in Southern California so she started a blog to share some of her sketches. As if that wasn't fun enough, she then started scanning all of the animation memorabilia that she's been finding.

Now, she's decided to split the subjects into two blogs, Blackwing Diaries for the memorabilia and Blackwing Sketchbook for her art. Go visit both. They are quite excellent.

The Comic Strip, Part 27 - When all logic grows cold and all thinking gets done

"GLC" - February 15th, 1990

London, like many large cities, is a megapolis made up of a number of smaller entities that have joined together to make a more efficient whole. From 1964 to 1986, metropolitan London was governed by the Greater London Council. Perhaps the best known leader of the GLC was a gentleman named Ken Livingstone, who, as I understand it, leans a bit to the left of the political spectrum.


Perhaps more than a little bit.

As I write this I notice that Livingstone is making headlines in America for calling the US ambassador to Britain a "chiseling little crook." I love it when these things come together.

At the end of The Strike there is a throwaway joke about how the next film that gets the over the top "Hollywood" treatment would be the GLC, and here it is. Robbie Coltrane is Charles Bronson as Ken Livingstone, doing battle over the hearts of London with Jennifer Saunders' Margaret Thatcher. As before, a lot of the details are mucked with to the point that I have no clue what bits are real events slightly skewed, or made up out of cliches. For example, I'm not sure how much reality the meet-cute relationship with Dawn French as Cher as Livingstone's single mom/neighbor is based on.

One interesting side note is Peter Richardson as Tony Benn (as portrayed by Lee Van Cleef). Here is a post that I noticed a little while ago about Mr. Benn. Once again, it all comes together.

And this time the soundtrack is by Kate Bush. She sings the theme to the Greater London Council. I really want there to be a soundtrack album.

Strangely, I was not invited.

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the first appearance of Ultraman. To celebrate, all of his various incarnations gathered with family and friends for some cocktails, some memories and perhaps the opportunity to gang up and kick the snot out of a giant crawdad.

Here's the group photo:


Japundit gives you the who's who.

The Globe will teach you language skills.

From the Boston Globe article about the March 27th Boston Red Sox/Tampa Bay Devil Ray bench-clearing brawl:

Players from both teams then rushed in, Sox reliever Jonathan Papelbon all the way from the bullpen, behind the stands, arriving in time to pull Gathright out of the pack and hold him. Trent Durrington, the Sox' resident Aussie, found himself at one point at the bottom of the mudpile. (''A bit of a wank," Durrington told reporters afterward, using a native idiom for ''show.")

la saveur d'huile de moteur!

Blasting its way out of Napa is this blend with the exciting name that I won't mention here.

I don't want to ruin the surprise when you click.

$50 a bottle, $150 for a wooden case of three (So a free wooden case. Cool.)

And look! The wine has a podcast!

You can't eat your status as a gigantic icon to science fiction fandom

Now on e-bay, the opportunity to eat dinner with Harlan Ellison! Starting at $5,000 (and there have been no bids as of yet) you can make your own way to LA, where Ellison will take you, your optional companion, his wife and a celebrity friend (to be determined) to a restaurant that he will choose himself. He will pick up the tab from the money that you just spent on him, except for any alcohol that you or your optional companion might drink - he wants you to pay for that.

Of course now, also thanks to e-bay, you can show up to dinner in Stan Lee's car. Described as "a long, lean 1987 Mercedes 420 SEL gray touring sedan," this deal comes with Lee's vanity plate "MRVLCMX" and he will autograph it "on dashboard or wherever desired. Excelsior!" Current bidding is $3,550, and the reserve has not been met. Added Bonus!: "Countless celebs have sat in the comfortable leather seats."

Stuff I Find

One of the reasons that I started this blog in the first place (you might tell from the address) is because I have, over the years, accumulated a lot of stuff, and this would be a place for me to make a note of it.

Then I could get rid of it.

I spent a chunk of the weekend digging through my stuff and not blogging.

Here's something I found - A flyer from some bookseller advertising "Books from the Moscow Flat of Kim Philby."

I think I snagged it because I was amused by this item:

Malcom Muggeridge, The Earnest Atheist.
A Study of Samuel Butler. Author's presentation copy. Inscribed, "Dear Bobo, I don't particularly like this book now, and I'm sure you won't, but I've just got the six copies of the American edition and I thought I'd send you one......Malcom Muggeridge 31.3.37"

The Comic Strip, Part 26 - I'd love to hold you, I'd like to kiss you, I ain't got time for that now

"South Atlantic Raiders Part 2" - February 8th, 1990


I love the way they take advantage of the two parter by having the second part start in medias res. Actually as the beginning of a second parter is always in medias res, this episode starts in the middle of the second half of things.

To sum up, the first part ended with Stan busting his band of misfits out of a British prison, and part 2 opens with him in his skivvies about to be executed by Lemmy from Motörhead.

From what I recall of the American news coverage of the Falklands War at the time, events went like this:

Argentina invaded these islands that clearly belonged to the British. The British went to take them back because, even though they were useless, it was the principle of the thing. Months later, a big load of British warships showed up and the Argentinians went "whoops, sorry!" and scampered back to their llama farms, never to bother anyone again. No shots fired. Hooray for Thatcher because she behaved just like Reagan would if he were in a similar situation.

Really. That's how I remember it.

It seems that it was a bit more complex, have a look in wikipedia for details.

Two more things to mention: First, I notice that the soundtrack is by Jeff Beck. It's not that bad, I wonder if somewhere there might be a soundtrack album of all the sound cues from the series. Secondly, nice to see a good old-fashioned comedy airliner hijack. That's another thing that has gone away with the sensibilities of recent days.

Enjoy a clever music video

"Don't Fuck With Love" by The Sad Little Stars. It's a clever song too.

Via Do Copenhagen.

Yeah, like anyone would get upset by a cartoon.

A group of pagans are putting out their own "Jack Chick" style religious tracts.

In ["Heathens Idolize School Prayer"], we see a band of Vikings at the Board of Education offices, demanding prayer in the schools. But their demands are a bit different - they're asking for prayer to the Moon on Monday, classroom mead drinking and sword-fights in honor of the war god Tui on Tuesday, Woden honored on Wednesday, Thor on Thursday, and Frigga on Friday! They respectfully point out that since the children will be using these names for the days of the week all their lives, perhaps they should be familiar with their origins! It puts the whole school prayer ruckus in its proper perspective.

The Comic Strip, Part 25 - Transmit the message to the receiver, hope for an answer some day

"South Atlantic Raiders" - February 1st, 1990

This is the start of a new season, the first on the BBC. This is also the first two-parter, which feels like it doesn't count because we're back to half hour episodes.

Looking back over what we've seen so far, I've come to the conclusion that the two themes that The Comic Strip loves to come back to are:

1. People trying to be something that they are not.
2. Crime and how easily plans for such can fall apart.
   

Stan and Frances are two ham radio operators who fall in love over the air. She is a birdwatcher doing research in the Falkland Islands, he is an armored truck driver. When Stan is led to believe that the Falklands are under attack, he devises a plan to rob one of the banks on his route to raise the funds to stage a daring rescue. Chaos ensues.

It might be a result of dropping back to the half hour format, but I thought the pace of this episode was wonderful. It's a great friendly little romp, nothing that needs too much thinking about. Of course, this leads to the question of how much this show has been de-fanged now that it's come over to the BBC. Time will tell.

Finally, this episode sees the first appearance of Lenny Henry. Lenny Henry always seems to have a strange vibe for me - no matter how deeply he is into his character (and make no doubt, he is a talented actor) I can always tell that he is having a jolly time and thinks that the situation that he has to inhabit is an enormous lark.

In this one he has a cameo where he is raped in a prison.

Status Report

I'm posting text fine, but now I can't get pictures up to both blogs.

Amusingly, the Blogger status page notes that "If you get an error viewing a blog, refreshing the page once or twice should clear it." So, if you can't read this, that's how to fix it so you can.

Who was that man? I'd like to shake his hand.

When trying to shore up the blog from the ongoing Blogspot server problems (exact quote from the current post on their status page: "the affected blogs are no longer entirely inaccessible.") I had a quick look at my search hits.

With all of this hoo-ha there were still two in the last day-ish, and they are amazing.

The first: "who wrote the book of yob"

This one zeroed in on my post about The Comic Strip episode called "The Yob." So on the surface, a sensible hit. The thing is this, as soon as I see the thing, I get "Who Wrote the Book of Love" stuck in my head. So I have that going on. Because I have the song stuck in my head, I start to get curious. Is there a "Book of Yob?"

So I do the search - sure enough, I am the second hit in the main results, and half of the others are references to text where "yob" and "wrote the book" are sort of close (just like mine). The post that pulls ahead of me as number one (at the moment - I'm betting that this post will cruise me into first place) is a review in the London Review of Books of an autobiography of a British Footballer named Keane (he seems to have reached the level of fame where you only need one name). I love skimming quickie autobiographies of celebrities that I've never heard of, because it's fun to try to work out what ghastly deeds they are accused of, want to set the record straight on, and yet don't even want to mention specifically in their book because they are "taking the high road." This looks like it might be one of them. It is now on my "to get" list in the "99 cents/pence and under" column.

But that's not the best one. Above the main hits, Google offers product searches. Top hit for "who wrote the book of yob" is the new Ray Davies album.

Google also suggests that I might be looking for information on the Book of Job. Which makes these results even more thrilling.

The second Google search was for "humorous ditty for sixtieth birthday." Every once in a while I'm stuck in a restaurant where somebody is having a fiftieth or sixtieth birthday, and someone will stand up and read some horrid poem about how the guest of honor is getting older and more decrepit, will die soon and be eaten by vultures and worms, but first their brains will stop working and their genitalia will fall off. (Strangely, those songs and poems don't happen for eightieth and ninetieth birthday celebrations.) They found their way to me (I'm the fourth hit) because I put this post up a while ago.

Perhaps the new Ray Davies album will be of interest here as well.

It's a free service - and worth every penny!

Blogspot has been pretty horrible these days, system-wise.

It seems to be on the mend, but I notice that February seems to be having particular trouble.

Don't be surprised if the site does some goofy things over the weekend as I try to get everything back in order and do a bit of clean-up besides.

The Comic Strip, Interlude - Come On, People

Please notice this disk:



This is the order of upcoming episodes:

23 "South Atlantic Raiders"
24 "South Atlantic Raiders Part 2"
25 "GLC"
26 "Oxford"
27 "Spaghetti Hoops"

Here is the menu for this disc:


So how hard would it have been to put the episodes in order in that layout?

Not at all says my eye.

The Comic Strip, Part 24 - In the crowd of a million people, I'll find my valentine

"Funseekers" - March 26th, 1988

Someone had a lousy vacation.

I am always wary of the sort of folks who go in for mandatory organized hedonism. You will be having a perfectly good time at a party or drinking establishment, and then someone will start to get mad because they feel that everyone will be having so much more fun playing something like "catch the water balloon" or "pictionary" or "poker."

I like a good aimless party where people show up, eat/drink, listen to loud music while jumping up and down, and then I like it when it slows down and people start talking to each other.

I like traveling to places to see what is there, to feel for a moment like I am a part of it. I hate being trapped in a bubble of tourists who are so intimidated by the fact that people talk different and they don't know the way to the museum without asking or checking a map that they build up their defense mechanisms to the point where they might has well have gone on the grand tour of their back yard.

Dear heavens, I am a curmudgeon of fun.

When this episode started, I hated it. It was a bunch of alpha-enforced fake fun. And then, not to give the ending away, it all works out.

As a post-script, I have to say that I love this:


They spend about five minutes contriving to get the characters into precisely that pose, as well as a bunch of foreshadowing showing images of the Madonna looking like Katrin Cartlidge, but there is no reaction to this. It happens for the viewer, and then it is done. They refuse to take the easy way out. Good for them.

From the family album

Here is my grandmother and my mother on the streets of San Francisco, 1943.

The new video by The Rumble Strips will make you smile.

Go have a look:


Thanks to Cool Blue Shed!

A pop culture rollercoaster

I love it when one found item can, after a bit of digging, lead to an amazing path of odd tangents and strange turns.

Here is a marvelous little post that does just that, starting with Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and ending up at what looks like the daftest Star Trek novel ever published.

New dimensions in museum-going

As a part of the Edvard Munch exhibit, the MOMA is offering you the opportunity to download their audiotour ahead of time. The intention is so you can load it onto your own iPod-ish device instead of getting one from the museum.

Of course, you can also just listen to it as you walk around the house looking at random objects and pretend that, for example, all of those family photos that fell out of the most recent round of Christmas cards are the depictions of pre-psychedelic despair and incipient madness.

Once inspired, you can then fly to Oslo and rubberneck with all of the tourists who are now marching over to the recently discovered site of "The Scream" to get a photograph of themselves making that iconic "Home Alone" face.

Quote of the day

A hundred years from now, there will be no more kings and queens, and the writers of the day will envy us, just as the writers of this day envy the men who wrote of chivalry and tournament, and they will have to choose their heroes from bank presidents, and their heroines from lady lawyers and girl politicians and typewriters. What a stupid world it will be then!

--Richard Harding Davis, 1895

The cleansing power of art

Alexandre Orión is an artist who photographs the juxtapositions of paintings (generally on walls) and the real world as they wittingly or unwittingly interact.

From his "Metabiotics" series:


"Triumph Over Mastery II" by Mark Tansey:

I don't know why this makes me laugh so much

From the pages of comic book history comes the best villain ever:

A Nazi Made of Bees.

Oh No! We're trapped in a time loop!

If you have your own blog on blogger, you will know that there is a "drafts queue" or a list of posts that have yet to be posted because they are still being worked on.

Lately, I've noticed that a good percentage of my posts that are not ready for "prime time" are related to Doctor Who.

Other blog systems give you the opportunity to "tag" your posts so that if someone were to come to this blog searching for my thoughts on Doctor Who only, they could click on the tag and not read anything else. I don't want that - my original intention was that this would be a blog about everything I came accross in both my day to day life and my process of going through all of the interesting stuff I've accumulated and said "someday I will do something interesting with this."

On the other hand, I've found that my ideas for things to post about Doctor Who have such a detailed amount of background that one needs to know to understand the posts, that posting it on a blog which seems (at first glance) to be about anything, would cause the need for internal explanation within each post to become unwieldy. So it sits in my post queue or is deleted because I think to myself "I've posted enough on Doctor Who already this month," or "This is going to take a hell of a lot of explanation for those readers who haven't watched Doctor Who as much as, say, me."

So with great trepidation and qualification, I link you to here, another blog that I have set up for myself.

Preston and his amazing adventure with tupperware

>As part of my ongoing quest to discover everything that is wrong with my dog, circumstances required me to collect a urine sample.

Actually it was the vet who required it of me.

This was a task I never performed before. Stool samples - that one I can do no trouble. Urine posed some problems of what I shall call logistics, which led to the following exchange:

Me: Um. Can you offer some pointers as to how I do this?

Vet: Well, really it's all about the timing.

Ah.

I have a tendency to have situations like this, so I was prepared for all sorts of complications to ensue, leading to a story which goes on for about twenty minutes and ends with the listener telling me "You know, that's the sort of thing that only happens to you." This in mind, I was prepared for anything.

Turns out I am a diva of timing.

The only mishap is that my dog thinks I'm a bit weird, and the lack of comic adventure means that the amusing post title I came up with might have to go to waste.

So I'm writing it up anyway.

The internet vindicates my ghastly memory

Every so often a discussion about film and/or pop culture will lead to Woody Allen. A small percentage of those discussions will cause me to mention my youthful memories of Woody Allen's newspaper comic strip.

None of the participants of these discussions (except for me) had any recollection of these comic strips. Some went so far as to use my memories as proof that my brain was addled.

Have a look, doubters!

The Comic Strip, Part 23 - Dinsdale.

"Didn't You Kill My Brother?" - March 19th, 1988

This episode is precisely the sort of thing I was hoping to see. On the one hand, you can see the sort of things that they are sending up and where the episode is going to go. On the other hand, there are enough surprises to keep it fun.

It is a lot of fun.

This is the second Alexei Sayle vehicle, and the first that he has a hand in writing. One of the things that it is easy to forget is just how talented he is. The way he can deliver a monologue is amazing. Halfway through he has a scene where he walks into a youth club and delivers what I have to call the best scene that I've seen in the entire series so far.

Nowadays I suppose you will not likely see a scene where the protagonist shoots up a room full of kids. Even less so making it an uplifting scene. But it is an amazing moment.

The episode seems to be based on the real life story of a couple of London gangsters known as the Kray Twins. This is another one of those cultural touchstones that Americans have only heard about sideways - it's strange to learn about something that so many things you have seen refer to. It feels like everything comes together just a little bit closer somehow.

Of course, the fact that these are twins means that Alexei Sayle can play a dual role. It's easy to forget how well he can act. When he walks onscreen, my brain just goes "oooo. Alexei Sayle." Like I'm expecting him to just be doing the same schtick with different hair.


I also notice that Alexei Sayle had a hit single called "Didn't You Kill My Brother?" I suspect that it might have something to do with this episode.