You bet it is, Yotsuba. From volume 5 of the incredibly charming manga series Yotsuba&!, a story about a cute little girl with a lot of enthusiasm. It's from chapter 31, entitled "Yotsuba & Stars." I'm not a big manga guy, but I'll be danged if this isn't one of the best things I've read in a while. You will not be sorry for having read it.
I just posted this over on the Mixtapery blog. I'm mailing my mix. Today. Don't you wish you'd joined? Don't worry, you'll get your chance. Next year.
I'll post a more detailed description over there (and most likely link to it here) once people start getting them. [ sigh ] I do so love a good mixtape, don't you?
We'll start off with the rom-com P.S.: I Love You starring that actress who won an Oscar for looking uncannily like a teenage shemale:
Oh man, that looks just atrocious, right? And I sort of liked Return To Me. (Shut up! It's Bonnie Hunt. She's a funny lady. Can't pick a script, but still.) Does anybody get a weird feeling from the premise of this movie? It's all a little creepy, innit? Dude's dead, but he's pimping his old lady out from beyond the grave? Ewww. Is it gross, or is it just me?
Moving on, we come to the "non-negotiable" section of this post. These next two movies involve actors that are deal-breakers for me. I have a list of a few actors that I will not tolerate. (I also have a "Yes, Please and Thank You" list of actors with a free pass that I'll post... sometime or another.) If they're in a movie, I am bound by honor to pass on said movie. My list includes:
* Angelina Jolie
* Nicholas Cage
* Will Smith
* J.Lo
* Sorry dad, but Costner's burned me too many times.
* Leonardo DiCaprio's a hard sell.
* Tom Cruise (with the exception of Minority Report. That movie friggin' KICKED!) is - and has been for a long while - a firm "no".
* Also, any singing is grounds for disqualification.
* If it's directed by Bret Ratner or James Cameron = no.
* And if Mel Gibson's in it and it's a historical epic, no thanks.
So, imagine my chagrin when the following films both kicked it into overdrive and started showing up in Every. Single. Commercial. Break. Ever:
I know, it looks sort of cool, but let me just give you a tip to help strengthen your resolve after Christmas when somebody says "Let's go see that vaguely awesome-looking post-apocalyptic vampire movie with the Fresh Prince." Repeat after me: "Will Smith will not bring me happiness. He's not a very good actor and has a tendency to bring the suck to anything he touches. Also, dude was the! Fresh! Prince! How come nobody seems to remember that?! Why!?" Repeat until you feel strong enough to run screaming from the room in horror, as if your brain caught fire by merely entertaining the notion of seeing a Will Smith movie. Because it will catch fire sometime before those credits roll. Just say "no".
Next up, the trailer for National Treasure 2: Book of Whatever:
You know the most frustrating thing about Nicolas Cage? It's that he used to be awesome. He used to be fun. Now he's all jacked up on his own self and how he's a serious actor/action star and all that.
Remember him in Red Rock West, not to mention his flawless performance in Raising Arizona? Remember that guy? Yeah, he got killed by some guy who's too busy making dreck like Con Air or Face/Off or Gone In 60 Seconds or marrying Elvis' crazy daughter (did he marry her after Jacko? Because if he did... there is no hope for him). He buried him in a ditch somewhere and then sped off to get his teeth capped and hair plugged into his head. It's a shame really. (I will say this: I thought he was excellent in the Weather Man, probably because he was playing himself: a guy who's become so caught up in his own self he's completely incapable of being a real live human being. He's just a guy who smiles for the camera. Kinda eerie to think about, huh?)
Anyway, that's it for this week. Come back next week. We'll make popcorn.
Or this guy:
Or this guy:
Oh, beloved internets, how did we survive without you for so long? I mean, where else can you get pictures like this? Books? I think not. Those librarians (or as I like to call them: "the Birkenstock Brain Police") and their high-falutin' ideals on what is and isn't "literature" would never let their precious Dewey Decimal System be sullied by a book on unfortunate facial hair, mullets and orange Elvis impersonators. Trust me on this one. I mean, I went to the trouble of making the book (well, okay I just stapled all my loose pages of yellowed print-outs, photocopies and scribbled, half-intelligible ramblings/rantings together between two pieces of construction paper with the title: At Least You're Not This Guy: Unfortunate Facial Hair, Mullets and Orange Elvises; Why America Is Greatest There Is - A Chronicle of Radness In the 21st Century. Also Includes Some Awesome Recipes. And An Exclusive Interview With the Ghost Of El Santo. By Dylan "Aw Hecks Yeah" Todd, Professional Breakdance Aficionado and Collector Of Lando Calrissian Action Figures), the least they can do is make it available to the public. I mean, come on! I pay my taxes! I eat my vegetables! I can eat 23 Oreos in one sitting! What are you uptight NPR-listening-to ninnies afraid of? A little truth? Is that too much for your sweater-vest-clad soul to digest? Huh!?
Fascists.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer, the local newspaper, ran a little profile on me as part of its "Brain Gain" feature. I am now famous. You can read the blurb online right here. I'm a little sad they don't have my profile picture posted online, as I looked pretty smoking hot. Derek Zoolander better watch out.
Now that I've been in the newspaper, I feel just a little bit better than everyone else for some reason. Is this what it's like to be Brittany "Paris" Lohan, Esq.? It feels so wrong, but so... right. I promise that fame won't change me, though.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go take my underwear off in a lingerie store, steal a wig or two, check into rehab, have a fight with my mom, fistfight an old lady in a wheelchair, buy 13 baby albino Bengal tigers to use in an underground tiger/kangaroo fighting league and have my driver drive drunk through a Sears parking lot while I yell about how much I hate the orange M&M's.
Or as I like to call it: "Just Another Wednesday".
This week's A-OK! (Album Of the Week, for the uninitiated) is Canadian pop superstars Sloan's thoroughly solid Navy Blues album. It's like a plank of oak it's so solid. I remember previewing it at Big B's (remember when that place existed and/or was awesome? I sure do. Because I am old.) and, about three seconds into the into the first song ("She Says What She Means") - there's this huge, fat-sounding riff that kicks off the album... well, after a little cough - and I knew I had to own it. Immediately. I ran into "Moe Jaloney" there (who's in another Vegas band whose name sounds sort of like "the Leibchers" and was in another band at the time that we - the Asthmatics - played with now & then but I can't remember the name of his band right now. Something to do with "wolves"? I dunno) and I was all excited and like "you gotta hear this" and, well, it did not have the same effect. (He always was a little "too cool for school," though, so I didn't take it too personal. I probably shouldn't have typed his full name, huh? What with the Google and all. Easily remedied. There. Done. Names changed to protect the blahblahblah) Oh well, no accounting for taste, right?
I'm not sure if it was my first Sloan album (probably was) but I was so smitten that I spent the next few months tracking down their previous releases and have been faithful to them ever since (despite the fact that they seem to have lost the plot somewhere around 2003's Action Pact). Sloan makes 70's AM music for the late 20th/early 21st century. In fact, their music is so remniscent of that sound Sophia Coppola used it in the soundtrack to The Virgin Suicides next to genuine article bands like 10cc, Heart and Todd Rundgren.
Navy Blues is the last of three perfect Sloan albums. The streak started with 1994's Twice Removed continued with 1996's One Chord To Another and finished off with this album. I actually was going to put One Chord in the sidebar but couldn't find a decent jpeg that wasn't tiny, so, there, now you know how the Big Red Robot sausage is made. Still wanna eat it?
Anyway, the album's aces. Rob old ladies for record money if you must. Just get it somehow.
Also, I found out my super-sweet fake band name, Debate Team, is spoken for (or stolen?!). The clouds went grey. The trees themselves wept. Well, there's always Dead Writers, right? Which reminds me... I need to make a Dead Writers poster, don't I? In January. Maybe. We'll see. Right now I'm focused, laser-like, on getting Dance, White People! Dance! in the mail to my fellow Mixtapery denizens and I also have a special little thing planned for readers of this very blog, so keep yr ears to the pavement and yr eyes glued to yr screens.
Until next time. Peace.
A hand-animated video for the Whitest Boy Alive's "Golden Cage" from their album Dreams which I was able to download because my main man Ryan "the Castlerocker" Adams hooked me up with some iTunes downloads. Because he is awesome like that. This isn't the official video. It's better than the official video.
So today we're talking about Joe Casey and Tom Scioli's insane cosmic superhero epic: Gødland.
Gødland is the comic book Stan Lee and Jack Kirby would be writing today if they were able. And sort of on drugs. It's a garage rock cover of a Lee/Kirby FF story gone horribly wrong. It's a gaudy dayglo, over-the-top, "But this one goes to 11" honest-to-goodness comic book where the action flies by, the characterization is there but not the focus and the ideas come fast and hot and don't entirely make sense.
Basically, it's a sloppy Grant Morrison comic.
Casey's sort of like the guy you call when Morrison's too busy conversing with 10th-dimensional alien polymorphic beings in Kathmandu to return your invitation to pitch. He's the Robbers On High Street to Morrison's Spoon - Indie snob reference! - while not entirely derivative when listened-to/read in isolation, one definitely stands out as the better band/writer when placed in close proximity. (See his short-lived Doom Patrol-esque freak-out Automatic Kafka if you don't believe me) He's also a solid superhero writer, with his Iron Man mini the Inevitable and his Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes minis as decent examples of solid recent Capes & Tights fiction. They also showcase Casey's love for and handle of the Avengers, which, if Marvel had any sense - and they don't, sadly - would warrant his immediate position as writer for life of that corner of Marveldom.
Gødland is very much a comic book, from the omniscient, Stan Lee carnival-barker timbre of the narration to the internal dialogue expressed in the thought balloons (How long has it been since those were widely used? Since... oh yeah, the grim & gritty mid-80's, I'd guess). It's not so much poking fun at the conventions of comic books as it's sort of wallowing in them, taking them all out and seeing if they still work. For too long (since the double-shot of Miller's Dark Knight and Moore's Watchmen) comics have been pretty ashamed of themselves and Casey (along with contemporaries like Morrison and Matt Fraction) seems intent on reminding us of why comics exist, why they're not just movies on paper or static television shows. I mean, where else can you have your hero, Adam Archer, former astronaut and current cosmically-powered being utter dialogue like this:
The series focuses on Archer who got crazy superpowers when he went to Mars. Which makes perfect sense because this is unashamedly "that type" of comic. He lives in a swell skyscraper called Infinity Tower in the middle of Manhattan that has been adapted to facilitate his new form (not unlike the Fantastic Four's Baxter Building). In the second issue, he rescues a giant green talking dog-type thing from outer space named Maxim who teaches him how to use his newfound powers. He's like Yoda, only, you know, a giant space dog. He finds out that the universe was formed by a giant, warmongering space-god named Iboga. He has a growing feud with America's Cherished Hero: Crashman and his government does not trust him. At all. He fights villains with names like Discordia and Freidrich Nickelhead and, my personal favorite, the drug-addicted, skull floating-in-a-jar sleazeball Basil Cronus, shown here getting all messed up on Maxim's precious bodily fluids:
Try and find that sort of stuff playing in a multiplex near you. It's insane, ridiculous fun. Not as mind-bending as some work out there (it pales in comparison with say, Seaguy), but still thrilling, seat-of-your-pants stuff.
If Casey's doing a cracked Stan Lee impersonation, it's aided and abetted by Scioli's obviously-likes-the-work-of-Kirby shaky, bombastic linework. And while it's very reminiscent of the King's dynamic style, it's not entirely a rip-off. Scioli's lines seem to vibrate a lot more, seem more nervous, more self-conscious and are much more intentionally crude. It completely compliments the over-the-top nature of the plot and it's telling that Casey has yet to bring in another penciller to help keep the book on schedule, as I don't think it would be nearly as successful with another artist. (Plus, they're co-creators, so... yeah)
Right now, there are three paperback collections out: volume 1: Hello, Cosmic, volume 2: Another Sunny Delight and volume 3: Proto-Plastic Party. Or you can spring for the oversized hardcover of the first twelve issues, Gødland: the Celestial Edition. Or you can kick it old school and pick up the pamphlets, published by Image Comics (whose website is atrocious to navigate, by the way).
Whew! That was a lot more intense than I expected. That's all for today. I'm gonna go watch some TV.
