Alexander

I agree completely, and that is one fucked up thing. I understand discussing it, lamenting about it, and trying to fix it. What I don't understand is blaming Getz or Presley for how fucked up society was/is. Thank you! I'm tired of Elvis Presley being the universal symbol of the untalented whitey who unfairly makes it while more worthy black musicians starve to death. As though his career was engineered by the KKK to undermine blacks. As if he was a bigoted roughneck.

The Mighty Boosh is freakin' BRILLIANT! Check out the Crack Fox... "Put me to sleep with your kind boots, Mr. Fancy Man..."

Do any of you have experience with the Bear Family Johnny Cash box "Come on Ride This Train" with 8 "concept" albums of Americana? Eight complete albums plus outtakes, not a chronological order like the boxes. I'm not quite the completist, so I don't think that I need the other Bear Family boxes, but this one intrigues me. Same intrigue--I'm reading a new book about Cash from IU Press and feel an obsession coming on. Actually, all of the Bear Family boxes look pretty good to me...would be curious to hear from any who have one or all of them. I have the three-CD anthology that Columbia put out a few years ago, a single disc of Cash's Sun Recordings, and the Folsom Prison/San Quentin reissues. I've got a single disc of the Sun material, a single disc Best-of on Columbia (probably long overdue for an upgrade. I think I got it from Columbia House), a Best-of collection of his Columbia material with June, a disc of highlights from his TV show, The Folsom Prison and San Quentin reissues, and all of his American recordings. I've been thinking about a better way to get his Columbia recordings (short of getting all the original albums). Is that three disc set a good buy? What's on it?

Yeah, Joe's a dude. I'd love to meet him someday. He's got amazing taste and I'd love to hear some of the stuff he keeps in that basement of his that HASN'T made it to CD or LP reissue. But, that being said, I think he's waaaaay off in his assessment of "real" music and its limits and boundaries. I know he doesn't think of Johnny Cash as being "country," but anybody with ears should be able to tell that he's just as "real" as Clarence Ashley, Kelly Harrell, or Dock Boggs. But it's all cool, of course. I don't begrudge Bussard his opinions, especially since the dude really knows his shit.

So I've been out of work for a loooooong damn time. This is, in fact, the longest I've been out of work since...well, I was about fifteen years old. So I'm trying something different. I'd like to create an eyecatching website where I can promote myself, my resume, and my ideas and philosophy of education. I've been looking at Google and some of the other free services that allow you to create webpages, but they all look pretty generic and crappy. What sort of investment am I going to have to make here? Am I actually going to have to hire someone to do this for me or is it possible for me to make a good website of this type on my own? The idea is that I would include the web address on my resume and in my cover letters so prospective employers can visit my site and get to know me a little better, hopefully making me stand out from the crowd. Any ideas or advice that folks here can give me would be much appreciated...

Yes, there is a chapter of the motion comic. I don't know. I wasn't terribly impressed with it. I saw a few clips online and was a bit more impressed with it then. Perhaps when one is watching it with the expectation of essentially a flash animation on a website, one's expectations aren't as high. Watching it on DVD highlights the limited nature of the animation and begs the question: What, in the end, is the point of something like this? Are we trying to fix it so that people don't have to read for themselves? It just kind of seems to defeat the whole point of a comic book, which is something you read at your own pace. Scott McCloud in "Understanding Comics" makes much of how comics are distinct from animation. I enjoy both, but this is something in between, neither fish nor fowl. There are also some technical things I would have done differently (I would have had the text in the captions fade in rather than wipe, which I think looks cheesy). Also, I don't like the fact that the whole thing is read by one actor. I would have preferred a whole voice cast, or at least enough different actors to really make the distinction between characters. It reminded me of how I tend to dislike audiobooks for the same reason (although, hypocritically, I would love to PERFORM audiobooks).

Really? Was it the "Tales of the Black Freighter"? Perhaps it wouldn't look so good on a big screen, but I thought it looked GREAT on my TV late at night with all the lights out!

I decided to make this a separate thread from the Watchmen movie thread because, well, it's a different thing! For those who have read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons classic comic, one of the biggest disappointments of the Snyder film was the inevitable loss of the supplementary material that made the book so rich. "Tales of the Black Freighter" is a comic within the comic being read by a minor character (a teenage boy hanging out at a newsstand that later becomes a key location). "The Black Freighter" begins in issue three and continues (with various fits and starts) throughout the remaining nine issues of the series. It tells the gruesome tale of a shipwrecked mariner and his attempts to reach his home in advance of the titular ship, eventually constructing a raft using the bloated corpses of his former shipmates as floats. His story and his descent into madness parallels Ozymandias' plot to save the world by murdering millions in cold blood, the end justifying the means. Since the "Black Freighter" story would only distract from the main story in the film, and make the film at least twenty minutes longer, it was cut. But Snyder, whose desire to do right by Moore's original is admirable, has decided to make "The Black Freighter" available as an animated short released on DVD today, along with another short feature. I felt, as I said in my review of the film, that Snyder was ultimately unsuccessful in bringing "Watchmen" to the screen because he was slavishly devoted to the book. He made few choices and really took no risks, which (in my opinion) made the film drag. Fortunately, the animated film's director does a better job than did Snyder. The original comic-within-a-comic was a story told entirely in captions, but the film chooses not to use every word from the character's narration. The film perfers to show rather than tell, only making use of voiceover narration to add color to the narrative and provide inner thoughts. The film also shows a sequence only hinted at in the book. During the story, the narrator talks about "conversing" with his dead shipmates. The film boldly illustrates this with an actual dialogue between the mariner and the decaying Boatswain Ridley. The scene nicely dramatizing the character's madness. I honestly think they did a better job with this short (23 minute) film than they did with the feature. The second feature is even more brilliant. The first three issues of "Watchmen" featured excerpts from original Nite-Owl Hollis Mason's autobiography "Under the Hood," which further fleshed out the world of "Watchmen" and provided necessary backstory (although it was possible to skip the text section and just read the book on its own, reading the text pieces made the book an ever richer experience). The film cuts Hollis down to one scene at the beginning of the film (even cutting the character's death at the hands of a street gang that appears throughout the book), although copies of "Under the Hood" are shown in his apartment during that scene (a copy is also shown on Adrian's desk later in the film). The live-action short (which runs about forty minutes) is presented as an episode of a 1985 news program which broadcasts excerpts from a 1975 interview with Hollis Mason. Much of the dialogue is taken straight from the book, but the actors were also clearly allowed to improv alot of the interviews which gives them a nice sense of realism. They also incorperate an interview with Sally Jupiter that ran at the end of one of the later issues (ten, I think) and parts of the essay "Dr. Manhattan: Super Powers and the Superpowers" that ran at the end of issue four. The film does a bit of "Zelig"-esgue photo and film manipulation to have (for example) some of the costumed heroes testifying before the real Senator McCarthey during the HUAC sessions. The film stock matching isn't perfect, but what do you expect with something that is essentially a bonus feature? An incredible amount of time, effort, and talent clearly went into making "Under the Hood" and I think they did a fantastic job. Once again, I enjoyed this a LOT more than Snyder's film. The only quibble I have about this is the pricing: The full retail price is listed at $27.99. Best Buy had it for $19.99 (I actually bought the slightly more expensive edition that came in the nice metal box. You can get it at Best Buy for $17.99 if you settle for the regular plastic box) and I had a $5.00 coupon that brought it down to $15, which I thought was reasonable. The fact remains that you only get about an hour and a half of material, counting the bonus documentary on the making of the films, and undoubtedly both features will be included in the eventual DVD release of the film (they may even be incorperated into the film itself, as they were originally intended). So I think this is only worth buying if, like me, you are a fanatical devotee of the book and want to collect everything. But it is without question worth renting! So put it on your Netflix queue immediately! I've been planning to see "Watchmen" a second time (my wife is interested and she didn't see it with me the first time) so I'm looking forward to seeing how having seen the DVD enhances my experience of the film. I do think that the film would have been improved if the "Black Freighter" film had been shown as a short before the feature film. That way the film audience could have had the experience of seeing it (and seeing how it related to the feature film) without having it interrupt the flow of the movie. But that didn't happen, so that's neither here nor there. Oh, and the "Black Freighter" features Nina Simone's fantastic reading of Brecht/Weil's "Pirate Jenny" from "Three Penny Opera" (which gives the film its title) over the ending credits. Very worth sitting through to hear!

An amazing life. You can't say that Ziprin didn't seize the day!

Congrats! As the father of a girl, I can tell you that you have some wonderful times ahead...

There's no point in fighting it. The genie is out of the bottle. Downloading music is now a reality and musicians have to figure out how to turn it to their advantage. Some have already done so.

"I'm not afraid of dying, I just don't want to be there when it happens." - Woody Allen

Yeah, I listened to the whole thing. Every second of it. It was a few years ago, so I don't remember exactly how long it took to do it (a month maybe?). And yes, I did go crazy by the end of it... like I said, it turned me off of the Beatles for a bit! Still, I'm glad I did it! If I had the time and the inclination (and I don't!), I'd cull that 83 CD set down to maybe 15 CDs of just the highlights. Cheers, Shane And I thought that the 5 CD set of Bob Dylan's "The Basement Tapes" was a lot to wade through! I have the complete Basement Tapes and with a few exceptions, I find it a delight almost from beginning to end. I think the big difference between the Let It Be sessions and the BT sessions that Dylan and the Band were having FUN. They were delighting themselves and each other, which makes it equally fun to listen to. By contrast, the Beatles were in the process of breaking up while recording what eventually became "Let It Be." For that reason, the documentary is hard to watch. I can imagine that listening to the tapes would be equally hard to do...

Wasn't the Beatles' catalogue SUPPOSED to have been reissued in 2007? And here it is 2009 and STILL the only thing offically available are those damn 1987 masters. Which they still charge full price for. It's downright criminal. As I said earlier in this thread, I own every single Beatles album multiple times over. I've bought every official release. There isn't another dime they can squeeze out of me until the new reissues come out, so until then I'll make use of the Purple Chick releases. In other Beatles news, my nine-year-old daughter has caught the Beatles bug. She saw "Help!" on DVD and has simply fallen in love. It's great fun sharing all my Beatles recordings with her! Another generation goes to the Beatles...

Here's a link to my blog in which I write about a totally geeky project I just embarked on: Compiling a soundtrack album to the "Watchmen" graphic novel (I thought the film's soundtrack album was lacking). You can read it here.

I saw this yesterday. It is very clever and well-executed. I would like to point out, however, that my childhood friend Jason Yungbluth beat this guy to it a long, long time ago. Behold! Weapon Brown. A post-apocalyptic take on Peanuts. In this story, Weapon Brown is looking for Little Red, the girl he loves, who has been taken from him by the evil Doctor Van Pelt and her religious fanatic brother, Linus. Linus plans to sacrifice Red to the Great Pumpkin. Will Weapon Brown get to her in time? Will he ever kick that football? This came out in installments several years ago before being compiled into the one-shot seen above. Jason is currently at work on the followup, "Blockhead's War." Here, Weapon Brown goes up against the heroes of other comic strips. Here's the first couple of pages... I know what you're thinking. Yes, I grew up with a freakin' genius. Visit his website whatisdeepfried.com in order to read the whole story. You can also order the first Weapon Brown story ("A Peanut Scorned") and the first issue of the new story directly from him. He's a nice guy. And tell him Alex sent ya!

It was far from his best work, I'll agree with that.

I honestly don't see how you CAN like jazz without appreciating Armstrong. His sound is central to the genre. Everything blossoms forth from his horn...

When I first got into jazz, I remember looking askance at Brubeck, simply because "Take Five" was one of those "classics" everybody had heard. It seemed like everytime a cocktail party was shown in a movie (and classical music was not being played), "Take Five" was the song playing. It seemed like shorthand for college educated urban hip. Then I picked up "Time Out" and liked it a lot. Over the years, I've gotten many other Brubeck albums. I will admit that I prefer the Desmond years (haven't heard as much of his work with Mulligan) over some of the later stuff I've heard, but have to say that I dig Dave.

I have to say that I'm into just about everyone on the list. I've been going through my Armstrong recordings chronologically over the last few months, and they never fail to satisfy. I'm BIG into Getz and Bud Powell. I went through phases a few years ago where I bough virtually every recording I could find by these two artists. I will say that of all the artists listed, the only I picked was Braxton. Not that I dislike him, but I have virtually nothing by him (maybe one or two side man appearences, but that's it). So it's not so much that I CAN'T get into him, simply that I have not done so thus far. The artist it took me the longest to get into was Ellington, but once I did, I got into him in a big way.

Byrne has always been one of my favorite artists. I used to own his entire run on the FF and on Alpha Flight (the first book I ever really collected). I also loved his X-Men comics (inked by Terry Austin). Byrne is clearly inspired by Kirby and has done some of his best work with Kirby created characters (the FF, the New Gods, the Demon). Has anybody here read "The Hunger"? Darkseid vs. Galactus!

I would think you'd remember half of the Superman cast getting killed off...

Actually, Moore's "Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow?" was drawn by Curt Swan! It's an amazing story. In the late '80s, around the time Moore was doing "Watchmen," DC (as I mentioned above) was preparing a complete reboot of the Superman character to be done by then-hot property John Byrne. Byrne was to rewrite Superman's origin story in a miniseries called "Man of Steel" and would then take over writing and drawing both "Superman" and "Action Comics" (Jerry Ordway would draw the "Adventures of Superman" book) which would follow Bryne's reboot. For example, one of the changes Bryne made was making Superman the only survivor of Krypton, which meant that there was no Supergirl, no Krypto, no Phantom Zone, no Bottle City of Kandor. There would also be Green Kryptonite only (no Red, Gold, Blue, White, or any other colors). Anyway, as a send-off to the "old" Superman continuity, Moore was comissioned to officially "end" the series in a two-part story called "Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow?" The story is set ten years after the death of Superman. Now married and retired from reporting, Lois Lane is interviewed about Superman's last days during which he and his closest friends and allies were under attack from various old enemies. Since nothing Moore did would be carried over into Byrne's new continuity, he took the liberty of killing off Lana Lang, Jimmy Olson, Lex Luthor, Brainaic, the Kryptonite Man, Krypto the Superdog, Bizarro, The Toyman, the Prankster, and Mr. Mxyzptlk (who is revealed to be something far more than a little man in a funny hat). He also exposed Superman's identity as Clark Kent. I had never been a Superman reader up until this point, but Swan's art is wonderful. The image of Lex Luthor's corpse (with Brainaic's head wired into to his skull) staggering forward is one of the most horrific in mainstream comics...

I hate to sound like a total wacked-out fanboy, but the Superman stories I like the most are the ones written by Alan Moore. I love "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow"! (Superman mythos ended by Moore...)

Interesting, though would we say the same about Krazy Kat (that it doesn't go anywhere)? There are occasional short narrative arcs, but ultimately everything comes back to a kat, a mouse, a brick, a dog and a jail. It is almost a meditation on the endless repetitiveness of life, as well as the perversity of love and desire or the many faces of crime and punishment. But it is also awfully repetitive. I really do like Ben Katchor's older work (hard to find his new work now) but it is all very much of one tone -- a lament on the passing of Brooklyn of the 1950s. The characters sort of walk through this half-remembered, half-invented city having adventures nearly as momentous as Leopold Bloom's, but do they "go anywhere?" I had some other examples in mind, but I have forgotten them. That said, I tend to find reading Chris Ware's panels fairly exhausting and the reward for going through everything isn't usually worth it, since the punchline is that you grow old and die alone. The ones I do like are the ones in the apartment building with the young woman with the artificial leg. They hold my interest a bit better. I do like the Building Stories (with the female amputee), but my favorite Ware material is the Rusty Brown stories, which are about a creepy toy collector (when Rusty's an adult) and a sad little boy (when Rusty is a kid). The Rusty Brown stories get REALLY creepy, especially when Rusty starts spying on his best friend's preteen daughter while she's on the toilet! These stories make me feel REALLY bad when I read them, but that's the point of them!