Novelty Has Not Worn Off

I'm still riding my bike through the 'Hood most everyday, about forty miles a week. I'll be having some pictures soon, but I don't think anyone really reads this. My motivation is for myself.

Stiff working on a few posts for TV and movie stuff, as well as some stuff about this Wasteland I see everyday.

I'm loving it, though...

Missing for Too Long 2

I was trying to finalize a few ideas to briefly mention a nod to the "Pop-Culture" part of this blog, a sort of 'I know I've been gone but does anybody really care?' post, maybe briefly mention having seen (and sneaked a  canteen of g&t into the theater) Star Trek 14, or whatever edition they're on, when a commercial caught my attention. (I'm huddled over my lappy with ST:TNG on in the background (I'm johnny-come-lately to the whole phenomena).)

The commercial was for Cheerios. A little girl maybe five years old asks her mom if Cheerios are good for your heart. The little girl is a cutie with a chocolate milk complexion and nearly blonde frizzy hair and the mom is an alabaster toned hipster with dark hair and dark rimmed glasses. She blandly reads the box to the little one.

The next scene is the dad, presumably, asleep on the couch, waking up to see his chest is fully covered in Cheerios, his daughter having poured the box's contents onto him. The dad is black.

Their house show's they're fully upper-middle class, which is refreshing, but how awesome is it that it's so casual to have an interracial couple in any commercial? It used to be illegal to marry someone of a different race.

Progress in the Pop-Culture Wasteland...

Missing for Too Long 1

I've been away from posting here, having missed February, April and May. I had a post I wanted to put up, one I will in a bit, but life out here in the Wasteland has had a full set of new wrinkles. I'm trying to start a novel life project: I'm plotting to be an LA guy without a car, an LA weirdo on a bike.

We'll see how long it lasts...

Saw a Bit of Myself...

I missed February, but only because I was busy with other shenanigans. I'm planning a few neato pieces for this Pop-Culture Wasteland blog. One is a lengthy breakdown of prime-time animated families since the Simpsons, culminating with the idea that Fox's Bob's Burgers is the rightful heir to the quirky-and-slightly-dysfunctional-but-loving-family mantle that the Simpsons created back in the early '90s. Another is about the main antagonist of that show, Louise Belcher, and how she's a nice mix of Lisa Simpson and Eric Cartman. Another post is a retractive post about how I talked shit when I shouldn't have, and it concerns Disney's animated feature The Fox and the Hound.

But right now I have a picture I took that I'd like to share. It's from an episode titled "Our Town", episode 24 from season 2 of one of my favorite shows growing up, and after rediscovering it again on Netflix, it has become one of my favorite shows anytime: The X-Files.

The episode revolves around a town that's been ritualistically killing and eating humans for years, and after some creek dredging, they find bundles of bones. In the picture above, Scully is able to identify a government inspector who'd gone missing (he was presumed to have run off with a young lady) by the metal on his femur.

I saw that and thought, that's me! My bar's a little less, but it'll survive me being boiled, that's for sure.

I Swear It Was Him

So, when the missus and I run out of coffee, we jump on the bikes and head over to our local beanery. Those are some of the perks of the Wasteland: pleasant weather, beach-side bicycle paths, and coffee bean roasters a jaunt down the way.

We rode to the spot and then turned left, heading into the crowded neighborhood that separates the fancy shopping drag with the sand and ocean. The road was one-way and dense. The ride lazy.

As we went along a man was heading to his car, saying something to his passenger. He looked over to me and the missus, gave a weird smile and said Heya or Hiya. Howdy, I called back with a smile. Maybe he thought we recognized him. The missus asked after we turned right down another one of the tight streets, Do we know that guy?

It was totally Steven Spielberg. I swear.

The car was dark and sleekly unassuming, like one of the suppository Benz's. The pair were kind of in a rush to get in the car and get going, but not frazzled by any means. The clothes this Spielberg doppelganger wore were the kind that look like a nice pair of jeans and nice sport coat, but on closer inspection you can tell that the jeans were probably five hundred bucks, and the coat three times that. The man was the right size and had the same facial features, the same look in his eye, the same hair and facial hair (but he had shaved recently) as the famed director. Who's to say that Spielberg couldn't know somebody who lives in that particular expensive neighborhood? Our little berg has its charms...

They way he said Heya or Hiya with his weird smirk led me to the conclusion that he felt we recognized him. At least the way both the missus and I responded to him--pleasantries in kind--made us the cool ones that afternoon.

We're all just so friendly down here in the Wasteland.

Literally: Part 1

"April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain."

Lines 1-4.

I like the irony anger that's right on and under the surface in calling "April the cruellest month", especially followed with the "breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land." That just smacks of horror imagery, and following it with "mixing/Memory and desire" sounds like the clarion call of the embittered.

Bitter zombie lilacs coming to bring cruel and chilly sunshine mixed with rain. Seeing April and the coming spring as cruel can only come from someone who is dead, or dying, or angry and bitter at all the life, and this is reinforced by the title of this section, "I. The Burial of the Dead".

I'm not a professional critic, but I like to play with things and let my imagination run wild, so let's see where else it goes. For me, Chef Gonzo, "stirring/Dull roots with spring rain." is like a commentary on family. Family--your "roots"--dull and boring, is only barely moved by the cruel machinations of the annual rebirth.

Bringing of life is annoying and cruel, but only when you're dead, or in a state that today we call "depressed."

What Some Folks Need...

Some folks might need a little excitement in their love lives, a spark maybe. This is true for real people and even works its way into art, if you can consider the following photos from a television show "art".

Even fictional characters need a break from their own lives in order to provide a spark:

I'd forgotten that I'd even taken these pictures. This episode was late in the run, but I couldn't tell you what the other storylines were, but Al and Peggy were out of the house.

(I mostly just wanted to share these pictures...)

Super Team

Down here in the Southland the pop-culture muses spent all night partying, celebrating the groping-leading-to-wedded-bliss marriage of Star Wars and Disney. Two billion straight cash for Lucas, as he hands over the Lucasfilms reins to Disney and starts his retirement, passing along the "goods" while he's still alive, gracefully?

Now we can expect to be inundated with Star Wars crap even more than already. Holy shit, hope you didn't think we were at a saturation point. New movies, toys, video games, television shows, amusement park rides, board games, radio teleplays, vaudeville acts, and new iambic pentameter Jedi poetry are all sure to show up very soon. They'll fit nicely along with the costumes, bed sheets, party cups and favors, throw rugs, decorative pillows, Yoda bath salts, Jamaican Greedo cigarettes, cool-looking-but-wholly-uncomfortable chairs, Indian-made compact and luxury automobiles, speed boats, yachts, airplanes of both the Cessna and jumbo-jet varieties, as well as hot air balloons emblazoned with the mouse logo on one side and the Rebel Alliance logo on the other.

Get. Prepared.

I guess it's super-fucking-cool if you're into all that.

A WTF Moment from a WTF Movie

Not all weird movies on Netflix's streaming list are created equal. One movie the missus was convinced by the synopsis to tuck n the instant queue was about contemporary Mongolia. "Dealing with traditions in modern Mongolia" or something similar.

I like Mongolia. It's one of the places that fascinated the hell out of me as a kid. So exotic in the arid, Asian steppe kind of way. Genghis Khan, people! He alone has got somewhere like thirty-million descendants.

And...then there's this movie, called Khadak.

Brief Notes Before I get into the Meat of this Post::

1) Khadak was a German production filmed on location in Mongolia with a Mongolian cast.

2) In the very funny Strong Bad Email "Independent", about the differences between "Independent Films" and "Indie Films", the character Strong Sad makes a joke that in film school he majored in holding on wide shots for too long. I'm betting this German director was the dean of that college.

3) Mongolian language sounds odd. It's not tonal, like Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese. In fact, it sounds as close to a kid's gibberish language as anything I've ever heard. But it's real, so that makes it kind of interesting. But, from this movie, you could hardly tell since there may be fifty words spoken in the first hour of the movie. That may be generous.

The movie starts out on the steppe with a herding lad and his sheep. He's moving them along grazing lines. When he makes it back, he says that he needs to go back out, see, one of the sheep got lost. He lives in a really nice yurt with his mom and her her dad. Grandpa says go back out and get it. After the teenager leaves, mom says was that such a good idea. We viewers (besides wrongly believing that this will actually turn out to be a dialogue using kind of a movie) wonder why she's so overprotective.

Until Bagi, the boy, has a vision of the yurt on fire, and has a seizure right there on the step. If you've got an epileptic kid, maybe sending him out on his own isn't such a good idea. Mom knows this, and she's already out looking for him.

The next few scenes portray his being unconscious from the seizure as him being lost in a forest, while a shamaness screeches and dances in the yurt, tending to his condition, he sees her in his woodsy visions as a helper, trying to get him back to the camp. Eventually he comes to.

That was pretty cool. Artsy and mostly quiet, the scenes unfold like a early seventies convoluted plot, where as an audience member, you're expected to figure certain things out. And the damn Kraut director kept holding on his shots for too long. (Don't get me wrong; the compositions being held upon for too long are beautiful, so there's that.)

Then the government comes through with news of a plague on the animals, and how they need to confiscate all heads of sheep and move all herders into a "city" and become productive workers in a coal mining concern. Then Bagi rescues a beautiful coal thief from sure death, and then they both get arrested.

It must be my powers of summary, because those preceding paragraphs almost make Khadak sound like it was a nearly coherent movie, when that's not the case. There's some performance art later on, and then some other stuff, but it really breaks down near the end. I remember when the camera was in a maneuver that I couldn't comprehend exactly why it was fucking doing it, the combination of the image and the subtitle from the voiceover was so perfect as to demonstrate this movie's essence, that I blurted out laughing, and pretty loudly at that.

I paused it and took a picture, laughing that showing it to someone who hadn't seen the movie was just as enlightenng as having seen it live in the 75th minute of this 100 minute long thing. Here's the picture:

So...there you go. Have fun with that.

When I say the movie broke down near the end, I should some things. There was a fair amount of gin and beer involved, but those things only help with my critical enjoyment of cinema. I seriously watch films, especially when they're perplexing or otherwise incoherent because that's how I enjoy them--trying to figure out just what the hell is going on. This movie's incoherence is widespread.

I went to Wikipedia to get a sense of what contributors to the site said about the movie. They claimed that Bagi and the girl thief start to pull pranks to on the people in the mining town to enliven their lives and bring some mirth to the cadre of former herders. Um, that's not this movie. They try to get some justice, because of course there was no plague, but pranking?

And then, on Khadak's own webpage, they claim the story is about Bagi trying to come to terms with his own destiny to be a shaman. What? In no way did I get that as a sense of what the movie's trying to be about. I mean, Bagi finds and saves the girl from under a huge pile of coal that he would otherwise have no way of knowing about. He said he heard her, knew she was there. Fine. He has visions and epilepsy--or at least what we call it these day--but he's connected to her, and this connection made it possible for him to find her. At least that was my take on that whole scenario. But since there is very little dialogue and the actors are more like statues in a windy valley, there is very little cues to give away the motivations beyond the human sculpture.

And besides, Bagi dies. (I can't imagine anyone being terribly upset about me spoiling it.)

Neither Wikipedia nor their own website have story explanations that resemble what  we watched, and neither resemble each other...wow, good job German director.

One thing I learned to appreciate from this German/Mongolian production is that they have very cool names in Mongolia. The main character, teenager Bagi, has for a real first Batzul. Now that's pretty sweet.

Also, they all have such badass coats and hats.

Some Well Executed Tattoos

In my random journeys around the Internet, I've come across some weird things. One was originally subtitled "The Gallery of Regrets", it was known as Ugliest Tattoos.

In the early times, they'd showcase poorly executed or poorly designed tattoos, maybe with misspellings, maybe with zombie-my-little-ponies, and each one made you embarrassed to look at it.

Now they focus on a wider range of tattoos, some that are done well, some that are godawful, but they don't have the really explicit stuff like they used to have. It always shocked me how many people have tattoos of flying penises. Seriously.

So here I've collected some that mean something to me and are well executed.

The first is a pretty well done Cornholio, Beavis' alter ego that emerges after too much caffeine or sugar:

Next we have a pretty well executed Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, the band from the Muppets. I always liked the name:

This look of Popeye--as a realistic person and grizzled sailor--always caught my attention. I have no tattoos, but this work has been done masterfully, and is from an artist that I would want for myself, had I an upcoming ink-work plans.

Gonzo Gonzo and Animal as Oscar Acosta. Awesome.

How could I pass up a brilliantly executed portrait of Tesla, history's baddest-ass maddest-ass scientist?

(Thanks to Ugliest Tattoos.)

The Many Meanings of "Ocean View"

This blog is about pop-culture and/or the Southland, and like an earlier post about some of our finer highways down here, this one highlights one of the other, less thought upon phenomena.

There's seventy miles of coastline in Los Angeles County and another forty in Orange County. A-hundred-ten miles of coastline sounds like a lot, but there are more than a dozen-million people living in the five counties that make up the "Southland", and yet...

...Not all views of the ocean are equal.

Here's a shot from the hills in San Pedro, an erstwhile independent community that was annexed by Los Angeles (and everybody around here insists on pronouncing it San Peedro):

This is the western edge of the breaker system fencing in the ocean around the south-eastern side of the RPV peninsula and encircling our little breezy berg in Long Beach .

From this vantage, residents can watch as the sheer tonnage comes and go every day if they wanted, but I imagine few do. At least this view is better than this next, only off to the left of this point:

Not all are "Ocean Views" are equal. This hazy look back at towards the ports would be showing off Terminal Island and Long Beach's skyline, if the visibility was a little more forgiving.

Sometimes the views you get around these parts in no way jive with the romantic views most of this country ascribe it.

Cold Cases

There was a show that used to be on prime-time Sunday night, I guess, called Cold Case. I've caught a few episodes in rerun latenight on one of the free channels we have. The premise is that a Philly cop team solves old, still open, cases, AKA "cold" cases. The gimmick is that the scenes of the crime-time are played out with one set of actors, and then usually a second set of older actors are used during the investigation phase, and they occasionally flicker between the two, for dramatic effect.

If you like cop mystery/procedural shows, it's probably serviceable. If you're one of the many The Wire fans, most cops shows are ruined for you. The fully preposterous nature of solving crimes on a single span of forty-two minutes of show is made painfully clear in that hyper-realistic show.

But then there's the cold case aspect  of the show. Another show they used to show on A&E, I think, and now on some local channel in the morning, is called Cold Case Files, and it's a documentary style cop show about how old cold cases are solved. This show is hard to watch as well, but for a different reason. It seems like the only cold case files that get solved these days are rape/murders where now they have DNA technology and old swabs left over.

I'd be willing to guess that the prime-time cop drama doesn't feature too many rape/murders getting solved due to DNA samples. That's a little too, eh, much of a downer for Sunday night television, I guess.

Essentially LA

What's essential to Los Angeles and the Southland? Why, driving of course.

And what's more essential to LA driving than our criss-crossing collection of freeways? Nothing, I'm guessing.

Here's some "neat" shots of the various locations and names of highways in an around LA county, and even a non-LA county destination. It's not Orange County, and good luck finding which one it could be.

First up on our non-exhaustive list of area highways is the Artesia Freeway, in the numerical nomenclature it's CA Hwy 91, Redondo Beach to Riverside. This is an actual freeway, bigger than US 101 in San Luis Obispo.

Here's a buy spot getting near downtown LA, where the arteries break apart like the branching aorta, 101 heading to downtown LA, I-5 heading to the mountains and north out of the city, and I-10 heading west to Santa Monica. The eastbound section of 10 is less than a mile away.

Here's where the 101 splits off just north of the city on it's way to Hollywood and Ventura, with the 110 becoming Interstate 110 heading south, through LA all the way to San Pedro, becoming the Harbor Freeway, and becoming CA Hwy 110 going up to Pasadena (that's probably more like "over to Pasadena" at this point).

CA Route 27 is also known as Topanga Canyon Road, and it dies/begins at the ocean into/from the PCH. I made sure I got the sign notifying the location: 4 miles to Santa Monica, 7 miles to Malibu.

Having seen CA Hwy 91, we see CA Hwy 90 here, the Marina del Rey Freeway. This seems to be a freeway link from the 405 through Culver City to Marina del Rey, a coastal community immediately south of Santa Monica. This is also the first picture of the famous CA Hwy 1, also known as the Pacific Coast Highway. Calling something "the Pacific Coast Highway" doesn't make as much sense when it's an urban street like Lincoln Blvd here, or Santa Rosa Rd, in my old college town. But it is what it is; weird things happen when it's an almost thousand mile long road.

Briefly we see the 405, the San Diego Freeway on the way to Long Beach, as the spur 105 shoots off in two directions, one to Norwalk, and one to El Segundo. Norwalk is in the South-Central section of the city, while El Segundo is north of the Rancho Palos Verdes peninsula and even north of Torrance, but south of Redondo Beach (which itself of south of Santa Monica and Marina del Rey).

CA Rte 107 heads from Inglewood to Lawndale, to mostly forgotten communities in Central LA; neither is violent enough to become famous in the hip-hop arts, nor wealthy enough to influence politics.

Here we see the Harbor Freeway, I-110, again, as it crosses the 405 far south of where it originated, heading off to San Pedro.

And, getting back to where we started our journey, we meet up with the Long Beach Freeway, which heads south to Long Beach and north to Pasadena, while the 405 heads down to Orange County, where it meets up with I-5 and heads down to San Diego.

Lastly, here is the classic picture with the classic name, seen together. Oddly, this exit represents easily the ugliest stretch of this road. Before this crossing of the 710, the road signs in Long Beach all say "PCH", but it's really 18th street, a few miles from the ocean. On the west side of the 710, it stretches between refineries and industrial wastelands. At least the sign gives the right idea.

Public Votes for Movie Characters--Resulting List Heavy with Whitey

I came across a list of the top 100 movie characters as voted on by readers of the magazine, or site, or whatever. I didn't keep really tight notes, but they were tight enough for me.

I made some observations I wanted to put up somewhere, and here seemed like the best spot.

Cutting through the treacle:

10. Vito Corleone
9. Ripley
8. Cpt. Jack Sparrow
7. the Dude
6. Indy
5. Hannibal Lecter
4. Han Solo
3. the Joker (Heath Ledger version)
2. Darth Vader
1. Tyler Durdin, Brad Pitt, Fight Club

To start: Tyler Durdin? Okay...wouldn't have been my choice, but what can you do? It's not the worst choice, now that I think about it, but...wow.

I was kinda bummed that Charles Foster Kane isn't there, or Jake Gittes, but I guess I didn't really expect that, especially with today's voters.

Also: Harrison Ford twice, Star Wars franchise twice.

One girl, Sigourney Weaver as the badass alien killer. And, this is a pretty white list. Very white. All you have is James Earl Jones' voice, but it is number 2.

The next black face? Which is actually the first black character on the list? Clocks in at #19: Jules Winnfield, Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction.

The list is so white that a computer character, Gollum, ranks higher, #13, than Jules. This list is pretty light on the minorities, and I'm trying to figure out if it's just because the voters were mostly guys my age and skin color, or if there's just a dearth of good roles for the non-white actors and actresses.

Well, shit, it's gotta be both. That, and the institution of the cinema in this country is inherently racist, but...that's fodder for another post.

So, I move on with the observations. Sticking with the minorities:

19. Jules
22. Red, Morgan Freeman, Shawshank Redemption
33. Tequila, Chow Yun-fat, Hard Boiled (I saw this in a theater in Sacramento in 1996 or '97)(badass)
47. Blade, Wesley Snipes
78. Axel Foley

Wow. 4 black guys and Chow Yun-fat. Tony Montana was on there somewhere, but since that was Al Pacino, I didn't write it down, but I guess you could make the case that a Cuban should count.

Does this put into perspective the three computer animated characters, two puppets, 1 actual computer and 1 cell animated character?

13. Gollum
25. Yoda
63. Wall-E
74. ET
94. Buzz Lightyear
99. HAL

I didn't mention the cell animated character because it's Jessica Rabbit, a lady. The Ladies are better represented in the latter half of the list. Some of these should rate way higher, and I'm sure any of the few people reading this might agree. Here're the women:

9. Ripley
41. Mary Poppins (32 spot wait for Mary Poppins?)
45. Amelie
56. Juno
62. Mathilda, Natalie Portman as a young lady in movie of the same name
66. the Bride (fucking number 66?)
75. Marge Gunderson, Fargo
88. Jessica Rabbit
89. Princess Leia
90. Wicked Witch
91. Scarlet O'Hara
97. Carrie

Random "Luke" observation:

53. Luke from Cool Hand Luke
54. Luke Skywalker

Right next to each other. Go figure.

Jake Gittes, Jack Nicholson, Chinatown

Where's his number? Oh yeah, he was left off the fucking list. Who was that other guy I mentioned earlier...CITIZEN fucking KANE himself?

98. CharlesFoster Kane

I guess this is what you get when you let regular folks vote for something as important trivial as a movie character list.

The Really Real Ghostbusters

On one of the free digital signals we get down here in the Southland seems only to play at night, later night anyway, and is called Qubo.

Qubo has all sorts of cartoons that are designed to get the viewers like me specifically into waxing nostalgic over and leaving the channel tuned to Qubo. They are the 'toons of us early-30s guys' childhoods.

They show He-Man, She-Ra, something I never heard of called BraveStarr (it sounds cool enough: a Native American sheriff-type on an alien world with a laser blaster and maybe a mechanical horse), and, of course, the show from which this picture's taken, Ghostbusters:

This is not the Ghostbusters that most of us know and love, but I'll get to that in a second.

First let me say that all these shows suck sweaty balls. Holy shit are they bad. Poorly animated, poorly voiced, poorly written, trite from every angle. I suppose the fantasy-meets-and-drunkenly-humps-sci-fi universe that He-Man and She-Ra romp around in is novel---in theory...but goddamn. These Ghostbusters do go in and out of some netherworld dimension, but I wasn't drunk enough to give half a shit.

So, the Ghostbusters...There was the 1984 smash hit Ivan Reitman movie. It's canon for being a kid in the '80s. It spawned a sequel, which was also beloved by us stupid kids, although there have been plenty of worse sequels out there. It also spawned an animated show, starring the same main four characters from the movie. And Slimer. It was great.

Another show arrived around the same time, in between the two movies, in 1986, calling itself "Ghostbusters", and starring an ape, a fat idiot, and the blond hero. Their car was ghostly, had a mind of it's own, and was a scaredy-cat like C-3PO. 

This show surfed on enough of the attention and buzz created by the "main" franchise that they caused that "main" franchise to rename themselves "The Real Ghostbusters".

I remember thinking, even at that time, this seems weird. How can this show be getting made? There were things about it I preferred to the Real Ghostbusters, namely their frequent trips to the ghost-lands. But even as a kid, it just seemed illegal somehow to make a show and call it the exact same name as a different highly popular franchise.

The very first episode was on the other night, and I caught a little bit more that I had of the other shows I'd surfed through before going to bed. The fat idiot and the blond hero both were reluctant to become Ghostbusters, but were forced into it by the Gorilla after the original Ghostbusters, both guys' fathers, had been kidnapped. They showed the fathers, and I remembered a picture I'd seen somewhere:

Each of those two guys were animated, and were supposed to be the fathers of the young men who are in the animated cell from above.

See? Who was the real Real Ghostbusters?

There was a television show 1975 called the "Ghostbusters". Larry Storch was the star. It turns out that they sued, and won (or it was settled) Columbia Films over the name of the 1984 movie kids my age consider classic, and somehow were able to retain enough rights over the name of the property that they could produce an animated show pretty quick after that '84 movie.

While I preferred the fake "Real Ghostbusters" to the real "Fake Ghostbusters", I never hated the one with the Gorill, like some of my cohorts did. Maybe it was easier for kids to hate and talk shit, but for me, that show had some neat aspects lacking in the other, more popular show.

I always imagined them coexisting in the same universe, going about their ghostbusting business in separate circles, as there were enough ghosts to go around.

Early Adaptation

The other night the missus and I were looking though our instant queue on Netfilx and settled on an exploitation film. These kinds of films are kinda defined by being low budget, churned out quickly so the production values are slight, and generally made for a specific audience and set to be released in their neighborhoods.

This was a Blaxpoitation movie, and starred a young lady that was the reason we put it in the instant queue in the first place: Pam Grier.

Made in 1975 in Los Angeles, the movie is called Friday Foster. Pam Grier plays a young lady named Friday Foster, a young former model who lives with her younger brother, and now makes a living as a fashion photographer.

I was surprised to learn that this premise was actually based on a daily comic strip, and when I looked it up, I found this:

This is the Dell Comics edition/collection(?) of Friday Foster stories, where she splits her time between photography and sleuthing.

This is an early comic adaptation movie, and shows that non-superhero comics have a long history that spans to this era (Road to Perdition, From Hell).

As an exploitation movie, this is pretty good. The story and plot are convoluted and will keep you on your toes (uhh, with a grain of salt of course), and, if you compare it to Superfly or Shaft, it looks very good.

Also: if you've ever had any idea why Pam Grier was an "it" girl, watch this movie. She's smart, resourceful, loyal, has more moxy than power, is fearless, has a sense of humor, and is a young fox, showing off her stacked chest in non-gratuitous ways. It kinda reminded me of watching the 1989 Tim Burton's Batman for the first time in many years back in 2007. Having seen Kim Basinger in things like L.A. Confidential I remember thinking of how in love with her I was back during the Batman days when I was a kid. Then, 2007, and I was reminded what it was that did it.

Seeing Pam Grier in Friday Foster reminded me of a feeling that I didn't have specifically for her, but was the, "Oh...now I get it," epiphany.

Bongo Shows up in "The Simpsons"

One of the great pleasures in the alt-weekly liberal newspapers are the comics, things like "This Modern World" and "Trouble Town", and one of my favorites, the cynical and scarily brilliant "Life in Hell", from Matt Groening.

"Life in Hell", or rather a single comic given as a gift to James L. Brooks, prompted that producer to give Matt Groening a meeting, the results of which are well known by now.

Bongo is the single-eared son of Binky, the main character of "Life in Hell". He has been the star of two of my favorite single panels ever (I took these pictures from my Big Book of Hell).

So, when I was watching an episode of The Simpsons one morning while lately being on the mend, I was excited to see Bongo sitting in the front row of a studio audience during an Itchy and Scratchy segment.

This is from the "Bart After Dark" episode, when Bart gets a job working at the burlesque house. That show has one of my favorite lines, uttered by Bart, upon believing the Maison Derriere was inhabited by witches: "Lady, I've been grossly misinformed about witches."

Preface?

I wrote a piece about three topics recently in which I mentioned a few of the random comic book artists I like and would follow no matter the title or character. I didn't mention specifically the good writers I respect, like Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, John Byrne, maybe John Ostrander. This was more about artists, or those really cool creators who both write and pencil the work.

What I've done for this post is go through my collection and find the random things some of the guys I named have done and have some pictures. The guys I named were Frank Miller, Tim Truman, Mike Mignola, Mike Allred, and my favorite superhero artist, Joe Quesada.

Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee and Erik Larson and Sam Kieth and Greg Capullo...the powerhouse of the Image comics lineup, while spectacular, aren't really for me. I recognized the skills, but I wasn't around while they were cutting their teeth on things like Spider-Man and the Hulk, and I always felt like going with them would be just too easy and trendy. I found my own guys I liked.

Tom Mandrake's a guy I liked, but he was the artist for a specific title I read, and I'll be getting to that one in due time.

Okay, so...Frank Miller has become mostly famous lately because of the movies made from his Sin City and 300 properties, two collections I have pretty much have all of. I first found Sin City in 1991, when it was that weird smelling paper and nothing but stark black and white, expressive silhouettes, and adolescent boy fantasy. I started then and followed it going forward. 300 was beautiful, while "based of historical events", was a fun comic miniseries.

Here's my random Frank Miller comic:

It's designed to look like an old "Tales from the Crypt" book, and has three stories, all written and illustrated by Miller. The first is a Lance Blastoff story, the first story with this character, reprinted from the A-variant cover of "Dark Horse Presents #100", but in color for the first time. The second story is a Sin City tale, and the third story is an original Lance Blastoff tale. The different styles between the two Blastoff stores is interesting; the first is the original, and the original was initially done in the black-and-white Sin City style, the stark contrasting that fans are used to. In this edition, it's colored in, but retains a bit of the original blocky flair. The second Blastoff story is similar to the cover, closer in style to a space-comic.

Tim Truman is the next guy, and his style is much different. I can't really describe the design, but "un-flashy" may be a start. He tends to bring in elements of the old west and science fiction, blending them seemlessly with his unique artwork. At first I was not a fan, but it grew on me. His most famous work may be his screwball Jonah Hex mini-series', the one of which I have is "Riders of the Worm and Such". An early project that Truman created for the small publisher Eclipse was called Scout. In this post-apocalyptic tale the main character is an Apache warrior, because in Truman's own words, "who else would still be surviving?"

He was given the reins to a title I followed, Turok, Dinosaur Hunter, and drew and wrote issues 7, 8, and 9 with it's own contained story line. Here's the cover for #7, with Turok, the dinosaurs, and the Spider-people, who Truman brought into the Lost World. Up until this story line, Turok was one of the sleekest looking, dinosaur killing Miwoks ever presented in comic form. With this issue, I remember thinking, WTF? What did they do to my character? Eventually I came to like the artist and found some of his older books and kept an eye out for his newer ones.

Mike Mignola has become "famous", kinda, also, with the two Hellboy movies. Hellboy was Mignola's creation when he left the constricting gigs and was given more freedom. One of the earliest works he did is seen here, an off-regular-timeline tale of Batman, "Gotham by Gaslight." This story is set in London in the late nineteenth century, where the Wayne's are wealthy philanthropists, get gunned down, and young Bruce does his thing, and eventually we get Batman tracking down Jack the Ripper. The cover below shows off the basis of Mignola's eventual off-kilter Hellboy look.

Mike Allred is a different story. His comic here is anything but random. He's spent many a year trying to forge a career outside the mainstream, and created his most famous character, Madman, a few years before getting this almost-major company, Dark Horse, to publish a new series. The colors are eye-popping, the action is cartoony and anachronistic, and the plots are bizarre enough to be fun as hell. I have an even more random and harder to find book by Allred, from an even smaller imprint, but I'm trying to raise awareness to Madman. Allred sued Warner Brothers Animation for their character Freakazoid, who looks almsot exactly like Madman, except he's got a purple suit with a black exclamation point. I think they settled, or Allred dropped the case because he couldn't afford the court costs. He's since worked on Superman and a few other things, but his unmistakable character design always catches the eye.

Ah, on to my favorite superhero artist, and candidate for simply favorite comic artist, Joe Quesada. This is the third, and last, issue of Ninjak that Joe Quesada worked on. His work for Valiant was fast and bright. He did some covers for Solar, did the for Bloodshot #0, did the entire X-O Manowar #0, and the first three issues of Ninjak. I'm pretty sure that's all the Quasada Valiant work. Seems so bizarre, thinking about it now. Even now, fans like me can pick his work up easily.

Maybe this is some kind of introduction to a lengthy attempt to discuss my time with comics and how it's evolved through the years.

No, this isn't an introduction, it's more of a preface. A tiny taste.

Look at all the pretty pictures!

Pep Streebek Memories

Using my streaming Netflix I watched a movie that was a favorite of my brother and myself: the 1987 "classic" Dragnet. A comedic look at the police procedural from the fifties and sixties, it stars Dan Ackroyd as the anachronistic Joe Friday, acting exactly as his "uncle", the original show's star, named the same and played by the show's creator Jack Webb. Ackroyd plays is straight from the sixties, the super straight man for Tom Hank's detective Pep Streebek.

It was this night that I remembered how funny and entertaining and confident Tom Hanks was, or maybe "can be". I never watched the Med Ryan movies he made, and ever since Forrest Gump knocked out Pulp Fiction in most categories at the Oscars, I was pretty much done with Tom Hanks.

Of course you can recognize skill, and I enjoyed Catch Me if You Can, but Tom Hanks as a draw for me was over.

I had somehow buried my fond memories of what his movies use to mean for me. I'm talking the bad ones, or at least the ones other folks consider not his star-turns. I'm talking after Big, after Splash...I'm talking my old favorites. (Actually Dragnet is older than Big.)

The Big 3 as my brother and I probably see it were Dragnet (1987), The 'Burbs (1989), and, probably the weirdest one, Joe Vs the Volcano (1990), which it turns out is a Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks movie. I remember it more fondly...the brain cloud and a suicidal sacrifice...maybe I should watch it again, and try not to be too disappointed.

Maybe it was just Dragnet and The 'Burbs that endeared Tom Hanks to us. I do know that I fully loved those movies as a kid, and Tom Hanks was a funny guy who could carry a movie.

Seeing Dragnet again as an adult filled in the blanks that whooshed over my head as a kid watching a movie with those kinds of jokes. The first time newly minted partners Friday and Streebek show up at the skin mag Bait creator's Hefner-esque mansion, the lady on the intercom mistakes who they are, and with a throaty and sexy voice asks, "Vibrator repair?" How ridiculous, of course, but that was a joke that I never understood.

There were other jokes like that, but really, I was more basking in my pleasant memories of the Streebek Phenomena. How crazy a mostly wasted movie about glorifying the LA cops in 1987, the same shitty group of assholes that had lost their grip on the crack epidemic and fed the anger and fear of an entire subset of the city's population until they blew four years later in a major race riot caused me to remember the power that fucking Tom Hanks had over my imagination as a kid?

Good stuff. Also, A League of Their Own. I liked that one, too.

Homosexual Green Lantern Clarifications

I thought I'd clear up this whole gay Green Lantern conversation. Mainly because of a stupid republican-themed comic strip in my local paper, "Mallard Filmore", kept muddling up the situation with its ignorance.

So here goes. DC Comics is considering it a brave and bold move from the company, trying to keep it cutting edge. They consider it the first "major" gay superhero, since he's pretty far from the first. Green Lantern's major, right? He did just have a big budget movie release, right? Yes and no.

In DC Comics, Green Lantern is a major character, but that would be Hal Jordan or later, Kyle Rayner.

The character they made the first "major" gay superhero is indeed a Green Lantern, but it is Allan Scott, the gentleman on the left below, labeled as the Golden Age Green Lantern.

This was the first incarnation of a hero called Green Lantern, and this is not the same as the Hal Jordan iteration and the one the film's based upon. The Green Lantern Corp from the movie and both the Silver Age and Modern Age from above is an intergalactic police force that wield rechargeable rings that manifest will power.

Alan Scott was a train conductor who found a magical meteor and forged a magical ring from it. Whereas Hal Jordan used power from the central core, Alan Scott uses an entirely different source: magic.

Above it may seem odd that Hal Jordan occupies both the Silver Age and Modern Age spots. A few notes on that. One, this set is from 1992, and the major changes in both the industry as well as the DC Universe had yet to take place. At different times after 1959 many of the early comic book characters were updated and revamped for a more modern audience. 1959 is when the first updating occurred, when the Flash became the more recognizable hooded iteration named Barry Allen. Soon after all the major DC characters followed, and a real rival, Marvel Comics, entered the market with their stable of complex characters.

Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corp were created, and the Silver Age, as it's known, was in full bloom.

The main difference you'll see between the Silver and Modern Ages above will be the silver streaks in Hal's hair. That was a construct to show that Jordan had been updated for the modern times, hence, the Modern Age.

DC had big changes in store for Hal Jordan. It turned out the the silver in his hair was the sign of an evil having inhabited his body, and it has since been purged and Hal Jordan has returned as Earth's main Green Lantern. In the interim, though, he went crazy, blew up the central core, started a huge war, was killed, was then resurrected as the Spectre, and another (white) Earth Green Lantern was found and cultivated; this is Kyle Rayner. Check out the picture below.

The first spot is labeled "Green Lantern", even if you can't read it. That's Kyle Rayner. Next is Allen Scott; then a tool named Guy Gardner, who got himself a power ring; then Sinestro, an early ally of Hal Jordan who eventually became an enemy (in the 1970s); then Hal Jordan himself in one of his super-bad-guy outfits; and then the Guardians, the creators of the central battery core and forgers of the power rings.

These cards are from maybe 1994 or '95, so the entrance of Kyle Rayner has occurred, but not Jordan's final demise before becoming the Spectre.

Now Jordan's returned to the dark haired hero with no silver streaks, and then an announcement came along saying that a Green Lantern is coming out. So...I knew it wouldn't be Hal Jordan. That would have been bold, but they're trying to market and fund the second Ryan Reynolds GL movie, and I imagine his sexual orientation would be too hot of a potato. If  it had been Guy Gardner or John Stewart, a black Green Lantern from Earth that doesn't get enough press, they wouldn't be able to say that it was a "major" character coming out.

I expected it to be Kyle Rayner. He didn't have the decades of love built up or new movies coming out. But, what he does have, or did get, is/was a promotion. He was bumped up, when Hal Jordan returned, to a character named Ion. His powers and abilities were enhanced and he's not so much a Lantern anymore. I think he might have changed again, but I haven't really found out.

So, since 1938, Alan Scott has been running around the DC Universe. First in the mainstream, but then for much longer around the edges, along the fringe. A cynical view would be that they're trying to drum up some attention to an archaic character, a nearly outdated title and premise.

But, who are we to say to what's a major character or not? I haven't really collected comics in many years and I don't know what has happened in the DC Universe since then. Maybe Allen Scott has become an important character besides just a "major" title.

In any case, good for him. Them. Eh, keep reaching for that rainbow!