I’ve checked in with a bunch of webcomics over the years, ever since the internet started saying that webcomics would be the new salvation for the comic book world. But none of them have ever held my attention for more than a few episodes (webisodes?). I liked Cat and Girl, and have already expressed my love of Wigu, but none of them have captivated me the way Dash Shaw’s "Bodyworld" has. Earlier in the Fall I read his "Bottomless Belly Button" and thought it was fun and ok (all the characters are drawn normally except for one who’s got a frog head). Maybe a bit too much in the comic-self-confessional genre for me.
But "Bodyworld" is fantastic. An oddball mix of z-movie alternate reality, semi-sci-fi teen drama with a little kung fu action film mixed in, "Bodyworld" has got something for everyone: weird hallucingenic drugs, strange semi-steamy love scenes, nunchuks, aliens. Super highly recommended…
Wow, and that video’s kind of great too, right? I have this real soft spot for Robert Earl Keen. When I was living in England, from 81 – 86, I used to stay up late and set my tape recorder recording when John Peel would start his show. That was the only place to hear hip hop and I was so into rap and breakdancing and stuff. I would dub the rap tracks of the show and build these great 80’s hip-hop compilations. No clue what happened to these tapes.
I couldn’t care less about all the other stuff he was playing, I was just waiting for the rap. The other stuff was "really weird". Years later when I was in high school and really into listening to Top 40 radio, I came across one of those tapes of John Peel’s show. At that point I wasn’t really into the hip-hop OR the "really weird" stuff. But there was this one song that I couldn’t stop listening to. I put it on a mix I made for myself and listened to it over and over. I knew I didn’t like country, but this didn’t seem like country, even it did have that little voice-break bit when he sings a few of the phrases. And it was a waltz. And it had a TROMBONE!
Even now when I hear it it speaks to the ridiculous high school romantic in me; it just totally hits that late-night feeling, and it’s old-timey and sweet, and the narrator is obviously more confident in his story-telling than his romantic prowess. But by the end, all is right with the world. Damn this song is sweet.
So this is the fourth year that DJ BC (the guy responsible for the Beastles) has put out a compilation of various artists’ Christmas mashups…under the "Santastic" banner, this year’s is called, cleverly enough, Santastic 4, and includes a great tribute to Kirby-era Fantastic Four art (above). I got each of the three previous ones, and they were pretty hit or miss, but from all 3 I’ve been able to cull about an hour’s worth of solid Christmas mashups. Last year I was so looking forward to this year when I could add more and finally get it to the level where I could give out a full-length Christmas mashup CD…
but this year’s is crap! I don’t get it. There’s really only one on there that is any good, and mostly what it is is delightfuly weird:
Let me tell you, it is fairly rare for me to make some promo at work that I feel really proud of. I mean let’s face it, most of the time promos are "tune in this Friday at 10" and that’s it. We’ve been doing some interstitials recently and that’s a whole ‘nother ball game ‘cuz you get some time to actually tell a story, which is great. And sure, if you get a good budget and time and creative approval, you can make a good promo, but those occasions are few and far between.
Which is why I’m so stoked to have made this last week (let it load fully before playing):
So have you noticed the commenter named "oointgroov"?
Back in 1998 (I think) I was working at BBC America, painstakingly cutting out the swear words and nudity from British programming to make it palatable for American audiences. We would also cut up their programs and put in breaks for commercials. It was early days for BBCA and they didn’t really know how long it would take an editor to cut an hour of programming down, so they would give us tons of time for not much work. Which was great.
So I had all this time there. I would crank out my work for the week, and then parcel out delivering it, made sure I looked busy, and worked on all sorts of personal projects — mix CD’s, party flyers, personal films. I would hang out a bunch with one of my best pals, MR, who was working there at the time. We’d take these 2-hour lunch breaks and watch series that weren’t assigned, and just generally ahve a good rockin time.
The drummer for my band in college was working on a solo project called T Groove. He did this thing where he posted a bunch of solo split tracks for one his pieces, called "Robot Dance Party", and invited people to remix it. So MR and I spent some time remixing it on the AVID editing system I was using. This was kind of painstaking. I would put in the tracks from T Groove, and then download drum samples from the drum machine museum (site since taken down). Since we couldn’t control the speed of any of the audio, I would have to try each sample out individually, and then use the ones that just happened to be at the same tempo as the original track. Took a while, but damn fun.
Then we went to AT&T Labs’ text to speech demo and put in a bunch of lines for the speech synthesizer to rap over the track. This part was a blast. Something about the way "he" would read the lines, emphasize weird syllables, stretch sounds out in odd ways. Awesome. We made the chorus the refrain of "who put the ‘oo’ in T Groove". MR posts as commentator oointgroov. A while ago, I asked T Groove if he still had the remix but he said he didn’t.
Then out of the blue last week, he found it! I listened to it one morning, and it was the best part of my day/week. It gives me a good good feeling even now to listen to it.
"The beats T kicks are funkity fresh/ kicking the shit out of old John Tesh."
For some reason lately I’ve been thinking about the future and all the things that must be going on now that they will find utterly ridiculous. When I think about this, I start with the easy ones: can you believe that stuff about gay marriage?! Unregulated financial markets? That having a black president was a big deal?!
But then I’ve been reading things that put it in perspective, that there are bound to be countless other cultural assumptions we’re making that they won’t in the future. I read about how it was a big deal that JFK was the first Catholic president. Really? People cared about that? I can barely imagine. I read an account of Columbus setting sail on his historic journey, and how he had to bribe and assuage his sailors because they actually believed that they were going to sail off the map, and that there were monsters there waiting to destroy them. They actually believed in monsters! It’s hard to fit that in my brain, that perfectly ordinary, rational humans believed in the physical actuality of fantastical monsters.
When I worked on Random 1, one of the Executive Producers was David Riordan, the guy who wrote the 70’s hit "Green Eyed Lady". Sometimes we shared an office, and he was a pretty extraordinary person. He would often wax on about these far-out notions of time — some of the stuff I had come across at Burning Man — and gave me a great calendar from the law of time folks who believe that humanity’s sense of time is fundamentally flawed, and that by making 12 months out of what is clearly a 13 month year (due to lunar cycles), we are at odds with a primal part of our nature. I love this stuff.
One of the greatest things he told me was he firmly believed that in the future, society would look back at us now at marvel at the fact that we truly believed that time was money. that we would equate time with money. that we had the phrase "well, time is money." That this would seem so crazy to them, the same way we look back at "colored only" water fountains and can’t quite believe it now. I love this notion, because there does seem to be something wrong with the idea that time can somehow yield money. One is so fundamental and life-connected, the other so base and illusory.
Thinking about it now, equating it with Columbus and the fear that some folks have about gay marriage, I’m realizing this: that the very notion of time = money is a monster itself, as fantastical and unreal as the monsters of 1492 mapmakers.
