A personal diary keeping people abreast of what I am working on writing-wise.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

ROBOPOCALYPSE PLEASE

Hey, Portlanders! The Rocopocalypse Comics Collective is having an art show this Thursday, May 1, as the First Thursday show at Tender Loving Empire.

You should come by and check it out.



I know a couple of the artists in the group, and I picked up their new anthology minicomic at Stumptown over the weekend. It's all stories themed around the name of their group. It's a lot of fun, and shows all of the artists are really developing. It's not available yet on their site, but I am sure they will have it at the gallery--especially since some of the art on the promo image is from the mini.

Also check out their release by BT Livermore, The Life and Times of Baby Otto Zeppelin.

Current Soundtrack: Dino 5, Kaiser Chiefs, Jamie T, Sam Cooke

Current Mood: drained

e-mail = golightly at confessions123.com * Criterion Confessions * Live Journal Syndication * My Corporate-Owned Space * ComicSpace * Last FM * GoodReads * The Blog Roll * DVDTalk reviews * My Books On Amazon

All text (c) 2008 Jamie S. Rich

Monday, April 28, 2008

YOU SAY PARTY! I SAY SLEEP!

I'll admit. I'm spoiled by living in a comic book town. "Oh, another Stumptown? Sure. I guess I'll show up for an hour or two."


All photos taken from the Stumptown 2008 Pool on Flickr



Which I did. And it looks like the show is only getting bigger and better. I know a lot of the folks who have gotten involved with the programming and were part of the move from fall to spring, and it looked like it was an idea that paid off. Good weather, good crowds, and lots of excellent guests. As I said before, I skipped this time just because I was feeling overexposed in my place of residence, and felt it was good to take a break while I wait for new material to come out. Still, I wasn't going to pass up doing some browsing, shaking hands, and kissing babies.

The weekend actually started on Thursday. The Get Graphic! event in support of comics in libraries went very well, with speeches from Charles Brownstein of the CBLDF and Douglas Wolk, and a raffle in which I won copies of the books I had donated. Ooops! I gave the books to one of the librarians and divvied up the add-ons. I had really wanted to win the 12 Reasons Why I Love Her art Joëlle Jones had donated, which was easily the best prize of the evening (only one cartoonist gave art? for shame!), but it was not to be. It did go to a good home, though.

That night shifted from the event to a bar and then to Oni publisher Joe Nozemack's house. I learned at least one new lesson that evening: if you're out with Farel Dalrymple, make sure you map out the spill zone in proximity to where you are sitting in regards to him. Otherwise you end up with a Singapore Sling up your sleeve--and not in the sneaky "Have I got a trick for you!" sense of being up your sleeve.

Thursday ended relatively early in comparison to Friday. A small private gathering with lots of cartoonists and local publishing folk spilled over to Guapo Comics for their annual event. I got to meet and/or say hi to Craig Thompson, Lark Pien, Derek Kirk Kim, Landry Walker, Jason Shiga, Shannon Wheeler, and a variety of the Oni, Dark Horse, and Top Shelf crews. In fact, there are probably some people at Dark Horse who are annoyed with me this morning as I'm sure the tales I told out of school trickled back to them now that the work week has begun. I left their employ in 1998, and I carry with me plenty of anecdotes about the old days that the newer employees always love to hear. "Hey, did you hear about the time me and your supervisor went to a Spice Girls concert? And his mom picked us up in her car?"

Getting home at 4:30 that morning was not the best way to transition into the real show. I had promised my friend Mason I'd meet him at around 11:00 so he could have my extra pass, and I was the worse for wear, I must say. I carried on conversations, but in the sense an ant carries a bread crumb that is five times his size--it didn't come without some effort. This is part of why I only lasted a couple of hours, but it also comes down to the fact that I just don't know what to do with myself at comic book shows anymore. I'm not that compelled to go to most industry panels, and the socializing is usually better afterwards than on the con floor. On the floor, to talk to someone who is exhibiting, you generally have to block their customer path. It can be good, because it makes it look like there is interest and shoppers tend to follow one another, thinking if someone else likes it, maybe there is something good over there. Yet, you don't want to be that guy who keeps standing there and doesn't go away and doesn't move for the real business to take place.


Yes, that's Jeff Parker in wig and glasses hosting the Art Battle.



I do like to look at stuff, but I tend not to spend much money, and I feel tremendously guilty looking and then moving on. I think it comes from knowing the really weird, unintentional ways shoppers at conventions can say "no" without saying no. You'd be surprised how disheartening it can be when someone looks at your book, makes a sour face, and then bails.

So, what with trying to avoid spending a lot of money, and also not wanting to be a jerk, I was being careful to browse from afar, zoom in when I felt interested If I were more egotastic, I'm sure I could maybe try to trade on my name, but that's not right. Even if the people hawking the books know who I am for whatever reason, I'm not an editor anymore.

By 2:30, I was home with a handful of acquisitions, most of which I haven't broken into yet. I did read the minicomic Stuffed Afterlife by Angela Melick (http://www.spikecomix.com). Done as part of last October's 24-Hour Comic Book Day, Stuffed Afterlife is the sweet tale of a stuffed toy cat who has lived with the same owner on through childhood and into adulthood. The cat, Dotty, is attacked by her owner's dog, and when her stuffing is torn out, she finds herself in stuffed animal heaven. There she is told that she carries a piece of her owner's soul with her, and if she can solve the riddle of what ails this person, she can be restored. What follows is a Wizard of Oz-style journey where Dotty and several other lost toys searching for the missing questions that plague their beloved humans.



The comic has a surprisingly effective emotional core. It's not a very complicated story, but it manages to hit the buttons Melick is searching for. The art has its ups and downs, but I'm surprised to find that, as a cartoonist, Melick shows more sophistication in her storytelling than she does in the actual draftsmanship. Young artists so often focus first on style and let the building blocks of story only come after. Not true here. My complaint would be that the stuffed animal characters show more personality and artistic confidence than the human beings and the backgrounds, which is also strangely backwards. The less real it is, the more real it feels.

Saturday night, after a nap, I went to the Comic Art Battle at Cosmic Monkey. I can't believe it was my first time at their Sandy location. The store is huge! Check out the Monkey gallery on their site. They have all of them on the wall, too, including ones not online. They have a Joëlle original that actually has the monkey saying a line of dialogue I wrote. I want a scan of that!

The event was also very well attended. Even Brian Bendis was there, very graciously allowing fans to corner him and talk about Skrulls. I didn't see much of the battle, it was a little loud inside the store, but from my understanding, regardless of what Corey Lewis was challenged to draw, he drew Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Can I get a chorus of, "Oh, Corey"?



Sunday I stayed home and worked on some stuff I had deadlines for. I needed to get ahead on Daring Students' Association vol. 2 before heading to Dallas this weekend, and Mike Allred was also sending pages from Madman Atomic Comics #9 throughout the day. The goal was to turn it into Image today, and so we were putting everything into making that happen. You guys are in for a real treat. It's another issue where Mike will make you entirely rethink what is possible in a stapled, printed comic book.

Current Soundtrack: Ennio Morricone, Underworld, My Little Airport, Sister Vanilla, White Rabbits, Cardigans

Current Mood: heh

e-mail = golightly at confessions123.com * Criterion Confessions * Live Journal Syndication * My Corporate-Owned Space * ComicSpace * Last FM * GoodReads * The Blog Roll * DVDTalk reviews * My Books On Amazon

All text (c) 2008 Jamie S. Rich

Thursday, April 24, 2008

TIM, DO YOU REALLY WANNA MAKE A FILM?



THIS WEEK IN THEATRES...

* Baby Mama, the Tina Fey/Amy Poehler vehicle is good, but not as good as we want it to be. Someone forgot to remind me about that "awwwww" factor they always have to have in baby movies.

* My Blueberry Nights, Wong Kar-Wai's first English-language film gets overanalyzed yet again.

Really, it's the week for movies that aren't bad but aren't exactly what they could have been, either.

THIS WEEK IN DVD REVIEWS...

* The Delirious Fictions of William Klein - Eclipse Series 9, which is the surprise of the spring. Three absolutely crazy movies that you really must check out. If nothing else, get your hands on Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (Also at Criterion Confessions.)

* The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, one of the best movies of last year. A tremendous achievement by Julian Schnabel.

Current Soundtrack: The Walker Brothers, After the Lights Go Out: The Best of 1965-1967


Current Mood: whatever
SNOWBALL IN NEGATIVE

I read the "Chance Meeting" ads, and have done so off and on since way back when I did that "Chance Meetings" comic strip for the Oni Press website. Part of it is I'm just curious to see some of the stories, and you never know, one might be useful one day for a story of my own.

I'll admit, too, I'm like everyone else. Who doesn't read them without at least a tiny little twinge of, "Maybe I'll see myself in there"?* Once there was an ad for one of the other employees at Trilogy Video and the other boys who worked there saw it, and we were mad. So much so, we never told the guy who it was for that he was in the paper. I have no idea if he ever saw it.

That's pretty messed up, I'm not going to pretend. It could have been the love of his life, he could be married with kids by now. Then again, knowing him, I doubt it. Plus, given that I was stopped at the local grocery yesterday by a former customer and she asked me, "Whatever happened that that other guy, the one all of us ladies liked to talk to," karma bites me on the ass again.

As messed up as that is, though, I think it's beat by what I saw in yesterday's Willamette Week.

For a couple of weeks now, they have been running this ad:

Fred Meyer, potting soil :)

Hey - Thanks for letting me go ahead of you. I had already decided to ask you out before I left the line, but by the time I doubled back, you were gone. This must be reconciled. If you respond, I'll invite you to meet up for a walk, let you know that I think you're cute, and insist, semi-awkwardly, that I reimburse you for bothering to respond to this ad!



Sure, he likely isn't doing himself any favors by being so nervous about it. If you're going to make up for chickening out in real life, then you might as well be gutsy when the face-to-face is off the decks. Still, not bad, kind of sweet, no reason to hate.

Yesterday, he got his response:

Good soil?

I may be the woman you're writing to if you mean the SE Freddies on Hawthorne. If so, you're probably far younger than I. You were cute; I was tired. Most likely you're seeking someone else."



Yeowch! He's getting the "I'm too old for you, you don't want me" turndown! I've gotten that before, and let me tell you something, even if it's meant to "let him down easy," it's a pretty annoying way to be refused. Even if it's true, it sounds like a cop-out, a bullshit "It's not you, it's me" line.**

In this case, though, if you're not interested, why respond at all? The beauty of taking a chance on a Chance Meeting ad is the person placing the ad never knows for sure that the person they seek ever saw the listing. No response doesn't mean you failed, it just means fate is not going to intervene this time and you can walk away maintaining the positive fantasy of what might have been. Not so for Mr. Potting Soil! Because the object of his desire had to be cruel and smack him down in public, turning his hopeful Prince Charming mission into a rejection.

Sorry, buddy, you mistook the Wicked Stepmother for Cinderella.



* Please, no one now go and put an ad in one of the Portland papers for me that says, "Hey, look, you finally made it!" It's a nice thought, but it wouldn't be the same thing, now, would it?

** I do realize that there is a reading of the woman's response that suggests she is equally as nervous as the man, and that she is not saying no, but instead refusing to believe it's her. My first reaction was that she was giving him the brush-off, and I am sticking to that.

Current Soundtrack: The Roots, Rising Down

Current Mood: nauseated

e-mail = golightly at confessions123.com * Criterion Confessions * Live Journal Syndication * My Corporate-Owned Space * ComicSpace * Last FM * GoodReads * The Blog Roll * DVDTalk reviews * My Books On Amazon

All text (c) 2008 Jamie S. Rich

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

MORE NEWS FROM NOWHERE

* Marc Ellerby has restarted his "Ellerbisms" comic strip, which sounds kind of like an explosion that happens in your brain, probably brought on by listening to a bunch of crunchy music full of barking. You can read it at his site, MarcEllerby.com, where he has also leaked the following cover images from the inevitable Side B collection of Love the Way You Love. Preorder it off Amazon, if you so desire, or expect it in the August Diamond catalogue.





* I am running three eBay auctions for Joëlle Jones, and you can check them out on my seller's page. It includes a Gen13 drawing and two pages from 12 Reasons Why I Love Her. Scoot over to her blog for an updated price list for her pages and commissions.

* The Stumptown Comics Festival is this weekend, and though I am not setting up, I am sure I will be wandering around at least on Saturday. In anticipation of that, Joëlle and I will be attending the Get Graphic benefit on Thursday. I've donated a complete signed set of Love the Way You Love to the auction, and Joëlle has given them a 12 Reasons page, so come down to buy. (It's the last page of reason 5, and I may feel compelled to bid on it myself. It's a nice one!)

* Free Comic Book Day is May 3, and we will be officially attending CAPE 4 in Dallas, Texas. Other guests include Chynna Clugston, Ian Shaughnessy, Jason Pearson, Gail Simone, David Mack, and many more. We'll have our books, and Joëlle will be doing sketches. Contact me if you want to try to get an advance booking for one of her drawings.


Current Soundtrack: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!; various New Order tracks I have on my computer


Current Mood: focused

e-mail = golightly at confessions123.com * Criterion Confessions * Live Journal Syndication * My Corporate-Owned Space * ComicSpace * Last FM * GoodReads * The Blog Roll * DVDTalk reviews * My Books On Amazon

All text (c) 2008 Jamie S. Rich

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

OUR LOVE TO ADMIRE

Johanna Draper Carlson wrote a splendiferous review of 12 Reasons Why I Love Her over at Comics Worth Reading. You should follow the link and read it. It's one of those amazing write-ups that any creative person could hope for. Like Colleen Mondor's review of Have You Seen the Horizon Lately? for Bookslut, this assessment of 12 Reasons hits all the right points, and validates for me, as a writer, that I did my job right--because if even one person can suss it out, that means I've given my readers all of the information they require to see what I am trying to say.

Here's a taste:

"Joëlle Jones makes her debut in stunning fashion. Her style impressively changes to match the mood of each piece. And that’s necessary, because Jamie Rich’s script relies on her art — he’s comfortable letting the images tell the story when needed. The reader gets to see the leads interact instead of being told what they’re thinking and feeling. That’s still obvious, though, through the well-drawn gestures and attitudes of the two. And they’re both cute. He’s got a Dean Cain-ish charm, with glasses and a great smile, while her punch of her gorgeous body is lightened by a sprinkling of freckles across her nose."

Ellerby sent me the link and it was waiting for me when I got home from a meeting with Gretchen Stelter, my agent, and that went very well, too. You haven't heard the last from me, world!

Completely unrelated, the new Madonna album, Hard Candy, has started circulating, and as a longtime Madonna fan, I'm embarrassed for her. The tracks are all produced by Timbaland and Justin Timberlake or Pharrell Williams, and they all sound like songs by those people with Madonna singing on top. It doesn't have any of her personality, but instead sounds like the record made by some young nobody who has been handed to hotshot producers. Isn't Madonna a little too far in her career to be pushed around in the studio? Or did she just check out and let them do the work? As Ian Shaughnessy said to me, they should have just called it Justified 2. There is even a song called "Spanish Lesson" that is like a half-finished sequel to J.T.'s "Senorita." The album sounds several years out of date and wholly generic.

It's a weird world when instead of Gwen Stefani wanting to be Madonna, Madonna wants to be Gwen Stefani. And she's failing.

Current Soundtrack: Barry Adamson, Back to the Cat

Current Mood: elated

e-mail = golightly at confessions123.com * Criterion Confessions * Live Journal Syndication * My Corporate-Owned Space * ComicSpace * Last FM * GoodReads * The Blog Roll * DVDTalk reviews * My Books On Amazon

All text (c) 2008 Jamie S. Rich

Sunday, April 20, 2008

AN AUDIENCE WITH THE POPE

Paul Pope is contributing the cover to Popgun, vol. 2.



To refresh your memory, Joëlle Jones and I have a ten-page story called "Reverberation (Doubt)" in the book (colored by Keith Wood). Joëlle has the first page on her blog.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

HAPPINESS IS A WORN PUN



THIS WEEK IN DVD REVIEWS...

* Bernard & Doris, Bob Balaban's underfed biopic of billionairess Doris Duke and her butler. Starring Susan Sarandon and Ralph Fiennes.

* Dam Street, a Chinese film, directed by Li Yu, showing the stigma and long-lasting effects of Communism's strict moral code in the 1980s/90s on a teenage girl who becomes pregnant.

* The Pied Piper of Hützovina, a documentary on Gogolo Bordello's Eugene Hutz returning to the Ukraine.

* Silent Ozu: Three Family Comedies - Eclipse Series 10, a boxed set showing the Japanese director's formative years. (Also at Criterion Confessions.)

* Starting Out in the Evening, in which Frank Langella gives a tremendous performance as a writer at the tail end of his career and facing the outer edges of obscurity.

UPDATED TO CRITERION CONFESSIONS...

This week's reviews written specifically for the site are:

* Le Bonheur, another from 4 X Agnès Varda, this time a colorful satire showing one life too well lived.

* Death of a Cyclist, Juan Antonio Bardem's Spanish classic mixing Hollywood suspense with political discourse.

* Paddle to the Sea, a highly regarded children's short about the journey of a wooden boat from the Canadian mountains to the Atlantic Ocean.



Current Soundtrack: Chemical Brothers, We are the Night

Current Mood: ditzy

e-mail = golightly at confessions123.com * Criterion Confessions * Live Journal Syndication * My Corporate-Owned Space * ComicSpace * Last FM * GoodReads * The Blog Roll * DVDTalk reviews * My Books On Amazon

All text (c) 2008 Jamie S. Rich

Friday, April 18, 2008

HELLO, I'M IN THE FRONT ROW

The New York City Comic Convention is underway. My friend Francis Rizzo III, fellow DVD Talk reviewer and proprietor of 1106, sent me this photo from the Oni table:



Stop by and ask them for Love the Way You Love vol. 6. Not to bug them for it being late, since that's our fault, but to make them think people are really interested. :)

Current Soundtrack: Elbow, The Seldom Seen Kid


Current Mood: famous

Thursday, April 17, 2008

THE JOB MR. ELLERBY DONE

Love the Way You Love vol. 6 is completely drawn and turned in to Oni! Whooosh!



I have nothing pithy to say. Read Mr. Ellerby's note here instead.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

ONE NIGHT OF LOVE THAT PUT MY HEAD IN A MESS



Portlanders are in for a rare treat this week when a revival print of Alain Resnais' 1961 masterpiece Last Year at Marienbad arrives at Cinema 21. Long out of print on DVD in the U.S., it's not a film you're often going to stumble across, and the quality of the Region 1 DVDs that remain in circulation leave a lot to be desired. I got a chance to attend a screening of this new 35mm print a couple of weeks ago, and I can attest that it's quite lovely.

Last Year at Marienbad is a rumination on an affair. Twelve months before, X (Giorgio Albertazzi) met A (Delphine Seyrig) and the two had an affair--or so he says and so she denies. The "plot" of the film is X trying to get her to admit to what happened. They had made an agreement to meet after the year was up, so that she could remove herself from her husband, M (Sacha Pitoeff). The film is structured as a string of elliptical, poetic remembrances, the same event revisited in multiple ways, the setting and the circumstance changing. The director, Alain Resnais (Hiroshima, Mon Amour), is attempting to replicate the variables of memory and the flickering flames of passion. A romance may be alive for the man in one way, but alive for the woman in a completely different way, and fear of the future will alter its existence even further.

So it goes, over and over, M's insistence, A's denial, an off-hand admittance, a retreat. All the while, M circles the room, looking like a holdover from Dr. Frankenstein's lab, luring other men, including X, into a card game they can never hope to win. The game is another series of patterns, a sequence of cards displayed the same way each time, removed in a different order, but always with the same result.



Some viewers are going to find Last Year at Marienbad maddening, particularly the first time they see it. The screenplay is by experimental French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose book Jealousy used similar tactics to show a suspicious husband driving himself insane, and I so hated it when it was assigned to me in my first semester of college I've never read another of the man's books. Marienbad will require less of your time, but the film almost demands more patience and concentration, because Resnais, working with director of photography Sacha Vierny and art director Jacques Saulnier, has created such a gorgeous film, it's hard not to stop paying attention to what is happening and just stare. (Special mention must also be given to editor Henri Colpi, because Marienbad is the kind of picture that most likely really came alive in the cutting room.)

Shot at various locations in Bavaria, the opulent estates and posh interiors used for X and A's wanderings are tremendous. More distracting, however, is Delphine Seyrig. Outfitted in gowns from Chanel, she is one of the most dazzling women to ever appear on a movie screen. In some scenes, she wears a dress made entirely of feathers that is to drool over. With her inky black hair and pale skin, Seyrig is practically otherworldly. Though on the surface she must portray a chilly demeanor, her lies are apparent in her face and tentative movements. There seems little debate that A is the woman X is looking for. If she's not, if he really is mistaken, then she surely wishes he wasn't. If his tale is invented, then the variations are merely bait in a fishing expedition. Concoct enough scenarios, and maybe she'll agree to one of them.



Since this new version is being released by Rialto Pictures (with an excellent new poster), there is a pretty good chance we’ll be seeing a new DVD of Last Year at Marienbad soon, possibly even from Criterion, who have released Rialto reissues in the past. Still, it will be worth it not to wait, particularly as this is the kind of movie that gets better with each viewing. If you catch it now, you'll be all the more prepared to settle in and absorb the film when the DVD does land in your player. The revival has a few more stops after Portland, you can check if it is coming to your area here.






Current Soundtrack: The Zombies, "Time of the Season;" Mystery Jets, "Young Love;" The Yardbirds, Ultimate!


Current Mood: indecisive

e-mail = golightly at confessions123.com * Criterion Confessions * Live Journal Syndication * My Corporate-Owned Space * ComicSpace * Last FM * GoodReads * The Blog Roll * DVDTalk reviews * My Books On Amazon

All text (c) 2008 Jamie S. Rich

Monday, April 14, 2008

MARIA'S PARTIES

That little howler monkey Marc Ellerby is about two days done from putting the last tones on Love the Way You Love #6. In celebration of that, he shares a side-by-side comparison of the issue's flashback to #1 on his blog.

That was actually a scene James and I had him redraw a couple of times already back in the day, so I guess it was cruel of me to make him revisit it. I honestly didn't think about it when I wrote the script. I was too busy feeling guilty about making him draw medieval knights and mountain climbing.

Just a reminder, Love the Way You Love #6 is available in June, and the Diamond order code is APR08 4036.

Also, I updated my blog sidebar with links to Tally and Renee French. Ahoy, girls!

And check Joëlle's blog for a colored page of 12 Reasons Why I Love Her. It was done by one of our friends just messing around. Pretty neat, though. It looks like the German edition of the book is going to be out in June, and we're about to do an interview for it. I'll eventually post that here, since we'll be doing it via e-mail in English.

Current Soundtrack: Kylie, "Rippin' Up the Disco (Matty Boys Remix)/The One (Voyager Remix)"

Current Mood: bored

e-mail = golightly at confessions123.com * Criterion Confessions * Live Journal Syndication * My Corporate-Owned Space * ComicSpace * Last FM * GoodReads * The Blog Roll * DVDTalk reviews * My Books On Amazon

All text (c) 2008 Jamie S. Rich

Saturday, April 12, 2008

SHADOWPLAY



I finally made it out to see Leatherheads, and I'd say the mediocre reaction the film has been receiving has been fair. George Clooney's third directorial effort is perfectly okay, but only just that. It aspires to be His Girl Friday, but Clooney has missed the key Howard Hawks ingredient: speed. Take the same cast, same script, and certainly the same director, because Clooney has the potential to be one of our greats, but turn everything up a notch, cut the pauses and maybe add a little more physical comedy (thus making the sleeves catching on fire and the goofy disguises seem less incongruous), and Leatherheads would be a very funny film. As it is, the performers are charming enough to make it a pleasant afternoon diversion.

Amusingly, all of the people in the theatre with me looked like they could have been alive in 1925 when the movie took place. I swear to God, I saw two different male senior citizens get lost between the door and their seats, one on his way in before the movie and the other on the way out. The first was rescued by his wife, the second was just kind of wandering in circles when I passed him in the hall. He dropped in step behind me and followed me out. I was half tempted to turn into a wall and keep bumping into it like a toy robot with no ability to change direction.

But then I remembered karma and the fact that I was really only looking a year or two into my own future, and I let the impulse to be mean die.

Speaking of hearkening back to older times, I think the album I am currently most anticipating is the debut from Last Shadow Puppets, a new pop outfit featuring Alex Turner from Arctic Monkeys and Miles Kane from the Rascals. I just got my hands on their first single and its excellent B-sides, including a cover of an early Bowie track, "In the Heat of the Morning."

From a production standpoint, the single, "The Age of the Understatement," is everything I like. I have an image of Bernard Butler playing that boxing video game "Punch Out," but he's unlocked a secret code so that the battling pugilists are Phil Spector and Ennio Morricone.




I even like the visual imagery of the video--Russian choruses, clean-cut boys with Beatles hairdos in long coats, lonely stage performances. I checked out some of the Rascals singles, not having heard of them before, and their tunes are very much in an Arctic Monkeys vein, though without Turner's personality or lyrical dexterity. (Kane was formerly in the Little Flames, whose "Put Your Dukes Up John" was covered by the Monkeys.)

The album is out May 6 in the U.S. Click through and check out the well-tailored cover art.

While you're waiting, out this week at least in the UK, is American Demo by the Indelicates. I've had a chance to sample it and its fantastic. Many of their singles have been re-recorded for it, so even if you think you've heard it, you haven't. The new versions fit more cohesively with the new songs than I think the originals would have.

The band is hard to describe. It's like Luke Haines had a secret pop terrorism camp where he trained kids to form rock bands that performed classic pop with the most acerbic of lyrics.

I wish there were a more clear video of "We Hate the Kids," but this live version will have to do. I wish this song were around when I was a teenager. I would have bought a 78 rpm record of it.



Also check out their song "If Jeff Buckley Had Lived," which quite accurately and irreverently predicts what would have likely happened to the overrated singer's sterling image had he not met a young demise. I know the guy had a pretty voice, but his music seems flat, overcalculated, and underfelt to me. I'm sure Leonard Cohen appreciates the royalties, nevertheless.

Current Soundtrack: Lightspeed Champion covering Amy Winehouse; Last Shadow Puppets; the Indelicates; the Little Flames


Current Mood: nostalgic

Thursday, April 10, 2008

SO NICE, SO SMART



THIS WEEK IN THEATRES...

* Smart People, a well-acted, mostly charming comedy that does have the problem of not being as smart as its material demands. Noah Baumbach should have done script rewrites.

THIS WEEK IN DVD REVIEWS...

* 27 Dresses, effectively ending feminism in America and making me glad for the first time in my life that I have a penis. Why, Katherine Heigl, why?

* Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. I know at least one Confessor will disagree with me, but I found this intricate crime tale to be riveting from front to back, with a stand-out cast and exciting direction.

* The Cats of Mirikitani, a heart-warming documentary about a Japanese American artist who survived the internment camps of WWII to end up homeless in NY, and how he reconciled all that.

UPDATED TO CRITERION CONFESSIONS...

This week's review written specifically for the site is:

* La Pointe Courte, the lead film of the 4 X Agnès Varda boxed set provides a link between Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave in a tale of a married couple looking for their lost passion at a remote fishing village.

Of everything I watched this week, however, this annoyed me more than anything else:



So, I can understand the economic sense of not hefting the cost of making pennies any further, but this dink says the more important thing we can save is time? Because we lose 2 1/2 seconds at the store? I'm sorry, but if this guy has time to worry about this and make it his life's work, I'm not sure his schedule is overtaxed enough to warrant the concern. Imagine what he could do with that brain of his is he had 2 1/2 more seconds to think of unnecessary campaigns to spearhead!

Current Soundtrack: McAlmont & Butler, "Yes;" Girls Aloud, "Crazy Fool;" the Long Blondes, "Giddy Stratospheres;" and "Jeopardy" on the TV

Current Mood: irritated

e-mail = golightly at confessions123.com * Criterion Confessions * Live Journal Syndication * My Corporate-Owned Space * ComicSpace * Last FM * GoodReads * The Blog Roll * DVDTalk reviews * My Books On Amazon

All text (c) 2008 Jamie S. Rich
CURRENT WORKLOAD: DO YOU KNOW HOW TO WALTZ?


Dear Waltz vol. 2 by Yun Ji-Un




Current Soundtrack: Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan, "Saturday's Gone/It's Hard to Kill a Bad Thing;" These New Puritans, Beat Pyramid


Current Mood: still busy