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As promised, here are my final 25 cuts by the unforgettable Elton and Betty White. I think that due to the shortness of their songs, one needs to hear rather a lot of them to gain a better feel for what they did. I suppose I should describe their music to those who haven't heard it, I keep assuming that WFMU reader/listeners know about them; the best and most I could say is that they sing straight from the heart about some earthy, patently human things, and what they may lack in skill as poets and players disappears under the weight of their charm. I didn't even expect to be doing Elton and Betty as my first couple of regular posts here on BOTB, but fate seemed to push them into this spot, in several ways. By the way- I'm tickled to be here.
The second tidal wave of E & B hits after the break.
Pesky WFMU playlist termites The Bran Flakes have launched a new animated video ("What It's All About") in conjunction with the February 24 release of their album, I Have Hands (Illegal Art).
Animation by TBF's Sir Mildred Pitt. Shouts to fellow Flake Otis Fodder, who quit smoking last Friday "after 25+ years of a pack every day or two."
"Right now I am tettering on the edge of sanity," Otis reports. "It's been 72 hours and my smoking days are over. Yes yes. But where shall I go? Maybe smoking was my talent. Shoot me."
Earlier this week, a little bit of awesome turned up in my inbox, via the South Florida Sun-Sentinel of all places. This gallery of retro cereal boxes is fun not necessarily because it's a reminder of all the crap I used to eat, but rather because it nicely highlights all the cereal ideas and kooky design ideas that didn't quite work.
Considering this explosive newsbreak in nail trends, we are reminded that it's once again the season for obsessing over the keratinous growths on the ends of our fingers and toes. The inevitable question comes up: What's hot for summer? The answer remains as transitory as fashion itself. The Celeb Set is all over the Neon Pink, while fashionista writers are screaming that Spring's navy blue trend has definitely gone the way of turquoise and other blue variations. There is however, no accounting for taste when such dictums invariable trickle and triple-filter down to the masses. Judge not ye ghetto nails, lest your own nasty nails be judged:
This week, animator/comic genius Brad Neely dropped a new short musical animated piece. I wrote a bit about Neely in a previous post, and he is popping up on screen as one of the subjects of the new film We Are Wizards, which examines the subculture around the Harry Potter books (the film played at the NY Underground Film Festival earlier this month, as is in the Independent Film Festival of Boston this weekend).
His new cartoon is musical ditty in which "all of the woodland elves, satyrs and hobgoblins are finally coming together for a ragtime protest ditty against us Homo sapiens." They have a rather impressive list of all the things we get wrong.
Dirty, crude, juvenile, and completely reprehensible. And catchy as hell...
(NSFW) The Groovy Age of Horror is a blog devoted to bizarre horror paperbacks, comics and movies. For the past year the curators have been posting scans of Italian Fumetti (comics), starting with the wild and weird series Terror Blu. The stories are a sick and hilarious mix of gynecological and genital terror told within ludicrous sci-fi storylines The stuff is not for the faint of heart but I'm sure your ghoulish curiosity will get the better of you as you scratch your head wondering how anyone concocted such a carnival of carnage.
I sometimes hear guys talking about how mystified they are by choices women make when it comes to a hetero partner. Frankly, even as a broad, I can offer little insight into what goes on in the minds of women myself. I just know that girls start a hell of alot earlier than you may have been led to believe when it comes to creating a sexual inner life. Add to that mix the fact that most boys find girls icky until they are almost thirteen and you've got yourself the first giant chasm in the gender gap. As early as the age of four back in the late sixties/early seventies my preoccupation with and crushes on celebrities were a mental tsunami drowning the village of my own potential. Worse was the fact that my crushes were on personalities so incredibly unsexy to other young girls who dreamt about the classic version of Prince Charming that I could not even share during girltalk, leaving me left out of that whole female bonding thing. The endurance of each of my manias made Wuthering Heights look like a Peanuts cartoon. Meanwhile other girls flipped their crushes as quickly as they thumbed through the latest Tiger Beat. Similarly when other little girls collected 45s, I sat transfixed with my LPs stacked on the return arm of the stereo. For the sake of some (any) logic, I've lumped my pre-teen loves into three different categories. Mind you, some of the celebrities are literally shoe-horned into these groups but I'm trying make things easier for you people. Anyhoo, there are "The Nice JewishBoys","The Pan-Sexuals" and "The Feel Funnys". In the first category, I give you Barry Gordon FromA Thousand Clowns, one of the more influential films for me as a kid. I guess I related to Barry's geekiness. He plays Larry David's Rabbi now on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Then there's Wes Stern. You might remember him from Getting Together with that douchey Bobby Sherman, and also The Mary Tyler Moore Show, where he played Lou Grant's nephew who wanted to lose his virginity to Mary. Later I think he grew up, changed character and did it with Brenda Morgenstern on Rhoda. Scott Jacoby was the Nice Jewish Boy who played Bad Ronald, one of the greatest '70s TV-movies ever. There's quite a bit of Scott up on youtube and I still think he was pretty hot back then. Inevitably, we come to Gene Wilder in this first group. When I finally did get a friend by the sixth grade, she and I fought over who was going to marry him first. I really resented her for this. Can I just say a million dorky girls like me were really really happy when he married Gilda Radner because we actually could relate to her just a little bit more than say, Farrah Fawcett-Majors?
Spitzer went to prostitutes, and McGreevey had threesomes with his driver, and Paterson had affairs and did coke, and NOW we find out Bush is into furries.
French artist/musician Ludovic Debeurme is a fantastic illustrator of debased fairy tales populated with sad and dejected characters. His work veers from cute to the sexually surreal with an awkward but animated figurative style similar to Dan Clowes and Max Beckmann.
This is making the rounds of all the big bloggie-things today, so who am I to deny it's awesome power. Herewith, we have Garfield cartoon strips brought to life, and then remixed into trippy music videos. Ladies and Gentlemen, LasagnaCat, an idea so simply stupid that it is absolutely brilliant.
Here's another disturbing video update of a childhood character. This one is a lovely mash-up of two of my favorite comedy bits from when I was 13: Muppet cranks Statler and Waldrof with new dialogue from Derek and Clive.
NSFW - unless your workplace likes copious use of the word "cunt".
German illustrator Herr Schulze's chaotic works are a comical maelstrom of stabbing, sex and spam rendered in a layered and tight style. Believe it or not, he also creates pretty darn cute characters that would fit nicely on a Hallmark greeting card.
Thanks to the artist just known as "Mark" (perhaps wisely forgetting to put his last name to avoid having Glenn Danzig and Jerry Only show up at his front door) for sending his Slade Vs the Monkeys comic book, as well as allowing us to put some of his artistic executions up on the blog. The Goner store should have 'em ready for your shopping cart. In the meantime, enjoy such scenes captured as:
Brian K. Jones' paintings of fat men culled from the Craigslist classifieds are strangely alluring. I usually find that source material of this nature trumps any “artistic” copy because of the incredible difficulty in conveying the dense but subtle narratives of the originals. Jones seemingly started this project for shits and giggles (some of the paintings come off as one-note fat man jokes) but somewhere along the line he hit a painterly stride where he began to enjoy rendering the mounds and folds of flesh in a manner not unlike Jenny Saville albeit in a much (appropriately) cruder manner.
An intrepid band of so-called "film preservationists" attempt to recreate and restore a long-lost medium, derisively referred to as "flatties." These cinematic artifacts are neither virtual nor immersive, but involve documented action embedded on sequential frames of transparent strips of photographic stock. Historians claim that these relics served as "entertainment" vehicles generations ago.
"What survived, survived piecemeal," according to researcher Sky Hepburn. "We work with a variety of binary source materials which are themselves re-encodings of long-obsolete single-perspective external media. Sometimes we have just one channel of information to work with, so we can only approximate the original experience."
Hepburn described the difficulty of trying to reconstruct an artifact from 1968 entitled Planet of the Apes: “We have the picture element and a commentary track by Roddy McDowell, but all attempts to recreate the original dialogue through lip reading have come up empty."
Hepburn also explains the mysterious process known as "maltinization."
