11/17/2005
Cuz, I’m all about saving you guys moolah, check this out- Google “Black Friday” & “circulars”…and what do you get?
A site with all the Day After Thanksgiving Ads the week before!
Well, most of them anyway…I’m probably picking up more SHIELD from Best Buy…speaking which, I’d love a Nick Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D. TV show…
More Yoko Kanno at work today- she’s sooo cool…
...ball of confusion, that's what the world is today...hey, hey...
…watching forever….
CURE NEWS- from the official site:
drippinginfromthenewsposts...11/16/2005 1:45:23 PM - by CURE:ROBERTSO!WHY NO NEWS POSTS?BECAUSE THERE IS NO REAL NEWS AS SUCH TO POST?I AM WRAPPING UP THE NEXT RE-ISSUES WITH VARIOUS PEOPLE - THE BLUE SUNSHINE, TOP, THOTD AND KMKMKM DELUXE EDITIONS - COMPILING EXTRAS CD'S, REMASTERING THE SOUND, FIXING THE BOOKLETS UP...ALL SCHEDULED FOR RELEASE IN SPRING 2006...WRITING SOME FILM MUSIC...CHOOSING THE BEST DEMOS...GETTING THE WORDS RIGHT...PUTTING TOGETHER A 5.1 LIVE SUMMER 2005 DVD THING...LIVING...WE WILL NOW NOT BE IN THE STUDIO 'FOR REAL' UNTIL JANUARY 2006...BUT WE ARE STILL ON COURSE FOR A SUMMER RELEASE AS IT'S ALL IN THE PREPARATION!LATER...LOVEROBERTPSTHE REASON WE ARE NOT ON THE LIVE8 DVD IS BECAUSE 'THEY' WANTED 'HITS'... PLUS CA CHANGE, PLUS C'EST LA MEME CHOSE? OR SOMETHING...
· And some info from HispaCure and Universal Music Spain:
"This is Ivan (HISPACURE). Last week we spoke with some people from UNIVERSAL MUSIC SPAIN. They told us some news-rumors about The Cure in 2006: - New album and New Tour (spring 2006). Robert told us in our meeting with the band after Benicassim Concert. He also announced it during the press conference at this festival. - First Quarter 2006 (january - march): They will release the new remaster deluxe editions. UNIVERSAL MUSIC SPAIN told us that they only have news about THE HEAD ON THE DOOR remaster album ... but they also suppose that it will be also two more delux editions. - First Quarter 2006 (january - march): The Cure will release IN ORANGE DVD !! This is the info UNIVERSAL MUSIC SPAIN had one week ago, they also told us that they are not sure about the correct dates these items will be released."-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Plus- cuz I know someone who works at Wal-Mart
Mr. Greenwald’s WarA Wal-Mart critic hits the road by STEVEN MIKULAN
The high cost of shoppingat Wal-Mart
“Come look for me,” director Robert Greenwald e-mailed a reporter. “I am the short Jewish guy — and, they say, balding.”Now that his latest documentary is out, Greenwald is finding that the real work is just beginning as he spends the next two months crisscrossing the country and Europe to promote Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. This Sunday he was busy in the Valley, speaking at a church and a synagogue. After the screening and discussion at Temple Kol Tikvah, in a space outside the rabbi’s office serving as an impromptu green room, Greenwald recounts a recent New York screening.“I’m standing against the wall of the theater,” he says, “and see this guy holding a cell phone out in front of him ” — he makes an arm’s-length gesture — “which is not the way to make a call. Oh, shit, I thought, someone’s already pirating the film. But what are you going to do? So I stepped outside for a bit.”Greenwald quickly returned upon learning that the man was a Wal-Mart consultant.“ ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him. ‘Oh, I’m just making a phone call, trust me,’ he said. I told him, ‘Why should I trust you?’ ”The men’s conversation soon became heated, and the consultant was escorted out.Poor Wal-Mart. It had been on a PR roll with Hurricane Katrina, when it seemed as though every Louisiana and Mississippi sheriff was praising its help. Then came Greenwald’s film and a leaked corporate memo that acknowledged that nearly half of Wal-Mart’s employees’ children have no health coverage while the company encourages store managers to lower insurance costs by screening out overweight job applicants. With its 1.3 million workers and $285 billion in annual profits, Wal-Mart is virtually a parallel country, a banana republic without the bananas. Greenwald’s documentary suggests that it is also the kind of country the rest of America could become under the spend-and-cut policies of the Bush administration.“The culture of fear is so strong,” Greenwald says, describing the making of his film, which had been shot in strict secrecy. “One of our three Hollywood backers dropped out because he thought it could hurt his chances of getting work. And even with the promise of secrecy, store employees were afraid to participate. A camerawoman would go to their homes at night, and they’d change their minds before she could get through the door — they were so certain that Wal-Mart would somehow find out and fire them.”Greenwald is a youthful-looking 60-year-old who, having grown up in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, still speaks like a New Yorker and does not consider himself an Angeleno — despite having lived and worked here for a quarter-century.Wal-Mart is the latest in a series of guerrilla-style film critiques of corporate America that began with Michael Moore’s Roger & Me and continued with Super Size Me, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Greenwald’s own exposé of Fox News, Outfoxed. Last year, Moore broke new ground by allowing Fahrenheit 9/11 to be downloaded to home computers and by rushing it into release before the presidential election — knowing this would cost the film an Oscar consideration.Greenwald has gone a step further with Wal-Mart by releasing the DVD for immediate sale and distribution among anti–Wal-Mart activists. He has also created WM*TV (
www.walmartmovie.com/wmtv), whose deceptively homey ads counter the anti-Greenwald propaganda campaign that Wal-Mart has belatedly set up.Even one week after Wal-Mart’s debut, the film’s Web site (
http://www.walmartmovie.com/) was busy spoofing a Wal-Mart Veterans Day TV spot — juxtaposing the company commercial with an interview of an injured Iraq war vet whom Wal-Mart denied medical coverage when he returned to his job.“I’m trying to evolve a model where the film is never finished,” Greenwald says.But isn’t this war of Web sites and DVDs (a pro-company documentary, Why Wal-Mart Works, is ironically riding on the coattails of Greenwald’s success) giving short shrift to public debate at the grassroots level?“There’s always a danger in declining public participation,” Greenwald admits. “My films are tools for participation and community action.”Greenwald is a movie and TV producer and director whose past credits include Burning Bed and Steal This Movie. (His direction of 1980’s ill-fated Xanadu figures prominently in the Wal-Mart campaign.) Today he divides his time between his two companies: RPG Films, for his commercial ventures, and Brave New Films, which produces his volunteer efforts, such as Wal-Mart. “Propaganda” is probably not how Greenwald would describe his movie, especially considering that many of the victimized people interviewed in Wal-Mart are heartland Republicans.“I’ve been very conscious not to articulate ‘the solution’ in my films,” he says. “Our research for Wal-Mart found that there were Republicans who are waiting to be talked to. My inspiration here was Arthur Miller rather than Bertolt Brecht.”
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And Since I love Comics:
10 Comics That Shook The World(Of comics, anyway) by DOUG HARVEY
With all the hoopla surrounding the opening of the bipartisan Hammer & MOCA museums show “Masters of American Comics,” you’d think comics had never been taken seriously as an art form. The truth is, newspaper comic strips had supporters among the literary intelligentsia from the get-go — George Herriman’s Krazy Kat being singled out for rhapsodic praises by the likes of e.e. cummings and critic Gilbert Seldes as well as receiving the enthusiastic support of the Surrealists and other European avant-gardists. It was comic books — produced and distributed without the imprimatur of the WASP newspaper-publishing establishment — that bore the brunt of elitist disdain, resulting in Dr. Frederic Wertham’s scabrous Seduction of the Innocent, then Senator Kefauver’s 1954 hearings on comics’ causal relationship to juvenile delinquency, and finally the establishment of the self-censoring Comics Code Authority.These days, when Art Spiegelman’s funny-animals-in-Auschwitz graphic novel Maus wins a Pulitzer, and magazines like Gary Groth’s exponentially toney Comics Journal and Todd Hignite’s exquisite Comic Art treat the funnybook medium with seriousness and reverence, it’s unlikely that there will be much controversy over the inclusion of comic-book artists like Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Kirby in “Masters of American Comics.” Still, many who are familiar with the genius of Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts or Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy remain completely unaware of the enormous wealth of innovative visual materials that make up the history of the comic book. Here are 10 landmark comics that expanded the boundaries of what was possible.Action #1While most comic book aficionados would argue over some of the titles included in this list, there’s little debate about where the medium originates. DC’s Action #1 introduced Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman to the world, jump-starting an industry and inventing a new genre of fictional character — the superhero — which would have an impact on the popular imagination bordering on (Joseph Campbell would say embodying) the mythological. The story had been gathering rejections from newspaper syndicates for a couple of years when, in 1938, a prescient editor at DC pulled it from the slush pile and pasted its episodic plotline into a single book. While there had been instances of original material appearing in the format earlier, most comic books were collections of previously published newspaper strips, and this was a whole new ballgame. The art and writing are best described as workmanlike, yet the impact of this single ephemeral volume is incalculable. Aside from creating the visual template for the majority of superhero stories that followed in its wake, comic books would not exist today if it weren’t for Siegel & Shuster. Too bad they surrendered their copyright to this Kryptonian cash cow for $130.
Four Color Comics #9
“I’m just a duck man . . . strictly a duck man,” said Carl Barks when asked why
he had never applied his formidable skills to anything but Donald and his
extended waterfowl family. In any other mass medium, Barks’ gift for convoluted
adventure yarns — especially in his Uncle Scrooge masterworks, plus his
ability to infuse the strict Disney house style with tremendous visual verve
and inventiveness, his brilliant comic writing filling each panel with snappy
dialogue and a treasure of hidden background gags — would have made him a
household name. Instead, Barks labored for a quarter-century in anonymity
before being discovered and honored post-retirement by the emerging
comic-fan community. It might never have happened if Barks’ outline for an
abandoned Donald Duck feature-length animation called Pirate Gold hadn’t
been lying around when Dell Publishing — Disney’s comic-book licensee — visited
the studios. The result was Four Color Comics #9 a.k.a Donald Duck
Finds Pirate Gold!, which could have easily wound up a forgotten one-shot.
Barks had just quit Disney’s story department to farm chickens in San Jacinto when he was recruited for the regular comic-book gig
that allowed him to stretch his wings and transform the sputtering rage shtick
of cartoon Donald into the minutely articulated self-contained universe known
as Duckburg. While Spiegelman’s Maus and Walt Kelly’s Pogo are
often cited as proof of the “funny animal” genre’s ability to transcend its
juvenile roots and become “real” literature, Barks was there first and, in
spite of his modesty, there better.
Fantastic Four #48
When Marvel took the comics world by a storm in the early ’60s with characters
like Spiderman, Thor, the Fantastic Four and the Incredible Hulk, it was
negotiating a deceptively bland terrain mined with the recently interred stink
bombs of the persecuted Cryptkeeper and his eyeball-injectin’ brethren at EC
comics, which had been reduced to a single title — MAD — by anti–First
Amendment terrorists. The genius of the Marvel Universe was to embrace the
limitations of the Code and pump it full of ironic hyperbole — and to enlist
the talents of Jack Kirby, who had already revolutionized comics several times
over, inventing both Captain America and the Romance Comic genre with his
writing partner Joe Simon. But it was for his 1960s work for Stan Lee at Marvel
that Kirby is most recognized, forging almost single-handedly the exaggerated,
self-conscious, dynamic model of superheroism that continues to be the standard
for both comic books and their lucrative movie and TV spin-offs. Kirby’s art
was already impressive, but while churning out pages for Marvel he began taking
greater and greater experimental chances, incorporating photocollage,
multiple-page spreads, neo-Mannerist anatomical distortions, and an
abstract-fetishistic depiction of complex machinery that borders on Outsider
Art. While much of his early Marvel work is more beloved, and his greatest
personal visionary work was to come when he jumped ship to DC for his never-completed
Fourth World tetralogy, it was with this 1966 issue of FF that
the gathering momentum of the Marvel Universe exceeded its potential, with the
introduction of chromed enigma The Silver Surfer, soliloquy-prone herald for
the planet-devouring Galactus. In the year when TV’s Batman brought
unprecedented popular attention to comics and pop cultural masterpieces like Pet
Sounds, Blow-Up and In Cold Blood (not to mention McLuhan’s Understanding
Media) were the norm, the three-issue-long Coming of Galactus more
than held its own, cementing comics’ hipness for all eternity.
Zap #2
Although Zap #1 (and later the lost and found #0) introduced the world
to the man Time art critic Robert Hughes called “the Brueghel of the
last half of the twentieth century,” it was with its second issue that Zap
opened some windows on R. Crumb's hermetic world of psychedelically mutated
cartoonist clichés. What flew in were the revolutionary nonlinear abstract
comix of San Francisco rock-poster pioneers Victor Moscoso and Rick
Griffin, and the exquisitely detailed and considerably more influential
perversions of S. Clay Wilson. While its role as the flashpoint of erupting id
that eventually defanged the Comics Code Authority is usually (and rightly)
emphasized, the Zap artists also opened the floodgate for unbridled
formal experimentation, shedding the unquestioned mandate for linear cinematic
narrative in one eye-boggling blast, and opening the medium to the kind of
deconstructive virtuosity that was already possible in film, literature and
music. Although traditional storytelling continued to dominate and produce much
of the best material, the last big taboo — abstraction as opposed to incest —
had been finally broken.
Howard the Duck #1
Given that Howard is almost forgotten thanks to the cinematic mangling
bestowed by George Lucas and company in 1986, it’s hard to imagine the
excitement that greeted the launch of the wisecracking noir-inflected fowl’s
solo adventures a decade earlier. Written by Steve Gerber, probably the most
accomplished scripter of the ’70s ironic/literate era, and drawn by Conan
the Barbarian artist Frank Brunner (soon replaced by the vastly underrated
Gene Colan), Howard the Duck was at once the epitome and the denouement
of the “Silver Age” of comics that had begun with DC’s revival of The Flash in
1956. All the craft that had evolved over the previous decades was put in
service of the story of an interdimensionally displaced (“Trapped in a world he
never made!”) funny-animal duck combating zany existential alienation,
villainous super-accountants and the urge to interspecially merge with
bodacious human sidekick Beverly. Unfortunately, art slammed into the wall of
commerce as Gerber became entangled in a landmark lawsuit attempting to retain
the copyright of the character he’d invented (and unsuccessfully fought one
from Disney that demanded Howard be forced — I kid you not — to wear pants so
that he wouldn’t resemble Donald), and the series lost steam and faltered.
After Howard, comic books began talking down to their readers and
skimping on pages and quality art. It would be another few years before the
'80s phenomenon of small publishers returned artistic vision and idiosyncrasy
to the medium.
Heavy Metal #1Nobody understands American pop culture like the French, and if it weren’t for them, America would probably still think jazz and film noir were trash. And they had been taking comic books seriously for decades when in 1977 National Lampoon was inspired to import Metal Hurlant, an adult-oriented sex, drugs 'n’ sci-fi–drenched comic magazine founded by Jean “Möbius” Giraud (the most gifted and successful comic artist in France) and a group of like-minded European artists. Retitled Heavy Metal and fleshed out with work from such Yankees as fanzine superstar Richard Corben and mainstream crossovers Howard Chaykin and Walt Simonson, the book was a sensation, achieving the mass mainstream popularity that had eluded the underground press. Readers came for the sex and violence, but stayed for the . . . well, they stayed for the sex and violence too. But along the way they got to see the perfect melding of the Underground and mainstream traditions. And American comic fans were summarily awakened to the vast untapped wealth of non-English graphic narrative — and the richly varied attendant histories of formal invention — waiting to be discovered.
Love & Rockets #1
After the Silver Age and Undergrounds had petered out, there was a time of
darkness in the land of the comic book, when it seemed as if the medium might
be on its last legs. What better way to rekindle the flame than the
completely-out- of-left-field appearance of a Mexican-American fraternity of punk-rock
draughtsmen penning parallel (and radically woman-friendly) soap operas?
Revolving around the adventures of rocket scientists Maggie and Hopey (Jaime’s Mechanix)
and Luba, matriarch of the Mexican town of Palomar (Gilbert’s Heartbreak
Soup), Los Bros Hernandez’ distinctive graphic and narrative styles made Love
& Rockets one of the most consistently rewarding comic series ever,
favorably compared to the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez. The Oxnard natives’ first issue marked the dawn of the ’80s
comic renaissance and unveiled a cast of characters as beloved as any in
literature. Their exclusion from the hometown-organized “Masters of American
Comics” exhibit is only the most scandalous of numerous glaring omissions, but
thankfully the Pasadena City College Art gallery makes it right with Love
& Rockets: The Comic Art of Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, up through
December 3. Info, (626) 585-3285.
Raw #3
The ’80s witnessed a pandemic of alternative anthology titles, most of which
lasted a few issues before vanishing. The two most important and long-lasting
were R. Crumb’s Weirdo and Francoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman’s Raw,
which played out a West Coast Lowbrow vs. East Coast Intellectual dichotomy.
Crumb, underrated spouse Aline Kominsky, and acolyte Peter Bagge proffered an
evolving mishmash of fumetti (staged photo-comics), outsider screeds,
and veteran and second-generation underground artists in an upscale but
proletarian format. Raw included mostly artists in and around Harvey
Kurtzman’s NYC School of Visual Arts comic class presented in some of the most
well-designed and printed artifacts to ever qualify as comic books. The first
two issues hit the ground running, but issue #3, featuring Gary Panter’s
everyman Jimbo (arguably the most featureless archetypal fictional
character ever) on the cover, plus the second installment of Spiegelman’s Maus
and Charles Burns’ DogBoy made it plain that there were not only many
unexplored avenues remaining for comic artists, but that they could be explored
with a level of respect and care previously reserved only for “real” art.
Dirty Plotte #1
While there had been chicks in comic books throughout their history, and
particularly as an aspect of Undergrounds (check out Dori Stories by the
late great Dori Seda), there had never been an auteur along the lines of Crumb
until the early ’90s, when French Canadian Julie Doucet’s Xeroxed mini-comics
were collected and published by Drawn & Quarterly as Dirty Plotte #1.
Doucet’s powerful graphic style, progressively convoluted panel compositions,
endearingly fractured Franglish, and alternately revelatory autobiographical
and bracingly surreal narratives put her at the top of the heap in a decade
where suddenly everyone seemed to be publishing their own comic book. Sadly,
deadline pressure combined with her peripatetic bohemian lifestyle took a toll
and Doucet pretty much withdrew from the field after 1996, leaving 10 issues
and a wrap-up graphic novel as testament to the fact that girls can be
comic-book geniuses too.
Kramer’s Ergot #4/paperrodeo
The flood of quirky individual comic books in the '90s has abated only slightly
in the new millennium. For its first three issues, localized yokel Sammy
Harkham’s Kramer’s Ergot was a steadily improving anthology of
good-to-excellent contemporary comix. In 2003, issue #4 hit the shelves and
immediately established itself as the new paradigm in comprehensive (and
beautifully printed) presentation of contemporary comic-book art. With work
ranging from traditional (even retro) storytelling — Harkham’s own haunting,
Euro-cinematic Poor Sailor and Lasky & Young’s deadpan Little
Orphan Annie–style recounting of the Carter Family’s rise to fame — to the
acid-blasted collages of Joe Grillo and Billie & Laura Grant of the Rhode
Island–based Dearraindrop collective (not to mention mysterious RI
co-contributor “C.F.” with his inspired Quiet Grace and his Dog Hannah),
Kramer’s Ergot has become the book to watch for cutting-edge graphic
narrative. In an ironic reversal of the RAW/Weirdo rivalry, the very scene that
spawned Joe Grillo and friends continues to produce the scabby but dazzling
newsprint broadsheet paperrodeo, featuring work from the
dearraindrop/Fort Thunder/Paper Rad cluster of intrepid visual explorers. The
same gang recently published a collection of a dozen or so variously authored
stories about the “open source” funny animal character Tux Dog (the next
Superman?) for a public art exhibition at Exit Art in NY. Meet the new
Masters…
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And from the LA Weekly- cuz
I used to go to Golden Apple weekly:
When I was in high school, driving out from the ’burbs to Golden Apple on Melrose was a pilgrimage to Mecca. It had everything: comics of every genre and subgenre,
tchotchkes galore. These days, rival Meltdown may be more designerly, more
artistic in presentation, but Golden Apple is old school, historic. It was the
progenitor of the comic book store as megastore à la P.T. Barnum, with
rock-star clientele and signings by pro-wrestlers, even. So when owner-founder
Bill Liebowitz died last year, the entire industry mourned. Over the years the
flagship Hollywood branch has gotten rough around the edges (a sister
Apple exists in Northridge), but the big names still come to present their
work. For nostalgia’s sake, I ask Mikey J, the “back-issue Czar,” if he’s got Zot,
about a teenage alien boy who fell to earth. He pauses to think, reaches behind
a stack of books on a bottom shelf, and presents a dusty Zot compilation.
“Still got it,” he smiles.
