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Saturday, August 16, 2008 ( 8/16/2008 11:18:00 AM ) Bill S.  "THIS ISN'T TEACHING, IT'S CHILD ABUSE!" When we first see Andy Wicks, the middle-aged middle-management protagonist of Alex Robinson's Too Cool to Be Forgotten (Top Shelf), he's standing in the dark, smoking what he hopes will be his last cigarette. Accompanied by his wife Lynn, Andy has come to a holistic medical center to be hypnotized out of his nicotine addiction. But once put under by a kindly medicine lady, he finds himself back in 1985 - a sophomore in high school. Balding Andy has seemingly physically regressed into his longhaired 15-year-old self even as he retains his unreliable memories of everything that's to come. Our hero first thinks that the reason behind his trip to the past is to revisit the moment he had his first cigarette and Just Say No this time. But, actually, there's deeper unfinished business for young Andy to resolve - and not just with the girl he had an unfulfilled teen crush on either.Aficionados of '80s cinema will immediately recognize the sources for Mr. Wicks' time trek back to the hallowed hall of high school: Back to the Future and Peggy Sue Got Married. Robinson knows this and even includes a variation on Peggy Sue's algebra joke - plus a ref to the "new Michael J. Fox movie" that's showing in town. But the writer/artist is after deeper comedy than either of these two gimmicky popcorn flicks. For Andy, his time-traveling experience proves more bittersweet than broadly comic. He half recalls his friends' and family's futures, but there are no simple sitcom solutions that will change the course of their lives. Even his big play for the girl he let get away in high school turns messy as our adult-minded hero suddenly freaks out in a moment of adolescent passion. Andy's efforts at pushing his friends out of their wholly age-appropriate shortsightedness prove ultimately futile but amusing. Robinson possesses a knowing eye and ear for the lives of eighties teens. ("TV and movies can make you forget how awkward and . . . unformed they are," our hero thinks of his peers. "Maybe a realistic portrayal would be too boring . . . or too painful.") He catches his believable characters with a clean cartoon work reminiscent in places of a kinder R. Crumb or a less self-loathing Joe Matt. There are some genuinely affecting character moments in this short little graphic novel, not just between Andy and his teen buds but also - in the book's big finale - between a boy and his dying parent. That last proves to be the real emotional impetus behind Andy's hypno time traveling, and if Robinson's foreshadowing of it is more than a little obvious, the book's climax is so convincingly rendered that we're willing to forgive a few broad missteps. While we leave Too Cool not entirely sure if our man has successfully given up smoking, we know that his brief visit to the past has yielded some potent life changes. # | Friday, August 15, 2008 ( 8/15/2008 01:21:00 PM ) Bill S. "CAUSE ONCE I'M STARTED, I CAN'T STOP!" I'm behind in acknowledging the recent death of soul great Isaac Hayes, but I've been playing a lot of his Stax work the past two days - the stuff he co-wrote with David Porter for Sam & Dave - since that's the material that hit my young ears first. "You Don't Know Like I Know," "Hold On! I'm A Comin,'" "Soul Man" and "When Something Is Wrong with My Baby." (That last's my personal fave.) Hayes would go on to make his name in a variety of ways: seventies era deep-voiced singer/songwriter, low-budget exploitation actor, the closest thing to an adult ever presented on South Park. But it's those early songs that linger with me in the middle of the night. R.I.P. Isaac. # | Thursday, August 14, 2008 ( 8/14/2008 04:36:00 PM ) Bill S. "THE CUCKOO CLOCK!" Courtesy of Mark Evanier, I was led to a site which tells you what the number one song in America was on the day you were born. So, what was my song on the pre-rock-'n'-roll date of June 17, 1950? "The Third Man Theme" by Anton Karas. I like that. # | Wednesday, August 13, 2008 ( 8/13/2008 10:30:00 AM ) Bill S. MID-WEEK MUSIC VID: After ruminating on the sonic weirdness that's the Residents, how about a burst of straight-up rock 'n' roll? Here's the incomparable Little Richard lip-syncing to a performance of "Lucille": (A new Best-Of CD of Mister Penniman's Specialty singles - all the great fifties stuff - is reportedly on the horizon.) # | Tuesday, August 12, 2008 ( 8/12/2008 10:50:00 PM ) Bill S.  "ALL THE SHEEP HAVE FOLLOWED THE SPOKEN WORD I'M COMING CONSTANTINOPLE" Even a hard-core pop-rock junkie can occasionally feel the urge for some bracingly ugly music: in the late sixties, that need was best met by Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention; in the late seventies, it was a group of anonymous wiseasses named the Residents. Through a series of albums which simultaneously built upon and deconstructed Top Forty tropes (Meet the Residents, The Third Reich 'n' Roll, Fingerprince), this band of faceless conceptualists produced an amazing catalog of comically abrasive anti-pop pop: music designed to get on the nerves of even those who thought that punk was the pinnacle of musical rebelliousness.Of the early Residents' releases, perhaps their best-known - and most accessible - was 1978's Duck Stab. Recently reissued by Mute Records in a handsomely designed hardbound booklet/CD, Stab first was released as a seven-song EP, which quickly was coupled with a second EP (Buster & Glen) into long-playing format. This gives the full disc a sort of Magical Mystery Tour feel - with two blocs of music jostling against each other. The disc's opening track "Constantinople" even gets reiterated with the chaotic seventh blues jazz cut "Elvis and His Boss," providing a sense of closure to the first batch of songs even if, lyrically, the listener doesn't really have a clue as to what it's really all about. With the exception of one instrumental ("Booker Tease," which blends a soulful bassline with shrieking hornwork), the two sets of music follow a similar strategy: hooky tunework subverted by out-of-tune instrumentation - some of which sounds like the background arrangement from some old warped '78 - dadaesque poetry and cartoonish vocals which manage to make Captain Beefheart sound mainstream. In "Blue Rosebuds," for instance, a damaged singer's sappy love song is interrupted by a high-pitched voice declaiming absurdist putdowns ("Infection is your finest flower mildewed in the midst"), while "Sinister Exaggerator" undercuts its effectively ominous guitar stabs (courtesy of guest fingerman Snakefinger) with a barking background chorus that sounds like something the Manimals on the island of Dr. Moreau might've chanted. Good ambient music for those who've used the soundtrack to Eraserhead to put 'em to sleep at nights: the "In Heaven" song could've easily been non-sung by a Resident in one of his little girl voices. Many of the songs that make up the second half of the disc (a.k.a. the Buster & Glen EP) toy with the themes of disconnected families ("Birthday Boy," "Lizard Lady") and body dysmorphia that the group would return to in their groundbreaking Freak Show CD-Rom. "Weight Lifting Lulu" features a narrator who's simultaneously appalled and aroused by his girlfriend's physique ("I hated your body but needed your touch."), while "Hello Skinny" describes a noodle-thin entrepreneur who sells a used copy of a Hello Dolly record to a truck driver - climaxing in a tuneless rendition of that musical's show stopping chorus. The whole shmear concludes with "The Electrocutioner," a warped little ditty sung by Ruby of the long-departed Rick & Ruby comedy troupe, a group with ties to Peewee Herman's old live comedy shows. Depending on your tolerance for willful weirdness, you've either stopped listening to Duck Stab long before the Buster & Glen bits or immediately hit "replay" when you get to the end. To test their admirers' perspicacity, the group would follow this release with Eskimo, a totally tuneless aural collage filled with wind sounds, barks and grunts which purports to tell a tale of life in the frozen North. I still don't know what to make of that puppy - also recently reissued by Mute - but I'll happily cop to loudly singin' along with Stab's "Constantinople." # | Sunday, August 10, 2008 ( 8/10/2008 10:28:00 PM ) Bill S.  "IT TAKES A SPECIAL PERSON TO BE AN ASSHOLE FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE." In the future of Radical Comics' newest five-issue mini-series, Freedom Formula, the world's war-mongering governments have been overthrown by the people in a "global civil movement," leaving a self-described capitalist utopia ("Free enterprise for a free world!" two revisionist talking heads tell us) where the big conflicts are purportedly resolved through a cross-country race entitled Formula Infinity. "The generous corporations have modified the vicious cycles not for war," we're told, "but for sport and the celebration of freedom." Doesn't take too many panels to see that this blather is b.s., of course (the phrase "generous corporations" is the first big clue), and that our free market future is just as filled with downtrodden have-nots as the bad old world.Among these are the Eugenes, genetically modified workers with barcodes tattooed on the back of their necks that do the crap work in the city, and the ordinary folk who live in the desert wastelands outlying the city. Among this latter group is a sullen boy named Zee, who has been given the task of delivering a mysterious package to the city. We don’t know much about Zee in the first ish - except that he's pissed off at his dead daddy who he somehow blames for his mother's death. Ah, family issues. Striking off across the wasteland in his dusthopper, our hero winds up riding into the middle of Formula Infinity - where robot-suited racers think nothing of decimating competitors' road crews to give themselves the advantage. Zee is himself nearly dusted when a racer rams into a crew's vehicle, sending an electrical tower onto his dusthopper. He hooks up with a girl mechanic named Myles to make his way into the city of Los Petropolis, but completing that delivery isn't as simple as Zee thinks. At the end of the first book, his delivery brings him face-to-face with a menacing half-cybernetic creature who may or may not be a rogue former racer named Prometheus. Influenced by drive-in fare like Death Race 2000 and the movie version of Damnation Alley, writer Edmund Shern and artists Kai & Chester Ocampo may not be traveling any unfamiliar territory here, but they do so slickly. Shern's script may be a little too parsimonious with the background info, but since some of it's being given to us via corporate double-speak, we can assume that much of this stuff will be clarified as the series progresses. Kai and Ocampo's art is moody, but I particularly enjoyed the few action panels where the duo dropped all the painterly coloring in favor of stark black-and-white inked figures against a bright red background. In those brief moments, Freedom Formula has a manga-esque feel suited to the series' Big Machinery. Frankly, I'd have preferred it if more of the book had been done in this style - if only to bolster the impact of the action scenes - but since Radical has made the painted look a part of its house style, I'm probably being too much of a graphic storytelling traditionalist here. Of the three mini-series currently pubbed by the fledgling comics line (Caliber and Hercules being the other two), I'm personally least interested in a dark and gritty dystopian tale of robot/cybernautic racer/warriors. But for those who still get a charge out of Robotech/Micronaut/Transformer-y styled comics, than this book probably has the winning formula. # | |
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