July 31, 2011
July 30, 2011
July 29, 2011
July 28, 2011
Love Song For The Inner Larry
Who are you?
Why, I'm me.
No, you're not
You're the Inner Larry!
We're all a part
Of the Inner Larry!
The Inner Larry
Is WE!
July 27, 2011
July 26, 2011
Planet of the Apes Party Fun Time
July 25, 2011
Feta Cheese Mustache
He takes off his hat
as a gesture
showing himself to be
a polite
upstanding
gentleman
in this moment of solemn
seriousness
and reveals a
slightly smaller
hat,
there,
underneath.
July 24, 2011
Cheap Thrills - ALTER EGO #2
Random Pulls from the Bargain Bin
Author's Note: This article originally appeared on Comics Bulletin
Author's Note: This article originally appeared on Comics Bulletin
In these economic times, finding inexpensive entertainment is difficult. Thank goodness for my local comic shop and a slew of comics nobody cares about anymore! Each week I randomly grab a comic from the bargain bin (for 50 cents) to see what kind of bang I can get for my two-bits. These are those tales.
July 20, 2011 – paid 50 cents for:
ALTER EGO #2
Published by First Comics
Written by: Roy Thomas
Art by: Ron Harris
HOW CAN I SIT HERE EATING THIS CAFETERIA CRAP – WHEN I THINK I MUST BE GOING CRAZY!?
The summer of 1986, July specifically, seems to have been a time of torpidity. I mean really, what happened then? Sure, the reopened the Statue of Liberty after spending all that time making it all safe and shiny and shit, but that’s about it.
Some of the biggest releases in music then were Music from the Edge of Heaven from Wham! and Flaunt It by Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
Hell, in July, 1986 Lindsay Lohan was born!
Into this thick miasma of lifelessness, First Comics snuck a weird little gem into comic shops in the form of Alter Ego #2. This event should be noted because this comic is either a brilliant subversive missive promulgating a Gay Rights manifesto, a work of metafiction akin to Morrison’s run on Animal Man, or an incoherent slop-fest of tumid mouth breathing inanity. Maybe by the end of this week’s column I will finally decide which it is, and thereby be the better man for the journey.
July 23, 2011
July 22, 2011
SEE THIS MOVIE! Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould
Sometimes the most universal truths can be found in the smallest slices of life. That’s what makes independent documentaries so powerful, engaging, and entertaining. Not only do they show you little worlds to which you’ve never had access, but they oftentimes also tell the larger story of what it means to be human. Armed with this intellectual conceit, a bag of Funyuns, and a couple of Miller beers, I curl up in front of the TV and delve deep into the bowels of Netflix Documentaries to find out a little bit more about all of us.
Today I found 2009’s Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould.
Glenn Gould has been described (at least in the Genius Within Press Release) as “an enigmatic musical poet (and) world-renowned pianist (who) continues to captivate international audiences years after his untimely death.” Glenn Gould was a musician, an artist, an innovator, an iconoclast, an eccentric, and a legend. What people tend to forget, though, was that even though he was all of these things, he was first and foremost a man who could express his humanity on a fundamental level through his genius and classical music.
The directors of this documentary, Michele Hozer and Peter Raymont, made it their focus to push aside much of what other biographies of Gould dwell upon (specifically his idiosyncrasies and eccentricities), and focus their film on trying to provide a more complete understanding of Glenn Gould as a man and what it was that he was trying to create in his rather erratic career.
July 21, 2011
Hi-Fi by Bante
July 20, 2011
Ruminations on Expressionist Art
This kind of contemporary Expressionist art, in order to be any good, seems like it needs to avoid two pitfalls. The first is a self-consciousness of form where everything gets very mannered and refers cutely to itself. The second pitfall, more complicated, might be called “terminal idiosyncrasy” or “antiempathetic solipsism” or something: here the artist’s own perceptions and moods and impressions and obsessions come off as just too particular to him alone. Art, after all, is supposed to be a kind of communication, and “personal expression” is cinematically interesting only to the extent that what’s expressed finds and strikes chords within the viewer. The difference between experiencing art that succeeds as communication and art that doesn’t is rather like the difference between being sexually intimate with a person and watching that person masturbate. In terms of literature, richly communicative Expressionism is epitomized by Kafka, bad and onanistic Expressionism by the average Graduate Writing Program avant-garde story.--David Foster Wallace from an essay entitled “David Lynch Keeps His Head” as published in his collection of essays called A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again published by Little, Brown and Company 1997.
July 19, 2011
July 18, 2011
Cheap Thrills - ALL STAR COMICS #63
CHEAP THRILLS
Random Pulls from the Bargain Bin
In these economic times, finding inexpensive entertainment is difficult. Thank goodness for my local comic shop and a slew of comics nobody cares about anymore! Each week I randomly grab a comic from the bargain bin (for 50 cents) to see what kind of bang I can get for my two-bits. These are those tales.
July 13, 2011 – paid 25 cents for:
ALL STAR COMICS #63
Published by DC Comics
Written by: Paul Levitz
Art by: Keith Giffen and Wally Wood
CAT HAS MADE GRUNDY MAD!
I cheated this week, and I am man enough to admit it.
Normally for this column I randomly pull comics from my Local Comic Shop’s bargain bin, but this week I happened upon a garage sale run by this truly twisted tweeker couple. Amongst the rusted lawn mowers and torn baby clothes, I inadvertently found a torn-to-shit comic book among the stacks of old coverless magazines they had piled in the dirt.
That comic? Why it was All Star Comics (with the Super Squad) #63 from December, 1976.
You remember December, 1976, don’t you?
Samoa joined the United Nations, Richard Daley, the Mayor of Chicago, died, and Jimmy Carter was girding his loins to take on the mantle of our 39th President (and then later sinned in his heart).
Also, The Sex Pistols spewed profanity on the BBC, Bob Marley got shot in a failed assassination attempt, The Eagles released their album Hotel California, and, in the movie theaters, a very sexy Jessica Lange got scooped up by a giant monkey (not Jeff Bridges, but the bigger one).
All this created a veritable stew upon which to stew. The added spice to the meal, though, had to be the publication of All Star Comics #63.
The tall toothless tweeker wanted seventy-five cents for the comic. I distracted him with something shiny and gave him twenty-five cents. He seemed happy with this.
For a solid quarter we are really talking Cheap Thrills.
But on to the book at hand.
July 17, 2011
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