Blam's Blog

Under the Rainbow

2012-02-15T01:00:00.002-05:00

I've been meaning to write about comics veteran Tom Ziuko since the news broke a year ago that he was ill.

Ziuko was a longtime colorist for DC. I vividly recall being struck by his muted yet vibrant work on the cover to 1986's Legends #1, which I'm pretty sure was also one of the earliest covers to carry a colorist signature along with that of the pencil and ink artist(s) — in this case, John Byrne.

Cover to Legends #1 © 1986 DC Comics.

The Grand Comics Database lists over 1,500 credits for Ziuko spanning nearly 30 years of covers and interiors, from Superman to Hellblazer to Animaniacs, including color reconstruction on reprint projects for both Marvel and DC. His more recent work ranges from newly colored reprints of Nick Bakay & Alan Kupperberg's National Lampoon feature Evil Clown Comics to covers for The Jack Kirby Collector, Alter Ego, and other TwoMorrows publications.

Word came in January 2011 that Tom was dealing with kidney failure, among other problems, which as a lifelong freelancer put him in a typically tough state financially. You can find last year's call for donations from Kupperberg at various places on the Web, including his Facebook page and the blog of historian Daniel Best (at the link). Daniel's blog also hosts a more recent update from Tom's friend Gary Mann on his continuing health problems. Both posts include copious examples of his talent. Update: Alan Kupperberg has told me that contributions to help offset the costs of Tom's medical care and loss of income can now be sent to his own PayPal account, chroma99@aol.com, rather than to Alan.

Sending along a few bucks to go with my well wishes only felt right, and I hope that others who've appreciated Ziuko's work over the years do the same. Valentine's Day has come and gone, but there's never a bad time to share the love. As Kupperberg points out just a dollar apiece from enough people goes a long way — heck, it's how an Internet-oriented economy might function one day. The Hero Initiative, a chartered not-for-profit corporation that helps out creators in need, posted a message from Tom in October and has not just a PayPal account at its blog but an online store where you can score some unique swag while ensuring that folks like Ziuko who've long toiled in the trenches of an industry that is historically lean on safety nets can find some measure of support from grateful fans.

Week Links

2012-02-12T06:00:00.002-05:00

The Baldo strip for Jan. 21st, online at the GoComics site, is such a pure joke that I had to jot down a reminder to share it. While I'm a tireless proponent of the fact that the comics medium is founded on sequential graphics, and the silent panel in this strip demonstrates beautifully how much of the writing in comics is inherent in the artwork, the words here are also as essential as they are spare.

Image © 2012 and characters
TM Baldo Partnerships.

For those of you seeing this post in truncated form via the blog's main page or a search return, by the way, I direct your attention to the labels in the footer below so that you have an idea of what's yet to come after the break.

The downside to my switch to the "jump" format a year ago is this: I worry that whenever I've posted a catch-all "Quick Hits" piece the pre-jump segment having so little relation to subjects in the post-jump remainder may not dawn on readers skimming the blog who don't care a whit about the Muppets but would love Michael T. Gilbert's use of Richie Rich to parody the preciousness of late-'90s highbrow comics — to use an example from a few months ago.

Maybe I'll put a reminder in the sidebar, because I hope to do more survey posts like this one even as I take a break from more in-depth posts later this year. I know, I've been threatening to do that for a while now, and other than some spells when I haven't been able to blog I've not really made good on it, but the time is coming. If — and it's a big if — I can refrain from contextualizing the links too much or going off on tangents, I plan to make "Week Links" a regular feature down the road. The posts won't entirely be made of links relevant to the past or coming week, and they almost certainly won't actually be weekly in a dedicated fashion, but I'm going to aim for a mixture of the zeitgeist, oddball stuff of the moment, and links that have been languishing on my laptop.

To wit:

Image © year of creation Warner Bros. Entertainment.

I came across this pièce de perplexité after clicking on a bad link at the French Warner Bros. site last month for my review of The Artist. Of course the studio probably has an "Error 404 / Page Not Found" message spelled out like the Hollywood sign in English on its domestic site, and that would be a moment's amusement at best; versions of the most mundane things in other languages than one's own, however, even if they're somewhat familiar, are always so much stranger. Non?

Photo: Mary Ellen Matthews for NBC Universal LLC © 2012.

And speaking of French, I've had a brief Slate piece in which Tarran Killam discusses the origins of "Les Jeunes de Paris" sitting around for about a year.

"Les Jeunes" is a recurring sketch on Saturday Night Live that returned in last night's episode hosted by Zooey Deschanel. And — spoiler warning if you haven't seen it — speaking of The Artist, Jean Dujardin popped up in character as George Valentin in that very sketch.

There aren't any clips from the episode up yet at NBC's Saturday Night Live site or the show's Hulu page, but when there are I'll update this post to link directly to the better ones [Done!] — including "Les Jeunes de Paris" (which, as much as I loved its randomness at first, was really only worth reviving this time for the surprise guest appearance), the double shot of Nicolas Cage on Weekend Update, and "Bein' Quirky with Zooey Deschanel". Most of the episode's offerings just sat there, all the more painful thanks to Deschanel's game performance and the choice bits that really did hit the mark: the "decency strap" in Piers Morgan Tonight; Bill Hader as Clint Eastwood saying "Pizza! Pizza!"; Deschanel's part in the old-time newspaper sketch; and the entirety of "Bein' Quirky". The latter featured Abby Elliiot as Deschanel, Killam doing Michael Cera, Kristen Wiig reprising her Bjork, and Deschanel hilariously channeling Mary-Kate Olsen.

Strip © 2011 Kevin Kobasic.

The above is the first three panels of a four-panel strip at Kevie's Metal Shop. You have to click on over for the punchline. And then you have to click around the blog some more to take in the breadth of Kevin Kobasic's art. I met Kevin a couple of years ago at the Nik at Nite dinner in Manhattan that brought together the visiting Nikki Stafford and some of her regional commenters, only to discover that long before blogging was a thing we were just two degrees of separation apart — or maybe one, but I don't think you count yourselves — in the real world, back when Kevin worked at Marvel Comics and I was a fledgling stringer for Comics Buyer's Guide who interviewed his senior editor.

Entertainment Weekly's Inside Movies blog, incidentally, recently posted Lucas's actual take on the gamble that was the making of Star Wars.

Image © 2009 Ron Frenz, unless work-for-hire, and featuring
characters TM DC Comics, Marvel Comics, and the Estate of Jack Kirby.

Finally, I came across this nifty mock wraparound cover to The Official Handbook of the Jack Kirby Universe drawn by Ron Frenz. The commission is viewable at a larger size over at the ComicArtFans site with comments from its owner.

Enjoy your Sunday and hug your loved ones, folks!

The Slog Delayed

2012-02-11T23:00:00.000-05:00

I'd hoped to have posts up a couple of days ago and again today to celebrate the third anniversary of Blam's Blog. My first post — which set the tone for much of my blogging by complaining about trouble blogging — went up three years ago Thursday, and my first substantive post, "Welcome", got published two days later. On the blog's first anniversary I posted my inaugural State of the Blog report, "The Slog". While I planned to follow it up annually, last year I had to defer the occasion due to my grandfather's sudden illness and passing soon after, finally getting around to a follow-up, "The Clog", six months later, which was six months ago. Nothing so sad is keeping me from finishing up the State of the Blog post I wanted to get up today, but a cold that was percolating this week has roared up with a vengeance and made it even harder to concentrate on stringing together the words than usual, so, like the title above says...

41 Favorites: #6

2012-02-07T20:30:00.001-05:00

Back when I was a kid in the 1970s, the few accessible books about comics often mentioned "The Good Duck Artist". Past generations who read Dell's Disney comics had no way of knowing his name, in the days before most creators were credited and before fans, collectors, and scholars could easily share information far and wide. Yet so many of them found his contributions so obviously head-and-shoulders above other artists' that the appellation "The Good Duck Artist" — or, in the context of the Disney duck stories, simply "The Good Artist" — became an acknowledged shorthand.

"The Good Duck Artist" turned out, these same books revealed, to be a gentleman named Carl Barks. He is not the subject of this post.

Also back when I was a kid in the 1970s, there was a fellow whose covers for various offerings from DC — chiefly, in my experience, Superman, The Flash, and World's Finest Comics — led me to think of him as "The Good Cover Artist". He turned out to be a gentleman born Nicholas Peter Viscardi and known during his time at DC as Nick Cardy.

I'm not sure exactly when I found out his name, because I was still so young when I did that I don't have a good grasp of how long it was before I did; time passes much more slowly when you're five, six, seven years old. Most of his covers weren't signed, and when they were the signature was often what I now know is a stylized "NC" rather than the "Cardy" that he also used. The name didn't matter much anyway, since at that age my comics-collecting friends were understandably even less focused on the people behind the stories and pictures than I was — it takes a level of rational thought beyond most kindergarteners to leverage one's chances of enjoying an issue that one is buying (or trading for) based not just on the art or the characters involved but the credit of a writer who's written stuff one liked in the past. What does the name of an artist matter as long as you know on sight whether you like or dislike his work?

Everything that I needed to peg Cardy's identity was there in one of my most memorable childhood artifacts, Limited Collectors' Edition #C-34, a tabloid-sized anthology with the more poetic cover title of Christmas with the Super-Heroes.

Dated Feb.-Mar. 1975 in the indicia but released in November of the previous year, its reprints included the 1967 Teen Titans classic "A Swingin' Christmas Carol!". Writer Bob Haney, artist Nick Cardy, and editor George Kashdan are credited on the splash page, and Cardy signed the cover clearly, but it's entirely possible that I didn't make the association at first through some combination of not really noticing the cover signature and not particularly caring about putting a name to "The Good Cover Artist". Especially in the days before I ever set foot in a dedicated comics shop, after all, none of the stores at which I bought new comics or the flea markets that I scoured for older ones were run by anybody who'd know if they had issues with Nick Cardy covers; I had to eyeball them on my own — and besides, as I've probably driven into the ground by now, I wasn't amassing covers drawn by "The Good Cover Artist" because of any inherent value attached to his name but due to gut-instinct aesthetics.

Once I did start visiting comics shops and going to conventions, Nick Cardy covers were pretty much the only creator-related criterion I had for purchasing back issues. I tended to prefer DCs, and of those I had a special affinity for issues with so-called Imaginary Stories, Earth-One/Earth-Two crossovers, and Golden or Silver Age reprints; finding a Cardy cover on one of those was a perfect storm of comics awesomeness.

The style that Cardy used in penciling and inking stories in Aquaman and Teen Titans during the 1960s was rounder and rougher than the sharp, clean covers of his that captivated me in the early 1970s. I admire his interior work a great deal, yet it's those covers that came to mind when I brainstormed a few dozen favorite things for these posts thanks to not only nostalgia but outright excellence in layout and linework. Carmine Infantino, DC's publisher at the time and himself a celebrated artist, often provided Cardy with cover-design sketches; there is indeed an identifiable Infantino aura to many of Cardy's most iconic covers, although he could also compose scenes beautifully in his own right. I loved and still love everything from Cardy's precision and relative simplicity in general to such specifics as the way he rendered Superman's insignia and spitcurl. He could draw the most enticingly absurd scene on one cover, a come-on to some featured story within the issue at hand, while on the next turn in the kind of lovely static, wordless illustration that made him, in my estimation, the Norman Rockwell of comics.

Only later would I discover that Cardy contributed covers to DC's string of supernatural titles as copiously as he did to its superhero line, just as I was unaware of his efforts on romance titles and the idiosyncratic, short-lived but highly acclaimed Western series Bat Lash. I tended to look right past such releases as The Witching Hour, Ghosts, The Unexpected, Girls' Love Stories, and Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion on the spinner rack in favor of Action Comics, Batman, and Justice League of America. Cardy's tenure as one of DC's primary cover artists overlapped during my own personal Golden Age of Comics with the publisher's 100-Page Super-Spectaculars, which usually had a trove of reprints and fillers backing a new story, as well as with the Super-Sons saga in World's Finest that I'll be mentioning again here shortly.

Right now I have a loose moratorium on adding new back issues to my collection — partly because I'm still cataloguing everything that I own and getting it in order, partly because thanks to deficits of both space and funds I can't in good conscience justify buying more old comics without first selling off a bigger chunk than I plan to take in. As I've written here before, I'm hoping over the coming years to pare down my hoard considerably to a choice selection of treasures. So long as issues sporting the telltale talent of "The Good Cover Artist" remain out of my hands, however, I know that my collection is almost thrillingly incomplete.

Covers © 1973, 1974 DC Comics, featuring characters and logos TM/® DC Comics.
Pencils & Inks: Nick Cardy. Letters: Gaspar Saladino. Text, Colors: Unknown.

Previously in "41 Favorites": #5 (Edie Brickell)
Related Posts: Rhymes with Childhood; And That's Why It's Called Cape May

Late and Mean

2012-01-28T23:00:00.088-05:00

Well... Posting has become difficult again.

I admit that it's never easy, but sometimes yet another new Blogger problem crops up or I forget about an old one because I'd been avoiding it for a spell or I just don't have the patience to deal with the workarounds, repetition, and troubleshooting. And that's when I put up the bottle of Devil Tylenol from Hell or its predecessor, the can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup — which you may recall is an ancient Internet tradition begun by Mark Evanier, practiced by an unknown number of folks including me and, I was glad to see recently, at least one online pal of mine. It's also when I share another batch of word-verification definitions if possible, a phenomenon explained on the dedicated page of this blog that collects them all to date.

• ashible — [ash ih bull] adj. Made of such substance as will be reduced to powder by burning.

• Boxidect™ — [boks ih dekt] It's ten — ten — ten boxes in one!

• caticeph — [kat ih sef] n. A being with a feline head.

• compi — [kahm pi] n. Toast for a gratis helping of 3.14159 oz. of saké. [Ooh... Multilingual humor!]

• dabless — 1. [duh bless] n. What dapriest does to daflock. 2. [dab liss] adj. Lacking hair product.

• fergpod — [furg pahd] n. How new singers for The Black-Eyed Peas are grown.

• fiersh — [feersh] excl. Drunk Christian Siriano's catchphrase.

• gatillin — [gat till in] v. Usin' yer gun ta work the field 'cause y'ain't got no rake.

• healinc — [heel ink] n. A medical conglomerate.

• inglid — [ing lid] n. Cap on a jar of gerunds.

• merfloth — [mur floth] n. What a lisping sea siren uses for oral hygiene.

• oxorber — [oks or bur] n. Collector of bovine eyeballs.

• patizzle — [puh tih zull] n. Where Snoop Dogg enjoys his lemonade.

• pumince — [poom inss] n. Finely chopped cougar.

• radom — 1. [rad um] adj. Haphazardly missing letters. 2. n. [rah dum] Domain of the Egyptian sun god. 3. [rad ohm] n. Meditative chant used at nuclear power plants.

• snall — [snall] n. Noise made by uppercrust English dogs.

• subtr — [sub tr] v. Take away the last few letters of a word. (You can then put them in a test tube and separate them in a — wait for it — subtrfuge.)

• TopoLido — [toh poh lee doh] Pool attraction featuring Aquaman's octopus buddy at the Super Friends amusement park.

• unamir — 1. [ahn ah mee air] A friendly French consonant. 2. (UNAmir) [yoo en ah meer] High-ranking Middle Eastern delegate to the United Nations.

Silent Treatment

2012-01-21T19:00:00.006-05:00

I can see why so many folks in the American movie biz have both admiration and affection for The Artist as well as why it's received almost universal acclaim from critics. While it does drag a bit in the middle, I found the movie a delight on the whole — and I love the fact that the audience clapped at the end.

Applause when a movie concludes, based on the unscientific sampling that is my own theatergoing experience, is much rarer today than it was when I was a kid. I'm not sure if that's because people are more used to watching movies at home (in smaller parties and/or alone) or because there are fewer films that rouse an audience to applause than there used to be; either way, it's one of the fun, communal aspects of seeing a flick on the big screen in a packed house. The Artist is definitely one to savor in such a setting, surrounded by fellow film buffs in near-darkness with the smell of popcorn in the air.

I won't spoil anything here. You likely already know the gist of The Artist and, if you haven't seen it yet, know whether you want to. There's a trailer at the film's US website that shows it off well and fairly spoiler-free, but the video clips that load next give away some delightful moments better seen in context.

Written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist is a mostly silent film set at the end of Hollywood's silent-film era and the dawn of "talkies" — set, indeed, within the movie industry itself, where we find marquee idol George Valentin marginalized by new technology, changing tastes, and his own hubris. Like Hugo, My Week with Marilyn, and to a lesser extent The Muppets before it (as I wrote last month), The Artist is a movie about movies.

French actor Jean Dujardin plays Valentin and looks in the role very much like obvious inspiration Douglas Fairbanks, whom he "quoted" when winning a Golden Globe last Sunday (as I wrote the next day). Bérénice Bejo, who resembles the young Rickie Lee Jones, is his sassy match as rising star Peppy Miller; she has a meet-cute encounter with Valentin early in the film and pops back into his life in various ways throughout. Dujardin, leading man of Hazanavicius' popular OSS 117 films, and Bejo, Hazanavicius' wife, possess the requisite chemistry — but you're forgiven if the pairings that most enchant you are Dujardin/Valentin's with the dog and Bejo/Miller's with a jacket and coat rack.

The lack of familiarity with Dujardin and Bejo among audiences outside France works in the film's favor, while by contrast some recognizable faces from movies and television in supporting turns can be jarring at first. Despite rhapsodizing in my Hugo review about the magic that allows us to dissociate (in any distracting regard, at least) actors from previous roles when they're properly cast in a good film, I found that the appearance of such American actors as John Goodman, Penelope Ann Miller, James Cromwell, Malcolm McDowell, and Joel Murray (not a familiar name, perhaps, but a face you'll know) took me out of the action momentarily, but ultimately it added to the unreality of The Artist in a positive way. It's as if the actors were not so much losing themselves in their roles in the normal fashion, with the audience complicit in its own deception, but rather transformed into avatars of themselves in odd roles in a dream sequence within a film that consists of nothing but the dream sequence. No, I'm not entirely sure what I mean by that either, but it's the best I can do to describe the phenomenon right now. What's important as always is that the emotion is genuine even as the artifice remains enchanting — in this case, all the more gloriously so by how artificial it is.

Of course The Artist is, like those it homages, a silent film only in the sense that it lacks spoken dialogue. It does occasionally employ absolute silence, to superb effect, including once early on in a fashion that reminds us that we are watching an ode to the very sort of thing we are watching with the benefit of hindsight and with the silence being a deliberate artistic choice rather than standard operating procedure. But The Artist also uses intertitles for dialogue and has a great score of borrowed and original music for which composer Ludovic Bource won a Golden Globe himself. The rest of the crew operates in similarly rarefied air, from editors Hazanavicius and Anne-Sophie Bion to production designer Laurence Bennett to cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman.

I expect that if The Artist trumps Hugo when the last envelope is opened on Oscar night, Martin Scorsese will be as quick to his feet as he was last weekend at the Golden Globes, which is a testament to him as a gentleman and a lover of film. Hugo still edges out The Artist, however, as not only my favorite release of last year but, measured by any conceivable metric in my mind, the best. It's almost criminal that these two very moving, very beautiful, very different movies that each look back at the creation of silent films in their own way are pitted against one another during this awards season. What are the odds that the most enchanting movies of 2011 would be a pair of films taking place 80 years ago — one an American production set in France, about a French auteur (if that's not a redundancy); the other a film set in Hollywood, made by one? The real losers, in a way, are those who are tasked with judging the films against one another. The winners, of course, are the rest of us, who can enjoy both without having to do any such thing.

Images courtesy The Weinstein Company and Warner Bros. Entertainment France.

All @Twitter

2012-01-17T23:30:00.006-05:00

Screencap © 2012 Worldwide Pants Inc.

David Letterman has been having fun with Twitter for a while now. He acts more befuddled than he actually is — mistaking the 17 feeds that the official Late Show Twitter account is following for how many followers it has, for example, when the latter number is actually over 150,000 at this writing, or literally typing in the words "hash tag" (which he's at least amended to "#HashTag").

I wasn't more than bemused with this ongoing bit, however — with one exception — until the moment frozen in the above screencap struck me. Dave is just a skitch younger than my parents, a generation older than I (unless you're counting in Base Dustin Hoffman... Golden Globes callback, baby!), and I've seen him age along with my folks from the time Late Night with David Letterman debuted 30 years ago. He was a wacky but still middle-America guy, in that quietly subversive way many comics born in the heartland who left to seek their destiny in Hollywood are, bucking the system from within, and a revelation to those of us in our high-school or college years as he rose to prominence (Late Night successors Conan O'Brien and Jimmy Fallon included, straddling that decade-or-so divide). As I wrote of Dave in a post some time back, "He's the establishment now, with Johnny's time slot and nearly three decades of hosting under his belt, but there was always some of the curmudgeon in his punk behavior; the ratio has simply flipped."

That squint and lean-in with the glasses on the forehead is a familiar one to me. I've watched my mom do it, and more recently my cousins — I'm probably not far from the bifocals myself, now. Seeing the always cranky, still quick-witted, increasingly world-weary Letterman do it too, especially hunched over a fancy laptop (or, as Dave would have it, "Twitter machine"), is just endearing.

As for the exception to my mere bemusement mentioned above, I direct you to Brian Williams' appearance a couple of weeks ago. The Nightly News anchor, who has shown considerable comedic chops on The Late Show (doing one hell of a Regis Philbin in his previous visit) and hosting Saturday Night Live, called Dave out on everything he was mock-mishandling. I can't find the segment by itself, but the full episode is up at the Late Show website — for not much longer, I suspect, given its second-to-last placement.

I have now for the first time in three days gone an entire post without mentioning Ricky Gervais — a statement that was originally intended as a joke, oxymoron as it made itself, but Gervais is/was actually a guest on The Late Show with David Letterman tonight. I'm not able to verify how worth watching his spot is as I haven't seen it yet, and there's only a clip up so far, although the whole episode should be online soon.

Slow Globes

2012-01-16T23:00:00.114-05:00

I said at the end of yesterday's post that any write-up of this year's Golden Globes telecast would be short and scattershot. Here's me trying to make good on that claim. For a more in-depth reflection on many of the Globes' quirks, see my write-up from last year.

Overall, Ricky Gervais as host was once again fine but not stellar. Most of his barbs didn't have the bite that I think he wanted them to, as he — and NBC, and The Hollywood Foreign Press Association — seemed to promote his return this year as a go-for-broke train wreck waiting to happen, which is rather a silly thing. Gervais was, y'know, invited back. Of course he comes with a certain amount of edginess, but he's a professional and there were negotiations and he knows how far he can push it. This isn't an accidentally "tweeted" nude photo; it's three hours of prime-time network programming on a Sunday night. We can all feign anticipated shock only so far.

My favorite bit of his was probably the extended riff during his opening monologue on "Jodie Foster's Beaver". It's an easy, built-in joke — but what made it so funny here was the repetition and, especially, the cut to Foster's enthusiastic encouragement of the bit. As it's much better heard from the source than retyped, I direct you to the video clip of the monologue currently up at NBC's website; the Beaver bit is at the 2:50 mark if you want to get there straight away.

After Johnny Depp was introduced, Gervais asked him if he'd honestly watched The Tourist yet. I suppose that Depp's no was meant to come off as telling, and for many it probably did, yet anyone who's seen Depp's visits to David Letterman (or, presumably, seen or read any of several other interviews with him) knows that Depp generally doesn't watch any movies he's made. So, okay, The Tourist was bad, and Gervais's jab at it last year has been vindicated, and Depp's a good sport — but, really, it's kind-of mean to pull this on him in front of millions of TV viewers who don't know about Depp's aversion to seeing himself onscreen, as that lack of knowledge is what Gervais is counting on to make Depp's reply more damning of the film and justify last year's The Tourist jokes.

I've been getting a bit tired of Gervais's self-satisfaction since the end of last year's Globes show, to be honest. I don't mind the put-on smugness within his act so much as the actual smugness of him "out of character" — inasmuch as there's a distinction — making a big deal out of being unapologetic about that smugness, which makes it all harder to take. [n.b. I'm also feeling pretty cranky myself at the moment.]

Since I appear to be faring terribly with the brevity thus far, I'll just offer a link to a list of winners before I move on to select commentary on the rest of the night.

The categories seemed more random than ever this year, apart from naturally slotting the pair of Best Picture categories, Drama and Comedy or Musical, as the finale bookend of Casual Minute with George Clooney. It gets particularly whiplash-inducing because the Globes cover both film and television.

Gerard Butler is already hard for me to take seriously, but he hit new levels of absurdity when, ~~chewing~~ reading the list of nominees for (deep breath) Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture, he accented the last syllable in the name of the film Moneyball.

Can words describe how archaic it is to have a Miss Golden Globes? Even if you take out the torso-oriented double entendre that Bette Midler so memorably brought to the fore one fine year, it's still awfully sexist. "Look! The fledgling model/actress daughter of a Hollywood star of some magnitude! What an honor for her to be done up in a nice dress and not say anything like proper eye candy!" Sigh...

I still haven't seen HBO's Mildred Pierce, but its nominations reminded me that it was helmed by Todd Haynes, writer/director of the beautiful Far from Heaven.

For that matter, I wish I'd seen a lot of other films and television programs nominated, if only to judge them properly. Most of the TV stuff was HBO, BBC America, and Showtime fare I've not more than heard good things about.

Even so, I can't believe that Kelsey Grammer's or any other performance by a male actor on TV last year was more award-worthy than Bryan Cranston's on AMC's Breaking Bad.

"If I were to write a song right now, it would be a tap-dance number," said Ludovic Bource, winning the Golden Globe for Best Original Score — Motion Picture. The Artist had in the aggregate the most charming acceptance speeches of the night, perhaps owing to English not being the filmmakers' first language and their general appreciation for the appreciation of this love letter to old Hollywood by present-day Hollywood.

Michelle Williams won for Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture — Comedy or Musical for My Week with Marilyn. So was My Week with Marilyn a comedy or a musical? 'Cause I saw it and I didn't think it was either one (which is not damning it with a snide remark; I don't think it was intended to be).

In his acceptance speech for bringing to life Tyrion Lannister on HBO's Game of Thrones, Peter Dinklage concluded by mentioning "a gentleman in England I'm thinking about — Martin Henderson; Google 'im." This ensured a snake-eating-its-own-tail Google result that had Dinklage's plea returned highest in those results; the topic also trended on Twitter, as discussed in the very first Google hit I clicked, which explains who Henderson is.

Dinklage's category was, by the way, Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series, or Motion Picture Made for Television. As I mentioned last year, the male and female versions of this category cast so broad a net across genres and types of programming as to make comparisons absolutely impossible. Dinklage was up against Eric Stonestreet of ABC's Modern Family, for instance, while Jessica Lange of FX's American Horror Story beat out a field of five that included Sofia Vergara in Modern Family and Evan Rachel Wood in Mildred Pierce. At least one of those things is very not like the others.

Downton Abbey and BBC America's Luther are also infamously still in the Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television categories despite having run for more than one season.

The award for Animated Feature Film went to The Adventures of Tintin. I bet it would've been Rango if I hadn't started typing "Rango" just before the winner was announced — based purely on expectations, not on having seen any of the nominees, although of course I have to remember that it's kind-of impossible to be sure of any particular Globes victory since the voting pool doesn't even reach the triple digits in number.

Since Midnight in Paris writer/director Woody Allen wasn't there to pick up his hardware for Best Screenplay, I'd love to have seen somebody come in with a Woody impression to accept on his behalf — Jon Stewart (not really a mimic, but he does a recognizable Woody) wasn't there, so maybe Jimmy Fallon could've pulled it off.

My own — and, I suspect, everybody else's — award for Best Presentation goes to Felicity Huffman and William H. Macy for their quick a cappella ditty.

While I still have fond memories of Dustin Hoffman's mangling of the lyrics to No Doubt's "Hey Baby" at the Grammys several years ago, I still wasn't prepared for the bout of foot-in-mouth disease that led him, after he read off the names of such relative young'uns as Claire Danes and Mireille Enos, to ad-lib "my generation" when he got to Madeline Stowe in Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series — Drama. Hoffman was born in 1937, Stowe (who looks great) in... well, that might be rude, so I'll just say that it was a couple of years after Hoffman left college to pursue an acting career. Never mind that we're living in a world where a woman is suing IMDB for revealing her birth date on the grounds that the knowledge will make it harder for her to get cast in certain roles; Mr. Wishful Thinking was just plain wrong on the math by rounding Stowe's age up from "late Baby Boomer" to "whatever the generation born before Hitler invaded Europe is called".

The high-five between Tina Fey and Jane Lynch on "Penis joke!" was a bit forced but still a darned sight funnier than oh, say, Ricky Gervais introducing Madonna with a reference to a song older than all the kids in Modern Family put together. Who knew that it was possible to root for Madonna — or that she could think so quickly on her feet as to reply with an invitation for Gervais to come back on stage because it'd been a while since she kissed a girl?

Props go to the always game Helen Mirren, lamenting her lack of roles opposite Cecil B. DeMille Award recipient Morgan Freeman with the line, "For God's sake, I could've been a penguin." I'm so glad that they showed a clip from The Electric Company in his career-highlight reel — "I love / to take a bath / in a casket..." — even if there was no Easy Reader.

I was thrilled to see Martin Scorsese get the Best Director nod for Hugo, my favorite film of 2011 (in fact, one of my favorite films of all time), and I don't expect Globes Best Picture winners The Artist or The Descendants — one or both of which I hope to see this week — to change my mind in terms of rooting for Hugo to be crowned champion at the Oscars. Again, I realize that the HFPA is a small group and that the Globes aren't really a predictor of the Oscars except by chance — as opposed to the SAG awards, whose voting body overlaps with the largest segment of that of AMPAS. I just think that the life of every man, woman, and child on this planet would be enriched by seeing Hugo and want the word of its magnificence spread as widely as possible.

Although I'm happy for ABC's Modern Family I can't help thinking that NBC's Community and Parks and Recreation should both at least have been in the running if not actually holding the trophy. Disagreement with the slate of nominees to begin with is a key frustration in any batch of awards. Sofia Vergara and Steven Levitan's bilingual acceptance speech, however, was classic comedy, with Levitan soon straying far afield in his translation; even with a generous B in my one semester of college Spanish I know that Vergara was not promoting the fact that TV writers "may look pasty and nervous and out-of-shape but they are the greatest lovers I've ever had".

Perhaps the best line of the entire night came from Jean Dujardin after he won for his starring role in The Artist: "And as Douglas Fairbanks would say, ' .'"

I haven't seen The Iron Lady yet, but we all know that Meryl Streep is a virtual shoo-in at every awards show this season — not only because of her impressive skills of transformation but the fact that her acceptance speeches, like the one she gave last night, strike just the right note between humility and faux humility desired by her peers as well as showcase some tastefully shocking-just-shocking giggles. Her opening remark that "Ricky Gervais' deal fell through and they came to me to play Margaret Thatcher" counts as a side-splitter in this crowd, although I did like the line "I just want to thank my agent, Kevin Huvane, and God, Harvey Weinstein... The Punisher. Old Testament, I guess."

The bleeped moment is excised from the above-linked clip of her speech, but as Streep ascended to the stage I was actually thinking that I'd love to see her go off on a profanity-laced tirade — right when, lo and behold, she said "Oh shit..." upon realizing she forgot her glasses.

So that's my attempt to stick to a lightning-round approach. Given the amount of time and mental energy it takes to write up something relatively breezy like this (on which I've already taken notes, no less), I can't help but think that it would've been time and mental energy much better spent on any number of other things — like putting up another one of the many blogposts awaiting my attention or watching the entirety of Mildred Pierce.

All screencaps © 2012 NBCUniversal Media and/or The Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

FYI: The comments section has taken a turn towards the NSFW. OK?

Funny Business

2012-01-15T19:30:00.030-05:00

Photo from Talking Funny © 2011 Home Box Office, Inc.

Ricky Gervais is hosting the Golden Globes ceremony again after all.

Last year there was foofaraw from some quarters — including The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which runs the Globes and was one of Gervais's targets — about his barbs being distastefully sharp. Many of the Western world's most prominent humorists rose up to defend him. I was in the minority position, expressed in my writeup of last year's telecast, of not minding the acerbity of the jokes but feeling a lack in their overall quality and even quantity; Gervais didn't seem as sharp to me as usual (in terms of keenness of delivery, not pointedness of content) and he was AWOL for long stretches.

Gervais said in the wake of the hubbub that followed the 2011 show that he wouldn't host again even if asked, less because he was incensed at the HFPA's lack of support than because he wanted to go out on a high note. But come 8 p.m. ET he'll be back in the saddle tonight on NBC. While I believe that it's a funny man's prerogative to change his mind and he will almost certainly not be on his best behavior and everyone likes the neatness of a trilogy, I'm a bit sorry to see him do an about-face just on curmudgeonly principle.

"I loved doing it, but I was worried that I couldn't improve on last year," Gervais wrote in a November post on his blog (which apparently doesn't allow for links to individual posts) of the decision to host the Globes "for a third and definitely final time" — at least for a while, he later clarified. "I knew some people would be uncomfortable with me being host," he added, noting parenthetically that he considered that fact "a pro".

Anyway, I've spent too long on that subject. I'm also writing to let you know that a nifty conversation about stand-up comedy called Talking Funny, which debuted last April on HBO, is coming to HBO Go today, Jan. 15th, through the end of February (which is a day longer than usual this year); returning to HBO On Demand tomorrow, Jan. 16th; and showing on HBO channels several times over the next couple of weeks starting on Jan. 16th at 5:05 a.m. ET on HBO East. You can find a complete schedule (as well as some clips) on the show's page at the HBO website by holding your cursor over the Schedule button at the bottom right and then, if you want, clicking All Showings in the pop-up window — if you just click Schedule right away you get the whole HBO grid of what's on at the moment.

Talking Funny is 50 minutes of Ricky Gervais, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Louis C.K. talking amongst themselves about their craft. I probably don't have to tell you that there's harsh language involved, especially as Seinfeld explains why he doesn't work blue, Rock and C.K. discuss using a certain racial epithet, and a recurring joke is made of a parody lyric to Otis Redding's "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay". Even if you're not a particular admirer of any of the gentlemen involved — which if you like stand-up comedy is unlikely — you should find this fly-on-the-wall experience enlightening.

I found it fairly fascinating, as I love shop talk about any creative discipline in which I have even a passing curiosity. That stand-up comedy is equal parts "creative" and "discipline" (in the other sense of the word) is something that gets rewarding air-time here. I started jotting down notes as I watched last May — a hazard of this blog, it seems, as I've taken to doing that when watching or reading anything I think I might write about — but stopped because there was just so much of interest and it really broke the flow of the show for me to keep pausing it; my laptop had a tough row to hoe at the time anyway.

One topic that stood out for me, though, even more so than how a particular bit evolves, is how much of a set should consist of older bits versus newer material. Rock pointed out that he grew up admiring Woody Allen and Prince — "I like short geniuses," he observed, which made Seinfeld laugh — and said, "Every year Woody Allen has a new movie; every year Prince has a new album," making the case for constant creative output.

"But Jerry's point is that when you go to see Prince you want to see his greatest hits, not his new album you haven't heard," Gervais responded.

"I want to see both," Seinfeld clarified, and therein lies the crux of the problem that bedevils so many creative professionals.

One takeaway from the show for me is a resolve to see more of Louis C.K. He's probably the least known quantity in Talking Funny to most people, but I've heard too many good things about him for too long not to have searched out more of his work online if nothing else. The first two seasons of his FX series, Louie, are in my Netflix queue awaiting release.

My biggest complaint about Talking Funny is that it was too short — and the quick Google search that I did to remind myself exactly when the show premiered last year revealed that I'm not alone. I recall some transitions feeling a bit artificial because the participants presumably had at least an outline of subjects to touch upon in under an hour of airtime. There's no DVD of the program yet, and hopefully when there is it'll contain copious bonus material — but hopefully, too, it will lead to sequels and spinoffs. Not everyone who practices stand-up comedy, even well, is necessarily going to make for a great round-table participant, but the hyperverbal, almost obsessively observant Patton Oswalt comes to mind as a prime suspect; I also think that expanding to more than one gender would be fruitful, with at least a couple of women involved so that neither is chained to the de facto position of speaking for all femininity.

Gervais mentioned to David Letterman when he visited The Late Show last year to promote Talking Funny that if it was successful he'd like to do a similar project about what Brits like him call "chat shows" (Talking Talking, perhaps). Ricky Gervais picking the brains of Letterman, Conan O'Brien, and Jon Stewart or maybe even Craig Ferguson — a refreshing throwback to the days of Jack Paar when hosts were legitimately invested in having a conversation with their guests — would be Christmas at any time of year, especially if they could really get Letterman to open up and engage in some analysis of his own and others' work, because he ain't as dumb as he looks.

You're probably aware of Ricky Gervais's website, home to the above-mentioned blog, and his Twitter feed, if you're a fan, but there are those links as well. He'll probably have something to say about the Golden Globes telecast when it's over.

I said just about everything that I have to say about the Golden Globes as a phenomenon last year, and I'm trying to wind down my blogging for a spell, so if I do blog on tonight's show it'll just be a random wrap-up of good lines and genuine surprises.

Search Me

2012-01-10T23:30:00.058-05:00

I get a kick out of seeing what searches lead folks here. While I'm always curious to see the Posts listing in the Stats provided by Blogger, I find how people are landing on certain pages of the blog — and as much why as one can hypothesize from the how — even more interesting than what those pages are.

Very often, I have little to no idea how a given search relates to what Google turns up, like so:

{craving for a holiday experience}

The above string showed up, no surprise, in December, and it turned out that at that time — but apparently no longer — a Google Image search for the string would return the image from last year's hodgepodge dispatch on The Hulk, Evan Dorkin, and Twitter [warning: cuss word in that image] as a representative of the blog's archive page for April 2011. I have no idea what the person(s) who input that string hoped to get, but despite their obvious curiosity over the image (they did click on through, after all) I doubt that they were looking for a doodle of Marvel's ~~jolly~~ sullen green giant. Most folks don't seem to know (or remember, or care) to use quotes in their Google searches even when searching for a specific phrase — which, true, may not have been the case here — so, although pages where the words appear in close proximity to one another may show up higher in the search returns, a search will eventually turn to pages like this one of mine where the words may be scattered about in unrelated contexts.

For example, I got a chuckle recently over {sistine chapel nutella} just because it seems like such a non sequitur, but I also feel bad that the Google Image search that returned Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam as seen in December 2010's "Stocking Stuff" did so purely because Nutella is listed as a label in this blog's sidebar.

I wrote the other day that {alex carter} was the top search leading folks here last year — and that my June 2010 post "Vampire Weekend" got loads of hits from that search on Google Images even though there's no actual picture of Alex Carter in that post. My links to photos of Scarlet Johansson and David Boreanaz in that post also garner hits for it.

And that brings me to another favorite search, {david boreanaz' jaw/lip/cheek}. Yes, really.

I began checking the Traffic Sources section of my Stats multiple times throughout the day, when possible, after realizing a few months ago that it was a gold mine of such quirky searches. The Stats page has to be visited often to find them, however, because they'll cycle off the Now view quickly and not make it into the top ten of the cumulative Day view unless they're searched for repeatedly, which is unlikely due to their very quirkiness. More popular searches that linger in the Week, Month, and All Time views tend to be less amusing, if no less informative of what people are looking for and how my blog might be able to cater to their needs — Garrett Morris's Chico Escuela character from Saturday Night Live is a perennial favorite, although well behind Alex Carter; {menorah first night} and {first night of chanukah} were big in the latter half of December, as sundry Muppets searches have been over the past few months; like I wrote at the end of that Alex Carter post, the image in my Thanksgiving 2009 entry "Cut Me a Slice of That" gets hits from variations on strings like {cecilia venn diagram} and the more generic {how i met your mother funny}, to name the two most common variations (mutually exclusive in wording, oddly enough).

Google seems to be by far the top feeder to this blog — at least in terms of arrival here from links on other sites; if you type the blog's address into your browser or you've bookmarked it, that's another story (and, fear not, something that isn't tracked, as the most specific the Stats get are Pageviews by Countries, Browsers, and Operating Systems). Seven of the ten Referring Sites in the All Time view of my Traffic Sources are incarnations of Google (US, Canada, UK, Australia, Germany, Brazil, and France, in order), with Yahoo Image Search and Microsoft's Bing both bested by the only entry that isn't a search engine, the aggregation blog Update-a-Tron. I should be very happy to get such constant traffic from Update-a-Tron, which offers feed excerpts of the latest posts from various comics-oriented blogs, since I don't write about comics here as often as I would like to — not very often at all, lately, although it's neck-and-neck with television overall in terms of post subjects; whether the proprietor got wind of Blam's Blog during a patch of relevant posts or I was grandfathered in because of past enterprises I have no idea. Of course I'm also thankful for the links on blogs and other sites run by friends, acquaintances, and admirers.

I leave you with a handful of particularly strange search terms that have popped up in my Stats — either strange in and of themselves or simply because there's no good reason for them to lead to my blog.

{intellectual beatles}

{fencing lame jokes}

{batman irony}

{fat dc comics robin}

{comic script of moral responsibility}

{feminine discipline}

{peewee herman hands}

I certainly don't want to go looking that last one up, given the circumstances of Paul Reubens' arrest in an, um, adult cinema several years back. As for the others, well, I made selections from my ever-growing list of choice searches that didn't turn up anything particularly interesting when I recreated the searches myself, and about which I didn't have much of anything to say. I'll be sharing more searches at some point down the line that do beg commentary.

What's the weirdest search string you've ever seen?

Paris Review

2012-01-08T18:30:00.047-05:00

Midnight in Paris came out on home video a couple of weeks ago. I caught it in theatrical release last summer and came away with mixed feelings. Upshot? I'd probably recommend it as a rental for the enjoyable execution of the premise; I only wish that the present-day cast was half as compelling as that populating the scenes set in the 1920s.

The film, you probably know, stars Owen Wilson as Gil, a successful American screenwriter and aspiring novelist vacationing in Paris, France, who one night finds himself somehow transported some 80 years back to the Jazz Age, rubbing elbows with the likes of Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Ernest Hemingway. As something of a devotee of magical realism, in which baldly fantastic elements are introduced into otherwise naturalistic fiction without explanation, I quite liked the matter-of-fact absorption of Gil into this mysterious witching-hour demimonde, but I'm not much of a fan of Wilson's acting — he was tolerable, and still only tolerable, due to the fact that his dialogue so obviously marked him as a stand-in for writer/director Woody Allen (as often happens in Allen films that don't star Allen himself). I could all but see a flickering image of the filmmaker superimposed over Wilson's laid-back, blond, blank-faced Gil.

Of course the whole point of Gil's after-midnight escapades is that they're more colorful than the life he's living, but it's a shame that we — I and most of the rest of my viewing party, at least; I know that Wilson has his admirers — don't feel more of an emotional investment in Gil, as well as that Rachel McAdams, who can really sparkle in the right role, has so little to do as Gil's fiancée Inez. Alison Pill does sparkle here as Zelda Fitzgerald, while Corey Stoll is such a standout as the hilariously macho Hemingway that I want to see a series of film shorts starring him as an anachronistic adventurer in the vein of Robert Downey Jr.'s reimagined Sherlock Holmes. I won't give away any of the more fleeting supporting roles since the reveals of exactly whom Gil and his nocturnal muse Adriana, played by Marion Cotillard, end up meeting — reveals sometimes immediate, sometimes belated, depending on both the script and a viewer's own knowledge base — are part of the fun.

The fact that Midnight in Paris is essentially a trifle in the Allen oeuvre is odd given that its North American box-office take is, before translating past grosses to 2011 dollars, the biggest ever for an Allen film, surpassing late in its run the celebrated Hannah and Her Sisters. Classics like Annie Hall and Manhattan still come out ahead of both Hannah and Midnight once adjusted for inflation, per Wolfram Alpha (an interesting resource that I've failed to consult since writing about it last year; this link to its Tumblr blog came through a Google search), although such comparison is an inexact science since ticket prices don't rise in lockstep with inflation or the costs of other services. Even stranger to me is the film's critical reception as Allen's best work in ages, which is a label that seems to have been trotted out once every few years over the past decade — for 2005's Match Point and again for 2008's Vicky Christina Barcelona, although I just plugged them into Metacritic and see that Midnight in Paris outscores them both. Was The Curse of the Jade Scorpion such a bomb that Allen has to claw his way out of the boarded-up doghouse with each new release?

I'm curious what you thought of Midnight in Paris if you saw it — and if you didn't, why you didn't.

Midnight in Paris is available from Amazon on DVD, on Blu-Ray, via instant-video rental, and as a download for purchase. If you click through the links in this paragraph to buy those items or anything else placed in your cart during the session, Blam's Blog gets a small cut of the sale. Not to talk my way out of a bigger commission, but like I said above a rental via Amazon, On Demand, or Netflix is probably the way to go, especially since even the Blu-Ray has only a photo gallery and a press conference from Cannes as extras.

Carter Beats the Google

2012-01-05T16:00:00.031-05:00

Hello! Are you looking for this?

Photo detail © 2010 CBS.

I've kinda rigged the question by providing that photo, since Alex Carter's name was the most searched-for string leading folks to Blam's Blog last year according to Blogger's stats analysis.

What's really funny is that there hasn't actually been a photo of Carter, who plays Det. Lou Vartann on CBS staple CSI, here on the blog until now. In June 2010, I reviewed ABC's summer newbie The Gates and CW repeats of The Vampire Diaries; when I did, I noted how many of Diaries' actors resembled other actors (or mash-ups of other actors) and that Gates' male lead, Frank Grillo, looked to me like a cross between David Boreanaz and the aforementioned Mr. Carter. Even though the photo of Carter that I linked to for reference doesn't appear in my post, when one does a Google image search for {alex carter} said photo is one of the top results — it's the very first in the returns for {alex carter csi} — with this blog's address as the source.

I know that Google's algorithm takes links to and from a given webpage into account, but it still doesn't seem right for Google Images to direct people to a page that doesn't actually contain the image associated with it in search results.

So I apologize to everyone who's gone to that post looking for a photo of Alex Carter. I did not mean to mislead you. I realize that you can get to the photo easily enough by clicking on the hyperlink of Carter's name in that post, but it's still a bait-and-switch for which I feel bad if not exactly culpable in any active way.

To make up for it, I offer the photo of Mr. Carter above; links to his IMDB page (which has one lonely head shot at this writing) and his Wikipedia page (which is pretty sparse), both giving his date of birth as Nov. 12th, 1964, and his birth name as Alex Apostolopoulos; a link to an interview with Carter for a CSI fan site from last November; and just for good measure another link to that autographed photo that's made my earlier post so popular, hosted by somebody on ImageShack.

I hope that all of you Alex Carter fans have bopped around this place a bit and liked what you found. Ditto for everyone who comes here for the screencap of Jason Segel as Marshall Eriksen holding that hilarious Venn diagram on How I Met Your Mother, the most popular image that's really and truly on the blog...

The Vampire Slayer Diaries: Epilogue & Prologue

2011-12-31T07:00:00.012-05:00

Exactly one year has passed since I mentioned on this blog the impending launch of Nikki Stafford's Great Buffy Rewatch over at her blog, Nik at Nite. The exercise in entertainment and insight ended this past week, as our group viewing of and conversations about the seven seasons of Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer — including, for some of us, the first four of five seasons of spinoff series Angel — drew to a close.

I'd hoped to be writing companion pieces here, but it was all I could do to keep up with the Rewatch schedule, read the posts over at Nik at Nite from Nikki and her guest contributors, read the comments on those posts, and then add my own comments to the mix. Often I didn't even get to do the latter in a timely fashion, and it became pretty clear early on that with the amount of time I was spending on Buffy posts for Blam's Blog — none yet published beyond a look at the original feature film and an update saying basically what I'm saying right now — I was sacrificing other content here as well as participation in the Rewatch discussions there. So I stopped with an eye towards restarting my "Vampire Slayer Diaries" at a later date. While it would be nice if I could do so this summer, to coincide with the movie's 20th anniversary, I'd have to get a lot more written in advance than I have now to feel comfortable about rolling out the posts in a timely fashion; my aim is to cover all of both Buffy and Angel's TV incarnations as well as some choice comics along the way, including the official Whedon-blessed (and sometimes even Whedon-scripted) continuations of both series that began several years ago with Buffy Season Eight. Each post will link to the relevant posts at the Great Buffy Rewatch and entries at Wikia's Buffy the Vampire Slayer wiki.

Should you be moved to watch or rewatch Buffy sometime before my posts do resume, you should check out the Great Buffy Rewatch Archive post for links to each installment; Nikki Stafford and a host of fans and scholars offered original material each week from a variety of perspectives and areas of interest. The only downside to the Rewatch, due to understandable time constraints, is that it covers Angel tangentially at best and in lockstep with Buffy starting with the premieres of Angel Season One and Buffy Season Four, whereas like I said when I linked to a recommended combined viewing order in my update last May it's sometimes necessary to watch ahead on one show or the other — especially towards the end of Angel Season Four and Buffy Season Seven — to make the continuity between shows jell.

Uncanned X-Pun

2011-12-27T23:30:00.005-05:00

Why can't the X-Men use Twitter?

Because you're limited to 140 characters.

I've been holding onto that one at least since the X-Men: First Class movie came out.

And if anyone knows a better graphic to run here than the above stuffed-but-not-stuffed-enough shot that looks to have been drawn by Carlos Pacheco (inker, colorist, and source unknown), they're more than welcome to tip me off to it.

Image copyright year of production, and featuring characters who are trademarks of, Marvel Comics.

Muppet Monday 12/26

2011-12-26T11:00:00.074-05:00

When these posts began their avowed purpose was to make sure the blog had some content while my attention was mostly directed elsewhere, stoking my own and hopefully my readers' enthusiasm for the new Muppet movie.

Of course these past few months have ended up being among the busiest on the blog, not only in terms of posts posted but viewers viewing them — which is one reason why I decided to keep the new content flowing with more than just Muppet Monday stuff, but that too, even after the movie opened. I'll share some further thoughts on bloggy business in a couple of weeks; right now I'm wrapping up this volley of Muppet Monday with one last round of links.

Here's a list of seven sites for Muppet lovers interested in further exploration, most official and most mentioned on the blog before.

1. The website for The Muppets has select character bios, video clips, a photo gallery, games, downloads, and more.

2. The official Muppets Studio YouTube channel, which has been bringing us the occasional golden viral video for a few years now — like Beaker's multitracked version of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" and the Muppets' take on Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" — also has clips from the new film, trailers and TV spots promoting it, and other fun stuff.

3. The Muppet Wiki is an unofficial, astoundingly comprehensive information depot spanning the Muppets' history over the past 55+ years — and beyond, in the case of biographical information about key contributors to the Muppets legacy like Jim Henson, the man who started it all. The wiki's 24,516 pages (at this writing) also span non-Muppet aspects of Henson productions and collaborations, living up to its billing as "a collaborative encyclopedia for everything related to Jim Henson, The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, and The Muppets Studio."

4. The official Sesame Street website has games, classic and new video clips, and pages devoted to the Muppets from that show.

5. The website for The Jim Henson Legacy, founded after Henson's passing by his widow Jane Henson to keep his memory and creative perspective alive, has links, information on permanent and traveling exhibits about Henson's work, and more. Its mission statement says that the organization "is dedicated to preserving and perpetuating Jim Henson’s contributions to the worlds of puppetry, television, motion pictures, special effects and media technology."

6. The website of The Jim Henson Company is devoted to the puppetry, animatronics, and digital-effects work still being done by the Creature Shop and related arms of the enterprise that sprang from the mind of Jim Henson. While the company transferred the rights to the Sesame Street Muppets to Sesame Workshop and sold the characters familiar from The Muppet Show (and its spinoffs) as well as the Muppets name to The Walt Disney Company, The Jim Henson Company still controls such properties as The Storyteller, Farscape, Fraggle Rock, The Dark Crystal, and Labyrinth. Among the website's varied sections are an online store, links to new and classic video clips, and excerpts from Jim Henson's so-called Red Book with his brief journal entries often annotated through contextual essays and related archival images.

7. The website for Stuffed and Unstrung, a theatrical production from The Jim Henson Company's adult-oriented Henson Alternative division, has video excerpts from and tour-date information for the traveling show.

I'm hoping to return to the Muppet Monday movement next year around the time The Muppets hits home video. Previous Muppetational posts are easily browsable by clicking the Muppets label.

Logos, characters, and images are copyright year of production and are trademarks of their respective rights-holders.

Stocking Stuff

2011-12-25T00:01:00.001-05:00

Christmas is here. As always, I wish you a day of peace — and family, and tradition, and fun. My grab-bag of goodies is especially full of music this year.

I heard a very clever parody of The B-52s' "Love Shack" called "Toy Sack" on WXPN the other day. Bob Rivers apparently wrote and recorded the ditty for his 1997 album More Twisted Christmas. His version is on Vimeo set to holiday lights at the preceding link.

photo © 2011 Brian Saner Lamken

This year the winter holidays have been a bit different for my family. We had a bunch of cousins move up here to the Philadelphia suburbs from South Florida this past summer, bringing with them an annual tradition of doing Christmas big, whereas usually I either try to visit my father in New Jersey or hang out with friends if I'm able to get out at all. Last weekend there were almost twenty of us decorating cookies; the menorah with the blue background at the bottom of the photo up there and the Christmas tree right above it are both mine, paying homage to my interfaith heritage.

I found the holiday decorations in my mother's attic that I'd lamented losing track of last year, by the way, so lights have been up and the Grinch is on display and I got to hang some ornaments on the Chanukah bush.

screencap © 2011 Worldwide Pants

A few nights ago, Shannon Eis gave Dave crabs while showing off some toys for last-minute gift ideas on The Late Show with David Letterman. The clip and the entire episode are up now at the CBS website, for however long they last.

So is last night's annual last-before-Christmas episode, in which Jay Thomas visits to tell his Lone Ranger story and square off against Dave in The Holiday Quarterback Challenge as they attempt to knock the meatball off of the Late Show Christmas tree. I haven't yet seen it at this writing, so I don't know how it plays out, but it's usually good fun whether it takes one throw or twenty.

screencap © 2011 Worldwide Pants

Of course, Darlene Love also showed up to sing "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" as she's done for nearly a quarter-century now. And this year the Late Show website put up a special treat — a 10-minute online exclusive that gives us a peek at the making of the yuletide spectacle, with commentary from Love and Paul Schaffer. It ends with a mash-up of the performance as seen over many years, worth watching on its own if only for Bruce Kapler's entrances for the saxophone solo and even if you're not interested in the backstage showbiz stuff.

photo © 2011 NBCUniversal Media

The week after its official season finale, NBC's The Sing-Off returned for a live holiday show. Season 3 champions Pentatonix joined with Season 2 top dogs Committed and Season 1 winners Nota to open the show with their own snazzy rendition of the above-mentioned Darlene Love / Phil Spector classic.

Other highlights of the episode, which can be seen online in full or via clips: Sara Bareilles and Ben Folds singing a duet of "Baby It's Cold Outside" with Folds on piano and a quartet of Sing-Off performers on vocal bass, percussion, and brass; a larger group billed as The Sing-Off All-Stars doing similar duty — operating as a true a cappella orchestra — while backing doo-wop veteran and Season 2 alum Jerry Lawson on Arthur Conley's "Sweet Soul Music"; and just for pure fun Troy Horne's deep lead on Urban Method's rendition of "You're a Mean One, Mister Grinch" with Myke Charles spitting out Dr. Seuss rhymes. The bass vocalists have been a standout this season, particularly Pentatonix's versatile Avi Kaplan, Urban Method's Horne and Tony Huerta, Delilah's amazing Jo Vinson, the classic sound of North Shore's Thomas Duarte, and Afro-Blue's awesomely groovy Reggie Bowen.

screencap © 2011 NBCUniversal Media

How could I not wrap up this year's "Stocking Stuff" with a Muppets clip? On Friday night's final Late Night with Jimmy Fallon of the year, Jimmy was visited by Saturday Night Live head writer and Weekend Update anchor Seth Meyers. NBC has the whole episode online, but the highlight came when Dave and Conan's successor — who runs a Late Night that I wish I could check out more often — took the stage with Kermit the Frog and his nephew Robin to sing "Where the River Meets the Sea" from the Muppets' 1979 album with John Denver, A Christmas Together.

I hope that you got a spend a Christmas together.

I Melt with You

2011-12-24T23:30:00.006-05:00

Gelt is the Yiddish word for money. You almost exclusively hear it today in the context of "Chanukah gelt" — unless you know people who routinely speak Yiddish and talk about money. In older times, parents and wealthy community members might give money to children at Chanukah, but now kids mostly get presents and Chanukah gelt mostly comes in the form of foil-wrapped, coin-shaped chocolate.

My Chanukah this year, as you can see above, has been full of melt.

Among the things that I love about that little travel-sized traditional menorah — which my family has had for at least as long as I can remember — is its collection of "battle scars". Little bits of leftover wax, never completely scraped off the arms and base or entirely gouged out of the little cups that hold the candles, have accreted over the years to give it some extra character.

Still... The Jackson Pollack craziness that's occurred over the past few nights is kind-of ridiculous. I'm guessing based on the permutations of candles and menorahs four nights in that either the smaller candles used are just outright cheap or they've undergone some chemical process while sitting in a drawer for however long.

On the first night, I used the small candles in the small menorah, and while the shamash — the middle candle, used to light the others (which by the last night will number eight) — was fine, the candle representing the first night looked like it forgot to close its eyes at the climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

On the second night, we swapped in a funky menorah that we've also had forever and placed some taller, fancier candles in it. I took the picture that you see right after they were lit, but no grotesque melting ensued as they burnt out.

On the third night, I placed the smaller candles in the funky menorah, and again they burned quickly while shedding wax tumors.

On the fourth night, I went back to the little traditional menorah and more distorted melting ensued. Some of the sloughed-off wax of candles next to one another began to intermingle, as you can see below, and in fact right after I took that picture the flames of the candles representing the second night and third night — counting from right to left, just as text is read in Hebrew — merged as well.

Next year I'm definitely going to get some new candles for the miniature menorah, hopefully in one of those little blue boxes with the words to the traditional Chanukah song "Ma'oz Tzur" written on the side. Holidays are in large part about nostalgia, after all, as evidenced by my mother (once a mother, always a mother) getting me a bag of chocolate coins this year.

Projections

2011-12-21T18:30:00.000-05:00

The last three movies I saw were about movies. And one of the next ones I see probably will be too, as The Artist is opening soon at my local art-house theater. I came to this realization walking out of a screening of My Week with Marilyn the other day, my last cinematic indulgences having been Hugo and The Muppets.

While the Muppets actually put on a telethon in The Muppets, and the film's cornerstone reference is TV's The Muppet Show rather than the 1979 Muppet Movie (reprises of "The Rainbow Connection" notwithstanding), it's about movies in the way the characters make metatextual references— in the broader sense of the word; "metacinematic" if you prefer — to being in a movie.

Hugo could be said to be a movie about the moviegoing experience by virtue of the way in which it takes full advantage of the medium of film — the 3D process in particular. Of course, Hugo is also about movies themselves in the very literal fact of its plot involving silent-film auteur Georges Méliès. The scenes of Méliès and company producing his early-1900s fantasias is a highlight of Martin Scorsese's masterpiece, as is the opportunity to see actual clips from classics of early cinema featuring Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, Louise Brooks, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin rendered in Hugo's surprisingly thoughtful 3D.

A film set and screening room at Pinewood Studios are among the primary backdrops of My Week with Marilyn. Unlike Hugo's flashbacks (from a fictional tale itself set 80 years ago) or the winking way in which The Muppets is sort-of a movie about and made by the very characters appearing in it, the re-created scenes we get of Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe in 1957's The Prince and the Showgirl are part of Week's much more straightforward story. There is some recursive self-reference at the end, as the brief typewritten epilogues familiar from historical films include mention that Colin Clark, to whose "week with Marilyn" the title refers, went on to make documentaries and pen the memoirs The Prince, the Showgirl, and Me and My Week with Marilyn — on which the very film telling us this was based.

I reviewed Hugo last week. My full review of The Muppets probably won't appear until that film hits home video, although I've already proclaimed it the bee's knees — until Hugo, it was easily my favorite movie of the year. Here are some thoughts on the third of the three:

My Week with Marilyn is certainly not a bad movie, but it had two competing distractions for me that — together with its rather thin story — kept it from being more than a lark.

One was the perhaps inevitable result of famous people portraying other famous people. I stand by what I said in my Hugo review about the magic of a great movie — great acting, on this point, particularly, as well as makeup and costuming — having the power to make us believe that faces we know from elsewhere belong only to the characters on screen for the duration, and I do think that this illusion can be held even when those characters are historical figures or other celebrities. Michelle Williams' embodiment of Marilyn Monroe in My Week with Marilyn is actually a prime example of that. The film overall, though, comes off as something of a parlor game. Look! Kenneth Branagh is playing Laurence Olivier! Who's that as Arthur Miller? Ooh... Judi Dench! Derek Jacobi! Julia Ormond as Vivien Leigh — I haven't seen her for ages... Whoa! The wardrobe assistant is Hermione Granger!

That last one is patently unfair; I know Emma Watson's name, and of course she's allowed to take other roles. A couple behind me, however, whispered almost exactly that. In films that really suck you in, the actor and the setting and the whole of it all totally overcome the artifice (or revel in it — or, like Hugo, somehow do both); that's the point of watching a film — and of going to the movies in particular. My Week with Marilyn felt more like an exercise in capturing some behind-the-scenes escapades, albeit one in which the participants are having a grand time, than it did an engaging story. It might've been trying too hard to capture magic to actually make any, Williams' performance aside.

Dougray Scott — the guy who was going to be Wolverine before Hugh Jackman (which I'm sure is exactly how he likes to be referenced, right after "the guy who was Susan's insufferable British boyfriend back when people still watched Desperate Housewives") — is who's playing Arthur Miller, by the way, and although his persona is rather affected he at least disappears into it in a way that Toby Jones — the guy who was Truman Capote in the film about Capote writing In Cold Blood that wasn't the one that starred Phillip Seymour Hoffman — didn't disappear into his role thanks to one of those put-on American accents that sounds exactly like a put-on American accent.

The other distraction for me was that even (if not especially) with the primary players here, Marilyn Monroe chief among them, having passed on, it just felt a bit unseemly to have a movie made about someone's personal recollections of time spent with her. I realize that My Week with Marilyn is far from the only book or movie produced about the enigmatic Monroe, who died almost a decade before I was born and so is someone whom I only know through stories. Colin Clark doesn't come off as entirely saintly in Adrian Hodges' screenplay, directed by Simon Curtis and based on Clark's after-the-fact production diaries, but whether the former Norma Jean Dougherty was the perpetrator or victim — or both — of the Marilyn Monroe mythology in her private as well as public lives, I'm not sure that translating time spent with her privately into art-cum-gossip for public consumption is, for lack of a better word, cool.

Like I said above, Michelle Williams is captivating in her fluid inscrutability as Marilyn. Williams is one of the most versatile actors working today, as anyone who's seen Blue Valentine can tell you, able to move from hardened to vulnerable and back before you've even noticed. Her performance in My Week with Marilyn might seem disjointed if Monroe weren't so famously mercurial, as she comes off as shy and bold, welcoming attention and shunning the spotlight, manipulative and terminally codependent in repeat succession with no hint of which swing of the pendulum is ultimately at her core. I'd say that the film is worth a look for Williams' embodiment of her role alone, with the vague sense that it's telling tales out of school either a caveat or an added recommendation depending on your disposition.

Poster and screencaps © 2011 The Weinstein Company.

Fired Up

2011-12-20T23:00:00.004-05:00

Right in time for Chanukah...

I'm not gonna say it's a miracle. Over the past couple of days, though, I was finally able to get up some blog posts that I've been trying to publish properly since the start of the month. So, y'know, it's no oil lasting in the Temple for eight days, but I'm happy about it.

The oldest post was a very long Muppet Monday that offers what are now some pretty last-minute gift ideas. After that came the fifth installment of a series previously called 40 Favorites, begun to mark my ~~millstone~~ milestone birthday last year; it needed to be renamed one number up since I'm now 41, and like I said in that post I'm going to try to finish the series before I hit 42. Still as yet unpublished is a long-in-the-making (and just plain long) post on the TV series Smallville, which I've let sit since trouble getting it on the blog when the series ended last spring and which I really wanted to have up for the recent Season 10 and complete-series DVD releases — now it's just old news, or more properly old reviews.

I can't tell you why it's happening all of a sudden, but my latest trouble involves the free online image-hosting service Picasa. Graphics that I've uploaded to it from my laptop and then linked from it to my blog periodically disappear, leaving a standard warning image instead. Early on I realized that if I changed the location or filename of a picture on my laptop I'd have to cut-and-paste it from Picasa to my blog anew; lately, though, graphics that haven't been altered by me at all have gone missing from the blog at a rapid pace and even more strangely gone missing from my Picasa albums online altogether. [Yes, I have considered foul play, most likely in the form of the fella(s) who hijacked the blog last year, but so far I'm not convinced.]

This is of course in addition to the standard trouble of dealing with HTML quirks in Blogger, which I've mostly learned to work around but which still isn't without its hassles and which seems to flare up in new ways periodically when Blogger decides to make some perceived improvements to its structure. I have to wonder if changes in Picasa aren't similarly to blame, since Picasa and Blogger are both owned by Google, and Blogger very clearly has a history of changing things either without anticipating or without caring what bugs result. Blogger revamped its profile pages about a week ago; I have yet to see one, using both Safari and Google's own browser Chrome, whose profile icon (head shot, etc.) wasn't now distorted horizontally, a problem that persists even when the image is uploaded again.

I'm hoping to finally get the rest of my Fantastic Four #1 Cover Album up before the month and year are out. That Smallville post is less of a sure thing, because for the most part trouble with text still trumps trouble with graphics, and like I said it's rather lengthy, but as you've probably noticed I'm stubborn enough to backdate posts to when I first tried to get them published if the posts are (or, he said ruefully, were) timely and the fault lies mostly on the technical end rather than mine. Although I will certainly cop to just giving up for a while when the frustration or other obligations trump the value of the post itself — as well as when I can punt the post down the road like I've done with my behemoth review of the new Justice League #1, since I got a subscription to the series for my birthday and can now look forward to preparing an even more massive review of the entire inaugural storyline next year — I know that most of the posts on this blog only get read in retrospect anyway, so it's not hurting anybody to let items here remain dated when the first attempt to publish them was made.

Welcome aboard to all of the new visitors who've discovered Blam's Blog in recent weeks and months, sending my stats skyrocketing, whether through search or link or word of mouth, and thanks to especially to my faithful readers!

Photo © 2011 Brian Saner Lamken.

Muppet Monday 12/19

2011-12-19T23:30:00.001-05:00

Jimmy Fallon returned to Saturday Night Live this weekend — and so did Horatio Sanz, Tracy Morgan, and Chris Kattan, to help him close out 2011 with a rendition of their old standard "Christmas Is Number One".

Screencap © 2004 NBCUniversal.

The last time the song was performed on the show, seven years ago, Sanz was the only one of the four still in the cast, and stopped the tune almost before it had begun when he realized there was nobody to back him up. Until, that is, Kermit the Frog popped up to tell Horatio that his friends would happy to join in... Here's the video from this past Saturday, to jog your memory, and the 2004 clip with the Muppets.

Muppet Monday 12/12

2011-12-12T23:00:00.015-05:00

Screencap © 2011 Disney.

Given that last week's installment was another long one — also that I've had trouble posting, with both that and this going up late — I thought I'd keep today's Muppet Monday brief. A music video for the song "Man or Muppet" from The Muppets (performed by the new Muppet, Walter, and Jason Segel as his human brother Gary) has been released with clips from other parts of the film interspersed with the song's scene in the movie. For those who've seen The Muppets, the song is a treat to revisit, but for those who haven't seen it and plan to there are some surprises spoiled — like what's probably the funniest cameo in the film, even if like me you don't actually watch the show that made the actor in question famous.

Ghosts in the Machine

2011-12-11T22:00:00.004-05:00

Whether you're fortunate enough to still be in touch with your sense of wonder or have lost it and thought it never to be regained, I beseech you: See Hugo.

Directed by Martin Scorsese from John Logan's screenplay, based on Brian Selznick's acclaimed book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Hugo is 126 minutes long. About 120 of those minutes are pure cinematic nirvana. I'm almost mad, yet also strangely relieved, that no matter how many films I see as this stacked season progresses — and no matter that it's difficult to compare movies of wildly different styles, aims, and approaches — I've clearly seen the most fascinating, most captivating movie of the year (unless, somewhat ironically given their subject matter, The Artist ends up matching it).

I haven't yet read Selznick's book, although I plan to do so before I see the movie again, so I can't say how faithful the film is to it. I can only tell you that Scorsese has delivered a masterpiece.

I'm guessing that Hugo was not given the book's full title — or even called simply Hugo Cabret, as the French release is — to make it more accessible as "a children's movie". The problem there is that it's no such thing. It's a movie for just about anybody who isn't irredeemably dead inside — except perhaps for today's youth, due to its period setting, muted tones, and deliberate pace. The poster of young Hugo dangling from a clock tower feels misleading. Hugo is not bereft of suspense or physical adventure, but it remains a story set in the 1930s of an orphaned boy (played by Asa Butterfield) with a gift for fixing mechanical objects who lives in a Paris train station, his book-loving friend Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz), her stern guardian (Ben Kingsley), and the potentially disquieting automaton that through chance unites them, built by a moving-picture pioneer now forgotten to the general public.

From reviews I've read and conversations I've had, I gather that Hugo started a bit too slowly for some viewers and/or went on a bit too long. Given how quickly and completely I was caught up in the film, I can't agree on either score, although as suggested above there are some passages that I could have done without — not for time per se but for content. The scenes focused on the bumbling station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) broke Hugo's hypnotic hold on me nearly every time; I appreciate the color that he and other regulars in the station's bustling ecosystem provided both literally and figuratively, as well as his importance to the plot, but I'd have preferred less of him.

What I liked most about the inspector was the splash of cerulean that he brought to the film's lush browns and golds, set off most often by judicious blues but also the occasional well-placed red. The predominantly amber setting of most of the film's action — lush, never drab, despite its limited palette — was broken most starkly by the wares of the station concourse's florist (Emily Mortimer), those of its venerable bookseller (Christopher Lee), and the fantastical silent films of Georges Méliès excerpted with increasing frequency as Hugo progresses. If Hugo were stripped of its convincing performances and its compelling message of how each of us has a place in the clockwork movings of the universe, it would still be a visual delight.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Hugo to me, of many remarkable things, is the way in which 3D contributes so mightily to its singular experience. I tend to avoid 3D showings of films, even those that were shot specifically for the process rather than converted to 3D after the fact, because at best there isn't enough value added to justify the extra expense; I find the glasses awkward — I'm among those who have to wear them over my own glasses — and the effects are almost always distracting rather than complementary, with the film usually too dark in the bargain because somewhere in the chain from distributor to theater the glasses haven't been compensated for with brighter prints or bulbs, better projectors, or whatever. Last night I placed my faith in Scorsese, plunked down my $15, and plumb loved the result. Colors popped and I was absolutely enchanted, lost in a painstakingly crafted world of wonder.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," wrote science-fiction grandmaster Arthur C. Clarke.

Years ago I learned some of the very tricks that Hugo shows Georges Méliès employing, once upon a time when film was an actual physical thing that you cut and spliced. But I have no practical idea how the hundreds of people whose names scroll by at the end of a movie create what we see on screen today. I certainly don't know — nor, for that matter, would I want to, if such knowledge is even attainable — how it's possible for a roomful of people to sit in the dark and believe that actors familiar from other roles are these and only these characters at this moment, inhabiting a world that only exists through brawn, sweat, illusion, and willful acceptance of unreality.

What I do know? Hugo is magic.

Images © 2011 Paramount Pictures.

41 Favorites: #5

2011-12-07T19:00:00.111-05:00

The look at some of my favorite things begun last year after my 40th birthday is finally continuing. Now, though, it's 41 Favorites, since I took over a year off after my last post; I'm going to try to wrap it up before I turn 42.

My fifth favorite thing in alphabetical order of the bunch that I spitballed last October is the music of Edie Brickell.

I came home for winter break my first year at college in December 1988 and while standing in the kitchen of my mother's house one day was entranced by music coming from the television in the den. MTV still lived by the words that gave the channel its name back then — Music Television — and it was playing the debut video of Edie Brickell and New Bohemians, for a song called "What I Am". The very next day that I was able, I went out to Sam Goody and bought the group's record, Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars (yes, record; it was vinyl).

Now, I'm not going to pretend that "What I Am" is the greatest song ever written, but it struck me at a time when I was discovering great old music thanks to friends and dorm-mates at Oberlin yet inspired by precious little new music. And the album as a whole really got under my skin, from that first cut to the dreamily romantic "Air of December" to the driving "Beat the Time" to the closing number "I Do" — originally an unlisted track, a fact that's always made it all the more haunting to me. It didn't hurt that I had the album in heavy rotation the next summer as I corresponded with a lovely young woman between semesters, nor that whenever I set the needle down on the record my beloved cat Fef would trot into the room and jump up on my bed.

Edie Brickell is not just some generic hippie-chick singer/songwriter, and only a so-called "one-hit wonder" by the literal metrics of the pop charts. She hasn't put out an album that I haven't played almost incessantly, under her own name or with New Bohemians or as part of another ensemble, helped along surely by the way I so internalized Rubberbands but due also to the voice and craft that drove me to put that first album on constantly in the first place. The 2006 release Stranger Things, which reunited Brickell with guitarist/co-founder Kenny Withrow and other New Bohemians, might actually be a better album than Rubberbands by more objective measures (keeping in mind, of course, that we're still talking about the highly subjective, um, subject of music), and her 2003 "solo" album Volcano is probably her best overall, so if you're curious about her work or all you know is "What I Am" I'd start there.

Volcano featured late Bohemians member Carter Albrecht and the great bassist Pino Palladino, the latter also a member of The Gaddabouts — a new band whose name is a play on that of drummer Steve Gadd; they premiered with an eponymous album back in January of this year and (I've just discovered) are set for another in early 2012. Brickell released her own eponymous album the week before The Gaddabouts came out, recorded over several years, again featuring the work of Albrecht and Volcano producer/musician Charlie Sexton. Many of the songs had earlier been made available to fans through Brickell's website, at which you'll currently find some video clips of demos and songs from 2011's Edie Brickell.

Brickell's versatility is really on display on the 2008 album The Heavy Circles, named after her project with Harper Simon — son of Brickell's husband Paul Simon, who co-produced her 1994 non-Bohemians debut Picture Perfect Morning. Circles has a different kind of indie-rock vibe than New Bohemians' output and features contributions from Sean Lennon, Martha Wainwright, and Cibo Matto's Yuka Honda.

While Rubberbands was one of the last vinyl records I bought, in the days when the format was being phased out in favor of compact discs (before its resurgence in popularity among hipsters and audiophiles), New Bohemians' 1990 excellent but darker follow-up Ghost of a Dog was one of the first — and very few — albums that I bought on tape, when CDs were still a little rich for my blood. The band's discography is rounded out by 2000's rare The Live Montauk Sessions and the 2002 Ultimate Collection (a hodgepodge of greatest hits, non-album singles, collaborations, and previously unreleased material).

I didn't mean for this post to be little more than a recital of Brickell's body of work, but if I really delved into an album-by-album excavation we'd be here forever and I suppose that I can't write concisely about the overall feeling her music, in all its variations, gives me — something that, from the moment I first heard it, has felt like it's been a part of me forever.

Edie's 2011 releases Edie Brickell and The Gaddabouts, among other albums, are currently available at Amazon. If you buy them or anything else through the preceding link, Blam's Blog gets a small cut of the sale. You can avoid buying used and/or collectible-priced copies of New Bohemians' The Live Montauk Sessions at that link by going to The Connextion; Blam's Blog doesn't get a cut of that sale, but I think the band does, so, y'know, it's cool.

Volcano cover © 2003 Universal Music Group. You can see a chronological gallery of album covers from Edie Brickell projects in my Picasa album; it's taking too long to finesse them into this post.

Previously in "41 Favorites: #4 (The Big Sleep)
Next in "41 Favorites": #6 (Nick Cardy covers)
Related Posts: Vuelvo; Fab-Four Knowledge

Muppet Monday 12/5

2011-12-05T23:00:00.081-05:00

Above is a neat homage to the iconic, oft-mimicked Robert Freeman photograph used on the cover to 1963's With The Beatles and early the next year for the US release Meet The Beatles! It's from a recent Parade article titled "Meet the Muppets (Again!)" — which is also the general theme of this post.

I'm of the first generation to grow up with Sesame Street, which is where I first met the Muppets. Perhaps because I was an early reader, however, Sesame didn't have much to teach me in terms of letters and numbers; I was better suited to its PBS companion The Electric Company. The Muppet Show was actually much more like The Electric Company or the grown-up SCTV than like Sesame Street, with its conceit of showing us not only a series of skits and songs but the backstage antics that were taking place in the fictional universe where the Muppets themselves — rather than the human Muppeteers, production crew, et al. — were staging the production.

Sesame Street can still fill me with nostalgia, however, and what's more it can still hold my interest whenever I check in on new episodes. I took a student-taught class on Sesame at Oberlin — it was one of the most popular courses in the ExCo (Experimental College) department, which I later co-chaired, and I think I gained a greater appreciation for the show as an adult than I had as a kid. A TV special called Sesame Street: 20 and Still Counting aired on NBC the year before (Sesame and I, born in 1969 and 1970 respectively, are both in our 40s now); that special was followed by the debut of the short-lived series The Jim Henson Hour, an anthology whose segments included The StoryTeller (which later ran on HBO) and an unsuccessful Muppet Show update called MuppeTelevision.

Part old-time vaudeville, part contemporary primetime variety series, The Muppet Show also came with a heaping dollop of the irreverence found in the more counterculture, postmodern sketch projects of the era like SCTV, Monty Python's Flying Circus, and Saturday Night Live. Yet it could also be eminently sincere, and that's a large measure of its charm — the rascally but reassuring Muppet spirit abounded whether Steve Martin was goofily guest-starring or the show was staging a surreal sketch around Harry Nilsson's "[Put the Lime in the] Coconut" or Kermit the Frog was duetting with Helen Reddy on her endearingly schmaltzy single "You and Me against the World" (penned by Paul Williams, who co-wrote "The Rainbow Connection" for The Muppet Movie).

There's a short video accompanying the aforementioned Parade article in which Kermit and Miss Piggy offer some gift-giving tips. Over at the Muppets Studio YouTube channel, among the most recent content is "Animal's Holiday Guide"; while the spot is little more than another promo for The Muppets, any excuse for a dose of Animal is all right by me.

With the winter holidays almost upon us, I thought that I'd round out this post with some recommendations of my own for the Muppet enthusiasts in your life. Links in bold below go to pages on the unofficial but insanely informative Muppet Wiki, and the Amazon links are there in case you're moved to make a purchase. The blog (in the form of, well, me) will get a small cut of any purchases made when you click over; I promise to spend my earnings — already in the triple digits, if you count decimal places — on stuff to be reviewed here.

My sister loved the first DVD set of Sesame Street: Old School, covering 1969-1974, which I got her for Chanukah sometime after its 2006 release. I've yet to see it, because she has the nerve to live on the other side of the country, but she periodically threatens to bring it when she visits. The only thing keeping me from getting it for myself (or putting it on my Amazon Wish List) is the fact that I already have so danged many things metaphorically if not literally queued up to watch.

The above link goes to a disambiguation page on The Muppet Wiki, from which you can read more about the content of the Vol. 1 CD set, Vol. 2 CD set, Vol. 1 DVD set, and Vol. 2 DVD set, all orderable from Amazon.

I suspect that I'll be moved to get ahold of the Old School packages when I find time to read Michael Davis's Street Gang: The Complete History of 'Sesame Street'. Among the many official and unofficial items released before and during the show's 40th anniversary, it was quite well reviewed, and I picked up a remaindered copy at Borders last year. I've always loved reading behind-the-scenes stuff, in print and these days online, sometimes more than I enjoy reading or watching the stuff that's being written about.

You can read more on the book at (say it with me now) The Muppet Wiki via the above link. The 2008 hardcover is currently on sale at Amazon at a bargain price, cheaper than the 2009 softcover, but the latter apparently corrects some errors and looks cooler. Audio versions of the first edition are available, both abridged via Audible and unabridged on CD — read by Carroll Spinney, performer of Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch.

For a more comprehensive look at Sesame Street's history than the Old School efforts provide, there's the 2009 set Sesame Street: 40 Years of Sunny Days. The bonus features that complement the best-of excerpts on this pair of discs, which also comes with a commemorative booklet, sound awesome. And where else can you find Batman, Alicia Keys, Pixar's Luxo Jr., Fonzie, Pee-Wee Herman, Robert De Niro, and Madeline Kahn all in one box of educational goodness? Order now!

One more DVD to note before we move on from Sesame Street is the set The Best of 'Sesame Street' Spoofs!, released this past summer. It contains song parodies like "Hey Food" and "Rebel L"; such TV spoofs as "A's Anatomy", "Hill Street Twos", and "RSI: Rhyme Scene Investigation"; and, as a bonus feature, Grover's "Smell Like a Monster", which I linked to here a year ago last month. Amazon has Vol. 1 available as an instant video purchase as well as the two-disc collection of Vols. 1 & 2.

When The Muppet Show: Season One was released on DVD in 2005 for Kermit the Frog's 50th anniversary, I was thrilled, only having seen compilation VHS cassettes on occasion since the series went off the air in 1981. I'm still waiting to get ahold of it (as well as later seasons) and dig in; the home-video release of the new Muppets movie next year might be just the occasion.

At the link above, of course, you'll find a breakdown on The Muppet Wiki of just what's in the Season One, Season Two, and Season Three sets, all available at Amazon. The site also offers a set of the three seasons, but it's almost twice as much as the three individual sets cost in total, and there doesn't appear to be any special packaging or exclusive features. Season Four was announced for 2010 release and then postponed; no word on when it or Season Five will be released at The Muppet Wiki, which notes on its Season Four page that Walter of The Muppets fame pleaded with Disney to put them out in a promotional interview for the film. You'd think that the film's own release would be the perfect time, because not only is there a resurgent interest in everything Muppet but The Muppet Show itself is a plot point in the movie.

I have no idea why the later sets have Miss Piggy's, Fozzie Bear's, and (tentatively) Gonzo's faces on them, but Season One just has Kermit's collar and tummy.

I'd already planned on trying to carve out some time for rewatching the first, original, accept-no-substitutes Muppet movie, 1979's The Muppet Movie, and its successors when The Muppets arrives on DVD. The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, The Muppets Take Manhattan, The Muppet Christmas Carol, Muppet Treasure Island, and Muppets from Space were all either rereleased in 2005 or (in the case of Manhattan and Space, whose distribution rights apparently rest with Sony rather than Disney, and which are also paired in a double-feature DVD set) rereleased in 2011 as Blu-Ray/DVD combo packs. I suspect that it doesn't pay to get the 2005 versions of previous films with The Muppets itself coming to home video soon, however, especially if you're a Blu-Ray viewer, as the time would seem ripe for new editions.

Last month a cousin of mine who may well one day join the ranks of creative folks at Disney, Pixar, or Muppets central (if he doesn't launch his own company instead) received from me as a birthday gift Henson's Place: The Man behind the Muppets. I haven't seen it yet, but the 2010 DVD available on Amazon gets rave reviews and sounds great; it's a documentary made in 1984 covering Henson's career from his first TV series, Sam and Friends — which debuted in 1955 and introduced Kermit in pre-frog form — through the planning of the feature film Labyrinth, with of course attention paid to Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, the first two Muppet movies, Fraggle Rock, and The Dark Crystal.

Of course this only scratches the surface of Muppet material out there, but I hope that it points you in the direction of discovery (or rediscovery) — whether you're shopping for a Muppet maven or looking to treat yourself. The comments section is open for reactions and further recommendations. Happy holidays!

All images are the intellectual property of their respective rights holders, used for identification purposes; no infringement is intended or implied.

Cover Album: Marvel's 25th

2011-12-03T07:00:00.265-05:00

I'll have the rest of the Fantastic Four #1 Cover Album up as soon as possible. First I wanted to run a gallery of the covers celebrating Marvel's 25th anniversary before November 2011 got too far behind us — because last month was, ignoring the discrepancy between on-sale dates and cover dates, the 25th anniversary of that 25th anniversary. A special border appeared on issues of most ongoing series published by Marvel Comics dated November 1986, surrounding a head shot of a (if not the) lead character of each series.

cover to Marvel Age #44 [AW]

As noted in the first post of the aforementioned Cover Album quartet, Marvel traces not only its main fictional universe but the very existence of Marvel Comics to the debut of Fantastic Four. Yes, Marvel Comics #1 hit the streets in 1939, with — The Grand Comics Database's relatively new brand-tracking field shows — the word "Marvel" appearing on covers in some context across the line as early as 1946. The publisher was still largely known within the industry as Timely, however, even during the years commonly referred to as the Atlas era. A little box with the initials "MC" began showing up as of June cover dates in 1961, several months before FF #1, and remained through the first dozen issues of Fantastic Four before the first version of the "Marvel Comics Group" label was finally introduced.

Just to keep things confusing, in between celebrating its 25th anniversary back in 1986 and its 50th anniversary this month, Marvel also marked its 70th anniversary — counting from Marvel Comics #1, Timely Publications' entry into the comics field — in 2009.

One way in which Marvel observed that 25th anniversary was the special borders and head shots referenced above, showcased here in just a bit. The other way was its New Universe line, brainchild of editor-in-chief Jim Shooter. In a move that either makes perfect sense or none at all, Shooter decided that Marvel should honor the slowly built, now-sprawling, quarter-century-old Marvel Universe that sprang from the work of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and others, whose ground zero was Lee & Kirby's Fantastic Four #1, by introducing a separate line of interrelated titles: The New Universe, divorced from traditional Marvel continuity and rooted much more firmly in the real world outside readers' windows.

The flagship New Universe title was Star Brand, one of two NU series that debuted in July 1986, dated October, heralding the rollout of the other half-dozen titles the following month. While the New Universe issues had a common trade dress all their own, the Marvel 25th Anniversary motif was used on the edition of house organ Marvel Age that previewed the NU line for fans, seen atop this post. The NU cosmic-lightning icon, rather than the usual Spider-Man head, was used in the lower-left-hand box (reserved for the bar code on newsstand copies and featuring stock art or a promotional message on copies sold through the direct market).

Here are the covers to the first issues of the original 8 monthly New Universe series, in alphabetical order.

covers to D.P. 7 #1 [GCD/AW] and Justice #1 [GCD/AW]

covers to Kickers Inc. #1 [GCD/AW] and Mark Hazzard: Merc #1 [GCD/AW]

covers to Nightmask #1 [GCD/AW] and Psi-Force #1 [GCD/AW]

covers to Spitfire and the Troubleshooters #1 [GCD/AW] and Star Brand #1 [GCD/AW]

And that's probably the only time that anything New Universe will be mentioned or seen on this blog.

The links in the captions corresponding to each issue go to The Grand Comics Database [GCD], source of all the cover images save one, and Mike's Amazing World of Marvel Comics [AW]. You can click through to your site of choice, or both, for credits and information on issue contents where available.

I hadn't remembered that the Marvel 25th Anniversary trade dress, with the border drawn by Marvel veteran John Romita, was applied to series featuring licensed properties like Conan, GI Joe, and Transformers as well as Marvel Universe titles. Seeing it on issues in the fairly short-lived, kid-focused Star Comics imprint is especially strange. Most of the Star titles were licensed, and the only Marvel-owned series with staying power was the unforgettable Peter Porker, The Spectacular Spider-Ham (yes, really). Issues of the Epic Comics imprint, which included both creator- and company-owned titles aimed at older readers, were not included in the commemoration, nor were miniseries, anthologies like Marvel Fanfare, and other special projects.

Here are the covers to the 28 issues besides Marvel Age #44 that had the special November 1986 trade dress, in alphabetical order, with adjectives secondary to the primary feature — meaning that Amazing Spider-Man is sorted by Spider-Man, Classic X-Men by X-Men, and so on. Spidey was wearing his supposedly black costume at the time, but the reprint series Marvel Tales allowed for a nice Ditko-esque shot of him drawn by Steve Lightle in his classic outfit; the existence of four separate Spider-Man series (not counting Peter Porker, even) meant that Marvel had to come up with that many separate shots, an entirely different problem than team titles had — although Alpha Flight pulled a neat trick on that front.

covers to Alpha Flight #40 [GCD/AW] and The Avengers #273 [GCD/AW]

covers to West Coast Avengers #14 [GCD/AW] and Captain America #323 [GCD/AW]

covers to Care Bears #7 [GCD/AW] and Cloak and Dagger #9 [GCD/AW]

covers to Conan the Barbarian #188 [GCD/AW] and Conan the King #37 [GCD/AW]

covers to Daredevil #236 [GCD/AW] and Ewoks #10 [GCD/AW]

covers to Fantastic Four #296 [GCD/AW] and GI Joe, A Real American Hero #53 [GCD/AW]

covers to Heathcliff #12 [GCD/AW] and The Incredible Hulk #325 [GCD/AW]

covers to Iron Man #212 [GCD/AW] and Marvel Tales #193 [GCD/AW]

covers to Masters of the Universe #4 [GCD/AW] and Muppet Babies #10 [GCD/AW]

covers to The New Mutants #45 [GCD/AW] and Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man #120 [GCD/AW]

covers to Peter Porker, The Spectacular Spider-Ham #12 [GCD/AW] and The Amazing Spider-Man #282 [GCD/AW]

covers to Web of Spider-Man #20 [GCD/AW] and Thor #373 [GCD/AW]

covers to Transformers #22 [GCD/AW] and X-Factor #10 [GCD/AW]

covers to Classic X-Men #3 [GCD/AW] and The Uncanny X-Men #211 [GCD/AW]

Some of you might be wondering why Captain America, The Incredible Hulk, and Thor clock in with issue numbers higher than that of Fantastic Four, from whose debut the anniversary dates. It's because those series took over the numbering of Tales of Suspense, Tales to Astonish, and Journey into Mystery, respectively, all of which preceded FF. Others of you might be wondering why anybody would notice that, which is probably healthy.

I particularly like the Lightle cover of Marvel Tales #193, John Buscema & Tom Palmer's Black Knight head shot on Avengers #273, the Walt Simonson / Bill Sienkiewicz collaboration on Daredevil #236 (which doesn't resemble the usual work of either gentleman), Art Adams' shot of Storm on Classic X-Men #3, and Barry Windsor-Smith's callback to FF #1 on Fantastic Four #296, with The Thing in his old fedora, sunglasses, and trenchcoat.

You can see all of Marvel's covers with a November 1986 cover date — including those without special trade dress — on the month's Time Platform page at Mike's Amazing World, or place those issues in the context of releases from a host of publishers using that website's Newsstand mode. I'm aware that those pages might beg the question of why I bothered to do a Cover Album here at all, but as with my "DC in '76" entry I'd like to think that I've added some value not only through my commentary but by singling out the celebratory issues and the New Universe debuts as well as cropping, centering, and generally spiffing up the images where necessary.

All covers © 1986, featuring characters and logos that are TM/®, Marvel Comics — except licensed properites, which are © 1986, featuring characters and logos that are TM/®, their various respective rights-holders.

Yucky and Mean

2011-12-01T23:30:00.008-05:00

Due to me being under the weather, some posts that should be up are getting delayed even further. Here to start the month off with some fun is the lucky 17th edition of the word-verification definitions that I leave when commenting on other blogs, starting with a seasonal one that's been gathering virtual dust until the holidays came back around. You can find an explanation of what's going on here and a collection of all the definitions to date on the phenomenon's dedicated page, "The Mean Streak".

• adynog — [ad ee nahg] n. (Spanglish) Having promotional material in one hand, a traditional Yuletide drink in the other.

• britend — [brit end] n. 1. A bum (not a panhandler; a tush, a fanny, the buttocks region) in Merry Olde England. 2. Farthest point of the United Kingdom's territorial waters in the English Channel or Atlantic Ocean.

• colifou — [koh ly foo] n. French bacteria strain that takes your sanity.

• copone — 1. [kop wun] v. Get handsy. 2. [koh pohn] v. Make cornbread in tandem.

• Exhiali — [eks hee ah lee] Alien race of heavy breathers.

• Flumenta™ — [floo men tuh] The first FDA-approved treatment for psychic influenza.

• grizato — [grih zah toh] n. Italian ice cream made from brown bears. [No animals were actually harmed in the creation of this definition.]

• holose — [hoh looz] n. Epic prostitution fail.

• lubioni — [loo bee oh nee] n. Italian engine oil.

• Lytor — [liy tor] Planet with a Butane atmosphere.

• olexcurl — [oh leks kurl] phr. Superman taunting his bald arch-enemy with the forelock on his lush head of hair.

• palverse — [pal vurs] n. 1. Friendly poetry. 2. Alternate reality where everyone's your buddy.

• preashes — [pree shiz] v. Delivers a sermon under the influence.

• prophant — [prahf ant] n. An oracular insect.

• reggless — [reg liss] adj. Wantonly dismissive of the work of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, et al.

• sectax — [sek taks] n. A tariff levied 60 times per minute.

• stion — [sty ahn] n. A pigpen with a positive charge.

• Syssinex™ — [siss in eks] "For those days when it just feels like every time you push a boulder up a hill it comes crashing back down, ask your doctor about Syssinex."

• trence — [trens] n. A hypnotic state held for exactly three seconds.

• unlizes — [un liyz iz] v. Takes off one's makeup after performing in a Liza Minnelli tribute show.

• Vatero — [vah teh roh] Southwestern cattle-driving supervillain with the power to control giant tubs of liquid.

End Notes

2011-11-30T00:01:00.031-05:00

Well, America got it right in voting Pentatonix winners of this year's edition of NBC's The Sing-Off. I was a bit bummed that just about everybody turned in sub-standard performances on Monday night's live finale, when presumably viewership would get a bump from Dancing with the Stars' absence; maybe it was the lack of pressure, since voting was already closed, but more likely the crazy rehearsal schedule and holiday weekend are to blame. Friends who finally tuned in after hearing me rhapsodize about Pentatonix, Afro-Blue, and Urban Method have my apologies.

Photo © 2011 NBCUniversal Media LLC.

I complained in a post last month about the judges' inexplicable preference for certain groups over others — on the whole, traditional large university-based ensembles beating out more inventive, idiosyncratic but clearly cooler combos. Not that a cappella is all about being "cool", nor that I have an inherent dislike of the collegiate model; quite the opposite, in fact. The Sing-Off's diversity of size and style in the participants selected is one of the things that makes it so fascinating, though, and if the aim of the producers or the judges is to maintain that diversity as the competition pushes on then I think they should be entirely up front about it. Shawn Stockman rose even higher in my esteem last week when he chose Afro-Blue, a great jazz outfit born out of a class at Howard University, to advance to the finals, whereas — much to my dismay, as I appreciate where both are coming from in general — Ben Folds and Sara Bareilles's selection of the Dartmouth Aires borders on the criminally insane.

Afro-Blue returned last night anyway, to back up Smokey Robinson on "You've Really Got a Hold on Me" — lovely even though it didn't quite have the special swing of their usual arrangements. Host Nick Lachey reprised a tune from his 98 Degrees days, "Give Me Just One Night (Una Noche)", with Pentatonix, while Folds took a page from Bobby McFerrin's book in getting the audience to participate in a performance of his "Not the Same", backed by the Aires, and Bareilles teamed up with Urban Method for a version of her single "Gonna Get Over You" (whose music video is embedded in Bareilles's Sing-Off blog). Boyz II Men have a new album to promote as well, so I'm not sure why Stockman didn't take the stage.

The above links all go to clips from the show, and I'm going to add a few more. While a cappella handles doo-wop, classic and modern pop, showtunes, and even jazz very well, it's rare to hear a voices-only group that can really rock; Pentatonix did just that when tackling Steppenwolf's "Born to Be Wild" — full of vocal "guitar fuzz" and a driving beat even though the gang also throws in its trademark faux-electronica tricks. My all-out favorite performance of the group's is probably either its rendition of Florence & The Machine's haunting, powerful "Dog Days Are Over" or its reinvention of Kanye West's "Love Lockdown", although the epitome of the crazy-sick Pentatonix sound — where the quintet really made its mark on the show — is its cover of The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star". Pentatonix killed the need for instruments and studio production.

Despite the fact that the other night marked the end of this year's competition, The Sing-Off will return next Monday for a live holiday-themed episode at 8 p.m. ET featuring Season 1 winners Nota, Season 2 winners Committed, and various groups from Season 3.

You can download Pentatonix's "Dog Days Are Over", "Love Lockdown", "Video Killed the Radio Star" and other Sing-Off performances on iTunes as well as from Amazon. If you click through the links in this paragraph to the Amazon MP3s and buy the singles, the downloadable albums that contain them, or anything else, Blam's Blog gets a small percentage of the sale.

Muppet Monday 11/28

2011-11-28T23:00:00.001-05:00

Since my review of the new Muppets film isn't done, I offer some snippets of songs from the movie.

The scene in which Camilla the Chicken and friends sing — well, bwawk — the hit single known politely as "Forget You" is a showstopper. I lie not; in the theater, the audience was laughing raucously the entire length of the number. While the clip on DisneyMusic's YouTube channel incorporates other footage (and inserted audio) from the film, in the movie itself the scene is center-stage, uncut, and much the funnier for it.

And that might not even be the strangest cover in The Muppets, whose soundtrack features original ditties written by its music supervisor, Flight of the Conchords' Bret McKenzie (like the anthem "Life's a Happy Song"); oldies performed by the original artists (including Paul Simon's "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard"); a couple of covers reimagined by the Muppets ("Forget You" and a barbershop-chorus version of a tune I won't reveal); some Muppet classics revisited ("The Rainbow Connection" and "Mah Na Mah Na"); and even a Muppet cover band's version of a Muppets classic. Christophe Beck, who's best known for his Emmy-winning work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, contributed the delightful instrumental score.

You can listen to excerpts of many of the songs on an original video — with text commentary from what I think is supposed to be Statler and Waldorf — or hear brief bits and view the complete listing of the soundtrack on another page if you don't mind having some surprises spoiled.

Images © 2011 The Muppet Studios LLC.

The soundtrack album for The Muppets is available on Amazon at this writing as a CD for just $6.99 and as an MP3 download for only $4.99. If you order those items or anything else by clicking through the links in this paragraph, Blam's Blog gets a small percentage of the sale. What a deal!

Siteseeing: Quick Hits

2011-11-27T21:00:00.049-05:00

I saw The Muppets last night. You could find a worse way to spend a couple of hours — many, many worse ways, in fact, among them enjoying a hot-fudge sundae after a Swedish massage; I almost unreservedly loved it. A review's on the way, but for now I present one more movie-related video to add to the onslaught from Muppet Tuesday last week: a pre-film policy trailer for AMC Theaters that advertised the gang's return to the big screen.

More Muppets after we break for some timely comics-related stuff — the first of which is actually related to Timely Comics...

In honor of my recent post on the origins of Fantastic Four #1, I want to belatedly share a neat bit of coincidence-or-inspiration speculation on the part of Ken Quattro (yes, Quattro) at The Comics Detective over whether a prose entry in 1940's Marvel Stories Vol. 2 #2 — a science-fiction pulp magazine from the publisher of Marvel [Mystery] Comics — was on the mind of creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby when they dreamt up FF two decades later.

Speaking of The Comics Detective, Michael T. Gilbert shared another unpublished story with Ken shortly after my mid-September plug of "The Green Rock of Terror". This one is a Vertigo-style treatment of Harvey icon Richie Rich, sending up artsy, "mature" comics of the era, intended for publication in DC's great 1992 one-shot Ambush Bug: Nothing Special (whose breakout character is the photostatted, disembodied head of longtime DC editor and goodwill ambassador Julie Schwartz).

Speaking of Fantastic Four #1, meanwhile, among the homages to its cover that won't be included in my Cover Album series about same — to resume later this week — is the above bit of Concrete art, awesomely assembled by Paul Chadwick. That's because I can't source it and doubt it actually appeared on a cover; more likely, it was printed as an extra in a collection of the Concrete miniseries Strange Armor, perhaps (given the "stamp" in the upper-right-hand corner, mimicking the old Comics Code seal) from a promotional illustration that Chadwick did for New Zealand retailer Pegasus Books. Chadwick's inventiveness is on full display here, with forced perspective making Concrete look like a giant as he mangles utensils in his right hand, Maureen Vonnegut standing in the back of the room but seeming as if she's caught in his clutches the way The Invisible Girl was held by The Mole Man's creature; a splash of red wine forms a pattern resembling The Human Torch, spaghetti takes the place of the rope-bound Mister Fantastic, and of course a fortuitously shaped roll in the bread basket resembles The Thing.

Among the many bloggers counting down to the release of the new Muppet movie was artist David Vordtriede, whose Muppet Alphabet, The Muppabet, is a delight. The preceding link takes you to the introductory post on the Muppabet Tumblr feed, whose main page starts with Zoot and scrolls along in reverse Muppabetical order to his Electric Mayhem bandmate Animal. You'll also find the mission statement and thumbnails of all the illustrations on the group's front page on Flickr.

Images are copyright year of creation, and may contain trademarks or registered trademarks of, their respective rights holders.

Cover Album: Fantastic Four #1 (Part II)

2011-11-23T11:00:00.027-05:00

Thanks to John Byrne, Alter Ego #33 — seen in Part I — wasn't the first magazine about comics to have a cover homaging Fantastic Four #1. Byrne is responsible for a significant number of such homages across the board, actually, during and after his own tenure as writer/artist of FF.

His first effort was the June 1981 cover of Amazing Heroes #1, below top left, in honor of the FF's imminent 20th anniversary and Byrne's recent installation as their chronicler. Byrne had provided breakdowns on the interiors of FF #209-218 and #220-221 — also writing those last two, reworked from a Coca-Cola promotion that the company rejected — with Joe Sinnott handling finished pencils and inks. As of Fantastic Four #232, however, released in Apr. 1981 and dated July, he began a five-year run scripting, penciling, and frequently inking what has often billed itself as "The World's Greatest Comic Magazine!" ("comic magazine" being an early, and more apt, name for what's now commonly known as the "comic book").

Next came the cover of Dec. 1982's What If? #36, inked by Byrne's old X-Men partner Terry Austin. It depicts a non-powered Reed, Ben, Johnny, and Sue spouting dialogue similar to the original but with a twist — including Reed's inability to escape from his ropes. Then we got Fantastic Four #264, dated Mar. 1984, starring just Torch and The Thing; it was soon followed by Marvel Age #14, the May 1984 edition of Marvel's house organ, which as seen atop this post substituted Byrne himself for The Mole Man's monster.

Just as he had done on the What If? cover, Byrne kept as much of Stan Lee's somewhat stilted 1961 dialogue as possible, adapted for the new scenario, when he aped the cover to FF #1 again on Jan. 1990's Avengers West Coast #54, bottom right above. This may well be the first time — although far from the last — that The Fantastic Four was replaced in such an homage by other characters, with the members of the titular superteam standing in; among them was Johnny Storm's predecessor, the original Human Torch.

Painted by Gary Cody over Byrne's inked art, the cover to May 1994's Danger Unlimited #4 appears to be at least inspired by that of FF #1, but as suggested at The Grand Comics Database's index of the issue it also echoes the Jack Kirby & Dick Ayers cover to May 1961's Journey into Mystery #68. One would have expected a more direct homage to FF #1, with a quartet of characters battling the creature, given that Danger was built around the Fantastic Four template — reworked, in fact, from Byrne's proposal for Marvel's Fantastic Four 2099 — but maybe the obvious parallel is exactly the reason Byrne avoided it. Byrne himself clearly considers it an FF #1 homage, based on its presence in the gallery of such covers at the Art of John Byrne website. As we'll see in Part III, the fact that Danger Unlimited was published by Dark Horse rather than Marvel was surely no obstacle to a more faithful recreation.

Byrne's last FF #1 homage to date is the decade-old cover to X-Men: The Hidden Years #20, dated July 2001. The series was set before Byrne's tenure on the "All-New, All-Different" X-Men, during the original X-Men title's hiatus in publication; this issue's story, as it happens, includes an appearance by The Fantastic Four and takes place during the events of FF #102, co-creator Jack Kirby's last issue.

Next: Fantastic Four #1 is harvested and goes Hollywood!

Covers © 1961, 1981, 1982, 1984, 1990, 2001 Marvel Comics, except Danger Unlimited #3 © 1994 John Byrne. Images used for historical reference.

Cover Album: Fantastic Four #1 (Part I)

2011-11-22T22:00:00.000-05:00

Fantastic Four #1 was published by Marvel Comics 50 years and a few months back.

Why is this Cover Album is going up now? The same reason why I belatedly marked Watchmen's 25th anniversary a month ago instead of in June: FF #1 hit newsstands in August 1961, but it had a cover date of November — and I've not yet fully supplemented the master list of comic-book landmarks that will be a cornerstone of my long-in-progress website The Comicologist with on-sale dates. I'm still observing milestones based on the more familiar, more circulated indicia/cover dates for now.

Marvel's celebrating the 50th anniversary this month, too, by the way.

Even though it entered the burgeoning comic-book market in 1939 — with Marvel Comics #1 — the company best known as Marvel traces its "Marvel Universe" to FF #1, released over two decades later. That first issue of Marvel Comics debuted The Human Torch, created by Carl Burgos, and The Sub-Mariner, created by Bill Everett; with Joe Simon & Jack Kirby's Captain America, who showed up at the start of 1941, they formed a trio of flagship characters for what was then called Timely Comics despite the name of its premier(e) title. And those '40s stories are part of Marvel Universe history, just somewhat less canonically (for various reasons) than the interrelated continuity that began with Fantastic Four #1 — whose success led, slowly at first, to a litany of other offbeat superheroes including The Hulk, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Thor, and The X-Men.

A new version of The Human Torch was in fact one of the Fantastic Four, while The Sub-Mariner showed up in FF #4, but the series was a departure from... well, from almost everything, thanks to the creativity of the veteran Kirby and Marvel writer/editor Stan Lee. It was, the story goes, a blue-sky effort on Lee's part to put together the kind of comic book he really wanted to make after prodded by Timely/Atlas/Marvel publisher Martin Goodman to take yet another stab at reviving the largely moribund superhero genre at their company in the wake of rival DC's success with its fledgling Justice League. The Torch, here a teenager named Johnny Storm, was joined by his sister, Sue Storm, alias The Invisible Girl; her beau, stretchable scientific genius Reed Richards, a.k.a. Mr. Fantastic; and Reed's army buddy Ben Grimm, whose rocky orange hide earned him the inconsiderate appellation of The Thing.

In today's vernacular, Lee & Kirby mashed up traditional superheroics with the sci-fi and supernatural monster tales that along with romance, humor, and war titles had come to dominate the medium. At the start the FF didn't even have costumes, and they operated without secret identities from a public headquarters; both their atomic-age acquisition of strange abilities — they were bombarded by cosmic rays in an experimental spacecraft — and their frequent squabbling (due to individual angst as well as interpersonal conflict within the family unit) set the stage for the Marvel Universe to come.

You can read much more about the origins of The Fantastic Four elsewhere. If you care enough to be reading this, in fact, you're probably already pretty aware of the stories on the page and behind the scenes. The point of this little endeavor is to commemorate FF #1 with a gallery of homages to its cover, easily one of the most frequently aped covers in all of comicdom; heck, as I found out collecting some of the harder-to-find graphics that populate this series of posts, the cover's iconic status has made show-and-tell of its imitations a popular topic on the Internet, but I suppose another such effort can't hurt.

The sharp cover image of Fantastic Four #1 above was taken from the issue's entry at The Grand Comics Database, source for most of the covers here as usual. Other sources include Comic Vine (where you'll find a cover-flow homage gallery, sans commentary) and Mike's Amazing World of Marvel Comics; at the latter, in addition to the issue's own index you can actually check out the company that FF #1 kept upon its August 1961 premiere within Marvel or among various publishers from DC to Harvey to Charlton to Archie (which beat Marvel back into the superhero game, although it wasn't Marvel's first revival). I should also note that while the indefatigable Stan Goldberg, a mainstay of the Timely/Marvel bullpen before his career-defining work at Archie, has confirmed that he colored the cover to FF #1, nobody is certain — or, better to say, not enough people are certain in the same direction, and there's no documentation — of who exactly inked Kirby's pencils, although George Klein, Christopher Rule, and Dick Ayers have been the leading contenders.

It's comic-book legend — but quite possibly apocryphal — that Martin Goodman charged Stan Lee with developing a property along the lines of DC's Justice League of America after hearing of the title's success during a round of golf from an executive at DC or its sister company Independent News (which at the time distributed both DC and Marvel, among other periodicals). Of course, Fantastic Four was pretty far off the reservation, overlaying the aforementioned "Atlas"-era creature features that Lee had been producing with Kirby and others upon the premise of DC's Challengers of the Unknown (itself a 1956 Kirby creation); The Avengers, bringing together more colorful solo superheroes who cropped up at Marvel in the FF's wake, would be closer to the all-star JLA.

Some have even suggested that the cover to Fantastic Four #1 was modeled after the one that introduced the League in Mar. 1960's The Brave and the Bold #28, above left, penciled by Mike Sekowsky and inked by Murphy Anderson. You can certainly see an echo of Aquaman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern, and The Martian Manhunter battling Starro the Conqueror in Kirby's layout for FF #1 if you're looking for it, but there are also only so many ways to clearly depict four or five characters fighting a giant alien and/or subterranean menace. Roy Thomas — Lee's initial successor as writer of Fantastic Four and editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics — referenced the FF/JLA comparison when he had Ron Frenz draw the cover above right, inked by Kirby's longtime FF collaborator Joe Sinnott and colored by Tom Ziuko; it appeared on 2004's Alter Ego #33 from TwoMorrows Publishing (unhappy home to my own magazine Comicology, one short decade ago).

An early homage to the cover of FF #1 was that of Sept. 1972's Fantastic Four #126, above left, inked by Sinnott over the pencils of John Buscema and with modified dialogue in the vein of the original. Inside, "The Way It Began!" kicked off Thomas's brief first run as regular writer of the series by revisiting the events of #1 — including the team's confrontation of The Mole Man and his minions from Monster Isle. The covers and stories of both FF #1 and FF #126 were repurposed for book-and-record sets from Golden Records in 1966 and Power Records in 1974, respectively, the latter being quite possibly my first "issue" of Fantastic Four ever.

One of the most recent homages is the second-printing variant cover of May 2011's FF #1, above right, drawn by Ed McGuinness. And that "FF" is not a shorthand for "Fantastic Four". Johnny Storm, you see, apparently died earlier this year in Fantastic Four #587, with the series ending (not for the first time) one issue later and succeeded the month after that by the new initials-only FF; Spider-Man has replaced The Human Torch in the team's roster, and it now operates as The Future Foundation.

Marvel has been shipping some of its most popular series in greater-than-monthly frequency in recent years, which explains why FF #12 is scheduled to hit comic-book shops next Wednesday, but not quite why Fantastic Four proper will resume one week before that — tomorrow — with #600. I know that many series from Marvel and DC have relaunched with #1s (either due to a long hiatus or just for the hype) and later reverted to issue numbering reflective of their entire publication history (for both an appropriate sense of longevity and for the hype), but since the new FF is continuing as well it's awfully odd for Fantastic Four #600 to just spring forth from the ether. The 50th anniversary wasn't a big enough deal? Marvel could have promoted that and then twelve issues later had another excuse to get all celebratory on the sexicentennial.

Given that I got even more loquacious than usual in annotating FF #1's origins, I've decided to break this enterprise into a fitting four parts that will run as close to daily as Thanksgiving and ease of posting allow.

Next: Fantastic Four #1 gets Byrned!

Cover to Fantastic Four #1 © 1961 Marvel Comics. All other images © year of creation and characters TM or ® their respective owners. Images used for historical reference.

Muppet Monday 11/21

2011-11-21T17:30:00.001-05:00

Jason Segel was joined by the Muppets in his monologue this weekend on Saturday Night Live. The real highlight, though, was Kermit the Frog showing up during Weekend Update to join anchor Seth Meyers in one of my favorite recurring segments in all of SNL. Ladies and gentlemen: Really!?! with Seth & Kermit. Yaaayyy!!!

Screencap © 2011 NBCUniversal Media LLC.

I must say that Kermit oversold it at times, but at least they let the follow-up to the "sausage casings" line go with relative subtlety.

If You Meta the Batman, Kill the Batman

2011-11-20T19:30:00.001-05:00

The seemingly paradoxical nature of the Zen koan that was adapted for this post's title is reflected in its subject: Friday night's series finale of Batman: The Brave and the Bold.

Image © 2011 DC Comics.

I expect that fans who loved the series loved the episode, titled "Mitefall" — a reference to Bat-Mite, the magical imp who appeared regularly in the often-goofy Batman comics of the early 1960s, and to Knightfall, the grim-'n'-gritty Batman storyline of the early 1990s. It references many of the show's most popular traits and co-stars B:TBATB's breakout version of Aquaman, a pompous cross between the classic incarnation of DC's sea king, his Marvel counterpart Namor the Sub-Mariner, and Gaston from Disney's Beauty and the Beast.

Yet I'd also recommend the episode to fans who didn't care so much for the series but watched anyway, as well as those who never saw it — through design, indifference, or (my situation for the bulk of its run) lack of access to Cartoon Network — but are aware of its general tone, for the finale's grandly deconstructionist aspect. The way it calls out many of the specific complaints about the series from those who prefer their Batman in Dark Knight rather than Caped Crusader mode, and the way it references TV tropes in general, are a metafiction aficionado's dream. My own favorite fourth-wall-breaking antihero pops up (literally) to help save the day, as we see him watching the episode we're watching, in which Bat-Mite is watching (and tampering with) the episode that we'd been watching, making the show a self-referential set of recursive Russian nesting dolls.

The bittersweet final scene is a coda that will mean the most to loyal viewers but touched me, too, and certainly makes me want to catch up on the large swath of The Brave and the Bold that I haven't seen. Despite my ambivalence over certain components of the show, largely revolving around its tongue sometimes being too firmly in cheek, I can't deny that its heart is in the right place and the cool factor of seeing so many obscure characters brought to animated life is almost overwhelming. I certainly hope that the art-imitating-art-imitating-art companion series from DC Comics — now drawn by Rick Burchett, melding his natural style with the designs of B:TBATB producer James Tucker, and written by Sholly Fisch with obvious affection for DC history — will continue publication for a spell.

"Mitefall" was directed by Ben Jones, written by the great Paul Dini, and storyboarded by Jones, Andy Suriano, Chuck Patton, Tim Eldred, Jake Casorena, and Lauren Montgomery. Montgomery, frequent director of the DC animated features in Warner Premiere's straight-to-DVD line, was in charge of the CGI segment that ran as a fake teaser within the episode for the next Batman series on Cartoon Network. Voice talent includes Diedrich Bader as Batman, John DiMaggio as Aquaman and Gorilla Grodd, Paul Reubens as Bat-Mite, Peter Renaday as Abraham Lincoln, Henry Winkler as Ambush Bug, and renowned series killer Ted McGinley as kinda-sorta himself.

Muppet Thursday 11/17

2011-11-17T19:30:00.018-05:00

Despite the almost reverently expectant note on which my last post ended, I carry a small amount of dread that The Muppets will be unfulfilling or, worse, offensive in some way to its heritage — and moreover I understand that no matter how satisfying it may be on the whole it can't help but lack an essential ingredient.

Promotional photo for The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson © 1990 Muppets Studio LLC.

I'm speaking, of course, about Jim Henson, who invented the Muppets, performed Kermit the Frog (among many others — including Rowlf the Dog, as much his alter ego as the little green dude), and guided a sublimely creative, colorful enterprise for decades.

My generation endured a harsh one-two punch when Henson died in May 1990 and Theodor Geisel, alias Dr. Seuss, passed away in September of the following year. Geisel had already given us a lifetime of work, at least; Henson was gone too young, at age 53, never mind that what he did leave behind is a diverse, delightful legacy of the sort that transcends any earthly measurement. Like Walt Disney, George Lucas, and Jack Kirby, Henson was a genius whose contributions to popular culture transcend the media most associated with them; while their primary impetus was entertainment — if not art — their innovations behind the scenes in the implementation and commerce of that entertainment are no less essential for being lesser known.

But I digress from the main point, which is that the vision and voice of Jim Henson were forever silenced over 20 years ago.

I remember gathering in my dorm's TV lounge at Oberlin in November 1990 to watch a CBS special called The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson. For all the vintage clips and celebrity testimonials, the most touching part of the special was that Kermit remained unseen until the end, when he finally joined the group of assembled Muppets (not only from The Muppet Show and its later iterations, but Sesame Street and Fraggle Rock), poignantly mute — and then he piped up, voiced by Steve Whitmire, utterly ruining the moment. Whitmire is a longtime Muppeteer who was asked to take over Kermit by the Henson family themselves, and nobody I know begrudges his selection for the difficult task as long as Kermit was indeed going to have a life after Jim Henson's death, but it was a poor choice to begin with the very occasion that eulogized Henson most successfully through the judicious absence, then silence, of his signature character.

Whether any of the characters performed by Henson should have continued beyond him is a matter of dispute tackled this past July with depth, insight, and conviction by Elizabeth Stevens in an article for The Awl titled "Weekend at Kermie's: The Muppets' Strange Life after Death". Among the aspects of the modern-day Muppets existence she explores is their sale to The Walt Disney Company, whose relationship with Henson properties over the years is, naturally, encapsulated in the Disney entry on The Muppet Wiki. Stevens also makes observations about the length of US copyright protection familiar to me from discussions with both lawyer-folk and laypeople when it comes to the way some iconic works are (mis)treated by the corporations that own exclusive rights to exploit them.

The wiki's entry for Steve Whitmire includes passages from a Muppet Central interview in which he discusses assuming the role of Kermit. At the wiki's Jim Henson entry you'll find plenty of staged and candid photos of Henson posing and performing with his creations; there's also an entry on The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson, no surprise to anyone who's visited the wiki and been overcome by its detail.

Given the affection that writer/producer/star Jason Segel seems to hold for the Muppets, I don't think it's pure fantasy to hope that The Muppets will be the closest thing to an old-school Muppet movie that we're likely to get in the wake of Henson's passing. Segel and his Muppets co-writer, Nick Stoller, penned the screenplay to Forgetting Sarah Marshall, in which Segel's character dreams of mounting an all-puppet rock opera about Dracula (for which Segel collaborated with The Jim Henson Company, although as with other new Henson puppets the results couldn't legally be called Muppets thanks to Disney's ownership of the trademark). Far more unrealistic is the expectation that Kermit would never have been revived after Henson's death, although it's strange to think that Segel, 10 years younger than I, has mostly known Jim Henson Company productions without Jim Henson at the helm, and that younger generations have only heard Jim voice Kermit, Rowlf, Ernie, The Swedish Chef, Dr. Teeth, the Muppet Newsman, et al. in archival footage, repeats, and home video.

I'd like to think that Henson would actually be happy to see his literal and spiritual progeny movin' right along.

Muppet Tuesday 11/15

2011-11-15T19:00:00.003-05:00

Next Wednesday The Muppets will be released by Walt Disney Pictures. Since the countdown to the film was the impetus for these Muppet Mostly-Mondays, I figured that now would be a good time to share the numerous posters and links to the various trailers that have been produced to date.

The Muppets' first trailer debuted May 20th online and in theaters with Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. As the mock Green with Envy poster below left suggests, the trailer appears to be for a romantic comedy starring Jason Segel and Amy Adams until the voiceover stumbles when it reaches co-star Kermit the Frog; breaking the fourth wall, the narration then comes to a halt altogether as Segel — a writer/producer on the film as well as its leading man — asks, surrounded by felt and furry critters, "Are there Muppets in this movie?"

A week later came the next trailer, referencing The Hangover Part II's so-called Wolf Pack, with its own unrecognizably Muppetudinal poster. June brought yet another parody trailer on the 16th — code-named Being Green and mimicking Green Lantern, like the poster below left that accompanied it, until Jason Segel pipes up again — and the film's first official trailer on the 20th. The poster below right of patriotic Sam the Eagle dressed as the title character of Captain America: The First Avenger was released in July to coincide with that film's opening; it had no concomitant trailer but plenty of corporate synergy — even using the Marvel logo, replacing its usual M with the one in the Muppets logo that (weirdly) sports Kermit's lily-pad collar — since The Walt Disney Company purchased the Muppets in 2004 and Marvel Entertainment in 2009 (as I noted here at the time).

July also saw the release of "normal" posters advertising the film in the US, above left, and internationally, above right.

In August, TV spots hawking the film began appearing. It's no surprise that the unofficial, awesome Muppet Wiki, source of most of the information in this post, has a comprehensive page devoted to the commercials that have aired to date and numerous promotional videos featured on various Disney-owned channels.

Come September we got still another parody trailer and poster, both inspired by the much-buzzed-about campaign for the English-language version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; the trailer also promoted the recent release of The Green Album (whose remake of the classic Muppet Show theme song by OK Go I linked to in a Muppet Monday last month).

At the end of September and into October, a Muppets "Fan-a-Thon" was held pleading for "likes" on Facebook through a series of promotional videos starring Miss Piggy, Kermit the Frog, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo with Pépé the King Prawn, and Animal. October also brought the second official trailer, with new scenes from the film that also appeared in some of the sneak-peek TV spots noted earlier, plus two groups of character-specific posters, seen above and below.

The Muppets' final parody trailer appeared at the end of October, goofing on the previous parody trailers, the Shrek spinoff Puss in Boots, and the latest installments in the Paranormal Activity, Happy Feet, and Twilight franchises, with a trio of posters aping the latter just released today.

Once you've clicked on any of the above links to the trailers, you'll notice that the Muppets 2011 playlist at The Muppets Studio's YouTube channel also features a bunch of clips from the film. Enjoyable as the trailers are, I don't want to have any more of the movie spoiled for me.

As some wise... uh... things once said, "It's time to play the music. It's time to light the lights."

All images © 2011 and TM/® The Muppets Studio LLC.

Muppet Monday 11/7

2011-11-07T23:00:00.008-05:00

I'm very sorry that this post is going up late. And I realize that there was no Muppet Monday installment at all last week, although I'll try to make it right by doubling up one week soon.

What can I say? Accidents happen. Things fall apart.

If you don't believe me, ask the cast of that hit musical Spider-Monster...

Screencap © 2011 Sesame Workshop.

Cover Album: Time Warp

2011-11-06T02:00:00.048-05:00

Sometimes it feels like fate reassures you of a good idea.

While filing away some comic books tonight, I got the bug to put together a quick Cover Album post to mark the return of Standard Time — just as Edie Brickell's "2 o' Clock in the Morning" began playing on my laptop, naming the very hour we officially end Daylight-Saving Time. Plenty of titles, features, and characters lend themselves to the concept, but not wanting to divert much energy from finishing up some other imminent posts (along with all the other stuff going too slowly these days) I've decided on the covers to the five issues of DC's 1979-1980 anthology Time Warp.

Although they intrigued me when published — that logo is insanely cool, and the Michael William Kaluta artwork ain't too shabby itself — I was a kid with limited funds who just couldn't justify a whole dollar for stand-alone science-fiction stories when there were so many continuing superhero sagas to devour and regular issues cost less than half as much (not that I didn't happily plunk down the buck for thick, ad-free editions of Adventure, Detective, World's Finest, and Superman Family).

Today the brief run of Time Warp is on my want list, like many other issues of series in genres that didn't thrill me in the single digits of age, despite the fact that I'm aiming to pare my comic-book collection down to at least a quarter of its current size. Even as I mine my vast, varied hoard for enjoyment and research in one inconceivably long farewell tour, I'm happy to let the items that don't hold much intrinsic pull for me as artifacts go to loving homes (especially in return for cash) — while anticipating the strange mixture of nostalgia and discovery that I know from experience awaits when I acquire issues which date to my childhood but which I never quite engaged at the time.

Yeah, Time Warp was the perfect choice.

Cover images from The Grand Comics Database and © 1979, 1980 DC Comics.

Jobs Report

2011-11-01T21:00:00.001-04:00

I hadn't submitted any entries to the online Late Show with David Letterman Top Ten Contest in several months until doing so this week — and coming up with a winner.

As usual, I threw in a couple of options that weren't stellar along with my personal favorite(s), because you never know what will ring the bell of whomever makes the selections.

Here are my...

Top Five Surprises in the Steve Jobs Biography

5. He slipped Bill Gates' barber a fifty every month for 30 years.

4. But for the flip of a coin, he'd have been wearing black pants and a denim turtleneck every day.

3. His kids had to show him how to program the VCR.

2. Ironically, he got the idea for the Apple when a book about Isaac Newton hit him on the head. (Think about it, people!)

And the Number One Surprise in the Steve Jobs Biography...

1. He was actually more of a papaya guy.

The contest isn't for submissions to the actual show, remember; there are staff writers for that. You can check out the past week's winners and the current week's topic, as well as submit your own entries, at the Late Show website via the link above, which together with the weekly Late Show newsletter is the only place the winning entries get seen. Once upon a time there was a prize for having one of the ten entries chosen, but now you're not even notified by E-mail; you have to subscribe to the newsletter or check the website yourself.

I liked my Number Five the best, which is the one that got selected, although I do have a soft spot for the slightly tortuous Number Two. Numbers One and Three were mostly submitted because they seemed closest to the kind of humor that's usually selected for the winning list. Number Four ain't so hot, but I wanted a list of five and it's the best I could do at the time.

Hounds and Fury

2011-10-28T00:30:00.062-04:00

What if Scooby-Doo was genuinely spooky... and every member of the Mystery Machine gang had paws... and, supernatural stuff aside, the setting was surprisingly realistic... and the end result was totally awesome?

You'd have Beasts of Burden, a delightful breed of horror stories featuring ghosts who walk, creatures that stalk, and most particularly dogs who talk (to one another), created by comics virtuosi Evan Dorkin of "indie" fave Dork! and Scary Godmother author Jill Thompson. I've blogged about both before, Dorkin briefly in April and Thompson back in May 2009 when I first praised her bewitching work on Magic Trixie; I'll blog about 'em again, too.

The first BOB story was published in 2003's The Dark Horse Book of Hauntings. "Stray" introduced us to the troop — or didn't, actually, jumping right in and making us figure out the dogs' names from dialogue as we went along, but that's the closest thing I might have to a complaint about it. We meet them as they attempt to summon a so-called Wise Dog to help them figure out the strange sounds, smells, and sensations surrounding beagle Jack's new doghouse.

"My grandpa told me when I was a pup... 'Howl at midnight, three strong,'" Whitey, an excitable terrier, assures his pals after the invocation seems to fall flat. "Then again, they did put Grandpa down the next day."
In addition to Jack and Whitey, the core group consists of Ace, the leader of sorts, a noble husky; Pugsley, an irreverent pug; Rex, an imposing Doberman who's also something of a scaredy-cat (but who's been brave in a pinch); and Orphan, the only actual cat in the bunch to start, whom everyone — including Orphan himself — considers an outsider yet who always ends up involved in the adventures at hand. The Wise Dog also shows, and the cast expands in later tales to include an apprentice Wise Dog named Miranda, the sorcerous black cat Dymphna, and others.

At first Jack chalks up the disturbances in "Stray" to bad food or nightmares, and his human family even brings in a pet psychic who says that Jack is asking for "more affection". ("Please don't listen to this moron," Jack counters silently, "I just want a decent night's sleep!") The Wise Dog determines that the doghouse is haunted, and the pack digs until bones are found — normally a treasure, but not when the bones belong to another dog. While the entire story lasts only 8 pages, the concept is fresh, its characters are well defined, and the denouement is quite poignant. The beasts of Burden Hill are bound by the indelibly eerie experience.

Small wonder that the critters, having garnered Thompson an Eisner Award (not her first or last), were back in 2004 in The Dark Horse Book of Witchcraft for the 12-page "Unfamiliar" and twice again after that in ever-longer anthology entries, uniting the group further in tragedy, before the long-awaited Beasts of Burden miniseries debuted in September 2009. The first issue's 23-page "The Gathering Storm" ends with the Wise Dog deputizing our heroes upon their success in confronting, to quote Pugs, "a mother-humpin', big-ass giant frog" (made up of smaller frogs) and the realization that Burden Hill is apparently a magnet for bad mojo.

Occult frog infestations are not unfamiliar to those of us following Dark Horse's line of Hellboy projects, edited like BOB (and the anthologies from which the feature sprang) by Scott Allie. You could do a lot worse than to follow Allie's name when selecting comics to sample, in fact, especially if you like your fantastic literature on the spectral side; beyond the expansive series of miniseries based on the work of Mike Mignola (Hellboy, BPRD, Abe Sapien, Witchfinder, Lobster Johnson, and the unconnected Baltimore), his duties include Dark Horse's licensed Conan and Buffy the Vampire Slayer efforts. Also worth mentioning from the BOB credits are Jason Arthur, who took over the lettering from Thompson using a font based on her own style for the word balloons, and Sarah Dyer, Dorkin's domestic and sometimes professional partner.

You can read "Stray", "Unfamiliar", and the disturbing 16-page "Let Sleeping Dogs Lie" from 2005's The Dark Horse Book of the Dead at the Dark Horse website for free — and once you do, you'll want to own them, which you can now accomplish without tracking down the original anthologies (but that is still recommended given the other goodness they contain). All three short stories plus the 20-page "A Dog and His Boy" from 2006's The Dark Horse Book of Monsters, the final installment of Allie's annual pre-Halloween treats, are reprinted in 2010's Beasts of Burden: Animal Rites hardcover [ISBN 978-1-59582-513-1], which also collects the four 22-to-24-page stories from last fall's BOB miniseries and throws in a sketchbook section for a list price of just $19.99. The World's Greatest Paranormal Investigator himself crossed paths with the BOB cats and dogs in the October 2010 Hellboy / Beasts of Burden one-shot, Sacrifice, and last month a new 8-page story, "Food Run" — less intense and more whimsical than what's come before — appeared in the fourth volume of the revived Dark Horse Presents, with further BOB tales promised for future issues.

Dorkin reins in the sarcasm and outrageousness present in such work as his Milk and Cheese comics for Slave Labor (scheduled for a deluxe hardcover collection from Dark Horse in December) or Cartoon Network's Space Ghost Coast to Coast, while Thompson's artwork blends cartooning and naturalism beautifully in the lush watercolors that readers have come to expect from her Magic Trixie books for Scholastic or the Sirius Scary Godmother hardcovers (collected by Dark Horse last year). The genius of his writing and her art is epitomized by a pair of panels from "The Gathering Storm" wherein an action shot worthy of Thompson's fellow comics-painting Chicagoan Alex Ross depicts Orphan ready to strike, his claws reflected in the eye of the frog beast that is his target, after gravely intoning, "This is for Fluffy, you big stinkin' pile of crap."

You may read that as purely a laugh line out of context, but when I describe Beasts of Burden as poignant and disturbing I mean it; the occasionally slightly crude dialogue isn't the only reason these stories are not appropriate for younger readers. For every instance of levity, be it a tough-talking raccoon or a magic hairball or the pun in the title of "Something Whiskered This Way Comes", the stakes remain life and death (and sometimes reanimation) with true sacrifices made. We grow to love these beasts as they banter, yet it's often the silent scenes that truly touch the heart. As in much good fiction, the moments of humor and pathos follow closely on the heels of one another, rendering the beasts of Burden Hill something very akin to human.

Images © 2003, 2005, 2010 Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson.

Vocal Opposition

2011-10-25T21:00:00.031-04:00

I've had to restrain myself mightily from blogging on NBC's The Sing-Off each week. As I proved last year, I'm capable of going on at ridiculous length about the show, given my love for a cappella music and creative arrangements of pop songs in general. Until now I've been successful at holding back, but my resolve finally broke last night after the latest in a string of confounding eliminations.

The Sing-Off upped its roster this year to a stunning sixteen groups, starting with two brackets of eight groups each. My early favorites in the first bracket were Afro-Blue, Delilah, and Urban Method, although Delilah soon proved uneven; second-bracket standouts were The Collective, Pentatonix, Sonos, and North Shore. It's curious to me that of these groups all but North Shore, a traditional male doo-wop quintet, and Delilah, an all-women's outfit based on the collegiate a cappella model, are smaller and more experimental. Despite my affection for the format, such collegiate ensembles as this year's Dartmouth Aires, University of Rochester Yellowjackets, and Vocal Point of Brigham Young University have left me underwhelmed. While I love all kinds of unaccompanied vocal performance — from '60s-style streetcorner sounds to the spiritual Sweet Honey in the Rock, the traditional African a cappella of Ladysmith Black Mambazo to the astounding solo-voice stylings of Bobby McFerrin, the versatile (but no relation to McFerrin) band of voices The Bobs to close-harmony barbershop chorus — I think of collegiate a cappella as the standard-bearer in the field.

I have to wonder, though, if the collegiate groups on The Sing-Off just haven't matured as much musically as their rivals, many of whom have either graduated from such groups or took different, musically intensive paths to their current positions — the exception being Afro-Blue, a jazz-oriented combo comprising students from Howard University. And in turn I have to wonder if maybe the judges are trying to keep as great a mix of styles in the competition as possible, given On the Rocks' and The Backbeats' staying power last year or the unbelievable victory of The Yellowjackets over The Collective in the sudden-death "battle" round last night. The only rationale that I can find for the judges' dismissal of the gentlemen of North Shore over the faltering Delilah last week — based on both that episode's performances and those on the season to date — was a desire not to put the fellas in the awkward position of going through hip-hop week; as other groups showed last night, however, the challenge (thankfully) allowed the entrants to adapt hip-hop songs to their own vibes, and North Shore demonstrated a couple of weeks ago in tackling Bruno Mars' "The Lazy Song" that it's perfectly capable of channeling today's music in an appropriate fashion.

So I'm left simply flabbergasted by the judges' taste, which is strange not only given their qualifications but more to the point given the fact that I've agreed with their insights in previous seasons pretty consistently. Ben Folds is a singer/songwriter ("Rockin' in the Suburbs") and a cappella aficionado, Shawn Stockman is a member of the frequently a cappella R&B group Boyz II Men ("End of the Road"), and Sarah Bareilles is a singer/songwriter ("[I'm Not Gonna Write You a] Love Song") who was herself in an a cappella group at the University of California; Bareilles replaced Nicole Scherzinger, who defected to The X Factor, which can have her. All of the judges have been spot-on in their critiques of the Sing-Off performances — except when they haven't, mostly in the pass they've been giving to the Aires and Yellowjackets despite pitch problems, lack of dynamics, and less-than-inspiring lead vocals.

A couple of weeks ago the inventive Sonos, which outside of its Sing-Off appearances uses electronic gadgets to augment and alter the group's sound, was roundly criticized for being too inventive in its arrangement of the Jackson Five classic "I Want You Back". The number was insane; while it might have been an unnecessarily out-there and complicated interpretation of the song, it was nonetheless soulful and brilliant. I did agree with the comment from Bareilles that Sonos would have done better to at least work in a quotation of the familiar "I Want You Back" for a few bars because it's so familiar, but I can't fathom the judges' literal dismissal of Sonos when the Dartmouth Aires' highly praised iteration of "Pinball Wizard" was so hollow. The Aires did to "Pinball Wizard"(but worse) what The Yellowjackets did last night to Nelly's "Just a Dream" in their head-to-head "battle" against The Collective — render it blandly, sucking out all the flavor (rock or hip-hop, respectively) and painting by the numbers. The biggest trap that large, collegiate a cappella groups fall into, one that's all but swallowed whole said groups on The Sing-Off this season, is the tendency to turn songs with edge into showtunes.

The judges were put in a difficult position after The Yellowjackets' kiss-ass rendition of Frankie Valli's "Can't Take My Eyes Off You" — during which the breathy, weak lead (understandably but shamelessly and a little creepily) sang directly to the fetching Bareilles. Yet I'd apparently wrongly assumed that the group was saved purely due to its ploy embarrassing the judges into inaction regarding the Yellowjackets' desperate performance; instead, I find the Aires', Yellowjackets', and to a lesser extent Vocal Point's deficiencies routinely ignored while risk-taking (and risk-taking that pays off) by the likes of Sonos and The Collective, whose approach to "Just a Dream" was far more artistic and appropriate than the Yellowjackets' generic arrangements, is picked apart even as the outside-the-box approaches of Urban Method and Pentatonix are virtually unassailed. It's almost enough to make you wonder if some kind of fix is in.

I'm hardly turned off enough to stop supporting the show, because doing so would only mean denying myself the opportunity to continue enjoying some killer a cappella sets, but I desperately wish the past couple weeks' episodes hadn't colored my admiration for the judges so. And I look forward to hearing the booted worthy contenders elsewhere.

Muppet Monday 10/24

2011-10-24T08:00:00.017-04:00

Halloween's only a week away, which means that it's time for Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker over at Muppet Labs to perfect the Carve-O-Matic.

Screencap © 2009 The Muppet Studio LLC.

Jersey Boys

2011-10-21T01:00:00.023-04:00

I didn't get around to publishing this post during the regular season, and the Phillies' early exit from the playoffs left me too bitter to come anywhere near the subject of our national pastime. Since yesterday's unnecessary behemoth of a disquisition tied a belated bow on 2011 baseball for me, however, it's now or next year to discuss my favorite jersey accents.

We're not talking about Tom Kean, Danny DeVito, or Joe Pesci here.

The first time I saw the back of once and future Met Jason Isringhausen's baseball jersey, I couldn't help but chuckle at how densely packed his name was. Ever since then, I've tried to keep an eye out for other contenders in the Awkward Jersey Derby. At 11 letters, Paul Goldschmidt's last name is one shy of Isringhausen's 12, but it's stuffed with consonants; even so, perhaps because of how the Diamondbacks place names on their jerseys, it doesn't take up the space that the equally lengthy — and much more challenging to spell — Marc Rzepczynski's does on his Blue Jays uniform.

Despite the fact that Isringhausen's name is somehow more fun to say the more you say it, the placement on his jersey clearly made the Rzepczynski rainbow a mark to beat. Until I saw...

His old Braves togs didn't do Jarrod Saltalamacchia's name justice. Now that he's with the Red Sox, well, that's just a thing of beauty. Wikipedia says that his is the longest last name in the history of Major League Baseball, and various sources agree that it translates from Italian as either "jump over the spot/mark/stain" or "jump over the shrub/bush/thicket". (From the same Latin root as "salta" we get the English word "assault"; "macchia" is also found in "macchiato", an espresso drink marked with a spot of milk.)

Share your own favorites in the comments!

Images cadged from other websites, uncredited, and used in good faith.

P Funk

2011-10-20T17:00:00.371-04:00

The World Series began last night, with the St. Louis Cardinals taking Game 1 from the Texas Rangers. I didn't watch.

I'm still bummed about my Phillies falling to the Cardinals in the NLDS playoffs, which is a large part of the reason why. As I wrote in the last week of the regular season, 2011 was a banner year for the Phils — which makes it all the more confounding (if not ironic) that they didn't win a pennant. Charlie Manuel's team won a franchise record 102 games, by far the best mark in the major leagues, yet as more than one wag put it the team's ballyhooed four aces were beat in the first round of the playoffs by a wild card; none of the wags, as far as I know, referred to the Phils as royally flushed.

There are those — fans, journalists, and ballplayers, not necessarily in that order — who believe that even (perhaps especially) a stellar regular season is for naught if you don't make it to the World Series. Failing to reach at least the league championships is a particular sore spot, since before the extra round of playoffs that came about in 1994 with the restructuring of the National and American Leagues into three divisions each (from two; the odd number thus introduced the wild-card slot) the teams with the best regular-season record in each division automatically went to the LCS and played for a World Series berth. [Prior to 1969, MLB had no playoffs unless a tie necessitated them, as the AL and NL teams with the best records claimed the pennant outright and proceeded straight to the Fall Classic. Prior to 1970, however, I did not exist, and so the traditional playoffs make perfect sense to me whereas the revised brackets are "new" and weird.]

What this all-or-nothing attitude lacks is acknowledgement — I almost used the word "appreciation", but I'm not sure it fits — that the postseason really has become a gauntlet unto itself. Any team that qualifies for the playoffs, even by dint of winning a one-game tiebreaker for the wild-card slot, is capable of taking a best-of-five from any other such team in the divisional series, and probably of taking a best-of-seven league championship if it gets there. Energy is heightened in the postseason, but injuries, streaks, slumps, good calls, bad calls, and other kinds of luck are just as possible as they were over the six months from April to October that led there.

You really have to look at the 162-game regular season as the main course of the hearty meal that is the annual baseball cycle, and the playoffs as dessert. I'm not saying that you should want to, mind; I'm saying that you really do have to, because otherwise the system that's been in place for the past 17 years (maybe even the 42-season-strong concept of dedicated playoffs altogether) is essentially built to dash dreams — the equivalent, kinda/sorta, of calling nominees who don't win an Academy Award "losers" instead of focusing on the fact that they were selected as finalists when hundreds of others were passed by.

Hitting a grand slam doesn't win a game if the other team still scores more runs, but it's a heck of a thing. Winning a game by 10 runs doesn't count for any more than winning a game by 1 run, but it's a heck of a thing. Winning a season with the best record in Major League Baseball doesn't get you any farther ahead in the playoffs than the wild-card pick (beyond home-field advantage), but... You see where I'm going. The stats aren't invalidated, and the pride in them shouldn't be either.

There are also those — among them friends of mine — who claim that if one does not watch the World Series because one's favorite team is not participating then one is guilty of sour grapes or is just not a true baseball fan.

As I said above, I admit that the Phillies' absence — and the presence of the team that beat them — is a contributing factor to my skipping the Fall Classic this year. I groove to the very form of baseball and I've tried to bone up on its history on occasion, yet I find that with any sport I need a hook on which to hang emotional investment. When the playoffs roll around, I hate that the local radio broadcasts are out of sync with the visuals airing on TBS or Fox because I prefer the voices of the announcers I know; there are players and clubs besides the Phils for whom I root out of past loyalty or geography or pure admiration, but I really don't have the ability to follow the whole field during the regular season and so even the most consequential playoff games involving teams I don't care about are, well, games involving teams I don't care about. Every moment spent doing one thing is a very conscious and often difficult choice made to not be doing something else — particularly since I can't really focus on more than one thing at a time on a good day — so most games that don't involve the Phillies (and many of those that do) are pretty easy to pass up when stacked against the negative-image scrapheap of books not read, movies not watched, concerts not attended, conversations not had, and vistas not experienced.

I do like the fact that the Rangers' ballpark in Arlington, Texas, is known as Rangers Ballpark in Arlington. Corporate names on ballparks, including Philadelphia's, leave me cold at best and often are outright silly. And despite knowing decent people from St. Louis, I have reason to root against the Cardinals for the same reasons I root for other teams. The Cardinals' manager rubs me the wrong way, and I'm not alone; if you're not easily offended, Google "Tony LaRussa is" and check out the suggestions offered to complete your search term.

The logo for this year's World Series is really nice, emphasizing the autumnal setting of October baseball, so at least there's that.

I don't know how to be any more excited for the Phillies' 2012 season than I was for this one, and like I said above what's really galling is that it almost can't go any better. The Phils contributed to their own defeat as much as the Cardinals did by not scoring enough runs, but the pitching was about as good as it could be on both sides given that actual human beings play these games and not their statistics. So there ain't much for a fan to do but turn a deaf ear to the catcalls of those from opposing sides reveling in the club's inability to go all the way and thank the guys for a satisfying meal. Let's all try to lose a few pounds and maybe next time we'll grab dessert...

2011 World Series logo, Phillies logo, and 2012 Phillies schedule are the property of Major League Baseball.

Muppet Monday 10/17

2011-10-17T23:00:00.053-04:00

Just a quick (and late) link this week: OK Go's rendition of The Muppet Show's theme song, featuring the Muppets themselves.

Screencap © 2011 Walt Disney Records.

It premiered on Vevo, where you'll also find a behind-the-scenes short. The band's other intricate efforts are referenced throughout. Don't forget to close the annoying ad at the bottom if you get one and expand the video player to fullscreen...

The song is now available on Amazon as a single MP3 download or as part of The Green Album in CD or MP3 form. If you purchase the song or anything else after clicking through the links in this paragraph, Blam's Blog receives a small percentage of the sale. OK? Go!

Dead October

2011-10-16T11:00:00.012-04:00

Bob Mahoney photo of The Walking Dead cast © 2011 TWD Productions LLC.

The Walking Dead begins its 13-episode second season tonight at 9 p.m. ET on AMC.

Its character work — the hallmark of AMC's original series, thanks to brilliant contributions on both sides of the camera — makes Dead recommended viewing for anyone who can stomach the viscera and suspense-laden filmmaking that are endemic to a show set during a zombie apocalypse. You don't have to be a horror enthusiast to enjoy it, however, any more than you have to know or care about the advertising world or crystal meth to get hooked on the stellar storytelling in Mad Men or Breaking Bad. Sure, The Walking Dead is about survival in a world where a global outbreak has left living, breathing humans the minority amidst hordes of shambling corpses whose only instinct is to feast on fresh flesh and transfer their disease, but the emphasis is on the stark reality of our protagonists' existence.

For those who missed the 6-episode first season that debuted last Halloween, or just want to watch it again, AMC is airing it in order today starting at 2:30 p.m. ET (1:30 p.m. CT). The 90-minute second-season premiere follows, repeating at 10:30, after which comes a live special discussing the show called Talking Dead. Extras including behind-the-scenes videos and six brief "webisodes" are available the above-linked site.

Old and Mean

2011-10-14T07:30:00.079-04:00

I'm not feeling particularly grumpy, nor am I going to wax philosophical about age here like I did in my last birthday post. Really the title is just to keep up the usual conceit of my word-verification definition offerings. For those not familiar with the phenomenon, I've explained it on the dedicated page that collects accumulated entries to date.

• antick — [an tik] n. 1. Ye olde foolish behaviour. 2. Half ant, half tick.

• bledlump — [bled lump] n. A smidge of clotted exsanguination.

• botica — [bah tih kuh] n. The study of 'droids and other 'tomatons.

• Clola™ — [cloh luh] Clam-flavored cola. [Don't knock it 'til you've tried it.] [Uh... But don't try it.]

• derbsaly — [durb suh lee] adv. About or referring to a horse race (or a sporting contest in general). "Derbsaly speaking, Kentucky is my favorite."

• exess — 1. [eks iss] n. A former girlfriend. 2. [eks ess] n. Too many former girlfriends.

• exesseri — [ek sess uh ree] pl. n. Bangles worn by your former girlfriend.

• funce — [funss] n. Enjoyable action that can't be repeated.

• gyrat — [jy rat] n. Twirling vermin.

• loqui — [loh kwy] pl. n. Positions of talkativeness.

• misolit — [mee soh lit] n. Emerging genre of stories about Japanese seasoning.

• pargenti — [par jen tee] pl. n. Average Italian men.

• poldo — [pahl doo] n. Mitt Romney's hair.

• sailati — [say lee ah tee] n. 1. The yachting class. 2. Italian ice cream... on a boat!

• sparf — [sparf] v. Vomit while training for the big fight.

• thloge — [thlohj] n. Slang term for die-hard student of God and religion. "You hear that dude goin' on about the role of the redactor in crafting what we now consider the canonical Genesis? Man! Guy's a total thloge!"

• zygrate — [zy grayt] v. Shave off bits of a fertilized egg.

G Love

2011-10-11T23:00:00.016-04:00

If your life was lacking Glee tonight due to those gosh-darned baseball playoffs, maybe some day-after-Monday Muppetude will get you grinning again. Sesame Street has given us some great goofs on popular songs and TV series, from a Billy Idol lookalike Muppet singing "Rebel L" to the detectives of ABCD Blue. Now give it up for... G.

I got a grin out of Rachel's lines in the crowd noise that opens the skit, the bearded piano player who pops up out of nowhere, and more, but the grandest giggle goes to the amazing likeness of "Mr. Goo".

Muppet Monday 10/10

2011-10-10T08:30:00.001-04:00

Grover and I share a birthday, according to the awesome book 'Sesame Street' Unpaved — Oct. 14th.

A prototype of Grover called Gleep appeared as early as 1967 on an episode of The Ed Sullivan Show. I get that info from the Muppet Wiki link at the beginning of this post, which is not to be confused with The Monster at the End of This Book (on which more shortly). Nearly all proper nouns seen in blue hypertext during Muppet Mondays, if not otherwise specified, head over to that expansive and entertainingly informative website despite it not being an authorized outlet.

I've been tickled by having a birthday in common with Grover since I found out about it. He is so earnest and so lovable and so game for anything — running Near and Far to exhaustion, for example, as seen right now on his home page at the official Sesame Street website — that he edged out Kermit as my favorite Muppet; his occasional adventures as Super Grover didn't hurt, of course. [Just in case "Near and Far" has cycled off by the time you visit the page, I'll throw in a YouTube link.]

The Monster at the End of This Book was a classic of my childhood (and many others') that I've read to my nieces in character exactly once at severe peril to my throat — Kermit, The Count, and even Cookie Monster are much easier on the vocal cords, let me tell you. Like many of the Sesame Street sketches that involve throwaway lines or parodies of pop-culture for parents and other adults to enjoy, Monster at the End rewards sophisticated sensibilities by virtue of its metatextuality as well as the sheer emotionality of Grover. It was such a joy that I even bought its belated sequel, Another Monster at the End of This Book, in which Grover is joined by Elmo (who's considered by many to be the hellspawned price that the Sesame Street people were forced to pay when making a deal with the devil for their show's success). The original's above-linked Muppet Wiki entry reveals not only numerous printings but adaptations of the book to multimedia formats and even a Twitter take on it from 2009.

Super Grover was introduced as a parody of a certain costumed Kryptonian who sported a red cape, chest insignia, and old-fashioned knight's helmet that often obstructed his vision. He's been much more of a merchandising phenomenon than I'd realized, according to his own Muppet Wiki page, and last season on Sesame Street he was given a newer, more complicated costume that (intentionally or otherwise) reflects the trend towards such outfits in comics and films. The Sesame Street website has some brief videos featuring the so-called Super Grover 2.0 — dubbed thusly in his introductory appearance — along with recipes, games, and other content. I'm still partial to old-fashioned, more unkempt, less encumbered Super Grover 1.0 myself.

Grover has become less shaggy and a brighter blue in recent times, with Eric Jacobson taking over performance duties in 1998 from the legendary Frank Oz. If you compare the way other long-running characters, from Batman to the Bart Simpson, looked in their earliest appearances to the way they look today, they've all changed. When he first appeared on Sesame Street during the opening season, the Muppet who would be dubbed Grover actually had dark green fur and a reddish-orange nose (as opposed to the pink he sports now), just as he looked when known as Gleep on Ed Sullivan in 1967 and Jim Henson's 1968 Muppets on Puppets special — but he was given the name Grover towards the end of that first season, and it stuck through the changes the following season that brought us the Grover we came to know. The Muppet Wiki, no surprise, has an entry on the Grover prototype that bridges his Gleep days and the later familiar version of Grover, an incarnation that has apparently been nicknamed Fuzzyface by fans.

With Grover's official birthday falling just a month before Sesame Street's 1969 premiere I can only conclude that, while he has remained whatever age he is for the past four decades in the Muppets realm, the guy is exactly one year my elder as we humanfolk reckon time. I think that both of us look pretty good for a few days shy of 41 and 42, respectively, although he's obviously had some work done. Maybe it's time to start dying my fuzz?

Cover to The Monster at the End of This Book and video screencaps © 1971, 1975, 2011 Sesame Workshop.