DO I KNOW YOU?
From Facebook's new "People You May Know" feature:



Can I bring the person to bring Stipe and Kasell together at last?

ANOTHER REASON WHY I'M THIS CLOSE TO SWITCHING TO MSNBC.COM FOR MY HEADLINE NEEDS

Two of today's headlines from CNN.com:

This was also a day where a women dying after a freak collision with a sea ray got a lot of play.

The New York governor without fear?

Who is new New York governor David Patterson? I mean really. When nobody is looking, who is he? Here's a theory:

Patterson was left blind by a childhood ear infection.

Daredevil was blinded by a childhood accident with radioactive waste.

Patterson's father served as Secretary Of State of New York, setting an example that his son would have to struggle to live up to.

Daredevil remains haunted by the death of his father, killed by gangster's after refusing to throw a fight.

Patterson has a law degree.

So does Daredevil.

Patterson: Tortured romantic history.

Daredevil: See above.

I guess what I'm getting at is that while I'm not sure there are tights and a fighting stick in Patterson's closet, I'm not sure there's not.

CNN.com-watch: The more Obama asks for change...

Barack Obama delivered a speech yesterday that a) excellently defused the Rev. Wright controversy b) demanded that this political season be played on higher ground and c) revealed the soul beneath the politician. I thought I might have overestimated its effectiveness until I read an editorial than went even further than I was thinking.

Not everyone got it, however. Here's how it appeared in the headline feed at CNN.com

:

The Box Of Paperbacks Book Club: Supplemental

In the Box Of Paperbacks post that went up today I wrote about Wolfshead, a 1968 collection of miscellaneous Robert E. Howard stories. It was packaged, like the paperback collections of his Conan stories, with a cover featuring Frank Frazetta art, in this case a slightly censored version of the painting below (as always, click to enlarge):

One of my readers commented that "The Howard and E.R. Burroughs boom [of the 1960s and '70s] was the result of the Frazetta covers as much as the stories." I don't think he/she is right but they certainly played their part. Frazetta is the definitive adult fantasy artist. And one whose work fills me with profoundly mixed feelings. As I wrote back, "Every bit of good taste and refinement in me wants to resist all those image of musclemen, dripping swords, heavy-breasted women, and scowling animals but I can't. His stuff is amazing." It's all that's leering, and sexist, and simpleminded in fantasy and science fiction but it also accesses the parts of those genres that reach directly to the id. I shouldn't overthink it. If I can like Brahms and The Cramps and I can like Mondrian and Frazetta.

That's not even the point of this post. The point was to spotlight a few weird Frazetta corners I found in researching that Wolfshead post. Namely, a couple of paintings done for L. Ron Hubbard Novels.

This is The Lieutenant from Final Blackout, a Box Of Paperbacks subject I covered (pretty unfavorably) here:

And this is a puny Man-Animal doing battle with an alien in Battlefield Earth. (If the movie looked like this, it would have been much better):

Finally, here's a piece of art from From Dusk Til Dawn I'd never seen before, with Salma Hayek in full Vampirella mode and Frazetta renderings of Tarantino, George Clooney, and Juliette Lewis:

Again, that's much better than the movie I remember. Maybe, if they'd used that as the poster, it would have drawn a bigger audience. Maybe that guy who wanted to credit Burroughs' and Howard's latter-day success to Frazetta was on to something.

The Awesome Pulp/Archie Mash-Up You Didn't Know You Were Waiting For





From Chris's Invincible Super Blog

Enter The Hulu

Hulu, NBC and Fox's joint online video venture debuted today and it's pretty neat. Scott Tobias and I both signed up to be early users. He got accepted; I did not. But via his login I've been playing around with it for a little while. Now that it's a fully operational Death Star of a site it's even more impressive. You can embed whole movies in your blog, if you choose, in addition to TV shows from The Office to Galactica 1980. Users can also watch them on the Hulu site and the quality is impressive.

But one of the neatest features has to be the ability to trim clips. Like, say, you just wanted to share the part of Boat Trip when Cuba Gooding Jr. and Horatio Sanz realize they've accidentally signed up for a gay cruise, gay Roger Moore and all:

Oh, Boat Trip. As if seeing you once for professional reasons wasn't bad enough, you came back to me like a bad meal last fall when my dad was in the hospital. One of his succession of bad roommates was a grotesquely overweight man prone to make room-clearing use of his bedpan in ways that were pleasing to none of the senses. He also liked to play his TV at maximum volume. Consequently we once spent a Sunday morning in a fetid hospital room while a TBS showing of Boat Trip blared in the background. I can laugh about it now. Kind of.

"This is only the beginning!!!"
I don't usually promote Onion (as opposed to A.V. Club) stuff here because a) I figure everyone in their right mind is already checking out The Onion and b) It's always good, so what is there to say? But every once in a while something really sticks withe me, like this disgusting/hilarious Onion News Network piece:


Anonymous Philanthropist Donates 200 Human Kidneys To Hospital

It is nice to have a positive story once in a while, isn't it?

LATE TO THE MOVIES: The Mist
I'd heard good things about The Mist for a while now, from general buzz, from my pal Josh Rothkopf and our own Tasha Robinson's review. This week Scott Tobias became a convert. I was still skeptical. I've never had any great affection for writer/director Frank Darabont. The Shawshank Redemption is solid enough, and I like the way it balances roughness with sentiment. But after sitting through The Green Mile and The Majestic I'd lost the faith. But after watching The Mist tonight I can confirm the rumors are true.
Adapted from a 1980 novella by Stephen King, it combines the best of King—the class-conscious realism and the ability to make horror emerge from the fabric of everyday life—with the best of H.P. Lovecraft—hungry, tentacled beasties. (Side note: Do this and Cloverfield suggest a trend of stealth Lovecraft adaptations?) It's tense and minimal, extremely well-crafted, and able to deliver on the promise of shocks. Is there any cheesier horror movie device than one character looking over the shoulder of another and gasping, "Oh god!" Probably not. But every time it happens here the imagery that follows is truly Oh God!-worthy, even if there's not an element lacking an easily identifiable source of inspiration.
It's also political as hell, thanks to Marcia Gay Harden's fire-and-brimstone crazy lady character, who uses fear to make herself a demagogue. There's no shortage of monsters here, but the bulk of the action concerns the meltdown of trust amongst characters trapped in a supermarket. It's like the Twilight Zone episode "Monsters Are Due On Maple Street" only with, you know, actual monsters. And unlike a lot of King story's, it has an ending that works, courtesy of Darabont. A horrific, horrific ending.
I think a cult following awaits The Mist, which did little at the box office but has already had a couple of midnight showings At The Music Box here in Chicago. It's certainly one of the best mainstream horror movies of recent years even if, after that final scene, I'm now thinking Darabont's kind of a bastard.

MOORE FOOTNOTE
Noel Murray and I put together an Alan Moore Primer for The A.V. Club last week. I think it turned out pretty well. We spent quite a lot of time on Moore as the cause and solution to the grim and gritty trend in superhero comics. I didn't have room to talk about it in the piece but over the course of putting this together I came across, "Grit," a funny little four-page parody of Frank Miller's Daredevil from the early-'80s that I came across in researching its piece. It's interesting for two reasons: 1) It's a reminder that all those funny (and occasionally "funny") short stories in Tomorrow Stories didn't come out of nowhere. And 2) It's a send-up of the grim and the gritty from a the perspective of a then-outsider to the world of American superhero comics. He was about to get his hands dirty with the very material he's parodying here. Click on the images to enlarge:

GRATUITOUS CUTENESS
Well, once you factor me out. This is Scott and Ali's daughter Isabel meeting our dog Sophie.

MY FAVORITE BAND THIS WEEK: Los Campesinos

I've been laying off music reviewing a little this year, if not quite as thoroughly or publicly as Noel Murray. But I still have opinions and my opinion is that Cardiff's Los Campesinos are awesome. They're young. They're Welsh. They have a violin player. And they sound like they're having a lot of fun while making some unpredictable-but-not-fussy and rhythmically charged music. Noel turned me on to the band's debut EP last year. The forthcoming full-length Hold On Now Youngsters does not disappoint. Here's a great track, that's not even the best on the album:



Los Campesinos: "We Are All Accelerated Readers"

RANDOM INFORMATION

• I'm in Ohio visiting the parents now and it's destined to snow. That's been the case the past few time I've been here. I foresee a lot of sitting around. Also, it's the second time I've shown up here after the state has gone what I believe to be the wrong way in an election. But looking around at least I'm not filled with rage that the people I see might have voted for Clinton. When it went to Bush in 2004 I felt like I was in Invasion Of The Body Snaachers. Clinton supporters seem essentially human.

• From here by way of io9: LOLTHULU!:


• Why does Brett Favre, the only football player I've ever cared about, seem more pissed than sad announcing his retirement?:

The Mysteries Of Chicago: The Gas Station With The Slippery Adjectives
Not far from my office, there's a gas station I frequent for its proximity, its steady supply of diet soda, and its brusque-but-efficient service. This gas station has a car wash I've never used for no particular reason. But I'm not sure I'd be more inclined to use it now that its services descriptive phrases have gotten an upgrade.

Exit The Critic: Terry Lawson
Reading Defamer earlier today I came across a post about the Detroit Free Press' decision not to replace film critic Terry Lawson, who took a buyout offer late last year. I could go on about the death of film criticism, but I want. For the record, I think there are plenty of fine critics out there and plenty of people reading them. But there is a problem with newspapers and the fact that a paper like the Free Press can't keep Lawson around says everything about that problem.

I grew up reading Lawson when he wrote for Dayton's Journal-Herald and later the Dayton Daily News. (A merger brought him from the city's morning paper to its only paper.) He was a tough, fair critic with a personable prose style who wasn't afraid to criticize a sure-to-be popular movie if he didn't like it or champion one he liked even if it didn't look to be a popular favorite. (I remember his four-star review of Robocop making me feel like I had permission to think of a really great genre film as just a really great film. Period.) He was also a local. I remember attending a Sunday-afternoon art film series in 8th grade where he would show up for Q&A sessions after the film.

Other reviews that mattered to me: His declaration of Hannah And Her Sisters as a masterpiece meant a lot. I saw the film in junior high and loved it. I'm sure I didn't get all the nuances—-Why would Allen need to buy white bread and mayo to convert to Christianity?--but I'm with A.O. Scott in thinking that it's okay for kids to stretch out of their comfort zone. His review of Jean De Florette brought me downtown to my first foreign film.

I don't want to write about the guy like he's dead. Hopefully he'll keep writing for someone else. But I also hope the Freep and all the other papers trimming back their local arts coverage realizes what they're losing by getting rid of their local arts sections and replacing their critics with, say, the semi-ubiquitous, widely syndicated Orlando critic Roger Moore. There's no sense of connection there. As a budding film buff, it felt important to have a guy who was just as passionate and a lot more knowledgeable about the things I loved in town. It felt like these things were important to where I was and not just something that happened somewhere else.

And, yeah, I recognize the irony of me saying this as someone who's mostly read online and published in a newspaper distributed in 10 cities. Why should someone in our Denver edition feel like I'm writing for them? I don't know. But I only hope that someone reading me develops a passion for what I'm writing about of the sort Lawson prompted in me. Even if I did like Cloverfield.

The Mysteries Of Chicago: The identity crisis bookstore
On Belmont St. over by the old Onion office there's a fine little bookstore that, for as long as I can remember, has done business under a sign saying "Town Cleaners."

I can't even remember the real name most of the time since it's pretty dull. It's The Gallery Bookstore I've always thought of it as the Town Cleaners Bookstore. It reminds me of a character from Grant Morrison's run on Doom Patrol named Danny The Street. Danny was a transvestite street. On the outside he featured Guns and Ammo stores and other macho fixtures. But on the inside he was all nice boutiques.

I'm pretty sure the Town Cleaners Bookstore was just too cheap to have the original sign removed, however.

The Mysteries Of Chicago: Cafe Muppet
What is it? How can it exist in a copyright-intense business culture? Why does it barely show up on Google? (All I could find was a Yelp entry from someone who had never eaten there.) Some questions may never be answered. (Click to enlarge and you'll see that, yes, that's a little Kermit on the sign, or you would if it weren't so blurry.)

PERMANENT RECORDS REMOTE: The Feelies' The Good Earth (1986)

We put our Permanent Records feature on hiatus over at The A.V. Club so of course I find an album I have to write about. The feature will probably be back in some form later on, but I need to say some words about The Feelies' The Good Earth, the New Jersey band's second album. Released in 1986, it followed their debut Crazy Rhythms by six years. Crazy Rhythms is often, and rightly, cited as an influential albums. It jittery, post-punk jangle can be heard in countless subsequent bands from '80s college rock on. But it's The Good Earth that I love. I parted it with it in a cash-strapped CD purge somewhere between high school and gainful employment. I don't know how I could ever have let it go. It's fallen out of print in subsequent years but thanks to eBay and a part-time wholesaler in Thailand I now own a copy again.

R.E.M. was among the bands wearing out their copies of Crazy Rhythms and Peter Buck repaid the favor by producing The Good Earth. The band had a slightly different line-up by then and a slightly different sound. R.E.M. had listened to them and clearly they'd listened back. The Good Earth mixes the jangle and countryside spirituality of early R.E.M. with a Velvet Underground drone but the sound is all its own. Here's a favorite track:

Always a cult favorite, never a popular success, The Feelies signed to Warner Brothers, put out two more albums, then called it a day. I don't have those but I suspect eBay does. But I might wait. The Good Earth is pretty much all I want to listen to right now anyway.

REMAINING BOX OF PAPERBACKS BOOKS

Hunter Adams, The Man From Planet X: The She-Beast

Brian Aldiss, Starswarm

James Blish, A Life For The Stars

James Blish and Robert Lowndes, The Duplicated Man

John Boyd, The Last Starship From Planet Earth


Ray Bradbury, Chad Olivr, and Theordore Sturgeon, Three To The Highest Power

Edgar Rice Burroughs, The People That Time Forgot


Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Mad King

John Coleman Burroughs, Treasure Of The Black Falcon

A. Bertram Chandler, The Alternate Martians

Gordon R. Dickson, Naked To The Stars

Gordon R. Dickson, None But Man

Philip Jose Farmer, Down In The Black Gang And Other Stories

Philip Jose Farmer, A Private Cosmos

Philip Jose Farmer, The Green Odyssey

Philip Jose Farmer, Flesh

John M, Faucette, Crown Of Infinity

Ian Fleming: Thunderball, The Man With The Golden Gun, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Goldfinger, From Russia With Love, Doctor No., Thrilling Cities


H. Rider Haggard, Cleopatra

Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint, The Blind Spot ("The most famous, fantastic novel of all time," according to the cover.)

Robert Heinlein, The Puppet Masters

Nat Hiken, Sergeant Bilko

Robert E. Howard, Wolfshead

Otis Adelbert Kline, The Outlaws Of Mars

C.M. Kornbluth, Not This August

A. Merritt, The Metal Monster


Ed McBain, Vanishing Ladies

Larry Niven, Neutron Star

Larry Niven, World Of Ptavvs

Andre Norton, Lord Of Thunder

Andre Norton, The X Factor

Philip Francis Nowlan, Armageddon 2419 A.D. (The original Buck Rogers Novel)

E.E. Doc Smith, Grey Lensman (2 copies), First Lensman, Children Of The Lens, Second Stage Lensmen

Cordwainer Smith, Space Lords

O.F. Snelling, James Bond: A Report

George R. Stewart, Earth Abides

Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human

William F. Temple, Battle On Venus


Jack Vance, The Five Gold Bands / The Dragon Masters (Ace Double)

Jack Vance, Space Opera

Various Authors, The Avengers: The Passing Of Gloria Munday, The Avengers: The Afrit Affair


Various Authors, The Alien Condition

Jules Verne, The Demon Of Cawnpore

A.E. Van Vogt, Slan

H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man

Leonard Wibberley, The Mouse That Roared

Leonard Wibberley, The Mouse On Wall Street

DIVIDED BY A COMMON LANGUAGE
I interviewed Michel Gondry yesterday in advance of the terrific new film Be Kind Rewind and it was a terrific experience. He was an engaged, thoughtful interview subject and I found the whole experience quite pleasant. He's French and has a pretty good command of the English language, even though he sometimes needs to take the roundabout way to get to his point. He also has a distinct French accent, which, of course, only makes sense. When I'm talking to someone who's not a native English speaker, I find, as I'm sure everyone does, that the mind naturally adjusts to meet them halfway. It just kind of happens.
If you're not there, however, it can be baffling. I passed the audio file on to one of our new interns who started work on the 38-minute conversation at 10am. I got busy and didn't check on him until around 2:30 and I asked him how he was doing. He said, "It's tough." I said, "How far into it are you?" (Because, you see, it kind of has to be done soon to make the deadline for our Sundance issue.) He said, "Twelve minutes." And here's a sample of what he had done:

AVC: It’s seems to me, maybe I’m making the wrong connection here, but was this in any way influenced by Dave Chappelle’s Block Party?


Gondry: Yeah, completely. And in that, she’s(?) the ground basically. I had this concept for years, the fact that this kid remakes these movies. Uh, it’s as if(?) someone fears if he got a concept that had, for years, if he couldn’t keep it up he put it down for 10 months(?) and then he doesn’t do it itself, because there are needs. And the film would not have to be typically achieved, because it’s like watching a home movie. You don’t watch it for the technique or aspect, you watch because it’s reminiscent of the good men known to these parts(?) as your friend, or it reflects who it belongs to.

It's beautiful, in its way. And completely unrunnable. I ended up doing the transcript myself.
And I don't blame the intern at all. I probably would have transcribed it the same way if I weren't a participant in the conversation. Funny how that works.
Also funny: Gondry's parody of the popular "Will It Blend?" clips that float around the Internet that doubles as a commercial for his film The Science Of Sleep.