Fox has already called Ohio, CNN maintains it’s still too close, and I’m going to bed. Meanwhile, people are still voting in Ohio (link to first-hand account). I really hope Kerry stands his ground and waits for each and every vote – provisional or otherwise – to be counted in Ohio before making a premature concession.
In the past few weeks I’ve been finding some great stuff in the ‘Dollar Racks’ in the front of my local Target store: dollar DVD’s.
Just before Halloween I managed to pick a few schlocky 60’s horror double-feature discs (One includes Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Dementia 13‘), and just the other day I found a great compilation of 1930’s Tom & Jerry Shorts.
I’m a sucker for animation to begin with, but this is the BEST kind: Old, Black and White, and absolutely Music-centric. These cartoons were made when speech was still used sparingly in animation, and the on-screen action was closely tied to the often elaborate orchestration of the soundtrack. The DVD consists of 9 black and white Tom & Jerry animated shorts from 1931-1933.
Clearly, these are not the characters that first spring to mind when one thinks of ‘Tom & Jerry,’ but they get a pass since they were there first. The manufacturer of the DVD, Genius Entertainment, shrewdly attempts to exploit this confusion in the on-box copy:
“Two of the most popular cartoon creations are together again in this one-of-a-kind collection of their most fun-filled escapades. Poor Tom is always going up against the wise Jerry in their cat-and-mouse games. You’ll enjoy these hilarious shorts over and over again.”
Watching the shorts reveals that this Tom & Jerry are actually a team of sorts, and don’t “go up against” each other at all. There’s a good website with information on these cartoons here.
If you’re a big weirdo and interested in getting a copy of your own, check out the nearest Target, dollar store, or if you don’t feel like getting up, you can order it from Amazon (Though it’ll cost you an extra fifty cents).
Bonus: The Horror double-feature DVD’s also feature ‘Spooky’ Tom & Jerry shorts of the same vintage, which are not included on the Tom & Jerry DVD. Rib-cage xylaphones abound!
Those of you who might be interested in boring stuff like the behind-the-scenes bits of minutiae dealt with by Fantagraphics Books as they assemble their ‘Complete Peanuts’ series: HAVE I GOT THE POST FOR YOU! All sorts of unnecessarily thorough detail!
This thread on the Fantagraphics message board has previews of Canadian cartoonist Seth‘s designs for volumes three and four of ‘The Complete Peanuts.’ Each volume of the hardcover series covers two years worth of strips and will feature a different Peanuts character on the cover. Volumes one and two, released this year, feature Charlie Brown and Lucy respectively. As you can see below, Pigpen and Snoopy have been chosen for next year’s volumes.
Fantagraphics representative Kim Thompson adds:
“The final cover will have a different colored logo (like the first two, it will be a variant of the main background color but in a metallic ink, but those don’t show up real well on digital images so we’re sticking with the neutral/tan ones for now), a Snoopy image in the upper left hand corner instead of the repeated Charlie Brown (the upper left hand image repeats the main character), and of course the “INTRODUCTION BY —” copy. But it’s good enough as a spaceholder for Amazon.com.”
There is a giant feature on Seth in the latest issue of Comic Art Magazine (AKA the best magazine in the world, ever), which includes some lengthy discussion of the Peanuts designs. I quote liberally from the Comic Art article below, in the hopes that your mind will be blown and you will immediately order a copy of your own.
“These are the covers from the Schulz reprint proposal that I presented to Jeannie Schulz. Basically, Gary [Groth] went through all the dealings and then after they’d got things fairly concrete, where it looked like it was going to happen, they brought me down so I could talk to Jeannie and show her what I wanted to do with the book. I went there with a small talk planned, basically to tell her that I felt Schulz’s work was so wonderfully sophisticated and that it had been, I felt, undersold in the last 30 years-pushed as kids’ books, really Pop-y, and that I wanted to try to put together a package of some sort that had some quality of understatement to it. So, here is the production art that I brought down to sell the idea. These fake covers I put together are pretty rough, really. I outlined how the books would fit together and what the design system was…originally. I was planning on one book per year and I wanted to do 50 covers with Charlie Brown’s face on each one. His face would have been taken from the specific year and then you could chart his changes over 50 years. Basically, everybody but me felt that was too much, that we should vary the characters, which is what will happen. This original idea was to demonstrate how much variety there really was just in the Charlie Brown face itself. Conceptually I like it, but I didn’t really expect them to go for that. So, we’ll have 25 books with all the characters appearing once on the covers-one face per book-although Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and Lucy (maybe Linus too) will reappear-Charlie Brown will defmitely be on the first and the last books. Not all the characters can get the cover-but everyone will make the spine. I’ll start the early volumes with the minor characters, like Shermy. Each cover-featured character will dominate that specific volume’s design.”
“In many ways, the design has stayed almost exactly the same as I originally conceived it. The endpapers for each are completely assembled from Schulz’s background imagery, which I’ve reworked. I’m keeping the same endpapers for each decade. so it’ll change once we hit the ’60s, and what’s interesting is that by the time we hit the ’90s. there are almost no backgrounds: it’ll become very minimalist. with just a bit of grass, or some detail to build around. When you open the book, I want the reader to move into Schulz’s work in a quiet way, so they start with the environment-then you cross a double-page splash of just grass that will lead you into the book. The grass will be updated every 10 years as well, which no one will even notice but me. That will lead into a series of spreads that go throughout the book before you enter into the strips. Each book will feature one of the iconic places – 25 iconic backgrounds I can work with (Snoopy’s doghouse for example). It’s a pretty straightforward design system, in that with each volume I don’t have a huge amount of elements to change, just certain spreads. I have to replace elements here and there with new imagery from that volume’s years, of course. Things slowly evolve over the whole series. but in a very subtle way, which from book to book really isn’t noticeable, but by the time you get to the last book the changes in the strip and the characters will be very clear.”
“In the design, what I’m going for-I hope to create a package around the work that shows it in a slightly different context than it’s been presented in for years. I don’t want the reader to think much about it at all, but when they come to it, I hope they’re led in and out of Schulz’s work in a way that puts them in the right mood to read it again as the subtle work that it is, not as the product that has been pushed for so many years by merchandising and TV specials. But, we’ll see. Jeannie Schulz was very receptive and easy-going about things. I was somewhat prepared that if there was any sort of conflict and I felt myself being pulled down the road having to do the same old boring Peanuts books that everyone’s done, I would probably back out of the project. I was happy that she was so open, and what’s great about Jeannie Schulz is that you could really see when talking with her that she thought of Charles Schulz as a genius. You know, when someone’s been married for 30 years (or however long it was), it would be very easy to imagine the widow feeling the exact opposite: sick to death of that irritating husband who spent all his time in the studio complaining about being a sad multi-millionaire. But she didn’t have that quality at all.”
Now that we’ve got some insight into the theory behind the design, why not take a look at the plan from a marketing standpoint? One of the posters on the Fantagraphics webforum posted the following question:
“Any indication of how the sales of Complete Peanuts 2 compare to the first? I would imagine this volume will be a better indicator of what the long term sales will be, minus the media frenzy and testing how many people will want to buy a $30 book every six months. I notice that it’s at 178 on Amazon, with the boxed set in the top 500 as well.”
Fantagraphics font of knowledge Kim Thompson responds:
“It’s hard to do a one-to-one comparison because of the box set. If you count initial sales of Book 2 as an individual title vs. initial sales of Book 1, Book 1 wins. If you count initial sales of Book 2 in all configurations (within or without the box set) Book 2 comes out ahead.”
“I expect Book 3, which won’t have holiday sales or a box set (and the least popular main Peanut, Pigpen), will dip a bit. Book 4, on the other hand, will have a triple whammy: holiday sales, a box set (most likely), and Snoopy, by far the most popular character, on the cover — as well as being probably the first book where the characters really look entirely like themselves.”
“Long term, who knows? Volumes 6 through 10 might slow down a bit, but on the other hand the ’60s are the peak period.”
You may or may not remember that due to the sad state of our nation’s newspaper archives, there were still several ‘missing’ strips from the years covered by the second volume. Fantagraphics representative Kim Thompson keeps us updated on this matter in this thread:
“[At press time] The only thing missing was a top strip (title panel and first, “breakaway” panel) for one Sunday, and Seth did a minimalist faux one to keep the format consistent. (This is all acknowledged and detailed in the back of the book.) Should the full Sunday ever materialize, subsequent reprintings will include the “real” top strip.”
“Oddly, 1955-1956 (Vol. 3) has THREE Sunday strips with missing top strips. Well, we have about four months to try to find them.”
“Very few papers printed the strips at the time, even fewer have decent copies available, and of those that do all the ones we’ve found ran just the bottom 2/3rds. I’ll post the dates here just in case, but trust me, even obsessive PEANUTS collectors have come up snake eyes on ’em so far.”
Fans of Seth’s work should also check out the August 23rd issue of the New Yorker – he did the cover.
Though it occurs to me that my idea of ‘cool looking’ is the rough equivalent of most people’s idea of ‘hard to read.’
I made a special trip to Chicago this past weekend to see a performance by the remnants of my 2nd-favorite british invasion band, The Zombies. Singer Colin Blunstone and Keyboardist Rod Argent have assembled a backing band and taken the Zombies back-catalogue on the road. They played nearly everything I had hoped to hear, including a good 80% of “Odessy & Oracle,” all the early hits, and even their arrangement of Gershwin’s ‘Summertime.’ There was a slow patch in the middle of the set consisting of material from their much-maligned new album, an Argent song (‘Hold Your Head Up’), and a song from an earlier Blunstone solo effort.
The backing band consisted of Argent bassist Jim Rodford (Rod’s Cousin), his son on drums (ridiculously talented), and some faceless dude who looked like Jessica Simpson’s Dad on guitar. Save for a gratuitous guitar solo by Mr. Simpson – who had managed to remain pretty understated for the bulk of the set, everyone was very tasteful in their reproduction and occasional accentuation of the original parts. A few purists on the Zombie Heaven mailing-list were whining about the blasphemy of performing Odessy & Oracle songs without a live mellotron, but that’s to be expected from old-guy pop-fan crybabies.
I should probably say that the primary reason I was there was to hear Colin Blunstone sing some of the classic Zombies songs live, so I was pretty happy to find that his voice is still in great shape, and the vocal harmonies by Mr. Argent and Mr. Rodford were spot on.
At any rate, the next day, a “friend of the band” posted the following message on the Zombie Heaven mailing list. I can’t vouch for its credibility, of course.
“You know the reason I love this list we’re on is that we’re all passionate about The Zombies and most of us know what we want to see and hear. That’s one of the reasons why ‘As Far As I Can See’ saddens me so much. I suppose that first of all, it being listed as a Zombies album really gets to me. I know people will come back and point the finger in the direction of New World, but there is a difference between the two. When New World came about all of the Zoms (Rod included) had a chance to reunite the group. It was an open invitation to all, but Rod made it clear that he didn’t believe in going back, and everybody respected that. He gave the project his
blessing and so Colin, Chris, & Hugh moved along with it and brought in
other people who could help. It may not have been the greatest album of all
time but it was put together with the very best intentions.‘As Far As I Can See’ comes across as a little bit of a joke. When Chris White sang some backing vocals on it he had no idea at the time that this was going to be a “Zombies” album. He thought it was another Rod & Colin album. Rod had told him of his dream where he saw (in lights) the names Rod Argent and Colin Blunstone with the words “are Zombies” underneath, but never once let it slip that they would be selling and touring this under the Zoms name. Paul knew but understandably didn’t care due to his own situation [Original guitarist Paul Atkinson died of cancer early this year. There’s a memorial here -ak], but Hugh didn’t have the foggiest. There wasn’t even a phone call out of basic common courtesy to let him know about the whole thing.
It wasn’t until the Paul Atkinson benefit concert that either Hugh or Chris got an inkling of what was going on. All that aside, do you want to know what the very worst thing about all of this is? I’ll tell you anyway. The most upsetting thing is that, more than anything else in the world, both Hugh Grundy and Chris White want to tour O & O with Rod and Colin.
Hugh and Chris are waiting to tour America doing the whole of O & O much in
the same format as Brian Wilson is doing with Smile, and Rod and Colin know
it. I have personally spoken to three of the four Zombies about this recently and I get the same responses every time. The man standing in the way is Rod Argent. He still doesn’t believe in “going back” except of course when it helps him sell a few extra ‘solo’ records. There have been discussions with Rod about an O & O tour (and whatever could come of that, but one step at a time) and his response has been an insult to the rest of the Zombies.So far, he has said he will consider it but only if Hugh and Chris agree to letting him use his current touring band. He would like to give Hugh a tambourine and let Chris sing backing vocals and of course his lead on Butcher’s Tale and a verse of Brief Candles.
My last conversation with Rod was about 18 months ago and is more revealing now that it ever was then. He believes one of the main reasons that The Zombies “failed” was because nobody (apart from him) was a good enough musician, which was what he tried to correct when putting Argent together. His main argument for not putting an O & O tour together is pretty much all related to that. He says that neither Hugh or Chris have played professionally for well over 30 years and that they’re just not good enough. His short sightedness bemuses me, it really does. It even scares me. It’s one of those things that I had kept to myself because I believed that
perhaps it wasn’t my place to stir up trouble, but I’m just so sick and
tired of it all now.I apologise for the length of this rant, I really do but I leave you with this thought. The Zombies want to reform, Rod doesn’t respect them enough to even give it genuine consideration. You can draw your own conclusions.
Roger”
Naturally, this got a pretty big reaction on the list. Another member suggested:
“Perhaps, as a compromise, The Zombies could tour again, and half their set could be older material, with Hugh and Chris, and the remainder with the new band.”
…and Roger responded:
“This was suggested by Hugh and Chris. They would have Rod, Colin and the new
band up for the first half doing newer bits and pieces and the second half
would be The actual Zombies doing O & O and a couple of others that people
may want to hear. Rod didn’t like that. New band all the way or nothing.
Hopefully there’s some life left in this yet as the last thing that anybody
wants is a legal fight. That would just dash any hope of anything ever
happening and we would be the people that suffered most. Nobody would like to see that.”
The next day, this message appeared:
“After reading with amazement, as probably most of you did, Mr. McClair’s message from October 10th, I decided to forward this to Rod. In a first e-mail he told me he never heard of Mr. McClair and that he would make time, inspite of his busy schedule, to mail me a detailed reply. And so he did.
I appreciate this very much, because the travelling and playing concerts almost every other night must be very exhausting. That Rod takes the time to write to us proves to me once again what a great guy he is and that he does not take his fans, and especially this group, for granted.”
Rod’s message:
“Hi Cobi,
Here is an explanation, as detailed as I can make it, of our current situation./ Could you post it on the group so that people can get a true
picture? Thanks!I don’t normally reply to this sort of stuff, but this message makes me really angry – I just cannot let the mis-information and inaccuracy stand.
Firstly – I HAVE NEVER SAID, OR FELT IN ANY WAY THAT THE ZOMBIES ” FAILED” (!) BECAUSE THE MEMBERS WERE NOT GOOD ENOUGH. THIS IS NOT ONLY DAFT BUT OFFENSIVE. In fact, Chris will tell you that on first hearing the box set in 1997( the first time for years that I had re-listened to Zombies material), my first call was to him to say that I had forgotten just how good his bass playing was!
Secondly, I would welcome a much heavier involvement from Chris and Hugh in the event of performances of O & O. Again, Chris will tell you that I
phoned him just before our current U.S. tour to suggest that he and Hugh might start familiarising themselves with the songs with a view to us
getting together after our current period of touring, to see how we play together after all these years . As some of your members know, I personally get my energy from creating and playing new songs. However, within that context, both Colin and I are delighted to play the old stuff as well. If we do O&O, I would regard it as
a “period piece”, and would like to recreate it as faithfully as possible.However – you have to realise that we haven’t tried anything like this for many years, and we HAVE to see what is practicable. IT IS NOT ME WHO INSISTS THAT WE SHOULD NOT PLAY AS A UNIT. Colin will tell you that it is me who has been arguing strongly to him for ages that if we do it at all, we should try to recreate it with heavier inv olvement from Chris and Hugh.
PLEASE !!!- “I’m using The Zombies name to sell a few more solo records!! I have never been motivated by money, and am not now. If so, why would I spend
a year doing a classical album which can only bring me back a quarter of the money I laid out to record it?Colin and I are trying to do what we are doing at the best level we can This means that, far from making a lot of money, the whole effort is about a
struggle to break even! We are not complaining – playing and touring hard with this great band is a joy, and absolutely what we want to do. I can tell
you though, that we are many thousands of pounds away from a break even point. If I want to make money I can stay at home, collect royalties from my
back catalogue, and not have to use them to subsidise what we are doing now!The context of cost also brings to bear on the possible O & O performances. If we do it, we have to involve extra singers and at least one extra
keyboard player. I would see us being able to bring this off in two or three places – London, New York, L.A? – but touring extensively with such
forces would be financial suicide. I can tell you we would not pull the size of audience that Brian Wilson has to make it viable.The fact is that we haven’t “reformed” anything. Our situation has evolved naturally, through delight and enthusiasm, and it’s only the fact that we
are working together in such a band situation that has led us to acknowledge our inevitable Zombies connection . We are always at pains to tell reporters
that this is our, current, take, and we always insist on our own two names on albums and publicity so that people are in no doubt. This does not
reflect on the original incarnation of the band – in fact I can tell you that it has already stimulated sales of O & O in the U.S. No body is in any
doubt.Well , that’s it. I have absolutely no interest in replying to this “Roger McClair” personally, but I do not want your members to suffer such
personally offensive mis-information.Rod Argent”
Kempa.com – your #1 source for ’60-year-old dudes squabbling about their band’ gossip.
Hey friends.
I’ve been MIA for the last month or so, so I figured I’d drop a line here to keep you posted on the excitement that is my life.
After another round of fruitless second interviews, I find myself back at square one in the job search department, so I’m working on tweaking my PHP / MYSQL skills. The perfect project for doing that is to bring my various web-ventures up to date, so I’m tying up all sorts of loose ends. Hopefully all of these scattered efforts will coalesce into something tangible within the next few weeks.
I’ve also been spending lots of time working on several music-related projects. The Recital will (hopefully) FINALLY finish that full length we’ve been talking about for release in the new year, and I’m incubating several fun massively-collaborative recording projects, so if you’re interested in that, get in touch.
I bought one of these Gameboy media readers, and have successfully transferred an episode of a television show to my gameboy advance. (Loosely related sidenote: I’m considering purchasing either a gamecube or an Xbox. Gamecube seems to have better games, Xbox is more customizable. Got a strong opinion one way or the other? Convince me).
During the first presidential debate, Bush said “Mexed Missages,” so naturally I registered Mexedmissages.com. Unfortunately I used a bargain-basement back-alley registrar, who confirmed the order but sat on it for 24 hours while someone else registered it. LAME. They’re not even doing anything with it!
What else? I’m taking a train to Chicago to see the Zombies with Love tommorrow night. That should be pretty amazing. Also, I’m working on three more vinyl articles in my spare time, so if that first batch bored you, WATCH OUT! That’s about it. Write back.
Adam
P.S.
If you have anything to say on the matter of WordPress vs. Movabletype, let me know about that, too.
My favorite result of Self-Googling:
“Kempa, Adam of Detroit, Wayne County, Mich. Independent American candidate for U.S. Representative from Michigan 1st District, 1960; Independent American candidate for delegate to Michigan state constitutional convention from Wayne County 5th District, 1961. Still living as of 1961.” [link]
Further digging yields the following eerily applicable excerpt, from a summary of the September 12th, 1961 Michigan Constitutional Convention:
“Adam Kempa (Independent American), defeated.”
Bonus points to anyone who can tell me how to find anything else about this guy.
Update!
I found the following results page, showing the voting breakdown between the parties involved in this campaign. The Democrat won, the Socialist beat him.
More:
Born: Dec 24th, 1913. Erie, New York.
Died: February 6th, 1975. Detroit, Michigan.
Have any ipod users noticed weirdness since the last firmware update? All my radio shows (large files) are only playing the first 30 seconds or so, then cutting to silence. It will play through the whole hour in silence if I let it, but if I try and jog ahead, it just skips to the next song. All my other songs are playing fine. I checked Apple’s forums and have noticed a lot of people reporting variations on this theme in the last week. Hm…..
If you’re in the market for an easy to install wiki, I can wholeheartedly recommend Qwikiwiki. Simplest installation ever.
A few footnotes to last week’s lonesome ‘pi pie’ entry that sparked so much inspired humor – Several other pi pies have come to my attention. The most finely detailed was submitted by Andy Baio, though he doesn’t know the source of the photo.
My Roommate Ryan baked a Pi:
