Things I Listened to This Weekend: Number Six of Six: The Mekons — “Where Were You?”
Just to finish this YouTube run off on a high and weighty note, here is one remarkable single from 1978, about which there is not a ton that wants explaining or decoding: it seems to blurt out a simple feeling with great passion and then just stop.
I can imagine someone saying it’s stalkery, actually. I don’t know if it really gives us enough information to be firm either way, and somehow it sounds too ardent and self-righteous for me to think of it as creepy in that particular way — but I can see how someone might.
And maybe that’s the thing. I’m always taken with the way the bass rumbles and blurts, just like the song does — the way it’s all reckless and too forthright and not sensibly in control of its feelings. So maybe that’s exactly the thing, or exactly the reason I feel pleasantly exhausted after listening to it.
A great, great, great record. Also the source of the riff from Boredoms’ “Super Roots 7”!
Stunning Fantasia-inspired letterhead used in 1942 by RKO, Walt Disney Studios’ distributors at the time.
Walt Disney’s Fantasia, 1942 | Source
This whole blog is amazing.
Comics’ relationship with cinema is complex. While it has become rote to hear creators compare comics to everything from pop songs to television to theater in recent years, film is probably the dominant influence on comics, if only because both employ editing from moment-to-moment and image-to-image. The comic as film pitch complaint that is common these days is valid ( there are so many comics that barely exist as comics), but it maybe ignores the closeness of the media to each other. The problem isn’t that comics is influenced by film, it’s that comics aren’t influenced by the medium but influenced by films. So ripping off the plot of a scifi film du jour is common rather than working out why John Woo times his action scenes the way he does. (via Emma Peel Sessions 39 – “Have you seen the Lady From Shanghai? Orson Welles… that one makes no sense.” « supervillain.)
Family Fodder — “Savoir Faire”
Auto-reblog for one of my favorite songs of all time. Like, top ten ever, probably.
An immediate use of one of the most interesting techniques Quitely showcased in his last go on B&R — the blacking in of shapes around the panel borders. Here, in a full-bleed panel, it creates an organic frame for the picture while maintaining the effectiveness of an opening splash. Beyond that, though, it places you much deeper “inside” the comic than a more typically bordered shot would. While your run-of-the-mill panel borders simply block in the picture, the shapes Quitely uses here to outline his image are also part of the image itself. The unorthodox framing creates not only a great sense of depth and dimensionality, but also an increased tension between the panel’s elements, an expanded sense of their spacial relationships to one another. Not to mention the circular-ish shape of the picture, which, when coupled with the arrangement of the figures and the angle of the staircase, encourages the eye to kind of spiral in on the central figure of Jim Gordon. And then when you get there, the Commissioner’s bizarro-Hamlet pose is pretty stellar. (via DEATH TO THE UNIVERSE) —excellent panel-by-panel analysis of the entire Frank Quitely sequence in Batman #700!
It’s really eight seconds long including the credits. But definitely worth it.
Finally, the World Cup tribute video to “World Cup Fever” we’ve all been waiting for!
YESSSS. Best song ever written about the World Cup, and there actually are a bunch of other candidates. Air Miami go!
Let’s Make Lentil Salad! (by featherbed) —I really really really want Laura Park to do an entire cookbook.
