* As you may have heard, this is a landmark week for popular culture: Crank: High Voltage comes out on DVD today. I…I just can’t describe…please see this movie. It makes everything else look like it’s half asleep. I don’t care if you can hear the bass in Beatles songs that aren’t “Don’t Let Me Down” now^: You will never feel more alive than you do while watching Crank: High Voltage.
* Lost in my bookmarks: My erstwhile Robot 6 coblogger Chris Mautner caught this fascinating interview with Alan Moore by Mania.com’s Kurt Amacker about all things Marvelman. The newsy bit is Moore’s statement that his Marvelman material is likely going to be reprinted by Marvel, with his blessing but without his name attached (a decision having to do with his distaste for the material retrospectively, his distaste for Marvel generally, and his distaste for the mainstream American comics industry at large). But even more interesting to me is Moore’s account of the long and ugly-sounding saga of his involvement with the Marvelman rights dispute–I, for one, had no idea that the rights to the character seem to have been quite literally stolen out from under Mick Anglo, who legally never ceased to maintain them. I also really liked this bit about Moore’s intentions upon writing the character’s relaunch/revamp:
“I’d got a vague idea that there was a way that I thought superheroes could be done that would be more gripping and more intense than the way they were being done at the time.”
Having not read Marvelman I can’t speak to whether or not he pulled it off. But I’ve read Watchmen a few times, and I think that Moore’s current disdainful view of the genre, and that of many critics who use Moore’s superhero work as a cudgel against the genre in general, obscures the fact that at its heart, that book’s a cracking good superhero story that succeeds on exactly the grounds Moore stipulates above. I wouldn’t be surprised to find this true of Marvelman as well.
* Speaking of prickly legal disputes over genre-fiction landmarks, the Lord of the Rings royalty dispute between The Tolkien Trust, HarperCollins, and New Line Cinema has officially been settled. This means Guillermo Del Toro’s Hobbit movies continue apace.
* Brian Hibbs loved Strange Tales #1. Brian, I can assure you it wasn’t thought of as Wednesday Comics counterprogramming, unless someone at Marvel got wind of Wednesday Comics over two years ago…
* Daylight vampires? Sure, I’ll eat it.
* I said earlier on Twitter that I love the Beatles and that the current onslaught of Beatles coverage couldn’t go on long enough as far as I was concerned. (This was before I read Chuck Klosterman’s egregious AV Club piece. Ugh. But still.) In that light I recommend Pitchfork’s overview and album-by-album coverage of the Beatles’ catalog’s CD rereleases, all of which can be found by clicking that link. Mark Richardson’s overview explains in easy-to-grok detail what’s going on with the remastering and packaging and why you should (or shouldn’t!) care. Tom Ewing’s album reviews (he’s done the five pre-Rubber Soul records so far) chart a steady course between the Scylla and Charybdis of Beatles criticism–tediously reverent supplication and equally tediously wrongheaded skepticism–neither throwing his hands up in surrendered awe nor spitting out barbs about the emperor’s new clothes but focusing instead just on what they’re doing with each song and each album and how it does or doesn’t click. This being the Beatles, it mostly clicks hard, and Ewing’s open about that, which I appreciate.
I also appreciate the case he lays out for the creative identities of each of these early records. I think I’ve described before how the Beatles fit on a continuum with J.R.R. Tolkien and Monty Python for my adolescent self–art as a dizzying torrent of information, a multifaceted array of reference-making and world-building. And so, as I imagine was the case for many fans of my ilk, it’s really the psychedelic and post-psychedelic material that clicked with me hardest–Sgt. Pepper onward, for the most part, during my teen years, and to a lesser extent Rubber Soul and Revolver after that. These records, of course, also fit most neatly with the rockist philosophy that largely held sway among music critics prior to this decade–the belief system that holds “John was the only true genius in the group” a truth to be self-evident. (This viewpoint still lives, by the way–I saw Mikal Gilmore say exactly that in a supplement to his recent Rolling Stone cover story on the Beatles’ break-up and I was momentarily stunned. That’s what a decade of poptimism and being surrounded by Macca boosters will do to you.) Now, I never disliked the early pop smashes, far from it. (Except maybe “Twist and Shout,” because that’s how much I hate Ferris Bueller.) In fact I always liked them a lot–they just didn’t fire my imagination. Since then I’ve come to love them. But I’d never really sat and processed a case for the albums some of them came from as albums–as full-length statements by artists, as opposed to soundtracks and odds’n’sods collections of radio staples and covers and slow-dance pop ballads churned out by record labels–prior to reading Ewing’s work here. It’s really rather exciting and I recommend it if this isn’t something you’d ever really considered before.
^ not true–yes I do
If you’re interested in saying it I’d love to hear what you hate about Ferris Bueller. It’s not a great movie but it’s probably my favorite movie if you go by how often I rewatch it, which is a rare thing for me to do. You calling it out specifically for italicized hate has peaked my interest now since most people just dismiss it as 80s fluff if anything.
If you’re interested in saying it I’d love to hear what you hate about Ferris Bueller. It’s not a great movie but it’s probably my favorite movie if you go by how often I rewatch it, which is a rare thing for me to do. You calling it out specifically for hate has peaked my interest now since most people just dismiss it as 80s fluff if anything.
I also have really been enjoying Tom Ewing’s Beatles reviews.
He has a fanstatic blog called Popular, in which he reviews every UK #1 single in order since 1952. He started it years ago, so he’s up to 80’s singles now, but it is a phenomenal blog, and full of the kind of insights and discussions of pop music as his pitchfork reviews. Lots of stuff there to sink your teeth into (and obviously a bunch of Beatles singles to read about, too, back in the archives)
http://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/