Drooly Bunny-Chan
We like to do the occasional jaunt to the Japanese-owned dollar store near our neighborhood. Today I was looking at the kids’ items and I spotted the item at right. It’s the packaging for a tiny rubber stamp (not pictured), with the stamp’s impression below. This beady-eyed bunny apparently loves strawberry shortcake so much, it makes him drool. I don’t know Japanese, so what he’s saying on the stamp is a mystery to me — but I kinda like it that way. It has that “goofy/cute/enigmatic” aura that makes Japanese pop culture so appealing.
It embarrasses me to say this, but much of the time when I’m designing manga books for VIZ I can’t tell what the hell is happening with the story and characters. Currently I’m in the middle of desiging two titles for them. Hunter X Hunter is an action-filled tale typical of their Shonen Jump Advanced titles, with saucer-eyed kids racing after monsters and stuff. The other one I’m doing, Reborn!, is quite different. It’s about a middle school kid who is tutored by a baby mobster. It’s my understanding that some of the characters start out as bulbous, Pokemon-like creatures who eventually “grow” into relatively normal looking children. It also sports a saucy infant/adult romantic storyline, which is probably why the books are rated “T+” for older teens. Those Japanese kids get all the cool stuff, don’t they?
Wasting Away Again
I’m somewhat amazed that Todd Haynes’ legendary underground film Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story has been up at Google Video for several months now without getting pulled. See it before Richard Carpenter catches on. (hat tip to William)
Girls in White Dresses
Here’s what happens when stodgy chronicler of American history Smithsonian Magazine takes on ’60s Girl Group music. The article is very dryly written and unengaging, making obvious points and dwelling too much on Motown (which granted has some overlap with the Girl Group sound, but still …). The best thing about the piece is the lovely color photo of the Supremes rehearsing on some TV variety show. Perhaps my Supremes lovin’ friend Dan can fill me in on when/where that pic was taken.
Feudin’ Fillies of ’48
So I’m sitting here at my computer, getting over another flu and nursing an ailing s.o. while simultaneously attempting to squeeze a 9 page playbill design into 8 pages. Between all that work I’m scanning through several dozen weblogs and wondering why so there’s so little inspiration to be found there. Seems like the bloggers have lots to write about, but nothing of real substance. I did, however, find a couple of little things. First off is the junky redesign of the Dairy Queen logo, found via Coudal. This is what’s called “design by committe”, folks. Other, less upsetting examples of corporate rebranding are laid bare on the Brand New weblog.
My second finding are these scanned pages from a single 1948 issue of Collier’s magazine, courtesy of the always scintillating ASIFA. It demonstrates how valuable illustrators were back then, but even more intriguing to me was that “HEDDA AND LOUELLA STOP FEUDIN’” tagline on the issue’s cover. Hedda and Louella, why didn’t you just kiss and make up?
I Can Only Draw Cats
Drew this while chatting on the phone with Christopher. Here is Eero napping on top of her beige carpet-festooned kitty condo.
Update the Feed
A week later and I think I have a semi-solution for the scrubbles.net feed problem. Most of the new scrubbles.net feeds are being redirected to FeedBurner. For now I’m keeping the old, non-functional feeds. It’s useless to say this (since the people who need this most won’t be able to see it), but to get the latest, greatest feed go to your favorite reader and enter this address:
Popcorn in Bulk
WFMU shares 79 versions of the song “Popcorn” at their weblog. Gershon Kingsley’s original version of the tune sounds so different from the Hot Butter hit of two years later. I enjoyed James Last’s trumpet-heavy take as well. And don’t forget The Marimba Band of Fairfax High School‘s charming cover, contributed by Otis Fodder last January. All very diverse renditions of the same hypnotic melody; more about the song at Wikipedia.
Ladies in Waiting
Just spotted that DVD Savant has an item about Warner Home Video readying a series of Cult Camp Classics DVD boxes for a June 26th release. All four sets look tantalizingly good, but the one that had me really jazzed was the “Women In Peril” one containing latter-day vehicles for two aging movie queens (Joan Crawford in Trog and Lana Turner in The Big Cube, neither of which I’ve seen) and the excellent Women In Prison flick Caged. The latter is honestly not very campy, but its DVD release of this high-style Warner Brothers melodrama will be a welcome one. Eleanor Parker? Excellent. The lady who plays the quasi-lesbian prison guard? Also excellent (okay, maybe the movie’s got some camp).
Speaking of Women In Peril movies, I just had the “priviledge” of watching Lauren Bacall’s turn at the genre in her 1981 thriller/camp classic The Fan. For those with short memories, this is the one where she plays a famous stage actress stalked by an obsessed fan (played by Michael Biehn). Overall it’s pretty bad, but in a slick and watchable way that reminded me another trashy film from that same period — the Jodie Foster “teenagers gone wild” opus Foxes. Biehn’s murders raise more questions than answers (like, how could he get away with stabbing a guy in a crowded public pool?), and the whole thing lumbers along predictably. Bacall’s song and dance numbers at the climax are all laughably awful, like some dime store TV telethon thing. Of course, the audience in the movie cheers rapturously every time. Her fictional show deserves a fictional Tony Award for Best Unintentional Comedy.
Fussbudgets Rejoice
Look at what Fantagraphics will be giving away as part of Free Comic Book Day on May 5th — The Unseen Peanuts, a collection of rare strips which never got reprinted in those ubiquitous old Peanuts paperbacks. Some of these strips have already been collected in the Complete Peanuts volumes, but it’ll be nice to have them all in one place.
Four for the Feeds
Still working out the kinks on this WordPress conversion, but I have a few new (to me) weblogs to share which I can across during the transition period:
- Vintage Pop is the latest venture from J.D. Roth of Folded Space. This one deals in early 20th century American pop culture, and he’s already off to a great start (and thanks for helping me out, J.D.!).
- Condour of Wacky Neighbor has embarked on another project in the form of Smallist, a weblog dealing with all things miniscule. It’s fascinating the variety of stuff one can write about in such a small area, no pun intended.
- I came across The Hits Just Keep Comin’ after the proprietor linked to a scrubbles post. Nice writings on pop music of the recent past, especially as it relates to the Billboard charts (a freaky obsession of mine). Loved the recent post on the vaguely psychedelic ez-listening obscurity “1900 Yesterday” by Liz Damon & The Orient Express (among other tunes).
- Modeling Midcentury Modern comes from a guy who does these amazing 3-D models of vintage buildings. His rendering of the Monsanto House of the Future was recently linked on The Disney Blog, but my personal fave might be this nifty old-skool Jack In The Box.
Betty Hutton: Ball of Fire
Earlier this week, I was saddened to hear about the death of singer-actress Betty Hutton at age 86. What a roller-coaster life she lived. Hutton is one of those odd, semi-forgotten performers that old movie fans rarely have neutral feelings towards. Many find her brassy personality annoying, but personally I love her total lack of inhibition. Especially considering that, during her peak in the ’40s, female singers were expected to come off as ladylike as possible. What impressed me the most about her was her versatility. She completely throws herself into Annie Get Your Gun with contagious energy, for example, but what really surprises are the moments where she conveys a touching vulnerability. For a peek of Betty at her best, enjoy her performance of “Doctor, Laywer, Indian Chief” from the 1945 musical The Stork Club:
Dumb and Dumber
A couple of articles to make you question the intelligence of Americans – first up the L.A. Times has a piece on how TV games shows have gotten progressively easier over the last decade or so. A depressing read which reminded me of how much my own family absolutely adores Deal or No Deal. Granted I’ve never watched an episode, but c’mon, picking suitcases? It just goes to show that you can’t choose your relatives.
This one’s a little less of a downer – Entertainment Weekly on unfinished books. Everybody has at least one book which was started in all earnestness, but never completed. But what about the books that you just have sitting around with no intention of ever reading? Going through a bookshelf recently, I was struck by a pristine copy of The Tale of Genji which has only been saved from the fate of the thrift store box for its nice cover design. Only a severe sickness would ever drive me to read that book.
The Case of the Missing RSS Feed
Another update on the Great Scrubbles.net Migration – it appears that all of my feeds are now dead. I’m working hard on getting this fixed, despite knowing squat about feeds and how they work. Under the old setup, the atom feed was the only functioning feed in the bunch. Now I want to get all of them up and working. Apparently the fact that WordPress was installed in a subdirectory is causing the problem. If anybody reading this has some ideas, I’d love to know them.
The New Scrubbles.net
Hi, I’m back … I spent the last week migrating this weblog over to WordPress. To make a long story short, the old Movable Type system was getting bogged down with spam comments. The situation got so bad that I often couldn’t access the control panel until early evening — then I’d be consumed with slogging through a painfully slow system just moving and deleting those damn comments. When the time spent doing the backstage stuff vastly outnumbers the time spent posting new weblog entries (you know, the fun part), it’s time to move on!
So I installed WordPress and, attempting to find a template that resembled the old design as much as possible, selected a semipopular one called Andreas. Although the overall layout was nice, I ended up doing lots of tweaking on the typography until arriving at what you see here. I like this design very much (dig the modified banner art) – even if it still seems a little plain and LiveJournal-ish (no offense to you LiveJournalers).
As for the WordPress, it’s remarkably easy to use and I’m guardedly optimistic that it can handle the spam (anybody know any good anti-spam plugins?). Please feel free to comment on anything at all. I’m just happy to be back and posting again – on my third blogging system!
Taking a Break
I’m taking a short hiatus to do some retooling around here. Movable Type and/or my server is running real slow and it’s driving me crazy. If you’ve attempted to leave a comment and it results in a slow load, I’m sorry. I will try and get this fixed.
