Elvis Costello, yet again

In my last post on the topic, I implied that the Get Happy!! bonus CD was better than the King of America bonus CD, but now I'm reconsidering. It's true that there are more tracks of interest on the Get Happy!! bonus CD, but none of them are as good as "Having It All" or "End of the Rainbow" from the King of America bonus CD. Elvis Costello's singing on those tracks is so desolate it's almost heartbeaking.

Ghostbusters

I saw something today that reminded me that I'd seen Ghostbusters when it first came out, and had thought it only mildly amusing. I had thought it would be about three guys calling themselves "ghostbusters" trying to exorcise ghosts that didn't exist. That would have been funny. Instead it turned out to be about three guys successfully exorcising ghosts that did exist, and I didn't see what was funny about that. Also, I think you have to "get" Bill Murray to find the movie funny, and I didn't. And, since I never watched Ghostbusters again, or anything else with Murray in it subsequently (except a few minutes of Lost in Translation) I probably still don't.

King of America bonus disc

So, to finish up with the Elvis Costello bonus discs, the King of America bonus disc is intermediate in value between the Get Happy!! and Blood and Chocolate bonus discs. Its highlights are "Having It All," "I'll Wear It Proudly" and "End of the Rainbow," three moving solo acoustic demos; "Betrayal," an outtake; a terrific live version of "The Big Light"; and some lightweight but fun live blues covers.

Oh, and I'm feeling better today.

Questioning this blog

Technically, I've been pretty good about posting something every day either here or on my main blog. But I'm starting to wonder if there's any point to this if I'm just going to post stuff written in five minutes at the end of the day when I'm exhausted. This wasn't what I intended when I started this blog.

Get Happy!! bonus CD

[I slipped yesterday. I had a post all ready to go, but didn't get around to posting it until I was too tired to do anything but sleep. So here it is today, bright and early, and not counting as today's post.]

Get Happy!! was originally a twenty-track album, which was an awful lot for an LP back in those days. (The Rhino set even includes an unlisted bonus track of a radio commercial for the LP whose main selling point was that it had so many tracks.) Of course, twenty tracks on a CD is nothing special; but Rhino outdoes themselves on the bonus disc, which contains thirty tracks (not counting the one mentioned above). And a substantial proportion of these are worth repeated listenings. Some are better than anything on the original LP. The tracks that stand out are alternate versions of "B Movie" and "Girls Talk," "Hoover Factory," "Just a Memory," an alternate version of "New Amsterdam," demos of six songs that appear on Get Happy!! and a solo acoustic demo of a previously unreleased song called "Seven O'Clock."

The Get Happy!! demos are quieter and more subdued, with a country-rock flavor and without the swirling keyboards that dominate the album. I'm normally not in favor of rock being quieter and more subdued, let alone of country rock, but in this case the demos are way better. It's not that I don't like the sound of the album: I do. But on the demos, the songs sound like they're good songs. On the album, they don't.

Listening to these albums, I came to the realization that I like Elvis Costello best when he's keeping things relatively simple. Simple arrangements, either unadorned and acoustic, or straight-out rock; and simple (for Elvis Costello, anyway) lyrics. Which is a problem, of course, because his tendency has been to complicate things (at least up until Spike, when I stopped listening to him).

A placeholder post

Once again, it's late and I'm tired. I'm writing a post, but I won't finish it tonight. So consider this a placeholder, to be expanded later.

I've been listening to the bonus disc to Get Happy!! as I intimated in my last post, and there's a lot more interesting stuff there than on the Blood and Chocolate bonus disc, even proportionately. (There are twice as many tracks on the former as on the latter.) Specifically, I found twelve tracks worth listening to more than once, or even twice. If you want to play along at home, they're tracks 8, 9, 16, 17 and 19-26.

Blood and Chocolate bonus CD

If you read my earlier Blood and Chocolate post, you may have wondered why I was listening to the album in the first place if I remembered it as not being very good. The short answer is: the bonus CD. The long answer is that about a week ago I noticed that my local library had copies available of the early 2000s Rhino reissues of Get Happy!! King of America and Blood and Chocolate. Each of these reissues came with a bonus disc loaded with tracks. I was an Elvis Costello fan back when people thought of him as being punk, or at least New Wave. And though I wasn't interested in hearing the albums themselves again, I was curious enough about the bonus tracks to borrow the CDs. This set me off on an Elvis Costello mini-project, in the course of which I decided to listen to the original albums after all.

Well, of the three bonus discs, the one for Blood and Chocolate is by far the least interesting. There were only three tracks that drew my attention: an uptempo version of "Battered Old Bird," a track called "American Without Tears No. 2 (Twilight Version)" which has the same music as the King of America track but almost completely different lyrics, and a song called "Seven Day Weekend" with Jimmy Cliff. The first two of these are not necesssarily better than the original versions ("American Without Tears No. 2" is definitely worse), but they're interesting to listen to.

Incidentally, I didn't post yesterday because it was my birthday and I decided to give myself a day off.

Blood and Chocolate

I just finished listening to the Elvis Costello album Blood and Chocolate for the first time in many years. It's better than I remembered it being, but it's still not very good.

Diary of the Dead: suspension of disbelief

I just watched George Romero's latest (I think) film Diary of the Dead, in which he reboots, so to speak, his long-running series by going back to the first appearance of zombies but setting it in the near-present, as opposed to 1968 when Night of the Living Dead appeared. Reviews may have been mixed, or so I surmise from the obscurity of the sources of the blurbs on the DVD box. But I enjoyed it, though it has its flaws: in particular, some of the "meaningful" dialogue comes off as pretentious. (I'm unusual, though, in that I preferred Night of the Living Dead to Dawn of the Dead.)

But there's one major aspect of the film which I have a hard time suspending my disbelief for. As I said, the film takes place in the present, as the role played by the Web makes clear. And the protagonists are film students who, as the film begins, are making a horror movie. But nobody ever mentions any of Romero's films, although they would be the first thing that would come to anyone's mind if they began hearing reports about the dead returning to life and eating the living. What's more, nobody ever even says the word "zombie." Now, I understand the convention by which, for example, the South Park doesn't exist in the South Park universe, although shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy do. But flesh-eating zombies are now such a major part of our popular culture that to simply "delete" them doesn't work, at least not for me.

Stuff I don't like as much as I'm supposed to, Part 2: More TV

The Sopranos
Wire
Deadwood
Lost
Battlestar Galactica
Seinfeld
The Simpsons

Stuff I don't like as much as I'm supposed to, Part 1: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Well, this should be an inexhaustible source of posts when I can't think of any other topic. The subject is just what the title says: stuff that other people say I should really like, but which I don't like that much (or at all). These won't be reviews because I won't be trying to be fair. It will be just me sounding off.

SPOILER WARNING: This post has spoilers for season 2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer; also for the first arc of Sailor Moon the manga.

The premiere of this series is devoted to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the TV series, of which I have watched on DVD the first episode and what I gathered were the best episodes from the second season. (See what I mean about not being fair?) The first episode didn't interest me enough to watch any further. First of all, it didn't strike me as being like high school. Rather, it was like a Hollywood version of high school, where even the "plain" characters are pretty or handsome by non-Hollywood standards and everyone is constantly being witty (that's the writers' intent, anyway). Second, I just couldn't suspend my disbelief enough to buy the whole defeating-vampires-with-martial-arts shtick. And third, like I said, it just wasn't that interesting to me.

Some months later, after encountering a bunch of intelligent people who were fans of Buffy on the internet, I decided to give the show another try. This time, I wanted to see the series at its best. And as far as I could tell from reading books, websites etc. it was at its best in Season Two, and the best episodes from that season were the two-parter where Angel reverts to Angelus and the two final episodes, plus one other which I don't remember too well now. Again, I just wasn't that interested. I was particularly annoyed with the finale, because 1) the setup for Buffy killing Angel just after he's turned back from Angel is so obviously and ridiculously contrived, and 2) the teenage girl killing her boyfriend because he's possessed scenario was done better in the first arc of Sailor Moon the manga (which is otherwise pretty forgettable).

And I'm not even going to get into the plot's obvious illogicalities (some of which, to be fair for one second, may have been explained in the episodes I didn't see).

Nocturnes follow-up

If there perchance happen to be any readers of this blog who are wondering what happened after this post, the results of my rereading of Nocturnes can be found here.

Princess Tutu again

I just finished watching Princess Tutu (against my own advice) and the ending (most of which I had forgotten since my first viewing) was good enough to make up for any feelings of disappointment with the rest of the series. A lot of anime flub the ending, but here the ending is the best part. I will say that in retrospect the series feels somewhat padded, but this is probably true of most 26-episode anime.

Sayonara, Zetsubou Sensei

I gave the manga comedy Sayonara, Zetsubou Sensei a lukewarm review in a recent Comics Journal. But I've been watching the anime, which is remarkably faithful to the manga, and it's one of the funniest anime I've seen. I'm not sure what accounts for my differing responses. Part of it is that the anime has a much higher density of gags, many of which go by too fast to be seen clearly. But I think the main reason is that the anime has that anarchic spirit which the manga lacks, as I noted in my review.

Anime: Princess Tutu

I'm in the middle of watching the anime Princess Tutu for the second time. It's good, but not quite as good as I'd remembered it. One problem with it is the protagonist's "friends" Pike and Lilie. The same-sex "friends" of the protagonist who do nothing but annoy and obstruct him or her is are a cliche of anime, and while they're intended as comic relief, usually they only annoy the viewer as well. Pike and Lilie were actually funny at first, but having now watched them for twenty episodes, they're irritating as heck. It occurs to me that it might be better to watch one episode of Princess Tutu a week, as I originally watched it, and as it was first broadcast. That would probably reduce the feeling of repetitiveness that arises from watching a bunch of episodes in a row. And Pike and Lilie would certainly be less irritating when taken in small doses.

Metapost

I have to say that so far this isn't working out quite the way I wanted. The problem is that by the time I get around to posting, I'm often so tired that I can't come up with anything substantial, so I wind up with these very brief posts, which isn't what I intended. And my first priority is practicing Japanese reading, so when I'm at my most alert I do that instead of blogging.

Incidentally, there was no post on Tuesday because I was up in Chicago all day, and by the time I got back it was way too late, and I was way too tired, to blog.

A word of advice

If you're planning both to watch Princess Tutu and to listen to Forbidden Broadway Cleans Up Its Act, watch Princess Tutu first. In particular, make sure you see episode 13 first. (Actually, this only matters for "Swan Lake" on Forbidden Broadway Cleans Up Its Act.)

A Sgt. Pepper epigram

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band has been labelled overrated for so long, and by so many, that it's now underrated. (Sorry; I'm very tired and that's all I can come up with tonight.)

The Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics

The Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics includes a number of stories that are indeed classic: three Barks stories, three Sugar and Spike stories by Sheldon Mayer, two classic Little Lulu stories (and one not so classic, as I mentioned before), and one (only one?) of George Carlson's stories from "Jingle Jangle Comics." If you're familiar with comics history -- particularly if you've read The Smithsonian Book of Comic Book Comics -- you'll be familiar with these artists, if not necessarily the particular stories chosen. But to the "layman," these stories will be revelations.

The trouble is that it includes even more stuff that is far from classic. Some are simply hackwork: Nutsy Squirrel, Intellectual Amos (represented, incomprehensively, by three stories), Alix in Folly-land, Supermouse, Billy and Bonny Bee, Flip and Flopper. Rover may not be hackwork, but it's dull. Some stories are interesting but hardly classic: among these are The Fox and the Crow, Egbert the Elephant, and a Dick Briefer Frankenstein story. (Going by this story, claims that Briefer was a great artist are wildly overstated.)

Then there are the inferior stories by great artists. As I stated in another earlier post, I include the non-Lulu John Stanley stories in this category. And while I'm a huge Pogo fan, the Walt Kelly non-Pogo stories included here are depressing: cute mice and bunnies and Disneyfied dwarves engaged in lukewarm gags or adventures. For that matter, I was disappointed by the Pogo story included here. The Pogo stories in The Smithsonian Book were better. I know I'm in the minority here, but while I love Sugar and Spike, I've never cared for Mayer's earlier strip Scribbly. And while some of Mayer's funny animal stories are indeed classics, the ones included in The Toon Treasury aren't.

I know I'm also in the minority in not liking Kurtzman's Hey, Look! strips (I'll admit, I did like a couple of the ones in here, but even those are hardly classics). Likewise, though Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly, the editors, may have felt bad about their decision to omit any Plastic Man stories, Cole's Burp the Twerp one-pagers are not an acceptable substitute. In fact, most of the covers and one-page strips included could have been omitted with no loss, and the extra space used for another George Carlson story, or one of the stories where Little Lulu tells Alvin a story.

A successful anthology of this sort should make you think "Wow, how much more great stuff that I've never heard of is out there?" This anthology, on the other hand, is more likely to leave you suspecting that this vein must be nearly tapped out. The only real discoveries here for me were two Alice in Wonderland-based stories by Dave Berg. Yes, that Dave Berg. I can't claim that these are classics, but I would like to see more of these stories. It's also a surprise how much Berg's art in these stories resembles Will Elder's EC art.

Incidentally, lovers of Tintin, Asterix or Dr. Slump, to name only three, will be surprised to learn that only the United States produced classic children's comics. (This is particularly ironic, of course, considering the book's editors.)

No post yesterday

Technically speaking there was no new post yesterday, but I did replace an earlier post with all-new content, and I also wrote some of a post that will eventually show up on my main blog, and I decided that was sufficient. Oh, and this counts for today, so there.

Oops

I removed the post that was originally here. I decided that I wasn't comfortable with singling someone out like that, and I wouldn't be able to defend it if called upon to do so. Fortunately, it's unlikely that anyone read it. (Edited 10/30)

Followup to yesterday's post

Following up on yesterday's post about John Stanley's stories in The Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics, recently people have taken to regarding everything Stanley did as a masterpiece on the same level as Little Lulu. But if you compare "Five Little Babies" and "Two Foots is Feet," the two Little Lulu stories in Toon Treasury, with the non-Lulu related Stanley stories "A Day in the Country" and "Mice Business" (the latter a Melvin the Monster story), the non-Lulu stories simply aren't in the same league. Considering the writing alone, the Little Lulu stories are works of genius, while the non-Lulu stories are merely competent humor strips.

On John Stanley and Irving Tripp

In their introductory material to The Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics, Spiegelman and Mouly write that "[John] Stanley wrote and visually planned out his Lulu stories, but most were simply rendered by journeyman cartoonist Irving Tripp, without the deftness of touch visible in Stanley's own drawing, as seen in the ... Tubby story we selected" (p. 12). On the contrary, the art in the two stories in Toon Treasury on which Stanley collaborated with Tripp is classic, while the solo Stanley art in the Tubby story referred to looks like a poor imitation.

Robert Walser

Robert Walser is one of those writers who I feel like I ought to like but have never read more than brief snippets of. (I actually own one of his books but have never gotten around to reading it.) But today in the library I saw Speaking of the Rose, a collection of his short prose pieces, and leafing through it I was intrigued enough to borrow it. We shall see.

No title

I wound up returning Four Freedoms to the library without reading further. I have too many books waiting to be read or reread, and too much other stuff I'd like to do, to force myself to read something I don't really want to.

Micro-post: Nocturnes

Again, not enough time to write a full fledged post. I just read Nocturnes, Kazuo Ishiguro's recently-published collection of short stories. If I had to pronounce upon it right now, I'd have to say that it's not as good as his novels; but I suspect there's more to it than meets the eye. I hope to post more on the book after I reread it, either here or on my main blog.

Micro-post: Stella

Too tired to write a substantive post, so I'll just say that I watched the first forty-odd minutes of the Stella DVD (a sort of cross between standup comedy and sketch comedy) and didn't like it.

Manga Corner: 20th Century Boys, vol. 5

Although it's frequently said that 20th Century Boys is Urasawa's best work, the first four volumes didn't really grab me. In fact, I was considering dropping the series. But volume five, which I bought today, for the first time has me feeling impatient for the next volume. It helps that about halfway through the focus shifts to a new protagonist who is, frankly, more interesting than Kenji.

Comics corner: Stitches

I just finished reading David Small's acclaimed graphic memoir, Stitches. My quick reaction is that while it's absorbing, it's absorbing like a disaster is absorbing. We don't get any insight into Small or his dysfunctional family. Nor was I impressed with either the visual storytelling (except for a few places) or the art. As I said, though this is just a first impression based upon one quick reading.

Commentary tracks to documentaries

Following up on yesterday's post, when the director and producer did their commentary track, they were expecting Orny Adams to do one. He didn't, although there's a short film called "Where Is Orny Now?" (iirc) among the DVD's special features. Documentary theorists sometimes worry about the imbalance of power between documentarians and their subjects. Giving unhappy subjects the chance to do commentary tracks would seem to be a way to reduce this imbalance and to introduce "oppositional voices," as theory would put it. But I don't know any instance of this. Seinfeld and his friend Colin Quinn (who appears in the film) do a commentary track on the Comedian DVD, but they're happy with the film, as far as I can tell. The two high school basketball players who are followed in Hoop Dreams do a commentary track on the DVD to that film, but they likewise express no complaints about the film. The only "oppositional" commentary tracks by a film's subject that I know of are to mockumentaries, where sometimes the main characters will do a commentary track in character. The examples I've heard are on the DVDs of This Is Spinal Tap and Nothing So Strange.

Movie Corner: Comedian

I've been watching the documentary Comedian on DVD. It's primarily about Jerry Seinfeld's post-Seinfeld struggle to build a completely new standup act after retiring his old act, but there's a subplot about an up-and-coming standup comedian named Orny [sic] Adams, who is potentially on the verge of his big break. I think it's safe to say that he comes off in the film as a conceited, arrogant jerk. I know that when I watched the film for the first time, I was rooting for him to fail. This may not be fair: there are indications that his "conceit" and "arrogance" (which he only displays talking to the camera, not to other people in the film) are really intended to build up his own confidence, which standup comedians obviously need a lot of. But these come later in the film, after one's impression of Orny has been formed.

In their commentary track, the director and producer aren't exactly apologetic, but they do say that Orny is "misjudged." It could be that they were too close to the material to realize how it would look to an audience, or that they overestimated the extent to which they could get viewers to revise their first impression. On the other hand, having a "villain" -- Orny -- does make the film more compelling dramatically, and I would have liked them to take more responsibility for how they portrayed Orny. (To be sure, they didn't have to say anything.)

As for the film as a whole, I didn't like Seinfeld and am not a fan of standup. While the film didn't change my mind about either of these, it gave me more respect for Jerry. You have to respect someone who is as devoted as he is to his craft, which in this case is making people laugh. Bear in mind that there was no need for him to retire his entire act, and indeed, judging by the film and the commentaries, for an established comedian to set about building a new act from scratch is almost unprecedented.

Get Real

I just read Get Real, Donald Westlake's final Dortmunder novel. I've never been a fan of the Dortmunder books: I prefer the Parker books, and of his comic novels my favorite is The Spy in the Ointment. In Get Real, too, I find the satire of "reality" show production (which is portrayed here as virtually 100% staged) funnier than Dortmunder and his gang. One thing I realized, though, is that Westlake is a good writer at the sentence level. His style isn't flashy, so it's easy to overlook this; but his descriptions are crisp, vivid and sharply observed, and free of flowery language and cliches.

Four Freedoms

John Crowley's fantasy Little, Big is one of my very favorite books, so I was excited when I saw a new novel by him, Four Freedoms, in my local public library yesterday. I have now read the first eighteen pages and my excitement is gone. In fact, nothing in those pages made me want to read further. The slackness of the prose is particularly disheartening. Of course it might get better later on, but looking ahead I'm not optimistic.

No post yesterday

No post yesterday because:

1) I was extremely tired, and

2) when I finally got around to trying to write, I was unable to stay connected to the net long enough to post anything.

The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya

I recently read The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya, the second book in the series of Haruhi Suzumiya novels (at least in the U.S.). I've seen some negative reactions to it, but I'm not sure why. Haruhi's absurdity and Kyon's acid responses are still funny. There are also hints of a larger plot running through the novels as a whole.

Ground rules

The ground rules of this blog, for those who may find their way here by chance or otherwise:

1. I write for myself alone (this post, and any other meta-posts, excepted).

2. I write something every day, except on days when I post something on my main blog.

(Edited 10/11 to add the final clause. By no coincidence, I posted something on my main blog today.)

Hello

Hi! There should be content here shortly. If you've stumbled across this blog by accident, my main blog is here.