Robbie the Werewolf

         
          Robbie the Werewolf was a nightclub performer in the early sixties. Yes, he would actually perform disguised as a werewolf. His act combined "sick" beatnik comedy with rock 'n' roll and folk songs rewritten with funny monster lyrics. Surprisingly, the act also showcased his virtuosity as a flamenco guitarist!
          According to Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys, "(Robbie) was a monster talent --no pun intended!"
          His act was captured for posterity on a super rare LP "Robbie the Werewolf  at The Waleback". The LP has supposedly sold for as much as $1000.00 a copy. I wouldn't recommend spending that much, but I downloaded it for free a few years ago and it was well worth the effort. You can hear (and maybe download?) Mp3s for the album at the link below. Hey --'tis the season!
http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2008/07/robbie-the-were.html

Cute Li'l Halloween Costumes!

I don't care how old a guy gets -- he never gets too old to enjoy seeing "youngsters" in their cute li'l Halloween costumes. Check out the link below!
http://www.legavenue.com/en/women/costumes

Elephant Toenail Report Blog Rules, Man!!!!

The band above is the Czech novelty band, Ivan Mladek & Banjo Band. It is typical fair from the great weblog The Elephant Toenail Report at www.elephanttoenailreport.blogspot.com  The blog is full of weird and hilarious stuff, reported in a dry "we can all identify with this" (although no sane person could) manner which makes it that much more hilarious. It is the best thing on the internet.
Honestly, where does he come up with this stuff? CHECK IT OUT!

The FUGS' Tuli Kupferberg (86) RIP

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/arts/music/13kupferberg.html

Click above for a fine obit, on Tuli Kupferberg, who brought a lot of laughter and happiness to people while shocking them into thinking! (about peace and love (all kinds), tolerance & the joys of art and freedom.) How many popular artists have accomplished that?
I know this is old, but it is news to me.

The HUNGARIAN SUICIDE SONG

My strangest experience in a lifetime of being a record collector / music listener;
Years ago, I bought the Rykodisc reissue of one of my favorite old albums “Trust” by Elvis Costello. One of the bonus tracks on the CD had a disturbing effect on me – it made me feel profoundly depressed for hours. No mere song, no matter how depressing in subject matter should have that degree of effect on a normal, mentally healthy human being. Corny as it might sound, the song actually scared me, and I vowed to myself that I would never listen to it again.
Years later, I bought an inexpensive book called “Strange But True – Mysterious and Bizarre People” by Thomas Slemen. It contained a chapter on “The Hungarian Suicide Song”. I quote;
“In December, 1932, a down and out Hungarian named Reszo Seress was trying to make a living as a songwriter in Paris, but kept failing miserably. All of his compositions failed to impress the music publishers of France, but Seress carried on chasing his dream nevertheless. He was determined to become an internationally famous songwriter. His girlfriend had constant rows with him over the insecurity of his ambitious life. She urged him to get a full-time 9 to 5 job, but Seress was uncompromising. He told her he was to be a songwriter or a hobo, and that was that.
One afternoon, things finally came to a head. Seress and his fiancée had a fierce row over his utter failure as a composer, and the couple parted with angry words.
On the day after the row - which happened to be a Sunday - Seress sat at the piano in his apartment, gazing morosely through the window at the Parisian skyline. Outside, storm-clouds gathered in the grey sky, and soon the heavy rain began to pelt down.
"What a gloomy Sunday" Seress said to himself as he played about on the piano's ivories, and quite suddenly, his hands began to play a strange melancholy melody that seemed to encapsulate the downhearted way he was feeling over his quarrel with his girl and the state of the dispiriting weather.
"Yes, Gloomy Sunday! That will be the title of my new song" muttered Seress, excitedly, and he grabbed a pencil and wrote the notes down on an old postcard. Thirty minutes later he had completed the song.
Seress sent his composition off to a music publisher and waited for acceptance with a lot more hope than he usually had in his heart. A few days later, the song-sheet was returned with a rejection note stapled to it that stated: "Gloomy Sunday has a weird but highly depressing melody and rhythm, and we are sorry to say that we cannot use it."
The song was sent off again to another publisher, and this time it was accepted. The music publisher told Seress that his song would soon be distributed to all the major cities of the world. The young Hungarian was ecstatic.
But a few months after Gloomy Sunday was printed, there were a spate of strange occurrences that were allegedly sparked off by the new song. In Berlin, a young man requested a band to play Gloomy Sunday, and after the number was performed, the man went home and blasted himself in the head with a revolver after complaining to relatives that he felt severely depressed by the melody of a new song which he couldn't get out of his head. That song was Gloomy Sunday.
A week later in the same city, a young female shop assistant was found hanging from a rope in her flat. Police who investigated the suicide found a copy of the sheet-music to Gloomy Sunday in the dead girl's bedroom.
Two days after that tragedy, a young secretary in New York gassed herself, and in a suicide note she requested Gloomy Sunday to be played at her funeral. Weeks later, another New Yorker, aged 82, jumped to his death from the window of his seventh-story apartment after playing the 'deadly' song on his piano. Around the same time, a teenager in Rome who had heard the unlucky tune jumped off a bridge to his death.
The newspapers of the world were quick to report other deaths associated with Seress' song. One newspaper covered the case of a woman in North London who had been playing a 78 recording of Gloomy Sunday at full volume, infuriating and frightening her neighbors, who had read of the fatalities supposedly caused by the tune. The stylus finally became trapped in a groove, and the same piece of the song played over and over. The neighbors hammered on the woman's door but there was no answer, so they forced the door open - only to find the woman dead in her chair from an overdose of barbiturates. As the months went by, a steady stream of bizarre and disturbing deaths that were alleged to be connected to Gloomy Sunday persuaded the chiefs at the BBC to ban the seemingly accursed song from the airwaves. Back in France, Rizzo Seress, the man who had composed the controversial song, was also to experience the adverse effects of his creation. He wrote to his ex-fiancée, pleading for a reconciliation. But several days later came the most awful, shocking news. Seress learned from the police that his sweetheart had poisoned herself. And by her side, a copy of the sheet music to Gloomy Sunday was found.
At the end of the 1930s, when the world was plunged into the war against Hitler, Seress' inauspicious song was quickly forgotten in the global turmoil, but the sheet-music to the dreaded song is still available to those who are curious to know if the morbid melody can still exert its deadly influence...”
Although I didn’t remember the name off the top of my head, I instantly KNEW this had to be the song I had heard on the Elvis Costello CD several years earlier. No two songs could be THAT depressing! I dug the CD out and of course, I was right.
However, Slemen’s suggestion that the song is rarely (if ever) heard these days is an outright lie, to add mystique to the song’s reputation. I did not bother to include a video clip of the song here, but several of them can readily be heard on You-Tube. An iTunes search reveals that over 100 artists have recorded the song, including Billie Holiday (who was forced by her label to tack on an “it was all a dream” ending, as they found it too depressing to release otherwise), Sarah Brightman, Mel Torme, Etta James, Sinead O’Connor, Artie Shaw, Ricky Nelson, Ray Charles, Marianne Faithful, The Smithereens & The Lightcrust Doughboys. The most depressing version I’ve heard is by Diamonda Galas, which is also a You-tube clip.

Car Crashes Into Cedar Rapids Eye Clinic

(Wednesday 10/05/11)
A car crashed through the front entrance of the Wolfe Eye Clinic building in southeast Cedar Rapids this morning.
The car came through the front entrance around 10:15 a.m. Wednesday, authorities said.
Everyone in the clinic, located at

1245 Second Ave.

SE, was asked to evacuate, but patients are now back in the building. Appointments are expected to resume sometime after 11 a.m., but some services are being canceled because of debris and dust in the air.
The female driver involved in the accident was a patient at the clinic, officials said. She was the only person injured in the incident.
The car came about a foot from hitting the clinic’s front desk

From Beto & Jaime with Love & Rockets

Gilbert Hernandez (left) Jaime Hernandez (right)

 (Above) Examples of Gilbert's art 

(Above) Examples of Jaime's art

          Last night I got to see a Q&A session with Gilbert (aka Beto) & Jaime (pronounced HI-may) Hernandez – two of the world’s greatest living cartoonists. They appeared at Shambaugh Auditorium on the campus of The University of Iowa in Iowa City. Although they are still young men, for over thirty years they have been writing and illustrating the classic alternative comic book “Love and Rockets” (later appropriated as the name of an unauthorized rock band.) “Love and Rockets” is a comic book made up of two unrelated, yet somehow complimentary halves. Jaime’s half concerns Maggie and Hopey, a pair of young lesbians living in Hoppers, a Latino community in Los Angeles. Gilbert’s half is set in the South American pueblo of Palomar, featuring Luba and her many children. 

          Embarrassingly, I have to admit that I am not very familiar with their writing – there is so much great stuff in the world, there simply aren’t enough hours in a lifetime to see and hear and read everything great that’s out there. Suffice to say that they have received pretty much universal acclaim for their writing. Interestingly, the moderator last night (who, overly modestly, did not state his name) is not an art teacher, but an English teacher.

         What I do know about the Hernandez brothers is that their black and white artwork is exquisitely beautiful. Every panel is a masterpiece, every page is a masterpiece. Interestingly, last night’s moderator showed slides of several full comic pages, almost none of which contained any writing or dialogue. Jaime’s elegant, mostly solid blacks on white is perfect for his sleek, modern storytelling. Gilbert’s funkier approach is perfect for his stories about down- to- earth characters who share magical, mystical beliefs. Don’t take my word for it, though. In the most recent Comics Journal (issue 301), R. Crumb (the greatest cartoonist in history) singles out (doubles out?) The Hernandez Brothers as masters of anatomically correct drawing, and masters of drawing beautiful women. (Crumb claims limited ability at the former and NO ability at the latter). In relation to their drawings of beautiful women, one critic (I don’t know his name) memorably wrote of the Hernandezes “Their genius is like cruelty – it makes you fall in love with lines on paper.”

          Considering their considerable reputation, the two men came across as genuinely modest and likeable.

          Last night’s most memorable moments;

          Gilbert related that their mother would occasionally spend hours telling them stories about her growing up in Mexico. The Hernandez children were utterly fascinated by her stories, which regularly combined realistic situations with supernatural elements presented unquestioningly as fact.

          Jaime related that one of his favorite cartoonists was a creator of Li’l Archie comics. As an example, he described one panel in which a single element – a dark side of a barn – almost subliminally related to the reader that it was sundown and therefore, Li’l Archie, walking on the road, is headed for home before it gets dark.

          “Love and Rockets” used to appear about three times a year. It is now an annual. I was surprised to learn that nowadays each artist only produces 50 pages a year, but that is more than they ever produced in years passed.

          Their work is available, as always, from their long time publisher Fantagraphics Books.