FLOPS!

Happy American family in their new 1959 Edsel

As a person with no talent who has never accomplished anything in his life, I take particular pleasure in reveling in the failure of others. (Admit it – you do too. We all do!) It is in this spirit that the following blog is submitted.

FILM

          What is the lowest grossing film of all time?

According to Wikipedia 

The Worst Movie Ever! is a 2011 action comedy musical film, written, produced, and directed by Glenn Berggoetz. The film had its theatrical premiere on August 19, 2011, in a single cinema, the Laemmle Sunset 5 in Los Angeles, resulting in the theater's worst box office results ever: just one paid admission and grossing just $11. According to director Glenn Berggoetz, the film sold just one ticket over the weekend (for the sole Saturday screening), with nobody attending the Friday screening.

Zyzzyx Road

(pronounced /zəˈzɪzɪks/ zə-ziz-iks) is a 2006 independent thriller film. It stars Leo Grillo, Katherine Heigl, and Tom Sizemore. The screenplay was written by John Penney, who also directed the film. The film has gained a degree of notoriety due to its extremely low U.S. box office gross ($30 USD).

Zyzzyx Road

was shown once a day at noon for seven days (February 25 through March 2, 2006) at Highland Park Village Theater in Dallas, Texas, a movie theater rented by the producers for $1,000. The limited release was deliberate: Grillo was uninterested in releasing the film domestically until it underwent foreign distribution, but needed to fulfill the U.S. release obligation required by the Screen Actors Guild for low-budget films (films with budgets less than $2.5 million that are not for the direct-to-video market). The strategy had the side effect of making the film at the time the lowest grossing film of all time, earning just $30 at the box office from six patrons. Unofficially, its opening weekend netted $20. The $10 difference is due to a personal refund by Grillo to makeup artist Sheila Moore, who had worked on the film, and her friend. It has since been beaten by the film The Worst Movie Ever! which took in $11 and sold only one ticket.Both

Zyzzyx Road

and the similarly named Zzyzx have been cited as the lowest-grossing film of all time.
The low gross of the former could have been a publicity stunt. The low gross of the latter was clearly due to unusual circumstances. The lowest box office gross I have found, that appears to be legitimate (ie; the gross was low because no one went to it) is the 1982 Columbian film Contaminacion. By this films tenth anniversary (1992) the film had grossed $1,500.
          The brilliant but extremely erratic filmmaker Terry Gilliam created Tideland in 2004. It was not released in the U.S. until almost a year later, when it appeared in one theatre and grossed $7,276.

                                            More Edsels


TELEVISION
What is the lowest rated TV show of all time?
In July 2004, famous tennis playing hot-head John McEnroe began a CNBC talk show entitled McEnroe. The show was unsuccessful, twice earning a 0.0 Nielsen rating, and was cancelled within five months. It’s the first show in the history of TV that scored so low it was a mathematical possibility that NO ONE watched it.

What was the TV show that was cancelled the quickest?
ABC’s Turn On! Was, arguably, cancelled in 11 minutes. Turn-On was an American sketch comedy series that aired on ABC in February 1969. Again, per Wikipedia: Turn-On's premise was that it was produced by a computer, though this was not the case. Distinguishing characteristics of the show were its use of the Moog synthesizer and lack of sets, except for a white backdrop. Unlike Laugh-In the show "focused almost exclusively on sex as a comedic subject", using various rapid-fire jokes and risqué skits but no laugh track. The program was also filmed instead of presented live or on videotape. Several of the jokes were presented with the screen divided into four squares resembling comic strip panels. The production credits of the episode appeared after each commercial break, instead of conventionally at the beginning or end.
(The show’s host) Tim Conway has stated that Turn-On was canceled midway through its only episode, so that the party the cast and crew held for its premiere as the show aired across the United States also marked its cancellation. Cleveland's WEWS stopped the episode before it finished (after "11 minutes", according to Conway).^[5] The station sent ABC network management an angry telegram: "If your naughty little boys have to write dirty words on the walls, please don't use our walls." Denver, Colorado's KBTV did not air the episode, stating that after previewing it "We have decided, without hesitation, that it would be offensive to a major segment of the audience"; ABC's Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington affiliates also decided to not show the episode. Viewers of Little Rock, Arkansas's KATV, which disliked the show but decided to air it, "jam[med] the station's switchboard" with complaints.
Turn-On was not officially cancelled for several days, but WEWS, KBTV, and KATV told ABC that they would not air the show again, and Bristol-Myers ordered Schlatter and Friendly to end production. ABC received 369 calls of complaint during the show, compared to 20 supporting it. Announcer Gary Owens was busy when it aired, so he has never seen his own show.
So, what the heck was so offensive? Here is Wikipedia’s outline of the shows contents

·                    Two policemen say, "Let us spray," before spraying cans of mace at the camera.

·                    A firing squad prepares to shoot an attractive woman when the squad leader says, "Excuse me, miss, but in this case we are the ones with one final request." (This skit was recycled in Schlatter's revival of Laugh-In in 1978, with no complaints.)

·                    A bikini-wearing Teresa Graves lounges on a park bench surrounded by cardboard bushes. She exclaims, "I feel so guilty - I mean, lying here and all." Pause. "I should be out *shopping* somewhere!"

·                    An armed hijacker tells an ersatz Superman: "OK buddy, take me to Cuba."

·                    Chuck McCann, dressed as a cop, prowls around cardboard bushes with his nightstick while singing, "Hello, young lovers, wherever you are ..."

·                    "The Body Politic", shown three times during the episode, featured a buxom, reclining blonde (Maura McGiveney) saying things like "Mr. Nixon, as President, now becomes the titular head of the Republican Party."

·                    McGiveny asks Tim Conway if he loves her. Conway gets offended, telling her that he just met her and, for all he knows, she could be a "a pot-smoking, jaded, wild-eyed, radical dropout." When McGiveny tells him that she's just that, he says, "I love you!"

·                    A sleazy TV pitchman (Robert Staats) promotes a breakfast cereal "soaked in mescaline."

·                    The same pitchman appears in a second spoof commercial selling women's shoes, though he is gradually revealed to be a foot fetishist.

·                    A diagram of a swastika is displayed as a narrator says, "You are now looking at the table at the Paris peace accords agreed to by General Ky."

·                    Several homosexual-themed messages scrolling across the screen, including "God Save the Queens", "Free Oscar Wilde" and "The Amsterdam Levee is a dike".

·                    A pregnant woman singing "I Got Rhythm" (alluding to the rhythm method of birth control).

·                    A vending machine dispensing the birth control pill, with an anxious young woman putting coins into it and then feverishly shaking the broken machine (some ABC affiliates cut the show off after this sketch).

·                    A draft-dodger holding a sign reading Sweden.

·                    Conway, dressed in a samurai outfit and speaking mock Japanese, is revealed to be university president/politician S.I. Hayakawa.

·                    A black man, face-to-face with a white man, says, "Mom always did like you best!" (an allusion to a popular catchphrase of The Smothers Brothers)

·                    One cop, played by Chuck McCann, asks a second, "You want to take some of this pornographic literature home with you tonight?" The colleague replies, "I don't even have a pornograph!" McCann then rips up a skin magazine and begins eating the pieces.

·                    A commercial spoof shows Conway touting a masculine deodorant while lifting weights and working out. "When I'm all through, I smell like a lady," he concludes and is shown in drag.

·                    In another commercial parody, Conway is shown wearing a tuxedo, and heavy eye mascara.

·                    A sequence (the show's longest) with the word sex flashing on and off in pulsating colors while Conway and Bonnie Boland leer at each other.^[3] Various stock photographs are displayed during the sequence, including one of Pope Paul VI.

·                    Conway as spokesman for "Citizens Action Committee of America," a group with the acronym CACA.

·                    The black programmer shown programming the computer supposedly generating the show says he dreamed he was a duck in Lester Maddox's bathtub. "I migrated," he says.

·                    A young woman in cap and gown is shown lobbing a hand grenade.

·                    Two men (Hamilton Camp and Chuck McCann) are standing at a globe. "Tell me," one says to the other, "where is the capital of South Vietnam?" The second man spins the globe and points, "Mostly over here, in Swiss bank accounts."

·                    A Catholic nun asks a priest, "Father, can I have the car tonight?" The priest replies, "Just as long as you don't get in the habit."

·                    Conway tells Graves, "I was so damned angry when I found out my kids were popping pills, I went out and got drunk."

·                    One message scrolled across the screen: "Israel Uber Alles."

·                    A recurring series of skits with Conway as a marriage counselor in session with an African American husband and an Asian wife. The last state laws against interracial marriages had been struck down only two years earlier.

·                    Two men in Stetson hats defend the principles of Southern womanhood. One then says to the other, "Come on, big beauty," and they hold hands and walk out effeminately.

·                    A white Southern hotel guest phones the main desk about the Gideon Bible which states "'Moses married an Ethiopian woman' ... in the Atlanta Hilton!?!"

·                    A puppet snake says, "Remember, folks, I could have given Eve the apple and the Pill!"

 

IF IT PAYS TO BEAT A DEAD HORSE WITH A SPATULA, THEN THAT'S GOOD ADVERTISING !

Wow! Bizarre. This and the next ad are from around 1890!

But, as Freud said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

What the heck does this ad mean? Copy reads;
"Be Grateful For That Plateful
American chow,
is better right now,
than millions abroad have been getting,
So it gives us a pain,
when people complain,
at the table Uncle Sam is setting!"
Smoothness, one of the 5 Crowns is force-feeding peas and mashed potatoes to "Toughness the Wanter".The other 5 Crowns; Flavor, Lightness, Body & Richness watch, peeking from behind a partly opened door. This ad is from the 1940s.

Copy reads, "Should a Gentleman offer a Tiparillo to a Librarian?"
Nowadays, a naked librarian would be embarrassed to be seen smoking in public.

Copy reads: "Know why Wolfschmidt Vodka's making such a splash? Because it's the only vodka that's won 33 medals!"
"When I hear that I feel like shouting Bloody Mary!"
What kind of medals do vodkas win? Apparently that's none of our business. In the late 1960's most people still believed you shouldn't eat within an hour before swimming, but apparently alcohol consumption was practically recomended. 
  

BACK FROM THE GRAVE Rockin' 1966 Punkers!

          I love compilation CDs of impossibly obscure, great old singles. These compilations allow a cheapskate geek like me to own hundreds and hundreds of ultra – cool songs without having to waste the money and time that collector geeks spend to score the original old records.

          In the area of 60’s rock ‘n’ roll, the Nuggets and Pebbles series get the lion’s share of critical attention. Every Pebbles disc has at least  three or four mind blowing classics, and the first two Nuggets boxes are sheer ambrosia. My favorite however, is the Back From The Grave series. While Pebbles and Nuggets intermix garage band trash (That’s a compliment!) with psychedelia*, folk rock* and full - blown pop music productions**, “Back From the Grave” never veers from pure, sinister, ultra primitive, demonic, garage band trash! Before the more common term “garage band rock ‘n’ roll” took over, this type of music was referred to as “60’s punk”, and these comps show the accuracy of that term! You won’t think for one second that any of these musicians are professionals or over the age of twenty at the most. (And that’s the way rock ‘n’ roll is supposed to be!!!) On the CDs there are five volumes, numbering 1 through 4, then skipping to #8. (There were eight original vinyl double - record volumes, the contents of which can fit into five digital discs, so apparently the fifth CD is listed as the “eighth”  as a sign of completeness.) Each of these CDs contains between 29 & 32 songs!

       These songs have to be heard to be believed, but I can’t resist trying to describe a few. On Volume One; “Jack the Ripper” by The One Way Streets, in which the singer is out in the slum after dark in the age of the Ripper murders. The song is something of a call and response, with the lead singing things like “Now I hear my mother calling me”, followed by the band shouting “Jack the Rippa! Jack the Rippa!”. He needn’t have worried – at the end of the song he realizes he is Jack the Ripper. The lyrics (but not the wild music) of “Surfside Date” by The Triumphs is a great, sarcastic fun – in – the- sun parody; “We’ll take a dip in the waves / Like sun – ripened surfside slaves / After that usual razzamatazz / I’ll take you home and all that jazz / We’ve had a surfside date!” When someone unearthed it years later, they assumed “The Crusher” by The Novas featured the TV wrestler The Crusher on lead vocals. However, it was really a 300 pound 16 year old boy imitating “the great athlete”. The lyrics go along the lines of, ”Do the hammer lock, Do the hammer lock, Do the hammer lock you turkey - necks, everybody do it now. ROAR!!! Do the eye gouge, Do the eye gouge, Do the eye gouge you turkey necks etc.)

          Volume Two is just as great – among the many highlight is “Willie the Wild One” by Willie the Wild One. According to the song, the guy drives a motor cycle and has long purple hair. After singing the verses he likes to holler masochistically “AW – SUFFER!” Oddly, Conrad Birdie, the Elvis parody character in the wholesome Broadway play “Bye, Bye Birdie” frequently yells that during one of his songs, after which the girls all swoon.  

            The insanity is unabated through Volumes Three & Four. The former kicks off with a gloriously tacky, hyperactive organ riff from “In the Hall of the Mountain King” introducing the great “Stormy” by The Jesters of Newport”; “ I love you girl, but you’ll never adore me / You’re like the ocean / You’re stormy”. “Nonymous” by The Treytones sports the lyric, “Had a blind date the other night / She looked like the loser of a hatchet fight!” The song is unrelenting until the band stops on a dime after the lead singer shouts “That’s it! I Quit!”

            The latter has “The Snails’ Love Song” by The Snails. The band plays the same four note R&B riff over and over again, while the vocalist (an ultra nerdy looking white teenage boy – pictured in the CDs booklet) does a James Brown type rap: “Yeh, we’re the snails, (“audience” cheers) over here is Mister Randy Corley on gee-tar (“audience” cheers)” Apparently the band invited about a dozen friends into the studio to create a party atmosphere -- punctuated by cheers from the audience and calls for sandwiches! Volume four also includes two songs by The Spiders, Alice Cooper’s original teen garage band!

          By the way, the same label, Crypt, that released Back From the Grave, also released two volumes of Garage Punk Unknowns. Every one of the 31 songs on Volume One is great. It includes great Mersey Beat style remakes of Bobby Vinton’s Roses are Red My Love, and

Frankie Lane

’s Jezebel. It’s every bit as great as the first four volumes of Back from… and beats that series’ lackluster Volume Eight all to hell. Garage Punk Unknowns Vol. One is a tad less wild than that other series – perhaps that warranted a different title in the producer’s minds. Like Back From 8, Volume Two of Garage Punk Unknowns is a disappointment too, except for The Little Boy Blues remake of The Yardbirds remake of Tiny Bradshaw’s R&B classic “Train Kept A Rollin’”. It features the wild, rewritten lyric, “She was a heifer, and I’m a real gone stud!” I recommend getting the song on the vastly superior Pebbles Volume 10.

      

         

* (not that there’s anything wrong with it)

** (not that there’s anything wrong with ‘em)

World's Weirdest Comic Books Pt.1

From the creators of Shazam! (aka Cpt. Marvel) came "Fatman the Flying Saucer" (no. 1 April, 1967). Van Crawford saved the life of an extraterrestrial. The grateful E.T. gave Van a chocolate drink that would transform him into a flying saucer. Van teams up with Lucious Pindle, a thin teenager alias The Tinman.
In issue one (was there ever an issue 2?) Anti-Man (who is similar to The Creature From the Black Lagoon) is hell bent on destruction of the human race, since they have destroyed his race, leaving him the last of his kind. Before any real destruction can be done, anti-man's battle-ax wife shows up and tells him he needs to support their 5,000 tadpoles. She explains that "Every time he gets hopped up on seaweed juice", he goes around claiming he's the last of the species.

Of course, Elsie is the mascot of Borden Foods, and her husband Elmer is the namesake of  Elmer's glue. This November 1949 comic is about their domestic adventures with their children Beulah and Beauregard. In one story, Elmer is shrunk down to the size of a mouse by Beauregard's chemistry set. The mice tell him they would prefer cheese rather than the bacon he puts in their mouse traps.Surprisingly, this is the only pro-dairy product statement in the book. 

A parody of the Johnson administration. Ladybird as Wonder Woman is hilarious. (1966)

(June 2004) These guys spend a lot of long, lonely nights on the road. One night, despite their being in denial, old mother nature takes her course, and the duo begin an ongoing homosexual relationship. (The smell of Petey's socks drive Butch insane with desire, and cupids fill their tawdry hotel room.) They begin seeing penis shapes everywhere they look.  To confirm to themselves that they "hate the fags", the two engage in a killing spree, mass murdering homosexuals. (Hey -- I said these were weird!)

This is the first in an on-going series I will do whenever I can't come up with anything else to do.
 

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS -- The Mesopotamians

THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS -- "All about the public acceptance of fragile ideas."

          Last Sunday, October 30, I saw They Might Be Giants perform at The Englert Theatre in Iowa City, Iowa. I am used to seeing bluegrass bands, where five or six people come out with acoustic instruments and blow the audience away with nothing more than their pure musical virtuosity. TMBG’s huge, rear – screen projections, dozens of colored light effects, disco mirror ball & dry ice fog struck me as a bit of culture shock. (I was a bit prepared for it, because their show was like this when I saw them in person ten years ago.) My unavoidable reaction – “is this about dazzling an audience with special effects, or is it about MUSIC & IDEAS?”  I enjoyed the show, but felt it was seriously lacking content. Happily, I would be proven wrong as the night progressed.

           Surprisingly, just as they had done ten years ago, the band played “Fingertips” in it’s entirety. “Fingertips” is 20 separate, utterly disjointed song fragments ranging from about 10 to 20 seconds in length. An audience member who has never heard the original  “Apollo 18” CD would have absolutely no idea what was going on during this. Hey – I’ve owned the album for something like 20 years, and I still have absolutely no idea what was going on during this.

            Well into the show, John Flansburgh made a valuable comment – “This show is about the public acceptance of fragile ideas.” Shortly after this, one of them stated that it was time for The (somebody?) and (somebody?) Show”. (the vocals during the music were perfectly amplified, but when the guys were speaking, their voices were often so distorted they were incomprehensible.) Anyway, the guys had a small camera they could use to project a live image of the audience on the huge rear screen. They turned this camera around and performed a puppet show projected on the screen, featuring a pair of somewhat linty looking, knitted, googly eyed puppets. Even though I couldn’t make out most of what they were saying, the concept itself was hilarious and charming, and it completely won me over for the rest of the show.

          NOW I understood what they were doing! They were using all their high – tech gadgetry to strong-arm a rock audience into accepting their “fragile ideas”. To perform a puppet show in the middle of a wild rock concert is “a fragile idea”. Their stubborn insistence on performing the utterly incoherent “Fingertips” was a “fragile idea”.

          Throughout the evening, They performed “Birdhouse In Your Soul”, “Snail Shell”, “Ana Ng”, “Dead” (remember, “I returned a bag of groceries accidentally taken off the shelf before the expiration date etc.”) and many others. At some point they performed their mind boggling new song “Cloisonné” with John Linnell playing a huge bass saxophone. Now, a week later, I don’t quite remember when certain songs were performed in the show. Hey, I go to a show to enjoy it, not to take notes! Anyway, towards the end of the show, Linnell finally got out the accordion, to joyous applause from all. They performed their classic “Triangle Man”. The show proper ended with the anthemic “The Mesopotamians”.    

            For the first of two encores, they performed “If I Was A Girl”, as a duet, with both guys on vocals and Linnell’s accordion the only instrument. (Most of the show had Linnell and Flansburgh backed by a four piece rock band.) They performed one of my all time favorites, the jazzy “Lie Still Little Bottle” with Linnell on bass sax, Flansburgh improvising on a portable little electronic noise making machine (fragile idea, anyone?), and another band member on keyboards. The first encore ended with the rather anti – climactic “Why Won’t You Die?’

           The second encore got off to a rousing start with the standard, “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)”, and ended with an equally rousing “Hi, We’re The Replacements”. So, They Might Be Giants ended their show by introducing themselves as a different band! I think that would be yet another of this bands’ fragile ideas.   

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.   



MONROE CROSSING -- A Man of Constant Sorrow

MONROE CROSSING -- Into the Fire

Part 3 -- BLUEGRASS -- The Best Bands You've Never Heard In Your Life!

www.monroecrossing.com
MONROE CROSSING

FOUNDING MEMBERS of MONROE CROSSING;

ART BLACKBURN – Lead vocals, guitar, harmony vocals

LISA FUGLIE – Lead vocals, fiddle, mandolin, guitar, harmony vocals

MARK ANDERSON – (Lisa’s husband) Bass, bass vocals

MATT THOMPSON – Mandolin, fiddle, harmony vocals  

BENJI FLAMING - Banjo

Art Blackburn has recently retired and been replaced by a fine singer, songwriter, guitarist DEREK JOHNSON

          My month - long coverage of the bands that appeared at The Aledo Bluegrass Festival Labor Day weekend ends with my favorite current bluegrass band, Monroe Crossing. They are the current leading purveyors of traditional bluegrass music a la Flatt & Scruggs, The Stanley Bros., Reno & Smiley, & their namesake, Bill Monroe.

          Yet, there is more to their act than staunchly following tradition. Highlights of their stage shows and albums also include The Temptations’ “My Girl” & Etta James’ “At Last”. Their comedy shtick often includes the band playing short bursts of The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me”, The Troggs’ “Wild Thing”, Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love”, Mancini’s “Baby Elephant Walk” & the music that plays whenever Darth Vader appears on screen.

          Highlights of the Labor Day shows included Lisa’s take on Bill Monroe’s take on Jimmie Rodger’s “Mule Skinner Blues”, & her vocal tour de force “At Last”.  The Saturday night show ended with their perennial showstopper “The Orange Blossom Special”, resulting, as usual, in a hollering and cheering standing ovation. They topped it all off with a rousing rendition of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”. Overall, their performances were much subtler & low – key than I remember them being in the past, but these guys are so brilliant that, even when they are tastefully understated, somehow their phenomenal playing ability still shines through brightly.

           If you can’t see them in person any time soon, I recommend you go to their website and purchase a copy of their great DVD – the next best way of experiencing their showmanship, humor & musical virtuosity.

           Happily, all ten of their CDs are available for download from iTunes. With the exception of their bizarre experiment “The World Beloved – A Bluegrass Mass”, they are all uniformly excellent. They are characterized by an endearing, gentle, folky approach. If I had to recommend ONLY ONE, I guess it would be “The Green Mossy Ground”. It contains the best mix of bluegrass standards and original compositions by the group and their friends.           

FREE KOZMO !!!

If you want to add some FREE humorous content to your website, why not include “Kozmo of the Cosmos” comic strips? They are a great source for humorous internet content. According to strip creator Bob Kronlage, “I only have a few requirements;

1) You must get my permission by e-mailing me at kozmoofthecosmos@hotmail.com. The only way I can only imagine I would turn down your request is if your site has material not appropriate in relation to an innocent strip like “Kozmo”.

2) You must include my copyright info. (Naturally!)

3) You must always reference www.kozmoofthecosmos.com

4) You may not change any content of the strips.

Otherwise you can go crazy.” This thing won’t go viral on its own!

HELLO KITTY -- A brief character study.

Hello Kitty is the height of five apples, and the weight of three apples. Her favorite food is Mama’s apple pie. She has her own fragrance, Hello Kitty Cologne. It has the fragrance of apples – yellow, red & green ones. Her turn-on’s include sushi bars and the Pillsbury Dough Boy. Her turn offs are mean puppies and shallow people. Oddly, even though she is a kitty, she has a pet kitty named Charmmy Kitty.

(Two sentences in Ms. Kitty’s profile were just made up by me.)

DENNIS THE MENACE What the hell were they thinking?

Hard to believe, but this Dennis the Menace strip ran all over the world in 1970. Yet again, NO ONE in the entire process spoke up to suggest this might be a racist depiction of a black person?” Following outraged responses, the strip’s creator Hank Ketcham apologized that the strip was a product of his own naivete, not racism. Had the man never met a black person in his life? Crazily enough, according to Ketcham (according to the authoritative source “Hank Ketcham’s Complete Dennis the Menace” (Fantagraphics Books) “I named him ‘Jackson’ and designed him in the tradition of  Little Black Sambo, with huge lips, big white eyes, and just a suggestion of an afro.” YEESH!

AMISH MUG SHOTS

These Amish men from Kentucky got arrested for refusing to put those big orange reflective triangles on the back of their slow moving vehicles. Also, apparently there have been major advances in haircuts in the last 100 years or so. Who would have thought that?

Part 2 BLUEGRASS- The Best Bands You Never Heard in Your Life

www.bankesters.com

http://www.harmansbluegrass.com/home.html

www.theexpeditionshow.com

Three more bands that appeared at The Aledo Bluegrass Festival were; The Bankesters, The Harmans & The Expedition Show.

The Bankesters (pronounced in three syllables (Ban kes ters) are a family band consisting of Mother (Dorene) & Father (Phil), three of their four daughters (Alysha & Emily, & Melissa Triplett) & the oldest daughter’s husband (Kyle Triplett). They are all fine singers. The youngest daughters appear to be about 13 and 15. The youngest plays mandolin and fiddle, the second youngest (featured in the above video) plays fiddle, mandolin & claw hammer banjo. Their self titled CD is excellent. It is very sweet and smooth, without ever becoming boring or cutesy. The producers created an album that is as near to perfection as I can imagine – a perfect showcase of this family’s talents. Many of the songs probably would have to be categorized as modern Christian music, but they are presented in a completely unpreachy, this – song – has – a - message – if – you – want - it manner which perfectly fits the family’s attitude. There is old fashioned bluegrass too; a great vocal / instrumental medley of the old fiddle tune “St Anne’s Reel” & notably Ralph Stanley’s creepy “I Am the Man Thomas” (The resurrected Jesus confronting Doubting Thomas). Another very dark gospel tune is the great “Water Grave” which equates suicide by drowning, with baptism by submersion. One of the band’s mentors is country song writing legend Tom T. Hall, founder of the CD’s

Blue Circle

label.

The Harmans hail from Bethalto Illinois, a very small town where they run the sales barn. Obviously, it is another family band. Their leader is their father Mike, formerly banjo player for Alison Krauss. Highlights of their performances included a Mexican gunfighter ballad called “Gunfighters Lament”, appropriately Leroy Van Dyke’s “The Auctioneer”, & a finale of “John Hardy” which featured the band playing their instruments behind their backs. The CD I got, ”Timeless and True” features a vocal duet with Ms. Krauss, the afore mentioned “Gunfighter’s Lament”, and surprisingly, a bluegrass remake of The Orleans old 70’s pop hit “Dance With Me” (Remember “Dance with me, I want to be your partner, can’t you see, the music is just starting, night is falling and I am calling, dance with me”) The remake sounds shockingly similar to the original.

The Expedition Show were the headliners from Nashville. They were formerly The Williams & Clark Expedition before Clark quit. Their leader is banjoist / songwriter  Blake Williams who played banjo with Bill Monroe for ten years, followed by another ten years as bassist for Mike Snyder, followed by ten years with The Expedition. Surprisingly, they were the most low key band of the weekend, but they are a fine band, and a little extra listening effort revealed Blake is an incredibly ornate back-up banjoist. I like their self titled CD even better than the live performances. It is available on i-Tunes, so check out the song clips!

Next time, my heroes, Monroe Crossing!    

Ashley Lewis --Haunted

Pt. 1 - BLUEGRASS - The Best Bands You've Never Heard in Your Life!

http://www.barnesbluegrass.com
www.ashleylewis.net

          Friday night, and all day Saturday. Labor Day Weekend, I attended The 39^th Annual Barnes Family Bluegrass Festival in Aledo Illinois. It was excellent as always. The acts were; Ashley Lewis, The Bankesters, The Harmans, The Expedition Show & Monroe Crossing. All week long, I’ve been facing the daunting task of trying to write a review that would cover five bands, each performing three times, plus reviews of their CDs I bought. This flies in the face of my goal, which is to create this web log using little or no effort. The above video of Ashley Lewis goes a long way towards relieving me of my writing duties. “Haunted” is one of her original compositions. Her live act also included some Django Reinhardt / Stephane Grappelli style swing jazz numbers, traditional bluegrass, and fine bluegrass arrangements of “Johnny B. Goode” & “Burning Love”. Funny – I’ve heard Elvis sing that song a million times, but it’s as if I’d never heard the lyrics until I heard Ashley sing it, (ie; “my chest is heaving… higher & higher the flames are licking my body, ‘til I’m a hunka hunka burnin’ love.”  Yow! (She’s even cuter in real life than on the above video.)

          She provided the weekend’s most impressive moment of showmanship. On the first song of her second show, her mike was creating horrible feedback any time she got anywhere near it. Undaunted, she walked down in front of the front row of the audience, unmiked, playing what must have been a minute-and-a half long, ferocious  mandolin solo, stopping walking several times to play for whoever she was standing in front of. This fearless improvisation really won over the audience.

          Her CD “Here I Stand” is excellent. Most of the songs on it are her original compositions, & they reflect an artistic maturity beyond her years. (I would have guessed she was 18, but apparently she is a few years older.) Unfortunately, only two songs from it are available on iTunes.         

          I’ll be writing about the other groups soon.

JC PENNEY What the hell were they thinking?

For girls ages 7 to 14. T-shirt says, "I'm Too Pretty to Do Homework so my brother has to do it for me." Copy says "With the new Justin Beiber album out, who has time to do homework? She'll love it because it's just as cute and sassy as she is." Empowering!
Seriously, JC Penney is a huge corporation. How many people had to see and hear about this shirt during it's concept, design and production, yet NOBODY SAID, "What the heck are we saying with this shirt?"