“Not You Guys Again”

Following the advice of Jean-Luc

Yesterday, I asked my girlfriend of three years to marry me.

She said yes.

The Black Smurfs

“This is the story of the day the Smurfs became terrorists.”

Actually this isn’t, but I think that may be the greatest opening statement ever.

(&, if true, might even explain why they got carpet bombed)

Over at the Savage Critics, Jog reviews King Smurf, to-date the only Smurf comics album translated and released in English, despite the Smurfs’ raging 80’s childhood fanbase.

Within that excellent & well-worth your time review is this jewel, on the origin of Grouchy Smurf:

“…Grouchy Smurf, who boasts one of the more iconographically questionable origins in comics history, having been a sunny Smurf who was bitten by a bug that turned his skin black and made him violent and sour; more and more Smurfs were bitten and made black, until Papa managed to expunge the blackness from Smurf society, although Grouchy was still grouchy afterwards. This all went down in 1963’s The Black Smurfs (Les Schtroumpfs Noirs), not available in English.”

If you follow that wiki link you will be reminded that this plot also occurred in an episode of the TV series, but in that episode, “to soften any racist connotation”, the bitten smurfs were ” whitewashed” purple.  (“purplewashed?”).

Anyway, I don’t know if, as a young black child I would’ve been offended or totally thrilled to see some black smurfs on TV. 

The Smurfs were kinda dodgy on “blackness” anyway, particularly in that great bit of misogyny, the TV origin of Smurfette:

“The Hanna-Barbera cartoon series of the Smurfs, made in 1981, had her as an actual Gargamel spy and saboteur who intentionally tries to disrupt life in the village. She was magically created from blue clay, sugar and spice but nothing nice, crocodile tears, half a pack of lies, a chatter of a magpie, and the hardest stone for her heart…”

“…[Smurfette] admitted her slavery to Gargamel, and begged Papa Smurf to make her a real Smurf. Papa Smurf undid some of Gargamel’s spells, consequently turning Smurfette into a more beautiful creature. Her hair grew, becoming blond and more voluptuous. Her dress became more frilly. As a final touch, her shoes turned into high-heel pumps.”

Information Addiction

 

There is an interesting interview with Ben Chasny (of Six Organs of Admittance & Comets on Fire) over at The Quietus talking about “the tension between music production and consumption” in the “era of technological immediacy”:

 

 

 Totally unrelated (except in my brain) image above by Jesse Balmer.

“what I have noticed over the years is that people are being more and more herded, by themselves, into believing that faster is better when it comes to obtaining music. Faster has always meant “better” to the modern mind, so it makes sense that if one can obtain music faster with new technology, one must be progressing, right? But we humans happen to be living at a peculiar time as we find ourselves at the point on the technological line that is about to go vertical in its exponential slope on the chart of progress. Essentially, we are standing on the verge of what some scientists call the technological singularity, which is the point where technology will begin to overtake humans in intelligence as they recreate themselves and reproduce.

“Yes, this is some William Gibson business, but landing on the moon was once a fairy tale as well (this year Stanford University created a helicopter that could teach itself to fly by watching other helicopters. If that isn’t sci-fi, I don’t know what is). Some see this as a positive future and a part of our evolution as we fuse our bodies with this technology. Some see this as the end of Humankind (Paul Virilio has stated that there will be aliens on this earth but the aliens will have evolved from us. And we won’t even get into what Virilio says about the inevitable ‘accident’ as we fuse ourselves with technology). So back to what I was saying before – I see people thinking that faster-is-better as conditioning themselves (I don’t believe this is some conspiracy) for the inevitable technological singularity…”

There’s more at the link regarding the humanizing factor of physical media and the loss of true community in the pursuit of information addiction:

“…And I do believe we are becoming addicted to information. You only need to look at those people who have hard drives filled with songs that they have never even listened to. They are not even collecting music. They are collecting information. And the more people become addicted to information and the faster they can obtain that information, the less they will be able to contemplate that information, and it is the contemplation of the information which makes it art.”

Visit Silver Currant, download The Lost Electric Six Organs of Admittance album.  & Contemplate that, “on some William Gibson sh-t.”

Primal Scream – Shoot Speed/Kill Light

Live at Club Nokia in Los Angeles, March 16 2009.

(sadly, the video cuts  off a bit before the song ends).

There was a time when I would put this song on every mix I made.

Concert review/pics over at Stereogum.

The Exciting News of the Day

To me anyway.  (via The Comics Reporter)

This summer, Fantagraphics will launch an ongoing series of hardcover books presenting the works of the legendary French cartoonist Jacques Tardi.

The first two books will be West Coast Blues (Le Petit bleu de la Cote Ouest), a hard-boiled crime thriller adapted by Tardi from the novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette, and You Are Here (Ici Meme), a satirical, surreal story written for Tardi by Barbarella creator Jean-Claude Forest that many consider one of the first true French graphic novels. Both will be released simultaneously, in what series editor Kim Thompson calls a “double-pronged shock-and-awe assault on the American readership, to immediately show off Tardi’s range.”

There’s more in the press release at the link, which also has a short interview between Tom Spurgeon and Fantagraphics’ Kim Thompson, who is editor and translator on the project.

The Adele-Blanc-Sec books are truly marvelous and some of my favorite comics of all time.  I look forward to Fantagraphics republishing them down the road.  If yr local library has ‘em, they are totally worth checking out.

Shakespeare & Company

(photo by Glynnis Ritchie)

George opened his doors midday to midnight, and the deal then is the deal now: sleep in the shop, on tiny beds hidden among the bookstacks; work for two hours a day helping out with the running of the place; and, crucially, read a book a day, whatever you like, but all the way through, unless maybe it’s War and Peace, in which case you can take two days.

George still reads a book a day, and gets very cross if he hears that anyone is wasting his time. You can be bawled out of Shakespeare and Company just as suddenly as you are invited in. The spirit of the place has to be honoured, and there are no exceptions.

(via John Coulthart)  A great article in The Guardian by Jeanette Winterson on Left Bank Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company, which, among other things, was the bookstore within which Ethan Hawke read and was reunited with Julie Delpy, in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset.

 

If you are a published writer, then you might be able to stay in the tiny pod of the writers’ room, and huddle against an ancient plug-in radiator and not worry too much if the electricity goes down and you have to abandon your laptop for a notepad. “There was no running water, no electricity when we started,” George says. “It didn’t matter. That stuff doesn’t matter. Books, people, ideas, that’s what matters.”

While there are plenty of readers who are not writers, there are no writers who are not readers, and one of the great gifts of this extraordinary bookshop is to keep writers and readers on the same creative continuum. Writers are not reduced to small-time semi-celebrities, and readers are not patronised as consumers. As Sylvia says, “We sell books for a living, but it’s the books that are our life.”

It Came From The Library Donation Box

Remember these guys?

Talk about yr childhood flashbacks!

Fearless Fish, Kidding Kangaroo, X-Rating Xerus(?!), I’d forgotten you even existed.  Much less all lived together in the 3 X 4 block radius of one small town…

I remember my sister and I studying this map like crazy when we were kids.  It ain’t Kamandi, but still,…pretty cool.

2008 Performance Appraisal

I never met a deadline I couldn’t miss.

so Pazz N Jop has gone down, & I find that I really don’t care about 2008 anymore.  Neither should you.  In fact I can barely be bothered to list the records (TV ON THE RADIO – DEAR SCIENCE/PORTISHEAD – THIRD/SPIRITUALIZED – SONGS IN A & E/DIRTY PROJECTORS – RISE ABOVE/BLACK MOUNTAIN – IN THE FUTURE) or films (DARK KNIGHT/CONTROL/IN BRUGES/I’M NOT THERE) that I really got into last year.  Books though, I’ll bother.  Here some “literature” worthy of your attention that you may or may not have missed:

MY FAVE FIVE:

SLUMBERLAND by Paul Beatty

Dense, delirious, exhilarating and full of shit.  Read it and be turnt out.

LIBERATION: BEING THE ADVENTURES OF THE SLICK SIX AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA by Brian Francis Slattery

Alright you, Sensitive Criminals, This here’s living mythology.  Things have always been & always are falling apart. Here’s a guide for how we can begin to put ourselves back together again.

SWAY by Zachary Lazar

“Q: Do you believe in God?

John Lennon: Yes, I believe that God is like a powerhouse, like where you keep electricity, like a power station. And that he’s the supreme power, and that he’s neither good nor bad, left, right, black or white. He just is. And we tap that source of power and make of it what we will. Just as electricity can kill people in a chair, or you can light a room with it.”

(It’s funny to me that, in a book about the Rolling Stones (& Kenneth Anger)(& Bobby Beausoleil), a epigraph quoted from an interview with A BEATLE exposes the narrative’s dark beating heart.)

HARD TRAVEL TO SACRED PLACES by Rudolph Wurlitzer

“This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds.
To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at the movements of a dance.
A lifetime is like a flash of lightning in the sky.
Rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain.”

WAVE – Suzy Lee

Rush In.

—

Honorable Mentions:

THE DISREPUTABLE HISTORY OF FRANKIE-LANDAU BANKS by E. Lockhart

Hey Kids, Never let anyone tell you who you are…

LITTLE BROTHER by Cory Doctorow

…or what it means to be free.

FRANKENSTEIN TAKES THE CAKE by Adam Rex

Or that you are too old to be silly & have fun.

(Kaiju Haiku.  Even more fun than songs sung by the Hulk).

Ning!