The Sound of the Crowd

Dick Giordano: Changing Comics…

“Americans instinctively know that anyone who’s willing to demean the presidency in order to gain it is not worthy of having it entrusted to him.”–RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie

Dub Pistols.

Everybody wants to be a cat…because a cat’s the only cat who knows where it’s at…

Very bad, right now. Anybody have any idea what they are? Go on, take a guess. Take a wild guess.

Good article on Howard Dean’s “meaness.” That link will only lead you to the first part of the article if you’re not a Salon subscriber, then you can decide for yourself if you want to go through the ad and get the whole thing. It’s the Visa ad with the sexy Asian woman again, though, if that makes a difference.

“Even closer to me, right at my feet, is another memory, the skin of the rogue croccodile I killed back in 1976, eleven feet and 560 pounds of very tough, very dangerous old creature, One-Eyed Jack we called him in his prime. I put three bullets from a rusty .30-30 into his brain–good shooting even if I do say so myself, over open sights in the dark–until he quit thrashing around and we were able to drag him into the airboat with us, where of course he came right back to life. Not a good moment, that.”
–Cash, Johnny Cash

Eric Idle is publishing a very funny blog obstensibly about his current US tour, but actually containing a number of autobiographical ruminations. Highly recommended for Python fans, and if you’re not one, go away and don’t come back to this blog until you have seen at least two Python films and one episode of the TV series. We have standards here, you know.

Keith Gordon has made a couple of my favorite films, The Chocolate War and Waking The Dead, in his career as a filmmaker after acting in such films as All That Jazz–he’s the lead character as a youth in flashback–and Back To School–he’s Rodney’s son.

His latest film is The Singing Detective, based on the much praised BBC miniseries of the ’80s. I don’t know if it’s as good as those others, but there’s an interesting interview with him here. I’ve linked to the last page in the interview because I especially like what he has to say about the Academy screeners controversy–first thing that explained to me why it mattered a damn.

I love voice performances like Ellen DeGeneres in Finding Nemo and Patrick Warburton in The Emperor’s New Groove, but still I have trouble believing this, and not just because it’s from FOX news. People really go see an animated feature or not because a celebrity does a voice? Really? My animation snob instincts kick in and I think such people don’t deserve to go see an animated feature. I want people to see them because the animation is gorgeous, or the film looks funny (preferably both), and so on. Also I don’t like this because it looks like a variation of legendary Hollywood attitude that only the stars matter and nothing else–like oh, say, writers.