Online comic strip PvP has had some funny Watchmen spoofs the past couple days (click the thumbnails to see full versions).
PvP Watchmen Spoof
A Movie in the Making: The Entertainers
Fierce competition. Close camaraderie. A dying art form. And some of the fastest hands you’ll ever see.
That’s the premise of The Entertainers, a ragtime documentary being created by friends (and FLYMF co-founders) Nick Holle and Michael Zimmer, in collaboration with filmmaker Brent Watkins. The movie centers on the World Championship of Old-Time Piano, an annual competition held in Peoria, Illinois. As competitors gather to see who can wring the most swing from their piano, these guys are on hand to capture the love, joy and sorrow that accompanies the practitioners of one of America’s original art forms.
Their trailer gives a sense of the richness of the ragtime experience:
As The Entertainers web site says:
These talented, idiosyncratic performers represent a broad spectrum of the American experience, but they share one abiding love: for ragtime, the first great American music.
Like a combination of Spellbound and Best In Show, The Entertainers will explore a unique American sub-culture, whose eccentric and hilarious characters pursue the perfection of an esoteric art.
Help them make this movie a reality. In exchange for early contributions, the filmmakers are offering space in the credits, DVDs upon release and other exciting goodies. Nick and his friends at WutWutAlma Productions followed a similar fundraising strategy for their first movie, Illegal Use of Joe Zopp, and it worked out great.
Great movies need great supporters. You can play a role in telling this exciting story.
Why I Oppose Chicago 2016
But based on the existing evidence I think a little skepticism is warranted: if there are cost overruns, or if no developer steps forward with $1 billion to pour into a speculative housing deal in the middle of the greatest housing crash since the Great Depression, then guess what, Chicago? You’ll be covering the balance. Money that could go to schools, parks, police, and firefighters will be diverted to the Olympic effort—including the $10.5 million the bid says will spent coming up with a mascot. Plus, Daley is expecting residents to give up something at least as precious as public money: public space. Only he’s not being up front about it—he’s pretending that we don’t have to be inconvenienced at all.
-Ben Joravsky, The $10.5 Million Mascot, Chicago Reader
The arguments for stating the 2016 Olympics in Chicago are similar to when a big-league team begs for money for their new stadium. “Net gain!” they say. “It’ll create jobs. Bring in tourists.”
Well, profit doesn’t always materialize, even in good times, much less an economic meltdown. And Chicago hasn’t shown itself to be capable of managing costs or timelines for big projects.
The Olympics sound exciting, but I’d rather spend the money on our schools, streets, parks, public transit and other projects that will benefit residents more than Mayor Daley’s ego.
Alan Moore Flaunts His Curmudgeon Status
“The average age of the audience now for comics, and this has been the case since the late 1980s, probably is late thirties to early fifties—which tends to support the idea that these things are not being bought by children. They’re being bought in many cases by hopeless nostalgics or, putting the worst construction on it, perhaps cases of arrested development who are not prepared to let their childhoods go, no matter how trite the adventures of their various heroes and idols.”
-Alan Moore, putting a perhaps-unsupportable weight on “probably”
Wired magazine has an interview with Alan Moore in which he presents his thoughts on the state of comic books, the influence of Watchmen and future plans for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. As the quote above implies, he’s seems to enjoy playing the role of the scold, and an egotistical one at that. He’s often revered as the greatest writer in comics—and I’m a fan of his work—but he’s not the only one capable of doing worthwhile work in the genre, as he seems to imply.
Undermining his “hopeless” analysis is the admission, “I have to say that I haven’t seen a comic, much less a superhero comic, for a very, very long time now—years, probably almost a decade since I’ve really looked at one closely.” But sit down and tell us about those superheroes today, with their hippity-hop and capes hanging down below their asses, Grandpa Moore.
SXSW 2009 Preview: Part Two
Parenthetical Girls
They are: “Parenthetical Girls are a musical group operating within the pop idiom. Entanglements is the name of their recently completed full-length album. A dense, winkingly ambitious orchestral song cycle, Entanglements is an eleven-song, linear meditation on authority, adolescent sexuality, quantum mechanics, consent, and other moral ambiguities—all set to an elaborately orchestrated olio of timeworn, traditional pop forms” (SXSW web site).
Uh, yeah.
Sounds like: Lou Reed’s “Goodnight Ladies,” only with more orchestration and an actual singer
The tracks (from their MySpace site):
A Song for Ellie Greenwich
I don’t know how “winkingly ambitious” it is, but it kicks off with a lively trumpet/baritone setpiece and walks through a multinstrumental suite. It’s dense, but never too heavy, and the vocals are warm and well-placed.
Unmentionables
Falsetto vocals begin over a halting trumpet-tuba-ukulele pattern before the whole thing swoons to strings. The song changes gears mid-way, passing through a brassy march and pizzicato strings en route to an understated finish. A neat track.
The Weight She Fell Under
A light, pushing drone and xylophone arpeggio pace this bright tribute to a woman seemingly sliced in half by a train.
The verdict: Very cool stuff. Their sound is complex without being overstuffed, ambitious without being pretentious. There will be a lot of pieces to pull together live, but I’d like to see how they’re going to do it.