My favorite web comic is still Cat and Girl. Here’s something I wrote about it a few years ago that never got published:

Like the world needed another comic strip about a human being living with a sassy, anthropomorphic cat. But this time, the cat has a chronic paint-drinking addiction (“It’s my major source of essential lead”) and his insults run along the lines of “You’re about as much fun as a party full of bloggers.” That’s the brilliantly funny Internet comic strip “Cat and Girl,” whose lead characters are a platonic cat and girl named, wait for it, Cat and Girl. They live in a house without adult supervision, argue about class structure and Billy Joel lyrics, and go shopping at Pol Pottery Barn.

Creator Dorothy Gambrell grew up under the delusion that cartooning was an easy way of making a living. Years of doing strips for about a dozen readers disabused her of that notion, but www.catandgirl.com now draws about 30,000 visitors a week and offers not-ready-for-QVC merchandise like “Future Corpses of America” t-shirts and “My Other Car is a Pynchon Novel” bumper stickers. “Any idea that I think is funny, I squeeze it in,” says Gambrell, who has found punchlines in Proust, urination, and mail-order pizza. “I thought maybe I had reached the limit when I thought of alternate lyrics about Jesus to Weezer’s ‘Sweater Song,’ but apparently not.”

Many of you are probably familiar with Cat and Girl already; if not, here’s a few strips to get you started.

But what I actually wanted to call your attention to today was Gambrell’s other project, the charts she does at Very Small Array, which lately have been presenting information on the past 58 years’ worth of number-one singles.

Check it out:

She’s done a bunch more, including the percentage of #1 singles by male and female vocalists, #1 singles by geographic origin, and #1 singles by number of people in the musical act.

posted 1 October 2008 in Articles, Links, Unpublished. 2 comments

A glowing white light wobbles around and comes into focus: it’s a pair of headlights on a deserted highway. The car’s driving on the right side of the road: this video was filmed in the States, apparently. Clouds race across the sky. An attractive brunette girl in a peach-colored prairie dress and a black leather jacket walks by the side of the road, and then scampers through the grass. She leans against a telephone pole next to the side of the road and we get a closer look at the car: an old-fashioned American station wagon.

As the song hits its stride with a peppy synthesizer riff, we cut to Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark–or OMD, as they were calling themselves by now. They’re performing in a “recording studio” that looks like it’s been requisitioned from a New Orleans private detective in a late-night made-for-TV movie on Cinemax. There are lots of pillars painted blue and white, and a standing fan that looks like it dates from 1952. Light streams in through the Venetian blinds. An old-fashioned reel-to-reel recorder is spooling away in the corner, allegedly capturing a live performance.

Lead singer Andy McCluskey stands with his right leg up on a box, leaning into the microphone with his hands on his right knee. It’s an odd posture–maybe he got used to putting his leg up on his stage monitor? As he sings, little rectangles of colored animation periodically get superimposed on the screen: they look like boxes that have been filled in with colored pencils. The effect adds up to “Remember that a-ha video for ‘Take on Me’ three years ago? What would it look like if we did it on a smaller budget?”

McCluskey’s only at the microphone for a few seconds before we cut to him sitting on a high-backed bench, drinking from a coffee mug. Given his British passport, I’m going to guess that it’s actually a cup of tea. The animated patches keep popping up.

Quick cut to the brunette girl, now sitting on the hood of the station wagon. Isn’t she getting hot wearing that leather jacket out in the sun?

Back to OMD, who really don’t look like I expected them to. I only ever knew little snippets about them–British synth act, signed briefly to Factory Records, big hit on the Pretty in Pink soundtrack with “If You Leave”–but I expected them to have more of a New Romantic appearance. Some eyeliner, or at least ruffles on their sleeves. Maybe that was how they rolled in the early ’80s, but by the time of this clip, they look like four regular blokes who got together at the pub to knock out some Brinsley Schwarz covers. Drummer Malcolm Holmes industriously toils away behind a full kit, asking us to believe that the percussion track was not programmed in the studio.

I don’t remember this song at all, but it’s a good, catchy slice of synth-pop. “I was only trying to catch your eye / I was only wishing you would notice me / Instead you said goodbye.” This single was the new track that baited The Best of OMD (also known as In the Dark, a title not included on the credits block in this video). The group would break up the following year after eleven years together. (McCluskey put together a different lineup of OMD in 1991.) The split was very traumatic for their fans, I’m sure, but it means that OMD released their greatest-hits album at the perfect time. Picking that release date can be a delicate balance, and I marvel at the way AC/DC still haven’t released one. (Somebody needs to tell them that they should do it right now, because once their music goes up for sale on iTunes and its ilk, as eventually it will have to, fans are going to be rolling their own.)

The camera gets closer and closer to McCluskey’s face. The brunette is now hugging a telephone pole. Holmes has a great British-drummer nose, a schnozz to rival Ringo Starr’s. The animated rectangles get larger. The director positions McCluskey so he’s singing in front of a hat rack, with both feet on the floor. McCluskey starts to dance and flail around. The band pulls a dropcloth off an equipment case, something that makes them unreasonably cheerful. If they actually are tired of each other at this point (as the following year’s breakup would suggest), they’re doing a good job of faking the bonhomie.

We come to the bridge (with lots of drum machine): more shots of the brunette and the clouds racing across the American sky. The vocals here get heavily processed, to the point of being as incomprehensible as the Hamburglar.

Back to the “recording studio,” where now apparently it’s night. Actually, somebody just changed the lighting setup: it’s a lot darker, but there’s still light coming in through the blinds. The video closes with McCluskey dancing and snapping his fingers, with images of white clouds in a blue sky projected on the pillar next to him.

“Dreaming” hit #16 on the American pop charts (the band’s second-biggest single in the States). You can watch the video here.

posted 30 September 2008 in 1988. 6 comments

I’ve got a new piece up at the the Barnes and Noble Review: this one’s a short assessment of a long graphic novel, Dash Shaw’s Bottomless Belly Button. (To read it, scroll down to the bottom of the page, past Felix Dennis and Gorgeous George.)

While we’re on the subject of comics: it occurs to me that no major superhero has a rogue’s gallery quite as dumb and slapped-together as Captain America. Batroc the Leaper? The Serpent Squad? M.O.D.O.K. (Mental Organism Designed for Only Killing)? After World War II, it was all downhill for Cap.

posted 29 September 2008 in Outside, Reviews. no comments yet

In late 2005, I spent most of a week on assignment in New Zealand, interviewing Peter Jackson and his colleagues about the King Kong remake. (This is the trip that led to my unbelievably jetlagged interview of George Clooney upon my return.) Between interviews, I tried to explore as much of New Zealand as I could. I was probably spoiled by the cinematography in the Lord of the Rings movies: without even realizing it, I expected the whole country to be beautiful craggy wilderness, not the pleasant rolling farmland I found near Wellington. But during a walk on the beach, I did find this:

Eventually, the land reclaims everything.

posted 26 September 2008 in Photos. no comments yet

A deliveryman stands outside Whitney Houston’s dressing room: we can tell it’s her room because it’s got “WHITNEY” and a star engraved on the frosted glass. This implies that Houston’s abandoned her pop-music career in favor of starring in a Broadway show–or maybe she has “venue will provide artist with a specially made door with personally engraved glass” written into her contract rider for wherever she performs.

The deliveryman doesn’t knock, but Houston opens the door anyway, smiling and excited. When she sees who it is, her face falls and she pouts. As if that weren’t rude enough, she takes the box without tipping the guy.

In the dressing room, Houston sits down by an old-fashioned backstage mirror. She opens the box to reveal a bouquet of white roses and pulls out an envelope. Reading the note, she gasps. We see a closeup of the handwritten note (which also reveals that Houston’s manicure features clear polish and is quite restrained): “Goodbye / XXX / I.”

So the central mystery of the video is revealed: What does the “I” stand for? Ike? Isabel? Iggy? Perhaps Houston has adopted the Rastafarian concept of “I and I” and has sent herself the flowers?

Houston gazes off forlornly into the distance and closes her eyes: looks like it’s time for a flashback! Dissolve to a black-and-white sequence of Houston on a date at a café. She’s with a guy. He’s shot over the shoulder, but he seems good-looking enough. Let’s call him Iggy. In the foreground, chairs have been put upside-down on the tables, telling us that these crazy kids have been talking for so long, they’ve lost track of the time. They appear to be drinking glasses of water. You know how the hours just fly by when you’ve had a bit too much water.

Next flashback: Iggy (off-camera) gives Whitney a white rose. She’s wearing a big white fur wrap. She holds the flower to her nose and smiles, pleased that her sense of smell still works.

Back to the color stock and the present day, where Houston puts one of the delivered white roses to her nose, and then leans her head back, overcome by emotion. She, by the way, is wearing a very short black dress with a white wrap around the shoulders: it looks so constricting, I’m a little surprised she can get that flower up to her nose. Nevertheless, Houston looks totally cute: at age 24, she still had her baby fat and a bit of a dewy look, as opposed to the terrifying lich-diva she would become.

We hit the chorus, and go back to black-and-white: Houston’s in a studio, singing into a microphone dangling from the ceiling. She’s got her hair up, a blouse with a plunging neckline, and some extra-glossy lipstick. The camera pivots around her and the microphone; she keeps turning with it so she can sing into the lens. We eventually wheel around to a studio door, which opens, revealing a silhouetted man wearing a suit: hi, Iggy!

A transitional shot of Houston walking around her dressing room, showing off her legs, leads us to more flashbacks: Whitney puts on a big white hat, while Iggy inspects the brim. Whitney and Iggy sit at a coffee bar with two mugs. This profile shot is our clearest view of Iggy so far. He remains mostly off-camera–clearly, they want him to be an undefined presence in this video, presumably so people can imagine whoever they want to be standing in his shoes. Whitney and Iggy move on to a pool hall: she’s now wearing a leather jacket and a small black cap. Grinning, she leans over the pool table with a cue, about to break. Before we can see her billiard skills, we move on to a closeup of her hands on another date: Iggy’s hands slowly but brazenly move over hers. A smile plays on her lips, taking us into the chorus again.

This time Houston sings it as she walks through her dressing room, idly running her left hand through the outfits on a garment rack. She keeps looking over her right shoulder at the camera, making sure it’s following along with her. The chorus of this song is catchy, and gives Houston a chance to belt out dramatically–an opportunity, of course, that she grabs with both hands. In general, though, this is a generic R&B ballad of the period, with unmemorable verses and way too much synth. It was produced, as usual, by Clive Davis’s designated knob-twiddler, Narada Michael Walden. (Fun fact: Walden appended the “Narada” to his name because he’s a devotee of guru Sri Chinmoy.)

Another b/w flashback: now Houston’s wearing a black dress with white roses sewn onto them, which isn’t particularly subtle thematically, but shows nice attention to detail by the wardrobe department. We return to color and the dressing room for the song’s bridge, and then go back to black and white for a sequence where Whitney and Iggy go ballroom dancing on the landing of a grand staircase. Then a train station where Iggy’s leaving: Whitney embraces him, and oddly, gives him a chaste peck on the cheek. Lots of steam billows across the screen.

Back in the dressing room, Houston takes a single white rose and her jacket, which she slings over her shoulder. She leaves the room and walks down the hallway past flight cases stenciled “Whitney,” just in case we forgot her name.

And then Iggy comes back (still mostly in silhouette). I can only assume that he wants to make sure that his roses arrived. (“Uh, did you get that note where I broke up with you? Okay, great, I gotta go catch another train.”) But Houston smiles and gazes at him longingly, lips parted. The white rose falls to the ground. Houston sings the final words of the song (“you still care for me”) to Iggy. He puts his arm around her and they walk away as the synthesizers swell. Unfortunately, we never find out whether Houston was any good with a pool cue.

“Where Do Broken Hearts Go” hit #1 (staying there for two weeks). It was Houston’s seventh #1 single in a row, breaking a record jointly held by the Beatles and the Bee Gees. Narada Michael Walden said at the time, “There are seven lower worlds and seven higher worlds. With Whitney’s seventh in a row, she takes all of us to that seventh higher world. This is the place that all broken hearts go for inner nourishment, inner satisfaction, inner and outer peace.” You can watch the video here.

posted 25 September 2008 in 1988. 1 comment

Last year, I visited a modern comedy mecca: the studio where The Office is filmed. The Dunder-Mifflin offices look reasonably large on screen, but they’re actually very cramped in person (in contrast, when I visited the Mad Men sets, I found the offices of the Sterling Cooper advertising agency to be surprisingly sprawling and capacious). The glass windows throughout the office are all subtly raked to avoid light reflecting into the camera. The show’s parking lot also serves as the Dunder-Mifflin parking lot on the show (which now makes it difficult for me to imagine it as located in Scranton).

I spoke with many of the cast members and writers, but the resulting article in Rolling Stone focused on the three people doing double duty as members of the cast and the writing staff: Mindy Kaling, Paul Lieberstein, and B.J. Novak. (There was also comedy shop talk, including Kaling’s explanation of the term “chuffa.”) Lieberstein was modest and clearly uncomfortable with his recurring role; it was no surprise to me at the end of last season when he wrote himself out of the show’s cast.

The fifth season of the American version of The Office begins tomorrow night.

posted 24 September 2008 in Archives, Articles. no comments yet

For those of you just tuning in: Cleaning out my garage earlier this year, I found three old videotapes that contained the entirety of MTV’s 1988 year-end top 100 countdown. Each Tuesday and Thursday for the past four months, I’ve written up another segment of the countdown (usually a video, but sometimes a commercial break). Improbably, we’re now one-fifth of the way done. So far, Kevin Seal has been our host, and has provided us with much sarcasm and squinting. My favorite clip has probably been the Pet Shop Boys’ “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” but I think the most entertaining video remains Cher’s “I Found Someone.” We’ve also had our fair share of dreck: take a bow, Glenn Frey.

Number of the 20 videos we’ve seen so far that were filmed partially or completely in black and white: 6.  Number that were straight-up performance videos (i.e. no plot or dancing girls): 3. Number that featured photos or cameras: 5. Number with really big hair and/or mullets: 6.

#81: Van Halen, “Finish What Ya Started”

#82: Icehouse, “Electric Blue”

#83: Pet Shop Boys, “What Have I Done to Deserve This?”

#84: Belinda Carlisle, “Circle in the Sand”

#85: The Fat Boys, “The Twist”

#86: Henry Lee Summer, “I Wish I Had a Girl”

#87: Kylie Minogue, “The Loco-Motion”

#88: Michael Bolton, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay”

#89: The Traveling Wilburys, “Handle With Care”

#90: Natalie Cole, “Pink Cadillac”

Also:

A video not on the countdown that MTV played anyway: U2, “Angel of Harlem”

Ad time: Commercial Break #5, Commercial Break #6, Commercial Break #7, Commercial Break #8

And the countdown’s first hour, spanning #100 to #91.

posted 23 September 2008 in 1988. 2 comments

I was shocked, of course, to hear about the plane crash Friday night in South Carolina that killed four people and hospitalized drummer Travis Barker and DJ Adam Goldstein. (The most recent press reports say that Barker and Goldstein are both expected to make a full recovery.) Everyone on that plane (and their friends and families) has my deepest sympathies. I haven’t seen Barker for a while, but I got to know him pretty well a few years back: between 2000 and 2003 I wrote three separate articles for Rolling Stone on his previous band, Blink-182. When I spent time with him, Barker was intensely focused on the things he loved–principally music and Cadillacs. In addition to being a beast on the drums, Barker was Blink-182’s de facto arranger: if you enjoyed the stop-start dynamics of a single like “All the Small Things,” that was his doing. Barker was quiet and reserved, especially in contrast to the other members of Blink-182, who were entertaining loudmouths–but once I got to know him, he was genuinely sweet. I wish him (and Goldstein) a speedy and complete return to good health.

My 2000 cover story on Blink-182 was previously up in the archives; I’ve just added the article I wrote about traveling to the Middle East with Blink-182 in 2003, when they played shows on an American naval base in Bahrain and an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Oman. It’s probably worth noting that Tom DeLonge changed his mind about the merits of the war and its politics not long after this article was printed; he was a vocal supporter of John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election.

posted 22 September 2008 in Archives, Articles, News. 2 comments

From the latest (September 26, 2008) issue of Entertainment Weekly, Alicia Keys on her collaboration with Jack White:

“I like to call it rock & soul.”

posted 21 September 2008 in Tasty Bits. no comments yet

If you’re new to this site and you haven’t seen my flipwalks before, here’s what you need to know: while I was living in New York City, near the site of the former World Trade Center, I would take walks, leaving the route up to the flip(s) of a coin at every intersection. After an hour, I would photograph whatever block I was on.

The teaser for the latest walk:

You may be slightly perplexed by the full image. It’s probably worth affirming that yes, the picture was taken in lower Manhattan, and no, its subject was not confined in any way. He had arrived in the neighborhood a month or so previously; there was initially a lot of hoopla as various people tried to capture him, without success. Eventually he seemed to settle into a contented life in Battery Park, just one more immigrant in New York City.

posted 19 September 2008 in Photos. no comments yet