July 9, 2012
Tony Millionaire (b. 1956) (real name Scott Richardson) is an American cartoonist, illustrator and author known for his syndicated comic strip ‘Maakies’ and the ‘Sock Monkey’ series of comics and picture books. The nautical settings of much of Millionaire’s work draw inspiration from his childhood memories of his grandparents’ artwork and seaside home in Massachusetts as well as the novels of Patrick O’Brian, of which he is an avid reader. He draws in a lush style that mingles naturalistic detail with strong doses of the fanciful and grotesque. His linework resembles that of Johnny Gruelle, whom he cites as one of his main sources of inspiration along with Ernest Shepard and ‘all those freaks from the twenties and thirties who did the newspaper strips’; many of Millionaire’s admirers adduce a similarity to the work of E. C. Segar in particular. He draws with a fountain pen.
When asked in interviews why he uses a pseudonym, Millionaire maintains that he does not, and that ‘Tony Millionaire’ is his real name: ‘It is my legal name, and it’s been around a lot longer than I’ve been a cartoonist.’ He has claimed that his unusual surname is an Old French word meaning ‘a person who owns a thousand serfs.’ Skeptics trace the origin of the name to a character in an episode of the ’60s TV series ‘I Dream of Jeannie.’ Millionaire has speculated that in the future he may publish some family-friendly works of his under a different moniker in order to dissociate them from his other, more ribald output.
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July 9, 2012
The Believer is a United States literary magazine that also covers other arts and general culture. Founded and designed in 2003 by the writer and publisher Dave Eggers of McSweeney’s Publishing, it is edited by novelists Vendela Vida and Heidi Julavits, along with’Village Voice’ editor Ed Park. The magazine is published in San Francisco nine times a year. Eggers and his cohorts initially planned to ‘focus on writers and books we like,’ with a nod to ‘the concept of the inherent Good.’
The magazine urges readers and writers to ‘reach beyond their usual notions of what is accessible or possible.’ Illustrations and cartoons are featured throughout the magazine. The cover illustrations are done by Charles Burns, while most of the other portraits and line drawings are by Tony Millionaire (following Gilbert Hernandez from the fifth issue on). Michael Kupperman’s ‘Four-Color Comics’ has appeared in many issues, and in most issues a series of images from a given artist or other source run throughout the articles à la ‘The New Yorker.’
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July 9, 2012
Futurism was a modern art and social movement which originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It was largely an Italian phenomenon, though there were parallel movements in Russia, England, and elsewhere.
The Futurists practiced in every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, theater, cinema, fashion, textiles, literature, music, architecture, and even gastronomy.
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July 9, 2012
‘The Art of Noises‘ (‘L’arte dei Rumori’) is a Futurist manifesto, written by Luigi Russolo in a 1913 letter to friend and Futurist composer Francesco Balilla Pratella. Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth, and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city.
In his letter, Russolo argues that the human ear has become accustomed to the noise of the bustling urban industrial soundscape; furthermore, this new sonic palette requires a new approach to musical instrumentation and composition. He proposes a number of conclusions about how electronics and other technology will allow futurist musicians to ‘substitute for the limited variety of timbres that the orchestra possesses today the infinite variety of timbres in noises, reproduced with appropriate mechanisms.’ ‘The Art of Noises’ is considered to be one of the most important and influential texts in 20th century musical aesthetics.
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July 7, 2012
‘Superman: Red Son‘ is a comic book mini-series published by DC Comics that was released under their Elseworlds imprint in 2003. Author Mark Millar created the comic with the premise ‘what if Superman had been raised in the Soviet Union?’ The story mixes alternate versions of DC super-heroes with alternate-reality versions of real political figures such as Joseph Stalin and John F. Kennedy. The series spans approximately 1953-2001, save for a futuristic epilogue.
In ‘Red Son,’ Superman’s rocket ship lands on a Ukrainian collective farm rather than in Kansas, an implied reason being a small time difference (a handful of hours) from the original timeline, meaning Earth’s rotation placed the Ukraine in the ship’s path instead of Kansas. Instead of fighting for ‘…truth, justice, and the American Way,’ Superman is described in Soviet radio broadcasts ‘…as the Champion of the common worker who fights a never-ending battle for Stalin, socialism, and the international expansion of the Warsaw Pact.’ His ‘secret identity’ (i.e. the name his adoptive parents gave him) is a state secret.
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July 5, 2012
American Pop is a 1981 American animated musical drama film produced and directed by Ralph Bakshi. The film tells the story of four generations of a Russian Jewish immigrant family of musicians whose careers parallel the history of American popular music. The majority of the film’s animation was completed through rotoscoping, a process in which live actors are filmed and the subsequent footage is used for animators to draw over.
However, the film also uses a variety of other mixed media including water colors, computer graphics, live-action shots, and archival footage. Michael Barrier, an animation historian, described ‘American Pop’ as one of two films that demonstrated ‘that Bakshi was utterly lacking in the artistic self-discipline that might have permitted him to outgrow his limitations.’
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July 4, 2012
The Show With No Name was a long-running and highly popular Public-access television cable TV show in Austin, Texas, hosted by Charlie Sotelo and the mysterious ‘Cinco.’ Each show featured clips of TV, film and music ephemera along with commentary by the hosts and calls from a predictably unruly Public-access television audience.
The clips were usually video snippets that captured a crazy moment of ephemeral history, such as Ed McMahon drunk on ‘The Tonight Show,’ an early live TV appearance by Frank Zappa playing the bicycle and other found instruments, or the famously disastrous Andy Kaufman appearance on ‘Fridays’ (ABC’s weekly late-night live comedy show). Often they were obscure cult favorites only circulated underground, such as ‘Heavy Metal Parking Lot,’ the profane bloopers of an actor in a Winnebago sales video, or Corey Haim’s ‘Me, Myself, and I.’ Many other clips simply presented a zeitgeist gone by: a trailer for an Akira Kurosawa or Sam Peckinpah film, a Bill Hicks comedy set, or Bob Dylan appearing on the Johnny Cash show.
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July 4, 2012
The Found Footage Festival is a live comedy event and screening featuring unusual and humorous clips from VHS videotapes gathered from thrift stores, garage sales, warehouses, estate sales, and dumpsters throughout the United States. Founded in 2004, the Festival originated in Wisconsin and Minnesota by Joe Pickett, Nick Prueher and Geoff Haas, childhood friends from Wisconsin. While still in high school, Pickett and Prueher began collecting videos from garage sales, training videos from odd jobs, and copies of tapes from a video production house. The friends would then play selections from this collection for entertainment at parties.
In 2004, Pickett and Prueher quit their day jobs to focus on production of their first feature documentary, ‘Dirty Country.’ They started the touring ‘Found Footage Festival’ show to fund the production of the documentary. In addition to its regular touring schedule, the Festival has appeared at the HBO ‘US Comedy Arts Festival,’ ‘Just For Laughs’ (the Montreal comedy festival), the ‘New York Comedy Festival,’ the Impakt Festival in the Netherlands, and the ‘Central Standard Film Festival’ in Minneapolis. The Festival is currently based out of New York City.
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July 3, 2012
The Basement Tapes is a 1975 studio album by Bob Dylan and The Band. The songs featuring Dylan’s vocals were recorded in 1967, eight years before the album’s release, at houses in and around Woodstock, NY, where Dylan and the Band lived. Although most of the Dylan songs had appeared on bootleg records, ‘The Basement Tapes’ marked their first official release.
When Columbia Records prepared the album, eight songs recorded solely by the Band were added to sixteen songs taped by Dylan and the Band. Subsequently, the format of the 1975 album has led critics to question the omission of some of Dylan’s best-known 1967 compositions and the inclusion of material by the Band that was not recorded in Woodstock.
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July 3, 2012
Linda Perhacs is an American psychedelic folk singer, who released her only album ‘Parallelograms’ in 1970 to scant notice or sales. The album was rediscovered by record enthusiasts and grew in popularity with the rise of the New Weird America movement (a subgenre of psychedelic and indie music) and the Internet. Her songs have been featured in soundtracks to many films, most recently and notably in Daft Punk’s ‘Electroma.’
Perhacs also sang backing vocals on ‘Freely’ from Devendra Banhart’s ‘Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon’ and features in Prefuse 73’s track ‘Rain Edit (Interlude)’ from the album ‘Surrounded by Silence.’ Encouraged by the newfound attention to her work, she has reportedly recorded two new albums with Ben Watt (British producer and half of Everything but the Girl) as of 2007.
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July 3, 2012
‘Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes’ is a 1997 book by music critic Greil Marcus about the creation and cultural importance of ‘The Basement Tapes,’ a series of recordings made by Bob Dylan in 1967 in collaboration with The Hawks, who would subsequently become known as The Band.
When subsequently published in paperback, the book was re-titled ‘The Old, Weird America,’ a term coined by Marcus to describe the often eerie country, blues, and folk music featured on the ‘Anthology of American Folk Music.’ The term has been revived via the musical genre called New Weird America (a subgenre of psychedelic and indie music).
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July 3, 2012
New Weird America describes a subgenre of psychedelic and indie music, often psych folk, of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The term is generally believed to have been coined by David Keenan in a 2003 issue of ‘The Wire,’ following the Brattleboro Free Folk Festival organized by Matt Valentine and Ron J. Schneiderman. It is a play on Greil Marcus’s phrase ‘Old Weird America’ as described in his book ‘Invisible Republic,’ which deals with the lineage connecting the pre-World War II folk performers on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music to Bob Dylan and his milieu.
The musical style described as New Weird America is derived mainly from psychedelic rock and folk groups of the 1960s and 1970s, including American performers Holy Modal Rounders and English and Scottish groups, such as Pentangle, The Incredible String Band, Donovan, and Comus. It also finds inspiration in such disparate sources as heavy metal, free jazz, electronic music, noise music, ethnic musics, musique concrète, tropicália, and early- and mid-20th century American folk music. Another primary inspiration is outsider music, often played by technically naïve and/or socially estranged musicians, such as The Shaggs, Roky Erickson, and Jandek. Other genre classifications with similar aesthetics are psychedelic rock, psych folk, freakbeat, and freak folk.
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