Entries from August 2008 ↓

To Catch a Fish

“I totally rock.”

I’m not a CSI fan, but I recognize the significance of this: Laurence Fishburne is about to stuff shut the hole being left in the CBS series by departing star, William Petersen, below.

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Papa’s Got a Brand New Heir.

Family reunion.
Miss Dynamite: LaRhonda Petitt easily passes the
“Looks Like Her Daddy” test

As the Washington Post archly puts it, “There was no off switch on the ‘Sex Machine.'” So, rightly, upon legendary musician James Brown’s Christmas 2006 death, a lot of his far-strewn kids started coming home…with their hands out for a piece of the Hardest [Working] Man in Show Business’s estate.

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The Gap Band: Making Charles Goodyear Extremely Proud in 1980.

Where there’s smoke there’s fire…

When inventor Charles Goodyear accidentally dropped a piece of untreated rubber on a hot stove and “discovered” vulcanization (“Mesoamericans” had mastered the process centuries earlier), he probably never dreamed that, over 140 years later, the notion of burning rubber would lead to a #1 R&B smash for the GAP Band. Yet, alas.

Merci to hyper-cool Digital Femme Cheryl Lynn for linking to the video, which I’d never seen, despite the track being fundamental as 11-dimensional strings when it came to me getting through senior year at Freeport High School. Most of all, though, Lynn argues that “Burn Rubber On Me (Why You Wanna Hurt Me)” should be cited as “Reason #525 why Rock Band needs a Funk Band Expansion Pack.” To which I say, hear, hear.

GAP Band Redux, or Weird Moments in Wikipedia Disambiguation

Look up “GAP Band” on Wikipedia, and you’ll see “Not to be confused with band gap,” beneath the headline.

“Band gap”?? I took the bait:

In solid state physics and related applied fields, the band gap, also called an energy gap or stop band, is a region where a particle or quasiparticle is forbidden from propagating. For insulators and semiconductors, the band gap generally refers to the energy difference between the top of the valence band and the bottom of the conduction band.

Or:

Perfect clarity…

Thank you for your time!

METRO Gives Up the Love!

Maybe it’s Christmas!!A super-special shout-out to the people at my favorite free daily, METRO, for their tip-of-the-hat to MEDIA ASSASSIN in the paper’s “Voices: Blogarithms: A look at the best of the blogs” section this past Thursday, right. (The piece ran in their NY, Boston, and Philadelphia editions.) I absolutely was not expecting the coverage, or the reproduction of my recent “Mackin’ On-the-Go” post. So, imagine my surprise when picking up the paper to search its nonexistent movie listings. I was hit with a sudden, “That Looks Familiar…Oh, WOW!” slightly-out-of-body experience. Wonderful, just wonderful to receive all of the support we’ve gotten. Thank you, METRO, so much for including us in your oft-wry, smartly-written publication.

Best. Obama. Cover. Ever.

“What…me win the nomination?”

I bought MAD magazine‘s hilarious Barack Obama parody on sight yesterday, only $4.99 cheap! HuffPo ran the story, but my question is the same one I had when I saw the hacked artwork documenting Obama’s illegal wiretaps vote: Who’s gonna try swingin’ a placard-sized version of this at the Democratic National Convention, next month?

Screaming Alleged Bloody Murder.

“Do I look fat from here?”

Few Americans, perhaps, understand how massive a medium comic books became after World War II. At their peak, retailers were moving $80-100 million worth of them per week. Plus, they were hugely influential: With a typical issue passed around between six to ten readers, comics were consumed by more people than the number of adults taking in movies, magazines, radio, or TV.

However, fewer of us, even more, understand how frantic the nation became when the medium went completely pulp, highlighting tales of noir crime and horror, like the infamous EC comic cover, above. With the enormous popularity of these criminal, murderous tales, comics were blamed for everything from truancy to homicide.

So argues David Hadju, in his new book, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. Hadju is my guest today on my WBAI-NY / 99.5 FM radio show, NONFICTION, this afternoon, Friday, August 15, 2 pm ET.

You can hear his ideas by tuning in at 2 pm. If you’re outside of the New York tri-state, you can check out our stream on the web. If you miss the live show, check out our archive for up to two weeks after broadcast.

The Other Side of Riverdale

Va-va-va-voom…

Artist Dan S. DeCarlo (1919-2001), below, is widely recognized as the creator of both the Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Josie and the Pussycats strips. But he is best known as the illustrator who gave Archie—the comic featuring the eponymous redheaded Hi. I’m Dan DeCarlo.teenager, plus his friends Betty, Veronica, Jughead, Reggie, and the rest—their definitive form and line, the look by which they’re most known, and that modern artists must emulate when drawing the characters.

I think it’s for this reason that I love the two recently released Fantagraphics texts The Pin-Up Art of Dan DeCarlo, and The Pin-Up Art of Dan DeCarlo Vol. 2, edited by Alex Chun and Jacob Covey.

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“Yo, Kirk: Your Boy Spock is Niiiiiiiiice!”

Logical.
Check 1, check 2, check 3.1415926535….: Spock keeps the beat

Hip-hop is truly an advanced form of human culture, both musicologically and conceptually. In fact, when you think about the formal proposals it makes, it’s so out there, I’m starting to wonder if it’s actually human culture.

Indeed, as of late, I’m inclined to believe that, like the Pyramids, the Mayan calendar, the Sungbo Eredo, and pretty much everything white people didn’t come up with first, hip-hop was brought to Earth by advanced life-forms from outer space.

And now, with help from Doobybrain.com, I finally have proof.

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

Revenge of the Abused Kitties

“DIIIIIIE!!!!!”

Every now and then, after I gratuitously kill an insect, I go into this weird thought space: I wonder what would happen if, one day, I opened the front door and outside was a huge, Kafka-sized roach, fly, or ant, there to avenge all the insects I’ve ever murdered, en toto.

What would happen? What would one see?

Probably something like this, above.