ROCK Sex

BEST MOVIES & TV: 2011

2012-01-27T13:40:00.000-08:00

FAVORITE MOVIES:

EROS

-THE ARTIST (France) ↑
When the only thing one should say is, "I love you."

-CIRCUMSTANCE (Iran)
Two women in love, and the Morality Police who can't handle it.

-CHICO AND RITA (Spain/U.K.)
Moved me to tears.

THINK

-THE KING'S SPEECH (U.K.)
A film about stammering with impeccable timing. Razor-sharp cast, moving story.

-FOR COLORED GIRLS
Tough to adapt a poetic play. This is like an ensemble song cycle: some swagger notes are a bit stagey, but all the pain notes are devastatingly true.

-TRUE GRIT
A gripping story well-acted, with raw poetic dialogue so great you'd watch it again just to savor it.

-NORWEGIAN WOOD (Japan)
Elegant and bittersweet. Reject death, embrace life.

-THE TREE OF LIFE
The big picture, the little things. Love your life while it's happening.

-DRIVE
Cruises mostly on pure style, like the best film Michael Mann might've made in 1986.

-ONE DAY
Mixed feelings on the story structure, but Anne Hathaway was terrific.

-THE DEBT
Good thriller, great cast.

-THE HELP
The Civil Rights movement is too big to expect one film to carry it. Taken for its own merits of telling a part of that story, this film is generally strong, if sometimes mawkish or soft, with great performances from Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer. If its massive success encourages people to learn more, then all the better.

To go further, make sure to watch the best non-fiction series ever made for television,
"Eyes On The Prize: America's Civil Rights Years 1954-1965"

-A SEPARATION (Iran)
Distressed people at the mercy of bad luck, and the fundamentalist regime that makes it worse. Emotionally grueling, complex, and riveting, and worth every minute of it.

*****The more I think about it, the more this seems to be the best film of the year for me.

-THE WOMAN KNIGHT OF MIRROR LAKE (China/Hong Kong)
In early 1900's China, a badass woman leads a revolution against repression with smarts, poetry, and martial arts. Count me in.
(Based on the true story of Qui JIn.)

-MARGIN CALL
An ensemble piece about the 2008 financial meltdown viewed through one company.

-THE IDES OF MARCH
When idealism collides with ambition.

-KINYARWANDA (Rwanda/U.S.)
Powerful expose on the Rwandan genocide.

-THE FLOWERS OF WAR (China)
Every film by Zhang Yimou is automatic viewing. This is a grittier take on his theme of championing humanity in the face of repression.

-THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (U.S.)
Telling the same good story again, just as well as the Swedish film and with added dimensions.

-HUGO ↑
A beautiful love letter to early film and classic books. Sweet, inspiring.

SMILE

-WIN WIN
Nice character play, astute details.

-PAUL
A little soft, but carried by Kristen Wiig and some clever in-jokes.

-ELEKTRA LUXX ↑
The sequel to WOMEN IN TROUBLE by Sebastien Gutierrez, the L.A. answer to Almodovar. Carla Gugino is always excellent.

-GIRL WALKS INTO A BAR
Another Sebastien Gutierrez film, an interlocking comedy of errors.

-CRAZY, STUPID, LOVE
Could have been another Six Whiteys movie for the mallburbs, but there's enough touching scenes and manic surprises to elevate it. Good moments from Julianne Moore, Marisa Tomei, and Emma Stone.

-MIDNIGHT IN PARIS
A fun story beautifully shot, with a legendary cast of characters.

DREAM

-THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU
A 'Twilight Zone' premise underlined by romance.

-SOURCE CODE
Taut, engaging, twisty. From the director of MOON, Duncan Jones.

-HAUNTERS (S. Korea)
The bridge between UNBREAKABLE and PUSH. Sharply made, great characters, constant surprises, a rousing finish.

-SUPER 8
J.J Abrams brings it all full circle with this mysterious and tender homage to the 1977-1982 sci-fi movies that ignited everything since.

-HARRY POTTER And the Deathly Hallows, Part II
The craft of director David Yates has been exponentially impressive for the final three films.

-ANOTHER EARTH ↑
A carefully etched character drama. The soulful silences are enriched by the breakout star (and co-writer/co-producer), Brit Marling.

-RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES
On the surface, a 'popcorn flick'. Underneath, a deeply clever prequel to the original 1968 film.

NIGHTMARE

-BLACK SWAN
Darren Aronofsky's companion piece to THE WRESTLER. They are essentially the same story, exposing the traps and pitfalls of enforced gender roles.

-ATTACK THE BLOCK (U.K.)
One of those great debuts that transcends 'b-movie' into first-rate.

-THE THING [new prequel] ↑
John Carpenter's 1982 film was ignored on release and trashed by critics. It found its cult audience later on cable and video, and now is recognized as a classic cast-driven thriller.
And so will this one eventually, as perfectly dovetailed a prequel as has yet been made.

-APOLLO 18
Impressive debut delivering a great deal from deep constraints.

-THE SKIN I LIVE IN (Spain)
No means no.

GRAPHIC IMAGES

-SUPER
A bent Indie comedy take on what would really happen if you tried to be a superhero, featuring an unhinged Ellen Page.

-THOR
Kenneth Branagh really went for it all. The Earth stuff was a little rushed, but Asgard was glorious.

-CAPTAIN AMERICA
A refreshing surprise. No irony, no jingoism, just a great Pulp adventure homage with all the right instincts.

-GRIFF THE INVISIBLE (Austrailia)
A modest take on homemade superheroes, with an engaging romance and some twists.

-BATMAN: Year One
An anime take on the classic Frank Miller/David Mazzucchelli origin.

-The Extraordinary Adventures Of ADELE BLANC-SEC (France)
The grumbling adventurer gets a fine film treatment of her illustrated exploits by Luc Besson.

-The Adventures Of TINTIN ↑
Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson wed artist Herge's clean-line world and rich plots to 3D realism, noir lighting, and Hitchcock angles...and pull it off spectacularly. A breathtaking avalanche of smart fun.

ARTFLIX

-CHICO AND RITA (Spain/U.K.) ↑
Beautiful to watch, to listen to, and to feel. Wonderful.

-THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN
It isn't the 3D 'realism' that makes this come to life; it's the faithfulness to the canny plots, crafty heroes, and slapstick ballet of Herge's timeless books that gives it such spirit.

-RANGO
Excellent and mediocre at the same time. Baffling. The craft and sequences are inspired, the dialogue and plot strangely uneven. The finale sold me.

-THE SECRET WORLD OF ARRIETTY (Japan)
Another gem from Studio Ghibli, this charming tale of miniature people is a winner all around. Smart, heart, art.

FAVORITE DOCUMENTARIES:

-REVENGE OF THE ELECTRIC CAR
The sequel to the great 'WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR?'

-PROHIBITION
The dangers of zealous lobbies and capitalist corruption...

Watch it free here.

-WOMEN, WAR, AND PEACE

Watch it free here.

-WE WERE HERE
The shadow of death unleashes compassion and love of life.

-FREEDOM RIDERS
Young people with compassion can change the world for the better.

Watch it free here.

-THE BLACK POWER MIXTAPE 1967-1975 ↑
All power to the people!

-GRANT MORRISON: Talking With Gods
Grand writer holds forth.

-WOODY ALLEN: American Masters
The Perpetual Motion Picture Machine, on the couch.

-GEORGE HARRISON: Living In The Material World
The great spirit who happened to be in the greatest band.

FAVORITE TV:

DRAMA

-THE KILLING ↑
The expansive remake of the Danish series FORBRYDELSEN, with richer character and new directions. (And a healthy dose of TWIN PEAKS.)

-BOARDWALK EMPIRE
Basically the roots of THE SOPRANOS and THE WIRE. At its best, an allegory of the corrupt politics and social repressions of today.

-HOMELAND
Political thriller, layered twists, quick surprises, strong character.

-TREME
By the makers of THE WIRE (a.k.a., the greatest television show ever made).
What are you waiting for?

WONDER

-GAME OF THRONES ↑
Only 5% of this is 'Fantasy'. The other 95% is the best character drama about court intrigue one could imagine.

-THE WALKING DEAD
I like it enough, while others love it. It's playing one note pretty well.

-FRINGE
X-FILES never paid-off any of its set-ups well. FRINGE always does, in an unwinding tapestry that only gets better as it goes.

UK

-DOCTOR WHO
They caught lightning in a bottle again casting Matt Smith. This second season is less focused and more chaotic, but he stitches it together.

-TORCHWOOD: Miracle Day
Sprawling, ambitious. Too many great notes in the symphony to be sniffed at.

-MISFITS
The Sex Pistols of 'superheroes'. Sacrilegious and hilarious.

-SHERLOCK ↑
The only Sherlock Holmes that matters, alive on today's streets. A marvel to watch.

-THE FADES
A supernatural thriller, with pop culture in-jokes galore.

-DOWNTON ABBEY
At the height, a layered look at class relations in transition. At the base, a smart Soap.

-THE HOUR
The dawn of tough investigative journalism in repressed 50's Britain. An amazing pilot episode propelled the strong new series.

COMEDY

-ENLIGHTENED
A star turn for Laura Dern, playing a fragile light surrounded by black holes.

-30 ROCK

-PARKS AND RECREATION

-THE DAILY SHOW, With Jon Stewart
The real News ridiculing the fake News.

-THE STEPHEN COLBERT REPORT
Ditto.

ANIMATION

-FUTURAMA
Hey...It's Futurama!

-BATMAN: BRAVE AND THE BOLD
A love letter to the Silver Age Of Comics. Fun, wonder, and impossible non-sequiters.

VIDEO BOX SETS

-DRAGON TATTOO Trilogy: Extended Edition (Sweden) ↑

I love the first film and really like the other two. The first is an essential thriller with a terrific lead in Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace). The follow-ups show some plot strain but they pull it all off nicely.

INTEND TO SEE, Dept:

The reason the deities invented DVD...

(drama)
-J. EDGAR
-A DANGEROUS METHOD
-TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY
-SHAME
-LE HAVRE (France)
-PARIAH

(comedy)
-YOUNG ADULT
-THE MUPPETS
-CARNAGE

(thrills)
-MARY MARCY MAY MARLENE
-BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW
-ABSENTIA
-SOUND OF MY VOICE
(from the creators of 'Another Earth')

(animation)
-ALOIS NEBEL (Czech)
-WRINKLES (Spain)
-MIA AND THE MIGOO (France)
-A CAT IN PARIS (France)
-FROM UP ON POPPY HILL (Japan)

(documentary)
-THE INTERRUPTERS
-RESURRECT DEAD: The Mystery Of The Toynbee Tiles
-THUNDER SOUL
-CONNECTED: An Autobiography About Love, Death & Technology
-THRIVE
-MAGIC TRIP

(series)
-BREAKING BAD
-ALPHAS
-MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE
-BLACK MIRROR (U.K.)

BEST MUSIC: 2011, With Music Players!

2012-01-25T11:51:00.000-08:00

Anna Calvi

FAVORITE NEW ALBUMS:

Indie Rock, Funk, Electro, Folk, Garage, HipHop, Soul, Grrrl, and the indefinable!

The Kills, "Blood Pressures"

(To watch Videos, click the arrows on the video thumbnail in the upper left!)

This music player has songs from the following albums, in the same order.

-tUnE-yArDs, "w h o k i l l"

-The Black Keys, "El Camino"

-Charles Bradley, "No Time For Dreaming"

-Gillian Welch, "The Harrow and the Harvest"

-Anna Calvi, "Anna Calvi"

-Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi, "Rome"

-Shabazz Palaces, "Black Up"

-Nikka Costa, "PRO*WHOA"

-Cults, "Cults"

-A.A. Bondy, "Believers"

-Tom Waits, "Bad As Me"

-Feist, "Metals"

-Mayer Hawthorne, "How Do You Do"

-St. Vincent, "Strange Mercy"

-Ty Segall, "Goodbye Bread"

-The Go! Team, "Rolling Blackouts"

-EMA, "Past Life Martyred Saints"

-MeShell Ndegeocello, "Weather"

-Girls, "Father, Son, Holy Ghost"

-PJ Harvey, "Let England Shake"

-Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears, "Scandalous"

-Alela Diane & Wild Divine, "Alela Diane & Wild Divine"

-The Love Me Nots, "The Demon And The Devotee"

-Fitz & The Tantrums, "Pickin' Up The Pieces"

-The Dum Dum Girls, "Only In Dreams"

-The Kills, "Blood Pressures"

Quality-Is-Timeless, dept.,
(a.k.a., Great Returns By Iconic Artists)

"If it was good in the past, it's still good." -Sly Stone, Woodstock, 1969

Sly Stone and George Clinton today

-June & Jean Millington (of FANNY), "Play Like A Girl"

-Blondie, "Panic Of Girls"

-The Cars, "Move Like This"

-Gang of Four, "Content"

-Wire, "Red Barked Tree"

-The Bangles, "Sweetheart Of The Sun"

-Beastie Boys, "Hot Sauce Committee, Part Two"

-Janes Addiction, "The Great Escape Artist"

-Sly Stone, "I'm Back"

COOL SONGS:

Boogie, PostPunk, Triphop, Garage, Underground Rap, Ambient, Funk Rock, Nu Folk, Punk, Cinematic, and joyful chaos!

THEESatisfaction

(To watch Videos, click the arrows on the video thumbnail in the upper left!)

This music player contains the following songs, in order:

The Black Keys, "Lonely Boy"

SBTRKT, "Wildfire"

The Dirtbombs, "Cosmic Cars"

THEESatisfaction, "Bisexual"

Telekinesis, "You Turn Clear in the Sun"

Nikka Costa, "Head First"

A.A. Bondy, "Twist"

New Look, "The Ballad"

Freestyle Fellowship, "We Are"

Julianna Barwick, "The Magic Place"

Wire, "Please Take"

Alice Smith + Aloe Blacc, "Baby"

Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr., "We Almost Lost Detroit"

Marketa Irglova, "Crossroads"

Gang Gang Dance, "MindKilla"

Bass Drum of Death, "GB City"

Charles Bradley, "The World (Is Going Up In Flames)"

Los Lobos , "Rango Theme Song"

Jessica Lea Mayfield, "Our Hearts Are Wrong"

Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi (feat. Jack White), "The World"

Anna Calvi, "Rider To The Sea"

The Fresh & Onlys, "Vanishing Cream"

Lynda Kay, "Dream My Darling"

The Bo-Keys, "Hi Roller"

The Go! Team, "Secretary Song"

Doomtree, "The Grand Experiment"

Lana Del Rey, "Blue Jeans"

The Raveonettes, "Ignite"

Slim Moore And The Mar-Kays, "Just Can't Get Ahead

Smith Westerns, "Weekend"

The Bots, "You Are A Liar"

Over The Rhine, "All My Favorite People"

Raphael Saadiq, "Stone Rollin"

Atmosphere, "Hands On"

Arama Mara, "Concrete Blues"

Ty Segall, "It #1"

The Cool Kids, "Penny Hardaway"

Izzi Dunn, "Tits and Ass"

Those Darlins, "Be Your Bro"

The Funk Ark, "Horchata"

Beady Eye, "Four Letter Word"

St. Vincent, "Cheerleader"

Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears, "You've Been Lyin'"

Matana Roberts, "Lulla/Bye"

Phantogram, "Don't Move"

Nick Lowe, "'Til The Real Thing Comes Along"

Death Grips, "Takyon (Death Yon)"

Gillian Welch, "Dark Turn of Mind"

Lenny Kravitz, "Black And White America"

Marques Toliver, "Deep In My Heart"

Asa, "Why Can't We"

Dearling Physique, "Monster"

The Civil Wars, "Barton Hollow"

Piel, "Coat"

The Cars, "Keep On Knocking"

Wild Flag, "Racehorse"

Kaiser Chiefs, "Little Shocks"

Liam Finn, "The Struggle"

Dum Dum Girls, "Coming Down"

Thao and Mirah (ft. tUnE yArDs), "Eleven"

The Kills, "Future Starts Slow"

FAVORITE MUSIC RE-ISSUES:

The Beach Boys, "SMiLE"

Quality is timeless.

-"Let's Have a Party: Girls Gone Rockin', vol. 2" (1950's Rock'n'Roll women)

-THE BEACH BOYS, "SMiLE" (1967)

-JIM FORD, "Harlan County" (Country Funk!; 1969)

-MARVIN GAYE, "What's Going On" (1971)

-SUZI QUATRO, "Suzi Quatro" (1973)

-STONE COAL WHITE, "Stone Coal White" (rare Funk Rock band)

-"The Fame Studios Story: 1961-1973" (Muscle Shoals compilation)

-PINK FLOYD, "Wish You Were Here" (1974)

-CRASS, The Remastered Albums (1977-84)

-THE ROLLING STONES, "Some Girls" (1978)

-ESG, "Come Away With ESG" (1983)

-TALK TALK, "Laughing Stock" (1991)

-U2, "Achtung, Baby" (1991)

-NIRVANA, "Nevermind" (1991)

-QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE, "Queens Of The Stone Age" (1998)

"A splendid time is guaranteed for all!"

BEST COMIX: 2011

2012-01-23T15:20:00.000-08:00

BEST GRAPHIC NOVEL:

-"STARSTRUCK Deluxe Edition" ↑ ; by Elaine Lee, Michael Wm. Kaluta, and Lee Moyer

Still the smartest, funniest, and most creative series there is.

And the lavish, giant-sized omnibus packed with goodies blows all other competition away. >

BEST COMICS:

DC:

Click image to enlarge

-"BATWOMAN" ↑ ; story by J.H. Williams III and W. Haden Blackman; art by J.H. Williams III, or Amy Reader
The best of the best.

-"SWAMP THING"; by Jeff Lemire and Yanick Paquette
Pulls off the impossible, by bringing back all of the best elements of the Wein-Wrightson original, the Moore-Bissette-Totleben renaissance, and with a new sense of surprise. Astounding so far.

-"ANIMAL MAN"; by Todd Snyder and Travel Foreman
Matches the original heyday of Grant Morrison with better art and its own sophistication. A wonderful companion piece to the new SWAMP THING.

-"ACTION COMICS"; by Grant Morrison and Rags Morales
The 1938 Superman was a populist everyman who fought for the workers and took down the fatcats who lorded over them in the Depression.

The new Superman is again an avatar of the foreclosed, the downsized, and the penniless under the heels of the greed machine.
Look, up in the sky...it's our raised fists!

MARVEL:

-"ULTIMATE COMICS: SPIDER-MAN" ↑ , by Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli
While some jerks overreacted to a new Hispanic/African American Spider-Man, what we really got was a tender coming-of-age story of a charming teen kid starting his path to glory. Excellent all around. >

-"MOON KNIGHT"; by Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev
Bendis and Maleev...hey, what more could you ask for?

TOP SHELF:

-"LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDIANARY GENTLEMEN: 1969" ↑ , by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill
Alan Moore takes on the lit and culture of 60's London. A dream come true.

GRAPHIC NOVELS:

-"HABIBI" ↑ , by Craig Thompson
BLANKETS was an intimate story with a wide canvas. HABIBI is an intimate story on an epic scale that encompasses religions, countries, cultures, and gender. Ambitious and stunning.

-"GREEN RIVER KILLER: A True Detective Story", by Jeff Jensen and Jonathan Case
Noted pop culture writer Jeff Jensen details the personal dimension of a notorious case solved by his father.

-"CELLULOID", by Dave McKean
One of the best fine artists in the field doing an experimental meditation on erotica.

-"BATMAN: NOEL", by Lee Bermejo
Lee. Bermejo.

Everybody's-Talking-About, Dept:
(a.k.a., "haven't read these yet but the talk about them is great")

-"FINDER: VOICE", by Carla Speed McNeil

-"ANYA'S GHOST", by Vera Brosgol

-"HARK! A VAGRANT", by Kate Beaton

-"DAYTRIPPER", by Gabriel Ba

-"LUCHADORAS", by Peggy Adam

BEST COLLECTIONS:

-"WONDER WOMAN Chronicles, vol.2" ↑ , by Wm. Moulton Marston and H.G. Peter
Moulton's 1940's proto-feminist parables are still light years ahead of any version of her done since, and Peter's nouveau art is still as wonderful as it is unsung. >

-"The Complete POGO, vol. 1", by Walt Kelly
The definition of smart art. Absolutely essential.

-"KAMANDI Omnibus, Vol. 1", by Jack Kirby
Jack Kirby in the early 70's. Unbeatable.

-"CHASE", by D. Curtis Johnson and J.H. Williams III
Fans may know Chase from BATWOMAN; this overdue volume collects all her early adventures, with art by J.H. WILLIAMS III.

-"X-STATIX Omnibus", by Peter Milligan and Mike Allred
A huge compilation of their fun and satiric X-FORCE and X-STATIX series.

OUR CREATORS:

-"LILY RENEE, Escape Artist: From Holocaust Survivor to Comic Book Pioneer", by Trina Robbins.
Historian emeritus Trina Robbins shines light on another creative woman who deserves her place in the pantheon.

-"The Adventures of HERGE", by Jose-Louis Bocquet, Jean-Luc Fromental, and Stanislas Barthélémy
A biography of Herge done in the style of his beloved TINTIN books.

-"SUPERGODS", by Grant Morrison
Grant's insights on comic history are required reading.

(His judgement on Alan Moore is lacking, and can be corrected by reading...)

-"ALAN MOORE: Storyteller"↑ . by Gary Spencer Millidge
The most comprehensive overview on the multi-talented maestro, including an exclusive CD of his performance recordings.

---MOVIES AND TV---

GREAT

GREAT: Movies

Super 8; Hugo; Tintin

-THOR
Kenneth Branagh really went for it all. The Earth stuff was a little rushed, but Asgard was glorious.

-CAPTAIN AMERICA
A refreshing surprise. No irony, no jingoism, just a great pulp adventure homage with all the right instincts.

-SUPER 8
My personal favorite of the summer.

In the mid-70's, science fiction films were declared dead. Then STAR WARS remade the movie industry like The Beatles revised music. All those 13-year-old fans then made the pop culture of the next three decades. J.J Abrams brings it all full circle with this mysterious and tender homage to the 1977-1982 movies that ignited everything to come.

-HAUNTERS (S. Korea)
The bridge between UNBREAKABLE and PUSH. Sharply made, great characters, constant surprises, a rousing finish.

-HUGO
A beautiful love letter to early film and classic books. And perhaps the most thoughtful use of 3D yet seen.

-THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN
My old saw is, "Do Herge's actual clean-line style mapped onto CG puppets."

Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson did the opposite -wedding Herge's world to 3D realism, noir lighting, and Hitchcock angles- and pulled it off spectacularly. A breathtaking avalanche of smart fun.

GREAT: TV

Game Of Thrones; Misfits; Fringe/Fringe

-GAME OF THRONES
Only 5% of this is 'Fantasy'. The other 95% is the best character drama about court intrigue one could imagine.

-MISFITS (U.K.)
The Sex Pistols of 'superheroes'. Sacrilegious and hilarious.

-FRINGE
X-FILES never paid-off any of its set-ups well. FRINGE always does, in an unwinding tapestry that only gets better as it goes.

-THE FADES (U.K.)
A supernatural thriller. Like reading one of the finest Vertigo Comics of 1993, with in-jokes galore.

GREAT: Animated

-CHICO AND RITA ↑ (Spain/U.K.)
Beautiful to watch, to listen to, and to feel. Wonderful.

-THE SECRET WORLD OF ARRIETTY (Japan)
Another gem from Studio Ghibli, this charming tale of miniature people is a winner all around. Smart, heart, art.

-BATMAN: BRAVE AND THE BOLD
I never liked Bat-Mite because he 'epitomized how the 1950's had ruined Batman'.

Until now. Here, Bat-Mite points out that this show is a love letter to the Silver Age Of Comics. And he's right. Before we got too dark and serious, comics used to be about fun, wonder, and impossible non-sequiters. This show brings all of that back with hyper zeal. It's great fun in all the right ways, and won me over completely.

-BATMAN: Year One
An anime take on the classic Frank Miller/David Mazzucchelli origin. Effective, though Mazzucchelli's grittier artwork was more effective.

-FUTURAMA
Hey...It's Futurama!

GREAT: Documentary
-"GRANT MORRISON: Talking With The Gods"
Grand writer holds forth.

GOOD:

GOOD: Movies

-GREEN LANTERN
(Wait for it.) I like the 2/3 with the Lantern Corp and outer space.

The remaining third, the earthbound scenes with Mall-Friendly-Star and Model-Of-The-Minute, was hokey and cringe-inducing.

-SUPER
A bent Indie comedy take on what would really happen if you tried to be a superhero, featuring an unhinged Ellen Page.

-GRIFF THE INVISIBLE (Australia)
A modest take on homemade superheroes, with an engaging romance and some twists.

-The Extraordinary Adventures Of ADELE BLANC-SEC (France)
The grumbling adventurer gets a fine film treatment of her illustrated exploits by Luc Besson ("The Fifth Element").

GOOD: TV

-THE WALKING DEAD
I like it enough, while others love it. It's playing one note pretty well.

-GRIMM
Whedon-esque characters, fun stories, terrific lighting. A pleasant surprise.

GOD-AWFUL:

GOD-AWFUL: Movies

-X-MEN: First Class
Yeah, I hear it already; "How could you give GREEN LANTERN any props while dissing this film?"

Two-thirds of that works, one-third of this does (Michael Fassbender). The story is wildly uneven; the Civil Rights opportunity is inexcusably ignored; and reaching beyond 1962 to homage culture styles well after it creates an anachronistic clusterfunk.

-TRANSFORMERS 3
As James Brown said, "Talking loud and saying nothing."

GOD-AWFUL: TV

-AMERICAN HORROR STORY
A textbook case in how to overdo everything and accomplish nothing.

(For the antidote, watch THE FADES series from BBC.)

Nuff said, pilgrim. Excelsior!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

2011-12-31T08:19:00.001-08:00

...from 'The Herstory Of Rock'n'Soul'!:

http://www.youtube.com/funknroll

REVOLUTION!: An 'Occupy Wall Street' Music Player

2011-11-05T11:17:00.000-07:00

"V FOR VENDETTA", By Alan Moore and David Lloyd.>

"Remember, remember
the 5th of November..."

200 songs to Fight The Power, by all your favorite artists with smarts and heart!

Folk, Blues, Country, Soul, Garage Rock, Songwriter, Funk, Hard Rock, Reggae, Punk, Go Go Funk, Rap, Grunge, Riot Grrrl, Alt Country, Indie, and more!

Up with the People,
down with the Rich,
break the Banks,
fire the Puppets,
and make a fairer World!

V's JUKEBOX

Create a playlist at MixPod.com

Starring:

Woody Guthrie!
Pete Seeger!
Sam Cooke!
Bob Dylan!
Odetta!
The Kinks!
Sly & The Family Stone!
The Doors!
The Rolling Stones!
Nina Simone!
MC5!
Gil Scott-Heron!
John Lennon!
Marvin Gaye!
Black Sabbath!
War!
Stevie Wonder!
Schoolhouse Rock!
Bob Marley!
Patti Smith!
Funkadelic!
Sex Pistols!
The Clash!
X-Ray Spex!
Peter Tosh!
Gang Of Four!
Poison Girls!
Dead Kennedys!
U2!
Fela!
XTC!
Public Enemy!
Sinead O'Connor!
Fugazi!
Bikini Kill!
L7!
Neil Young!
Le Tigre!
Tom Waits!
The Coup!
Spoon!
Billy Bragg!
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club!

And hosted by V
and Charlie Chaplin!

This Public Service Announcement
was brought to you by
Fawkes News.

'Ideas are bulletproof.'

The Big Bang of STARSTRUCK: The Roots and Branches of Elaine Lee & Michael Kaluta's space opera

2011-10-08T09:49:00.000-07:00

(2nd Anniversary Edition!
Original post: 10/8/09)

"I was, and am, a huge fan of STARSTRUCK,
which I think was one of the most brave and elegant experiments
in comic book story-telling."
-Clive Barker, ("Hellraiser")

"Favorite comic book of all time? STARSTRUCK, by Lee and Kaluta."
-Mike Carey, writer; "Lucifer", "Hellblazer"

STARSTRUCK is a raucous space opera created by writer/actor Elaine Lee and designer/illustrator Michael Wm. Kaluta. It has morphed from stage play to graphic novel, comic series to radio waves, and knows no bounds. For years, in its chimerical forms, it has delighted the daring and perplexed the piddling. It is a science fiction magnum opus where galactic gals boot you up the buttside, revolution is a rollercoaster, and slapstick flies higher than helium.

Smart and sexy, sassy and sacrilegious, STARSTRUCK is flat out more fun than your brain knows what to do with!

(UPDATE: The entire new series is now collected at larger size in the STARSTRUCK Deluxe Edition, available since March, 2011.)

STARSTRUCK, with new painted color by
Lee Moyer
(except Harry Palmer, color by Kaluta;
photo by Sean Smith)

It began as a stage play in 1980 in the postpunk cuisinart of NYC. Lee and Kaluta then extended the mania into challenging adult comics for the radical HEAVY METAL magazine. Those stories became a graphic novel from Marvel Comics in 1984, who unwittingly accompliced a new mini-series through their mature imprint Epic Comics in '85. In 1990, the demented duo began revising and expanding these stories through Dark Horse Comics. Now, they are up to their subversion again; a new remastered version of these legendary stories is now being released by IDW Comics in a monthly comic, with expanded art and breathtaking color by painter Lee Moyer. And then there's the new audio recording of the stage play, and the rumors of the new radio series...

STARSTRUCK draws from a deep reservoir of cultural ideas and then spikes the kool-aid. It can be compared, connected, or coincidenced against many themes, genres, styles, and creators from before it, but it roils quite clearly on its own course. Wanna know Who and Where, and Why it's there? For loyal fans and new readers, this article will try to point out some of the parallels before and after it, to appreciate its beginnings and show how it helped forge the cultural future you live in.

Strap in and hang onto your keister!

ALLUSION: When I assume a clear connection between one thing another.
ILLUSION: When I get it totally wrong.

Getting into character...

BUCK ROGERS

The silhouette of STARSTRUCK's ship,
The Harpy, recalls the Buck Rogers serial poster.

"Buck Rogers" brought the solar system to Main Street. There had been "scientific fiction" novels before his debut in 1928 -like H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs- but Buck Rogers was the one who brought it into everyone's living room. First as a few pulp magazine short stories, then as the first science fiction comic strip ('29), the first sci-fi radio show ('32), and as movie serials ('39), and TV series ('50, '79). Americans were first exposed to a fantastic future, rocket ships, jet packs, killer robots, and rayguns through this swashbuckling futurist. Thirties pulps and Forties comics were flooded with Buck imitations from Flash Gordon and british Dan Dare to countless also-flews.

Top: Amelia Earhart; Buck Rogers button; Wilma Deering
Bottom: Wilma (Constance Moore) in "Buck Rogers" serial; Brucilla the Muscle

STARSTRUCK often homages the retro technology, clothes, and adventurous spirit of this big bang of modern sci-fi. Buck and his running partner Wilma Deering reflected the hero aviators of the time, like Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, with futuristic aviator caps and flight suits. They soared in art nouveau shuttles and sported ringlet laser pistols. Their universe was a playground of weird wonders and cliffhanger escapades, where danger just meant more fun.

Top: Buck Rogers comic strip,
Phil Nowlan & Dick Calkins, 1933
Bottom: Buck Rogers rocket toy;
Galactic Girl Guides ship

Artist Dick Calkins, and later Rick Yager, charted this future in ink. For the STARSTRUCK play, Michael Kaluta designed sets based on movie serial spaceships, with screens, piping, and levers. The silhouette of its spaceship, the Harpy, hearkens to the ship's shape on the 1939 Buck Rogers serial poster. The aviator-style cap is worn by hero Brucilla The Muscle. There are rayguns and art deco robots, corkscrew bullet ships, and flying cycles aplenty in the comic stories.

Top: Buck's raygun; Brucilla's blaster
Bottom: Serial rocket set; pulp mag spaceship; Bronwyn on Harpy set

SCI-FI GOOD GIRL

Wilma Deering, woman of the 25th Century!

Wilma Deering is the template for the SF women that followed. She was bold, in charge, dressed like the men, and did everything beside Buck. She was the modern flapper girl now in the 25th century, leaving all the petticoats and parlors behind. Distaff buccaneers and evil queens now seeded the pop universe because of her, such as Dale Arden and Princess Aura from "Flash Gordon". The 40's publisher Fiction House, in its Planet Stories pulps and Planet Comics, had a knack for showcasing fighting SF women on its covers, particularly brash blonds with blasters like "Mysta of the Moon". Wonder Comics profiled "Tara the Pirate Queen", a spacefaring captain charting her own course.

Tara, the Pirate Queen, 1948 (art: Alex Schomburg/"Xela")

Many great pulp SF stories were written by Leigh Brackett, the queen of Golden Age Sci-Fi. The type of women she trailblazed clearly inspired George Lucas to homage them with Princess Leia Organa and her mother, Queen Padme Amidala, in the STAR WARS films. (Making the circle complete, Leigh Brackett helped co-write the screenplay for "The Empire Strikes Back"!)

Top: "Planet Comics" from Fiction House, late 1940's
Bottom: Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher); Padme Amidala (Natalie Portman);
Galatia 9 & Brucilla (Kaluta commission art, 2004)

From this tradition come Galatia 9 and Brucilla The Muscle, Mary Medea and Eeeeeeelah, from STARSTRUCK.

SCI-FI BAD GIRL

But where would the good girls be without the bad girl? If the good girls mentioned were women with the shackles off, bad girls were hellions with all inhibitions gone. If the good no longer needed permission to be full-range, the bad wouldn't even think to ask. The bad girls are secretly admired because they don't apologize for their desires. Even if they are in the wrong, that attitude is rather liberating, even if experienced only vicariously.

Top: Queen Azura (Flash Gordon,'35); The Dragon Lady ('30s); Miss Lace ('40s)
Bottom: The Queen (Snow White,'37);
Devil Girl From Mars ('54);
Black Queen (Barbarella,'68)

In the tradition of H. Rider Haggard's "She" and Burroughs' Queen La of Opar there were many powerful women in books, films, pulps, and comics. Always, they were role fantasies based on people's fears or desires. They were as trapped or free as your outlook allowed.

Elaine Lee believes in character over agenda. "You know, I've never purposefully set out to write a feminist story, or even a story with a strong message," she wrote in 1997. "It would be hard for me, as I tend to fall in love with all my characters, so that the bad guys never end up too bad...just misguided."

Top: Verloona Ti (Sandra Spurney onstage)
Bottom: With Kalif (Paul Ratkevich) and Rex (Neal Ashmun);
Lucrezia Bajar, a.k.a., Ronnie Lee Ellis

In STARSTRUCK, two women vie for villainesque. Verloona Ti, a vain and ruthless schemer with flamboyant class and sensual abandon; the two villain men, Kalif Bajar and Rah El Rex, become adjuncts to her. And Lucrezia Bajar, a.k.a. Ronnie Lee Ellis, the twin of Kalif who is both a famous SF writer and a vindictive schemer in her own right. The villains' machinations are motivated erratically more by personal faults than pure evil.

"The story isn’t always linear" says Lee. "Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes serious and sometimes a mix, depending on which character you’re following. We took a character like Kalif, who in the play came off as simply evil, and gave him a past - a sister who tormented him, a father who expected too much – and tried to show how he became who he became." So his sister Ronnie Lee Ellis ended up becoming a crucial player in the crazed game.

This long trend of femme fatales in SF continues through the mercurial Catwoman, the Black Queen in "Barbarella", Ursa from "Superman II", Supreme Commander Servalan from "Blake's 7", the Borg Queen, Kai Winn of "Star Trek: Deep Space 9", Saffron on "Firefly", and T-X the Terminator.

Setting the stage...

ARTISTS

Michael Wm. Kaluta is a master artist who is heir to the classical era of design and illustration. He channels little of traditional dynamic superhero cartooning (Jack Kirby, John Buscema), instead drawing from the deeper well of pioneers of art nouveau, art deco, pen illustration, pulp covers, french comix, and manga. STARSTRUCK lets Kaluta make puckish nods at all his inspirations.

Top: "Isle of the Dead" (Basel version, 1880) by Arnold Bocklin
Bottom: Aisle of the Dread (Dictator wannabe)

-The symbolist painting, "Isle of the Dead", by Bocklin gets a clever nod in a surreal boat sequence.

Left panels: Aubrey Beardsley
Right panels: Michael Wm. Kaluta

-Aubrey Beardsley can be sensed in two ways: the use of hard graphics with lyrical, patterned lines for mid-tones; and in lampooning the spoiled elite in their antiquated masquerade clothing. The former can really be appreciated in Kaluta's fine work on the black/white version of STARSTRUCK from 1990. The latter can often be seen in schizoid dandy Rah El Rex, and courtesans of the corrupt Bajar family.

-The pen textures of great line illustrators like Charles Dana Gibson, Joseph Clement Coll, Arthur Rackham, and Franklin Booth grace much of his ink work. (Intrigued readers should also check out unsung women like Clara Elsene Peck, Elizabeth Shippen Green, and Dorothy Pulis Lathrop.)

-His sense of adventure illustration in a classically trained style sometimes recalls N.C. Wyeth, J. Allen St. John, and Roy G. Krenkel; and pulp cover wizards like George Rozen ("The Shadow"), Walter M. Baumhofer ("Doc Savage"), Earle K. Bergey, Norman Saunders, and Virgil Finlay.

Left top: "Death and Life", Gustav Klimt, 1919;
Left bottom: studies for "The Lovers", Klimt, 1910.
Right: study for Harry Palmer and Erotica Ann, Michael Wm. Kaluta.

-His strong sense of pattern, geometry, and design summons art nouveau eternals like Alphonse Mucha and Gustav Klimt, especially in covers and splash pages.

Top: "The Dinky Bird", Maxfield Parrish, 1904;
"Little Nemo", Winsor McCay, 1907
Bottom: The Bajar holoroom by Kaluta

-The art nouveau cartoonist Winsor McCay ("Little Nemo In Slumberland") resonates in his use of wondrous architectural spaces.

Top: "Daybreak", Maxfield Parrish, 1922
Bottom: The planet Hydrangea by Kaluta and Moyer.

-Maxfield Parrish rings in his use of translucent light, lush panoramas, sense of harmonic balance, and strong idyllic graphics. Parrish also painted "The Dinky Bird" as an illustration for "Poems of Childhood" by Eugene Field. This book is quoted during scenes of Galatia 9's childhood.

Left: Life magazine cover, John Held, Jr., 1929
Right: Galatia 9 and E-V, the recorder droid

-John Held, Jr. specialized in balloonish cartoons for the art deco era. That frankfurter whimsy is captured in the companion droid, E-V. And there may be some of the deco-delic whimsy of Rick Griffin's underground comix creatures there, too.

Top: "The Spirit", Will Eisner, 1946
Bottom: Kalif Bajar bested by Randall Factor

-"Anybody who doesn't think I've studied this Will Eisner fellow just hasn't looked at my work," Kaluta offers up front. Will Eisner created The Spirit, a sophisticated 40's series considered the "Citizen Kane" of comic art. His textured cities, theatrical shadows, use of sound effects, emphasis on storytelling, and deeply human characters are a major influence.

-As mentioned, Kaluta tributes the early futurist tech of Dick Calkins and Rick Yager ("Buck Rogers"). But also other grand strip cartoonists like the graceful storytelling of Hal Foster ("Prince Valiant", "Tarzan"), and the elegant drama of Alex Raymond ("Flash Gordon" ). Consider the sequence where Galatia 9 fights the ogres.

Top: "Tales of Three Planets" illustration,
Roy G. Krenkel
Bottom: "Time To Leave", Incredible Science Fiction #31, 1955,
Roy G. Krenkel

-Their heirs were the astounding stable of EC Comics in the 50's, with Frank Frazetta, Wally Wood, Al Williamson, Jack Davis, Bernard Krigstein, and Roy G. Krenkel, who went from hero to mentor for Michael. The 60's work of Krenkel and Frazetta for paperback covers like "Tarzan" and "John Carter of Mars" first inspired his career into motion.

Robert Crumb flashes back to his childhood epiphany, 1982

-The bastard scion of the EC gang were the Underground Comix freaks in the 60's, who injected shocking levels of freeform chaos, sociopolitical slapstick, deviant sexuality, and hallucinatory mindblow into comics. Culprits include Robert Crumb, Spain Rodriguez, Robert Williams, Rick Griffin, and Melinda Gebbie. Kaluta greatly admires the organic rendering and particularly the strong storytelling of Crumb, especially in his recent post-drug decades.

Top: Phillipe Druillet
Middle: Moebius
Bottom: Inki Bilal

They in turn paved the french SF countercultural comix of Jean Gerard (a.k.a., Moebius), Phillipe Druillet, and Inki Bilal. As the collective Les Humanoides Associes they unleashed the adult fantasy magazine METAL HURLANT in 1976. Their work had immediate and dramatic effect on Kaluta's mature style. "(Moebius) has very unusual characters and very unusual situations and they act very unusually," he told Phil Trumbo in '85. " And the end is never necessarily what you're going to expect. I love it."

-More skill refinement came from his friendships with NYC artist peers of deep illustration ilk like Neal Adams, Walt Simonson, and Charles Vess; and Barry Windsor Smith, Jeffrey Jones, and Berni Wrightson, with whom he formed the collective The Studio right before STARSTRUCK emerged. The imprint of this is clear in his initial poster and portfolio of designs for the STARSTRUCK play.

"Veep 7 Vacationing on Aguatunisia", Michael Wm. Kaluta

-Kaluta is also an admirer of manga and anime legends like Katsuhiro Otomo ("Akira"), Hayao Miyazaki ("Spirited Away", "Ponyo"), and Masamune Shirow ("Ghost In the Shell"). Some of that shows in the samurai-tech design for the Vercadian Protector Droid, or "Veep".

That set the stage; now here's the Players and the Scenery...

MEDEA

STARSTRUCK begins with Mary Medea, a former rebel who helped usher in the anarchic era of freedoms, or Anarchera, in the wake of the Dread Dictator's fall. Mary is the catalyst for everything that unfolds in the story, kickstarting its heroes and its villains into a larger scheme.

"As the books progress," Michael Kaluta discloses, "the reader gets a slow reveal of the greater energies and alliances by the way they impact the lives of the happy-go-lucky space girls and boys eking out their bits of the big ball of wax."

Top: Medea by Evelyn De Morgan, 1889; by Alphonse Mucha, 1898;
"Planet Stories", pulp sci-fi rebel by Allen Anderson, 1952
Bottom: Mary Medea, rebel grrrl

In greek myths Medea has a complex history, which varies according to the teller. In general she is known as the wife of Jason during the Trojan War, a clever strategist who you don't want to cross. Most of her stories credit this resourcefulness and her protection of her family. But one oddly negative variant, in which her anger over Jason's adultery propels her to kill their children, hogs all the attention. It's understandable that filicide attracts our horror, but the fact that this defiant woman in an era of male dominance is nullified by an injected scare story seems awfully suspect. Take it with a pillar of salt.

GLORIANNA

Mary Medea becomes Glorianna, the prime minister of the asteroid sector of Phoebus where the valuable krystals are mined, and potentially ruler of the emerging interworld order if she plays the cards right.

Top: "Princezna Hyacinta", Alphonse Mucha, 1911; Glorianna of Phoebus
Bottom: Glorianna is behind Erotica Ann

This has parallels in "The Faerie Queene" (1590-96), a long allegorical poem by Edmund Spenser that tributes Queen Elizabeth I. In it he refers to her as 'Gloriana', which naturally set him up for life with the queen. Also, the sun god Phoebus is a latin variation of either Apollo or Helios. And the mythical Medea happens to be the granddaughter of Helios.

Mary Medea/ Glorianna is the granddaughter of Molly Medea, a freedom fighter who took down the Dread Dictator. After that victory, the universe is left in the anarchic free-for-all that we find in the stories. Making sure to have a wild card on winning destiny, Mary sees that Molly has a second go-around...

AMAZON

...as Galatia 9, or the cloned Molly Medea. In her 22nd year, we see Galatia on a backwater world where amazons fight hillbilly ogres. As an amazon intern, Galatia has gained fighting skills and focus, and lost a breast through initiation. This circle of sisterhood gets rudely interrupted as she is hurtled out into the universe and destiny.

Top: classical Amazon; "The Golden Amazon",
SF pulp hero by John Russell Fearn
Middle: pulp SF amazon; "Wonder Woman,"
Wm. Moulton Marston & H.G. Peter, 1945
Bottom: Galatia 9 initiation and keg party

The greek myth of amazons is well-known, but evidence of actual warrior women who banded together for defense and expression exist in all cultures of the world. These sisterhoods of strength became important symbols for the feminist movement in the early 70's. Gloria Steinem almost single-handedly resurrected Wonder Woman with a 1972 hardback book of 40's reprints, and a thorough essay of archealogical and historical examples of amazons by Phyllis Chesler prefaced it.

The desire to purge patriarchal theocracy led to Goddess worship in the late 70's which centered on a female diety and perceived feminine spirituality. Elaine Lee says that, "Galatia 9's amazons and the Cosmic Veil were influenced by the whole Goddess movement" and particularly "Dianic Wicca for the amazons."

STARSTRUCK is a fluid universe where all views collide and creative chaos insues. It doesn't have time for didactic stances and 'either/or' traps because everything is everything. "Science Fiction is at its best when it offers us new ways to look at our problems," Lee wrote in 1997. "It is silliest when it offers too many (or too little) solutions. Then it is simply an allegory...or worse, propaganda." Aspects of religion, philosophy, consumerism, militarism, and the arts are all blasted irreverently through the series' blender just to see what happens. The amazon sequence explored a rising new dimension of SF writing from the time.

"Back in the late 1970's, the women's movement was raging, and a lot of 'women's sci-fi' was produced," Lee recalls. Writers included greats like Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and Octavia Butler. "I read a lot of it, and saw that it tended to fall into one of two categories. The first type followed the 'planet of the chauvinist pigs' scenario." Women are enslaved by piggish men, and either become love dolls or rebels who fight back. "The second type... was Utopian." Women achieve a separated state of sister-love and selective cloning somewhat like a tranquil New Age dream. "My main problem with Utopian sci-fi is that nothing ever explodes, and the love scenes are really boring."

Confronted with being "some musclebound alien's house drudge" or a blissed role-modelbot, Lee created her own path. "I wrote Galatia 9 for myself because I was acting in soap operas and commercials, and I'm small and blond, and I was getting all the wimpy dumb blond parts. So I wanted to be a tough starship captain. I said, why do all Amazons have to be really tall and buxom?" She performed Galatia 9 onstage and Kaluta draws her in Elaine's likeness.

George Clinton once described the premise of his funk concept albums as 'putting the black man where you least expected to find him'. In the case of his group Parliament in 1975, this meant in the White House, and as spacefaring Afronauts who had originated early human cultures. Lee and Kaluta, with the simple act of featuring acerbic women in roles so worn out by decades of men, had likewise flipped the SF script. This was met with kneejerk defensiveness then and now, but STARSTRUCK has too much fun to even care. "They're people that don't pander to what you're expecting a female character in a science fiction play or comic book to be," Kaluta replied in the 80's, "they're just people. If you don't like them, they're not going to change for you."

Top: carved Amazon battle frieze
Middle: 'Amazon' Stories, 1949; "Prince Valiant", Hal Foster, 1964
Bottom: Galatia 9 fights valiantly

The amazon sequence also recalls "Prince Valiant": Galatia's short bob haircut, her swordplay and archery; fighting trollish louts; the castle-esque ruins of the refinery; a hearty battle song; and Kaluta's illustrative linework. Later, Elaine co-wrote an excellent mini-series of "Prince Valiant" with Charles Vess for Marvel, which Michael did the covers for.

VALKYRIE

Galatia's partner is Brucilla the Muscle, a stout-framed pilot. We first see her when her space brigade squadron is strafing a nebula cloud in formation.

Top: "The Valkyrie", P.N. Arbo, 1885; B. Schott, 1889
Middle: Arthur Rackham, 1910
Bottom: Brucilla by Kaluta, 1980

Brucilla is a pulp update on Brynhildr the valkyrie, or Brunnhilde as she's known in the opera, "The Ring of the Nibelung". Valkyries of Norse legend emerged from the clouds on flying horses to deliver dead warriors to heaven. By turn, Brucilla is tricked into a suicide run through the space clouds that kills all of her team. Afterward, her uncanny piloting through it seems to open up a gate to something...else.

With her strong build, we-can-do-it attitude, and dexterous mechanical skills, Brucilla also recalls Norman Rockwell's take on Rosie the Riveter.

Top: "Rosie the Riveter", Norman Rockwell, 1943
Bottom: Brucilla the mechanic

"Brucilla was that young hothead (previously male) in every space opera," says Elaine, "but is also based on my uncle, John M. Waters, who wrote a couple of books called "Rescue At Sea" (1966), about flying helicopter rescue missions for the coast guard (which he did), and "Bloody Winter", about submarine warfare in the North Atlantic (where he served in WWII). When he was a kid he was in the Sea Scouts and I have his old manual. He collected sea shanties and sang them all the time. He sounded like Foghorn Leghorn. So there's a lot of Foghorn in Bru."

"Ring of the Nibelung"; Brucilla sings the Amercadian anthem;
Foghorn, I say, Foghorn Leghorn

50's sci-fi carried the imprint of the military design, rank, and attitudes of the War, which is apparent in the 'blockhead-trumps-egghead' stance of this "Tom Corbett" episode. The series also released a 45 single of their fight
anthem. Likewise, Brucilla proudly bellows the Amercadian Space Brigade Anthem often. This is also known as "Us Against the Void": not content that their xenophobia drove them to blow up the "other side" of the Earth, Amercadia (the western hemisphere) turned that jingoism into a manifest destiny pointed at the universe. This eventually led to the Dread Dictator. (Insert Bush joke here.)

BORGIA

"Now we are in the power of a wolf, the most rapacious perhaps that this world has ever seen. And if we do not flee, he will inevitably devour us all."
-Giovanni di Lorenzo de' Medici (later Pope Leo X), warning of the Borgias' reign

TOP: Pope Alexander VI; Cesare Borgia; Lucrezia Borgia
BOTTOM: Baron Bajar; Kalif Bajar;
Lucrezia Bajar

The rebel Medea family has been in a generational war against the corrupt Bajar dynasty. The Bajars have names that act as historical signifiers of evil scheming:

-Baron Roderigo Sejanus Vasco d'Gama Bajar, the machiavellian twit
-his son, Prince Phillipe Cesare Kalif Alexander Bajar, the chosen heir and airhead
-his daughter, Indira Lucrezia Ronnie Lee Ellis Bajar, the slighted heir with slight-of-hand

Primarily the Baron and his scheming son and daughter reflect the Borgias of Renaissance Italy: Roderic de Borja i Borja of the Spanish kingdom of Valencia, who bribed his way to become Pope Alexander VI; his murderous son Cesare Borgia; and equally poisonous daughter Lucrezia Borgia. Just as the Borgias misused their religious power to murder, rob, and colonize, the Bajars use religion, the military, and politics to advance their wicked power dreams. Pope Alexander may have been poisoned by his son, a fate that doesn't portend well for Baron Bajar.

The word "bajar" is spanish for 'to descend', a pun on both decline and descendents. The spiritual incest at the heart of the Bajars' backbiting struggles is doomed to eat them inside out. The Baron's name also refers to Sejanus, the Roman Praetorian who ended badly; and Vasco da Gama, the thuggish Portuguese explorer.

The Bajar son's name refers to (perhaps) Phillip III of Spain, a right bastard; the general term Kalif/ Calliph, a Muslim civil and religious leader, but also Kalifah, a radical revolutionary distortion of that power; and Alexander the Great and Pope Alexander VI. Clearly his father was loading the conqueror thing on heavy.

This is leavened by the wily daughter, whose name happily puts good Indira Gandhi right next to twisted Lucrezia Borgia, aptly summing her schizoid potential; and the downhome Ronnie Lee Ellis, which probably has nothing to do with basketball player LeRon Ellis but may have some hint of a certain sci-fi writer turned evangelist....

PYGMALION

"Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockle shells, and pretty maids all in a row."

1: PYGMALION & GALATEA

In the greek myth, Pygmalion was a Cypress sculptor who, repulsed by real women, created an idealized statue that he fell in love with. Through divine intervention she is given life and becomes his wife. In later accounts she was given the name Galatea.

Jean-Leon Gerome, 1865; "Pygmalion", 1938; "My Fair Lady", 1964

George Bernard Shaw's 1912 play "Pygmalion" was a variant on this, with a King trying to reprogram a beggar girl to fit his station. This was filmed in 1938, and turned into the musical play "My Fair Lady" and then film (1964) starring Audrey Hepburn.

These themes are subversively inverted in STARSTRUCK, where revolutionary Mary Medea makes android doubles of herself to undermine a corrupt ruler, and also a clone of her ancestor who becomes the freedom-fighter named Galatia 9.

Initially, when Mary Medea was first seen with the baby clone, a poem referencing Pygmalion narrated the sequence. "I whose name means heavenly womb will play Pygmalion to her Galatea/ and shape a Goddess not of clay/ but out of dancing atoms and another's Spiralling DNA." But in later print revisions this text was dropped as the scene was expanded.

Lee was also reading the Bible while writing the original play. "Galatia was named for the Epistle to the Galatians, the ninth book in the New Testament," explains Lee, saying it had no specific allusion to it. "Then in the play, the character says it was a name she took among the amazons, so we told that story in the (prequel) graphic novel. In that story, Galatia sees the name on the side of a ruined grain silo."

Glorianna saves Erotica Ann from destruction

The story upends themes of vanitas from different angles. There's Glorianna/ Mary Medea with her army of Ann droids, a practical move made for surveillance and infiltration, but with a hint of self-preservation. But then there's her target, Baron Bajar, who wanted the perfect heir and got twins; a son who can't get it together, and a smarter daughter he rejects because he can't get it together. "Zounds! That boy is not working out the way I'd planned," he grouses. "Almost too close for fraternal twins," Mary later ponders, "More like-," at which point a tangent song about clones is sung.

"I'd rather have a paper doll to call my own than a fickle-minded real live girl." -Johnny S. Black, "Paper Doll", 1942

2: PAPER DOLL

Pygmalion can be seen as an allegory of the insecure heart yearning for love, turning from the unpleasantness of reality to construct a romance that comforts them. In an individual sense the story is touching and universal. But taken more broadly, the story can err into the worst side of male control fantasies, in which their intended is only an mirror to reflect their own vanity or power. The area between romantic and chauvinist blurs pretty quick.

Who isn't moved during the film "Vertigo" when Judy pleads, "Couldn't you just love me, for who I am?" And chilled when Scotty insists she be someone else with, "Judy, please, it can't matter to you."

This theme of women as a fetish object or empty vessel of another's ego runs through pop culture. It takes forms in stories about mannequins, toy dolls, androids, sex dolls, and emotional puppets. In STARSTRUCK, all of these are combined in Erotica Ann, the pleasure droid that Mary Medea creates. Erotica Ann's gradual arc includes being spy, love slave, barmaid, bargaining chip, science officer, and sentient rebel.

Parallels to this include:
-Fritz Lang's expressionist deco masterpiece "Metropolis" (1927), where the consciousness of Maria is placed into an android who takes on human form.

Maria in "Metropolis"

-"The Bride of Frankenstein" (1931), where a constructed female mate for Frankenstein's pitiful creation is repulsed by him and wants escape.

-"Vertigo" (1958), a tale of two women and one man's blind obsession.

-Elaine points to an episode of "The Twilight Zone" that struck her in youth called "The Lonely" (1959) which explores the middle ground between ownership and companionship. Another episode with a related theme of prefab identity is "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" (1964), where a young woman in the consumerist future of 2000 resists becoming a plastic surgery copy of everyone else. Ahem.

-Elaine also was influenced by the brief series "My Living Doll" (1965), starring Julie Newmar, as some inspiration for Erotica Ann. Julie plays a brilliant but inexperienced android surrounded by men who only want to paw or domesticate her. Played for chucklehead yuks, of course.

-"In the town of Stepford, the men are getting what they always dreamed of...perfect wives. And the dreams are becoming a nightmare for The Stepford Wives." (1975)

-In the films "Westworld" (1973) and "Futureworld" (1976) robots role-play every human fantasy, including as love slaves. But they rebel.

-In "The Bionic Woman" TV series (1976-78), the cyborg heroine combats 'Fembots', killer female androids controlled by an evil scientist.

"#12 Looks Just Like You"; "My Living Doll";
Pris the anti-doll, "Blade Runner"

-In "Blade Runner" (1982), replicants of both sexes are used for everything including as sex toys. But a group rebels violently, including sex model Pris (Daryl Hannah). In the STARSTRUCK play, Erotica Ann uses her legs to crush a certain enemy, a move that preceded the similar scene with Pris in "Blade Runner" by two years.

-Recent variations include the hero of "Ghost In the Shell", the adult dolls of "A.I.", the villain in "Terminator III", the hero of "Terminator: The Sara Connor Chronicles" (Summer Glau), the perfected-self society of "Surrogates", and the inverse puppets of "Dollhouse" (Eliza Dushku).

Kalif and Ann (onstage, Paul Ratkevitch and Karen Stilwell)

Erotica Ann is first seen as a gift given to the corrupt Bajar family, where young Kalif Bajar falls for the idealized gynoid. A bad incident involving her traumitizes Kalif who goes on the wrong path as a future villain. When all Erotica Anns are ordered destroyed, the final one houses their collective consciousness and she breaks off on her own path. This is recorded in a galactic bestseller by his neglected twin, Ronnie Lee Ellis, as "The Prince and the Pleasure Droid."

Of course STARSTRUCK quips the script. There are male versions of sex droids, like Handi Andi and Joe Andy Nova, or "kick-on-a-stick". From the STARSTRUCK Glossary: "Living Doll Cybernetics sent questionnaires to billions of women asking them exactly what they would like to see in or on a male pleasure droid. They got answers like: 1) blue eyes, 2) a nice voice, 3) an assortment of detachable appendages." Women bought them in droves but then returned them because something wasn't 'right'. LDC left the doll the same and changed the advertising. Now pitched as a companion instead of a convenience, Joe was a grand slam. "He's been with me now through sub-space, six lovers, and an interplanetary war, and I find that I've grown to love him."

Barbie in outer space

One of the strongest inspirations for the pleasure droids was Barbie, confirms Elaine Lee. This is clear in her exaggerated feminine body proportions, her use as a fantasy toy, her assembly manufacture, and as social fetish object for gender attitudes.

"Look at Erotica Ann's Dream House in the first issue," Lee says. "And its pink!"

Top and Left: Erotica Ann's Dream House
Right Top: vintage Barbie Dream House
Right Bottom: life-size Barbie Dream House, by Jonathan Adler, 2009

Barbie, then and now:
1959
1965
1967
1971
1983
2009

PIN-UP

STARSTRUCK perpetually makes fun of gender stereotypes. One aspect of this is in how the 'man's man' Harry Palmer and 'womanly woman' Erotica Ann look like pulp-era pin-ups. Naturally they are lovers.

Top: artist Zoe Mozert posing for her own pin-ups (1,2); Betty Grable (3)
Bottom: George Petty (2); Tom of Finland (4)

Erotica Ann is in permanent cheesecake mode, striking 'come hither' postures like a George Petty or Alberto Vargas model.

Harry Palmer, the tough sailor, is all beefcake, with the slender hips and broad shoulders of a Tom of Finland fantasy.

The Rocketeer; Brucilla the rocket girl

The Bettie Page revival was almost entirely ignited by Dave Stevens' homage character of her in his 1980's "The Rocketeer" comics. Michael did a playful nudge at his good friend by flipping the script with Brucilla.

COWGIRL

Mary Medea and the rest of the Medea family grew up on the Barkly Ranch in New Wyoming's desert plains. This is a wink at the Barkley family from the western TV series, "The Big Valley" (1965-69), which was headed by bold Barbara Stanwyck.

Cowgrrrls from Western pulps and comics, 1930s to 1950s

One of the most popular pulp magazines of all time was "Ranch Romances", which lasted until the early 70's, twenty years after all others gave up the ghost. In "Rangeland Romance" and "Western Romance", tough cowgals could rope a bronco, brand a steer, bullwhip a gun out of your hand, and smooch a cowpoke faster than a greasefire. 50's comics like "Women Outlaws" turned the prairie prose into two-fisted toons. That tornado unwinds through films like "Outlaw Women" (1952), "The Dalton Girls" (1957), "Hannie Caulder" (1971), "The Legend of Frenchie King" (1971), "The Quick and the Dead" (1995), "Hooded Angels" (2004), "Gang of Roses" (2004), and "Bandidas" (2006).

Space, the final frontier...
The Medeas; Brucilla; and Galatia

And what better ancestor for Brucilla the Muscle could there be than Calamity Jane on "Deadwood"? (@#%&ing language alert...)

Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert); Brucilla does William Tell

SCI-FI WOMEN: Where Women Should've Gone Boldy Beside, The 60's and 70's

"Star Trek" embarked boldly in its 1965 pilot episode by having a female second in command, Number 1 (Majel Barrett). A studio suit, in all their eternal wisdom, told Gene Roddenbury "to lose the girl, and that guy with the pointed ears". Gene instead retooled it so Spock was second in command, and Majel sidestepped to a lesser, blonder role. Evidently the Romulans weren't threatened by women, as proven by the Romulan Commander (Joanne Linville) in "The Enterprise Incident" (1968). But sadly, even in the final episode "Turnabout Intruder" (1969), women aren't allowed to be Federation starship captains, provoking rejected Janice Lester to take revenge on James Kirk.

Number 1 (right); The Romulan Commander; Janice Lester

But in the UK, they could be Moonbase Commander, and wear it with brilliant flair and purple hair, like Lt. Gay Ellis (Gabrielle Drake) on "UFO" (1970-71).

"Star Wars" (1977) hit the film industry like The Beatles hit music, and with it came no-nonsense Princess Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) from the planet Los Angeles. She shot, she smirked, she strangled your ass with a chain. The television knock-off "Battlestar Galactica" (1978) featured female Viper pilots and bridge crew in her wake.

Lt. Gay Ellis (right); the original Galactica crew;
Madge Sinclair, "Star Trek IV"

But no one was prepared for Ellen Ripley. The hellion from "Alien" (1979) played by Sigourney Weaver was the real badass who never stops, the anti-'scream queen' who takes control and saves the day. "Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?" she snaps at the greedy suits in "Aliens" (1986), and who doesn't cheer? That year also saw the first glimpsed female Federation captain in the movie "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," played by Madge Sinclair.

Elaine Lee is heartened by the escalating trend. "One thing that has really changed since we were first published is that people are used to seeing strong female characters in adventure stories. When STARSTRUCK first came out, there was no Buffy, no Xena, no Sarah Conner, no River Tam."

"There were no shows like "Heroes" or "Firefly" or "Farscape"," she continues, "with a good number of very different female characters. Of course, there were some female characters in comics, but they were in the minority and (other than a few characters like Wonder Woman) tended to take a backseat to the men in the group. Because we had many female characters, and they tended to be movers and shakers, readers found it surprising. These days, no one would even lift an eyebrow."

Galatia 9 (Elaine Lee)

It's in this company that Elaine Lee became a starship captain in 1980. But a much rowdier, funnier, friskier one.

LUST IN SPACE

"Heaven is in your eyes, bright as the stars we're under,
Oh, is it any wonder, I'm in the mood for love." -Jimmy McHugh/ Dorothy Fields, 1935

Hot rockets, black holes, horsehead nebulas, heavenly bodies, celestial spheres, out-of-body experiences, astral projections, comet tails, otherworldly vibrations, first contacts, transcendental portals, planets colliding, digital interfaces, wormholes, silvery moons, docking bays, unexplored spaces, and big bangs. C'mon now. Science Fiction has always been sexy, with scantily clad explorers like Princess Aura in "Flash Gordon", The Martian Manhunter, and Hawkman and Hawkgirl; or the group love of "Stranger In a Strange Land" (1961)...

Sexy pulp mags and paperbacks

All fiction is role-playing, but sci-fi has more liberty by being in the future, on other worlds, or in new cultures. Because it has the widest context of any storytelling, it exposes any of our limits for the imposed restrictions they are. SF is particularly alarming to a repressive status quo because it questions all social controls and the mass delusion of a 'natural order'. It does so by simply showing another alternative. (The same could be said of Rock'n'Roll.) It's no coincidence that anyone who felt marginalized by their gender, sexual orientation, physicality, or skin color found a haven there from the 50's onward. Science Fiction was where you could let it all hang out.

"Shahna, your drill thrall"; Nyota Uhura on the prowl; rough trade

This really heated up during the Free Love of the counterculture. While "Lost In Space" still seemed like "The Donna Reed Show", shirtless Kirk or Spock were melting the screen weekly with every hottie under any sun. Evil Uhura with bare midriff and a knife in a kinky mirror universe, anyone? Android lovers? Mind melds? Festival, the Red Hour? A virus that frees all inhibitions? Orion Slave Girls with green skin? (Later, on "Enterprise" in 2004, the secret reveal was that they were the masters all along.) Many chide Roddenbury for the mini-dresses Uhura and Rand wore, without knowing that Nichelle Nichols and Grace Lee Whitney personally designed them 'to show off our great legs'.

Barbarella (Jane Fonda)

In these hedonistically heady times, french artist Jean-Claude Forest let loose his adult comics heroine Barbarella upon a randy universe, a cross between Fanny Hill and Buck Rogers. It became an equally infamous movie (1968) starring Jane Fonda as the devil-may-care deviant, John Phillip Law as the nearly-naked angel, and Anita Pallenberg as the devouring-all-comers Black Queen. Belgian artist Guy Peellaert responded with the startling pop art comic "Pravda", a biker hellcat in a sexy psychedelic universe where anything goes. Pravda wore only boots, a vest, and a belt, which somehow seemed to magically hide the happy stuff.

Metal Hurlant; Ah! Nana; "Wimmens Comix", Melinda Gebbie; Skin Tight Orbit

This, combined with the gleeful debauchery and hyper hatching of San Francisco's underground comix, inspired the collective of Moebius, Druillet, and Bilal to expand the palette with Metal Hurlant magazine in the mid 70's. It was adult in all its subject matter but got noticed because of all the naked women. Kaluta was a fan of feminist american undergrounds like Wimmens Comix, which featured luminaries like Melinda Gebbie, Trina Robbins, and Aline Kominsky who included mature sex and sexuality in their work. The french response was "Ah! Nana", a female-created Metal Hurlant that was so scandelous it got itself censored out of business. (Surprise! double-standard.) It launched the careers of Annie Goetzinger ("Felina"), Chantal Montellier, Nicole Claveloux, and Florence Cestac.

So where does an american duo go when they want to make sophisticated, sexy sci-fi comics? Why, to Heavy Metal, the domestic version of Metal Hurlant who first published all of the first STARSTRUCK stories in 1982-83.

Top: Orion Slave Girls, Vina (Susan Oliver); Marta (Yvonne Craig)
Bottom: Brucilla as a Krabian Slave (Susan Norfleet Lee, with Dale Place)

In the STARSTRUCK play, Brucilla poses as a Krabian Slave Girl to infiltrate Verloona's ship. This is an homage to the Orion Slave Girls of Star Trek, who are themselves a continuation of the harem fantasies of the Orientalism period. During the Napoleonic years, french fantasies constructed an imaginary Far East, a blinkered blur of the Middle East and Asia where kept women danced for any lucky Imperialist master's desire. In the Star Trek pilot, Vina dances to a melody reminiscent of Duke Ellington's "Caravan", a reflection of this fantasy.

Of course, women have always been sexy in stories. But the outlook that this was all they are had become the timeworn limitation. From the 70s onward, sci-fi often reflected the social move toward a wider individuality. The women of Wimmens Comix, Ah! Nana, and STARSTRUCK were people who expressed their sensuality as another facet of their being. For all its advances, Heavy Metal magazine's popularity among teen boys with old gender attitudes started to pin it in. Writers like Elaine Lee with her galactic gal'livanters helped reopen their horizons.

But who says sexy has to mean sexism? It's easy to sort out that sexism is evil, but sensuality is essential. 'Sex' is a synonym for gender and also intimacy. Often people confuse inequity and desire without speaking well to either; not much chance of an "Us" when you're always angry at "Them". Where does that stalemate leave the full range of personal expression for anyone?

"When we were first doing the play," Lee recalls, "Kaluta was in the lobby during intermission. On one side of him, two sort of macho guys were talking and one said, '... bitches must hate men.' On the other side there were two women talking and one said, 'Skimpy costumes for a feminist play!' We couldn't win! We managed to piss off the feminists and the macho guys. And both groups missed that we were joking about everything. When Galatia 9 recites one of her feminist rhymes, we're making fun of both the old-style sci-fi man-hating amazons ("Botchino!"), and the humorless 1970s feminist variety. Geeze, Louise! Can't women be both strong and sexy at the same time?!!!"

"We've put our hearts together/ now we are one, I'm not afraid."

Later, Elaine Lee put the SF in sex with her two graphic novels for Amerotica, "Skin Tight Orbit, vol. I" and "Skin Tight Orbit, vol. II" (1995). Concurrently, artist Sandra Chang reimagined herself as a bawdy SF buccaneer in her "Sin Metal Sirens" comixxx ('95). Female authors have always expressed sensuality in SF and Fantasy, and that tradition continues with publishers like Circlet Press. And then there's the women on "Farscape"('99-'03)...

SCI-FI SETTINGS

STARSTRUCK is a very layered story with very textural art. "They're not buildings in the background," Kaluta explained about his philosophy toward detail, "they're buildings in a city, with people living in them, or people who have lived in them and died. And there's one on top of another, and there's conduit pipes, there's bathrooms, there's pictures on the wall..."

Science Fiction reflects the architecture, technology, and outlooks of its times. In STARSTRUCK, Kaluta often recalls parts of all the SF styles of the five decades that preceded it:

-The art deco grandeur of "Metropolis" (1927) and "Buck Rogers". Their new outlook was the sky is no longer the limit.

20s: "Metropolis"; Buck Rogers

-The Expressionist use of lighting and the coils-and-tubes labs in 1930's and 40's action, suspense, sci-fi, and horror movies. By then, machines were a marvel or a menace to an age struggling to grasp them.

50s: Frank Frazetta; Wally Wood

-The big machines of WWII influenced the portrayal of 50's rockets, all tubular rooms with fuseboxes, switchboards, and piping like submarines and planes. You see them in "Forbidden Planet", "Tom Corbett", and the great sci-fi EC Comics by masters like Frank Frazetta, Wally Wood, and Al Williamson. Outer Space was there just for military reconnaissance.

60s: Joe Columbo; "Magnus", Russ Manning;
George Beylerian, Barbara D'Arcy

-In the 1960's, Italian futurism rounded everything into pop plastic modularity, like "The Prisoner" and "2001: A Space Odyssey". The future was hip, immediate, prefab, and oddly perfect.

70s: "Solaris"; "Star Wars"

-The 70's is the hangover where cynicism seeps in. The lonely decay of "Solaris", the 'lived-in look' of Tattooine in "Star Wars", the existential deconstruction of the 60's modularity in Metal Hurlant art.

Top: Ron Cobb design for "Alien"
Middle: "Alien" illustrated adaption by Walt Simonson
Bottom: Ronnie Lee Ellis' pad by Kaluta

-By the 80's, that funkiness mutates into seedy overload as seen in "Alien", "Outland", and "Blade Runner", before coming all apart in the "Mad Max" films. The weariness then of living with nuclear annihilation over your shoulder and a mad leader on the trigger.

Left: "Alien" spacesuit design by Moebius
Right top: Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver)
Right bottom: Brucilla the valkyrie

Director Ridley Scott brought in a gang of conflicting art talents for designing "Alien", including H.R. Giger, Chris Foss, and Moebius. Though Moebius only had a short spell on the production, his astronaut and crew clothing designs became essential to the film. That style echoes in Amercadian ship interiors, flight suits, and architecture in STARSTRUCK.

The design styles of "2001", "Solaris", "Alien", and "Outland" have come back around in recent films like "Sunshine" (2007) and "Moon" (2009).

TECH NOIR

Science fiction and hardboiled detective stories invented themselves through pulp short stories at the same time. It was inevitable that futureshock and postwar dread would envelope them together.

Top: William S. Burroughs; "Alphaville"
Bottom: the 'Blade Runner', Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford); Harry Palmer

William S. Burroughs grew up on Universal horror films, pulp detectives, film noir, comic strips, and literature. There is a strong mix of Raymond Chandler, H.P. Lovecraft, and Jean-Paul Sartre in his story narrators. This laconic observer haunts books like "Naked Lunch" and the more sci-fi 'Nova trilogy' in the early 60's, which he called "a new mythology for the space age".

In the french film "Alphaville" (1965), Eddie Constantine inverts his usual secret agent routine by playing Lemmy Caution, a trenchcoat misanthrope up against the technocracy. This synthesis of noir and sci-fi became a pivotal classic. It paved the way for SF films fusing expressionist lighting, existential angst, dystopian futures, surrealist delirium, and jaded rebels.

"Blade Runner" (1982) is essentially a 30's detective story in 2019. It is "The Big Sleep" in a "Metropolis" society that has gone very wrong. Though it was based on Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", it's significant that the name Blade Runner was borrowed from William Burroughs. The film's intense style, featuring design work influenced directly by Metal Hurlant, inspired the genre term Tech Noir. Later films in the future noir vein include "The Element Of Crime" ('84), "Ghost In the Shell" ('95), "Dark City" ('98), "Children of Men" ('06), and the bold animated "Renaissance" ('06).

"Ike Garuda"; "Ghost In the Shell"; "Dark City"; "Renaissance"

STARSTRUCK is a prism and various narrators wrangle its angles. At one point, Harry Palmer the bartender/sailor/detective takes over in a classic noir investigation of political intrigue, convoluted lost love, a calloused soft heart, and lurking betrayals. It ends badly and really well.

It's tempting to think the sailor was named for Harry Palmer, the everyman agent played by Michael Caine ("The Ipcress File"), or as a masturbation pun. But actually, Lee explains, "Harry Palmer was named for two bartenders at the place Kaluta and I liked to hang out, The Library - Billy Palmer and Harry. And Ike Garuda was drawn to look like a third bartender from the same place."

The future noir fusion was still new when Lee did her take in '84. Later she amplified this in the cult classic "The Transmutation of Ike Garuda" (1991), an adult mini-series featuring a Parker-esque ("The Hunter") gumshoe in the slippery future. Featuring a hardbitten antihero ricocheting between murder and desire, it's like "Chinatown" meets "Magnus, Robot Fighter", all excellently rendered by Jim Sherman. And lately she is excited about "beginning work on comics based on Honey West, a female pulp detective from the 50s and 60s." These will be published by Moonstone.

Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart); Randall Factor

In "Casablanca" (1942), Humphrey Bogart plays Rick, the owner of a gambling den/nightclub in the international zone where war refugees look for safe passage. Rick becomes part of love triangle in which he has to make some hard choices and play some slippery moves.

In STARSTRUCK, Randall Factor is a former lover of Mary Medea's who runs an upscale gambling club on the recreation space station. As Harry Palmer investigates, it's unclear what moves his former romantic rival Randall is making and for what motive. Visually, Randall is an homage to Herb Briton, another friend of Lee and Kaluta's from the play days who hung with them at The Library bar. "Randall Factor was named right after an argument I had with a pal who believed 'everything happens for a reason'," Lee remembers. Enter the random factor.

Also, in the STARSTRUCK play, a couple of lines from Rick Blaine are quoted by the villains' computer.

SEA SCOUT

There is a nautical current running through the series. The Sea Scout manual gets quoted. Harry Palmer is seen as a sailor, with white hat, hairy arms, and tattoos. He charters the Sailor's Grave, a bar in the labyrinthine levels that comprise the infamous Recreation Station 97. This international zone in space is like the Barbary Coast, where everyone docks at their peril for reasons no one should ask about. Galatia is a captain putting to port who ends up scramming on the lam.

"The name of the Sailor's Grave was a nod to Thomas Pynchon," says Lee. "There is a bar of the same name in his novel 'V'." The reclusive writer is a former Navy man and the only known photos of him show him in uniform from that period.

Sea Scout Manual; "Rescue At Sea", John M. Waters;
Harry Palmer; Galatia 9 at The Sailor's Grave

By the time of the play (for which all the comic stories are a prequel) we meet the psychic fishgirl Eeeeeeeeeluh. Her people once triggered the psychic abilities of Sister Bronwyn, another later character, when she fell in their aquarium. They may be a funny take on the Sea Monkey family from the classic comic ads.

Also, Elaine enjoyed "Where the Boys Are" (1960) as a kid. Check out the pool scenes at 2:28 and 2:43 for a possible genesis for Bronwyn's dunk and Eeeeeeeeeeluh's ascent. "'Where the Boys Are' was half teen Spring Break movie and half a preachy movie warning girls not to have sex. I don't think I got the message. I just wanted to be one of those mermaid girls."

Top: Legendary Sea Monkeys ad; Eeeeeeeeeluh (Laurie Gittleman)
Bottom: Bronwyn and the fish family; Eeeeeeeeeluh

AIR WARS

Brucilla is an excellent pilot from her days in the Amercadian Space Brigade. Gunning away in her force-field cockpit, she soars from a long history.

Amelia Earhart; 1940s Air pulps and comics

Flight had jolted the world's imagination and aviators like Lindbergh and Earhart became international heroes. The new action hero had to have wings, and 1930's pulps like "Aces", "War Birds", and "Bull Barnes, Air Adventurer" immortalized the lone pilot in the open cockpit machine-gunning biplanes in aerial dogfights. Some pulps even merged this into sci-fi with futuristic planes, like "Dusty Ayres and His Battle Birds". WWII brought in carrier planes with crews and gun turrets and formation bombing runs. In comics, women got their wings when Harvey Kurtzman created Black Venus, an aviatrix all in black leather who ruled the winds. And there was Airboy's nemesis and later ally, The Valkyrie. (The air pulp era was later lushly homaged in "The Rocketeer" comics and movie ('90), and in the underrated "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" (2004).)

Top: The Black Venus; Luke Skywalker
Bottom: Cookie Fabre, STARSTRUCK;
1978 Viper pilots;
Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, 2005

George Lucas patterned his X-Wings on the early solo fighters, and the Death Star sequence was mapped out by cutting together WWII bomber footage as a guide. This immediately went into the SF lexicon, from the first "Battlestar Galactica" to the latest. And how about that recent video game, "Gratuitous Space Battles"?

MATINEE MADNESS

"My Dad used to take me to science fiction and horror movies," says Lee. "Every Friday night, I watched "The Twilight Zone" and every Saturday morning, I watched old horror and sci-fi on 'Sunrise Theatre'." She remembers seeing such classic films as Buck Rogers serials, "The House of Wax" (1953), "The Queen of Outer Space" (1958), "The Flesh Eaters" (1964), "Barbarella" (1968), and "Journey To the Far Side of the Sun" (1969). And TV shows like "Lost In Space", "The Outer Limits", "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet", and of course "My Living Doll".

"Don't know if I would call myself a fan of the movies I saw when I was a kid," Lee says. "I just saw them and something about them stuck with me." She refracted these celluloid flashes into strobing semaphores all her own.

Top:"House of Wax", Vincent Price; "Queen of Space", Zsa Zsa Gabor
Bottom: Norris Rex waxes before waning

In "House of Wax", Vincent Price runs a wax museum where the waxworks seem eerily lifelike. This gets an homage in STARSTRUCK, with Norris Rex's wax museum, next to Harry's bar. Rex forgoes Price's Marie Antionette in favor of, ironically, using Erotica Ann to homage Glorianna. In "Queen of Outer Space" a world of amazons just needs a few pushy louts to show them who wears the pants. (Anyone know any valiant blond archers?)

"Anyone who reads STARSTRUCK who doesn't think that we're trying to point out science-fiction cliches and have fun with them just isn't reading it," Kaluta laughs.

Lee says, "We lifted themes, archetypes and settings from classic sci-fi and tried to drop into them flawed characters with real human problems."

KRYSTALS

Emerald gems called krystals shine glimmers of connection throughout STARSTRUCK.

"Molly (Medea)’s daughter, Margaret, is also a very successful businesswoman, but a more benign type," Lee says. "She is the owner of Krystals ‘n’ Things, a company that trades in Borinyum Krystals, which are both a source of energy and capable of storing vast amounts of information." Her daughter, Glorianna of Phoebus, now mines the green krystals which have a peculiar reaction to a specific sequence of soundwaves. These emeralds also seem to run through the players in her grand scheme.

"My Dad was a big science fiction fan," Lee explains, "and I used to read books he left around waaaaaaaay before I was old enough to understand them. I still have lots of images floating around in my head from those old books from the fifties and early sixties. I remember both a book and an episode of a TV show that had do with living crystals and I'm certain that's where the krystals came from, but can't remember titles." She recalls that one book "involved a red crystal that somehow made a copy of a boy. A Doppelganger. It was really creepy."

Top: Zara and her crystal; "The Monolith Monsters"
Middle: Brucilla mining on Phoebus; baby Galatia
Bottom: Krystals and things...

By coincidence, the Tom Corbett radio show had an episode called "The Living Crystals of Titan", but 1952 was too early for her to hear it. In 1957, there was "The Monolith Monsters" flick where crystal meteors grow into prism forests and absorb the desert townfolk. And J.G. Ballard ("Crash", "Empire of the Sun") had a 1966 book called "The Crystal World", where a crystal forest in Africa seems to grow and spread infection.

The energy source aspect of the krystals is also reminiscent of the dilithium crystals that drive Federation starships. And coincidentally the Adegan crystals that power Jedi lightsabers, an aspect which came to the fore well after the STARSTRUCK play.

In a funny synchronicity there's a late 40s comics cover of Tara the Pirate Queen, who's a bit of a precursor to Galatia 9, holding up a glowing emerald!

GALACTIC GIRL GUIDES

"First, I was a girl scout," admits Lee. "Sold the cookies. Went camping. Got in trouble."

In the Anarchera, everyone fends for themselves including little girls. It's a tough universe and these scrappy urchins take it on. So you often see street-lethal girl scouts running around the stories who can charm, con, rob, and ditch anyone before they can blink. Brucilla and her co-pilot "Cookie" Fabre used to be Guides, and in back-up stories we flashback to their manic misadventures.

The real Girl Guides were started in 1907 when scouting took off. Sometimes they mixed with the boys, sometimes not, depending on era or place. Their regimen included learning survival skills, which the Galactic orphans have taken to all extremes. This is both charming, seeing funny kids in unexpected places, and alarming, in that it's quiet code for the survival course women have to run physically and emotionally throughout their lives just for being female.

Top: "Our Gang"
Bottom: Li'l Brucilla, Puddyface Johnson,
and Cookie Fabre

The GGG are descendants of the "Our Gang" film comedies (later repackaged for TV as "The Little Rascals") which blitzed theaters from the 30's to the 50's. These raucous brats did everything wrong perfectly right. They're also the only example on film in this period of male and female, 'black and white', running around freely as friends. It hit some bum notes on race and gender, but that's a good one. They were just kids and they were hilarious. Our Gang inspired film bratpacks like The East Side Kids, The Bowery Boys, The Dead End Kids, and The Little Tough Guys; and comics like Simon and Kirby's Newsboy Legion and the Boy Commandos. Recently there's been Bart Simpson, "Malcolm In the Middle", and "Everybody Hates Chris".

Top: Junior Woodchucks Huey, Duey, and Luey;
Galactic Girl Guides; 1952 pulp space scouts
Bottom: Astro Boy;
"See all evil, hear all evil, speak all evil"

There's also a bit of a parallel in Huey, Duey, and Louie, nephews to Donald Duck who starred as Junior Woodchuck scouts in 60's comics. Another influence may be Astro Boy. In a costume design sketch for Verloona, Kaluta noted her corkscrew headpiece being akin to Astro Boy's head. These swirl-bladed motifs are also in GGG hats.

One of the funniest parts of STARSTRUCK is its use of sound effects, which punctuate and pile-up everywhere. On the "Fibber McGee and Molly" radio show (1935-59), Fibber would always absently fetch something from the hall closet, where eveything ever made would avalanche out until one final handbell clang. That Burlesque tradition also happened in comics, like MAD magazine's crazy clusterfonts or the human trainwrecks of "Tintin".

Top: Fibber McGee opens the closet; MAD sci-fi parody, Wally Wood, 1952
Bottom: Brucilla + Girl Guides= chaos

MIRROR

"...and it's very like our own passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond." -Alice, "Through The Looking Glass"

1: DOPPELGANGER

There's a running theme of twins in STARSTRUCK. Mary Medea has a few: her Erotica Ann droids, the version of her that seemed to die in a rebel battle, her reinvention as Glorianna, and, perversely, posing as an Ann. Her grandmother, Molly Medea, is reborn as the clone Galatia 9, whose youth is an echo of Mary's own past at the Barkly ranch. The heirs to the corrupt Bajar empire are fraternal twins, seemingly.

Tweedledee and Tweedledum, by John Tenniel, 1871;
"The Parent Trap", Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills

"For some reason, I loved stories about identical twins when I was a kid", Lee explains. One favored film from her youth is Disney's "The Parent Trap", starring Hayley Mills as two girls who meet at summer camp and find out they are twin sisters.

Top: "The Patty Duke Show";
Mary Medea; Molly Meda II
Middle/Bottom: Harry Palmer sings the Clone Song

"In Starstruck #2 (2009), Harry and Mary talk about a show about Clones. I was thinking of the Patty Duke Show, of course. They even sing a similar theme song."

This extends to the metaphorical bad twin, too. Ronnie Lee Ellis is part of two variants of this. Her whole catalyst has been her frustrated hate for her twin brother receiving divine birthright by way of his winkie. But later she sees Glorianna's galactic scheme unfolding and resolves to be "the anti-Annie". Where Glorianna leads her followers toward a goal where any duality will be transcended, Ronnie invents a passive nun sisterhood where conflicted dualism "is the law".

Galatia 9 is likewise stalemated by her evil stepsister, Verloona Ti. This reaches its fruition in the STARSTRUCK play.

Left: Ronnie Lee Ellis vs. Glorianna
Right: Galatia 9 vs. Verloona Ti

2: THE MIRROR

There is a mirror theme, as well. Ronnie Lee Ellis hides her neutralized nuns in a nebulous pocket called the Neutral Zone, where she watches Phoebus to learn Glorianna's plan. The surface of this zone is called Deadman's Mirror because hitting it wrong will destroy you. Brucilla has a bizarre episode flying into it, inverting somehow, and then projecting back outward which makes you wonder what it means to go through the looking glass.

Brucilla faces the mirror

Fun fact: In "Journey To the Far Side of the Sun" (1969), two astronauts find an alternate earth, a reversed twin, always hidden in orbit by the sun. The original british title was "Doppelganger". It is similar to a 1963 Twilight Zone called "The Parallel". Fans of TV's "Fringe", take note.

Top: Glorianna poses as Erotica Ann
Bottom: Galatia reflects on the face of things

Actual mirrors are also seen as a motif at different times, such as in Erotica Ann's Dream House. At one point, Galatia 9 gazes into a mirror with a funny intuition; behind the two-way glass are her 'sisters' Glorianna and Erotica Ann looking back at her.

RELIGION

"To you do we send up our sighs, mounting and weeping in this vale of tears." -the prayer Salve Regina

The Sailor's Grave bar is nooked in the labyrinthine levels of sin and perdition on Rec Station 97 called the Vale of Tiers. New visitors are given a pin-on button saying "Have a heart" to vainly dissuade the scamming residents from taking them for everything they own.

L. Ron vs. Ronnie Ellis

L. Ron Hubbard was a writer for pulp magazines in the 40's. He wrote all genres, basing much of it on an adventurous life around the world. But when his editor handed him a sci-fi assignment, something must have clicked. Ray Bradbury often writes as if in a poetic revelation. Hubbard wrote like he was Ayn Rand reinventing God. With "Dianetics" he pulled off a trick no other SF writer could beat: inventing his own religion. The name of which escapes me. I'll look on Wookiepedia or something...

In STARSTRUCK, Ronnie Lee (hmmm) Ellis writes sci-fi best sellers with pulp titles like "The Prince and the Pleasure Droid", "Old Sailors Never Die", and "Wax Zombies of the Noh Zone". But with "Mind Spiders of the Planet Xenon", she invents her own real religion: the passive sisters in the neutral zone known as the Cosmic Veil, Cloistered Order of the Goddess Uncaring.

Not to be undone, Glorianna wrote "Of Mice and Movers: Ripples In the Cosmic Pond", in which she parodies Ellis and implies that she has manipulated her into action all along.

"There is no ruler of the universe making other people dance," Kaluta notes. "But there's lots of people in the comic who think they're making other people dance. And that's where the fun is, to watch the characters delude themselves."

"Dune" (1965) by Frank Herbert had a lot of influence, both on George Lucas (Tatooine, spice mines), and Elaine Lee: in STARSTRUCK it's the struggle between noble houses, the sandy Bajar planet, and perhaps the strange nun sisterhood. The Bene Gesserit sisters in the Dune books are far creepier and more focused than the sheepish sloths of the Veil, though, who are played for comic effect. The Cloister is both like a sleepy cult and a spiritual front for a political shell game. Oh. Scientology, I just remembered.

Top: Hildegard has innervisions; "The Gnostic Gospels";
Erotica Ann, Sister Bronwyn (Kathy Gerber), and Brucilla onstage
Bottom: Bronwyn is enveloped in the Veil

Sister Bronwyn of the Veil is a character who becomes important in the STARSTRUCK play. She has psychic abilities from falling into a pool of telepathic fishpeople as a little girl. Somewhat akin to this is the multi-talented Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), an abbess of a German cloister who invented opera, wrote plays, mastered various sciences, and drew illustrations of visions she had when God possessed her. Being cloistered away from men gave her time to think without any meddling foolishness.

Elaine Pagels wrote "The Gnostic Gospels" (1979), a scholarly treatise on the disparate views colliding in early Christianity, including how women initially found an unusually open opportunity to express their spirituality through it. "I was reading lots of women theologians, including Elaine Pagels," Lee says, "who certainly influenced the part of Galatia's story that featured the Troikani actors." A trio of actors with the same mind, these characters share the blame for the catastrophically bad play "Archeorganaapocolypsia" that they were part of. As they morph through their parts as the Holy Trinity, Galatia eyerolls, "Yeah...sucked meat! I thought they shot you guys."

STARSTRUCK has a few other explorations of religion and spirituality:
-The March Baptists preach the word of 'Zed, the Dangling' in their Brand New Testament: from their 27 Amendments to the 10 Commandments; "3) Thou shalt talk louder than anyone else in the room." They are fundamentalist zealots allied with the space military and a corrupt, would-be dictator. (Hmmm, let me try to think of an historical precedent for that.)

-There's Brzzt Oomph Burble "Call me Bob" Griivarr, whose "Simple Recipe For Happiness" book was such a huge smash that he owns eight planets. (The recipe tenets were inspired by the homilies that Robert Brault wrote for The National Inquirer.)

-And there's Soul Sharing, the revelation among androids that each series shares a collective consciousness. This spooks them into contemplation about mortality and sentience. In Ronnie Lee Ellis' book based on Erotica Ann, "The Prince and the Pleasure Droid", the robot heroine "is made leader of a powerful religious movement, and has a hand in deciding the Fate of the Free Universe." (This kind of portends aspects of the play, but could infer events in its aftermath.)

Lee was also a fan of "The Trouble With Angels" (1966), where a pair of boisterous girls are prey to bad habits. This film is an heir to the four St. Trinians films of the 50s, about a catholic school undone by wild young girls. Another antecedent for the Galactic Girl Guides, these films have recently been remade.

AUTHOR, AUTHOR

"If you can't sing Seigfried, at least you can carry a spear." -Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"

The original STARSTRUCK graphic novel was dedicated to filmmaker Robert Altman and author Thomas Pynchon. Both are known for complex stories where events seem to happen spontaneously and even simultaneously. Their work is layered, challenging, innovative, serpentine, farcical, ambiguous, satirical, dream-like. Things that seem trivial later become crucial. Every visit to the material rewards you with new nuances. The glowing 'Aha!'

Joe McCulloch writes in his blog, "I suspect the STARSTRUCK graphic novel was probably tough reading for a lot of people at the time. It's still kind of tricky today, until you realize that the book isn't trying to tell (the) whole story, just a story, rich with incident and cross-reference and sheer joyous worldbuilding."

William Burroughs; Thomas Pynchon?; Kathy Acker

Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" (1973) is an eclectic narrative that tells itself from angles that add up oddly. It was almost awarded the Pulitzer, but was rejected by the nervous conservative wing as "unreadable, turgid, overwritten and obscene." Now it is routinely in every top list of best novels ever written.

This flat-earther reaction pattern has dogged other innovative writers who stretched the form like William S. Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, and Kathy Acker. Burroughs scandalized the literary world with "Naked Lunch", which was held up in courts for years as being too obscene to publish. When he wrote a sci-fi trilogy -"The Ticket That Exploded", "The Soft Machine", "The Nova Express"- using his cut-up method, he overloaded everyone's volt. Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse 5" (1969) got notoriety as much for its pinball narrative as for its anti-war message. And Acker hit academia like punk rock with her spritzer of social taboos, positive sexuality, and narrative anarchy in books like "Pussy, King of the Pirates" (1996).

A still photograph is one story but a collage is another. In fact it is many stories, all subjective to the viewer. Like these books, the approach is used on film in Fellini's "8 1/2", Lynch's "Mulholland Drive", Nolan's "Memento", and TV's "LOST".

Speaking about untangling the angles, Lee says,"That’s something we tried to do throughout STARSTRUCK. A character like Brucilla may exaggerate, others will outright lie and still others may be misinformed. Like life. When you’re looking through the eyes of any one character, you’ll only get a fraction of the picture."

Frank Herbert; Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.; Ursula K. Le Guin; Douglas Adams

STARSTRUCK has always been in the same space with those writers, telling layered and startling stories; it is its true strength, but is often held against it as a weakness. Since the beginning it has been rotely termed as "esoteric" whenever someone doesn't get it. That limitation is simply theirs. Basically, STARSTRUCK believes that you are smart, that you want to have fun, and that these can happen at the same time.

"If you don't take the time to read them, you can just look at the pictures, and if you don't understand them, it's your own damn fault," Kaluta scoffs. "Who said that comics were supposed to be easy to read?" Kaluta points happily at an early letter from an irate reader taking them to task for making him spend more than his customary twenty minutes to read a superhero comic.

The stories can be read straight on as a slapstick space opera, with a penchant for cool dialogue. They also add up to a novelistic mystery that is carefully unfolding itself. More subtly, it is a nuanced work where re-readings reveal multiple meanings, sly satire, and thematic connections. While WATCHMEN was subsequently hailed for these qualities, STARSTRUCK did them first and funner. And the ancillary pieces, like the Glossary, add crucial context to everything for the sharp reader. In fact, like Alan Moore's text pieces for "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," they are another essential dimension of the story. They're also a nice parallel to the hilarious work of former Monty Python writer Douglas Adams and his "Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy" series.

The initial STARSTRUCK play was a fun romp pinballing through the tropes of Sci-Fi. That sense of humor is the spine of all the prequel comics stories also, even with the added depths of darkness, surreality, destiny, and ambivalence they branched into. Lee has stated that, big ideas and crafty telling aside, STARSTRUCK is always meant to be fun first. The Ha-Ha's hit first with the A-Ha's as a chaser.

Kaluta says, "(Epic Comics enjoyed but kiboshed it)...but I wanted an ad that said, 'Readers of The World, Unite! You Have Nothing To Use But Your Brains!'"

Smart art:
"Love & Rockets", Los Brothers Hernandez; "RAW", Spiegelman, Burns, etc.;
"A Child's Life", Phoebe Gloeckner:
"League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", Alan Moore

"For every answer we give away, we try to include another couple of questions" Lee says now about their story method. "This way of storytelling was sometimes a problem for us in previous incarnations of the book. When we were first published, people were used to comics with linear stories about a main character. But now, with an audience used to shows like "Heroes" and "LOST", with large casts and non-linear storylines, we’re hoping that STARSTRUCK will find an even larger readership."

Close on the heels of the "esoteric" tsk is that old yawn "written from a feminine point of view", a backhanded description which comes up overly often. But it's never qualified what this means exactly. That she writes from a 'softer, girly' perspective? Or a man-hater's? Or not butch enough for teen boys? It's probable it means they saw her first name is Elaine and not Alan or Neal, since "Promethea" and "Coraline" don't seem to get this treatment.

"(With STARSTRUCK) we got quite a reaction," she remembered in 1997, "to the fact that there were so many female characters in the story. (Is the writer lesbian? Does she have a political agenda? Is the artist gay? Do they both hate men?) We had to wonder why everyone was so concerned about our sexuality when no one was wondering what the Hernandez Brothers meant by putting all those women in 'Love and Rockets'."

An important early chapter is titled "The Spear Carrier". This alludes to Pynchon's quote, but also to the acting slang for 'the peripheral role'. The story is about Mary Medea and Harry Palmer, both of whom then become stealth players in the unfolding epic but prove the phrase ironic later. And Mary's father happens to be Siegfried Siegfreidsen, completing the Pynchon link.

Your soul has been Funkadelicized by Pedro Bell!

A kindred spirit to Lee and Kaluta's STARSTRUCK is artist Pedro Bell. Through the 70's he created incredibly elaborate artwork for the album covers of acid-funkers Funkadelic. The gatefold LPs were twined in his cosmic cartoonery like rampant ivy, bursting with freeform psychedelia, social commentary, sexual mutations, freeform slang and puns. Inside he often blasted brains with his dense and lurid narratives that twisted SF conventions like mobius strips. His sci-fi cosmology was as crucial to the band's image as anything they put on wax. It created a subculture of deviant SF street art for an underground of the funk faithful, and was an inspiration for graffiti and indie comics artists later. There is a likeminded correlation of cerebral slapstick and galactic graffix between Pedro's 'scartoons' and STARSTRUCK's funkyverse.

AUTEUR, AUTEUR

Pinky Rose: "I had a bad dream."
Millie Lammoreaux: "Dreams can't hurt ya." -Robert Altman's "Three Women"

Robert Altman bucked the Hollywood system making movies in a naturalistic style. He used general outlines as a script and had actors improv their way. Character was forced forward and dialogue overlapped, happenstance became magic, and ambiguity was an asset. On the set of "M*A*S*H*", stars Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland thought he was insane and petitioned to have him fired, then halfway through realized he was an instinctive genius and rolled with it. That film's success gave Altman the clout to do a run of really groundbreaking films with challenging stories, rich characters, and trenchant satire like "Nashville", "The Player," and "Gosford Park". Always the outsider and better for it, Altman's style is lately reflected in "The Wire", "Arrested Development", "The Office", and "Curb Your Enthusiasm".

"M*A*S*H*", "Nashville", "Three Women", "Short Cuts"

Altman had a strange dream about three women and blurred identity, which became the film "Three Women," (1977) starring Sissy Spacek, Shelley Duvall, and Janice Rule. True to Altman's form, it is less about plot than simply being in a moment and letting the odd mystery of living happen. The film is another variant on reflected selves. "Not about women who look alike, but who act alike...steal each others' personalities," Lee remembers. "Saw it a bunch of times and was fascinated. Weirdly the character I played on the soap opera was 'lifted' from Sissy Spacek's character in 'Three Women'."

In 1979, Lee had a pivotal role on "The Doctors", a long-running soap opera on NBC that also gave breaks to Tina Louise, Ellen Burstyn, and Kathleen Turner. Lee was nominated for a 1980 Daytime Emmy Award for her role as Mildred Trumble. At the same time she was co-founder and artistic director of the Wild Hair Productions troupe, whose third play became STARSTRUCK. All of this led to the Troikani, a trio of shared-mind actors that Galatia and then Brucilla run into.

The Troikani actors about to become their own spear

STARSTRUCK is a canny series that talks like a smartass. Like Altman's "Nashville", even the creative world can't escape unskewered, actors, writers, and artists alike. "It takes the hearts, minds, and souls of AT LEAST three Troikani to make up one respectable psyche," reports the Glossary. "(On its deathbed) it will call the actor's union every marbec on the marbec to complain about everything in the known universe until the union sends someone to put it out of its misery." The Troikani trio share shame over the literary crimes of a wretched playwright, who is rumored to have been killed as a performance piece by the aesthetic assassins, the Guernican Art Squad.

STARSTRUCK employs the Altman sensibility of eccentricity, farce, coincidence, and savvy smarts in ways that have not been well-recognized by the comics community in its three print runs across the decades. Altman went for R-ratings because he felt kids didn't have the patience to appreciate their depth. (Hmmm, should I make a mean jibe at fanboys here...? Nah, let's let the hip voices lead the way...)

Critical reception...

Comics critic and long-time fan Johnny Bacardi writes, "The intricacies and the imagination employed to build this universe amazes me just as much in 2009 as it did in 1982. The Altman-esque dialogue style is also a joy to parse out- as confusing and disorienting as it sometimes can be, it's always witty and clever." He urges, "You'll have to work a little to follow along, but believe me, it's worth it, especially if you enjoy experiencing the unique. A+"

New initiate and critic Greg McElhatton opines "STARSTRUCK is a truly strange comic, but I think it was worth the wait. For the main story, it’s definitely one where a slow burn is going to pay off. As those pieces slowly come together, though, the Galactic Girl Guides stories will certainly function well as short-term entertainment value for each issue. STARSTRUCK isn’t quite like anything else out there, but I think that’s part of the attraction. I look forward to seeing more."

Leroy Douresseaux writes, "Lee’s story and script are complicated and challenging, but fans of space opera will want to dig through this intricate and exotic concept. Of course, having Mike Kaluta, with his decorative, illustrative style, as the artist to visualize Lee’s concepts into comics art is serendipity. Her oblique and outlandish storytelling and his intricate, Pre-Raphaelite graphic scenarios were meant to be together." He adds, "I must call attention to painter Lee Moyer’s glorious new coloring for this rebirth of Starstruck. A-"

The New Inquiry hails, "Starstruck could be both silly and smart, was progressive but unpretentious, and clever but not so impressed with itself that it ever forgot to entertain. IDW’s reprint of the series is a service to fans of science fiction, aficionados of comics as an art form, and anyone who loves a good story."

The Comics Journal urges, ""pick up this book, because not having read it is sort of like not having read Pogo, or listened to Trout Mask Replica, or seen a Hayao Miyazaki film."

"There is a story, and by the third and fourth issue, lots of pieces have fallen together," Kaluta emphasized in 1986. "If someone's curious enough, they will have gone back and forth and I have met those people and they are delighted with the story. And they don't think we're being too clever. They know what's going on."

ALLUSION: I could be right.
ILLUSION: I could be wrong.

GET STARSTRUCKED!

In 1985, Kaluta was asked about mainstream readers missing out on the radical and innovative independent comics of the time. "But they might, years later, pick up (Love & Rockets)...," he replied with ironic prescience, "and go, 'Damn it, why didn't I read these things back then?' Because they weren't ready for it, right? They weren't ready to be entertained in that sphere of their life."

As STARSTRUCK is reborn for today, Lee feels its time has come with the expanded, repainted version. "Our fans should find things in the story that they may have missed before. New, young readers will see a story that, though exciting and complex, is structured like many of the stories they are used to seeing. After the run of the series, it will be thrilling for me to see the STARSTRUCK stories collected into their own graphic novel and the Galactic Girls Guides collected into theirs. Hopefully, we’ll find a whole new readership for these collections in mainstream bookstores."

Now that we've caught up with the past, let's catch up with the future. Act like you know and buy STARSTRUCK today!

UPDATE: The entire new series is now collected at larger size in the STARSTRUCK Deluxe Edition, available since March, 2011.

Buy STARSTRUCK at a Comic Book Shop near you!

Buy the new Audio Recording available on a double-CD or for download!

STARSTRUCK back issues:
The play (1980)
The graphic novel (1984)
The first comic series (1985) #1-6
The expanded comic series (1990) #1-4

STARSTRUCK communities:
-Facebook Group
-Facebook Book

Sources:
-STARLOG #41, Dec. 1980
-HEAVY METAL magazine, May 1983
-AMAZING HEROES #57, Oct. 15, 1985
-THE COMICS JOURNAL #103, Nov. 1985
-"Brainbanx"#1, March 1997, Helix Comics
-correspondence with Elaine Lee
-interviews with Michael Kaluta

-Art:
STARSTRUCK: The Play
Heavy Metal, Nov.'82-July '83
STARSTRUCK graphic novel (Marvel,'84)
STARSTRUCK #1-6 (Epic Comics, '85)
STARSTRUCK: The Expanding Universe #1-4 (Dark Horse, 1990)
STARSTRUCK #1-13 (IDW, 2009)
Michael Wm. Kaluta's website
-all STARSTRUCK play photos by Sean Smith

I want to especially thank Elaine Lee, whose gracious time and enthusiastic input made this at all possible.
And Michael Kaluta for his generous encouragement of my own art in recent years.
And Lee Moyer for bringing it all back home.

writer Elaine Lee, artist Michael Kaluta,
painter Lee Moyer

(middle photo, © Kyle Cassidy)

(Also, a shout-out to
illustrious letterer Todd Klein!)

-Tym Stevens, semi-infamous historian, 2009

'STARSTRUCK Strikes Back!': 2nd Anniversary Edition

2011-09-09T12:27:00.000-07:00

(This blog was adapted for print in the
STARSTRUCK Deluxe Edition
hardcover collection, by editor Elaine Lee.*)

(Orig.: 9/9/09)

"Because you demanded it, True Believer...it's the history of STARSTRUCK!!"

We have come to kick your ass.

I often say, "STARSTRUCK is the greatest comic you've never read". And people say, "Well, what is it exactly?" (Or "Who are you?," or "How does this relate to Rock or Sex?", or "Please respect the 100 feet distance from the restraining order, sir.")

So here's the lowdown...

STARSTRUCK began as a science fiction play performed off-Broadway in 1980. It was co-written by Elaine Lee, who was acting on a TV soap opera at the time, along with her sister Susan Norfleet Lee and Dale Place. Elaine played the wily hero Galatia 9 while Susan played her kickass partner Brucilla The Muscle. By chance they'd hooked up with reknowned comics artist Michael Wm. Kaluta, who went from volunteering for the poster to designing the sets and costumes, and even building them with compatriot artist Charles Vess.

STARSTRUCK was also created during the exploding late 70's/early 80's NYC scene, whose Do-It-Yourself spirit ignited the first Punk bands of CBGB's, the No Wave and Punk Funk aftermath, the dawn of Hip Hop, the splicing of Mutant Disco, the skronknoize Jazz bands, and a bristling Indie film movement. This entire subcultural scene overlapped and propelled itself. There was apocalypse around the corner and all bets were off. Make what you can with what you got. Created in this combustible gumbo, STARSTRUCK the play was likewise DIY with its wicked and satirical humor, its sets and costumes collaged from street throwaways, its gender-upending, and its postmodern absurdism. It was postpunk science fiction for the new rebel underground.

STARLOG magazine noticed enough to cover the ensuing madness of this demented semi-musical (#41, Dec 1980) and a portfolio of designs by Kaluta was released. But that was just the beginning.

STARSTRUCK the stage play: Brucilla The Muscle (Susan Norfleet Lee),
Galatia 9 (Elaine Lee). (photos, © Sean Smith)

The STARSTRUCK play was essentially like an episode of STAR TREK; on a few ship sets, heroes and villains flung witty dialogue along with some fists. And there were songs and outlandish costumes. And farrr more lead women. Along the way characters rapped rich backgrounds mentioning other characters never shown. Lee and Kaluta realized this backstory was too good to waste. It was too grand to stage or film but Michael could draw it better anyway. So the first STARSTRUCK illustrated adventures began.

So the first STARSTRUCK illustrated adventures began.

Top: Brucilla (Susan Lee) & Galatia 9 (Elaine Lee); Verloona (Sandy Spurney)
Middle: Kalif Bajar (Paul Ratkevich), Erotica Ann (Karen Stilwell),
Rah El Rex (Neal Ashmun), Bronwyn of the Veil (Kathy Gerber)
Bottom: Galatia 9 vs. Verloona
(All play photos, © Sean Smith)

But where could they possibly print these Pulp/Punk future stories?

At the time the rules of speculative illustrated fiction had been rewritten by METAL HURLANT magazine, a French countercultural exploration of high art, sophisticated stories, and pervasive sensuality. The standard set by creators Moebius, Philippe Druillet, and Enki Bilal raised the bar for mature comics dramatically by filtering the fantasy and science fiction of the radical 50's EC comics through the uncensored advances of the 60's underground comix.

The first wave of STARSTRUCK magazine comics stories, a series of prequel vignettes to the play, were a natural for this graphix revolution. These serial stories first debuted in the similar Spanish anthology, ILUSTRACION+COMIX INTERNATIONAL, edited by Joseph Toutain in 1981; the intricate watercolourish washes were by uncredited Spanish artists using Kaluta's color directions. They were then reprinted in HEAVY METAL, the American version of Metal Hurlant, from 1982 to 1983. There was also an article about it all (HM #74, May 1983) and a second staging of the play.

The Indie underground spirit was infiltrating the comic book world as well. In the early 80's, DC and Marvel found their duopoly undermined by upstart start-ups like Star Reach, First, Pacific, and Eclipse Comics. These rebels bypassed the newstand and drugstore racks to sell directly through the emerging network of comics-only stores. Most welcome of all, the creators retained the rights to their work while the company only distributed it. Pulp paper was replaced by more archival stock and color got more advanced. Without corporate control, fake morality Codes, or a teen threshhold, they were free to do whatever they wanted. Like independent record labels, they infused a stagnant industry with vital new blood. There were new standard-bearers like AZTEC ACE (Eclipse), MARVELMAN (Quality), AMERICAN FLAGG (First), and LOVE AND ROCKETS (Fantagraphics).

The two majors noticed.

The graphic novel, Marvel Comics, 1984.
(All STARSTRUCK words and images,
© Elaine Lee and Michael Wm. Kaluta)

In Marvel's more mature line of graphic novels they chose to collect all of the HM stories. "STARSTRUCK: The Luckless, The Abandoned and Forsaked" graphic novel came out in 1984. The format was really big (8 1/4 x 11") and the color lush and translucent like watercolors. Stacked against anything else out its 74 genius pages were formidable.

Kaluta was most known for his gritty, retro work on THE SHADOW (1973), all edgy intensity and Pulp chiaroscuro. But his STARSTRUCK was a revelation: a vast dreamlike landscape infused with light like Winsor McCay; the technology of Dick Calkins' 30's BUCK ROGERS strips filtered through the hallucinatory kineticism of Moebius; and the elegant architecture and design sense of Alphonse Mucha and Gustav Klimt.

But Lee upped the ante with her storytelling: these prelude stories covered generational arcs in short and long gallops; the narrators rotated, the conversations overlapped or piled up or became song verse; the glossary was intergalactic and hysterical; the dialogue was so crackling you read it out loud to savor it; what seemed like happenstance eventually built up in layers and every minor thing paid off startlingly. It was a bit like William S. Burroughs writing STAR WARS, or Lily Tomlin writing DUNE, or Robert Altman filming FIREFLY, only much funnier and weirder.

You didn't read STARSTRUCK...you held on like a rollercoaster and tried to keep up.

Brucilla The Muscle
'(Mama) don't take no mess!'

"Well, what is it exactly?"

Let's see, where to begin? It involves a gradually dumbing dynasty versus a revolutionary cowgirl, pleasure droids who become sentient, an amazon clone and freelance fighter, passive/passive space nuns, an omnivorously sexual scheme queen, The Brand New Testement, robot samurai, frivolous cults, Noir detective bartenders, piously jingoistic space fleets, street-lethal Girl Scouts, schizoid dandies, alien boytoys, copious booting (see: boots, knocking), immortality bootlegging, Art Squads from the aesthetic planet Guernica ("Sex is art and art is power."), the infamous Recreation Station 97, and everything is increasingly connected.

There is much drinking, explosions, polymorphous polyamory, slapstick chaos, some songs, and vicious satire that goes down like ice cream. You'll laugh, you'll think, you'll feel hot to trot.

Galatia 9 and Bruscilla the Muscle.

The most profound innovation of STARSTRUCK was its redefinition of female leads. To be fair, a male industry selling to presumed teen boys had made some advances in the 70's responding to Feminism. There were more women heroes up front, with equal strength and solo titles. But attitude and aggro don't equal depth or range. And often it felt like they were still just stronger pin-ups for young guys who hadn't worked out their range of respect yet beyond fists and fishnets. You wished there was a mature illustrated fiction where characters were just individuals with real personalities, period. Where gender was about as relevent as a shirt and sensuality was natural as breathing.

But STARSTRUCK was already beyond all that. Lee wasn't interested in a SciFi that was trapped in the didactic slants of anyone's war of the sexes. She unleashed a universe of possibility where everyone fended for themselves full-on. Everyone was as unique, quirky, irritating, horny, and surprising as reality. These people lived, they breathed, they were a riot. Seeing that fuller range in fruition was the real liberation.

Meanwhile the most edgy advance for women in the normal comics was that Elektra could be just as much an amoral @$$hole as The Punisher. (Nice layouts though.)

Verloona Ti vs. Galatia 9.

Marvel Comics had responded to the threat of Heavy Metal with their own Epic Illustrated magazine. In their most inspired move of the 80's they started a seperate imprint for mature titles called Epic Comics. These were creator-owned series for adults, edited by the beloved Archie Goodwin, who promptly roped in Lee and Kaluta to do a bi-monthly STARSTRUCK comic book. It would be 'direct market' only to comic stores, in amounts limited to market sales. They could do whatever they wanted.

The revolution would be serialized.

The comic series continued from the sprawling set-up of the graphic novel, but focused more fully on the cosmic misadventures of the swashbuckling Galatia 9 and fireball Bruscilla. There were six issues of 30 pages each from 1985 to 1986, no ads except for their own T-Shirts, and often character photos from the play inside the cover. After decades of comics with misregistered color on pulp paper, these specialized books had stronger brighter stock and more controlled color. These comics also cost more, but maturing readers like me dropped the newstand superhero stuff entirely for direct-market books that rewarded our attention and our age.

But not enough of us. STARSTRUCK was like a secret even your best friends missed out on and it was discontinued. But it wasn't truly ended.

STARSTRUCK, all 6 issues, Epic Comics, 1985-86.

Par for the course, in its wake, the mainstream started catching up. Alan Moore and Frank Miller paved most of that in 1986, and DC's separate Vertigo Comics later succeeded in the adult path that Epic had paved. By 1990, the upstart indie Dark Horse Comics felt the time was right for Lee and Kaluta to try finishing what they started.

The "STARSTRUCK: The Expanding Universe" revised series came out with a revitalized and revisionary mandate: it would reprint everything but with over 320 pages of new material laced through; there would be 12 issues covering three major arcs until it was all done.

The only catch was it was black and white and cost about twice as much. And there was the page size thing; to mirror the more square-ish dimensions of the story portions from the graphic novel, the new integrated page art left more blank air at the bottom of the rectangular book. But hey, Kaluta was drawing his butt off, so extending the art was a bit much to expect then. And at twice the cost, you were getting a double-length book that was six times deeper than any competition.

STARSTRUCK: The Expanding Universe, all 4 issues, Dark Horse, 1990-91.

And what a ride! Suddenly everything was deeper, wider, richer. The re-evolution was all revelations. The single page story that had jumpstarted the original novel now had an additional six pages opening up new levels of clarity and connection. Or a new chapter kicked in that widened a character's backstory while sharpening the understanding of her actions. The art may have been a bit constrained in page proportion (though certainly not in detail and scope), but the story was more revelatory and exponential.

The first third of the grand plan, 'Volume 1', did come out in four issues (three 48 page issues and a fourth 64-pager). In all, more than 100 new pages had enriched the grand tale. It was a stunning start. And then it stopped before it could finish because of hard times and soft sales.

While everyone gushed about SANDMAN and WATCHMEN, they'd missed the real party again.

Mary Medea and her Erotica Anns; young Galatia 9; cadet pilot Brucilla

There were multiple attempts to resurrect STARSTRUCK through the 90's; a film, toys, trade paperbacks, TV series. But too many deals collapsed during the process. The diehard fans have held their breath since 1991, scrabbling for any rumor like it was a portent.

STARSTRUCK, the new series, IDW Publishing, 2009-2010.

And now it's happened.

IDW Comics is reprinting everything as intended remastered in 13 monthly issues, and a collected hardcover. This time, Kaluta has rectified the 'square' art problem just mentioned by extending the art of every page to full rectangular dimensions. It is in full color thanks to the stunningly lush work of painter Lee Moyer. It includes all of the Expanded Universe tales. And it features back-up stories of Brucilla's childhood in the larcenous and ludicrous Galactic Girl Guides, with inking by fantasy great Charles Vess. (Only a couple of these have ever been seen before.)

The first monthly issue came out in August, 2009. It levitated on the shelves and said, "Be not afraid. I have a sexy behind and I am funny." (Untrue event, true sentiments.) The original play was re-performed that month as a benefit drive for the ailing Gene Colan, legendary comics artist. This was a warm-up for an audio recording of the play that will be released next year (update: now available), and an all-new radio series of STARSTRUCK is in the planning.

UPDATE: The entire new series is collected into the STARSTRUCK Deluxe Edition, available since March, 2011; bigger art, everything included, plus surprise extras!

The smartest, sexiest space opera ever made has returned better than ever!

Here's a comparison of the 1984, 1990, and 2009 versions:
(compare the middle panel, and lengths)

Top: 1984, graphic novel original color and size;
Middle: 1990, B/W and odd height problem;
Bottom: 2009, lavish color and extended art

Another victory for the indie underground, right?

Well, when I look around, I still don't see this book getting the recognition it deserves. (Hey, Stan, hand me your soapbox for a minute.)

This is my third time through the "Groundhog Day" loop on this, so trust me, I recognize the fanboy attention incest that causes this blindspot pattern. Whenever you look at comic-news sites, it's the same-old-same: the five billionth article on Deadpool and Wolverine, the latest stunt-event crossover (cosmic plot, shallow angst), the latest dead superhero came back, the latest corporation bought your comic company to co-opt it for movie fodder.

So with a major comic convention every month, where's the coverage for this book? With advance issue art previews, where are five pages from this book? With motion comics breaking, where is the adaption of this that makes STAR WARS look tame? With weekly New Release lists, why isn't it ever listed? With forum threads, where is anyone who actually knows the subject matter before they react at it?

If the 'direct market' and WATCHMEN once opened us to all the mature possibilities of illustrated fiction, why is everything still dominated by the same teen superhero stuff with added violence and bad crosshatching? (Thanks, Todd.)

That lite stuff is fun on the go. But how long can you chew gum for supper?

I'm not trying to insult anybody's interests, but I do want to sound a wake-up call. We can do better than what we've been given lately. This is an opportunity to advance from past mistakes.

TOP 7 REASONS THAT ALWAYS CHUMP THIS BOOK:
-it isn't publicized enough
-the superhero clique can't get a grip on it
-the straight media is still dazzled by five classics from the 80's from trade reprints**
-'it costs too much' unlike that dumb thing you bought instead
-it's thought of as a 'chick book' by dummies
-it's 'esoteric' because it flew right over a thud's head
-some mistake its sensuality or empowerment as sexism

Yawn.

Well, let's starstruck the lunks upside the head...

Are you ready for a real revolution?

Do you want smart stories with real art? Do you want the hip underground to trounce the zombies of mediocrity? Do you want to beat back the electro-squids and save Zion?

We don't have to accept ignorance as the hand of fate this time. It's taken us twenty-five years to catch up to what this series was always doing. What everyone wasn't ready for before is now becoming commonplace. The rise of manga, serial TV shows, cyberpunk novels, Riot Grrrl, and kickass heroines has broadened the audience market to catch up with this book. With Comic-Con at critical mass, superhero movies raking in, channels like SyFy, thousands of comic book stores globally, loads of comic-news sites, hipster blogs, viral marketing, YouTube slideshows and reviewer videos, and Twitter, there is no excuse for this top-quality book to go unnoticed again.

Where's that real indie spirit, rockerboy and riot grrrl?

We can be our own direct market of good taste. We can support the indie comics that the mono-distributor tries to exclude. We can hit the comic shops and say, "Gimme your STARSTRUCK and no one gets smacked." We can write our own articles and word-of-mouth through the net when the comics-news sites drop the ball. We overlap now and we can propel ourselves.

This is our book and this is the moment. Let's rock'n'roll!

STARSTRUCK, examples of the lavish new color by Lee Moyer, 2009.

STARSTRUCK Deluxe Edition

'STARSTRUCK Deluxe Edition' Reviews:

The Comics Journal, 8/15/2011:
"Pick up this book, because not having read it is sort of like not having read Pogo, or listened to Trout Mask Replica, or seen a Hayao Miyazaki film."

The New Inquiry, 8/15/2011:
"Naturally, a story of more complex ideas necessitated a more complex structure to transmit them, and Starstruck was also a major innovator in terms of comics narratology.
STARSTRUCK could be both silly and smart, was progressive but unpretentious, and clever but not so impressed with itself that it ever forgot to entertain."

Here's why you shouldn't miss the rocket this time:
Or, "How does this relate to Rock or Sex?"

If you're into Riot Grrrl, anarcho-punk, punk feminism, buy this book.
If you're into challenging narratives like LOST, THE PRISONER, WATCHMEN, KILL BILL, buy this book.
If you're into Anais Nin, Susie Bright, Carol Queen, Regina Lynn, Violet Blue, buy this book.
If you're into Monty Python, HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, GALAXY QUEST, buy this book.
If you're into Weird Science, Zap Comix, Heavy Metal, Love & Rockets, buy this book.

If you're into STAR WARS, STAR TREK, FIREFLY/SERENITY, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, DOLLHOUSE, DOCTOR WHO, buy this book.
If you're into Hannah Hoch, Frida Kahlo, Cindy Sherman, The Guerilla Girls, buy this book.
If you're into YELLOW SUBMARINE, GHOST IN THE SHELL, SPIRITED AWAY, buy this book.
If you're into The Marx Brothers, The Little Rascals, WILLY WONKA, SCTV,
The Young Ones, MADtv, buy this book.
If you're into Ray Bradbury, Leigh Brackett, Phillip K. Dick, buy this book.
If you're into PROMETHEA, CORALINE, PLANETARY, Y: THE LAST MAN, buy this book.

If you're into Martha Washington, AEON FLUX, THE FIFTH ELEMENT, THE MATRIX, ULTRA VIOLET, buy this book.
If you're into William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, buy this book.
If you're into THE POWERPUFF GIRLS, SAMURAI JACK, FUTURAMA, WALL-E, buy this book.
If you're into The Luv'd Ones, Betty Davis, Poly Styrene, The B-52s, The Cramps, Shonen Knife, The She Creatures, buy this book.
If you're into LITTLE NEMO, KRAZY KAT, BUCK ROGERS, FLASH GORDON, THE SPIRIT, ZIPPY THE PINHEAD, buy this book.
If you're into Lord Buckley, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin, Susan Norfleet, buy this book.

If you're into Alphonse Mucha, Winsor McCay, Alex Raymond, Matt Baker, Al Williamson, buy this book.
If you're into BARBARELLA, SIN METAL SIRENS, SKIN TIGHT ORBIT, buy this book.
If you're into Berni Wrightson, Charles Vess, Walt Simonson, Jeffrey Catherine Jones, William Stout, Barry Windsor Smith, P. Craig Russell, Howard Chaykin, buy this book.
If you're into MAGNUS: ROBOT FIGHTER, THE ROCKETEER, TANK GIRL,
buy this book.
If you're into the 'bubble babe' pin-ups passing for women in Image, AC, and CrossGen Comics, kiss my asp.
If you're into Carol Lay, Phoebe Gloeckner, Julie Doucet, Sandra Chang, Isabel Samaras, Tara McPherson, buy this book.
If you're into Funkadelic, Frank Zappa, Devo, Le Tigre, buy this book.

If you're in your right mind...buy this book.

"It's a tough galaxy...but somebody's gotta live in it.
It might as well be YOU!"
pictured: Cookie Fabrè, Galactic Girl Guide.

This ROCKS, it's SEXY, now let's kick out the jams, brothers and sisters!

Excelsior!
-Tym Stevens,
©2009, 2011

(Here's your soapbox back, effendi.)

LEARN MORE!

STARSTRUCK Articles:
Newsarama 1 2 3
Robot 6
The Savage Critic
Publishers Weekly
Suicide Girls

Wikipedia

STARSTRUCK Links:
YouTube: Elaine Lee on STARSTRUCK censorship
YouTube: Lee Moyer on STARSTRUCK's return
YouTube: Lee Moyer on repainting STARSTRUCK
SequentialScott color appreciation

STARSTRUCK on Facebook:
-Group
-Book

Elaine Lee, writer
Michael Wm. Kaluta, artist
Lee Moyer, painter
Todd Klein, lettering

STARSTRUCK Articles Here On RockSex:
1) "The Return of STARSTRUCK! Or, Riot Grrrls Conquer the Universe!"
2) "STARSTRUCK Strikes Back!"
3) "The Big Bang of STARSTRUCK: The Roots and Branches of Elaine Lee & Michael Kaluta's space opera" Epic.

Also:
-Best Comix 2000-2010
-"STARSTRUCK Does It In Your Earhole! New STARSTRUCK Audioplay For CD And MP3!"

Small Print, Dept.
*Disclaimer: I donated this essay out of love; all profits from the book are made by the three creators, who deserve the support.

**The Critics' Darlings are WATCHMEN, DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, MAUS, THE KILLING JOKE, SANDMAN. Winners all, but just the beginning...
And not a woman in the Boys Club anywhere, huh, guys?
-Ye Smartass

"Please respect the 100 feet distance from the restraining order, sir."
Okay, okay!

"Something In The Way": James Taylor> The Beatles> Nirvana

2011-09-06T11:19:00.000-07:00

One line inspired three different classic songs.

In 1968, THE BEATLES created their own record label, Apple Records, to support artists they loved. JAMES TAYOR made his first album there and this song was on it:

JAMES TAYLOR - "Something In the Way She Moves" (1968)

GEORGE HARRISON was sparked by that title line and went his own direction with it. It became the first Beatles #1 not written by John or Paul, and FRANK SINATRA called it "the greatest love song ever written".

THE BEATLES -"Something" (1969)

KURT COBAIN found another slant in that phrasing and pursued a different angle with it. The lysergic pacing, cellos, and chorus harmonies are in the spirit of Lennon.

NIRVANA -"Something In The Way" (1991)

"I CAN'T EXPLAIN": The Who> Bowie> The Clash> Fatboy Slim> The Hives

2011-08-20T00:27:00.001-07:00

Creativity is each putting their own spin on an idea, advancing new directions. Here's another relay using one song.

THE WHO were tearing it up in their early days as a Mod band doing blasting R'n'B and Blues covers. But PETE TOWNSHEND found his feet composing his first song and their first Top 10 hit, "I Can't Explain".

The song was inspired in its punching chords riff by THE KINKS' "All Day And All Of The Night" (which was inspired by "Louie Louie", which was inspired by a Chuck Berry song, which was inspired by a Calypso song, which connects on to songs from the Old World, and the short of it is that I'm your Great Grandfather from the future. But back to the story.)

THE KINKS -"All Day And All Of The Night" (1965)

That's the hand-off. Now here's our young punks creating the future in two minutes flat. (Check for bruises and your wallet before going to the next song.)

Note that from the very start, the band finds its identity in insular lyrics with anthemic power chords.

THE WHO -"I Can't Explain" (1965)

In the early 70's, as THE WHO turned its Mod beginnings into the rock opera "Quadrophenia", others began to look back also.

From the 50's revival in films ("American Graffiti", "That'll Be The Day") and Glam Rock (T-Rex, Suzi Quatro, Gary Glitter), to the seminal "Nuggets" double-album anthology, to DAVID BOWIE's covers album, "Pin Ups"...

DAVID BOWIE -"I Can't Explain" (1973)

Fresh off her success as Mary Magdalene in the screen version of "Jesus Christ Superstar", here's Hawaiian (by way of Ireland, Japan, and China) YVONNE ELLIMAN with one of the best, unheralded versions ever recorded.

This becomes important again later.

YVONNE ELLIMAN -"I Can't Explain" (1973)

THE CLASH loved this riff and used it a few times: in "Clash City Rockers" (1977), "Capitol Radio" (1977), and "Guns on the Roof" (1978); as well as a sample at the end of BIG AUDIO DYNAMITE's "Contact" (1989, at 2:53).

THE CLASH -"Clash City Rockers" (1977)

Keeping it Punk, here's Jimmy Lydon -the younger brother of JOHN LYDON- with a Post-Punk dub take. Who else thought to use a Jaw Harp then?

4" Be 2" -"I Can't Explain" (1980)

Not far off from that spirit in a Big Beat dance style, here's FATBOY SLIM sampling the overlooked Yvonne Elliman version over the drums from LED ZEPPELIN's "The Crunge".

FATBOY SLIM -"Going Out OF My Head" (1997)

Like THE CLASH, here's more young punks putting new kick in the strut: the premiere neo-Garage Rock band THE HIVES from Sweden.

THE HIVES -"Walk Idiot Walk" (2004)

And here it is in a rewrite by Brazilian band ULTRAJE A RIGOR done acoustically...

ULTRAJE A RIGOR -"Eu Nao Sei (I Don't Know)" (2005)

'MOONLIGHT SONATA': Beethoven> The Beatles> Piero Umiliani> En Vogue

2011-08-17T12:25:00.001-07:00

Creativity is a cultural relay race. Here's another great baton.

"The Moonlight Sonata" by LUDWIG van BEETHOVEN is one of the most haunting and romantic Classical ballads of all time. It's actual title is "Piano Sonata No. 14 in C♯ minor, "Quasi una fantasia", Op. 27, No. 2"; the Latin phrase translates as "Almost a fantasy".

Sit back and be transported into mood indigo.

LUDWIG van BEETHOVEN -"Piano Sonata No. 14 in C♯ minor, "Quasi una fantasia", Op. 27, No. 2" (composed 1801)

A classic Pop song that incorporates Beethoven's melody is "Past Present Future" by THE SHANGRI-LAS. Producer Shadow Morton, firmly in the Phil Spector aural tradition, smartly puts the spotlight on Mary Weiss and her ever-haunting monologues.

The line "but don't try to touch me" is especially chilling, and the song was a natural for a new remake by Marianne Faithfull.

THE SHANGRI-LAS -"Past Present Future" (1966)

Yoko Ono is a classically trained pianist. While she was playing "Moonlight Sonata" once, JOHN LENNON lit up and asked her to play the chords backwards. This inspired the framework for his song "Because" on the ABBEY ROAD album. George Harrison plays a Moog synthesizer in various parts.

"Because" is loved for its melody, its cheeky puns ("because the wind is high, it blows my mind"), and for the lovely chorus sung by John, Paul, and George. Bringing the relay full circle, the song is often covered by symphonic orchestras. But it is also as popular in a capella versions, like this one by the late great Elliott Smith.

THE BEATLES -"Because" (1969)

By coincidence that same year, Italian film composer PIERO UMILIANI used "Moonlight Sonata" as the framework for this spectral piece for the film "Angeli Bianchi...Angeli Neri/ White Angel, Black Angel".

The piano is most certainly Umiliani, with vocals by I Cantori Moderni (The Modern Singers), who sang on all the classic 60's and 70's Italian soundtracks.

PIERO UMILIANI -"Magical Moonlight" (1969)

In the tradition of The Shangri-Las and The Beatles, here's EN VOGUE with a midnight serenade.

EN VOGUE -"Sad But True" (2000)

The Beethoven melody has also inspired songs by Alicia Keys, Atmosphere, and Down Low.

At some point someone is bound to do a mash-up mix of "Moonlight Sonata" and "Because"!

Waiting For Spider-Man

2011-08-10T14:41:00.001-07:00

"...YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN!"

There's a new SPIDER-MAN in town, and it's a wonderful thing.

'Not a dream! Not a hoax! Not an emo reboot or a bad musical!'

Marvel Comics built their empire on the character of Spider-Man, as important to their survival as Superman is to their rival, DC Comics. It would be easy for them to play it safe with their breadwinner, but they have a second option to get bold with.

Marvel publishes a regular line of comic titles with all their classic heroes, but they also publish a separate line of Ultimate Comics. In this alternate universe, the characters have been re-imagined as their ultimate best selves for a modern era. The regular comic Spider-Man, that ever wisecracking Peter Parker, is alive and well. But over in the Ultimate Spider-Man comic, Peter Parker has just passed away and a young teen kid named Miles Morales will replace him in September. >

Your friendly neighbor's hood.

There seems to be some kind of flustered fuss about this.

Having an African-American and Hispanic kid as the new Spider-Man is a great thing in multiple ways. Most smart people understand why and said so. But a few fringe voices from the old hate had problems with it, which only reveals their sad flaws.

"HEY, WAY TO MAKE A GUY FEEL WELCOME!" -Peter Parker
a.k.a., 'Who says only Stan The Man can have a soapbox?', dept.

Well, let's get it out of the way, and point out the ~~elephant~~ irrelevant in the room.

ITEM: Here's the straight-up, pilgrims: there are no such things as races. There is only one race, the Human Race. This isn't idealism, it's simply a scientific fact. > >

When people speak of different races, they are mistaken. The flat scientific reality is...there is only one race, the Human Race, Homo sapiens ("wise man", "knowing man"). You can't divide people by minor physical quibbles, by religion, by map borders, or by cultural traditions and call them races. > It's ignorant and no better than superstition. So terms like 'bi-racial' are just (brace yourself) compounded dumbness. > > >

This may sound like idealism, but it is also a smack-exact scientific fact, Jack.

(Let's cut to the quick: a single African tribe seeded every person on Earth, we are family, stop hitting your cousin and grow up or I'll turn this car around right now.) > > >

Races don't exist, but racism does. Racism is the belief in races, and justifying acting badly to others because of it. That's very real, even if it is as stupid as we could possibly be. > I would've skipped all this as a given, effendi, but all the articles -whether pro or con- about Miles prove that the bulk of us still haven't grasped this.

Repeat. When you say 'bi-racial', you're being double-dumb. Like bubble gum.

"Hey, tigers, time to get with reality!" concurs Mary Jane, "Get wise, man; act like you know and let's go. Next."

Stan Lee's Soapbox column, 1968.

"...SPIDER SENSE IS TINGLING!"

Some folks think this is a heavy subject for such light reading. They're judging covers on mags they've never read.

But you know the score, true believers!

Comic books are as advanced in story and craft as any book, film, or series, and have been for many decades. Four generations worth of hip folks have enjoyed this, while some hack journalists and their clueless readers still have their head up their comics code authority.> >

Regardless, the generation who grew up on graphic novels now writes the best blogs, mags, books, shows, and films, which is turning the tide of public awareness; these professionals know that comics at their best have the pulse of the times, and often accelerate it. > >

Marvel Comics (alias Jack Kirby) introduced the first Black superhero,
the african king Black Panther, in 1966.
> > > > > > > >

There's ways to do a good thing right, and still ways to go wrong anyway.

When the character Batwoman was announced as a lesbian (2006), it was decried by some as a stunt.> But, in practice, the character's confident sexual identity only enhanced some of the most essential stories and art of the decade. By focusing on depth and strength of character, in strong stories with stunning art, the creators showed that quality of craft and humanity of heart are the best keys for progress.

Another good character move was the debut of an Asian Batgirl named Cassandra Cain (1999), but she was mishandled. The creators seemed to think the concept 'Asian' was enough and blurred her background in a hodgepodge of pan-Asian cultural cliches. In the city I live in, where everyone comes from all the radically diverse cultures grouped under Asia, this was infuriating instead of empowering.

And you know writers are clueless when they descend to the whole 'hero/now villain/now hero' ricochet. The creators seemed equally tonedeaf to the resulting backlash; "Huh?", blink, blink. Newsflash: way to ruin a great character in no time flat, ya boneheads. (What was their solution? They just replaced her with a blond. Yeh. Nuff said.)

Batwoman; Batgirl

Good stories about good people are the whole point of superhero comics. They're fantasies of our inner spirit personified as its ultimate best.>>

Sadly, some bad people with their own problems slung a lot of abuse at Batwoman for having love in her life; and have so again at the casting of Perry White with a fine actor; and of course at our fledgling spider-kid, Miles for being...something they're unskilled to read anyway. So I was really impressed when the main man at Marvel Comics, Joe Quesada, responded to all the bigot blowhards by saying, "if people with racist tendencies disagree with the things we do, then I know we're doing the right thing."

Joe Quesada is hispanic, and extends the proud history of immigrant underdogs that made comics (and culture) great. Comic books were invented in the melting pot of 1930's Depression-era New York City, cranked out by idealistic young Italians, Jews, Poles, Irish, and more who yearned to empower themselves in a better world. > From the later waves of Filipino, French, and Spanish artists in the 70's, to the English and Scottish writers in the 80's, to the rise of African-American artists in the 90's>, and Asian artists in the 00's, American comics are only improved by inclusion and empowerment.

"Sayyy, aren't you forgetting something there, buddy?" interjects Mary Jane.

Woman make up the majority of the human race, but they are the most neglected and marginalized part of the comics community.> > > > So it's even better that the series is being drawn by a woman, which there can never be enough of in comics creation. Sara Pichelli has a keen eye for telling a story, particularly through the humanity imbued in clothes, expressions, and gestures. > And what an excellent job with the costume! Totally new and yet totally identifiable as Spidey.

Hey, wake up over there, I'm on a roll. Wow, tough room. Did we run out of women-in-leather pics? Cue the film, Irving!

"WITH GREAT POWER COMES GREAT RESPONSIBILITY." -Uncle Ben Parker

But what really put the passion in me was in seeing how much they were influenced by the documentary "Waiting For Superman".

This indie film has clearheaded prescriptions for solving the education crisis in America, using the metaphor that we can't depend on any messianic agency when we should focus on saving ourselves. > >

The cruelest and most moving part of the film is seeing all of the bright kids from poor homes pinning all their hopes on a random lottery system that might let them into a school that can save them. The horror of seeing qualified kids thrown to the wind by sheer chance is almost too heartbreaking to take.

Looking at the three pages of preview art from ULTIMATE COMICS SPIDER-MAN #1 >, it's clear that writer Brian Michael Bendis has adapted this exact scene from the film. At that point my empathy for Miles Morales was absolute, and I knew I was going to buy this book every month.

Waiting for hope
Click image to enlarge

"Waiting For Superman" nails what's criminally wrong about our current education system. We strobe to kids that they can do anything with an education. But we don't provide them with the education which allows them to do anything. When we reduce their chances to a lottery, we tell them that all their hard work means nothing against fickle fate, and they should just give up.

I say, tell fate to go fickle itself.

Girl reads comics, 1947. source

Comic books were first created to lift kids' dreams. Their sole purpose is to empower the hero within you.

In this new Depression, we need to believe that quality will win, that the inner spirit is stronger than evil or fate, that the dreams of our own youth weren't delusions, and that the dreams of the new youth can be given a fair chance. That we have humanity and decency in common, and that together we can make a better world.

We need a narrative of belief that we make happen ourselves. Miles Morales is the hero for our times because we are Miles Morales.

President Obama meets the kids from "Waiting For Superman".
Miles Morales was almost certainly inspired
by the two people shaking hands.

If you haven't seen the film, I can't urge it enough. Then see how you feel about our friendly new neighbor....

ULTIMATE COMICS SPIDER-MAN #1 goes on sale at comic shops September 14, 2011.

(This is a variant cover.)
> > >

Excelsior!

RELATED POSTS:

DR. KING

BEST COMIX 2000-2010

STARSTRUCK

ROCK GRRRL: Sister Rosetta Tharpe / Alabama 3, Noisettes, Plant & Krause

2011-08-08T16:18:00.000-07:00

ROCK GRRRL='She rocks. Revise your history with her story', dept.:

SISTER ROSETTA THARPE was a rocker before there was Rock. She is a mother of us all.

She was the first Gospel star, while burning off Blues and Jazz licks on her guitar like a greasefire. She toured with The Jordanaires a decade before anyone heard of Elvis. She pulled a young kid onstage to sing with her who later changed his name to Little Richard. She was Johnny Cash's favorite singer for life.

And she may have recorded the first Rock'n'Roll song. Years before Muddy Waters' electric blues band (1948) or "Rocket 88" (1951), here is our angel with all the keys to the kingdom: boogie-woogie, blues licks, swaggering stance.

SISTER ROSETTA THARPE -"Strange Things Happening Every Day" (1944)

Though it was heresy to mix secular sounds with gospel music in the 50's, Rosetta didn't care a whit and poured on the rockin' leads regardless. In the film "AMELIE" (2001) the elfin star is entranced with wonder watching Rosetta perform this song on her TV:

SISTER ROSETTA THARPE -"Up Above My Head"

Check out her soloing during the second half. Who's your mama now?

SISTER ROSETTA THARPE -"Down By The Riverside" (live, 19__)

The influence of Sister Rosetta Tharpe never ends. Here are three recent songs about her:

ALABAMA 3 -"Sister Rosetta" (1997)

THE NOISETTES -"Sister Rosetta (Capture The Spirit)" (2007)

Originally by SAM PHILLIPS, here's the gossamer siren Ms. Krause to carry us out...

ROBERT PLANT & ALLISON KRAUSE -"Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us" (2007)

'Oh Bondage, Up Yours!': X-Ray Spex> Chicks On Speed

2011-07-30T11:05:00.000-07:00

"Some people say little girls should be seen and not heard
But I think
OH BONDAGE UP YOURS!"

Punk meant to break down all barriers and restrictions- in sound, fashion, and outlook. Because of its physical energy and aggro stance, it could've trapped itself into becoming the macho crap it was trying to defeat. Luckily, POLY STYRENE changed that.

© Jerome Gaynor, Rocktober Magazine.

Poly and the X-RAY SPEX were the molotov cocktail that drove away the mob to save the party. She injected feminist parody and lacerating wit, creating a political stance with a bracing sense of humor. She made Punk fun and smarter. She opened the doors for THE SLITS, THE AU PAIRS, THE POISON GIRLS, BIKINI KILL, HOLE, L7, BABES IN TOYLAND, TRIBE 8, LESBIANS ON ECSTASY, and PEACHES.

Here she turns masochism into a metaphor for our slavery to consumerism, and tells where to put it.

X-RAY SPEX -"Oh Bondage Up Yours!" (1977)

In that fine tradition, here's CHICKS ON SPEED to alter the face of things.

CHICKS ON SPEED -"Plastic Surgery" (2006)

LADIES FIRST: 'What A Man', Lyndell> Lee> Salt-n-Pepa

2011-07-26T13:42:00.000-07:00

Linda Lyndell

Another classic song that 'she did first'.

The original "What A Man" is by Southern soul singer LINDA LYNDELL. It was released by the ever-wonderful Stax Records on their Volt label, and produced by ISAAC HAYES and David Porter, hot off of creating all the hits of SAM & DAVE.

LINDA LYNDELL -"What A Man" (1968)

It was first remade by Atlantic Records' soul great LAURA LEE, most known for "Dirty Man", "Women’s Love Rights", and "Crumbs Off The Table".

LAURA LEE -"What A Man" (1972)

The song reached its biggest fame when adapted by rap dynamos SALT-n-PEPA, backed up perfectly by EN VOGUE at their peak.

SALT-n-PEPA (with En Vogue) -"Whatta Man" (1994)

LADIES FIRST: 'You're No Good', Warwick> Everett> Ronstadt> Finland!

2011-07-05T09:56:00.000-07:00

Here's another classic song that 'she did first'.

We all love "You're No Good" in versions by Betty Everett and later Linda Rondstadt. But actually, it was done first by DEE DEE WARWICK as a B-Side in 1963. Check out the surprisingly tough guitar fuzz in the break (1:17), well ahead of Garage Rock. And Dee Dee sounds both pissed and swinging at the same time!

Beyond being the sister of Dionne Warwick, Dee Dee has gained much love in Soul circles for her own fine body of work.

DEE DEE WARWICK -"You're No Good" (1963)

Sometimes the cover becomes the definitive version, and here's BETTY EVERETT with her great hit take on the song.

BETTY EVERETT -"You're No Good" (1963)

The song went international as a hit for the U.K. band THE SWINGING BLUE JEANS during the British Invasion.

THE SWINGING BLUE JEANS -"You're No Good" (1964)

Which led to the first Finnish version by these amiable moptops.

EDDY & THE LIGHTNINGS* -"Olet Paha" (1964)

*(a.k.a., Eddy & The Boys)

And this terrific French version by PUSSY CAT. Great Garage-style attitude in this one!

Sigh. If only Rhino Records would do a NUGGETS box set of Garage Girls. I could give them a list of eight discs worth in no time flat.

PUSSY CAT -"Mais Pourquoi" (1966)

In America, this Michigan band gives it the full-on Psychedelic Soul treatment!

PHLEGETHON -"You're No Good" (1970)

Sometimes the cover of the cover becomes the new definitive version.

The reason is twofold: LINDA RONSTADT's voice and Andrew Gold's playing. Linda brought a no-nonsense swagger that made the song an anthem during the rise of Feminism. Gold played all of the instruments, bringing the edgy mood, the sultry keyboards, and one of the most letter-perfect George Harrison slide guitar homages ever recorded (1:31).

LINDA RONSTADT -"You're No Good" (1974)

Which reset the template for another Finnish response!

MARION -"Paha Ooot" (1975)

Here's some moody Rock from early VAN HALEN.

VAN HALEN -"You're No Good" (1979)

JILL JOHNSON, a Country Soul artist from Sweden, responds to the Linda Ronstadt template here.

JILL JOHNSON -"You're No Good" (2007)

And here's Punk Pop from the French band THE PLASTICINES that owes a debt to The Ramones. Love that "ah, ah-ahhh/ hey-ho-hey" chorus they throw in!

The band took their name from a lyric in "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds."

THE PLASTICINES -"You're No Good" (2010)

Every time I hear this timeless song, I thing, "You're so good, baby, you're so good!"

Rumble In The Red Room: Link Wray> Adam Ant> TWIN PEAKS

2011-06-30T10:35:00.000-07:00

A riot in the streets or a tumble in the sheets? Here's a song full of secrets both sexy and dangerous.

It started with a dance in the late 50's called "The Stroll"; crowds would line parallel while couples vamped spontaneous dances in the walkway between them. This was often done to easy shuffles like Chuck Willis' remake of the perennial blues, "C. C. Rider".

A Canadian quartet called THE DIAMONDS had a huge hit on the trend with "The Stroll", turning it into a sensuous slow-grind with raunchy sax and an air of menace underneath.

THE DIAMONDS -"The Stroll" (1958)

Guitarist LINK WRAY was jamming with his band to work out an instrumental take of "The Stroll" for a live gig. They emphasized the grinding edge and came up with a new original which was a smash with the crowd, who demanded they play it five times. Link punched holes in his amp speakers to replicate that live buzz when it came time to record it.

It is the only instrumental ever banned on the radio because of conservative fear that it would trigger gang riots! Instead, it unleashed a style riot that never ends. The song is hailed as the dawn of feedback and distortion in Rock music, opening the way for Garage Rock, Heavy Metal, Punk, Industrial, and Grunge later.

LINK WRAY & HIS RAY MEN- "Rumble" (1958)

ADAM ANT and his great guitarist Marco Pirroni modified the "Rumble" riff for their own song of menace...

ADAM AND THE ANTS -"Killer In The Home" (1980)

"Rumble" is the spiritual and sonic father of this song by the acclaimed composer ANGELO BADALAMENTI for the soundtrack, "TWIN PEAKS: Fire Walk With Me" (1992). In the film, troubled teen queen Laura Palmer gets into a night of debauchery in The Pink Room, a dangerous room in a sleazy bar. (The room portends the hinge to The Red Room, the ultimate crux of the TWIN PEAKS series.)

Slow, edgy, sexy, lethal...

ANGELO BADALAMENTI -"Pink Room" (1992)

Here is an alternate extension, released later...

ANGELO BADALAMENTI -"Blue Frank" (1992/2007)

"... and then your body would just burst into fire."

*****NOTE: If you are new to TWIN PEAKS, watch the complete TV series first, and then the film "TWIN PEAKS: Fire Walk With Me" last. Though the film is a prequel, it is deliberately meant to be seen afterwards for dramatic context.*****

SEE ALSO: TWIN PEAKS: The Music And Its Inspirations!

The BIG PAYBACK: Thank you, Aaron!

2011-06-21T10:08:00.001-07:00

"But you won't fool the children of the revolution!/ YEAH!" -T-Rex, 1972

Music can change your life. Here's two music players and a story to prove it.

AARON

A friend is a door to more. They open up your life.

The two tricky things in life are money and access. A lot of times, without one you don't get the other. I spent much of the 80's reading about albums I couldn't hear, flipping through LPs in record shops that I couldn't buy. The library, the radio, and music videos were my best friends (being free and all), until I started working at record stores to feed my habit.

In the early 90's a record store amigo named Aaron started giving me mixtapes. He was pulling together lots of stuff I'd heard tangentially or just heard about. They came with great titles like "Far Out In The Red Sky", "It Used To Be Alright But Things Got Strange", and "Trailing On Next To Sick". Cornucopias of Agitfolk, Garage Rock, Dream Pop, Psychedelia, Glam, Krautrock, Punk, PostPunk, Shoegaze, Grunge, Neo-Psyche, and Noize.

Aaron had that core understanding...that everything was related, interconnected and ever-evolving through hybrids. In pinball fashion the songs linked the 60's through to the 90's. They were new universes looped through plastic and magnetic tape.

Aaron drew gothic Beardsley covers for each, and wrote extensive liner notes in pencil. Another born culture maven and archivist! His knowledge for a young person was astonishing, guided of course by his boundless enthusiasm. Thank god for those folks.

Whenever I hear The Creation, Captain Beefheart, Brian Wilson, Syd Barrett, The MC5, Marc Bolan, Mudhoney, or Jon Spencer, I give a silent thanks to my friend for the gift.

Aaron's mixtapes opened up my mind and expanded my life. I want to thank him for that on his birthday, and pass the songs on to you here. Listen to the music player above and free your mind.

In The Spirit Of AARON

But every door leads to windows!

Here is another music player of songs that are in the spirit of all the vistas Aaron opened my doors to. They are in basic order from the 50's to now: a howling blow-out of Rockabilly, Merseybeat, Garage Rock, Girls In The Garage, Psychedelic, Dream Pop, Glam, Funk Rock, Punk, PostPunk, Paisley Underground, College Rock, Grunge, Riot Grrrl, Noize, Neo Garage, and Brian Wilson disciples.

A splendid time is guaranteed for all! Open up a friend and pass it on...

"You heard the words of Aaron
He spoke the truth in these things
Both great and small"
-The Move, 1971

UMBABARAUMA!: Jorge Ben> Imperial Teen> Soulfly

2011-06-19T09:55:00.000-07:00

"And I'm familiar/ with the Kama Sutra..."

Today, a culture relay from funky samba to indie rock to thrash metal.

Brazil's JORGE BEN JOR made a Funk homage to a soccer star with his song "Ponta de Lanca Africano (Umbabarauma)" in 1976. The song began (like all things) as a cross-cultural hybrid, this one between Brazilian Tropicalia and West African rhythms with some decided U.S. Funk swagger.

The lyrics homage "Umbabarauma/ an African point man/ ...a man whose mind is made up."

JORGE BEN -"Ponta de Lança Africano (Umbabarauma)" (1976)

The song was made more internationally famous in 1988 when it was the spotlight hit on David Byrne's Brazilian compilation album, "Beleza Tropical". A striking animated video helped drive its success.

IMPERIAL TEEN, a kind of indie supergroup based out of San Francisco, used the rhythm guitar lick as a departure point for their own stellar song, "Yoo Hoo". The song was used in the film "Jawbreaker", and star Rose McGowan appears in the song's video:

IMPERIAL TEEN -"Yoo Hoo" (1999)

SOULFY, a thrash band that Brazilian Max Calavera formed after SEPULTURA, did a hard-crashing cover of it that extended its fame.

SOULFLY- "Umbabarauma" (live, 2002)

"Run, kick, find a hole, thrill and give thanks
See how the whole city empties out
On this beautiful afternoon to watch you play"

THE BIG PAYBACK: Thank you, Greg

2011-06-02T11:41:00.000-07:00

Someone always wanders into your life and changes everything. When it's for the better, we should thank them.

My friend Greg expanded my whole musical outlook. We were teenagers in a remote, conservative area circa 1980. Greg was a mischievous lunatic who would do anything without any qualms.

While I was recoiling from the slick corporate music scene into The Beatles and counterculture politics, Greg was the first to embrace Punk and New Wave. This seemed at odds, but Greg exposed to me to a range of new stuff that was advancing off of what I already loved.

1981 B.C.: Stephen, David, me, and Greg (in mock Bowie mannequin pose).

These were the real Indie years. You could only see Rock acts on late night shows, sometimes. Magazines were few and cost too much. I taught myself the history reading issues of Rolling Stone for free at the library. Verrry few Punk and New Wave acts were carried by major labels, and were promoted haphazardly at best. No college radio shows yet, no clubs, no tour circuit, no video channels, and almost no press, just obscure ads in fanzines and word of mouth. Bands were putting out indie records, but you had to mail order them on pure faith, an impossible expense for most teenagers. Where I was, in the rural outskirts, everyone was still trying to process or erase the 60's, and this new 80's futurism stuff just seemed like evil alien shadows on the far horizon.

That's why Greg loved it. He went to all the little record stores and somehow ordered all of these. The few majors and many of the minor labels. He was ahead of the curve on everything. Whatever tore open the envelope, that's what he had to do.

The Clash. The Cars. The B-52's. Elvis Costello. Split Enz. Plastics. Gary Numan. Gang Of Four. The Jam. Talking Heads. Punk and New Wave and PostPunk and Psychobilly and Coldwave and Power Pop. Usually before they had been labeled.

We watched the new acts on maverick TV like "Saturday Night Live", the stellar "SCTV" from Canada, or most often on "Fridays", the L.A.-based competition. The video clip (on the player below) of Split Enz doing "I Got You" is the exact moment where my ambivalence faded and I was converted entirely to the new breed.

Sadly, my friend has passed on. On what would have been his birthday, this is a music playlist of all the wonderful music that Greg expanded my life with. When I hear these songs, Greg is eternal and as fearless as ever.

Thank you, my friend, for enriching our lives.

(To see the songs as videos, click a song
and then click the arrow on its thumbnail
in the upper left of the player)

"I'm the Antenna
Catching vibration
You're the transmitter
Give information!"

-KRAFTWERK

"I wanna bite the hand that feeds me
I wanna bite that hand so badly
And the radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools
Tryin' to anaesthetise the way that you feel"

-ELVIS COSTELLO

"She opened strange doors
that we'd never close again"

-DAVID BOWIE

"Electric angel rock and roller
I hear what you're playing"

-THE CARS

"By day we run by night we dance, we do
I'm in love with the coming race
I've got the best, I'll take all I can get
I'm living for the Eighties"

-KILLING JOKE

How SPAGHETTI WESTERNS Revolutionized Rock Music! (3 Music Players!)

2011-03-17T14:15:00.000-07:00

The Man With No Name

SPAGHETTI WESTERNS brand much of your favorite music. Here are three music players to prove it.

Straddle your saddle and ride some of the coolest music ever made!

WAR, ABBA, BLONDIE, THE CLASH, CHILI PEPPERS, PIXIES, BEASTIE BOYS, PORTISHEAD, MUSE, QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE, GNARLS BARKLEY, KILL BILL.

All of them and many more from every music style have paid loving tribute to Ennio Morricone's scores for these radical Western films.

In the mid-60's, a minor TV star named Clint Eastwood took the odd offer of making some Western films in Italy. The trilogy -"A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS", "FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE", and the epic "THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY"- made him an international star, revolutionized film technique, and unleashed scores of clones.

(The films got called "Spaghetti Westerns" because Americans thought it was novel to have their history retold by Italy. Since we don't call US films "Hamburger Movies", I'm going to skip that tired pejorative and call them what they are, Italian Westerns.)

Director Sergio Leone's use of hand camera, natural light, fast edits, severe close-ups, and panoramic vistas virtually invented modern cinema and videos. But just as important was that thunderous, edgy, bizarre, and brilliant music.

If you know, you're raring to go. And if you don't, it's time for a mind blow...

Here are three music players:

-The roots of the sound
-The Italian Western soundtracks
-The galaxy of hit songs that homage the sound

1-The Roots Of The ITALIAN WESTERN Sound!

(To see the songs as videos, click a song
and then click the arrow on its thumbnail
in the upper left of the player!)

Many different strains of music all led to the classic Italian Western sound.

-Folk activist WOODY GUTHRIE was an unlikely catalyst. His song "Pastures Of Plenty" would be the trigger for the Spaghetti Western sound in a later remake arranged by Morricone. (More below.)

-Western soundtracks are the obvious main template: Film scores such as Dmitri Tiomkin's "HIGH NOON" and Elmer Bernstein's "THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN"; TV themes such as "RAWHIDE", covered later by THE BLUES BROTHERS and DEAD KENNEDYS.

-Country & Western was actually two different musics; Western was influenced by old Cowboy songs and later incorporated Swing Jazz horns. More importantly for our topic, the guitar took on a hard clanging sound played with deep bass notes in a new genre called HonkyTonk in the mid-50's. This hard clang galloped hits by JOHNNY HORTON, JOHNNY CASH, and guitarist BILL JUSTIS.

-Rock'n'Roll had strong Country roots, and the hard clang of HonkyTonk then inspired guitar virtuosos like DUANE EDDY and LINK WRAY. Eddy's sound of strong resonant bass chords earned him the name "the Twang Bar King". In their wake came all-guitar bands with instrumental hits like THE VENTURES and DAVIE ALLAN & THE ARROWS.

-English guitar bands, many produced by sonic wizard Joe Meek, followed in pursuit, like THE SHADOWS with hugely-influential hit "Apache", and THE OUTLAWS which included young Ritchie Blackmore (DEEP PURPLE, RAINBOW). A rival was THE JOHN BARRY SEVEN, whose leader went on to use the tough guitar sound with dynamic strings as legendary composer for the James Bond films.

-Surf music caught that sonic wave and rode it to new shores with DICK DALE and THE SENTINALS. Note the original version of "Cecilia Ann" by THE SURFTONES, later immortalized by PIXIES. And also JACK NITZSCHE's "The Lonely Surfer", an arranger for Phil Spector whose use of epic strings, hard clang, and triumphant horns foretells Morricone.

-Classical clearly paved the way with the use of symphonic scores for Western films. But, in its loose and instinctive structure, the spirit of freeform Jazz also haunts the trails. A good parallel course is MILES DAVIS and Gil Evan's atmospheric hybrid of both forms on the "Sketches Of Spain" album.

-Spanish flamenco guitar particularly is a key ingredient of many Italian Western scores. And while Opera ushered the theatrical vocals, another similar parallel for mood and majesty is the Portuguese blues of Fado music, ruled by AMALIA RODRIGUES.

-Mexican horns lift the triumphant anthems of the sound, which scored hits for HERB ALPERT like "The Lonely Bull".

2-The Music Of ITALIAN WESTERNS!

(To see the songs as videos, click a song
and then click the arrow on its thumbnail
in the upper left of the player!)

Why is this music so damn cool?

The "Punk Rock" Of Italian Western Cinema

Martin Scorsese makes the case that Westerns changed to reflect their times. In the 30's, America saw itself as morally good, and the Westerns coded that into simple good-versus-evil plots which starred White Hat paragons like John Wayne against swarthy Black Hats. By "THE SEARCHERS" (1957), America was undergoing much inner struggle as to the morality of its character, and John Wayne plays an ambivalent and strident crusader who's squarely on the wrong side.

Because their post-War affluence in the 50's seemed like the fruition of Manifest Destiny, Americans loved film and television Westerns that reaffirmed this in moral parables. But the Civil Rights movement and rising youth rebellion called this status quo into question. Now issues like Native American rights and an array of past injustices began to surface.

By the 60's, that reassessment of moral character and social injustice became a shared world struggle. The Italian Westerns are in a sense anti-Westerns. They use the conventions of Westerns, but they upend them in every way.

The contrived Hollywood theatricality and artifice disappeared. No more studio sets, slick grooming, and jingoistic robots. Italian Westerns, made in the wake of naturalistic films from Neorealist pioneers to Japanese auteurs to France's New Wave youngbloods, were shot verite-style, in the moment and location, with lens flares, gritty edges, and unadorned. The heroes were anti-heroes, with no stance but survival. In musical terms, if John Wayne was akin to Frank Sinatra, then Clint Eastwood was closer in spirit to Johnny Rotten.

Italian Westerns absorbed the style and substance of avant-garde film and succeeded with mainstream audiences. The raw style and maverick outlook helped trailblaze the counterculture's New Hollywood films of the early 70's.

©Billy Perkins, 2008.

Why all this yadda-yadda? Because that radical revamp extended to the music.

Western scores had always been triumphant anthems and romantic swirls that sloshed through every scene. Stirring at best, syrupy at worst. It was time for something else. Enter Ennio Morricone.

Woody Guthrie's "Pastures Of Plenty" was covered by Italian crooner PETER TEVIS in 1962, with a dramatic arrangement by rising composer Morricone. Film director Sergio Leone was so taken by the style that he insisted it be used for his Western, "A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS" (1964). It became the signature sound of all Italian Westerns going forward.

A hard clanging guitar. Brutal chanting chorals. The rubbery twang of a Jaw Harp. Stampede rhythms. An eerie whistling. An ethereal wordless female aria. A corroded harmonica. Midnight Flamenco. The declarative horns of Mexican angels.

Gone were the amorphous symphonies tumbling, replaced now by silences, streamlined harshness, and textural sounds. In the moment, in the character, with emotional flares, gritty edge, and unadulterated. An anti-symphony for anti-heroes, something both brutal and glorious.

Some of the coolest music ever made.

The Players

"La Dolce Vita". Rome in the mid-60's was as much a pop renaissance scene as London, Paris, and San Francisco. The Cinecitta film scores by a pantheon of composer gods are holy scripts of hyper-hip.

The composers swung every style that came, from Rock to Bossa to Electronic to Lounge to Funk. Nowadays their soundtracks are coveted by rockers, cratediggers, and samplers of all countries and styles. (I'll do separate blogs profiling their varied sounds.)

ENNIO MORRICONE

The Prime Mover. The Italian Westerns launched his career and fame, but he was too vast and prolific to be hemmed in. He has made over 400 scores in every musical style and movie genre, most of them superior to the films they were for. Almost certainly the most diverse and formidable composer in film history.

Everyone in Rome followed his lead.

ALESSANDRO ALESSANDRONI

The clanging guitar and signature whistling was by his friend, Alessandroni. 'Sandro' also led the Cantori Moderni (Modern Singers) who did all the chorals and chanting. Besides playing, whistling, and singing on everyone's scores, he wrote great film soundtracks of his own.

BRUNO NICOLAI

Morricone's right-hand man, Nicolai arranged all of Ennio's compositions for recording, and wrote many excellent scores in his own right.

EDDA DELL'ORSO

Edda is the ethereal operatic voice that lifts so many of these themes. Morricone used her voice like an instrument, avoiding words for soundscapes. She enlivens countless Italian soundtracks with angel arias, jazzy scat, sensual cooing, edgy moaning, and lounge bliss.

PIERO UMILIANI

The hepcat, very jazzy and funky. As hip as anything going, whether Funk or Electronic or Psychedelic. He did the original "Mah Na Mah Na" that the Muppets covered.

LUIS BACALOV

The Argentinian, bringing in the Bossa Nova and Samba Jazz. Could also Rock like a brofo!

PIERO PICCIONI

Umiliani's contender in the Funk and Jazz stakes. Uber-cool, sexy swang, makes you wanna shake that thang!

ARMANDO TROVAIOLI (also, Trovajoli)

Another embarrassingly talented and well-rounded composer who hit it note perfect in every genre.

NORA ORLANDI

Thankfully breaking up the boys club, Nora was a choral leader (who discovered Alessandroni) and also wrote terrific scores.

3-The Sound Of ITALIAN WESTERNS
in Rock, Pop, Electronic, Punk, Hiphop,
Reggae, Metal, Games, and TripHip!

(To see the songs as videos, click a song
and then click the arrow on its thumbnail
in the upper left of the player!)

The sound of Italian Westerns raised generations. Whether at the movies, on TV, or video, that haunting and powerful sound was all-pervasive and seductive to musicians of all angles. It haunts many of our favorite songs, even when we don't realize it.

GHOST RIDERS

From 1966 on, bands were in love with the soundtracks of Morricone and his gang. Here's a walk through time that sheds light on many of your favorite songs...

-LOVE lived in L.A. when the Spaghetti Westerns hit critical mass in 1966. Their Spanish-inflected and cinematic "Alone Again Or" bears striking similarity to the Morricone sound. Later, THE DAMNED covered it with a video homaging the Leone films. Scout out also THE DOORS' "Spanish Caravan" and MOUNTAIN's "Theme From An Imaginary Western".

-That hard horse-galloping power, akin to "Riders In The Sky", is the drive underneath BLACK SABBATH' "Children Of The Grave", HEART's "Barracuda", and MELISSA AUF DER MAUR's "Skin Receiver".

-Bollywood gets in the act with a number from the classic "SHOLAY", the biggest film in Indian history.

-BLONDIE's "Atomic" is a fine homage; this is why the horse is riding around NYC in the video.

-Then there's THE CLASH connection. 'The Last Gang In Town' has a lot of that Morricone mood in "Straight To Hell". Mick Jones' BIG AUDIO DYNAMITE throw in samples from "The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly" in their "Medicine Show". Paul Simonon's HAVANA 3AM really rides the range with "Hey, Amigo". Joe Strummer starred in the modern Leone homage film "STRAIGHT TO HELL", while fronting The Latino Rockabilly War with their b-side "Don't Tango With Django".

-Punk grabbed the reins in such songs as DEAD KENNEDYS' "Holiday In Cambodia" (listen to those guitar soars), and the opening of THE VANDALS' "Urban Struggle".

-In the PostPunk years, that hard clanging anthemic guitar rode roughshod through MAGAZINE's "Shot From Both Sides", BAUHAUS' "In The Flat Field", CRIME AND THE CITY SOLUTION's "Trouble Come This Morning", NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS' "The Weeping Song", THE PLUGZ' "Reel Ten", and TOM WAITS' "Yesterday Is Here".

-Atmospheric and cinematic bands like CALEXICO, GRAVENHURST, FRIENDS OF DEAN MARTINEZ, and SCENIC continued that tradition. And MUSE went for glory with "Knights Of Cydonia" and its epic Leone-esque video.

-New Wave guitarists loaded their arsenal with that sound. Particular stand-outs are THE GOGO's "This Town", Marco Pirroni's ringing guitar and the blasting horns of ADAM ANT's "Desperate But Not Serious", and WALL OF VOODOO's "Call Of The Wild".

-Dance bands knew a good riff and horn chart when they heard it. Check out the galloping synth and fanfare that opens ABBA's "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" again. France's CASINO MUSIC extends that quest with "Faites Le Proton", foretelling the Jaw Harp and eerie vibe of AIR's "Wonder Milky Bitch". And after their song "Clint Eastwood", GORILLAZ really ride rawhide with "O Green World".

-HipHop had lots of lyrical shout-outs to Cowboy films from the beginning. Avant-Funkers MATERIAL enlist DJ DsT in their street take on "For A Few Dollars More"; KOOL MOE DEE chronicles the "Wild Wild West" with the classic "Good/Bad/Ugly" riff; and the trail is picked up lyrically by THE BEASTIE BOYS' "High Plains Drifter"; and lately, Columbian rapper ROCCA, and THE CYCLE OF TYRANTS.

-Surf helped unfurl the sound in the first place, and that came back around in PIXIES' Morricone-esque cover of The Surftones' "Cecilia Ann", and retro-wavers like SHADOWY MEN FROM A SHADOWY PLANET and THE AQUA VELVETS.

-Electronic Music was an early tool of the Italian film composers, so it should be no surprise that acolyte GEORGIO MORODER rides the moog through "Tears". Electronica continued the chase with THE ORB's "Little Fluffy Clouds", and THE PRODIGY's "The Big Gundown".

-Video Games flint the flame with themes in "SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 2" (Masato Nakamura), and "WILD ARMS" (Michiko Naruke). Italian Westerns got their own game with "OUTLAWS", and this continues with current hits like "RED DEAD REVOLVER" and "RED DEAD REDEMPTION". Plus, their influence is clear in shooter games like "Fallout: Las Vegas" and "Bulletstorm".

-TripHop, with its cinematic moodiness, of course brushfired the plains with songs like PORTISHEAD's "Cowboys", HOOVERPHONIC's "Jackie Cane" and its video, and Alison GOLDFRAPP channeling Edda Dell-Orso's arias and Alessandroni's whistle through "Lovely Head".

-GNARLS BARKLEY used a sample of the Italian Western theme for "Last Man Standing" (by Gianfranco Reverberi ) as the basis for their giant hit, "Crazy". Now DANGER MOUSE is doing an homage album to Italian Westerns called "Rome" with musician/ producer Daniele Luppi and the reunited studio players from the original soundtrack sessions!

-Metal thundered into town with METALLICA's take on "The Ecstasy Of Gold". Mike Patton (FAITH NO MORE, FANTOMAS) was so enamored of Morricone that he issued CD compilations on his own record label, and sang covers with the orchestral MONDO CANE.

-MORRISSEY enlisted Ennio Morricone himself to arrange the orchestra for "Dear God Please Help Me".

-The Italian Composers put the thrill into "KILL BILL. 1 and 2". The yin-yang films, an Eastern and a Western, continued the cultural-swap tradition: "Seven Samurai" had inspired "The Magnificent Seven", "Yojimbo' had inspired "A Fistful Of Dollars". (This rocksex continues with today's "Sukiyaki Western Django" and "The Good, The Bad, The Weird".) Quentin Tarantino and RZA deliberately picked songs in the Morricone tradition by fellow composers like Bacalov, Trovaioli, Ortolani, and Orlandi, and artists like ZAMFIR, TOMOYASU HOTEI, and NANCY SINATRA.

Recent Films That Homage ITALIAN WESTERNS

-EL TOPO (Spain)
-WESTWORLD
-SHOLAY (India)
-ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK
-MAD MAX II
-BACK TO THE FUTURE III
-STRAIGHT TO HELL
-SIX STRING SAMURAI
-THE QUICK AND THE DEAD
-DEAD MAN
-ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO
-GUN CRAZY: A WOMAN FROM NOWHERE (Japan)
-GANG OF ROSES
-KILL BILL, I and II
-SERENITY
-EXILED (Hong Kong)
-SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO (Japan)
-THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WEIRD (Korea)
-THE BOOK OF ELI
-RANGO
-COWBOYS AND ALIENS

TV:

-KUNG FU
-DEADWOOD
-FIREFLY

Animation:

-VAMPIRE HUNTER D
-COWBOY BEBOP
-SAMURAI JACK

Books:

-The DARK TOWER series by Stephen King

Comics:

-JONAH HEX
-SABRE
-PREACHER
-THE MAN WITH NO NAME
-THE DARK TOWER

Video Games:

-OUTLAWS
-RED DEAD REVOLVER
-RED DEAD REDEMPTION

Holly and Karon buy a Morricone CD in Gotham City.
(CATWOMAN #50; (w) Will Pfeiffer and (a) Pete Woods, 2006.)

Ride the range!:
Morricone Rocks!

SLY STONE: 'I Want To Take You Higher' And Its Unending Influence!

2011-03-15T10:08:00.001-07:00

Happy Birthday to SLY STONE!

SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE are one of the most influential bands in history. Here's just one song and its impact on four decades of music, with a music player of all!

"I Want To Take You Higher" is just about the Big Bang of Funk-Rock. It drove half-a-million people to their feet in dancing ecstasy at Woodstock, and helped turn Funk music into the soundtrack of the 70's. From HipHop to Mixology, from Manchester to Iran to Japan, it continues to lift the world.

SLY actually did it before and after he did it. The trial run was an album track called "Higher" in 1968, and again on another epic track called "Dance To The Medley". (The psychedelic soul of the latter is virtually the template for Funkadelic.)

Those joyful gospel choral chants of "Higher" must've triggered something, and the ultimate song "I Want To Take You Higher" ascended in 1969 on the essential album, "STAND". Later he did the wry rewrite "I Get High On You" in 1975, and a playful bounce of it as "High, Y'all" in 1983.

HIGHER!

The song became an instant classic and was either covered by everyone or referenced lyrically for years to come. The core of it is the "Higher!" chant. It summed up the utopian hopes of the progressive counterculture generation, while also winking about getting high.

If it wasn't being covered by Brian Auger, Tina Turner, or Googoosh (Iran), then the "Higher" chant was popping up in originals from The Temptations, The Chambers Brothers, War, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, and beyond.

It gets a shout-out in the rapidfire pop history novelty "Life Is A Rock", gets quoted on the trail-out of "Play That Funky Music", and may be referenced sideways in Paul McCartney's banned single "Hi Hi Hi".

Into the 80's and 90's, it rises up in Grandmaster Flash's "White Lines", an unreleased song with the same name by Roger Taylor (Queen), a Curtis Mayfield homage by Lenny Kravitz, a Madchester trip-out by raving Moonflowers, a namecheck by Public Enemy, a pot anthem by Cypress Hill, and an electro resurge from Future Funk.

BOOM SHACKA LACKA LACKA,
BOOM SHACKA LACKA LACKA,
BOOM SHACKA LACKA LACKA BOOM!

Another key ingredient of the song that keeps coming back up is the lyric "Boom shacka lacka lacka, boom shacka lacka lacka, boom shacka lacka lacka boom". Everybody uses it, even if by now they don't know where it came from.

This chant has become a classic Reggae song, a Reggae band, and a Reggae magazine.

It jumps up in HipHop songs like "Whoomp! There It is!" and pop songs like Brianna's "Boom Shaka Laka".

It's become slang in Basketball and in HipHop.

It's even been the name of a Bollywood film and an Indian fantasy TV series for kids!

George Clinton and Sly Stone, 2008.

"Feeling that should make you move
Sounds that should help you groove
Music still flashin' me
Take your places
I WANT TO TAKE YOU HIGHER!"

'Boredom/ Rip It Up': BUZZCOCKS> ORANGE JUICE

2011-03-14T10:13:00.001-07:00

All Indie bands exist because of THE BUZZCOCKS.

The SEX PISTOLS bulldozed the way for anyone to be a band. But THE BUZZCOCKS proved you could record and release your own record.

The "Spiral Scratch" EP (1977) was self-recorded and released on their own label, the first Punk indie label ever. 'Do-It-Yourself' was the new revolution. Every upstart act since owes them a debt of gratitude.

Here's their first single "Boredom", a deadpan and dead cheeky blast of energized ennui. Singer Howard Devoto makes sly puns while guitarist Pete Shelley subverts guitar heroes with a bored one-note solo that enthralls!

BUZZCOCKS -"Boredom" (1977)

The Punk ethos was to fearlessly try anything. Beyond the classic sound, the scene flourished into myriad styles with as many names.

Scotland's ORANGE JUICE were wringers of the New Pop, which brought sunny melodicism back into the mix with askew angles. Amid the disco chops and arch lyrics, they throw in lines from "Boredom" and a playful vamp on the guitar solo (at 2:10).

ORANGE JUICE -"Rip It Up" (1982)

The phrase "Rip it up and start again" perfectly summarized the PostPunk explosion of musics, and was used as the title to Simon Reynbold's crucial overview, "Rip It Up And Start Again".

'Bad Reputation': JOAN JETT> PEACHES

2011-03-11T10:31:00.000-08:00

After the pig record industry chased out THE RUNAWAYS, they gave guitarist JOAN JETT the runaround for years.

But when her "I Love Rock'n'Roll" became one of the biggest single smashes ever, she had her revenge with this follow-up hit and video.

JOAN JETT -"Bad Reputation" (recorded 1980)

Electroclash provocateur PEACHES took that sentiment to its most blatantly profane conclusion using this sample...

PEACHES -"I Don't Give a F@#*!" (2004)

And then JOAN joined PEACHES for this raucous fracas...

PEACHES with Joan Jett -"You Love It" (2004)

"A girl can do do what she wants to do
And that's what I'm gonna do
And I don't give a damn about my bad reputation!"

'Crosseyed And Painless': Fela> Talking Heads> Brazilian Girls

2011-03-08T10:46:00.001-08:00

"I'm changing my shape, I feel like an accident,
They're back to explain their experience..."

Another cultural relay handoff today, centered around a TALKING HEADS song.

Nigerian FELA Ransome Kuti is the father of AfroBeat, a polyrhythmic and political funk-jazz inspired by James Brown and the counterculture rebellion of the 60's.

These propulsive jams had enormous musical influence from the late 70's New York DIY scene and London's dub culture to son Femi Kuti and Antibalas today.

FELA -"Roforofo Fight" (1972)

New York's TALKING HEADS and producer Brian Eno expanded their palette with a kind of abstract punk take on AfroBeat, starting with the crucial album "REMAIN IN LIGHT" (1980).

This expanded touring band includes keyboard sorceror Bernie Worrell (P-Funk) and guitar maniac Adrian Belew (King Crimson):

TALKING HEADS -"Crosseyed And Painless" (1980)

New York's BRAZILIAN GIRLS stirs the pan-cultural stew further with their take on the Heads' song. Singer Sabina Sciubba scats across five different languages.

BRAZILIAN GIRLS -"Crosseyed And Painless" (2006)

"The feeling returns whenever we close our eyes
Lifting my head, looking around inside..."

'Warning Sign': Talking Heads> Local Natives

2011-03-08T10:30:00.000-08:00

One of the great producer and band partnerships in Rock is Brian Eno's collaborations with TALKING HEADS.

This song has a killer drum break by Chris Frantz, mesmeric bass by Tina Weymouth, and stellar guitar work by David Byrne.

Its paranoic edge and polyrhythmic dynamics embody their musical transition from The Velvet Underground toward Fela.

TALKING HEADS -"Warning Sign" (1978)

Talking Heads set the template for most every indie band for the next three decades, with their normal anti-style look and mercurial style shifts.

Here's a latest descendent, LOCAL NATIVES, doing "Warning Sign" with a harmonic emphasis that would also please Beatle or Brian Wilson fans.

LOCAL NATIVES -"Warning Sign" (2010)

LADIES FIRST: 'See See Rider', Ma Rainey> Janis> Mitch Ryder

2011-03-03T11:14:00.000-08:00

Another classic song that 'she did first'!

Most folks know "See See Rider" from the mid-60's hit by Mitch Ryder. But the song had a forty year history before that.

GERTRUDE "MA" RAINEY did the original in 1924. In the new world of vinyl records, it was the huge popularity of women like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey that put Blues music on the map and ushered the vinyl revolution.

Here she is backed up by Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson, who were concurrently defining Jazz for the future.

MA RAINEY -"See See Rider" (1924)

This Folk Blues take by LEADBELLY changed young Martin Scorcese's life. "If I could have played guitar, really played it," he said, "I never would have become a filmmaker." Scorcese later made the BLUES documentary mini-series to expose new ears to the great legacy.

LEADBELLY -"See See Rider" (1935)

He was initially tipped to it, like many young people at the time, by this RnB version by CHUCK WILLIS. The song is sometimes sung as "C.C. Rider" or "Easy Rider", the latter of which is a whole subcategory of other songs to itself.

CHUCK WILLIS -"C.C. Rider" (1957)

One of the queens of Atlantic Records, LAVERN BAKER did a slide and glide through it.

LAVERN BAKER -"See See Rider" (1963)

As well as some upstart girl from Texas...

JANIS JOPLIN -"See See Rider" (Late '62 or '63)

The most famous version is the medley of "See See Rider" and Little Richard's "Jenny Take A Ride" by MITCH RYDER & THE DETROIT WHEELS, who must've been punning on his surname. This band was essentially the template for Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band who also often covered Mitch's version in concert.

MITCH RYDER & The Detroit Wheels -"See See Rider" (1965)

The other most famous version is by THE ANIMALS, fronted by Soul belter Eric Burdon who still sings it to this day.

THE ANIMALS -"See See Rider" (live 1967)

The song has been covered over the decades by John Lee Hooker, Peggy Lee, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, The Everly Brothers, The Who, The Grateful Dead, and Elvis Costello.

'We Are IRON MAN!': Iron Giant> Black Sabbath> The Cardigans

2011-02-28T11:20:00.001-08:00

The British author Ted Hughes wrote a sci-fi novel in 1968 called "THE IRON MAN: A Children's Story In Five Nights". It was a sociopolitical parable about a young boy who befriends a huge metal man that he finds in the forest one night, a noble soul who is met with fear and distrust. (Hughes later wrote an environmental sequel called "THE IRON WOMAN".)

Pete Townshend of THE WHO loved the book and wanted to develop it into a film based around his rock opera score. When the film plans lagged, he released a solo album of the work.

PETE TOWNSEND -"A Friend Is A Friend" (1989)

After years of development hell, the film was finally made as the universally beloved animated classic THE IRON GIANT. The name change may have been to avoid confusion with the Marvel Comics superhero, Iron Man, who was popular since 1963.

THE IRON GIANT trailer (1999)

Funnily enough, for all the comparisons to the superhero Iron Man, the film robot has a touching admiration for Superman!

In 1970, a few years after Hughes' book, BLACK SABBATH recorded "Iron Man". Its lyrics about a misunderstood metal man very broadly parallel the book but are purportedly coincidental. On its own merits it is one of the coolest riff songs of all time.

BLACK SABBATH -"Iron Man" (1970)

Here's a rap and metal rethink of the song.

SIR MIXALOT with METAL CHURCH -"Iron Man" (1988)

To really throw some swing on it, here is a sexy lounge take on it! (The sultry coo of "Oh! Iron Man!" never fails to make me smile.)

THE CARDIGANS -"Iron Man" (1996)

And an avant Jazz run-through!

THE BAD PLUS -"Iron Man" (2004)

And the riff is the basis for this song from Thailand.

SORANG SANTI -"Khuen Khuen, Long Long"

Aside from always being compared to Hughes' IRON MAN book, the Sabbath song was also thought to be inspired by the superhero Iron Man. Although it wasn't, everyone always associates the two anyway, so it was inevitable that the song and the lyric "I am Iron Man!" became a crucial part of the film IRON MAN (2008).