Mean Joe Anderson didn't like the current style of music. Actually, Mean Joe Anderson didn't like anything in the current style not the music, the clothes, or the attitude. Mean Joe Anderson would have been called an "old soul" if he had had one, which he most certainly did not. No one could quite figure out why he dressed like a 1940s gangster but no one really dared to ask. The last guy that made fun of his fedora hat had gotten his nose smashed into his brain. Needless to say, Mean Joe Anderson didn't have many friends either. He wasn't in the right line of work for that. The bouncer who's fingers he had just broken sure wasn't going to invite him out to the movies on Saturday night...
Chicago's had only opened up about a week ago but it had already earned a reputation as a "rough joint." You really had to watch yourself or risk getting a knife in your back...or worse.
Mean Joe sat down at the bar and ordered a whiskey on the rocks. A slutty young bartender with a tramp stamp above her thong underwear tried to talk him up while he poured it. Mean Joe ignored her and she went to the other side of the bar. He was thinking about how much the young people grinding up against each other on the dance floor and the vulgar music make him ill when two young males in wife-beaters sat down on either side of him. Mean Joe lit up a cigarette.
"Hey man, whats with the crazy outfit? Where the fuck you think you is?" Said the one on the left.
Mean Joe pulled on his coffin nail and looked down at his shitty drink.
"Hey man, didn't you hear what my friend is saying to you? Is you retarded or somefin?"
Mean Joe looked at the guy on his right. He was wearing a large black hat with a white G embroidered on the front, canted off to the side. This amused Mean Joe quite a bit, but he didn't smile. Mean Joe never smiled. Maybe he had once after a particularly satisfying hit on a well paying job, but just that once and never again. Mean Joe took another drag on his cigarette. The punk on his left leaned in close to Mean Joe's face.
"You chicken shit motherfucker, you're going to get out of here, you hear me? Or you is gonna be in some serious trouble."
His friend pulled out a knife. Mean Joe took the cigarette out of mouth and said in his low gravelly voice:
"No, you're going to leave or I'm going to break your neck."
The punk on his left laughed and looked over at his friend.
"Hey man, you hear dat shit? Thats funny, do you know who we is? We's wanted in five states. We bad ass niggas, we ain't never scared of no clown ass pieces of shit like you. What the fuck you think you doin' walkin' in her wearing that shit? Don't make me tell you again, get the fuck out of my club."
Mean Joe put his cigarette out in the plastic ashtray and lit another.
"Did you hear me motherfucker? I said..."
He didn't get to finish. With one swift motion Mean Joe put his cigarette out in the kids eye and smacked the knife out of his friends hand, caught it, and sliced his throat open. The boy's screams were louder than the music and the DJ cut it. Everyone in the silent gloomy club stood looking at the dapper man in the gray suit with the scar down the left side of his face and at the young man writhing around on the floor in pain. As they watched, Mean Joe leaned over and whispered in the young man's ear.
"I told you I would."
Then he snapped his neck.
Mean Joe picked up his drink and walked back to the private room the owner of the club had reserved for him. Fun time was over, now it was time to get down to business...
Saturday, April 11, 2009
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Gulliver's Travels on Blu-ray
If you haven't heard yet, the middling but still historically interesting film Max Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels has been released on regular and Blu-ray DVD. This should make animation fans happy little skunks right? It should but unfortunately the transfers are so botched that DVDtalk.com is calling it "the single worst title to find its way onto the format to date". Why so bad?
Well, for one instead of getting a print from an original (or a copy) negative, they pulled from what appears to be a bad video tape. On top of that they DVDRed the living shit out of the image to try and make it DVD quality, making the resulting image almost unwatchably blurry. Let me rephrase that: they made a blu-ray disc that looks worse than the VHS tapes that have been around forever and the dollar DVDs you can pick up at Wal-mart. And they want you to pay 12 bucks for it.
But oh my brothers, thats not all. The film is presented in fake widescreen to accommodate widescreen TVS. The problem with this is that that the movie wasn't originally in that format so they smashed the image flat on the top and bottom, making everything abnormally wide. The DVDtalk reviewer quoted above also mentioned that the animation seems to lack the usual Fleischer smoothness meaning that pieces were probably cut out to cut "restoration" costs. To put it bluntly, they fucking butchered this movie.
The thing is, its really not that great of a film, but it is a Fleischer cartoon and to me that means that it deserves some respect. I mean, for crying out loud, they were more popular than Disney for a good long time and their early cartoons are goofy and surreal beyond anything Walt would have imagined in his worst nightmares. Their Popeye cartoons get released in fantastic box sets with some of the most stunning DVD restoration ever done and then we get this, its really like a kick in the nuts.
To close my rant, go here and watch this cartoon for free: http://www.archive.org/details/gullivers_travels1939
Do not do not do not pay money for this awful money grubbing travesty. Please inform any other animation fanatics about this so they don't waste their money as well. Thank you for listening.
Addendum:
The funniest part of this whole thing is the reviews on Amazon.com. Apparently, the company who put out this piece of junk paid people to give it glowing reviews and when people with actual souls called them out on it, several very funny arguments ensued. Most of these have been deleted but you can still see the remnants of the epic flame wars between animation fans and corporate ass-puppets.
Well, for one instead of getting a print from an original (or a copy) negative, they pulled from what appears to be a bad video tape. On top of that they DVDRed the living shit out of the image to try and make it DVD quality, making the resulting image almost unwatchably blurry. Let me rephrase that: they made a blu-ray disc that looks worse than the VHS tapes that have been around forever and the dollar DVDs you can pick up at Wal-mart. And they want you to pay 12 bucks for it.
But oh my brothers, thats not all. The film is presented in fake widescreen to accommodate widescreen TVS. The problem with this is that that the movie wasn't originally in that format so they smashed the image flat on the top and bottom, making everything abnormally wide. The DVDtalk reviewer quoted above also mentioned that the animation seems to lack the usual Fleischer smoothness meaning that pieces were probably cut out to cut "restoration" costs. To put it bluntly, they fucking butchered this movie.
The thing is, its really not that great of a film, but it is a Fleischer cartoon and to me that means that it deserves some respect. I mean, for crying out loud, they were more popular than Disney for a good long time and their early cartoons are goofy and surreal beyond anything Walt would have imagined in his worst nightmares. Their Popeye cartoons get released in fantastic box sets with some of the most stunning DVD restoration ever done and then we get this, its really like a kick in the nuts.
To close my rant, go here and watch this cartoon for free: http://www.archive.org/details/gullivers_travels1939
Do not do not do not pay money for this awful money grubbing travesty. Please inform any other animation fanatics about this so they don't waste their money as well. Thank you for listening.
Addendum:
The funniest part of this whole thing is the reviews on Amazon.com. Apparently, the company who put out this piece of junk paid people to give it glowing reviews and when people with actual souls called them out on it, several very funny arguments ensued. Most of these have been deleted but you can still see the remnants of the epic flame wars between animation fans and corporate ass-puppets.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
Sigh
I could do without people, I really could. Scratch that, I could live without people telling me what to do. That was Robert E. Howard's biggest gripe with the working world and a major motivation for him to succeed as a writer. It's such a simple thing but it bothered him a lot. It didn't really bother me that much until today when I was reprimanded for something small and it got blown out of proportion. I got called into my bosses office and had to stand there while she cursed at me and said what I did was unprofessional (which I thought was ironic seeing as how she kept dropping the f-bomb.) It turned out to not be that big of a deal, like I knew it would, but I still had to endure a quite homely woman who's main job consists of falling asleep at her desk calling me lazy and stupid. All I could think was "Do I, a moderately intelligent adult, need to be reprimanded like a child and made to feel worthless? I wouldn't talk to a kid like this for crying out loud."
My goal is to someday be like my hero Mr. Howard and never have to work a real job for a real boss again. Ever. Is that too much to ask? Is that really just a pipe dream for the lucky few? I know everyone has to pay their dues and work shitty jobs but is this mine? Will I find a way to be self-employed after this? Find out on the next episode of...My Life Sucks.
My goal is to someday be like my hero Mr. Howard and never have to work a real job for a real boss again. Ever. Is that too much to ask? Is that really just a pipe dream for the lucky few? I know everyone has to pay their dues and work shitty jobs but is this mine? Will I find a way to be self-employed after this? Find out on the next episode of...My Life Sucks.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Only Communists Don't Enjoy Stupid Novelty Songs
See that guys? Incessant showering of your wuv on random women and being short and blue will get you thrown off a building, the rumors are true!
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Friday, April 3, 2009
Some Lovecraft Love
Pickman's Model
The Outsider
The Picture in the House
Call of Cthulhu
There's the cruddy dinner party conversation starter question: If you could go back in time and converse with one person from history who would it be? My answer is Lovecraft every time.
The above stories blew me away the first time I read them in a beat-up anthology collection. At the time I thought I was the only one in the world who had ever discovered and fell head over heels for Mr. H.P. Lovecraft (A completely platonic literary love, of course). I was dead wrong as there are actual Lovecraftian scholars as I found out later, but it was still an awesome feeling of discovery to have stumbled on such crazy freaky weird stories at our small town library. Lovecraft changed my whole way of looking at the world. I actively sought out the cracks in reality, I looked for shadowy cults operating in the dark woods at night, and signs that the great old ones were walking among us again. I'm still convinced that theres a whole world out there beyond what we're able to receive through our senses. I haven't found any proof yet, but I have never stopped looking.
While I adore his writing, the man himself was quite interesting too. He's often portrayed as the ultimate loner but he was married for awhile and was an obsessive letter writer. As you can tell by reading the above stories, he was also quite a racist and you could say he was a product of his times, but I think it goes deeper than that and the more I read and re-read his work the more his world view starts to come out. I'm probably wrong but its my gut feeling that he was deathly afraid of the unknowable, possibly a consequence of being very sickly as a child. While his writing is a bit purplish at times, it is certainly all his own. He has a lot of imitators but no one ever comes close.
Pointless story time: When I worked at my depressing fencing company job I would pull out my borrowed copy of Lovecraft stories with a freaky Pickman's Model inspired illustration on the front to read on my lunch break. Oh, the weird looks I got, I savored all of them. I don't know if it was because I was reading a book or the cover, but probably a combination of both. I was so so glad the day I got fired from that job...
The Outsider
The Picture in the House
Call of Cthulhu
There's the cruddy dinner party conversation starter question: If you could go back in time and converse with one person from history who would it be? My answer is Lovecraft every time.
The above stories blew me away the first time I read them in a beat-up anthology collection. At the time I thought I was the only one in the world who had ever discovered and fell head over heels for Mr. H.P. Lovecraft (A completely platonic literary love, of course). I was dead wrong as there are actual Lovecraftian scholars as I found out later, but it was still an awesome feeling of discovery to have stumbled on such crazy freaky weird stories at our small town library. Lovecraft changed my whole way of looking at the world. I actively sought out the cracks in reality, I looked for shadowy cults operating in the dark woods at night, and signs that the great old ones were walking among us again. I'm still convinced that theres a whole world out there beyond what we're able to receive through our senses. I haven't found any proof yet, but I have never stopped looking.
While I adore his writing, the man himself was quite interesting too. He's often portrayed as the ultimate loner but he was married for awhile and was an obsessive letter writer. As you can tell by reading the above stories, he was also quite a racist and you could say he was a product of his times, but I think it goes deeper than that and the more I read and re-read his work the more his world view starts to come out. I'm probably wrong but its my gut feeling that he was deathly afraid of the unknowable, possibly a consequence of being very sickly as a child. While his writing is a bit purplish at times, it is certainly all his own. He has a lot of imitators but no one ever comes close.
Pointless story time: When I worked at my depressing fencing company job I would pull out my borrowed copy of Lovecraft stories with a freaky Pickman's Model inspired illustration on the front to read on my lunch break. Oh, the weird looks I got, I savored all of them. I don't know if it was because I was reading a book or the cover, but probably a combination of both. I was so so glad the day I got fired from that job...
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