Jason's Blog, page 97

Corner

The Jasons

(Lutes, Little & Shiga)

I don't know why there is a bluish tone on all the latest scans. I crank up the contrast, and it looks okay in photoshop...

The Pogues

Top 5 Pogues songs:
1. Sally Maclennane
2. Streams of Whiskey
3. Dirty Old Town
4. Fairytale of New York
5. If I Should Fall from Grace with God

Sunday

For a long time there was no place in Montpellier to get a latté, and then suddenly three different places opened, within a month or two. Two chains, Columbus Café and French Coffee Shop, and then an independent one that I tried out today, Coffee Club, a tiny but cozy café, and it's the one I should support, I guess, but there's also a certain hipness there, that makes you want to, like Louis CK, walk around and hit everybody's paper cups to the ground. I got a coffee to go, no hitting, and then walked down to the Pavillon Populaire that has free art exhibitions. This year there's a Linda McCartney retrospective, with photographs of The Beatles, different 60s artists, like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, Paul at home and on the road, and their kids. Lots of stuff I hadn't seen, and it's a good thing I went now, since it closes on May 4.

King, Splendor

The King of Marvin Gardens by Bob Rafelson
Jack Nicholson plays a very un-Jack Nicholson character in this film, very quiet and  unassuming, and good for him as an actor, but in the end he's actually more fun when he's being more Jack Nicholson-y, like in Five Easy Pieces or The Last Detail. Bruce Dern and Ellen Burstyn are good, but the film is very slow and it's hard to care about these people. Atlantic City looks very cinematic in the winter, though.

Splendor in the Grass by Elia Kazan
Warren Beatty's first film, doing his best James Dean. Him and Natalie Wood are horny teenagers, but since this is Kansas in the 20s they can't have sex before marriage, so Beatty finds some slutty girl and Wood loses her mind. I guess masturbation wasn't invented yet. Pat Hingle is the sort of clueless dad deciding the future for his son, that we often find in movies like this. The ending is surprisingly bittersweet.

Wendell Gee

Burt Lancaster

Top 5 Burt Lancaster films:

1. Local Hero
2. Birdman of Alcatraz
3. Field of Dreams
4. Atlantic City
5. Criss Cross

It's a bit difficult to choose. The guy did a lot of good films! I haven't seen The Leopard yet, and I guess both Sweet Smell of Success and From Here to Eternity deserves to be up there somewhere.

Some books I've read 16

Anything Goes by Lucy Moore
A book about the roaring 20s, going through some of the best known people from that decade: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Jack Dempsey, Charles Lindbergh, Al Capone and so on. Even the Ku Klux Klan. There's stuff I had come across before, like the Sacco and Vanzetti case, but here you get the background.

Cannon by Wallace Wood
The first 70 or 80 pages are fun, but at some point I stopped reading the text and just looked at the pictures. Well, it turns out you can actually get tired of looking at tits. In the second half of the book Wood just lost interest or had to work faster and the quality of the drawings goes down quite a bit. I assume there also were some assistants involved. I refuse to believe that it's Wood who drew page 178.

Hellboy: The First 20 Years by Mike Mignola
Damn, twenty years! I remember buying that issue of Next Men just because it had some Hellboy pages in it... While waiting for the Hellboy in Hell collection, this book is nice to look at in the meantime. Lots of covers from the last decade, the period where Mignola stopped drawing comics, sometimes in colours, sometimes in black and white, with blue pencil lines and white-out showing. And you can see the evolution, from the early, more Marvel-ish compositions to less noisy, more moody ones, with details left to a minimum.

Bark by Lorrie Moore
The master of the short story that is both sad and funny at the same time. Middle age, divorce, death, disease, war in Iraq, you name it, it's all here, without actually being depressing. Almost every page has some sentence that is pure gold. Favourite story: Debarking

A Christmas for Shacktown and Christmas on Bear Mountain by Carl Barks
I keep buying these books even though I find the stories can be uneven and Donald Duck not very interesting as a character. But it's hard not to enjoy Barks' masterful cartooning, just the delight of his lines on paper.

Essential Fantastic Four vol. 3
I realized I haven't really read any Jack Kirby - I think maybe an issue of Thor or something like that, so I figured I should do something about it, and this book is the peak of the Kirby / Lee stuff, no? I like the Jack Kirby drawings, especially when inked by Joe Sinnott, but I wish Stan Lee could have cut the text by... oh, say 50%.

The Moving Target by Ross MacDonald
What do you do when you've read all the Chandler and Hammet books? You move on to Ross MacDonald.

Progress report

So, okay, because of a problem with tendinitis in the elbow I'm taking a break from drawing, but this is what I got so far on the new book:
Rough pencils: 31 pages
Half finished: 23 pages
Almost finished: 8 pages
Finished: 36 pages

Jane Greer 2