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Fun with movie trailers!

Published 8 February 2006 by Jason Crane

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My friend Jeff Vrabel sent me two links today. Both were spoof movie trailers based on Brokeback Mountain. A little digging turned up quite a few more spoof movie trailers on everything from Titanic to Psycho. Here’s a sampling. Enjoy!

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New collections on the way from Harry Shearer

Published 5 February 2006 by Jason Crane

Let me say right off the bat that I’m a huge fan of Harry Shearer. I think his radio program Le Show is one of the funniest things going. But don’t take my word for it. Check out Harry’s Web site for yourself. You’ll find audio archives there, along with a lot more Shearer magic.

In March, Harry is putting out a new DVD and a new CD. A friend in the biz sent me this press release:

HARRY SHEARER UNLOCKS PERSONAL VAULTS FOR THE FIRST TIME FOR NEW DVD “NOW IT CAN BE SEEN” AND CD “DROPPING ANCHORS” TO BE SIMULTANEOUSLY RELEASED MARCH 21, 2006

DVD and CD Include Shearer’s Hilarious Sketches On Saturday Night Live As Well As HBO Comedy Specials, Unreleased Material and More

Los Angeles, CA – January 2006 – Actor/writer/director Harry Shearer for the first time has opened his personal vaults for a special DVD of his television comedy. The DVD, Now It Can Be Seen includes Shearer’s most memorable performances that have not been viewed since their first broadcast, as well as never before released material. In addition, Shearer will release a comedy CD, Dropping Anchors. These two unique collections will be released separately March 21, 2006 through Courgette Records, a company formed by Shearer, his wife, singer/songwriter Judith Owen, and her manager Bambi Moé. The DVD and CD will be distributed through Warner Music Group’s ADA.

The DVD Now It Can Be Seen features some of Shearer’s best work including his first Cinemax-HBO special, It’s Just TV, his live HBO special, The Magic of Live, and hilarious sketches from his years with Saturday Night Live (1979-80 and 1984-85), including the infamous men’s synchronized swimming also featuring Christopher Guest and Martin Short.

Released the same day will be the 7 track CD, Dropping Anchors, a comedy album that is a satirical farewell to the television news anchors whose era has just ended. This features the humorous exits of Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Ted Koppel and Aaron Brown. There is also a hilarious bit of Shearer as Barbara Walters singing “82 Facelifts.” In addition, the CD features Shearer as Brokaw singing “Songs in the Key of L,” in which he performs snippets of such titles as “Lay Lady Lay” and “Ukelele Lady.”

Shearer can currently be heard in the Disney animated blockbuster “Chicken Little” and will soon be seen in the new Christopher Guest film “For Your Consideration.” The film is slated for a fall 2006 release.

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Expose Exxon

Published 5 February 2006 by Jason Crane

Here’s a nice little Flash animation about ExxonMobil. It ends with an opportunity for you to take action.

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Nursery rhymes from my Great-Uncle Jack

Published 5 February 2006 by Jason Crane

My grandmother’s brother, Jack Coughlin (1912-2000), was quite the character. He served in the Marines during WWII as a cook in Hawaii. When he came home, he and his first wife, Evelyn, lived in the apartment above my grandparents on Main Street in Lenox, Massachusetts. He worked at the post office, and he knew everyone in town. Before police scanners were readily available, he’d wake the entire family at the sound of the fire bell and race off to watch the firemen at work. Later in life, he bought a police scanner and listened to it constantly.

He was the first vegetarian I ever heard of. If memory serves, he became a vegetarian after a visit to a chicken farm.

He also had quite a sense of humor. What I remember best are his twisted takes on classic nursery rhymes. Here are a few for your enjoyment:

Hickory dickory dock,
Two mice ran up the clock,
The clock struck one,
And the other escaped with minor injuries.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells,
And one stinkin’ petunia.

Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey.
Along came a spider and sat down beside her,
And said, “Is this seat taken?”

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Back in the day

Published 5 February 2006 by Jason Crane

I went to Tapas with a friend tonight. Tapas is a bar/lounge in downtown Rochester that features salsa music. Tonight, the band Tumbao was playing. Man, did that take me back.

If you’ve only known me since I moved to Rochester, you may find it hard to believe that I used to play salsa and latin jazz for a living. That’s right. The pasty, overweight, reasonably lame guy that y’all have come to know and/or love was, at one time, a pasty, much thinner, slightly hipper cat who played saxophone and percussion in the dance clubs of the Southwest. As a matter of fact, Jen and I met in a latin dance place. Wacky, huh?

Being down in the basement lounge at Tapas with the music blaring and the dance floor filled was like stepping into La Machine De Wayback. If you’ve never had a roomfull of people grooving to your music, you’ve really missed out. And there’s nothing like that moment when the band is completely locked in clave and the whole joint is heaving back and forth in one fluid motion.

I gave up playing when I moved here, and I thought I had come to terms with that. But tonight made me remember what I really loved about the music, and it made me miss it. Maybe I’ll give Tony Padilla a call and see if they can use a just-past-his-prime sax player.

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Our beloved president

Published 4 February 2006 by Jason Crane

OK, so this video is worth seeing. It’s a slightly … uh … revised version of Bush’s State of the Union address. Enjoy!

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Grab-bag of Craneish goodies

Published 3 February 2006 by Jason Crane

Yoikes! It’s been way too long since I posted something here. Work has been crazy recently. As you know, I work as a labor union organizer, and that’s not a 9 to 5 job. I worked every night last week, and almost every night this week (in addition to every day).

Despite all that, I have had a bit of time to read, watch and listen to some cool stuff. In the reading department: I just checked out Scurvy Dogs, a pirate comic written by Andrew Boyd and Ryan Yount. The premise? Classic pirates (Yar! and all that) try to get jobs and find love in the modern city. It’s hilarious, and the preceeding description can’t hope to do it justice. Get it today. You can thank me later.

I also had a conversation in my local comic shop (Comics, Etc.) the other day about the big crossovers of the 1980s. I was buying some back issues to fill in my collection of DC’s Millennium crossover, and the guys and I got to talking about how “the kids these days are reading Infinite Crisis without ever having read the original Crisis On Infinite Earths.” Before I go on, I’d just like to reiterate: I’m married, and I’ve fathered two children. Thank you.

The point is that some of those old crossovers were really hip. OK, they were also shameless attempts to get you to drop a whole month’s allowance in one trip to the comic shop, but still…

In defense of “these kids today,” the big comics companies (DC and Marvel, primarily) haven’t made it easy to get into the back-catalog material. It seems like they reset their entire universes about every six months, and most of the changes that take place in the big crossovers don’t last. Robin died — now he’s back. Superman died — he’s back, too. In Millennium, the parents and friends of many of the DC universe’s biggest heroes were revealed to be Manhunters bent on destroying the universe. All those people are still in their respective comics, and it’s as if the whole Millennium series never happened. Oy!

On the listening tip: My friend Otto Bruno is host of the fantastic Sunday Music Festa program on my favorite jazz station, Jazz90.1. He recently loaded me up with more than 400 episodes of the Jack Benny radio show from the 1930s and 1940s. I’ve been collecting old radio shows since I was a kid. This was quite a haul! I’ve been listening to them in cronological order. I’m still in 1933. It’s great to hear Jack make jokes about current events, just like Letterman or Leno (except funny, unlike the latter example). For example, one 1933 monologue contained jokes about Greta Garbo, King Kong, and Gandhi. That’s right, Gandhi. The sound quality is all over the place on these recordings, but they’re a priceless snapshot of that time. You can check out a big collection of Old-Time Radio mp3 CDs at OTRCAT.com.

Back to the reading list for a moment: In combination with these radio shows, I’m reading a biography of Jack Benny written by his wife, Mary Livingstone, with the help of her brother (and former Benny writer) Hilliard Marks. It’s a fun read, and a touching look at the life of a great entertainer. As far as I know, it’s long out of print. I found a first edition of it this week at the Yankee Peddler Bookshop here in Rochester, NY.

Finally, the watching list. Jen and I have been catching up on the TV show Scrubs. My sister gave Jen the first two seasons for her birthday and Xmas. It amazes me that a show this good even made it on to TV, let alone that it has survived for several years. Brilliant!

A final note: If you’d like to know more about my family than you could ever imagine, you can head over to The Flanders Family Blog and download the latest edition of Flanders Family News, the monthly newsletter I publish. Enjoy!

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Stardust (the NASA mission, not the ballad)

Published 16 January 2006 by Jason Crane

In the interest of full disclosure, I want you to know what kind of nerd you’re dealing with when you visit this Web site. In 1998, NASA put out a call for names to be inscribed onto two microchips that would go into space on the Stardust mission. Stardust was NASA’s first attempt to fly through a comet and collect a sample.

Jen and I were living in Japan at the time, and I submitted my name. I made it on Chip #2! That still thrills me, and I realize what that implies, so you don’t need to bring it up. There were actually two sets of chips — one set that would fly through the comet and return with the sample-collecting spacecraft, and another set that would stay out in space forever.

Early this morning, Stardust returned to Earth. Welcome back, and bring on the science!

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Curtis Mayfield

Published 15 January 2006 by Jason Crane

Curtis Mayfield is a genius. There, I said it. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Go right now and pick up a copy of his solo debut Curtis (1970). If you’re an iTunes user, here’s the link to the album.

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Maryland stands up to Wal-Mart

Published 13 January 2006 by Jason Crane

Back in the halcyon days of The Jason Crane Show on NewsTalk 950, Joan Collins-Lambert talked about the effort by the Maryland legislature to pass a bill mandating that companies with more than 10,000 employees in Maryland must either spend 8% of payroll on healthcare for their employees, or they must pay into a healthcare fund for the state’s poor.

This was seen as a move against Wal-Mart. The company pays its workers so poorly, and provides them with such substandard health care, that states end up footing the bill. The legislature passed the bill last year, but Maryland Governor Robert Erlich vetoed it. Just this week, the legislature overrode his veto.

The New York Times has the story (registration required).

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Celestial Madonna: Timothy Leary didn’t write it, but he could have

Published 9 January 2006 by Jason Crane

I mentioned recently that I’ve been reading a comic book called GODLAND, written by Joe Casey and drawn by Tom Scioli. The book is drawn in the classic Jack Kirby style, and written in the cosmic adventure genre done so well by guys like Kirby, Steve Englehart, and Jim Starlin. Some GODLAND fans have even created a site devoted to the comic at godlandonline.com.

One of the hip features of the fan site is a regular column by writer Joe Casey called The Genre, in which he explores the world of classic “cosmic comics.” In the first edition, Casey paid homage to Steve Englehart’s “Celestial Madonna” storyline, which ran in The Avengers from 1974-75.

It’s very, very hard to write a simple synopsis of the storyline, mostly because I’m not in possession of whatever mind-altering substances Mr. Englehart was using back in the day. Suffice it to say that the story begins with the appearance of a mystical star glowing above Avengers Mansion, and ends with the character Mantis marrying a tree. Yup — a tree. (Insert sound of bong hit here.)

On Mr. Casey’s recommendation, I asked Andy at Comics Etc. to order the Celestial Madonna trade paperback collection for me. I finished it this morning. Yoikes! This thing was written back in the day when comic book dialgue made George Lucas sound like David Mamet. As Carrie Fisher said of George’s scripts: “You can write that stuff, but you can’t say it.” The Celestial Madonna collection takes that adage even further — you can barely read some of this stuff, let alone say it out loud. That is not an indictment, particularly if you grew up reading comics in the 70’s, as I did. Sure, things have come a long way, but it’s still cool as heck to sink deep into the pages (and pages and pages and pages and pages…) of ridiculous narration and even more ridiculous dialogue.

I was never a big Avengers fan, although I did collect West Coast Avengers for a while in the 80’s. The version of the Avengers featured in Celestial Madonna includes Thor, Iron Man, The Vision, Scarlet Witch, Mantis, and the Swordsman, along with appearances by Hawkeye, Nomad (the former — and future — Captain America) … and every villain Marvel could dig up and dust off. The main heavy is Kang The Conqueror, and that means that our heroes will be traveling through time. They do, visiting the past and the future, and even making a pit-stop in Limbo (!) to fight the likes of Frankenstein’s Monster and WWII-era villain Baron Zemo.

If your head is already spinning just from reading this, imagine how reading all 224 pages must feel!

It was worth it, though. I’m really getting into the whole cosmic adventure thing, and it’s fun to bone up on my cosmic history while enjoying modern treasures such as GODLAND and the equally brilliant Fear Agent, written by Rick Remender and drawn by Tony Moore.

As a teaser, I’ll tell you that I have my own GODLAND project planned, and that it won’t be in the form of a comic book. Stay tuned, true believer…

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It’s good to be King (Kong)!

Published 27 December 2005 by Jason Crane

If you haven’t seen the original 1933 version of King Kong, run down to your local video emporium and pick up the new 2-DVD Special Edition, released earlier this year.

First and most importantly, the newly restored Kong looks fantastic. Many lost or censored scenes have been added back in — and they’ve been taken from a recently discovered UK print of the film, rather than from grainy 16mm reprints. The music has been remastered, and it’s wonderful, although still in mono.

I was really amazed by how much I got into this movie. I have to come clean: I’d never seen the original in its entirety. I’d seen bits and pieces here and there — I think it’s just about impossible not to have seen the Empire State Building sequence at some point in your life — but never the whole thing. And here comes an understatement: It’s a great movie. A little hammy where the acting is concerned, but I actually find that a plus, not a minus. After all, this was a monster movie made in 1932. It’s supposed to be hammy!

The second DVD contains two documentaries — one about director Marion C. Cooper, and another 2.5-hour documentary about the making of the film, produced by Peter Jackson, who directed the new King Kong movie and a little indie fantasy trilogy called Lord of the Rings. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. This latter documentary contains all the standard “making of” stuff, plus the kind of detail and extra effort only found when fans talk about their favorite films. The coolest bit? Peter Jackson and the WETA Digital crew use 1932 technology and stop-motion animation to recreate the classic lost “Spider Pit” scene, removed from the original film because it was too shocking.

Two documentaries, one classic film. This set should be in everyone’s collection.

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The adventures of Scott Pilgrim

Published 22 December 2005 by Jason Crane

After living in Japan for several years, you’d thing I would have a fair amount of experience reading manga, Japan’s wildly popular comic books. You’d be wrong. For some reason, I never really got into manga when I lived there, even though they’re a fairly useful way to learn Japanese. Part of the problem for me was the content, and in particular the offensive portrayal of women in many manga, but that’s not a reason to have missed out on the whole genre.

As it happens, manga are also becoming wildly popular in the English-speaking world. I recently read a review of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim manga on somebody’s blog. I wish I could remember where, so I could give the blogger credit. In any case, this person gave a huge recommendation to the Pilgrim books, so I had my local comics shop order them for me. They came yesterday, and I read them both last night.

Manga are smaller in height and width than regular comic books, but they’re several times longer. Every manga I’ve ever seen has been in black and white, as are the Scott Pilgrim books. Thus far, Bryan has written two books: Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

THIS PARAGRAPH CONTAINS VERY MINOR SPOILERS: The premise is a combination of the mundane and the fantastic. Scott Pilgrim is a 23-year-old bassist in a crappy Toronto rock band. He’s dating a high school student named Knives Chau. And he’s having strange dreams about a roller-blading woman with exotic hair. Things turn weird when he actually sees this woman in the real world. Turns out she’s Ramona Flowers, the only delivery worker in Toronto for amazon.ca. She’s been traveling through Scott’s dreams as she delivers packages. They end up dating. But before they can live happily ever after, Scott must fight Ramona’s seven evil ex-boyfriends. And Ramona must defend herself from the jilted Knives Chau. Hilarity ensues.

Like any description of a visual work, the preceeding paragraph pales in comparison to the real thing. You really need to see and read Scott Pilgrim for yourself. You can visit the Web site to learn more, or you can cut to the chase and order the books from the Oni Press site. And of course, if you’re in Rochester, you can stop by Comics, Etc. at 274 N. Goodman St. in Village Gate and ask Andy to order them for you.

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Giving the gift of Respect

Published 22 December 2005 by Jason Crane

The Bop Shop Atrium was rockin’ last night with the joyous music of The Respect Sextet, one of the best bands to come out of the Rochester scene.

The band — Josh Rutner, Eli Asher, James Hirschfeld, Red Wierenga, Ted Poor, and Matt Clohesy — played its patented brand of jazz (whatever that word means) replete with radio transmissions, electronicals, uplifting beats, gorgeous melodies, intricate post-bop lines, and … um … some other stuff.

A capacity crowd crammed around the Xmas tree that now fills up most of the atrium. People were peeking through the branches, sitting on the stairs that lead up to the second floor, and hanging over the upstairs railings to see the show, the first in Rochester by the band in 18 months.

If you’ve never heard the Respect Sextet, do yourself a favor and visit their Web site. And while you’re there, pick up a copy of one of their CDs. The most recent recording, Respect In You, has received critical aclaim in several national magazines. It captures the band during a live performance. Also available is the popular studio album The Full Respect. Either one makes a great gift for yourself or for anyone you know who digs good music that manages to say something without taking itself too seriously.

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