video – Page 70 – Wis[s]e Words

Shaft or Sidney Poitier

Published on March 26, 20115 Comments

“In comics there are two kinds of Black people: Shaft or Sidney Poitier” — Dwayne McDuffie.

A trailer for Jonathan Gayles’ documentary movie on Black masculinity in comics, which came out last year. Its site has a great selection of takes from the movie, to give you an idea of what it’s about. Lots of talking heads of course, but the subject itself is interesting enough for this to not matter. Since it seems to currently do the rounds of various film festivals, it’s not available to buy yet, but I’ll certaintly keep an eye out for it once it does come out on dvd. Especially when the teasers promise things like the influence of the P-Funk mythology might have had on superhero comics and vice versa.

(There was at least one comics writer funky enough to know about George Clinton, Bootsy and Bernie Worrell, Peter B. Gillis, who would Tuckerise them as the founders of A.I.M. in, IIRC, an issue of Supervillain Team-up.)

When I first got into that P-funk cosmic mythology a few years backs, the images that the music put to mind where all pure Kirby. If P-Funk had ever been put into comics, Kirby at his most seventies extravagant would’ve been ideal for it.

Nina

Published on March 25, 20112 Comments

Back in ’87 this was the tune for a Chanel No 5 ad, which in turn led to a rerelease of this tune from 1958 with a videoclip by Aardman animation. I remember there being a whole wave of ad-driven, nostalgia fueled hits for old soul/jazz singers around that time, what with the Levi 501 ads, Jive Bunny and not to mention the similar claymation videoclip for Jackie Wilson’s Reet Petite… But this is the one that stuck with me the most.

And this is what I came across on Youtube while looking for completely different things, a song I’d never heard or seen before, but from the same album as “My Baby Just Cares for Me”, Nina Simone’s debut album. Both songs are jazz standards, originally written for quite different singers, but which of course she completely makes her own. Especially that little bit of Bach iimprovisation on the piano in the middle of “Love Me or Leave Me” left my drymouthed, slackjawed the first time I heard it. I’m normally a rockist at heart and it’s easy to underestimate the power of a song like this, dominated by piano rather than by drums and guitar, but damn this grabs you by the throat.

Truly outrageous

Published on March 18, 2011

So so eighties.

Back in the day any half decent cartoon on Dutch telly was watched, whether or not it was a “girls” cartoon or not and Jem was better than most, mainly due to the writing talents of Christy Marx, who you may know from her work on Conan and Red Sonja for Marvel, as well as Sisterhood of Steel for Epic and Eclipse. Animation paid better, which is a bit of a shame because it’s not as comics in the eighties was overburdened with female writers…

Giefors

Published on March 16, 2011

Really everything that came out in the seventies or eighties and has some appeal to thirty and fortysomething grownup nerds is being made into movies or tv series these days, isn’t it? Gatchaman is no exception and while the hardcore fan might find anything but the original anime suspect, I suspect this is really aimed at those of us who got to know it under another guise, as Battle of the Planets, bowlderised and chopped to bits as it was. Gatchaman was my first fandom, playing in the sandlot at kindergarten in the very early eighties and fighting over who got to be Mark, Jason, Tiny though not so much the princess or Keyop. Yet back then we didn’t have the slick version shown above; rather we had something like this:

Linda Smith: five years ago today

Published on February 27, 2011

Five years ago Linda Smith died. She’s missed still. Here’s a collection of the best bits of her from the News Quiz. As Jeremy Hardy said five years ago: “She sort of flirted with the listener in a way”. Here you can hear how she did that.