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"These Guns are Fully Loaded"

If the fever dream scene from last night's episode of Glee had aired in the 1980s...

 

...a spinoff Glee Babies Saturday morning cartoon would be immediately rushed into production.

 

That is all.

Summer Vacation: Getting Animated

This blog post is horribly overdue, I'll admit. The First lady of Inkville had a work conference in Los Angeles back in August, and I tagged along. Besides visiting to Disneyland, eating Brazilian food, and  hitting numerous tiki locales, I flew solo for one day and visited the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where I saw two fantastic museum exhibitions, both of which were ending that very day.

The AMPAS Ray Harryhausen exhibition was an incredible collection of photographs, film clips, and, most excitingly, scale models. Many non-geeks are sadly unaware of Harryhausen and his legacy. The man was a genius of stop motion animation, animating fantasy sequences in films like Mighty Joe Young, The Seven Voyages of Sinbad, and, most excitingly for this 7th grade Greek Mythology fanatic, the original Clash of the Titans.

 

Photography wasn't allowed in the galleries, and a dude behind a desk was glowering at me a bit, so I hope you'll forgive these grainy, through-the-lucite iPhone photos, one of the models for Perseus and the Pegasus, the other of the monstrous Kraken. Seeing these models up close reminded me of the amazing level of fear and anticipation Harryhausen inspired in my middle school self with his Medusa sequence, and how the CGI effects of the recent Clash remake fail to deliver in terms of visceral fright... even with the requisite mental adjustment to account for nostalgia.

The second exhibition was even more amazing, and the real reason I mastered aggro Los Angeles traffic to make the commute to AMPAS. The exhibition featured materials and ephemera from the career of Chuck Jones, the amazing director of a number of your favorite Looney Tunes shorts from midcentury ("What's Opera, Doc?," anyone? "One Froggy Evening"?), including animation cells, cartoon scripts, personal correspondence, video clips, and even the man's Oscar statuette.

  

Chuck Jones was a bit (okay, a lot) of a personal hero of mine in the 80s and early 90s. I read the man's autobiography, as well as several other tomes on animation history. I watched Looney Tunes incessantly. I still think that the two-part Elmer Fudd hunting series cartoons Jones directed stand as some of the best-timed and funniest animated films in the medium.

Again, no photos were allowed, so I grabbed these images of the Internet. In fact, security was so tight at this thing, I halfway expected to see Foghorn Leghorn with a baseball bat whacking weasels on the head. When a couple of confused museum-goers confusedly attempted to stray into the AMPAS screening theatre, they were escorted back out again, quite definitively. A far cry from laid-back Oregon.

Amazing exhibitions, amazing trip. That's all, folks!

Summer Vacation: Tiki Travelogue

A couple of weeks ago, the First Lady of Inkville attended a work conference in her professional capacity. I tagged along to Los Angeles in a decidedly un-professional capacity. Still addled on the rum-soaked fumes of the Northwest TikiKon earlier this month, I decided to cram as much Polynesian pop as possible into my visit, with one goal in mind: Tiki pilgrimage.

And what Los Angeles Tiki travel would be complete without a visit to the Enchanted Tiki Room in Disneyland? The entirety of the Adventureland portion of the park is pretty Tiki-tastic, but the Tiki room (complete with its delicious and overpriced pineapple Dole whip) remains the Genesis moment for many Tikiphiles' obsession, including that of your intrepid guide.

Spoiler alert: those Tikis totally come to life.

After working up a sweat escaping the Haunted Mansion and whining about the insertion of Johnny Depp mannequins into the original Pirates of the Caribbean, we adjourned to downtown L.A. to quench our thirst at the Trader Vic's:

A Chicken in Every Pot, a Man Cave for Every Man

The digital cable box here in Inkville tends to be squarely pointed at HGTV much of the time, despite my protests. And until such time as I am able to wrest the box away and point it at The Venture Bros. or Treme or hell, anything else, I consider myself an unwilling conscript learning about recessed lighting and SoCal property values.

The program House Hunters offers viewers a ride-along as wealthy families decide amongst three megamansions to waste their money upon. I’ve decided to use the opportunity for a little armchair ethnographic fieldwork. And in the past couple of years, I have noticed a trend. Scratch that, make it a truism: every rich dude expects a Man Cave.

If you’re not familiar with the concept... congrats, you're probably not wasting you life on basic cable, as am I. Snark aside, essentially the Man Cave is a room in the megamansion in which the male half of a heterosexual couple goes to commune with his inner loutish being, a place for neon beer sign collections, framed Red Sox jerseys, and cardboard boxes full of early-70s issues of Playboy. 

I wrote for the Eugene Magazine megamansion beat for over two years, and let me tell you, I have seen my fair share of new construction Man Caves. Since when did this Man Cave idea become a man's inalienable right?

On one level, it seems sort of sad to me. Should a man really need to hide away from his better half? What does it say about a relationship if half the couple needs a space, with formal borders or passwords or whatever, in which to avoid the other? Sorry if I'm a turncoat, fellas, but I actually like my wife. The idea of an oasis is one thing; devoting real estate to it is another.

On another level, I guess I can understand the appeal. My wife shares my sense of design in many ways, but all the same, it might be cool to have a place for my rows of tiki mugs and action figures… rockabilly pouring from the speakers... the walls adorned with comic book art… a special tumbler reserved just for bourbon I pull out of the special cabinet reserved just for the bottle… and most of all, the TV would never linger on HGTV.

Hmm, maybe I can chalk my distaste for the Man Cave idea up to the fact I can’t afford one myself? Perhaps it's all just sour grapes on my part. Any corporate sponsors out there looking to burn through a few clams by financing a blogger's renovation? We can call HGTV to film it, honest...

Shutter Island: The Epiphanies of Confinement

In my recent video interview for the University of Oregon's Talk project, I was asked to name one thing I fear. I replied, "an enclosed space." I've always been somewhat claustrophobic. Recently the First Lady of Inkville and I were walking in the woods here in western Oregon, and we came upon a damp playground situated in a quiet campground. I remarked that the cement tubes painted in bright pastels, placed near the swings for children to crawl through, had always given me the creeps as a kid.

Back in the city, we watched a trio of films that, coincidentally, each address notions of confinement, claustrophobia, and the epiphanies that arise from confronting oneself in a closed system. Be forewarned, for herein lie mild spoilers for Shutter Island, Coraline, and, yes, believe it or not, Couples Retreat.

Scorsese's noir Shutter Island is a lush, beautiful film. It's not the visual confection of Coraline or Amelie, but the saturated color, beautiful stars, and unforgiving, verdant landscape are visually compelling. And while Shutter Island is, indeed, frightening, it's not the slasher thriller the trailer makes it out to be; its heart-in-the-throat thrills derive as much from the plot's implications for its protagonist's life and lifestyle, as from any shadowy boogeymen.

The film opens on a Boston harbor ferryboat in 1954, with a pair of U.S. marshals, a surprisingly likable Leo DiCaprio and the reliably wry Mark Ruffalo, assigned to investigate the disappearance of a violent escapee from an island mental institution. What they uncover, of course, is not so straightforward.

With its forbidden zones, violent secrets, abandoned facilities, and requisitely spooky graveyard, the closed system of the Shutter Island prison is as much a stand-in for the human mind as it is an actual filmic environment. This is a "locked room" mystery adventure writ large, and it's only through the DiCaprio character's' submersion into his own psyche that said mystery can be solved. Along the way, the protagonist must abandon his detective smarts, and ultimately, his very identity, to emote his way through a maze where logic fails. Eventually he must face the reality of what Shutter Island represents for him personally, and, related, what sort of man he has become. It is only through the confinement, the enclosure, of the island that DiCaprio's character is able to grow.

Ya Gotta Get Hot to Play Real Cool

I've always had a thing for the music of mid-20th century America. In high school I was the guy who was cranking up Rosemary Clooney's "Slow Boat to China" on my Buick Skylark's tape deck while the preppy guy stopped next to me at the light was blasting Blues Traveler. 

So it's no stretch that last week I dragged the too-busy James Stegall, who certainly has other things to do, with me to a screening of Welcome to the Club: The Women of Rockabilly, a Grammy-nominated 2001 documentary by Washington State-based filmmaker Beth Harrington at Eugene's Downtown Initiative for the Visual Arts.

The film was fantastic, just what the doctor ordered in terms of a pick-me-up in the midst of a soggy northwest winter. And it got me thinking about the roots of my taste in music. Upon reflection, it all really boils down to two major influences:

"Johnny Fedora and Alice Bluebonnet," a short that helps comprise Disney's 1946 poorly-titled theatrical release Make Mine Music, first introduced me to the close harmonies of the transcendent, angelic Andrews Sisters (and by extension the Puppinni Sisters, their 21st century successors). I remember that repeat viewings on the Disney Channel of the 1980s had already transpired before I realized there were multiple voices singing. Beautiful.

And hey, as an added bonus, this cartoon includes the mind-blowing surreality of anthropomorphised chapeaus wriggling around like angry puppies attached to human heads.

Turning the culture clock ahead by a decade, the 1957 Looney Tunes short "The Three Little Bops," directed by the underappreciated Friz Freleng and scored by Shorty Rogers, not only engendered in me an appreciation for Louis Jordan-style jump blues, but the streamlined mid-century googie aesthetic, as well. 

This is one weird cartoon, including, as it does, oblique references to jazz drug culture (the wolf's "red-rimmed eyes") and segregation ("a sign on the door: no wolves allowed"), and achieves its denouement (spoiler alert!) with the lovable loser anti-hero reborn as a horrifying, crimson-hued shade sprung from Hades, forever to haunt his porcine tormentors. Heavy, daddio.

Did any childhood cartoons have a strong influence on your adult tastes in music? Let me know in the ol' Inkville comments corral. And no, getting the Muppet Babies theme song stuck in your head last week doesn't count.