August 17, 2009

Wild Things and a Tribute to Nilsson's "The Point!"

Beloved children's books! Beloved children's cartoons! Oh boy! October is going to be a quite a month. First, Where the Wild Things Are finally comes out on October 16th:

There's even an excerpt of Dave Eggers' Where the Wild Things Are screenplay / novelization available courtesy of The New Yorker.

On Oct. 27th, we get a tribute to Harry Nilsson's The Point!, one of my all-time favorite records and movies. Featuring covers from Devotchka, Martha Wainwright, Andrew Bird and more, you can stream the songs here:
http://amanorecordings.bandcamp.com/album/songs-from-the-point

The record benefits Eggers' 826NYC, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting literacy and writing skills to kids in NYC and beyond.

Speaking of totalitarian cultural regimes (and yes, that's essentially what The Point! is about), I'm flying through Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn - a novel about the gradual outlawing of the alphabet on the fictional island of Nollop - and it scares the hell out of me for some reason. I highly recommend it for the subversive and literate (or even literally subversive), especially at a whopping $5 from The Strand.

March 23, 2009

"Where the Wild Things Are" movie pics

Coolest thing I've ever seen? Probably. The Dave Eggers-penned film finally comes out in October, and the trailer debuts this Friday in front of Monsters vs. Aliens.

See more at FilmDrunk

March 1, 2009

Popular Penguins: Retro Penguin Books Styling

I'm a sucker for punchy, to-the-point design, and old paperbacks from the early 60s are a great example. Penguin's division in Australia recently started re-issuing a collection of classic and modern books with the retro cover treatment, and sales have more than doubled their projections.

I love any story where books sell well -- take a look:

clipped from network.nationalpost.com

The series of 50 books - 25 fiction and 25 non-fiction were redesigned to recall Penguin's first paperbacks, published in the 30s. Then, the softcovers were colour coded - orange books were fiction, blue for non-fiction. The new retro Penguins all carry the same orange cover.

"If you're standing looking at those books you know
subconsciously or by implication that all of these books are going
to be OK," said Peter Blake, the company's Australian sales
director who conceived the idea of the series.

"Even if you've not heard of Geoffrey Robertson's Crimes
Against Humanity you think, 'It's part of the collection, I
trust the brand and it's surrounded by all these other classics by
authors like Waugh or Fitzgerald so it must be OK.' "

To have a look at the entire series, visit Popular Penguins.

March 1, 2009

Dead Poets Society, the Animated Series

Very cool stuff, and more than a little bit creepy - check out T.S. Eliot, Christina Rossetti and James Joyce below.

clipped from network.nationalpost.com

Poetry Animations is a YouTube channel put together by British videographer Jim Clarke. His project animated old images of famous to make it appear as if they are reading their poems. Some of the recordings are the poet's reading their works. Where archived readings were unavailable, they are voiced by other readers.

June 12, 2008

Hot time, Summer in the city

This is only a half-truth. I actually can't hear you over the oven-like sounds of 99-degree plus weather in Philadelphia, which makes my life feel a lot like the following clip:

Just replace "Tommy" with "National Weather Service" and "best chance to hook up with this girl" with "best chance to not die a terrible, fiery death" and you get the picture. But this post is not about the hard of hearing or the tired of sweating, friends. It's about the fond of seeing, whether they be slightly sightly or blightly unsightly.

Someone sent me a fantastic collection of famous film scenes done using only typography (make sure to check out "Ocean's Eleven" and "Psycho" as well).

Also and additionally, check out Vampire Weekend's video for "A Punk" -- an excellent song from an excellent album, rounded out nicely with an excellent video:

I also got to see James Hunter again on Tuesday night, a treat that I missed at last summer's XPoNential Music Fest because of rain that never appeared. He was still in fine form, did a killer rendition of "Riot in My Heart" with weird key changes, and some sort of bizarre calesthetic acrobatics with his guitar. The new record isn't as immediately engaging as People Gonna Talk, but he does get a face-melting guitar moment or two, especially on "Don't Do Me No Favors."
Check out this video of "Don't Do It" from the first time I saw him at the TLA two years ago: