jughead's setup

I have never seen any Archie strip or show where the group The Archies is included in a story. The clip above emphasises this, since it begins with Betty diarising that she had just heard a great new song on the jukebox and it is instantly revealed that the song is by her band and she plays on it. I always thought Betty was a little more devious than she seemed, though what her game was here I can't imagine.

Jughead runs like a monkey, as we see but he has a very idiosyncratic drumming style (unlike a monkey's). In one shot he is only playing the snare. In the group shot towards the end I am not sure he even has a snare; he has a huge kick drum, possibly the cymbal we see earlier, and a tom. Note that Jughead's kick drum is so big it would virtually obscure him from the audience, but that Reggie and Archie wear their instruments high, Bill Wyman or Mark King style, to show crotches.

Interesting fact from Wikipedia's Archies article:

'Contrary to popular belief, although the verses of Jingle Jangle are supposedly sung by either Betty or Veronica (the only two female members of the fictional group), in reality, it was not performed by any female vocalist, rather it was Dante using a falsetto voice as evidenced by the lyrics "It's my true heart I'm showin'/or my nose would be growin'/you know that it gets longer when I lie".'

'Dante' is Ron Dante, the singer on most (all?) Archies records. I assume this wikiwriter is suggesting it is only men whose noses grow when they lie, thus showing him or herself an adherent to Freud's phallo-nasal theories of noses being like dicks and lies being like sexual stimulii.

Also I note in the last moments of that clip they are actually playing to a live audience! I thought they never played live, being cartoons.

bullock fest

Well I have been recuperating from illness so have been indulging in a bit of a Sandra Bullock fest here the last couple of days. Yesterday you see when I went to my doctor in Westmeadows I dropped into the op shop two doors down (I got to the Dr. six mins early) and picked up some VHS videos for a dollar each. Two of them were While You Were Sleeping and Two Weeks Notice. I had seen them a while ago but didn't really remember them, but enjoyed them again very much. I only like SB when she is doing comedy (I reinforced this by trying on 28 Days this evening, which I think is a drama, or at least a dramady and it didn't take at all). I thought we had a copy of Miss Congeniality somewhere too - now, that is a funny film - but no. Or, 'yes but I don't know where it is.'

What is not to like about Sandra Bullock in comedy films? She is superb. Though I would have liked her to find a leading man to suit her talents. Hugh Grant does alright, I suppose in Two Weeks Notice but he reminds me of someone annoying. WYWS is about her, not about any kind of Hepburn-Tracey type banter.

Oddly enough in both TWN and WYWS SB plays a character called Lucy, but not the same character called Lucy. Both films also have the same joke, about women discovering their feminine side. I was willing to stick with 28 Days if they had that in there but if they do, they didn't put it in in the first half hour.

my life as a child star

I am in this clip from 1:26. What were my parents thinking? I know that Michael Jackson, after talking to my mother in Vegas 34 years later, realised that this early exposure - during which I was in absolutely no physical danger - sealed my future as a celebrity allowing me the opportunity to accept billions of dollars in endorsements in later life, and thus put his own plan in action on behalf of Blanket, who he dangled by one leg from a German hotel balcony in November 2002. Vince Lovegrove was crouched in the bushes four stories below, ready to carry out a scheme which, oddly, was not pre-arranged but in fact entirely happenstantial; he was staying in the same hotel, and had been to see John Waters in Glass Onion, as VInce likes to yell obscenities and throw shit at Johno every time he puts on the show, but he's been banned from all Australian venues. When he saw the incident taking place he accidentally dropped a vial of acid he hadn't got round to throwing at Waters, in the bushes so he wandered in there to take a piss. Both Vince and Michael agreed later that had Jackson actually dropped Blanket, the patented Lovegrove catching ability would have ensured no tragic ensuance.

You will notice that in this clip though cute I have very long arms and legs. This abnormality later corrected itself through the natural life phase of years of gruelling operations in hospitals done by doctors with saws. I recall the headmaster at Auburn South Primary School once asking my mother if there were gorillas in my family, of which she was most offended, being proud of our gorillistic heritage.

Many people ask me today if I am sick of seeing this clip, which is shown whenever I appear on This is Your Life (yes, it's been 11 times now) and similar tributes. Of course not. 'Build Me Up, Buttercup' is a great song which satisfies mind, body and spirit. I often tell the story of Bon taking me to a whorehouse after the taping though as I always add the story is untrue; he merely tossed me an old Esquire in the green room. I wasn't even sure he was tossing it to me; I had been put in the wastepaper basket for safekeeping while Mom went out for a night on the town with Doug Lavery, who had promised to introduce her to his predecessor as drummer for the Valentines, Warwick Findlay.

can i want more

I am trying to find videos of my all-time favourite party songs. Here is one.
You know, when you have a blog for a few years you forget what you've already covered. I don't know what would be more embarrassing, that I repeat myself or that I contradict myself. Well, contradicting yourself over a few years is OK, people change and that's valid.
This Can song is so brilliant it's all the evidence anyone needs that punk rock was unnecessary and everything was going along fine.
By the way I was disappointed to find that there is no video of Nick Gilder (or Sweeney Todd) doing 'Roxy Roller', unless you count the video of a surprisingly well-preserved Nick Gilder doing 'Roxy Roller' with a band calling itself Sweeney Todd in 2007. That is definitely one of the best songs ever. And more evidence that punk just ruined everything.

more simple pleasures

Not only did I get a lot of stuff done today I also found time to revisit some old favourites which lack of time denied me. Get Fuzzy is the only mainstream comic strip I think is genuinely funny, a lot of the time, and which I can also somewhat identify with. It is way cool. And the drawing's really good too.

diary of a cold

Two days ago:
So I am sick in bed and this perhaps explains my reluctance to work even though (even though!) I have a huge amount of material to read, write and edit/comment on. Insane! I was lying there feeling all maudlin and rank and I developed a theory, about however labour-saving our lives become, we still manifest some kind of resistance to labour – because I had all the work on a memory stick, and all I had to do was get my computer out, and put the memory stick in it, and that mere act seemed as daunting as whatever my pre-industrial forebears must have had to do – get on a boat to Africa to pluck an ostrich feather and squeeze a squid for ink or whatever.

I just have a stupid cold, it’s never going to go away it’s a fixture now. I thought I had chased it off last Friday, and now it’s returned doubly monstrous, and I’m losing my voice.

Today:
Well I didn’t take it seriously enough and now I have pneumonia – haven’t had this particular gift since 1986 when it spelt my last days ‘living’ in London. Last night I was shaking uncontrollably and in some pain but strangely also some indescribable angsty discomfort. What can that be? The discomfort was worse than the pain. The ‘after hours’ doctor came and said I had pneumonia and gave me antibiotics and I was quickly much, much better though I seemed to wake up every hour and regarded the night as something to endure.

When I had pneumonia in 1986 I had to go to a hospital in Iforgetwhere, actually Hammersmith, and I had a blood test, and I remember asking the doctor if he could tell me my blood type, and he said that cost more money than they could afford, so I now assume it was an HIV test, though someone might be able to set me straight on that. Then he asked me how I thought I had become so sick and I went into a weird reflection on probable psychosomatic causes (that I had somehow sensed it coming). He took this in his stride and I became of the opinion soon after that I only talked like that because I was a bit mental from the illness. That said, I have reflected that over the last few weeks I have been extremely eager for the pressures of the end of semester to be past, and wishing I could go on holiday… so perhaps there is a bit of psychosomaticism involved, though whether it’s causative or responsive I can’t say. Nor can you.

how would you judge a book?

toby's exhibition edinburgh castle

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Person on a big wing thing in our reserve 10 mins ago

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Just wanted to say this is the best completely cohesive and nothing-below-par Red Krayola record since, probably, I don't know, years ago. Sensational piece of work. The drums-piano combination overall is quite spectacular.