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Recipe for a monster novelty album: Combine three chicks (including Sean Yseult from White Zombie), two guitars, and a set of drums. Add three fiendish alter-egos and a handful of goofy garage/surf songs about vampires, hairy eyeballs, and Satan. Throw in a Cheap Trick cover. Mix. Makes fifteen servings of easily digestible rock 'n roll pleasure.
Before there was a comics code authority, Dick Briefer wrote and drew a violent comic book based on Mary Shelley's famous fictional creation. Once Frankenstein had vanquished the Nazis, the series became a good-natured, supernatural comedy -- and that's when it really came alive. Reprints are hard to come by, but Pure Excitement Comics has posted two classic stories online (see issues 18 and 23) that will delight horror-comedy fans of all ages.
While most computer games are first-person affairs -- you fly the jet fighter, you throw the touchdown, you shoot the zombies -- Age of Empires II is a "God game," offering a third-person, omniscient view of resource management, exploration, invention, and conquest. The premise: Try to lead your villagers to process enough wood, food, gold, and stone to support an ever-expanding society of fighters, scholars, and monks. Mix in 13 different historic civilizations, polished single-player scenarios, challenging multi-player action, and sumptuous visual design -- and you end up with a wholly addictive pastime.
The air-safety cards found in the seat-back pockets of airplanes offer simple drawings that can save your life in the event of a water landing or loss of cabin pressure. Airtoons livens up these familiar images with hilarious, often off-color captions (with an "under 18" section available for unescorted minors). The laughs are well worth the trip.
The latest incarnation of Mayo Thompson's well-traveled collective has produced an album that is as tuneful as it is challenging. Thompson has always made music that surely left some listeners scratching their heads, but on Hazel his young ensemble (which includes members of Tortoise and Gastr del Sol, as well as ex-Minutemen drummer George Hurley) has drawn out of him his most melodic and satisfying work to date.
Originally published in 1973, this investor's tour guide is frequently revised. The copy I own was updated in 1995, just months before baby-faced Internet stocks began their conquest of America's headlines. Yet, as I read, it seemed that Malkiel had seen it all before it happened. And in fact, he had -- in the form of the biotech boom of the 1980s, the IPO craze of 1983, the "Nifty Fifty" of the '70s, and wave after wave of irrational exuberance, dating all the way back to the legendary tulip bulb mania of the early 17th century. Random Walk is a truly enlightening read for those who have money to invest, as well as those who just want to understand how the game is played.
The first of Universal's classic horror movies, Dracula was filmed without music. Bela Lugosi has seduced virgins and drunk blood in silence for decades. However, for the film's 1999 re-release, Philip Glass remedied the situation with a subtle, yet powerful score for strings, performed by the Kronos Quartet. "The children of the night; what sweet music they make..."
A year after his upbeat, chart-topping "Brown-Eyed Girl," Van Morrison unleashed Astral Weeks -- a wholly different animal. Eight tracks, no hits, all genius. It still stands as Morrison's masterwork, and having come so early in his life and career, it's the benchmark by which he's been measured from that day forward. Still, Van's burden is your reward. Put on your headphones and get lost in the slipstream, wandering "Cypress Avenue" and crossing paths with "Madame George."
A man drives around the outskirts of Tehran looking for someone to perform a simple, yet grim task for him. The pace of this Palme d'Or-winning film is languid, with long passages taking place inside the man's car, but it is also compelling and quite beautiful. Taste of Cherry offers a meditation, not only on life and death, but on storytelling itself.
Most Americans have probably never heard of him, yet William H. Johnson is one of our greatest artists. Classically trained in Paris, his work took off when he infused his academic skills with his folk-art roots. Johnson did most of his painting in Europe and Harlem, but Mom and Dad was painted during a trip back home to Florence, South Carolina. The National Museum of American Art has a fantastic archive of Johnson's works, many of which can be viewed online.
