I still don’t know if I’ve ever heard something by Lady Gaga, and I’m not even sure she’s not a guy with a gimmick. But thanks to BBC Radio 2 I know about the music duo Roxette from Sweden, aka: ABBAland. When I first heard their new song, She’s Got Nothing On (But the Radio), with its great Europop sound, I was surprised to learn they’ve been cranking out tunes for 25 years.
Roy Lichtenstein – the master of found art
Roy Lichtenstein couldn’t draw. I’ve seen Lichtenstein paintings in person, in New York, and the sheer scale of them is impressive; but I’m sorry, the man was a total fake. He swiped art done by others, some of them comic book greats, others not so great. In the video at this link (sorry, can’t embed), look for the examples of his early work, and it’s obvious that Lichtenstein was no draftsman, and had to resort to tracing. The latest outrage that has set me off is this news item.
Lichtenstein Drawing Acquired for $10 Expected to Achieve over $1,000,000 at Christie’s
A million dollars for a 6″x6″ drawing that any Silver Age comic book fan can see was traced from a John Romita Sr. panel in a DC romance story! Romita should sue for a cut of the proceeds. Heck, even I can draw better than Lichtenstein. This is a panel I did for a failed comic strip submission many years ago, with a character inspired by John Lennon’s I Am the Walrus.
© DOuG pRATt
It’s no longer acceptable to justify what Roy Lichtenstein did by saying he helped elevate comic books to an accepted art form, and thereby brought them recognition they wouldn’t have otherwise had. Nonsense. David Barsalou reveals the truth in his Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein project.
The Troubadour door
The image that’s borrowed the most from this site is of my dear friend, lovely Prue Bury sitting between John Lennon and Pattie Boyd. My second most popular pictures are of John Lennon and Harry Nilsson, immediately after they’d been shown the door at the Troubadour nightclub, for abusively heckling the Smothers Brothers.
So in 1974, when Tom and Dick decided to revive their stage act, they booked their first shows at…the Troubadour in West Hollywood. Nilsson, being a good friend, decided to surprise Tom again, and this time bring along a friend who was in town having a very long “lost weekend”: John Lennon.
“It was horrendous,” Tom recalls, laughing at the memory. “They came in pretty ripped to see our show, and, as Harry later explained to me, he told John, ‘He needs some heckling to make this thing work.'”
Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, David Bianculli, 2009, p.333
This is where I originally posted the pictures, and here is a higher-res scan of the page they came from. Click to enlarge.
They’re in a magazine called John Lennon: A Man Who Cared, published by Paradise Press shortly after Lennon was murdered in December, 1980. The credits are: Editorial Consultant Jeremy Pascall with material compiled by Robert Burt.
Double-dip?
On the drive home tonight I saw premium gas selling for $3.999/gallon. If regular goes to four-and-a-quarter like it did the summer of ’08, count on the economy tanking again.
Sign of the endtimes
The Boston Globe has cut its Sunday comics down from six pages to four. 🙁
Selling the world
It’s already been 20 years since David Bowie’s catalog was on Rykodisc, a label that was started here in Massachusetts. Bowie’s album The Man Who Sold the World was 20 years old when the Rykodisc CD was released. How times flies…
Nirvana did a popular cover of The Man Who Sold the World…
… but that was long after Lulu (To Sir With Love) did her own version, way back in ’74, with Bowie producing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y1LTndlCi8