Kingdom of Evan

King of the Hill

Going a little off-topic for this blog - as if it had or needed one - I'd like to wish a very happy 20th anniversary to the Hill Times, the deeply esteemed and delightfully saucy newspaper of parliamentary affairs where I used to work. Twelve hours ago I was in Ottawa for their birthday party at Library and Archives Canada; eight years ago, soon after my interests began to turn to newspaper journalism, I was their high-school co-op student. It wasn't a glamorous time - my "office" most days was a phone booth across the hall from the press-gallery office - but it was a glamorous job for me, and I remember my time there fondly: poring through government documents, writing research briefings for the reporters, memorizing MPs' faces so I could organize piles of unlabelled and undated archive photos, polling parliamentary staff on which MP they thought was sexiest (Peter MacKay, evidently) and once in a while, after much effort and second thoughts, writing a story.

Happy birthday, guys. We've come a long way.

...

P.S. Yes, my summer blogging hiatus is over. As you were.

Season of the witch

Death Penalty
Originally uploaded by phronetic

... aaaand we're back.

Apologies for the long hiatus, readers. Spring arrived, and my workbench seemed like a lonely and unhappy place compared with the sunny streets. And what do I listen to when I'm lonely and unhappy? Metal. The heavier it is, the better it helps me through the tough times. But as comforting as it is, one thing about it makes me cringe: terrible album-cover design.

The cover for Witchfinder General's Death Penalty is a classic example of this. The typography is an all-caps Gothic mess, and the main picture is a crowded Renaissance Faire scene showing the band members pretending to rape and murder a girl. This is an instance where one shouldn't judge a book by its cover, though; while they're basically an unapologetic clone of Black Sabbath -- Zeeb Parkes's lyrics sometimes sound faintly like the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons channeling Ozzy Osbourne -- it's really tight music, acknowledged as one of the pioneering forces in doom metal.

Witchfinder General
Free Country
Invisible Hate

I've been thinking a lot about heavy-metal album design since listening to a really interesting D-Crit podcast on the subject. I don't understand the metal scene's fascination with Gothic fonts. They're too elegant for music that's stripped-down, solid and abrasive. A metal font should look like it's been hewn from stone or forged from solid steel.

This is a bare-bones attempt at trying something different with Witchfinder General. The hangman idea came to me fairly recently, and I wanted to see what I could do with it.

I'm Gaiman for anything

The winners of Neil Gaiman's #100K photo-captioning contest are up. Some pretty clever ones, I must say. I didn't win anything, though; c'est la vie.

O caption, my caption

Coraline
Originally uploaded by phronetic

Within an hour of watching Coraline with a friend -- my second time, this time in 3D -- what should I find on my RSS feed but a personal challenge from Neil Gaiman: a photo-captioning contest. Seem's Neil's reached the 100,000-subscriber mark, and to celebrate, he supplied two pictures for his readers to caption, or, in my case, illustrate.

This is picture A, featuring Coraline and Neil's dog, Cabal. I made some minor tweaks to the background for compositional purposes, but tried to be as faithful as possible.

If anyone else is interested in entering, the deadline's not till midnight Pacific time on Saturday.

The Facebook meme lives again

An Internet meme is usually fated to die as Puff the Magic Dragon died: Alone and neglected by its friends. But for the record, I hate that song. I've always hated it. If you're going to give up on a childish thing, give up on it honestly and deliberately; don't just let it fade away.

I'm pleased, then, that one of the groups organizing the Facebook album-cover meme I participated in is getting a party to celebrate its 1,000th album cover . . . which I can't attend. Sigh. Winterhoek would have loved to make an appearance, but their touring schedule just can't allow it. But if you're in Montreal on Thursday, April 9, the get-together is at Casa del Popolo. The invite says "we'll be doing it 5@7-stylee," which I presume means 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. But basically, just show up. I've been to Casa before, and it's worth going to for its own charms; you don't need an excuse.

More details on the album cover designers' Facebook group.

Variations on a meme, part deux

Reel Talk
Originally uploaded by phronetic

Ladies and gentlemen, presenting the debut album by Nick Poirier's Reel Talk: Not to Have Run Away. Reel Talk and Winterhoek will be doing a joint North American concert tour later this summer, so stay tuned.

Thanks again to those who participated in the Facebook meme contest. Nick, drop me a line and you can come to claim your prize.

Party on, contest winners

Okay, so it's not exactly midnight as promised, but I have selected a winner for the make-your-own-album-cover contest. Nick Poirier, come on down! I'm going to get started on an album cover for Reel Talk -- reel soon. Thanks to the others who participated.

In other news, I saw Watchmen today. Who watches the Watchmen, you say? Well, you should. ASAP. There are things I didn't like about it, and to be honest, the first half of the movie won't be that enjoyable for people who haven't read the book. But once the Zack Snyder-style ass-kicking begins, it's a lot of fun.

Some observations, in Rorschach-style sentence fragments:

On the movie-going experience

• Only about 80 people at the matinee. Small enough group for me to do a head count. Total number of women present: five.
• The theatre didn't have any pre-movie ads, or even Muzak. Just a blank screen and darkness for half an hour.
• The movie started late. Theory from the guy behind me: "They actually got the reel for Legally Blonde 7 instead of Watchmen, and they just don't want to tell us."

On the actors, in descending order of quality

• Rorschach: TOTALLY BAD-ASS. Just the right amount of psychotic menace. Voice pitch-perfect.
• Comedian: Also bad-ass. Wish there was more of him in the movie.
• Nite-Owl II: Excellent. Transition from retired schlub to credible Batman wannabe very credible.
• Dr. Manhattan: Average. The performance was good, but the voice is totally mismatched to the character. How can a muscled blue demigod talk like Norman Bates?
• Silk Spectre II: Weak. Gasped incredulously way too much.
• Ozymandias: God-awful. Scowls in a creepy sort-of-European accent that makes it way too obvious that he's up to no good.
• Richard Nixon: Jesus Christ, what's up with the ridiculous Cyrano de Bergerac nose?

On the story

• Highly faithful to the book.
• Much-vaunted "tweaked ending" actually makes sense. I may find logical flaws with it later, but for now, I'm impressed.

On random stuff

• Soundtrack was really hit and miss. Some songs were just way too obvious and corny, and others just made no sense. Simon and Garfunkel? WTF?
• If you look carefully during the scene with the Comedian getting wailed on, the apartment number (3001) suddenly gets turned into "300" when a number gets knocked off. Nice self-promotion, Zack Snyder!

Over all

Excellent.

Mad Props #6: Enough is never enough of The Stuff

The Stuff
Originally uploaded by phronetic

Consumerism and zombie movies go together like beans and rice. George Romero knew this. So did Shaun of the Dead, and arguably, 28 Days Later sort of acknowledged it also. But there are other horror films that explore the idea that the desire to consume can, in turn, consume us, and make us monsters. Sometimes, they bite off more ideas than they can chew, and the result can be as cerebral and as gag-inducing as a mouthful of human brains.

Which brings us to The Stuff. It's a horror-movie monster like none seen before or since: a Cool Whip-like dessert that's actually a sentient super-organism, which controls people's minds and devours them from the inside. This is a consumerist zombie movie for the New Coke era, and while it hasn't aged well since the 80s, there are some reasons I still find it enjoyable. One is Michael Moriarty, who nearly succeeds in carrying the movie as Mo Rutherford, a corporate spy for the ice-cream industry -- yes, they can apparently afford spies -- who catches on to the Stuff conspiracy and tries to stop it.

In the hands of the right director, it is possible to make faceless, gooey blobs into credible monsters, but Larry Cohen doesn't pull it off. The movie tries too hard to be a satire of the advertising industry and not hard enough to scare people. The plot veers off into pointless directions, especially the sudden introduction of a paramilitary group led by Paul Sorvino, and a totally unnecessary role for Garrett Morris, who disappears for more than half the movie. But Moriarty makes it watchable. Think of it as Law and Order: Just Desserts.

This is a collage of a lid of The Stuff, culled from an ad that Mo and Female-Love-Interest-Whose-Name-I-Can't-Remember watch on TV. I noticed and corrected a factual mistake in the original prop: Some metric-illiterate designer put a decimal point where there shouldn't be one. I really doubt that .474 ml of Stuff is a threat to anyone, and it's certainly not a pint. Maybe there just wasn't room in the budget for enough editors; after all, they did splurge on a cameo by the "Where's the beef?" lady.

Variations on a meme

Winterhoek
Originally uploaded by phronetic

Seems I'm not the only one making album covers these days. If you haven't heard of this Facebook meme yet, the rules are as follows:

1. Use Wikipedia's "Random" tool to find an article. The article title is the name of your band.

2. Go to "Random quotations" and find the last quote on the page. The final four or five words make up the title of your first album.

3. Go to Flickr and click on "Explore the last seven days." The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4. Assemble an album cover with whatever photo-editing software you have.

5. Post it to Facebook with this text and tag people to join in the meme.

But here on Kingdom of Evan, we believe in taking it up a notch. I've added another step between 4 and 5: Annettize the album cover. And here's the result: the debut album by Winterhoek. I choose to believe that this is an indie-pop trio from New Brunswick whose hot blonde lead singer plays the marimba. For you meme purists, though, the classic version is here (apologies for the image size; Flickr wouldn't let me click-and-save the full-sized image).

So, having raised the stakes already, I'm going to raise them a little more. I want you to create a meme album and post a link to it in the comments section of this entry, or in the corresponding note on Facebook. At midnight this coming Thursday night, March 5, I'll randomly select an album cover to collage-ify, and after I've finished, the creator will get a handmade CD sleeve.

Given the time required to make one, I'd ask for a pay-as-you-can donation. Think of the benefits: Not only would you get original Kingdom of Evan art, but you'd get to remember a fleeting Facebook phenomenon forever, and use it to store mix CDs or what have you. So, to quote a song from my new favourite band, Winterhoek, "Everybody wins."

Mad Props #5: Burn After Reading

Fahrenheit 451
Originally uploaded by phronetic

Recent events have had me preoccupied -- unhealthily so, some people tell me -- about the future of newspapers. They're my livelihood and my passion, but they're changing fast, as are readers, as must I. In the best case, this is a dark prelude to the shiny future of literate, media-savvy Web-heads that my generation will inherit. But in the worst case . . .

Well, what is the worst case?

Francois Truffaut's fear, evidently, was that even in a society that had given up on reading, newspapers would still survive -- but only as catalogues of images, strung together without meaning or context. There's a short, easy-to-miss but endlessly intriguing scene in Fahrenheit 451, his film adaptation of the Ray Bradbury novel, where I got the idea for this collage. The book-burning fireman Montag is at home in bed, reading what looks like a broadsheet comic strip with no dialogue, captions or titles over anything. You only see it for a few seconds, and get no explanation of what it is.

This piece is pretty much a direct reproduction of the entire close-up shot of the document (here's the original), and even from that, it's hard to tell what some of these images are. It's clearly a newspaper page, but is it the comics page or the news section? Is this how people get their news in a future where books are banned?

For people who love reading, as Truffaut did, Fahrenheit 451 is an engrossing movie to watch, because he thoroughly thought through what it'd be like in a world where nobody reads. There isn't even text in the opening title credits; they're read aloud over quick-zoom shots of TV antennas. The implication is pretty clear: broadcasting has replaced the printed word, and has killed the imagination. It must have been a common anxiety in the 1960s, another era when newspaper people were afraid their business was dying. But the papers survived back then, so if Truffaut means what I think he means by this scene, the newspapers proved them wrong. Maybe we can do so again.