Seriously disturbing animation

Tom Spurgeon's Comics Reporter recently re-posted a link to this fascinating cartoon, which I managed to miss when it was first uploaded.

It's got a relentless fairy-tale logic to it--one of the nasty ones, like "The Juniper Tree"--and a Glen Baxter-like disconnect between the placid visual tone and the hallucinatory material. A-mazing.

"Rabbit", by Run Wrake, behind the cut.

( Enter--if you dare! )

Another terrific little film

This is the video for a filk on Bowie's "Andy Warhol": "Andrew Marvell". Includes genuine artificial music-video effects!

Watch on YouTube

Private Lexicon: Thunderclap

For a long time, I've meant to post some of the words and phrases which inform my own version of the English Language--the running jokes, coinages, shortcuts, and nicknames which simultaneously add richness and simplicity to my spoken world.

Here's one from my teen years that has stuck with me. I was listening to the radio while driving with my friend Kenny Hirsch and the rock/folk protest song "Something in the Air" came on. I knew I knew the song, but I could not for the life of me remember the name of the artist. We arrived at my brother's apartment before the song ended, so we didn't get to hear the DJ backlist the songs, and this inability to recall the singer's name nagged at me for several minutes until I put it out of my mind.

About two hours later, while we were talking about nothing even remotely related, the memory burst into my mind and shouted out of me, "Thunderclap Newman!"

So, ever since, that rushing in of memory after you've forgotten you were even trying to remember something--to me, that's a "thunderclap".

( Video version behind the cut )

Just today, I had another--during the weekly NYRSF meeting, agrumer, bugsybanana, and I briefly discussed the band Squeeze, and I tried to remember the name of the lead singer. Alas, there was no internet available, and it eluded me. I long ago realized that the true purpose of the internet was to protect me from thunderclaps.

Today I was listening to my favorite radio station, The Peak (WXPK, 107.1, White Plains NY) and the DJ backlisted the songs, mentioning Squeeze. I immediately said, out loud though no one was in the car with me, "Glenn Tilbrook."

The initial discussion was Wednesday last week--that is, 12 days ago!

This, of course, was the image that gave birth to Alan Moore's Marvelman--the idea of Mike Moran/Billy Batson sleepwalking through his humdrum, adult life, nagged by the vague sense that there's a word he's forgotten, and if only he remembers it, it will thunder out through him with the force of a star and remake the world. And who among us hasn't felt that, sometimes?