Sad news: Japanese director/animator Hayao Miyazaki
plans to retire after the release of his film, "The Wind Rises," this year.
Miyazaki, who won a lifetime achievement award from the Venice film
festival in 2005, previously retired following the international success
of Princess Mononoke, but returned to direct Spirited Away four years
later and then stepped in to take charge of Howl's Moving Castle when
original director Mamoru Hosoda unexpectedly quit the production. The
Wind Rises, his 11th feature-length film, is a fictionalised biography
of Jiro Horikoshi, who designed Japanese fighter planes during the
second world war.
-----
Best dad ever? An Ohio man
sold his copy of Amazing Spider-Man #1 to fund his daughter's wedding ceremony.
The Spider-Man comic was not in perfect condition, but was in good
enough shape to contribute $7,000 towards the cost of the wedding.
-----
Dangerous Minds offers up some
guitar-playing tips from the late, great Captain Beefheart.
2. Your guitar is not really a guitar.
Your guitar is a divining rod. Use it to find spirits in the other
world and bring them over. A guitar is also a fishing rod. If you’re
good, you’ll land a big one.
-----
Faith in humanity department: A Beatles tour guide in Liverpool
took it upon himself to restore the gates to the Strawberry Fields Salvation Army Home property to their original red after they'd been painted yellow by a vandal a week or two back. Unfortunately, the Salvation Army is a little uptight about this unsanctioned act of good will.
A spokesman for the Salvation Army said: “While we understand the
motivation of the individual who painted the replica gates to Strawberry
Field, we are very disappointed that they have been vandalised again.
We will be restoring the replica gates, which were installed in 2011 to
protect the original gates from damage, to their original condition as
soon as possible. We will assist the police in any investigations they
wish to conduct into these incidents.”
------
Speaking of the Beatles (and we tend not to ever shut up about them), check out this vocals-only mix of the
Abbey Road medley:
-----
The Comics Journal has an overview of the anti-war war comics written and sometimes illustrated by the great cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman for EC in the 1950s, which were recently republished in a
collection by Fantagraphics.
Before Kurtzman, war comics, wrote William W. Savage, in Comic Books in America 1945-1954, confined
themselves to expressing “the virtue of the American cause and the
sterling qualities of the American fighting men… (T)hey questioned
nothing; and they dealt almost exclusively in happy… endings.” Kurtzman
conveyed his counter-message by exercising a degree of control over his
books that made him an auteur before Francoise Truffaut let anyone know
such a thing existed.
-----
Twits:
