new posts in all blogs
Viewing: Blog Posts Tagged with: Late Night, Most Recent at Top [Help]
Results 1 - 25 of 125
How to use this Page
You are viewing the most recent posts tagged with the words: Late Night in the JacketFlap blog reader. What is a tag? Think of a tag as a keyword or category label. Tags can both help you find posts on JacketFlap.com as well as provide an easy way for you to "remember" and classify posts for later recall. Try adding a tag yourself by clicking "Add a tag" below a post's header. Scroll down through the list of Recent Posts in the left column and click on a post title that sounds interesting. You can view all posts from a specific blog by clicking the Blog name in the right column, or you can click a 'More Posts from this Blog' link in any individual post.
I guess there's a Star Wars thing this week? Oh what's the use. I don't think I've gone 10 minutes without hearing Sar Wars music, seeing Star Wars stars or a Force Awakens trailer for weeks. Like the rest of the world, I had a #StarWarsRewatch over the last week or so starting with the original trilogy and then the prequels, just to get in the mood for the new filme. And I discovered something very alarming.
By:
Heidi MacDonald,
on 11/4/2015
Blog:
PW -The Beat
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
JH Williams III,
Roberta Gregory,
the isotope,
Events,
Retailing & Marketing,
Culture,
Late Night,
signings,
Top News,
Donna Barr,
Add a tag
By Victor Van Scoit The San Francisco Bay Area has some fantastic comic book shops, with each having its own take for hosting creator events. One such store known for their intimate signings and creative shindigs is The Isotope. They’re hosting two upcoming events this November that, should you live anywhere in Northern California, are worth checking out. […]
Autograph authenticator Steve Grad has a collection of 100s of Star Wars cards signed by the original cast, and he’s posted a gallery on FB, with more to come. But I think this one by Mark Hamill may be the best one of all. Although these are pretty good, too. More in the link.
It’s July 1st, meaning it’s the day we celebrate the Beat’s birthday and today marks 11 years of daily comics news! It’s a very special day—I even ganked some clip art for the occasion.
I was going to write a long essay here about the State of the Blog but frankly, I’m too wiped out by this early Comic-con stuff. The short version is that every word of this Variety piece on how movie bloggers have gone mainstream reflected everything I’m feeling. While the nerd blogs have “won” they’ve also been co-opted by the system, and the rewards are dwindling as competition increases.
Nobody goes into blogging to get rich. Editors on some movie sites earn $25,000 to $70,000 a year, and many freelancers have to contend with as little as $25 a post, if they get paid at all. And though a successful site can sell for more than $3 million and make $50,000 in ad revenue a month, many owners struggle to keep the lights on. Take Gordon and the Whale, a well-regarded site that closed its doors in 2011, when the roughly $1,200 to $1,300 it generated in advertising revenue monthly barely covered the $900 it was shelling out to run its server.
“I was at Cannes, and it hit me that we had gone about as far as we can go,” said Chase Whale, the site’s co-founder. “There was still no money. We had like 21 people writing for free, and it made me feel like sh-t that I couldn’t pay these people.”
For those still toiling in the trenches, it’s more difficult to stand out from the armies of pundits who keep cropping up.
“If I was starting a movie blog now, I probably wouldn’t do it,” said Neil Miller, the founder of Film School Rejects. “It’s so hard to be noticed, especially if you don’t offer clickbaits and salacious headlines.”
While I often feel like sh-t too, I’m too dumb to quit and too stubborn to walk away. As this year’s
comics media diaspora has shown, you’ve got to
really love doing this and/or have a cheap rent to continue. It’s increasingly absurd for one person to continue to run a website, even a person with a staff of excellent (but mostly volunteer) writers who do their comics writing between their paying jobs. And instead of teaming up to fight evil, everyone insists on being a lone vigilante like me. I begged David Harper to team up with me so together we could rule the galaxy but no, he insisted on doing
his own excellent and already necessary site. See you can still do good things!
Like I said last year, I keep doing this because I don’t see anyone else doing it the way I want to do it. And I’ll keep my archives online for as long as I possibly can so people can see what went on back in the day.. (I see the mysterious new owners of Comicon-com have wiped the servers, Goodbye cromlech.) This is hard work but I still think it’s valuable work.
There’s a lot more to be said about the devaluation of writing (does ANYONE make a living at it any more?) the generational shift from boomers to millennials taking over comics, but you’ll have to catch me at a party at Comic-Con to hear all about it.
Not that I’m complaining! We’ll celebrate our birthday the way we always do, with some cracking good content, including what I believe may be the first ever look at comics in Almaty coming later today, a Terminator Genisys review, a sales chart and all the usual fol de rol. I like to complain but this is still the best job in the world and part of the reason is the Beat’s Elite Operative staff: Kyle, Hannah, Alex, Alex, Torsten, Edie and the rest. Wait until you see what we have cooked up for Comic-Con! You’ll need to go buy some new socks because your old ones got blown off.
And I invite you to attend our annual comics journalism panel to see who’s left standing:
Thursday, July 9 • 6:30pm – 7:30pm
Comics Journalism: It’s About Ethics in Comics Journalism
Gamergate, cheesecake covers and the objectification of women, barking puppies at the Hugo Awards, punching down at Charlie Hebdo, diversifying the multiverse – ethics has become one of the hottest issues in pop culture today, and fandom has converged on comics news sites as a battleworld for debating who should win the culture wars. The Beat’s Heidi MacDonald, CBR’s Joe Illidge and Casey Gilly, Comicbook.com’s James Viscardi, Hitfix’ Donna Dickens and other leading comics journalists discuss what, if any, ethical principles should shape news stories affecting the comics community. Attorney and ethics professor Jeff Trexler moderates.
I ceded the moderating to an actual ethics professor so this should be a good one! Sadly the Bleeding Cool panel is at the very same time (qua?) so Rich sends his regards.
Anyhoo, thanks for stopping by every day or so, thanks for commenting intelligently 90% of the time, thanks for advertising, thanks for the many kind words on show floors and in email. Thanks for the tips and hints. Thank you INCREDIBLY for supporting my Patreon. Thank you thank you thank you. Stick around, there is always more to come, and it’s going to be fascinating.
Drawing by Igor Zakowski
By:
Heidi MacDonald,
on 5/20/2015
Blog:
PW -The Beat
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
Late Night,
Casanova,
David Letterman,
Harvey Pekar,
Matt Fraction,
Top News,
Kelly Sue DeConnick,
sex criminals,
Seth Meyers,
Late Night with Seth Meyers,
Add a tag
Here’s the part where you support your favorite comic book creators almost as much you endorse the films they help make possible.
Kelly Sue DeConnick’s husband, Matt Fraction, will be making his first appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers this Thursday, May 21.
The other guests on the show include America’s Got Talent’s Heidi Klum, and funny man Richard Lewis. If that’s not the strangest and perfect line-up to offset the slowly dying Late Show With David Letterman, then I don’t know what is.
We are confident that Fraction will be the next Harvey Pekar of late night talk show. Hopefully, he shows Meyers first hand how to be a sex criminal, the origin of Pizza Dog, and discusses the glorious and frustrating process of creating Casanova with Brazilian twins.
Don’t miss Fraction on Thursday at 12:35 a.m. on NBC.
Last week, a sad story made the rounds about cartoonist Jim Wheelock having all of his comics stolen out of a storage unit in Vermont. It was quite a large and potentially valuable collection that went back to the 60s and in an interview at Seven Days he mourns its loss:
“I remember where I was and what I was doing when I bought or read many of [the comic books]. Later, when I worked in the financially rickety world of a freelance artist, knowing the books were in Vermont gave me a sense of security, a retirement nest egg. This is what the culprit robbed me of….I’m deeply angry that a man I never met has done so much damage to my life. But mostly, I want my comic books back. I believe he will attempt to sell them. I hope people will keep an eye out at stores, flea markets and online for a large collection of comics from the ’60s through the ’90s.”
Although a suspect has been found, he hasn’t been definitively tied to the theft and the comics—including runs of Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four and The Hulk from their original single digit runs—have not been found.
Wheelock lives in Los Angeles, far from the storage unit, but it’s hard not to sympathize with the idea of having your old comics somewhere safe, though far away. Suddenly finding out they are gone, even if you had no physical contact with them, is a psychological shock. I still have my old comics in my parent’s garage…I think. I’m not sure where they are exactly, but I have the idea that they are somewhere safe…even though I haven’t seen them or touched them in 30 years. Other stuff I had stored was lost in a fire—they didn’t burn up but there was smoke damage—and I still think about things that I had in those long gone boxes…a Spirit printing plate given to me by Denis Kitchen, a page of art from Amethyst, a gift from Ernie Colon, my original Howard the Duck Treasury…how can I still remember these things so clearly and miss them?
Which brings me to my next link, writer Rachel Kramer Bussel’s frank and honest discussion of her hoarding and how it affects her current relationship. We’ve all seen Hoarders, but this is no dead-eyed retiree living in a crumbling brown ranch. Bussel is a vibrant, busy lady (I know her from around town and she’s appeared in some of Seth Kushner’s fumettis) and reading the thoughts of someone this intelligent and present in the world as Bussel is both stunning…and recognizable:
Just to be clear — I didn’t go out of my way to accumulate items. I didn’t have to; they found me. I kept everything — theater playbills, cards from my grandmother, old bras and makeup, lone shoes, a giant martini glass I won playing bingo. I even had a fax machine, though I don’t have a land line. I didn’t mind having to wade through mini mountains to get to the bathroom, because who was I hurting? Even when a momentary desire to “get organized” would strike, I couldn’t fathom where to start, so I just made do. As long as I had my glasses, keys and laptop, I was fine.
As I’ve alluded to here many times, I’m not a hoarder, but I am a packrat. I throw out old underwear…when I get around to it, and everything else seems more important to me. I don’t see clutter, I see cool things. I love my stuff, and I do have anxiety about losing my stuff. (Digital hoarding is now a problem—HOW do you make sure all those digital photos are safe?) Every few years
I write about my organization efforts here , but my storage unit is just about full up and now what?
People hold on to things because they have sentimental value—the object is a trigger for pleasant memories of the past—or because they are thought to have some future value. “I’m going to ebay that.” How many times have we said that!
Hoarding is one of the most difficult mental conditions to cure—in fact it can usually only be controlled. The main problem is that it’s simply how you see the world, not a separate condition. I literally don’t understand how people can live in an environment without books or things. But too many things is not a healthy place either. It’s something I struggle with literally every day. But at least I have a degree of mindfulness so far.
For all of my late-night author and illustrator pals -- who try desperately to strike a "balance" in their lives by staying up into the wee hours of the AM. Keep fighting the good fight, and
DO get your rest now and then!
Word on the street is that we’re getting some snow here in the Northeast.
NYC may get as much as three feet in a historic snow dump that is expected to last from this morning right on until Wednesday with blizzard-like conditions.
We at Stately Beat Manor do not fear the snow.
We’ve socked in supplies—cat food, batteries, water, kale—in case the power goes out.
.
James Jean’s cover to Fables: 1001 Nights of Snowfall
We’ll keep blogging as long as we can.
But if the lights do go out, we’ll hang in there and our correspondents from warmer climes will send out smoke signals.
What is your favorite snowy comic? We may need something to read by candlelight…
Even though everyone says Comic-Con isn’t about comics, it’s still the biggest, best comics show in the western hemisphere. The guest list and programming alone make it unrivaled as a place to celebrate cartoonists and their creations. From Gilbert Shelton to Lynn Johnston to Katsuhiro Otomo. The Comic Arts Conference. Tr!ckster. So much more. Even with all the fuss and muss, if you love comics, it’s still the best place to be.
Thus I feel a small pang of guilt when I cover all the hoopla and nerdlebrity explosions in the run up and during the show, because they get the lion’s share of the attention from all the media coverage you’ll be seeing next week. But the experience itself is so one of a kind that it can’t be ignored. We’ll all be complaining about the flyers and the autograph seekers and the klieg light parties and the giant banners and sky-writing and expensive cocktails…but…well, it’s the whole swirling miasma that creates those fever dreams and sunset memories.
I have made my peace with the whirlwind that is con. Reading some of my past posts on the show, I seemed to have some kind of grandiose idea that complaining could change things. It took a few years, but in the end you had to let go, let Wil Wheaton. And in addition, I had the memory of The Breakfast Burrito to keep me going. Because sometimes you find your perfect moment in all the craziness.
In 2011, you veterans may recall, there was a South Park theme park opposite one end of the Convention Center. And they had a morning media preview. Being a fan of South Park, I trekked over a bit before it opened. And there I found a parking lot filled with food trucks. And also a giant bus previewing that The Lord of the Rings: War In the North video game which sucked, I guess?) I also love The Lord of the Rings. I also love breakfast. And you know eating at the Con is always a challenge. So I grabbed myself a breakfast burrito from one of the trucks and sat down on a lamp post and ate it while I waited for South Park to open.
And that was the best damned breakfast burrito I ever had. It came with a green sauce that was life-changing. It was like fiesta and Christmas ann in one bite. As I sat there eating that burrito I marveled at how everything was fitting together. South Park. Angband. Kyle and Stan. Elladan and Elrohir. Coffee. Green sauce. An Adventure Time parade lining up by the trolley tracks. A morning of promise before a day of unknown joys and terrors. A day where anything at all could happen.
I felt that moment of peace, that moment of knowing you where were you belonged for one brief instant.
And for one whole year, I have been dreaming of going back and getting another breakfast burrito, of the creamy eggs and crispy bacon and chewy burrito and tangy green sauce, merging into one perfect bite.
The food truck lot was right next to my hotel, you see. I pictured myself getting up each morning, downing some Vietnamese Instant Coffee, dashing off some posts and then hustling over and grabbing a burrito, and for one more moment centering myself with bacon and eggs and green sauce. A moment before the madness.
I can’t tell you how many times I thought about this.
And then I found out that the city of San Diego has banned food trucks in the Gaslamp district.
The city told the food trucks they had to leave a
About once a year, we give Stately Beat Manor a really good going-over — tossing out unwanted pamphlets, moving some stuff into storage, organizing permanent additions and so on — and after doing so we write a post with our thoughts about storage and hoarding and so on.
This is that post, c. 2011.
I assume most of you reading this are borderline hoarders, like The Beat. Your shelf porn resembles a splatter film. You have more longboxes than you do pieces of silverware. Your home contains at least one Billy. You have at one time — perhaps even at this very moment — made use of some kind of software to catalog your collection even if it was just Excel or Google spreadsheets. You know the drill.
Herewith, some observations on comics and collecting comics.
• Art supply stores have some awesome storage options.
Screw “The Container Store” and all that expensive bullshit. I made a trip to A.I. Friedman, the venerable art supply store here in NYC, and came away with two items that I’ve long thought would be very useful. #1 was a cheap portfolio for storing artwork, flat posters and the like. All of that stuff had been sitting in an unsightly pile on top of my Expedit, and now it looks all sleek and organized in a black portfolio like all the cool kids carry. Less than $15 and you’re good to go.
The second item was one that I did not know existed. Cool-looking poster tubes in colorful plastic! Alvin Ice Tube 25 Inch Clear
You know all those unsightly rolled up posters from Con and so forth? Now they are super sightly! The tubes have a strap for when you are banging around the Javits or wherever.
I should add that this was a prime spot for purging. I live in a New York Apartment and don’t really have room for an art show. I saved a few key pieces –some nice screen prints various folks gave me over the years, Ben McCool’s first signing poster, a giant poster from RETURN OF THE KING that shows Frodo and Sam in a very gay embrace on the skirts of Mount Doom – you know the kind of stuff that will make a great art show some day.
I was pleased to note that although it had started out as an art and office supply store, A.I. Friedman has been attempting to adapt to modern times with a huge section of laptop and iPad bags and covers. Although it was large, it was dwarfed by the row upon row of racks of Moleskine and Moleskine-like little notebooks for jotting important thoughts. Everyone may own a tablet soon, but to be truly profound, a ponder must be scribbled in a little wee bookie.
• A pamphlet is a fleeting thing.
Every time I do a purge, it’s easier to get rid of these suckers. I will, however, never get rid of my original runs of SANDMAN, PREACHER, and INVISIBLES because they had the cool letters pages which were all the contact we ha
This weekend I suffered the technocrat’s greatest nightmare and dunked my iPhone. It’s currently sitting in a bag of rice and soon I will find out if my life is over or not. In the meantime, for someone who is attached at the metacarpal to her iPhone, this past weekend was very interesting.
For instance, I had to find my way to someplace I’d never been. Instead of relying on GPS when I got out the subway, before leaving the house I had to look it up on a map and print it out. And then pull out a paper and look at the map when I arrived. It was like a Geico caveman commercial.
The daily routine of life was much different as well. While ordering a Vietnamese coffee I found myself reflexively reaching for my pocket. Even though it takes less than two minutes to get a Vietnamese coffee, I would normally pull out my phone and look at my twitter or gmail “to kill time”. I’ve pretty sure my time was long ago stuffed and mounted over the mantlepiece. Is twiddling really necessary?
My socializing was rocketed back to 1997. It’s amazing how much we use our gadgets to isolate in a crowd. Unable to whip out my phone google whatever was passing through my mind, I found I had to actually sit and talk to people. Weird! How on earth did we survive those primitive times?
Thing is, I don’t actually use my phone as a phone very much. The problem of ordering some sushi for dinner was solved with Skype and my iPad. I tried to retrieve my messages from another phone but realized I’d never bothered to learn the architecture for doing so. Oops.
Don’t get me wrong. I want my phone back. But a little lesson in non-digital life was a bit refreshing. In fact I found I had way MORE time. So much so that I decided to take the evening to clean up my RSS feeds. A bloated thing of 600+ feeds, I found countless dead or misdirected feeds, and long ago ghosts of an internet that was. Where have you gone, Chesterfest blog? I was kind of saddened that so many art blogs that I once loved to visit have been moved to Twitter or Tumblr. Even more have moved over to Facebook, much to my sorrow. I consider Facebook the AT&T of the digital era, a giant corporation has no real interest in helping its customers — it only wants to keep customers.
For instance, once you get sucked in there is no way to get sucked back out. Sure I’d like a nice discrete feed of all my actual friends and family. Unfortunately I did not have the foresight to start this five years ago, so now I have a bloated 2000+ friends, some of whom are not people I actually know. There is also no easy way to create a feed of an individual page — once there was, but Facebook keeps fiddling with the settings.
While cleaning up the feeds, I found this post by media expert Anil Dash called Facebook is gaslighting the web. We can fix it in which he points out several alarming things. As of today you can no longer import your own content to Facebook Page notes. You must do so manually — right, like I’m going to physically make a FB note every time I make a blog post. Because, as FB puts it:
We want you to connect with your fans in the most ef
Speaking of Vermont, Beat Spy Inky Jen passed along this epic photo of a huge Batman carved from the icy terrain spotted by a passing motorist/blogger. (Click link for larger image.)
A little Googling reveals that this is the crowning glory of the Totem Pole Ski Shop in Ludlow, VT. Digging around we found some even more impressive photos of the two-story high sculpture:
[Photo by SkiDiva]
The masterpiece seems to have been crafted in February but as you can see from the more recent photo, Batman is surviving the rising temperatures. Of course, he won’t last forever…someday only a puddle will mark this great achievement. But the Legend of Snow Batman will live on in the hearts of men, yes, it will.
Once I was paid to review websites. In a magazine. And look what was cutting edge in 1997 in the pages of CMJ Monthly.
Click for a larger version.
DAMN! Warren Ellis is “the only writer with a web page”? How things change!
“Why American comics can ape Japanese manga without understanding what makes them work as stories.”
Some things never change!
“The SF series Transmetropolitan looks very cool.”
Had I but known…
As funny as this is, the next review — which I have no memory whatsoever of writing — is even better.
I wish we could still “Just ask Jerry.” It was all so simple then.
Oh yeah, that’s how the Federation rolls.
Actual Time-Warner Cable ad received in email moments ago.
The best stuff we found in this month’s Previews:
from Antarctic Press
From DC and Amanda Conner. KITTY!
And now every time I get a little burnt out on what I “have” to do for work, I shut out all the external pressures around covering comics as an industry and read some comics that no one told me too. You should try it sometime too!
–
Kiel Phegley
“The dominant tech culture says everyone should just give away their content and their expertise,” Lanier told me this week. “Then they are supposed to make money later through personal appearances, or selling T-shirts or whatever. That doesn’t really help the photographer or the graphic artist who is trying to make a living right now.”
–From an
LA Times article by
James Rainey on the bleak financial picture for creative types.
And at this his face totally changed, and he said “What are you talking about?!” and so I told him I would be leaving the show, because; and that was as far as he let me go, and he said, “STOP! You cannot! You cannot leave this show! Do you not understand what you are doing?! You are the first non-stereotypical role in television! Of intelligence, and of a woman and a woman of color?! That you are playing a role that is not about your color! That this role could be played by anyone? This is not a black role. This is not a female role! A blue eyed blond or a pointed ear green person could take this role!” And I am looking at him and looking at him and buzzing, and he said, “Nichelle, for the first time, not only our little children and people can look on and see themselves, but people who don’t look like us, people who don’t look like us, from all over the world, for the first time, the first time on television, they can see us, as we should be!
–
Nichelle Nichols on Martin Luther King Jr. telling her not to leave Star Trek. [
via]
As some of you may know, tonight is Conan O’Brien’s last night as host of the Tonight Show. The story has been little covered by the media, so we thought we’d end the week with a brief comics-related tribute via the pages of MYTHOS SPIDER-MAN, a 2007 Marvel miniseries which had a brief O’Brien appearance. Artist Paolo Rivera covered it on his blog, and today newly promoted Senior Editor Steve Wacker also bids CoCo farewell.
The moral of the story?
When you take that relocation package….make sure you really like the West Coast!
§ Superhero division: Maxim presents 12 Superheroes Who Should Be On ’70s Vans, which, considering that several of these characters were created at a time when van art was an influence is a little Moebius strip for our tastes, but has Photoshop ever been used for a better purpose?
§ Indie Division: We’re very late on this, but The Daily Cross Hatch’s Indie Costume Contest Winners are too epic to ignore, esp. this Matt Furie-inspired Landwolf.
(pretend for the time being there are shirtless pictures of Gerard Butler and Clive [used to be cool before finding out he was a Liverpool fan] Owen here)
We’re sure that FMB will give the Beat a wonderful birthday, let’s hope that AMC also delivers a present of a good adaptation of THE PRISONER tonight.
As previously mentioned, Sunday night, AMC premieres the first episode of their reimagining of The Prisoner. To support this, there’s quite an extensive website up. They are also serializing a PRISONER graphic novel by M. Scott Veach, Mitchell Breitweiser and Hugo Petrus. The story is a prequel, exploring the background of the Village. Be forewarned, as Comics Alliance reveals, it’s actually a MOTION COMIC, but instead of taking existing art and awkwardly attempting to move it around, Terry Gilliam style, it was planned that way and stays in a flat-plane animation style. Palatable.
The new series debuts on AMC Sunday night at 9 pm. It stars Jim Caviezel as Number 6 and Ian McKellen as Number 2. While we’re neutral on the need of this remake, we’ve got our DVRs set.
On the PLUS side, you can watch all the ORIGINAL Prisoner episodes on the AMC website, and the site for the original series is top notch. We just can’t get enough of these production photos! More in the jump.
Okay, this time we mean it.
As October dawns, we’re looking to start another “21 Days of Halloween” art festival here, so if you have some Halloweenish art you’d like to let us post here, drop us a line at the usual place. Last year, we got some AWESOME stuff, and we’re definitely in the mood for this Samhain!
Nikki Finke reports some changes for the Hollywood trades: Variety is going back behind a paywall online and THR (The Hollywood Reporter) is going online only. Information delivery evolves yet again.
This news unlocks some memories. Way back in the day, one my first jobs was at The Hollywood Reporter–not, as some might guess, as a cub reporter but in the advertising department. My job consisted mainly — for the first few weeks , at least — of sending telexes and cutting people off on the phone, and it never really got any easier. The ad department was a mad house, full of outsized personalities who labored under hellish daily deadlines. No one had a cubicle, it was all one giant room, and private moments usually turned into shouting matches as a spectator sport. From all this I learned the fine points of not crying in front of your boss.
When I first started, THR was notable in that it owned its own printing press. Housed in a crazy quilt building that had once been a men’s haberdashery (and had the ornate dark woodwork to show it), the printing press was located in the back of the building, right next to the composition dept. where guys in jumpsuits cut film to lay out the paper. As I recall, it was a rotogravure press (although I may just remember it that way because I like the word rotogravure) and the quality was very good, if archaic even then.
The press room was an incredibly loud and stinky place. The guys who ran the presses were literally ink-stained and they rarely came out front, and when they did, they smelled of chemicals. (We were amazed when one of the women from the layout dept. married one of the pressmen; this was the first time I heard the phrase “There’s a lid for every pot” used in such a context.) Once in a while I would have to go back there to deliver late ad copy or something, and I’d track some of the smell back to my desk, or imagined it anyway. But it was still a kind of romantic notion that we were creating a newspaper from soup to nuts under one roof — from the reporters running out to screenings to those of us taking down the “For Your Consideration” ads, to composition to the press to the loading dock, where each days bundles of paper would be picked up for delivery, in the early hours, to land on some studio moguls desk each morning along with Variety.
After Billboard bought the Reporter in 1988, the printing press was quickly sold and dismantled — there was no point to owning your press any more, with the costs of paper and printing so cheap at a big dedicated house. THR moved to a very rudimentary computer typesetting system called CTS that we all figured stood for “creates total shit” because it was a nightmare to deal with. The Reporter was never really cutting edge in technology.
The press room was converted to a lunch room, with a lone table and a tattered brown leather sofa. Most afternoons the music editor could be found fast asleep on this sofa, after another late night out at the Rainbow. (The Reporter art staff consisted mostly of people in bands, and it’s a miracle most of them even made it in to work — I know because I was usually there when they played.)
Although such knowledge is useless these days, working at the Reporter did give me a basic grounding in production that helped me navigate all kinds of turmoil my print days. I learned a lot about repro and what could go wrong, and dealing with all kinds of production people and learning their concerns helped me solve problems when they arose. I learned a lot about four and five color printing, live areas, bleeds, specing ads from scratch and PMS colors, nitty gritty shit that’s all taken care of by pressing the return key these days. I also learned the flux, exhaustion and exhilaration of the daily news cycle, something that I’ve carried right through to blogging.
Now, I know HTML. And so does THR.
We have learned that folks would rather argue about “journalism” than talk about a picture of Spider-Man shooting webbing out his ass.
That really surprised me, frankly.
View Next 25 Posts
I guess there's a Star Wars thing this week? Oh what's the use. I don't think I've gone 10 minutes without hearing Sar Wars music, seeing Star Wars stars or a Force Awakens trailer for weeks. Like the rest of the world, I had a #StarWarsRewatch over the last week or so starting with the original trilogy and then the prequels, just to get in the mood for the new filme. And I discovered something very alarming.
Everything here is exactly right! I think you’re the only other person I’ve heard voice this dislike for Attack of the Clones. It’s the absolute worst — for me, mainly, because it shows how badly Lucasfilm dealt with opportunities. Why didn’t we have Yoda Force-dropping a mountain on Dooku, leading him to shed a tear of regret for the now-lost peace and likely coming Empire? Because it was “cooler” to show him flipping around and battling Dooku with a lightsaber he didn’t need. The whole trilogy is made up of barely-strung-together “wouldn’t it be cool if?” moments that don’t tell a good story. All three movies are terrible but Phantom Menace is the best of them.
Thumbs up on the Irv Kershner love.
Also, “I love you.” I know.” Maybe the greatest improvised dialogue in movie history?
That Star Wars generations article was a fun, interesting read, but I do have one nitpick: there’s a “lost generation” from about 1980-1985 who had a very different experience from people born 1986-1999. This group was young enough to miss out on seeing the original trilogy in the theater, but old enough to have been in high school when the prequel trilogy came out.
My two-years-younger brother and I are in this “lost generation,” and I’ve had fascinating discussions with coworkers who are only 5 years younger than me who loved Jar Jar and the prequels while my brother and I (and high school classmates at the time) hated those.
Agree with you about Attack of the Clones. Phantom Menace was laughably bad, but Clones was deadly dull. A solemn snooze from start to finish.
“The Empire Strikes Back is a great movie, period.”
Yes. And it’s also the only SW movie that’s aimed more at adults than kids. So you can enjoy it for the rest of your life, without having to fall back on childhood nostalgia to excuse the lame parts. There are no lame parts in Empire.