As the New Yorker says,
This Friday night at 7, the Morgan Library & Museum will hold a special screening of “Gahan Wilson: Born Dead, Still Weird,” a documentary, directed by Steven-Charles Jaffe, about the life and work of the New Yorker cartoonist of the gleefully macabre bent. Wilson and the director will be on hand for a Q. & A. after the screening (which is being presented in conjunction with the museum’s exhibition “On The Money: Cartoons for The New Yorker”). Meanwhile, we have some new work by Wilson: he illustrated this short animated adaptation (also directed by Jaffe) of “It Was a Dark and Silly Night,” a story by Neil Gaiman, the author of (among many, many other works) “Coraline,” a movie which was recently celebrated in these pages by David Denby.
It should probably say that the story was actually written for the Mouly/Spiegelman edited book "It Was A Dark And Silly Night" and was the second of my five-finger exercises before I started The Graveyard Book (the first was the short story "October in the Chair"). And that I loved working with Gahan, and talking about him in the documentary.
(You can hear Art Spiegelman talking about the book here http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1435446)
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Beautiful Graveyard Book-inspired photos at
http://integral-options.blogspot.com/2009/04/jazjaz-40-hauntingly-beautiful.html
Vanessa at Fidra Books writes about Blueberry Girl, as does Mama's Cup.
Jon Scieszka made the Battle of the Books more interesting by knocking The Graveyard Book out in the first round. Which I thought was a wonderful thing to do, and it makes things much more fun.
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An explanation for what actually happened at Amazon is at http://blog.seattlepi.com/amazon/archives/166329.asp?source=mypi
(As The English all probably suspected, it was the fault of The French.)
Cheryl Morgan does a good summing up of the upshot of AmazonFail at http://www.cheryl-morgan.com/?p=4528
(I would add, the best, and also the most dangerous thing about Twitter is the speed with which things happen. If you're a big company and something like this explodes, just having someone who can simply say "Yeah, we know. Thanks for alerting us. It's not malicious, we're trying to fix it by working through our Easter Sunday" on Twitter would probably have been enough to pour oil on twitter-troubled waters.)
(And the thing that is best, and thus most problematic about Amazon, is that we do use it as a resource. I'll normally link to Amazon for a book rather than to, say Indiebound, only because there's more raw information at Amazon than at Indiebound, and it's normally easier to access than Barnes and Noble. (Each of the links are to The Graveyard Book, on Amazon, Indiebound and B&N respectively.) And in twelve years, no-one has replaced that thing.)
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Moby has a new CD coming out. He gave an instrumental track "Shot in the Back of the Head" to David Lynch, with instructions to do whatever he wanted. David Lynch made a haunting little mostly hand-drawn animation. I made a shrunken URL for it at Http://bit.ly/lynchmob, because it made me smile. (It's actually at http://pitchfork.com/tv/#/musicvideo/966-moby-shot-in-the-back-of-the-head-mute).
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(I would add, the best, and also the most dangerous thing about Twitter is the speed with which things happen. If you're a big company and something like this explodes, just having someone who can simply say "Yeah, we know. Thanks for alerting us. It's not malicious, we're trying to fix it by working through our Easter Sunday" on Twitter would probably have been enough to pour oil on twitter-troubled waters.)
(And the thing that is best, and thus most problematic about Amazon, is that we do use it as a resource. I'll normally link to Amazon for a book rather than to, say Indiebound, only because there's more raw information at Amazon than at Indiebound, and it's normally easier to access than Barnes and Noble. (Each of the links are to The Graveyard Book, on Amazon, Indiebound and B&N respectively.) And in twelve years, no-one has replaced that thing.)
...
Moby has a new CD coming out. He gave an instrumental track "Shot in the Back of the Head" to David Lynch, with instructions to do whatever he wanted. David Lynch made a haunting little mostly hand-drawn animation. I made a shrunken URL for it at Http://bit.ly/lynchmob, because it made me smile. (It's actually at http://pitchfork.com/tv/#/musicvideo/966-moby-shot-in-the-back-of-the-head-mute).
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And finally congratulations to the Wieden+Kennedy folk, whose awesomelytriffical Coraline website has been nominated for two Webby Awards, at http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php?season=13
(Also, you can nominate and vote for the websites you think are the best of the web at http://pv.webbyawards.com/)
Labels: "It was a Dark and Silly Night", Amazon foolishness, david lynch, make Gahan Wilson King of America, moby