The passing of the days is captured in art

From the equally soon-to-be-gone Our Valued Customers:

Bookmarks - Internet stuff: Henry Rollins

Dirtfarm goes to see the now FIFTY YEAR OLD Henry Rollins kick off his spoken word tour and reports back in comic form:

The illustrated Hello: Charlie Brown

The son of a dentist, who never grew up. Charlie Brown's life of quiet melancholy could only have got darker once Schulz realised the real money was in tiresome depictions of a dog pretending a kennel was an aeroplane.

It can't have helped that his name was used on this - one of the most irritating songs in the world. Before Simon Cowell was invented, anyway:



Oh, The Coasters, how could you?

Perhaps Charlie Brown's more lasting musical legacy is the soundtracks to the US TV specials - ones where Brown got proper billing in the title, too, rather than coming bemusingly under the name of a popular type of legume.

Created by the Vince Guaraldi Trio, I think it's arguable that the continued affection for Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown; He's Your Dog, Charlie Brown; It's Tax Day, Charlie Brown and the others is down the soundtrack.

This is perhaps the most famous of the Charlie Brown tracks, Skating:



Vince Guaraldi had served in the Korean war - literally, serving, as he was a cook. He was a figure well-liked amongst jazz fans, but lucked out when DJs took a liking to the b-side of his bossa nova single Samba de Orpheus. This was the track on the other side:



Cast Your Fate To The Wind would secure Guaraldi's first Grammy. It was also this track which led to the approach to compose for the Charlie Brown specials, and would secure fifty years and onwards popularity for his music.

His heart, though, remained with jazz:



Guaraldi died in 1976. Playing Butterfield's Nightclub in Menlo Park, between sets he suffered a heart attack. Later Charlie Brown movies would be scored in his style, but none of the later ones quite had the same verve.

[Part of the illustrated Hello]

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet - Michael Jackson

Every Day Is Like Wednesday considers the theological implications of the editorial cartoons on the death of Michael Jackson:

When we go to heaven, will we look like we did at the point we died, or will we look like we did at an earlier point in our life?

Lee Ryan playing possum

Some surprising news from this morning's Sunday People. No, not that the Sunday People is still going - although, yes, that is pretty surprising in itself.

No, it's this:

Blue hunk LEE RYAN is busy learning the language of lurve after landing a role in the Italian version of hit movie, Ice Age 3.

Hottie Lee, who turned on 26 on Wednesday, flew out to record the voice of the character Eddie the possum for two days this week.

I know what you're thinking - "how bloody cheap must the people doing the dubbing into Italian be?"

The People's Katie Hind tries to explain this curious casting:

Lee won the role because Blue were one of the biggest bands Italy has ever seen.

One of the biggest bands Italy has ever seen, were they, Katie? And yet, surprisingly, for "one of the biggest bands" the country has ever seen, they only managed a single number one.

Darkness at 3AM: Oh my God, you killed journalism. You bastards.

There's a warning from 3AM today:

Joke around with Kanye West at your peril...

Really? Why, 3AM Girls?

In Wednesday's episode of South Park, entitled Fishsticks, a cartoon Kanye tells David Letterman and Jay Leno: "I am not gay! And I'm not a fish!"

Then, incensed at being the butt of the show's joke, the 31-year-old rapper beats comedian Carlos Mencia to death with a baseball bat. Ouch!

So... you're saying we should be careful making sport of Kanye West because of something a cartoon version of him did? You're actually saying that, are you?

And... if I just take a step back... you're running a news item which is effectively something that happened in a cartoon on US TV?

Trinity Mirror staff who are currently facing compulsory redundancy will be delighted to see exactly where the savings made by throwing them out of work are being spent.

Vedder fights for Tomorrow

It really is a pity that Pearl Jam sound so bloody awful, as Eddie Vedder really seems a genuinely nice guy who often is right about stuff. Like his attempt to organise support for Tom Tomorrow's This Modern World cartoon.

Tomorrow's strip has been dropped from twelve US alternative weeklies:

“Obviously that means a loss of income for him,” Vedder says. “Perhaps even worse is the lost connection to readers who faithfully turn to Tom and his sardonic penguin Sparky to help them survive the absurdities of the world around us.”
[...]
“When you write, please be polite and respectful,” Vedder asks. “Many of the editors at these papers are friends of the cartoonists we’re supporting... after all, they’re the folks who gave the cartoons a home in the first place. Suspending the work was a corporate decision made during incredibly tough times for all newspapers.”

It's not only Tomorrow who's suffering: Matt Groening's 22 year-old Life In Hell has also been caught up in the cull, as Village Voice Media drops all its syndicated cartoons. And the papers are also losing staff writers. The question might be if there's any alt weeklies left to not publish cartoons in for much longer.

Voice throws comics

Disheartening news from the US alternative press: the magazines owned by the Village Voice (including our beloved Denver Westword) have followed the lead of the print edition of The Onion and axed their cartoons.

It's a cost saving in the face of the recession, but Rehabilitating Mr Wiggles calculates the saving as being somewhere around five thousand dollars per title, which - set against the loss of a creative, distinctive voice - seems to be misjudged pittance.

Bookmarks: Some stuff to watch on the internet: Crayoning The Beatles

The estimable Out On Blue Six opens the archives for an episode of The Beatles cartoon series, with Penny Lane in danger. Last person to set up a Technorati feed for posts tagged 'where am i going to get my spacemen 3 albums from at 9am on a saturday morning now?' is using AOL.

Cartoonistobit: Ray Lowry

Really sorry to hear of the death of Ray Lowry, the cartoonist whose career was reinvigorated by punk.

Lowry had already built a reputation on the underground press circuit in the late 1960s, working for titles like the International Times and Oz, but it was the 1970s where he really kicked into gear - sending illustrated reports back from The Clash's tour of the US to the NME, most notably. He designed the London Calling sleeve for the group - which surely gives him a position in British music culture at least alongside Peter Blake - and, more recently, returned to adding pictures to words about the band for Johnny Green's A Riot Of Our Own.

It was as a cartoonist, though, that he earned his living: providing acerbic editorial and pocket cartoons for the NME, of course, before moving on to provide work for everybody from Punch to Private Eye, the early Face and - perhaps uniquely - getting paid for material by The Spectator, New Society and Loaded.

Ray, who was 64, was found dead at his Lancashire home on Tuesday. His official website team is collecting tributes.

My favourite Lowry cartoon was one of a series of his 'men in a high-powered office' sketches, featuring a top-paid business man sat at his desk, the penthouse floors of lowlier skyscrapers visible through the window. A pinstriped arm reaches for the intercom, and the caption: "Remind me again, Miss Jones - what was my raison d'etre?"

... whereas who can't do a spot of rapping?

Fabolous might want to think a little harder before discussing his career path:

"I thought I was going to be an artist. I went to art and design high school. I drew cartoon characters. Then I realised I wasn't very good, so I turned to music."

Given that drawing cartoons doesn't always call for the highest level of artistic skill, this doesn't really suggest Fabolous viewed rap as a difficult option.