Miscellany – Page 323

A HALLOWEEN TREAT: GHOULARDI SAYS, “STAY SICK! TURN BLUE!”

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

“As I got older…I kept thinking, ‘What is this Ghoulardi thing? What is it? What? What?’ We went back to Cleveland once when I was 14 and we were mobbed at the airport by people chanting ‘Ghoulardi! Ghoulardi!’ And when I do interviews anywhere in the country, constantly, constantly, people who are enamored of my father or who grew up with him bring him up or even thank me for Ghoulardi!”

– PT Anderson, interview with the Toledo Blade, 2000

WMFU’s Beware of The Blog! beat me to the punch:

Cleveland’s most legendary horror host was unmistakably Ghoulardi. He was only on the air for about three years (63-66), but he left an indelible impression. His real name was Ernie Anderson, and after retiring Ghoulardi, he moved to Hollywood and become a legendary voice-over artist (he was the voice of The Love Boat, the Carol Burnett Show, and pretty much every top 40 radio station). He is also the father of none other than director Paul Thomas Anderson, who pretty much based the Philip Baker Hall character in Magnolia on him.

But most importantly, Ghoulardi used that booming, commanding voice to unleash an anarchistic spirit. Rather than just play bad movies and make jokes, he began setting up blue screens and dropping in random images over the top of the film, or making strange noises over the soundtrack. And things weren’t any better outside of the movie, where his set could be pure chaos. He was topical, he was funny as hell, he was just plain weird, he WAS the counterculture invading the average middle-American’s television. Nobody that saw a Ghoulardi show ever forgot it, and in a way he shaped the weird climate of Cleveland in the late 60s and early 70s. David Thomas of Pere Ubu was one of his disciples and describes watching his show as such:

“Everyone who saw Ghoulardi will tell a favorite story – like the night he set off a egregiously large home-made explosive device sent it by a fan – he was always setting off fireworks and blowing up things in the studio – and quite clearly off-camera crew were telling Ghoulardi not to light it up and you could see people running across the studio, the camera abandoned to skew off balance, pointing at the floor, and then the entire room was stunned senseless for some minutes… live… smoke, curtains on fire, people stumbling around…”

PAUL WAS AN APOSTLE, JUDAS WAS AN APOSTATE

Monday, October 30, 2006

Greetings from GRE-studying hell! For the next two weeks, your humble entertainer will be busy learning obscure words. Words like “adumbrate,” “bedizen,” and “calumniate.” (He admits, he has only made it past the letter “C” in his Hit Parade.)

To keep his sanity, your humble entertainer will still be scratching and posting pretty pictures, and might even continue giving those pictures silly mnemonics titles, like: “chary is to be wary!,” “asperity is severity!,” and “a minister prone to cozen, a congregation hozen!”

And if text and links are what you’re looking for, go see Jessa at Bookslut. She’s been killin’ it lately.

EXCERPTS FROM A TERRIBLE CALAMITY AT SEA!

Monday, October 30, 2006

An (abandoned) graphic novel-in-progress:

terrible calamity cover

a terrible calamity at sea!

terrible calamity at sea

WHEN THE ONLY CURE IS A CHEESEBURGER AND A MILKSHAKE

Thursday, October 19, 2006

I thought it was unbearably depressing today.

I spent a good part of the day surfing the internet, checking out Paul Hornschemeier and Married To The Sea (both boys from Ohio!) and drooling over the Tom Gauld comics I got by airmail yesterday.

Now, Meg and I are going to Red Robin, and then we’re going to go wedding band shopping.

STAR WARS AND COUGH DROPS

Monday, October 9, 2006

It seems like just about everybody has the plague these days, and over at our place it’s no different. I spent the weekend recovering from the crud, watching the Star Wars trilogy on DVD, reading comic books and Elmore Leonard, and eating like a hog. (Starve a fever, feed a cold.)

The best thing about the trilogy box set is a 2 1/2 hour long documentary called Empire of Dreams. It mostly focuses on the first movie, but it does a pretty amazing job at putting Star Wars — which seems like it came out of nowhere — into a context.

What interested me the most was the huge role played by Ralph McQuarrie, a conceptual design artist who Lucas hired to make paintings of several scenes (including C-3P0, R2-D2, a lightsaber battle, stormtroopers, and Darth Vader) so that Lucas could take them to the studio and say, “This is what it’s going to look like.” Essentially, McQuarrie’s drawings sold the movie, and got the thing made, but not only that, he created the look of the films. He took what was in Lucas’s head, and made it come to life.

Pictures trumped words.

You can see a bunch of these things at McQuarrie’s website.

Other inspiration from the weekend? Check out Tom Gauld’s Guardians of the Kingdom:

I love pretty much everything that I’ve seen from him.

And I can’t say it enough: if you haven’t read Elmore Leonard before, you are in for a real treat. Killshot is about to come out as a movie.
Ok, that’s all I can think of. Between wedding plans, GRE, and grad school apps, there’s not much time for anything else, but maybe I’ll put something pretty up this week.