Off the top of my head: Muddy Waters in The Last Waltz, David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, & Tom Waits in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs ("How high can a bird count, anyway?").
Silver Spring, MD Indie cartoonist making comics. Autistic and in constant physical pain. Former theater artist. Forever cinephile. Buy my comics and paintings at michaelavolio.etsy.com. Support my comics work at patreon.com/michaelavolio.
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Off the top of my head: Muddy Waters in The Last Waltz, David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, & Tom Waits in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs ("How high can a bird count, anyway?").
It wasn't the latter, but it was the former! Haha. Thank you. :)
I just found out I'll be tabling at DC Zinefest again this year! 11am-4pm Sat Oct 26, free admission, MLK Library in DC. Last year I sold dozens of comics, plus a couple of art prints and a painting or two. Hoping to have a new comic done before this year's show. Looking forward it!
& also @drewweing.bsky.social! :) Are you & Eleanor coming to SPX? I didn't see either of you on the exhibitors list.
It's my 44th birthday, and I'm running a sale at my Etsy shop! Use code BORN44 to get 44% off my comics, drawings, paintings, original comic art pages, and art prints through the end of the month: michaelavolio.etsy.com?coupon=BORN44
Thanks for the reposts, @zacksoto.bsky.social & @leavingfilmstrk.bsky.social! :)
Those folks still need to work, though. They make almost no money without orders. I guess they could drive to MD or VA instead, but I have no idea what kind of area most of them cover. It's shameful this is so risky for them, regardless.
This is what happens when you order delivery in DC right now.
Thank you so much, Farran! It's an honor to get a birthday wish from you. And thanks for the repost!
Thank you!
It's my 44th birthday, and I'm running a sale at my Etsy shop! Use code BORN44 to get 44% off my comics, drawings, paintings, original comic art pages, and art prints through the end of the month: michaelavolio.etsy.com?coupon=BORN44
The New York Comics & Picture-story Symposium schedule for the rest of 2025 is here. Meetings are free and online. I'm especially interested in seeing Jordan Crane's presentation and hearing Fahmi Reza interviewed on satire against power. More info: nycomicssymposium.substack.com/p/fall-2025-...
Highly recommended: @silentfilmmusic.bsky.social's The Silent Film Universe, a very informative, erudite, and creative primer on what makes silent film so special. Articulates its production and presentation that, for me, explains that lovely, almost intangible, special feeling the era's films have.
Indie comics publisher @fantagraphics.bsky.social is being robbed of millions of dollars' worth of merchandise by the distributor Diamond to pay for the latter's bankruptcy. Fantagraphics is running a sale to help cover these costs - 30% off everything on their website through Mon: Fantagraphics.com
Happy National Potato Day, I guess. I gotta admit, my heart's just not in it this year.
Maybe the best movie & performance from Terence Stamp (1938-2025) is The Limey, Soderbergh's 1999 crime drama. Stamp is an old cockney gangster investigating the death of his daughter in LA. Stylized & sharp. Great cast includes Luis Guzmán & one scene of Bill Duke. www.kanopy.com/en/product/1...
What makes the rolling curve of a lapel better than it being flat against the chest? Just to add more variety?
Aside from everything else, think about the security breach it is to have a former KGB agent and current dictator of Russia inside the vehicle the President of the United States rides around in regularly. But hey, if Putin takes him off our hands...
Looking forward to it! That Cold Day in the Park is one of his weird, Losey-ish films - I hope people will give some attention to that one.
"There's a reason why you separate military and the police. One fights the enemy of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people." Battlestar Galactica
Will no one rid us of this meddlesome president?
Grocery stores that have been eating the cost of tariffs are about to pump the brakes. Some are looking to be more transparent about the coming price hikes. Starting tomorrow, new tariffs of 15% to 50% hit a wide range of food items. If you’ve got a household food budget, this is a must-watch.
Criterion's Eclipse imprint returns, with Imogen Sara Smith as series editor! Wonderful news. Eclipse was always a way for Criterion to release sets of less expensive, more obscure films. www.criterion.com/current/post...
Sorry to hear that "DOGE" guy was attacked and survived. He helped kill tens of thousands of sick and starving children with the illegal freeze on USAID funds, still ongoing. All the "DOGE" monsters deserve the same fate as they've given those kids. And anyone who defends "DOGE" can join them.
It's also funny to act like 13-15 year olds would need more to read than 2 years' worth of 13-15 year old "content." There are way more age-appropriate novels than they can read before they mature out of YA or whatever & start reading books for adults. (I was reading books for adults by 13 anyway.)
Richard Widmark should pay a visit to Governor Abbott.
Your most recent post is of a Guardian link.
The Comics Journal interview with Raina Telgemeier & Scott McCloud on their new graphic novel, The Cartoonists Club: www.tcj.com/what-do-you-...
I wondered that too - they didn't even pull out a screenshot of Black in the debate. First glimpse I got of him was from the archived link to his Twitter.
A few of Seth's covers (& his logo) for the magazine Canadian Notes & Queries.
Monk, an hour-long 1968 Thelonious Monk film, is free to watch for a week at the Le Cinéma Club website: www.lecinemaclub.com/now-showing/...
Oh, and Hogan was a racist too.
Jesse Ventura tried to get wrestlers unionized back in the day, but Hulk Hogan undermined the attempt by snitching to Vince McMahon, whose incompetent wife is now the Trump-appointed head of The Department of Education. Hogan was also a Trump cultist. I'm glad he's dead.
Yeah. I've seen some people concerned about getting Vance as president if Trump is impeached & removed, saying "Vance would be worse!" But while Vance is obviously evil, he doesn't have the support & therefore power that Trump does. No one's gonna ruin their career for the Hillbilly Elegy guy.
Nice! Yup. I had forgotten they were friends but remembered when I saw him. I also looked at the end of the cast list in the end credits and saw his name, and his character even had a name and something written in parentheses, but I didn't catch what it was.
Daniel Clowes has an unspeaking cameo near the end of Eddington.
They're bringing Ran back to AFI Silver at the beginning of next month! Looking forward to it.
The Rain People (1969) A serious, understated drama about a married woman who wakes up unhappy on a quiet rainy day and begins a solo road trip to get away and think about things. My Letterboxd review of the film Francis Ford Coppola made just before The Godfather: boxd.it/amEmkv
"...an American girl. You can tell she was raised on promises." - Francis Ford Coppola, Dementia 13, 1963 "She was an American girl, raised on promises." - Tom Petty, "American Girl," 1976
Reminds me of how he said Diet Coke "doesn't work," apparently thinking it was supposed to be some kind of weight loss tonic instead of just a calorie-free alternative to a product loaded with high fructose corn syrup.
& I mentioned The Dirty Dozen being a more conscripted version. Both have "assembling a team for a mission & doing the mission," regardless of whether the assembly is voluntary or what the mission is.
I do think of heist movies - starting with The Asphalt Jungle, if not before - as being in the same family. Maybe 7 Samurai is a combination of the "assembling a team & doing a mission" trope & the "defending a community you're not part of" trope - heists are the former, lone knights do the latter.
Interesting - Usual Suspects is like if we mostly only heard from one character in Rashomon. Maybe the "putting a team together for a mission" trope goes back to The Asphalt Jungle, a handful of years before Seven Samurai, if not before. From that, we get most heist movies & stuff like The Sting.
Seven Samurai is a ragtag band too - one of them isn't even a real samurai. I guess I think of the trope as "assembling a team for a mission they then carry out," whether the mission is protecting another community or attacking Nazis or whatever it may be. But I could be going too broad with it.
Isn't The Dirty Dozen just a more conscripted version of Seven Samurai?
Jaime Hernandez talking process for about 45 minutes. (The beginning and ending of the video are in Spanish, subtitled in English, but the rest is in English, subtitled in Spanish.) youtu.be/EHgmA8hiX-w
I guess it's just as simple as toxic levels of nostalgia in adults combined with kids & adults wanting to see CGI dinosaurs on the big screen, no matter how shitty the movies themselves are.
Yeah. If I know anyone who watches the new Jurassic movies, I'm unaware of it. I thought people hated Jurassic Park 3. The Jurassic World legacyquel was about 15 years later. I can understand the nostalgia driving ticket sales for that one, but it's weird to me people are sticking with the series.
Great episode - really fun ending.
Dark Waters is also the second installment in the "Mark Ruffalo vs. DuPont" film series, with Foxcatcher as the first.
No. That's a theory that's circulated, but it's unlikely. Trump reached for his right ear before anyone was near him. It makes far more sense that he got hit by some of the same debris that hit the cops standing near him.
Championing this weak and poorly attended parade to celebrate our authoritarian president while casually including a photo of a fascist traitor in a J6 hat without comment makes me glad I already cancelled my subscription to this once-great newspaper. Pathetic and shameful work here, Post.
Championing this weak and poorly attended parade to celebrate our authoritarian president while casually including a photo of a fascist traitor in a J6 hat without comment makes me glad I already cancelled my subscription to this once-great newspaper. Pathetic and shameful work here, Post.
I love how specific this is. Haha. & I agree.
Image is the excerpt from this local news report at the time, which got continually updated: www.wpxi.com/news/local/s...
I usually think the easiest explanations make the most sense. Of course if he got hit with a bit of plastic, he's not gonna announce that - he's gonna want people to believe he got grazed by an actual bullet. His team isn't clever enough to stage it & not have any leaks, etc.
If you get nicked in the ear, it can bleed a little but heal up nicely. I don't believe it was faked, especially since someone did die, but it wasn't a bullet that hit his ear. & those cops getting little injuries like his lead me to believe the same thing happened to him.
Good to know about the official forensics info. I believe he was hit in the ear by a piece of plastic or metal, like some of the cops standing near him. It was reported at the time that several of them got minor injuries from debris, & that's the sort of thing that probably hit his ear. No bullet.
I had never heard that song until a few days ago, watching the 1980 Filipino film Bona, in which a character randomly sings the chorus while bathing. & I thought, "That sounds interesting, I should look it up" & forgot it. & now I've seen a parody of the same song less than a week later. Wild, haha.
If Abrego Garcia committed a crime, he should be charged and tried. I wondered reading this headline why they didn't just do this in the first place, and then read the article to discover that they only began the investigation in April, after he was deported.
I eventually bought a bootleg Blu-ray of the "de-specialized edition" of the original trilogy. Would've bought an official Blu-ray of those if one existed. I missed the release of the DVDs that included the original versions.
I know whose mom that is! Whoa!
The play by Conor McPherson with Bob Dylan music, Girl From the North Country, is available to watch on the PBS website: www.pbs.org/video/girl-f...
Bob Dylan is 84 today! Here's the audio from the first time I saw him in concert, back in 2000. Dylan and his band were outstanding, and the setlist combined classic hits with eclectic rarities. youtu.be/nhvYKrKHoiY
Ah, that makes sense.
I've never heard the Quay brothers speak but for some reason thought they were French! So Pennsylvania gave us the dark, weird Quay brothers AND the dark, weird David Lynch. Thank you, PA.
This is the first time I realized there were different Reckonings in the titles. So that must be why this new one doesn't have "Part Two" in the name despite the previous one having "Part One" in it! A-ha!
Maybe the English accent rubbed off on him a bit when he was living there for decades. I don't know if I've heard audio of his voice from the early part of his career.
I've long noticed that too. Sorry it's happening here on Bluesky as well - would've been nice if the weirdos had stayed on just Twitter.
Yes. Music videos are short films.
Hope so. Also, kids like re-watching the same episodes over & over, & they can learn from the repetition. & Sesame Street reuses a lot of segments. (90 hours is actually much less than 5% of the total Sesame Street archives. The show was an hour long for decades & has had more than 4,500 episodes.)
In today's bizarre news, I found out there's an audiobook of the famous grammar guide The Elements of Style (Strunk & White). I'm glad to own a paperback copy of the book (gifted to me by someone in a creative writing class I took over 25 years ago), but I can't imagine it makes for good listening.
"Where you see gratuitous cruelty most often is in police brutality; in the police of all countries I have ever been in, including, especially, my own." Ernest Hemingway Death in the Afternoon published 1932
Ernest Hemingway from "A Free Shave" The Toronto Star Weekly - March 6, 1920 republished in By-Line: Ernest Hemingway read here by Campbell Scott
It's great when teachers & librarians can guide kids to niche stuff they'll like.
Ah, interesting! I remember Anne of Green Gables being popular but don't remember all that.
I saw Anne of Green Gables as a kid but barely remember it - what behavior did kids adopt from it?
Yeah, his writing is pretty obnoxious to me, even when I agree with a point his character is making, haha.
It feels like good banter is about the characters being clever, whereas Sorkin, Gilmore Girls, Dawson's Creek, MCU, Whedon, etc. attempts seem to be about the writer being clever.
The 20th Century Fox logo fanfare always gets me too, though I guess that's technically "before" a movie rather than "in" it. I see it was written by Alfred Newman & had been largely phased out before Star Wars, & John Williams wrote the SW theme in the same key! starwars.fandom.com/wiki/20th_Ce...
Chishu Ryu's little smile. Related: someone made this supercut of one minute of Chishu Ryu saying "hmm." youtu.be/WLLCJGeHQgY
Maybe it's my bias because of what survives, with the cream rising to the top, but it sure feels to me like good banter used to be more plentiful back in the 1930s & '40s compared to the past bunch of decades.
17 writers, jeez. That's wild about the law and women's hats! Great piece.
You're welcome - thank YOU for making this wonderful film available, Ben! It's a delight, especially when watched with your accompaniment.
I've been greatly looking forward to this and just pledged $. I've seen The Cardboard Lover twice, both times with Ben improvising music at AFI Silver, and it's one of my favorite comedies. I'm excited to get to own a copy. If you like Davies, silent film, or comedy, this is a Kickstarter to back!
One of the best of 1999, which was a ridiculously strong year for US-made movies. I didn't know it had failed at the box office. I've loved it all these years. First heard of it on Ebert's show. Guest host said she hoped it was the second of a Soderbergh father-daughter trilogy, after Out of Sight.
Back when Black Adam bombed I was on @jessehawken.bsky.social's pod talking about just this. That if you want to look for the analogue for modern cape flicks, it's Paint Your Wagon and Darling Lili.
And it's also worth pointing out that the superhero film basically pushed out and starved out films like Sinners, as studios went all in on cinematic universes.
Constance Tsang's debut feature film, Blue Sun Palace, is about Asian women who work at a massage parlor in New York City and a man who starts the movie involved with one of them. Realistic, slowly paced, understated, and emotionally captivating. My review on Letterboxd: boxd.it/9Gmz5f
Sorry to hear it, man. That's rough. I hope you can work things out.
🧵 NY-17 Rep. Mike Lawler had a local social worker physically dragged out of his town hall Sunday night. Emily Feiner was singled out by private security, lifted out of her seat, as the crowd chanted “let her stay” and “shame, shame.” She’s a constituent. Not a threat. Fascism again.
Trump is better at being negative than positive. "The art of the deal" apparently just means being a bully & a liar.
Could be just that Affleck didn't want to do it until recently, something like that. I usually think retrofitting another script is a bad idea. Weird Hollywood habit. I'd feel conflicted if I sold an original screenplay & they made it into a movie... after turning it into a franchise sequel, haha.
Trump wants his xenophobia to punish those of us who enjoy international films.
Sinners in 70mm May 23-26 at AFI Silver Silver Spring, MD just outside Washington, DC silver.afi.com/Browsing/Mov...
Ahh, that makes sense that they had the script done soon after the first one & just didn't get it made for awhile for whatever reason, haha.
That's funny. I'm probably gonna have to revisit the previous Mission: Impossible movie to refresh my memory before seeing the new one, and that only came out TWO years ago. Doesn't help that some people have memory issues from covid these days too.
Great music. Check out Over the Rhine if you haven't heard them. Albums like Good Dog Bad Dog, Love & Revelation, Ohio, Drunkard's Prayer, Films For Radio, Meet Me at the Edge of the World, The Long Surrender, Eve. The best unknown band - soulful songwriting & beautiful music.
Jill Sobule (1959-2025) My introduction to her music was her warm, beautiful, gentle cover of Warren Zevon's song "Don't Let Us Get Sick" on maybe the best tribute album of all time, Enjoy Every Sandwich. Sometime after that, I bought her crowdfunded album California Years. youtu.be/W7NL03zncD0