home again

Another punishing three days of 12 hour shifts done with. Everybody's back from vacation so hopefully this is the last one for awhile. It's not the working for 12 hours, it's the combination of that, the getting up early, and the NOT keeping to that schedule on my days off that's making it so punishing. Getting home at 7:30 on a Saturday night and not having the energy to do anything more than get some dinner and hit the rack is annoying, especially in a city full of people in costumes going to parties. I think I saw a "Bob McKenzie", though those could have just been his normal clothes, it's hard to tell.

Anyway this week we managed to scrape up some Found Sound for you in the form of an entire Funky Phantom LP detailing the exciting adventures of a Revolutionary War ghost and his ghost cat and the teenagers they hang out with.



And over at Stupid Comics we explore Chilling Tales Of Sorcery with Sabrina, the teenage witch.



Sabrina plays horror hostess, the Bible saves us from evil, what more do you want? It's all at Mister Kitty's Stupid Comics.

Other than that, and working, not a whole lot has been going on around the Toy Factory HQ of Dave And Shain. We did get out and buy Love & Rockets New Stories #4 which is probably the most emotionally moving comic book you'll read all year. If you're like me you've been reading Love & Rockets since you were 15 though the various incarnations and publication types - the magazine, the solo books, the comic, and now the annual book - and if you have any investment in these characters at all, the Jaime story in this latest one will ring your bell and leave you on the canvas looking at all the pretty lights.

To be honest I missed the last few issues of the comic book sized L&R. I'd buy it, read it, and then a week later I would be asking myself, hey, did a new L&R come out? Not this one, kids. The Beto story is great too - it looks like his inking is going from a brush to teeny tiny pen lines, which I don't know is a good choice ultimately, but hey, it's his book - but Jaime knocks it out of the park on this one, I'm talking 'Death Of Speedy' here.

If you have never read Love & Rockets, you have my sympathy. Get down to your local library and start reading. These are some of the best American comic books ever published, end of story.

I also got the new Black Jack which has some terrific stories, including one involving a tokusatsu actor.

That's one of the benefits of the 3-day shift, you have time off during the week to catch up on comic books and movies. We went to the cheap Tuesday movies and saw CONTAGION, the Matt Damon - Kate Winslet - Jude Law - Larry Fishburne - CDC movie about what happens the next time we get a really good dose of bird flu or SARS. At this point I think Soderbergh could make a great movie about people reading the phone book, and with material like this he manages a terrific movie, scary, moving, and tight. Not a wasted shot in this picture. This is the kind of breakdown-of-society film that Spielberg was trying to do in his WAR OF THE WORLDS, but Spielberg will always go for the "gosh wow" at the expense of the mundane. WARNING: this movie features an autopsy scene involving Gwynneth Paltrow, and she ain't one of the doctors, I'm just sayin'.

Today is going to be recovering from the work week, drawing, maybe going out to a spook house or junking. Tomorrow it's back to work!

castlegate -dunfey's royal coach-burt reynolds??

A while back, years ago, I wrote an article about the Castlegate hotel where we held AWA I and where a bunch of Atlanta conventions went to be born or to die. The article is here: http://atlantafantasyfair.blogspot.com/2008/09/castlegate.html - and in the article I state as a fact that scenes from the film "Cannonball Run" were filmed there (that factoid came from the Atlanta Journal Constitution). If you've ever seen the picture you know that the opening of the film starts off with all the racers assembling at "The Old English Inn" to sign up and start. There's a scene where a car crashes into the lobby, a scene in a bar, lots of exteriors. So I obtained a copy of this film and have been digging through it trying to find images of the Castlegate, or as it was known at the time, the Dunfey's Royal Coach, from 1980.

So I'm watching the film, and while the interiors and the exteriors are similar, they really don't seem to fit the geography of the Castlegate. And further research has shown that a "Old English Inn" did exist at I-285 and Glenwood Road, and I have seen it stated that this is where the Cannonball Run scenes were filmed.

So I guess the question is, did an Old English Inn really exist at that location? Did Cannonball Run shoot there, or at the Dunfey's? Who wants to spend an afternoon going through the stacks at the public library digging up old AJC articles about the filming of Cannonball Run, or old ads for Atlanta hotels out of old Yellow Pages? And why am I wasting my time on this amazingly trivial nonsense?

I am appalled that hotels of such amazing ugliness existed not once, or twice, but covered the landscape like horrible scars. How many ugly "Ye Olde English" off-ramp hotels does one city need? I never got around the city a whole lot at the age of 10, being 10, but the Dunfey's was hard to miss when you're going down I-75 into the city. How many other tacky Tudor-style hotels infested Atlanta? America? The world?