Pop Culture Safari!

BBC digs upcoming Wanda Jackson album, produced by Jack White

Jack White did a great job several years back producing Loretta Lynn. He and rockabilly queen Jackson seem like an even better match. I look forward to hearing this one.

From the Beeb:

None of which would matter if age had wearied Jackson’s voice, but it doesn¹t sound like age has even been trying. Her trademark kittenish snarl is in devilish form on Eddie Cochran’s Nervous Breakdown, and she's never crooned anything so affectingly as she does Sammy Cahn and Gene De Paul’s Teach Me Tonight. This is a rich, warm, big-hearted and hilarious album.

New Bond film set for 2012

MGM announces via press release:

Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli of EON Productions, together with Gary Barber and Roger Birnbaum, Co-Chairmen and Chief Executive Officers of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., today announced that the 23rd James Bond film will commence production in late 2011 for a worldwide release on November 9, 2012. Daniel Craig will be returning as the legendary British secret agent, with Sam Mendes directing a screenplay written by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan.

Revived love of hip hop inspires Chabon's next novel

A reignited love affair with comics led Michael Chabon to pen his wonderful novel, "The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay." Now, he's rediscovered a passion for hip hop music. He describes his writing process:

Every novel is a license to obsess. To fixate on a subject--chess, comic books, Yiddish, the Khazars. To go overboard; to pluck the beeswax stoppers from the ears, cut the restraints, and freestyle madly toward the siren subject that is calling from the shore.

Vinyl records, for example. Early on, I decided to make a used-records store on Telegraph Avenue one of the key settings of my novel in progress. Okay, maybe "early on" is an under-exaggeration. Maybe it would be more accurate to say "the entire novel is just a pretext for spending as much time and money as I possibly can in used record stores." (A similar rationale doubtless underlies my projected next novel, the epic Tacos Al Pastor.)

BTW: If you're a regular visitor to this site, and you haven't read this book, please do. You'll be glad you did:

Trailer for new Camelot series on Starz

Video documentary on Jack Kirby

I haven't had a chance to watch all of these yet, but here's a collection of video interviews of comic industry folks talking about the King -- I guess from the bonus disk to the first "Fantastic Four" film from a few years back. Looks pretty well done. I do think that Kirby is deserving of a big-budget PBS-style documentary. Maybe a project for Ken Burns?

New Sucker Punch movie banner poster

Old gang reuniting for Hobbit film

Andy Serkis and Ian McKellan will appear in Peter Jackson's two-part adaptation.

McKellen and Serkis are not the only Lord of the Rings alumni set to appear in The Hobbit. Rather to the chagrin of some Tolkien purists there are reports that Elijah Wood (Frodo), Cate Blanchett (Galadriel) and Orlando Bloom (Legolas) have all been approached with offers. None of those characters appeared in Tolkien's book, which sees Frodo's older cousin Bilbo travelling with a band of dwarves and Gandalf to liberate a hoard of treasure from the sly old dragon, Smaug.

Exploring DC Universe Online

The Los Angeles Times takes a look at DC's new online subscriber-based gaming thing that I'm too old for:

Initially slated for release in 2009, DC Universe Online took 150 programmers and artists across four U.S. cities 5 1/2 years to complete, at a cost of more than $50 million. That’s roughly twice the budget and timeframe of a typical game. DC Universe Online is atypical in another way — it belongs to a rare class in which thousands of players can inhabit the game’s world simultaneously and interact with one another in real time.