Posts Tagged ‘Billboard’
The Sincerest Form of Flattery, Part Two: The Wonders of Cultural Appropriation…
From the always-amusing 11 Points (“Because Top Ten Lists Are For Cowards”), “11 Amazing Fake Harry Potter Books Written In China“…
From Harry Potter and the Leopard Walk-Up-To Dragon (cover above)…
…the author took the text of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and replaced the character names with names from the Harry Potter universe. Except for Gandalf — he remains and joins forces with the Potter crew. Here’s a passage, full on [SIC] in advance:
“There was a hobbit, who didn’t even know how to return home. He lived in a hole in the ground, and didn’t know where he came from or where he was going to. He even didn’t know why he had become a hobbit. This was Hogwartz School of Witchcraft and Wizardry 5th year apprentice Harry Potter.”
…through Rich Dad, Poor Dad and Harry Potter…
I couldn’t find a translation of this book (or a picture of its cover) but the title just kills me — smashing together two completely unrelated, but popular, Western book series to produce (I’m guessing) a non-sequitur mess. It would be like the bootleggers making a movie called “Avatar: The Hangover” or a TV show called “Laverne and Shirley and Jon and Kate”.
… to Harry Potter and Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters…
This is an interesting literary move — they just carbon copied the plot of the first real “Harry Potter” book… but moved the voice to Harry’s first-person perspective. That’s some deep “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern” stuff right there.
An excerpt:
“This was a secret I had cherished in my heart for seven days. It scratched my heart and made it itch, and I decided not to tell anyone of it. But when I saw Hedwig, my owl, jumping outside my window, I knew it was the call from Hogwarts for me.
…
I would ride on my favorite flying broom, together with Hedwig and my magic wand, go-go-go, night clouds in the urban sky would cover my trails, and the meteor you saw in the sky was my traipsing manteau.”
The other eight Harrys, along with some absolutely stunning cover art– including the jacket for Harry Potter and Beaker and Burn, onto which Harry welcomes (for no explicable reason) Flick, the star of Pixar’s A Bug’s Life— at “11 Amazing Fake Harry Potter Books Written In China.”
Readers might note that cultural appropriation of this sort has long (and storied) precedent. Jim Fallows quotes a wonderful passage from “”Wild Bird Hickcock and His Friends,” an essay by James Thurber– a fan of French pulp-novel versions of American Westerns:
There were, in my lost and lamented collection, a hundred other fine things, which I have forgotten, but there is one that will forever remain with me. It occurred in a book in which, as I remember it, Billy the Kid, alias Billy the Boy, was the central figure. At any rate, two strangers had turned up in a small Western town and their actions had aroused the suspicions of a group of respectable citizens, who forthwith called on the sheriff to complain about the newcomers. The sheriff listened gravely for a while, got up and buckled on his gun belt, and said, “Alors, je vais demander ses cartes d’identité!” There are few things, in any literature, that have ever given me a greater thrill than coming across that line.
As we realize that we too are free to mash up, say, Dostoyevsky, we might recall that it was on this date in 1954 that Bill Haley & His Comets released “Rock Around the Clock”, the first rock and roll record to reach number one on the Billboard charts.
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!…
Michael Deal, a Brooklyn-based graphic designer, has created “Charting the Beatles“:
These visualizations are part of an extensive study of the music of the Beatles. Many of the diagrams and charts are based on secondary sources, including but not limited to sales statistics, biographies, recording session notes, sheet music, and raw audio readings.
Consider, for example, “Authorship and Collaboration” (based on authorial attributions quantified by William J. Dowlding in the book Beatlesongs):
See Mike’s other nifty infographics e.g., (Self-Reference, Song Keys) here. And check out the “open source” collection of Beatles charts and graphs that Mike has solicited here… where one will find your correspondent’s favorite:
Many thanks to reader MH-H for the lead.
As we tap our toes, we might recall that on this date in 1964 Tollie Records (the fourth label to release a Beatle’s disc in the U.S.) released “Twist and Shout” (B-side: “There’s a Place”); it went on to spend 11 weeks on the Billboard chart, rising as high as #2.
Across the Pond on this very same day, George Harrison met Patty Boyd, his future wife (and the inspiration for Eric Clapton’s “Layla”), while filming the train sequence for A Hard Day’s Night.
Who ya gonna call?…
…From whoiseyevan (Ivan Guerrero), who has also graced Youtube with retro trailers for Raiders of the Lost Arc and Forest Gump, with more “pre-makes” to come…
As we realize that William Bendix was the pre-incarnation of Jerry Seinfeld, we might recall Chubby Checker’s useful advice: “Try stubbing out cigarettes with both feet while rubbing your back with a towel”– his classic, “The Twist,” reached #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 on this date in 1960.
(In fact, Chubby’s version was a cover of a song written and originally released in 1959 by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters as a B-side (to “Teardrops on Your Letter”); it scratched the charts in early 1960– but it was the Mr. Checker [Ernest to his parents, Mr. and Mrs Evans of Spring Gulley, S.C.] who created the craze.)
source: RateYourMusic.com
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