Belly question

I was just thinking. You know those postcards that came with the 7" singles for "Feed The Tree" and "Gepetto"? On the back they say "1 in a series of 6" or something like that, and I've only ever seen four. I have the "Gepetto" 7" and it came with the chair and the giant with black hair. I wonder if 4Ad was originally gonna put out another single of Star and it just never happened. So now I'm dying to know: Was there gonna be another single? What was it gonna be? Did they have the artwork all set up? Did they have 2 more postcards prepared? If anyone has any information, please let me know. Thanks, RJ

Belly "Star" back cover

After doing this for almost four years I was starting to think that I'd seen all the 4AD images from the 90s. Then, tonight, I saw this image- the back cover of Belly's Star on LP. This picture might be the very best image that was created for Belly. I can't get over how good it looks. It's perfect. The colors, the design, the way it all comes together. I'm trying to imagine what it must've felt like to have taken the photo of those flowers and then developed the picture and seen how beautiful it is. And even at 4AD and v23 where they're used to amazing, beautiful images it must've surprised everyone. Like TOTY, I only owned Star on tape, never CD. The back cover of the CD is the same photo, but the text is printed on top of the photo, to great effect. I love that image. It was already my favorite Belly image. But now there's this- the photo, so crisp and clear, above the text with it's bright red background. I was just thinking: the back cover image is so good- I wonder why they didn't include it in the cassette sleeve. I bet it would've looked awesome shrunk down to tape-size. Now I'm wondering if there are versions of the Star cassette that use the back cover image. Maybe I've got something else to look for.

Blogger changes

Blogger is making some changes in the way that posts are composed- the page is different and I've heard other bloggers complain that they're having trouble transfering their writing from Microsoft Word to Blogger, but I've only had one problem: in the past, I never knew how to insert photos inside the text. If you've been here before you might've noticed that the pictures always show up above the text. It's all I know how to do. But now I keep on getting the pitures stuck in after the first line or two. I'm not sure what to do, maybe I'll edit this shit later. Anyway...

"Teenager Of The Year" LP

I've got Frank Black's Teenager Of The Year

on tape and I never owned it on CD. I know it's long but I always forget that it's a double album, like 1999. Tonight I saw these images of the record labels and record sleeves. I might've liked something different- maybe playing around with the original album cover text and colors- but I like what they did here.

I just don't know what to do with myself

My favorite blog, Final Girl, is on hiatis, and it makes me wonder if I should continue on with RJ Battles. One of the things that bothers me is that I have no readers. That bother's me a little. It's been almost four years. But then, like I've said before- if someone stumbles across this blog and they like it then there's almost four years worth of posts that they can go back and read and enjoy. I wish that writing this blog had made me a better writer. I don't know, maybe it did. But I'm not as good as Final Girl and that's what I wanted. I love going back through her Reviews Archive and reading her reviews of certain movies, especially when she did her two movie marathons: The Halloween movies and the Friday the 13th movies. It was the perfect idea and she did it so well. I don't think I've written any posts that people would go back and read over and over. The one good thing about this blog is all the good record sleeve images I've come across and posted here. I've found some excellent pictures. And as I've said before- a lot of them I didn't even know existed. In a lot of cases I was looking for something else and just stumbled across them. But the thing is, eventually I'll run out of favorite record sleeves to post. Belly only made so many records. So anyway, just writing this has made me realize that I have to keep going. If I continue on with RJ Battles I know I'll find a new purpose. I have an idea in my head of what I want this blog to be and sometime soon I'm going to get there.

The Breeders

I love the Breeders. I have almost every song they've ever done- easy, because they haven't put out that much over the past 22 years. It feels weird to say it like that. As I've probably said here before. I first came to The Breeders after hearing "Cannonball" and falling in love with it. I still think it's a cool, catchy song, and I'm still impressed with the video. Watching it you can see why Kim Deal had such a reputation for being "cool" back then. So I loved "Cannonball", and, at the same time, I loved the song "Feed The Tree" from Belly. I bought Belly's Star and The Breeders's Last Splash and played them both over and over. At the time I still didn't know anything about the Pixies or Throwing Muses, though soon I'd buy a couple of each of their albums. Then one day I was at a record store and it happened to have another Breeders album that I'd never heard of: Pod. 'Cool',I thought, and then I looked at the front and the sticker on it saying The debut album from The Breeders featuring Kim Deal and Tanya Donelly. That was an exciting discovery. I really liked it but I was disappointed that Donelly wasn't featured more; she didn't even do much writing on the record (it wasn't til a few years ago that I read that Deal and Donelly had an agreement: Deal would write the first Breeders album and Donelly would write the second; Donelly left to form Belly and the songs that became Star

were originally meant to be the second Breeders record).

"Dig For Fire" Pixies

Dig For Fire EP (1990) Pixies

This has always been one of my favorite Pixies EPs. Cool B-sides. "Velvety" is alright, but I really like "Winterlong" and "Santo" (I read somewhere that "Dig For Fire" was meant to be like a Talking Heads impression, but I think "Santo" sounds more like TH).

FLYBOYS (2006)

FLYBOYS (2006)

Sometime soon I hope to write about FLYBOYS, a 2006 James Franco movie about WWI pilots. Franco's character is based on Frank Luke, who I've been obsessed with since 1999.

I was looking up FLYBOYS on Wiki and looking at the guy who directed it. His name is Tony Brill. Looking back over the movies he's made, I didn't recognize any till I got to the 1980s and 90s. He directed MY BODYGUARD (1980). That was a strange movie- it just had a lot of odd touches, I thought. His next movie was one that I remembered seeing a lot on HBO when I was a kid. It was a sad, sappy "dying kid" movie starring Mary Tyler Moore and Dudley Moore. The kid as six weeks to live and I clearly remember her dying on a subway, right after going to see a Broadway play or something. The other movie I recognized was 1990's CRAZY PEOPLE, also starring Dudley Moore- it was a comedy that I saw at the movies with my brother and I thought it was kind of funny at the time but I've seen it since and could only take about 15 minutes of it.

Anyway, I'm not expecting much from FLYBOYS, and I don't really like James Franco, but I really do wanna see it. Maybe it'll be a good story but either way, I've gotta see it because it's Luke-related.

Snowglobes

I've always had a thing for snowglobes and things filled with water. I think just about anything looks better under glass. When I was a kid I got a plastic CapeCod keychain and it was just a tube with sand, some tiny shells and rocks, and a small piece of seaweed. It looked so cool- I wish I knew where it was now.

I did a search online for snowglobes and these were the best pictures I could find. One thing I really liked was the snowglobe sugar cookies. That's a really good idea, you get plastic globes at a craft store and cut them in half. I wanna do that except I wanna use those plastic wine glasses that you assemble. Then I'm gonna put Peeps and other Easter candy inside.