The Blog I Want To Be

The World of Kane


The Sixties never died for Will Kane

I don't know how I stumbled across this site, but The World of Kane - subtitled "Retro Candy for Your Eyes and Ears" - is the blog I want to be. What a great site! Do yourself a favor: stop reading my blog and check out the World of Kane, whose borders know no bounds - with a MySpace and Flickr presence and the auxillary Mondo Kane blog. Better yet, subscribe to Kane's RSS feed.

It's Kane's World: We Just Live In It
Unlike myself, an almost hip guy, Will Kane is the real deal, a totally hip guy with great taste in everything (and he's younger than me, damn him!). Maybe I say that because his tastes mirror mine, especially in his fascination with anything from the retro-cool "swinging" 1960s (maybe that's because he, according to his MySpace profile, lives in "Swinging London"). I like everything he likes, right down to his profile tagline - "I feel a nostalgia for an age yet to come" - which name-checks my fave pop-punk purveyors, The Buzzcocks. Boing Boing agrees with me, calling Kane's blog is "a regularly updated gallery of mod design in architecture, cinema, furniture, print, etc."

For example, I ran across this post from October 2005 that featured blogging about Mara Bava's 1965 spaghetti sci-fi movie Planet of the Vampires, Serge Gainsbourg, French yeh-yeh, France Gall, unsung French guitar hero Michel Polnareff, designer/animator Ryohei Yanagihara, Brooklyn-based fashion designer Rebecca Turbow, Roman Coppola's cult period film CQ, illustrator Guy Peellaert (he did the cover for the Wizzz! French psychedelic pop music compilation CD), Saul Bass, Brigitte Bardot music videos, children's book author/illustrator Miroslav Sasek (I grew up on this guy's wonderful books, which only recently have come back into print), and my all-time favorite import musicians, Japan's Pizzicato Five. I even found links to Sheila B's (pictured above right) Cha Cha Charming website, another great blog and resource center for all things j-pop, girly pop or 60s retro. Oi vey, so much good stuff, my mind is reeling from taking it all in.

Will Kane even includes this great link to an essential French Pop guide on Amazon.com.

I like the way Kane breaks down his interests into related subject matter links - all of them great - such as Cartoons, Illustrations & Ephemera, La Musique Pop and Retro/Modernism. He even has a link that features clips from a documentary about the Helvetica typeface (how cool is that?). But I think my favorite is the one for Miniskirts.

It's a lot of stuff, so get to work, culture vultures.

It's a Kane, Kane, Kane, Kane, Kane World:
World of Kane (Blogger.com)
Will Kane (MySpace)
Will Kane's Photos (Flickr)