Sucker-punched and bitch-slapped all at once

So I sit down with MPC1 to watch Testament - a made-for-TV movie from 1983 that actually got theatrical release because the studio heads liked it so much - and was devastated. (She was moved, but OK. Certainly not as messed up as I was.)

Here's the deal: I thought it was an apocalyptic movie with a HAPPY ending, based on my misreading of this little exchange on Roger Ebert's Answer Man:

Q. Re the reader who asked if there was ever a positive movie about post-Apocalyptic America: the people seemed to behave fairly decently towards each other in "Testament." I am pretty certain that there are others along these lines but none are coming to mind. I'd have said "The Bed-Sitting Room" but that was England.
Peter Sobcynski, Chicago

A. "Testament" remains one of the best American independent films. It blew me away at Telluride. America after the Bomb.

Note the finer point made by Mr. Sobcynski is that the people in the film "behave fairly decently towards each other" in response to the query if there was ever a "positive movie about post-Apocalyptic America." I missed this distinction entirely.

Well, SPOILER ALERT, nearly everyone dies. In particular, the main character loses her husband in the initial attack - he never comes home - and she goes through two of her three children dying from radiation poisoning, one of them being a kindergartener. And we get to go through it with her. END SPOILER.

This is a solid crimson bummer of a movie. Dear God on a Ritz cracker.

As I have often mentioned here, I assiduously avoid any "entertainment" where children are in harm's way or die. Especially little children. "Entertainments" EXACTLY LIKE this movie. Dammit anyway.


Is it a good movie, you ask? Well, yes it is. And, for once, the dated-ness of a movie actually works in favor of it. The ending monologue is especially affecting. The last thing the mom says to the remaining children (they pick up a boy with Down's Syndrome after his father dies), is that they should remember this time and, assuming there are better times, "to deserve the children." Beautiful.

Too bad most people will be sobbing so hard, or actively chambering a bullet to put through their skull, that they won't be able to HEAR the line. Did I mention this movie is a downer?


I remember in the 80s living with the very real fear that the bombs could drop at any moment. (Remember that lyric from Donald Fagan song New Frontier: "In case the Reds decide to push the button down"?) There were a few times when I half expected to turn on the news and hear that it was happening. Most of my buddies and I had "Hiroshima" nightmares where the bombs dropped, we saw the mushroom clouds, and we could see the shadow images of people burned against the wall from the blast; that's how detailed the nightmares were. We've found out since then that we came really close to that reality at least once. (In a weird case of synchronicity, this close call happened the same year Testament came out.)

So, back in the day, this was very much on everyone's mind. Had I seen Testament then (and who knows, I may have), I would've thought it was an awesome movie. But after having kids, most of us can't brook tykes getting snuffed in entertainment, even if it is pretend.


I sometimes wonder if in addition to adult content warning stickers and ratings we should have some sort of indication of children in peril. I certainly would appreciate it.

Standing Close to Andy Summers

As promised, here's my report on One Train Later by Andy Summers.

Copeland's book is still the best of the lot, but this really was a fun read, too.

For instance, I love this part about having money.

Having money, one realizes after a while, is very nice, but you need to develop a razor-edged awareness if you want to hang onto it. There is a large number of thieves disguised as angels out there who can't wait to relieve you of your burden. They slip under your door, confront you in dark hallways, slighter through the letter box, whisper in tones of silk, infiltrate your life with the stealth of a cell quietly dividing. The water has fangs, and the only way to make it to land is by keeping your head up and thinking about the next song.

- One Train Later by Andy Summers, pp. 313.

The title refers to the couple days they were discussing dropping their current guitarist and going with Andy. (Andy said he would not join the band if the other guitarist stayed, which was what Sting and Stewart wanted, but Andy knew he couldn't blend with the other guy's style.) Stewart and Andy happened to disembark from the same London train, laughed at the coincidence, then went for coffee where the deal was sealed. So, had either been on one train later, there would've been no Police.

One surprising bit of trivia was two-fold: Summers was Neil Sedaka's guitarist for a while. Yes, Mr. Every Breath You Take made his daily bread for a while by playing "Calendar Girl" and "Laughter in the Rain." The second surprise is that Sedaka is one of the American artists who's more popular in Britain than he is here.

My favorite section of the book is excerpted below. It's about how Summers did the guitar part to "Every Breath You Take" in one take and other ephemera about the recording of the album.

The linchpin of Synchronicity is a song called "Every Breath You Take." When Sting first plays us his demo, it sounds not unlike the group Yes with a huge rolling synthesizer part. It needs work, needs the stripped-down guitar and drums treatment, bur it has something. More obvious than some of Sting's material, it has a classic pop song chord sequence with a dramatic C section bur it needs clarity. This song is the one that gets the most argument. Sting and Stewart go on endlessly about the drums and bass -- how they should underpin the vocal -- but after a couple of weeks we get a track down with just bass and drums and a token vocal to give us some perspective.

Feeling slightly numb, we sit on the couch at a creative standstill. Sting leans over and says, "Go on, go in there, make it your own." This is either a beautiful example of trust between partners or is tantamount to being told to jump off a cliff, prove you're a man , or walk the gang plank. But there she is, a nice naked track, waiting to be ruined or trimmed with gold by yours truly. "Right," I say, "right," and heave my bum up off the deep plush and toward the direction of the big room. In the engulfing loneliness of the empty studio I am hyperaware that everyone is watching and listening. This will be the naked truth.

I pick up my Strat and stare out across the gloom. It's a simple chord sequence and shouldn't prove a problem, depending on one's imagination, inspiration, and context. What are the criteria? It should sound like the Police -- big, brutal barre chords won't do, too vulgar; it has to be something that says Police but doesn't get in the way of the vocals; it should exist as music in its own right, universal but with just a hint of irony, be recognized the world over, possibly be picked up by a rapper as the guitar lick to hang a thirty-million-copy song on in eleven years or so. "Yeah, okay," "roll it, " I say. The track rolls and I play a sequence of intervals that outline the chords and add a nifty little extension to each one that makes it sound like the Police, root, fifth, second, third, up and down through each chord. It is clean, succinct, immediately identifiable; it has just enough of the signature sound of el Policia. I play it straight through in one take. There is a brief silence, and then everyone in the control room stands up and cheers. It is an emotional and triumphant moment, and it will take us to number one in America.

With this lick I realize a dream that maybe I have cherished since first picking up the guitar as a teenager -- to at least once in my life make something that would go around the world, create a lick that guitarists everywhere would play, be number one in America, be heard at weddings, bar mitzvahs, births, funerals, be adapted into the repertoire of brass bands in the north of England, and make my mum and dad proud. Do you ever really get beyond them? Maybe not and maybe this is where the story should fade out, with me standing there, grinning like an idiot, feeling like a hero and just happy to have pleased.

[snip]

Laying down the guitar part for "Every Breath You Take" clears the air and increases the chances that we have a hit album. Whether it will reach number one is not a certainty, but we all hope for it. From Montserrat we return once again to Le Studio in Canada to mix the album. Generally we let Hugh Padgham prepare the mixes to a point, and then we come into the control room to fine-tune the mix ourselves. But I receive a nasty shock when sitting down to hear the mix of "Every Breath." The thick creamy Strat sound I had in Montserrat has been reduced to a thin over-reverbed whine. I become extremely upset and tell Hugh to go back immediately to the rough mix from Montserrat, check the sound, and get it back. Luckily, we still have the rough mixes. It takes a couple of days, but we get the guitar sounding almost as good as the rough mix. But to my mind, it is not quite the same. The track is almost stillborn, but it has a future to fulfill.

[snip]

We struggle on through the mixing and end the sessions with a ridiculous scene in which we toss a coin to see which tracks will go onto the album. Will Stewart and I get our songs on? Is it fair to let the whole album be only Sting's songs? Miles valiantly tries to hold some sort of democracy together so some of us don't go away feeling pissed off and alienated. What will the final sequence be? I finally solve that one by suggesting that maybe we put all the softer songs on one side and the up-tempo stuff on the other. Sting likes this idea, and thus it is ordained.

- One Train Later by Andy Summers, pp. 323-325.

Thanks, but, ah, no....

So most of the "best of" lists for the last decade have Synecdoche, New York in there somewhere. And, hey!, it was written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, whose movies I have loved so far, and it stars Phillip Seymour Hoffman, an actor I really dig (perhaps the only one besides DeNiro and Pacino who can play an icky character as well as an awesome one and have you believe both).

Well, it started off with a lot of promise. It was note-perfect for the start of a busy day with kids and the kind of conversations you have. I love being a parent, and would still choose to be one (though I'd've started earlier so I could have more), but if I'd known how many conversations I've have about poop, it might've given me the briefest pause.

Anyway, then things started getting darker and darker, and I just don't have the time or patience to sit through an utter bummer anymore. Just don't care to. At this age, there is enough to worry about and feel bad about where I don't need to invite more in through entertainment. Leave the (realistic) tragedy for the young, the worry-free, the perpetually buoyant.

Though it was one of my favorite movies, I simply couldn't tolerate Sophie's Choice at this age. Yes, I would miss a great story had I not seen it when I had the stomach for it, but in the grand scheme of things, it would've been a small loss.

And I say "(realistic)" because I still dig myself some adventure / sci-fi tragedy stuff. (Thinking of a couple of events in Avatar and my fave movie of all time John Carpenter's The Thing.) The once-removed reality renders the bitter pill nothing but a placebo.

Anyway anyway, when the Phillip Seymour Hoffman starts digging in his own poop and announces he has blood in his stool, I hit fast-forward. This is a trick I use with novels that have just put me off and made me wonder if I should bail. I skip forward in the story and see if anything intrigues; if it does, I back up and pick it up. I could pretty much glean the plot of the movie by watching it at 16x normal speed, and I'm SOOOOO glad I bailed. I could tell it was pretty much a work of genius, like all of Kaufman's works are, but it truly did continue in a death spiral. Literally.

Glad I missed it.


In other "not for me" entertainment news, I finally got ahold of Bob Dylan's Christmas album - Christmas in the Heart - and by the third song I was overtaken by the giggles.

Dear Lord it's a horror.

Now constant readers will know I love Bob Dylan. I was one of those who in my younger years could NOT understand how the guy had any sort of career at all, let alone the fame and adulation he has. Well, a fateful listen of Blood on the Tracks after a recent and rending breakup ripped the scales from my eyes, and since I've been a diehard.

That does not mean, though, that I'm not unaware of Mr. Dylan's challenges as a vocalist. Sometimes he's the perfect voice for the song (believe it or not), other times - like a Christmas album for instance - it's just painful.

If you're looking for a new comedy album or something that'll clear the party at 2:00 AM, this is your disc. Otherwise, get a copy of Blood on the Tracks, if you've never had the pleasure.

Blush

So, I made a new mix CD recently that I've been passing around to buddies and kin. I do try to avoid including anything risqué assuming that there will be kids in the car at some point, but boy did I FAIL.

One of the songs I put on there was Britney Spears' latest song "3", and a couple mornings ago while I was waiting in a drive-thru, I tuned into the lyrics. Slowly it dawned on me that the song could be about nothing other than a threesome. My initial shallow/surface listen made me think it was a sorta cute electronic drone song about counting or computers or something.

But, no, it's pretty clear what's going on. Here is an abbreviated version of the lyrics:

1, 2, 3
Not only you and me
Got one eighty degrees
And I’m caught in between

Countin’
1, 2, 3
Peter, Paul & Mary
Gettin’ down with 3P
Everybody loves [orgasmic "oh!"]
Countin’

Babe, pick a night
To come out and play
If it’s alright
What do you say?

Merrier the more
Triple fun that way
Twister on the floor
What do you say?

Are - you in
Livin’ in sin is the new thing (yeah)
Are - you in
I am countin’!

[Chorus]

Three is a charm
Two is not the same
I don’t see the harm
So are you game?

Lets’ make a team
Make ‘em say my name
Lovin’ the extreme
Now are you game?

[Chorus and repeat of lyrics]

What we do is innocent
Just for fun and nothin’ meant
If you don’t like the company
Let’s just do it you and me
You and me…
Or three….
Or four….
- On the floor!

[Chorus, lyrics repeat, play out]

When I told a buddy of my gaff, he said that whole album of hers was kinda blue, pointing out that another song was entitled "If You Seek Amy" that, when you sound it out, is "F. U. C. K. me."

And that's kinda how I feel after this: Well. fuck. me.

TLD:
One of the songs I included on the CD was this short piece of fun filler from a Stampede Beer commercial; the tune itself is G-rated, but the commercial itself isn't. Enjoy it here.

Go To Hell

I don't remember where I encountered this link anymore, I just had this info stored in my "future blogs" bucket. But anyway if you want to take an internet quiz that cheerfully and arrogantly inform you that you are going straight to hell, here ya go.

It's put together by Kirk Cameron of the 80s sitcom "Family Ties" and his fundie buddies.

As it states on the site:

This test is designed to answer 2 questions:
Are you a good person according to God's standards?
And if so, are you good enough to go to heaven?

It's crap like this that made me write my old Christianity FAQ which used to be the #1 hit on Google before Yahoo turned of Geocities.

Btw, my old Geocities vanity site, and the Christianity FAQ (including my answer to "A 'Christian' told me I'm going to hell. Am I?"), were rescued by a group who call themselves ReoCities. They thought it was wrong of Yahoo to pull the plug on so much historical web content, so they've made a point of restoring it and making it available again. How cool is that?

If you had a Geocities page, just replace the "g" in the link with "r" to see if they've brought it back. If they haven't, you can ask them to!

I can think of a few folks who aren't going to hell for sure. I'm not so sure about Kirk and his buds, though.

No Country For Old Men

Finally watched this recently and my reaction when the credits rolled was: WTF?

I went out to The Movie Spoiler to see if what I'd actually seen what I thought I saw.

And, yes, it turns out

*** SPOILER ALERT ***

that the movie really does end with everyone the bad guy was hunting being slaughtered and Tommy Lee Jones telling a weird story about someone carrying a fire in a horn

*** END SPOILER ALERT ***

then the credits roll.


To borrow from Ebert: I hated hated hated that movie.

And, I've now had it with Cormac McCarthy.

I didn't really like the Kafka I had to read in college when I got past the morbid interest, and I see no point in anyone trying to out-Kafka Kafka.

I see less point in reading it.

Don't Stand So Close to Me

(I must point out that this title is ironic, because The Police have to be the best self-documented band that I'm aware of.)

Had the happy accident of happing across Stewart Copeland's Strange Things Happen: A Life with The Police, Polo and Pygmies, which is a sheer joy. It's even a great companion piece to his must-see insider's documentary: The Police - Everyone Stares: The Police Inside Out, still my favorite rock-doc to date. (Oh, and the little doc on the DVD on the Certifiable set is a nice third component, if you have the money or interest; however, their older Police: Live is a better example of what they there were like in concert when they were kings.)

Between the two (or three), you get a real good sense of what it was like to be a huge rock star, and just how funny, charming, and decent Stewart Copeland really is.

You also get a feel for Sting and Andy Summers. Apparently, Sting is truly a gifted musical genius - almost savant - so maybe his seemingly arrogant public pronouncements are actually humble. Exactly what Andy Summers does on the guitar is wonderfully articulated as well.

For music nuts like me, this is nirvana. (Which reminds me Mr. Grohl, sit down at your computer someday and tell us the story, k?)

If you want a taste of what the book is like, this interview comes close:


Since Copeland mentions both Sting's and Summer's books, I leaped to my library site and procured Andy Summer's book. I'll report on that when I'm done. Don't intend to read the Sting book though, based on the comments on Amazon and the fact it stops before the Police get started.

Besides, thus far I've noticed that people as gifted as (Copeland says) Sting is aren't very good at conveying themselves, and thus far any attempts I've come across from Sting of that nature appear to support my theory. (I read a bit of his book online.)

Copeland, however, is as gifted at articulating his life and times - and being entertaining about it - as he is at drumming and film scoring.

One thing that puzzled me was no mention of his post-Police band: Animal Logic. He mentions Stanley Clarke once, but other that that, nada. Wonder why...

________
Update:

I forgot to include one of my favorite things from the book - Copeland's dislike of jazz, as he puts it: "jazz, a music that elevates dexterity over spirit."

How true! I do like myself some classic jazz, and sometimes am even in the mood for modern "smooth" jazz, which is muzak's pretty sister, but for the most part Copeland coins what I've thought about it for a while.

And, I wanted to continue and refine my thought about The Police being the best self-documented band by stating the obvious that the Beatles are the most documented band. However, even though Lennon and McCartney have both explained who really wrote which song, and who did which parts of songs they wrote together, they didn't necessarily self-document like The Police have.

To that end, there's some interesting stuff going on in that space, known as "Charting the Beatles." Here's a blog, and here's a flickr group devoted to it. I discovered this via both Kottke.org and ffffound.com.

This just in…

Obama still President, apparently for three more years at least. Democrats still have the majority in House and Senate.

So why is there all this (practically uniform) media crowing about how DaBomba has failed?

As usual, "The Daily Show" provides some actual perspective; the whole thing is funny, but the real fun starts at the 6:35 mark - "Democrats, Meet Me at Camera Three":

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Mass Backwards
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

I love the fact that he points out how badly the Democratic campaign was run, and how Massachusetts actually already has a better healthcare plan that being proposed nationally - meaning more progressive and encompassing than - so they could care less about the rest of the nation.

So perhaps -- just perhaps -- it's not really a Republican victory, but a Democratic loss.

Gotta say it, "The Daily Show" is still the only news that's informative and not just a Conservative/Wingnut dogpile. Now that Charles Gibson is gone, replaced by a former member of the Nixon administration, there is no news that even attempts to stay in the middle - they're all variants of Fox anymore. To me, that's much darker news than the recent election in Mass.

Yet, there's hope

I complained in this post about how pathetic, pathetic, the bestseller charts in music are anymore.

Then I happened across one of the Denver radio stations that's kind of reinvented itself lately to play the best in modern rock - No Lady Ga Ga, no Black Eyed Peas, no Rob Thomas (all good music mind you), just rock, thank you. It reminds me of my favorite stations from the 70s and 80s. Check it out: 93.3 KTCL - they stream over the web!

Within a half hour of listening, I had one of those epiphany moments where you hear a song you immediately love and know you'll love forever, like (for me) Smells Like Teen Spirit and Hey Ya!.

The song started and I thought, "That sounds like Eddie Vedder, but this is way too hooky for Pearl Jam (and I loves me some Pearl Jam, don't get me wrong, but their tunes are usually not as "major key uptempo" - to borrow a phrase from an old work buddy). It even had a yeah yeah yeah chorus! So, rushed home, found the site, and bless them they had a "what we're playing now" list on the web. Sure enough it was freakin' Pearl Jam; the song is called The Fixer.

I've provided two versions of the video in case one of the links dies or the vid is removed.





Pearl Jam - The Fixer

Pearl Jam | MySpace Music Videos

Isn't that just one of the best songs you've heard in while?

Another song I heard and liked was "Girlfriends" by Single File. The song should start playing when you follow the link.

And you've probably heard it, but the new one by Weezer is a hoot.

Weezer |MTV Music

Rock lives! Even if it lives under a rock right now.

Surprise

So, I didn't even consider seeing Terminator Salvation given the critical response, but there it was at the library. Insomnia struck on a weekend night, so I got up and fired it up.

I enjoyed it a lot. It was much better than the third flick, for sure.

If you like the franchise, do check it out.


**** Tiny Spoiler ****

Even the Ahnold Terminator makes an appearance, but it's completely computer generated, which is kinda cool. All these years there's been a prediction that an older or dead actor would be placed in a movie this way, and here it is.

**** End Tiny Spoiler ****

Watched Every Little Step about the revival of A Chorus Line (which I haven't seen for years and forgot how overwhelmingly gay it was - NTTAWWT), because Peter Travers, whom I know follow because of this test, said it was good. (And because I usually dig "behind the scenes" stuff.) Peter is my other go-to critic besides Ebert - I agree with him more than Ebert these days - but I wasn't that impressed with this flick.

Oh well.

Well, that was nice

I slogged to the end of the year bone-tired, dropped into a week of vacation around the house (as wife's job does not allow vacation), living in jams and losing track of the transition from morn to noon to night.

Been a tough year at work; probably facing a worse one. The bad economy turned nearly everyone into a bad contestant on Survivor, so half of everyone's time is wasted putting up with everyone else's panic over possibly losing their job randomly in a layoff. So everyone's trying to look useful and taking on too much (as early retirement and other attrition has reduced staff), even stuff they've shouldn't be doing, and they do it badly because they don't know how. Never having been at the upper-management level where layoffs are decided, it seems futile to guess what the motives and decisions are based on who stays and who goes, so this Lord of the Flies environment is aggravating, because anyone who has paid attention - or been through it before - knows that treating everyone as a threat only makes things worse - and seemingly makes no difference with the HR ladies start escorting folks into conference rooms.

So, I settled into vacation with the happy surprise of getting Stephen King's new weight-lifting challenge (over a thousand pages) from the reservation list at the library on day one. That being Under the Dome.

It kicks off in grand form, and after getting past the "didn't I see this in the Simpson's movie?" dubiousness, it keeps the pedal on the floor for most of the duration; it dragged a bit in the 600 page range, but recovered and ended spectacularly. Glad I read it rather than eventually seeing the inevitable movie, because children die, and I can kind of handle reading about it, but can't face it in a movie.

The best way to describe it is the inverse of King's The Stand, where rather than facing grim survival in the wide open world, our pro- and antagonists face grim survival in a closed-off township terrarium. Also, King finally steps up and gives John Irving a run for his money, showing he can do quirky, funny, yet socially relevant commentary, too.

Not often have I spent the majority of a novel pissed off. (Vague memories of Crime and Punishment and one of the Dickens' melodramas where some guy falls in a well and dies for no reason other than the "isn't that sad?" factor, come to mind.)

The bad guy is drawn so clearly - we've all met this son of a bitch at some point in our lives - so each time he succeeds, it pisses you off. A lot. If I had ever been a smoker, I would've doubled my intake during this read. As it was, I had to put it down and decompress so I wouldn't snap at the kids. I bet many copies of this first printing get dashed on the floor a couple times.

I was honestly impressed at how King commanded the story, and how much it got to me. Put it on your list for the next time you've got time to spare - because it's hard to put down - and when your folks can manage you running a little hot under the collar for the duration.


Got a date night with my lovely wife to go see the new sensation: Avitar. It's everything they say it is.

Including the fact that it's three hours long. I can see why it's that length, because while a third of it is story development and character background, it would seem truncated and less rich if it were missing. And if you finally got the DVD with that extra hour reinserted, you'd be a little miffed you didn't get to see it in 3D.

Nonetheless, my wife and I did glance at each other about the two-hour mark and mentally sigh - even though we were enjoying ourselves at the time.

The plot is kind of The Abyss meets Dances with Wolves plus a quasi-famous (among sci-fi readers) short story about the concept of someone ensconced in a pod "driving" a grown, perfect, appropriate body for some large corporation. I will never remember the name of the story or the author, but basically this amazingly deformed woman is hired to drive an avatar of a beautiful Hollywood starlet (think Meagan Fox) and when the connection is severed, the man in love with the avatar goes looking for the actual person behind the puppet, only to discover the horror that raises from the pod to embrace him (because she loves him, after all) is so horrific, I believe he kills her reflexively. (If anyone can remember the story, help a brother out.)

Bladder issues and babysitting dues aside, it was one of those movie-going events you'll always remember, so get thee hence.


Happy New Year.

Hope it's a good one.

2009 - The Year the Music Died

About once a month I comb Amazon's bestseller lists (music and books) to look for new stuff.

Today's perusal ended in dismay over the state of the charts. Since Amazon represents only that company's sales (and I've noticed they are skewed towards web people's tastes), I hopped over to Billboard and ran the numbers on types of music selling (for the first 100).

Christmas - 25
Rock - 13
Country - 8
Hip-hop - 10
Pop - 21
Christian - 3
American Idol - 4
Dunno - 16

A solid fourth of the list is Christmas albums - old ones even. 8 of them are catalogue (meaning old) albums or greatest hits compilations - and that's not including the Christmas albums that are ancient. Even Christian albums are charting (most Christian music gives me the dry heaves, even though I am a Christian).

That many Christmas albums shouldn't even be charting if the industry were healthy, let alone a showing by Christian music at all.

Note that there are 16 albums I couldn't identify genre by sight. These days, my wife and daughters listen to a station that plays a mix of the old and the new, so I knew who Lady Gaga was before she started showing up nekkid everywhere. Yet, for almost a fifth of the albums, I've never heard of the artist.

So, I think the evidence is pretty solid. The music biz, and I knew it and loved it up until American Idol came on the air, is pretty much dead.

Merry Christmas.

Music These Days

Gad, another month (or so) without a post. I sure know how to keep a blog lively, don't I?

Happed across this oddity: "The Beatles Never Broke Up"

The story is this guy passes out in the desert somewhere and is rescued by an inter-dimensional explorer who happens to come from a parallel world where the Beatles never broke up, so before the guy is dropped back in our dimension, he lifts a mixtape the traveler's college girlfriend made.

Suuuuuure.

That (mildly clever) bullshit aside, the site has a free (and surely illegal) mashup of Beatles and Wings tunes. It's a cute diversion, and intriguing attempt to sound like what it claims to be. Frinstance, it changes the Wings song "Jet" to "Jen" and is edited just enough to sound like it's calling out "Jen" rather than "'jet".

TLD: This reminds me of a site I can no longer find (I have it on an archive but don't care to search for it now) that was ostensibly a blog (before they were known as blogs) about this woman who was dying in Alaska of some mysterious disease that gave her migraine headaches so profound she was unable to function or remember what she did when they hit. Oh, and her eyes would go completely red like a vampire, so she would often frighten children if she was out and about when one hit.

The other story-line was how much she loved to screw, and her fetish for guys who were kielbasa-sized - teeny peenies need not apply.

The weird mix of tragedy and erotica was, well just that: weird, and it was fun to guess if the author was a real person relating true events or someone just having a lark. I came down on the side of "lark" because the final two posts were made by her friend who found her out dead on the top of a mountain. Topless.

Since most women wouldn't put so much emphasis on the state of a dead friend's relative state of dress, or linger on that fact so pruriently, it tipped the scale for me. I also remember the new author waxing on about her vision of the woman's soul lifting up out of her body and looking down on her bare form, and noticing how beautiful she was, even in death.

It was interesting purple fiction when it was out there. More than a few newsgroups debated whether or not she was real.

I don't think there will be all that much debate on the alternate reality Beatles tape though. Pure boy bovine shite. Someone put a lot of work into it, though.


In the world of real music, I recently spun up the new Flaming Lips, Embryonic. Both myself and my eldest daughter, who love all the FL stuff we've heard so far (essentially the trilogy - Bulletin, Yoshimi, and War), were less than impressed. My daughter didn't even recognize it was the same band.

I heard snippets of stuff I liked, but not one whole song. I'll probably carve it up and place the interesting stuff between other Lips cuts on some future anthology, but I doubt I'll put it on again to listen on purpose.

You can never really know, but it felt like they had a lot of good half ideas, but just couldn't get any of them to gel into a couple of complete good tunes. Kinda like Abbey Road's second side - except the Beatles realized all they had were interesting partial songs and rather than try to make them stand alone, they mashed them into one big medley.

Still, I will check out all future Flaming Lips efforts. They're on my "always check it out" short list with Dwight Yoakam, Joe Jackson, Jeff Lynne, Rickie Lee Jones, U2, Everclear, Ween, Steve Miller, Elvis Costello, Maria McKee, Marshall Crenshaw, and Donald Fagen.

(Quickie: the brand-new Rickie Lee Jones is OK; fans should give it a spin.)

The album I've been putting back in the machine the most is Moby's latest, Wait for Me. It's one of those things he does best: a wall of oddly pleasant melancholia.

The melodies and chord progressions that bang around in that man's bald head can be some of the most beautiful you've ever heard. If there's such a thing as reincarnation (and I don't think there it, at least how most people think of it), Mozart is back, living in New York, and running a vegan restaurant. (And is a Christian to boot.)

The other thing I'm enjoying the hell out of is Cheap Trick's Sgt. Pepper Live, which is a performance of the whole album, in order (with a little help from the New York Philharmonic), plus parts of the medley from side 2 of Abbey Road as the playout.

Listening creates that sorta fun cognitive dissonance you get when hearing a really good mashup of two songs you know really well, but without the betrayal of not hearing what you expect. This is a band in top form, sonically in the same place they were on the fantastic At Budokan, playing an album anyone my age knows by heart. Somehow it rocks just a bit more than the original.

Here's something I found via Attu Sees All (google that and you'll find Attu's site - NSFW, though):

EMBED-Ballon Bass And Box Jam - Watch more free videos
You can bet I'll be annoying some folks at the next party with that particular contraption.

Finally, this must've missed my radar due to the sad fact that no one has really broadcast videos in a long time. Bjork continues to floor me with some of the visuals (and songs, of course) that she's dreamed up. This tops them all, though. Growing a ribbon dress out of your nipples? Wonder what gave her that particular nightmare. NSFW, btw, due to nipples.

Bjork - Cocoon @ Yahoo! Video

Some Excitement

I've recently gotten a bang out of these:

2012 in which John Cusack stars in the end of the world where stuff blows up real good. Just a popcorn movie, but one that has actual suspense to offer (as long as no one you know has given up some spoilers). My wife, a tough critic, liked it too. Date movie!

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Dan Brown's The Lost Seal, in which Tom Hanks, I mean Robert Langdon is drafted to solve another mystery where signs and portents are hidden in paintings, pyramids and preposterously placed body parts.

Lovers of well-written fiction often claim they can't get past Brown's prose, and this tome will prove no different. Even I, who has a high tolerance for clumsy prose (I cut my teeth on sci-fi after all), rolled my eyes as one more character was rolled out who happed to be rich, good-looking, ethical to a fault, and beloved by all. Even the bad guys are uber-dudes.

And, of course, if you are a believer of any religion, you'll find plenty to annoy you. If you're a practicing Roman Catholic - someone who's beyond the show-up-and-kneel-stand-kneel-pray-go-out-to-breakfast stage - you'll again want to slash Brown's tires. However, in a small shocker, he reveals that Langdon is a practicing Catholic.

But, the man knows how to write breathless, labyrinth adventures with a satisfying twist ending. The dual in the dark (you'll know what I mean when you get there) was especially clever.

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Finally saw the musical Wicked.

As constant readers know (assuming I have any anymore given my near absence from posting lately), I rilly rilly don't like most musicals, so they start out in the hole with me and have to claw to level ground before they impress me.

I liked it a lot.

I wasn't expecting the plot to move along so peppily, but damn, every 15 minutes you're completely somewhere else than you were before - kinda like Fight Club. The climaxes brought the requisite goosebumps that good theatre can.

As I suspected, the plot was unique to the play and borrowed only incidental details from the turgid (and somewhat wretched) book, thus it was a great story. And it fit nicely enough into the plot of the movie we've all seen, which was a brilliant choice. The novel takes the stance that the "Oz we know" was a rosey mythological retelling that left a lot of the gory details out. The play occurs "inside" the movie and doesn't betray it.

Both the movie and this play transcend their original material to be so much better that similarities feel incidental. I find that really compelling. I can't think of another example where the derivation outshines the source, and more than once.

Some would say the new "Star Trek" reboot is an example of that, and I would kinda agree. But a lot of the thrill is seeing how the new version of the character references the old. You have to have seen the original to get the full effect, which is not the case with The Wizard of Oz and Wicked.

See it if you can.

Since You've Been Gone

Sorry about the dearth of posts. Life and work got in the way for a while. As the holidays approach, and Colorado gets buried by a freak pre-Halloween snowstorm, I hope to find more time to find stuff to blather about here.

One of the things that happened while I wasn't posting was my wife won tickets to a Jason Mraz concert at Red Rocks, which is everything they say it is. If you ever get a chance to see a show there, do.

Since my eldest daughter and I are the main fans of Mraz, we got to go. A day before the concert, the radio station that gave us the tickets called and asked if we wanted to also do the meet and greet before the show.

So, here's my daughter and Mr. Mraz prior to the show.



He's a great guy. Here he is clowning around, giving my daughter a "blessing," lofty words and all, which was really sweet.



Oh, and apparently Jesus has returned and is now selling t-shirts at Mraz shows.



(Forgive me Lord. I just couldn't resist.)

Scary Movie

I've nearly completely stopped enjoying horror movies - at least the ones that intend to scare the hell out of you, so the new release Zombieland doesn't count.

When this first dawned on me, I wondered if it was just another aspect of aging, like my once deep love for roller coasters (why is that two words?) morphing into dread once I passed the age of thirtysomething. Gallagher explains it here, just after the 3:00 mark.

After giving it some thought, I've concluded that not enjoying a good scare comes from my becoming a father. One of the gifts of parenthood, if you will, is a whole new and different relationship with fear. Before kids, most of your fear is, well, selfish and episodic: fear of yourself being hurt, embarrassed, wronged, etc. - all of which only come up on rare occasion.

After having kids, fear shifts to this constant background hum.

At the library I was fetching my returns from my trunk, which just slams when I let it go because the pneumatic system that holds it open failed long ago. A mom with her two little ones about two cars away did the parental jump, spin, and immediate scan of the environment to see if they had gotten hurt, followed by the scan to see if they had done anything to cause that sound. I immediately apologized and said I had kids, too, and often did the same thing.

Thus, getting an additional jolt - anything that tosses a stone into your rippled pool of parental fear - just isn't pleasant. At all.

My realization that getting scared for fun was no longer fun started with The Ring, which I went to alone, when I was feeling kinda crappy with chills and a headache. Since movies have always been a major source of succor and comfort for me, I didn't really think the movie would scare me - it'd been a long time since one had - and I would be entertained enough to get away from feeling icky for a couple hours.

Then, after the creepy opening, the parents opened their daughter's closet to find this (with the big cacophonous noise on the soundtrack, etc.):


I literally jumped out of my seat (luckily I was at the back of the balcony, so no one saw this), my chills tripled and my headache temporarily fled in panic, but slammed back into my skull the second I regained composure and sat back down.

"Shit," I thought to myself, "do I really want to go through this?" I seriously considered walking out of the movie, but it was so damn good, I felt like I was being a pussy for even considering leaving, so planted myself. After the next nasty shock, I debated leaving again, but again was embarrassed by being actually frightened by a movie for the first time in a long time. I stuck it out, but when I got into my car, I felt a hell of a lot worse than I had before I'd gone in. So much for comfort and succor. It just sucked.

The Ring was one of the new wave of horror movies inspired by Japanese horror flicks (or blatantly copied from, actually), which had found a way to be legitimately frightening, rather than just drop a "boo!" once in a while, or hack the hell out of a co-ed after a shower or screwing her BF, like most American horror flicks. Except The Exorcist, which if you know nothing about it and watch it in the dark, is still one of the more frightening film experiences, in my opinion.

Then, my wife and I watched The Grudge, which even got to my horror-film-loving wife who never really gets honestly frightened. She watched stuff as a child (with her father) that would've kept me awake for a solid month had I watched it at the same age.

TLD: The primary horror of my childhood was some mummy film where someone took a broach off of a mummy, which was then x-rayed, which brought it to life, and it pursued the possessor of the broach with this leaden, relentless plodding. The penultimate scene was the heroine staring intently at the jam of her bedroom door one night, thinking she'd heard something, and just as she was about to relax, a bandaged hand gripped the edge of it. That week at school our "Weekly Reader" featured a story about a mummy that had just been x-rayed, oh and there was a broach under the bandages. For the next year or so when I couldn't sleep, I would stare at the doorway of my bedroom convinced that I, too, would see a bandaged hand grasp the edge. If staring at something had the same effect as the sun does on color photos, I would've nearly blacked the edge of my doorway.

The Grudge really pinged my lovely wife. She jumped and yelled, got goosebumps, etc. (though not as much as I did - a grand source of entertainment for her). When the credits rolled, she announced that she didn't want to watch a movie like that again. What finally got her was [mild spoiler] when the thing crawled out from under the covers of the heroine's bed, which was violation of all that's good and true, because our beds are where we are supposed to be safe, as long as we don't let an arm drape over the side.

That was the last truly scary horror film either of us has seen since. Oh, we saw Saw, which was clever, but it wasn't scary so much as icky and gory. We never have been much of a fan of those, though.

So these wonderful new terrors like Paranormal Activity and The Fourth Kind will most likely go unseen by us. Which is too bad, because they look frightening as hell.

This one shot alone from the preview of The Fourth Kind gives me the willies (someone in the midst of being abducted), so I can't imagine being able to convince myself to stay seated, and then sleep well anytime soon. Though I don't believe alien abduction is real, it still gives me the fantods.


If you're up for it, go see them and report back. At least I can live vicariously.

This will be the death of us if we believe it.

Another great Ebert discovery from his blog is the following preview from the new George Clooney movie where he plays the guy corporations hire to come in an perform huge layoffs (what a career, eh?). This is his "backpack" speech.



Isn't that just pure evil in a nutshell? The corporation telling you that desiring or having a life is essentially wrong...

Like I said in the title of this post, this will be the death of us if we believe it.

(Can't wait to see the movie.)

Not that you didn't already know this

Roger Ebert's blog has become his latter-day opus. Since his recovery (and just barely at that) from cancer, some folks, including myself, view his movie reviews as different animals than his previous ones - after all this is a different man on this other side of his life. (A brush with mortality does that, they say.)

Ebert recently put his finger on what's really going on in the public/media healthcare reform debate:

I don't pretend to know if this information is available to the angry people who have shouted down their representatives at town hall meetings. I think I do know where their anger is fed. The drumbeat of far-right commentators fuels it. Their agenda is not health care, but opposition to the Obama administration. It takes the form of demonizing Obama. It uses the tactic of the Big Lie to defame him. An example of this is the fiction, "he wants to kill your grandmother." Another is the outrageous statement that he is a racist who hates white people. A person capable of saying that is clearly unhinged and in the grip of unconditional hatred.

My emphasis added.

In short, it's about nothing other than being anti-Obama.

I bring this up because one truly weird bit of fallout from the Kanye West episode - where he yanked the mic away from Taylor Swift in mid-thank-you-speech - is "legit" reporters (like Terry Moran) broke with a long-time precedent to Twitter that Obama called West a jackass during off-limits, pre-interview chatter, and criticized the pres for saying something that's demonstrably true (even by the offender: "But I need to, after this, just to take some time off and analyze how I'm going to, you know, make it through rest of this life, how I'm going to improve").

How's that for a case in point?

Speaking of movies

Haven't seen a stinker like this in a while: Duplicity with Clive Owen and Julia Roberts.

*** NOTHIN BUT SPOILERS ***


It amazes me when this much money is spent on stars and production value when the script has such an obvious flaw.

The premise is Owen and Roberts are super-spies who fall in love after she rolls him on an assignment, so they become corporate spies who are double-agents for each other so they can retire to a life of luxury and no more secrecy someday. You sit through over two hours of plot twists to arrive at an ending where they LOSE - one of the corporate heads had figured them out along the way and so set up a sting.

But it happens in such an anticlimactic way that when the credits rolled, I was still waiting for the real ending.

Avoid this one even on cable, if you're trapped in a bed, ill, without a remote and have to call a neighbor to change the channel just to avoid this turkey.

Graphic Content

This is a thing of beauty, a thing of joy: Information is Beautiful.

Graphs and charts of consequence and ephemera. You'll lose a couple hours here.