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Dec052009

Finally! Gold Monkey on DVD!

gold-monkey_tvguide-spread.jpg

It’s been just over two years since I noted a rumor that the old TV series Tales of the Gold Monkey might be headed for DVD, and now — finally! — it looks like it’s actually happening. TV Shows on DVD.com reports that the series is now available in the UK and Australia, and an American release is planned for sometime in the spring of 2010. Even better — and quite surprising, given that this series lasted only a single year and is nothing more than a cult classic at best — it’s going to include an all-new retrospective documentary and recent interviews with the series’ stars, Stephen Collins and Caitlin O’Heaney, and there may be some other special features from the European release as well.

I can’t tell you all how happy this makes me. As I’ve explained before, Gold Monkey made a huge impression on me back in the day. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a good old-fashioned adventure story about a dashing American cargo pilot and a cast of eccentric characters who live and work in the exotic South Pacific of the late 1930s. Coming on the heels of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which had been released the previous year, the series was marketed (rather inaccurately, in my opinion) and dismissed (rather unfairly, I think) as nothing more than an Indiana Jones knock-off, but it was a fun show in its own right and deserved more of an audience than it got. I picked up a VHS bootleg of the series several years ago and was very pleased at how enjoyable it still was. You always run the risk when revisiting childhood favorites of discovering that they weren’t what you remember them being; happily, Gold Monkey was pretty much exactly what I remembered. The bootlegs, however, weren’t worth the tape they were recorded on. They appeared to be 10th-generation copies with such a bad picture that I often couldn’t tell what I was looking at, so I imagine viewing a nice clean DVD version is going to be like seeing the show for the first time. I can’t wait…

In a somewhat related note, I see that the ’80s detective series Matt Houston, in which Lee Horsley of The Sword and the Sorcerer played a Texas oil millionaire who solved mysteries as a hobby, may also be coming soon. Which means that pretty much every TV series that’s ever mattered to me is or shortly will be available for me to own, except for The Wonder Years and the originally aired version of WKRP in Cincinnati, both MIA because of costly music licensing issues. Oh, and The Six Million Dollar Man; I have no idea what’s holding that one up. I have to admit, it’s a strange thing to consider, so much of my childhood being out there on the market now. It’s kind of sad in a way, like a long quest is at last coming to an end…

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Dec022009

What Would You Do With an Old Phone Box?

As a bit of an Anglophile and an unrepentant nostalgic, I’ve been bummed in recent years to learn that the iconic red telephone box is fast disappearing from the British landscape. The culprit is, of course, advancing technology — who needs a public phone anymore when everyone is carrying a personal one in their pockets? American phone booths are an endangered species as well, but they don’t carry the same weight of cultural symbolism as their UK counterparts; I doubt anyone identifies an American-style booth with America itself, while, to many people around the world, the red phone box fairly shouts “Great Britain.”

One of the many highlights of my visit to England in 1993 — one of the experiences that drove home the fact that, yes, I was really there, in another country for the first time in my life — was encountering one of those familiar boxes I’d seen so many times in movies and television programs, seeing it standing there on the street fulfilling its function, not a tourist attraction but simply a part of somebody’s everyday life. The thought of them heading for the scrapheap of history brings an inevitable pang.

Fortunately, there are efforts afoot to save at least some of them. British Telecom (BT) has instituted an “adopt-a-kiosk” program that allows communities to buy the boxes for a nominal sum (all of one pound) and then use them for whatever purpose they wish. Some towns elect to keep them functional, with a working pay phone; others have turned them into “street art” or touristy photo spots. But the best idea I’ve run across yet was one small village’s inspired decision to repurpose their local phone box as a tiny lending library. As I understand it, it’s an informal, community-driven operation in which the residents donate books they have read and take ones they haven’t, so the inventory is constantly changing. (I guess it would actually be more accurate to call it a book exchange, rather than a library.) The box has room for about 100 books, as well as CDs and DVDs. The village now has a valuable community resource, the citizens are fully involved, and a little bit of history is still standing. And that’s what I call cool.

Wish this sort of thing happened more often here at home.

Credit where it’s due: I first read about this on Boing Boing. And there’s a more detailed article about the Adopt-a-Kiosk program here.

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Nov302009

Troublesome Lolcat

Man, am I conflicted about this one:

funny pictures of cats with captions
see more Lolcats and funny pictures

It’s an interesting photo and a clever caption, but that egregious apostrophe misuse kind of sours the experience for me. I know it’s folly to expect grammatical correctness from the medium that brought us “I can has cheezburger,” but there are some things I can overlook in the name of humorous representations of hypothetical feline speech and some I cannot…

Sigh. I’m going to go take an ibuprofen now.

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Nov282009

Music Meme

Between the earlier entry on soul music and spending much of the afternoon ripping my CD collection into iTunes (have I mentioned that I finally got around to getting an iPod?), I’ve been thinking a great deal about music today, so it seems like a good time to do this musical meme I stole (yet again) from Samurai Frog…
List 10 musical artists (or bands) you like, in no specific order (do this before reading the questions below). Really, don’t read the questions below until you pick your ten artists!!!

  1. Rick Springfield
  2. Linda Ronstadt
  3. The Eagles
  4. Boston
  5. Bonnie Raitt
  6. Bob Seger
  7. Jimmy Buffett
  8. B.B. King
  9. The Bangles
  10. Buddy Holly

Continue Reading…

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Nov282009

A Little Bit of Soul

As my three Loyal Readers have probably gathered from the handful of entries I’ve written on the subject, my favorite type of music is guitar-based classic rock and the catchy pop-rock of the late 1970s and early ’80s. But this is by no means the only kind of music I enjoy. I was lucky to have a mom who loved a lot of great popular music while I was growing up. She used to begin each morning by placing a stack of LP records on her massive old hi-fi console, a stereo appliance the size of your average sofa (no, really!), which would then play throughout the day, one platter after another. Her main man was Elvis Presley, but she also liked country — the ’70s pop-country crossover stuff in particular — as well as soft rock, what we now call “oldies” from the ’50s and ’60s, and, yes, even disco. (Oh, stop! It was the ’70s, people, and Mom liked to dance.)

As I got older, I naturally started developing my own tastes and I eventually drifted into acts with a much harder edge than she liked — Mom never appreciated the coolness of Boston, for example — as well as genres that she never explored at all. Nevertheless, a lot of her music has stuck with me over the years, including a love of vintage soul. Like every other musical category, “soul” has a somewhat slippery definition, depending on who you talk to; when I use the term, I’m referring to mid-60s Motown, Memphis-based artists like Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett, and early-70s R&B types like The O’Jays, Al Green, and Marvin Gaye. The soul sound I like didn’t survive beyond the mid-1970s, sadly; it morphed into funk, disco, and a lot of other threads I know little about. What’s called “soul” these days strikes me as a degenerate form comprising whiny vocals, bland (or nonexistent) melodies, and hip hop-derived rhythms that frankly set my nerves on edge. The sound of classic soul, on the other hand, has the exact opposite effect. Even the sad songs somehow just make me feel good.

All of which is a very long introduction for a video I ran across this morning. Allow me to present “100 Days, 100 Nights” by Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings:

 

Isn’t that great? Sounds like something Auntie ‘retha might’ve recorded around ’66, doesn’t it? Guess again, though… that’s modern. It’s the title cut off an album that was released in 2007. (The video looks vintage because it was shot using a pair of old TV cameras reportedly purchased on eBay for 50 bucks each.) And its apparently not a one-off gimmick, either, but rather a whole revival, at least on a niche level, of ’60s- and ’70s-style R&B, soul, and funk. Sharon Jones’ label, Daptone Records, claims that its artists “channel the spirits of bygone powerhouses like Stax and Motown into gilded moments of movement and joy,” and its offerings are even available on vinyl.

Much like the classic soul sound itself, this little tidbit of information has made me effortlessly happy.

Thanks to Graywhale, my local independent music chain, for bringing this to my attention. You guys rock!

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Nov272009

Thanks-meme-ing

I should be taking advantage of my day off to write something meaningful, like a short story or a screenplay outline, or notes for a novel I’d like to write, or even just a recap of my DC trip or a half-dozen other blog entries I’ve been putting off, but I’m feeling pretty lazy, intellectually speaking, so I think I’ll just swipe a Thanksgiving-themed meme from Samurai Frog:

Continue Reading…

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Nov252009

Do They Make the Abductees Squeal Like Pigs?

I had just turned eight when Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released in the fall of 1977, and I remember being completely freaked out by the commercials for the film. Oddly enough, the image that mashed down so hard on my “primal dread” button wasn’t even in the movie: a POV shot in which we’re flying down a highway at night toward a hill, on the other side of which is a brilliant, mysterious light. I’m sure my Loyal Readers would recognize that image. It was used on the movie’s one-sheet and various tie-in products, and it’s been copied and/or parodied so many times since that I’m willing to bet most people don’t even realize where it comes from. Whenever I run across it today, I experience a warm spark of nostalgia; back in ’77, it scared the ever-loving crap out of me.

The movie, of course, turned out to be entirely non-frightening (well, except for the scene where little Barry gets abducted from his house; that’s pretty scary), but think of how terrifying it would’ve been had the aliens come from, shall we say, a more southernly part of the galaxy….

Close Encounters of the Redneck Kind from Marc Bullard on Vimeo.

Via Sullivan, who somehow manages to find a lot of cool stuff in spite of making upwards of 50 or so political posts every single day. I envy him his blogging time…

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Nov212009

Presenting… The Delectable Pam Grier!

Traveler’s tales are still forthcoming, but first, I’d like to provide a little educational service for my recent traveling partner, Cranky Robert, whose knowledge of all things pop-cultural is somewhat, shall we say, less expansive than my own. He is especially lacking in the areas of B-movies, comic books, and pulp sci-fi novels. You know, the crap I grew up on. Makes you wonder what they’re teaching those literature PhDs these days, doesn’t it?

In any event, we were sitting in a Washington Starbucks one night discussing — go figure — the sorts of women we find attractive, and somehow my memory banks kicked out an image of the actress Pam Grier. I was surprised to learn that Robert had never heard of in spite of her frequently being credited as the first female action-movie hero. That’s right, kids, there was a butt-kicking woman on the big screen long before Ripley told the Queen Mother Alien to get away from that little blond girl.

Pam may not be a household name, but she’s had a long, more-or-less steady career in film and television, beginning with women-in-prison schlockers made for the drive-in and grindhouse circuit, then finding her first surge of fame in a pair of classic blaxploitation flicks, Foxy Brown and Coffy. In the ’80s, she had a recurring role as Rico Tubbs’ old flame on Miami Vice, then in the ’90s, Quentin Tarentino gave her the lead in his Jackie Brown (no relation to Foxy Brown, as far as I know, but then I’ve never seen it). In between those landmarks, she’s appeared in a slew of movies and television roles. According to Wikipedia, she’s most recently been a regular on a cable TV series called The L Word.

But enough introductory blather… the point here is really to post up a couple pictures of Pam, to show Robert who I was talking about and also to amuse myself with photos of a beautiful woman.

Here she is in her blaxploitation heyday:
1970s-vintage Pam Grier

And here she is a couple decades later, looking classy in Jackie Brown:
Pam Grier in Jackie Brown.jpg

I really need to rent that one, I think…

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Nov202009

The Sparkly Thing Just Makes Them Easier to Find…

Hey, there, me droogies.

Sorry, I don’t know where that came from. Well, yes, I do, but I don’t know why I’m making a Clockwork Orange reference at this particular time, other than it seemed really boring to just say “Hi, I’m back from DC, how are y’all?”
Anyhow, I’ll be posting a recap of my Washington trip soon, but in the meantime, I’d like to celebrate tonight’s big New Moon premiere with an image that depicts the movie I’d like to see:

Let’s see if Edward Cullen’s emo dreaminess can protect him from the sword of the Daywalker! Ha!

Seriously, I’m usually right there in the front of the line for all of the latest pop-cultural fads, but the whole Twilight thing mystifies me. The Girlfriend says it’s because I was never a 15-year-old girl, and perhaps there’s something to that. (Although if 15-year-old girls really fantasize about awaking to find a sullen, beady-eyed, greasy-haired guy who says it’s a constant struggle to keep from killing them because they smell so damn good standing at the foot of their bed, and they think that’s romantic rather than alarming, then I obviously never understood teenage girls half as well as I thought I did.) In any event, vampire stories just aren’t what they were when I first discovered Lestat back in college. I’m predicting that once the cycle of movies based on Stephanie Meyer’s novels runs out, these venerable immortal anti-heroes are going to, ahem, go underground for a good long while… at least, it’s my opinion that they ought to. They’ve pretty much run their course for this generation. While they’re resting up for a few years, maybe someone can figure out how to reinvigorate werewolves the way Anne Rice did the bloodsuckers…

(Credit Where It’s Due Department: That nifty photoshop job has been all over the ‘net, but I grabbed it from Michael May; he also posted this little gem, if you’re looking for more Twilight-mocking fun…)

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