Simple Tricks and Nonsense

I was a commuter student when I was at college; that is, I lived at home on the south end of the Salt Lake Valley and drove back and forth to the University of Utah every day, a 50-mile round trip, for five years. I had my reasons for doing it that way at the time, but in retrospect, it wasn't the greatest idea I've ever had. I certainly wouldn't do it again, if I could live those years over. I spent way too much time on the road, and I missed out on too many of the social aspects of college life.

Even so, I do have some memories of those years that don't involve driving or classrooms. My class schedules often had lengthy periods of free time built into any particular day, especially during my freshman year, and I managed to explore the campus pretty thoroughly during those gaps.

One of my favorite spots was a sort of lounge in the student union, a section of the main dining area that was elevated a bit above the rest of the room, and which boasted a big-screen TV, one of the old-fashioned rear-projection models that were about the size of a bank vault. Nine times out of 10, it was tuned to MTV... and this was back when MTV was still playing actual music videos instead of The Real World or whatever the hell they run nowadays. I spent a lot of time in that lounge... studying, watching girls, meeting friends, vegging out. That was the place where I developed a taste for coffee and bagels with cream cheese.

There are a handful of videos I very clearly remember watching on that massive old dinosaur of a television, songs that instantly remind me of what it felt like to be 18 and filled with vinegar and romantic notions. The soundtrack of my late teens, and the last few moments of my wide-eyed innocence. Here's one of them...

Slaughter-Fly To The Angels
Uploaded by SirDroopy. - See the latest featured music videos.

Yeah, I know... hair metal. It's supposedly the nadir of western civilization, mind-numbingly stupid and terminally uncool. Whatever. I'd still rather listen to this stuff than all those mopey guys from Seattle who drove a stake through the heart of real rock and roll. And this particular video includes a gorgeous old airplane and automobile, which is probably the reason why it's stuck in my head all these years. I have no idea what kind of car that is, but I think the plane is a Lockheed similar to the one Amelia Earhart was flying on her final expedition.

Watching this again after all these years, I'm struck by how damn young the lead singer looks. I remember thinking back in the day that all those guys in the rock bands were so much older than I was... they were adults out there doing grown-up stuff, and I was just a stupid, punk kid. Or so it seemed then. I now realize that a lot of them weren't much older than I was, and they all look like stupid punk kids to me now. Even the ones with enviable hair.

Incidentally, the leader singer of this particular band of punk kids, Mark Slaughter, has done some interesting things in the years since "Fly to the Angels." He's now a voice-over artist who worked on Animaniacs, among other things. That same series also employed Jess Harnell, who's currently singing his heart out for the awesome (and very hair-metal-ish) Rock Sugar, which I wrote about a couple weeks ago. The entertainment industry is very small sometimes.

And I'm just babbling, killing time here at the office until Mr. Slate pulls the tailfeathers on that little dinosaur-bird. I think I'm going to get out of here... enjoy the music, folks. And if I don't manage to blog again for a couple days, enjoy the weekend, too. Savor the few minutes of real life you can manage to snatch before The Man drags you back into whatever veal pens you're locked in during the week...

Posted by at 4:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Remember that photo of Kirsten Dunst in some kind of anime-inspired outfit that I posted a few months ago? If you'll recall, it supposedly came from a music-video shoot in Tokyo's famed Akihabara district. Well, the finished video has finally leaked out into the InterWebs, and, despite the best efforts of the corporate copyright Nazis to get it taken down, there are still copies floating around. Like this one, courtesy of the esteemed SamuraiFrog:

(Be warned before you hit "play" that there are manga-style cartoon boobies in this, so some people might consider it NSFW and/or offensive.)

I've found in my online wanderings that Kirsten is something of a binary proposition: people seem to either really like her or they really do not. Her detractors tend to become especially fixated on her uneven teeth, for some reason. Personally, I think she's adorable, teeth and all. Not conventionally pretty, perhaps, but she's got something that works for me. I especially like that sultry eyebrow-lifting thing she does sometimes -- you can see it in this video at about the 2:37 mark. Is that TMI? Probably...

Anyhow, as you saw in the opening title card, this video was directed by McG, the guy responsible for the most recent entry in the Terminator series as well as those two Charlie's Angels movies a few years ago; the producer, Takashi Murakami, is a Japanese artist who works in a variety of media. My understanding is that the video was played on an endless loop at the entrance to Murakami's recent "Pop Life" exhibition at the Tate Modern in London.

Now, you may wonder what the heck a mid-list starlet in a blue wig singing a 30-year-old one-hit-wonder has to do with an art exhibition. I've read that it supposedly articulates the cliche'd Japan of Western imagination, i.e., Murakami's notion of Anglo-American stereotypes about his native country's pop culture. Or some damn thing. The really important point is that it gives us an excuse to see Kirsten Dunst in a blue wig and a really short skirt singing one of the most terminally catchy tunes of the '80s, The Vapors' "Turning Japanese." Which is really not about masturbation, as the old urban legend we all heard in middle school claimed. At least, The Vapors say it's not about that, and they oughta know, right?

Damn, she's got long legs... and there's that eyebrow thing again...

Posted by at 1:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I've got some things in the works, but for right now, enjoy a song that was one of my favorites back in the early '90s and which I've just rediscovered:

The song is called "You Can Sleep While I Drive" (if you hadn't surmised that already), a somewhat obscure track from the 1989 album Brave and Crazy by Melissa Etheridge. As I recall, this song was my introduction to her... I have vague memories of hearing it on a short-lived but wonderful radio station called The Mountain (105.7 FM) not long after I returned from my summer sojourn in England, way back in 1993. Melissa broke out (and came out of the closet) that same year with the monster-selling album Yes I Am, but I'm pretty sure I first heard "You Can Sleep" before that happened. I honestly can't recall for sure at this point, but no matter...

I've always loved the mood of this one, the plaintive earnestness, the restlessness, the slight tinge of wee-hours-of-the-morning desperation that seasons but doesn't overwhelm the song. It was the perfect articulation of everything I was feeling after coming home from a big adventure that I knew even then was going to end up being a singular experience for me. I was struggling with going back to my movie-theater job, knowing that it was time to move on but having no idea what to do next. I was struggling with a lot of things, actually. And hearing a woman's voice sweetly suggest that we shake off the familiar dust of home and just... drive... well, anyone who reads this blog knows that's still an alluring fantasy for me.

Despite my long affection for this song, however, I'd never seen this video before today, and it's really kind of a trip. The pre-coming-out Melissa looks like a tougher version of a friend's wife, and she also has a certain something that reminds me of a girl I used to know a long time ago and still think about sometimes. If I'd seen this back in '93 (or earlier, since the video was apparently made in 1990), I probably would've developed a big crush...

Posted by at 5:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, let's say you're a small boy who has gotten separated from your parents in some big, crowded place where you're surrounded by strangers. Who are you going to turn to for help?

How about the nearest pair of superheroes?

His dad must've been very proud of his son that day. I know I would've been.

I spotted this charming photo -- which supposedly was not posed, but actually depicts a lost kid asking Wonder Woman and The Flash for help -- at Byzantium's Shores; Jaquandor, in turn, took it from Cal's Canadian Cave of Coolness. And I imagine it regresses back into the reaches of the Internets from there...

Posted by at 3:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

So, where to begin? The week-long outage has really put me off my game, I'm afraid, and I'm not quite sure which pieces to pick up first. Oh, let's see, maybe... this one:

A few years ago, The Girlfriend and I had a semi-heated discussion over mash-ups, those songs in which two or more well-known tunes are digitally blended together to produce something new. Her favorite radio station had recently begun a new drive-time feature, the mash-up of the day, and she was pretty enchanted with them for a while. Anne argued that the ones that worked, worked very well, and on their own terms as actual songs, not merely as interesting or amusing novelties. She was impressed by the artistry behind picking just the right elements to combine in order to achieve a certain effect. While I didn't (and still don't) dispute that there is a certain skill involved in a successful mash-up, I was (and am) pretty uncomfortable with the basic concept of it, i.e., using pieces of someone else's work to "create" one for yourself. Anne (and other friends I've discussed this with) have asked me how this is any different than George Lucas borrowing much of the plot of Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress for Star Wars, or why I enjoy those YouTube videos that put scenes from well-known movies to theme songs from '80s detective shows. I don't have a good answer to that, except that the examples feel different. In the latter case, the end result is obviously intended to be nothing more than a joke, while in the former case, Lucas wasn't splicing together actual footage from The Hidden Fortress with clips from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Being inspired by someone else's story while creating your own similar-but-different story feels more legitimate to me than mashing up (or whatever the verb form is) bits of existing media. And YouTube gags seem harmless to me in a way that mash-up songs do not.

(For the record, I don't care for sampling, either; I remember being infuriated by the popularity of "Ice Ice Baby" and "U Can't Touch This" because no one seemed to realize -- or care -- that the backing instrumentals were from Queen's "Under Pressure" and Rick James' "Super Freak," respectively.)

If you'll notice, though, my hang-up seems to be with the use of existing recordings. I'm not nearly as troubled by the idea of someone re-arranging other people's music if they record the final result themselves. Which is the loophole that enables me to think the following is a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of total awesome:

An insanely unlikely melding of '80s pop and '80s hair metal, done so skillfully that if you didn't know the source material, you'd swear it was an original song? Oh, hell yeah! I've already ordered the CD. Yes, actual physical media. Because I'm old, and the website didn't offer a download option anyhow.

I thought at first that Rock Sugar must be a cover band that came up with a clever marketing gimmick, but a little digging reveals that lead singer Jess Harnell is the voice-over artist who played Wacko on the early-90s TV series Animaniacs, among many, many other things. This leads me to believe that there was a bit more calculation involved in the birth of Rock Sugar than just "hey, wouldn't it be funny if we started playing a Metallica song, but you started singing Journey lyrics instead?" However Harnell came up with this idea, though, I think it's bloody brilliant. And they're playing it to the hilt, too -- check out the band's website, read their insane story and member bios, and listen to the rest of their music. If you like the '80s the way I like the '80s -- or even if you hate the '80s and just like to snigger at the excess and schmaltz of that decade -- you ought to be amused.

Via Scalzi, who may have just made up for all the snarky shit he's said about Night Ranger over the past year.

Posted by at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I was just shy of my eighth birthday when Elvis Presley died at the age of 42. His was the first celebrity death -- possibly the first death, period -- that I can recall being aware of and understanding as death, i.e., the permanent state we're all doomed to achieve sooner or later, which those we leave behind experience as loss and pain. It was, with no exaggeration, a transformative event in my life. You want to know the origins of my compulsive obituary-writing? Blame Elvis Presley. Or more precisely, blame the way our culture responded to his passing.

I actually wrote my very first dead-celebrity tribute for Elvis. I had this red leatherette agenda book, the sort of thing businesspeople scribbled their appointments in before the advent of Day Planners, PDAs, and BlackBerries, a piece of branded corporate swag. It was given to me by our neighbor's adult daughter, who worked for an airline. I imagine she thought I'd enjoy looking at the photos of jets that were interspersed between the calendar pages. (She was correct, of course.) But even at that early age, I was trying to express myself in written words, to record the things that seemed to matter. In other words, I was dabbling at keeping my first diary in that book. And on a page dated August 16, 1977, I was inspired to write the following in the shaky, block-printed letters of a young boy who hated to practice his penmanship: GOODBYE ELVIS, WE'LL MISS YOU. (I think I probably stole that from Walter Cronkite's evening broadcast that day, but hey, I had to learn how to say these things from someone, right?)

Continue reading "75" »

Posted by at 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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 "Music Meme" »

Posted by at 8:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

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!

Posted by at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I haven't followed country music very much (read: not at all) since the early '90s, so I'm only dimly aware of who Taylor Swift is, and I probably wouldn't even know her name if she hadn't done that CMT Crossroads thing with Def Leppard a year ago. But then, you really don't need to know who someone is to enjoy something like this, do you?

I don't have my dad's uncanny knack for identifying classic cars on minimal evidence -- his knowledge of mid-century tail-light design is nothing short of amazing -- but I think she's sitting in a Chevy Bel Air from the early '60s. A pretty girl in a cool old car... these things make me happy.

(Via.)

Posted by at 8:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Despite the best efforts of a couple of well-meaning and enthusiastic friends, I still do not get the appeal of anime, i.e., Japanese animated films. I also don't get -- aside from a handful of titles -- manga, or Japanese comic books.

But I very definitely do see the appeal of Kirsten Dunst dressed in some kind of anime princess outfit as she wanders the streets of Tokyo's infamous geek mecca, the Akihabara district:

Yeah, now that's a pretty sight. Kirsten hasn't exactly lived up to the hype of a few years ago that painted her as the Next Big Thing, but I like her. And I really like her in this get-up. The short skirt and the stockings are nice, of course, but weird as it sounds, I'm really grooving on the blue hair. I don't know, it just works for me.

From what I can discern, this photo is a behind-the-scenes candid from a video shoot. An artist named Murakami, in association with Hollywood director McG, filmed a short starring Dunst for an exhibition at the Tate Modern in London. Modern art is, of course, something else I do not get. But whatever, I can live with it if it gets me pics of Kirsten Dunst in a tiny skirt and blue hair. More photos and info here; original source for this here.

Do I have to go back to work now?

Posted by at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Loyal Readers of this blog know that I think the musician Rick Springfield is one of the coolest guys in show business.

Somewhat less well-known (since I've never actually mentioned it) is the fact that I think exactly the opposite of David Archuleta, the young man who came in second on American Idol a while back. (I don't know exactly how far back... it seems to me like that damn show is always running, and I don't follow it closely enough to distinguish individual seasons.)

Now, L'il Davey, as I like to call him, just happens to be a hometown hero -- he comes from Murray, Utah, a former industrial center located right smack in the middle of the Salt Lake Valley, not more than a 15-minute drive from my front door. Utahns are nothing if not savagely loyal to their own, especially one of their own who happens to have been on national television, so I am risking a lot of heat by dissing the kid in public like this. But I can't help it. He's just so... goofy. Whenever I say things like that, my mother and The Girlfriend are quick to remind me that he's just a kid, that he's probably had a sheltered upbringing, that he seems to be a very sweet boy, and all of that is undeniably true. He is also -- in my humble opinion -- awkward on stage, shy to the point of seeming eternally dumbfounded, and too sickeningly wholesome to be any kind of genuine pop star. He is not merely not-cool; he is anti-cool.

So what then am I supposed to make of... this:

Continue reading "A Tremor in the Force" »

Posted by at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

In one of those weird moments of Internet synchronicity, I spotted the following video over on Boing Boing just as I was finishing up the previous entry. Actually, it's just audio without any more video than what you're seeing right now, but whatever. The song is a "I'm a Boinger" by Billy and the Boingers, a fictional rock band that Berke Breathed cooked up for Bloom County in response to the Congressional hearings on sex in popular music that took place in the mid-80s. It and another song -- "U Stink But I ♥ U" -- were released on one of those floppy record thingies that used to come in magazines sometimes back in the pre-digital days, those square "discs" that you usually had to put a penny on to make them play properly. The Boingers disc was bound into the Bloom County collection Billy and the Boingers Bootleg... and yes, if you're wondering, I still have my copy of both the book and the record down the Bennion Archives (i.e., my basement). This version is much more accessible, though; my thanks to whoever digitized this:

I haven't heard that in probably 20 years. And you know... for a gag record that came as a free insert with a book of cartoons, it's actually a pretty good song...

Posted by at 3:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I first encountered Bloom County, the renowned daily newspaper cartoon strip by Berke Breathed, in middle school. It caught my eye one day because -- can you guess? -- Breathed was doing a Star Wars parody in which one of his regular characters dreams that he is Luke Skywalker, with the rest of the Star Wars cast "played" by other inhabitants of the strip. (Opus the Penguin is featured as Artoo in a memorable sight gag.) As I recall, this was around the time of Return of the Jedi's release in 1983; I liked the cartoons so much that I cut them out of the paper and kept them in the back corner of my desk drawer for years. Unfortunately, I threw them out during a moment of extreme dumbassery following the purchase of a Bloom County collection that included the storyline. Naturally, I later realized I'd rather have those yellow scraps of newsprint for my collection of vintage memorabilia than another damn book. C'est la vie, I suppose.

In any event, I was hooked by that storyline, and I continued to read Bloom County until the end of its run in 1989. I thought it was funny more often than not, frequently LOL-funny, as we now say, and I liked the gentle absurdity that permeated the strip. Also, the frequent references to Star Wars, Star Trek, Michael Jackson, and other pop-cultural touchstones appealed to my fanboy sensibilities. And, for someone whose experience with comic strips to that point had been limited to the vacuum-sealed worlds of Peanuts, Garfield, and Beetle Bailey, a strip that referenced and commented upon current events was utterly fascinating. I know Breathed's forays into political subjects, as well as a generally liberal perspective on things, led to criticism that Bloom County was merely a knock-off of Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury with talking animals, but honestly, I think the similarity was a good thing. At least for me. Because I doubt I ever would've come to appreciate Doonesbury if the more adolescent-friendly Bloom County hadn't prepared me first, and I do treasure Doonesbury now. In a very real sense, I owe one of my current daily pleasures to what Berke Breathed and his silly penguin were doing 20 years ago.

As I mentioned, Bloom County wrapped in 1989, and while he hasn't been nearly as Salingeresque as, say, Gary Larson or Bill Watterson -- he has created two "sequel" strips and written a number of children's books over the past two decades -- Breathed has kept a pretty low profile since then. Thus, the surprisingly candid interview I ran across yesterday was a revelation. It turns out Berkeley Breathed is a man with regrets, who's willing to acknowledge that he was something of an ass in his younger days, and who doesn't think much of his own talents or creations. I found him to be much more likable than I expected to. If you ever had a stuffed Opus doll -- and my Loyal Readers aren't wrong in assuming I still have mine! -- go give it a read.

In a related note, the first volume of a new series of hardcover books collecting every Bloom County daily and Sunday strip (many never before reprinted, as the publicists say) is now available. It looks like a desirable addition to the library, and it's even reasonably priced. If anyone would like to get me a late birthday present (or an early Christmas gift), there's an idea for you.

Postscript: In looking up those Star Wars parody strips I linked to above, I was startled by the prescience of this one... how weird that Breathed came within a year of getting it right! And that he anticipated how the fanboys would one day turn on the Great Flanneled One!

Posted by at 2:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, I'm still at the office at 6:44 PM, looking at another late night following a really hectic day. Yay me. Long-time readers know how much it irritates me on those occasions when my job precludes me from having any time in the evenings to, you know, live. But long-time readers probably also don't want to have to read yet another boring whine about how much I hate something. So instead, how about if I just share a photo with y'all? Behold:

P1000385, originally uploaded by jackskitchen.

Yes, that's right, kids. That's my balding -- but, I hasten to add, not yet completely bald! -- head in the general vicinity of Rick Springfield! This was taken by my buddy Jack at a concert about ten days ago; he and his wife accompanied The Girlfriend and myself to the show and an overnight stay in Salt Lake's favorite cultural relief valve, Wendover, Nevada.

And now, thanks to the wonders of the Internets and its peachy-keen user-generated content, here's a video clip from that very same concert. This is the big climax of the show. Sing along, kids, you know the words...

Forced good humor aside, it is slightly amazing that that I can so easily find and view a reasonably good-quality amateur video of a concert I attended less than two weeks ago, and for free, too. If you'd told me way back in 1981 that we would one day be able to relive these sorts of events in this fashion, and while I'm still relatively young, I would've figured you'd been reading too much Arthur C. Clarke.

Sigh. I wonder what else I'll be able to find on the tubes before that project I'm waiting on finally makes its way back to my desk...

Posted by at 6:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Reading the Sunday funnies yesterday brought me to an important moment of self-realization.

No, really.

You see, yesterday's edition of "Get Fuzzy" turned on a disparaging reference to the TV sitcom Two and a Half Men, a series that seems to be deeply loathed by a not-insignificant number of people. I like it, myself; it's not remotely deep, but I find it is consistently laugh-out-loud funny, at least to my sensibilities, and I'm frankly baffled by the level of ire I often see directed at this amiable -- if admittedly crass -- little show.

So I was thinking all of these things about Two and a Half Men and suddenly it struck me.

OMG... I like crap.

The things the sophisticates, connoisseurs, intellectuals, and hipsters generally decry as lowbrow, superficial, or -- how I have come to loathe this word! -- cheesy are often the things I most enjoy. And in turn the things that make them gush with enthusiasm and sweet, sticky joy tend to leave me, well, unimpressed. Consider the evidence:

Continue reading "I Like Crap" »

Posted by at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Here's another Facebook meme, courtesy of my friend and co-worker Waylon. The idea this time around is to list 50 musical artists or bands you've seen in concert. As with that movie meme from the other day, you're not supposed to think too hard about this, but to list only the first 50 acts that occur to you. Of course, that presumes you've been to at least 50 concerts, which is a pretty unlikely situation, I think, for most people. But even if that's in the realm of possibility, listing 50 music shows off the top of your head isn't as easy as it sounds; I've kept a scrapbook of ticket stubs and reviews ever since my very first concert back in 1981, but without having it here beside me to refer to, I had a devil of a time remembering who-all I've seen. I couldn't quite manage 50 names even when I included the handful of memorable opening acts I've seen, but I'm not sure if that means I haven't actually seen 50 discrete musical artists or if I'm just forgetting somebody.

In any event, here are the results, along with the usual commentary, starting with the original rules:

Continue reading "My 50 Concerts Meme" »

Posted by at 6:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I was driving home last night about 12:30, with the top down and the light of a nearly full moon diffusing through a scrim of thin clouds. The air temperature was right where I like it, hovering just this side of being too chilly for shirt sleeves, the pleasant crispness that still signals to me that it's time to get headed back to school, even though I've been finished with that chapter of my life for 20 years now. And this was on the radio:

Ahhh. These are the rare moments when I feel the most like the person I used to think I was supposed to be.

Posted by at 2:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If I were to fire up my time-traveling DeLorean and go tell my 17-year-old self that one day he would more-or-less willingly attend a Depeche Mode concert, I can only imagine the poor kid would sit up sleepless at night wondering when the early-onset dementia was going to hit. Depeche Mode? Really? But... but they're a New Wave band!

You see, back in the days when the kind of music you listened to actually mattered, I self-identified as a rocker. Not a metalhead, mind you -- my tastes were never that extreme -- but the stuff that most strongly resonated with me was almost exclusively guitar-based, and mostly of that simple, feel-good variety that's all about cars and summer nights and breaking free of whatever's holding you down, about illicit adventures and giving the finger to authority, and, most of all, it was about sex. It was rebellious and restless; it vibrated its way into your bones and affected you at a gut level... or, in the case of the really good stuff, a bit south of there. To this day, a good rock song can for three minutes and a few odd seconds make me feel mean, or masculine, or sexy, or simply like I want to mash the accelerator down a little harder and feel my car surge forward like nothing can stop us.

New Wave never did any of that for me.

Continue reading "Strangelove, or, How I Went to a New Wave Concert and Lived to Tell the Tale" »

Posted by at 1:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Overheard during my lunchtime walk: Kansas' "Dust in the Wind" emanating from the open door of a tavern near my office. How depressing would it be to park yourself in a dark little hole that smells of sweat and mildew, drinking beer and listening to that existential dirge while a beautiful late-summer afternoon unwinds just a few steps away? Even I don't have that much appetite for melancholy self-reflection...

Posted by at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Briefly noted, yesterday was my main man Rick Springfield's 60th birthday. Sixty. That's only a couple years younger than my parents. Good thing I didn't put that together when I was a teenager; the cognitive dissonance of my guitar hero being in the same general age group as my folks would no doubt have triggered some kind of mental breakdown. Of course, the similar age is easier to ignore when you consider that my parents have never looked anything like this:

Yeah, I hope I look that good in another 20 years. Hell, I wish I looked that good now...

Posted by at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been working today on a little project that's led to me rediscover some music from deep in my CD collection that I've not listened to in a very long while. One of those albums is Songs from Ally McBeal, a soundtrack comprising mostly covers of 1960s pop tunes, with a few original tracks, all performed by the lovely Vonda Shepard. I'm finding that I still enjoy this music as much, if not a little more, than I did when it was current; Vonda has a warm and powerful voice, and her arrangements of old chestnuts are interestingly different from the familiar versions. Also, the whole album has a kind of pleasantly melancholy feel that's very agreeable to me as I putter around the house.

But here's the weird thing: I cannot for the life of me recall any specifics about the TV show these songs are from. I used to watch Ally McBeal pretty regularly, too, and it seems like I was as emotionally invested in it as in any program I follow. But I'll be damned if I can summon up the plot of a single episode, or any character names beyond Ally herself, or much of anything really, aside from a few faces and that spooky CG baby that popped up from time to time. How is it possible that I still remember specific scenes and even lines of dialogue from shows I saw once when I was 12, but a series that's only 10 years or so old has become a complete blank for me? And does this phenomenon say more about my mental state or the series itself?

Posted by at 5:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I've been pondering something tonight... I like to alphabetize my music collection, but some bands make that difficult for me by naming themselves after the lead singer plus the backup group, e.g., Tommy James and the Shondells, Diana Ross and the Supremes, etc. So, should "singer + backup" names like Huey Lewis and the News go under "H" (treating the entire band name as a single unit) or "L," as in "Lewis and the News, Huey," which I believe is how the Library of Congress would probably do it?

Any of my Loyal Readers have any thoughts on this?

Posted by at 10:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Via Wil Wheaton, a little tidbit that ought to be of interest to some of my Loyal Readers, particularly Cranky Robert:

It seems that the prog-rock band Pink Floyd performed live instrumental music during the BBC's coverage of the Apollo 11 landing, something I'd never heard before. David Gilmour refers to it as a "jam session" in his remembrance today in the Guardian newspaper. The piece was called "Moonhead," and, if I'm understanding correctly, they played it during cutaways when the NASA action slowed down. The entire 12-minute piece was played uninterrupted later in the broadcast. You can hear it on YouTube, naturally; according to the notes on the video clip, it's never been officially recorded but has turned up on a couple of bootlegs.

Those must've been strange times indeed...

Posted by at 3:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

My buddy Mike sent word this morning that the new Cheap Trick album, appropriately titled The Latest, will be available soon in multiple formats, including -- are you ready for this? -- 8-track tape.

Yes, 8-track, that clunky lo-fi audio technology of the early 1970s that never sounded especially good even by the standards of the day. I'm sure everyone of, ahem, a certain age remembers how 8-tracks always tended to interrupt the songs (usually in the middle of the bridge or a cool guitar solo) with a harsh click-clack sound as the head changed from track to the next, and the way those brick-like cartridges got hotter than a microwaved Kwik-e-Mart burrito after only a couple of plays. I can't imagine anyone feeling nostalgic for these things, unless it's simply for the objects themselves, as artifacts of a simpler time; I'm definitely not aware of any kind of 8-track-o-phile community that actually enjoys the sound of 8-tracks, like the vinyl true believers who still prefer records to CDs. And yet this Cheap Trick offering is apparently not a joke. You can pre-order The Latest on 8-track here. (You can also get the album on LP or CD, depending on your preference. Oh, and I suppose there'll be a downloadable version for the Damn Kids™, not that any of them would be listening to an old band like Cheap Trick anyhow.)

I've noted before that I'm not really a fan of Cheap Trick's music, but I must admit this little stunt has greatly increased my respect for the band. It's just so charmingly counterintuitive to offer a 2009 release on a 1973 format...

Posted by at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

After last night's grim entry, I figure we could use something a little more uplifting this morning. At least I could. So here's a music video I've be meaning to post for a few days, a nifty version of one of my favorite songs, the old Leiber and Stoller chestnut "Stand by Me" as recorded by Jon Bon Jovi and an Iranian singer named Andy Madadian. I first spotted this over on Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, but it's been making its way around the Interwebs, and I'm proud to do my part to spread it farther. There's an intro on the clip by producer Don Was that explains what it's all about; you can also listen to an NPR interview with Andy that gives a little more background.

And now for the music:

As Don Was says, the song isn't available for sale anywhere, but if you like it, you can download a free MP3 here. I like it a lot myself; I'm frankly astounded by the flexibility of this song, how it can be performed in Farsi of all things and yet still work as well as when Ben E. King laid down the original version all the way back in 1961. They don't call them classics for nothing, kids.

Hope we're all feeling better now...

Posted by at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Have you ever experienced one of those early morning moments when you're lightly dozing but conscious enough to realize that, somehow, during the night, everything about your environment has become magically perfect? The house is at just the right temperature and ambient light level; the sheets have been washed enough times to have achieved optimal softness, and they're draping around you wonderfully, neither constricting nor exposing anything; and even the pillow -- that accursed crap pillow you've never managed to beat into quite the right shape -- has morphed into something that actually cradles your head instead of twisting it off on some awkward angle that leaves your neck stiff and achy all freaking day. It's at those moments that you feel most restful and content. Even better, you know that if you let yourself drop back into full sleep, you'll easily go for two more hours and awake fully refreshed for the first time in days or even weeks...

And then that damn cheap alarm clock starts up with its insistent, shrill beeping and you know it's not going to stop bugging you no matter how many times you hit the snooze button and now your bladder is calling for attention, too, and you've got to get up because it's Monday and you've got to get to the office and start the whole Sisyphean struggle all over again and the whole time you really want nothing more than to sleep and maybe do some blogging sometime after lunch...

I hate Mondays.

Posted by at 1:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I encountered the following over at Scalzi's Whatever and thought it was pretty cool. FYI, there's no actual video here, only music played over a still image:

I normally don't care for cover versions of songs I consider personal landmarks -- which "Jump" definitely is for me; it's an instant time portal back to one particular summer -- for much the same reason that I resist movie remakes: I like what I like and, with few exceptions, I don't think there's anything wrong with still listening to or watching favorite older media. "Old" doesn't equal "bad," in my opinion. That said, a cover that's well-done and drastically different from the original can sometimes make something that's become intimately familiar seem exciting and fresh again. If nothing else in this case, I can finally understand all the lyrics that I've never managed to decipher in 25 years of listening to David Lee Roth's slurry delivery.

Incidentally and for whatever it's worth (not much, probably), I was really annoyed with the commenters over at the Whatever. One guy said "I didn’t think it was possible to make that song listenable," and there were several other remarks along the lines of "lame 80s song," "cheesy 80s song," etc. I know I'm in the terminally unhip minority for continuing to enjoy the stuff I liked as a kid, but I just don't understand where this kind of attitude comes from. Why does music that was once immensely popular have to be declared lame after a few years? Is it a backlash thing? Or snobby hipsters who can't handle the idea of something appealing to a mass audience? Or is just the Damn Kids showing zero tolerance for anything that came out before they had breakfast yesterday?

Posted by at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Pretty much my entire adolescence compressed into two minutes and 34 seconds:

God I miss that decade sometimes...

(Via.)

Posted by at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Just to give my loyal readers a taste of how entertaining a Rick concert really is, here's a recent performance of one of his playlist standards, "I Get Excited," including his regular schtick of inviting a bunch of female admirers on stage and getting up close and personal with one lucky lady in particular:

I've seen him do this same routine six or seven times now, and it still cracks me up. And incidentally, despite how this looks, there are plenty of male Rick Springfield fans, too...

See you all next week!

Posted by at 11:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It has come to my attention that B.B. King's latest album is called One Kind Favor, not One Small Favor as I previously said. Just in case anyone is keeping track...

Posted by at 11:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Girlfriend and I have seen the legendary blues guitarist B.B. King perform live several times, and every time we do, we seem to end up discussing the possibility that this might be the last time. That may sound ghoulish, but consider the facts: The man is 83 years old, and a plus-size diabetic to boot. Surely we can't have that many more opportunities to see him in concert, as sad as that is to contemplate.

Continue reading "One Small Favor" »

Posted by at 10:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've read in a couple different places this morning that the venerable magazine Starlog -- which is for sci-fi fans something like Rolling Stone is to music lovers -- has ceased publication. The official announcement calls it a "temporary" cessation while the publishers re-evaluate and revamp, and they apparently intend to continue producing digital content for their website, but I think we know what this move really means. For all intents and purposes, after 33 years and 374 issues, Starlog is finished. It may live on in a diminished form as some kind of blog or genre-centric website, but there are thousands, if not millions, of those already, and Starlog.com is going to have a hard time differentiating itself from, say, io9. The most public and respectable face of science-fiction film and television fandom -- our only honest-to-god, widely distributed, often-seen-on-regular-newsstands magazine -- is dead.

Continue reading "Starlog: 1976-2009" »

Posted by at 9:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This has been floating around for a while -- it seems like someone emails it to me every couple of months -- but I never get tired of watching it. It always boosts my spirits a little, even on days like this one. Maybe especially on days like this, when I'm not depressed, exactly, but I am feeling beaten down because of too many nights staying up late trying to finish the crap I didn't have time to accomplish earlier, and too many afternoons putting out stupid little fires that have everyone around me losing their heads while I struggle gamely on.

Stand By Me from David Johnson on Vimeo.

What a charming notion, don't you think? That disparate people from all over the globe can find common ground in a sweet old chestnut from Motown's golden years? Yeah, I feel a little better now.

Posted by at 5:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

more animals

What does it say about me that I could go with either interpretation?

(Actually what it says is simply that I am part of the unfortunate demographic group labeled Generation X. Neither Boomer nor Millennial, we enjoyed a brief but superficial flirtation with the marketers and journalists back in the early '90s, but we soon lost our sparkle when those damn all-digital kids who are going to inherit the 21st Century started doing... whatever it is that they do. The folks my age are trapped between The Summer of Love and Hannah Montana, doomed to see our influence limited by dint of the overwhelming numbers of those who preceded us and those who follow.

But maybe I'm just feeling testy at the news that yet another classic film from my younger days, Predator, has been added to the remake/reboot/reimagine/screw-you-Gen-X-kids-because-your-stuff-wasn't-as-cool-as-you-always-thought list. Bastards.)

Posted by at 5:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Following up on something in the previous entry, the Don McLean song that gave us the expression "the day the music died" is, of course, "American Pie," an eight-minute-long anthem that debuted in 1971 and has been a staple of rock radio ever since. It's a beautiful piece of songwriting, simple, catchy, and haunting, in no small part because the lyrics are so bloody mysterious. I have no doubt that generations of college freshmen sat up half the night trying to decode this song. I didn't have to myself, because right around the time I was in my oldies fandom phase, I started hearing a version of "American Pie" where some guy's voice had been dubbed over the top of the song, explaining what all of the symbolic lines were actually supposed to be referring to. I don't know the provenance of this version, or how much the explanations actually jibe with Don McLean's intentions, but based on what I know of the historical and musical milestones of the 1960s, it all seemed plausible.

Here's a video clip that repeats much of the information from "American Pie: The Overdub" (or whatever it was called) in visual form. Again, I make no claim on the accuracy of any of this. But it is interesting, and you get to see some great vintage pictures of Buddy Holly, among others, and hear one of the enduring classics of the rock era:

Posted by at 9:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

You wouldn't know it based on the type of music I usually talk about around this place, but I went through a phase in my late-high-school/early-college years when I was simply mad for the stuff that's usually categorized under the catch-all term "oldies," i.e., the early rock-n-roll artists of the 1950s, the girl groups of the mid-1960s, and the Motown sound and blues-influenced hard rock of the later '60s. For a while, it was like I was trying to make myself into an honorary Baby Boomer or something.

Oldies music was somewhat resurgent at the time, turning up in popular movies like Back to the Future and Dirty Dancing, and on television shows such as The Wonder Years and some others you probably don't remember, and of course it was used in all kinds of commercials that were cynically targeted to our nostalgic parents (just like the commercials of the last decade have been leveraging the Awesome '80s to lure we thirtysomethings into Burger King or whatever). But for me, the appeal of this genre was the same things that drew some of my peers to punk or obscure college-radio alternative bands: it was refreshingly different from the stagnating pop scene of the late '80s, and it was sufficiently esoteric that liking it was an easy way of declaring my individuality. It was also a vast, unknown territory with an intricate and interconnected history that I could explore and lose myself in and become insufferably opinionated about, which are, of course, the fundamental elements of any fannish concern. It didn't hurt that my old Ford Galaxie, my beloved Cruising Vessel, had a stock, AM-only radio and oldies were about the only kind of music you could find with that thing. And of course a lot of that music is just plain good. There's a reason why songs by The Four Tops and Roy Orbison are still heard in movie soundtracks 40 years after they were recorded, and it's the same reason why certain tunes by Sinatra and the Glenn Miller Band live on, too. Because they managed to express something so perfectly that they continue to work for us, despite the passage of time. I hope we never change so much as a culture or a species that they cease working.

Anyway, there were a lot of artists I enjoyed and admired during my oldies fanboy phase -- Sam Cooke, Fats Domino, The Supremes, The Platters, The Drifters, Chuck Berry, the aforementioned Orbison -- but my favorite was a guy who's possibly more famous for his untimely death than for anything he did while he was living, which is one of the great shames of music history. I'm talking about a skinny kid from Texas named Buddy Holly, who died in a plane crash 50 years ago today.

Continue reading "The Day the Music Died" »

Posted by at 5:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

WHEREAS: Life in the 21st century pretty much sucks, as determined by a whole raft of assorted metrics; and

WHEREAS: Few things manage to hit my personal joy button as quickly as (a) looking at pretty girls in bikinis and other scant clothing, and (b) superficial guitar-based music about cruising for same;

The management now presents this little trifle for your amusement:

The song is "Summertime Girls" by a band called Y&T; you may remember hearing this in the classic Val Kilmer movie Real Genius (if I recall, it's playing over the scene in which the geniuses have turned the hallway of their dorm into a skating rink).

Ahhhh... bad lip synching, checkered short-shorts, male belly shirts (revealing genuine male bellies instead of today's unnaturally defined six-packs), really big boombox steroes, hot chicks in t-shirts that read "Choose me," and the casual weirdness of mid-80s music videos. (Why, for instance, would you wear a leather vest to the beach? Or pour motor oil on yourself while suntanning? What's up with the guys coming out of the fake boulder in the beginning? Or the grenade launcher? Or the robot trudging across the beach? Who the hell knows... it was the Awesome '80s, man!) God, I love this silly stuff.

Amusing details to watch for: there's a sign near the beginning that prohibits accordion solos, and I think the poindexter being hit up by the panhandling hara krishna at about the 2:16 mark might be Tim Kazurinsky of Saturday Night Live fame. He would've been on SNL around the same time this was video was made. But then if this actor was a pretty well-known TV star of the time, you'd think he would've had more to do in the video, so maybe it isn't Kazurinsky after all. I can't tell for sure.

In any event, I do feel better this morning than I did last time I blogged. Even if it is because I've escaped into my usual nostalgic fantasies. Sometimes you just gotta try and remember what it was like to be 15 years old and still thinking that life was nothing but good times and wonder...

Posted by at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Seeing all those glorious mullets and baggy t-shirts and big-block plaids earlier sent me wandering around the InterWebs in search of more of the nostalgic same, which eventually led me to 80s-Music.net and the following compilation of music-video clips that span the entire decade. It's pretty fun:

Is it just me or did music go to hell the year after I graduated from high school (1987)?

Posted by at 4:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I've noted before that I'm not a big fan of Christmas music, and the stuff from that I do like tends to be of the more melancholy, wistful variety. The upbeat songs usually make me squirm, because their cheerfulness so often strikes me as synthetic and forced, if not downright hysterical -- "Carol of the Bells" is a particular offender in the "hysteria" category; it always sounds to me like the performers are going to ram their bells down our throats if we don't acknowledge their mantra of "merrymerrymerrymerrychristmas!" -- and also because I simply don't want to give into their shiny insistence that everything is holly-jolly-wonderful. So I was a little bit surprised at just how happy this old music video made me feel when I ran across it earlier, especially considering that I've been teetering at the edge of my annual funk for a couple of days:

Yes, I know this song -- "Do They Know It's Christmas?" by Band Aid, in case you don't remember -- and its American counterpart, "We Are the World," are sappy and condescending toward the very people they were recorded to help, and we all got really damn tired of hearing them every five minutes (especially "We Are the World," which at its peak was well-nigh inescapable). But I got a kick out of seeing the old clothing styles and trying to identify all the participants, and... well, hell, I'm not going to apologize for the fact that this little piece of '80s claptrap made me feel better on a gloomy morning. Maybe it'll do the same for someone out there...

Via Sullivan, who made me smile with his quip that, "George Michael's hair always makes my yuletide gayer."

For the record, I still miss my mullet.

Posted by at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's a quaint little something I've been meaning to post for a while. It's a television commercial from 1985 that, as you will see at the beginning of the clip, originally aired during the very first MTV Awards show. I only vaguely recall the commercial -- I think I must have seen a truncated version of it on regular network channels, but certainly not this long-form clip -- and I don't remember the car that's being shilled at all. Which is weird because I usually have a pretty good memory for this sort of thing. (Have you ever noticed that the era of "classic" cars seemed to end with the '70s? Seriously, aside from the DeLorean and a few high-end sportsters that no normal person could ever afford, are there any memorable cars from the '80s?) Nevertheless, I just love this silly ad because it so wonderfully encapsulates the atmosphere of that moment in time, the heady combination of seedy glamour, escapism, fun-loving decadence, and cheese. Oh, and it's got a catchy jingle, too; it's only fair to warn you now, you'll be humming this tune for days:

There is apparently an urban legend that this ad was shot in an operating cocaine factory, and that all the white stuff visible in the background and caked on the pipes and catwalks is the real deal, genuine Bolivian Marching Powder. I haven't been able to find any solid evidence for or against this tale, but I tend to doubt it myself. Oh, there was probably plenty of blow floating around that set -- some of those dancers are looking a little manic, and it was 1985, after all -- but come on, an actual coke factory? Would it really be that messy, considering how expensive that stuff was (is)? That's a little far-fetched, even by urban-legend standards. I'd imagine the owners of such a plant would be a very unhappy to see all their precious product scattered around the floor like that.

One final note: the pretty brunette singer in the poofy skirt is none other than Finola Hughes, one of the stars (at the time) of the daytime soap General Hospital. Later, she would appear in one of my favorite guilty pleasures, a low-budget flick called Aspen Extreme. (Usually described -- and not inaccurately -- as "Top Gun on the ski slopes," the movie features some awesome, Warren Miller-style skiing footage and quite possibly the coolest bachelor pad ever seen in the movies, an old railroad caboose set up in the woods. Finola plays a wealthy temptress who leads our noble hero astray.) I had quite a thing for Ms. Hughes back in the day; I'm pleased to see on her official website that she's remained quite yummy...

Posted by at 2:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

My results for the latest silly Internet quiz surprised me a bit:

So, is this a very easy test, or do I have a better memory of those old record club flyers than I thought?

Posted by at 3:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm having one of those downer days when I'm feeling nostalgic, wistful, a bit melancholy... yes, I mean moreso than usual, you bunch of smart alecks! One of these days, I oughta...

Anyhow, I've been thinking the last couple of days about relatively obscure songs that I used to like and haven't heard in many years, trying to remember their titles and track them down in some form or another. Here's one of those songs, Dennis DeYoung's "Desert Moon," which seems to perfectly match my mood today. I don't think I've ever seen this video before now. It's pretty cheeseball, what with the bad acting, occasional patches of banal dialog, and DeYoung's purple big-block-plaid shirt (actually, I always liked those large-patterned plaids back in the day, but even I have to admit that it looks pretty dated in 2008). Still... I like the song, and on days like this when you can feel the summer heat gradually draining out of the world and autumn lurking just over there in the shadows, I like to listen to this sappy old stuff. Maybe you will, too...

Posted by at 2:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ah, Saturday morning. Blessed Saturday morning. You know how I know I've been spending too much time at the office lately? Because cutting my lawn -- an obligatory chore I usually perform only grudgingly -- was actually kind of pleasant this week.

You know what else is kind of pleasant? Making lists and doing memes. Yeah, I know I was bitching yesterday about how I've only been able to do memes and photos lately instead of writing real blog entries -- whatever those may be -- but you know what? I like doing memes, and I'm in a better mood today.

Once again, this is a meme I borrowed from SamuraiFrog, who seems to be finding all the best meme-age lately. In this one, you go to a particular website and enter your birthday to find out what the Number One song was that day, according to Billboard, for every year you've been alive. Commentary is apparently not required, but you know me...

One brief proviso: I haven't paid much attention to popular music in years, not since Cobain and all those other throat-singing, flannel-clad mopes from Seattle turned rock into a dirge and hip-hop claimed ascendency on the pop charts. Which means I don't recognize many of these titles until we get back quite a few years. Yeah, I know, I'm an old fart. For the record, I'm listening to Janis Joplin as I type this, so take from that what you will.

Anyhow:

Continue reading "Thirty-Eight Number Ones" »

Posted by at 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

You know, every time I'm close to despair over the fact that all the pop culture I loved in my youth is now being remade, re-imagined, mashed-up, or just plain forgotten, and that nothing really ever seems to stand the test of time, least of all the crap I like, I'll hear an anecdote that restores my faith, however briefly, that all is not lost...

Continue reading "Maybe There's Still Hope for the Dang Kids..." »

Posted by at 4:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just to prove Mojo Nixon's theory that Elvis is everywhere, have a look at this Roman sculpture dating to the 2nd Century AD:

Kind of eerie, eh? According to this article, this bust that bears such an uncanny resemblance to the one and only King of Rock and Roll is something called an acroterion, "a kind of architectural ornament often found for decoration on the corners of a sarcophagus, a stone tomb or burial chamber."

Hm. A burial chamber? So perhaps this is a likeness of someone inside the burial chamber? And how could a man who died 1,800 years ago... look like Elvis? There are those who believe that Elvis was some kind deity... but let us not go there. A more likely theory -- which explains a great many things about the truly weird life of Mr. Presley -- is that he wasn't entirely human. Think of it: an entire planet of Elvii who come here in their rhinestone-bedazzled spacecraft every century or so to try and teach our mortal species the wisdom of the universe... or perhaps there was only one Elvis, our Elvis, but he didn't really die in the bathroom of Graceland in '77 as everyone believes, he just quantum-leaped to another time and place... ancient Rome, say, where he became a man of sufficient wealth and influence to have an acroterion carved in his likeness.

Or perhaps this is a very silly blog entry being written by a man who ought to be putting his time to better use.

Me, I'm going with the Planet of the Elvii theory.

Via.

Posted by at 9:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

And tonight's entertainment is:

You know, at this rate, I'll have managed to see all those '80s bands I missed back in high school by the end of this decade...

Posted by at 4:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If Rick Springfield isn't your thing, perhaps you'd prefer some classical?

Posted by at 1:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

That new Journey CD I mentioned a couple days ago is a great summertime listen, but the album I'm really waiting for -- man, that feels weird to even think, let alone admit, because this is the first time in a very long time that I've actually been anticipating a new music release -- is Venus in Overdrive, the latest from my main man, Rick Springfield. It's not hitting stores and online sellers until July 29, but the first single from it, "What's Victoria's Secret," is already peeking out from behind the curtain: The Girlfriend heard a few seconds of it on the radio yesterday, and I've just found the video below. This may or may not be the "official" video -- I'm not sure if this is just a performance on some TV show or if this is the actual promo clip made to go with the song -- but give it a click anyhow and see what you think:

I like it -- there's a definite "Jessie's Girl" vibe there, but that's okay by me, and it suggests that maybe Rick is trying to get back onto the charts after a long time in the wilderness. The press release for Venus confirms that he's going for a more light-hearted, radio-friendly sound than his recent efforts (shock/denial/anger/acceptance was a great album and a fine artistic achievement, but song titles like "Every Night I Wake Up Screaming," "Your Psychopathic Mother," and "Idontwantanythingfromyou" don't exactly appeal to a mass audience, you know?), with Rick even going so far as to refer to the new album as "Son of Working Class Dog." Hopefully that's a good descriptor of what the fans are likely to be hearing shortly: some good-time pop-rock with strong hooks and maybe just a hint of grit around the edges. (Working Class Dog was, of course, Rick's big breakthrough record, the one that spawned "Jessie's Girl" and a couple of other singles; it was also the very first LP I ever owned, and lyrically a bit darker and more grown up than most people remember.)

In any event, it's shaping up to be a great summer, musically speaking at least...

Posted by at 11:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

If you've been scratching your head all weekend, pondering the meaning of the previous entry, allow me to explain now: on Friday night, The Girlfriend and I went to something that seems to be turning into an annual event for us, a little thing we like to call "the Old Fart Triple-Threat Summer Nostalgia Party-time Concert™." As you may recall, last year's line-up consisted of The Stray Cats, The Pretenders, and ZZ Top. This year, it was Cheap Trick, Heart, and Journey. Yes, I'm well aware I have the musical tastes of a mullet-headed, Camaro-lovin' fifteen-year-old from the year 1985. Did you have a point?

Anyhow, to be honest, we almost didn't go to this one. We only bought our tickets a week beforehand, following about a month of conversations that were all variants on the theme of, "Do you want to go?" and "I dunno, do you want to go?" What finally clinched it for us was picking up Journey's latest album, the aptly named Revalation. It's their first release featuring their new lead singer, Arnel Pineda, and it is, in a word, incredible. Sonically, it could've been recorded at the band's peak 25 years ago, and yet the songs are deeper than anything on Escape or Frontiers -- it's the same old sound, but now coming from a more mature place, and it's immensely appealing if you like these older bands. I've had it on nearly constant rotation in my car the last couple of weeks. Even so, it was Anne -- who I must remind everyone was always a New Wave girl back in the day, and is most definitely not an aging rocker like me -- who finally said she really wanted to see Arnel live, based on the bonus DVD that comes with Revelation. We managed to find some reasonably decent seats, considering how late we finally made up our minds, and we were off...

Continue reading "Some Will Win, Some Will Lose... Some Are Born to Sing the Blues" »

Posted by at 9:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

No, really, just try... give a shot...

Posted by at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I don't know if teenage boys still go through a phase where they're obsessed with comedy albums -- my guess would be "not," since the "album" is an endangered species these days, and stand-up doesn't appear to be quite the cultural force it used to be -- but back in my increasingly far-off youth, it was almost as if every thirteen-year-old male in the country was issued one at the door as he left that infamously awkward, boys-only puberty lecture in seventh grade. You know, the one where red-faced PE coaches mumbled dire warnings about how we were going to start "noticing hair in new places" and we'd need to start showering every day if we wanted girls to like us. Maybe the comedy album was supposed to be a consolation prize for having just been made to feel impossibly icky about our own bodily functions. Here's a record, kid; go listen to somebody making fun of the stuff you'll be obsessing over for the next few years.

We all had our favorite comedians in the middle-school crucible of the 1980s. As I recall, my buddy Keith liked the absurdities of Steve Martin, while my neighbor Kurt Stephensen grooved on the earthy 'n' crude acts like Richard Pryor and the up-and-coming Eddie Murphy. I liked those guys just fine, but my comedy hero during those harrowing early-teen years was George Carlin.

Continue reading "In Memoriam: George Carlin" »

Posted by at 11:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

It's currently 94 degrees in the SLC, and there's a gaggle of bare-chested, tattoo'd, and be-pierced skateboard punks sprawled on the plaza outside my building, in the shade near the fountain. I think it's safe to say that summer has finally arrived.

To celebrate the arrival (which I'll no doubt be cursing a month from now when 94 becomes 104), let's have a listen to one of my favorite tunes, a golden oldie that always makes me think of summer for some reason, "Be My Baby" by Ronnie Spector and The Ronettes. The year was 1965, before most of us were born, kids:

Ronnie was a sexy little thing, wasn't she? In a mid-Sixties, big-haired sort of way. Not that there was anything wrong with that at the time.

As a special bonus, here's another summertime song that featured Ronnie twenty years after "Be My Baby," Eddie Money's "Take Me Home Tonight," from 1986:

Talk about big hair...

Posted by at 3:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I was planning to write today about that big fire at Universal Studios a couple weeks ago, and how annoying it is that most of the media coverage has centered on the loss of backlot sets and tourist attractions that can be rebuilt, while ignoring or downplaying the far more significant loss of hundreds of 35mm film prints spanning the entire history of both Universal's and Paramount's catalogs. (The original elements are safely stored elsewhere, but given the expense of striking new prints and the industry's determined march toward all-digital exhibition, it is unlikely that most of the affected movies will ever again be seen the way they were meant to be, i.e., projected by means of light shining through a strip of actual film, and I -- being the unabashed analog-phile that I am -- find that unutterably sad.)

I also thought I'd comment on the sad reports that one of the classiest guys ever to grace a movie screen, the legendary Paul Newman, is fighting cancer.

But you know what? After all the crapstorms I've weathered the last couple of weeks, I've about had it with the doom 'n' gloom stuff, so why don't we just watch a fun video clip? The audio here is William Shatner performing Pulp's "Common People" -- stop rolling your eyes, this is actually a good song, a cut off The Shat's album Has Been, which I found to be a surprise in about a dozen different ways, not least of which is how much it doesn't suck -- and the video is footage from the old animated Star Trek series, an early-70s Saturday morning classic. Enjoy:

I love how the mouth movements actually kinda-sorta synch up with the vocals, at least as well as they ever did back on Saturday mornings. As for that last scene with Kirk and Spock... well, that's why these two have an entire genre of homoerotic fanfiction named after them.

Posted by at 12:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Catching up with the news, I see the Hollywood obituary list has been unusually long the last couple weeks. They say these things always come in threes, but there have been seven notable passings recently: a renowned actor-director, a composer, three of the men who made the original Star Trek into the classic it is, one of the funniest comedy straight men who ever lived, and a seminal blues-rock guitarist. Chances are you've all already heard about these, but I'd like to mention them anyhow...

Continue reading "In Memoriam: Super-Jumbo Edition!" »

Posted by at 11:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I was listening to one of my old Jimmy Buffett CDs yesterday, and a couple of lines from the song "Pencil-Thin Mustache" grabbed my attention:

Now I'm gettin' old, don't wear underwear
I don't go to church and I don't cut my hair
But I can go to movies and see it all there
Just the way that it used to be

It's weird when something seems to have been written exclusively for you, isn't it? I mean... how did he know? Well, aside from the bit about the underwear. I'm not a fan of chafing...

Posted by at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Coming home tonight after a late evening out, I was thinking about this song:

That's Pat Benatar's "Shadows of the Night," if you don't know it. I've always liked this one; it's probably my favorite Benatar tune, even though it was one of her lesser hits and seems to be somewhat unknown these days (at least, I rarely hear it out there in the world; whenever the oldies station -- sigh -- plays a Benatar song, it's almost invariably either "Hit Me with Your Best Shot" or "Love Is a Battlefield"). I groove on its combination of romantic melody and rock 'n' roll bombast, I guess. I vaguely remembered the video showed her in a cockpit singing into an old-fashioned microphone, but wow, it turns out to be quite the little epic, doesn't it?

A couple of thoughts:

• I don't know what kind of planes are featured in Pat's daydream, but they're not P-51 Mustangs, as shown on that poster she's looking at in the framing scenes.
• This was made in 1982, the year after Raiders of the Lost Ark came out. Could the Nazi theme have possibly been inspired by Raiders' success? It seem like there were a lot of Nazis and 1930s/1940s things in pop culture around that time, but did Raiders begin that or was it merely another example of the same zeitgeist?
• Did you catch Judge Reinhold and Bill Paxton as the pilot in the red cap and the Nazi radio operator, respectively?
• And finally, is it just me or are women in 1940s-style flying gear damn sexy? Maybe it's me...

Posted by at 2:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A couple of days ago, I brought you the wonder of a Japan-ified "Smoke on the Water." Now as a little Saturday morning wake-me-up I present The Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop" played -- quite well, incidentally -- by two guys with ukeleles. Why? I dunno... it just amuses me:

Posted by at 8:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The text that didn't get reproduced from the quiz site (and which inspired the title of this entry) reads: "You are a Master! You're either an old man or a serious throwback!"

Um, yeah. We won't comment any further on that...

Posted by at 4:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

In honor of Salt Lake's fourth annual Japanese Festival this Saturday, here's an example of cross-cultural pollination that you simply have to experience to believe:

Cheerfully ganked from Javi.

Posted by at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This morning as I was driving over to the train station, I heard the song "Jessie's Girl" by my main man Rick Springfield... on KODJ. That's the local oldies station, if you don't know.

Then, coming home on the train tonight, I was serenaded by a couple of sweaty, pubescent twelve-year-old boys with dumb haircuts who were wearing baggy jeans and way-oversized hoodies covered in skulls. They were singing "I'm Turning Japanese."

I honestly don't know which of these two events made me feel more over the hill.

At least the kids weren't being mocking or ironic -- they were, in fact, behaving like this moldy chestnut was a really cool and funny song. Which it is. And at least Rick's back on the radio somewhere.

I'm rationalizing, aren't I?

Sigh. I'm going to go put on a sweater and lay in a supply of rocks for chasing the damn kids off my lawn...

Posted by at 9:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ah, the awful work day is over. Let's talk about something a bit more uplifting, shall we? How about television?

The late, lamented Futurama has always been something of a conundrum for me. It's a show I really wanted to like: an animated science fiction/comedy series created by the guy who brought us The Simpsons, a spoof of and loving homage to all the futuristicky space crap I've always loved, a niche thing that appeals only to a particular elite (read: cult) who actually recognize all the subtle nods to the big SF films and TV of the last 40 years. Oh, and it features the voice talents of the lovely Katey Sagal, a.k.a. Peggy Bundy from Married with Children, one of my guilty pleasures for years. How could I not love Futurama?

I don't know, but somehow I don't. The overall design of the show -- the look of the environment, the Galaxy Express spaceship, the characters -- amuses me, and I occasionally snicker at the sociopathic robot Bender or the frankly bizarre Dr. Zoidberg, but I don't very often laugh deeply, not the way I do at The Simpsons or some other sitcoms. Hell, I find Two and a Half Men a lot funnier than Futurama. (I don't know if that says more about Futurama or me, though, and I don't know that it's something I ought to be admitting, either...).

I do, however, love Futurama's opening credits. Like the title sequence for The Simpsons, this sequence is a tour of the world in which the show takes place, set to a catchy, somewhat goofy theme song. Also like The Simpsons, the opening credits for Futurama feature a gag that changes every episode, in this case the text under the main title itself. Here's a typical example:

But's here's an interesting bit of trivia for you: that theme song is apparently based on a much older piece of music. Naturally, somebody out there on the InterWebs has tracked down that piece of music and made it available to the entire world... click through for more!

Continue reading "The Original Futurama Theme" »

Posted by at 10:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There were a couple of deaths last week that I feel I need to mention.

Continue reading "In Memoriam: Jeff Healey and Gary Gygax" »

Posted by at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For the record, I consider U2 to be one of the most overrated bands of the last two centuries.

That remark is based, of course, on the fact that the active phase of their career stretches across both sides of Y2K -- there's a term you haven't thought about in a while, I'll bet! -- and not because I think U2 sucks hard enough to make them stand out against the vast catalog of recordings that 200 years would encompass, if there actually was 200 years worth of recorded music. Which there isn't, because recording technology is only 131 years old. But that's beside the point, because as I said, U2 doesn't suck that hard. I actually do like a good bit of their music, at least enough of it to warrant buying the basic greatest hits package that was released a few years back.

However, I've never understood the intense, near-religious devotion so many of my acquaintances seem to feel for these guys. A couple of my co-workers speak of Bono as if the man can make the blind see and the lame walk simply through the awesomeness of his blue wraparound shades or something, and, well, I just don't get it. In fact, I so don't get it that I find it rather distasteful. C'mon, people! The band has a unique sound, but I don't think their lyrics are profound so much as opaque (occasionally bordering on the tedious), and I also tend to distrust the sincerity of rock stars with causes. But maybe I'm just an old grump that way.

What I do get is, though, is the power of iconic imagery, and there's no denying that U2's biggest album, The Joshua Tree, was graced by some beautiful and unforgettable photography that remains instantly recognizable and evocative even 20 years later. And that's why, despite my ambivalence about the band itself, I found this site so interesting. I love comparing "then and now" photos of changing landscapes, and when they're familiar landscapes, as these are, my emotional reaction to the changes can sometimes be unexpectedly strong.

Which is my way of saying that I felt rather bad to learn that the Joshua tree has died and toppled over...

Posted by at 3:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Heh. This amuses me... according to the gossip site TMZ.com:

Tom Scholz, founder of rock group Boston, wants Mike Huckabee to quit using "More Than a Feeling" as a campaign anthem... because Scholz is an Obama guy, and Huckabee is "the polar opposite" of what Boston stands for.

Funny, I always thought Boston stood for Camaros and excellent doobage... but then I really can't imagine Mike Huckabee enjoying either of those things, so I guess Tom's statement does make sense, doesn't it?

Posted by at 3:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

And now for something completely unrelated to Indiana Jones (no doubt my Three Loyal Readers are rejoicing at those words), a meme stolen from Javi. It's one of those musical memes that seemed to be so popular a few years ago, when iTunes and iPods were the hot new deal. Up until fairly recently, I've been unable to participate in these memes as I remained stubbornly iTunes-less, but I've finally been assimilated into the intangible music paradigm. Well, I've got iTunes on my home and work machines, anyhow; I still don't have much motivation to shell out my hard-earned cubits for an iPod. But then I always have been a late adopter.

Anyhow, here's the meme. It's probably worth keeping in mind that these results come from the version of iTunes I have on my work computer, so it's based on the very specific (and generally pretty mellow) handful of CDs I've bothered to bring into the office with me. Or maybe that doesn't matter. I don't know... either way, enjoy the useless trivia...

Continue reading "iTunes Meme" »

Posted by at 1:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over on the Whatever tonight, Scalzi asks, "What’s a song you love that you think no one else knows about?"

I scanned my brain for the most obscure old song I could think of and came up with a little ditty called “My Girl (Gone, Gone, Gone)” by a Canadian band named Chilliwack. This was one of the first 45s I ever bought way back in the early ’80s, right after "Jessie's Girl" and "Another One Bites the Dust." As my loyal readers can no doubt guess, I still have the vinyl, but I haven't listened to it in years. (I keep thinking that someday I ought to invest in a phonograph again and give all my old platters a spin, just to remind myself of what music used to sound like; it's been so long since I played an actual record...)

A couple of years ago, after much searching, I finally tracked down a CD compilation that included the song. It’s not quite the masterpiece my twelve-year-old self believed it to be, but it's still got a dang catchy hook, and I love the early '80s pop-rock sound. Those were the days, baby. And wouldn't you know it, there's a video for it on YouTube. Apparently, I am not the only person who knows about this tune after all. Oh, well... can't win 'em all, I suppose. Enjoy a little blast from the past:

Posted by at 11:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I don't pay a whole lot of attention to current music -- in the time-honored tradition of grumpy old farts throughout history, I tend to think it all went to hell after my teen and young-adult years -- but every once in a while, a song comes along that's so ubiquitous, it manages to penetrate even my indifference. There was such a song last summer, a sweet and catchy little ditty that I quite liked called "Hey There Delilah" by the Plain White T's.

I found out today that there really is a Delilah, specifically a young lady named Delilah DiCrescenzo. Tom Higgenson, the lead singer for the Plain White T’s, met her several years ago and, in an effort to impress her, he promised to write a song for her. She had a boyfriend, so their romance went nowhere, but he nevertheless kept his promise. The song became the band's break-out hit and has been nominated for a Grammy. And Delilah is finally going to go out with him, as his date for the Grammy ceremony. She still has a boyfriend so they're going strictly as friends, but even with that little imperfection, I find this story simply charming. It'd make a good plot for a movie, actually...

Details are here, if you're interested. And I'll give a Stan Lee-style "no-prize" to the first loyal reader who can tell me where this entry's title derives from...

Posted by at 5:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

How is it possible that Dick Clark, some 40 years older, debilitated by a stroke, and struggling mightily to make himself intelligible when he speaks, still has more zest and personality in his presentation than that human piece of melba toast Ryan Seacrest? I guess the old cliche is true: they really don't make 'em like they used to...

Posted by at 1:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As I mentioned the other day, this is the time when everybody starts recapping the previous 12 months, trying to gain some perspective on the year just winding down or at the very least remember just what exactly has gone on lately. In that spirit of recollection, have a look at this:

Love those boys at JibJab. Extra credit to them for playing off Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire," a song that I always loved because I knew what more of the events referenced in the lyrics actually were than my friends did. (I'm all about establishing my own intellectual superiority.) In fact, I think Billy ought to revisit that tune once a decade or so, to keep it all up to date. Think of it, Billy Joel, the keeper of recent American history! That's a much more impressive title than mere musician...

(Hat tip to Brian Greenberg, who probably found this specifically because of the Billy Joel connection. It is your destiny, Brian...)

Posted by at 1:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A Beatles tribute group doing "Stairway to Heaven" in the style of the Ed Sullivan-era Fab Four? It's like a message from the Bizarro World, or that alternate universe where Spock has a beard; everything seems familiar, except it's so very, very wrong... just watch it and tell me if this isn't one of the stranger things you've ever seen and/or heard...

Posted by at 11:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

When I heard last night that the singer-songwriter Dan Fogelberg had died, I immediately had a powerful memory flash -- not just a mere run-of-the-mill recollection that's as two-dimensional as an old postcard, but one of those strange and rare experiences when it seems as if time and space become malleable and, for just one brief instant, you are someplace else, someplace you haven't been in a very long time. In this case, I was 13 or 14 years old, riding in the top bunk of our old camper as the truck beneath it carved through the darkness. I don't remember where we were going, or maybe it was where we'd been; Dad used to drive the truck-and-camper around town all the time, so it might not have been anywhere special. I can't see anything beyond the front window except a cone of highway caught in the headlights. In my imagination, the white lines flashing past on the pavement are doppler-distorted stars seen from a starship clicking along at point-five past lightspeed. I'm reading a Clive Cussler paperback, and on my amazing little Sony Walkman -- that was a type of portable music player in the pre-iPod days, kids -- I'm listening to a cassette of Dan Fogelberg's Greatest Hits.

Continue reading "The Leader of the Band is Tired..." »

Posted by at 9:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So, one of the songs on that list of my favorite Christmas tunes I put together a year ago is an obscure little ditty called "Christmas is the Time to Say I Love You" by arena rocker Billy Squier. Something got me thinking about that song earlier today, so naturally I thought I'd poke around the InterWebs and see what I could come up with. I found the following clip, a "live" performance of the song Billy gave on MTV along with "the MTV chorus," i.e., anybody around the cable net's offices who was willing to appear on camera. It's a fun little video, full of genuine -- if goofy -- cheer, and if you remember the early days of music videos and the "vee-jays" who introduced them, you'll no doubt recognize some faces in the crowd. I gotta say, though... that sweater that Billy is wearing... oy. You'll never find a bigger apologist for the eccentric fashions of the Reagan Years -- I love and miss that decade with a fierce passion, and I'd still have my mullet and Members Only jacket if I could -- but that sweater goes beyond even my pale...

Posted by at 11:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, I've been thinking all day about that Starfighter video game, specifically about how truly weird it is that somebody bothered to make one and that people -- at least a few people -- are moved to talk about it here in the year 2007, some 23 years down the road from the movie's release.

Look at this way: the guys who made that game, the bloggers who've posted about it, and the people who read those blogs are all using technologies that would've sounded almost as science-fictiony back in 1984, the year The Last Starfighter was released, as the idea of aliens recruiting Earth kids to fight in interstellar wars, which is that movie's premise. The Internet is arguably one of the most revolutionary gadgets our species has ever come up with, and what do we mostly use it for? Besides distributing pictures of naked girls, I mean? To commemorate, reproduce, disseminate, and obsess over pop-cultural artifacts that are two or three decades old. In other words, we're using this very futuristic tech to talk about stuff from the past. Does that strike anyone else as weird?

I've been gradually formulating an idea over the past several months, largely in response to all the recent remakes of movies that I loved as a kid, that popular culture seems to have frozen -- some would probably say "stagnated" -- somewhere around the end of the 1980s. Oh, sure, a lot of original work is still being produced, but the stuff that really gets people talking all stems from a roughly 25-year period -- let's say 1966-1989 -- that ended a generation ago.

Continue reading "The End of Pop Culture?" »

Posted by at 11:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This one took a little effort, but you kids are worth it: earlier this afternoon, my buddy Dave sent me a link to a short blog entry which reads as follows:

If you're a child of the 1980s, you're no doubt well aware of the movie The Last Starfighter, the fantasy epic about a videogame lovin' kid in a trailer park who's recruited by aliens as a gunner an intergalactic battle. I mean, based on that short description alone how can you not think the movie is awesome? The only problem is that the Last Starfighter game was never actually released. As crazy as it is, Atari developed the game but never released it for some reason. Talk about not following through on capitalizing on ancillary markets and product tie-ins.

Well, 23 years later the game has finally seen the light of day. Sure, its tech specs are less than impressive at this point, but you can't beat the nostalgia value. It was custom-built into a cabinet that looks exactly like the one from the movie, but if you want to try it in the comfort of your own home you can now download the game as a simple exe file. Who knows, maybe you'll be recruited if you try it out and are good enough.

Hmm, thinks I, this is intriguing. I remember liking The Last Starfighter back in the day. I would've been about 14 when it came out, and it was a perfect little piece of summertime adolescent wish fulfillment; what disaffected teen hasn't dreamed of discovering they have some remarkable talent that will enable them to save the day? Or, in the case of Alex Rogan, the protagonist of TLS, the universe? The summer of '84 was also the golden age of my interest in video gaming, so naturally I thought it be totally awesome to play a for-real arcade game just like the one in the flick. And now someone has finally made such a game? Awesome! Where do I click for more information? I tried here, the link referenced in the blog entry I quote above. Nope, not the source of this story, just another blog:

Who didn't walk out of The Last Starfighter -- yep, the Lance Guest movie from the '80s -- hoping to find a Starfighter game in the arcade? Sadly, the game was never produced. But some guys over at Rogue Synapse recreated a playable version of the actual game from the movie -- it's a free download -- and offer drawings of the movie-prop game cabinet. Add a little MAME ingenuity and you've got yourself the arcade you dreamed of as a kid. (Just don't leave me behind if Centauri comes for you first.)

Okay, now we're getting somewhere, a destination at last... and I'll be darned if the screen caps of the game these guys have cooked up don't look just like what I remember from the movie. Very impressive indeed... personally, I can't imagine having enough dedication to any movie to spend the time and effort needed to develop a game, let alone build a cabinet to house it, but I am utterly blown away that someone out there has. It's so easy to imagine myself walking up to this thing in the middle of a dark, cacophonous room that smells of sweat and ozone, a heavy wad of quarters dragging my pants pocket all out of shape, only moments away from becoming the hero of the story behind the screen, and in my own mind... sometimes I really miss being 14.

Posted by at 11:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So, I'm just plugging away at today's stack o' work in the New Proofreaders' Cave as a cold front sweeps into the valley and paints the sky the color of lead. I'm listening to ye olde iTunes, a little of my man Rick, and I thought I'd share the one I coming back to:

I look around me and I see what I wanted and what I settled for
Yeah, I've got the heart of a Joan of Arc but the soul of a gigolo.
I've been good at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Anytime I stopped to smell the roses they drew blood from me.
Do you know what I mean?
You never ever get away clean. But it's alright,
Yeah, touchdown, turn around, flag on the play.

It's always something, you know it is, it's always something,
It's always something, everyday, it's always something.

When I was a kid the teachers and the priests said,
"Why do you let him run around like that?"
My father said, "If the boy wants to play guitar, I say we let him."
Through the hard years he was my rock
when I just could not win.
So it goes y'know my father died
just before my leaky ship came in.

Do you know what I mean?
You never ever get away clean. Oh, but it's alright yeah.
Down one, homerun, your dog steals the ball.

I step up to the table in the middle of my life
and I take my cards and I check them twice.
I've got a killer hand and I'm ready to stake my claim,
the cops raid the game.

...it's always something

That's a great song, "It's Always Something" (sometimes rendered as "itsalwayssomething"), from the 1999 album Karma. It's heavily autobiographical, and not nearly as melancholy as the lyrics alone probably make it sound. The image it conjures in my mind is of a middle-aged guy who's been seriously knocked around by the universe but is still standing and somehow managing to soldier on. Which is what Rick Springfield is, and I guess it's what I am, too, at the moment. It certainly seems to fit my mood this afternoon.

My day job has been slightly less overwhelming recently, but I'm still feeling pretty frazzled, and like I'm not accomplishing much outside of keeping the bills paid. Not much of any substance anyhow, as my recent blog entries no doubt demonstrate. There are so few hours in the day, and so many projects both at the office and at home that need my attention, and my attention span seems to be down to about a tenth of a second these days.

None of which anyone cares about, probably. Welcome to the grown-up world, Bennion. Yeah, yeah, I know. It's a great song, anyhow. Give it a download, or whatever you kids do these days.

Posted by at 1:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Via Cheno, here's a highly entertaining music video featuring Christopher Walken dancing to Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice." Sure, you've probably seen it before, but watch it again. It'll make you smile:

You know, it's really a shame that Walken is so often typecast as a violent loon, or otherwise freaky characters, because he really is wonderfully charismatic and funny when he's given a chance to be. And, as this clip demonstrates, he can dance. If someone were to attempt to revive the old-fashioned Fred Astaire-style song-and-dance picture, I can totally see him starring...

Posted by at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As best I can recall, my introduction to the medium of comic books came when I was six years old. I was home from school, sick in bed with a bad cold or the flu or something. My dad went to the local drugstore to get some medicine, and when he returned, he also had with him a little treat that he hoped would cheer me up, or at least distract me in between puking sessions: a pair of what he called "funnybooks." Which confused me, because they weren't funny. But that's beside the point. One was a collection of stories about Superman and his various friends, cousins, and pets. The other (which I found much more appealing, probably due to the semi-lurid cover art) was an issue of a series called Marvel Team-Up.

As the title suggests, the premise of this series was to combine two or more characters who wouldn't have ordinarily crossed paths in their own titles, and then send them off on an adventure together. In the issue my dad got for me -- which somehow is the only one of this series I've ever read -- the action was played straight. Apparently, however, not every issue was so serious:

Spider-Man and the cast of Saturday Night Live? Wow, I've got to track that one down... that's got to be a hoot. Especially if you read it drunk, which is probably how it was written. Click the pic to go to the image source and a synopsis.

Incidentally, I understand that most issues of Marvel Team-Up were self-contained stories. Naturally, that lone issue my dad got me, the only one I've ever read -- which, to no one's surprise I'm sure, I still have -- was one of the rare two-parters. To this day, I have idea how Spidey manages to free the Scarlet Witch from Cotton Mather's foul mind-controlling cross-power...

Posted by at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Well, I've been been accomplishing nothing fast on this lovely Saturday afternoon. The Girlfriend is spending the weekend at her parents' place out in Tooele and I was planning to take care of all kinds of mundane jobs around the Compound that I keep putting off, but instead I've spent much of the day puttering around my office, surfing the web, IM'ing with some buddies, and listening to Pandora.com. (That's been a strange journey today. The algorithms that supposedly determine your tastes started me off with Natalie Imbruglia's "Torn"; now, three hours later, I'm listening to Ozzy Osbourne. That either says something about me, or about Pandora, and I haven't been able to decide which...)

You know what, though? I'm okay with not having done anything noteworthy today. It's felt damn good to just screw around, actually. I've been something of a stress-kitten lately, and I've been suffering for it (briefly, I carry my tension in my back and I also tend to sleep in awkward positions, and those two variables reached critical mass about a week ago and left me with a kinked neck that I couldn't turn to the left without yelping in pain). Well, I just realized that nothing hurts at the moment, for the first time in days. It's luxurious, and it goes a long way toward assuaging my conscience.

And if that's not enough, I've found some amusing stuff out there today, which I will share with you below the fold:

Continue reading "Random 'Net Crap on a Saturday Afternoon" »

Posted by at 6:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Sometimes we need to be reminded of the startingly obvious. Click the image and go read the rest of the strip. Funny and wise, a rare combination...

Posted by at 4:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As long as we're talking music, here's an interesting trivia note: the compact disc was introduced 25 years ago today. There's a pretty detailed article about its development here... although I notice it failed to mention that the preliminary work in converting analog music to a digital file was done by a grad student at my very own alma mater, the University of Utah. Granted, the actual physical disc technology was developed later, by other people, but the ground work for the digital music revolution was done right here in my back yard.

Continue reading "My First CD(s)" »

Posted by at 2:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

So, if you weren't following along in the comments, the correct answer to yesterday's "pop quiz" -- i.e., what do the groups ZZ Top, The Pretenders, and The Stray Cats have in common? -- was provided by our esteemed webmaster Jack: those three bands all performed Wednesday night at West Valley City's Usana Amphitheater, and The Girlfriend and I were there for what seems to be turning into an annual tradition for us, namely, seeing one multiple-act, '80s-nostalgia outdoor concert per year. (Last year's entry in this category was Journey and Def Leppard, if you'll recall.)

I was pretty enthusiastic for this show, although it did strike me as a really strange line-up. When I first heard about it, the only thing I could think of that these bands had in common was that they all had hit songs in the year 1983. (That would be the three tunes whose videos I posted yesterday: "(She's) Sexy + 17" by The Stray Cats, "Back on the Chain Gang" by The Pretenders, and "Gimme All Your Lovin'" by ZZ Top.) The more I pondered it, though, the more I realized that it was actually brilliant programming; there was something for everyone! You had the good-time retro rockabilly of The Cats for the neo-swing hipster crowd; the punk-influenced "modern" sound of The Pretenders for the aging New Wavers-turned-suburbanites (easy to spot in their madras shorts and polo shirts); and down-and-dirty, bluesy Tex-Mex rock and roll of ZZ for the former (and current) mulletheads. Guess which category I fall into?

Continue reading "Like a Boomerang, I Need a Repeat" »

Posted by at 1:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Before we begin, yes, that title up there is indeed a play on words, a pun, as it were. Groan if you feel the need. I'll wait...

Finished with that? Good, now let's begin. Tell me -- if you can -- what do the following three items have in common?

I'll provide the answer sometime tomorrow, after I've gotten some sleep...

Posted by at 11:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

That obnoxious buzzing sound you hear? It's gotta be Satan's snowblower, because David Lee Roth is rejoining Van Halen for a concert tour.

(Naturally, the closest this tour is coming to my stupid little backwater is Glendale, Arizona. Sigh.)

The cynic in me gives Eddie and Diamond Dave maybe three performances before they're at each other's throats again and the whole enterprise is disintegrating under the weight of their respective egos. The romantic in me hopes that they somehow manage to hold it together, make a lot of money, and realize they could make even more money by adding additional performances to the roster... like, say, one in Salt Lake City. Hey, it's not so crazy... The Police Reunion Tour is still underway, isn't it? Of course, they passed over my hometown, too, the bastards...

Van Halen was never my favorite band, but they were pretty ubiquitous during my formative years ("Jump," "Panama," and "I'll Wait" are indelible tracks on the soundtrack of my life, and "Dance the Night Away" is simply a perfect little summertime parfait), and I just think it would be way cool to see Dave and Eddie on stage together, as they should be. Nothing against Sammy Hagar, whose stint with the band also generated a lot of good music, but David Lee, as big an ass as he appears to be, is the one true lead singer of this particular group, as far as I'm concerned. I won't travel to catch this tour, but if by some miracle they do add a Utah date, man, I'm so there...

Posted by at 2:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Perhaps the cheesiest episode ever of the old 70s-vintage Buck Rogers TV show -- which is saying a lot, considering how that entire series was one long block of yummy, yummy fromage -- was "Space Rockers," wherein evil Jerry Orbach wants to control the minds of the galaxy's youth via subliminal signals embedded in truly awful music. Actually, it probably wasn't such a bad idea for a story, at least not back then, when people still believed there were backmasked Satanic messages underlying "Stairway to Heaven." The way it was executed, however... oy. I thought it was embarrassing even when I was a kid and Buck was don't-miss-viewing.

Part of what made it so dippy was the appearance of the "rock" band Orbach was secretly using for his nefarious scheme. Leaving aside their cringe-inducing costumes -- which consisted of body stockings and rope lights -- their "playing" looked really, well, goofy. The series was set in the 25th Century, so everything had to be electronic and futuristic-looking, right? That meant that the "guitar" had no strings and Bonzo played his "drum kit" by tapping plastic rods with a pencil. But the most ridiculous item was the synthesizer/keyboard doohickey: it was just a table with colored circles on it, which was the musician "played" by passing his hands (or, in an over-the-top eruption of Velveeta, his leg) over them. Have a look at the video, if you dare.

Silly, right? Well, maybe not. Via Scalzi comes word of a new electronic musical instrument called the ReacTable, and I'll be damned if it isn't highly reminiscent of that old Buck Rogers prop:

Wired.com has an article about this new instrument here.

You know, if something from Buck Rogers had to developed out here in the real world, I think I'd have chosen those spandex jumpsuits that Erin Gray always wore. Maybe there's still hope for those...

Posted by at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

You know, I like to think of myself as a pretty good writer, able to turn a decent phrase and evoke a mood when it suits me. But there are times when I run across something I wish I'd written, something that so perfectly crystallizes an idea, a moment in time, a cultural scene, that I can only doff my hat, hang my head, and think, "Damn, how does he do that?"

Case in point: John Scalzi's fever dream du jour:

I've mentioned before that there's a musician out there named Mike Scalzi (no relation) who is the leader of a band called Slough Feg, who play unreconstituted pre-hair band-era metal; really, you can taste the bong resin, see the black light Houses of the Holy poster and feel the conversion van plush carpet between your toes when you listen to these dudes.

[Listen to the latest Slough Feg album] and be transported to a land that time forgot: where Poison and Cinderella and Winger were all publicly executed for their crimes against humanity, where Vikings do roam the land, hoisting their mighty warhammers to battle the leather clad, GTO-driving survivors of the nuclear apocalypse, and where all the women look just like Julie Strain, and they're totally hot for you in your Music from "The Elder" t-shirt, and they've got a friend who looks like Little Queen-era Ann Wilson that they want to bring over to your garage loft for a special, special time. You know, before you all have to go out and kill some orcs. With your swords. That eat souls.

Good times, good times.

Good times indeed... and a good trick of exactly capturing the sticky zeitgeist shared by all early-teenage boys circa 1982 or so, back when our hormone-addled imaginations were fueled by endless reruns of John Carpenter movies on HBO, nascent music videos, Heavy Metal magazine, Robert E. Howard reprints, cheap pin-up posters won at state-fair midway games, and rounds of D&D played in our best friend's clammy basement bedroom, not to mention the occasional, furtive glimpse of our dad's Playboy stash and way, way too much sugar delivered by direct Slurpee infusion. God, I do miss those days, sometimes...

Posted by at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Courtesy of Eric D. Snider, a former Utahn who now snarks at movies for a living in Portland, Oregon, comes a manifesto written by this guy, a radio DJ from the Pacific Northwest. With only a few minor tweaks, it could've just as easily been written by myself:

What a geek believes
According to Rick Emerson

I believe that Han shot first. I believe that Ally Sheedy was hotter before Molly Ringwald cleaned her up. I believe in miniatures, models, claymation, and not revealing the shark until you absolutely have to. I believe that George Lucas, for better or for worse, change[d] the way we see the world, each other, and ourselves. And I believe that we will someday reach those stars that he himself made visible. I believe that George Lucas is also a narrow-minded, money-grubbing, pig-headed slave to the now, who ought to be locked away from his own creations, lest he do them further harm. I believe that Jean-Luc Picard is the better Starship Captain, but I also believe that James Tiberius Kirk is infinitely cooler. I believe that a child standing in line to buy a book at midnight is fantastic; I believe that reading makes you smart — it’s schools that make you dumb. I believe that any episode of Futurama is better than any program featuring a precocious teenager who’s wise beyond their years. I also believe Buffy the Vampire Slayer to be the sole exception that proves this rule. I believe that comic books are an art form, and will someday be recognized as such. I believe that good shows die too young; and crap shows last too long. I believe that Eddie Izzard is the funniest man alive, and I don’t care whether you’ve ever heard of him or not — it’s still true. I believe that a girl who likes movies about zombies is hotter than whoever is on the cover of Maxim this month. I believe that Belloch ate that fly, I swear to God that I heard Luke call Leia “Carrie,” and I believe that Samwise Gamgee never quite got the credit he really deserved. I believe in magic, I believe in dreams, I believe in the power of music, movies, and the untold worlds inside an everyday library card. And I do not believe that geeks will inherit the earth; I believe that we already have.

So, did you catch all the references? If you're wondering about those tweaks I mentioned, they're after the fold:

Continue reading "What a Geek Believes" »

Posted by at 1:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Oh, boy... remember what I said earlier about disgust, embarassment, and lingering regrets? What combination of those emotions do you suppose these guys are feeling now that their 20-year-old homemade music video for a goofy novelty song has hit the InterWebs?

Incidentally, the purveyors of "Pac-Man Fever," Buckner and Garcia, have a web site. I'm shocked to discover that you can still get their 1982 album of video-game-themed ditties; download it from the usual sources or order the CD here. (I'd recommend you order the tangible artifact, personally; I've dealt with CD Baby before, and it's a great company, an indie record shop in Oregon that'll send you some of the most deliciously eccentric e-mail you've ever read...)

(My thanks to Scalzi for bringing this to the world's attention.)

Posted by at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wil Wheaton on reports that Hollywood execs were using last week's Comic-Con as a focus group:

For those [Hollywood] executives [who almost always seem to screw up movie adaptations of the things fanboys love], I present a very brief, very simple primer in understanding geeks: We want this stuff to be done right because we’ve lived it for our entire lives and know it better than any of you ever will. We’ve played with the action figures and written the fan fiction and crammed fifteen of our friends into the hotel room so we could afford to go to the conventions where we buy T-shirts that say HAN SHOT FIRST because, goddammit, this stuff is our lives. Before we could talk to girls, there was Princess Leia. Before we had cars, there was the Batmobile. Before we could find escape from the horrors of modren life in a bottle, we escaped into the pages of comic books and science fiction magazines.

These stories that you buy and put on the big screen may just be numbers on a yearly accounting to you, but they are more than that to us. To us, they are something that brings us together and makes us part of an exclusive (and frequently stinky, unfortunately) club.

I concur. The whole essay is a passionate battle-cry that's worth reading if you've ever salivated at the thought of your favorite superhero coming to live-action life, only to be crushed when the movie turns out to be colossal dud like, well, 98% of the superhero movies that come out. Be warned, though -- Wil can get pretty potty-mouthed when he's worked up about something, and he's very worked up about the upcoming movie adaptation of Watchmen...

Posted by at 5:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Damn it! I just heard that the Weekly World News -- that most outrageous of supermarket tabloids, the one which brings us vital updates on the impending end of the world as well as the latest adventures of Bat Boy -- is ceasing publication in only a few short weeks.

The WWN is utterly ridiculous, of course -- is there anyone, even in the farthest reaches of the Ozarks, who actually believes anything they read in its pages? -- but it's always brought me some much-needed amusement as I stood in line at the checkout stand with the Muzak boring into my skull and my eyeballs burning from the flourescent overheads. I'm going to miss seeing which politicians are meeting with the aliens this month...

One note of interest: the article I linked to above says that WWN "...was also known as a reliable source of paychecks for science fiction and fantasy writers looking to make a few extra bucks." I always wondered where that stuff came from.

Posted by at 5:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Sorry for the crass title, but that episode of South Park so perfectly encapsulated Paris Hilton's low character in that one vulgar phrase that I have a difficult time thinking of her in any other terms.

Anyhow, I've been trying to work up the dudgeon to comment on the media circus that accompanied her release from jail last night -- you'd have thought it was the biggest damn movie premiere in the history of moving pictures, the way EntertainmentExtraAccessTonight was so breathlessly talking about it -- but I just can't seem to summon the words I need to adequately convey my disgust with the media, with the SSW's stupid fanbase for idolizing this vacuous waste of protoplasm, and even with my own inability to leave this story alone while being fully aware that I'm giving the little twit exactly what she craves: attention. (oh, the hurtful prick of irony!) So I'll borrow someone else's observations instead, and let them stand in as reasonably close facsimiles of my own thoughts:

Phil Spector is on trial for murder but nobody notices. The newspapers have been filled with reports that Paris served more time than 80 percent of people accused of similar crimes. They fail to take into account that Paris was pulled over three times. That she was swerving. That she had a signed statement saying she knew she was not allowed to drive. That she failed to show up to mandatory classes. The judges have discretion in these cases for a reason. Paris had flagrantly flouted the law. Several days ago she called Barbara Walters at 2 in the morning, 11 at night West Coast time. Nobody seems to think that's strange. A call to Barbara Walters at 11 at night from a prison cell.

The jail holds 2,200 people. It is full to capacity. There are only eight medical beds. Paris has occupied one of them almost the entire time.

...we shudder and complain about the attention Paris Hilton gets but we talk about her just the same, sometimes in quiet and disparaging tones. We talk about her more than we talk about Iraq and often we talk about how we talk about Paris Hilton when we should be talking about the war in Iraq.

But we don't.

Food for thought, kids. That's all I'm sayin'...

Posted by at 3:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hm. This is curious... as John Scalzi reminds us, Saturday was the 40th anniversary of the U.S. release of The Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

This was also the day when I decided to renounce Beatledom.

You just know there's got to be some kind of grand karmic consequences for something like that. It's like spitting in a church or something...

Posted by at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I realized something on Saturday afternoon as I was waxing my car and listening to the radio: "I Am the Walrus" is quite possibly the most aggravating song ever recorded. Yes, even more so than Britney Spears' "Toxic." The nonsensical, deliberately inscrutable lyrics, delivered by John Lennon in a voice that is simultaneously high-pitched, yet whiskey-raspy (two qualities which, combined, suggest to me the way Mickey Mouse might sound if he'd just smoked several bowls of particularly harsh ganja), and set to a plodding, mechanical beat... well, let's just say that the overall effect of the song is to set my teeth on a razor-thin edge.

In fact, when I'm really honest with myself, I have to admit that I really don't like The Beatles that much at all. Oh, I can't deny that they were historically significant, or that they influenced countless bands that followed, or that they did a handful of songs that only a completely joyless churl could criticize -- "Yesterday," "Norweigian Wood," and "Here Comes the Sun" are genuinely wonderful -- but, generally speaking, they just don't do much for me. I can't recall the last time I landed on one of their songs on the radio and happily stayed there without surfing on in search of something I preferred.

And as long as I'm revealing the depths of my philistinism, what the heck is the big deal about U2? Yeah, "Where the Streets Have No Name" is a great song, but why do so many people seem to think listening to this band is akin to communing with Buddha himself? I just don't get it...

Posted by at 10:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

As fate would have it, today, in addition to the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, is also Towel Day, the international tribute to the late Douglas Adams. The 25th of May is a very hoopy day indeed.

Posted by at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

I just learned that Bo Diddley, the elderly blues-and-rock guitarist best known for the classics "Who Do You Love?" and "Bo Diddley," suffered a stroke following a performance on Saturday night. And even though articles like this one are optimistic that Diddley will play again, I personally think his career is over. He's 78 years old, and my personal experience with strokes was not a positive one (my grandmother had one when she was still relatively young -- early 60s, I believe -- and she ended up trapped in a half-paralyzed body, unable to speak, for the last 16 years of her life).

Diddley played Salt Lake not too long ago and I remember thinking that I really ought to make an effort to go see him, because at his age you never know if he's going to come around again. I really need to pay more attention to thoughts like that...

Posted by at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Uber-cool B-movie star Bruce Campbell has done another Old Spice ad in the viral-video medium, and this one is even funnier than the first one:

Posted by at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Look, kids, it's another quiz! It's the lazy blogger's way of posting up some quick 'n' easy content for your reading pleasure!

This one is a little different, at least. It's about music:

Continue reading "Music Quiz" »

Posted by at 1:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Kristy Kruger is an award-winning singer-songwriter from Texas whose older brother, Lt. Col. Eric Kruger, was killed in Iraq a few months ago, on only his second day in the country. Kristy has since written a sad, sweet, deeply moving little song of farewell to her brother, and she's now on a 50-state tour of the U.S. to pay tribute to Eric's memory (she says she'd like to see what he died for, i.e., the whole of America). The tour has brought her here to Salt Lake, where she'll be performing tonight at a venue called Kilby Court.

Continue reading "The Stupidity of Local TV News" »

Posted by at 6:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The way I remember it, there was one summer when I didn't think much about music at all, when I was just a wee lad content to listen to whatever Mom put on our gargantuan old hi-fi console, and then the very next year after that, I was a budding audiophile who obsessively followed the weekly Top Ten Countdown and toted around a transistor radio everywhere I went. The biggest song in the land that summer was "Jessie's Girl" by Rick Springfield, and I was absolutely crazy about it.

Continue reading "Guitar Hero" »

Posted by at 11:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I was saddened a couple weeks ago by the death of Brad Delp, the lead singer of the classic-rock band Boston, but I'm positively heartbroken to learn this morning that he in fact committed suicide. He sealed himself in his bathroom with a pair of charcoal grills and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. A note attached to his shirt said he was "a lonely soul" and had lost his will to live, a curious sentiment considering he was engaged to be married, but then no one ever said that clinical depression was a logical condition.

In a gesture I find deeply touching and even heroic in an small, quiet, odd kind of way, Brad left another note on the bathroom door warning whoever came to find him that there was CO inside. What a damn shame that a man who felt this much compassion for others apparently couldn't find enough for himself.

Oh, and just to add another layer of sorrow to this already sad story, it looks like Brad's old bandmates, friends, and family members are squabbling in the aftermath of his death. The bones of contention are complicated and old -- the basic grudge dates back to legal battles in the early '80s -- but the practical result is that several people who cared about Brad, including Tom Scholz, Boston's founder and Brad's friend for 35 years, were not invited to his funeral.

I know from my own bitter experiences that deaths seem to exacerbate and cement these kinds of ancient hurts, rather than healing them as Hallmark movies would have us believe. Still, I think it's unspeakably crappy that Scholz, in particular, felt excluded. The article I linked suggests that he hopes to smooth things over so the current Boston line-up can attend a public memorial; I hope he succeeds...

Posted by at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Man, I am so colossally bummed by this news: Brad Delp, the lead singer of the rock band Boston, was found dead in his home on Friday. The cause is still unknown; Delp was a far-too-young 55.

Continue reading "Brad Delp" »

Posted by at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Speaking of Britney Spears (well, I did mention her yesterday), I've been thinking about her head-shaving escapade last weekend and the way the media has reacted to it.

I know, I know... it's a lame non-story that everyone is sick of, and I imagine at least one of my celebrity-contemptuous Loyal Readers just rolled his eyes and clicked off to some other site. Still, I just keep coming back to the subject in my mind, like a loose tooth that I feel compelled to wiggle with my tongue. The truth is, as ridiculous and messed-up a person as she seems to be, I really do care about what's happening to her, at least in as much as I care about any human being who's obviously in a whole world of confusion and hurt. I feel sorry for the girl. And I feel genuinely angry at the way the entertainment "news" media -- i.e., all the television tabloid and gossip shows -- are exploiting her and that other hapless train wreck of a human being, Anna Nicole Smith, for the sake of sensationalistic headlines and, presumably, higher ratings.

Continue reading "Who Is Britney Spears, Anyhow?" »

Posted by at 8:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have to be honest, I'm not a big fan of Christmas music. Actually, I'm one of those grinchy-scroogey curmudgeons that develops an uncontrollable shoulder-cringe and a twitchy eyelid every year right around November 1st -- which is, not coincidentally, the same day that FM100, our local "lite hits" station, begins its two-month-long all-Christmas, all-the-time format. Now, you may wonder why this affects me in the least since I don't actually listen to FM100. It's the principle of the thing; just knowing that there's a radio station here in the valley that's pumping out not just one but two whole months of every imaginable recording of "Jingle Bells"... well, it just gets to me. Especially if I have to call The Girlfriend at work and spend any time at all on hold, because her employer's hold music is, you guessed it, provided by FM100. Gack.

I think it's the constant, unrelenting tidal-wave effect that really does it. If the Christmas music was spread out, just a song here and there with regular music in between, maybe I could handle it. But as it is, if you find yourself exposed to it, whether on some company's hold-music feed or trapped in a department store somewhere, it just goes on and on and on until you want to strangle the nearest elf with a popcorn-string and then pour curdled eggnog into his open, staring eyes. I find almost the entire genre completely and utterly annoying. Almost. There is a small handful of Christmas songs that I do kinda, sorta like. Because, hey, even I am not immune from sentiment and warm childhood memories and all that crap. So, for your ongoing edification on that most important of all subjects -- my personal tastes -- here are Bennion's Favorite Christmas Songs, complete with a little video treat at the end...

Continue reading "Bennion's Favorite Christmas Songs" »

Posted by at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

To hell with all this election stuff, the really important news of the day is that Britney is divorcing the odious K-Fed! Our long national nightmare is over! It already seems that the sun in shining a bit more brightly...

Posted by at 3:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been in a pretty foul mood the past couple of days, owing to several long nights at work, too much caffeine, too little sleep, and a whole lot of minor stuff that usually wouldn't bother me too much, but, coming as it has during this most crappy of weeks, has been really irritating me. I won't bore you with any further details; suffice it to say that I feel like I've been dragged through a knothole sideways (one of my mother's quaint expressions) and I really need a break from the grim-faced, clench-toothed treadmill slog that my life has unaccountably turned into. (Some time to turn out a couple of decent-sized blog entries would be nice, too!)

Coincidentally (or maybe not), I've been listening to a lot of the music I loved back in high school but have somehow forgotten about in the years since. One of the old recordings that I've blown the dust from is Bob Seger's The Distance, which, as I recall, was one of my favorite albums back around my senior year (class of '87, for the record). I've been pleasantly surprised by how much I still like this one. It's a solid set of straight-ahead rockers and wistful ballads by an artist who was in his prime at the time of its recording. (Sadly, Seger's best years were over by his next album, the over-produced, over-slick, and badly dated Like A Rock; there are maybe four songs on that one that are still listenable these days, including the title track, which is actually a good song if you can get past Chevy using it as a jingle for the last decade or so.)

Continue reading "Roll Me Away" »

Posted by at 2:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Interesting... yesterday, I read that a man named Paul Vance, who wrote the obnoxious 1960 novelty tune "Itsy-Bitsy Teenie-Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini," had died. Today, however, I see that the report wasn't true:

Continue reading "Mistaken Identity" »

Posted by at 4:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Here're some more amusing photos from the e-mail, this time courtesy of the inimitable Chenopup, who wanted to share with me his latest acquisition:

Continue reading "Best. Album. Ever." »

Posted by at 5:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

We weren't even through the gates yet when we saw the fight. Two guys in baggy shorts and tent-sized white t-shirts seemed to fall inexorably into each other, as if drawn together by the gravitational force of their own beer-bellies. The three of us -- myself, The Girlfriend, and our friend Amber -- stood there in shock as the battle raged on the other side of the chain-link fence.

Truth be told, it wasn't much of a battle. The word "battle" implies something epic, and this wasn't even particularly exciting. It was just two guys bear-hugging each other, turning around and around like fat, drunken binary planets circling a common point in space, grunting and shouting unintelligibly at each other. One of them eventually got the better of his opponent. A nose was broken, blood and tears began to flow, security arrived, and it was over. Two grown men, fast approaching middle age, who were behaving like jackass teenagers and would probably never speak to each other again. It was pathetic. And I found myself wondering if I was, too, attending a Def Leppard concert at my age.

Continue reading "Rock of Ages" »

Posted by at 4:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

If going to see John Tucker Must Die with a thirteen-year-old wasn't enough to make me feel old and out-of-touch, the news that MTV is 25 years old today is.

Continue reading "I Want My MTV!" »

Posted by at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I know it's something of a heretical view, but I must be honest: I'm not much of a Beatles fan. I like many of the band's singles and I freely acknowledge their significance to the history of popular music, but for the most part, I've never understood the deep, almost mystical reverence that so many hold for the boys from Liverpool. They just don't grab me that way. I think it's even arguable as to whether their music qualifies as "rock and roll"; the later stuff, especially, sounds to my ears more like a descendant of the English music-hall than anything related to the blues.

Still, I like them well enough, and I'm always interested in stories about lost-and-found treasures. Which is all my roundabout way of saying that I was very intrigued this afternoon by the news that some 500 tapes from the 1969 "Get Back" sessions have been recovered:

The tapes recorded [The Beatles] performing more than 200 cover versions of work by the artists who had influenced them: Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. They played their own version of Bob Dylan’s Blowing in the Wind, and Rod Stewart’s Maggie May. They belted out Great Balls of Fire, Hippy Hippy Shake and Lucille in spontaneous bursts of play.

You know that at least some of this stuff will be released on CD -- more likely all of it will in a big old collectible box set -- and, despite my reservations about the orthodoxy of the band's greatness, I'd really like to hear Lennon's take on "Great Balls of Fire..."

Posted by at 3:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Oh, boy... this is bad. That dang Scalzi has just pointed me to a time-sink of unbelievable proportions: it's an online repository of old '80s-vintage music videos. Hundreds of them, enough to waste hours and hours looking at hair styles that, for some inexplicable reason, us thirtysomethings used to think were pretty cool.

Continue reading "Another Way of Wasting My Life" »

Posted by at 4:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Sad news this afternoon for fans of fantasy art: Tim Hildebrandt, who, along with his brother Greg, was one of the most prominent book illustrators of the 1970s and '80s, died yesterday at the not-very-advanced age of 67.

Continue reading "Tim Hildebrandt" »

Posted by at 6:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I don't know what frightens me more: the fact that the Internet has finally revealed its true purpose as the repository of all the pop-cultural detritus of the last 50 years; the fact that I love the first fact so damn much; or the fact that I get all warm and nostalgic over a TV commercial that I must've seen 52,432 times during my childhood:

Continue reading "Rich Corinthian Leather" »

Posted by at 1:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've been thinking of how best to present this next find, but words are failing me. Some things simply have to be seen to be believed. And sometimes the words of others just have to stand on their own without further comment:

We at BringBackBritney.com hold firm that a hosed-down, scantily clad Britney Spears is vital to the livelihood of millions of Americans. We will not sit silently as she sullies her persona in the public eye; that of a Kabbalah chasing, non seatbelt wearing, ovary farm for any two-bit backup dancer to take advantage of. This is not the Britney we hold in high regard.

[ADDENDUM: The really interesting thing is that this site seems to be tied in with Madame Tussaud's wax museum in New York, which, not coincidentally, just debuted a stripper-pole-straddling likeness of Brit -- complete with heaving breasts that actually, er, heave. You know, I feel sorry for the girl, I truly do...]

Posted by at 3:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If the Sears Wishbook isn't enough entertainment for you on this long, sunny Friday afternoon, how about this: the immortal William Shatner performing Harry Chapin's "Taxi" in the same melodramatic, spoken-word style that has made his rendition of "Rocket Man" such a classic.

[Ed. note: I moved the video player below the fold for the convenience of dial-uppers, and also just to keep the place tidy...]

Continue reading "We Learned About Love in the... BackofaDodge..." »

Posted by at 5:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I know you're all waiting on tenterhooks for the second half of my All-Time Favorite Movies list, but this was too good not to share immediately. For years, I heard whispered tales about Fred and Barney hawking Winston cigarettes back in the days when The Flintstones was running in primetime, but I'd never seen any actual evidence of it. When the news went out that the show would be released on DVD, there was much fanboy speculation about whether the legendary commercial would be included as an extra, and much disappointment when it was not. Some people even suggested that the whole thing was apocryphal, that it never happened.

But it did. And here's your proof:

I love weird little pop-culture artifacts like this...

[Ed. note: I found this clip courtesy of Mark Evanier; if you're interested, he offers a brief history of this commercial, The Flintstones, and some other primetime cartoons here.]

Posted by at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Here's a quickie musical meme, courtesy of Scalzi:

Using this site, find and reveal the song that was #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart the day you were born.

Continue reading "Musical Meme" »

Posted by at 10:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Hey again, kids. Sorry it's been so long since I've posted. Hope you haven't missed my sterling prose too much. I've been working on a nice long recap of Anne's and my Yellowstone snowmobiling adventure, and I was planning to post it tonight, but...

There's always a "but" when computers are involved, isn't there? In this case, the "but" refers to the way I somehow lost three-quarters of the entry when I tried to e-mail the part I wrote at work this afternoon to myself so I could finish it tonight here at home. I'm hoping I can recover it tomorrow when I get into the office. If I can't, I'm going to be a very unhappy blogger, because I thought what I'd done was quite good. For a change. I haven't been terribly proud of my recent writing here at Simple Tricks; this entry, however, seemed to be going very well.

In any event, I'm long overdue to give you guys something -- I'm surprised my three loyal readers aren't banging their tin cups against the bars by this time -- but about all I have to give you tonight is another of those e-mail survey thingies that occasionally makes a circle of the 'net. You know, those long lists of random questions that try to elicit trivial responses. It's kind of lame, I know, but it's quick content, and you may learn something interesting about moi. Hopefully, I'll find my travel piece waiting for me tomorrow and I'll be able to finish it and get it up to you before tomorrow night. In the meantime, enjoy the trivia...

Continue reading "Consolation Prize" »

Posted by at 11:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

If the proofreading gig doesn't pan out, I'm thinking I can always fall back on the Full Monty scenario...

Your Stipper Song Is

Closer by Nine Inch Nails "You let me violate you, you let me desecrate you You let me penetrate you, you let me complicate you Help me I broke apart my insides, help me I've got no Soul to tell" When you dance, it's a little scary - and a lot sexy.

Curiously, I took the test twice, entering the same answers both times, but got two different results. The first time, my song was "Dirrrty" by Cristina Aguillera. I've never heard either of these tunes that I can remember. I'm so unhip...

Posted by at 6:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Once, in what now seems like a previous life, I listened to a lot of music by The Doors. Like many other young men with artistic pretensions and a generally sulky disposition, I was drawn to the dark vibe of the music and the cryptic, existential lyrics of the band's late frontman, Jim Morrison. I fancied myself a wounded romantic for reasons that shall remain anonymous, and I identified with the band's well-known songs of alienation and pain, songs like "Riders on the Storm," "Love Her Madly," and "People Are Strange." I bought into the myth of Morrison as a shaman in leather pants, and although I never seriously believed he was still alive, it long amused me to think that he might have faked his death to escape an unsatisfactory life as a rock 'n' roll sideshow freak.

Continue reading "What Would Jim Do?" »

Posted by at 3:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Responding to a sudden whim this afternoon, I walked over to Night Flight Comics on my lunch hour. It's been a while since I've hung out at a comic shop, longer, perhaps, than I'd realized. Browsing the new issues, knowing that I'd be coming into the middle of all those stories with no idea of what was happening, seeing new titles I didn't recognize at all -- not to mention how damn young the store's employees seemed relative to myself -- it all made me feel something like a college student who has returned to his old high school for one last, sentimental look around. It hasn't been that long ago that this place was home, but it's been just long enough. Things are different now.

I ultimately selected a book I've had my eye on for a couple of years, a nifty trade paperback collection of the '70s-vintage Star Wars comics that I loved as a child. When I laid it on the counter along with my debit card, the shaggy-haired clerk in the Green Lantern shirt noticed the familiar logo and asked a sadly predictable question: "What did you think of Episode III?"

I had to hold my breath to keep from sighing. I wasn't in the mood to have this debate, not today, not again.

Continue reading "Weary of the Fight" »

Posted by at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

What does it say about me that I know more about Baby Boomer pop culture than my parents?

To explain: my folks don't have their own e-mail addresses, e-mail apparently being something akin to the arcane arts of blackest magic as far as they're concerned. That means that all their buddies who are e-literate tend to send their jokes and stories and other assorted spam to me, hoping that I will be a good son and relay it to the parental units. Most of the time I don't bother because very little of it is worth their time, or mine, either. (I especially despise the would-be heartstring-tuggers!) But every now and again something comes through that's kind of fun and worth passing along.

Case in point: a trivia quiz that arrived yesterday, composed of questions about TV, music, and historical events from the late 1950s and '60s. When I first opened the message, I was confident that I'd know quite a few of the answers, since I spent a good part of my childhood watching re-runs of the previous decade's television programming, but imagine my surprise when I got more of these correct than my parents. Obviously something is seriously amiss in the space-time continuum...

Here's the quiz, slightly edited by me for grammar and such:

Continue reading "Boomer Trivia" »

Posted by at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Dick Clark will be returning to Times Square this New Year's Eve. Even though the title of Clark's annual broadcast, Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve, hasn't been strictly accurate in years -- how much rocking can you really do with musical guests like Kool & the Gang? -- Clark on New Year's is an institution, and I, for one, missed seeing him last year. I know he can't last forever, despite all the jokes about him being an android; the linked article notes that Ryan "I have lousy taste in clothes and no discernable charisma" Seacrest is warming up to take over for Clark permanently. There'll be a time, probably not too distant now, when Dick Clark will be just one more old-school pop-cultural reference that garners blank stares from the whippersnappers. But in the meantime, I really hope ol' Dick's got a few more New Year's broadcasts left in him. We have so little continuity in our society these days, so few common points of reference, that we need to prolong the careers of our cheesy, beloved, old TV hosts as long as we possibly can...

Posted by at 9:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm a shade too young to have owned the famous poster of Farrah Fawcett (or, as I believe she was known at the time, Farrah Fawcett-Majors). It was originally released in 1976, and I wouldn't become interested in hanging my first girlie poster until sometime in the '80s. Nevertheless, anyone who was alive and had their eyes open during the late '70s surely knows that image of Farrah: the billowing mass of blond hair, the red swimsuit, the big, scary, "say cheese" smile. It's an icon of its age, so much so that movie-set decorators often use it to help evoke that long-lost time when collars were wide and sex was just good, clean fun.

It turns out there's an interesting story behind the poster, a tale of two brothers who started small, made a fortune, then lost everything, including each other. If you don't have much on the agenda today and need something to while away your afternoon, check out this article about Mike and Ted Trikilis and their one time poster-publishing empire, Pro Arts Inc. It's a pretty long piece, but I found it fascinating. It's also rather sad, but then, many of the best stories are, aren't they?

(For the record, the first pin-up to grace my bedroom wall was as much an icon of the '80s as the Farah shot was of the '70s, specifically that one of Heather Thomas in a pink bikini. Don't know who Thomas is? She used to provide eye-candy for a TV series called The Fall Guy. Which, oddly enough, starred Farrah Fawcett's ex-husband, Lee Majors. Hmm. There's gotta be some kind of cosmic symmetry there, don't you think?)

Posted by at 1:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hey, kids, it's time for another one of those silly Internet quizzes, because I know how much you all love 'em...

This one determines which Looney Tunes character you are based on the usual bizarre, somewhat personal, and seemingly irrelevant questions. You know the drill. Honestly I don't know why I fool around with these things, since the results almost always disappoint me. Almost inevitably, I'm told that my personality traits most closely align with the lamest, most uninteresting whatever of the available categories. I'm never Han Solo, according to these things; I'm Threepio, or Uncle Owen, or Red Six. I'm never Captain Kirk, I'm always Transporter Chief Kyle. In the universe of these quizzes, it appears that most people are sidekicks and background characters, not heroes. So when I settled in to take this one, I figured I'd be assessed as Sylvester the Cat, or Elmer Fudd, or one of those no-name, one-off characters like Sylvester's creme-colored doppelganger, Claude the Cat. So imagine my surprise when I got these results:

Continue reading "Well, Now, This is Pleasing..." »

Posted by at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Pop quiz: who's the coolest actor working in the film industry today? I'm thinking of someone who has appeared in both blockbusters and art-house movies, a journeyman actor who both headlines and does small character roles, a man who commands a legion of die-hard fans, and who is the very definition of "suave."

Am I referring to Sean Connery? Nah, I said someone who's still working today, and all the signs indicate that Sir Sean has retired. Harrison Ford? Hasn't worked in several years, apparently content to spend his days playing Rescue Ranger in his helicopter. Tom Cruise? Please... the word "suave" hardly applies to someone who publicly abuses a sofa in the name of mid-life-crisis/publicity-stunt love. No, the person I have in mind is someone you could actually imagine yourself hanging out with, a regular guy who just happens to have landed a job a whole lot of people think they want (but would probably hate if they got it), and who has managed, somehow, against all odds, to forge a decades-long career in an industry that is finished with most people within a couple of years.

I'm talking about the one and only... Bruce Campbell.

Continue reading "I Made Love to a Screaming Brain!" »

Posted by at 10:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For any Floyd fans who may be lurking among my three loyal readers, my friend Robert sends word that speculation about the band's Live 8 set list has begun! (Of course it has; this is the Internet, after all...)

If you'd like to join in the fun or just see what other people are hoping to hear, check out the discussion thread at the Pink Floyd forum.

For whatever it's worth, Robert would like to see the band "do some real esoteric shit like [his] personal favorite, 'Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict.'"

Hmm. I can't say I'm familiar with that one...

Posted by at 5:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Well, this is just amazing: Pink Floyd is getting back together for a one-night-only performance at Bob Geldof's upcoming Live 8 concert. For the record, I don't especially like Floyd -- I mostly find their work pretentious and depressing -- but the conflict between the band's bass player Roger Waters and guitarist David Gilmour is legendary among rock-music afficianados, and for fans of the band, this news must seem like nothing short of a miracle. As I recall, Geldof pulled off a similarly unlikely reunion of Led Zeppelin for his '85 LiveAid concerts. If he can perform impossible stunts like getting these notoriously acrimonious musicians back together, why hasn't this man taken over the world by now? Maybe that's the next item on his agenda...

Posted by at 1:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Given the two subjects that have gotten the bulk of my attention lately, I was greatly amused by a line in the new issue of Newsweek:

Now that we've learned how Anakin became Darth Vader and who Deep Throat really was, can we finally close the book on the '70s?

I didn't think that book was still open, myself, but it does seem like a lot of loose ends are getting tied up lately, doesn't it? Star Trek, Star Wars, the final mystery of Watergate... what's next, for someone to dig up Jimmy Hoffa's body? How about finding Jim Morrison alive and well on Fiji? Is a Sasquatch about to wander into downtown Portland, or will a Scottish fisherman finally manage to land Nessie? Keep watching the skies, kids, because you never know...

Posted by at 11:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you're still hanging around the computer on this beautiful, sunny, pre-MemDayWeekend afternoon, you're more than likely looking out the window and longing for anything other than work to occupy your attention. Allow me to help by tossing out a few links I've been meaning to post for a while...

Continue reading "Friday Afternoon Reading" »

Posted by at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was seven years old in the summer of 1977, the prime age of susceptibility to a story featuring young, swashbuckling heroes, strange-looking creatures, and scary -- but not too scary -- villains. (See also Potter, Harry, modern kids and.) I'm sure I must've seen a few movies on the big screen before then -- I vaguely recall a couple of early-70s live-action Disney films about people in really bad polyester knits -- but the first truly memorable film I saw in a theater...

Wait. Stop.

I'm not going to continue with that thought. My experience of seeing Star Wars for the first time couldn't have been much different than a lot of other people's. We were all kids, we'd never seen anything like it, we stood in lines that went around the block (literally, in my case -- I saw the film at the long-lost Centre Theatre in Salt Lake; there was no lobby to speak of, and the only place to queue up was outside, on the street), big spectacle, big excitement, tiny little brains melting, lifelong obsessions forming, blah blah blah.

We were all there, weren't we? And those of you who weren't have probably heard about it from someone who was. It was the defining communal experience of our generation, at least until the towers fell.

But here's the thing that was unique about my personal experience: I didn't actually want to see Star Wars. I had no interest in it whatsoever, and, in fact, I remember being frightened of it. I don't recall why, but something in the TV ads gave me a major case of the willies.

Continue reading "A Wallet Full of Bread Cards" »

Posted by at 6:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I'm not a big fan of punk music, which was always too unrelentingly angry and anti-everything for my tastes. But I did find Sandman writer Neil Gaiman's recent comments on the subject interesting, and even inspirational:

I think that the punk ethos of you don't need anything, you just need to do it and figure out what you're doing as you go, has probably informed everything I've done since [the punk movement]. It seemed a pretty sensible and refreshing idea at the time. Likewise the idea that you ought to be enjoying what you're doing and be doing it because you think it's cool and fun. The idea that mistakes are part of what make things interesting, and it's probably wisest to get it right and move on and not spend the rest of your life polishing it.

(It also left me with the idea that a black leather jacket was an appropriate sartorial item in any possible context.)

Posted by at 1:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last night I cancelled my membership with BMG Music Service. It was easy. All I had to do was click one button on the Web site (although the button itself was kind of tricky to find), and the actual decision was a no-brainer, too. I think I've bought only one CD from them in the last eighteen months or so, and paging through the monthly catalog was kind of like looking at a stranger's yearbook: lots of pretty young faces, but the names mean nothing to me. Hell, I don't even listen to music much anymore -- I can go months without turning on my stereo, and I haven't been really aware of what's current since the days of Nirvana and Pearl Jam.

Still, I couldn't help but feel a twinge of sadness when I clicked that "cancel" button. It was a genuine end-of-an-era moment, seeing as I've been a member of BMG since before compact discs were the standard music format. Back when I joined, BMG was the RCA Record and Tape Club, and before that I was a member of the Columbia Record and Tape Club. Once upon a time, way back in the glorious, pre-digital '80s, everybody was a member of the Columbia Record and Tape Club. How could any self-respecting teenager resist the offer of twelve albums for only a penny?

Continue reading "No More Selections-of-the-Month" »

Posted by at 2:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This past weekend found me enjoying the springtime weather in Salt Lake's Sugarhouse area, which, for you out-of-towners, is the closest thing to a Bohemian district we have in these parts. Back when I was a student at the nearby University of Utah, it was a run-down pit: eight or ten square blocks of decaying bungalows, boarded-up storefronts, seedy coffeehouses, and leftover head-shops run by guys who hadn't gotten the memo about the '60s being over. It was the place you went if you wanted to have your fortune told or your nose pierced. It was probably also the place you went if you wanted to score some weed, although I personally wouldn't know about that. That was never my thing.

I loved Sugarhouse back then. I loved the mildly disreputable atmosphere, and the heady smells of patchouli and tobacco and old-building mustiness that wafted from open doors. I loved to shop in the weird little holes-in-the-wall where you could buy a statue of Ganesh or a cheap "pre-owned" paperback of On the Road. And I loved to watch all the exotic people: punks, metalheads, flower children, gypsies, derelicts. To a kid from the white-bread suburban frontier of the straightest city in America, it was deliriously cool.

Continue reading "Coffee in Sugarhouse" »

Posted by at 11:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A few days ago, John Scalzi posted an entry on his blog called 10 Things I've Done You Probably Haven't. As he explained, this is another of those LiveJournal triggers, or "memes," that are supposed to get you thinking about your life. In this case, you're supposed to list ten experiences or accomplishments that are unique to you. Presumably this exercise is intended to help you realize how cool you really are, or at least give you something to write about.

Since I'm always on the lookout for new blogging inspirations -- that is, I'm a copycat -- I figured I'd take a stab at this one myself. It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. It turns out that a lot of the cool things I've done aren't so very different from things I know my friends have done themselves. For example, most of my really memorable experiences are somehow related to travelling, and I know that several of the folks who read this blog have travelled to the same or similar places that I have. In some cases, my friends were actually with me and shared my most memorable experiences, so I can't really say that all of the things on my list are unique to me. But I gave it my best effort and I think I came up with a few items that most of my readers probably haven't experienced. In any event, here's my list, presented in no particular order:

Continue reading "Ten Things" »

Posted by at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

There's more Galactica talk on the way, but in the meantime I'd like to direct the attention of my three loyal readers to some cool stuff I've run across during my recent surfings.

Continue reading "A Few Points of Interest" »

Posted by at 2:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Two more notable figures have left us: comic-book writer and artist Will Eisner and illustrator Kelly Freas, both of whom died earlier this week.

Continue reading "Eisner and Freas" »

Posted by at 1:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For the record, my musical tastes mostly run to classic rock and blues. Over the years, however, I've rounded out my CD collection with odds and ends from other genres, including a fairly large number of movie soundtracks. (No surprise there, given my other interests.) The wonderful thing about soundtracks is that they often span across all the other musical genres, since the music selected for any given film needs to complement the film's setting and mood. Because of soundtracks, I've discovered a whole range of music and artists I otherwise wouldn't know about. For example, it was on a movie soundtrack that I first remember hearing the song, "Begin the Beguine."

Continue reading "Begin the Beguine" »

Posted by at 2:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The frequent visitor to Simple Tricks has probably noticed that I am prone to frequent and often uncontrollable attacks of nostalgia. What can I say? I'm well on my way to becoming one of those boring old farts who is convinced that the modern world is going to hell in a bucket and that everything was much better back in the day. As near as I can tell, this process of codgerification began right around the time kids started to talk about something called "grunge" and could no longer identify Night Ranger as the band who recorded "Sister Christian." The rate of decay accelerated to light-speed when I realized that most of them couldn't even identify "Sister Christian."

In that vein of grimly humorous pop-cultural disenfranchisement, allow me to present the lyrics for my new theme song, a little ditty called "1985" by the band Bowling for Soup. It may help you better understand where I'm coming from. At the very least, it will give you something to read while I continue banging away at a very long political post...

Continue reading "My New Theme Song" »

Posted by at 9:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I'm working on a fairly long post about recent developments in the presidential campaign, which should be up tonight or tomorrow, but I have a couple of other things I'd like to share in the meantime.

Continue reading "Random Stuff on a Late Summer's Morn" »

Posted by at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It�s another one of those grab-bag days here at Simple Tricks when I�ve got a whole mess of items that I want to write about, including celebrity deaths, human achievement, human striving, and stuff that�s just plain cool. Some of these have been kicking around my brain pan for a couple of weeks now, so my apologies if this is old news to some folks.

Continue reading "Miscellaneous Points of Interest" »

Posted by at 8:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As I demonstrated recently, my knowledge of so-called higher culture is pretty shaky. I'm especially ignorant when it comes to music, at least of the pre-rock 'n' roll variety. To me, "The Great American Songbook" and "Tin Pan Alley" are vaguely understood terms at best, and up until a couple of weeks ago the only Cole Porter tune I could name was "Anything Goes," and that's only because I've seen the opening credits of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom so many times.

But then I saw De-Lovely, an unconventional biographical picture about Porter, and I realized that I do, in fact, know quite a few of the popular songs from the first half of the 20th Century. I've heard them for years in movies both new and old, and I think it's fair to say that they are woven into the fabric of our cultural consciousness; in other words, everybody knows these songs, even if their origins are cloudy these days. (I'm personally quite fond of "Begin the Beguine," which I knew from the film The Rocketeer, and from a CD collection of Big Band music I picked up a few years ago, but I never realized it had been written by Porter.) De-Lovely is filled with Porter's music, performed by modern-day singers such as Sheryl Crow, Elvis Costello, Alanis Morisette, and others whose faces I recognize but whose names I escape me. The film actually is a sort of musical, although the songs are used more to punctuate a given scene's emotional impact than to drive the action or reveal information, as they do in a more traditional musical. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Continue reading "Movie Review: De-Lovely" »

Posted by at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There's another one of those big personality surveys making the rounds on the 'net this morning, 100 questions about your cultural preferences called the "Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index." This survey originated on a blog belonging to a Manhattan music and drama critic named Terry Teachout. Given Teachout’s credentials, it's not too surprising that some of the items on this survey are a bit, well, hoity-toity, and not really the sort of thing that would appeal to a non-New York intellectual. (That's a roundabout way of saying that I, like fellow blogger Kevin Drum, didn't know enough about many of the choices to have any preference. I hang my head in shame at my apparent Philistinism.) However, Teachout does state that his blog is about "all the arts, high, medium, and low," and, true to that declaration, his survey has plenty of the lower-brow stuff that I can relate to. Besides, I like taking these things. And therefore I offer the following window into my tastes, or lack thereof:

Continue reading "Wherein I fail the "Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index"" »

Posted by at 2:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There's an old cliche that says you can't sing the blues if you haven't known pain. I don't know if that's literally true, but it's pretty obvious that those who have suffered and overcome hardship are able to inject a certain richness of texture into their work, a level of emotion and complexity that other, more naive artists have a hard time achieving. If you want proof of that, have a listen to Ray Charles' best-known song, "Georgia on My Mind." If you have the means, listen to it on vinyl, with all the organic pops and scratches that come with that format. It's a melancholy tune of lost love; performed by any other musician that's all it ever could be. But when Ray sang it, there was much more going on there than mere sadness.

Continue reading "Ray Charles" »

Posted by at 9:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I've been reading all over the 'net that today is the tenth anniversary of the suicide of Kurt Cobain, the troubled, heroin-addled lead singer of the seminal grunge band Nirvana. Two of my favorite bloggers, John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton, have commented on this event in heartfelt, if somewhat ambivalent, entries. Personally, I feel no ambivalence on this subject.

I don't care.

I didn't care about Cobain when he was alive, I didn't care when I first heard he was dead, and I certainly don't care that it's been a decade since his death.

Continue reading "The Fuss Over Cobain" »

Posted by at 11:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[Ed. Note: This entry was actually written in the wee hours last night. I was unable to post at that time due to some technical difficulties. This means that even though all those other bloggers out there are saying the exact same things as myself this morning, I was, in fact, completely original at the time of writing. Hey, it's not my fault that my brainwaves leaked out into the zeitgeist before I could post...]

For movie lovers and people in The Industry, tonight was the biggest night of the year, a celebration of imagination and glamour and all that show-biz stuff. So was it just me or did the proceedings all seem a little ho-hum this time around?

Continue reading "Oscar thoughts" »

Posted by at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)