A few months back I shared a video of Alice Cooper talking about Frank Zappa.
Here's Frank Zappa talking about Alice Cooper:
Category: TV
Dancin' Fool
SNL, 1978.
Doctor Who: The Pirate Planet
I am very tired, so here's another old Doctor Who review. Originally posted Brontoforumus, 2008-11-18.
The Pirate Planet is not what you expect either from the title or for the writer (Douglas Adams). The pirates are not of the traditional variety (though the leader has robot parts), are never referred to as pirates, and it is unclear until halfway through or more why the serial is called "The Pirate Planet".
But all that's part of a series of mysteries in the serial that are quite cleverly revealed. Some are obvious, others (why do gems fall from the sky right before the stars change?) are not.
Adams crafts a story with far fewer laughs than you would expect, but it's quite clever and plays out at a good pace, and features an interesting cast of characters (particularly the villains). As usual, he wears his environmentalist cred on his sleeve, but uses it in a way that makes the story interesting.
For $11, it's on the "worth owning" list.
That said, I have zero interest in watching the rest of the Key to Time Series. I've already watched 200 minutes of a collection quest; I don't really see following the remaining 450. Frankly, as much as I love Baker I think I'll take a break from him, maybe watch some more Pertwee or Davison.
R&B
Zappa and childhood friend Denny Walley talk about his early blues influences.
Another documentary from the Dutch station VPRO -- man, those guys must love him.
This one appears to be a 2007 doc called Frank Zappa: Pioneer of the Future of Music. At a glance I can't find any place to purchase it legally, which is a shame -- if you know of any, please let me know and I'll gladly link to the store.
Edit 2012-12-29: I've posted the entirety of the documentary.
Halloween
Just not feelin' it like I used to -- s'pose I'll put on my Axe Cop costume and hand out candy to trick-or-treaters but frankly that sounds like kind of a boring evening. Even with Buffy and Twilight Zone and appropriately Halloweeny things on Netflix.
Nice day, though. Biked downtown, got comics -- including Zip-A-Tone TMNT! -- and then dropped the bike at the shop for a tuneup and got a ride home.
Damn sight better than last Halloween, anyway.
Andy
Covered by a group called Ossi Duri, 2001 -- according to uploader ossiduritube, they were only 15 or 16 years old.
The man on lead guitar and vocals is, of course, the great Ike Willis.
Doctor Who: The Ribos Operation
All right, so I'm phoning it in with another Doctor Who review I already wrote. Just because I've got free time doesn't mean I've got ideas for things to write about -- hell, the opposite may even be true.
So here goes. Originally posted on Brontoforumus, 2008-09-03.
The Ribos Operation is a mediocre story saved by interesting characters. It's probably most remarkable as the first appearance of Romana, who isn't one of them. At this point she's just a know-it-all college girl and general ice queen (as made less subtle by her costume). While this is the only serial I've seen with Mary Tamm in the role, I can reasonably assume she and the Doctor warm up to each other over time -- but I can also reasonably assume she never achieves the same chemistry with Baker that Ward had, what with Baker and Ward sleeping together and all.
This is the first part of The Key to Time Series, AKA Collection Quest: The Movie, wherein a generic good-guy overlord tells the Doctor he has to collect a series of MacGuffins before a generic bad-guy overlord can get to them first. The plot from there is simultaneously simple and needlessly convoluted: as the Doctor and Romana seek the first piece of the Key, they find that a royal exile and a pair of small-time thieves want it too. The series shows the pacing problems faced by so many early Who serials in that nothing really happens until it's half-over.
That's saved, as I said, by a good cast of characters: the lovable con-men, the ambitious villain, an alien version of Galileo, an entertainingly over-the-top augurer, and a rubber-suit monster that doesn't get nearly enough screen time.
It ends with what I've so often complained that RTD simply can't seem to do: a short but satisfying goodbye scene.
All in all, it was probably worth the rental but leaves me fairly nonplussed about the whole Key to Time series. I assume I will find the next serial, The Pirate Planet, much more impressive, as it was written by Douglas Adams.
I expect I will get to reposting my Pirate Planet review at some point here; suffice to say it had its moments but I was largely disappointed and I didn't stick around for any of the rest of the season arc. I did watch the Black Guardian Trilogy from the Fifth Doctor Era, and wished I'd stopped after the first serial.
On Mozart
It's interesting -- Zappa talks about Mozart the man (or, more accurately, Mozart the boy) and doesn't say much about him as a composer -- obviously everybody else has that one covered.
The plight of fetishizing dead creators to the detriment of live ones is something I've often thought about -- remember the story a year or two back where people in Tucson freaked the fuck out because the local paper was going to pull Peanuts?
The Two Lying Bastards Show, Season 14, Episode 2
All right, I missed the season premier and the All-Sidekick Special. But I caught this one.
On the whole I think Obama pulled this one out but they both did pretty well. Romney was at his best when he was criticizing Obama's record, his failures and broken promises -- and I think that speaks to the fundamental weakness of each campaign. Obama has failed to be the President he promised to be four years ago, but on the other hand, Romney is essentially running the same campaign John Kerry was eight years ago -- nobody's voting for him, they're voting against the incumbent.
Today's top story was Secretary Clinton's mea culpa on the attack in Benghazi. This was an opening for Romney; to my mind the Administration has bungled its narrative on the attack over the past few weeks, sticking to the "spontaneous attack over a YouTube video" story well after it became clear it was a coordinated terrorist strike.
Romney fucked that up.
The bit where he claimed Obama didn't refer to it as a "terrorist attack" on day one, and Crowley checked the transcript and confirmed that he had? That was the strongest audience reaction of the night, and we'll be seeing it in the highlight reel. Romney's best line of attack on foreign policy is effectively neutralized.
(The Republican talking point now appears to be that Crowley lied and Obama never used the phrase "terrorist attack". Per the transcript, the actual phrase he used was "acts of terror" -- claiming that the two phrases are not equivalent is absurd hairsplitting.)
Crowley was great, too; she gave the candidates rope when it was appropriate and reined them in when it was appropriate to do that. I only heard a bit of the first debate, but what I heard was consistent with what everyone said about Lehrer afterward: he was a moderator in name only and the debate was completely out of his control. Crowley owned it.
On the whole I'm still not happy with Obama. (And that he's got the balls to go up there and criticize Romney for supporting China in conducting surveillance on its own citizens, even as he's ramped up domestic surveillance beyond even Bush Administration levels...) I'm leaning Stein at this point. But I still prefer Obama to the alternative and hope he wins. If I were in a swing state, I might bite the bullet and vote for him -- but I'm not. There's a single poll showing Obama running within the margin of error in Arizona; the New York Times explains why it's best taken with a grain of salt (tl;dr the sample is too small and if Arizona were to go blue it would be part of a nationwide surge in Obama's favor).
All in all, a decent episode but I'm not sure it was good enough for me to stick around for the finale. Not nearly as good as the new episode of Walking Dead the other night.
Forum Musiques
French TV, 1968. Audio cleaned up by uploader TooleMan87. Which may be why he's disabled embedding -- click on over to YouTube to give it a watch and listen. It's got a nice rendition of Teddy Bears' Picnic.