More Zappa in London -- this time an interview on Capitol Radio. He discusses Sheik Yerbouti, his frequent band changes, being a connoisseur of stupidity, sexual repression, stupid love songs, and his contempt for everyone and everything.
corporate-sellout.com
If You Can Read This, You Can Read This
corporate-sellout.com
If You Can Read This, You Can Read This
Hi, I'm Thad. I build websites.
This blog's been up in one form or another since 1999. In that time I've written about topics ranging from comic books to video games to copyright law to creators' rights to Frank Zappa.
I also write eBooks and narrate audiobooks. Here's where you can find them:
Dear everybody who has ever mailed me back a filthy keyboard,
I don't mail you my garbage for you to throw away.
Maybe someday I'll just mail a user a half-eaten sandwich. Here, have some disgusting trash.
Guess this kinda fits the very loose Zappa/Olympics theme, right? Zappa covering some tunes by some boys outta Liverpool?
Not that the last two were terribly topical either.
- Dark Knight keeps its spot as the best of the three. But this one hung together a lot more consistently than Begins.
- I think Hathaway wins as the best movie Catwoman. Nice that they remembered "cat" refers to being a cat burglar, not some goofy-ass feline mysticism.
- For that matter, Hardy of course wins as best Bane, but he could do that just by default given that the previous one was a mute thug in Batman and Robin.
- It's gotten progressively harder to ignore the right-wing fantasy element of these movies.
- Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm a liberal, but -- Superman's original New Deal leanings notwithstanding -- there's something inherently conservative about the superhero genre. (But that's an essay for another day.)
- Bit too much of characters explaining their philosophies and the themes of the movie in dialogue.
- Which you can't understand half the time. It turns out my experience watching Dark Knight a few months back with the bass up too high to hear what anyone was saying was an authentic theater experience!
- And it's an ending. A real, honest-to-God ending. The exact thing that indefinitely-serialized comics lack. (And movies, for that matter -- superhero movie series are rife with finales that the filmmakers didn't know were finales and, thus, lack conclusive endings: Batman and Robin, Spider-Man 3, Superman 4, Superman Returns, even X-Men 3 and Blade 3.) This was a real-ass ending, and it was satisfying.
I expect I'll get into spoilers and specifics later on down the line. But that's it for now.
Continuing the Olympic theme, here's a show at Munich Olympiahalle, 1980.
And if you found this page doing a search for Munich Olympics, I can pretty much guarantee that it is the happiest, most upbeat thing in your search results. You're welcome.
So I guess there was some kind of thing in London today?
Here is a song that has "London" in the title.
Xeni Jardin posted this video on BoingBoing. It's a jest.com montage of Phil Moore singing along to the theme music on Nick Arcade.
In the comments section, someone going by Seg links to a Splitsider interview with Moore and the creators of the show, James Bethea and Karim.
On the so-famous-somebody-made-a-montage-of-it song-and-dance silliness, the piece has this to say:
And there’s his rather — at times — goofy antics (which he also told me he can now look back on and laugh about, wondering "what kind of crack was I smoking," explaining to me that he only would so indulge when he felt the kids were freaking out so bad about being on a nationally televised show that if he was weird enough, nothing they could do would embarrass them).
There's some fascinating stuff in there -- I never thought about the logistical challenge of the simple four-directional decision tree for Mikey's movements on the game board. Dragon's Lair was out nearly a decade before Nick Arcade aired, but of course there's a difference between burning LaserDiscs for mass distribution and having one put together especially for an episode of a game show. Or at least there was 20 years ago; you can do all that shit on a phone now.
Other interesting subjects: making sure the girls on the show were comfortable; not realizing Moore was the only African-American game show host on TV at the time; the surprising ease with which they convinced the major publishers to send them games, even betas.
Those betas, of course, have become important to the collector community; most notably, the Sonic 2 prototype, which made its way into the wild some 14 years later. It includes the Hidden Palace Zone, which was teased in magazine previews but didn't make it into the final version of the game (causing, as you might expect, all manner of proto-Internet rumors in its day), and contains a whole lot of leftover material from the original Sonic, proving that Sonic 2 was built on top of the Sonic 1 code.
A silly little show, probably mostly forgotten -- funny how cutting-edge the thing actually was.
(And I don't know about you, but I was singing "Adjust that score and play some more, adjust that score and play some more..." before I pressed Play.)
(Also funny: "Fillmore", by coincidence, is the name of the first area on Act Raiser -- which was featured on Nick Arcade.)
Sweden, 1973. Featuring a kick-ass trombone solo by Bruce Fowler, whose work you are almost certainly familiar with if you have seen a movie in the past twenty years.
Watched Jaynestown again last night, and gorrammed if'n it ain't still one of my all-time favorite hours of television.
There's something about the way it all comes together -- it takes the most two-dimensional character on the show, the comic relief, and gives him more depth and humanity than we ever see in any other episode. It asks Big Questions -- and manages to approach those same questions, of the relationship between symbol and reality, in two different subplots, without it ever feeling forced. And while the Inara/Fess subplot is pretty standard Inara Being Wise stuff, the Book/River one has some of my favorite lines from the series and does a great job pairing off two characters who don't usually interact with each other.
It's a great episode -- legitimately funny, with a downer of an ending. If that's not vintage Whedon I don't know what is.
But while it's a Whedon show, the writer credit on this episode is Ben Edlund -- perhaps best known as the creator of The Tick.
And I got to thinking -- you know, there are a lot of ways Jayne and the Tick are similar.
They're simple and childlike, we don't really know anything about them other than their basic personality traits, they provide comedy rather than depth of character, and they seek simple solutions to their problems, usually consisting of violent mayhem.
And then, of course, you get to temperament, and they're polar opposites.
The Tick is pure. He wants to do the right thing, the heroic thing, the thing that helps people. Jayne is pure id; he's not actually evil (I'd say more chaotic neutral, though people with more D&D experience can feel free to correct me on that) but he has no motivations beyond his own immediate and selfish gratification. Jayne's speech to the mudders at the end of Jaynestown is like the inverse of an inspirational Tick speech -- full of anger, despair, frustration, cynicism, nihilism, and self-loathing. It's a bitter pill: "Heroes don't exist and no one is going to help you."
Needless to say, this kind of thinking is anathema to everything the Tick stands for.
I think maybe it comes down to something like this: the Tick is an overgrown 8-year-old, and Jayne is an overgrown 14-year-old.
At any rate. Damn good television, and thought-provoking -- and it's not even my favorite episode. (That'd be the one immediately following, Out of Gas.)
A lovely piece by Ruth Underwood discussing her work with Frank and his experimentation. It's fitting that she compares him to a mad scientist -- in The Real Frank Zappa Book, he says that was his first impression of Edgard Varèse, on seeing his photo on an album cover as a child.
Then she gives us a lovely peek behind the curtain with a look at some of Zappa's sheet music -- fine, detailed, intricate, as you'd expect -- and discusses the "Zappa sound".
Ruth plays her part from St. Alphonzo's Pancake Breakfast and does a hell of a job even for someone who hadn't been retired for three decades, then Dweezil, Napoleon, and the band play us out.
I've seen a few versions of this video floating around YouTube but I'm not sure what the source is. Obviously it's recent (relatively -- this version was uploaded about 5 years ago). Could be on the ZPZ DVD, but according to Wikipedia that was released a few months after the upload date. Anybody knows, drop me a line.