May 2010 Archives

I already posted this trailer on Facebook, so I apologize to anyone who may be following me over there who's already seen it, but I'm very enthused about this movie and want to spread the word as far as I can. Hopefully, a groundswell of attention will inspire someone to actually distribute it here in the U.S.

Les Aventures extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec (i.e., The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Dry-White) is apparently based on a French comic book. I first heard about the film a few months ago over on Michael May's Adventureblog, and I thought it looked kind of cool, but I don't speak French so it didn't really grab my attention until I found a trailer with English subtitles. Once I could tell what was going on... wow. I wanted to see the movie right away. Like now. Have a look and see if it doesn't have the same effect on you...

(Be warned that there is a brief glimpse of bare boobies at about the 2:00 mark, if that sort of thing bothers you; for what it's worth, they're seen in a bathtub setting as opposed to a sexual context, if that makes any difference. Hey, what do you expect, this is a French movie, after all!)

Victorian-era Paris, a pretty heroine, a pterodactyl, and a reanimated mummy who politely asks for tea, plus 1980s-style gratuitous nudity, and all of it directed by Luc Besson, the man behind one of my all-time favorites, The Fifth Element. How can this be anything less than a perfect afternoon at the movies?

From what I've been able to learn, it opened in France over a month ago and there are international release dates in various countries through October, but no word whatsoever of a release in this country. My friend Dave suspects there won't be, because of the well-known American aversion to reading subtitles. I must grudgingly admit that he may be right; foreign films simply don't do well in the U.S. But surely something dripping with this much pure awesome would transcend that silly bit of provincialism? At least enough to allow for a straight-to-video release? I'm keeping my fingers crossed...

I'm posting our weekly music feature a little early this time; I'll be on the road by this afternoon, heading west to Wendover, Nevada, a.k.a. Salt Lake's moral exhaust port. I'm going out for a concert, and no, it's not Rick Springfield for a change. It's these guys, actually, another favorite band of mine from the Awesome '80s:

Ah, the '80s, when images of six guys standing around watching a woman sleep weren't considered creepy at all. It really was a different time... a better, more innocent time in a lot of ways. Sorry about the dodgy picture; The Man has disabled embedding on all the decent-quality Huey Lewis videos, at least the ones I could find in two minutes of Googling.

"Do You Believe in Love," from the album Picture This, was the first charting single from Huey Lewis and the News. I remember hearing it quite a lot back in the day and I always liked it, but the band wouldn't really break through into "household name" status until the next album, Sports. Sports was a monster hit, with four of its nine tracks hitting the top 10 singles charts, and a fifth breaking into the top 20. The album itself was the second bestseller of the year, right behind Michael Jackson's Thriller.

The Arbiters of Cool never thought much of Huey and the boys, and I suppose I can understand why. Their image was more cuddly than cutting-edge; Huey himself was a bit older than the usual pop star, with rugged yet average features that appealed to the housewives; and a lot of their lyrics admittedly tended toward the cutesy and/or sappy. But then, so did the early rock 'n' roll and 1950s doo-wop that so obviously influenced their sound. And anyway, you can't listen to Lou Reed and The Ramones all the time. Well, I suppose you can, but if you do, I don't want to hang around with you.

We have time for one more, my personal favorite by Huey Lewis and the News, the one that drove the strait-laced, finger-wagging set into hissy fits because they didn't understand what the song was really about:

Yeah, good stuff. Any band that can come up with that opening wail is rock-and-roll in my book. Incidentally, that dunking-your-face-in-a-sink-full-of-ice-cubes gag was done by Paul Newman in at least two movies that I know of: Harper, from 1966, and 1973's The Sting. And one final thought: I always admired that red suit with the black t-shirt that Huey's wearing. I still like the look, actually; if I ever find myself in the position of having to wear a suit, that might not be a bad way to do it...

Bummed because Google's 48-hour tribute to the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man -- a fully playable version of the game standing in for Google's homepage banner -- is over? Maybe you missed the whole thing and you're feeling really lame and out of the online fad-loop that all the cool kids seem to be plugged into? Well, have no fear, because Google has apparently decided to keep the game page up indefinitely, if not permanently. Just go here and drop virtual quarters 'til your heart's content.

My thanks to Evanier for cluing me in about this. And now I think I'm going to go play a quick round...

I'm sure everyone has heard by now that space shuttle Atlantis returned safely to Earth this morning, concluding her 32nd -- and final -- mission. The old girl isn't quite ready for mothballs yet; she will be prepped again as per the usual turnaround routine to serve as the "launch-on-need" vehicle -- that'd be a "back-up" to you and me -- for Endeavour's final flight in November, which will be the last of the shuttle program. Barring any problems with Endeavour, however, Atlantis is effectively finished. I won't reiterate again how sad this makes me. Instead, let's just paste a couple of souvenirs into our online scrapbook, and enjoy the memories while they're still fresh.

First up, Twittering astronaut Soichi Noguchi captured a really gorgeous portrait of Atlantis as she pulled away from the International Space Station a couple days ago; click on the thumbnail below to see the full-size version:

And here is NASA's official video coverage of the landing. This is what the future looked like when I was a kid, and even though I know a lot of people now see this as the past -- the 1970s, to be precise -- I never get tired of seeing it. For a vehicle that was once derisively referred to as "the flying brick," the shuttle always strikes me as incredibly graceful in the air and surprisingly delicate when it touches down.

The next scheduled launch will be Discovery in mid-September...

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you've probably figured out that I'm not exactly a "glass is half-full" kind of guy. I don't consider myself overly negative or pessimistic (although I've certainly been accused of both by friends and family), but I do have a painful awareness of the worst-case scenario, if that makes sense.

That's why I find the late Christopher Reeve so endlessly fascinating and, to employ the shopworn cliche, inspirational. He was a guy who ended up in the worst imaginable worst-case scenario, and yet somehow, he endured. No, that's not quite correct; he rose above it. Not only did the accident that paralyzed him fail to destroy him, it actually made him a better human being. And his accomplishments after the accident were at least as impressive and important as the ones he'd achieved before it.

Consider the following list, taken from an article about Bret Michaels and other celebrities who set examples of courage and dignity in the face of potentially devastating health problems:

In his “Still Me” memoir, the cinema “Superman” recounted his rehabilitation, admitting that initially, he considered suicide because he thought his life was over. However, he:

• wrote two best-sellers,
• directed two telefilms,
• produced and starred in a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window,”
• received multiple Emmy nominations for his acting and directing work,
• traveled across the United States giving speeches,
• established the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation to speed spinal cord injury research and aid sufferers,
• co-founded the Reeve-Irvine Research Center,
• was instrumental in pioneering a new form of therapy that has accounted for a number of paralyzed patients becoming able to walk again,
• made the cover of Time,
• won a Grammy,
• and shattered ratings records for CW series when he guest starred on “Smallville.”

I'm not ever going to become a Pollyanna who always looks on the bright side of life. That's just not me. And frankly I despise that simplistic aphorism about what you should do when life hands you lemons, because oftentimes those lemons are too small and hard to squeeze enough juice out of them to make any damn lemonade. But this list definitely suggests that you can find some use for the little buggers. Even if it's just turning throwing them back at the smug jackass who gave them to you in the first place...

I wouldn't call myself a fan of the late heavy-metal singer Ronnie James Dio, who died last week at the age of 67. His music was a little too far to the headbanging side of the spectrum for my tastes (well, except for that one song on the Vision Quest soundtrack; I liked that one). But even so, he was a pretty formidable presence out there in the culture during my formative years, a familiar face and voice, and I seem to have reached a point in my life where I feel a pang at the loss of any iconic figure from my youth, whether I was a fan or not. So, to honor the recently departed Mr. Dio, I'm going to post one of his videos, "The Last in Line," which is admittedly kind of ridiculous even by MTV standards, but is nevertheless... interesting.

To be honest, I've been thinking about posting this clip anyhow, as an example of what I like to call "narrative videos." I haven't done any kind of statistical analysis or anything, but it seems to me that the vast majority of music videos are little more than performance clips. That is, they're really just footage of the band playing the song. They may be wearing weird costumes or performing in bizarre settings or something, but there's usually not much story happening. Some vids, though, have a definite plot: the three famous ZZ Top clips involving the Eliminator hot rod, for example, or more obviously, a-ha's justly praised "Take on Me" video, in which a young woman is sucked into a comic-book world and proceeds to have adventures with the band's hunky lead singer as they're pursued by sinister guys in dark uniforms and helmets. And then of course, there's Dio's "The Last in Line," which is perhaps single-handedly responsible for the entire "heavy-metal hell" sequence in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey:

As I said, pretty ridiculous, but it has the virtue of being far more ambitious than most videos, as well as a piquant commentary on the social concerns and fads of the early '80s (i.e., the kids whose punishment is to play arcade games for all eternity -- wonder which sin warranted that?). I think the similarity to Bogus Journey is pretty obvious, if you remember that movie at all, and you could also argue that the demon guy with the hoses sticking out of his neck was an inspiration for the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation. (It would seem that American culture has been uneasy with the idea of cybernetics for a very long time.)

Lastly, a brief trivia note: You may have recognized the young man who's taking the tour of hell. That's Meeno Peluce, a child actor who was all over the boob tube during the late '70s and early '80s. He's best known for the short-lived but well-loved time-travel series Voyagers!, and as fate would have it, he's also the brother of Soleil Moon-Frye, a.k.a. Punky Brewster. I always thought Peluce was a cool kid, as well as a natural and appealing actor; he's a little younger than me, but close enough that I easily identified with him in Voyagers! and other roles. This video, made in 1984, was the last time I remember seeing him in anything, although Wikipedia says he's appeared in a number of made-for-TV movies since then. He apparently grew up to become a history teacher -- interesting, considering his character on Voyagers! was a history buff and, as I recall, the son of a teacher -- and he's also an accomplished photographer who has shot Courtney Love and Lady Gaga. Not bad, kid... not bad at all...

I took a walk earlier, from my office over to my credit union, and along the way, I happened to spot a handbill pasted to a lamppost. It was typical for this sort of thing: a homemade, Xerox'd advertisement for a band I've never heard of, scheduled to play at a club I'd never set foot in, the sort of ad I see a dozen times a week and never pay any mind to. This one, however, caught my attention because I recognized the photo the band had used, no doubt with a great deal of irony and private amusement on their part. It was, in fact, this photo here:

This is a publicity still from a short-lived TV series called The Powers of Matthew Star, circa 1982 or thereabouts, about an alien prince from a besieged world, hiding out here on Earth in the guise of a typical teenage boy. Who just happens to have telekinetic superpowers with which he helps out the people around him, of course. I suspect that 99.99999% of the rest of the world has completely forgotten this show, if in fact anyone ever knew about it to begin with. Probably Louis Gossett, Jr., doesn't even remember this show, and he was in the damn thing. But I remember it. Because I'm me.

This is my gift. And my curse.

Incidentally, I ganked that image up there from this site, a pretty nifty project in which somebody is scanning and commenting on old issues of Starlog magazine. I always loved Starlog, the best source of sci-fi and fantasy news for decades before this whole InterWeb thing came along. I still have quite a few back issues down in the archives. Including the one with the article about The Powers of Matthew Star.

It's okay, I'm frightened, too...

In addition to Pac-Man, today is also the 30th anniversary of another major signpost in the pop-cultural landscape: the premiere of The Empire Strikes Back. But perhaps you've not heard of it? It was, after all, just a little-known sequel to a cultish fantasy movie about a farm boy who befriends a trashcan and a walking carpet...

Okay, so that was a really lame attempt at humor. Sorry about that.

I don't have much to say about the movie itself. We've all seen it. We all know the shocking twist at the end. Popular consensus long ago determined it was the best of the six Star Wars films, and I don't disagree with that assessment. (I do, however, hold about the same level of esteem for both it and the original Star Wars. They're quite different in many respects, but I love them equally.) It remains, even after decades, the textbook example of everything a good sequel ought to do: its plot was original and compelling, not simply a redo of the original; it expanded upon the established setting without rewriting any rules; it deepened the familiar characters, added new ones that were equally as interesting and/or lovable, and offered more sophisticated themes. Like the Harry Potter novels would do years later, the Star Wars saga was growing up, keeping pace with the maturation of its primary fanbase. It's a shame that Return of the Jedi was in so many ways a step backwards... but that's a blog entry for another time.

I have several strong memories associated with the release of Empire, most notably the fiendish way in which I found out about Vader's big revelation to Luke, but quite honestly, I don't have the time right now to do that story justice. So what I'd like to do is share with you the little-seen teaser trailer that was released a year before the movie itself:

Yes, I know, two posts with nearly identical titles in only one week's time... but by some weird coincidence this year is turning out to be packed with landmark anniversaries for things that really don't seem like they happened all that long ago. Today's impossible-that-so-much-time-has-passed event is the release of the arcade video game Pac-Man, which holds the Guinness World Record for "the world's most successful coin-operated game."

There are a handful of video games that were so mind-boggling to me for one reason or another that I can still remember the place and circumstances in which I first encountered them. Space Invaders, for instance -- I saw my first SI game at a grotty old movie theater called the Greenbriar, which ran a special program of Saturday double-features for the kids every summer, in association with the local PTA. (Most memorable bill: Clash of the Titans with Dragonslayer... now that was an afternoon's entertainment!) One weekend, though, nobody seemed much interested in the movie... instead, we were all in the lobby, clustered around this tall wooden cabinet from which some really weird sounds were emanating. I can still recall the feel of a quarter clenched in my moist palm, the knurled edge biting into my skin; the smell of musty carpet, fresh popcorns, and overheated (i.e., sweaty) kids; and the pleasure of shooting down 8-bit aliens on the march, only to become clenched by a ratcheting sense of anxiety as that last little bugger evaded my turbolaser and raced for the surface. It was, in a word, an amazing experience unlike anything I'd ever done before, and it obviously etched itself deeply into my memory.

Pac-Man, not so much. I mean, I played Pac-Man, I liked Pac-Man, but it was a different experience from my first encounter with Space Invaders... or Zaxxon, which upped the realism factor by adding a third dimension to your avatar's maneuverability... or Gauntlet, which could be played by four people simultaneously, and was really just a kick-ass game anyway. Pac-Man, on the other hand, was simply a ubiquitous part of the background noise of my early adolescence. A very pleasant noise, to be sure... the opening theme song and the pathetic little "zoink-zoink" sound when ol' Packy gets eaten can still bring a smile to my face. But I can't remember the first time I saw or played the game; it seems like all of a sudden, it was just all over the place, appearing fully grown overnight like dandelions on the front lawn. And it still is all over, if you're paying attention. Arcades have gone away and cabinet-style coin-op games are pretty rare in general, but if you encounter a vintage game out there somewhere, odds are good that it's going to be a Pac-Man... or at least one of those combo units that have several classic games in one cabinet, and Pac-Man is always an option in those. The longevity of the cute little yellow mouth and the pop-eyed ghosts who are his mortal enemies is nothing less than astounding.

If you haven't seen it already, Google has done something pretty cool to celebrate 30 years of that "wocka-wocka-wocka" sound. The search engine site has replaced its usual banner with a fully playable (if weirdly elongated) recreation of the game:

Just click the "Insert Coin" button and you're right back in middle school, gobbling those power-pills and chasing Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde around the maze at breakneck -- well, okay, maybe not so fast -- speed. I've been hearing the opening theme and the sound effects all over my cube farm this morning, and it's making an otherwise stressed-out Friday a lot more enjoyable. Also a lot less productive, but given the pace we've been keeping lately, I'm all for that...

Anyhow, there's a brief article on the anniversary and Google's commemoration of it here, or you can just hit Google's homepage and commence to playing.

Check out the official Pac-Man page too!

Actor-writer-blogger-geek-extraordinaire Wil Wheaton has a brief but evocative post up about his memories of the Challenger disaster and watching the launch of Atlantis the other day. Here's the bit that resonated the most with me:

When mission control gave the order to go with throttle up, I held my breath like I have every single time since the shuttle program was reinstated in 1988, and when the shuttle separated from the boosters and glided into orbit, I got something in my eye. Just take a moment, if you don't mind, and think about what it means that we can leave our planet, even if we've "only" gotten as far as the dark side of the moon. Think about what it means that something as incredible as putting humans into space and bringing them back safely to Earth today earns less media attention and public excitement than the typical celebrity breakup.

It is amazing that we can do this, and even though I've come to believe the shuttle program isn't the best way to spend NASA's tiny budget (which is a pitiful fraction of what it should be), I hope that there was a child watching the launch today who will feel inspired to reach out to the stars and see what's out there.

We humans are a flawed species, to put it mildly, and I think we could do a much better job taking care of our planet and each other ... but when I see what we're capable of doing, it gives me hope that the future I pretended to live in twenty years ago will actually arrive some day.

(For anyone who doesn't catch the reference in the final sentence -- and I know at least one of my Loyal Readers probably does not -- Wil played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation.)

SamuraiFrog reminds us that yesterday, May 16, was the 20th anniversary of Muppet-master Jim Henson's sad and far-too-early death. Twenty years since that spooky day when my entire university campus seemed to fall into a deep depression. Few individuals have that kind of effect on an entire generation. And the thing I admire so much about Jim is that he did it with nothing more than whimsy and sly humor, and the imagination to turn feathers and foam and random bits of stuff into characters that still seem to live and breathe in our collective consciousness.

Still... twenty years? I'm really having a hard time wrapping my mind around that one!

Incidentally, the photo above is one I ran across quite a while ago; I've been waiting for a good reason to post it, and this seems as good a time as any. I'm sorry to say I don't know who the man on Jim's left is; the gentleman to his right is, of course, Frank Oz, Jim's friend and co-conspirator during what I would call the "golden age" of The Muppets: the pre-Elmo Sesame Street, The Muppet Show, and The Muppet Movie. It seems to me that Frank, like Dan Ackroyd after Belushi, lost some minuscule but crucial animating spark after Jim's death. Perhaps that's presumptuous of me, considering I don't know the man, but that is nevertheless the sense I get when he talks about the old days.

I think a lot of us feel that way, actually...

Just about one hour ago, space shuttle Atlantis lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center for the final time.

It was a textbook launch into a beautiful cerulean sky, and the shuttle is now safely on orbit and chasing after the International Space Station for a rendezvous two days from now. Mission STS-132 is scheduled to last 12 days; in its payload bay, Atlantis carries a Russian laboratory module -- the first time a Russian-built ISS component has flown on an American spacecraft -- as well as an assortment of replacement parts and batteries for the station.

Atlantis, the second youngest of the shuttles, flew for the first time in October 1985, and has racked up an impressive list of "firsts" in the 25 years since. Here's a fairly nifty video produced by NASA to commemorate her life:

(And yes, I know I was just bitching about not having any time to blog, let alone watch space shuttle videos. So I'm rebelling a little, give me a break...)

I'm having one of those grinding, despair-inducing weeks that consist of little more than proofreading, restless and unsatisfying sleep, and numbly shoveling food into my mouth without tasting it. Late nights, impossible deadlines, not enough hands around the agency to manage the volume of work, neglected chores and personal projects at home, and the bleak feeling that I've somehow lost sight of whatever my "real" life was supposed to be... you get the idea.

At times like this, when daydreams of walking away from everything and hitting the open road with nothing but a dufflebag at my side like Bill Bixby in The Incredible Hulk are occurring more and more frequently -- like, every 45 seconds or so -- I can't help but wonder how in the hell people with families can tolerate the demands of the modern workplace. I know many of my coworkers have spouses and kids. If I'm feeling antsy about missing out on the life part of the work-life balance, what sort of torment are they enduring?

In any event, my agenda is crowded enough that I may not manage to get a Friday Evening Video up today, and I really doubt that I'll be managing anything of actual substance for awhile, either. And yes, I am deeply frustrated by that, thanks for asking.

In the meantime, let's all take a moment to enjoy a vintage photo of the lovely Bettie Page, shall we?

Jaquandor pointed me last night at a nifty tool that helps you visualize the scale of the Deepwater Horizon disaster by overlaying a satellite image of the oil slick on top of the landscape of your choosing. This is what resulted when I entered Salt Lake City as ground zero:

For my non-local readers who don't know the geography of this area, the big blue splotch in the upper left is the Great Salt Lake; the smaller blue splotch to the south, the one that's mostly covered by the oil slick, is Utah Lake. In between those two lakes is the most densely populated area in the state, what we locals refer to as the Wasatch Front. As you can see, the oil would cover most of that area -- two valleys, two counties, two major cities and all the 'burbs in between. It looks like the city of Ogden to the north might be spared, but it'd have oil lapping at its borders. And the slick has intruded into the Tooele Valley to the west, and that long eastward-bound pseudopod has taken out Park City, home of the 2002 Winter Olympics, and crossed the border into Wyoming. In other words, this damn thing is big. Mind-boggingly big.

Keep in mind that the image of the oil spill was taken May 6, four days ago; it has surely grown since then. How can we possibly fix something like that?

I'll bet you all had a hunch when I started prattling on about Roy Orbison last night who was going to be be appearing in this week's Friday Evening Videos, didn't you? Smart little Loyal Readers.

You're quite correct: I was planning to post what I thought was Roy's final hit, "You Got It," from the 1989 album Mystery Girl, which was a favorite cassette of mine during my sophomore year of college and the following summer. But as I started poking around looking for the video clip and any interesting background information I could find, I discovered that this was not, in fact, Roy's last charting single, and Mystery Girl was not his last album. Remember that he'd been working a lot with producer Jeff Lynne in the year or two prior to his death in 1988; it turns out he recorded more material than what ended up on Mystery Girl, enough to fill out one more album, which Lynne compiled and released four years later. Somehow, I completely missed King of Hearts in 1992, and I also missed the two final, posthumous hits it generated, a duet of Roy's classic "Crying," sung with k.d. lang, and this song:

"I Drove All Night" reveals a fairly tangled history when you delve into it. The song was written specifically for Roy, and he recorded it in 1987, a full year before his death, but for some reason it wasn't selected for Mystery Girl, and of course it wouldn't appear until King of Hearts came out in '92. In the meantime, Cyndi Lauper, of all people, scored a top-10 hit with it in 1989, and I'm willing to bet a lot of people probably think the song was hers, and Roy's version was the cover. It has since been covered again by a band I've never heard of, Pinmonkey, and most recently by -- shudder -- Celine Dion in 2003.

Since I was unfamiliar with the song, I obviously had never seen the video either, until this afternoon. I think it's absolutely magnificent. The imagery is a perfect match for the audio, it's very clever how the director covers for the fact that Roy had been dead for four years, and the young stars are simply beautiful to gaze upon. (If you can't place them, you're looking at Oscar-winning actress Jennifer Connelly, seen here at the peak of her Rocketeer-era detectability, and Jason Priestley, who was then riding high on the success of Beverly Hills, 90210.) Everything about this evokes a particular time in my life, a time I often miss, to be honest. I was old enough in '92 to know something, but still young enough to believe in a lot of things. I acted tougher than I really was, and I was in love with the idea of love itself. In other words, I was a lot like the character that Priestley is playing here. Or at least, that's how I used to imagine myself, and how I like to remember myself.

Hell, I could just reacting to the car, I guess. Priestley is driving a 1964 Galaxie, a little bit different than my older '63, but close enough for this video to stir up a lot of sense memories.

For our second feature this evening, I wanted to post "End of the Line" by The Traveling Wilburys, another fabulous song that combines a catchy hook with some truly authentic and wise lyrics; unfortunately, the foul Copyright Lords have forbidden anyone from embedding it, so if you'd like to see it, you'll have to click through. If nothing else, it's worth a look to see how this one handled Roy's absence.

Finally, here's a little something by request, a B-52s song for my friend Keith. To be honest, I really don't care for The B-52s -- I find the majority of their stuff obnoxious, what with the herky-jerky delivery and a sound that generally rubs me the wrong way -- but their 1989 hit "Roam" isn't too bad, and it's kind of in the same thematic ballpark as "I Drove All Night," at least in the sense that it's about traveling and love. Enjoy, Keith!

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Yeah, I know, but it's Friday, and I'm punchy after a very busy week and several nights of lousy sleep. Hopefully I'll make it back later with a couple things...

You'd never guess from the songs I've been waxing nostalgic over in my Friday Evening Video segments, but sometime around my junior or senior year of high school, I developed a serious affection for the music of the 1950s and '60s, better known as the oldies. I don't remember what, precisely, triggered my interest in the stuff my parents used to listen to, but I suppose you could probably blame my car, my '63 Ford Galaxie, as much as anything. You see, my old Cruising Vessel had only a stock AM radio, and there wasn't much music on the AM band by the late '80s. When I was bombing around the valley with the top down, pondering the unfathomable mysteries of growing up -- i.e., girls -- I had a choice of either the oldies station or the country station, and at that point in my life, there wasn't any question of which I was going to prefer. I ended up building a lot of my identity as a young adult around that car, and by extension, around that music.

One of my favorites artists from that period was Roy Orbison, a strange-looking man who had an even stranger voice. Everyone knows him for "Oh, Pretty Woman," of course, but the larger percentage of his work tended to comprise haunting, melancholy tunes about loneliness, heartbreak, insecurity, and longing -- in other words, the perfect soundtrack for your teens and early twenties, when nobody understands you and every perceived slight is a tragic thing that hits you like a baseball bat in the gut. I recall many evenings when I was driving along the dark roads on the south end of the valley -- there wasn't much traffic then, and not a lot of street lights either, so it often felt like my big old car was gliding through deep space -- with the air temperature turning brisk against my face and arms as I passed irrigated fields then warming again as I left them behind. The dashboard lights bathed the car's interior in a greenish light, and Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" or "Only the Lonely" was fading in and out of the static-y background noise like messages from another dimension. Eerie... and, as I noted, perfect.

As fate would have it, Roy was experiencing something of a comeback right around then. In 1987, he recorded, along with George Harrison, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne of the Electric Light Orchestra, and Bob Dylan, the astounding Traveling Wilburys, Volume I -- there's not a bad cut on that album -- and his older music was starting to turn up in movies. In November of 1988, he releasedrecorded a solo album called Mystery Girl, which spawned his first all-new hit in years, "You Got It." His star was definitely rising again. And then, right at the end of 1988, when I was a sophomore in college, Roy Orbison died unexpectedly of a heart attack. I remember being really depressed that I'd lost him just as I'd discovered him. It didn't seem fair, somehow.

I also remember thinking that he was quite old.

Well, I've just been reading a retrospective on Roy -- NPR has named him one of its 50 Great Voices -- and it turns out that his age upon his death was all of 53 years old. Fifty-three. I don't mind telling you, I'm a little freaked out by this realization, both because 53 no longer seems old to me, and also because I was such a dunce back in '88 as to think that it was. I'm going to have to ponder this whole thing for a while, I think.

In the meantime, go check out that article. It's an interesting read, especially if all you know about Roy is that he did the theme song for some Julia Roberts movie...

So what the heck is going on down there in the Gulf of Mexico, anyhow? How can a fire on a big steel platform that's standing above the water lead to an oil leak of apocalyptic proportions under the water?

If you, too, have been asking these timely questions, check out this handy video that explains such mysteries in only about one minute:

Well, I thought that was pretty interesting. I guess I imagined the oil was leaking directly from the wellhead, and never considered the associated piping, which of course makes for a much bigger problem.

One interesting sidenote: that video came from Al Jazeera, the Middle Eastern news network. It seems they have an English-language division, which I did not know. I'm learning all sorts of things today. My thanks to Sullivan for posting the video and sending me down that particular rabbit hole.

Getting back to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, if you're interested in some numbers, check out this chart at Information is Beautiful. Among other fascinating -- if deeply sobering -- factoids: The spill already covers an area roughly the size of Jamaica, and we may have less than 30 years of easily obtainable oil remaining to us. I don't know about you, but I don't relish the idea of adopting a Mad Max-style existence for my 70th birthday.

One final link: For a peek into the bowels of hell itself, here's a gallery of incredible photos showing the final hours of the Deepwater Horizon's fight for existence. I have to confess a perverse attraction to disasters like this. I imagine watching that thing heel over and fall into the sea would've been an awesome -- in the original, non-1980s sense of the word -- spectacle...

I think this speaks for itself (click on the image if you can't read the fine print and need to enlarge it):

My man Rick has actually had a pretty colorful -- and sometimes difficult -- life: He became a teen idol at the improbably advanced age of 32 (when "Jessie's Girl" hit number one) after years of struggling to find an American audience, and he's struggled ever since to find respect as a genuine musician instead of a one-bubblegum-hit wonder; he lived for several years with Linda Blair of Exorcist fame -- she was all of 15 when they moved in together, and he was a decade older (I imagine that raised a few eyebrows, even in the anything-goes 1970s); he collapsed into a deep depression in the late '80s, when it seemed his moment had come and gone in such a brief span of time, and he actually contemplated suicide; and now at the age of 60, he's rebuilt both his musical and acting career, and consistently puts on one of the best live shows I've ever seen, even if it's only his hardcore fans who ever actually see it.

Assuming that he can write prose at all (or has found himself a good ghost writer), I expect all this ought to make for a hell of a read...

At least, that's my hope. I still remember all too well my excitement at the news that Jimmy Buffett was writing a memoir, and the crushing disappointment when I finally got around to reading it. All those wild experiences and people that surely inspired his songs about swashbucklers and vagabonds, the rumors that he'd made ends meet for a while by smuggling weed from Cuba to Key West, the beer-drinking-and-hell-raising early days of his career... that's what I expected from A Pirate Looks at Fifty. Instead, I got a fairly boring travelogue written by a middle-aged capitalist who thinks he's more clever with a turn of phrase than he often is. Rick, old buddy, don't let me down the way Jimmy did...

Before I could fix a nice brunch for The Girlfriend yesterday morning, I had to make a quick run to the store for a couple of items. Grocery shopping early Sunday morning is always an interesting experience. There's not much life yet -- most people are home cooking breakfast for their own loved ones, or else in church, I guess -- but the life you do encounter seems to embody so much despair, longing, resignation, and, sometimes, outright agony. It's a peek into the torments of the suburban damned, I tell you. In just eight short minutes, I saw:

• A young single father with a four- or five-year-old child in his cart, probably on a weekend visitation, standing in the cereal aisle as if paralyzed by the vast range of possibilities, torn between visions of being the cool dad who gets the kid the cereal that turns the milk purple and contains a nifty prize, and the responsible dad who makes the child eat something that's good for him. Or at least something that won't cause the boy's mother to throw another hissy fit and emasculate him in front of her parents yet again, as she's done nearly every week since that disastrous prom night when she promised him everything would be all right because you can't get pregnant on the first time.

• A visibly hungover guy, ashen-skinned behind very large, very dark sunglasses, pondering the selection of refrigerated fruit juices, wondering which would be least likely to make want to vomit again. Or would at least provide the least offensive visual effect when he inevitably went down on his knees before the Porcelain God for the sixth time in the past eight hours.

• A Latina woman with a cart completely filled with family-size bags of tortilla chips, on sale this week for the incredible price of $1.29 a bag. She knows she's surrendering another little piece of her heritage to the behemoth consumerism that defines modern America, and she feels a minor pang of guilt at the way so many of her family's traditions have already been cast onto the rubbish heap, but damn, that's such a bargain! And anyway, who wants to spend all day bent over a hot oven, making tortillas and cutting them into quarters for baking?

• And finally, the grim-faced woman with the too-orange tan, the too-pale hair that comes from a bottle, the fine lines around her eyes that no amount of Oil of Olay seems to fill in, and last night's sweat-stained blouse and nylons with a run in them, doing the Walk of Shame after waking up in a dilapidated single-wide with a paunchy guy who'd looked much better the night before. A fresh pack of smokes won't make her 19 again, but she hopes it'll at least take the stale tequila taste out of her mouth.

And just so you get the full effect, all this human drama was set to the tune of Fleetwood Mac's "Sara," as wistful and mournful as adult contempo shopping music has to offer.

Of course, my interpretation of things may have had something to do with being hungry and not having had any coffee yet. I tend to see things through a glass darkly in my pre-caffeinated state. But you have to admit that that state tends to produce better stories...

I spotted the following meme on the subject of comic books over at SamuraiFrog's last night and thought it'd be fun to do it today, in honor of Free Comic Book Day. If you're unaware of it, Free Comic Book Day is held annually on the first Saturday in May, and it's exactly what the name suggests: Participating comic shops nationwide give away free comics to anyone who sets foot through the door. The idea is to try and draw new readers -- and customers -- into the somewhat insular world of this hobby that, quite honestly and sadly, is in decline.

Unfortunately, I ran out of time before I had to leave the house for the day, and the moment of maximum relevance has now passed. That's pretty typical for me anymore, I'm afraid. Always a day late and a dollar short. I'm going to do the meme anyhow, though. Hope nobody minds.

For the record, I am really just a dilettante in the world of comics. I've been lurking around the fringes of this particular scene off and on for years, and I enjoy reading the form, but I've never gotten into full-bore into the hobby. Much of my knowledge of the important characters and stories comes not from the primary source material, the comics themselves, but from the movies and cartoons based upon them, and from occasional research when something comes up in conversation.

Just so y'all know where I'm coming from...

Friday evening, Saturday morning... it's all the same for some of us, right?

Anyhow, I received some feedback earlier this week about our musical feature here: Loyal Reader Keith expressed some dissatisfaction with the songs I've been choosing for Friday Evening Videos. He lamented the fact that, despite our long years of friendship, he's never been able to drag me over to the dark side -- his words, not mine -- of post-New Wave/alternative music.

This is an old, old rivalry between us. The battle lines between rockers and Wavers were drawn by forces larger than ourselves way back in high school -- maybe even middle school -- and I picked my tribe very early. I was a rocker. Not a metal head, mind you -- that's a whole other kettle of guitar picks -- but I always identified far more with the earthy, long-haired fellows in the leather and acid-washed jeans than the twee weirdos who played that bloodless synthesizer crap. At least, that's how I thought of things back in the day.

The irony, of course, is that most of my friends and girlfriends -- including Keith and The Girlfriend -- were Wavers. The universe can be truly perverse at times.

In any event, I've come in recent years to appreciate (or at least tolerate) a lot more alternative music than Keith probably realizes; hell, I took Anne to see Depeche Mode last year, the very epitome of everything I always disliked about New Wave synth bands, and I even had a reasonably good time. My mulleted 17-year-old self would be stunned to hear that, I'm sure. But the fact is, the label "alternative" covers a pretty broad spectrum, and I started realizing at some point that it wasn't all bad, and that I'd actually liked a fair amount of it all along, even back in my militant teen years. Without realizing it, of course. I mean, they played The Cars on Rock 103, so that made them okay, right?

If I could trace this awakening to any one song or event, I think it would probably be learning a few years ago that Stuart Adamson, the lead singer of the band Big Country, had died in an apparent suicide. Not that I was ever a fan of Big Country back in the day; if I was aware of them at all in the '80s -- and I don't think I was -- I would've sneeringly dismissed them simply because the radio stations on which they were played were not my stations, i.e., the rock stations. But a funny thing happened as I was perusing the online tributes to Adamson: They all referenced Big Country's hit single "In a Big Country," and when, purely out of curiosity, I tracked down this song, it turned out that I liked it. I liked it a lot. It wasn't sung in that weirdly passionless style that so many British imports of the '80s had, and which I've always found so off-putting. The orchestration was sweeping and dramatic, the chorus was catchy. And what was that? Was there a guitar in there? I was, quite frankly, surprised by this song:

(Apologies for the crappy video quality; this was the best version I could find.)

"In a Big Country" caused me to re-evaluate a few things about music and what was cool. As I told Keith, I don't think I'll ever love alternative music the way I do the more traditional varieties of rock and roll -- too much of it simply fails to resonate with me either emotionally or viscerally -- but I'm hopefully a little smarter now about what I'm willing to sample, and what I'm willing to let myself enjoy.

Keith, I'm not dismissing your list of suggestions; I'll see if I can work in some of the things you mentioned in the coming weeks.