It’s pedal-to-the-metal at the office this week, and I’ve been almost as busy at home with a little — okay, a big — renovation project that I’ll elaborate on another time. In the meanwhile, let me entertain you with this really awful sight gag/pun based on the unexpected juxtaposition of popular music and typography (whoever came up with this has a sick, sick mind):
We can thank Sullivan for this horror show.
And now back to the regularly scheduled grind…
I’d like to give a quick kudo to my friend Diane Olson, who I mentioned in passing during last week’s lengthy pity-party about my gout.
Diane is a copywriter at the ad agency where I work, but before that, she was a journalist and a staff writer for Catalyst magazine, a Salt Lake alternative monthly. She had quite a run there, stirring the muck, sticking it to The Man, earning a number of awards, and even having a creepy Silkwood moment or two while investigating what really goes on at Utah’s infamous Dugway Proving Ground. (Trivia note: Stephen King was inspired to write The Stand after he heard about some of the scary crap that happens out there.)
These days, Diane’s only work for Catalyst is a regular column called the Urban Almanac, a monthly compilation of timely factoids about what’s happening in the natural world right outside our patio doors, as well as tips for how readers can improve their gardens, their diets, and their connection to something more authentic than the suburbs. I know Diane gets a lot of satisfaction from her column, but she’s often said she’d hoped to do more with her writing (a familiar lament among us word-slinging types).
Just last week, quite out of the blue, as they say, she got a message from her editor at Catalyst; it seemed that someone from a local publishing house was trying to track her down. They want to turn Diane’s Urban Almanac into a full-blown book, an illustrated hardcover, no less. Whereas the Catalyst version is region-specific for SLC, the proposed book will be more global (or at least national) in scope… and they want it by October.
Diane is understandably over the moon about this, especially the way it just fell into her lap during something of a low moment, and I’m very happy for her myself. (Also a little jealous, but we won’t tell her that.) I’m already on the list for an autographed copy. And who knows… depending on when the finished volume hits the stands, it may make my Christmas shopping much easier this year!
Astounding! Earlier in the week, I reported the DVD release date for the 1982-83 TV series Tales of the Gold Monkey; now this morning I read the even more unlikely news that Max Headroom is on its way as well!
Although I’m sure most children of the ’80s will remember Max from the Coke and New Coke commercials of the day, the series Max Headroom had nothing to do with those, aside from the character of Max himself. Based on a British made-for-TV movie called Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future, the American-made series followed the adventures of Edison Carter, an investigative journalist living in a near-future dystopia entirely dominated by massive corporations and television. When Carter gets a little too close to uncovering his employers’ nasty secret, they attempt to download his brain and create a virtual replica of their top-rated news personality so they can eliminate the troublesome original. The experiment doesn’t quite succeed, and a smart-mouthed AI named Max Headroom is born!
Max Headroom was a trippy show, a biting satire of consumerism and mass media wrapped up in a tissue of futuristic ideas that wouldn’t penetrate the consciousness of mainstream audiences for another 10 or 15 years. (I’m not ashamed to admit that I didn’t fully comprehend some aspects of it myself.) Weirdly prescient in a lot of ways, and just plain weird in a lot of others, the show failed to find much of an audience, and it lasted less than a single season. Nevertheless, it made an impact on those who liked it; I don’t think it’s a stretch to call it a minor landmark in the history of science fiction, and certainly in the pop culture of the 1980s. I can’t begin to imagine how well it holds up today, but I’m excited to add it to my collection.
The press release doesn’t mention anything about possible extra features on the DVDs — I’d love to have those old Coke ads at least, and ideally the complete 20 Minutes into the Future movie — but the way these things go, I’ll count myself lucky just to have the series itself.
The release date for this set is August 10. I ought to be finished with Gold Monkey by then, so that will be just about perfect…
Update: I’ve just remembered that I already wrote about Max Headroom a couple years ago, when I posted the show’s opening credits as part of my TV Title Sequences series. It appears that the embedded video in that previous entry has been removed by the copyright Nazis; for your viewing pleasure, here is another version:
That’s sad news about actor Andrew Koenig, the son of Star Trek‘s Walter Koenig. If you haven’t been following the story, Andrew disappeared on February 14, after visiting friends in Vancouver. His family, friends, and fans initially hoped he was just going off the grid for a while to sort some things out, but as more details have trickled out over the past week, the grim conclusion to this story started to seem both obvious and inevitable: his father received a letter from him in which he sounded “despondent”; he’d recently dropped the lease on his LA apartment and sold or given away a lot of his possessions; he’d also turned down a couple of job offers. And Vancouver was reportedly a place where he’d been happy earlier in his life. So the discovery yesterday that he had committed suicide in one of that city’s parks was not at all unexpected. But I still found it deeply sorrowful.
Hi. My name is Jason, and I have gout.
If you don’t have any first-hand knowledge of the so-called “disease of kings,” consider yourself extremely lucky. I wouldn’t wish this shit on anyone, not even Dick Cheney, and my Loyal Readers all know how I feel about that guy. I can honestly say without exaggeration or hyperbole that I cannot imagine any pain worse than what I experience at the peak of a full-on outbreak of gout, except maybe a burn. A napalm burn, to be exact.
But Bennion, you’re asking, what exactly is this horrible affliction, and how can it be so horrible without having its own telethon?
I’ve just learned that Tales of the Gold Monkey, one of the “holy grails” of my misspent youth, will get its official DVD release on June 8. You can read the details here, if you’ve a mind to.
It looks like it’s going to be a nicely done set, with a 36-minute retrospective documentary (rare for these old television shows), a number of photo galleries and episode commentaries, and a collectible booklet. That’s impressive treatment for a series that lasted only one season way back in 1982! And I even like the package art, which is usually a big weak spot for TV-show DVDs. Although I do have to admit that the Gold Monkey artwork looks a lot like what was done for the Young Indiana Jones series; I guess Gold Monkey never will manage to shake off that particular association, will it?
In any event, this makes me irrationally happy… the last week or so has been pretty crappy, for reasons that will be revealed shortly, and this little jolt of good news is welcome distraction indeed.
Oh, and if you have no idea what the hell I’m even talking about, I’ve previously written about Tales of the Gold Monkey here and here.
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…
Not much to say, I just really liked this photo I spotted over at SamuraiFrog’s place.
It amazes me how alive The Muppets, and especially Kermit, still seem to me, even after all these years, and even when I’m looking at a picture that ought to shatter any remaining illusion that these things are anything but a cloth tube — a decorated sock, really — with a human being’s hand up the bottom. And yet, looking at this all-too-recognizable pose, this reminder that a gentle man and an insanely creative artist left us way before his time, brings a lump to my throat because, for just a moment, I know exactly what that silly cloth frog is “feeling.”
I miss him, too, Kermie… we all do.
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…
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.
