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Jan082016

Friday Evening Videos: “A Little Less Conversation”

I wasn’t planning to do a Friday Evening Video this week; I only have half a dozen other entries on my “to-do” list, including a review of The Force Awakens, which will no doubt run a bit long (ahem). But when one of my Facebook friends posted the following in honor of the late, great Elvis Presley’s birthday today (he would’ve been 81, as difficult as that is to imagine), I simply couldn’t resist doing the same here.

This isn’t a music video per se; rather, it’s a clip from the 1968 movie Live a Little, Love a Little. However, Elvis’ movies were arguably long-form ancestors of the MTV-style video, existing for little reason other than to sell his music, as well as a particular image of Elvis himself (it’s not by accident that he almost always plays some kind of sexy, fun-loving playboy in those flicks). In addition, Elvis movies, like MTV videos, usually take place in some kind of artificial reality that is weirder, funnier, more exotic, and more glamorous than our own, populated by beautiful young people who don’t behave quite like any real person you’ve ever known, and always throbbing with an undercurrent of decadent lust. And the blue-screen effects are always atrocious, too. It really wasn’t that big a leap from Live a Little, Love a Little to “Hungry Like the Wolf.”

But hey, how about we do as the song requests and talk a little less:

“A Little Less Conversation” was released a month prior to the film as the B-side to a single called “Almost in Love,” and it became a minor hit. Elvis also recorded an alternate version of the song for his 1968 television special (usually referred to as the “comeback special,” even though it wasn’t officially titled as such; it’s also known as “the one where he wore that black leather outfit”), but the alternate ultimately wasn’t used in the special and it wouldn’t be officially released until it turned up 30 years later on a 1998 compilation album. I wouldn’t say either of version of the song was remembered as an important part of the Presley oeuvre, at least not until the start of the 21st century.

Then things got weird. The song was briefly heard in the 2001 George Clooney/Brad Pitt film Ocean’s Eleven, and suddenly it was back on the pop-cultural radar. An electronic remix of the tune by Junkie XL (or JXL) became a smash hit around the world, reaching the number-one chart position in at least 10 different countries. A version of the remix was used in a Nike ad and credited  to “Elvis vs. JXL,” and that was a number-one hit in 20 countries. In the U.S., the Elvis vs. JXL cut peaked at number 50 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming Elvis’ first Hot 100 appearance since 1981 (remember he died in 1977). According to Wikipedia, one version or another of the tune has since been heard in TV shows, movie trailers, films, advertisements, and even political campaigns. Not bad for a minor tune from an era that’s widely dismissed as a low point in the King’s career.

One more thought: one of my greatest disappointments is that real-life computers do not have lots of meaningless blinking lights or make bleep-bleep noises…

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Jan022016

Another Year Gone

And 2015 is in the books.

Normally, this would be the entry where I get all melancholy and lament the passage of time and all the stuff that didn’t happen in the past twelve months, how my life isn’t amounting to much, etc. But this year… well, 2015 was actually a pretty damn good year for me. There were some moments of sadness, yes. A couple friends passed away, both of them far too young and whom I regret not getting to know better while I had the chance. And there was one celebrity passing that affected me deeply. Also, I completely failed (as usual) to write a novel or clean out my damn basement. I didn’t read enough, I didn’t manage to keep up on new movies, and I struggled (as usual) to find the time for everything and everyone that required it.

But I also seemed to have more than the usual allotment of triumphs for one year, too, some of them pretty major on their own terms.

I celebrated ten years at the ad agency, the longest I’ve ever been with any one employer and something pretty astounding to reflect on, considering I initially thought it was just a “for now” job that would last maybe six months.

I underwent LASIK eye surgery, threw away my glasses, and regained my original face (and, as lame as it sounds, a lot of my confidence).

I caught three “wishlist” musical acts that I never thought I’d manage to see live, namely the legendary rocker Bob Seger and his Silver Bullet Band; national treasure Willie Nelson; and Van Halen, improbably reunited with original frontman David Lee Roth.

Anne and I went to Scotland for 16 days.

And the year ended with a new Star Wars film, which the more that I think about it, maybe wasn’t that big a triumph after all. But that opening weekend was fun, at least.

Overall, though, it was a good year. It feels both good and really odd to say that. It’s so out of character for me. But it’s late, and rather than dwelling on that, I think I’ll just post this photo again. Because it makes me smile, and because it symbolizes, as well as anything else, my 2015:

coo kiss

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Dec312015

What? There’s a New Star Wars Movie?

star-wars_tfa_poster_wide[Ed. Note: This is not a review, and there are no spoilers ahead, just in case there’s anyone remaining at this late date to whom that matters. What this entry is is something I started noodling with a week before The Force Awakens opened but ran out of time to finish before I got swept up in the events of the big weekend. I liked the direction my musings were taking, so I decided to come back and see where they ultimately led. Think of this entry as something that got lost in hyperspace for three weeks and has finally arrived in the here and now. Because of that provenance, you may encounter some odd phrases relating to time. Sorry about that. And for the record, I am planning to do an actual review of the film, so that’ll be coming soon…]

Did you guys know about this? A new Star Wars movie? Wonder how they managed to sneak that onto theater schedules without anyone noticing?

Just kidding.You’d have to be living under the cliche’d rock to not know about this movie. The familiar logo and character faces are everywhere this holiday season. As far back as Halloween, some of my friends were grumbling that they were already getting sick of it, that it was even worse than the marketing blitz for The Phantom Menace back in 1999. Personally, I’ve been enjoying it, at least to the extent that I’ve even been aware of it. Weirdly enough, I was more or less oblivious to it until just a short time ago. Aside from the online hubbub that accompanied the release of each new trailer, I somehow didn’t see all the merchandise trickling into stores or notice all the tie-ins infiltrating TV and even social media ads. I don’t know how I could’ve missed it; too damn busy with the mundane duties of my daily life, I guess. Adulthood… sigh. But now that my eyes have been opened… well, I’m in my element. My friends may find it obnoxious to go into a grocery store and see a jug of coffee creamer decorated to resemble Chewbacca, but I enjoy it. I like feeling that old Star Wars buzz again, the same one I remember feeling way back in 1980 and ’83, and yes, in ’99, too. It makes me happy.

However, the buzz isn’t exactly like it used to be, is it? While people are unquestionably excited about the prospects of a new Star Wars, I sense an undercurrent of reservation this time. At least I am more reserved about it. Back in ’99, I had a countdown clock and a pre-production painting of a podracer on my work computer’s desktop for months ahead of time, and I’d already bought a bunch of merchandise well before the movie opened. (I can recall a coworker shaking his head and hissing, “It’s like a cult for you people!” Um, yeah. So?) This time around, though… well, it’s just different somehow. I’ve known the release date was coming up and I have my advance tickets, but like I said above, I really haven’t given the movie much thought until recently. And I’ve looked at some of the new toys and collectibles that are out there, and while a lot of them have made me smile, so far none of them have found their way into the Bennion Archive.

Some have suggested all of us cultish fans are gun-shy after being burned by the prequels. Maybe that’s the explanation for some people, but I don’t think that’s what’s holding back my enthusiasm. The truth is, I basically liked the prequels. No, really, I did. I had my quibbles with them, sure; they weren’t what we all hoped for, certainly, or what they could’ve and arguably should’ve been. But they weren’t that bad. Trust me, I’ve seen bad movies, movies so bad they can boil your eyeballs and liquefy your brains, and the prequels really, truly were not in that league. At least not in my estimation. If your mileage varies, I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree and not discuss it. I’m done having that conversation, because all the bile those movies have inspired over the last 16 years has been hurtful and toxic and tiresome, and frankly it’s sucked a lot of the fun out of being a Star Wars fan. If anything, that’s probably more to blame for my “wait and see” attitude about The Force Awakens than anything: my fear that the Great Fanboy Wars, which finally seemed to be calming down a bit in recent years, are about to flare up all over again.

Consider: If TFA sucks, then the outcry will be enormous. For many fans, it will be the final disillusionment, and a whole lot of people will just turn away from Star Wars once and for all, as many already have because of the prequels. And I, a die-hard loyalist to the end, will be find myself constantly defending what the popular wisdom will have decided is indefensible, namely, the entire Star Wars franchise. (Like I haven’t been there before, any time anyone mentions the 1978 version of Battlestar Galactica or even — increasingly and utterly baffling to me — the original Star Trek series.) And if by some chance the new entry is great, then the “I told you so’s” directed against poor old Uncle George and his prequels will be deafening. And that will really trouble me too, because I already think the amount of disrespect he receives is unjustified.

I’ll be honest, I’m much more apprehensive about the former possibility — that Episode VII will suck — than the latter. I have very little faith that director JJ Abrams can deliver any sort of watchable Star Wars movie, not after the utter hash he made of my beloved Star Trek. (I know, I know, those films had a different writing staff than The Force Awakens, and JJ has always claimed to be far more of a fan of Star Wars than Star Trek. And I also know I initially gave the 2009 reboot picture a somewhat positive review. But as time has passed, my position toward that one has hardened. A lot. That’s a tangent I shouldn’t take right now, but let’s just say that as far as I’m concerned, the reinvention of the Star Trek franchise has been an unmitigated disaster, and JJ is the one person most responsible for it, since he was the man in the center seat. That’s a reference that Trekkies will get.)

Ultimately though, it kind of doesn’t matter if The Force Awakens is any good or not, because Star Wars is — and always has been — much more than the movies themselves.

Star Wars is the tattered paperback novelization that I read over and over and over until it finally split in two, coming apart right up the middle of the spine, a book I read so many times as a kid that I can still remember some of the lines. It is the plastic Slurpee cups and the cheap, fuzzily printed posters from Burger King. It is the black-edged trading cards that came in loaves of Wonder Bread, which we never actually ate but which my mom cheerfully bought anyhow, so I could collect those cards and carry them in my wallet like family photos. It is the incredibly daft (I like to say “swashbuckling”) Marvel comic books that featured a six-foot-tall green rabbit and a space pirate who strode the decks of an off-model star destroyer in hot pants and a muscle shirt. It is the summer afternoon I spent in a corner of our still-under-construction barn listening to the entire NPR radio show on a scratchy transistor radio, and the cheap knock-off “lazer sword” toy I waved at my friends who were armed only with sticks, and it’s the rubber-backed t-shirt iron-ons that always made my chest feel clammy but were so damn cool looking.

Star Wars is the line that wrapped around the block in front of the old Centre Theatre in downtown Salt Lake, and it is Meco’s disco “interpretation” of John Williams’ famous music, and it is all the painfully bad variety-show and sketch-comedy attempts to hop on the bandwagon. Yes, it’s those episodes of The Donny and Marie Show and The Muppet Show and The Richard Pryor Show, and it’s Bill Murray singing the theme on SNL. It is even — god help us — the infamous Holiday Special.

Star Wars is my dad buying me a copy of Han Solo’s Revenge by Brian Daley that I spotted in a drugstore window, just because he knew I wanted it, and it is that awesome birthday cake my mom made for me that had all the Kenner action figures standing knee-deep in chocolate frosting instead of candles.

Star Wars is the night I passed on going to a dance so I could record the film from broadcast TV without commercials. It is the all-day marathon of the original trilogy I went to with an old girlfriend, and the all-night marathon I went to with my Anne. It is the rush of sheer joy I felt one afternoon in 1991 when I wandered into Waldenbooks and literally stumbled across a display for the first tie-in novel published in years, the start of the publishing juggernaut that came to be called the Expanded Universe.

Star Wars is the Qui Gon Jinn insulated tumbler I used to use during my morning commute, and the Darth Maul figurine that was on the cake I received for my thirtieth birthday.

Star Wars is all the conversations I had with the younger guys I worked with at the movie theater, the guys who nicknamed me “the Jedi Master.” And it is the debates I had with my friend Robert until the wee hours of the night at Selwyn College in Cambridge, England, my friend who flew in from halfway across the country to see The Force Awakens with me. And it is the countless arguments I used to have online before I decided it simply wasn’t worth my time to argue about it anymore.

And yes, Star Wars is that damn Chewbacca coffee creamer, and the Death Star tea infuser, and the box of Cheez-Its with the First Order stormtrooper on the front.

In short, Star Wars is a thread that runs throughout the tapestry of my life. All our lives, anyone who’s been alive in this culture for the past 40 years. It is a thread both material (in the form of merchandise) and experiential. It has penetrated our discourse and our thoughts to the level that people can use its characters and situations as metaphors with no doubt that they will be understood.

Star Wars is an exercise in marketing hype, yes. And it is even, when you get right down to it, a series of movies. But in a weird way, the actual movies are the least important aspect of the whole thing… and I personally wouldn’t have it any other way.

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Dec112015

Friday Evening Videos: “My Own Worst Enemy”

My company holiday party was last night and it was… well, it was really something. An incredible venue with a panoramic view of Salt Lake City, a live band, an open bar, an ice luge, and a whole lot of people both younger and prettier than myself who were wearing their holiday finest. Despite my occasional griping, there are some real perks to working in the advertising business. And I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t overindulge just a bit, but under those circumstances, how could I not, right? Right?

Fortunately, I didn’t make an ass of myself — so far as I know, anyhow — and I had a nice long train ride in which to sober up before I had to drive home from the park-and-ride lot. Even so, I had to laugh when I snapped on my car’s radio and the first song that came up was this:

Lit was one of a handful of so-called “pop-punk” bands I became briefly enamored of during the last period in which I made any real effort to remain current in my musical tastes. (If you’re curious, the others were Sugar Ray, Blink-182, The Offspring, and Bowling for Soup.) “My Own Worst Enemy,” the band’s best-known song, was released in March 1999 and landed on a number of charts, including the Billboard Hot 100 (peaking there at #51), the Billboard Mainstream Top 40 (#31), and Billboard‘s Alternative Songs, where it was a number-one hit. Unlike the music of those other pop-punkers, I still hear this one from time to time; one of our local Sunday-night sports shows was using it as a theme song for a while, I believe. I still love the opening guitar riff, so raw and catchy at the same time, and the the lyrics still amuse me too, although now they’re more a reminder of a certain period of my life — the time when I was teetering on the edge of responsible adulthood, about to turn 30 — than anything I can actually relate to. Except of course when I’m driving home from a really wild party in the wee hours of a school night.

As far as I can recall, today was the first time I’ve ever seen the song’s video, and it amuses me too. I don’t know about you guys, but the the late ’90s “lounge lizard revival” fad seems a lot more dated to me than anything on Miami Vice. I might have to write a longer entry about that sometime. But for now, I’ve got a train to catch and a weekend awaiting. And some hair of the dog to imbibe…

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Nov262015

Turkey and Cheesecake

Evidently, it used to be A Thing to photograph Hollywood starlets in silly holiday-themed scenarios involving oversized, seasonally appropriate props — giant jack-o-lanterns for Halloween, giant fireworks rockets for the Fourth of July, etc. And this practice was evidently A Thing for a very long time, as I’ve seen examples of it from the Silent Era up through the 1960s or thereabouts. (Barbara Eden of I Dream of Jeannie fame did a lot of these.) For today, allow me to share with you one of my favorites from this genre, featuring the lovely Mary Philbin.

Philbin was a busy actress during the 1920s and is best-known today for playing Christine in the original Lon Chaney version of The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Although her career mostly ended with the coming of talking pictures, she dubbed her own voice for a special 1930 reissue of Phantom, when it was given a synchronized score, sound effects, and some limited dialog scenes. She died in 1993, at the age of 90.

I have no idea when this photo was taken, but at a guess I’d say it was around the same time she appeared in Phantom, the mid-1920s. It always makes me smile. Hope it does the same for you.

thanksgiving_mary-philbin+turkeyHappy Thanksgiving to my Loyal Readers everywhere!

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Nov202015

Seriously, I HATE the 21st Century

I recently read someplace that you can supposedly tell what a new century will ultimately be about by the time you reach the fifteenth year of that century. In other words, the issues and overarching trends that will define the century are, according to this theory, already shaping up in that first decade and a half. If that’s true… if the past fifteen years are any sort of guide to the 21st century as a whole…

Is it any wonder I’ve practically made nostalgia into my own personal religion?

I’m going to go home and watch The Rockford Files now.

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Nov202015

Don’t Believe These Crackpot Lies…

Superman wasn’t the only Eisenhower-era hero who had something to say about the American ideal. Here’s Batman saying essentially the same thing in somewhat blunter terms… as Batman does, of course:

batman_american-heritage

Like I said yesterday, these old PSAs look quaint and preachy, even laughable, to our jaded modern eyes, like those 16mm educational films that people, ahem, of a certain age will remember drowsing through in school. You know, those much-spliced, color-faded, warbly-sounding propaganda pieces that showed little Billy becoming a better citizen by getting to his box-boy job on time every afternoon, or whatever. In all their simplistic earnestness, though, these comic-book messages deliver a powerful signal-to-noise ratio. Of course, they were created as a response to the rampant bigotry and xenophobia of their day — the 1950s really weren’t some perfect age of grace that we fell from with the coming of the sexual revolution, no matter what conservatives like to imagine. And how sad is it that they are still so brutally relevant today, nearly 70 years after the fact?

But I like to think that’s as much because of the timelessness of their values as the tenacity of the ills they address. Remember, kids: “Don’t believe those crackpot lies about people who worship differently, or whose skin is of a different color, or whose parents come from another country.  Remember our American heritage of freedom and equality!“

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Nov192015

Keep Your School All-American!

I shared this on Facebook earlier, so apologies if you’ve already seen it, but it touches me pretty deeply, and I feel honor-bound to spread it as far as I can. This cartoon (which I believe was also produced as a poster in the 1950s) encapsulates the ideal of America that I grew up believing in, an ideal that feels pretty quaint and naive in light of many of the things being said at the moment. But it’s an ideal I still cling to:

superman_all-americanLike I’ve said before, “They can be a great people, Kal-El, they wish to be… they only lack the light to show them the way…”

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Nov192015

The Quality of a Nation

And now a selection from the “Inspiring Quotations that Shouldn’t Be Controversial But Probably Will Be in Today’s Political Climate” file:

The quality of a nation isn’t determined by how well the people at the top are living — no, the true quality of a nation is determined by how well the people at the bottom are treated. We will be judged by the way we treat the sick, the poor, the elderly, children, animals, and even the world we live upon.

 

If we want to pride ourselves as good people, as rational people, as compassionate people — then we must not give in to our own darker impulses.

 

And as angry as we might feel about the criminal act of any perpetrator, that will never be a justification for abandoning our own morality.

— David Gerrold, science-fiction writer

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Nov192015

It Was a Lovely Weekend

It was a lovely weekend.

It wasn’t cold out, and the valley was domed by one of those crystal-clear skies that hurt to look at directly but lift your spirits when you catch them out the corner of your eye.

Saturday morning, Anne and I ate breakfast at a favorite greasy spoon, then did a little shopping. We delivered a few items to a Toys for Tots charity drive organized by some local cosplayers we know from Salt Lake Comic Con. Later, we raked leaves and laughed at the antics of our kitty-boy Evinrude, and later still we watched Ian McKellan’s latest film, Mr. Holmes. (Highly recommended, if you’ve not seen it.) The following morning, we slept late, then I spent several hours tagging and Photoshopping our photos from Scotland. That evening, we went to dinner with a friend and coworker of Anne’s. We shared a hot fudge brownie for dessert.

Meanwhile, in Paris and Beirut and Kenya, people were mopping up blood and tallying the dead.

It feels uncomfortably like 2002 all over again. The shouts of the fearful and the xenophobic are drowning out everybody else. Cynical politicians are trying to figure out how they can use the situation to their advantage, or at least to score some snarky hits on the despised President Obama. There’s a chill of hysteria in the air, and even people I personally know to be rational and decent human beings are hardening their hearts toward those who have no place to go — those we should be helping if we were true to our ideals of what America is supposed to be. And underlying it all, I can hear the drums pounding again, those drums that have always been there, somewhere off in the distance, since that sunny September morning all those years ago, urging us to stop thinking and just fall into step and march off to… where exactly? Does it matter? Will this tiresome shit never end, or is the rest of my lifetime going to be just rinse and repeat, one step forward and three goose-steps back?

Last Friday, on the day of the Paris attacks, a good friend of mine said, “Days like these really make me wonder if we as a species are even worth saving.” I don’t blame him for thinking that way, I really don’t. Not when you get a good look at all the ugly, wriggling, pale things from deep in our collective psyche that are so easily exposed with so little prompting. But I myself can’t give in to that kind of defeatism. I just can’t, for my own sanity, believe that humanity is doomed to always fall back on our own worst impulses.

I spent Friday thinking of Jor-El’s comment in Superman: The Movie: “They can be a great people, Kal-El, they wish to be.”

Or the lines spoken by Danny Glover’s character Simon in Lawrence Kasdan’s Grand Canyon: “Man, the world ain’t supposed to work like this. I mean, maybe you don’t know that yet. I’m supposed to be able to do my job without having to ask you if I can. That dude is supposed to be able to wait with his car without you ripping him off. Everything is supposed to be different than it is.”

Or the earnest words of the great everyman hero of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Samwise Gamgee:

“It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something. … [the idea] that there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it’s worth fighting for.”

Of course, the fearful and the xenophobic and the self-proclaimed strongmen have a different idea of what “some good” actually means, as do the men who shot up Paris and Beirut and Kenya. And that’s the really disheartening, depressing, frightening thing.

To me, the good that we need to hold onto is the idea that we can find a way through all this bullshit. That we can find a way to live together with all of our differences, to stop killing each other and to heal our wounded planet, and to become… better. You know, all that naive, idealistic, bleeding-heart Star Trek stuff. Not so long ago, it really felt like it was within our grasp. And sometimes, for brief, fleeting moments, it still does. Like, for instance, on a Saturday afternoon following a Friday of grim headlines, when you see a grown man dressed as the Incredible Hulk on a street corner, collecting toys for poor children…

It really was a lovely weekend.

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