So, this just happened at the Bennion Compound:
Anne: I have to go to work.
Me: Do you have to put in a full eight hours, or ten, or what?
Anne: I have no idea, I’ll find out when I get there.
Me: Well, it’s all right either way. I’ll be here. Right here. Waiting for you. You know, like Richard Marx.
< pause >
Anne: You are such a dork.
I never got around to actually writing it down, but for a long time I maintained a mental list of musical acts I wanted to see live. Most of these were bands or performers that I missed during their heyday in my teens, or older “living legend” types who rarely toured, or at least rarely (if ever) came to Utah. Now, thanks to all the nostalgia touring and comebacks in recent years, I’ve been able to cross off Clapton, B.B. King, Journey, Def Leppard, Pat Benatar, Chris Isaak, Bon Jovi, and KISS — essentially my top-priority “A-listers.” That leaves the fantasy list, i.e., the ones who are semi-retired, unlikely to ever come to Utah, or really expensive/difficult to get in to see: Springsteen, Tina Turner, The Rolling Stones, Willie Nelson, Bob Seger. There are also some acts that I’ve seen before that I’d like to see again, if they’re in the area: Loverboy, Bryan Adams, Night Ranger, ZZ Top. And there’s my main man Rick Springfield, of course — Anne and I have a standing date to see him whenever he’s nearby.
And then there’s the B-list, the acts that I like well enough but have never really been must-see “holy grails” for me. Billy Idol is one of those. I liked some of his music back in the day — “Rebel Yell,” “Hot in the City,” and “Dancing with Myself” all come to mind — but honestly I was always put off by his persona. My musical tastes as a teen and twentysomething were far more informed by my libido than by feelings of alienation or disaffection with the Establishment, so the punk scene held little appeal for me. And even though I always realized Billy’s solo work was pretty far removed from his punk roots, the leather-and-chains and the sneer and the raised fist were all too close to a subculture I just didn’t want any part of for me to really embrace him.
Well, funny things happen as you get older. At some point, I got over restricting my tastes according to rigid categories of what is and is not “my scene.” I picked up a Billy Idol Greatest Hits CD and discovered that I recognized and liked a lot more of his work than I had realized. And Billy himself mellowed. I’ve been downright charmed by his recent television appearances to plug his new memoir, Dancing with Myself. He comes across very much like Rick Springfield, actually, as somebody who survived a lot of really bad decisions and is grateful for it, who passed through all the bullshit that comes with celebrity and lived to tell the tale, who acquired some wisdom along the way and also learned to laugh at himself a bit. Hell, he even learned to smile. And when he does his trademark sneer now, it always seems to end in a self-deprecating chuckle that says, “Can you believe I’m still doing this?” In short, he’s turned into someone who seems like he’d be pretty damn cool to hang out with for a while. Only a couple weeks ago, I told Anne that if he happened to come to our Nevada-border outpost town of Wendover — to the casino venue where all the old ’80s acts play these days — it might be kind of fun to see him.
Well, as it so happens, I learned yesterday that he’ll be playing Salt Lake in just over a month as part of the X96 Nightmare Before Christmas holiday show (X96 is a local radio station, for my out-of-state readers). And I have to say, I’m actually pretty darn stoked about seeing him. I ordered the tickets within an hour of getting the announcement. It’s a general-admission show in a small, warehouse-style venue, so it really ought to be something — up close and personal, and probably pretty reminiscent of his early punk years. It’ll be different from the arena-style shows I’m used to, for certain. And we don’t even have to drive out to Nevada!
To celebrate this head-spinning turn of events that once would’ve seemed so unlikely — me, going to a Billy Idol concert! — here’s one of my favorite songs of his, a catchy tune called “Cradle of Love” from his 1990 album Charmed Life. It was his last top-40 single in the United States — it made it all the way to number two on the Billboard chart — and the video is… well, it’s pretty sexy, in my humble opinion. I guess my musical tastes are still driven, at least in part, by my libido:
Just as an aside, I wonder if anyone has ever totaled up how many videos involve sexy women (or girls, in this case) walking all over some hapless schmoe who doesn’t know what hit him? That was the motif for just about every one of ZZ Top’s MTV clips, for instance. Inquiring minds want to know!
If you’re one of the three people on Earth who hasn’t heard yet, the official announcement went out this morning: Principal photography on Star Wars Episode VII has wrapped and the actual title of the movie has been revealed:
Um, yeah. Okay.
I hate to be one those fans, you know, the ones who seem to derive more pleasure from bitching about the thing they supposedly love than, you know, actually enjoying it, but I have to admit I am… not impressed. It’s become somewhat axiomatic that the prequel titles — The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith — were ridiculous and clunky (and there are even some who say the same of the original trilogy titles, A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi), but I disagree. I liked them from the start, because they evoked the saga’s origins in the old Flash Gordon cliffhanger serials of the 1930s, whose episodes had titles like “The Unseen Peril” (sound familiar?), “The Prisoner of Mongo,” and “Doom of the Dictator.” They have an enthusiastically pulpy sound that I personally find appealing. The Force Awakens, on the other hand… the tone is off, to my ear. It sounds very much like the title of a fan film to me, so many of which seem to be sooooo self-consciously serious, at least in my experience of them.
I don’t know, I could be wrong. It’s just three words, after all. They might grow on me after I’ve lived with them a while, and it could be they perfectly reflect the story, which will only become evident after we see the finished picture. I recently encountered a rumored plot line — which I won’t repeat here, for those readers who are trying to remain unspoiled — that this title would actually be quite appropriate for, as it supposes that certain characters have been, shall we say, dormant since we last encountered Our Heroes. But I don’t know that I believe that premise is for real, for a number of reasons. JJ Abrams played a lot of games in the run-up to Star Trek into Darkness, trying to fool everyone into believing that his film actually wasn’t a remake of The Wrath of Khan, when of course that’s precisely what it was. (Or so I’ve been told, as I still haven’t seen it. Trusted sources warned me to stay away if I wanted to maintain a healthy blood pressure.) There have been a lot of supposed leaks from the set of Episode VII, everything from pre-production art to that plot line to behind-the-scenes photos. Call me a cynic, but I wouldn’t put it past Abrams to be deliberately planting red herrings to get the fanboys talking, and also to keep them distracted from discovering what the movie is really about.
Or the leaks could be the real thing after all… in which case, I am… concerned. I’m trying very hard to remain open-minded about this first post-Lucas Star Wars film. I want it to be good, I really do. I’d love it if The Force Awakens is so good that it heals the rift that the prequels opened and makes it possible to again be a Star Wars fan without having to qualify where you stand. That it will again be possible to talk about Star Wars without it automatically turning into another tiresome debate. I want this film to recapture the magic of the original trilogy while also paving the way into the next generation of the Star Wars franchise. I want a movie that everyone will love. But I have a very hard time believing that JJ Abrams is the man to deliver it, after the complete hash he made of Star Trek. His take on that franchise was superficial flash that contained a lot of surface-level nods to the source material — or at least to the general public’s notion of the source — but showed no real understanding of what the source material was actually about. Abrams-Trek was an impression of Star Trek, rather than an authentic or meaningful updating of the franchise. And I fear that’s what we’re going to get with his take on Star Wars, as well. Granted, much of the blame for the Trek debacle lies with the scriptwriters… but it was Abrams, in the end, who was calling the shots. And it’s the same with Ep VII. He may have Lawrence Kasdan involved in writing the screenplay, but that doesn’t mean the director’s vision is going to be clear. Or worthwhile.
I’m especially worried about the tone of Episode VII. I think it’s going to be incredibly difficult to pull off. The grown-up fans who’ve lived with this franchise for 40 years, such as myself, are going to insist they he take the material very seriously — we understandably want a Star Wars that speaks to us, that’s matured along with us, and not a version made for the kiddies — and yet this material was never meant to be dark-n-gritty in the currently popular mode of so much of our entertainment. Star Wars shouldn’t be The Walking Dead; it’s the heir to Flash Gordon. That’s always got to be paramount when approaching this material. But of course so many people have forgotten that, or don’t want to admit it. The original trilogy had its dark moments, true, especially during Empire… but it was always fun, above all else. That sort of tone can be found — I think the films that comprise the Marvel Cinematic Universe are doing an exceptional job of it — but can it be done with Episode VII? Or perhaps more accurately, has it been done?
The alleged Ep VII pre-production art that’s floating around the web is very cool… but also very dark. Whereas the storyline I’ve run across is frankly pretty silly. There’s an immense ying-and-yang tension at work here… and again, I’m just not certain that JJ Abrams has the talent, the skillset, or frankly the depth to reconcile the two extremes and make it work.
And then there’s the fact that Our Heroes are pretty long in the tooth. I’m not opposed to seeing beloved characters getting old — The Wrath of Khan, widely considered the best of the original-cast Star Trek films, was more about Kirk coming to terms with his advancing age than blowing things up; that’s what made it such a great Star Trek film — but will Episode VII actually address the aging issue, or will we have the embarrassing spectacle of seeing Harrison, Mark, and Carrie trying to behave as they did 40 years ago (as in the worst of the original-cast Trek films, The Final Frontier)? For that matter, will Our Heroes even be an integral part of the story, or are they relegated to mere cameos? Again, that “leaked” story I’ve seen suggests the real action of the film is carried by the younger cast. Which I suppose would be fine if Harrison, Mark and Carrie’s cameos have some meaning to them and aren’t just stunts. But at this point, it’s impossible to say which direction Abrams will take.
And then there’s Anthony Daniels’ recent tweet that this film is going to be better than The Empire Strikes Back, which struck me as somebody trying too hard and just makes me suspicious about the true quality of this thing.
Again, I’m trying, I’m really trying to be open-minded… but I keep hearing that oft-repeated motto of the Star Wars saga in my head: I’ve got a bad feeling about this… and nothing that’s come out yet, including the official title, has done much to settle that feeling…
Astronauts on the International Space Station submerge a sealed GoPro in a blob of water. Awesomeness ensues:
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/turnabout.png
Trust me, this is very funny. And after the week we had last week in space-travel news, a little levity is called for.
(Oh, all right, for those who don’t get it: The Apollo retroreflectors are essentially mirrors that were left behind on the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts. If you bounce a laser beam off them, you can measure very precisely the distance from the Earth to the Moon. They’re also a nice refutation for all the crackpot theories that the Apollo missions were faked, because the mirrors are there, and their locations are known. If you can get a hold of a powerful enough laser, you too can do a little rangefinding of your own. And if the retroreflectors weren’t placed there by astronauts, where did they come from, hmmmm?)
Space is hard – but worth it. We will persevere and move forward together.
–Richard Branson, founder and CEO, Virgin Galactic
Last week was a tough one for commercial spaceflight.
Last Tuesday morning, an unmanned Antares rocket, operated by a company called Orbital Sciences Corporation and packed with supplies and experiments bound for the space station, exploded in a spectacular fireball seconds after rising from its launch pad. The latest report I’ve found indicates the launch safety officers deliberately detonated the rocket after its first-stage propulsion system failed, as a precaution to keep it from going down over a populated area. The cause of the failure is still under investigation. This was the third of eight cargo missions Orbital is contracted to perform for NASA; the company’s competitor SpaceX will reportedly fill the gap created in the resupply schedule. Also affected by the Antares disaster is Planetary Resources, the company that wants to mine the asteroids; its Arkyd 3 test platform was aboard the doomed rocket as well. You can read more about that here, if you’re interested.
As if losing the Antares wasn’t enough of a blow, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo then broke up during a test flight on Friday, resulting in the death of one of its pilots and serious injuries to the other. It appears the rocket plane’s braking system somehow deployed earlier than it should have, although investigators still haven’t said conclusively that was the cause of the accident, or have any idea of why the system deployed.
Predictably, there was an almost immediate torrent of op-eds and online commentary denouncing private space operations (Time had a memorably galling headline, “Enough with Amateur-Hour Space Flight“), and even calling for an end to manned spaceflight altogether. “People are dying!” the cries go. People could die, if something like that Antares blast happens to, say, a crewed Dragon capsule. To which I reply, yes, they are. and they could, and that’s tragic… but how many sailors died during the Age of Exploration? How many would-be colonists did not survive the passage from the Old World to the New? How many pioneers fell while crossing the Great Plains, or didn’t make it through their first harsh winter of homesteading? How many early aviators died trying to figure out how those new-fangled (and by our standards, appallingly fragile) aeroplanes really behaved?
Don’t misunderstand, I’m not heartless, and I certainly don’t mean to be glib about human lives. I regret and mourn every life lost in the cause of furthering a human presence in space. I certainly wouldn’t want to lose my own life in such an accident, or a friend or family member’s. But I firmly believe those deaths are honorable and meaningful. Because I believe passionately in the cause they died for.
Whenever this subject comes up, I always think of a moment from the original Star Trek series, a scene that’s come to be known to fans as the “risk speech”:
Now, obviously Captain Kirk’s soliloquy here is tailored to the details of a specific storyline. When he says “risk is our business,” he’s referring to the crew of the Enterprise, and to Starfleet, and the risk he’s speaking of is first contact with the alien species of the week. But what I hear in these words from a 46-year-old television segment is nothing less than my vision of the entire human race. Risk is our business, as a species. I believe the urge to explore, to wander, to want to know what’s over the horizon, is built into our very DNA. Pushing back new frontiers is dangerous… but as Kirk says, the possible returns are immense. Too immense to ignore, whether you believe we need to get off this rock in order to preserve our species in the event of a planetary-scale catastrophe, or you think there’s money to be made from the resources out there, or if, like me, you just think exploration is a worthy enough goal in itself, simply for the sake of seeing what’s out there..
Virgin Galactic isn’t in quite the same category as the Apollo missions, of course. The company’s raison d’etre is to take well-heeled customers on a brief thrill ride, and nothing more. SpaceShipTwo isn’t even capable of reaching orbit — its flight plans are all merely trampoline hops up to the edge of space and back — and I’ll confess I’ve been pretty dismissive of this venture compared to, say, SpaceX and its long-term goals of sending people to Mars. (I’ll also confess that I’d be a lot more enthusiastic about Virgin Galactic if I thought there was a chance in hell that I could one day afford one of its trips.) But in the wake of this accident, I’ve done some thinking, and I’ve decided that it doesn’t matter if SpaceShipTwo is just a rich man’s folly, because the more human beings we actually put up there in the black, even if they’re only there for a few minutes, the more we become a space-faring species. And by figuring out how to do it efficiently, safely, and cost-effectively for this one purpose, we learn things that can go toward other applications. Perhaps suborbital hops like this could someday shorten travel time for ordinary civilians like myself. Perhaps there are problems we haven’t even identified yet that will be solved by things we learn now.
Look, Richard Branson, the founder and CEO of Virgin Galactic, said it perfectly in the tweet I quoted at top of this entry. Space is hard. Getting there is hard, at least with our current approach. We’ve been in this place before, after the loss of space shuttle Challenger, when everybody was stunned to suddenly realize what a rocket ship actually is: a massive load of high explosives. And again after the loss of Columbia, when everybody realized it’s as difficult to come back from space as it is to get there. That’s just how it is, at least until someone invents an antigravity drive like we see in all the movies, or builds a working space elevator. We’ve just got to accept a certain amount of risk if we’re going to open this particular frontier. And I think we are going to open it, and that we should. I think we’re going to find we really don’t have any choice. And given the economic realities of our age, we’re going to need private enterprise to be a part of the opening process. So forget all this talk of abandoning space, or just leaving it to NASA. Let’s just suck it up, find out what went wrong with the Antares and SpaceShipTwo, mourn our losses, and then move on…
The gravel-voiced singer-songwriter Kim Carnes is best known for her monster number-one hit from 1981, “Bette Davis Eyes” (the biggest song of that year and, to my mind, one of the few genuinely timeless classics from that decade), as well as, to a lesser extent, her duet with Kenny Rogers from the year before, “Don’t Fall in Love with a Dreamer.” But in honor of tonight being All Hallow’s Eve, I thought I’d share another song of hers that I’ve always quite liked, a little exercise in paranoia and afraid-of-the-dark anxiety (that also has a really catchy synth line) called “Crazy in the Night.” The first single from her 1985 album Barking at Airplanes, the song reached number 15 on the Billboard Hot 100, but was sadly the last time Kim would ever break the top 40.
I’ve got no particular memories or associations with this one, I just like it. Happy Halloween, everyone!
When I was a kid, my dad always made big plans for Halloween. We had the paper skeletons in the windows and the jack-o-lanterns on the front porch, but he wanted to do something more impressive. Of course, this was the 1970s, long before there was a seasonal Halloween super store on every corner and Hollywood-style special-effects gadgets available to the public. If you wanted something more than, well, paper skeletons and jack-o-lanterns, you had to figure out how to make it yourself. Like the time a neighbor of ours turned his barn into a “haunted attraction,” or, as we called ’em back then, a spook alley. (Basically, he would lead neighborhood kids on a twisty path through the barn while older kids in rubber fright masks jumped out from behind farm equipment and hay bales to scare the little ones. It was pretty primitive compared to what you could do these days, but it was effective.)
Dad’s ideas weren’t quite so grandiose as that. He wasn’t the sort to try and organize a small army of young helpers; instead his ideas focused on things he could do by himself. For example, he used to talk about getting a refrigerator box from Mortensen’s Furniture Store, painting it to look like a coffin, and setting it up on the front porch, so he could “rise” for the trick-or-treaters. Then there was his idea to put together a Headless Horseman outfit and ride our ghostly white horse Thunder through the dark subdivision streets behind our house, just so he could be seen. Sadly, neither of those schemes ever went anywhere. Dad worked the afternoon shift back in those days — 2 to 11 PM — so he often wasn’t around on Halloween night.
But one of his ideas that did come to fruition was to rig up a speaker in the front-room window and play a record of spooky sound effects to set the mood for trick-or-treaters as they approached the house. As I recall, the record included the usual Halloween-ish fare like rattling chains, moans, and creaking doors, and also since this was in the post-Star Wars late ’70s, there were some “spacey” sounds like flying saucers landing and rayguns zapping. And somewhat incongruously, there was the sound of a giant gong ringing. I myself never found that to be especially frightening — I associated it with the old movies I saw on TV, actually — but based on the reaction of one small child, at least, I may have been wrong about that.
I remember sitting on the couch the Halloween we played that record, looking out the window as the kid timidly mounted the front steps of our house. His mother waited back on the sidewalk for him, and thinking about it with an adult’s perspective, I realize this was probably a big night for him… the first time he’d had the courage to venture out on his own a bit, perhaps the first time his mom had loosened the apron strings enough to let him do it. The kid had to stand on his tippytoes and stretch out his index finger to reach the doorbell… and by coincidence, just at the instant he pressed the button, that gong crashed out of the speaker and rolled into the night. The kid seemed to contract into himself like an accordion as he pivoted on one foot and ran screaming back to his mother. My own mother opened the front door and tried to lure him back for his candy, but the kid was too traumatized to set foot anywhere beyond the edge of our front lawn. I didn’t know whether to laugh or feel sorry for him. And now, over 30 years later, I really hope our inadvertent prank didn’t set back his development somehow.
You know, it’s odd… as many childhood relics as I can easily lay my hands on, I have no idea whatever happened to that record. I imagine my mom has it tucked away some place, or at least I hope she does. Because I really did love it. Not for the sound effects, fun though they were. But they were only one side of the LP. No, what I really loved was the ghost story on the other side of the album, which was like an old-time radio show with actors and sound effects painting creepy, hair-raising pictures in our minds. I must’ve listened to that side of the album a thousand times, even well after the month of October was over, giving myself a good case of the creeps in the middle of the summertime.
I don’t know what made me think of that record earlier this week. It’s probably been decades since I’ve seen or heard it. But some confluence of the decorations around the house or the movies I’ve been watching to get in the seasonal mood, or perhaps just the slanting, guttering light and fragile warmth of an October day… something jarred loose an old memory. And so, without even recalling the title of this ancient piece of ephemera, I started googling… and as ever, I found myself utterly amazed by what you can find out there in the back alleys and hole-in-the-wall curiosity shoppes that comprise the InterWebs.
It turns out I’m not the only one with fond memories of this record, as it was ridiculously easy to track down. It was called Halloween Horrors: The Sounds of Halloween (and Other Useful Effects), released in 1977 by A&M Records, serial number SP-3152, with cover art by a guy named Gary Meyer. And here it is:
And here’s the back cover:
I even found a version without the credits, so you can appreciate that fantastic illustration:
Isn’t that great? I love this album’s artwork, and I now recall spending a lot of time studying it as a boy. These illustrations are, to me, the very essence of Halloween: not the intense, deeply disturbing stuff that haunted attractions and horror films have turned into, but more the decrepit-house-on-the-hill Gothic sort of thing.
And now, here’s the most unexpected find of all, the piece de resistance… the actual story from the album, digitized and YouTubed for our modern convenience:
Children of the ’80s ought to pay especially close attention as they listen to that. Does the voice of the gas station attendant sound familiar? It should… that’s Peter Cullen, who played Optimus Prime in the old Transformers cartoon and continues to bring life to that character in the Michael Bay films today! As I said, the things you can discover out there on the Web…
Since I missed posting the customary video at the start of the weekend, how about we rev up the work week with this just-released official video for the mighty Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll”?
In the immortal words of Rocket Raccoon, “Oh, yeah.”
Truthfully, I’m not the world’s biggest Zep fan — my affection for them is more on a “greatest hits” level, which is a bit of a misnomer since Zeppelin never actually had a charting single, at least not in the U.S., until the 1997 re-release of “Whole Lotta Love” — but some songs are simply timeless classics, and “Rock and Roll” is one of them. It doesn’t sound like a relic from 1972. It simply sounds like itself, like an entire genre encapsulated in three minutes and 42 seconds. And it makes me want to put the top down and drive way too fast, and that’s a feeling I never grow tired of..
Technically, the song in the video above is not the same one teenager rockers have been blasting from their car stereos for 42 years, though. This is an alternate mix — the guitars have been de-emphasized in favor of the drums — from the new Deluxe Edition of Zeppelin’s landmark fourth album (variously known as Zoso or Led Zeppelin IV), featuring remastered content, studio outtakes, and “additional companion audio,” whatever that may be. Either way, it’s good stuff.
And now that my heart is pumping, what should I do with my day?
This week’s FEV isn’t a music video in the usual sense; rather, it’s a clip from today’s episode of The Ellen DeGeneres Show in which the legendary rocker Bob Seger performs his classic hit “Night Moves.”
I had the Night Moves album on cassette when I was a teenager, and I have vibrant memories of listening to it on my old Walkman as I slouched in the back of my French classroom before the bell rang (I was a good kid and didn’t listen during class, but the interval in between classes? That was my time, Mr. Hand!) And even though there’s not a bum track on that album, this song, the title track, was always my favorite, the reason I’d bought the tape in the first place.
First and foremost, I’ve always responded somehow to the basic sonic quality of it: the acoustic guitar, the melody, the pause toward the end and the slow pickup that builds to a crescendo. Something about that sound just activates my nervous system in a pleasant way, I guess. And the lyrics have always spoken to me in personal ways, too. Back in high school, the bit about working on mysteries without any clues in the backseat of an old Chevy held a certain — how shall I say this? — aspirational appeal. Later on, I came to understand the melancholy heart of the tune. And now, as the years have piled on top of each other, the verse about waking in the middle of the night and the dramatic pause that follows have acquired an almost shocking degree of truth.
As for this particular performance, well, Seger’s getting old… and that lends the song even more poignancy than it already possessed. It’s no longer the song of a thirtysomething grappling with the specter of approaching middle age, but the reflection of a man who’s well into his own autumn. Give it a listen… and stay through the end to hear Ellen’s fond remembrance of the time Seger did something decent for her. He’s a good guy, old Bob… well, aside from his confounding refusal to ever come to Salt Lake when he’s on tour. What the hell, Bob?