Friday Evening Videos: “I Gotsta Get Paid”

For we Gen-Xers, it seemed as if ZZ Top didn’t exist until the night they came blazing out of our cable-TV boxes in their ’33 Ford coupe, fully formed in all their outlandishly bearded glory, but of course the “li’l old band from Texas” was an established force in the music industry long before MTV came along. The band got together in 1969 — the year I was born, kids! — and scored their first radio hit with “La Grange,” an infectious ode to their home state’s infamous Chicken Ranch brothel, in 1973. (Incidentally, that link to the Chicken Ranch is perfectly safe to click… it directs you to the site of a writer who has just completed a book on the subject. Lots of interesting history there… ought to be quite a book!) Even so, there’s little question that the three music videos they made in support of their Eliminator album — “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” “Sharp Dressed Man,” and “Legs” — catapulted the band into much wider prominence than they’d previously known, or have managed to retain in the years since. Of course, it helped that those three songs are great songs, but really it was the imagery and, perhaps more importantly, the mythology established in those clips that linger in a generation’s pop-cultural imagination: the desert scenery; the mysterious (and apparently enchanted) hotrod that appears out of thin air and vanishes again when its mission is complete; the hot babes who teach downtrodden young people how to strike back against The Man and, more importantly, how to score. Admittedly ridiculous in the same way that so much of ’80s pop culture was, this was also deeply powerful and memorable stuff that touched on some primal chord — at least in the young men of the day. So perhaps it’s no surprise that the Top would eventually feel compelled to revisit this familiar territory.

Here’s the video for “I Gotsta Get Paid,” the first single from ZZ Top’s latest album, La Futura, which was just released about a month ago:

It’s not quite a return to their classic MTV clips. The band’s sound has become more funky and dirty than it was in the Eliminator era, and interestingly enough, the visuals here reflect that change. Instead of the slick and polished Eliminator car — which mirrored the highly produced music of those days — the cars in this video are the bare-metal, rough-welded “rat rods” that are currently popular in gearhead circles. (My dad loves ’em, for some reason.) Rat rods are literally cobbled together from whatever the builder can find, so they’re very organic and even artistic in appearance, but they’re also raw and primitive-looking… and deliberately so. The girls in this video also have a different look than the classic ZZ Top babes; their outfits, like the cars and the music, have an improvisational, post-apocalyptic trashiness, whereas the old ZZ babes were more refined… in a sleazy sort of way, of course.

While the specifics may have changed, though, there are hot cars and hot women here, and they, like the sound, are unmistakably ZZ Top. And of course there’s that talismanic keychain, fashioned in the shape of the band’s double-Z logo. In the old videos, it seemed to represent freedom, exploration, and sexual license. (Would anyone be surprised if I reveal now that I’ve used a ZZ Top keychain for my old Galaxie since I was 17 years old?) I’m not sure if it has any such symbolism in “I Gotsta Get Paid.” But it sure made me smile when the girl held it up for the camera at the end. It’s good to see it again…

And on that note, hope everyone has some good plans for the weekend ahead!

Oct142012

So Just How Big Is a Space Shuttle Anyhow?

That’s a question The Girlfriend has repeatedly asked me in the last few years, since the impending end of the shuttle program revived my boyhood obsession with these vehicles. But no matter what statistics or comparisons I’ve thrown out in reply — 78-foot wingspan, about the same overall size as a DC-9 airliner — she just hasn’t been to get a handle on it. And I imagine she’s not alone in this… a big spacecraft is just too outside her usual frames of reference, and it’s tough to imagine the scale of something you’ve never stood beside. But I think I may have found a visual aid that will finally put it all in perspective for her and all the rest of my Loyal Readers who just can’t quite grok the size of the thing we used to throw up into space on a somewhat regular schedule:

That’s the Endeavour, of course, seen Friday during her 12-mile parade through Los Angeles on her way from LAX to the California Science Center. Moving the big old girl has taken a bit longer than originally planned, due to obstacles along the way. Reportedly there have been places where her wingtips came within inches of trees or utility poles. But the last I heard, she was within sight of her new home and continuing to inch her way along, with thousands of people out to see the spectacle of a retired spacecraft rolling down city streets.

Not to be cynical, but I wonder how many of those folks showed equal enthusiasm for the shuttles while they were still flying…

Photo credit: Walter Scriptunas II/Spaceflight Now; taken from here.

Oct112012

Reviewing Rick: Introducing a New Feature

If you haven’t seen any of his myriad appearances on TV talk shows this week, you might not know that my main man, Rick Springfield, has a new album out. Songs for the End of the World was released on Tuesday, and I’m sure none of my Loyal Readers will be remotely surprised to learn I already have my copy. (A couple of them, actually, thanks to an insidious marketing scheme involving different covers and bonus content unique to each variant… oh, well. Such is life as a collector/fanboy.) I like it. It’s a good album. I thought at first it was more of the same thing we got with his last one, Venus in Overdrive, but the more I listen, the more I’m thinking of it as a kind of thematic and sonic sequel to his 2004 release shock/denial/anger/acceptance, only with less rage and hurt, and a bit more humor. It’s kind of like we’re checking in on the “character” from that primal scream of an album a few years later and finding him farther down the road to recovery, a bit happier about his life, but still trying to process the emotional hangover. Which, of course, is a pretty accurate description of Rick Springfield in 2012 versus the 2004 Rick.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

You see, I’ve been thinking for quite a while that it might be fun to go through Rick’s entire oeuvre in chronological order, all his official albums — as opposed to the dozens of fly-by-night greatest-hits packages that have been produced since his heyday in the mid-80s, as well as a couple of weird bootleg items I know about — and review them as a recurring feature here on Simple Tricks. Now, before you say something smart-assy like “that shouldn’t take long!,” you should know that Rick has been in this business a lot longer than most people realize. He’s recorded 18 studio albums over a span of 40 years — yes, that’s right, his first record was released in 1972. A long time before anyone ever heard of “Jessie’s Girl.” And that’s just the solo work he’s done here in the United States. He also played and recorded with several bands in Australia before he moved here in search of greater glory. More on that another time, though.

I know going in that this project may not be of much interest to anyone except myself and possibly The Girlfriend. Also, I’ve got to admit I’m really not confident I can pull it off, since music is outside my comfort zone as a writer and a blogger. I love music, especially rock and blues, and I have my opinions about it, obviously, but no actual training in it, no technical knowledge or formal understanding of how it works or why it doesn’t… which means I don’t feel that I have much vocabulary for describing my opinions. But I want to try.

I thought Rick’s music was cool when I was young, then I lost it for a while. I’ve told that story before. But in the 12 years or so since I rediscovered him, it’s become, well, meaningful to me. All the moreso as I’ve learned more about the man and his life and his problems. I don’t see him merely as my guitar hero anymore, but as a guy, a guy not unlike myself, an all-too-human being who has screwed up in some pretty spectacular ways and somehow managed to soldier on through. And I like this guy. His music has evolved considerably over the past 40 years. So has he. I hope my skills are up to the job of analyzing the evolution, and conveying why it matters to me.

As I said, I intend this to be a recurring feature. Hopefully I’ll manage to make it a fairly regular one… I know myself too well to make promises about how frequently it will appear, though. Just keep your eyes open, I guess… assuming you care…

Oct102012

And the World Keeps Moving On…

About an hour’s drive northeast of Salt Lake, high in the mountains above Ogden City, you’ll find a sleepy little burg called Huntsville, Utah. The surrounding hillsides are dotted with summer homes and vacation cabins, and signs near Pineview Reservoir — the pocket-sized lake that defines the town’s western edge — excitedly proclaim the coming of beachfront condos, leaving little doubt that this bucolic hamlet is going to end up as just another anonymous bedroom community before too many more years pass. But for now, at least, cows still graze contentedly at the roadside, and traffic along the main drag through town frequently bogs down behind slow-moving tractors and combines. It’s a great place to escape to for an afternoon; The Girlfriend and I have been going up there at least once a summer for over a decade now.

We drive the old two-lane highways, enjoying fresh mountain air with the top down, and once we get there, we always enjoy lunch at a quirky little bar called the Shooting Star Saloon, which claims to be the oldest continuously operating tavern in the state. (I’ll write more about that place some other time.) But before we go for Star Burgers and beer, we like to stop into the monastery nestled against the mountains on the other side of town.

Yes, believe it or not, there is a Catholic monastery in Mormon-dominated Utah. The Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity was founded in 1947 by Trappist monks, who set up housekeeping in several World War II-surplus Quonset huts with plans to build more permanent structures sometime in the future. It never happened. The whitewashed humps of the Quonsets are still there, shaded by trees that have grown tall and grand in the last 65 years. But the monks have made do, as their kind does, and their abbey, surrounded by a buffering ring of farmland, is a lovely green respite from the outside world.

I don’t recall how or when I first heard about the abbey. It may have been back in college, when stories went around of a place where young men could go for a few days when they needed to clear their heads. Many a time, I considered taking one of those retreats myself, when the weight of everything I was going through with classes and girls and growing up got to be too much. But I always chickened out. Not being religious, let alone Catholic, it didn’t seem like the best fit, no matter how alluring the idea of unplugging from the world and spending some time just thinking may have been. It felt like I would’ve been taking unfair advantage of someone’s hospitality. At some point, though, I learned about the honey, produced by the monks themselves from hives they kept on the grounds and sold through a tiny gift shop they maintained near their chapel. And that was what finally convinced me to go for a visit.

It turned out you could buy a lot of goods made by the monks in that shop — honey in various flavors and consistencies, bread, oatmeal — as well as St. Christopher medals and holy water that would be blessed for you on the spot, and books and rosaries and candles and other goods of interest to Catholics. I never purchased any of those items, naturally, but I brought home lots of honey over the years, and I sampled the oatmeal, too — simple, coarse stuff, very unlike machine-made Quaker Oats. Often times, I bought more than I needed, so much that it would take me a couple years to get through it all, but I liked the idea that I was supporting a unique local industry. And it really was good honey, which helped.

Anne and I somehow missed going to Huntsville last year. Not sure why; just busy I guess. A few weeks ago, we decided on the spur of the moment that we were long overdue and it was time to re-affirm our tradition. It was my birthday, as it happens, and it was a glorious day, the kind I love, when the sky is like a hard crystal dome arching impossibly high above you and the air is so clear it seems to sparkle a little. For the first time in several years, I was not crashingly depressed by the thought of making another orbit around the sun. I wasn’t thinking much about the passage of time at all, in fact… until we stepped into the little gift shop by the chapel at the Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity and saw that there was no honey on display. No oatmeal or bread, either. In fact, the only food for sale was some caramels, made by nuns in a convent in another state. Puzzled, I turned to the monk sitting near the cash register and politely waited for him to set aside his reading.

“Do you not carry the honey anymore?” I asked.

The father looked at me through pale, watery eyes, and smiled ruefully. “No,” he said, “I’m afraid we sold the last of it sometime last year. Brother So-and-So has gotten too old to care for the hives, you see, and he has no one to help.”

“That’s a shame,” I said. It suddenly occurred to me that this man — whom I’m certain I’ve encountered before on my annual visits, many times — suddenly appeared to be much smaller and more frail than I remembered.

“Our average age now is 82,” the monk continued. “There are only 18 of us left, and two of us are in a nursing home. So you understand we’ve had to make some changes.”

I found myself apologizing to the monk, although I don’t know what for. Skipping the prior year’s visitation, perhaps, and feeling like I’d come too late. Or perhaps I felt sympathy for the man’s advancing age and obvious physical deterioration. Maybe I was thinking of the articles I’ve read about the Catholic Church’s inability to attract young men to the clergy anymore, signifying the decline of this gentle man’s whole way of life. Maybe I was just sorry to realize that this unique gem of my home state probably doesn’t have much longer before it gets subdivided, too. I bought a candle and some caramels for Anne, to soothe my own feelings as much as the monk’s, and then we drove to the Shooting Star, where I drank a couple glasses of Coors Light and pondered the unfair cruelty of a world where men can work hard at building something for six and a half decades, only to find at the end of their lives that no one is interested in continuing their legacies after they’ve gone. That all their efforts ultimately amounted to nothing. I’m sure the monks wouldn’t see their lives as exercises in futility; I’m not sure I could see my own in any other way, were I in their shoes.

For the record, I still have one cup of “Trappist Honey” left in my kitchen pantry. Brandy flavored. It’s pretty old, but I don’t think honey goes bad, does it? I intend to try it before too much longer, and to use it up if it hasn’t gone rancid. And once it’s gone, I’ll clean out the cup — or at least the lid — and carefully store it in the Bennion Archives. Another souvenir of another thing that once mattered to me, and is — or at least soon will be — no more…

Oct102012

On the Positive Side…

The SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, which took off Sunday evening in the spectacular nighttime launch seen above, successfully docked with the International Space Station first thing this morning. This is the first official cargo run of the dozen SpaceX is contracted to handle for NASA. (The Dragon carried some cargo on that groundbreaking flight a few months ago, but that was still technically just a shakedown cruise; the Dragon is now considered fully operational.) The era of true commercial spaceflight has begun; welcome to the future.

The mission hasn’t been all smooth sailing, though. The first stage of the SpaceX Falcon-9 booster rocket lost one of its engines during the ascent, but despite how it appears in the rather alarming video that’s been floating around, SpaceX insists the engine did not explode. Apparently, there’s some kind of a fairing around the engine that came apart — that’s the debris you can see in the video — and the engine automatically shut down, but continued to transmit data, which it would not have done if it’d gone boom. In any event, the Falcon — like the space shuttle and the Saturn rockets before it — was designed to make it to orbit with a dead engine, and this incident was ample demonstration that the failsafe design works.

The Dragon is scheduled to remain at the station for 18 days before returning to Earth with over 800 pounds of research samples and other material the ISS crew is sending home.

In other SpaceX-related news, the company recently fired up its “Grasshopper” testbed, essentially just a rocket motor attached to a set of spindly landing legs, and successfully hovered it for about three seconds. That doesn’t sound very impressive, I know, but the company’s ultimate goal is to someday have its Falcon boosters and possibly the Dragon capsules themselves return to their launch site and land vertically, on their tails and under power, just like the silver-winged rocketships in all those old 1950s sci-fi flicks. The Falcons are currently one-use-only disposables, and the Dragons have to be laboriously recovered at sea; bringing them home in this fashion would cut expenses considerably, and make the Falcon/Dragon combination into something much closer to a truly reusable spacecraft than the shuttle ever was (as much as it pains me to say that). And, also… 1950s-style rocketships! How cool would that be? Needless to say, I’ll be watching this Grasshopper thing with great interest…

Oct092012

Wait… I Need That!

So you remember in the original TRON when the Master Control Program threatens his lackey Sark by “slowing down his power cycles?” Yeah, I don’t really know exactly what that means either… but I think it just might be a pretty good description of what’s going on with my brain this afternoon. Like all my mental gears are… getting… gummy…

Man, I hate these days when the workflow is unrelenting, and everything is urgent… and then you have several of those in a row, and a long-range forecast of many more to come, and it all has a cumulative effect… somebody just de-rez me now, won’t you?

Oct082012

Mornings Are the Worst

If you’ve been a fan of any of the sitcoms produced by Chuck Lorre over the past 15 years — Dharma & Greg, Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory, or Mike & Molly — you probably know about Lorre’s “vanity card,” i.e., the screen that comes up at the very end of the show’s closing credits. Most vanity cards are just a logo of some kind for the show’s production company, sometimes involving a little animation or brief film clip; think of MTM’s cute little kitty, or JJ Abrams’ Bad Robot, or “Sit, Ubu, Sit,” that sort of thing. But at some point, Lorre started doing something different, using his card almost as a sort of blog on which he posts little essays, makes observations on life, cracks jokes, or, most famously (and stupidly, from a legal standpoint), shot off his mouth about the troubles Charlie Sheen was giving him during Sheen’s infamous psychological disintegration. The cards aren’t on-screen long enough to actually read them, but that’s part of the fun. You have to record them (or watch the DVD) and freeze-frame them in order to catch the complete content. Back when Lorre first started doing this on Dharma & Greg in the late ’90s, it felt like an almost-underground “cool kids only” kind of thing that not many people even knew about; nowadays, of course, it’s a built-in part of Lorre’s brand, an expected schtick, and all his “postings” are easily available online. The cards have gone mainstream, man, so of course they’re not as cool anymore…

Anyhow, the Girlfriend and I have recently gotten hooked on The Big Bang Theory — that’s a development I probably ought to discuss in its own entry — and we’ve been binging the last few weeks on the DVD sets for the first four seasons. And after each and every episode, we pause the playback and read the vanity card. Most of them are ephemeral, a momentary amusement that’s forgotten within seconds as we forge ahead into the next episode. But there was one I spotted over the weekend that perfectly suited the mood I’ve been in lately, and some of the things I was getting in my previous entry on my semi-annual frustration. I thought I’d share it here, faithfully copied from Lorre’s own archive so I get it right:

Mornings are the worst. The mind seems undefended, easy prey for both memories and imagination. What happened. What should’ve happened. What might happen someday. Your fault, my fault, no one’s fault. The only way to relieve the torment is to get up, empty the bladder, drink the coffee, read the paper, run the treadmill, perform the animal sacrifice, paint the chicken blood on the groin and call upon the demonic spirits to bring you back.

Nights are bad too. Once again, exhaustion makes the mind vulnerable to obsessing over woulda, shoulda, coulda. The only thing to do is sit alone and eat the chicken which was senselessly murdered in the morning.

Mmm, murdered chicken. Pass the barbecue sauce, please…

Oct032012

No, I’m Not Dead

Not that I’d blame you for assuming so, given the utter paucity of activity around here lately. Remember when this blog was a happening place and jasonbennion.com was on the verge of exploding into a world-dominating brand that would be spoken of in the farthest corners of the InterWebs for years to come? No? Me neither. Even so, I deeply regret that I’m no longer able to find the time or energy to blog regularly. It’s been long enough since my last entry, for example, that there are probably virtual tumbleweeds blowing down the main street of downtown Simple Tricks, or at least there would be if we experienced cyberspace as an actual environment with “buildings” and such, the way William Gibson first imagined it way back in the ’80s. Not to put too melodramatic a spin on the situation, but with the slow diminishing of my output here, I honestly feel like the last vestige of my self-identity as a writer — a notion I’ve carried around since the eighth grade, more or less — is finally slipping through my fingers. But then I’ve been thinking lately that a lot of things I used to take for granted are slipping away…

Eh, don’t mind me. I’ve just entered another one of those periodic phases when it feels like somebody’s cranked the treadmill up to 11 and my limbs are flopping around like the Wizard of Oz‘s Scarecrow doing a jig, and I’m about three steps away from losing my footing and going flat on my face. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably noticed this happens every year around this time. The production cycle at my dayjob always picks up toward the end of summer, leading to days (and occasional late nights) of constant, urgent activity that leave me utterly drained. It’s just dumb, bad luck that this uptick coincides with my annual melancholy over my birthday and the changing of the season; the slightly frantic feeling I get as I try to cram in a last few summertime activities while the weather holds; the nagging disappointment in myself for things I should’ve done when I was young and now fear I never will; and of course that weird, rootless sensation I still experience, even after all two and a half decades away from it, because it’s time to be heading back to school and I’m not going. You stir all this together and you end up with a big old bowl of frustration and sadness.

Maybe I wouldn’t have such a hard time with all this stuff if it didn’t seem like so many of my friends and coworkers are privy to some secret that’s apparently been denied me. They all have jobs and commutes and obligations, too, and yet somehow they also manage to keep their houses clean and cook fabulous meals and host parties and exercise and enjoy hobbies and participate in causes. They find the time to go back to school and garden and make things, and some of them — many of them — create art or play a musical instrument or become highly skilled in some craft. Sometimes all of the above. They’re interesting people who appear to be living good lives. Oh, and some of them are even raising kids. And still they manage to pull it all together. Compared to them, I’m a tremendous failure at this life thing.

Hell, I can’t even keep the kitchen sink free of dirty dishes, let alone accomplish anything really worthwhile. I haven’t written fiction in longer than I care to admit. I haven’t yet sorted or posted the photographs from my Hawaiian cruise clear back in February… or any of my other trips for the last several years. The Girlfriend has been living with me for eight months and we still haven’t gotten all of her stuff out of the storage unit we rented in January. I have a list of half-finished projects as long as my forearm, some of them dating back to the mid-90s. Oh, and that movie I mentioned in the last entry, Son of Kong? That was the first feature-length DVD I’ve managed to get through in a single sitting in months. And it’s only 70 minutes long! So much for my hobby as the great film buff.

When I think about all these things, then consider how many of my days consist only of commuting to my dayjob, working my dayjob, traveling home from my dayjob, eating dinner, and collapsing for the night without managing to get a damn thing done for myself… well, I just can’t believe it’s like this for everyone. I’m doing something wrong, but I’m damned if I can figure out what it is. Sometimes I wonder if I’m not just plain damned.

So, yeah, not dead yet… but I’m not sure you can really call this living, either…

Sep162012

Quickie Movie Review: Son of Kong

Old black-and-whiter for this Sunday night’s entertainment: Son of Kong, the sequel to the all-time 1933 classic King Kong. Obviously made much more quickly and cheaply than its predecessor (Son was in theaters only nine months after the original!), the movie nevertheless surprised me with an unexpectedly realistic portrayal of the consequences of the events of King Kong. As Son begins, Carl Denham, the entrepreneur and adventurer who captured Kong and brought him to New York, is being sued every which way to Tuesday and is up on criminal charges related to the deaths and property damage caused by the giant ape’s rampage, so he splits the country with his friend and sidekick Captain Engelhorn aboard the SS Venture, the tramp freighter from the first film. After various misadventures (read: failures), the two find themselves drawn back to Skull Island in search of a treasure that might pay off their debts…

Of course, much of that thoughtfulness and grown-up sensibility goes out the window once they encounter “Little Kong,” who is played much more for laughs than his daddy was. And then the island spontaneously crumbles into the sea for no apparent reason. Even so, the ending still brought a tear to my eye. Overall, a satisfying little adventure movie that I’ve somehow never gotten around to catching. Fans of Indiana Jones and/or Tales of the Gold Monkey ought to give it a look; if nothing else, you’ll recognize the atmosphere…

Sep142012

For the Last Time…

Space shuttle Endeavour was lifted onto the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft this afternoon for her upcoming ride from Florida to California… the last time any of the surviving shuttles are likely going to be moved in this fashion. The last time we’ll ever see this ungainly piggyback configuration. I find myself wondering what’s going to become of the two SCAs. It seems to me that at least one of them ought to be preserved as well — as far as I know, they are unique in aerospace history; I don’t know of any other aircraft that have carried another craft of nearly equal size on its back like this — but I haven’t heard if there any such plans.

Speaking of plans, Endeavour‘s new home, the California Science Center is Los Angeles, has extremely ambitious ones for displaying its new acquisition. The Center intends to mount Endeavour as if she were on the launch pad, standing vertically, attached to a pair of empty solid-rocket boosters and an external fuel tank that will be supplied by NASA at a later date. In other words, the CSC, unlike all the other museums that simply have an orbiter sitting in a hanger, wants to display a complete shuttle stack. And I thought Kennedy Space Center’s “in-flight” display plans sounded cool! I have no idea how soon this vision might come to reality (assuming it ever does), but I hope it happens soon.

The youngest of the space shuttles is scheduled to depart from Kennedy on Monday, September 17, and take three days transiting the country (she’ll be overflying seven states and eight NASA facilities, essentially making a farewell tour). Endeavour will land at LAX and spend a couple weeks getting ready for her “road trip,” then be placed on an oversized flat-bed trailer and towed 12 miles along LA city streets in what’s being called “the mother of all parades,” finally reaching her new home in Exposition Park on October 13. The public will be able to call on her beginning October 30.

Photo credit: NASA Kennedy Space Center’s Twitter feed.

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