[NOTE: This post contains spoilers for the Watchmen graphic novel, and I’m assuming readers are familiar with its plot and characters.]
Remember a few years ago, when I said that I wanted to reread Watchmen, but this time with the Annotated Watchmen alongside? Well, the time has come at last. As expected, it’s producing a much more satisfying reading experience — even just rereading the graphic novel with an eye towards structure and symbolism is deeply rewarding, as opposed to the first time, when I was just reading for the plot. Now the project is spawning a few sub-projects of its own.
I thought it would be fun to pursue the references embedded in the annotations, so as to get a richer understanding of Watchmen‘s various layers of allusion. Here was the first one I saw, in reference to The Comedian’s secret(ish) identity as Edward Blake:
“Edward Blake is obviously a reference to Blake Edwards, the director of the Pink Panther comedies. And, no one’s spotted this, Rorschach’s methods of terrorism are all taken from Pink Panther movies.”
Are they, now? Are they really? Very well, I believe I’ll watch the Pink Panther movies. (That means the Sellers/Edwards Pink Panther movies, mind you. I’m sure Alan Moore wouldn’t want me to have to plow through Alan Arkin, Ted Wass, Roberto Benigni, Steve Martin [who I love, but come on — those are paycheck movies for him], or the truly execrable Trail of The Pink Panther, about which more later.)
Verdict: There’s something valid in the comment, but it’s quite overstated. I’ll buy that Edward Blake refers to Blake Edwards. And there are definitely some parallels between Rorschach’s behavior and one of the movies, The Return Of The Pink Panther. For instance, in the film, retired jewel thief Sir Charles Litton, aka “The Phantom” (played here by Christopher Plummer, taking over the David Niven role from the first movie) investigates a crime for which he’s being framed. In doing so, he pushes around a stoolie, abusing the man’s fingers just as Rorschach does to a low-level underworld type in chapter 1 of Watchmen. Well, not exactly “just as” — Litton’s victim is played for laughs as his hands are squeezed, whereas Rorschach’s target is clearly in agony as his bones snap. But still, the finger torture analogue is there.
There’s an even more blatant connection, though. In Return Of The Pink Panther, Edwards revists the running gag from the previous Inspector Clouseau movie (A Shot In The Dark), in which Clouseau has instructed his manservant Cato to attack him by surprise at any time, so as to keep the Inspector’s battle skills sharp. In Shot, Cato attacks Clouseau in the bedroom and in the bathtub, but in Return he steps up his game by leaping at Clouseau out of the freezer:
In chapter 3 of Watchmen, Moloch encounters a similarly unpleasant surprise:
So yeah, there are definitely parallels, and the “Edward Blake” thing seems like a clear enough reference that the parallels are unlikely to be coincidental. However, that’s about as far as it goes. You don’t see Cato following up on his freezer trick by leaving a “Behind you” note next time around. The Phantom doesn’t shoot anybody in the chest with a grappling hook gun. And Clouseau sure as hell never burns somebody with cooking fat or kills dogs with a cleaver, even if they bite.
Isn’t it odd, too, that while Edward Blake is supposedly The Comedian, it’s Rorschach who gets all the best gags? I mentioned in my last writeup that The Comedian is never funny, but what I didn’t notice is that Rorschach often is. And by “often”, I mean “seldom”, but a lot more often than most of the other characters. It’s Rorschach who actually tells a joke (albeit in his diary — the Pagliacci joke at the end of chapter 2.) He delivers many of his lines with bone-dry irony and sometimes even biting wit. (“Tall order.”) And he provides the biggest laugh in the book — indirectly, admittedly — by dropping Captain Carnage down an elevator shaft, a rather Clouseauesque fate for a villain to meet. His moral simplicity, along with his talent for verbal understatement and physical overstatement, make him the funniest character in Watchmen.
As for the Pink Panther movies themselves, well. One of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, to this day, is The Trail Of The Pink Panther. I didn’t actually walk out of the theater, but considering I was twelve years old when I saw it, I think it was the first movie I’d seen in my life that was bad enough to make me think, “This is a terrible movie,” as it unspooled. It was the first time I can recall thinking critically about a movie while watching it.
Trail is basically the movie equivalent of one of those clip shows that long-running television programs sometimes resort to when deadlines are plentiful but inspiration is not — a loose frame story provides excuses to show lots of highlight reels from previous episodes. Peter Sellers died fully 18 months before production began on the movie, and Edwards strings together a Sellers “performance” by using a bunch of deleted scenes from the fifth and last Pink Panther film, along with the funniest bits from the first four. They haul out the carcasses of Sellers’ major co-stars from the previous films to give talking-head interviews about Clouseau. David Niven was so weak that they actually chose to have his lines dubbed in by Rich Little in post-production.
The movie is so bad that Sellers’ widow in fact sued its producers, claiming that it had diminished her late husband’s reputation. The courts agreed, and awarded her over a million dollars. Still, watching all five Pink Panther movies in a row, I could see why the clip show approach must have appealed to Edwards. Every one of these movies is essentially a bunch of middling-to-great set pieces and jokes dangling from a plot that’s more or less beside the point. I saw these movies first in bits and pieces myself, watching over my parents’ shoulders growing up, and re-watching them now, it’s clear how much they were just vehicles for Peter Sellers to be funny. To watch them in sequence is to witness an actor and director zeroing in on a character’s comedic voice.
In the first, eponymous Pink Panther movie, Sellers isn’t even the lead. He’s a supporting character to David Niven’s roguish jewel thief, but Sellers steals the show so wonderfully as Clouseau that Edwards immediately sought another showcase for the character. He found it with A Shot In The Dark, originally a stage play with no connection to the Pink Panther universe whatsoever. Edwards rewrote the screenplay (along with a pre-Exorcist William Peter Blatty) around the Clouseau character, and Sellers hit another home run.
Lots of people cite Shot as the best Pink Panther movie, but I’d have to disagree. In my opinion, the one where the pieces all came together is the one to which Moore tips his hat: Return of The Pink Panther. That movie reprises the compelling characters and setting from the first movie, layers in the funniest elements of Shot (Cato, Dreyfus), and strips away some of the previous distractions — Clouseau as cuckold, Clouseau starry-eyed in love — to focus on the detective pursuing a case through one spectacular failure after another. They crib some costuming from the intervening Arkin movie, and Sellers perfects his outrageous ultra-French accent, complete with befuddled reactions from other characters. After the formula jells in Return, the subsequent films have the easy rhythm (and sometimes the tiredness) of recurring SNL sketches.
Sellers certainly nails all the physical comedy — I laughed out loud the first time he spun a globe and then tried to lean on it — but I found that my favorite parts were the more subtle verbal interchanges. The conversations where Clouseau, in his certainty, completely bewilders another character while not even realizing he’s doing so, are pure genius to me. And I adore him getting worked up and confronting a suspect with, “I submit, Inspector Ballon, that you arrived home, found Miguel with Maria Gambrelli, and killed him in a rit of fealous jage!” Once the films had fully codified the character, even his wardrobe was funny. Come to think of it, that trenchcoat-and-hat combination looks awfully familiar. Haven’t I seen it in something I read recently…?
One of my favorite books as a teen, and a huge influence on me during that time, was a novel called The Armageddon Rag, by the then-little-known George R.R. Martin. The book is about… well, it’s about many things, including loss of innocence, the metaphorical end of the Sixties, the rewards and regrets inherent in revisiting the past, and the enormous power of music. The way it is about those things is that it follows a journalist investigating a murder, one that seems inextricably bound to the music of a fictional Zeppelin-esque defunct band called The Nazgûl, whose lead singer died on the same date as the murder. As the journalist investigates the story, he is startled to discover that the band is getting back together, and somebody who looks and sounds a whole lot like the singer is fronting them…
The documentary Searching For Sugar Man is about many things too, and the way it is about them is that it follows a journalist investigating how a beloved artist died. The artist’s name is Rodriguez. A Detroit singer-songwriter in the Dylan mold, he released a couple of albums in the early 70s — good albums, beloved by producers and critics, but completely ignored by the American audience. He quickly faded into total obscurity. Well, almost total. By some quirk, the albums became wildly popular in South Africa, their protest lyrics credited with awakening an anti-apartheid generation to the possibility and power of questioning authority. One South African describes Rodriguez’s popularity there like so: “If you went into any white, middle-class, liberal home in South Africa and started flipping through the record collection, there are three albums you’d always find: Abbey Road by The Beatles, Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon & Garfunkel, and Cold Fact by Rodriguez.”
But while there are reams of information available about The Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel, South Africans could learn almost nothing about Rodriguez. They couldn’t even find out how he died, though many seemed to agree it was grisly in some way. Did he immolate himself on stage? Blow his brains out right after the encore? Nobody seems to know, so in the 1990s, South African music journalist Craig Bartholomew-Styrdom starts researching an article whose premise is: “How did Rodriguez die?” He followed the money, made a lot of phone calls, and also made use of this nifty new tool called the Internet. With fan Stephen Segerman, he created a website called “The Great Rodriguez Hunt”, casting far and wide for leads on the mystery.
I don’t want to reveal what he found. It’s best learned watching the film. Quoth Roger Ebert: “Let me just say it is miraculous and inspiring.” For me, it was like a mirror image of The Armageddon Rag: where the story of The Nazgûl is dark and apocalyptic, the story of Rodriguez is redemptive and luminous. Even better, the story of Rodriguez is true. I spent pretty much the entire movie thinking it was a hoax, along the lines of Dave Stewart’s Platinum Weird stunt a few years ago. Nope. It’s not a hoax. It is one hundred percent true, and it shone a light on a couple of things that really moved me.
The first of these is about mystery and music. Not to sound like a village elder, but I am old enough to remember a time when you could hear a song, or an album, and love it, but have almost nothing more than the song or the album. If you heard it on the radio, you might not even know the title or the artist! I once taped a lovely Robert Plant song off the radio, and it took me years to find out the title of the song, and that it was solo Plant rather than Zeppelin.
Even if you owned the music rather than hearing it on the radio, you might have an album cover or some liner notes to peruse, but those could be sparse or willfully obtuse, and in any case they were merely snapshots in time. You could subscribe to Creem or Rolling Stone and get up-to-date news, but only for the artists they chose to showcase. You might be able to find some historical info at the library, for well-established artists, but again, that would be up to the caprice of your library’s collection. Even the albums themselves could be elusive — I remember driving all around Aurora, searching fruitlessly for a copy of Pink Floyd’s The Final Cut.
This atmosphere gave rise to wild rumors and legends. I suppose the poster child for this would be the Paul is dead phenomenon, but these legends lasted well past the Sixties. I remember someone confidently asserting to me that Michael Stipe and Natalie Merchant had a daughter together. It is a truth universally acknowledged that when there is a vacuum of information, human beings will fill that vacuum with speculation, and doubly so for the things we’re passionate about. Thus were many hours spent trading ridiculous stories of our pop idols.
That’s all different now. Don’t get me wrong — the age of rumors wasn’t golden, and I wouldn’t want to go back to it. I absolutely love that we have Google, and Wikipedia, and Shazam, and even horrible ad-splattered lyrics sites. The trade wasn’t something for nothing, though. What we lost was a little bit of that mystique, that sense of the unknowable. Having information at our fingertips about the musical pantheon brings them a lot closer to earth with the rest of us. It’s a mixed blessing.
The other aspect of this film that really spoke to me was about recognition and arrival. The filmmaker speaks to Rodriguez’s daughters, who knew their father as someone who had put his music out into the world, only to see it immediately sink beneath the surface. When they learn that it finally found its home in South Africa, that those songs were deeply loved by an entire nation of people, the revelation is immensely powerful. They see that their father’s spirit, his true self, has been kept alive for all those years. Did the news come too late? Maybe, but I don’t think so. See the movie and judge for yourself.
This part of the movie felt allegorical to me. We each have our core, our essence, and as bravely as we can, we express it to the world. Sometimes the world embraces it, sometimes not so much. But it never goes away. It is there, still waiting to be seen and heard. Sometimes, it gets seen and heard in the most unexpected ways, and when that happens, the resulting illumination is a wonder to behold.
Final entry in the 2012 XYZZY best games review project — Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis. With tremendous innovation, technical polish, and abundant humor, Adam Thornton upends the medium of interactive fiction with a work that’s simultaneously traditionalist and transgressive, a layered and richly allusive delivery system for some highly demented and depraved content. It’s a hugely impressive achievement, and I can’t imagine anyone else pulling it off. I can’t imagine anyone else even trying.
[We interrupt our regularly scheduled IF reviews for this topical superhero discussion. That review of Mentula Macanus is coming soon– er, on its way.]
I’ve been reading a lot of 1960s Marvel comics lately, letter columns and all. I did this once before, with just Spider-Man comics, which was a lot of fun. This time I’m skipping around more from title to title, getting a feel for the way the universe gelled, and how the constant stream of feedback from readers contributed to that process. It’s really given me a sense for what Marvel did differently back in those early days. For a while there, they could almost do no wrong — “what they did differently” was more or less synonymous with “what they did right.”
Know what else I’ve been doing a lot lately? Seeing Joss Whedon’s Avengers movie. Well, okay, just twice, but that counts as “a lot” in my movie-watching book. The movie is everything I wanted it to be. It was even more satisfying the second time around. Like those early Marvels, it makes the right call pretty much every time. Really: just like those early Marvels.
Continued stories
In 1961, when the Marvel Universe as we know it began, comic books were disposable, not collectible. There was no expectation that whoever bought issue #41 would necessarily have bought issue #40 or have any intention to buy issue #42. Consequently, each one was required to be self-contained, with one story, or even multiple stories, that began and ended within its covers. That’s a bit of an oversimplification, but the general expectation was that a comic book contained at least one complete story. Sure, there were motifs that continued from one issue to the next, but they were more or less in the form of an established status quo. Clark Kent always works at the Daily Planet. Lois Lane never gets any closer to figuring out his secret identity. Jimmy Olsen is always just as young and eager and boneheaded as he ever was or ever will be. Stories that deviated from this status quo always made sure to return to it before the issue was over.
Many early Marvels followed this pattern too, though their internal status quo was a fair bit more interesting. However, it quickly became apparent that the stories they wanted to tell were too complex to be contained within a single book. Not only that, they seemed to be attracting older, more sophisticated readers, who might be more reasonably expected to buy a title consistently. So, in many books, “continued stories” became the rule, and whoever read issue #41 might in fact need the previous one or the next one, or several iterations thereof, to get the full tale.
Oh, the complaints that readers sent in about this! The company was accused of greed, insensitivity, poor storytelling, and more. In fact, the hue and cry was so great that at one point Marvel actually abandoned continued stories and tried to keep all issues self-contained. The (predictable) result? Duller, more superficial stories. In fact, it may have almost been a calculated move on their part — by the time they did it, the Marvel Universe had already been established as an enormous tapestry of characters whose lives regularly interwove, collided, and separated again. To write the very kind of stories they had made obsolete may have been their way of saying, “Oh, this? Is this really what you want?” Needless to say, continued stories returned soon afterwards.
In 2012, the majority of movies are self-contained, but there are plenty of franchises in which each sequel moves the characters along a larger arc. However, what we hadn’t seen yet is a movie that ties together multiple franchises in the way that The Avengers does. There are four different lines of movies, each with its own sequel trajectory, that come together in this one. Four sets of stories feed in, and this story will resonate along at least three lines in the future. (I’m not sure if there are going to be any more Hulk movies, though no doubt the success of Avengers makes that outcome more likely. Heck, maybe even Black Widow and Hawkeye will get their own franchises.)
This is an immensely powerful position for a movie to occupy. In the comics, a shared universe gets you several great things:
If you’re following multiple lines that come together, you get to feel like an insider when the collisions happen. The more lines you follow, the more satisfying this can be.
The coherency of each strand is enhanced by its participation in a greater coherent whole. When Spider-Man bursts into Stark Industries, he may wonder why Iron Man isn’t showing up. Those of us reading Iron Man know that he’s trapped by a villain in another part of the factory, and knowing this lets us feel that both Spidey and Stark are a legitimate part of a larger, grander story.
When personalities do come together, especially if they clash, the drama of the encounter is greatly enhanced when each character is fully fleshed out with a detailed background and a story of his own.The Avengers movie inherits each of these advantages, along with the sheer pleasure of seeing a bunch of great actors thrown into an ensemble cast, and an enormous sense of payoff from the most elaborate setup ever.
These people do not get along
As I said, Marvel set up a fictional universe in which its superheroes were constantly running into each other. And when that would happen, inevitably, they would fight at least once. Fans loved seeing the good guys square off against each other, if only from the geeky desire to take the measure of each hero. And so Stan Lee would contrive some sort of misunderstanding or unusual circumstance that would force the heroes into conflict. Letter columns were always full of people eager to know who would win in a fight: Hulk vs. Thor? Thing vs. Iron Man? Spidey vs. Black Widow? Hero vs. hero conflict gave those fans a little satisfaction, though not always as much as they wanted, given that the story often took a left turn before either hero suffered a full defeat.
The Avengers takes this cue and runs with it. And, uh, now it’s probably time for the SPOILERS ASSEMBLE! warning.
The movie gives us so many awesome hero vs. hero matchups:
Black Widow vs. Hulk, twice. She dominates him strategically as Banner, he dominates her physically (of course) as Hulk
Thor vs. Iron Man vs. Captain America
Hawkeye vs. everybody, which was a great way of establishing Hawkeye’s badass credentials. (Casting Jeremy Renner didn’t hurt either.)
Stark, Banner, and Cap piercing Fury’s subterfuge, leading to a great 6-way argument and a lovely Whedonesque camera move, inverting the heroes and placing the Staff Of Bad Influence in the foreground
Thor vs. Hulk
Black Widow vs. Hawkeye
And that’s all before they team up to fight the Big Bad! No wonder this movie had to be 143 minutes long. These matchups do several things for the movie, besides their obvious Big Action Thrill value. I mentioned how turning Hawkeye against everyone, and having him nearly take down the whole shebang, was a great way of establishing him as a powerhouse to be reckoned with, despite his lack of superpowers. Really, that’s true for all the inter-hero fights. In order for us to believe in the enormous victory the Avengers pull off in the movie’s climax, we have to believe in their powers and abilities. Having them establish these against each other is both efficient and effective. This way, we see more heroes in action more of the time, and our belief in one reinforces our belief in the others.
Moreover, the physical conflicts help the movie express the characters’ underlying philosophical conflicts. Superhero stories, at least when they’re done well, are metaphors writ large. So when Thor fights Iron Man, it isn’t just Thor fighting Iron Man — it’s the Mythical/Ancient/Pastoral at war with the Modern/Scientific/Technological, and it’s not accidental that the image of Idealized Patriotism and Selfless Heroism is defeated by neither and brings both together.
Finally, the conflicts move the plot along, which is far from a given in modern action movies. Heroes fighting each other does everything from achieving key turning points (such as when the Widow administers a “cognitive recalibration” to Hawkeye, switching him back to the side of the angels) to subtly filling in explanatory details (such as when Banner finds himself holding the Stick of Psychic Malevolence as he’s getting angry.)
How do you solve a problem like The Hulk?
In fact, this last one helped me understand something about the movie that puzzled me the first time around. I’ve mentioned before that although the Hulk exists in a world of superheroes, he’s not a superhero himself — he’s a monster. Unlike everybody else on the team, he’s not necessarily here to help. This is a hard problem to solve for any story that includes him as a protagonist, and the first time I saw The Avengers, I thought the film hadn’t quite solved it. Why is he all “SMASH BLACK WIDOW!” the first time he appears and then all “SMASH ONLY BAD GUYS AND CATCH IRON MAN AND GENERALLY HELP OUT!” the second time?
Then my friend Tashi suggested this interpretation to me: Banner’s revelation during the climactic battle (“I’m always angry”) indicates that he has figured out that suppressing his anger is the wrong way to go. So instead, he lives with it all the time so that it doesn’t blossom into rage, and tries to atone for his past damage by helping the helpless. (Boy, sounds Whedonishly familiar, doesn’t it?) He believes that he might be able to control “the other guy” now that he’s learned to live with his anger, but he’d rather not take the chance if he doesn’t have to.
Then he gets tangled up with the whole SHIELD thing. He finds himself aboard a massive airship — as he comments when it takes off, that’s a worse place for him to be than even a submarine. Loki’s whole plan is to get the Hulk to wreck everything once he’s aboard the Helicarrier. Well, that and also get Hawkeye to wreck everything from outside the Helicarrier. So, using the remote magic of the Nasty Pointy Spear Of Malefic Intent, he manipulates Banner’s mind (as indicated by the “put down the scepter” scene), weakening his mental control so that when Hawkeye strikes, the Hulk is in rampage mode rather than “I’m at peace with my anger” mode. Then, later, when Banner motors up for the final battle, he’s himself again, and can drive the beast enough to be a hero.
I love this explanation, and I think it’s supported by the film. It’s certainly better than anything Stan Lee figured out in the 60’s. His Hulk was constantly hunted, and his Banner was far from reconciled with his anger. (That is, once it was established that anger is what triggers the change. At first it was actually nightfall that did it, like a werewolf. The anger/stress thing set in pretty early, though.) He tried pills, and he tried locking himself away. He tried staying out of stressful situations. You can imagine how well all that worked out. The comics Hulk was often well-intentioned, but always misunderstood.
There wasn’t a trace in this movie of Thunderbolt Ross-esque anti-Hulkism — on the contrary, the government is looking for Banner to enlist his help, despite knowing he could potentially Hulk out. You don’t get much of that in the early comics, though they repeatedly attempted to cast the monster as a hero. In fact, he was even a charter member of the original Avengers… but he was out of there by the third issue. He’s really not much of a team player.
Homage and better
Having the Hulk be present for the founding of the movie Avengers is just one of the many lovely ways this film pays respect to its source material. Just as in the comics, Loki is intimately involved with the Avengers’ formation. Just as in the comics, the early Hawkeye and Black Widow are a couple, albeit one frequently beset by misfortune. Just as in the comics, the Avengers bicker and argue and crack wise, although the players and personalities are a bit different in the film from how they work in the original stories.
The movie is far from a literal recreation of those early Avengers issues. Instead, like the first Iron Man movie, it faithfully absorbs the spirit of the comics, but compresses, abridges, and enhances to make a coherent story that fits together like an exquisite puzzle. Thank you Joss, for mining the gold from an enormous vein, then shaping and polishing it so beautifully for us. And by the way, that really long sequence shot that went from hero to hero during the third act was JUST AWESOME. Mmmm, I think it’s time to see this movie again.
Here’s another entry in the series of 2012 XYZZY nominees game reviews: Robb Sherwin’s Cryptozookeeper. It’s the most Sherwin-esque Sherwin game I’ve yet seen. It’s gonzo, it’s funny, it’s extreme, and it’s shambolic, and it’s all these things to the most highly refined degree I’ve ever seen Robb accomplish, which means it’s all these things to the most highly refined degree I’ve ever seen anyone accomplish.
IF-Review has published the second in my series reviewing all the Best Game XYZZY nominees of 2012. The game this time is Wade Clarke’s Six. I don’t think I’ve ever been so charmed by an IF game.
It’s been a long, long time since I reviewed a text game, so I’m embarking on a mini-project of reviewing all four games nominated for the 2011 Best Game XYZZY award. First up: Zombie Exodus. My review is up now at IF-Review. Thanks to Mark Musante for publishing it.
At Geek Bowl V last year, my team The Anti-Social Network ended up winning all the marbles, except the marbles were actually considerable sums of cash. Hooray! This year, the event moved from Denver to Austin, Texas, and we didn’t fare quite so well, coming in 10th out of 146 teams. Still a respectable showing! But not enough to get paid, as only the top 3 teams win money.
Nevertheless, a great time was had! I got to spend quality time with my wonderful teammates, met the delightful Valerie Thatcher, spent a great afternoon with the estimable Rob Wheeler, and got to experience the Austin 6th Street bar strip during a pretty freaky power outage. Turns out that the bar scene is really not my scene, and the bar scene when none of the bars or streetlights have electricity, and thousands of people are roaming through darkness, is really REALLY not my scene.
Of course, the reason I went there was Geek Bowl VI, which now bills itself as the biggest live trivia event in the U.S. It’s a pub quiz multiplied by 20, and every year, Geeks Who Drink does a little better job with the event. It’s never without its flaws, but it’s quite impressive to manage 150 or so teams and deliver a variety of good questions in a fun way. Not to mention the cash prizes, which make for a very cool incentive.
Here’s the format: each team has its own small table, with 6 chairs. Quizmasters read questions from the stage, and the questions are also projected onto large screens throughout the venue. Once all the questions in a round have been asked, a two minute timer starts, by the end of which you must have turned in your answer sheet to one of the roaming quizmasters. The game consists of 8 rounds, each with its own theme. Each round contains 8 questions — usually, each question is worth one point, so there’s a maximum possible score of 8 points for each round. However, some rounds offer extra points — for instance, Round 2 is traditionally a music round, with 8 songs played, and one point each awarded for naming the title and artist of the song. In a regular GWD pub quiz, it’s only Round 2 and Round 8 (always the “Random Knowledge” round) that offer 16 possible points. However, in this year’s Geek Bowl, two other rounds were upgraded from 8 potential points to 16. Finally, teams can choose one round to “joker”, meaning that it earns double points for that round.
For posterity and enjoyment, here are the questions from Geek Bowl VI. Note that I’m reconstructing these from memory and notes, so they may be missing any clever turns of phrase that they might have had originally, and any inaccuracies that result from my paraphrasing are solely my fault. I’ll put any commentary about our team’s experience in [square brackets].
At the request of Geeks Who Drink, I had taken these down. Then, in a pleasing and surprising turn of events, we had a good conversation over email in which they decided that having the questions posted might be okay after all, as long as they were posted at least a week past the date of the event. So, I’m pleased to say, the questions have returned to this entry! Thanks, Geeks!
Round 1: Austin-tatious, a round about Austins and flamboyance
1. What is the name of Stone Cold Steve Austin’s trademark finishing move? [We were clueless on this one, guessing “cold cock.” Nope!]
2. What fancy-ass palace was built by Louis XIV of France on the site of his dad’s hunting lodge? [Teammates Dave and Lori had actually visited there, so they had this one well in hand.]
3. Who wrote the theme to Austin Powers, 30 years before the movie came out?
4. Ryan Good rocked the Twitter-verse by announcing that he was resigning as what musical artist’s “swagger coach”?
5. Jane Austen wrote two novels with one-word titles. For one point, name them both.
6. How many yards is an NFL team penalized for excessive celebration after a touchdown?
7. Spelling counts for this question: What is the first name of President Obama’s former economic advisor Mr. Goolsbee? [Again, clueless. We guessed “Osten.” Not even close! Well, except for the fact that we knew it was some variant of “Austin.”]
8. Tawûsê Melek is a peacock angel in the Yazidi religion of what ethnic group of Russia and northern Iraq?
[Our score for this round: 6]
Round 2: Music
[The usual GWD music round has some theme or other. They play 8 mp3 excerpts, and teams must name the title & artist of each song. Geek Bowl is usually a little grander — for instance, last year they brought in a mariachi band to cover 8 different songs. This year, they took advantage of Austin’s self-billed status as the “live music capital of the world” by bringing in eight different musical artists, one for each question.]
1. An 80’s hair-metal band covered “Teenage Dream” by Katy Perry. [Our team is fortunate to have Brian Ibbott, creator and host of the very entertaining Coverville podcast. Brian nailed this one right away.]
2. A Cuban band covering “Careless Whisper” by Wham!. Or Wham! featuring George Michael if you want to get technical.
3. A rockabilly band covering “I Got Stripes” by Johnny Cash. [We knew it was Johnny Cash, but couldn’t identify the song.]
4. An air guitarist and air drummer “covering” “Hot For Teacher” by Van Halen.
5. A classical string quartet covering “Everlong” by the Foo Fighters.
6. A local theater group doing an a capella version of “The Money Song” from Avenue Q. [For this one we named the musical instead of the artist, which was no problem. However, we were unable to come up with the title “The Money Song”, instead taking a shot with the unwieldy “When You Help Others (You Can’t Help Helping Yourself).”]
7. A brass group covering “Crazy Train” by Ozzy Osbourne.
8. A glee club from the University of Texas doing a vocal version of the beat from “Kill You” by Eminem. [We were nowhere close to this, guessing “Cuban Pete” by Desi Arnaz. Hey, it never hurts to guess.]
[Our score for this round: 12, giving us a total of 18.]
Round 3: A 50/50 round about sex
[Round 3 is often some version of 50/50 chance questions like true/false or multiple choice with only 2 choices.]
1. On the Kinsey scale, would Waylan Smithers be closer to a 0 or a 6? [We guessed in the wrong direction on this one. We didn’t know the scale, and I thought it might have had a slight anti-gay bias by putting homosexuality closer to 0 than 6. Nope!]
2. Who first coined the phrase “vaginal orgasm”, Sigmund Freud or Margaret Mead?
3. Who did Frank Sinatra bone first, Ava Gardner or Mia Farrow?
4. Who released the song “Let’s Talk About Sex”, TLC or Salt-n-Pepa?
5. If you were tying up your partner for some traditional Japanese bondage, what sort of rope would you use: jute or sisal? [Another one with no clue, but here we guessed right. Teammate George literally wrote the two answers down on two scraps of paper, held one in each hand, and had Lori pick a hand.]
6. If you’re a dacryphiliac, which one are you turned on by: yelling or sobbing? [Guessed wrong here, though. We reasoned that “lacrym-” has to do with tears, therefore “dacrym-” must be something else. Nope!]
7. In the 17th-century Japanese woodcut by Hokusai called The Dream Of The Fisherman’s Wife, is she getting it on with the crew of a fishing-boat or with octopi?
8. What was the power source of the first known vibrator: wind-up or steam-powered?
[This round had a bonus 9th question, a speed round worth 8 points in itself, making the round worth a total of 16.]
9. In three minutes, name the eight characters besides Carrie Bradshaw who have appeared in more than 20 episodes of Sex And The City. First names are sufficient. [We got 5 of these: Miranda, Charlotte, Samantha, Big, and Steve. That we even got that many was thanks to Brian.]
[Our score for this round: 11, bringing our total to 29.]
Round 4: High-culture/low-culture Before And After
[This round used the old “Before and After” format seen on Wheel Of Fortune and Jeopardy! to lock together two different answers, one to a high culture question and one to a low culture question. For instance “A William Shakespeare and George Romero production about cross-dressing zombies” might be “Twelfth Night of The Living Dead.”]
1. A philosophical principle for selecting the simplest answer as the correct one chooses a 90’s wheeled kid’s toy.
2. A 2100-year-old armless statue of a hottie goes on an adventure with a pug puppy and his kitten pal.
3. The English monarch who went on the Third Crusade helps Debbie Harry with her fragile cardiac organ.
4. A teaching strategy devised by Plato’s mentor educates a founding member of the Wu-Tang Clan.
5. An ancient Greek’s machine for moving water somehow helps Samus Aran destroy enemies. [Brian’s video game knowledge came through on that second part.]
6. Dickens’ only novel featuring a female narrator depicts what Kid ‘n Play get up to when their parents aren’t around.
7. An award-winning play about Sir Thomas More introduces some new biker characters from a drama series on the FX channel.
8. Two Brazilian ladies eat poo from a dome-like architectural structure atop a larger dome.
[Finally a perfect round score! Our 8 on this round gave us a total of 37.]
Round 5: Hips and Hops
[Round 5 of GWD is always a visual round. In the regular pub version, this consists of a half-sheet of paper with 8 pictures on it. At Geek Bowl, it was 8 images projected onto the screen, with questions alongside. I used to have to rely on my lame powers of description for this, but the Geeks have since posted a video! Now my lame descriptions have been moved to the answers section.]
[Another perfect round! 37 + 8 = 45.]
Round 6: No Straight White Males Were Harmed In the Making of This Round
1. The National Women’s Hall Of Fame is located in what central New York town, which was also the site of the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention? [Great pull by Lori on this one.]
2. What model of Pontiac did Oprah give away to every member of her audience in 2004? [Hilariously, a variation on this very same question came up in the trivia game some of us had played the night before. How I love quiz synchronicity.]
3. Manon Rhéaume, the first female goalie to play in the NHL, was signed to what expansion team in 1992? [Larry and Dave puzzled this one out nicely.]
4. Future coin star Sacajawea was a member of what Native American tribe? [I knew this thanks to Dante’s recent coin-obsession.]
5. On October 1, 1989, Axel and Eigil Axgil entered into the world’s first legal civil union for a gay couple, in what Scandinavian country? [Toss-up between two countries on this one, and we guessed wrong, with Sweden.]
6. Reggie and Cheryl Miller are basketball-playing siblings who played for what two rival universities?
7. In her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women, what feminist argued that pornography incites men to rape? [This one KILLED me. 18 years ago, when I was steeped in academia, I’d have had it cold. In 2012, however, I just could not retrieve it, and nobody else had even heard of it.]
8. Fill in this 4-word quote from Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing: “I’m just a struggling black man trying to __________ in a cruel and harsh world.” [I have seen that movie at least 3 times, though none recently. I think all of us around the table had seen it. Yet none of us could recall it at this level of detail.]
[This was a bit of a struggle. 5 points scored, bringing our total to 50.]
Round 7: A Movie Round About Pizza!
[In regular GWD, Round 7 is a second audio round. It’s often movie clips, but can be a wide variety of other things, like clips from NPR interviews or 1980s commercials. In Geek Bowl, though, Round 7 seems to have solidified as a movie round, with onscreen movie clips. The twist this time was that 16 points were available. Each clip contained a 1-point question and a 2-point question. You had to answer one or the other — answering both would net an automatic 0 points.]
1. Video: This, stopping at about 0:45. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: Where does Jake find The Geek? [We answered the 2-pointer]
2. Video: This. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: What movie did the director make immediately after this one? [We answered the 1-pointer.]
3. Video: This, stopping at about 0:26. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: Name the producer, a famous b-movie maker who helped launch the careers of Jack Nicholson, William Shatner, and Robert De Niro, among others. [We answered the 2-pointer.]
4. Video: This, stopping at about 0:37. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: How does Pizza The Hutt die? [We answered the 1-pointer.]
5. Video: This. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: What is the name of the fat kid who burns the vampire with garlic pizza? [We answered the 1-pointer. Great job George even identifying that much.]
6. Video: This, stopping at about 0:17. 1-point question: What is Wayne’s last name? 2-point question: What Pepsi slogan does Wayne recite at the end of this scene? [We answered the 1-pointer.]
7. Video: This. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: Give the last name of the director, which he shares with his son, director of “The Princess Bride.” [Kind of a heavy-handed hint there, dontcha think Geeks? We answered the 2-pointer, grimacing at how easy it was compared to the other 2-pointers.]
8. Video: This. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: In what New York City borough does this scene take place? [We answered the 2-pointer — way to go Lori.]
[Good but not great on the movie round. We scored 12 points, for a total of 62.]
Round 8: Random Knowledge
[Round 8 of GWD is always a hodgepodge, and always worth 16 points. Usually, the point distribtion is random too, with some questions worth 1 point and some worth as many as 4. However, in the Geek Bowl, each question was worth 2 points.]
1. Exact answers and first names required. For 1 point each: Name the author of The Princess Bride and the author of Lord Of The Flies. [Abbott and Costello-esque confusion ensues as members of our team try to tell each other the answers.]
2. In 2003, Peyton Manning and Steve McNair shared the NFL MVP award. The last time that happened was 1997. For 1 point each, name the two players who shared the award that year. [We got one right, but guessed wrong with Troy Aikman on the other.]
3. Unlike headhunting, head-shrinking has only been found on one continent. For one point, name the continent. For another point: the process uses herbs containing what organic compounds, also found in red wine and tea? [We got the compound but missed the continent, guessing Africa.]
4. For one point each: in the acronym HDMI, what do the M and the I stand for? [Got the I but not the M, guessing “Multiple.”]
5. Famous Browns. For one point, who preceded Gordon Brown as prime minister of England? For another point: The landmark Supreme Court Case Brown vs. Board Of Education overturned what controversial 1896 decision?
6. Three installments of the Final Fantasy series were released for the Playstation: VII, VIII, and IX. Each of these games has a central protagonist. For one point each, name any two of them. [Thank goodness for Brian pulling out one of these. We guessed wrong on the other, with Sephiroth, who was actually the antagonist in Final Fantasy VII.]
7. Scientists with effects named after them. Question 1: The effect that causes water to swirl counter-clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere is named after what scientist? Question 2: Christian Doppler, discoverer of the Doppler effect, was born in what Austrian city, also the birthplace of Mozart?
8. After Hungarian-British conductor Georg Solti, who has won more Grammy awards than anybody else with 31, the 2nd and 3rd place record for most Grammys are held by a 78-year-old producer and a 40-year-old bluegrass singer and fiddler. For one point each, name them. [We guessed wrong on the producer, saying Clive Davis.]
[11 points scored this round. We hadn’t used our joker yet, so we used it here, doubling our points to 22 and bringing our final total to 84.]
And now…
THE ANSWERS
1. What is the name of Stone Cold Steve Austin’s trademark finishing move? The Stone Cold Stunner
2. What fancy-ass palace was built by Louis XIV of France on the site of his dad’s hunting lodge? Versailles
3. Who wrote the theme to Austin Powers, 30 years before the movie came out? Quincy Jones
4. Ryan Good rocked the Twitter-verse by announcing that he was resigning as what musical artist’s “swagger coach”? Justin Bieber
5. Jane Austen wrote two novels with one-word titles. For one point, name them both. Emma and Persuasion
6. How many yards is an NFL team penalized for excessive celebration after a touchdown? 15
7. Spelling counts for this question: What is the first name of President Obama’s former economic advisor Mr. Goolsbee? Austan
8. Tawûsê Melek is a peacock angel in the Yazidi religion of what ethnic group of Russia and northern Iraq? The Kurds
Round 2: Music
[Answers are in the questions.]
Round 3: A 50/50 round about sex
1. On the Kinsey scale, would Waylan Smithers be closer to a 0 or a 6? 6 (exclusively homosexual)
2. Who first coined the phrase “vaginal orgasm”, Sigmund Freud or Margaret Mead? Sigmund Freud
3. Who did Frank Sinatra bone first, Ava Gardner or Mia Farrow? Ava Gardner
4. Who released the song “Let’s Talk About Sex”, TLC or Salt-n-Pepa? Salt-n-Pepa
5. If you were tying up your partner for some traditional Japanese bondage, what sort of rope would you use: jute or sisal? Jute
6. If you’re a dacryphiliac, which one are you turned on by: yelling or sobbing? Sobbing
7. In the 17th-century Japanese woodcut by Hokusai called “The Dream Of The Fisherman’s Wife”, is she getting it on with the crew of a fishing-boat or with octopi? Octopi
8. What was the power source of the first known vibrator: wind-up or steam-powered? Wind-up
9. In three minutes, name the eight characters besides Carrie Bradshaw who have appeared in more than 20 episodes of Sex And The City. First names are sufficient. Samantha Jones, Charlotte York, Miranda Hobbs, Mr. Big, Steve Brady, Stanford Blatch, Trey McDougal, Aidan Shaw
Round 4: High-culture/low-culture Before And After
1. A philosophical principle for selecting the simplest answer as the correct one chooses a 90’s wheeled kid’s toy. Occam’s Razor Scooter
2. A 2100-year-old armless statue of a hottie goes on an adventure with a pug puppy and his kitten pal. Venus de Milo and Otis
3. The English monarch who went on the Third Crusade helps Debbie Harry with her fragile cardiac organ. Richard The Lionheart Of Glass
4. A teaching strategy devised by Plato’s mentor educates a founding member of the Wu-Tang Clan. Socratic Method Man
5. An ancient Greek’s machine for moving water somehow helps Samus Aran destroy enemies. Archimedes’ Screw Attack
6. Dickens’ only novel featuring a female narrator depicts what Kid ‘n Play get up to when their parents aren’t around. Bleak House Party
7. An award-winning play about Sir Thomas More introduces some new biker characters from a drama series on the FX channel. A Man For All Seasons Of Anarchy
8. Two Brazilian ladies eat poo from a dome-like architectural structure atop a larger dome. 2 Girls 1 Cupola
Round 5: Hips and Hops
1. Image: a picture from Dr. Seuss. Question: What Dr. Seuss book is this image taken from? [Answer: Hop On Pop]
2. Image: An assassin in a black hat and cowl. Question: In what movie did Doc Hopper hire this assassin to eradicate a certain amphibian? [Answer: The Muppet Movie. That’s your basic wheelhouse question for me.]
3. Image: 3 different pictures of hips, decorated variously. Question: To what performer do all these hips belong? [Answer: Shakira]
4. Image: The painting Night Hawks by Edward Hopper. Question: What is the name of this famous painting by Edward Hopper?
5. Image: A vaguely C-shaped organ. Question: This was ripped straight out of somebody’s head. What in the hell is it? [Answer: Hippocampus. George caught onto this answer very quickly.]
6. Image: Some hops. You know, the plant. Question: What variety of hops are these? Hint — they happen to be named after a city in Texas. [Answer: Amarillo hops. Somehow my unconscious brain knew this. I do not know how.]
7. Image: Close-up on a male statue’s groin. Question: These famous hips belong to what statue? [Answer: Michelangelo’s David]
8. Image: An African-American guy from the 1980s. Question: This man is sometimes called the Grandfather of Hip-Hop. Name him. [Answer: Afrika Bambaataa. Major kudos to teammate Larry on this one. Half the team was leaning towards “Grandmaster Flash” for this answer, but Larry insisted that the man pictured was tougher-looking than any picture he’s ever seen of Grandmaster Flash. He was arguing for Afrika Bambaataa, and since he’s our team’s closest equivalent to a hip-hop expert, we went with it. Glad we did!]
Round 6: No Straight White Males Were Harmed In the Making of This Round
1. The National Women’s Hall Of Fame is located in what central New York town, which was also the site of the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention? Seneca Falls, New York
2. What model of Pontiac did Oprah give away to every member of her audience in 2004? The Pontiac G6
3. Manon Rhéaume, the first female goalie to play in the NHL, was signed to what expansion team in 1992? The Tampa Bay Lightning
4. Future coin star Sacajawea was a member of what Native American tribe? Shoshone
5. On October 1, 1989, Axel and Eigil Axgil entered into the world’s first legal civil union for a gay couple, in what Scandinavian country? Denmark
6. Reggie and Cheryl Miller are basketball-playing siblings who played for what two rival universities? USC and UCLA
7. In her book Pornography: Men Possessing Women, what feminist argued that pornography incites men to rape? Andrea Dworkin
8. Fill in this 4-word quote from Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing: “I’m just a struggling black man trying to __________ in a cruel and harsh world.” “keep his dick hard”
Round 7: A Movie Round About Pizza!
1. Video: This, stopping at about 0:45. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: Where does Jake find The Geek? [We answered the 2-pointer] Movie: Sixteen Candles, of course. Jake finds The Geek under the coffee table.
2. Video: This. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: What movie did the director make immediately after this one? Movie: Goodfellas. Scorsese directed Cape Fear immediately afterwards.
3. Video: This, stopping at about 0:26. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: Name the producer, a famous b-movie maker who helped launch the careers of Jack Nicholson, William Shatner, and Robert De Niro, among others. Movie: Rock And Roll High School, directed by Roger Corman.
4. Video: This, stopping at about 0:37. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: How does Pizza The Hutt die? Movie: Spaceballs. Pizza The Hutt dies by eating himself.
5. Video: This. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: What is the name of the fat kid who burns the vampire with garlic pizza? Movie: The Monster Squad. Character’s name is Horace.
6. Video: This, stopping at about 0:17. 1-point question: What is Wayne’s last name? 2-point question: What Pepsi slogan does Wayne recite at the end of this scene? Wayne’s last name is Campbell, and at the end of the scene, he says, “Pepsi: The Choice Of A New Generation.”
7. Video: This. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: Give the last name of the director, which he shares with his son, director of “The Princess Bride.” Movie: The Jerk. Director’s last name: Reiner.
8. Video: This. 1-point question: Name the movie. 2-point question: In what New York City borough does this scene take place? Movie: Saturday Night Fever, which takes place in Brooklyn.
Round 8: Random Knowledge
1. Exact answers and first names required. For 1 point each: Name the author of The Princess Bride and the author of Lord Of The Flies. William Goldman wrote The Princess Bride, and William Golding wrote Lord Of The Flies.
2. In 2003, Peyton Manning and Steve McNair shared the NFL MVP award. The last time that happened was 1997. For 1 point each, name the two players who shared the award that year. Brett Favre and Barry Sanders.
3. Unlike headhunting, head-shrinking has only been found on one continent. For one point, name the continent. For another point: the process uses herbs containing what organic compounds, also found in red wine and tea? Continent: South America. Compounds: Tannins
4. For one point each: in the acronym HDMI, what do the M and the I stand for? “Multimedia Interface”
5. Famous Browns. For one point, who preceded Gordon Brown as prime minister of England? For another point: The landmark Supreme Court Case Brown vs. Board Of Education overturned what controversial 1896 decision? Tony Blair preceded Gordon Brown, and Brown vs. Board of Education overturned Plessy vs. Ferguson.
6. Three installments of the Final Fantasy series were released for the Playstation: VII, VIII, and IX. Each of these games has a central protagonist. For one point each, name any two of them. Cloud, [which was the one we got] Squall, and Zidane.
7. Scientists with effects named after them. Question 1: The effect that causes water to swirl counter-clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere is named after what scientist? Coriolis Question 2: Christian Doppler, discoverer of the Doppler effect, was born in what Austrian city, also the birthplace of Mozart? Salzburg
8. After Hungarian-British conductor Georg Solti, who has won more Grammy awards than anybody else with 31, the 2nd and 3rd place record for most Grammys are held by a 78-year-old producer and a 40-year-old bluegrass singer and fiddler. For one point each, name them. The producer was Quincy Jones. [Yes, again, dammit. George was arguing for Quincy Jones, but we couldn’t believe he’d be an answer twice in the same game. Those tricky Geeks! This answer even had a parenthetical comment: “(That’s right, two Quincy Jones questions!)”] The fiddler is Alison Krauss
Thanks for a great time, Geeks. Hope I can afford to make it there next year if it’s held out of town again.
A couple of years ago, I wrote about my annual Christmas tradition with my friends Siân and Kelly, a mix CD of songs I’ve been listening to that year. The songs generally reflect a little something about my life in one way or another, though not perfectly so — sometimes they’re just songs I’ve imprinted on for some reason. The liner notes tradition has continued as well, but I didn’t post the notes from 2010. See, 2010 was a terrible, terrible year. Professionally, it was by far the unhappiest I’d ever been in my job, and personally, my marriage tailspun into a major crisis right at the same time we moved into a new house and my work life was at peak misery. It was very difficult, and painful, and I withdrew from many things and people.
Then came 2011. In January, I started a new job, thank god. I am in a much healthier atmosphere now, and am much, much happier at work. Laura and I finally found the right counselor in the spring, and have healed a lot of things. By the time November rolled around, I had started to emerge from a fair amount of depression, and it was in that mood that I made this year’s CD. I feel really happy with the collection, both as a musical collage and as a reflection of my year.
1. DEAR PRUDENCE – Siouxsie and the Banshees
Siouxsie Sioux was always in the back of my mind as somebody I wanted to learn more about, so last year I procured a greatest hits album. I liked it, though I don’t think I’ll go much deeper than that. I quite enjoy her voice, especially on this cover. It was a pretty Beatles-y year for me, so this was a fitting choice for that, but even more so for the lyrics and tone of the song itself. To me, this is about emerging, after being shrouded in protection. That’s pretty much what happened with me this year. I can hardly measure how much better things are now, both at home and at work, compared to this time last year. Not that everything is magically perfect — there’s still a lot of work to do — but the skies are a lot sunnier now.
2. ALL THIS BEAUTY – The Weepies
And what do we see when we come out to play? This was a year of The Weepies for me. They’re a married couple of singer-songwriters, Deb Talan and Steve Tannen, who started out as fans of each other’s solo work, and then literally began to make beautiful music together. Their harmonies are lovely, and their songs are just killer. I absolutely fell in love with their album Hideaway, from which this track is taken. That was the launching pad for my Weepies infatuation, and this was one of the songs that made me want to buy the album. (Thanks to the Internet radio station for bringing them to my attention.) It’s hard to pick just one song from that album, but this one fit my mindset a lot, or at least a part of it. (Lucky for me, there are other Weepies songs to fit other parts. 🙂 ) It’s about remembering to be amazed — there is so much beauty in this world, and sometimes it’s easier to see it if you close your eyes, then slowly open wide.
3. HERE COMES THE SUN – Paul Simon with David Crosby and Graham Nash
Speaking of lovely harmonies. I saw Paul on tour this fall, and he completely surprised me by singing this song as part of his set. It’s such a beautiful song anyway, and it fits his voice perfectly. After a little research, I found that he actually has a long history with the song — he sang it with George on an SNL episode way back in 1976, and various times in his career after that. I’m a lifelong Paul Simon fan, but I had no idea about this connection. It was a high point of the concert for me, and those always find their way to these end-of-year compilations. Not only that, it resonates with one of the most beautiful moments from the Love show I saw this year (more about that later), and perfectly encapsulates the theme of the year. Hence my title. I had a little trouble finding a good recording of him singing it solo, so I went with this one, from the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame’s 25th anniversary concerts.
4. TRUE FAITH – New Order
Sometimes focus falls on something one year because it belonged to a project from the previous year. So it was with this song. My Christmas gift for my sister in 2010 had a Guns ‘n’ Roses theme, since that’s one of her favorite bands. I decided to follow up on that with her birthday gift (not much of a reach, since her birthday is on New Year’s Eve.) Our tradition is some kind of themed CD as her birthday gift from me, so last year I decided to make her 3 volumes of songs from 1987, the year G+R’s first album came out. I love a lot of the music from that year — it’s probably not coincidental that I was 17 at the time, and just fully embracing music as a part of my identity for the first time. I’m sure plenty of people find much of their favorite music rooted in their late teens. This song appeared on that collection — it’s one of two New Order songs written that year to be bonus tracks on their greatest hits collection Substance. I find the music both hypnotic and uplifting, and the lyrics fit in well with the previous song — “my morning sun is a drug that brings me here.”
5. SECRET LOVE – Stevie Nicks
Why yes, Stevie Nicks did come out with a new album this year! 🙂 In Your Dreams was her first release in 10 years, and I’m sure it’s no surprise to anyone that several songs from it would appear on this compilation. This one was the advance single, and the record company offered a download of it with pre-orders of the album. It’s based an a demo I’d been listening to for years. Stevie has tons and tons of these unrecorded demos that have circulated amongst fans forever, and it’s an incredible thrill when she finishes one up with a proper studio version and releases it. Sometimes these actually turn out to be a little less satisfying than the demo — a couple of songs from the 2003 Fleetwood Mac album are like that — but often they are wonderful realizations of a rough outline. That was the case with this song. I got a full-body rush when listening to it for the first time. I think Dave Stewart does a fantastic job of production, Stevie’s vocals sound great, and it got me very excited for the album.
6. MOONLIGHT (A VAMPIRE’S DREAM) – Stevie Nicks
Here’s one of my favorite tracks from that album, and one of the standouts from her wonderful concert this summer. Again it’s based on a demo, but in a peculiar way. The demo that fans have been calling “Lady From The Mountain” has the beginning verses and piano part, but the more driving music that kicks in on the lyric “Strange, she runs with the one she can’t keep up with” is all new. Apparently Stevie was inspired by the first Twilight movie — she says it reminded her of an experience she had, though she coyly never reveals what that was. I’ve never read or seen any Twilight anything. All I know is that this song charges me full of energy every time I hear it. I love what it does with “Lady From The Mountain”, marrying its fragility to a smooth, powerful backbone.
7. GERM FREE ADOLESCENTS – X-Ray Spex
This song begins what I think of as the “Thank You Siân” section — all artists I’ve learned to love because of her influence. Laura was friends with Siân first — they were in CU‘s English Literature PhD program together. That’s how I met Laura too, except that I was doing my M.A. Siân wrote her dissertation on punk rock. I remember her telling me about X-Ray Spex back when she lived in Colorado — in fact, now that I look at the dissertation, its very title is an X-Ray Spex reference. So I filed that away but rarely thought of it again until she mailed me a couple of CDs of punksongs from the Sunday Times. This song appeared on that CD, and I liked it enough to seek out a compilation. The songs in that collection made X-Ray Spex one of my favorite punk bands — “Identity”, “Art-I-Ficial”, “I Am A Cliche”, “Let’s Submerge”, “Age”… I’ll stop before I list out all their songs. They’re all great, but this was the one that lit the way, and there’s still something special about it.
8. SHOOT THE MOON – Hugh Blumenfeld
Yeah, here’s another guy I wouldn’t be listening to if not for Siân. Hugh is actually a friend of hers, and she’s put various songs of his on mixes she’s made for me over the years, and I eventually became a fan. She and Kelly visited us in August of 2010, and she brought me four of his CDs at that time. My backlog being what it is, I ended up listening to them in November, which marks the beginning of this music-listening year for me. There were many songs I enjoyed from those CDs — I picked this one both because it reminded me of Dante and because it happened to have a wonderful resonance with another much-loved song from another much-loved Siân Mile artist…
9. THE SPACE RACE IS OVER – Billy Bragg
I think Bragg is Siân’s favorite artist overall, and another one I adopted because she passed some of his best stuff along to me. I’ve been buying more things in MP3 form in the past few years, to feed and fill the iPod’s sacred shuffle, but that’s meant that I don’t listen to them as closely as I do my CDs. Therefore, I periodically burn a batch to CD, and so it was with one CD from a Billy Bragg box set I’d downloaded a couple of years ago. It’s a fine collection — some songs I knew and liked because Siân had included them on various compilations, while others I heard for the first time and learned to love on my own. This was one of the latter. I think my jaw literally dropped when I heard him sing, “I watched the Eagle landing on a night when the moon was full / And as it tugged at the tides I knew that deep inside / I too could feel its pull.” What an incredibly gorgeous lyric. I love the way this song summons an elegiac and wistful tone for the bright future that might have been. I think it’s better than the Blumenfeld song, though that’s hardly a fair comparison, and they do pair so nicely.
10. PICTURE WINDOW – Ben Folds and Nick Hornby
This is from the album Lonely Avenue, in which Ben Folds and Nick Hornby do their version of an Elton John/Bernie Taupin partnership — Hornby wrote the lyrics and Folds wrote and performed all the music. It is a gorgeous album, and while it’s hard to pick a favorite song on it, this one emerged from the pack for a couple of reasons. First, I think it’s just heart-rendingly poignant; it’s easily the most moving song on the record. Second, it reminds me strongly of an experience that made a major impression on me this year. A very close friend of mine went through a horrible hospital experience this summer — her 12-year-old son went into the hospital as a result of multiple health issues crashing into each other. I visited them frequently during this period — her son loves comics and music, so I was able to relate to him and bring him some things to make him happy in that difficult hospital environment. I watched him suffer awful, awful mental and physical anguish, and I watched her agonize every day over him, playing the very difficult role of protector and intermediary between him and the institutional realities. There was a series of horrible situations produced by a combination of organizational dysfunction, misjudgements, parental personalities, and the nature of his issues, which weren’t easily pigeonholed. After several weeks of hell, he finally got some treatment that, although rather invasive, began to turn things around. They were in there for a couple of months total, and they’re still recovering. Watching your child suffer like that day after day is one of the worst things I can think of.
11. HELPLESS – k.d. lang
About 5 years ago I saw a movie called Away From Her, about a woman (played by Julie Christie) whose mind is slowly disintegrating from Alzheimer’s. It made a huge impression on me, and this song played over the credits of that movie. It blew my mind. lang’s incredible voice brings out a power I’d never heard in this song before, and every time I hear it, I feel this thick blanket of emotion settling over me. Eventually I sought out the album it came from — Hymns Of The 49th Parallel, in which lang covers all Canadian artists — and listened to it this year. Covers are definitely her metier, I think — her own material (with the exception of Ingenue) tends to fall flat for me. Whereas when she gets a hold of something that’s already really strong, like this song, she can make it profoundly affecting.
12. LIVING IN TWILIGHT – The Weepies
Remember when I said the skies are sunnier now? I know that’s true because we spent much of the earlier part of the year in the twilight this song so perfectly describes. Parts of my life this year were like one of those movies all scored by one artist (Magnolia, Harold & Maude, Good Will Hunting). The Weepies sang the soundtrack of my movie.
13. THE SOUND OF SETTLING – Death Cab For Cutie
Last year, Pink was the artist I discovered 10 years later than everyone else. This year, it was Death Cab For Cutie. I think I listened to their album Transatlanticism for about 3 weeks straight in September. It is just amazing. I knew I’d be picking a song from it for this compilation, and the choice was so difficult I just randomized it. Fittingly, this was one of the Death Cab songs that made me decide I needed to go out and buy their albums. I find the first lyric especially arresting: “I’ve got a hunger / twisting my stomach into knots / that my tongue has tied off.” Wow! I just love that.
14. YOU JUST HAVEN’T EARNED IT YET, BABY – Kirsty MacColl
There is one reason that things are better between Laura and I, and that reason is that we have worked our asses off this year to get to where we are. We have both been very committed to learning new ways of relating, and putting our new knowledge into practice. As a consequence, our conflicts are fewer, less frightening, and more quickly resolved. I don’t mean to make it sound like we’re finished working, but we’re closer than we’ve been in years, and we’ve earned it, baby. I’ve loved this song ever since hearing it on the She’s Having A Baby soundtrack in high school. I’ve never been much of a Smiths person — I like Johnny Marr well enough, but with a few big exceptions I just find Morrissey too grating. However, I do have strong affection for some Smiths covers, and this one tops the list. I adore Kirsty’s voice, and the production is gorgeous and uplifting. I can’t get enough of it.
15. ON SUNDAY – ‘Til Tuesday
‘Til Tuesday’s Welcome Home was another of those CDs I burned from downloaded MP3s. I’ve been a Mann fan for years, but never went beyond the “greatest hits” level with her old band. I like this song a lot, and it fit my life since part of my commitment with Laura was to do a regularly scheduled session of emotional/relationship work on Sundays when we didn’t have a couples therapy appointment. “Why spend your sadness now? / Save it up for me, on Sunday.”
16. ROCKS AND WATER (LIVE AT CHAUTAUQUA 2011-08-27) – The Weepies
As a part of my Weepy year, I saw them on tour at the Chautauqua Music Hall. It was a wonderful concert, everything I’d hoped it would be and more. The “more” was composed of a few things. One of these was actually the amazing set and lighting. They had this stylized miniature city set up on one side of the stage, and then kind of a forest glade on the other, and throughout the show, the lighting would change on various things to highlight different parts. At one point, a previously unseen river gets lit up, running through the city and the woods. You can get a little flavor of it from this photo, though obviously that doesn’t get at the different lighting changes. One of the other great parts was the new songs they played — well, new to me anyway. I have their albums, but forgot all about the fact that they had solo careers before they got together! This is a song from one of Deb’s solo records, and I just adored it the first time I heard it. As soon as I came home, I downloaded both her version and one that they did in an iTunes exclusive concert. However, neither version captivated me the way the concert version had. Lucky for me, some bright soul put up a bunch of clips from the concert on YouTube, so I used my handy-dandy DownloadHelper and turned the audio from that clip into an mp3. God bless the internet.
17. SEA AND SAND – The Who
Three things about this song. 1) I listened to Quadrophenia more intently this year than I had ever done before. For reasons “I Can’t Explain”, Quad was kind of a passed-over Who album from my youth, so I ended up really appreciating it much later than most of the rest of their material. 2) This song is a major standout from that album for me. It’s one of the most perfect Who songs to me, flawlessly blending Pete’s fantastic lyrics and storytelling with the immense power of the band. 3) Given that “Sea and Sand” was already on my list, how could I resist pairing it with “Rocks And Water”?
18. HERE COMES THE SUN/THE INNER LIGHT [TRANSITION] – The Beatles
I went to Las Vegas for a trivia convention this summer — a great experience. While I was there, I saw the Cirque Du Soleil show of The Beatles Love — an utterly transcendent experience. I’ve already written about how I spent most of the show with tears streaming down my face, so I won’t rehash all that. I just new that I needed to pick a song for this compilation to represent that experience. It was very hard to choose. I settled on this one both for the reasons I mentioned in the Paul Simon entry, and because this part of the show remains absolutely indelible for me. It wasn’t the yoga poses and the trapeze artists, though those were certainly eye-popping. Instead, it was the massive ball of candles, glowing warmly and rising from the center of the stage, as robed children sit on the edge, radiating joy from meditative poses.
19. ADD MY EFFORT – The Weepies
Yep, one more Weepies song. This one returns to the theme touched on earlier in the MacColl and ‘Til Tuesday songs. It’s about loving someone who frequently lives in darkness — really loving them. I was always adding my effort, but without understanding, that effort can be fruitless or even counterproductive. However, when understanding is there, effort can be enough.
20. CHEAPER THAN FREE (FEATURING DAVE STEWART) – Stevie Nicks
Yep, one more Stevie Nicks song. This the closer for In Your Dreams, and it felt like a perfect closer for this collection as well. It is a pure love song, and for me, purely magical. “What’s cheaper than free? You and me. What’s better than alone? Going home. What does money not buy? You and I. What’s not to feel, when love is real?”
Last year, I wrote about the Beatles album Love, an astonishingly brilliant mash-up of Beatles songs crafted by George and Giles Martin. That album is the soundtrack to a Cirque Du Soleil show of the same name, which appears in only one place in the world: the Mirage hotel and casino in Las Vegas. Well, when I knew I would be going to Vegas, exactly a year after writing about Love for the first time, I seized the opportunity to see the show.
I’m finding the experience of the show very difficult to put into words. Here are the words I gave it in an email I sent that night:
Oh my god, I think it may have been the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t stop crying. Seriously, I must have cried through like 70% of it. I kept thinking, “I can’t believe this is happening to me.”
Why? Well, a big part of it had to do with sound. I’ve never heard anything like the sound in that theater. They built the theater at the Mirage especially for this show. There are something like 6,000 speakers in it. Every seat has speakers embedded invisibly, including a speaker that faces the seat behind it. Hearing the incredible sound collage of Love in that theater… it feels like being inside the music. No, that’s not it. It felt like the music was inside me. I’ve been to plenty of concerts, including some where I was seated in the front row, directly in front of the band, hearing them play. This was different. The music was everywhere, not just in front of me, with pieces separated out — some close, some far, but all incredibly crisp and clear. It was perfect. It sounded perfect — like a sonic diamond. It would have been a moving experience just to sit in that theater and listen to the album, with no show at all.
But of course, there was a show. This was my first (and only) Cirque show, and it had what Cirque is known for: acrobatics, feats of daring, movements so graceful and gorgeous you can hardly believe they’re possible. “Humans in the service of beauty” should be their motto. And all of that was wonderful, and thrilling, but it wasn’t what was causing the tsunamis of emotion in me, or at least not in itself.
There was something remarkable, though, about seeing those movements synchronized with music that I love. Sometimes, the bodies on stage gave physical expression to the soaring, giddy feeling that was in me, inspired by a particular sound or lyric. Or a hopeful feeling, or a loving feeling, or sorrowful, or whatever. In a DVD extra to All Together Now, a documentary about the show, Yoko says, “Beatles were like acrobatics of the mind, and Cirque Du Soleil is the acrobatics of the body. When it comes together, it makes a kind of… something that’s whole.” She’s absolutely right. The other crucial quote from the film is from Dominic Champagne, director of the show: “You know, bodies go. George Harrison is dead, but we can really say that his spirit is with us, and we gave a body to that spirit. All together.”
It seems ridiculous to even try describing the various pieces of the show in any detail. It’s even worse than the old “dancing about architecture” bit, because the show is already dance, and theater, and art, about music. Not to mention, my powerful emotional reaction to it all makes me keep reaching for superlatives in a way that feels authentic to write, but I suspect is rather tedious to read.
So I’m not even going to try anything like a systematic recounting of the show, but instead just mention a few things that resonated intensely with me, and that remain strong memories of the show:
The kids: For whatever reason, I just did not expect there to be kids in this show. The way they were used just blew me away. Since becoming a parent, I’ve gotten rather softhearted about children as symbols. Consequently, seeing them sit in happy meditative poses in front of a huge ball of candles for “Here Comes The Sun”, or rocket towards the sky on a bed whose billowing sheet envelops the audience in dreamy atmospherics, or scramble through the rubble of the Blitz, was quite moving for me.
The imagery: Champagne calls the show “a rock and roll poem”, which aptly captures its astute use of imagery. Rather than just a greatest hits dance performance, or a musical homage, or, as I had originally imagined it, “a bunch of guys in tights, swinging from trapezes, forming human pyramids, and so forth”, the show is actually an evocation of some of the most important emotions woven into Beatles music. It does this with a deft use of images. Liverpool just after World War II — crumbling or destroyed brick edifices, exploded further by youthful energy. Groupies and Beatlemania — a girl with a dozen legs, frenetic in her movements. Longing and disappointment “As My Guitar Gently Weeps” — letters raining from the sky onto a solitary dancer. Lucy in the sky with diamonds — twinkling LED stars hang down everywhere, illuminating the swings and arcs of a trapeze artist.
The voices: I don’t just mean the singing, though that was breathtaking, especially the a capella voices of “Because.” But beyond that, at several points in the show, Beatle shadows are projected onto screens or hanging muslin, and they move in sync with recordings of the Beatles talking, from studio sessions or casual chatter. Combined with the amazing sound quality, this produced an amazing feeling of intimacy, like you were right there with them. It was an especially wonderful surprise because those sounds are not included on the album.
I could go on, and on, but I won’t. Suffice it to say that if The Beatles hold a special and sacred place in your heart, as they do for me, Las Vegas has just become your Mecca. You must go there and experience Love in that theater, at least once in your life. I don’t know that everyone else will feel what I felt, though if you love the Beatles I suspect you will. For me, it was elevation, suffused with spiritual transcendence and love. If there’s such a thing as heaven, I hope it feels like that.
