Author: paulobrian Page 20 of 28

Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Season 3 revisited

On August 9, 2009

Early in my Buffy-watching project, I swore off both DVD extras and Television Without Pity recaps, because they were just way too spoiler-laden. Now that I’ve finished watching all episodes of Buffy and Angel, I’m (slowly!) going back through the whole saga, reading the recaps and watching the extras.

I just finished season three of Buffy for the second time, and am amazed anew. What a marvelous achievement. It’s just such great television, and this time through I found myself appreciating a couple of things that had passed me by the first time:

*** Spoilers after this point ***

1) I liked the Mayor the first time around, just because his milk-and-cookies qualities made such a great contrast to his evilness and batshit insanity. What I appreciated about him this time, though, was the fact that because he really didn’t care about them, he was able to speak the absolute truth to Buffy and Angel. I loved the scene in “Choices” where he tongue-lashes Angel for selfishness in relation to Buffy. Everything he says is absolutely dead-on, and highlights the fact that even though they don’t look it, Buffy and Angel are a ridiculously May-December relationship. There’s a strong argument to be made that Angel is taking advantage of her — whatever she’s had to go through, she’s still an 18-year-old (if that) girl. The mayor’s genuine disgust with Angel in that scene is a fantastic way of completely dooming their relationship from an unexpected direction.

2) The resonance of the classroom scene in “Earshot” is just a thing of beauty. The Othello discussion serves the purpose of showing Buffy’s sudden classroom smarts, and her peers’ reaction to it, of course. The teacher’s explication puts focus on Buffy’s anxiety about Angel and leads us in to the attempted mind-reading scene, of course. But let’s take a look at what Buffy actually says about Iago:

“Well, he, um, he sort of admits himself that his motive are… spurious! He, um, he does things because he, he enjoys them. It’s like he’s not, he’s not really a person. He’s a, the dark half of Othello himself.”

The dark half of the protagonist? Doing evil for the joy of it, with spurious motives? Ring any bells about anybody from this season? Oh, right: Faith. Of course.

And listening to the DVD commentary from writer Jane Espenson reveals that this scene was heavily rewritten by Joss. Of course it was.

Etta James at the Boulder Theater, 6/13

By paulobrian

On June 21, 2009

In Uncategorized

I became an Etta James fan in kind of a backwards way. Being quite the dedicated Eurythmics fan back in the 80’s, I even paid attention to their quirky little side projects. One of these was the soundtrack for a 1989 movie called Rooftops, which I never saw but was apparently fairly awful. Dave Stewart did some songs for it, and one of these was a track called “Avenue D”, on which Etta was the vocalist. I didn’t really know who she was, aside from the fact that I recognized her name and knew she’d been around a while. I did read a little article saying something like, “Dave Stewart does his best work when paired with a soulful singer, and James certainly fills the bill.” I was at NYU at the time — I actually remember listening to the 45 at Tower Records, liking the song, and buying it. I really dug her performance on that song. I looked into her a little more (which in those pre-Internet days meant just paying attention to what records of hers were in the stores), and found that she had done a comeback album the previous year called Seven Year Itch. A friend and I split the cost of the cassette, and I really liked that too. I bought her next couple of records, then lost track of her for a while.

10 years or so later, I became conscious of “At Last”, again in a backwards way — Stevie did a cover of it at a benefit concert where everybody sang standards. I fell in love with the song then, and heard Etta’s version later in the movie Pleasantville, and loved it again. Still, I never got around to pursuing her further, until this past Christmas, when I put The Essential Etta James on my Amazon wish list, and received it. I’d been listening to it a lot in the car when I heard that she was coming to Boulder in concert. I decided that I needed to go, and I found a fantastic ticket online: 2nd row aisle seat.

When I got there, I was thrilled to find that it was indeed one of the best seats in the house. I had a perfect sightline to everything, and was wonderfully close. There was an unannounced opening act, which was a drag — I’d asked Laura to cover childcare so I could get to the show on time. If I’d known, I’d certainly have come much later. Anyhow, after that, stagehands started setting up Etta’s stage, including a big comfy leather seat with the word “Etta!” inscribed on the front. At 9:00, her band filed onstage, along with somebody who didn’t introduce himself. He greeted the crowd, said “Miss James is in the house!”, and then introduced The Roots Band. (Not The Roots, who appear on Jimmy Fallon’s talk show, but rather just a bunch of touring musicians.) It was cool — a horn section, two guitarists, keyboard, bass, and drums. So then The Roots Band proceeds to vamp for 10 minutes.

Finally, Etta herself comes out, sits on the chair, and opens with “Come To Mama,” a song from Seven Year Itch that I’d known previously when Bob Seger recorded it (as “Come To Papa.”) In Seger’s hands, the song has a clear sexual subtext. Coming from James, the subtext becomes supertext, with lyrics like “If you feel like a horse chomping at the bit / Call my number, 777-6969, I’ll get you a fix.” But lyrics aside, OH MY GOD. It was easily the most sexual performance I’d ever seen, and I’ve seen both Tori Amos and Liz Phair (the latter of whom suffered a wardrobe malfunction that exposed her bare breast to the audience for the better part of a song.) Etta sang the entire song while absolutely pawing herself, and I mean her entire body, giving special emphasis to lines like “I’ve got your favorite toy / Guaranteed to bring you joy.” We are talking about a 71-year-old woman here, a grandmother, whose son is actually in the band, as her drummer. It was, to say the least, a little shocking. I wasn’t really bothered by it (though as a friend of mine pointed out, would you want to watch your mother doing that night after night?), but I was pretty floored. She continued in that vein the entire show. She never stood up, but her hands never rested much either. When singing “I’d Rather Go Blind,” she elaborated: “Sittin here thinkin’ of your kiss, and your… mmmmm, you all know what I’m talkin’ about.” And the song after that was called, “I Want To Ta-Ta You, Baby.”

While Etta’s libido has never waned (at least if her stage shtick is to be believed), I’m afraid the same can’t be said for her mind. For one thing, she clearly thought she was in Canada. “It’s been a long time since I’ve played in Canada!” she said. “I’m so happy to be back!” I thought she was joking at first, but then in the next song, she introduced her guitarist with, “This is Joshua. He’s Canadian, too!” She also introduced “I’d Rather Go Blind” by saying, “Here’s a song my sons and I wrote together.” Now, that song was first recorded in 1969, when James was 31 years old. The Internet doesn’t seem to want to tell me when her sons were born, but it does tell me that the song is co-credited to Ellington Jordan, not Donto and Sametto James. Oh, and then there was the long introduction where she said she was going to do a song by one of the baddest chicks of all time, Janis Joplin, and that song is called, “You Can Leave Your Hat On.” Written by Randy Newman. In 1972. Two years after Joplin died. All I could do was shake my head and laugh.

Her voice, though, still sounds amazing. She kept stealing glances at the lyric sheet next to her, but that didn’t stop her from nailing every single note. She also had a terrific stage presence, despite remaining seated the entire time. She was always playfully, bawdily bantering with the audience, even as she was performing songs. In “You Can Leave Your Hat On,” after she sang the line, “Suspicious minds are talking / They’re trying to tear us apart,” she would very clearly mouth the words “FUCK THEM.” It was hilarious.

Unfortunately, while the music was great, I didn’t get to hear it for very long — at 9:55, she said good night, and walked off stage, only to immediately drive back on astride a little red Rascal scooter. She sat back down in the chair and sang “At Last”, sounding phenomenal. And then… that was it. She left, stage lights came up, just an hour after the band had come on. That was very disappointing to me, as the ticket hadn’t been cheap. I quite understand that it’s probably hard on her to play very long, but if the length of your show is going to be much less than is conventionally accepted, your ticket price should be well below the standard too.

All in all, it was one of the strangest shows I’d ever seen. I loved the music, and was greatly amused by the rest. But I sure wish I’d known to come late, and been ready to leave early.

Watchmen

By paulobrian

On March 21, 2009

In Uncategorized

I’ve just seen Watchmen again, this time in IMAX, and now I think I’m ready to write about it. There are a number of people (say, for example, Adam) who found the Watchmen graphic novel to be one of the best things ever. I do not fall into this group. Don’t get me wrong — I love Alan Moore, and I liked the book very much, but I didn’t find it overwhelmingly compelling and revelatory in the way that some people do. To me it felt like a good, well-written story that resisted superhero clichés in some interesting ways. A solid B or B+.

Now, I think there were a couple of things working against me at the time I read it. One was the fact that I read it in the mid-90s rather than the mid-80s. By that time, various aspects of it had been frequently imitated in various ways, and what was revolutionary and groundbreaking about it no longer seemed so.

Laura has a story about being assigned Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in a college class, and complaining to the professor, “These guys write in such a clichéd style, it’s driving me crazy!” To which her professor of course replied, “No, no, see, these guys invented this style. It was their thousands of imitators who turned it into a cliché.” Well, I had a bit of the Hammett/Chandler effect going when I read Watchmen, even though intellectually I understood that Moore was the originator. His ideas just couldn’t have the same impact on me that they would have had if I’d read them first.

My other disadvantage is the fact that the book is so highly and universally praised. Reading something after hearing bunches of people call it The Most Awesome Thing Ever I Mean Ever can hardly help but be a slightly disappointing experience. It’s the expectation theory.

Well, having read quite a bit of the press around the movie and how it compares to the book, I think it’s safe to say that I missed entire layers of that book in my first reading. I’d really love to reread the graphic novel, perhaps with some kind of Annotated Watchmen alongside it. (Okay Watchmen book, go stand over there in the line marked “to read.” Yes, I know there are 112 books in the line. Hey, I pick randomly from the group, so maybe you’ll get lucky.) Like the book, I think the movie benefits from repeated viewings. I know I was catching things this time around that completely passed me by on the first viewing. However, my overall opinion remains the same, which is that it is a very enjoyable superhero movie, with a great story, some excellent writing, magnificent visuals, and a couple of sublime performances, but it is also significantly flawed in certain ways.

*** Spoilers after this point ***

The first of these is that it is far too much in love with violence, which leads it to undermine one of its story’s main points. From almost the first moment of the movie, characters are punching through solid walls and withstanding beatings that would stagger a rhino, not to mention performing phenomenal feats of strength and speed. Watching these fights, it is impossible to believe that these people are not somehow enhanced, and the fact that the so-called superheroes are not enhanced (with the notable exception of Dr. Manhattan) is supposed to be crucial to the story. In addition, some of those fights are gratuitously gory — I was really tired of seeing people’s bones broken by the end of this film. Another flaw, though one far less in director Zack Snyder’s control, is that the main source of tension in the narrative is the idea of impending nuclear war between the US and the USSR, an idea which has lost most of its emotional resonance today. Viewed as a period piece (despite the fact that it’s set in an alternate universe, it still operates as a period piece), it’s fine. Then again, as huskyscotsman points out, the Doomsday Clock is at five minutes to midnight now, so maybe I’m just far too complacent.

Some people have faulted Snyder for hewing too closely to the source material, but that’s actually one of the things I enjoyed the most about Watchmen. The movie lifts entire scenes, dialogue intact, from the comic, which means that much of its dialogue is quite a bit better than that of the average superhero movie. In addition, it was quite wonderful to see these characters and this world brought to life so faithfully. I don’t know whether somebody who hadn’t read the book would react adversely, but for me it was the thrill of seeing static images come to life. The entire visual atmosphere of the movie is outstanding. The color palette is exactly what it should be, Rorschach’s mask looks perfect, Dr. Manhattan’s glow is just right.

Oh, and I think the opening credits sequence is one of the best I’ve seen in any movie, ever. It manages to pack in an enormous amount of exposition about the characters and their world, all without any dialogue. It does this via a series of striking images which are both reference-heavy (Silk Spectre I’s retirement dinner as Last Supper; Silhouette taking the sailor’s place in the famous V-J day kiss) and highly interconnected (flashbulbs, historical recreations), something that captures the Alan Moore spirit exquisitely. It mixes humor and horror, often within moments of each other, and manages to tell a poignant story of forty-five years in just five minutes. Masterful.

Speaking of masterful, and of Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan, those two characters get the best performances of the film. Billy Crudup’s voice work captures his character’s not-quite-detachment completely, and Jackie Earle Haley is freaking phenomenal every moment he’s on screen as Rorschach. In some moments, he manages to convey enormous emotions from behind a mask, just using his body, his voice, and the shape of his face beneath the fabric. Once the mask is off, he’s even more powerful.

Then there’s Jeffrey Dean Morgan. He certainly nails the character of The Comedian, but that character has always puzzled me. Watchmaniacs, please be patient while I plod through my thought process, and keep in mind it’s been like 15 years since I read the book. So here you have a milieu of heightened, explicit symbolism. Doctor Manhattan is both a genius and a living nuclear weapon. Nite Owl has big goggles, and a bunch of owl-themed gadgets. Rorschach sees the world in black and white, and his “face” is made up of moving black blobs on a white field. And so on. In this world, you have a character called The Comedian, who is never funny, and never makes a joke. Sure, he laughs a lot, but it’s a bitter, cynical kind of laugh. In fact, he’d be more appropriately called The Cynic. It’s not because the story lacks for humor, either. I mean, yeah, it’s a dark story, but there are certainly plenty of comedic moments. Heck, even Rorschach gets off a bunch of good one-liners in the prison scenes. So the character whose theme is comedy is in fact the least funny, and the most horrifying, at least on a personal level.

Nobody seems to comment on this, except for Rorschach, who claims that The Comedian “saw the true face of the 20th century and chose to become a reflection of it, a parody of it.” Except, as I said, he’s not funny. Now, I know that comedy and horror are not strangers, and I understand that exaggeration is a comical tool, so is The Comedian’s over-the-top repulsiveness a comic exaggeration of human savagery? I would argue that it is not. Comedy, even brutal satire, works because it has a moral center, an oppositional point of view. It may shock, it may exaggerate, and it may distort, but it does not simply personify or repeat. It works toward healing, or at least toward tearing down the things it opposes, not amplifying them. The Comedian is more like a parody of a parody — where a parody would exaggerate in order to show ridiculousness, he exaggerates but without questioning. Where a parody would personify human savagery in order to decry it, he personifies human savagery because, well, he kinda digs it. In fact, it’s completely unclear why he’s even a superhero at all. The closest hint we get is when Hooded Justice is attacking him for his attempted rape of Silk Spectre I. “Is this what gets you off?” he asks, while receiving a beating. Maybe it takes one to know one.

That smiley face icon is strangely appropriate for him, if we take it as the ultimate symbol of empty cheer. If the smiley in culture is an attempt to pretend that the darkness doesn’t exist, it’s sledgehammer irony to put it on the darkest character in the book. In Watchmen, that illusion can’t sustain itself. It’s bloodstained. Just as it repudiates the emptiness of cheerful Golden Age superheroes, just as it takes an extremely dim view of human nature, arguing that the only cure for warfare is a common enemy, so must it mutilate the icon of simpleminded sunniness. In itself, I don’t know that this subversion of cheery fantasy is a bad thing, but I’m not sure I agree with the so-called reality that replaces it. In my real world, humor can be a healing force. In Watchmen, there aren’t many of those kind of laughs around, whether or not The Comedian is dead.

Goodbye Rocky

By paulobrian

On February 28, 2009

In Uncategorized

I’m feeling a weird kind of grief today, because the Rocky Mountain News just closed. It was both sudden and not sudden. The writing had been on the wall for a long time. There are conflicting stories about the reason, or rather reasons. There’s the economy, of course. There’s Craigslist, which has drained millions away from classified ads by offering a better product, for free. Newspapers all over the country are struggling for those reasons. Denver had some peculiar circumstances alongside these. It was one of the last non-consolidated newspaper towns. I remember when I was taking media classes at NYU in 1988, even then the prof was saying that the vast majority of major cities had only one newspaper, or multiple newspapers owned by the same conglomerate. Denver was the exception back then, and remained so until 2001, when the RMN and the Denver Post consolidated. Now, things have contracted further, and the News has died. Scripps, its corporate owner, tried to find a buyer for it, but the smart money is not buying newspapers these days. A good summary of the reasons for the paper’s demise is here. (I’d recommend against reading the comments. Actually, that holds true for almost everything on the Internet.)

The sudden part was that the closing was announced on Thursday night, and the final edition of the paper was on Friday. Just like that. That final edition had lots of good stuff about the Rocky‘s history (it was just short of its 150th birthday) and reflections on what the paper has meant. Most of those stories were prepared ahead of time, I’m sure. Still, it feels so strange to have the announcement and the end so close together.

I grew up with the Rocky Mountain News. It’s the newspaper I’ve been reading since I was able to read. It has a feature called “The Mini Page”, a newspaper for kids with puzzles that I used to work through. I’ve been reading Doonesbury in that paper for more than 25 years, as well as Peanuts, Calvin & Hobbes, Mutts, etc. I wrote a letter to the paper when I was in high school, annoyed at the fingerpointing frenzy over Dungeons & Dragons that was happening at the time. I still remember getting the phone call verifying my identity, and seeing the letter printed alongside a fantasy-oriented drawing. When I went to live in New York, I tried to find a paper that was like the Rocky. I couldn’t stand the Post, and found the Village Voice unbearably hipper-than-thou. The Times was good, but had no comics, which was a dealbreaker for me. I finally settled on the Daily News. Still, when I transferred to CU Boulder, I was very glad to see the Rocky again, and subscribed to it immediately at my dorm. That was while the Newspaper War between the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post was still going, and subscriptions were super cheap. When Laura and I started living together, we had the News delivered, and we’ve read the Spotlight section together every night before going to bed, for the last 10 years or so.

Now it’s gone. The Denver Post arrived at our doorstep this morning. I’m sure we’ll continue our subscription — we value the newspaper too much to not get one. Still, it feels like a step down. I loved the News‘s pop music writer, and the one from the Post feels like he was trained at the Village Voice school of indie snobbery. Also, the Post is in this very annoying broadsheet format. I loved the Rocky‘s tabloid arrangement, but the Post forces a whole lot of unfolding and re-folding. Endlessly bothersome. Some of the writers from the Rocky came over, and all of the comics did, but it’s not the same.

I miss my Rocky already.

Earth And Sky — live transcripts

By paulobrian

On February 15, 2009

In Uncategorized

I wrote a series of superhero-themed interactive fiction games called Earth And Sky. If you’re interested in learning what the games are like without actually, y’know, playing them, you may be in luck.

Recently, a group of IF enthusiasts over at ifMUD played through all three games in a chatroom environment, as part of a venture called Club Floyd. Floyd is a bot on the mud who can act as a game interpreter, so a group of people can (virtually) gather to play a game in Floyd’s room. This makes for a lovely combination of playing, kibitzing, snarking, and even the occasional insight or analysis. I showed up for the sessions, so I was sometimes able to offer a bit of information about the making of the games.

Transcripts are here:

Part 1: Earth And Sky

Part 2: Another Earth, Another Sky

Part 3: Luminous Horizon

Replacing LAUNCHcast

By paulobrian

On February 11, 2009

In Uncategorized

I’ve mentioned here a few times before that I love my LAUNCHcast station. I created a custom station there (after being driven from the previously shuttered radio.sonicnet, and Imagine Radio before that) in 2003, and over the course of the next five years rated a total of 25,094 artists, albums, and songs.

Imagine my chagrin when I was informed via email at the end of last year that CBS Radio is taking over LAUNCHcast, and that customized stations will be eliminated. After a quick trip through the stages of grief, I started in on the project of finding a new fix for my internet radio jones.

I had a few requirements:

I want to be able to construct a station based on a fixed list of artists, with the occasional movie or show soundtrack thrown in, e.g. Rocky Horror or West Side Story. I’d try to put it together using the list of artists I’d added to my LAUNCHcast station.
I want to be able to adjust that station at will.
I want to hear new artists, ones that aren’t on my list but that I have a chance of liking based on who is on the list.

Based on a bit of Googling, I identified five candidates: last.fm, Slacker, Pandora, mystrands, and Jango. Then I tried them out, one by one. I took a lot of notes during that process. On the off chance that those might be worthwhile to somebody, I post them here:

1893 review

By paulobrian

On January 22, 2009

In Uncategorized

It occurs to me, albeit many years later than it should have, that when I have some writing appear elsewhere on the net I should probably post a pointer to it here.

So, in that spirit: I’ve written a review of Peter Nepstad’s epic IF game 1893: A World’s Fair Mystery for IF-Review.

[Note from 2024: IF-Review is sadly long gone, but I’ve resurrected the review to live on >INVENTORY, the site that houses all my IF writing. I’ve switched the link in this post to point there.]

A for enthusiasm, C- for style

By paulobrian

On January 11, 2009

In Uncategorized

Okay, I’m glad that Women’s Basketball magazine exists. Really, I am. But man oh man, does it ever have some bad writing. Check out this recent article opener:

As the 2009 NCAA women’s basketball campaign gets under way, “change” is in the air.

Yep. That theme is not limited to aspirants who have been seeking residency at a house bathed in white at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, in Washington, D.C.

“A house bathed in white”? Such a poetic turn of phrase, but whatever do you mean? Oh, I see, you’ll be qualifying that further. But wait, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave [That’s “Ave” as in “Ave Maria”, given that the abbreviation for avenue has a period at the end] in what city? You could mean any bathed-in-white-house that happens to have that address!

Or how about this one:

“You can’t turn it on and turn it off. You have to play your best all the time.”

That coaching cliché has been accepted as gospel truth since the first Olympics back in 776 BCE, if not the first mammoth hunt, and every player has heard it pronounced over and over again as though it is written in stone in some secret, sacred cave.

I love how the mammoth hunt part is presented as conjecture but the 776 BCE part comes across as straightforward fact. Thanks, time-traveling reporter! Oh, and I cheer for “secret, sacred cave”, not just because of the wonderful sound of it, but because it’s just the sort of place you’d expect to find something that’s repeated over and over again to everyone.

This article also goes on to explain that the Detroit Shock have definitively disproven this eternal gospel truth. Talk about making history!

These articles remind me of nothing so much as some of the lamer student papers I’ve received. I’m just waiting for one to begin, “Webster’s Dictionary defines ‘winning’ as…”

Angel Season 5

By paulobrian

On December 1, 2008

In Uncategorized

Oh, it’s a sad, sad day. It’s now official: I’ve seen every episode of every Joss Whedon show. I suppose it’s a happy day, really — it’s been a very satisfying journey since the day I saw Serenity (October 1, 2005, as it happens.) Still, I can’t help feeling a little grief at the fact that I’ll never watch another new episode of Buffy or Angel.

Well, at least I had a good sendoff. I was quite pleased with this season of Angel. Like season 7 of Buffy, the show found its feet again after a dreary and depressing previous season. It was both funny and thrilling, with a solid premise that was low on the endless angst and high on the superheroics of old. Not only that, it had a lovely elegiac quality, bringing back moments and characters from previous seasons like some kind of victory lap, or maybe a greatest hits album.

*** Spoilers after this point for all seasons of Angel, and lots of Buffy as well. ***

Word Power: The Top 5

By paulobrian

On November 16, 2008

In Uncategorized

To top off my fortnight of word-related posts, I am channeling Rob Gordon and making a Top 5 list of my favorite words, either learned or relearned, from my recent trip through a small thesaurus. I love these words either for their sound, or simply for the fact that they exist.

5. niminy-piminy: Affectedly dainty or refined.

4. rejectamenta: Things thrown away or dismissed.
[I have got to incorporate this one into my repertoire. Though I suppose I should be careful, since it apparently has an excretory connotation — not that most people hearing it would know that!]

3. absquatulate: To leave in a hurry; depart.

2. hemidemisemiquaver: In music notation, a sixty-fourth note.
[Every time I think of this one, I feel like shouting it out a la Zippy The Pinhead: “Hemidemisemiquaver! Hemidemisemiquaver! Hemidemisemiquaver!”]

And of course, the Number One favorite word has to be:
1. sesquipedalian: Having many syllables; given to the use of long words.
[I have to love something that so perfectly and beautifully enacts what it describes.]

Oh, and as I mentioned in the comics post, honorable mention goes to “defenestrate.”