If anything bugs me the most about the fact that Joss Whedon’s Firefly didn’t even run a full season, it’s that I didn’t get to hear more of Greg Edmonson’s distinctive music for the series. At least there’s a soundtrack album, which I review on theLogBook this week. Other related reviews:
So I have Glen Phillips’ official site bookmarked, because I like to keep up with the former Toad the Wet Sprocket singer. (Yes, I was a big fan of Toad, and I’ve seen two of Glen’s live acoustic shows. More of that living in the 90s I was talking about before, perhaps.) But there haven’t been a lot of updates, so I haven’t checked it very frequently. Well, tonight I went there and discovered that Glen has a myspace site with sound clips and a more-frequently updated blog. The official site is much snazzier to look at, but according to Glen, the myspace site is easier for him to post stuff to. There’s something about that I find kinda endearing.
By all means, go check out either of the sites, and Glen’s album Winter Pays for Summer. It’s good stuff.
With Revenge of the Sith out on DVD, I have been a very happy Star Wars geek the last week or so. Here’s a roundup of Episode III-related reviews I’ve written over at theLogBook:
Back in the summer I also did a week-long viewing of all six movies in numerical order, using my old VHS copies of the original trilogy. I wrote down some notes that at one point I was going to put up on the forums, but I figure this is as good a place as any.
My sense is that if I try to view the whole thing as one six-part story of Anakin’s rise, fall, and redemption, it doesn’t quite work for me. If I look at it as a two-part generational story that focuses first on Obi-Wan and Anakin and then on Luke, Han and Leia, I think it actually works rather well. For the most part, the prequels lend interesting subtext to existing reactions and interactions that didn’t really stand out before.
I have been a member of numerous fandoms in my life. And if you participate in any fandom long enough, you will eventually find yourself in the middle of a canon discussion. Philosophers have spent thousands of years contemplating the nature of reality, but they are rank amateurs compared to two fans of a fictional creation debating what “really� happened to the creation in question.
If you’ve never encountered such a discussion before, “canon� with regards to a fictional universe refers to the set of stories that are considered “official,� such that future stories in that universe will be expected to reflect and not contradict the earlier tales. (Comic fans, who have been grappling with this issue for decades, tend to use the term “continuity.�) The goal is to have an internally consistent master narrative built from a series of smaller stories. It’s a noble goal, but one seldom achieved. Contradictions pop up, some trivial, some major. At that point, something has to give – one of the contradictory elements must be jettisoned. And then there’s the matter of stories that, for one reason or another, a fan would like to ignore and forget about, to the point of never wanting so much as to risk seeing it referred to again. At this point the campaign to have said story expunged from the canon begins.
To be dismissed from the canon is, in the eyes of many fans, tantamount to being branded a leper. For these fans, the possibility that a story would contradict stories they have already read, or that future stories would not reflect its consequences, takes so much of their enjoyment away that the merits of the individual story don’t matter. They only care if it “counts,â€? and to be non-canon is a seal of disapproval. Last year the BBC announced a series of animated Doctor Who stories would be presented on the Web and on DVD. Many fans were excited by the prospect of new stories in a visual medium. (The Doctor has had a steady career in books and audio dramas since he went off the air.) But a significant minority turned up their noses. If it wasn’t broadcast on television, it wasn’t “proper Doctor Who,â€? and they weren’t interested. These fans went into paroxysms of joy when the BBC announced a new television series to air next year – at least until they started worrying about whether this new series would fit into the established canon of the previous series. Read the remainder of this entry »
VH1 has recently been running a behind-the-scenes special on the making of Fleetwood Mac’s eagerly anticipated 2003 studio album, Say You Will. The album itself was generally well received, though that’s not much of a surprise given the veteran rock group’s enormous fan base. Many of those fans were overjoyed to see the reunion of the group with Lindsey Buckingham, the creative powerhouse whose departure after the 1987 album Tango In The Night left them wondering if there could be a Fleetwood Mac without him. What seems to have been forgotten in the interim is that there was, in fact, a Fleetwood Mac without Lindsey Buckingham. And there had been before.
Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac several years into the band’s life. Stinging from the departure of moody guitar genius Peter Green, the core members – Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and Christine McVie – took on the California duo who had created something of an underground hit with their self-titled Buckingham Nicks album (and maybe that catchy combination of their surnames to create their identity found some resonance with Fleetwood and the McVies as well). Buckingham and Nicks were a couple at the time, and their addition to Fleetwood Mac propelled the band’s self-titled 1976 album to acclaim and, more importantly, airplay. But in the wake of that album, Buckingham and Nicks’ relationship deteriorated (as did the marriage between John and Christine McVie), and the resulting hard feelings informed 1977’s Rumours, still considered by many to be Fleetwood Mac’s magnum opus. And it’s the success of that album that has created, in the minds of many, the picture of the Buckingham/Nicks/McVie/Fleetwood/McVie lineup as the definitive Fleetwood Mac.
Buckingham was eager to avoid doing, as he frequently put it, “Rumours II,”and spent the group’s next two studio albums carving out an increasingly experimental niche in rock music. When Buckingham departed in 1987, the rest of the group auditioned for the best of the best, finally hiring two well-regarded sessions players who were both guitarists, vocalists and songwriters in their own right. The product of the new recruits was 1991’s Behind The Mask. Somehow, Mask – despite ample airplay and curiosity from even casual fans about how Fleetwood Mac sounded minus Buckingham – didn’t soar to the best-selling heights of its predecessors. Then Bill Clinton adopted “Don’t Stop” (from Rumours) as the theme for his 1992 Presidential campaign, and when he won the vote, asked Fleetwood Mac – with Buckingham – to perform at his Inaugural Ball. (Money, it seems, couldn’t keep the band together, but a Presidential decree could.) With Buckingham, and without Behind The Mask recruits Billy Burnette and Rick Vito, the Mac was back, and a major tour (and, consequently, a best-selling live album) ensued. Read the remainder of this entry »
Three distinct cases from April and May concerning the current military operation in Iraq have raised questions about the control and dissemination of information in wartime conditions.
Item 1: The Pentagon has had a policy of not allowing any publicity for the return of soldiers’ bodies from Iraq and Afghanistan. In two separate recent incidents, those images finally became public. In one case, a contractor on a plane carrying the coffins home took a picture of the soldiers carefully attending the flag-draped coffins; she sent the image to a friend, who then sent it to the Seattle Times, which published it. In the second case, Russ Kick – who runs a site called The Memory Hole – filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to get copies of photos the Pentagon had taken of the coffins and their reception at Dover Air Force base; in what the Pentagon is now calling a mistake, he received the photos and posted them to the site. Both the Seattle Times and Memory Hole images soon spread to other newspapers, online news sources, and TV networks.
Item 2: Nightline decided to devote its May 1 program to reading the names and showing the pictures of the over 700 American soldiers killed in action in Iraq. Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which owns a handful of ABC affiliates and which has donated substantial money to the Republican party, charged that Nightline was trying to make the President look bad and refused to air the program.
Item 3: American soldiers serving as prison guards in Iraq – specifically in Abu Ghraib, formerly one of Saddam Hussein’s most notorious torture camps – took photos of themselves humiliating prisoners, including stripping them naked, attaching wires to their bodies and threatening them with electrocution, and forcing them into sexually suggestive positions. These photos were passed along to military police and eventually made their way to CBS. CBS sat on the photos for two weeks at the Army’s request before airing them as part of a special report on 60 Minutes II. It has since come out that an army report completed in February has identified over 50 incidents of abuse toward prisoners, that at least two prisoners were killed by their guards, and that there are dozens of ongoing investigations into the action of American military personnel and contractors. Read the remainder of this entry »
Soon after my daughter was born, she started watching the 6:30 AM showing of Sesame Street on our local PBS station. The combination of colorful, frenetic characters and music was, unsurprisingly, a big hit. It was soon clear we would need more Muppet material, and as we’ve discussed before here, Pattie and I are nothing if not big on the research. So I started checking out Muppet websites, and eventually found my way to Tough Pigs. The essays and reviews on the site combined insightful analysis with the irreverent humor you’d want to see in a site devoted to the Muppets. And I soon discovered that the site’s webmaster, Danny Horn, lives right in my back yard. Danny is the Education Director at the Mazzoni Center, Philadelphia’s gay/lesbian/bi/trans health center, working with the staff at Philadelphia public schools on GLBT health and safety issues. (He and his boyfriend Ed live in the suburbs with three cats and a house full of Muppet toys.) I thought it would be neighborly to chat with Danny about the Muppets, his site, and fandom, so we got together for an IM chat.
So, ladies and gentlemen, let’s have a big welcome for Danny Horn! YEEAAHHHHH! (Waves arms wildly while leaving the stage . . .)
DT: We might as well start at the beginning. How’d you become a Muppet fan in the first place?
DH: How did I become a Muppet fan. I don’t think people become Muppet fans. I think it just happens before you’re even conscious of it. I was born in 1971, which was two years into Sesame Street. So I was watching Sesame since before I can remember; it was just always there. Then I was five when The Muppet Show started in 1976. I remember seeing commercials for the show over the summer, and I watched the first episode that aired on the New York station. It was Rita Moreno, and it ended with the sketch that had Rita trying to sing “Fever” while Animal interrupted with crazy drum riffs, and at the end, Rita comes up behind Animal and crashes his head with cymbals. It was so obviously the best thing ever. So that was pretty much it. Read the remainder of this entry »
More of Dave’s conversation with Tough Pigs editor Danny Horn:
DT: Well, I was going to ask you what motivated you to attach a forum to your webzine, but I think you already answered that one.
DH: Well, there have been some other places for people to gather over the years, but I wasn’t happy with any of them. I was on the Muppet newsgroup for a long time, that’s where I first met a lot of the people that I still hang out with. But newsgroups were kind of the Wild West; they were the lawless frontier. Full of trolls and crazies and cattle rustlers.
DT: Yeah, I’ve generally steered clear of unmoderated newsgroups for a while. And even with moderated groups and message boards, finding the right tone can be a challenge.
DH: Well, you have to be able to moderate well. It’s a skill, and it’s not easy to do it well. But in my opinion, you need some rules to make a group work well. Unless you want to keep fighting the cattle rustlers forever, and that gets old.
DT: In a hurry. It also helps to have that core group of people who feel comfortable with the tone you’re going for, and can keep things moving in that direction.
DH: Yeah. That happens naturally in a group, I think, that it develops in a particular direction.
DT: The Tough Pigs forum seems to reflect the same tone you go for in the webzine itself, so I imagine there’s some symbiosis there.
DH: To some degree. The site pulls in the kind of people who like the site. But it’s also because I run the forum with the same kind of attitude that I run the site.
DT: It works because it works.
DH: I guess. Yeah.
DT: Getting back into the way back machine for a second . . did the fanzine have the same tone and approach as the website, or did that evolve? Read the remainder of this entry »
One of the things I remember hearing – and thinking – as the Internet, DVDs, and other new technology came to the fore in the Nineties was that all of these new gadgets would help spread the word on new artists; stuff that previously would have flown under the radar would get an all-new visibility. I remember signing up with the Firefly service and entering, in fairly extensive detail, my musical and other preferences; the idea was that my custom designed Firefly “agent� program would flit about the system and find other users with tastes similar to mine and let me know what other stuff they liked. The technology never quite lived up to the potential, but the Net was young, and I was pretty sure it would get better.
Today, old and new technology alike has made the situation better. I’m a member of one of the best public radio stations around, WXPN in Philadelphia. I have a Netflix account that delivers my selections from a vast library of DVDs right to my mailbox. I have digital cable that not only gives me dozens more channels, it lets me access many programs at a time of my choosing through its On Demand service. Over the years I’ve developed a huge profile at Amazon that informs their recommendation lists, and my Internet access lets me peruse message boards to see what new acts I might be missing. There should be a never-ending stream of Cool New Stuff making its way into my cranial space. Read the remainder of this entry »
…and Burn
Late 1984 and 1985 belonged to the home computer market, and the handful of software makers that had survived the crash. But the industry wasn’t dormant. In 1983, Nintendo had made a splash in its native Japan with the Famicom game console – short for Family Computer. Vastly ahead of anything in the American market with its processing power, the Famicom seemed like a shoo-in for the American market until the crash happened. Nintendo initially approached Atari to market the Famicom in the western hemisphere, and at first, it seemed like a done deal – both sides were eager to join forces.
Then one of the biggest decisions in the entire history of the business of video games took place, signaling the rise of one company and the fall of the other – and all because of a misunderstanding.
At a 1984 Consumer Electronics Show, Atari and Nintendo were close to inking the Famicom distribution pact. Very close. As a show of good faith, Atari had received rights to translate Nintendo’s games for the U.S. home computer market, and the future looked bright – until Atari executives noticed a new version of Donkey Kong running on an Adam computer at Coleco’s booth. Infuriated, they confronted their counterparts at Nintendo, who threatened to yank the home console rights out from under Coleco. By the time the misunderstanding was settled, there had been a changing of the corporate guard at Atari, and the deal was off. Nintendo was on its own, and by the time it made it to market with the American version of Famicom – now called the Nintendo Entertainment System – U.S. investors and consumers had turned a cold shoulder toward the video game business.
Through a series of brilliant marketing maneuvers, such as including a remote-controlled robot called R.O.B. with the system and selling the resulting package as a toy, Nintendo broke into the market and kick-started a renaissance of the game industry. But it wasn’t about to let another crash begin: Nintendo clamped down on licensing and manufacturing rights, forcing anyone wishing to make games for the NES come to Nintendo to have the cartridges manufactured. Anyone circumventing the built-in security features which would allow only licensed software to run was swiftly and aggressively sued, including an Atari subsidiary, Tengen, which battled with Nintendo over the cartridge rights to a simple Russian puzzle game called Tetris. Nintendo won the battle, and the rest – including Tengen – was history. Read the remainder of this entry »