This Is Not News

I may be repeating myself here. If so, consider it an added bit of meta-commentary, because I think the time is right for this conversation again.

In the last ten to twenty years, the reboot has joined the remake as a source for new programming. Serialized stories, from TV shows to movie series to comic books, have had their story continuity restarted, sometimes but not always with some kind of link to what has gone before. Examples include the Star Trek movie from 2009, the Battlestar Galactica series that aired on Syfy, Daniel Craig’s James Bond films, and every third week of DC Comics publishing. Many of these stories are well-received, but there is also a certain stigma attached – a reboot is considered a sign of laziness, or inability to come up with something new. I wonder if that stigma is deserved.

This came to a head in the last few weeks because of two events. A couple of months ago, DC announced that they would restart all of their comics from new issue #1s in September. Many, but not all, of the previously-published plot points would be wiped from the storylines. And then J. Michael Straczynski, creator of the cult-favorite SF series Babylon 5, announced that he had been in negotiations with Warner Brothers to reboot that show along the lines of the Battlestar Galactica reboot. The premise would be kept, everything else would be up for grabs. Actors from the original series might be used, but perhaps they would play new roles.

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I am late to the party here, I know. The Internet chorus rendered its verdict on Green Lantern at the same time that audiences did, the former with an abundance of snark and the latter with an abundance of not-being-in-the-theater. But after 30 years as a DC fanboy, I think I have reached a breaking point, so I have some venting to do.

Plus, if we’re lucky, my brother will show up to share his thoughts, and that’s some prime entertainment value right there.

Here’s the thing about Green Lantern. They gave me just enough get-my-geek-on moments that I could imagine what an awesome Green Lantern movie would look like. And then they absolutely failed to deliver that awesome Green Lantern movie in any way. Pattie will tell you I spent two weeks before the movie came out watching and re-watching the trailers. There are about five to ten minutes where test pilot Hal Jordan is on the planet Oa, meeting aliens and making swords and shields out of green energy. DC and Warner Brothers made sure everyone say those ten minutes, because those ten minutes are pretty cool. One of the aliens is even named Tomar Re. (Tomar . . . Thomer . . . never mind.) The problem is that they forgot to save much equally-cool stuff for the actual movie. Instead, they showed an almost uncanny knack for making bad decisions at every opportunity.
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I finally got around to watching Iron Man over the weekend, and I liked it a lot. Definitely the best superhero origin movie I can remember, and considering how much of the movie Robert Downey, Jr. has to spend talking to himself, that’s pretty impressive. But there has been something nagging at me since I finished the movie and started looking at some of the deleted scenes: there’s a really ugly attitude toward women present. I know Tony Stark has the whole playboy lifestyle, but we’re going beyond a guy who dates a lot of women to a guy who employs flight attendants whose job appears to be to double as strippers who are willing to sleep with Stark and anyone he’s flying on his jet. And almost every woman in the movie appears prepared to drop whatever they’re doing to hop into bed with Stark. Even the reporter who antagonizes Tony, confronts him with evidence of his company’s wrongdoing, and questions his cover story sleeps with him. And after she does, she gets catty with Pepper Potts – seemingly the only woman who has avoided sleeping with Tony – and Pepper returns the favor. My sense is that this is all supposed to be a joke – that Tony is an irresponsible hedonist ramped up to the nth degree and the movie wants to showcase that excess. But I can’t help but be a little worried about people who don’t pick up on the joke, or who think Tony has it right in the first place.

Last night I was doing some searches for music – mostly because I was trying to psych myself up to buy The National’s album Boxer (I did) and because I wanted to see if Matthew Sweet’s new album was as disappointing as his last one (it’s not, but that doesn’t mean it rises to the level of “good,” unfortunately). But while I was at it, I decided to check if The Jayhawks’ Rainy Day Music was back in print – and lo and behold, it’s been reissued. One dollar later, “Save It for a Rainy Day” is in my iTunes library, and the sun is shining a little bit brighter, metaphorically speaking.

I have to say I was pretty disappointed reading this interview with Aaron Sorkin on GQ’s site. Sorkin’s work on The West Wing was one of the big pushes that motivated me to start Not News. And even when I lost interest in that show, and when Studio 60 turned into a major disappointment, I thought fairly highly of the guy for the idealism he poured into his work. But as it turns out, not only did he try to undermine the bargaining position of his union during the writer’s strike, he somehow seems proud of that and argues that it was the right thing to do. I don’t know if that’s poor judgment or pure selfishness, but geez, either way it’s disappointing.

I still owe the blog a couple of essays on my overall thoughts about the Obama campaign, but I gotta get my two cents in on the New Yorker cover. The idea of the cover is supposedly to satire the various e-mail smears and rumor-attacks directed at both Barack and Michelle Obama and point out how ridiculous they are. And certainly I don’t think anyone who gives serious thought to the cover thinks it’s a literal depiction of anything that goes on in the Obama home. But the thing that gets me is, satire usually exaggerates the thing that it’s mocking. It’s almost the entire stock in trade of editorial cartoons. And there’s nothing in the cover image that exaggerates or distorts the people who spread/believe these rumors. There’s just a ridiculous caricature of the Obamas. So why wouldn’t a reasonable person believe that the purpose of all the exaggerated satire is to mock the Obamas and thus to support the underlying claims of those smears? It’s not simply the use of racially charged imagery that makes this a bad cover – it’s the poor design that left out the intended target.

Matthew Sweet has updated his web site and announced a release date for Sunshine Lies, his next album. Two tracks can be sampled at the web site, and more are available at his myspace site. So far I’m very partial to Byrdgirl, which is one song more attached than I became to his last album.

Joie Calio from Dada released three tracks to mp3.com back in 2001 from a project that, at the time, he was calling Candy Apple Black. Those sessions form the basis of Happiness in Hell, an album released under the band name X Levitation Cult. The three mp3.com tracks are on the album, with different mixes that I can’t quite get used to after six-plus years. But the rest of the album is really good power-pop.

R.E.M.’s show at the Mann Center – which included Eddie Vedder guesting on Begin the Begin and Johnny Marr on Fall on Me – is easily my favorite of the five performances I’ve seen. I was pretty impressed with opening act The National as well, but I’m trying to figure out if their studio recordings have the same vibe that appealed to me live.

Roughly a week into listening to the new REM album, Accelerate, I realized I’m having fun being an REM fan, and that hasn’t been true in a while. I’ve been walking around with my iPod, singing along with many of the tracks and probably scaring passersby. I’ve been recording TV appearances and reading reviews, and feeling downright giddy about the upcoming tour. And I don’t want to be guilty of projection, but I think part of my fun is feeling like the band is having fun. I remember watching the documentary about the Vote for Change concerts back in 2004, where REM was playing with Bruce Springsteen right around the time that Around the Sun came out. There’s a bit backstage where Michael Stipe is looking at some of the packaging for the special edition version of the CD, and he gives a copy of the album to Springsteen. But there’s a bit where he shows the album to Peter Buck, and Buck seems pretty much disinterested, and almost glum. Given what I’ve read about the band’s attitude at that time, disinterested and glum don’t seem so off the mark. This time around, Buck’s bantering with Stephen Colbert and summing up the lessons of 2004 as “Make a better record” on the Today show.

It’s a nice feeling, is what I’m saying. But if Stipe is giving interviews in 2011 talking about how the band has finally addressed its communications problems, you’re probably gonna be seeing a story on the evening news about a lunatic philosophy professor running through the streets mumbling incoherently. So let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

Yesterday was probably the best experience of live music I’ve had, one of those everything-comes-together situations that just makes me feel incredibly lucky to be living the life I’m living. I’m gonna try and get some of those moments onto the record and point you to some spots on the Internet where you can catch a glimpse of them.

I went downtown to World Café Live to see a Free at Noon concert with Crowded House and Joan as Police Woman, a concert you can hear online at NPR. I’d never been to the venue, but it’s a very nice little theater and the sound was pretty good. Joan was pretty good, doing three songs on the keyboard with a bassist and drummer before switching over to electric guitar for her finale. The radio host misread her notes at one point during the interview, which made me feel bad – I beat myself up when I mis-speak in front of 30 students, which is merely one reason that a career in radio is probably not for me. But this is an important point in today’s story – we’ll come back to it in a moment.

After Joan’s set Crowded House walked onto the stage, looking very much like they wanted to know whose bright idea it was to get them up to perform this early in the day. Most of the band members were wearing T-shirts, and I’m not sure Neil Finn had gone near a comb that morning. They were in good spirits, though. When someone from the audience yelled “You forgot Tim!â€? (Neil’s brother and frequent collaborator), Neil feigned surprise – “I knew I left something behind!â€? – before nodding toward his son Liam and saying “I brought his nephew.â€? At this point the radio host started introducing the band and referred to their most recent album as Together Alone, at which point the audience started murmuring in a way that I interpreted as “Umm . . . should we interrupt her?â€? before Neil said, “That wasn’t very recent . . .â€? Turns out the host had written a note to say that the band had just put out their first album since Together Alone. The philosopher in me thought that was an interesting case of how our brain can just grab a piece of information and run with it based on prior patterns and expectations, but I put that out of mind. There was music to hear, now with the added benefit of a running joke. Read the remainder of this entry »

At this very moment, I am listening to the last song on my iPod’s random playlist of my entire library. I have an even 1200 songs on the Pod, and I need to put a few dozen more on. But I couldn’t plug the iPod in to resync it without resetting the Shuffle Song list, and by God I was determined to get through all 1200.

It’ll probably be a while before I try this again.

At any rate, oddly enough, songs 1199 and 1200 were both tracks from Don Henley’s End of the Innocence album. (And 1197 or 1198 was Matthew Sweet’s “Nothing Lasts.” Don’t tell me the shuffling algorithm wasn’t programmed with a sense of humor.)