Brief intermission from music posts. A moose bit my sister.

Pun sort of intended. While the expedition partner and I share many of the same musical experiences, our movie literacy is pretty divergent. I grew up so far out in the boondocks, it was a real production to go anywhere to see a first-run movie before I was about eleven years old. The first first-run movie I remember seeing, in fact, was 'Star Wars' in 1977.

The other half lived nearer to movie theaters, growing up in the burbs, so he saw more movies. Not necessarily better ones, mind you, but more.

Off and on, we both get the bug to expose each other to movies we remember, whether good or bad, from years ago. The first time I tried this was not a raging success -- 'Dark Star' isn't the movie you want to offer as a waterline of your taste, y'know? I mean, it's a hoot. It's John Carpenter's first movie, after all, and it has hippies and aliens and suspense. Only problem is, if you don't smoke hash, the movie comes off as what it was -- a low budget science fiction camp epic about four personality impaired nerds stuck on a space ship for twenty years. With an alien who looks like a Hippity Hop or a giant version of one of the fungi we've seen in the yard the past couple of years, pressing up out of old tree stumps like a creepy dildo.

Anyway, the next serious recommendation was a little more satisfying -- 'The President's Analyst,' a James Coburn (rest in peace) vehicle that was a real howler in light of the current governmental paranoia and invasions of individual citizens' privacy. For some bizarre reason, I don't think people in the late sixties would have thought The Phone Company should be tapping their phones and listening in on even the aggregates of their conversations, or else this movie never would have been made. It certainly wouldn't have been as good a joke as it was in this movie, at least, if people genuinely had believed their conversations and behaviors were being pawed over by members of their government. Cult movie or not, it skimmed a zeitgeist that wasn't just paranoid UN-haters. Back then, everybody hated 'the government' and 'The Phone Company,' not just canaries in the coal mine.

Tonight, we watched 'Westworld,' which I'd recalled sucking a bit when I saw it, back in the late seventies. Sometimes, we mellow, and as we age we can find nuance in movies that we didn't find originally, or at least enough camp value to make them laughable.

'Westworld' still sucks.

When you spend the last fifteen minutes of a movie asking each other why Richard Benjamin's character doesn't do ... well, anything much but run around, the suck quotient rises so high you start yelling "grab a weapon, wouldja? Jeez! How many times does that bastard have to show up on your ass before you realize the last one didn't work?" ... it sucks.

So I've added 'A Boy And His Dog,' 'Omega Man,' 'Damnation Alley' (with the caveat that the movie kind of sucked) and 'THX 1138' to the list. If I must sit through bad early to mid seventies SF, it might as well at least be based on well-written original stories, however badly executed.

As much as I hate "Chuck-Chuck-Bo-Buck-Banana-Fana-Fo ... uh ... you'll have to get out," (bonus points to anybody who can pinpoint where I stole this routine) Heston, I'll credit that Omega Man was actually a pretty decent campy science fiction movie. Of course, so was 'Soylent Green,' if only for the interminable jokes about Soylent Green being people. It was even concept-checked by Steven Colbert's voiced character, Phil Ken Sebben, on 'Harvey Birdman,' only instead of Soylent Green it was the cafeteria's baba ghanoush. One of the reasons I actually cried real tears when Phil Hartman died -- that SNL sketch he did based on that scene was pure genius, one of the funniest things I ever saw on that show once the original cast all left to make progressively less successful movies, become some variety or other of assholes or die of drug overdoses. Or else be Bill Murray.

Footnote -- 'Westworld' can be dumped, steaming and sparking, squarely at the feet of global warming denier Michael Crichton, whose last worthwhile effort was, in my opinion, 'The Andromeda Strain.'

Though I never actually saw the movie all the way through, I also threw 'Rancho Deluxe' into the mix. It isn't science fiction, it's just Lebowski-type gooniness. Oh, yeah -- we'll probably rent 'The Big Lebowski' at some point in the near future, too. I'm sure we'll both kick ourselves for not having seen it years ago.

I hate seeing movies in the theater. You can't pause them to get up and piss, and for the most part, you can't have a glass of wine (or three, if the movie sucks, CF: Westworld) while you do so. I think I developed bizarre anxiety attacks when seeing movies while I was in a period of serious emotional turmoil, and I've never quite got over it. Sitting in a theater demands a really captivating movie, for me, or I start worrying about shit I can't do anything about and stop watching the movie.

Yeah, I'm a freak. I'm guessing the prior posts where I made arguments in favor of bands like Foreigner and Zebra (granted only for single songs by either of them) probably already convinced you, if you know who they are. I never really minded being a freak, for that matter -- what the hell kind of boring conformist makes a judgment like that, anyhow?

Exactly.

Hasta!

In addition to old, I am profligate.

And busy. Without going into sufficient personal detail to give much away, work got blowed up in a tsunami of chaos a couple of months ago, and everything's still staggering around. I went from doing twenty hours in four days a week to doing thirty-five hours in the same four days, and throwing in a couple of hours elsewhere to make full-time. And there still are weeks when there's work left on my freakin' desk.

I don't want to bitch about work here, though, I have other outlets for that. Work is about as far from arts and music as anything I can imagine, for that matter, and that was the original point of starting this particular outlet. Just briefly explaining to my nonexistent fan base why I ain't posted nuttin' in almost two months.

I suppose since it involves Todd, I should make a remark about the New Cars. All I've seen so far is the quasi-new single, "Not Tonight," on Leno. As someone remarked elsewhere, it reminded me greatly of Utopia minus Willie and Roger. I mean, it's half the old Cars and half Utopia. Not that I don't appreciate any chance I can get to see Kasim Sulton perform -- I even saw him when he was in the Blackhearts, backing up Joan Jett in 1990. Well, okay -- Cheap Trick also were on the bill, or the odds are we wouldn't have ponied up for the ticket price. I love Kaz, but I wouldn't have paid what we paid to see Kingdom Come and Joan Jett, without the added impetus of the Rockford gang.

My brudda's already bought tickets for the show they're scheduled to play in our neck of the woods. The significant other Expedition Sailor and I have not purchased said tickets yet, though I'm not sure if it's just pure inertia. The show will probably be great. Todd still can sing the paint off the side of a Chrysler. Kaz is a better bassist every time I see/hear him. And we actually found the motivation to purchase the entry fee for Dwight Yoakam. I've loved Todd's stuff for over twenty years.

Gofigger.

I don't know. I guess there's some rebellious part of me that says this whole New Cars detour is really just a way of bankrolling his Roth IRA so Michelle and the Toddclone don't starve when he's past earning a living. I don't mind that, don't get me wrong -- on a personal level, it's fine if Todd's trying to put the Harvard entry fees in the bank for his larva to go to college when Todd himself may or may not be around to earn it anymore. That's good, progressive thinkin' on the man's part, and I'm all for that kind of thinking on the part of breeders everywhere ... but I don't feel compelled to finance it anymore. I've bought most of what Todd's recorded and released under his name, over the years. I've liked at least two-thirds of it, which is as good or better than I can say for any other artist I ever "went catalog" over, including Cheap Trick.

It just smells funny.

I don't even feel good about admitting that. I worry I'm becoming judgmental in my old age, or at least quick to judge. At the same time, I don't see any freakin' reason I should buy something I have a feeling is going to be unsatisfying to me esthetically, or even go so far as to squick me out with its transparently commercial aspirations. I want to be wrong.

I SOOOOOO want to be wrong, you can't imagine.

And yet I'm really much more interested in the new songs the 'Mats are supposed to have on the album that's to be released shortly, here.

Don't get me wrong -- a Utopia reunion? Road trip to Toronto! Chicago! Whatever. I'd do that in a New York minute. But maybe, just maybe, it's the fact that I lost interested in The Cars not long after Candy, Oh! and I just don't give a fat shit anymore. There were perhaps three or four songs from that album on that I care if I ever hear again. I put the Cars in the same cultural niche, for my own tastes, as Foreigner. The early stuff they did that I liked, I really, really liked.
The rest of it just didn't reliably do it for me.

I love ya', Todd, and the same goes for Kaz, but I just don't know that I can justify the ticket price for my local venue to see you cover "Let The Good Times Roll." Especially when I don't know how long after that song was originally recorded I'd have paid the entry vig to see Ric Ocasek and Ben Orr play it.

Man, I feel like such an infidel. I just can't get my enthusiasm behind it at all.

I want a couple new 'Mats songs and a new Sloan album. Because somewhere between the two, I'm convinced that's where the agnostic's line on heaven lies. And heaven lies.