Umm Hello time...

Next year?
http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony_pictures/spider-man_3/

Umm Hello? Like, I'm there:
http://www.snakesonaplane.com/

L.S.C.

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A Canticle for The Grocery List Guy...

There are many places on the Internet to waste time, but this is one takes the prize. It is a collection of grocery lists that some guy found. He began collecting them in the nineties and at some point the Internet became savvy enough to accept his collection as a website. I’m torn about this site. On the one hand, it’s hysterical and on the other, it’s just plain, sad. But, then again, imagine if we had a collection of thousands of hand-written notes from people who lived two thousand years ago.

You can imagine how fascinating that would be!

If you ever read the book, A Canticle for Leibowitz, this is familiar. In that book, a post-apocolytic society on Earth vows to simplify and then proceed to destroy all books because they blame science for the nuclear holocaust. Liebowitz, a Jewish engineer, converts to Catholicism and starts a cult to preserve knowledge. (I guess A Mitzvah for Liebowitz just didn't have the same zing as Canticle.) They save books, calling it booklegging. In the story, hundreds of years later, a monk finds a storage of hand-written notes by Liebowitz himself, one being a grocery list reading, “pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels–bring home for Emma.” The monks see this as a miraculous discovery, the original writings of a potential saint. Though it causes problems since the miracles are so bountiful that it threatens Leibowitz’s sainthood.

I’m not sure if this site is all that important. If this guy becomes beatified because of it then I’m in the wrong business. As for time wasting, it’s like watching the status bar on your computer tick by as you copy files or download illegal music. (Which I never, ever, do, by the way.) While you know that there are so many better ways to spend your day, like say, working, it’s quite therapeutic. Gen X never had it so good.

Try it out for yourself but if you get fired because your boss is an unironic old fuddy duddy, don’t come to crying to me.

The Grocery List Collection.

LSC

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Crazy Diamond Shines No More...

Syd Barrett one of the original, founding members of Pink Floyd has died at the age of 60. Although he left the band a few years after he helped form Pink Floyd he remained an influence on major rockers such as David Bowie who has said Barrett had a “major impact” on him. He was known as an innovative and experimental guitarist inventing the signature sound of Pink Floyd and stretching the boundaries of music at the time. He named the band after two names on the liner notes of a Jazz album by Blind Boy Fuller and the improvisation of Jazz was a major influence on his style and sound. The band set itself apart from acts of its day like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones because of their sound.

Though he wrote most of the hit record “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” in 1967, a generation of fans who came to know Pink Floyd through records like “Dark Side of the Moon,” and “The Wall,” never really knew his music. Ironically, the album “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” was recorded in a studio right next to where the Beatles were recording their seminal psychedelic album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” at the same time. Piper became a critical and commercial success in England, but not so much in the United States.

The album “Wish You Were Here” was written as a tribute to Syd Barrett by his band mates. Syd suffered from mental instability probably brought on by his use of LSD. Syd is said to have visited Abbey Road studio while Pink Floyd was recording “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” a song from their 1972 album, “Wish You Were Here.” Syd was said to have been overweight and had shaved off his hair and eyebrows. He also held a toothbrush in his hand and proceeded to brush his teeth by holding the brush still and jumping up and down. Most of the band members didn’t recognize him at first but when they did, they were brought to tears by his condition. That meeting influenced the scene in the movie, “The Wall,” where Bob Geldof shaves his hair in the mirror.

Barrett spend the last of his years in Cambridge, England living in his mother’s house. He was rarely seen except on a few occasions and he did not like to be reminded much of his past musical roots. There, he began to paint and garden frequently.

The members of Pink Floyd made sure that Syd received his royalties from his contribution to the band’s original albums. He led a reclusive life after leaving the band releasing only two solo albums and an album of unreleased material in 1988.

Some have said he suffered from schizophrenia but more like he had a condition known as Asperger's Syndrome, a form of Autism. The death of his father when he was eleven years old also may have contributed to his mental condition. Although these mental deficiencies were prevalent and contributed to his declining condition the psychedelic experiences, fame and drug use were most likely catalysts to his decline.

Many have shown interest in Syd Barrett’s life and work. Multiple artists including David Bowie, REM, Soundgarden and The Smashing Pumpkins have covered his songs. Johnny Depp has also shown an interest in a movie about Syd Barrett’s life.

Syd Barrett died on July 7, 2006 of a diabetes related illness.

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Hello. My name is Lon. And I'm addicted to Netflix...

As many of you know I am a huge fan of Netflix. It is one of the few (very few) services I will promote on my blog that I don’t get paid for. One of the reasons I love it is because it’s one of those ideas that is so elegant the universe just had to think it up eventually. Think of those by-mail music-ordering clubs from Columbia House or BMG? Remember those? When you would pick off a selection of cassettes that you wanted, ten for a penny? Then the company would send them to you in the mail. If it wasn’t for the fact that the remaining contract was so absurdly expensive, those could have ruined my music shopping experience forever.

Let me ‘splain.

Starting about Junior High School I began to become a music connoisseur. Before that, I listened to all types of music and I loved it all, but some recessive music gene kicks in around 12 or 13 years old. I see it in my own son. I’d get lost in Record World for hours just browsing the music categories. Back then it was all about records. I could flip through hundreds of records mentally listing those I thought looked interesting. It was a history lesson in vinyl in every bin. I’d look at the album art, the liner notes, and the song lists… If I had a question about one of the artists, I’d seek out one of the sales associates and ask questions. Like some in the fine art community peruse the galleries, I was a music browser. I had to be discriminating because I had very little dough to spend. If my purchase wasn’t careful, I’d end up with a clunker, so I took my time. Not to say I didn’t go out on a limb once in a while. Some albums I bought just because of the cover art.

This was how I discovered The Cult, Billy Idol, Metallica and others before ever hearing them on the radio or in my clique. I was a shopper. My mother could get in a whole season’s worth of clothes shopping at the mall and I would still be only halfway through the store when she came to retrieve me. Record World was like a built-in babysitting service.

When I got a little older I began to discover the joy of reading. Around high school, I added another addiction to the mix: Books. This was before Borders and Amazon. I could only get my fix at B. Daltons or Walden Books. They were the perennial favorites. There were small local bookstores but being the suburban teen that I was, my life revolved around the modern town center, the mall. A trip to the mall would have to include an hour in each store, which I could do very easily. Again, having to be very discriminating, my purchases were of very choice books.

You would think that as the years passed I would outgrow this little addiction. Not true. As a matter of fact, with the passing years, my browsing grew. When I got my license, I could drive myself to any record or bookstore I liked and spend hours just looking around. Still, to this day, if I step into a bookstore or music store I know that I am not getting out of there in less than an hour if I’m not in a hurry. It’s like a time vortex. Those stores sucked hours from my life. I walk out, blinking in the painful sunlight, like some cave creature, pasty and waif-thin from my sojourn into the heart of my addictive darkness, with a plastic bag of music or books to add to the ever-growing pile. My junk is media.

Ever since I saw the original Star Wars, I was hooked on movies. Not just Science Fiction but every type of movie. Adventure, Romance, Drama, it doesn’t matter. I love films. But, until a few years ago, collecting movies was just too daunting a task to take on so I relied on rental places for my fix. I could, again, get lost in a local video rental store or Blockbuster just as easily as in any book or music store.

The trifecta of entertainment bliss: Movies, Books and Music. Ahhh, heaven.

I never got into buying and collecting movies on VCR tape like some other people. I just found tapes unwieldy and not easy to categorize. Too fat, too clunky, to plastic-y and just too breakable. Then G-d invented DVD and I was a changed man. Where before, my movie collection consisted of the original trilogy of Star Wars and the Queen-soundtrack Flash Gordon, now I was free to collect at will.

And I did.

My DVD collection is not as impressive as others, but it is better than average. Only, something was different. $9.99 movie bins, I could handle, but if I wanted to collect whole seasons of my favorite shows, well, that was just too damn expensive. I mean, how can I justify spending seventy bucks per season for Quantum Leap? Or Star Trek? What about all the shows I missed, like Babylon 5 or Stargate? The only moderately priced television show, of which I own every episode of every season, is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But after spending hundreds of dollars on that, I was tapped. I couldn’t do it anymore. How can I watch TV if I can’t pay the electric bill? It was a conundrum.

Then came Netflix.

This was a lifesaver. The selection of movies and television shows is immense. They almost always have anything I want and they have the newest releases right away. Boy do I sound like a commercial. But it's true. For a small fee per month I have unlimited viewing. The mail service is exceptional and I never have to wait more than two days for a film to be shipped to me. It has destroyed the thrill of browsing my local Best Buy or Circuit City. I used to enjoy shopping in those places. Now I find myself, sitting in the parking lot wondering why I was about to go in. If I don’t have a specific reason to be there, a specific item I need to pick up, what's the point? My DVD browsing days at the brick and mortar stores were over.

But the best part of the Netflix service: The Queue. This is a great idea. I have literally hundreds of movies queued up. Hundreds! Probably more than 300! I surf their site for movies anytime I think or hear of one I’d like to see and queue it up. The queue is god. The queue is king.

Long live Queue.

And if I get a movie that I didn’t particularly like, I just return it and I don’t feel like I wasted my money. There has never been a service that is matches my love and addiction to browsing for titles with my diversity of tastes and selections. Imagine the same thing for other media. Imagine a place where for a very tiny fee you could go in and take out books, read them and then return them. Not only that you can get new ones as soon as you return the old ones. More than that, the selection is virtually unlimited. Can you imagine a place like that?!?!?!?

L.S.C.

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B5: Four And One Half

Babylon 5 is almost over. Yes. Sad to say, I have watched four and one half seasons of the show through my Netflix queue and now, I find myself at a loss for words. It is such a large and complex show that spans so many different themes and storylines that I could never hope to summarize it in a short blog post.

I originally started watching Season One with great trepidation. I knew nothing about the show except that it was a science fiction show with a continuing 5-year story arc. (5-years? Where have I heard that before?) I had overheard things from friends, once in a while, but never enough to make me indulge.

A weekly commitment was valuable time when the show originally aired and I am embarrassed to say that I preferred the lacquered planks of my favorite bar and a pint or two of and ale or lager to the television set. Well, OK, I’m not embarrassed to say that but you get the point, I didn’t have the time. Suddenly, I’m home with infants and toddlers and I have nowhere to go but to the tube for some late night temptation.

After the first season, I was slightly impressed, but not overwhelmed. After the second season, I was hooked, big time. Not just hooked a little. I was hooked like never before. This is probably one of the greatest space shows ever to come to television. Better than anything I have ever seen on the small screen in terms of science fiction. One thing that had always bothered me (and just about everyone else) was the reset factor in most sci-fi, much less all other non-soap opera drama. Star Trek: TNG had a certain quality of the evolving story line but it was limited to sporadic appearances and mini arcs. Though the Borg showed up in the first season with Q and made a reappearance in one of the greatest story arcs of the Star Trek universe, that still didn’t scratch the surface.

B5 was brave, groundbreaking, complicated and emotional. I found that the issues J. Michael Straczynski tackled mirror some of the same ones we are dealing with today, in the real world. He had a telescope placed firmly on the new millennium. That is what was great about this show. Even ten years later it does not seem at all dated. Sure there were some special effects that looked fake and the design was, like, reminiscent of, like, what a person in the, like, Eighties thought the future would be, like, like but it totally, like, evolved over the years. In the beginning of the first season the sets were decorated with neon and the outfits were installed with shoulder pads. By the fifth season they had Neil Gaiman writing episodes about death and the sets were neon-less and grungy, befitting the Nineties style.

One thing that impressed me as a writer was the way Straczynski held the tension and drama, season after season. Even when plotlines were resolved they resonated in the next year’s story.

I have to admit that this show could not have been produced except through the vision of one man. Hollywood too often makes decisions by committee and that has proved disastrous and unfortunate for us. J. Michael Straczynski made one of the greatest epic space operas of all time.

One that I hope will be continued for generations to come.

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